Resource Links Tagged with "White Supremacy"

The Truth about How Microaggressions Work; Microaggression as Social Control

*Paywall Alert
by Max Smith | June 2020
What is a microaggression really? I looked up the definition because I wanted to be sure I was clear. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, it is: a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (such as a racial minority).
In thinking about it, I couldn’t come up with any extraordinary examples. And maybe that’s the point: the everyday nature of microaggressions. How they seep into conversation and under skin…My advisor, who happened to be white and middle-aged, advised that I not get my hopes up about getting a white collar job, predicting that quite likely I would have to settle for a job as a waitress or secretary, and that I should take it as it would be my first post-college job, and might pay better than low-level white collar work.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Microaggressions] [Definitions] [White Privilege] [White Supremacy] [White Blindness] [White Culture] [Black Lives Matter] [Systemic Racism]

You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument; The Black People I Come from Were Owned and Raped by the White People I Come from. Who Dares to Tell Me to Celebrate Them?

by Caroline Randall Williams | June 2020
I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.
If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument. Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.
I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Confederate Monuments] [History] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [Slavery] [Systemic Racism] [Accountability]

Here Are Concrete Actions White People Can Take to Fight Racial Injustice

“My call to action challenges white professionals to lean into discomfort and bring about change.”
by TaLona Holbert | July 2020
Every day of my life, I have experiences that infer Black inferiority and anti-Blackness. It is exhausting to wake up each day and convince myself and others that I belong, that my life matters and that I am capable, despite being surrounded by social, cultural and professional cues that suggest otherwise. No matter how subtle or seemingly innocuous signals of Black exclusion and inferiority are, they diminish Black people’s dignity and humanity, erode our identity as Americans, and reinforce decades of stereotypes and discrimination intended to cement our status as second-class citizens.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Black Lives Matter] [Policing] [Systemic Racism] [Confederate Monuments] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Blindness] [Assumptions]

What We Get Wrong about ‘People of Color’

by Jason Parham | November 2019
The phrase turns a plural into a singular, an action that betrays all the ways we have come to understand contemporary identity.
This past summer, in one of the most bizarre applications, Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, who is white and Republican, described himself as a “person of color” when discussing Trump’s comments about four Democratic congresswomen. “It’s time to stop fixating on our differences—particularly our superficial ones,” he said.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [Prison System] [Politics] [Racial Covenants] [White Privilege] [White Supremacy]
[White Defensiveness] [White Blindness] [Denial] [“All Lives Matter”] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Culture]

A Teenager Didn’t Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention.

by Jodi S. Cohen | July 2020
A 15-year-old in Michigan was incarcerated during the coronavirus pandemic after a judge ruled that not completing her schoolwork violated her probation. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” said the girl’s mother. Because of the confidentiality of juvenile court cases, it’s impossible to determine how unusual Grace’s situation is. But attorneys and advocates in Michigan and elsewhere say they are unaware of any other case involving the detention of a child for failing to meet academic requirements after schools closed to help stop the spread of COVID-19. The decision, they say, flies in the face of recommendations from the legal and education communities that have urged leniency and a prioritization of children’s health and safety amid the crisis. The case may also reflect, some experts and Grace’s mother believe, systemic racial bias. Grace is Black in a predominantly white community and in a county where a disproportionate percentage of Black youth are involved with the juvenile justice system.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [Systemic Racism] [Prison System] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [-ing While Black]

Textbook Racism; How Scholars Sustained White Supremacy

*Paywall Alert
by Donald Yacovone | April 2018
After reviewing my first 50 or so textbooks, one morning I realized precisely what I was seeing, what instruction, and what priorities were leaping from the pages into the brains of the students compelled to read them: white supremacy. One text even began with the capitalized title: “The White Man’s History.” Across time and with precious few exceptions, African-Americans appeared only as “ignorant negroes,” as slaves, and as anonymous abstractions that only posed “problems” for the supposed real subjects of history: white people of European descent.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2010’s] [White Supremacy] [History] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Accountability] [Myths]

