Reviews and Comments

On February 26th, 2012, Trayvon Martin was killed in an act of biased, extrajudicial, vigilante murder by George Zimmerman.

Zimmerman was declared "not guilty" of 2nd degree murder due to a failure of Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin's legal team.

Trayvon's death illustrated the racial bias against black men in the United States and gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.

"Our son is your son...We're going to stand up for justice, and stand up for what's right!" - Sybrina Fulton at the Million-Hoodie March on March 21st, 2012

I just finished The Color of Law. I suggest you read it. Rothstein's thesis is supported in crushing detail. The laws and history behind mortgages, zoning, and deeds are boring, but without an understanding of them, you don't understand government-sponsored apartheid in the United States.

"While private discrimination also deserves some share of the blame, Rothstein shows that “racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments…segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.” Government agencies used public housing to clear mixed neighborhoods and create segregated ones. Governments built highways as buffers to keep the races apart. They used federal mortgage insurance to usher in an era of suburbanization on the condition that developers keep blacks out. From New Dealers to county sheriffs, government agencies at every level helped impose segregation—not de facto but de jure."[1]

De facto: practices that exist in reality, even though they are not officially recognized by laws.
De jure: practices that are legally recognised

Here are a couple of topics worth knowing about:

Block Busting: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting

Mortgage Descrimination: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_discrimination

Exclusionary Zoning: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_zoning

Racist Deed Covenants: www.cnn.com/2020/02/15/us/racist-deeds-covenants/index.html

[Painting] Kerry James Marshall: Better Homes, Better Gardens, 1994. Found in the St. Louis Art Museum during December 2019.
[1]https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/22/when-government-drew-the-color-line/

Six steps for cultivating quality learning environments for black girls according to Monique W. Morris' extensive interviews and research in Pushout.

1) The protection of girls from violence and victimization in school
2) Proactive discussions in school about healthy intimate relationships
3) Strong student-teacher relationships
4) School-based wrap-around services
5) Increased focus on student learning coupled with a reduced emphasis on discipline and surveillance.
6) Consistent school credit recovery processes between alternative schools and traditional district or community schools.

I just finished How to be an Antiracist[1] by Ibram X. Kendi. The book is a memoir of how Kendi grew up absorbing racist ideas and overcame them while growing up and starting the Antiracist Research and Policy Center[2]. It is also a practical philosophical tome that provides an ideology to demolish racism through policy. How to be an Antiracist supports many ideas that I will incorporate into my activism.

1) "Not Racist" supports the status quo. All ideas and policies (not people) are racist or antiracist meaning that they either support equality among races or they support inequality.

2) Moral suasion is the idea that outright rhetorical appeals will change hearts and minds to support policy change. Moral suasion does not work. Policies sculpt thought. We must use antiracist power to put antiracist policies into effect.

3) An antiracist activist is someone who has a history of antiracist policy victories. While online moral suasion helps to unite antiracists and serves as an outlet for frustration, it does not make one an activist.

Also, Kendi is putting out a kids book called Antiracist Baby. Preorder it for your babies[3].

[1]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40265832-how-to-be-an-antiracist
[2]https://antiracismcenter.com/
[3]https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624774/antiracist-baby-by-ibram-x-kendi-illustrated-by-ashley-lukashevsky/

Joshua Wong gives his memoir of a colonized city fighting for independence, democracy, and the first Amendment rights that are slipping under fascism in the US.

His dedication to his cause through Scholarism and Demosisto is noble and should serve as an example to all of us.

His support of Donald Trump and Josh Hawley at the end of the book for the Hong Kong Resolution[1] left a bad taste in my mouth. I think Wong would benefit from reading Angela Davis to understand the global struggle against colonialism and international solidarities. Both the US and China are hostile to ex-colonies seeking independence.

Unfree Speech: slpl.bibliocommons.com/item/show/1465819116

[1]www.hawley.senate.gov/senator-hawley-delivers-floor-speech-support-hong-kong

I just finished "Kill All Normies" by Angela Nagle. She outlines the crimes of the alt-right and the identity tumblrs of the left in a harsh, critical light.

I just finished Dr. Kendi’s phenomenal book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. In the book, Kendi makes three distinct schools of thought regarding race obvious: segregation, assimilation, and antiracist. Segregationists seek to separate the races. Assimilationists seek to force non-white races to take on white culture as their own. Antiracists see that race is a false construct bolstered by racism and bad science. Antiracists seek to eliminate the disparities between racial groups to create an egalitarian society.

Dr. Kendi explores the ideas of segmentation, assimilation, and antiracism throughout American history through five individuals: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis.

Kendi concludes by discussing the antiracist goal of eliminating disparities between racial groups. Historically, antiracists have sought to use moral suasion, uplift, and education to encourage Americans to pursue the elimination of racial disparities. These strategies have failed. As in his other work, Kendi concludes that Antiracist political power must be used to eliminate racist policies and create antiracist policies in the interest of creating a more egalitarian society.

I wish I knew how to build antiracist power.

1/Sam J Miller's (@sentencebender) #BlackFishCity explores a city built in a post-climate apocalypse artic on oil platforms. This delightful futurist romp combines plagues, human-animal mind melds, and governance by artificial intelligence.

2/If older science fiction seems to be missing an ecological angle, Black Fish City adds that and more.

In Overdue, Oliver (@aelaineo) mentions the vast destruction that social media has done to our connections with each other and information. While providing this diagnosis, Oliver mentioned Jenny Odell's (@the_jennitaur) How to Do Nothing, a glorious book.

I spend too much time on the Twitter and don't really have much to show for it. Odell urges us to replace our rather shallow connections with social media with a deeper connection to place and people.

Odell makes several main points in the book:

A) Doing "nothing" and refusing is a great form of life and resistance.
B) Reclaiming our attention is a way to do "nothing" in the attention economy.
C) Removing your attention requires you to have a place to put it. You can change your habits of attention with art, nature, and the community around you.
D) There are many ways to continue to use technology to connect but refuse the attention economy.
E) Once we have placed our attention on something else, we can actually do something good for our communities with it.
F) Manifest Deconstruction: as overturning the legacy of misguided thinking about the economy that has caused the problems we are facing now such as the issues that are intertwined and emerge within public space, environmental politics, class, and race
G) Context Collapse: the flattening of multiple audiences into a single context

All of that sounds obvious, but the way Odell delivers this information is compelling.

How to Do Nothing is worth your time.