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systemic racism
Birthright Citizenship Is a Promise We Cannot Break
Defending birthright citizenship is not only about protecting children of immigrants. It is about preserving a constitutional framework that recognizes our shared humanity and limits the government’s ability to decide whose rights matter.
Mar 31, 2026
For more than 150 years, the 14th Amendment has been an uncompromising line: If you are born on US soil, you are a citizen. That principle is so foundational, many of us take it for granted.
But that principle is under attack.
On April 1, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments challenging President Donald Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship. At the center of the case is an executive order issued on the first day of Trump’s second term to end Birthright Citizenship for children of undocumented parents.
The justices will now decide whether a president can rewrite one of the clearest promises embedded in American law.
If the court strikes down birthright citizenship, it would let the government decide who counts as American based on the circumstances of their birth.
On the surface, threatening the rights of children born in the United States might seem like an immigration debate. But history tells a different story.
Birthright citizenship was never an abstract ideal. It was a response to America’s long history of dehumanization—a past that Trump and his MAGA allies are now openly trying to resurrect. The 14th Amendment was designed to dismantle a system that denied Black people a political voice, treated us as property, and denied our humanity.
Ratified in 1868, the amendment overturned Dred Scott v. Sandford, which declared that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Birthright citizenship was meant to be simple and permanent so no government could take it away based on race, ancestry, or political whim.
For formerly enslaved people and their descendants, it guaranteed recognition as full citizens in their own country. But the 14th Amendment did more than correct the injustices of slavery: It expanded who counts as American.
The Constitution says plainly that anyone born in the United States and subject to its laws is a citizen. That principle was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which ruled that a man born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents was a citizen, establishing that US-born children of immigrants are citizens. This was despite the fact that Chinese immigrants at the time were barred from naturalization under the Chinese Exclusion laws.
The case now before the court seeks to undo that understanding.
If the court strikes down birthright citizenship, it would let the government decide who counts as American based on the circumstances of their birth.
The 14th Amendment’s authors understood the danger of that approach. Once citizenship becomes conditional, every other right soon follows.
Ending birthright citizenship would affect everyone—not just children of immigrants—in a system that has long questioned the belonging of people of color, including Black Americans.
Who must prove their citizenship? Who is presumed to have it? Who gets stopped, questioned, or detained? Who lives under suspicion?
History answers clearly: Marginalized communities pay the price first.
I write this as someone who has spent more than 15 years organizing for racial justice and as a Black man whose citizenship was once explicitly denied by law. Today, I see how systemic racism—from policing to voter suppression—continues to shape the livelihoods of Black Americans.
And that danger does not stop with birthright citizenship: These attacks threaten the entire 14th Amendment, including the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses that underpin victories against segregation, discrimination, voter suppression, and unchecked government power.
If the government can redefine citizenship, unequal treatment under the law becomes easier to justify. Civil rights become conditional. Equal protection becomes negotiable. State power expands while accountability shrinks.
We have seen this playbook before. After Reconstruction came Jim Crow. During industrialization came the Chinese Exclusion Act. Black workers were excluded from key New Deal protections. The gains of the civil rights movement were followed by voter suppression and mass incarceration.
Each time progress threatened entrenched power, the response was restriction rather than inclusion.
The 14th Amendment was written to break that cycle.
Defending birthright citizenship is not only about protecting children of immigrants. It is about preserving a constitutional framework that recognizes our shared humanity and limits the government’s ability to decide whose rights matter.
So the stakes could not be clearer during these Supreme Court arguments.
Birthright citizenship is more than law. It is the promise that America’s diversity, struggle, and resilience matter. It is the legacy of those who fought to be recognized as fully human—and the foundation of a democracy that must belong to all of us.
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‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Elon Musk Says Teachers Should Be ‘Imprisoned’ for Accurate Lessons on US History
The world’s richest man believes it is “treason” to teach students the plain fact that the United States was built on stolen Native American land.
Jan 15, 2026
Self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" Elon Musk believes schoolteachers should be "imprisoned" for educating students on topics that portray America negatively—including the nation's history of racism and the displacement of Native Americans.
The world's richest man, who was a prolific donor to President Donald Trump and a member of his administration, expressed this desire in a post on his social media app X on Thursday in response to a survey of high school students from 2022 conducted by the right-wing Manhattan Institute, about whether they had been taught concepts labeled as part of "critical social justice."
The post Musk replied to specifically emphasized that, according to the poll, 45% of students said they had been taught that "America was built on stolen land," while another 22% said they'd heard it from an adult at school.
