Resource Links Tagged with "Social Justice"

History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools

by Matthew Lynch | October 2019
Racial biases are not unknown to the history of the U.S. education system. Dating back to the 1800s, Native American children were taken from their homes and forced into boarding schools where they were pushed to abandon their native language and adopt a foreign religion. Education was used to assimilate these Native American children to White culture forcibly. This institutional racism created a belief that White culture was far better than the Native American Way. These racial biases expressed themselves with the Chinese in a different manner. Instead of forcing them to assimilate into the prescribed White educational system, Chinese-American children were barred completely from going to school. Later legislation stated they had a right to public education but segregated them into Chinese-only schools. Latinos faced the same fate as the Chinese in being methodically shut out from education. Latinos were later granted access to education under the ruling of a judge with a particular belief; the judge asserted that Latinos were of White descent and therefore above other minorities. In the American South, laws against African-Americans completely obstructed their ability to get an education. By law, it was illegal for an African-American to learn how to read and write. African-American communities had to turn to schools established by Quakers and Christians in order to get an education. But turmoil and violence would always find their white allies, forcing these schools to close their doors. Fear of uprising was palpable in these plantation states, and illiteracy became a weapon used against African-Americans. If African-Americans remained uneducated, plantation owners and Southern Whites believed, they would not revolt, maintaining the status quo of slavery.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2010’s] [History] [Implicit Bias] [Indigenous] [White Culture] [Asian] [Black Lives Matter] [Quaker] [Faith-Based/Spiritual] [Slavery] [Social Justice] [White Privilege] [Teachers]

What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

by Steven Sawchuk | May 2021
Is “critical race theory” a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement. The topic has exploded in the public arena this spring—especially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban its use in the classroom. …Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies. The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.
A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Housing] [Systemic Racism] [Politics] [Social Justice] [White Privilege] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Defensiveness] [Slavery] [Definitions] [Racial Covenants] [Black Lives Matter] [Latino/a] [Teachers] [History]

The Rise of The Racism Industry; Black People’s Value Goes Beyond Our Suffering

by Steve QJ | April 2021
Every black person has a story about racism. It might be about a chance encounter on holiday or being denied entry to our own home. It might be about the statistically improbable rate at which we’re “randomly selected” for additional screening or those awkward moments when a poorly thought out comment backfires.
If there’s such a thing as “the black experience”, these stories are a part of its oral tradition. A collection of life lessons, clapbacks, and cautionary tales through which we celebrate our victories and vent our frustrations. They’re in-jokes that provide a sense of community and solidarity. They’re touchstones that help us to navigate a world that doesn’t always treat us as it should.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [Policing] [Police Shootings] [Social Justice] [Black Lives Matter] [History]

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]

8 Ways People of Color are Tokenized in Nonprofits

by Helen Kim Ho | September 2017
There’s a type of racism in the workplace many of us have personally witnessed, perpetrated or experienced: tokenism. Nowhere have I seen this play out more than in the nonprofit space. Tokenism is, simply, covert racism. Racism requires those in power to maintain their privilege by exercising social, economic and/or political muscle against people of color (POC). Tokenism achieves the same while giving those in power the appearance of being non-racist and even champions of diversity
TAGS: [Strategies] [2010’s] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Economics] [History] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Social Justice] [Accountability] [White Supremacy] [White Blindness] [Black Lives Matter] [Asian] [Politics] [White Fragility/Tears] [Employment]

The Cost of Doing Nothing; Georgetown University Researchers Estimate in a New Report that the United States Loses Billions of Dollars Annually Because of Inequities in Higher Education

by Sara Weissman | May 2021
The United States loses out on hundreds of billions of dollars each year because of racial and socioeconomic inequities in higher education attainment, according to a new report by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
The report, conducted in partnership with the Postsecondary Value Commission, an initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and managed by the Institute for Higher Education Policy, found that it would take $3.97 trillion to close racial and socioeconomic gaps in college degree completion in the country. But after that initial investment, the United States would gain $956 billion per year in increased in tax revenues and GDP and cost savings on social assistance programs.
TAGS: [Strategies] [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Economics] [Social Justice] [Black Lives Matter] [Latino/a] [Asian] [Systemic Racism] [History]

