Indecency has become a new hallmark': writer and historian Jelani Cobb on race in Donald Trump's America
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Indecency has become a new hallmark': writer and historian Jelani Cobb on race in Donald Trump's America
"You hear stray wisps of information, almost always the most inflammatory strands of a much bigger, more complicated set of circumstances. The dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in New York could be reflecting on the recent killing of the racist provocateur Charlie Kirk. In fact, he is thinking back to Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American student from Florida who was shot dead by a white Latino neighbourhood watch volunteer in 2012."
"The Martin case the nightmare specter of a lynching screaming across the void of history ruined the mood of a nation that had, just a few years earlier, elected its first black president, and in a dizzying moment of self-congratulation, began to ponder on editorial pages whether the nation was now post-racial', Cobb writes in the introduction to his book Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025."
Newsrooms often receive partial, inflammatory fragments that obscure larger, more complex circumstances. Trayvon Martin's 2012 killing by a neighbourhood watch volunteer and the 2013 acquittal of his killer catalyzed urgent national conversations about racial profiling, gun laws, and systemic racism and helped galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement. Subsequent white supremacist violence, including the 2015 Charleston church massacre that killed nine Black parishioners, underscored persistent racial terror and radicalization. Events in Ferguson and Minneapolis further exposed systemic injustice. These linked episodes show that progress on racial justice and the health of democracy are interconnected and not inevitable.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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