This chapter examines the past decade of organizing against the carceral state under the banner of “Black Lives Matter” (BLM). It draws on my collaborative research with Color Of Change and the movement for transformative justice alternatives to prison and policing for gendered violence. I look at recent BLM mobilizations through three lenses. One tracks BLM’s macro-level gains for community power at the situational, institutional, and systemic levels. Another documents the micro-level psychological empowerment processes of Black queer feminist approaches that center Black joy, political education, and care for Black women. Lastly, I look at the meso-level organizational settings that bridge individual psychological empowerment and capacity-building with macro-level outcomes like policy changes and culture shifts. Drawing on Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa’s concept of the “prism” (2021), I coin the term “Black prism” to describe organizations like Color Of Change that build political homes to amplify the power of Black constituents.

Antiracist moral and civic education should educate about both interpersonal racism (racism toward other individuals) and institutional racism (systemic racial injustices). Both areas involve both avoiding racial wrongs (stereotyping, antipathy, demeaning the other) and promoting positive racial goods (respecting racial others as equals, recognizing positive racial difference). Institutional racism requires civic education, to recognize patterns of injustice, to analyze their causes, and to be able to measure them against both morally sound and nationally salient ideals (such as equality, liberty, and justice). Antiracist education must be sensitive to students’ particular racial identities and to asymmetries between the way white and nonwhite identities function morally and civically. It must teach positive racial ideals of racial justice, understanding, and harmony.

Young Black changemakers are civic actors with purpose. Their changemaking is aimed at long-term, big picture visions for a racially just future. Changemaking is not fleeting or spontaneous, but rather thoughtful and purposeful. Changemaking for racial justice is a big tent, and within it, Black youth have different visions for changemaking that can improve the world for Black people, ranging from resisting and seeking to change unjust systems to uplifting Black youth and communities now and into the future. Black youth are not siloed into one domain of civic action or one way of changemaking. Instead, there are overlaps and complexities across the ways of changemaking, underscoring that each young Black changemaker is charting their own path.

Margaret Bonds’s Credo sets the nine articles of W. E. B. Du Bois’s iconic manifesto for global equality – first penned in 1904, revised in 1920, and modeled on the sacred symbol of the arch – as a symmetrical set of seven movements for soloists, chorus, and piano (1965) or orchestra (1965–67). This chapter offers a close reading of Du Bois’s anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, pacifist text and examines the means by which Bonds translated it into a musical structure all her own that reflects diverse influences ranging from gospel song through the cantatas of J. S. Bach (whom she called “the father of all good music”), also emphasizing womanist themes that are at best minimally present in Du Bois’s text.

Laws and policies created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic ameliorated some long-standing barriers to reproductive justice. By granting access to paid family leave and telemedicine reproductive services, federal and state governments gave individuals greater responsibility for and autonomy over their reproductive and family lives, removing barriers to reproductive well-being. However, this devolution of personal responsibility back to individuals has occurred predominantly for people who already have means. Thus, COVID-19-stimulated policy changes have not only been ineffectual for marginalized individuals (for whom policy changes are most needed), but have in practice further entrenched harms to them: requiring them alone to continue to work when they or their family members are sick, and to overcome numerous barriers to seek reproductive care in person. This bifurcation is deliberate. American policy has long ascribed a kind of “personal responsibility” to Black and Brown people (who were disproportionately designated “essential” during this pandemic) that requires responsibility without providing a means to effect it, and punishes when prescriptive benchmarks are not met. It pretextually responsiblizes marginalized people, especially Black women and other women of color, for their health outcomes, instead of creating the conditions for reproductive and health justice. This chapter argues for laws and policies that enable a kind of responsibility that is consistent with reproductive justice. This responsibility sees people as worthy of making decisions about their and their family’s health, removes barriers to them doing so, and provides the underlying support to make such personal reproductive health decisions possible.

Twentieth-century feminist activism and thought spread with an urgency and ambition unseen before, as advocates for women achieved mass recognition, unsettled long-held convictions, and upset the status quo in ways unimaginable in previous centuries. No novel genre escaped these changes or failed to register them. Feminist politics reshaped the content, and sometimes the form, of the novel. Yet, dramatic as the expansion of US women’s opportunities was, progress was never unchallenged or universal. Feminist political gains inspired significant backlash: Patriarchy supporters fought back. Meanwhile, feminist organizing fractured from within. Before the twentieth century even began, women of color were explaining why they couldn’t be expected to identify only as women, as if all women belonged in a single category. Their message often went unheeded, particularly in the most widely circulated versions of feminist thought, which elevated white middle-class experiences over those of working-class, Indigenous, Black, Latina, and Asian women. Throughout the century, narratives by women of color pushed back against the white supremacist version of feminism. The American novel narrated multiple feminisms, triumphant and defeated, jubilant and anguished, razor-focused and utterly lost.

Given America’s history of racial oppression, addressing racial discrimination has been the Court’s most transformative engagement with democracy. The Reconstruction Amendments’ prohibition of racial discrimination explicitly legitimizes judicial advancement of racial equity in elections. Relying on this mandate during the Civil Rights era, the Court struck down explicitly discriminatory laws (and permitted robust congressional action) with little controversy. However, in recent decades the Court has been fiercely divided over the substance of racial equity. Conservatives have argued that racial equity requires only ensuring formal equality in terms of race. Progressives have argued for a substantive constitutional conception of racial equity that would permit laws and rulings that benefit disadvantaged minorities and afford them substantive political power. The chapter first observes the unity of this debate across applying Equal Protection Clause to districting, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and the preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act. It then analogizes the struggle on the bench to Rawls’s and Nozick’s famous debate over the fair allocation of resources.

In Chapter 4 we describe how values and knowledge will help you to work as a community consultant and share examples of how they look in practice.

Measures that address racial and ethnic inequalities have been an important subject of legal and political discussion in many countries over the last decades. The legal questions include the meanings and purposes of equality, adequate methods of legal interpretation, and the possible role of constitutional courts in promoting social transformation. Participants in this debate also raise issues such as the role of the state in a democracy, the changing nature of racism, the social meanings of race and its correlation with national identity. This broad range of questions reveals the immense relevance of this topic for comparative analysis. An adequate understanding of this complex subject requires an examination of how law and race interact in different jurisdictions to produce and legitimate particular social arrangements. This is the case of Brazil, a country that implemented large scale affirmative action policies in the last fifteen years, a process that generated an intense debate about the social importance of race in a country that has historically represented itself as a racial democracy.