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Race in America 2019

1. How Americans see the state of race relations

Table of contents.

Majorities of whites, blacks and Hispanics say race relations are bad
Majority of Americans say Trump has made race relations worse
For the most part, Americans see positive intergroup relations
No consensus on best approach to improving race relations
Opinions about the amount of attention paid to race vary across racial and ethnic groups
Majority of Americans say racial discrimination is overlooked
One-in-five black adults say all or most whites in the U.S. are prejudiced against black people
Across racial and ethnic groups, similar shares say they hear racist or racially insensitive comments from friends or family
Seven-in-ten say a white person using the N-word is never acceptable; about four-in-ten say it’s never acceptable for blacks
Majorities see advantages for whites, disadvantages for blacks
Many see racial discrimination and less access to good schools or jobs as major reasons blacks may have a harder time getting ahead
Most agree blacks are treated less fairly than whites by police and justice system
Plurality says country hasn’t gone far enough in giving black people equal rights with whites
Most say legacy of slavery affects black people’s position in society a great deal or fair amount
Blacks more likely than other groups to say their race has hurt their ability to succeed; whites most likely to say their race has helped
Majorities of blacks, Asians and Hispanics say they have faced discrimination
Most blacks say their family talked to them about challenges they might face because of their race
Most blacks see their race as central to their overall identity
Acknowledgments
Methodology

A majority of Americans say race relations in the United States are bad, and of those, about seven-in-ten say things are getting even worse. Roughly two-thirds say it has become more common for people to express racist or racially insensitive views since Donald Trump was elected, even if not necessarily more acceptable.

Opinions about the state of race relations, Trump’s handling of the issue and the amount of attention paid to race vary considerably across racial and ethnic groups. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians are more likely than whites to say Trump has made race relations worse and that there’s too little attention paid to race in the U.S. these days. In addition, large majorities of blacks, Hispanics and Asians say people not seeing discrimination where it exists is a bigger problem in the U.S. than people seeing it where it doesn’t exist, but whites are about evenly divided on this.

This chapter also explores Americans’ views of intergroup relations; whether they think the better approach to improving race relations is to focus on what different groups have in common or on the unique experiences of each racial and ethnic group; whether they have ever heard friends or family members make potentially racist or racially insensitive comments or jokes and, if so, did they confront them; and views about white people and black people using the N-word.

Majority of Americans have negative views of the state of race relations

About six-in-ten Americans (58%) say race relations in the U.S. are generally bad, a view that is held by majorities across racial and ethnic groups. Still, blacks (71%) are considerably more likely than whites (56%) and Hispanics (60%) to express negative views about the state of race relations.

Democrats have more negative views of the current state of race relations than Republicans. About two-thirds of Democrats (67%) say race relations are bad, while Republicans are more evenly divided (46% say race relations are bad and 52% say they are good). These partisan differences are virtually unchanged when looking only at white Democrats and Republicans.

Most who say race relations are bad think they’re getting even worse

Overall, 53% of the public says race relations are getting worse. Views are particularly pessimistic among those who say race relations are currently bad: 69% of this group says race relations are getting even worse, and 22% say they’re staying the same. Just 9% think they’re getting better. Among those who say race relations are good, 30% see things getting even better, while 30% say they’re getting worse and 40% don’t see much change.

Most black, Hispanic and Asian adults say Trump has made race relations worse

Two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, 56% of Americans say Trump has made race relations worse. A relatively small share (15%) say the president has made progress toward improving race relations, and 13% say he has tried but failed to make progress; 14% say Trump has not addressed race relations.

Assessments of the president’s performance on race relations vary considerably along racial and ethnic lines. Most blacks (73%), Hispanics (69%) and Asians (65%) say Trump has made race relations worse, compared with about half of whites (49%).

Democrats and Republicans have widely different opinions of the president’s handling of race relations. Fully 84% of Democrats say Trump has made race relations worse, compared with 20% of Republicans. And while 34% of Republicans say Trump has made progress toward improving race relations, virtually no Democrats (1%) say the same. Among Democrats, views on this don’t vary much along racial or ethnic lines, but white Democrats (86%) are somewhat more likely than black Democrats (79%) to say Trump has made race relations worse.

Most Americans say it’s become more common for people to express racist or racially insensitive views since Trump’s election

Most say it’s now more common for people to express racist views

Majorities across racial and ethnic groups say it has become more common for people to express racist or racially insensitive views since Trump was elected, but blacks (76%) and Hispanics (75%) are more likely than whites (60%) to say this is the case. Whites are more likely than blacks and Hispanics to say expressing these views is about as common as it was before Trump’s election.

Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans to say it has become more common for people to express racist or racially insensitive views since Trump was elected (84% vs. 42%). Half of Republicans – vs. 12% of Democrats – say people expressing these views is about as common as it was before, while small shares in each group say it is now less common than before Trump’s election. These partisan differences remain when looking only at white Democrats and Republicans.

Among whites and blacks, the view that expressing racist or racially insensitive views is now more common is particularly prevalent among those with more education. Some 84% of blacks with a bachelor’s degree or more education and 86% with some college experience offer this opinion, compared with 66% of blacks with a high school diploma or less education. Among whites, the difference is between those with at least a bachelor’s degree (71% say expressing these views has become more common) and those with some college (55%) or no college experience (53%).

More than four-in-ten say it’s now more acceptable for people to express racist or racially insensitive views

A plurality of Americans say expressing racist views has grown more acceptable

While most Americans say it’s become more common for people to express racist or racially insensitive views since Trump’s election, fewer (45%) say this has become more acceptable. About a quarter (23%) say it’s now less acceptable for people to express these views, and 31% say it’s about as acceptable as it was before Trump was elected.

Overall, blacks (53%) are more likely than whites (43%) or Hispanics (45%) to say it’s become more acceptable for people to express racist or racially insensitive views. Among Democrats, however, whites are the most likely to say this (70% of white Democrats vs. 55% of black and 57% of Hispanic Democrats).

Again, educational attainment is linked to these views. Among whites, blacks and Hispanics, the view that it has become increasingly acceptable for people to express racist or racially insensitive views is more prevalent among those with more education. Overall, 58% of adults with at least a bachelor’s degree say this has become more acceptable since Trump’s election, compared with 44% of those with some college and 36% of those with a high school diploma or less education.

Views on whether it’s become more acceptable for people to express racist views since Trump was elected are also strongly linked with partisanship. More than six-in-ten Democrats (64%) say this is now more acceptable; 22% of Republicans say the same. Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say this is about as acceptable as it was before Trump’s election (50% vs. 15%).

Public is divided on how well blacks and whites get along; views of other intergroup relations are mostly positive

Despite their generally negative assessments of the current state of race relations, Americans tend to say that most racial and ethnic groups get along well with one another. Among those who gave an answer, about six-in-ten or more say this is the case for whites and Asians (88% say these groups get along very or pretty well), Hispanics and Asians (73%), blacks and Hispanics (65%), whites and Hispanics (63%) and blacks and Asians (62%). Relatively large shares do not know enough about how some of these groups get along to give an answer.

Assessments of how well blacks and whites get along are more divided. Among those who gave a rating, 51% say these groups generally get along well, while 49% say they don’t get along too well or at all. Whites are far more positive than blacks in their views of how the two groups get along. About six-in-ten whites (58%) say blacks and whites get along well; the same share of blacks say these groups do not get along well.

There’s a significant age gap among blacks on this issue: Blacks ages 50 and older express more positive views of black-white relations than do their younger counterparts. Among those in the older group, 53% say blacks and whites get along very well or pretty well, compared with 33% of black adults younger than 50.

Whites and Hispanics also offer considerably different views of how their groups get along, though majorities of each say they get along very well or pretty well (70% of whites vs. 54% of Hispanics). And while large shares of blacks and Hispanics say their groups generally get along, blacks (83%) are more likely than Hispanics (69%) to say this.

While those who say race relations are good are consistently more positive about how these groups get along, more than half of those who say race relations are bad also say intergroup relations – with the exception of black-white relations – are also generally positive. When it comes to how blacks and whites get along, just 36% of those who say race relations are bad say these groups get along well, compared with 76% of those who say race relations are good.

Whites are more likely than racial and ethnic minorities to say focus should be on what groups have in common

More than half of Americans (55%) say that, when it comes to improving race relations, it is more important to focus on what different racial and ethnic groups have in common; 44% say it’s more important to focus on each group’s unique experiences.

Asians (58%), blacks (54%) and Hispanics (49%) are more likely than whites (39%) to say it’s more important to focus on the unique experiences of different racial and ethnic groups. Still, about four-in-ten or more of these racial and ethnic minorities say the better approach to improving race relations is to focus on what different groups have in common.

Among whites, opinions vary considerably across age groups. Younger whites are the most likely to say that, when it comes to improving race relations, it’s more important to focus on what makes different groups unique: 54% of those younger than 30 say this. In contrast, majorities of whites ages 30 to 49 (57%), 50 to 64 (63%) and 65 and older (67%) say it’s more important to focus on what different racial and ethnic groups have in common. Age is not significantly linked to views about this among blacks or Hispanics.

Whites are more likely than blacks, Hispanics and Asians to say too much attention is paid to race

About four-in-ten Americans (41%) say there’s too much attention paid to race and racial issues in the country these days; 37% say there’s too little attention, and 21% say it’s about right. Whites are far more likely than other racial and ethnic groups to say there’s too much attention paid to race, while blacks are more likely than other groups to say too little attention is paid to these issues.

Half of whites say too much attention is paid to race and racial issues these days, while smaller shares say there is too little (28%) or about the right amount of attention (21%). In contrast, about two-thirds of blacks (67%) and half of Hispanics say there’s too little focus on race. Asians are more divided, with similar shares saying there’s too little (39%) and too much (36%) attention paid to race and racial issues. A quarter of Asians say the amount of attention paid is about right.

Among whites, the view that the country is too focused on race is more common among those who are older and without a bachelor’s degree. Opinions also differ considerably across party lines: Three-quarters of white Republicans think there’s too much attention paid to race and racial issues, compared with 21% of white Democrats. About half of white Democrats (48%) say there’s too little attention paid to these issues and 29% say it’s about right. Black Democrats are far more likely than their white counterparts to say there’s too little attention paid to race: 71% say that’s the case.

Nonwhites are more likely to say discrimination is overlooked

When it comes to racial discrimination, a majority of Americans (57%) say the bigger problem for the country is people not seeing discrimination where it really exists, rather than people seeing racial discrimination where it really does not exist (42% say this is the bigger problem).

More than eight-in-ten black adults (84%) and somewhat smaller majorities of Hispanics (67%) and Asians (72%) say the bigger problem is people not seeing racial discrimination where it really exists. Among whites, about as many say the bigger problem is people overlooking discrimination (48%) rather than seeing it where it doesn’t exist (52%).

Younger whites, as well as whites with a bachelor’s degree or more education, are more likely than older and less-educated whites to say the bigger problem for the country is people not seeing racial discrimination where it really exists. Views also differ sharply by party, with white Democrats and white Republicans offering views that are the mirror image of each other: 78% of white Democrats say the bigger problem is people not seeing discrimination where it really exists, while 77% of Republicans say the bigger problem is people seeing discrimination where it doesn’t exist.

One-in-five black adults say all or most white people are prejudiced against black people

Relatively small shares of Americans overall think all or most white people in the country are prejudiced against black people (9%) or that all or most black people are prejudiced against whites (13%). But majorities say at least some whites and blacks are prejudiced against the other group (70% say this about each group).

Among blacks, one-in-five say all or most white people in the U.S. are prejudiced against black people; 6% of whites say the same. The difference, while significant, is less pronounced when it comes to the shares of blacks (10%) and whites (14%) who say all or most black people are prejudiced against white people; 12% of Hispanics and 16% of Asians say this.

Racist or racially insensitive comments are about as common across groups

Whites (46%), blacks (44%), Hispanics (47%) and Asians (47%) are about equally likely to say they often or sometimes hear comments or jokes that can be considered racist or racially insensitive from friends or family members who share their racial background. About half in each group say this rarely or never happens.

Majorities of whites and blacks say they have confronted someone who has made racially insensitive comments

Among those who say they hear these types of comments, even if rarely, majorities of whites (64%) and blacks (59%) say they have confronted a friend or family member who shares their racial background about this; 50% of Hispanics and 43% of Asians say they have done this.

While many say they have confronted a friend or family member who has made a racist comment, the public is skeptical that others would do the same. Only 6% of all adults think all or most white people would confront a white friend or family member who made such a comment about people who are black, and 3% say that all or most black people would do the same if a black friend or family member made a racist comment about people who are white.

Black women and older blacks are more likely to say it’s never acceptable for a black person to use the N-word

Most Americans (70%) – including similar shares of blacks and whites – say they, personally, think it’s never acceptable for a white person to use the N-word; about one-in-ten say this is always (3%) or sometimes (6%) acceptable. Opinions are more divided when it comes to black people using the N-word: About half say this is rarely (15%) or never (38%) acceptable, while a third say it is sometimes (20%) or always (13%) acceptable. Again, black and white adults offer similar views.

Among blacks, opinions about the use of the N-word by black people vary across genders and age groups. Black women are more likely than black men to say this is never acceptable (43% vs. 31%). And while half of blacks ages 50 and older say it’s never acceptable for black people to use the N-word, 29% of blacks younger than 50 say the same.

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Black Progress: How far we’ve come, and how far we have to go

Subscribe to governance weekly, abigail thernstrom and at abigail thernstrom senior fellow, manhattan institute stephan thernstrom st stephan thernstrom.

March 1, 1998

16 min read

Let’s start with a few contrasting numbers.

60 and 2.2. In 1940, 60 percent of employed black women worked as domestic servants; today the number is down to 2.2 percent, while 60 percent hold white- collar jobs.

44 and 1. In 1958, 44 percent of whites said they would move if a black family became their next door neighbor; today the figure is 1 percent.

18 and 86. In 1964, the year the great Civil Rights Act was passed, only 18 percent of whites claimed to have a friend who was black; today 86 percent say they do, while 87 percent of blacks assert they have white friends.

Progress is the largely suppressed story of race and race relations over the past half-century. And thus it’s news that more than 40 percent of African Americans now consider themselves members of the middle class. Forty-two percent own their own homes, a figure that rises to 75 percent if we look just at black married couples. Black two-parent families earn only 13 percent less than those who are white. Almost a third of the black population lives in suburbia.

Because these are facts the media seldom report, the black underclass continues to define black America in the view of much of the public. Many assume blacks live in ghettos, often in high-rise public housing projects. Crime and the welfare check are seen as their main source of income. The stereotype crosses racial lines. Blacks are even more prone than whites to exaggerate the extent to which African Americans are trapped in inner-city poverty. In a 1991 Gallup poll, about one-fifth of all whites, but almost half of black respondents, said that at least three out of four African Americans were impoverished urban residents. And yet, in reality, blacks who consider themselves to be middle class outnumber those with incomes below the poverty line by a wide margin.

A Fifty-Year March out of Poverty

Fifty years ago most blacks were indeed trapped in poverty, although they did not reside in inner cities. When Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma in 1944, most blacks lived in the South and on the land as laborers and sharecroppers. (Only one in eight owned the land on which he worked.) A trivial 5 percent of black men nationally were engaged in nonmanual, white-collar work of any kind; the vast majority held ill-paid, insecure, manual jobs—jobs that few whites would take. As already noted, six out of ten African-American women were household servants who, driven by economic desperation, often worked 12-hour days for pathetically low wages. Segregation in the South and discrimination in the North did create a sheltered market for some black businesses (funeral homes, beauty parlors, and the like) that served a black community barred from patronizing “white” establishments. But the number was minuscule.

