RIGHT 2 THE CITY Blog

Selected Media

We’ve Entered the Era of ‘Branding for Black Lives’

By Dave Zirin

Read the full article from The Nation, here.

“Amid this push and pull between player dissent and league branding, a hero did emerge—but not in the NFL. Naomi Osaka won the US Open in thrilling fashion, and the 22-year-old tennis star wore a different mask before every match with a different name of someone who had been killed by police. After her final triumph, a comeback victory against Victoria Azarenka, ESPN’s Tom Rinaldi asked Osaka, ‘You had seven masks with seven names, what was the message you wanted to send?’ She gave a response for the ages, looking at Rinaldi and saying, ‘Well… what was the message you got?'”

Selected Media

Report: PPP loan program shortchanged Buffalo’s Black neighborhoods

By Jerry Zremski

Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.

“The federal government’s main effort to rescue small businesses during the pandemic tended to benefit wealthier neighborhoods far more than predominantly Black parts of metro Buffalo, according to a new study by a group that researches federal policy and its implications nationwide. The study found that the ZIP code with the largest Black population in Buffalo, on the city’s East Side, received the smallest number of loans. Meanwhile, the most loans locally went to the 14221 ZIP code, which includes Williamsville and parts of Amherst and Clarence.”

Selected Media

Report: PPP loan program shortchanged Buffalo’s Black neighborhoods

By Jerry Zremski

Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.

“The federal government’s main effort to rescue small businesses during the pandemic tended to benefit wealthier neighborhoods far more than predominantly Black parts of metro Buffalo, according to a new study by a group that researches federal policy and its implications nationwide. The study found that the ZIP code with the largest Black population in Buffalo, on the city’s East Side, received the smallest number of loans. Meanwhile, the most loans locally went to the 14221 ZIP code, which includes Williamsville and parts of Amherst and Clarence.”

Selected Media

Where Calling the Police Isn’t the Only Option

By Sarah Holder and Kara Harris

Read the full article from CityLab, here.

“In so many of the police shootings that have inspired protests since the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May, fatal encounters with officers began with minor, often unrelated complaints. ‘Abolition seeks to eradicate this Jim Crow system of public safety — not merely a two-tiered system, but a system where one tier benefits by extracting from the other,’ writes Josie Duffy Rice, a journalist and lawyer, in Vanity Fair. ‘Nowhere is the extra layer of unnecessary violence more reflected than in our insistence on sending men with guns to resolve mental health crises.'”

Selected Media

Black Labor Leaders Are Needed Now More Than Ever

By Marc Bayard

Read the full article from The Nation, here.

“These actions and acts of radical defiance by workers have made it clear that systemic racism cannot be separated from the growing and perverse economic inequalities that have devastated Black workers and Black America for generations, and made them much more vulnerable to the current global pandemic. To win the corporate accountability required to rectify this inequality, our labor and worker movement must embrace this racial awakening and elevate and adequately resource Black people in roles of leadership and strategy.”

Selected Media

Eviction is Not the Answer

By Lee Flannery

Read the full article from Planetizen, here.

“Matthew Desmond, director of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, understands the devastating impact of eviction during a time when unemployment has reached levels to rival those seen during the Great Depression. Demond’s recent opinion piece describes the real-life consequences of insufficient federal rental aid support and a housing crisis that forces the majority of sub-poverty line tenants to allocate over half of their income to rent.”

Selected Media

They’ll give your killer water and ignore your gasps for air: An American love song is violent

By Jeneé Osterheldt

Read the full article from Boston Globe, here.

Police will give water to Kyle Rittenhouse, your killer, before he shoots you, Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum. And after you die they will tell the world how he was cleaning walls before he shot you for protesting police brutality. They’ll barely say your names. You were white and fighting for Black lives, so they are burying you like they bury us.

Selected Media

Blue Bloods: America’s Brotherhood of Police Officers

By Eve L. Ewing

Read the full article from Vanity Fair, here.

History would suggest that unionism and policing are, at their foundation, incompatible. For one thing, the officers who founded the FOP made it very clear that it was not a union. In the volume The Fraternal Order of Police 1915-1976: A History, a work commissioned by the FOP itself, cofounder Martin L. Toole is quoted as saying, “We are banded together for our own enjoyment!” Founding officers rejected the name “United Association of Police because ‘that name sounded too much like Union, and Union sounded too antagonistic.’ ”

Selected Media

Tito Ruiz’s camera is his ‘weapon of choice’ in exhibit featuring Buffalo police protests

By Nick Lippa

Read the full article from WBFO, here.

It wasn’t just George Floyd’s name heard at protests across Buffalo this summer. The names of Quentin Suttles, Wardel ‘Meech’ Davis, and Cariol Horne were all chanted as a national fight against systematic racism continues. Photographer Tito Ruiz was on the front line with protestors to capture the emotion felt locally in Western New York’s fight for racial justice. Now, more than 30 of his large prints are on display as part of a solo exhibit at CEPA Gallery.

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