Racial Terrorism

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In Memoriam: I Can’t Breathe

by Renee After | May 2020
I am angry. I am anguished. I am heartbroken. I am hallowed out.I am sick and tired of police needlessly killing black and brown people. Some police still see black men as threats, to brutalize, to contain, to remand. They have stereotyped our grandfathers, fathers, husbands, sons, and nephews, as monsters, subject to violence and death. They have killed our grandmothers, mothers, wives, daughters, and nieces. Every time I watch the video of George Floyd’s death, my heart weeps. Who in their right mind, kneels on another human’s neck and ignores desperate pleas of “I Can’t Breathe”? Where is the humanity of these white police officers? Policing should not be predicated on brutal force and a complete disdain for black life. White supremacy has no place in the criminal justice system, in government, in the White House, in the United States. Black lives matter every second, every minute, every hour, every day. A memoriam list of those unarmed black and brown people killed by the police, sheriff Deputies, and security guards.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Black Lives Matter] [Policing] [Police Shootings] [History] [Systemic Racism] [-ing While Black] [Justice System]

Indigenous Women Still Forced, Coerced Into Sterilization: Senate Report

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]

Is America Ready to Face the Truth About the Atrocities Against Indigenous Children?

by Nick Martin | June 2021
Deb Haaland is pushing for a federal reckoning with what the U.S. did to Native Americans. But she cannot be alone in her mission.
On Tuesday, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland revealed at the National Congress of American Indians’ annual midyear conference that the federal government, led by her department, will “undertake an investigation of the loss of human life and the lasting consequences” of federal Indian boarding schools. The announcement comes on the heels of a continent-shaking discovery made three weeks ago by the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, which found the remains of 215 Indigenous children buried in a mass grave outside of Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada. That horrific announcement was followed by another on Wednesday evening, when Cowessess First Nation revealed that it had discovered 751 unmarked graves at Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Politics] [Systemic Racism] [Accountability] [History] [Silencing POC] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Economics] [Justice System]

Native Americans to Feds: Own Up to America’s Indian School History

by Cecily Hilleary | June 2021
In late October 1912, 15-year-old Agnes White, left her home on the St. Regis Mohawk reservation in northern New York to begin five years of vocational training at the Carlisle Industrial Indian School in Pennsylvania. She would never see home again. Records show White spent only a year in the classroom. The following May, she was farmed out on the first of four work details as a servant in white households. That fall, a Philadelphia surgeon operated on her eyelid to correct a malformation caused by trachoma, a highly contagious eye infection that was epidemic throughout the boarding school system and a major public health concern.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [History] [Systemic Racism] [Health Disparities] [Slavery] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [White Blindness] [Politics]

In Memoriam: I CAN’T BREATHE

By Renee Ater | May 2020
I am angry. I am anguished. I am heartbroken. I am hallowed out.I am sick and tired of police needlessly killing black and brown people. Some police still see black men as threats, to brutalize, to contain, to remand. They have stereotyped our grandfathers, fathers, husbands, sons, and nephews, as monsters, subject to violence and death. They have killed our grandmothers, mothers, wives, daughters, and nieces. Every time I watch the video of George Floyd’s death, my heart weeps. Who in their right mind, kneels on another human’s neck and ignores desperate pleas of “I Can’t Breathe”? Where is the humanity of these white police officers? Policing should not be predicated on brutal force and a complete disdain for black life. White supremacy has no place in the criminal justice system, in government, in the White House, in the United States. Black lives matter every second, every minute, every hour, every day. A list of names.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Black Lives Matter] [-ing While Black] [Systemic Racism] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [Policing] [Police Shootings]

Fatal Police Shootings Of Unarmed Black People Reveal Troubling Patterns

by Cheryl W. Thompson | January 2021
Ronell Foster was riding his bicycle through the hushed streets of Vallejo, Calif., one evening when a police officer noticed that the bike had no lights and that he was weaving in and out of traffic.
The officer, Ryan McMahon, went after Foster with lights flashing, siren blaring and the car’s spotlight pointed directly at him. Foster stopped. The pair exchanged words before Foster, who was on community supervision for a car theft conviction a month earlier, fled, eventually ditching the bicycle. McMahon caught up with Foster and jumped on top of him. The two struggled. McMahon, a rookie on the force, used a Taser on the father of two and struck him several times with his department-issued flashlight. Gunfire erupted — seven shots total. When it was over, Foster, 33, lay dying in the bushes in a darkened courtyard near an apartment complex.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [Black Lives Matter] [Policing] [Police Shootings] [-ing While Black] [Justice System] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Defensiveness] [White Privilege] [Black Lives Matter] [Accountability]

