![]() ![]() And in the day to day, it's still much easier-and much more flattering-to think about racism in terms of individual actors and actions. But there's the academy, and then there's reality. The term "institutional racism" has floated around in liberal circles for decades. Imagine a betrayal that can come from all sides, even from people who should be running alongside you.Ī photo of Tyre Nichols is positioned prior to a press conference on Jan. The common thread is how we are treated when we engage with the ordinary institutions in our lives. The common denominator isn't what race the security guard is, or cop, or tour guide, or professor. He eventually continued on with his newfound friends.īlack folk around the country have a trove of these stories ranging from the relatively benign to the downright terrifying. Then he pretended not to understand me when I told him. Next, he asked where I was coming from and heading, even though all that information was printed right in front of him. Still about 8 feet away, he barked at me, and only me, for my ticket. I ultimately rolled the dice, got some great food, and breathed a sigh of relief when those police cruisers were gone on my return.Īs soon as I sat back down at my seat, however, I saw a Black assistant conductor enter the car, yucking it up with an older white couple. But when I saw four cop cars milling outside the station, I half considered staying put. I could finally go to a real grocery store instead of subsisting on microwave hotdogs. At the tail end of a 3-day cross-country Amtrak trip, I was excited to pull into an Arizona station for a 45-minute break. There's also the individual testimony of Black Americans. No, Ron DeSantis Is Not Trying to Ban Black History.Ron DeSantis Is Banning Black Studies in Schools and It's Disgraceful.DeSantis' CRT Obsession Ignores Florida's Education Inequities.Removing the MCAT Could Improve Diversity in Medicine.Mayors Are Not Afraid To Take On the Gun Industry.Not to mention slavery depictions that came well before and have followed.Īmericans can't really say that we don't know about a phenomenon which has rolled through literature, theater, Hollywood, hip hop, and even a bombastic Quentin Tarantino slavery-western mashup. Jackson's portrayal of the "Uncle Tom" character Stephen in Django Unchained. It's not anything that wasn't revealed in Samuel L. That play later became A Soldier's Story, featuring a young Denzel Washington, and puts front and center the self-hating Sergeant Vernon Waters-played masterfully by the late Adolph Caesar, who earned an Oscars nod. It's not anything that wasn't explored by Charles Fuller's 1982 Pulitzer Prize winning work A Soldier's Play, about an all-Black WWII regiment in the Jim Crow South. But really, everyone should know this.Īfter all, it's not anything that James Baldwin didn't say in 1955 in Notes of a Native Son: "In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it." The Black community already knew that having people in power who look like us isn't necessarily a salve. All five cops involved in the sadistic beating are Black, setting off a familiar reverberation around the country- including surprise that Black cops can be as brutal as white ones. That iconic scene first came to mind when the bodycam video of Tyre Nichols' death was recently released. "Scared now, eh? I like that," booms Coffey as Tre is brought to tears. The stop quickly escalates, with Coffey producing a gun and placing it square under Tre's chin. Black teens Tre and Ricky get pulled over by an abusive Black cop, officer Coffey. There's a powerful scene in the late great 1991 John Singleton classic Boyz n the Hood. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |