Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University

ARPC is proud to announce our 2024-2025 research scholars!

Dr. Omi Davis-Smith has been selected for the ARPC Fellowship for Transformative Scholarship to support the completion of her book manuscript, Putting Africa in Her Place: Germaine Acogny’s Modern African Dance Technique. Her book examines the development of the Acogny dance technique to reveal intersections between Africana dance, geopolitics in post-independence Senegal, and modernism within a Francophone African context. In her book, Dr. Davis-Smith also introduces her pan-African theoretical paradigm for dance, Awòdá, which derives from indigenous African philosophies and languages.

Dr. Sarah Iverson’s research project investigates the impact of the 2023 Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action on racial inequities in higher education, with a specific focus on concepts of race in the admissions process. As the recipient of the ARPC Racial Justice Research Seed Grant, she will have the resources to interview students about how the decision affects their college applications, particularly how they write about race and ethnicity in their college essays.

We look forward to sharing their brilliant research with the world!

This May Day, ARPC’s collective commitment to intersectional racial justice requires us to speak clearly and explicitly on the ongoing violence in Gaza, the transnational mobilization of all parts of civil society in opposition to this violence, and the policies of censorship, containment, criminalization and punishment being used to silence dissent.

We stand in support of students and educators nationwide in their principled opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza. We condemn recent university and police crackdowns on student, staff, and faculty protests. We do not believe that our principled and informed stance on Gaza is contradictory to our commitment to challenging all forms of white supremacy, including antisemitism. Our reasoning is based on foundational tenets we hold as an antiracist research center and have articulated over the past three years:

1. Our struggles are interconnected. We cannot procure safety and liberation for some by enacting death and destruction on others.

2. Racism and antisemitism have common origins in white nationalism and white supremacy. Working toward racial justice requires explicitly rejecting antisemitism. It also requires that we reject the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and condemn the racist targeting of Arab, Muslim, and other communities of color as the perpetrators of anti-Jewish hate.

3. Antiracism includes a principled critique of settler colonialism everywhere it exists, from the United States and Canada to Australia, Aotearoa, and Israel. As we note in our mission statement, racial justice and decolonial struggle are inseparable.

4. As scholars and racial justice workers, we know that police and prisons are designed to maintain raced and classed hierarchies and to uphold systems that disproportionately harm our communities. Police don’t make campuses or communities safer–they perpetuate violence and white supremacy.

Antisemitism, anti-Palestinian racism, Islamophobia, and settler colonialism are all forms of white supremacy. Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.

TOMORROW. Join us online for “‘TIL ALL OF US ARE FREE: The convergence of prison abolition and reproductive justice.” Register at link in bio.

Join us on Thursday, April 11th for a virtual panel exploring the intersections of reproductive justice and abolition. The discussion will connect our Center’s 2022-23 focus on “Race & Reproductive Politics After Roe,” with our 2023-24 theme of “Abolition Everywhere.

This panel of leading thinkers, cultural workers, and activists working at the intersections of reproductive justice, gender justice, and prison abolition will address the lessons and opportunities that emerge from a conjoined critique of the carceral logics of policing and imprisonment and the containment, criminalization and surveillance of sexuality and reproduction. Their discussion will illuminate the power and potential of an abolitionist reproductive freedom movement that centers BIPOC feminist approaches to anti-violence, decriminalization, and decarceration.

Be sure to RSVP using the link in bio.

Climate justice = racial justice = food justice = farm justice.

ARPC and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC/LAF) are thrilled to release the Pointing the Farm Bill Toward Racial Justice toolkit.

Far too few Americans know of the historic role that Black farmers and cooperatives played in the great racial justice movements of the 20th century. Even fewer understand how important agricultural policy remains for increasing racial equity in areas such as food access, environmental justice, and racial disparities in generational wealth.

The toolkit breaks down the farm bill and addresses ways to point it toward greater racial justice and equity, while simultaneously supporting climate justice.

The analysis comes directly from participants of both our 2023 Farm Bill summit and the Federation’s two year member listening sessions.

We are grateful for the SDFR Policy Research Center at Alcorn State University and the Berkeley Food Institute for contributing to the text and to the Platform for Agriculture and Climate Transformation and the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation for supporting.

Download at link in bio.

