Written by:

Here’s our pick of news, writing, and research this week that investigates political questions at the intersections of gender, race, and region.

1. “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women
The African American Policy Forum has released an updated version of their May report which includes information on “the circumstances around [Sandra] Bland’s suspicious death… [and] stories of Black women who have been killed by police, shining a spotlight on forms of police brutality often experienced disproportionately by women of color.” Co-author Andrea Ritchie explains that the report “begins to shine a light on the ways that Black women are policed similar to other members of our communities” while also pushing for a gendered analysis of how women of color experience police violence, including “sexual assault by police, police abuse of pregnant women, profiling and abusive treatment of lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming Black women, and police brutality in the context of responses to violence—which bring Black women’s experiences into even sharper focus.”

2. “Our Racial Moment of Truth
Isabel Wilkerson: “With the lowering of the Confederate flag in the state that was the first to secede and where the first shots were fired, could we now be at the start of a true and more meaningful reconstruction? It would require courage to relinquish the false comfort of embedded racial mythologies and to open our minds to a more complete history of how we got here. It would require a generosity of spirit to see ourselves in the continued suffering of a people stigmatized since their arrival on these shores and to recognize how the unspoken hierarchies we have inherited play out in the current day and hold us back as a country.”

3. “Race, Class, and College Access: Achieving Diversity in a Shifting Legal Landscape
A new report released on Tuesday presents findings from a survey of admissions and enrollment management leaders at 338 four-year colleges regarding their admissions practices in the context of recent legal challenges to race-conscious admissions. The report shares approaches institutions are taking to diversify their student body year over year, finding “three of the five most widely used strategies to support racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity involve student outreach and recruitment.” The authors call for more “straightforward, practice-relevant resources” based on research around admissions strategies and the educational impact of campus diversity that universities can use as they work towards “successfully utilizing and complying with restrictions on the tools available to them to achieve this diversity.”

4. “State director: 96,000 might have been denied vote if election law had been in effect
“North Carolina’s election director Kim Strach… also acknowledged that she could find no evidence of significant fraud in same-day voter registration. House Bill 589, which was signed into law August 2013, eliminated same-day voter registration, reduced the days of early voting from 17 to 10, prohibited out-of-precinct provisional voting and got rid of preregistration of 16- and 17-year-olds.” In recent elections, “African-Americans in North Carolina were twice as likely to vote early, use same-day registration, and vote out of precinct compared with whites.”

5. “India Clarke: 10th Trans Woman Killed This Year
Jay Brown: “Even as the transgender community experiences historic visibility and increasingly inclusive protections, the reality is that violence and brutality are a part of far too many transgender people’s daily lives—especially transgender women of color. As we mourn the death of India Clarke, we must also work to address the realities that conspire to put transgender people at risk, including high rates of unemployment, lack of healthcare and housing instability.”

Want to get “This Week” in your inbox on Friday mornings? Sign up here:


Related Posts: