Comments

1. rq says

   14 June 2015 at 1:34 pm

   #Ferguson protesters chant #BlackLivesMatter as #Cardinals & #Royals fans walk around Downtown #STL & police patrol.
   4 white Cardinals fans walk into street & flip us off. Police just told protester they’d arrest anyone in street…
   #STL cops are lining up across the street from protesters who stopped to film/ #CopWatch as they arrest Black kids.
   Hm. I seem to have lost the tweet where baseball fans joined the protest.

   No charges planned against officers in Icarus Randolph shooting (VIDEO). It does seem to be a trend.

   No charges will be filed against police officers in the shooting death of Icarus Randolph last July, District Attorney Marc Bennett announced Friday afternoon.

   Randolph was killed last July 4 when he approached Wichita police officers with a knife and a Taser was ineffective.

   “The conclusion in this case is that the police officer was placed in a situation where he objectively and reasonably felt he needed to defend himself against the advance of someone who was not responding to calls … either from the officer or from family,” Bennett said. “He did not respond to non-lethal force when the Taser was used, and as a result of this, I find that there is no basis for criminal charges to be filed in this matter.”

   Bennett released his full report on the shooting Friday afternoon, which he said is in an effort to introduce more transparency to his office.

   “To have a press conference to say I’m not going to do anything may strike some as sort of a wasted effort, but my point in doing so, my point in adding depth and more and more information in these is, I think people have an expectation of transparency, and if they’re going to have any faith in the quality of the investigations, have faith in the people who make the decisions, those people – me – need to be able to stand up here and answer questions and give as much information as possible,” Bennett said.

   More at the link.

   NYPD Cops Withheld Key Details in Eric Garner Death to Superiors Prior to Video Going Viral, and yet they ask for public trust.

   In the hours after New York City police officers placed a chokehold on Eric Garner last year, leading to his death, officers drafted a five-page report, describing how they grabbed him by his arms and took him down to the ground – never once mentioning any contact with his neck.

   But that was apparently before a video of his chokehold death was posted online by the New York Daily News six hours later last July, quickly going viral, showing the 43-year-old man gasping the now infamous words, “I can’t breath,” before he died.

   The new information was obtained by the New York Times and published in an investigative report Saturday titled “Beyond the Chokehold: The Path to Eric Garner’s Death.”

   Without video of his final struggle, Mr. Garner’s death may have attracted little notice or uproar. Without seeing it, the world would not have known exactly how he died.

   The video images were cited in the final autopsy report as one of the factors that led the city medical examiner to conclude that the chokehold and chest compression by the police caused Mr. Garner’s death. Absent the video, many in the Police Department would have gone on believing his death to have been solely caused by his health problems: obesity, asthma and hypertensive cardiovascular disease. The autopsy report, which is confidential, was provided by a person close to Mr. Garner’s family.

   “We didn’t know anything about a chokehold or hands to the neck until the video came out,” said a former senior police official with direct knowledge of the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his access to confidential department information. “We found out when everyone else did.”

   However, the video of his death along with a second video showing the unwillingness of paramedics to treat Garner at the scene did nothing to persuade the grand jury to indict the officers involved in his death.

   But now the New York Times reveals that the grand jury had shown little interest in crucial details that would have helped them make a thorough analysis of the information presented to them, refusing to prod deeper into witness testimony that a sergeant told NYPD Detective Danny Pantaleo to ease off him as he lay on top of Garner squeezing an arm around his neck while pressing his head into the sidewalk.

   As Officer Pantaleo and other officers pressed Mr. Garner onto the sidewalk, a uniformed patrol sergeant, Kizzy Adonis, entered the tight frame of the video. It was not clear exactly when a second sergeant, Dhanan Saminath, arrived. In the report, both described arriving after Mr. Garner was on the ground.

   The beauty store manager, Mr. Lee, said he heard the female sergeant say, “Let up, you got him already.” An officer looked up but did not let go, Mr. Lee said.

   Before the grand jury, Mr. Lee said he testified briefly about what he saw, but left feeling the jurors, who were able to ask questions, were uninterested. “They didn’t ask me nothing,” he said.

   Mr. Orta also told the grand jurors that a sergeant instructed officers to ease up. “Let him go, let him go, he’s done,” Mr. Orta recalled her saying.

   The internal report handed to superiors after the incident also quoted a witness, Taisha Allen, who recorded the second of two videos at the scene, as saying that no chokehold was used.

   However, Allen told the Times that she later testified in front of the grand jury that she did see a chokehold, accusing police of twisting her statements to fit their narrative. […]

   The original Ramsey Orta video totaled 16 minutes, which was shown to the grand jury, but only a portion of it has been made public.
   Allen told the grand jury that police placed Garner in a chokehold, but prosecutors told her she was not allowed to say they placed him in a chokehold.
   An autopsy conducted the day following Garner’s death reported there was no visible damage to his neck, fueling the narrative that he died because of existing medical issues, but a later autopsy determined there “were telltale signs of choking: strap muscle hemorrhages in his neck and petechial hemorrhages in his eyes.”
   The New York City Police Department, who have long operated under the “broken windows” theory of policing, which requires them to crackdown on minor victimless crimes, are now exploring new ways to address minor offenses that do not require arrests.
   The owner of the building where Garner stood in front selling untaxed cigarettes, Gjafer Gjeshbitraj, who called police to complain about the cigarette peddlers several times, no longer calls police on the men selling untaxed cigarettes because although he finds them a nuisance, he does not believe they deserve the death penalty.

   None of this is surprising for those of us who follow these types of incidents closely, but it’s refreshing to see the New York Times dedicate a significant amount of time and research to investigate what took place in the days leading to Garner’s death as well as the months following his death, which sparked a national awareness of police abuse that had been lacking in this country.

   After all, it is obvious that the ones who should have been doing the investigating were doing everything and anything to avoid conducting a serious investigation.

   Yep, they told a witness to lie.

   And for a dose of WTF? CNN Anchor Refers to Dallas Gunman’s Actions as ‘Courageous and Brave’. I’m not even going to cite anything from the article. Just wow.

2. rq says

   14 June 2015 at 2:47 pm

   Twitter commentary from the Louisville shooting:
   Just saw footage from a local business owner. confirms Victim charged cop with pole…BUT…video CLEARLY shows cop had gun drawn#Louisville;
   Victim had back to cop. While cop drew gun. Victim turns around…gun is pointed at him..he swings pole at cop. #Louisville
   Business owner with video was threatened by police. #Louisville he is terrified;
   The man shot and killed today was from sudan. Everyone knows him but no one seems to know his name..#Louisville
   They just started laying flowers #Louisville We still don’t have a name. Cops cleaned up their area asap..#Louisville

   In Atlanta, Community, police hold ‘Bridging the Divide’ town hall meeting

   Law enforcement, churches and members of the community met at Morehouse College Saturday to talk about ways to build bonds between police and citizens.

   The Rev. Markel Hutchins said the “Bridge the Divide” town hall meeting was organized in response to high-profile fatal shootings involving police in other cities and in Atlanta.

   The discussion was heavy, centering on those recent deadly police encounters and better relations between citizens and police.

   “The path to progress is conciliatory,” said Hutchins.

   He said he is working to get leaders from all aspects of life on that path.

   In the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College, the room was filled with people wanting to have better communication and understanding.

   But at one point, frustration with law enforcement brewed on the stage when family members of a man killed by DeKalb County police walked up demanding justice for his death.

   DeKalb County police shot and killed Kevin Davis in December and his family members have been critical of the county’s response to the shooting.

   The interruption Saturday was settled calmly.

   “We get nothing, no progress from screaming at each other. Progress only comes when we have the courage to talk to each other,” Hutchins said.

   Hutchins, who helped organize the event, said every police chief and elected sheriff in the metro area was invited and encouraged to participate.

   Channel 2’s Monica Pearson and Mark Winne moderated the discussion with those in attendance.

   “How do we close the gap of fear that exists between police and citizens?” Pearson asked the audience.

   Many believe it starts in a meeting just like Saturday’s, speaking calmly, listening to one another and being open to communicate.

   “We’re going to try to make this the first step; the hard part is after today. Today’s the easy part, it’s the work after today,” said Clarence Coxx with the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement.

   Good luck to them!

3. rq says

   15 June 2015 at 6:07 am

   Tamir Rice Case: No Hard Evidence Found That Cop Ordered Boy to Raise Hands.

   Investigators have found no hard evidence a Cleveland police officer who fatally shot a 12-year-old boy carrying a pellet gun ordered him to raise his hands before opening fire.

   Documents released Saturday by the prosecutor handling the racially charged case detail the moments before the brief, deadly encounter — and how the responding officers seemed almost shell-shocked as Tamir Rice lay dying outside a rec center.

   Cleveland police have said the officer who fired the fatal shot, Timothy Loehmann, told Tamir three times to put his hands up, then opened fire when the boy reached for the pellet gun tucked in his waistband.

   Grainy, choppy surveillance video shows Loehmann firing two shots within two seconds of his police cruiser skidding to a stop near the boy. Cuyahoga County sheriff’s detectives investigating the shooting wrote that, based on witness interviews, it was unclear if Loehmann shouted anything to Tamir from inside the cruiser before opening fire. […]

   The surveillance video appears to show Tamir reaching for the pellet gun, which is tucked in his waistband, when he’s shot. Investigative documents said it’s been estimated that Loehmann fired twice at a range estimated at between 41/2 and 7 feet. Autopsy records indicate Tamir was struck only once.

   Related: Judge Finds Probable Cause for Charges Against Cops in Tamir Rice Killing

   An FBI agent who is a trained paramedic was on a bank robbery detail nearby. He began administering first aid four minutes after the shooting. The agent, whose name is redacted from the files, told investigators that Tamir’s wound was severe but he was still initially conscious. Tamir, he said, showed a response when he told him he was there to help.

   Loehmann, 26, and Garmback, 47, have been criticized for not giving Tamir first aid. The officers seemed to freeze, the agent said.

   “They wanted to do something, but they didn’t know what to do,” the agent told investigators. [which is strange, because i was under the impression that police officers receive training in first aid, in the academy… – rq] […]

   Loehmann’s attorney, Henry Hilow, said he has not had a chance to read the investigative file and said the officer committed no wrongdoing.

   “The events were a tragedy, but there was no crime committed,” he said.

   And can they stop it with the ‘I haven’t looked at the file / the documents / the evidence but I’m 100% sure nothing wrong was done’? Please? It’s so fucking annoying and it’s statements made without full knowledge of the situation. (What was the incident a few months ago where the initial statements were made by the attorney, then they looked at the case in more detail, and then left the case?)

   “He gave me no choice”: First side of the story released from Cleveland cop who shot Tamir Rice , if anyone really wants to read about that again. No sympathy for Loehmann. NONE. Not from me. “There was nothing I could do”, he also says, as if his hand holding his gun were a completely separate part of his body.

   The Man Behind the Art of the Black Panther Party

   Emory Douglas was one of two African American students in his graphic design classes at San Francisco City College. It was there that he became involved in political activism, and by the late 1960s he was serving as the Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party. The production company Dress Code used archival footage and conversations with Douglas to share his story alongside the rise and fall of the Panthers. “My art is about enlightening and informing people about issues,” he says in the film. “We were creating the culture—the culture of resistance, the culture of defiance, the culture of self-determination.”

   Video at the link.

   Tribune analysis: Cops who pile up complaints routinely escape discipline. I wonder if that’s just in Chicago, or everywhere? Seems to be a bit of a pattern.

   Few Chicago police officers who are accused of misconduct are found to be at fault, and when they are, most of them are cited for minor infractions that carry little if any punishment, a Tribune analysis of data found.

   In fact, nearly three-fourths of the officers found to have committed some kind of wrongdoing weren’t docked any time off or received suspensions of five days or less, the analysis of Police Department records shows.

   Department critics and some police accountability experts say people filing complaints against the police face obstacles and long odds in getting their allegations investigated and then substantiated. Nearly 60 percent of all the complaints were thrown out without being fully investigated because the alleged victims failed to sign required affidavits. What’s more, investigators won’t consider an officer’s complaint history as part of the investigation, and many of the cases come down to the word of the officer versus the accuser.

   In the end, very few alleged victims prevail, the analysis found. Over four years ending in mid-December 2014, investigators “sustained” a little fewer than 800 of the approximately 17,700 complaints, just over 4 percent. The sustained rate rose to about 11 percent if the thousands of people who didn’t sign the affidavit are excluded from the tally.

   In the relatively few cases in which officers are found at fault, about 45 percent were given a reprimand or what’s called a “violation noted,” neither of which results in any docked time for the officer. Another 37 percent of the officers were suspended, but three-fourths of them were docked only one to five days off work. Almost 15 percent resigned before punishment could be imposed, the analysis found. And only a dozen officers were dismissed over complaints filed during the four-year period, according to the department records.

   Police officials objected to the Tribune’s analysis, saying there are complicated factors at play. Officers routinely stack up complaints by working in Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods. They said the affidavit law protects them from false complaints. And the Independent Police Review Authority, the city agency that investigates the most serious complaints, said it would be unfair to flag officers for past complaints for which they were cleared.

   The Tribune analysis found that officers who piled up the most complaints routinely escaped discipline of any kind. Over the four years, the 11 officers with the most complaints amassed a combined 253, in some cases for serious allegations of misconduct such as excessive force or illegal searches. Yet just one officer was punished — and received only a five-day suspension for neglecting his duties, the analysis found.

   A few of the officers with the most complaints over the last four years also ranked high on similar lists from the 2000s.

   More at the link, and none of it is good – and the special pleading on behalf of officers! Higher standard, indeed.

   Seeking Black trans writer for op-ed/Insight on Dolezal/Jenner, “transracial” v. transgender, ASAP. $100. Pls DM @darcco or @theoffingmag – I don’t know if the opportunity’s still open, but just in case.

4. rq says

   15 June 2015 at 8:33 am

   This is going to be annoying.
   Every time I post a comment (for page 2) it brings me back to page 1.
   Anyway.

   +++

   Dexter Barber. Chairman of the Board of Commissioners in his Florida county. Regarding calling folk n*gg*rs. Because some black people got in line ahead of him to see their loved ones in jail (he was there to see his brother).

   Officer fatally shoots African man swinging flag pole in Louisville, that again…

   An African man was shot and killed by a Louisville Metro Police officer Saturday afternoon, after police say he grabbed a flagpole and swung it at the officer.

   The man, whose name has not yet been released by authorities, was shot twice and died later at the hospital, according to the police department.

   The African immigrant was a regular presence in the Old Louisville neighborhood surrounding the busy street corner where he was killed, neighbors said. A neighbor left a bundle of yellow lilies on the sidewalk where he fell.

   Dozens began to gather there Saturday evening, trying to piece together what led to the fatal shooting and calling for police to quickly release footage from nearby surveillance cameras.

   Police Chief Steve Conrad said a 22-year-old woman called the police just after 2 p.m. to report she had been assaulted near the corner of South Third and West Oak streets. The responding officer, who has not been identified by police, spotted a man who matched the description of the alleged assailant a block away, at South Fourth Street.

   The officer pulled over and spoke briefly with the man, the chief said. The man started to walk off, then grabbed a metal flagpole, lunged toward the officer and started swinging, Conrad said.

   The officer stepped backward and ordered the man to drop the pole, the department said. But he continued to swing, according to police.

   Conrad said the officer fired two shots in self-defense.

   The man was taken by ambulance to the University of Louisville Hospital, where he later died.

   Kenneth Williams said he watched the shooting from across the street and refuted the police department’s account. The man had been staggering down the street and looked dazed, Williams said.

   He said the police officer got out of his car and confronted him, with his hand resting on his sidearm. Williams said it looked like the man “panicked.” Williams said he picked up the pole, which had been standing outside a business, and reared it back over his shoulder. But he didn’t swing it, Williams said.

   Leslie Lewis, who works in a Laundromat nearby, ran outside as soon as she heard the shots and saw the man collapse onto the ground. She estimated the flagpole was about 6 feet long.

   Nick Holiday said he knew the man well; they attended a recovery class together twice a week at a coffee shop nearby. The man, who police estimated to be in his 30s, emigrated from Africa a number of years ago, Holiday said. He didn’t speak English well and struggled to understand what people said to him. He lived in an apartment building around the corner from the intersection where he was killed.

   Holiday, and others gathered at the intersection Saturday evening, questioned why the officer resorted to deadly force when faced with a flagpole, rather than use a Taser or other non-lethal means. They called for a quick and transparent investigation into the killing.

   So, as opposed to trying to deal with any number of issues that this man might have had (language barrier, mental illness, drugs, etc.), the officer shot him.

   Teen finds fame with ‘on fleek’ slang term – just a sort of happier story.

   Newman, who uses the online pseudonym, Peaches Monroee, invented the phrase “on fleek” on a video in the Vine in June 2014, and it has taken off with more than 30 million loops (views, for those not initiated to Vine).

   “It’s been crazy but it feels good,” she said. “Life is very different.”

   Newman made the video on a whim after having her eyebrows done for the first time back in June. She was waiting in the car for her mother, Denise, outside of Burlington Coat Factory.

   Online slang-definer Urban dictionary says something is on fleek when it’s “perfect, or going right or on point.” That’s how Newman felt her eyebrows looked that afternoon.

   “It just came out,” Newman said. “I was just saying stuff.”

   The attention has been almost overwhelming, the Thornton Fractional South junior said. She has to dress well whenever she leaves the house, because people ask for her autograph and take pictures. She’s been the subject of a story in a March 3 edition of Newsweek and had been invited on “The Steve Harvey Show” but that was canceled. Newman says she was told she’d be asked again for next season.

   Even Denise hasn’t escaped. Some have taken to calling her “Mama Fleek” and “Mama Peaches.”

   “I told (Kayla) the other day that she’s not the average teenager, anymore. She’s in an elite group of teenagers,” Denise said. “I tell her to hope for the best, but don’t expect it. Work hard and let the rest unfold.”

   Celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, Lil Wayne and Chris Brown and teenagers around the country have made “on fleek” part of their vocabularies. Ariana Grande famously sang it on MTV.

   Singers Nicki Minaj and Christina Milian actually argued over social media about which of them had invented the phrase. That’s when the Newman’s decided it was time to get an attorney to trademark and copyright “on fleek.”

   Newman sells shirts online but hopes to financially capitalize further in the future.

   Good luck!

   Report: Prosecutors In Eric Garner Case Told Witness Don’t “Say They Put Him In A Chokehold”. Yup, that headline just goes right out there and says it.

   Witness Taisha Allen, an acquaintance of Garner’s, shot the video showing police, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians milling around for several minutes without providing first aid to Garner. She has previously expressed disbelief about the Richmond County grand jury’s decision not to indict Pantaleo, but the grand jury records remain secret and the latest report provides new details about how she said prosecutors sought to downplay the negligence of officers and medical responders on the scene:

   Several times during her testimony, which is kept secret under grand jury rules, Ms. Allen said prosecutors urged her to watch her words. When she said Mr. Garner did not appear to have a pulse, a prosecutor stepped in. “Don’t say it like that,” she recalled the prosecutor saying. “You’re only assuming he didn’t have a pulse.”

   A prosecutor also interjected when she told jurors how Mr. Garner was taken to the ground. “I said they put him in a chokehold,” Ms. Allen recalled saying. “‘Well, you can’t say they put him in a chokehold,'” she said a prosecutor responded.

   The account is one of many jarring details included in the Times article, published 11 months after Garner’s death outside a beauty supply store in Tompkinsville.

   Another list of jarring facts at the end of the article there. Incl. that there’s not enough funds to buy a headstone for Garner’s grave. :(

   With Great Power Comes Great Accountability, ACLU on Cleveland police.

   After the U.S. Department of Justice publicized its findings from its most recent investigation of the CDP, the ACLU provided recommendations for how Cleveland police can fix their unconstitutional policies and practices. Nearly all of our recommendations were taken into consideration and echoed throughout the new agreement with the DOJ and the city of Cleveland.

   But we’ve a long way to go before true reform happens. For the CDP to make substantial and lasting changes to its unconstitutional policing methods and biased culture, the division and every one of its officers need to understand and embrace the concept of accountability.

   What Being Accountable Means

   As you grow up, you learn that when something you do or don’t do hurts someone, the appropriate response is to own up to your mistake and accept the consequences. It’s being accountable. Although we learn this lesson in our youth, we also all know that it doesn’t always play out in reality.

   In regards to law enforcement, examples of accountability are more often the exception, rather than the rule. Police officers make mistakes, whether unintentionally or deliberately, go unpunished, and are never corrected for the future. This lack of oversight and discipline fosters an environment where the desire for power and the feeling of invincibility dictate a police officer’s actions, rather than the oath to protect and serve.

   Truly Supporting the Police

   Police officers are sworn to enforce the law in order to protect and serve our communities, and that often means being placed in dangerous situations. Why wouldn’t we want them trained according to the highest standard? Our tax money pays their salaries, so why wouldn’t we want the reassurance that they’re acting ethically and lawfully?

   Did you know that to become a barber in Ohio you must go through at least 1,800 hours of training, but to become a police officer you only need a minimum of 605 hours?

   That’s unacceptable. Our current approach to policing isn’t only endangering our communities, especially people of color, but also is endangering our police officers.

   Respect the Badge

   Advocating for greater police accountability and training absolutely demonstrates support for the police. And yet so many individuals, elected officials, and community leaders, perceive the cries for reform as anti-police rhetoric. They misinterpret advocating for a better approach to policing as a threat to the police community. By no means, does asking for police accountability and respecting police authority have to be viewed as mutually exclusive.

   The badge must be respected, not only by citizens, but also those who wear it.

   That’s a good point at the end, there. That cops who don’t adhere to a higher standard (don’t hold themselves to one) are actually seriously disrespecting what it means to be an officer.

   A makeshift memorial for #DengManyoun outside Smoker’s Smoke Shop. Per @jeredowns: #Louisville #BlackLivesMatter – that’s his name, Deng Manyoun.

5. rq says

   15 June 2015 at 8:38 am

   Just another quick one on the Louisville shooting: Police: Officer kills man swinging metal pole. Sorry if it’s a repost, there’s been many articles but sort of dispersed among everything else.

   Oh, and yesterday I mentioned a possible shooting in Cleveland! Well, the information isn’t any more clear today – Apparently there was no #ClevelandShooting as previously reported. (Man got hurt running into fence while running from police.)
   So, there was a shooting. #ClevelandShooting (Officer fired shots prior to this, because man pointed gun at them.)
   Is the Cleveland PD saying that they fired shots at someone today but because all of the shots missed the person that it’s not a shooting?
   All the union reps are here, hard to believe there was no officer involved shooting. #clevelandshooting

   Melissa Harris-Perry on Rachel Dolezal: ‘It Is Possible That She Might Actually Be Black?’

   If you’ve been following the Rachel Dolezal story online, you may have seen the word “transracial” being thrown around and people saying choosing to be black is like Caitlyn Jenner choosing to be female. It’s unclear how much of it’s sincere and how much is just straight-up trolling, but MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry entertained the notion on her show today with kind of a huge question.

   “Is it possible that she might actually be black?”

   While not wanting to make the transgender comparison, Harris-Perry questioned whether one can be “cisblack and transblack,” and whether there’s a way to describe “the achievement of blackness despite one’s parentage.”

   Alyson Hobbs, who literally wrote the book on “racial passing,” said there’s “certainly a chance that she identifies as a black woman and there could be authenticity to that.”

   Okaaaaaay, but I’m not sure that lying about your parentage, ancestry, and upbringing is a part of all of that…

6. rq says

   15 June 2015 at 8:45 am

   Highest Learning: Dwyane Wade Graduates From Harvard Management Program

   Dwyane Wade’s contract status with the Miami Heat might be murky, but that hardly means the two-time champion’s playing days are anywhere close to over. After yet another highly productive season, it’s ever-apparent that he seems primed to remain an impact player for years to come.

   Still, Wade understands that there will eventually be a life beyond basketball – and the 32-year-old has already begun preparing for it. In between serving as a guest analyst for ABC during the NBA Finals, Wade began and completed a four-day executive course in sports and entertainment management at Harvard University.

   Wade’s post-playing resumé was already impressive: Two-time NBA champion; Finals MVP; Olympic Gold medalist; television commentator; author; and most importantly, spouse of a Hollywood star. Now, with “Harvard graduate” added to the list?

   Yeah, we’re pretty sure Wade will have his pick of careers once his basketball one is finally finished.

   AND IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT BEING BLACK. Rachel Dolezal’s painting The Shape of Our Kind is a near duplicate of J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 The Slave Ship.

   Just minutes after #DallasPDShooting, @GovAbbott was off to a #gun range to sign #opencarry law, opposed by #police.

   Stop. Making. Us. Learn. New. Names. via @deray

   African American Women in Physics

   Q: How do we calculate the number of African American Women with PhDs in Physics and related fields?

   A: There is a Physics and Astro only list and a Physics Community list.

   On the Physics and Astro only list we included all women with PhDs in Physics, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Applied Physics, and Space Physics.

   On our Physics Community list we included all the Physics and Astro only list as well as women who identify as Physicists. For example, a number of women have Physics bachelors degrees, and Electrical Engineering PhDs and work for NASA. They participate in the physics community and identify themselves as physicists—so we include them on the Physics Community list.

   We have also included 4 pioneers—women who due to various circumstance did not finish their PhD, but studied advanced physics before 1980.

   If you believe that you or someone you know should be included on this list, or if you have a correction or update, please contact us using the link above.

   There’s 74 on one list, and 100 scientists on the other… That doesn’t seem like a lot.

7. rq says

   15 June 2015 at 9:00 am

   From the UK, Police brutality UK-style: The tragic case of Kingsley Burrell – it’s a long read, and I’m only going to cite a little bit of it. TW for violence and… general lack of human empathy, I suppose.

   In March 2011, Kingsley Burrell called the police requesting help, fearing he and his son were at risk from an armed gang. By the end of the day, Burrell had been arrested, beaten and had his son taken from him. Four days later he was dead.

   Since then, it has been a long, hard struggle by Kingsley’s family and friends to find out the truth about what happened – but last month, during an excruciating five-week inquest, that truth finally came out.

   When they arrived on the scene and found no evidence of anyone threatening Kingsley, the police decided to arrest him under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act, claiming he was delusional. Both he and his son were taken away in an ambulance, where the police set upon Kingsley in an attempt to forcibly remove him from his son. During the inquest, it emerged that Kingsley had not been asked to relinquish his son before police attacked him. One officer admitted in typically guarded language: “I accept that to communicate to everybody, in an ideal situation, that would have been done.”

   Kingsley was then driven to the Oleaster mental health unit of the local hospital and later transferred to another mental health facility, the Mary Seacole Unit. What exactly happened to him during this time is unclear, but his sister Kadisha visited him in the unit the following day, telling the inquest “Kingsley had three lumps, one on his forehead. I said to [his partner] Chantelle ‘take a photo of that’.”

   “Kingsley said to me, ‘I can’t move’. He couldn’t move the upper part of his body… He couldn’t move his head, couldn’t move his body, couldn’t move his shoulders,” she said, adding he had deep marks around his wrists. She later discovered that her brother had been left handcuffed to the hospital floor for five or six hours, had not been allowed a drink of water or a visit to the toilet and was subsequently left to urinate on himself. He told her that after he requested the handcuffs be loosened the guards tightened them even more.

   On March 30th, police were called back to the Mary Seacole Unit after staff there reported he was acting aggressively; when pressed for more detail in the inquest it transpired that he had been making ‘stabbing motions’ with his toothbrush.

   This was apparently all the excuse the police needed to launch another blistering attack on the man they had left barely able to walk just three days previously. Kingsley over the course of the next two and half hours was again beaten, this time whilst sedated, handcuffed and in leg restraints. During this time, he was transferred by police to the Queen Elizabeth hospital, first to emergency to stitch up a head injury he had sustained during the course of the restraint, and then back to the Oleaster Unit of the hospital. During the ambulance journey, a towel was wrapped around Kingsley’s head; when asked why, it was explained that it was because he had been spitting. The restraints were finally removed on arrival at the Oleaster seclusion unit. A staff member present told the inquest that whilst removing the restraints, one officer “knelt on Kingsley’s back between his shoulder blades” whilst others punched his thighs “with a lot of force,” including with the butt of a police baton. He noted: “These were methods that I had never seen before—they were alarming and shocking.” He explained how the police then left Kingsley face down on the bed with the blanket still wrapped around his head. He was motionless.

