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The Zinn Education Project is my compass in a sea of corporate textbooks, packaged common core curriculum and standardized testing. My entire curriculum is based on lessons that can be found on the Zinn Education Project.

High School Social Studies Teacher, Portland, Ore.

Your support is needed to help more students learn people's history. 100% of Zinn Education Project funding comes from individuals like you. Donate today.

By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

From voter ID laws to voter-roll purges, gerrymandering to poll closures to the deadly in-person voting conditions during a pandemic, the right to vote is under attack and the stakes are high. It is critical that students learn about the fight for voting rights, past and present.

Nov. 30, 1924: Shirley Chisholm Born...

Teaching About the Violence in Palestine and Israel...

I can UNDERSTAND pessimism, but I don't BELIEVE in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical EVIDENCE. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give HOPE, because for hope we don't need certainty, only POSSIBILITY.

-Howard Zinn

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Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

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The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people's history in middle and high school classrooms across the country. Based on the lens of history highlighted in Howard Zinn's best-selling book A People's History of the United States, the website offers free, downloadable lessons and articles organized by theme, time period, and reading level.

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Seeing the Water: Whiteness is Daily Life

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38 books for those open to changing themselves, and their world.

In the years before he became Virginia's governor, Ralph Northam apparently chose not to read books in which blackface was present. "I used just a little bit of shoe polish to put under my-or on my-cheeks," he said about the day he impersonated Michael Jackson in blackface. "I look back now and regret that I did not understand the harmful legacy of an action like that."

Now, as governor, Northam is choosing not to heed calls for his resignation. He is denying he's pictured on his medical-school yearbook page in blackface or in a Ku Klux Klan outfit above the notation of his alma mater, his interests in pediatrics, and his quote advocating having "another beer."

Is Northam, then and now, two sides of the same blackfaced white man affronting African Americans? He wants to be seen another way.

"Now that he knows better, he is going to do better," a Northam adviser told BuzzFeed.

He is being presented as another white American awakening to the pervasiveness of racism and his role in sustaining it. His advisers are giving him a reading list that includes Roots by Alex Haley and " The Case for Reparations " by Ta-Nehisi Coates. And they say he has started reading.
Conor Friedersdorf: What Ralph Northam's defenders get right-and wrong
Here's my own anti-racist reading list for Northam and my fellow Americans who are truly awakening after their own blackface moment. It is for people realizing they were taught by their relatives and friends and the media how to be racist. How to paint on blackface as if it were nothing. How to look down on black faces like they were nothing. How to support racist policies like they harm nothing.

This anti-racist syllabus is for people realizing they were never taught how to be anti-racist. How to treat all the racial groups as equals. How to look at the racial inequity all around and look for the racist policies producing it, and the racist ideas veiling it. This list is for people beginning their anti-racist journey after a lifetime of defensively saying, "I'm not a racist" or "I can't be a racist." Beginning after a lifetime of assuring themselves only bad people can be racist.

This list of nonfiction books on antiblack racism is introductory, for minds beginning to open to the ubiquity of racism in the 21st century and its history. The list includes the books I would read if I were beginning my journey today. Recent or enduring books. Books accessible to anyone. Books that primarily expose racist policies and ideas. Books that are ambitious and sweeping, mostly covering a long period or wide scope, or a specific space or time from the eyes of the nation, from the ears of history. The kinds of books that send us searching and learning and changing more and more. It is 38 books for two 19-week introductory courses. But please add to it.
Amanda Mull: Ralph Northam's yearbook page speaks for itself
We should begin by developing clarity and direction that can come only from definitions.

Definitions of race: Dorothy Roberts's Fatal Invention.

Definitions of racist and anti-racist, which I seek to explain in my books: Stamped From the Beginning and the forthcoming How to Be an Antiracist.

If you are white and feeling on edge already, then read Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility. If you are a person of color and think this syllabus isn't for you, then read James Forman's Locking Up Our Own.

Once definitions and feelings are clear, it may be prudent to be carefully led into racism and anti-racism through political memoirs of the past-Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Autobiography of Malcolm X-and then of the present, with Janet Mock's Redefining Realness, Brittney Cooper's Eloquent Rage, and Kiese Laymon's Heavy.

From memoirs, proceed to essays: James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider, Coates's Between the World and Me, and Jesmyn Ward's anthology, The Fire This Time.

From the essays, move to the nonfiction monographs:

Slavery: Edward E. Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told. Daina Ramey Berry's The Price for Their Pound of Flesh.

The North: Leon Litwack's North of Slavery.

Reconstruction: Eric Foner's Reconstruction.

Convict leasing: Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name.

Jim Crow: James D. Anderson's The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. Khalil Gibran Muhammad's The Condemnation of Blackness. Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law. Thomas J. Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis.

The Great Migration: Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns.

Civil and human rights: Jeanne Theoharis's A More Beautiful and Terrible History. Mary L. Dudziak's Cold War Civil Rights. Deborah Gray White's Too Heavy a Load. Paula J. Giddings's When and Where I Enter.

Mass incarceration: Elizabeth Hinton's From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime. Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Angela Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete? Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy.

Police violence: Wesley Lowery's They Can't Kill Us All. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.

Health and housing: Harriet A. Washington's Medical Apartheid. Matthew Desmond's Evicted.

Voting: Ari Berman's Give Us the Ballot. Carol Anderson's One Person, No Vote.

From each book, move to a lifetime of anti-racist action.

Northam is apparently moving toward a legislative life of anti-racist action in Virginia. His team is reportedly fashioning a racial-equality platform of putting more funds into affordable housing and public education, instituting equitable standards for small-business procurement, and expanding economic opportunity for entrepreneurs. These plans will help, in the same way a nice raise helps a low-income worker, even as these plans will do nothing to address why homes are unaffordable, why certain public schools are underfunded, or why black entrepreneurs face restrictions.
Vann R. Newkirk II: Ralph Northam's mistake
From afar, I want to believe Northam's sincerity and commitment. But too often, feigned ignorance buys racial innocence. When people do not deny their racism, they claim their ignorance of racism. And they are believed because people commonly believe the fundamental villain in America's racist saga is ignorance.

Racist power is the fundamental villain in America's racial saga. But in order to challenge or overtake racist power, we must know racist power and its policies and ideas and blackfaced and hooded and badged and suited soldiers of violence.

This anti-racist syllabus is a first step. It is for people beginning their anti-racist journey after a lifetime of not truly knowing themselves or their country. It is for people opening to knowledge now, to changing themselves now, to changing the world now.

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origins of the urban crisis.the great migration

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38 books for those open to changing themselves, and their world.

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What Is Implicit Bias?

Implicit bias, sometimes called unconscious bias, happens when we allow our own attitudes, feelings, stereotypes, or beliefs to impact our judgment or understanding of other people. It's called unconscious because it isn't something we do blatantly; rather, it is an involuntary process based on our deep-seated thoughts.

Implicit bias may be based on any number of characteristics, ranging from race, age, social group, or appearance. Those are the ones you might suspect. But implicit bias can also be based on height, weight, marital status, children, disability, political affiliations, college attendance, and so much more. Some of these biases are born as early as childhood. Later they may be strengthened by friends, entertainment, and even media reports.

Some experts say there are more than 150 various implicit biases out there. Let's take a look at some types of implicit bias and some examples of them in action.

Affinity bias

This is tending to be more receptive to people who resemble our lives is some way. For example, imagine a job recruiter saying, ''I hired her because she reminded me of my sister.''

Confirmation bias

This is looking for information that supports our beliefs and ignoring details to the contrary. Now imagine someone saying something like, ''He's from Appalachia so, of course, he isn't very well educated.'' This is an example of confirmation bias at work.

Halo effect

This happens when we like something about someone and, therefore, assume that everything about them must be great. For example, imagine a teacher saying something like, ''My student is well-behaved, so he must also be smart.''

Perception bias

This is stereotyping people based on a group they belong to. For example, imagine someone saying something like, ''Many crimes are committed by this particular ethnic group, so a person of the same ethnicity must be a criminal.''

Bandwagon bias

This is simply believing something because others believe it. You've probably seen this expressed with one of your friends saying something to the effect of, ''No one else enjoyed that movie, so neither did I.''

The Impact of Implicit Bias

You can see from our examples that we've just covered, some biases may not be that serious. After all, what difference does it make that someone hates a movie because everyone hated the movie. Implicit bias in the workplace, however, can have very detrimental effects on employees and the organization as a whole.

Unconscious biases can present challenges to a company's diversity and inclusion initiatives. Let's say a business is trying to become more diverse, but one of the hiring managers has an unconscious bias against hiring outside his race. This presents a problem for the entire company.

Implicit bias can also prove to be a problem with retaining good employees. Let's say a woman is consistently neglected for a promotion she deserves because her boss has an affinity bias toward promoting male employees. She's far more likely to leave the company.

Another area that can be negatively impacted is the area of annual performance reviews. Let's say an employee is well-liked by her supervisor because they attended the same women's college. Because of this, the supervisor may not be able to objectively assess the employee's performance.

All of these can add up to undermine the entire culture of a business. It can take an organization that strives to be diverse and inclusive and turn it, unintentionally, into one that rejects people based on a whole host of preconceived ideas.

Addressing Implicit Bias

So how does an organization go about addressing and managing implicit bias? By nature, being unconscious, it presents difficulties because it may not be easy to spot.

Businesses that want to correct or avoid unconscious biases should consider these strategies:

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implicit bias in the workplace: definition

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examples & impact - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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Implicit Bias in the Workplace: Definition, Examples & Impact - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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Implicit bias, sometimes called unconscious bias, happens when we allow our own attitudes, feelings, stereotypes, or beliefs to impact our judgment or understanding of other people. It's called unconscious because it isn't something we do blatantly; rather, it is an involuntary process based on our deep-seated thoughts.

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Woke Kindergarten. 4.3K likes. This page is ANTI-RACIST, PRO LIBERATION & PRO ABOLITION. If you do not believe in these life-affirming values, this page and its resources are not for you....

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Understanding how school discipline policies can contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline is essential for educators and families. Harsh punishments, automatic out-of-class time and police involvement for discipline can push young people out of classrooms and into the criminal legal system. But educators, parents and caregivers can help to change this harmful system by advocating for and implementing practices that prioritize mental health and well-being.

We offer this new resource page that highlights LFJ articles and content to open dialogue, shift practices and foster change to benefit all young people.

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Learning for Justice | Education Resources

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Learning for Justice provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

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Teaching on Days After: Dialogue & Resources for Educating Toward Justice

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This group will share resources and offer a space for dialogue about teaching on days after injustice, traumas, and tragedies, on an international, national, or local scale. How do we as educators...

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Beacon Press: We Want to Do More Than Survive

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Drawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists.

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Protests calling for revolution in the wake of George Floyd's brutal murder in Minneapolis at the hands of police have awakened in many school leaders a renewed sense of responsibility to lead discussions about systemic racism and racial injustice in our schools.

Join faculty in MSU's College of Education who teach about and research these topics in an opportunity to learn more about the historical origins of these protests as well as steps school leaders must take to continue conversations about the current climate in their own schools.

Featured speakers:

Terah Venzant Chambers, professor of K-12 educational administration and the associate dean for equity and inclusion. Her research interests include post-Brown K-12 education policy and urban education leadership. Specifically, she is interested in the ways within-school segregative policies influence African American students' academic achievement and school engagement, as well as the price of school success for high-achieving students of color (racial opportunity cost). She has been an associate editor for several journals and currently serves on the editorial boards of AERJ, JRLE, and Urban Education. She has previously served as a Congressional Fellow with the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation (CBCF) with placements in the Office of Rep. Diane E. Watson (retired) and the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education.

Dorinda Carter Andrews, chairperson for the Department of Teacher Education. She is also a professor of race, culture, and equity. Her research is broadly focused on racial justice and educational equity. She examines issues of racial justice in P-12 learning contexts and on college campuses, urban teacher preparation and identity development, and critical race praxis with K-12 educators. Her scholarship examines these issues by illuminating voices of youth and adults who have been historically and traditionally marginalized in schools and society. Carter Andrews is a 2019 co-recipient of the Division G Outstanding Mentoring Award from the American Educational Research Association. She is also co-editor of the Journal of Teacher Education. She has given two TEDx talks, "The Consciousness Gap in Education" and "Teach Kids to be Eagles." Her work has been published in several top-tier academic journals and media outlets.

Alyssa Hadley Dunn, assistant professor of teacher education. A former high school English teacher, she now researches urban education and the sociocultural and political contexts of urban schools, with a focus on issues of race, justice, and equity. She is currently working on her third book, based on interviews with teachers around the country, about how educators make pedagogical decisions on "days after" major events, tragedies, or instances of injustice. As a public scholar, Dr. Dunn's work has been featured on The Huffington Post, CNN, and National Public Radio, as well as education blogs and podcasts. She is also Senior Associate Editor of the journal Multicultural Perspectives and mother of two young children.

Jada Phelps-Moultrie, assistant professor of K-12 educational administration in the College of Education at Michigan State University. Her scholarship includes family engagement, culturally responsive leadership and equity in education. She takes an intersectional approach to exploring families and communities and their educational pursuits, extending to online education. She often examines the intersection of race and racism with other forms of oppression. In that aim, she includes how leaders support or detract family/community pursuits. Currently, her work includes how African refugee families support the education of their children in xenophobic climates. She has served on several national research organizations, including the Critical Race Studies in Education Association (CRSEA) and the Graduate Student Council for the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA). Jada was also a NCAA Division-I All-American and an Olympic Trial Qualifier in Track and Field. She desires to serve student-athletes at MSU.

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Rising to Our Responsibility: A Forum for School Leaders to Address Racial Violence and Anti-Blackness in Michigan Schools

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Protests calling for revolution in the wake of George Floyd's brutal murder in Minneapolis at the hands of police have awakened in many school leaders a renewed sense of responsibility to lead discussions about systemic racism and racial injustice in our schools.

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Compliments of MSU Dept of Education "Rising to Our Responsibility: A Forum for School Leaders to Address Racial Violence and Anti-Blackness in Michigan Schools"...(Future additional sessions will be available)

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The Quarto Group will be donating 100% of their profits of the This Book is Anti-Racist eBook to Black Lives Matter and Color of Change, throughout the month of June. Organizations dedicated to combating racism and seeking justice for people of color.

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[Image description: Illustration from 'Not Quite Snow White' by Ashley Franklin and Ebony Glenn. A white child whispers into the ear of an East-Asian child as they look at Tameika, a Black girl. Tameika looks uncomfortable.]
In part 1 of this series on anti-racism for kids, we unpacked colorblind fallacies and discussed how refusing to acknowledge racial diversity further stigmatizes kids of color. With this collection, we teach kids why we must be mindful of social power in anti-racism work.
Bold and *marked books are written or illustrated by #OwnVoices makers of color. Books For Littles(BFL) is free and accessible for readers who can't afford a paywall. Posts may contain affiliate links, which allow me to earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Check out the full affiliate disclosure along with the BFL statement of accountability. If you get books at your local library (please do!), an even better way to support BFL is on Patreon.
Anti-Racism For Beginners: Understanding Social Power In Racial Discrimination

Using Kids Books That De-Center Whiteness

...

"My daughter is Asian American growing up in a super white city, and the microaggressions are beginning to wear on her" Anonymous reader from the Books For Littles Facebook Group.

...

Reverse racism isn't a thing. Stop trying to make reverse racism a thing.

Racism, like all -isms, only exists within a hierarchy of social power.
Training our kids to see invisible power structures requires we recognize it in our daily lives.

We overlook how social power plays into systemic discrimination because when we have power, we breathe it like air. It's completely invisible. Only the folks who don't have the same power we do - those who struggle to breathe - can help us to recognize it by telling their stories.
(CONTENT WARNING FOR CHILD ABUSE)
Racism is not just discrimination between races. But that's really hard to mentally grasp, so here, let's try this...

