MMTC, the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council, is giving new voice to issues surrounding social justice.
MMTC president Maurita Coley said that the idea behind the new online publication, which was prompted by the recent protests, is to use the group's platform to bring awareness of the impact of racial justice issues on tech, media and telecom.
It will include resources on inclusion efforts as well as reflections from a diverse group of professionals.
Volume 1, issue 1, leads off with a piece by former FCC commissioner Tyrone Brown, who was the first law clerk to a Supreme Court Justice (Earl Warren), about police brutality.
"For 400 years, the principal assignment of law enforcement in places inhabited by large numbers of Blacks has been to keep the Blacks underfoot," he writes. "In the slave-holding South, it was a job performed by men who did not themselves own slaves. That assignment, keeping Blacks down, came North in earnest with the mass migration of African Americans to northern cities in the first half of the 20th Century. This particular element of slavery infected police forces all over. And criminal justice professionals - district attorneys, even judges - manipulated 'justice' to support oppressive police action.
"Policemen, in the institutional - not the individual - sense, are not alone at fault. They have been doing what America for four hundred years has told them to do. That ill-guided woman in Central Park, calling the police to put down a Black man who merely disagreed with her, revealed the face of what America has told the police it expects from them in dealing with Black men and youths."
