by Jason Parham | November 2019
The phrase turns a plural into a singular, an action that betrays all the ways we have come to understand contemporary identity.
This past summer, in one of the most bizarre applications, Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, who is white and Republican, described himself as a “person of color” when discussing Trump’s comments about four Democratic congresswomen. “It’s time to stop fixating on our differences—particularly our superficial ones,” he said.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [Prison System] [Politics] [Racial Covenants] [White Privilege] [White Supremacy]
[White Defensiveness] [White Blindness] [Denial] [“All Lives Matter”] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Culture]
by Jodi S. Cohen | July 2020
A 15-year-old in Michigan was incarcerated during the coronavirus pandemic after a judge ruled that not completing her schoolwork violated her probation. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” said the girl’s mother. Because of the confidentiality of juvenile court cases, it’s impossible to determine how unusual Grace’s situation is. But attorneys and advocates in Michigan and elsewhere say they are unaware of any other case involving the detention of a child for failing to meet academic requirements after schools closed to help stop the spread of COVID-19. The decision, they say, flies in the face of recommendations from the legal and education communities that have urged leniency and a prioritization of children’s health and safety amid the crisis. The case may also reflect, some experts and Grace’s mother believe, systemic racial bias. Grace is Black in a predominantly white community and in a county where a disproportionate percentage of Black youth are involved with the juvenile justice system.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [Systemic Racism] [Prison System] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [-ing While Black]
by Bret Turner | March 2019
For young children, learning the power of words, personal boundaries and social dynamics is a crucial part of their development. In my first-grade classroom, students are in the thick of learning to read and write. And just as actively, they’re learning how to communicate with others. They experiment with tone, diction, intent and body language with one another and with the adults around them. It’s an expected, developmentally appropriate part of learning how to coexist with others. Sometimes, as in the common cases of name-calling, teasing and excluding, that experimentation can be painful. Addressing unkindness is part and parcel of working with young students. But not all unkindness is the same. It can be particularly detrimental when the hurtful language relates to race, gender, religion or other aspects of a child’s identity. These are microaggressions: small, subtle, sometimes-unintended acts of discrimination.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Microaggressions] [Teachers] [Implicit Bias] [Implicit Racism] [White Privilege] [Anti-Racism]
*Paywall Alert
by Donald Yacovone | April 2018
After reviewing my first 50 or so textbooks, one morning I realized precisely what I was seeing, what instruction, and what priorities were leaping from the pages into the brains of the students compelled to read them: white supremacy. One text even began with the capitalized title: “The White Man’s History.” Across time and with precious few exceptions, African-Americans appeared only as “ignorant negroes,” as slaves, and as anonymous abstractions that only posed “problems” for the supposed real subjects of history: white people of European descent.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2010’s] [White Supremacy] [History] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Accountability] [Myths]
by Red Dawn Foster and Miski Noor | July 2020
Though the history books written by enslavers and colonizers would have us unaware, our stories as Black and Indigenous Peoples are threaded together through past and present, and surely, through the future as well. Settler-colonialism is a continuous project that relies on sustained socio-economic policies that perpetuate white supremacy and maintain violence against Black and Indigenous peoples. Both genocide and enslavement built the settler-colonial nation as we know it today. Black and Indigenous history is tied to the colonization of this land and our liberation is inherently tied together, that is why Black and Indigenous solidarity is essential.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Black Lives Matter] [Systemic Racism] [History] [Politics] [Reparations] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Myths] [Confederate Monuments]
by Edward Ball | NOVEMBER 2015
“My grandfather went to the folks who had owned our family and asked, ‘Do you have any documentation about our history during the slave days? We would like to see it, if possible.’ The man at the door, who I have to assume was from the slaveholding side, said, ‘Sure, we’ll give it to you.’ “The man went into his house and came back out with some papers in his hands. Now, whether the papers were trivial or actual plantation records, who knows? But he stood in the door, in front of my grandfather, and lit a match to the papers. ‘You want your history?’ he said. ‘Here it is.’ Watching the things burn. ‘Take the ashes and get off my land.’ “The intent was to keep that history buried,” McQuinn says today. “And I think something like that has happened over and again, symbolically.”
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Slavery] [History] [Silencing POC] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [White Privilege]