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Beginning in the 1940s, however, deep demographic and economic change, accompanied by a marked shift in white racial attitudes, started blacks down the road to much greater equality. New Deal legislation, which set minimum wages and hours and eliminated the incentive of southern employers to hire low-wage black workers, put a damper on further industrial development in the region. In addition, the trend toward mechanized agriculture and a diminished demand for American cotton in the face of international competition combined to displace blacks from the land.

As a consequence, with the shortage of workers in northern manufacturing plants following the outbreak of World War II, southern blacks in search of jobs boarded trains and buses in a Great Migration that lasted through the mid-1960s. They found what they were looking for: wages so strikingly high that in 1953 the average income for a black family in the North was almost twice that of those who remained in the South. And through much of the 1950s wages rose steadily and unemployment was low.

Thus by 1960 only one out of seven black men still labored on the land, and almost a quarter were in white-collar or skilled manual occupations. Another 24 percent had semiskilled factory jobs that meant membership in the stable working class, while the proportion of black women working as servants had been cut in half. Even those who did not move up into higher-ranking jobs were doing much better.

A decade later, the gains were even more striking. From 1940 to 1970, black men cut the income gap by about a third, and by 1970 they were earning (on average) roughly 60 percent of what white men took in. The advancement of black women was even more impressive. Black life expectancy went up dramatically, as did black homeownership rates. Black college enrollment also rose—by 1970 to about 10 percent of the total, three times the prewar figure.

In subsequent years these trends continued, although at a more leisurely pace. For instance, today more than 30 percent of black men and nearly 60 percent of black women hold white-collar jobs. Whereas in 1970 only 2.2 percent of American physicians were black, the figure is now 4.5 percent. But while the fraction of black families with middle-class incomes rose almost 40 percentage points between 1940 and 1970, it has inched up only another 10 points since then.

Affirmative Action Doesn’t Work

Rapid change in the status of blacks for several decades followed by a definite slowdown that begins just when affirmative action policies get their start: that story certainly seems to suggest that racial preferences have enjoyed an inflated reputation. “There’s one simple reason to support affirmative action,” an op-ed writer in the New York Times argued in 1995. “It works.” That is the voice of conventional wisdom.

In fact, not only did significant advances pre-date the affirmative action era, but the benefits of race-conscious politics are not clear. Important differences (a slower overall rate of economic growth, most notably) separate the pre-1970 and post-1970 periods, making comparison difficult.

We know only this: some gains are probably attributable to race-conscious educational and employment policies. The number of black college and university professors more than doubled between 1970 and 1990; the number of physicians tripled; the number of engineers almost quadrupled; and the number of attorneys increased more than sixfold. Those numbers undoubtedly do reflect the fact that the nation’s professional schools changed their admissions criteria for black applicants, accepting and often providing financial aid to African-American students whose academic records were much weaker than those of many white and Asian-American applicants whom these schools were turning down. Preferences “worked” for these beneficiaries, in that they were given seats in the classroom that they would not have won in the absence of racial double standards.

On the other hand, these professionals make up a small fraction of the total black middle class. And their numbers would have grown without preferences, the historical record strongly suggests. In addition, the greatest economic gains for African Americans since the early 1960s were in the years 1965 to 1975 and occurred mainly in the South, as economists John J. Donahue III and James Heckman have found. In fact, Donahue and Heckman discovered “virtually no improvement” in the wages of black men relative to those of white men outside of the South over the entire period from 1963 to 1987, and southern gains, they concluded, were mainly due to the powerful antidiscrimination provisions in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

With respect to federal, state, and municipal set-asides, as well, the jury is still out. In 1994 the state of Maryland decided that at least 10 percent of the contracts it awarded would go to minority- and female-owned firms. It more than met its goal. The program therefore “worked” if the goal was merely the narrow one of dispensing cash to a particular, designated group. But how well do these sheltered businesses survive long-term without extraordinary protection from free-market competition? And with almost 30 percent of black families still living in poverty, what is their trickle-down effect? On neither score is the picture reassuring. Programs are often fraudulent, with white contractors offering minority firms 15 percent of the profit with no obligation to do any of the work. Alternatively, set-asides enrich those with the right connections. In Richmond, Virginia, for instance, the main effect of the ordinance was a marriage of political convenience—a working alliance between the economically privileged of both races. The white business elite signed on to a piece-of-the-pie for blacks in order to polish its image as socially conscious and secure support for the downtown revitalization it wanted. Black politicians used the bargain to suggest their own importance to low-income constituents for whom the set-asides actually did little. Neither cared whether the policy in fact provided real economic benefits—which it didn’t.

Why Has the Engine of Progress Stalled?

In the decades since affirmative action policies were first instituted, the poverty rate has remained basically unchanged. Despite black gains by numerous other measures, close to 30 percent of black families still live below the poverty line. “There are those who say, my fellow Americans, that even good affirmative action programs are no longer needed,” President Clinton said in July 1995. But “let us consider,” he went on, that “the unemployment rate for African Americans remains about twice that of whites.” Racial preferences are the president’s answer to persistent inequality, although a quarter-century of affirmative action has done nothing whatever to close the unemployment gap.

Persistent inequality is obviously serious, and if discrimination were the primary problem, then race-conscious remedies might be appropriate. But while white racism was central to the story in 1964, today the picture is much more complicated. Thus while blacks and whites now graduate at the same rate from high school today and are almost equally likely to attend college, on average they are not equally educated. That is, looking at years of schooling in assessing the racial gap in family income tells us little about the cognitive skills whites and blacks bring to the job market. And cognitive skills obviously affect earnings.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the nation’s report card on what American students attending elementary and secondary schools know. Those tests show that African-American students, on average, are alarmingly far behind whites in math, science, reading, and writing. For instance, black students at the end of their high school career are almost four years behind white students in reading; the gap is comparable in other subjects. A study of 26- to 33-year-old men who held full-time jobs in 1991 thus found that when education was measured by years of school completed, blacks earned 19 percent less than comparably educated whites. But when word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, arithmetical reasoning, and mathematical knowledge became the yardstick, the results were reversed. Black men earned 9 percent more than white men with the same education—that is, the same performance on basic tests.

Other research suggests much the same point. For instance, the work of economists Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy has demonstrated the increasing importance of cognitive skills in our changing economy. Employers in firms like Honda now require employees who can read and do math problems at the ninth-grade level at a minimum. And yet the 1992 NAEP math tests, for example, revealed that only 22 percent of African-American high school seniors but 58 percent of their white classmates were numerate enough for such firms to consider hiring them. And in reading, 47 percent of whites in 1992 but just 18 percent of African Americans could handle the printed word well enough to be employable in a modern automobile plant. Murnane and Levy found a clear impact on income. Not years spent in school but strong skills made for high long-term earnings.

The Widening Skills Gap

Why is there such a glaring racial gap in levels of educational attainment? It is not easy to say. The gap, in itself, is very bad news, but even more alarming is the fact that it has been widening in recent years. In 1971, the average African-American 17-year-old could read no better than the typical white child who was six years younger. The racial gap in math in 1973 was 4.3 years; in science it was 4.7 years in 1970. By the late 1980s, however, the picture was notably brighter. Black students in their final year of high school were only 2.5 years behind whites in both reading and math and 2.1 years behind on tests of writing skills.

Had the trends of those years continued, by today black pupils would be performing about as well as their white classmates. Instead, black progress came to a halt, and serious backsliding began. Between 1988 and 1994, the racial gap in reading grew from 2.5 to 3.9 years; between 1990 and 1994, the racial gap in math increased from 2.5 to 3.4 years. In both science and writing, the racial gap has widened by a full year.

There is no obvious explanation for this alarming turnaround. The early gains doubtless had much to do with the growth of the black middle class, but the black middle class did not suddenly begin to shrink in the late 1980s. The poverty rate was not dropping significantly when educational progress was occurring, nor was it on the increase when the racial gap began once again to widen. The huge rise in out-of-wedlock births and the steep and steady decline in the proportion of black children growing up with two parents do not explain the fluctuating educational performance of African-American children. It is well established that children raised in single-parent families do less well in school than others, even when all other variables, including income, are controlled. But the disintegration of the black nuclear family—presciently noted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan as early as 1965—was occurring rapidly in the period in which black scores were rising, so it cannot be invoked as the main explanation as to why scores began to fall many years later.

Some would argue that the initial educational gains were the result of increased racial integration and the growth of such federal compensatory education programs as Head Start. But neither desegregation nor compensatory education seems to have increased the cognitive skills of the black children exposed to them. In any case, the racial mix in the typical school has not changed in recent years, and the number of students in compensatory programs and the dollars spent on them have kept going up.

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A pandemic that disproportionately affected communities of color, roadblocks that obstructed efforts to expand the franchise and protect voting discrimination, a growing movement to push anti-racist curricula out of schools – events over the past year have only underscored how prevalent systemic racism and bias is in America today.

What can be done to dismantle centuries of discrimination in the U.S.? How can a more equitable society be achieved? What makes racism such a complicated problem to solve? Black History Month is a time marked for honoring and reflecting on the experience of Black Americans, and it is also an opportunity to reexamine our nation’s deeply embedded racial problems and the possible solutions that could help build a more equitable society.

Stanford scholars are tackling these issues head-on in their research from the perspectives of history, education, law and other disciplines. For example, historian Clayborne Carson is working to preserve and promote the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and religious studies scholar Lerone A. Martin has joined Stanford to continue expanding access and opportunities to learn from King’s teachings; sociologist Matthew Clair is examining how the criminal justice system can end a vicious cycle involving the disparate treatment of Black men; and education scholar Subini Ancy Annamma is studying ways to make education more equitable for historically marginalized students.

Learn more about these efforts and other projects examining racism and discrimination in areas like health and medicine, technology and the workplace below.

Update: Jan. 27, 2023: This story was originally published on Feb. 16, 2021, and has been updated on a number of occasions to include new content.

Understanding the impact of racism; advancing justice

One of the hardest elements of advancing racial justice is helping everyone understand the ways in which they are involved in a system or structure that perpetuates racism, according to Stanford legal scholar Ralph Richard Banks.

“The starting point for the center is the recognition that racial inequality and division have long been the fault line of American society. Thus, addressing racial inequity is essential to sustaining our nation, and furthering its democratic aspirations,” said Banks , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and co-founder of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice .

This sentiment was echoed by Stanford researcher Rebecca Hetey . One of the obstacles in solving inequality is people’s attitudes towards it, Hetey said. “One of the barriers of reducing inequality is how some people justify and rationalize it.”

How people talk about race and stereotypes matters. Here is some of that scholarship.

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The Stanford Center for Racial Justice is taking a hard look at the policies perpetuating systemic racism in America today and asking how we can imagine a more equitable society.

The psychological toll of George Floyd’s murder

As the nation mourned the death of George Floyd, more Black Americans than white Americans felt angry or sad – a finding that reveals the racial disparities of grief.

Seven factors contributing to American racism

Of the seven factors the researchers identified, perhaps the most insidious is passivism or passive racism, which includes an apathy toward systems of racial advantage or denial that those systems even exist.

Scholars reflect on Black history

Humanities and social sciences scholars reflect on “Black history as American history” and its impact on their personal and professional lives.

The history of Black History Month

It's February, so many teachers and schools are taking time to celebrate Black History Month. According to Stanford historian Michael Hines, there are still misunderstandings and misconceptions about the past, present, and future of the celebration.

Numbers about inequality don’t speak for themselves

In a new research paper, Stanford scholars Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt propose new ways to talk about racial disparities that exist across society, from education to health care and criminal justice systems.

Changing how people perceive problems

Drawing on an extensive body of research, Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton lays out a roadmap to positively influence the way people think about themselves and the world around them. These changes could improve society, too.

Welfare opposition linked to threats of racial standing

Research co-authored by sociologist Robb Willer finds that when white Americans perceive threats to their status as the dominant demographic group, their resentment of minorities increases. This resentment leads to opposing welfare programs they believe will mainly benefit minority groups.

Conversations about race between Black and white friends can feel risky, but are valuable

New research about how friends approach talking about their race-related experiences with each other reveals concerns but also the potential that these conversations have to strengthen relationships and further intergroup learning.

Defusing racial bias

Research shows why understanding the source of discrimination matters.

Many white parents aren’t having ‘the talk’ about race with their kids

After George Floyd’s murder, Black parents talked about race and racism with their kids more. White parents did not and were more likely to give their kids colorblind messages.

Stereotyping makes people more likely to act badly

Even slight cues, like reading a negative stereotype about your race or gender, can have an impact.

Why white people downplay their individual racial privileges

Research shows that white Americans, when faced with evidence of racial privilege, deny that they have benefited personally.

Clayborne Carson: Looking back at a legacy

Stanford historian Clayborne Carson reflects on a career dedicated to studying and preserving the legacy of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

How race influences, amplifies backlash against outspoken women

When women break gender norms, the most negative reactions may come from people of the same race.

Examining disparities in education

Scholar Subini Ancy Annamma is studying ways to make education more equitable for historically marginalized students. Annamma’s research examines how schools contribute to the criminalization of Black youths by creating a culture of punishment that penalizes Black children more harshly than their white peers for the same behavior. Her work shows that youth of color are more likely to be closely watched, over-represented in special education, and reported to and arrested by police.

“These are all ways in which schools criminalize Black youth,” she said. “Day after day, these things start to sediment.”

That’s why Annamma has identified opportunities for teachers and administrators to intervene in these unfair practices. Below is some of that research, from Annamma and others.

New ‘Segregation Index’ shows American schools remain highly segregated by race, ethnicity, and economic status

Researchers at Stanford and USC developed a new tool to track neighborhood and school segregation in the U.S.

New evidence shows that school poverty shapes racial achievement gaps

Racial segregation leads to growing achievement gaps – but it does so entirely through differences in school poverty, according to new research from education Professor Sean Reardon, who is launching a new tool to help educators, parents and policymakers examine education trends by race and poverty level nationwide.

School closures intensify gentrification in Black neighborhoods nationwide

An analysis of census and school closure data finds that shuttering schools increases gentrification – but only in predominantly Black communities.

Ninth-grade ethnic studies helped students for years, Stanford researchers find

A new study shows that students assigned to an ethnic studies course had longer-term improvements in attendance and graduation rates.

Teaching about racism

Stanford sociologist Matthew Snipp discusses ways to educate students about race and ethnic relations in America.

Stanford scholar uncovers an early activist’s fight to get Black history into schools

In a new book, Assistant Professor Michael Hines chronicles the efforts of a Chicago schoolteacher in the 1930s who wanted to remedy the portrayal of Black history in textbooks of the time.

How disability intersects with race

Professor Alfredo J. Artiles discusses the complexities in creating inclusive policies for students with disabilities.

Access to program for black male students lowered dropout rates

New research led by Stanford education professor Thomas S. Dee provides the first evidence of effectiveness for a district-wide initiative targeted at black male high school students.

How school systems make criminals of Black youth

Stanford education professor Subini Ancy Annamma talks about the role schools play in creating a culture of punishment against Black students.

Reducing racial disparities in school discipline

Stanford psychologists find that brief exercises early in middle school can improve students’ relationships with their teachers, increase their sense of belonging and reduce teachers’ reports of discipline issues among black and Latino boys.

Science lessons through a different lens

In his new book, Science in the City, Stanford education professor Bryan A. Brown helps bridge the gap between students’ culture and the science classroom.

Teachers more likely to label black students as troublemakers, Stanford research shows

Stanford psychologists Jennifer Eberhardt and Jason Okonofua experimentally examined the psychological processes involved when teachers discipline black students more harshly than white students.

Why we need Black teachers

Travis Bristol, MA '04, talks about what it takes for schools to hire and retain teachers of color.

Understanding racism in the criminal justice system

Research has shown that time and time again, inequality is embedded into all facets of the criminal justice system. From being arrested to being charged, convicted and sentenced, people of color – particularly Black men – are disproportionately targeted by the police.