International Women’s Day commemorates the achievements of women and celebrates the history of women’s struggle for our own rights and contribution to other struggles for peace and freedom. At ARPC, we understand that all struggles are interconnected and we celebrate the central role women have played in civil rights, racial justice, and antiracism.

As Black History Month comes to an end, we wanted to highlight our last abolitionist, Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Gilmore has been working towards prison abolition in the United States for over 30 years, with the goal of making prisons and policing unnecessary and unthinkable.

Gilmore frames abolition not as a question of what we can get rid of, but of what we choose to build and orient around instead. She argues that by investing in the vital systems of support that many communities lack — jobs, education, housing, healthcare, and more – we create the “conditions in which life is precious for all,” instead of simply punishing those who “mess up” due to that lack. Even as Gilmore observes how incarceration shapes nearly every aspect of contemporary US life, she urges us to seek out places and practices of freedom. In 2020, Gilmore was listed by Prospect as the one of the top ten thinkers during COVID-19, with the magazine reporting, “Gilmore has spent the best part of 30 years developing the field of carceral geography…As the failings of the US justice system come once again to the fore, Gilmore’s radical ideas have never felt more relevant.”

In addition to her prolific career as a scholar and author, Gilmore has also cofounded several grassroots organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. Be sure to check out her publications in the link in bio and look forward to seeing her here at American University in the future!

As part of our initiative to highlight abolitionists everywhere, we present Angela Y. Davis, a Black activist, feminist, philosopher, educator, and author for civil rights, racial justice, and other social issues.

From a young age, Angela Y. Davis believed racism and capitalism were dangers to the American justice society, leading her to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, and eventually the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-Black branch of the Communist Party focused on ending capitalism. Davis spent her time in Che-Lumumba Club elevating the branch’s ideals of helping “global revolution, third-world people, people of color” and advocating for racial equality, the rights of women, the end of police brutality, better housing, and “stopping the depression level of unemployment in the Black community.

In 1970, Davis’s work with political activists and imprisoned people led to her being accused of conspiracy, murder, and kidnapping, keeping her on the run for four months and in jail for almost 18 months. Although she was exonerated of all charges, her experience with the criminal justice system built her commitment to prison abolition and becoming a vocal advocate for the rights of incarcerated individuals. Her influential book “Are Prisons Obsolete?” called for alternative approaches to justice and rehabilitation and critiqued the “brutal, exploitative, convict-lease system.” Davis’ vision of a world without prisons challenges society to “reimagine a justice system that focuses on healing, restoration, and addressing the structural inequalities that perpetuate criminal behavior.”

Join us for our Spring lunch ‘n’ learn for undergraduates, graduate students, and other members of the AU campus community who want to learn more about contemporary issues in racial justice. This time, our panel of faculty and student speakers will be addressing the history and present day significance of solidarity work among student and youth activists for racial justice and Palestinian freedom movements. Advance registration is required.

Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted in December of 1981 and has continuously pleading his innocence for over 40 years.

Before his incarceration, Abu-Jamal was (and still is) highly involved within the Black community. He became one of the founding members of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party at the age of 14 where he was appointed as the chapter’s “Lieutenant of Information,” responsible for writing information and news communications. He also worked for several Philadelphia radio stations, including WHYY, covering police brutality and corrupt/racist White leaders.

While in incarceration, Abu-Jamal has been outspoken about prison reforms, the corrupt law system, and other forms of injustice. He has released fifteen books — including the 1995 best-seller “Live from Death Row” — detailing his account of the prison brutalities and humiliations he had to face, and a scathing indictment of racism and political bias in the American judicial system.

Abu-Jamal also released the first statewide prison radio station in the country called Prison Radio fully operated by incarcerated men and women. The radio station offers regular programming available to inmates and outside audiences.

In keeping with 2024’s Abolition Everywhere initiative, we’re highlighting the importance of abolition in the Black political tradition, from slavery to the present. But even as we commemorate Black History Month, the meaning and value of Black history is being attacked nationwide. So, this year we’re not just recalling the long history of Black resistance and transformative justice work, we’re celebrating Black historymakers in the here and now.

Stay tuned over the month as we highlight abolitionists everywhere.

Save the date for our first Lunch n’ Learn of the year on February 28, 2024 in collaboration with Students for Change, the Muslim Student Association, Students for Justice in Palestine, Black Student Union, Korean Student Association, National Association of Hispanic Journalists at AU, and Brave Spaces AU.