   After further delays in receiving proper medical attention, Burrell died. Now the family’s being told that the best thing from this case is ‘the lessons learned’:

   Despite the ‘lessons learnt’ from the Lawrence case, both factors clearly played a role in Kingsley’s death. PC Shorthouse, a six-foot-four tall police officer involved in Kingsley’s death, told the inquest that his “knees were knocking together” in fear of dealing with Kingsley, prompting the family’s lawyer to ask him: “Are you sure you were not applying the stereotype of Kingsley being mad, black and dangerous?” “No, not at all,” Shorthouse replied. “He was the strongest, most aggressive person I have ever met in my career as a police officer.” Perhaps. But one wonders how much aggression Kingsley was meting out whilst sedated with his arms and legs strapped down, or whilst being beaten face down and motionless on a hospital bed.

   Another explanation for the incident was put forth by the Institute of Race Relations in their examination of similar cases: “Black men, especially young black men, acting erratically or even asking for help, are stereotyped first and foremost as bad, mad, and, being black, likely to be involved in drugs and/or violent – so they are met with violence.”

   Even when victims display clear warning signs of being in serious danger, police often ignore them on the grounds they believe their victims are “faking it.” As Shorthouse told the inquest, he assumed that Kingsley pleading with him that he couldn’t breathe was “tactical.” Such assumptions were also fatal in the cases of Sean Rigg, Christopher Alder and Habib Ullah, as well as many others.

   Yet this ‘lesson’ – that institutional racism and racial stereotyping is dangerous and can even be fatal – is one that had supposedly already been learnt from the MacPherson report in 1999. Just for good measure, it was ‘learnt’ again in 2006 when an IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission) report concluded that “unwitting racism” contributed to the death of Christopher Alder – a very generous finding given CCTV footage appeared to show the officers standing around making monkey noises whilst he lay dying – and that four of the officers present when Alder died were guilty of the “most serious neglect of duty.”

   Another lesson not being learnt is that, when it comes to holding the state to account, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is not fit for purpose. In 1999, the Butler Report – an official government inquiry into deaths in custody – was seriously critical of the CPS’s obvious unwillingness to prosecute police officers. Yet given the behavior of the CPS in subsequent years, the report may as well have never been written. Even when verdicts of unlawful killing are reached, as the IRR has noted, “there has still been a marked reluctance to prosecute those implicated.” The number of prosecutions resulting from the 509 suspicious custody deaths detailed in their report can literally be counted on one hand – and even where prosecutions are brought, they are not done so effectively.

   So, it looks like some things are cross-cultural (or perhaps have developed from a common cultural ancestor).

   Staff disciplined after jailed Florida teen’s death

   For more than a decade, Florida juvenile justice administrators have been on notice: Children are not supposed to die in state custody for lack of the same medical care that non-delinquent kids readily receive.

   But there was Andre Sheffield — Berlena Sheffield’s grandson, the one she adopted and raised as her own child — in the Brevard County Juvenile Detention Center’s East Module, complaining of a headache and stomach pain, soiling himself, limping, walking strangely sideways and falling over, as if he had no control over his 14-year-old body.

   Registered nurse Karen Rainford gave him Tylenol. He died hours later.

   Juvenile justice investigators completed a report late last month on Andre’s death, concluding that guards at the 40-bed lockup routinely violated agency rules regarding the treatment of sick detainees, and ignored growing evidence of Andre’s illness before he was found dead in his cell Feb. 19 around lunchtime. The 50-page report also faulted the lockup’s top officer, Superintendent Vicki Alves, for “failing to ensure” that officers under her command were properly trained in agency sick-call procedures.

   “We’ve got to hold staff accountable at the very highest level,” DJJ Secretary Christy Daly told the Miami Herald in an interview Friday. “That goes all the way up to the superintendent of the facility. The leadership of the facility sets the tone.”

   “We’ve got to have that compassion across the board,” Daly said. “We have gotten rid of a lot of people across the state who have not bought into what we’re trying to do.”

   Discipline meted out to six staff members late last week was mild compared to similar incidents in the past: The lockup’s superintendent, Vicki Alves, was suspended for five days for “poor performance” and “negligence.” Her deputy received a written reprimand for poor performance. Three guards who were faulted for ignoring sick-call procedure or failing to seek medical care for a sick detainee were given written reprimands, as well.

   Rainford, the Cocoa lockup’s in-house nurse, was “immediately terminated” by DJJ administrators on Feb. 27 after she refused to be interviewed by investigators with the agency’s Inspector General’s Office. The report said she did not follow a medical protocol for the diagnosis of abdominal pain prior to Andre’s death. Rainford could not be reached by the Herald.

   “Andre was a fine, loving kid. He smiled all the time,” his grandmother, Berlena Sheffield, said. He was supposed to be released in April, and told his grandmother he was looking forward to returning home, where the family dog, Roxy, a pit bull mix, had given birth to 14 puppies, one of which was going to be his.

   “He was anxious to get home, and play with the puppies, said Sheffield, 75, of Jacksonville. “When he came back, he was already dead. It’s so hard. I ain’t quite got over it yet. I try not to think about it much. But when I think about it lately, I have to go into my own space.”

   He died of untreated bacterial meningitis while supposedly under the supervision of the state (i.e. corrections officers).

   Each one, Teach one #BlackLivesMatter

   @deray Im still looking for ANY coverage of the 17yr old suspect killed in Kokomo IN Friday. But since suspect female…

   Orlando police dog mangled arm of 12-year-old burglary suspect

   An Orlando Police Department dog mangled the arm of a 12-year-old burglary suspect during an arrest last week, sending the boy to the hospital for three days and adding to ongoing concern over whether deploying dogs on juveniles constitutes excessive force.

   The OPD incident report from June 4 states the boy had pried open portable classrooms at Shingle Creek Elementary School and started running after officers told him to stop.

   But two other minors, also charged in the burglary, saw the whole thing and said the injured boy had already dropped to his knees in compliance when the dog lunged at him, family members said.

   Their attorney, Bradley Laurent, said the family will pursue a lawsuit if the city cannot resolve the issue. The boy — who turned 13 on Friday and is not being identified because he’s a minor — must return to the doctor every week to check for nerve damage because his arm is too swollen to diagnose it right now, Laurent said.

   “This kid is going to need extensive rehab,” Laurent said by phone on Friday, adding that the child appeared to have suffered three separate bite wounds. “There’s no telling if he needs surgery to repair any nerve damage, and he may need plastic surgery.”

   Barring exceptional circumstances, OPD does not put police dogs on children age 12 or under — a distinction most agencies do not make, according to Deputy Chief Eric Smith, who oversees the K-9 unit.

   I wonder if being black and being perceived as more adult was a factor in this case? Anyhow. Dogs seem to be misused more and more. Or maybe I’m just noticing right now.

   Congratulations “Leo4G” & “Accelerating Africa”, winners of CERN’s beamline for schools!

8. rq says

   15 June 2015 at 9:07 am

   Wow. Dues-paying black women who’ve voiced concern about Rachel Dolezal are now banned from attending their NAACP Spokane meeting Monday.
   2) The Spokane NAACP’s Rev. Dr. Lawrence Brunley reprimanded Rachel Dolezal, insisting on a meeting tomorrow.

   Remind me not to run loose today. Check out the typo in the first sentence of the article linked… (photo at the tweet).
   And the article here: Authorities kill black bear in eastern Missouri. At the time of posting, the article has been corrected.

   The Other Cultural Forces Behind Police Brutality

   Even for a radical magazine in a radical decade with Molotov cocktails on its mind, the cover of the July 1969 issue of Ramparts was, shall we say, arresting. Breaking the fourth wall in a big way, it cried Halt! with a helmeted, face-shadowed policeman pointing a revolver square at the reader’s head, and offered the following bounty: “$10,000 for Information Leading to the Arrest and Conviction of any Cop who has Murdered a Black Man.” Many of Ramparts’ insurrectionist covers have dated into countercultural relics. Not this one. Here we are, 46 years later, deep in the second term of the country’s first African-American president, and, for all of the country’s racial progress, the killings of black men (and boys) by police officers haven’t dwindled into a few grievous, rogue-cop incidents; they’ve appeared to accelerate and hemorrhage into a Rorschach blot of blood pools. Were any magazine to tout a similar wanted poster today the inundation would immobilize its in-box. Ramparts felt compelled to step up to the plate with its graphic proposal because, back in those analog days of Mad Men yore, documentation of police brutality was sketchy, sporadic, heavily dependent on eyewitness accounts. Digital technology has democratized eyewitnesshood, made it less subject to the Rashomon effect. All it takes to record law officers in the act of firing on an unarmed suspect or executing a beatdown is a bystander with a cell-phone camera or a surveillance cam in just the right spot. Yet the vortex impact of viral footage of killer cops—the outrage, protest marches, criminal charges—doesn’t seem to have inhibited lethal-forcers. Each week a new victim seems to go up on the scoreboard.

   Black Lives Matter was the protest message adopted after the acquittal in 2013 of George Zimmerman in the shooting of the unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. It swelled into a movement as open season seemed to be declared on black males and tragedies multiplied. Black lives matter in America, but white lives rule. Self-styled, homegrown, beef-jerky Red Dawn “Wolverines!” Open Carry showboats can preen about with AR-15s strapped to their backs without meeting kingdom come, and a psycho-killer such as James Eagan Holmes can be apprehended in one piece after conducting a massacre in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater that left 12 dead and 70 wounded, while a black father of four, Rumain Brisbon, can be shot for holding a vial of pills mistaken for a weapon, another can be shot for handling a pellet gun at Walmart (John Crawford, aged 22), and a 12-year-old black child can have his future erased for playing with a BB gun, shot by an officer who may not have been aware the boy was holding a toy gun. (The victim, Tamir Rice, died the next day at the hospital and six months after his death had still not been buried, denied even that dignity. His family finally decided to have him cremated.)c

   The latitude of response allowable to a black suspect is razor-thin to nonexistent. Resist, like Eric Garner, surrounded by a scrum of cops for the quality-of-life offense of allegedly selling individual cigarettes, or “loosies,” and you can find yourself in a choke hold that leaves you gasping, “I can’t breathe,” until the last breath goes. Flee and you may get shot in the back, like Walter Scott, felled by a South Carolina officer whose fairy-tale account of the incident collapsed when video showed him performing his fatal marksmanship, or like Eric Harris, who uttered, as he lay dying from a gunshot wound, “My God, I’m losing my breath,” to which one of Tulsa County’s finest responded, “Fuck your breath.” Or you may get tossed into a van and reduced to a bag of broken body parts, like Freddie Gray, whose death ignited a raging tempest in Baltimore. Seemingly surrender and you can still get killed point-blank, as happened to Jerame Reid, who emerged from the passenger side of a car at a traffic stop in New Jersey with his hands raised. Six shots later, he was history. […]

   This marriage of outlaw-sheriff mystique and a militarized warrior class, where Dirty Harry meets RoboCop, has been a long time bulking and armoring up. In The Second Civil War, published in 1968, Garry Wills reported on the preparations for containment and suppression of racial uprisings—ghetto control—to prevent a black militant guerrilla insurgency from turning American cities into The Battle of Algiers. It wasn’t a work of alarmism. In 1968, Civil War II wasn’t some prototype Tea Party/neo-Confederate wet-dream Nightmare on Elm Street scenario, but a plausible irruption after Detroit’s “12th Street Riot,” the year before—which left 43 dead, hundreds injured, and an estimated 1,400 buildings burned—and the nationwide conflagration ignited by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Race relations would improve in the following years and decades, but the domestic arms race, like the international military overstretch, never quite abates. After 9/11, the date from which so much of our hulking entropy can be marked, the War on Terror revived police militarization with a righteous vengeance. State and local law enforcement in communities that didn’t have a mouse squeak of a threat risk from sleeper cells could roll out hardware worthy of a Pentagon yard sale. As our twin theaters of operation in Afghanistan and Iraq tapered down, military equipment was re-deployed Stateside, courtesy of the Department of Defense, even such vital peacekeeping machines as the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, capable of withstanding bomb blasts. Because, as we all are aware, this country’s rotting infrastructure is pimpled with I.E.D.’s. North Little Rock, Arkansas, even retains a couple of armed robots formerly used in Afghanistan, robots being especially attractive acquisitions because they don’t put in for overtime or expect pensions.

   Much of this hardware has been rolled roughshod over citizens’ rights in the War on Drugs, but with the decriminalization of marijuana trending, it will have to be put to other wasteful uses, since adults in authority never want to give up their toys. It will be oiled and ready to quell civil disorder, which we’re likely to see more of in chronically poor regions and urban sectors now threatened with resource scarcity due to drought and environmental destruction. Thousands of citizens in Detroit and Baltimore have had their water turned off owing to nonpayment of bills, an excellent way to foster a powder keg. Part of the premonitory hold of The Walking Dead is the sense that it may be a preview of coming attractions.

   To preserve black lives and the lives of every vulnerable shade, body cams, indictments of officers, and the A.C.L.U. of Missouri’s “Mobile Justice” app (for videoing police encounters) are all to the good, as is the social-justice crusade that has mobilized (see Jay Caspian Kang’s profile of activist DeRay Mckesson, “Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us,” The New York Times Magazine, May 10), but what’s also required is a concerted rollback of police-statism and penal-colony proliferation—a genuine libertarian movement, not the mostly frat-bros version we have now. Because what looms behind this country’s gunslinger mentality is a prison-gray machine.

   Ezell Ford Supporters Demand Removal of LAPD Chief, Charges Against Officer, audio.

   Southern California activists are pressuring LA County DA Jackie Lacey to file charges against the LAPD officer who violated policy in the shooting death of Ezell Ford.

   Supporters of the Ford family hosted a phone banking to flood the DA’s office with calls on the matter. Other groups, such as Black Lives Matter LA, are calling for LAPD Chief Charlie Beck to resign in the aftermath of officer-involved fatal shootings of black men in South LA, Hollywood, and Skid Row.

   Pacifica KPFK’s Ernesto Arce files this report from Los Angeles.

9. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

   15 June 2015 at 5:06 pm

   I’m going to link to a bunch of articles about Rachel Dolezal. I’ll be doing excerpts of these articles.
   First up-
   From The Smoking Gun: Rachel Dolezal sued Howard University over race claims:

   Rachel Dolezal, 37, who headed the NAACP’s Spokane, Washington chapter, sued Howard for discrimination in 2002, the year she graduated from the historically black college with a Master of Fine Arts degree.

   Dolezal, then known as Rachel Moore, named the university and Professor Alfred Smith as defendants in a lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C.’s Superior Court. During the pendency of the civil case, Smith was chairman of Howard’s Department of Art.

   According to a Court of Appeals opinion, Dolezal’s lawsuit “claimed discrimination based on race, pregnancy, family responsibilities and gender.” She alleged that Smith and other school officials improperly blocked her appointment to a teaching assistant post, rejected her application for a post-graduate instructorship, and denied her scholarship aid while she was a student.

   The court opinion also noted that Dolezal claimed that the university’s decision to remove some of her artworks from a February 2001 student exhibition was “motivated by a discriminatory purpose to favor African-American students over” her.

   As detailed in the court opinion, Dolezal’s lawsuit contended that Howard was “permeated with discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult.”

   Judge Zoe Bush dismissed Dolezal’s complaint in February 2004, 18 months after the lawsuit was filed and Dolezal was deposed on several occasions. Bush found no evidence that Dolezal was discriminated on the basis of race or other factors. The D.C. Court of Appeals subsequently affirmed Bush’s decision.

   ****

   From Alter Net–
   Mimicry is not solidarity: Rachel Dolezal and the creation of antiracist white identity:

   Allyship involves, at its best, working with people of color, rather than trying to speak for them. I suspect Dolezal discovered at Howard that it isn’t enough to love black culture and profess one’s solidarity with the movement for black equality; that indeed, black people don’t automatically trust white people just because we say we’re down; that proving oneself takes time, and that the process is messy as hell, and filled with wrong turns and mistakes and betrayals and apologies and a healthy dose of pain. I suspect she didn’t have the patience for the messiness, but armed with righteous indignation at the society around her, and perhaps the one in which she had been raised out west, she opted to cut out the middle man. To hell with white allyship (or as my friends and colleagues Lisa Albrecht and Jesse Villalobos are calling it, “followership”), to hell with working with others; rather, she opted to simply become black, to speak for and as those others. Perhaps it was her way of obtaining the authenticity to which she felt entitled because of her sensibilities, and which she felt had been denied her by those whose approval she sought.

   It is a more extreme version, to be sure, but of a piece with those white folks who think dabbling in eastern religion makes them more spiritual, that donning beads and dreamcatchers in their rear-view mirrors makes them indigenous, or that blaring the loudest, brashest hip-hop beats in their stale suburbs renders them hard and street and real, in some way that isn’t possible within the confines of white normativity.

   I am quite sure that in her mind, her intentions were good; that rejecting whiteness, not merely in the political sense but even in herself was a righteous, perhaps even revolutionary act. But it was neither. It is revolutionary for real black people to rise up against whiteness because they possess a deep and abiding sense of the risk involved in doing so, not from having read about it, but because it is etched in their DNA, in the cell memory passed to them by their ancestors. For black people to challenge whiteness and the horrific consequences of white supremacy is to demand my people shall live, even if I must die.

   \For white people, the revolutionary act is not blacking up and pretending to share that historical memory; rather, it is demanding that despite one’s whiteness, one places humanity above skin and the conceits of race, to say that my people will live even as white supremacy must die. It is to remain white and yet challenge what that means in society by striving to change that society every day. Conversely, a white person who has lived as an African American since only slightly before the advent of the Obama administration is effectively seven years old in black years, and even then less weathered by what that means than any actual black seven-year old in this country. A mimic perhaps, possibly even a good one, but a mimic nonetheless. And mimicry is not solidarity.

   Most disturbing of all, there was another path, however much Dolezal showed no interest in treading it. Whether intended or not, by negating the history (and even the apparent possibility) of real white antiracist solidarity, Dolezal ultimately provided a slap in the face to that history by saying it wasn’t good enough for her to join. That the tradition of John Brown, of John Fee, of the Grimke sisters, of Anne and Carl Braden and Bob and Dottie Zellner, to name a few, wasn’t a meaningful enough heritage for her to claim. She wasn’t willing to pay her dues, to follow the lead of people of color. She didn’t want to do the hard and messy work, struggling with other white people and challenging them, which is what SNCC told us white folks to do in 1967, and what Malcolm had already said shortly before his death. She wanted to be done with white people altogether, to immerse herself in blackness, yet, as a white person, she knew she could never do that fully. And so, instead, this.

   There is a lesson here, for those of us who are white and care deeply about racial equity, justice and liberation: authentic antiracist white identity is what we must cultivate. We cannot shed our skin, nor our privileges like an outdated overcoat. They are not accessories to be donned or not as one pleases, but rather, persistent reminders of the society that is not yet real, which is why we must work with people of color to overturn the system that bestows those privileges. But the key word here is with people of color, not as them. We must be willing to do the difficult work of finding a different way to live in this skin.

   ****

   From If You Only News–
   NAACP president ‘misrepresenting herself’ as black for 10 years prompts #askrachel hashtag:

   You’ll have to click the link on this one, bc it’s comprised largely of Tweets.

   ****

   From Mic–
   Rachel Dolezal is nothing like Caitlyn Jenner-and here’s why:

   So what’s the difference between identifying as black and identifying as a woman?

   It’s pretty clear: Dolezal has lied. She’s spent the last decade going out of her way to falsely represent herself as black. And she claimed her race, as well as her outspoken activism, made her a target for hate mail and death threats (an allegation that investigators have yet to substantiate, according to KXLY News).

   Rather identifying as a white ally, Dolezal misrepresented herself. This does not necessarily distort her leadership potential or passion for justice, but deeply mars her general credibility as an individual. In a statement Friday morning, the NAACP said “one’s racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership. … In every corner of this country, the NAACP remains committed to securing political, educational and economic justice for all people, and we encourage Americans of all stripes to become members and serve as leaders in our organization.”

   On the flip side, transgender people like Caitlyn Jenner are not lying. If anything, their decision to come out is the ultimate declaration of honesty, of being upfront with who they are.

   Dolezal has been performing a sort of blackface, a stereotypical concept in itself, that is largely seen as falsely representing black existence. So the big difference is that while we don’t know why Dolezal carried on with an assumed black identity for so many years, we do know that transgender people aren’t donning costumes or masquerading in different genders. They’re living their truth, which seems to be more honest than what’s been unfolding in Spokane.

   ****

   From Addicting Info–
   NAACP leaders’ Tweets make evidence that she’s white even more puzzling:

   Another one that is largely Tweets.

10. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    15 June 2015 at 5:19 pm

    And now for other race related a/o police brutality stories (again, all excerpts)-
    From Addicting Info–
    Racist Walmart throws four black men out of store for ‘walking too slow’, one arrested:

    Since the advent of smartphones, America has become a laundromat – all its unmentionables are showing and people are beginning to talk now that all the cotton and lace is visible. Much the way smartphones have allowed the common practice of police brutality to be witnessed nationally and thereby condemned, so we are able to do the same with racism.

    Though thankfully no one was killed in the video below now circulating social media, it is nonetheless disturbing and repulsive to witness thanks to those very same smartphones, not to mention the foresight of the fella to begin filming the incident in the first place. Somehow, coupled with the climate of endless murders of unarmed black folks by (typically) white cops, this video of a group of four black men being kicked out of a Pensacola, Florida, Walmart for “walking too slow” rounds out the reality and broader picture of systemic racism in the United States.

    Not only is this where I live, I think the Walmart this happened at is walking distance from my house.

    You don’t have to be killed in the streets by the police for no reason in order to experience racism. It comes in many shapes, forms, and in nearly any degree. In this case, one man was even arrested for maintaining his right to continue shopping, having committed no crimes or behaved in a manner that would justify the store’s request that he leave. Officers also threw his phone to the ground and broke the screen even though the man never resisted or struggled in the slightest while handcuffed.

    The incident began after the four men had been in the store “a few minutes,” according MediaTakeOut. One of the men, later revealed to have been in a car accident recently, drove one of the store’s electric carts. Apparently, however, the store’s manager felt the men were “taking too long,” and rather than approaching them, himself, to voice his bigotry to their faces, he called the police on them instead, seeking to have them removed from the store.

    The video clearly shows the men remaining calm, though somewhat indignant, as most anyone would be in such a situation. In response to being told to leave the store by a police officer, one man can be heard saying, “F*ck you,” and good for him. He and the folks in his party are then met with a barrage of profanity and intimidation to leave the store. One of them is eventually accused of “showing his ass,” which more than likely is simply a reference to sagging. All the men, naturally respond that no one was “showing their ass” and that they would not leave the store. In response, they are then threatened with arrest if they do not immediately leave.

    Facing arrest, the men start slowly making their way toward the front of the store, arguing in disbelief the entire time, insisting that they were still going to purchase the few goods they’d picked up on their way out.

    They were not successful, however, as the man driving the electric cart was placed in handcuffs, arrested and ushered outside by one officer as his friends followed him, pleading with the cop that arresting the man was unnecessary, stating over and again, “We don’t need this!”

    A second cop shows up then, also white, and shoos the arrestee’s friends away, ushering them off into the parking lot to enter their vehicle and leave the premises while their friend is being arrested for nothing more than insisting on his right to shop in a public business.

    ****

    Addicting Info–
    ACLU app brilliantly solves the problem of cops destroying cell phones:

    A quick Google search reveals multiple cases where cops have confiscated and destroyed cameras or arrested the person filming, despite the Supreme Court ruling. In fact, there is an entire website, called Photography is Not a Crime, which shows police being bad and police taking and destroying cameras.

    The ACLU, naturally, has been on this issue and they have found at least a partial solution and it’s sort of brilliant. If you download the Mobile Justice app and record under that app, the video will be automatically uploaded to the local ACLU chapter when you stop recording, even if a cop takes your phone and destroys it. The app also reminds people of their rights, should they be stopped.

    Video at the link.

    ****

    From Vox–
    White people have been passing for black for centuries. A historian explains:

    The story of Rachel Dolezal — the now-former Spokane NAACP president whose parents have claimed she’s white — has opened up an enormously complicated debate about race and identity in general, and blackness in America in particular.

    Dolezal has presented herself as “black, white, and American Indian/Alaskan Native,” but her estranged parents say she’s simply white and has been trying to deceive everyone. When the scandal attracted national attention, Dolezal resigned from her NAACP presidency — without saying anything about her race.

    Examples of white people passing as black are much less common than the reverse, but there’s still historical precedent for what Dolezal did. Baz Dreisinger, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, traced the history of white passing in a 2008 book called Near Black. I talked to Dreisinger about how white passing has worked over time, and asked her whether there is ever a legitimate way to “cross-identify” with black culture.

    Dara Lind:Can you give us a brief rundown of the history of white people passing as black in America?

    Baz Dreisinger:It’s not like this was a massive chapter in American history, like traditional racial passing, which is a massive chapter. But I think people are shocked to discover that there is actually this history of white people who’ve passed as black and that Rachel Dolezal is hardly the first person to come along and do it, and in fact the way that she did it is in line with a number of historical examples.

    In the context of slavery, there are both real and fictional accounts of white people who became enslaved — sometimes white people from the North who are kidnapped and sold into slavery as black. In a sense, passing for black becomes secondary to passing for slave. The idea is that the economic basis of this trumps the racial basis — not that they’re separate.

    In that context, obviously, there was no change of appearance necessary. But in the 20th century, there’s a technology of passing that has to happen in order for the passing to be successful. Some people dyed their skin black and passed as black — the most famous example of that is John Howard Griffin, who wrote a memoir of his experience passing for a black man in the South during the era of Jim Crow. It’s called Black Like Me. He did it for a temporary experiment; he literally sat under the sun lamp and darkened his skin in order to do that. And there’s a woman who did a similar experiment to Griffin, whose name was Grace Halsell, who actually spent much of her life doing experimental passings — she passed as Native American, she passed as working-class — in order again to write exposés about what it’s like to be those things. So she wrote a memoir in the ’60s called Soul Sister, where she went through the same experiment Griffin did, only 10 years later, she’s in the North in Harlem as well as in the South, and her whole concept was, “I want to see what it’s like as a woman to do this.”

    I think music is the most powerful place where we’ve seen this sort of passing happen, and also cultural appropriation — in many ways, my book is as much about cultural appropriation as it is about passing. You have a character like Eminem who’s clearly not passing, but is bringing up all these questions about cultural ownership and cross-racial identification — what does it mean to own a culture? Is there such a thing as owning a culture? Passing is a difficult thing to do today, given the legacies of cultural appropriation, of the metaphorical ripping off of black culture that we’ve seen — and, especially in music, appropriation where there’s literally not a credit being given and also not financial remuneration being given for cultural products that were inventions of nonwhite people.

    Dara Lind:You’ve written about the idea that “proximity” to black people can make someone black by association, and that seems relevant here. How has that worked?

    Baz Dreisinger:Proximity gets defined differently as the generations proceed. First it was used as a racist trope: this notion that if you were too physically close to black people it would become contagious. And this is something that grows up during the slave era in the context of anxiety around being physically close to black people. Especially with the end of slavery there’s this anxiety about “what’s going to separate poor white from black, now that we don’t have slavery as an institution anymore, and that there is this physical proximity in neighborhoods?” And so you had to impose physical distance by way of segregation in order to assert that there is this physical difference between the two.

    But then part of what I argue with the book is that this same idea around proximity, literal and metaphorical closeness to black people, having the power to turn a white person black — becomes part of the fantasy that develops later. Such that people gain the right to say, “Hey, I identify with black because I grew up in a black neighborhood.” Or in the case of Grace Halsell and women who pass, there’s usually a man involved in the story: I married a black man or I got involved with black men, I had that sort of proximity.

    ****

    Vox–
    Study illuminates why multiracial Americans almost never call themselves white:

    A new study by Pew Research Center takes a comprehensive look at the experiences of multiracial Americans. Using a different approach than the census by taking into account people’s parents’ and grandparents’ racial backgrounds in addition to their self-reported race, it concluded that multiracial adults currently make up 6.9 percent of the adult American population.

    One of its many findings has to do with multiracial identity, and that age-old question of why mixed-race Americans like Obama and so many others don’t seem to give their white parents’ ethnicity the same weight as their other heritage when it comes to self-description.

    The study revealed that people who identify as multiracial say they experience discrimination based on the part of their heritage that is not white. Here’s how Pew explained it in the write-up (emphasis added):

    For multiracial adults with a black background, experiences with discrimination closely mirror those of single-race blacks. Among adults who are black and no other race, 57% say they have received poor service in restaurants or other businesses, identical to the share of biracial black and white adults who say this has happened to them; and 42% of single-race blacks say they have been unfairly stopped by the police, as do 41% of biracial black and white adults. Mixed-race adults with an Asian background are about as likely to report being discriminated against as are single-race Asians, while multiracial adults with a white background are more likely than single-race whites to say they have experienced racial discrimination.

    This echoes the way Obama has explained why he calls himself black. “I’m not sure I decided it,” he once said in an interview with 60 Minutes. “I think, you know, if you look African-American in this society, you’re treated as an African-American.”

