By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Read the full article from Boston Review, here.
“The point is not to impose onto or require a more radical viewpoint from Obama when she does not have one, but rather to expose her ultimately conservative message. Obama served as an inspiring role model—her personal story is extraordinary by any measure. But it is crucial for both her and us to acknowledge that it was made possible by the confluence of institutional changes and her own talents.”
Remarks by Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr.
“I am an activist turned scholar, not a scholar turned activist. I started my professional career as a clinical audiologist. My father, who received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1954, always challenged me to use my skills and talents in service of black people and to help build a better, more just and humane world. So, I obtained a Master’s Degree in clinical audiology, and became director of audiology at a small Speech and Hearing Clinic in Newport News, Virginia. In the late 60s, like many of my peers, I was radicalized, moved my clinical operations to near-by Hampton Institute, a historically black college, and joined a militant organization modeled after the Black Panther Party.”
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 Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr.
“King argued that Selma and the Voting Rights Act were nothing more than Phase One in the larger Black Liberation Movement. The Civil Rights Movement was about the struggle to remove the legal obstacles that constrained, circumscribed and limited the struggle for the larger freedoms. The Second Phase of the Black Liberation Movement would be about the fight to realize in practice these ‘larger freedoms.'”
By Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr.
“In the United States, we are conditioned to view racism through individual dispositions, situational frameworks and/or the practices of specific institutions. Rarely, if ever, do we see the association between the day-to-day struggles of working class blacks and the larger structures of racism. This harsh, down-on-the-ground reality is hidden from view by the cultural blinders of individualism, personal responsibility, and socioeconomic mobility.”
By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Read the full article from The Guardian, here.
“The incongruent logic of deploring ‘systemic racism’ while championing the US as ‘the last, best hope of Earth’ lends itself to the constant questioning of Clinton’s sincerity. Perhaps she thinks that both can be true, but others might conclude that the candidate has either not truly grasped the depth or scale of the crises in black communities today, or that she will say anything to get votes.”
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.
“Today, 350 years after the first slaves landed in Jamestown; 150 years after the Civil War ended, 61 years after the Supreme Court outlawed segregation, 50 years after passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act, and 47 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., blacks are still receiving an inadequate education, face police violence, high levels of unemployment, low-incomes, poverty and die prematurely. They are still living in neighborhoods characterized by bad housing, blighted surroundings, food deserts, supportive service swamps, and crime.”