Tag Archives: OddBox

Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan: The Story Behind the Famous Little Rock Nine ‘Scream Image’

You’ve probably seen the photo: a young African-American girl walks to school, her eyes shielded by sunglasses. She is surrounded by a hateful crowd of angry white people, including a girl caught mid-jeer, her teeth bared and her face hardened with anger. It’s one of the most famous images of the civil rights era, but it turns out that the story of the young women in the photo is even more complicated than the racial drama their faces portray.

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Elizabeth Eckford (right) attempts to enter Little Rock High School on Sept. 4, 1957, while Hazel Bryan (left) and other segregationists protest. (Will Counts Collection, Indiana University Archives)

On September 4th, 1957, nine African-American students entered Little Rock Central High School as the school’s first black students, including Elizabeth Eckford. On her way to the school, a group of white teenage girls followed Eckford, chanting “Two, four, six, eight! We don’t want to integrate!” One of these girls was Hazel Bryan. Benjamin Fine of The New York Times later described her as “screaming, just hysterical, just like one of these Elvis Presley hysterical deals, where these kids are fainting with hysteria.” Bryan is also credited as shouting, “Go home, nigger! Go back to Africa!”

After the photo became public, Hazel started to receive “critical” mail, all from the north. Author David Margolick wrote that while Hazel only found the criticism “surprising”, “Hazel’s parents, though, found her sudden notoriety sufficiently alarming to pull her out of the school.”

Bryan left her new school when she was 17, got married to Antoine Massery and began a family. After that, her attitude toward Martin Luther King and the concept of desegregation changed. “Hazel Bryan Massery was curious, and reflective… One day, she realized, her children would learn that the snarling girl in their history books was their mother. She realized she had an account to settle.”

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The crowd gathered outside Little Rock Central High School. The military men were ordered by Governor Orval Faubus to surround the school and prevent Black students from entering the grounds. (William P Straeter/AP/REX/Shutterstock)

In 1963, having changed her mind on integration and feeling guilt for her treatment of Eckford, Bryan contacted Eckford to apologize. They went their separate ways after this first meeting, and Eckford did not name the girl in the picture when asked about it by reporters.

During the time after Little Rock, Hazel had become increasingly political, branching out into peace activism and social work. David Margolick discovered, “She taught mothering skills to unmarried black women, and took underprivileged black teenagers on field trips. She frequented the black history section at the local Barnes & Noble, buying books by Cornel West and Shelby Steele and the companion volume to Eyes on the Prize.”

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These nine teenagers integrated the white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. They were kicked, ridiculed, threatened, called every name, spat on, ignored, and had acid thrown in their faces. Bottom row (L-R): Thelma Mothershed, Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Gloria Ray; Top row (L-R): Jefferson Thomas, Melba Pattillo, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Daisy Bates (NAACP President), Ernest Green, 1957. (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo)

Bryan hoped her reputation could be gained back, but this did not happen until the 40th anniversary of Central’s desegregation in 1997. Will Counts, the journalist who took the famous picture, arranged for Elizabeth and Hazel to meet again. The reunion provided an opportunity for acts of reconciliation, as noted in this editorial from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on the first day of 1998:

One of the fascinating stories to come out of the reunion was the apology that Hazel Bryan Massery made to Elizabeth Eckford for a terrible moment caught forever by the camera. That 40-year-old picture of hate assailing grace — which had gnawed at Ms. Massery for decades — can now be wiped clean, and replaced by a snapshot of two friends. The apology came from the real Hazel Bryan Massery, the decent woman who had been hidden all those years by a fleeting image. And the graceful acceptance of that apology was but another act of dignity in the life of Elizabeth Eckford.

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Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery at Little Rock Central High School in 1997. (Will Counts Collection/Indiana University Archives)

Feeling awkward when they first met, Eckford and Bryan surprisingly became friends afterwards:

They went to flower shows together, bought fabrics together, took mineral baths and massages together, appeared in documentaries and before school groups together. Since Elizabeth had never learned to drive, Hazel joked that she had become Elizabeth’s chauffeur. Whenever something cost money, Hazel treated; it was awkward for Elizabeth, who had a hard time explaining to people just how poor she was.

