As Nation Reckons with Race, Poll Finds White Americans Least Engaged

by Adrian Florido and Marisz Penaloza | August 2020
Collins sympathized with the people marching in the protests but felt “I’m not that type of person.” So instead, he called and wrote his representatives in Congress and asked what they were doing to address racism in the country. He didn’t hear back, “but I still thought it was important to do.” As the nation navigates its most consequential racial justice movement in a half-century, some people have responded to the calls for action to remedy the country’s racist past and present by protesting in the streets or doing something as simple as reading a book about race. But a new NPR/Ipsos poll finds that these people remain a minority.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Anti-Racism] [Systemic Racism] [Policing] [Collective Action] [Latino/a] [Asian] [White Culture] [Black Lives Matter] [Reparations] [-ing While Black]

Black Girls in Mass. Nearly 4 Times More Likely to Face School Discipline than White Girls, Report Finds

by Naomi Martin | September 2020
The authors of the report, “Protecting Girls of Color from the School-to-Prison Pipeline,” said stark racial disparities in school discipline is a nationwide problem. But they chose to focus on girls, who they said should be included more in the national conversation on racial justice, and picked the three states to compare as case studies. … The report found that in all three states, Black female students were far more likely than white ones to be suspended in school, suspended out of school, expelled, referred to law enforcement, and arrested. Out-of-school suspensions affected the largest share of Black girls. Though Massachusetts’ racial disparities were generally comparable to the two other states, Kansas and Alabama both suspended a far larger portion of their Black female students from school.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [White Blindness] [Prison System] [Policing] [Black Lives Matter] [-ing While Black]

The Ugly History of the Pledge of Allegiance — and Why It Matters; Requiring Displays of Patriotism Have Often Been Tied to Nativism and Bigotry

by Christopher Petrella | November 2017
The origins of the pledge trace to the late 19th century, the product of an expansionist American project. In 1891, the family magazine Youth’s Companion asked 35-year-old Francis Bellamy, a former pastor of Boston’s Bethany Baptist Church, to fashion a patriotic program for schools around the country to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s “arrival in America” by “raising the U.S. Flag over every public school from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” …Far from a political outlier, Bellamy tapped into the ubiquitous turn-of-the-century nativism that made enemies of the 2.5 million Slavs, Jews and Italians who immigrated to the United States throughout the 1880s and 1890s.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Indigenous] [Policing] [History] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Immigration] [Slavery] [Anti-Racism] [Assumptions]

American Environmentalism’s Racist Roots Have Shaped Global Thinking about Conservation

by Prakash Kashwan | September 2020
American environmentalism’s racist roots have influenced global conservation practices. Most notably, they are embedded in longstanding prejudices against local communities and a focus on protecting pristine wildernesses. This dominant narrative pays little thought to indigenous and other poor people who rely on these lands – even when they are its most effective stewards.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Systemic Racism] [Myths] [Confederate Monuments] [Slavery] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Economics] [History] [Environment]

When White Women Practice the Politics of Polite, the Violence of Nice We Must Admit That, When We’re Moderate, We’re Complicit.

by Real Talk: WOC & Allies | August 2019
It turns out, not so much. Our extreme discomfort with discord and our inability to sustain even the mildest of stress fractures when our tools fail us, is why we are not moving the needle on the meaningful dismantling of systems and institutions that intentionally uphold white supremacy. We recoil from the concepts of subversion and disruption like vampires from the hot sun. Because subversion is not polite and disruption is not nice. We need to embrace the discomfort, the edges and the messiness of overturning that which has kept us in the number two slot of the power and privilege pyramid for over 500 years.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2010’s] [Politics] [White Privilege] [Systemic Racism] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Supremacy] [Bystander Intervention] [Policing] [Anti-Racism] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Microaggressions] [Assumptions]