June 8, 2020
Dear CASBS Community,
Three years ago today, eminent scholar William Julius Wilson delivered the 2017 SAGE-CASBS Award lecture. As we honor the many who have suffered and died as well as those currently engaging in protest and struggle to achieve racial justice, Wilson’s words, available on this video, deserve listening to again. His work documents the persistence of inequality and disadvantage in multiple forms and for many racial and ethnic groups and immigrants. He identifies the fuel for the current social movement and the reasons we need a new moral political economy.
On Wednesday, June 10, CASBS will participate in the #ShutDownAcademia strike as one way of demonstrating our commitment to achieve racial justice and greater equity. The strike was called by Black academics but is meant in support of and in solidarity with all those who have experienced prejudice and discrimination.
We are confident that the scholars and thinkers we attract to the CASBS community will, through their research and voices, advance our understanding of the persistence of racism, the sources of inequality, and remedies for inadequate government and corporate responses. And not just in the U.S. but throughout the world. Our ongoing webcast series, “Social Science for a World in Crisis,” will highlight important research and insights from members of the extended CASBS family.
Wilson argues that inclusive multiracial cooperation to solve shared problems is more important than ever. The challenge Wilson poses and that CASBS accepts is to identify issues and programs that concern the families of all racial and ethnic groups, so that people within those groups, in common cause, can “honestly perceive mutual interests and join in a multiracial coalition to move America forward.”
Margaret Levi
Sara Miller McCune Director
Sally Schroeder
Deputy Director