    He later told PBS, “If I’m outside your building trying to catch a cab, they’re not saying, ‘Oh, there’s a mixed-race guy.'”

11. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    15 June 2015 at 7:46 pm

    From For Harriet–
    Denitria Lewis talks changing the tech landscape by creating community for black women:

    FH: Why is it so important for Black women to pursue tech?

    DL: Black women, statistically speaking, are often times the financial lifeblood for their families. “Holding the purse strings” is not just a turn of phrase for our community. That is not to say that the earning power of Black men doesn’t matter, it does, but Black women more often than not set the tone for achievement and financial growth in our communities. When you look at the tech landscape, that environment is built on abundance. Investors are banking big money on the success of young white men from MIT. Black women, and Black people in general, are game changers and innovators. Companies and investors miss out on a lot by not backing us, or supporting our efforts.

    FH: What do you like the most about working in the tech field?

    DL: For all the things that may be constant – absolutely no day is the same. We are constantly engaging our community, meeting new people, analyzing data, and working towards disrupting pattern-matching in tech. It’s also a great bonus for me to hear about new products and platforms as they are happening. It’s very inspiring, and makes me excited about the possibilities for our community.

    FH: When did you become interested in tech?

    DL: I have always been “into computers,” as my family would say. I started off being digitally inclined at a young age; back when computers HAD to be programmed in order for you to even use them. I mean, how many kids remember what using a computer was like before visual basic? I remember coding in C+ just to get my computer to say “Hello, My name is Denitria.” Working in marketing and media ultimately led me back to tech, because clients want you to be able to understand the technology that their audience is consuming.

    FH: What do you want to tell Black women that may be discouraged by discrimination in the tech field?

    DL: There will always be doubters, naysayers, and the proverbial “haters.” You honestly cannot be the least bit worried about what they think of you, or your idea. Focus your energy on developing your best product, and on those people who are willing to help you grow your company to the next level and building a viable business.

12. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    15 June 2015 at 7:50 pm

    Another from For Harriet–
    We are all survivors: How systemic inequality traumatizes black women:

    Everyone experiences trauma. Whether it’s natural trauma, such as the death of a loved one or a serious illness; interpersonal trauma, such as abuse or sexual violence; or insidious trauma, such as racism and sexism—we can all count ourselves as trauma survivors.

    But some of us are more at risk for experiencing trauma than others, and very few are more at risk than Black women. Why? Simply put, oppression and abuse go hand in hand, and given that Black women wield less social and political power compared to other demographics, we’re more likely to experience all types of trauma.

    We know by now that Black women suffer disproportionate rates of sexual violence, incarceration, interpersonal violence, and state violence. Black women are more likely to experience poverty, chronic illness, and reproductive and medical violence. We are also more likely to die younger than our white peers. Queer and trans Black women face even higher rates of life-threatening violence and poverty. Black women often must also cope with the high rates of incarceration and state violence experienced by their brothers, sons, and other Black men in their lives. The lingering social and political effects of slavery and Jim Crow segregation also arise in racist and sexist interpersonal interactions, such as microaggressions and abuse.

    All of this—from “big T” traumas like sexual violence, to “little T” traumas like the continued vigilance borne of coping with anti-blackness—has real and measurable effects on our physical and emotional well-being. Besides the obvious physiological consequences such as chronic illnesses and shortened life spans, we often experience lasting psychological consequences from the constant stress of merely existing as Black women in a world hostile to our presence.

    So, what do we do with all of this information?

    We must recognize the ways in which structural inequality and trauma are connected, and the implications they have for the mental and physical health of Black women. We must think and talk about how macro-level marginalization lays the groundwork for micro-level trauma. We must know that confronting these macro-level issues may help reduce both macro- and micro-level trauma for Black women. Most importantly, we must recognize that we’re all survivors here—each and every single one of us—and that we share so much as Black women.

    It can be difficult for us as Black women to address this trauma and begin healing because many of us want to be strong. For me, the process began with the simple act of recognizing many of my life experiences as traumatic and acknowledging that these experiences framed some of the emotional and mental health issues with which I struggled. Further into the process, it meant seeking out therapy to learn healthier coping mechanisms than those I previously used to deal with the stressors of life as a Black woman. It meant reaching out to other women of color (in this instance, in the form of a women’s trauma group), realizing I wasn’t alone, and supporting others and gaining support in return.

13. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    15 June 2015 at 8:20 pm

    Some Hollywood news from Variety–
    Forest Whitaker cast in upcoming Star Wars spinoff:

    At April’s Star Wars Celebration convention in Anaheim, Edwards revealed that the plot of “Rogue One” revolves around the heist of the Death Star plans by a group of rebel fighters, with Jones starring as one of the rebel soldiers. Sources say Ahmed and Luna also play Alliance fighters. Whitaker’s role is unknown at this time.

    The film will take place between Episode III and Episode IV, but closer chronologically to “A New Hope.” It’s set to bow December 16, 2016.

    Whitaker is currently filming Denis Villeneuve sci-fi drama “The Story of Your Life” opposite Amy Adams, and is in negotiations to follow that film with “The Crow” remake in the fall before jumping into production on “Star Wars: Rogue One.”

    ****

    From For Harriet–
    The myth of the Welfare Queen: How classism has worked against black women:

    We have to ask ourselves, how was this stereotype of the welfare queen perpetuated and how did it become so ubiquitous across the United States? The truth is, Black women have had to deal with stereotypes since slavery. The idea that Black women are irresponsible mothers dates back to slavery, when Black children were bought and sold on the auction block. This makes the autonomy of black mothers a myth according to societal standards.

    In her article “The Value of a Black Mothers Work,” Dorothy E. Roberts writes:

    “First, workforce advocates fail to see the benefits of black women’s care for their young children… Contemporary poverty rhetoric blames black single mothers for perpetuating poverty by transferring a deviant lifestyle to their children…The forced separation of black children began during slavery, when black mothers faced their children being auctioned off.”

    This distorted perception of Black women and their children has cropped up multiple times in history with consequences being as far ranging as the forced sterilization of Black women in prison, completely erasing Black women’s autonomy over our own bodies. It also harkens back to the idea of Black women being lascivious and completely out of control of their sexuality. This in turn leads to pregnancy, more children, and according to societal standards, more money being funneled out of taxpayers pockets.

    There are also ideas of Black women “gaming the system” by being lazy, and unable to find a job because they don’t try hard enough. The issue here is ultimately structural. Women in impoverished communities, especially if they grew up there, lack access to educational opportunities. Due to gentrification and red lining, we find that a number of Black welfare recipients are unable to access the resources that will both revitalize a community and help them retain the job skills necessary to completely move out of a cycle of poverty.

    What we find in impoverished communities are a number of Black women who work two to four jobs to keep food on the table, according to the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. This lack of time limits the ability to actively apply and pursue higher education or at least finish an equivalency program such as a GED. The lack of education keeps them away from higher paying jobs and leads to them and their children being ceaselessly being mired in poverty.

    As this issue is both racist and classist, we would need to rework the entire system. Structural issues like gentrification and housing separation won’t get a complete overhaul overnight. Changes could occur if we push education, offering a sustainable increase in welfare benefits for impoverished women who are actively pursuing it. We will likely see an increase in this phenomenon, as Obama recently presented a proposal that would make college tuition completely free for students attending community colleges. This could offer more people who don’t have the means to attend school and break the cycle of poverty. If they do well in school, they will also be able to apply for scholarships to four-year universities.

14. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    16 June 2015 at 12:19 am

    Here’s a different type of article on the myth of ‘black on black’ crime from Citylab–
    The origins of the phrase ‘black-on-black’ crime:

    The phrase “black-on-black crime” gets tossed around so cavalierly these days that it can be hard to ascertain the intention behind it—no matter who says it.

    When President Obama uses it, it may take on the tone of solidarity, especially when he’s speaking at a black church or HBCU. But thanks to social media, his voice carries. The words get copied and pasted into less-generous agendas, sans the care of the original context.

    Some conservatives use it as a retort to—or a deflation tool for—“Black Lives Matter” narratives aimed at shining a light on the police killings of African Americans. Meanwhile, residents of black communities also use it, as they have for decades, to express concerns about safety in their neighborhoods. The African Americans in this latter group are often employing their “inside voices” when invoking the “black-on-black” issue—meaning within safe, black discourse spaces, and usually as a way of stirring black community.

    How can one term shape-shift so abruptly and easily? Because it is a myth.

    Many writers, notably Slate’s Jamelle Bouie and Natalie Hopkinson for The Root, have done a tremendous service exposing the term as such. They correctly point out that what’s referred to as “black-on-black violence” is really a by-product of residential segregation and concentrated poverty: Black homicide offenders don’t kill people because they have dark skin, like a Klan member would. This may seem obvious, and yet the myth of black-on-black crime persists.

    Clearly, though, there’s more work to be done on the use of this highly charged phrase. Understanding the term’s origins helps further explain why it is so stubbornly entrenched in the public lexicon.

    In December of 1970, Chicago Daily Defender columnist Warner Saunders wrote about getting invited to speak at a seminar on black-on-black crime. To prep for the talk, he caught up with a neighborhood hustler named “Fast Willie” and asked him why he “robbed and beat up black people who are brothers.” Willie’s response was an early indication of what we need to know about the supposed “black-on-black” phenomenon:

    We go where the business is and where the man ain’t looking. Can you see me going up to Deerfield, black as I am, trying to stick up? The man would be on me so fast I couldn’t get a chewing gum wrapper. Out here the man is too busy whooping them Panthers and giving tickets to mess with me. Any way, he don’t care if [N-word; redacted to avoid tripping the filter-Tony] get ripped off. But you can bet he’s watching his ‘thang’ back in his own ‘hood.’

    Deerfield is a north Chicago neighborhood that’s historically been predominantly white, and is 96 percent white today. The rest of Willie’s testimony is self-explanatory: He commits crimes against other African Americans because that’s who lives around him—and that’s what police will let him get away with.

    Jesse Jackson also saw things playing out this way, and in that year rebuked white government officials and mainstream media for “their silence and ineffectiveness in dealing with the present black-on-black crime crisis,” while applauding the Chicago Daily Defender for its “courageous challenge of black-on-black crime.”

    Jackson was complaining to local and state officials that the criminal justice system had been punishing black criminal suspects more harshly when their victims were white as opposed to when the victims were black. Pointing to the “killing of more than 70 black youths” that year, Jackson was illuminating a paradox that remains with us today: That black neighborhoods are often simultaneously underpoliced and overpoliced, with black victims of violence less likely to receive justice, as Mother Jones’ Edwin Rios and The Nation’s Kai Wright recently reported.

    Cook County criminal court judge Saul A. Epton attempted to dispel this perception in 1971, when he gave two black men the same sentence of 100 to 150 years in jail after each was convicted of murder—one for killing a white person, the other for killing a black person. Epton said at the time he did this to address “a fiction in the black community that the sentence will be less when a black person kills a black person than when a black person kills a white person.”

    Those sentencings were reported in the mainstream daily Chicago Tribune newspaper, where the conversation around black-on-black crime had officially entered into the realm of white readership. And it was quickly expanding. In 1972, the African-American psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint, later known for his consultancy on The Cosby Show, tackled the issue in one of his first books, Why Blacks Kill Blacks, which included an introduction from Jesse Jackson.

    There is quite a bit more to the article. I definitely recommend it.

15. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 6:49 am

    How Black Slaves Were Routinely Sold As ‘Specimens’ To Ambitious White Doctors. Black people’s mistrust of the health system and vaccination campaigns has a bad, bad history.

    There is a rich and rapidly expanding scholarly literature examining the history of human subject research, including studies of the burgeoning bio-medical economy in the US in the 20th century. The Tuskegee experiment and other episodes of medical racism all feature prominently.

    The history of the acquisition and exploitation of slave bodies for medical education and research in the US, first explored in depth by historians James Breeden and Todd Savitt, focused primarily on medical schools and the traffic in slave bodies in Virginia. Savitt’s work drew attention to professional medicine’s use of slaves in classroom and bedside demonstrations, in operating amphitheatres, and experimental facilities.

    Savitt argued that African Americans were easy targets for ambitious and entrepreneurial white physicians in the slave south. Slaves, as human commodities, were readily transformed into a medical resource, easily accessible as empirical test subjects, “voiceless” and rendered “medically incompetent” through the combined power and authority of the enslaver and their employee, the white physician. Savitt suggested that “outright experimentation upon living humans may have occurred more openly and perhaps more often owing to the nature of slave society,” and also that “the situation may have been (and probably was) worse in the Deep South.” […]

    All of the key training, networks and power bases of southern medicine —apprenticeships, private practice, colleges, hospitals, journals, and societies —operated through slavery’s ruthless traffic and exploitation of black bodies. White medical students, as a matter of course, expected education and training based on the observation, dissection and experimental treatment of black bodies.

    White doctors, including those in remote rural locations, routinely sent reports of experiments on slave subjects to medical journals and trafficked black bodies to medical colleges. Medical museums openly solicited black body parts and medical societies relied on black bodies. Students too wrote graduating theses based on the medical manipulation of black “subjects” and “specimens”.

    Under slavery, there was also an extensive network of specialist “negro hospitals”. The grimmest of slavery’s institutions, these hospitals were often sites of risky medical research and were closely linked to “negro traders” anxious to patch up their “stock” for sale. Large numbers of individual doctors routinely advertised in southern newspapers that they would pay cash for black people suffering from chronic disease. The fate of these trafficked medical subjects, of course, assumed the very worst possibilities.

    Slaves were generally unable to prevent treatments chosen by their owners and physicians could take enormous risks with the lives of these patients. Those risks were all the greater when doctors were also the owners of the enslaved patients. The opportunities presented by the system of chattel slavery meant that white doctors had at hand an easily accessible population upon which they could execute experimental research programs and develop new tools, techniques and medicines.

    White racist attitudes, the enormous traffic in human chattel, and the slave regime rationalised and normalised the use and abuse of black bodies. Human subject research under American slavery was ultimately nothing unusual. In the context of a society defined by dehumanisation, impoverishment, violent punishment, incarceration, a vigorous trade in human property, racialisation and sexual interference, it should come as no surprise that human experimentation and the exploitation of enslaved bodies was a frequent, widespread and indeed commonplace feature of medical encounters between physicians and slaves. That was the culture of American slavery and every day slave patients faced appalling dangers.

    Exclusive: Dave Chappelle won’t be making jokes about Rachel Dolezal anytime soon. Here’s why.

    Anyone who remembers great comedy from 2003-2006 remembers “Chappelle’s Show,” Dave Chappelle’s eponymous sketch program that aired for just over two glorious seasons on Comedy Central.

    One of his most memorable conceits was the racial draft, in which various groups selected celebrities (usually multi-ethnic) before they could get snatched up — for example, the black delegation used their first pick on Tiger Woods, while the Latinos selected Elian Gonzalez “before the white people try to adopt him as one of their own.”

    So where would Rachel Dolezal go?

    “I think black,” Chappelle said Sunday, referring to the Spokane, Wash., NAACP president who last week was outed by her own parents as a white woman who had been masquerading as black for 10 years. “We would take her all day, right?”

    Chappelle, 41, was in town to deliver the commencement address to this year’s graduating class of his alma mater, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. In explaining why artists are important to contextualizing the world, he cited Dolezal.

    “The world’s become ridiculous,” he told the awestruck grads at George Washington University’s Lisner auditorium. “There’s a white lady posing as a black lady. There is not one thing that woman accomplished that she couldn’t have done as a white woman. There’s no reason! She just needed the braids! I don’t know what she was doing.”

    Despite the mention in his speech, backstage and no longer held to the constraints of a 15-minute time slot, Chappelle revealed why he would wait a while before he incorporated any Dolezal jokes into his act, if he decides to do so at all.

    “The thing that the media’s gotta be real careful about, that they’re kind of overlooking, is the emotional context of what she means,” Chappelle said thoughtfully, between drags of American Spirit cigarettes. “There’s something that’s very nuanced where she’s highlighting the difference between personal feeling and what’s construct as far as racism is concerned. I don’t know what her agenda is, but there’s an emotional context for black people when they see her and white people when they see her. There’s a lot of feelings that are going to come out behind what’s happening with this lady.

    “And she’s just a person, no matter how we feel about her.” Yes, the man who came up with the idea of Clayton Bigsby, a blind black Klansman (who doesn’t know he’s black), was reserved when it came to Dolezal.

    “I’m probably not going to do any jokes about her or any references to her for awhile ’cause that’s going to be a lot of comedians doing a lot. And I’m sure her rebuttal will be illuminating. Like, once she’s had time to process it and kind of get her wind back and get her message together.”

    The @NAACP “America’s Journey for Justice” march will leave from Selma on August 1 and will arrive here in Washington on September 12. That should be an interesting event to follow.

    Rachel Dolezal Resigns As President Of Spokane NAACP, basically old news by now.

    “In the eye of this current storm, I can see that a separation of family and organizational outcomes is in the best interest of the NAACP,” Dolezal said in a statement posted to the organization’s Facebook page. “It is with complete allegiance to the cause of racial and social justice and the NAACP that I step aside from the presidency and pass the baton to my Vice President, Naima Quarles-Burnley.”

    Over her time at the NAACP, Dolezal had become a prominent figure in the civil rights movement. On Friday, as the drama unfolded, the NAACP issued a statement in support of Dolezal.

    “One’s racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership,” the statement read.

    In her statement, Dolezal does not directly address why she identified as black, Native American and white in a government form. She does say that many have opined without knowing the full story, but she doesn’t give more details.

    “While challenging the construct of race is at the core of evolving human consciousness, we can NOT afford to lose sight of the five Game Changers (Criminal Justice & Public Safety, Health & Healthcare, Education, Economic Sustainability, and Voting Rights & Political Representation) that affect millions, often with a life or death outcome,” Dolezal wrote.

    She’s not wrong about a lot of things – but her message is definitely diluted and somewhat spoiled by the way in which she’s gone about in delivering it. Sadly. The person does reflect upon the message.
    And on that note:
    How Rachel Dolezal Just Made Things Harder for Those of Us Who Don’t “Look Black”

    I am biracial. Yes, the very white-looking person you see in the picture above has a black mother and a white father. They are my biological parents, and there’s a zero percent chance of my them coming forward and saying that I’m lying about it, unlike the parents of NAACP chapter president Rachel Dolezal, who, as you might have heard, has allegedly been pretending to be black for years.

    And she’s ruining it for us biracial and light-skinned folk.

    My brothers are darker than me, but still on the light-skinned side of things. One brother is a tall, lanky musician with dreads all the way down his back, while the other is a musclehead that looks more like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson than he does me. I may look lighter than them, but there’s no way any human can be in the room with us and not know that we are biologically related. We look alike, we sound alike, and we all have the same twisted sense of humor.

    The thing is, when I was growing up, I had no idea that I looked white. Call that whatever you like. Call it naiveté. Call it an identity crisis. I call it good parenting. My parents did not raise me to judge a book based on its cover, so I’ve always had trouble being able to distinguish “colors.”

    The more unfortunate side of the story is that I grew up being made fun of for being black for a long time. I grew up in a small town where everyone knows your business, and we were one of the few black families in town. I got called all the names. All of them. Oreo, zebra, the n-word, Brillo Pad (for my then-curly hair, which was never curly enough to be likened to a Brillo Pad)—I could go on. And as a kid, I bought into those names, like any child would.

    If you had asked me in high school what my race was, I would not have said I was biracial. I would’ve told you I was black. It wasn’t until college that my friends said, “Uh, you know that you don’t look black, right?” I had no idea! I laugh about it now.

    But now, Rachel Dolezal is ruining it for people like me.

    I already get asked the dumbest questions you can imagine about race. I think that now, with Dolezal’s little antics, it’s only going to get worse. People already give me the side eye if I tell them that I am biracial. Am I going to have to carry some form of identification? You know people are going to ask me to “prove my blackness” now.

    I am honored to be the one my white friends go to when they have questions about black people. I love my friends, and I know that the questions are generally harmless. But then there are the “friends”—the people I don’t know all that well, who I’m friends with on social media and share an occasional beer with. When they start to ask questions, I get really nervous about where the conversation is going.

    And forget about the complete strangers who think they can ask me personal, invasive questions about race. Or the things you hear people say when they have no clue that you’re biracial. That’s when you see what real assholes people can be.

    Let me give you some fun examples of what people say to me, just in case you’re curious:

    “But you don’t look black,” in a tone like some kind of compliment.

    “Well you have the best of both worlds because you have good hair and a big butt.” Besides being racially offensive, tell any woman on earth that she has a big butt and you deserve to rot.

    “You can’t be offended about that because you are white.” 1. I’m not white, I’m biracial. 2. Don’t downplay what I went through in life, because you don’t know me. 3. Who is even 100% white any more in America? 4. No matter what color you are, you have every right to be offended when someone is a bigot.

    “So what will you do if you have a baby and it comes out black?” This is actually one of the most frequent questions that I’m asked. The problem with the question is the underlying racism involved. Like a black baby is any less amazing than a white baby? (And don’t get me started on the assumption that just because I’m a woman I have plans to procreate.)

    Rachel, these are the types of idiotic questions people ask me every day of my life. Can you imagine, for one second, the kinds of questions I’m going to get now that you’ve spent years posing as a black woman?

    And, girl, you passed. You sure as shit look more “ethnic” than I do. Was that a perm? Who does your spray tans? I get a golden glow like that about two months out of the year here in New York, so I have no clue how you managed to rock that year round in Spokane. Your Glam Squad must be damn good.

    But all kidding aside, you should know that conversations about race are precarious, even in 2015. You should know that because of what you do for a living. Did you think that you couldn’t make an impact on the world because of your race? Well, I guess minorities probably feel that way every day.

    The thing that is most concerning to me, though, is the welfare of the people who have really struggled. So what if I was called some names when I was little? So what that I still have fools asking me dumb questions all the time? My life is not so bad. But there are minorities struggling in our country every day that need a voice. You were supposed to be one of those voices, and now your credibility is shot to shit. Who’s going to listen to you now? You didn’t have to lie to stick up for those who deserve a fighting chance.

    I’m not pleased that this game you’ve been playing is going to make people think that they can ask me even more invasive questions about my racial identity, but I am not afraid of who I am. I am not afraid to stick up for people who need it. I am not afraid to voice my opinion on any matter, even race, because I’m one of the people who think all should be equal.

    For now, I’m going to take this stunt as a compliment. I’ll interpret it as you finding black women beautiful, because they are. I’ll overlook your lie and hope that it doesn’t hurt your office’s credibility. But stop the lying. Tell the world who you are. If you’re confused about who that is, it’s OK to say that out loud. We’re not going to be offended if you tell us you wanted to be black. Just stop lying and start using all that time and energy to stand up for people.

    San Diego City Council Approves Joint Settlements against SDPD

    On Tuesday morning, San Diego City Council approved joint settlements against the San Diego Police Department, authoring $1.5 million for three alleged victims of former police officers.

    A woman who says a former SDPD Officer Donald V. Moncrief groped her in a patrol car while he took her to Las Colinas Detention Facility will be paid a quarter of a million dollars. Another two women who brought charges against former Officer Christopher Hays will split more than $1.3 million.

    Councilmember David Alvarez, who voted against the payouts, issued the following statement in response, “I did not vote in support of this settlement because this is simply not an issue we can continue to sweep under the rug.

    “The actions that led to this settlement sicken me, and if I was at liberty to talk about them, I think the public would agree we need to face this problem head on and hold management accountable.”

    But SDPD Lt. Scott Wahl said Chief Shelley Zimmerman was already worked to hold her officers accountable, going as far as firing those who cannot uphold their standards and rolling out body cameras for all officers.

    “Chief Zimmerman has tackled issues head on and has not swept anything under the rug. From Day One she has brought reform to this organization and has implemented a culture of excellence. It starts with her as the Chief of Police all the way through our newest recruit and our entire civilian staff,” Wahl’s statement said in part. […]

    The District Attorney’s office declined to file charges against Moncrief because investigators had insufficient evidence.

    “As with any case, whether it is a police officer or not, we can only file charges when we believe we can prove them beyond a reasonable doubt,” said DA Public Affairs Officer Tanya Sierra.

    In late April 2014, Moncrief filed a claim against the city seeking damages for defamation, among other things. That claim has not yet been settled.

    Gilleon said his client passed a lie detector test, while Moncrief did not take one.

    Another two women brought allegations against Christopher Hays, which led to his conviction of misconduct on the job.

    Hays pleaded guilty to felony false imprisonment as well as misdemeanor counts of assault and battery under the color of authority by a peace officer on Aug. 22, 2014.

    Hays’ case put the SDPD under fire, further marring the department’s image, which has faced a wave of public scrutiny for quite some time.

    When news broke of the alleged sexual misconduct crimes, then-Chief William Lansdowne ordered an outside audit of the police department from the U.S. Department of Justice. Lansdowne’s successor, Chief Shelley Zimmerman, supported the audit.

    “We are not going to tolerate this misconduct and betrayal of our badge and our profession,” Zimmerman said in March 2014.

    Former San Diego police officer Anthony Arevalos is currently serving prison time for multiple felony counts of sexual battery, assault and asking for bribes while in uniform as a police officer patrolling the Gaslamp from 2009 to 2011.

    On Sept. 25, 2014 attorneys and city officials announced that a San Diego woman who was victimized by Arevalos will receive $5.9 million in a legal settlement negotiated between the victim and the City of San Diego.

    The woman, known only as “Jane Doe,” filed a claim of police misconduct after an interaction with then-officer Arevalos inside a 7-Eleven store bathroom on March 8, 2011.

    According to prosecutors, the corrupt cop conducted a routine traffic stop on Jane Doe and then suggested the two of them go into the nearby convenience store. The two entered the restroom with the agreement that she would give him her panties, and in exchange he would not charge her for a DUI.

    Jane Doe’s lawsuit was one of 13 filed by victims of Arevalos, who was convicted in November 2011.

    Sounds like the San Diego PD has some things to clean up, too.

16. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 8:22 am

    $5.9M Paid to Settle Ex-Cop Anthony Arevalos Civil Lawsuit, more specific info with video on the Jane Doe lawsuit mentioned above.

    Border Patrol absolves itself in dozens of cases of lethal force. This is why law enforcement should not investigate themselves.

    A U.S. Border Patrol agent who killed an unarmed 15-year-old Mexican boy by shooting him in the face after a rock-throwing incident on a border bridge to El Paso in 2010 was recently cleared of wrongdoing by the agency’s internal affairs office.

    So was a Border Patrol agent who shot and killed a 17-year-old Mexican who threw rocks from the Mexican side of the border fence near Nogales, Ariz., in 2011.

    Internal affairs also cleared an agent who shot and killed a 19-year-old U.S. citizen as he climbed over a border fence into Mexico near Douglas, Ariz., in 2011. Agents said the man was seeking to flee after driving a narcotics-laden truck into a Border Patrol vehicle.

    In all, an internal investigation of 67 shooting incidents, which left 19 people dead, absolved agents of criminal misconduct in all but three cases, which are still pending. The review was completed last month.

    None of the agents involved has been charged with a crime, said Anthony Triplett, who helped direct the review at the office of internal affairs for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol.

    Only two agents faced disciplinary action. Both received oral reprimands.

    Criminal charges are still possible in the three pending cases, officials said. Prosecutors in the Justice Department’s civil rights division have been investigating those lethal shootings, all from 2012, since they occurred.

    The agents in those three cases are still conducting armed patrols on the border, officials said.

    Critics along the Southwest border and in Mexico long have argued that the Border Patrol, the federal government’s largest law enforcement force, operates with little transparency or accountability in cases involving purported abuses.

    The agency’s broad approval of its own record in scores of shooting cases, despite vows by the Obama administration to crack down on agents who use excessive force, is unlikely to change that perception.

    “We are deeply disappointed” with the lack of action, said Juanita Molina, executive director of Border Action Network, a human rights organization based in Tucson. “When you have someone throwing rocks and someone responding with lethal force, it is just not proportional.”

    “Turning the page doesn’t mean burying the past,” said Chris Rickerd, a border security expert at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. “There is no assurance to border residents that agents who have used excessive, improper lethal force aren’t on the job in their communities.”

    Administration officials say they are determined to restore public trust in the Border Patrol despite its tradition of closing ranks around its paramilitary culture.

    Yep, I can see that public trust uneroding all the way from here. Not.

    Activists fighting for justice for #TamirRice may have have opened an avenue for #JohnCrawford activists to pursue.

    Video shows deputy using Taser on teen – a 13-year-old, to be exact. He was so out-of-control, an adult officer – trained in de-escalation, right right – couldn’t control him.