“So many reforms are needed: police accountability, judicial intervention, reducing prosecutorial power and increasing resources for public defenders are places we can start,” said sociologist Matthew Clair . “But beyond piecemeal reforms, we need to continue having critical conversations about transformation and the role of the courts in bringing about the abolition of police and prisons.”

Clair is one of several Stanford scholars who have examined the intersection of race and the criminal process and offered solutions to end the vicious cycle of racism. Here is some of that work.

Police Facebook posts disproportionately highlight crimes involving Black suspects, study finds

Researchers examined crime-related posts from 14,000 Facebook pages maintained by U.S. law enforcement agencies and found that Facebook users are exposed to posts that overrepresent Black suspects by 25% relative to local arrest rates.

Supporting students involved in the justice system

New data show that a one-page letter asking a teacher to support a youth as they navigate the difficult transition from juvenile detention back to school can reduce the likelihood that the student re-offends.

Race and mass criminalization in the U.S.

Stanford sociologist discusses how race and class inequalities are embedded in the American criminal legal system.

New Stanford research lab explores incarcerated students’ educational paths

Associate Professor Subini Annamma examines the policies and practices that push marginalized students out of school and into prisons.

Derek Chauvin verdict important, but much remains to be done

Stanford scholars Hakeem Jefferson, Robert Weisberg and Matthew Clair weigh in on the Derek Chauvin verdict, emphasizing that while the outcome is important, much work remains to be done to bring about long-lasting justice.

A ‘veil of darkness’ reduces racial bias in traffic stops

After analyzing 95 million traffic stop records, filed by officers with 21 state patrol agencies and 35 municipal police forces from 2011 to 2018, researchers concluded that “police stops and search decisions suffer from persistent racial bias.”

Stanford big data study finds racial disparities in Oakland, Calif., police behavior, offers solutions

Analyzing thousands of data points, the researchers found racial disparities in how Oakland officers treated African Americans on routine traffic and pedestrian stops. They suggest 50 measures to improve police-community relations.

Race and the death penalty

As questions about racial bias in the criminal justice system dominate the headlines, research by Stanford law Professor John J. Donohue III offers insight into one of the most fraught areas: the death penalty.

Diagnosing disparities in health, medicine

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted communities of color and has highlighted the health disparities between Black Americans, whites and other demographic groups.

As Iris Gibbs , professor of radiation oncology and associate dean of MD program admissions, pointed out at an event sponsored by Stanford Medicine: “We need more sustained attention and real action towards eliminating health inequities, educating our entire community and going beyond ‘allyship,’ because that one fizzles out. We really do need people who are truly there all the way.”

Below is some of that research as well as solutions that can address some of the disparities in the American healthcare system.

Stanford researchers testing ways to improve clinical trial diversity

The American Heart Association has provided funding to two Stanford Medicine professors to develop ways to diversify enrollment in heart disease clinical trials.

Striking inequalities in maternal and infant health

Research by SIEPR’s Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater finds wealthy Black mothers and infants in the U.S. fare worse than the poorest white mothers and infants.

More racial diversity among physicians would lead to better health among black men

A clinical trial in Oakland by Stanford researchers found that black men are more likely to seek out preventive care after being seen by black doctors compared to non-black doctors.

A better measuring stick: Algorithmic approach to pain diagnosis could eliminate racial bias

Traditional approaches to pain management don’t treat all patients the same. AI could level the playing field.

5 questions: Alice Popejoy on race, ethnicity and ancestry in science

Alice Popejoy, a postdoctoral scholar who studies biomedical data sciences, speaks to the role – and pitfalls – of race, ethnicity and ancestry in research.

Stanford Medicine community calls for action against racial injustice, inequities

The event at Stanford provided a venue for health care workers and students to express their feelings about violence against African Americans and to voice their demands for change.

Racial disparity remains in heart-transplant mortality rates, Stanford study finds

African-American heart transplant patients have had persistently higher mortality rates than white patients, but exactly why still remains a mystery.

Finding the COVID-19 Victims that Big Data Misses

Widely used virus tracking data undercounts older people and people of color. Scholars propose a solution to this demographic bias.

Studying how racial stressors affect mental health

Farzana Saleem, an assistant professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education, is interested in the way Black youth and other young people of color navigate adolescence—and the racial stressors that can make the journey harder.

Infants’ race influences quality of hospital care in California

Disparities exist in how babies of different racial and ethnic origins are treated in California’s neonatal intensive care units, but this could be changed, say Stanford researchers.

Immigrants don’t move state-to-state in search of health benefits

When states expand public health insurance to include low-income, legal immigrants, it does not lead to out-of-state immigrants moving in search of benefits.

Excess mortality rates early in pandemic highest among Blacks

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been starkly uneven across race, ethnicity and geography, according to a new study led by SHP's Maria Polyakova.

Decoding bias in media, technology

Driving Artificial Intelligence are machine learning algorithms, sets of rules that tell a computer how to solve a problem, perform a task and in some cases, predict an outcome. These predictive models are based on massive datasets to recognize certain patterns, which according to communication scholar Angele Christin , sometimes come flawed with human bias .

“Technology changes things, but perhaps not always as much as we think,” Christin said. “Social context matters a lot in shaping the actual effects of the technological tools. […] So, it’s important to understand that connection between humans and machines.”

Below is some of that research, as well as other ways discrimination unfolds across technology, in the media, and ways to counteract it.

IRS disproportionately audits Black taxpayers

A Stanford collaboration with the Department of the Treasury yields the first direct evidence of differences in audit rates by race.

Automated speech recognition less accurate for blacks

The disparity likely occurs because such technologies are based on machine learning systems that rely heavily on databases of English as spoken by white Americans.

New algorithm trains AI to avoid bad behaviors

Robots, self-driving cars and other intelligent machines could become better-behaved thanks to a new way to help machine learning designers build AI applications with safeguards against specific, undesirable outcomes such as racial and gender bias.

Stanford scholar analyzes responses to algorithms in journalism, criminal justice

In a recent study, assistant professor of communication Angèle Christin finds a gap between intended and actual uses of algorithmic tools in journalism and criminal justice fields.

Move responsibly and think about things

In the course CS 181: Computers, Ethics and Public Policy , Stanford students become computer programmers, policymakers and philosophers to examine the ethical and social impacts of technological innovation.

Homicide victims from Black and Hispanic neighborhoods devalued

Social scientists found that homicide victims killed in Chicago’s predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods received less news coverage than those killed in mostly white neighborhoods.

Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.S. Census data.

AI Index Diversity Report: An Unmoving Needle

Stanford HAI’s 2021 AI Index reveals stalled progress in diversifying AI and a scarcity of the data needed to fix it.

Identifying discrimination in the workplace and economy

From who moves forward in the hiring process to who receives funding from venture capitalists, research has revealed how Blacks and other minority groups are discriminated against in the workplace and economy-at-large.

“There is not one silver bullet here that you can walk away with. Hiring and retention with respect to employee diversity are complex problems,” said Adina Sterling , associate professor of organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Business (GSB).

Sterling has offered a few places where employers can expand employee diversity at their companies. For example, she suggests hiring managers track data about their recruitment methods and the pools that result from those efforts, as well as examining who they ultimately hire.

Here is some of that insight.

How To: Use a Scorecard to Evaluate People More Fairly

A written framework is an easy way to hold everyone to the same standard.

Archiving Black histories of Silicon Valley

A new collection at Stanford Libraries will highlight Black Americans who helped transform California’s Silicon Valley region into a hub for innovation, ideas.

Race influences professional investors’ judgments

In their evaluations of high-performing venture capital funds, professional investors rate white-led teams more favorably than they do black-led teams with identical credentials, a new Stanford study led by Jennifer L. Eberhardt finds.

Who moves forward in the hiring process?

People whose employment histories include part-time, temporary help agency or mismatched work can face challenges during the hiring process, according to new research by Stanford sociologist David Pedulla.

How emotions may result in hiring, workplace bias

Stanford study suggests that the emotions American employers are looking for in job candidates may not match up with emotions valued by jobseekers from some cultural backgrounds – potentially leading to hiring bias.

Do VCs really favor white male founders?

A field experiment used fake emails to measure gender and racial bias among startup investors.

Can you spot diversity? (Probably not)

New research shows a “spillover effect” that might be clouding your judgment.

Can job referrals improve employee diversity?

New research looks at how referrals impact promotions of minorities and women.

Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are, but rather sets of actions that people do. Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

About the Author

PAULA M. L. MOYA, is the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford University. She is the Burton J. and Deedee McMurtry University Fellow in Undergraduate Education and a 2019-20 Fellow at the Center for the Study of Behavioral Sciences.

Moya’s teaching and research focus on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary studies, feminist theory, critical theory, narrative theory, American cultural studies, interdisciplinary approaches to race and ethnicity, and Chicanx and U.S. Latinx studies.

She is the author of The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (Stanford UP 2016) and Learning From Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (UC Press 2002) and has co-edited three collections of original essays, Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (W.W. Norton, Inc. 2010), Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave 2006) and Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (UC Press 2000).

Previously Moya served as the Director of the Program of Modern Thought and Literature, Vice Chair of the Department of English, Director of the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and also the Director of the Undergraduate Program of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

She is a recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, the Outstanding Chicana/o Faculty Member award. She has been a Brown Faculty Fellow, a Clayman Institute Fellow, a CCSRE Faculty Research Fellow, and a Clayman Beyond Bias Fellow.

Mulberry Street, Little Italy, New York, c 1900. Photo courtesy Library of Congress

How to see race

Race is a shapeshifting adversary: what seems self-evident takes training to see, and twists under political pressure.

by Gregory Smithsimon + BIO

We think we know what race is. When the United States Census Bureau says that the country will be majority non-white by 2044, that seems like a simple enough statement. But race has always been a weaselly thing.

Today my students, including Black and Latino students, regularly ask me why Asians (supposedly) ‘assimilate’ with whites more quickly than Blacks and Latinos. Strangely, in the 1920s, the US Supreme Court denied Asians citizenship on the basis that they could never assimilate; fast-forward to today, and Asian immigrants are held up as exemplars of assimilation. The fact that race is unyielding enough to shut out someone from the national community, yet malleable enough for my students to believe that it explains a group’s apparent assimilation, hints at what a shapeshifting adversary race is. Race is incredibly tenacious and unforgiving, a source of grave inequality and injustice. Yet over time, racial categories evolve and shift.

To really grasp race, we must accept a double paradox. The first one is a truism of antiracist educators: we can see race, but it’s not real. The second is stranger: race has real consequences, but we can’t see it with the naked eye. Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them. Fundamentally, race makes power visible by assigning it to physical bodies. The evidence of race right before our eyes is not a visual trace of a physical reality, but a by-product of social perceptions, in which we are trained to see certain features as salient or significant. Race does not exist as a matter of biological fact, but only as a consequence of a process of racialisation .

O ccasionally there are historical moments when the creation of race and its political meaning get spelled out explicitly. The US Constitution divided people into white, Black or Indian, which were meant to stand in for power categories: those eligible for citizenship, those subjected to brutal enslavement, and those targeted for genocide. In the first census, each resident counted as one person, each slave as three-fifths a person, and each Indian was not counted at all.

But racialisation is often more insidious. It means that we see things that don’t exist, and fail to recognise things that do. The most powerful racial category is often invisible: whiteness. The benefit of being in power is that whites can imagine that they are the norm and that only other people have race. An early US census instructed people to leave the race section blank if they were white, and indicate only if someone were something else (‘B’ for Black, ‘M’ for Mulatto). Whiteness was literally unmarked.

A brief aside on the politics of typography, in case you’re wondering: throughout this article I leave ‘white’ as is, but I capitalise ‘Black’, as well as ‘Indian’ and ‘Irish’. Why? Well, as the writer and activist W E B DuBois said in the early 20th century, during the decades-long campaign to capitalise ‘Negro’: ‘I believe that 8 million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.’ I could argue that I don’t capitalise white because ‘white’ rarely rises to the level of a cultural identification – but the real reason I don’t is because race is never fair, so it’s fitting for inequality be written into the words we use for races.

Putting whiteness under inspection shows how powerful race is, despite the instability of racial categories. For decades, ‘whiteness’ was an explicit standard for citizenship. (Blacks could technically be citizens, but enjoyed none of the legal benefits. Asians born outside the US were prohibited from becoming citizens until the mid-20th century.) Eligibility for citizenship – painted as whiteness – has remained a category since its inscription in the Constitution, but those eligible for membership in that group have changed. Groups such as Germans, Irish, Italians and Jews were popularly defined as non-citizens and non-white when they first arrived, and then became white. What we see as white today is not the same as it was 100 years ago.

Thomas Nast’s cartoons are notorious in this regard. His caricatures of Irishmen and Blacks are particularly shocking because they are a type we no longer see today. Working-class Irishmen are represented as chimpanzees in crumpled top hats and curled-up shoes. Their faces have a large dome-shaped upper lip surrounded by bushy sideburns:

At times, Nast partnered the Irishman with an equally offensive image of a Black American, with big ‘Sambo’-style lips, perhaps a large rump and clunky bare feet. Today, few Americans have an image in their minds of what an Irish American should look like. Unless, perhaps, they meet a man named O’Connor with red hair, Americans today rarely think to themselves: ‘Of course! He looks Irish.’

Americans can’t see German, Irish or French, but they could . Not all white people look the same

But Nast was not only sketching nasty caricatures of Irishmen; he was doing so in a way that would appear believable to his audience. In a similar example of invisible ethnicity, 15 per cent of Americans in 2014 reported German heritage. This ethnic group is widespread and numerous. So let me pose a simple question: what do German Americans look like? One in seven Americans are German American; how many of the German Americans you meet have you identified that way? Even more so than later immigrant groups such as Italian, Irish or Jewish, German is invisible.

Americans can’t see German, Irish or French, but they could . It’s not the case that all white people look the same. My parents are both of predominantly Irish heritage. One summer, my family was travelling and had a layover in Ireland long enough for us to see the city of Dublin for the first time. We had not left the airport before my seven-year-old son said what I was already thinking: ‘Everybody here looks like grandma and grandpa!’ My family, according to my seven-year-old, looked like people from Ireland.

A few years later, I was to meet a French colleague at a busy Paris train station at rush hour, but neither of us knew what the other one looked like, and there were hundreds of people. I tried to guess which of the women entering, exiting, waiting, smoking, texting and milling about was the person I was to meet, but to no avail. Then I turned, and from a block away, through a crowd of hundreds, a woman waved directly at me. She had picked me out. I had been vaguely aware, before then, that no matter how familiar I got with Paris, I stood out on the subway: I might feel perfectly French riding the train, reading the advertisements in French and understanding the conductor, but when I got home and looked in the mirror, I knew my face was different from the diverse visages I saw in public.

Later I asked my colleague, and she said she knew I wasn’t French. How so? I asked. She scrutinised me. ‘ La mâchoire .’ It was your jaw, she said, with a satisfied smile. Until that day, I never knew there was such a thing as an Irish chin, but I had one. And no doubt, if Nast ever met my earliest American ancestors on the street, he’d know they looked Irish too. We don’t see Irish anymore, we don’t recognise it, we no longer caricature it. But we could.

T he racial category of Asian is just as unstable and entangled with political power as whiteness is. The US census started counting ‘Chinese’ back in 1870 (with no other category for people from the continent of Asia). Around the same time, the census started counting a similarly excluded group, American Indians, which the Constitution had designated as ripe for expropriation. Tellingly, Indian racial categories were unstable from the start: after not being counted at all, Indians were then included but tallied in the ‘white’ column – except in areas where there were large numbers of Indians, where they became their own category.

