We begin with a narrative about the vast inequalities between the 2021 women’s and men’s college basketball championships (sponsored by the National Collegiate Athletic Association). These disparate events exemplify systemic inequalities across college athletics that we document with data showing sex-based disparities in participation, resource allocation, and leadership. We introduce a critical perspective on Title IX – the celebrated 1972 U.S. sex nondiscrimination law – arguing that aspects of institutions employed under nondiscrimination policy can nevertheless undermine the quest for equality. We outline a set of policy proposals to address gender inequalities. These include more aggressive enforcement of Title IX, policies to ensure equal resource allocation and protections for women student-athletes, and initiatives to increase opportunities for women’s industry leadership. We then theorize three routes to policy change – from the bottom up, top down, and outside in – as well as the institutional hurdles that stand in the way of change. Throughout this discussion, we make a concerted effort to highlight how sex segregation, inadequate representation, androcentric organizational culture, and market demands are hurdles faced not just by those seeking equality in athletics but by other marginalized groups as well.

A final possible path for change is from outside the system – that is, from the public and/or consumers of college sports advocating from the outside in. We theorize that fans will be less supportive of gender equity initiatives than the general public, given their investment in the product and the overwhelming media bias that places higher value on and coverage of men’s sports. We also predict those men who participated in formalized sports in high school will be more inured to gender inequalities and less supportive of aggressive change – a downstream socialization effect from participating in a sex-segregated system. We find strong support for our hypotheses, using a novel measure of fandom. We also find that parents with daughters who play sports express greater support for gender equity initiatives; however, this effect is dwarfed by the fandom and enduring high school sports dynamics. This shows barriers to change from the marketplace and the enduring impacts of sex-segregated institutions preventing change from the outside in.

This chapter focuses on the possibilities for pursuing change toward gender equity policy from the bottom up. Women are targeted beneficiaries of the gender equity initiatives (and therefore we expect their support to be relatively high); however, they comprise only 43 percent of student-athletes. Stronger majority coalitions thus require obtaining the support of male student-athletes. We theorize one route to coalitions via interpersonal contact. We build on the enormous extant literature on contact to identify conditions under which male student-athletes may become more supportive of policies for marginalized female student-athletes. These include when men understand the plight of the marginalized group (women) and when they trust the policymaking institutions (colleges and the NCAA). We argue that interpersonal contact is a mechanism by which the first condition is met. We provide clear evidence for our predictions with observational and experimental data. However, we also find that the sex-segregated institutions of college sports prevent significant contact between women and men, thereby vitiating the likelihood of such a coalition emerging to pursue change from the bottom up.

Chapter 2 analyzes the life histories and experiences of métis children who were wards of the colonial state in the 1930s in Senegal and Gabon. They received government funding and management of their education. The daily lives of métis wards became a battleground through which fictive and blood kin, métis activists, emerging African political leaders, French colonial administrators, and Catholic missionaries debated the meanings of race, culture, and child welfare. In Senegal, African stakeholders mediated métis children’s access to French education, living conditions, and colonial welfare payments based on their parentage from French and European men. The state was obliged to provide access to education for all children born in Africa, with métis as a distinct group. In Gabon, an association of adult métis lobbied for access to favorable material conditions for métis children and for them to attend a school for European children and reside in a boarding home without black children. Contestations around their welfare hinged on the French republican rhetoric of universal rights and equality and racialized hierarchies within African societies.

In order for democratic deliberative interactions in educational settings to fruitfully occur, certain favorable conditions must obtain. In this chapter, I chiefly concern myself with one of these putative conditions, namely that of school integration, believed by many liberal scholars to be necessary for consensus-building and legitimate decision-making. I provide a critical assessment of the belief that integration is a necessary facilitative condition for democratic deliberation in the classroom. I demonstrate that liberal versions of democratic deliberation predicated on this condition are puzzlingly inattentive both to the inevitability of segregation, as well as the inequities occasioned by “school integration.” I then move to probe the possibilities for democratic education in the absence of integration. I argue that neither the possibilities for deliberation nor the cultivation of civic virtue turn on an environment being “integrated.” Indeed, some kinds of segregation may be more conducive to fostering both deliberation and civic virtue.