Any even cursory retelling of US history makes such a statement beyond dispute. Since the arrival of European settlers in what would become the United States, Native Americans have been subject to over 300 years of well-documented forced migration policies, wars of extermination, and coercive treaties codifying their dispossession from lands they lived on for centuries.
In 2021, a year before the survey was conducted, researchers examined the first comprehensive dataset quantifying the forced removal of Native Americans and found that Indigenous people had lost approximately 99% of the lands they historically occupied.
The poll showed that students had also been taught other ideas about America that, while politically contentious, are also well-founded by US history and ongoing realities of legal and economic inequality—including that "America is a systemically racist country," that "white people have white privilege," and that "America is a patriarchal society."
With state-level bans on what it calls "critical race theory," "gender ideology," and other supposedly "divisive concepts" in public education, the right has in recent years been systematically chipping away at classroom discussions related to the uglier parts of US history and resulting ongoing inequality. Meanwhile, the second Trump administration has sought to use federal funds to coerce public schools into adopting his standards for "patriotic education."
But Musk, who donated an unprecedented $290 million to Trump to help him reclaim the presidency in 2024, thinks merely banning students from learning negative things about the country is not enough.
"Teaching people to hate America fundamentally destroys patriotism and the desire to defend our country," he wrote. "Such teachings should be viewed as treason and those who do it imprisoned."
The irony was immediately apparent to many. Musk's call comes just days after he claimed that by pushing to ban his platform X over its proliferation of nonconsensual artificially generated pornography, including of children, the United Kingdom “want[s] to suppress free speech.”
Musk has on numerous previous occasions emphasized the importance of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees the right to free expression.
"You can't claim to care about the First Amendment if you believe this," responded Billy Binion, a reporter for the libertarian news outlet Reason." Treason is a capital offense. Imprisoning or executing people for their words is impossible to reconcile with any understanding of free speech. Incoherent and un-American."
The billionaire has long claimed to be one of free speech's foremost defenders, but often only in cases involving his ideological allies.
Since he took over the social media platform formerly known as Twitter in 2022, those who have criticized him, reported negative news stories about him, or promoted causes he disagrees with—particularly Palestinian or LGBTQ+ rights—have often had their accounts suspended or their content’s reach limited.
In recent weeks, echoing rhetoric from the Trump administration about deporting tens of millions of nonwhite American citizens, Musk has spiraled further into explicit calls for the ethnic cleansing of the United States, endorsing posts stating that white people must “reclaim our nations” or “be conquered, enslaved, raped, and genocided” and that “if white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered,” necessitating “white solidarity.”
"Obviously, the whole Elon-is-a-free-speech-absolutist thing is long dead," wrote Alex Griswold, a spokesperson for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, commonly known as FIRE. "But it goes beyond that to the point that he is significantly more censorial than the median American."
Pam Fessler, a former news correspondent for NPR wrote that "People who call for the imprisonment of those who teach facts are the ones who 'hate' America."
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Social Justice and Eclipse: Predicting and Preparing For Change
It is best to approach social justice the same way the world prepares for an eclipse—with foresight, community, and coordination.
Apr 23, 2025
Millions of people across the United States and parts of Canada and Mexico recently witnessed a total solar eclipse—a rare and breathtaking alignment of the Earth, moon, and sun. Scientists had predicted its precise timing and path years in advance, with detailed maps showing where the event would be most visible.
Across the U.S., communities prepared—gathering in fields, schools, and rooftops with protective glasses and cameras in hand. They trusted science. They trusted preparation. They showed up.
In the same week one year later, over 600,000 people across all 50 states signed up to protest against U.S. President Donald Trump and his ongoing threat to democracy for the Hands Off Protests in 1,300 locations. These protests were not spontaneous—they were planned, anticipated, and powerfully aligned. Total estimates for the day’s peaceful protests are 3 million people.
It is not always possible to predict the exact moment of breakthrough, but one can prepare for the shift through mutual aid, political education, youth leadership, and conflict transformation training.
If it is possible to chart the movement of celestial bodies with such precision, then it is also possible to chart the social conditions that produce change. Responses to the conditions that cause criminality, injustice, or violence can also be charted and faced.
A crime can unfold in seconds, but its consequences—especially in marginalized communities—can last a lifetime. The root conditions that set the stage—poverty, childhood trauma, environmental injustice, disinvestment in education, and systemic racism—are all in place and can be addressed.
Knowing the precursors of injustice, it is prudent not to sit still and wait for tragedy before taking action. It is best to approach social justice the same way the world prepares for an eclipse—with foresight, community, and coordination.
