Anti-Racism
With the awarding of its first government funding to demolish a road designed to sustain racial discrimination, the Biden administration is rounding off the president’s recent visit to Michigan, which was mostly focused on worker rights and transportation innovation.
The action is a part of the Biden administration and its larger initiative to redesign America’s infrastructure in a fairer way, which also includes correcting racist roadways that were built to encourage white flight and deny Black people access to housing and business opportunities.
I-375, the highway that divides Detroit’s Black Bottom neighbourhood and Paradise Valley, the city’s epicentre of Black business, will be demolished using $104.6 million in federal funds from last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg confirmed to The Associated Press on Thursday.
The money is being given to Detroit as a part of a $1.5 billion grant programme for states to advance important projects called Infrastructure for Rebuilding America, or INFRA.
Buttigieg described the Detroit roadway to the AP as “cutting like a gash across the neighbourhood, one of many examples I have seen in neighbourhoods around the country where a piece of infrastructure has become a barrier.”
With the help of this money, he said, “we’re now working with the government and the neighbourhood to make it a route that will unite rather than divide.
Millions more were included in the Biden administration announcement on Thursday for various projects in Arizona, Colorado, New York, and other states throughout the nation. The large sum required to rebuild Black Bottom and its neighbourhood demonstrates how detrimental America’s racial infrastructure has been. And it’s an indication that far more money will be required to solve the issue on a national scale.
CEO Jason Kilar acknowledged to his colleagues that racism is “a problem” for their firm and that he is dedicated to changing it during a panel discussion on racism that was aired to Warner Media personnel on Thursday and acquired by TheWrap. Later on Thursday, the business described the funds it would contribute and further improvements it would make.
We have an issue, was the comment I intended to make. This is a global issue, not just one that affects American society or the country itself. He repeatedly thanked everyone who had written to him over the weekend to discuss their experiences at the corporation and stated, “We’ve had an issue at Warner Media, too.
Kilar expressed his horror at recent events in our nation over the persecution of the Black community in a company-wide email issued on Saturday and examined by TheWrap. In addition to promising to listen to staff members of colour and “lead with empathy and action in this time,” he posted links to publications and speeches that discussed racism in America.
Kilar continued at the event on Thursday by stating three sentiments that he found to be “very common” in the emails he had received from staff members and had read numerous times: “I heard that people — whether they had worked at Warner Media for one year or 20 years — that in many ways they had never felt truly seen or heard. And when I hear it, it makes my heart ache. Even though I am aware that it is true, it still hurts.
Kilar joined Warner Media little over a month ago; he assumed the role of CEO on May 1. A significant portion of the leadership structure has been updated since AT&T bought what was formerly Time Warner. Richard Plepler, the longstanding CEO of HBO, and David Levy, the longtime CEO of Turner, both left their positions last year. Bob Greenblatt was appointed to lead WarnerMedia’s entertainment division.
The second prevalent opinion shared with Kilar was that Black WarnerMedia employees work every day out of concern for their husbands and boys.
When Georgetown University and the Jesuits began efforts to make amends for selling 272 enslaved people to a Louisiana plantation in the racial unrest in 1830s, leaders of the Catholic institution for higher education went beyond their apologies and offers of restitution.
Georgetown officials launched the Georgetown Slavery Archive in 2016 and put it online so that people will have access to it, because they thought it was important to help people understand the past as a way of securing the future.
“Whatever you think society should do today to deal with the legacies of slavery and other forms of racism, it has to be grounded in a sincere understanding of the history,” said Adam Rothman, a Georgetown history professor and the principal curator of the slavery archive.
“People have to know what happened,” Rothman told Catholic News Service. “If you don’t know what happened, and if you don’t know it in some detail, I don’t think you’re going to even be able to imagine possibilities for either reconciliation or reparations today.”
The harmful effects racism has had on American society and how embedded racism is within both U.S. government systems and churches has been a concern of Pope Francis and many U.S. bishops. racial unrest
It’s a difficult topic for many Americans to approach or even acknowledge and in the current U.S. political climate there has been push back on educational programs that teach about the horrors of slavery, continued forced servitude among men and women of color following the Civil War and into the 20th century and continued societal racism.
Some Republican politicians have expressed concern that this approach to history in schools will convince white people they are fundamentally racist and should feel guilty about the advantages their race affords them.
From abdication to divorce and accusations of racism, the royal family has been no stranger to scandal over the decades.
Queen Elizabeth II is largely credited with weathering the various storms the picture of poise amid family dramas that made for juicy tabloid fodder.
Here are some of the crises that rocked the royal family during the queen’s lifetime:
Love Over Country
Elizabeth got a brush with royal drama even before she took to the throne in 1952.
Her father George VI only became king after the abdication of Edward VIII, 326 days into his reign in 1936, in the biggest scandal in modern royal history.
Edward’s decision to step down to marry an American divorcee socialite Wallis Simpson sparked a constitutional crisis.
