Tag: Integration

A Conversation With Black Women on Race

Click Here to watch a short documentary in which black women talk about the challenges they face in society. 

This latest installment of the NYTimes “Conversation on Race” Op-Doc video series highlights the negative emotional impact of racist attitudes on black women’s lives. Everyone we reached out to for this project was eager to tell her most intimate stories of pain and discrimination, from childhood, to work, to profiling by the police. We hope that in sharing them, we are helping to complicate the public representations of black women and girls — highlighting the unique challenges they face, as well as experiences and feelings that are universal.

From Harriet Tubman to Ida B. Wells to Dorothy Height, black women have been heavy presences in social justice movements throughout history. However, issues particular to these women are often relegated to secondary status in our collective consciousness. This seems to be changing. Recent events in Texas, Baltimore and Missouri show that black women are again in leadership roles, and are speaking out against the mistreatment they regularly experience. But in our nation’s current movement for social justice, women’s voices need a louder bullhorn. Conversations like the one we’re hoping to start with this Op-Doc are a first step to understanding, and to changing.

 

See below to watch the other installments of this Op-Docs series:

“A Conversation With Police on Race”

“A Conversation With My Black Son”

“A Conversation About Growing Up Black”

“A Conversation With White People on Race”

The Two Asian Americas

“What have I made of myself and my children? … We cannot exercise our rights. Humility and insults, who is responsible for all this? Me and the American government. Obstacles this way, blockades that way, and bridges burnt behind.”

The quotation above was excepted from the 1928 suicide letter of Vaishno Das Bagai, an Indian immigrant victimized by racist Anti-Asian legislation which stripped him of his citizenship, property, employment, and ultimately, his self-esteem in America. This New Yorker article looks at history and the experiences of people like Bagai to explore how systemic racism continues to influence the lives of Asians in America.  It describes the duality of the Asian American experience:

“There are now, in a sense, two Asian Americas: one formed by five centuries of systemic racism, and another, more genteel version, constituted in the aftermath of the 1965 law. These two Asian Americas float over and under each other like tectonic plates, often clanging discordantly. So, while Chinese-Americans and Indian-Americans are among the most prosperous groups in the country, Korean-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, and Filipino-Americans have lower median personal earnings than the general population.”

Click here to read more.

AUDIO: This American Life – The Problem We All Live With

A two part series about how the racial integration of schools is a reform that has been shown to really improve the education for minority children, but that people have apparently given up on. It discusses the case of a school district in Normandy, Missouri (where Michael Brown studied), which accidentally happened upon an integration program.

Click Here.

MAP: 37 maps that explain how America is a nation of immigrants

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“American politicians, and Americans themselves, love to call themselves “a nation of immigrants”: a place where everyone’s family has, at some point, chosen to come to seek freedom or a better life. America has managed to maintain that self-image through the forced migration of millions of African slaves, restrictive immigration laws based on fears of “inferior” races, and nativist movements that encouraged immigrants to assimilate or simply leave.

But while the reality of America’s immigrant heritage is more complicated than the myth, it’s still a fundamental truth of the country’s history. It’s impossible to understand the country today without knowing who’s been kept out, who’s been let in, and how they’ve been treated once they arrive.”

Click here.