What We’re Reading: The Fight for Racial Equity, Justice and Black Lives

How the movement that’s changing America was built and where it goes next.

A proper understanding of urban rebellion depends on our ability to interpret it not as a wave of criminality, but as political violence.

“What I want to see is not a rush to judgment, but a rush to justice.”

Why does it remain so difficult for outrage over the killing of Black women to be the tipping point for national protests challenging state violence?

Without the proper context, it is impossible to understand the mushroom cloud of uprisings that are exploding across the country in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless others.

In 1921, Tulsa was home to one of the most prosperous African American communities in the country. But in a span of just more than 12 hours, the thriving community known as Black Wall Street was wiped out by white mobs.

“It occurred to me that like a wedding or a funeral announcement, a lynching was a kind of press release.”

The sparks of global rebellion we are seeing today are rooted in the Haitian Revolution, the first successful Black-led uprising for racial equality and independence in the modern world.

Perhaps more than ever, we need to better educate ourselves on the history of slavery, and consider the ways in which it informs how we have arrived at the present.

Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. For generations, black Americans have fought to make them true.

“What could be more American than pretending truths were self-evident when they seldom were?”

Demands for racial equity and justice have always been part of the American story. While the images here span the past two weeks, the words paired with them span the past 100 years.

“It’s hard to breathe without her.”

George Floyd had big plans for life nearly 30 years ago. His death in police custody is powering a movement against police brutality and racial injustice.

Ahmaud Arbery went out for a jog and was gunned down in the street. How running fails Black America.

As a person of peace, “Big Floyd” opened up ministry opportunities in the Third Ward housing projects.

These are their stories.

“I call the young people who grew up in the past twenty-five years the Trayvon Generation. They always knew these stories. These stories formed their world view. These stories helped instruct young African-Americans about their embodiment and their vulnerability.”

To be black and conscious of anti-black racism is to stare into the mirror of your own extinction.

Black lives matter and so do the characterizations of those lives that lead to their demise.

“I just witnessed the lynching of a black man, but don’t worry Ted, I’ll have those deliverables to you end of day.”

Bernice L. McFadden ruminates on all the things her mother has endured only to find herself spending her golden years in the midst of a deadly plague and state-sanctioned racism.

“The first time I was acutely aware of my Blackness, I was probably 6 or 7 years old.”

On Omar Jimenez, George Floyd, Christian Cooper and the myth of being non-threatening.

“I wasn’t prepared for any of this. I had come from a majority-black country in which no one was wary of me because of my skin color. Now I wasn’t sure who was afraid of me.”

On the eve of her birthday, in a moment of extraordinary darkness, a critic explores questions of aging and visibility through two exceedingly different works of art.

For Saeed Jones, generations collapse into seconds during an American week of chaos and sorrow.

Shots were fired in Long Island, but there was no rush to call 911. It made perfect sense to this reporter.

“The problem is the way policing was built,” historian Khalil Muhammad says.

And rebuilt the department from the ground up. The strange, hopeful, politically complicated story of Camden, N.J.

Police unions were born of resistance to discipline for brutality. Do they belong in the labor movement?

How tear gas went from a World War I weapon to police’s favorite anti-protester tool.

TV perfected the cop show, metastasized it, and then franchised it into ubiquity. How does that affect the way audiences think about police?

Nordic nations have both enormously smaller police departments and prison systems than the United States, and much less violent crime, especially murders.

The controversial version of the U.S. flag has been hailed as a sign of police solidarity and criticized as a symbol of white supremacy.

When videos of controversial police encounters generate headlines, there’s an important figure in the story that we rarely hear about – the person filming.

Wendi C. Thomas is a black journalist who has covered police in Memphis. One officer admitted to spying on her. She’s on a long list of prominent black journalists and activists who have been subjected to police surveillance over decades.

So many people taught us to be more than the hatred heaped upon us.

Awash in the ghastly video mosaic shot by black people’s cameraphones, I found myself doubled over the kitchen sink. Then a lyric gave me strength.

