Social Justice Self Education: Reading and Playlist

Headerblog31024x768.png

I am sharing the reading and playlist that’s informed and inspired me about the structural injustice and discrimination embedded into American society.

I am not an activist or scholar, nor I am intending to make any kind of political statement. I believe in the power of words and cinema to crack open doors that lead an individual to be transported into the experience of other worlds and minds. From my earliest memories, I was captivated by the power of story. That curiosity has guided and enriched my life experience in profound ways. There are specific books that were like beacons shining right on me at that moment and revealing the next step towards life-changing decisions and adventures. 

August 9, 2014

The day after my dreamy wedding in Taos, New Mexico, 18 year old recent High School graduate Michael Brown was shot 12 times by a police officer and died alone on the street in Ferguson, Missouri. As we hiked and explored the glorious Colorado mountains, news of the protests and riots that followed his untimely death swirled around in my thoughts. 

It was a whirlwind of the happiest and love-filled time of my life, with friends and family from all over the globe; while the community of suburban St. Louis reeled with another heartache and terror, this time on the public stage. 


Though I lived outside the US, I’d heard about Eric Garner, who died in July 2014 while stopped by the NYPD police on suspicion of selling cigarettes. In a chokehold, lying face down on the sidewalk, Eric repeated the words "I can't breathe" 11 times. After losing consciousness, he remained lying on the sidewalk for seven minutes while police officers waited for an ambulance. He was pronounced dead at an area hospital approximately one hour later.

It got my attention.. although I didn’t understand why incidents like these were still happening. Wasn’t US “moving forward” in equity and diversity? 

I worked and traveled throughout Kenya and East Africa from 2007 - 2016 with some great organizations helping create income opportunity and education for rural Africans.  I watched and listened to everything I could about the history of colonization, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, the wars and genocide in Rwanda, Kenya’s tribal factions and how the efforts of do-gooders and AID work was a double-edged sword. It was incredibly valuable to have a glimpse of history and context as I visited and worked with people from cultures so vastly different from my own. 

 Reconciliation in Rwanda

In 2006, I had the opportunity to observe a Rwandan village’s Gacaca proceeding, a traditional form of communal justice, whereby local judges are elected by the community to preside over proceedings. The Gacaca courts were set up after the horrific 1993 genocide which killed around 800,000 Rwandans. These public hearings encouraged offenders to confess, express public apology, and offer reparations, facilitating the reintegration of perpetrators. The purpose was “to enable truth-telling,” “to promote reconciliation,” and help eradicate the culture of impunity. They continued until 2012. To learn more, I recommend the NYTimes best seller, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, an account of the Rwandan genocide, by Philip Gourevitch

We wish2.png

I was not aware of the extent that the legal systems in my country were set up to suppress and discriminate non-whites. After growing up in Pittsburgh in a well funded suburban school district, I transitioned to grad school and a career in advertising in Chicago, and then to Denver where I ventured out to start a small marketing firm.  It took hard work, but it was not really difficult for me to learn, work, travel, and secure an exciting series of new opportunities. 

It did not occur to me to question why there were so few non-whites in the offices I worked. I felt fortunate to be accepted into a job at a top ad agency in Chicago. I didn’t realize then, that opportunities like these were due in part to the privileges of being white and educated.

Racism is a System, not an Individual Act

James Baldwin, the black author and activist wrote in the manuscript of his memoir Remember This House,

James Baldwin, the black author and activist wrote in the manuscript of his memoir Remember This House,

My perspective of social injustice in America was based by my experience, or lack thereof. I did not have an understanding of how racism is a structural component of American society and institutions. I thought racism was associated with specific behavior by individuals or groups.

“Racism = a system of advantage or oppression based on race. It involves one group having the power to carry out systematic discrimination through the institutional policies and practices of the society and by shaping the cultural beliefs and values that support those racist policies and practices. ”
— Racial Equity Tools Glossary
white-supremacy-visual.png
 

Return to America

We moved from Nairobi to Pittsburgh in 2016, six months before the US election, and days after the UK voted for Brexit. It was a confusing and tumultuous time, slogging through the arduous green card process with my husband who is a British. He was adjusting from decades in the British Army to a vastly different career in the American individualistic, work-centric culture. I was starting a business in a city I had not lived in since I was a teenager.

BTW&M.png


During that time I read Between the World and Me, by Ta Nehisi Coates, a letter to his teenage son and autobiographical account of Coate’s youth in Baltimore. From boyhood onwards, the violence against black men woven into American society has a devastating impact of anxiety and despair. Instead of serving, schools, police, and "the streets" endangered and threatened black men and women. His account of a classmate at Howard University, Prince Carmen Jones Jr.,who was driving in his Jeep Cherokee and mistakenly tracked and shot 16 times by an undercover policeman is unimaginable.

 

Relearning History

Selma960x637.png

In Ava DuVernay’s historical drama Selma, I learned how voting rights activists including John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr, organized a march from Montomery to Selma in 1965. These brave men and women were met and beaten by police troopers armed with clubs, horses, tear gas, etc. The troops were sent by the Alabama Governor, George Wallace.

In 2017, we bought a 100+ year old Victorian renovated home in East Pittsburgh, with big old trees, great proximity to parks and downtown Pittsburgh. The diverse, urban neighborhood has loads of “potential” but is burdened with super high property taxes, very low school performance and a high percentage of abandoned homes. 


Close to Home

A year later, not far from us, an unarmed 17-year-old African-American, Antwon Rose, was fatally shot by a policeman. He had no significant criminal record prior to his death, was a high school student who took advanced placement classes and worked as a community volunteer.  

