racial injustice
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3 Black Men Get $18 Million Settlement After Spending Nearly 40 Years in Prison for a Crime They Didn’t Commit
Egregious police corruption and a racist justice system caused three black men to be sent to prison in Cleveland, Ohio, for nearly four decades for a crime they did not commit. Now, the city is paying those men $18 million to settle a lawsuit accusing police officers of coercing witness testimony and falsifying evidence. According…
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Study Shows Link Between Police Shootings of Unarmed Black People and Health of Black Babies
Fatal police encounters are devastating for the communities in which they occur: families are irreparably ripped apart; trauma spreads through neighborhood institutions like schools and churches; and trust between the community and law enforcement (and, oftentimes, other branches of local government) is broken. Any one of these problems present tremendous challenges to the health and…
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The One Place Colorblindness Will Benefit Black People: America’s Courtrooms. The Supreme Court Should Take Note
Black people usually recoil when we hear a white person say, “I don’t see color,” and with good reason. It usually denotes a form of racial denialism, at best, and a subtle, yet clear implication that there is something wrong with race, and specifically, something wrong with being black. But there is one venue that…
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Hollow Gesture Alert: Billionaire New England Patriots Owner Robert Kraft Would ‘Very Much Like’ to See Kaepernick Back in the NFL
These are the words of a billionaire owner of an NFL franchise, the words of the most (or second most behind Jerry Jones) influential owner in the league, the man whose team is led by a 41-year-old quarterback and a backup who probably isn’t even good enough to be fourth-string: “I would very much like…
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Guess Who Thinks Black People Aren’t Trying Hard Enough to Succeed?
That’s a trick question, of course. Basically, the whites are at it again, back at it with another “Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps” story. A recent poll published by YouGov (pdf) on Wednesday (h/t Newsweek) showed that some 40 percent of white Americans think that black people are just not trying hard enough…
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Watch: History of the Juvenile Justice System
America incarcerates more juveniles than any country in the world. In 2015, black children were five times more likely than white children to be incarcerated. So while 86 of 100,000 white children in the United States were behind bars, 433 of 100,000 black children found themselves locked up. To understand how we got here, let’s…
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What #JusticeForJazzy Would Look Like if I Were Jazzy
My formative years were spent on the south side of New York City’s Jamaica, Queens. The small neighborhood is almost considered a quiet suburb of New York City. Quiet—it is not. Suburban—kinda, sorta, but not quite. Sure, there were blocks of tree-lined streets, houses and backyards with grassy knolls, but it also included the 40s…
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Michael Bennett Will Continue to Sit During Anthem, Says Kaepernick Needs a Job Before NFL Can Move Forward With Players
Seattle Seahawks defensive lineman Michael Bennett says the issue of Colin Kaepernick’s unemployment needs to be addressed before players and the league can move forward with talks on how to work together on social causes. “I think the first step to even being able to even have a conversation is making sure that Colin Kaepernick…
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La. Sheriff Furious at New Laws Allowing for Release of ‘Good,’ Nonviolent Inmates Because ‘We Use Them to Wash Cars’
In case you ever wondered about the way (some) correctional officers see their inmates, I lead you no further than to Caddo Parish, La., Sheriff Steve Prator, who is ranting and raging mad about new criminal-justice reform laws that will go into effect next month—because it will mean getting rid of cheap labor. But don’t…