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Fruitvale Station has found a particular resonance with audiences this week. A brief but eloquent scene deftly illustrates the subtleties of white privilege - a reality too seldom portrayed in film and too often ignored by its beneficiaries in life. When Hollywood tackles race directly, it's usually by way of uplifting allegories like "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," "Crash" and "The Help," each of which, in its own way, perpetuates the consoling idea that eradicating racism is simply a matter of purging our negative prejudices. Rarely do films ask audiences to grapple with the deeply embedded, race-based habits that give white Americans an edge in everything from housing to employment, or the positive racial profiling that grants white people countless free passes."

""The widespread assumption is that Asian Americans came to the United States very disadvantaged, and they wound up advantaged through extraordinary investments in their children's education," says Brown University economist Nathaniel Hilger. But that's not what really happened, he says. Hilger recently used old census records to trace the fortunes of whites, blacks and Asians who were born in California during the early- to mid-20th century. He found that educational gains had little to do with how Asian Americans managed to close the wage gap with whites by the 1970s. Instead, his research suggests that society simply became less racist toward Asians."

"In the 1950s and 1960s, ethnic writers moved onto the bestseller lists and achieved recognition in literary circles. Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, and N. Scott Momaday showed how Americans once at the margins were now closer to the country's cultural center. In doing so, all three writers expanded the boundaries of American literature and opened up the definition of what it is to be American. The video provides the backdrop for this era, as a post-World War II America began to enjoy a prosperity that led it toward conformity and mass consumption. However, the postwar economic boom and "white flight" to the suburbs increased the physical and class distance between the white middle class and ethnic minorities who remained in older neighborhoods closer to the city centers. Ellison, Roth, and Momaday helped to resist the imaginative segregation that accompanied these changes in the urban and suburban landscape. Ellison's adaptations from jazz and blues, Roth's ethnic comedic rifts, and Momaday's ingenious use of Native American narrative traditions all helped to make storytelling richer and expanded readers' awareness of where narrative art comes from and who is capable of creating it. The video also emphasizes the risk these authors took in their innovative approaches as representatives of their own communities, often facing fierce criticism and misunderstanding of their fiction and its intentions. "

"Much has changed for African-Americans since the 1963 March on Washington (which, recall, was a march for "Jobs and Freedom"), but one thing hasn't: The unemployment rate among blacks is about double that among whites, as it has been for most of the past six decades."

Without question, Tom Robinson would be better off today. In fact, Tom Robinson could live a life completely unimaginable and unrecognizable to the characters in Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" - the groundbreaking book, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week.  No lynchings.  No all white male juries.  No presumption of guilt based on skin color.  No state-sanctioned discrimination. Yet, Tom would realize a sad, but undeniable truth -- that racism is still alive and all too well in contemporary America.  He would know it in the economic injustice that has left a disproportionate number of African-Americans -- 25 percent -- living in poverty.   He would see it in the criminal injustice that has left a disproportionate number of African-American men - 6 times the number of white, non-Hispanic men -- living in jails and prisons.  And he would feel it in the hate-filled, racist rhetoric that still defines too much of our political discourse - rhetoric that questions the Civil Rights Act, rhetoric that questions the birthplace of our President.

A new Harvard Business School study reveals that whites believe discrimination against them is rising, and that it's more prevalent than racism toward blacks. Host Michel Martin continues the conversation about anti-white bias with the study's co-author Michael Norton and Color Blind author Tim Wise.

New research shows that whites in the U.S. believe there are increases in racial bias toward them and public policies that create inequality. Vice Chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Abigail Thernstrom deems these claims as 'ridiculous,' and adds that race-based preferences will vanish when all students have leveled playing fields in schools

" Patrick Sharkey's look at neighborhood poverty levels for blacks and whites. This is from his deeply troubling book, Stuck In Place. There is some sense - and the president has affirmed this - that racism is no longer a real threat to mobility, that it is now class. This is wrong. And Sharkey's chart is just one reason why. Basically it shows that huge swaths of black people live in neighborhoods with poverty levels that virtually no whites ever experience. And this finding has been consistent across post-Civil Rights history."

