Question your understanding of "authentic" food.

Happy Wednesday! Many of our cultural traditions are defined by our relationship to food. As we enter the holidays, it's a good time to think about how, as Jami puts succinctly in today's piece, our perception of cuisine defines our understanding of culture. It's a great way to consider how you can authentically support the cultural diversity in your community with where you dine.

Thank you for making this newsletter possible! Support our work by making a one-time contribution on our website or PayPal, or giving monthly on Patreon. You can also Venmo (@nicoleacardoza). To subscribe, go to antiracismdaily.com. New! You can share this newsletter and unlock some fun rewards by signing up here.

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Reflection: What makes you feel that food is “authentic”? Who in our culture is given authority on what kind of food is valuable?
Advocate and support the cultures and communities whose food you consume.
Advocate for the workers in our food supply chain, many of whom are enduring terrible working conditions during COVID-19.
Instead of asking “Which restaurant serves the most ‘authentic’ food” think, ask yourself “What community am I supporting by giving my money to this restaurant?”

GET EDUCATED

By Nicole Cardoza (she/her)

Across America, COVID-19 restrictions are increasing, due to its astronomical spread. In many states, that means restaurant owners have to figure out once again how to survive without indoor dining (TK). In response to the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on the restaurant industry, there’s been a large push to support small restaurant owners— especially immigrant and BIPOC owners—through our takeout orders and our GoFundMe donations. But with today’s wealth of options of “ethnic cuisine” available comes some troubling perspectives on what makes “authentic” food.

Foodies are often eager to seek the most “authentic” representation of whatever “ethnic cuisine” they want to eat. By authentic, they usually mean food that’s the closest to what you would eat in the country of origin. But the word authentic is fraught. In a deep dive on Eater, food writer Jaya Saxena dives deeply into our contemporary relationship with the idea of “authenticity,” and notes: “What consumers deemed “real” was heavily influenced by whiteness. Americans still largely consider European-influenced cuisine as the norm (see any “new American” menu for proof), and their opinions of what is authentic extend from that center point.”

A separate report from Eater NY studied over 20,000 Yelp reviews. The writer summed up her results succinctly: “The word “authentic” in food reviews supports white supremacism, and Yelp reviews prove it… According to my data, the average Yelp reviewer connotes “authentic” with characteristics such as dirt floors, plastic stools, and other patrons who are non-white when reviewing non-European restaurants” (Eater NY). On the other hand, reviewers considered European restaurants “authentic” when they had the hallmarks of upscale dining, like white tablecloths and fresh-cut flowers.

Such viewpoints are pervasive. Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I learned what (white) Americans thought of Asian cuisine before I grasped what Taiwanese and Japanese foods meant to us personally. I internalized the myths that all Chinese food was unhealthy and cheap, for example, while Japanese food had social cachet. How we view cuisine often mirrors how we view culture. With little cultural and political representation in the United States, recent immigrant cultures are usually most visible through their food. Our conception of other cultures’ food is often filtered through what we are served at “ethnic restaurants,” without an understanding of the ways that dishes and customs change when the owners need to keep their lights on when they know their audience wants a sanitized version of their foods.

The question of “authentic” vs. “not authentic” also can ignore the effects of colonization, imperialism, diaspora, and the ways communities must adapt to their surroundings. The Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese food industries, for example, were heavily influenced by American foreign policy. Instant ramen—a food we think of as being inherently Japanese—was invented because America shipped their surplus wheat to East Asia after the war, and the food was seen as being more nutritionally balanced than bread (International Institute for Asian Studies).

That’s why asking “is this food authentic?” isn’t the right question— especially when we rely on Yelp reviews for the answer. Wealthy chefs can claim authenticity when they spend tens of thousands of dollars in a foreign country, learn ancient methods from locals, and return to develop their own high-priced restaurants— but that isn’t what I want to support.

Instead of asking, “which restaurant has the most authentic food?” we can ask ourselves, “which community am I supporting by giving my money to this restaurant?” Is the restaurant owned by a large restaurant group, or is it a family operation? How integrated is the restaurant into the cultural community and the local geographic community? As consumers, we have power. What we pay for is literally what we value. Let’s use our power to invest in these communities.

This piece was inspired by What We Feed Ourselves, a project developed by my sister Cori Nakamura Lin (@cori.lin.art). This project examined food, culture, and acculturation through interviews from immigrant-owned restaurants, essays from local writers, and illustrations of different meals. The restaurants were all from East Lake Street in Minneapolis (the area near where George Floyd was murdered by the police). Thank you to the restaurants who participated in this project: Moroccan Flavors (@moroccanflavorsmpls), International Cuisine, Wiilo Food Distributor, Taqueria Las Cuatro Milpas (@las_cuatro_milpas), and Gandhi Mahal (@curryinahurrympls).

KEY TAKEAWAYS

With little cultural and political representation in the United States, recent immigrant cultures are usually most visible through their food.
Conversations about what food is “authentic” often center white Americans’ version of authenticity.
The idea that there is one “authentic” version of cuisine also ignores the effects of imperialism, colonization, diaspora, and assimilation.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Thank you for all your financial contributions! If you haven't already, consider making a monthly donation to this work. These funds will help me operationalize this work for greatest impact.

Subscribe on Patreon | Give one-time on PayPal | Venmo @nicoleacardoza

Nicole Cardoza 12/7/20 Nicole Cardoza 12/7/20

Demand justice for Nickolas Lee.

On April 12th, 2020, Cassandra Greer-Lee discovered that her husband, Nickolas Lee, had died after contracting coronavirus in Chicago’s Cook County Jail (CCJ). At the time, the jail was the nation’s “largest-known source of coronavirus infections” (NY Times). Like many of CCJ’s detainees, Lee was awaiting trial. Today, Cassandra is sharing her personal experience with us. In this interview, she tells us about her beloved husband, her ongoing activism, and what she thinks achieving true justice for her husband would look like.

Happy Monday and welcome back to the Anti-Racism Daily. Today, we're centering Cassandra Greer-Lee and her fight for justice for her husband, Nickolas, and all detainees vulnerable to COVID-19. Take a few moments today to join her efforts.

This newsletter is made possible by our generous group of supporters. Join in by making a one-time gift on our website or PayPal, or giving monthly on Patreon. You can also Venmo (@nicoleacardoza). To subscribe, go to antiracismdaily.com. You can share this newsletter and unlock some fun rewards by signing up here. Thank you all for making this work possible.

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Support Cassandra and other Cook County Jail protesters via @justice4nicklee or facebook.com/JusticeForNickolas. Mutual aid can be sent to facilitator @Megan-Kay-2 (Venmo) or $megankay11(Cashapp). To spread awareness, use hashtags #JusticeForNick and #FreeThemAll.
Contact your state’s attorney or county sheriff’s office. Demand that officials protect public health by protecting, isolating, and releasing detainees. (If you are in Cook County, Chicago Community Bond Fund (@chibondfund) provides templates.)
Support laws like the Pre-trial Justice Fairness Act to end money bond. Donate to bail bond funds.
Follow groups like Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation (@soulinchicago), Torture Justice Center (@chitorturejustice) and Nikkei Uprising to support and learn more.

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin with Cassandra Greer-Lee (she/her)

Today, Cassandra is sharing her personal experience with us. In this interview, she tells us about her beloved husband, her ongoing activism, and what she thinks achieving true justice for her husband would look like.

First, some context: today, eight months after Lee died, coronavirus is again widely circulating at CCJ. As of December 4th, 316 of the 5,493 people detained in the jail have coronavirus, the highest number of current cases ever (Cook County Jail Coronavirus Tracker). Yet CCJ does not plan to release any further detainees. (In the spring, due to public pressure and coronavirus concerns, CCJ released some of “those awaiting trial and low-level nonviolent offenders” (CNN).)

Inmates, advocates, and correctional officers themselves have long argued that CCJ hasn’t done nearly enough to protect the public health of people inside (Block Club Chicago). In September, a federal appeals court upheld a judge’s earlier injunction that mandated widespread coronavirus prevention policies inside the jail, despite Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart’s appeals (Chicago Community Bond Fund). For more on the conditions inside CCJ, check out Injustice Watch.

Interview with Cassandra Greer-Lee

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

In the beginning of this painful battle, on the day Nickolas died, I called Channel 7 News. They were airing the coronavirus deaths, and I asked if they could please stop labeling him “Detainee #3”. He has a name. My battle has been to show that he was a man. Not just a detainee, not just a number. That’s why I carry his big picture around all the time. He had a family that loved him.

He was only 43 years old. He had a lot of living left to do with me. He was a phenomenal cook and a wonderful friend. He was the type of person to encourage you to do better and be better. People might have thought he was mean because he never smiled, but he wasn’t. He loved to see me smile. God couldn’t have blessed me with a better man, and I will never find another friend like him in all my life. My goal was to continue to grow old with him. But that was cut short. His death was preventable.

So I want people to know— please look past the things [Sheriff Tom] Dart said about my husband. He should have had the opportunity to go through the judicial system so a judge could decide whether he was guilty or not guilty. But instead, he was sentenced to death by coronavirus at Cook County Jail. The saddest part about CCJ and this whole system is that they would rather prepare for mass incarceration than to make programs, help children, and give money to low-income communities to prevent mass incarceration.

The jail system is not made to reform anyone. This is profit. This is human lives for profit.

I just need everyone to know— yeah, my husband was an inmate. He still deserved to live. I don’t deserve this pain. I tried to save his life. My husband tried to save his own life to no avail. And Tom Dart [who tested positive at the end of November] gets to quarantine with all the wonderful luxuries of his home and the comfort of his wife. I don’t wish him any ill will, because no one should have to go through the pain that I’m going through. But he doesn’t have to be in a hospital room alone with people coming in wearing space suits. At the hospital, my husband couldn’t even walk to the window to see me, and I was downstairs there every day he was at Stroger [Hospital]. I was just trying to send up my energy to him.

I think if he had gotten to Stroger earlier, he could have lived. But when he got there, he went straight to the ICU. He was already in an advanced stage of COVID. Based on speaking to my husband on the phone, the [CCJ] guards were scared to come on the tier. The nurses were afraid. It took until inmates were deathly ill before they could be moved [to the hospital].

I am fighting my hardest to make sure that no other family feels this pain. Unfortunately, we just filled the eighth casket that we were hoping that we wouldn’t. But we’re still fighting, and I now have forces that have joined with me. At the beginning, I was alone and no one really cared about an inmate’s wife. And then people like Chicago Community Bond Fund (@chibondfund) and Nikkei Uprising came and stood with me. People like Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation (@soulinchicago) and Torture Justice Center (@chitorturejustice).

On one hand, we are getting victories— on the court side, judges are agreeing with us. We were able to defund the jail by $35 million, even though it was only a fraction of the $157 million we were hoping to put back into Black and Brown communities. (Read more about Budget for Black Lives. ) We are being heard. This fight isn’t in vain.

But the victory isn’t where I really would like to see it, which is back there with the detainees [in CCJ], those human beings whose lives are in jeopardy. Their fate could be my husband’s. I keep in contact with other inmates mainly through the phone, but also when I’m outside protesting, through letters in the windows, notes on dry erase boards. I first connected with them when my husband was there— he would have other inmates call me to see if I had found any help [for his coronavirus]. Some days he was too sick to call me, so they would call me instead.

After Nick, I told them to keep calling me. My heart is so heavy for them. I am fighting for them. I was speaking to one of their mothers, and she was crying so hard. Her son’s bond is $200,000, and she just doesn’t have it. She’s doing all the overtime she can. It broke my heart because she was right: your freedom depends on wealth. And he’s not yet convicted of anything.

So for me, finding true justice for Nickolas would be first, voting Tom Dart out, and to get [a sheriff] who understands that inmates’ lives matter. Second, to end money bail. And then— I know this is farfetched— to close down county jails. Before then, to stop preparing for mass incarceration, and instead to prevent incarceration.

As of right now, the memories hurt. I try to think so hard about them, even though that’s all I have left— memories. But I have to fight. I just can’t let them murder him and do nothing. I’m going to go out every Sunday until we win. As long as my husband is dead and Tom Dart is there, I’m going to be out there.

Cassandra Greer-Lee protests in front of Cook County Jail every Sunday afternoon from 1-5pm and welcomes others to join her. For more information, check out @justice4nicklee or facebook.com/JusticeForNickolas. Mutual aid can be sent to facilitator @Megan-Kay-2 (Venmo) or $MeganKay11(Cashapp). Donations are requested for protester supplies (heaters, signs, etc) and for materials for people inside CCJ (books, crosswords, etc). To spread awareness, use hashtags #JusticeForNick and #FreeThemAll.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Nickolas Lee died on April 12th, 2020. He was a phenomenal cook, a wonderful husband and friend, and the third person detained at Cook County Jail (CCJ) to die of coronavirus. At the time, CCJ was the nation’s “largest-known source of coronavirus infections” (NY Times).
Like many people in CCJ, Lee was awaiting trial. Because of America’s unjust pre-trial money bond system, the wealthy can await trial at home, while those without enough money to pay bail remain incarcerated and at risk.
Lee’s wife, Cassandra Greer-Lee, believes that achieving #JusticeForNick means replacing Sheriff Tom Dart, ending money bail, changing our mass incarceration system, and— eventually— closing county jails.

10/29/2020 | Fight racist death row sentencing.

8/23/2020 | Support those incarcerated and impacted by COVID-19.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 11/19/20 Nicole Cardoza 11/19/20

Decolonize your reading habits.

Until recently, I worked for a public library. Part of my department’s job was recommending books to patrons who wanted suggestions of what to read next. Unfortunately, our staff often only recommended books by writers of color if the patron asked for it specifically— if they asked for books about racism or for Black History Month or about “the immigrant experience.”

It's Thursday! Welcome back to the ARD. As we enter the holiday season and plan to spend more time indoors, book sales spike. If you're looking to gift yourself or a loved one with a new book, make it a new tale from a diverse writer. Today, Jami explains the significance of broadening your reading habits and pitfalls of the publishing industry.

This is the Anti-Racism Daily, a daily newsletter with tangible ways to dismantle racism and white supremacy. Support our work by making a one-time contribution on our website or PayPal, or giving monthly onPatreon. You can also Venmo (@nicoleacardoza). To subscribe, go to antiracismdaily.com.

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Browse through your bookshelves or think about the books you’ve read this year.
Reflect: How many books are by people of color? By Black writers? Are all those books only focused on trauma or pain? Are all the books you read for fun or pleasure all by white writers?
Ensure that your anti-racism reading translates off the page. After you read a book, ask yourself: what actions or steps are you taking in response?
Divest from Amazon. Buy from Black-owned bookstores.

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

But people didn’t ask those questions very often. They asked for thrillers. For books like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. For a book with a good love story. And in those cases, our staff would often suggest white author after white author.

My experience at the library is mirrored in our reading habits across the nation. In the wake of George Floyd, people talked a lot about how anti-racist reading was on the rise, and pointed to the number of Black authors on the bestsellers’ lists (NYTimes). But with one or two notable exceptions, those authors were writing nonfiction explicitly about racism. Meanwhile, the lists were full of white writers writing about everything (Publisher’s Weekly).

