Black voters are getting a significant amount of attention these days.

In many ways, it’s a welcome development: After years of helping Democrats secure crucial election victories, black voters are being recognized as an influential voting bloc. This was perhaps most notable in 2008 and 2012, where their increased turnout helped deliver the White House to Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president.

But black voters had been wielding their power even before this, in situations like the 1984 Democratic primary, where the support of black voters single-handedly turned Jesse Jackson into a contender, or the 1992 primaries, which saw black voters help Bill Clinton secure the party’s nomination. Since the 1990s, black voters have largely backed the candidate that has gone on to win the Democratic nomination, cementing the group’s status as powerful players in presidential politics.

But that does not mean black voters are a monolith.

In other words, there isn’t a single black vote. There are many. A seemingly monolithic black electorate often coalesces only after individual black voters make decisions based on a nuanced set of political calculations. 

“Black voters today are behaving in a very smart and strategic way that they’ve always behaved in, but no one ever really lets us be smart,” says Keneshia Grant, an assistant professor of political science at Howard University. “Black voters get viewed as sheep who are being told where to go, and I think that’s wrong and the data shows that this is wrong.”

Black voters, much like other voters in the electorate, have varying ideologies. Some are more conservative than others. Some are far more progressive. And there other splits as well, along lines of age, gender, income, and geography. This has always been the case, and yet, it is rarely discussed in mainstream political conversations about courting black voters.

It’s an important reality, though, and could become particularly significant in the current election cycle. While prior elections have shown a united black vote, over the past few months black political journalists, strategists, and academics have made the argument that the 2020 race is incredibly fluid. With so many candidates in play, black voters could potentially spread their vote across multiple candidates in early-primary and caucus states, or push their support to a different candidate than former Vice President Joe Biden, the current frontrunner.

In fact, a lot of black voters (like voters more broadly) have said they are open to switching to a different candidate or are undecided about who to support, and the next few months of campaigning could be especially important for any campaign hoping to attract as many black voters as possible. Candidates need to do more than black outreach, though: They also must show a clear understanding of black voters, their needs, and their concerns. 

“Based on the different demographics of the black electorate, you do have some people making different choices about who their top candidate is or who their second choice is,” Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, a group focused on increasing black political power, tells Vox. “That is what is most distinctive about the black vote now. It isn’t exactly going en masse to one place.”

What black primary voting has looked like in prior elections

To understand what’s at stake when it comes to winning black voters in 2020, it’s helpful to understand how this group has voted in previous elections. A 2019 analysis from NBC News offers one of the most comprehensive histories of black voting behavior for the nine competitive national Democratic primaries that have occurred since exit polling began in the 1970s.

That project found that black voters have become an increasingly important share of the Democratic Party, going from a bloc that drew national attention as it flexed its muscle during the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns of civil rights activist Jesse Jackson — forcing concessions and promises from the Democratic Party in the process — to a group that 20 years later helped Barack Obama gain the electoral advantage necessary for him to clinch the 2008 Democratic nomination.

In what is perhaps more predicative to the 2020 election, though, the NBC News project showed that black voters have become powerful because of how they vote, with this demographic often rallying around a single candidate as the primary voting continues — but not always before. Securing a high margin of votes from black people can make it easier for candidates to win decisive victories in states with high black populations, helping to tip the nomination toward them.

Take, for example, the aforementioned 2008 Democratic presidential primary. While then-Sen. Barack Obama’s success over Hillary Clinton is often remembered — as is the fact that black voters began to overwhelmingly support him after the Iowa Caucus — what often isn’t as readily acknowledged is that for months before this, there had been a noticeable split in the black voters backing him and the black voters who weren’t. Early in the contest, Obama was supported mainly by younger black voters, as older voters and many black politicians backed Clinton, pointing to her established history in the black community, her work during her husband’s presidential administration, and for some, their belief that Obama wasn’t well-known enough to be electable.

But when a majority of this group flipped to Obama in 2008, they helped him advance further, propelling him to a win in South Carolina weeks later. Obama also won every primary held in a state where blacks were more than 20 percent of the population, and in some states, he managed to win over as much as 90 percent of black voters.

