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Response .............. 13Resources ................ 17

CONTENTS:

September/October 2011 Volume 20: Number 5

(Please turn to page 2)

Does Unconscious Bias Matter?by Ralph Richard Banks & Richard Thompson Ford

Ralph Richard Banks ([email protected]) is Jackson Eli ReynoldsProfessor of Law; Richard ThompsonFord ([email protected]) is GeorgeE. Osborne Professor Law, both atStanford Law School.

Banks is author of Is Marriage forWhite People? How the AfricanAmerican Marriage Decline Affects

Everyone. Ford is author of RightsGone Wrong: How Law Corrupts theStruggle for Equality, out from Farrar,Strauss & Giroux in October.

This article is adapted from the au-thors’ article, “(How) Does Uncon-scious Bias Matter?: Law, Politics,And Racial Inequality,” 58 Emory L.J.1053 (2009).

During the past several years, psy-chological research on unconscious ra-cial bias has grabbed headlines, aswell as the attention of legal scholars.The most well-known test of uncon-scious bias is the Implicit AssociationTest (IAT), a sophisticated and meth-odologically rigorous computer-ad-ministered measure that has beentaken by millions of people and fea-tured in major media. Its proponentscontend that the IAT reveals wide-spread unconscious bias against Afri-

can Americans, even among individu-als who believe themselves to be freeof racial bias.

A computer-administered test avail-able over the Internet, the IAT is acompelling interactive experience thathas been taken by millions of people,and featured in print and broadcastmedia. The IAT measures the strengthof the association between social cat-egories (e.g., blacks or whites) andpositive and negative attributes (e.g.,“joy” and “love” versus “agony” and

“evil”). Akin to a computer game forgrownups, the IAT requires momen-tary immersion into the interactivemedium. In a series of trials, the par-ticipant categorizes images or wordsthat appear on the computer screenby pressing particular computer key-

Implicit Bias: A ForumThe insight that we are all, in different ways, subject to “unconscious” or “implicit” bias is a continuing theme in

modern anti-discrimination theory, even though it is still largely ignored in civil rights legal jurisprudence. Tracing backat least to Charles Lawrence’s path-breaking 1987 article “The Id, the Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning withUnconscious Racism,” the concept has gained momentum in recent years with research results from the “Implicit Asso-ciation Test” and the increasingly sophisticated use of racial images in political advertising. For proponents of using theresearch in legal advocacy (political and litigation), it offers a possible strategy to garner support from those who areskeptical that racial bias continues to exist. The theory is also thought by some to allow for a more open and lessdefensive discussion about race. At the same time, there are those who believe that placing too much emphasis on implicitbias undermines the more important project of addressing structural discrimination and its outcomes; that it lets peopleoff the hook for their conscious racist views; and that it is a potential trap for anti-discrimination law. The forum thatfollows presents several aspects of this debate from some of the leading proponents and critics of the implicit biasapproach. We hope that the discussion will shed some light on this important issue.

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2 • Poverty & Race • Vol. 20, No. 5 • September/October 2011

(BIAS: Continued from page 1)

Unconscious bias dis-course may disserve thecause of racial justice.

board keys as quickly as possible. Atthe end of the exercise, the computercalculates a score that reflects the na-ture and magnitude of one's implicitbias. Most participants are found tohave an implicit bias against AfricanAmericans. The overt racism of theJim Crow era, the psychological re-search suggests, has given way to ra-cial bias that is predominantly uncon-scious.

In fact, the findings of the IAT areambiguous. The characterization ofthe IAT as a measure of implicit biasdepends on being able to distinguishimplicit bias from conscious bias. Yetit is extraordinarily difficult to disen-tangle the two because, since the dis-avowal of racism during the civilrights era, research participants havebecome increasingly unwilling toopenly express views that may be con-demned as racist. Thus, the IAT coulddefensibly be viewed as a subtle mea-sure of conscious psychological pro-cesses, of attitudes and beliefs that areknown to oneself yet intentionallyconcealed from researchers. This em-pirical ambiguity has been practicallyeclipsed by the unconscious bias ac-count. Why?

Scholars may focus on unconsciousbias because they think it poses uniquechallenges for anti-discrimination doc-trine. This explanation for theascendance of the unconscious biasdiscourse is intuitively appealing andwidely embraced. But it is wrong.

Anti-discrimination law grapples aswell, or as poorly, with unconsciousbias as with covert bias. Neither statu-tory nor constitutional anti-discrimi-nation law turns on the distinctionbetween the two. While the researchcannot distinguish between consciousand unconscious bias, the law (fortu-nately) does not require courts to doso.

The better explanation for theprominence of the unconscious biasdiscourse relates to the comfortingnarrative it offers about our nation's

progress in overcoming its racist his-tory. Assertions of widespread uncon-scious bias are more palatable thanparallel claims about covert bias. Theinvocation of unconscious bias levelsneither accusation nor blame so muchas it identifies a quasi-medical prob-lem buried deep within us all, an ail-ment that distorts our thinking andbehavior. People may be willing toaccept that unconscious bias influ-ences their behavior, even if theywould vigorously deny harboring con-scious bias. Assertions of consciousbias would open a constellation ofvexing issues—for example, whetherracial disparities reflect discriminationor group differences, whether dis-crimination may be rational, and if sowhether it should be prohibited. Thediscussion of such matters would beuncomfortable for many and, in anyevent, would be unlikely to yield anyquick consensus. The unconsciousbias discourse promotes a (superficial)consensus that the race problem per-sists precisely by bypassing potentialsources of disagreement.

Despite its ostensible political ben-efits, the unconscious bias discoursemay disserve the cause of racial jus-tice. Just as it misdescribes the IATby eclipsing the ambiguity of its find-ings, the unconscious bias approachprompts people to acknowledge thepersistence of the race problem bymisdescribing it. The unconscious bias

approach not only discounts the per-sistence of knowing discrimination, itelides the substantive inequalities thatfuel conscious and unconscious biasalike. While we do not doubt the ex-istence of unconscious bias, we dodoubt that contemporary racial biasaccounts for all, or even most, of theracial injustice that bedevils our soci-ety. The racial injustices that mosttrouble us are substantive—educa-tional failure, large-scale incarcera-tion, segregated and impoverishedcommunities—and stem from a com-plex interplay of economic, histori-cal, political and social influences.While historical bias has certainlyplayed a role in producing these in-equalities, it is fanciful to attributetheir persistence to contemporary bias,unconscious or otherwise. The goalof racial justice efforts should be thealleviation of substantive inequalities,not the eradication of unconsciousbias.

The unconscious bias discourse isas likely to subvert as to further thegoal of substantive racial justice. Anarrow focus on the IAT may fail asits empirical claims receive greaterscrutiny, which would make it diffi-cult for scholars who have linked theirpolicy positions to the IAT to main-tain the impartiality that is the hall-mark of the scholar's commitment totruth. But even emphasizing uncon-scious bias more generally would bea mistake.

The most fundamental problemswith the unconscious bias discourseare that it reinforces a misguided pre-occupation with mental state, and per-petuates an obsession with anti-dis-crimination law, rather than policy re-form, as a means of realizing racialjustice goals. If the goal is to elimi-nate substantive inequalities, then thetask of racial justice advocates shouldbe to say why those inequalities areobjectionable and how to addressthem. Not every claim for racial jus-tice needs to be addressed to a courtapplying anti-discrimination doctrine.The best political approach, over thelong term, is to straightforwardly de-fine and defend policy goals, and thenfigure out how to achieve them. ❏

98% of our brain workswithout our expresscognition.

Implicit Bias Insights as Preconditionsto Structural Changeby john powell & Rachel Godsil

john powell ([email protected]), a PRRAC Board member, di-rects the Kirwan Center for the Studyof Race and Ethnicity at Ohio StateUniv.

Rachel Godsil ([email protected]) is Eleanor Bontecou Pro-fessor of Law at Seton Hall Univ. LawSchool and Research Director of theAmerican Values Inst.

We generally assume that we“control” our behavior most of thetime—particularly when an issue is im-portant. This assumption, like manyassumptions, is wrong. Scientists es-timate that we have conscious accessto only 2% of our brains’ emotionaland cognitive process. Neuroscien-tists have also determined that we pro-cess 11 million bits of information ata time but have the capacity only tobe aware at best of 40 bits. In otherwords, the vast majority of our be-havior is dictated by the 98% of ourbrain that works without our expresscognition. This startling fact, socialpsychologists contend, is crucial toour ability to understand an array ofseeming inconsistencies between ourconscious attitudes and our behavior.Lawyers, law professors and activistshave begun to look to this body ofresearch to address our nation’s oth-erwise baffling contradictions sur-rounding race.

Professors Banks and Ford—ablescholars who have devoted much oftheir academic writing to issues ofracial justice—argue that the move toembrace this research may disservethis cause. We disagree—and insteadare convinced that scholars, as wellas racial justice activists and advo-cates, need the insights into humanbehavior available from the mind sci-ences for our work to advance ournation toward social justice goals.

The argument that other scholars’use of implicit bias research is some-how an impediment to progress is sur-

prising coming from Banks and Ford—both of whom have written in com-plex and thoughtful ways about race.In this context, however, their argu-ment seems to presume that but forthe improvident attempt to use implicitbias insights, our country would beopen to a discussion of the role raceplays in limiting life opportunities formany people of color. It also appearsto be undergirded by the presumptionthat following this frank discussionabout race, our polity will supportpolicies intended to eliminate these

structural barriers. As Banks and Fordhave discussed in other work, the evi-dence does not support these assump-tions.

What the EvidenceShows

First, the Right has successfully co-opted the concept of “color-blindness”to suggest that any attention paid torace is itself racist—and therefore cre-ated a strong presumption against anyconversations about race. RichardFord’s 2008 book, The Race Card:How Bluffing About Race Makes Ra-cial Bias Worse, describes this phe-nomenon brilliantly. Second, the rea-sons progressives seek to address is-sues of race follow from the extraor-dinary racial disparities found in vir-tually every aspect of life. However,the fact of racial disparities does notsuffice to prompt a constructive dis-cussion about race. And the insightsfrom the implicit bias research helpexplain why not. If we have bias to-ward members of a particular group,even when structures are clearlyshown to be the cause of disparity,

we are likely to attribute the cause topersonal behavior. Scholars havetermed this tendency the “the attribu-tion error.” The combination of therhetorical success of the “color-blind-ness” frame and attribution error arecrucial to understanding why coldhard facts about significant racial dis-parities do not result in any moral ur-gency to address these disparities.

In our view, Americans’ cognitivedissonance regarding race is on therise. We can boast that we haveelected a Black man as our Presidentand confirmed another Black man asAttorney General, while our prisonshouse a shockingly large number ofBlack men. Black and Latino men andwomen serve as executives at Fortune500 companies and as presidents ofour finest universities, yet Black andLatino children are 3 times as likelyto live in poverty and 20% less likelyto graduate from high school thanWhite children.

The challenge of addressing theseopposing racial realities has neverbeen more difficult. Many Whites seethe continuing string of racial firstsalong with the broad acceptance ofinter-marriage and support for anti-discrimination laws as signs that, as anation, we have finally moved beyondour origins in slavery and the darkyears of Jim Crow. If a person in pub-lic life uses a racial epithet or otherlanguage suggesting a disagreementwith the prevailing anti-discriminationnorm, that person is immediately con-demned by people across the politicalspectrum. The combination of thesefactors makes a powerful case to mostWhites that issues of class and indi-vidual initiative explain how differ-ent individuals and families are situ-ated.

Many people of color and racialjustice advocates of all races see anadditional set of facts that complicatethe picture. Despite the progress our


September/October 2011 • Poverty & Race • Vol. 20, No. 5 • 3


Implicit bias research-ers reject the reduction-ist trap.

nation has experienced on issues ofrace, dramatic racial disparities in im-prisonment, wealth, academicachievement, rates of housing fore-closure, and environmental protec-tion, along with housing and educa-tional segregation, continue to createharsh obstacles to the full inclusionof people of color into American life.People of color regularly experiencemicro-aggressions in workplaces,schools, stores and restaurants. Forracial justice advocates, the combina-tion of the data and lived experienceare seen as proof that we have far togo before we can truly claim themantle of racial equality.

How to Move PastThis Impasse

The political challenge is how tomove past this impasse. To addressthese polarized points of view, wemust create a political space in whichit is possible to first have a construc-tive dialogue about the continuing sa-lience of race, then generate supportfor the policies necessary to addressthe role race continues to play, andfinally, and as importantly, developimplementation measures that will al-low these policies to achieve thesought-after outcomes. Contrary toBanks and Ford, we think the insightsfrom social psychologists about howthe human brain functions—and howhumans see themselves and their en-vironment—have great promise tomake these steps possible.

