#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.

[vague-humanoid]

The Virginia Legislative Black Caucus is calling on Gov. Glenn Youngkin to investigate. 

A number of inmates at a western Virginia state prison have intentionally burned themselves in response to alleged abuse, prompting state lawmakers to call for immediate action and an investigation. 

The Virginia Legislative Black Caucus (VLBC) on Tuesday urged Gov. Glenn Youngkin and the Virginia Department of Corrections Director Chadwick Dotson to investigate allegations of abuse and mistreatment at Red Onion State Supermax Prison in Wise County. 

Since Sept. 15, at least 12 Black men have burned themselves in response to alleged systemic abuse, neglect, and human rights violations at Red Onion, according to the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus. The self-burnings are “acts of desperation” by inmates fed up with alleged racism and intolerable conditions and come after a hunger strike at Red Onion earlier this year that lasted more than 40 days.

Asked by The Dogwood if Youngkin planned to investigate, Youngkin’s Press Secretary Christian Martinez shared the following statement: “Governor Youngkin is aware of the six inmates at Red Onion State Prison who burned themselves using improvised devices that were created by tampering with electrical outlets. They were treated for electrical burns at the Department’s secure medical facility at the VCU Medical Center and cleared to return to the facility.”

A spokesperson for Attorney General Jason Miyares declined to comment, citing a pending investigation. The spokesperson did not clarify any details about the nature of the investigation. 

The Virginia Department of Corrections did not respond to a request for comment.

Advocates say the problems at Red Onion have been known for years. 

“The real, fundamental issue over the conditions that led to people taking such desperate actions – that is not a new story about Red Onion,” said Chris Kaiser, policy director of ACLU of Virginia, in an interview with The Dogwood. “It is well past time for some action.”

Prisoners at Red Onion have allegedly been subject to racial and physical abuse from correctional officers and have had medicine withheld from them. Prisoners there have reportedly dealt with excessive stays in solitary confinement, including the case of Tyquine Lee, who spent over 600 days in solitary.

Advocates have called on Youngkin to reconsider his position on solitary confinement, even though the governor vetoed legislation earlier this year that would have banned it in Virginia. The debate around solitary confinement can get bogged down in euphemisms and definitions in a way that advocates say overlooks the inhumane treatment of isolating prisoners. 

In his veto statement, Youngkin said, “imposing arbitrary timeframes for stays in restorative housing, including investigation time, restricts the staff’s ability to maintain order and security.” Youngkin also highlighted his support for the creation of the Department of Corrections Ombudsman, which has independent oversight of the state’s prisons. 

Del. Holly Seibold of Vienna visited Red Onion earlier this year to get a first-hand look at conditions there. The visit made her question whether Red Onion was doing anything to actually rehabilitate its prisoners.

“We should be holding them accountable, but our goal should be to rehabilitate them,” Seibold said in an interview with The Dogwood. “How is this going to happen if the prison is structured in a way where they’re just being punished 24/7.” 

[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.

Continue Reading.

[shrinkrants]

Since the 1870s, during the reconstruction of the American government after the Civil War, white reactionaries insisted that opening the vote to anyone but white men would result in socialism. Their argument was that poor voters—by which they meant Black men—would elect leaders who would promise them roads and schools and hospitals, and so on. Those public benefits could be paid for only with tax levies, and since white men held most of the property in the country in those days, they insisted such benefits amounted to a redistribution of wealth from hardworking white men to undeserving Black Americans, even though poor white people would benefit from those public works as much as or more than Black people did. This argument resurfaced after World War II as an argument against Black and Brown voting and, in the 1970s, against the electoral power of “women’s libbers,” that is, women who called for the federal government to protect the rights of women equally to those of men. Beginning in 1980, when Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan called for rolling back the government regulations and social safety net that underpinned society, a gap appeared in voting behavior. Women, especially Black women, tended to back the Democrats, while men moved toward Republican candidates. Increasingly, Republican leaders used racist and sexist tropes to undermine the active government whose business regulations they hated. 

-- Heather Cox Richardson

[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.

[deaddee-anime-brownfanlady]

[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.

[anarchistettin]

Brea Baker goes over land justice theoretically, and with historical specificity.

good podcast in general - key ep