In Our Resistance against the State, Black and Indigenous Peoples are Collectively Powerful

by Red Dawn Foster and Miski Noor | July 2020
Though the history books written by enslavers and colonizers would have us unaware, our stories as Black and Indigenous Peoples are threaded together through past and present, and surely, through the future as well. Settler-colonialism is a continuous project that relies on sustained socio-economic policies that perpetuate white supremacy and maintain violence against Black and Indigenous peoples. Both genocide and enslavement built the settler-colonial nation as we know it today. Black and Indigenous history is tied to the colonization of this land and our liberation is inherently tied together, that is why Black and Indigenous solidarity is essential.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Black Lives Matter] [Systemic Racism] [History] [Politics] [Reparations] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Myths] [Confederate Monuments]

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.’ “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] [Slavery] [History] [Silencing POC] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [White Privilege]

The Invention of the Police, Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.

by Jill Lepore | July 2020
In Philadelphia, in 1705, the governor expressed the view that the militia could make the city safer than the watch, but militias weren’t supposed to police the king’s subjects; they were supposed to serve the common defense—waging wars against the French, fighting Native peoples who were trying to hold on to their lands, or suppressing slave rebellions. The government of slavery was not a rule of law. It was a rule of police. In 1661, the English colony of Barbados passed its first slave law; revised in 1688, it decreed that “Negroes and other Slaves” were “wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws . . . of our Nations,” and devised, instead, a special set of rules “for the good Regulating and Ordering of them.” Virginia adopted similar measures, known as slave codes, in 1680.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Slavery] [History] [Policing] [Police Shootings] [Systemic Racism] [Black Lives Matter] [White Supremacy] [Prison System] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Politics]

That Time George Washington Ordered “Total Destruction and Devastation” of the Haudenosaunee

by Thom Dunn | July 2020
Washington was known as “town destroyer.” He was given that name by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy because he led a scorched-earth campaign against the Haudenosaunee prior to the Revolutionary War, but also during the Revolutionary War to push them further westward, to make room, you know, to create Lebensraum or living space for the new kind of white-Anglo nation that was under construction. Every sitting president to date of the United States has the name “town destroyer” from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [History] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Systemic Racism]

A Conversation about Truth and Reconciliation in the US

by Ezra Klein | July 2020
What would it take for America to heal? To be the country it claims to be? This is the question that animates Bryan Stevenson’s career. Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a clinical professor at the New York University School of Law, a MacArthur “genius,” and the author of the remarkable book Just Mercy — which was recently turned into a feature film where Stevenson was played by Michael B. Jordan.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Confederate Monuments] [Role Model] [Advocacy] [Prison System] [History] [Denial] [White Blindness] [Slavery] [Civil War] [Economics] [White Supremacy] [Systemic Racism]

The False Promise of Anti-Racism Books

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by Saida Grundy | July 2020
Texts that seek to raise the collective American Consciousness are rendered futile without concrete systemic changes. …When offered in lieu of actionable policies regarding equity, consciousness raising can actually undermine Black progress by presenting increased knowledge as the balm for centuries of abuse. Executives at major corporations such as Amazon, for instance, have invited race scholars and writers to “help [them] unpack” such topics as the American justice system and how to be an anti-racist ally. Yet Black employees at many of these companies have pointed to the hypocrisy of in-house dialogues about race while practices like labor exploitation continue. In the form of hollow public statements and company-sponsored conversations, consciousness raising is often toothless.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Anti-Racism] [Confederate Monuments] [White Blindness] [Denial] [Accountability] [Implicit Racism] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [History]

A Medical Student Couldn’t Find How Symptoms Look on Darker Skin. He Decided to Publish a Book about it.

by Sydney Page | July 2020
*Paywall Alert
Malone Mukwende, a 20-year-old medical student, found himself repeatedly asking the same question: “But what will it look like on darker skin?”
He’s publishing a book to answer that question.
Since his first class at St George’s, University of London, “I noticed a lack of teaching about darker skin tones, and how certain symptoms appear differently in those who aren’t white,” said Mukwende, who recently completed his second year of study in the medical program. Whether a rash, a bruise, blue lips or other common physical reactions, “it was clear to me that certain symptoms would not present the same on my own skin,” said Mukwende, who was born in Zimbabwe and now lives in London. “I knew that this would be a problem for patients of a similar skin tone to mine, or of a darker skin tone in general.” Not only was there an absence of imagery to highlight the difference, but students were not instructed on the correct terminology to describe conditions that appear on darker skin, Mukwende said.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Role Model] [Advocacy] [Colorblindness] [Denial] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege]

