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]
Resource Links Tagged with "Racial Terrorism"
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
“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]
“Put the Fangs Back in Feminism”: Author Rafia Zakaria on How Feminism Loses Relevance to Whiteness
by Kylie Cheung| August 2021
“If we want to salvage feminism, you have to remove white racial privilege,” says “Against White Feminism” author
y now you’ve seen the jokes about the “girlboss,” and her depoliticized, so-called “feminism” that can be achieved through climbing the corporate ladder or buying an expensive pair of shoes. You’ve seen the scathing takedowns of women politicians like Hillary Clinton for their parts in U.S.-perpetrated atrocities in the Middle East. And you’ve seen videos of white woman after white woman calling the cops on Black people in their communities, and the lethal power of white women’s tears when called out for racism. What does all of this have in common? According to Rafia Zakaria, an author, lawyer, domestic violence survivor and tireless voice for women of color-led feminism, in her new book “Against White Feminism” (W.W. Norton & Company, Aug. 17) all of this extends from white feminism. White feminism, Zakaria notes on the very first page of her book, isn’t defined by an individual’s race, but their refusal “to consider the role that whiteness and the racial privilege attached to it have played . . . in universalizing white feminist concerns, agendas and beliefs as being those of all feminists.”
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [White Fragility/Tears] [Systemic Racism] [White Blindness] [White Supremacy] [Collective Action] [Politics] [Social Justice] [Tips-Do’s/Don’ts] [Prison System] [Racial Terrorism] [Assumptions]
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]
Teenagers Charged In Death of Little Girl Who Was Shot By Cops; The Girl’s Family Says It’s the Officers Who Should Be Held Accountable
by Keith Reed | November 20201
Two teens in a Philly suburb were just charged with the tragic shooting death of an eight-year-old Black girl who died back in August. The only problem is nearly everyone acknowledges it was cops—who have yet to be charged—who shot the girl and three other people at the scene. We’re confused, too. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s coverage, the incident happened on Aug. 27, 2021 when Hassein Strand, 18, and Angelo Ford, 16, started shooting at each other about a block away from where a high school football game was concluding. Both are now charged with first-degree murder and other counts by the Delaware County District Attorney’s office in the death of Fanta Bility, a little girl who died at the scene. It all sounds straightforward, until we hear from the DA, Jack Stollsteimer about why he charged who he charged.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Policing] [Police Shootings] [Accountability] [-ing While Black] [Black Lives Matter] [Systemic Racism] [Justice System] [Assumptions]
BLACK LIVES MATTER; How White Feminism Failed in the Age of Trayvon Martin
by Rachel Cargle | February 2022
It was the Women’s March on January 21, 2017, that opened my eyes to the racist underbelly of the feminist movement. I was so eager to be a part of what was happening that I partnered with a friend of mine to organize a busload of people to leave from Manhattan’s Lower East Side for our nation’s capital at 4 a.m that day. … Admittedly, it didn’t dawn on me right away. It wasn’t until weeks after the march — after I was called in by a group of Black peers inviting me to question the ways white feminism gave space for my Blackness — that I took a pause to really think it through. At the march, there was an abundance of pink pussy hats but a disturbing lack of Black people among the millions chanting. It was alarming to consider, especially since the country remained in the midst of racial unrest. Audre Lorde once said, “I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.” Years after she spoke these words, I felt the same tense inseparability of my doubly oppressed identity.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [White Blindness] [Anti-Racism] [Social Justice] [Racial Terrorism] [Policing] [Intersectionality] [Black Lives Matter] [Advocacy]
America’s Gun Obsession is Rooted in Slavery; A Series of Slave Revolts Terrified White Residents and Helped Fuel the Rationale for Gun Ownership
by Carol Anderson | June 2021
For too long, the second amendment has been portrayed with a founding fathers aura swaddled in the stars and stripes. But “a well-regulated militia” wasn’t, as the story goes, about how valiant and effective the militias were in repelling the British. George Washington was disgusted with their lack of fighting ability and the way the men would just cut and run from battling against a professional army. Nor was the militia reliable as a force to uphold the law. In Shays’ Rebellion, bands of armed white men, who were in the state’s militia, attacked the Massachusetts government because of foreclosures and debt seizures, demonstrating, again, how unreliable the militia were. Boston merchants had to hire mercenaries to put down the rebellion.