Roaming around in São Paulo can be quite a stimulating experience: The city’s bustling rhythm, its effervescent cultural life, and its ethnic heterogeneity leave little room for doubt as to why Brazil’s largest city is generally considered South America’s most vibrant and cosmopolitan metropolis. Meanwhile, the city’s “tough concrete poetry”1 also bespeaks a configuration in which human bodies are dwarfed and citizens are constantly reminded of their respective place – a proverbial “city of walls”2 in which the utopia of a universally accessible and politically empowering public space has long since been thwarted by a maze of privatized streets, fortified urban enclaves, and an omnipresent array of surveillance devices. Despite the local elites’ attempts to depict São Paulo as a place which is defined by both its tolerance and its diversity,3 the city’s very material configuration thus indicates an urbanistic model which segments and separates more than it joins and unites. Rather than the clichéd melting pot, São Paulo resembles a kaleidoscope in which social class and ethnic affiliation assign each citizen a precise spatial coordinate in a cityscape defined by a mesh of internal frontiers – some brutally physical, others more subtle and ethereal – and the corresponding characteristic of an almost suffocating impermeability.

The rise in prison populations in the 1980s coupled with the silencing of the voices of those in prison compromised the visibility of some Black writers. Writers who were not incarcerated began to write about the prison experience, especially in terms of its effect on families. Although that trend can be seen earlier and later, the neoconservative 1980s catalyzed the need for a new approach to Black prison writing that would enable prisoners’ stories to be told by family members. At the vanguard of that movement is John Edgar Wideman whose willingness to tell the story of his incarcerated brother changed the trajectory of contemporary African American literature and its intersection with prison writing. This chapter utilizes the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of the carceral archipelago in order to advance a broader literary/cultural critique. Foucault enables us to extend Wideman’s inquiry outward from prison into a series of institutions designed to preserve and promote the idea of racial hierarchy despite mythological national claims of opportunity, democracy, equality, and equal justice for all well after the abolition of slavery and the end of legal segregation.

August Wilson had one of the most impressive debuts in the history of theater in America, an area whose highest echelons had previously been dominated, overwhelmingly, by white playwrights. The four plays Wilson brought to Broadway between 1984 and 1990, however, not only changed the scope of American drama but also the shape of its audience, drawing Black theatergoers to Broadway in numbers significant enough to impact Broadway’s sense of its audience and of the infinite possibilities of live theater. These 1980s productions thus not only set the parameters of Wilson’s ten-play cycle – one play set in each decade of the twentieth century – as it explores the tension in African American history between community expectation and heroic disappointment, but, within those parameters, also enabled Wilson to create on the American mainstage some portion of the history that might have been visible in a world where American history is always already Black.

Mapping one of the “global afterlives of slavery,” this chapter thinks about how the racist technologies of control in the United States, from slavery to Jim Crow Segregation, formed templates for other racist configurations of control across the colonial world. Charting the transatlantic reach of white supremacy transmitted through ecosystems of transcolonial influence, the chapter explores what it means to think about the legacies, or “afterlives,” of the policies and ideological structures that emanated from the histories of slavery in the southern United States, and how these traveled as markers of both precedent and caution to other nations, and especially in the case of South Africa. As a transnational afterlife to the histories of slavery in the United States, apartheid can be seen to grapple with the legacies of racial control such as segregation, employing the racialized landscapes of the post-slavery American south as metrics and templates for the articulation of segregationist platform that would lead to formal apartheid by the mid-twentieth century. The chapter argues that while slavery did not create apartheid, the transcolonial circulation of technologies of racial control did mutually inform and structure the national and cultural landscapes of spaces such as the American south and South Africa.

We all share a common interest in preserving the well-being of our planet. But the changing climate does not affect us in the same ways, at the same pace, or to the same degree. This is because of where we live, but also due to our respective levels of wealth and income, our physical and mental disabilities, the colour of our skin. We can’t address climate change without contending with issues of difference and inequality. It’s precisely because those least responsible for climate change will suffer its most severe impacts – within cities and regions and across the globe – that an approach which takes account of that imbalance is essential. Applying an equality lens to climate litigation is not just the right thing to do; it’s also more effective. By underscoring the ways in which climate change is a reflection of unjust power relations, a focus on equality makes it more likely that policy will attend to climate change’s causes and help ensure that the most culpable bear the greatest costs of redress. While some cases should advance the universal rights of everyone to a sustainable climate, litigation through an equality lens offers distinctive political, strategic, and jurisprudential advantages.