Soon after, the friendship began to fray. In 1999, David Margolick travelled to Little Rock and arranged to meet Elizabeth and Hazel. According to Hazel Bryan, she said, “I think she still… at times we have a little… well, the honeymoon is over and now we’re getting to take out the garbage.” As Eckford began to believe Bryan “wanted me to be cured and be over it and for this not to go on… She wanted me to be less uncomfortable so that she wouldn’t feel responsible anymore.” The other eight of the Little Rock Nine didn’t want this friendship to last any longer. The friendship quietly dissolved in 1999, when Elizabeth Eckford wrote “True reconciliation can occur only when we honestly acknowledge our painful, but shared, past” on the brick of Central High. This message affected their friendship.

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Elizabeth Eckford in front of the main entrance of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, 2007. Eckford was the first of nine black schoolchildren to make history on September 4th, 1957 when she arrived, alone, for the first day of classes at the all-white high school. (Charles Ommanney/Getty Images)

The principal of Central High School stated “I just had hoped that I could show this picture and say, ‘This happened, and that happened, and now…’ and there is no ‘now’.” She added, “And that makes me sad. It makes me sad for them, it makes me sad for the future students at our school, and for the history books, because I’d like a happy ending. And we don’t have that.”

For Valentine’s Day: The Many Loves of Nizar Qabbani

For Valentine’s Day, we bring you two new translations of love poems by Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani:

By Rachel Schine

Artwork by Molly Crabapple, used with permission.

In his obituary to the celebrated Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, published a few days after his death in May 1998, Adel Darwish writes that “for Qabbani, national liberation was meaningless without sexual liberation.”

Qabbani, who had spent much of his life as a diplomat and ardent Arab nationalist, also spent much of his life as a romantic in more conventional terms, and through verse he brought his world and its muses into vivid, living color. Much of the way in which Qabbani achieved this was by using the language of the everyday, stripped of pretense and elitism. In the plain speech of the two poems presented in translation below (an “Ode to Sadness,” or, Qaṣīdat al-Ḥuzn, and “You Want,” or Turīdīna), one may detect a sort of plaintive hope laced with a countervailing, often tongue-in-cheek cynicism: there is a hope that the narrator can be enough for the woman he adulates, that his words can satisfy, and that she can fulfill him in turn.

There is also a hope in these poems that the landscapes the poet has traversed — the cities and communities that he has had occasion to inhabit and speak on behalf of throughout his life — might meld with, accommodate, or elucidate his love for another human being. In the first poem, we are told that his lover has taught him “how to see Beirut” (to which he migrated after ending his government career) as a harlot on promenade, bedecked with beautiful robes but also divulging pain. In the second poem, the narrator laments that he is unable to give a woman all that she dreams of because he is “A laborer from Damascus — poor,” who “soak[s his] morning loaf in blood/ [his] hair in spit.” Wrapped up in the complications of love are the complexities of the poet’s relationship with these classed geographies, lending credence to Darwish’s point that Qabbani viewed the health of the nation and the free expression of sexuality as intertwined; his humble Damascene roots are thus both a source of pride and anxiety during courtship, while his lurid portrayal of Beirut goes hand in hand with learning the art of sadness from a practiced, female teacher. Indeed, it is through these ambivalent depictions of contemporary locales and the socioeconomic realities that they intimate that the poet fashions some of the most poignant portions of the poems.

In contrast, one of the great joys of these verses is that Qabbani consciously relishes looking backward through the centuries and across a more extensive regional terrain, revivifying the clichés of classical Arabic love poetry. In the spirit of rediscovering old chestnuts anew, he tells the reader in “Ode to Sadness” (the title of which is itself a throwback to the traditional qaṣīda with its opening refrain of love lost and its peripatetic, camel-mounted middle section) that his lover teaches him to act like a child, to read stories of knighthood and gallantry, and to think of women in terms of all the visually delighting but timeworn tropes that the canon has to offer; reading across the two poems, we find a woman whose lips are like pomegranates and whose eyes are like gulf water — she is redolent with fragrance and her eyes are kohl-rimmed. With respect to imagery, this is a very back-to-basics, classicizing approach to depicting a lover, though encased in the modern structure of free verse rather than the old-school ghazal, or metered love poem. In addition to pairing himself with his beloved, Qabbani marries his Christian, Arab, and more trans-regionally Middle Eastern identities and experiences in these pieces: we find references to church bells and heaven-sent manna alongside allusions to the erstwhile courtyard of the Sasanian sovereign Khosroes (the iwān kisrā) in Ctesiphon and the Thousand and One Nights.

