Education Scholar Julie Park joins the #RaceClass Podcast to discuss her new book: "Race, Class and Affirmative Action: College Admissions in a New Era." It's hard to imagine a more timely book that takes on so many enduring questions regarding race and class in university admissions. We break down the good, bad, and oh so very ugly new frontier of college admissions following SFFA v. Harvard and the federal government's ever-escalating assault on our basic right to teach and learn. Lots of threads to highlight including key research from folks like Victor Ray, Liliana Garces, James Murphy and Michael Bastedo (among many others) and a few sharp words for Raj Chetty's Opportunity Insights, NYT columnist David Leonhardt, and PPI's Richard Kahlenberg.

Dr. Evelyn Carter joins the #RaceClass Podcast to discuss her new book: "Was That Racist? How to Detect, Interrupt and Unlearn Bias in Everyday Life." Dr. Carter is close friend of the Pod and one of the smartest folks out there when it comes to understanding how racism manifests and how institutions can cultivate equitable and inclusive environments. We explore a range of topics from the racial anxiety that arises in interracial conversations to group chats gone bad to talking with kids about race. And how to bring a growth mindset to everything we do.

Learn all about Dr. Carter's work, grab a copy of her book, and subscribe to her newsletter at https://www.evelynrcarter.com/.

Jon and Arnie chat about Ta-Nehisi Coate’s observation that “Trump has clarified an inconvenient fact—the culture war is an actual war.” The actual war manifests physically in ICE, the $85 billion entity that gleefully profiles, terrorizes and executes people across the United States. The actual war is also the anti-Black racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-LGBTQ bigotry that animates MAGA and the right side of America’s so-called “culture wars.” This hateful rhetoric and fear mongering, which Steven Miller, Charlie Kirk, JD Vance and others have sought to mainstream, serves a purpose in ICE’s war on our communities: to dehumanize and legitimize violence against those deemed unfit for the Homeland.

As part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Congress created the little-known Community Relations Service (CRS). CRS has since become known as "America's Peacemakers" -- a nod to this small federal agency's outsized role resolving conflicts and restoring peaceful relations in American communities struggling with civil rights violations and hate crimes. In this special episode, former CRS associate director Julius Nam shares a personal account of the Trump administration's attempt to kill CRS and how stakeholders are fighting back to save America's Peacemakers.

Learn all about CRS at https://www.americaspeacemakers.com/.

Boston University Law Professor Steven Dean joins the #RaceClass Podcast to discuss his new book: "Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: the Story of Global Jim Crow." Our conversation explores how international tax law was designed to serve white nations and harm Black nations following decolonization in the mid-20th century. Professor Dean also reflects on his experiences as a Black man in academia and the ways that racist systems in the United States and the Bahamas shaped his family's path over the past half century and beyond.

Fordham Law School professor Atinuke Adediran joins the #RaceClass Pod to discuss her new book "Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress." Against the backdrop of Trump's war on civil rights, Professor Adediran's book explores the brief tidal of wave of corporate commitments to antiracism that followed 2020's global protests for racial justice. We discuss what it means to be Black in America and how corporate words too often constrain real racial progress.

Arnie and Jon discuss JD Vance’s white supremacist screed at last week’s Turning Point USA conference “AmericaFest.” Along with remarks defending racist speech, Vance proclaimed that “in the United States of America you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” As others have observed, this language invokes white supremacist talking points from the past century – including leading southern Klansmen. Vance’s comments came after the Department of Justice eliminated disparate impact liability from its civil rights enforcement and the EEOC urged white men to file discrimination complaints when they feel victimized by DEI. It’s increasingly hard to deny that for Trump's MAGA agenda, segregation is the goal. Beyond putting everyone in their “place,” the Trump regime wants to normalize all of the hate-filled and empirically bankrupt racial and gender tropes that rationalized pre-civil rights America.

“Voting rights right now is precarious and leaves open the door for undoing the generations of work to protect our young and fragile multiracial democracy.” That's the upshot from my conversation with Professor Atiba Ellis, a national voting rights expert and law professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. The conversation could not be more timely.

This week in California, the Trump White House and other plaintiffs are asking a federal court to enjoin Proposition 50, the California ballot initiative designed to counteract the GOP's redistricting efforts in Texas and elsewhere. Later this spring, the Supreme Court is poised to rule on a lawsuit that seeks to invalidate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The future of voting rights hangs in the balance.

Washburn University law professor Rory Bahadur joins the #RaceClass Podcast to discuss his new book: A Critical Race Approach to Systemic Inequity. We explore Professor Bahadur's own racial education, his approach to analyzing racism in America, how human nature reproduces racism and the myths that corrupt our collective ability to understand the American project.

Professor Charisse Burden-Stelly, aka Dr. CBS, joins #RaceClass for a wide ranging conversation about the election of Zohran Mamdani, the legacy of Black Studies, resistance in the age of Trump, and her new book Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States.