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Racism

Data Suggests Police Prey On Drivers In Black DC Neighborhoods

August 9, 2021 Anoa Changa, News One. , , , ,
In Washington D.C., Black residents fill the city’s coffers with fines and fees collected through traffic enforcement. A new analysis from The Washington Post found that 62 percent of all fines were from majority Black neighborhoods with an average median income of less than $50,000. Metro Database Reporter John D. Harden searched through millions of records over a five-year period from 2016 to 2020. According to the report, the disparity remains even through the pandemic period of March 2020 to June 2021. In a Twitter thread, Harden laid out some facts about the cycle of debt that can trap some drivers in the District. Harden’s reporting also illustrates the importance of data in exposing inequality. Data analyzed revealed that two-thirds of drivers ticketed by police since 2019 were Black.

Multiple Mainstreams

August 9, 2021 Carla Murphy, Dissent Magazine. , , ,
I suppose I’m meant to care how “the left” talks about race and class. I fit the profile; I’m a black female journalist. My stories since the early 2000s have featured men and women made invisible or marginalized by society, sometimes by their own communities, and certainly by newsrooms. But as a news gatherer, I’ve always tinkered on the borderlands of mainstream and progressive journalism, the left’s gathering space. I never fully committed. That’s because early in my career I settled on an important distinction: it’s not how you talk about class and race that matters; it’s to and for whom. Audience determines how. Left conversations about race and class rarely center my folks as their audience: the precarious middle-class, working-class, and working-poor residents of my Brooklyn street; recent immigrants; and native-born Americans like them.

Scientific Crusader Showed That No Biological Basis For Race Exists

August 7, 2021 Prabir Purkayastha, Struggle La Lucha. , , ,
Lewontin always harked back to what being radical means: going back to fundamentals in deriving a viewpoint. As a Marxist and activist, Lewontin believed that we need to fight at both levels: to expose class, race and gender stereotypes as a reflection of power within society, and also at the level of radical science, meaning from the fundamentals of scientific theory and data.

Seattle Vigil Against Racist Medical Negligence

August 5, 2021 Devyn Forschmiedt, Liberation News. , , ,
Hundreds of protesters gathered at Westlake Park in Seattle on the afternoon of July 24 for the Healthcare Equity March. This was the most recent of a series of protests centered around Kaloni Bolton, a 12-year-old Black girl who died tragically at the beginning of this year as a result of medical negligence. The protests have been organized by Kaloni’s family and local organization Decolonizing Science, who Kaloni’s mother and aunt Kristina Williams and Francis Bowman say have been very helpful in bringing people out. Williams and Bowman spoke with Liberation News to bring attention to Kaloni’s story. On December 29, 2020, Kaloni’s older sister brought her to the Renton Landing Urgent Care clinic in Renton, Washington, run by Valley Medical Center of University of Washington Medicine.

Racism Is Magnifying The Deadly Impact Of Rising City Heat

July 31, 2021 Alexandra Witze, Nature. , , ,
To help reduce the risk of heat stroke and other heat-related illnesses, urban planners, meteorologists, climate experts and other scientists are working to identify the most vulnerable neighbourhoods. Underlying such efforts is a growing awareness of how extreme heat takes a disproportionate toll on people of colour and those in lower-income communities. Racist urban policies, particularly in the United States, have left communities of colour at higher risk of heat-related illness or death than their white neighbours.

Environmental Racism And Detroit

July 15, 2021 Emma Boyhtari, Left Voice. , , ,
Oftentimes, racism and environmentalism are thought of as separate issues. Since the Black Lives Matter uprising of last summer, however, there has been a growing awareness of the scope of racism and its existence in every facet of society. The legacy of racism, dating back to the enslavement of Black people in this country, is woven into the fabric of American society. It has existed in many forms on structural and personal levels, including racist real estate practices such as redlining and restrictive covenants, as well as discriminatory employment practices. Not to mention how Black folks are criminalized, brutalized, exploited, and killed by police and the prison industrial system. The list goes on, and it also includes being more vulnerable to environmental pollution.

Illinois Bill Mandates Public Schools Teach Asian American History

July 10, 2021 Jordan Williams, The Hill. , , ,
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) has signed legislation mandating public schools teach Asian American history, making the state the first in the nation to do so. The legislation, the Teaching Equitable Asian American History Act, requires a unit of Asian American history to be taught in public schools beginning in the 2022-2023 school year. As part of the curriculum, students should be taught “the contributions of Asian Americans toward advancing civil rights from the 19th century onward,” Pritzker’s office said in a statement. The curriculum should also include “the contributions made by individual Asian Americans in government, arts, humanities, and sciences,” as well as “the contributions of Asian American communities to the economic, cultural, social, and political development of the United States.”

