ClydeStyle

Tag: civil rights

  • What should America do with it’s minority population?

    Have you ever wondered why America didn’t just send African-Americans back to Africa after the signing of the emancipation proclamation?

    I know if I were a white guy saying this, it would look racist, but this is something I have always wondered because clearly, the majority of America did not want people of color here.

    There are so many disparities in America, from healthcare, criminal justice, housing, wealth, and such. Black men have been label so negatively that it would have made sense.

    After doing some research, I found that there were black organizations that wanted equality here because this is where slaves though they belonged after being abducted and separated from their homeland.

    So we stayed to be treated horribly with a few of us making it big.

    Many whites believe that Blacks should have risen up and created something big for themselves. They should have by now created whole communities to their benefit. History tells us they did, but can you guys what happened?

    Several race-driven massacres and instances of racial violence against African Americans have occurred in the U.S. history. Here is a list of some which happened in just the month of August:

    • August 1896: Polk County Massacre White workers in Arkansas attacked Black workers who were coming to work on the Kansas City, Pittsburg, and Gulf Railway. This attack resulted in the deaths of three African Americans and eight wounded.
    • August 14-16, 1908: Springfield Massacre (Springfield Race Riot of 1908) A mob of approximately 5,000 white individuals launched an attack on African Americans in Springfield, Illinois. The massacre resulted in six Black individuals being shot and killed, two lynched, and about two thousand driven out of the city. This event was one of the catalysts for the formation of the NAACP.
    • August 11, 1965: Watts Riots Beginning on August 11, 1965, and lasting for six days, a series of violent confrontations erupted between Los Angeles police and residents of Watts and other predominantly African American neighborhoods of South-Central Los Angeles. The Watts riots resulted in the deaths of 34 people and more than 1,000 injuries.
    • August 30, 1919: The Knoxville Riot This event involved a white mob attacking the Black community in Knoxville, Tennessee.
    • August 1947: Fernwood Park Race Riot This riot occurred in Chicago in mid-August. 

    Literally, whole communities were created by black folks and destroyed by white folks. Tulsa, or Black Wallstreet, is the most notable circumstance, but Willmingotn, NC and Rosewood, FL were equal devastating.

    During reconstructioning this happened all the time. So, you don’t want us to make it on our own, and you don’t want to send us back. What is left?

    Now, ICE is being used to eliminate brown people. Maybe America should be honest about what she really wants.

  • American satire: The media’s usual vision for covering news

    In America, it used to be that Fox News would slant stories more to the conservative end, and MSNBC would slant stories more to the liberal end, and we could rely on CNN to land somewhere near the middle. Today, media coverage is extremely biased and used more as a weapon than a resource.

    The only exception is when it comes to race. Last weekend in Mongomery, Alabama, on the riverfront where ironically slave ships dropped off its cargo, the media told us that a fight broke out involving many people, and lots of arrests were made.

    Those are the details, and that would be fine if we didn’t know what actually happened. If Black people were the aggressor, the media coverage would have been something like: “Several gang bangers were arrested after starting a brawl on the riverfront.”

    What actually happened was that a security guard was instructing people to move their boat from the area where they docked it. Words were exchanged, and the patron punched the guard, and the fight began. Several people came to the aid of the patron, and in seconds, they had the guard on the ground, punching and kicking him.

    Onlookers were outraged and came to the aid of the guard. So the fight that should have taken place 250 years ago on those same docks took place then. The groups were, of course, divided by race. Since the aggressors were Caucasian, the Caucasian media just called it a brawl – like it just started like a fire. Caucasian aggressors don’t fit the narrative. When Caucasians do aggressive things, the language is cleaned up to make it less horrible.

    Most mass shooters have been white males. There is actually a psychological reason for that, but I won’t go into it here. The point is that you would never hear the media say, “Yet another Caucasian male has killed several students and teachers in a school, police baffled as to the reason.”

    For decades, the media has villianized Black men in news reports, and we hear it so often that it sounds normal. The videos of the Montgomery incident have gone viral, and memes regarding the event are everywhere.

    Many are asking the question, what would you do if you were there? What side would you have taken, or would you have stayed out of it completely? For many, this was more than just a brawl. It was more than just some strangers coming to the aid of a man in need. It was finally the response that Gen z and Under would rather have learned in their history books. It was the response that mirrored what many have said they would have done if they were present back in the Jim Crow south. Finally, Black people banded together and fought back.

    Will this make future incidents worse?

  • The power of our integrity

    The division we face in this world is directly related to our integrity. Let me explain. Integrity is the state of being whole and undivided. Our divisions come from a response to what is happening and the blaming of opposing sides.

    For example, Republicans are convinced that President Joe Biden is bad for America. A growing population believes the Republicans are holding back our country. Depending on what side you fall on, you will pick up the disagreements where they left off. You will be outraged because they are. You will play out their thoughts with your aggression as we saw at the insurrection on Jan. 6.

    Integrity is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. It’s moral uprightness. You see, this allows me to maintain my moral integrity even when my favorite party goes rogue.

    Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris ran on a platform that promised to improve our criminal justice system. Now they could still do something but the fact that it’s not even being discussed is disappointing. Further, under this administration, we are doing more for Ukrainian refugees than we are for American citizens who are struggling. Congress recently passed legislation that allows Ukrainian refugees to collect social security benefits — to the tune of more than two grand per person in the household.

    Social security is a system that the beneficiaries have paid into over time. This would mean that our hard-earned dollars are going to help them and not the folks that it was intended. And neither party has solved the problem of making sure all eligible veterans receive their benefits. There are too many who are homeless.

