I think it’s important to discuss something that’s affecting the US right now, and has been affecting our society since it was created, and that’s racism. Racism that has created the inter-generational traumatic oppression of Black lives in America. It’s been happening since the first Black person arrived on American soil in 1619 and it’s still happening today. Inter-generational trauma is caused by events that target a group of people over a long period of time, several generations. Which means, even family members who have not directly experienced the trauma can feel the effects of the event generations later. Inter-generational trauma is also referred to as historical trauma. In general, historical trauma consists of three factors: the widespread nature, traumatic events resulting in a collective suffering, and the malicious intent of those inflicting the trauma. This form of trauma is specific as it affects a large population and is typically more complex than individual trauma. Historical trauma can result in a greater loss of identity and meaning, which in turn may affect generations upon generations until the trauma is ingrained into society and that this is truly what is happening here in America. I would like to preface with a trigger warning for this episode, I will be going into the brutal details of this history. It’s difficult to hear the truth about what really happened, the stuff they don’t teach us in school. I think it’s really important to fully understand the malice of our nation’s founders that persists in our societal structure today.
On May 25, Minneapolis police officers arrested George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, after a convenience store employee called 911 and told the police that Mr. Floyd had bought cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. Seventeen minutes after the first squad car arrived at the scene, Mr. Floyd was unconscious and pinned beneath three police officers, showing no signs of life. The police officer pinned him down with his knee for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. In the span of nearly four minutes, Floyd can be heard telling police at least a dozen times that he can’t breathe and asking the officer to take his knee off his neck — He said “Please, I can’t breathe”. Meanwhile, bystanders, including the grocery clerk who initially called 911, plead with the officers to let Floyd get up.
Peaceful Protests
The history of Black Americans suffering violence at the hands of whites stretches back hundreds of years before that. In the last few weeks, since the death of George Floyd, our nation and the world has broken out in hundreds of peaceful protests and marches, to protest George Floyd’s death, the death of countless other unarmed Black lives who were killed and demand justice for the murderers who wrongly took his life. The thing is, these protests were peaceful until the police used force on the protesters. People have been shot in the head with harmful metal pellets, crowds tear gassed, tear gas that attacks your lungs, which was okayed by our 45th president. During a pandemic he approved the use of tear gas that could potentially and has had a deadly effect on those who encounter it, while trying to practice their first amendment right to peacefully gather and protest.
I went to a protest here in San Diego. I know it’s risky to do that during a pandemic, but it was so important to me to show up and physically be there to help keep the momentum of this incredibly crucial movement. I was blown away by the positive and inspiring energy of the crowd. By the end of the march there was about 7k people. We met up with the crowd in North Park, they came down the hill on University Ave from Hillcrest. I will never forget that site, thousands of people careening down towards me. As we joined, I immediately took up screaming the chants. We took a knee just up the road from where I joined and were told instructions of how to remain peaceful and help the people around us. Then we marched for 4.5 miles to downtown. We took over the highway and as we went under an underpass, the crowd erupted in cheers and clapping. Such a thunderous proclamation of strength and resilience. When we got downtown, I saw someone handing out water so I grabbed a bottle and kept marching. We eventually came to a halt in front of a line of police, about two blocks between our group and them. We took another knee then were told to peacefully disperse.
The devaluing of Black lives and the control of Black bodies are ingrained in the institutional fabric of the United States of America. It foes far beyond the physical wounds, mental and emotional wounds persist as over policing harms Black communities. It is important for people to not sit silently as institutional racism continues to wreak havoc on the health profiles of Blacks. Some universities such as Georgetown and Princeton have formalized reparation plans, and the federal government should follow suit. America is not truly equitable until every chain of the legacy of 400 years of bondage is ameliorated and afforded atonement.
What is Racism?
Racism has existed throughout human history. It may be defined as the hatred of one person by another — or the belief that another person is less than human — because of skin color, language, customs, place of birth or any factor that supposedly reveals the basic nature of that person. It has influenced wars, slavery, the formation of nations, and legal codes. Race is one of the most powerful determinants of a person’s life course, opportunity, and health status. The concept of race itself is a product of a racist world view. Racism makes groups of people susceptible to stereotyping, stigmatized for their cultural styles, isolated socially, experiencing an internalized sense of helplessness and despair, with limited access to communal networks of mutual assistance. Their purported criminality, sexual profligacy, and intellectual inadequacy are the frequent objects of public derision.
Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – this diagnosis is typically associated with combat veterans or terrified rape victims, but new research indicates that racism can be just as devastating as gunfire or sexual assault. Changes in the DSM-5 open the door for a better understanding of this phenomenon. Before we dive into the repercussions of this trauma, we must understand that this trauma has been happening for hundreds of years. It has not gone away, it has just changed forms as our nation found new and different ways to oppress Black lives, while still claiming America was about liberty and freedom for all. I think it’s important we first understand exactly what has happened, what the trauma is, before we talk about its lasting impacts.
The most notorious example of racism by the West has been slavery, particularly the enslavement of Africans in the New World (slavery itself dates back thousands of years). This enslavement was perpetuated by the racist belief that Black Africans were less fully human than white Europeans and their descendants. The United States of America, “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” began as a slave society. What can rightly be called the “original sin” slavery has left an indelible imprint on our nation’s soul. A terrible price had to be paid, in a tragic civil war, before this new democracy could be rid of that most undemocratic institution. But for Black Americans the end of slavery was just the beginning of their quest for democratic equality; even now millions of Americans recognizably of African descent languish in societal backwaters.
This racist belief was not "automatic", Africans were not originally considered inferior. When Portuguese sailors first explored Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries, they came upon empires and cities as advanced as their own, and they considered Africans to be serious rivals. Over time, though, as African civilizations failed to match the technological advances of Europe, and the major European powers began to plunder the continent and forcibly remove its inhabitants to work as slave laborers in new colonies across the Atlantic, Africans came to be seen as a deficient "species," and labeled "savages" and “beasts”. They used this view to justify the slave trade at a time when Western culture had begun to promote individual rights and human equality.
American History
So, let’s talk about the history of this traumatic oppression in America. Society is created by a complex web of social connections and a long train of historical influences interact to form the opportunities and shape the outlooks of individuals. Of course, individual effort is important, as is native talent and sheer luck, for determining how well or poorly a person does in life. But social background, cultural affinities, and communal influence are also of great significance. The deeper truth is that, for some four centuries now, the communal experience of the slaves and their descendants has been shaped by political, social, and economic institutions that, by any measure, must be seen as oppressive. When we look at “underclass culture” in the American cities of today we are seeing a product of that oppressive history. It is morally obtuse and scientifically naive to say, in the face of the despair, violence, and self-destructive folly of these people, that “if they would get their acts together, then we would not have such a horrific problem in our cities.”
Sadly, this ignorance is more common than you may think. Research conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2017 shows that our schools are failing to teach the truth about African enslavement. Only 8 percent of high school seniors surveyed can identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. Two-thirds (68 percent) don’t know that it took a constitutional amendment to formally end slavery. Fewer than one in four students (22 percent) can correctly identify how provisions in the Constitution gave advantages to slaveholders. The truth is clear if we choose to see it.
America was built on white supremacy
Nearly 12.5 million ancestors of Black Americans were shipped as slaves from Western Africa to the Americas. The Middle Passage, typically an 8 to 12-week voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, resulted in the death of nearly 2 million of the Africans who were transported in chains. About 15% of slaves died during transport, mostly due to brutal physical treatment and suffocation in the bottom of slave ships, inadequate healthcare, and unsanitary conditions, as well as through acts of resistance such as fighting back, jumping into the Atlantic, or refusing to eat.
The Middle Passage started the legacy of chains that hinder the health outcomes of Black Americans and contribute to the devaluing of Black bodies. The legacy of slavery highlights how the most insidious outcomes for Blacks led to some of the most prosperous outcomes for whites. While Blacks were in chains and picking cotton and being whipped, many white families were acquiring land and building wealth on the backs of the enslaved. Around 1619, whites from Europe and Blacks from Africa were both brought to America as indentured servants. It was a deliberate, calculated, and racist decision by European settlers–and then the U.S. government–to honor the indentured servitude for Whites and implement the brutal form of enslavement for Blacks.
The first slaves arrived here in 1619. Between 1619 and 1865, Virginia passed more than 130 slave statutes to regulate the ownership of Black people.