Unfortunately, we have a tendency to read Black authors or authors of color only when they write about very specific topics—and it’s a problem deeply entrenched in publishing. “In the industry, stories about police brutality, the struggle, poverty, etc. have been dubbed “issue” books, and it’s a not-so-secret secret that if your book doesn’t fall into this category, it won’t get any real push or marketing,” says L.L. McKinney, author of the fantasy series The Nightmare-Verse (Tor.com). The industry, she explains, focuses predominantly on Black pain.

The results of such pigeonholing are far-reaching. Often, these are the only books about Black people assigned in school— an example of how curriculum can unintentionally result in racial trauma (Teaching Tolerance). Meanwhile, McKinney argues that “there’s the exploitative aspect of non-Black readers taking in this story and somehow feeling they’ve accomplished something. They’ve managed activism by bearing witness to the events of the book, but then don’t follow up with seeking change in the real world. Reading then becomes performative” (Tor.com).

This happens against the backdrop of a publishing industry with a huge diversity problem across the board. Editors are 85% white, sales representatives are 81% white, agents are 80% white, book reviewers are 80% white (Lee & Low). (Interns, however, are only 51% white, a statistic that comforts me not at all.) The viral Twitter campaign #publishingpaidme (started by McKinney and YA author Tochi Onyebuchi) exposed the enormous pay discrepancies between Black writers and non-Black writers (Buzzfeed News). Black writers like N.K. Jemisin, whose amazing Broken Earth trilogy won basically every fantasy and sci-fi award, was paid an $25,000 advance for her book; Roxane Gay got a $15,000 advance for Bad Feminist (NPR). Meanwhile, white authors with less experience in the same genre were pulling in six-figure advances.

So it’s not that reading books about “issues” is problematic. It’s problematic when those are the only books by Black authors (or authors of color) you read. It’s problematic when you turn to writers of color when you want to be educated, but white writers the rest of the time. Instead, we should also be reaching for authors of color when we want a lighthearted, fluffy book. When we want to read something to decompress from our months of election anxiety. When we want to travel to a different world. We shouldn’t have our “race/racism bookshelf”, crammed with writers of color, and have every other shelf filled with white writers.

It can be hard to know where to start—especially when major publications and newspapers don’t make much space for these kinds of books. Luckily, the Internet is chock-full of so many reviewers and book bloggers of color who have collected so many resources for all sorts of genres. Lists like 8 Great Books Celebrating Black Joy by Enobong Essien, 5 Indigenous Speculative Fiction Authors You Should Be Reading by Rebecca Roanhorse, and The Asian Detective Novel: From Racist Caricature to Authentic Representation by Pooja Makhijani show that there’s no excuse for ignorance. (For parents [and other people who love reading YA or kidlit] check out the organization We Need Diverse Books and their wonderful Instagram.)

And when you choose to buy, purchase from Black-owned, Indigenous-owned, or other POC-owned bookstores, many of which have been hit hard by COVID. Most importantly: don’t buy from Amazon. I know, I know—I too have been seduced by their low, low prices, especially when compared to an indie bookstore. But I’m trying to remember that the $5 or $6 dollars I save buying at Amazon is possible because of their exploitative, unethical practices (which we covered in a previous newsletter). The company can offer cheaper books because “they are cutting other costs: taxes, publisher payments, author payments, and safe-labor practices” (Social Justice Books). (For more on Amazon pricing and problems, check out The Nation.)

We need to imagine a different future. Books can point us there—but only if what we’re reading also helps us imagine and understand a world full of the fullness of Black lives, of the joy in Indigenous community, in the mundane and the silly and the vastness of experience of people of color. It’s important to educate ourselves about the painful reality of racism, but we can’t stop at trauma. Instead, we need to incorporate books by writers of color into all of our reading, and ensure that what we read translates into our actions.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

he publishing industry promotes books about Black pain and trauma more than books by Black writers in other topics or in other genres, like fantasy and romance (Tor.com).
It’s important for us to read books by Black writers and writers of color not only when we want to read about racism or want to be educated, but also for leisure—mysteries, romance, thrillers, literary fiction, etc.
The publishing industry is predominantly white. Editors are 85% white, sales representatives are 81% white, agents are 80% white, and book reviewers are 80% white (Lee & Low).

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 11/9/20 Nicole Cardoza 11/9/20

Seek solidarity, not charity.

Throughout 2020, more of us have heard about mutual aid than ever before. After COVID-19 started affecting people’s livelihoods, mutual aid networks popped up like never before—with new networks likely in the thousands (Sustainable Economies Law Center). The uprisings after George Floyd’s death also accelerated mutual aid; groups quickly came together to feed protesters (Eater), post bail (Chicago Community Bond Fund), and provide support in many other ways.

But the concept of mutual aid is much more deeply rooted than the simple act of Venmo-ing $15 to a stranger on Twitter.

Happy Tuesday and welcome back to the Anti-Racism Daily. Our email from last week on billionaire philanthropy was a hot topic; many of us were inspired to reflect more on how giving can skew our perception of change. Today, Jami is back with a broader look at charity and how it can help fuel inequitable systems.

This is the Anti-Racism Daily. We send one email each day with tangible ways to dismantle white supremacy. You can support our work by giving one time on our website, PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza). You can also give monthly or annually on Patreon. If this email was forwarded to you, you could subscribe at antiracismdaily.com.

ps – the early bird readers received an email yesterday with some major typos. I think I sent a draft, not the final email by accident. A revised version was sent later and updated on our website. My apologies!

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Get involved in the existing mutual aid networks in your area. Scroll down to the exhaustive, state-by-state list of resources at Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, or simply Google “ your city+mutual aid.” (Many of these networks appreciate non-financial support as well!)
Evaluate what kinds of groups, organizations, or people you’ve given money to in the past. How did you evaluate whom to give to? Has the white savior complex infected your giving philosophy?
Research the organizations you support. How do they stack up against Dean Spade’s chart on mutual aid vs. hierarchical charitable programs?

GET EDUCATED

By Nicole Cardoza (she/her)

But the concept of mutual aid is much more deeply rooted than the simple act of Venmo-ing $15 to a stranger on Twitter.

“Mutual aid consists of the collective actions it takes to support community wellbeing and reaffirm that all lives have inherent value. We all have needs and we are all capable of helping each other to fulfill some of these needs. This approach is distinctively egalitarian and rooted in reciprocity and agency.”
"What is Mutual Aid? A Primer" by the Climate Justice Alliance.

One of the core tenets of mutual aid is the idea of solidarity, not charity. Solidarity involves collectively working together to solve the root causes of structural inequity, as trans activist and scholar Dean Spade outlines in a chart comparing mutual aid to nonprofits (DeanSpade.net).

Meanwhile, the charity philosophy possesses an “inherent imbalance; it moves resources from places of abundance to places deemed as needy, a deficit-based perspective instead of one based on the values and abundance already present within communities” (Climate Justice Alliance).

The concept of mutual aid (if not the specific term itself) has been practiced for generations, particularly among Black and Brown communities and immigrant populations. In the 1780s-1830s, Black “benevolent societies” developed in the northern states, wherein Black people— many previously enslaved— supported each other through voluntary cooperation (The Massachusetts Review). As documents from the era show, the “earliest mutual assistance societies among free blacks provided a form of health and life insurance for their members—care of the sick, burials for the dead, and support for widows and orphans” (National Humanities Center).

Mutual aid is also central to many Indigenous cultures and economies, as the founder of the First Nations Development Institute explains in an interview for Yes! Magazine. Other historical examples of mutual aid include the mutualista societies that Mexican immigrants brought with them to Texas and the Black Panther free breakfast program (Sustainable Economies Law Center). I think of how, a couple years after my grandfather was released from a Japanese American incarceration camp, my grandfather ran out of money during a cross-country bus trip. He had to live in a Chicago bus station for a few weeks until he ran into a guy he’d known in camp, whose mother let him live in her boarding house rent-free for six months.

For many of these Black and Brown and immigrant communities, mutual aid was not— and is not— a philosophical choice, but an act of “resilience and defiance, practiced out of necessity in the face of inequitable access to basic needs” (Sustainable Economies Law Center). Such communities often get overlooked by dominant aid structures. Grassroots projects dedicated to queer and trans Black and Brown people, for example, often don’t have enough funding because money gets funneled to bigger nonprofits that leave those communities behind (Zora).

Believing in the mission of mutual aid requires us to reflect deeply on our actions and our beliefs. It’s not just a matter of choosing what kind of people/organizations/projects we give our money or time to. It’s a matter of how we think about it. It’s easy for us to fall into the trap of white saviorism, for us to think we know better than the people we are giving to, for us to elevate ourselves higher while ignoring structural problems. As Teju Cole writes in his illuminating article in The Atlantic:

“The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund. I have no opposition, in principle, to such donations (I frequently make them myself), but we must do such things only with awareness of what else is involved.”

Many nonprofits function on the idea of charity, utilizing a hierarchical structure that keeps the power in the hands of the givers. They decide who is deserving and what they deserve. As Jennifer Seema Samimi explains, the “separation of social justice and social service provisions has silenced the people most directly affected by issues of injustice, and it privileges educated employees and board members of nonprofits” (Columbia Social Work Review). On the other hand, the mutual aid framework focuses on keeping social justice at the center while empowering those most directly affected.

When we redistribute funds, we need to remember our own position. Remember that “charity can do more harm than good because often people outside of the community dictate what the community itself needs, rather than based on what the community itself knows it needs” (Climate Justice Alliance). Believe in everyone’s own self-determination. Believe in the strength of solidarity and our own collective power.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The concept of mutual aid has been practiced for generations, particularly in Black and Brown communities and immigrant populations often overlooked by other governmental and nonprofit aid.
One of the core tenets of mutual aid is the idea of solidarity, not charity. Solidarity involves collectively working together to solve the root causes of structural inequity.
Many nonprofits function on the idea of charity, utilizing a top-down, hierarchical structure that keeps the power in the hands of the givers.

6/11/2020 | Support Black-owned businesses.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 11/1/20 Nicole Cardoza 11/1/20

Question billionaire philanthropy.

On October 13th, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced that they were donating another $100 million to support local election offices and polling places ahead of the presidential election (Washington Post). This money followed their earlier $300 million donation towards the same cause (Vox).

Hello and Happy Sunday. Because we're likely going to be deep into the election this week, let's spend today focusing on corporate America. Jami analyzes how billionaires are often more complicit in sustaining economic and racial inequities than solving them, and unpacks the racial philanthropy gap.

This is the Anti-Racism Daily, where we send one email each day to dismantle white supremacy. You can support our work by giving one time on our website, PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza). You can also donate monthly or annually on Patreon. If this email was forwarded to you, you could subscribe at antiracismdaily.com.

ps – if you can, vote.

TAKE ACTION

Read this Vox article that explains the racial philanthropy gap.
Reflect on the corporations and businesses you support. How can you work towards advancing economic equality, instead of supporting corporations that further economic inequality?

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

Many conservative groups decried the donations, accusing Zuckerberg of partisanship and election manipulation (The Press-Democrat). However, the bulk of the money is being funneled through the non-profit organization The Center for Tech and Civic Life, which is “regrant[ing] the money to local election officials so they can recruit poll workers, supply them with personal protective equipment, and set up drive-through voting” (Vox). The rest of the money is being distributed to Secretaries of State.

However, there are still many other concerns with the funding (and with billionaire philanthropy in general). First, to use a popular metaphor, Zuckerberg’s money is like Band-aid over a bullet wound—the wound being how massively underfunded the elections are this year. This spring, Congressional Democrats and a wide coalition of civil rights organizations (including the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, NAACP, and Indivisible) pushed for at least $4 billion in state election assistance (Civilrights.org), but the bill that passed only included one-tenth of that (NPR).

Instead, municipalities are using Zuckerberg’s money to fill in the gaps, to pay for necessities like ballot drop boxes, additional poll workers, and personal protective equipment (NY Times). This is problematic when we begin to rely on private money instead of pressuring the government to adequately fund our institutions (like when we normalize GoFundMe crowdfunding as an adequate replacement for affordable healthcare.)

It’s sometimes difficult to critique such philanthropy because the money is filling a concrete need. Zuckerberg’s donation does increase voting access. But this type of action is an example of what writer and political analyst Anand Giradharadas describes as actions the ruling class (like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos) takes to pretend that they are not, in fact, one of the sources of the problem. “This is the kind of change that allows you to stand on someone’s back while saying you’re helping them,” he explains (The Guardian). If they donate enough money, maybe we’ll forget about all their problematic, unethical business practices.

"
Generosity is not a substitute for justice... One popular [move of the ruling class] is using generosity to obscure one’s own complicity in injustice. You commit an injustice and then rely on generosity on a much smaller scale to cover it up. This is the most obvious move. This happens often enough that when you see an act of plutocratic generosity you should at a minimum be skeptical.”

Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, via an interview with The Guardian

When Jeff Bezos made a $100 million donation to the nonprofit Feeding America in June (CNBC), the gift — which made all the headlines — also functioned as a publicity stunt). This kind of free publicity can work in a corporation’s favor; in Bezos’s case, such headlines might make us forget about Amazon’s consistently poor working conditions, which have become more dangerous during COVID-19 (Vox). The amount of money also seems shockingly large, until you break it down two ways: that the donation was just .07% of his wealth, and that it came out to just $2 for each of the 46 million Americans who rely on food banks (Nonprofit Quarterly).

In January, Bezos was worth $115 billion (CNN), but by August, he became the first person to be worth $200 billion (Forbes) — the same amount as the net wealth of the entire country of Ecuador. In a year when millions of people across the world have lost their jobs and financial stability, when his company refuses to provide data about coronavirus outbreaks to its workers, Bezos gained $85 billion, due to our global ever-growing dependence on Amazon. Meanwhile, his workers can’t even find out if there’s a coronavirus outbreak at their own warehouse (NBC).

In short: this system of philanthropy is used to “reinforce a politico-economic system that enables such a small number of people to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth… and serves to legitimise capitalism, as well as to extend it further and further into all domains of social, cultural and political activity” (The Guardian).

Again, it can be difficult to critique when many of the causes these billionaires support — like racial equality — are things we also believe in. But this version of philanthropy can reek of white saviorism, and can lead to a disturbing dynamic wherein “communities of color come… are forced to beg philanthropic grant makers for resources that... were earned through processes of exploitation in the first place” (Vox).

To fight racism, we must address our society’s economic inequality. Our past newsletters have addressed the massive wealth disparities between white households and households of color. And when we look deeply at the racial and class divides in this country, we understand that no matter how much these billionaires give away, they’ll never make up for what they’re taking from the rest of America.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Billionaire philanthropy often serves as a way for leaders of corporations to “commit an injustice and then rely on generosity on a much smaller scale to cover it up” (Anand Giridharadas via The Guardian)
Jeff Bezos’s net worth has increased by over $85 billion this year — at the same time his Amazon warehouse workers suffer grueling, unsafe warehouse conditions.
To fight racism, we must address economic inequality.