Social psychologists, with a scien-tific sophistication Freud would havefound unimaginable, have developedthe ability to test and measure biaseswe hold implicitly. These implicit bi-ases are important because they can

determine our behavior—even if weconsciously hold a different set ofvalues. Implicit attitudes flow fromour brain’s natural tendency to cat-egorize stimuli—to create schemas. Asour brains develop, we create schemasfor objects we encounter (tables, cars,cell phones), which rarely have po-litical salience, but instead are help-ful in allowing us to function in a com-plex world. Not surprisingly, we alsocreate schemas for humans (men,women, old, young). These schemasneed not be problematic if the catego-ries within a society are consideredworthy of equal respect. However, if

categories applied to humans are sub-ject to negative stereotypes or other-wise determine “out-groups,” theseschemas can result in bias. A widearray of data, from political opinionsurveys to marked disparities, supportthe idea that race continues to be sa-lient. Yet, as we note above, it is nowa deeply held American value to re-ject racial stereotypes. Those peoplewho seek to subscribe to the egalitar-ian ideal, but whose brains schematizepeople on the basis of race, then, aresaid to hold an implicit bias.

Banks and Ford argue against theuse of this research in law reform ontwo primary grounds. First, that itfails to distinguish with complete con-fidence between implicit (or uncon-scious) bias and covert bias. Second,they suggest that accepting the con-clusions from this research with re-spect to race may disserve the goalsof racial justice. Implicit bias research,they contend, will result in a diver-sion of energies away from address-ing the substantive inequalities thatform the most destructive aspects ofour country’s racial hierarchy and in-stead will result in a move to the di-versity training room or the therapists’couch rather than the legislative table.

Critiquing Banksand Ford

We will begin with the latter cri-tique. First, implicit bias researchersreject the reductionist trap that con-cludes that the study of how informa-tion operates in individuals necessar-ily entails ignoring the connectionbetween individual and society. In-deed, the vast majority of those whostudy implicit social cognition are “so-cial" psychologists. And the researchconcludes that bias in our society issocial rather than individual and thatour material conditions can act asprimes. Implicit bias is the result ofthe pervasive stereotypical images (ofBlacks as unequal and criminal, ofLatinos as “other” and illegal, ofwomen as passive—the list goes on)in our society—not individual viewsand ideas.

Implicit bias researchers are alsonot so naïve as to think that implicitbias will be “cured” by diversity train-ing. This is a straw argument. Socialpsychologists are acutely aware of thechallenges of addressing bias. And itis notable that, though relatively na-scent, the research suggests that trulyto overcome those biases, broad soci-etal change will be required. Peoplewill need to experience sustained in-ter-group contact, the presence of ra-cial exemplars, interactions withpeople of color in positions of author-ity, and an end to the cultural barrageof negative images. In addition,changes in the material environmentwill be important in disturbing thenegative associations. For those con-ditions to be present, we will have toaddress the over-incarceration ofyoung Black men, racial isolation ineducation from K to higher education,the paucity of people of color in posi-tions of authority throughout oursociety—this list is also long. In otherwords, our unconscious minds arehighly cognizant of current inequali-ties even if our conscious selves tryto ignore them so that we can con-sider our society to be fair and ourown positions to be earned. Our un-conscious minds are not so easily

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(POWELL/GODSIL: Cont. from page 5)


Speculators, Not CRA, Behind Foreclosuresin Black Neighobrhoods

by John I. Gilderbloom & Gregory D. Squires

Recent foreclosureactivity and thesubsequent costs arenot race-neutral.


John I. Gilderbloom ([email protected])is a professor ofurban and public affairs at the Uni-versity of Louisville; Gregory D.Squires ([email protected]) is a pro-fessor of sociology at George Wash-ington University.

This article is reprinted, with per-mission, from The American Banker,September 9, 2011.

Foreclosures continue to decimatecommunities around the nation, withblack neighborhoods being the hard-est hit. Some pundits and politicianspoint to federal policies that encour-aged homeownership in low- andmoderate-income communities,coupled with reckless behavior on thepart of greedy homeowners, as thecrux of the problem. One example isthe statement by Fox News reporterNeil Cavuto that "loaning to minori-ties and risky borrowers is a disas-ter." To the contrary, our recent re-search demonstrates that it is outsideinvestors living in other, predomi-nantly white neighborhoods, not lo-cal homeowners, who account for theadverse impact on our nation's blackcommunities.

Observers ranging from CreditSuisse to the Center for ResponsibleLending estimate that about 6 millionfamilies have lost their homes to fore-closure and project that 12-15 millionfamilies altogether will lose theirhomes before the crisis is over. Ac-cording to the U.S. Department of theTreasury, $17 trillion in householdwealth was eliminated between 2007and 2009 and more losses are sure tocome. Such losses reduce propertytaxes, cut consumer buying power forlocal businesses, and weaken the abil-ity of municipalities to provide vitalservices. In the end, all households,businesses and non-profits suffer ifthey or their neighbors are foreclosedand lose their homes.

Recent foreclosure activity and thesubsequent costs are not race-neutral.According to the Center for Respon-sible Lending, approximately 8 per-cent of African-American and Latinofamilies have lost their homes to fore-closure compared to 4.5 percent ofwhite families. United for a FairEconomy has estimated that a third ofblack households and 40 percent ofLatinos are at risk of falling out ofthe middle class and into poverty as a

result of the foreclosure and relatedeconomic crises.

So what accounts for the concen-tration of subprime lending and fore-closures in minority neighborhoods?The culprit, at least in Louisville, isinvestors, primarily white investorswho do not reside in the affected com-munities. In our research we foundthat in 2007 and 2008 there were ap-proximately 2,000 foreclosure saleseach year in Louisville. There were39 per census tract (a rough approxi-mation of a neighborhood) in blackcommunities compared to 20 in whitetracts. More telling is the fact thatthere were 15 foreclosures on prop-erties owned by investors rather thanowner-occupants in black communi-ties, compared to two foreclosures inwhite areas. A close examination offoreclosed properties in black neigh-borhoods found most owners werewhite and often living miles away insuburbs.

It is investors seeking a quickprofit, not homeowners, who are thereal problem in black neighborhoods.We suspect Louisville's story is notunique. Louisville is right in themiddle of this pack, ranking 103 outof 203 metropolitan regions in the rate

of foreclosures in recent years.Several factors account for why a

property goes into foreclosure andwhy foreclosure rates are higher insome neighborhoods than others. Raceis certainly not the only factor, andmay not even be a consideration whenother variables are taken into consid-eration.

We controlled on a range of vari-ables that contribute to foreclosures—crime rates, housing values, house-hold income, employment levels, va-cancies, number of high-cost loans—and found that the rate of foreclosuresfor owner-occupants was no differentin black and white Louisville neigh-borhoods. That is, race was not a fac-tor in accounting for differences in therate of owner-occupied foreclosuresamong Louisville neighborhoods.

But when we examined investorforeclosures, neighborhood racialcomposition was the primary predic-tor. Not only was race a significantfactor in accounting for different lev-els of investor foreclosures amongLouisville neighborhoods, race wasthe single most important factor, evenmore important than the rate of high-priced or subprime lending

So black communities have beenhardest hit, but not because of the fed-eral policies pointed to by Cavuto andother conservative observers like LouDobbs, Charles Krauthammer andeditorial writers from the Wall StreetJournal and a range of other newspa-pers. Their prime target is the federalCommunity Reinvestment Act thatprohibits redlining. Yet as research-ers with the Federal Reserve, NationalCommunity Reinvestment Coalition,and several other government, non-profit and academic institutions havedemonstrated, this is simply nonsense.

The CRA does require federally-regulated depository institutions(banks and thrifts) to affirmativelyascertain and be responsive to the



(POWELL/GODSIL: Cont. from page 4)

Saying bias is implicitdoes not rob us of ourmoral obligation to act.

fooled. We agree with Ford and Banks that

bias (implicit or explicit) does not ac-count for many of the most troublingracial injustices. As co-author powellhas argued in many other settings, in-dividual racial attitudes are only oneform of how race affects human in-teractions; to achieve reform, we mustfocus our efforts on structuralracialization. Racialization refers tothe set of practices, cultural norms andinstitutional arrangements that bothare reflective of and simultaneouslyhelp create and maintain racializedoutcomes in society.

However, implicit bias insights arecrucial to addressing the substantiveinequalities that result from structuralracialization in two respects. First,they will allow us to enter into thepolitical discourse effectively ratherthan being heard only by those (fairlyfew) who already agree with us. Sec-ond, these insights, along with otherinsights from social psychology aboutthe effects of racial anxiety, will benecessary for successful implementa-tion of any political victories. If weachieve substantive victories eitherthrough legislation or litigation, anyremedial scheme will likely requirehuman implementation. So long ashumans are guided by their implicitbiases, conditions of inequality willcontinue to be present.

Some might argue that if Banks andFord are correct that a significant per-cent of Americans are in fact con-sciously hiding their bias rather thanholding egalitarian values but still pos-sessing implicit bias, then our viewthat people will choose to overcomeor correct for their bias is naïve. Alarge body of social science data, how-ever, shows that people go to consid-erable lengths to correct for any po-tential racial bias if the potential for

such bias is evident—even if there isno reason to think that their bias willbe made public. Jury studies, for ex-ample, demonstrate that when race ismade explicitly relevant, White jurorswill treat Black and a White defen-dant identically. However, when raceis present as a factor but not high-lighted, White jurors tend to treatBlack defendants more harshly.

Nonetheless, we agree with Banksand Ford that the line between implicit(literally unknown) and conscious buthidden bias may not be stark. It canbe argued that people are perhapschoosing to ignore their biases so thattheir sense of themselves as “good”people with egalitarian values can be

maintained. Yet people’s desire tomaintain their self-concept is power-ful—and can induce changes in behav-ior when they are aware that their ac-tions conflict with their self-concept.So even if we accept that implicit so-cial cognition and the measures of biassuch as the Implicit Association Test(IAT) cannot perfectly distinguishbetween implicit bias and deliberatelyhidden bias, the value of the tool formeasurement is clear. In contrast withself-reporting (which, as Banks andFord acknowledge, is unlikely to un-earth honest results), the IAT providesa window into the bias that would oth-erwise be effectively hidden. And itserves as a more objective mechanismto measure the degree to which thatbias continues to be present.

The final argument Banks andFord’s article seems to raise is thatusing the language of implicit bias—if it is possible that hidden bias is infact at play—is somehow a form ofpolitical pandering that lets racists off

the hook. We disagree. The fact thatour nation has adopted such a power-ful sense that anti-discrimination andequality of race are necessary at-tributes of our fundamental values isdeeply important. To allow people tomaintain a self-concept as egalitarian—but to challenge behavior and struc-tural conditions that are inconsistentwith those values—is the only routeto progress. Saying bias is implicitdoes not rob us of our moral obliga-tion to act—just as structures that un-intentionally create racialized out-comes require a social response. Con-tinuing to argue about “hidden” rac-ism will keep us locked in a polarizeddebate that is ultimately impossible towin. ❏

credit needs of all neighborhoods intheir service areas, including low- andmoderate-income communities. Butthe law also explicitly states they mustdo so consistent with safe and soundlending practices. The Federal Re-serve reported that only 6 percent ofhigh-cost subprime loans made to low-and moderate- income borrowers wereoriginated by lenders covered by theCRA. The overwhelming majoritywere made by mortgage bankers andbrokers not covered by the law. Andwhile all households in a communitysuffer when foreclosures mount, ourresearch indicates it is investors, gen-erally white investors, not owner-oc-cupants, whose properties in blackneighborhoods are lost to foreclosure,again to the detriment of all who liveand work in those communities.

Foreclosures continue to devastatemillions of families and the commu-nities in which they live. But it is notreckless or greedy homeowners whoare the problem. Likewise, federalpolicies that have increased respon-sible lending in low-income and mi-nority communities are not the cul-prits either. It is investors who do notlive in, understand or appreciate theblack communities they are tearingapart, who are at the heart of the prob-lem. ❏

(FORECLOSURES: Cont. from page 5)

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Washington v. Davisneeds to be overturned.


Eva Paterson ([email protected]) is President of theSan Francisco-based Equal Justice So-ciety.

Litigating Implicit Biasby Eva Paterson

If you find yourself applying for ajob, you may want to make sure yourname is Emily or Greg rather thanLakisha or Jamal. A recent studyfound candidates with more “white-sounding” names received 50% morecallbacks for jobs than those with“African-American sounding” names,even when the resumes were other-wise nearly identical. This is not be-cause employers are necessarily weed-ing out African-American candidatesbecause of overt racism, but becauseimplicit racial biases still affect ev-eryday decisions and behavior.

