This chapter introduces young Black changemaking. Black youth face racism at interpersonal, cultural, and institutional levels. Young Black changemakers take civic actions to resist racism. Our work brings a fresh, contemporary look at young Black changemaking that is drawn from youth’s own voices and relevant to the current times. The research study is set in Los Angeles, a city with a long history of anti-Black racism and resistance, and coincided with summer 2020, a time of racialized police violence and uprising. Sociopolitical development theory is an important foundation for understanding young Black changemaking. We end the chapter with the 10 main ideas found in the book.

In this chapter, we presented Black youth’s reflections on summer 2020 and the powerful protest movement for Black lives that reverberated about the globe. Young Black changemakers saw summer 2020 as a watershed moment in which real changes toward racial justice were happening. Summer 2020 connected Black youth’s personal experiences of racism to a historic movement for racial justice, continuing a legacy of fighting for racial justice. Alongside profound joy, inspiration, and hope, Black youth experienced sadness, frustration, numbness, anger, and fear. We captured these youth’s feelings while they were living through this momentous time, and they were still in the midst of processing the moment, their feelings, and their role in the movement. Summer 2020 activated agency, critical knowledge, and action for some, and for others, the movement advanced and solidified their purposeful commitments to racial justice for now and into the future.

The chapter is concerned with racial health disparities in the United States. These disparities are large, significant, and persistent. Black Americans are much more likely to become ill and to die from their illnesses than are White Americans with the same illnesses. Black Americans’ poorer health reflects health disparities that have social, economic, or political causes rather than biological differences between the two groups. The root cause of these racial health disparities is anti-Black racism, which includes individual racism (negative thoughts about and feelings toward Black people) and systemic racism (societal standards, cultural values, and formal laws that systematically disadvantage Black Americans). Both kinds of racism have very long histories in the United States and continue to pose significant threats to the health of and the healthcare received by Black Americans. Specifically, individual and systemic racism cause: (1) chronic stress, which produces physiological and psychological responses that threaten a person’s health; (2) racial housing segregation, which creates poor and under-resourced Black neighborhoods, containing numerous environmental threats to the residents’ health; (3) inequities in the quality of medical care received by Black patients and White patients; and (4) disparities in socioeconomic status, the strongest single correlate of a person’s health status in the United States.

This chapter is about the origins of anti-Black racism in the United States. It describes two separate but related processes. The first process involves historical events, of which slavery is the most important. In addition to systemic exploitation and degradation of enslaved people, slavery produced beliefs that enslaved people were inferior human beings. Reinforcing these beliefs was scientific racism – supposedly scientific theories that purported to prove the innate inferiority of Black people. Even after slavery ended, economic competition, racist laws, and social norms created social and economic disadvantages for Black people. The second process involves the ways humans think about the people they encounter. Humans place themselves and other people in social groups largely based on physical characteristics, particularly those that society considers to be important. Perceived race is a major determinant of how people socially categorize others, which forms the psychological foundation for racial biases at both the conscious and nonconscious levels. Thus, even in the absence of malevolent intent, it is likely that people will develop negative racial beliefs and feelings. These biases lead to the tendency of White Americans to justify the disadvantages experienced by Black Americans by attributing them to inherent defects in Black people.

Many American fascist groups arose in the 1930s out of the Northern Ku Klux Klan (KKK) of the 1920s. We can see the continuity by using British socialist theorist Raymond Williams’ concept, a “structure of feeling.” The 1920s KKK targeted Catholic, Jewish, and other non-white Protestant immigrants – though never abandoning its anti-Black racism – and the fascists narrowed their target to Jews alone, but common to both was the construction of fear and then anger. Yet a fundamental difference between the Klan and the fascists is equally important: the Northern Klan was a mass, largely nonviolent movement that won major victories by relying on electoral politics, while the small fascist groups used violence as their primary tactic. Too often “fascism” has been used as a condemnation without specific content. Examining the Ku Klux Klan and the fascists side by side and focusing on what fascist groups did can yield better analyses. While there are commonalities among fascists in different contexts and different historical moments, the term is most useful when understood as a “cluster concept”: a cluster of ideas, values, and actions not all of which will be found in each exemplar of fascism.