Between the coronavirus and police killings, Black communities are coping with seemingly endless grief. The absence of funerals during the pandemic has been particularly devastating to a culture in which collective mourning plays a vital role.

For 500 years, Black communities in America have sustained and supported protest through food.

Nic Stone, author of the best-selling young adult novel Dear Martin, explains why your anti-racist reading lists aren’t enough.

Understanding the appeal of the ‘carefree’ aesthetic to black male musicians from Young Thug to Chance the Rapper.

“Parable of the Sower” isn’t just a prescient dystopia—it’s a monument to the wisdom of Black women and girls.

“Black readers need to see themselves in narratives outside of racism, slavery, Jim Crow, police brutality. As do non-Black readers. In order to create a safe world for Black people, books that don’t focus on “issues” need to be given just as much space.”

What happens when an African American woman decides to solo-hike the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine during a summer of bitter political upheaval? Everything you can imagine, from scary moments of racism to new friendships to soaring epiphanies about the timeless value of America’s most storied trekking route.

“I don’t know exactly when I decided to stop writing about whiteness and focus purely on blackness. What I do know is that for the past few years I specifically made a decision to write about the celebration of blackness and black culture and whatever comes with it.”

If you’re a “well-meaning” white person feeling lost in your own self-actualization process, here are five basic ideas you must grasp.

If you’re not black and you have black friends whom you are only reaching out to now, be thoughtful about how you do it.

Black people all across the US are receiving the world’s weirdest form of reparations: Venmo payments from white people. In this podcast, producer Emmanuel Dzotsi investigates.

Mostly, my non-Black friends are doing all of the right things this week, both online and off. But that doesn’t stop me from being mad.

Too often whites at discussions on race decide for themselves what will be discussed, what they will hear, what they will learn. And it is their space. All spaces are.

Emmanuel Acho sits down to have an “uncomfortable conversation” with white America, in order to educate and inform on racism, system racism, social injustice, rioting & the hurt African Americans are feeling today.

“This sudden attention to the ongoing grief of black life can also feel like a slap in the face. Didn’t you notice we were dying?”

The veteran civil rights campaigner on growing up in segregated America, the opportunity of the Black Lives Matter movement and what inspires her to keep fighting.

John Lewis, congressman and civil-rights legend, will never lose hope.

“Changing the way we police, prosecute, judge, and punish is the essence of criminal-justice reform,” the famed civil-rights lawyer and founder founder of the Equal Justice Initiative says.

Talking about race, feminism and COVID-19 with Mikki Kendall, author of the new book Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot.

The author of Between the World and Me on why this isn’t 1968, the Colin Kaepernick test, police abolition, nonviolence and the state, and more.

In a rare interview, the activist opens up about the George Floyd protests, police brutality, and the conditions in the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center after a staffer came down with coronavirus.

An interview with adrienne maree brown on why changing the world doesn’t have to be just another form of work.

Activist and academic Rachel Cargle takes us into the weeds of America’s systems of oppression with womanist scholar EbonyJanice Moore.

In Black families, it’s known as “The Talk”: the discussion Black parents have with their kids about what to do should they end up in an interaction with a police officer.

This country prizes Black children’s precocity — insists on it, even, much of the time.

With a new daughter entering a world defined by protests and a pandemic, a middle-aged father feels his faith in America—or, more accurately, “Great-Again America”—slipping away.

When the Movement for Black Lives began, I did not have children. Now the fight means more to me—coupled with fears that are even deeper.

On a playground, the messy birth of a 5-year-old’s “otherness.”

Even for a psychologist who studies how kids understand racism and violence, talking to her own children about it is difficult.

Two dozen experts explain why.

The quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.

A Charlottesville-based activist, organizer, and social impact strategist — offers insight into how people can take anti-racist action.

An expert breaks down what anti-racism actually is, and how we can truly embrace it.

We must get it right this time or risk losing our democracy forever.