A full conceptualization of discrimination requires that research focuses on preventing discriminatory behaviors, which are largely perpetrated by White individuals, as well as on larger systems of structural racism and White supremacy in which discrimination experiences are embedded and from which they emanate. The current chapter presents an integrated model of anti-racist socialization for White parents, synthesizing the critical consciousness, anti-racism, and parental racial socialization literatures. The model includes three elements of anti-racist racial socialization: (1) racial content, (2) socioemotional competencies, and (3) parenting processes. The model grounds anti-racist racial socialization in White families as part of the daily activity settings of parent–child interactions, positioning anti-racist socialization as regular, ongoing, and integrated into daily life.

This chapter advances the premise that one way in which racism impacts health and developmental outcomes is through the experiences of the finite resource of time. Although all humans experience the same twenty-four hours in a given day, how those hours are allocated, how much agency over how those hours are spent, and the lived experiences of that time are stratified by structural systems such as racism. Taking a lifecourse perspective, we describe how human development is shaped as much by social factors as biological influences, using time as an example. Ultimately, stratified experiences of time set the stage for racism to shape even the most fundamental of human experiences. We call upon the field to deepen our study of the connections between time, racism, and health inequities, and offer a few recommendations for future research.

Research is another area of social work subject to racial biases. Historically, research was used as a weapon against BIPOC, designed to “prove” their inferiority. While less overtly racist nowadays, research continues to promote a racial divide through several different means: overreliance on a positivist paradigm for researching social questions; holding on to theories based on white normative assumptions, failure to proportionally include people of color in sampling, or include them in defining the research question in cultural and locational contexts.

Chapter 1 introduces the book’s key themes by describing the Buchanan v. Warley case in its historical social-movement context in Louisville and nationally, the legal theory behind the Supreme Court’s invalidation of racial zoning, and the 100+ years in which many subsequent land use policies and practices have segregated American landscapes and perpetuated racial injustice. The chapter provides a multi-dimensional snapshot of racially unjust land-use conditions in the U.S. more than 100 years after the nation’s missed opportunity to embrace an anti-subordination vision of land use. Based on distributive, procedural, and social justice concepts and the insights of the nine core chapters in the book, three major themes are identified: (1) racial inequity is deeply and systemically embedded in American land use in multi-faceted ways; (2) cross-disciplinary scholarly study is essential to understanding race and land use; and (3) American land use is characterized both by the intransigence of systemic racism and by social, legal, and policy changes that advance racial justice.

Chapter 9’s case study of a major market-driven development project in Baltimore, the Port Covington project, explores how racial segregation and economic segregation are implicitly assumed to be normal parts of zoning’s spatial ordering of American cities. Inner cities are now places where private developers in a global neoliberal economy seek to use both public and private investments to create new exclusive, elite spaces for higher wealth consumers. Port Covington, a forty-two-block multi-use redevelopment of a vacant industrial site, is one such example on a massive scale. Although Baltimore’s relatively weak inclusionary zoning ordinance forced the developers to agree to include a limited number of affordable housing units in its new development plan, there were no discussions about whether or how to remedy Baltimore’s racialized geography and its legal and policy history of segregation, exclusion, and unequal opportunity. Major land-use decisions should not only embrace mixed-income and mixed-use policy goals but also government-provided affordable housing units and robust inclusionary measures to redress the subordinating dynamics of entrenched structural racism in local zoning.

This chapter identifies two recurring themes that, beginning with Teodoro Ramos Blanco and Alberto Peña in the 1920s–1930s, has continued to define the conceptual basis of many Afro-Cuban artists up to the present. One is their efforts to conceptualize and celebrate their African cultural heritage. The other direction focuses on Afrodescendants’ social conditions and engages with political struggles against structural racism. Challenging the established historical arc accepted by the scholarship, the chapter identifies the 1940s as the most radical moment of Afrodescendant rupture in Cuban arts. It involved the revolutionary visual language of Uver Solis, Roberto Diago Querol, and Wifredo Lam, as well as the reformist executions of unknown artists such as Nicasio Aguirre, grounded on ideas of racial inclusion and black honorability. It also questions the assumed divide between pre- and post-1959, noting how revolutionary institutions continued to function under the common sense of the superiority of Western-centric art. It points to how the defining feature of the supposedly “new” revolutionary art, socially engaged figurative expression, was long established in Republican Cuba. The serious explorations of African-based cultures pioneered in the 1940s also continued in the 1960s–1970s with Grupo Antillano.

