activism

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What White Children Need to Know About Race

 

Silence is a racial message and a “tool of whiteness.” In order to support the goals of their diversity mission statements and work toward a “racially just America,” schools need to take a more proactive approach to teaching white students about race and racial identity.
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Students must develop a sense of how systemic racism works on an individual, community, and institutional level.

 

– Click through to read more –

 

Source: www.nais.org

 

Many white people do not have an urgency about racial injustice.

 

Many white people live in segregated communities where they do not see racial injustice. Unless people tune into the right media channels, they are not going to have a feeling for the insidiousness of racial injustice.

 

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The Alarming Rise of Migrant Deaths on U.S. Soil—And What to Do About It

 

More migrants’ lives could be saved with a few inexpensive adjustments in water availability, rescue beacons, and search-and-rescue capability. A directive by the Department of Homeland Security for the Border Patrol to establish water drums, particularly alongside rescue beacons, would be an important step to avoid preventable deaths on U.S. soil. Increasing the number of rescue beacons, as well as providing additional funds to expand Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue Unit teams (BORSTAR), particularly in southwest border sectors with high numbers of migrant deaths, could also help to assist migrants in distress.

Many of the recovered remains of migrants, which now number in the thousands, are unidentified. Local officials in Brooks County, Texas, estimate that the costs of dealing with the unidentified dead, including mortician fees and autopsies, amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. No unified procedure exists to process remains and DNA samples of bodies found in the border region. Many remains have not had their DNA sampled, and there has been no consolidated effort to match the DNA of unidentified remains with family members searching for missing loved ones.

Measures such as the following would greatly contribute to identifying these remains and provide answers to family members of missing migrants about the whereabouts of their loved ones:

  • Providing federal funding to counties and tribal governments for the handling and DNA analysis of migrant remains;
  • Creating a Missing Migrants program within the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs); and
  • Encouraging genetic laboratories receiving federal grant monies to process samples from unidentified remains and compare the resulting genetic profiles against samples from the relatives of missing migrants

Immigration reform legislation currently before the U.S. Senate (S. 744) includes billions of dollars in new funding for border security. It makes no mention, however, of steps to prevent needless deaths of migrants on U.S. soil, or to help cash-strapped counties identify the dead. The current bill offers an important legislative opportunity to stem the rise of this alarming human tragedy on the U.S. side of the border.

 

Click through to read more.

 

 

Source: www.wola.org

 

Texas recently sent 1000 National Guard to the border. That should prevent some deaths. But we need to prevent all the deaths.

 

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Border Angels – The Power of One

 

Since 1994, 10,000 people have died trying to cross the border between the United States and Mexico, according to Enrique Morones founder of Border Angels. Among those who attempted the journey are men, women and young children. Due to harsh weather conditions, tough terrain and often the expensive price migrants must pay to smugglers, however, many do not make it across.

Founded by Morones in 1986, Border Angels is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing humanitarian assistance to undocumented immigrants. After bringing food and water to migrants who were living in the canyons of North County San Diego, Morones and the Border Angels expanded their operation by going out to the desert to place water near the recently constructed wall dividing the United States and Mexico, also known as Operation Gatekeeper.

“Before Operation Gatekeeper, one or two people died every month,” said Morones.

“After Operation Gatekeeper, one or two people die every day.”

 

Click through to read more.

 

Source: misaelvirgen.blogspot.com

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Angelina Jolie Opens Sex Violence Summit With Aim to End War Rape

 

 

ABC News’ Hamish Macdonald reports:

LONDON – Actress Angelina Jolie opened a high-profile global summit in London today, aimed at ending sexual violence in conflict and emphasizing the message that victims have nothing to be ashamed of.

Rape in war zones is widespread and affects hundreds of thousands of people, many in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

“It is a myth that rape is an inevitable part of conflict; there is nothing inevitable about it,” Jolie, special envoy to the U.N. Commissioner for Refugees, said in opening the London conference. “It is a weapon of war aimed at civilians. It has nothing to do with sex, everything to do with power.”

 

Click through to read more. 

 
See on abcnews.go.com

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Undoing Border Imperialism: Harsha Walia

 

“Harsha Walia has played a central role in building some of North America’s most innovative, diverse, and effective new movements. That this brilliant organizer and theorist has found time to share her wisdom in this book is a tremendous gift to us all.”—Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine

Undoing Border Imperialism combines academic discourse, lived experiences of displacement, and movement-based practices into an exciting new book. By reformulating immigrant rights movements within a transnational analysis of capitalism, labor exploitation, settler colonialism, state building, and racialized empire, it provides the alternative conceptual frameworks of border imperialism and decolonization. Drawing on the author’s experiences in No One Is Illegal, this work offers relevant insights for all social movement organizers on effective strategies to overcome the barriers and borders within movements in order to cultivate fierce, loving, and sustainable communities of resistance striving toward liberation. The author grounds the book in collective vision, with short contributions from over twenty organizers and writers from across North America.

Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist, writer, and popular educator rooted in emancipatory movements and communities for over a decade.”

 

 

Community Village‘s insight:

 

I’ve started reading this book and I highly recommend it.

 

@getgln

See on www.amazon.com

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Biracial Woman Talks To KKK Members To Confront Racism Face-To-Face

See on Scoop.it – Community Village Daily

 

“Most people would be afraid to confront a member of the Ku Klux Klan to talk about racism, but one filmmaker has made it her mission to do just that.

Mo Asumang, daughter of a black Ghanaian father and a white German mother, is literally challenging racism head on.”

 

Click through to WATCH video

 

 

Community Village‘s insight:

 

She’s super brave. I’m scared to death of the KKK. Although, I’ve read that some will have a dialog if you engage with them – just like in this video.

People apply labels to groups, then that label makes us frightened. But they are human. And often the ‘normal’ person is the one who does something crazy.

I think many people, including the media, the military, and religious groups attempt to over simplify the complexity of human relations, especially the fact that everyone has the capacity to do good or bad.

The human mind is so interconnected and influenced with the culture and community that it lives in, it’s easy for humans to get their ideas twisted, and many never have the opportunity to study philosophy, anthropology, sociology, biology, intercultural studies, nor the opportunity to travel the world. And even with the power of the internet (YouTube ‘university’) – there is still so much ignorance and hate.

The world is in a constant battle between ignorance and knowledge, bad and good, yin and yang.

 

See on www.huffingtonpost.com