Foreword Introduction to Symposium: Enhancing Anti-Discrimination Laws in Education and Employment

When this Symposium was first conceived in the Summer of 2021, the nation was just emerging from the first phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was the beginning of trying to go back to life as normal. Given this reawakening, the Symposium’s planning committee felt the urgency of a need to regroup, rethink, and reassess the state of employment antidiscrimination law. We were not sure where others would be on this possible project, given the newness of the hopeful end to lockdowns and social isolation and return to “normal” concerns.

But we quickly found that those who joined the Symposium planning group, and then those who responded to our calls to contribute to the Symposium, were more than ready to join in a reassessment and relinking of the many unresolved issues confronting employment anti-discrimination law. We saw such reassessment as all the more pressing in light of the multiple pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, the #MeToo Movement, and the racial reckoning that followed the state sponsored murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and 184 other persons of color in the spring of 2020,1 on top of the countless state-sponsored murders of persons of color stretching far back into the past and the rise of Sinophobic violence.