While mainstream media continues to focus on replaying every bigoted word and tweet Trump spews, communities of color across the U.S. continue to resist racist and xenophobic local and national policies. Indigenous communities continue to unite against oil pipeline destruction, formerly incarcerated people continue to fight for their rights, and students are taking educational equity into their own hands. No matter what the media shares repeatedly in the news cycle, these narratives deserve our attention every day, but are rarely highlighted.
These stories, published on Daily Kos, are rounded up by the Daily Kos Liberation League (DKLL). We focus on news media and campaigns that center racial justice, gender equality, and LGBTQ rights. Here are some of our favorite stories.
Indigenous communities across North America continue to unite in resistance against oil pipeline construction. These actions take many forms and demonstrate the pride, collective cohesion and resilience of First Peoples. Thriving in various social and political contexts, they point to countless human rights and treaty violations associated with the construction of pipelines. Dance plays a central role in this type of artistic and cultural activism.
As some Democrats propose a radical Green New Deal centered around justice and equity, behind the scenes, they face a reckoning over the environmental movement’s homogeneity.
According to the 2014 Green 2.0 report, people of color were 36% of the US population, but they made up no more than about 12% of environment organizations studied. A 2019 update to the report found that diversity actually got worse over the past few years.
The New Yorker is running an important three-part series: How Climate Change Is Fuelling the U.S. Border Crisis. It shouldn’t be missed by anyone who cares about climate change or immigration.
Alongside the Movement for Black Lives and college anti-racism movements like the 2015 University of Missouri protests, middle school and high school students in the U.S. have become increasingly vocal about issues like police brutality, gun violence, school closings in communities of color, as well as racist incidents in their schools.
The latest of these protests came in March, when scandals over a racist video at a private school in New York, and online threats of violence against Black and Latino students in Charlottesville, Va., drew strong reactions from students.
One year after police killed Stephon Clark in his family’s backyard, law enforcement officials launched a different kind of assault on the 22-year-old when they attacked his reputation and impugned his character. The Sacramento district attorney publicly released a series of Clark’s text messages with his fiancee, detailing conflicts in their relationship and his mental health struggles.
In November, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to former felons who’ve completed their sentences. In March, Florida Republicans advanced a bill that will strip hundreds of thousands of these individuals of the franchise once again.
Walking while black, waiting for an Uber while black, swimming while black, entering an apartment building while black, selling water while black, barbecuing while black: Simply existing while black has become a headline-worthy situation as black people—doing nothing more than going about their daily lives—have become the target of racist and racially-motivated attacks that often end in the police being called on the innocent.
Manhattan D.A. Cyrus R. Vance Jr. invested $38 million to get rape kits tested, none of them in his own jurisdiction. Over the past three years, the evidence from these tests has resulted in more than a thousand arrests, and hundreds of convictions. But another estimated 155,000 kits are still untested, letting rapists roam free. Some kits have been left on the shelf so long that even when suspects are identified, they can’t be prosecuted because of the legal deadlines and other factors, according to authorities. Vance calls this a “an absolute travesty of justice,” noting “that backlog not only undermined justice and the perception, and reality, of equality—it also made every woman and every American less safe.”
Across the country, the students leading the climate strike have connections with activist groups like Zero Hour, Extinction Rebellion, and March For Our Lives. But the organizing model the team uses is deliberately independent of any single organization, and horizontal. It builds on the momentum of the increasingly black and brown leadership behind the Green New Deal, driven by organizations like Justice Democrats and the youth-led Sunrise Movement.
“Our generation grew up watching the segregation of the environmental movement and its inability to bridge across generations, race, class, etc.,” says Varshini Prakash, the co-founder and executive director of Sunrise.
The two Democratic freshman representatives are the first Native women to serve in Congress. Now Senate seats in their home states of New Mexico and Kansas have opened up—and some of their supporters would like to see them seek those higher offices. When asked if she might run for the seat being vacated by Democrat Tom Udall, Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo, gave a hearty “maybe,” tweeting “I’m giving the Senate race a lot of thought and consideration.”
In northern California, the Winnemem Wintu Tribe and the grassroots organization W.A.T.E.R. (We Advocate Thorough Environmental Review) filed an Opening Brief in Superior Court on February 22, continuing a six year community challenge to the flawed EIR for Crystal Geyer Water Company’s bottling plant project at the base of Mount Shasta, located within the historic aboriginal territory of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe..
The project's significant environmental problems all stem from its location on the lower slopes of Mount Shasta, a major water source area for all of California, well-known for its incredible beauty and extreme environmental sensitivity.
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