If my five year old punches me in the stomach, I'm allowed to get upset.

Disrespectful! Unacceptable disobedience! How dare!

Even if I'm physically hurt, I'm still the one with control in this relationship. This flurry of tiny fists does not make me feel threatened or unsafe. I'm not afraid my 5-year-old will destroy my life. I'm not in any danger.

In our society, we adults have not just physical power over children - but also social power. All things being equal, a five-year old who shares the same privileges and social status as me can't do me much harm.

Now reverse it. Let's imagine I let loose and punch that kid 5-year-old right in his adorable little face.

Because of my size, I can physically overwhelm them and steal any sense of autonomous safety and control without their consent. (That loss of control - that's the stuff complex trauma is made of, by the way.) Even when we equalize physical power in this situation, I've got more options. As teens, my kids will outweigh and overshadow me - but I still hold the authority.

But there's also the impact of what happens when someone with power over you hurts you. I don't just have personal authority over my kids. I have the privileges that come with adulthood. People trust my word over a child's. I have connections, cash, and know how to work the system in a way a 5-year-old survivor of violence does not.
How we use intimidation to maintain power.
Long after their wounds have healed, this encounter will reverberate as an ongoing potential threat so long as I maintain power over them.

From the moment I hit my child - they will live with the understanding that I could use my larger physical mass, my social ties, and all the tools within my reach to hurt them. Whether they know it consciously or not, they must live with caution - knowing that I have the power to destroy them on a whim.

And yet - we don't call an adult's violence or disobedience toward a child ' disrespectful.' We call it discipline.

The punishments we meter to kids are manufactured consequences designed to maintain our societal norms. Adults controlling children through intimidation upholds our social structure. Which is why corporal punishment is still socially acceptable, particularly among families who believe there should be a social hierarchy.

Even though I don't hit my kids, I am raising my kids in a culture of adult supremacy. I benefit from it at a cost to them - their freedom, and their sense of safety.
Refusing to acknowledge my power makes me even more dangerous because I'm oblivious to my power and how it impacts them.
So when I raise my voice, and my kids flinch, telling them 'I'm one of the good non-hitting parents' dismisses a valid fear they have every right to feel. Telling them that they are ' blowing things out of proportion ' implies that I don't recognize my power over them.

Aaaand now that I'm writing this all out. I'm realizing I've never explicitly explained this to my kids. So I'm going to talk to them about it tonight.

See? We can all afford to do a little better. Like my light-skinned privilege, I didn't create this power inequity and I don't want it. But I still benefit from it and it's my job to recognize when I'm doing it and empower my kids to protect themselves when I stumble into it.

Childism is not racism, but both share roots in paternalism
People of color, disabled folks, and so on for all groups who hold less social power - we are not children.
I'm using this physical example of child abuse to illustrate a tool we use to dismiss and ignore oppressed groups - paternalism. Paternalism is the idea that those with less power (people who are oppressed) are incapable of identifying what harms them, and those in power (oppressors) know best for those they're abusing.

Paternalism also gives us a false belief that equivocating two different oppressed groups to gain a foothold for one of them, is okay. It's not okay. It's fundamentally problematic to do what I did above.

Go back and read it again, noticing the subtle way I normalized whiteness/adults as the default, equivocating people of color as children. As the author of this article, this is an abuse of my power and authority and feeds into the thing we're claiming to fight.

See how that works?

Equivocating two marginalized groups to empower group A disempowers group B. This perpetuates a pattern of behavior that reinforces a supremacist mindset, and makes group A easier to pulled down in the long run.

(That's why our fights for equality need to be intersectional!)

Equivalencies reinforce oppression for folks who hold both of those identities. Which we know from...them explaining it to us. But unfortunately, we often don't listen to multiply-marginalized folks - because we see them as multiply-incompetent! This is one way we use our paternalistic view towards oppressed groups to defang and dismiss calls for equity.

As a small Autistic Asian woman, I'm perceived as less competent than my tall white male partner. When I tell people the things they do are problematic, or even that they are hurting me relating to my race, gender, or disability - I'm brushed aside. When my partner says the exact same things - people believe him.

My ' stop' to a white man using yellow face is dismissed because I'm some hysterical nagging lady. My partner's ' stop ' is a command , a truth, to be considered and believed.

Centering voices of color is an act of civil disobedience

The trouble is, as intelligent and kind as my partner is - my partner cannot ever fully feel the impact of these -isms. His accomplice work will always lack the nuance and details I can provide as a disabled woman of color with lived experience.
So long as we center white voices in anti-racism work, we're just perpetuating racism.
When folks in power look for ways to fight racism - we tend to look towards authority (a position that has been traditionally entrenched with whiteness for hundreds of years) for advice.

White supremacy culture views disobedience toward authority as a negative violation that threatens to unravel civilization. In our authoritarian society, it's acceptable for folks with entrenched power to do unfair things to maintain power. We justify this because it keeps people who matter safe and comfortable. The question is - who matters?

The idea that some humans can and should have power over others to preserve their safety and comfort - that those with less power should obey and suffer, is integral to supremacy.

This is the corruption of power. This is the mandate of heaven. This is westward expansion. This is purity culture. This is the culture of conquest. This is respectability politics. But this is not a universal human belief. White supremacy is not human nature, it's just the one we've grown accustomed to due to white supremacy and colonialism.

Disobedience can be healthy - even necessary for a healthy human society. Disobedience is a check on broken systems and wide social gaps in power. Obedience and disobedience must be practiced side-by-side for a healthy human community. That's why disobedience is the antidote to corruption in so many stories of faith and justice.

What if disobedience was seen for what it is - a symptom of a system that is not working for everyone? If you value inclusion and believe powerful people are responsible for protecting the weak - maybe noodle on that.

Teach your kids to speak up against abuse of power - including their own
If we have no clue how systemic racism works within a social power structure, or even what racism is, we can't teach our kids how to stop racist behavior.
Given that we're unaware of our power and the ways others can be perceived us as threatening - dealing with other humans can end up so terribly confusing. Because of this, we have to be mindful of it, and wield our power gently.

If we're unable to see the ways we are complicit in white supremacy ( we all are - including me), we can't teach our kids to dismantle systemic racism. Reverse-racism removes power from the equation of racism. This handy trick makes it easy to dismiss and silence people of color who speak up against racist action and systems of inequity.

It's human nature for us to view those with less power as less capable. Which makes it easy to dismiss them. Which makes speaking truth to power very hard for folks with less power. Damn vicious cycle, is what it is!

This is what we call: Systemic racism. It's a system, efficiently self-perpetuating. Gotta break it.

So how do we tell our kids of color that racial discrimination exists, and that it's gonna be harder to do basic things like be humans in the world, simply because of our race? Without overwhelming them and sending them into a spiraling pile of tears and anxiety?
How do we teach all our kids to disobey safely (and disobey we must!) when unjust systems are hurting people?
How do we teach white kids to shake off the instinct to dismiss people of color? Without provoking white fragility (more on that later) and inspiring them to justify negative treatment towards kids of color as inherently deserved?

THE PLAN: Teach our kids to understand power inequity so they can name it, unpack it, and dismantle it when it happens in the real world. Let's start these discussions with adorable picture books!

Teach our kids to be anti-racist as if lit from a fire below - bring power back to those who have had it denied. Social power is not a scarce or limited resource. We're social animals who benefit when the community thrives - social power catches like fire. It grows. We lift up kids of color, and all kids rise.

Power Up: Why Responsible Representation Matters

Center. Voices. Of. Color.

The problem with books about racism written by white folks is that there are key elements about being targeted by racism that white folks just don't know to include. It's very hard for some of us with racial privilege to shut up and pass the mic. But we must!

We can tell kids of color that they can grow up to be President one day - but as an Asian girl raised on history books full of rich White men (and those few go-to Black men), I didn't need anyone to tell me that no matter how I performed or organized my life, there is no way our country would be electing an Asian woman into the highest office of our government within my lifetime.
*Parker Looks Up, *Milo's Museum, *Auntie Luce's Talking Paintings, Schomburg: The Man Who Built A Library
**Keepin' it on the up & up: Zetta Elliott, the author of 'Milo's Museum,' is one of the lovely supporters who keeps this post free and accessible for all - but I've been recommending her books since way before she joined our patreon community and have had plans to analyze how it differs from the tokenism in 'Grandma in Blue with a Red Hat' (exclusively for patreon supporters) since way before we connected.
These books - all written by Black women, highlight how important it is that kids of color see themselves responsibly represented. Our kids can't become if they don't even see becoming as a possibility.

Power Up: Disobey & Refuse To Submit

There aren't many folks who break glass ceilings unscathed.

Our culture doesn't do a great job at celebrating the battle scars of social progress. So we've got to teach our kids to value disobedience and a certain type of scratchy disagreeableness.

Who is seen as a ' natural' - a natural talent, a natural leader, a natural beauty? Who is pinged for advancement and handed power because they ' seem like a good fit' through some ambiguous gut intuition (aka unconscious bias)? We all love easy-going folks. It's much easier to be easy-going if things are already going your way and society is not designed to progress at your expense. Nasty cycle.

By nature of this work - folks who smash glass ceilings must be disobedient and non-compliant. They lend themselves to being perceived by those who want to maintain inequity as unlikable or even dangerous. All those harsh b*tches, dragon ladies, angry Black women, [ insert your least favorite slur here] - labels used to denigrate women of color who refused to accept their place as subservient.
*Clara Lee And the Apple Pie Dream, *Not Quite Snow White, *Shining Star
So you're going to have a hard time finding books about unlikable heroes. American children's authors love sanding off the rough parts before going to print, as if kids can't accept imperfect heroes. Sneaky paternalism.

For now though, you'll have to settle for glass-chippers who manage to ignore haters. Normalize rebellion. Teach girls and nonbinary kids of color that disagreeableness isn't to be feared - oppression is. Teach kids to value feminine disobedience, to disambiguate goodness from polite quietness.

Also - avoid saviorism ( click here for a patron-only book list unpacking that nonsense). If you're reading a book about racism and a white protagonist helps a kid of color through racial injustice, that's not centering people of color, that's disempowering POC as useless victims.
Keepin it on the up & up: Sailaja Joshi, the founder of Bharat Babies & publisher of Always Anjali, is one of the delightful patreon supporters who keeps my work open and accessible for all - but I've recommended Always Anjali before we connected. Bonus: When you join our patreon, community, you'll get help identifying, naming, and dismantling racist tropes in kidlit, plus sneak peeks and exclusive content - such as this booklist unpacking problematic savior tropes in popular children's books.
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Power Up: Understand The Emotional Labor Of Being The Only One

Being the only one person of color in a sea of whiteness is exhausting. Even though kids can feel it, they need our help naming it, analyzing it, and understanding the roots of it. If we don't help them through it, kids grow up internalizing racism, believing that those microaggressions and the discomfort and trauma of being targeted by racist behavior is inherent to them, rather than a symptom of an unhealthy society.

By targeting cultural associations instead of skin color, aggressors excuse racist behavior as not-racist because it's about something like a name, a hijab, or targeting someone within their own racial group. This bigotry centers whiteness as the default, and anything deviant from whiteness as inferior.

Notice that the kids in these stories aren't explicit targeted because of their race, but the aggression against them is still racist. Kids need to see that oppression expands beyond simply skin color or racial identity. We target Muslims because Islam is perceived as a threat to Eurocentric Christianity (it's not.) We target Asian names because they don't conform to Whiteness. We target darker-skinned people even within the same family or race because of colorism - tool to divide and conquer within each group of color that elevates proximity to whiteness.

Within each book - we see how external aggression from outsiders become internal thoughts that drive each child's behavior. Individual acts of racial bias are just the tip of the glacier in white supremacy. Racism is a system that teaches kids of color to value whiteness. Racism exhausts a child of color's ability to thrive because their minds and bodies are too busy orienting themselves around whiteness in order to stay safe in a racist society.

Stay Curious, Stand Brave & Believe People of Color

Join us to support these articles and help ignite a generation of kind & brilliant luminaries.

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Anti-Racism 102: Why Not All Racial Discrimination is 'Racism' - Books For Littles

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Image description: Illustration from 'Not Quite Snow White' by Ashley Franklin and Ebony Glenn. A white child whispers into the ear of an East-Asian child as they look at Tameika, a Black girl. Tameika looks uncomfortable.] In part 1 of this series on anti-racism for kids, we unpacked colorblind fallacies and discussed how refusing to acknowledge racial diversity further stigmatizes kids of color.

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[Image description: Illustration from All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold & Suzanne Kaufman. Children of various races and faiths pointing to locations on a world map.] If you're nervous about talking about race with your kids, these books about racial diversity will give you an easy place to start destigmatizing difference & celebrating racial diversity. Bold and *marked books are written or illustrated by #OwnVoices makers of color. Raising Luminaries is free and accessible for readers who can't afford a paywall. Donate or shop using an affiliate link via| Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book Anti-Racism For Beginners: Part 1 Acknowledging & Celebrating Racial Diversity Posts may contain affiliate links, which allow me to earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Check out the full affiliate disclosure along with my statement of accountability. If you're into supporting libraries (please do!) more than consumerism, you can also support my work directly:

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" How do I teach my kids to be anti-racist when I'm still learning myself?"
- Anonymous, Books For Littles Facebook Group (archived)

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It's normal to get flustered when when our children talk about race. But if we let nervousness keep us silent and still, our fear becomes a weapon.

Growing up, I was told that discrimination would magically disappear if we stop acknowledging racial difference. All people are the same. Skin color doesn't matter. Only bad people are racist. If we are all nice and well-behaved, racism will go away.

This is the fallacy of colorblind ideology. It's a tool to keep us complicit in white supremacy. Don't be a tool.

We must talk about race with young kids. Racism thrives in silence.

When we refuse to talk about race at an early age, children absorb our silence as shame. We're taught that if we have nothing nice to say - say nothing at all. Well - white folks are aggressively silent when it comes to race! Does that mean that being Brown or Black is something to be ashamed of?

Kids pick up when we refuse to acknowledge racial difference - and how we treat people of color. Why are we surprised then, to see nice, well-behaved children reflect unconscious bias against people of color, then grow into adults who blame people of color for violence and harm against them?
(It's your job to be that adult.)
Your child needs at least one adult to speak truth to BS about racial assumptions.

My White mother who openly talked about race from birth - and how society would perceive and treat me because of my multiracial heritage. She raised me to understand that discrimination against me was not my fault. Violence would happen to me because of my race, my gender, my class but it wasn't caused by me - it was caused by white supremacy.

The Mominator refused to let me internalize the idea that I deserved racism. To do that, she first needed to acknowledge my race and the fact that I would have obstacles in life that white kids didn't.

We can help our children understand racism - and empower them to work toward racial equality.

Raise kids of color to feel proud of their culture and their right to self-advocate.

Raise white kids to recognize their duty to stand up against injustice.

But first, you've gotta acknowledge that racial differences - even though they are an imaginary, human-imagined construct, exist as a real thing in our society, with real-life impact on real-life people.

Start by telling our kids that yes - we do see skin color and racial identities.

For folks who were never given space to talk about racism and discrimination as kids (or even racial diversity), it's scary to start. We don't want to say the wrong thing and mess it up.

No worries, we are going to start very gently with non-controversial, easygoing books that just show kids that racial diversity exists. In future collections, we'll get into more emotionally loaded topics - like racial discrimination, racial privilege, colorism, and the subtle tools that uphold white supremacy, such as white fragility and respectability politics.

And this diversity is glorious.

Acknowledge & Celebrating Racial Diversity

From two anonymous BFL members:

"My daughter came home saying she didn't like her brown skin and wanted white skin and 'bright' hair instead. I'm looking for books that reinforce pride in who she is."

