What happened at the University of Missouri is huge. Even if you do not see it hyped on mainstream news outlets, you make sure YOU hype it up. You repeat this. You make this story huge.
We have the power. We just have to use it.
So you make sure University Presidents, Mangers, and CEOs all over the country know. Let them know that they can be removed or lose much revenue, and just not because they or their staff acted in violence based on race. Make sure they know they can be removed because they failed to act, because they failed to protect people of color.
Ex-President Timothy Wolfe has to be sitting at home shell shocked right now. He's gotta be as shocked as Hillary was when Barack Obama got the democratic nomination instead of her.
I wonder why this is happening now. But then again, I don't wonder why. So many unrelated things have come together to create **the now** we find ourselves in.
In 2007, subprime lending got shakey and other countries stopped buying our bank products. When our banks started to collapse, economies all over the world started heading for recession and depression because our economies are so intertwined now.
Things got so bad here in the U.S., foreclosures left and right, that some white people were willing to elect the best person for the job even if he was black (Okay--maybe only 1/3 or white people but that was enough to put Barack Obama over the top)
Having a black president for two terms has made race a much larger part of the national conversation. The Tea Party's growth and its overt racism is a response to having a black man be the most powerful man in the world.
However, the Tea Party has been less of a problem than I thought they'd be. The collective IQ is so low all they've been doing is screwing up the republican party's ability to use dog whistle racism to unite the party and run everyone else down as usual (Trust me, the republicans were united and scary a decade or so back. They'd have been able to make Trump go sit down a long time ago.)
Black Lives Matter, born out of the frustration over The Trayvon Martin Verdict, has been pushing back by putting a huge spot light on white police officers who have walked away from murder again and again and again.
Even though anti-black racism hasn't actually increased as much as white people seem to think it has, all this in-your-face violent racism in the mainstream news all the time is having an effect on
1) what we, as black people, are willing to take while ONLY grumbling among ourselves
2) what the very white main stream media is reporting as news because they don't have the control they used to.
Social media has control of what's news to a large extent. And luckily we, as black people, have some significant control over social media.
Black Twitter Detective Agency has tracked down and gotten more than one person fired over racist statements and actions. Black Lives Matter protests "go viral" because we pass information about protests around social media until a local protest is known about from coast to coast.
And whatever we make "go viral" is big money to news outlets. To me, this means that the white, mainstream news outlets are not the gatekeepers they once were.
I don't think we'd have heard about this protest at all if it hadn't been for black folk on social media. And this protest being so successful, so powerful, in such a short amount of time ought to be awe inspiring to you.
And now that it has hit the mainstream news, just think about other white University Presidents, middle managers of this corporation or that corporation who just poo-poo an act of barbarous racism, pass it off as an aberration, and make no effort to investigate, no matter how many acts of racism there are in a row. Some of them must be wondering about what they're going to do now that muttering, "Tsk-tsk, that shouldn't have happened to you" isn't going to cut it anymore.
We've moving.
We're not moving fast. But black progress is never smooth or fast. It's more like a car moving on bad gas. The car seems like it's gonna sputter and die, but it keeps chugging along until there is this sudden, little surge forward.
I think kicking Tim Wolfe's ass to the curb was one of those surges forward, a rather big one.
SCISSORS CUT PAPER,
ROCK BREAKS SCISSORS,
PAPER COVER ROCK,
BUTLER REFUSES TO EAT PAPER
WOLFE IS DEVOURED BY BUTLER
THEN SPIT OUT
A list of the changes coming to University of Missouri at the link: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/11/10/us/ap-us-university-of-missouri-initiatives-glance.html?_r=0
I'm happy. Aren't you? Do A Little Victory Dance!!!
Do your victory dance fast and hold tight to it in your mind. White entitlement is not going to go down easy. White entitlement is going to fight back like it always does. And the fight is likely to be rabid among the college aged set.
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