Minnesota Racial Equity Challenge: Understanding the Measurable and Immeasurable Effects of Racism in Minnesota

As Minnesotans and legal professionals, we share a responsibility to gain a deeper understanding of the history and issues that led to deep racial disparities in our state. By understanding the root causes, we can take more meaningful action to create equitable communities. Join us for an in-depth course with Dr. Anansi Wilson to learn more about the people who live in Minnesota, the racial inequities that currently exist in our state and their origins, and what we can do to eliminate these racial inequities.

Over the course of six months, participants will read selections from The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee and A Good Time for the Truth, edited by Sun Yung Shin, as well as other materials. After completing the course, participants will be recognized publicly by TCDIP and WILD with our Minnesota Racial Equity Challenge Certification.

September 27 - October 28: Course registration is open!
November 18: First class date!
May 12: Final class date

Course participants can expect to dedicate up to 5 hours a month to the Equity Challenge, including time outside of classes. Throughout the six month course, participants will attend 12 classes on Fridays at 9:00 AM. See the course syllabus for more details!

Dr. Anansi Wilson | Professor, Author, and Equity Challenge Course Facilitator

Dr. Anansi Wilson is an associate professor of law and the founding director of the forthcoming Center for the Study of Black Life and The Law at Mitchell Hamline School of law. They are an award-winning scholar of law, literary and cultural studies, a racial-and gender justice consultant, and an author of creative nonfiction. They received their law degree from Howard Law School and their PhD in African & African Diaspora Studies from UT Austin.

Their legal research is situated in legal philosophy, critical theory, political economy, and constitutional law. Their writing and scholarship primarily focuses on the history of Black thought, art, and imagination crafted in response to, and resistance against, the social, political, and legal realities of domination in the West. They seek to understand the processes of retrenchment after moments of social progress, and how freedom dreams are nevertheless sustained. Wilson’s work analyzes the ever-changing relationships between race, law, sexuality, power, and citizenship; both in the construction of law and policy and the maintenance of the way we live our lives. They are particularly concerned with 4th, 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment questions. Their teaching interests include criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional law, federal criminal civil rights, Fourth, 13th and 14th amendment law, Reconstruction, political and civil rights, critical race studies, LGBTQ issues, and all areas pertaining to race, law, and society.

Dr. Wilson employs Critical Race, Black Feminist, Performance and Women & Gender Studies and legal methodologies to examine how instances and (extra) legal precedents of anti-Black violence and racial-sexual terror continue to frame and impact notions of Black being and citizenship. Professor Wilson employs a multidisciplinary gaze to engage the creative, the legal, and the literary to uncover an emerging approach to encountering, understanding, and extrapolating anti-Blackness as a jurisprudential logic, underpinning, and precedent embedded in the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and decisions they inform.

Ready to join the challenge?