Racial justice advocates must en-gage in multi-pronged strategies thatinclude pushing the courts to seekremedies for rights violations. Afteryears of forward momentum in racialjustice litigation, the Supreme Courtretrenched anti-discrimination juris-prudence in one fell swoop—Wash-ington v. Davis. 426 U.S. 229 (1976).In that case, the Court created a newevidentiary standard for victims ofdiscrimination: Plaintiffs needed to es-tablish a perpetrator’s intent to dis-criminate. The “Intent Doctrine,” asit is now known, places a heavy bur-den on plaintiffs who are alleging dis-crimination in violation of the EqualProtection Clause of the FourteenthAmendment. It requires them to provethat the discriminating actor or agency“selected or reaffirmed a particularcourse of action at least in part ‘be-cause of,’ not merely ‘in spite of,’ itsadverse effects upon an identifiable[racial] group” under the Equal Pro-tection Clause. Personnel Adm’r ofMass. v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279(1979). But in contemporary society,much racial bias is not overt. Rather,racial stereotypes often infect people'sdecision-making processes in a sub-conscious way. Consequently, the

courts need to “catch up” to modernforms of racism and allow plaintiffsto prove that race discrimination ex-ists beyond the intentional racial ani-mus that plaintiffs currently have toprove under the Intent Doctrine. Re-quiring proof of discriminatory intentessentially closes the courthouse doorsto victims of racial bias. If there hasever been a law worth the struggle tochange in modern society, this is it.

The Intent Doctrine needs to beoverturned for anti-discrimination lawto actually be successful in overcom-ing racial injustice. After all, the Courthas long recognized that the EqualProtection Clause is meant to protectindividuals from discrimination. Yeta growing body of research confirmsthat racism is not an isolated, uncon-nected, and intentional act, but a pro-cess that is influenced and internal-

ized as a subconscious process. Infact, the subconscious processes orimplicit biases influence the way inwhich we perceive and make deter-minations about other people.

Less than a decade after Washing-ton v. Davis, Professor CharlesLawrence wrote a seminal article thataddressed the limitations and short-comings of the Intent Doctrine.Lawrence utilized social psychologyto demonstrate that “requiring proofof conscious or intentional motivationas a prerequisite to constitutional rec-ognition that a decision is race-depen-dent ignores much of what we under-stand about how the human mindworks.” Lawrence’s critique of theintent standard centered on the ideathat unconscious racism is a modernform of discrimination that the courtsfail to understand and subsequentlyremedy: “By insisting that a blame-worthy perpetrator be found before theexistence of racial discrimination can

be acknowledged, the Court createsan imaginary world where discrimi-nation does not exist unless it was con-sciously intended.” “The Id, the Ego,and Equal Protection,” 39 Stan. L.Rev 317, 324-25 (1987). As JudgeCharles Breyer recognized in Chin v.Runnels, unconscious racial stereotyp-ing and group bias are pervasive, and“these unconscious processes can leadto biased perceptions and decision-making even in the absence of con-scious animus or prejudice against anyparticular group.” 343 F. Supp. 2d891, 906 (N.D. Cal. 2004) (citing lawreview articles by scholars).

Since the publication of Lawrence’sarticle, psychological and social sci-ence research has made great stridesin providing a broader understandingof how we all possess subconsciousor implicit biases—beliefs, attitudesand expectations that are based on ste-reotypes about specific discrete cat-egories (i.e., race, gender, age, etc.)to which an individual belongs. Thereis “increasing recognition of the natu-ral human tendency to categorize in-formation and engage in generaliza-tions, of which stereotyping is a part,as a means of processing the hugeamount of information confrontingindividuals on a daily basis.” Chin,343 F. Supp. 2d at 906.

In fact, implicit bias and uncon-scious racism received mainstreamattention through Malcolm Gladwell’sbestseller, Blink. In Blink, Gladwelldiscussed the way in which peopleengage in rapid cognition based on“instantaneous impressions” whichcan result in significant—albeit some-times unintended—harms. As an ex-ample of the pernicious impact thatmay result from acting on instanta-neous impressions, Gladwell discussesthe 1999 killing of Guinean immigrantAmadou Diallo and the racial preju-dices that led to his death. While theNew York City police were attempt-ing to question him, Diallo, scared and

(PATERSON: Cont. from page 7)

We need a new doctri-nal paradigm.


confused, reached for his wallet.Based largely on racial prejudices, thepolice assumed the wallet to be a gunand shot Diallo 41 times.

In light of our present inability tofind adequate redress for racism andracial injustices through the courts be-cause of the impossible (and unrealis-tic) standard of the Intent Doctrine,we need a new doctrinal paradigm toadvance racial justice through EqualProtection jurisprudence. This ap-proach must include psychological andsocial science research to prove thatdiscrimination exists even when it maynot be tied to an overt act. Since oursociety has become somewhat hostileto people holding racial biases, socialscientists and psychologists have de-veloped increasingly subtle mecha-nisms that detect implicit racial biases.Through methods like the ImplicitAssociation Test, litigators have madegreat strides in marshaling psychologi-cal and social scientific research onimplicit bias to prove instances of dis-crimination. It is critical that we findways to present this evidence in courtto establish that implicit bias is thecatalyst of discriminatory injustices inthis day and age.

Using social science in litigation isnot a new phenomenon, nor would itbe the first time that the SupremeCourt would rely on social scienceevidence to address historical griev-ances. Charles Hamilton Houston de-veloped a strategic litigation plan inthe 1930s that combined impact liti-gation, innovative use of social sci-ence and collaboration with civil rightsorganizations across the political spec-trum to challenge Plessy v. Ferguson’sprinciple of “separate but equal” fromthe ground up. The Houston Plan (asit has come to be known) led to over-turning Plessy in the landmark deci-sion Brown v. Board of Education. Aspart of the Houston Plan, litigators inBrown from the NAACP Legal De-fense Fund introduced social sciencedata from the “doll test,” which illus-trated the devastating impact of seg-regation on the emotions and psychesof black children. As part of the test,

children were shown two dolls, onewhite and the other black, and askeda series of questions to determinewhich doll was associated with posi-tive attributes and which was associ-ated with negative attributes. The re-sults overwhelmingly showed that themajority of children—both black andwhite—attributed positive aspects tothe white dolls and negative aspectsto the black dolls. The Supreme Courtrelied upon this study along with sixothers to support its conclusion that“separate but equal” violated theEqual Protection Clause. Brown v. Bd.of Educ. of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483,494-95n.11 (1954)

Social science research and data

coupled with legal arguments havemore recently been used in the fightfor marriage equality in the courts.This is striking considering the evo-lution of perspectives and attitudes to-wards homosexuality in the UnitedStates from just 17 years prior in Bow-ers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986).Perry v. Schwarzenegger, 704 F.Supp. 2d 921, 941-44 (N.D. Cal.2010); Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S.558, 568-71 (2003). As an exampleof changing attitudes, in August 2011the American Psychological Associa-tion unanimously approved a resolu-tion supporting same-sex marriage,citing numerous social science stud-ies. These studies provide the courtswith evidence of discriminatory ac-tions, effects and implications.

While we must continue to addressconscious bias, that task is made dif-ficult in a society where few are will-ing to admit to holding such beliefs.An implicit bias discourse, as opposedto a strict intentional racism approach,allows for a more open societal con-versation about racism than could oth-erwise happen. Implicit bias discoursefocuses the attention on the creationof structural inequality and internal-ized biased actions that entrench suchinequality. My organization, TheEqual Justice Society (EJS), has ac-

complished important groundworkthrough the introduction of the socialscience (e.g., implicit bias cognitivetheory), of race and racism to judges,racial justice litigators, employmentlitigators and federal civil rights agen-cies charged with upholding anti-dis-crimination laws. Judges are a neces-sary part of the target group. Train-ing judges on implicit bias can havetremendous results for open-mindedness in the courtroom andhelps to cement a deeper understand-ing of how the reality of race discrimi-nation today conflicts with currentlegal doctrine.

The judiciary is often concernedabout how wide-sweeping their deci-sions will be and what policy ramifi-cations will result. In particular, trialjudges are concerned about makingdecisions without a strong factual ba-sis, even though they might be sym-pathetic to plaintiffs. In his dissent inMcCleskey v. Kemp, Justice Brennanattributed the majority’s concern thata ruling for McCleskey would lead toincreased litigation as a fear of “toomuch justice.” 481 U.S. 279, 339(1987). Yet this is exactly whylitigators need to continue raising im-plicit bias in the courts and present-ing strong social science data tojudges. The law should reflect real-life experiences, serve to counter dis-crimination, and substantively addressstructural and implicit bias’ effects.Our role as litigators is to keep press-ing and educating judges both in courtand outside of chambers.

Judges do listen and implementtechniques to prevent bias from en-tering their courtrooms. There are alsojudges who believe that we now livein post-racial America. Recently,Judge Noonan denied relief to transitriders of color, writing: “What is trueof the young is already characteristicof the Bay Area where social changehas been fostered by liberal politicalattitudes, and a culture of tolerance.An individual bigot may be found,perhaps even a pocket of racists. Thenotion of a Bay Area board bent onracist goals is a specter that only des-perate litigation could entertain.”Darensburg v. Metropolitan Transp.

Training judges on im-plicit bias can havetremendous results.



Com’n, 636 F.3d 511, 523-24 (9thCir. 2011). We strongly disagree withJudge Noonan’s assertion that the BayArea has purged itself of all racialbias.

As racial justice advocates, we un-derstand that racism, bias and dis-crimination are alive and well. Ourfocus is to develop remedies for vic-tims of discrimination by providingas many tools as possible to victimsand their attorneys, while pushing thecourts to be creative in providing so-lutions. Although in many parts of thecountry race discrimination has be-come increasingly subtle over time,the effects of discrimination on vic-tims and society remain as powerfulas ever. It is thus crucial to lead amulti-faceted approach to remedyingsuch injustice. Through our work inthese areas, there are three lessons wehave learned as litigators: (1) implicitbias is a tool that addresses acts ofracism that are not overt but still per-nicious in impact; (2) the use of im-plicit bias is part of a long-standing

tradition of using social science re-search to provide the courts with evi-dence of discriminatory actions andeffects; and (3) implicit bias providesan entry-point for people to discussrace.

Accordingly, EJS has met with ex-perienced public interest litigators andour own legal staff to discuss the manyareas in which the Intent Doctrine acts

as a barrier to achieving racial jus-tice. Litigation in these areas alreadyexists.

EJS’s role is to raise legal argu-ments based on implicit bias and, asappropriate, structural racism. Wehave established new relationships andfortified existing ones with key legaladvocates. Together, we are address-ing some fundamental questions tobest position ourselves to litigate: how

best to use social science, what thestructure of the arguments should be,and where we can obtain the neces-sary resources, including legal sup-port and funding, to bolster our liti-gation. We are focusing on racial dis-parities in the criminal justice systemthat could also affect death penaltylitigation and municipal disparities indelivering governmental services.

If the goal of racial justice is to ac-knowledge and ameliorate substantiveinequalities, we can never get thereby solely focusing on conscious bias.We absolutely must fight the battleagainst racial injustice on every front:tackling conscious discrimination andunconscious discrimination together;educating the public; advocating in thelegislatures for policy reform; and liti-gating implicit bias in the courts tooverturn the regressive Intent Doc-trine. Each step takes us closer to hav-ing a judiciary that may once againserve as a bastion of justice for vic-tims of race discrimination. ❐

Implicit Bias, Racial Inequality,and Our Multivariate World

by Andrew Grant-Thomas

Richard Banks and Richard Th-ompson Ford make a number of po-tentially important arguments. I focushere on two: first, their assertion thatthe Implicit Association Test may mea-sure conscious-but-concealed biasrather than implicit bias; and, second,their claim that attention to uncon-scious or implicit bias deflects atten-tion from “substantive inequalities”and the policies needed to remedythem. Like Banks and Ford, I referhere almost exclusively to IAT-basedwork, but note that evidence for theprevalence and impact of implicit biasextends well beyond results garnered

through use of the IAT and well be-yond the domain of racial attitudes.

What Does the IATMeasure?

In addition to the possibility that theIAT taps concealed-but-consciousbias, some research psychologists haveargued that the IAT may tap otherkinds of mental content as well, in-cluding the subject’s awareness of bi-ases in the culture, anxiety about be-ing labeled a racist, and sympathywith, or guilt regarding, disadvantagedpopulations. Some critics also protestthe inference, drawn largely from IATtest results reported at the Project Im-plicit demonstration site, that mostAmericans harbor “racist” attitudes

against Black people. Both criticismsunderline the need for greater clarityabout the meaning of implicit, andwider appreciation of the contingencyof our racial attitudes and related be-haviors. I take these points in turn.

On the one hand, Banks and Fordare doubtless right to note that sometesters will deliberately misreport theirexplicit attitudes. On the other, theyare wrong to believe that that factposes a problem for the IAT. The mainpurpose of the IAT, after all, is toprobe attitudes people may be unableor unwilling to report. Myriad stud-ies offer strong support for the notionthat implicit attitudes, as gauged bythe IAT, and explicit attitudes, as in-ventoried through self-reports, are re-lated but distinct. Self-reported atti-

Andrew Grant-Thomas ([email protected]) is Deputy Direc-tor, Kirwan Institute for the Study ofRace and Ethnicity at Ohio State Univ.

(GRANT-THOMAS: Cont.from page 9)

There is a tendency tolegitimate the statusquo.


tudes, and those probed by the IAT,have been found to be associated withdifferent kinds of brain activity.