A 1662 law made all children of enslaved mothers’ slaves, regardless of the father’s race or status, so that rape by white slave-masters couldn’t create a free child. A 1667 law codified that slaves who converted to Christianity were still slaves.
A 1669 law allowed slaves to be killed for resisting authority.
Forty of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves.
Under the Constitution, a slave was counted as three-fifths of a free person. Ten of the first 12 presidents owned slaves. This is who we were as the United States became a nation.
Francis Scott Key, the person who wrote our national anthem, was an avowed white supremacist. The third verse of the national anthem celebrates the murder of slaves: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave…”
In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime
It continues
Convict Leasing
The Southern convict leasing systems were a means of extending slavery for African Americans well past the Civil War, Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th and 14th amendments. Convict leasing began in Alabama in 1846 and lasted until July 1, 1928, known as “slavery by a different name,” it is regarded as one of the brutal periods of American history. Southern laws were crafted to guarantee that the now “free” African Americans would be incarcerated at much higher rates than whites. Blacks were picked up, hauled off and locked up for ridiculous crimes such as “vagrancy” (being homeless or unemployed), loitering in public, speaking loudly in the company of white women or selling farm products after dark, to name only a few. Whites would then profit off of these so-called-convicts. Convict leasing accounted for nearly three-fourths of Alabama’s state revenue in the late 1800s. As one historian described it, the system was “brutal in a social sense, but fiendishly rational in an economical sense”.
Once these people were matriculated into the prison system, they had effectively become slave laborers again. The state allowed convicts to be leased out to private corporations for little more than a pittance - convict laborers were rented out at monthly rates that represented a 50-80% discount over the wages paid to free laborers. They were forced to work in some of the most dangerous environments at the time, laying railroad and mining coal, and a significant percentage developed severe illness/injuries and died in the course of such work. It is estimated that at least 9000 convict workers were murdered or died of “natural causes” over a few decades under this system alone.
The nadir of American race relations
This was the period in the history of the United States from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 through the early 20th century, when racism in the country was worse than in any other period in the nation's history. During this period, African Americans lost many civil rights gained during Reconstruction. Anti-Black violence, lynchings, segregation, legal racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy increased. Because more than 80% of the nation’s African Americans lived in former slave states until well into the twentieth century, they had to exercise their new citizenship rights among ex-confederates and their sons and daughters. Although textbooks tend to portray the history of African Americans as if not much happened between 1870 and 1954, the period was actually a long war for civil rights. White southerners continually reinvented new ways to impose white supremacy on their Black neighbors. Black southerners fought back against disfranchisement and unequal treatment, the imposition of segregation, and the violent white people who perpetrated racial massacres and lynching. Because the rapidly industrializing South set up a system of racialized capitalism that left Black people in segregated jobs at the bottom of the ladder, they sought the self-sufficiency of land ownership and started small businesses. Despite the onslaught of white supremacy, African Americans held hope that they would win the war for civil rights.
Share Cropping
Another less explicit form of forced labor was sharecropping, in which the poor Black farmers theoretically received a percentage of the profits from sale of a certain crop grown by them. In the early years of Reconstruction, most Blacks in rural areas of the South were left without land and forced to work as laborers on large white-owned farms and plantations in order to earn a living. Many clashed with former slave masters bent on reestablishing a gang-labor system similar to the one that prevailed under slavery. These workers were forced to take out relatively large loans just to meet daily expenses and these loans sometimes carried interest rates upwards of 50% or 60%. At the end of day, many of these sharecroppers were treated just like slaves and received very little compensation for their work, besides the basic necessities of life. In an effort to regulate the labor force and reassert white supremacy in the postwar South, former confederate state legislatures soon passed restrictive laws denying Blacks legal equality or political rights, and created “Black codes” that forced former slaves to sign yearly labor contracts or be arrested and jailed for vagrancy.
Jim Crow
The Jim Crow period highlighted a rapid increase of lynching’s. From 1882-1968, nearly 5,000 people were lynched for organizing unions, asking for fair wages, and voting. This meant that roughly one person was lynched every week. Jim Eastman in Brunswick, Tennessee was lynched in 1887 for not allowing a White man to beat him in a fight. In 1894, Jack Brownlee was lynched in Oxford, Alabama for having a White man arrested for assaulting his daughter. Bird Cooper was lynched in 1908 in Claiborne Parish, Louisiana after being acquitted of murder charges. Not only were Blacks brutalized and killed, they also could not vote, gain equitable employment, or acquire wealth through government programs. These acts of brutality contributed to the racial gap in mortality and wealth–a gap that persists today. Even if a person was not lynched, the mental and emotional turmoil associated with terror and fear had grave consequences for black people.
