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“Oh Great Spirit, keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked a mile in his moccasins.”
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“Black on the outside, white controlled on the inside.”
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“Early in the formation of the United States, blacks became the designated drivers of the Scapegoat Express. We were the ‘indecent others.’ The nation needed a permanent workforce and a permanent pariah. African-Americans, by virtue of some seventeenth-century decree, got the job. No amount of education, no amount of wealth, could remove the stigma of race. The paradox and dilemma of the virulent racism is that our exclusion became the basis of our unity. The next two hundred years of existence were defined by reacting to racism.”
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“How about the irony of, ‘Free speech is fine if you’re a neo-Nazi chanting hate slogans, but free speech is not allowed to kneel in protest?’” [Steve] Kerr added. “No matter how many times a football player says, ‘I honor our military, but I’m protesting police brutality and racial inequality,’ it doesn’t matter. Nationalists are saying, ‘You’re disrespecting our flag.’ Well, you know what else is disrespectful to our flag? Racism. And one’s way worse than the other.”
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you want us to assimilate into a culture which is at its core, anti-us?
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“Black athletic culture, like the rest of African-American culture, evolved under the pressure of oppression. At every stage, that oppression — from slavery to segregation — has been struggled against, and in some cases vanquished. But at every turn, lessons were learned, weapons formed, a legacy created. Black athletes have historically struggled against the great problems of American life — in fact, the great problems facing humanity. They have fought dehumanization, an unfair playing field, economic exploitation, and inequalities in power. The legacy of black athletic culture is a fighting spirit, as embodied in fiery characters from Jack Johnson to Curt Flood. The legacy of the black athlete is an elegant style, developed by physical artists from Willie Mays to Allen Iversen, as a way of showcasing the humanity, creativity, and improvisatory spirit of its practitioners. And the legacy of the black athlete is an acceptance of a larger mission, as displayed by Muhammad Ali‘s stands of conscience, Tommy Smith’s raised fist, or Rube Foster’s goal of creating an economically viable, independent black baseball league. Each of these legacies was initiated and refined as a response to a specific historical barrier, but the responsibility of black athletes today — and of all of us, really — is to understand how those legacies can also shape the future.”
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“The British gave up their last colonies in Africa half a century ago. But they left their wigs behind. Not just any wigs. They are the long, white, horsehair locks worn by high court judges (and King George III). They are so old-fashioned and so uncomfortable, that even British barristers have stopped wearing them. But in former British colonies — Kenya, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Malawi and others — they live on, worn by judges and lawyers. Now, a new generation of African jurists is asking: Why are the continent’s most prominent legal minds still wearing the trappings of the colonizers?”
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“It was only two years ago that researchers found the first ancient human genome in Africa: a skeleton in a cave in Ethiopia yielded DNA that turned out to be 4,500 years old. On Thursday, an international team of scientists reported that they had recovered far older genes from bone fragments in Malawi dating back 8,100 years. The researchers also retrieved DNA from 15 other ancient people in eastern and southern Africa, and compared the genes to those of living Africans.”
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“Why are today’s athletes so lost? The answer lies mainly in the succession of devastating spiritual losses black athletes have sustained since they began participating in integrated sports. The most significant of these has been the loss of mission, a mission informed by a sense of connection to the larger African American community and a sense of responsibility to the legacy of struggle they made possible this generation’s phenomenal material success.”
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“In her new book, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap, Mehrsa Baradaran, a professor of law at the University of Georgia specializing in banking law, provides a deep accounting of how America got to a point where a median white family has 13 times more wealth than the median black family. Baradaran’s book covers the period of time spanning from Reconstruction—with the promise and subsequent revocation of land, jobs, and economic independence for freed slaves—to the present. Over this expanse of history, Baradaran finds that much of the economic turmoil black Americans have faced has been the direct result of negligence, discrimination, or broken bonds on the part of both government and private entities run mostly by white Americans. With that history in mind, she interrogates the question of whether or not black Americans can fix the problem on their own, for instance by turning to black-owned banks to spur lending and wealth creation. She determines that, while theoretically promising, the movement in support of black economic self-sufficiency will falter without the type of powerful assistance that helped create white wealth, including government policies promoting jobs, homeownership, education, and access to loans. “The theory behind developing a separate black economy had been that economic power would lead to political power, but perhaps they had it backward,” Baradaran writes.”
