If anyone can recommend accessible pieces on the individual vs. systemic racism distinction, I’d be grateful. Some of Garcia’s work defends an individualist position (e.g.., his 1995 piece), but a fairly specific one (that racism is a vice grounded in volition). Mills has some work responding to Garcia, but because of the specific nature of Garcia’s position, it might be too narrow for a lower-level class. I apologize if I’m missing some obvious pieces–this is not an area I’m very familiar with.

In my Intro to Ethics courses for non-majors, I’ve regularly taught a 3(ish) week unit on how we should respond to injustice (so really, it ends up being about the nature and justification of protest). There are personal and political components; I vary the former pretty regularly, but I think I’ve hit on a good sequence for the latter. For the personal section, I’ve recently used the Nussbaum/Srinivasan anger debate and Linda Radzik’s paper on atonement, since that concerns how we should respond to injustice when we are its perpetrators rather than its victims. I end up excerpting all this work since it’s written for professional philosophers, but the main lines of argument are relatively straightforward

For the political section, I use Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” speech (sometimes this is supplemented with his “Letter to Thomas Auld”), Boxill’s “Self-Respect and Protest,” which covers the Washington/Dubois debate over the value of protest, and King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which never fails to surprise people who only know the bare minimum of MLK’s thought. Basically, all of this can be read as is, even by non-majors. This political part of the course is almost always the part I get the best feed back on, even though it only lasts 3-4 lectures.

I teach an undergraduate course on Racial Justice and Injustice. It may be a bit advanced for some classes, but most of my students when I’ve taught it have no background in philosophy, and they handle it well. I think a lot of these readings would work in shorter modules within more general courses. (I do two days on racial justice in my Intro to Political Theory course, mostly on discrimination theory.)

I only do one reading on the concept of race. I like Anthony Appiah’s “Race, Culture, and Identity” for this introductory purpose.

I do a couple weeks on reparations: Bernard Boxill, “A Lockean Argument for Black Reparations”; Jeremy Waldron, “Superseding Historical Injustice,”; A.J. Simmons, “Historical Rights and Fair Shares”; Adolph Reed, “The Case Against Reparations”; Debra Satz, “Countering the Wrongs of the Past”; Hilary McD. Beckles, “Britain’s Black Debt.”

I then do a couple weeks on discrimination: Sophia Moreau, “What Is Discrimination?” (She also has a new book coming out that I might assign from.) Deborah Hellman, When Is Discrimination Wrong? Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”; John Gardner, “Liberals and Unlawful Discrimination”; Jack Balkin and Reva Seigel, “The American Civil Rights Tradition: Anticlassification or Antisubordination?”; Richard Arneson, “Discrimination, Disparate Impact, and Theories of Justice”; Elizabeth Anderson, “The Imperative of Integration,” chaps. 7-8; Glenn Loury, “Racial Inequality and Developmental Affirmative Action.”

Finally, some weeks on applied topics:

Segregation: Anderson, Imperative of Integration, selected chapters; Tommie Shelby, “Integration, Inequality, and Imperatives of Justice”; Andrew Valls, “A Liberal Defense of Black Nationalism.”

Punishment and Incarceration: Michelle Alexander, “The New Jim Crow”; Karl Lippert-Rasmussen, “Born Free and Equal?” chap. 8.

Race and Political Representation: Clarence Thomas opinion in Holder v. Hall; Andrew Altman, “Race and Democracy”; Jane Mansbridge, “Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women?”

Policing: Matthias Risse and Richard Zeckhauser, “Racial Profiling”; Annabelle Lever, “Why Racial Profiling Is Hard to Justify,” Renee Bolinger, “Reasonable Mistakes and Regulative Norms”; Robert Gooding-Williams, “Fugitive Slave Mentality (NY Times March 27, 2012). (This is one with a lot of good new work coming out, so probably newer/better readings are out there.)

I have found success in my Intro level Contemporary Moral Issues course with the following. I give the students a set of core readings, and then I ask a subset of them to find supplemental readings for the class to discuss. For a unit on reparations for Black Americans, I used these core readings, and they worked quite well:

Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations”
Adam Ruins Everything (video), “The Disturbing History of the Suburbs”
Adolph Reed, “How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence”

Then students found great readings to share with their classmates, representing a diverse set of voices and viewpoints.

I’m teaching a contemporary moral problems course this fall. Just want to say first: thanks for this post.
Does anyone know of anything recent and accessible that can be assigned on policing in general? I’m looking for basic (preferably not contingent consequentialist) arguments on why there should/shouldn’t be (violent) police enforcement at all, and I don’t want to just assign Hobbes. (Obviously there’s not-so accessible stuff on state violence, or when it is accessible, isn’t as general as I want. I know of Suemas Miller’s book, “Shoot to Kill,” but couldn’t find anything brief enough in it. Right now, I’m thinking of assigning parts of Huemer’s chapter on “predation” in his book on state (il)legitmacy.)
I’m also interested in accessible but still philosophical work on restorative justice. I saw Radzik’s work on atonement mentioned, which I’m thinking of assigning. But I would be interested in any other specific recommendations.
Thanks!