“KILL KILL KILL BLACKS” written inside a bathroom late last week at the Sligo Creek Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland. One student reported the incident to their teacher, who apparently didn’t inform the school’s administration, which only learned about the graffiti after a member of the building service crew found it and reported it.
(Juan, CC BY-NC).
The Southern Poverty Law Center has a very in-depth look, following a survey, on the impact the presidential campaign has had on the nation’s schools, particularly the impact on students, and the impact on teaching. Normally, teachers take advantage of a presidential campaign to teach on a variety of subjects. That’s not the case this time. Many teachers are afraid to bring it up, because of the incitement it causes, which ends in harassment and bullying of some students, and other teachers are at a loss to explain to their students why this campaign was so utterly filthy, with none of the ideals and high standards they are taught about. Many teachers are heartbroken, seeing the profound fear many of their students have, even in kindergarten. The article is a long one, and there’s a .pdf available, and a link to full comments at the main page.
Every four years, teachers in the United States use the presidential election to impart valuable lessons to students about the electoral process, democracy, government and the responsibilities of citizenship.
But, for students and teachers alike, this year’s primary season is starkly different from any in recent memory. The results of an online survey conducted by Teaching Tolerance suggest that the campaign is having a profoundly negative effect on children and classrooms.
It’s producing an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom. Many students worry about being deported.
Other students have been emboldened by the divisive, often juvenile rhetoric in the campaign. Teachers have noted an increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates on the campaign trail.
Educators are perplexed and conflicted about what to do. They report being stymied by the need to remain nonpartisan but disturbed by the anxiety in their classrooms and the lessons that children may be absorbing from this campaign.
Two responses from teachers illustrate their dilemma. A teacher in Arlington, Virginia, says, “I try to not bring it up since it is so stressful for my students.” Another, in Indianapolis, Indiana, says, “I am at a point where I’m going to take a stand even if it costs me my position.”
Mother, Jennifer Reynaga — (NBC4 screen grab)
A Los Angeles area substitute teacher has been fired after a student recorded him taunting Latino sixth graders about the election of Donald Trump, telling them their parents were going to be deported, reports NBC4.
According to Jennifer Reynaga, she expected Latino students to be harassed after the election of Trump who made bashing immigrants,and Mexicans in particular, a cornerstone of his campaign.
“I would think the kids would do it, but I never thought a teacher would do it,” said Reynaga said in an interview.
The Reynaga family turned over the recording, captured with another student’s cellphone, to the school district where the unidentified substitute physical education teacher can be heard speaking to students at Bret Harte Middle School in South Los Angeles.
“If you were born here, then your parents got to go. Then they will leave you behind, and you will be in foster care,” the teacher can be heard telling Reynaga’s 11-year-old daughter.
When the sixth grader asked how Trump would find them, the teacher replied, “I have your phone numbers, your address, your mama’s address, your daddy’s address. It’s all in the system, sweetie.”
Emphasis mine. So, this is adulthood, is it? A person supposedly mature enough to be trusted with children? Apparently, all those people who decided to cast a vote for Trump are immature assholes who represent a clear danger to others. This ‘teacher’ has been fired, but it’s not enough. Such incidents also need to see charges and arrests. Here in the lost country, it’s perfectly okay to abuse the hell out of people who are simply trying to keep water clean, to arrest them and charge them for doing nothing at all, but someone who threatens children has nothing happen outside the loss of their job. Welcome to Trump Land indeed.
Another teacher is on the receiving end of a suspension, but for offending Trumpoids:
The Monterey Herald said that Mountain View High School placed teacher Frank Navarro on paid leave after a parent complained in an email about the lesson and statements that Navarro made in class.
Navarro — a 40-year classroom veteran and expert in Holocaust studies — said, “This feels like we’re trying to squash free speech. Everything I talk about is factually based. They can go and check it out. It’s not propaganda or bias if it’s based on hard facts.”
The school district, Navarro said, would neither reveal the contents of the complaint email nor go over the lesson plan with him to determine what the parent found problematic.
Mountain View/Los Altos High School District Superintendent Jeff Harding told the Herald that Navarro was originally suspended through Wednesday, Nov. 16, but he could return to the classroom as early as Monday.
“We are interested in getting Frank back in the classroom … we’re just trying to maintain our due diligence,” Harding said. “We have a heightened emotional environment right now with the election. It’s always a challenge to maintain a line in a classroom.”