That primary offers a lot of lessons. For one, it shows that the margin of victory for a candidate among black voters matters almost as much as the victory itself, meaning that it’s in a candidate’s best interest to push their support among black voters as high as it can possibly go. The 2008 primary also provides one example of how black voting power has worked in recent elections: showing how a presumed frontrunner who was banking on black support (Clinton), and actually did have a lot of support from specific groups of black voters and the black political class, saw much of her lead evaporate after a different candidate proved they could also get votes from different portions of the electorate.

And after the primary, the 2008 general election also showed that black voters responded well to continued engagement and outreach later in the election cycle, with their turnout reaching historic levels in 2008 and 2012.

But if 2008 showed how black voters could help turn a candidate from an underdog to a presidential nominee, eight years later, in 2016, black voters showed how withholding their votes could keep a candidate’s chances as a longshot.

In this cycle, Clinton, again the presumed frontrunner, faced off against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. However, this time, Clinton’s lead with black voters held, helping her win the nomination. But there were fractures among black voters that were often overlooked or dismissed in discussions of the contest: a large chunk of young black voters, much as they had for Obama, broke for Sanders early and stayed with him through the primary, and also played a key role in Sanders winning in Michigan. But what differed this time is the fact that Sanders was unable to pull many older black voters to his side.

The story of black voters in 2016 has largely focused less on the primary than on the general election, with news reports in the immediate days after the November election focusing on how black turnout declined compared to 2008 and 2012. But when it comes to actually understanding differences among black voters, the 2016 primary matters: It shows some important differences among black voters that have only grown more pronounced in 2019. 

In 2016, the differences between Sanders and Clinton supporters weren’t just a matter of a younger voter/older voter split or a geographic one. Clinton also did better with black women than black men and attracted more support from more moderate black voters looking to maintain the gains of the Obama era rather than adopt an agenda of radical change. On the other hand, she also got less support from young black progressives looking for a jolt to the system, many of whom criticized Clinton’s record on issues like racial justice.

This reveals some important divides in how black voters settled on her candidacy and shows that while the majority of black voters may have backed Clinton, there were many different reasons and motivations behind why they did (and in some cases did not). More importantly, the way these divides intersect and diverge is critical to understanding the behavior of the black electorate now. Elections may have shown that black voters often become an electoral monolith, but they are far from being an ideological one.

“Black America is no more monolithic than any other group,” Theodore Johnson, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice who studies African American politics and black voter behavior patterns, told Vox. “Whatever the spectrum is for ideology and politics, black voters are scattered all along that spectrum just like any other racial group.”

Biden is currently the leading choice for black voters — but that lead isn’t indestructible

In the 2020 election cycle, it’s likely that we will see high black turnout and enthusiasm. Many black voters will mobilize for a number of reasons: a desire to oust Trump, an interest in a new anti-racist policy agenda in the White House, and a hope for change on the issues affecting their daily lives and communities.

“Black voters want to back the candidate who is going to win, and in the Trump era, that also means backing the person most likely to push Trump out of office,” Johnson says.

With the start of primary voting still a few months away, we can’t definitively say who will benefit from this. Currently, polling shows former Vice President Joe Biden having a large lead among black voters, beating his competitors by double digits with this group. Biden is banking on black support, and his team has increasingly indicated that it sees the majority-black South Carolina primary, which will happen on February 29, as critical to his chances of winning the nomination. According to an October poll from Winthrop University, for now, his plan is solid: 46 percent of black voters in South Carolina say he’s the most likely candidate to get their support.

“The black folks support Biden, next to Jesus right now, that’s where he is,” Dot Scott, head of Charleston’s NAACP chapter, told Vox’s Li Zhou recently, pointing to Biden’s deep ties to black communities in the state and his role as Barack Obama’s vice president.

When the primary began earlier this year, some experts thought things would turn out differently. “I went into [this election cycle] thinking that this would be a cycle where we would see black voters’ political diversity at play,” Johnson told me. He noted that last winter and spring, the field seemed to be wide open and full of relatively unknown candidates of different ages, racial backgrounds, genders, and political ideologies, potentially leaving black voters to spread out across multiple candidates.

