Tagged: racial equity and social justice

Selected Media

How I Became a Police Abolitionist

By Derecka Purnell

Read the full article from The Atlantic, here.

“The first shooting I witnessed was by a cop. I was 12. He was angry that his cousin skipped a sign-in sheet at my neighborhood recreation center. I was teaching my sister how to shoot free throws when the officer stormed in alongside the court, drew his weapon, and shot the boy in the arm. My sister and I hid in the locker room for hours afterward. The officer was back at work the following week.”

Selected Media

You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument

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.”

Selected Media

Forget snow. Treatment of fired cop now shapes national image

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.”

Selected Media

Whose Streets? Black Streets

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.”

Selected Media

The End of Black Politics

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.”

Selected Media

THEY KNEW AND DID NOTHING

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.”

Selected Media

Stop Blaming Black People for Dying of the Coronavirus

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.”

Selected Media

Yes, this virus discriminates, because we still do

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.”

Selected Media

Future City

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?”

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