Research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) confirms that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)—like neglect, abuse, or household dysfunction—can have long-term impacts on health, behavior, and justice involvement. Communities with higher poverty rates have higher crime rates, not because of moral failure, but due to decades of disinvestment and inequality.
As someone who has spent decades working for criminal and social justice reform in communities and far beyond, I see that systems and practices can indeed seed meaningful social change.
The Theory of Change is a framework that maps how and why desired change is expected to happen in a particular context. It’s not magic. It’s modeling. And when used correctly, it helps communities anticipate outcomes and align resources toward justice.
Like eclipse chasers who travel to be in the “path of totality,” social justice organizers prepare to be where the change is coming. They build coalitions, train communities, and develop infrastructure so that when the time is right, they do not to miss the moment to act.
At this time in history when daily political efforts are aimed at reversing timeworn, proven paths to social justice, such as defunding financial assistance to federal programs, universities, associations, and individuals based on principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion, it is urgent to prepare and put into place ways to counter the effects.
This preparation involves policymakers, funders, nonprofits, communities, advocates, individuals, families, institutions, and faith-based organizations to work toward the goal of social change of equity, fairness, access, and justice.
You cannot stare directly at an eclipse without special tools. Similarly, you often can’t see the slow build of a movement until it’s in full swing. Yet humans can sense change—like animals do before an eclipse, like trees that darken and cool in response to a shadow overhead.
Similarly, social change is intangible yet deeply felt. It is not always possible to predict the exact moment of breakthrough, but one can prepare for the shift through mutual aid, political education, youth leadership, and conflict transformation training.
Preparation now is crucial. Facing funding cuts nationally to vital services, rollbacks of civil rights protections, and an increasing normalization of political violence, it is urgent to create needed structures that assess possibilities in order to anticipate and respond proactively.
Throughout history, research shows that Black women have sensed these shifts and led people and communities through them—not just during well-known moments—but in everyday resistance throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
For example, Rosa Parks didn’t just refuse to give up her seat one time; she was a seasoned organizer and a supporter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or the SNCC Legacy Project. Shirley Chisholm wasn’t just the first Black woman to run for president—she helped reframe what political leadership looks like.
Barbara Jordan called out President Richard Nixon with such clarity it redefined accountability in American politics. Tennis icon Serena Williams crip-walked across a tennis court and reclaimed joy on a global stage. First Lady Michelle Obama wore sleeveless dresses and shattered expectations of what dignity and leadership looked like in a Black woman’s body.
A 2021 Texas A&M University study reports, “Black women, through their inclusive, community-based activist endeavors, continue to carve out fugitive spaces and counterpublics where counternarratives are actively generated to fight for a more equitable and inclusive democracy that serves all.”
As a Black woman, I see that Black women are the eclipse, the unexpected alignment. They have known through history how to bring light through the dark.
Social change can happen in quiet corners—in small towns, church basements, classrooms, or in the act of mentoring one young person. It doesn’t have to be a massive protest or a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. It can be both.
But when those moments do arrive—like the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the LGBTQ+ rights movement—they are rarely surprises. They are the result of decades of work, layered with setbacks and strategy.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But that arc doesn’t bend on its own. It requires intention and action.
It is time not just to watch the changes happening, but to prepare and to make change, witnessing the outcomes together.
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A Juneteenth Reflection on America’s Unfinished Business
This year, as we celebrate the end of chattel slavery in the United States, we must remember the work that Frederick Douglass called upon us all to do remains unfinished.
Jun 18, 2024
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” asked Frederick Douglass in his Fourth of July Oration in 1852. “I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty” of America.
Douglass’s speech remains among the most powerful and poignant in United States history more than a century and a half later. With the Civil War nearly a decade away, and the system of chattel slavery still going strong throughout the South and powering the economy throughout the country, Douglass pointed with undeniable clarity at the “venomous creature [that] is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic.”
As we celebrate Juneteenth in 2024, the work that Douglass called upon us all to do remains unfinished. The Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Reconstruction Amendments formally put an end to the widespread practice of enslavement of Black people in this country. But the work of reconstructing our society and creating the truly equitable and free society promised in our founding documents has a long way to go.
Today we have the job of coming to grips with our history and charting a new path for those who come after us.
That is why on this Juneteenth, we should all ask: What, to us, is Juneteenth? For all of us, and especially for the Black community, it is a day of joyful celebration, marking the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, as it has been for a century and a half. It marks the end of that “venomous creature” in the republic. To be sure, each one of us should celebrate that important day in 1865, as the Black community did so memorably in Texas that year.