Why are young black men seen as public enemies?  I watched 13th (Netflix Documentary), on the recommendation of a neighbor and teacher who had known Antwon. The documentary connects the 1865 amendment that abolished slavery to the tough on crime and ‘war on drugs” policies in 1980’s and ‘90s and public campaigns declaring young black men as “rapists, burglars and super predators” and led to a 100% increase in prison population, mostly black men. 

13th.png

Just after the amendment passed, the southern states forced African Americans away from voting booths and other public places using terrorism and the courts. KKK and white supremacy groups emerged in 1866, along with lynching of black people by white mobs. These groups, with many of their members in the police force and legal system, helped to overthrow local governance and restore white supremacy through brutality, murder and imprisonment. Then the1870’s Jim Crow legislation was passed to legalize segregation and suppress minorities, forcing them into second-class status. The U.S.Supreme Court upheld these measures that excluded and brutalized black voters. I didn’t learn that in school.

 

Justice in Action

It was Bryan Stevenson in the film Just Mercy, and his memoir, Just Mercy that unhinged my ideals about America having “Equal Justice for All.” Bryan is a 60 year old Harvard educated lawyer from Delaware who set up a nonprofit law practice the Equal Justice Initiative, in Alabama after learning the state had the fastest growing condemned population in the country, a hundred people on death row, and no public defender system. 

Just-Mercy.png

The film stars Michael B Jordan as Bryan and Jamie Foxx as Walter McMillan, one of Bryan’s clients who was sentenced to die in Alabama for the murder of a young white woman that he didn’t commit. Witnesses and a policeman affirmed Walter’s alibi the day of the murder, which happened 11 miles from his home. An interview where the main prosecution witness complains that police coerced him into lying was buried. Walter was put on death row before his trial. The case was wrought with inconsistencies and lack of evidence, but he was on death row for six years before he was finally exonerated and the case dropped.  Walter’s and thousands of lives ruined by incarceration exemplify how the death penalty in America is a direct descendant of lynching and racism.

 
 
Due to EJI’s efforts, over 367 people who were convicted have been exonerated due to DNA evidence since 1989, yet only 1.5% of Prosecutors offices dedicate any resources to conviction integrity.

Due to EJI’s efforts, over 367 people who were convicted have been exonerated due to DNA evidence since 1989, yet only 1.5% of Prosecutors offices dedicate any resources to conviction integrity.

“African Americans make up 47% of exonerations even though they are only 13% of the population. Innocent Black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people, and Black people who are convicted of murder are about 50% more likely to be innocent than non-Black people convicted of murder”
— National Registry of Exonerations, -Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States, 2017.
Justmercybook.png
 

What Do We See?

WTSU.png

When They See Us (Netflix) is based on the Central Park Five and directed by the brilliant Ava DuVernay. The four part series follows the lives and families of young boys between 14 and 16 who were falsely accused and prosecuted on charges related to the rape and assault of a woman in Central Park, New York City in 1989. They were convicted based partly on police-coerced confessions, and each spent between six and 13-plus years in prison for charges including attempted murder, rape and assault. They maintained their innocence but were not exonerated until thirteen years later when another man confessed to the crime that was confirmed by DNA. 


2020, as we know, has been wrought with more and more deaths by police, thugs, and coronavirus. The video of the murder of George Floyd, suffocated to death beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, added another name and triggered protests around the globe. I began to grasp the scope of the issue. It’s not about police behavior. They are not the villains. It’s all of us - lawmakers, law enforcers, judges, educators, business leaders, politicians and ordinary citizens are implicated in systemic racism. The truth of that makes us not just uncomfortable, but guilty. The whiteness of our institutions has created, enforced, condoned and largely ignored the truth of systemic racism.

A long road lies ahead towards real change. The question remains whether this “awakening” will be swept under the rug as history has shown, or whether we will take responsibility to face and unravel the lies that America was built on, that the color of one’s skin somehow determines the value of an individual.

“ in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others... and ‘black people are essentially inferior, less human than white people..”
— Eddie Glaude, Jr. and Author of Begin Again, James Baldwin’s Lessons for America
Beginagain186x283.png

It is my sincere hope that you join on a journey of discovery. Leave a comment or reach out and let me know what you learn.


Thought Provoking Articles and Essays 

Videos and Film

Books - Designed for White Allies - Nonfiction

  • Between the World and Me, Ta-Nahesi Coates

  • Begin Again, James Baldwin’s America and Urgent Lessons for Today, by Eddie S Glaude

  • I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

  • Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Bryan Stevenson

  • Born A Crime: Stories from a South Africa Childhood, Trevor Noah 

  • White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, Robin Diangelo

  • So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo

  • Me and White Supremacy, Layla Saad

  • Ulysses S. Grant Biography, Ron Chernow 

  • The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarnation in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander

  • Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi

  • Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice, Paul Kivel

  • Waking Up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race, Debby Irving

  • White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, Tim Wise

  • Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge

Fiction

  • The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead - a fictionalized perspective of the network run by Harriett Tubman that helped slaves escape the south. 

  • Bluest Eyes, Toni Morrison 

  • Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin an autobiographical novel

  • Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Aditchie -- the meanings of race, racism, black, white, foreign, and native in America and Africa

  • Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng - a novel about two families living in 1990s Shaker Heights, OH who are brought together through their children.

  • The Color Purple, Alice Walker

social justice, systemic racismCindy KerrcKarma MarketingJust Mercy, Bryan Stephenson, Social justiceComment