by James Ross | June 2023
As we struggle today with a multiplicity of critical racial justice issues, we cannot afford to engage in whataboutism. Of course, we should be concerned about children’s access to education elsewhere. Yet, that is separate from the urgent reality that state legislatures throughout the United States are working to restrict what teachers can say and the educational outcomes they can seek – and even how students should “feel” – in courses in which race is an essential component of the discussion, such as history, civics, and literature. If we seek justice, we must focus.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Teachers] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Social Justice] [History] [Whataboutism]
Resource Links Tagged with "History"
James Forbes’ Ode to Juneteenth Calls on Americans to Embrace the Promise of Freedom
by Yonat Shimron | June 2021
(RNS) — The Rev. James A. Forbes Jr. was already an adult when he first began to understand the significance of Juneteenth. It was his wife, Bettye, whom he met in the early ’60s when they were both students at Howard University, who helped him gain an appreciation for the commemoration.
She had grown up in San Antonio, Texas, where each year on June 19, Blacks across the city celebrated their freedom with pageants, parades, performances and other public events in city parks.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Black Lives Matter] [History] [Civil War] [Policing] [Police Shootings] [White Supremacy] [Systemic Racism] [Social Justice] [Slavery]
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]
The Racist Roots of American Policing: From Slave Patrols to Traffic Stops
by Connie Hassett-Walker | Updated June 2020
Outrage over racial profiling and the killing of African Americans by police officers and vigilantes in recent years helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new. There are many precedents to the Ferguson, Missouri protests that ushered in the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protests erupted in 2014 after a police officer shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown; the officer was subsequently not indicted.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Policing] [Slavery] [Black Lives Matter] [History] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [-ing While Black] [Civil War] [Racial Covenants] [Politics] [Justice System] [Police Shootings] [Implicit Bias]
How Textbooks Taught White Supremacy; A Historian Steps Back to the 1700s and Shares What’s Changed and What Needs to Change
by Liz Mineo | September 2020
Yacovone, who co-authored “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” with Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2013, is now writing “Teaching White Supremacy: The Textbook Battle Over Race in American History.”
The Gazette interviewed Yacovone about the origins of his research, his findings, and why he thinks it’s necessary to teach the difficult story of slavery and white supremacy and their legacies.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [History] [Slavery] [Denial] [White Supremacy] [Systemic Racism] [Social Justice] [Black Lives Matter] [Civil War] [CRT]
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]
‘The Invention of Race’: Documentary Explores How the Concept of Race Developed
by MPR News |June 2021
Tuesday marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Mobs of white residents, many of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has been called the single worst incident of racial violence in American history. Racial incidents make headlines year after year in the United States. We are a society made up of all the races and ethnicities on the planet, and we have a painful history of exploitation and oppression tied to race. What we don’t often consider is where the idea of different races came from. God? Nature? Or was it man-made? — and if so, why? “The Invention of Race,” a documentary produced and hosted by John Biewen, explores how these concepts developed from the ancient world to today. …
One history professor says the invention of race came later, tracing it back to a surge of African slaves being brought to Europe in the 1600s.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [History] [Silencing POC] [Slavery] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Social Justice]
Thousands of pages documenting slavery found in attic of Eastern Shore House
by Anagha Srikanth | July 2021
Thousands of papers, some documenting the auction and sale of enslaved Black Americans, were headed for the auction block themselves before Black historians and community members stepped in to reclaim ownership over their past. “It was important to the community because this will connect the dots for people and the younger generation, to let them know how things were. To move forward, you have to see what the past was like,” said Carolyn Brooks, a community historian with the Chesapeake Heartland Project. About 2,000 pages dating from the late 1600s to early 1800s were found in a plastic trash bag in the attic of a 200-year-old house near Chestertown, Maryland, as the owner, Nancy Bordely Lane, was cleaning it out this spring. The foundation of the house, built in 1803 on property that had remained in the family since 1667, was reportedly damaged and the structure was going to be demolished. The documents were headed for the garbage, but were rescued and delivered to Dixon’s Crumpton Auction in waxed seafood boxes, John Chaski, an antique-manuscript expert, told the Washington Post.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Slavery] [History] [Systemic Racism] [Art & Culture] [Racial Terrorism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture]
The Shameful Final Grievance of the Declaration of Independence; The Revolution Wasn’t Only An Effort to Establish Independence from the British—it Was Also a Push to Preserve Slavery and Suppress Native American Resistance.