"My white daughter said to me the other day, 'I don't like dark skin. ' I ran to the internet to research books like these."

Yikes.

Use these comments as learning opportunities. Read these books to discuss biases they've absorbed during a quiet time home together (story time!) Encourage kids to speak bias aloud so they can hear how ridiculous it sounds, think about where it comes from, and realize how it develops.

When children point out that they like particular skin tones, body shapes, or hair textures more than others - don't shout at them or insist they are wrong. Kids this age can't untangle feelings from fact. Shaming them for a gut reaction is just going to get them to clam up.

Instead, help them untangle bias from fact on their own. Ask why they feel this way. Use in an open, non-judgemental tone. Keep asking questions to unpack these assumptions. We're not here to tell them what to think, we're here to model critical thinking about racial bias moving forward.

Discuss how all bodies are good bodies - how we differ, and what we have in common.

All Are Welcome, *Lovely, We're Different, We're The Same

Acknowledge & Celebrate Cultural Diversity

When we over-simplify racism, we tell kids that racism is simply bias against people based on skin color - it's not.
How do we counter the entrenched dominant narrative's focus on whiteness?
(That's colorism, another problem we can tackle later.)

Racism expands beyond skin color - it's assumptions and discrimination against individuals and groups of people, based on racial identity. This includes not just skin color, but also cultural norms and behavior, language, and other markers of racial and ethnic identity.
*On The Day You Begin, *Where Are You From?, *Alma And How She Got Her Name
White supremacy is assuming that racism would be over if people of color just assimilated and acted more like white people, that assimilation is even a goal for people of color, and that non-white culture is deviant or inferior to whiteness.

Read stories that show how people of color are not monolithic - we're complex individuals who can't be reduced to the caricatures of mainstream media. Our ethnic heritage is something valuable worth exploring, and our ancestors traditions, achievements, and challenges have an impact on who we are today.

But our race and ethnicity is not the only thing that defines us. Show kids how we all have a right to pride in our heritage - just not at the expense of punching down another culture.

Not pictured: *Islandborn is another lovely book, which I recommend with reservations. In 2018, several survivors came forth about Junot Díaz's problematic behavior toward women. One of these reports has been shown to have been overblown - but I'm not comfortable with the way we're dismissing all survivors of his actions because of this. The book itself is great - so I'll let you decide how to move forward with all that on your own.

Explain How Diversity Makes Us Stronger

Having a broad range of experiences to draw from, mindsets to brainstorm, and abilities to solve the problems facing humanity is a very good thing. Human diversity is good for all of humanity and evolution and stuff. I am pretty sure this is SCIENCE.

The idea that winnowing humanity into one make-believe-super-race, or segregating us all into silos based on our racial identity sounds ABSURD. Right? RIGHT?!

Obviously some families are not absorbing the fact that genetic diversity is good for society and the fate of humanity, so we have to make this clear. That whole 'melting pot' assimilation thing our teachers celebrated 20 years ago turned out to be a bad idea.

What we need is more of a chunky stew, with folks proudly retaining and celebrating our individual racial and cultural identities while cognizant of the challenges and discrimination many groups face. These books help kids see how diversity makes us stronger.

Stay Curious, Stand Brave & Talk About Race

Don't stop here. Now that your kids understand that human skin, hair, and all of that stuff comes in a broad change of colors, shapes, and textures - help them see how all people deserve basic human rights, respect, and kindness.

Click here for part 2 of raising Anti-Racist Kids - Children's Books That Teach Kids About Social Power & Paternalism

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Anti-Racism For Kids 101: Starting To Talk About Race - Books For Littles by Raising Luminaries

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Books to help kids to unpack racial bias so they can hear how ridiculous it sounds, think about where it comes from, and realize how it develops.

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Free download of Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness
When it comes to race, the experience you most need to understand is your own. The people you most need to talk to are your own family members.

This book can help you do that. Right now.

Click the button and complete the checkout process to download PDF
(no credit card required)

Free download of IntersectionAllies: We Make Room For All
When society feels this broken, it's hard to know where to begin. The theory of intersectionality helps us see where change needs to be made by teaching us to notice where power lies, who benefits, and who doesn't. Being an effective ally means turning that knowledge into action. It means noticing when and where you have power, and using that power to make room for all.

Click the button and complete the checkout process to download PDF
(no credit card required)

Free download of The Nightlife of Jacuzzi Gaskett
At night Jacuzzi, age 11, takes care of things if mom is out. Kids at school and teachers might not realize how special and smart he is-but baby brother Jamaal does. A collaboration between the artists Brontez Purnell (writer) and Elise Peterson (illustrator) portrays a common childhood experience of responsibility and family life that is almost never depicted in children's books.

Click the button and complete the checkout process to download PDF
(no credit card required)

Free download of Death is Stupid
A boy's grandmother dies-and people say some stupid things to comfort him. The new edition of Anastasia Higginbotham's award-winning Death is Stupid is back in print August 4. Because it's very needed right now, you can download a PDF of the book for free here.

Click the button and complete the checkout process to download PDF
(no credit card required)

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Free download of Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness When it comes to race, the experience you most need to understand is your own. The people you most need to talk to are your own family members. This book can help you do that. Right now.

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Warner Bros. has made "Just Mercy" free to rent on digital streaming platforms throughout June.

The film is being offered as a resource to help educate people about the dangers of systemic racism.

Based on a true story, the movie focuses on the life of the civil-rights attorney Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) as he fights to overturn the wrongful murder conviction of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx).

To learn more about Stevenson and his work with the Equal Justice Initiative, check out EJI.org.

In response to current events, Warner Bros. is offering free streaming rentals of its film "Just Mercy," from the director Destin Daniel Cretton and starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx.

"Just Mercy," released in theaters on January 10, tells the true story of Bryan Stevenson (Jordan), a civil-rights attorney who works to defend Walter McMillian (Foxx), who was wrongfully convicted of murder.

You can rent "Just Mercy" for free in June through a variety of digital movie services in the US, including Apple TV, FandangoNow, Google Play, Amazon Prime Video, Redbox, the PlayStation Store, Vudu, Microsoft, and YouTube.

The studio said it hopes the film will be an educational resource for people who want to learn more about the dangers of systemic racism in our society.

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'Just Mercy' is now free to stream through June to help educate people on systemic racism

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Warner Bros. has made "Just Mercy" free to rent on digital streaming platforms throughout June. The film is being offered as a resource to help educate people about the dangers of systemic racism. Based on a true story, the movie focuses on the life of the civil-rights attorney Bryan Stevenson (Michael B.

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Parents and other caregivers are seeking resources to help them hold children through the current, terrible wave of racialized violence, which is exacerbated by the tensions and vulnerabilities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. As scholars, writers, and parents who use books to connect with our children and spark conversations with them, we've developed this book list to help engage the broad range of emotions and needs of diverse children in our multiracial society. In some cases, we've highlighted worthy, albeit lesser-known titles. Some are older books, some are newer, and a few will publish later this year but are available for pre-order now. This list skews heavily towards #ownvoices books and is arranged alphabetically by title.

Please use these books to help you do the work of making the world a safer, more equitable place for all children.

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20 Picture Books for 2020: Readings to Embrace Race, Provide Solace &...

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As scholars, writers, and parents who use books to connect with our children and spark conversations with them, we've developed this book list to help...

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EmbraceRace is a multiracial community dedicated to sharing and developing best practices for raising and caring for kids, all kids, in the context of race. We partnered with MomsRising - a transformative multicultural organization of more than a million members working to increase family economic security and end discrimination against women and mothers - to create these tips for our communities.

They are designed to help parents of all backgrounds talk to and guide their children about race early and often by lifting up age-appropriate activities that can be incorporated easily into your daily life. We hope these tips provide some much needed support for families committed to building tolerance, racial equity, and a social culture where all kids and families can thrive!

1) Start early.

By 6 months of age babies are noticing racial differences; by age 4, children have begun to show signs of racial bias.

Let your child know that it's perfectly okay to notice skin color and talk about race. Start talking about what racial differences mean and don't mean.

2) Encourage your child.

Encourage your child to ask questions, share observations and experiences, and be respectfully curious about race.

Expose your child to different cultural opportunities - photographs, films, books, or cultural events, for example - and discuss the experience afterwards.

You don't have to be an expert on race to talk with our child. Be honest about what you don't know and work with your child to find accurate information.

3) Be mindful.

What kids hear from us is less important than what they see us do.

You are a role model to your child. What you say is important, but what you do - the diversity of your friendship circle, for example - is likely to have a bigger impact.

If your child doesn't attend a diverse school, consider enrolling her in aer-school or weekend activities such as sports leagues that are diverse if you're able. Choose books and toys that include persons of different races and ethnicities. Visit museums with exhibits about a range of cultures and religions.

4) Face and know your own bias.

Let your child see you acknowledge and face your own biases.

We're less likely to pass on the biases we identify and work to overcome.

Give your child an example of a bias, racial or otherwise, that you hold or have held. Share with your child things you do to confront and overcome that bias.

5) Know and love who you are.

Talk about the histories and experiences of the racial, ethnic, and cultural groups you and your family identify with. Talk about their contributions and acknowledge the less flattering parts of those histories as well.

Tell stories about the challenges your family (your child's parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents and great grandparents, others) has faced and overcome.

6) Develop racial cultural literacy.

Develop racial cultural literacy by learning about and respecting others.

Study and talk about the histories and experiences of groups we call African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and whites, among others.

Be sure your child understands that every racial and ethnic group includes people who believe different things and behave in different ways . There is as much diversity within racial groups as across them.

7) Be honest.

Be honest with your child, in age-appropriate ways, about bigotry and oppression.

Children are amazing at noticing patterns, including racial patterns (who lives in their neighborhood versus their friends' neighborhoods, for example). Help them make sense of those patterns, and recognize that bigotry and oppression are sometimes a big part of those explanations.

Be sure your child knows that the struggle for racial fairness is still happening and that your family can take part in that struggle.

8) Tell stories.

"Lift up the freedom fighters ": Tell stories of resistance and resilience.

Every big story of racial oppression is also a story about people fighting back and "speaking truth to power." Teach your child those parts of the story too.

Include women, children and young adults among the "freedom fighters" in the stories you tell. A story about racial struggle in which all the heroes are men wrongly leaves many people out.

9) Be active.

Be active - don't be a "bystander" on race.

Help your child understand what it means to be, and how to be, a change agent.

Whenever possible, connect the conversations you're having to the change you and your child want to see, and to ways to bring about that change .

10) Plan for a marathon, not a sprint.

It's okay to say, "I'm not sure" or "Let's come back to that later, okay?" But then do come back to it.

Make race talks with your child routine. Race is a topic you should plan to revisit again and again in many different ways overtime.

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10 tips for teaching and talking to kids about race

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These tips are designed to help parents of all backgrounds teach and talk to their children about race early and often by lifting up age-appropriate activities that can be incorporated easily into your daily life.

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‘Raising White Kids’ Author On How White Parents Can Talk About Race

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NPR’s Michel Martin talks to Jennifer Harvey, author of Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America, about how to talk with white kids about racially-charged events.

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Your Kids Aren't Too Young to Talk About Race: Resource Roundup - Pretty Good

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Your kids aren't too young to talk about race. Here are a few resources to get your started.

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1. Freedom for Our Children to Thrive

We envision a world where children and families are supported and have the freedom to thrive, an end to the school to prison pipeline, and a shift away from punishment towards trauma-informed restorative environments for students, teachers, and families.

1. Michigan schools must invest in mental health care to better equip educators and school support staff with the tools and resources to work with children who need heightened engagement, instead of suspensions.

2. Michigan schools must end their participation in the school-to-prison pipeline that punishes, over-medicates and pushes kids out of the classroom and into the streets and jails. We demand an end to zero-tolerance policies, complete removal of police officers from school settings, and a shift to a restorative model. We want schools to have a trauma-centered approach to conflict, kids, and families.

3. No child under the age of 18 should ever be charged with a crime as an adult.

4. We demand that no kids are held in adult facilities; not one for any reason.

5. We demand more diversion programs that keep kids out of juvenile detention, and allow our young people to stay in the community.

2. Community-Determined Public Safety

We envision a world where communities define public safety. We believe communities have the power to keep themselves safe, defuse conflict, and provide support in times of crisis.

3. Care Not Criminalization

We believe care and treatment of the mind is just as important as treatment of ailments in the body. People should not be punished for being ill.

4. Innocent until Proven Otherwise

We believe in the presumption of innocence until a case is adjudicated. No one should be incarcerated, fined, or otherwise punished based on an accusation.

1. We demand an immediate end to cash bail and all pretrial fines and fees that criminalize poverty.

2. We demand an end to the punitive pretrial practices of drug testing, pretrial probation and electronic monitoring.

3. We believe that pretrial services should exist to support people as they fight their cases. Tools like text reminders about court dates, transportation and childcare are essential.

4. We demand transparent information to assess the impact of individual judges and prosecutors on our communities to ensure public accountability.

5. Sentencing and the Right to Redemption

We envision a world where sentencing people to death by incarceration is a violation of their human rights and an affront to the humanity of us all.

1. We demand an end to sentences of life without parole. We call for the end of prison sentences that exceed 20 years. Extension beyond that would only be in cases where the prison administration could prove to the Parole Board serious unresolved disciplinary infractions.

2. For those already serving sentences of imprisonment, we must end truth in sentencing policies, establish good time policies and develop other programs for early release that do not come with punitive conditions or tripwires.

3. Juvenile Life Without Parole is cruel and unusual, and we need to make sure that understanding is put into practice in the state of Michigan. The Miller factors need to be applied in all re-sentencing of the Juvenile Lifers.

6. End Prison Slavery

We envision a world where human dignity is considered, respected and maintained at all times. Cages (in all forms) are not to be used as a tool of control or punishment for being black, brown or poor.

7. Right to a Second Chance: Rebuilding Life After Incarceration

We believe all people coming home deserve opportunities to employment at a living wage, affordable housing, education and entrepreneurial initiatives. We believe re-entry should be gender, trauma, and community informed to equip individuals with tools for success.

1. We demand clean slate expungement upon release.

2. We demand independent and stable housing, specifically by expanding MSHDA vouchers to all and making fair chance housing statewide.

3. We demand an end to all post-incarceration surveillance for people on probation and parole.

4. We demand a $100 million divestment from prisons to be reinvested into regional community resource centers that support housing, training, education, employment and health care.

8. Justice for Wrongful Convictions

We envision a world where justice is pursued for those who have been wrongfully convicted. We believe in accountability for wrongful convictions by prosecutors and judges who care more about their political careers than the truth.

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Michigan Liberation | Comprehensive criminal justice reform - courts, prosecutors, policing, prisons, juvenile systems, re-entry and diversion programs, and parole.

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1. Freedom for Our Children to Thrive We envision a world where children and families are supported and have the freedom to thrive, an end to the school to prison pipeline, and a shift away from punishment towards trauma-informed restorative environments for students, teachers, and families.

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Delivery: Can be download Immediately after purchasing. For new customer, we need process for verification from 30 mins to 12 hours
Version: PDF/EPUB. If you need EPUB and MOBI Version, please send me a message (Click "message us" icon at the right corner)
Compatible Devices: Can be read on any devices (Kindle, NOOK, Android/IOS devices, Windows, MAC)
Quality: High Quality. No missing contents. Printable

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Delivery: Can be download Immediately after purchasing. For new customer, we need process for verification from 30 mins to 12 hours Version: PDF/EPUB. If you need EPUB and MOBI Version, please send me a message (Click "message us" icon at the right corner) Compatible Devices: Can be read on any devices (Kindle, NOOK, Android/IOS devices, Windows, MAC) Quality: High Quality.

