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During the early years of the study, Myrdal also began to give thought to the way that he would synthesize this mountain of information into a final manuscript of his own. Since the goal of the project was to produce a solution to the race problem, he took particular note of the group of Americans he thought had power to effectuate change in the country: elite, white northerners. He hypothesized that these Americans viewed the race problem as a conflict between actual practice and the “the American state religion” of justice, equality, and freedom. He intended to write a manuscript with their value system in mind. He hoped to motivate them to abandon all the forms of racial discrimination that he planned to outline in the book.

In writing Contact with America, they set out to disprove stereotypes about the United States that their fellow countrymen seemed to hold. In particular, they sought to explain that the U.S. was not just a heterogeneous group of people who treated racial minorities (particularly black Americans) as cruelly as Germans treated Jews. Rather, Americans (like Swedes) were a common folk united by egalitarian national ideals. They argued that, unlike Germans who discriminated against Jews, Americans were a morally conscious people who sought to correct their discrimination against black Americans to meet their egalitarian ideals. Americans, the couple explained, welcomed criticism of their race problem because they aspired to be a better people.

In 1941, the Myrdals returned to the United States and secluded themselves in Princeton, New Jersey, where Gunnar Myrdal wrote the final manuscript of the American project. Years later, he remembered the urgency they felt for writing the manuscript: “Particularly we Swedes were deeply conscious of the sufferings of young people in Europe. Many were killed in the war or became imprisoned, tortured or liquidated by the Nazis, while we were living here in beautiful Princeton. The work on the book became to us in a way our ‘war effort’ and our moral duty, where there could be no excuse for resting an hour.” By the time Myrdal returned to the United States, he viewed his American study as a war project. He would use the American Creed not only in order to motivate leading white Americans to take action, but also to present a positive image of Americans on the global stage.

The issue at hand was—and still is—the city’s nine elite public high schools. Like most public high schools in the city, these schools can choose who attends. But the elite schools are their own animal: Whereas other schools look at a range of criteria to determine students’ eligibility, eight of these nine elite institutions admit applicants based exclusively on how the students score on a rigorous, two-and-a-half-hour-long standardized test.

The test-only admissions policy is touted by supporters as a tactic that promotes fairness and offers the best way to identify the city’s most gifted students. But the complaint, which is still pending, tells a different story—one of modern-day segregation, in which poor kids of color are getting left behind.

Public schools in cities across the country—schools intended to break down the walls typical of expensive, elite private institutions by opening up access to stimulating, quality education for kids of all means—are closed in their admissions. In other words, kids aren’t just automatically enrolled because they live in the neighborhood—they have to apply to get in

"More assertive" action is needed to tackle discrimination against Muslim women and their segregation in some UK communities, David Cameron has said.

The PM said it was time to confront a minority of Muslim men with "backward attitudes" who exercised "damaging control" over women in their families.

A £20m language fund is to be set up in England, to help the 22% of Muslim women who have little or no English.

More than two decades after the Southern Baptist Convention — the country’s second-largest faith group — apologized to African Americans for its active defense of slavery in the 1800s, its flagship seminary on Wednesday released a stark report further delineating its ties to institutionalized racism.

The year-long study by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary found that all four founding faculty members owned slaves and “were deeply complicit in the defense of slavery,

The report also noted that the seminary’s most important donor and chairman of its Board of Trustees in the late 1800s, Joseph E. Brown, “earned much of his fortune by the exploitation of mostly black convict lease laborers,” employing in his coal mines and iron furnaces "the same brutal punishments and tortures formerly employed by slave drivers.”

Contra Barack Obama, there is a white America and a black America. There are also varying versions of Latino and Hispanic Americas across different regions of the country. There are robust, enduring differences in belief across races and communities about just what America’s identity should be and how politics are experienced, and they in turn create the political reality of the countr

these differences might be structural, informed by the basic fact of human geography, a geography itself built on the fact of American apartheid.

The PRRI/Atlantic poll, a random survey of slightly more than 1,000 people taken in December, reveals major differences among racial groups on some of the basic questions about what makes America America, and what makes Americans so

Although slavery and then racism were eventually widespread across what became the United States, it was in Virginia where the so-called peculiar institution was born, where it was codified in law, and where the most famous slave-led rebellion in America, the Nat Turner uprising of 1831, occurred.

