Racism Page 1
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The origins of race-based laws and colonial hierarchies
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How redlining shaped the racial wealth gap
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The impact of algorithmic bias in modern tech
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Media narratives and policies that sustain racial disparities
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Case studies, legal documents, and historical analysis that expose the architecture of inequality
Award-winning* mediator and conflict resolution specialist David Evans applies insights and tools from his mediation career to address the long-standing conflict between black people and white people. He shares his insights in his new book, "Black & White: How To Have Our American Conversation About Race."
The Color of Compromise is not a call to shame or a platform to blame white evangelical Christians. It is a call from a place of love and desire to fight for a more racially unified church that no longer compromises what the Bible teaches about human dignity and equality. A call that challenges black and white Christians alike to standup now and begin implementing the concrete ways Tisby outlines, all for a more equitable and inclusive environment among God's people. Starting today.
Freeman, Kwame. Foundations of Injustice: From Slave Codes to AI Bias — How Systemic Racism Built America and How We Rebuild Equity . Kindle Edition.
Introduction
The Code of Oppression In January 2020, Porcha Woodruff — eight months pregnant — was arrested at her Detroit home on charges of carjacking and robbery. The evidence against her was a single facial-recognition match generated by an algorithm. She was innocent. The algorithm had misidentified her. Eleven hours of detention detention passed before anyone acknowledged the error. Three hundred and fifty-eight years earlier, Virginia lawmakers passed a statute decreeing that the legal status of a child — free or enslaved — would follow the condition of its mother. The law was written to commodify the reproductive bodies of enslaved women and ensure that a perpetual labor force would reproduce itself. One statute was carved in colonial ink. The other was embedded in a neural network. The machinery has changed across four centuries. The logic has not. Systemic racism is not a relic. It is a living architecture — a structure of laws, policies, economic arrangements, and cultural codes built, partially demolished, and rebuilt in new forms across four centuries of American history. Unlike the overt racism of slavery and Jim Crow, which announced itself openly in law and custom, the systemic racism of the contemporary era is often invisible to those it does not harm. It operates through school-funding formulas tied to property values deliberately suppressed by federal mortgage policy. It operates through sentencing guidelines written when the crack-powder cocaine disparity was a political calculation, not a pharmacological one. It operates through hiring algorithms trained on decades of discriminatory decisions. It operates through the accumulated weight of all the preceding mechanisms combined — a compound interest of disadvantage that multiplies across generations.
Evans, David. Black & White: How To Have Our American Conversation About Race. The Jonah Press. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
An unarmed young black man is gunned down by a white policeman, and, in the outcry that follows, someone, usually a white person, always says, “We need to have a conversation.” But somehow that conversation never seems to happen. Then the cycle is repeated in some other city, and once again we hear the familiar refrain, “We need to have a conversation.” We desperately do need to have a conversation. But where? And how? I believe I’ve found an answer to these questions. Several years ago, I accidentally stumbled onto a situation that provides a key for having that national conversation. It’s a kind of template. I’ve tried it out locally and had excellent results. And it could be replicated across the country. Here’s what happened: In 1992 in Los Angeles a young black man named Rodney King was stopped by the police and savagely beaten. A bystander happened to take a video of the beating and the video went viral. People around the world were outraged, and the police responsible for the beating were brought to trial. But at the conclusion of the trial the police were acquitted of wrongdoing, and a huge swath of the city exploded in a fury of outrage and flames. Predictably, key spokesmen for the city and the white community responded by saying, “We need to have a conversation.” At the time, I was going to an almost completely white church on the west side of Los Angeles. (I myself am white.) One of the pastors there knew a minister in a black church in South Los Angeles, and they set up some exchanges between the two churches. We had a couple of meetings, but the relationship never went very far, and the two churches drifted back into their separate demographics..
Tisby, Jemar. The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (p. 9). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
On July 4, 2016, as my social media feeds filled with images of American flags and friends’ backyard barbecues celebrating America’s independence, I took to Twitter and posted a picture of seven African Americans picking cotton in a field with the following caption: “My family on July 4th 1776.” While the tweet received more than 15,000 retweets and 23,000 likes, there were numerous tweets frustrated by the fact that I chose to post such an image and caption on the day celebrating America’s independence. One follower questioned my patriotism; another accused me of making every issue a race issue instead of a gospel issue. From where I sat, I was simply telling the truth about our country’s complicated, imperfect history on a day when people were celebrating a simplistic, incomplete narrative about our country. Though those responses frustrated and grieved me, they didn’t surprise me. My work as a black hip-hop artist with an audience in white evangelicalism has shown me the tension that exists between black and white America, specifically when it comes to the history of the white evangelical church in America. Throughout its pages, Jemar carefully surveys the history of the white church in America and its complicity with racism.