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On Monday evening, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police. Video surfaced of a white police officer holding his knee to Floyd's neck for eight minutes while Floyd pleaded with police saying "I can't breathe." Floyd became unresponsive and died shortly after at Hennepin County Medical Center. This brutal killing follows the death of Breonna Taylor in her bed at the hands of police in Louisville, Kentucky, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in a Georgia suburb and centuries of police abuse and violence.

In this moment, w know there are thousands of white people who are looking for direction and a way to show up alongside Black communities and communities of color. Welcome. You are needed. Here are a few ways to start showing up - not just in words but in action.

1. Come out as anti-racist and invite others to join you. Be public and vocal about which side you are on, share details of the actions you are taking to make this commitment real, and invite others to join you. Join SURJ to build a mass base of people breaking white silence by signing up here and share this graphic on your Facebook and social media pages to invite others to sign up as well.

2. Join fights to defund the police. It's local budget season and right now across the country towns and cities are deciding how your community will spend its resources. Join your local group already doing this work or plan an action to tell decision makers what your community really needs - like mental health services and affordable housing - instead of more funding for police. In Los Angeles, when the Mayor proposed giving 54% of the budget to the police, SURJ's affiliate White People for Black Lives showed up alongside Black Lives Matter to push back and they've won the first round of the fight. Many local SURJ chapters are already engaged in these fights alongside their partners - click here to see if there is a chapter in your community.

Minneapolis based Black Visions is asking folks to call Minneapolis Mayor Frey and the City Council to "stop making statements on social media and start holding MPD accountable in the only language they speak: money. Call Mayor Frey and tell him: 'Cut MPD's budget. We need money to keep our communities healthy during the pandemic, not murder them in the streets.'" Make this call today and share their post on Facebook.

3. Make a commitment to "organize your own" for the long haul. White communities are used to uphold the power structure and business-as-usual. When we break away and join movements for justice, this can help tip the balance of power and win real change. For too long, those at the top have relied on the silence of white folks to keep things as they are - and then we all lose. Our work is to organize in our own communities to bring more white people into struggles for justice, and to support the efforts led by people of color.

Police departments and white supremacists have been emboldened under the Trump administration. The head of the Minneapolis Police Union has sold "Cops for Trump" t-shirts, has been applauded by the President on Twitter, and even spoke at a Trump rally. White voters elected Trump, which has led to an escalation in racist scapegoating of and violence against communities of color. We need to show up big this election year to ensure white voters don't re-elect Trump. Sign the Collect Your Cousins Pledge to join us in calling white voters in critical battleground states. SURJ is calling white voters on June 4th at 6:00 EST. Click here to sign the Collect Your Cousins Pledge to join the phone bank and help us call in thousands more white people into the work.

4. Focus on building our numbers, not being right. To end police brutality, white supremacy, and to build a movement to get us all free, we need to move people with us - namely people who are conflicted or watching from the sidelines. This means calling in our folks - people in our families, faith communities, neighborhoods, and workplaces - inviting them to join a movement and be on the right side of history. It might feel good to just yell at other white people in the short run. But when we spend time with those who are awakening in this moment and are wanting to show up, as imperfect as they are, that helps us all. This is the work.

5. Help resource the work of Black-led groups that are fighting for police accountability and abolition. Find and support a local group in your community or move your money to the front lines in Minneapolis. Make sure folks most impacted have the resources to stay in the streets and dream up the most powerful, transformative pathways forward. Make a donation today to Reclaim the Block and Black Visions who are on the frontlines in response to the murder of George Floyd.

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5 Ways White People Can Take Action in Response to White and State-Sanctioned Violence

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On Monday evening, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police. Video surfaced of a white police officer holding his knee to Floyd's neck for eight minutes while Floyd pleaded with police saying "I can't breathe." Floyd became unresponsive and died shortly after at Hennepin County Medical Center.

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By Eric K. Ward
I understand the rage. I was in 4th grade the first time I was chased by police. My best friend got caught; I did not. His life ended up very different from mine, in part because I ran faster than he did.

I understand the rage. I lived ten blocks from the Signal Hill Police Department in Long Beach, California where Ron Settles was found beaten and hanging from a noose in his jail cell the day after his 1981 arrest just a few blocks from my house. Two years later, I was 17, on my bike, near that very spot. A cop pulled me over, put a gun to my head, and said, "I could kill you right now and no one would care."

By 1992 when a jury acquitted four officers in the brutal beating of Rodney King, I was a student leader at the University of Oregon, helping to organize protests in response. Within a week, I and other Black leaders would be hiding off campus, unable to go to classes for fear of being served by a grand jury summons. In 1999 I was among the first wave to get pepper sprayed and hit by bullets in the Battle of Seattle. Later my work in philanthropy gave me the chance to shift institutional resources to fund grassroots infrastructure to challenge police brutality, through the Ford Foundation and co-founding Funders for Justice.

Engaging in disciplined protest and systemic change doesn't mean I don't understand the rage. Months after starting a job in philanthropy, I'm in my fancy suit in a line of people exiting the train at Grand Central Station. A white guy pushes me out of line. I push back. He comes after me. I lock his arms down to his side. Through the music in my headphones I hear him say, "Let me go. I'm a cop." I release one of his arms so he can show me his badge, if he has one. He pulls his badge out from under his shirt. I let him go but I'm furious. I keep yelling at him, waiting for the police to show up en masse. I'm so angry I don't even care. If this is how I die, I think, this is how I die. No other cops come and I proceed to the office. Most of the folks I work with are unmoved by my story.

So I understand the rage. You follow the rules and yet injustice after injustice just keeps on coming. But even as I sit here in a rage that makes it difficult to be rational, I can see that there's more going on than the language of the unheard, as Dr. King described rioting at times like this. There are accelerationists on the right and the left exploiting our rage. Trump has tweeted his intention to designate antifa as a terrorist organization. The distraction of chaos can cloud our view. Which is why I have to testify to what is clearly at stake in this moment.

America is on a precipice. Whether we go over the edge into the abyss of a full-blown authoritarian state or find firm ground on which to construct an inclusive democracy depends on what we do right now. We need to be clear: every word and every action has consequence.

This is what I see today, from my home in Portland, Oregon where I pray my neighbors' late-night loud music doesn't bring the police to my block. From my work with Western States Center and Southern Poverty Law Center, responding to the rise of white nationalism and a far-right authoritarian state. From deep in my bones, where I've been living the reality of police brutality my whole life.

This is what I can point towards, 21 things those committed to inclusive democracy can do right now.

1. Recognize the precarious moment that American democracy finds itself in right now.

2. Honor the grief and anger that the public is feeling over the recent lynchings of Black Americans, many at the hands of law enforcement.

3. Understand the culpability of elected officials and senior law enforcement who waited until people were at their wits end (protesting and rioting in the streets) before taking the issue seriously and taking action, and who now stand by as the police riot in cities across the nation.

4. Condemn Donald Trump's call for violence and demand that the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate open hearings immediately on the President's unlawful incitement of violence.

5. Be troubled by the seven people shot in Louisville; the 21 year-old shot and killed in Detroit; the law enforcement officer shot in Milwaukee, the two law officers shot in Oakland, one killed.

6. Raise concern about the number of vehicle assaults against protestors by both law enforcement and possible vigilantes, a deadly tactic we remember from the protest against the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally where Heather Heyer was killed.

7. Decry the disparate and disproportionate policing response to the protests of police brutality in cities around the nation compared with the hands-off response to "reopen" rallies where armed white men shut down state capitols.

8. Acknowledge that white folks (rioters, not protestors) have again and without invitation, hijacked, sidelined, and distracted from Black communities' leadership attempts to stop Black lynchings in America.

9. Demand that law enforcement prioritize de-escalation and that all violence against non-violent protestors cease immediately.

10. Build the collective memory that law enforcement has a long-established track record of disproportionate response to social movement protest that comes from the left, and of employing agent provocateurs to incite violence.

11. Insist that police not equate property damage with the taking of a human life to justify state violence against protests.

12. Lift up the peacemakers, those like Erika Shields, the chief of police in Atlanta who walked the streets with protestors, talking to everyone; Ruhel Islam, whose restaurant burned in the Minneapolis uprising and said that wasn't the most important thing; networks like the Movement for Black Lives (#DefendBlackLives #DefundPolice) and local NAACP chapters (#WeAreDoneDying) who are calling for concrete and tangible changes to systems of policing.

13. Raise alarm about the activation of national guard and military units, martial law, and states of emergencies, and the idea that those opposing fascism could now be labeled terrorists.

14. Condemn accelerators on both the right and left who glorify and center violence over justice, othering over community, divisive ideology over common-ground values. Demand that all parties cease engaging in violence and the targeting of civilians and their property through arson.

15. Demand that cities and state governments launch independent investigations into the deaths or injury of any individuals in the midst of protests and rioting.

16. Call on cable, news, and other media to drop all pay walls during this time. Americans need access to real-time, fact-checked information.

17. Call on the United Nations to immediately appoint a human rights Special Rapporteur to investigate present-day lynchings of Black Americans and organize towards a Truth and Reconciliation Commission on policing in America.

18. Press philanthropy to immediately double grantmaking, for at least three years, to advance real equity in America.

19. Acknowledge injustice but call on all to restrain from a cycle of systemic and physical violence that will only escalate the rise of authoritarianism in America. Continued violence - from white nationalists, from law enforcement, and from the left - puts beleaguered communities in further danger and will contribute to the re-election of Donald Trump, which could end forever the dream of inclusive democracy that our ancestors fought and died for.

20. Bring together people of goodwill who believe the American experiment's best days are yet to come. Defend inclusive democracy by using disciplined non-violent protest and non-violent direct action to demand justice and hold local elected officials accountable.

21. If you believe that Black lives matter, support the goals being established by the Movement for Black Lives. Respect the Black leaders who have lived this reality their whole lives. Educate yourself and others on the connection between police brutality in America and fine and loan forgiveness, universal basic income, and other forms of reparations as outlined by the Black-led movement for justice.

Do one thing. Do them all. But take seriously - and warn others - that the attempt to create an inclusive American democracy is now on a precipice. Words and actions carry real consequences that could drive us over the edge and to a point of no return.

Eric K. Ward is a Senior Advisor with Race Forward and Executive Director of Western States Center.

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Authoritarian State or Inclusive Democracy? 21 Things We Can Do Right Now

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I understand the rage. I was in 4th grade the first time I was chased by police. My best friend got caught; I did not. His life ended up very different from mine, in part because I ran faster than he...

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Anti-Racist Reading List from Ibram X. Kendi - Chicago Public Library

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Anti-Racist Reading List from Ibram X. Kendi by Rattusnorvegicus - a community-created list : "This anti-racist syllabus is for people realizing they were never taught how to be anti-racist. How to treat all the racial groups as equals. How to look at the racial inequity all around and look for the racist policies producing it, and the racist ideas veiling it.

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Each day, our team fights to reunite families, lift barriers to employment and housing, and strengthen communities by supporting small businesses and land trusts. We're building a more equitable and just Detroit, and we need your help.

DJC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose EIN number is 82-2295339. All donations made to DJC are tax deductible to the fullest extent permitted by law.

Have questions? Email info@detroitjustice.org.

Note: After you fill out the form in Donor Box, you should be re-directed to a thank you page, and will automatically receive a confirmation email.

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Each day, our team fights to reunite families, lift barriers to employment and housing, and strengthen communities by supporting small businesses and land trusts. We're building a more equitable and just Detroit, and we need your help. DJC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose EIN number is 82-2295339.

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Opportunities to Donate to Support Local Work for Racial Justice

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Opportunities to Donate to Support Local Work for Racial Justice

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Shared Resources to Facilitate Reflection and Springboard Action

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Shared Resources to Facilitate Reflection and Springboard Action

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Thank you for emailing me if you notice that any of the following resource links become inactive or if they are otherwise problematic.

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Compliments of: Victoria Alexander via Twitter: https://twitter.com/victoriaalxndr/status/1266829408268095493

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Reclaim the Block began in 2018 and organizes Minneapolis community and city council members to move money from the police department into other areas of the city's budget that truly promote community health and safety.

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This is Breonna Taylor
She was brutally shot and killed by police in her own home. She did nothing wrong. Months after her murder at the hands of LMPD, her family has been denied the justice they deserve. Click below to take action or call 502-735-1784 to demand justice for Breonna right away.

Breonna Taylor: Say her name

Keep reading for important updates and action steps to #StandWithBre and finally secure justice in this case-or click to learn more about Breonna and the facts of the case.

CASE UPDATE:

Breonna and her family are still without justice. Attorney General Daniel Cameron just announced that the grand jury failed to indict any of the officers for Breonna Taylor's death, and that they would indict only Officer Brett Hankison with shots fired into other apartments during this senseless killing. This announcement is a slap in the face to the family of Breonna Taylor and the community at large. Here are five things that must happen to ensure an injustice of this magnitude never happens again. We'll need all hands on deck:

1. The Department of Justice must take immediate action to bring charges against all LMPD officers involved in Breonna's murder. The State of Kentucky has failed to secure justice for Breonna Taylor, for her family, and for her community. The responsibility now falls on the Department of Justice to hold Breonna Taylor's murderers accountable. Additionally, we demand that the Biden/Harris Campaign, who can and should be leading the call for justice on this issue, demand immediate DoJ action in this case.

2. Commonwealth's Attorney Tom Wine, who originally presided over Breonna's case, must step down for his gross mishandling of the Louisville Police Department and the subsequent investigation of Breonna Taylor's murder. In the days following her murder at the hands of officers Brett Hankison, Myles Cosgrove, and John Mattingly, Attorney Wine made no moves to condemn or in anyway hold the LMPD accountable. When he did take action, it was to charge Breonna's boyfriend Kenneth Walker for attempted murder of a police officer- even though he was defending himself from the plain clothes officers who recklessly and violently invaded his home that night. YOUR demands caused Attorney Tom Wine to drop the charges against Kenny and ultimately recuse himself from the case. Now we must demand that he step down!

3. We need full transparency from the grand jury and an independent overhaul of its findings, including a release of the transcripts from the proceedings as requested by Breonna's family. Breonna Taylor was sleeping in her own bed when she was murdered. It is outrageous that not a single charge was brought for her death. We CAN'T let this stand.

4. We must pass Breonna's Law to ban no knock warrants in cities across the country to prevent more murders like Breonna Taylor's. A No-Knock warrant is the type of warrant that killed Breonna. They're dangerous, unnecessary, and statistically more likely to target black and brown lives. We successfully helped pass Breonna's Law in Louisville, which banned no-knock warrants there-now we MUST do it again nationwide.

5. Lastly, we must support a new Commonwealth's Attorney candidate for Louisville, and for prosecutors' offices across the country, who can stand up for civilians against the brutality of our criminal legal system. The system hasn't failed, it was built this way. It is critical that we come together to dismantle and replace it with something imaginative and redemptive.

It is critical that ALL of us step up and make these five demands of our country and of our communities. We CAN secure justice for Breonna and end the epidemic of police brutality in America, but it will take all of us doing the hard work necessary to create that change. Please join us.

As a full-time EMT for two hospitals in Louisville, Kentucky, Breonna Taylor was a beloved and respected essential worker during the coronavirus pandemic. That police brutality killed her, and not the virus, is a painful reflection of the state of America.

A loving daughter, caring sister, and a kind and giving friend throughout her short life, she had a servant's heart and dedicated her entire life to helping people.

Breonna and her hard-working family moved to Louisville, Kentucky 12 years ago looking for a better life together. They found better jobs, a welcoming community, good schools, and were happy to call Louisville their home.

Breonna was always caring and thoughtful of others. At an early age she decided to dedicate her time to helping people. She worked with children with disabilities right after she graduated high school and spent the last several years working as an Emergency Medical Technician as she prepared to become a full-time nurse.

