Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Boy: Part II

They both feature big concepts (and maybe a greater than average amount of big words) that have long histories and implicate a lot of people.

Yet, those who proudly fly it today (at least one of whom took part in the Capitol Hill insurrection) still argue it’s meant to show pride for Southern heritage.

We’ve already seen how the dream gets deferred on the individual level...

Those everyday traces are the fingerprints of an even bigger, more deeply entrenched reality.

If there are fewer businesses in the particular neighborhood, there will also be much less tax revenue. So schools in poor neighborhoods are forced to do more with less.

Now, why do scholars link mass incarceration today to a clause that was passed back in 1865—over 150 years ago?

Now, why do scholars link mass incarceration today to a clause that was passed back in 1865—over 150 years ago?

But on the other hand, can you trace your family tree as far back as it goes in America and claim that every single person on your family tree was a staunch abolitionist?

But on the other hand, can you trace your family tree as far back as it goes in America and claim that every single person on your family tree was a staunch abolitionist?

You have black people who believe that they can't be racist because they believe that black people don't have power, and that's blatantly not true.

There literally aren’t enough black people with institutional authority over white people in America to facilitate systemic racism against them.

These people don’t understand the difference between equity and equality.

They marked the week in February because it was the birth month of both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, men who played an integral role in shaping black history.

While you’re out there living your life every day, pay attention to how many times you hear something being touted as the first black X.

You and I have never seen democracy; all we’ve seen is hypocrisy.

To vote that year, I pulled up to Fiesta with the confidence of a dude who’d last voted in an affluent neighborhood, thinking I was going to walk my happy little butt into another polling station and zippity-do-dah right out.

Mason trooped down to her local polling station, and to her surprise, her name wasn’t registered on the voting rolls. Determined, she cast a provisional ballot, meant to be approved pending further checks.

Each has been corrupted with more discrimination than we could cover in all four quarters and overtime of a tight football game, so in the interest of space, I’ll focus on the long history of voter suppression of black people...

You might’ve learned about a little thing called the electoral college.

And then there’s gerrymandering. This is when a state redraws the boundary of a voting district so as to negate certain votes.

Two ways to do this: One is “packing,” where the boundaries are drawn in such a way that several voters for a particular party are clustered into a district already predicted to be a win, rendering a significant number of votes for that party useless because they would’ve won anyhow.

At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, they attempted to curtail mail-in voting...

The Supreme Court had ruled the selection of jurors by race to be unconstitutional just a year before Foster’s trial, so prosecutors could no longer legally, intentionally appoint an all-white jury to judge his case. So they created a loophole called peremptory strikes, a playbook of “race-neutral” reasons to strike a black juror from a case.

Our democracy is supposed to be fair and impartial, but the truth is that both Republicans and Democrats engage in the Fix to some degree...

Crystal Mason waived her right to a jury. You have to wonder, why would a black woman in Texas waive her right to be tried by a jury of her peers?

His crime was not, in any way, an accident or oversight. It was a premeditated affront to our political system.

A five-year sentence upheld on appeal for a black woman versus a two-year sentence commuted into probation for a white man.

They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators. No conscience. No empathy.

At the same time, the policing and incarceration of black bodies is rampant and unjust, made worse in no small part by the racist specters of the superpredator, the gangbanger, the thug.

At the same time, the policing and incarceration of black bodies is rampant and unjust, made worse in no small part by the racist specters of the superpredator, the gangbanger, the thug.

The Crips were formed in the late 1960s by guys named Raymond Washington and Tookie Williams and were originally styled after the Black Panther Party—a black militant group fighting for civil rights.

Soon after the phrase was coined, black civil rights leader Jesse Jackson (the guy who had run for president and campaigned for the term African American) started to chastise white government officials and media for “their silence and ineffectiveness in dealing with the present black-on-black crime crisis.”

But it had also been transformed from a well-intentioned critique of a neglectful and biased justice system into a weapon for white people to argue that violence is inherent to black communities, and for them to begin drafting policies that made the problem worse.

The majority of violent crimes against white people are perpetrated by white people. But I’ve never heard anyone in my life (have you?) reference white people killing white people as “white-on-white crime.”

But what we don’t need and can’t stand is the stigma that crime is only a black problem.

It actually comes from the Hindi word thuggee, which means “deceiver” or “thief” or “swindler.”

But since thug always had a negative connotation...it was easy to paint them as thugs after the Civil War and for it to catch on.

A thug is the fictional archetype of Dilulio’s nightmares, a stand-in for a black man that is hopelessly lost to violence, drugs, whatever; a vector of crime that needs to be feared and stopped, a caricature instead of a human being.

A thug is the fictional archetype of Dilulio’s nightmares, a stand-in for a black man that is hopelessly lost to violence, drugs, whatever; a vector of crime that needs to be feared and stopped, a caricature instead of a human being.

We can’t have the stereotype of black men as inherently dangerous without President Woodrow Wilson thinking The Birth of a Nation was “like writing history with lightning” in 1915, without all the lies and propaganda used to lynch black men, without black people being maligned as superpredators.