Six on History: Black History is Every Month
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1) I, Too, Rage America, Boston Globe
"America always meant for our murders to go viral. They used to put lynchings on postcards.
Our elders were tortured, burned, and hanged while hundreds and even thousands of white folk watched, as if Black pain were their favorite melody. They took photos and made souvenirs of our suffering, sometimes with pieces of us attached. America delighted in our deaths.
They murdered us and called it just back then. Now, we chant Black lives matter and big businesses and colleges and even churches post signs on their front doors. They sometimes call our dead martyrs. You cannot kill folk, call it sacrifice, and then party over “progress” on the anniversary of their deaths. Because we’re still dying.
A year ago, George Floyd was murdered. We watched him die millions of times, crying out for his mama as a cop knelt on his neck. We wept and flooded the streets with cries for freedom and justice.
It feels as though America has learned to value us in our deaths instead of doing the liberation work that would lead to our long lives. There were many before him, but we like to think Floyd’s lynching changed the world. In some ways it did, but the bodies keep coming.
“We were never fighting for one man or one verdict,” said Ron Harris, chief resilience officer of Minneapolis. In his role, he centers racial equity, economic inclusion, and environmental justice. “The world’s consciousness elevated a bit. George Floyd’s murder was a flashpoint, but it should have identified all of the other things we experience as Black Americans. If we hadn’t made progress on that, what are we memorializing?”
Violence goes beyond police killings. Violence is being pushed out of your homes or not making enough money to even have one. Violence is a health care system filled with inequities. Violence is an education system that vilifies and erases folk who look like us. Our spirits are T-shirts tagged in graffiti with names of our losses. Lives lived were here.
We cannot catalog the faces and places where we’ve lost all our people. There are candlelight vigils across this country in little communities we under-resource and over-police. And even when the videos play, it’s more likely a court will say the killing was justified. Convictions like Derek Chauvin’s are a rare gasp of accountability, but true justice means not having to fight to live in the first place.
Yes, the verdict brought relief. But it is momentary. Harris said the work continues and we must maintain the urgency. George Floyd, like so many victims of police violence, was also a victim of societal ills. We’re fighting that sickness, too.
“White people were super happy,” Harris said of Chauvin’s conviction for Floyd’s murder. “It felt like they were vindicated in that moment and relieved to move on. George Floyd was not a martyr who died on a cross for our sins. ... We cannot move on.”
We wear our grief in how we change the way we walk and how we talk depending on who is nearby. It stains us in the way we restrain ourselves in debates even when we’re right. It shrinks us in rooms where we deserve to shine. Is this what becomes of a people whose American existence has been spent as victims of their government?
“Black people deserve to have joy and be loved and feel safe and we don’t,” said Biiftuu Ibrahim Adam, co-director of New Leaders Council-Twin Cities, a nonprofit dedicated to training young progressive leaders.
Who might we be if we weren’t always marking someone’s murder anniversary and made to witness the myriad ways this country kills us? Can an open wound be healed?
I was in elementary school when I, like the rest of the world, watched Rodney King brutalized by Los Angeles police. They beat him. More than 50 blows of their batons to his body, a few 50,000-volt Taser shots, and kicks, too. His neck was stepped on. His skull was fractured in 11 places, jaw displaced, bones and teeth broken.
From that March night in 1991 until his death in 2012, he never felt his smile flush the right side of his face. It remained numb.
Two weeks later, that same month in 1991 in Los Angeles, Latasha Harlins was murdered. Her killer, Soon Ja Du, accused her of stealing. The shopkeeper did not care that the 15-year-old was approaching the counter, $2 in her hand and the juice in her backpack. She was a Black girl.
Du snatched her. There was a struggle. Harlins broke free of the grown woman’s grip and put the juice on the counter. She walked toward the door. But Du grabbed a .38-caliber and shot the little Black girl in the back of the head. She was found guilty. But the judge chose to give her 400 hours of community service and a $500 fine. Probation. I was in elementary school when Latasha Harlins was killed.
I was a little Black girl, too.
