400 Years of Inequality: Slavery, Race, and Our Unresolved History

Wed, Oct. 2

As a national conversation about reparations takes root, BHS and the Social Science Research Council gathered a panel of experts to unpack the notion of reparations broadly, examine various forms that reparations might take, and look at one concrete example happening today. In 1838, Georgetown University sold 272 enslaved people ‘down river’ to secure its financial health. What is owed to their descendants, and how has Georgetown made amends? New York Times contributing writer Rachel Swarns led a conversation with Adam Rothman, GU historian and principal curator of the Georgetown Slavery Archive; Mélisande Short-Colomb, student activist and descendant of the GU272; and Katherine Franke, author of Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition and Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University.

This program was filmed, and the video is linked below.

Thu, Oct 10

Biased policing. Discriminatory sentencing. Over-incarceration of black people. America’s long history of segregation and structural racism has led to today’s racialized criminal justice system. How do we address the roots of a system designed to perpetuate racial subjugation? Can we realize a just and equal future? Nick Turner, president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America, discussed centuries of racial injustice, and how white Americans have reaped the benefits while black Americans have paid the price.

This program was recorded, and the audio is linked below.

Wed, Oct 16

Redlining—the systematically racist banking practice of denying loans to people of color in post-WWII urban neighborhoods—is often portrayed as a closed chapter in the nation’s history of structural inequality. Yet intense discrimination persists as non-white communities face continuous exclusion from the “American Dream” of homeownership, or are targeted by predatory lending practices, further widening the racial wealth gap. In this program, UC Berkeley’s Richard Rothstein revealed the findings of his book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America. Following a presentation, Rothstein joined April de Simone, co-creator of the Undesign the Redline project, and Sarita Daftary-Steel, founder of the East New York Oral History Project, in a conversation moderated by Kai Wright, host of WNYC podcasts There Goes the Neighborhood, Indivisible, and The Stakes.

This program was recorded, and the audio is linked below.

Thu, Oct 17

Mary Travis Bassett, former NYC Commissioner of Health and currently Director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, sat down with Harriet Washington, author of the award-winning Medical Apartheid and, most recently, A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault of the American Mind, to bring their insights, analysis, and thoughts to the subject of racial bias in healthcare and the need to right centuries of wrongs.

This program was recorded, and the audio is linked below.