Showing posts with label African Americans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label African Americans. Show all posts

Thursday, June 18, 2015

#Charleston Massacre

I am so tired of waking up in the morning to the awful news that another evil man has committed mass murder in the United States. I am so tired of waking up to hear that another white person has murdered black people or other people of color in the United States. These are the names of the nine African-American people who were murdered last night at the Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, because they were African-American.
  • Cynthia Hurd, 54, a library branch manager
  • Susie Jackson, 87
  • Ethel Lance, 70
  • The Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49
  • The Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41, the church’s pastor and a state senator
  • Tywanza Sanders, 26
  • The Rev. Daniel Simmons, 74, who died at the hospital after the shooting
  • The Rev. Sharonda Singleton, 45
  • Myra Thompson, 59
More on some of the victims:
Sen. Pinckney and Sanders were both alumni of Allen University. The university was founded soon after the American Civil War on the basis of the AME church. 
Sanders was a 2014 graduate of the Division of Business Administration. 
Rev. Sharonda Singleton was a speech therapist and track coach at Goose Creek High School in South Carolina. 
Hurd was a 31-year employee of the Charleston County Public Library. 
Thompson was a longtime member of the church and was teaching Bible study when she was killed. Her husband, Rev. Anthony Thompson, is one of the bishop's clergy members. 
Witnesses say the gunman stood up and declared he was there "to shoot black people." Another survivor told Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of Pinckney, that the shooter said, "I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go."
I'm not interested in knowing about the murderer. We spend too much talking about the perpetrators. Let's talk about the victims - the people we all lost today. Photos and some information about four of the victims of the #CharlestonMassacre.






On the church where they were killed: http://www.thenation.com/blog/210313/charlestons-mother-emanuel-church-has-stared-down-racist-violence-200-years

Mother Emanuel Church
Charles Blow on the massacre:



Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Tuesday, June 03, 2014

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Reparations are due because black people have been injured

Another great article by Ta-Nehisi Coates, this time arguing with a writer for the National Review who believes that there is actually such a thing as "race":
Reparations are not due because black people are black, but because black people have been injured. And the Anglo-American tradition has never been a system of "racial apportionment," but of racist apportionment. Like most writers and public intellectuals (liberal and conservative) Williamson's reply is rooted in the idea of "race" as constant—i.e. there is a "black race" that can be traced back to Africa, and a "white race" that can be traced back to Europe. There certainly is such a thing as African and European ancestry, and that ancestry is not entirely irrelevant to our world. But ancestry is tangential, and sometimes wholly unrelated, to racism, injury, and reparations.
We know this because there is no constant idea of "black" or "white" across time or space. We know this because Charlie Patton fathered the blues, and Alessandro de Medici ruled in Venice. Black in America is not black in Brazil, and black in modern America is not even black in 18th-century Louisiana. Nor are people we consider "white" today any sort of constant. Throughout American history it has been common to speak of an "Italian race," an "Irish race," a "Frankish race," a "Jewish race" even a "Southern race." One might take a hard look at Williamson's agreeable portrait, for instance, and note the problem of assigning anyone to a race. "Race," writes the imminent historian Nell Irvin Painter, "is an idea, not a fact."
In this country, at this moment, "African-Americans" are an ethnic group comprised of individuals of varying degrees of direct African ancestry. Nothing about this fact necessitated plunder or injury, and it is the injury—through red-lining, black codes, slaves codes, lynching, ghettoization, fraud, rape, and murder—with which reparations concerns itself. The point is not "racial apportionment," which is to say giving people things because they are black. It is injury apportionment, which is to say restoring things to people who have been plundered.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)