For Asians, as Paul Schor points out in his fascinating history Counting Americans (2017), the US government counted Chinese and Japanese but still left the rest of Asia blank, adding ‘Filipino, Hindu, and Korean’ in the 20th century. For something so clearly created by people, lists of racial groups are never comprehensive and typically ill-defined. Looking across the Eurasian continent, the US government today is still vague about where white ends and Asian begins. People in the US who were born east of Greece and west of Thailand are often unsure which boxes to check in the US census every 10 years. Like storm-borne waves or wind-blown sand dunes, race is a daunting obstacle that shifts and changes.

During the Second World War, China was a US ally, while Japan was an enemy. The US military decided it necessary to identify racial differences between the Chinese and the Japanese. In a series of cartoon illustrations, they tried to educate American soldiers about what to look for – what to see – in order to distinguish a Japanese solider who might be trying to blend in among a Chinese population.

Today, the ‘How to Spot a Jap’ leaflets are an offensive novelty – used either to illustrate the history of racist stereotyping or sold on postcards as ironic curiosities. But they can also be examined in another way. In The Civilizing Process (1978), the sociological theorist Norbert Elias studied books on manners from the European Renaissance to understand the process of the creation of what he called habitus . Manners that we see as utterly natural and inevitable today, like not blowing one’s nose at the table, or eating off the serving spoon, or belching or farting in public, are, in fact, socially constructed and learned behaviours.

At the historical moment at which they were introduced, books of manners were required to teach what is today utterly obvious to adults. They make for incredible reading. In his chapter ‘On Blowing One’s Nose’, for instance, Elias quotes a ‘precept for gentlemen’ that matter-of-factly explains: ‘When you blow your nose or cough, turn round so that nothing falls on the table.’ ‘Do not blow your nose with the same hand that you use to hold the meat.’ ‘It is unseemly to blow your nose into the tablecloth.’ Some of the recommendations are as poetic as they are graphic: ‘Nor is it seemly, after wiping your nose, to spread out your handkerchief and peer into it as if pearls and rubies might have fallen out of your head.’ It appears that actions that seem completely natural had to be taught explicitly.

Genetic inheritance isn’t what matters. What we literally see is shaped by politics

The ‘How to Spot a Jap’ flyers were printed to serve much the same function as the manners books that Elias studied. They tried to create and implant a racial habitus that distinguished the Japanese from the Chinese. That Second World War poster looks offensive today – crude, reductionist, insulting – and it is. We think that recognising such ridiculousness makes us less racist than the people who made it. It doesn’t. It merely means that we have different racial categories than in 1942.

Chinese and Japanese people look no more ‘similar’ or ‘different’ from one another than Irish Americans do from French Americans. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t differences as a matter of statistical distribution, but only that what we think we know about race has to be learned, and that what people ‘know’ and ‘see’ as salient and obvious changes over time. Most Americans cannot distinguish a white American of Irish origin versus one of French origin walking down the street, yet they hardly need pamphlets explaining what to look for to tell if someone is white or Black. If the distinction between Japanese and Chinese had remained as significant in the US today as it was to US soldiers during the Second World War, many people would see it as similarly self-evident.

On-the-street racial distinctions don’t have to be ‘perfect’. People often don’t recognise the author Malcolm Gladwell as Black, although he is; other times whites are mistaken for Blacks. For the purposes of making or unmaking a racial difference, genetic inheritance isn’t what matters. What we literally see is shaped by politics. The same two groups can be visibly different racially or indistinguishable racially, depending on the political context and power relations by which they’re categorised.

F rancis Galton was a pioneer in modern statistics. But he was also a eugenicist. Among other things, Galton became notorious for photos in the late 19th century that purported to reveal the ‘Jewish type’. At the time, people believed that Irish, Jewish, Japanese, Chinese or German denoted races. When Jews were a race, people thought that they could tell who was Jewish by looking at them. Today, many Jewish people recoil at the idea that there is a Jewish ‘race’, and find the suggestion that there is a Jewish ‘look’ inherently racist. At various times, then, the US Army, Thomas Nast and the father of the statistical method of regression analysis all believed that there were visually distinct and observable races that many Americans today would be generally unable to identify – certainly not with the level of certainty they’d feel with respect to racial categories such as Caucasian, African American, Latino or Asian.

I suspect that a visitor from a planet without race would have a very difficult time slotting anyone on Earth into the racial categories we use today. If they were asked to group people visually, there is no statistical possibility that they’d use the same set of arbitrary boxes, and even if these categories were described for them in detail, they would probably not sort actual people in the same way as the modern US does.

That we think we see race naturally, when in fact it’s socially constructed, is the third eye through which we see the world. The census prediction that the US will be majority minority is less a conclusion than a question: ‘What future will immigrants of colour build in the US?’ The answer involves not just changes that transpire between one group and another, but changes to the membership of those groups and their symbolic meaning. In response to demographic shifts, the very boundaries of whiteness are likely to shift, as indeed they’ve done before.

In the worst case, a majority non-white US could take its cue from apartheid-era South Africa

In The History of White People (2011), Nell Irvin Painter argues that the idea of ‘whiteness’ has expanded several times to include more and more people. First came the Irish and previously ‘suspect’ non-Protestants, who ‘gained’ whiteness in the late 1800s. The next great expansion of whiteness came with the social upheaval and physical relocation of both servicemen and migrating industrial workers during the Second World War. In the war economy, groups including Italians, Jews and Mexicans became upwardly mobile, and sought to present themselves in allegiance with Anglo-Saxon beauty ideals (the only Jewish Miss America was crowned in 1945) – all of which helped to recast them as ‘white’. The narrative of white inclusivity continued from the Roosevelt era into the postwar period. Finally, intermarriage eventually dissolved previous notions of racial boundaries. Few white Americans could claim a single national race (Swedish, German, French) with any confidence, and whiteness could no longer sustain the idea of nation-based races. For Painter, this most recent change closed the book on any scientific basis for race, and helped to make the US a country where people are much more mixed, across old racial boundaries, than ever before.

Perhaps this mixing means that the US is finally warming to multiracial identity. But if that is indeed happening, it’s not because of demographics, but because of the tireless efforts of activists who continue to fight racism and racial segregation. Movements for racial justice succeed not simply because of demographic shifts but because racial privileges cannot justify themselves in the face of an organised alternative. Many countries have been minority white yet held on to whiteness; to the extent that whiteness meant citizenship, these were states that were ruled by a minority and oversaw the hyper-exploitation of a much larger part of the country. In the worst case, a majority non-white US could take its cue from apartheid-era South Africa, or Brazil, or Guatemala, where a small light-skinned group has enjoyed privileges at the expense of many more who are excluded.

The path to justice therefore involves attacking the prerogative to categorise people in order to justify their exploitation or colonisation. That means acknowledging and challenging the basis of racial categories. It’s not about a token embrace of multicultural colour: it’s about power, and power is far too wily for us to expect it to stand still and be overtaken by demographic change. We need to confront the force of racial privilege no matter who inhabits the privileged caste at any given moment. It’s no good imagining that innate human diversity will render the system powerless.

T he US shift towards majority non-whiteness is not destiny, but it is an opportunity. Painter notes that when external conditions change, it becomes possible to imagine different racial hierarchies. The geographical and social remixing of the Second World War cooked down the diverse European identities in the US into a single racial category of ‘white’. Likewise, Asian immigrants occupied one role when Asian immigration was largely working class, West Coast, limited in numbers, and male, as it was at the end of the 19th century. But the racial constraints on Asian Americans shifted when immigration law came to favour professionals, and brought middle- and working-class people, women and men, in larger numbers than before to more US cities.

Using shifting social situations to upend racial hierarchies is not just about challenging racism, but race itself. This doesn’t mean the disingenuous denial of race when racism still very much exists, but a collective challenge to its right to determine our lives. The Black Lives Matter movement seeks to take away the police’s prerogative to use violence against African Americans with no legal sanctions; success would undermine an important means of maintaining racial segregation and inequality. What would it mean, once and for all, to bury the shameful, misplaced pride some white people have for the South’s role in the Civil War, and acknowledge instead the irredeemable mistakes of their forefathers? What would it mean to frankly acknowledge each nation’s racial past, and think about what reparations would set us on a path to greater prosperity? Race is neither inevitable nor something we can wish away. Instead, we must take advantage of the instability in what we perceive, and redistribute the power that perpetuates race.

Race never stays still. As the sociologist Richard Alba pointed out in The Washington Post last month, the prediction that the US will be majority non-white by 2044 relies on a definition of race that is static, and doesn’t acknowledge the surprising reality that people’s races change. Nearly 10 million people listed their racial identification differently on the 2010 census than they had in 2000. Alba criticises the census for ‘binary thinking’ which counts anyone with Hispanic heritage as Hispanic, and through a quirk in the census questions, effectively ignores any other racial identity that they could claim. ‘[A] majority-minority society should be seen as a hypothesis, not a foreordained result,’ Alba wrote, of the 2044 claim. This is important, because when it comes to fighting racism, we can’t rely on demographic shifts to do the work for us. Instead, if we recognise that race looks solid but is shifting, we can find additional ways to destabilise the structures of racial inequality.

Getting rid of racism requires clarity about the nature of the enemy. The way to defeat white supremacy is to destroy it. The US will truly be ‘majority non-white’ only when white is no longer the privileged citizenship category, when white is no more meaningful than the archaic Octoroon or Irish. This is not to discount the anxiety about cultural loss conjured by talk of an imagined colourblind future, but to recognise the inextricability of racial identities and power inequality. With work, perhaps the next expansion of whiteness will be into oblivion.

This Essay is adapted from Cause … And How it Doesn’t Always Equal Effect (2018) by Gregory Smithsimon, published by Melville House Books.

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A free and unified Europe was first imagined by Italian radicals in the 19th century. Could we yet see their dream made real?

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Stories and literature

On Jewish revenge

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Consciousness and altered states

How perforated squares of trippy blotter paper allowed outlaw chemists and wizard-alchemists to dose the world with LSD

What do you think? Leave a respectful comment.

An essay on the importance of interracial friendships.

Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/an-essay-on-the-importance-of-interracial-friendships

In a year when racism has been front and center in Americans’ minds, how can we break out of our own orbits to understand the life experiences of other people -- especially those of other races? Author and journalist Christine Pride shares her humble opinion on why it’s important to seek out friends of different races.

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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Amna Nawaz:

Almost two-thirds of Americans say that social media has a mostly negative impact on the country, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.

They report concerns like the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and only listening to people that you agree with.

So, how can you really break apart those echo chambers?

One way, make a friend.

Tonight, author and journalist Christine Pride shares her Humble Opinion on the importance of interracial friendships.

Christine Pride:

I wonder if you have ever had a Black person to your home for a social visit. I know the answer is probably no, because most people can count their Black friends not just on one hand, but with one finger.

And I know this to be true, because I am often that person, the one Black friend. And as much as I love and adore all my white friends, that role can get a little old.

The fact that most people don't have a friend of another race speaks to our segregated society, but also our complacency. Many people, many white people, could easily go their whole lives without ever getting to know someone of another race, which requires effort.

Making a new friend is hard, period. Making a friend of another race is harder yet. You don't have the ease of common experience and instant camaraderie.

And, for Black people, going out of our way to make a white friend requires enormous trust. It could, after all, be only a matter of time before said friend reveals their true colors.

It's much easier to conclude, why bother?

Well, we all have to bother. These relationships are important. Even the most well-intentioned, well-meaning white person isn't going to get the same benefits researching and reading about race, though you still should do that, as hearing about the personal experiences of someone you respect, admire and trust.

And this is not to say that white people should go seek out strangers or acquaintances and say, tell me about your Black experience. Do not do that. That's not friendship. That's a transaction.

Real friendship means a willingness to listen carefully, and have your views challenged, because your Black friend doesn't see the world the same way you do. It's going to require you to do the important work of earning and offering trust, so that, if you make a mistake or misstep, you will have some good will to fall back on.

But, even before that, it starts with stepping outside your comfort zone. A diverse social circle isn't just going to fall in your lap. You're going to have to think carefully about where you live and where your children go to school, the activities you participate in, because, if you're only ever around people who look like you, it's going to be all but impossible to create a meaningful connection with someone of another race.

Ultimately, these friendships are going to require putting actions behind intentions.

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American Race Relations as a Social Construct Essay

Race relations have been a continuous part of the American history, from the horrors of slavery to the melting pot of immigration. Unfortunately, racism has become the focal point of interracial interaction, as any minority population faces challenges in a society dominated by the Caucasian race. Throughout history, racism has undertaken various forms. However, in contemporary times of supposed equality and acceptance, bigotry has become more covert and intractable. *Race relations in modern America are defined by institutionalized racism that has been masked under the means of microaggressions and political ignorance, with the only solution being a massive reform of social values.*

The whole concept of race division is a social construct that has roots in the incriminating injustices of American history. The domination of socio-political and economic structures by the Caucasian race is unparalleled. Despite some progress of past decades in racial equality, with a recent political emergence of the Republican party the tensions are growing again. The politics of aggrieved whiteness, a concept that seeks to maintain a Caucasian hegemony in the social order, has gained traction.

There is a strong political context to this development. Liberalism is associated with profligacy, beholden to minorities. Meanwhile, conservatism seeks to encourage individual values of hard work and, by extension, equality for all. Furthermore, any attempt by the government to recognize racial inequality through policy or welfare programs comes under fire for supposed social injustice that puts whites at a disadvantage.

Consequently, there is fanatical support for forms of repression against racial groups, such as Muslims, illegal immigrants, and urban African-American communities. This approach to politics makes it ultimately impossible to overcome social injustice since any meaningful attempts to make a difference are obstructed by the status quo of white supremacy. Despite this, an average class Caucasian person feels like reverse anti-white racism is the dominant form of racial discrimination (King).

“Our brains are hardwired to think in terms of place and to associate psychic value or meaning to the places we inhabit” (Dickey 7). The racial divide in America is often visible most clearly in urban communities. Certain neighborhoods are a hive of existence for racial groups, as their culture takes root there. While in most of America communities are more mixed, there are still privileged neighborhoods which are predominantly white.

The minority race in an opposing community would experience social unease and even covert discrimination. The racial tension is evident as the communities seek to conserve the status quo of their demographics, creating a sense of tribalism (Vance). Race is a primary factor in the American class structure, which, in turn, instigates social segregation, even if it is unintentional.

There is an entrenched concept of institutionalized racism in the nation which is largely ignored for more easily vilified interpersonal prejudices. There is no consensus or medium where such controversial topics can be discussed, with racial groups radically disagreeing on basic issues and politicians using it as an electorate tool (Blow). Race relations in current society have become a carefully avoided issue filled with superficial illusions to mask its core motives.

In the novel The Underground Railroad , such a phenomenon is accurately described, “But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world…Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach” (Whitehead 143). The pretense of racism not existing in the light of evidence of its devastating consequences has nothing but a derogatory effect to prevent it from being a recurrent issue.

The most typical exemplification of racial issues can be seen in social behavior. Racism exists both in institutions and personal prejudices. However, in most communities, outright racism is condemned or illegal; therefore, people begin to exhibit it covertly.

This happens subconsciously, as the societal way of thought has been embedded into behavior since childhood. Such daily behaviors and verbal interaction is a psychological concept that is essentially a clandestine expression of racism as racial groups are insulted and degraded. These may have a basis in the national origin, education, culture values, criminality, or even competency (Sehgal).

A prominent example, which is also evidence of institutionalized racism, is the recent spike in police violence against African-Americans. The disproportionate police intervention including racial minorities, and, consequently, their imprisonment is unjustifiable. The whole concept of the racial, social construct has pragmatic evidence here, as a racial profile is established around the black community. News and media outlets aid in this by showing a biased perspective of African-Americans as either involved or associated with criminality.

Consequently, society begins to exhibit prejudice and fear, in turn, leading to a conflict based on irrationality, creating a social crisis. Claudia Rankine frankly identifies this concept in her prose, “because white men can’t police their imagination, black people are dying” (135).

