Voice of Consciousness

“If I didn't  define myself  for  myself , I  would  be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.” -- Audre Lorde Tamika Mallory's speech provides an important lesson and warning about letting other people define what the nationwide #GeorgeFloyd protests means for us and why you should not allow people to write our story of our actions. See my full transcription of the speech below. View this post on Instagram A post shared by matthewacherry (@matthewacherry) on May 29, 2020 at 3:13pm PDT My transcription of Tamika Mallory's Speech on Nationwide #GeorgeFloyd Protests This is a coordinated activity happening across this nation,  And so we  are in  a state of emergency. Black people are dying,  in a state of emergency. We cannot look at this  as an isolated incident. The reason why buildings are burning are n...

A response to how sociologists "deal" with race launched a heated exchange on Scatterplot at the end of February regarding attributions of racism. I was disappointed at the defensiveness present in the Scatterplot response to the “trauma” post and at the dismissiveness present in their response to the NY Post picture overall (not to say that all bloggers were defensive or dismissive, respectively, at one or all issues presented). In response to a healthy discussion already in place at Scatterplot , Skinny Malinky 's original "trauma" post states: I mean to pause and remember the force of the accumulated and collective traumas of racism, and to think about what sort of failure it is for sociology to refuse a consideration of that force, and to what new traumas that failure contributes. As a POC who grew up in the Deep South ( not to say this identity is definitively linked to the subsequent clause, but to provide sociological context to me saying that: Upon se...

Unfortunately, a lot. A recent report by the Kirwan Institute on Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University projects that the relief purposed to come from the Economic Stimulus Plan will not benefit all groups to the same degree. Because of the racial stratification of occupations and employment opportunities, the jobs created in the stimulus package are designed for industries where blacks, in particular, are underrepresented (e.g., the construction industry). In parallel fashion, the handouts of the New Deal disproportionately fell in the hands of white middle class America , as it funded the seeds of suburbanization and the post-World War II White Flight phenomenon through the National Housing Act of 1934 implemented by the Federal Housing Administration. These government handouts are largely responsible for the large black-white gap in wealth we still see today. Fortunately, unlike the 20s, we currently have laws that criminalize racial discrimination in hiring and wage allotmen...