Working Towards Ending Racism

  I’ve only read a portion of Dorothy Roberts’ (Twentieth Anniversary Edition) challenging - Killing The Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty .    Many of the things she spoke of prior to the books’ publication in 2017 have been greatly amplified by the multiplicity of murders and aggressions since then which have targeted Black People, particularly women and transgender People. I can’t write a relevant “review” of this book, until I complete my reading of it, and that likely will be delayed.    It is challenging to know where to begin!    The impacts of slavery upon Black People are immense.     Rarely do we - white men - let go of our “personal safety” and really emotionally open up to what has been, and unfortunately continues to be done in the name of “government”,   “society”, or even us as individuals. I can not imagine emotionally what it could have been like to kill one’s young baby, feeling that one doesn’t want to force that child to live in a world

  ----     BOOKS    ---- The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and The Chicago Police Department Murdered a Black Panther (Updated Edition) - Jeffrey Haas - Well Worth Reading! At the Dark End of the Street  – Danielle McGuire Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom  - Derecka Purnell Being White Today: A Roadmap for a Positive Antiracist Life - Shelly Tochluk and Christine Saxman The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America  - Richard Rothstein - Incredible Incredible book Florynce "Flor" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical  - Sherie M Randolph How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and Don't) Say About Human Difference  - Adam Rutherford The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store - James McBride - INCREDIBLE! How to be an Anti-Racist  - Ibram X Kendi KILLING THE BLACK BODY: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty - Dorothy Roberts LOVING: Interracial Intimacy in America and the

MARSE:  A Psychological Portrait Of The Southern Slavemaster And His Legacy Of White Supremacy  - By: H.D. Kirkpatrick  (Prometheus Books, 2022) This is an amazing book!     It brings in a whole new layer (or way of explaining it) into understanding racism - especially for white people - and even more so for white men.    It is scary reading!     It is a “good” kind of scary!    It helps me open up my heart - more and more to ponder the intersections of the power of elites.   It shows how they play off the “little people” - against each other.   It shows how, by our essential relative silence, we (,who think we are “better” than those “other “ white people,) acquiesce to their power. The book until its concluding chapter focuses historically on the Racist and horrifically pathological, criminal nature of slavery.    It shows how relatively few major slaveowners deeply impacted the U.S. and the other major world powers.     It paints a picture of “normalcy” that is highly disturbing

  In 1822 the Denmark Vesey slave insurrection was planned in Charleston but was thwarted.   Nearly three dozen people were executed.   Erskine informed us that “thirty-five Blacks were hanged and more than forty sent to the Caribbean or to Africa.” (40)   Historian Lacy K. Ford added that the Vesey insurrection revitalized the “colonization movement” among Southern whites, as a possible means of colonizing free Blacks and troublesome slaves as a way to enhance white security. (41) The net effect of the Vesey revolt changed many white Charlestonians views of management of the enslaved.   As Stampp said “After the Vesey conspiracy, Charlestonians expressed disillusionment with the idea that by generous treatment their enslaved ‘would become more satisfied with their conditions and more attached to whites.”’ (42)   In other words, enslavers ramped up greater repressive actions dropping the paternalistic pretense that slaves were family.    Berlin noted that “white supremacy manifested i