King
On April 4th, 1967–exactly one year before his assassination—Martin Luther King Jr. gave his now-famous speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Over 160 media outlets decried King’s speech; the NAACP accused him of endangering the civil rights movement; President Lyndon Johnson cut off all communications with King. Half a century later, “Beyond Silence” is considered one of his most astute and powerful speeches, and his insights on the Vietnam War and Cold War era US militarism have been borne out by time.

As the US commemorates King’s birthday today, we at ARPC honor what he and so many of his comrades and compatriots demonstrated.
1. To work for racial justice in the US requires opposing this nation’s investment in systems of colonialism, militarism, and economic exploitation that rely on and reproduce racial oppression.
2. Standing for justice is rarely celebrated in the moment. It requires us be unflinching in the face of condemnation, harassment, and silencing, and to stand and speak with those who are the most vulnerable. There is nothing short of the future itself at stake.
3. Though we’ve said it before, it bears repeating: our struggles are interconnected. We cannot free ourselves without reaching back for each other. None of us are free until all of us are free.

For the full text of “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” see the link in bio.

Author-activist Arundhati Roy has written, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

At ARPC, we are working every day to create a new world by putting research into action for racial justice and intersectional liberation.

Will you help us build that world?

Your support goes directly to our programmatic budget for initiatives like our Abolition Everywhere research group and series, our Pointing the Farm Bill Toward Racial Justice toolkit, and our ongoing work for reproductive justice and educational equity.

All who give $200 and up will be listed on our website as 2024 ARPC Changemakers. Everyone who signs up for a monthly donation—at any amount—will be listed as ARPC 2024 Sustainers. If neither of these options is a good fit for you, please know that we are grateful for any amount. Link to give in bio.

Wishing you a safe and happy New Years Eve and Day.

December 21st is the winter solstice—the Northern Hemisphere’s shortest day of the year. Given these tumultuous times, it seems all too appropriate to be sending you wishes for light, joy, and justice from the Antiracist Research and Policy Center on the cusp of winter’s longest night. After all, at this moment of heightened racism, religious bigotry, militarized violence, and xenophobia, research centers like ARPC are doing vital work to shed light on the conditions that create and maintain death-dealing racial hierarchies and on each our roles in transforming those unjust systems of power.  

We hope that it lightens your spirits to follow along with ARPC’s work, successes and exciting new initiatives. If it does, please consider giving to ARPC before the end of the year. Your support goes directly to our programmatic budget, boosting funds for community collaborations, public events, and critical research. From now through the end of next year, all who give $200 and up will be listed on our website as 2024 ARPC Changemakers. Everyone who signs up for a monthly donation - at any amount – will be listed as ARPC 2024 Sustainers. If neither of these options is a good fit for you, please know that we are grateful for any amount. Everything helps. Giving link in bio.

This is a pivotal moment for racial and social justice in education.    From kindergarten teachers to college professors, educators across the country are being banned from teaching about race or racial justice. Students of color face profound new obstacles in their path toward higher education, while at colleges and universities across the country, programs that support diversity, equity and inclusion are being outlawed and eliminated.

Right now, it’s more important than ever that we insist on the crucial role that organizations such as the Antiracist Research & Policy Center play in creating lasting, meaningful social change.

Every day at ARPC we put research into action to increase educational equity and access, challenge racism in policing and incarceration, and support reproductive and environmental justice for all people.

But we can’t do it alone. We need your support. This Giving Tuesday, consider giving the gift of a more just tomorrow by donating to the Antiracist Research & Policy Center. All donations, big or small, help us build a better future.

Link to donate in bio.

Join us with our partners at Bol on Wednesday, November 29th for a book talk and signing with Author-scholar Orisanmi Burton who will be joined by Joshua M. Myers to discuss Burton's new book Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, a radical reinterpretation of "Attica," the revolutionary 1970s uprising that galvanized abolitionist movements and transformed prisons.

We are so excited to partner with Bol, a worker-owned bookstore, at the community-centered creative space Creative Grounds to discuss how to transform our understanding of prisons—not only as sites of race war and class war, of counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of defiant Black life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility. Complimentary refreshments are served at 6:30pm, talk begins at 7pm. Free registration is required via Eventbrite, see link in bio.

