We support Black lives. Today, and every day. You are seen. You are heard. And we are with you.
— Hulu (@hulu) May 31, 2020
Sunday, May 31, 2020
HULU Supports Black Lives
Pushed to the Edge
An excerpt from the LA Times -
Op-Ed: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Don’t understand the protests? What you’re seeing is people pushed to the edge
By Kareem Abdul-Jabar
What was your first reaction when you saw the video of the white cop kneeling on George Floyd’s neck while Floyd croaked, “I can’t breathe”?
If you’re white, you probably muttered a horrified, “Oh, my God” while shaking your head at the cruel injustice. If you’re black, you probably leapt to your feet, cursed, maybe threw something (certainly wanted to throw something), while shouting, “Not @#$%! again!” Then you remember the two white vigilantes accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery as he jogged through their neighborhood in February, and how if it wasn’t for that video emerging a few weeks ago, they would have gotten away with it. And how those Minneapolis cops claimed Floyd was resisting arrest but a store’s video showed he wasn’t. And how the cop on Floyd’s neck wasn’t an enraged redneck stereotype, but a sworn officer who looked calm and entitled and devoid of pity: the banality of evil incarnate.
Maybe you also are thinking about the Karen in Central Park who called 911 claiming the black man who asked her to put a leash on her dog was threatening her. Or the black Yale University grad student napping in the common room of her dorm who was reported by a white student. Because you realize it’s not just a supposed “black criminal” who is targeted, it’s the whole spectrum of black faces from Yonkers to Yale.
You start to wonder if it should be all black people who wear body cams, not the cops.
What do you see when you see angry black protesters amassing outside police stations with raised fists? If you’re white, you may be thinking, “They certainly aren’t social distancing.” Then you notice the black faces looting Target and you think, “Well, that just hurts their cause.” Then you see the police station on fire and you wag a finger saying, “That’s putting the cause backward.”
You’re not wrong — but you’re not right, either. The black community is used to the institutional racism inherent in education, the justice system and jobs. And even though we do all the conventional things to raise public and political awareness — write articulate and insightful pieces in the Atlantic, explain the continued devastation on CNN, support candidates who promise change — the needle hardly budges.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-05-30/dont-understand-the-protests-what-youre-seeing-is-people-pushed-to-the-edge
Saturday, May 30, 2020
We Keep Reliving the Same Nightmare
I've included a snippet, but this article is too good to cherry-pick. I hope you'll have the time to read it in its entirety.
A lynching without a rope — and in America, that’s nothing new
It used to be racist mobs. Now it’s racist cops. Watch Donald Trump pivot from 100,000 dead to "law and order"
By LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV
Today, in 2020, it's George Floyd in Minneapolis, killed by a police officer kneeling on his throat during an arrest for the alleged offense of "forgery." Cell phone cameras captured the whole thing. Images of a handcuffed black man lying face-down on the street, under the knee of a white police officer, quickly flew around the world. Rioting broke out on Wednesday and Thursday nights. Stores were looted. Buildings burned. Early on Friday morning, fires burned at the Third Police Precinct in Minneapolis, where the four officers present at the death of George Floyd were assigned.
But long before there were cell phone cameras, there were black men and black boys, and there were cops who beat them or killed them, and there were riots in the streets of cities where the killings took place. What followed was as predictable as it was pathetic. Governors issued lamentations and called for "understanding" and "unity." Stores and buildings destroyed during the rioting were rebuilt. Occasionally, official "commissions" were empaneled to "study" the cause of the violence, and lame pledges were made that we've got to do better.
https://www.salon.com/2020/05/30/a-lynching-without-a-rope--and-in-america-thats-nothing-new/
How Much Time Do You Want?
How much time do you want, for your progress pic.twitter.com/zq7edBylnc
— Qasim Rashid for Congress (@QasimRashid) May 29, 2020
She Did It!
An excerpt from People -
Yale Student Who Grew Up Homeless Reveals How She Achieved Goals: 'Keep Your Eyes on the Prize'
Chelesa Fearce's mother experienced a health battle that led to a series of financial difficulties
By Susan Young
It’s a big leap from homeless teen to Yale medical school student, but perseverance paid off Chelesa Fearce of Clayton County, Georgia.
“Just keep your eyes on the prize,” Fearce, now 24, tells PEOPLE. “You can’t get stuck in the moment and worry about the right now."
"You always have to think about your future and what inspires you," she adds. "That’s helped me get through.”
Fearce was a fourth grader when her mom, early childhood education teacher Reenita Shephard, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. That began a financial spiral for the mother of four.
“People don’t realize it can happen to anybody,” Fearce says.
