by Anna North | June 2020
Eugene Williams, a 17-year-old black boy, was stoned to death by white people in 1919 after he swam into what they deemed the wrong part of Lake Michigan. In response, black people in Chicago rose up in protest, and white people attacked them. More than 500 people were injured and 38 were killed. Afterward, the city convened a commission to study the causes of the violence. The commission found “systemic participation in mob violence by the police,” Khalil Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and author of the book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, told Vox. “When police officers had the choice to protect black people from white mob violence, they chose to either aid and abet white mobs or to disarm black people or to arrest them.”
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [History] [Systemic Racism] [Policing] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [Systemic Racism]
by Kelly Kirschner | June 2020
Similar to recorded killings of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, the only reason that this came to the public’s attention and outrage was due to the Herald-Tribune’s publication of a video recording of a SPD officer allowing an inebriated immigrant, Juan Perez, to climb out of a squad car and fall six feet onto his head, his hands handcuffed behind his back The officer then proceeded to kick the man and stand on him. It ultimately led to the firing of the officer, the resignation of the chief of police, the creation of a city police complaint committee and an independent police advisory panel. In spite of a history of other complaints of excessive use of force against the offending officer, he remained and advanced within the force prior to the Perez incident, which ultimately cost the City hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuit settlements and legal fees. Perhaps most disturbing, three years after the incident, a panel of Sarasota residents that included a former and current city commissioner board voted unanimously to reinstate the fired officer, giving him three years of back pay, in spite of the African American chief of police advocating that they ratify the officer’s termination, due to his dangerous disregard of protocol in caring for a handcuffed individual.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Slavery] [History] [Politics] [Anti-Racism]
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 Brit Dawson | June 2020
One group seemingly still clueless about how to support Black Lives Matter is influencers. First, they were posing at protests for clout, and now they’re doing blackface to ‘show solidarity’ with the movement. In an Instagram post, satirist and socio-political activist Saint Hoax shared screenshots of influencers who had painted their skin Black, along with a brief history of blackface. They wrote: “How can you ‘spread awareness’ about a subject you know so little about? If you genuinely care about a cause, the least you can do is educate yourself about it.” They continued: “It’s infuriating that we still need to educate people about the racist and painful history of blackface. We shouldn’t be having this conversation in 2020.”
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Accountability] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [White Supremacy] [Black Lives Matter] [White Culture] [Myths] [Strategies]
by Carrie Gentile | October 2020
A Hatchville resident called police on Sunday, October 25, after she found a black doll’s head with “n—er luva” written on its forehead in her front yard. … The woman told police she feels she was a target because of her political views that were on display in front of her house. “Someone went to great lengths to find a doll, cut off the head, and drive it to my house. It’s intimidation,” she said. What is also troubling is that her grandson, who lives with her, saw it. “We’ve had a lot of tough conversations about it,” she said. “He is mortified.”
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Black Lives Matter]
by Jae Jones | March 2020
Most slave women worked in the fields right along with the men, enduring hard labor from sun up to sun down. Some slave women who were chosen to work inside the main house. Early adolescence for female slaves was often difficult because of the threat of exploitation. For some young women, puberty marked the beginning of a lifetime of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse from masters and mistresses, overseers, and male slaves.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Slavery] [History] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Accountability]