RELATED ISSUES

9/30/2020 | Close the racial wealth gap.

6/30/2020 | Boycott as a form of protest.

9/10/2020 | Fight for fair labor.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 10/25/20 Nicole Cardoza 10/25/20

Learn the history of the Texas Rangers.

But behind each hashtag is a person. This time, his name was Jonathan Price. He was a 31-year-old from Wolfe City, Texas, a small town outside Dallas. He was a “motivational speaker, a mentor to student-athletes in the area, and a frequent participant in community service activities” (Yahoo News). He was beloved by his community. And on October 3rd, he defused a fight he witnessed between a man and a woman at a convenience store. For his intervention, he was killed. To be more precise: on October 3rd, a police officer, a Texas Ranger, murdered an unarmed Jonathan Price as he walked away from the scene (Washington Post).

Happy Sunday, and welcome back to the Anti-Racism Daily. Each day, we send one email to spark action – and dismantle racism and systemic oppression in the U.S. To support our work, you can donate one-time or monthly on our website, Patreon, Paypal or Venmo @nicoleacardoza.

Last week we published an article about sports team names that glorify violence against communities of color. Today, Jami unpacks the history of the Texas Rangers and demands justice for another Black man whose life was stolen away. Read and rally for accountability in your community.

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Ensure Jonathan Price stays part of the conversation. Demand #JusticeforJonathan.
Call for police accountability in your community. Follow up on conversations on defunding the police and re-investing in other community support systems.
Reflect: Are there any groups, people, or institutions like the Texas Rangers that are romanticized or glorified in your area? Take a careful look at the history behind those local legends. Did their glory come at others’ expense?

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

If you stumbled across the #JusticeforJonathan hashtag recently, you could probably guess what it referred to, even without context. This is what we have learned to expect in America: another day, another name, another Black person killed by the police. Because these events happen so frequently, people can easily tune out the deaths, especially when they aren’t as high-profile as George Floyd’s or Breonna Taylor’s.

But behind each hashtag is a person. This time, his name was Jonathan Price. He was a 31-year-old from Wolfe City, Texas, a small town outside Dallas. He was a “motivational speaker, a mentor to student-athletes in the area, and a frequent participant in community service activities” (Yahoo News). He was beloved by his community. And on October 3rd, he defused a fight he witnessed between a man and a woman at a convenience store. For his intervention, he was killed. To be more precise: on October 3rd, a police officer murdered an unarmed Jonathan Price as he walked away from the scene (Washington Post). For more about Jonathan Price, read Marquise Francis’s article from Yahoo News.

When I read that, I thought about the line from our recent newsletter on being an active bystander: “It’s important to note that being an active bystander often takes privilege.” Jonathan Price intervened as an active bystander to stop the violence he happened to see, and yet, because he was a Black man, he was murdered for his efforts. This, unfortunately, is not surprising when we think of the litany of “reasons” the police have killed Black people. What is surprising, though, is that the officer was charged with murder in the next few days (WFAA). Unfortunately, as Americans are well aware, both the charges themselves and the speed with which they were deployed are a rarity.

To better understand the context of this police shooting, we need to look at the unique history and structure of the Texas Rangers, an influential agency within Texas law enforcement. The Texas Rangers, a “division within the Texas Department of Public Safety with lead criminal investigative responsibility” (Texas.gov), are unlike the state police in other states. They have broader power and higher-level responsibilities, like overseeing special operations and SWAT teams (Dallas Morning News).

More importantly, the Texas Rangers have captured American popular imagination in a way no other state law enforcement agency has. They were mythologized in the character of the Lone Ranger, of radio, TV, movie, and comic book fame (History), and in the later Walker, Texas Ranger TV series, which ran from 1993 to 2001 (IMDB). Even the 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove (and subsequent Emmy-nominated miniseries) is based on the exploits of former Texas Rangers (Pulitzer). The law enforcement agency is also memorialized in the name of the Arlington-based Major League Baseball team (Dallas News).

In such media, the Texas Rangers are portrayed as do-good defenders of the law, with a staunch moral code, battling for the soul of the Old West. Americans love such stories because we have a collective nostalgia for the West. But our collective nostalgia is, at its core, collective amnesia. The saying “History belongs to the victors” is exemplified by the fact that we still view westward expansion through the lens of the rugged, individual (white) American spirit – instead of through the lens of colonialism and genocide. For more on the myth of the frontier, check out our previous newsletter on racism in sports team names.

In the case of the Texas Rangers, when we remember only the Lone Ranger and the like, we ignore the racism and white supremacy at the root of the institution. In the early 1820s, the Texas Rangers began a small, informal army to “protect” the white settlers from the Indigenous people whose land they occupied. According to the founder, Stephen T. Austin, protection meant the eradication of the Native tribes: “There is no way of subduing them but extermination” (Texas Monthly).

In the 1910s, the expanded, established Texas Rangers participated in similar violence:

"
[The Texas Rangers] didn't invent police brutality, but they perfected it down there on the [Texas-Mexico] border, where they operated as what we would now term death squads… They executed hundreds, perhaps thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. And some of those were bandits who had attacked white-owned farms and ranches, but many of them had committed no crimes. You know, they were guilty of having brown skin.
Doug J. Swanson, author of Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers, on NPR

Over the next century, their violence towards people of color continued. Before the Civil War, they collected bounties for escaped enslaved people; after the Civil War, they ignored the lynching of Black men (Texas Monthly). In the 1918 Porvenir Massacre, 15 unarmed Tejano men and youth were “taken into custody, denied due process, and executed en masse” by the Texas Rangers (Texas State Historical Association).

Some might argue that we cannot judge an institution today based on their actions in the early 1800s. But even in 1956, the Texas Rangers merely watched while a gravel-throwing white mob prevented Black students from entering their school. A decade later, they assaulted Mexican American workers while breaking a strike (Star-Tribune). Institutional rot spreads and trickles down.

It is true that Jonathan Price’s murder was not organized or sanctioned by the Texas Rangers themselves, and that they charged the responsible officer relatively quickly. Yet the officer’s actions descend from the same racist beliefs upon which the Texas Rangers were founded. Jonathan Price deserves justice— the kind of justice denied to all the other Indigenous, Mexican, and Black people the Texas Rangers killed over the last two centuries. And the rest of us need to ensure we do not succumb to collective amnesia. We must remember the truth behind the myths of the American West.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Jonathan Price, a 31-year-old Black man from Wolfe City, Texas, was walking away after breaking up a fight when a Texas Ranger shot and killed him on October 3, 2020.
The Texas Rangers law enforcement agency is mythologized in popular media. Rangers are often depicted as moral defenders of the law, battling for the soul of the Old West.
The agency was founded in the 1820s specifically to protect white settlers by “exterminating” (killing) the Native residents.
In the 1910s, Texas Rangers massacred hundreds of Mexicans and Mexican Americans along the border.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 10/16/20 Nicole Cardoza 10/16/20

Abolish the grand jury.

Many of us are still reeling from the grand jury decision that brought no charges against the police officer that killed Breonna Taylor, as we covered in a previous newsletter. And yet, of course, many of us were not surprised. We’ve seen this before. We’ve seen how the grand jury cleared the officer that killed Michael Brown in Ferguson (NYTimes), and how things haven’t changed since then. We’ve seen how rarely officers are convicted even if they do get charged (FiveThirtyEight). We have learned not to expect justice from our legal system.

Welcome back! Yesterday many of you emailed with one question: is there anything we CAN do to block this Supreme Court appointment? And aside from calling your senators, we don't have much power to exercise as citizens. But we can get more involved in other aspects of our justice system, which matters more than you may think. I was going to publish this next week, but I feel Jami's thoughtful analysis of the grand jury is a strong follow-up from our conversation yesterday. Read and let me know what you think.

Tomorrow is Study Hall – our weekly reflection on the topics we unpacked this week (and there was a LOT we covered). Send me your questions / thoughts by responding to this email.

You can help our work thrive by making a one-time or monthly contribution. Thank you to everyone that makes this newsletter possible.

Give on our website, PayPal or Venmo @nicoleacardoza
Subscribe monthly or annually on Patreon

ps – the Anti-Racism Daily Podcast is here! I'll be hosting conversations on the most impactful ways to take action around critical current events, and interviewing inspiring changemakers. Listen to the trailer on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

TAKE ACTION

Write to your state legislators asking to abolish the grand jury process for criminal indictments (Connecticut and Pennsylvania already have!)
Spread awareness about the injustice in the grand jury system, as many people do not understand how it works
Reflect: What privilege(s) may you have based on your identity that shapes your understanding of the criminal justice system?

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

“The police and law were not made to protect us Black and Brown women.”
Tamika Palmer, Breonna Taylor’s mother (VOA News)

Clearly, the grand jury process failed Breonna Taylor. But what is important to note is that it’s not that this grand jury failed her, it’s that all grand juries are inherently structured in a way that is unjust. At a grand jury, there are no defense attorneys present (that is, the defendant does not have access to counsel). There is no judge. The prosecutor is the one asking all the questions, the one who decides what to charge the defendant with, what sentencing to recommend, and whether to offer a plea deal (Harvard Law Review). In other words: all the power lies with the prosecutor, and the prosecutor works for the government as a district or state’s attorney, or in Breonna Taylor’s case, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron (NPR).

A grand jury differs in many ways from a trial jury. A trial jury is what we think of when we think of the word “jury”: a group of people that decides whether or not the defendant is guilty. This takes place in a courtroom with a judge, with lawyers for both the defense and the prosecution (US Courts). The trial itself is usually public, and the defendant’s counsel can call its own witnesses.

On the other hand, a grand jury happens before a trial. It consists of a group of 16-23 people that decides whether or not there is enough evidence to believe that the defendant has committed a crime (US Courts). As Stanford University law professor Robert Weisberg explains, “A grand jury doesn’t decide guilt or innocence. It decides the preliminary question of whether there’s enough evidence to justify [sending] him to trial in the first place” (Louisville Public Media). It’s an additional step, so it’s used for higher-order crimes. About half the states require a grand jury to press felony charges. In the other half, it’s up to the prosecutor whether to require a grand jury or whether to skip to a trial (FindLaw).

People have been concerned about the injustices inherent in the grand jury system for many years. England, from whom we inherited the system, by and large stopped using the grand jury in 1910s and formally abolished it in 1933 (Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology); its other former colonies, including New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, all have done the same (Slate). The United States has kept this process despite the overwhelming evidence that grand juries “do not (and cannot) protect the accused” (Cornell Law Review).

But these police shooting cases show that the problem is more complex than that. In Breonna Taylor’s case, the police officer was the accused (NPR). And yet he was the one protected by the process, because the grand jury system protects who the prosecutors choose to protect. In most capital criminal cases, they have no motivation to protect the accused—except when the accused are the police.

“Prosecutors work with police day in, day out, and typically they’re reluctant to criticise them or investigate them,” law professor Samuel Walker told The Guardian. In the Guardian’s analysis of 2015 police killings, they found that in one-third of the killings that were ruled as justified “the criminal inquiry work was done by the officer’s own police department, meaning the evidence used to decide if an officer should be prosecuted was prepared by the officer’s co-workers” (The Guardian).

"[Grand juries] are said to be 'putty in the hands of the prosecutor.' In other words, the prosecutor really tells them what he or she wants and they will go along with it,” legal writer Joshua Rozenberg told the public radio newsmagazine The World. Because of the prosecutor’s power in a grand jury, he added: “It must be even easier [to get an acquittal] if that is what the district attorney may actually want." And there are many other problems with the grand jury process that we don’t have space for here. (Harvard Law Review presents a thorough overview of other problems although they call for reform, not abolition.)

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron was supposed to be prosecuting the police officers but his actions show that he was defending them. “I never had faith in him,” Breonna Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, wrote (NBC News). “I knew he had already chosen to be on the wrong side of the law the moment he wanted the grand jury to make the decision.” The court even released the tapes of the usually-secret grand jury proceedings because of a juror’s complaints against Daniel Cameron (NPR).

Cameron claimed the jurors decide independently of the prosecutor, but that is clearly not the case. In grand juries, the prosecutors shape the case: Cameron had only recommended the charge of wanton endangerment (CBS News). He claims he did this because he would not be able to prove other charges, were the case to go to trial—but convening a grand jury is an easy way to pass the blame onto jurors while also not holding the police accountable.

While a lot of energy is now devoted to defunding and abolishing the police and prisons, we also need to focus on the legal institutions that link these two systems. We need to eliminate the grand jury and reimagine our legal system in general. Though only an amendment to the Constitution could remove the grand jury on a federal level, many states could eliminate it through legislation (Al Jazeera). Connecticut and Pennsylvania have already abolished the use of a grand jury in criminal indictments (FindLaw), so I believe it is possible to make change, state by state.

So contact your legislators. Increase awareness. Promote understanding of the flaws in the system. The grand jury did not bring justice to Breonna, so we need to bring justice to the grand jury. It must be abolished.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The grand jury is an inherently unjust system. It is a secret proceeding whose power lies in the hands of prosecutors who work for the government.
In one-third of “justified” police killings, the “evidence used to decide if an officer should be prosecuted was prepared by the officer’s co-workers” (The Guardian).
The grand jury did not bring justice to Breonna, but we need to bring justice to the grand jury. It must be abolished.
England and its former colonies have all abolished the grand jury system—except for the United States (Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology).

7/6/2020 | Abolish qualified immunity.

7/2/2020 | Remove police from our public schools.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 10/13/20 Nicole Cardoza 10/13/20

Support Chinatown during COVID-19.

Happy Tuesday,

We're continuing our ongoing coverage of COVID-19 by analyzing the impact of anti-Asian racism on small businesses, mainly restaurants, in Chinatown. Jami shares stories and insights from the communities impacted and outlines how we can help.

Speaking of help, thank you all for helping our work grow. Thanks to you and Jami, we're bringing on an influx of new writers to offer fresh perspectives. If you haven't already, consider making a contribution. You can give on our website, PayPal, Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe monthly on Patreon.

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Support your local Chinatown. If you’ve never been, do some research to find out the perfect place to order from. Don’t be constrained by what’s available on apps—to find the best food, you’re probably going to have to make a phone call.
Read the stories in Resy’s extensive “Welcome to Chinatown, USA” series. Each is a love letter to a food or restaurant in Chinatowns across the country.
Broaden your understanding of Chinese American history and culture beyond just food.

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

Like many other Asian Americans, when I first heard about the novel coronavirus ravaging Wuhan, China, I was afraid. Our fear was not just of the potential reach of the disease, but of what being Asian American, particularly Chinese American, would mean in a country prone to xenophobia, racism, and hysteria. I remembered the white college friend who, upon greeting me, would say, “Eww, don’t touch me—you probably have bird flu.” For him, this was a recurring bit; for me, it was a bite.

