Monthly Archives: July 2019

White supremacy is where my PTSD and intrusive thoughts intersect – The Black Youth Project

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“The trending topics on Twitter over the last year are evidence enough that I’m not going to be able to manage this by poking holes in my own stream of consciousness. I can’t use mind games to reprogram myself when there’s a plethora of trauma porn in my Facebook feed for my brain to soak in and terrorize me with.The only thing that’s changed since last year when I first started to write about my PTSD is that I’ve realized that the problem isn’t how I engage whiteness in my capacity as an organizer or as an intentionally visible Black person. It’s whiteness period. The head-on collision between my PTSD and these intrusive thoughts is consistently triggered by white supremacy.How do you take a break from racialization?How do you divest from the imperial core that you’re living in?How do you put the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade on the back burner? You don’t.”

Source: White supremacy is where my PTSD and intrusive thoughts intersect – The Black Youth Project

White People Need to Understand That Helping Is Not the Same as Controlling

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He told me that White people need the humility to understand that helping is not the same as controlling. Not only should we not assume the lead, we must also possess and exercise the humility to be told what to do, what is best, what is right—and what is wrong.We need to help support communities gain the power to control their own destiny, not “help” them by assuming that control for ourselves.And we need to be honest.

IF WHO WE TRULY ARE DOES NOT ALLOW US TO TEACH, SUPPORT, CARE, LOVE AND FIGHT FOR BLACK AND BROWN KIDS, THEN WE NEED TO GO DO SOMETHING ELSE.

If who we truly are does not allow us to teach, support, care, love and fight for Black and Brown kids, then we need to go do something else.These were not easy things for me to hear. I was triggered, defensive and unsure. Which was precisely the reaction that demonstrated how comfortable I had been telling others what to do and how to be, but how little experience I, as a White man, had being on the opposite side of the conversation.

Source: White People Need to Understand That Helping Is Not the Same as Controlling

 Atlanta Black Star 10 outrageous reasons Black people were lynched in America.

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Atlanta Black Star is a digital magazine that publishes narratives intentionally and specifically to change our world.

Source: Atlanta Black Star on Twitter

Atlanta Black Star on the Web

How Racism Takes 7 Different Forms

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Members of the Arkansas based white pride organization ‘White Revolution’ meet with locals to protest illegal immigration on May 21, 2005 in Danville, Arkansas. avid S. Holloway/Getty Images

“Racism exists when ideas and assumptions about racial categories are used to justify and reproduce a racial hierarchy and racially structured society that unjustly limits access to resources, rights, and privileges on the basis of race.

Racism also occurs when this kind of unjust social structure is produced by the failure to account for race and its historical and contemporary roles in society.Contrary to a dictionary definition, racism, as defined based on social science research and theory, is about much more than race-based prejudice—it exists when an imbalance in power and social status is generated by how we understand and act upon race.”

Source: How Racism Takes 7 Different Forms

Inside Liberty University’s ‘culture of fear’: How Jerry Falwell Jr. silences students and professors who reject his pro-Trump politics. – The Washington Post

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“Falwell, 57, possesses a certain Orwellian gift for painting Liberty as a bastion of tolerance where alternate viewpoints are not just permitted but encouraged. In March, he attended the signing of Trump’s executive order on college free speech and later claimed on “PBS NewsHour” that Liberty was inclusive of all ideas because it had invited Jimmy Carter to deliver its 2018 commencement address and Bernie Sanders to speak in 2015 at the assembly that students are required to attend twice a week. After Falwell learned last month that I was writing this essay, he posted a column on Liberty’s site disputing “sensational stories . . . that we do not allow opposing views.” He wrote, “If there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that there will be a strong and critical response to this article by a few former students and a handful of national media determined to paint Liberty in a completely different light on these issues.”His Twitter account is a much better reflection of his approach to dissent. Falwell’s profile announces that “Haters will be blocked,” and several students who have disagreed or argued with him on Twitter have met this fate. Falwell outright lied on the platform to Sojourners Web editor Sandi Villarreal — who is now my colleague — when he said he’d removed a Champion op-ed criticizing Trump’s “locker room talk” defense because there was simply not enough room on the page. (The piece was already laid out on the page when he pulled it.) In fact, much of Falwell’s message control has to do with safeguarding Trump.”

Source: Inside Liberty University’s ‘culture of fear’: How Jerry Falwell Jr. silences students and professors who reject his pro-Trump politics. – The Washington Post

Embracing the Courageous Four:Radically Reconceiving and Reconstructing America

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“Trump’s attacks on these four courageous, committed, knowledgeable and defiant congresswomen of color, not only reflect his commitment to views, policies and practices that are racist, anti-people of color; xenophobic, anti-immigrant and those different; sexist, anti-women; and opportunistic, ever self-promoting and peacocking.

These attacks also reflect his reactionary politics and conception of America. It is a politics of White supremacy; predatory capitalism at home and abroad; warmongering; privatization of public wealth and space; and peddling a personalized patriotism based on his astonishing ignorance, multiple insecurities and vulgar interests.We must constantly expose, criticize and condemn the monster side of America we call Trump and his supporters and enablers, but we must not over focus on him and under focus on the rising movement to actively resist him in Congress, as represented by the initiatives of the courageous four and also in our various communities across the country. To make this mistake would be like over focusing on a devast[at]ing fire and the havoc it is wreaking and under focusing on the response and responders needed to control and extinguish it.

