racial – Page 4

Curtis Flowers freed court ruled racial bias

4Apr

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IN OTHER NEWS

Curtis Flowers freed court ruled racial bias

Judge grants Mississippi man bail after six trials for same crime ended in mistrials or were overturned. A Mississippi man whose murder conviction was overturned by the US Supreme Court for racial bias was released from custody on Monday for the first time in 22 years. Curtis Flowers walked out of the regional jail in the central town of Louisville hours after a judge set his bond at $250,000. A person who wanted to remain anonymous posted $25,000, the 10 percent needed to secure Flowers's release, said his lawyer Rob McDuff. "It's been rough," Flowers said. "Taking it one day at a time, keeping God first - that's how I got through it." When asked another question, Flowers sighed, smiled and tossed his hands in the air. "I'm so excited right now, I can...

4Apr

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Two UConn students charged with shouting racial slur

Jarred Karal and Ryan Mucaj were charged with ridicule on account of creed, religion, colour or race, police say. The slurs were recorded by an African American student from an apartment window and posted on social media [EPA] Two University of Connecticut (UConn) students have been charged with shouting a racial slur outside a campus apartment complex in an episode that was caught on video and has led to protests at the school. Jarred Karal, of Plainville, and Ryan Mucaj, of Granby, both identified by police as 21-year-old white men, were charged Monday with ridicule on account of creed, religion, colour, denomination, nationality or race. The charge is a misdemeanour that carries a possible sentence of up to a year in prison. Phone and email me...

4Apr

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Racial Microaggressions Are Real. Here’s How to Navigate Them

Experts weigh in on ways to deal with microaggressions that don’t burden Black, Indigenous, and people of color who experience them daily. White people find my halo of gravity-defying hair irresistible to the touch. I don’t mind as long as they ask before they cop a feel, but they usually don’t. So after years of enduring this over familiarity from everyone from the stranger behind me in the checkout lane to a middle-aged male dental hygienist, I came up with a strategy. Now when that unbidden White hand starts creeping toward my head, mine starts creeping toward theirs. I go as far as they go. They usually flinch back, and then resignedly lean into my touch, laughing with recognition as their faux pas—their microaggression—sinks in. I laugh along with them—because let...

9Oct

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Journalism

Racial Profiling and the Loss of Black Boyhood

At 13, I was into chess and Dungeons and Dragons. That was the year I hit my growth spurt—and learned what it is to be seen not as a child, but as a threat. At 13, I had just hit my first growth spurt. I walked to and from junior high with friends. I walked the same path every day with the same guys. One sunny spring afternoon on our way home, a police car came from nowhere, jumped up on the curb, and blocked us off on the sidewalk. Shocked, we were stiff with fear when the two large armed and armored men stepped slowly from their squad car. White and clean-shaven as usual, they both had their hands already on their guns. They told us to stand against the wall. A couple of us tried to ask what was happening or what we’d done. They didn’t answer; they just kept asking, ...

Leveraging White Privilege for Racial Justice

4Apr

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SOCIAL JUSTICE

Leveraging White Privilege for Racial Justice

These White people aren’t just checking their privilege. They’re using it to bring about positive racial change. Social justice demands more now than we’re used to giving, and it isn’t only the responsibility of people of color to demand change. These White people are not just checking their privilege, they’re also leveraging it to bring about justice. Jane Elliott The morning after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968, Jane Elliott tried something new in her Iowa classroom. “I exposed 26 third-grade students to an exercise in discrimination based on the color of their eyes,” she says. This became known as the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise, and has been demonstrated as an effective tool to teach children about racism. Racism could be learned, she realized, and ...

4Apr

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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 Distric...

Remembering Our History of Racial Injustice Through Soil

28Feb

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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 lynchi...

4Apr

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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 p...

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

15Nov

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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 ...

27Dec

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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 s...