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Storming The U.S. Capitol Was About Maintaining White Power In America

538 JAN. 8, 2021 Hakeem Jefferson

"It is not by chance that most of the individuals who descended on the nation’s capital were white, nor is it an accident that they align with the Republican Party and this president. Moreover, it is not a coincidence that symbols of white racism, including the Confederate flag, were present and prominently displayed. Rather, years of research make clear that what we witnessed in Washington, D.C., is the violent outgrowth of a belief system that argues that white Americans and leaders who assuage whiteness should have an unlimited hold on the levers of power in this country. And this, unfortunately, is what we should expect from those whose white identity is threatened by an increasingly diverse citizenry."

Analysis: How the media created a 'superpredator' myth that harmed a generation of Black youth

Analysis: How the media created a 'superpredator' myth that harmed a generation of Black youth NBC NEWS Nov. 20, 2020, 3:00 AM PST By Carroll Bogert, The Marshall Project and LynNell Hancock, Columbia Journalism School

But who was doing the dehumanizing? Just a few years before, the news media had introduced the terms “wilding” and “wolf pack” to the national vocabulary, to describe five teenagers — four Black and one Hispanic — who were convicted and later exonerated of the rape of a woman in New York’s Central Park.

“This kind of animal imagery was already in the conversation,” said Kim Taylor-Thompson, a law professor at New York University. “The superpredator language began a process of allowing us to suspend our feelings of empathy towards young people of color.”

The “superpredator” theory, besides being a racist trope, was not borne out in crime statistics. Juvenile arrests for murder — and juvenile crime generally — had already started falling when DiIulio’s article was published. By 2000, when tens of thousands more children were supposed to be out there mugging and killing, juvenile murder arrests had fallen by two-thirds.

What the Nazis Learned from Jim Crow: Author Isabel Wilkerson on the U.S. Racial Caste System

<embed> https://www.democracynow.org/2020/8/12/caste_isabel_wilkerson </embed> Democracy Now AUGUST 12, 2020

In her extensively researched new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson argues the United States’ racial hierarchy should be thought of as a caste system, similar to that in India. In a wide-ranging interview, she describes how she also looks at the ways Nazi Germany borrowed from U.S. Jim Crow laws. “The Nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate,” Wilkerson says. “But what they did was they sent researchers to the United States to study Jim Crow laws here in the United States, to study and to research how the United States had managed to subordinate and subjugate its African American population.”

In Oklahoma tribal decision, ‘rule of the strong’ falls to rule of law

<embed> https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2020/0716/In-Oklahoma-tribal-decision-rule-of-the-strong-falls-to-rule-of-law </embed> The CSM 7/16/2020 By Henry Gass

“On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise,” opened Justice Neil Gorsuch for the majority opinion in McGirt v. Oklahoma, referencing the forced removal, beginning in the 1830s, of Native American tribes from their historical lands in today’s U.S. Southeast to west of the Mississippi River. Estimates vary, but thousands are believed to have died on the roughly 5,000-mile journey, including as many as one-fourth of the Cherokee Nation.

Mr. Williams, a senior staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), is a member of the Cherokee Nation and a descendant of the Cherokees who negotiated treaties with the federal government. Seeing those treaties, promising them a “permanent home” in the West, referenced throughout the opinion was “quite striking.”

For Some Black Americans, Love Of Country Means Holding It Accountable

<embed> https://www.npr.org/2020/07/03/886535795/for-some-black-americans-love-of-country-means-holding-it-accountable </embed>

"I think that if anywhere you find just how heterogeneous Black Americans are, it's around this question of patriotism," said Farah Jasmine Griffin, the chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University. "You have African Americans who are definitely patriotic, but not uncritically so, not naively so. And then you have others who find a problem with the very notion of patriotism, and I think that's always been an ongoing and consistent tension."

The Georgia town that was home to Ahmaud Arbery has an environmental racism problem

<embed> https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/7/3/1957278/-The-Georgia-town-that-was-home-to-Ahmaud-Arbery-has-an-environmental-racism-problem?utm_campaign=recent </embed>

Brunswick is one of many majority-Black communities in the U.S. dealing with environmental racism, which Dr. Robert Bullard, the “father of environmental justice,” defines as “any policy, practice, or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups, or communities based on race or color.” 