‘Lynchings in Mississippi Never Stopped’

by DeNeen L. Brown | AUGUST 2021
JACKSON, Miss. — Since 2000, there have been at least eight suspected lynchings of Black men and teenagers in Mississippi, according to court records and police reports. “The last recorded lynching in the United States was in 1981,” said Jill Collen Jefferson, a lawyer and founder of Julian, a civil rights organization named after the late civil rights leader Julian Bond. “But the thing is, lynchings never stopped in the United States. Lynchings in Mississippi never stopped. The evil bastards just stopped taking photographs and passing them around like baseball cards.”
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [-ing While Black] [History] [Collective Action] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Justice System] [Black Lives Matter] [Policing] [Accountability]

A slave Mother’s Love in 56 Carefully Stitched Words

by Amina Al-Sadi & Jeannie Yandel | December 2016
For about $300, a 9-year-old girl named Ashley was sold as a slave.
Her mother, Rose, remained a house slave at a mansion in South Carolina. This was the 1850s, roughly a decade before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, setting slaves free. Before mother and daughter were separated, Rose gave Ashley a cotton sack. It contained a tattered dress, three handfuls of pecans and a lock of her hair. Rose told Ashley it was filled with love — always. Ashley never saw her mom again, but she kept the sack. It was handed down through the generations, along with her story, to her granddaughter, Ruth Middleton. Ruth, a single mom in Philadelphia, stitched her family story into the cloth sack in 1921…. Nearly 100 years later, the bag was found at a flea market in Tennessee. A woman bought it and donated it to Middleton Place, a famous plantation in South Carolina that refuses to shy away from its awful history.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Slavery] [History] [Art & Culture] [Civil War]

8 Suspected Lynchings Have Taken Place in Mississippi Since 2000 Mississippi Was a Top State for Lynching and, According to a Report in the Washington Post, It Still Is.

by Terrell Jermaine Starr | August 2021
There is no more blatant form of racial intimidation against a Black person that one can use than that of a noose. The practice of lynching was used against enslaved Black people, but it was an especially popular form of violence against Black Americans after slavery ended.
It is considered a more dated form of violence today, but a story in the Washington Post reports that the practice of lynching never truly stopped. Jill Collen Jefferson, a lawyer and founder of Julian, a civil rights organization named after the late civil rights leader Julian Bond, has been conducting her own research into lynching in Mississippi and found that at least eight Black people have been lynched in the state since 2000. She began her research into lynchings across the country in 2017 and focused on Mississippi, her home state, in 2019. In each case of lynching she discovered, Jefferson said the police ruled the deaths suicides, but the families of the deceased said their loved ones were lynched. “There is a pattern to how these cases are investigated,” Jefferson said. “When authorities arrive on the scene of a hanging, it’s treated as a suicide almost immediately. The crime scene is not preserved. The investigation is shoddy. And then there is a formal ruling of suicide, despite evidence to the contrary. And the case is never heard from again unless someone brings it up.”
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Slavery] [History] [Black Lives Matter] [Policing] [Justice System] [Collective Action] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture]

“Kill Every Buffalo You Can!” On the Cruelties of Colonial Power

by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel | August 2021
In the war on the Indigenous people of the Great Plains, the United States explicitly targeted the buffalo, their spiritual cornerstone and staple of food, medicine, shelter, and clothing. Toward the end of the 19th century, the US military sponsored the killing of millions of buffalo, inflicting starvation and dependency on the tribes. While it was never officially announced as the army’s policy, the Montana land baron Granville Stuart noted in his journal in 1879 that “slaughtering the buffaloes is a government measure to subjugate the Indians.” Colonel Richard Irving Dodge summed up the spirit of the massacre: “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” Before 1800, an estimated 30 to 60 million buffalo ranged the Great Plains. By 1900, only a few hundred remained, the survivors of the most violent genocide of any mammal ever documented. With the buffalo gone, Plains Indians’ bodies suffered trauma, cultural erasure, and starvation. Depression, diabetes, and drug dependency became endemic—all diseases characterized by chronic inflammation.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Silencing POC] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [History] [Asian] [Health Disparities] [Economics]

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Racial Terrorism

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