by David Ferguson | September 2016
Police in Hagerstown, MD are under fire after a video surfaced showing them pepper-spraying a handcuffed teen girl after she tried to leave the scene after being struck by a vehicle. The Hagerstown Herald-Mail reported Wednesday that a Facebook video of police manhandling the 15-year-old girl has got the police department scrambling to explain itself. According to Flicker, the girl — who is the daughter of a white mother and a black father — was riding her bike on Sunday afternoon when she was struck by a car.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [-ing While Black] [Policing] [White Supremacy] [Systemic Racism] [Accountability] [White Blindness] [Silencing POC] [White Privilege]
by Edward Rhymes | June 2015
It seems we live in an American society that is hellbent on euthanizing black hope and injecting our despair and frustration with adrenaline. We abide in a country that counts our lives as cheap, and through brutal conditioning has taught too many us to feel the same. White mass killers are apprehended by police alive, black children, just walking home are not. Nothing to see here, people, it’s just a 12-year-old boy gunned down by police. Keep moving along, citizens, it’s just another unarmed black man killed by a cop. Just stroll on by, folks, racism had absolutely nothing to do with the killing of those nine black people attending a Bible study, even though they were killed by a self-proclaimed white supremacist.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [White Supremacy] [White Blindness] [White Privilege] [-ing While Black] [Systemic Racism] [Policing] [Calling Police] [Black Lives Matter] [History]
Talking, just having an open-ended conversation, can be a useful strategy. Simply print out and fold “table tents” with the above or similar images and put them on tables during a group mealtime.
“Let’s Talk” is a PDF resource created by Teaching Tolerance that shares with educators strategies to facilitate difficult conversations about race and racism.
Much has been written about how white women perpetuate and/or support racism and include behaviors such as using our white fragility and tears as as weapons of oppression or calling the police on POC for ordinary things like having a picnic. Historic reasons include, and go beyond, white privilege and supremacy.
Do not merely quote words that make you feel good and do not challenge your thinking and actions. Do not tweet quotes that are nothing more than a Twitter performance when in actuality you have done nothing to support the causes that impact Black America. Do not use Dr. King’s quotes as a way to “check” Black America. Do not ask Black America, “What would Martin Luther King Jr. do?”… be reminded that Dr. King said: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”… When you tell Black America, “Well, it’s the law,” be reminded that Dr. King said, “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was legal.”
