Chandra Taylor-Sawyer joined the #RaceClass Podcast to discuss the fight for environmental justice. Chandra is a Senior Attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and leads its Environmental Justice Initiative. For nearly two decades, she has worked to confront the disproportionate burden of pollution borne by communities of color and low-wealth neighborhoods across the South. We explored how SELC builds power to support local communities and dug into a recent SELC report that "connects slavery-era land exploitation to today's environmental racism, revealing how Black communities continue to bear the cost of pollution."

Learn more about Chandra's work at https://www.selc.org/staff/chandra-taylor/.

Jon and Arnie discuss the many segregationist and white supremacist dimensions of the Trump administration’s war on multiracial democracy. To map the assault on equality and democracy, we engage a recent report from the African American Policy Forum titled: “Antiblackness is the Point: Racism, Misogyny, and Donald Trump’s Assault on Equal Opportunity.” The AAPF report connects today’s racial fascism to 19th “Redeemers” who employed “a combination of racist rhetoric, policy and historical narratives meant to rationalize” white male domination and undo the gains of post-Civil War Reconstruction. We also touch upon Toni Morrision’s 1995 essay “Racism and Fascism,” which offers a useful framework for understanding the tactics the Trump regime is employing to dehumanize and brutalize so many communities in the United States. The conversation leads to a pressing question: Why do so many of today’s democracy defenders fail to name Trump’s overt racism when challenging Trump’s policies? If we don’t name racism, how can we hope to combat it?

UC Davis Law Professor Brian Soucek joined the #RaceClass Podcast to discuss his new book: "The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education." Brian is one of the most thoughtful folks out there when it comes to grappling with - and injecting quite a bit of sense into - the most contentious and ongoing debates about academic freedom, free speech and equality on university campuses. His book is an incredible read and highlights what so many so-called "free speech" organizations like FIRE and Heterodox Academy get wrong about the relationship between academic freedom and free speech on campus and in the classroom.

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.