Genetta Adams @genetta - Tumblr Blog

Slate's Jamelle Bouie explains why it was unlikely that Darren Wilson was going to be indicted for shooting Mike Brown.

Another young black man has been gunned down. His name was Mike Brown. He was unarmed.

My [redacted] e-mailed me because she knew I would be upset about this story, because she knows all of my heart, and all I could say in response was, “I am numb.”

I don’t care if Mike Brown was going to...

#mike brown #unarmed black men

We think it is rape culture or gun violence that will define us as a fallen civilization. But it’s the indifference that will do us in. It’s our fierce commitment to independence — emotional, cultural, financial, spiritual — as our most prized and noble value that dooms us. We are nothing without each other, nothing if all we can manage is protecting our own children, nursing our individual grief, urging others to be more like someone else who was “independent” enough to “move on” and “dust herself off” and “get over it.”

Powerful piece on Jada. More here: Carrying Jada

#jada #iamjada #justiceforjada

The tendency, in selective recollections of history, is to choose the version that looks most like an alibi—and it is for this reason that the conversation Coates has restarted is not really about reparations. It is, more fundamentally, about acknowledging the bastard history that would warrant reparations in the first place. The unspoken divide between black people and white people—whether over reparations, affirmative action, or the question of paying N.C.A.A. athletes—comes down to a question of history. In one version, that history appears as an incremental movement toward equality after a long night of discrimination; in the other, history looks like a balance sheet, and the cumulative debits of sanctioned theft, enforced poverty, and scant opportunity far outweigh the inconsistent credits of good will. Few whites recall, for instance, that General William Sherman, during his March to the Sea, issued orders mandating the redistribution of land seized from Confederates, in forty-acre parcels, to newly emancipated black families. But within black America, that fact—and the fact that the orders were revoked following Lincoln’s assassination—is common knowledge, recalled with the bitterness of an outstanding debt. Absent an understanding of this past, it’s possible—even entirely reasonable—to conclude that affirmative action represents a full recompense for the social engineering that produced a disproportionately black underclass in the United States. To the extent that the history remains obscured, the narrative looks like a lineage of failed handouts to a feckless and troublesome population, never quite capable of pulling themselves up, and mired in their own self-defeating ways.

The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb, dissecting Ta-Nehisi Coates’ brilliant piece on reparations in this month’s Atlantic Magazine. The rest here

Rest in peace, Miss Maya.

Thanks, Beyoncé, but if we're verbing, I think you meant 'Bill Clinton'd all on my gown,' not 'Monica Lewinsky'd.'"

One of the best lines in that Vanity Fair essay.

#Monica Lewinsky #Beyonce #Bill Clinton #politics

Elegant racism is invisible, supple, and enduring. It disguises itself in the national vocabulary, avoids epithets and didacticism. Grace is the singular marker of elegant racism. One should never underestimate the touch needed to, say, injure the voting rights of black people without ever saying their names. Elegant racism lives at the border of white shame. Elegant racism was the poll tax. Elegant racism is voter-ID laws.

The Atlantic's Ta-Nehesi Coates on why it's easy to shutdown oafish racist like Donald Sterling and Cliven Bundy while still ignoring the real costs of racism. The rest here.

Yes, the movie business is tough, and whatever your race, a Best Supporting Actress Oscar guarantees you nothing, especially in a field in which women are considered old at 31. But the evidence is the evidence: When the people who make movies look at Lupita Nyong’o, they see a slave, a stewardess, and an “exotic.” On that level, the range of opportunities for a black actress on the big screen in 2014 doesn’t look all that different than it did in 1967, the first time Disney made The Jungle Book.

EW's Mark Harris, giving Hollywood a "WTF?" for failing to give Lupita some decent roles after her stunning Oscar win. Read the rest here.

#Lupita #Hollywood

newyorker

The Borowitz Report: Sterling Says He Will Miss Being Around People He Hates

LOS ANGELES (The Borowitz Report) — After being banned by the N.B.A. Tuesday afternoon, the Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling told reporters that he would miss being around people he hates.

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/1o0IOoN

Photograph by Mark J. Terrill/AP.