Mountain View High School’s newspaper, the Oracle said that some of Navarro’s students that his lessons were “one-sided” and that he used language that Trump supporters would find offensive. Other students have defended the 65-year-old teacher, who has won multiple awards for his studies of the Nazi Holocaust.
[…]
“I’ve had Mexican kids come and say, ‘Hey, Mr. Navarro, I might be deported,’” he said. “Is it better to see bigotry and say nothing? That’s what the principal was telling me (during our conversation). In my silence, I would be substantiating the bigotry.”
Aaaaand:
“Your headscarf isn’t allowed anymore. Why don’t you tie it around your neck and hang yourself with it off of your neck instead of your head.”
The note was signed, “America!”
Full story here.
The white supremacist assholes at Daily Stormer have a list of of people who tweeted their dismay, upset, and fears about the election, with this added on:
You can troll these people and definitely get some of them to kill themselves.
Just be like “it’s the only way you can prove to the racists that Hillary was right all along.”
“Mass Suicides After Trump Victory” would be a headline the media would play up, but all it would do would demoralize the left even further.
GOGOGOGOGOGOGO!
If you’re on Twitter, consider putting blocks in place, taking a break from it, or if not that, be forewarned about harassment, and if you need help, please, please, reach out. There’s an extensive list of health resources here.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell talks to reporters after the Senate Republican weekly policy luncheon at the Capitol in Washington, July 8, 2015. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque.
Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said repealing the Obamacare health insurance system is a “pretty high item on our agenda” for the new Congress that was elected on Tuesday, calling it the “single worst piece of legislation” from the first two years of the Obama administration.
McConnell told reporters he would like to see bipartisan comprehensive tax reform, and that border security should also be high on the to-do list. He expects president-elect Donald Trump to send the Senate a Supreme Court nominee soon, and to review environmental regulations put in place by Obama, including on coal.
All those people who could only get healthcare through ACA (affordable Care act), well, look just how fast the republican thugs want to yank that threadbare rug out from under you. Gosh, having citizens who have affordable healthcare, oh, how horrible, it’s unthinkable! Much better for people to be sick, and who gives a fuck if they die? Certainly not republicans. The only thing republicans truly excel at, besides inciting fear based on racism, is holding a spiteful grudge. They just can’t wait to destroy anything President Obama did, and if it makes people suffer, hey, all the better!
And Arkansas senator Tom Cotton just can’t wait to built that wall, and to force everyone to turn over immigrants.
Via Raw Story.
Virginia man outside polling location carrying a handgun_ — Image via Twitter.
A woman in Virginia claims she was stopped by a man wearing a Trump T-shirt and wearing a handgun on his hip, who blocked her path to a voting site on Friday and asked her if she was voting for Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
A local GOP official defended the man, stating, “It’s a free country.”
In an interview with the Huffington Post, Erika Cotti said she was on the was to county’s registrar’s office in Loudon County in order to vote when she was accosted by the man
“I had my 9-year-old son with me. I felt intimidated,” Cotti said. “And I had to explain to my 9-year-old why a man with a 357 magnum is standing outside the polling station.”
[…]
Loudoun County registrar Judy Brown confirmed that the man was outside the office, but was beyond the 40-foot no-canvassing zone so there was nothing she could do about it, with law enforcement saying the man had a right to carry the gun in an open-carry state.
“They said that there’s nothing they could do, that he was well within his rights to be carrying his weapon,” Brown explained.
Informed about that man, a local Republican Party official, stated that the man is a former law enforcement official, and that they asked him to pull his Trump T-shirt over the gun on his hip.
“’We don’t want to startle anyone,’” Republican Committee Chairman Will Estrada told the Huffington Post. “He felt really bad, he pulled his T-shirt over it, and I think everything was fine after that.”
Oh, the wrong. He felt really bad? He didn’t seem to feel bad when he was busy intimidating voters, attempting to force a repub ticket on them, and asking who they were going to vote for. Now we know the magic of making guns everywhere okay – just pull your shirt over them. No one would ever be able to tell you had a gun then, oh no. And of course, no one would feel the least bit intimidated anymore, what with that magical piece of gun neutralizing fabric taking care of everything. FFS.
The problem with this free country business? It’s only a free country for the same people it always has been, colonial white people. Out at Standing Rock, it’s quite clear that it’s not a free country for us Indians. Across the nation, it’s quite clear that it’s not a free country for any persons of colour, and it’s certainly not a free country for those who do not profess Christianity.
Via Raw Story.