But that changed once a particular candidate entered the race. “As soon as Biden jumped in, it sort of ruined the calculus,” Johnson says of the former vice president’s leap to the top of the polls this spring, a position he has maintained (with some stumbles) in the months since. “He’s such a known quantity.”

As I wrote in June, there are a lot of reasons why some black voters started lining up behind Biden early. Some black voters say their support makes sense given their pragmatism, and they believe that Biden is the only “electable” candidate who will be supported by more moderate white voters and some conservatives unwilling to vote for Trump. Other black voters place a lot of importance on Biden’s role as Obama’s vice president and support him due to that history. And some black voters believe that Biden is actually the best policy choice, that his incremental approach to civil rights and call for a return to “normalcy” is the right one in this particular moment. There are voters who believe more than one of these things and others who believe all three.  

“There is an aspect of this that is about who can put up the fight that is going to be required to take Trump down,” Shropshire tells me. “And some black people know that part of Biden’s narrative is that he’s a fighter and that he fought for Obama. And that is not insignificant.”

Some of these arguments have been pushed frequently by the Biden campaign, which has repeatedly emphasized the former vice president’s connection to black voters, particularly the older, more moderate voters who regularly turn out for elections. “They have a sense of who my character is and who I am — warts and all,” Biden told a group of black reporters in August.

Polling also shows that this group is supporting Biden strongly. An October poll from Morning Consult, for example, found that Biden has 48 percent support among black voters aged 45-54, 53 percent among those aged 55-64, and 56 percent among those 65 and older.

Biden is also quick to remind voters of his role in the Obama administration, which also likely plays a role in these numbers. “The Biden campaign has been masterful at messaging Biden as the ‘great friend and ally of Barack Obama,’ who Obama loved so much and chose as his vice president,” Grant, the Howard University professor, says. “To the extent that black people are saying that they support Joe Biden, I think that they are supporting who they think has the highest likelihood of being competitive in a general election and their opinion of Barack Obama.”

However, she adds, “I don’t think they like Biden as an independent person who’s running and has policies they are enamored with.”

This latter point is telling: Given criticism of the former vice president’s record on some issues and arguments that he isn’t strong enough on matters of racial justice to be the best pick for black voters, there could be an opening for a different candidate to pull support from Biden in the coming months. But that candidate, and anyone else looking to shrink Biden’s lead with black voters, needs to be working to make inroads with them now.

Other 2020 candidates have a chance to capitalize on splits among black voters

While Biden might have the majority of the black vote now, his support can’t really be taken for granted. Just look what happened to Clinton.

Generally speaking, at this point, someone defined as a “black Biden voter” looks very similar to those who strongly backed Clinton in the early months of the 2008 primary: they’re more likely to be older, are more closely aligned with the Democratic Party, and in Biden’s case are more interested in returning to a stable state of affairs after Trump than voting for a change agent.

And while all of this is currently working in Biden’s favor, it isn’t a completely sure thing that this will permanently be the case. After all, much like in 2008, many of these voters could still move if they believe another candidate stands a better chance of winning the primary. As Angela Geter, the Democratic Party chair in South Carolina’s Spartanburg County, told Vox earlier this month, “Nobody has it in the bag. Everybody needs to put in the work.”

In fact, recent reporting from the New York Times has highlighted that some of the splits among black voters seen in recent elections are already highly noticeable in the current primary contest. Older black women and men, for example, are far more sold on Biden than their younger counterparts, a trend consistent with the 2008 and 2016 primary cycles. A September Essence poll found that black women aged 18-34 ranked Biden fourth, putting him behind Sanders, Harris, and Warren. Older black women, however, ranked Biden first, supporting him in high enough numbers to make him the overall leader in the poll.

And while October polling shows that roughly 40 percent of African American respondents support Biden right now, his numbers with black voters under 45 are lower than that. The aforementioned Morning Consult poll, for example, finds that just 32 percent of black voters ages 35-44 support Biden. For the youngest bloc of voters, aged 18-29, this number falls to 29 percent.

The figures match with what experts tracking black voters of different ages have seen. Those who are not Biden supporters are more likely to be (but aren’t exclusively) younger and are often further to the left in their ideology. When they look at Biden, they see not stability but a candidate whose call to return to the Obama era is insufficient to deal with the current political reality — a reality that differs in many ways from what Obama himself faced while in office.

