Black History is Every Month: W.E.B. Du Bois, 1901, The Freedman's Bureau; Four Cartoonists on Decolonizing Their Lives; 43 Percent of White Students Harvard Admits Are Legacies, Jocks, or the Kids of Donors and Faculty; Eric Garner's Mom Shares Hear
panaritisp
And please don't forget to check out the pertinent images attached to every post
Thanks Gary, John and Phil
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"We’re all taught as children Lord Acton’s axiom that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But the longer I live, the more I think that’s incorrect. It’s not power that corrupts. As Lindsay Ellis once cited, power in itself only reveals what you would like to do.
It’s the lack of accountability for how you use that power that corrupts. And what I keep seeing at every level is people vested with the power of life and death, who do not feel in any way that they should be beholden to any form of accounting for how they use that power.
In this case, what we saw with Eric Garner’s death was a clear abuse of power: the man was arrested on suspicion that he was selling loose cigarettes . . . which he wasn’t in fact doing at the time he was arrested. The NYPD apparently felt six officers were required to effect this arrest. And immediately upon escalation, they used tactics that led immediately to his death, whereupon their labor official then blamed Garner, on the grounds that if he’d only been healthier when he was placed in an illegal chokehold, he wouldn’t have died.
And yet, despite all that, it takes years just to fire the officer. You can’t tell me that lack of accountability, the sense that the System Had Their Back No Matter What, didn’t impact how the NYPD chose to approach that particular situation."
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Stumbling Towards a Post-Racial World: We Have a Long, Long Path Ahead
"Eight years later Obama’s farewell address was a list of achievements; an upbeat view of the future and a realization that we were far from a post-racial society.
There’s a … threat to our democracy – one as old as our nation itself. After my election, there was talk of a post-racial America. Such a vision, however well-intended, was never realistic. For race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society. I’ve lived long enough to know that race relations are better than they were ten, or twenty, or thirty years ago – you can see it not just in statistics, but in the attitudes of young Americans across the political spectrum.
Three years into the Trump presidency much of the Obama achievements have been ripped away or hanging on frayed strings. The future of our democracy is threatened from within and we fear we are edging towards wars abroad.
Beneath suits and dresses of too many Americans we see the cloaks of the Klan. Attempts to address inequities that were once collective actions across the political spectrum are now bitterly attacked.
In New York City attempts to address the inequities of the Specialized High School Admittance Test (SHSAT); the results of the SHSAT test in the spring of 2018: only nine offers of admittance to Black students out of over 900 offers."
"In How to Be An Antiracist, Kendi outlines how all willing Americans can overcome this denial and reach a point of confession and truth. Specifically, he challenges us to reflect on what it truly means to be “racist,” what it means to be “not racist,” and what it means to be “antiracist.”[7] Kendi demonstrates how, in America, when individuals are accused of racism or being racist, their knee-jerk reaction is often “I am not racist” or “that was not racist,” or even more vehemently, “I’m the least racist person in the world.” Kendi questions this response, asking us to consider: is there really such thing as being “not racist?” Is “not racist” the true opposite of “racist”?
