65 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2024
    1. Saturday, May 11, 2024BICYCLE TOUR OF PASADENA AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY: THE 710 STUBJoin Allen Edson, President of the NAACP Pasadena branch, as he leads a bike tour highlighting the 210 freeway, the 710 stub, and the community displaced by the construction.

      The 710 freeway displaced a large number of people between 1965 and 1974 in West Pasadena.

  2. Jun 2022
    1. I’ve also learned, thanks to my doctoral training in sociology, that one must expand one’s personal problems into the structural, to recognize what’s rotten at the local level as an instantiation of the institutional. Our best public sociologists, like Tressie McMillan Cottom and Jess Calarco, do this exceptionally well.
    1. First, the majority population in eastern Virginia were enslaved blacks. Whites lived in constant fear of slave insurrection. Everyone knew about the 1739 slave rebellion in Stono, S.C., when blacks broke into a store, decapitated the shopkeepers, seized guns and powder, and marched with flying banners, beating drums and cries of “Liberty!” Up to 100 joined the rebellion before being engaged by a contingent of armed, mounted militiamen. Scores died in the ensuing battle.
    1. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/patrick-henry-virginia-ratifying-convention-va/

      While gerrymandering isn't brought up explicitly here, the underlying principles are railed against heavily.

      Some interesting things applicable to the rise of Donald J. Trump hiding in here.

      Interesting to read this in its historical context versus our present context. So much can be read into his words from our current context, while others can extract dramatically different views--particularly by Constitutional originalists.

    1. After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.
    2. More controversially, the laws restricted importation of “Saturday Night Specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. Because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”
    1. Governor Ronald Reagan, who was coincidentally present on the capitol lawn when the protesters arrived, later commented that he saw "no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons" and that guns were a "ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will." In a later press conference, Reagan added that the Mulford Act "would work no hardship on the honest citizen."
    2. The Mulford Act was a 1967 California bill that prohibited public carrying of loaded firearms without a permit.[2] Named after Republican assemblyman Don Mulford, and signed into law by governor of California Ronald Reagan, the bill was crafted with the goal of disarming members of the Black Panther Party who were conducting armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods, in what would later be termed copwatching.[3][4] They garnered national attention after Black Panthers members, bearing arms, marched upon the California State Capitol to protest the bill.

      WTF!

  3. May 2022
    1. Published criticisms of this excellent book bear the hallmarks of a style of racism that is extraordinarily difficult to counter, because so few people have the intellectual training to understand the difference between evidence-based accounts of Indigenous Australia and popular mythologies that misrepresent the facts. These criticisms are entirely unreasonable.

      This sounds a bit like Australian political culture is facing the same sort of issues that are being see in the United States with respect to ideas like critical race theory. Groups are protesting parts of history and culture that they don't understand instead spending some time learning about them.

    1. A spike in fears about new immigrants and newly emancipated black people reproducing at higher rates than the white population also prompted more opposition to legal abortion.

      Were fears about immigrants and Black people in the late 1800's milieu of evolutionary theory and beginning of eugenics thought influential in the growing debate about abortion?