On the other hand, where the militia had been steadfast was in controlling the enslaved Black population. Access to guns for white people was essential for this function.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Economics] [Justice System] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Politics] [White Blindness] [White Defensiveness] [History] [Black Lives Matter] [Social Justice] [Systemic Racism] [Slavery] [Policing] [Silencing POC]
The Re-Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Wendell Griffen | January 2022
This year, the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, an agency of the Arkansas Department of Education, has invited an un-reconstructed Southern Baptist preacher, right wing politician, and Fox News pundit named Mike Huckabee to deliver a “keynote address” during what it terms an “inter-faith prayer breakfast” on the King holiday (January 17). Attendance will be by invitation only. The event will be held at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [History] [Systemic Racism] [Social Justice] [Role Model] [Politics] [Racial Terrorism] [Civil War] [Black Lives Matter] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Economics] [White Privilege] [White Blindness] [Intersectionality]
More than 1,700 Congressmen Once Enslaved Black People. This Is Who They Were, and How They Shaped the Nation.
by Julie Zauzmer Weil, Adrian Blanco and Leo Dominguez| January 2022
From the founding of the United States until long after the Civil War, hundreds of the elected leaders writing the nation’s laws were current or former slaveowners. More than 1,700 people who served in the U.S. Congress in the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries owned human beings at some point in their lives, according to a Washington Post investigation of censuses and other historical records.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Civil War] [Slavery] [Politics] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [White Blindness] [Justice System] [History] [Black Lives Matter] [Silencing POC] [Confederate Monuments] [Indigenous]
Police Abuse Complaints by Black Chicagoans Dismissed Nearly 99 Percent of the Time; Investigators Rarely Sustain Allegations of Any Kind
by Shane Shifflett, Alissa Scheller, Scilla Alecci and Nicky Forster | December 2015
Long before Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke shot and killed a black teenager, sparking a public outcry and now a Justice Department probe into the city’s troubled police department, he had established a track record as one of Chicago’s most complained-about cops. Since 2001, civilians have lodged 20 complaints against Van Dyke. None were sustained by investigators. While it may seem surprising that so many complaints against one officer would be tossed out, a Huffington Post analysis of four years of city data released by the Invisible Institute, a nonprofit journalism organization, reveals that there are more than 180 city police officers with more complaints than Van Dyke who weren’t disciplined at all over that time. Most of those complaints were made by black residents, whose allegations of police misconduct are dismissed at nearly four times the rate of complaints filed by whites, HuffPost found.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Police Shootings] [Policing] [Black Lives Matter] [Justice System] [Silencing POC] [Denial] [Accountability] [Systemic Racism] [-ing While Black]
Native Americans and Mount Rushmore
by From the Collection: Native Americans | Date Unknown
The creation of Mount Rushmore is a story of struggle — and to some, desecration. The Black Hills are sacred to the Lakota Sioux, the original occupants of the area when white settlers arrived. For some, the four presidents carved in the hill are not without negative symbolism. The Sioux have never had much luck dealing with white men. In the Treaty of 1868, the U.S. government promised the Sioux territory that included the Black Hills in perpetuity. Perpetuity lasted only until gold was found in the mountains and prospectors migrated there in the 1870s. The federal government then forced the Sioux to relinquish the Black Hills portion of their reservation.These events fit the pattern of the late 19th century, a time of nearly constant conflict between the American government and Plains Indians. At his second presidential inauguration in 1873, Ulysses S. Grant reflected the attitudes of many whites when he said he favored a humane course to bring Native Americans “under the benign influences of education and civilization. It is either this or war of extermination.” Many of the land’s original occupants did not choose to assimilate; for them war, was the only option.”
