Police violence linked to segregated housing. By Charlene Crowell — The August 23 police shooting of an unarmed Black man in Kenosha, WI, triggered yet another round of community protests and national news coverage of a Black man. A series of multiple gunshots fired by a local police officer, were not fatal for 29-year old Jacob Blake; but may have permanently paralyzed him from the waist down. Days later on…
By Jesse Jackson — “The poor will always be with us,” say the cynics. No doubt, some will always be wealthier than others. We wouldn’t want to live in a society that forced all to be equal. But poverty isn’t inevitable. The 30 million people in America who lived in poverty even before the pandemic when unemployment was at record lows needn’t exist in that state. Too many myths and…
By Edwidge Danticat, NYREV — My neighbor died recently. I saw the ambulance arrive. The red and blue strobes bounced off every glass surface on both sides of our block. She was eighty years old, and ambulances had come for her before. There was that time she broke her arm in her backyard, and already accustomed to osteoporotic and arthritic pain, she treated herself until her movements led to other…
Dr. Maulana Karenga — Part 2. Now the interrelated moral imperative to be ourselves and to free ourselves is intimately related to our commitment as advocates of Us to the principle and practice of unbudging Blackness and the deep-rooted and irreversible embrace of Africa as our moral ideal. To talk of our Blackness, again, is to talk not simply of our color, i.e., our appearance and genetic makeup, but also…
By Robert Reich – Since the first colonizers arrived in the United States to this very moment, wealthy elites have used the tools of theft, exclusion, and exploitation to expand their wealth and power at the detriment of Black, Latinx, Indigenous people, and marginalized people of color. It all boils down to this simple truth: Racism is profitable. The profitability of racism sparks a vicious cycle called the Oppression Economy:…
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson — Robert Woodward certainly couldn’t have been shocked at Trump’s answer to his very loaded question. The question was whether he could understand any of the racial pain that African Americans feel. Trump stood the question on its head and accused Woodward of “drinking the Kool Aid.” Translated: Why should he or any other white guy like him feel any guilt, let alone empathy, at the…
Nearly all the improvement in the unemployment rate over the past few months has been for white workers. By Emily Peck, HuffPost — At first glance, the unemployment rate seems a lot less terrible than it did a few months ago. In April, at the start of the COVID-19 shutdown, the jobless rate was a record-high 14.7%. This month, the Labor Department announced that the unemployment rate had dropped to 8.4%. But…
Black diasporans discuss the ways the label can be overly broad—and leave out an important part of their identities. By Janel Martinez, Vice — For many Black people, their identification with Latinx identity is complicated—the term, meant to be all-inclusive, has the exact opposite effect. Though Black and Indigenous Latin Americans have contributed significantly to Latinx culture (think musical genres like rumba, tango, and reggaetón, to name a few, or the masterful creations…
The country needs truth-telling and acceptance of our moral, legal, political, and sociocultural responsibilities. By Joyce Hope Scott, BU Today — This is a transformative moment in history in the United States as well as in the rest of the world. Despite myths of a post-racial society as a result of many positive social transformations, we are today again forced to examine our inheritance of America’s great sin—slavery and its…
Barbados has announced its intention to remove the Queen as its head of state and become a republic by November 2021. A speech written by its prime minister, Mia Mottley, quoted a warning by the Caribbean island nation’s first premier, Errol Barrow, against “loitering on colonial premises”. Reading the speech, governor-general Dame Sandra Mason said: “The time has come to fully leave our colonial past behind. Barbadians want a Barbadian…
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