The title should probably be “Praise Mankind and Pass the Bleach”, as Genesis II is quite the scam, and goes to some length to explain that they aren’t really a god type church, but a to serve mankind church. They do this via MMS, Master Mineral Solution, and yes, of course it cures every possible ill. You can read about mixing a basic dose here, and yes, chlorine dioxide gas. So healthy, that. They’ve made the news once again, for selling Autism miracle cure kits. As if kids with autism don’t have enough to deal with, here, drink this bleach.
By playing off the fears of parishioners looking for an answer to autism, which may have impacted them or a loved one, the church was able to sell millions of its “miracle cure” kits worldwide.
“This is a high-strength industrial bleach. It really scares me that people would give this to their kids because it is a poison,” Dr. Paul Wang, the senior president of Autism Speaks, an advocacy organization in the United States that has been a source of funding directed towards the causes and treatment of autism, told ABC News. “You can’t blame any parent for wanting to help their child. In this case, we just want to make sure that everybody understands MMS (the Church’s chemical solution) is not a cure.”
[…]
Its [Genesis II / MMS] creator Jim Humble, a man who calls himself an archbishop and claims to have come to Earth from another galaxy, introduced his first of four books about the supposed healing solution titled “Master Mineral Solution of the Third Millennium” and published in 2010.
[…]
Because it is illegal to sell similar false cures under federal law, Humble moved to Mexico to avoid being convicted like other officials from the objectively eccentric church have been already.
Louis Daniel Smith sold bottles of the same “cure” online for $9.99 in Spokane, Washington under a company called “Project Greenlife” from 2007-2011. He was found guilty on five federal counts, including “introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce with intent to defraud or mislead,” and sentenced to 51 months in prison in October 2015, according to the United States Department of Justice.
Though Smith was not a member of the church, Genesis II supporters came to his aid by providing emotional support and raising money for his legal defense online.
Full story here.
Native single mom Renee Davis was five months pregnant when she was killed by deputies on Friday (Facebook.com)
Renee Davis was five months pregnant when she was fatally shot by King County sheriff’s deputies checking on her welfare Friday night, according to her foster sister, Danielle Bargala.
Davis, 23, had struggled with depression, and had texted someone earlier that night to say she was in a bad way, according to Bargala. That person had alerted law enforcement, leading the deputies to arrive at Davis’ house on Muckleshoot tribal lands shortly after 6:30 p.m.
Bargala, a Seattle University law student, said Saturday that she and other family members have a lot of questions about what happened next. The sheriff’s office declined to comment Saturday beyond what it said Friday night — that the deputies, investigating a report of someone suicidal, found a young woman with a handgun and two small children in the house.
The children were Davis’, ages 2 and 3, according to Bargala. The single mother had a third child, 5, who was at the home of a family friend Friday.
Yesterday, I posted about Native Lives Matter, and an article about the high percentage of Native people who die at the hands of cops. More Indigenous people are killed by cops than any other group. The complete lack of interest in that post was not in the least unexpected, but it left me with a bitter, burning sadness I can’t begin to describe. Yesterday, three people were good enough to actually click over and read the article linked, and one kind person shared the post. I don’t know who you are, but I thank you, from the depth of my heart.
On Friday, Renee Davis was gunned down by cops who were supposedly there to do a wellness check. Obviously, nothing good happened to Ms. Davis. It’s doubtful that any judgment will go against the cops, they seldom do, and yet another Native person is dead at the hands of cops.
Via The Seattle Times.
I have mentioned, often, that in uStates, the highest percentage of extrajudicial killings are of Indigenous people. To say this isn’t well known would be quite the understatement. It isn’t known at all, and when people do find out, they don’t much care. The Guardian has kept track, along with all the other groups of people who are consistently killed by cops. Very few of these murders get any press at all. The murder of Loreal Tsingine got a little bit, and so did the murder of John T. Williams. Those people who read Indian publications are aware of most of the others, but they don’t get any write up at all. Indigenous people also have the highest rates of dying in captivity, and cops casually toss off excuses like “hey, she overdosed on meth”, as they did in the case of Sarah Lee Circle Bear, who was only 24 years old. The cops neglected to explain how she could have died from a meth overdose while in custody for two days. Sarah’s case, and that of so many others, has been a cause of deep outrage in Indigenous circles, but once again, if you aren’t reading native publications, you aren’t likely to know about any of them.