    Sheriff’s officials are investigating a deputy’s use of force after he Tased a 13-year-old runaway boy in the back Saturday in Fallbrook and an onlooker recorded the struggle with his cellphone.

    Sheriff Bill Gore on Monday said the incident, which has been shown by local news channels, was more the result of “an out-of-control juvenile” who refused to comply with the deputy’s orders than a case of a deputy who lost control.

    Deputy Jeremy Banks used his Taser after being bit on the arm by the boy, who he said repeatedly refusing to voluntarily get into the deputy’s patrol car or to be handcuffed, Gore said. The struggle took place around 5 p.m. behind a store on South Mission Road near Ammunition Road, in an area frequented by skateboarders.

    Video of the exchange was posted online Sunday.

    “Use of force is never something pretty to watch,” Gore said at a news conference at Sheriff’s Department headquarters.

    Gore said the boy was arrested on suspicion of resisting arrest and assaulting a police office. He was checked out by doctors at a Temecula hospital after he was Tased and then booked into Juvenile Hall.

    “I think it has been portrayed in some of the clips that we had an out-of-control deputy,” Gore said. “”The deputy was very conscientious in this case, following up on the lead, trying repeatedly to get the juvenile to go in the car so he can be returned to his mother.

    “In actuality what we have is an out-of-control juvenile who could have prevented this whole thing just by obeying the command of the deputy.”

    Banks, an eight-year veteran, suffered a bite wound on his forearm and injuries to his hand in the altercation with the teen, who Gore said was 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighs 145 pounds. Photos of his injuries were distributed at the news conference.

    “He approached the juvenile and repeatedly, repeatedly asked him, “Let’s get in the car. Let’s go home. Let’s go home’ ” The juvenile ignored the request,” Gore said.

    After the teen refused to turn around and put his hands behind his back to be cuffed, there was a scuffle. The boy ended up on the ground and the deputy “went hands on” and tried to gain control of him by putting an arm around his upper body. Gore said the move was not a choke hold or a carotid restraint.

    The boy then bit Banks, “leaving significant bite marks,” the sheriff said, and it was then the deputy deployed his Taser.

    The video shows the teen on the ground, leaning against the deputy, who is on his knees, when the deputy puts his Taser up against his back and stuns him. Onlookers can be heard yelling profanities, with one shouting, “he’s a kid” and another saying, “police brutality right here.” A voice also can be heard saying, “You’re going to get sued, dude.”

    Gore said the deputy deployed his Taser once.

    Errr, I suppose it’s a difference in definition, but… putting your arm around someone’s neck, not a chokehold? Perhaps not one technically correct, but if you’re choking someone, then… no?

    Tina Knowles Lawson To Cover July Issue Of ‘EBONY’ Magazine

    Beyoncé isn’t the only Knowles with reason to celebrate. Momma Beyoncé, aka the lovely Tina Knowles Lawson, will grace the cover of the July issue of EBONY magazine!

    EBONY has decided to feature “Miss Tina,” one of the entertainment world’s favorite mothers, on there upcoming issue, following Kendrick’s placement last month. Besides being responsible for Beyoncé’s existence, Tina’s had quite the career of her own. Being the youngest of seven siblings, Tina embraced the struggles and hardships ever since she left home at the age of 18 and went on to be a successful entrepreneur. Her life has been a roller coaster ride to say the least, but all in all, the young-minded woman is living her life by her rules.

    Check out the cover below and be sure to pick up your copy next month when it hits newsstands.

    It sounds silly to say, but I didn’t know any of this about Beyoncé’s mother. Wow!

    Rachel Dolezal’s Parents Respond To Her Resignation, Say She Didn’t Address Her Dishonesty

    During the segment, Ruthanne pointed out a problem with her daughter’s statement. “I noticed in her letter of resignation there was no actual addressing of the issue of being dishonest about her ethnicity, nor was there any apology,” she told Roberts.

    She continued, “So I see that as a first step in her path to moving away from the negative feelings that she’s had toward her family members, and I pray that she will take the steps necessary to embrace her true personal identity and not feel compelled any longer to be false or malicious toward her family.”

    Dolezal’s parents previously told HuffPost they find their daughter’s dishonesty “very concerning.” Her father said he was particularly pained to learn that she had at one point identified a black man as her father, rather than him.

    “It hurts deeply because she used to call me Papa,” Dolezal’s father Larry told Roberts.

    Larry told MSNBC that he and his wife decided to tell the truth when the Coeur d’Alene press contacted them and asked if they were in fact her birth parents.

    “We had never been asked before. The question had never been presented to us,” he told Roberts. “And we had the choice of lying, telling the truth, hanging up, or telling them no comment. We have always taught and trained our children to tell the truth, be straightforward. We told the truth.”

    During the MSNBC segment, Dolezal’s parents said their daughter is continuing to lie about her identity. Ruthanne also rejected claims that Dolezal may be “transracial” — a controversial term that suggests that Dolezal may still identify as black, despite the fact that she was born white.

    “I don’t see any honest way that a person can describe themselves as transracial because your ethnicity comes from your genetic code and what’s handed down to you by your parents, your real biological parents,” Ruthanne said. “And I think the healthy path to take on this kind of discussion is to find a way to embrace and celebrate who you are — or who you really are.”

    Ruthanne said she is worried about their daughter and how this controversy will impact her going forward. “I am concerned for Rachel, particularly because of her dishonesty and then the unwillingness so far to address that and choose a new course. And I think that will be absolutely necessary for her to move forward,” she said.

    Of course, the way forward is Rachel’s own, but I hope she realizes that there are people willing to support her. Good luck to her and her family moving forward.

    At Least Rachel Dolezal ‘Walked the Walk’ of Being Black. Seriously? Because black people didn’t?

    Part of me wants to hate Rachel Dolezal for pretending to be black. How dare Dolezal claim blackness without having grown up amidst the cultural experience? But I can’t hate her. In fact, I think I agree with her actions, at least more than I do with others who embrace blackness in even phonier ways.

    For example, many non-black people under a certain age embrace cultural aspects of blackness such as speech patterns, dress styles, greetings, carriage, musical taste, and dress. This shows affection for blackness—or at least parts of it. Their idea would seem to be that these traits are more “real” than “whiteness,” which is often seen as boring, too buttoned-up, too cold, and lacking flair.

    “I’m blacker than you!” such non-black people happily tell black people like, yes, me.With their immersion in hip hop, saying “naw” instead of “no,” certain hand gestures, and “street” social identification, I suppose you could say they are indeed “blacker” than I am, in a way. Yet there is a sense of Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” about this “blackness.”

    Make no mistake—the “browning” of American culture is a marvelous thing. It’s evidence of progress on race that is too seldom acknowledged. Yet the idea that how a person moves his body to music has something important to do with his or her worth as a human being is easy, sloppy, and dangerous. When white people venture such parochial sentiments in praise of themselves, they are called racists.

    Dolezal, living as black for real, put her money where her mouth is in a way people like this would never even consider.

    And she’s also certainly ahead of the curve compared to those who think progress on race means whites “acknowledging” their white privilege.

    On that, I get the basic idea: An enlightened America should indeed understand that racism is much more than being called the n-word or not being allowed to shop at a store. But the white privilege routine of white people acknowledging the benefits that white people face is presented as something grander than that. The “acknowledgement” of white privilege is cherished as somehow being as important as, say, actual political activism. The ultimate purpose of this is to make white people feel absolved of racism, but blacks gain less.

    Dolezal shines in contrast. She isn’t soberly “acknowledging” her white privilege and then going about her business. Nor is she just dancing blackness or hairstyling blackness within the cozy confines of a middle-class white existence. Dolezal actually left whiteness behind and presented herself as black to society. She has undergone what it is to be perceived as black (even if she has possibly been fabricating a particular hate-crime experience).

    Moreover, she has done this not just to perform a charismatic piece of street culture, but to do something as serious as leading a branch of the NAACP. That’s no picnic—the NAACP is an organization with serious problems. She resigned from her position today.

    Of course, all of this is a little weird, and even a little fake. One suspects that for Dolezal, being “black” was a way of feeling special and important, perhaps out of a sense that being a white political activist would have somehow been less “cool” or “real.” But none of us is perfect, most of us are actors to an extent, and I’ll certainly take Dolezal over “I feel like I am black!” and “I hereby acknowledge my privilege.”

    Those types are talking the talk. Dolezal is walking the walk.

    It’s a valid opinion. But I find it seriously diminishes the contributions of many black people who are doing so much for their communities all over USAmerica (see: several activist organizations and people that appear on this very thread!), and it also erases the contributions of white allies who don’t present as black but do do a lot of important things, using their acknowledged privilege to support and assist where it matters (see: activists, organizers, those filming or photographing).
    Could just be my white privilege talking, though.

17. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 9:02 am

    One in moderation.
    How 10,000 Black Fathers On Facebook Are Shutting Down the Deadbeat Dad Myth – pictures guaranteed to make you smile.

    A father’s love is one of the greatest loves out there, and often the least recognized.

    But one dad changed that for 10,000 men.

    “I’m very much an introvert, but I knew that I wanted to build a brotherhood in a sense – and I didn’t see anything else like that out there.”

    12 years ago, Matt Prestbury became a single dad working as a kindergarten teacher with two toddler sons. The Baltimore native soon realized that while there are plenty of online communities to support Black moms, there wasn’t a space for Black fathers to come together as they faced parenting challenges. So, in 2008, the self-proclaimed introvert created a Facebook page for dads.The group, simply titled Black Fathers, quickly grew in number as dads posted adorable pictures of their candid moments with their kids, local events in their communities, and uplifting material that shows the positive side of fatherhood. According to Matt, the page would be a powerful support system for dads and shatter the stereotype that Black fathers are deadbeats:

    I wanted to create a virtual space where fathers could come together and be a resource for each other — and help break lot of stereotypes to change the narrative of what it means to be a black father in America. There used to be the perception that fathers, and in particular black fathers, all abandon their children. But I wanted to have stories represented like mine, where the fathers are actively involved in their kids’ lives.”

    Now, the group boasts over 10,000 members and has official events like daddy-daughter dates and workshops. Members also help each other via in-depth discussions and give referrals to dads in need of a professional to help them with custody issues. Matt Prestbury, who has since remarried and added two more children to his family, admits that even with the success of his page, dads still often play the background to moms when it comes to advertising and parenting information:

    “Everything you see and read about parenting seems to be directed towards moms…What about us? I keep saying, ‘We’re here, too.’ It’s unfair to negate the role that fathers play. We have lots of stay-at-home dads and working fathers who play a very active role in their kids’ lives.”

    Matt Prestbury seems to be right. We can simply watch our Facebook and Twitter timelines during Mother’s Day and Father’s Day to see the difference. Mom gets lots of love, gifts, and pictures. But, when Father’s Day rolls around, Dads don’t get as much love. Instead of celebrating the good dads in the world, the focus is usually on the ain’t sh-t baby daddies who don’t do anything for their kids or the dad who wasn’t on his job in the past. But, there are so many excellent dads in the world, both famous and non-famous, who step up to the plate and make fatherhood seem cool. And, making men want to be great dads is exactly what Matt wants.

    “[My ultimate goal] is to make it so that you feel like if you’re not involved in your children’s lives, you’re a fool.”

    Based on the pictures on Black Fathers page, it looks like he’s on his way to achieving that goal. The group hosted a daddy-daughter tea party date in Baltimore last year and the pictures are too cute!

    Another on Rachel and the construct of race, from Jelani Cobb: Black Like Her

    The easy presumption about Dolezal, who has two white parents and light skin and eyes—and hair that has ranged from blond to brown, though she has worn it in ways that are culturally associated with black women—is that this is an instance in which someone finally pointed out the obvious: the emperor is naked. But, in truth, Dolezal has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. This doesn’t mean that Dolezal wasn’t lying about who she is. It means that she was lying about a lie. […]

    Among African-Americans, there is a particular contempt, rooted in the understanding that black culture was formed in a crucible of degradation, for what Norman Mailer hailed as the “white Negro.” Whatever elements of beauty or cool, whatever truth or marketable lies there are that we associate with blackness, they are ultimately the product of a community’s quest to be recognized as human in a society that is only ambivalently willing to see it as such. And it is this root that cannot be assimilated. The white Negroes, whose genealogy stretches backward from Azalea through Elvis and Paul Whiteman, share the luxury of being able to slough off blackness the moment it becomes disadvantageous, cumbersome, or dangerous. It is an identity as impermanent as burnt cork, whose profitability rests upon an unspoken suggestion that the surest evidence of white superiority is the capacity to exceed blacks even at being black. The black suspicion of whites thus steeped in black culture wasn’t bigotry; it was a cultural tariff—an abiding sense that, if they knew all that came with the category, they would be far less eager to enlist.

    But this is precisely what makes the Dolezal deception complicated. Artists like Eminem and Teena Marie, white people who were by and large accepted by black people as a legitimate part of black cultural life, nonetheless had to finesse a kind of epidermal conflict of interest. Irrespective of their sincerity, a portion of their profitability lay in their status as atypically white. Dolezal’s transracialism was imbued with exactly the opposite undertaking. She passed as black and set about shouldering the inglorious, frustrating parts of that identity—the parts that allocate responsibility for what was once called “uplifting the race.” It’s an aspect of her story that at least ought to give her critics—black ones, particularly—a moment of pause.

    Dolezal is, like me, a graduate of Howard University, a place where the constellation of black identities and appearances is so staggeringly vast as to ridicule the idea that blackness could be, or ever has been, any one thing. What I took from Howard, besides that broadened sense of a world I’d presumed to know, was an abiding debt to those who’d fought on its behalf and a responsibility to do so for those who came afterward. It’s easy to deride Dolezal’s dishonesty—to ridicule her hoax as a clever means of sidestepping the suspicion with which white liberals are commonly greeted—until we reflect on a photograph of Walter White, the aptly named man who served as the second black president of the N.A.A.C.P. Or one of Louis T. Wright, who served as the national chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. board during the Great Depression. In the nineteen-twenties, amid a feud with the organization, the black nationalist Marcus Garvey criticized the N.A.A.C.P. for being a organization whose black and white members were essentially indistinguishable.

    The spectrum of shades and colorings that constitute “black” identity in the United States, and the equal claim to black identity that someone who looks like White or Wright (or, for that matter, Dolezal) can have, is a direct product of bloodlines that attest to institutionalized rape during and after slavery. Nearly all of us who identify as African-American in this country, apart from some more recent immigrants, have at least some white ancestry. My own white great-grandparent is as inconsequential as the color of my palms in terms of my status as a black person in the United States. My grandparents had four children: my father and his brother, both almond-brown, with black hair and dark eyes, and two girls with reddish hair, fair skin, freckles, and gray eyes. All of them were equally black because they were equal heirs to the quirks of chance determining whether their ancestry from Europe or Africa was most apparent. Dolezal’s primary offense lies not in the silly proffering of a false biography but in knowing this ugly history and taking advantage of the reasons that she would, at least among black people, be taken at her word regarding her identity.

    Race, in this country and under certain circumstances, functions like a faith, in that the simple profession of membership is sufficient. The most—possibly the sole—democratic element of race in this country lies in this ecumenical approach to blackness. We are not in the business of checking membership cards. In this way, Dolezal’s claim on black identity is of a different order than the hollow declaration of a Hollywood scion or anyone else who opted to be Negro for a season. They can plead ignorance. But Dolezal spent four years at an institution steeped in the delicacies of race. If nothing else, she understands the exact nature of the trust she violated. […]

    Rachel Dolezal is not black—by lineage or lifelong experience—yet I find her deceptions less troubling than the vexed criteria being used to exclude her. If blackness is simply a matter of a preponderance of African ancestry, then we should set about the task of excising a great deal of the canon of black history, up to and including the current President. If it is simply a matter of shared experience, we might excommunicate people like Walter White, whose blue eyes were camouflage that could serve both to spare him the direct indignity of racism and enable him to personally investigate and expose lynchings. Dolezal was dishonest about an undertaking rooted in dishonesty, and no matter how absurd her fictional blackness may appear, it is worth recalling that the former lie is far more dangerous than the latter. Our means of defining ourselves are complex and contradictory—and could be nothing other than that. But if the rubric is faulty it remains vital. The great majority of Americans recognize slavery as a figment of history, interred in a receding past. But, for black people, that past remains at the surface—close at hand, indelible, a narrative as legible as skin.

    Beautiful 16 yr old, Arnesha Bowers, was raped, strangled and set on fire in Baltimore. Why so little news coverage?
    Here’s one: Baltimore police arrest two men in killing of 16-year-old girl.

    EXCLUSIVE: ‘Star Trek’ Star Nichelle Nichols Says She’s as ‘Wild and Woolly’ As Ever After Stroke

    Less than two weeks after suffering a stroke, actress Nichelle Nichols says she’s feeling fine and doing great.

    On June 3, Nichols suffered a mild stroke at her California home and was rushed to the hospital to undergo testing to determine the severity of the incident. She began an inpatient rehabilitation and recovery program two days later.

    Now, less than two weeks after the incident, the 82-year-old actress — best known for her groundbreaking role as Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek series — sat down with ET’s Nischelle Turner for an interview at her home, where she assured her fans that she was alright.

    “I am feeling the best that I felt in a very long time,” Nichols said, smiling.

    Nichols added that there’s been no loss of mobility in the wake of her stroke, telling ET, “I am as wild and woolly as I have ever been.”

    The acclaimed actress says that she was able to get past her illness using a coping technique she learned from her parents.

    “Things I can’t deal with and have no say over, I deny them,” Nichols explained. “And strangely enough most times they go away. So this was one of those times.”

    But she recognizes that simply denying something won’t always work, and sometimes you have to fight hard to get past obstacles.

    “Yeah, I am a fighter,” Nichols said. “Don’t be messing with my game. My game is my career.”

    Yay!

    Dominican Republic to be ‘Socially Cleaned’ in two days

    In two days about a quarter of a million people will be made stateless. They will have no homes, no passports, and no civil rights. There are several reasons for this, but the primary reason is racism.

    At issue is a ruling by the Constitutional Court in the Dominican Republic to strip away the citizenship of several generations of Dominicans.

    According to the decision, Dominicans born after 1929 to parents who are not of Dominican ancestry are to have their citizenship revoked. The ruling affects an estimated 250,000 Dominican people of Haitian descent, including many who have had no personal connection with Haiti for several generations.

    What we are witnessing is one of the largest humanitarian crisis in the western hemisphere, except this one is completely by choice.

    As a recent Peace Corps volunteer in the DR, stationed near the border of Haiti, I have a very personal perspective on this issue.
    This may be hard to believe for most Americans, but racism in the DR is much worse than racism here in the United States. The idea of being black in the DR is wrapped up with being Haitian, and then takes on a xenophobic quality.
    The thing is, 90% of Dominicans would be considered ‘black’ by American standards. So there is a huge difference between being considered moreno (brown) and negro (black). The Policia Nacional Dominicana are so underpaid and openly corrupt that being mistaken for being Haitian means having to bribe officers (which I’ve personally witnessed) or be arrested and possibly beaten. Being mistaken for being Haitian means being denied job opportunities, public education, bank accounts, and health care.
    In other words, being black in the DR means being a second-class citizen with no legal protections. And now it means being stateless.

    The Dominican government recently opened seven deportation centers near the Haitian border, and gave them the Orwellian name of “welcome centers”.
    The Dominican government has also requested 36 large passenger buses “be made available for continued use”.

    “This is an extremely ominous sign,” he said. “Everything is set for the deportation and that the DR government is saying it is going forth on this Tuesday, June 16.”

    The US State Department has denounced the Dominican government for this plan, and pointed out that it is a gross violation of human rights according to the U.N. charter.

    In February, Dominican-Haitian Henry Claude Jean (nicknamed ‘Tulile’), an impoverished shoeshine boy, was found lynched in a public park in Santiago, the DR’s second-largest city. His hands and feet were bound. The police were quick to blame it on the victim’s ‘criminal past’ and “rejected racism as a motive”, but it seems hard to believe that this is how criminals operate.

    “For the Dominican authorities to rule out racism as a factor less than 24 hours after a man of Haitian descent was hanged in a public square is not just irresponsible policing, it is an outrageous example of discrimination endemic to the Dominican Republic,” McMullen wrote to HuffPost in an email. “And frankly it is all too reminiscent of the shameful denials of Southern officials during the decades of terror lynchings perpetrated against African-Americans here at home.”

    The lynching came just one day after a protest in Santiago calling for the deportation of Haitians.

    Dominican officials began refusing to grant copies of birth certificates to the Dominican-born children of Haitian immigrants in 2005. This was in violation of the American Convention on Human Rights.
    After years of protests and legal haggling, the Dominican government began allowing Dominican-Haitians to get copies of birth certificates again, but the process was badly flawed. Thousands of Dominican-Haitians have gotten no response from application submissions even after nine months, as protesters claim.
    In the Dominican Republican being born in a hospital is the exception, even for people with Dominican parents.

    It’s a charade. The offices are overcrowded, understaffed, and the needed paperwork doesn’t exist (many Dominicans of Haitian descent were born in rural areas, since their parents came to work the sugar fields, with midwifes and not in hospitals, and were therefore never issued birth certificates).

    The US press has been largely silent on this rapidly approaching disaster. Even Human Rights Watch is silent on the issue. The pope has spoken on the issue, but to berate the Dominican Republic’s Catholic bishops for being silent on it.
    Where will these people live in Haiti? Most of them have never been to Haiti. Haiti can’t even house all of its own people. Dumping a quarter of a million people on the border of the poorest nation in the hemisphere will quickly lead to a public health disaster.

    He also reports that in the barrios, police trucks have come through to conduct limpiezas (“cleanings,” with the adjective implied: “social cleanings”): “The detained tend to range from intoxicated persons to suspected prostitutes, but are disproportionately Haitian or dark-skinned Dominicans with Haitian facial features. These could just be guys drinking and playing dominos or women standing on street corners. More often, though, they tend to be young men with Haitian features and darker skin.

    Dominican hatred of Haitians extends back to 1822, when Haiti invaded and conquered the Dominican Republic and promptly freed the slaves.
    In 1912, the Dominican government passed a law limiting the number of black-skinned people who could enter the country.
    However, the racism peaked under dictator Rafael Trujillo. He was known for wearing makeup in order to make himself look more white. In 1937 he ordered the Parsley Massacre, also referred to as El Corte (the cutting) by Dominicans. It is unknown how many Haitians died in those five days, but it was in the tens of thousands.
    President Joaquin Balaguer, Trujillo’s right-hand man, and the dictator that the United States installed in 1966, claimed that the Haitians were trying to invade and that their secret weapon was “biological.” As Balaguer put it, Haitians “multiply with a rapidity that is almost comparable to that of a vegetable species.”

    The article now says they will wait until August to start deporting, but HOLY SHIT.

    Rikers again. Man arrested as teen has waited 7 years in Rikers for trial

    A Manhattan man has spent nearly all of the past seven years locked up on Rikers Island awaiting trial — a dubious record for pretrial incarceration that is not likely to end anytime soon, experts told The Post.

    Carlos Montero, now 24, was with two pals when one fatally stabbed a man and the other slashed another during a robbery in Washington Heights on Oct. 23, 2008, authorities have charged.

    Montero, who has spent six years and eight months in Rikers, attempted to get his case tried separately — while one of his alleged cohorts fights the DNA evidence — but the judge balked, and his lawyer won’t even seek bail for him now because he says it’s a lost cause.

    “I’m depressed in here. I just want to go home,’’ said Montero, who entered the jail at age 17.

    The state statute that is supposed to guarantee a prisoner’s right to a speedy trial — within 180 days — doesn’t apply to murder cases.

    There also is a right to a reasonably rapid proceeding under the Sixth Amendment, but the US Constitution doesn’t lay out a timeline.

    So Montero is still waiting for his day in court, even after 77 appearances in Manhattan Supreme Court before Justice Ronald Zweibel — and 2,423 days behind bars.

    Montero said he was aware of the recent suicide of Kalief Browder, a Bronx teen who was locked up on Rikers for three years while he awaited trial.

    Browder was eventually cleared, but his lawyer said the abuse that the teen suffered at Rikers led to his June 6 suicide.

    Montero said that while his situation has left him despondent, too, “I don’t think about killing myself because I love myself.”

    “I still think I can get justice,” he said.

    Montero’s case seems tailor-made to challenge the law, said famed civil rights lawyer Ron Kuby, who is not connected to the case.

    “This case is gold medal-winning when it comes to delay,” Kuby said. “The longest period of time I’ve heard of is about five years in New York state.”

    “It seems a very clear constitutional violation to hold somebody for nearly seven years in pretrial detention without trial,” he said.

    Seven. Years. Pre. Trial. PRE. Trial. PRE.
    Yeah.

18. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 9:07 am

    One in moderation.
    http://necoleb*tchie.com/2015/06/how-10000-black-dads-on-facebook-are-shutting-down-the-deadbeat-dad-myth/ How 10,000 Black Fathers On Facebook Are Shutting Down the Deadbeat Dad Myth [please replace asterisk with ‘i’, as the comment won’t post with the real URL] – pictures guaranteed to make you smile.

    A father’s love is one of the greatest loves out there, and often the least recognized.

    But one dad changed that for 10,000 men.

    “I’m very much an introvert, but I knew that I wanted to build a brotherhood in a sense – and I didn’t see anything else like that out there.”

    12 years ago, Matt Prestbury became a single dad working as a kindergarten teacher with two toddler sons. The Baltimore native soon realized that while there are plenty of online communities to support Black moms, there wasn’t a space for Black fathers to come together as they faced parenting challenges. So, in 2008, the self-proclaimed introvert created a Facebook page for dads.The group, simply titled Black Fathers, quickly grew in number as dads posted adorable pictures of their candid moments with their kids, local events in their communities, and uplifting material that shows the positive side of fatherhood. According to Matt, the page would be a powerful support system for dads and shatter the stereotype that Black fathers are deadbeats:

    I wanted to create a virtual space where fathers could come together and be a resource for each other — and help break lot of stereotypes to change the narrative of what it means to be a black father in America. There used to be the perception that fathers, and in particular black fathers, all abandon their children. But I wanted to have stories represented like mine, where the fathers are actively involved in their kids’ lives.”

    Now, the group boasts over 10,000 members and has official events like daddy-daughter dates and workshops. Members also help each other via in-depth discussions and give referrals to dads in need of a professional to help them with custody issues. Matt Prestbury, who has since remarried and added two more children to his family, admits that even with the success of his page, dads still often play the background to moms when it comes to advertising and parenting information:

    “Everything you see and read about parenting seems to be directed towards moms…What about us? I keep saying, ‘We’re here, too.’ It’s unfair to negate the role that fathers play. We have lots of stay-at-home dads and working fathers who play a very active role in their kids’ lives.”

    Matt Prestbury seems to be right. We can simply watch our Facebook and Twitter timelines during Mother’s Day and Father’s Day to see the difference. Mom gets lots of love, gifts, and pictures. But, when Father’s Day rolls around, Dads don’t get as much love. Instead of celebrating the good dads in the world, the focus is usually on the ain’t sh-t baby daddies who don’t do anything for their kids or the dad who wasn’t on his job in the past. But, there are so many excellent dads in the world, both famous and non-famous, who step up to the plate and make fatherhood seem cool. And, making men want to be great dads is exactly what Matt wants.

    “[My ultimate goal] is to make it so that you feel like if you’re not involved in your children’s lives, you’re a fool.”

    Based on the pictures on Black Fathers page, it looks like he’s on his way to achieving that goal. The group hosted a daddy-daughter tea party date in Baltimore last year and the pictures are too cute!

    Another on Rachel and the construct of race, from Jelani Cobb: Black Like Her

    The easy presumption about Dolezal, who has two white parents and light skin and eyes—and hair that has ranged from blond to brown, though she has worn it in ways that are culturally associated with black women—is that this is an instance in which someone finally pointed out the obvious: the emperor is naked. But, in truth, Dolezal has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. This doesn’t mean that Dolezal wasn’t lying about who she is. It means that she was lying about a lie. […]

    Among African-Americans, there is a particular contempt, rooted in the understanding that black culture was formed in a crucible of degradation, for what Norman Mailer hailed as the “white Negro.” Whatever elements of beauty or cool, whatever truth or marketable lies there are that we associate with blackness, they are ultimately the product of a community’s quest to be recognized as human in a society that is only ambivalently willing to see it as such. And it is this root that cannot be assimilated. The white Negroes, whose genealogy stretches backward from Azalea through Elvis and Paul Whiteman, share the luxury of being able to slough off blackness the moment it becomes disadvantageous, cumbersome, or dangerous. It is an identity as impermanent as burnt cork, whose profitability rests upon an unspoken suggestion that the surest evidence of white superiority is the capacity to exceed blacks even at being black. The black suspicion of whites thus steeped in black culture wasn’t bigotry; it was a cultural tariff—an abiding sense that, if they knew all that came with the category, they would be far less eager to enlist.

