In the early 1960s, Minister Malcolm X gave a speech about the problem of unlawful police actions against black people in America. This is a powerful message concerning police brutality that continues some fifty years later.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
While facts and figures are useful to understand the scale of the refugee problem, for most people it’s the personal angle that they best relate to. But this personal angle, and the sympathy and understanding that it promotes, is hard to come by, especially in young children.
Children’s literature that focuses on the refugee experience can provide just that. Books such as Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah and The Other Side of Truth by Beverley Naidoo focus on the individual’s story. They offer a voice to descriptions of suffering and resilience in the face of the huge challenges that fleeing for safety and seeking asylum bring
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Source: www.theepochtimes.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.
See on Scoop.it – Community Village World History
Governor Powell Clayton of Arkansas observed:
Undoubtedly the underlying motive for this effort to bring in Chinese laborers was to punish the negro for having abandoned the control of his old master, and to regulate the conditions of employment and the scale of wages to be paid him.”
U.S. business leaders always want the lowest cost labor.
When U.S. unions demanded a living wage with reasonable benefits, instead of complying, businesses moved their manufacturing out of the U.S.
Money and manufacturing easily cross borders. However, (im)migration laws make it difficult for people to cross borders.
See on abagond.wordpress.com
