Leana Cabral (Researcher at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at Columbia University) wrote an article for The Conversation about anti-Black attitudes in elementary and middle schools in Philadelphia. From interviews with current and former Black students across three generations, Cabral found that students consistently described feeling like their white teachers had low academic expectations of them, they received harsher punishments than non-Black students, and that they “had to work twice as hard” as white students. Cabral also found that some students experienced classrooms that “affirmed their Blackness and did instill in them a sense of pride,” primarily in schools with a majority of Black teachers.

ProPublica ran an article describing how immigrants face harsher sentencing than U.S. citizens. The article cites Michael Light’s (Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin) research on citizenship and sentencing in California and Texas. In Texas, Light found that noncitizens received 62% longer sentences than citizens with the same charges and similar criminal records.

Reformed Journal featured Ryan Burge’s (Professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center at Washington University in St. Louis) new book, The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us. The book discusses the “hollowing out” of American religious life as a space to find belonging and community “no matter how much or how little one believed in Jesus Christ that particular Sunday.” Burge argues that “American religion has become an ‘all or none’ proposition—conservative evangelical religion or none at all,” leaving little space for theological or political moderates. 

While diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programing is often criticized as politicizing workplaces, Celina McEwen (Senior Researcher in Sociology of Work at the University of Technology Sydney), Alison Pullen (Professor of Gender, Work and Organization at Macquarie University), and Carl Rhodes (Professor of Business and Society at the University of Technology Sydney) argue that DEI is “failing because it refuses to be political at all.” In an article for The Conversation, they discuss three common shortcomings of DEI programs: 1) treating people as categories, 2) treating diversity as a “checkbox,” and 3) avoiding substantial discussions of power.