"Remembering Emmett Till"/ "New survey a 'first step' to dismantling anti-Black racism, says researcher"

Here are two articles about anti-Black racism.  You may be angry, depressed, and in a bad mood after reading this.

Mar. 24, 2018 "Remembering Emmett Till": Today I found this article by David Bauder in the Edmonton Journal:

Gruesome images of a NEW YORK lynched Emmett Till were seared into the minds of many black Americans in 1955 and helped lead to the modern civil rights movement. But few whites knew of their existence at the time.

That reality is at the top of NBC’s two-hour documentary about how images propelled the civil rights effort. The film debuts Saturday as the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King ’s assassination approaches.

Till was the 14-year-old black Chicago boy visiting relatives in Mississippi, killed after a white grocery store clerk claimed he had treated her rudely. Decades later, she recanted her story. 

That was far too late to save Till from being bludgeoned, shot in the head and thrown into a river. Two men were acquitted of the crime, even though they later admitted to it.

Given a casket nailed shut, Till’s mother ordered it open and Jet magazine took pictures of his horribly maimed head, beaten beyond recognition.

“For a mainstream, news audience, my guess is a large number of people knew his name, but didn’t really know what happened, which is the best and highest calling for a documentary like this,” said NBC News chairman Andrew Lack. “Seeing these pictures underscores what happened, what really happened, why the murder of Emmett Till was such a shocking and important event in the civil rights movement.”

There’s no evidence that NBC ever showed the picture of Till’s body until a Today show story on the anniversary of his death in 1985, the network said. NBC wasn’t alone among the mainstream media.

“It was a different America,” Lack said.

As if to make amends, the documentary shows the image of a murdered Till seven times.

 NBC compared Mamie Till’s insistence that the brutal truth of what happened to her son be made visible to actions in 2016 by the girlfriend of Philando Castile, who streamed the aftermath of his shooting by a police officer outside of St. Paul, Minn., where he had been pulled over for a busted light.

Mamie Till went to Jet because, at the time, it was the top news source for black America, said MSNBC’s Joy Reid, who participated in the documentary. “If you were a mother in Mamie Till’s position, you wouldn’t go to NBC or CBS or even The New York Times,” Reid said.

The pictures “took the issue of lynching away from the grainy photographs of a body hanging in the woods,” she said. The anniversary of Till’s death was later chosen as the date of King ’s March on Washington, she said.

“The civil rights movement never forgot Emmett Till,” Reid said. “He was to that movement what Trayvon Martin was to Black Lives Matter, a symbol that remained incredibly potent.”

NBC’s documentary shows how King innately understood the power of images beamed by the still-infant medium of television. A peaceful march or sit-in could draw yawns from a general public, yet a march of well-dressed children set upon by police with dogs and fire hoses produced pictures that made many Americans recoil when they saw them on the evening news. King could count on racists to reveal themselves and provide the pictures he needed to give the movement momentum.

Many demonstrations were planned before noon to give enough time for film to be delivered to New York to be shown on the network evening news.

The documentary was initially made for MSNBC but Lack said he felt compelled to request a primetime window on the network.

https://www.pressreader.com/canada/ottawa-citizen/20180324/282467119436120

May 21, 2021  "New survey a 'first step' to dismantling anti-Black racism, says researcher": Today I found this article by Adina Bresge on CTV news:

 TORONTO -- Seven in 10 Black Canadians have experienced racism on a regular or occasional basis, suggests a preliminary study that experts are calling a "first step" toward dismantling systemic discrimination.

Researchers at York University released early findings Friday from a national survey examining how Black Canadians experience race and racism across social spheres.

The interim report, produced in partnership with the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, draws from the responses of roughly 5,500 participants, including about 1,800 Black people, between March 21 and May 5.

Seventy per cent of Black respondents reported facing racism regularly or from time to time, while roughly half of Indigenous people and other racialized people said the same, according to the ongoing study.

Lead author Lorne Foster said the research breaks new ground in compiling granular data on Black Canadians, in contrast to existing literature that combines all racialized groups into the catch-all category of "visible minorities."

"We see this data as really the first step in dismantling systemic racism, particularly anti-Black systemic racism," said Foster, the director of York University's Institute for Social Research

"With this type of information, it's difficult now to even deny or ignore the calls from the Black community to address racism in the major sectors and institutions of our society."

Researchers blended traditional online survey techniques and new digital tools to gather a wide breadth of insights, including participant-submitted policy proposals, said Foster.

The polling industry's professional body, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.

Foster said he and his team will continue to refine and expand their investigation as data collection continues through June 1.

But the initial results paint a clear and detailed picture of the extent to which anti-Black racism pervades Canada's systems of education, employment, health care, child welfare and criminal justice, he said.

Of particular concern is racism in the professional world, which Foster pointed to as a primary driver for socioeconomic disparities along racial lines.

A staggering 96 per cent of Black respondents said that racism is a problem in the workplace, including 78 per cent who saw it as a serious or very serious issue.

Moreover, 47 per cent of Black Canadians told researchers they have been treated unfairly by an employer in hiring, pay or promotion in the last year.

Some respondents told researchers that the stress and trauma of workplace racism was so severe that it resulted in mental health issues, poor morale or alienation from the workforce, said Foster.

"I recently quit my job of over 20 years, partly due to burnout brought on by discrimination," one respondent told researchers, adding that his employer didn't even acknowledge his departure with a goodbye card.

Meanwhile, 56 per cent of white participants saw racism on the job as a small problem, or not at all.

Another sector that 91 per cent of Black respondents said has a racism problem is the health-care system, and 88 per cent of Indigenous participants agreed.

The survey found that 22 per cent of Black participants said they had been unfairly stopped by the police in the previous 12 months -- twice the rate of any other group.

In Atlantic Canada and British Columbia, more than two in five Black men told researchers they'd been unfairly stopped by law enforcement in the past year.

More than nine in 10 Black respondents viewed racism as a problem in their communities, and two-thirds said they had been treated with suspicion in the last year.

The COVID-19 crisis has fed into this unease, with 34 per cent Black participants expressing concern about being treated with suspicion when wearing face coverings in public.

Kimberly Bennet, the director of communications at the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, said these numbers crystallize what Black Canadians have long been saying: that racism ripples through every facet of society, and it's going to take a collective effort to address it.

"All entities need to look at how they can use this data to address policies within their companies, within their agencies or within their departments to dismantle any form of racism or discrimination that is making life more difficult for Black Canadians or people of colour in general."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 21, 2021.

New survey a 'first step' to dismantling anti-Black racism, says researcher | CTV News