by Fakiha Baig | June 2021
A Cree woman had just given birth to her sixth child in Saskatoon, when she was presented with a consent form for her sterilization. “She tried to wheel herself away from the operating room, but the doctor wheeled her right back in the direction of the same operating room,” says a new government report, which details the woman’s sterilization in 2001. “When she was in the operating room, she kept asking the doctor if she was done yet. Finally, he said, ‘Yes. Cut, tied and burnt. There, nothing is getting through that.”’
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [History] [Health Disparities] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism]
by MPR News |June 2021
Tuesday marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Mobs of white residents, many of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has been called the single worst incident of racial violence in American history. Racial incidents make headlines year after year in the United States. We are a society made up of all the races and ethnicities on the planet, and we have a painful history of exploitation and oppression tied to race. What we don’t often consider is where the idea of different races came from. God? Nature? Or was it man-made? — and if so, why? “The Invention of Race,” a documentary produced and hosted by John Biewen, explores how these concepts developed from the ancient world to today. …
One history professor says the invention of race came later, tracing it back to a surge of African slaves being brought to Europe in the 1600s.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [History] [Silencing POC] [Slavery] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Social Justice]
by Anagha Srikanth | July 2021
Thousands of papers, some documenting the auction and sale of enslaved Black Americans, were headed for the auction block themselves before Black historians and community members stepped in to reclaim ownership over their past. “It was important to the community because this will connect the dots for people and the younger generation, to let them know how things were. To move forward, you have to see what the past was like,” said Carolyn Brooks, a community historian with the Chesapeake Heartland Project. About 2,000 pages dating from the late 1600s to early 1800s were found in a plastic trash bag in the attic of a 200-year-old house near Chestertown, Maryland, as the owner, Nancy Bordely Lane, was cleaning it out this spring. The foundation of the house, built in 1803 on property that had remained in the family since 1667, was reportedly damaged and the structure was going to be demolished. The documents were headed for the garbage, but were rescued and delivered to Dixon’s Crumpton Auction in waxed seafood boxes, John Chaski, an antique-manuscript expert, told the Washington Post.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Slavery] [History] [Systemic Racism] [Art & Culture] [Racial Terrorism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture]
by Jeffrey Ostler | July 2021
“We hold these truths to be self evident.” Say these words, and many Americans will be able to recite what follows: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, …The closing words of the Declaration are far less known. The last of a list of 27 grievances against King George III, they read as follows: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” These words call attention to hard truths about America’s founding that have often been brushed aside.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Slavery] [Indigenous] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [History] [Politics] [White Privilege] [Economics] [Racial Terrorism]
by Andrew Kennard | June 2021
WASHINGTON — A $59 million settlement in Peltier v. Haaland, a class action lawsuit alleging trust fund mismanagement and failure to account by the Department of the Interior, will go to four tribes located in the Midwest and Northwest United States and more than 39,000 beneficiaries. On June 10, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia finalized the settlement, which was reached in the Court of Federal Claims with the Chippewa Cree Tribe of the Rocky Boy’s Reservation of Montana, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota, the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana, and the White Earth Band of Chippewa Indians of Minnesota, the Interior Department announced. The tribes were represented by the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), according to the website designated for the lawsuit.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Reparations] [Indigenous] [Systemic Racism] [Justice System] [History] [Economics] [Politics]
by David Gushee | June 2021
The hysteria over Critical Race Theory right now means many things.
Most immediately, it means that the relationship between skilled right-wing demagogues and their audience in the U.S. these days is positively Pavlovian. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, rinse and repeat. If Tucker Carlson says over several nights on Fox News that Critical Race Theory is a huge threat to America, it won’t be long before crowds will be in the streets protesting, Republican legislators will be banning the heresy from being taught even in universities, and previously sleepy school board meetings will be broken up by hysterical white parents. … The deeper meaning of the manufactured Critical Race Theory furor is that there appears to be a massive audience in the U.S. for anything that triggers what is variously called “white rage,” “white fragility” and “white hysteria.” A significant portion of the U.S. white population simply cannot face the vicious history and ongoing reality of white racism in this country.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [History] [Systemic Racism] [White Fragility/Tears] [CRT] [Politics] [White Blindness] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [Prison System] [Policing]