Liberal, Progressive — and Racist? The Sierra Club Faces its White-Supremacist History

by Darryl Fears and Steven Mufson | July 2020
As Confederate statues fall across the country, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in an early morning post on the group’s website, “it’s time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Club’s early history.” Muir, who fought to preserve Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Forest, once referred to African Americans as lazy “Sambos,” a racist pejorative that many black people consider to be as offensive as the n-word.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Confederate Monuments] [POC Climate Action] [Indigenous] [Black Lives Matter] [Accountability] [History] [White Supremacy] [White Blindness] [Economics] [Employment] [Anti-Racism] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Strategies]

How Slaveholders in the Caribbean Maintained Control The whip was not the only tool in their arsenal: slaveholders were masters of manipulation too.

by Christer Petley | November 2018
As elsewhere in the Americas, the right of masters in Jamaica to punish slaves was enshrined in law, and the violence that sustained slavery went far beyond whipping. Punishments could include amputation, disfiguring, branding and more. … Privileging some enslaved people above others was another effective means of sowing discord. Slaveholders encouraged complex social hierarchies on the plantations that amounted to something like a system of ‘class’. At the top of plantation slave communities in the sugar colonies of the Caribbean were skilled men, trained up at the behest of white managers to become sugar boilers, blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, masons and drivers. Such men were, in general, materially better-off than field slaves (most of whom were women), and they tended to live longer.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2010’s] [Slavery] [History] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Silencing POC] [Systemic Racism] [Economics] [Denial]

White Supremacy Shaped American Christianity, Researcher Says

by Carol Kuruvilla | July 2020
It wouldn’t be hard for many white Christians to find examples of white supremacy’s claims on their own family’s trees, Jones said. But white Christians’ image of themselves and their religion has been warped by what Jones calls “white-supremacy-induced amnesia.” Jones wrestles with that amnesia in his new book, “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.” He argues that white Christians ― from evangelicals in the South to mainline Protestants in the Midwest to Catholics in the Northeast ― weren’t just complacent onlookers while political leaders debated what to do about slavery, segregation and discrimination. White supremacist theology played a key role in shaping the American church from the very beginning, influencing not just the way denominations formed but also white Christians’ theology about salvation itself.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Faith-Based/Spiritual] [History] [Slavery] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Blindness] [White Privilege] [Police Shootings] [Accountability] [Politics]

For Local Native Americans, a Reckoning over Hurtful Images Goes Way Beyond One South Philadelphia Statue

by Jeff Gammage and Maddie Hanna | July 2020
James Logan was not just a colonial statesman and Philadelphia mayor. He was an architect of the infamous “Walking Purchase,” a scheme in which he and others swindled the original Lenape inhabitants out of perhaps a million acres of land in 1737. “You see these things every single day,” said Mach, 33, a University of Pennsylvania doctoral student who studies how Native Americans are represented in museums. “This stuff is just everywhere.”
Across the United States, the Black Lives Matter protests against racism and police violence have also ignited new discussions and demands over the use of Native images, symbols and mascots, and the future of monuments to men who harmed and killed indigenous people.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Myths] [Systemic Racism] [Indigenous] [Policing] [History] [Economics] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [Confederate Monuments]

In 1912, This Georgia County Drove Out Every Black Resident Between the 1860s and the 1920s, White Americans Pushed out Thousands of Black Residents from Their Communities.

by Becky Little | August 2019
To understand what Abrams is up against in November, when she’ll compete against two Republican men in a red state that has only elected white men, it’s useful to look at the state’s history of white supremacy and how that legacy affects Georgians today. One county in particular shoulders an especially egregious past. The northern county of Forsyth, one of Georgia’s 10 most populous, leans heavily white and conservative. Its demographics are shaped by an event that happened in 1912, when white people forced out all 1,098 of Forsyth’s black residents, who comprised about 10 percent of the population at the time.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [History] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Defensiveness] [Racial Covenants] [Denial] [Housing] [Accountability] [Policing]