TAGS: [Strategies] [Indigenous] [Racial Terrorism] [Systemic Racism] [Silencing POC] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [Politics] [Social Justice] [History] [White Privilege] [Prison System] [Art & Culture]
Jim Crow Laws
by history.com Editors| Updated January 2022
Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation. Named after a Black minstrel show character, the laws—which existed for about 100 years, from the post-Civil War era until 1968—were meant to marginalize African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education or other opportunities. Those who attempted to defy Jim Crow laws often faced arrest, fines, jail sentences, violence and death.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [Silencing POC] [Racial Covenants] [History] [Collective Action] [Denial] [Politics] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Black Lives Matter] [Policing] [Prison System] [Housing] [Justice System] [Advocacy] [Role Model] [Definitions]
Penobscot Nation Members Do Not Want Ancestors’ Scalping Whitewashed; A new educational film produced by the tribe explains how settlers were encouraged to scalp natives for cash bounties.
by David Sharp | December 2021
Most Americans know about atrocities endured by Native Americans after the arrival of European settlers: wars, disease, stolen land. But they aren’t always taught the extent of the indiscriminate killings. Members of the Penobscot Nation in Maine have produced an educational film addressing how European settlers scalped — killed — Indigenous people during the British colonial era, spurred for decades by cash bounties and with the government’s blessing. “It was genocide,” said Dawn Neptune Adams, one of the three Penobscot Nation members featured in the film, called “Bounty.” She said the point of the effort isn’t to make any Americans feel defensive or blamed. The filmmakers say they simply want to ensure this history isn’t whitewashed by promoting a fuller understanding of the nation’s past. At the heart of the project is a chilling declaration by Spencer Phips, lieutenant governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Systemic Racism] [History] [Social Justice] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [Politics] [Economics] [Teachers] [White Blindness]
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] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [History] [Health Disparities]
The Bloody History of Anti-Asian Violence in the West; One of the Largest Mass Lynchings in the United States Targeted Chinese Immigrants in Los Angeles
*Paywall Alert
by Kevin Waite | May 2021
This year marks the 150th anniversary of one of the largest mass lynchings in American history. The carnage erupted in Los Angeles on October 24, 1871, when a frenzied mob of 500 people stormed into the city’s Chinese quarter. Some victims were shot and stabbed; others were hanged from makeshift gallows. By the end of the night, 19 mangled bodies lay in the streets of Los Angeles.Lynching is a term most often associated with violence against African Americans in the post-Civil War South. But racial hatred has never been quarantined to one American region or confined to a single ethnic group. In Los Angeles in 1871, the victims were Chinese immigrants. Their deaths were part of a wave of anti-Asian violence that swept across the 19th-century American West—and reverberates to this day.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [History] [Asian] [Systemic Racism] [White Privilege] [Silencing POC]
Anthropology, Racial Science, and the Harvesting of Black Bones: Dr. Michael Blakey Interviewed
by Dr. Jemima Pierre | May 2021
Most renowned academic institutions in the United States are implicated in the macabre practices of “racial” science. “They don’t see African Americans as the same real complete human beings that they and their white families and neighbors are.” On Mother’s Day, May 13, 1985, the City of Philadelphia dropped two bombs on the MOVE Organization compound on Osage Avenue , killing 11 people including 5 children. Thirty-six years later, on April 21, 2021 , we learned that two anthropology professors had held on to the bones of two of the MOVE children. Alan Mann, a currently retired forensic anthropologist, had kept the remains of Tree and Delisha Africa in a cardboard box at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and shuttled them back and forth between his jobs at UPenn and Princeton University. Janet Monge, Mann’s former student and currently a lecturer at both universities, used the bones in an online Princeton anthropology course titled, “Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology.”
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Racial Terrorism] [History] [White Supremacy] [Black Lives Matter] [Indigenous] [Slavery] [Systemic Racism] [Myths] [Social Justice] [Anti-Racism] [Politics]
Slave Traders Knew Exactly What They Were Doing; A New History of Three 19th-Century Human Traffickers Explodes All the Old Excuses
by Rebecca Onion | April 2021
The Ledger and the Chain tells the story of how these three men profited from the United States’ decision to outlaw the foreign slave trade, in 1808. The change, of course, did not put an end to slavery inside the United States, and because the slaveholding states of the Upper South were finding that their land was increasingly difficult to work after decades of tobacco cultivation, they profited by selling people further South, where cotton and sugar production was booming. …
This dynamic is most visible in the traders’ letters discussing teenage girls who were sold as sex slaves. In trading these young women, identifiable in documentation by their much-higher-than-usual prices (and, sometimes, by the traders’ explicit discussion of their likelihood to sell for those purposes), Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard prided themselves on their ability to know what buyers might want—their success “speculating on the erotic desires of slaveholders.” They also raped such women, themselves; Rothman found many ribald references to those activities in their own correspondence, interspersed with discussions of everyday business matters.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Slavery] [History] [Systemic Racism] [Black Lives Matter] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Social Justice] [Politics]
Return the National Parks to the Tribes; The Jewels of America’s Landscape Should Belong to America’s Original Peoples.