She and her family moved in and out of shelters, hotels and even the family car.
https://people.com/human-interest/yale-student-who-grew-up-homeless-reveals-how-she-achieved-goals/
Radio Silence From College Football Coaches
An excerpt from USA Today -
Opinion: College football coaches scared to speak, stand with players in conversations on racism, police brutality
By Dan Wolken
The profession that sells leadership and toughness as if it were a TED Talk was largely silent on Friday.
The profession that relies on the talent of young African-American men to keep millions of dollars flowing to lavish athletics budgets and bloated salaries took a pass on the national conversation around racism, police brutality and unequal treatment before the law.
The profession that drones on and on about becoming a man and doing the hard things decided to sit this one out.
On a day where athletes across many sports were speaking out, just a few prominent college football coaches tackled this painful moment.
The murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests that have brought us — again — to this miserable place as a country is apparently too hot for most coaches to handle. The pressure to take a public stand about how we need to change as a society, as a culture, was left to the young people, many of whom are grieving and scared. The guys making millions of dollars? They were mostly sending tweets about recruiting, as if the entire concept of George Floyd wasn’t something that was hitting home at that very moment with every black player they recruited and promised to fight for.
Where’s their fight now? Where’s the truth? It certainly wasn’t on social media, where hardly any head coaches even acknowledged that something was desperately wrong in America.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/columnist/dan-wolken/2020/05/29/college-football-coaches-silent-george-floyd-and-police-brutality/5287206002/
Cure for Racism?
An excerpt from the NY Times -
Remember, No One Is Coming to Save Us
Eventually, doctors will find a coronavirus vaccine, but black people will continue to wait for a cure for racism.
By Roxane Gay
Eventually, doctors will find a coronavirus vaccine, but black people will continue to wait, despite the futility of hope, for a cure for racism. We will live with the knowledge that a hashtag is not a vaccine for white supremacy. We live with the knowledge that, still, no one is coming to save us. The rest of the world yearns to get back to normal. For black people, normal is the very thing from which we yearn to be free.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/opinion/sunday/trump-george-floyd-coronavirus.html?referringSource=articleShare
Why He Took a Knee
An excerpt from the Washington Post -
This is why Colin Kaepernick took a knee
By Sally Jenkins
Two knees. One protesting in the grass, one pressing on the back of a man’s neck. Choose. You have to choose which knee you will defend. There are no half choices; there is no room for indifference. There is only the knee of protest or the knee on the neck.
NFL owners chose the knee on the neck. They did. They may rationalize it as controversy avoidance or respect for the flag or audience mollification or economic strategy or business exigency. But when they collectively ostracized Colin Kaepernick for his protests against police brutality on unarmed black citizens, they chose the wrong knee. They chose the knee on the neck, the knee that pressures, stifles, gags, chokes and silences.
Kaepernick is still so present in the American consciousness that he might as well be playing in the league. Oh, the owners thought they made him disappear with a settlement. But the image of the kneeling, bow-headed Kaepernick becomes newly indicting each time someone is pinned down by a brute in a blue uniform and dies pleading in a street. The owners misidentified the problem, you see. The problem they can’t get rid of isn’t Kaepernick or his knee. It’s themselves. Their own denial, that’s what dogs them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/05/30/this-is-why-colin-kaepernick-took-knee/
Thursday, May 28, 2020
What a Difference a Color Makes
An excerpt from Salon -
I can't get past the differences between the Minneapolis BLM protest and anti-lockdown protests
In Minneapolis, police tear-gas unarmed protesters opposing racist violence — but armed Trumpers get the red carpet
By AMANDA MARCOTTE
On Memorial Day, four Minneapolis police officers killed a black man named George Floyd. In a video taken by a bystander, one can hear Floyd, who is on the ground and not resisting as an officer named Derek Chauvin kneels on his neck, pleading for his life, saying, "I can't breathe" and moaning in pain. (Chauvin was involved in at least two previous police shootings of civilians.) Onlookers can also be heard begging the police not to kill Floyd, while another cop named Tou Thao just glares at them, indifferent to the gathered crowd's increasing panic. As the cops take Floyd's unconscious body away, one man can be heard yelling, "You just really killed that man, bro."
The video is incredibly disturbing, so it's no surprise that thousands of people hit the streets in protest on Tuesday, breaking lockdown in a city with a rising rate of coronavirus infection to register their outrage.
The vast majority of protesters weren't violent and none were armed. But Minneapolis police showed up ready to rumble. News photos show the cops pouring out of vehicles fully clad in riot gear and as soon as a handful of protesters committed minor acts of property damage and threw some water bottles (the Star Tribune reports that peaceful protesters pleaded with others to stop the vandalism), cops used that as a pretext to shoot tear-gas canisters into the crowd.
