Imagine a black rookie cop in Colorado Springs, infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, by posing as a white supremacist in the 1970s. If this wasn’t based on a true story, not even Spike Lee could get us to enter fully into this film, BlacKkKlansman. Lee masterfully connects the past and present without missing a beat. The film opens with a scene of tattered Confederate soldiers in “Gone with the Wind.” This nostalgia segues to a white supremacist leader practicing a speech and finally cuts to Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) walking into the Colorado Springs Police Department to apply for […]

Seven Benefits for All in Dismantling Racism These days seem to be filled with needing to talk about racism because 1) it still exists and threatens to split the U.S. yet again; 2) there are so many incidents which are either racially charged or are debated as such; 3) for people of color, racial incidents happen all the time. How can we begin to truly dismantle racism in this country, for the benefit of all? I like the helpful twist that Jodi Picoult adds to this thought in her novel Small Great Things:  Kennedy, public defender: “Do you think there will […]

“Once more the car drove by, but this time the police officers stopped and got out. They immediately arrested my brother for ‘fitting the description’ of someone who had recently committed a crime.” The responses to racialized arrests, beatings, and trials we’ve seen in the United States are so “predictable, as many people fall into their default defensive positions,” Drew Hart points out. Drew G. I. Hart was on a road trip with a carload of white college friends when his mother called and told him about his brother’s erroneous arrest. It was a critical wake-up call for Drew, who […]

By Joshua Russell A recent article in the Washington Post showed a map of “the most racist parts” of the United States. This map was determined by data from Google, who had tracked the frequency of searches for a particular racial slur in media markets across the country. Markets that had a higher search rate were classified as more racist than those that had a lower search rate. The map classified Baltimore as less racist than average. If this methodology is taken at face value, then apparently the recent protests over the death of Freddie Gray were mistaken. In reality, […]