Edward was the first monarch in the 1,000-year history of the British Crown to give up the throne of his own free will.
Margaret’s Heartbreak
In 1952, her sister princess Margaret, then aged 22, began a romance with her late father’s divorced aide, former Royal Air Force officer Peter Townsend.
Their wish to marry prompted a battle between the disapproving government and the public which was seen to be sympathetic to the union with the queen caught in the middle.
Margaret was eventually persuaded to abandon the relationship and instead married photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1960. They divorced in 1978.
‘A Horrible Year’
The queen memorably described 1992 as an “annus horribilis” after three of her children’s marriages crumbled and a fire devastated her Windsor Castle home.
Heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles’ split from Princess Diana after 11 years of marriage caused a media sensation.
She then rocked the monarchy by leaking shocking details of palace life to author Andrew Morton for his 1992 book “Diana: Her True Story — In Her Own Words”.
Then the queen’s second son, Prince Andrew, separated from wife Sarah Ferguson. Meanwhile Princess Anne, her only daughter, divorced her first husband Mark Phillips.
The United States government has renamed hundreds of peaks, lakes, streams, and other physical features on federal properties in the West and elsewhere, joining a ski resort and others who have stopped using a racist terms for Native women.
Nearly 650 locations now have new names to replace the derogatory epithet “squaw,” including names that are mundane (Echo Peak, Texas), strange (No Name Island, Maine), and Indigenous (Nammi’I Naokwaide, Idaho) phrases whose meaning is obscure to people who are not familiar with Native languages.
The tribes recommended the new name, Nammi’I Naokwaide, which means “Young Sister Creek” and is located in the traditional territories of the Shoshone and Bannock tribes in southern Idaho.
“I feel a strong responsibility to utilize my position to make sure that our public lands and rivers remain open to the public and friendly. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement that this process “begins with eliminating racist terms and disparaging names that have adorned federal locations for far too long.
The adjustments made public on Thursday put an end to a nearly 12-month process that started in 2021, shortly after Haaland became the first Native American to head a Cabinet department. Haaland is a Laguna Pueblo native.
A non-profit legal organization called the Native American Rights Fund applauded the modifications.
While the pejorative epithet in question, “squaw,” was named by the Interior Department on Thursday, has only lately drawn widespread derision in the United States, changing place names in response to growing anti-racism sentiment has a long history.
In 1962, the government mandated the renaming of locations with discriminatory terms for Black people, and in 1974, it ordered the renaming of locations with negative terms for Japanese people.
Meanwhile, California has made its own efforts to get the term removed from place names. The phrase would be eliminated from more than 100 locations starting in 2025, according to a measure that the California Legislature enacted in August.
Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor, has until the end of September to decide whether to sign the legislation into law.
BYU has asked people who were at the Aug. 26 game for help finding the person who yelled slurs at a Black player for Duke University.
Brigham Young University said Tuesday that it was still investigating who was responsible for the racist slurs and threats that a Black player for Duke University’s women’s volleyball team said were directed at her at a match on Aug. 26.
After the match, B.Y.U. banned a person who had been sitting in its fan section from all university sporting events.
But last week the school told The Salt Lake Tribune and other local media that it had not found evidence that the unidentified spectator was responsible for the shouted slurs.
“The investigation is ongoing,” the university’s associate athletic director, Jon McBride, said Tuesday in an email.
“We are investigating fan behavior as well as the BYU. response to the behavior, reviewing video and audio as well as taking firsthand accounts from individuals who were present.”
McBride said that the person who was banned had been pointed out by Duke University, but that B.Y.U. had been “unable to find any evidence of that person using slurs in the match.”
The university has not identified the person, but said it was not a student. McBride did not respond to a question asking if the ban had been lifted.
More than 5,500 people were in the stands. The school asked people who were at the game to share videos to help with the investigation, The Tribune reported.
The Duke player’s father, Marvin Richardson, told The New York Times after the game that a slur was repeatedly yelled from the stands as his daughter, Rachel Richardson, was serving and that she feared the “raucous” crowd.
In a text message on Tuesday, he said the family was declining to comment on the investigation.
Advocates are linking the water crisis in Jackson, Miss., to environmental racism. Meanwhile, California is facing electric grid issues amid extreme heat, and a judge sided with the Biden administration over a challenge to oil lease sale postponements in Wyoming.
This is Overnight Energy & Environment, your source for the latest news focused on energy, the environment and beyond. For The Hill, we’re Rachel Frazin and Zack Budryk.
Advocates see justice issue in Jackson water crisis
As tens of thousands of residents of Jackson, Miss., were without clean water, some advocates say the situation stems from years of environmental racism.
More than 80 percent of Jackson residents are Black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Last week, those residents saw their main water treatment facility fail in the wake of flooding, leaving them without clean water for drinking, bathing or cooking.
“While the recent flooding has been a contributor to where we are today, this is not the first time this issue has come about, where the city of Jackson is without water and unable to function,” Vangela Wade, president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice, told The Hill.
