Sean Gillies (Posts about justice)

Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr

Sean Gillies — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 01:50:46 GMT

Civil rights activist and Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15, 1929 and was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Today was the official US holiday honoring King and his legacy, the 35th year we've done so in Colorado.

White Americans are highly selective in how they remember and honor King. Many of us think only of the following, pat ourselves on the back while thinking of the non-white musicians, comedians, athletes, celebrities who entertain us, and consider King's work done.

I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was an anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-militarist, and was aiming beyond today's state of color-blindness for the well off, towards a truly equitable world. One where your family's wealth didn't depend on your skin color. One where workers were fairly compensated for their labor and treated with respect. One where education was prioritized over jets, bombs, drones, and extravagant military adventures. I implore you to read up on this and push back on people who try to whitewash King's legacy.

Renaming St*pleton

Sean Gillies — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 19:25:05 GMT

The Rename St*pleton for All campaign has won.

Benjamin F. Stapleton was a Ku Klux Klan member and a 5-term mayor of Denver. This bit of Colorado history has been whitewashed for seventy years. I didn't know the story until I read this great blog series by Meg Dunn about the Colorado K.K.K..

Remember: de-honoring white supremacists isn't erasure of history as long as we continue to teach future generations that the K.K.K. once held considerable political power in the State of Colorado. And that it could happen again.

Parade in Denver, May 21, 1926 Denver Public Library Digital Collections, X-21543).

The Kind of Hits That Whitaker Took

Sean Gillies — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 17:19:36 GMT

The newly appointed Acting Attorney General of the United States is completely unqualified for the job and people are chortling over a tweet this morning that reiterates the point.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article referred to Matthew Whitaker as a football "star." With 200 yards and two touchdowns in three seasons at Iowa, it appears he was an unspectacular player.

We regret the error. https://t.co/GY9WeYfLMb
— Esquire (@esquire) November 14, 2018

It reminds me of an interview on NPR last Friday in which a friend of Whitaker says:

HAUS: I think that if you know Matt, as I and a lot of other people know Matt, you will know that this is a man who has a very strong core. Again, harkening back to the '80s, you don't play tight end for the University of Iowa and take the kind of shots and hits that he took and get up and get back in the game if you're not a person that's got a very strong core. You know your purpose, and you know your job.

The kind of shots and hits Haus is talking about are the ones that briefly knock you out, make you see stars, make you temporarily lose the feeling in your extremities, erase your memory, and we now know that these hits are implicated in chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease.

People clearly learn and grow from playing football, as they do from playing other team sports. I don't think that playing through concussions and hiding brain injury is a good lesson. This is not the definition of character. We're still in an era where people argue that exposure to brain trauma qualifies a person for stressful intellectual jobs. I hope we're reaching the end of this era.