Shakespeare’s White Others’ conclusion engages The Comedy of Errors to reaffirm how race always matters. I argue that The Comedy of Errors’ concern with mistaken identity resonates with the modern Black experience. While considering my book’s preoccupation with the effects of racism, othering, anti-Blackness, and racial profiling, I turn to Patricia Akhimie’s Comedy of Errors criticism to consider how one can be “bruised with adversity” not just physically, but also psychologically. The conclusion’s title plays on the name of Shakespeare’s comedy because, as I see it, anti-blackness and anti-Black racism position white people, including white others, in opposition to Black people in what feels like a comedy of (t)errors: a space that is a genre of its own and akin to Negro-Sarah’s funnyhouse environment in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. Racial tribulation is a life sentence tied to the Black existence.

This chapter examines Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) with Black couples. Important clinical considerations (e.g., racial realities of anti-Blackness) are provided that must be integrated within the EFT therapy model to provide an appropriate adaptation that is culturally responsive couples therapy. EFT and attachment theory will need to be significantly modified to be a culturally responsive therapy to meet the needs of Black couples. Adult attachment needs to be conceptualized from a network approach (e.g., multiple relationships/collectivism) instead of only a dyadic perspective. In addition, acculturation (i.e., racial identity), race/ethnicity, institutional decimation and Black sex ratios, marriage, anti-Black racism, internalized stereotypes (anti-Blackness), Strong Black Woman/Superwoman Schema, John Henryism, and religion and spirituality are all important factors to consider in providing culturally responsive care and clinical interventions that strengthen treatment approaches with Black couples.

Enns reflects on the meaning of guilt and responsibility in the context of Indigenous struggles in Canada. While rarely uncomplicated, the question of who is to blame poses a unique challenge in the case of historical atrocities with enduring legacies. When those guilty of the original violations are long dead, yet leave behind institutions that perpetuate the conditions for oppression and privilege, it is tempting to assign collective guilt. With the help of Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, who argued in the aftermath of World War II for a robust understanding of collective responsibility, distinct from individual guilt, Enns navigates the effects of oversimplifying these concepts. Central to her discussion is the dramatic shift in contemporary scholarly and public discourses on victimhood and identity – on victimhood as identity – since Arendt famously wrote: “Where all are guilty, no one is.” With reference to the parallel ways in which victimhood is assumed as a permanent state and granted moral authority in North American Indigenous and anti-Black racism struggles, Enns notes the limits of an identity-based politics, and argues for a richer understanding of collective responsibility – one that will create a future world with a better inheritance.

This essay ponders how scholars can both pay attention to the specificities of racial formation in any period of what is sometimes called “American” history and also think about race at any time of that history as of our own contemporary moment. It begins by analyzing how the idea of transformable race informs late eighteenth-century American literature and how scholars have expanded our study of natural historical discourses in early America. After outlining drawbacks to this kind of tight historical focus, the essay engages how we might think about race in the antebellum United States more diachronically, as more of a piece with our own present moment. Highlighting the work of writers, artists, and scholars who are thinking about the moment of slavery and settler colonialism as our own moment, the essay turns to considering the work of William Apess alongside contemporary work of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe to enact sovereignty and to protect their land and, thus, to conjecture about what we might learn when we read what we generally call “early American literature” as literature both of its own time and our own.

Later stories about Raúl, channeling racialized ideas about class, criminality, minority, mental illness, and malingering, suggested that Raúl, as a lower-class Black man, was all but fated to go astray. “Youth” situates the origins of those racialized ideas at the turn of the century, at the height of Argentina’s (overlooked) scientific racism and a broad panic about the “degeneracy” of the lower classes. It was precisely then that the young Raúl himself began his troubles with the law and was placed by his father in a reformatory for unruly boys for over a year (aged 19–21). By tracing Raúl’s experiences with the police, the army, the courts, and reformatory authorities who linked his “degeneracy” to his Blackness, this chapter illustrates how racial narratives, wielded by state and medical agents, began to circumscribe Raúl’s life. The chapter’s key argument is that Raúl’s experiences in this decade, after leaving his parents’ house but before achieving widespread fame, flesh out a key transition in Argentina’s racial narratives between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: from marking difference primarily along lines of race, to marking difference along lines of class. His trajectory helps illustrate for the first time what it could have meant, in an embodied sense, for Afro-Argentines to “disappear” or amalgamate into a lower class of people racialized by a new, more diffuse form of blackness associated with poverty, marginality, or degeneration rather than strictly with African descent. This early twentieth-century shift in racial narratives in some ways defused the intensity of elites’ gaze upon Afrodescendants and Indigenous people, drawing it toward a wider contingent of lower classes. But the stain of African Blackness and accompanying prejudices did not go away; even as Argentina’s new racial narratives made room for some Afrodescendants to blend into Whiteness (as Raúl’s father, brother, and others did), they came down even more forcefully on people like Raúl who did not conform.