Resource Links Tagged with "Slavery"

How COVID-19 Hollowed Out a Generation of Young Black Men

by Akilah Johnson and Nina Martin | December 2020
They were pillars of their communities and families, and they are not replaceable. To understand why COVID-19 killed so many young Black men, you need to know the legend of John Henry. Bates was only 36, too young to be at risk for COVID-19, or so the conventional wisdom went. He attributed his malaise to allergies and pushed forward with his second full-time job, as head pastor of Forest Aid Baptist Church, working on his Sunday sermon between naps. Online church was a new concept to his parishioners, and during the next morning’s service, he had to keep reminding them to mute their phones. As he preached about Daniel in the lion’s den — we will be tested, but if we continue to have faith, we will come through — he grimaced from the effort. That night he was burning up with fever. Five days later he was on a ventilator; five days after that, he died.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Health Disparities] [History] [Black Lives Matter] [Systemic Racism] [White Blindness] [Economics] [Denial] [Social Justice] [Slavery] [Housing] [Employment] [Intersectionality] [-ing While Black] [White Privilege] [White Culture]

After Attempted Coup, We Must Fight White Supremacy and Sow Revolutionary Love

by Adrienne Maree Brown | January 2021
The confederacy, whose flag was waved in the Capitol building on Wednesday, was a four-year alignment of 11 states committed, among other things, to the right to own slaves. It emerged toward the end of a centuries-long period during which it was easily assumed that the role of people of African descent was to provide free labor until death. The foundations of U.S. wealth and reach are heavy bricks sunken into the bloody soil of that labor. There are many flags that could be created and waved if the issue at hand were the right of states to self-determine their own destinies, but those who claim the U.S. confederacy are easily aligning with a very specific and racist right, a very specific white supremacy.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [White Supremacy] [Slavery] [History] [Economics] [Civil War] [Systemic Racism] [Black Lives Matter] [Myths] [Denial] [Politics]

White Images, Black Reality: How to Talk to the Accidental Apologists for Monsters

by Earl Hazell | June 2020
We are now living in another one of those times in history when the majority of white people feel compelled to project all of their most deluded fantasies and deepest insecurities onto People of Color simultaneously, to avoid dealing with the systemic crisis they have created. As such, some of them are looking for any excuse to disrupt our communication with each other with a specific objective: to make themselves feel better by getting us to reestablish the sanctity of their illusions. How I ended an online conversation with several friends of mine that a white person entered recently—without invitation—is something that might be helpful to others who will inevitably find themselves in similar situations for some time to come. For some white people, particularly liberals , crisis does not begin when innocent people are ritualistically murdered . Crisis begins when ignorance is no longer bliss. When a lessor enlightened person of European descent elbows their way into one of your talks online, and passive/aggressively asks you to deny reality so you can comfort them, try telling them something like this: _____, the first thing you need to do is cop to the fact that your principle objective for coming into this conversation is to dominate it.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Denial] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [History] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Blindness] [White Defensiveness] [Racial Terrorism] [Economics] [Silencing POC] [Systemic Racism] [Policing] [Slavery] [Reparations] [Black Lives Matter] [Indigenous] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts]

Denial Is the Heartbeat of America; When Have Americans Been Willing to Admit Who We Are?

by Ibram X. Kendi | January 2021
“Let me be very clear: The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America. Do not represent who we are,” President-elect Joe Biden said during Wednesday’s siege. …To say that the attack on the U.S. Capitol is not who we are is to say that this is not part of us, not part of our politics, not part of our history. And to say that this is not part of America, American politics, and American history is a bald-faced denial. But the denial is normal. In the aftermath of catastrophes, when have Americans commonly admitted who we are? The heartbeat of America is denial. It is historic, this denial. Every American generation denies. America is establishing the freest democracy in the world, said the white people who secured their freedom during the 1770s and ’80s. America is the greatest democracy on Earth, said the property owners voting in the early 19th century. America is the beacon of democracy in world history, said the men who voted before the 1920s. America is the leading democracy in the world, said the non-incarcerated people who have voted throughout U.S. history in almost every state. America is the utmost democracy on the face of the Earth, said the primarily older and better-off and able-bodied people who are the likeliest to vote in the 21st century. America is the best democracy around, said the American people when it was harder for Black and Native and Latino people to vote in the 2020 election.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [Black Lives Matter] [Indigenous] [Latino/a] [Denial] [History] [Politics] [White Defensiveness] [White Blindness] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [Slavery] [Civil War] [Racial Terrorism] [Policing] [Police Shootings] [Economics]