by Jeffrey Ostler | July 2021
“We hold these truths to be self evident.” Say these words, and many Americans will be able to recite what follows: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, …The closing words of the Declaration are far less known. The last of a list of 27 grievances against King George III, they read as follows: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” These words call attention to hard truths about America’s founding that have often been brushed aside.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Slavery] [Indigenous] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [History] [Politics] [White Privilege] [Economics] [Racial Terrorism]
Class Action Settlement Brings $59 Million to Descendents of the Pembina Band of Chippewa Indians
by Andrew Kennard | June 2021
WASHINGTON — A $59 million settlement in Peltier v. Haaland, a class action lawsuit alleging trust fund mismanagement and failure to account by the Department of the Interior, will go to four tribes located in the Midwest and Northwest United States and more than 39,000 beneficiaries. On June 10, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia finalized the settlement, which was reached in the Court of Federal Claims with the Chippewa Cree Tribe of the Rocky Boy’s Reservation of Montana, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota, the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana, and the White Earth Band of Chippewa Indians of Minnesota, the Interior Department announced. The tribes were represented by the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), according to the website designated for the lawsuit.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Reparations] [Indigenous] [Systemic Racism] [Justice System] [History] [Economics] [Politics]
White Hysteria, Critical Race Theory, and Eyes That Dare Not See
by David Gushee | June 2021
The hysteria over Critical Race Theory right now means many things.
Most immediately, it means that the relationship between skilled right-wing demagogues and their audience in the U.S. these days is positively Pavlovian. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, rinse and repeat. If Tucker Carlson says over several nights on Fox News that Critical Race Theory is a huge threat to America, it won’t be long before crowds will be in the streets protesting, Republican legislators will be banning the heresy from being taught even in universities, and previously sleepy school board meetings will be broken up by hysterical white parents. … The deeper meaning of the manufactured Critical Race Theory furor is that there appears to be a massive audience in the U.S. for anything that triggers what is variously called “white rage,” “white fragility” and “white hysteria.” A significant portion of the U.S. white population simply cannot face the vicious history and ongoing reality of white racism in this country.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [History] [Systemic Racism] [White Fragility/Tears] [CRT] [Politics] [White Blindness] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [Prison System] [Policing]
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]
James Forbes’ Ode to Juneteenth Calls on Americans to Embrace the Promise of Freedom
by Yonat Shimron | June 2021
The retired pastor’s spoken word is not simply a paean to freedom. It’s a call to all Americans to face the reality of the nation’s history and the unfinished work of Juneteenth. Forbes’ spoken word is not simply a paean to freedom. It’s a call to all Americans to face the reality of the nation’s history and the unfinished work of Juneteenth. “I felt, as a preacher, that this day, in a curious way, has a power not even present in the Fourth of July,” Forbes said. “The Fourth of July set people free from the British Crown. But Juneteenth set people free from the divisions, the dehumanization, the cruelty and bondage of slavery itself.” Recently, he shared his spoken word with another North Carolina religious leader, the Rev. William J. Barber II. Barber liked it so much he had Forbes deliver it on camera. It’s now posted to his Repairers of the Breach YouTube channel.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Slavery] [History] [Civil War] [Racial Terrorism] [Black Lives Matter] [Role Model] [Politics] [White Supremacy] [Policing] [Social Justice]
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]
White People’s Fear of Critical Race Theory is Based in Ignorance Separating Fact from Fiction
by Allison Gaines | May 2021
Our nation is in the process of exchanging color-blind ideology with anti-racism. White people will have to take a good, hard look in the mirror and into their family albums. Some are afraid of the skeletons they will find, and others are leery of the theory that will make them take a look in the first place. White people want to focus on selected parts of American history, lionizing their role. Many choose to ignore that the gap between Black and white homeownership is wider than it was 50 years ago. Or that Black families have one-tenth the wealth as white ones. Currently, Black people are 3.25 times more likely to die in police encounters.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [History] [Policing] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [White Defensiveness] [White Supremacy] [White Blindness] [Denial] [Racial Covenants] [Housing] [Health Disparities] [Economics] [Politics] [Social Justice] [Definitions] [Intersectionality] [Colorblindness] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [CRT] [Accountability] [Slavery]
