Enfnts Terribles

If you don’t know what to do about racism and white supremacy, getting started on educating yourself and acknowledging your own white privilege (unconscious prejudice) is a good place to start. First of all, please educate yourself on all the violent hate crimes that have been happening against people of color, especially black people.

Justice For George 

[TRIGGER WARNING] George Floyd was arrested on Monday, May 25 in Minneapolis, America. Important to note is that George was cooperative, but still, he was brutally forced to the ground by police officer Derek Chauvin who pushed his knee to George’s neck for eight minutes with two other police officers kneeling on his lower half and a third police officer standing by. He eventually lost consciousness and died later in the hospital. A video of the arrest surfaced not much later that showed George begging for his life, letting the officers know that he couldn’t breathe and that his stomach and neck hurt. Chauvin didn’t budge and kept suffocating him.

Following the backlash of the video, the four officers present at the scene were fired. The three police officers who sat on George’s lower half and who stood by haven’t been charged. But as of yesterday, ex-police officer Derek Chauvin has been charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter. Which means he has been charged for accidentally killing a man. Which is bullshit. You don’t accidentally kill a man when he told you for eight minutes that he couldn’t breathe and was hurting. What happened to George Floyd is murder and those four police officers should be rightfully charged so.

Sadly, George Floyd isn’t the only black person that has been murdered by police or white people. Look up their names, learn about what has happened to people like Ahmoud Arbery, Sean Reed, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddy Gray, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Sandra Bland, Adama Traoré and many others.

Now, let’s talk about some things you can check out to get educated on racism and white privilege.

Podcasts To Listen To

About Race is a podcast hosted by Anna Holmes, Baratunde Thurston, Raquel Cepeda, and Tanner Colby. They host a multiracial, interracial conversation about culture, identity, power, and privilege in our racial society.

Pod for the Cause is a podcast from The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. It promotes a just, inclusive, and fair democracy, one that works for everyone. It was created for people who want change, who understand the importance of restoring our democracy and want to engage in deep conversations about the issues.

1619 was created by The New York Times and talks about how slavery has transformed America and connects past and present through storytelling. The podcast is hosted by Nikole Hannah-Jonas, who examines the long shadow of American slavery.

Code Switch is a podcast by a multi-racial, multi-generational team of journalists fascinated by the overlapping themes of race, ethnicity, and culture and how they play out in our lives and communities. How all of this is shifting.

Other podcasts worth checking out: Intersectionality Matters! hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Momentum: A Race Forward Podcast, and Pod Save the People (Crooked Media).

Organizations to donate to

You can also donate to different organizations, we sum up a few for you:

– The NAACP Legal Defense Fund: They fight for racial equality.
– Black Visions Collective: This is a black-, trans-, and queer-led organization in affiliation with the Black Lives Matter Global Network.
– The Minnesota Freedom Fund: This organization pays jail bonds for those who can’t afford to fight discriminatory and coercive jailing (This fund has announced that they are being overwhelmed with donations and now encourage people to give money to other organizations in need).
– Black Lives Matter: This is an organization that has the mission statement to bring justice, freedom, and healing to black people across the globe.

If you want to do even more, check out this Google Document with organizations to donate to, petitions to sign, and how to better educate yourself. 

For more podcasts, movies, books, and social media accounts to follow, definitely check out this Google Document created by Alyssa Klein and Sarah Sophie Flicker in May 2020.

If you want to follow other people on Instagram who fight for this cause, these are some honorable mentions: ckyourprivilige, nowhitesaviors, Rachel.cargle, action4humanity_se

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Co-written by Janne Schellingen, Mira Van Lierop