Members of multiple community-based organizations gather for Friday’s Stand Against Racism event. (Photo by Edgar Mendez)
Local leaders and members of several community-based organizations including Community Advocates, Social Development Commission, United Way of Greater Milwaukee, and Diverse and Resilient gathered in front of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. statue in Milwaukee, looking to raise awareness about institutional and structural racism. They were participating in Stand Against Racism, a national campaign created by YWCA USA.
Similar events took place across the country Friday. The theme of this year’s event, according to Paula H. Penebaker, president and CEO of YWCA Southeast Wisconsin, was racism against girls and women of color.
The campaign is meant “to bring together people who are interested in or working for justice to be part of a national campaign aimed at ending all types of racism, including against women,” Penebaker said.
Edgar is a senior staff reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service. Mendez is a proud graduate of UW-Milwaukee, where he double majored in Journalism and Sociology, and of Marquette University, where he earned a master’s degree in Communication. As an accomplished journalist, Edgar’s awards include a 2018 Regional Edward R. Murrow award, several press club awards and a Society of Professional Journalists’ regional award for columns dealing with issues such as poverty, homelessness and racism.
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Let’s get serious with this thing that has been around for 300 years!
excerpt from Mexico Reloaded by George F. Sanders
“…white people don’t know who they are or where they come from…and that’s why you think I’m a problem…But I am not the problem …your history is …and long as you pretend you don’t know your history you are going to be prisoner of it and there no question of you liberating me …you cannot liberate yourselves.” James Baldwin, 1986. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTjY4rZFY5c
Baldwin’s quote regarding white people illustrates how America’s lying history creates its own victims — many preferring to live the lie as it supports a sense of legitimacy based upon distortions, propaganda and then tied to pseudo sciences created by well known white authors, teachers and scientists who legitimize the lie — all of which continue to plague the nation even today.
Examples:
Arnold Toynbee historian, philosopher of history, (1889-1975): “When we classify mankind by color, the only one of the primary races…which has not made a creative contribution to any of… twenty-one civilizations is the black race. I am apt to suspect the Negroes…to be naturally inferior to the White.”
David Hume, 1711-1776: “There never was a civilized nation…other complexion than white.”
John William Burgess (1844-1931) “Blacks ….never created a civilization of any kind.”
Abraham Lincoln: 1809-1865) “…I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races … “
Sir Cyril Burt (1883-1971) fraudulently argued that blacks were “genetically flawed…”
Henry Kissinger: 1923 “Negroes are only momentary Individuals?”
William Shockley Jr. (1910 -1989) “…claimed that blacks are less intelligent than whites.”
Charles Murray, 1943; Richard Herrnstein’s May 20, 1930 – September 13, 1994) “The Bell
Curve,” “…argues that class and race are linked with intelligence.”