With the result of recent elections, racial tensions began to emerge. The new leadership despite its promises to unite the nation has done only the opposite to address issues facing minorities. Polls show that the majority of African-Americans think race relations are at a low point and only getting worse. There are obvious schisms in the perception of social justice amongst races. Obama at one point stated, “we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present” (Sack and Thee-Brenan).

The task to challenge white hegemony which instigates the racial tension begins with an honest conversation. By understanding history and accepting identity, socio-political structures will be morphed to create a truly egalitarian society. Such processes may take generations, but until then, the status quo will persist if people choose to be ignorant to injustice.

Works Cited

Blow, Charles, “ The State of Race in America. ” New York Times. 2017. Web.

Dickey, Colin. Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places . Viking, 2016.

King, Michael. ” Aggrieved Whiteness: White Identity Politics and Modern American Racial Formation. ” Abolition Journal. 2017. Web.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric . Graywolf Press, 2014.

Sack, Kevin and Megan Thee-Brenan. “ Poll Finds Most in U.S. Hold Dim View of Race Relations ” New York Times. 2015. Web.

Sehgal, Priya. “ Racial Microaggressions: The Everyday Assault. ” American Psychiatric Association . 2016. Web.

Vance, James. “ The Racial Conversation We’re Having Today is Tribalistic .” National Review . 2016. Web.

Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad . Doubleday, 2016.

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Essay: Race Relations

Sen. Trent Lott's remarks on segregation opened up a different kind of discussion on race relations in America. Among friends, however, such a topic can be even more sensitive. For essayist Nat Irvin, the answers aren't simply black and white.

US race relations, 1945-1968 for Leaving Cert History #625Lab

What were the main developments in race relations in the US, 1945-1968?

#625Lab – History , marked 87/100, detailed feedback at the very bottom. You may also like: Leaving Cert History Guide (€).

In 1776, the Declaration of Independence stated that all US citizens were born equal, but this certainly was not the case for African-Americans in the US. Up until the 1960s, the black community were treated like second class citizens in all aspects of American life and society, and the Jim Crow laws implemented in the South further segregated US society. In 1896, the Supreme Court even ruled segregation constitutional in the case of Plessy vs Ferguson. However, with the growth of the mass media following World War II amd ( amid ) increased influence among the black community, African Americans began to demand their rights. In what would be a slow process, the Civil Rights movement succeeded in winning equal rights for all by 1965.

The first main development in race relations was the desgregation ( desegregation ) of the US army. Before World War II, African Americans were not permitted to join the Air Corps or Marines. Throughout the war, the army was segregated by race, but white officers were placed in charge of black contingents. In 1946, President Harry Truman established a Committee on Civil Rights, which recommended integrating the armed forces. In 1947, Truman began to undertake their suggestions and started the process of integration. This was a major development in race relations, as it was the first official step towards equality and represented presidential support for the Civil Rights Movement.

Another major development in race relations was the gradual integration of the education system. In 1954, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was established in 1909 to fight for the constitutional rights of African-Americans, took the case of Brown vs Topeka to the Supreme Court. A young girl, Linda Brown, was not permitted to attend a local white school and therefore had to travel miles to school each day. The NAACP argued that this was unconstituional ( unconstitutional ) under the 14th Ammendment ( Amendment ) and won the case. Segreation ( Segregation ) is ( in ) all schools was then ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. However, the process of integration was not an easy one. In 1957, President Eisenhower was forced to send federal forces into Little Rock High School in Arkansas to protect nine black students from violence. Similarly, in 1962, President Kennedy sent forces into the University of Mississippi to protect African-American student James Meredith from protestors. Although the process of integration caused violent outbursts and riots amongst some members of the public, it was clearly successful as in 1969, 20% of black children attended previously white schools, compared to 1% in 1959.

The next major development in US race relations was undoubtedly the integration of public facilities. The fight for equality in this area was sparked in December 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery and was subsequently arrest. Montgomery had a 40% black population and some of the most restrictive segregation laws in the US. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was them launched by Jo-Ann Robinson and the NAACP in December 1955. It lasted 381 days in total and cost the bus companies $250,000. Overall, the boycott proved to be a huge success for the Civil Rights Movement, as segregation on public transport was ruled illegal in November 1956.

Similarly, the process of peaceful protests known as “sit-ins” became popular amongst students and members of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It was sparked in 1960 in North Carolina, when four black students sat down in a segregated restaurant and asked to be served. Hundreds of thousands of other students followed suit, and soon all public facilities in the south were integrated. During the Freedom Rides of 1961, activists rode around the southern cities on buses, ensuring that the equality laws were being enforced.

Perhaps one of the biggest developments in race relations in the US was the progressive leadership of Martin Luther King Jnr. A charismatic, energetic and well-educated pastor, King became the face of the Civil Rights Movement. King promoted peaceful protests and resistance and called for interracial cooperation. A pacifist, King was a believer in using peaceful means to gain equal voting rights for African-Americans. Previously, African-Americans were impeded from voting by unfair poll tax and literacy tests. King’s motto was “free by ‘63” and he led his followers in numerous peaceful marches of resistance, such as his march to Selma.

King’s most influential march was that of August 196, where he led 200,000 of his followers to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. and delivered his “I have a dream” speech. This directly resulted in one of the biggest developments in US race relations at the time: the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Passed by President Johnson, these acts gave, legally, equality to all and banned discrimination on grounds of race. It also gave equal voting rights to all African-Americans in the south and was a major achievement for both King and all organisations involved in the Civil Rights Movement.

However, a militant side of the Civil Rights Movement also developed, with the leader of SNCC, Stokely Carmichael, openly denouncing interracial cooperation by 1964. In 1966, the paramilitary group, the Black Panthers, were set up under Huey Newton. Tired of what they viewed as King’s ‘useless rhetoric’, the black nationalist group called on African-Americans to stockpile weapons to use against the police. As a result of these organisations and the growing racial conflict, hundreds of riots broke out during the summers of 1966 and 1967 in Chicago, Detroit and New Jersey. In 1967 alone, 83 people died as a result of over 160 riots. Elsewhere, the Ku Klux Klan were openly terrorising members of the black community, sending them violent threats and warnings. Due to this growth in violence, a huge gap developed between members of the black and white communities and tension and violence grew as a result.

Another development in race relations at this time was how the black Civil Rights Movement inspired other minorities to fight for their rights. The ‘Brown Power’ movement of the Mexican-Americans were one such group that emerged. In 1967, the ‘Red Power’ movement of the native American-Indians began fighting for their rights too, and staged a massive protest in this year.

Therefore, I believe it is clear that there was some major developments in race relations in the US from 1945-1968. Although not always easy, the new middle-class black community that emerged in the decades after World War II used their new-found affluence and education to campaign for their rights. Slowly but surely, every aspect of American life was integrated, as a result of the hard work and dedication of many organisations and individuals. Although the movement later took a violent turn, it was the peaceful tactics used that led to the passing of laws which are still relevant in the US today and help to make America a more tolerant and equal society.

Feedback: This is a good essay that answers the question in a comprehensive and well-written way. It’s great that you included a paragraph about other minorities as it shows that you know the topic really well. It’s a good length for an essay, and all the information you include is relevant and accurate, and you mention plenty of key personalities. To improve, try to include a few quotations from historians or historical figures. Be careful of small spelling errors like the ones I’ve highlighted in bold, as examiners will be watching out for things like this. Don’t use personal phrases like “I believe” in a history essay as you ought to be objective. Instead of “therefore” in your conclusion, it might be better to simply say “in conclusion”, in order to highlight the fact that the essay is ending.

Cumulative Mark: This essay could definitely achieve 60/60 for its cumulative mark.

Overall Evaluation Mark: I would give this about 27 out of 40 for its overall evaluation mark. Total Mark: 87/100

Another essay for the same title. Credit: Caoimhe Flynn

Race relations in America from 1945 to 1968 were a hugely topical issue and significant change was brought about during this time. After the emancipation of slavery in the 1800’s, black people were living in slavery in all but name. This is because of the Jim Crowe laws, mainly enforced in the South of the country which were put in place to ensure that black people would always remain inferior to the white community. The 1896 case of Plessey vs Ferguson ruled that segregation was legal once the facilities remained equal, a condition that we know was not adhered to. The civil rights movement began when black people realised that they deserved better and used the method of peaceful protest to achieve desegregation in education, transport and public spaces, which all concluded with the signing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights act in 1964 and 1965 respectively. This time was hugely significant for the black community in American and brought about great change for a country that was deeply racist.

Truman began to desegregate the army to try and improve race relations. Truman was the first American President to address the problem of segregation facing his country. After fighting for their country and seeing many fellow African Americans die whilst fighting they felt that they deserve equal rights due to the sacrifice which they had made for America. African Americans fought in separate units, and after seeing how integrated England was and experiencing an integrated society the Black soldiers wanted that in their own country. It was also difficult for the United States to reprimand other countries for human rights violations whilst treating its black citizens so poorly. It was ironic that the American troops were fighting against the segregation in Nazi Germany whilst there was segregation occurring in their own backyard. Segregation brought international shame to the US and Truman decided to desegregate the army in an attempt to reduce this shame. This was a positive step in the right direction however was not enough to drastically change race relations in America.

The segregation of schools could no longer be justified by Plessey vs Ferguson and were challenged by the Civil Rights movement. Linda Brown was the first civil rights case to be brought to the Supreme Court. Linda Brown was a 3rd Grade African American Girl who had to walk 20 blocks past the local white school in order to attend the Black school. Her father supported by the NAACP reinforced a message that segregate schools were separate and therefore unequal challenging the Plessey vs Ferguson case. The Board of Education argued that segregated schools were preparing the children for what they would face in later life however it was decided that ‘ separate ( separate ) educational facilities are naturally unequal’ and it was decided that schools across America should be desegregated. This was a positive move however there was no deadline for this ruling and want Southern States remained segregated. One school in Little Rock, Arkansas, attempted to become integrated, however when 9 Black students tried to enroll ( enroll ) they were met by state troops and a mob of protesters. Paratroopers were sent by the President to protect these students for 1 year. These students faced horrendous punishment, through abuse, both physical and verbal, along with expulsion over minute offenses such as standing up for themselves. The events at Little Rock were deemed unconstitutional and brought about great support for the civil rights movement due to the media coverage. Ernest Green became the first African American to graduate from Little Rock Central High School in 1958. The improvements in integrating the education system were a major leap forward for the movement and showed them the value of using the Supreme Court to make real changes.

Protests in Montgomery led to the desegregation of buses and the emergence of strong leaders for the Civil Rights movement. Montgomery was a hugely segregated city even though there was a large minority of 40% African American. This group were the main users of the bus service, however this along with most other public services was segregated, with black people suffering abuse from drivers and being forced to stand in order to give a white person a seat. Rosa Parks was the first high profile case to be taken after she defied this segregation and refused to give up her seat to a white person. On the day of her trial, the 5th of December 1955, a boycott of the bus service was planned by the Women’s Council to protest segregation on buses. It was well organised, with carpools being arranged and taxis offering cheaper fares so that boycotters could get to work. The boycott faced a lot of resistance during its 11 month duration, with carpool stations being targeted by the KKK and people being arrested for loitering whilst waiting for taxis. MLK emerged as a strong leader as he urged the black community in his city and church to commit to the boycott and remain peaceful. He met with bus company managers, whom eventually agreed to their demands of desegregated buses, black drivers and fair treatment to all passengers. MLK and other leaders rode on the first desegregated bus. This was a step forward for the movement however the ruling did not spread to all cities across America.

The events such as the lunch counter sit ins and the freedom rides highlighted the persistence of the black protesters and desegregated towns and buses across America. The student sit ins began on February 1st 1960, when 4 African-American students sat at a white lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina and philately asked to be served. They were refused and day by day, respectably dressed black students joined the movement at lunch counters across America. As the protest grew so did opposition, with students being harassed verbally and physically; one protesters coat was even set on fire. By the end of 1960, economic pressure grew for the company and they eventually desegregated lunch counters across America, with the movement spreading to libraries and churches, towns began desegregated. Even though towns were becoming desegregated and buses had previously been desegregated, bus stations and buses in some states, mainly the deep south like Birmingham, Alabama remained extremely racist and segregated. The SNCC took up freedom riders who would ride through the towns to protest segregation on buses. They faced great resistance with buses being set on fire and over 200 riders were arrested. The governor did little ti protect the protesters until he was put under pressure by President JFK. Black Americans had achieved great success in desegregating towns across America, but also showed that they were no longer willing to be intimidated.

MLK and the SCLC turned their efforts to desegregating Birmingham, Alabama. According to MLK Birmingham was the most segregated city in America. Employment and public facilities including bathrooms, benches and water fountains were all segregated. Fair grounds and to hold ‘coloured days’ and in 1962, the city council closed off all public facilities to black people. In April 1963 MLK and other leaders continued their tactic of peaceful protest, and although protected by the constitution, a circuit court judged ruled their protest illegal, leading to the arrest of 500 people including MLK’s. To continue the campaign a ‘children’s crusade’, including thousands of school children, were trained in peaceful protest and they marched through the city. Bull O’Conner, the deeply racist Commissioner of Public Safety ruled for the use of water canons, dogs and batons to break up the children. Photos and videos of the events became widespread and caused uproar. The mayor agreed to meet leaders and they came to agreement to desegregate business in Birmingham. The events in Birmingham brought further need for a civil rights bill and led to President JFK saying that America ‘will not be fully free until all of it’s ( its ) citizens are free’, showing the governments support for equal rights and commitment to the Civil Rights Bill.

The March of Washington showed the support for the civil rights movement and brought about the end of leal ( legal ) segregation in America. On August 28th 1963 the March on Washington riveted the nation. An attendance of 100,000 was expected but 200,00 people black and white showed up to call on the President and Congress to provide ‘Jobs and Freedom’ for black people in America. The group marched to Lincoln Memorial where Martin Luther King delivered his iconic ‘I had a dream’ speech. He made the movement personal which drew support. MLK was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. In 1964, President Johnson followed on in the late JFK’s honour and signed the Civil Rights Bill into the constitution. It brought about the end of legal segregation in America and became known as the ‘second emacipation ( emancipation )’ . This was a huge victory for the civil rights movement and brought about great ( great ) change in America however voting was still extremal unequal leading to a lack of representation in government.

Even though the Civil Rights act had been passed, Voting inequality remained a problem for African American people in America. Black people were prevented from voting by literacy tests, poll taxes and intimidation, all which were aimed at maintaining white dominance in government. The SNCC and SCNL decided to protest this and targeted their efforts at one of the worst effected ( affected ) areas, Selma, Alabama, where only 2% of eligible African Americans were registered to vote. Segregationist governor, George Wallace was a strong opposer of the movement and his violent reaction would bring publicity and support for the movement. After prominent Civil rights campaigner was killed whilst protesting Voting discrimination, a march was planned from Selma to Montgomery, 54miles between two of the most segregated cities in the country. The first march was cut short after 1/2 mile when marchers were charged by the police with batons and teargas. The second march was stopped by Martin Luther King, who turned back when he saw the flashing police lights ahead so to not endanger the marchers. The third march was successful as President Johnson sent paratroopers to protect the marchers. It took them 5 days to get to Montgomery and over 30000 people joined the march. The Voting rights Bill was eventually passed in 1964 and gave Black people better representation at all levels of government.

The civil rights movement in America achieved significant gains in the years 1945-1968. Through peaceful protest the movement highlights the deep segregation in society and the imminent need for change. Peaceful demonstrations were generally attacked by segregationists often forcing the judicial system to step in and help. Using these tactics American buses, schools and public places were desegregated. Monumental legislation such at the Civil Rights Bill and the Voting Rights Act enshrined in law the protection of the rights of African Americans and ended legal segregation. However despot ( despite ) all this black people living in America still face racism and inequality on a daily basis, with recent Black Lives Matter movements and poverty remaining high among the African American community. We are still left dreaming, like MLK in 1963 of an America where ‘children are judged on the content of their character and not the colour of their skin’.