But on Juneteenth, we should also remember that while the snake may have been slain, too much of its venom remains in our system. The venom still takes the form of racism, racial inequity, and the enduring power of white supremacy.
What, to each of us today, is Juneteenth? For those of us in the white community of the United States, I see it as a call to action to do our part to continue the work of reconstruction. We can and should imagine a truly equitable, multiracial America—one we have never before encountered but one which remains a real possibility. There is a fierce pushback against this work today, but this is a pushback we must resist as we continue the unfinished work of Reconstruction.
Like many white Americans whose families have been in the United States for a long time, and in fact came to these shores before the nation even existed, my family has both been involved in the business of enslaving others and has fought for the end of slavery. As Douglass pointed out in his soaring Fourth of July oration, ancestors of mine have done terrible things to others in the name of Christianity, in pursuit of money, and out of ignorance and hate. Others have valiantly fought against friends and families to create a better, fairer society.
Today we have the job of coming to grips with our history and charting a new path for those who come after us. That is why white people must join with others in the work of making our communities and institutions more diverse. Those of us who identify as white and male have a particular obligation to reflect on Juneteenth and consider how we can use what we have to be part of overcoming in the name of a brighter, more sustainable future. We have power to wield, and should wield it, in making our economies more equitable and inclusive.
In Chicago, where I live, there is a fact that I cannot shake. I can’t get it out of my head that a baby born in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Englewood is expected to live 30 years less than a baby born on the same day in the predominantly white, and more wealthy, neighborhood of Streeterville downtown. That is a difference of six miles—and 30 years.
The promise of abolition, a healed and equal society, has not yet been realized. And we can only get there by working together with friends, community, and in solidarity.
This disparity of life expectancy is a combination of a multitude of factors of which racial identity is one, but it boils down to this: a Black baby born in one part of our nation’s third largest city is less likely to enjoy as long and healthy a life as a white baby born a few miles away. There is no way to imagine that this marks an equal society. Health disparities such as this one affect Native American communities and Latin communities across America, too.
Alongside health, consider gaps in education, earnings, and wealth between racial groups in the United States, in state after state. These, in the words of Douglass, remain among our “national inconsistencies.” Black Americans consistently enjoy fewer of the fruits of the republic than those of other racial and ethnic groups. To achieve true racial healing in America, to get the venom truly out of our system, requires us to keep at the work of racial equity.
The promise of abolition, a healed and equal society, has not yet been realized. And we can only get there by working together with friends, community, and in solidarity. At the MacArthur Foundation, we put this approach into practice each day as we collectively strive to lead with a commitment to justice. The progress we have made in the past, and any progress in the future, requires collaboration between people from all kinds of backgrounds.
Juneteenth is a call to do better as a nation, to create an America in which every child born today—no matter their race, their ethnicity, their gender, their neighborhood—has an equal chance to thrive. We remain a long way from that reality. No matter our race, we should do our part on the unfinished work of creating a free and equal society.
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UN Report Urges End to Forced US Prison Labor—a 'Contemporary Form of Slavery'
One of the U.N. experts who compiled the report after visiting the U.S. earlier this year said its findings "point to the critical need for comprehensive reform."
Sep 28, 2023
A report published Thursday by United Nations human rights experts condemns systemic racism in the U.S. criminal justice system and policing, while describing "appalling" prison conditions and decrying forced unpaid convict labor as a "contemporary form of slavery."
The U.N. International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in the Context of Law Enforcement report follows a visit to the U.S. earlier this year by a team of human rights experts. The U.N. officials collected testimonies from 133 affected people, visited five prisons and jails, and held meetings with advocacy groups and numerous government and police officials in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, and Washington, D.C.
"In all the cities we went to, we heard dozens of heartbreaking testimonies on how victims do not get justice or redress. This is not new, and it's unacceptable," Tracie Keesee, an expert member of the mechanism, said in a statement. "This is a systemic issue that calls for a systemic response."
"Law enforcement and criminal justice institutions in the United States share and reproduce values, attitudes, and stereotypes of U.S. society and institutions. These must be reformed."
The experts found that "racism in the U.S.—a legacy of slavery, the slave trade, and 100 years of legalized apartheid that followed slavery's abolition—continues to exist today in the form of racial profiling, police killings, and many other human rights violations."
The report cites instances of prisoners locked away in solitary confinement—widely recognized as a form of psychological torture—for a decade or longer, children sentenced to life in prison, and pregnant inmates chained during childbirth, "who due to the chaining, lost their babies."
