#institutional racism

[deaddee-anime-brownfanlady]

[alwaysbewoke]

[long-sleeved-sandwich]

something happened recently in my small town that i think is a microcosm of white “liberalism”. it’s not a secret that since a new juvenile detention center was built a few years ago, the high and middle schools have been targeting young black men, particularly young black men with special needs/mental illness/disabilities to fill it with. the school administrators and our local judge, a corrupt, nasty, crooked white woman, are rumoured to be making a ton of money as a part of this conspiracy. my grandmother, an advocate for special needs children, and my dad and aunt(teachers), have watched the school to prison pipeline with their own eyes, and my grandmother and several others in town have been trying to build a case for years against the judge and other corrupt individuals. recently however, an old white widow who has been a teacher at the high school for almost 50 years, and beloved by all, was fired for saying the n-word. she heard some students saying it and took a few minutes to educate them on why it’s racist to say it, but in doing so, she said it several times. some students videoed her and cut it up to make it seem like she was the racist one. the school promptly fired her. i think that’s a perfect representation of white “liberalism”. actively participating in systemic racism but robbing an old widow of her livelihood to maintain the superficial image of being politically correct.

[thoughtlessarse]

The Home Office has been forced to release a suppressed report on the origins of the Windrush scandal by a tribunal judge who quoted George Orwell in a judgment criticising the department’s lack of transparency. For the past three years, Home Office staff have worked to bury a hard-hitting research paper that states that roots of the scandal lay in 30 years of racist immigration legislation designed to reduce the UK’s non-white population. The 52-page analysis by a Home Office-commissioned historian, who has not been named, described how “the British empire depended on racist ideology in order to function” and explained how this ideology had driven immigration laws passed in the postwar period. The department rejected several freedom of information requests asking for the Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal to be released, arguing that publication might damage affected communities’ “trust in government” and “its future development of immigration policy”. Officials also argued that disclosure would impair “free and frank” disclosure of advice to the Home Office and threaten the existence of a “safe space” within the department to discuss immigration policy. […] The report, which was leaked to the Guardian in May 2022, concluded that the origins of the “deep-rooted racism of the Windrush scandal” lie in the fact that “during the period 1950-1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK”. The scandal saw thousands of people who were legally resident in Britain, many of whom were born in the Caribbean, wrongly classified as immigration offenders. As a result, many were sacked from their jobs, evicted from their homes or denied healthcare and pensions; some were wrongly arrested, detained and deported.

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It's easy to blame legislation made between 1950 to 1981, but it took David Cameron's government and the Home Office under Theresa May, from 2010 to 2016, to weaponise it.

What is surprising as that they invited people from the Caribbean to the "mother country" at the same time they were writing legislation to prevent their arrival and settlement.

[berniesrevolution]

MSNBC | “You cannot ignore the racial dynamic of what happened today”: Tennessee Republicans expel two Black lawmakers from state legislature for participating in anti-gun violence protests. Justin Pearson remarks after expulsion.

[readyforevolution]

[crazycatsiren]

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[larrywilmore]

Institutional racism & its deep effect on mental health in the black community

Journalist Antonia Hylton & I talk about the history of institutional racism and the twisted way black people's health and well-being was, and to some degree still is, deeply impacted by those views.

Listen to our full conversation on @spotify

[mindblowingscience]

In 2022, Latinos, as a group, comprised more than 19% of the U.S. population or nearly 64 million individuals. People of Mexican ancestry make up almost 12% of the US population and 62.3% of Latinos. Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Central American Ancestry (MPRCA) individuals represent 4 of 5 of US Latinos but continue to be underrepresented across the board in every job profession in the United States, including STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) careers. The disparity is even greater for Latinas in academia. To help gain a better understanding of the underrepresentation, an intergenerational group of 16 MPRCA Latinas and allies met to identify major challenges to hiring, persistence, and success faced by early career MPRCA Latinas. Their research, titled "Early Career Latinas in STEM: Challenges and Solutions," was released in Cell. The group identified multi-level challenges that present barriers to MPRCA Latinas (and others) and solutions for Institutions, Departments and Mentors, and Individuals that would benefit MPRCA and the entire academic community. The challenges include financial concerns, caregiver and other family responsibilities, academic inclusion, evaluation of service, especially involving community outreach and mentoring, mentoring needs, and safe environments.

