by Jamilah Lemieux | January 2017
I don’t know that I serve my own mental health needs by putting my body on the line to feign solidarity with women who by and large didn’t have my back prior to November. I’ve never felt any thing remotely resembling sisterhood with White women. That lack of sisterhood haunted me at times during the 2016 election season. As Election Day approached and Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton emerged as the frontrunner, I waited to feel something. Some sort of connection between her and me, some sort of emotion tied to the likelihood that a person who shares my gender expression would be the “leader of the free world.” It never came. However, the absence of that sisterhood never felt more real for me than it did when I learned that 53 percent of White female voters cast a ballot for a man whose bigotry was, perhaps, his greatest selling point. I never expected that White women by-and-large would favor Clinton over Donald Trump because she promised criminal justice reform or would do more to protect the rights of people of color than her opponent. But I did believe that Trump’s incredibly public misogyny—manifested in attacks on women’s looks, a boast about “pussy” grabbing and promises to prosecute people who seek abortions—would have made him less than favorable. Silly me to expect self-preservation to take priority over racism, I suppose.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Accountability] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [White Fragility/Tears] [Politics]
by Ashleigh Shackelford | November 2015
This Black Girl Attitude phenomenon lies within the idea that Black girls, women, and femmes are inherently angry, bitter, unrelenting, and a threat to functioning institutions and spaces. In understanding that this is how I’m seen, I do not intentionally align my presentation, navigation, or performance as a Black girl in a way that embodies the opposite of the stereotypes codified upon my existence within white supremacist patriarchy. Black girls are scripted as angry, bitter, ungrateful, savage beings that are denied the ability to be seen as dimensional or nuanced. So when a Black girl like me is walking around, existing, not forcing myself to assimilate to this politicized idea of ‘approachability,’ I am in direct affirmation of society’s idea of black femininity’s abrasive nature.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Microaggressions] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Implicit Racism] [Implicit Bias] [Accountability] [White Supremacy]
by Elle Dowd | January 2018
“White people love niceness, but we fail to see that our ideas about polite society are not very nice at all. They serve instead to preserve a system that is criminalizing people of color and dehumanizing white people with our callous indifference. They act to protect institutions built on killing the bodies of people of color to the detriment of our own souls. We say we value niceness, but what we really value is being in charge of what that looks like and when it’s appropriate, by our own standards. We value control.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [“All Lives Matter”] [Systemic Racism] [Black Lives Matter] [Accountability]
by Karen Fleshman | June 2017
White People: Which Side Are You On?
I realized just recently that my original stomping ground was a “sundown town,” a place where people of color could not rent nor own a home, much less stay in a hotel. Sundown towns were as American as apple pie, omnipresent in this country until the 1960s, when federal law made their ordinances and practices illegal.
The law changed. Residential patterns, and mindsets, did not. De Facto. Instead, the problem — the phenomenon — shifted, took on a different shape to accommodate present conditions.
TAGS: [History] [Collective Action] [Assumptions] [2010’s] [White Privilege] [Systemic Racism]
by Victor E. Kappeler, Ph.D. | January 2014
The institution of slavery and the control of minorities, however, were two of the more formidable historic features of American society shaping early policing. Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities. For example, New England settlers appointed Indian Constables to police Native Americans (National Constable Association, 1995), the St. Louis police were founded to protect residents from Native Americans in that frontier city, and many southern police departments began as slave patrols. In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation’s first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Slavery] [History] [Policing] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [Systemic Racism]
by Tom Jackman | April 2015
The Sheriff’s Emergency Response Team regularly records their operations, and the Fairfax County police have said there is video of the “extraction” of McKenna. This presumably would include her being hit with four Taser shocks after she was handcuffed behind her back, shackled around the legs, a hobble strap connected to both restraints, and a spit mask placed over her face. The police, who are investigating the case for any possible criminal violation, have declined to release the video while the case is still under investigation. When it does come out, it may well join the growing canon of video of fatal law enforcement actions which has shocked the country.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Policing] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [Accountability] [White Privilege]
