Reckon With has emerged out of years of study about the history of racial injustice and movements towards repair.
Below is our understanding of the landscape and how we hope to contribute to it.
At a glance:
Our nation remains in crisis because inequity’s source — false myths about racial hierarchy — has not been uprooted. “White” people have not heeded movement leaders’ call: interrupt these toxic narratives and the harmful actions they fuel as they emerge every day in ourselves, with the “white” people in our communities and the institutions we’re part of.
We remain in crisis.
Over 400 years ago, Christian Europeans colonized North America and initiated generations of harm:
The genocide of Indigenous people and theft of their land
246 years of racial slavery
100 years of racial terrorism and legalized racial segregation
59 years (and counting) of mass incarceration and racial discrimination
“Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
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The Equal Justice Initiative, The 1619 Project, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ of the United States, and Ronald Sanders’s Lost Tribes and Promised Lands: The Origins of American Racism
Black, Indigenous and People of the Global Majority experience inequitable and unjust outcomes across systems.
“Today, the United States remains nowhere close to racial parity.”
—Ibram X. Kendi
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Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi (2016), The Groundwater Approach: Building a Practical Understanding of Structural Racism by Deena Hayes-Greene and Bayard P. Love (The Racial Equity Institute, 2018), Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap by Ebony Reed and Louise Story.
All of us are damaged by historical and contemporary harm: those who experience it, and those who perpetrate it.
Generations of enacting and witnessing supremacist violence has compromised “white” peoples’ humanity; regardless of wealth, “white” people are spiritually distorted and exist without healthy identity or culture.
“American notions of whiteness threaten white well-being.”
—Jonathan M. Metzl
“I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks.”
—Harriet Jacobs
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The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison (2017), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1861), Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland by Jonathan Metzl (2019), My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem (2017), and Healing Roots.
Change has been achieved, but not sustained.
Black, Indigenous and Communities of Color continue challenging structural inequality…
1865-1877:
Reconstruction
13th, 14th and 15th Constitutional amendments and Reconstruction & Ku Klux Klan Acts
Mobilization of Black voters, election of Black legislators
Establishment of public schools and HBCUs, Black businesses and banks
1960s:
Black freedom struggle
Legislative change through the Supreme Court (Brown v. Board, Loving V. Virginia) and Federal advocacy (Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act)
Boycotts, Freedom Rides, and Black Power organizing
2013 - Today
Black Lives Matter movement, Reparations legislation, voter mobilization, and DEI programs
“As much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of black resistance.”
—Nikole Hannah-Jones
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“Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true” by Nikole Hannah-Jones (2019), Black Past, and The Zinn Education Project resources.
… and most “white” people continue to resist progress:
1865-1877:
Reconstruction
Founding of the KKK, later the establishment of the Red Shirts
Adaption of Black Codes
Presidency of Andrew Johnson
1960s:
Black freedom struggle
White Citizens Councils and campaign of Massive Resistance to integration and equality, redlining, delay and roll back of legislative change; Continued terrorist activities (KKK)
Presidency of Richard Nixon
2013 - Today
Moms for Liberty, national campaigns and legislation banning books and criminalizing DEI and trans healthcare and identity
Presidency of Donald Trump
There have also always been “white” people who have fought for racial justice. Learn about them from Lynn Burnett’s work here and others documented in our research.
“White rage has undermined democracy, warped the Constitution, weakened the nation’s ability to compete economically, squandered billions of dollars are baseless incarceration, rendered an entire region sick, poor and woefully undereducated, and left cities nothing less than decimated.”
—Carol Anderson
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White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Alexander, Reconstruction in America & Segregation in America by the Equal Justice Initiative, Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. Du Bois, books by Eric Foner, and Anti-DEI Legislation Tracker by BestColleges.
How do we break this cycle and achieve sustained transformation?
We must address the root cause of our crisis: false ideas about racial hierarchy.
“The root of the problem is othering.”
—The Othering & Belonging Institute
To condone the atrocities of Native genocide and African enslavement that English settlers were committing in the 1600s, they developed and institutionalized false ideas that “white” people are superior and Black and Indigenous people are subhuman.
"English colonists gradually transferred an institution (indentured servitude) into a form of permanent slavery for people of African origin. While doing so they initiated the development of a unique and subtle ideology about human differences, not least of which was the homogenization of all Europeans into a "white" identity and of all those with African ancestry into an identity as "Negroes" and slaves."
—Audrey Smedley
These false myths remain unconfronted, fueling injustice.
"We won't eliminate discrimination in the criminal justice system, in the education system, in the employment system until we change the narrative of racial difference that we have all accepted."
—Bryan Stevenson
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Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview by Audrey Smedley (2012), PBS’s The Origin of Race in the USA video, The Othering & Belonging Institute, Lies About Black People: How to Combat Racist Stereotypes and Why it Matters by Omekongo Dibinga, the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and reports.
Scholars identify today as our nation’s third pivotal era, and perhaps final opportunity to achieve racial justice and democracy.
“A moral reckoning is upon us, and we have to decide, once and for all, whether or not we will truly be a multiracial democracy.”
— Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
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Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr., The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century by Peniel E. Joseph, and The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution by Eric Foner.
Transformation requires 6 conditions:
Other movements – like marriage equality – have succeeded when change occurs at all levels.
“The Waters of Systems Change” by John Kania, Mark Kramer and Peter Senge, https://www.fsg.org/resource/water_of_systems_change/
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“The Water of Systems Change” by John Kania, Mark Kramer, Peter Senge at FSG (2018), “The Improbable Victory of Marriage Equality” by John F. Kowal at the Brennan Center (2015), other examples (smoking, drunk driving) documented in our research.
Black, Indigenous and People of Color continue making structural change…
Organizations like Resource Generation, Showing Up for Racial Justice are doing incredible work to mobilize “white” people to donate, volunteer, and engage in electoral politics through phonebanking and canvassing.
…but there are still missing pieces: changing mental models, power dynamics, and relationships.
Whose responsibility is it to change the narrative and interrupt harm in relationships? The people who unjustly hold disproportionate power and interact mostly with one another:
“white” people
“The Negro thinks then that the so-called Negro probelm is the white man’s problem. Both races have much to do to effect a readjustment but the white race, being in control, holds the key to the solution of the problem.”
—Dr. Carter G. Woodson
“When we say that the causes of the race problem are rooted in the white American and the white community, we mean that the power is the white American’s and so is the responsibility.”
—Lerone Bennett Jr.
“Who really needs to heal are white people. The people who cause the harm are the people who need to do the healing, the reflection, the fixing.”
—Nikole Hannah-Jones
“Where is the intervention? Our white-bodied siblings have to intervene. I appreciate them being at our rallies, and that’s important, but folks have to really intervene and stand up.”
—Makani Themba
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“Three quarters of whites don’t have any non-white friends” by Christopher Ingraham at The Washington Post, “Among white americans, 91% of people comprising their social networks are also white” from the Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey of 2013, The Appeal by Dr. Carter G. Woodson (1920), “The White Problem in America: Introduction” in Ebony Magazine by Lerone Bennett, Jr. (1965), The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X (1965), Nikole Hannah-Jones at W. K. Kellogg’s National Day of Racial Healing Town Hall (2023), How to Survive the End of the World interview with Makani Themba hosted by adrienne maree brown (2024), “Black Lives Matter, Black Power, and the Role of White Allies in Black Perspectives by Say Burgin.
