This was written by Mychal Denzel Smith at Salon.com: In 1996, Chris Rock told a joke. Granted, he told a number of jokes, because he’s a comedian and that’s literally his job. But he only told one joke that would come to serve as the basis of analysis for a generation of would-be sociologists and pseudo-black-intellectuals everywhere. “I love black people, but I hate n–gers.” The joke here being that…
April V. Taylor FOX News Bill O’Reilly is known to make comments that stir up controversy, and in a recent interview with PBS radio host Tavis Smiley, he left Smiley baffled as he alleged that Black people are to blame for their economic problems and admitted that Republicans are scared of Black people. The conversation took place on an episode of “The O’Reilly Factor,” where the two discussed the Black…
April V. Taylor Michael Brown’s mother Lesley McSpadden will be traveling to Geneva, Switzerland to testify to the United Nations Committee Against Torture about her son’s death. Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, was killed by Officer Darren Wilson in August. Wilson has not been arrested and leaks indicate that a grand jury is not likely to return an indictment against him for killing the unarmed Brown. With little hope of…
[View the story “#FergusonFireside Tells Country What The Mainstream Media Will Not” on Storify]
April V. Taylor For the first time in the history of the United States, Amnesty International has documented human rights abuses on American soil. The report entitled, “On The Streets of America: Human Rights Abuses In Ferguson,” declares Michael Brown’s death a human rights abuse and also highlights abuses that include police reactions to protesters and racist policing tactics across the country. Specifically regarding Officer Wilson killing unarmed teenager Michael…
[View the story “Thousands March Against Mass Incarceration and Police Brutality” on Storify]
April V. Taylor For anyone truly paying attention, it is no secret how white supremacy and privilege structures how mainstream media reports and frames events in the United States. The weekend yielded a perfect and unsettling example of just how pervasive this bias and privilege is when white college students from Keene State College rioted and destroyed property during the school’s annual Pumpkinfest. Twitter lit up with people mocking white…
April V. Taylor Rev. Jim Wallis, who is a Christian writer and political activist and also founded Sojourners, marched with fellow clergy during Ferguson October’s Moral Monday protest. After being arrested alongside Dr. Cornel West, Carl Dix and more than forty others, Wallis did an interview with HuffPost Live in which he discussed the role white Christians must play in helping to dismantle the “racialized police system” that exists in…
April V. Taylor Thanks to the terribly inadequate federal record keeping about the number of people killed by police, there is a lot we do not know about who cops kill, but what has been determined by a recent study completed by ProPublica is that Black men are 21 times more likely than white men to be killed by police. ProPublica ia a non-profit that specializes in investigative journalism; they…
April V. Taylor After giving a rousing address at Chaifez Arena, Dr. Cornel West joined Ferguson October protests that occurred late Sunday evening into Monday morning. After marching and organizing all weekend along with others, there were many who felt that the thousands of people who filled the arena to hear religious platitudes and take advantage of a free opportunity to hear Dr. West needed to do more than just…
April V. Taylor The destruction of Black Wall Street during the Tulsa race riot of 1921 has conveniently been left out of American history books. What is even more unnerving is that many survey courses of African American history have also made this same glaring omission. One has to wonder how this is even possible, but in the American conscious, forgetting has always been easier than remembering. In a country…
April V. Taylor Pedro Serrano is an officer with the NYPD’s 40th precinct who secretly recorded his superiors telling him and other officers to target Black and Hispanic men between the ages of 14 and 21 to be stopped and frisked and that they had to meet certain stop and frisk quotas. Serrano reported that he and other officers were required to participate in van hunts where officers would ride…
April V. Taylor For anyone who was holding out hope that the euphoria the country experienced after Barack Obama’s historic election would somehow magically improve centuries of racism, the reality has set in for many that this is just not the case. As the nation watched Obama be inaugurated as the 44th President and the first President of color in 2012, many felt that he was ushering in a new…
April V. Taylor Black people have been taught for years that their freedom is due in large part to Abraham Lincoln and his signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. What many fail to realize is that Lincoln never wanted to free slaves and have them live on American soil. A recent article written for The Root by scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. explores this topic and reveals that Lincoln implored free…
April V. Taylor Most Americans tend to think of lynchings as a dated form of racial violence that suddenly disappeared with the ending of Jim Crow; however, America’s proclivity towards slaughtering black people lives on through the country’s police departments. A recent article published by The Guardian illustrates just how true this reality is, revealing that historians estimate that during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, two to three…