About racist.systems
racist.systems is an archival platform documenting racist systems — the policies, institutions, and patterns that sustain racial injustice — and surfacing the pathways out of them.
The name is deliberate. The content is not. This site is anti-racism documentation, in the spirit of South Africa's Truth & Reconciliation Commission, the ACLU's case archive, and the Equal Justice Initiative's reports. It exists because the systems named here are real, persistent, and citable.
Why an archive, and why now
Civil-rights documentation in the United States is rich but fragmented. Court rulings live on federal-court websites and academic law-school archives. Federal commission reports sit on agency PDFs that get moved and unmoved across administrations. Housing-policy primary sources are preserved by university digital-scholarship labs. Voting-rights data lives across the Census Bureau, the Brennan Center, and state election-board pages. A reader trying to understand how institutional racism actually operates — not as abstraction but as procurement code, underwriting standard, sentencing enhancement, school-discipline metric — has to assemble that picture from a dozen separate archives.
This platform exists to gather that material in one place, organized as a coherent reading surface, with every assertion routed back to its primary source. We treat the work as historical record-keeping in service of a present readership: students, policy researchers, journalists, lawyers verifying citations, ordinary readers trying to ground their understanding of the news in the documentary record that preceded it.
What's on the platform
- A testimony archive — curated accounts, public-domain narratives from the Federal Writers' Project alongside contemporary contributions, every entry with provenance.
- A sourced timeline — events of racist policy and resistance, each citing the commission report, court ruling, or statute it draws from.
- Civil-rights pathways — if something happened, here is the org, the phone, the filing deadline. Every contact card lists the source page we retrieved it from.
- ZIP-code legal aid lookup — coarse-grained provider directory, indexed by ZIP-3 prefix so a misspelled digit still surfaces useful results.
- Surveys and campaigns — signal-boosting research calls and organizing coalitions, always with attribution and link-out to the owning org.
- Editorial notes — short-form staff updates on what we are working on, what we are revising, and what readers have asked us to clarify.
- A curated reading list — the books we treat as load-bearing references for the analysis on the platform. Affiliate-tagged through Bookshop.org, which routes commissions to independent bookstores.
What's not on the platform
- Personalized ad targeting without consent. Analytics scripts load only after you accept the cookie banner; AdSense serves in non-personalized mode until you accept.
- Real names of testimony contributors unless the contributor explicitly consented in writing.
- Original political action. We link out to the coalition that owns the campaign.
- Legal advice. We're a directory; verify everything on the source page before relying on it.
- Doxxing or named accusations against private individuals. The unit of analysis on this platform is the system — the statute, the agency, the standard, the underwriting manual — not the individual.
- Real-time news coverage. The platform indexes archival material and durable policy patterns; for breaking news we point readers at the working press.
Editorial policy
Every published item carries a citation. Contemporary testimonies require informed consent and editorial review. Pathway contact info is verified against the organization's own published guidance; the retrieval date is noted so readers can spot stale entries. Inaccurate or expired entries are a bug — please report them.
Composite scenarios — entries labeled as such — are illustrative reconstructions of documented patterns of harm drawn from paired-tester studies, federal civil-rights enforcement data, and peer-reviewed empirical research. They are never representations of specific real cases and are always flagged with an editorial note at the top of the entry naming the underlying empirical source.
Where the analysis sits politically
The platform's posture is descriptive and historical, not partisan. We cite federal statutes, Supreme Court decisions, agency manuals, federal commission reports, peer-reviewed research, and university-archived primary sources. Readers across the political spectrum will find material here they agree with and material they do not. What they will not find is invective, ad hominem, or claims unmoored from the documentary record.
Anti-racism documentation, properly done, is conservative in the original sense of that word: it conserves the record. It treats the material as something to be preserved, indexed, and made findable so the next generation does not have to start from scratch. That is the tradition the South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission, the Library of Congress Slave Narratives Collection, the Mapping Inequality project, and the Equal Justice Initiative's lynching report all represent. This platform is a much smaller effort in the same lineage.
Operations and stewardship
The platform is operated by Nungaa Systems as part of a small archive portfolio. Hosting and infrastructure are funded by a combination of reader-supported subscriptions, in-house affiliate income (Bookshop.org commissions on the curated reading list), and unobtrusive display advertising routed through Google AdSense. We do not accept paid placements, sponsored content, or editorial influence from any advertiser. The reading-list affiliate program is disclosed on every page that contains an affiliate link.
The codebase is maintained by a small team. Content review, source verification, and correction handling are the principal ongoing activities — far more of the platform's labor goes into checking citations than into writing new entries. We treat that ratio as the mark of an archive done seriously rather than as a publishing-velocity problem to solve.
How readers can contribute
Readers who spot a stale phone number, a moved court-record URL, or a mis-cited statute should send corrections to the editorial address above. Readers who hold relevant primary-source material in their own archives — family papers from the Federal Writers' Project era, twentieth-century housing-court files, deed restrictions with restrictive covenant language, mid-century employer policy manuals — are encouraged to write to us about transcription and indexing opportunities. The platform does not pay for content, but it will credit contributors who request attribution and respect the privacy of contributors who request anonymity.
Contemporary testimony submissions go through informed-consent intake handled by the editorial team. We do not accept testimony submitted through public web forms because the consent and verification work cannot be done at form scale. A direct email exchange with the editorial address remains the way in.
Languages and accessibility
The platform is currently English-language only. The reading surface is designed for screen-reader navigation: every article uses semantic heading order, every primary-source link includes its target text in the visible label, and every image carries descriptive alt text describing the civic building, monument, or signing ceremony depicted. We do not use stock photography of unidentified people because the decorative-image convention works poorly for both screen-reader users and readers who object to the use of decorative photography in anti-racism documentation.
A note on the domain name
Readers occasionally write to ask why the platform uses the domain racist.systems. The short answer is that the name is the thesis. The longer answer is that we deliberately chose a name that cannot be mistaken for a euphemism. Anti-racism documentation that hides its subject in a polite acronym tends to be read as a polite acronym; documentation that names the system out loud tends to be read as documentation. The domain is a deliberate posture, not an embellishment.
Contact
reach-us@racist.systems — for corrections, contributions, partnerships.
Domain inquiries
This domain is owned by Nungaa Systems and may be available for transfer to the right operator. If you're interested in acquiring it, write to buy-domain@racist.systems.
Quick reference: a short editorial standards FAQ covers the most common reader questions about the domain, sourcing, and editorial position.