When there’s trouble in Milwaukee, there’s usually a small army of young people leading the charge. It’s no coincidence. Milwaukee Public Schools spends considerable time and effort developing its students to become young revolutionaries.
The district was one of many across Wisconsin (and the country) that spent the entire first week of February on “Black Lives Matter Week of Action” curriculum. At some of those schools, only a handful of students are proficient in English or math. Apparently, though, at these schools it’s more important to teach students what to think instead of how to think. MNS’ Bill Osmulski has more in this video report.
Interview: Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi: ‘We have taken the baton’
Tometi grew up in the tight-knit Nigerian-American community of suburban Phoenix, where she attended nearly all-white schools and was often the only black child in class. In first grade, a classmate flung the N-word at her: she did not know what it meant.
Today I’m hardly giving her a moment to chew as I press her on how we can create a world in which parents no longer teach racial slurs to six-year-olds. Will hers be the slogan that finally motivates people around the world to eradicate systemic racism, once and for all? Or will Black Lives Matter fizzle out, like the US civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which can claim great achievements in terms of desegregation and equal rights but left far too many African-Americans mired in poverty and exposed to racial violence.
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https://www.ft.com/content/71efd9a2-c1bb-47b6-b4c5-7795b1a66cacUnlike some young anti-racism activists who deny that this previous generation of civil rights leaders achieved anything at all, Tometi places herself firmly in the tradition. “Ours is part of a longstanding quest for justice . . . there’s not some great new master plan. But we know that the justice that we’ve been calling for, for generations, has yet to be achieved. We have taken the baton, and are using the tools of our age,” she says.
“I’m sure at some point we are going to have a Black Lives Matter Plaza in every major city,” she adds: already those three words can be seen from outer space, painted on a street outside the White House. “But that’s not what we’re talking about . . . We need real investment in our communities, in our safety and our ability to access jobs and our ability to access good quality education and housing and not to be discriminated against in every aspect of society”.
One thing that has changed since the 1960s is the share of elected officials who are African-American, I reply; many big US cities have had black mayors for decades. Why hasn’t black representation translated into a decline in racial inequalities? Black families living in poverty in the US fell from about a third in the 1960s to 21 per cent in 2018 but that is still more than twice the number of non-Hispanic white families, at 8 per cent.
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https://www.ft.com/content/71efd9a2-c1bb-47b6-b4c5-7795b1a66cacBefore I’ve finished my question, she plonks down her cutlery. “I love having this more complicated conversation because” — and she pauses for dramatic effect — “we have to remember that Black Lives Matter started under a black president.
It may feel polarising but what’s beneath all of this is an invitation to examine, what does safety look like?
“So that tells us that it’s not enough just to have black representation or black people in seats of power; that does not equate to justice . . . I think we now have more black elected officials than we have had at any time in history . . . it’s important for us to remember that you might have representation on face value, but if we don’t change the actual systems . . . ”.
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https://www.ft.com/content/71efd9a2-c1bb-47b6-b4c5-7795b1a66cacAn opinion poll at the height of the protests from the Pew Research Center found that just 25 per cent of Americans support reducing spending on their local police, and only 12 per cent said there should be big cuts. Twice as many African-Americans support defunding than whites, the poll found, but fewer than half of black adults (42 per cent) support cutting spending on police.
Where does she stand on some other activist positions that are red flags to Trump and his supporters, such as boycotting the Fourth of July? Tometi says she doesn’t celebrate the public holiday in the same way as some (white) Americans do. “But I don’t mind a day off,” she adds with a disarming guffaw.
During the pandemic, plenty of Americans had time off work to do things like protest. Now that many are back at work, does she worry that the protests will fizzle out? “I do have my concerns about longevity,” she admits. “But I’m trying to encourage people to get plugged in in a deeper way so that we don’t allow . . . apathy to creep back in.”