    But this is precisely what makes the Dolezal deception complicated. Artists like Eminem and Teena Marie, white people who were by and large accepted by black people as a legitimate part of black cultural life, nonetheless had to finesse a kind of epidermal conflict of interest. Irrespective of their sincerity, a portion of their profitability lay in their status as atypically white. Dolezal’s transracialism was imbued with exactly the opposite undertaking. She passed as black and set about shouldering the inglorious, frustrating parts of that identity—the parts that allocate responsibility for what was once called “uplifting the race.” It’s an aspect of her story that at least ought to give her critics—black ones, particularly—a moment of pause.

    Dolezal is, like me, a graduate of Howard University, a place where the constellation of black identities and appearances is so staggeringly vast as to ridicule the idea that blackness could be, or ever has been, any one thing. What I took from Howard, besides that broadened sense of a world I’d presumed to know, was an abiding debt to those who’d fought on its behalf and a responsibility to do so for those who came afterward. It’s easy to deride Dolezal’s dishonesty—to ridicule her hoax as a clever means of sidestepping the suspicion with which white liberals are commonly greeted—until we reflect on a photograph of Walter White, the aptly named man who served as the second black president of the N.A.A.C.P. Or one of Louis T. Wright, who served as the national chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. board during the Great Depression. In the nineteen-twenties, amid a feud with the organization, the black nationalist Marcus Garvey criticized the N.A.A.C.P. for being a organization whose black and white members were essentially indistinguishable.

    The spectrum of shades and colorings that constitute “black” identity in the United States, and the equal claim to black identity that someone who looks like White or Wright (or, for that matter, Dolezal) can have, is a direct product of bloodlines that attest to institutionalized rape during and after slavery. Nearly all of us who identify as African-American in this country, apart from some more recent immigrants, have at least some white ancestry. My own white great-grandparent is as inconsequential as the color of my palms in terms of my status as a black person in the United States. My grandparents had four children: my father and his brother, both almond-brown, with black hair and dark eyes, and two girls with reddish hair, fair skin, freckles, and gray eyes. All of them were equally black because they were equal heirs to the quirks of chance determining whether their ancestry from Europe or Africa was most apparent. Dolezal’s primary offense lies not in the silly proffering of a false biography but in knowing this ugly history and taking advantage of the reasons that she would, at least among black people, be taken at her word regarding her identity.

    Race, in this country and under certain circumstances, functions like a faith, in that the simple profession of membership is sufficient. The most—possibly the sole—democratic element of race in this country lies in this ecumenical approach to blackness. We are not in the business of checking membership cards. In this way, Dolezal’s claim on black identity is of a different order than the hollow declaration of a Hollywood scion or anyone else who opted to be Negro for a season. They can plead ignorance. But Dolezal spent four years at an institution steeped in the delicacies of race. If nothing else, she understands the exact nature of the trust she violated. […]

    Rachel Dolezal is not black—by lineage or lifelong experience—yet I find her deceptions less troubling than the vexed criteria being used to exclude her. If blackness is simply a matter of a preponderance of African ancestry, then we should set about the task of excising a great deal of the canon of black history, up to and including the current President. If it is simply a matter of shared experience, we might excommunicate people like Walter White, whose blue eyes were camouflage that could serve both to spare him the direct indignity of racism and enable him to personally investigate and expose lynchings. Dolezal was dishonest about an undertaking rooted in dishonesty, and no matter how absurd her fictional blackness may appear, it is worth recalling that the former lie is far more dangerous than the latter. Our means of defining ourselves are complex and contradictory—and could be nothing other than that. But if the rubric is faulty it remains vital. The great majority of Americans recognize slavery as a figment of history, interred in a receding past. But, for black people, that past remains at the surface—close at hand, indelible, a narrative as legible as skin.

    Beautiful 16 yr old, Arnesha Bowers, was raped, strangled and set on fire in Baltimore. Why so little news coverage?
    Here’s one: Baltimore police arrest two men in killing of 16-year-old girl.

    EXCLUSIVE: ‘Star Trek’ Star Nichelle Nichols Says She’s as ‘Wild and Woolly’ As Ever After Stroke

    Less than two weeks after suffering a stroke, actress Nichelle Nichols says she’s feeling fine and doing great.

    On June 3, Nichols suffered a mild stroke at her California home and was rushed to the hospital to undergo testing to determine the severity of the incident. She began an inpatient rehabilitation and recovery program two days later.

    Now, less than two weeks after the incident, the 82-year-old actress — best known for her groundbreaking role as Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek series — sat down with ET’s Nischelle Turner for an interview at her home, where she assured her fans that she was alright.

    “I am feeling the best that I felt in a very long time,” Nichols said, smiling.

    Nichols added that there’s been no loss of mobility in the wake of her stroke, telling ET, “I am as wild and woolly as I have ever been.”

    The acclaimed actress says that she was able to get past her illness using a coping technique she learned from her parents.

    “Things I can’t deal with and have no say over, I deny them,” Nichols explained. “And strangely enough most times they go away. So this was one of those times.”

    But she recognizes that simply denying something won’t always work, and sometimes you have to fight hard to get past obstacles.

    “Yeah, I am a fighter,” Nichols said. “Don’t be messing with my game. My game is my career.”

    Yay!

    Dominican Republic to be ‘Socially Cleaned’ in two days

    In two days about a quarter of a million people will be made stateless. They will have no homes, no passports, and no civil rights. There are several reasons for this, but the primary reason is racism.

    At issue is a ruling by the Constitutional Court in the Dominican Republic to strip away the citizenship of several generations of Dominicans.

    According to the decision, Dominicans born after 1929 to parents who are not of Dominican ancestry are to have their citizenship revoked. The ruling affects an estimated 250,000 Dominican people of Haitian descent, including many who have had no personal connection with Haiti for several generations.

    What we are witnessing is one of the largest humanitarian crisis in the western hemisphere, except this one is completely by choice.

    As a recent Peace Corps volunteer in the DR, stationed near the border of Haiti, I have a very personal perspective on this issue.
    This may be hard to believe for most Americans, but racism in the DR is much worse than racism here in the United States. The idea of being black in the DR is wrapped up with being Haitian, and then takes on a xenophobic quality.
    The thing is, 90% of Dominicans would be considered ‘black’ by American standards. So there is a huge difference between being considered moreno (brown) and negro (black). The Policia Nacional Dominicana are so underpaid and openly corrupt that being mistaken for being Haitian means having to bribe officers (which I’ve personally witnessed) or be arrested and possibly beaten. Being mistaken for being Haitian means being denied job opportunities, public education, bank accounts, and health care.
    In other words, being black in the DR means being a second-class citizen with no legal protections. And now it means being stateless.

    The Dominican government recently opened seven deportation centers near the Haitian border, and gave them the Orwellian name of “welcome centers”.
    The Dominican government has also requested 36 large passenger buses “be made available for continued use”.

    “This is an extremely ominous sign,” he said. “Everything is set for the deportation and that the DR government is saying it is going forth on this Tuesday, June 16.”

    The US State Department has denounced the Dominican government for this plan, and pointed out that it is a gross violation of human rights according to the U.N. charter.

    In February, Dominican-Haitian Henry Claude Jean (nicknamed ‘Tulile’), an impoverished shoeshine boy, was found lynched in a public park in Santiago, the DR’s second-largest city. His hands and feet were bound. The police were quick to blame it on the victim’s ‘criminal past’ and “rejected racism as a motive”, but it seems hard to believe that this is how criminals operate.

    “For the Dominican authorities to rule out racism as a factor less than 24 hours after a man of Haitian descent was hanged in a public square is not just irresponsible policing, it is an outrageous example of discrimination endemic to the Dominican Republic,” McMullen wrote to HuffPost in an email. “And frankly it is all too reminiscent of the shameful denials of Southern officials during the decades of terror lynchings perpetrated against African-Americans here at home.”

    The lynching came just one day after a protest in Santiago calling for the deportation of Haitians.

    Dominican officials began refusing to grant copies of birth certificates to the Dominican-born children of Haitian immigrants in 2005. This was in violation of the American Convention on Human Rights.
    After years of protests and legal haggling, the Dominican government began allowing Dominican-Haitians to get copies of birth certificates again, but the process was badly flawed. Thousands of Dominican-Haitians have gotten no response from application submissions even after nine months, as protesters claim.
    In the Dominican Republican being born in a hospital is the exception, even for people with Dominican parents.

    It’s a charade. The offices are overcrowded, understaffed, and the needed paperwork doesn’t exist (many Dominicans of Haitian descent were born in rural areas, since their parents came to work the sugar fields, with midwifes and not in hospitals, and were therefore never issued birth certificates).

    The US press has been largely silent on this rapidly approaching disaster. Even Human Rights Watch is silent on the issue. The pope has spoken on the issue, but to berate the Dominican Republic’s Catholic bishops for being silent on it.
    Where will these people live in Haiti? Most of them have never been to Haiti. Haiti can’t even house all of its own people. Dumping a quarter of a million people on the border of the poorest nation in the hemisphere will quickly lead to a public health disaster.

    He also reports that in the barrios, police trucks have come through to conduct limpiezas (“cleanings,” with the adjective implied: “social cleanings”): “The detained tend to range from intoxicated persons to suspected prostitutes, but are disproportionately Haitian or dark-skinned Dominicans with Haitian facial features. These could just be guys drinking and playing dominos or women standing on street corners. More often, though, they tend to be young men with Haitian features and darker skin.

    Dominican hatred of Haitians extends back to 1822, when Haiti invaded and conquered the Dominican Republic and promptly freed the slaves.
    In 1912, the Dominican government passed a law limiting the number of black-skinned people who could enter the country.
    However, the racism peaked under dictator Rafael Trujillo. He was known for wearing makeup in order to make himself look more white. In 1937 he ordered the Parsley Massacre, also referred to as El Corte (the cutting) by Dominicans. It is unknown how many Haitians died in those five days, but it was in the tens of thousands.
    President Joaquin Balaguer, Trujillo’s right-hand man, and the dictator that the United States installed in 1966, claimed that the Haitians were trying to invade and that their secret weapon was “biological.” As Balaguer put it, Haitians “multiply with a rapidity that is almost comparable to that of a vegetable species.”

    The article now says they will wait until August to start deporting, but HOLY SHIT.

    Rikers again. Man arrested as teen has waited 7 years in Rikers for trial

    A Manhattan man has spent nearly all of the past seven years locked up on Rikers Island awaiting trial — a dubious record for pretrial incarceration that is not likely to end anytime soon, experts told The Post.

    Carlos Montero, now 24, was with two pals when one fatally stabbed a man and the other slashed another during a robbery in Washington Heights on Oct. 23, 2008, authorities have charged.

    Montero, who has spent six years and eight months in Rikers, attempted to get his case tried separately — while one of his alleged cohorts fights the DNA evidence — but the judge balked, and his lawyer won’t even seek bail for him now because he says it’s a lost cause.

    “I’m depressed in here. I just want to go home,’’ said Montero, who entered the jail at age 17.

    The state statute that is supposed to guarantee a prisoner’s right to a speedy trial — within 180 days — doesn’t apply to murder cases.

    There also is a right to a reasonably rapid proceeding under the Sixth Amendment, but the US Constitution doesn’t lay out a timeline.

    So Montero is still waiting for his day in court, even after 77 appearances in Manhattan Supreme Court before Justice Ronald Zweibel — and 2,423 days behind bars.

    Montero said he was aware of the recent suicide of Kalief Browder, a Bronx teen who was locked up on Rikers for three years while he awaited trial.

    Browder was eventually cleared, but his lawyer said the abuse that the teen suffered at Rikers led to his June 6 suicide.

    Montero said that while his situation has left him despondent, too, “I don’t think about killing myself because I love myself.”

    “I still think I can get justice,” he said.

    Montero’s case seems tailor-made to challenge the law, said famed civil rights lawyer Ron Kuby, who is not connected to the case.

    “This case is gold medal-winning when it comes to delay,” Kuby said. “The longest period of time I’ve heard of is about five years in New York state.”

    “It seems a very clear constitutional violation to hold somebody for nearly seven years in pretrial detention without trial,” he said.

    Seven. Years. Pre. Trial. PRE. Trial. PRE.
    Yeah.

19. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 9:18 am

    Okay, that’s two in moderation!
    Et pour le troisième…

    Cleveland 8 today asked for arrest warrants of officers in #TamirRice death.

    Civil-rights group wants Orlando police chief to resign

    A local chapter of a civil-rights group will ask OPD chief John Mina to resign Monday, following his response to the use of force by two Orlando police officers recently.

    “We really need a change of leadership,” said Lawanna Gelzer, president of the Central Florida chapter of the National Action Network, a civil rights group founded by the Rev. Al Sharpton. […]

    “I don’t want to hear about the Band-Aid things,” Gelzer said. “I want to hear that this particular way of policing will cease, and if it does not cease, we need new leadership.”

    After the discussion on the stairs outside of City Hall, the group will provide comment at the city council meeting.

    “The ongoing failures with the Orlando Police Department are alarming and unacceptable,” Gelzer said in a statement. “The community demands accountability, and now it is clear that must start from the top.”

    Mikulski speaks with religious leaders about police reform proposals

    Mikulski attached several police reform proposals to an appropriations bill that faces an uncertain future, though the senator said she hoped to have it signed by President Barack Obama by the end of the summer. Mikulski is seeking to require police departments applying for grants from the U.S. Justice Department to prove they have trained officers about the proper use of force, racial and ethnic bias, conflict de-escalation, and civic and public engagement.

    “There is a trust gap between the people and the police department,” Mikulski said Monday at the meeting at First Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Sandtown-Winchester. “We saw it in Baltimore, but our challenges are not unique. It is happening all over America. People need to have confidence in their police department.”

    Police departments would also be required to tell the Justice Department when an officer is killed in the line of duty or when a prisoner dies in custody.

    “Right now also there is no mandate for the reporting of lethal force,” said Mikulski, a Democrat. “We don’t know the extent of what goes on in police-civilian interaction that results in death. There is no data. We don’t know if it’s 100 people, we don’t know if its 1,000 people, we don’t know if its geographically focused, or is it across the board. The Justice Department simply doesn’t know and therefore how can it intervene?”

    The senator added that her proposals would benefit both police and communities. “The police are doing the right thing, and we need our police department,” she said. “We need to respect our police and the police need to respect the community.”

    Mikulski, the vice chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, attached her language to the $51 billion Commerce, Science, and Justice spending bill approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday.

    After giving details on her proposals to the media, the roundtable meeting between Mikulski and with a couple dozen pastors and other leaders from churches including New Born Community of Faith, Mount Lebanon Baptist and St. Peter Claver Catholic Church, was closed to the press. She was introduced by Rev. Derrick DeWitt, the pastor of First Mount Calvary Baptist Church, who said he got his first summer job as a teen passing out fliers for Mikulski’s campaign.

    Al Stokes, an elder at New Song Community Church in Sandtown-Winchester, praised Mikulski’s proposals.

    “I think this is a tremendous opportunity,” he said. “There is definitely a need for police reform. Many children do not know an Officer Friendly.”

    Mikulski, when asked about a recent drop in arrests by Baltimore police amid a spike in homicides, said she wanted more information on the potential causes. “We need to know more about what’s going on,” she said.

    @deray Come vigil for Kalief Browder Tues June 16 at 6pm Union Sq/NYC #closerRikers

    The Real Black Women of Spokane Deserve to be Seen

    When I first saw Rachel Dolezal in my hometown of Spokane, Washington, I wondered, “Who on Earth is this White chick?”

    I had returned to Spokane — where the Black population consistently hovered around 2 percent — for a short stint after living in California, D.C. and Namibia for several years. I was shopping, and she caught my eye. After Africa, I was reeling with the culture shock of Spokane’s sheer whiteness. But upon seeing a White woman with blonde braided “extensions,” my brain took a moment to make sense of it all.

    A hairdresser, I thought. She must be a hairdresser and likes experimenting with style.

    I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. Because what White woman in her right mind would rock blonde twists past her butt unless returning from Jamaica or recently discovering how to lengthen her hair with extensions? I attributed the sighting to the madness of Spokane where whiteness — even whiteness with a weave — goes unchecked.

    Then last week, a friend sent me an article about a White woman president of the Spokane NAACP who’s been faking Blackness for nearly 10 years.

    Only in Spokane, he texts.

    I’d been gone so long, self-exiled as one of the few forgotten Black daughters of Spokane, that I had no idea the woman I saw was portraying herself as an Actual Black Woman complete with faux Black father, harassment claims, and critique of hair privilege.

    And fiery anger engulfed me.

    Yes, Rachel Dolezal can only exist in a town that loathes, ignores and renders Black women invisible.

    Her passing could not happen without being given a pass, welcomed as a substitute in a town that has no love for the real thing. She can masquerade as Black in a place where Black women are underrepresented and underappreciated, where Actual Black Women feel isolated, unseen, and alone.

    For those outside this Pacific Northwest town of 200,000, it may seem a strange story. To me, this confirms what I felt and always knew —that the people of Spokane, Black, White or otherwise, would rather embrace a “Black-acting” White woman than one or many of the hard-working Black women who were the foundation of our small community.

    I know because, in Spokane, my kinky-ish hair and caramel skin were rejected. Your hair is poofy, the little White girls would say. You’re so muscular, the little White boys would say, scared. You’re not really black, some adults would say as if congratulating me.

    What would the little Black boys say? Nothing. I was not the epitome of beauty. That was the little White girls. And then the teenage White girls. And then the I’ve always wanted to be with a Black man White women. They loved to say I’ve always wanted mixed babies … they’re the cutest. […]

    I rarely saw a Black man loving a Black woman in Spokane. The only couple I knew where a Black man was loving a Black woman were my godparents, and they lived on the other side of the state. When I told my mother nobody would love me here, she cried and apologized for raising me in such a place. In a town like this, are we surprised that a White woman was embraced as Black?

    My own family was void of love for Black women. My Black father married my White mother. When they got divorced, he found another White woman. In my father’s world, Black women didn’t exist except to do hair or be his mother. My brothers never brought home Black girls. Maybe as friends, but rarely. It was the White and Asian girls that got their love. My family would tell me I was beautiful, but I was positive they were just being nice. They would tell me all the boys were intimidated and the girls were jealous. It was clear that Black girls were not for loving, but I knew that this straight little Black girl would have to try. So, I left and never turned back.

    Now, far removed from that painful experience, I can only imagine how this situation devolved. I am not surprised that in a city where I rarely saw Black men valuing Black women, this charade was allowed to continue. For it to end, someone would have had to call out her passing as an insult to Black women. She could not have passed without the approval of Black men and women lending their credibility and relinquishing their birthright to Blackness — an act I can only imagine is out of survival in a place where being invisible is safer than rocking the boat. But, Black people of Spokane, we do not have to surrender our Blackness to achieve equality or gain power. We must do it while holding firm to who we are and what we deserve.

    A town that loves and respects Black women would not settle for an imposter. Its people would not be content to see their women mocked and worn as a costume, would not stand idly by as a White woman attained civil-rights positions while purporting to be “going natural” for her birthday. A Black community that loves Black women would not silently accept a White woman following the trends of Black womanhood, studying her subjects and performing Black womanhood by accessorizing herself with cultural or aesthetic cues. Though she may understand some history, she failed to understand her role in perpetuating white privilege and supremacy, the very structures she claimed to be dismantling. Dolezal and those like her benefit from the invisibility of Black women. She appropriated what it means to be a Black woman and rendered invisible the very women who sustain the 2 percent.

    You see, Rachel Dolezal is not just playing Black. She’s playing Black Woman in Spokane without actually knowing the trauma of being a Black Girl in Spokane. If we don’t see Rachel Dolezal as an affront to Black women, we are steadily sliding down a slippery slope where sewing in, putting on, and bronzing up are enough to claim the heritage and experience of those who are dying or in exile — pushed out of communities we built.

    And #RachelDolezal got more coverage than James Boulware who shot up the @DallasPD HQ and planted bombs under police vehicles. Chalk that one up to #CrimingWhileWhite.

20. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 10:31 am

    A guide to debunking the need for “All Lives Matter” and its rhetorical cousins

    It’s summer, you’re at a barbeque feeling really right with your Kool-aid, potato salad and hot dog. You strike up a conversation with a guy about black lives mattering. It’s not an unusual conversation, lots of people are having it. But suddenly, you’re mid-chew and this guy says “Right, but, don’t all lives matter? I’m more of an ‘all lives matter’ kind of guy.”

    Lol.

    Last week, close to 200 Philadelphians showed up to protest for white lives. According to Philadelphia’s ABC affiliate, the event was held in response to an alleged “rash” of beatings in a white South Philadelphia neighborhood by four black women. And so the white residents of this Philadelphia neighborhood rallied for white lives.

    In December, right when the black lives matter movement was picking up momentum, Kathleen McCartey, president of Smith College, wrote in an e-mail to the college in support of student protest efforts around the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. In it she said: “We are united in our insistence that all lives matter.” After students voiced their disappointment with McCartney’s use of the term, the president apologized.

    Fox news panelist Lars Larson was outraged by McCartney’s apology. “In fact. I think the crowds, the mobs, who’ve been making these protests for the last couple of weeks all over America, they owe society an apology,” he said about using the phrase. “Because by exclusion it suggests that others matter less,” he continued. “It’s a bigoted thing to say.”

    Lol.

    So, what do you say when confronted with an “all lives matter” enthusiast? And, really, Why is it so bad? Below is a guide to help you through those tricky times.

    Keep reading to find out!

    Transracial doesn’t mean what Rachel Dolezal thinks it means – I like it’s an article classified as ‘This week in whitesplaining’.

    This week, Rachel Dolezal, the head of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was revealed to be a white woman masquerading as a black woman. Just when you couldn’t imagine anything more contemptible than someone from a privileged racial background faking her way into a space for ethnic minorities, Dolezal claimed she was “transracial.”

    According to Dolezal and some dark corners of the blogging platform Tumblr, “transracial” is the racial equivalent of “transgender” – meaning a person who believes they are a different race than what they biologically are.
    Andy Marra, an LGBTIQ activist, is a trans woman and Korean adoptee. To Andy, who faced coming out to both her adoptive family as well Korean birth family, the state of being transracial is not comparable to being transgender

    Whether being transracial is a real condition or not, it doesn’t have any bearing on the fact that this is being used as justification for a series of lies and deception that has upset the black community, the transgender community – and now the very real transracial community.

    Many people have seen Dolezal’s use of the term “transracial” for the absurdity her story is. But transracial is actually already a word with its own meaning.

    Transracial is a term to describe interracial adoptees and is commonly used in organisational and academic contexts. Simply put, a transracial person is someone raised in a culture or race different from their own. Having been raised by her white parents and choosing to identify as a person of another race, Dolezal does not get to use this term. […]

    The racism I faced – the endless interrogations of who I was allowed to call my “real” parents, being berated for not speaking Korean yet also being assumed to not speak English, the general awkwardness and microaggressions of people who could not get over the fact that I looked “different”, comparing me to stereotypes, the rise of anti-Asian sentiment in Australia in the 1990s and 2000s that eventually became a bipartisan norm – discouraged me further from wanting to have anything to do with my cultural heritage. I saw being Asian solely as the thing that made people uncomfortable around me, the thing that would override any distinguishing features of my personality. There have been many days when I wished I was white, just so people wouldn’t notice me orshout obscenities at me on the street or ask where I was from and just leave me alone.

    It wasn’t until I got a bit older and made some Asian friends as a teenager thatI slowly started becoming interested in Korea. In 2013, I went back to Korea for the first time to meet my Korean birth parents. In 2014, I signed up for a year-long English teaching contract to try living in my country of birth, get to know my family and learn Korean.

    I don’t regret my time in Korea, but I am constantly reminded that no matter how hard I try, I will never truly be Korean – every time I open my mouth and my Australian-accented Korean comes out, when I forget to take off my shoes or hold my right elbow when I give something to someone and all these little rules that I never knew about until 2013. The worst is when I am reduced to communicating with my own family with English and Korean baby talk and exaggerated hand movements. I’m torn between berating myself for not getting my own culture “right” and seeing it through a privileged Western lens, as well as the frustration that I was cut off from it for 25 years through no fault of my own.

    This confusion over racial identity is a very common experience for transracial adoptees, and something that I would not wish on anybody.

    Being transracial is hardly similar to “feeling black”, like Rachel Dolezal claims. It’s not like gender dysphoria either – the politics of race and gender are not interchangeable in this context. Unlike many black Americans, Rachel’s family background does not carry the trauma of slavery and institutionalised racism. Unlike people who really are transracial, Rachel has not been physically torn between two cultures and denied intimate knowledge of her birth culture. Unlike people who are black and transracial adoptees, Rachel has not had to deal with both of these life-affecting experiences at the same time.

    It is normal, and quite healthy, to be interested in another culture than your own. But if the people of that culture cannot pick and choose their own race – whether it’s biologically or through shared history – then neither can you. All you can do is be a good ally.

    Plenty of white folks who aren’t deceitful and dishonest are battling racial injustice alongside us. Dont make Rachel a hero. She aint shit

    Racism is the othering of one’s very own species’ varying phenotypes. Just another way of defining racism. Omits the power differential.

    Video: Officers taken off patrol during ‘use of force’ investigation http://on.wesh.com/1Begtqj See video at link.

21. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 11:04 am

    So here’s how we better support black women (see following tweets)
    1. Listen. Don’t listen for a response, just listen. That means being quiet. There’s more than one voice in this #BlackLivesMatter fight
    2. Ask. Ask about what you don’t understand, but don’t attempt to rebut. It’s not your lived experience.
    3. Support. Don’t negate the experiences of ALL black women because they’re not yours. When you learn of issues ask black women how to help.
    4. Be willing to use your privilege. Go into the spaces where black women are denied and welcome them in.
    Those are not all of the ways, just a few of the ways. It’s about being sensitive, respectful and helpful.
    Just as recommendations (see how simple they are!) to contrast all the ‘Rachel Dolezal is doing it wrong’. A few hints on how to do it right.

22. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 11:12 am

    Going to take a moment to focus on the Dominican Republic. I know it’s not USAmerica, but there’s something huge, and hugely wrong and racist, about to happen there. Just in one article above, but here’s a few more (the first is a few days old):
    We Regret to Inform You That in 4 Days You and Your Family Will Be Deported to Haiti

    Last week, I wrote that the Dominican Republic has summarily stripped over a hundred thousand Dominicans born in the DR of Haitian parents of their citizenship and is threatening to deport them to Haiti. And though initial reports suggested that the deadline for deportation might be delayed, it now seems to be going forward as planned: In four days, hundreds of thousands of people in the Western Hemisphere will become stateless.

    Where is the US press? Why aren’t they covering it? And why the silence from human-rights groups? The main page of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch has three posts on Venezuela. Nothing on the Dominican Republic. HRW’s director Ken Roth is a prolific voice on Twitter—yet nothing on the topic since November 11, 2014 (but do a Twitter search for @KenRoth and Venezuela and bathe in the stream).

    The pope has spoken out, sort of. He told Dominican bishops that they “cannot be indifferent to the plight of Haitian immigrants.” Yet the impending expulsion will not be of immigrants but Dominicans of Haitian descent, born in the Dominican Republic, with family and friends and property and work in the Dominican Republic; many of them have never been to Haiti or know anyone in Haiti (though the Dominican press insists on calling them “Haitians”).

    How many are vulnerable? The common reference is over 100,000. Rachel Nolan, who reported on the impending deportation in Harper’s, writes 210,000. I’ve also heard between 300,000 and 500,000. But who knows? And what will be the criteria to decide once the expulsions get underway and achieve self-propulsion? Already in poor neighborhoods they are sweeping up “dark-skinned Dominicans with Haitian facial features.”

    The Dominican government has set up a number of centers where Dominicans of Haitian descent can try to “regularize” their status, and thus avoid being expelled. It’s a charade. The offices are overcrowded, understaffed, and the needed paperwork doesn’t exist (many Dominicans of Haitian descent were born in rural areas, since their parents came to work the sugar fields, with midwifes and not in hospitals, and were therefore never issued birth certificates).

    An aid worker based in the poorer barrios of Santo Domingo and Puerto Plata (the two primary hubs of Haitian immigrants in the DR), who doesn’t want to be named, writes that three days ago, on June 9, local Dominican television media reported that the government solicited transportation companies for up to three dozen large passenger buses to be available on a rotating basis, with an implicit understanding that these would be used for pending deportation trips. “This,” he said, “is an extremely ominous sign.”

    Dominican Republic to Be ‘Socially Cleaned’ On June 16th

    On June 16th about a quarter of a million people will be made stateless. They will have no homes, no passports, and no civil rights. There are several reasons for this, but the primary reason is racism.