There are also questions about how Biden would navigate a political landscape that has been further shaped by a surge in activism among the black Left and a growing desire for antiracism among some white liberals. And as Vox’s Ezra Klein wrote in September, the fact that Biden differs from the 44th president in terms of style, politics, and demographics means that he “will not be able to pursue an Obama-like campaign or run an Obama-like administration,” something that goes against his efforts to present himself as a natural continuation of the Obama presidency.

There have also a been series of issues on the campaign trail — including Biden’s opposition to using busing for school desegregation in the 1970s, his support for the 1994 crime bill, and his many recent unforced errors when discussing race and policy — that are a large part of the reason why many younger black voters say they’re looking to take their votes elsewhere. Some of them are trying to convince their elders to do the same.

Many of these Biden skeptics would likely fall into the roughly 20 percent of respondents who told the Black Census Project earlier this year that the Democratic Party is taking African Americans for granted. And these voters want their chosen candidate to have a clear vision for how they plan to fight racism and aid the black voters who help deliver the nomination and, they hope, the presidency.

Perhaps recognizing this, some candidates trailing Biden with black voters have fought to make inroads with specific groups separate from the often older and typically more moderate black voters Biden is currently leaning on.

Sanders, for example, has worked to build on the connections he established in 2016 with younger progressive black voters and he has also worked on outreach to other black voters attracted to his calls for a political revolution.

Harris has targeted black women, who are among the most consistent black voters. In the wake of critiques from some African Americans that a black woman can’t win against the current president, she has also been more proactive than other candidates in going after Trump.

Booker, the only other black candidate, has noticeably struggled to find an exact lane with black voters. But he has focused on highlighting a message of hope and justice while speaking with mannerisms of the black church, suggesting that for now at least, he is likely looking to peel voters from any of the other candidates.     

Other candidates have largely used issue agendas and discussions of racial justice, be they platforms focused on specific issues like police violence and reform (Julián Castro) or larger “black agenda” platforms addressing a number of issues comprehensively (Pete Buttigieg) when making appeals to black voters.

In another primary cycle, these pitches — and the fact that the Democrats have the most diverse primary field in history — might have been more persuasive to black voters. But right now, many these candidates, and especially the candidates of color, haven’t really risen to the top of the list for many black voters.

The candidate who currently faces the biggest pressure to reach black voters — and also stands to make the biggest gain with black voters as of now — is Warren, who has seen her level of national support among black voters increase several points in recent months but has not done well enough yet to catch Biden. In the coming months, her efforts to make inroads might face additional hurdles among some groups of black voters who value familiarity and name recognition.

Warren’s strategy has largely revolved around using her policy proposals — from her plan to provide support to historically black colleges and universities and black students struggling with student loan debt to her plans for black women worried about maternal and infant mortality — to highlight various ways that racial injustice has affected black Americans’ quality of life. And as she works to cut into Biden’s lead in South Carolina, Warren is also trying to build connections with black community leaders in an effort to grow her base of support.

Those efforts are being watched closely by black voters, and they could become extremely important in the coming months. “She’s playing the long game — black voter outreach isn’t something where you do it well for a month and then see voters swing,” says Johnson. “But if Biden stumbles, she’s there to pick up all of that support because she’s putting in the work now.”

Undecided black voters could also play a big role in the primary and the general election

Of course, all of this talk about black voters and the differences between them overlooks something else about black voters a few months before the first primary contests: A lot of them are still undecided about who they will vote for. In fact, some polls show that this undecided group is arguably bigger than the voters who have sided with any of the candidates in the field.

An August poll from Pew, for example, found that while Biden held the lead among black voters, 45 percent of black voters polled weren’t currently supporting a candidate. The more recent Winthrop University poll found that while 46 percent of likely black voters in South Carolina currently support Biden, 44 percent of black respondents said they might change their mind about who they are supporting and 9 percent said they don’t know yet who they are voting for. Just 41 percent said they were very sure about their vote.

