Author: Reggie Jackson

“The moment you make racism more than an isolated incident, when you begin to talk about it as systemic, as baked into the way we live our lives … people don’t like that. It runs counter to a narrative that we want to tell ourselves about who we are. We have a narrative of progress, that we’re getting better.” – Gloria Ladson-Billings, president of the National Academy of Education The irony of systemic racism is that it allows the system to deny systemic racism. My question about this is simple. What are you afraid of? A lot of people...

“You can see that people just feel very entitled out here. They paid for their tickets – great, I’m grateful that they’re coming in to watch a great performance. But we’re not at the theater. We’re not throwing tomatoes and other random stuff at the people that are performing… You’re seeing a lot of old ways come up. It has been that way in history in terms of entertainment, performers and sports for a long period of time and just underlying racism and just treating people like they’re in a human zoo. Throwing stuff at people, saying things. There...

In the days ahead, Americans will hear the ugly details of the most infamous anti-black race riot in the nation’s history. The Tulsa Race Massacre, which will have its 100th anniversary commemorated on May 31, was the first case of an American city being bombed from the air. Most have never heard of the second case of a mainland American city being bombed from the air. It occurred in May 1985 in Philadelphia. An organization of Blacks called MOVE, who wanted to have nothing to do with the America that existed in Philadelphia at that time, had their compound...

“In the wake of the mass protests for racial justice sparked by the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, a flood of legislation has been introduced in statehouses across the United States that would restrict protest rights. From June 1, 2020, through March 15, 2021, state policymakers have introduced at least 100 proposals in 33 states. Anti-protest bills were being introduced at an alarming rate even prior to last year’s protests, but as a point of comparison, from January to May of 2020, PEN America identified only 15 such proposals. The rate at which such legislation is...

“By the 1960s, black poverty was deeply entrenched, but more importantly, it was marked by its stark contrast to the white middle class’s prosperity. Not only had the majority of blacks not ridden the postwar economic boom; conditions in the ghetto had actually worsened. Almost half of black children lived in poverty in contrast with only 9 percent of white children. Black families had less than one-fifth the wealth of white families. A Federal Reserve study concluded that the source of the wealth gap was historic inequalities in income and opportunities, “a legacy of past economic deprivation,” which would...