As proud as her family was of the good she did, they were concerned by the risks she faced serving patients impacted by the coronavirus. As an employee of not just one but two medical centers, she was living out her dream of serving others. She was truly on the front lines of the pandemic response, risking her own life every day to protect the community that she had come to love, and that loved her.

Stand with Breonna

Breonna was asleep at home when a rogue task-force of the Louisville police broke down her door in the middle of the night and murdered her. They were attempting an illegal drug raid in the wrong neighborhood for a suspect that they'd already arrested earlier that day.

Since the launch of this petition, Commonwealth Attorney Tom Wine has recused himself from the investigation into the LMPD conduct that night, the FBI is now investigating the killing of Breonna Taylor, the LMPD Police Chief, Steve Conrad, announced his retirement, all charges have been dropped against Breonna's boyfriend, Kenny Walker, and the Louisville Metro Council passed a ban on no-knock raids like the one used to break into Breonna's home, but our work is not done.
Breonna and her family are still without justice. Attorney General Daniel Cameron just announced that the grand jury failed to indict any of the officers for Breonna Taylor's death, and that they would indict only Officer Brett Hankison with shots fired into other apartments during this senseless killing. This announcement is a slap in the face to the family of Breonna Taylor and the community at large. We need all hands on deck to ensure an injustice of this magnitude never happens again.
We must continue fighting through legal channels for justice for Breonna's family and accountability for the officers involved. But in this moment, we must also do everything in our power to fight for deep, systemic change that prevents more murders like Breonna Taylor's. That's why we're launching a full-force, nationwide demand that cities across the country pass Breonna's Law to ban no-knock warrants. Add your name right now to call on city officials to stop more murders like Breonna Taylor's, immediately.

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She was brutally shot and killed by police in her own home. She did nothing wrong. Months after her murder at the hands of LMPD, her family has been denied the justice they deserve. Click below to take action or call 502-735-1784 to demand justice for Breonna right away.

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Thank you for reaching out. The Bail Project is in the process of expanding. At this time we can only serve individuals in cities where we have a site. If you or a loved one needs help paying bail in one of the following cities please select your location and complete the form below.

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The Bail Project - Los Angeles is only able to accept referrals from Public Defenders at this time. Please contact your loved one's Public Defender and ask that they contact us for the Referral Form. If you don't know the Public Defender associated with their case you can find that out by looking them up on this website, calling the appropriate office, and providing them with the name and case number of the person you're trying to refer.

In 2021, Illinois became the first state to eliminate the use of cash bail entirely. In response, The Bail Project - Chicago is no longer providing bail assistance but has partnered with the Lawndale Christian Legal Center to support people coming out of pretrial detention on personal recognizance.

The Bail Project - Tyler is building capacity and community referrals are coming soon.
The Bail Project, Inc. is a nonprofit organization. We pay bail for people in need at no cost to them or their loved ones. We are an independent organization not affiliated with or a part of any law enforcement agency. Our services are free of charge. If you receive an inquiry from someone claiming to be from The Bail Project and asking for money to pay bail for you or your loved one, please do not send any money. Instead reach out to us directly using this form or by giving us a call at (323) 366-0799. You should not send us any confidential information in response to this webform. Whatever you disclose to us will not be privileged or confidential and The Bail Project, Inc. cannot protect this information if requested through a court.

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The Bail Project is a national nonprofit organization that pays bail for people in need, reuniting families and restoring the presumption of innocence. Because bail is returned at the end of a case, donations to The Bail Project can be recycled and reused to pay bail two to three times per year, maximizing the impact of every dollar.

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As an organization dedicated to Black liberation and to collective liberation, we need a radical and ongoing investment in our own healing. By claiming love for our own bodies, our own psyches, our own experiences, and by building the resources we need to integrate healing justice into all that we do, we are insisting on conditions that can carry us towards the next generation of work, and towards a deeper place of freedom for all of us.

Powerful Campaigns

BLVC is committed to a long term vision in which ALL Black lives not only matter, but are able to thrive. What we know to be true in order to create this world is that oppressed people, especially Black people, need to build collective power in order to create systems transformation. Through the development of powerful strategic campaigns, we seek to expand the power of Black people across the Twin Cities metro area and Minnesota. This can look like delivering mobilization and action goals as part of a national coalition in which Black lives are centered, but it most often looks like visioning and leading targeted collaborative local campaigns that advance a concrete impact for people's lives here, while also advancing a shift in public narrative that connects to transformative long-term change.

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As an organization dedicated to Black liberation and to collective liberation, we need a radical and ongoing investment in our own healing. By claiming love for our own bodies, our own psyches, our own experiences, and by building the resources we need to integrate healing justice into all that we do, we are insisting on conditions that can carry us towards the next generation of work, and towards a deeper place of freedom for all of us.

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Since our nation's founding, discriminatory policies and laws have created an unequal system in which Black communities have had their civil rights and liberties denied and have been systemically locked out of opportunities in education, housing, employment, and more.

Through our Systemic Equality agenda, we will use nationwide litigation, advocacy, and public education to advance laws and policies rooted in racial equity and end discriminatory policies, laws, and practices that have an outsized impact on Black communities.

Help us in our fight to ensure all people have equal access to housing, voting rights, education, and more by learning more, pledging your support, or donating. When we have full and equal access to education, jobs, housing, voting rights and more, better futures are possible.

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The ACLU dares to create a more perfect union - beyond one person, party, or side. Our mission is to realize this promise of the United States Constitution for all and expand the reach of its guarantees.

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Florida Housing Complex Forced to Stop Illegally Evicting Black Families

Last January we launched a rapid response campaign following a wave of evictions at Holly Court Apartments in Tampa. Victoria Lee, a tenant there, used our OrganizeFor platform to mobilize thousands of members and amplify tenant demands to fix the plumbing, honor leases, and support tenants who'd been illegally pushed out. Many families were given eviction notices on New Year's Eve for no reason at all and given just 30 days to find a new home. One mother reported having to go to the corner store to use the bathroom as raw sewage backed up in her tub. Management all but ignored calls for help and she had to call out of work for days because she couldn't shower. After the online petition and a sleep-in protest, Palm Communities agreed to honor residents' leases, provide temporary housing for displaced residents, and resolve maintenance issues. Housing is a human right, but far too often greed and profit trump the needs of Black and low-income residents who live in buildings owned by private equity firms. Your calls and text messages kept residents in their homes!

AT&T Pulls Funding from White Nationalist Network

With your help, we pressured AT&T to stop funding the far-right network One America News. OAN was a major vehicle for Trump, and has continued to provide a "friendly" platform for his allies. We've seen correspondents use racial slurs, call for the execution of election officials, suggest shooting unhoused people - all without consequence. OAN consistently promotes hate-filled content, and disseminates dangerous misinformation about the 2020 elections and safety of the COVID-19 vaccine, with the goal of provoking their audience. Research revealed a major reason for the network's success was support from AT&T. AT&T should know better. So thousands of Color Of Change members wrote to AT&T CEO John Stankey, and we were heard. One America Network has been removed from DirectTV. This is another step towards making sure the media isn't allowed to amplify racist lies that lead to real-world violence against Black people.

Biden Grants Clemency to 70 People on Home Confinement

Throughout the pandemic, we've fought to get incarcerated people who pose no risk to their communities but could fall deathly ill with COVID sent home. On April 26, 2022, nearly 150,000 Color Of Change members helped convince President Biden to free 70 people on home confinement. That means they can live independently, pursue their dreams, spend time with friends and family without electronic monitors or other dehumanizing conditions of confinement. It is historic for a president to grant so many clemencies in their first term. But thousands more people deserve to be free - and risk being sent back due to minor technicalities or bureaucratic errors. People on home confinement have had to turn down jobs or miss funerals because they're outside of the range they're allowed to travel. Biden promised he'd end mass incarceration and cut the prison population in half. Help us hold him to that.

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Color Of Change - Color Of Change helps you do something real about injustice.

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Last January we launched a rapid response campaign following a wave of evictions at Holly Court Apartments in Tampa. Victoria Lee, a tenant there, used our OrganizeFor platform to mobilize thousands of members and amplify tenant demands to fix the plumbing, honor leases, and support tenants who'd been illegally pushed out.

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Official George Floyd Memorial Fund, organized by Philonise Floyd

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On May 25, 2020, my life shattered as I learned of the tragic passing of my dear b... Philonise Floyd needs your support for Official George Floyd Memorial Fund

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ActBlue Charities is a qualified 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization and donations are tax-deductible to the full extent allowed under the law.

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Black Lives Matter: Support the movement

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Our movement is dedicated to ending state-sanctioned violence, liberating Black people, and ending white supremacy forever. Join us in supporting the movement today!

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CNN and 'Sesame Street' to host a town hall addressing racism | CNN

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As anger and heartbreak have swept across America over the killing of yet another black man at the hands of police, CNN and Sesame Street are refocusing their second town hall to address racism.

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Opinion | George Floyd’s Death Is a Failure of Generations of Leadership (Published 2020)

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Policymakers in the 1960s had the answers — give political and economic power to the people — but walked away.

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The Bail Project (TBP) is a national nonprofit organization that pays bail for people in need, reuniting families and restoring the presumption of innocence. The Bail Project currently operates in 9 cities around the country, including Detroit.

How it Works

● The Bail Project receives referrals from community members, defense attorneys, and others

● TBP staff interview potential clients to determine eligibility (see below)

● If eligible, TBP aims to pay bail for clients within one day of the interview

● TBP stays in touch with clients throughout their case, providing reminders about court appearances and helping with issues like transportation

● At the end of a case, the bail money is returned to TBP and used to bail out another client

Eligibility

To be eligible to be bailed out, potential clients must:

● Have a bail amount of $5,000 or less

● Not have warrants or holds that will prevent them from actually being released should TBP post their bail

● Be willing and able to stay in touch with our team and to return to court, as demonstrated by roots in the community, reliable contact information, and a limited history of prior failures to appear

Team & Referrals

TBP has three staff members in Detroit. You can make a referral by contacting any of them, or by using the referral form, available at tinyurl.com/TBPDetroit

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The Bail Project - DETROIT JUSTICE CENTER

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The Bail Project (TBP) is a national nonprofit organization that pays bail for people in need, reuniting families and restoring the presumption of innocence. The Bail Project currently operates in 9 cities around the country, including Detroit.

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In the days since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, there have been peaceful protests, violent clashes and persistent calls for justice. But there is a long history behind this particular shocking event. Professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is chair of the department of African American Studies at Princeton University, and he joins Amna Nawaz to discuss the broader context.

Judy Woodruff:
And now Amna Nawaz continues our conversation about some of the larger underlying issues surrounding all of this.

It's part of our ongoing series Race Matters.

Amna Nawaz:
Judy, it's been four days since George Floyd died in police custody.

Since then, there have been peaceful protests, violent clashes, and persistent calls for justice. But those four days are about much more than just this incident.

Joining me to talk about that is Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of the department of African-American Studies at Princeton University, and he's the author of the book "Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own."

Eddie Glaude, welcome to the "NewsHour."

And let's just start with the news of today. It's been four days, as I mentioned. It took video documenting a man's death and days of protest, but the officer was arrested today. What's your reaction to that?

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.:
It's a great first step.

It doesn't dispel the deep distrust. We have seen before officers arrested or individual citizens arrested, and the process of - the judicial process taking place, and many of those same folks have been acquitted.

So this is just the beginning. It could have been an easy step, given what we saw on the video, but we don't want to over - overreach. You know, we always want to congratulate ourselves in these sorts of moments. We just need to understand this as the first, perhaps, obvious step that should have been made four days ago.

Amna Nawaz:
We have also seen night after night of growing tensions, of people's frustrations coming out into the streets.

The other piece of news today is the mayor announcing a curfew and a state of emergency. Is that the right move right now?

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.:
Well, you know, I'm not a mayor of a major city in the United States. I don't want to presume.

But I do want to say this, though, that is anger is - the anger that was expressed over the last few days, and especially last night, reflects, I think, a kind of accumulated grievance, you know?

And in the way in which we tell the story of African-American politics, we always want to kind of bracket anger. We're not allowed to be angry in public. And, in some ways, anger, going back to the ancients, going all the way back to Aristotle, announces that something just happened here.

It puts folk on notice that something must change. And it's not just simply a spontaneous act. It is the consequence of, shall we say, as I said earlier, accumulated grievous.

So, there is a curfew. Folks will perhaps calm down, but we need to understand that anger, in this instance, rightly expressed, right, is the precondition for a general and, I think, appropriate correction of the underlying problems that define the life of black folk in Minneapolis and in some ways across the country.

Amna Nawaz:
And, of course, none of this is happening in a vacuum. You saw many of the protesters out there wearing masks. You can't forget all of this is unfolding on top of the health crisis, a pandemic that is disproportionately killing black Americans.

You wrote about that today. I just want to read you a short quote from that.

And you said: "How does one live in such a time? For those African-Americans who lost loved ones and their jobs, who find themselves in long lines at food banks, who have to deal with the ongoing stress of a virus that can strike at any moment, how do you manage the trauma of loss and the terror of seeing another black person killed by police?"

And you use the word another because we have seen video after video. What's the collective impact of that, the cumulative toll of those videos?

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.:
Oh, my God.

I mean, for those of us who have to watch it, and then we have to worry about our children and our brothers and sisters and our uncles and aunts and friends, right, it increases the levels of stress and worry and concern.

You know, when we think about every major urban uprising in this country, bracketing 168 after the murder and assassination of Dr. King, every last one of them have been rooted, since '64, going back into the 1940s, in some form of encounter with police, some form of police brutality or some act in which the police have in some ways harmed or even murdered a black person.

So, here we are in the moment in which we're dealing with a global pandemic, trying to figure out how to live under these conditions. And we still have to deal with the fact that our children, that our family members, that our friends can be murdered by the police.

It makes living hard. It makes it difficult, in a moment that's already difficult and hard.

Amna Nawaz:
We come back again and again to this question of, when will it change, how will it change?

I was speaking earlier with a police chief in a major city who is himself a black man, and he said the frustration for him right now is that - he said, I don't know what else we can ask people of color to do. I don't know what else we can ask black men to say or do that hasn't already been said or done. And until the people who aren't affected are as outraged as the people who are, nothing will change.

Do you agree with that?

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.:
I understand it.

I don't think we can wait on those who are invested in the idea of whiteness to change. If we do that, we're going to lose another generation, those who are invested in the idea of America as a white nation in the vein of old Europe clinging to those commitments.

And in - and in the interim, we keep losing people. Those of us who are - who have learned the lessons of our history, those of us who want to imagine America differently, we have to start building a world where those kinds of beliefs have no corner to breathe.

Vice President Biden needed to say, what we need to do is hold police accountable, what we need to do is decriminalize, right, a whole host of actions that force these encounters. We need to change the way police see black men and women, right, which is rooted in a deep cultural ethos. We need to address the fundamental underlying conditions of resource-deprived communities, where people don't have a living wage, where they don't have decent education, where they don't have decent housing.

All of this is rooted in this belief that America is a white nation. If we have to wait on those folk who are committed to that, America will continue to be this ugly place.

So, I believe, in my heart of hearts, that you and I and those of us who are committed to a more just America, a new America, we have to get about the business of building it now.

COVID has changed everything, has changed everything. We can't go back to what was. We can't allow people to double down on their ugly commitments. We have to finally muster the courage to build a new America, or this thing will go to hell.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.:
That's a bit melodramatic, but I hope you get the point.

Amna Nawaz:
I do, indeed, and it was very well said.

And I apologize. We only have a few seconds left.

But I have to ask you, because you shared in this essay that, when you watched the video of George Floyd, that you wept. And you dig into the dark chapters of American history and spend your time making that truth very clear to the rest of the country and the world.

What was it about this video and this moment that brought you to that moment?

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.:
He cried out for his mother.

She's been dead for two years. She's been dead. He basically told someone to tell my kids that I love them, because I'm going to die.

