Friday, March 7

Tag: black

Racism and the black hole of gun control in the US
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Journalism

Racism and the black hole of gun control in the US

Would tighter gun laws help protect African Americans or make them more vulnerable to racism and police brutality? I will never forget the day in eighth grade when my friend pointed a pistol at my face and pulled the trigger. I am old enough now that many of my childhood memories have faded into blurry black and white pictures, but 30 years later, that scene is a vivid colour film in my memory. I can see the smirk in his brown eyes as he points the pistol at my forehead, the slightly blue shimmer of the metal in the afternoon light, the way that the flat side of the barrel reached a nipple of an opening, suddenly curving inward, and the explosion of sound as he pulled the trigger. Time stretches in moments like these, and as time expanded before me, I thoug...
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Sick of Black Friday? Help others Buy Nothing
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SELF

Sick of Black Friday? Help others Buy Nothing

In 1992, the Seinfeld episode “The Pitch” featured this conversation between the main characters: JERRY: And it’s about nothing? GEORGE: Everybody’s doing something, we’ll do nothing. JERRY: So, we go into NBC, we tell them we’ve got an idea for a show about nothing. A show about nothing may seem ludicrous, but what about a Black Friday that involves making no purchases? Yet, the Buy Nothing Project, founded in 2013, is a contrasting movement in an era when Black Friday is viewed as a day to buy everything. The Facebook-anchored project focuses on sharing existing items with others as a way to: ‒ Get to know neighbors and others within a community. ‒ Keep unwanted items from ending up in a landfill. ‒ Meet specific needs of others. ‒ Provide gently used or new items that can be given a...
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Democrats Need Black Women Voters Now More Than Ever
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POLITICS

Democrats Need Black Women Voters Now More Than Ever

Turnouts demonstrate that when we are effectively engaged, our work can make seemingly impossible victories possible. Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro caused a stir last week when he remarked that it’s time to change the order of the primary states in presidential elections. The current schedule puts first two of the Whitest states in the country, Iowa and New Hampshire. Neither is demographically “reflective of the United States as a whole, certainly not reflective of the Democratic Party,” Castro said. After that MSNBC interview, Castro furthered those comments to other media outlets. He told Rolling Stone, if Democrats don’t elevate voters of color, “Why the hell are we Democrats in the first place?” To Vogue, he said, “We can’t go around thanking Black w...
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A New Generation of Black Farmers Is Returning to the Land
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IMPACT

A New Generation of Black Farmers Is Returning to the Land

They are working to repair harm inflicted over the past 400 years, with an eye toward reparations. “Imagine your neighbor stole your cow. A few weeks later the neighbor comes over, laden with remorse, to offer a sincere apology and a promise to make it right. The neighbor offers to atone by giving you half a pound of butter every week for the rest of the cow’s life. What do you think of that?” The challenge was issued by Ed Whitfield, board member of the Southern Reparations Loan Fund, during the E.F. Schumacher Center lectures in 2018. His audience was unanimous in its response: “We would want our cow back!” And the United Nations agrees. The UN Principles on Reparations and Immunity, which provides basic guiding principles around gross human rights violations, holds t...
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GI Bill opened doors to college for many vets, but politicians created a separate one for Black people
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EDUCATION

GI Bill opened doors to college for many vets, but politicians created a separate one for Black people

When President Franklin Roosevelt signed the GI Bill into law on June 22, 1944, it laid the foundation for benefits that would help generations of veterans achieve social mobility. Formally known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, the bill made unprecedented commitments to the nation’s veterans. For instance, it provided federal assistance to veterans in the form of housing and unemployment benefits. But of all the benefits offered through the GI Bill, funding for higher education and job training emerged as the most popular. More than 2 million veterans flocked to college campuses throughout the country. But even as former service members entered college, not all of them accessed the bill’s benefits in the same way. That’s because white southern politicians designed the distr...
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Black Trans Women Are Being Killed. Could Paying Them Help Stop This?
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Journalism

Black Trans Women Are Being Killed. Could Paying Them Help Stop This?