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[enbycrip]

A fascinating and bittersweet part of my family history here, and a sign of how the lives of very ordinary people end up entwined with the wider world, which here in Britain in the mid-20th century meant with Empire.

This book belonged to my Granda, from when he was sent to Kenya to do National Service. He was, of course, a working class white boy from urban Glasgow, who had already been working full time since he was 14. I grew up with his stories about his time out there - it was frightening, and difficult, because it was so different from what he knew, and he had no choice or say in where or when he went, but it was also incredibly exciting and interesting for him.

I’m entirely sure that he, like most of my family, was neurodivergent, and my guess is autistic; I recognise so many of his mannerisms and features from myself. That can only have made being suddenly moved right out of his context so much more difficult for him. I know he found army discipline initially very difficult; much like me, he always found being told what to do for no good reason incredibly challenging, and all his later jobs were either self-employed - he was a taxi driver for 30+ years - or very self-directed. But he also got to learn to drive a jeep, and then to join the Signals Corps and learn radio physics, which had been a special interest for him since he was a child, and he would never have managed to fund a university degree.

And of course, as this book shows, he got to meet incredibly interesting people from somewhere very different from his own culture, and learn to speak their language. When I was small, he told me a lot of the funniest stories, like the time he and his pal borrowed a couple of horses and mocked up cowboy outfits because all the Kenyan guys in his platoon had only really seen white people in cowboy movies before they joined up, and had a running joke that all of them were actually cowboys at home, so they could go in and be like “Yeehaw, you’ve found us out!”

But he also told me a lot of the stuff that bothered him about being part of the machinery of Empire even when I was small, and, as he said, “I was just a wee boy then myself and didn’t know anything about anything either”; things like him being put in command of a Kenyan squad of black soldiers literally just because he was white. He told me about being expected to give orders to this incredibly experienced sergeant in his forties, who had been through WWII, when he was a 17 year old working class boy from Glasgow, and being very much “there is no way this is remotely right, or makes any sense whatsoever.” My Granda, of course, was a member of the Communist Party, and I think being in the position of seeing - and having to be part of - colonialism and Empire close-up definitely influenced his politics later in life.

He also got to meet just ordinary Kenyan people too; he told me stories about going to the markets to buy stuff from old ladies who reminded him of the ladies selling in the Barras back in Glasgow, and when one of his guys got married and brought his new wife in to meet everyone. She was initially very nervous, but then laughed her head off as my Granda tried out his Swahili on her.

My Granda died in 2019, just a few months before COVID first hit. He’s still very present to me in so many ways - I have a photo of him up in my kitchen, and inherited his compost bins and rain butt for my garden - but I always think of him in particular when I’m working on my history stuff. I’m going to treasure this book.

I think a lot about this whenever anyone claims modern Brits “shouldn’t have to feel guilty about Empire”. This is a place where my direct family history intersects very directly with Empire just two generations back from me. And yes, my Granda was just a radio operator and a driver, was never more than a private, and happily left the army as soon as he could. But he was still part of the imperial machinery when Britain was doing horrendous shit in Kenya, little as he wanted to be, and much as he felt having to do that was imposed on him as a Scot for an English Empire.

And of course he, like I, grew up and have lived our lives in Glasgow, a city whose wealth was built on imports from sugar plantations, and imperial trade, and thus from slavery. And so both of us benefitted from that, despite being just ordinary working class people.

This is the nature of Empire. The benefits and the oppression are both frequently diffuse. Co-option happens. While some people benefit *enormously* - there are still many *incredibly* wealthy families descended from slave owners who have only used that wealth to further entrench their privilege - and far more only suffer exploitation, in such a vast institution so many people live in a complex place where they experience both benefits and exploitation, in a thousand complex variations.