Or was I? Black folk do not get the luxury of being little or children. And the names of Black girls and women and trans folk melt on our tongues.
The country did not carry Latasha Harlins’s name the way it did Rodney King’s then or the way it does George Floyd’s now. Just as it didn’t for Breonna Taylor. Taylor was murdered in March, two and a half months before Floyd, but we did not say her name until after his death.
There are so many names we do not know, and sometimes I weep for them, too. Because I know somewhere, someone is being brutalized and only their family members will witness. Only they will remember.
Our memories are far too short because it’s easy to run out of spaces to pack and tuck this trauma. We squirrel away our own brutalization, forgetting, erasing, pushing forward. We binge, filling up on names to lift, and then we purge to make room for more. Expanding enough to carry the vast grief of our people seems it would require the breaking of ribs. And we rarely seem to spare one for Black girls, women, and trans folk.
We didn’t remember Latasha the way we should have. Are we going to forget Breonna when corporations are done commodifying her image?
The same day the jury reached a verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial, police killed Ma’Khia Bryant in Ohio. She was 16. But she held a knife, they justified. She was a child in a fight with not one but multiple people and the officer did nothing to deescalate or to stop the chaos and understand the dynamics. No Taser, no humane measures. He shot to kill a child in a split second, the same way police pulled a drive-by on Tamir Rice in seconds, the way an officer in Chicago killed Adam Toledo in seconds. Adam dropped the gun as told. His tiny brown hands were up. And he’s still dead.
“I am a child,” a 9-year-old Black girl in upstate New York told police earlier this year when told she was acting like one. She was having a mental health crisis, running from them, and begging for her daddy. They pepper sprayed her. When they see our young they do not see children. So in a split-second decision, they choose pain. They did not fear Kyle Rittenhouse and his semi-automatic rifle as he walked the streets of Kenosha during the protests last summer even after he’d unloaded it into protesters. They gave the 17-year-old water and gratitude. They saw a patriotic white boy. They let him go home, across state lines, and sleep in his bed.
Meanwhile, in Minnesota during the Chauvin trial, an officer yelled Taser and instead shot her gun at 20-year-old Daunte Wright. He was armed only with a valid fear for his life. He’ll never be old enough to drink. He’ll never see his son again. He’s forever frozen in time and memory. Gone.
And we watched. We tune in to witness the killings of us going viral, a racist infection. W.E.B. Du Bois said the unasked but ever present question of Black folk is, “How does it feel to be a problem?”
America sees not its racism as the issue, but Blackness itself. This is the vision America chose to paint us in: viral pain. And that hurts like hell.
Blackness, America, is not the problem. You will not clothe us in burden and pretend racism isn’t the foundation of the nation and needs dismantling. Death will not become us.
But we must make time to grieve. To mourn. To rest. To see the beauty of being here, now, alive. That is how we will reclaim our image in America, with pride and presence and joy.
It’s been a year since a cop knelt on George Floyd’s neck and we wept and flooded the streets with freedom cries for justice. And we kept on going. Always moving, fighting, resisting, and surviving."
" ... None of these criminal acts have ever been prosecuted by the government at any level, as the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 concluded in its 2001 report. Previous legal attempts to secure reparations for the victims of the massacre, including a lawsuit dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005, have all failed.
This week, a group of survivors and their descendants filed a lawsuit against the city in the Tulsa County District Court, demanding reparations for the long-lasting harm experienced by black residents both during and after the events of 1921. The lawsuit lists seven defendants, including the Tulsa County sheriff, the Oklahoma National Guard and the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, according to Maria Cramer of the New York Times.
Per the 2001 report, city officials in many instances conspired with white citizens to attack Greenwood’s black citizens. Per the Oklahoma Historical Society, local police deputized 500 white men and armed them with weapons.
Led by a 105-year-old survivor of the attack, the plaintiffs detail almost 100 years of lasting harm
Dr. McWhorter is a linguist who has written extensively about both race and language. He is the author, most recently, of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter,” from which this guest essay is adapted.
