By Dr. Lori L. Martin
“Baton Rouge is a city divided by many fault lines. A single street divides the city’s predominately white and black communities. North Baton Rouge, where Alton Sterling was killed, is under developed relative to south Baton Rouge. Access to emergency rooms, quality schools, healthy food, reliable transportation, and good jobs are limited, while health care complexes, blue ribbon schools, business and industry flow freely to the south.”
By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Read the full article from In These Times, here.
“Fewer than 40 miles from Baltimore, in the nation’s capitol, resides the nation’s first African-American president. There are 43 Black members of Congress and two Senators—the highest number of Black Congress members in American history. And just as the West Side of Baltimore was erupting against the police killing of Freddie Gray, Loretta Lynch became the first Black woman appointed as Attorney General.”
By Emily Badger
Read the full article from The Washington Posts, here.
“’On one level,’ says Henry Louis Taylor, ‘they all look and appear to be very, very different.’ But, argues the professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo, it’s about time we begin to talk about them in the same breath. ‘These are places that are left behind, forgotten,’ he says. ‘They’re places we’ve gotten very good at shielding from view.'”
By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Read the full article from Jacobin, here.
“Perhaps at its most basic level, black liberation implies a world where black people can live in peace, without the constant threat of the social, economic, and political woes of a society that places almost no value on the vast majority of black lives. It would mean living in a world where black lives matter. While it is true that when black people get free, everyone gets free, black people in America cannot “get free” alone. In that sense, black liberation is bound up with the project of human liberation and social transformation.”
By Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr.
“The per capita income in Ladue is $90,000 annually. In Ferguson, it is $18,000; Black Jack, $23,000; Berkeley $14,000, and in Kinloch, $9,000. Ladue is 94% white and Ferguson, Black Jack, Berkeley and Kinloch are all more than 60% black. This metropolitan inequality is institutionalized and legitimized by the metropolitan governance structure, which has created a geography of race-class segregation that is reflected in developed and underdeveloped suburbs.”