Here's my pop culture pick of the week...an interview by Amy Goodman (Democracy NOW) of Ryan Coogler about his film "Fruitvale"...I think I want to see this. Grant was murdered early New Year's Day in 2009...4 years ago this month.
Transcript was not up when I visited the interview page at Democracy NOW, but you can check back for it here.
Seems like the hidden history of slavery and white privilege in the United States is gradually coming into the light. Here's the latest flash of it from Douglas Blackmon at the Washington Monthly (via Alternet):
As dumbfounding as the story told by the Carrie Kinsey letter is, far more remarkable is what surrounds that letter at the National Archives. In the same box that holds her grief-stricken missive are at least half a dozen other pieces of correspondence recounting other stories of kidnapping, perversion of the courts, or human trafficking—as horrifying as, or worse than, Carrie Kinsey’s tale. It is the same in the next box on the shelf. And the one before. And the ones on either side of those. And the next and the next. And on and on. Thousands and thousands of plaintive letters and grimly bureaucratic responses—altogether at least 30,000 pages of original material—chronicle cases of forced labor and involuntary servitude in the South decades after the end of the Civil War.
The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.
Also check out this commentary on what we need to do today on Martin Luther King's birthday by Russell Simmons at Huffington Post. I found it touching and inspiring:
Great article from Imara Jones at Colorlines today for those of us trying to raise up impacts of our colonial ancestry:
Much hullabaloo has been made recently about slavery as entertainment in movies like “Django Unchained.” But lost in the discussion is slavery as history, and the simple fact that it was an economic system which seized the economic know-how of Africans in order to construct unimaginable wealth in North America, Europe and throughout the Western Hemisphere. Wealth from the slave trade took Western Europe from being one of the world’s poorest regions to its wealthiest and most powerful in under a century.
Though sadistic and macabre, the plain truth is that slavery was an unprecedented economic juggernaut whose impact is still lived by each of us daily. Consequently, here’s my top-10 list of things everyone should know about the economic roots of slavery.
I might also point out that the Idle No More movement is helping descendants of European colonials in Canada to discover untold, untaught history about oppression of First Nations citizens. I could really identify with some of the comments in this excellent OpEd by Heather Mallick yesterday in the Toronto Star, in particular her discovery of how oppressed peoples become invisible in the eyes of the privileged groups:
Most of Canada’s native people live in a misery we don’t even see
because we’d rather not know. It’s one of the many drawbacks of living
on the reserve, far away from the southern cities that Canadians cling
to. There’s no one to hear you scream, as the Irish writer Edna O’Brien
once said about rural child abuse in her own country.
If you don’t like Indians getting uppity, try this. Look at the
gorgeous, hopeful faces of their children, who don’t yet know they’re
headed for a life of blank despair thanks to our idleness.
But we don’t look because we don’t have to. They don’t live where we
do. We don’t consider them until they block our passage on road and rail
and then we just spray them with the same idle anger we show to other
drivers, cyclists and people not inside our own little vehicle.
White supremacy is a low-level assumption about characteristics that white people allegedly have which transforms inequality between them and everyone else into something natural. It often masks itself as fairness and goes unquestioned as a result. Using this definition, our current tax code is a work of white supremacy.
The fact that we’ve arrived at this point on the watch of the country’s first black president is an irony too large to ignore. Mostly victim, partly complicit, Obama is not fully to blame. Yet, economically speaking, the stubborn fact remains that the country is at a moment of racial injustice not seen in more than a generation. In the last four years, that injustice has only expanded and calcified.
Just yesterday I posted a link relating to similar insensitive behavior by some students at Duke University...the Universe must want us all to take a hard look at this. The Colorlines article links to a great website that features a poster campaign meant to counter such demeaning actions as these two Minnesota students engaged in. Here's a sample:
See all the posters at S*T*A*R*S, Ohio University's Students Teaching About Racism in Society. We need more stuff like these students are doing. And we need to do a lot more talking -- as a national collective -- about race.
As I read this article I tried to place myself in history and did the math: my family moved from Chapel Hill, NC -- where my step-dad was working on his masters and PhD at UNC and Duke, respectively -- at about the same time that black students were finally being admitted to Duke. I was 15, just starting high school.
For those that do not know, I am a proud graduate of Duke University (Class of '93). As a black alumnus of one of the greatest universities in the world with a troublesome history with race and racism, I am often treated to the highs and lows of the Duke experience. Last week was no different as members of the Duke University Black Alumni Committee reached out to me to begin the process of organizing an event featuring myself, Grant Hill, Nia-Malika Henderson and others to commemorate the 50-year celebration of the presence of black students at Duke -- yes, it's only been 50 years. Duke beat Kentucky -- i.e. Duke men's basketball beat the University of Kentucky -- and this is always good. But in addition to these great moments -- moments that make me proud to be a Duke grad, we were once again treated to the insensitive (and now common) practice of white undergraduates who "dress up" as black characters and blacken up their faces in order to do so. Sigh.
In the full article Dr. Peterson includes a brief history of blackface minstrelsy as a demeaning and destructive practice in the United States. This was really interesting to me, but disconcerting as well as I recalled participation of family members in such activity back in the fifties...not to mention Little Rascals and all kinds of other Hollywood portrayals of black people that I grew up watching.
BTW, I'm about ready to launch a series of reflections on my experience of racism, white privilege and exploration of social healing practices in relation to racism in the US. Now that the pressure of the 2012 election is off, I'm feeling new energy around talking about this stuff.
Despite all the lies, hate speech and crazy talk flying around during this 2012 election cycle, I do occasionally hear a courageous soul telling it like it is. I was watching the Ed Show last night when Col. Lawrence Wilkerson commented on John Sununu's suggestion that Colin Powell endorsed President Obama because of his skin color:
“My party, unfortunately, is the bastion of those people, not all of
them, but most of them, who are still basing their decision on race,”
Wilkerson said. “Let me just be candid: My party is full of racists. And
the real reason a considerable portion of my party wants President
Obama out of the White House has nothing to do with the content of his
character, nothing to do with his competence as commander-in-chief and
president, and everything to do with the color of his skin. And that’s
despicable.”
This great article by Michelle Chen looks deeper into issues behind a pending Supreme Court case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin,
that challenges U.T. Austin's admissions policy to to bring in more
students of color by considering race among other factors. As part of her analysis, Chen reviews a new book that will be of interest to racial justice activists:
The backlash against affirmative action—and more broadly against institutional efforts to desegregate schools and workplaces—has been accompanied by straw-man accusations of “reverse racism,” heard in debates about everything from President Obama to high school textbooks. Meanwhile, affirmative action's detractors paper over the persistent inequities across our workplaces and classrooms.
A new book, Documenting Desegregation, sheds light on how racial inequity really works and why it's so pernicious. The book traces the evolution of equal opportunity policies under the Civil Rights Act since its implementation in the mid-1960s. The authors, sociologists Kevin Stainback and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, tell Working In These Times that effective enforcement of civil rights depends on both strong pro-integration policies and, more importantly, grassroots political movements that can hold institutions accountable.