Looking at the specific groups of black voters candidates are courting — like young voters and black women — a lot of them remain undecided, too. In June, the University of Chicago’s GenForward Survey found that 24 percent of young black respondents aged 18-36 said they would support someone not currently in the primary race. In September, the aforementioned Essence poll found that roughly one-quarter of the black women it contacted were undecided.

This suggests that black voters are carefully weighing their options and are looking at multiple candidates or, in the cases of other black voters dissatisfied with the options, are deciding if they will vote at all. And coming after years of black political strategists arguing that the Democratic Party needs to do a better job of engaging with black voters beyond eleventh-hour calls for them to get out the vote on Election Day, what happens in the coming months could be especially important to convincing some black voters that they should turn out next November.

“The party is going to have to get the people who haven’t been participating to participate,” Grant says, noting that some undecided or infrequent black voters “will support the person who went and got them.”

How candidates go and get voters will depend on their outreach. Polls of black voters have shown that there are multiple priorities for different groups, including issues like health care, education, climate change, racism, and criminal justice. Who black voters, individually, will ultimately vote for is far from settled. Their process of determining who to support can’t be reduced to simple statements about a universal “black vote.”

“It would be a misjudgment for people to think that any of these numbers are baked,” says Shropshire. “There’s just so much time left.”

Georgetown University is joining a growing movement of colleges providing restitution for their ties to slavery, announcing on Tuesday that it will launch a new fundraising effort to assist the living descendants of the 272 enslaved men and women sold by the school’s Jesuit founders.

The announcement comes six months after students at Georgetown voted to create a fund to support the descendants, with students committing to the creation of a $27.20 student fee that would generate roughly $400,000 annually to support the descendants. 

The April referendum was non-binding but marked an important moment in a recently resurgent national conversation about reparations that has involved activists, presidential candidates, and other academic institutions. The final decision on the funding plan, however, was left to university officials. For months after the vote, the school did not comment on whether it planned to adopt the proposed fee, leading to increased pressure from the students who voted for it. 

Now, Georgetown says that it will move forward with the effort, but in a different way than what students voted for. Rather than creating a reparations fund through a new student fee, school officials say that the university will rely on fundraising to pay for it, sparking criticism from some students skeptical that a donation-based program will be sufficient.

“We embrace the spirit of this student proposal and will work with our Georgetown community to create an initiative that will support community-based projects with Descendant communities,” Georgetown president John J. DeGioia wrote in a letter to the university this week. In the same statement, DeGioia added that the school “will ensure that the initiative has resources commensurate with, or exceeding, the amount that would have been raised annually” through the proposed student fee. 

According to the New York Times, the fund, which will also be used to help pay for Descendant community-based projects like health clinics and schools, is just one part of a larger commitment sought by the descendants of those sold in the 1838 deal that generated roughly 3.3 million in modern dollars, and helped settle the school’s debts. In 2016, the Times notes, a group of descendants asked for “$1 billion for a foundation that would finance educational, health, housing and other needs.”

Georgetown is the third school in the past two months to announce plans to provide some form of financial restitution to the descendants of the enslaved. In September, Virginia Theological Seminary announced a $1.7 million fund to “help address the ‘particular needs’ of the descendants of slaves who worked at the seminary,” and create new programs supporting black clergy and alumni. Less than two weeks before Georgetown’s announcement, Princeton Theological Seminary announced a $27 million program that will include scholarships and other educational efforts aimed at better acknowledging the school’s ties to slavery. 

While the three schools are being commended for reckoning with and acknowledging the specific ways their institutions benefited from the labor and sale of enslaved men and women, the efforts have not come without criticism. Some students arguing that the measures still don’t go far enough. 

More schools are examining their ties to slavery, but they’re dealing with that history in different ways

A growing number of schools have started to look into reparations and restitution for descendants of the enslaved. But most of these schools have stopped short of supporting actual funds to provide compensation, instead launching studies to better understand how they profited or otherwise benefitted from the use of enslaved labor.

These efforts have led to initiatives like Universities Studying Slavery, a University of Virginia-led consortium of roughly 50 schools that examines the history and legacy of slavery and its continued impacts in the present. Individual schools have also looked into the matter; earlier this year at the University of Virginia, for example, a genealogist began working to identify and find the descendants of some of the 4,000 slaves estimated to have worked on the university’s campus before 1865.