Private Museums Could Face NAGPRA Scrutiny; Museums and Other Institutions that Accept Stimulus Funds Could Be Required to Repatriate Indigenous Artifacts and Remains

by Nanette Kelley | May 2021
Small museums and private institutions that accept federal CARES Act money or other stimulus funds could be forced to relinquish thousands of Indigenous items and ancestral remains now in their collections.
Under the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, museums or other institutions that accept federal funding must compile an inventory of Indigenous cultural items and initiate repatriation of the collections and remains to tribes or family members. At least two museums are now facing possible scrutiny – the nonprofit Favell Museum of Native American Artifacts and Contemporary Western Art in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and the End of the Trail Museum, which is connected to the Trees of Mystery gift shop in the redwood forest in Klamath, California.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Art & Culture] [Silencing POC] [History] [Politics] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Economics] [Systemic Racism] [Advocacy] [Social Justice]

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]

Racism and Health; Racism is a Serious Threat to the Public’s Health

CDC Website | Date Unknown
Racism is a system consisting of structures, policies, practices, and norms—that assigns value and determines opportunity based on the way people look or the color of their skin. This results in conditions that unfairly advantage some and disadvantage others throughout society. Racism — both interpersonal and structural – negatively affects the mental and physical health of millions of people preventing them from attaining their highest level of health, and consequently, affecting the health of our nation. A growing body of research shows that centuries of racism in this country has had a profound and negative impact on communities of color. The impact is pervasive and deeply embedded in our society—affecting where one lives, learns, works, worships and plays and creating inequities in access to a range of social and economic benefits—such as housing, education, wealth, and employment. These conditions—often referred to as social determinants of health—are key drivers of health inequities within communities of color, placing those within these populations at greater risk for poor health outcomes.
TAGS: [Strategies] [Health Disparities] [Economics] [Systemic Racism] [Housing] [Employment] [Social Justice] [Politics] [Black Lives Matter] [Indigenous] [Asian] [Latino/a]

Black Soldiers Played an Undeniable but Largely Unheralded Role in Founding the United States; Veterans like Prince Hall Fought for Independence and then Abolition in the Earliest Days of the Nation

by David A. Taylor | February 2021
Just after dawn on Christmas Day 2020, Clarence Snead Jr., received a phone call with harrowing news: The Prince Hall Masonic Lodge in Providence, Rhode Island, was ablaze. Snead, whose nickname is “Grand” (for “Most Worshipful Grand Master”), rushed the half-hour drive to the lodge on Eddy Street and found the building engulfed in flames. The lodge had a remarkable history that a passerby might not suspect from the two-story wooden structure; a destructive blaze would strike a terrible blow for historic preservation. It housed one of the earliest organizations established by African Americans, stretching back to the era of Prince Hall, a black Bostonian and Revolutionary War veteran. Hall started the first lodge for black Freemasons in his home city in the 1770s with a charter obtained from British Freemasons, because Massachusetts’ white Masonic brethren rejected his application. The arc of Hall’s life and legacy point to the underappreciated role played by African Americans in the Revolution, an indication that the path to black civil rights is as old as the nation itself.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [History] [Black Lives Matter] [Slavery] [Social Justice] [White Supremacy] [Indigenous]

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]

Okinawans Exhibit Artful Way of Reclaiming Indigenous Space

by Megumi Chibana | April 2021
Note: This article originally appeared in Verge 4.2 (Fall 2018), published by the University of Minnesota Press.
In 1995, the Okinawan community of Yomitan — which had been dispossessed of their lands during the Pacific War to allow for the building of a Japanese airfield — revealed their plans for the future of their village. Village leaders placed an image and a poem at the center of this new vision, an artful way of imagining indigenous space…. In 1995, the Japan-US Special Action Committee on Okinawa, or SACO, agreed on joint use of the Yomitan Airfield. Although the permission provided only for “interim use,” the repossession and use of the airfield by the village opened new space for the community. Through self-organization and the reconfiguration of space, the village successfully refuted the military use of indigenous space and regenerated the landscape as a democratic hub for deliberating alternative futures. This is when the community developed and detailed the Phoenix Plan, as a new vision to imagine indigenous space.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Art & Culture] [History] [Politics][Indigenous] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Reparations] [Social Justice]

You’re Already on Stolen Land. You Might as Well Pay Rent.

by Sena Crow | November 2019
And yes, if you’re wondering: this post is for white settlers. f you’re not already actively working to unlearn colonizing habits and unconditionally support Indigenous people, now is the perfect time to start. It’s November, and that means it’s Native History Month. Native History Month urges us to ask how we can better recognize, support, and protect Indigenous communities.First, ask yourself this question every day: Whose land am I living on? The second question to ask yourself: What do I own on this land? And the third: What people have lost from what I have gained?
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Indigenous] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [History] [Social Justice] [Accountability]

