It looks like On The Media hasn’t created a Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook for racism, but we desperately need it. (In fact, we really need it for daily news not just breaking…)

Their own coverage usually highlights these sorts of broader issues, but we could all use an explainer/outline to better see when racism is being hidden by other media outlets that don’t take the time or make the effort.

A place to start: Moving the Race Conversation Forward: How the Media Covers Racism, and Other Barriers to Productive Racial Discourse by Race Forward


YWCA Glendale = in #YWCA21DayChallenge ()

Race Forward in Moving The Race Conversation Forward – YouTube ()

Bookmarked Hard Histories at Hopkins (Johns Hopkins University)
Launched in fall 2020, the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project examines the role that racism and discrimination have played at Johns Hopkins. Blending research, teaching, public engagement and the creative arts, Hard Histories aims to engage our broadest communities—at Johns Hopkins and in Baltimore—in a frank and informed exploration of how racism has been produced and permitted to persist as part of our structure and our practice.

Some great articles hiding here. Glad that Johns Hopkins is doing some research into it’s own history.

Read - Want to Read: Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America by Martha S. Jones (Cambridge University Press)
Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, and black Americans' aspirations were realized. Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans.
Read - Want to Read: How to Argue with a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and Don't) Say about Human Difference by Adam Rutherford (Experiment)
Race is not a biological reality.
Racism thrives on our not knowing this.
Racist pseudoscience has become so commonplace that it can be hard to spot. But its toxic effects on society are plain to see--feeding nationalism, fueling hatred, endangering lives, and corroding our discourse on everything from sports to intelligence. Even well-intentioned people repeat stereotypes based on "science," because cutting-edge genetics are hard to grasp--and all too easy to distort. Paradoxically, these misconceptions are multiplying even as scientists make unprecedented discoveries in human genetics--findings that, when accurately understood, are powerful evidence against racism. We've never had clearer answers about who we are and where we come from, but this knowledge is sorely needed in our casual conversations about race.
How to Argue With a Racist emphatically dismantles outdated notions of race by illuminating what modern genetics actually can and can't tell us about human difference. We now know that the racial categories still dividing us do not align with observable genetic differences. In fact, our differences are so minute that, most of all, they serve as evidence of our shared humanity.
Read How Saidiya Hartman Retells the History of Black Life (The New Yorker)
The scholar’s provocative writing illuminates stories that have long gone untold.
This is an interesting take on history and archives. Reminiscent perhaps of Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropology and fiction work. One definitely heavily informs the other. I’ll have to pull some of her work to read.
Read The latest excuses for Trump’s ‘white power’ tweet reveal his weakness by Greg SargentGreg Sargent (Washington Post)
President Trump’s reelection message is that white America is under siege — that white Americans are on the losing end of a race war. But what if white America — or, at least, a large chunk of it — isn’t buying the story that Trump is peddling?
Reposted a thread by Dr. Ariela GrossDr. Ariela Gross (Twitter)
Read - Want to Read: Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights by Jessie Daniels (Rowman & Littlefield)
In this exploration of the way racism is translated from the print-only era to the cyber era the author takes the reader through a devastatingly informative tour of white supremacy online. The book examines how white supremacist organizations have translated their printed publications onto the Internet. Included are examples of open as well as 'cloaked' sites which disguise white supremacy sources as legitimate civil rights websites. Interviews with a small sample of teenagers as they surf the web show how they encounter cloaked sites and attempt to make sense of them, mostly unsuccessfully. The result is a first-rate analysis of cyber racism within the global information age. The author debunks the common assumptions that the Internet is either an inherently democratizing technology or an effective 'recruiting' tool for white supremacists. The book concludes with a nuanced, challenging analysis that urges readers to rethink conventional ways of knowing about racial equality, civil rights, and the Internet.
RSVPed Attending Academia, race, and the pandemic

We're going to explore how racism and white supremacy shape social and academic responses to COVID-19.  On Thursday, May 21st, from 2-3 pm EST, we'll be joined by Jessie Daniels, an activist and scholar of racism and the digital world.  Daniels is faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center and professor at Hunter College (Sociology) and The Graduate Center, CUNY (Sociology, Critical Social Psychology, Africana Studies).

Daniels is an internationally recognized expert in Internet expressions of racism, and the author or editor of five books, two of which are about racism on either side of the digital revolution: White Lies (Routledge, 1997) and Cyber Racism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). She is currently at work on Tweet Storm:The Rise of the Far Right, the Mainstreaming of White Supremacy, and How Tech and Media Helped. In 2016, she co-edited (with Karen Gregory and Tressie McMillan Cottom) Digital Sociologies, which has been adopted by courses at several universities around the world.

Daniels’ attention is increasingly focused on how digital media technologies are changing higher education. She has co-authored two books on this topic, Being a Scholar in the Digital Era  and Going Public , along with a number of articles. In 2020, Daniels launched Public Scholar Academy to help faculty who aspire to be public scholars achieve their goals and to help university administrators who want to assess and respond to attacks from the far right against their institutions. 
I plan on asking Dr. Daniels about how racism shapes the unfolding pandemic. How does that impact colleges and universities?  What can we do to create a more just academy?

Read Opinion | I Helped Fact-Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me. by Leslie M. Harris (POLITICO)
The paper's series on slavery made avoidable mistakes. But the attacks from its critics are much more dangerous.

Beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century, historians like Gary Nash, Ira Berlin and Alfred Young built on the earlier work of Carter G. Woodson, Benjamin Quarles, John Hope Franklin and others, writing histories of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras that included African Americans, slavery and race. A standout from this time is Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, which addresses explicitly how the intertwined histories of Native American, African American and English residents of Virginia are foundational to understanding the ideas of freedom we still struggle with today. 

These could be interesting to read.
Annotated on March 07, 2020 at 09:12PM


Scholars like Annette Gordon-Reed and Woody Holton have given us a deeper understanding of the ways in which leaders like Thomas Jefferson committed to new ideas of freedom even as they continued to be deeply committed to slavery. 

I’ve not seen any research that relates the Renaissance ideas of the Great Chain of Being moving into this new era of supposed freedom. In some sense I’m seeing the richest elite whites trying to maintain their own place in a larger hierarchy rather than stronger beliefs in equality and hard work.
Annotated on March 07, 2020 at 09:22PM