Symposium marks 400th anniversary of slavery in the US

Last Friday, UC Berkeley initiated a year-long initiative commemorating the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies with a day-long symposium. It drew hundreds of attendees who heard from more than a dozen...

Blog: Kashmir and Palestine share the struggle for self determination against colonial occupation

August 12, 2019 By Zainab Ramahi As a Kashmiri living in North America, I have been to Kashmir some twenty times. I have experienced the instability, power outages, curfews, and closures that are a cruel part of everyday life, and witnessed massive...

Blog: The road not taken: Housing and criminal justice 50 years after the Kerner Commission report

Last year, on the 50th anniversary of the “Kerner Commission” report, the Economic Policy Institute, collaborating with the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California, Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins University’s 21st...

On Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton: A call to recognize our shared humanity

We are in national mourning after a horrific week in America of mass murder. We extend our deepest sympathy to the families of those who have been killed and our hearts go out to the communities forever transformed by these acts of violence. We, as a...

Blog: Responding to Racial Demagoguery

President Donald Trump attacked four Congresswomen on July 14 in a Twitter tirade that culminated in a call for them to go back to countries they “originally came from” to “fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Three...

Blog: Single-Family Zoning in the San Francisco Bay Area

Editor's note (August 17, 2020): The author's have completed and published the full set of zoning maps and the accompanying Part 5 segregation report referred to at the end of this article In mid-June, the New York Times published ten zoning maps of...

Blog: Revived debate over school busing highlights deepening racial segregation

When Senator Kamala Harris told former Vice President Joe Biden “that little girl was me,” she evoked a mostly-forgotten era, a half-century distant, when federal courts mandated busing of black children to schools in white neighborhoods. The court...

Blog: Tensions over Reparations Expose Crisis of National Identity

The question of reparations for African Americans has entered the political discussion in a way it has never before. A number of candidates for the Democratic nomination for the presidency have publicly declared their support for a reparations plan...

Blog: The Troubling Elimination of Puerto Rican Public Schools

Escuela Luis Santaella, a shut down school outside of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Nearly half of the public schools in Puerto Rico have been closed in just nine years, an unprecedented elimination of public education facilities in recent US history. The...

Blog: Reforming anti-Tax Prop 13 is a Racial Justice Issue

With an amendment to Proposition 13 on California’s ballot in 2020, the conversation around the measure’s impact and its potential reform is intensifying. Understanding how Prop 13 not only resulted in exacerbating inequality, but in some ways welcomed it—by those who stood to benefit from public disinvestment—helps underscore the urgency of its reform.

Blog: The 1966 Hunters Point Uprising in “the San Francisco America pretends does not exist”

Riot police draw guns on residents during 1966 riots on 3rd Street. Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library This week, Haas Institute Assistant Director Stephen Menendian and Senior Fellow Richard Rothstein with Coblentz Fellow Nirali...

Unfinished Business

Boasting a reputation as a progressive stronghold and a sanctuary state, Californians pride themselves on inclusive cultural attitudes and regard their state as a hub of the “resistance” to the Trump administration’s exclusionary policies. Yet...

Blog: Does "Belonging" Mean Economic Inclusion or New Economic Structures?

In the last couple years, the conversation around "belonging" as a social and political term has become more salient, sparking important debates around how it is used to interpret and imagine social change.

When condemnations don't suffice: Christchurch mosque shootings

Like many others around the world we at the Haas Institute are horrified at the news that dozens of Muslim worshippers were gunned down by a white supremacist inside two of their mosques during Friday prayers in a normally quiet region of New Zealand...

White people: Let’s start by understanding our own biases

The headlines this summer were seemingly incessant: “Georgia woman calls cops on black man taking care of 2 white kids”; “Woman Assaulted Black Boy After Telling Him He ‘Did Not Belong’ at Pool, Officials Say”; Neighbor Calls the Police on a 12-Year...

Explore Othering and Belonging

Transformative Research Toolkit

Introduction We have seen and participated in transformative research strategies that defeated proposed jail expansions, won millions of dollars for community-prioritized programs, and built new community-led organizations that changed a political...
Apr
6

Depolarization Day

Want a chance to hear from experts studying the root of what’s driving us apart and how we come back together? Eager to build the skills to listen empathetically, elicit narratives of connection, and interview professionally? Looking for a chance...

Book Talk: Before Gentrification, with Tanya Golash-Boza

Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza's book Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap explores how redlining, incarceration, anti-blackness, and gentrification have resulted in DC becoming an extremely unequal city. She presented her book...