On the Anniversary of His Death, Theodore W. Allen’s Analysis Still Resonates

by Jeffrey B. Perry |January 2021
“White supremacy” wrote Allen, is “both the keystone and the Achilles heel of U.S. bourgeois democracy.” “White identity had to be carefully taught.”Theodore W. “Ted” Allen (August 23, 1919-January 19, 2005) was an anti-white supremacist, working class intellectual and activist. He developed his pioneering class struggle-based analysis of “white skin privilege” beginning in the mid-1960s; authored the seminal two-volume “The Invention of the White Race” in the 1990s; and consistently maintained that the struggle against white supremacy was central to efforts at radical social change in the United States. Born on August 23, 1919, in Indianapolis, Indiana, he grew up in Paintsville, Kentucky and Huntington, West Virginia (where he graduated from high school), and then went into the mines and became a United Mine Workers Local President. After hurting his back in the mines he moved to New York City and lived his last fifty-plus years in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn where he worked various jobs including as a postal worker at the Bulk Mail Center in Jersey City, NJ and as a librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [Social Justice] [History] [Slavery] [Economics] [Civil War] [Systemic Racism] [Politics]

12 Racist and Offensive Phrases That People Still Use All the Time

by Christina Sterbenz and Dominic-Madori Davis | June 2020
As language evolves, we sometimes forget the offensive origins of certain words and phrases. Or we never knew them in the first place. Many common terms and phrases are actually rooted in racist, sexist, or generally distasteful language. For example, the popular phrase “peanut gallery,” typically used to reference hecklers, originated as a term to refer to those — usually Black people — who sat in the “cheapest” section of the Vaudeville theaters.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [Assumptions] [Implicit Bias] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Definitions] [History] [Slavery] [Accountability] [Microaggressions] [White Blindness]

Uncle Tom Was a Man Who Refused to Beat Black Woman….

by gamma | January 2020
Most Black folks have heard or used the term Uncle tom when we refer to a sell-out, or someone we feel is tap dancing for the attention and acceptance of other races. It has always been used in a derogatory manner to infer that this was the type of person who cozied up to his slave master, but did you know that the inference and analogy is totally wrong? … His name? Josiah Henson! Josiah Henson was an author, abolitionist, and minister. Born into slavery, in Port Tobacco, Charles County, Maryland, he escaped to Upper Canada in 1830, and founded a settlement and laborer’s school for other fugitive slaves at Dawn, near Dresden, in Kent County, Upper Canada, of British Canada.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Myths] [Slavery] [History] [Denial] [Teachers]

The Pre-Civil War Fight Against White Supremacy; In a Country Driven by Racial Politics, Three Women Strove for a Just Society

by Dorothy Wickenden | January 2021
Two years into the cataclysmic war, Lincoln found a way to justify emancipation, as a “military necessity.” Frances greeted the proclamation with relief, but not euphoria. She was equally subdued when the Thirteenth Amendment eventually passed, on January 31, 1865, inscribing into the Constitution the eradication of slavery. Back in Auburn, she read the Herald Tribune’s report about the giddy scene in Washington. The visitors’ galleries were full, and senators and Supreme Court Justices squeezed onto the House floor. Finally, Speaker Schuyler Colfax stood and gavelled the room to order, announcing in a quavering voice that the ayes had a hundred and nineteen votes, the nays fifty-six. As Democrats looked on stonily, Republicans threw their hats in the air, cheering and roaring. Women in the gallery waved their handkerchiefs. Artillery at the Capitol fired a hundred-gun salute. The Tribune’s headline declared, “freedom triumphant. commencement of a new era. death of slavery.” It was a historic victory, but it had been won as much by political horse-trading as by deep principle. Henry and Lincoln, in a months-long backroom campaign, had lobbied wavering representatives with bribes and offers of jobs. And, Frances thought, it was too soon to celebrate. The amendment still had to be ratified by three-quarters of the states. Half a million men had died in the war, and it was not over. General William Tecumseh Sherman was moving through the Carolinas, and Ulysses S. Grant was eight months into his siege of Petersburg. There were rumors that rebels would attempt to assassinate the President. After reading about the joyous outpouring in the House, Frances wrote Henry a bracingly solemn note: “I congratulate you on the passage of the Constitutional amendment which I know you had much at heart. The prospect of abolishing slavery throughout the United States is indeed cheering.” The battle for equality had barely begun.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Slavery] [Justice System] [Civil War] [History] [Politics] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Systemic Racism] [Racial Terrorism] [Prison System] [Faith-Based/Spiritual] [Quaker]

