White kids need to learn about white anti-racist activists
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Let’s face it. Black people, who are only about 14% (more or less) of the population of the United States are never gonna be able to cure this country of its foundational and deeply-rooted white supremacy and racism. If we add the victims of stolen lands, and cultural genocide into the mix — Native American/Alaskan Natives who comprise 2.9% of the populace— it still ain’t happening.
This country’s problem is white people. (Cue up the push-back of “not all white people” yadda yadda.)
I’ll repeat what I just said. White people are the problem. Y’all overwhelmingly vote for white supremacist Republican leaders and politicians on the local, state and the federal level. Y’all control every major media outlet — both print and televised. Y’all control police forces and police unions. Sadly, most white folks don’t recognize how white supremacy ultimately negatively affects them (hat tip to Black Kos Community member mohistory2 who repeats this like a mantra). But I digress.
I was just re-reading this 2022 WaPo piece from Perry Bacon Jr.
He wrote:
A clear majority of White Americans keeps backing the Republican Party over the Democratic Party, even though the Republican Party is embracing terrible and at times antidemocratic policies and rhetoric. The alliance between Republicans and White Americans is by far the most important and problematic dynamic in American politics today.
Non-Hispanic White Americans were about 85 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, much larger than the 59 percent of the U.S. population overall in that demographic. That was similar to 2016, when White voters were about 88 percent of Trump backers.
[...]
The political discourse in America, however, continues to ignore or play down the Whiteness of the Republican coalition. In 2015 and 2016, journalists and political commentators constantly used terms such as “Middle America” and “the working class” to describe Trump’s supporters, as though the overwhelming Whiteness of the group was not a central part of the story. In this year’s campaign cycle, recent articles, in The Post and in other outlets, have highlighted Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s supposed weaknesses with Black voters. This is a strange framing. It is likely that more than 70 percent of White voters in Georgia will back Abrams’s Republican opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, but fewer than 20 percent of the state’s Black voters will vote for the incumbent. If Kemp wins reelection, it will be because of White Georgians, not Black ones.
The comment section (all 4237 of them) was a hot mess of mostly offended, in denial, white people.
So what can be done to fix this? Black people are never gonna be able to do it. The answer, from my Black pov is that more white folks need to step up and do some organizing, educating and anti-racist work with their skinfolks, however I want to take it a step further.
I have a suggestion. We need to do the opposite of right wing Prager U (who is NOT a university) and teach kids — white kids (and all other groups as well) about some white heroes and sheroes of the civil rights and anti-racist movement.
Those white people who don’t vote for white supremacists, or embrace racism from the left (yes, it exists) who are active anti-racists must begin to learn about and tell the stories of important white history makers. Simply trotting out the pictures and histories of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, or even Ida B. Wells and Malcolm X for young white folks to learn about during Black History Month doesn’t cut it. They need some powers of example they can relate to, identify with and embrace. Though young white kids may wind up admiring Black leaders, frankly I doubt they identify with them. Might be better if they also learn about some folks who look like mom — or grandma.
I have a long list of names, you may or may not be familiar with — too many to go into depth about in the story here today, so I’ll just highlight one today — Anne Braden.
Who was Anne Braden you may be asking? The Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research at the University of Louisville has some answers.
Anne Braden (1924-2006) was a Louisville journalist, organizer, and educator who was among the earliest and most dedicated white allies of the southern civil rights movement. For 60 years, Braden and her husband Carl used the power of the printed word to advance human rights movements across the U.S. South.
She was commended by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and she was a key adult adviser to 1960s youth in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Her central message was whites’ responsibility to combat racism. A mentor to several generations of racial justice activists, in her final years Braden taught social justice history at Northern Kentucky University and at the University of Louisville.
“When the civil rights struggle engulfed the South, Anne Braden was one of the courageous few who crossed the color line to fight for racial justice. Her history is a proud and fascinating one…Anne Braden is indeed a ‘subversive southerner’—a label she can wear with pride because she spent her life fighting to build a New South, where all our people could live together in freedom and equality.”
~ Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.
Here’s the trailer from a documentary about her life and work. Anne Braden: Southern Patriot (1924-2006) -- 3 minute sample from Anne Lewis on Vimeo.
"Anne Braden: Southern Patriot (1924-2006)" is a feature documentary completed May 1, 2012. Braden was hailed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail as a white southerner who was "eloquent and prophetic." Ostracized as a red, Braden fought for transformation and liberation throughout her long and good life.
The film is by Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering with music by Dirk Powell with Nathaniel Smith on cello. It is produced by Appalshop, in Whitesburg, Kentucky
This Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) video illustrates Braden’s impact in her community.
This digital story explores more contemporary manifestations of whites organizing other whites by profiling Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), a local and national network organizing white communities to join with people of color in ending racism. The project grew out of the University of Louisville’s Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research, namesake to longtime Louisville-based anti-racist journalist Anne Braden. A coalition of historians, students, and workers connected to the Institute partnered with a community group called Louisville Showing Up for Racial Justice, or LSURJ, to create two digital stories that examine the ways that the 1966 call to “organize your own” infused organizing for racial equity in and around Louisville. These stories juxtapose oral history audio snippets with relevant historic images and artifacts.