"All these practices—including shackling pregnant women before, during, and after labor—are an affront to human dignity and the best interest of the child," the report states. "Instruments of restraint shall never be used on women during labor, during childbirth, and immediately after childbirth, in accordance with the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners," also known as the Nelson Mandela Rules.
The experts were "astonished" that forced unpaid or poorly paid convict labor "exists to this day in the United States, constituting a contemporary form of slavery." The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude, "except as punishment for crime," and congressional efforts to close the loophole have been unsuccessful.
The report notes:
The delegation received shocking information over "plantation-style" prisons in Southern states, in which contemporary forms of slavery are reported. Commonly known as "Angola," the Louisiana State Penitentiary occupies an 18,000-acre former slave plantation, larger than the island of Manhattan. The plantation prison soil worked by incarcerated labor today is the same soil worked by slaves before the Civil War. Angola currently houses nearly 5,000 adult men, the majority of them Black men, forced to labor in the fields (even picking cotton) under the watch of white "freemen" on horseback, in conditions very similar to those of 150 years ago. The mechanism received direct testimonies from Angola victims and allegations of children being transferred to this prison, held in solitary confinement, and in general under appalling detention conditions.
Earlier this month, a federal judge ordered Louisiana officials to stop imprisoning children on Angola's former death row by September 15.
Addressing the more than 1,000 people killed annually by U.S. law enforcement officers—only 1% of which result in the killer being criminally charged—the report warns that such killings will continue unless police use of force regulations are aligned with international standards.
"We reject the 'bad apple' theory," There is strong evidence suggesting that the abusive behavior of some individual police officers is part of a broader and menacing pattern," said mechanism expert member Juan Méndez. "Law enforcement and criminal justice institutions in the United States share and reproduce values, attitudes, and stereotypes of U.S. society and institutions. These must be reformed."
To that end, the report contains a lengthy list of over 30 recommendations, including:
- Fully implementing the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights' four-point agenda for transformative change for racial justice and equality;
- Tackling poverty and lack of quality education, employment opportunities, healthcare, adequate housing, and other human rights violations as a way to combat systemic racism;
- Adopting a human rights-based approach to policing and a national strategy—including legislation—to reduce killings by law enforcement;
- Eliminating all racial profiling;
- Creating an effective nationwide record system of individuals under investigation or found criminally or administrative guilty for police misconduct;
- Removing police from schools in favor of alternatives, including counselors, social workers, nurses, and mental health professionals;
- Adopting an immigration system with a human rights-based approach and addressing systemic racism within the ranks of immigration authorities;
- Ending the "War on Drugs" and adopting a human rights-based approach to drug policies, in part by decriminalizing low-level drug offenses;
- Reducing and strictly regulating militarized police and "no knock" entries;
- Abolishing the death penalty, "death by incarceration" sentencing, and the charging of children as adults;
- Exercising clemency powers in favor of condemned prisoners, people serving sentences beyond life expectancy, and those who were convicted for confessions under torture—especially children;
- Strictly regulating solitary confinement and other forms of restrictions in detention in accordance with international standards;
- Eliminating free or poorly paid prison labor; and
- Reducing former felon disenfranchisement.
"Our findings," said Méndez, "point to the critical need for comprehensive reform."
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Dear Gov. DeSantis: You're a History Grad. Please Tell Me When Systemic Racism Ended
Greater unity around a shared understanding of history is exactly what DeSantis fears. Maybe all those history courses taught him that—though he clearly learned the wrong lesson.
Feb 27, 2023
When Ron DeSantis was asked by a Fox News host two years ago if the United States is “systemically racist,” the Florida governor quickly responded: “It’s a bunch of horse manure.” He went on to boast that he had banned such ideas in Florida’s schools.
Boisterously banning books, educational curricula and college programs that address racism or LGBTQ dignity – or both (with added bigotry toward writers like James Baldwin and Audre Lorde) – DeSantis is building his national “anti-woke” profile as he seems to be readying a presidential campaign against his former hero Donald Trump.
DeSantis is a Yale history and Harvard law graduate, who taught high-school history after Yale. Even DeSantis probably agrees that U.S. slavery was systemic racism. And I’m somewhat certain he agrees that legally enforced Jim Crow racial discrimination in the U.S. South was systemic racism, including Florida’s toxic racial-oppression-by-law that lasted for 100 years after the Civil War.
As late as 1967, sixty miles from where DeSantis would later grow up, this law was enacted by the city of Sarasota, Florida:
"Whenever members of two or more…races shall…be upon any public…bathing beach within the corporate limits of the City of Sarasota, it shall be the duty of the Chief of police or other officer…in charge of the public forces of the City...with the assistance of such police forces, to clear the area involved of all members of all races present."