The Tulsa Massacre
The Tulsa race massacre (also called the Tulsa race riot, the Greenwood Massacre, or the Black Wall Street Massacre took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents attacked Black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has been called "the single worst incident of racial violence in American history." The attack, carried out on the ground and from private aircraft, destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the district—at that time the wealthiest black community in the United States, known as "Black Wall Street". Archaeologists are planning an excavation in July of what they believe is a mass grave, evidence of one of the worst race massacres in U.S. history. The Tulsa massacre destroyed more than 35 blocks of the city, along with more than 1,200 homes and left some 300 people dead, mostly Black. Ten thousand people were left homeless. Yet this act of domestic terrorism is rarely mentioned or taught in schools. What we choose to remember speaks volumes.
Redlining
In the United States, redlining was the systematic denial of various services by federal government agencies, local governments as well as the private sector either directly or through the selective raising of prices. In the 1960s, sociologist John McKnight coined the term "redlining" to describe the discriminatory practice of fencing off areas where banks would avoid investments based on community demographics. During the heyday of redlining, the areas most frequently discriminated against were Black inner city neighborhoods. For example, in Atlanta in the 1980s, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by investigative reporter Bill Dedman showed that banks would often lend to lower-income whites but not to middle-income or upper-income Blacks. Neighborhoods with high proportion of minority residents are more likely to be redlined than other neighborhoods with similar household incomes, housing age and type, and other determinants of risk, but different racial composition. While the best known examples of redlining have involved denial of financial services such as banking or insurance, other services such as health care or even supermarkets have been denied to residents. In the case of retail businesses like supermarkets, purposely locating stores impractically far away from targeted residents results in a redlining effect.
Mass Incarceration
High rates of incarceration in the 1980s and 1990s gave rise to a generation of Blacks who were locked in chains in prison cells and locked out of college and opportunity. In 2001, over 2 million people were incarcerated. One out of three Black men in their twenties was either incarcerated, on parole, or had a previous criminal record. It is another example of how Black chains led to white prosperity. For-profit prisons–and investing in them–are extremely profitable. Additionally, a large percentage of Black men are incarcerated for non-violent drug crimes. Many of these crimes are now decriminalized, and some whites are profiting off the same drugs that put Blacks in chains. Furthermore, the care and concern that America has for opioid addiction that mostly affects white communities was nowhere to be found when Blacks were addicted to crack cocaine. America continues to find ways to put Black people in chains for things it profits from.
Instead of working to change our fundamental economic structures and mitigate the stress triggers, our society has sought to “punish” and “rehabilitate” these people by placing them in environments of unprecedented fear and stress, such as prison. Given the amount of money and resources poured into the “war on drugs” in the U.S. over decades, there is never any shortage of people that can be easily sucked into this prison complex and then become a part of an enslaved labor force. Maintaining prisons and their populations has become very costly to taxpayers, but that’s the whole point.
School System
Schools are also a location of over policing. There are numerous incidents of handcuffs and police brutality being used on Black children in schools that are supposed to educate and protect them. In addition to student resource officers, some schools are allowing teachers to hold guns on school property. While guns may give some students and parents false comfort in the case of a mass shooting, Black students worry that the guns may be used on them when their Blackness is threatening and viewed as a weapon. In this regard, over policing is not just committed by the police, but it is also committed by neighbors, teachers, and healthcare providers.
Trauma
Everything from the exclusionary practice of redlining, which segregated American cities, to the story of Ahmaud Arbery, who was killed for jogging through a white neighborhood, contributes to a collective trauma that underwrites the Black experience. The notion of traumatic effects of enslavement being transferred to successive generations starts with the idea that slavery was not only a dreadful individual ordeal but a cultural trauma to African American people; a syndrome which occurs when a group has been subject to an unbearable event or experience thereby undermining their sense of group identity, values, meaning and purpose, or their cultural worldviews and is manifest in symptoms of hopelessness, despair and anxiety. Our nation gave little value or meaning to African American lives, they were callously tied to their capacity for labor or ability to reproduce. Moreover, their identity was literally supplied by whoever happened to own them as though there was “not even a separate identity the ego can claim”. As the eminent African American essayist W.E.B. Du Bois claimed, African Americans were effectively banned from any pursuit of a cultural life through laws to prevent reading, writing and most communal life.
