Racial Justice

Ira Harkavy and Rita Hodges of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships and others co-wrote an op-ed about higher education and systemic oppression. “Just as many colleges and universities are reckoning with their own institutional histories of exclusion, higher education as a field must recognize where it has failed and come up short. Only then can it come honestly to tables with communities, governments, and citizens to build inclusive, antiracist democracies together,” they wrote.

The inaugural Figure Skating Prize, aimed at Black artists, curators and contemporary art scholars who are advancing equity and racial justice within the arts, has been awarded to Meg Onli of the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Krystal Strong, an organizer with Black Lives Matter Philly and assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education’s Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division, says justice was not obtained in the guilty verdict for Derek Chauvin. “Justice means that George Floyd would be here,” she says. According to Strong, a guilty verdict like the one reached Tuesday “can be used to deradicalize us, placate us, convince us the system is capable of reforming itself.” Strong, who advocates for abolition and divesting police funding to other community resources, also says the small number of officers charged or convicted in police killings shows that “the system cannot reform itself.”

In addition to the next slate of trials for Chuavin’s colleagues, Philadelphians are still processing the fatal police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. and the city’s own checkered history of policing Black and other communities of color. Ariane Thomas of the Graduate School of Education comments on the importance of talking about feelings and leaning into their complexity. 

Elizabeth Howell of the Perelman School of Medicine said that severe maternal morbidity, in which women experience severe complications related to pregnancy and childbirth, impacts more than 50,000 U.S. women each year. “Similar to maternal mortality, Black and brown women have elevated rates of maternal morbidity,” she said.

Camille Z. Charles of the School of Arts & Sciences spoke about how discriminatory housing practices like redlining shaped U.S. neighborhoods in the 20th century. “If you take the redlining maps that were used before the passage of fair housing legislation and overlay them on present-day maps of pretty much any major city in the U.S., and certainly any city that has any meaningful Black population, they look really similar in the sense that Blacks are still largely shut out of those neighborhoods that they were legally shut out of during that time period,” she said.