Tag: racism

justpar:

Updates from Antonio French

I’ve been seeing posts and photos about the looting and the police standing around, I just wanted to say that Antonio French has been tweeting all about the looters and the protestors, please go to @AntonioFrench to read through what happened last night, these are all written by him while he was there or retweeted from him, there’s a lot I didn’t include, please stay informed by those that are there.

my-tardis-sense-is-tingling:

These tweets (and one retweet) are from my friend Ryan, a journalist who has been on the ground in Ferguson for the past few days. (His Twitter account is here, and it’s a great source of updates on the situation there   [x]).

I just wanted to remind everybody that while spreading word about Michael Brown’s unjust murder and the horrifying events of the night of August 14, 2014, please do not oversimplify or ignore the complexities of the situation.

Journalists in the town have been doing what journalists do: focusing on all the negative aspects about the community to try and make it look like a hell-hole in order to sell their own pictures and stories, and basically all many of them want to do is further their own careers. But focusing on all that negativity only paints the picture of one side of the story, ignoring a lot of other important things going on there.

Please do not fall prey to the media’s game. Anger at the actions of the police in Ferguson is totally justified, but in the midst of that we cannot allow the people who are living with the situation every day to be dehumanized. Despite all this tragedy and chaos going on around them, they’re still a community and in many ways they’re pulling through all of it together. They want peace. Anyone looting or burning things down is a very small portion of the community. The whole story is so much bigger.

A story doesn’t need tear gas to be interesting. We need to hear every side of this story, not just the horrific parts.

TL:DR: please don’t fall prey to media attempts to dehumanize and oversimplify the situation in ferguson!!

famphic:

postracialcomments:

soulrevision:

You WILL want to watch this.

In the early morning hours on 8/16/2014 in Ferguson, MO, Greg Thomas spoke with VICE about Ferguson, structural racism, media bias and more!!!

Please reblog & signal boost so we can get this truth out!!

Greg Thomas can be found on twitter, here: Minossec

#Ferguson #MikeBrown

Spread this!!!!

From 2:00 onwards:

The St. Louis Dispatch, they did a thing where, yesterday, they went over to Florissant and asked white people in Starbucks, “What do you think about what’s going on in Ferguson?” First off, most of them weren’t even watching the news and had no idea what happened, but they knew a boy was killed, and their reaction was, “Well, what did he do to deserve it? I know he did something.”

That is embedded in the system. That is embedded within white privilege, and within the country itself: that people are bad because they deserve it.

We have this whole Puritanical system that is set up from the people who got kicked out of England for being too radical…that people who have bad things happen to them deserve it. So, we must’ve deserved slavery. We must’ve deserved Jim Crow. We must’ve deserved 100:1 crack laws. We must’ve deserved the war on drugs. We must’ve deserved racial policing. So now, if you have that mentality about black people, and it gets passed on from person to person, generation to generation, that black people deserve what happened to them, then, when you go ask them, there’s not questions. It’s, “Well, wrong happened to them, so they must’ve deserved it.”

Incredible. Please watch this.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

huffingtonpost:

ONE THING YOU SHOULD NEVER CALL AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN

There are many ways to kindly and respectfully compliment the way a woman looks. But one descriptor that should be left out of such comments? “Exotic.”

Cristen Conger of the How Stuff Works podcast, Stuff Mom Never Told You, takes on the topic of “exotic” beauty.

Watch the full video with Conger explaining how Lupita Nyong’o was “extocized” during the 2014 Oscar season here. 

humansofnewyork:

“I wanted to be a defense lawyer because I wanted to come back and protect my community. I wanted to protect my people from the police. People around here grow up hating the police. But you know what they’ve done? The police have recruited our people. They’ve made it more complicated. They’ve got Dominicans and Puerto Ricans doing their work for them. Because they know it’s hard to hate your people. But as soon as that badge goes on, it changes you. Once that badge goes on, your people are the ‘boys in blue.’”

assbutt-in-the-garrison:

bloodwort:

frusturbation:

janefondle:

xpsycho:

eatimitationcrab:

revolutionary-afrolatino:

setbabiesonfire:

Sgt. Thomas McVicar of the Jersey City Police Department shot 22 year old Kwadir Felton, leaving him blind, after Kwadir pulled a gun on him, he claims. Kwadir Felton denied the accusation, stating that he doesn’t even carry guns.

“I don’t understand!” Felton yelled at a police officer before his mother was removed from the courtroom. “You didn’t have to shoot me in the head for no reason! You trying to charge me with something I didn’t do!”

Sign the Change.org petition and get this story out there.

SIGN THE PETITION. Still at least 1,000 signatures needed. SIGNAL BOOST THIS or i will judge you.

This post has 140k notes, yet the change.org petition only has 44k. Sign the damn petition! 

This broke my fucking heart.

hey this needs about 16k more signatures

SIGNAL BOOST

smallstrawhat:

i’m watching a live stream with Vice and Al Jazeera America camera crews on the ground in Ferguson right now and it is absolutely incredible. the area was very good and there was a lot of positive energy from people who were glad the police weren’t attacking and shooting them anymore and they were break-dancing and camera crews were doing interviews with them and then the police thought that it was getting out of control so they brought in SWAT teams and tried to break everyone up.

a lot of people started reacting really negatively and breaking things and going into the street and the police told them to get out of the street and go home and people were yelling about how the police told mike brown to “get the fuck on the sidewalk” before they murdered him. a group of people then broke into the liquor store that the police claimed mike brown stole from and threatened the Vice and Al Jazeera America crews, telling them to stop filming them (the looters) (all of this was on the live stream which i was watching) and shoving them into the road so they backed off for a long time and were nervous to check on the store again for about 15 minutes.

when they next checked there was a group of about half a dozen black men blocking the broken entrance to the liquor store with their hands raised and keeping anyone else from going in. the camera crews approached them and began interviewing them and here are some things i caught even though it was loud with multiple interviews going on at once: “we live in this town and these are our stores. we shop at these stores. every one of us protecting this store is from ferguson and the people looting it weren’t. they wanted to set it on fire. we stopped them and told them ‘that’s what they want us to do. that’s how they want us to act here’. very few people want to fuck things up and ruin people’s day to day jobs and those are the stories the press wants to cover but they don’t show us chasing them off and protecting our stores. we want our town to stay together. the police don’t care about us, they will kill us the same as if we were the ones doing it because they can’t tell us apart. they don’t care enough to try to tell who is looting and who is peacefully protesting and trying to keep things together.”

one of the guy who was blocking people from looting the store then handed his cellphone to the al jazeera america reporter and said “my mom is on the phone and she’s scared for me, she thinks i’m out here fucking things up, can you tell her what is going on” and the reporter talked to the guy’s mom and was telling her how brave her son is. god damn.