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Systemic Racism

#WhiteCoatsForBlackLives Wants Racial Justice In Medicine

In the weeks since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, there have been daily sustained protests across the country advocating for the equality and liberation of vulnerable and marginalized communities, particularly that of Black people. One such protest came from the medical community. If you search the hashtag White Coats For Black Lives, what you’ll find is a smattering of media, ranging from videos to photos, to outright statements acknowledging and yet decrying racism that exists within the medical field with statements and pledges to do better and help to alleviate this issue. Joining us today to discuss this is Randi Abramson, M.D. She is the Chief Medical Officer for an organization in Washington, D.C. called Bread For The City, where their mission is to help low-income district residents empower their communities through various means of aid.

A Decade Of Research On The Rich-Poor Divide In Education

Education inequality is not just a divide between rich and poor but also between the ultra-rich and everyone else. In 2020, a Pennsylvania State University researcher documented how the wealthiest school districts in America — the top 1 percent — fund their schools at much higher levels than everyone else and are increasing their school spending at a faster rate. The school funding gap between a top 1 percent district (mostly white suburbs) and an average-spending school district at the 50th percentile widened by 32 percent between 2000 and 2015, the study calculated. Nassau County, just outside New York City on Long Island, has the highest concentration of students who attend the best-funded public schools among all counties in the country. Almost 17 percent of all the top 1 percent of students in the nation live in this one county. 

These Three Studies Prove That Systemic Racism Is Very Very Real

Racism is like sewage. Whether we’re currently engaging in a national dialogue about it or not, it’s still there. It runs under our streets, our buildings, our society. Millions of tons of shit. Rarely is racism truly visible to the naked eye. More often, it trickles along beneath our collective consciousness, quietly infecting everything. A lot of people try to claim systemic racism no longer exists. “It’s gone. What systemic racism? ‘Black Panther’ was one of the most popular movies ever, therefore, racism is over,” they claim. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. Three studies prove just how many millions of gallons of fetid, systemic racism still fill our country. Let’s start with education. A recent report found a $23 billion racial funding gap for schools.

The Disproportionate Blues

Here in the year of 2020 of the 21st century, we descendants of the people who created and first started singing the blues set to music, way back in the 19th century, are still singing the blues today. Those people who historically gave us the reasons to write and sing the blues because of our ill treatment and overwhelming oppression could not truly understand, appreciate or relate to our historical or present-day pain and suffering.  We African Americans have often been told that times have changed. We have been told by the powers that be throughout this country’s history and our existence to stop crying, to get over it, to move on, and for the most part we have tried to do so. We have tried to stop complaining and crying about our collective pains, and that is why the blues was created.

Too Late To Reform, Time To Disband Philly Police

Philadelphia - The Philadelphia Police Department, the fourth largest in the U.S., is one of the oldest municipal police agencies, founded in 1854. Its history has been marked by patterns of police brutality, intimidation, coercion and disregard for constitutional rights. Recently, a statue of former Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo (1967-71), whose tenure is synonymous with racist police brutality, was finally removed. While welcomed, simply removing his statue changes nothing fundamental. It is only a first step. Philadelphia Mayor James Kenney had ordered the removal of the hated statue in the middle of the night on June 3, robbing activists, who for years had fought for its removal, the pleasure of taking it down themselves. Back in 2017, Philadelphia REAL Justice had launched a campaign called “Rizzo Down.”

United Nations Sets Up Inquiry Into Racism After George Floyd Death

Geneva - The U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday condemned discriminatory and violent policing after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last month and ordered a report on "systemic racism" against people of African descent. The 47-member-state forum unanimously adopted a resolution brought by African countries. The mandate also asks U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to examine government responses to peaceful protests, including alleged use of excessive force, and deliver findings in a year's time. Philonise Floyd, the brother of the Black man whose death under the knee of a white officer roused world protests against racial injustice, urged the forum on Wednesday to investigate U.S. police brutality and racial discrimination.

Abolishing Policing Also Means Abolishing Family Regulation

The uprisings taking place across the nation and the world have brought unprecedented attention to abolition as a political vision and organizing strategy. More Americans are recognizing that police killings of black people are so pervasive that they can no longer be considered aberrations. Rather, police violence stems from the very function of policing to enforce an unjust racial order. Policing, therefore, cannot be fixed by more failed reforms; it must be abolished. The most prominent demand emerging from the protests is to defund the police and reallocate the money to provide health care, education, jobs with living wages, and affordable housing. I am inspired by calls to defund the police.