This article contains obscenities and racial slurs, fully spelled out. Ezekiel Kweku, the Opinion politics editor, and Kathleen Kingsbury, the Opinion editor, wrote about how and why we came to the decision to publish these words in Friday’s edition of the Opinion Today newsletter.
"In 1934, Allen Walker Read, an etymologist and lexicographer, laid out the history of the word that, then, had “the deepest stigma of any in the language.” In the entire article, in line with the strength of the taboo he was referring to, he never actually wrote the word itself. The obscenity to which he referred, “fuck,” though not used in polite company (or, typically, in this newspaper), is no longer verboten. These days, there are two other words that an American writer would treat as Mr. Read did. One is “cunt,” and the other is “nigger.” The latter, though, has become more than a slur. It has become taboo.
“Nigger” began as a neutral descriptor, although it was quickly freighted with the casual contempt that Europeans had for African and, later, African-descended people. Its evolution from slur to unspeakable obscenity was part of a gradual prohibition on avowed racism and the slurring of groups. It is also part of a larger cultural shift: Time was that it was body parts and what they do that Americans were taught not to mention by name — do you actually do much resting in a restroom?
That kind of concern has been transferred from the sexual and scatological to the sociological, and changes in the use of the word “nigger” tell part of that story. What a society considers profane reveals what it believes to be sacrosanct: The emerging taboo on slurs reveals the value our culture places — if not consistently — on respect for subgroups of people. (I should also note that I am concerned here with “nigger” as a slur rather than its adoption, as “nigga,” as a term of affection by Black people, like “buddy.”)
For all of its potency, in terms of etymology, “nigger” is actually on the dull side, like “damn” and “hell.” It just goes back to Latin’s word for “black,” “niger,” which not surprisingly could refer to Africans, although Latin actually preferred other words like “aethiops” — a singular, not plural, word — which was borrowed from Greek, in which it meant (surprise again) “burn face.”
English got the word more directly from Spaniards’ rendition of “niger,” “negro,” which they applied to Africans amid their “explorations.” “Nigger” seems more like Latin’s “niger” than Spanish’s “negro,” but that’s an accident; few English sailors and tradesmen were spending much time reading their Cicero. “Nigger” is how an Englishman less concerned than we often are today with making a stab at foreign words would say “negro.”
Eric Tait, Bob Anthony, and Alan Singer discuss racism in America including voter suppression on Media Watch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ektVwDes6zE&list=PLLz6bAKzWo27XYlXtfqKr5Rym286kg1vD&index=10&t=60sTeaching Learning Technology
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" ... The only problem is that you were a free man in Brooklyn, and didn’t even have the same name as the person they are looking for. No matter, because no one believes you anyway, and the protests of a Negro man don’t mean anything; one slave is as good as any other. This is a true story, and it happened to Williamsburg resident James Hamlet in 1850. Under the protection of the Fugitive Slave Act, Hamlet was legally kidnapped and taken out of state to Maryland. The slave catchers said he was an escapee named James Williams, who belonged to a woman named Mary Brown of Baltimore. Williams had successfully escaped north two years before, and was thought to be in New York City somewhere. Mary Brown’s son said that while he was on a trip to New York, he saw Williams and notified the slave catchers, who arrested James Hamlet at his job as a porter in lower Manhattan.
James Hamlet could prove that he was not James Williams, but under the new Fugitive Slave Act, his testimony was forbidden. He had no rights whatsoever to defend or prove himself in any way. As far as the law was concerned, he was property, and had no right to even prove that he was not. This case could have had a tragic ending, except for one thing: James Hamlet had friends in Brooklyn who would not be satisfied until he was back in Williamsburg in the arms of his family.
The national anti-slavery press took up the story in great detail for many weeks. Abolitionists in both Brooklyn and Manhattan raised funds to buy Hamlet back, raising $800. His story was printed in a pamphlet, the e-mail blast of its day, with copies handed out in the streets of both cities, making people aware of the case, and urging them to not only contribute to buying Mr. Hamlet’s freedom, but to protest the Fugitive Slave Act as well as the institution of slavery. Interestingly, the Brooklyn Eagle never wrote a word about it, even though it was a big story and had a Brooklyn connection.
