Could a Truth Commission Unite America?

How Fractured Nations and Communities Reckon with History and Move Toward Repair

Can democracy stand the test of time? Many factors have triggered the deep schism in American politics today. But a root cause of our faltering democracy may be our failure to grapple with the truth about the nation’s history of discrimination and institutionalized racism. Because Americans can’t even agree on basic truths about our history of exclusion, slavery, and Jim Crow segregation, we have become mired in contentious debates about what role, if any, the government should play in addressing past injustices and their present-day legacies. To forge a path …

by Gloria Y.A. Ayee | June 20, 2022

Why Divestment Defeated Apartheid and How It Might Help Beat Climate Change

The Money Didn’t Matter. The Movement Did

by Zeb Larson | February 17, 2022

The environmental activist and writer Bill McKibben estimates that climate divestment—the movement to pressure universities, churches, and other institutions to stop investing in, and thus profiting from, carbon-emitting companies—has removed …

Did We Fail the Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes Experiment—Or Did It Fail Us?

A Half-Century Old Classroom Exercise Shows Americans’ Hunger for a Silver Bullet to ‘Cure Racism’

by STEPHEN G. BLOOM | December 6, 2021

Today’s heated arguments about critical race theory shouldn’t surprise us because they aren’t new. Indeed, one of the best-known classroom experiments to combat racism remains a divisive subject more than …

Is a Merit-Based System Worth Aspiring For? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Is a Merit-Based System Worth Aspiring To?

It Can Be a Safeguard Against Nepotism and Corruption. It Might Not Make Society More Equal

by Sarah Rothbard | November 17, 2021

Should society judge people based on merit? How do 21st-century institutions measure merit, and how should they measure merit? And what is merit, anyway? These were three of the thorny …

The Mississippi Sharecropper Who Helped Black Americans Win Voting Rights

Fannie Lou Hamer's Legacy Reminds Us That Everyday People Can Effect Change—Even When the Nation Is Impossibly Divided

by Kate Clifford Larson | November 8, 2021

Though Black people represented 50 percent of Mississippi’s voting age population in 1964, Jim Crow literacy tests, poll taxes, violence, and intimidation had managed to all but silence their political …

Caught in White Supremacy’s Web, Seeking a Future My Mother Showed Me | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Navigating the Constellation of Restraints on Black Life

Scholar Dexter Voisin on Whiteness, Colorism, and the Societal Narratives We Inherit

by Dexter Voisin | March 24, 2021

“The true focus of change is never merely the oppressive systems we seek to change but the oppressor that is planted deep within each of us.” —Audre Lorde

In the 1960s, …

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