Feedback : This is a good essay that answers the question well with lots of relevant and accurate factual information. You also make good use of quotation, so keep this up. Your introduction gives good context and lays out the essay well, and your conclusion is good as it sums up the essay but also adds something more by tying it into the present day. All of your paragraphs are good, but it might be good to highlight how each of these events are a new development, and to comment on whether this was a positive or negative development. Watch out for small spelling errors, and always spell out numbers under 101.

Cumulative Mark : As this essay only has 9 paragraphs, each paragraph would need to achieve 6 or 7 marks for you to reach the maximum 60 cumulative marks – as it stands, this would achieve around 55 marks out of 60. You can bring this up by adding extra paragraphs, or by splitting some of your current paragraphs to make more short paragraphs.

Overall Evaluation : For Overall Evaluation, this essay would achieve around 25 out of 40. To bring this up, you can improve the commentary that you make in each paragraph.

Total : 80/100

Post author: Martina
Post published: January 8, 2019
Post category: #625Lab History / History

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Race Relations Essay

Race Relations in America

Every country throughout the world has its problems that come and go, some faster than others. However, race relations have been a reoccurring problem for centuries around the world, whether it’s between Blacks and Whites, Whites and Hispanics, Asians and Europeans, or any other races. In the United States, specifically, race relations between Blacks and Whites have recently reached a point of conflict that the country has not seen since the 1960’s, a time where segregation plagued the country. While there are many theories as to what caused the spike in conflict between the two races, there is no argumentation on the fact that there is a prevalent issue between Blacks and Whites, and that it needs to be resolved. However, to discover how the relationship between Blacks and Whites has reached its current state, one must look back to the history of the two races in the United States.

The first white individuals to come to the territory now known as the “United States of America” arrived in the 16 th century. It was soon after, in the year of 1619, that the first black individuals were reported to be in the United States. Though both Blacks and Whites were now in America, the statuses of these two races were quite different. The Whites had come to America willingly to look for new resources, power and religious freedom. The Blacks, however, were forced against their will to come to the newfound territory as “indentured servants” or “slaves” of the white individuals. It was this initial act of misused power and forceful reign that set the precedent for the relationship between Blacks and Whites for centuries to come.

Slavery is a topic that all students in the United States learn about from a young age, yet that cannot take away the ramifications of the events that occurred during that period. The number of slaves residing in the United States grew at an alarming rate as the white population increased, the amount of land occupied increased, and more Americans began forming large plantations. In fact, by the start of the Civil War, it is estimated that around 4.4 million slaves lived in the United Sates. The number of slaves would however be diminished to 0 just four years after the start of the Civil War as slavery was abolished through the 13 th amendment. Though slavery was no longer legal, the black population still dealt with abuse and discrimination after the 13 th amendment was passed. Thus, Congress met again and passed the 14 th amendment which granted citizenship rights and equal protection of the law to all colored people residing in the United States. The 14 th amendment did significantly increase the quality of life for Blacks, but they still suffered from segregation and “Jim Crow Laws”. Eventually, the Civil Rights Movement began and created enough attention to make Congress pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which desegregated the entire country. From that point on, Blacks and Whites were “legally” on a level playing-field and were essentially given the same opportunities in every aspect of life. Today, Blacks hold some of the most prominent positions in the entire world, including President of the United States. However, tensions between Blacks and Whites are the highest they have been since the early 1960’s. Now that the history of the interaction between these two races has been established, one must look at what is currently causing the discrepancy in their relationship.

Communication is key in any relationship, and that is no different in the relationship between Blacks and Whites. In a recent study done by the Pew Research Center, the results showed that communication is severely lacking between black and white people. Per the study, “nearly 40 percent of White Americans say that the country has made the changes necessary to give Blacks equal rights [whereas] only 8 percent of African Americans agree,” (Journal of Blacks in Higher Education). This statistic clearly shows the drastic difference between how Whites and Blacks view the country’s commitment to racial equality. Another alarming statistic from the study reported that “nearly half of all White Americans say race relations in this country are good [while] only a third of African Americans agree,” (Journal of Blacks in Higher Education). It is clear by looking at this finding that communication is completely broken down between Blacks and Whites as many more Blacks believe that race relations in the United States are poor. What is more, a breakdown in communication has much larger ramifications then many people believe. As can be seen in the riots and protests that have occurred over the past 2 years, Blacks and Whites have come to resent each other to a certain extent as neither of the groups believe that they are being heard or treated fairly. However, the problem goes further than simply a lack of communication. In the United States, both Blacks and Whites have completely misunderstood the problem which the other group faces. For Whites, they believe the black community wants special treatment due to the transgressions inflicted against their families for many generations when in fact Blacks simply want to be treated the same as their white counterparts. For Blacks, they believe that Whites are against the black culture when they get angry about protests, and ultimately believe that Whites want to have a higher place in society than Blacks. However, Whites get angry about the protests themselves, not the reasoning behind them. This clash of misunderstanding between the two races leads to an overreaction from both sides. Both races become so infatuated with the current situation that they become blind to the real problems and issues that are at hand. Once Blacks and Whites can get past the present-day problems, they will be able to focus on real solutions to the overall issues.

When it comes to solutions, there are very practical ways that the United States can come together and mend relations between Blacks and Whites. To start, children need to learn the history of relations between Blacks and Whites from both sides of the issue. Most students are taught about exploration, slavery, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement, but many times the story is only told from one side. Both sides of history need to be told to give perspective to students. It is important for students to look to history to discover how racial issues were mended in the past, and thus use that knowledge to help fix current racial problems. A second solution to the problem is having monthly meetings in city councils across the United States where both Whites and Blacks are present to discuss how their respective cities can continue to mend the relationship between the black and white communities. Another idea that both Blacks and Whites need to adhere to is “Less protests, more conversations” as conversation is far more productive. The Civil Rights Movement was instrumental in creating equality for Blacks in the United States, but that was during a time when no Whites would listen to their black counterparts. Today, Blacks hold some of the most powerful positions in the entire world, thus opening a channel for all Blacks to be heard in society. It is important for both Blacks and Whites to communicate with one another, but most importantly to listen to one another. One final concept that both the black and white communities need to commit to is allowing children to form their own opinions. Parents influence their children’s thoughts and perceptions about race far too often in society. Children often think negatively about different races before they even get a chance to form their own opinion. It is crucial that parents allow their children to live their own life and form their own opinions when it comes to race. Otherwise, our society will turn into a never-ending cycle of reoccurring problems. Children have innocent perceptions and opinions that need to be formed by their own life experiences, not their parents’ experiences.

Race relations in the United States have reached a point that hasn’t been seen in several decades. Though this is very unsettling, it can be fixed and made better than ever before. Blacks and Whites both ultimately want the same thing: equality and prosperity in the United States. Racial tensions are high and both races feel that they have a reason to be upset. However, fixing the communication breakdown, understanding the underlying problems and controlling reactions can significantly mend the issue. The black and white communities have come farther in the past 250 years than anyone could have imagined. It is now on the current members of the races to continue to progress that relationship rather than digress it. Race is simply color and nothing more. It is time for both Blacks and Whites to come together as free Americans to resolve their differences and create a better United States of America.

Works Cited

“Early Conquest, Colonialism, and the Origins of African Slavery.” Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia , edited by Junius P. Rodriguez, ABC-CLIO, 2007.

Keller, Morton. “Obama and Race in America” The Forum , 14.1 (2016): 17-24. Retrieved 5 Dec. 2016, from doi:10.1515/for-2016-0003

“Progress and its discontents; Race in America.” The Economist , 16 July 2016, p. 23(US).

Rael, Patrick. Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777–1865 . University of Georgia Press, 2015, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1757596 .

“The Pew Research Center Releases New Study of Race Relations in the United States.” ProQuest . Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 5 July 2016. Web. 4 Dec. 2016.

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James W. Loewen (1942-2021)

We mourn the loss of our friend and colleague and remain committed to the work he began.

Essay 14: How to Teach the Nadir of Race Relations

Recognizing that inaccurate history often subtly promotes continuing white supremacy, the National Education Association (NEA) commissioned these articles and has posted some of them in slightly different form at its website . I thank Harry Lawson and others at NEA for the commission, for editorial suggestions, and for other assistance.

From 1890 to 1940, white Americans went more racist in their thinking than at any other time. We call this the “Nadir of Race Relations.” “Nadir” means low point. During the Nadir, the ideology of most whites — their understanding of the social world — went more and more racist toward African and Native Americans. Except for discussing Jim Crow in the South, most U.S. history textbooks don’t treat the Nadir. Authors find it hard to fit into their overall storyline of inexorable progress.

Ask students, “Who was the first black player in organized baseball?” The answer is not Jackie Robinson but perhaps Moses Fleetwood Walker. Then they learn that whites forced African Americans out, as the Nadir set in. Ask, “Who was the first jockey in the National Racing Museum Hall of Fame?” Students discover a fabulous black jockey and also that the Kentucky Derby barred blacks after they won 15 of the first 28 derbies. During the Nadir, in the North as well as the South, whites forced African Americans from skilled occupations like carpentry and unskilled jobs like mail carrier. Three underlying social processes led to the Nadir. First was U.S. policy toward American Indians. Reconstruction laws requiring equal justice toward African Americans did not apply to Native Americans. As a result, when whites found gold on Indian land in Colorado and Dakota, they took it, leading to the final Plains Indian wars. Second was immigrants. Democrats courted their votes, promising them jobs once they drove African Americans from the wharfs, teamstering, and other positions. Instead of quelling Democratic racism, Republicans got mad at the immigrants, eventually supporting nativism and eugenics. Third was imperialism, an ideology from Europe. We bought into it, took over Hawaii, and attacked our Filipino allies in 1899. Students can discover America’s increasing racism after 1890 themselves. In the process, they will realize how events of long ago still affect us. For instance, during the Nadir, textbooks started lying about secession. So this is another opportunity to teach “historiography” — the social influences on history — discussed earlier in the essay on Reconstruction. Historiography prompts critical thinking. Students can learn it as early as fifth grade. Now that many newspapers are on line, students can search one in their state for all articles with “Negro,” characterizing the view of each toward African Americans as positive (+1), neutral (0), or negative (-1). Then they can calculate averages (means) by decade and look for trends. Students can examine old U.S. history textbooks — online or from your collection — to see how their treatments of John Brown, for example, change over time. Did authors consider him idealistic? crazy? During the Nadir, segregation increased everywhere, not just in the South. The Index of Dissimilarity, D, measures segregation. It is mathematical but easy; students can apply it to census data for their city over time. It is also clear: 0 means perfectly integrated, while 100 means complete apartheid. In most cities, D increased from about 45 in 1890 to 70 by 1940. Many smaller communities became sundown towns — all-white on purpose. Cemeteries and colleges became segregated too. For example, after World War I, Harvard still admitted African Americans but no longer let them live in the dormitories. Most colleges have archives, often in the library. High school students can talk with the archivist to learn about race relations over time. After students document that racism sometimes rose and sometimes fell, they can explore why. In the process they learn that racism is a historical product, not “natural.” So are black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods.

Essential Reading

Loewen, Chapter 10, “The Nadir,” in Teaching What Really Happened (NY: Teachers College Press, 2010), suggests other ways to help students see the Nadir for themselves.
Loewen, Chapter 11, “Using the Index of Dissimilarity to Determine the Extent of Segregation,” in Social Science in the Courtroom (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1982), shows how to calculate and use D.
Leola Bergmann, “The Negro in Iowa,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics , 1969 [1948], 44-45, analyzed the treatment of African Americans in Iowa newspapers from 1865 to 1900. At first, newspapers told of activities and individuals within the Black community. By the 1890s, almost every story about African Americans concerned crime.
Loewen, “How To Confirm Sundown Towns,” tells how to use census data, interviews, etc., to determine if a town has a sundown past.

All essays in the Correct(ed) series: Introducing the Series Essay 2: How to Teach Slavery Essay 3: How to Teach Secession Essay 4: Teaching about the Confederacy and Race Relations Essay 5: Confederate Public History Essay 6: Reconstruction Essay 7: Getting History Right Can Decrease Racism Toward Mexican Americans Essay 8: Problematic Words about Native Americans Essay 9: How and When Did the First People Get Here? Essay 10: The Pantheon of Explorers Essay 11: Columbus Day Essay 12: How Thanksgiving Helps Keep Us Ethnocentric Essay 13: American Indians as Mascots Essay 14: How to Teach the Nadir of Race Relations Essay 15: Teaching the Civil Rights Movement Essay 16: Getting Students Thinking about the Future

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A photo illustration of the inside of an abortion clinic with a target set over it and various conservative figures surrounding.

The Untold Story of the Network That Took Down Roe v. Wade

A conservative Christian coalition’s plan to end the federal right to abortion began just days after Trump’s 2016 election.

Credit... Photo illustration by Vanessa Saba

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By Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer

Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer are reporters for The Times and the authors of “The Fall of Roe,” from which this article is adapted. They spoke to more than 350 people and reported from 16 states.

May 28, 2024

It happened almost by accident, over cocktails. Exactly the kind of accident that Leonard Leo intended to happen at his Federalist Society’s annual conference — a three-day gathering of the conservative tribe and a strategy session for right-wing lawyers, officials and judges that drew both big names and those who had lower profiles but were no less ambitious.

Nine days after Donald Trump won the 2016 election, the halls of the Mayflower Hotel, just blocks from the White House, were adorned with twinkling Christmas lights and abuzz with the possibilities of a future that had changed overnight. Hillary Clinton, the woman the anti-abortion movement feared more than perhaps anyone, had failed to win the presidency. And Leo and the conservative legal movement that he worked for years to create were about to reclaim power. With that power would come the chance to do what seemed unthinkable until this moment: strategize to take down Roe v. Wade.

For more than 40 years, a passionate band of conservative and mostly Christian activists tried to find ways to undermine the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion and revolutionized America. But they had been losing. The country appeared to be moving away from them, increasingly secular and increasingly liberal on sexual matters. The anti-abortion movement lacked the critical mass needed in Washington and the control of courts to end federal abortion rights. But now, with Trump, who promised to name “pro-life judges,” in the White House, there was a new vista before them.

Leo, the force behind this network, arrived at the Mayflower after spending the day at Trump Tower in New York. He met with the president-elect and his top aides about turning the list of Supreme Court justice candidates that Leo curated into legal reality. Republicans in the Senate had taken a risk by refusing to hold hearings to fill the seat left open by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia toward the end of Barack Obama’s presidency. Now, with Trump positioned to nominate one of its own, Leo’s movement stood on the verge of an enormous triumph, with a court that would once again be dominated by Republican-appointed justices — and those who were firmly on the side of restricting abortion. Trump confirmed in the meeting that if someone was not on the list, that person would not be considered.

Leonard Leo stand at a podium with American flags behind him.

At the Mayflower, those on the list were not just names on paper. At least nine judges of Trump’s 21 possible Supreme Court nominees at the time were scheduled to speak, and most of the other hopefuls attended at various points. So did some of those who already held seats on the highest court. Leo opened the conference by introducing his friend Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the ballroom, overflowing four deep in the balcony. The mood was both exuberant and serious as the new power brokers considered the opportunities ahead.

So when it was time for cocktail hour, the young solicitor general of Wisconsin, Misha Tseytlin, who had clerked for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, was surprised when he overheard someone say that Roe v. Wade would never be overturned.

There was no reason to think overturning Roe was impossible now, Tseytlin believed. Republicans had the White House, an open Supreme Court seat and legislatures passing a flood of laws restricting abortion in states across the country. If there really was no right to abortion in the Constitution, as many at the Mayflower believed, this was the time to prove it. And Tseytlin had an idea of how to do just that.