Chase Iron Eyes started NLM in 2014, but once again, it’s been a slow take because about the only people who care about native lives are natives. In These Times has a very good article about Native deaths at the hands of law enforcement, and the bigotry Natives face every single day. Please, go read. Please, share. I thank you.
A group of high-school boys pose for a picture with a campaign sign for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump outside the Mohegan Sun Arena before a rally, October 10, 2016, in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Dominick Reuter/AFP/Getty Images.
Melissia Hill was eating crepes with her 5-year-old son, Phoenix, at a Brooklyn cafe this summer when he asked her, “Is Donald Trump a bad person? Because I heard that if he becomes president, all the black and brown people have to leave and we’re going to become slaves.”
Next he wanted to know, “What is a slave?” and, “Where are we gonna go?”
Hill was taken aback, and well aware of the wide-eyed interest Phoenix’s questions attracted from neighboring tables. She asked him where he’d heard these things. His answer: from another child at his local YMCA day camp.
[…]
And kids like Phoenix aren’t waiting to see what happens on November 8 before they absorb these views, repeat them, and integrate them into the set of perspectives that combine to make up how they see themselves and others. Many, according to a recent survey of teachers’ perceptions of their students, are using them as fodder for bullying. Others are anxious and scared as a result of the taunts and the real-life threats to their families.
Nobody — not even those who study the development of racial attitudes in kids or the impact of racial trauma — can say with certainty what the long-term effects of this unprecedented dose of high-profile animosity will be on the young people who are steeped in it.
This spring, Teaching Tolerance, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s education arm, took an informal poll of educators to gauge how this campaign had affected schools so far.
Maureen Costello, the director of Teaching Tolerance, said the organization’s interest in the election’s effect on school-age kids was piqued by news reports about high school sporting events where chants of “Trump, Trump, Trump” and “Build a wall” were used against predominantly Latino teams.
“We wondered, is this the tip of an iceberg? Is there something beneath this?” she said.
The organization sent queries to the teachers who subscribed to its weekly newsletter. “We weren’t trying to be scientific. We were trying to find out, ‘Is there anything going on?’ I compare it to the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] asking doctors to report if there are measles outbreaks,” Costello said.
The organization’s conclusion from the thousands of comments it received: Yes, something is going on. More than two-thirds of teachers reported that students — mainly immigrants, children of immigrants, and Muslims — had expressed concerns or fears about what might happen to them or their families after the election:
Teachers used words like “hurt” and “dejected” to describe the impact on their charges. The ideas and language coming from the presidential candidates are bad enough, but many students — Muslim, Hispanic and African-American — are far more upset by the number of people, including classmates and even teachers, who seem to agree with Trump. They are struggling with the belief that “everyone hates them.”
There were reports of tears shed in classrooms from second grade to high school. Concerns about being “sent back” transcended immigration status, as in Phoenix’s case, to affect African-American kids:
African-American students aren’t exempt from the fears. Many teachers reported an increase in use of the n-word as a slur, even among very young children. And black children are burdened with a particularly awful fear that has been reported from teachers in many states — that they will “be deported to Africa” or that slavery will be reinstated. As an Oklahoma elementary teacher explains, “My kids are terrified of Trump becoming [p]resident. They believe he can/will deport them — and NONE of them are Hispanic. They are all African American.
According to the report, even children who did not face, or did not believe they faced, direct threats as a result of Trump’s policies, perceived the same pattern as the white supremacists who support Trump: that the candidate’s vision for a return to a “great’ version of America was dismissive of people of color.
I highly recommend reading the whole article at Vox. This is heartbreaking, to say the very least. Institutionalized, systemic racism is bad enough in uStates, what with it being the very core and framework of this country, now there’s the storm of ugly Americanism breaking right over the heads of these children. I remember growing up under the cold war and the constant threat of nuclear war, you heard about it constantly, and it was a very real fear. Even that pales in comparison to the depth of fear facing non-white children now. Do people truly want to claim this legacy? A legacy of hate, fear, and bigotry? A legacy of gleeful traumatization? There is already a deep divide in schools when it comes to white children and non-white children. I was reading an article about Seattle teachers donning BLM t-shirts, and there was mention of children of colour not seeing themselves in curriculum or histories. No kidding. And if people think that’s bad for Black and Hispanic children, think about what it’s like for Indigenous children. I have mentioned, so many times, just how white-washed uStates ‘history’ is – if you aren’t white, you’re definitely going to be the villains in one way or another, if you are represented at all. About the only people who actively campaign to have special history modules taught in school are various Indigenous tribes, who are damn tired of the lack of representation, combined with ugly, racist, inaccurate representation. There’s not been any concerted effort to have accurate history texts, and with Texas in charge of school textbooks, it’s not likely that will ever happen.
