Racial justice in a post-COVID America

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the causes of the wave of social unrest now agitating American society and discusses actions that conflict resolvers may take in the nonviolent pursuit of peace and justice. In the United States, the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has disproportionately killed and sickened racial minorities, especially African Americans. Black people have long recognized and lived with these kinds of inequalities in housing, employment, health, and health care, but COVID-19 has made them visible for all to see. The debate between system maintenance and revolutionary work is certainly not a new one for our field; practitioners and scholars have been discussing these tensions for decades. Conflict resolution in and across networks requires specialized skills, including mapping and better understanding how knowledge circulates between and within varied political and social ecologies. People of color living in America’s most violence-affected cities are too often portrayed either as passive victims or irredeemable perpetrators of violence.