July 4 Glorifies The US Military — A Force With White Supremacy At Its Core

July 5, 2021 Rory Fanning, Truthout , , ,
The U.S. isn’t young anymore. One can’t help but wonder what Fredrick Douglass would say if he were to give a speech on the country’s 245th birthday. The “great streams” of American racism, white supremacy and sexism have indeed worn deep. A full 169 years after Douglass’s speech, the U.S. is still bogged down by many of the same contradictions.

Olympics Chiefs Relax Protest Rules For Tokyo Games

July 3, 2021 Deutsche Welle. , , ,
The decision came amid calls to relax rule 50.2 of the Olympic Charter, which states: "No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas." The International Olympic Committee (IOC) had promised to review the rule after the Black Lives Matter movement gained global support.

Governor Signs Law To Stop Teachers From Talking About Racism

June 25, 2021 Jennifer Bendery, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday signed one of his party’s top legislative priorities into law: a bill aimed at stopping teachers from talking about racism and any current events that may be contentious. The legislation, supported by virtually every GOP state legislator, states that social studies teachers in public K-12 schools “may not be compelled” to talk about current events or public policy or social issues considered controversial. If they do talk about such things, they are required to present the issue “without giving deference to any one perspective.” The law specifies all the things that social studies teachers aren’t allowed to talk about. They can’t make it part of a course to talk about the concept that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex.”

To End Racial Capitalism, We Will Need To Take On Policing

June 20, 2021 Henry A. Giroux, Truthout. , , ,
Police in the United States act with impunity in targeted neighborhoods, public schools, college campuses, hospitals, and almost every other public sphere. Not only do the police view protesters, Black and Indigenous people, and undocumented immigrants as antagonists to be controlled, they are also armed with military-grade weapons. This police militarization is a process that dates at least as far back as President Lyndon Johnson when he initiated the 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which supplied local police forces with weapons used in the Vietnam War. The public is now regarded as dangerous and suspect; moreover, as the police are given more military technologies and weapons of war, a culture of punishment, resentment and racism intensifies as Black people, in particular, are viewed as a threat to law and order.

Colombia Removes Statues Of Columbus And Spanish Queen After Attacks

June 14, 2021 Adriaan Alsema, Colombia Reports. , , ,
Colombia’s culture ministry removed statues of 15th-century explorer Christopher Columbus and Spain’s late Queen Isabella amid fears they would be tumbled. Government workers removed the statues from their pedestals in the capital Bogota on Friday after native Colombian protesters tried to tumble them on Wednesday. The attempts triggered tensions with a fringe white supremacist group that subsequently tried to attack the protesters of the Misak people from southwest Colombia. According to the Culture Ministry, the statues that were erected in 1906 were taken to a safe place for “a process of restauration.” The National Patrimony agency said that it would hold talks with different social sectors about the future of the European explorer and the late monarch who financed the naval adventure that led Columbus to the Americas.

Discovery Of Mass Graves Reinforces Need For Truth And Reconciliation

June 14, 2021 Equal Justice Initiative. , , ,
One hundred years after the Tulsa Massacre, a team of scientists has discovered the remains of 27 people believed to be murdered by the white mob that destroyed the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. The victims were uncovered just two weeks after the discovery of a mass grave on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, a boarding school where Indigenous children were forcibly sent until the late 1970s. The bodies of 215 children—some as young as three years old—have been uncovered so far. In both Tulsa and British Columbia, the discoveries came after decades of effort by descendants of survivors and family members of victims urging local and federal officials to acknowledge this history.

California Reparations Committee Confronts Harms Of Slavery

June 13, 2021 Jackie Botts, Cal Matters. , , ,
For more than three decades, Black members of Congress have introduced legislation to study the lasting harms of slavery on African Americans, and propose remedies. Year after year, the federal proposal languished. Now, California is going it alone. This month, California’s first-in-the-nation task force to study reparations met for the first time, kicking off a two-year process to study the consequences of slavery and systemic racism against African Americans in California. The reparations committee of nine prominent lawyers, academics, politicians, religious and civil rights leaders — many of whom are descendants of slaves — will make formal recommendations on how the state should make reparations.

A New Nevada Law Bans Racial Mascots In Schools

June 7, 2021 Dustin Jones, NPR. , , ,
Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak met with members of the Nevada Indian Commission in Carson City on Friday as he signed legislation removing racially discriminatory identifiers or language from schools. Additionally, counties can no longer sound "sundown sirens," which once signified it was time for certain people to leave town. The law will require schools to change any name, logo, mascot, song or identifier that is "racially discriminatory" or "associated with the Confederate States of America or a federally recognized Indian tribe." Under Assembly Bill 88, exceptions can be made only with tribal approval. The legislation applies to public schools and charters, universities and community colleges. Friday's signing took place at the Stewart Indian School, which served as a federally run Native American educational institute for 90 years.
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