The majority of these projects have not yet led to financial reparations, instead culminating in the announcement of new academic programs or efforts to reduce the on-campus prominence of figures who owned men and women. However, in some cases, these programs have served as the first step toward the creation of a larger funding program.

At Georgetown, for example, the announcement of the new fundraising effort comes years after the school first began to study the 1838 sale. In 2016, the school announced a new preferred admissions program for living descendants and also said that it would rename two campus buildings after black Americans. As those announcements occurred, the school also said that it would study the sale further and genealogists were able to identify many of the descendants of the 272 men and women.

In 2016, the New York Times reported that there were potentially thousands of descendants of the people who were sold, the majority of them concentrated in Maryland and Louisiana. An April Politico Magazine article noted that some of the descendants have spent generations living in towns like Maringouin, Louisiana, which struggles with a limited number of available jobs, below-median income, and an under-resourced school system.

But what was possible at Georgetown may not necessarily translate to other schools. The 1838 sale was extensively recorded, which made it possible — but not necessarily easy — for living descendants to be located. And some supporters of reparations programs at colleges have argued that these programs should go beyond announcements of new funds or scholarships to acknowledge each school’s history and tell a more complete story of how the institution built its success on the backs of enslaved men and women. 

This is something that came up when Princeton Theological Seminary announced that it would set aside $27 million for scholarships and other initiatives as it works to acknowledge its ties to slavery. After the program was announced, black students at the seminary said that the fund is a good start, but added that the school still had more to do, arguing that the $27 million was an insufficient amount and that the school also needed to address how it  “used theology to justify the institution of slavery.” 

And some academics studying reparations, like Duke University’s William Darity, argue that while university-based programs are well intentioned, they are ultimately not sufficient to deal with an issue that benefited the United States as a whole. 

“It’s the federal government’s policies and practices that permitted these atrocities to take place,” Darity told NPR this week, “both because of the legal framework the government established but also because of its implicit approval of these kinds of practices by its failure to intervene.”

It is likely that as the national debate about reparations moves forward, colleges and universities will continue to be active participants in discussions about what America owes to the descendants of the enslaved. But if the country is truly committed to answering that question, schools can’t be the only ones taking action. 

Daniel Pantaleo, the NYPD officer who was fired in August for using a department-prohibited chokehold that contributed to the death of an unarmed Eric Garner in 2014, has filed a lawsuit to get his job back. 

The lawsuit, which was filed by Pantaleo’s lawyer Stuart London in Manhattan civil court on Wednesday, argues that the former officer’s firing was “arbitrary and capricious.” London also told the New York Post that he hopes the state will find that an NYPD judge was wrong to recommend that Pantaleo be fired earlier this year following an administrative trial.

When NYPD commissioner James O’Neill fired Pantaleo, he pointed to NYPD Judge Rosemarie Maldonado’s August recommendation that the officer lose his job for recklessly using the chokehold and for making an “implausible and self-serving” argument as to why he had done so. Garner’s death first drew national attention in July 2014 when a video taken by bystander Ramsey Orta showed Pantaleo using a prohibited chokehold on Garner, after the officer had approached the man for allegedly selling untaxed loose cigarettes. 

The firing meant that Pantaleo was no longer eligible to receive his pension, but he would be given any money that he had already paid into it. 

News of the new lawsuit was praised by some police groups in New York City, including the Sergeants Benevolent Association. “He never should of been fired! He was scapegoated by a cowardice police commissioner,” the group tweeted on Tuesday. “The real story as to why officers were making an arrest for loose cigarettes was never told.”

The suit has been strongly criticized by police reform advocates who argue that Pantaleo should not get his job back and should actually face more punishment for Garner’s death. In recent months, Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, has also called for other officers involved in Garner’s 2014 arrest to be disciplined and held accountable. 

”Pantaleo’s decision to seek his reinstatement is not only disrespectful to the Police Commissioner and NYPD, but also the Garner family,” Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the  National Action Network, said in a statement. “He has shown no contrition or acknowledgment of his violent actions that ultimately killed Eric Garner.”