The Supreme Court Still Refuses to Acknowledge Systemic Racism

<embed> https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/washington-v-davis-supreme-court-systemic-racism.html </embed>

Ending qualified immunity is important, but a much more obscure yet monumental Supreme Court decision needs to be overturned.
In Washington v. Davis, decided in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws or government policies that disproportionately harm Black people do not violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The case was brought by aspiring Black police officers challenging the statistical disparity in test scores between Black and white test takers as a reflection that the D.C. police department’s hiring policy was unconstitutional. The test, known as Test 21, was chock full of white cultural and idiomatic references that may well have contributed to the fact that from 1968 to 1971, 57 percent of Black applicants failed the test as compared with 13 percent of whites.

US voter suppression: why this Texas woman is facing five years' prison

<embed> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/27/crime-of-voting-texas-woman-crystal-mason-five-years-prison </embed>

Fort Worth is suffering a crisis of democracy – just 6% of electors voted in the last midterms – so why is it aggressively pursuing those who mistakenly cast ballots?

In 'Cancer Alley,' a renewed focus on systemic racism is too late Black Americans are dying from COVID-19 at more than double the rate of other groups, which experts say is due in part to pollution in Black communities

<embed> https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/cancer-alley-renewed-focus-systemic-racism-too-late-n1231602 </embed>

On Twitter, indigenous Guatemalans share experiences of everyday racism

Sparked by the murder of healer Domingo Choc, the #GuateRacista movement is an attempt to bring discussions of race and identity into the open <embed> https://news.trust.org/item/20200617150435-yknu8 </embed>

The National Museum of the American Indian

Native American Net Roots 9/22/2010

The essay below was written by Carter Camp aka cacamp. In 1973, Carter was one of the original organizers of AIM, he was in charge of Military Operations in the take over of Wounded Knee. They held Wounded Knee for more than 70 days and brought important national and international media attention to the current American Indian issues. (An aside; Meteor Blades was at the take over for 51 days.)

HIDING GENOCIDE: The National Museum of the American Indian

By Carter Camp

There is an enormous cultural rip-off being foisted upon our Nations by Washington D.C. I’ve warned of it before, but a small voice is easily drowned out when millions of dollars are being spent and the voice of the Great White Father anoints Indian leaders.

For a decade or more the Smithsonian fundraising machine has gone merrily along, draining much needed funds away from the Indian community and diverting America’s attention away from the economic, cultural and legal devastation going on across our homelands. Many interest groups coveted the final two vacant spaces on the National Mall. Congress in its wisdom awarded one site to a very politically powerful (and deserving) Jewish applicant and another to the very politically powerful Smithsonian Institution, their ‘keeper of the loot’.

Caribbean excavation offers intimate look at the lives of enslaved Africans

<embed> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/caribbean-excavation-offers-intimate-look-lives-enslaved-africans AAAS Science 11/08/2019 </embed>

To glimpse those lives, archaeology is required. "One of the very few ways to get at the experiences of enslaved Africans is to look at [what] they left behind," Dunnavant says. That's why he and archaeologist Ayana Omilade Flewellen of the University of California (UC), Berkeley, spent 4 weeks directing excavations here this summer, the third of five planned dig seasons. The team is part of a wave of archaeologists around the Caribbean focused on studying not only the institution of slavery, but also the daily lives of enslaved Africans in all the intimacy and texture left out of history. Seen through Dunnavant's and Flewellen's eyes, the lost buttons, cooked bones, and shards of pots and porcelain are vital clues to how enslaved Africans maintained their individuality and humanity within a system designed to strip them of both. And by studying the vegetation, water systems, and other environmental features of plantations, these archaeologists are also documenting how slavery literally reshaped the islands—and the world.

Calls grow for Scotland to reckon with its slave-owning past

<embed> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/calls-grow-scotland-reckon-its-slave-owning-past-n1230406 </embed>