Two pictures of racial tensions in the US, taken 50 years apart.
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The challenge with white privilege is that most white people cannot see it. We assume that the experiences and opportunities afforded to us are the same afforded to others. Sadly, this simply isn’t true. Privileged people can fall into the trap of universalizing experiences and laying them across other people’s experiences as an interpretive lens…
Source: manofdepravity.com
January 1, 1892, Annie Moore, a teenager from County Cork, Ireland, was the first immigrant processed at Ellis Island. She had made the nearly two-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean in steerage with her two younger brothers. Annie later raised a family on New York City’s Lower East Side.
Some of America’s first settlers came in search of freedom to practice their faith. In 1620, a group of roughly 100 people later known as the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in Europe and arrived at present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, where they established a colony. They were soon followed by a larger group seeking religious freedom, the Puritans, who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By some estimates, 20,000 Puritans migrated to the region between 1630 and 1640.
A larger share of immigrants came to America seeking economic opportunities. However, because the price of passage was steep, an estimated one-half or more of the white Europeans who made the voyage did so by becoming indentured servants. Although some people voluntarily indentured themselves, others were kidnapped in European cities and forced into servitude in America. Additionally, thousands of English convicts were shipped across the Atlantic as indentured servants.
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Source: www.history.com
This article mentions the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 but fails to mention the Asian Exclusion act of 1924.
It also fails to mention that non-Europeans were not allowed to become citizens at many points in U.S. history.
People born in India were not allowed to become US citizens till 1946.
All Asians were allowed to become citizens in 1952 with the Walter–McCarran Act.
If we do not talk about citizenship rights when we talk about immigration, we are missing half of the discussion about dignity, respect and humanity.
Today’s social injustice issue is still about who is allowed to immigrate and become a citizen.
History shows that humans were allowed to (im)migrate to the U.S. for both religious and economic reasons.
Today’s (im)migrants move for reasons of survival (like the Irish did).
And they also move as war refugees, climate refugees, economic refugees and political refugees.
No human is illegal.
AMY GOODMAN: Just miles down the road from the scene of protests in Ferguson, we’re hearing a lot about Florissant. Just down Florissant is the grave of Dred Scott, who’s buried in the Calvary Cemetery on West Florissant Avenue. Born a slave in Virginia, Dred Scott sued in a St. Louis court for his freedom. The case went to the Supreme Court, resulting in a landmark Supreme Court decision that’s called the worst ever. In 1857, the court ruled African Americans were not citizens of the United States, and therefore had no rights to sue in federal courts. The court described blacks as, quote, “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” unquote. Again, the Dred Scott decision, considered the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court, in the slave state of Missouri, the seven-to-two decision. The chief justice was a slave owner himself. In fact, a number of the Supreme Court justices were slave owners themselves.
To talk more about the significance of this case today, we’re joined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University, founder of the African American Policy Forum.
Kimberlé, thank you for joining us. Professor Crenshaw, talk about the significance of Dred Scott’s body just lying down the road on Florissant, the road we’ve heard so much about, as these protests continue and escalate.
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: Well, really couldn’t be more symbolic. As you point out, Dred Scott is widely regarded as being one of the worst cases ever. And there are two ways in which we might see its relevance in this particular moment. One, when the Supreme Court was trying to decide whether African Americans could be citizens, what they considered was the way African Americans were treated. They weren’t necessarily looking at formal law. In a lot of ways, free blacks had more rights than white women did. But the overall idea was that they could be enslavable. The overall idea is that they weren’t seen as having the same social worth as white Americans and could be enslaved for their own good. So the very possibility of their enslavability meant that, at least as far as the founders were concerned, they were going to be forever and permanently a stateless people. And that would have likely been the case had the case not led to a civil war.
Source: www.democracynow.org
The journey of the Oglala Lakota of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, from their origins through to their contemporary life. The most comprehensive look at an Indian Reservation in a documentary made over 13 years by international award winning film-maker Steven Lewis Simpson director of Rez Bomb.
Click through to Rent or Buy movie.
Source: vimeo.com
POST TRAUMATIC SLAVE SYNDROME
As a result of twelve years of quantitative and qualitative research Dr. DeGruy has developed her theory of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, and published her findings in the book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome – America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing”. The book addresses the residual impacts of generations of slavery and opens up the discussion of how the black community can use the strengths we have gained in the past to heal in the present.
WHAT IS P.T.S.S.?
P.T.S.S. is a theory that explains the etiology of many of the adaptive survival behaviors in African American communities throughout the United States and the Diaspora. It is a condition that exists as a consequence of multigenerational oppression of Africans and their descendants resulting from centuries of chattel slavery. A form of slavery which was predicated on the belief that African Americans were inherently/genetically inferior to whites. This was then followed by institutionalized racism which continues to perpetuate injury.
Thus, resulting in M.A.P.:
Source: joydegruy.com
Before dying of pneumonia at a Guatemala hospital in late May, the recently deported 21-year-old Gustavo Antonio Vásquez Chaj told his family that the U.S. Border Patrol had kept him, at some point, wet, stripped of a layer of clothing, and in a cold cell during several days in detention.
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The tragic journey of Vásquez Chaj and Tucux Chiché is one story among many of how harmful U.S. political and economic policies in Latin America violently intersect with a hardening and brutal system of U.S. immigration control. In their case, the young men’s voyage was first and foremost one of necessity rather than of choice. Vásquez Chaj and Tucux Chiché were economic migrants fleeing a country of wreck and ruin that decades of harmful U.S. foreign and economic policies have helped to bring about.
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It is indisputable that the United States shares significant responsibility for the genocide of tens of thousands of Guatemalans—mainly indigenous Mayans, including members of Gustavo and Maximiliano’s community, who comprised a majority of the (at least) 150,000 killed in the 1980s alone.
Click through for whole article.
Source: nacla.org
Do history books written by white folks tell the truth about Native Americans? We think not. Here are just some of the lies they tell.
This is a MUST SEE internationally award winning film that depicts and explores facts of history that are not whole known or taught in any educational system. It is an eye-open look at the concept that makes the case for why reparations should be open for discussion and the necessity for it to be addressed. -John Wills
AWESOME DOCUMENTARY!
Source: thoughtprovokingperspectives.wordpress.com
At 5, he was imprisoned. At 28, he was a famous spaceman. At 68, he did something much, much better.
Source: www.upworthy.com
Click through for a great debate between Malcolm X and James Baldwin.
HT Harsha Walia
Today in 2014 there is STILL massive segregation in the U.S. and there is STILL systemic racism and oppression. Any who are unsure about this can check Michele Alexander’s research on The New Jim Crow.
