MFP Contributor
It has been 16 years since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Mississippi Gulf Coast region. The City of Biloxi is a coastal community that sits quietly along a small peninsula in the heart of the Gulf of Mexico. Category 5 winds destroyed residential communities and businesses throughout Harrison County. Unfortunately, the negative impact on the infrastructure is still felt today.
The issue is not about who posted the photo. It has more to do with a lack of understanding about race and how patterns of systemic racism and other injustices toward ADOS communities amplify the need to think critically about race in America. The misinformation that exists in regards to ADOS extends well beyond our online media outlets.
The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a state-funded spy agency charged with resisting integration and civil-rights activity, actively surveilled these civil rights activists and allowed law enforcement agencies to openly violate their constitutional rights in Jim Crow Mississippi. Those were dangerous times that still affect my family today.
The duplicitous nature of the relationship between policy makers and Wall Street opens the door to predatory lenders who prey on disenfranchised residents whose only access to banking is check cashing centers, payday-loan stores and ATMs. Major banking institutions like Wells Fargo and TD Bank have agreed to pay back hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution for illegal practices that targeted ADOS and other marginalized consumers.
Black farmers in unincorporated communities in Mississippi continue to be disenfranchised by Big Agriculture and Wall Street. Our lawmakers have turned a blind eye to this corruption. Farmers actually owned very few farms themselves.
Neither party has stood up for American descendants of slavery when it comes to racial disparities in environmental, social and economic policies. Co-founder Leo Carney writes that ADOS of MS are seeking reparative justice that is a pathway for statewide and federal reparations for American descendants of slavery in Mississippi and across America.
Mississippi Journalism and Education Group is a a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization (EIN 85-1403937) for the state, devoted to going beyond partisanship and publishing solutions journalism for the Magnolia State and all of its people.
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The Mississippi Free Press is a project of the Mississippi Journalism and Education Group, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit journalism organization (EIN 85-1403937).