The story of how an elite strike force of Christian lawyers, activists and politicians methodically and secretly led the country down a path that defied the will of a majority of Americans, who wanted abortion to remain legal, has been hidden until now. The ultimate aim of this behind-the-scenes conservative coalition, which powered one of the most significant political resurgences the United States has ever seen, went far beyond questions of when — and if — a pregnancy can be legally ended. For them, the fall of Roe was not an end but a beginning in their effort to make all abortion illegal and, in effect, roll back the sexual revolution. It was not only a political battle but a spiritual mission, rooted in their Christian faith and their belief that they were fighting for the highest moral stakes of the modern age. Their opponents didn’t see what was coming until it was far too late. After so many decades of taking Roe for granted, supporters of abortion rights had grown dangerously complacent and disorganized in ways that made them slow to appreciate the severity of the threat.

This investigation is built on more than 350 interviews with people who had knowledge of these events, including elected officials, lawyers, activists, doctors and ordinary people whose lives were changed by the fall of Roe. The reporting spanned 16 states and Washington, from statehouses to the White House, and a review of previously unreported documents.

In the gilded halls of the Mayflower, amid the throngs of lawyers, Tseytlin was thinking about how to get the Supreme Court to take an abortion case. A rarity within the movement, he was not particularly religious; his family had left the former Soviet Union as Jewish refugees when he was a child. But he had long opposed abortion for moral reasons.

Across the country, anti-abortion activists had worked to help pass laws in nearly a third of states that banned abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, defying the standard set by Roe for legal abortion up to fetal viability, at about 24 weeks. Most of those bans had not been challenged by abortion rights lawyers — who feared they might be upheld by the Supreme Court — creating a new national standard, leaving them in effect in states where Republicans controlled the legislatures, like South Carolina, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Even when one of the new laws went before the Supreme Court in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt in 2016, the abortion rights lawyers arguing the case chose to focus only on the provisions regulating clinics — and left the 20-week Texas ban untouched.

Now Tseytlin posed a theoretical question, according to people familiar with the discussion: What would happen if a state tried to pass an abortion limit at, say, 15 weeks? A slightly earlier restriction could force the court to examine the viability rule — and shake the very foundations of Roe. Could they push the number of weeks back just to the point at which their opponents would challenge it?

Tseytlin had a hard time believing that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. or Kennedy, who had come to inhabit a role as the court’s swing vote, would strike down a ban that was just a few weeks earlier than 20. Many restrictions in Europe were drawn at 12 or 15 weeks.

Tseytlin mused about all of this to a new acquaintance connected with the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Christian legal organization that Leo praised in an interview as “formidable” and “a real major force in the conservative legal world.” (A.D.F. participated in multiple on-the-record interviews over several months, but later, in response to repeated questions, a spokeswoman disputed what she referred to as this article’s “inaccurate and mischaracterized” assertions.)

Even during the political exile of the Obama administration, A.D.F. had won five major cases at the Supreme Court, including ensuring the right to pray at government meetings and securing an exception for Christian colleges from the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to pay for insurance coverage for contraception. Their victories consistently carved out additional space for Christianity in American public life. Now A.D.F. saw a new chance to advance a body of law to attack abortion rights. It was a window that its lawyers believed might not be open for more than a few years, and they were determined to take advantage of it.

In the summer of 2017, A.D.F. convened hundreds of top conservative leaders at the luxurious Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, Calif., for a private four-day summit. The stated goal was to discuss religious freedom. But the deeper ambition was to develop an agenda for the new Trump era. The guest list included 10 state attorneys general and solicitors general; a collection of the most powerful Christian lawyers in the country; and Jeff Sessions, Trump’s new attorney general. Sessions initially kept his remarks, which offered a strident defense of religious freedom and A.D.F.’s work, a secret from the public.

Like the Federalist Society, A.D.F. aimed to connect lawyers and legal allies to further its goals. But A.D.F. was also profoundly different. It was an explicitly conservative Christian legal-advocacy project, designed to bring together lawyers, elected officials and activists to achieve policy goals in line with its religious mission.

Now A.D.F.’s work was growing, and largely under the radar, as it sought to become a mainstream Christian rival to the A.C.L.U. No one on the outside knew just how extensive the network’s ambitions were, or that it was beginning to lay the groundwork to challenge Roe.

A.D.F. had invited another delegation that sought to keep its participation off the official record: a team from the Wisconsin attorney general’s office, including Tseytlin. When a reporter from the USA Today Network-Wisconsin later unearthed the delegation’s participation , a state spokesperson simply said that Tseytlin was a leader of a session at the conference. No one disclosed what it was about. Tseytlin’s remarks that day remained unknown to the public. But Tseytlin, a man most Americans had never heard of, was there to present his legal strategy to end Roe. Lawyers had a moral duty to act, Tseytlin told the group, according to participants. He proposed his idea for an abortion ban that set a limit earlier than 20 weeks to undercut Roe more openly.

Even to those in the room with Tseytlin, it was far from clear that the plan they were hatching would, just five years later, lead to the most consequential Supreme Court ruling on abortion rights in half a century. The early months of the Trump administration had been good for A.D.F. The group now had some 3,000 allied lawyers in its network and brought in more revenue than the A.C.L.U. Part of A.D.F.’s power was built from events like the one in Laguna Niguel that brought together state attorneys general and solicitors general from across the country with like-minded lawyers to strategize on priorities. Some of those guests were reimbursed for travel expenses; for this summit at the Ritz-Carlton, the group paid part of Tseytlin’s travel costs.

The organization asked guests to maintain the secrecy of their discussions, as it often did, according to participants. A.D.F. did not disclose its list of allies and encouraged lawyers involved with its efforts to not even acknowledge attending its events, according to attendees. A.D.F. declined to comment on Tseytlin’s presentation, or even confirm that he spoke, saying the details of its conference were confidential.

The idea of moving up bans from 20 weeks faced resistance from some anti-abortion activists. Even with Trump in office, the movement remained divided over the best legal path to end abortion rights. Some worried that an earlier limit would be too aggressive for the justices. If their test case got to the Supreme Court and lost, it could set their movement back years.

But another flank of the movement wanted to take advantage of this moment of power and move more aggressively to pass laws that flouted Roe’s viability requirement. Arkansas had already passed a 12-week law, and it had been blocked by the courts, so that seemed too early. A.D.F. lawyers decided to get a state to ban abortion at 15 weeks. The spark of Tseytlin’s cocktail-hour conversation became a flame.

The goal would be to remove Roe’s viability line without directly asking the court to take the more drastic — and more politically inflammatory — step of directly overturning the decision. It could be the first move in a longer strategy to end legal abortion entirely.

A.D.F.’s mission was to draft airtight legislation that would survive the journey through conservative statehouses and the inevitable legal challenges in the lower courts in order to eventually arrive at the Supreme Court. A.D.F. lawyers then identified states where they believed the bills had the best chance. They looked for favorable governors, attorneys general and legislatures. Three states stood out: Arkansas, Mississippi and Utah. Each was in a different circuit-court region. The thinking was that if the laws were debated in different circuit courts and the courts issued conflicting rulings, the Supreme Court would be more likely to take up one of the cases and arbitrate among them. It was this kind of conflict — what lawyers call circuit splits — that often attracted the interest of the justices, who saw part of their mandate as ensuring that the law was applied consistently across the country. “A circuit split would mean there had to be a resolution,” says Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a top political anti-abortion group, who was on A.D.F.’s board at the time.

While A.D.F. tried to reverse-engineer its way to the Supreme Court, anti-abortion activists on the state level were also trying to advance tighter bans. A.D.F. tracked them all. Every legislative session was another opportunity to move forward. The states where residents were most religious were the ones where the legislatures were pushing for abortion restrictions. And at the top of that list, with 59 percent of adults identifying as “very religious,” according to Gallup, was Mississippi.

Since 2004, there had been only one clinic in Mississippi where women could get an abortion: Jackson Women’s Health Organization, with its unmistakable bubble-gum-pink walls. The Pink House, as everyone called it, was just a seven-minute drive from the State Capitol, where lawmakers tried to find ways to shut it down with bill after bill. And again and again, the Pink House and its lawyers at the Center for Reproductive Rights, a legal-advocacy group that supported abortion rights, pushed back in the courts, arguing that the laws violated the standards set in Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 Supreme Court decision that upheld Roe (but allowed states further latitude in restricting abortion).

In the fall of 2017, a few months after Tseytlin’s presentation at A.D.F.’s Ritz-Carlton summit, Jameson Taylor, a conservative Christian lobbyist, started what he called his annual “intelligence gathering” on what anti-abortion legislation he wanted to push in the next session of the Mississippi Legislature. He made the rounds to various Christian groups and called different policy experts, including Kellie Fiedorek, a young lawyer who worked for A.D.F. Her job was to build out the A.D.F. network in the states, to push its model legislation on various issues through the statehouses and to create an army of allied local lawyers who could defend it.

This was the next step of a tightly held plan, whose details have never been revealed to the public. Soon Taylor was listening as A.D.F. lawyers made their case that the Supreme Court might uphold a law that banned abortion before Roe’s standard of viability — and that Mississippi would make an ideal testing ground. Denise Burke, one of the movement’s top authors of anti-abortion measures at A.D.F., explained how the model legislation she was writing would work, Taylor recounted. To end the federal right to an abortion, activists needed a law that could actually reach the Supreme Court. Passing a ban that was too aggressive would be categorically struck down in the lower courts.

Burke and A.D.F. were drafting the legislation with Kennedy in mind. He was a practicing Catholic but had ruled in favor of abortion rights in the landmark cases of Casey and Whole Woman’s Health. But he had also criticized abortion later in pregnancy in Gonzales v. Carhart, where he wrote the majority opinion upholding a ban on so-called partial-birth abortion. Now they hoped he might be a swing vote once again, this time to uphold a law that would nudge an abortion ban earlier in pregnancy and, in the process, eradicate the underpinning of Roe.

The legislation was written in a way that suggested it was grounded primarily in medical reasoning. But it featured specific legal language that aimed directly at A.D.F.’s real target. Roe had called the developing embryo and fetus “potential human life.” This bill described it as “an unborn human being” and highlighted specific details of prenatal development as evidence. The legislation stated that the United States was one of seven countries in the world to allow for abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, a way to argue that the country was an outlier among developed nations.

The bill picked quotes from the decisions in Roe and Casey that acknowledged that states had an interest in protecting “the potentiality of human life” and “the life of the unborn.” A.D.F.’s idea was to design the legislation to draw out what it saw as an inherent conflict in those two rulings — each allowed abortion before viability but also said that states had an interest in preserving potential life. The bill would argue that Mississippi was doing exactly what the Supreme Court allowed and force the court to reconcile the difference.

Taylor knew a 15-week ban would criminalize only about 3 percent of the roughly 2,600 abortions that were performed in Mississippi that year. But stopping procedures was not the point. A.D.F.’s primary goal was to write bills as a litigation strategy, not draft laws that would make for the strongest public policy or end the greatest number of abortions. The Mississippi bill was a legal tool to provoke a Supreme Court challenge to Roe — and set in motion a much larger plan to eventually end all abortion in America.

Some lawmakers in Mississippi worried that they would be sued if the bill passed and did not want to be saddled with the exorbitant cost such litigation could bring. But A.D.F. had a plan for that too, offering to have its lawyers defend the law at no cost to the state. This free legal counsel was a selling point for Taylor when he lobbied the legislators to take up the bill.

And Taylor had an important ally in the statehouse whom he knew he could count on to push an anti-abortion bill: Representative Becky Currie, a nurse, an observant Christian and at the time a three-term legislator who was one of the state’s most ardent advocates for the cause. “I’ve been pro-life since I was 18 and pregnant,” she said in an interview. “The more we worked on the bill, it just felt anointed. You just know when it was right.” She sponsored and introduced the bill A.D.F. wanted, called the Gestational Age Act, in early 2018.

Currie’s experience as a nurse shaped her political views. She often told the story of an incident in the hospital as a young nurse when a pregnant woman came in and delivered far too early. The details varied in her telling — sometimes the premature infant was a girl, at others a boy, sometimes it was 15 weeks, at others 14. But what Currie remembered most was that she waited until the heart stopped so she could put the remains in a plastic container to send to the lab. What Currie felt she understood about what happened was that the fetus “wanted to live.”

“I just never got over that,” she remembered.

Currie was exactly the kind of woman anti-abortion activists in Washington had strategized to make the face of their movement. A single mother, Currie had decided against having an abortion but still fulfilled her dream of becoming a nurse and then a politician. She could speak personally and authentically about the subject and her faith. Across the country, Republican women made up less than 10 percent of state legislators from 2008 to 2017, but they were significantly overrepresented as sponsors of anti-abortion bills. Of the more than 1,600 anti-abortion bills introduced during that period in state legislatures, nearly half had a female Republican co-sponsor, and a third had a female Republican as the primary sponsor. It became more complicated for Democrats to paint abortion opponents as anti-woman when women were leading the charge.

But even as Currie proudly championed the bill, she would not know the full story behind it until after Roe fell more than five years later. In an interview, she explained that she thought her vision for a 15-week cutoff, rooted in her foundational story of the beating fetal heart, had driven the plan. No one had told her that A.D.F. had coordinated its strategy with Taylor before their meeting, or that 15 weeks was part of its specific legal plan to undermine Roe, she said. Or that Tseytlin had brainstormed this possibility at Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society cocktail hour and advanced it at an upscale California resort alongside Republican leaders and attorneys.

When Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi signed the bill into law, with Currie smiling next to him, it became the tightest restriction on abortion in the nation. It made no exceptions for rape or incest, just a narrow provision to preserve the life of the woman or in cases of “severe” fetal abnormality. Less than an hour later, Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the Pink House — filed a lawsuit through their attorneys at the Center for Reproductive Rights. The Pink House performed abortions only until 16 weeks of pregnancy, the center’s lawyers wrote, and had done just 78 abortions when the fetus was identified as being 15 weeks or older in 2017.

Going after that small fraction, of course, was exactly the plan. Not too early in pregnancy and not too late, but exactly the line that might compel the Supreme Court to wade back into the subject of abortion. “We were seeking to be incremental and strategic,” Taylor said. Christian activists, he said, were learning to control their “moral passion” so as not to lose sight of their long-term goal.

There were still so many unknowns. For the law to serve its intended purpose, anti-abortion activists needed a majority on the Supreme Court. A.D.F. attorneys and their allies like Tseytlin had designed the legislation to target Kennedy, but what they couldn’t foresee was that Kennedy would retire that summer, allowing Trump to fill a second seat, this time with Brett Kavanaugh. Now conservatives had a 5-4 split on the Supreme Court, with Kavanaugh joining Roberts, Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. And there was more to come.

“As a Christian,” Currie said, “sometimes you don’t know God’s plan, and he kind of makes things happen.”

In her Virginia office just across the Potomac River from Washington, Marjorie Dannenfelser, of the Susan B. Anthony List (now known as Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America) and the A.D.F. board, had a detailed map drawn on a wall-size whiteboard. From a distance, it looked like the kind used by political campaigns to track polling and turnout, swing districts and congressional votes. But this one was color-coded to indicate states where Republicans held both the state legislature and the governor’s mansion and was partitioned by circuit-court-of-appeals jurisdiction. By early 2019, Republicans held complete control of state governments in 22 states, giving them total power over abortion legislation. Some 20 cases, with different legal strategies to gut Roe and Casey, were in litigation in lower courts. A magenta triangle meant the state had passed a “heartbeat bill,” generally a ban that started around six weeks; a green square signified a “pain-capable” abortion law, typically a 20-week ban. Red stars showed the federal appeals courts where judges nominated by Republicans outnumbered those nominated by Democrats — of the 11 on the board, they controlled seven. It was a map of how all the laws were moving up toward the ultimate court that mattered.

