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Have a Loved One with Distressingly Racist Ideas? Me too.

9/12/2020

 
By Heather Millar

Like most people in this country, I’ve been arguing a lot this year. Pointing out racism and lack of empathy on social media. Bristling a bit when made aware of my own racist missteps.

Doomscrolling and raging against the headlines.

I’ve been a journalist for most of my life, though I’m now pandemically unemployed. Among many other things, I’ve covered jails and prisons, politics and social policy. I thought I “got” this country’s racism. I knew it was foundational to our nation’s problems, central to our history. I volunteered regularly; protested occasionally.
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A discussion between a younger woman and an older woman hits a sticking point.

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400 Years of Resistance

9/11/2019

 
By Micki Luckey

While visiting the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, Christina Sharpe, a Black Professor from York University, was deep in contemplation of the trauma represented by the names of lynching victims on 805 hanging steel columns and similar coffin-like columns laid in the ground. She was approached by a white woman who said, “I’m so sorry.” Sharpe said she did not reply; full of her own sorrow, she did not want to take on the unknown white woman’s distress.

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“Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.”

8/25/2019

 
By Sandy Bredt

“Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.” With that salvo, Nikole Hannah-Jones opens the introduction to her latest gem, the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” a comprehensive exploration of slavery and racism, produced with the Smithsonian and the Pulitzer Center in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the first African slave ship landing on our shores.

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Mass shootings cannot become the accepted norm

8/25/2019

 
By Christina Robinson and Elizabeth Humphries

In just one week three communities across this country faced terror and the loss of loved ones at the hands of white men armed with guns. Our hearts are heavy with sadness for those who are grieving and those who have been touched in other ways — like those who will never be able to attend the Gilroy Garlic Festival without remembering the terror that happened there. And because it can feel like any town, city, church, or festival could be next, we share the fear and trepidation of people throughout our country.

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Desegregation: Where were the women?

3/3/2019

 

By Micki Luckey

PictureWhite women protesting bussing
I admit I was distressed reading Mothers of Mass Resistance, the new book by Elizabeth Gillepsie McRae that documents how women upheld white supremacy in the US from 1920 to 1970.  Not that any part of this meticulously detailed history was false. After reading and writing about the struggles for civil rights and integration, I simply did not want to recognize the power white women have wielded in opposing desegregation and civil rights.  But McRae contends that the roles women played to support segregation of the races, while generally kept out of the limelight, were nonetheless effective.  She states, “…when we focus too much on national legislative victories over legal segregation, we miss the endurance of white supremacist politics and practices in local institutions, in local communities.” (McRae, p.10)

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#12DaysToShow Up Day 7: Working with Our Youth to Dismantle White Supremacy

12/22/2018

 
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What’s one of the most effective ways to dismantle white supremacy?
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Our SURJ Bay Area Youth and Families (Y&F) Committee starts at the roots by educating and mobilizing youth, parents, youth workers and educators, as well as partnering with local organizations with a child- and family-centered lens toward racial justice.

One of our major partners is Abundant Beginnings, a local community-based organization founded and run by Black queer freedom fighters. Abundant Beginnings uses a kid-friendly vocabulary — defining solidarity, for instance, as “the act of supporting other people (especially those who are not being treated fairly).” We are proud to stand in solidarity with Abundant Beginnings as we work toward a world in which children can grow up free from the injustices of white supremacy.


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#12DaysToShowUp Day 6: Support Black Liberation

12/20/2018

 
Image of people holding hands with the text #12DaysToShowUp, Donate to SURJ's 12 Days to Show Up campaign. Background image courtesy CRC Media.
​In 1969 Fred Hampton Sr, the 21-year-old charismatic chairman of the Chicago Black Panther Party, was targeted and killed by the FBI in a raid organized by the Cook County State Attorney. Law enforcement carried out the raid and murders after several months of media coverage blasting the the Black Panther Party as “Wild Beasts”, and the FBI issuance of internal memos deeming them a “major threat” to the country. The FBI was committed to dismantling the Black Panther Party “by any means necessary.”

​We look back at that time and those events in disgust and awe. However, we know that targeted repression of Black resistance is unquestionably NOT a thing of the past. We need only look at a 2017 FBI internal report entitled “Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers” which seems to have been used to justify surveilling and jailing a black activist — severely disrupting his life — based solely on his Facebook posts calling out police brutality.


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Racial Bias in Police Shootings by the Numbers

5/7/2018

 
​The police killings of Black and Brown people in the US is a threat that stretches well beyond the individual officers who pull the trigger. Recent data show that throughout the country Black and Brown people are far more likely to be shot by police than white people, regardless of local and race-specific levels of crime. The racial bias behind these murders is a systemic problem that is the product of biased policies in police departments and cities and the compounded effects of historical and present structural racism in the US. Racism in policing is one aspect of systemic white supremacy. In the Bay Area we see examples by looking at the murders of Kayla Moore, Alex Nieto, Luis Góngora Pat, Oscar Grant, Mario Woods, Sahleem Tindle, and others by police.

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#12DaystoShowUp Day 8: Protecting our Communities from White Supremacists

12/23/2017

 
As a part of SURJ Bay Area’s #12DaysToShowUp Fundraising Campaign — and our ongoing commitment to racial justice and reparations — 50% of all donations raised for SURJ are passed on to local POC-led organizations. The other 50% will be used to fund under-resourced rural SURJ chapters and to support our own work mobilizing white people in the Bay Area.
Donate to SURJ Bay Area before December 31 to help us reach our year-end fundraising goal of $20,000.
In addition to your donation to SURJ, we encourage you to match donations directly to POC-led organizations like those we’ve featured each of the 12 Days of this campaign.

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  • Home
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