Racism and oppression and America

Below is generally a place I’ll keep notes and thoughts for reference.

Parenting and race

It’s been a minute podcast position in episode

Aug 12th 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville NC. How do you talk to your kids about race, and when, how. Need to talk to your kids when they’re young, or they’ll think their misconceptions are the right ones. It’s white privilege that talking to your kids about race is an option, as opposed to a necessity to survival. Her kids 9 and 12 school hasn’t talked about it. Sam Sanders got race talk before sex talk. He thinks it’s that way for a lot of black kids.

The first place to start any progress is to start having conversations, bit by bit, starting small.

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by BeverlyTatum amazon. 20 years old, but a good book about race questions with children.

Waking Up White by Debbie Irving amazon. Race is a social, and kids need concrete examples.

Kaepernick sits down during National Anthem.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told NFL Media in an exclusive interview after the game. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” nfl.com

Trump twitter archive

Unitarian music director DeReau Farrar Testimony, video

Men can respond with #iwill lifehacker

“on November 8th, the dispossessed ….. will vote for … the man who promised to upend the system that screwed them… Donald J Trump.” youtube

Change my view (CMV) subreddit. Learned about it from NPR

This American Life episode 627 – Suitable for Children.  Details a trip as a child, and as an adult to the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore.

When you step inside the museum, it’s dark. Immediately to the right, there’s a wax figure of a slave. He’s on his knees, his teeth knocked out, and he’s being held down by two white slavers who pull his head back. They’ve shoved a long funnel into his mouth and are pouring gruel through it, force-feeding him. Brown gruel spills out of his mouth. As an act of rebellion, some slaves wouldn’t eat, so the slavers made them. This is the very first thing you see.

[…]

For me, that’s the point. When they leave shaken, when they leave crying– and that’s often the reaction– I have no problem with those tears. What people are going to talk about years later is going to be our slave ship. And they are going to say, I never forgot your lynching exhibit.

And everything else, it seems like a movie, if you don’t have a sense of exactly what people were fighting against. If you think that Rosa Parks, that what she did had something to do with the seat on the bus and you don’t understand that that act was going to get her jailed, but it could have gotten her lynched, as well.

facebook convo 11/2017 “It’s OK to be white”

I’m confused. Who said it wasn’t?? And people ask me why are you so tired every day?!!!

A Cambridge public works employee could be seen scraping them off with a putty knife.
BOSTONGLOBE.COM

Tracey-Ann Daley They were all over our building ?

Carolyn Brinkworth Yea, you wouldn’t believe the number of white people who basically try to pick a fight with me because they think (before I’ve opened my mouth) that I’m going to tell them it’s not ok to be white. Simply because I’ve said diversity is a good thing. So much fragility, so little time.

Nicole Hartzog Floyd People learn and grow from diversity. Either from religion, race, ideas, and opinions…some people need to get over it because there is more in this country to fret about. We have homeless people, food kitchens, equal pay, insurance for all and affordable education is what people should be wanting to make happen.

Raven Tukes Likeeeeee .. Tracie this is crazyyyyy

Raven Tukes Like state the obvious. Of course it’s okay to be white because white folk don’t get killed by police officers and then officers get away with it ?

Tracie Jones Yeah, Tracey-Ann Daley I heard about that!!

Drew Kerlee I can already hear how ridiculous this sounds in my mind – but I still think it’s worth typing: those stickers probably come from white folks who feel racism for the first time. To feel that, I don’t think they have an understanding of what Kaepernick and black lives matter stand for.

Someone feels a pea under the mattress of being white, and we get stickers on college campuses vs hundreds of years of slavery.

There is a real disconnect between many parts of our country. Where I live, my Facebook profile, where I get my news, who I work with and spend time with: we just don’t have an understanding of the larger picture in American right now. Proof is in the White House.

This friend of mine would also like this thread. He’s not your FB friend, but I’ll see if I can tag him here. John Fahey

Al Most The sticker is saying that the construct of whiteness–and it’s accompanying dichotomies such as superiority/inferiority, wealth/poverty, value/waste, legal/criminal–are okay to espouse. People of european descent aren’t clamoring to be black–or brown or anything else. So it’s not a reminder that being of european descent is okay… but an expression that whiteness and those dichotomies are inseparable; and an affirmation that those anachronistic ideologies are still okay. Those people, in their twisted constructs of society, choose to believe they’re being told they can’t be white. And if their whiteness comes at the cost of my liberty, they are right.