    At issue is a ruling by the Constitutional Court in the Dominican Republic to strip away the citizenship of several generations of Dominicans.

    According to the decision, Dominicans born after 1929 to parents who are not of Dominican ancestry are to have their citizenship revoked. The ruling affects an estimated 250,000 Dominican people of Haitian descent, including many who have had no personal connection with Haiti for several generations.

    What we are witnessing is one of the largest humanitarian crisis in the western hemisphere, except this one is completely by choice.

    As a recent Peace Corps volunteer in the DR, stationed near the border of Haiti, I have a very personal perspective on this issue.

    This may be hard to believe for most Americans, but racism in the DR is much worse than racism here in the United States. The idea of being black in the DR is wrapped up with being Haitian, and then takes on a xenophobic quality.

    The thing is, 90% of Dominicans would be considered ‘black’ by American standards. So there is a huge difference between being considered moreno (brown) and negro (black). The Policia Nacional Dominicana are so underpaid and openly corrupt that being mistaken for being Haitian means having to bribe officers (which I’ve personally witnessed) or be arrested and possibly beaten. Being mistaken for being Haitian means being denied job opportunities, public education, bank accounts, and health care.

    In other words, being black in the DR means being a second-class citizen with no legal protections. And now it means being stateless.

    It seems to be the same text as the Daily Kos article upthread.
    Dominican Republic Threatens to Deport Haitian Families. This seems to be the newest article so far.

    An unfunny thing happened while the media was obsessing over now-former Spokane, Wash., NAACP President Rachel Dolezal: The government of the Dominican Republic moved forward with yet another major human rights violation against Dominicans born to Haitian parents.

    In 2013 the Dominican Republic Constitutional Court ruled that those born in the D.R. to Haitian parents without proper documentation (legal immigrant status) were not citizens of the Dominican Republic, even if in possession of a Dominican Republic birth certificate.

    Many railed against the ruling because of the inhumanity of stripping the citizenship of those who were born in the Dominican Republic and have lived their entire lives in the country. Others argued that the government was within its rights because the Dominican Republic does not automatically grant citizenship to those born on Dominican soil without proper documentation. The fact that many born to Haitian parents had obtained birth certificates does not make them valid or legal citizens just because they have lived, loved, worked and purchased property in the D.R.

    As if the loss of citizenship weren’t enough, reports have surfaced that the government has now planned a mass deportation of Dominicans who are no longer considered Dominican because of their Haitian parentage and lack of proper paperwork. Thousands of Dominicans born to Haitian parents are now eligible to be detained and deported to neighboring Haiti if they have not secured legal documentation by this week’s deadline.

    While many of us have been enthralled by black Twitter’s dragging of Dolezal and her shenanigans, mass sweeps have reportedly been happening in the poor neighborhoods of Santo Domingo and Puerto Plata, the two main hubs of immigration in the D.R., where dark-skinned people with Haitian features have been harassed, detained and released.

    And while we’ve spent days discussing a white woman pretending to be black, actual black people are having their rights trampled on with little to no fanfare in the U.S. media. Nearly 1.5 million people of Dominican descent live in the U.S., and more than 800,000 of Haitian descent (pdf) live here, so why has the U.S. media been largely silent on this issue? In terms of national broadcast coverage, we’re talking nada.

    This case has issues of nationality, racial and ethnic identity, dominant media images, immigration, access, power and privilege all over it, and yet there has been little discussion about this pressing matter, even on black Twitter. Don’t get me wrong. I love black Twitter like everyone else, and the Dolezal memes are everything, but the human rights violations happening in a country to which many of us have ties should be a priority in reporting, discussion and activism.

    As for folks who are rallying behind a white woman pretending to be black and faking a lot of her story, why aren’t these same folks rallying behind those who are actually black and are being removed from their property and the only lives they’ve known? If the laws of the Dominican Republic don’t line up with humanitarian practices, then what, if anything, can be done about it?

    Depending on the source, an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 Dominicans born to Haitian parents could be slated for deportation. It will be a sad commentary when this happens without so much as a peep from the larger black community in the United States.

    DR is not only targeting Haitians but anyone who they think could be Haitian. So darkskinned Dominicans aren’t safe either. That also means mostly poor and rural people who don’t have (valid) birth certificates.

    NYC stands up against injustice in the DR. #Not1More deportation of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent

    Can this be signal-boosted even more? A lot more?

23. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 11:45 am

    Yes, let’s talk about race as a social construct, but not as a tool to invalidate the real experiences of real black people.
    And Ta-Nehisi Coates delivers! What We Mean When We Say ‘Race Is a Social Construct’

    Andrew Sullivan and Freddie Deboer have two pieces up worth checking out. I disagree with Andrew’s (though I detect some movement in his position.) Freddie’s piece is entitled “Precisely How Not to Argue About Race and IQ.” He writes:

    The problem with people who argue for inherent racial inferiority is not that they lie about the results of IQ tests, but that they are credulous about those tests and others like them when they shouldn’t be; that they misunderstand the implications of what those tests would indicate even if they were credible; and that they fail to find the moral, analytic, and political response to questions of race and intelligence.

    I think this is a good point, but I want to expand it. Most of the honest writing I’ve seen on “race and intelligence” focuses on critiquing the idea of “intelligence.” So there’s lot of good literature on whether it can be measured, its relevance in modern society, whether intelligence changes across generations, whether it changes with environment, and what we mean when we say IQ. As Freddie mentions here, I had a mathematician stop past to tell me I needed to stop studying French, and immediately start studying statistics — otherwise I can’t possibly understand this debate.

    It’s a fair critique. My response is that he should stop studying math and start studying history.

    I am not being flip or coy. If you tell me that you plan to study “race and intelligence” then it is only fair that I ask you, “What do you mean by race?” It’s true I don’t always do math so well, but I understand the need to define the terms of your study. If you’re a math guy, perhaps your instinct is to point out the problems in the interpretation of the data. My instinct is to point out that your entire experiment proceeds from a basic flaw — no coherent, fixed definition of race actually exists.

    The history bears this out. In 1856, Ralph Waldo Emerson delineated the significance of race:

    It is race, is it not, that puts the hundred millions of India under the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe. Race avails much, if that be true, which is alleged, that all Celts are Catholics, and all Saxons are Protestants; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the representative principle. Race is a controlling influence in the Jew, who, for two millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same character and employments. Race in the negro is of appalling importance. The French in Canada, cut off from all intercourse with the parent people, have held their national traits. I chanced to read Tacitus “on the Manners of the Germans,” not long since, in Missouri, and the heart of Illinois, and I found abundant points of resemblance between the Germans of the Hercynian forest, and our Hoosiers, Suckers, and Badgers of the American woods.

    Indeed, Emerson in 1835, saw race as central to American greatness:

    The inhabitants of the United States, especially of the Northern portion, are descended from the people of England and have inherited the trais of their national character…It is common with the Franks to break their faith and laugh at it The race of Franks is faithless.

    Emerson was not alone, as historian James McPherson points out, Southerners not only thought of themselves as a race separate from blacks, but as a race apart from Northern whites:

    The South’s leading writer on political economy, James B. D. De Bow, subscribed to this Norman-Cavalier thesis and helped to popularize it in De Bow’s Review. As the lower-South states seceded one after another during the winter of 1860-61, this influential journal carried several long articles justifying secession on the grounds of irreconcilable ethnic differences between Southern and Northern whites. “The Cavaliers, Jacobites, and Huguenots, who settled the South, naturally hate, contemn, and despise the Puritans who settled the North,” proclaimed one of these articles. “The former are a master-race; the latter a slave race, the descendants of Saxon serfs.” The South was now achieving its “independent destiny” by repudiating the failed experiment of civic nationalism that had foolishly tried in 1789 to “erect one nation out of two irreconcilable peoples.”

    Similarly, in 1899 William Z. Ripley wrote The Races of Europe, which sought to delineate racial difference through head-type:

    The shape of the human head by which we mean the general proportions of length, breadth, and height, irrespective of the ” bumps ” of the phrenologist is one of the best available tests of race known. Its value is, at the same time, but imperfectly appreciated beyond the inner circle of professional anthropology. Yet it is so simple a phenomenon, both in principle and in practical application, that it may readily be of use to the traveller and the not too superficial observer of men.

    To be sure, widespread and constant peculiarities of head form are less noticeable in America, because of the extreme variability of our population, compounded as it is of all the races of Europe; they seem also to be less fundamental among the American aborigines. But in the Old World the observant traveller may with a little attention often detect the racial affinity of a people by this means.

    Two years later, Edward A. Ross sought to apprehend “The Causes of Race Superiority.” He saw the differences between the Arab “race” and the Jewish “race” as a central illustration:

    It is certain that races differ in their attitude toward past and future. M. Lapie has drawn a contrast between the Arab and the Jew. The Arab remembers; he is mindful of past favors and past injuries. He harbors his vengeance and cherishes his gratitude. He accepts everything on the authority of tradition, loves the ways of his ancestors, forms strong local attachments, and migrates little. The Jew, on the other hand, turns his face toward the future. He is thrifty and always ready for a good stroke of business, will, indeed, join with his worst enemy if it pays. He is calculating, enterprising, migrant and ambitious

    You can see more of this here.

    Our notion of what constitutes “white” and what constitutes “black” is a product of social context. It is utterly impossible to look at the delineation of a “Southern race” and not see the Civil War, the creation of an “Irish race” and not think of Cromwell’s ethnic cleansing, the creation of a “Jewish race” and not see anti-Semitism. There is no fixed sense of “whiteness” or “blackness,” not even today. It is quite common for whites to point out that Barack Obama isn’t really “black” but “half-white.” One wonders if they would say this if Barack Obama were a notorious drug-lord.

    When the liberal says “race is a social construct,” he is not being a soft-headed dolt; he is speaking an historical truth. We do not go around testing the “Irish race” for intelligence or the “Southern race” for “hot-headedness.” These reasons are social. It is no more legitimate to ask “Is the black race dumber than then white race?” than it is to ask “Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?”

    The strongest argument for “race” is that people who trace their ancestry back to Europe, and people who trace most of their ancestry back to sub-Saharan Africa, and people who trace most of their ancestry back to Asia, and people who trace their ancestry back to the early Americas, lived isolated from each other for long periods and have evolved different physical traits (curly hair, lighter skin, etc.)

    But this theoretical definition (already fuzzy) wilts under human agency, in a real world where Kevin Garnett, Harold Ford, and Halle Berry all check “black” on the census. (Same deal for “Hispanic.”) The reasons for that take us right back to fact of race as a social construct. And an American-centered social construct. Are the Ainu of Japan a race? Should we delineate darker South Asians from lighter South Asians on the basis of race? Did the Japanese who invaded China consider the Chinese the same “race?”

    Andrew writes that liberals should stop saying “truly stupid things like race has no biological element.” I agree. Race clearly has a biological element — because we have awarded it one. Race is no more dependent on skin color today than it was on “Frankishness” in Emerson’s day. Over history of race has taken geography, language, and vague impressions as its basis.

    “Race,” writes the great historian Nell Irvin Painter, “is an idea, not a fact.” Indeed. Race does not need biology. Race only requires some good guys with big guns looking for a reason.

    Well, that was the entire article. And while ‘race’ may be a construct, the racism that arises from perceptions of race have very real, worldly consequences.

    You are not black if you can stop being black at your discretion.

    Black women: “#SayHerName”
    Media: “…”
    White woman: “I identify as black.”
    Media: “tell us more”

    Cleveland police union head: Emboldened criminals, politically motivated officials making officers’ jobs more dangerous. Are they sharing a script with Baltimore or what??

    The head of Cleveland’s police union blamed Sunday’s West Side gunfire involving police and gun-related arrests near the scene on an ever-expanding anti-police narrative that will make officers targets.

    Steve Loomis, head of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, said that federally mandated police reforms, a Cleveland judge’s finding of probable cause for charges against the officers involved in the Tamir Rice shooting and the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s release of the investigation materials in that case were “politically motivated.”

    “What it’s doing, and what all these sideshows and unprecedented events are doing, is emboldening the criminal element,” Loomis said. “Like I said before, it absolutely is going to get somebody killed; one of us or one of them. Neither is a good thing.”

    An officer responding to a report Sunday of six men with guns near Detroit Avenue and West 85th Street said that he fired four shots at a 22-year-old man who pointed a gun at him during a foot chase, Cleveland police Chief Calvin Williams said.

    Seconds later, two other officers also involved in the pursuit heard several gunshots as they ran through a field, the chief said. Loomis questioned whether someone tried drawing officers into the field.

    “Up until that point, it was a very typical gun run in a high-drug, high-crime neighborhood,” Loomis said. “What doesn’t happen is, as soon as policemen start running in an open field, they start taking gunfire from above. That’s not a typical situation, and that’s very, very troubling.”

    The incident touched off hours of tension at the scene, with neighborhood residents escalating rumors that police killed a man as bystanders hurled insults at officers across police tape.

    “We’re in an environment where people want a reason to be upset,” Williams said at an impromptu press conference held at the scene. […]

    “There is no reason to hide the facts about the death of a child from the community,” McGinty said. “With the evidence public, there can be an informed civic conversation about what actually happened and about relevant use of deadly force issues.”

    But Loomis said the pendulum was swung too far from police officers.

    “The reality is that we’ve given the inmates the keys to the asylum,” Loomis said. “It’s not right. It’s not safe for the police officers and it’s not safe for the good, God-fearing, law-abiding citizens out there. But this is the path that leadership, federal, state and local, has put us on.”

    Umm, I think people want a reason to be less upset. But that may just be my perception.

    Suspect in officer involved shooting was Sudanese Refugee. Louisville. He probably came to USAmerica to live a better life, or one less persecuted.

    A man who was friends with the suspect in an officer involved shooting said he was Sudanese refugee who was acting out of character.

    Deng Manyoun died Saturday, June 13 after being shot by a Louisville Metro Police Department officer on the corner of Oak and Fourth Streets.

    Benjamin Luan said he had known Manyoun for years. They are from the same village in South Sudan and fled their native country because of a civil war. After they fled they went to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. They eventually made their way to the United States, hoping for a better life.

    Manyoun lived in Nashville, Tennessee for 14 years before coming to Louisville in 2008.

    Luan said on Saturday Manyoun was on his way to a see a friend. He never expected an attack on an LMPD officer would unfold in the middle of the afternoon.

    Louisville Metro Police Chief Steve Conrad said Manyoun had assaulted a woman shortly before the shooting.

    “He came up to her and I’m told he grabbed the purse pulled it off her head threw it down the street,” said Chief Conrad. “Grabbed her cell phone, threw it down on the street and started to punch her.”

    A witness tried to help and called 911. The witness gave a description of the attacker which was consistent with the description of the man Officer Nathan Blanford confronted outside Smoker’s Smoke Shop.

    In the surveillance video captured by the store’s security camera Manyoun is seen stumbling across Oak Street and seconds later the incident escalates.

    “He wasn’t supposed to do that, but he was drunk,” said Luan.

    Neil Brown, who works at Barasti Bar and Grill not far from the scene, said he would see Manyoun in the area and would often try to help him.

    “I don’t know what he was going through that day, but I’ve never seen him do that before,” said Brown.

    Luan said Manyoun was homeless and had troubles with drinking. He wondered if Officer Blanford could have used something other than a gun to stop his friend.

    He hopes another incident doesn’t happen.

    “We have some other people who are in streets like rest of lost boys they are on the streets and we don’t want that thing to happen to them,” said Luan.

    Chief Conrad said there may have been a language barrier between Manyoun and the officer, but the officer gave clear verbal and physical commands for Manyoun to stop.

    The woman who was assaulted was not taken to the hospital.

    Officer Blanford has been placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.

24. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 11:49 am

    Her understanding of white supremacy and white privilege is precisely why it’s nearly impossible for her to ‘identify as black’. Her = Rachel Dolezal
    Listen to her lectures. She gets it. Rachel Dolezal understands white supremacy and what it’s meant to America.
    Rachel Dolezal does not ‘identify as black’ culturally, or racially. She’s too smart, her understanding of white privilege too complete.
    We have to stop treating Dolezal like she’s a novice when it comes to her cultural literacy and comprehension. She’s not Iggy or Eminem.
    A more likely scenario – based more on what we actually know of Rachel Dolezal – is that blackness, for her, was a shortcut.
    And when that road got rough, she fell all the way back on to the age old bastion of white privilege, reverse victimization.

25. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 11:53 am

    #BrandonTateBrown family wants officers removed from street, DA to reopen case and Feds to come in @KYWNewsradio

    “Lino” is a teacher and varsity track coach at my school and they want to stay silent about this and sweep it away, includes screengrabs of comments. o.O A track coach?

    Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Let Rachel Dolezal Be as Black as She Wants to Be

    I sympathize with the dilemma of Rachel Dolezal, the head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP whose parents maintain that she is not any part black, as she has claimed (#whiteisthenewblack). See, I too have been living a lie. For the past 50 years I’ve been keeping up this public charade, pretending to be something I’m not. Finally, in the wake of so many recent personal revelations by prominent people, I’ve decided to come out with the truth.

    I am not tall (#shortstuff).

    Although I’ve been claiming to be 7’2” for many decades, the truth is that I’m 5’8”. And that’s when I first get out of bed in the morning. Just goes to show, you tell a lie often enough and people believe you. I expect there will be some who will demand I give back the championship rings and titles that I accumulated during my college and professional basketball career because I was only able to win them by convincing other players that they had no chance against my superior height. How could these achievements have any lasting meaning if I’m not really as tall as Wikipedia says I am?

    The evidence against Dolezal does seem pretty damning. Her birth parents have decided to express their parental love by outing her in response to a legal dispute they have with her (#returnworld’sbestparentstrophy). They offered photos of a farm-fresh Rachel looking like she just stepped out of the General Store in Mayberry and a white-on-white birth certificate. Some siblings have also attested that she’s not black, though she was raised alongside four adopted black children. Dolezal herself has just stepped aside from her position at the NAACP.

    Despite all this, you can’t deny that Dolezal has proven herself a fierce and unrelenting champion for African-Americans politically and culturally. Perhaps some of this sensitivity comes from her adoptive black siblings. Whatever the reason, she has been fighting the fight for several years and seemingly doing a first-rate job. Not only has she led her local chapter of the NAACP, she teaches classes related to African-American culture at Eastern Washington University and is chairwoman of a police oversight committee monitoring fairness in police activities. Bottom line: The black community is better off because of her efforts.

    At no time in history has the challenge of personal identity seemed more relevant. Olympic champion Bruce Jenner struggled for years with her gender identity and only at the age of 65, as Caitlyn Jenner, seems to have come to some peace with it. The same with many in the gay community who have battled internal and external demons before embracing their true selves. The difference is that these people faced a biological imperative rather than a free will choice of orientation (#readthesciencebeforepostingoutrage). Dolezal chose to identify with a racial group she was not born into, like Sean Connery as the Japanese expert in Rising Sun.

    The thing about race is that, scientifically, there is no such thing. As far back as 1950, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released the conclusions of an international group of anthropologists, geneticists, sociologists, and psychologists that stated that the concept of race was not a scientific entity but a myth. Since then, one scientific group after another has issued similar conclusions. What we use to determine race is really nothing more than some haphazard physical characteristics, cultural histories, and social conventions that distinguish one group from another. But, for the sake of communication, we will continue to misuse the word, myself included, in order to discuss our social issues so everyone understands them. As far as Dolezal is concerned, technically, since there is no such thing as race, she’s merely selected a cultural preference of which cultural group she most identifies with. Who can blame her? Anyone who listens to the Isaac Hayes song, “Shaft,” wants to be black—for a little while anyway (#who’sthecatwhowon’tcopout).

    Al Jolson, once considered the most popular entertainer in the world, rose to fame wearing blackface. He also used his considerable influence to help blacks. At one time, he was the only white man allowed into some of the nightclubs in Harlem. Ironically, Jolson admitted that when he performed the same songs without blackface he never felt he did as good a job. Some critics say it’s because while singing in blackface, he was singing for all downtrodden people, including his own Jewish people. And he found his strength and passion and power while identifying with another culture. Maybe like Quentin Tarantino in Jackie Brown and Django Unchained.

    So, does it really matter whether Rachel Dolezal is black or white?

    Dr. King said we should be judged by the content of character rather than color of skin, which is what makes this case so difficult. So, yes, it does matter. Apparently lying to employers and the public you’re representing when the lie benefits you personally and professionally is a deficit in character. However, the fight for equality is too important to all Americans to lose someone as passionate as she is and who has accomplished as much as she has. This seems more a case of her standing up and saying, “I am Spartacus!” rather than a conspiracy to defraud. Let’s give her a Bill Clinton Get Out of Jail Free card on this one (#Ididnothavesex) and let her get back to doing what she clearly does exceptionally well—making America more American.

    It’s given me the courage to also say, “I am Spartacus. All 5’8” of me.”

    So there’s another perspective.

    Prince Harry meets Michelle Obama for tea at Kensington Palace. I hope they have fun!!

    Fourteen-Year-Old George Stinney Executed in South Carolina, today in 1944.

    On June 16, 1944, George Stinney, Jr., a ninety-pound, black, fourteen-year-old boy, was executed in the electric chair in Columbia, South Carolina. Three months earlier, on March 24, George and his sister were playing in their yard when two young white girls briefly approached them and asked where they could find flowers. Hours later, the girls failed to return home and a search party was organized to find them. George Stinney, a member of the search party, casually mentioned to a bystander that he had seen the girls earlier. The following morning, their dead bodies were found in a shallow ditch.

    George was immediately arrested for the murders and subjected to hours of interrogation without his parents or an attorney. The sheriff later claimed he confessed to the murders, though no written or signed statement was presented. George’s father was fired from his job and his family forced to flee out of fear for their lives. On March 26, a mob attempted to lynch George but he had already been moved to an out-of-town jail.

    On April 24, George faced a sham trial virtually alone. No African Americans were allowed inside the courthouse and his court-appointed attorney, a tax lawyer with political aspirations, failed to call a single witness. The prosecution presented the sheriff’s testimony regarding George’s alleged confession as the only evidence of his guilt. An all-white jury deliberated for ten minutes before convicting George Stinney of rape and murder, and the judge promptly sentenced the fourteen-year-old to death. Despite appeals from black advocacy groups, Governor Olin Johnston refused to intervene. George Stinney remains the youngest person executed in the United States in the twentieth century.

    Let’s help get this #blackandstem woman to physics grad school! Biophysics heads up @blackandstem http://www.gofundme.com/lanellwilliams

26. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 2:12 pm

    *sigh* Previous in moderation, and I even know why.

    Federal judge upholds ruling finding Joe Arpaio guilty of racial profiling, targeting opponents

    In a written ruling, U.S. District Judge Roslyn Silver let stand the findings of another federal judge in a separate 2007 lawsuit filed by civil rights groups. The judge in that case ruled Arpaio’s deputies racially profiled Latino drivers and unlawfully detained them.
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    Silver said she would not allow the parties to relitigate the allegations involving the “discriminatory traffic stop claims” in granting the request for summary judgment made by Justice Department attorneys.

    The Justice Department filed its suit in May 2012 alleging that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, run by Arpaio, intentionally engaged in racial profiling and unlawful arrest of Latinos, violating their constitutional rights.

    It also accused the office of routinely violating the rights of political opponents by targeting them with unsubstantiated complaints and lawsuits, including arresting them.

    The lawsuit further alleged that Arpaio’s deputies discriminated against Latino inmates with limited English proficiency.

    Those latter claims will be the focus of a trial set to begin before Silver on Aug. 10 in federal court in Phoenix.

    Arpaio, who bills himself as “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” denies the allegations and pledged to fight “to the bitter end” when the Justice Department’s lawsuit was filed.

    An Arpaio spokeswoman declined comment on Monday’s ruling, and his attorney could not immediately be reached.

    The decision is the latest legal setback for the 83-year-old lawman, who is fighting civil contempt proceedings by another federal judge as part of the separate 2007 racial profiling case, which was filed by civil rights groups on behalf of Latino drivers.

    Frustrated by violations of his court orders in that case, Judge Murray Snow held contempt hearings in April against Arpaio and four others in the case.

    But further proceedings were put on hold after lawyers for Arpaio and an aide asked that Snow be removed after what they called decisions that could be seen as biased.

    Probably any decision that doesn’t go their way is ‘biased’.

    Dominican Republic Orders Haitians To Be Deported For Social Cleansing, via Bossip.

    Free Albert Woodfox! (Petition)

    On June 8, 2015 a federal judge granted Louisiana prisoner Albert Woodfox unconditional release. Albert’s conviction had already been overturned three times – most recently in 2013 – yet every time the state has appealed.

    Today, Albert is still behind bars after spending four decades in cruel, unjust solitary confinement. He believes that he and fellow prisoners, Herman Wallace and Robert King, were first placed in solitary confinement in retaliation for their activism. All three men were members of the Black Panther Party. Together, they came to be known as the Angola 3.

    It is time for the State of Louisiana to stop standing in the way of justice. Call on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to ensure Albert’s cruel and unjust confinement is not his legacy.

    He should be free. The state insists that he not be. What a fucked up situation.

    This Is Not an Article about Rachel Dolezal

    I’m not writing about Rachel Dolezal. There’s no need for her — and her lies, cultural theft, violence, and overall fuckery — to take up any more space.

    But since we’re all so transfixed with Black women now, can we perhaps channel our collective societal anger and newfound enlightenment towards Arnesha Bowers, the 16-year-old Black girl and 11th grader at City College who was stalked, sexually assaulted, strangled, robbed, and set on fire by two gang members in Baltimore?

    You may have missed her story. After all, the deaths of Black women rarely raise national outrage.

    Bowers was recently killed by Adonay Dixon (23) and John Childs (20), two Blood affiliates. Baltimore, a notoriously impoverished city with high rates of violence and crime, and seen a significant spike in homicide following the death of Freddie Grey. Dixon met Arnesha Bowers at a party, and thinking her grandmother with whom she lived had money, followed her home. He returned to Bowers’ home with Childs, and the two brutally tied Bowers up in her grandmother’s basement, raped her, and burglarized her home before setting her home on fire.

    The robbery only yielded $40, an iPad, and a laptop. Both Dixon and Childs were charged with first-degree murder charges, alongside 11 other members of a related drug crew.

    There’s so many layers to this tragedy that I’m still struggling to unpack. As a Black feminist activist, I hold justice for Black women above all. But doing so comes at great risk.

    In demanding justice for Black women when Black men do harm to us, there’s a serious question whether justice is best served in a racist and corrupt criminal justice system that serves no function other than to repress and brutalize Black bodies. I consider the criminal justice system to be invalid and illegitimate, and it’s not my wish to see Black folk trapped in a structurally racist conglomerate wreaked in permanent stigma and trapped in cyclical oppression.

    But without a decentralized core syndicate armed with resources and is further supported through efficient coordination, that works to exact justice in a manner appropriate and befitting of the Black community, what options do we — as Black women — have when our Brothers harm us in ways so virulent to our culture?

    Publicly exacting justice against Black men who harm us presents other challenges, as well. White supremacy don’t sleep. And they’ll pounce on our community, exploiting perceived schisms to create fractures and deteriorate trust between us all. Does that mean we — Black women — must suffer in silence to uphold the community? Does it mean that we must remain alone, isolated, and alienated in order to maintain a united front?

    This is the burden of Black women and girls. It’s a heavy burden, with so many historical undertones, and cultural nuances that I can’t unpack in just one blog post.

    But what I can solidly vocalize is that BLACK MEN NEED TO DO BETTER.

    I won’t generalize. I’m speaking to that cohort of Black men that hate Black women.

    Black men who hate Black women need to unlearn a lot of shit. Patriarchy is a function of white supremacy. It’s a fucking tentacle that wraps itself around and in between racism, classism, and other -isms that were created by white men (and facilitated through white women) who sought to concretize their control over marginalized groups. Turning Black men against Black women was a tactical and strategic mechanism for ultimate divide and conquer.

    Black men who invest in the hate of Black women are literally upholding white supremacy.

    Black men who are a bit more conscious … EDUCATE YOUR BROTHERS. I literally cannot. Nor can my Sisters. We’re busy. We’re tired. We’re traumatized. We don’t have the time or emotional energy to un-teach the patriarchal/white supremacist bullshit that was beaten into the weakest of us.

    Misogynoir is real as fuck. And it caused two young, impressionable Black men to rape a Black girl. So Black men, it’s time for y’all to show up. In body, mind, and spirit. We — as Black women — are tired of suffering in silence, while y’all suffer in martyrdom.

    It says A LOT that yall are so eagerly willing to erase the well documented work of REAL BW for the FAKE work of a WW in Blackface

    And a good read, Opinion: Washington needs to tell the truth about police violence

    There have only been 9 days this year when the police have not killed somebody.