His “joke” recalled all those old stereotypes associated with the Chinese in America—that we carry disease, that we are dirty—that the coronavirus brought again to the forefront. (I wrote at length about coronavirus, fear, contagion, and Asian America in another essay.)

“The outbreak has had a decidedly dehumanizing effect, reigniting old strains of racism and xenophobia that frame Chinese people as uncivilized, barbaric “others” who bring with them dangerous, contagious diseases and an appetite for dogs, cats, and other animals outside the norms of Occidental diets. These ideas [are] perennially the subtext behind how Chinese people are viewed by the Western gaze.”
-Jenny G. Zhang in Eater

In those early months, fear arrived in the United States long before the virus did. This fear was wielded as a weapon, as evidenced by all stories of Asian Americans being spat on, jumped, shouted at, as we wrote about in a previous newsletter. But beyond those individual stories, you can just look at what happened to Chinatowns across the country.

Before the first cases ever arrived in New York City, fear of the virus made Chinatown business drop 50-70% (NYTimes), a number that replicated in Chinatowns across the United States (Eater) and in other Western nations. And it wasn’t just Chinatown—other restaurants owned and operated by Asian Americans started declining as early as December or January (KQED). The timing was especially poor: this happened around the Lunar New Year when Chinese restaurants pull in most of their business.

“At New Year’s, we had our 121st Golden Dragon Parade celebration, and only like 10 percent of the people showed up. The virus didn’t have anything to do with Chinatown, but it being associated as an Asian thing by the president, people just got that phobia about it.”
-Glenn SooHoo, owner of a small business in Los Angeles’s Chinatown (National Geographic)

“It was a fall-off-the-cliff kind of decline,” the owner of Hang Ah Tea Room in San Francisco told NPR’s Bay Area affiliate KQED. Several restaurants have closed permanently; others are unsure how long they can survive. The loss of some of these restaurants would mean losing pieces of our history and culture. Hang Ah Tea Room is the country’s oldest dim sum house, and one hundred years after its opening, the owner had to lay off over half his staff, most of them new immigrants (KQED).

But Chinatowns have faced very similar xenophobia before. During the 19th century, their residents were blamed for smallpox outbreaks. “The city health officer ordered the fumigation of every house in Chinatown,” writes Melissa Hung (San Francisco Chronicle). “Yet the epidemic raged on. Unable to account for the epidemic’s severity, he doubled down on his belief that “treacherous Chinamen” had caused it.”

The first Chinatown developed in San Francisco during the influx of Chinese immigrants during the Gold Rush in the 1800s. “These men were bachelors who needed sleeping quarters, clean clothes, and hot meals after long days of grueling labor; this [led] to a proliferation of housing, laundry services, and restaurants in burgeoning, Chinese-centric neighborhoods,” writes Rachel Ng (National Geographic). But, she adds, they also grew out of necessity, as they were not welcome in many other places. “After the abolition of slavery, Chinese immigrants provided a cheap source of labor, leading to resentment from the white working class.”

After the Gold Rush, Chinese immigrants found all kinds of work, most famously on the railroads. (Learn more about their work on the transcontinental railroad through the Smithsonian’s online exhibit Forgotten Workers). But anti-Chinese sentiment grew among white Americans, and in 1882, President Arthur signed the first Chinese Exclusion Act, barring almost all Chinese from entering the country (Chinese Historical Society of America). It was America’s first race-based immigration law.

Such stereotypes and discrimination have also shaped how many Chinese restaurants run and what kind of food they serve today. White Americans usually don’t view Chinese food as fancy or refined; they’re not used to paying a higher price point (NPR). Therefore, Chinese restaurants often use a high-volume, low-margin business model. Without a high volume of patrons, they are hit extra hard. Additionally, most restaurants in Chinatowns are small businesses, some owned and operated by generations of a single family. Few used apps like GrubHub before the coronavirus, so they were at a disadvantage when the pandemic struck (Fortune).

📰 Read about the model minority myth in our previous newsletter.

If all our Chinatowns make it through, it will be because of the resilience of the community. “Chinatown has a history of surviving adversities, with several indications the neighborhood will weather this one, too,” writes Melissa Hung (San Francisco Chronicle). Even during these difficult times, the community has banded together. Feed and Fuel Chinatown, an initiative from San Francisco’s Chinatown Community Development Center, delivered over 120,000 free meals to people living in public housing or SROs throughout COVID-19 (Chinatown CDC).

In August, Chicago’s Chinatown had “signs of a modest rebound,” said Kevin Pang (Resy). “Outdoor seating has been installed in Chinatown Square, and virtually everyone wears face masks.” When I went, it wasn’t nearly as busy as pre-pandemic, but neither was it a ghost town. There were signs of life. So when you choose to order food, remember to support the restaurants coronavirus hit first and hardest. Support our Chinatowns.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The coronavirus revived our country’s long history of anti-Chinese racism.
In Chinatowns across the country, restaurant business dropped 50-70%, even before the shutdowns (Eater).
The first Chinatown developed in San Francisco during the influx of Chinese immigrants during the Gold Rush in the 1800s.
In 1882, the president signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first race-based immigration law (Chinese Historical Society of America).

8/16/2020 | Think before eating out.

7/27/2020 | Support Asian Americans through COVID-19.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 10/11/20 Nicole Cardoza 10/11/20

Support climate justice.

Happy Sunday! The environment has been a popular topic in this newsletter, and as we unpack the racial disparities of global warming and environmental disasters, it's important that we have shared language on making an impact equitably. Today, Jami outlines what climate justice means beyond the hashtag, and encourages each of us to take our eco-friendly initiatives a step further.

Thank you for your contributions! Your support helps us grow. To support you can give on our website, PayPal, Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe monthly on Patreon.

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Join or support climate justice organizations, such as PODER (@poder.sf), the Environmental Transformation Movement of Flint, or the Center for Earth Energy and Democracy.
Read about Just Transition, the transformative framework for change promoted by many climate justice organizations.
Hold your local environmental organizations accountable. Who is on the board? What communities do they center? Who do they exclude?

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

In our recent newsletter on climate migration, we briefly mentioned the climate justice movement. Though climate change comes up frequently in the news, in election campaigns, and political debates, we hear about climate justice much more rarely. As a reminder: it is a movement that centers marginalized communities and those affected by racial and socioeconomic inequities, while also pushing for larger-scale change than most policies currently address (NAACP). (The terms climate justice and environmental justice are sometimes used interchangeably, while other times climate justice is used to refer to the effects of climate change specifically.)

“I represent the third-poorest congressional district in the country, and folks in my district can tell you that we have been in a crisis mode far before Covid-19 showed up. Folks in my district can also tell you that the climate crisis we are experiencing is one that they have been fighting to address for decades.”
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, US House District 13 (Facebook via Central Florida Climate Action).

Climate justice developed partially in opposition to mainstream environmental activism (like the conservation and preservation movements) that did not look at intersections of race and class at all. Instead, those groups were (and usually still are) white-led and white-run, and viewed the environment through a narrow lens (Environment and Society). Such environmentalism is directly descended from the colonialism and white supremacist ideals of Teddy Roosevelt-era conservationists. As environmental law scholar Jedidiah Purdy writes in a history of conservation’s racism, “For these conservationists, who prized the expert governance of resources, it was an unsettlingly short step from managing forests to managing the human gene pool” (New Yorker).

Even in 2014, a study of 293 leading environmental organizations, foundations, and government agencies found that ethnic/racial minorities occupied less than 12% of leadership positions, and very rarely in the highest positions (Diversity in Environmental Organizations). It also found that “few of the organizations studied collaborate with ethnic minority or low-income institutions or groups.” As an example: usually, the people included in disaster relief planning (on the local to global level) are not from the communities who will actually receive the disaster relief; affected people in disadvantaged communities often do not have a voice at the table (Minority Rights Group International).

The study’s author, Dorceta Taylor, also conducted research on white and BIPOC students studying environmental courses, and discovered that the two groups had virtually identical GPAs and course loads, even though the people getting hired by environmental groups are predominantly white males (Yale Environmental 360). Again--we cannot blame the pipeline, as we covered in a recent newsletter. [link when it’s up on the archive]

Recently— and largely as a response to Black Lives Matter— green groups have begun to examine their complicity in racism (National Geographic). They have made public commitments to diversify; they have renounced some of their founders, like John Muir. Yet it’s too soon to know how much of this is performative and how much will result in lasting change. When the rot goes so deep, can one or two token minorities on a board truly make a difference?

Climate justice, on the other hand, is rooted in anti-racism, in centering the communities ignored by mainstream environmentalism. “Advocacy and scholarship about protecting communities of color are rarely called environmentalism because those communities are still largely not considered places worthy of protection by environmentalists,” explains Danielle Purifoy, one of the only Black Ph.D. students in her environmental studies program (Inside Higher Ed).

Importantly, climate justice is a grassroots movement. Climate Justice Alliance, for example, comprises frontline organizations. Engagement centered in the communities— not top-down policies created by disengaged congressmen—is necessary. But for BIPOC activists, it can also be dangerous. Jayce Chiblow, a leader at the Canadian organization Indigenous Climate Actions, noted that while ‘Youth are leading us and taking on frontline activity,” many of them experienced violence and were arrested and removed as a result of their activism (Resilience.org). Read some profiles of Indigenous activists here.

What was most eye-opening for me was realizing how entangled all economic and environmental and social and racial issues are. Climate justice encompasses many other justice issues that we often think of as separate from environmental concerns, like workers’ rights and Indigenous sovereignty. Right now, our government tries to attack each problem piecemeal, ignoring the holistic view. On the other hand, the Just Transition plan from the Climate Justice Alliance implements a different framework for change than Biden’s deal or even the Green New Deal:

“We must build [a] visionary economy that is very different... This requires stopping the bad while at the same time as building the new. We must change the rules to redistribute resources and power to local communities... Shifting from dirty energy to energy democracy… from gentrification to community land rights… and from rampant destructive development to ecosystem restoration. Core to a just transition is deep democracy in which workers and communities have control over the decisions that affect their daily lives.”
Just Transition framework from Climate Justice Alliance

Climate justice—and this framework in particular—presents a different, more expansive vision, one that is so holistic and far-reaching that at first glance, it can seem impossible. Implement a regenerative economy here? How? But I suggest reading through the plan slowly, a little bit each day. It is a framework that can, like “Abolish the police,” guide our goals and shape what we should ultimately be working towards: transformative, structural change.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

A 2014 study found that 88% of leadership positions in environmental groups were held by white people (Dorceta Taylor/Diversity in Environmental Organizations)
The mainstream conservation and environmental movements descend from colonialism and white supremacy (New Yorker)
Climate justice is a grassroots movement that centers BIPOC and those most affected by climate change, communities historically ignored by environmentalism.
Climate justice promotes transformative, far-reaching change— a shift from our current extractive economy to a regenerative economy (Climate Justice Alliance)

7/24/2020 | Reduce your plastic consumption.

7/12/2020 | Learn how air pollution exacerbates COVID-19.

7/5/2020 | Support the Navajo Nation through COVID-19.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 10/7/20 Nicole Cardoza 10/7/20

Rally for fair taxes.

This year a graduated income tax amendment (known as the Fair Tax) is on the ballot here in Illinois. Right now, our state’s constitution requires us to have a flat tax rate, in which everyone is taxed the same percentage. The proposed amendment would repeal that requirement, opening the door for a tax rate that changed based on your income.

Happy Wednesday!

We had a LOT of questions about taxes after last week's newsletter on tax inequity. And I get it – taxes are still confusing to me, honestly. It's hard enough to know how to file them effectively, let alone how to dismantle its racist foundation. Today, Jami highlights the tax amendment on the ballot in Illinois this election and uses it as a benchmark for how we can change state taxes when we have a chance.

Your contributions help our newsletter thrive. Give on our website, PayPal, Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe monthly on Patreon. Thank you for all the support!

Nicole

ps – tonight Kamala Harris will face Mike Pence in the VP Debate. Consider how the "angry Black woman" trope we unpacked in a previous newsletter may come into play in the news Thursday.

pps – I had to remove the sharing assets from these emails, as they're making many go to spam. Instead, snag them from our Facebook or Instagram accounts.

TAKE ACTION

If you are in Illinois, vote for the Fair Tax (also known as the Graduated Income Tax Amendment)
Use the Who Pays? analysis from the Institute of Taxation and Policy to find out how inequitable your state’s tax policies are. Who benefits from the policies? Who is harmed?
If you are financially comfortable, check out Resource Generation to learn about how and why you could redistribute some of that wealth to others. Uprooted & Rising provides a Mutual Aid Plug In Guide, an excellent step-by-step worksheet.

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

Like many people, the extent of my knowledge about taxes has to do with inputting my information into TurboTax or H&R Block’s free tax software and either being pleasantly surprised at my tax refund or despairing about how much I owe. Our convoluted tax system in America means that we outsource the preparation to professionals—or, increasingly, software—and the extent of our interest extends to how the rules affect us individually, rather than seeing the bigger picture.

This year, though, a graduated income tax amendment (known as the Fair Tax) is on the ballot here in Illinois. Right now, our state’s constitution requires us to have a flat tax rate, in which everyone is taxed the same percentage. The proposed amendment would repeal that requirement, opening the door for a tax rate that changed based on your income. While effects can vary depending on a lot of individual factors, in general, if you belong to the 97% of Illinoisans that make less than $250,000, your taxes will decrease (Chicago Sun-Times). (You can check how it will affect you personally at the Illinois Fair Tax Calculator.)

I know most of you don’t live in Illinois, and you might be asking: why does this matter to me? You might not be able to vote for this specific resolution, but sooner or later, you’ll have to vote on tax-related changes in your area, and taxes greatly affect wealth inequality. While Americans are now much more wealth inequality in general, we sometimes overlook how taxes contribute to that disparity. According to leading economists, tax policy is one of the four primary reasons that between 1980 and 2007, the 1% most wealthy people in America doubled their total income share (Journal of Economic Perspectives). More recent data shows that even after the Great Recession, income concentration has continued to rise at the top (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities).

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Nearly every state government, including local governments, collects more taxes from poor families than from high-income families relative to their incomes, and more taxes are generally collected from middle-income families than high-income families.
Palma Joy Strand and Nicholas A. Mirkay in Racialized Tax Inequity: Wealth, Racism, And The U.S. System of Taxation

Our federal tax policies are geared towards letting the already wealthy accumulate more wealth and pass it down to their children. But even those of us who are not millionaires benefit disproportionately. Many people who consider themselves middle-class benefit from tax-preferred 401k pension plans, tax-deferred 529 college savings accounts, and mortgage deductions. Such policies and problems might look like a divide amongst the rich and the poor—issues of class, rather than race. But in America, “investigators of inequality… have documented that the rich tend to be White and the poor tend to be people of color” (Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy).

Compared to white Americans, a far smaller percentage of Black and Brown people own their homes or possess such accounts. They do not benefit from such tax breaks. Meanwhile, income disparities amongst Black and white people have increased since 1979. On average, white households are ten times richer than Black households and eight times richer than Latinx ones (Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy). A shocking 2016 study from the Federal Reserve and Duke University shows that in Boston, the median wealth of a white family was almost $250,000, while the median wealth of a non-immigrant Black American family was $8 (Federal Reserve of Boston). Eight dollars.

