On Tuesday, just minutes before a jury found Derek Chauvin guilty in the murder of George Floyd, another police officer in Columbus shot and killed 17-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant.
Even the most optimistic of us have learned by now that there is no justice in accountability. We've learned that it can take nearly a year of national trauma and rage to assign blame from nine minutes of video evidence. We've learned that even as this broken system continues to thrust us into cyclical collective trauma, it still does not expect us to react.
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We've learned too that a moment of more time, more energy, or an even playing field will not come. We've learned how to mourn in motion. As our editorial team wrote last summer, we know that nothing stands still, regardless of why we create it—so we have no choice but to knock down and build up, always at the same time, in rhythm, over and over again.
We deserve to express our anger and our grief and our fear for those we love. We deserve to remember things that the system wants us to forget. And armed with this knowledge, we must continue to choose to resist the messages that say we’re helpless, that our power is not ours, or that there’s nothing to be done. Everything will be done.
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In the face of anti-trans bills, 'Mama Gloria' is a blessing
Antonia Randolph, Scalawag
"Rather than offering a litany of the trauma that Black trans women endure, we see how anti-trans violence may have haunted Mama Gloria's life, but does not define it. The film's poignancy comes from contrasting the victories and disappointments that make up any life with a portrayal of the unique forces that subject Black transgender women to premature death."
Many Black trans women struggle to imagine life after 40 due to the violence they experience daily. A new documentary by Black filmmaker Luchina Fisher honors the life and work of Gloria Allen—a Black trans activist, icon, and elder who transitioned before Stonewall. Fisher made the film out of a desire to find Black trans women role models for her transgender daughter.
"Like so many Black women before her, Mama Gloria wagers that respectability can protect her from being mistreated, believing 'if you act like a lady, you'll be treated like a lady,'" Randolph writes in this review. Mama Gloria didn’t just teach young trans girls etiquette—she taught them how to survive [Link]
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1. Born with two strikes
Toluse Olorunnipa & Griff Witte, The Washington Post
“My mom, she used to always tell us that growing up in America, you already have two strikes,” as a Black man, Floyd’s younger brother Philonise said in an interview. “And you’re going to have to work three times as hard as everybody else, if you want to make it in this world.”
The Black Lives Matter movement has been examined over and over in the context of the social justice movements that predate it, but a true long-view of American racism requires an even further timeline. George Floyd's great-great-grandfather, Hillery Thomas Stewart, spent the first eight years of his life enslaved. He acquired 500 acres of land during Reconstruction, and lost it all when white farmers seized the land using legally questionable maneuvers that were common in the postwar South. Stewart’s state-mandated illiteracy left him powerless to mount a legal defense.
A hundred years later, Floyd was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina. In 1977, when he was three, his single mother moved with her three kids to Houston, hoping to put North Carolina's tobacco fields behind her and start a new life in Texas. But the Third Ward was racked with white flight, underinvestment, and mass incarceration. This immersive deep dive follows Floyd's family lineage as just one touchstone in a long, long context of racial abuses that plague every Black American family to this day.
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2. Appalachia’s 'Gunmen Of Capitalism' And The Matewan Massacre
Mason Adams, WV Public Broadcasting
"A very important thing to remember about Baldwin-Felts is the organization was founded by mountaineers. It was run by mountaineers. And most of the gunmen they hired who shot miners or beat up Black railroad workers were native mountaineers. So they're getting their gun thugs from the same labor pool as the people that they're torturing. And that's a dynamic that really needs to be explored."
This summer marks the 100th anniversary of the largest armed uprising in America since the Civil War, the Battle of Blair Mountain. The battle came several months after the Matewan Massacre, a shootout that left seven detectives, two miners, and the mayor dead.
The event has been immortalized in stories, songs, and films. In history's telling of these conflicts, the coal companies hired henchmen from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to fight their battles against a pro-union sheriff and mayor. Here, Inside Appalachia co-host Mason Adams speaks with historian Bob Hutton about his research into the Baldwin-Felts agency as more than just a villain in this story, but as an enforcer of Jim Crow.
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3. Radically Rural: Reimagining Rural Healthcare Post-Pandemic
Caroline Tremblay, The Daily Yonder
From exchanging ventilators to launching mobile vaccine delivery, rural healthcare innovations have been plentiful during the pandemic. Enabled by waivers put in place by the federal government, telehealth services have seen huge spikes in use across the country, and trends aren't showing signs of a return to pre-pandemic levels of in-person visits.
Unfortunately, a key component of that access is still missing in many rural communities: broadband. Strengthened telehealth systems could help meet access needs in more remote and rural regions across the country, where hospitals are closing more by the day over the last decade, and leveraging existing broadband programs through the USDA and Federal Communications Commission could remove some of those barriers. But while those investments are indeed necessary to meet future needs, experts say that bottom-up organizing is crucial to the systems’ continued sustainability after the grants run out.
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Suggesting a disturbing pattern of behavior stretching back decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced Wednesday that convicted murderer Derek Chauvin closely matches the profile of a mysterious blue-uniformed killer behind hundreds more unsolved slayings nationwide. 'The suspect’s M.O. is clear. He dons a blue uniform much like Mr. Chauvin’s, stalks unarmed men who are disproportionately Black, and often obsessively uses the same three murder tactics: a nightstick, sidearm, or chokehold,' said FBI chief Christopher Wray, noting that the Blue Hat Killer, as the murderer was known, could be linked to hundreds of cold cases in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Houston, and other major cities and towns across America.
'There may even be some sort of fetishistic aspect as well, because many bystanders report this individual continually carries around handcuffs, which I would add Mr. Chauvin had on his person. Frankly, if we can confirm he was responsible for these horrific deaths, it would finally bring much-needed relief to thousands of families who despaired about ever receiving justice.' Wray added that time was of the essence in substantiating the link due to testimony suggesting the Blue Hat Killer kept even more still-living victims locked away in dingy lightless cells. [Link]
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