Tag: racial

IN OTHER NEWS

US court tosses black man’s murder conviction over racial bias

Supreme Court tosses out Curtis Flowers's conviction in sixth trial of 1996 murders, citing racial bias. Curtis Giovanni Flowers, left, listens to testimony in his third capital murder trial [Winona Times/Dale Gerstenslager/AP Photo] The United States Supreme Court on Friday threw out the murder conviction and death sentence for a black man in Mississippi because of a prosecutor's efforts to keep African Americans off the jury. The defendant already has been tried six times and now could face a seventh trial. The removal of black prospective jurors deprived inmate Curtis Flowers of a fair trial, the court said in a 7-2 decision written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The long record of Flowers's trials stretching back more than 20 years shows District Attorney...
Journalism

Remembering Our History of Racial Injustice Through Soil

The Equal Justice Initiative is using soil to document the lynchings of more than 4,400 African-descended people between 1877 and 1950. In July 1898, a Black ice cream vendor by the name of John Henry James was accused of assaulting a White woman just west of Charlottesville, Virginia. He was dragged off a moving train by an angry mob, hanged from the branch of a locust tree near the train tracks, and shot multiple times. This past summer, 120 years later, John Henry James was taken on a pilgrimage from Charlottes­ville to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, which memorializes the victims of racial violence in the United States. James, symbolically represented by a jar filled with soil collected at the site of his lynching, ...
IN OTHER NEWS

How Funding Black Businesses Can Help Bridge the Racial Wealth Gap

The Runway Project is making entrepreneurship more accessible to Black communities. Richmond, California, native April Fenall didn’t grow up with aspirations of becoming an entrepreneur. But upon moving from Sacramento back to the Bay Area in 2015, she couldn’t find work. A past conviction—even though it had been expunged from her record—and severe scoliosis made it difficult to find gainful employment. So she became an entrepreneur out of necessity. “I wasn’t able to show up as my complete self,” Fenall said, referring to her struggle to integrate into the workforce. “And I made an assumption that other people were probably encountering the same thing, of having all of these different identities that make up a whole person but not being able to show up as that whole perso...
Journalism

Why Co-ops and Community Farms Can’t Close the Racial Wealth Gap

Circulating local dollars can’t create wealth when there’s not enough to begin with. Residents of one Detroit historic neighborhood have been looking forward to next year’s opening of a food co-op. It will help bring to market produce from a community farm and is part of a larger community development project that will include a health food cafe, an incubator kitchen for food entrepreneurs, and space for events. The project expects to employ 20 people from the mostly low- to moderate-income area. Twenty jobs may not seem like a lot when unemployment in the approximately 80 percent Black city is 8.7 percent, twice that of state and national rates. But this is what economic progress generally looks like in many Black communities: cooperative ventures such as grocery stores and ...
Journalism

9 Essential Reads For Your Racial Justice Conversations

By now we know that racism is a discussion that everyone needs to have, yet it’s easy to become overwhelmed by it all. These discussions can challenge what we know. There is still much we don’t know about each other and the impact of race and racism in our homes, our schools, our workplaces, our local governments. Many of our families and communities are simply microcosms of the greater society that often miseducates us. When we enter school, we learn about the fact of slavery but too often without context or judgment. We don’t learn about the resistance movements. Or the full stories of Nat Turner or John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth. This is changing slowly. Small groups of people of all racial backgrounds are discovering the centuries of literature that do tell these stor...
Help Stop Racial Profiling and Move America Forward Together
SOCIAL JUSTICE

Help Stop Racial Profiling and Move America Forward Together

There are very many cases of racial profiling in this current era. However, not every individual is precise on the meaning of this highly sensitive term. Racial Profiling is the consideration of an individual's race when profiling any suspected criminal. In the United States of America, there are very many cases where people are grouped according to their country origins basing on neighborhoods too. As such, if there is a case of theft, people may have experienced some sort of criminal offense in their locality thereby causing the police to look in the given area where the people of similar origin live in. As Americans, we all need to help stop racial profiling and move America forward together. There are very many cases that have been happening recently which has led to some sort of divi...
SOCIAL JUSTICE

If Being Black is not a Crime: Why Does Racial Discrimination Exist in the Criminal Justice System?

Racial discrimination has been the main entrée at everyone's dinner table for the past decade. Nowadays, everyone has an opinion about racial discrimination; even researchers have agreed to disagree on many aspects of the question. While various researchers debate on the issue from various approaches, it is evident that racial discrimination is deeply-rooted in the criminal justice system. The term racial discrimination has been used interchangeably with the term "racial profiling," and the evidence is shown in prosecutorial convictions. Racial discrimination is the result of cumulative unethical practices that have not been properly addressed or redressed within the justice system.These presumed practices include but are not limited to racial profiling, disparity practices, unethical poli...