How ‘Good White People’ Derail Racial Progress

by John Blake | August 2020
Angry White parents gripping picket signs. People making death threats and a piece of hate mail reading “Blacks destroy school systems.” Community panic about school desegregation orders. But this wasn’t archival footage of White Southerners from the 1960s. This took place last year in Howard County, Maryland, a suburban community that prides itself on racial integration. It was there that progressive White parents mobilized with other groups to try to stop a school integration plan that would bus poor students, who were mostly Black and brown, to more affluent, whiter schools.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [White Supremacy] [Silencing POC] [Systemic Racism] [White Privilege] [Black Lives Matter] [White Culture] [Economics] [Accountability] [White Defensiveness] [White Blindness]

What Is White Centering and Are You Doing It? Plus, 7 Ways To Stop

by Jessica Sager | June 2020
White centering is putting your feelings as a white person above the Black and POC causes you’re supposed to be helping. Layla F. Saad explains in Me and White Supremacy, “White centering is the centering of white people, white values, white norms and white feelings over everything and everyone else.” White centering can manifest as anything ranging from tone policing and white fragility to white exceptionalism and outright violence.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [Silencing POC]

7 Ways We Know Systemic Racism Is Real

by Ben & Jerry’s | Month Unknown 2020
While Barack Obama’s presidency was indeed a profound and meaningful mark of true progress, racism, of course, never really went away. The presence of a black president, hockey starOpens a new window, or movie-franchise superheroOpens a new window, however welcome and exciting, cannot reverse centuries of racial injustice. In fact, racism is built right into every level of our society in ways that might surprise you. Includes a video from Demos “We Must Talk about Race to Fix Economic Inequality.”
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Employment] [Economics] [Prison System] [Housing] [Policing] [Advocacy] [White Privilege] [White Supremacy] [Accountability] [Politics]

American White People Really Hate Being Called “White People”

by David Roberts | July 2018
It occurred to me that white people rarely if ever experience questions like this, about their very legitimacy. Do they belong? Is having more of them around good for America? One thing white people have never experienced is a poll on whether their presence in their own country is intrinsically detrimental. In fact, I thought, I bet asking the question at all — not answering it either way, just asking it — would make a lot of white people flip out. Imagine if they saw that on a poll! So, as a bit of goofy provocation, I made just such a poll:
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Supremacy] [White Defensiveness] [Politics]

It Took 10 Minutes to Convict 14-Year-Old George Stinney Jr. It Took 70 Years after His Execution to Exonerate Him.

by Lindsey Bever | December 2014
In March 1944, deep in the Jim Crow South, police came for 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. His parents weren’t at home. His little sister was hiding in the family’s chicken coop behind the house in Alcolu, a segregated mill town in South Carolina, while officers handcuffed George and his older brother, Johnnie, and took them away.
Two young white girls had been found brutally murdered, beaten over the head with a railroad spike and dumped in a water-logged ditch. He and his little sister, who were black, were said to be last ones to see them alive. Authorities later released the older Stinney – and directed their attention toward George. On June 16, 1944, he was executed, becoming the youngest person in modern times to be put to death. On Wednesday, 70 years later, he was exonerated.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [Policing] [Prison System] [White Supremacy] [History] [Black Lives Matter] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [-ing While Black] [Denial] [Assumptions] [Accountability]

Why the Media Loves the White Racist Story

by Martin LaMonica | January 2019
Why are so many people interested in pointing out and shaming individual white racists? There have been dozens of these events highlighted on social and mainstream media this year. Here are a few of the incidents that went viral and sparked outrage: a video of Fort McMurray teens mocking Indigenous dance, another of a North Carolina woman’s racist rant and the racist tirade against a Muslim family at the Toronto Ferry Terminal. Why are people less interested in calling out the systems that prime them to act in racist ways and foster lifelong inequities.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [Indigenous] [Assumptions] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [White Defensiveness] [Politics]

Five White Louisiana Judges Uphold Life Sentence of Black Man Jailed for Stealing Hedge Clippers 23 Years Ago

by Namrata Tripathi | August 2020
A man from Louisiana, who was sentenced to life in prison for stealing a pair of hedge clippers over 20 years ago, will continue to remain in prison after the state Supreme Court denied a request to review his case. Fair Wayne Bryant, a 62-year-old Black man, was convicted for stealing garden equipment in 1997, which landed him in prison for the rest of his life. Bryant, in 2000, had appealed his life sentence to be unconstitutionally excessive and his case had made its way up to the high court of the state. However, his hopes were dashed after a Louisiana Supreme Court panel, consisting of five White men and one Black woman, upheld his life sentence 5-1 last week. The only person to dissent was the Black judge on the panel, Supreme Court Justice Bernette Johnson.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Prison System] [Systemic Racism] [Silencing POC] [Accountability] [Policing] [Economics] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Blindness]