African Americans experience much higher rates of poverty, unemployment, and negative health outcomes compared to whites in the US. The inter-generational cultural trauma caused by 300 years of slavery – alongside poor economic circumstances and social prejudice – has led to the poor state of physical, psychological and social health among African Americans. Research shows that trauma can alter one’s perceptions of overall safety in society. Black people with PTSD have been found to have lower expectations about the benevolence of the world than Whites. When comparing Black and white Americans, one study reported that African Americans held more negative perceptions of the world, appearing more skeptical and mistrustful. Experiencing a traumatic event changed perceptions of the world in white victims from positive to negative, yet the perceptions of Black victims were not as impacted by traumatic experiences.
Research shows the incidence of diabetes, high blood pressure, premature death from heart disease, and prostate cancer are generally double among adult African Americans compared to White Americans. African Americans experience significantly higher psychological stress and PTSD, and these are related to depressive symptoms, poor self-rated health, functional physical limitations and chronic illness. Similar comparisons of social health show homicide rates are higher, black men are 5 times more likely to be incarcerated than Whites (5 percent of the African American male population are incarcerated in many American states), and illicit drug use and rates of intimate partner violence are highest among African Americans.
The poor general state of African American physical, psychological and social health demands a comprehensive response from researchers, health practitioners, policy-makers and the community. The cultural trauma experienced by African Americans over the more than 300 years of their enslavement has been transmitted to the current generation and is related to their current general state of poor health. This perspective implies strategies to strengthen the resilience of African American cultural worldviews would remedy the negative impact of cultural trauma on their health. Two valid explanations for theses outcomes to their health have received significant focus in the research literature: poor economic circumstances and social prejudice
Micro aggression
Racism-related experiences can range from frequent ambiguous “microaggressions” to blatant hate crimes and physical assault. Racial microaggressions are subtle, yet pervasive acts of racism; these can be brief remarks, vague insults, or even non-verbal exchanges, such as a scowl or refusal to sit next to a Black person on the subway. These events may happen frequently, making it difficult to mentally manage the sheer volume of racial stressors. The unpredictable and anxiety-provoking nature of the events, which may be dismissed by others, can lead to victims feeling as if they are “going crazy.” Chronic fear of these experiences may lead to constant vigilance or even paranoia, which over time may result in traumatization or contribute to PTSD when a more stressful event occurs later. In fact, one study of female veterans found that African Americans scored higher on measures of ideas of persecution and paranoia, which the authors attributed to an adaptive response to racism.
While most of us can understand why a violent hate crime could be traumatizing, the traumatizing role of microaggressions can be difficult to comprehend, especially among those who do not experience them. One study of racial discrimination and psychopathology across three U.S. ethnic minority groups found that African Americans experienced significantly more instances of discrimination than either Asian or Hispanic Americans. Furthermore, those African Americans who experienced the most racism was significantly more likely to experience symptoms of PTSD as well. one in ten Black people becomes traumatized, and I think these rates may actually be higher since diagnosticians are usually not considering the role of racism in causing trauma.
Make no mistake, Asian and Hispanic Americans receive their unfair share of racism too, and research shows that it may even be harder to manage for individuals in these groups. But each ethnic/racial group has its own package of negative stereotypes that impact the form of racism experienced. Studies also show that African Americans with PTSD experience significantly more impairment due to trauma, indicating greater difficulty carrying out daily activities and increased barriers to receiving effective treatment. Research has linked racism to a host of other problems, including serious psychological distress, physical health problems, depression, anxiety, binge drinking, and eating disorders.