What Really Happened on Juneteenth — and Why It’s Time for Supremacists and Their Sympathizers to Surrender
by Robin Washington | June 2021
If you saw my column about Juneteenth posted here over the last few days, or a previous version on the website of Be’chol Lashon several years ago, or a video version currently presented by Be’chol Lashon, you would know I had bittersweet feelings about the history of the day. I no longer do. I am outraged by it. My change in emotion comes after learning from historian friends that the oft-repeated tale of Union soldiers arriving in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865 to inform enslaved African Americans that they were free is pure fiction. Not because they weren’t legally freed 2-½ months earlier when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Or technically freed 2-1/2 years before when President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slavery null and void in areas under rebellion, very much including Texas.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [History] [Slavery] [Myths] [Racial Terrorism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Social Justice]
Make Juneteenth Great Again: The Caucasians’ Guide to Celebrating Juneteenth
by Michael Harriot | June 2021
Now that Juneteenth is a federal holiday, we created a CRT-free educational curriculum to help colonizer Americans resist the urge to gentrify this celebration. Hold up, white people. Now that you have officially discovered Juneteenth,* you need to become familiar with the traditions, customs and history lest you succumb to the Caucasian colonization gene and gentrify this auspicious celebration. Before hopping on the Juneteenth bandwagon, you first need to realize that you have no say in driving the narrative about this special day. Left to your devices, Juneteenth might become a day when you parade around in African headwraps drinking Hennessy just like y’all celebrate Mexican Independence Day on May 5 by donning sombreros and taking shots of American tequila.** So, to protect the legacy of this special day, The Root created this handy-dandy guide to help you become familiar with existing in spaces you don’t own.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Tip’s-Dos/Don’ts] [History] [Slavery] [Definitions]
Offensive Mascots Take Toll on Indigenous Athletes; Natalie Weeks-O’Neal Hasn’t Forgotten the Attacks She Faced on the Basketball Court from Fans
by Jaden Urban | July 2021
…But on that day in the 1990s, Williams asked Weeks if she could have a private moment with her. Once they were alone, the coach warned her that the team they were about to play had a racially based mascot, the Indians. Williams knew Weeks’ heritage and culture and wanted to let her know before the game, so she wouldn’t be surprised. “Hey, when we go in there, this is something you might potentially see,” Williams told her. “I just want to talk to you about this, warn you, and get you mentally prepared. There are some things you’re going to have to block out.”
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Systemic Racism] [Social Justice] [History] [Role Model] [Racial Terrorism] [Politics] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Blindness]
The Battle for Mount Rushmore: ‘It Should be Turned into Something like the Holocaust Museum’
by Annette McGivney | July 2021
The national memorial draws nearly 3 million visitors a year – and Native Americans want the site back with a focus on oppression.
Mount Rushmore national memorial draws nearly 3 million visitors a year to its remote location in South Dakota. They travel from all corners of the globe just to lay their eyes on what the National Park Service calls America’s “shrine of democracy”. Phil Two Eagle is not opposed to the fact that the giant sculpture of American presidents is a major tourist attraction but he thinks the park should have a different focus: oppression. “It should be turned into something like the United States Holocaust Museum,” he said. “The world needs to know what was done to us.” Two Eagle noted what historians have also documented. Hitler got some of his genocidal ideas for ethnic cleansing from 19th and early 20th century US policies against Native Americans.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [History] [Systemic Racism] [Denial] [Silencing POC] [Politics] [Social Justice] [Policing] [Economics]
Battle for the Ballot; The Black Sorority That Faced Racism in the Suffrage Movement but Refused to Walk away
by Sydney Trent | August 2020
The air was chilly, the trees still bare, yet the sky was clear and bright. March 3, 1913, was shaping up to be a perfect day for a grand and purposeful parade. Thousands of showily dressed suffragists had amassed in Washington from across the nation — indeed the world — to march along Pennsylvania Avenue on the eve of President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Politics] [Role Model] [History] [Systemic Racism] [Employment] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Social Justice]
This Man Not Only Invented the Gas Mask But Rescued 32 Men During An Explosion With It
by Storyteller | JULY 2021
The son of former slaves, Garrett Morgan was born in Paris, Kentucky on March 4, 1877. His early childhood was spent attending school and working on the family farm with his brothers and sisters. While still a teenager, he left Kentucky and moved north to Cincinnati, Ohio in search of opportunity. Although Garrett Morgan’s formal education never took him beyond elementary school, he hired a tutor while living in Cincinnati and continued his studies in English grammar.