This is why a progressive income tax matters. In Illinois, the average income of the top 1% of families is over 65 times larger than the average income of the bottom 99% (Illinois Economic and Policy Institute). Yet the poorest 20% in Illinois pay 14.4% of their income in taxes, while the wealthiest 1% pays 7.4% (Shriver Center on Policy and Law). Illinois and other states with flat taxes are part of the Terrible Ten, “states that tax their poorest residents — those in the bottom 20 percent of the income scale — at rates up to six times higher than the wealthy” (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy).

So if you cheer when you get your tax refund, make sure to also remember that taxes don’t affect everyone equally. Our tax policies are designed to benefit the rich. A progressive income tax is only a small reform in a system that needs an entire haul, but it is a tangible, if limited, way to fight against wealth inequality. And, as always, while fighting for policy change, we can also directly make change on the ground. If you are able, commit to redistributing some of your income or wealth every month.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

On average, the 20% of Americans with the lowest incomes pay a state and local tax rate 1.5x higher than the 1% of Americans with the highest incomes (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy).
Tax inequity is one of the driving factors in wealth inequality in America (Journal of Economic Perspectives).
White households are, on average, 10x wealthier than Black households and 8x wealthier than Latinx ones (Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy).
In Illinois, voting for the Fair Tax will support tax equity.

RELATED ISSUES

9/28/2020 | Fight racial tax inequity.

9/30/2020 | Close the racial wealth gap.

6/11/2020 | Support black-owned businesses.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 10/5/20 Nicole Cardoza 10/5/20

Protect undocumented Americans.

Happy Monday!

We are 29 days from the election, and it's critical to remember how many voices deserve to be heard at the polls. Today, Jami calls us to action to protect undocumented immigrants here in America (and around the world), and provide sanctuary no matter where we live.

As always, you can support the newsletter by giving one-time on PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe monthly on Patreon. Thank you for your support.

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Protect your community and know your rights. Check out United We Dream’s (@unitedwedream) Deportation Defense toolkits for undocumented immigrants and allies.
If you witness an ICE raid or spot them in your community, call the MigraWatch Hotline at 1-844-363-1423. This will spread the word and keep others safe.
RAICES’s (@raicestexas) Take Action list provides many ways you can support—from tweets to petitions to donations to starting conversations with your family.
Donate to your local immigrant mutual aid network or to organizations like UndocuBlack

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

As we reach the last weeks of the presidential race, the Trump administration, hoping to persuade voters with a strong “law and order” message, is preparing immigration raids in sanctuary cities, according to the Washington Post. On September 24th, Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE) officials announced that they arrested over 500 people within a few days (LA Times). Across the country, undocumented immigrants and activists in the targeted cities, including Philadelphia, are getting their communities ready (Philadelphia Inquirer). In the 2018 fiscal year (the most recent year combined data is available), ICE and Border Patrol deported over 337,287 undocumented immigrants from the interior United States (Pew Research Center). This number is separate from people apprehended while attempting to cross the border; these were people who had built lives here.

For those of us who are documented citizens, we can’t understand the pervasive fear, stress, and anxiety that goes along with being undocumented. In a New York Times podcast, an undocumented mother from Nicaragua explains to the host: “Sometimes I cry… you’re like, oh, my God, what I did bad? Just staying in a country where I want to feel safe? I don’t know. I don’t know. Right now, I’m in my car talking to you, and I know, when I get through that door, I have to turn off that light and stay in my room. Why?” (NYTimes The Daily)

The woman goes on to describe the way she and her family live when there are rumors of immigration crackdowns: never opening the door, only using a small light, parking in a neighbor’s space instead of their own. Even if the threat never materializes, fear is a powerful tool, one that this administration wields like a hammer to keep undocumented Americans underground, unable to access basic needs like health care during the pandemic (NYTimes). While living in a sanctuary city can be safer for undocumented Americans, due to local protections, it can never be—or feel— truly safe.

The term sanctuary city, in fact, has no specific legal or government-defined meaning. “Lots of people use the unofficial term “sanctuary city” to refer to local jurisdictions (not just cities but counties and sometimes states) that don’t fully cooperate with federal efforts to find and deport unauthorized immigrants,” explains Dara Lind, in a useful primer on the history and context of sanctuary cities at Vox. “If that sounds vague, that’s because it is, and it gets at the tension between federal policy and local law enforcement generally used to carry out those laws.”

Most of us have a limited view of undocumented Americans—often because of the narrow, biased single narrative that our government and media push: Mexico, border crossings, DACA. In the new book The Undocumented Americans, author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (the first undocumented student to graduate from provides a nuanced, deeper context, pushing back on the limited narratives we usually see. “This book is for everybody who wants to step away from the buzzwords in immigration, the talking heads, the kids in graduation caps and gowns, and read about the people underground,” she writes in her introduction. “Not heroes. Randoms. People. Characters.”

As she says, undocumented Americans are not a monolithic block. An estimated 619,000 Black undocumented immigrants are residing in the United States (Pew Research Center). They are more likely than non-Black undocumented immigrants to be deported. “Although Black immigrants comprise just 5.4% of the unauthorized population in the United States, they made up a striking 10.6% of all immigrants in removal proceedings between 2003 and 2015,” reports the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. For more information, read interviews with undocumented Black Americans at ThinkProgress and the Atlantic.

If you or your family are (or have ever been) undocumented and want to share your experiences, feel free to share your experience at submissions@antiracismdaily.org; we will not share identifying details.

We can help provide sanctuary no matter where we live. United We Dream (the largest immigrant youth-led organization) states: “In a sanctuary… members of that community are united and prepared to protect immigrants from deportation forces… are united against police brutality... [Sanctuary spaces] are places in which the dignity and integrity of every individual as a human being is respected and preserved” (UWD Here to Stay Toolkit). We need to work to ensure that our actions are guided by such principles.

Part of that is becoming more intentional in thinking about how we privilege citizenship, and what barriers our communities, often unintentionally, present for undocumented people. Some of that means expanding our definitions: in one case, Black students discovered that they weren’t eligible for the few college scholarships open to undocumented students because they weren’t Latinx (The Atlantic). Often, it means asking ourselves how welcoming our spaces are for undocumented people. I used to work for a public library—an institution that prides itself as being for everyone— but at libraries like mine, you need identification, a discriminatory policy that prevents many undocumented people from receiving our services (Time). Undocumented Americans pay billions of dollars in local, state, and federal taxes per year (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy), but they are not able to receive many of the benefits they’re paying for.

Lastly: remember that the dehumanization of undocumented Americans didn’t start—and won’t end—with Trump. ICE, deportations, and border camps existed under the Obama, Bush, and Clinton administrations as well (NYTimes). Our immigration policies have been discriminatory since their implementation. We can fight for better policies, but we need to always remember that communities and people can provide sanctuary in ways that laws cannot.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

In the 2018 fiscal year, 337,287 undocumented immigrants were deported from the United States (Pew Research Center).
Black undocumented immigrants are more likely than other undocumented immigrants to be deported (Black Alliance for Just Immigration).
Undocumented Americans pay billions of dollars in local, state, and federal taxes per year (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy).
The dehumanization of undocumented Americans didn’t start—and won’t end—with Trump. We need to support them no matter who is president.

RELATED ISSUES

9/17/2020 | Abolish ICE.

8/10/2020 | Respect the relationship between name and identity.

6/17/2020 | Analyze representation in media.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 9/29/20 Nicole Cardoza 9/29/20

Learn about climate migration.

It's Tuesday and the world is still on fire. For many of us, global warming has never felt so urgent as it does now. And as we think about how to save the future, we can't forget that millions already impacted by environmental disasters are still in need. Today, Jami introduces the concept of climate migration to the newsletter. She explains how the vulnerable communities on the frontlines of environmental crisis need to be at the center of our path forward.

Some of you received incorrect key takeaways in yesterday's article on tax inequity. My mistake.You can find them updated on our archives.

Thank you for all your support! If you enjoy this newsletter, consider giving one-time on our website, PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe for $5/mo on our Patreon.

– Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Support people and organizations fighting for climate justice, not just against climate change. Check out Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy (@gcclp) and your local members of the Climate Justice Alliance (@cjaourpower).
Hold corporations--and the governmental bodies that enable them-- accountable for their actions. Companies benefit when we only focus on our individual actions (recycling, shopping, etc.) instead of corporate culpability.
Investigate the politicians on your ballot. What are their positions on the Green New Deal? On immigration? On social justice? These issues all affect climate migration.
Read more about international climate migration and American climate migration in ProPublica.

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

The wildfires blazing across the West Coast have brought climate migration back to the forefront of many American’s minds. This year, almost 8000 fires have burned over 3.6 million acres of land in California alone (Cal Fire), and many residents are wondering whether they can stay (CNN). Whether they should stay. Or whether they should pick up and move away from their families and communities, joining the ever-growing climate migration across the globe.

Climate migration refers to the movement of people due to climate change-induced environmental stressors, including heat, drought, and natural disasters. This is already happening globally; in 2018 alone, 17.2 million people were recorded as internally displaced (within their own countries) by environmental disasters (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre). But according to researchers, almost 162 million Americans will experience a “decline in their environment, namely, more heat and less water” within their lifetimes (NY Times). Another study predicts that 1 in 12 Americans in the South will have to move within 45 years due to environmental factors (Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists). While such migration will eventually affect everyone on earth, it matters to anti-racism work because of what communities are most affected. Climate change disproportionately affects communities of color, developing countries, and low-income and underserved populations (NAACP).

“It is important to acknowledge that those impacted the most by the climate crisis are victims to decades and centuries of norms, values, regulations, behaviors, and policies that have made it this way today,” wrote Chanté Harris in a previous newsletter on climate change. Hurricane Katrina is an excellent and terrible example. In the New Orleans area alone, 272,000 Black people were displaced, comprising 73% of the parish’s total displaced population (Congressional Research Service). Across the Gulf South, a lack of affordable housing has made it impossible for many former residents to return to the area.

In 2015, a decade after the disaster, there was only one-third as many public housing apartments in New Orleans as before the disaster, while housing costs in general New Orleans rose 40% (AmnestyUSA). The same year, a survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation/NPR showed that white residents and Black residents had had very different experiences after the crisis. 70% of white residents were able to return to their homes within a year, while less than half of Black residents were able to. Additionally, around half of both the Black and low-income populations did not believe recovery efforts had helped them. In contrast, about two-thirds of both the white and high-income populations thought that recovery efforts had helped them. (Kaiser Family Foundation). Read more about how climate migration will reshape America in New York Times Magazine.

After such disasters, people— especially people of color and those below the poverty line—have to pick between two terrible choices: to remain in their homes and communities (places that will likely be struck by disaster again, with governments that choose not to prioritize their recovery), or to leave. Internationally the situation is even more dire. In India, 600 million people are already facing a water crisis, whether because of drought or degradation of water quality (National Geographic). Each year, runoff declines and water becomes scarcer (Climate Institute). Such events are leading to mass climate migration across the globe at the same time as nationalistic immigration policies rise in the West (ProPublica). Here, yet again, the climate crisis goes head-to-head with America’s racist, xenophobic laws. Read ProPublica’s report and model of climate migration across international borders.

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Our cities and our communities are not prepared. In fact, our economic system and our social systems are only prepared to make profit off of people who migrate. This will cause rounds of climate gentrification, and it will also penalize the movement of people, usually through exploited labor and usually through criminalization.

Colette Pichon Battle, founder of the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy, an organization that “advances structural shifts toward ecological equity and climate justice in Gulf South communities of color.” Watch the rest of her TED Talk here.

Climate migration shows the necessity of climate justice, a movement that focuses specifically on addressing racial and socioeconomic inequities and transitioning away from our current toxic, exploitative economy. (Later, we’ll do a deeper dive into climate justice, but for now, check out the Just Transition Framework for Change from the Climate Justice Alliance.)

Issues like climate change can feel insurmountable for us individuals to deal with. We don’t always know what to do in response. And indeed, many well-meaning initiatives (like banning plastic straws) can shift the focus onto individual culpability instead of corporate accountability, while having their own unintended side effects (NPR). But what I do know is: there is power in community action. We cannot rely on our government or on a top-down plan of action. Look at the member list at Climate Justice Alliance for organizations in your area. Support them—by volunteering your time, money, or social media feed. And when you think or talk about climate change or climate migration, make sure you remember the ways that racism impacts the climate crisis.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Because of climate change, many areas are becoming uninhabitable for humans. The shifting environment is leading to climate migration across the globe.
In 2018 alone, at least 17.2 million people were displaced by environmental disasters (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre).
Climate change disproportionately affects communities of color, developing countries, and low-income and underserved populations (NAACP).

7/24/2020 | Reduce your plastic consumption.

7/12/2020 | Learn how air pollution exacerbates COVID-19.

7/5/2020 | Support the Navajo Nation through COVID-19.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 9/27/20 Nicole Cardoza 9/27/20

Protect the polls.

It's Sunday! I've paused our weekly COVID-19 reporting to bring you more ways to take action this election. Last week, we discussed the importance of a diverse justice system. Today, Jami takes us into the racial bias that affects our polls.

For a more historical view on the importance of protecting the polls, I highly recommend you read our reporting on voter suppression and the legacy of Rep. John Lewis. In addition, last week's piece on the modern-day poll tax only emphasizes this issue. Let me know if you sign up to be a poll worker!

Thank you for your contributions. If you enjoy this newsletter, you can give one-time on our website, PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe for $5/mo on our Patreon.

– Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Sign up to be a poll worker. Requirements differ from state to state, but positions are paid and usually require working on Election Day plus additional training. Go to workelections.com and select your state for more information.
Serve as a voting resource. Read up on voting rules and regulations in your county. Push out accurate information on early voting, absentee voting, etc. on social media. Make sure your friends know they can come to you with any questions!
Push for your workplace to make Election Day a paid holiday.

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

We’re less than two months away from Tuesday, November 3rd— Election Day. In many states, we’re fast approaching the deadline to register to vote. We recommend checking out Slate’s comprehensive guide on the best way to vote in every state, which includes not only all deadlines and rules for voter registration and mail-in voting, but also recommendations on which method of voting will most ensure your vote will actually be counted. Unfortunately, as our past newsletters on voter suppression and Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting have shown, our government doesn’t make it easy for us to vote, or for those votes to be counted accurately.

This year, the lack of poll workers will make it even more difficult for people to vote. During the pandemic, many poll workers—the bulk of whom are over 60 years old (U.S. Election Assistance Commission)—are staying away. Election officials are scrambling to find younger people to fill the gaps, as the lack of poll workers has already hindered many state’s primaries (NPR). On the April 7 primary in Milwaukee—a city that usually has 180 polling places— officials only had enough workers to staff five, leading to extremely long wait times (CNN). This disproportionately affected the city’s large Black population (Business Insider). Even in normal, non-pandemic years, Black and Latinx people wait almost 50% longer than white voters (Brennan Center).