  4. Feb 2022
    1. Several years would pass, and a new editor-in-chief would ascend, before the paper eliminated the automatic race tags, in 1961, under pressure from readers who were sick of them.
    2. At that time, The Sun was still choosing to identify Black people by race in its coverage — and only Black people — placing the tag “Negro” after individual names, even though many other newspapers had long since stopped similar practices. When a Westminster minister and seminary professor asked the paper to discard “this discriminatory practice” in 1955, according to an article in The Afro-American, the editor-in-chief flat out refused, self-righteously declaring that “the Sunpapers will not be a party to such suppression” of fact and that “the matter of what it is now fashionable to call ‘pigmentation’ is important from both the white and the Negro point of view.”
  5. Jan 2022
  6. Dec 2021
    1. The denial of native parental rights was finally legalized in 1891 and led to the mass forced removal of native children.[32] It wasn't until the 1976 Indian Child Welfare Act that the forceful removal of native children from their parents ended.
  7. Oct 2021
    1. The earliest legal restrictions on the nighttime activities and movements of African-Americans and other ethnic minorities date back to the colonial era. The general court and legislative assembly of New Hampshire passed "An Act To Prevent Disorders In The Night" in 1714:[6][7] .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}Whereas great disorders, insolencies and burglaries are oft times raised and committed in the night time by Native American, Negro, and Molatto Servants and Slaves to the Disquiet and hurt of her Majesty's subjects, No Indian, Negro, or Molatto is to be from Home after 9 o'clock. Notices emphasizing and re-affirming the curfew were published in The New Hampshire Gazette in 1764 and 1771.
    1. Moving forward, members of the council have advocated different ways for the city to help turn the page on that past. As Councilman Dan Brotman noted on Tuesday night, the council’s vote makes Glendale the third former sundown town in the nation to formally reject that part of its history — and the first in California.
  8. Sep 2021
    1. On one occasion, hearing a great noise from belowdecks where the blackswere chained together, the sailors opened the hatches and found the slaves indifferent stages of suffocation, many dead, some having killed others indesperate attempts to breathe. Slaves often jumped overboard to drown ratherthan continue their suffering. To one observer a slave-deck was “so coveredwith blood and mucus that it resembled a slaughter house.”

      Here I feel compelled to revisit an earlier quote:

      One slave trader, John Newton (who later became an antislavery leader), wrote about the people of what is now Sierra Leone:

      The state of slavery, among these wild barbarous people, as we esteem them, is much milder than in our colonies

      Which was really the more barbarous culture?

    1. ple". The Mexican mineworker had the custom of returning to his village for corn planting and harvest: His lack of initiative, inability to save, absences while celebrating too many holidays, willingness to work only three or four days a week if that paid for necessities, insatiable desire for alchohol - all were pointed out as proof of a natural inferiority. He

      In the next paragraphs, it turns out that there isn't laziness, but misaligned incentives. The lifeways of the people involved were not those of the writer who jumped to conclusions about the people who were different from him.

      In generalizations supported by another study of Mexican labour conditions, Wilbert Moore remarks: "Work is almost always task-orientated in non-industrial societies ... and ... it may be appropriate to tie wages to tasks and not directly to time in newly developing areas".

      When comparing and contrasting cultures, empathy for each and their particular incentives must be taken into account.

      This is particularly important as he's spent a dozen pages talking about how poorly the English dealt with industrialization over centuries themselves. How quickly we forget.

    2. ry. The debate provoked by the attempt to impose a tax on all clocks and watches in 1797-8 offers a little evidence. It was perhaps the most unpopular and it was certainly the most unsuccessful of all of Pitt's assessed taxes: I

      William Pitt (the younger) assessed a tax on clocks and watches from July 1797 to March 1798 and it didn't go well. One would suspect it was the case that those who purchased them were the richer upper-classes (as argued above in the piece) who had the power and wealth to vitiate against such taxation.

      Presumably if the masses were the target, the tax may have stayed.

      This sort of power seems to ensconce racist policies.

  9. Jul 2021
    1. In our case, a system intended to expand equality has become an enforcer of inequality. Americans are now meritocrats by birth. We know this, but because it violates our fundamental beliefs, we go to a lot of trouble not to know it.

      Class stratification helps to create not only racist policies but policies that enforce the economic stratification and prevent upward (or downward) mobility.

      I believe downward mobility is much simpler for Black Americans (find reference to OTM podcast about Obama to back this up).

      How can we create social valves (similar to those in the circulatory system of our legs) that help to push people up and maintain them at certain levels without disadvantaging those who are still at the bottom and who may neither want to move up nor have the ability?