It is important to understand that race-based stress and trauma extends beyond the direct behaviors of prejudiced individuals. Being surrounded by constant reminders that race-related danger can occur at anytime, anywhere, to anyone. Seeing clips on the nightly news featuring unarmed African Americans being killed on the street, learning of these events brings up an array of painful racially charged memories, and what has been termed “vicarious traumatization.” Even if the specific tragic news item has never happened to the person directly, they may have had parents or aunts who have had similar experiences, or know people in our community who have, and their stories have been passed down. Over the centuries the Black community has developed a cultural knowledge of these sorts of horrific events, which then primes them for traumatization when they hear about yet another act of violence. Another unarmed Black man has been shot by police in our communities and nowhere feels safe.
Once sensitized through ongoing racism, routine slights may take an increasingly greater toll. Microaggressions, such as being followed by security guards in a department store, or seeing a White woman clutching her purse in an elevator when a Black man enters, is just another trigger for racial stress. Social messages and stereotypes may blame the victim, and tell us that Blacks need to stop “dressing like thugs,” “get off welfare,” and assimilate into White culture to gain acceptance. But these experiences can happen to any Black person of any social status. Sometimes higher status Black people experience more discrimination because they threaten the social order and thus draw increased hate from others.
Victims often feel powerless to stop these experiences because the discrimination is so persistent. Those who are exposed to this type of racial oppression may turn their frustration inward, resulting in depression and disability, or respond outwardly through aggression or violence. And at the same time, they continue to remain resilient in the face of ongoing, undeserved discrimination. Within the Black community, positive coping with racism may involve faith, forgiveness, humor, and optimism. These cultural values have allowed African Americans to persevere for centuries even under the most oppressive conditions.
Trauma Response in White Spaces
Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome is a condition that exists as a consequence of centuries of chattel slavery followed by institutionalized racism and oppression have resulted in multi-generational adaptive behavior, some positive reflecting resilience, and others that are harmful and destructive. Theory of P.T.S.S. was developed by Dr. Joy DeGruy as a result of twelve years of quantitative and qualitative research. The recent killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta as an example of how black trauma can inform certain reactions in white spaces. Brooks was questioned by two white police officers after he was found sleeping in his car in a Wendy’s drive-through. After what appeared on surveillance video to be a calm and respectful interaction between Brooks and the officers, the situation devolved into a scuffle. As the officers moved to arrest him, Brooks hit one officer, grabbed the other’s Taser, and fired it. Then he fled, firing the taser once more behind him as he ran. Officer Garrett Rolfe responded by shooting Brooks twice in the back, killing him.
You may be asking yourself, why didn’t Brooks just comply? By grabbing the taser and running, didn’t he essentially cause his own death? It’s precisely these kinds of questions that constitute what Craig and Rahko call commonplaces of anti-blackness: the standard arguments that underlie structural racism. One such argument, frequently invoked, is that black people fail to act in their own self-interest, thereby creating their own misfortune. The role of empathy in the case of Brooks, involves not only attempting to understand what Brooks may have been feeling in the moment he ran, but also understanding how the reality of collective black trauma informed that decision.
What can we do?
Act
Stay up to date on this movement and how you can help: https://blacklivesmatter.com/
Educate yourself
One of the most important steps you can take in this moment is to unlearn your racial biases and educate yourself on what it means to be antiracist with resources like these laid out by blacklivesmatter.carrd.co. You can read books and articles, listen to podcasts and watch shows and movies that discuss race and racism through analysis and critiques.
Podcasts: “About Race,” “Seeing White” and NPR’s “Code Switch,” which talk about the construction of race and how race is a confounding factor in every aspect of American life.
Books
Here’s a great website with different types of books to read.
A Mercy - Toni Morrison
Beloved - Toni Morrison
How to Be Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi
Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindess by Michelle Alexander
They Can't Kill Us All: The Story of the Struggle for Blacks Lives by Wesley Lowery
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Movies
Netflix
13th
When They See Us
Strong Island
7 Seconds
Hulu
If Beale Street Could Talk
Blindspotting
Amazon Prime
Do The Right Thing
Malcolm X
Fruitvale Station
Rest in Power: The Trayon martin Story
I am Not Your Negro
Get Out
Donate to pro bono organizations, communities and families affected by police brutality
If you are able, actions speak louder than words, and there is no shortage of deserving organizations and fundraisers to donate in support of black lives – including the families of Floyd, Taylor, McDade, Ahmaud Arbery and other black Americans killed unjustly.