Gov. DeSantis, who dislikes questioning from actual journalists (as opposed to Fox News hosts), seems bent on riding white fragility, anger and grievance into the White House. He should be confronted at every opportunity to answer a simple question: If it’s currently “horse manure,” when did systemic racism end in our country?
If his answer is 1964, when Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act, DeSantis should be directed to Sarasota’s 1967 city ordinance. If his answer is that it ended with the 2008 election of biracial Barack Obama, he should be asked to explain persistent patterns of racial discrimination that outlived the Obama presidency.
For example: racial segregation in housing and wide-ranging barriers to black home ownership like redlining and predatory bank lending. That’s also systemic racism and it’s happened in both North and South -- as Newsday showed recently in its exhaustive study of discrimination faced by minority potential homeowners on Long Island, New York.
Today, racially segregated neighborhoods lead to segregated schools, with people of color systemically offered inferior educational opportunities. The highest percentage of predominantly single-race schools in the 2020/21 school year were found not in the South, but in the Northeast and Midwest, according to a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Environmental racism is long-standing and enduring in our country as pollution and cancer-causing industries hit communities of color disproportionately, causing death and disease – compounded by pervasive racial disparities in the provision of medical care.
DeSantis hopes to run for president as a “law-and-order” candidate with the endorsements of police unions. He should be asked about criminal justice and police practices that systematically treat black citizens and other people of color differently and worse than whites. That’s a present-day problem, as shown in study after study across the country. After the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, for example, the U.S. Justice Department investigated the Ferguson, Missouri, police department and found that racial bias and the city’s need for revenue resulted in routine Constitutional violations that disproportionately affected African Americans – with officers “stopping people without reasonable suspicion, arresting them without probably cause, and using unreasonable force against them.”
When DeSantis was reelected governor last November in a landslide, he received only 13 percent of the black vote, according to exit polls. I’ve been spending my winters in Florida, where it’s hard not to see black poverty, despair, and segregated neighborhoods. Yet DeSantis looks away.
When I attended public elementary and middle schools in Detroit in the 1960s, we didn’t learn much of any black history. Today’s champions of white victimhood claim that the teaching of ethnic history and ongoing/systemic racism stokes guilt feelings among white students and anger between students of different racial groups. If we’d had such teaching back in Detroit, I think it would have indeed prompted anger among black and white students -- not at each other, but at the persistent patterns of racism in our country . . . with many motivated to activism.
But greater unity around a shared understanding of history is exactly what DeSantis fears. He’s a divide-and-conquer politician, in the tradition of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and he has the Ivy League degrees to prove it.
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DC Bishop 'Outraged' by Trump Clearing Protests With Tear Gas and Using Bible as a Prop for Church Photo Op
"Everything he has said and done is to inflame violence," the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde said of the president.
Jun 02, 2020
President Donald Trump had police violently disperse peaceful protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets on Monday night so he could threaten to deploy the military to U.S. cities from the Rose Garden and then walk to the nearby St. John's Episcopal Church for a photo op--moves sharply condemned by the bishop who oversees the church.
"Everything he has said and done is to inflame violence... We need moral leadership, and he's done everything to divide us."
--Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde
"I am the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and was not given even a courtesy call that they would be clearing [the area] with tear gas so they could use one of our churches as a prop," the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde told the Washington Post.
"Everything he has said and done is to inflame violence," Budde said of the president, who threatened to use force to quash ongoing protests against police brutality and systemic racism. "We need moral leadership, and he's done everything to divide us."
Trump's speech and subsequent stunt outside the church--along with the swift backlash it provoked--came as demonstrations erupted around the world over the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, in Minneapolis and the long history of discrimination and violence by U.S. law enforcement.
Budde denounced Trump's photo op--in which he held up a Bible and gathered with members of his administration outside the church--in a series of Monday night television appearances.
"Let me be clear: The president just used a Bible, the most sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and one of the churches of my diocese without permission as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and everything that our churches stand for," Budde said on CNN.
"And to do so... he sanctioned the use of tear gas by police officers in riot gear to clear the churchyard," she added. "I am outraged."
In an appearance on MSNBC, Budde said she found it "deeply offensive" that Trump used the chuch as a backdrop and the Bible as a prop, saying that the sacred text "call[s] upon us to love God and love neighbor... proclaims every human being to be a beloved child of God, and exhorts us to live lives of peace and justice."
In her position, Budde oversees more than 80 Episcopal congregations, including St. John's. In a written statement to the Post, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, head of the Episcopal denomination, also denounced Trump's behavior.