It seems fitting, given the date but also the times, to dive into some poetry that deals in the many and hybrid types of love described above, for women, memories, nations, cultures, and of course, for one’s own self.

An Ode to Sadness

By Nizar Qabbani, tr. Rachel Schine

Your love has taught me… how to be sad.

And I have needed, for ages

A woman to make me sad

A woman in whose arms I could weep

Like a sparrow,

A woman—to gather up my pieces—

Like shards of shattered crystal

 

Your love has taught me, my dear,

The worst of habits

It has taught me to fill up my glass

A thousand times per night

And to sample the treatment of druggists

To knock at the diviners’ door

It has taught me— I now leave my home

To comb the roadside flagstones

And I stalk your visage

In the rain, and in the lights of cars

I stalk your specter

Even… even…

In sheets of advertisements…

 

Your love has taught me…

How I’ve been love-lost in my own face—for hours

Searching for a gypsy poem,

That every gypsy girl might envy

Searching for a face—a voice—

Your love is all the faces and all the voices.

 

Your love has made me enter, my dear

Cities of sorrows

Before you, I had not entered

Cities of sorrows—

I had never known—

That a tear was a person

That a person without sadness

Is the memory of a person…

 

Your love has taught me…

To behave like kids,

To draw your face—

With chalk upon the walls

And on the sails of fishermen’s crafts

Upon the church bells,

And the crosses.

Your love has taught me…

How love alters the turning of time—

It has taught me that when I love,

The earth holds back its spinning

Your love has taught me things…

That were never part of the accounting

So I read the stories of children—

I entered the palaces of the jinn kings

I dreamed that the daughter of the sultan

Married me—

Those eyes of hers… purer than the gulf waters

Those lips of hers… more luscious than a pomegranate’s bloom

And I dreamed that I safeguarded her

Like the knights,

I dreamed that I gifted her,

With strands of pearl and coral

Your love has taught me, my dear, what delirium is

It has taught me how life goes on,

With the sultan’s daughter never coming.

 

Your love has taught me…

How I love you in all things

In the naked tree

In the desiccated, yellow leaves

In the rainy weather—in the storms

In the smallest of cafes—

In which we, of an evening, drank our black coffee

Your love has taught me to seek refuge

In nameless hotels

In nameless churches

In nameless cafes

Your love has taught me…

How the night distends with strangers’ sorrows

It has taught me… how to see Beirut:

A woman… a madame of seductions

A woman, wearing each and every night

The finest garments she possesses

Sprinkling perfume on her breasts

For the sailors—and the princes—

Your love has taught me…

To weep for lack of crying

It has taught me how sadness sleeps

Like a young boy with severed feet

On the streets of Rūsha and Ḥamrā’

 

Your love has taught me… how to be sad.

And I have needed, for ages

A woman to make me sad

A woman in whose arms I could weep

Like a sparrow,

A woman— to gather up my pieces—

Like shards of shattered crystal

 

You Want

By Nizar Qabbani, tr. Rachel Schine

You want, like all women do,

The treasures of Solomon

Like all women…

Cisterns of perfume

And combs of ivory

Swarms of serving girls

You want, my Ladyship,

Him to proclaim your name like a parrot

To say, “I love you” at dawn

To say, “I love you” at dusk

While washing your legs with wine

O, Shahrazad of women,

You want, like all women do…

You want the stars of the sky from me,

And dishes of manna

And platters of quail

And slippers of chestnut blossoms

You want…

Silks from Shanghai

And from Isfahan—

Onagers’ skins.

But I am not one of those prophets,

Who casts his staff

And splits the sea

Who hews his solid stones from light…

You want, like all women do,

Fans of feathers

And kohl

And fragrance

You want a slave

Of profound idiocy

To read you bedside poetry

You want…

At one and the same time,

Rashid’s palatial court,

And Khosroes’ arching hall,

And a parade of bondsmen and captives

Keeping your skirts’ train in tow

O Cleopatra,

But I am not

Some globetrotting Sindbad,

Who can make Babel appear between your hands

Nor the Pyramids of Egypt

Nor the archway of Khosroes

I do not have a lofty lamp

With which to bring you sunrays through the night

As you desire… all you women…

And what’s more,

O Shahrazad of women,

I am a laborer from Damascus—poor

I soak my morning loaf in blood,

My hair in spit…

I live simply.

