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Khadijah Costley White

29 Dec, 11 tweets, 2 min read

Wanted to share with y'all a news story that has always stayed with me and that I discuss with my students every semester.

In 2008, a 26 year-old mom named Tarika Wilson was at home with her kids and holding her baby in her arms.

Police officers in plainclothes burst into her house with guns drawn. Tarika went to a bedroom to hide with her kids. The police first killed their two dogs. Then they shot at the bedroom, killing her and shooting her baby who was permanently disfigured.

This scene has played in my mind too many times to count, her children watching terrified as a bunch of men kill their mother, seeing their baby brother bleeding and screaming in pain. I try not to think much past that.

In any case when the New York Times’ reported on this crime, the writer included a sentence that described Wilson this way:
"She had six children. They were fathered by five men, all of whom dealt drugs[.]"

nytimes.com/2008/01/30/us/…

This is information that is not relevant to how she died or why she died. It was an unnecessary detail that portrays an innocent woman murdered by the police as lascivious and slutty, and somehow criminal, and subtly blames her for her killing.

It is infuriating.

Anyway, I'm thinking about Tarika and her children today. I'm thinking about all the people who have to survive in the wake of police violence. I'm thinking about how those kids have no mother and how the officer who killed her walked away free.

He was acquitted by an all-white jury 7 months later.

Tarika Wilson

The police officer who killed her seems to have happily retired and now is a full-time trainer for a major national school shooting training program, ALICE--- training law enforcement and school staff on how to respond in an emergency.

linkedin.com/in/joe-chavali…

I want to add this-- if journalists want to do better, put more attention on the previous abuses of the cops who kill & the failures to rein them in.

Return to these families years later -- ask these kids what this did to their lives.

Write these stories as if they happened to someone you love. As if they happened to you. As if they happened to someone you care about.

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Khadijah Costley White

@khadastrophic

29 Dec

Folks know that I love #familyorfiance as a show that features Black family and love, and the importance of therapy in navigating relationships. But in the most recent episode someone raised a concern about abuse that the show just kind of bypassed in a way that felt egregious.

The person who raised concerns about the abuse was the bride-to-be's mom, based on reports from a sister who lives with the couple (a sister who they curiously didn't invite to the show, instead bringing family who doesn't know them as a couple at all).

Rather than discuss the issue of how his temper and how he speaks to her (which the couple AND the mom all raised), the bride blew up at the accusation and the mom went around apologizing for raising a serious concern. Red flags glaring all around.

Read 4 tweets

Khadijah Costley White

@khadastrophic

28 Dec

LOL. I really thought that COVID would force us to expand access to paid sick leave & leave to care for ill loved ones.

Of course it just ended up with us making sick people go to work or neglect their sick family, as always.

You'd think I would know this place by now.

Maybe I should just make this my chain of "if we had done better with COVID fantasies" and used this as an opportunity to enrich the lives of normal Americans rather than corporations.

For example, what if we used COVID as an opportunity to forgive student debt instead?

What if we used COVID as an opportunity to be more flexible about k-12 schooling, allowing kids with disabilities and other challenges to learn aside peers at home (and still have access to peers when they were well)?

Read 11 tweets

Khadijah Costley White

@khadastrophic

27 Dec

I just realized that I can only name 10 Whoopi Goldberg films off the top of my head and I'm pretty disappointed in myself.

Ghost, The Color Purple, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Jumping Jack Flash, Sister Act 1 &2, [Angelina Jolie sociopath movie], Made In America,

[Movie where she played a carribean nanny], For Colored Girls (Tyler Perry version)...[Jumping Jack Flash 2?], [Film where she pretends to be a white man to succeed in business] That's all I can think of. I tried to come up with a 24 hour Whoopi marathon list and I petered out.

needed to share my shame.

Until that Roman Polanski defense, being Whoopi Goldberg's assistant was my dream job. A natural haired normal looking dark-skinned Black woman movie star??? She was my childhood hero, especially the drama kid in me.

Read 5 tweets

Khadijah Costley White

@khadastrophic

27 Dec

Just catching up on The Morning Show and the storyline of the young assistant who throws herself heavily at a reluctant male superior and goads him into an affair with her against a #MeToo plot backdrop feels... like a questionable choice.

Maybe it gets better, but the whole twenty-four year old subordinate who can't keep her hands off her middle-aged male superior and is hampered by an over-zealous HR feels like a Qanon "what if" fantasy and a red herring #MeToo argument to me.

I get their overall point, which is that a lot of sexual harassment is built into the everyday culture that we just learn to laugh off, that it's all gray, that consent is just too complex.

But consent pretty straightforward and a lot of #MeToo cases aren't gray at all.

Read 4 tweets

Khadijah Costley White

@khadastrophic

26 Dec

It's really depressing me that we've mostly decided to turn a public health crisis into an apocalyptic choose-your-own-covid-adventure game.

The short-term and long-term impacts of this virus won't be felt privately.

I totally get that COVID-19 can no longer be contained, but giving up entirely on mitigation when 1) kids under 5 still can't be vaccinated and 2) we still don't know very much about the long-term effects of this virus seems like a really, really bad plan.

Read 9 tweets

Khadijah Costley White

@khadastrophic

5 Nov

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1455180908114423813

I really wish people paid attention to the ACTUAL experience of Black children in public schools rather than made up white grievance stories.

A thread:

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1455180908114423813

Schools regularly ban Black children from wearing their hair the way it grows out of their heads. Braids have been banned. Covering their hair, too, has been banned.

chalkbeat.org/2020/1/16/2112…

Here's another list of discrimination against Black children's bodies in school, including a white teacher cutting off a 7 year old girl's hair in front of her class as punishment:

thegrio.com/2017/06/08/bla…

Read 23 tweets

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