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Showing posts with the label #whitePrivilege

When White People Call the Police on Black People

Clockwise from top left: Kelly Fyffe-Marshall, via Instagram; Dave Sanders for The New York Times; Melissa DePino, via Twitter; Myneca Ojo, via Facebook #African-American #BlackAmerican #Police #whitePrivilege #WhitePeople What makes the police encounters chilling is  how routine they are . They happen while black people are going about their everyday lives, only to be interrupted by someone calling the police for the thinnest of suspicions. In the past month, more than a handful of such interactions have attracted widespread attention on social media — and, in turn, in national outlets like The Times, CNN and The Washington Post. “It happens so frequently to people of color that we don’t often think of it as a big deal or as particularly newsworthy,” said Paul Butler, a Georgetown University law professor who is the author of “ Chokehold: Policing Black Men .” He added, “It’s humiliating and aggravating and upsetting, but the idea that it’s national news i...

The Greatest White Privilege Is Life Itself

# WhitePrivilege  #IbramXKendi  #ElijahCummings  #AfricanAmerican #Blackmen  #Racism  By Ibram X. Kendi   Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University   theatlantic.com Like so many other black men in America, Elijah Cummings died too young. I had a 30-minute ride to the train station. I nestled into my seat, opened my phone, and saw that Representative Elijah Cummings had passed away. I gasped and covered my mouth. The driver peeked at me in his rear-view m irror. He saw me shaking my head and whispering what many Americans whispered last Thursday:  He was only 68 . My mind turned to my father, whom I had just left at a hotel in Princeton, New Jersey. Dread burned in my chest. To get my mind off my father’s mortality, I started reading obituaries for Cummings, who will lie in state today at the U.S. Capitol. The more I learned about the gentleman who would not yield, the more my chest bur...