And that man, that moral monster kept his knee on his neck.

I didn't - I couldn't process it. It broke me.

Amna Nawaz:
That is Eddie Glaude Jr. weighing in at the end of a very difficult week for, not just the family and friends of George Floyd, the people of Minneapolis, and for the rest of the country.

Thank you so much for being with us today.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.:
Thank you.

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How response to George Floyd's death reflects 'accumulated grievance' of black America

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In the days since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, there have been peaceful protests, violent clashes and persistent calls for justice. But there is a long history behind this particular shocking event. Professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

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Scene on Radio host/producer John Biewen :

As the 2020 election approaches, the survival of the United States as a democratic republic is a topic of national conversation-Trumpian authoritarianism; voter suppression and gerrymandering; concerns about foreign intervention, election security, and the role of money in politics.

Our twelve-part Season 4 series on democracy will touch on those concerns but will go much deeper, effectively retelling the story of the United States from its beginnings up to the present as we complicate, maybe upend, our listeners' understanding of American history. Our series title, The Land That Never Has Been Yet, is borrowed from the Langston Hughes poem, " Let America Be America Again."

The Land reunites the Seeing White series team: my collaborator Chenjerai Kumanyika, journalism and media studies professor at Rutgers University, and our editor, the public radio veteran Loretta Williams.

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Scene on Radio host/producer John Biewen : As the 2020 election approaches, the survival of the United States as a democratic republic is a topic of national conversation-Trumpian authoritarianism; voter suppression and gerrymandering; concerns about foreign intervention, election security, and t

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Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels new, but in truth it's an old story.

Why? Where did the notion of "whiteness" come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for?

Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen took a deep dive into these questions, along with an array of leading scholars and regular guest Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika, in this fourteen-part documentary series, released between February and August 2017. The series editor is Loretta Williams.

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Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels ne

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We create practical, timely, affordable professional learning to help educators and instructional leaders provide students with a modern, equitable, and quality education.

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Lumumba Shabazz (Head men's soccer coach/Kalamazoo College)
You wanna know a secret? Whenever I get stressed, I work. I work a lot. As a soldier during the first Gulf War, I volunteered to literally burn shit in huge drums of kerosene because it was the only duty that I could do that would allow me the freedom and time to ease the stresses on my brain in a war time environment. I am sitting now, after a day of running on the trails, mowing the yard, fixing the mower, and cooking dinner, and all of this was done to avoid having to think about what was going on in Minneapolis as well as the rest of the country. You wanna know another secret? I was a choir boy growing up in Brooklyn, New York, literally and figuratively so. I was that kid that every mother loved; the kind she openly wanted her son to be: kind, compassionate, brilliant student and athlete, and a real nerd for history, arts and culture. I never smoked, never drank and never got in trouble for anything. I was a dope ass kid. However, not everyone liked me and for that, I had to learn to run.

This morning as I was preparing to head out to the trails near my house, my 14-year-old daughter followed me around as I was getting dressed and asked why I couldn't exercise in the backyard. This was unusual because she never really expressed any interest in my workout habits. I was fully prepared to ignore her but then she started crying - I mean, really crying. I was taken aback and through her anguished cries, she blurted out that she was terrified of me going out because she was scared that the prevailing mood in the country meant that I could be in serious danger. Her fears shook me to my very core and in that moment, I resented everything about this country for making me have to comfort my daughter so.

14, after all, is still an age of innocence. From what I remember, it is a time of budding rebellion from the chains of parental control. A time of discovering a way past your own awkward interpretation of self into a world of teenage angst, new awakenings and what pretends to be love. I am so angry that she is not being afforded that opportunity, and it is not like my wife and I haven't tried to shelter from the ugliness of the world. We have worked really hard at it but despite our best efforts, we keep falling short of the mark. We fell short when we could not protect her from being called a monkey in school, or being told by a middle school classmate on the school bus that his grandfather would have owned her grandfather. We fell short when we could not prevent her from the "Nigger Whispers", which is apparently something that white middle schoolers do when they want you to hear their contempt for your presence, but can still feign ignorance and pretend that they were addressing someone else when challenged. We fell short when we couldn't prevent her from hearing the sick jokes like "What do Black people and apples have in common?" The middle school answer: "They both look good hanging on trees." I hate that my daughter is being forced to grow up too quickly and that she has to defend her existence every single second of the day. I resent being powerless to stop what is already here, and the troubles yet to come.

I left the house this morning in full agreement with my women that I would check in every half hour or so, if just to ease their minds. After all, running outdoors is quite a new thing for me. The pandemic has meant that I can no longer go to the gym and the virus of eating every time I walk pass the refrigerator means that I need to get up and get active. So off I go, I run...

I run from the IHOP where I worked on Ralph and Avenue K in Brooklyn every single summer night in high school because not running would mean a serious beat down from the idle white boys who sat outside the pizza shop waiting on me to pass on my way home. I would sprint 30 minutes nonstop from there to Kings Plaza Shopping Center dodging bottles, garbage cans, baseball bats and a torrential downfall of "Nigger this and Nigger that" just to make it home safely. And then, I would immediately worry about having to navigate those same streets again the next day. This was a year or two before Yusuf Hawkins, a 16-year-old black teen, who had gone to inquire about a used car, was chased and murdered by a white mob in Bensonhurst. Already, my mother had warned me about going alone into Canarsie, Brighton Beach, Bay Ridge and Sheepshead Bay, but somehow, she forgot to mention Ralph and K.

Every night they would wait for me and every time I escaped, they seemed to grow angrier. Rain and thunderstorms were my salvation because when the rain fell, they wouldn't be out then. Those nights were comforting. I could afford to rest easy with my own thoughts about school, soccer, and which girl I wanted to ask out. Normal teenage shit I suppose. The hot summer nights were the worst because they would gather by the legions then, and those nights, I had to run. In fact, I quit the night after they almost caught me. That day at work, I was wrecked by migraines and simply had no energy left when I clocked out at 10pm to head home. As usual, my "friends" were waiting for me, but this time, they were spread out across two blocks in small groups, instead of congregating in front of the pizza shop as normal. I was terrified but immediately a sense of survival kicked in and I began to survey the scene in front of me. I made a quick decision to start running towards the largest group of boys and at the last moment, I dodged between two passing cars, only narrowly escaping getting hit, and started sprinting down the middle of the street. In the din of it, one of them screamed, "catch the nigger", but there was no catching me that night. As the boys closed in from behind, I remember seeing the faces of the adults flashing by as they sat on their front steps enjoying the nighttime breeze and Yankees baseball commentary. I remember them laughing when one of the boys got close enough to graze me with a punch on the side of my head. I remember running full speed at the group that was closing in from the front and lowering my shoulder to break through. God must have been with me that night because just as I was about to turn the corner to Kings Plaza, I was praying that a bus would be there. Fortunately for me, it was, but being late at night, the driver decided to pull off a few minutes early and I had to run a few extra blocks to catch up to it at a red light. Just as I arrived, the light turned green again and I started frantically slapping the side of the bus to get the driver's attention and thankfully, he slowed up enough, without completely stopping, and allowed me to hop on. Apparently, he saw me in the distance being chased and drove slower so that I could have time to make it on to the bus. That was my last night at IHOP and but not my last time running.

Senior year, I am working the closing shift at the KFC on Kings Highway and Ocean Parkway, still in Brooklyn. It was right across the street from Cinema Kings, the seediest, most grimy movie theater that ever existed, deep in white boy territory, and yeah, I had to run again. Funny thing is, the same boys would show up in the restaurant during the day and they would be the most well behaved, mannerly people that one would ever hope to meet, but at night, the freaks would come out. These fuckers were vicious. Bigger too. Myself and all of the other young black kids who worked there used to flag down passing patrol cars and the cops would flat out tell us that they couldn't help us. Some nights, we would pool money to get a taxi to go two or three train stations down, just to avoid them, but I was always the odd man out who lived in the opposite direction in Coney Island, so I had to run a lot more. I ran down busy streets; down train tracks, grabbed on the back of buses, I did whatever it took to survive, until I couldn't take it anymore and quit.

I should have run at Albee Square Mall in downtown Brooklyn when a group of white cops started beating a black vendor on the street for peddling goods without a license. The law stated then that the goods should have been confiscated and a summons issued, but since the law didn't apparently apply to black people, the cops started beating the young man without mercy. As a crowd gathered, my brother and I said loudly that the cops were in violation, and before we knew it we were being beaten too. After being beaten, we were dragged across the street to a paddy wagon, had hoods placed over our heads and punched repeatedly. The handcuffs were also applied so tightly that we started losing feeling in our fingers and wrists, and the verbal and physical abuse continued for several hours before we were released and issued a citation to reappear in court for resisting arrest.

I should have run when I walked out of a friend's church's choir practice (with the Bible in hand) and less than 30 seconds later, was spread-eagled over the hood of a squad car with guns drawn for fitting the description of some "Magical Negro", who commits a crime, goes to church, sings in the choir and comes out meticulously dressed in white with the Good Book in his hands seeking yet another victim.

My friends and I should have run when the police would stop by our flag football games in the park near our house in Coney Island, force us into their cars and make us stand in mandatory criminal lineups for some victim or the other to point in our direction, and all the time we would say silent prayers to which ever God felt like answering to not let it be us.

My two younger brothers should have run when at 11 and 9 they were arrested for rape. That's right, rape! It's funny now because I am quite certain as the eldest and the one who knew them best, that those two hadn't even discovered how to pleasure themselves just yet, much less to rape someone. But again, they fit the "Magical Negro" description, but then again, they didn't. The suspects were two black males and that was about all they had in common. In less than five minutes, the entire neighborhood rallied and made such a racket at the police station, that the cops had no choice but to release my brothers, and even after the woman admitted to lying, they still had to deal with pending charges of resisting arrest.

It's easy to see then that my interaction with the police has never been a great one, and I was the quintessential good kid. It was not a relationship built on reciprocal trust and respect. It has always been adversarial. It is a relationship of contempt and anger, and that anger subsides, only to rear itself again when black people are murdered in the street, and in their homes, their cars, the parks, and department stores, and their murderers continue to get away. It is difficult I imagine for my white colleagues to understand how we (Black people) are often approached by the police. There are no pleasantries exchanged, no small talk, no conversation, only fear, contempt, an assumption of guilt, and hands on guns. They reek of fear because after all, myself and many others like me represents a clear and present danger. I hear it all the time about how intimidating and scary I am. How unapproachable...How terrifying I seem. I know now there is a vast disconnect between how white people generally see me and how I see myself. They want me to laugh to make them comfortable because their idea of me terrifies them more than the reality.

The truth is I care about people, all people. I could not be a coach and be otherwise. I am compassionate to a fault, empathetic and hate to see anyone, regardless of race, gender, or creed, being taken advantage of. Credit to my parents for raising me so. I am lover of music, culture, great books, and wine, even though I am likely to sip on the same glass for an entire night. My wife says that I am a lightweight and I fully agree. I have close friends in Ghana and South Africa, and in Mexico, and in the Arab quarter in Granada. Some of my best friends are Romani who dance flamenco in the hills and caves of Andalusia, and others are Rastafarians, deep in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. Many of my closest colleagues in coaching are Croatian and Hungarian. I've had lovers in Turkey, Germany and Colombia - please don't tell my wife - but how is it that they can all see my complex nuances, my many faces, but here at home, I am vilified.

The one thing that the murder of George Floyd brings to the forefront is that we may yet find a cure for Covid 19 but the vaccine for racism, some 400 years later, proves unattainable. I had to shield my daughter's innocence when Sandra Bland was murdered, and Tamir Rice, and Ahmaud Arbery, and now George Floyd. As a combat veteran, who has seen the ravages of death up close, I still cannot bring myself to watch the video, and try as I may to prevent her from watching it, I know that it is an impossible battle to win. The little that I have seen of it remains etched in my brain and truthfully, it haunts my sleep. It robs, steals and destroys my energy, and it burdens me with worries. I worry about my children, my cousins, my nieces and nephews. I worry that their youthful naivety is being ripped away from their own hands and hate that they must live in an adult world that is unforgiving and callous in its approach. I worry that the world will not offer them the benefit of doubt and unlike their white peers, they cannot sit back now and think about lake cottages and summer vacations. Our living is not that easy, so this morning, after all these bloody years, I had to run again.

I have to pretend to be okay and not say anything controversial. And while running, I have to be careful to not make anyone feel threatened or frightened by my presence. I have learned to manufacture coughs and make arbitrary noises with every step, so the white ladies on the trail are not startled when I come `by. I have to make sure to run at midday when the sun is hot and a lot of people are on the trail because my wife has reminded me that I can be a suspect for anything that happens early in the morning, or late at night because every Black man fits that Magical Negro description. I am almost 50 years old but may seriously have to consider the offer from one of my wonderful friends (who happens to be white) for him to be my chaperone on my runs. I am tired though. I am weary. I do not have the energy to entertain the foolishness any longer. Just this past fall while on a preseason bonding trip on Crystal River in Northern Michigan with my collegiate team, an older white woman saw fit to block my canoe from passing and requested to see my passport. Her son and husband had to talk her down but this is one of many situations where I've had to manage my anger, manage my response, and truthfully, I cannot do it anymore. My anger is now a festering sore.

I am angry about the silence from so many - angry that they would be more upset if a dog or cat was killed but not George Floyd. I am angry because so many people continue to offer so many bullshit excuses instead of declaring on principle that what happened to George Floyd was wrong. No human being should be treated so. If Dylan Roof can walk into a church and kill nine people and be offered a meal and empathy, why not George? I am angry because I know that George could easily be me, and though I would like to think myself reasoned and calm, there is no telling how I would choose to react to someone who is hell bent on killing me. I wonder then if the people who know me would still choose to remain silent. I am not certain of that, but I am certain that I am done running.

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Lumumba Shabazz (Head men's soccer coach/Kalamazoo College) You wanna know a secret? Whenever I get stressed, I work. I work a lot. As a soldier during the first Gulf War, I volunteered to literally burn shit in huge drums of kerosene because it was the only duty that I could do that would allow me the freedom and time to ease the stresses on my brain in a war time environment.

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106 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

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Note 1: This article was last updated on February 5, 2022.
Note 2: Our work is to fix what we broke and left broken. The work isn’t done…

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George Floyd, Minneapolis Protests, Ahmaud Arbery & Amy Cooper | The Daily Social Distancing Show

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In September, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr., was only 38-years-old but already president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize when he took the podium at APA's Annual Convention in Washington, D.C.

A re-reading of his powerful address today captures the urgent tone of the 60s, as he cajoled the nation's social scientists to 'tell it like it is.' In fact, to APA's membership, whom he addressed as 'concerned friends of good will,' his plea for help in changing a society 'poisoned to its soul by racism,' seems now ever more poignant in light of the tragedy that struck only seven months later.

The words he spoke that Sept. 1, as the convention's Invited Distinguished Address, were reprinted in the Journal of Social Issues (Vol. 24, No. 1, 1968). While the speech was in galley proofs, the shocking and numbing news of his assassination was released.

Here is the full text of his speech.

The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement

By Martin Luther King Jr.

It is always a very rich and rewarding experience when I can take a brief break from the day-to-day demands of our struggle for freedom and human dignity and discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned friends of good will all over the nation. It is particularly a great privilege to discuss these issues with members of the academic community, who are constantly writing about and dealing with the problems that we face and who have the tremendous responsibility of molding the minds of young men and women all over the country.

The Civil Rights Movement needs the help of social scientists

In the preface to their book, 'Applied Sociology' (1965), S. M. Miller and Alvin Gouldner state: 'It is the historic mission of the social sciences to enable mankind to take possession of society.' It follows that for Negroes who substantially are excluded from society this science is needed even more desperately than for any other group in the population.