Come join American University’s ARPC, Muslim Student Association, Students for Justice in Palestine, Students for Change, Black Student Union, Korean Student Association, National Association of Hispanic Journalists at AU, and Brave Spaces AU for a Lunch N Learn on Wednesday, November from 1-2:30 in Bender Library 150! In this session, you will hear from AU faculty Dr. Kenjus Watson and JD Lia Epperson, accompanied by student leader, Josiah Carolina, to discuss the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s overhaul of Affirmative Action and its impacts on students of color. We will also discuss the ways in which educational equity may be achieved, and the methods available to utilize in the face of inequity in campus.

The past three weeks have seen a global surge in racist, antisemitic, and Islamophobic speech and actions globally. Jewish and Muslim religious centers, humanitarian and civil rights groups, and individuals have been targeted with slurs, unfounded accusations, symbols of white supremacy, and bomb and death threats. Closer to home, American University’s students, staff, and faculty have been targeted with swastikas, calls for their death, and accusations of terrorism.


It may be tempting to dismiss these acts as bigoted bullying by a few hateful individuals. But as scholars of race and racism, we know that “hate speech” doesn’t exist in isolation. It uses ideas and language drawn from historical and contemporary systems of racist, religious, and colonial oppression. By pathologizing and isolating vulnerable people and communities, it justifies and incites the continuation of this violence. We have witnessed this in the recent killing of a 6-year-old Palestinian-American child, and we are seeing it reflected daily in the dehumanizing language of nations at war.

ARPC encourages our followers to not only join us in condemning these recent acts of hate speech, but in challenging the systems of racist, religious, and military violence that they are part of.

National Hispanic Heritage Month may be over but ARPC and ARPC Co-Sponsored Latinx Events continue. This week, check out Alex Rivera’s keynote at the Bishop McCabe Lecture, followed by the Sleep Dealer screening and colloquium. In November, join us for Intertwining Roots and two days of advancing Latinx Environmentalisms.

ARPC is a center for the study and practice of racial justice, decolonization, and intersectional liberation. Through our research and analysis, we are working to build a world where the collision of power with difference no longer leads to dehumanization, dispossession, displacement, and premature death. As we bear witness to thousands of lives taken and destroyed in Palestine and Israel–and to the fear and devastation of our colleagues and students–we are compelled to speak out against the earth-wrecking violences of war, occupation, religious bigotry, racism, and genocide. We know that these systems of oppression reinforce one another, and we refuse to pick and choose which ones we fight. As Fannie Lou Hamer once said, “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” We stand for an end to the war and freedom for all in the Middle East.

To help contextualize this global moment, our community of scholars and educators have compiled a list of resources. Link in bio.

We are delighted to announce an upcoming two-day event series: Intertwining Roots: Collaborative Antiracist Scholarship in Environmental Studies. From the humanities to the hard sciences, this two-day event features scholars working collaboratively at the intersections of race and social justice to explore how scholarship on the environment is transformed when approached through lenses of race, culture, and power.

JOIN US NOVEMBER 9 for a public book talk with the Co-editors of the award-winning anthology on LATINX ENVIRONMENTALISMS

On NOVEMBER 10, AU RESEARCHERS are invited to a workshop on collaborative antiracist scholarship in environmental studies.

RSVP at link in bio.

From the Reconstruction era’s Freedmen’s schools to Brown v. Board of Education, and from Little Rock to Ole Miss, education has been a front line of the struggle for racial justice and full enfranchisement.

With today’s ruling, has set us back by decades. And they’ve done it using those elements of the Constitution and civil rights law created to rectify generations of enslavement, disenfranchisement, and ongoing discrimination against former slaves and their descendants.

It’s no mistake that this decision has come while the histories, literature, and critical thinking of people of color in the United States are being banned in schools and libraries across the country.

The right’s goal is clear: the rollback of nearly seventy years of limited progress incorporating the bodies, histories, and perspectives of people of color into US education. But we won’t go back.

Follow us on Instagram to join our Friday Instagram Live event, The Fire Right Now, where we’ll discuss the future of coalitional organizing for educational access with scholar-activist Janelle Wong.

We’re excited to join the DMV’s Indigenous community at the Kennedy Center to celebrate Indigenous Washington DC and launch of ARPC affiliate Dr. Elizabeth Rule’s new book, INDIGENOUS DC: NATIVE PEOPLES AND THE NATION’S CAPITAL. Join us this Thursday for food, music, and community—and to get a signed copy of INDIGENOUS DC!

