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Week One: Structural Racism

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The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates. And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today. — Deuteronomy 15: 12–15 — John Locke, “Second Treatise” By our unpaid labor and suffering, we have earned the right to the soil, many times over and over, and now we are determined to have it. — Anonymous, 1861 I.

Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. This was hardly unusual. ◤ RACISM VS PREJUDICE ◥ A Black Mississippi Judge's Breathtaking Speech To 3 White Murderers : Code Switch. U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves, for the Southern District of Mississippi. Courtesy of cleoinc.org hide caption toggle caption Courtesy of cleoinc.org Here's an astonishing speech by U.S. The speech is long; Reeves asked the young men to sit down while he read it aloud in the courtroom. One of my former history professors, Dennis Mitchell, recently released a history book entitled, A New History of Mississippi. Mississippi has expressed its savagery in a number of ways throughout its history — slavery being the cruelest example, but a close second being Mississippi's infatuation with lynchings.

Vivid accounts of brutal and terrifying lynchings in Mississippi are chronicled in various sources: Ralph Ginzburg's 100 Years of Lynching and Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, just to name two. In Without Sanctuary, historian Leon Litwack writes that between 1882 and 1968 an estimated 4,742 blacks met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs. Reeves is a U.S. Who the 'Model Minority' Stereotype Hurts Most. Published Online: August 4, 2015 Published in Print: August 5, 2015, as Why Reporting Data on Asian and Pacific Islander Students Matters Commentary By Peter T.

Keo In September, following its summer recess, Congress will continue debating a bipartisan overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The diversity of nearly 50 ethnic subgroups speaking more than 300 languages cannot be accurately captured in the use of the broad and single panethnic label "Asian. " The false labeling is even more pronounced when K-12 stakeholders compare white and Asian students with black, Hispanic, and Native students, especially when referring to the academic-achievement gap. —Getty Statistics from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency show that Laotian, Vietnamese, and Cambodian youths in Oakland, Calif., accounted for 68 percent of felony arrests among youths of the same age from 1991 to 2000.

But there's more. Poverty doesn't discriminate against skin color. Peter T. Back to Top. Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice. Racism alive and well in housing. (MoneyWatch) Racism is alive and well in the housing industry, even if it's much harder to spot. A new report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development shows that real estate and leasing agents do not show minority homebuyers and renters as many available properties as they do to white customers.

"Although we've come a long way from blatant, in-your-face housing injustice, racial discrimination still exists," said HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan. "Just because it's become less obvious doesn't mean that it's less harmful. " In the study, black, Hispanic, Asian and white home seekers called up housing agents and asked to set up an appointment to see advertised properties. These testers were all the same gender, the same age and all equally well-qualified to rent or own the properties.

But after that, not everyone was treated the same. In nearly all cases, whether renting or buying, minorities were told about and shown fewer properties than white people. The Racist Housing Policy That Made Your Neighborhood. Before you read this post, read Ta-Nehisi's Coates powerful case for reparations, our cover story this month. In it, TNC (as he is known around here) relentlessly demonstrates the "compounding moral debts" of discriminatory practices, especially around housing. One of the most heinous of these policies was introduced by the creation of the Federal Housing Administration in 1934, and lasted until 1968. Otherwise celebrated for making homeownership accessible to white people by guaranteeing their loans, the FHA explicitly refused to back loans to black people or even other people who lived near black people.

As TNC puts it, "Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived. " To understand the depth of the racism of these regulations, you have to read the descriptions of the grades that FHA gave to neighborhoods from A (green) to D (red). TNC focuses in on North Lawndale, a neighborhood in Chicago, to make his point. But it's a similar story across the country. No-Man’s-Land. DISCUSSED: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Kansas, Bonnets, “A Great Many Colored People,” Copper Gutters, Martin Luther King Jr., People Who Know Nothing about Gangs, Scalping, South Africa, Unprovoked Stabbing Sprees, Alarming Mass Pathologies, Chicago, Haunted Hot Dog Factories, Gangrene, Creatures from the Black Lagoon, Tree Saws, Headless Torsos, Quilts, Cheerleaders, Pet Grooming Stores, God “What is it about water that always affects a person?”