  10. Jun 2021
  11. May 2021
  12. Apr 2021
    1. West Virginia’s non-Hispanic white population is 92 percent, much higher than the nation overall (60 percent). I’m not suggesting that Manchin doesn’t care about Black voting rights, but he doesn’t have a huge Black constituency pressing him on this issue, as only 4 percent of West Virginians are Black (compared with 13 percent in the nation overall). 

      This seems to be the biggest linchpin in the system propping Sen. Manchin up.

      It at least provides him cover for not helping to tip the scales toward equality for all Americans.

    1. “The whole point is that we want to take up space,” Ms. Obell said. “Take the time to say black, Latinx and Asian. Say our names. Take the time to learn. Show me that you know the difference.”

      It almost looks like BIPOC was invented to give all of these people space, but in making it an acronym, we've given them all the least amount of space possible.

      It's definitely worth considering something else.

    2. “It is lazy to lump us all together as if we all face the same problems,” said Sylvia Obell, a host of the Netflix podcast “Okay, Now Listen.” “When you blend us all together like this, it’s erasure. It allows people to get away with not knowing people of color and our separate set of issues that we all face. It allows people to play it safe and not leave anyone out, and it also allows you to not have to do the work.”
  13. Mar 2021
    1. An answer to Mr. Bendetsen's testimony came from Milton S. Eisenhower, former president of Johns Hopkins University, who in 1942 directed the Federal War Relocation Authority.In a written statement, Mr. Eisenhower, who was unable to attend because of illness, called the internment of Japanese-Americans ''an inhuman mistake.'' Moreover, he said, the threat of Japanese forces' invading the West Coast was ''extremely remote.''He said that the relocation furor could have been avoid, ''had not false and flaming statements been dinned into the people of the West Coast by irresponsible commentators and politicians.''
  14. Feb 2021
    1. Bad categories can also artificially exclude data. This frequently happens with crime statistics. The FBI has defined the crime of “rape” in a variety of different ways over time. In fact, they’ve done such a poor job of figuring out what rape is that many criminologists argue their statistics should not be used at all. A bad definition might mean a crime is counted in a different category than you expect or that it wasn’t counted at all. Be exceptionally ware of this problem when working with topics where definitions tend to be arbitrary, such as race or ethnicity.

      This can particularly lead to future problems that will hide potential racist policies.

    1. Think about why U.S. people, especially White people, have trouble seeing systemically. Explain the myth of meritocracy: that the unit of society is the individual and that whatever one ends up with must be whatever that individual wanted, worked for, earned, and deserved. Why do you think this myth survives so successfully, suppressing knowledge of systemic oppression and especially of its "up-side,"systemic privilege?
  15. Jan 2021
    1. One important note for white people: When people of color share their experiences with white supremacy, believe them. Life Kit 'Me And White Supremacy' Helps You Do The Work Of Dismantling Racism "I can't tell you how many people I've seen who claim to be anti-racist and care about building anti-racist organizations," Singh says. "But when people of color speak, they're like, 'Oh, well, they're doing it wrong.' Or 'That's one (person's experience).' You have an opportunity in that moment to believe what that person is saying."
    2. Which might explain why, for people dedicated to fighting racism, simply saying you're "not racist" doesn't feel like quite enough. To effectively defeat systemic racism — racism embedded as normal practice in institutions like education and law enforcement — you've got to be continually working towards equality for all races, striving to undo racism in your mind, your personal environment and the wider world.

      Perhaps a better framing is to not look at things from such a broad perspective, but to focus in on the smaller and more specific?

      Racism is a big forest, but to really see and fix it we need to look at individual racist idea hills and plains and specific racist policy trees, plants, and shrubs.

  16. Dec 2020
    1. In 1977, Mary Ann Jenkins, a 22-year-old Black woman, was found naked but for her jewelry; officials in Illinois incorrectly concluded that she had been killed in a lightning strike.

      This seems ludicrous on it's face.