The Police May Pull The Trigger, But It’s The System That Kills

Fifty years ago this year, I published my first book, entitled Rebels in Eden – an exploration of mass political violence in America focusing on the uprisings that had by then incinerated substantial portions of the inner city communities of Los Angeles, New York, Newark, Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, as well as scores of smaller towns and cities.[i] Those riots were far more destructive than anything experienced in the protests following the recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery by police and ex-police officers. The sixties uprisings killed several hundred people (almost all Black civilians), injured more than 12,000, and caused billions of dollars in property damage.

Defund The Police, Then Abolish It

The United States’ powder keg of racial capitalism, searing inequality and violent policing, compounded by the state’s ruinously indifferent response to a global pandemic and a sputtering economy, has finally exploded. Mass protest has shaken the country, with more than 40 cities instituting curfews and 23 states calling in a total of 17,000 National Guard troops to stamp out the uprisings. The eruption of righteous fury pulsating around the US represents a historic moment not seen since America’s last mass urban rebellions, the “long hot summer” of 1967 and the 1968 uprisings following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

Medical Workers Die-In To Protest Police Brutality

New York - Hundreds of medical workers at SUNY Downstate staged a die-in on Thursday to protest police brutality and the health disparities that affect black Americans.  Emergency medical residents and other hospital staff kneeled or lay on the ground for eight minutes and 46 seconds — the amount of time former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of 46-year-old George Floyd, killing him.  “I can stand here as a brown, female, immigrant physician with a loud voice — and I can do this because of the sacrifices made by black people a long time ago,” said Dr. Smruti Desai, an emergency medical resident. “It is our turn to fight for them.”  While hundreds of staff at the central Brooklyn hospital — which serves a predominately black patient population — kneeled or lay on the ground, speakers read aloud the names of victims of police violence.

Black Lives Extinguished, Black Ancestors’ Bodies Desecrated

This week, the progressive community is deeply traumatized over the slaughter of innocent Black people and the determination of ruling elites in politics, media and civil societies to patch up a deprived, debased and white supremacist system. One prime example is Minneapolis officials charging Officer Derek Chauvin with 3rd degree murder and manslaughter.  Is this charge a revisiting of the idea that Africans are 3/5th human?  White supremacy fault lines have intentionally deepened and the murder and incarceration of young, primarily black men, is the norm -- in fact, it is expected. Black leadership, usually channeled through corporate sponsorship called the Democratic Party, has completely failed. 

Push Back: US Police State Faces Revolt

Dr. Gerald Horne on the George Floyd protests, the black freedom struggle, and Trump’s expansion of the US police state at home and around the world. Historian and author Gerald Horne discusses the US uprisings against police brutality and systemic racism sparked by George Floyd’s killing; the devastating impact of the US government’s decades-old war on the black freedom struggle; the ongoing “Russia-baiting” of the protests; and how, amidst the suffering and repression at home, the U.S. government, in bipartisan fashion, continues to attempt to impose its will on countries abroad, from China to Venezuela. Guest: Dr. Gerald Horne, Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. Author of more than three dozen books, including the forthcoming The Dawning of the Apocalypse.

An Uprising Was Inevitable

There’s no greater frustration than working every day to build and inspire others to build a more just, compassionate world, only to be so brutally reminded of how far away that world is, as we are bombarded by videos of an atrocity such as the police killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd. Witnessing someone being killed is terrorizing. I am experiencing episodes of terror after seeing the life leave Floyd’s handcuffed body under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, while two officers held down Floyd, and another stood idly by. That image will stay with me for a long time, just as Eric Garner’s has, just as Philando Castile’s has, and Terence Crutcher’s, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice’s.

Media Smeared Ahmaud Arbery After His Lynching

While it took two and a half months for the authorities to finally make arrests in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, corporate media were much quicker to follow the time-honored practice of besmirching victims of racist violence (FAIR.org, 3/22/17). First they kill your body. Then they kill your reputation. When white supremacy is the foundation of the US’s media, political, legal and corporate system, victims of racist violence are often killed twice in this way. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation on May 7 arrested former cop Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Travis McMichael, 34, for the murder of Arbery, an unarmed 25-year old African American out for a jog—only after a widely circulated video of the lynching became too difficult to ignore.

Health Care Workers Call On Labor Movement To Take Action

As health care workers, we condemn the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers as an act of racist violence. We condemn the murder of Breonna Taylor by Louisville police officers as an act of racist violence. We condemn the murder of Tony McDade by Tallahassee police officers as an act of racist violence. Their killings are just a handful of countless examples of police brutality responsible for the early deaths of many Black people in the United States. Black people are three times more likely than white people to die by police violence. As health care workers, we witness first-hand how widespread racist police brutality harms Black and brown people. We understand the anti-Black, racist origins of the institution of policing, initially created to patrol and entrap people who had escaped enslavement.
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