Performative Activism Is the New ‘Color-Blind’ Band-Aid for White Fragility; White People Embracing Hashtags Won’t Help Us Destroy Anti-Black Racism. Here’s Why.

by Maia Niguel Hoskin, Ph.D. | June 2020
Because Whites are the nonracialized majority, they live in an insulated environment of racial protection and comfort, which makes them unable to tolerate racial stress. Whiteness scholar Robin DiAngelo refers to this as White fragility and says this about it: Once White people are confronted with racial stress, it triggers various defensive responses in them, such as anger, guilt, silence, outward displays of emotion, defensiveness, and shutting down. Some argue that color-blindness has been used as a way for Whites to accommodate their racial fragility and ease their guilt. Feelings of shame and defensiveness associated with racial injustice can be minimized if its existence is denied. Like color-blindness, performative activism is manipulative and maintains systems of racial privilege by Whites centering their desire to seek comfort over addressing racial injustice.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Myths] [White Fragility/Tears] [“All Lives Matter”] [White Defensiveness] [White Blindness] [White Supremacy] [Social Justice] [Policing] [Black Lives Matter] [History] [Colorblindness] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Anti-Racism]

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]

The Aggressive Fragility of ‘I’m Not Racist: and ‘Not All White People’

by Jeremy Helligar | March 2021
Dear Sharon Osbourne, Piers Morgan, and Becky from ‘The Real World Homecoming’: Please. Stop. People can be so exhausting. Correction: Some people can be so exhausting. Although exceptions are generally implied when we generalize, for some people, nothing can be left to implication — especially if the subject is racism. I see evidence of this in the comments section of nearly every article I read or write about race. There are always a few in the audience, usually White, who take offense because they presume that when Black people write about the racism White people inflict on them, unless “White people” is qualified with “some,” they are being lumped in with the main offenders. Apparently, for them, the true horror of racism isn’t racism itself but being accused of it due to association.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [History] [Social Justice] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Supremacy] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Microaggressions] [White Privilege] [Economics]

10 Ways Your Social Justice Work Might Be Inaccessible and Elitist (And Why That’s a Problem)

by Hari Ziyad | October 2020
It’s comforting not to have to constantly explain yourself and your work. It’s beautiful to learn from and be around folks who understand ideas like microaggressions, gaslighting, white fragility, and all the other odd terms that describe the myriad, important, and insidious ways oppression operates. But some of those ways are too insidious to recognize even within these spaces. Some are, in fact, unique to these spaces. Some oppressions are fostered by the very things supposedly set up to help justice spaces thrive. Inadvertently, they create power structures mirroring those they’re working to address. Being in these spaces for a while now, I’ve noticed that I’ve been increasingly receiving feedback that my writing is inaccessible. I dismissed a lot of this critique on the basis that I am, at my core, a big idea and theory girl. My way of communicating isn’t supposed to be meant for everyone. But that became a more difficult excuse to embrace once I noticed these concerns coming even from those who generally embrace theoreticals.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Microaggressions] [White Fragility/Tears] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Social Justice] [Accountability] [Intersectionality] [White Privilege] [Definitions] [Black Lives Matter] [Indigenous] [Economics]

How Black People Can Be Strong Allies to Asian Americans Right Now

by Char Adams | March 2021
“A big part of how to be allies in this moment is advocating with us,” said Alvina Wong, of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. Thousands of hate incidents against Asian people across the country have been documented by advocacy groups in the last year, ranging in severity from spitting to the unprovoked push of an 84-year-old Thai American man in San Francisco who died of his injuries a few days later. These incidents have prompted the renewal of conversations about security in Asian American neighborhoods, privilege, solidarity and even anti-Blackness in response to the violence. That last element, activists say, devalues the decades of coalition building and allyship between Asian American and Black communities. But Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University and co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, notes that efforts to create a racial wedge between such groups only empowers the white supremacy that makes racist violence possible.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Asian] [Advocacy] [White Supremacy] [Myths] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Policing] [Social Justice] [Anti-Racism] [Accountability] [Bystander Intervention]