How the Dawes Act Stole 90 Million Acres of Native American Land

by Dave Roos | January 2021
In the long, dark history of the United States government’s mistreatment of Native Americans, most people are familiar with the Trail of Tears, in which approximately 15,000 Native American men, women and children died during forced relocation from their tribal homelands in the American Southeast to Indian Territory in modern-day Oklahoma. But the theft of Native American tribal land didn’t stop with the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that authorized the Trail of Tears. Over the next century, Congress passed a series of laws that systematically stripped tribes of their lands, selling them to white settlers and corporations.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [History] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Slavery] [Systemic Racism] [Politics] [Economics] [Implicit Bias] [Justice System] [Assumptions]

Enslaved Native Americans Played Central Role in 1600s New England Households

by Cecily Hilleary | January 2021
In 1614, six years before the Mayflower crossing, English explorer John Smith led two ships to survey the New England coast. As he described in his “Historie of New England,” Smith left shipmaster Thomas Hunt behind to fish and trade with the Natives. But Hunt saw an opportunity in another kind of trade: He kidnapped 27 Wampanoags and sailed to Spain, where he sold “these poor innocent souls” into slavery. … Slavery in America is usually associated with Africa and the American South. But Ohio State University historian Margaret Ellen Newell told VOA that up until 1700, Native Americans comprised the majority of slaves in America. “The first documented case was in 1605, when an English expedition captured four Wabanakis in what’s now Maine and brought them back to London,” Newell said. “The expedition was run by a man named Ferdinando Gorges, who hoped to establish a colony in northern New England and was looking for captives to use as guides and interpreters.” Since the start of their settlement, Puritan colonists sought Indians as indentured servants as a solution to labor shortages, she said.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Slavery] [History] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Systemic Racism] [Justice System] [Prison System]

Embracing Reparations for Slavery

by Cabaretic Community | January 2021
Quakers have historically taken unpopular stances throughout history. We favored abolition and freed our slaves before most others did. We allowed women the right to participate in Worship, providing them the agency to contribute vocal ministry from the very beginning. Many women helped establish the Religious Society of Friends (our official name) as well. We revere our First Wave feminist foremothers who were suffragettes and indeed, many Second Wave feminists called themselves Friends as well. In recent times, Pendle Hill, a Quaker resource and learning center based outside of Philadelphia, has made tentative strides towards a potentially greater embrace of white wealth being transferred to black hands. The details of the proposal are below.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Quaker] [Faith-Based/Spiritual] [History] [Slavery] [Politics] [Economics] [Reparations] [Systemic Racism] [Social Justice]

PWB: Preaching While Black! Ten Indicators of Racism in Predominantly White Church Bodies and What You Can Do To Address Them; The Unholy Union of Racism and Christianity

by Rev. Dr. Jack Sullivan, Jr. | August 2015
Racism and Christianity are no strangers to each other. While no theologically and biblically alert and informed person of our day would dare to defend racism as a legitimate, holy expression of Christianity, it is important to note that United States church bodies were on both sides of the matter of the enslavement of Africans, with some “Christian” ministers and theologians taking the time to bend some biblical texts while remaining silent on others, in order to offer heretical justification of the evil practice of slavery while crafting the doctrine of White supremacy and Black inferiority to provide a perverse platform on which it was placed. Of course, segregation, discrimination, and White privilege as hallmarks of societal racism, were found in organized church bodies as well. Several predominantly White church bodies continue to struggle with racism in both society and their organizational bodies. Some have made defeating racism a priority, while other church organizations have gone so far as to call racism a sin and to issue apologies for their historic and contemporary silence and complicity with racist orientations, laws, and church practices. Still, a large number of church bodies choose to remain silent on the matter perhaps while not realizing that this option actually emboldens racist practices.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [Faith-Based/Spiritual] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [-ing While Black] [Employment] [Policing] [Slavery] [Latino/a] [Asian] [Indigenous] [Black Lives Matter] [Social Justice] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts]

The Brutish Museums by Dan Hicks Review – Return Everything; A Powerful Call for Western Museums to Return the Objects Looted in the Violent Days of Empire, During ‘World War Zero’

by Charlotte Lydia Riley | November 2020
The book is a vital call to action: part historical investigation, part manifesto, demanding the reader do away with the existing “brutish museums” of the title and find a new way for them to exist, not as sites of violence or trauma but as “sites of conscience”. Hicks is a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, whose website says that it displays “archaeological and ethnographic materials from all parts of the world”. He focuses on one particular region – the kingdom of Benin, now located in modern Nigeria.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [History] [Art & Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Denial] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Racial Terrorism] [Economics] [Slavery] [Reparations]