And I believe in bread and saints,

And I dream of love like the others,

And a partner patching up the holes

In my robes

A child sleeping on my lap

Like a field sparrow

Like the glow on the water

I think of love like the others

Because a lover is like air

Because a lover is a sun, shining

Upon the dreamers behind castle walls,

Upon the toiling breadwinners,

Upon the wretched

And those who lay down in beds of silk

And those who lay down in beds of sobbing

You want, like all women do…

You want the eighth Wonder of the World,

But I have nothing,

Except my boasts.

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Rachel Schine is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, focusing on premodern Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, and Persian literature. Her research interests include orality and storytelling practices, gender/sexuality and race/race-making in popular texts. Her dissertation is titled, “On Blackness in Arabic Popular Literature: The Black Heroes of the Siyar Sha‘biyya, their Conception, Contests, and Contexts.”

Debunking 3 myths behind ‘chain migration’ and ‘low-skilled’ immigrants

Don’t need any more explanation than Trump is a racist about immigration!

By Raquel Aldana
The Conversation

 

President Donald Trump has embraced the rhetoric of “chain migration” to spread the message that the United States is legally letting in too many of the wrong kind of immigrant.

That term, however, distorts the facts.

As a scholar on U.S. immigration law and policy, I’d like to correct and contextualize the numbers on the now maligned “family-based immigration,” and uncover the biases that underlie the preference for the “highly-skilled” immigrant. Family immigration is subject to significant limitations and it exists because American values include ideals such as family unification.

Myth : Family immigration is unlimited

On Jan. 5, the Trump administration published its framework on immigration reform and border security. To fulfill its promise to cut lawful immigration by half, the proposal limits family immigration to spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents. This proposed cut would eliminate the ability of U.S. citizens and permanent residents to sponsor their siblings and adult children. It would also stop U.S. citizens from sponsoring their parents.

To support these cuts, President Trump alleged in his first State of the Union address that current law creates a chain of migration that allows immigrants to sponsor “unlimited numbers of distant relatives.” This claim is untrue.

With few exceptions, all lawful permanent immigration to the United States is subject to annual limits. Moreover, no single nation may send more than 7 percent of the overall total number of immigrants coming to the United States in a given year. Only U.S. citizens can sponsor immediate relatives – their spouses, minor and unmarried children and parents – without these limits. In recent years, immediate relatives have comprised nearly half of all family immigration to the United States.

All family immigration categories except immediate relatives are severely backlogged, and in particular for nations with high levels of immigration to the United States. In fact, applicants for family immigration from China, India, Mexico and the Philippines face wait times of up to 20 years. According to the U.S. State Department, approximately 3.9 million immigrants are waiting in line for an opportunity to immigrate.

Myth : Family immigration is overwhelming

The White House website features a chart on chain migration that presents a series of data points intended to suggest that legal immigrants are overwhelming the nation. For example, the chart states, “Every year the U.S. resettles a population larger than the size of Washington D.C.” While factually correct, this data point distorts reality by ignoring context.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/LkI3Z/2/

It’s true that in absolute numbers, immigration to the United States is greater than any other country. However, it is small when considering the overall size of the U.S. population. In fact, according to the libertarian CATO Institute, as a percentage of its population, U.S. immigration flows rank relatively low as compared to other major industrialized nations such as Canada and Australia.

Myth : ‘Low-skilled’ immigrants don’t benefit the US

The Trump administration has expressed a preference for highly skilled immigrants. The assumption is that immigration systems that value other factors – such as family unification, diversity or humanitarian goals – allows “low-skilled” immigrants into the U.S. They also assume these immigrants cannot or refuse to assimilate, or may even be dangerous. The profiles of permanent immigration to the United States today, however, reveal a much more positive reality.

Nearly 34 million legal permanent residents live in the United States, two-thirds of whom arrived based on family sponsorship. As a whole, demographic data show that lawful permanent residents work in a range of occupations and professions. They show good levels of social integration. Legal permanent residents and immigrants also generally have lower levels of criminality compared to the population of people born in the U.S.

Most studies on the fiscal impact of U.S. immigration conclude that immigrant contributions have been positive to the overall U.S. economy. They have little to no adverse impact on native workers.

There are, however, variations among immigrants across measures such as educational attainment, home ownership and English proficiency. In general, for example, Asian immigrants outperform immigrants from Latin American and even the native born on some of these measures. But there are historical and geographic reasons that explain why immigrants from Mexico and Central America to the United States have tended to be from poorer and more vulnerable communities.