The Crimson Klan

by Simon J. Levien | March 2021
When J. Max Bond Jr. ’55 entered Harvard at the age of 16, he was among 15 Black students in his class, most of whom lived in the north corner of Harvard Yard. As his freshman spring semester began, two other Harvard freshmen erected a wooden cross facing that corner of the Yard, formed by Stoughton and Holworthy Halls. And around midnight on Feb. 5, 1952, the students lit the cross on fire… Post-Harvard, Bond became one of a few prominent Black architects in the 20th century. After his death in 2009, his widow, Jean Carey Bond, released an 11-page retelling of his life. In it, Jean reveals that the University threatened Bond or any Black student with suspension should they go to the media with the cross burning. Bond, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa and finished undergrad in three years, was never suspended.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [Silencing POC] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [White Defensiveness] [History] [Slavery] [Denial] [Social Justice]

How Native Americans Were Vaccinated Against Smallpox, Then Pushed Off Their Land; Nearly Two Centuries Later, Many Tribes Remain Suspicious of the Drive to Get Them Vaccinated Against the Coronavirus

by Dana Hedgpeth | March 2021
More than 180 years ago, the federal government launched the largest effort of its kind in the United States to vaccinate Native Americans against the deadly disease of smallpox… In 1832, Congress passed legislation — the Indian Vaccination Act — that allowed the federal government to use about $17,000 to hire doctors to vaccinate Native Americans who were living near White frontier settlements. Many White settlers feared that Indians would spread the disease to them. “It wasn’t in the interest of Indian people,” said Pecos, who is also co-director of the Leadership Institute at the Santa Fe Indian School. “It was a way of vaccinating them to move them so White Americans could move them into Western lands.”
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Health Disparities] [Politics] [Social Justice] [Systemic Racism] [Racial Terrorism] [Definitions] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Silencing POC] [History]

‘Shut Down DAPL’: Lakota Youth Bring Black Snake to Biden’s Front Door

by Acee Agoyo | April 2021
Five years since the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline became a worldwide movement, and four years after tribes and their allies took to the streets in protest, Lakota youth returned to the nation’s capital to once again hold the federal government to its trust and treaty responsibilities. Youth from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe traveled over 1,500 miles from their communities to make a simple yet pointed request. Shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline, which the federal courts have repeatedly determined was approved under a process that violated the law.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [POC Climate Action] [Environment] [Politics] [Social Justice] [Justice System] [Systemic Racism] [Advocacy] [Role Model]

The Decline of Black Business; and What it Means for American Democracy

by Brian S. Feldman | May 2017
The last thirty years also have brought the wholesale collapse of black-owned independent businesses and financial institutions that once anchored black communities across the country. In 1985, sixty black-owned banks were providing financial services to their communities; today, just twenty-three remain. In eleven states that headquartered black-owned banks in 1994, not a single one is still in business. Of the fifty black-owned insurance companies that operated during the 1980s, today just two remain. Over the same period, tens of thousands of black-owned retail establishments and local service companies also have disappeared, having gone out of business or been acquired by larger companies. Reflecting these developments, working-age black Americans have become far less likely to be their own boss than in the 1990s.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2010’s] [Art & Culture] [Justice System] [History] [Economics] [Systemic Racism] [Black Lives Matter] [Social Justice] [Politics] [Slavery] [Civil War] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [Racial Covenants] [Racial Terrorism]

For White Allies on Black History and Slavery in the U.S.

(posted) by Paula M. Fitzgibbons | Date Unknown
Black history month is about so much more than slavery, but in the U.S., Black history and slavery are inseparable. And sadly, many of us still don’t have an adequate education on the topic. I’m always flabbergasted when I hear people say that Black Americans need to “get past” slavery. “It wasn’t us,” they say. “That happened hundreds of years ago. Get over it already.” It’s clear to me that these people don’t fully grasp the horror of American slavery, how long it lasted, and what happened after it. They also don’t seem to understand how severe trauma works.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [Slavery] [Black Lives Matter] [Systemic Racism] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [White Defensiveness] [White Blindness] [Social Justice] [Racial Terrorism] [Silencing POC] [History] [Denial]

Peabody Museum Apologizes For Practices Around Native American Cultural Objects, Announces Policy Changes

by Oliver L. Riskin-Kutz | March 2021
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology administrators apologized for the “pain” the museum caused by its refusal to voluntarily return certain funerary objects to Native American tribes and pledged to reverse the policy in response to a letter from the Association on American Indian Affairs last month criticizing the museum. In February, the Association sent a letter to University President Lawrence S. Bacow accusing Harvard of legal and moral violations in the Museum’s practices regarding its collections of Native American human remains and cultural objects. In the letter, the nonprofit said Harvard’s practices are in violation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Art & Culture] [Systemic Racism] [White Culture] [Social Justice]