Leaving aside the details of thehighly technical, largely methodologi-cal grounds on which researchers inthe cognitive sciences wage their warsof interpretation, one would have tobe awfully cynical to suppose that mostpeople who express surprise at theirIAT results, including the lead re-searchers behind Project Implicit, aresimply being disingenuous. We havevery little reason to believe this. Thelikelier explanation is that self-reportsreflect attitudes of which subjects areaware, IAT results reflect attitudes ofwhich they are not, and sometimesthere is a dismaying difference be-tween the two.

In any case, for those of us con-cerned with the role that implicit ra-cial biases may play in the world, theircritical feature is not that they oper-ate outside our awareness, but thatthey operate automatically—withoutneed for intentionality or reflection.Someone taking the IAT, knowing itis meant to reveal “hidden bias,” maywell try to manage the expression ofthose biases. (Whether they are ableto do so is another matter.) The sameperson looking to hire a new em-ployee, sit next to one person or an-other on the bus ride home, decidewhether to call 911 about a late-nightscuffle outside her home is apt to beless vigilant. In these cases, automaticbiases may well influence her actionsand help trigger the consequences thatflow from them.

What about the broader criticism,that IAT results may reflect mentalfactors other than personal bias? JohnJost, Laurie Rudman and their co-au-thors offer a compelling response intheir 2009 review: “If IAT scoreswere [sic] measured nothing morethan familiarity or sympathy (or anyof the other artifacts proposed by crit-ics), then there is no way that suchscores would predict discriminatoryattitudes and behaviors in the mannerand to the extent that they do.” Herewe get to a question arguably more

fundamental than the one about pre-cisely what the IAT assesses: Does itprovide information that reliably helpsus anticipate behaviors we care about?Yes, it does.

A Nation of Racists?

Researchers have accumulated sig-nificant evidence that implicit bias, asmeasured on the IAT or in other ways,correlates with discriminatory behav-ior. Employment recruiters with largeimplicit biases in favor of nativeSwedes were much more likely to in-vite applicants with male Swedishnames for interviews than they wereto invite equally qualified applicantswith male Arab names. White studentswith high implicit bias scores weremore likely to report having directedverbal abuse or physical violence

against racial others. Many studieshave shown that police officers andcivilians alike are more likely to shootunarmed Blacks than unarmed Whites,and to shoot armed Blacks but notarmed Whites in video simulations.

More broadly, Anthony Greenwaldand his collaborators found in theirmeta-analysis of relevant researchstudies that IAT results did much bet-ter than self-reported attitudes in pre-dicting Black-White and other inter-group behaviors—including hiring andsalary decisions, sentencing decisionsand intention to vote for John McCainin 2008. The reverse was true in theseven other behavioral domains ex-amined. The researchers also foundthat IAT and self-report measures of-fered the best behavioral predictionswhen used in tandem than either didwhen used alone.

While the power of the IAT to pre-dict interracial behavior has often beenimpressive by the standards of behav-ioral science, its predictive capacitynonetheless must be considered mod-est by real-world standards. As a rule,

cultural information, social setting, re-cent experience, explicit attitudes andother factors together influence indi-vidual behaviors much more than im-plicit attitudes alone do. And, again,having implicit bias is not the same asembracing that bias, and people canbe differently alert about whether,when and how they express their bi-ases. As a result, “low-bias” peoplewill act in discriminatory ways some-times and “high-bias” people will of-ten refrain from doing so.

Where does this leave us? On theone hand, according to the Project Im-plicit web site, “75-80% of self-iden-tified Whites and Asians show an im-plicit preference for racial White rela-tive to Black” and a large and grow-ing body of empirical work indicatesthat such preferences help predictmany race-related behaviors and judg-ments, doing so better than self-re-ported data on racial attitudes. On theother hand, implicit biases usuallyaccount for modest amounts of thevariation in such behaviors and, asJost, Rudman and their colleaguesnote, implicit bias researchers warnrepeatedly against using the IAT todiagnose individual prejudice.

This is shades-of-gray stuff, and assuch very much in tension with theAmerican inclination to reduce mat-ters of race to stark, either-or bina-ries. Thus, in the United States, a per-son is either Black or not-Black. Thedegree to which many of us are in-vested in the distinction, in particu-lar, is evident in the back-and-forthabout Barack Obama’s racial identity.Either George W. Bush’s leaden re-sponse to Hurricane Katrina betrayedhis racism or his diverse cabinetshowed that he was not-racist. EitherObama’s election confirmed what theWall Street Journal called the “mythof racism” or it is completely anoma-lous. When it comes to race, we areoften blind to shades of gray.

Racial Bias andInequality

Suppose we suspected that manypeople in the United States, especiallymembers of its White-identified ma-

Personal biases are notrequired to maintainsome inequalities.



jority, harbored readily activated bi-ases, implicit or explicit, againstpeople of color and especially againstBlack Americans. (In 2009, publicopinion scholars Lawrence Bobo andCamille Charles concluded that “be-tween half and three-quarters of whitesin the United States still express somedegree of negative stereotyping ofblacks and Latinos.”) Suppose weknew that these biases sometimesmanifest in discriminatory behaviors.Suppose we recognized the substan-tial role that human discretion playsin the distribution of societal benefits,burdens and resources in such oppor-tunity arenas as housing, education,employment and criminal justice. Andwhat if we also recognized that thepower to distribute benefits and bur-dens was vested overwhelmingly inthe hands of White Americans?

Under this set of assumptions, thatthree in four African Americans areconfined to 16% of the nation’s cen-sus block groups would not surpriseus. The gross overrepresentation ofLatinos and African Americans in ourcountry’s prisons would not shock us.It might not even shock us to learnthat the only two states that allow pris-oners to vote, Maine and Vermont,are also the two “whitest” states inthe country. An argument like thatproposed by Alberto Alesina and Ed-ward Glaeser, that the United States’greater racial and ethnic diversity ac-counts for half the difference betweenthis country’s public welfare spend-ing and Europe’s more generous sup-port for its poor, would seem quiteplausible on its face.

The point, of course, is that inter-personal bias has very practical im-plications for our work on race. Let’sconsider the case of racial segrega-tion in some detail. With reference tothe pronounced residential segregationof African Americans, I suggest thatracial preferences might enforce seg-regation in the United States today inat least four ways.

Historical sediment. Many peoplehave elaborated on the ways thatWhite racial attitudes, especially in theNorth, fueled a range of “fight” and“flight” responses directed mainly

against African Americans throughmuch of the twentieth century. I pro-pose two ongoing effects. First, his-tory has bequeathed us patterns ofsegregation in many metro areas ofthe Northeast and Midwest that wouldrequire time to disrupt even if racialattitudes, policies and housing mar-ket practices today presented no fur-ther obstacles to doing so. Absentstrong remedial action, segregation inmotion tends to stay in motion. Sec-ond, in some areas, historical antago-nisms and discriminatory public poli-cies have entrenched entitlements to“racialized space” that residents re-gard as invariable.

Policy preferences. We know thatpublic support for policies dependssubstantially on the explicit racial pref-erences people bring to their consid-erations. We know much less abouthow implicit attitudes affect policychoices, though one recent study con-cluded that the IAT captures automaticattitudes that shape individual prefer-ences for immigration policy.

Current policy struggles with im-plications for racial segregationabound. In Milwaukee, then-CountyExecutive Scott Walker (same guy)successfully championed a fightagainst developing public transporta-tion that would have connectedmostly-Black city residents to jobs inmostly-White suburban areas. Tosimilar effect, Westchester County’s(NY) Executive so far has defied fed-eral orders to dismantle exclusionaryzoning ordinances that have limitedthe availability of affordable housingthroughout much of the county. It isquite likely that racial attitudes drivemuch of the dynamic in these casesand many comparable ones across thecountry.

Private actions. Any hope we haveto generate much greater neighbor-hood integration will depend largelyon modifying people’s automatic as-sociations about race. A video experi-

ment by Maria Krysan and three col-laborators found that Whites in Chi-cago and Detroit regard all-Black andracially-mixed neighborhoods asmuch less attractive than literally iden-tical neighborhoods with White resi-dents alone. We see the correspond-ing dynamics in places like Cincin-nati, St. Louis and Philadelphia,where African-American and, in somecases, Latino movement to older sub-urbs have been echoed by the move-ment of Whites to the exurbs.

One of the most notable findingsof the literature on residential segre-gation has been the status of AfricanAmericans as both the least-favoredneighbors and the group most disposedtoward integration. Bobo and Charlesreport that “[a]ctive racial prejudice—negative racial stereotypes, feelings ofsocial distance, and perceptions ofracial group competition—is the pri-mary factor driving preferences forneighborhood racial integration, andprejudice is therefore implicated in thepersistence of racially segregatedcommunities.” A more recent trendfinds more middle-class AfricanAmericans wanting to settle in pre-dominantly “Black” neighborhoods,possibly presenting yet another atti-tudinal barrier to greater integration.

System justification. System jus-tification theory highlights the ten-dency, shared by advantaged and sub-ordinate groups alike, to legitimate thestatus quo. The professed beliefs ofmany Whites that residential segrega-tion is fed mainly by the wish of Afri-can Americans and Latinos to “be withtheir own,” by their reluctance to dothe hard work required to succeed, orsimply by (legitimate) socioeconomicdifferences rather than (illegitimate)racial aversions can all be construedas supportive of the theory.

So too, arguably, do results from a2007 Pew Research Center surveyshowing majorities of African Ameri-cans agreeing that Blacks were mainly“responsible for their own condition”(53%) and that the “values held bymiddle class blacks and poor blackshave become more different” (61%).Almost 4 in 10 respondents believe

(GRANT-THOMAS: Cont. from page 11)


that “because of diversity within theircommunity, blacks can no longer bethought of as a single race.” Howsame-group racial attitudes, inflectedby notions of deservingness, condi-tion the wish of Black Americans tolive among same-race peers acrossclass lines, and our willingness to re-main invested in the broader struggleto upturn the racial status quo—theseare issues that would reward additionalstudy.

Our Multivariate World

Of course, the persistence of seg-regation and most other features ofracial inequity cannot be due entirelyto the persistence of implicit or ex-plicit biases. For one thing, unless webelieve that racial biases have actu-ally worsened over time, even perva-sive bias cannot account for the rap-idly increasing resort to incarcerationover the last three decades, theresegregation of public schools in theSouth, the recent widening of the ra-cial wealth divide, or the bifurcationof fortunes within the African-Ameri-can population, among other trends.

For another, we know that personalbiases are not required to maintainsome inequalities, though pervasivebiases surely exacerbate them. Anappallingly high number of Black andLatino children attend high-povertyschools with too few qualified teach-ers, crumbling buildings and classesthat prepare them poorly for college.In 2000, one in four Black childrenand one in eight Latino children (butonly one in 100 White children) livedin a severely distressed neighborhood.These kinds of institutional and struc-tural inequalities have terrible, self-reinforcing consequences for thepeople of color who suffer them, re-gardless of the play of biases withinthem.

We are complex creatures living ina multivariate social world largely ofour creation. Making substantialprogress in remedying racial injustice

and inequality will require a multi-pronged, insistently integrated ap-proach that engages issues of bias,culture, ideology, institutional andstructural inequities, and power. Thelag with respect to progressive policyreform that Banks and Ford lament isabout the ascension of color-blindnessas a norm in public life; about whocontrols the policy levers, and whodoes not; about the cultural models towhich those decision-makers and mostof their constituents subscribe withrespect to racial inequality; and so on.An unhealthy preoccupation that ra-cially progressive people have withanti-discrimination law has very littleto do with it.

Implicit Bias and RacialJustice – Next Steps

In terms of research, and even morein terms of vision and strategy, wehave much to learn and much to do.With respect to the implicit bias

agenda in particular, we have a rangeof pressing needs.

We need a deeper understanding ofthe factors that shape the initial de-velopment of implicit bias in youngpeople and on a community-widescale; better processes and tools fordemystifying the idea of implicit biaswith lay audiences; wider acceptanceof the need to engage implicit biasamong racial progressives and mod-erates; better tools for measuring im-plicit bias and its behavioral effectsacross contexts; much greater head-way in fashioning policy and practi-cal remedies to bias; and more insightsinto the ways implicit bias shapes oursocial structures and vice versa. Bywhat mechanisms do our biases shapethe institutional structures we createand allow to persist? How do we rec-oncile that premise with the systemsperspective that draws attention tounintended consequences? How do thestructures we create impact the waywe think about people?

Time to get back to work. ❏

Olati Johnson ([email protected]), a PRRAC Board mem-ber, is Associate Professor at Colum-bia Law School.

Beyond Biasby Olatunde Johnson

Professors Banks and Ford arecorrect to highlight the dangers of thecurrent preoccupation with implicitbias among academics and civil rightsadvocates. The central problem is notan empirical ambiguity in the ImplicitAssociation Test (IAT). And, notwith-standing the Court’s recent decisionin Walmart v. Dukes questioning ex-pert testimony that relied in part onthe science of implicit bias, I am morehopeful than Professors Banks andFord about the utility of implicit biasresearch for law and policy. Yet Iagree with their essential observationthat implicit bias is too thin an accountof the forces that maintain contempo-rary racial inequality.

