Racial reckoning should only address material racial inequality, not mere claims of hypothetical constitutional injury. This chapter defines racial inequality in measurable, visible terms and shows how Blacks experience disadvantage in institutional environments. Place, or residency, determines the access to resources that flow from key institutions like schools, neighborhoods and social capital networks. Place has a leveraging effect, amplifying advantages for some and compounding disadvantage for others. Less visible, race-neutral means perpetuate racially segregated places. The chapter shows how conservative constitutional doctrine conspicuously ignores these mechanics of inequality, and produces empirically bizarre results like the Supreme Court’s 2023 anti-affirmative action opinion about getting into Harvard. Colorblind antidiscrimination law offers a radical view of equality at odds with lived reality and core principles of racial equity, which reproduces more inequality.

This chapter reintroduces the U.S. mood in the spring of 2020 when George Floyd’s death and the Covid pandemic launched an uncanny “racial reckoning” based more on awareness of racism than accountability. The focus on one and not the other proved a shortcoming that contributed to a backlash that continues under the Trump presidency. The organization of the book shows that racial reckoning involved three major areas of racial inequality: disparities in policing, wealth and health. Future chapters present evidence that accountability is necessary despite the rise of federal legal and political developments in support of white supremacy and the denial of racial inequality to Blacks. The book ultimately argues that racial reckoning resembles Black wellbeing, which reflects the goals of most Americans and may be most achievable through local democracy.

This chapter examines how Covid-19’s devastating effects on Black people’s health and mortality reflected their overexposure to risk based on socioeconomic inequality, a disproportionate incidence of “underlying health conditions” and a distinct lack of trust in American healthcare. The combination shortens Black lives at all times. Racial reckoning after Covid demands asking why Black people suffer so many racial health disparities in the first place. This critical public health question leads to discoveries about the social determinants of health and the experience of pervasive implicit bias among healthcare professionals. All the underlying conditions associated with dying from Covid are exacerbated by environment and treatment dynamics that weaken trust, produce toxic psychological stresses and, unless reckoned with, put Blacks at heightened risk of the next pandemic.

This chapter argues that disproportionate police brutality against Black people is a fact of every American generation because the systems of oversight are not designed to deter it. The history of unchecked misconduct shows that criminal charges are almost unheard of because police criminality is not perceived as criminal. Civil constraints also face numerous structural obstacles--from a failure to monitor to a range of doctrinal roadblocks judges have imposed on federal civil rights laws. Many cases never get to court because of administrative hurdles drafted into collective bargaining agreements. Despite a small number of exceptions, the consistent result is a mutual lack of trust between Black communities and the public safety officers they count on and a systemic lack of deterrence when policing goes wrong.

This chapter reviews the 2020 “racial reckoning”, critiques its unfinished approach, evaluates the backlash against it and chronicles the rise of racial retribution with the second Trump administration. The original protests sought only awareness of racism in policing, wealth inequality and racial health disparities, not the accountability that could bring about structural changes in material inequalities. The Black struggle over inequality required recognizing racial equity as a core American value, something identity-oriented awareness and DEI programs could not establish. Instead, a structural backlash unwound performative support for reckoning and supported a radical inversion of antidiscrimination aligned with both a MAGA Republican political ideology and a Federalist Society legal movement called colorblindness. The country’s cynical pundulation on race undermined reckoning, challenging future progress.

The racial wealth gap, risks of housing displacement and lack of affordability that we see in unequal racial terms today has clear roots in urban renewal policies of post-WWII America. This chapter examines how the massive urbanization of Blacks in American cities as a result of the Great Migration led to race-conscious policies at the federal and local levels, entrenching segregation as a national policy and dictating the economic terms of Black-identified neighborhoods ever since. Urban renewal was a grand racial bargain. It destroyed hundreds of vulnerable communities at the same time other U.S. policies created generational wealth for non-Blacks through policies we call the American Dream. This chapter shows the decades-long accumulation of economic harms called “racial bargaining” as an example of systemic racism by modern U.S. governments.

This chapter is a critical evaluation of DEI, which became confused for racial reckoning and a target for the continuing backlash. It argues that there are two strains of DEI, the more popular corporatized DEI that seeks enhanced institutional belonging and economic pluralism and the more inclusive DEI that values increased representation of groups left out. Only inclusive DEI offers remedial possibilities for racial reckoning. Historically, both versions of diversity emerged as compromise positions for true racial accountability after remedial objectives were discarded by the Supreme Court in cases like Bakke. However, the viciousness of recent attacks on diversity and DEI by both conservative judges and the second Trump administration demonstrate its continued importance as an idea associated with racial reckoning, which must be vigorously defended on First Amendment grounds or risk the disappearance of Black presence and the erasure of Black identity.

This chapter argues that racial reckoning may mean something more to Black people than either awareness or accountability for racial inequality—it may mean material wellbeing. It tells the little-known story of 21st century Black migration away from traditional Back-identified urban spaces and suggests that these movements teach us a lot about the ingredients of racial reckoning according to Black households themselves. Millions have moved. The original research discussed here shows three trends rooted in affordability: involuntary displacement, local movement in search of better options and relocation by the most mobile for a reset of opportunities. Though some questions remain, the evidence of exodus shows how important local, state and democratic conditions are to a sense of Black wellbeing—and probably most Americans’.

The epilogue reviews the central conclusion—that racial reckoning must focus mainly on material accountability for cumulative racial inequality, especially at the local and state level—before summarizing many of the principles, goals and strategies discussed in the previous chapters. For instance, a key principle is to view policies about the way public goods are distributed through the lens of racial equity, even if the solution is to pursue race-neutral means. An underlying goal is to promote democracy through the deconcentration of social capital. The strategies that follow include specific, mostly localized policy choices in the areas on which the book focuses: place-based inequality, the racial wealth gap, racial health disparities, deterrence of police misconduct, DEI and equitable growth at the local level. There is also a brief example of a reparations program for urban renewal.