Ashley Akunna: On Lynching, Police Brutality, and Anti-Black Terrorism

Now This Opinions feature short but provocative videos offering real deal perspectives on controversial issues. I often appreciate them. But in the effort to make one clear point, the speaker sometimes has to leave out the broader context. And this frustrates me. I know that only so much can get said in a few short minutes (which is, unfortunately, all many viewers in the U.S. will give a topic, no matter how complicated or crucial). Yet, in my opinion, to leave out the context is to weaken the argument.

I am sharing the op-ed above because Ashley Akunna's voice is one that needs to be heard on lynching, police brutality, and anti-Black terrorism. But after watching it the first time, I broke into tears. Not because of what was said, but because expecting cops to have and demonstrate empathy for Black people sidesteps the point that most cops are not rogues operating individually or exceptionally.

Mwende "FreeQuency" Katwiwa: "The Joys of Motherhood"

Kai Davis: Fuck I Look Like?

I came to Louisiana for a nine-month temporary gig in August of 2007. So, by the time I finish this school year, I will have taught here for a decade. The day I arrived, I was told, "You will find our students lacking. They're under-prepared. They don't like to read. And they don't know that's a problem."

My thought at the time was, "Even if that's true, why would somebody say that to me on Day One? That's like calling students incapable before I even meet 'em." But it turned out that, by and large, I was being told the truth.

On the other hand, I eventually learned (on my own) that, while any low income student might demonstrate the traits I had been warned about and even students from families with money might have succumbed to the traits along the way, Black students, in particular, were the most likely to arrive as first year students looking and sounding like they fit the profile.

Then, I started dragging them to my office one at a time to explain the okey-doke. I assured them that, with a little input and a lot of effort -- despite the obstacles placed in front of them since birth -- they could build the boat while it was in the water and they were standing in it. Over the years, more than a few have proven me right.

The upshot is that, while many classes on the campus have two or three Black students at most in them, my classes tend to weigh in at 30% or better Black -- even the first year students who just arrived and are taking Intro courses with 90 students in them. It's not because I'm wonderful. It's because I tell them the truth. And I know who they are. And in the mirror of my face they see themselves succeeding. Because -- given a real shot -- they are ferociously ready to learn and ready to teach.

Jamilah King: 7 Ways Black People Still Aren't Free in America

This essay was originally published on mic.com

"What to the slave is the 4th of July?"

That's the question Frederick Douglass asked during a speech in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852. That speech, titled "The Meaning of July 4th to the Negro," is among Douglass' most famous public addresses in part because it focuses on the irony of a country celebrating its freedom while holding millions of people in bondage.

But there's another reason why Douglass' words still resonate 150 years later. It's that his fundamental question still remains. How are black people in America, still mired in institutional racism created by slavery and white supremacy, supposed to celebrate their country?

By no stretch of the imagination are black people still slaves in America. But the institutions created by slavery, namely white supremacy, still dictate black lives daily. Nowhere is this reality as stark today than in our criminal justice system.

Black people are imprisoned in exceptionally high numbers.

African-Americans make up one million of America's 2.3 million prisoners, according to the NAACP. They're incarcerated at a rate that's six times higher than that of whites. And those numbers have exploded since the 1970s, when America's War on Drugs exploded the country's overall prison population.

Black people are more likely to be arrested for nonviolent offenses.

As more and more people were sent to prison for drug-related crimes, black people fared worse than other groups. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, black people are 3.2% more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than their white peers, even though blacks and whites use the drug at similar rates.

Black people are more likely to be sentenced to death for crimes against white people.

Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, 80% of people who have been executed have been put to death for crimes against white people — even though blacks and whites are likely to be murder victims at roughly equal rates, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Black people are less likely to be judged by a jury of their peers in criminal trials.

Studies have found that racism is common in jury selection. The practice is so common that the Supreme Court ruled in May that a black man named Timothy Foster on death row in Georgia could be granted a new trial because he was convicted by an all-white jury. "Even after the undeniable evidence of discrimination was presented in this case, the Georgia courts ignored it and upheld Foster's conviction and death sentence," said Foster's lawyer, Stephen Bright after the Supreme Court's ruling.

Black children are more likely to be disciplined in school than their white peers.

The pipeline to prison starts early. Black children are more likely to be disciplined and suspended from school than their white peers starting as early as pre-school. That's the beginning of what experts call the school-to-prison pipeline, which slowly puts kids on the path to incarceration.

Each day, 500,000 people fill America's jails awaiting trial because they are too poor to afford bail. Most of them are black.

Americans are technically innocent until proven guilty, but hundreds of thousands of people sit in prison every day because they're too poor to afford bail. In 2013, a study from the Vera Institute found that 50% of people awaiting trial couldn't afford bail of $2,500 or less.

Even black men who do not have criminal records are less likely to be hired for jobs than white men who've been convicted of felonies.

While a criminal record can prevent a person from any race from having a fair shot at getting a job, one study found that even when a black man doesn't have a criminal record, he's less likely to be considered for certain positions than white men with felony convictions.

