Race is humanity
Manuel Castro Rodríguez
There is an accumulation of essential truths that are the key to civic peace and national greatness. The mix of cultures, habits, food, gestures, and religions provides a new dimension as the life experiences of different peoples are united.
Most of us in the West we reject racial differences — “Race is humanity”, José Martí tells us. However, the segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as ‘Jim Crow’ represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s. The laws affected almost every aspect of daily life, mandating segregation of schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains, restrooms, buses, trains, and restaurants. ‘Whites Only’ and ‘Colored’ signs were constant reminders of the enforced racial order.
Dr. Francisco ‘Pepe’
Hernández — then-president of the Cuban-American National
Foundation, the nonprofit Cuban-exile advocacy group founded by Jorge Mas Canosa — remembers arriving in Miami with his mother and two sisters as refugees at the beginning of the 1960s (emphasis
mine),
“We could not find anything. Why? Because there were signs that said, ‘No blacks, no Cubans, no dogs’,” he says. “It is hard to believe now.”
The homicide of George Floyd
The homicide of George Floyd occurred on May 25, 2020. Newly leaked bodycam video shows a scared George Floyd, an unarmed black American man, begging police to not lock him in a squad car. Up until this point, only transcripts of the arrest have been released. The 28 minute video begins with one officer knocking on Floyd’s window, but quickly escalates. The DailyMail.com posted the leaked material online. Retired NYPD detective and law enforcement analyst Marq Claxton join’s MSNBC’s Ari Melber to discuss what this means for the case.
Latinos and Asians grapple
with systemic racism they face
NPR’s Lulu García-Navarro speaks with Jay Caspian Kang and William García-Medina on the complex issues surrounding race relations within Asian and Latino communities and movements for Black Lives.
In an audio clip posted online, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said during a virtual town hall on July 14, 2020.
“Now I will tell you I'm not a scientist and I'm not a statistician, but one of the concerns that we've had more recently is that the Hispanic population now constitutes about 44% of the positive cases, and we do have some concerns that in the Hispanic population we've seen less consistent adherence to social distancing and wearing a mask.”
Democratic Rep. Verónica Escobar of Texas, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, responded to his comments on Twitter by saying (emphasis mine),
“This racist BS needs to stop … Latinos & African Americans are most at risk, dying at higher rates — and STILL going to work every day b/c they are essential workers ... Meanwhile, Republican colleagues in Congress are the ones who refuse to use masks. @ThomTillis — cut the crap.”
Democracy is not a state. It is an act
Kathleen Kingsbury
July 30, 2020
The brief essay that Representative John Lewis sent me two days before his death — to be published today, on the occasion of his funeral — expresses the hope for national healing and reconciliation that guided his life’s work.
For too many Americans, the civil rights movement is visible only in the rearview mirror of memory. Black and white photographs of demonstrators being attacked by police dogs and fire hoses; of lunch counters and schoolhouses, separate and unequal and in the past.
Mr. Lewis lived that history, of course. But his most urgent plea was that the work of the civil rights movement remains unfinished, and that conscience commands us to look to the future. Important civil rights legislation sits stalled in Congress at this very moment, held up by the patently false assertion that racial discrimination no longer exists.
Mr. Lewis served as a member of Congress for 33 years before his death from pancreatic cancer on July 17. Before ever being sworn in as a lawmaker, he’d already borne so much for America.
Mr. Lewis’s moral authority “found its headwaters in the aggressive yet self-sacrificial style of protests that he and his compatriots in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee deployed in the early 1960s as part of the campaign that overthrew Southern apartheid,” the editorial board wrote in remembrance.
The fight for civil rights was brutal. “I remember John had no reservations about going down and sitting in and knowing that we could be injured. You could be clobbered,” his classmate, Dr. Bernard Lafayette Jr., remembered in a recent Op-Ed. “I was there on the bus platform in Montgomery, Ala., when they hit him over the head with a Coca-Cola crate and smashed his head.”
John Lewis’s commitment to nonviolent protest never wavered, not through dozens of attacks and arrests, not through the reversal of hard-won gains, not even in the final weeks of his life as the country erupted in unrest over the police killing of George Floyd.
His final words ask us to cast our eyes forward. “Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself,” he wrote in today’s Op-Ed. I’d also recommend listening to it being read aloud in the powerful audio version.
Americans who want to honor Mr. Lewis and continue his fight for civil rights can do so by urging their lawmakers to restore the protections enshrined in the Voting Rights Act, for which Mr. Lewis fought so ardently. Ensuring that all Americans can exercise the right to vote was Mr. Lewis’s unfinished work. It’s up to the nation to finish it.
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