Anti-Black racism has once again moved to the center of national consciousness in the midst of two once-in-a-century events—the COVID-19 pandemic and the popular uprisings in response to unyielding forms of state violence and racial terror. The enduring racial inequalities laid bare by the casual murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, along with the profound racial disparities in the COVID-19 death toll have loosened the grip of colorblindness as the official embodiment of racial justice.

 

To capture the significance of this opportunity in the current struggle against anti-Black racism, it is important to understand the checkered history of post-apartheid race reform and the continuing legacy of slavery and segregation today in both the law and in wider society at large. Narrow conceptualizations of racial inequality have plagued the movement against anti-Black racism for more than a generation. And throughout this post-civil rights history, CRT and Intersectionality have produced wide-ranging bodies of knowledge to uncover how racial domination is produced, naturalized, and contested within the law, public policy, and a wide variety of institutional and social locations. CRT and Intersectionality have also modeled modes of collaboration, exchange, and collective analysis that stand in sharp contrast to the individuated understandings of social inequality that rule most disciplines and institutions today.

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This Summer School is designed to recover the broad insights and commitments of CRT/Intersectionality in this potentially transformative moment. In topics ranging from vote suppression and employment discrimination to affirmative action and criminal justice, faculty and instructors will demonstrate how CRT and Intersectionality figure prominently in efforts to foreground the many ways that social power and inequality are produced. LGBTQ rights, housing, public safety, public education, and their intersections with legacies of anti-Black racism will be uncovered and explored.  

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If this current reckoning with racism is destined to shake the foundations of the current order, the insights and tools of CRT and Intersectionality will provide critical tools that will render the dismantling of the status both urgent and imaginable.