Without enough polling places, people with the least access are the most likely to be deterred from voting. It’s hard to vote if you don’t have a car, and this year, you have to go across town instead of walking a couple of blocks to your polling place. It’s hard to vote if you can’t get time off work, or if you have a kid, and this year you have to wait in line for two hours. This is why having enough poll workers so important—because the deficit disproportionately disadvantages low-income voters and voters of color (The Atlantic).

Poll workers also individually can influence who actually gets to cast a ballot. Before, I didn’t realize that they had any authority; I thought that their duties were just administrative or clerical. But research shows that even though election workers don’t make the voting rules, they can influence how those rules are actually implemented. Poll workers, election officials, and county recorders often have discretion in what kind of minor errors in voter forms or registrations they can decide to let slide or not. Studies show that election workers enforce the rules unevenly, and the decisions often come down to racial bias (Michigan Journal of Race and Law).

In Big Horn County, Montana, officials made the voter registration process more complicated and technical for Indigenous voters than for white voters. Election workers looked for minor errors to use as excuses to deny the Indigenous voters’ registrations (Windy Boy v. County of Big Horn). Another report from Arizona showed that Indigenous voters were often “placed… on ‘suspense lists’ (similar to inactive lists) when the recorder was not satisfied that an applicant sufficiently clarified his or her address. There are few guidelines on what should constitute an adequate address in Arizona; instead, it is left to the recorder’s discretion and may be influenced by implicit bias” (Michigan Journal of Race and Law).

Similarly, the ACLU discovered that “black and Latino voters in Florida were more than two times as likely to have their mail-in ballots rejected as white voters—because of a mix of voter error and how the state processes ballots” (The Atlantic). But blaming these rejections as “voter error” is a way officials can blame the voters themselves without taking into account the inequality in voter information access. Even when voters ask the right questions, they might not get the right answers depending on their race.

In a study from before the 2012 election, researchers sent almost two thousand emails to legislators in 14 states, feigning to be constituents unsure if they could vote without a driver’s license. Half the emails were signed “Jacob Smith”; the other half were signed “Santiago Rodriguez.” None of the states actually required an ID, but legislators that supported voter ID laws responded to “Jacob Smith” much more than “Santiago Rodriguez.” Even legislators that didn’t support ID laws responded more frequently to the white-appearing name, though the difference was not as large (Legislative Studies Quarterly). These reports and studies show how people of color face barriers in voting – not only from our unjust voter suppression laws but also from clerical and administrative workers all throughout the voting process.

Voting is a tactic and should just be one aspect in our fight for equity and justice, alongside protests, community organizing, and other types of activism. But if you are willing and able, you can apply to be a poll worker by going to workelections.com and clicking your state. I just sent in my application here in Illinois. Am I nervous about the coronavirus risk? Yes. But I’m more nervous about voter disenfranchisement, and I will take all the precautions I can. If you can’t be a poll worker, help other people vote. Study up on all the voting regulations in your county and serve as an information hub for your family, friends, and social media feed. And of course, make sure your registration is accurate and up-to-date.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

At polling places, Black and Latinx voters wait in line almost 50% longer than voters (Brennan Center).
We don’t have enough poll workers this year because of coronavirus. A lack of poll workers disproportionately affects voting access for people of color. (You can sign up to be a poll worker via workelections.com!)
Research shows that officials are more likely to reject voter registrations and mail-in ballots from voters of color (Michigan Journal of Race and Law).
Voting is one tactic among many. No matter who wins, we cannot stop our fight for racial equity and justice.

9/9/2020 | Make the census count.

9/7/2020 | Learn about critical race theory.

8/4/2020 | Protect the right to vote by mail.

7/21/2020 | Honor the legacy of Rep. John Lewis.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Nicole Cardoza 9/23/20 Nicole Cardoza 9/23/20

Reject the modern-day poll tax.

Yesterday was National Voter Registration Day. And today there are still millions of people who can't vote in the U.S. this upcoming election. As part of our ongoing series on covering various forms of voter suppression, today we're analyzing how the modern-day poll tax disincentivizes people to vote.

Today's article – written by Jami – centers the voter disenfranchisement in Florida and the work of the FRRC. If you can do one thing today, share their work using the action items below.

Thank you for your contributions! If you enjoy this newsletter, you can give one-time on our website, PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe for $5/mo on our Patreon.

– Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Donate to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition’s We Got the Vote fund. 100% of these tax-deductible donations will help returning citizens pay their court fines so they can vote and fully participate in their communities.
Listen to Voting Rights for Returning Citizens episode of The Returning Citizen podcast, which explains the issue in a national context.
Read through the ACLU Florida’s collection of actions to fight racism and white supremacy in the state. Choose one or more to participate in.

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

On Friday, September 11th, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld SB 7066, Florida’s law requiring returning citizens to pay off their court debts before being able to register to vote (NPR). (The term returning citizen refers to people with prior convictions, in this case felony convictions specifically.) The law blocks almost 800,000 potential voters, a disproportionate number of whom are Black (The Guardian). In other words, it’s a poll tax—a fee one must pay in order to vote—and like the Jim Crow era poll taxes, it’s specifically designed to suppress the votes of low-income and Black citizens. But here in 2020, the poll tax is back again.

That this is happening in Florida is relevant. Florida is not only a swing state, but also considered one of the presidential race’s primary battlegrounds (FiveThirtyEight). It also has a history of poll taxes (Richmond University). People convicted of felonies were not allowed to vote until Floridians overwhelmingly passed a referendum restoring those voting rights in 2018, enfranchising 1.4 million people (NYTimes), including one in every five Black adults (Sentencing Project). In a swing state, 1.4 million potential votes matter a lot; in 2012, Obama beat Romney in Florida by just 74,000 votes—an 0.88% margin (St. Augustine Record).

Just eight months after these voting rights were restored, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed the new law requiring payment of court debts (Washington Post). This was a way to again disenfranchise the same population without explicitly saying so, as 774,000 of those 1.4 million owe debt, according to a University of Florida report (Courthouse News).

This May, a federal judge determined that DeSantis’s law was unconstitutional, but now the 11th Circuit Court has overturned that decision, making it valid again. Florida’s system also makes it difficult to know how much these potential voters owe, or how much they’ve already paid, as Slate outlines. The case could wind its way to the Supreme Court, but that takes time, and the Florida voter registration deadline is October 4th. For this presidential election, the damage is done.

The poll tax as we understand it now developed in response to the 15th Amendment, added in 1870, which stated “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” (National Archive/Our Documents). The idea that Black Americans—including formerly enslaved people— could vote did not go over well with many people in power.

“After the 1870s, particularly in the southern states, there was an effort to restrict any kind of political power for African Americans,” William Pretzer, the curator of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, told Smithsonian. “There was great concern on the part of the white power structure that this was a revolution in their lives.”

In response, white legislators enacted voter suppression laws that included required literacy tests (as we discussed in a previous newsletter) and poll taxes, which effectively blocked not only Black Americans, but also Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and other people of color whose growing numbers struck fear into the white political elite. In Texas, voters were required to pay around $1.50 ($30 in 2020 dollars) to vote, unless they were covered by a “grandfather clause” which exempted anyone who could vote before the Civil War (or whose ancestors could vote) from paying the tax (African American Policy Forum). As only white men could vote before the Civil War, this meant that only the descendents of white men were exempt from paying the tax. (The law also disenfranchised poor white immigrants who came to America after the war.) Similar laws were enacted across all the former Confederate states (Smithsonian). Thus the Southern political elite ensured that while the federal law might give Black voters the vote in theory, the state poll tax still forbade it in practice, consolidating power amongst the wealthy white.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 24th Amendment, which abolished the poll tax and guaranteed American citizens the right to vote regardless of wealth (National Archives). “There can be no one too poor to vote,” he said; everyone deserved the “freedom to vote without bans or barriers” (NYTimes).

And yet Florida’s law clearly shows that there are still people too poor to vote. At least three-fourths of people convicted of felonies in Florida owe the courts money, and most of them cannot pay it (NYTimes). Often, the word “felony” can call up images of murder, but driving three times with a suspended license is a felony in Florida, while murderers are explicitly excluded from the voting law. Instead, in a racist state with a history of overpolicing and overconvicting Black communities (ACLU Florida), the law is, again, a way to block poor people and Black people from voting while not expressly saying so. Like those Jim Crow voting laws, Florida’s law is a smokescreen. It is unconstitutional. It is voter suppression. Support the work of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition and donate to their We Got the Vote fund to support the cause and help returning citizens vote.

Key Takeaways

Florida’s law SB 7066 suppresses the vote of returning citizens (people with prior felony convictions) by requiring them to pay off their court debts first. SB 7066 affects around 774,000 people, a disproportionate number of whom are Black (The Guardian).
This law follows in the footsteps of the Jim Crow-era poll taxes, which effectively blocked Black voters and other voters of color.
The 24th Amendment (passed in 1964) abolished the poll tax and was supposed to ensure that anyone could vote regardless of wealth. But the overwhelming majority of those affected by SB 7066 do not have the means to pay their debts (NPR).

RELATED ISSUES

9/9/2020 | Make the census count.

7/21/2020 | Honor the legacy of Rep. John Lewis.

6/29/2020 | Don't vote for Trump.

6/24/2020 | Fight voter suppression.

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Nicole Cardoza 9/18/20 Nicole Cardoza 9/18/20

Reject racial gaslighting.

It's Friday! And we're introducing a new term to the newsletter: racial gaslighting.

This plays a major part in the systemic medical violence we've unpacked over the past week. And it's playing out in politics. When people and systems minimize the pain and trauma that people of color experience, they shield themselves from accountability and allow that harm to continue. Jami offers some specific examples of how this plays out in various spaces, and particularly how it impacts women of color.

Tomorrow is Saturday, where we host our weekly Study Hall. Reply to this email with any questions or insights from the content we covered this past week and I'll do my best to get to them!

Thank you for all your support! You can give one-time on our website, PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe for $5/mo on our Patreon.

– Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Watch how you and your friends/colleagues respond to the experiences of people of color. Consider how they may be gaslighting based on their comments, and inform them on why their approach is harmful.
If you’re considering two sides to a story, make sure you think about the power dynamics between the parties (in race, gender, age, position, etc.)
Don’t support businesses or organizations that deny or undermine the experiences of people of color.
Consider how racial gaslighting may play a part of the rhetoric of the upcoming election.

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

In March, Margot Gage Witvliet developed coronavirus symptoms after a trip to Europe. Four months later, many of those symptoms still remain, putting her in the camp of what are known as “long-haulers”--coronavirus patients whose symptoms persist for months, deviating from the typically understood trajectory of the illness (read more about her experience at The Conversation). The experience of long-haulers is finally receiving more attention, but for many sufferers, it’s too little, too late.

“Employers have told long-haulers that they couldn’t possibly be sick for that long. Friends and family members accused them of being lazy. Doctors refused to believe they had COVID-19… This ‘medical gaslighting,’ whereby physiological suffering is downplayed as a psychological problem such as stress or anxiety, is especially bad for women, and even worse for women of color,” writes Ed Yong in his thorough examination of long-haulers, whose numbers could potentially be in the hundreds of thousands (The Atlantic).

Most of our popular understanding of the term gaslighting is within the context of abusive relationships, as that is the context of the term’s origin (BBC). Gaslighting is a psychological method of manipulation used to deny the victim’s experience and make them question their reality, judgment, and sanity (Britannica). The goal is to make the victim dependent on the deceiver.

But gaslighting can also happen on a structural level. Instead of an individual abuser, the gaslighter is an abusive system denying the reality of entire groups and communities in order to perpetuate power imbalances. “Gaslighting is a structural phenomenon… It is a technique of violence that produces asymmetric harms for different populations,” writes Elena Ruiz, a professor of philosophy and American Indian and Indigenous Studies (PhilArchive).

Women as a whole are often targets of gaslighting (read the American Sociological Review for how gaslighting relates to gender-based stereotypes and inequality), and articles warning women about gaslighting techniques abound. Less is said in popular media about racial gaslighting, which specifically refers to “the political, social, economic and cultural process that perpetuates and normalizes a white supremacist reality through pathologizing those who resist” (Politics, Groups, and Identities Journal). Racial gaslighting says: the system is not broken, you are broken.

These are things that most readers versed in anti-racism work will already know (that the system blames people of color instead of itself), but looking at them as forms of gaslighting can help understand how such psychological manipulation is intertwined at the individual and structural levels. Interpersonal gaslighting (within relationships) is usually successful because of systemic gaslighting because the relationship is “rooted in social inequalities” (American Sociological Association). The framework can help us understand how white supremacy remains entrenched in our society.

Such racial gaslighting appears in many different areas. An academic study on a police force in Hamilton, Ontario, found that the way the police explained away their ID and carding tactics was a form of gaslighting. In their media appearances, the police used “obfuscation techniques” (lies, misrepresentations) to undermine local people of color, who had been arguing that the police’s carding techniques were discriminatory. They used gaslighting to deny their own structural racism (SAGE Publishing).

In the field of medicine, gaslighting happens when health professionals minimize, ignore, or disbelieve patients’ symptoms and experiences (Health). Examples of this include doctors blaming physical symptoms on mental illness without justification, or providers refusing to request follow-up tests because they don’t believe their patients. Medical gaslighting is especially pernicious because of the inherent power differential between doctors and their patients, even before adding in the intersections of gender and race. Doctors have been socialized to take female patients (NY Times) and patients of color less seriously, and medical professionals still hold many racial biases (National Institute of Health). While practitioners usually participate in medical gaslighting without meaning to harm their patients, individual intent doesn’t mitigate the systemic impact. Their disregard has dire health outcomes, as explained in our recent newsletters on Black maternal health and Black mental health.

“Missteps and misunderstandings, even by well-seasoned medical professionals, are human, but medical gaslighting is not. Normal test results in patients with chronic pain, unexplained sensitivities to the world, or fatigue should provoke more investigation, rather than a weak handoff.”

Dr. Anne Maitland for Op Med

A 2016 study by patient safety experts suggests that medical error is the third-leading cause of death in America, resulting in over 250,000 deaths per year (Johns Hopkins). But medical error is not nearly as widely researched as other causes of deaths, and we don’t know how many deaths per year can be attributed to medical gaslighting.

What we do know is that medical gaslighting especially affects patients of color. One doctor described the stereotypes patients of color with myalgic encephalomyelitis (a mostly invisible illness with symptoms similar to those of COVID long-haulers) faced: Black and South Asian patients were suspected of faking their symptoms to avoid work, while East Asian patients’ symptoms were thought to be the result of working too much (ME Action). In other words, their actual medical conditions were dismissed and attributed instead to racist stereotypes.

Think about the words of Canadian policy expert Emily Riddle: “To be an Indigenous woman in this country is to intimately understand both interpersonal and systemic gaslighting… Any Indigenous woman who questions anyone who demeans her or a system that perpetuates violence against her is bound to be called difficult.” (The Globe and Mail). To effectively combat the effects of systemic gaslighting in our own thinking, we need to question not just what we believe, but who we believe.

