DEI, Affirmative Action, and the Future of the Black Middle Class

On today’s episode of Justice Matters, co-host Maggie Gates speaks with Darcel Rockett,  senior journalist for the Chicago Tribune whose work centers on narratives for and about populations/communities who need to be heard. An avid documenter of the Black experience, she continually aims to shine a light on the many facets of race and culture. She is currently a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard where she is researching the impact of the Supreme Court’s reversal of affirmative action in higher education and the repercussions of the decision on the future of the Black middle class. In this conversation Darcell discusses the common threads she’s written about across her career, her reporting on the economic disparities in black communities as a result of housing, economic, and incarceration policies, her current examination of the effects of the reversal of affirmative action, the current attack on DEI policies and the historical context of these actions, and why she spends part of her reporting focusing on activists and artists who are doing work do build community in the face of hardship.