Whitesplaining: The Conversation about White Progressive Liberal Racism That We Aren’t Having

by Shanta Lee Gander | August 2020
Whitesplaining, or white people explaining things to Black people, is a phenomenon. Many of us Black folx swap stories with our friends or with family members as we deconstruct these situations and the assumptions. In this current moment of interrogating the culture, I’ve been re-visiting these moments of whitesplaining in my own life as an extension of an insidious kind of racism that often goes unnoticed. It is the other part of the conversation about race that America needs to have. I’ve lived in Vermont for 10 years. Here, the white progressive racism is partly due to the narrative that Vermont banned adult slavery in its constitution in 1777. With closer examination of the research conducted by Dr. Harvey Amani Whitfield, one learns that this “fact” is full of inconsistencies. Vermont at the time was still an environment that allowed slave owners to place ads for runaway slaves.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [White Privilege] [White Blindness] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [Definitions] [Individual Change] [History] [Slavery] [White Fragility/Tears] [Systemic Racism] [White Defensiveness] [Accountability]

After 78 Days, Michigan Teen Who was Jailed for Failing to Complete Her Homework While on Probation is Released

by Dawn R. Wolfe | August 2020
“Grace,” the 15-year-old Black girl who garnered international attention after she was jailed for failing to complete schoolwork while on probation, has been released after spending 78 days in a facility where at least four staffers have reportedly tested positive for COVID-19. Grace, who has been identified only by her middle name because of her status as a minor, was originally incarcerated in May by Oakland County Circuit Judge Mary Ellen Brennan. On Friday, the Michigan Court of Appeals ordered her immediate release pending an appeal of Brennan’s initial ruling. Brennan herself refused a motion to send Grace home on July 20. Criminal justice advocates say they believe the overwhelming attention given to the case—along with pressure brought on by tomorrow’s state primary—played a role in Grace’s release.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [-ing While Black] [Systemic Racism] [Accountability] [Prison System] [Black Lives Matter] [White Supremacy]

Discover What Indigenous Land You’re on with This App

by Emily Long | August 2020
You may have seen land acknowledgments on social media, where instead of geotagging a photo, posters identify the Indigenous people the land belongs to;or maybe you’ve heard a land acknowledgment presented at the beginning of a live concert or theater performance (remember those?). Land acknowledgments help us better understand, reflect on, and celebrate the history of Indigenous peoples, languages, territories, and treaties. So how do you learn more about specific land and the people it belongs to?
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [White Supremacy] [History] [Accountability] [White Privilege]

The Long History of How Jesus Came to Resemble a White European

by Anna Swartwood House | July 2020
The historical Jesus likely had the brown eyes and skin of other first-century Jews from Galilee, a region in biblical Israel. But no one knows exactly what Jesus looked like. There are no known images of Jesus from his lifetime, and while the Old Testament Kings Saul and David are explicitly called tall and handsome in the Bible, there is little indication of Jesus’ appearance in the Old or New Testaments.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Faith-Based/Spiritual] [Myths] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [History]

GREAT NEGRO PLOT OF 1741: THE RUMORS AND LIES THAT LED TO EXECUTION OF OVER 30 BLACK AMERICANS IN NEW YORK CITY

by Blackthen | August 2020
The details of the events that took place in New York City in the spring and summer of 1741 are recorded in numerous historic and later accounts, many of which contain contradictory information. According to nearly all accounts, a fire on March 18, 1741, at Fort George—then Lieutenant Governor George Clarke’s home—was the first in a series of fires in the city that may or may not have been set by slaves. The fires occurred at regular intervals and then with increased frequency until April 6, when four fires were set in a single day. Rumors raced across the city when a witness claimed to have seen a black man, identified as a slave named Cuffee, running from the scene of one of the fires.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [History] [Slavery] [Accountability] [Systemic Racism] [Policing] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [White Blindness] [Silencing POC] [Assumptions]