Key Takeaways

A whistleblower filed a complaint against ICE for “medical neglect" at the detention camp she worked at, including mass hysterectomies without detainees' content
Forced sterilization was a state-sanctioned practice, often funded by the federal government, that disproportionately impacted women and women of color during the 19th century
Forced sterilizations procedures are sexist, xenophobic, racist, and ableist, and often homophobic
Unwanted sterilizations are still happening today

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Nicole Cardoza 9/15/20 Nicole Cardoza 9/15/20

End Hollywood whitewashing.

Happy Tuesday!

With the recent release of Mulan and Concrete Cowboy, and the Oscars' new standards on diversity, I thought it might be a good time to discuss the role of whitewashing in Hollywood – and how it has perpetuated harmful stereotypes about people of color.

As many of us continue to stay home, WEAR A MASK, and scour Netflix for something new, it's a good time to invest in watching more diverse stories, celebrating the works of filmmakers of color, and analyzing how our worldview is shaped by what we watch. Jami does a great job of analyzing the many ways whitewashing persists, even in today's times.

If you're enjoying these newsletters, consider making a contribution. To support our work, you can give one-time on our website, PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe for $5/mo on our Patreon.

– Nicole

Oh and one more thing – last night the Aurora council voted unanimously to ban the use of ketamine by law enforcement until the investigation is complete 🎉

TAKE ACTION

Pick one of your favorite movies or TV shows. Do a deep dive into the cast, directors, writers, and producers and reflect on the following:

Are they predominantly white?
Are there any people of color with decision-making ability?
How did actors and staff of color feel during production? (Twitter is often an excellent place to find behind-the-scenes information.)

Ask yourself why you relate to the storylines or characters.

Do the characters look like you?
Do their experiences mirror yours?
Are you resistant to TV shows with main characters that aren’t like you?

Speak out against whitewashing when you see it. Public backlash is one of producers’ strongest motivators.

Reject the idea of whiteness as the default.

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

In the Hollywood and media context, whitewashing usually refers to the practice of casting white actors as characters of color, though it can also refer more generally to “preferring white actors, directors, cinematographers, and so on, over equally qualified people of color, as in the Oscar nominations,” (Merriam-Webster). (Here, for ease of use, we’ll use the word actors to refer to people of all genders who perform).

Often whitewashing occurs when the film is based on the life of a real person or adapted from a book. In some cases, a white actor’s appearance is altered to fit the role, as when Jim Sturgess’s eyes were digitally altered to appear almond-shaped for his Asian character in Cloud Atlas (Hyperallergenic). While this technical ability is new, it is merely the latest step in a long history of white actors donning garish makeup and outlandish costumes to depict racist caricatures and stereotypes (Paste).

As our past newsletter on digital blackface explains, “Minstrel shows gained popularity in the 1830s in New York, where white performers with blackened faces (most used burnt cork or shoe polish) would don tattered clothing and imitate enslaved Black people. These performances characterized Black people as lazy, ignorant, superstitious, and hypersexual.” Later this tradition expanded into brownface and yellowface, with white actors performing as other races and ethnicities explicitly to dehumanize them. Many contemporary movies and TV shows still depict people of color as flat and stereotypical, as shown in a Native professor’s examination of Jane Krakowski’s Native character in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (CutchaRislingBaldy.com).

Whitewashing also happens when characters that were people of color in the original material are changed to be white characters in the film, as in the movie 21 (IndieWire). While this bypasses the problem of blackface, yellowface, or brownface, it leads to the same result: rendering actual people of color invisible. Such casting often results from the belief that white actors are more capable than actors of color (Teen Vogue), or that it’s simply too difficult to find actors of color to fit the roles.

In every whitewashing controversy, defenders often ignore the context in which whitewashing occurs. They often fire back responses like, “Is someone of British descent not allowed to play someone with French descent?” But this is deliberately obtuse in a media landscape when the flipside doesn’t apply: people of color are not considered for white roles and are underrepresented in general.

A study of the 100 top-grossing movies from 2013 showed the racial breakdown of cast members by race: “74.1% were White, 14.1% Black, 4.9% Hispanic, 4.4% Asian, 1.1% Middle Eastern, <1% American Indian or Alaskan Native, and 1.2% were from "other" races/ethnicities. No meaningful change has been observed in the frequency of any racial/ethnic group on screen in 600 popular films between 2007 and 2013” (University of Southern California). More broadly, whitewashing takes place alongside structural oppression. In those minstrel shows, white actors assumed Black roles while Black people were still enslaved; later, white actors assumed Asian roles while Asian people were still not allowed to enter America (Teen Vogue).

These choices happen—whitewashed casts, stereotypical characters—often because the people making the decisions behind-the-scenes are also predominantly white. Despite people of color constituting almost 40% of the population, in 2016-17, they represented only 12.6% of movie directors, 7.8% of movie writers, and 9.4% of TV show creators, according to the Hollywood Diversity Report (University of California-Los Angeles). While detractors are quick to point out tentpole examples like Black Panther, these statistics prove that such movies are the exception, not the rule.

A goal, of course, is more representation for people of color in Hollywood across all roles. But representation is not enough. As Hari Ziyad explains, “ ‘Representation matters’ cannot be the beginning and the end of the conversation. Representation matters, but only when the white gaze doesn’t” (Afropunk). Hollywood is about veneers, and a diverse cast can provide cover for endemic behind-the-scenes problems. Even directors and producers of color can only do so much when we have an entire media system that privileges white stories and white identity, when Hollywood is inherently “imbued with white supremacy and a patriarchal structure designed to proffer advantages unequally,” as Elaine Low and Angelique Jackson outline (Variety).

Most of us can’t control who gets cast in the latest blockbuster, but we can denounce the beliefs that lead to whitewashing. If we reject the idea that whiteness is the default (APA PsycNet), we also reject the idea that white actors can invisibly inhabit any role. We can support directors of color, Black filmmakers, indie studios, and other people pushing for change in media. We can question what stories feel relatable to us and why. “So long as whitewashing continues to occur, we need to be conscious of whose stories are being marginalized and whose stories are not being told in mainstream media,” sociologist and author Nancy Wang Yuen told Teen Vogue.

Whitewashing exposes which identities Hollywood sees as being worthy of the big screen, what kind of audience it desires, and whose experiences it sees as universal and whose experiences it sees as niche. As moviegoers (during non-pandemic times!), we can make a difference with our wallets, our views, and our support.

Key Takeaways

In a Hollywood context, whitewashing is the practice of casting white actors in roles that were initially designed to be people of color, while overlooking actors of color (who are underrepresented in movies and TV).
America has a long history of white actors portraying people of color in dehumanizing, caricature-driven ways (as in blackface, brownface, and yellowface).
Despite people of color constituting almost 40% of the population, they represent only 12.6% of movie directors, 7.8% of movie writers, and 9.4% of TV show creators (University of California-Los Angeles).
While representation is a step forward, it is not enough in a Hollywood that structurally privileges white identities and white stories.

7/10/2020 | Understand the role of cancel culture.

7/9/2020 | Acknowledge the harm of microaggressions.

6/15/2020 | Diversify your media consumption.

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Nicole Cardoza 9/8/20 Nicole Cardoza 9/8/20

Reject the model minority myth.

Happy Tuesday, everyone! In today's Anti-Racism Daily, Jami unpacks the "model minority myth" and its lasting impact on the racism and discrimination marginalized groups experience.

And remember, this is a work in protest. Especially when everything feels overwhelming and hopeless. Each action we take brings us one step further to the equitable future we all deserve. Keep going ✊🏾.

Thank you all for your contributions. To support our work, you can give one-time on our website, PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe for $5/mo on our Patreon.

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Unpack who you consider “Asian American.” If you think things like “there are so many Asian Americans at this college,” what kinds of Asian Americans are you actually talking about?
Take time to learn more about the history of Asian Americans in your community, particularly refugees and the recently immigrated.
Resist media rhetoric that portrays recent protests as destructive and violent, instead of as actions in response to the destructive, violent anti-Black practices in our policing and government.

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin

After our recent article on affirmative action (Anti-Racism Daily), several readers were curious about the myth of the model minority. As an Asian American, this myth has followed me all my life; I was exposed to its pervasive narrative long before I ever heard the term. As a child, I heard flippant “of course you did well on this test— you’re Asian!” comments from friends at school, and dismissive comments about other people of color from elderly relatives at home, who believed that since we had made it, everyone else should have, too.

But these types of remarks reflect just the surface of the myth. The core of the model minority myth is the idea that Asian Americans were “able to rise to ‘honorary white’ status through assimilation, hard work and intelligence… [the myth is used] to put down and dismiss other communities of color; especially Black folks and Black political resistance,” explains the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA). The term “model minority” was coined by white journalist William Pettersen in a 1966 article called “Success Story, Japanese-American Style” (New York Times Magazine). He praised Japanese Americans for their triumph over adversity while explicitly comparing them with what he called the “problem minorities,” by which he meant first and foremost Black Americans.

Pettersen’s article did not appear out of a vacuum, but amidst major events that were shaping the face of America. In 1965 Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which replaced a restrictive national-origins quota with one that prioritized family members and the highly educated (House of Representatives Archive). This act replaced the immigration laws of 1917 and 1924, which had banned virtually all immigration from Asia (Densho). An unintended outcome of the 1965 law was a dramatic increase in immigration from non-European countries—especially Asian ones (History). (I can see how these laws have shaped my own family’s journey: my Japanese and Okinawan great-grandparents moved to America during the decades prior to the laws’ implementation, while my Taiwanese father and his family came in 1971, six years after the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act).

Secondly, the model minority myth appeared during the 1960s civil rights movement. “Numerous politicians and academics and the mainstream media contrasted Chinese with African Americans,” writes historian Ellen D. Wu (LA Times). “They found it expedient to invoke Chinese “culture” to counter the demands of civil rights and black power activists for substantive change.” These people believed that East Asians’ success meant that it should be possible for Black Americans to achieve success without dismantling the system. There’s no racism, the myth tries to sweetly convince: anyone can succeed in America, as long as you’re compliant and hard-working. It elides the differences in the experiences in communities of color, and particularly the trauma, disenfranchisement, and dehumanization that Black people have faced in this country since 1619 when the first slave ship arrived (The 1619 Project).

Another problematic outcome of the myth is that it also presents Asian America as a homogenous monolith, ignoring the wide diversity within. In 2017, the poverty rate among Japanese Americans (the group Pettersen originally called the “model minority”) was 3.8%, the lowest of all Asian ethnicities, while the rate among Burmese Americans was 28.4% (AAPI Data). But the model minority myth centers East Asians and the wealthiest Asian Americans, while rendering the rest—North, West, South, and Southeast Asians, struggling Asian Americans—invisible. We ignore the communities and the cultures that were colonized and that were most affected by our interference in the Vietnam War and the Secret War (LA Times).

The myth can be hard to denounce, partially because some Asian Americans (particularly wealthy East Asians, who benefit the most) wholeheartedly buy into it. And why not? The myth presents us as being responsible for our own success, as being people who fought against adversity and won. This can ring true to us, for as descendants of recent immigrants (or immigrants ourselves), we often do remember the struggle and discrimination we’ve faced. But we cannot allow ourselves to have tunnel vision at our own experience while ignoring the differences between our own experiences and those of Black Americans. The myth can be seductive, making us feel like we earned everything, deserve everything, which leads to us aligning ourselves with whiteness instead of being in solidarity with other people of color. Today, this is most visible in wealthy East Asians’ lawsuits against affirmative action, steps that align them with whiteness instead of in solidarity with other people of color (as Allen Chang outlines in his thorough article at Vox).

While most people today don’t throw around the terms “model minority” or “problem minority,” the stereotypes behind the myth are still pervasive today, seeping into our culture in insidious ways. When the media decries the recent “violent protests,” besides ignoring the role of the police as instigators (NY Times), they further the narrative that if Black people just protested in the right way, they would achieve their goals. History has proven otherwise. We cannot believe this rhetoric. We cannot use the supposed success of Asian Americans to lay blame at the feet of Black Americans instead of at the towering, crushing heel of systemic racism.

key takeaways

Critical race theory is a school of thought that analyzes how racism persists in social and political systems
The Trump administration aims to remove diversity trainings that use critical race theory, which impacts the federal government and conversations on race as a whole
Trump has fueled racism and divisiveness to maintain and gain power.

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Nicole Cardoza 9/1/20 Nicole Cardoza 9/1/20

Learn the legacy of Japanese American incarceration.

It's Tuesday and a new month. And here's hoping it brings some ease, grace, and collective healing.

I didn't learn about the Japanese American "internment" in school. Perhaps you didn't either. Yet this narrative isn't surprising considering our country's relationship with exclusion and inequitable criminal justice system. I'm grateful to have Jami's article – laced with heartbreaking personal narratives – carry us through history for today's Anti-Racism Daily. You can read more stories on incarceration on our updated archives page (long overdue for a facelift).

Thank you for all who make this work possible. If you're inspired by this work, you can give one-time on our website, PayPal, or via Venmo (@nicoleacardoza). Or, subscribe monthly to our Patreon.

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Investigate how your state or local school district teaches Japanese American incarceration. If it’s inadequate, contact them. (Feel free to share this newsletter).
Read more about the history of Japanese America on Densho’s Core Story.
Follow Japanese American activist organizations on Instagram like @tsuruforsolidarity, @jasforjustice, and @nikkeiresisters.

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin

“I was wondering how will they ever put all of us in a place that small. What surprised me most was why did the soldiers have to stand guard with guns...and to tell you the truth the way some people stared at us, it chilled me a bit.”

My grandfather, then sixteen, reflecting in 1944 on his arrival at Amache (Granada) Relocation Camp two years earlier.

Often when we talk about it amongst ourselves, we call it camp. To others, the benign-sounding word could recall sleepaway summers, pitched tents, sing-alongs around a campfire. But when I ask other yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese Americans) if their grandparents were also in camp, what I mean is: was your family also forcibly removed from their homes, from their lives? Were they also labeled the enemy and locked up for years? We call it camp, but what we mean is incarceration. What we mean is that we are just one link in the long American tradition of locking up people of color for no other reason than we are here. The effects of such incarceration linger within us, years and years after the inhabitants are set “free.”

On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which commanded the forcible evacuation of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. As a result, 120,000 Japanese Americans (and some Canadians and Latin Americans of Japanese descent) were incarcerated (National Archives). He passed this order despite a report commissioned by Congress that showed that Japanese Americans posed no threat. The army general in charge of the West Coast summed up the general government feeling when he stated, “They are a dangerous element, whether loyal or not,” (Smithsonian).

In school— if you learned about this event at all— you probably learned about it under the name internment. But this is inaccurate, as the Japanese American-led organization Densho explains: “‘Internment’ refers to the legally permissible, though morally questionable, detention of ‘enemy aliens’ in time of war. There were approximately 8,000 Issei (“first generation”) arrested as enemy aliens and subjected to what could be described as “internment” in a separate set of camps… This term becomes a misleading, othering euphemism when applied to American citizens detained by their own government.” Today, we choose to call this event what it was: incarceration.