It took years for Pantaleo to face discipline for the 2014 arrest that led to Garner’s death 

The August termination marked the first serious punishment that Pantaleo had received since Eric Garner’s death on Staten Island in 2014. Garner, a 43-year-old father of six, died of cardiac arrest following the 2014 encounter and a city medical examiner argued that the pressure placed on his neck — as well as the subsequent pressure on his chest after officers forced him to the ground — played a role in his death. Garner’s cries of “I can’t breathe” were recorded by a bystander and became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Months after Garner’s death, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo on criminal charges, a decision that was heavily criticized by activists and sparked protests. Just this July, the Department of Justice announced that after years of investigating the incident, the agency would not pursue civil rights charges against him.

The NYPD initially argued that it could not pursue disciplinary action against Pantaleo until a federal investigation into Garner’s death was completed. But in 2018, the NYPD’s Civilian Complaint Review Board announced that Pantaleo would finally receive an administrative trial this year, a process where a judge would hear evidence and recommend if Pantaleo, who had been on desk duty since Garner’s death, should lose his badge. In August, Maldonado recommended that Pantaleo lose his badge for the 2014 incident.

Pantaleo is the only officer who has faced any disciplinary action for Garner’s death. No officers have been indicted and just one other person, NYPD Sgt. Kizzy Adonis, has ever faced the prospect of disciplinary action or punishment related to the case. 

Adonis was scheduled to have her own department disciplinary trial this year but it was canceled in late August after she agreed to plead guilty to counts of failing to supervise other officers at the scene on July 2014. The announcement also noted that Adonis would lose 20 vacation days as punishment.

For more than a week, students at the University of Connecticut have been outraged over a recent video showing a small group of white students walking on campus, yelling the n-word. As anger over the incident has grown, UConn’s black students have stressed that the controversy highlights a long-standing set of problems on their campus: Racist acts are continuing to alienate the school’s black students, and UConn’s administration is not doing enough to punish students for it. 

The current controversy stems from an 11-second video that spread online after it was recorded on October 11 by a black UConn student sitting in his apartment. In the video, three students are seen walking across the parking lot of the school’s Chester Oaks apartment complex at night. Two of them can be heard saying the n-word multiple times in quick succession, saying the term louder with each repetition.

On Monday, the same day that students held a march and rally over the incident, campus police arrested two of the students in the video, identifying them as Jarred Karal and Ryan Mucaj. According to the Washington Post, in an incident report filed by police, Karal and Mucaj, both described as white, 21-year-old male students, had been playing “a game in which they yelled vulgar words” as they walked with a third student. 

After arriving at the parking lot of the student apartment complex, they “switched to saying a racial epithet,” according to the report. The men were loud enough for some students in the complex to hear the shouting from their apartments.  

On October 21, Karal and Mucaj were charged with ridicule on account of creed, religion, color, denomination, nationality or race, a charge that focuses on violations of the state’s hate crimes statute. The Post notes that this is a misdemeanor charge and that state laws dictate that the maximum punishment for this offense can range from 30 days in jail to a small fine, or a combination of the two.

The two students were released from custody after promising to return for an October 30 court date. The third student who was with them in the video was not charged, and police said their investigation showed that he did not use the slur. A UConn spokeswoman told the Post that campus administrators are still looking into what disciplinary action the students will face. 

The school says the use of the slurs is troubling. “It is supportive of our core values to pursue accountability, through due process, for an egregious assault on our community that has caused considerable harm,” University of Connecticut President Thomas C. Katsouleas said in a statement on Monday evening.   

But as the fallout from the incident has continued, black students at UConn say that Katsouleas has largely been missing in action as the racial slur controversy has unfolded, and that the university has had an inadequate response to both the recorded incident and other incidents of racism on campus. Now students are calling for the university to do more than condemn racism through public statements; they want the school to take aggressive action to make sure that such an incident doesn’t happen again. 

UConn’s black students say their school needs to have a stronger response to racism on campus

Student outcry over the video grew quickly, as black students argued that the incident was reflective of deeper issues when it comes to racism at the University of Connecticut, where black students make up roughly 7 percent of the student body. 

“I don’t feel comfortable here anymore,” UConn student Areon Mangan told local news outlet WTNH last week. “That was actually right outside my window, and that’s just so upsetting, like, that hurts.”

