By Michael Powell
…Yet the phrase is deeply contentious. Influential writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, a Boston University professor, have embraced it, seeing in white supremacy an explanatory power that cuts through layers of euphemism to the core of American history and culture. It speaks to the reality, they say, of a nation built on slavery. To examine many aspects of American life once broadly seen as race neutral — such as mortgage lending or college faculty hiring — is to find a bedrock of white supremacy.
“It is not hyperbole to say that white supremacy is resting at the heart of American politics,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor of Princeton, a socialist activist and professor of African-American studies, said in a speech in 2017.
But some Black scholars, businessmen and activists — on the right and the left — balk at the phrase. They hear in those words a sledgehammer that shocks and accuses, rather than explains. When so much is described as white supremacy, when the Ku Klux Klan and a museum art collection take the same descriptor, they say, the power of the phrase is lost…
Read MoreBy Khalil Gibran Muhammad
As I thought about writing this review, I imagined an opening paragraph summarizing the events of this summer’s nationwide protests against police violence. How observers and participants parsed the civil unrest along the familiar lines of peaceful protesters, rioters and looters, drawing competing moral distinctions between nonviolence and violence. How the police deployed official violence to punish and intimidate activists. How heavily armed, self-deputized white men threatened and used vigilante violence against demonstrators. How President Trump called for state violence against human beings to protect property. And how the residents of many cities committed acts of violence against their intimate partners, neighbors and fellow citizens, including small children.
And then, after finishing Elliott Currie’s “A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America,” a smart, timely, deeply disturbing and essential book by a veteran scholar and leading expert on the criminal legal system, I realized that the details of every precious life harmed or lost this summer reveal a bigger truth about the nation….
Read MoreOn a humid, windless night several years ago, I was driving my parents’ S.U.V. through the oak-covered back streets of my hometown with four teenage friends. At an empty intersection, I reflexively began turning left before spotting the no-left-turn sign on the traffic light above. I jerked the wheel right, crossed the intersection and headed for the U-turn lane.
Before my friend riding shotgun could even finish joking about my driving, we were surrounded by two blaring cop cars that had been waiting in the shadows nearby.
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
Thus far, the activist organization that comes closest to fulfilling Systemopedia’s vision is East Point Peace Academy. The progress they’ve made organizing a national network of like-minded small teams is particularly encouraging.
However, ambiguities in their website content raise two questions: 1) East Point, might you clarify your written commitments to more fully affirm everyone’s essential equality? 2) Might you invite your supporters to collaboratively plan and convene a workshop to explore how to advance your principles, with the understanding that the participants will be invited to plan and convene the next workshop?
Read MoreBy Peniel E. Joseph
…“America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s,” by Elizabeth Hinton, a Yale University professor of law, history and African-American studies, and one of the country’s leading scholars of mass incarceration, offers a groundbreaking, deeply researched and profoundly heart-rending account of the origins of our national crisis of police violence against Black America….
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On the opening episode of this “How to Citizen” podcast, Baratunde conducts a remarkable interview with Valarie Kaur, author of See No Stranger,. Kaur clearly articulates the spirit that drives the Systemopedia with her holistic worldview and her affirmation of mutual support for self-development..
With her Revolutionary Love Project, Kaur’s addresses our relationships with ourselves as well as our relationship with others. She examines internal changes we must make to our minds and hearts as well as institutional reforms. In response to whether we are experiencing the darkness of the womb or the darkness of the tomb, she replies, “It’s both” because we see the “dying of the nation we thought we were” as well as the emergence of transformation. Large numbers of whites joining in Black Lives Matter demonstrations was particularly encouraging.
External work such as getting to know our neighbors with an open heart is critical. The founder of the Sikh faith affirmed “I see no enemy.”
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