For black America, freedom isn't a guarantee of American citizenship.
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NOTE: Jamilah King is a senior staff writer at Mic, where she focuses on race, gender and sexuality. She was formerly senior editor at Colorlines, an award-winning daily news site dedicated to racial justice. Prior to Colorlines, Jamilah was associate editor of WireTap, an online political magazine for young adults. She's also a current board member of Women, Action and the Media (WAM!). Her work has appeared on Salon, MSNBC, the American Prospect, Al Jazeera, The Advocate, and in the California Sunday Magazine.

Fire!

This is what I woke up to on Facebook this morning -- a video of a fire that had been set in the Holman Correctional Center in Atmore, Alabama. And I'm sure most viewers in the United States will look at this, shrink back from the screen, and shake their heads, saying, "That's why they're in there. They're right where they belong. We don't want them out here with the rest of us..."

But I'm reminded of something I wrote for the Prisoners Digest International back in 1973 when the prison in McAlester, Oklahoma, went up in flames. I am reprinting it here dedicated to the men in the HCC who are, I'm sure, this morning suffering greatly and as far as I'm concerned through no fault of their own.

"The Fire"
by Becky Hensley, SRM, EcD
(PDI, Vol. 3, Issue 3 - 8/1/73)

"Burn, baby, burn!" and the smoke rolled out -- for forty miles you could see it touch the clouds. "Those animals," says Mrs. Johnson, six miles down the road. "They're burning tax dollars of hard-working citizens!"

They're burning your heart, not your cash, Mrs. J. They would set you on fire along with the "overworked" attorneys and underpaid prisoners' rights groups and pompous, phony legislators and silent ex-prisoners and uncaring mothers and hot-pantied girl friends and all the rest of those millions of hard-working, tax-paying citizens who sit on their hands 'cause it feels so good and suck Uncle Sam's tit when they can't reach his crotch.

Sit down, thirty-one-sixty-nine-twelve, you're trying to thaw out a freezer with a three-thousand-mile diameter. Why can't you learn to sit on your hands, too? Society wants you. It has big plans for its prisoners...

Listen to the smoke, folks. Listen to the smoke go forty miles or forty years or forty more lives -- you do remember Attica? How strange. Then how many Christs will it take to satisfy the God of the People? How many nails can you drive into somebody's brain before you puke, Mrs. Johnson? Two? Ten? A thousand? Maybe more! You have a strong stomach, America, but a weak backbone.

What color is smoke made of tears, made of pain, made of law-ful petitions to unlawful courts, made of unanswered letters, made of waiting for, waiting for, waiting for waiting?

Is it the same color as the smoke belched unendingly out of the chimneys of the corporation factories and collecting in the lungs of our children? Is it the same color as the smoke that hung over Watts and Cleveland and Dante's Inferno? Is it the same color as the smoke that always exists where the plague has struck when the dead are burned with everything they touched in their dying?

Is our Spirit so dead that the flames can't ignite it? Does anyone think for a minute ole thirty-one-sixty-nine-twelve wants to die? Does anyone think for a minute that fire was started by animals? There is blood on your hands, Mrs. Johnson. There is blood on my hands. We started that fire and it won't be put out until we put it out.

S-he whose Spirit does not burn will lose their bodies to the flames and finally get just what they earn with sniveling, groveling, sweetheart games.

Play on, America -- McAlester Atmore burns.

Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux: "Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement"

Charles E. Cobb (left) and Danielle L. McGuire

Originally published in The American Prospect.

On his first visit to Martin Luther King Jr.’s house in Montgomery, Alabama, the journalist William Worthy began to sink into an armchair. He snapped up again when nonviolent activist Bayard Rustin yelled, “Bill, wait, wait! Couple of guns on that chair!” Worthy looked behind him and saw two loaded pistols nestled on the cushion. “Just for self-defense,” King said.

In his new book, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, Charles E. Cobb, a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a visiting professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, explores what he sees as one of the movement’s forgotten contradictions: Guns made it possible. According to Cobb, civil-rights leaders recognized that armed resistance was sometimes necessary to preserve their peaceful mission. Guns kept people like King alive.

Danielle L. McGuire, an assistant professor of history at Wayne State University, argues that armed self-defense was also far more common for black women in the South than has generally been acknowledged. In her 2010 book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance, McGuire contends that the decision by women to combat sexual abuse and violence—sometimes with force—was one of the sparks that led to the modern civil-rights movement.

On the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer [in 2014], McGuire and Cobb discuss the legacies of nonviolent resistance and community organizing—and how hidden histories complicate familiar narratives about the civil-rights movement.

On Baltimore, Just So You Know

Dizzy Wright: "I Need Answers" featuring Kikkiya

Brit Bennett: "I Don't Know What To Do With Good White People"

Re-posted from Jezebel (12/17/14):

I don't know what to do with good white people.

I've been surrounded by good white people my whole life. Good white people living in my neighborhood, who returned our dog when he got loose; good white teachers in elementary school who pushed books into my hands; good white professors at Stanford, a Bay Area bastion of goodwhiteness, who recommended me M.F.A. programs where I met good white writers, liberal enough for a Portlandia sketch.

I should be grateful for this. Who, in generations of my family, has ever been surrounded by so many good white people? My mother was born to sharecroppers in Louisiana; she used to measure her feet with a piece of string because they could not try on shoes in the store. She tells me of a white policeman who humiliated her mother by forcing her to empty her purse on the store counter just so he could watch her few coins spiral out.