There, too, reverence for slavery’s defenders and monuments to its military heroes still haunt public spaces and dialogue, and memorialize a time when the country was ripped in two

In 1860, more slaves lived in Virginia — 490,000 — than in any other state in the Union, according to census data. The year before, in what was then Harpers Ferry, Va., the white abolitionist, John Brown, headed the doomed slave insurrection that helped spark the Civil War

In March 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks defied segregation laws by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin did exactly the same thing. Eclipsed by Parks, her act of defiance was largely ignored for many years. She herself didn't talk about it much, but she spoke recently to the BBC.

"I remember during Easter one year, I was to get a pair of black patent shoes but you could only get them from the white stores, so my mother drew the outline of my feet on a brown paper bag in order to get the closest size, because we weren't allowed to go in the store to try them on."

"The white people were always seated at the front of the bus and the black people were seated at the back of the bus. The bus driver had the authority to assign the seats, so when more white passengers got on the bus, he asked for the seats."

oe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

After the Voting Rights Act was passed, in 1965, the revolution’s center of gravity shifted north, along with the stragglers of the Great Migration—toward de facto as opposed to de jure racism. Baldwin’s frequent premonitions of unrest in the streets began to come true. In his 1966 essay, “A Report From Occupied Territory,” he discussed the “powder keg” of poverty, joblessness, and discrimination in urban ghettos and warned that it “may blow up; it will be a miracle if it doesn’t.” King, by then, had sensed the same trouble brewing in the slums as Baldwin had. In his 1966 campaign against segregated housing in Chicago, which moved his strategy of nonviolent protest from the South to the North, he tried to wield his activism machine against the social and economic troubles that Baldwin described. He was repaid with violent counterprotests.

King spoke of a “white backlash”—a term he helped popularize—to his movement. But in retrospect, the strength of the reaction he predicted and endured often receives short shrift. The support of white moderates who recoiled at images of Negro children sprayed by hoses and attacked by dogs was instrumental in passing laws that ended legal segregation and protected voting rights.

t a White House stag dinner in February 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower shocked the new chief justice of the United States. Earl Warren was Eisenhower’s first appointment to the Supreme Court and had been sworn in just four months earlier. Only two months into his tenure, Warren had presided over oral arguments in the blockbuster school-segregation case Brown v. Board of Education. As of the dinner, the case was still under advisement. Yet Eisenhower seated Warren near one of the attorneys who had argued the case for the southern states, John W. Davis, and went out of his way to praise Davis as a great man. That alone would have made for an awkward evening. What happened next made it fateful. Over coffee, Eisenhower took Warren by the arm and asked him to consider the perspective of white parents in the Deep South. “These are not bad people,” the president said. “All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big black bucks.”

Warren had been a prosecutor and a governor, and was no choirboy; he had heard bigoted language before. Yet as the chief justice, he embodied the impartiality of the entire federal judiciary. He was a man who believed in fairness and dignity. The president’s words had shaken him.

When the Court ruled on the remedies phase of Brown in 1955, a decision known as Brown II, the president was even less voluble. He said nothing about the Court’s delegation of supervisory duties to the district courts, or its famous directive that school districts should begin to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” The following year, Eisenhower personally rewrote the Republican platform to read that the party “accepts” the original Brown decision, rather than “concurs” with it.

When retired Harvard professor Nathan Glazer died Jan. 19 at 95, descriptive sociology lost its last great practitioner. Best known for “Beyond the Melting Pot,” his landmark study written with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Glazer also collaborated with David Riesman on a rare best-seller of 20th-century sociology, “The Lonely Crowd.

He was a descriptive sociologist in the sense that his books and articles aimed at a truthful depiction of social reality.

As a 93-year-old retired professor of sociology, I can remember the era when sociologists unanimously agreed with Glazer that our primary task was to describe as accurately as possible how societies worked

Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history

what’s to blame for this institutional aging?

One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018.

Degler, a gentle and quietly heroic man, accused his colleagues of nothing short of dereliction of duty: appalled by nationalism, they had abandoned the study of the nation.

“If we historians fail to provide a nationally defined history, others less critical and less informed will take over the job for us.”

historians seemed to believe that if they stopped studying it, it would die sooner: starved, neglected, and abandoned.

What is true for class also goes for race, gender, age and a range of other affiliations: the American left are the products of the very society they are trying to change. As Trump has targeted women, black people, Latinos, Muslims and immigrants – to name but a few – so those groups have rallied and are asserting themselves while others, within the progressive coalition, have become more sensitized to their condition.