  17. Oct 2020
    1. In 2018, according to the Pew Research Center, ninety-seven per cent of all tweets posted by American adults about national politics were posted by ten per cent of tweeters. A disproportionate number of the people in Twitter’s town hall are the sorts of people who were eligible to vote in 1820, before the first, Jackson-era expansion of the electorate: the wealthy, the educated, and the hyperpartisan. Twitter isn’t the future of American democracy; it’s the past.

      Wow! This is a damning statement. It certainly makes me rethink staying on the platform.

    1. Pearson, the publisher whose Texas textbook raises questions about the quality of Harlem Renaissance literature, said such language “adds more depth and nuance.”

      If they wanted to add more "depth and nuance" wouldn't they actually go into greater depth on the topic by adding pages instead of subtly painting it such a discouraging light?

      But Texas students will read that some critics “dismissed the quality of literature produced.”

    1. As African-American businessman Ishmael Trone said last week, the reform has to go beyond policing in order for there to be equality in this country, including banking reform, mortgage reform and business loan reform.
  18. Sep 2020
    1. The modern practice of the committee questioning nominees on their judicial views began with the nomination of John Marshall Harlan II in 1955; the nomination came shortly after the Supreme Court handed down its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, and several southern senators attempted to block Harlan's confirmation, hence the decision to testify.[1][8]

      Interesting that this practice stems from the imposition of what looks like racist policies.

    1. In American folklore, the nation was built out of a wilderness by free-booting individuals - the trappers, cowboys, preachers, and settlers of the frontier. Yet this primary myth of the American republic ignores the contradiction at the heart of the American dream: that some individuals can prosper only through the suffering of others. The life of Thomas Jefferson - the man behind the ideal of `Jeffersonian democracy' - clearly demonstrates the double nature of liberal individualism. The man who wrote the inspiring call for democracy and liberty in the American declaration of independence was at the same time one of the largest slave-owners in the country.

      Some profound ideas here about the "American Dream" and the dark underbelly of what it may take to achieve not only for individuals, but to do so at scale.

    1. Keenan calls the practice of drawing arbitrary lending boundaries around areas of perceived environmental risk “bluelining,” and indeed many of the neighborhoods that banks are bluelining are the same as the ones that were hit by the racist redlining practice in days past. This summer, climate-data analysts at the First Street Foundation released maps showing that 70% more buildings in the United States were vulnerable to flood risk than previously thought; most of the underestimated risk was in low-income neighborhoods.

      Bluelining--a neologism I've not seen before, but it's roughly what one would expect.

    1. Access and representation in tech isn't a pipeline or qualification problem. It's a white supremacy problem.
    1. 1. Small individual bias → Large collective bias. When someone says a culture is shapist, they're not saying the individuals in it are shapist. They're not attacking you personally. 2. The past haunts the present. Your bedroom floor doesn't stop being dirty just coz you stopped dropping food all over the carpet. Creating equality is like staying clean: it takes work. And it's always a work in progress. 3. Demand diversity near you. If small biases created the mess we're in, small anti-biases might fix it. Look around you. Your friends, your colleagues, that conference you're attending. If you're all triangles, you're missing out on some amazing squares in your life - that's unfair to everyone. Reach out, beyond your immediate neighbors.

      Nice summary here of their work. This has some ideas towards reversing structural racism and racist policies.

    1. These three strands collided throughout the twentieth century, as the prosperity gospel came into being. It started — like the “work ethic” Max Weber described — as a way to justify why, during the Gilded Age, some people were rich and others poor. (One early prosperity gospel proponent, Baptist preacher Russell H. Conwell, told his mostly-destitute congregation in 1915: “I say you ought to be rich; you have no right to be poor.”) Instead of blaming structural inequality, Conwell and those like him blamed the perceived failures of the individual.

      This philosophy also overlaps some of the resurgence of white nationalism and structural racism in the early 1900's which also tended to disadvantage people of color. ie, we can blame the coloreds because it's not structural inequality, but the failure of the individual (and the race.)