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote in her 1894 diary. “I never see a great river or lake but I think how I would like to see a world made and watch it through all its changes.” Forty years later, she would reflect that she had “seen the whole frontier, the woods, the Indian country of the great plains, the frontier towns, the building of the railroads in wild unsettled country, homesteading and farmers coming in to take possession.” She realized, she said, that she “had seen and lived it all….” It was a world made and unmade. And I did. Slavery’s Long Shadow. America is a much less racist nation than it used to be, and I’m not just talking about the still remarkable fact that an African-American occupies the White House. The raw institutional racism that prevailed before the civil rights movement ended Jim Crow is gone, although subtler discrimination persists. Individual attitudes have changed, too, dramatically in some cases. For example, as recently as the 1980s half of Americans opposed interracial marriage, a position now held by only a tiny minority.

Yet racial hatred is still a potent force in our society, as we’ve just been reminded to our horror. And I’m sorry to say this, but the racial divide is still a defining feature of our political economy, the reason America is unique among advanced nations in its harsh treatment of the less fortunate and its willingness to tolerate unnecessary suffering among its citizens. My own understanding of the role of race in U.S. exceptionalism was largely shaped by two academic papers. Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror | Equal Justice Initiative. Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror documents EJI’s multi-year investigation into lynching in twelve Southern states during the period between Reconstruction and World War II. EJI researchers documented 4075 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 – at least 800 more lynchings of black people in these states than previously reported in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date.

Lynching in America makes the case that lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation. Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials. This was not “frontier justice” carried out by a few marginalized vigilantes or extremists. The long, painful and repetitive history of how Baltimore became Baltimore. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images) Before there was a funeral and protest, then violence, curfews and canceled ballgames in Baltimore this week, there were other chapters in the life of this city that must be remembered.

Just a few years ago, Wells Fargo agreed to pay millions of dollars to Baltimore and its residents to settle a landmark lawsuit brought by the city claiming the bank unfairly steered minorities who wanted to own homes into subprime mortgages. Before that, there was the crack epidemic of the 1990s and the rise of mass incarceration and the decline of good industrial jobs in the 1980s. And before that? And before that — now if we go way back — there was redlining, the earlier corollary to subprime lending in which banks refused to lend at all in neighborhoods that federally backed officials had identified as having "undesirable racial concentrations. " A Home Owners Loan Corporation 1937 map of Baltimore shows the least desirable neighborhoods identified in red.

How railroads, highways and other man-made lines racially divide America’s cities. A racial dot map of the Washington, D.C. region. Courtesy of the University of Virginia Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. Like many metaphors, "the other side of the tracks" was originally a literal epithet. Blacks were often historically restricted to neighborhoods separated from whites by railroads, turning the tracks into iron barriers of race and class. In many cities, these dividing lines persist to this day — a reflection of decades of discriminatory policies and racism, but also of the power of infrastructure itself to segregate.

Look at racial maps of many American cities, and stark boundaries between neighboring black and white communities frequently denote an impassable railroad or highway, or a historically uncrossable avenue. Infrastructure has long played this role: reinforcing unspoken divides, walling off communities, containing their expansion, physically isolating them from schools or parks or neighbors nearby. [How race still influences where we choose to live] St. Department of Justice Ferguson Report Revealed. Despite the uncertainty surrounding the killing of Michael Brown, many black residents of Ferguson, Missouri, immediately thought that he was the victim of a wrongful death at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson, who shot him after a scuffle. This week, the Department of Justice concluded that there is no evidence to disprove Officer Wilson's claim that he feared for his life during the encounter. And the federal agency also presented context that explains why so many black residents assumed foul play and took to the streets in protest: For years, Ferguson's police force has meted out brutality, violated civil rights, and helped Ferguson officials to leech off the black community as shamelessly as would mafia bosses.

