Facebook suspends Trump for 2 years in response to Oversight Board ruling
By Elizabeth Dwoskin

Breaking: Facebook said Friday that it plans to suspend Trump for two years following his comments in the wake of the Capitol insurrection on January 6th, and will only reinstate him” if the risk to public safety has receded.“

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/03/trump-facebook-oversight-board/

Cousins.

by Lucian K. Truscott IV

You are looking at a photograph of me and my cousin Shannon Lanier. It’s a photograph that illustrates why the 1619 Project is such a white supremacist’s nightmare, teaching that racism and slavery played a major role in the founding of this nation. It’s a photograph of the truth exposed, at least in part, by critical race theory, an academic discipline that teaches the same thing. It is not only a photograph, it is a fact. It is history staring you in the face, history in flesh and blood, history that cannot be rewritten, cannot be buried, cannot be denied, because we are alive to tell it.

That’s Thomas Jefferson’s grave we’re standing on. We are 6th great grandsons of Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third president long idolized as a founding father of the United States. Shannon is descended from Jefferson’s 36 year relationship – if relations between an enslaved person and a slave owner can be called that – with Sally Hemings, who is his 6th great grandmother. I am descended from Jefferson’s relationship with his wife Martha, who is my 6th great grandmother. Shannon’s great grandmother was enslaved by my 6th great grandfather. We are tied together not only by blood but by the stain of slavery on our family and our country. We are cousins, and we are also blood brothers. We carry in our souls the legacy of the slavery that brought our great grandparents together. We are descendants of slavery. It lives within us.
..
I appeared with Michelle Cooley, one of my Hemings cousins, on the Today Show. Shannon and Michelle and I gave interviews to television crews from places like Bangkok and Paris and Moscow. And that afternoon, the death threats started. They came by email and by phone at first. Later, they would come in the mail to my home in Los Angeles, more than a hundred them.

One I remember very, very well because somehow this man had gotten my phone number, and he called me in the middle of the night. He threatened me, told me he knew where I was staying in Charlottesville and where I lived in California. When his threats had finally sputtered to a stop, I asked him why, and it led to a conversation that lasted about five minutes. He called me a traitor to my race and several other things involving the “N-word.” I asked him why he felt so strongly the way he did. He told me I was trying to change the way things had always been, that Black people were inferior, that they didn’t deserve to be treated the same way as whites. I asked him if he thought Black people should have the right to vote. He said, of course not. They weren’t real Americans. He said something like, “you don’t know it yet, but one day we’ll get things back to the way they used to be, before n-----s had rights and everything went to hell in this country.”

Today on its front page, the New York Times informs us that the state of Texas is entertaining “a flurry” of laws that would “reframe Texas history lessons and play down references to slavery and anti-Mexican discrimination that are part of the state’s founding.” The states of Idaho, Louisiana, New Hampshire, and Tennessee are all considering bills that would ban teaching about slavery and segregation and ban using the 1619 Project in state school curriculums. One Texas bill would “promote patriotic education” by omitting the introduction of slavery when Texas achieved independence from Mexico in 1836. Another bill would ban exhibits at the Alamo that show major figures in the Texas Revolution were slave owners. Another bill would constrain teachers from discussing how racism determined the legal system in Texas. The bills do not address how to teach about the Texas state constitution which legalized slavery the day it was passed, but “playing down” references to slavery isn’t going to help.

Earlier this week, the University of North Carolina refused tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, last year’s recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her role in creating the 1619 Project. She had been hired by the university’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media to be Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, a position which in the past had come with tenure. Stories in the Times, The Hill, the Charlotte Observer and elsewhere attributed the refusal of tenure to “a backlash among conservatives” on the UNC Board of Governors. Ms Hannah-Jones accepted a five year contract as a professor with an “option” for tenure review on completion of the contract.

This kind of stuff has been going on for a long time and it’s not stopping. But it is folly. They can pass all the laws they want, but they’re not going to erase the fact that slaves built Monticello, slaves built the United States Capitol, slaves built the White House, and slaves built practically every capitol building in every southern state, not to mention most of the county courthouses throughout the south. They can ban the 1619 Project from public schools, but they cannot hide from what it says about slavery being a part of the founding of this country.

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10158807216500369&set=a.10150207028560369|

Tom Hanks: You Should Learn the Truth About the Tulsa Race Massacre

By my recollection, four years of my education included studying American history. Fifth and eighth grades, two semesters in high school, three quarters at a community college. Since then, I’ve read history for pleasure and watched documentary films as a first option. Many of those works and those textbooks were about white people and white history. The few Black figures — Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — were those who accomplished much in spite of slavery, segregation and institutional injustices in American society.

But for all my study, I never read a page of any school history book about how, in 1921, a mob of white people burned down a place called Black Wall Street, killed as many as 300 of its Black citizens and displaced thousands of Black Americans who lived in Tulsa, Okla.

My experience was common: History was mostly written by white people about white people like me, while the history of Black people — including the horrors of Tulsa — was too often left out. Until relatively recently, the entertainment industry, which helps shape what is history and what is forgotten, did the same. That includes projects of mine. I knew about the attack on Fort Sumter, Custer’s last stand and Pearl Harbor but did not know of the Tulsa massacre until last year, thanks to an article in The New York Times.
...
How different would perspectives be had we all been taught about Tulsa in 1921, even as early as the fifth grade? Today, I find the omission tragic, an opportunity missed, a teachable moment squandered. When people hear about systemic racism in America, just the use of those words draws the ire of those white people who insist that since July 4, 1776, we have all been free, we were all created equally, that any American can become president and catch a cab in Midtown Manhattan no matter the color of our skin, that, yes, American progress toward justice for all can be slow but remains relentless. Tell that to the century-old survivors of Tulsa and their offspring. And teach the truth to the white descendants of those in the mob that destroyed Black Wall Street.

Should our schools now teach the truth about Tulsa? Yes, and they should also stop the battle to whitewash curriculums to avoid discomfort for students. America’s history is messy but knowing that makes us a wiser and stronger people. 1921 is the truth, a portal to our shared, paradoxical history. An American Black Wall Street was not allowed to exist, was burned to ashes; more than 20 years later, World War II was won despite institutionalized racial segregation; more than 20 years after that, the Apollo missions put 12 men on the moon while others were struggling to vote, and the publishing of the Pentagon Papers showed the extent of our elected officials’ willingness to systemically lie to us. Each of these lessons chronicles our quest to live up to the promise of our land, to tell truths that, in America, are meant to be held as self-evident.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/opinion/tom-hanks-tulsa-race-massacre-history.html

Organizer cuts off veteran's mic when he discusses role Black people played in origins of Memorial Day

The audio was cut on a veteran’s microphone at a Memorial Day event in Hudson, Ohio, shortly after he began discussing the role Black people played in the holiday’s origins in an incident that local media report was no accident.
...
During his speech, Kemter, whom the Journal reported was the keynote speaker for the event, discussed the history of the holiday, including the discovery of newspaper clippings and handwritten notes that showed a group of freed Black people were among the first to commemorate the holiday following the surrender of the Confederacy.
...
But about a minute after, Kemter’s microphone was cut roughly halfway through his address. The veteran could be seen trying to alert someone off-camera about his microphone after realizing something was wrong, continuing to address the audience.

According to the Journal, an organizer for the event confirmed to the outlet that either she or another organizer had the audio cut.

The organizer, Cindy Suchan, told the paper that the portion of Kemter’s speech in which the audio was cut “was not relevant to our program for the day” and that the “theme of the day was honoring Hudson veterans.”

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/556607-organizer-cuts-off-veterans-mic-when-he-discusses-role-black