There have been major strides and clear, sometimes violent, hostility toward America’s professed promise of equal opportunity for everyone. That reality makes it impossible to forecast how long the latest surge in race-equity initiatives will last, several scholars contend, adding that anything short of systemic change isn’t really change at all.
“It is not clear that the contemporary initiatives are going to be anything more than window dressing,” Dr. Anthony Thompson, founding faculty director of New York University School of Law’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law, told Diverse via email. “We often see an immediate response to social unrest related to race. But, all too often, those responses are followed with retrenchment … dramatic reversals on race. The election of an openly racist president after two terms of Obama is a prime example.”
Similarly, Dr. Sekou Franklin, president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, pointed out that although an anonymous donor did give the NAACP Legal Defense Fund $40 million to train 50 up-and-coming civil rights attorneys, it came just days after a mob of White supremacists and conspiracy theorists attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
In his own city of Nashville, global pharmaceutical giant Thermo Fisher Scientific recently invited Franklin — also an associate professor of political science and international relations at Middle Tennessee State University — to educate an audience of that firm’s employees on the history of and current threats to voting rights.
“‘I can’t breathe,’ George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement: these are reasons why all of this activity is occurring,” says Franklin. “That resistance is joined at the hip with the ability of Black advocates in various other
arenas and of Black lawmakers to pinpoint many things right now, including the racial disproportionality of the coronavirus’ impact.”
As scholars, including some who also are activists, assess today’s efforts to achieve racial parity in areas including education, employment, income, criminal justice and policing, they also are weighing in on how to sustain this new momentum in racial justice and parity.