Now, with Trump opening up Ugly Americanism, with way too many people diving into that ugly headfirst, we’ll have at least one generation of children who, already standing at the edge of a deep divide, will be traumatized and living in fear of their very lives. Way to go, America.
Full story at Vox. Via Black Lives Matter.
Tip left for SC waitress. (Source: Friend of waitress)
In Greenville, SC, a couple left a poison pill note for their server. They did note her service was excellent, but apparently all her hard work and excellence merited nothing more than a self-righteous helping of shit. Christians. Seriously, this sort of crap – every single one of you Christians knows people who commit this banal act of evil, and do you do anything about it? No. Gosh, you just add so much positivity to the world, don’t ya?
GREENVILLE, SC (FOX Carolina) –
A South Carolina server said she feels heartbroken and mortified after the tip she received from a couple she had served told her that her place is in the home.
The server who asked not to be identified said she had just finished clearing off the couple’s table after serving them when the couple walked back in and left her a note on a napkin and darted out the door.
What the napkin said angered her friend so much she submitted a picture of the napkin to FOX Carolina. The napkin read in its entirety:
(AFP Photo/Justin Sullivan).
Officers with assault rifles, backed by a huge armored grenade launcher, square up to a crowd furiously denouncing the killing of a young black neighbor.
It is a scene which could have been taken from archive footage of Mogadishu in 1990s Somalia or countless other battles, but this conflict is closer to home — the streets of small-town America.
The images, captured in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, open “Do Not Resist” — a disturbing documentary charting the transformation of police across the US into forces that look like military units.
The explosive film is set to fuel an already bitter debate raging in America over heavy-handed law enforcement, following a litany of police killings of black men that have sparked protests from Ferguson and Charlotte to Chicago.
Director Craig Atkinson, whose movie is opening across the US having won best documentary feature at the Tribeca Film Festival, says the American law enforcement ethos has changed “from a mentality of peacekeepers to that of an occupying army.”
Another eye-opening scene shows officers in black fatigues firing volley after volley of automatic rounds at cardboard targets, as if they were preparing for war rather than to “protect and serve.”
A khaki-clad instructor explains that security forces must prepare for all kinds of attacks, “including the Islamic State.”
MRAPs, the armored trucks that protect troops from roadside bombs planted along the dusty roads of Iraq and Afghanistan, are now ubiquitous across the US.
[…]
In another shocking scene, a SWAT team arrives in an MRAP at a tree-lined street in Columbia, South Carolina, to execute a search warrant in a drug case.
The officers, whose equipment looks barely distinguishable from that of an infantry division, end up badly damaging a family home in a raid that nets a small amount of loose cannabis.
Atkinson’s father, a retired policeman from Detroit, Michigan, spent over a decade in one such SWAT team, the New York-based filmmaker explains.
“In his time, his team intervened 29 times in 13 years. Now they are taking part in 200 raids a year,” Atkinson tells AFP.
[…]
Campaigners against police militarization accept that SWAT teams and their heavy-duty hardware have a vital role in combatting the rare instances of terrorism in the US.
But they point out that, due to prolonged mission creep, this is no longer how these resources are used.
Peter Kraska, a criminology professor at the University of Eastern Kentucky, says there are now at least 50,000 SWAT raids a year, up from 3,000 in the 1980s.
Most of the activities of these highly specialized units have little to do with the reasons for their inception, such as dealing with hostage situations, terrorist attacks and drug cartels.
According to Atkinson, one of the architects of the “warrior culture” is a hugely successful police trainer named Dave Grossman, head of a consulting firm called the Killology Research Group.
“We are at war and you are the frontline troops in this war. What do you fight violence with? Superior violence,” Grossman hollers at an audience of mesmerized police in one session filmed for the documentary.
The retired army lieutenant colonel has lectured throughout the US, according to his website, and Atkinson believes his influence has spread to every American law enforcement agency.
For those who are woke, none of this will come as a surprise, but I’d say this is necessary viewing for us all, and this ongoing militarization not only must be stopped, it needs to be revoked. It’s time to take all those shiny toys away from all the bully boys out there. If cops want to continue playing military, I suggest they quit being a cop, and join up.
Via Raw Story.