Curry accused the president of using "a church building and the Holy Bible for partisan political purposes." He added that "this was done in a time of deep hurt and pain in our country, and his action did nothing to help us or to heal us."
"The prophet Micah taught that the Lord requires us to 'do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God,'" Curry wrote. "For the sake of George Floyd, for all who have wrongly suffered, and for the sake of us all, we need leaders to help us to be 'one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.'"
Less than 24 hours after the controversial Monday night appearance, the president was scheduled to visit the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Northeast Washington with First Lady Melania Trump on Tuesday morning before returning to the White House to sign an executive order on religious freedom.
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What the Academy Awards Tell Us About the Value of Black Work
Feb 28, 2016
What's the value of an Academy Award?
It's a question I've been mulling over ever since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences--the revered gatekeepers of America's film industry--announced the nominees for their 88th Academy Awards ceremony, also known as the Oscars. In a bold feat of tone-deafness (read: overt racism), the Academy chose not to nominate a single Black actor in any of their four acting categories--again.
I wasn't surprised by the Academy's casual racism in refusing to recognize Black performers at this year's ceremony. Hollywood's diversity problems aren't new. The fact that there are still people who blithely question whether Black performances are even worthy of recognition speaks to the existence of pervasive bigotry within the institution. It's why Black people (along with other historically marginalized communities) have banded together to create our own institutions to recognize our work: without celebrations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Image Awards--and yes, even the BET Awards--daring to uplift Black performers in Hollywood, where else could we go to applaud and honor our stars?
What did surprise me was how some high-profile individuals like Helen Mirren, instead of grappling with the issue of the Academy's accountability to Black actors, blamed this year's lack of Black nominees on broader race and power dynamics within the industry. The Academy's lack of racial sensitivity, she argued, is a symptom of a deeply engrained culture of racial bias that disadvantages Black professionals; as a result, one should not read racist intent into the Academy's nomination decisions.
It isn't entirely wrong to deflect blame onto the wider industry. As many have rightly pointed out, industry diversity starts in the boardrooms, where casting and business decisions get made. But in our hurry to write off the Oscars' diversity problems as the logical byproduct of Hollywood's ubiquitous racism, we shouldn't dismiss the Academy's distinct responsibility to recognize Black artists. More than mere pageantry, the Oscars award ceremony represents an issue of economic justice because of its role as a public evaluation of people in the film industry. Neither the Academy nor the Oscars operate in a vacuum; the Oscars are where Hollywood ascribes value to the artistic and cultural experiences that move and define us and, by proxy, the performers who embody these stories.
Moreover, the awards aren't just a competition for cultural value: they double as an assessment tool that helps pick the industry's economic winners and losers--in full view of the adoring public. While mainstream recognition from an institution like the Academy is not necessary to validate the contributions and experiences of Black performers, it still carries significant implications for the economic realities of the movie industry. Because the vast majority of Black artists don't receive the same opportunities for exposure as their white counterparts, they aren't given access to the same springboard that launches other workers in the industry. For the working actor, the value of an Academy Award is concrete: increased exposure to the best directors, casting agents, and managers, combined with greater leverage for higher pay and more favorable working conditions. Even receiving a nomination can make booking the next job and sustaining a career easier.
And as resilient as Black people are--Black entertainers especially--it is not enough for us to create spaces where we validate our work if those spaces do not wield the same access to economic opportunities. Dismantling systemic racism goes hand-in-hand with ending economic inequality, and it's imperative to the liberation of Black people that we tackle them in tandem. And so, we must fight for inclusion in mainstream spaces where our economic futures are at stake and create spaces for Black achievement to be validated in a way that honors and respects us.
The whitewashing of the Academy Awards presents a unique economic challenge to Black performers and other Black workers in the industry. In addition to shaking our fists at the intersecting systems of oppression that permeate Hollywood, we must call equal attention to the Academy's actions--precisely because they speak to a larger ethos for how Black work and Blackness go unrecognized and devalued within the film and more significant entertainment industry.
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Kalief Browder Took His Own Life, but the System Murdered Him
When Browder was 16, he was arrested on a charge of stealing a book bag—a charge he denied. He spent three years in Rikers Island jail without ever receiving a trial. On Saturday he killed himself.
Jun 12, 2015
Kalief Browder was murdered, in the first degree.
The papers will say that on Saturday, Browder, 22, walked into a room in his home, took the air conditioner out of a wall and hanged himself.
But this was a premeditated murder of spirit, innocence, youth and dreams, which began in the spring of 2010 when police stopped a then-teenage Kalief on his way home. They say he stole a book bag. He tells them he didn't. They search him and find nothing. They tell him to come down to the station with them to get it all straightened out. They tell him he will go home.