Meanwhile, in Baltimore, James Hamlet was put on the auction block to be sold into slavery. In an interview he gave later, he said that potential buyers had been cautioned that they would do well to not buy him, as he was a New Yorker and they would lose their money. Meanwhile, the money raised was rushed down to Baltimore, and James Hamlet was set free. Upon arriving back in New York he was hailed as a hero. Between 4,000 and 5,000 people came out to see him at City Hall Park in Manhattan. In Brooklyn, two separate celebrations were held at two different black churches, one in Williamsburg and the other Downtown, where many black Brooklynites lived.
This story had a happy ending, but the fate of another family probably did not. Earlier, in 1838, a black woman named Margaret Baker was in dire straits and took herself and her three children to the Brooklyn Almshouse for food and shelter. All of them, mother and children, had been born free here in Brooklyn. The Almshouse, which was a public charity run by the city, was charged with helping those who desperately needed it. Instead, the Almshouse administration accused Baker and her children of being fugitives, and without any magistrate’s order, trial or inquiry, had them all removed down South and sold into slavery. Anti-slavery forces tried to get Baker and her children returned, but by that time the trail had gone cold, and they were lost, never to be found. No one knows what happened to them, but we can certainly guess.
So here in Brooklyn in the middle of the 19th century, black people lived in a world of uncertainty; freedom was tenuous, yet there was also some progress and success. As mentioned in the last chapter, the African-American towns of Weeksville and Carrsville had been founded by the 1850s, and were places in Brooklyn where black people were successful businessmen, community leaders, and owners of their own successful churches, schools, charities and businesses. Black Brooklynites also lived throughout Brooklyn, with large populations in the Downtown and Vinegar Hill area, as well as in Williamsburg and elsewhere.
Black churches had been established, along with, by then, both private and public schools for “colored students.” Many African Americans were successful blacksmiths, carpenters, innkeepers, coopers, herbalists and midwives. There was a small upper class of lawyers, doctors, teachers and ministers. A large service class of servants, laundresses, laborers, dockworkers and other unskilled workers was in existence, as well, but everyone, from the highest to the lowest, was never without the constant knowledge that but for the grace of God, they could be slaves in the Southern United States.
No matter how high they rose, or how long their families had been born free, if they were in the wrong place, and without papers or proof of their status, they could be the victim of a false identification, and they were without the right to give testimony, demand justice, or prove who they were. The phrase “being sold down the river” meant just that.
With that in mind, black people in the mid-19th century were not sitting on their hands waiting for the end of slavery. There were long established and new groups, both secular and religious, that held conferences and lectures. Black religious and civic leaders, as well as ordinary citizens, all attended these marches and anti-slavery rallies. They passed out literature, and they gathered petitions. They had lawyers challenge the anti-slavery laws, and they joined with white abolitionist groups to rally against slavery. Women became some of the most ardent and hardworking advocates for the end of slavery in this country, taking leadership positions for the first time, and becoming successful administrators in the cause.
Former slaves wrote stories about their bondage and journeys to freedom, and they became speakers at black, white, and mixed abolitionist meetings. Frederick Douglass was the most famous, and perhaps most eloquent of these speakers, but he was but one of many who told horrific tales of enslavement and inspiring escapes to freedom. The “slave narrative” was born, and there were plenty to tell tales of horror.
The 1850s was the pivotal decade of the century. Slavery, like it or not, was the topic du jour. It affected everything on the national landscape. The expansion of the United States into the west was causing a crisis point for national politics. Would these new territories and states be slave or free? Did the government have the right to tell people that they could not bring slavery into the new lands? Or was it up to the people themselves to decide? The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 saw westward expansion, and a precursor of the Civil War was fought in “Bloody Kansas” over just those issues. A new political party would rise out of this issue, the anti-slavery leaning Republican party, with its candidate of choice, a man named Abraham Lincoln.