Of course, I understand the appealof the implicit bias research. The find-ings of the IAT and other research onunconscious bias appear to provide anempirical account for continuing ra-cial inequality, potentially counteringnarratives that focus on individual at-tributes. Also, the unconscious biasaccount centers not on historic dis-crimination, but on contemporary dis-crimination in which we are allcomplicit. But in presenting implicitbias as universal, something that weall harbor and experience, this accountobscures the extent and multiplicityof barriers facing the most disadvan-taged groups in our society. More-over, an emphasis on individual-levelbehavior—whether covert or explicit—fails to show how individual pro-cesses are reinforced or produced byprivate and public institutions. Inshort, it omits what we have typically


I see promise in litiga-tion and policy advo-cacy.


called the “structural” aspects of in-equality.

In my view, our challenge as schol-ars and advocates concerned aboutinequality should be to provide richempirical accounts of the contempo-rary forces that sustain inequality. Justterming these inequalities “structural”will not go far enough. The term con-jures up racial discrimination that istoo pervasive and amorphous to bequantified or remedied. Instead, tocapture the appeal of empirical ac-counts of bias, we need to similarlydocument how the structural aspectsof racial inequality are maintainedtoday—for instance, by showing howracialized geographic spaces operateto limit economic and social advance-ment or how race-specific networksand poor social capital contribute toracial disparities in employment. Inaddition, rather than simply concen-trating on the individual, we need toshow the symbiotic relationship thatexists between individual-level biasand the macro-level forces that sus-tain inequality.

Rich accounts are manifest in re-search showing how race-neutral poli-cies interact with individual level biasto produce racial disparities in juve-nile justice confinement; in DeidreRoyster’s account of how segregatedjob networks exclude African Ameri-cans from blue collar jobs; and DevahPager’s work showing how employerattitudes, discrimination and theracialized consequences of mass in-

carceration affect labor market out-comes for African Americans. Law-yers and advocates should build onthis research to promote better under-standing of contemporary racial in-equality, and to alter the policies andinstitutional practices that produce it.

At the end of their piece, Profes-sors Banks and Ford argue that thecontemporary problems of racial in-equality are better addressed by

“policy,” not law. Their suggestionis that law is best suited to eradicat-ing bias, and has little purchase in ad-dressing more systemic barriers. HereI would disagree. Law, after all, isabout litigation and regulation, advo-cacy and problem-solving, about leg-islatures and policymaking bodies. Isee promise in litigation and policyadvocacy that promotes spatial inte-gration and regional equity in hous-ing, challenges disparities in the crimi-nal and juvenile justice system, fur-thers transportation equity, and battlesoccupational segregation and pay in-equities in low-wage jobs. These ef-forts combat not just discrimination,but what Glenn Loury calls “devel-opment bias”—the policies and prac-tices that lead to “unequal chances torealize one’s productive potential.”These interventions understand thatcivil rights lawyering is more thananti-discrimination practice, it is chal-lenging the multitude, complex andenduring forces that sustain racial in-equality. ❏

Banks and Ford ResponseWe are grateful that so many

scholars and civil rights activists tookthe time to consider our arguments andto reply to them. We cannot addressto all of the important issues that thecommentators raise, so we have de-cided to respond to what we see astheir major themes. One set of issuesis substantive: What does the researchshow? How do we conceptualize ra-cial inequality? The other set of is-sues is pragmatic and political: Whatare the most promising avenues ofreform?

Substantive Concerns

Many commentators remarked thatthe implicit bias research is more nu-anced than we acknowledged. We arevery familiar with the empirical re-search and we agree that the primary

research is remarkably nuanced andcareful. But any fair reading of thatresearch would have to acknowledgethe difficulty that we discuss in ouroriginal article: that of disentanglingcovert bias from unconscious bias.Andrew Grant-Thomas notes that thepurpose of the IAT is to “probe atti-tudes that people may be unable orunwilling to report.” That character-ization both highlights and elides pre-cisely our point: the distinction be-tween covert and unconscious atti-tudes. We view the IAT more as auseful and subtle measure of covertracial attitudes than as a measure ofwholly unconscious attitudes.

The thrust of our critique, though,is not simply to quibble with the re-search. We think that the researchexemplifies a widely shared view: thatthe problem of racial inequality is inlarge part a problem of individuals’

biased attitudes. We do not embracethat characterization. We think that incontemporary society the problem ofracial inequality is not primarily oneof people having “biased” thoughtsor acting on such biased thoughts.Pervasive racial inequalities persist,to be sure, and race remains salientlargely because of those inequalities.But we think that the “problem” isthose inequalities, not some suppos-edly biased mental state that has ledto them.

This is not to say that racial biasdoesn’t exist or that people are color-blind. They most certainly are not. Itis to say that many racial attitudes andstereotypes are in part a reflection ofthe social world that we all inhabit, aworld in which racial disparities arepervasive, and in which prevailingcontemporary racial attitudes are as


(RESPONSE: Cont.from page 13)

much a symptom of inequality as itscause. Our view is perfectly consis-tent with the IAT research, if it is un-derstood as a psychological reflectionof substantive inequalities, but it isinconsistent with the use to which thatresearch is often put, which is to un-earth the hidden causes of biased de-cisions.

We are convinced that the now-dominant civil rights focus on mentalstate is misguided and that implicitbias analysis is just another way tofocus on mental state. We think men-tal state has always been too elusiveto serve as the basis for liability andremediation in specific disputes andit has very little to do with today’ssocial injustices, and so we questionthe wisdom of a new focus on mentalstate.

Political and PragmaticConcerns

Typically, of course, the IAT is notportrayed as a measure of how sub-stantive inequalities shape people’sviews. Nor do advocates highlight thedifficulty of disentangling covert andunconscious attitudes. Rather, the re-search is often characterized in themedia and by racial justice advocatesin ways that eclipse the subtlety andlimitations of the empirical findings.Commentators have suggested, forexample, that the research links im-plicit bias to a wide range of discrimi-

natory behaviors even when, in fact,the evidence was quite sparse.

Racial justice advocates are all tooeager to the link implicit bias to allmanner of race-related disparities. Forexample, the commentaries on ourarticle suggest that the findings ofDevah Pager’s excellent work on raceand incarceration in the job-seekingprocess and of Marianne Bertrand andSendhil Mullainathan’s well-knownresume studies as evidence of implicitbias. In fact, neither study measuredimplicit bias—both were consistentwith a range of explanations, includ-ing consciously concealed racial bi-ases and more complex reactions tosocial familiarity and acculturation.

While some advocates genuinelyhave come to believe that implicit biasdoes account for some substantial por-tion of contemporary racial dispari-ties, we suspect that others deployimplicit bias, either knowingly ornot(!), in response to the political pres-sures with which all racial justice ad-vocates must contend. We suspect thatdeep down, even many proponents ofthe implicit bias research sense thatthe findings are being stretched anddeployed in ways that are not sup-ported by the actual research. Yet theyfeel they have little choice.

As many of the commentators re-marked, racial justice advocates facea political quandary: Many peopledon’t want to talk about race; theywould prefer to believe, especiallyafter having elected a black President,that our nation’s racial problems arebehind us. And under no circum-stances will people talk about race ifthere is a risk they will be labeled aracist. To this political impasse, im-plicit bias seems to come to the res-cue. It seems to offer a way of en-couraging people to talk about race,without fear of being labeled a racist.(After all, even many blacks, the re-search tells us, are implicitly biasedagainst African Americans.)

We agree that it may be beneficialto have people talk more honestlyabout race, but we are less sanguineabout whether the implicit bias frame-work will produce that conversation.But we worry that the prominence of

the implicit bias framework dependsin part on the exaggerated claims thatso often are thrown around in themedia and by some advocates. Wesuspect that if advocates consistentlylimited themselves to what rigoroussocial science research has actuallydemonstrated, much of the rhetoricalpunch of implicit bias would be lostand it would be one of the thousandsof sound and useful social sciencetheories that few outside the field areinterested in. But the strong claims arespeculative at best and reckless atworst. For example, some in the popu-lar press have proposed that we coulduse the IAT to disqualify racist jurors.No respectable social psychologistwould embrace this proposal, but it’sjust this kind of thinking that has madethe IAT so popular.

Another problem arises if the im-plicit bias framework is successful incapturing the attention of policy-makers. As the stakes become greater,the research and the claims made onits behalf will be subject to greaterscrutiny. And as people begin to lookmore closely, many will conclude thatimplicit bias is not in fact the primarycause of racial differences in incar-ceration, employment or education, toname a few. Having relied so heavilyon implicit bias, advocates will thenbe at a loss when people can reason-ably disagree about whether implicitbias is the source of some particularsocial problem. Implicit bias will be-come yet another in a long line of tac-tical arguments used in the now de-pressingly repetitive debates aboutrace and racism.

We suspect—and many of the com-ments confirm this suspicion—thatmany scholars and advocates knowthat implicit bias is not the real prob-lem, but embrace it as a politicallyeffective means of getting people tofocus on the substantive racial dispari-ties with which we are all concerned.If it weren’t for the pressure to frameracial problems in terms of bias—as aresult of the court-centric disparatetreatment framework that animates thelegal and political approach to racialinequality—we suspect that many re-searchers would be freer to acknowl-

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edge the ambiguity of the findings,and not to attempt so relentlessly toforce a set of various and complexsocial problems into the narrow boxlabeled “unconscious bias.”

Implicit bias is unlikely to causepeople to focus on the substantive dis-parities; in fact, it is more likely, inthe long run, to reinforce the view thata situation is not racially unjust un-less a “biased” decision-maker can beidentified and blamed. If no biaseddecision-maker is available, or thedecision-maker is found not to be bi-ased, then, according to this logic,there is no injustice. Although manyof the commentators hope that a fo-cus on implicit bias will expand ourfocus beyond isolated acts of discrimi-nation, we think that the implicit biasapproach is more likely to reinforcethe misguided idea that malignantmental state is the crux of racial in-justice.

This strikes us as another case inwhich liberals and progressives havebeen politically out-maneuvered byconservatives. Once progressives fo-cused directly on substantive inequali-ties and the importance of policy re-form, while conservatives preferredthe piecemeal and inevitably incom-plete approach of courts focused onindividual acts of discrimination.Ironically, today many progressiveadvocates have embraced a frameworkthat tends to eclipse the structural andsubstantive inequalities that generatecontemporary racial problems. Webelieve that individual psychology issimply the wrong focus for civil rightslaw. The Left knew this in the 1970s,when it was less true than it is today.But after decades of conservative in-sistence that individual animus is thesine qua non of a civil rights viola-tion, the Left, having basically ac-cepted this bad premise, is franticallytrying to gin up new forms of “bias”to attack.

The political payoff of the implicitbias approach is uncertain and the sub-stantive focus misplaced, so why notturn our sights directly on the realproblems? Why not zero in un-apologetically on the complicated his-


Resources

Annotated bibliography on implicit bias research and commentary: www.prrac.org/pdf/PRRAC_implicit_bias_annotated_bibliography.pdf

A comprehensive primer on implicit bias from UCLA Professor Jerry Kang: http://jerrykang.net/2011/03/13/getting-up-to-speed-on-implicit-bias/

Bennet, Judge Mark W., “Unraveling the Gordian Knot of Implicit Bias in JurySelection,” 4 Harv. L. & Pol’y Rev.149 (2010).

Bertrand, Marianne & Sendhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employ-able than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimina-tion,” The American Economic Review, 94(4), 991-1013 (2004).

Bobo, Lawrence and Camille Charles. 2009. "Race in the American Mind: Fromthe Moynihan Report to the Obama Candidacy." The ANNALS of the AmericanAcademy of Political and Social Science 621: 243-259. Available at http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/bobo/pdf%20documents/RaceMind.pdf

Brown, Michael K. et al., Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society(Univ. of California Press, 2003)

Dovidio, John F. et al., “Implicit and Explicit Prejudice and Interracial Interac-tion,” 82 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 62 (2002).

Gladwell, Malcolm, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking 14 (Little,Brown 2005).

Greenwald, Anthony, Andrew Poehlman, Eric Uhlmann, Mahzarin Banaji. 2009.“Understanding and Using the Implicit Association Test: III. Meta-analysis of Pre-dictive Validity.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97: 17–41.

“The Id, The Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning with Unconscious Racism,” 39Stan. L. Rev.317, 323 (1987).

Jost, John, Laurie Rudman, Irene Blair, Dana Carney, Nilanjana Dasgupta, JackGlaser & Curtis Hardin. 2009. “The Existence of Implicit Bias is Beyond Reason-able Doubt: A Refutation of Ideological and Methodological Objections and Execu-tive Summary of Ten Studies that No Manager Should Ignore.” Research in Orga-nizational Behavior 29: 39–69.

Krysan, Maria, Mick Couper, Reynolds Farley & Tyrone Forman. 2009. “DoesRace Matter in Neighborhood Preferences? Results from a Video Experiment,”American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 115 (2): 527-559.

