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Racial Discrimination

As Mississippi Loses Black Farmers Fast, This Couple Sows Solidarity

August 4, 2022 Erica Hensley and Teresa Ervin-springs, Scalawag Magazine. , , ,
Louisville, Mississippi - Until five years ago, Teresa Springs was always in heels and perfectly manicured. As a child growing up in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, she'd never even walked barefoot in the grass. Today, Teresa goes shoeless in rows of crops on her farm, grounding with the Mississippi earth as a part of her daily healing, connecting to the land at sundown before heading back with soil-covered hands and feet to her husband, Kevin, and their old farm house. Now five years into stewarding their farm—dubbed TKO Farming, an acronym for Teresa and Kevin's Oasis—they're still just as awe-struck by what they've built by hand. As self-described city folks who met in July 2013 while working on criminal-justice reform in Miami, the couple never envisioned living on, much less operating, a farm.

90-Day Protest Begins At McDonald’s Headquarters

February 23, 2021 Manny Ramos, Chicago Sun Times. , ,
Chicago - Community organizers on Monday kicked off 90 days of picketing at McDonald’s world headquarters in the West Loop, hoping to call attention to what they say are discriminatory practices against Black-owned franchises. “We are coming after every McDonald’s that we shop in,” activist Mark Carter said Monday morning. “We send this message starting today that if you don’t want to see us outside of your headquarters, then it would be in your best interest to sit down with those who have traveled 700 miles from Memphis, Tennessee.” The protest was organized ahead of a meeting scheduled for Tuesday in Chicago between McDonald’s executives and two brothers from Memphis, James Byrd and Darrell Byrd, who own four locations between them.

COVID-19 And Deadly Health Care For Black People

April 16, 2020 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
When black people need medical care they are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. The ferocity of anti-black racism is such that even an effort to spare one’s life can still end in death. Medical professionals are no more enlightened than anyone else and often join in meting out the harshest treatment possible for black people.  Black workers are less likely to be able to quarantine during the COVID-19 virus pandemic. Instead, men and women who work in fields such as mass transit, the postal service, retail, and in health care itself are exposing themselves to the COVID-19 virus. When they do seek treatment, they often receive inadequate care. Jason Hargrove was a Detroit, Michigan bus driver. Before he died from coronavirus complications he posted a video on social media alerting the public to the dangers of his job.

Newsletter: Success Against Racists, Build On It

August 20, 2017 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org , , , , , , ,
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. Last week, we wrote about the events in Charlottesville, Virginia in terms of their historical and political context. Since then, the national and international response to right wing mobilization has been rapid and powerful. The response has been global, e.g. women in Poland held photos of slain Heather Heyer while they blocked a far right wing march. The national conversation is changing to include criticism of white supremacy and confederate statues are being taken down. This week, we present a greater focus on the tasks of the movement for social justice and racial equality. It is possible to halt the rise of right wing extremism. To do that we must understand what institutions maintain white supremacy and turn our energy towards ending racist institutions in the United States and globally.

UN Experts Catalog Endless List Of Racial Discrimination In US

February 1, 2016 Andrea Germanos, www.commondreams.org , , ,
By Andrea Germanos for Common Dreams - From being victims of police killings to facing barriers to educational and health equity, African Americans are facing "systemic racial discrimination" and deserve reparatory justice, a United Nations working group said Friday. Having just completed an 11-day mission with visits to Washington D.C., Baltimore, Jackson, Miss., Chicago and New York City, the five-member Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent say they are "extremely concerned about the human rights situation of African Americans."

‘I Built A Clock And Got In Trouble For It’

September 17, 2015 Andy Campbell, www.huffingtonpost.com , ,
By Andy Campbell in The Huffington Post - The 14-year-old Muslim boy who was arrested Monday and suspended from school after his homemade clock was mistaken for a bomb is changing schools. Ahmed Mohamed was all smiles as he spoke outside his home in Irving, Texas, on Wednesday, saying that he'll spend the rest of his three-day school suspension looking to transfer out of MacArthur High School. "I’m the person who built a clock and got in a lot of trouble for it," he said in an interview aired by Fox News. "I built the clock to impress my teacher, but when I showed it to her, she thought it was a threat to her. It was really sad that she took the wrong impression from it and I got arrested for it later that day." Ahmed was pulled from class Monday and taken to a detention center after showing the digital clock to teachers at his suburban Dallas high school.

Newsletter – No Justice, No Peace

June 20, 2015 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.PopularResistance.org , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese for Popular Resistance. Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report writes that “No justice, no peace” is “a vow by the movement to transform the crisis that is inflicted on Black people into a generalized crisis for the larger society, and for those who currently rule.” In reality, given the violence being inflicted upon people, particularly people of color, whether directly or indirectly through rising poverty, unemployment, homelessness, lack of access to health care and more, and the government’s failures to address these crises and listen to the people, disruption is a necessary element of political change. In 1968 the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke outside a prison in California where people were being held for protesting the Vietnam War. In the speech he drew the connections between the Civil Rights movement and the peace movement against the Vietnam War. Today we see the links between racism, inequality, imperialism, militarism and ecocide and his comment on that day continues to ring true: "There can be no justice without peace. And there can be no peace without justice."

Raising Black Sons In A White Country

February 17, 2015 Jane Lazarre, www.tomdispatch.com , ,
It is 2015 and I could list so many names. I would pray, but I am not a believer, as people call us now, but I do believe in action, in what has always been called struggle, in what I insist on calling faith in the human capacity and responsibility to know and feel another human story. I witness my son, now a man of 40, marching from Washington Square Park up Fifth Avenue, across 34th Street, downtown on Sixth, long renamed Avenue of the Americas, to One Police Plaza. He marches and shouts with colleagues and friends: I can’t breathe! Black lives matter! Whiteness is a social and political category created to embed in the mind a false description of the body, its purpose to confirm privilege and superiority, to deny solidarity. It is not me. I reject it. It is not you. We can’t breathe.
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