It was incarceration based (like much mass incarceration) not on facts or danger, but on racism and economics. After Japan’s government bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, anti-Japanese American rhetoric was pervasive. At the same time, lobbyists representing “competing economic interests or nativist groups” pressured the federal government to remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast (Our Documents/National Archives). Incarceration also functioned as a land grab, as many white farmers were resentful of Japanese American farmers’ increasing presence. The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians estimated that Japanese Americans lost what in 2020 would be $3.38 billion in property and $7 billion in income as a result of incarceration (Personal Justice Denied via National Archives).

After the order was passed, Japanese Americans were given only a few days to evacuate, only allowed to pack what they could carry. “Many of the neighbors came to offer us ridiculously low prices for our possessions,” my grandfather recalls. Their refrigerator went for a dollar; the $700 car all the family had saved up for went for $100. They were taken to Merced, California, where they spent six months in one of fifteen euphemistically titled “assembly centers,” while the Army built permanent incarceration camps (Densho). In September, my grandfather and his family were evacuated again to Amache (Granada), a camp in the middle of the Colorado desert, where they would spend the next three years in a 20x25 barracks (Amache.org).

Not one Japanese American was ever found guilty of espionage or any other war crime.

In 1980, Congress organized a federal commission to investigate the impact of Executive Order 9066. Its 467-page report (fittingly titled Personal Justice Denied) called the camps a “grave injustice, motivated by racial prejudice, war hysteria, and the failure of political leadership” (Personal Justice Denied via National Archive). Later, the Sanseis (third-generation Japanese Americans) fought for reparations for their parents and grandparents (Densho). This decades-long battle, fraught with dissent even within our community, led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, also called H.R. 442 in honor of the highly decorated Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team (Go For Broke). The act stipulated that the $20,000 in compensation would only be paid out to survivors themselves, not descendants of any incarcerees who had died, because the government did not want to set a precedent or framework for reparations for “the descendants of slaves, [Indigenous people] forced onto reservations, Mexicans who lost land, and other historical victims of racism,” (Densho).

Today there are many Japanese American activist groups that utilize our past to work in solidarity with other people of color. We try to use the legacy of Japanese American incarceration as an opening to speak to our elders and our community. Japanese American-led activist groups are using our history to mobilize our community to protest detention sites (Tsuru for Solidarity), combat anti-Blackness (Japanese Americans Citizens League on Facebook), and fight against mass incarceration (Nikkei Uprising on Facebook). At a recent protest at Cook County Jail, young Japanese Americans lay origami cranes to honor those killed by police and who died in prison now, and our ancestors who died inside the World War II camps (NPR).

Densho’s mission – “to preserve and share history of the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans to promote equity and justice today” – succinctly summarizes why it’s so important to remember these historical events: because the past links to the present and the future. Today, Japanese Americans as a group are no longer treated the same way we were back then (though anti-Asian sentiment during the coronavirus hearkens back to those tropes, as I write elsewhere). But incarceration and its related trauma have profoundly shaped our community and our culture.

Last week, my grandfather turned 92. He still can remember the names of all the people he knew at Amache. He remembers what cell block they lived in, what hometowns they left behind. It happened eighty years ago, and it still affects him — and us, his children and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren — to this day. The racist actions our government is taking today — the border camps, the mass incarceration, the police brutality — are going to reverberate in communities of color for decades to come.

key takeaways

During World War II, over 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated because of the American government’s racist, unfounded fears.
President Roosevelt signed this executive order despite Congress finding no evidence to support it.
No Japanese American was ever found guilty of espionage or any war crime.
After a long battle, Japanese American camp survivors received monetary reparations—yet our government still refuses to discuss reparations for slavery or for Indigenous people.

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Nicole Cardoza 8/17/20 Nicole Cardoza 8/17/20

Fight for equity in remote learning.

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Happy Monday! My day job is in education (Yoga Foster) so I've been watching the decisions on back-to-school unfold with a blend of anticipation and dread.

For today's newsletter, Jami wrote a fascinating piece on what's unfolding in education this fall. I would love to hear how you're navigating this upcoming school year if you have children in school – reply to this email with your thoughts.

And thank you to everyone that's contributed money to the newsletter! If you haven't already, you can give on our website, Paypal, Venmo (@nicoleacardoza) or subscribe $5/mo on Patreon. And it's certainly not required, but always appreciated.

Nicole

ps – we've received a few questions about what is happening with the USPS. If you haven't already, we highly recommend reading last week's newsletter on the vote by mail situation and how you can take action.

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TAKE ACTION

Read your local schools’ reopening plans. How do they support—or fail to support—low-income families?
Contact your local school board, many of whom are specifically seeking responses from the community right now, with your concerns.
Reflect on how your position and access shapes the choices you and/or your family is making during this pandemic. How can you support other families?
Follow Black educators on social media for their perspectives.

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin

In the last month, 180,000 have children tested positive for coronavirus (American Academy of Pediatrics). This 90% four-week increase happened to coincide with many students in the South and Midwest returning to school. Parents all over the country are worried about whether it is safe to send their children back to school— and if not, what to do instead.

The situation we’re in is terrible for all parents, all students, and all families. Talk to any parents, and you’ll hear their fear, their worry. But what sometimes gets lost in the social media arguments about school reopening is that, while this affects everyone, it does not affect everyone equally. As all kids return to some form of school by September, it is low-income families that are going to get hit the hardest— families that are often Black and Brown, due to America’s systemic racism and structural barriers (Pew Research Center).

The disparity comes to light when we look at what happened in the spring. An in-depth LA Times survey of school districts found that districts serving low-income (predominantly Latinx and Black) students had much worse virtual learning outcomes than districts serving higher-income (predominantly white and Asian) (LA Times). Under-resourced districts struggled to get their students devices and internet connections. (Now, even months later, California officials still say that they need over a million computers and hot spots for their students.) One teacher had less than 10% of his students show up for classes. Beyond the barrier of the digital divide, these students also had bigger things on their minds than school: their parents losing their jobs, paying rent— and of course, coronavirus itself. Because Black people have died of coronavirus at a 2.5x higher rate than white people (and Indigenous and Latinx people at a 1.5x higher rate), non-white students have had much more first-hand experience with coronavirus than white students (COVID Racial Data Tracker).

Since the spring, schools have changed their plans, and changed their plans again, due to vacillating instruction from the government and their overly-optimistic ideas about the pandemic’s course (NYTimes). In response, parents are scrambling to find the best option for their own families—choices that are all fraught. I was struck by an article where the interviewer asked teachers what they thought about wealthy parents choosing to “pick the all-distance option, create a home-schooling pod if you need to for a year. Ease the pressure on the system, so the lower-income kids have more access to the resources they need, including if they need in-person learning” (Slate). Black teacher Brandon Hersey’s response was short and to the point: "I think that's racist as f---." The teachers agree: while it seems like a good idea, it just makes in-person school a hot zone for kids with the least options, resources, and access. Because of the inequity in many types of tutoring/homeschooling pods, some schools don’t support them (Fairfax County Public Schools).

Even in areas like mine where everyone is beginning the school year virtually, remote learning exacerbates the differences between the haves and have-nots. In response to working parents’ childcare concerns, my school district partnered with Right at School, a company that will “support students in their remote learning, providing small groups and a quiet space for schoolwork, as well as supplementing with fun activities and group fitness” to the tune of $225 per week (Right at School). In other words: the school will provide a semblance of in-person school, but it’s outsourced, and parents have to pay. There was no information on whether it would be provided for free or at a discount for lower-income households (I contacted my school board and am waiting for a response). In both this case and the one that the Slate teachers were worried about— where the rich stay home and the poor go to school— school is segregated between those who can pay and those who can’t.

Our government has left us with no good options, but some organizations are trying to develop more equitable solutions. Yenda Prado notes that learning pods could be successful if they are available to all who need them most; if this system could be scaled and supported institutionally (Online Learning Research Center). “Learning pods – when done in certain ways and contexts – can be a form of equity work that supports families and schools,” she writes. “When families, particularly those that have been marginalized, come together in times of crisis to address their children’s needs – that becomes equity work. It is incumbent on all us to support their efforts by developing systemic solutions at scale to the current educational challenges.” San Francisco is attempting to do this by creating learning hubs for underserved children (San Francisco Chronicle).

Many parents have important reasons for opting their children out of in-person learning. But opting out of in-person learning doesn’t have to mean opting out of collective action. Whether we have children or not, we can all put pressure on our local organizations to best support the kids in our communities who need it most.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

180,000 children have tested positive for coronavirus in the past month.
1. Our individual decisions about schooling affect the community.
2. Virtual learning exacerbates the educational inequities between students of color and white students.

7/8/2020 | Investigate school district funding disparities.

7/2/2020 | Remove police from our public schools.

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Nicole Cardoza 8/10/20 Nicole Cardoza 8/10/20

Respect the relationship between name and identity.

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Happy Monday!

A couple of weeks ago, we discussed the petition against Trader Joe's and I asked you to submit stories about whether your own name has ever been challenged or questioned. In today's newsletter, Jami explains the relationship between our names and our identities and features stories submitted by our community.

As always, we appreciate any and all contributions. Consider giving one-time on our website or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe for $5/mo on our Patreon.

Nicole

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Ask yourself what gut-level judgments you make based on other people’s names.
Make more intentional efforts to pronounce and honor other people’s names.
Learn the names and histories of Black and Indigenous activists and leaders who are alive and fighting—not just the ones who have been murdered.
Support BIPOC activists as they fight to change the names of institutions that honor racist legacies.

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By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

In America, many of our institutions, schools, and organizations are named after white men with racist histories and legacies (Education Week). After facing increasing public pressure from activists after the murder of George Floyd, many of these institutions are undergoing a reckoning. Some of the outcomes initially seem positive: Congress now has bipartisan support to remove Confederate names from military bases (New York Times). But an institution’s reluctant willingness to remove a problematic name isn’t the same thing as a willingness to publicly honor and support BIPOC leaders. After years of pressure from its Black students, Louisiana State University Library finally removed the name of its segregationist former university president—but refused to rename it after the school’s first black female Ph.D. graduate, Pinkie Gordon Lane, as petitioners wished (Library Journal).

People who resist these changes often think: what is the big deal? A name is just a name. But names are powerful symbols. For a person of color, a name can be one of the most visible links to our communities and backgrounds—and also a target for racism and discrimination. A 2003 study showed that job applicants with white-sounding names received 50% more responses than those with Black-sounding names (National Bureau of Economic Research). Just a few months ago, a white male professor asked Vietnamese American student Phuc Bui Diem Nguyen to “Anglicize” her name because it sounded offensive in his language (diemquyynh on Instagram). When she refused, he made up a nickname for her; he didn’t back down until her story went viral (New York Times).

Honoring names is especially important in light of the way Black and Indigenous people have had their names and cultural identities forcibly erased by white colonizers throughout their histories. In Liseli Fitzpatrick’s African Names and Naming Practices, she writes: “European colonizers attacked and defiled African names and naming systems to suppress and erase African identity – since names not only aid in the construction of identity but also concretize a people’s collective memory by recording the circumstances of their experiences.” Indigenous lawyer and writer Christina Gray notes: “Renaming has been a critical part of settler colonialism generally, which is predicated on the erasure of Indigenous peoples, including their languages, cultures and social structures — any and all evidence of Indigenous peoples’ living presence,” (Yellowhead Institute).

As a light-skinned Japanese Taiwanese American, my experience with my name is wholly different than those of Black or Indigenous folk. And yet as a child, I too felt shame because of my middle name, Nakamura, one that made me visibly different from the people around me. It wasn’t until I was older that I began to take pride in the ways my names connect me to my family and my history. I have thought long and hard about what my daughter’s name reflects to the world (New York Times).

Our names say that we are here. Our names say that we exist, that we have always existed, even if you haven’t always seen us. And read these powerful stories we received from readers reflecting on their names. Responses have been lightly edited and condensed for space constraints.

My father is Indian, and his name is Rajiv, but after being teased all throughout his school years he decided to go by 'Neil' when he started college, and still uses that name today. He also lost a lot of his ability to speak Hindi because my grandparents were afraid that it would hinder their children's English or their acceptance in America. I'm now teaching myself the language, which got him to attempt to re-learn it too. - Anonymous

When I was born, my parents named me Ángela. But that quickly got Americanized, as whoever did my birth certificate dropped the accent over the first letter of my name. It wasn't until the age of 21 that I decided to reclaim my name: Ángela. Doing so was incredibly empowering because I felt for the first time like my truest authentic self. Some people uplifted said reclaiming my name was honorable and beautiful. Other people did not get it and did not take me seriously. Over time, I've tried to not let those comments and reactions get to me, but to be honest, it still hurts. I hope one day that all changes. -Ángela Mendez

When I came to this country my teachers called me Lah-teef, which as a little girl, I assumed was my American name. I spent 15 years introducing myself that way to folxs. My name is really pronounced Lah-tee-feh. It just demonstrates how impressionable kids are. Had my teacher just asked me how to say my name, I wouldn’t have spent almost so much of my life mispronouncing my own name. -Latiffe Amado

There was one teacher that always mispronounced my name, saying that it "just sounded so much better that way." I never felt like I could correct him myself. The power difference was too great.
-Anonymous

If immigrants from Europe felt the need to "Americanize" or "English-ize" their names in order to be accepted/assimilated into American culture, how much greater that pressure must be for those from other parts of the world. My ancestors chose to change their name in order to separate themselves from the country they left and to start anew in America. That does not give me the right to expect the same from anyone else coming to this country. -Anonymous

My entire family in Thailand calls me a Thai nickname but it's very hard for Americans to pronounce. By pure coincidence, my parents had accidentally given me a Thai name that had an English-sounding name at the beginning of it. So I started going by [that name]. I had heard it would help me be remembered on resumes and at job interviews. My mom was even so worried she asked if I wanted to legally change my name to [the English-sounding name]. But I have legally kept my full name because it's a tribute to where I came from and I don't want to erase that. -Anonymous

My name is Dilpreet, which is pronounced phonetically. It’s written the way it’s said. Yet many times when I say my name, people look at me with complete confusion and annoyance that they have to pronounce such a different name. I made it a habit to give myself a nickname like Dil or DK to make it easier for those who thought my name was too difficult. In college, I finally met classmates who positively reacted to my name and wanted to make sure they were pronouncing it right. I’ve learned that I shouldn’t have to make others feel comfortable to say and understand my name, my identity. Let them say your name. -Dilpreet Kainth

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Take the time to learn how to say our names correctly, even if at first the sounds are difficult for you.
Acknowledge that a name is not just a name— it represents a history and a community.
Understand how the ongoing denial of names connects to our country’s legacy of erasure of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color.

6/5/2020 | Breonna Taylor. Say her name. And remember it.

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