“Over the last 50 years, you could say that this has been brewing because of the lack of investment in the city’s infrastructure by primarily state leadership.”
The latest water issues come after the last two years saw the city’s water system fail an Environmental Protection Agency inspection — which found the drinking water had the potential to host harmful bacteria or parasites — and the bursting and freezing of pipes during a winter storm last year left residents without water for nearly a month.
But advocates say the crisis has been decades in the making. Jackson first became a majority-Black city in the years following integration.
The white population fell from 52 percent to 43 percent through the 1980s, with another 35,000 leaving the city over the course of the 1990s, according to The Jackson Free Press.
Marshall lives in west Jackson, in the US state of Mississippi – a predominantly black and poor part of the city. He has no choice but to drink the tap water that Jackson residents have been told to avoid. When he turns the tap on – the water runs brown.
He says it’s been like this for about eight months and he has no choice but to drink it.
“Yes ma’am. I been drinking it.” He smiles when we ask whether it worries him. “I turn 70 later this month,” he says.
Marshall doesn’t have a car, so he can’t get to the sites where water is being handed out by the National Guard Racism.
He also doesn’t have electricity or gas because of a recent fire in the house next door, which means he can’t boil the water to help make it safer.
“Very seldom it’s pure. Sometimes it’s a little lighter, a little darker. In the bath tub when I first turn it on, it always comes out rust, then it gets lighter. But every time, the rust comes first.”
Jackson councilman Aaron Banks has lived in the Mississippi state’s capital for most of his life, and now represents a district that is more than 90 percent Black.
He says he thinks a devastating combination of ageing infrastructure and climate change ultimately led to the latest collapse of Jackson’s water supply.
“We have not gone a month without having a ‘boil water’ notice or low to no water pressure in the last two years,” he says.
“Unfortunately, that is something we have gotten used to as American citizens – nobody should be adapting to that type of quality of life.”
He was a founding father of jazz, a trumpet virtuoso and Louis Armstrong a gravel-voiced singer revered across the world, with Mack the Knife and Hello, Dolly! among his enduring hits.
Yet Louis Armstrong was so focused on how history would judge him that he sought to preserve his own story for posterity by taping his recollections, including about the prejudice he suffered over the colour of his skin.
Now the makers of a major documentary on the celebrated musician, nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, have been given unprecedented access to that archive, which includes thousands of hours of previously unheard audio recordings. On those tapes, Armstrong, who died in 1971, speaks of being “born with nothing” and the horrors of racism.
He remembers being insulted by an apparent fan – “a white boy”, possibly a sailor, who approached him after a show, initially shaking his hand and telling him that he had all his records, before turning on him: “He said, ‘you know, I don’t like negroes’, right to my face.
And so I said ‘well, I admire your Goddamn sincerity’. He said, ‘I don’t like negroes but… you’re one son of a bitch I’m crazy about’.” Armstrong laments that the majority of white people “dislike” black people, but they always have one “that they’re just crazy about”.
In another clip, he speaks of a crew member who disrespected him, ordering him about during the filming of Glory Alley in 1952. Armstrong told him: “ ‘Why you hand me that shit? Cause I’m coloured?’… I didn’t appreciate it. I’m just showing you what I go through for no reason.”
The recordings will be heard in a forthcoming feature documentary, Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues, which will be released this autumn following its premiere this week at the Toronto international film festival.
There are so many recordings that it took the film-makers about two years to restore, digitise and transcribe them.
For a time, it seemed as though a great shadow had passed over the world, and then faded — still present, though not quite Racist as ominous. There were those who could confidently believe they were seeing progress.
A fantasy? Perhaps. But not one without value. Yet, there were those who sought the cover of that shadow to hide from their own insecurities, failings, Racists uselessness.
They could not conceive of the endless potential of progress. Miserable little trolls left stewing in their own ugly ignorance and hatred, who sought regression, but proved too incompetent to succeed, even when emboldened by the lies from their weakened leader.
I could very easily be discussing Middle-earth, but I’m not. What I’m discussing is our very real world, and social media as an extension of that world. Racist
For the past week, I’ve been bombarded with messages of hate, called the N-word, told to go back to Africa, and called on to be executed.
The reason? The Lord of the Rings. It would almost be laughable if it wasn’t so profoundly sad. A wealth of stories, and a willingness to believe in wizards, Balrogs, giant spiders and magical swords.
But allow people of color to exist in Middle-earth? Well, that is an affront to all that’s good and decent. At least that’s the primary argument for those ruinous trolls apparently review bombing and harassing fans of color over Amazon’s Rings of Powers series.
I’ve been a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s world for almost as long as I can remember. I grew up watching Rankin and Bass’ The Hobbit (1977) and The Return of the King (1980) on repeat.
When it was time for school book fairs, I was the class’ early adopter of Tolkien’s works. Not just The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings, but The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-Earth.