These variations do not mean that some immigrants integrate poorly or fail to contribute to U.S. society. Rather, their contributions are devalued in this new rhetoric of “merit” migration.

This new standard of “merit” – measured in terms of high levels training and education, English-language proficiency and high wages – creates a hardly achievable race to the top. It narrows the definition of who should be considered a “deserving” immigrant. Nearly all U.S. citizens would likely be undeserving of U.S. immigration under these standards.

Other important values are lost that I believe should continue to define our identity as a nation. These values include family unification, compassion toward people who are persecuted and being good neighbors. They also mean valuing the contributions of immigrants who do the difficult work of picking our fruit, cleaning our houses, cutting our lawns and caring for our children and elderly.

Raquel Aldana is Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Diversity and Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

“The land where I grew up was very rich. The property was…

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“The land where I grew up was very rich. The property was empty when my father bought it, but he plowed it with cows and grew many crops there. He built it up from nothing. I have many memories there as a child. The land was next to a river. There were lots of coconut trees. The trees didn’t belong to anyone but they felt like my own. My father died when I was five years old and passed the land on to me. It was my only possession. It was my back-up plan. I worked as a janitor in the city, but I always returned to visit my mother and bring her money. It was in my twenties that I began to notice that the river was eroding the soil. Every time I returned, a bit more had fallen into the water. There was nothing I could do. We stayed until the water was five feet from our door. On the day we left, my mother told me: ‘One day you’ll realize how hard your father worked for this.’ And that’s the hardest part. The land was my only memory of my father. And now I can’t show it to my kids. I feel like it’s not just my inheritance that’s underwater, but all my father’s hard work.”

(Dhaka, Bangladesh)

لماذا نحب الشهداء

لماذا نحب الشهداء؟

 

اشتاقت الارض مرة اخرى لخيرة ابنائها، وشهدنا جنين ونابلس وارتقاء الشهداء. مشهد تتغير فيه الاسماء وتتبدل القصص، وتهدر الدموع فتجف العيون ، وتبقى الارض متعطشة للارتواء من دم ابنائها هؤلاء. انبكيهم ؟ ام نرثيهم؟ ام نزفهم بارتقائهم الى مكان لن يسع الا الابرار ؟

هل تكون هذه عبارات نضمد فيها اوجاعنا؟ تخفف عن مصابنا الجلل بفقدان الشجعان منا ، الذين يحملون الوطن بين نبضاتهم ويستبسلون من اجله حتى فراقهم لاخر انفاسهم ؟

لا استطيع ان اجد اجابة كافية ، في وقت يبكي فيه الوطن هؤلاء الشباب وبطولاتهم. فالخسارة فادحة عند التفكير بقيمة هؤلاء. هؤلاء الذين عشقوا الوطن بقدر عشقهم للحياة بل اكثر ، ولم يترددوا في الموت في سبيله ، فكيف لو عاشوا ليقدموا حبهم لهذا الوطن في الحياة؟

يجعلونا ،نحن اولئك الرابضون على الارض منتظرون للمعجزات ، اقرب ايمانا بان بالموت في المحصلة لا بد هناك حياة، حياة بها جنة للابطال، للشهداء.

الهذا نتمسك بهم؟ لأننا نعرف تماما ، انه اذا ما كان هناك جنة تأتي بعد حساب ، فهي فقط لهم . لأنهم استطاعوا العمل من اجل حياة لا تفنى بفناء الجسد ، بل تبقى مزهوة بأرواح من فدوا اجسادهم من اجلها.

عند ارتقاء احمد جرار شهيدا، اثار موته مشاعرا مختلطة ،كان الحزن بلا شك الظاهر منها ، ولكن ، كان بموته حياة لما جف من مشاعرنا وما يبس من امل لنا في حياة كريمة.

انحبهم شهداء؟ لا … ولكن بشهادتهم اضعف الايمان بالنسبة لنا .

فهناك منا من ينتظر ارتقاءهم ليكونوا سلما في درجات حساباتهم السياسية. وهناك منا من لا يزال ينتظر يوم تحرير قادم. فبارتقائهم تشع السماء بأمل جديد ،يصبحون كالنجوم مضيئين طرقات العالم الشاسع .

وهناك منا ….وهذا هو المصاب الاكبر، من ساعد في اغتيال هذا البطل.

