The Hurdles We Face 16 Months After George Floyd – Harvard Gazette

The May 2020 assassination of George Floyd sparked a historic protest movement against racial injustice that spawned more than 25 million Americans across the country. In contrast to the civil rights-era marches of the 1960s and 1970s, the protesters were remarkably diverse in terms of race, age, and gender. Political and cultural leaders, corporations, universities and others expressed their support and pledged to heed calls for systemic change.

But where are things 16 months later?

Ibram X. Kendi, founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research and a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and Heather McGhee, former president of the progressive think tank Demos and author of the recent “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper” Together ”spoke about the challenges the movement is facing during a virtual chat last Thursday evening as part of the“ Truth and Transformation ”conference at Harvard Kennedy School.

While it is important to expect more than just gestures of solidarity from white allies, blacks should avoid the “trap of making a zero-sum argument that racism is great for whites and terrible for blacks,” said McGhee, now chairman of the board from Color of Change, an online racial justice organization.

“On the flip side, there is so much bad faith” selling the notion that “every inch of progress for people of color must come at the expense of whites,” she said. Just focusing on the benefits of white privilege without taking an honest look at the country and its history “does the job of inadvertently marketing racism to white people.”

“If we are truthful about the extent of racism in our politics and policymaking, and how it is responsible for the dysfunction of the United States, as I spoke in ‘The Sum of Us’ – the story of what happened to it is a lot of America’s publicly funded swimming pools that have been segregated and then drained instead of being integrated – if we’re honest, like the central animating force in politics that led us from the era of shared prosperity to the era of inequality, and that hinders ours Progress continues, is racism, then we have to be honest that it costs practically everyone, “said McGhee.

Moderator Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School and director of the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project (IARA), which hosted the conference, asked the two of them what people struggle with the most, or even each other fight back when it comes to discussing race and racism.

“One of the sticking points I’ve found is the predominance of whites who say, ‘I’m not a racist,’ and the predominance of blacks who say, ‘I can’t be racist,'” Kendi said. “Everyone claims they aren’t – for different reasons, of course.

“Some resistance arises from the amalgamation of the terms ‘racism’ and ‘racist’, with both whites and blacks claiming that they are not racist because they have no institutional power. “If for the individual the question is: Do you challenge the structure? Are you challenging or strengthening the system? ”He said.

The biggest sticking point he’s seen up close is the backlash he’s received from left and right in defining politics in terms of racism.

“I have defined a racist policy as any action that leads to racial inequality or injustice, period. We should only focus on the outcome to determine whether a policy is racist or anti-racist, ”he said.

For McGhee, the current news and information landscape is so skewed and divided along political lines that even those willing to discuss race and racism have little common ground.

“The extent of the disinformation at the moment and the loading of the zero-sum” us against them “rhetoric on the right-hand side mean that these conversations, which are conducted across ideological boundaries, are often conducted with completely different points of reference and facts.”, ” She said.

While that has always been the case “to some extent,” she added, today “there is just a whole different universe” of information that feeds the political beliefs of many Republicans. So anyone who wants a meaningful conversation about race must first wade their way through “thousands of false facts” to piece together the narratives underlying those beliefs just to understand these references.

“And that comes back to the deep cynicism that a very narrow, self-serving elite has embraced for willingness to spend billions of dollars to create an alternative information ecosystem for their own economic and political gain,” she said. “It’s a scary time. I think that’s the biggest challenge. “

The IARA Project’s Truth and Transformation Conference, sponsored by the Ash Center and the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, is an annual two-day event that brings together academics, government, education, business, and the media to consider how promises are put into practice Make diversity, equity and inclusion a reality. Other attendees at the conference included Cheryl Mills, former advisor and chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Boston’s Acting Mayor Kim Janey; and Howard University Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones, journalist and founder of the New York Times 1619 Project.