by David Treuer | April 2021
The American story of “the Indian” is one of staggering loss. Some estimates put the original Indigenous population of what would become the contiguous United States between 5 million and 15 million at the time of first contact. By 1890, around the time America began creating national parks in earnest, roughly 250,000 Native people were still alive. In 1491, Native people controlled all of the 2.4 billion acres that would become the United States. Now we control about 56 million acres, or roughly 2 percent. And yet we remain, and some of us have stayed stubbornly near the parks, preserving our attachment to them. Grand Canyon National Park encloses much of the Havasupai Tribe and its reservation. Pipe Spring National Monument sits entirely inside the 120,000-acre Kaibab Paiute Indian Reservation, in northern Arizona. Many other parks neighbor Native communities. But while the parks may be near us, and of us, they are not ours.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [History] [Indigenous] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Denial] [Social Justice] [Accountability] [Environment] [Politics] [Assumptions] [Silencing POC]
Nulhegan Abenaki Post Statement on Abenaki Ethnocide
Posted on the website of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk-Abenaki Nation | January 2021
The Indigenous Abenaki people of the Northeast have, for generations, been subjected to both genocidal attacks (killing of people) and ethnocidal attacks (killing of culture) by colonial settlers and their descendants. In the colonial era, these threats took the form of murderous attacks on families and villages in war-time. In the modern era, these threats have included eugenic sterilization [http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/VT/VT.html], forced separations of children and families, misrepresentations of history, and other attacks that the United Nations classifies as “ethnocide.” By definition, ethnocide includes both a “mental element” – “the intent to destroy” – and a “physical element” – when perpetrators deliberately take actions to cause “serious bodily or mental harm” [https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml].
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Systemic Racism] [Silencing POC] [Racial Terrorism] [History] [Social Justice]
158 Resources to Understand Racism in America
by Meilan Solly | June 2020
Amid escalating clashes between protesters and police, discussing race—from the inequity embedded in American institutions to the United States’ long, painful history of anti-black violence—is an essential step in sparking meaningful societal change. To support those struggling to begin these difficult conversations, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture recently launched a “Talking About Race” portal featuring “tools and guidance” for educators, parents, caregivers and other people committed to equity. “Talking About Race” joins a vast trove of resources from the Smithsonian Institution dedicated to understanding what Bunch describes as America’s “tortured racial past.” From Smithsonian magazine articles on slavery’s Trail of Tears and the disturbing resilience of scientific racism to the National Museum of American History’s collection of Black History Month resources for educators and a Sidedoor podcast on the Tulsa Race Massacre, these 158 resources are designed to foster an equal society, encourage commitment to unbiased choices and promote antiracism in all aspects of life. Listings are bolded and organized by category.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [Anti-Racism] [Policing] [Teachers] [History] [Intersectionality] [Slavery] [Racial Terrorism] [Black Lives Matter] [Civil War] [Politics] [Social Justice] [Racial Covenants] [Housing] [Employment] [Economics] [Silencing POC] [Health Disparities] [Prison System] [Implicit Bias] [Indigenous] [Police Shootings] [Latino/a] [White Supremacy] [White Culture]
More Resources
Introduction
Definitions
Facts
Maps
Assessment Tools
History
Appropriation / Aggression
White Privilege / Supremacy
Public Displays
Performance Art
Workshops
Activist Resources
Dear White People
Being Allies
Reparations
Spiritual Foundations
Dear White People
Being Allies
Reparations
Spiritual Foundations
Public Displays
Performance Art
Workshops
Activist Resources
Assessment Tools
History
Appropriation / Aggression
White Privilege / Supremacy
Introduction
Definitions
Facts
Maps
Dear White People
Being Allies
Reparations
Spiritual Foundations
Public Displays
Performance Art
Workshops
Activist Resources
Assessment Tools
History
Appropriation / Aggression
White Privilege / Supremacy
Introduction
Definitions
Facts