By Caroline Randall Williams
Read the full article from The New York Times, here.
“I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.
If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.”
By Rod Watson
Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.
“Buffalo’s insecurity and paranoia over its national image are well-known. But now it might actually do some good after Cariol Horne made the rounds of network TV and radio shows in recent days, from CNN and CBS to ‘The Breakfast Club,’ the nationally syndicated radio show.”
By Amina Yasin
Read the full article from *The Tyee, here.
“Today, Black people across North America are reclaiming their cities with calls of ‘Whose Streets,’ ‘George Floyd’ and, in Toronto, ‘Justice for Regis’ and ‘No justice, no peace.’ Urban planners need to interrogate whether the profession has value if it fails to protect the public interest by not analyzing the historic and current manifestations of racism, specifically anti-Black racism, that pervades it.”
By Beth Kwiatek
“George Floyd’s killing by four white police officers, and the nonchalance in which it was enacted, has finally outraged white America. White America can no longer ignore or dismiss the reality of what it means to be black or brown in this country.”
By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Read the full article from The New York Times, here.
“The revolt in American cities, amid a deadly pandemic that is disproportionately killing African-Americans, suggests that people feel the political system cannot solve their problems. Many have been looking back at the urban uprisings of the 1960s to make sense of our situation. Those protests exposed a shocking degree of racism in the supposedly liberal North. A main demand from protesters then was more black political control of cities.”
By Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr., Beth Kwiatek, and Ian Stern
“Pundits might need to educate the public about the issues, but it is old news to elected officials, public health experts, and urban planners. Yet, this knowledge was never translated into action, down on the ground, in Black communities to blunt the devastation.”
By Ibram X. Kendi
Read the full article from The Atlantic, here.
“There is nothing wrong with begging all Americans to take this vicious virus seriously. There is nothing wrong with begging one’s black grandfather or white daughter or Latina sister or Asian father or Native friend to social distance. There is everything wrong with lecturing a racial group to behave better as a solution to racial disparities, as U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams did on Friday during a White House press conference.”
By Rod Watson
Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.
“In fact, many of the same health disparities that disproportionately affect African Americans are the very same health conditions that make a person more susceptible to severe illness from Covid-19. Yet very few people are talking about that, or what we should be doing about it. And the ones who are talking aren’t being heard.”
By Beth Kwiatek
“What does it mean when a group of young Black faces walk into a suburban school and say, “We don’t belong here”? What does it mean when those same kids face judges who are all male and white? What does it mean when those Black kids see white kids build cities in The Congo, Morocco, and Zimbabwe?”
By Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr.
“According to The News, HouHou and his investors littered and left the city’s communities with boarded-up and vacant, deteriorating, demolished, burned-down and vandalized houses. First and foremost, these neighborhoods were blighted long before HouHou came to Buffalo. Blight does not happen overnight or even in a few years. Neighborhood decline takes decades.”