Delegates to the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held on October 24-27, 1991, in Washington DC, drafted and adopted 17 principles of Environmental Justice. Since then, The Principles have served as a defining document for the growing grassroots movement for environmental justice. Continue reading “Principles of Environmental Justice”
Category: Race
Putting your shoulder to the wheel of history
“White people are taught that racism is a personal attribute, an attitude, maybe a set of habits. Anti-racist whites invest too much energy worrying about getting it right; about not slipping up and revealing their racial socialization; about saying the right things and knowing when to say nothing. It’s not about that. It’s about putting your shoulder to the wheel of history; about undermining the structural supports of a system of control that grinds us under, that keeps us divided even against ourselves and that extracts wealth, power and life from our communities like an oil company sucks it from the earth.”
– Ricardo Levins Morales
Claiming his body as his Own
Written by Lydia Wylie-Kellermann for a neighborhood Eucharist.
In a time when we are so mindful of the violence and racism done to black bodies and mindful of the privileges of our own bodies, we pause as a community to remember another body. One that was targeted and murdered by another violent system over 2000 years ago. Continue reading “Claiming his body as his Own”
Fifty Years Later. In Detroit the End of Brown: Separate and Unequal
By Bill Wylie-Kellermann
The Detroit Public Schools are being dismantled by design and effectively looted. Though Detroiters and the elected school board are consistently blamed for their demise, for twelve of the last fifteen years DPS has been under state control.
Mother Helen Moore, an attorney who heads the Education Task Force has become notorious for her fight on behalf of the schools, and tells the story over and over in community meetings. It’s well documented. Continue reading “Fifty Years Later. In Detroit the End of Brown: Separate and Unequal”
Against Silence
From Tyehimba Jess, whose first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Wave Books will publish his next book, Olio, in 2016. He is an Associate Professor of English at the College of Staten Island.
My name is Tyehimba Jess. I am a black poet. I have a silence to be rightened. I have a silence after each shooting. I remain a nation unsilenced. I am a poet murdering silence. My name is Eric. My name is Bell. My name is Eleanor. My name is nation. My rights fit any murder description. My remains remained on the asphalt for
Continue reading “Against Silence”
I Speak From Experience
From Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Americanah (2014):
The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable. It’s true. I speak from experience.
Invisible With Infinite Possibilities
From Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man (1952):
For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being ‘for’ society and then ‘against’ it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase – still it’s a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn’t accept any other; that much I’ve learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.
Help Wanted: White Allies
By Tommy Airey
…large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.
Martin Luther King
**This post was updated, edited and reposted on December 11 at 12:45pmEST.
Last week, an old friend checked in on me. He’s a kind-hearted, hard-working and sincere follower of Jesus. He sent me a series of texts in light of the Ferguson decision and in response to what I have written about it. Here’s a sample:
I don’t think the thought ever crossed my mind that the life of a person of color was somehow worth less than that of a white person. I doubt very much that is the mindset of many police or judges either. Hard to believe the kid from Ferguson was killed because of that mindset given the facts in that case. Would be interesting to research the number of black people killed by white people vs. black people killed by black people. God dislikes all taking of life from the womb to the point of natural death. #Alllivesmatter
Radical Discipleship 