    Some news outlets put the number as high as 500 dead in the past six months, according to both The Guardian and Killed by the Police.Net. The Washington Post’s own investigation showed nearly 400 dead as of the end of May.

    We know these numbers because activists have searched tirelessly to find instances where the media has reported that someone was killed by police. Yes, newspaper articles are currently the most consistent source of information on nationwide police killings because police departments are not required to collect or report this information.

    We live in the age of big data and analytics, yet we have no systematic way of collecting even the most elemental data on the actions of police officers. It is as if the lives of those that are killed by the police simply do not matter. In fact, it appears as if these lives are not even worth cataloguing.

    Although Ferguson, Mo., is a long way from Washington, D.C., those in the nation’s capital can do much to prevent what happened there and in cities across America.

    From the 101st Airborne Division escorting the Little Rock 9 into a segregated school building, to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the creation of the School Breakfast Program, we have seen that, in this America, federal intervention has always been necessary to protect the rights of the marginalized.

    It is ahistorical to suggest that the federal government cannot, or does not, have a role to play in ending police violence. There are several ways the federal government can help to end police violence.

    First, elected and appointed officials must tell the truth about the current state of police violence in black communities. And this truth must be told publicly and repeatedly. The bully pulpit has always been powerful in that it focuses attention in a decidedly crowded landscape of messages. And, to date, elected and appointed officials have been silent about the truth – the police are killing us.

    This is a time when laws protect killers at the expense of the killed: Mike Brown, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Jones-Stanely, John Crawford, Eric Garner, Sean Bell. Elected and appointed officials must say aloud what we know to be true – the police are killing us and it must end. It is only by telling the truth that we will be able to confront it. It is in the power of telling the story that the story can be rewritten.

    We understand that telling the truth is not always easy or convenient. Police unions are powerful lobbies. And the image of the police officer as the infallible American hero is potent. But I look forward to the elected and appointed officials who remember that our heroes are a reflection of our best selves and who will speak the truth knowing that the will of those armed with truth is stronger than those armed with the license to kill.

    Second, the only mandates that matter are funded mandates. The federal government has substantial financial resources – from grants to program budgets to line-items – that can be leveraged to ensure compliance of local law enforcement agencies with the recommendations of the Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Through DOJ grant funding alone, pressure could be applied to local law enforcement that would lead to demonstrable impact.

    The recent PRIDE Act, introduced by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), is an important first-step that could lead to the first mandated reporting of police violence in America. But even this legislation has a shocking provision tucked away in it that privileges police, creating a grant:

    “…for public awareness campaigns designed to gain information from the public on use of force against police officers, including shootings, which may include tip lines, hotlines, and public service announcements…”

    The PRIDE Act does not include any comparable language regarding the violence committed against civilians. Again, the police have killed up to 500 people this year alone. The text of the PRIDE Act is a reminder that the lives of marginalized people continue to be devalued, even in the wake of continued violence.

    The federal government could, today, withhold funds from law enforcement agencies that did not comply with its mandates and/or recommendations related to ending police violence. This would not be overreach – it would be the necessary intervention at the federal level to end an epidemic of police violence.

    And finally, we must not be seduced by quick wins and easy fixes. Justice is both never experiencing the trauma as well as accountability for those that perpetuate and initiate the trauma. We do not yet know justice.

    A host of changes will be required to end police violence and the racism that allows it to persist in our society. Body cameras, alone, are not the solution – we have watched on repeat footage of black bodies slain and the officers faced no consequence. We have seen “independent investigations” volley back-and-forth between government agencies as happened in Cleveland re: Tamir Rice most recently. Ending police violence will require deep structural and systemic solutions working in tandem with each other. Ending police violence will require a shift in hearts and minds, as well.

    We must be able to criticize our institutions as we yearn for them to be better. I, too, once believed in Officer Friendly. I, too, grew up thinking that the police would be the people to call in the event of any true emergency – that they were entrusted with the power to potentially end life because of their deep commitment to protecting life.

    The America I once knew simply does not exist. We must build an America that lives up to our ideals – our lives depend on it.

27. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 3:18 pm

    More on the Dominican Republic!
    5 Things to Know About the ‘Cleaning’ of Haitians From the Dominican Republic

    The Dominican Republic might deport more than 100,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent to Haiti in three days, reports The Nation.

    If you haven’t heard about the “social cleanings” taking place in the DR, it’s because mainstream media aren’t covering them. Even Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit dedicated to upholding political freedom and preventing discrimination, has no mention of the Dominican Republic on its homepage.

    Below are 5 things you need to know about what is happening in the Dominican Republic:

    1. The DR government has revoked the citizenship of more than 100,000 Dominicans born in the country of Haitian parents.

    If the Dominican Republic proceeds with its deportation plan, the Dominican-Haitians will be rendered stateless.

    According to Dominican Today, DR President Danilo Medina delivered a speech in February reminding foreign nations and international bodies that they cannot require the DR to compromise its legal order or constitution in relation to migration or other sovereign rights.

    2. Many of the Dominican-born Haitians facing the looming threat of deportation have never visited Haiti or know anyone there.

    Despite DR media outlets continuing to refer to Dominicans of Haitian descent simply as “Haitians,” many of them have no connection whatsoever to the country. So technically, the Dominican Republic is not expelling immigrants from its borders but rather people who were born and raised there.

    Many of the potential deportees own a business and work in the DR.

    Though the number of Dominican-Haitians in the Dominican Republic is most often cited to be over 100,000, that estimate is likely low. Harper’s reported the number to be more around 210,000, though 500,000 has been floating around also.

    It’s doubtful Haiti will be able to handle a massive influx of refugees; it doesn’t have the resources.

    3. The criteria the government will use in deciding who is to be bussed out of the country is “dark-skinned Dominicans with Haitian facial features.”

    In February, Dominican-Haitian Henry Claude Jean, described as a “humble shoe shine worker,” was found murdered in a Santiago public park, hanging by his neck with his hands and feet bound.

    The police refused to acknowledge the motive for the killing was most likely racism and instead said the violence was related to a robbery, reported The Huffington Post.

    Historically, the DR has demonstrated a tendency to scapegoat Haitians for crime, and the lynching was the latest manifestation of that trend.

    Around the same time, Dominican Rep. Ydanis Rodriguez of New York City was marching against police violence and the killing of Eric Garner, but failed to even acknowledge the plight of Haitians in the DR.

    “We want him to recognize that black lives matter in the Dominican Republic as well and end his silence on anti-Haitian violence and the denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent,” said Miriam Neptune, a Haitian-Americans who is a member of the New York City activist group We Are All Dominican.

    4. The DR government claims to have established a legalization process for Dominican-Haitians wishing to remain in the country, but the system is close-to-impossible, according to sources on the ground.

    Dominicans of Haitian descent can attempt to “regularize” their citizenship status by visiting one of the reportedly overcrowded and understaffed offices the government has set up. But paperwork, paperwork that many Dominican-Haitians don’t have, is required to take advantage of the process.

    Many of these DR residents of Haitian heritage weren’t issued birth certificates because they were born in rural towns under the care of midwives, not hospitals.

    “I am documenting dozens of personal accounts from Dominican-Haitians who have gone to great lengths to register, some as much as 8-9 months ago, and as of (June 12) have not received any type of confirmation that their paperwork has even been processed,” and aid worker, who wishes to remain anonymous, told The Nation.

    5. Even though currently the deportation of Dominic-Haitians persists as only a possibility, all evidence points to it happening.

    Dominican television media reported on June 9 that the DR government requested from transportation companies that up to 36 large passenger buses be made available for continued use, according to the aid worker.

    “This is an extremely ominous sign,” he said. “Everything is set for the deportation and that the DR government is saying it is going forth on this Tuesday, June 16.”

    Ignoring the fact that forcing people out of their own country is a human rights violation in itself, Jose Ricardo Taveras, the country’s former director of immigration, said in an August 2014 speech that the deportation process would be carried out with dignity and respect for human rights.

    “Initially, the foreign citizens who are in the country, will be invited to leave voluntarily,” he said. “Secondly, if they do not leave voluntarily, through various mechanisms established by law, they will be returned to their country of origin.”

    And more: Haitians scramble for legal residency in Dominican Republic

    Haitians and other non-citizens stood in long lines across the Dominican Republic on Monday in last-minute bids to secure legal residency, hurrying to beat a looming paperwork deadline along with the threat of possible quick deportation.

    Lines snaked outside Interior Ministry offices as foreign residents, who are overwhelmingly from neighboring Haiti, sought to submit papers before a 7 p.m. Wednesday deadline. Many said they have had to spend all day and return multiple times after being told they lacked sufficient documentation to complete the applications.

    “You still have to bring more papers. It’s always hard, but we’ll see,” bricklayer Aime Morette said as he waited with more than 140 other people to submit his application.

    Morette, a 28-year-old who has a wife and two children, said he has lived more than half his life in the Dominican Republic, but that doesn’t automatically qualify him for legal residency under an initiative begun last year aimed at regulating the migration of workers who have long flowed across the border from Haiti.

    Under the program, the government said it would consider granting legal residency to non-citizens who could establish their identity and prove they arrived before October 2011.

    Officials estimated up to 500,000 people were in this category, and relatively few have been able to provide sufficient documentation. Interior Minister Ramon Fadul said about 250,000 people have at least started the application process but only 10,000 had met all the requirements for legal residency. So far, only about 300 have actually received permits.

    Fadul has said anyone who does not register could be deported. While officials have said there will be no mass round-ups, authorities have prepared 12 buses and opened processing centers along the border with Haiti to expedite repatriations.

    Part of the problem has been that employers in the Dominican Republic are not providing workers with documentation to prove they have been in the country long enough to qualify. Another hurdle has been the Haitian government, which despite pledges to improve the process has been slow to provide birth certificates and other forms of identification to its citizens and has charged more than many people can afford to pay. […]

    The government has announced that it plans to restore nationality for more than 50,000 people who were born in the country and enrolled in a civil registry.

    They now have until Wednesday, apparently.

    From the Equal Justice Initiative, Fatal Police Shootings in Florida on the Rise

    Despite increasing scrutiny of police use of force nationwide, the number of fatal police shootings in Florida has tripled in the past fifteen years.

    According to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), between 1999 and 2013, a total of 574 people were killed by police from more than 110 law enforcement agencies. The number of fatal police shootings rose from 14 cases in 1999 to 58 cases in 2013. Miami-Dade Police Department led with 70 killings by police, followed by Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office with 42.

    In addition to the numbers, concerns about the way police shootings are being investigated and calls for independent inquiries are escalating. The U.S. Justice Department opened its own investigation into a string of police shootings in Miami in 2011, and found an unconstitutional “pattern or practice” of excessive use of force. It is now investigating the 2013 death of Charles Eimers, who died during a traffic stop in Key West, after evidence emerged that police dashboard camera videos of the incident were erased and another recording showed an officer saying they should get their stories straight.

    In Broward County, police have shot and killed 168 people since 1980, but not a single officer has been charged in a fatal on-duty shooting during that period. Lawyers in civil wrongful death cases throughout South Florida have found that files were missing, dashboard camera videos had been erased, and police reports did not always match the evidence, raising questions about how police shootings are being investigated. […]

    In January, the FDLE agreed to investigate all police shootings in Florida to establish if any criminal act had taken place, and it has launched an inquiry into a Miami police officer’s fatal shooting last Thursday of Fritz Severe, a homeless man known to local residents who carried a walking stick and whom witnesses said posed no threat. FDLE will conduct its investigation in cooperation with Miami police.

    Not a seat left here- #stl #fightfor15 supporters have packed the space!
    BB83 sponsor @shanecohn reminding the group “$7.65 is poverty wages, most can’t afford essentials for themselves”
    Fighting for acknowledgement that minimum wage must be increased (not even for the increase itself) in STL.

    LA Police Union Has Jokes and Sends Email to Ezell Ford’s Mother

    So it seems that the union that represents the rank-and-file men and women of the Los Angeles Police Department has jokes.

    On Friday, out of the blue, Tritobia Ford, Ezell Ford’s mother gets an email directly from the Los Angeles Police Protective League with the subject line: LAPPL BLOG: How can you trust the judgment of a Police Commission that applies the wrong legal standard?

    First, how in the hell did the League get her email address? She never has received emails from the police union before. Her email address is not public. But all of a sudden just days after the Board of Police Commissioner’s controversial decision that found one of the officers “out of policy” for shooting her son in South L.A. last summer, she’s signed up on the League’s email list.

    Bullshit.

    Someone over at the League has jokes and they are not funny.

    Mrs. Ford and her entire family have gone through enough already. The last thing she needs is to get some email from the League critiquing the Commission’s decision and pointing the finger back at her son. If that’s how the League feels, fine. They are entitled to feel that way but they can discuss it amongst themselves or take it up directly with the Commission. Why in the hell would you send it to Mrs. Ford except for shock value and to be cruel?

    I seriously doubt the majority of the rank-and-file represented by the League, no matter how they feel about the shooting of Ezell Ford and the Commission’s decision would have co-signed on something like this. No, I think this is courtesy of some of the League’s shady leadership who are pissed off at the Commission.

    I emailed the League’s president Craig Lally directly about this on Friday and heard nothing back from him. I wonder if he was the one who added Tritobia’s name to the email list?

    At any rate it was a cruel and evil thing to do to a woman who has gone through enough drama with the LAPD. Her son is dead Christ’s sake. And while I doubt they are, the League ought to be ashamed of themselves.

    If they wanted to send that email to someone they should have sent it to all five members of the Police Commission with whom they have their gripe with.

    Now if a cop was killed and someone sent an email to the officer’s wife gloating about how that cop deserved to be killed and created the situation in which to be killed, the LAPPL would be fit to be tied. They’d be screaming bloody murder into every news camera they could find. This is no different.

    This is the kind of shit that keep tensions high and keeps the drama going.

    Cut it the fuck out.

    And for my folks represented by the League, please have a talk with your peeps. They are seriously tripping and obviously trying to start some shit.

    Don’t the police have some sort of code-of-conduct that they must adhere to?

    The Inside Story of Starbucks’s Race Together Campaign, No Foam

    It’s early April, just five days after a police officer fatally shot Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, in South Carolina, and the Starbucks CEO is on stage at Spelman College, the historically black institution of higher learning for women. He’s here for a panel discussion with United Negro College Fund chief Michael Lomax and Spelman president Beverly ­Tatum, author of the best seller Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Schultz is seated in an awkwardly large white sofa-chair, fielding tough questions from the crowd, mostly black students who have come to hear this white, 61-year-old billionaire speak about racial inequality.

    Not long ago, he might have looked more out of place. But the crowd already knows that the head of the world’s largest coffee company is willing to thrust himself into this emotionally charged issue. Only three weeks earlier, he made waves with Starbucks’s “Race Together” initiative, an effort to spark a national dialogue about race in response to the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner—two other unarmed black men—and subsequent civil unrest. It was a bold idea that backfired. Starbucks had encouraged its baristas to write “Race Together” on the cups of coffee they served and engage customers in conversations. But critics lampooned what came across as a superficial gesture, and the backlash exploded onto social media, where Race Together received 2.5 billion impressions in less than 48 hours—much of it, Schultz complains, driven by a barrage of negative tweets filled with “visceral hate and contempt for the company and for me personally.”

    Advertisement

    Yet Schultz tells the audience he isn’t backing down. In fact, this event is his second two-hour forum on race today. Earlier this afternoon, he met with nearly 400 Starbucks employees (called “partners”) at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, which marked his 10th symposium on the subject in the past three months. At that event, the partners greeted him like a hero, snapping selfies and getting autographs before engaging in town hall-style group therapy, filled with tears and soul-searching discussions, employees professing love for what Starbucks and Schultz stand for (“You’re the reason I’ve stayed 14 years”) and sharing deeply personal experiences with racism. Schultz, dressed in a black suit, listened and responded in heartfelt ways. When a young black barista broke down while talking about the discrimination she faced in a past job and how working at Starbucks is the first time she’s ever not felt “disposable,” Schultz leaned forward, held her hand, and gently touched his palm to her cheek to wipe away her tears. […]

    Schultz believes corporations have obligations to society beyond what tangibly impacts their bottom lines. And with 22,000 stores and 75 million customers per week, Starbucks can certainly influence public discourse. In an age of the Koch brothers, Hobby Lobby, super PACs, and Washington lobbyists—a time when “corporations are people,” as Mitt Romney phrased it—Starbucks wants to make its values felt. The truth is, the role of a corporate leader is evolving. Tim Cook’s personal advocacy for gay rights has proven more popular than his company’s Apple Watch, and Sheryl Sandberg is more famous for her support of gender equality than for her role at Facebook. “We’re at a tipping point where businesses need to step up and take a lead with moral and ethical voices, and call out the things that are harming people and the planet,” says Rose Marcario, CEO of Patagonia—a company Schultz admires for seamlessly blending its beliefs into its brand.

    Schultz has long championed corporate social impact, but his high-profile push on the issue of race has some from both the business world and the black community wondering whether there’s a limit to the growing trend of what’s known as “CEO activism.” As he plots the future of Race Together, Schultz faces deep challenges and perhaps even deeper cynicism. He’s also creating a blueprint for other CEOs to learn from—even if it’s learning what not to do.

    “I feel we’ve been called to do this,” Schultz says on stage. “Along the way, there are going to be some mistakes.” […]

    Not everyone is buying it, however. “I don’t see this as some new trend of wonderful CEOs,” says Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “I see a certain institutionalized arrogance, where CEOs have been given the right to mouth off on whatever they feel like.” Schultz argues that his public-oriented endeavors are “not marketing—this is not PR,” but the truth is that they’re A-grade PR—marketing so camouflaged in genuine, magnanimous intentions that it’s hard to tell it apart from philanthropy. Starbucks’s efforts recently landed Schultz on the cover of Time, touting his presidential aspirations, and a barista on the cover of The Atlantic, which teased, “Can Starbucks save the middle class?”

    With Race Together, though, there’s simply no obvious corporate benefit. If anything, the potential downsides far outweigh any ostensible ROI. (Even Lichtenstein acknowledges there are a lot of “land mines for a white Jewish guy” talking about race.) Matt Ryan, whose team crunched the numbers for its education and veteran initiatives, says that there wasn’t even any financial forecasting done in advance.

    So where did the idea come from? The seeds can be traced back to December 2014, when the company held a grand opening for its Reserve Roastery, an upscale coffeehouse and tasting room in Seattle’s trendy Capitol Hill neighborhood. Schultz couldn’t get his mind off the racial protests dominating the national headlines in the wake of the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri, not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Michael Brown. “We were by the restrooms, and I don’t even know how we got on the conversation of race—we’d been talking about how the Roastery was doing,” says Starbucks retail EVP Chris Carr, who is black. “I’ve spent 30 years in the corporate environment, and there’s always been an unwritten policy that you don’t talk about politics, religion, and race, but he just started asking me about it, and saying he felt like no one was paying attention to the civil unrest. I told him, ‘Howard, frankly, I think it’s a crisis.’ ”

    Carr told Schultz about the dinner-table discussions he’d had with his kids regarding Ferguson. (“My daughter told me she feels like my generation let her down, that we’d become too complacent, which is hurtful for a parent to hear.”) When Schultz’s wife, Sheri, arrived, they decided to delay their post-opening dinner plans to talk more. “I remember him saying, ‘I don’t know what to do, but I have to do something,’ ” Carr recalls.

    That’s not to imply this was some mythical origin moment. It was just one of many race-related conversations employees tell me Schultz was engaging them in prior to Race Together. Rodney Hines, who oversees community investments, remembers being out with his mother one weekend and bumping into Schultz. The CEO pulled Hines aside to ask his thoughts on race. “You could tell he’d been stewing on it for a while—he was looking for answers,” Hines says. “I remember telling him that with the #BlackLivesMatter movement, this is a young, empowered, and fired-up group of people—not the historic faces of leadership like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.”

    A few nights later at home, Sheri says, Schultz, who was unable to sleep, told her, “I can’t just run this company and not say something, not have an opinion, and not allow others to have an ability to talk about what we’re not talking about.” […]

    Schultz is aware that people might find it hard to understand where this emotional drive and empathy comes from. “I’m not black, I haven’t lived a life in which I was racially profiled, and I wasn’t discriminated against because of the color of my skin,” he tells me. His outlook was shaped by his upbringing in the Bay View projects of Brooklyn—he often says that he always dreamed of building a company that his late father, who struggled financially throughout life, never had the opportunity to work for. “Look, I’ve known him for a long time, and I’m not bullshitting you when I say there’s a part of him that’s never forgotten where he came from,” says Whole Foods co–CEO Walter Robb. “He feels a deep sense of responsibility to create a better country with more opportunity.” At Schultz’s 60th birthday party, after a series of glowing toasts to the man who seemed to have it all, Robb recalls Schultz standing up and saying, ” ‘I just want to tell you guys, I’m still working things through, I don’t have [life] figured out.’ The humility and sincerity with which he said it—he’s really just trying to find his way like all of us.”

    Since diving headlong into the issue of race, Schultz has been on an educational journey (“the burden of proof is on me to establish legitimacy,” he says), and he often cites anecdotes he’s internalized from the forums, such as the white barista who grew up with family members in the KKK, or the black mother who makes sure her son isn’t wearing bright colors before he leaves for school. Schultz has met with clergy members and police chiefs. Recently, he had dinner with the newly elected CEO of JCPenney, Marvin Ellison, who confided how, while teaching his teenage son to drive, he had to train him to keep his hands glued to the steering wheel in case a white cop pulled him over.

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    Schultz shared his insights with the board, and the directors ended the meeting in agreement that Starbucks should pursue a broader initiative. Hobson says that they didn’t spend time discussing how it would look for a white billionaire to front a national dialogue on race, focusing instead on how to scale up what worked so effectively in the partner forums. They did foresee some challenges. “We went into this with our eyes open. I said to Howard, very clearly, that this will not be like [baristas] writing ‘Come Together’ [on cups] when there was a government shutdown in Washington—this will be more challenging, and has much more nuance,” Hobson explains. “I kept saying to him, ‘It’s one thing to be in a forum with partners self-selected to show up, and who not only trust you, but revere you. So what happens when conversations are not so controlled, and no one is facilitating? Could it lead to unintended consequences that we haven’t even thought of?’” Starbucks’s leadership, recalls retail EVP Chris Carr, raised a few questions as well. “We had conversations about whether [the rollout] shouldn’t occur during peak periods, because that’s not when customers would want to engage in dialogue,” Carr says. “We even had some conversations about whether it would be appropriate to [release the campaign] in certain parts of the country where [race issues] could be much more volatile than in many other places.” […]

    Like most Twitter witch hunts, the stake-burning didn’t last long, perhaps because so many people wrongly believed Starbucks had decided to cancel Race Together. Starbucks, however, remained committed. “The irony is, we did create a national conversation—not how we intended, but you learn from mistakes,” Schultz says. He adds that he feels that the campaign was misconstrued—that Starbucks never envisioned baristas and customers solving the racial divide over caramel macchiatos.

    This contradicts what Schultz himself said when introducing the initiative to partners. (“What if we were to write race together on every Starbucks cup, and that facilitated a conversation between you and our customers? . . . If a customer asks you what this is, try to engage in a discussion.”) But there were other, more egregious problems with the rollout. For one, it’s a mystery why Starbucks didn’t heed its team’s own warnings about potential pitfalls; strategy officer Matt Ryan tells me the company did no market research to vet whether Race Together would resonate with the public, a decision both refreshingly authentic and inexplicably naive. Second, the messaging was tone-deaf. The press release, which led with “It began with one voice,” all but heralds Schultz as a savior: “As racially charged tragedies unfolded in communities across the country, the chairman and CEO of Starbucks didn’t remain a silent bystander.” Critics have also lambasted the company for leaning on its low-wage workers for such emotionally taxing labor. While Starbucks says participation was voluntary, it’s evident the company didn’t think through even the most basic repercussions of this dynamic. (For example, if a store manager or employee chose to opt out of the program, would he or she be perceived as disloyal, or even racist?)

    How could Starbucks get something so important so wrong? Chris Carr contends that the company was swept up and “misled” by the success of the partner forums; Starbucks simply assumed that its goodwill would engender public support. Hobson feels there’s a greater force at play. “I told Howard this would be hard—that this conversation would get people worked up,” she says. “Because the de facto suggestion to white people, I believe, is that they’re somehow being called racists. America has a shame about our history around race.” (As for John Oliver’s comments, she says, “There are plenty of times we’ve disagreed and said no to [Schultz].”)

    Schultz has less patience for the Monday morning quarterbacking. “We made a tactical mistake. So what?” he says. “We’re moving forward.” […]

    Julian Bond, the longtime civil rights leader and former NAACP chairman, was a strong advocate for the gay community in Arkansas, working with the Human Rights Campaign to condemn the controversial legislation. But he becomes increasingly anguished when we talk about Starbucks, not because of Schultz’s missteps—he’s proud of the company for taking a stand—but because it solidified to him how little support there is for black issues in general. “My impression is American corporations are generally more eager to stand for gay rights than black rights, and they ought to be equally progressive,” he says. “The tech industry is so bad with respect to racial diversity, but that’s no excuse. All this is depressing.”

    Throughout my reporting for this story, I struggled to find business leaders willing to talk candidly about social and civic issues. Race, especially, was a topic no one wanted to touch. It could be that they simply don’t know what change they can effect, or whether their voices would even be welcome in the first place.

    Asa Hutchinson, the governor of Arkansas who faced a public fight against Walmart CEO Doug McMillon over Hutchinson’s support for the state’s “religious freedom” measure, feels that companies would be better served by not engaging in social issues at all. “If they start entering into the world of social debate, they’re going to have everybody from Greenpeace to the Rainbow Coalition saying, ‘We want you to support our initiatives.’ Where do you draw the line once you start down that path?” he says.

    Levchin, the PayPal cofounder, has dealt with this type of criticism firsthand. In a post entitled “The Discrimination Double Standard,” Re/code called him out for not addressing Silicon Valley’s gender disparities as forcefully as he did homophobia in Indiana and Arkansas. Levchin considers blowback like this inevitable, and recommends “picking your battles and sticking to them,” because if you try to anticipate cynicism or charges of hypocrisy, you’ll ultimately talk yourself out of doing anything. “What if Howard Schultz read all the negative press for [Race Together], and said, ‘Fuck it, I’m just never going to start another controversial thing, because all I get is flak in the press, while some people think I didn’t do enough’? ” Levchin says. “I don’t think that’s how he should feel. He should feel like he tried his best, and that he can do more when the timing is right.”

    He might not be able to wait too long. My interview with CVS/pharmacy president Helena Foulkes—who was going to speak about her company’s health initiative that removed all tobacco and cigarette products from its stores—had to be postponed at the last minute due to the unrest in Baltimore, where yet another unarmed black man, Freddie Gray, was allegedly killed by police. Two CVS stores were burned down.

    As Schultz puts it, we’re at an inflection point where racial inequality can no longer can be ignored. He’s pushing ahead, with or without the help of his colleagues. “Howard is doing what’s needed,” says John Wilson, the president of Morehouse, the historically black college for men, who is disheartened to think that business leaders might further avoid the topic of race after Starbucks’s PR stumble. “It’s so backward, the suggestion that this conversation belongs to some people and doesn’t belong to others,” he adds. Action on this issue, he believes, will “separate the courageous from the cowards.” […]

    Schultz had told me that morning that he planned to say something “not generally spoken about on Wall Street conference calls.” Grinning, he had said he expected there might be a measure of pushback about Race Together, since some thought it might have negatively impacted the company’s business. Like a home-run hitter eyeing a juicy fastball, Schultz had been looking forward to the challenge, and he ordered that I listen carefully to him when I dialed in. Schultz clearly relishes these kinds of opportunities. During Starbucks’s 2013 investor meeting, he squared off in person against a shareholder who complained that Schultz’s public stance on same-sex marriage was alienating customers and hurting earnings. “I don’t know how many things you invest in,” Schultz shot back, “but I would suspect not many things, companies, products, investments have returned 38% over the last 12 months [like we did] . . . [this] is not an economic decision to me . . . we’re making this decision [for our people] . . . to embrace diversity. If you feel, respectfully, that you can get a higher return than the 38% you got last year, it’s a free country. You can sell your shares in Starbucks and buy shares in another company. Thank you very much.” Investors in the audience erupted in cheers.

    But today, the earnings call came and . . . nothing. Race Together wasn’t even mentioned. When I ask him about it in his office, Schultz seems to have forgotten that he had teed anything up for me. “Performance drove the call,” he says matter-of-factly. “These are shareholders who are invested in Starbucks because of our financial performance, and we delivered today.”