So I don’t see it as being about “guilt”, but about acknowledgement, and about reparations. There are things I owe to people who are still experiencing adverse circumstances, poverty and exploitation now because of things the British Empire did that I am still benefitting from the results of. Sometimes that’s direct mutual aid, to individuals or organisations. Sometimes it’s fighting for my country to provide reparations, change its actions, or even just acknowledge actions and ongoing benefit. And sometimes it’s learning, and passing that knowledge on.

[alwaysbewoke]

[petervintonjr]

"We went to school. It was called a school of slavery and a school of segregation. And the lessons were very clear: You hate yourself. You are supposed to hate yourself because you are a, quote, 'minority,' you are different. You are lazy, apathetic, and so forth. And you pass out of this school and pass those lessons to the extent that you believe this, you see."

Everybody pour one out for academic activist and political scientist Charles Vernon Hamilton, who we lost exactly one year ago, today (though as befit his quiet and unassuming nature, we didn't actually learn about his passing until February of this year). Born in 1929 Oklahoma, Hamilton's family later moved to Chicago. Originally inspired to be a journalist, Hamilton instead pivoted to an interest in government and civil service. After a brief period in the military, he graduated from Roosevelt University, and then attained his Master's at the University of Chicago in 1957. A year later he joined the faculty at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), but was invited to leave less than two years later for his "incendiary" stance on civil rights (i.e., his association with the nascent SNCC and teaching students how to march, protest, and contact Congress).

Far from being the end, an impressive teaching career followed, taking Hamilton to Rutgers, Lincoln University, and even his own beloved Roosevelt before landing a prestigious appointment to Columbia in 1969 --one of the first Black scholars to chair a department at an Ivy League school. Over the course of this career he cultivated a partnership with Kwame Ture, neé Stokely Carmichael (see Lesson #71 in this series); together they published the controversial Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, which in many ways remains the definitive work on the Black Power movement. In the text, Hamilton coins the phrase 'institutional racism,' concluding that the best method to stand against such baked-in premises lay not in being divided recipients, but united participants. After the book's publication Hamilton continued to work to publicly frame the Black Power movement as a developmental process, not an end in and of itself.

In 1976 Hamilton worked with the Democratic Party as a strategist, suggesting that while it might be acceptable for presidential candidates to sidestep racial politics during a campaign, it was critical that they dealt decisively with issues that affected the black community once they were elected; that no matter how sympathetic a candidate might be to Black causes, that they could do nothing to help if they ultimately alienated their still mostly-conservative electoral base. (Sound familiar?)

Later in 1991 Hamilton published another seminal work, a biography of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., titled The Political Biography of an American Dilemma. Hamilton retired from the Columbia faculty in 1998 and moved back to Chicago in 2015.

[thoughtlessarse]

The recent European Elections have been hailed as a successful exercise in democracy with a record voter turnout but for the Roma, Europe's largest and most discriminated ethnic minority, the election results were a disappointment. Population figures are uncertain but according to the most quoted estimates, 10-12 million Roma are living in the EU and the candidate countries. They continue to face high levels of discrimination in their daily lives and serious challenges in accessing equal rights and services in housing, education, employment and health care. They are also far from being empowered in their home countries and in the EU. The outgoing European Parliament included four members (out of 705 members) of Roma origin, from Spain, Germany, Hungary and Slovakia, i.e. about 0,5 % of the total. The incoming Parliament, with 720 members, will not include any Roma MEP, according to the Brussels based Roma Foundation for Europe. According to their information, there were three Roma candidates from the Czech Republic, two from Slovakia, three from Hungary and one from Bulgaria but none of them were elected. All of these countries have relatively large Roma minorities. Romania, the country with the largest Roma minority, did apparently not include any Roma candidate in the election lists. Thorsten Schröder, lead communications advisor for the Roma Foundation, cautioned that it is important to note that it is difficult to make assumptions about a candidate's ethnic background if it is not publicly declared. Asked how many Roma MEPs could theoretically have been elected, in proportion to the size of the Roma minority, he replied that there is no straightforward answer to the question because of their fragmented number across EU member states. A cautious estimate, comparing their number with the population in a small country like Denmark (ca 6 million inhabitants) would result in up to 15 MEPs.

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[deaddee-anime-brownfanlady]

[readyforevolution]