For social scientists, the opportunity to serve in a life-giving purpose is a humanist challenge of rare distinction. Negroes too are eager for a rendezvous with truth and discovery. We are aware that social scientists, unlike some of their colleagues in the physical sciences, have been spared the grim feelings of guilt that attended the invention of nuclear weapons of destruction. Social scientists, in the main, are fortunate to be able to extirpate evil, not to invent it.

If the Negro needs social sciences for direction and for self-understanding, the white society is in even more urgent need. White America needs to understand that it is poisoned to its soul by racism and the understanding needs to be carefully documented and consequently more difficult to reject. The present crisis arises because although it is historically imperative that our society take the next step to equality, we find ourselves psychologically and socially imprisoned. All too many white Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life but with the product of these conditions-the Negro himself.

White America is seeking to keep the walls of segregation substantially intact while the evolution of society and the Negro's desperation is causing them to crumble. The white majority, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change, is resisting and producing chaos while complaining that if there were no chaos orderly change would come.

Negroes want the social scientist to address the white community and 'tell it like it is.' White America has an appalling lack of knowledge concerning the reality of Negro life. One reason some advances were made in the South during the past decade was the discovery by northern whites of the brutal facts of southern segregated life. It was the Negro who educated the nation by dramatizing the evils through nonviolent protest. The social scientist played little or no role in disclosing truth. The Negro action movement with raw courage did it virtually alone. When the majority of the country could not live with the extremes of brutality they witnessed, political remedies were enacted and customs were altered.

These partial advances were, however, limited principally to the South and progress did not automatically spread throughout the nation. There was also little depth to the changes. White America stopped murder, but that is not the same thing as ordaining brotherhood; nor is the ending of lynch rule the same thing as inaugurating justice.

After some years of Negro-white unity and partial success, white America shifted gears and went into reverse. Negroes, alive with hope and enthusiasm, ran into sharply stiffened white resistance at all levels and bitter tensions broke out in sporadic episodes of violence. New lines of hostility were drawn and the era of good feeling disappeared.

The decade of 1955 to 1965, with its constructive elements, misled us. Everyone, activists and social scientists, underestimated the amount of violence and rage Negroes were suppressing and the amount of bigotry the white majority was disguising.

Science should have been employed more fully to warn us that the Negro, after 350 years of handicaps, mired in an intricate network of contemporary barriers, could not be ushered into equality by tentative and superficial changes.

Mass nonviolent protests, a social invention of Negroes, were effective in Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma in forcing national legislation which served to change Negro life sufficiently to curb explosions. But when changes were confined to the South alone, the North, in the absence of change, began to seethe.

The freedom movement did not adapt its tactics to the different and unique northern urban conditions. It failed to see that nonviolent marches in the South were forms of rebellion. When Negroes took over the streets and shops, southern society shook to its roots. Negroes could contain their rage when they found the means to force relatively radical changes in their environment.

In the North, on the other hand, street demonstrations were not even a mild expression of militancy. The turmoil of cities absorbs demonstrations as merely transitory drama which is ordinary in city life. Without a more effective tactic for upsetting the status quo, the power structure could maintain its intransigence and hostility. Into the vacuum of inaction, violence and riots flowed and a new period opened.

Urban riots.

Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena. They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest. The looting which is their principal feature serves many functions. It enables the most enraged and deprived Negro to take hold of consumer goods with the ease the white man does by using his purse. Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking. But most of all, alienated from society and knowing that this society cherishes property above people, he is shocking it by abusing property rights. There are thus elements of emotional catharsis in the violent act. This may explain why most cities in which riots have occurred have not had a repetition, even though the causative conditions remain. It is also noteworthy that the amount of physical harm done to white people other than police is infinitesimal and in Detroit whites and Negroes looted in unity.

A profound judgment of today's riots was expressed by Victor Hugo a century ago. He said, 'If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.'

The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison. Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.

Vietnam War.

There is another cause of riots that is too important to mention casually-the war in Vietnam. Here again, we are dealing with a controversial issue. But I am convinced that the war in Vietnam has played havoc with our domestic destinies. The bombs that fall in Vietnam explode at home. It does not take much to see what great damage this war has done to the image of our nation. It has left our country politically and morally isolated in the world, where our only friends happen to be puppet nations like Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea. The major allies in the world that have been with us in war and peace are not with us in this war. As a result we find ourselves socially and politically isolated.

The war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has seriously impaired the United Nations. It has exacerbated the hatreds between continents, and worse still, between races. It has frustrated our development at home by telling our underprivileged citizens that we place insatiable military demands above their most critical needs. It has greatly contributed to the forces of reaction in America, and strengthened the military-industrial complex, against which even President Eisenhower solemnly warned us. It has practically destroyed Vietnam, and left thousands of American and Vietnamese youth maimed and mutilated. And it has exposed the whole world to the risk of nuclear warfare.

As I looked at what this war was doing to our nation, and to the domestic situation and to the Civil Rights movement, I found it necessary to speak vigorously out against it. My speaking out against the war has not gone without criticisms. There are those who tell me that I should stick with civil rights, and stay in my place. I can only respond that I have fought too hard and long to end segregated public accommodations to segregate my own moral concerns. It is my deep conviction that justice is indivisible, that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. For those who tell me I am hurting the Civil Rights movement, and ask, 'Don't you think that in order to be respected, and in order to regain support, you must stop talking against the war?' I can only say that I am not a consensus leader. I do not seek to determine what is right and wrong by taking a Gallop Poll to determine majority opinion. And it is again my deep conviction that ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher of consensus, but a molder of consensus. On some positions cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?!' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But conscience must ask the question, 'Is it right?!' And there comes a time when one must take a stand that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular. But one must take it because it is right. And that is where I find myself today.

Moreover, I am convinced, even if war continues, that a genuine massive act of concern will do more to quell riots than the most massive deployment of troops.

Unemployment.

The unemployment of Negro youth ranges up to 40 percent in some slums. The riots are almost entirely youth events-the age range of participants is from 13 to 25. What hypocrisy it is to talk of saving the new generation-to make it the generation of hope-while consigning it to unemployment and provoking it to violent alternatives.

When our nation was bankrupt in the thirties we created an agency to provide jobs to all at their existing level of skill. In our overwhelming affluence today what excuse is there for not setting up a national agency for full employment immediately?

The other program which would give reality to hope and opportunity would be the demolition of the slums to be replaced by decent housing built by residents of the ghettos.

These programs are not only eminently sound and vitally needed, but they have the support of an overwhelming majority of the nation-white and Negro. The Harris Poll on August 21, 1967, disclosed that an astounding 69 percent of the country support a works program to provide employment to all and an equally astonishing 65 percent approve a program to tear down the slums.

There is a program and there is heavy majority support for it. Yet, the administration and Congress tinker with trivial proposals to limit costs in an extravagant gamble with disaster.

The President has lamented that he cannot persuade Congress. He can, if the will is there, go to the people, mobilize the people's support and thereby substantially increase his power to persuade Congress. Our most urgent task is to find the tactics that will move the government no matter how determined it is to resist.

Civil disobedience.

I believe we will have to find the militant middle between riots on the one hand and weak and timid supplication for justice on the other hand. That middle ground, I believe, is civil disobedience. It can be aggressive but nonviolent; it can dislocate but not destroy. The specific planning will take some study and analysis to avoid mistakes of the past when it was employed on too small a scale and sustained too briefly.

Civil disobedience can restore Negro-white unity. There have been some very important sane white voices even during the most desperate moments of the riots. One reason is that the urban crisis intersects the Negro crisis in the city. Many white decision- makers may care little about saving Negroes, but they must care about saving their cities. The vast majority of production is created in cities; most white Americans live in them. The suburbs to which they flee cannot exist detached from cities. Hence powerful white elements have goals that merge with ours.

Role for the social scientist

Now there are many roles for social scientists in meeting these problems. Kenneth Clark has said that Negroes are moved by a suicide instinct in riots and Negroes know there is a tragic truth in this observation. Social scientists should also disclose the suicide instinct that governs the administration and Congress in their total failure to respond constructively.

What other areas are there for social scientists to assist the civil rights movement? There are many, but I would like to suggest three because they have an urgent quality.

Social science may be able to search out some answers to the problem of Negro leadership. E. Franklin Frazier, in his profound work, Black Bourgeoisie, laid painfully bare the tendency of the upwardly mobile Negro to separate from his community, divorce himself from responsibility to it, while failing to gain acceptance in the white community. There has been significant improvements from the days Frazier researched, but anyone knowledgeable about Negro life knows its middle class is not yet bearing its weight. Every riot has carried strong overtone of hostility of lower class Negroes toward the affluent Negro and vice versa. No contemporary study of scientific depth has totally studied this problem. Social science should be able to suggest mechanisms to create a wholesome black unity and a sense of peoplehood while the process of integration proceeds.

As one example of this gap in research, there are no studies, to my knowledge, to explain adequately the absence of Negro trade union leadership. Eight-five percent of Negroes are working people. Some two million are in trade unions but in 50 years we have produced only one national leader-A. Philip Randolph.

Discrimination explains a great deal, but not everything. The picture is so dark even a few rays of light may signal a useful direction.

Political action.

The second area for scientific examination is political action. In the past two decades, Negroes have expended more effort in quest of the franchise than they have in all other campaigns combined. Demonstrations, sit-ins and marches, though more spectacular, are dwarfed by the enormous number of man-hours expended to register millions, particularly in the South. Negro organizations from extreme militant to conservative persuasion, Negro leaders who would not even talk to each other, all have been agreed on the key importance of voting. Stokely Carmichael said black power means the vote and Roy Wilkins, while saying black power means black death, also energetically sought the power of the ballot.

A recent major work by social scientists Matthew and Prothro concludes that 'The concrete benefits to be derived from the franchise-under conditions that prevail in the South-have often been exaggerated.,' that voting is not the key that will unlock the door to racial equality because 'the concrete measurable payoffs from Negro voting in the South will not be revolutionary' (1966).

James A. Wilson supports this view, arguing, 'Because of the structure of American politics as well as the nature of the Negro community, Negro politics will accomplish only limited objectives' (1965).

If their conclusion can be supported, then the major effort Negroes have invested in the past 20 years has been in the wrong direction and the major pillar of their hope is a pillar of sand. My own instinct is that these views are essentially erroneous, but they must be seriously examined.

The need for a penetrating massive scientific study of this subject cannot be overstated. Lipset in 1957 asserted that a limitation in focus in political sociology has resulted in a failure of much contemporary research to consider a number of significant theoretical questions. The time is short for social science to illuminate this critically important area. If the main thrust of Negro effort has been, and remains, substantially irrelevant, we may be facing an agonizing crisis of tactical theory.

The third area for study concerns psychological and ideological changes in Negroes. It is fashionable now to be pessimistic. Undeniably, the freedom movement has encountered setbacks. Yet I still believe there are significant aspects of progress.

Negroes today are experiencing an inner transformation that is liberating them from ideological dependence on the white majority. What has penetrated substantially all strata of Negro life is the revolutionary idea that the philosophy and morals of the dominant white society are not holy or sacred but in all too many respects are degenerate and profane.

Negroes have been oppressed for centuries not merely by bonds of economic and political servitude. The worst aspect of their oppression was their inability to question and defy the fundamental precepts of the larger society. Negroes have been loath in the past to hurl any fundamental challenges because they were coerced and conditioned into thinking within the context of the dominant white ideology. This is changing and new radical trends are appearing in Negro thought. I use radical in its broad sense to refer to reaching into roots.

Ten years of struggle have sensitized and opened the Negro's eyes to reaching. For the first time in their history, Negroes have become aware of the deeper causes for the crudity and cruelty that governed white society's responses to their needs. They discovered that their plight was not a consequence of superficial prejudice but was systemic.

The slashing blows of backlash and frontlash have hurt the Negro, but they have also awakened him and revealed the nature of the oppressor. To lose illusions is to gain truth. Negroes have grown wiser and more mature and they are hearing more clearly those who are raising fundamental questions about our society whether the critics be Negro or white. When this process of awareness and independence crystallizes, every rebuke, every evasion, become hammer blows on the wedge that splits the Negro from the larger society.

Social science is needed to explain where this development is going to take us. Are we moving away, not from integration, but from the society which made it a problem in the first place? How deep and at what rate of speed is this process occurring? These are some vital questions to be answered if we are to have a clear sense of our direction.

We know we haven't found the answers to all forms of social change. We know, however, that we did find some answers. We have achieved and we are confident. We also know we are confronted now with far greater complexities and we have not yet discovered all the theory we need.

And may I say together, we must solve the problems right here in America. As I have said time and time again, Negroes still have faith in America. Black people still have faith in a dream that we will all live together as brothers in this country of plenty one day.

But I was distressed when I read in the New York Times of Aug. 31, 1967; that a sociologist from Michigan State University, the outgoing president of the American Sociological Society, stated in San Francisco that Negroes should be given a chance to find an all Negro community in South America: 'that the valleys of the Andes Mountains would be an ideal place for American Negroes to build a second Israel.' He further declared that 'The United States Government should negotiate for a remote but fertile land in Equador, Peru or Bolivia for this relocation.'

I feel that it is rather absurd and appalling that a leading social scientist today would suggest to black people, that after all these years of suffering an exploitation as well as investment in the American dream, that we should turn around and run at this point in history. I say that we will not run! Professor Loomis even compared the relocation task of the Negro to the relocation task of the Jews in Israel. The Jews were made exiles. They did not choose to abandon Europe, they were driven out. Furthermore, Israel has a deep tradition, and Biblical roots for Jews. The Wailing Wall is a good example of these roots. They also had significant financial aid from the United States for the relocation and rebuilding effort. What tradition does the Andes, especially the valley of the Andes Mountains, have for Negroes?

And I assert at this time that once again we must reaffirm our belief in building a democratic society, in which blacks and whites can live together as brothers, where we will all come to see that integration is not a problem, but an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.

The problem is deep. It is gigantic in extent, and chaotic in detail. And I do not believe that it will be solved until there is a kind of cosmic discontent enlarging in the bosoms of people of good will all over this nation.

There are certain technical words in every academic discipline which soon become stereotypes and even clichés. Every academic discipline has its technical nomenclature. You who are in the field of psychology have given us a great word. It is the word maladjusted. This word is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is a good word; certainly it is good that in dealing with what the word implies you are declaring that destructive maladjustment should be destroyed. You are saying that all must seek the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

But on the other hand, I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

In a day when Sputniks, Explorers and Geminies are dashing through outer space, when guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can finally win a war. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence, it is either nonviolence or nonexistence. As President Kennedy declared, 'Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.' And so the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a suspension in the development and use of nuclear weapons, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and eventually disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation. Our earthly habitat will be transformed into an inferno that even Dante could not envision.

Creative maladjustment.

Thus, it may well be that our world is in dire need of a new organization, The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. Men and women should be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, 'Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream'; or as maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who in the midst of his vacillations finally came to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; or as maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery, could scratch across the pages of history, words lifted to cosmic proportions, 'We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' And through such creative maladjustment, we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

I have not lost hope. I must confess that these have been very difficult days for me personally. And these have been difficult days for every civil rights leader, for every lover of justice and peace.
Copyright 1967 by Martin Luther King Jr. Copyright renewed 1994 by Coretta Scott King. Reprinted by permission by the heirs to the estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., care of Writers' House as agents for the proprietors.

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King's challenge to the nation's social scientists

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In September, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr., was only 38-years-old but already president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize when he took the podium at APA's Annual Convention in Washington, D.C.

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In the aftermath of a Minneapolis police officer's murder of George Floyd, some of our nation's media have turned to some crucial questions which must be addressed:
Should we condemn looting?
Yes, we should condemn the looting of the Global South by Western militaries and multinational corporations. We should fear the terrifying possibility that the COVID-19 vaccine will be enclosed, privatized, and sold for profit; and the looting of underdeveloped nations and underinsured people that would ensue.

