Racial Justice Working Group

Prof. Shelly Eversley of Baruch College—Interim Chair of the Department of Black and Latinx Studies, Co-Director of CUNY's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Transformational Learning in the Humanities initiative, and Provost’s Faculty Fellow—led department faculty in a discussion about "radical listening" as an approach to fostering productive dialogue about race and anti-racism. Through an interactive presentation, Prof. Eversley guided the faculty on practicing [...]

Prof. Nicholas Bloom convened a discussion of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee, former president of the think tank Demos and the current chair of Color of Change, the nation's largest online racial justice organization. McGhee charts how racism has been used to generate support for public [...]

The working group coordinated a simple program for the UPP faculty on “Anti-Racist Pedagogy: Course Structure and Classroom Practices.” Professors Jill Gross, Mehdi Heris, and Victoria Johnson made presentations on the ways they have approached setting the tone and creating “brave” space in their classrooms for open, honest dialogue about race, racism, and racial justice. [...]

Prof. Sigmund Shipp has joined the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning's (ACSP) Presidential Task Force on Anti-Racism.

Professors Sigmund Shipp and Jill Gross participated in the Race and Class Chat sponsored by the New York State Human Rights Commission.

The UPP faculty met to discuss the Racial Justice Working Group’s progress to-date and provide feedback on the working group’s next steps as a faculty-only committee. Prof. Sigmund Shipp presented a summary of the recommendations from the November 20, 2020 town hall. He also shared information about the School of Education’s Equity and Advocacy Committee [...]

UPP's Racial Justice Working Group has released a report summarizing the feedback shared at our community-wide town hall What Does an Anti-racist Department Look Like? The event took place November 20, 2020, and drew more than 85  students, alums, and faculty to engage with this question. The report also summarizes feedback gathered through an online questionnaire related to the [...]

Prof. Sigmund Shipp has given a lecture entitled “A Charge to Keep: Historically Black Colleges and Universities in America" to the Washington, D.C., Friends Meeting (Feb. 14), Cathedral Congregations' Racial Justice Task Force at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C. (Feb. 21), and R.C. Nusbaum Honors College, Norfolk State University, Norfolk, Virginia (February 22). He co-presented [...]

Following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor this spring (and countless other Black Americans before and since), and the larger national reckoning with anti-Black racism in the United States that began to unfold over the summer, a group of students in our department put their concerns about our practices, our culture, and our [...]

UPP's Racial Justice Working Group is pleased to announce What Does an Anti-racist Department Look Like?, a virtual (via Zoom) community-wide conversation on Friday, November 20, 2020, 6:00-8:00 pm, to which all members of the department—students (graduate as well as undergraduate Urban Studies majors), faculty, alums, and staff—are invited. Hosted and moderated by Racial Justice [...]