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4a82cd7
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"...After all, acknowledging unfairness then calls decent people forth to correct those injustices. And since most persons are at their core, decent folks, the need to ignore evidence of injustice is powerful: To do otherwise would force whites to either push for change (which they would perceive as against their interests) or live consciously as hypocrites who speak of freedom and opportunity but perpetuate a system of inequality.
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racism
hypocricy
george-zimmerman
trayvon-martin
black-and-white
black-history
privilege
white-privilege
race-relations
willful-ignorance
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Tim Wise |
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026267f
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Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say - that American propserity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.
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wealth
wealth-gap
wealth-management
white-guilt
institutionalized-racism
reparations
wealth-creation
whiteness
black-history
us-history
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cff571a
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For here you were, Big James, named for me--you were a big baby, I was not--here you were, to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.
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world
strength
love
loveless
black-history
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James Baldwin |
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6066335
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In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land values at tends of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism.
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institutional-oppression
slave-economy
kleptocracy
institutionalized-racism
land-ownership
american-history
black-history
us-history
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0ce5ed6
|
[whiteness] has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white--Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish--and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies. The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury.
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racism
blackness
whiteness
american-history
black-history
racism-in-america
race
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8ac767a
|
Those Garveyites I knew could never understand why I liked them but would never follow them, and I pitied them too much to tell them that they could never achieve their goal, that Africa was owned by the imperial powers of Europe, that their lives were alien to the mores of the natives of Africa, that they were people of the West and would for ever be so until they either merged with the West or perished.
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back-to-africa-movement
garveyites
black-history-month
black-history
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Richard Wright |
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23e1416
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The white economic and political elite often failed to recognize blacks as American, just as blacks often failed to recognize their potential for advancement outside of the limited opportunities afforded them by whites.
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black-history
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W.E.B. Du Bois |
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e7f421d
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To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting American's origins in a slavery economy is patriotism a la carte.
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slavery
freedom
black-history
us-history
slavery-in-the-united-states
democracy
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a3a82d5
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In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy.
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jim-crow
jim-crow-laws
kleptocracy
mississippi-history
segregation
black-history
us-history
mississippi
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8b5867c
|
Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state.
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|
19th-century
mississippi-history
1968
lynching
american-history
black-history
us-history
mississippi
20th-century
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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47851e8
|
"The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards' code of ethics warned that "a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood ... any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values." A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesireables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters - and "a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites." The federal government concurred. It was the How Owners' Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant - a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods. "For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace," the historian Kenneth R. Jackson wrote in his 1985 book, Crabgrass Frontier, a history of suburbanization. "Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees." Redlining was not officially outlawed until 1968, by the Fair Housing Act. By then the damage was done - and reports of redlining by banks have continued."
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housing-loans
real-estate-history
redlining
housing-discrimination
mortgage
institutionalized-racism
real-estate
loans
segregation
black-history
us-history
mortgages
property
housing
discrimination
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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63f4272
|
In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.
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housing-discrimination
lending
mortgage
american-history
black-history
us-history
housing
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cf81a39
|
THE NEXT DAY WAS RAIN-SOAKED and smelled of thick sweet caramel, warm coconut and ginger. A nearby bakery fanned its daily offerings. A lapis lazuli sky was blanketed by gunmetal gray clouds as it wept crocodile tears across the parched Los Angeles landscape. When Ivy was a child and she overheard adults talking about their break-ups, in her young feeble-formed mind, she imagined it in the most literal of essences. She once heard her mother speaking of her break up with an emotionally unavailable man. She said they broke up on 69th Street. Ivy visualized her mother and that man breaking into countless fragments, like a spilled box of jigsaw pieces. And she imagined them shattered in broken shards, being blown down the pavement of 69th Street. For some reason, on the drive home from Marcel's apartment that next morning, all Ivy could think about was her mother and that faceless man in broken pieces, perhaps some aspects of them still stuck in cracks and crevices of the sidewalk, mistaken as grit. She couldn't get the image of Marcel having his seizure out of her mind. It left a burning sensation in the center of her chest. An incessant flame torched her lungs, chest, and even the back door of her tongue. Witnessing someone you cared about experiencing a seizure was one of those things that scribed itself indelibly on the canvas of your mind. It was gut-wrenching. Graphic and out-of-body, it was the stuff that post traumatic stress syndrome was made of.
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sex
emotion
poetry
meaning
beauty
inspiration
humor
love
wisdom
black-authors
black-history
deity
literary-fiction
scorpios
valentine-s-day
wilmington
rebirth
prose
foodies
stress
knowledge
new-york
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Brandi L. Bates |