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White allies show solidarity with Black Lives Matter
In the wake of the recent police killings of two black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, public opinion, particularly among white people, has started to shift. Forty new chapters of a national network of groups and individuals organizing white people for racial justice –– Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) –– have formed in the weeks since the incidents.
Read MoreIt’s Time to Ring the Alarm About White Nationalism
The media reports on Islamic terrorism and individual ambushes of police, but it has largely overlooked increasingly brazen demonstrations and violence by the Far Right, treating each as a separate unconnected episode. But are they? In the last year, the level of violence has ramped up dramatically.
Read More212 Slaves Died on the São José Ship; National Museum Shares Their Story
The first items recovered from the sunken slave ship have arrived in Washington, D.C., and will be displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. By Allison Keyes, theRoot.com Paul Gardullo lifted an iron ballast from a Portuguese slave ship that sank in 1794 out of a crate Wednesday morning and…
Read MoreU.S. spending on prisons grew at three times rate of school spending: report
U.S. state and local spending on prisons and jails grew at three times the rate of spending on schools over the last 33 years as the number of Americans behind bars ballooned under a spate of harsh sentencing laws
Read MoreIn the Turmoil Over Race and Policing, Children Pay a Steep Emotional Price
By YAMICHE ALCINDOR, New York Times In the past week alone, there was the 4-year-old girl in Falcon Heights, Minn., who was captured on video consoling her mother after they watched a police officer shoot the mother’s boyfriend through the window of a car. And there was the 15-year-old boy in Baton Rouge, La., who sobbed uncontrollably in…
Read MoreStudy Supports Suspicion That Police Are More Likely to Use Force on Blacks
A new study has found that the race of the person being stopped by police officers is significant in terms of how much force is used. The study of thousands of use-of-force episodes from police departments across the nation has concluded what many people have long thought, but which could not be proved because of a lack of data: African-Americans are far more likely than whites and other groups to be the victims of use of force by the police, even when racial disparities in crime are taken into account.
Read MoreWhat White America Fails to See
By Michael Eric Dyson, Op-Ed Contributor, New York Times IT is clear that you, white America, will never understand us. We are a nation of nearly 40 million black souls inside a nation of more than 320 million people. We don’t all think the same, feel the same, love, learn, live or even die the same.…
Read MoreCritics of Police Welcome Facebook Live and Other Tools to Stream Video
After back-to-back killings of black men by police officers this week, scores of African-Americans declared on social media that they would be equipping themselves with a powerful tool: FacebookLive.
Read MoreDid a Fear of Slave Revolts Drive American Independence?
FOR more than two centuries, we have been reading the Declaration of Independence wrong. Or rather, we’ve been celebrating the Declaration as people in the 19th and 20th centuries have told us we should, but not the Declaration as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams wrote it. To them, separation from Britain was as much, if not more, about racial fear and exclusion as it was about inalienable rights.
Read MorePillars of Black Media, Once Vibrant, Now Fighting for Survival
When Johnson Publishing, a black-founded and owned company, announced a little more than two weeks ago that it had sold Ebony and Jet to a private equity firm in Texas, there was a sense of loss. Traditional media companies have struggled for years to adapt to a digital world, but the pressure on black-owned media has been even more acute.
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