Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s baseless claims about unvaccinated Black people being the bearers of COVID-19 were not surprising at all. This is yet another instance of people, and not just elected officials, using Black folks as scapegoats for the failures of the state, Mississippi NAACP President Corey Wiggins writes
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.
Now, with America refusing to act against voter suppression, and at least nationally/federally, against police brutality, many see the proclamation of a national holiday that recognizes Black liberation as performative. However, America can acknowledge the liberation of formerly enslaved persons, and still have work to do regarding repairing a damaged society.
The Shoestring team not only worried for themselves and their own families as the pandemic ascended, but for the children of high-poverty Georgetown and MidCity neighborhoods in Jackson where the organization has been providing support for 53 years. Its goals are to ensure access to education, health and self-sufficiency services for Jackson Public Schools students in grades pre-K through 12.
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.
My studies of newspaper archives and primary sources, and some good learning from Dr. Manning Marable at Columbia both widened my understanding from the racism in my native South to what really happened across the country and it, well, awakened me. It also made me want to come on back home and face down, and report, demons I needed to confront as a white Mississippian.
Where I once felt like a big-eyed, light-footed nurse, I now navigate through signs, symptoms and exacerbations with a pleading disdain for those in my community to change their ways. Sadly, the damage is so deep that to protect my empathetic energies, I may just need to change my position on the health-care spectrum.
Unresolved inequity is revealed when Black communities are hit first and hardest from hurricanes and floods yet are given inadequate resources to repair before the next storm, Heather McTeer Toney writes.
Black students and faculty at the University of Mississippi explain how administrators, donors and alumni can step boldly into an anti-racist future with transparency, publicly stated solutions and without depending on UM community members of color to do the heavy lifting. They love the university and want to see it reach its, and thus the state’s, full diverse, equitable and inclusive potential.
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