Audacious and defiant, these four progressive congresswomen resist and reject Trump’s attempt to impose his deformed and dishonest reactionary conception of patriotism and politics. Indeed, they cannot morally and will not politically accept Trump’s packaged and constantly peddled racist patriotic politics of vicious and varied forms of oppression: apartheid walls here and abroad; corruption and coercion; the savaging of immigrants and the abuse and separation of children from their families; anti-labor and anti-union policies; preference for the rich at the expense and injury of the poor; racial and religious restrictions and preferences; denial of climate change; and his obsessive and infantile attempt to rival and erase everything considered an Obama achievement.

Source: Embracing the Courageous Four:Radically Reconceiving and Reconstructing America

Existing While Black | HuffPost

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What does it feel like when every move you make is policed?

“HuffPost asked black readers to share their stories of being subjected to racial profiling and discrimination. They described moments when someone called the police on them for no apparent reason aside from their race. They recalled scenarios of cops stopping and searching them because their skin color made them look “suspicious.” They also said how maddening it is to live with the constant anxiety of possibly having their presence — and innocence — questioned.”

Source: Existing While Black | HuffPost

Seeing Red: A professor coexists with ‘MAGA’ in the classroom

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“Thus, in that moment, I was unsure whether the student was directing a hateful message toward me or if he merely lacked decorum and was oblivious to how his hat might be interpreted by his black law professor. I presumed it was the former. As the student sat there directly in front of me, his shiny red MAGA hat was like a siren spewing derogatory racial obscenities at me for the duration of the one hour and fifteen-minute class.Being a law professor, I understand the complexities of academic freedom and free speech. I respect students’ rights to freely express their political beliefs and values within the framework of the law. Yet, at the same time, law schools are inherently institutions of professional training. Just as faculty and staff are required to maintain professional formalities to aid the training and matriculation of their students, it seems only logical that students, too, should maintain similar businesslike etiquette.But when students fail to live up to such professional expectations, what are the professors’ options? Although my position is at a private university, I understood that my lack of tenure, precarious status as a VAP and the hue of my skin meant that I would be fighting an uphill battle should I have asked the student to remove his distracting red hat during class. Surely, there must be protocol when African-American professors—whose presence is scarce in most law schools—find their authority defiantly undermined by an insensitive student.As my blood boiled inwardly, outwardly I remained calm. In an effort to assuage the perceived tension, I jokingly told the student, “I like your hat,” when he raised his hand to participate in class discussion. Without missing a beat, the student mockingly grinned from ear to ear and said, “Thank you.”

Source: Seeing Red: A professor coexists with ‘MAGA’ in the classroom 

#TrustYourStruggle   #BlackTalkMatters

I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked. – The New York Times

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“I finally got up my nerve to ask a stranger directly about white privilege as I was sitting next to him at the gate. He had initiated our conversation, because he was frustrated about yet another delay. We shared that frustration together. Eventually he asked what I did, and I told him that I write and teach. “Where do you teach?” he asked. “Yale,” I answered. He told me his son wanted to go there but hadn’t been accepted during the early-application process. “It’s tough when you can’t play the diversity card,” he added.Was he thinking out loud? Were the words just slipping out before he could catch them? Was this the innocence of white privilege? Was he yanking my chain? Was he snapping the white-privilege flag in my face? Should I have asked him why he had the expectation that his son should be admitted early, without delay, without pause, without waiting? Should I have asked how he knew a person of color “took” his son’s seat and not another white son of one of these many white men sitting around us?I was perhaps holding my breath. I decided to just breathe.”

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Trump’s Racism: An Oral History – The Atlantic

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His racism and intolerance have always been in evidence; only slowly did he begin to understand how to use them to his advantage.

DAVID A. GRAHAM, ADRIENNE GREEN, CULLEN MURPHY, AND PARKER RICHARDS

“The first quotation from Donald Trump ever to appear in The New York Times came on October 16, 1973. Trump was responding to charges filed by the Justice Department alleging racial bias at his family’s real-estate company. “They are absolutely ridiculous,” Trump said of the charges. “We have never discriminated, and we never would.”To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.In the years since then, Trump has assembled a long record of comment on issues involving African Americans as well as Mexicans, Hispanics more broadly, Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, women, and people with disabilities.

His statements have been reflected in his behavior—from public acts (placing ads calling for the execution of five young black and Latino men accused of rape, who were later shown to be innocent) to private preferences (“When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” a former employee of Trump’s Castle, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, told a writer for The New Yorker). Trump emerged as a political force owing to his full-throated embrace of “birtherism,” the false charge that the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, was not born in the United States. His presidential campaign was fueled by nativist sentiment directed at nonwhite immigrants, and he proposed barring Muslims from entering the country.

In 2016, Trump described himself to The Washington Post as “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.”Instances of bigotry involving Donald Trump span more than four decades. The Atlantic interviewed a range of people with knowledge of several of those episodes. Their recollections have been edited for concision and clarity.”

Source: Trump’s Racism: An Oral History – The Atlantic