Carlisle Residents Urge Council ‘to Talk about the Scars’ before Solving Racial Equity

by Sue Gleiter | January 2021
Among the issues touched upon during the more than 2 1/2-hour meeting were affordable housing, the criminal justice system and schools, as well as the possibility of creating a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “This is a first step. This is just opening the door to the conversation and it needs to be more than conversation and we need to actually do something,” said Deb Fulham-Winston, council member. “We need to understand it and we need to give people the time and the space to be able to bring their concerns to light,” she said.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Social Justice] [Housing] [Justice System] [Teachers] [Anti-Racism] [Economics] [Advocacy] [Implicit Racism] [Policing]

Why History Matters: the Legacy of Slavery

by David Rosen | January 2021
When recalling Lincoln, many New Yorkers may remember the famous speech he gave at Cooper Institute (aka Cooper Union) in February 1860 calling to limit the extension – but not the end – of slavery. It was a critical campaign speech that helped him secure the Republican Party nomination for President. In November, he was elected, and, in December, South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union.
Unfortunately, few American – and likely very few New Yorkers – will recall that Lincoln’s speech was strongly attacked by city business leaders and the Democratic Party, many assailing him with the racist slogan, “Black Republican.” More important, Lincoln’s election sparked a strong movement in the city, led by Mayor Fernando Wood, to join the South and secede from the Union. This is one of the many important historical stories retold in an informative new book by Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War (Bold Type Books). Slavery was formally abolished in New York State in 1827, but the slave trade lived on in the city until the Civil War. Wells argues that the slave trade persisted in New York City in the decades before the Civil War because it was the capital of the Southern slave economy.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [History] [Civil War] [Slavery] [Politics] [Social Justice] [Policing] [Black Lives Matter] [Justice System] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Silencing POC] [Racial Terrorism] [Social Justice]

Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears; America’s Forgotten Migration – the Journeys of a Million African-Americans from the Tobacco South to the Cotton South

by Edward Ball | November 2015
“My grandfather went to the folks who had owned our family and asked, ‘Do you have any documentation about our history during the slave days? We would like to see it, if possible.’ The man at the door, who I have to assume was from the slaveholding side, said, ‘Sure, we’ll give it to you.’ When Delores McQuinn was growing up, her father told her a story about a search for the family’s roots. He said his own father knew the name of the people who had enslaved their family in Virginia, knew where they lived—in the same house and on the same land—in Hanover County, among the rumpled hills north of Richmond.“The man went into his house and came back out with some papers in his hands. Now, whether the papers were trivial or actual plantation records, who knows? But he stood in the door, in front of my grandfather, and lit a match to the papers. ‘You want your history?’ he said. ‘Here it is.’ Watching the things burn. ‘Take the ashes and get off my land.’ “The intent was to keep that history buried,” McQuinn says today. “And I think something like that has happened over and again, symbolically.”
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [History] [Slavery] [Silencing POC] [Confederate Monuments] [Politics] [Black Lives Matter] [Definitions] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Social Justice] [Civil War] [Accountability]

Former Falmouth Students Question Racial Disparity in Discipline

by Jessica Hill | February 2021
When freshman Adaesia O’Garro was accused of threatening another student at Falmouth High School in 2018, she was criminally charged and suspended for 10 months while her case made its way through the long court process. The charges, which included assault and battery, larceny and distributing material of a child in the nude, were later dismissed by Judge James J. Torney Jr., according to court records O’Garro shared with the Times. But O’Garro, who is Black, missed her sophomore year and, now a senior, continues to deal with the aftermath as she works to graduate in June with her class.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [Black Lives Matter] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [Social Justice] [-ing While Black] [Denial] [Calling Police] [Accountability] [Justice System]

This Emmett Till Memorial Was Vandalized Again. And Again. And Again. Now, It’s Bulletproof.

by Kayla Epstein | October 2019
The cars came one by one, down a gravel road and through a cotton field, to the edge of the Tallahatchie River and the spot where, 64 years ago, historians believe Emmett Till’s lifeless body was pulled from the river. The vehicles carried Till’s relatives, including cousin the Rev. Wheeler Parker, community leaders and advocates dedicated to keeping his memory alive. The group had gathered on Saturday at noon in the remote spot near Glendora, Miss., to dedicate yet another memorial to Till. And this time, it was bulletproof. It took 50 years to get the first memorial to Till erected in Tallahatchie County, the site of the lynching that helped spark the civil rights movement. But then an entirely new battle began: keeping the tribute intact.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [History] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Social Justice] [Black Lives Matter] [White Privilege] [White Defensiveness]