A little more financial security could make the difference between life and death for these women, who are often relegated to the margins of society. One of the more under reported trends in the LGBTQ community is the high rate at which trans people, especially Black trans women, are murdered. In 2018, 26 trans people were killed, most of them people of color. And at least 20 trans or gender nonconforming women of color have been murdered in the United States as of November 2019 alone. Those numbers do not account for unreported and misreported murders, or trans people who have unexpectedly died under suspicious circumstances, but whose deaths have not been determined to be homicide. While the number of individual deaths is low, Mic’s “Unerased: Counting Transgender Lives...
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Trump calls on black voters to reject Democrats, says impeachment ‘failing fast’
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POLITICS

Trump calls on black voters to reject Democrats, says impeachment ‘failing fast’

President Trump appealed to black voters Friday to support his reelection campaign, saying that Democrats in Congress are wasting their time on an impeachment effort that’s “failing fast” instead of working to improve black communities. “Imagine if Democrats just put 10% of the energy they devote to attacking me and my administration to instead making this a better country for African American citizens,” Mr. Trump told a largely black audience in Atlanta. The president said Democrats and the media are pushing “the deranged, hyper-partisan impeachment witch hunt, a sinister effort to nullify the ballots of 63 million patriotic Americans.” “It’s not happening, by the way, that’s failing,” Mr. Trump said of impeachment. “It’s failing fast, it’s all a hoax.” Mr. Trump spoke to the largely ...
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Journalism

Black folks get quizzed on the Civil Rights Act of 1866

Byron Allen’s racial discrimination case will be heard in the Supreme Court on November 12th. The media mogul who owns Entertainment Studios, The Weather Channel and theGrio, alleges that Comcast Corp. and Charter Communications are discriminating against him due to being a Black man. This factor is in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which prohibits racial discrimination in contracting. Due to an amicus brief filed by Comcast, the case has gone from being about Allen’s racial discrimination allegations to challenging the entire Civil Rights Act of 1866. According to legal experts, Comcast’s interpretation of the law would require plaintiffs to prove discrimination was the sole reason they were denied business or contracts. Allen has explained this case is bigger than his perso...
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Buffalo Wild Wings asks group to move seats because customer ‘didn’t want black people sitting near them’
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Journalism

Buffalo Wild Wings asks group to move seats because customer ‘didn’t want black people sitting near them’

A Buffalo Wild Wings near Chicago says it has fired multiple employees after a family claimed they were asked to move tables over another customer's "racist" remarks. Mary Vahl and her family were celebrating a child's birthday at the restaurant chain last week when the alleged incident occurred. Just as their group — the majority of whom were African American — was about to be seated, a staff member asked them if they could move to a new section, due to the request of some "regular customers." "A couple of minutes went by and the host went up to my husband and asked 'what race are you guys?'" Vahl wrote in a now-viral Facebook post describing the encounter. Mary's husband, Justin Vahl, told the Washington Post that he asked the host why their race mattered. The employee responded by sa...
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Oprah’s Book Club Changed the Game and Created a New World for Black Readers
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IN OTHER NEWS

Oprah’s Book Club Changed the Game and Created a New World for Black Readers

When Colson Whitehead got the call, he’d just landed in North Carolina to do a reading at Duke. He was still on the plane when, he told the Guardian, “I called [my agent] back and she said, ‘Oprah.’ I said, ‘Shut the front door,’ because I didn’t want to curse. She said, ‘Oprah book club.’ I said, ‘Motherfucker.’” Whitehead’s sixth novel, The Underground Railroad, getting chosen by Oprah was a door opening, or really more one blasting open—and Whitehead clearly knew it. Oprah’s stamp of approval on your book can make your career, massively boost your book sales, and get your book into the mainstream like really nothing else can, even a Nobel Prize. I mean, look at Toni Morrison. While I want to be clear that she is a literary genius whose impact was immense long before she got popular att...
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