Alexander Hamilton, Enslaver? New Research Says Yes; A Paper by a Researcher at the Schuyler Mansion Finds Overlooked Evidence in Letters and Hamilton’s Own Account Books Indicating That He Bought, Sold and Personally Owned Slaves.

by Jennifer Schuessler | November 2020
“Not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally,” she writes. “It is vital,” she adds, “that the myth of Hamilton as ‘the Abolitionist Founding Father’ end.” The evidence cited in the paper, which was quietly published online last month, is not entirely new. But Ms. Serfilippi’s forceful case has caught the eye of historians, particularly those who have questioned what they see as his inflated antislavery credentials.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Slavery] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Art & Culture] [Denial] [Myths]

Elites Use Race to Divide Us; The War on Police Brutality Hides a Much Bigger Threat to All Americans

by Monica Harris | June 2020
Let’s get something straight: white privilege is real. I know because I’ve lived in its shadow my entire life. I’ve felt it even when I’ve tried to forget or pretend it wasn’t there. White privilege wasn’t earned; it was gifted to people who brought others, shackled in the bowels of ships, to serve them. Living in a country where your ancestors were once stuff that other people “owned” leaves wounds so deep they can’t be erased from the collective memory. And when your ancestors were the ones allowed to “own” other people, it creates something equally indelible: an advantage that’s hard-wired into all levels of society. It’s like getting a head start in every race that always puts you a few yards from the finish line. It’s an entitlement that lingers, unspoken, in the back of all minds, silently playing out in everything we say, think, or do.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [History] [Policing] [Slavery] [Implicit Racism] [Economics] [Black Lives Matter] [Police Shootings] [Denial] [Civil War]

Black Farmers Have Been Robbed of Land. A New Bill Would Give Them a “Quantum Leap” Toward Justice. “This is the Black Farmers Civil Rights Act of 2020, and it’s Long Overdue.”

by Tom Philpott | November 2020
A new Senate bill, called the Justice for Black Farmers Act, set to be released November 30, would mount a long-delayed federal effort to reverse the “destructive forces that were unleashed upon Black farmers over the past century—one of the dark corners of shame in American history,” lead sponsor Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told Mother Jones. …The Justice for Black Farmers Act’s much more modest proposal would amount to an “equitable balancing of the scales after decades of systemic racism within the USDA that disadvantaged Black farmers, excluded them from loans, and other programs, [and] prevented them from holding on to their land,” Booker said.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Civil War] [Slavery] [White Supremacy] [Systemic Racism] [Politics] [Reparations] [Advocacy] [History] [Collective Action] [Racial Covenants]

Fact Check: Quotes from Prominent American Statesmen on Race are Accurate

by Reuters Staff | July 2020
An old image that is recirculating on social media purportedly shows quotes on race by the Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and member of the Virginia House of Delegates Henry Berry. The quotes, contextualized below, are accurate.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [History] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Slavery]

The Ugly History of the Pledge of Allegiance — and Why It Matters; Requiring Displays of Patriotism Have Often Been Tied to Nativism and Bigotry

by Christopher Petrella | November 2017
The origins of the pledge trace to the late 19th century, the product of an expansionist American project. In 1891, the family magazine Youth’s Companion asked 35-year-old Francis Bellamy, a former pastor of Boston’s Bethany Baptist Church, to fashion a patriotic program for schools around the country to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s “arrival in America” by “raising the U.S. Flag over every public school from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” …Far from a political outlier, Bellamy tapped into the ubiquitous turn-of-the-century nativism that made enemies of the 2.5 million Slavs, Jews and Italians who immigrated to the United States throughout the 1880s and 1890s.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Indigenous] [Policing] [History] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Immigration] [Slavery] [Anti-Racism] [Assumptions]

American Environmentalism’s Racist Roots Have Shaped Global Thinking about Conservation

by Prakash Kashwan | September 2020
American environmentalism’s racist roots have influenced global conservation practices. Most notably, they are embedded in longstanding prejudices against local communities and a focus on protecting pristine wildernesses. This dominant narrative pays little thought to indigenous and other poor people who rely on these lands – even when they are its most effective stewards.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Systemic Racism] [Myths] [Confederate Monuments] [Slavery] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Economics] [History] [Environment]

Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music; The Field Must Acknowledge a History of Systemic Racism While Also Giving New Weight to Black Composers, Musicians, and Listeners.

by Alex Ross | September 2020
This spring, the journal Music Theory Online published “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” an article by Philip Ewell, who teaches at Hunter College. It begins with the sentence “Music theory is white,” and goes on to argue that the whiteness of the discipline is manifest not only in the lack of diversity in its membership but also in a deep-seated ideology of white supremacy, one that insidiously affects how music is analyzed and taught. The main target of Ewell’s critique is the early-twentieth-century Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), who parsed musical structures in terms of foreground, middle-ground, and background levels, teasing out the tonal formulas that underpin large-scale movements. Schenker held racist views, particularly with regard to Black people, and according to Ewell those views seeped into the seemingly abstract principles of his theoretical work.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Art & Culture] [Systemic Racism] [History] [White Supremacy] [Myths] [-ing While Black] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [Immigration] [Slavery] [Civil War] [Asian]

How Prison Labor is the New American Slavery and Most of Us Unknowingly Support it

by Sara Burrows | June 2016
If you buy products or services from any of the 50 companies listed below (and you likely do), you are supporting modern American slavery. American slavery was technically abolished in 1865, but a loophole in the 13th Amendment has allowed it to continue “as a punishment for crimes” well into the 21st century. Not surprisingly, corporations have lobbied for a broader and broader definition of “crime” in the last 150 years. As a result, there are more (mostly dark-skinned) people performing mandatory, essentially unpaid, hard labor in America today than there were in 1830.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2010’s] [Slavery] [Prison System] [Strategies] [Economics] [Systemic Racism] [Individual Change]

How the Long Fight for Slavery Reparations is Slowly Being Won

by Kris Manjapra | April 2020
In a suburb of Chicago, the world’s first government-funded slavery reparations programme is beginning. Robin Rue Simmons helped make it happen – but her victory has been more than 200 years in the making. It began with an email. On an especially cold day in Evanston, Illinois, in February 2019, Robin Rue Simmons, 43 years old and two years into her first term as alderman for the city’s historically Black 5th ward, sent an email whose effects would eventually make US history. The message to the nine-member equity and empowerment commission of the Evanston city council started with a disarmingly matter-of-fact heading: “Because ‘reparations’ makes people uncomfortable.”
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Slavery] [Reparations] [Advocacy] [History] [Racial Covenants] [Systemic Racism] [Politics] [Denial] [Accountability] [Economics] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege]

The Racist History of Abortion and Midwifery Bans; Today’s attacks on abortion access have a long history rooted in white supremacy.

by Michele Goodwin | July 2020
Just like slavery, anti-abortion efforts are rooted in white supremacy, the exploitation of Black women, and placing women’s bodies in service to men. Just like slavery, maximizing wealth and consolidating power motivated the anti-abortion enterprise. Then, just as now, anti-abortion efforts have nothing to do with saving women’s lives or protecting the interests of children. Today, a person is 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion, and medical evidence has shown for decades that an abortion is as safe as a penicillin shot—and yet abortion remains heavily restricted in states across the country. Prior to the Civil War, abortion and contraceptives were legal in the U.S., used by Indigenous women as well as those who sailed to these lands from Europe. For the most part, the persons who performed all manner of reproductive health care were women — female midwives. Midwifery was interracial; half of the women who provided reproductive health care were Black women. Other midwives were Indigenous and white.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [History] [Slavery] [Black Lives Matter] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Politics] [Civil War] [Asian]

Teaching the Hard History of Indigenous Slavery; TT’s newest film, ‘The Forgotten Slavery of Our Ancestors,’ offers a classroom-ready introduction to the history of Indigenous enslavement in What is Now the United States.

by Teaching Tolerance Staff | October 2020
Recognizing the ways that American enslavement and dispossession continue to shape our lives is a critical first step in working to address oppressive systems still in place. And students deserve an accurate reckoning of that legacy. As Hasan Kwame Jeffries, chair of our Teaching Hard History Advisory Board, wrote in his preface to that project, “Some say that slavery was our country’s original sin, but it is much more than that. Slavery is our country’s origin.”
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Teachers] [Indigenous] [Slavery] [Anti-Racism] [Accountability] [Systemic Racism]