… On July 25, 1916, Garrett Morgan made national news for using his gas mask to rescue 32 men trapped during an explosion in an underground tunnel 250 feet beneath Lake Erie. Morgan and a team of volunteers donned the new “gas masks” and went to the rescue. After the rescue, Morgan’s company received requests from fire departments around the country who wished to purchase the new masks. The Morgan gas mask was later refined for use by U.S. Army during World War I. In 1914, Garrett Morgan was awarded a patent for a Safety Hood and Smoke Protector. Two years later, a refined model of his early gas mask won a gold medal at the International Exposition of Sanitation and Safety, and another gold medal from the International Association of Fire Chiefs.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [History] [Role Model] [Assumptions]
My Turn: Abenaki People’s relationship to the Connecticut River should Not Be Overlooked
by Andrea Donlon & Kathy Urffer | June 2021
For hundreds of years the Indigenous history of the Northeast has been systematically erased. It is time to speak up to make sure that the federal government and power companies do not continue that bitter legacy. Five hydroelectric facilities on the Connecticut River are renewing their operating licenses under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Later this summer, the public will have an opportunity to weigh in on terms for these licenses that will impact more than 175 miles of the Connecticut River for the next 40-50 years. The five hydro facilities are the Wilder, Bellows Falls, and Vernon dams in Vermont and New Hampshire, and the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Project and Turners Falls dam in Massachusetts.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Environment] [History] [Systemic Racism]
Black America’s Neglected Origin Stories
by Annette Gordon-Reed | June 2021
The history of Blackness on this continent is longer and more varied than the version I was taught in school. Origin stories matter, for individuals, groups of people, and nations. They inform our sense of self, telling us what kind of people we believe we are, what kind of nation we believe we live in. They usually carry, at least, a hope that where we started might hold the key to where we are in the present. We can say, then, that much of the concern over origin stories is about our current needs and desires, not actual history. Origin stories seek to find the familiar, or the superficially familiar—memory, sometimes shading into mythology. Both memory and mythology have their uses, even if they must be separated from the facts of the past. But in the case of Black people, the limitations of the history and possibility of our origin stories have helped create and maintain an extremely narrow construction of Blackness.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [History] [Myths] [Civil War] [Slavery] [Indigenous] [Black Lives Matter] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [Systemic Racism] [Silencing POC] [CRT]
‘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]
The Colonization of Africa
by Ehiedu E. G. Iweriebor – Hunter College | Date Unknown
Between the 1870s and 1900, Africa faced European imperialist aggression, diplomatic pressures, military invasions, and eventual conquest and colonization. At the same time, African societies put up various forms of resistance against the attempt to colonize their countries and impose foreign domination. By the early twentieth century, however, much of Africa, except Ethiopia and Liberia, had been colonized by European powers. The European imperialist push into Africa was motivated by three main factors, economic, political, and social. It developed in the nineteenth century following the collapse of the profitability of the slave trade, its abolition and suppression, as well as the expansion of the European capitalist Industrial Revolution. The imperatives of capitalist industrialization—including the demand for assured sources of raw materials, the search for guaranteed markets and profitable investment outlets—spurred the European scramble and the partition and eventual conquest of Africa. Thus the primary motivation for European intrusion was economic.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [Economics] [Slavery] [History] [Politics] [Social Justice] [White Supremacy]
The Racist Roots of American Policing: From Slave Patrols to Traffic Stops
by The Conversation | Updated June 2020
Outrage over racial profiling and the killing of African Americans by police officers and vigilantes in recent years helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new. There are many precedents to the Ferguson, Missouri protests that ushered in the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protests erupted in 2014 after a police officer shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown; the officer was subsequently not indicted.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [Implicit Bias] [Slavery] [History] [Policing] [Police Shootings] [Black Lives Matter] [-ing While Black] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Silencing POC] [Civil War] [Justice System]
It Turns Out, All Those ‘Woke’ White Allies Were Lying
by Michael Harriot | May 2021
When the country collectively witnessed the brutal May 25, 2020 death of George Floyd, white people were forever changed. Millions took to the streets, arm-in-arm with their fellow brethren, offering their support for justice and equality. …This multiracial outpouring of sympathy and solidarity transformed the country. And then, white people went home and kept being white. This harsh realization is not an opinion. It is a factual statement based on the research and analyses of multiple organizations. And before we get to the “not all white people,” part of the conversation, let’s be clear, the reports are based on studies that showed that the vast majority of white people didn’t just not do anything. According to stuff like math and science, the levels of white support are lower than they were before demonstrations swept the country last summer. For instance, remember all those corporations who pledged to donate money to social justice organizations? Well, it turns out that the companies employed a very complex loophole called “lying like a motherfucker” to get out of actually doing what they said they would. According to a review of pledges compiled by Creative Investments Research, businesses have donated less than one percent of the money promised.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Social Justice] [Systemic Racism] [Police Shootings] [Black Lives Matter] [White Blindness] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [Policing] [History] [Politics]