Anti-slavery protests were growing. Like protests against the Vietnam War more than a hundred years later, these demonstrations were working their way into America’s main streets, into their parlors, and into the daily conversation. The expanded and powerful Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, part of the so-called Compromise of 1850 between slave and free states, allowed the slave owners and their agents to have much more power in the North to capture and return escaped slaves from anywhere south of the Canadian border. It also made it a Federal crime for anyone to harbor or help the escapees. For anti-slavery activists, it soon became apparent that getting north to New York, Boston or Chicago was not north enough for escaping slaves. The Underground Railroad needed new stations leading all the way to Canada and brave people willing to break Federal law, not once, but consistently, in order to achieve success. One of the main terminals of the Railroad was Brooklyn. Next time we’ll look at our city’s participation in this pipeline to freedom. All aboard!"
"Two things I hate about America: all of the fake conservative Christian bullshit and the inability to own up to its past mistakes.
America, you did that shit. Own it.
But America and conservatives have a tough time dealing with the truth and as such Nikole Hannah-Jones, famed journalist of The 1619 Project, Pulitzer Prize winner and a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant” recipient, will no longer be given a tenured position at her alma mater UNC-Chapel Hill because conservatives don’t love her.
See, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media pursued Hannah-Jones for its Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, a tenured position, but after conservatives (read white people) took issue with the offer, UNC remembered that it was in the South and pulled its Confederate flag undies back up.
Instead, they have agreed to give her a five-year fixed position as the Professor of the Practice. (also known as the Allen Iverson spot. I kid.) Because this is a fixed position and not a tenured position it doesn’t need Board approval.
Hannah-Jones is slated to start at the school July 1.
“It’s disappointing, it’s not what we wanted and I am afraid it will have a chilling effect,” Susan King, dean of UNC Hussman, told NC Policy Watch.
From NC Policy Watch:
The 1619 Project is a long-form journalism undertaking that, as the Pulitzer Center put it, “challenges us to reframe U.S. history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our nation’s foundational date.” Hannah-Jones, who is Black, conceived of the project and was among multiple staff writers, photographers and editors who put it together.
The project sought to spur a reexamination of how America teaches and celebrates its own history. It caused debate among academics, journalists, even within The New York Times itself. Criticisms of its accuracy by some prominent historians led to edits and clarifications, but Hannah-Jones and the Times stand by the project, the introductory essay to which won her the 2020 Pulitzer for commentary.
Last summer, Hannah-Jones went through the rigorous tenure process at UNC, King said. Hannah-Jones submitted a package King said was as well reviewed as any King had ever seen. Hannah-Jones had enthusiastic support from faculty and the tenure committee, with the process going smoothly every step of the way — until it reached the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees.
The board reviews and approves tenure applications. It chose not to take action on approving Hannah-Jones’s tenure.
“I’m not sure why and I’m not sure if that’s ever happened before,” King said.
Let me see if I can clear it up: Conservative white people started conservative white peopling. Or, as a trustee who didn’t want to be named told NC Policy Watch: “Politics.”
“This is a very political thing,” the trustee said. “The university and the board of trustees and the Board of Governors and the legislature have all been getting pressure since this thing was first announced last month. There have been people writing letters and making calls, for and against. But I will leave it to you which is carrying more weight.”
Some members of the board tried to argue that Hannah-Jones couldn’t get a tenured position because she doesn’t come from a teaching background, but that too is bullshit.
“There was some discussion about ‘She is not from a teaching background, she is not from academia, so how can she just get a tenured position?’” the trustee told NC Policy Watch. “But if you look at the previous Knight Chairs, if you look at Penny Abernathy for instance, these are people who come from the world of journalism. That’s the idea. That’s what the program is and it’s always been that way. So that argument doesn’t really hold water.”
King noted that while she’s not happy with the outcome, she’d rather have some of Hannah-Jones than nothing at all.
“She represents the best of our alumni and the best of the business,” King said. “I don’t want to get into a food fight. I want to make sure that our students have the opportunity to have someone of her caliber here and to learn from her. I think our faculty do as well. I realize this is a fraught era in the state. When I heard that the chancellor and the provost wanted to move to this, it was better than having a battle royale about the theory of academic freedom.”
