What will it take to achieve racial justice in American politics?

In this week’s episode of Politics In Question, Megan Ming Francis joins Julia, Lee, and James to discuss racism and the potential for political reform. Francis is a Visiting Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington. She specializes in the study of American politics, with broad interests in criminal punishment, black political activism, philanthropy, and the post-civil war South. Francis is the author of Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Is racial justice possible in America? Or is racism too baked-in to our politics to eliminate? What impact does activism have on American political institutions? How important is money in helping organizations facilitate change at the local, state, and national levels? Why is our political imagination and sense of possibility so important to making political reform a reality? These are some of the questions Megan, Julia, Lee, and James discuss on this week’s episode.

This episode is also available on Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Show Notes

Megan Ming Francis, “The white press has a history of endangering black lives going back a century,” Washington Post (June 15, 2020).

Dorothy Roberts, “Abolishing Policing Also Means Abolishing Family Regulation,” The Chronicle of Social Change (June 16, 2020).

Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter From Birmingham Jail (April 16, 1963).

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 1962).

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “The End of Black Politics: Black leaders regularly fail to rise to the challenges that confront young people,” New York Times (June 13, 2020).