Loury, Glenn C., The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Harvard Univ. Press, 2003)

Mauer, Marc, “Racial Impact Statements: Changing Policies to Address Dispari-ties,” available at http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/rd_abaarticle.pdf

Nosek, Brian, Anthony Greenwald & Mahzarin Banaji. 2005. “Understanding andUsing the Implicit Association Test: II. Method Variables and Construct Validity.”Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31: 166–180.

Pager, Devah, Race, Crime and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration(Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007).

Pérez, Efrén. 2010. “Explicit Evidence on the Import of Implicit Attitudes: TheIAT and Immigration Policy Judgments.” Political Behavior 32(4): 517-545.

Pew Research Center. 2007. “Blacks See Growing Values Gap Between Poor andMiddle Class.” Available at http://pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/10/Race-2007.pdf

Remapping Debate. Available at http://www.remappingdebate.org/map-data-tool/mapping-and-analysis-new-data-documents-still-segregated-america

Resolution on Marriage Equality for Same-Sex Couples, American PsychologicalAssociation (Aug.11 & 15, 2011), http://www.apa.org/about/governance/council/policy/same-sex.aspx .

Royster, Deidre A., Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks ExcludeBlack Men From Blue-Collar Jobs (Univ. of California Press, 2003).

Shuford, Reggie, “Reclaiming the 14th Amendment,” Daily Journal (Feb. 3, 2010)

“The Ten Most Segregated Urban Areas in America.” Available at http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/03/29/most_segregated_cities


Four New Studies on Race and Poverty TrendsIn the past few weeks, a number of important new studies on racialized poverty and inequality have been released,

using a five-year data “snapshot” from the American Community Survey. Taken together, these studies illustrate thepersistent disproportionate racial impact of poverty in America, rising numbers of African-American and Latino familiesliving in high-poverty neighborhoods, and alarming increases in overall poverty and wealth inequality. These studies alsohelp to provide context for disturbing new poverty data, released in mid-September, that show increasing rates of povertyfor African Americans and Latinos (27% and 26%, respectively), and an overall poverty rate (15.1%) at its highest levelsince 1993.We provide some highlights from four of these reports in the brief summaries below:

Rolf Pendall, Elizabeth Davies, Lesley Freiman & RobPitingolo, A Lost Decade: Neighborhood Poverty and theUrban Crisis of the 2000s (The Urban Institute, for theJoint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Septem-ber 2011), available at www.jointcenter.org/institutes/health-policy:

• The number of people in high-poverty neighborhoodsincreased by nearly 5 million since 2000, when 18.4million metropolitan residents (7.9% of the total) livedin high-poverty neighborhoods. This rise since 2000 isa significant setback compared with progress in the1990s.

• African Americans, Hispanics and American Indianscontinue to be substantially more likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods than white non-Hispanics, andpeople who live below the poverty line—especially mi-norities in poverty—are at special risk of living in high-poverty neighborhoods.

• The report also includes interesting insights on the varia-tions in concentrated poverty trends across differentmetro areas, the increasing racial/ethnic heterogeneityof many high-poverty neighborhoods, and an analysisof the racial and economic trajectories since 1970 ofthe original “ghetto” neighborhoods identified in the1968 Kerner Commission report.

Pew Research Center, Twenty-to-One: Wealth Gaps Riseto Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics(July 2011), available at http://pewsocialtrends.org/:

• In the wake of the foreclosure crisis, the median wealthof white households is now 20 times that of black house-holds and 18 times that of Hispanic households.

• This wealth gap between whites and minorities is at ahistoric high, largely because of the slide in housingprices. From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted medianwealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and53% among black households, compared with just 16%among white households.

• Hispanics were hit hardest by the meltdown in the hous-ing market. From 2005 to 2009, the median level ofhome equity held by Hispanic homeowners declined byhalf—from $99,983 to $49,145—while thehomeownership rate among Hispanics was also falling,from 51% to 47%.

John R. Logan, Separate and Unequal: The Neighbor-hood Gap for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians in Metropoli-tan America (Brown University, July 2011) available atwww.s4.brown.edu/us2010/

• This study finds that African Americans and Latino fami-lies live in substantially poorer neighborhoods than whitefamilies, notwithstanding family income levels.

• Overall, Black and Hispanic households live in neigh-borhoods with more than one-and-a-half times the pov-erty rate of neighborhoods where the average non-His-panic white lives.

• The average black or Hispanic household earning morethan $75,000 still lives in a less affluent, resource-richneighborhood than a white household that earns lessthan $40,000.

• Even Asians, who have higher incomes than blacks andHispanics and are less residentially segregated, live insomewhat poorer neighborhoods than whites.

• Racial segregation itself is the prime predictor of whichmetropolitan regions are the ones where minorities livein the poorest and least desirable neighborhoods.

Nancy McArdle, Theresa Osypuk, Erin Hardy & DoloresAcevedo-García, Child Segregation Issue Brief (DiversityData Project, July 2011) available at http://diversitydata.sph.harvard.edu

• This study’s authors found that segregation levels re-main high for black and moderate for Latino childrenliving in the 100 largest metropolitan areas, althoughresidential segregation declined moderately between2000 and 2010.

• Black segregation fell substantially in large, highly seg-regated Midwestern metros, such as Detroit, Chicago,Minneapolis and Kansas City, and in smaller metros inFlorida and the West.

• While blacks faced higher segregation rates, black seg-regation fell in the great majority (83) of the 100 larg-est metro areas; whereas, Latino segregation fell in only52 metro areas.

• Increasing segregation of Latino children in many ofthe small to medium-sized metros in the South and Mid-west, which are experiencing some of the fastest Latinogrowth, bears careful attention.

Resources


Most Resources areavailable directly from theissuing organization, eitheron their website (if given) orvia other contact informa-tion listed.

Materials published byPRRAC are availablethrough our website:www.prrac.org. Pricesinclude the shipping/handling (s/h) charge whenthis information is providedto PRRAC. “No pricelisted” items often are free.

When ordering items fromPRRAC: SASE = self-addressed stamped envelope(44¢ unless otherwiseindicated). Orders may notbe placed by telephone orfax. Please indicate fromwhich issue of P&R you areordering.

torical and contemporary forces thatsustain and promote harmful racial in-equalities? This would not guaranteeresults, as many of the commentatorsnote, nor would it magically surmountall the obstacles to sustained and seri-ous conversation about racial injus-tice, but it would at least direct ourown analytic energies in the right di-rection. It would direct attention toreal problems, rather than politicallyexpedient measures, and it wouldmove us closer to practical solutionsand away from futile conceptualpuzzles (can a person be biased andnot know it?).

Of course the implicit bias frame-work is not the primary impedimentto a more substantive and fruitfulanalysis of racial inequality (and we

have never suggested otherwise), butit certainly doesn’t help matters. Thecurrent focus on implicit bias isgrossly out of proportion to its utilityor capacity to advance our understand-ing of social injustice and law reform.As such, it threatens to both divertenergies better spent on more practi-cal solutions and to reinforce the dan-gerous belief that mental state is thecentral issue in civil rights law. Theobsession with implicit bias strikes usas an act of desperation by advocatesand scholars who have watched civilrights law undermined, dismantled orturned against itself year after year.We sympathize: Desperation is an un-derstandable response in the era of theRoberts Court, and implicit bias seemsto offer at least a modest response toa growing hostility to civil rightsclaims: any port in a storm. Still, we

believe the implicit bias “solution” tothe unraveling of civil rights law is afalse hope, and we hope to discour-age those we see as our allies frommistaking shallow and rocky shoalsfor a safe harbor. ❏

(RESPONSE: Cont.from page 15)The U.S. Human

Rights Network isholding its 2011 Natl.Human Rights Conf.

& MembershipMeeting, Dec. 9-11

in Los Angeles.Contact

[email protected]

Race/Racism• At the Dark End of theStreet: Black Women,Rape and Resistance: ANew History of the CivilRights Movement fromRosa Parks to the Rise ofBlack Power, by DanielleL. McGuire (324 pp.,2010, $27.95), has beenpublished by Knopf.[12866]

• "America's Tomor-row: Is Our Racial GapBecoming a GenerationGap?," by Angela GloverBlackwell, a 3-page columnby the CEO of PolicyLink(and former PRRAC Bd.member), can be found—along with other elementsof their multimedia series,"America's Tomorrow:Equity in a ChangingNation"—atwww.PolicyLink.org/AmericaTomorrow [12874]

• "Back on the Bus:Remembering the Free-

dom Riders," by CalvinTrillin, appeared in the July25, 2011 New Yorker. Thewell-known writer reflectson his early 60s experiencein the Atlanta bureau ofTime and on the role ofreporters. [12876]

• Red Summer: TheSummer of 1919 and theAwakening of BlackAmerica, by CameronMcWhorter, a Wall St.Journal reporter, has beenpublished by Henry Holt(352 pp., 2011, $32.50).[12877]

• "The Equal RightsCenter's 2010 AnnualReport" can be down-loaded at www.equalrightscenter.org/annualreport [12886]

• The Civil RightsReader: African AmericanLiterature from Jim Crowto Reconstruction, by JulieBuckner Armstrong & AmySchmidt (363 pp., 2009),

has been published byUniv. of Georgia Press.[12889]

• Ethnicity and Race ina Changing World ispreparing its 5th issue,which will go live in Sept.,2011. They are looking forsubmissions for Issues 6and 7. Submission guidancefor essays and further inf.from [email protected],www.racearchive.org.uk[12893]

• Young Men's Initia-tive: NYC Mayor MichaelBloomberg has launched acomprehensive effort totackle disparities betweenyoung black and Latinomales and their peers. Keyareas are Education,Employment, Health andJustice. Further inf. fromMelanie Herzog, City Hall,NYC, NY 10007. [12911]

• "Separate andUnequal: The Neighbor-


hood Gap for Blacks,Hispanics and Asians inMetropolitan America,"by John R. Logan (23 pp.,July 2011), is available onBrown University'swebsite: http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010/Data/Report/report0727.pdf [12912]

• Islamophobia: TheIdeological CampaignAgainst Muslims, byStephen Sheehi (291 pp.,2011, $16.95), has beenpublished by Clarity Press.Available from Teachingfor Change, 800/763-9131[12913]

• The African AmericanOdyssey of John Kizell: ASouth Carolina SlaveReturns to Fight the SlaveTrade in His Homeland[Sierra Leone], by KevinG. Lowther & JosephOpala (301 pp., May 2011,$43.95), has been publishedby Univ. of South CarolinaPress. Available fromTeaching for Change, 800/763-9131. [12915]

• American Uprising:The Untold Story ofAmerica's Largest SlaveRevolt, by DanielRasmussen (276 pp.,2011), has been publishedby Harper Collins. [12927]

• "The New MetroMinority Map: RegionalShifts in Hispanics,Asians, and Blacks fromCensus 2010," by WilliamFrey (17 pp., Sept. 2011),is available (no price given)from The BrookingsInstitution MetropolitanProgram, 202/797-6139.[12956]

• "The Great Missis-sippi Road Trip," spon-sored by the MississippiCenter for Justice, will takeplace Oct. 13-16, 2011.Included are Medgar Evers'home, the B.B. KingMuseum, the town ofMound Bayou, the FannieLou Hamer Memorial Site,

and Bryant's Grocery(where Emmett Till's fatalencounter took place). Inf.from the Center, PO Box1023, Jackson, MS 39215-1023, [12885]

• "Transforming Race:Visions of Change,"sponsored by The KirwinInstitute for the Study ofRace and Ethnicity (headedby PRRAC Bd. memberjohn powell), will be heldMarch 15-17, 2012 inColumbus, OH. Sessionproposals due by Sept. 30.Call for Proposals isdownloadable at http://transforming-race.org/tr2012/TR2012CFP.pdf.Questions—[email protected] [12873]

Poverty/Welfare

• "Reducing RacialWealth Disparities inNorth Carolina: Researchon Promising Practices inAsset Building," byRoberto G. Quercia &Jessica Dorrance, appearedin the Summer 2011 issueof CURS Update, available(possibly free) from theCenter for Urban andRegional Studies,Hickerson House, CB3410, Univ. No. Carolina,Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3410, 919/843-9708,[email protected][12849]

• "Poverty and Oppor-tunity: What DifferenceCan a Task ForceMake?," by Jodie Levin-Epstein, Milla Sanex,Emily Feldman, JoshKotzman, Abby Lane &Lauren Stewart (21 pp.,July 2011), is available(possibly free) from TheCenter for Law & SocialPolicy (headed by formerPRRAC Bd. member AlanHouseman), 1200 18th St.NW, #200, Wash., DC20036, 202/906-8000,www.clasp.org [12895]

• "UNCENSORED:American Family Experi-ences with Poverty andHomelessness" (Summer2011) is available (likelyfree) from The Institute forChildren, Poverty &Homelessness, 44 CooperSq., NYC, NY 10003,[email protected],www.ICPHusa.org [12908]

• "At the Forefront:Poverty Impact Projec-tions" (13 pp., Aug. 2011)is available (possibly free)from the Center for Law &Social Policy (headed byformer PRRAC Bd.member Alan Houseman),1200 18th St. NW, #200,Wash., DC 20036, 202/906-8000, www.clasp.org[12934]