    Integrity is the element that should stop a person from grabbing a firearm and harming innocent folks! If you cannot look at the various arguments without losing your cool, you have an Integrity problem.

    What Dr. Martin Luther King was trying to do with the civil rights movement was take people with integrity to look at society’s problems systemically and find nonviolent ways to solve such problems. He was quite successful in doing that.

    Today America needs an integrity check and begin to solve its problems in the best interest of all people. If not, we will destroy ourselves from the inside.

  • Voting is a right, right?

    It’s November again and that means that in most parts of the country we will be setting our clocks back participating in Benjamin Franklin’s daylight savings regimen. It also means for this year that we will be exercising our American to vote for whatever candidate we choose.

    There’s much interest in getting people out to vote and there’s a lot on social networking sites like Facebook encouraging people to vote. I was asked recently why I am voting. The intent of the question was for me to say something like my ancestors fought for the right for me to vote and many of African heritage died so that myself and other minorities may have the right to vote. So basically I should, and every minority should take pride because “they” are letting us vote.

    I keep going back to the original question. What happen in the distant past does not motivate me to vote. What has happened in just the last decade keeps coming to mind for me along with the age old question of will my vote matter. For me, every time I go to the polls I think of why Al Gore didn’t continue to fight for his presidency. I keep thinking that with a race that close, he owed it to those who voted for him – the majority of the country – to challenge those results. He started, and then he just stopped. It’s as if he saw a butterfly flying outside his window and got interested in the environment and global warming.

    Then I think of the Bush vs. Kerry election and how there were people in poorer districts that were robbed of an opportunity to vote. I also think of the punch card controversy (carried over from the previous election) and who could forget the recounts in Ohio.

    If this were not enough, I think of how we taught Iraq how to vote – complete with teaching them about political parties and our brand of politics.

    I even question why we still have an electoral college. I often wonder if our elections are fixed or if it was just created to look like a complicated “rubrics cube” and President Barack Obama found the right algorithm to solve it.

    Maybe I’m thinking too much, but the last decade you’ll notice – if you have been paying attention – that our country is headed down a slippery slope. We have massive debt, a divided government, we have totally disrespected the power and position of the President and we’ve given every interest group the right to openly challenge authority, fight the powers that be and openly practice deception all in the name of democracy.

    I fear that America is too dumb to handle its problems. Too many people don’t have a clue to what’s really happening and the media has not done anything to help. People are voting for a candidate based on everything but the candidates true ability to serve in the office they are running for. Am I the only one frightened by this?

    I feel like our country is being hi-jacked by a bunch of irresponsible kids who claim to like tea. You know the ones who have made bad decisions and as a result were home living in mom and dad’s basement. Well now those same kids want to select positions in Congress.

    Although there are many reasons to vote, the glaring reason for me these days is habit.

  • True Revolution

    This past Friday marks the 35th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. I look back at that war and wonder what the history books will actually say happened.

    Will it say that we were invaders who tried to take control of another country’s commodities? Will it say that we are baby killers? Will it call our government a bunch of liars? Will it actually say that we lost that war?

    I remember being in my elementary school and junior high school social studies classes and we would spend much time talking and learning about the two world wars. I remember learning about war heroes who eventually became presidents, like George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt and Ulysses S. Grant. I even remember hearing about the civil rights era and it was like they picked a figure (Martin Luther King Jr., or Rosa Parks), stuck with just their story and avoided all the other things surrounding those historical events – like the murders of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X.

    I wonder is there some council of editors who decide what should be written in our history books and what should be excluded? Is there another council that checks to make sure that what is written is not too offensive to the powers that be? Where is the censorship coming from? It seems as though the history books wait on the current events until most of those who would be offended or who are guilty, are at least too old to remember anything, dead, or just too old to be prosecuted.

    I thought about (when I was in the 5th grade) the John F. Kennedy assassination and for the longest time I couldn’t believe that one person was actually able to kill the leader of the free world so easily. Then once the internet got up and running, I was able to get some other perspectives. I remember thinking that the Kennedy family must have pissed off the wrong person back then. I even remember thinking that the mafia must have been behind all these murders. I thought that because I watched a lot of mobster films and Hollywood always had a way of making bad things look good. Al Capone was one of the coolest figures in history to me.

    I guess my point is this: There used to be such a thing as the power of the press.  In the 1700’s, Benjamin Franklin began a tradition in the newspaper business that set the tone for the industry. Corporations, politicians and organizations were kept honest because they knew shady practices would be questioned, statements would be checked for validity and any claims made would be investigated. Today, we tell the press what to print. I remember the horrible Fort Bragg shooting. If you recall the earliest reports, we were told that the shooter was dead. All media outlets reported the same thing. Later that evening, he was in the hospital in intensive care. How could this have happened?

    We need to be a society that cares. By caring I mean we need to literally give a damn about what is happening in our country. We need to get involved and question everything. The days of staying in the dark are over. We are actually smarter than 5th graders and we need to act like it. There are things going on in our nation that are suspect. We need to demand answers and hold leaders accountable.

    I’m not trying to sound like a tea bagger here. The difference is that they believe there was a time in our past where we had things under control and life was good. They actually think we were once in control of things and we dictated our direction.

    I am saying that we were never in control. There was never a time in history when America was “fair” to all people and we certainly never controlled the direction of the country. The revolution I’m calling for is new, active, open and real. It says that we need to decide first the type of country we want to be and then make every effort to be that country. And those that are opposed can go to … Canada?