This Week's 5: The Fall of 'Tyrone' the Nazi

Author's Note: This Week's 5 is a weekly collection of stories designed to provide insight into how racism works and serve as an easily accessible resource for people trying to have nuanced discussions about these issues. For more explanation on how This Week's 5 works and descriptions of each of the categories, click here.

Overt: Michael Chesny is far from the first white supremacist to use military training to terrorize Americans. In this case, the explosives specialist spread detailed advice to other white supremacists on how to attack racial minorities ahead of the now infamous Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally. Read more from Al Jazeera.

Institutional: The NFL is many things, but subtle is not one of them. When the same league that forgives white players like Riley Cooper and Richie Incognito for yelling racial slurs on tape, punishes Black players for kneeling to protest police brutality and systemic racism, it’s obvious where their priorities lie. At best, owners are systemically silencing Black players for the grave offense of making them uncomfortable, in this case, with discussions about racism. At worst, the NFL is systemically silencing Black players while going out of its way to endorse modern day lynching and appeal to white supremacist segments of their fan base. Neither is acceptable. Read more from The Undefeated.

Critical Race Theory: Following the arrest of two Black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks for being Black in a Philadelphia Starbucks, the company has issued a series of public apologies and will be closing several thousand stores for a partial day of implicit bias trainings. Some have called it a PR stunt. One conservative publication even called it “sinister.” In reality, implicit bias training simply demonstrates how we all have unconscious biases, often towards people who look like us and/or those we feel we have the most in common with. These trainings also show how we often act upon these biases in our daily lives (i.e. calling the cops on Black people for disputes that you don’t involve the authorities in when the other side is white) and how to challenge some of our more toxic instincts. Read more from CNBC.

History: In 1853, the US paid Mexico $10 million for 29,670 square miles of land and subsequently split the Tohono O’odham native lands in half. Nearly a century and half after the Gadsden Purchase, the Tohono O’odham Nation owns the second largest Native American land base in the US, and they’re reminding the White House by blocking the National Guard. Read more from Splinter News.

The Fragility Breaker: “Acting Black” is one of those things that’s hard to explicitly define (mainly because habitual line steppers are constantly evolving their tactics) but you know it when you see it, and it’s not endearing. For example, if you are a white man who is going back and forth with Black writers on social media about cultural appropriation, at no point is challenging them to a basketball game and typing the words “what’s Gucci” a good look. Read more from The Root.

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