For three years, Browder sat behind bars in one of the toughest detention centers in America refusing to crack. He didn't take the book bag, and he wasn't copping to it. His parents couldn't afford the $10,000 bail to get him out, so for three years he waited for his day in court--and it never came. While in jail, Browder would be abused by guards, tormented by gangs and spend some 400 days in solitary confinement, and then, one day, without a trial, he was set free.
As if setting him free would make it right. The 400 days of solitary without a trial broke his innocence and stole his youth. The true thieves that night in 2010 were the police who stopped Browder on a New York City street. That was kidnapping. The young man taken that night from his neighborhood would never return.
There was a crime here. One perpetuated by a legal system that sees black men as objects for prison; police who see young black men and women as thugs who must have done something (see McKinney, Texas); correction officers who don't see teens as children but as hardened criminals.
At 16, Browder was still young enough to believe that the adults around him weren't all corrupt. He was still young enough to believe that there was a chance he would see his classmates again, maybe take the girl he'd been eyeing to the prom, maybe still have time to walk across the stage with his graduating class. Except his reality was the jail cell where he spent 23 hours a day, with mice creeping out at night, crawling over the thin bedsheet under which his young body couldn't find rest.
He would tell HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill that while in jail, he tried to commit suicide "five or six" times. That he had asked correction officers for help because he needed to speak to someone. He wasn't feeling right and wanted to be "stress-free." No one helped him.
Video of Browder's imprisonment would show two telling facts about his incarceration and his character: One video shows Browder being escorted from his cell by a correction officer, and the size difference is jarring. The visual shows the physical makeup of a grown man standing next to a child. In seconds, the video turns violent. Browder said he had only asked the officer why his cuffs were so tight, and the officer's response was to slam Browder down on the cold jailhouse floor.
A second video speaks volumes as to how hard Browder was willing to fight to make sense of it all.
While he was in jail, a gang leader spit on him. The video shows Browder's response. In a room full of kids all bigger than him, Browder walks up to the leader and punches him in the face. He delivers a few more blows before he is mobbed. On the ground, he curls himself into a ball until the kicking stops, and then he finds his way into another cell.
The gang is relentless; members threaten him through the glass square in the door of the cell. Browder doesn't back down. He checks his fists. Pats his hair down a bit and paces the small space, surely hopped up on adrenaline. One kid kicks the door in and the gang mobs him again.
When asked about the fight once on the outside, Browder stated only that if he had allowed the kid to spit on him, he would have been spit on every day.
I mention this only to illustrate that the pain Browder chose to endure that day was because for him, right was right. It was all black and white. He didn't steal the book bag, so he wasn't copping to it. He wouldn't tolerate being spit on, so he fought back.
The system is also black and white, and that is the reason it couldn't see Browder as a kid, or the book bag as a book bag. The book bag became right and Browder wrong, so without a trial, without a conviction, he was given the death penalty of three years in jail without even knowing it would be three years; just unending time in the box at the crux of manhood, too innocent to accept the gray parts that started taking shape.
No one looked at the boy in the cell or the years that had gone by and saw that he was changing, that his face had lost the fullness of his youth. In time, Browder was becoming something even he couldn't recognize anymore. No one saw the kid in pain, and in turn, by the time they let him go free, he was on the edge of manhood and the kid was off in the wind like a kite with no string, never to return home.
And I feel like I need to say this here because I have heard it mentioned too many times by some folks in the black community, and I can't let it rest: Suicide doesn't make you a punk. It isn't a testament to an absence of bravery. It is a final act of control when one is walking inside that dark place, a place that followed Browder like the mice in his cell, not allowing him rest.
He would tell the New Yorker how he felt once he was released.
"People tell me, because I have this case against the city, I'm all right," he told the magazine. "But I'm not all right. I'm messed up. I know that I might see some money from this case, but that's not going to help me mentally. I'm mentally scarred right now. That's how I feel. Because there are certain things that changed about me and they might not go back."
Kalief Browder's dreams were stolen, his youth taken one night on a New York street. His life turned into a room, barely bigger than his outstretched arms, and like a plant without sunshine, his innocence began to wither away, and there's nothing redeeming in this story. There is no silver lining. If you need something to take from this story, take this: The world can be a miserable place filled with sadness, and for some young black men, money, Rosie O'Donnell and even Jay Z can't make it right (and I'm not using their names as metaphors for mythical figures; they actually tried to make Browder's story right).
If you need a happy ending, look someplace else.
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