At a recent orientation for one Chicago-based progressive group new members related their experiences of the financial crash. The black participants shared stories about losing their jobs and homes and moving back in with their parents. The white ones talked about mounting college debt, graduating from college unable to find a job and moving in with their parents.

The first women’s march in Pittsburgh, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, was deeply divided over the involvement of women of color, culminating in a separate march and a black organizer asking whether the official march was a “whites-only feminist event”. In a very segregated city with an almost even split among black, Latino and white, the socialist victories in Chicago came in a range of places, including predominantly black, Latino and white wards as well as a couple that were relatively mixed.

ames Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model, which examines how the Third Reich found sustenance for its race-based initiatives in American law.

how the United States, a country grounded in such liberal principles as individual rights and the rule of law, could have produced legal ideas and practices “that seemed intriguing and attractive to Nazis.” In exploring this apparent incongruity, his short book raises important questions about law, about political decisions that affect the scope of civic membership, and about the malleability of Enlightenment values.

Pushing back against scholarship that downplays the impact in Nazi Germany of the U.S. model of legal racism, Whitman marshals an array of evidence to support the likelihood “that the Nuremberg Laws themselves reflect direct American influence.”

n the summer of 2020, the Stop A.A.P.I. Hate Youth Campaign interviewed 990 Asian-American young adults across the United States about their experiences during the pandemic, and found that one in four had reported experiencing racism in some way.

When schools closed and our country locked down, my family took daily walks, chalked the sidewalks, looked for teddy bears in windows, and tried to smile from behind our masks. But when a girl in our neighborhood pointed to my daughter and said they could not play together because of the “China virus,” I wept.

During lockdown, we devoured books with Asian-American heroines by authors like Grace Lin and Min Jin Lee. I marveled: “That’s my family’s story.” While my 7-year-old jumped from the couch, she said of one of the characters: “She likes to eat dduk guk” — Korean rice cake soup — “like me!

Keith Ammon, a Republican member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, introduced a bill that would bar schools as well as organizations that have entered into a contract or subcontract with the state from endorsing “divisive concepts.” Specifically, the measure would forbid “race or sex scapegoating,” questioning the value of meritocracy, and suggesting that New Hampshire—or the United States—is “fundamentally racist.”

“The vagueness of the language is really the point,” Leah Cohen, an organizer with Granite State Progress, a liberal nonprofit based in Concord, told me. “With this really broad brushstroke, we anticipate that that will be used more to censor conversations about race and equity.”

Most legal scholars say that these bills impinge on the right to free speech and will likely be dismissed in court.

A black World War I soldier was finally recognized for his military service over the weekend, decades after he was buried in an unmarked grave in Indiana.

I felt like he deserved one, and his memory needs to be kept alive and honored for his service and sacrifice.”

The armed forces weren't desegregated until 1948, meaning Inman likely served under French command, according to the chapter's research. Black soldiers were not allowed to directly engage in combat at the time.

The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.

Ms. Groves was among many incoming freshmen across the country whose admissions offers were revoked by at least a dozen universities after videos emerged on social media of them using racist language.

In one sense, the public shaming of Ms. Groves underscores the power of social media to hold people of all ages accountable, with consequences at times including harassment and both online and real-world “cancellation.”

In the most aggressive moves to knock out registered votes in modern memory, Republicans have already sought to nullify ballots before they are counted in several states that could tip the balance of the Electoral College.

In an early test of one effort, a federal judge in Texas on Monday ruled against local Republicans who wanted to compel state officials to throw out more than 127,000 ballots cast at newly created drive-through polling places in the Houston area. The federal court ruling, which Republicans said they would appeal, came after a state court also ruled against them.

In his last days of campaigning, Mr. Trump has essentially admitted that he does not expect to win without going to court. “As soon as that election is over,” he told reporters over the weekend, “we’re going in with our lawyers.”

The bank experience showed how you could be oppressed by hierarchy, working in an environment where you were neither free nor equal. But this implied that freedom and equality were bound together in some way beyond the basic state of being unenslaved, which was an unorthodox notion. Much social thought is rooted in the idea of a conflict between the two.

If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree—and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an “intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.” It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them.

What if they weren’t opposed, Anderson wondered, but, like the sugar-phosphate chains in DNA, interlaced in a structure that we might not yet understand?