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

Black youth who attend school in non-Black spaces do not always feel welcomed or comfortable, and they regularly experience everyday racism that is interpersonal and institutional. Young Black changemakers use multiple strategies to resist racism. Resistance involved creating safe spaces in schools they could claim as their own, holding administrators accountable, and raising awareness of Black culture and experiences. Black youth noted the importance of authentic allies in non-Black spaces, and also shared the burdens that arise from the emotional labor of being in non-Black spaces and engaging in racial justice work.

The Montgomery Variations and Credo were not just timely musical masterpieces; they were also large-scale compositions dealing with racial justice and global equality that were penned by an African American woman, an individual to whom the doors of the classical music performance and publishing establishments were closed because of race and sex. Both works may thus be understood as compositions tendered from within a double application of the “veil” or “double-consciousness” that Du Bois had seminally discussed in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk – one application is that of race; the other, that of sex. Keenly aware of both of her doubly veiled existence and of the near-total absence of Black folk and women in orchestras, as well as their disproportionately small presence in choruses and audiences, Margaret Bonds undertook a gambit of dual perspective. She used the rhetoric of White Euro-American classical music to valorize contemporary African Americans and others who bravely fought against the system with which most performers and audiences of that music normally identified. The chapter closes with a reflection on the crucial role played by Bonds’s personal and professional affinities with Langston Hughes in inspiring her to this gambit.

In this chapter, I explore how the new Court, immediately after its creation in 1998, enforced increasingly lower thresholds of severity to find a violation under the prohibition of torture and introduced several key positive obligations. I provide a detailed assessment of how, with a few audacious rulings, the new Court reversed the compromises made by the old Court, especially regarding the member states’ national security concerns. Different from the old Court, the new Court could act audaciously across the board. The most visible implication of this was the fact that the new Court accepted almost all the novel claims brought before it—even those concerning resource-intensive positive obligations and the violations perpetrated by private actors. As epitomes of sudden change, these positive obligations assumed a taken-for-granted status not long after their initial acknowledgment. Having described the achievements of the new Court, I also discuss the areas where progress was slower. In particular, I take a look at the Court’s treatment of claims arising from systemic racist policies.

The chapter is concerned with racial health disparities in the United States. These disparities are large, significant, and persistent. Black Americans are much more likely to become ill and to die from their illnesses than are White Americans with the same illnesses. Black Americans’ poorer health reflects health disparities that have social, economic, or political causes rather than biological differences between the two groups. The root cause of these racial health disparities is anti-Black racism, which includes individual racism (negative thoughts about and feelings toward Black people) and systemic racism (societal standards, cultural values, and formal laws that systematically disadvantage Black Americans). Both kinds of racism have very long histories in the United States and continue to pose significant threats to the health of and the healthcare received by Black Americans. Specifically, individual and systemic racism cause: (1) chronic stress, which produces physiological and psychological responses that threaten a person’s health; (2) racial housing segregation, which creates poor and under-resourced Black neighborhoods, containing numerous environmental threats to the residents’ health; (3) inequities in the quality of medical care received by Black patients and White patients; and (4) disparities in socioeconomic status, the strongest single correlate of a person’s health status in the United States.

The Conclusion starts by pointing to the surprising extent to which the Wehrmacht chaplains have faded into oblivion. It summarizes some of the findings from the project of bringing the chaplains into focus. Throughout the Nazi years, chaplains proved to be reliable partners. They assembled a record of loyalty to the Nazi German state and its military before the war, and in the six years of conflict, they did not deviate from that pattern. The reason was less ideological fervor than institutional self-interest. The interests of the churches and the chaplains dovetailed with those of the Nazi leadership, at least until the last year of the war. It closes by drawing connections with chaplains in other contexts, where they also function as part of systems, with conflicting demands. Yet hope can be held out for the possibility of solidarity between people.

