by Death Penalty Information Center | June 1998
The results of two new studies which underscore the continuing injustice of racism in the application of the death penalty are being released through this report. The first study documents the infectious presence of racism in the death penalty, and demonstrates that this problem has not slackened with time, nor is it restricted to a single region of the country. The other study identifies one of the potential causes for this continuing crisis: those who are making the critical death penalty decisions in this country are almost exclusively white.
From the days of slavery in which black people were considered property, through the years of lynchings and Jim Crow laws, capital punishment has always been deeply affected by race. Unfortunately, the days of racial bias in the death penalty are not a remnant of the past.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [Slavery] [1990’s] [History] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [Systemic Racism] [Silencing POC] [Accountability] [Prison System]
by Emily Peck | June 2020
Defunding the police is just part of the structural reform needed to root out racism in the U.S., says Mehrsa Baradaran, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies the economic inequities between Black and white Americans. What’s truly needed is a big-picture rethink of U.S. policy at every level, she told HuffPost in an interview by phone and in follow-ups over email this week. In her 2017 book “The Color of Money,” Baradaran lays out how, over centuries, policymakers wrote Black Americans out of the economic system — and how policies blocking Black people from obtaining mortgages, land and credit created an immense wealth gap between Black and white Americans that persists to this day. In her book, Baradaran says that after slavery was abolished, Black Americans held just .5% of all the wealth in the U.S. Today, the number is barely higher, at about 1%.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Reparations] [Economics] [History] [Housing] [Civil War] [Policing] [Systemic Racism]
by Lonnae O’Neal | September 2017
Education, love and exemplary black people will not deliver America from racism, Kendi says. Racist ideas grow out of discriminatory policies, he argues, not the other way around. And if his new center can help identify and dismantle those policies in the U.S. and around the world, he believes we can start to eliminate racism. At least that’s the goal. … “We have been taught that ignorance and hate lead to racist ideas, lead to racist policies,” Kendi said. “If the fundamental problem is ignorance and hate, then your solutions are going to be focused on education, and love and persuasion. But of course [Stamped from the Beginning] shows that the actual foundation of racism is not ignorance and hate, but self-interest, particularly economic and political and cultural.” Self-interest drives racist policies that benefit that self-interest. When the policies are challenged because they produce inequalities, racist ideas spring up to justify those policies. Hate flows freely from there.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2010’s] [Anti-Racism] [Systemic Racism] [Myths] [History]
by Beth Woolsey | June 2020
In 2016 I was super concerned about making sure I wasn’t in a social media “bubble.” I wanted to proactively avoid exclusively following, friending, and interacting with people who could provide me with a nice, comfy echo chamber and who would parrot back to me what I already think. I wanted to be open minded. I wanted to cultivate diverse perspectives. I wanted to be able to listen well and learn and grow. None of which was wrong in intention. Turns out, though, it was horrible in execution. …When people talk about “invisible privilege” this is what they mean. I genuinely DID NOT SEE that my feed wasn’t diverse, particularly because I’d taken such pains to cultivate diversity. I thought I was being diverse and open minded. I was actually being myopic and centering the white, cis, middle class experience and ensuring my demographic was the LOUDEST and received the most attention.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [White Blindness]
*Paywall Alert
by Ola Caracola | June 2020
Not all white people are bigots. But all white people consciously or unconsciously benefit from a system, which oppresses people of color. Our indoctrination with underlying racist ideals begins at birth and is so engrained in our culture that we may not even be aware of the biases we hold. Often our perception of people who look different than us is based on incomplete or all-together inaccurate stereotypes. We need to do better. This does not mean that as a white person, you don’t struggle with the realities of life, it simply means that your skin color is not one of the things making it harder.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Myths] [Systemic Racism] [Implicit Bias] [White Blindness] [White Privilege] [Accountability] [History] [Black Lives Matter]
by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca | Date Unknown
An 11th-grade student leaned back in his chair at Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon, and said, “Absurd. That is the only way to describe those numbers. They are absurd.” He and his classmates had just read statistics about the racial wealth gap in their Political Economy class: White households are worth at least 10 times as much as Black households; only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth while a third of Blacks do; Black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. These numbers are absurd, and they are not accidental. The mixer role play is based on Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, which shows in exacting detail how government policies segregated every major city in the United States with dire consequences for African Americans.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [Teachers] [Economics] [History] [Politics] [Housing] [Racial Covenants] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Reparations]
