Reggie Jackson, Author at Milwaukee Independent

Silence of the Self-Righteous: When will White people take “Personal Responsibility” in the Age of COVID?

Posted by Reggie Jackson | Nov 25, 2020

For so many years in this country I have heard the “personal responsibility” rant used against the Black community, blaming us for conditions that we had little control over. We have been blamed for so long, that some of us even throw out the ridiculous remark that “we are our own worst enemy.” These things infuriate me. I’m wondering where these arguments about “personal responsibility” are for White people in the resurgence of the coronavirus. I agree that all of us have some level of control over our decisions, but we do not control the environment around us. We...

Life without Trump: The problems faced by Blacks will not go away after Inauguration Day

Posted by Reggie Jackson | Nov 10, 2020 |

The results of the 2016 presidential election came as a huge surprise for many Americans. It did not surprise me. When I heard definitively that Donald Trump had won the election I was not shocked like many people were. I said in the weeks leading up to the election that people should prepare for the strong possibility that Trump would win. I did not have a crystal ball. I was not a pollster that studied what Americans said they would do on election day. I knew about something more valuable — the white backlash to Barack Obama. Trump prior...

Systemic Racism 201: The advantages Whites have felt entitled to for generations

Posted by Reggie Jackson | Nov 9, 2020 |

Reggie Jackson details the institution of racial discrimination that White Americans continue to ignore or support. This feature is part of a special series of articles that takes a closer look at the issue of Racism in the United States, understanding what Racism is and its social impact, along with exploring the conditions of Racism in Milwaukee’s culture. http://mkeind.com/systemicracism “What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life—that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad…This...

The hypocrisy of how “Facebook Police” enforce community standards

Posted by Reggie Jackson | Nov 2, 2020 |

“We do not allow hate speech on Facebook because it creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion and in some cases may promote real-world violence…Sometimes people share content containing someone else’s hate speech for the purpose of raising awareness or educating others. In some cases, words or terms that might otherwise violate our standards are used self-referentially or in an empowering way.” – Facebook Community Standards, October 2020 Update In public post to Facebook I linked my recent article Ignoring Domestic Terrorism and the Propaganda that Blinds Us to Its Threat. As is normally the case, I shared a...

America talks about immigrants pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, yet we didn’t even get boots

Posted by Reggie Jackson | Nov 1, 2020 |

“The islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States … each family shall have a plot of not more than (40) forty acres of tillable ground.” One of the most lasting tropes in America is the saying about immigrants “pulling themselves up by the bootstraps.” The argument is designed to show...

A Colonial Society: When Racism is the Pre-existing Condition

Posted by Reggie Jackson | Oct 30, 2020 |

ALIENATION: the act of alienating, or of causing someone to become indifferent or hostile; the state of being alienated, withdrawn, or isolated from the objective world, as through indifference or disaffection. People do not really understand how devastating systemic racism is in this country. We know racism exist. Even those who constantly deny it know very well that it exist. They simply refuse to be honest and acknowledge that their country is flawed. We need to understand more clearly the impacts of systemic racism on our psyches. We need to understand what racism does in preventing the true human...