*Paywall Alert
by Ryan Herring | October 2015
The Black Lives Matter movement offers a challenge to the church–and an opportunity. Another senseless killing of an unarmed black man Micheal Brown, who was killed in Ferguson, Missouri by police office Darren Wilson. “For many young people in the United States, especially those of us involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, this was our Sept. 11.”
TAGS: [Faith-Based/Spiritual] [Black Lives Matter] [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Police Shootings]
by Caroline Taiwo | Date 2010’s
Two years ago, I started work as a recruitment and retention specialist for a small Minnesota nonprofit. The organization’s mission was to serve youth in crisis and their matriculation rate was 90 percent poor Black kids. I was hired on to replace a woman they fired a month prior, a Black woman, for reasons unresolved. She had been telling people that she was pushed out for challenging racist policy. Our department had tripled the number of volunteers coming in for weekly shift rotations but incredibly, the entire pool was white. When I brought it up, and offered to lead an effort to all in more volunteers of color, the more outspoken of the bosses interjected with, “Well we could look for more Black volunteers but I don’t think they would pass our background check.”
TAGS: [Strategies] [2010’s] [White Supremacy] [Systemic Racism] [Silencing POC] [Accountability] [Employment] [Denial] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [Economics] [White Privilege] [White Defensiveness] [White Culture] [Assumptions] [Myths]
by Tauriq Moosa | May 2017
In striving to be ‘civil,’ white moderates provide cover for deadly white supremacy. .. Welcome to our current reality, in which white supremacists are treated like B-grade celebs on a reality TV show.
White supremacists are, after all, routinely landing profiles in leading media sites — because it’s apparently surprising Nazis can brush their hair and tuck in their shirt — and often getting invited onto popular shows, as if their ideas deserve more attention and platforms. …The way things are doesn’t equate to how things should be.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [Politics] [White Supremacy] [White Blindness] [White Culture] [Prison System] [White Privilege] [White Fragility/Tears]
by Courtney E. Martin | June 2015
“I’m grateful for a framing that helps me understand my own fragility. Experimenting with how I use the power that comes from my privilege is a messy process. Sometimes I feel like I manage to do something really useful in the world, whether its recommending a brilliant person of color to speak at a conference and working with them to hone their transformative message for a broad audience or saying I won’t speak on a panel that I’ve been invited to because there isn’t a person of color on it. Interestingly, white fragility often shows up as talking a lot, a kind of flood of effortful explaining, or the equivalent of a peacock’s display of anti-racist sentiment — posting on social media with great fanfare or calling out other white people with a sort of zeal.”
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [Accountability] [Systemic Racism] [Collective Action] [Definitions]
by Gretchen Palmer | July 2016
If you would have told me three years ago, before Michael Brown, before Eric Garner, before the Black Lives Matter movement that I am a racist, I would have fought you tooth and nail. Absolutely not, no way ― how dare you accuse me of such an awful thing? I really DID believe that I wasn’t a racist – but the truth is , I hadn’t really examined the topic very much and I certainly had never been called to the mat on it… ”I was an unconscious liar.” Includes 5 articles for those ready to move forward.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Colorblindness] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [White Privilege] [White Supremacy] [Accountability]
by Alan Pelaez Lopez | September 2016
Which one of your parents is the Black one? You never told me you were Black – you speak Spanish! I didn’t know [insert country] had Black people! Being both identities does not mean that I only live my life as Black 50% and Latinx 50%. Instead it means that I live my life as Black 100% of the time, and my life as Latinx 100%. The math doesn’t need to make sense! Below is a list of invasive comments, phrases, and questions that I, and many in my community, have received – and they must stop in order for us to work together, and really be a community.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Implicit Bias] [Implicit Racism]