As I mentioned, I have the names of quite a few more key white anti-racist organizer/activists. Anybody interested?
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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I’ve always been fascinated by election workers. They’re paid a pittance (Freeman got $16 an hour), and often nothing at all, to supervise elections. They do it because they believe in their communities, and in democracy, and demonstrate that quietly through action rather than words. Contrary to MAGA mythology, they are not dishonest and power-hungry; if you’re dishonest and power-hungry, life affords you many more promising avenues. They are, rather, people with strong values and a commitment to honesty well beyond the understanding of the 18 sketchy characters under indictment along with Trump.
“I should not be here,” Freeman told the House Select Committee on January 6 in a May 2022 deposition. “I signed up as an election worker because I believe in our democracy. I signed up to support my daughter, Shaye, whose entire professional career has been devoted to making sure that Fulton County elections are fair and that every vote is counted.”
For five years starting in 2017, Shaye Moss worked as a registration officer at the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections. Her duties were to process absentee ballot requests and voter applications, but on Election Day 2020 she was also asked to help process the vote count at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena, a polling place. Moss asked her mother, a retired Fulton County worker who’d helped coordinate 911 calls, to help out.
The trouble started when Moss and Freeman got captured on video tabulating ballots after hours. The ballots had been packed up for the night, but election officials changed their mind and ordered poll workers to continue scanning them. The video showed Moss, Freeman, and others removing ballots from what a right-wing super PAC called Restoration of America alleged on Facebook were suspicious-looking “suitcases.” Funded by the billionaire Schlitz heir Richard Uihlein, Restoration of America made similar unfounded post-election allegations about other polling places around the country. In fact, the “suitcases” were merely the bags in which the ballots had been stored overnight and sealed before election officials changed their plan.
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Federal judges in Georgia and Texas have ruled against key provisions of two controversial election laws passed two years ago as the Republican Party sought to tighten voting rules after former President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential contest.
U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez struck down a provision of Texas’ law requiring that mail voters provide the same identification number they used when they registered to vote. He ruled the requirement violated the U.S. Civil Rights Act because it led to people being unable to cast ballots due to a matter irrelevant to whether they are registered.
The change led to skyrocketing mail ballot rejections in the first election after the law passed in September 2021 and was targeted in a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice.
“This ruling sends a clear message that states may not impose unlawful and unnecessary requirements that disenfranchise eligible voters seeking to participate in our democracy,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a statement after the ruling, which came Thursday.
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Harris County, a Democratic stronghold in a state long dominated by Republicans, is one of the most diverse places in Texas, where the minority population has been growing for decades. Democrats have long predicted the state would turn in their favor, but those dreams have been dashed repeatedly.
Still, when the Republican-controlled legislature passed two measures this year to eliminate Harris County’s top election job and give the Republican secretary of state power to take oversight of the county’s elections, political operatives understood the stakes. They also knew that with a mayor’s race looming in Houston in November, the changes will be tested early if they survive a legal challenge.
The question of how voters of color in Houston will respond is more complicated.
Miller-Scarborough, 79, lives in Kashmere Gardens, a historically Black neighborhood in Houston. She thinks the legislature’s actions will fuel cynicism that already exists among voters who don’t remember the struggle for the right to vote.
“I hear my grandkids already saying, ‘See that, granny? I told you that didn’t do any good to vote, didn’t I?’”
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Salma Paralluelo could have been preparing for next year’s Olympics if she’d decided to stick with track and not make the switch to soccer.
But she did pick soccer and the 19-year-old winger has been a super-sub in Spain’s run to the Women’s World Cup final. Spain plays England on Sunday in the first all-European final since 2003.
“We’re over the moon to be through to the final,” said Paralluelo, who was treated for what appeared to be cramps in Friday’s training session.
“It’s incomparable. It’s so hard to get here and we managed to do so. And now we can dream big.”
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Human rights organisations in Brazil are clamouring for justice following the murder of a Black community activist who had been receiving threats.
Maria Bernadete Pacífico, a community and religious leader in the Pitanga dos Palmares quilombo – an Afro-Brazilian settlement of descendants of escaped slaves in the north-east state of Bahia – was killed on Thursday evening.
The 72-year-old, known as Mãe Bernadete (Mother Bernadete), had spent years demanding answers for the unsolved murder of her son Fábio Gabriel Pacífico, who was gunned down outside the community’s school in 2017.
She was killed on Thursday when two men wearing helmets entered her house and reportedly fired more than a dozen shots at her face.
“It is an immeasurable loss for the [quilombola] movement. She was a warrior, a fighter, she fought for human rights for everyone,” said Sandra Maria Andrade, the executive coordinator of the national quilombo association Conaq, of which Pacífico was a representative.
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