وهنا تكمن معضلة حبنا لاحمد جرار ورفاقه ، كما حبنا لباسل الاعرج ،فنحبهم كحب يعقوب ليوسف. يبكينا خداع الاخوة وتواطؤهم ثم رجوعهم باكين مدعين ان اخاهم قد اكلته الذئاب حاملين قميص مدمي.

حبنا لهؤلاء الشهداء كظم دموعنا ،فتحجرت ابصارنا ولم يبق امامنا من هول المصاب الا التمسك بالشهيد وحبه والاحتفاء به . وكأننا نقول لهم ، لاولئك الذين تواطؤوا وخانوا العهد والوطن والانسان ، بأن احمد وباسل ورفاقهم هم طريق الاشتباك الحقيقي الذي لن نحيد عنه. حتى ولو سكتنا هيبة ، وكتمنا هول مصابنا بالخيانة لأن هناك عدو بالنهاية يده التي تنفذ الجرائم الشنعاء . فإن قلوبنا تشتعل لهيبا على فقدانهم ، وعقولنا تتحرك تدريجيا نحو صواب واحد : بغض الاحتلال وخيانة الاخوة.

سكوتنا ليس خوفا ، ولكن حرقة . حرقة القلوب التي تعي ان الاقرب هو العدو الحقيقي. ان من ذلك الذي تأمنه على حياتك هو العدو الاخطر . وهؤلاء يتبين في كل مصاب انهم كثر.

ولهذا نحب الشهداء، لأنهم قادرون على اعطائنا الامل بالحياة. الحياة تلك التي نتوق لعيشها . حياة تكون الحرية هي عنوانها. حياة قيل لنا اننا جئنا اليها لنكون احرار. وهؤلاء …. احمد وباسل ومهند وبهاء ونشأت وليث ونجوم حقيقية في سمائنا ستبقى تنير لنا امل حياة نستحق ان نعيشها .

هؤلاء…. هم الباقون …. لا يموتون….

 

هؤلاء هم ابناؤنا ….فكلنا امهات واخوات وزوجات احمد وباسل وليث وبهاء ونشأت. فقدانهم هو فقداننا . خسارتهم هي خسارتنا . وارتقاؤهم شهداء هو احتفاؤنا .

Rare Footages of Shanghai During the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45)

When did World War II begin? Americans would say December 7, 1941. For Europeans, it was September 1, 1939. But in China, people know the actual date. It was August 13, 1937. That day, after more than a century of humiliation and six years of repeated “incidents” by the Imperial Japanese Army, China at last “stood up.”This act of defiance took place in Shanghai, the most international city in Asia. It was front-page news around the world. Today, the story is forgotten. As the 80th anniversary of this fateful battle approaches, we recall the four years when China stood alone against Japanese imperialism. It all began in Shanghai: 1937.

Spotted on: Shanghai 1937 video on Vimeo

Researchers find direct correlation between residential segregation and police shootings of unarmed Black victims

LatinaLista — Go to most towns and cities in the country and you’ll most probably find one section where whites live, another for Blacks and still another for Latinos or other residents of color. Some small towns were even known as Sundown Towns, meaning that if you were a person of color, you better not be seen outside after the sun went down.

This kind of racial segregation and outright threatening discrimination underscores the long history US society has with structural racism.

Also known as societal racism, it’s defined in Wikipedia as referring “to racist attitudes within a society…because, according to Carl E. James, society is structured in a way that excludes substantial numbers of people from minority backgrounds from taking part in social institutions.”

It’s against this backdrop that gives greater validity to new findings coming from a Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) study that discovered that states that had a greater degree of structural racism, especially residential segregation, were also more likely to have fatal police shootings of unarmed minority victims.

Believed to be the first study of its kind to look at data on the state level of structural racism and fatal police shootings of Black victims, researchers created an index of structural racism indicators, such as residential segregation, economic inequality, employment status, education levels, and incarceration rates.

Researchers surprised themselves at the strong correlation revealed in their analysis — the greater the score in any of the index indicators, especially residential segregation, the greater the increase in the state’s ratio of shootings of unarmed black victims to unarmed white victims.

“This research should change the conversation about the problem of police shootings,” said senior author Michael Siegel, professor of community health sciences at BUSPH. “Part of the resistance to openly discussing this issue is that many people feel offended by criticism of people who are risking their lives to protect all of us. Our study suggests that this problem is not simply about the actions of individuals, but about the actions of all of society. Hopefully, reframing this from an individual to a societal problem will pave the way for a meaningful discussion about institutional racism.”