“Cultural appropriation occurs when a style leads to racist generalizations or racial stereotypes where it originated, but is deemed high fashion, cool, or funny when the privileged takes it for itself.”
-Amandla Stenberg, Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows: A Crash Course on Black Culture, 2015.
Source: America Loves Black Culture But Not Black People – The Black Detour
“Credit reports and scores directly impact Americans’ economic security and opportunity. Credit history can affect the way Americans are treated by lenders, landlords, utility companies, hospitals and employers. Having a poor credit history or a “thin file” with insufficient credit information to generate a credit score can mean a consumer will end up paying more for loans and insurance (or have trouble even getting them in the first place). Misuses of credit history are prevalent and harmful: Job seekers can be denied work based on their credit history, and the Trump administration has even proposed using credit history to determine whether immigrants should be eligible for permanent residency. Most harmfully, our credit system is built on—and continues to reinforce and expand—deep racial inequities. Generations of discrimination in employment, lending, education and housing have produced significant racial disparities in credit history. Past discrimination is baked into current determinations of creditworthiness: Credit scores and other lending algorithms disproportionately represent black and Latino loan applicants as “riskier” customers. As a result, decisions drawing on credit data reproduce and spread existing racial inequality, making it harder to achieve true economic equity.”
Source: Establish a Public Credit Registry | Demos
Residents of a South Carolina public housing complex are demanding answers after two of their neighbors died from the gas.
Source: Carbon monoxide is killing public housing residents, but HUD doesn’t require detectors
“. . . As Stevens pointed out, the reasoning that says that no states seceded because the Constitution won’t allow it would also say that no man can ever commit murder because the law forbids it. “Black Codes” were put in place in most Southern states that, through various means, some overt and some insidious (anti-vagrancy statutes were a particular favorite), limited the rights of blacks to work and to relocate. The legislative reconquest was backed by violence: the Ku Klux Klan, formed as a terrorist organization by ex-Confederate officers, began murdering and maiming assertive black citizens. In 1877, after a mere dozen years in which black suffrage and racial equality were at least grudgingly accepted national principles, the federal government pulled its last troops from the South and, in what could be called the Great Betrayal, an order of racial subjugation was restored. . .”
Source: How the South Won the Civil War | The New Yorker
“Gender, through the lens of white supremacy, prescribes how we should be, instead of accepting us how we are. It tells boys they’re not supposed to cry (or even feel emotion), and it tells girls they’re supposed to be good at cooking and play with Barbies. Those are small examples of a much larger issue, and these gendered lessons exist at every turn, are all-consuming and ripple across our lives.There are people in bodies deemed masculine who have been told they are a boy time and time again, even though that’s not how they feel inside. They are told their feelings are unnatural and irrelevant. Boys are told over and over again that they must follow certain rules, their lives must be a certain way, their dreams must be a certain thing.Gender also tells us that we are not whole and are only one part of a whole; the whole being a man and a woman. This is incredibly anti-queer and an unhealthy way to view yourself and a relationship.
Viewing yourself as less than a whole being who possesses the capacity to be masculine and feminine, and perform a variety of roles or possess skills that are deemed feminine, is illogical.It is terrifying to think that so many of us internalize these messages on a deep, subconscious level, a message that exposes men to constant emotional isolation and violence if they exist outside of these preset parameters. It is alarming that many men move through life seeing themselves as incomplete because they will never be with a woman or because they have yet to marry their “soulmate.” It’s alarming that people will not teach their boys how to cook, robbing them of that that necessary survival skill. It is alarming how many people feel uncomfortable seeing men cry.”
OCG 