More progress is needed to achieve equity in racial and gender representation in the push to diversify the physical sciences. In order to continue moving towards representation and equity, there is a need for more analytic tools that can help us understand where we are and how we got here. This may also enable meaningful systemic change. In this…

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education overturned the "separate but equal" principle promulgated in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. Yet, almost 70 years after Brown, schools continue to be segregated, and the structure of the public education system has fostered inequities across the nation. Although…

This essay is a response to Angela Harris' "Racing Law: Legal Scholarship and the Critical Race Revolution." It further explores what Harris calls the "grammars of governance" from a historical case-law perspective and from the structure of our contemporary educational organization. First, a little-known case involving violence…

Urban South Grassroots Research Collective for Public Education (USGRC) is a New Orleans-based coalition melding research and grassroots organizing for racial-economic equity. Buras examines her involvement as a scholar activist working in solidarity with community groups to document the effects of the charter school takeover on black public…

Diversity is a ubiquitous concept in Education. Our contemporary racial discourse has been taken over by diversity talk. That is, to talk about race in the colorblind era in the contexts of school admissions or educational policy is to do so through the language of diversity. However, the hegemonic ascendancy of diversity has been dependent on the…

"Resisting Divide-and-Conquer Strategies in Education: Pathways and Possibilities" examines the ways in which divide-and-conquer strategies operate in the American public education system. In U.S. education, these mechanisms are endemic and enduring, if not always evident. Coordinated, strategic, well-funded, politically-viable campaigns…

The advent of critical race theory (CRT) in legal scholarship changed the way in which legal scholars think about race and racism in at least three ways. First, CRT scholars argue that the problem of racial justice is fundamental to American law, whereas the previous generation of civil rights scholars saw racial justice as a problem of…

From 1896 to 1954, the "separate but equal" doctrine instituted by the landmark "Plessy v. Ferguson" case reverberated in public education in the United States until its rejection in the 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka" Supreme Court decision. In this integrative literature review, the authors sought to…

This conceptual analysis centers two historical periods in which Black communities in the United States secured educational rights for themselves in spite of (not because of) intervention from the federal government. Drawing from the Critical Race Theory, the authors argue that Reconstruction and the post-"Brown" era offer valuable…