  19. Aug 2020
    1. What if, as in the case of anonymous résumés, the DA had no clue about the race of the accused? For that matter, what if you also removed identifying information on the victim and even the location of the crime? In 2019, the San Francisco DA’s office began anonymous charging, removing potentially biasing information from crime reports DAs use to decide whether or not to bring charges (http://bkaprt.com/dcb/02-30/). It’s too soon to tell the outcome of that experiment but, again, the removal of a decisive element may enhance an experience rather than detract from it.

      Another way to potentially approach this is to take the biasing information and reduce the charging by statistical means to negate the biased effects?

      Separately, how can this be done at the street level to allow policing resources to find and prosecute white collar criminals who may be having a more profoundly deleterious effect on society?

  20. Jul 2020
    1. White Fragility is, in the end, a book about how to make certain educated white readers feel better about themselves. DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think—or, better, stop thinking. Her answer to white fragility, in other words, entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people. The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.

      Perhaps the better advice to the potential readers of such a tome would be to ignore the "well-intentioned" white woman and instead take some time and patience to read some African American voices, Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning or The African-American Experience edited by Kai Wright.

      If you really insist on getting help from someone white to start off on your journey, then I can only recommend John Biewen's excellent Seeing White podcast series, though both John and the series are "kept honest" by recurring guest Chenjerai Kumanyika and a variety of other great guests and interviewees.

    2. Nor should anyone dismiss me as a rara avis. Being middle class, upwardly mobile, and Black has been quite common during my existence since the mid-1960s, and to deny this is to assert that affirmative action for Black people did not work.

      While he says this, I want to say that I've heard generally the opposite, particularly for African American boys/men from one generation to the next. I'll have to dig into sources for this, but I want to say some may be found in an episode of The Daily from the NY Times roughly a year ago.

    1. Now when police cross the line, holding them accountable is virtually impossible. The judge-made doctrine of qualified immunity makes suing the police for damages incredibly difficult. The exclusionary rule, which says that evidence seized by the police in the course of an unconstitutional search or seizure should be excluded from trial, is virtually a dead letter. And individuals harmed by unconstitutional policing policies, such as choke holds of the sort used to kill Floyd and Garner, cannot sue to prevent these policies from being enforced.
  21. Jun 2020
    1. . “ It i s . . . t he con-crete universal, self-determining thought, which constitutes the prin-ciple and character of Europeans,” Hegel once wrote. “ God becomes man, r evealing himself.” I n contrast, African people, he said, were “a nation of children” i n the “first stage” of human development: “ The negro is an example of animal man in all his s avagery and lawlessness.” They could be educated, but t hey would never advance on their own. Hegel’s foundational racist idea justified Europe’s ongoing coloniza-tion of Africa. European colonizers would supposedly bring progress to Africa’s residents, j ust as European enslavers had brought progress to Africans i n the Americas.
    2. Master/slave sex fundamentally acknowledged the humanity of Black and biracial women, but it simultaneously reduced that human-ity to their sexuality. I n the Christian world, s exuality was believed to be the animal t rait of humans.
    3. When Black people rose, r acists either violently knocked them down or i gnored them as extraordinary. When Black people were down, r ac-ists called it t heir natural or nurtured place, and denied any role in knocking them down in the first place.
    4. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1 793, bestowing on slaveholders t he right and legal a ppa-ratus t o recover escaped Africans and criminalize those who harbored them.
    5. With no intention to publish, J efferson unabashedly expressed his views on Black people, and in particular on potentially freed Black people. “ Incorporating the [freed] blacks i nto the state” was out of the question, he declared. “ Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; t en thousand recollections, by the blacks, of t he injuries they have sustained; new provocations; t he real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us i nto parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of t he one or t he other r ace

      Jefferson to French diplomat François Barbé-Marbois in 1781 in Notes on the State of Virginia.

      Little did he know that these convulsions would reverberate for over 240 years.

  22. Sep 2019
    1. and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
    2. he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.

      and yet slavery was allowed to flourish after this...