Dismantling systems of racial oppression requires that people from many different racial and ethnic backgrounds become critically conscious in challenging racial injustices. Youth’s pathways to critical consciousness may be very different depending on youth’s experiences with racial oppression and privilege. This chapter brings together relational developmental systems and critical race and intersectionality theories and existing research that can offer insights into different underpinnings and processes related to youth of color and white youth’s critical consciousness development. We also show how mapping complex variations in critical reflection, motivation, and action and situating these processes within contexts of oppression and privilege can advance understanding of critical consciousness development. We conclude by summarizing promising future directions for theory and research.

Chapter 10 examines the public health literature and research on well-being that suggests that being Black and middle class in America does not equate to overall positive health outcomes, due largely to prolonged exposure to racism. Chapter 10 investigates how being Black, middle class, and SALA impacts the health and well-being of the Love Jones Cohort and what coping mechanisms they employ to deal with the challenges they face. Chapter 10 reports that some Cohort members experience situational depression, situational anxiety, or situational loneliness usually stemming from feelings of stress, overwork, and frustration at their financial situations and/or jobs. Moreover, a good number of Cohort members report that their families – despite occasional negative feelings of obligation and responsibility toward them – serve as sources of support, guidance, and love. Many also emphasize the importance of close friendships and augmented families in maintaining well-being and providing a coping mechanism during times of high stress and anxiety.

Many institutions of higher education have failed in their attempts to retain talented African-American faculty. Efforts that are hyper-focused on increasing the number of Black hires will not capture desired outcomes. Simply checking the diversity box is not enough to support Black faculty in their persistence for careers in higher education. Equity and inclusion should be at the forefront of cultivating solutions to have a significant impact on retention. While equity provides faculty opportunities and access to resources, inclusion demands a sense of belonging and facilitates participation. These are actionable processes that require intentional efforts to support the success of all faculty. Providing these essential components situate current and potential Black faculty so that they are comfortable accessing the resources and opportunities afforded to their White counterparts. This chapter provides practical strategies to enact systemic change in institutional policies and practices to support the retention of Black faculty.

Higher education is an industry highly impacted by systemic racism. Previous research has revealed a persistent trend of underrepresentation and low academic status of African-American faculty members in many US colleges and universities. A lack of diversity, promotions, and scholarships are often hidden by the success of African-American faculty members receiving tenure, or promotions to dean or University president. Research statistics indicate persistent obstacles to recruitment and retention, though there is also acknowledgement of some success. Bell’s Critical Race Theory (CRT) is used to emphasize how systemic racism has allowed the culture of college campuses to discriminate against qualified minority candidates.

This introductory chapter underscores how the events of 2020 remind us of the importance of community. It discusses how the experience of COVID-19 shows how we are connected across the globe. At the same time, the chapter addresses the differential impact of COVID-19 on communities of color. The chapter talks about how the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd highlight national and transnational concerns with police brutality and racial profiling. These realities introduce questions such as: What does it mean to belong to a community? How do systemic racism and discrimination interfere with belongingness, access to freedom, and even life and survival? How can communities push macro-level change in the face of systemic oppression? A brief history of community psychology and a review of key competencies are provided. A rationale and overall introduction to the book is included.

Chapter 5 recounts how social scientists, during and after the war, tended to treat discrimination as a system-one with interlocking legal, political, and economic dimensions. By the 1950s systemic frameworks had receded in favor of more individualistic explanations for the “race problem.” The study of discrimination remained strikingly cross-disciplinary, but the lens of prejudice-individual attitudes in the aggregate-was newly prominent, supported by philanthropy and Cold War discretion. Gary Becker brought microeconomics to discrimination in this period, too, in an approach that, like the psychology of prejudice, stressed the causal priority of dispositions. The announcement of formal equality in the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s complicated the study of race for the balance of the century. Systemic accounts were partially revived, and evidence for persisting racial inequality was widely documented. But causal factors proved harder to identify. In the wake of de jure segregation, even radical critics of “institutional racism” and “internal colonialism” conceded that discrimination's effects were easier to describe than its causal dynamics. Quantitative sociologists and economists deployed a cascade of measures that demonstrated disparate outcomes, though again without clear explanatory accounts rooted in discrimination.