Juneteenth commemorates the day in 1865 when federal troops freed enslaved Black Americans in Texas—two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. In this sense, it is both an opportunity to celebrate Black liberation and a reminder that the promise of a truly free and racially just society has been deferred and denied for far too long.
 
We at ARPC take the lessons of Juneteenth to heart—even as we celebrate the successful struggles of Black communities for equity, justice, and self-determination, we know there is still much to be done. Every day, we bring together researchers, community-based organizers, and policy advocates to confront the ongoing impact of historical racism and build a just future. We know that ending racism and building an equitable and just society requires a commitment from all of us—scholars and artists, policymakers and activists, students and supporters. We ask each of you to commit to building a more just world by supporting our work in the coming year.
 
In thanks, and in honor of Juneteenth, we’re sharing some of APRC’s ongoing work with and to reckon with the influence slavery has had on AU's past and present. Our new interactive StoryMap, “American University’s History of Slavery” was created by APRC’s 2022-23 Public History Fellow in the History of Slavery and Its Legacies in Washington, DC, Joshua Johnson. Using archival documents and maps, Joshua created an interactive site where visitors can locate AU’s history with slavery within the larger context of slavery in Washington, D.C.
 
To see our new StoryMap and the other resources created during our 5-year project on slavery’s influence at AU—and to give to ARPC!—see the links in our bio.

For over fifty years, affirmative action has been a crucial—if limited—policy for increasing educational access and equity. But this month, it’s very possible that the Supreme Court will rule race-conscious admissions unconstitutional for any college or university that receives federal funds. As we await the Supreme Court’s decision, we at ARPC would like to remind you why affirmative action still matters for racial justice movements.

As a university-based racial justice organization, ARPC believes that colleges and universities can be vital partners in the project of catalyzing change, fostering racial justice, and increasing social equity. But that requires institutions of higher education to themselves be accessible and equitable. The field of college admissions is still far from level for students of color, who face both longstanding structural inequalities and ongoing racial discrimination.

This summer as we continue to intervene in political, scholarly, and changemaking spaces for the freedoms and liberties of reproductive justice, we lift up the voices of feminist activist-scholars working across all of these spaces. Here are some insights from our ongoing thinking partners from our public programs this past year. Visit our website to hear their full considerations for what we need to do in this political moment. to continue to engage with us in upcoming projects on . Thank you to scholars Elizabeth Rule .dc, Alexis Lothian, LaMonda Horton-Stallings, and Patricia Zavella for your wisdom and collaboration. https://www.american.edu/centers/antiracism/events.cfm

Congratulations to graduating seniors & AU faculty on an amazing Spring 2023 semester! You should feel pride in all of your hard work. We at ARPC look forward to witnessing all of the ways you carry your antiracist praxis with you into the real world. Here's 5 tips to help you get started on this next step in your journey. is lifelong work.

On April 30 through May 2, ARPC is proud to co-host with AU’s Center for Environment, Community, and Equity, Berkeley Food Institute, and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund (FSC/LAF), the “Pointing the Farm Bill Toward Racial Justice Summit and Briefing” held at Airlie Farms, Capitol Hill, and Eaton DC. The summit will be a historic convening of farmers, advocates, policy-makers, scholars, students, and the general public who are invested in making the 2023 Farm Bill a policy vehicle for advancing equity across each of the twelve titles in the bill. The summit will offer a comprehensive look at how the Farm Bill impacts farmers, landowners, and cooperatives as well as a collective analysis of climate justice, food system resilience, fair prices, international agricultural trade solidarity, and more.

@ federationofsouthercoop

@ ucberkeleyfood

@ americanu_cece

We’re thrilled to announce the 2023 Pauli Murray Residency for Art & Social Justice with Seema Reza ! This residency is an annual collaboration with ARPC, Eaton Workshop , & STABLE Arts to support artists working at the intersections of creation and racial justice.

Join us on Thursday, April 20 for an artist talk with Seema Reza at American University.

Then on Friday, April 28 poet, performer, curator, and community builder Seema Reza debuts a new body of work and multimedia exhibition and performance with “Light Multiplies: Healing Upstream” and will lead audiences through rituals both personal and communal. Informed by personal experience and more than a decade of community-based grief and trauma work across military, incarcerated, addiction disordered, and displaced populations, Light Multiplies will make use of kinetic text, digital projection, and portraits on glass. Reception to follow.