Institutional racism harms everyone it touches: even the privileged, from brilliant Thomas Jefferson to rather average me. It is a rot which eats away at our common humanity. I feel a lot of compassion for Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson. He could have been me. There are differences, of course. Darren Wilson is a […]
How To Become a Racist Laughingstock
Last November, KSTP TV in Minneapolis made themselves a laughingstock. They ran a news segment claiming that Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges had “flashed a gang sign” with an unidentified, faceless, African American man. The “gang sign?” She and voting rights activist Navell Gordon had posed together, pointing at one another! Politicians and everyone else point […]
Respect for Sandra Bland
A year ago Aug. 8, Michael Brown was shot by a police officer in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson. Not quite a year later, a Texas officer escalated a tiny traffic infraction in the exact same reckless way, culminating in police-on-black violence and then the black person’s death. This time it was a woman, Sandra Bland. She […]