And now, on Sept. 18, 2020, with the news of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, Dannenfelser and her compatriots could capture another majority. The kind of Supreme Court supermajority that could take down Roe.

Trump introduced Amy Coney Barrett as his nominee in the Rose Garden, in the same place where Bill Clinton introduced Ginsburg in 1993. Back then, Dannenfelser was 27 and dreaming of carving out a more powerful place for conservative anti-abortion women in Washington. That was half a lifetime ago. Now, at 54, she and those women sat in the Rose Garden watching Barrett, a Catholic mother of seven whom Trump had said he had been “saving” to succeed Ginsburg, become the avatar of the culture they wanted to usher in for America.

Barrett was both Christian supermom and high-powered legal scholar, elite and outsider, a combination of the more secular conservative Federalist Society credentials and the beliefs of the emerging Christian legal movement. This new iteration of conservative feminism didn’t argue that women’s gains should be rolled back or that women should not be professionally ambitious. But it wanted those advances not to come at the expense of ideals of motherhood, Christian morality and the centrality of human life at conception.

Seven days before the 2020 presidential election, Leonard Leo tuned in from his home in Maine to watch his close friend Clarence Thomas swear in Barrett to the court. Watching her raise her right hand felt like the culmination of the entire project. It was, he said in an interview, “exhilarating.” Trump had become the most successful anti-abortion president America had ever known. His administration transformed the judiciary. With his speech to the March for Life in 2020 — the first time a sitting president attended — and graphic comments in his 2019 State of the Union address about how abortion providers “execute a baby,” he changed political expectations and red lines for Republican presidents. What Trump and his Republican allies had done was to change the country by leveraging political force to conquer the courts. Trump had promised conservative Christians that “Christianity will have power.” And now that vision was at the center of a Republican Party they had remade.

Scott Stewart had never set foot in Mississippi. But Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election thrust the young lawyer from the Department of Justice onto the job market, and Lynn Fitch, Mississippi’s attorney general, had reached out. She needed a new solicitor general to lead the state’s biggest cases. Fitch’s team found Stewart’s name tucked into a pile of résumés from the Republican Attorneys General Association, a group that had received more than $13 million from Leo’s network of organizations and whose executive director used to work for the Federalist Society.

Over the past decade and a half, the job of state solicitor general had become a coveted slot for ambitious young lawyers, even a path to more prominent posts like judgeships. For Stewart, the opportunity was ideal — representing a Republican state when there was a Democratic president offered the potential for high-profile conflict. And there was the lure of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the Mississippi case named for its petitioner, Thomas Dobbs (whose name was on the case in his capacity as a state health officer), which had been appealed up to the Supreme Court. Dobbs could be Stewart’s first chance to argue a case before the justices.

Stewart had clerked for Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain, a pugnacious voice for right-wing judicial thought on the liberal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and for Clarence Thomas, parlaying his conservative credentials into a post on Trump’s transition team, assessing the legality of various potential policies. When he got the job in Mississippi, a friend he had worked with at Gibson Dunn, a law firm known in Washington as a conservative powerhouse, reached out to congratulate him and share advice on becoming a new solicitor general. It was Misha Tseytlin.

Now Fitch and Stewart watched the Supreme Court seem to ignore their case for months. And like their opponents, they found the apparent indecision strange. Everyone had a theory about why the justices were dragging their feet. Maybe they would decide to not hear the case at all.

The silence broke one morning in May 2021. Fitch was on her way to the airport after attending an event hosted by the Republican Attorneys General Association. That weekend, the organization held an exclusive gathering at a private island on the secluded coast of southeast Georgia nestled between the marsh and the sea. There, corporate bigwigs schmoozed with top state law-enforcement leaders, people like Fitch, who would often determine the fate of their interests in America’s highest courts.

Now Fitch stared at the text from her chief of staff, Michelle Williams, trying to absorb the magnitude: “We just got cert.” The Supreme Court had agreed to hear the case that could strike at Roe. The hopes of the conservative movement, and the fears of those who supported abortion rights, rested with Mississippi.

Stewart had to decide on a strategy. Fitch’s petition for certiorari focused on upholding the Mississippi law and mentioned the possibility of overturning Roe only in a footnote: “If the Court determines that it cannot reconcile Roe and Casey with other precedents or scientific advancements showing a compelling state interest in fetal life far earlier in pregnancy than those cases contemplate, the Court should not retain erroneous precedent.”

Stewart knew that a lot of lawyers would encourage him to continue down that easier path, to simply argue that Mississippi’s law should be upheld. To not push for the complete overturn of Roe but to chip away — as the movement had for so many decades — and get the court to undo the viability standard. But for Stewart, these circumstances were different from those in the past. Trump had pushed their cause from the biggest bully pulpit in the land. Conservatives now had a majority on the court that seemed to be on their side.

It was not a moment for compromise, Stewart reasoned, according to people familiar with his thinking. It was a lesson he had learned from Thomas, his former boss and mentor, who was known to hold the line without deviation. He would be steadfast: Roe and Casey were wrong and must be reversed.

Within weeks, in early June 2021, A.D.F. lawyers were on flights to Jackson. It was a crucial moment for the entire anti-abortion coalition. But even after years of pushing for this singular goal, the coalition was not a monolith. Stewart wanted to openly ask the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. A.D.F. also wanted Roe overturned, of course — its ultimate target was to ban abortion nationwide at conception — but it favored a more limited, less risky approach, lawyers at the organization recalled in a series of interviews. And they saw the Dobbs case as their project. Now they just had to make sure Stewart and Fitch didn’t jeopardize the plan that had been laid almost six years earlier with Tseytlin at the Mayflower Hotel.

The A.D.F. lawyers rode the old mirrored elevators of the Walter Sillers State Office Building in Jackson to the 12th floor for a private meeting with Fitch and Stewart. This could be the case of a generation, and A.D.F. wasn’t about to cede control.

A.D.F.’s incoming president, Kristen Waggoner, brought a core team of top-notch attorneys and media experts, including a new lawyer A.D.F. had hired: Erin Hawley, a graduate of Yale Law School. She was married to Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. Overturning Roe was a joint mission for the Hawleys, who met as clerks for Chief Justice Roberts.

Squeezed around a long table, A.D.F. lawyers lined up on one side and the Mississippi team on the other. This private meeting, one kept secret from the press, top politicians and even other allies in the anti-abortion coalition, would signify a pivotal turning point in the strategy of their movement. This account of the meeting is based on interviews with multiple participants and people familiar with the discussion.

The A.D.F. lawyers outlined their thinking. Priority No. 1, they argued, was to get the Supreme Court to remove the viability line established in Roe as the limit for when states could ban abortion. Removing that limit — about 24 weeks — would open the door to all kinds of restrictions being upheld by lower courts. It would be a huge victory for their cause. It was a backdoor way of gutting Roe, invalidating the central principle of the original decision, without requiring the justices to take the thornier step of overturning 50 years of precedent.

Stewart disagreed. The lawmakers of Mississippi had enacted a law, and that law was fundamentally incompatible with Roe, he argued. “The people of Mississippi are pro-life,” he told the room, according to Erin Hawley. “They enacted this law. It is my duty to defend it to the best of my ability, and the right thing to do is to ask the court to overrule Roe.” The only effective strategy, Stewart said, according to participants, was to target the very heart of it all: the right to abortion that the court had found via a right to privacy that it decided was protected by the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution in 1973. The best argument was that Roe was wrong, he decided.

Some of the A.D.F. lawyers bristled. Stewart’s plan felt risky and aggressive. If the court wanted to use this case to overturn Roe, it could, the A.D.F. team argued. But to ask for that explicitly could be pushing too far too fast, even for this new court. A defeat would be devastating, potentially even going so far as to reaffirm abortion rights in some way and create another precedent to fight.

There was a lot to consider. It wasn’t totally clear that they had five votes to fully overturn Roe right now. Certainly, it was the best court they had faced in a long time. But the 6-3 conservative majority was still new, and the country was still reeling from the contentious Supreme Court battles of the Trump era. And looming over the conversation was the reality that Stewart had never argued a case at the Supreme Court. By this point, A.D.F. lawyers had argued and won 12 Supreme Court cases. The A.D.F. lawyers’ message was clear: The safest path to victory was their plan. They should simply ask the court to uphold their 15-week law.

Fitch’s team was grateful for A.D.F.’s help. But to them, this had the feel of a power grab — a bunch of Washington lawyers coming down to Jackson to take over once there was a chance to make history. This was Fitch’s case. She had chosen Stewart, and Stewart was determined. Mississippi would forge its own path.

“Like everything else, you get four attorneys in a room, you’re going to get 10 opinions,” Kevin Theriot, an A.D.F. lawyer, said later in an interview, adding that he was on the phone for part of the meeting. “It’s not that our original strategy went out the window. It was just that instead of making ‘You should overturn Roe’ the second argument, they made it the first argument.”

Stewart’s thinking reflected the shifts that had overtaken the anti-abortion movement and the conservative legal project during the Trump administration. For four years, they had gone bigger and bolder than what previously felt possible. Courts blocked many of their state abortion bans. But the efforts themselves had further opened the window of possibilities. To overturn Roe, conservatives had to directly ask the court to do so. A.D.F. might have been skittish about making the request, but Fitch and Stewart were not.

While the anti-abortion views of the movement’s leaders still represented a distinct minority of the country, they had built an elite legal and ideological ecosystem of activists, organizations, lawmakers and pro bono lawyers around their cause. Their policy arms churned out legal arguments and medical studies. Their lawyers argued their cases, and their judges ruled on them, all fostered by the bench that Leo built. And their allied lawmakers pushed their agenda in statehouses and Congress. Yet despite their overwhelming success, many on the left continued to underestimate them. It was their greatest strength.

Behind closed doors, Fitch’s team drew up a nine-slide blueprint, marked “Confidential”: a 12-month political and public-relations strategy in the run-up to the expected court decision on Dobbs in June 2022. “Strategy to maximize impact at SCOTUS,” it began. The whole operation was surprisingly low-budget, estimated as up to $231,000, to be paid out of the attorney general’s office and Fitch’s political fund, according to the private document.

When Stewart filed the new brief for Mississippi that July, his argument was a full-scale assault on a precedent that had defined American life for nearly half a century, in plain language. “Roe and Casey are egregiously wrong,” he wrote. “The conclusion that abortion is a constitutional right has no basis in text, structure, history, or tradition.” That same month, Stewart attended a reunion of Thomas’s law clerks hosted at a West Virginia resort by the justice — before whom he would soon argue his case.

If Stewart won, Roe would fall. At least 13 states already had trigger bans on the books, making them certain to move quickly to ban abortion, with very limited exceptions. And at least a dozen more states were likely to follow quickly with their own restrictions. A victory by Mississippi could make abortion illegal in about half the country.

After Stewart argued the case at the Supreme Court in December 2021, leaders of the anti-abortion movement gathered that evening at the JW Marriott in Washington for an invitation-only dinner banquet sponsored by A.D.F. Everyone from the network seemed to be there, and A.D.F. gave out party favors of small wooden plaques depicting a pregnant woman leaning against a Supreme Court column. The mood was celebratory even though their ultimate victory wouldn’t come for another six months, with the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that would overturn Roe.

Marjorie Dannenfelser was in the room. As were local activists who pushed abortion bans through their statehouses. Authors of the amicus briefs supporting Stewart’s case. Becky Currie, who believed she had come up with the idea of the 15-week law in Mississippi. Many participants knew only the small part they played, not how the whole fit together. Currie met Stewart briefly that night for the first time. “He couldn’t pick me out of a crowd,” she said.

Onstage, Lynn Fitch, Scott Stewart and Erin Hawley sat proudly as they described how they had gotten to this moment. “First of all, to God be the glory,” Fitch began. “We all prayed, worked so hard for this day. It all came together because everyone here, everyone that’s been involved across our country, we’re believers, and we knew this day would come,” she said. “God selected this case. He was ready. The justices were ready to hear what we were all going to be talking about.”

For those listening, the people around them in that ballroom and all they accomplished represented a vision of the kingdom of God coming on Earth, as Jesus’ prayer taught in the Gospels. Their work offered a vision of what a modern Christian empire looked like. It did not involve violent crusaders or declaring an official state religion. It was not clerics instituting a theocracy. The anti-abortion movement had used the existing system to define the Constitution the way it saw fit. A right was not being taken away from women, the movement argued, because it never should have existed in the first place. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg had said Roe, rooted in a right to privacy, wasn’t built on the strongest legal ground. An argument explicitly based on a constitutional right to equal protection would have better protected it from challenges, she argued.

A.D.F.’s strategy on Dobbs reflected how it believed it could reshape America and overtake majority opinion. There’s a saying that law is downstream from culture, said Greg Scott, a former longtime communications strategist for A.D.F., explaining the idea in an interview that a cause gains popular support first and then the law formalizes those beliefs. “I actually reject that,” he said. “We are in this feedback loop and this ecosystem where frequently that is true. But then at other times, the law does drive culture.”

And now, amid the applause, A.D.F. leaders looked ahead. Their ultimate goal was sweeping change across America to preserve the values of conservative Christians. A.D.F. was, after all, a “religious ministry,” not just a legal network, as Kristen Waggoner said in an interview. Ending abortion was the first target, but A.D.F. had already begun planning for more.

According to an internal strategy document dated to May 2021, A.D.F. leaders set out to achieve what they called “generational wins,” victories that, like overturning Roe, would change the law and the culture of America for an entire generation. The document, never before reported, reveals secret details of the legal decisions A.D.F. hopes to challenge in the coming years.

A.D.F. lawyers would work to reverse the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith, to “fully protect the free exercise of religion,” the strategy document explained. That decision, written by Scalia, ruled that religious beliefs did not excuse disobeying laws.

They would pursue litigation to enforce free-speech rights on college campuses. They would push legislation to protect the freedom of association there as well, to eventually overturn a decision that Ginsburg wrote in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. The ruling allowed a public university not to recognize a Christian student group that excluded gay students. In his dissent, Alito called the decision a “serious setback for freedom of expression.”

They would target L.G.B.T.Q. rights and protections and “stop efforts to elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to protected-class status in the law akin to race.” They would “work to restore an understanding of marriage, the family and sexuality that reflects God’s creative order.”

And they wanted the court to strengthen parental rights over state authority by having the court revisit the 2000 case Troxel v. Granville, which allowed the state to override a parent’s wishes in some circumstances. A.D.F. would work to pass state legislation, similar to its approach on abortion, that would prioritize parental rights in medical decisions for minors who say they are transgender, to prevent parents from “being coerced into consenting to life-changing, ill-advised surgeries and procedures in the wake of gender dysphoria.”

It was an agenda that would inflame their liberal opponents and that not even everyone in the ballroom knew about. (An A.D.F. official distanced the organization from the specific cases named in the document, saying its legal strategies shift based on precedent and current events.)

In the months after Roe fell, their efforts would reach beyond the outlines of that one document. A.D.F. lawyers would get involved in the two high-profile Supreme Court cases, argued before the justices this spring, that could define post-Roe abortion access for American women; they focused on the legality of medication that is the most common method of abortion and on emergency care for pregnant women who face grave medical complications in states where abortion is banned.

But all that was to come. Onstage that night, Fitch beamed. For so many decades, Roe had seemed indestructible, the backdrop to the lives of three generations of American women and their families. Soon it would be a relic of an earlier time.

“We’ve got tough times ahead, but we’re ready,” Fitch told the audience. “This has been certainly a God thing. We’ve all been called. We’ve all been waiting.” Now, she said, they would not stop. “Everyone in this room, you’re ready.”

Additional research by Cameron Peters.

Source photographs for illustration at top: Getty Images, Associated Press, Reuters.

This article is adapted from “The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America,” being published in June by Flatiron Books.

Elizabeth Dias is The Times’s national religion correspondent, covering faith, politics and values. More about Elizabeth Dias

Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades. More about Lisa Lerer

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