• "A Lost Decade:Neighborhood Povertyand the Urban Crisis ofthe 2000s," by RolfPendall, Elizabeth Davies,Lesley Freiman & RobPitingolo (28 pp., Sept.,2011), produced withsupport from PRRAC, isavailable (possibly free)from the Joint Center forPolitical and EconomicStudies, 1090 VermontAve. NW, #1100, Wash.,DC 20005. [12944]

CommunityOrganizing

• "Raise the 'Roots" isan Oct. 4-5, 2011 confer-ence in Boston, sponsoredby the Tax FairnessOrganizing Collaborative, anetwork of state-levelgrassroots organizationsthat advocate for progres-sive and adequate statetaxes. The goal is to getorganizations and commu-nity organizers to moreeffectively engage diversecommunities on tax issues.Workshop proposals weredue by July 22, but you canalways see if they're opento good late proposals recommunities of color. Inf.

from United for a FairEconomy, 29 Winter St.,2nd flr., Boston, MA02108, [email protected] [12864]

CriminalJustice

• "Gaming the System:How the Political Strate-gies of Private PrisonCompanies PromoteIneffective IncarcerationPolicies" (44 pp., June2011) is available (no pricelisted) from The JusticePolicy Institute, 1012 14thSt. NW, #400, Wash., DC20005, 202/558-7974,www. justicepolicy.org[12853]

• "Incarcerating Death:Mortality in U.S. StateCorrectional Facilities,1985-1998," by EvelynPatterson, appeared inDemography 47, pp. 587-607. Study shows thatAfrican-American males inprison have a lowermortality rate than theirnon-incarcerated counter-parts -- likely explainableby a safety hypothesis.[12857]

• “The Death Penalty inAlabama: Judge Over-ride” (29 pp., July 2011),showing racial bias in thesystem, is available(possibly free) from TheEqual Justice Initiative, 122Commerce St., Montgom-ery, AL 36104, 334/269-1803, www.eji.org [12891]

• "Race and Incarcera-tion in Delaware" is a 25-page, June 2011 study forthe Delaware GeneralAssembly. Inf. on how toobtain it from The Sentenc-ing Project, 1705 DeSalesSt. NW, 8th flr., Wash.,DC 20036, 202/628-0871,[email protected][12892]

• "On the ChoppingBlock: State Prison


Closings" (4 pp., Aug.[?]2011), a Briefing Paperfinding that at least 13states have closed or areconsidering closingcorrectional facilities thisyear, is available (possiblyfree) from The SentencingProject, 1705 DeSales St.NW, 8th flr., Wash., DC20036, 202/628-0871.[12906]

• "Improving Outcomesfor Youth in the JuvenileJustice System: A Reviewof Alameda County'sCollaborative MentalHealth Court" (55 pp. +Apps., Feb. 2011) isavailable (no price listed)from the National Centerfor Youth Law, 405 14thSt., 15th flr., Oakland, CA94612, 510/835-8098,[email protected];downloadable at www.youthlaw.org [12924]

• "Tribal Youth in theFederal System" (204 pp.,May 2011) is available (noprice given) from TheUrban Institute’s JusticePolicy Ctr., 2100 M St.NW, Wash., DC 20037,202/833-7200. [12947]

• "The DisconnectBetween Crime andDiscrimination in Hous-ing" was an Aug. 26-27,2011 conference held at theJohn Marshall Law School.Inf. on the school'swebsite. [12847]

• "Criminal Justice2036: A 25-Year Vision"is The Sentencing Project's25th anniversary forum andreception, Oct. 11, 20111:30-7:30 at The NationalPress Club in Wash., DC.Inf. from 202/628-0871[12931]

Economic/CommunityDevelopment

• "The 2011 SustainableCommunities Regional

Planning Grant Guide"(33 pp.) has been producedby PolicyLink – www.policylink.org [12872]

• "Promote Sustainableand Equitable Develop-ment" is a Aug. 2011guide/toolkit, available(possibly free) from TheCenter for Housing Policy,1900 M St. NW, #200,Wash., DC 20036. [12939]

• The Research Tri-angle: From Tobacco Rowto Global Prominence, byWilliam Rohe (240 pp.,2011), has been publishedby Univ. of PennsylvaniaPress. Using discount codeP2F7 will give you 20% offthe list price. [12940]

Education• "Education andAchievement: A Focus onLatino 'Immigrant'Children," by Eugene E.Garcia (15 pp., Oct. 2010),is available (possibly free)from The Urban Institute,2100 M St. NW, Wash.,DC 20007, 202/833-7200.[12846]

• "Affordability andTransfer: Critical toIncreasing BaccalaureateDegree Completions" (8pp., June 2011) is available(possibly free) from TheNational Center for PublicPolicy and Higher Educa-tion, 152 N. 3rd St., #705,San Jose, CA 95112, 408/271-2699, [email protected],www.highereducation.org[12848]

• The School-to-PrisonPipeline: Theresa El-Amin,Regional Organizer for theSouthern Anti-RacismNetwork, formerly ofDurham, NC, now is inColumbus, GA, where sheis actively organizing onthis issue. Contact her (andget a copy of the op-ed sherecently published in thelocal paper, The Ledger-

Enquirer) [email protected].[12867]

• "The EducationalExperience of Young Menof Color: A Review ofResearch, Pathways andProgress," by JohnMichael Lee, Jr. & TafayaRansom (91 pp., 2011[?]),is available (no price given)from The College BoardAdvocacy and PolicyCenter, [email protected] [12879]

• "Successful School-Community Partnerships:Using Lessons Learnedfrom Practice andResearch to ExpandLearning," a 5-page, June2011 Forum Brief, isavailable (possibly free)from The American YouthPolicy Forum, 1836Jefferson Pl. NW, Wash.,DC 20036, 202/775-9731,[email protected] [12880]

• The National Oppor-tunity to Learn Campaignnewsletter is available viainfo@ otlcampaign.org;address: 675 Mass. Ave.,Cambridge, MA 02139.[12887]

• "DisadvantagedStudents: School DistrictsHave Used Title I FundsPrimarily to SupportInstruction" is a 58-page,July 2011 GAO Report(GAO-11-595); availablevia http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-595[12904]

• "Opportunity-RichSchools and SustainableCommunities: Seven Stepsto Align High-QualityEducation with Innova-tions in City and Metro-politan Planning andDevelopment," by DeborahL. McKoy, Jeffrey M.Vincent & Ariel H.Bierbaum (63 pp., June2011), is available (no pricelisted) from the Center forCities & Schools, 316Wurster Hall, #1870, Univ.

of California, Berkeley, CA94720, [email protected], http://citiesandschools.berkeley.edu[12905]

• "All Together Now,One By One: BuildingCapacity for UrbanEducation Reform inPromise Neighborhoods,"by James M. Quane &William Julius Wilson,appeared in the Summer2011 issue of Pathways: AMagazine on Poverty,Inequality, and SocialPolicy, published by TheStanford Center for theStudy of Poverty andInequality. Subs. are free—[email protected][12910]

• "Zero ToleranceDiscipline Policies: AFailing Idea," by MarianWright Edelman, a short2011 column, is available(likely free) fromChildren's Defense Fund,800/233-1200, [email protected][12916]

• Monthly Review's July/Aug. 2011 issue is acollection of 12 articles (byGrace Lee Boggs, CharlesCobb, Jr. et al.) titled"Education Under Fire:The US Corporate Attackon Students, Teachers,Schools," co-edited by Bill& Rick Ayers. $12 fromMR, 146 W. 29 St., #6W,NYC, NY 10001, 800/670-9499. [12948]

• "State EducationAgencies as Agents ofChange" was a July 27,2011 event co-sponsored byThe Center for AmericanProgress and the AmericanEnterprise Institute. Inf.from 202/682-1611; theCenter is at 1333 H St.NW, 10th flr., Wash., DC20005. [12881]

• "Learning fromBoston's Busing/Desegre-gation Project" is a Sept.20, 2011 discussion/film/


lecture/q&a session, 5-7pm, at the Gutman Conf.Ctr., Harvard Grad Schoolof Education, 6 AppianWay, Cambridge, MA02138. Inf. from 617/384-9968, [email protected][12929]

• "New AmericanRevolution: College andCareer Readiness for All,"the Public EducationNetwork National Confer-ence, will be held Nov. 6-8, 2011 in DC. Inf. fromthem at 601 13th St. NW,#710 South, Wash., DC20005, http://www.publiceducation.org/events.asp [12870]

Employment/Labor/JobsPolicy

• Ours to Master andOwn: Workers' Controlfrom the Commune to thePresent, eds. ImmanuelNess & Dario Azzellini(May 2011, $19), has beenpublished by HaymarketBooks, PO Box 180165,Chicago, IL 60618, 773/583-7884, [email protected][12854]

• Reviving the Strike:How Working People CanRegain Power and Trans-form America, by JoeBurns (206 pp., 2011), hasbeen published by IgPublishing, 392 ClintonAve., Brooklyn, NY11238, www.IGPub.com[12863]

• "Diversity andChange: Asian Americanand Pacific IslanderWorkers," by Hey JinRho, John Schmitt, NicoleWoo, Lucia Lin & KentWong (66 pp., July 11,2011), is available (no pricelisted) from The Center forEconomic and PolicyResearch, 1611 Conn. Ave.

NW, #400, Wash., DC20009, 202/293-5380,www,cepr.org [12896]

Families/Women/Children

• "Single Mothers Since2000: Falling FartherDown," a 2011 report fromLegal Momentum, isavailable (possibly free)from them, 395 HudsonSt., NYC, NY 10014, 212/925-6635. Downloadable athttp://www.legalmomentum.org/our-work/women-and-poverty-resources--publications/single-mothers-since-2000.pdf, www.legalmomentum.org[12845]

• "Race and ChildWelfare," by ElizabethBartholet, Fred Wulczyn,Richard P. Barth & CindyLederman (4 pp., June2011), is a Chapin HallIssue Brief, available(possibly free) from them,1313 E. 60th St., Chicago,IL 60637, 773/753-5900.[12852]

• "The State ofAmerica's Children 2011"(190 pp., July 2011) isavailable (no price listed)from The Children'sDefense Fund, 25 E St.NW, Wash., DC 20001,800/233-1200, [email protected] are devoted toPopulation, Poverty,Family Structure, FamilyIncome, Health, Hunger/Nutrition, Early Childhood,Education, Child Welfare,Juvenile Justice, GunViolence. [12897]

• To 'Joy My Freedom:Southern Black Women'sLives and Labors After theCivil War, by Tera W.Hunter (299 pp., 1997), hasbeen published by HarvardUniv. Press. [12901]

• Women FreedomRiders: The NationalWomen's Law Center (co-directed by former PRRACBd. member Nancy DuffCampbell) is holding itsannual Awards Dinner,Nov. 9, 2011 in DC,celebrating the 50thanniversary of the FreedomRides by honoring thewomen who participated inthem. Inf. from 202/588-5180, [email protected][12920]

Food/Nutrition/Hunger

• "Healthy Food,Healthy Communities:Promising Strategies toImprove Access to Fresh,Healthy Food and Trans-form Communities," byRebecca Flournoy (79 pp.,2011), is available (no pricelisted) from PolicyLink,1438 Webster St., #303,Oakland, CA 94612, 510/663-2333, www.policylink.org [12894]

• The Journal ofAgriculture, Food Systems,and Community Develop-ment is an online, peer-reviewed, internationaljournal. Dec. 1, 2011deadline for papers on theirupcoming issue, "HigherEducation and FoodSystems"' Feb. 15, 2012deadline for manuscriptsfor issue on "SustainableLivelihoods in FoodSystems" www.AdDevJournal.com [12900]

Health• "The EconomicBurden of Health In-equalities in the UnitedStates," by Thomas A.LaVeist, Darrell J. Gaskin& Patrick Richard (11 pp.,Sept. 2009), is available(possibly free) from theJoint Center for Political

and Economic Studies,1090 Vermont Ave. NW,#1100, Wash., DC 20005,www.joint center.org[12942]

• "Segregated Spaces,Risky Places: The Effectsof Racial Segregation onHealth Inequalities," byThomas A. LaVeist,Darrell J. Gaskin &Antonio J. Trujillo (36 pp.,Sept., 2011), produced withsupport from PRRAC, isavailable (possibly free)from the Joint Center forPolitical and EconomicStudies, 1090 VermontAve. NW, #1100, Wash.,DC 20005, www.jointcenter.org [12943]

• CommonHealthACTION is a nationalnonprofit public healthorganization, buildingorganizational and commu-nity capacity to addressdeterminants of health andcreate optimal health forall. 1301 Conn. Ave. NW,#200, Wash., DC 20036,202/407-7088. Their MetroAtlanta office is reachableat 202/407-7088, x1007.[12946]

• "Place Matters:Building Stronger Com-munities for BetterHealth" was a terrific,well-attended (by numbersand diversity) Sept. 7, 2011conference, organized bythe Joint Center forPolitical and EconomicStudies (with PRRAC co-sponsorship). Local PlaceMatters Teams are func-tioning in the followingplaces: King County (WA),Wayne County (MI),Cuyahoga County (OH),Boston, Baltimore, PrinceGeorge’s County (MD),Wash., DC, MarlboroCounty (SC), JeffersonCounty (AL), Mid-Mississippi Delta Counties,Orleans Parish (LA), So.Delta Counties (MS),Bernalillo County (NM),San Joaquin County (CA),Alameda County (CA).

