Reading the Past to Write a Better Future: On Public Scholarship with Victor Ray

Victor Ray is one of the leading voices on race and racial justice in the United States. Jamila Michener and Neil Lewis, Jr. talk with Victor about the current backlash to DEI initiatives in a conversation that connects research and personal experience to systems and power structures. Tune in to this wide-ranging episode to hear more about the current turn toward resegregation in the US, how organizations uphold structural racism, and the risks (and benefits) of doing scholarship in public.   Links to further reading from our discussion: Throughout the conversation, we reference Victor Ray’s work on critical race theory, mental health services to veterans, anti-DEI initiatives as segregationist, and especially his theory of racialized organizations. In our brief discussion on “mesearch,” we consider Ray’s essay on the subject and Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, a seminal book on poverty and housing justice. On resegregation, we look at policies leading to job loss and the undoing of civil rights, what is happening in the U.S. military, and attacks on DEI. We apply lessons from the theory of racialized organizations to the Department of Justice, Equal Employment Opportunity, university DEI initiatives, and academic leadership and freedom. On resistance, we mention No Kings protests, coordinated resistance to ICE in Minneapolis, and what James Baldwin wrote in a 1962 essay for the New York Times: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”