So far, a disproportionate amount of press attention has focused on racist emails circulated by Ferguson officials, causing two to be fired and one to be placed on leave. If you think those shortcomings disqualified him, think again. The report continues: For instance: Ahead of Ferguson anniversary, most blacks in U.S. say police have treated them unfairly, AP poll finds. WASHINGTON -- A majority of blacks in the United States - more than 3 out of 5 - say they or a family member have personal experience with being treated unfairly by the police, and their race is the reason why. This information, from a survey conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, comes as the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, approaches its first anniversary and the nation continues to grapple with police-related deaths of black Americans.

African-Americans said they felt especially targeted by the police. Half of black respondents, including 6 in 10 black men, said they personally had been treated unfairly by police because of their race, compared to 3 percent of whites. Another 15 percent said they knew of a family member who had been treated unfairly by the police because of their race. "It's been like this for a long time," Washington said. David A. "Everything is not right, but it's better," Thomas said.

Department of Justice Ferguson Report Revealed. The Racist Housing Policies That Built Ferguson. The Economic Policy Institute has just released a report by Richard Rothstein that gives some sense of how the world of Michael Brown came to be. It turns out that that world was born from the exact same forces that forged cities and suburbs across the country—racist housing policy at the local, state, and national levels. Rothstein's report eschews talk of mindless white flight, and black-hearted individual racists, and puts the onus exactly where it belongs: That governmental actions, not mere private prejudice, were responsible for segregating greater St.

Louis was once conventional informed opinion. In 1974, a three-judge panel of the federal Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that “segregated housing in the St. A lot of what's here—redlining, housing covenants, blockbusting, etc. At its peak in 1943 when civilian construction was limited, the FHA financed 80 percent of all private home construction nationwide. According to a study by the St.

And this is but one aspect. Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story. ‘The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning’ The decision not to release photos of the crime scene in Charleston, perhaps out of deference to the families of the dead, doesn’t forestall our mourning. But in doing so, the bodies that demonstrate all too tragically that “black skin is not a weapon” (as one protest poster read last year) are turned into an abstraction. It’s one thing to imagine nine black bodies bleeding out on a church floor, and another thing to see it.

The lack of visual evidence remains in contrast to what we saw in Ferguson, where the police, in their refusal to move Michael Brown’s body, perhaps unknowingly continued where Till’s mother left off. After Brown was shot six times, twice in the head, his body was left facedown in the street by the police officers. Whatever their reasoning, by not moving Brown’s corpse for four hours after his shooting, the police made mourning his death part of what it meant to take in the details of his story. Photo Anti-black racism is in the culture. For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education: Christopher Emdin: 9780807006405: Amazon.com: Books.

An Ivy League professor on why colleges don’t hire more faculty of color: ‘We don’t want them’ Marybeth Gasman (Photo by Darryl Moran) In “The five things no one will tell you about why colleges don’t hire more faculty of color,” a piece first published in the Hechinger Report, Marybeth Gasman took on a common question: Why aren’t college faculties more racially diverse? It’s a question gaining increased urgency from student protesters demanding change on campuses nationally. [Increasingly unified protests over race gain voice across the country] local grade-point Orlando Shooting Updates News and analysis on the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. post_newsletter348 follow-orlando true after3th false Grade Point newsletter News and issues affecting higher education.

Please provide a valid email address. Gasman is a professor of higher education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions and holds secondary appointments in history, Africana studies, and the School of Social Policy and Practice. Traffic Stop. Susan Burton: A New Way of Life. Michelle Alexander, The Age of Obama as a Racial Nightmare. Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex. Michelle Alexander: Locked Out of the American Dream. PRRAC - Symposium: Structural Racism. White America, It's Time to Be Uncomfortable and OK With It | Huffington Post. Fixing Institutional Racism in a Post-Racial Era.