"Three -- three decades of research reveal that students of color are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students, and are punished in harsher ways for the same infractions. They also learn this through the absence of their lives and narratives in the curricula. The Cooperative Children's Book Center did a review of nearly 4,000 books and found that only three percent were about African-Americans. And they further learn this through the lack of teachers that look like them. An analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics found that 45 percent of our nation's pre-K to high school students were people of color, while only 17 percent of our teachers are. 7:35 Our youth of color pay a profound price when their schooling sends them the message that they must be controlled, that they must leave their identities at home in order to be successful. Every child deserves an education that guarantees the safety to learn in the comfort of one's own skin."

" These are signs of unusual times. With Mr. Trump in the White House, the obsession with politics that has many adult Americans fiercely focused on the Senate's latest confirmation hearing and the president's last Twitter message has filtered down to those not yet of voting age. High school and even middle school students are showing a level of civic engagement not seen in years, their teachers and principals say. Continue reading the main story RELATED COVERAGE Donald Trump Loves New York. But It Doesn't Love Him Back. DEC. 9, 2016 Betsy DeVos Confirmed as Education Secretary; Pence Breaks Tie FEB. 7, 2017 "

Most Americans want their children to grow up to be "colorblind" when it comes to race. As a result, many parents, particularly white ones, don't discuss race with their children at all. But research demonstrates that babies as young as six months can recognize racial differences. And as they get older, kids start mentally categorizing people based on their race, whether they've been taught to by their parents or not. In fact, the authors of the book NurtureShock argue that parents' silence on the question may be exacerbating the problem. In the absence of open discussions about the role of race in kids' lives, they draw their own conclusions, some of which would be horrifying to progressive parents.

Nearly 100 years have passed since their ideologies clashed concerning the best way to improve the plight of African-Americans. Dubois said we could show white people we were their equals through intellectualism and liberal arts education. Here's the full text of Dubois' The Souls of Black Folk. And Mr. Dubois' response to Mr. Washington is here. Washington said that the only way we could become equal was to create our own businesess, learn trades and create an economic base in which we owned the capital, land and economic resources. Here's Washington's Up From Slavery in full text. So I ask you -- a 100 years later, who won? Who had the best suggestion? Was there a best suggestion? Were they both right?

This six minute video excerpt from "Target America" comes at the end of the documentary, and just after the last terrorist attack during the Reagan administration is cited-the bombing of Pan Am Flight #103 on Dec. 21, 1988. This excerpt begins with the seeming policy shift by the Reagan White House in the war against terrorism. And it ends with the thoughts of key policymakers who had participated in the battles against terrorists during the 1980s, and the lessons they learned.

As the Bush White House weighs its options, what are the lessons from America's first "War on Terrorism" in the 1980s? Includes interviews, a timeline, video, and the evolution of Islamic terrorism.

The civil rights legend has almost become "St. Martin" to schoolchildren, a larger-than-life figure whose sole achievement was delivering a speech about a dream, Winbush said. "It's like we boiled him down to four words - 'I have a dream' - the same way we've boiled Malcolm X down to 'by any means necessary,'" he said. "I think the students are in danger of getting an image of Dr. King … ascending into heaven." That image is inconsistent with how King was viewed before his death in 1968, Winbush said. "Dr. King was a peacemaker but the vast majority of people in this country, black and white, viewed him as a troublemaker because he told this country, 'Let's live up to what's in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.' I hope that students and teachers go beyond those four words and realize that he lived after the 'I Have a Dream' speech," he said.

King's famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail," published in The Atlantic as "The Negro Is Your Brother," was written in response to a public statement of concern and caution issued by eight white religious leaders of the South. It stands as one of the classic documents of the civil-rights movement

Read highlighted parts of sections Background, Local Context, and Religious Context for Wednesday.

Consider two recent examples of American justice. An op-ed that argues our justice system is punishes poor blacks much more severely than wealthy whites.