Those images are much like the ones we've grown accustomed to in the era of Black Lives Matter protests (though this time with the addition of face masks): Cops in riot gear striding like conquering soldiers through clouds of tear gas, unarmed protesters running in terror and weeping, surreal images of people's faces covered in milk as they try to wash the tear gas from their eyes.
But what I can't get past — and judging from the reactions on social media, I'm not alone — is how wildly different that scene played out compared to the astroturf anti-lockdown protests staged in various state capitals across the country over the past month or so.
https://www.salon.com/2020/05/27/i-cant-get-past-the-differences-between-the-minneapolis-blm-protest-and-anti-lockdown-protests/
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Oh God! It Happened Again.
If you’re unbothered or mildly bothered by the 1st knee, but outraged by the 2nd, then, in my father’s words, you’re “more devoted to order than to justice.” And more passionate about an anthem that supposedly symbolizes freedom than you are about a Black man’s freedom to live. pic.twitter.com/kxpVOEeTNR
— Be A King (@BerniceKing) May 26, 2020
Sunday, May 24, 2020
Black History is American History - Memorial Day
An excerpt from Time -
The Overlooked Black History of Memorial Day
BY OLIVIA B. WAXMAN
The Overlooked Black History of Memorial Day
BY OLIVIA B. WAXMAN
Nowadays, Memorial Day honors veterans of all wars, but its roots are in America’s deadliest conflict, the Civil War. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died, about two-thirds from disease.
The work of honoring the dead began right away all over the country, and several American towns claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day. Researchers have traced the earliest annual commemoration to women who laid flowers on soldiers’ graves in the Civil War hospital town of Columbus, Miss., in April 1866. But historians like the Pulitzer Prize winner David Blight have tried to raise awareness of freed slaves who decorated soldiers’ graves a year earlier, to make sure their story gets told too.
According to Blight’s 2001 book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, a commemoration organized by freed slaves and some white missionaries took place on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, S.C., at a former planters’ racetrack where Confederates held captured Union soldiers during the last year of the war. At least 257 prisoners died, many of disease, and were buried in unmarked graves, so black residents of Charleston decided to give them a proper burial.
In the approximately 10 days leading up to the event, roughly two dozen African American Charlestonians reorganized the graves into rows and built a 10-foot-tall white fence around them. An archway overhead spelled out “Martyrs of the Race Course” in black letters.
About 10,000 people, mostly black residents, participated in the May 1 tribute, according to coverage back then in the Charleston Daily Courier and the New York Tribune. Starting at 9 a.m., about 3,000 black schoolchildren paraded around the race track holding roses and singing the Union song “John Brown’s Body,” and were followed by adults representing aid societies for freed black men and women. Black pastors delivered sermons and led attendees in prayer and in the singing of spirituals, and there were picnics. James Redpath, the white director of freedman’s education in the region, organized about 30 speeches by Union officers, missionaries and black ministers. Participants sang patriotic songs like “America” and “We’ll Rally around the Flag” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In the afternoon, three white and black Union regiments marched around the graves and staged a drill.
The New York Tribune described the tribute as “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.” The gravesites looked like a “one mass of flowers” and “the breeze wafted the sweet perfumes from them” and “tears of joy” were shed.
https://time.com/5836444/black-memorial-day/
HBCU Love
An excerpt from The Undefeated -
My family is rooted in black colleges and now I am, too
I found my passion as a journalist at Hampton University
BY RANDALL C. WILLIAMS
My entire family is rooted in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
When my family could attend college, my grandparents flocked to North Carolina Central University, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and Fayetteville State University. My parents followed suit, attending Hampton University and N.C. A&T. That left the HBCU legacy up to me. And after attending predominantly white schools for all of K-12, I decided it was time for a breath of fresh air.
I followed my father’s footsteps to Hampton, and four years later, I can finally say that I understand the HBCU experience. It means connecting with young black folks from all around the world, blossoming, creating memories that will last a lifetime and building foundational steps for their desired profession.
https://theundefeated.com/features/my-family-is-rooted-in-black-colleges-and-now-i-am-too/
My family is rooted in black colleges and now I am, too
I found my passion as a journalist at Hampton University
BY RANDALL C. WILLIAMS
My entire family is rooted in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
When my family could attend college, my grandparents flocked to North Carolina Central University, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and Fayetteville State University. My parents followed suit, attending Hampton University and N.C. A&T. That left the HBCU legacy up to me. And after attending predominantly white schools for all of K-12, I decided it was time for a breath of fresh air.
I followed my father’s footsteps to Hampton, and four years later, I can finally say that I understand the HBCU experience. It means connecting with young black folks from all around the world, blossoming, creating memories that will last a lifetime and building foundational steps for their desired profession.
https://theundefeated.com/features/my-family-is-rooted-in-black-colleges-and-now-i-am-too/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)