Mapping the statements of Afro-Cuban artists on the Afrodescendant social condition and their cultural heritage during the revolutionary period, this chapter delves into the Afro-centric art of Manuel Mendive, Rafael Queneditt, Rogelio Rodríguez Cobas, and others who, during the 1960s–1980s, pointed their emphasis to the Yoruba and Bantú worlds that shaped Antillean societies despite the regime’s religious intolerance. Along with Adelaida Herrera Valdés, Julia Valdés Borrero, and others, they formed the Group Antillano, the first visual art collective grounded on notions of Afrodescendant consciousness that Cuba had ever experienced. The chapter moves chronologically, noting how what could constitute the groundbreaking “New Cuban Art” of the post-1959 period is not Volumen I, but the art of the Queloides collective. While their works were not the first to be concerned with issues of structural racism, they were an unprecedented endeavor that moved beyond previous reformist visions and instead aimed to dismantle the fundamental tenets of Cuban national narratives. The chapter concludes with the internationalization of Afro-Cuban art and how migration and diaspora shape the work of contemporary Afro-Cuban artists.

Historically, African-Americans have found work disproportionately in the public sector, including in local school districts, and I argue that this has created impediments to improving public education in majority Black cities. Educational reforms are evaluated primarily based on how they impact adult employment opportunities, not student learning. Often, the loss of local democratic control is necessary to overcome opposition to reforms driven by employment concerns. I illustrate these dynamics with two case studies of (1) the integration of schools in the South after Brown v. Board of Education and (2) the state takeover of New Orleans schools after Hurricane Katrina.

The Introduction of the book exposes students to key concepts surrounding how U.S. law has constructed and maintained the idea of race in society. Introducing the framework of individual and systemic oppression, the chapter explores the dualistic role that the law plays in the democratic process by both advancing and preventing societal change, based on how it is wielded.

Health care comprises a major segment of the US economy and is a critical influence upon citizens’ quality of life. The quality of health care and access to it are negatively affected by corruption. So too is citizen compliance with public health policies, a fact that became apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stay-at-home orders, for example, were significantly less effective in states with more extensive corruption. Low levels of trust in government contributed to those disparities. Such effects are more pronounced in poorer areas and Black communities. Racial contrasts in vaccine equity – access to vaccinations and related services – were pronounced and, again, reflected levels of corruption. Particularly intractable problems of collective action posed by structural corruption and structural racism must be addressed if disparities in the quality of health care are to be reduced.

Chapter 1 addresses the false belief that prejudice and discrimination are individual in nature and not systemic or institutional. Many people believe that racism, sexism, or homophobia comprise an individual’s negative feelings toward marginalized groups – a person has hate in their heart and discriminates against the relevant target. It is certainly the case that people can hate members of certain groups and that hate can manifest in discrimination. However, inequality is also refleted in insitutions. It is systemic and structural. That is, inequality is reflected in laws, policies, and practices, and is baked into insititutions such as health care, the criminal legal system, marriage, education, the military, and so on. Chapter 1 describes the key terms associated with systemic inequality, and describes the process by which systemic inequality is established and maintained. The chapter concludes with strategies to reduce systemic and structural inequality.

This chapter challenges the myth that rural communities lack racial diversity and that “rural” is synonymous with “white.” The chapter addresses in particular the misconception that, where rural regions do overrepresent white people, there is something natural or innate about the connection between rurality and whiteness. The chapter uses a critical-legal lens to examine the history and modern conditions associated with rural landownership and livelihoods. This analysis helps illustrate, in the words of Jess Shoemaker, “how rural landscapes got so white.” Certain experiences of the Gullah-Geechee people of South Carolina offer a case study for exploring heirs’ property, racial discrimination, and other mechanisms used to contribute to rural racial minorities’ land dispossession. The discussion demonstrates how property law, federal interventions, and other areas of law have facilitated the construction of rural regions as disproportionately white and racially stratified. Once again, the analysis reveals how rural America is a manmade project of public creation, rather than the product of benign or natural forces.