The Death Penalty in Black and White: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides

by Death Penalty Information Center | June 1998
The results of two new studies which underscore the continuing injustice of racism in the application of the death penalty are being released through this report. The first study documents the infectious presence of racism in the death penalty, and demonstrates that this problem has not slackened with time, nor is it restricted to a single region of the country. The other study identifies one of the potential causes for this continuing crisis: those who are making the critical death penalty decisions in this country are almost exclusively white.
From the days of slavery in which black people were considered property, through the years of lynchings and Jim Crow laws, capital punishment has always been deeply affected by race. Unfortunately, the days of racial bias in the death penalty are not a remnant of the past.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [Slavery] [1990’s] [History] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [Systemic Racism] [Silencing POC] [Accountability] [Prison System]

It isn’t Enough Not to be a Racist; Be an Anti-Racist

by Kelly Kirschner | June 2020
Similar to recorded killings of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, the only reason that this came to the public’s attention and outrage was due to the Herald-Tribune’s publication of a video recording of a SPD officer allowing an inebriated immigrant, Juan Perez, to climb out of a squad car and fall six feet onto his head, his hands handcuffed behind his back The officer then proceeded to kick the man and stand on him. It ultimately led to the firing of the officer, the resignation of the chief of police, the creation of a city police complaint committee and an independent police advisory panel. In spite of a history of other complaints of excessive use of force against the offending officer, he remained and advanced within the force prior to the Perez incident, which ultimately cost the City hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuit settlements and legal fees. Perhaps most disturbing, three years after the incident, a panel of Sarasota residents that included a former and current city commissioner board voted unanimously to reinstate the fired officer, giving him three years of back pay, in spite of the African American chief of police advocating that they ratify the officer’s termination, due to his dangerous disregard of protocol in caring for a handcuffed individual.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Slavery] [History] [Politics] [Anti-Racism]

Flogging: Holes Dug in Ground to Protect Unborn Children of Pregnant Slaves

by Jae Jones | March 2020
Most slave women worked in the fields right along with the men, enduring hard labor from sun up to sun down. Some slave women who were chosen to work inside the main house. Early adolescence for female slaves was often difficult because of the threat of exploitation. For some young women, puberty marked the beginning of a lifetime of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse from masters and mistresses, overseers, and male slaves.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Slavery] [History] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Accountability]

Why Juneteenth Matters: Professor Brenna Greer Shares the History and Significance

by Wellesley College | June 2020
Historians are increasingly illuminating the nature, extent, and consistency of investments in Black people’s oppression, which accounts for why, in this nation, Black freedom and racial equality have always required hard-fought battles, sometimes in the most literal and bloodiest sense. Juneteenth reminds us that, in this nation’s history, Black people’s freedom has traditionally been a question of economics and politics, not morality.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Economics] [Politics] [History] [Systemic Racism] [Slavery] [Civil War] [White Blindness] [White Supremacy] [Policing]

The Injustice of This Moment Is Not an ‘Aberration’; From Mass Incarceration to Mass Deportation, Our Nation Remains in Deep Denial.

by Michelle Alexander | January 2020
We are now living in an era not of post-racialism but of unabashed racialism, a time when many white Americans feel free to speak openly of their nostalgia for an age when their cultural, political and economic dominance could be taken for granted — no apologies required. Racial bigotry, fearmongering and scapegoating are no longer subterranean in our political discourse; the dog whistles have been replaced by bullhorns. White nationalist movements are operating openly online and in many of our communities; they’re celebrating mass killings and recruiting thousands into their ranks.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Immigration] [Systemic Racism] [Politics] [Prison System] [Employment] [Housing] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Colorblindness] [Slavery] [Police Shootings] [Advocacy]]

What Toni Morrison Taught Me about My People, the Quakers

by Becky Ankeny | July 2020
Mr. and Miss Bodwin, brother and sister, Quakers, for decades worked to abolish slavery from their home in Cincinnati. Their anti-slavery stance was based on the teaching that “human life is holy, all of it.” This work gave their lives meaning and purpose, so much so that to Edward Bodwin, life after the Civil War had lost its “spit and conviction.”…Nearly a decade after emancipation, when 18-year-old Denver goes to ask the Bodwins for work, she knocks on the front door. The Black maid tells her that the first thing she has to learn is which door to knock on, namely, the back door. On her way out the back door, Denver sees a figurine of a kneeling Black man, head back, mouth wide open to hold any number of small objects or even jelly. Painted across the pedestal he knelt on were the words “At Yo Service.”
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Quaker] [Slavery] [History] [Civil War] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [Faith-Based/Spiritual]