Website has lots of theconf. materials:www.jointcenter.org/hpi[12949]

• "North AmericanHousing & HIV/AIDSResearch Summit VI,"sponsored by The NationalAIDS Housing Coalition,will take place Sept. 21-23,2011 in New Orleans. Inf.from 202/347-0333,[email protected] [12890]

Homelessness• "Education forHomeless Children andYouth Program: DataCollection Summary" is a35-page, June 2011 reportfrom the National Centerfor Homeless Education,downloadable atwww.serve.org/nche.ibt/sc_data.php [12862]

• "Head Start's PositiveImpact on HomelessFamilies" is a 4-page, Sept.2011 Policy Brief, available(possibly free) from theInst. for Children, Poverty& Homelessness, 44Cooper Sq., NYC, NY10003, 212/[email protected],www.ICPHusa.org [12930]

• "Beds Not Buses:Housing v. Transporta-tion for Homeless Stu-dents," a free webinar puton by the National LawCtr. on Homelessness andPoverty, will be held Sept.27, 2011, 2-3pm. Inf. [email protected] [12945]

Housing

• "Study of the FairHousing InitiativesProgram" (63 pp. +Apps., May 2011), aconsultant study for HUD'sOffice of Policy Develop-ment and Research, isavailable at www.huduser.org/Publications/pdfFHIP_2011.pdf [12850]

• "Capital Needs in thePublic Housing Program"(60 pp. + Apps.) is aRevised Final Report (Nov.2010) prepared by AbtAssociates for HUD. Abt isreachable at 55 WheelerSt., Cambridge, MA02138. It is downloadableat http://www.hud.gov --click Program Offices, thenPublic and Indian Housing.[12860]

• "Profiles of Risk:Characterizing HousingInstability" is a 4-page,June 2011 Research Brief,available (possibly free)from the Institute forChildren, Poverty &Homelessness, 212/358-8086, www.ICPHusa.org[12865]

• "AffirmativelyFurthering Fair Housingin the District of Colum-bia" (10 pp. + Apps., June2011), by the District ofColumbia AdvisoryCommission to the U.S.Commission on CivilRights (a member of whichis PRRAC Soc. Sci.Advisory Bd. memberGregory Squires), isavailable (likely free) fromthe U.S. Commission onCivil Rights EasternRegional Office, 624 9thSt. NW, Wash., DC 20425.[12875]

• "Where Kids Go: TheForeclosure Crisis andMobility in Washington,DC," by Jennifer T.Comey & Michael Grosz(14 pp., 2011[?]), isavailable (possibly free)from The Urban Institute,2100 M St. NW, Wash.,DC 20037, 202/833-7200.[12884]

• "The 2010 AnnualReport of the Oak ParkRegional Housing Center"is available (possibly free)from the Center, 1041 So.Boulevard, Oak Park, IL60302, 708/848-7150.[12898]

• Tenant Talk, publishedby the National LowIncome Housing Coalition(whose ED Sheila Crowleyis a former PRRAC Bd.member), provides infor-mation on relevant federalgovernment actions.Subscribe via [email protected], or 202/662-1530,x316. [12909]

• People Wasn't Made toBurn: A True Story ofHousing, Race, andMurder in Chicago, by JoeAllen (328 pp., June 2011,$22.95), has been publishedby Haymarket Books.Available from Teachingfor Change, 800/763-9131.[12914]

• "Affordable Housingin the District of Colum-bia: Where Are WeNow?," by Benjamin Orr &Alice M. Rivlin (101 pp.,July 2011), is available (noprice listed) from TheBrookings Institution, 1775Mass. Ave. NW, Wash.,DC 20036, 202/797-6139,www,brookings.edu[12917]

• "HUD's Annual Stateof Fair Housing Report”is available at http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/documents/huddoc?id=ANNUAL REPORTS2010.PDF [12932]

• "Navigating UncertainWaters: MortgageLending in the Wake ofthe Great Recession" (78pp., Aug. 2011) is availablefrom the Inst. for Afford-able Housing Policy ofNYU's Furman Ctr. forReal Estate & UrbanPolicy, [email protected] [12935]

• "State of New YorkCity's Affordable Hous-ing" (55 pp., Sept. 2011) isavailable (no price given)from the Inst. for Afford-able Housing Policy ofNYU's Furman Ctr. forReal Estate and UrbanPolicy. Contact them at

[email protected][12950]

• Directory of New YorkCity Affordable HousingPrograms (Beta) (Sept.2011) is available (no pricegiven) from the Inst. forAffordable Housing Policyof NYU's Furman Ctr. forReal Estate and UrbanPolicy. Contact them [email protected][12951]

• "Rethinking theMortgage Interest Deduc-tion" was a July 28, 2011event sponsored by TheTax Policy Center of TheUrban Institute andBrookings Institution. Arecording of the event isarchived at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/urban-institute-events[12888]

• "Solutions for Sustain-able Communities: 2011Learning Conf. on State& Local Housing Policy,"hosted by The NationalHousing Conference & TheCenter for Housing Policy,will take place Sept. 26-28,2011 in Wash., DC. Inf.from The Center, 1900 MSt. NW, #200, Wash., DC20036. [12937]

Immigration• America Street: AMulticultural Anthology ofStories, ed. Anne Mazer, isa collection of 14 movingstories on the acculturationexperience of a wide rangeof immigrants to the U.S.152 pp., 1993, publishedby Perseis Books, 60Madison Ave., NYC, NY10010. [12843]

• "Immigration andPoverty in America'sSuburbs," by RobertoSuro, Jill Wilson & AudreySinger (20 pp., Aug.2011), is available (possiblyfree) from The BrookingsInstitution, 1775 Mass.Ave. NW, Wash., DC


20036, 202/797-6139,www.brookings,edu[12919]

• "Climate Change andMigration Dynamics," byKathleen Newland (13 pp.,Sept. 2011), is available(possibly free) from theMigration Policy Institute,1400 16th St. NW, #300,Wash., DC 20036, 202/266-1940, www.migrationpolicy.org [12954]

• "Bridging Communi-ties, Breaking DownWalls" is the 25th anniver-sary celebration of TheNational Network forImmigrant and RefugeeRights (headed by PRRACBd. member CatherineTactaquin), Nov. 5, 2011in Oakland. Inf. from 3108th St. #303, Oakland, CA94607, 510/465-1984,www.nnirr.org [12952]

InternationalHuman Rightsand U.S. CivilRights Policy

• The InternationalCouncil on Human RightsPolicy is at Rue Ferdinand-Hodler 17, Geneva 1207Switzerland, [email protected], www.ichrp.org[12903]

• “ImplementingRecommendations fromthe Universal PeriodicReview: A Toolkit forState and Local HumanRights and HumanRelations Commissions” isavailable at http://www.law.columbia.edu/ipimages/Human_ Rights_Institute/UPR%20Toolkit.pdf [12953]

• "Claiming Our Roleas Human Rights Law-yers: How a HumanRights Framework CanAdvance Our Advocacy"was a June 21, 2011webinar organized by the

Sargent Shriver NationalCenter on Poverty Law,previewing theorganization's Sept.-Oct.2011 special issue ofClearinghouse Review. Inf.from Ilze Hirsh at theCenter, 50 E. WashingtonSt., #500, Chicago, IL60602, 312/368-3323,[email protected],www.povertylaw.org[12861]

Transportation• "Where We Need toGo: A Civil RightsRoadmap for Transporta-tion Equity" (11 pp.,March 2011) is available(possibly free) from theLeadership Conference onCivil and Human Rights(headed by former PRRACBd. member WadeHenderson), 1629 K St.NW, 10th flr., Wash., DC20006, 202/466-3434,www,civilrights.org[12899]

• "Bus Rapid Transit:Chicago's New Route toOpportunity" is a 25-page,Aug. 2011 report, available(possibly free) from theMetropolitan PlanningCouncil, 140 S. DearbornSt., #1400, Chicago, IL60603, 312/922-5616.[12941]

Miscellaneous• The Revolution Startsat Home: ConfrontingIntimate Violence WithinActivist Communities, eds.Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani& Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (325 pp., May2011, $16), has beenpublished by South EndPress, PO Box 24773,Brooklyn, NY 11202-4773,718/874-0089, [email protected], www.southendpress.org [12858]

• Disability Law journal,sponsored by SyracuseUniv. Disability Law &

Policy, has just publishedVol. 5, No. 18. Contact co-editor Arlene Kanter,[email protected][12869]

• Resilience and Oppor-tunity: Lessons from theU.S. Gulf Coast afterKatrina and Rita, by AmyLiu, Roland V. Anglin,Richard M. Mizelle, Jr. &Alison Plyer (220 pp.,2011), has been publishedby Brookings InstitutionPress, 800/537-5487.[12955]

JobOpportunities/Fellowships/Grants

• AARP Legal Councilfor the Elderly (DC) isseeking a Senior Con-sumer Attorney. Applyonline atwww.aarpjobs.com oremail resume [email protected] [12835]

• The WoodstockInstitute (Chicago) islooking for a Vice Presi-dent for Applied Re-search. Resume/ltr./contactinf. for 3 profl. refs. [email protected],www.woodstockinst.org istheir website. [12840]

• The OpportunityAgenda (NYC) is seekingan Executive (75%) andAdministrative (25%)Assistant. Ltr./resume/writing sample [email protected][12841]

• The U.S. HumanRights Network (Atlanta)is seeking an ExecutiveDirector. Ltr./resume [email protected] about USHRN atwww.ushrnetwork.org[12868]

• The Woodrow WilsonInternational Center for

Scholars (DC) announcesopening of its 2012-2013Fellowships competition."Urbanization, migrationand immigration" is one ofthe primary themes for thiscompetition cycle. Ap-proximately 20-25 aca-demic year residentialfellowship to individualsfrom any country. Inf. andapplication guidelines from202/691-4170,[email protected] [12871]

• The National Eco-nomic and Social RightsInitiative (NYC) is hiring aDirector for its HumanRight to Housing Program.$60,000. Resume/1-pageltr./writing sample (max. 8pp.)/3 profl. refs. [email protected] [12883]

• The Fair HousingCenter of Greater Bostonis seeking paid volunteers.Contact them at 59 TemplePlace, #1105, Boston, MA02111, 617/399-0491,x109, [email protected] [12902]

• The University ofNorth Carolina is seekinga Director for its Centerfor Civil Rights who alsowill be a full-time facultymember at its Law School.Apply electronically withltr./c.v./contact inf. for 4refs. to http://jobs.unc.edu/2501568. Inf. from 919/962-0357, [email protected]. More inf.about the Center at http://www.law.unc.edu/centers/civilrights/default/aspx[12907]

• Advancement Project(Wash., DC) is hiring aDevelopment Director.Resume/ltr. to MollyBrennan [email protected] [12921]



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PRRAC'S SOCIAL SCIENCE ADVISORY BOARD

Dolores Acevedo-GarciaBouvé College of Health Sciences, Northeastern Univ.

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Camille Zubrinsky CharlesDepartment of Sociology, Univ. of Pennsylvania

Stefanie DeLucaJohns Hopkins Univ.

Ingrid Gould EllenNew York Univ.

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Lance FreemanColumbia Univ. School of Architecture,

Planning and Preservation

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& Social Research

Gary OrfieldUCLA Civil Rights Project

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POVERTY & RACE RESEARCH ACTION COUNCILBoard of Directors/Staff

CHAIRJohn Charles BogerUniversity of North CarolinaSchool of Law

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AssistanceSan Francisco, CA

SECRETARYjohn powellKirwan Institute for the Studyof Race & EthnicityOhio State University

Columbus,OH

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Annandale, VA

Demetria McCainInclusive CommunitiesProject

Dallas, TXS.M. Miller

The Commonwealth InstituteCambridge, MA

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Dennis ParkerAmerican Civil LibertiesUnion

New York, NYAnthony Sarmiento

Senior Service AmericaSilver Spring, MD

Theodore ShawColumbia Law SchoolNew York, NY

Brian SmedleyHealth Policy InstituteJoint Center for Political andEconomic Studies

Washington, DCCatherine Tactaquin National Network for

Immigrant & Refugee Rights Oakland, CA

[Organizations listed foridentification purposes only]

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University of the Districtof Columbia School of LawWashington, DC

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Washington, DCCraig Flournoy

Southern MethodistUniversity

Dallas, TXDamon Hewitt

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.New York, NY

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Dallas, TX

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PRRAC Poverty & Race · Professors Banks and Ford—able scholars who have devoted much of their...

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