In the summer of 2020, when many college campuses were still coming to grips with the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, students of color in the University of California, Berkeley economics department met with faculty on Zoom to talk about tensions that they and their peers were feeling. The group discussed "very basic stuff," recalls Teresita Cruz Vital, one of the students who'd requested the meeting: "What is racism? What is white supremacy?" And how were those ideas manifesting in the economics department?
But Cruz Vital says the students also aired a grievance about a department policy that, on its face, appeared to have little if anything to do with race.
