Tagged: racial equity and social justice

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

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

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.

Selected Media

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Limits of Representation

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Read the full article from The New Yorker, here.

“We are living in the recent shadow of a two-term Black President and two Black Attorneys General. And, despite this unprecedented concentration of Black political power, not much has changed for the vast majority of Black people. This was certainly true before the ravages of COVID-19 measured the exact depths of racial injustice in the country. There may be a multitude of contextual factors and contingencies that explain the impotence of the Black political class to change the conditions experienced by ordinary Black people, but those explanations do not change that basic reality.”

Selected Media

COVID-19’s Disproportionate Effects on Children of Color Will Challenge the Next Generation

By Faith Mitchell

Read the full article from Urban Wire, here.

“People of color, especially Black and Latino people, are not only more likely to contract COVID-19 and die from it, but they are also disproportionately affected by its economic consequences. Black and Latino adults report high rates of family financial insecurity and hardship. In July, 64 percent of Latino adults, 57 percent of Black adults, and 55 percent of Asian adults who responded to the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey said at least one member of their household had lost employment income since March 13.”

Selected Media

Why ‘White’ should be capitalized, too

By Nell Irvin Painter

Read the full article from Washington Post, here.

“Eve L. Ewing, a poet and sociologist of education at the University of Chicago, recently started capitalizing ‘White’ to emphasize the presence of whiteness as a racial identity: ‘Whiteness, she says, is not only an absence.’ She compares the fates of the McCloskeys, a white couple who pointed loaded firearms at protesters in St. Louis, with that of young Tamir Rice, who lost his life simply for playing with a toy gun in Cleveland. The capital W stresses ‘White’ as a powerful racial category whose privileges should be embedded in its definition.”

Selected Media

Breonna Taylor’s violent death highlights the dangers of racist gentrification

By Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr.

“The callous killing of George Floyd triggered a massive revolt against police violence and brutality against Blacks. Hostile and dangerous action against Black folk by white police has a long history. But African Americans have been demonstrating against violent police since at least the Chicago riots of 1919. In 1951, a group of Black activists, including the scholar W.E.B. DuBois and the singer-activist Paul Robeson, took a petition to the United Nations titled ‘We Charge Genocide,’ arguing, among other things, that ‘the killing of Negroes has become police policy in the United States.'”

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