We should fight back against the looting of underdeveloped nations' coffers by odious debts and structural adjustment programs being drawn up and imposed by international institutions at this very minute.
But should we care about the other kind of looting?
It would take a heartless monster not to care about the looting of homes and buildings by vulture capitalists. We should organize against the impending wave of evictions that will crash into our communities as soon as courts reopen. And we should fight back against the theft of stable homes and schools; the unnecessary destruction of lives due to their prioritizing food over rent.

We care that whole working-class communities will be gentrified, their buildings replaced with housing for wealthier, whiter families, who bring in a bigger haul of loot for the landlord. We should be outraged that police are looting homeless people's encampments, and we must demand that safe vacant homes and rooms no longer be hoarded away from unhoused people.
Should we care about actual looting?!?
Of course! Private equity stands to make a fortune off the bankruptcy of businesses around the country. By firing workers and raiding their pensions, they'll make off with the bag. We care about the attempt to loot the United States Postal Service, for example, destroying countless good union jobs and an essential public service in order to dismantle a publicly owned institution and turn it into a private business to generate profit.

We are outraged by the ongoing looting of local and state government welfare programs by a federal Republican Party that wishes to see them destroyed and a House Democratic leadership whose solution to this issue is to give the rich in blue states a gigantic tax break. We are disgusted that representatives who claim to stand for workers and oppressed people will gladly allow their standards of living to collapse while passing tax cuts for the rich.

Without organizing a powerful labor fightback, we will see the actual looting of public coffers while the billionaire class has become $434 billion richer during the pandemic.
But should we care about the looting of stores like Target and Autozone?
This was the destruction of property by people enraged over the murder of an innocent black man by a white police officer. Should we, like Martin Luther King's " white moderate," equivocate about an anti-racist uprising?

Should we blame working-class black people for lashing out at a government and economy designed to repress, exploit, and subdue them; during a pandemic in which capitalism has made it near impossible for them to survive? Should we participate in this ritual condemnation even though our media consistently treats identical acts of property destruction by sports fans as simply revelry and exuberance, and corporate looting of working-class communities as business as usual?

No. George Floyd mattered. Black lives matter. And until we can build a movement that can defeat racism and capitalism, until working people of all races unite against capitalists and their repressive apparatus, it is a good thing that bosses, government officials, and the police who protect them are sometimes reminded that black lives matter through a little proletarian fury.

If you care about looting, turn your eyes to the militaries, the police, the pharmaceutical companies, the private equity ghouls, the landlords, the real estate speculators, and the billionaires. And demand that a world once looted from the vast majority be now returned to them.

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No, We Should Not Condemn Uprisings Against Police Murders Like George Floyd's

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The uprising in response to George Floyd's murder by a Minneapolis police officer this week has led to predictable calls to condemn looting. But the real looting in our society comes from the military, the police, the pharmaceutical companies, private equity, the landlords, the real estate speculators, and the billionaires - not protesters against police brutality.

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I would never throw a rock at the police. I would never throw a brick through the window of a big-box store. I would never set fire to an office building. But I want to. I understand why some people do.

I know I am supposed to counsel nonviolence. I'm a 42-year-old man with a wife, two kids, and a mortgage; I've got a college degree and a law degree and a blue check mark on Twitter; I know I am supposed to shun "rioters" and "looters" who allegedly cede the moral high ground of protests when they respond to tear gas and rubber bullets with stone and flame. But all people have a limit to the injustice they can bear before lashing out.

The second day of protests in Minneapolis over the death of George Floyd erupted into violence last night. I understand why. And I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often.

Put yourself in the position of a relatively conscious black person in America just since this past March. Black people have seen a pandemic disproportionately rip through their communities while the media continually runs live press conferences of a racist president lying about the disease. We've seen layoffs and unemployment ravage our communities while Congress funnels billions of dollars to white-owned businesses. We've seen white people absolutely lose their minds, waving guns and Confederate flags at police officers, pushing them into lakes and gathering in large groups without consequence while we've seen police literally sit on black people for allegedly violating social distancing orders.

And then the stories of the killings started. In the past three weeks: Ahmaud Arbery was lynched, on video. Breonna Taylor was killed by police in her own bed, offscreen. And George Floyd was choked out on the street in broad daylight by police while strangers literally begged for his life.

Imagine you've been black this whole time and watched all of this happen and you show up to protest and, instead of being met with docile, restrained police that the white Confederates get, you are confronted by police in full riot gear who use tear gas and rubber bullets to control your crowd.

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And then you see a rock. And then you see an unguarded white-owned business. And then you see a match.

The fact that most black people do not pick up the rock in that situation is a miracle. The fact that the overwhelming majority of black people respond to the violence and terrorism practiced against us with words and songs instead of rocks and bricks is altogether supernatural. America should be thankful black and brown people respond to state-sponsored violence with nonviolence. In other times, in other places, the injustice regularly practiced by the white American paramilitary forces known as the local police would be met with rebellion or revolution. Here, black people take to the streets, and almost all of us do so nonviolently. America is the luckiest place on earth.

People need to understand and remember that nonviolence is a choice. I'm Haitian by ancestry. That's relevant because, as any person of Haitian ancestry will happily tell you, Haiti had the only successful slave revolt in the Western Hemisphere, and freedom wasn't achieved nonviolently. I think my heritage makes me acutely aware that nonviolence is but one option among many. Everybody talks like T'Challa when white people are listening, but Killmonger was right, at least partially. There are multiple ways to be a Black Panther.

It takes incredible strength to practice nonviolence in the face of murder and oppression. It takes incredible, nearly irrational faith that the long arc of history will bend toward the cause of justice. I'm not Jesus, and I'm not Martin Luther King Jr.; turning the other cheek does not come naturally to me. It doesn't even seem logical most of the time.

Until you've participated in a primarily black protest, you don't really know how naked, how exposed, nonviolence feels. Until you've heard the rumor ripple through the crowd that the cops are planning to open fire, you haven't really thought about what nonviolence means. You don't know how foolish it feels to be out there, unarmed, protesting police who you know are authorized to kill you.

The only one of those protests I've been to was after the murder of Sean Bell in New York City. And the protests around his murder didn't even get that hot. But I learned then that street-level activism was not going to be my thing. Being an effective black protester against white violence takes restraint. That's actually the most important skill. It would be a lot easier to show up, take a bucket of rocks, and throw them at enemies. Anybody can do that. It's natural to do that. But going out there knowing that violence can be done upon you while you are defenseless takes a kind of courage I do not have.

On top of all that, nonviolent black protesters know for an absolute fact that their strength and courage will be ignored by the white media, the very people whose attention they are trying to get, if even one knucklehead does something "violent." I am clever with words. I can make a bomb-ass placard. But I also know that I could stand outside for hours dropping verses like Lin-Manuel Hamilton and the camera would ignore me if two brothers jacked a television from Target. The camera likes fire. It likes blood. It is attracted to the violence. Sometimes people throw rocks because throwing rocks feels like the only thing white people even notice. More from Mystal

The press incentivizes violence, the rage inspires violence, and the instinct toward self-preservation makes violence seem smart and justified.

So I choose to praise those who protest nonviolently, instead of decrying those who do not. The restraint shown by black people all across this country is admirable. We are being terrorized. We are being traumatized. We are being hunted by cops who can kill us out in the open, and when we gather to complain, those cops use violent tactics to scare us and hurt us and disperse us. And still, almost all of us use our words instead of our fists.

This country could be on fire almost every night in almost every city. It's not, because most black people in this country choose to exercise tremendous restraint. Most black people are still willing to talk this out. Most black people have the courage and fortitude to withstand the violence done against us without lowering ourselves to the level of an American police officer.

America should be more thankful for that. And it should remember that it's a choice.

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People Can Only Bear So Much Injustice Before Lashing Out

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I would never throw a rock at the police. I would never throw a brick through the window of a big-box store. I would never set fire to an office building. But I want to. I understand why some people do. I know I am supposed to counsel nonviolence.

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In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, thousands of people took to the streets to protest the fact that the officers responsible for his death have not yet been arrested. Police responded by firing into crowds of peaceful protesters with tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets. In turn, protesters responded again, this time escalating their demonstration, and engaging in property damage. Now, as is too often the case, the media is framing protestors as the problem: Their behavior in combating injustice is now unacceptable, and the narrative around our oppressive system is being rewritten right in front of us.

The TODAY show called the protests "violent." Tucker Carlson called them "a form of tyranny" and "a threat to every American." A Fox9 reporter referred to people looting a Target as "awful" and lamented the lack of police presence. This is not dissimilar to the media response of the Ferguson uprising after the murder of Mike Brown in 2014 or the Baltimore protests following Freddie Gray's death in 2015.

"The dominant media is itself a tool of white supremacy: it repeats what the police deliver nearly verbatim and uncritically," Vicky Osterweil wrote at The New Inquiry in 2014 during the Ferguson uprising. "The media use phrases like 'officer-involved shooting' and will switch to passive voice when a black man is shot by a white vigilante or a police officer ('shots were fired')." Advocates are now pointing out an important discrepancy when reporting on injustice, and it's that language matters. What these media narratives do is uphold the white supremacist system and do the work for police.

Instead of putting the protests in context, of showing how people are fighting back against a system in which they have no power by disrupting it in any way they can, mainstream media instead tends to focus on the sensationalized images of the protesters breaking the social codes by which society is ordered.

But the point of protest is disruption. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said: "A riot is the language of the unheard."

And these voices can not be silenced. "One thing is clear tonight. There is a tremendous amount of anger and pain over the death of #GeorgeFloyd," journalist Liz Sawyer tweeted. "Several folks I talked to said they didn't care whether people agreed with their methods (i.e. looting, destruction of property). 'We have to get their attention somehow.'"

In another Twitter thread, attorney Preston Mitchum says that "one day we're going to reconcile that 'looting' doesn't randomly happen. It is triggered by screaming and not being heard. It is triggered by seeing us be killed with no justice. We're going to have to reconcile that none of us said it was THE answer and rooted in trauma."

Similarly, media coverage focuses on concern trolling about looting and property damage. But putting the focus on stealing objects from a store (during a pandemic, no less!) rather than on the injustice behind the looting, the horrific loss of life and racial violence that Black folks live with every day, is sending the message that property matters more than people. It just demonstrates the way that white supremacy sees more value in a TV set than in the life of a Black man.

"White people deploy the idea of looting in a way that implies people of color are greedy and lazy, but it is just the opposite: looting is a hard-won and dangerous act with potentially terrible consequences, and looters are only stealing from the rich owners' profit margins," Osterweil wrote. Not only that, it is these tactics that many people might view as extreme that bring the issue to the attention of the media at all. If not for the protests in Minneapolis, it is possible that George Floyd's death and the lack of accountability for the officers responsible would have already dropped out of the news cycle.

"Editors: it is your job to help your audiences understand why a story about a protest isn't about property damage. The story is one of pain caused, injustice left unsettled, and civil rights unprotected," Glimmer Editor Margarita Noriega tweeted.

Aaron L. Morrison, National Race & Ethnicity writer for the Associated Press, said on Twitter that the distinction in language here is most imminent. "Civil unrest - that's what it's called. A clear, mass expression of disapproval for leaders and systems funded by our tax dollars," Morrison wrote. "Riots are violent displays unconnected to any shared grievance and devoid of any clear demand(s) for change. Why is this so hard to distinguish?"

The media narrative about protest tactics has always been one centered around the discomfort of the majority, rather than the demands of the marginalized. During the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, ACT UP made headlines for actions like dumping the ashes of AIDS victims on the White House lawn. Their tactics were necessary in order to draw attention to a government that was failing them. When ACT UP founder Larry Kramer died this week, the New York Times called his tactics "abusive" and said they could "overshadow his cause."

You can be fighting for justice against a system and a government that does not value your life or the lives of your community members and you will be seen and portrayed as an instigator. But, protestors are not the problem, nor are their tactics. The problem is, and has always been, the white supremacist, capitalist, colonialist, genocidal systems within the United States - including, primarily, the government itself - that continue unabated, that are waiting to be overthrown.

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Why Are The Protestors Being Framed As The Problem? White Supremacy.

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In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, thousands of people took to the streets to protest the fact that the officers responsible for his death have not yet been arrested. Police responded by firing into crowds of peaceful protesters with tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets.

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There is anger on the streets in Minneapolis. And Los Angeles. And Columbus and Phoenix and Denver. It is deserved anger fed by the death of George Floyd, yet another unarmed black man killed as police arrested him.

Another. That's the key word.

The mature and reasoned response is, of course, to explore what went wrong Monday on that Minneapolis street. Why did the police officers responsible for this unnecessary use of force still have badges, given their history of previous complaints? Why did it take so long for authorities to arrest the officer filmed pinning Floyd to the ground with a knee on his neck? What can Minneapolis - or Los Angeles, or Ferguson, or New York City - do to improve relations between police and the communities they serve? Cue up the commission, bring in the experts, hold some hearings, let people vent for a bit and then, by golly, we'll have change.

That's the lie we tell ourselves with depressing regularity. The solutions we keep trotting out fail to address the real fault lines here. Police now often carry body cameras, undergo implicit bias training and embrace community policing strategies aimed at bridging the divide. We keep looking for the technology or training that can be bought and implemented to end police brutality, and there have been some improvements, particularly in cities where police departments have restricted use of force in making arrests. But progress is not victory.

And this is not a technology problem, or something that can be ended with some policy tinkering. It is a function of deep structural racism that we as a nation have proved to be incapable of exorcising.

Los Angeles burned in 1965 when a white California Highway Patrol officer pulled over a black motorist, starting a cascade of events that quickly released a community's pent-up rage and frustration over police conduct. Detroit burned in 1967 after a police raid on an after-hours bar filled with African Americans similarly breached a dam holding back years of anger over police violence against black neighborhoods. Newark, N.J., burned that year too, a single arrest and beating of a black man unleashing years of community frustration. These upheavals reflected years of rising anger in African American neighborhoods over the conditions of their existence and the excesses of police departments that, as the motto says, were there to protect and to serve. Then came the 1991 police beating of Rodney King, all the proof Los Angeles needed that history does repeat itself.

And no, police violence does not justify the rampages that erupted in Minneapolis. But as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out more than a half-century ago, "a riot is the language of the unheard." To focus on the damage and looting misses the point. Were it not for the killing of Floyd, and the history of police behavior, there would have been no protests.

According to one analysis, unarmed black Americans today are five times more likely to be killed by police than unarmed white Americans. We can blame some of that on over-policing, itself often an expression of unacknowledged bias. But the threat comes not just from people with badges. It crops up in daily life in the most mundane ways: A white woman calling New York City police on a black man out birdwatching who had the gall to ask her to leash her dog. A white man - again in Minneapolis - calling security when four black men rejected his demand for identification proving that they had permission to use the gym in a building where they all worked. A Starbucks manager calling police in Philadelphia to arrest two black men who were waiting to meet a potential business partner.

That's not the police sparking a racially framed encounter; it is white Americans surfacing the structural racism that, in its worst excesses, ends with the deaths of black Americans. Trayvon Martin. Ahmaud Arbery. Their killings did not involve police.

Yet it is in the intersection of structural racism and the police - the people whom we empower and arm to enforce laws - where such violence resonates with such ferocity. Floyd's death, as Minneapolis City Councilwoman Andrea Jenkins said, "was a symbol for a knee on the neck of black America." That knee has been there for an unconscionably long time. Too long.

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Editorial: Don't focus on looting. Be outraged that police keep killing black men

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There is anger on the streets in Minneapolis. And Los Angeles. And Columbus and Phoenix and Denver. It is deserved anger fed by the death of George Floyd, yet another unarmed black man killed as police arrested him. Another. That's the key word.