Black students on campus say that they are especially concerned with the university’s limited response to the incident in the immediate days after the video began spreading online, noting that the first campus response came not from Katsouleas but from the university’s housing department, which held a community meeting for students to discuss the issue. According to the editorial board of the campus newspaper, Katsouleas waited until a week after the incident to send an email to students condemning the video and announcing that the school would launch a nationwide search for a chief diversity officer. 

Students, meanwhile, argue that the university needs to take strong disciplinary action against the students in the video, with the school’s editorial board condemning the  university’s response as “painfully slow and underwhelming.” 

“Contrary to what many may believe, racism is alive and well at UConn and beyond,” the board noted in a recent editorial. 

University faculty, like UConn sociology professor Noel A. Cazenave, have also issued public criticism of the university’s response. In a letter to the editor published Monday in the campus newspaper, The Daily Campus, Cazenave argued that the university has long failed to adequately respond to racism and inequality on campus. He also notes that the issue isn’t limited to students, pointing to the university’s dwindling number of black administrators and stagnant level of black and Latinx faculty. 

“By not responding quickly and decisively to UConn’s most recent incidents of racial hostility you have stumbled out of the gate and left the impression that you are both ignorant of and uncaring about our concerns,” Cazenave added in his letter, which was addressed to Katsouleas. “Even more importantly, by your painfully slow response —following more than a week of silence — you have unwittingly condoned campus racism in ways that makes people of color here at the University of Connecticut feel both unwanted and unsafe.”

Student groups have also called attention to another recent incident involving racial slurs, this one occurring when two fraternity members allegedly used a racial slur against a female student at a party. On Monday, UConn’s NAACP chapter issued a list of eight demands for the university, arguing that it needs to take disciplinary action against the students involved in both incidents to show that racism on campus will not be tolerated. 

“Black students at this university account for about 7% of the student population. We have a collective responsibility to ensure their dignity, safety, and rights as students of UConn are protected,” the group said in its letter. They added that the use of slurs on campus  “displays a lack of compassion, morality, and respect.” The UConn NAACP chapter has called for the fraternity involved in the other recent incident to be investigated and for the school to take immediate action to improve faculty diversity.

The anger and calls for change at UConn are the latest in a growing movement on college campuses

As criticism of the university’s response has mounted, much attention has been paid to Katsouleas, who began his tenure earlier this academic year. So far, students and some faculty argue that he has not done enough to show that his administration takes fighting racism seriously.

Katsouleas, meanwhile, has worked to stress his belief that the university both has a zero-tolerance policy against racism and should not be defined by the recent racist incidents. “It is important that we remember that we get to decide who represents our community, and what behavior truly reflects who we are at UConn,” he wrote in his email to students sent last Friday. “To me, the best among us represent who we are — the 99%-plus who are good citizens and share our values, not the few who don’t. This is a choice we get to make.”

Unfortunately, these sorts of statements have only fueled the argument that university officials are more concerned about preserving their reputation than adequately responding to and punishing racism. And the frustration UConn’s black students feel builds off a recent wave of student activism that has seen renewed public attention in the wake of protests at the University of Missouri and other schools back in 2015.

As Vox’s Libby Nelson explained at the time, those protests and criticism of racist incidents on other college campuses fit into a long tradition of protest that has seen black students fight for their place at the institutions that once used race to exclude them. “While college leaders like to think of their institutions as progressive places, colleges, like other venerable American institutions, have both a past and a present laced with racism,” Nelson wrote. “For the first time since the late 1960s, students are forcing them to grapple seriously with it.” 

In recent years this activism has continued as students, motivated by grassroots movements like the Movement for Black Lives, argue that college and university campuses must respond better to racism that has occurred in a school’s past and that still occurs now. Students say this matters not only because it is the right thing to do but because it is a necessary step in showing black students that they are supported on campus. A similar argument has been made by UConn students as they call for the university to do more than damage control in the wake of the recent high-profile incident — to actually take the necessary steps to end the racism these students face on campus. 

“To just experience that on a daily basis and then having something that gets out to the public that everybody can see and understand is really impactful for the rest of us,” Mason Holland, a UConn freshman, told local reporters.