On June 16, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio is hosting a Juneteenth celebration commemorating the jubilant day in 1865 when the last Black slaves got word they were free more than two and a half years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. On June 17, labor, civil rights, education, and community leaders, child advocates and citizens are joining together in a silent march in New York City to protest the New York Police Department’s “stop and frisk” policing tactics. These two events cover very different places and times but are connected as part of the slow, hard and unfinished journey towards freedom and racial justice in our nation. Although we have come a very long way on the arduous road from slavery to freedom, we still have a long way to go.
The recent death of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida and the brutal hateful murder of James Anderson by a gang of young White men in Jackson, Mississippi attest to this continuing reality.
So does the persistent mass incarceration of Black and Latino sons, fathers and potential leaders which is becoming the new Jim Crow as Michelle Alexander calls it in her important bestselling book: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. That we have the world’s largest incarcerated population—our incarceration rate exceeds China, Russia and India combined—is the end result of a national Cradle to Prison Pipeline® crisis which is lodged at the intersection of continuing poverty and racial disparities in American life. A Black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime and a Latino boy a one in six chance of the same fate. Children of color, especially males, face an uphill battle in overcoming poverty (one in five Black children is poor) and continuing racial barriers and stereotyping.
An analysis of New York Police Department data by the New York Civil Liberties Union showed that more than 96 percent of the students arrested in the city school system in the first three months of 2012 were Black and Latino, and more than 73 percent were male. Police were 12 times more likely to arrest a Black student than a White one. It’s time to get the police out of the schools, to stop the massive suspension and arrest of children for nonviolent offenses and to stop the criminalization of children at younger and younger ages. It makes no sense for unarmed six, seven, and eight year olds to be handcuffed and arrested for nonviolent offenses. Sometimes I think many adults have lost our common and moral sense and forgotten the purpose of public education which is to educate and prepare children for the future not exclude or bar them in huge numbers every year. Some schools are initiating restorative justice practices which discipline children without excluding them from desperately needed education.
The June 17 march will be a silent protest against the stop and frisk tactics that purport to stave off crime and get guns off New York City’s streets—a goal I certainly share. But in 99.9 percent of these searches guns were not found. In reality stop and frisk may simply terrify and criminalize Black and Brown boys and young men and empower police to randomly stop, search, and demand account from Black and Latino boys and men ostensibly born free. Black and Latino young men ages 14 to 24 are less than 5 percent of the city’s population but are 41.6 percent of the stops. The reality in New York City today shows we are still far from being a free and just land.
How far have we come on the road from slavery to freedom isn’t just a rhetorical question more than 150 years later. A people who don’t know their history are more likely to repeat it. The resurgence of hate crimes and emergence of mass incarceration of males of color remind us that freedom requires constant vigilance and justice needs a fire that burns in all of us.
I believe that we are in the second post Reconstruction era—a view shared by distinguished historians David Levering Lewis, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W.E.B. Du Bois, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. They and civil rights icons including Myrlie Evers-Williams, Andrew Young, James Lawson, Vincent Harding, Ruby Bridges and many others will join us at the Children's Defense Fund's national conference in Cincinnati July 22nd-25th to examine the racial signs of our times, affirming our great progress, but ensuring we continue to move forward—and not backwards—on the still incomplete road to freedom. Although some forms of continuing racial intolerance are overt, some forms are subtle, covert, technical, political, and very polite. Wrapped up in new euphemisms, better etiquette and clever political rhetoric, it’s still, as Frederick Douglass warned, the same old snake. Let’s call it out systematically, oppose it nonviolently, and move forward on becoming a free and just nation.
Follow Marian Wright Edelman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ChildDefender
If they would only listen to you.
Great post !!
Part I
“We the people” are living an illusion: the illusion of inclusion. Specifically speaking, those of us of the African diaspora.
“Let the case of the slaves be considered, as it is in truth, a peculiar one. Let the compromising expedient of the Constitution be mutually adopted, which regards them as inhabitants, but as debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants, which regards the SLAVE as divested of two fifths of the MAN.”
And it is written in the Constitution, Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3:
“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons”(African Slaves).
Also let's not forget that without your fellow Africans the slave trade never could have happened.
You can try to change history, toss it flip it anyway you like. But the fact is, history does not lie!
Are you blind? Racism is HERE STILL and just because you decide to turn a blind eye does not mean that we are. Everything that you listed in your post is going on but we are as you put "bitching all the time". Stupid.
Those of us will not overlook this acts of prejudice and you can forget it. Our President is a person of interracial background and he is treated unjustly everyday however the media can play it and you turn a blind eye; well.. we won't. I caution you not to try that verbally.
The brainwashing of black is epic. The old saying is if you don't Black people to know something, put it in a book because they don't read.
The debate between WEB Dubois and Booker T Washington should be read by every Black person in America. Have a clear understanding how imperialism and colonialism has impacted the Black race. How the history provided to Black people is distorted and most times untrue. Only then will we see that not only Black people in America, but in Africa, Europe and the Carribean have been brainwashed into an inferior mindset.
Once the mental slavery is dealt with, everything else will fall into place.
"divide and conquor" is a potent weapon if used with the assist of money which those who have mass wealth is well aware of. I guess the "love of money is the root of all evil" in the life of many if not in all circumstances.
Sometimes the truth hurts. We have to stop this madness of trying to get other races to love us, and start to show real love for ourselves black people.
http://www.godonthe.net/wasblack.htm
Synagogue of Satan.
http://www.angelfire.com/la/israel3/chap/tares.html
Everything taught to Black people about religion was taught by slave owners and passed from generation to generation. The culture, faith and customs were forbidden once they landed in America and from that point on Black people have been indoctornated into European brainwashing.
We accept things because that's what was taught. Just because it was taught does not mean it's true!
http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/destruction_of_the_trade_centers.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym4TTmOJ4I8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLLpJgcQLCM&feature=related
http://www.bebaptized.org/u.htm
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”1 Peter 5:8
Although unseen by the natural eye, this adversary is not imaginary nor a mythological character. He will always seek to divert attention and blame for his actions upon others. But make no mistake, he is the real enemy, not your husband, wife, employer, government or Christian brethren! “...He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).
... Satan, using people here on earth, can make just about anything ..... you get this – This is Satan's home base, his home planet, and he RULES.
http://www.vaticanassassins.org/tag/the-black-pope/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7BYKAT9Fxs
http://www.christian-faith.com/forjesus/demons-and-fallen-angels
http://www.alamoministries.com/content/english/Antichrist/Satans_Church.html
http://www.angelfire.com/la/israel3/chap/tares.html
http://trueconspiracies.com/
1 John 4:1 "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world."
2 John 1:9,10 "If anyone comes to you and does not bring the Doctrine of Christ, do not receive him into your house nor greet him; for he who greets him shares in his evil deeds."
"Let nobody give you the impression that the problem of racial injustice will work itself out. Let nobody give you the impression that only time will solve the problem. That is a myth, and it is a myth because time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I'm absolutely convinced that the people of ill will in our nation -- the extreme rightists -- the forces committed to negative ends -- have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic works and violent actions of the bad people who bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama, or shoot down a civil rights worker in Selma, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time." Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals. Without this hard work, time becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always right to do right."