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    Perhaps this focus is a good thing. Schultz has long been wary of hubris born of success. In his office he keeps a bottle of Mazagran, a disaster of a coffee beverage Starbucks put out in the ’90s that reminds Schultz even the most well-intentioned ideas can fail. When I inquire about it, he grabs the bottle from a side table and looks down at it. “It reminds me every day that we’re not invincible,” he says. “It was my idea, and it was a complete fuck-up.”

    How will Schultz ensure that Race Together, or, for that matter, Starbucks’s other social initiatives, are not big failures too? He knows that Starbucks won’t bridge the racial divide on its own, nor end the achievement gap, nor save the planet. A coffee company can only do so much. But he knows that if he pursues these initiatives with the same vigor as he pursues corporate profits, he can sleep at night.

28. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 3:38 pm

    More in moderation! I’m on a major roll here.

    Mayor renews vow to deny riot aid to certain liquor stores

    City officials who for years have tried to close liquor stores located in residential neighborhoods have a new incentive at their disposal: the interest-free loans available to businesses damaged in the rioting that followed Freddie Gray’s April 27 funeral.

    On Monday, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake reiterated her policy that 23 liquor stores — unlike the rest of the nearly 400 businesses that sustained riot damage — are ineligible for the city loans because they do not conform to a zoning ban on alcohol sales in residential areas.

    As The Baltimore Sun reported Sunday, 23 of the 40 liquor stores looted or damaged in the rioting are considered nonconforming. They would be asked to stop selling alcohol or relocate if they want city assistance, although the state, which is also offering interest-free recovery loans of up to $35,000, has no similar restrictions.

    “I have a great amount of sympathy for those stores that have been damaged, and we want them to rebuild,” Rawlings-Blake said Monday. “We want them to reopen. But with all the grants and the loan programs that we have available we have a unique opportunity for these nonconforming liquor stores to convert into uses that can uplift our community.”

    Rawlings-Blake was joined by Dr. Leana Wen, the city health commissioner, and City Councilwoman Sharon Green Middleton at an event in Park Heights to highlight Baltimore’s long-running attempt to reduce the number of liquor stores in certain neighborhoods. They said that liquor stores contribute to crime and poor health in impoverished areas, which need other kinds of stores, such as those that sell fresh fruits and vegetables.

    Park Heights has a particularly high density of liquor stores, although none was damaged amid the rioting sparked by Gray’s death. Still, officials and community activists decried what they said are the ill effects of having too many liquor stores in one area.

    “Crime and grime is around liquor stores.” said Middleton, who represents the area. “So if they’re not going to work with the community, and change, they need to go.”

    City officials have said there are about 100 nonconforming liquor stores throughout the city; they were allowed to continue operating even as zoning laws were enacted to ban alcohol sales in residential areas. Many are owned by Korean-Americans, some of whom say the city is making them scapegoats for Baltmore’s problems.

    “The liquor store is not the original crime, the crime is [by] the people,” said Tak Song, who owns J&J Discount Liquor, about a block north of where the city officials discussed the issue on Monday. “I don’t think a crackdown on liquor stores will allow crime to decrease.”

    Across the street, several men at the Park Heights Barber Shop said they were encouraged that the city was taking on an issue they had long identified as a problem in their community.

    “You have so many people that want to have fruit and vegetables in this community,” said Johnny Clinton, the shop owner. “You want to help the people to become healthy. We can’t just let people drink liquor. It’s not good for them.”

    Wen cited studies showing that more alcohol outlets in an area correlate with increased violence and poorer health. She and Rawlings-Blake have been promoting a recent report showing that one in four Baltimoreans lives in a “food desert,” an area where there is no supermarket within a quarter-mile, limited access to transportation and a concentration of poverty. Non-conforming liquor stores should consider offering fresh food in these areas, Wen said.

    “Imagine how much this would transform this neighborhood to have liquor stores turn into grocery stores and other businesses that improve the community’s health,” Wen said.

    Interlude: Tupac! This One Quote Sums Up Tupac’s Powerful and Complex Legacy Better Than Any Other

    Tupac Shakur believed hip-hop was a true art form at a time when few did. He knew there was value in telling stories about the streets, but that they had to be told in the right way. He was hyper-conscious of the power of his lyrics and his influence as a cultural figure. And he wanted all rappers to be the same.

    In one of the last interviews with Vibe magazine, published a year before his murder, Tupac summed up the contributions he wished to leave hip-hop in nearly perfect prose.* And looking back today, on what would have been his 44th birthday, it seems that the change he wanted to see is coming to pass.

    Responsibility. Though Tupac’s songs were filled with drugs, violence and death, like so much mainstream hip-hop, he made a conscious effort to avoid glorifying these realities. He deemed it irresponsible when rappers “talk about murder and death and you don’t talk about the pain or you talk about killing and robbing and stealing and you don’t talk about jail and death and betrayal and all things that go with it,” he told MTV in October 1995.

    This philosophy seems to have taken hold with many of today’s most resonant voices in hip-hop — none more so than Kendrick Lamar, who considered naming his most recent album 2 Pimp A Caterpillar (acronym: 2 P.A.C.) to honor the legend. Lamar resurrects Tupac for a reconstructed interview between the two rappers on the album’s track “Mortal Man.” And the whole album insists on the idea that the artist has a responsibility to uplift and inspire his community, while scrutinizing every emotional challenge and potential hypocrisy that comes with assuming such a monumental task.

    The biggest hypocrite of 1995. Tupac struggled with the influence of his own complex and contradictory legacy his whole life. He postured himself as thug, but danced ballet while attending art school. He was a West Coast icon, but he was born and raised in New York, writing his first rap under the name MC New York. He wrote numerous songs with misogynistic lyrics, alongside some of the most empowering and tender feminist anthems the genre has ever heard — such as “Keep Ya Head Up” and “Dear Mama.”
    […]

    Tupac occasionally lost sight of this mission to uplift through his art. But he never lost it completely. Toward the end of his life when he got out of prison, he was spitting some of his most complex social and political meditations under a new name — Makaveli.

    “This Thug Life stuff, it was just ignorance,” Tupac reportedly told Vibe in that 1995 interview. “My intentions was always in the right place. So that’s what I’m going to show them. I’m going to show people my true intentions, and my true heart. I’m going to show them the man that my mother raised. I’m going to make them all proud.”

    He didn’t get much of a chance. But thankfully, the best parts of his legacy survive today.

    Haitians in the Dominican Republic in legal limbo, Al-Jazeera picking up on the story way back in April (2015).

    Featured in July’s @oprah magazine. Trailblazer. #Ferguson.

    And now, the Baltimore Police Union (@FOP3) is upset. Attached to the link within. Basically, accusing Batts and Mosby of doing a poor job of investigating the riots in April due to their unwillingness to turn over certain radio transmission recordings to the union. Or something. That’s what I got out of that rather accusatory text, at least!

    Dominicans of Haitian Descent Are Stateless: End the Crisis Now! (Petition)

    Many Dominicans of Haitian descent like Yolanda are expressly denied an identity card because their parents were Haitian. Yolanda was denied the right to lodge a complaint when she suffered domestic violence and file for child support because she didn’t have an identity card. Yolanda’s children, though born in the Dominican Republic, were denied birth certificates because she is of Haitian descent. Yolanda is unable to register her children in the civil registry.

    Since the early 2000s, Dominican authorities have been changing their policies on nationality and applying those changes retroactively in a manner that is particularly discriminatory toward Dominicans of Haitian descent. After years of using administrative directives and parallel legislation, on September 2013, the Dominican Republic Constitutional Court (TC 0168-13) ordered the Central Electoral Board to thoroughly examine all birth registries since 1929 and remove from them all persons who were supposedly wrongly registered and recognized as Dominican citizens.

    In violation of the Dominican Republic’s international human rights obligations, Dominican authorities have started to implement the Constitution Court ruling which in practice deprives people of foreign descent of their Dominican nationality. There are more than 200,000 people of Haitian descent that have lost their Dominican nationality and are now stateless -they have no nationality.

    Following national and international outcry, in May 2014 the Dominican Congress adopted Law 169-14. This created two categories of people: those who at some point were registered in the Dominican civil registry (group A), and those whose birth in the Dominican Republic was never declared (group B. The legal deadline for the naturalization process under Law 169-14 expired on February 1, 2015 and poor implementation of the law has meant that very few of those in group B were able to register before this deadline. According to official figures, less than 5% of the estimated 110,000 people falling into group B registered, but authorities have not confirmed whether those who applied under the Law were given residency permits. There are fears that those who have not managed to apply under the Law after the expiration of the deadline could face expulsion.

    Additional information at the link.

29. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 4:13 pm

    This is a targeted act of psychological terrorism against Black women: (see video)
    Black women own Black womanhood & it seems that there are efforts to take that away while simultaneously creating more trauma.
    Society tells Black women that faux-incarnations of Black womanhood *perform* Blackness better than they do. That’s a historical trauma.
    What’s happening right now is a societal acknowledgement that it’s okay to dismiss actual Black women & it seems everyone’s in on it.

    And for extra context on Rachel Dolezal, external to the racial appropriation that I’m leaving here because she’s been so much on the thread of late, The Media Is Doing Exactly What Rachel Dolezal’s Abusive Homeschooling Parents Want. Makes me think.

    Interlude: American Gods! Jason Momoa Wants Lead Role In ‘American Gods’ Adaptation, and I think he should have it.

30. rq says

    16 June 2015 at 4:17 pm

    They are still at the Ferguson SHOP’n Save getting @RecallKnowles15 signatures. Send your friends & Family. @deray

    Rachel Dolezal’s Harmful Masquerade

    Rachel A. Dolezal, who stepped down Monday as president of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., could have been a powerful ally to African-Americans. The participation of white allies has always been important to anti-racism work. By most accounts, she is educated about black cultures and an advocate for black causes. But empathy evolved into impersonation. And Ms. Dolezal’s subterfuge, made easier by the legacy of racism in America, undermines the very people she claims to support.

    “I identify as black,” Ms. Dolezal told Matt Lauer on the “Today” show this morning. That may be. But actual black people, like me, don’t have the option of choosing.

    The details are by now well known. Her estranged parents and Ms. Dolezal’s Montana birth certificate confirm that she is white (allegedly with some Native American ancestry).
    Continue reading the main story
    Related Coverage

    Rachel A. Dolezal stepped down as president of the N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Spokane, Wash., on Monday.
    Rachel Dolezal, Ex-N.A.A.C.P. Official, Breaks Her Silence on ‘Today’ Show and MSNBCJUNE 16, 2015

    Ms. Dolezal grew up with adoptive black siblings, one of whom she currently parents, and she has a biological son with her former husband, who is black. She attended a historically black college, Howard University. (While there, though, she identified as a white woman, even filing a lawsuit in 2002 for discrimination, since dismissed, on race and other grounds.) Ms. Dolezal eventually appeared to have darkened her skin. She adopted hairstyles associated with black women and claimed at least partial African-American heritage on an application for the Spokane police commission.

    Some people have pointed to this strange case as an illustration that race is malleable. I submit that Ms. Dolezal is a reminder that it is not. Racial identity cannot be fluid as long as the definition of whiteness is fixed. And historically, the path to whiteness has been extremely narrow.

    The “one-drop rule,” which, for much of American history, legally defined as black anyone with a black ancestor, was used to keep black people from adopting whiteness. Ironically, it has made it easier for Ms. Dolezal to claim blackness without others questioning the assertion. If they are not themselves of a similar hue to Ms. Dolezal, many black people watching her story unfold can recognize in her features a cousin, parent or grandparent. African-Americans vary in appearance from light-skinned to coal black, straight- to curly-haired, keen- to broad-featured, and every possible combination in between.

    This diversity is partly a result of this one-drop rule. The original intent of it was to protect racial privilege. Sometimes, if their appearance borrowed enough from white ancestors, black Americans could “pass” in white society. But that social sleight of hand came with many dangers, such as the chance that black lineage would be outed in the skin or hair of one’s progeny. Segregation simply would not work if society was fuzzy on who got the nice drinking fountain, the front seat on the bus and the right to vote. […]

    Ms. Dolezal may not be able to claim even a drop of African-American ancestry, but the way blackness has long been determined means that few would question a woman who presents as white but claims to be black. She was able to trade on a racist element of history to pass believably as a black woman.

    In the days since this story broke, many people have been quick to point out that race is merely a social construct — as if that fact changes the very real impact of race on the lives of minorities. The persistence of systemic racism means there are penalties for blackness in America.

    Black women — real ones — live at the nexus of that oppression and enduring sexism. The gender pay gap is steeper for them. They are more likely than their white counterparts to live in poverty, to be victims of domestic homicide and sexual assault. If Tyisha Miller or Rekia Boyd, black women who were victims of extrajudicial violence, had been able to slide into whiteness — for just a moment — they might still be alive. (Perplexingly, Ms. Dolezal told Matt Lauer that her decision to identify as black was a matter of “survival.” That is rich, indeed.) But racial oppression is not as easy to shrug off as racial advantage. This is partly because America has spent centuries ensuring that certain people can never be white.

    Being able to shift one’s race is a privilege. Ms. Dolezal’s masquerade illustrates that however much she may empathize with African-Americans, she is not one, because black people in America cannot shed their race. We cannot proclaim the black race a nebulous concept, while strictly policing whiteness and the privileges of that identity. I will accept Ms. Dolezal as black like me only when society can accept me as white like her.

    And a new website is launching: Justice Together

    Ending Police Brutality in the United States

    Police brutality, like sexual abuse from priests, should not exist. Unfortunately, in the United States, police brutality, including the murder of thousands of our citizens, is commonplace. Those we pay to protect us should never needlessly hurt, harm, or kill us. Justice Together is a national 50 state (plus DC) coalition of women and men who are bold enough to believe in an America without police brutality. It’s an ambitious goal, but one worth pursuing. Our lives depend on it.

    Go visit, if you can – they’re looking for people in the USAmerica to help out!

31. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    16 June 2015 at 10:32 pm

    I long for the day when I read a headline that says ‘Former sheriff Joe Arpaio in jail’.

    ****

    From Addicting Info:
    Rachel Dolezal’s invented blackness spawns the #actualblack Twitter movement:

    Rachel Dolezal is certainly an enigma. Identifying herself as black, this extremely white woman has people from all over the political spectrum wondering what to think. On the one hand, you have a woman who genuinely feels as though she belongs to the black culture. On the other hand, you have a family that seems wrought with dysfunction; becoming someone else may have been her way of dealing with it.

    Dolezal’s choice to become an African-American woman through hairstyle and what appears to be a pretty poorly done spray-tan is definitely NOT resonating well with many in the black community. Rachel Dolezal may be enjoying pretending she’s black, but in the end she just isn’t.

    As a white man, I can tell you that never could I imagine what growing up dealing with racism would have been like. I was hired at 15 for my first job at the ice cream stand by the river with little trouble and worked with a crew of all white people in a city that was nowhere near all white. I saw blacks and Hispanics apply for jobs they would never get. In no way could I pretend to know what that felt like. I know what it felt like to watch it happen; it wasn’t at all pleasant.

    Rachel Dolezal wanted to be black, so she simply sprayed it on. She didn’t live through what far too many black people live through, never experienced the racism, the dirty looks, the segregation, no matter how subtle. No matter how much she identifies with the black culture, she is not nor will she ever actually BE black.

    In what can be considered a positive side-effect to Dolezal’s antics, a movement was born on Twitter. #ActualBlack is growing in popularity and looks like it will be trending for quite some time.

    #ActualBlack is the black community’s response to the Dolezal conundrum. In the early stages of the movement, it appeared that pictures of women actually born black would dominate the hashtag:

    The rest are Tweets that you’ll have to click the link to read.

    ****
    From Counter Current News–
    Dog attacks 4 year old girl, dad kills it, saves her, & gets arrested:

    Chris Ford says he did what he had to do. It was a “spur-of-the-moment” decision and he felt he had no choice when the family dog began mauling his daughter.

    But because of his own criminal history, the State said he no longer had the right to defend himself against a human or non-human aggressor. Simply possessing a gun as a felon – even though he used it heroically – has landed him in jail, facing new felony charges and years in prison.

    Right now, 4-year-old Zaynah Ford remains in the hospital. She will survive though thanks to her father’s brave actions, that disregarded his own well-being and freedom to save her life.

    Why the family pit-bull named Tobin attacked Zaynah is unknown. It happened only moments after she had gotten out of the swimming pool at her grandmother’s home on Saturday.

    Chris heard what happened and came running to help when he heard his daughter screaming.

    “My baby is bleeding, I can’t even see her face, I don’t know where all the blood is coming from, I just see a big hole in her head… I pulled him off my daughter; I threw him, as soon as I threw him I grabbed my daughter and ran inside,” Chris Ford recalled.

    When he returned with a firearm, that’s when the State says he broke the law.

    “I shot down; I shot my own dog four times because he attacked my daughter,” Ford added.

    You see, Chris wasn’t breaking the law before. He didn’t actually own a weapon of any sort. But he grabbed his mother’s rifle which she legally owned. He ran over and shot Tobin four times after calling 9-1-1.

    “I stood back about right here, and at that point I fired down, and you could see the bullet hole, fired down there, fired down there, fired down there, and fire down there,” he explained.

    Chris had never been convicted of a violent crime, but that didn’t stop him from being prevented from not only owning a firearm, but even touching one. Now he’s facing one felony charge for that along with one for endangerment and even an animal cruelty charge to add insult to injury.

    He said he had no other choice.

    “I felt that it was my responsibility at that point because if he was a killer dog, he was still part of my family,” Ford continued.

    Why do I think if it had been a white guy, he’d have been hailed as a hero who save his child’s life?

32. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    16 June 2015 at 10:37 pm

    From Flavorwire–
    Turns out the Obama’s like to party. In private.
    The Obamas hosted a secret party for African-American Music History Month with a concert by Prince:

    Instagram seems to have outed the Obamas as throwers of superlative — and secret — parties. This weekend, a particular party involving Stevie Wonder and Prince started buzzing around celebrities’ social media (quarterback Russell Wilson posed with Ciara and posted it to Intstagram, which alone wouldn’t have been revealing if he hadn’t captioned it: “Dancing at The @WhiteHouse to Prince and Stevie Wonder with my lady Ciara. Thanks Mr. President and First Lady!”)

    The party, as CNN reports, was being kept especially secret, as it was not recorded in President Obama’s public schedule. During a briefing with the press yesterday, the White House press secretary remained cryptic, saying:

    The President and first lady did hold a private party at the White House over the weekend, but given the private nature of that event, I don’t have a lot of details to discuss from here.
    Allegedly, however, around 500 guests were present at the event, and Wilson’s mention of Prince was actually in reference to a performance he gave, during which he brought Stevie Wonder onstage for a duet. The event, according to Page Six, was a celebration of African-American Music Appreciation Month.

    Also spotted at the event were Tyler Perry, Connie Britton, Angela Bassett, Jon Bon Jovi, James Taylor, Gayle King, and Tracee Ellis Ross.

    I had no idea there was an African-American Music Appreciation Month.

33. rq says

    17 June 2015 at 12:09 am

    But because of his own criminal history, the State said he no longer had the right to defend himself against a human or non-human aggressor.

    I thought I’d seen all the bullshit.

34. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    17 June 2015 at 12:51 am

    From Everyday Feminism–
    20 examples that prove white privilege protects white people from the police:
    (here’s 10 of them)

    5. You Have a Greater Chance of Being Taken Seriously as a Victim

    Doubt. Interrogation. Harassment. Arrest. These are things police officers have done when they respond to intimate partner violence in communities of color. But not just to abusers – to survivors.

    This is just one of the ways victims of color struggle to be taken seriously as victims, leading us to not only be criminalized and treated as suspects, but also to have our calls to police go unanswered, our pleas for help ignored, even our murders uninvestigated.

    Consider these alarming facts: Black women are incarcerated at four times the rate of white women. We’re more likely to be arrested for defending ourselves against violent partners. We’re the fastest growing prison population, and 75% of women in prison are domestic violence survivors.

    And one last sobering number: Black women are three times more likely than other racial groups to be killed by a current or former partner.

    Deanna Cook is one Black woman who tragically lost her life after her pleas for help went unanswered. The final moments of her life were recorded in her last of many 911 calls, and her family is speaking out about how her death shows the lethal impact when law enforcement systems fail to take intimate partner violence seriously in communities of color.

    With the issue of IPV, problems with police show up across all racial groups, but survivors of color have to deal with an added racialized bias that gets in the way when we need help.

    6. Class Makes a Difference in How You’re Treated

    A lot of state violence targets people living in poverty – poor white folks and poor people of color alike.

    But while white people with class privilege can escape this targeting, wealthy and middle class people of color still experience the same old story of being treated like a criminal.

    In fact, wealthy Black folks may have to deal with more racial profiling, as they’re picked out for “looking like they don’t belong” in their upscale neighborhoods and suspected of being there to steal expensive cars and break into homes.

    Rock star Lenny Kravitz, scholar Henry Louis Gates, and comedian Chris Rock are just a few celebrities who are rich, famous, and, as Rock puts it, “still Black” – still being stopped by police for driving their own cars and entering their own homes.

    Which makes their lives as wealthy Black people still markedly different from the lives of their wealthy white neighbors.

    7. Your Pain Is Seen as Pain

    Research shows that many people view Black folks as able to endure more pain than white people.

    This racial empathy gap has real consequences, like prescribing fewer pain medications to Black people.

    A lack of empathy for Black pain also leads people to cast a “superhuman bias” on Black people – including Black victims of police violence – viewing them as the stereotypical “magical Negro” trope.

    For instance, police officer Darren Wilson’s testimony about Black teenager Michael Brown as a “demon” who charged at him through bullets was believable to many people, including members of a grand jury who decided not to indict Wilson.

    If someone’s perceived as incapable of feeling pain, violence against them isn’t seen as a problem – it’s even seen as necessary for taking down any threat they may pose with all of their mythical “superhuman” strength.

    8. Your Children Are Treated as Children

    When the racial empathy gap is applied to children of color, it leads people, including police officers who hold racial biases, to see innocent Black kids as guilty adults.

    In addition to seeing Black children as older and more guilty than their white peers, these officers are more likely to use force against Black youth.

    It’s a terrifying situation for our children.

    Consider how it turned out for twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, who was playing with a toy gun when police officers drove up and took one-and-a-half to two seconds to shoot him. When they called the station to report the shooting, they said Tamir was “maybe 20.”

    They also watched him dying in agony without administering CPR. And handcuffed his 14-year-old sister when she ran to his aid.

    These is a completely callous way to treat any child, but being treated as a child is a privilege that’s not afforded to Black children.

    Parents of white children don’t have to tell them the police will treat their skin color as a threat, warn them about the dangers of showing anger (even if they’re mistreated), or answer the heartbreaking question of “Why am I a target?”

    9. You’ll Get Less Time in Jail If You’re Arrested

    One reason for people of color to fear the police is the fact that if we’re arrested and charged with a crime, we’re likely to face harsher punishments than we would if we were white.

    The differences in the way we’re treated begin at the very start of our journey through the criminal justice system.

    For African-Americans, for instance, we’re more likely to stay in prison awaiting a trial and most never get a trial. Then, once sentenced, Black men get prison sentences nearly 20% longer than white men sentenced for the same crime.

    The reason most people sit in jail without a trial is absolutely infuriating: they simply can’t afford bail. This essentially sets up two different systems – one for the poor and one for the rich.

    Studies show that those who can’t afford bail face tougher sentences and that Black folks have to pay a lot more to bail out. With limited options for defendants, “bail is used as ransom to extract a guilty plea.”

    It’s scary enough to make a person of color afraid to turn themselves in, even if it’s “the right thing” to do.

    For instance, when 18-year-old Allen Bullock’s parents encouraged him to turn himself in after he was photographed damaging a police car during the Baltimore protests sparked by Freddie Gray’s murder, they didn’t expect it to turn out like it did. Bullock was hit with a $500,000 bail – higher than that of the police officers charged with killing Freddie Gray – and he faces the possibility of life in prison.

    Simply put, the criminal justice system doesn’t have the same measure of “justice” for all people.

    When the difference between two crimes is the race of the person committing it, white privilege can save you on fines, probation time, and incarceration time.

    10. You’re Less Likely to Get Arrested for Non-Violent Offenses

    Knowing that our sentences will be harsher if arrested and charged is bad enough – add to that the fact that people of color are more likely to get arrested in the first place, and you can see how we take greater risks than white people when we interact with police.

    Nothing makes this more clear than the War on Drugs – which, supposedly, keeps us all safe from dangerous drug users and dealers.

    In reality, this war’s approach leads to a rate of arrest for Black people with non-violent drug offenses that’s ten times higher than the arrest rate of whites – even though white people use more drugs.

    Thousands of people are serving life without parole for non-violent offenses – and 65% of those people are Black.

    One of them is Bill Winters, a 54-year-old man whose record of non-violent offenses ended with taking Gobstopper candy from an unlocked oncologist’s office, for which he now serves the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole.

    When weighing the risk of arrest and incarceration for a non-violent offense, white people have far less threatening numbers to consider.

    11. You’re Less Likely to Be Killed for a Non-Violent Crime

    Even if you overlook the racial disparities in arrests and sentencing, and even if you believe that the people who “do the crime” deserve to do prison time, we’re supposed to all have due process with a fair trial.

    Instead, people of color are more likely to be killed as a result of coming into contact with police for a non-violent offense.

    A Black man named Ervin Leon Edwards was tasered to death after being taken into police custody for sagging pants. His girlfriend begged police not to use their stun guns on him because of his high blood pressure. Between her pleas, his partial deafness, and his mental disability, you have to wonder why this man arrested for a non-violent crime was tased in the first place – and so severely that it led to his death.

    In addition to disability and mental health, factors such as age and language barriers should mean that police take extra care with the citizens they approach – but in cases like the beating of 84-year-old Chinese man Kang Wong, who was stopped for jay-walking, those factors make people of color less safe around police. Fortunately, Wong survived the beating – but the fact that violence was used against him in the first place is outrageous.

    A non-violent offense should not be punished with an immediate death sentence, but for people of color, it’s more likely that it will.

    12. You’re Less Likely to Be Killed for a Violent Crime

    It’s so ironic that police often say they “had” to kill someone to eliminate a violent threat, when they’ve already demonstrated that it’s possible in many cases to do that without killing anybody.

    And a white person has a greater chance of being taken in alive.

    Yuvette Henderson, a Black woman in Emeryville, CA, was not given that chance. Police say she was holding a gun, though activists dispute that claim, and neither party’s account says that Henderson ever pointed a weapon at officers. Whatever the truth was, it ended with police killing her with a military-grade, automatic AR-15 rifle.

    Could police have avoided her violent death? I can’t speak for them, of course, but I can point out that just two weeks earlier and half a block away, a white man named Sebastian Ledwick opened fire on officers, who arrested him without killing him.

    Countless examples show violent white people being apprehended by police and living to face their trials.

    For people of color, even a “suspicion” of violence can end in our deaths – and then it’s harder for us to see justice as victims.

    13. You Don’t Have to Fear Being Killed by Police Even If You Do Nothing Wrong

    The terrifying truth is, we don’t even have to talk about whether people of color are committing violent or non-violent crimes when they’re killed by police, because we’re also more likely to be killed by police for doing absolutely nothing wrong.

    The ways police target our neighborhoods, stereotype us as criminals, and see us as inherently dangerous combine to put people of color simply living their lives at risk of being killed by police.

    Black Marine Sergeant Manuel Loggins, Jr. was getting into his car, where his nine- and fourteen-year-old daughters were sitting, when a sheriff’s deputy who “feared for the safety” of the girls shot and killed him.

    Akai Gurley was coming home to one of New York City’s public housing developments, where officers do “vertical patrols” sweeping hallways and stairwells with guns drawn. Officer Peter Liang was doing just that when he shot Gurley in a staircase, then went back downstairs instead of offering him medical aid.

    Gurley was killed just for coming home and Loggins, for picking up his daughters.

    These are everyday activities white people can engage in without being profiled as a violent criminal and executed.

    14. You’re Less Likely to Be Stopped or Killed Because You ‘Fit the Profile’

    So if people of color can be stopped or killed by police without doing anything wrong, what is the deciding factor that puts usin contact with police so often?

    As Jezebel Delilah X writes, “These officers are rarely from the communities they patrol, and they’re more likely to utilize stereotyping and racial profiling to identify potential criminals.”

    Breaking down the numbers for New York City’s Stop-and-Frisk policy, it’s clear how often race determines who gets stopped. In 2013, nearly nine out of ten of those stopped under the policy were Black or Latinx – and about 90% were innocent.

    Innocence makes no difference in these tactics of policing, as Miami resident Earl Sampson can confirm. Sampson was stopped by police a whopping 258 times over the course of four years, most frequently being accused of or arrested for trespassing at the store where he works.

    The idea behind such policing is that it’ll get criminals off the streets.

    The reality is that it’s legal racial profiling, harassment of innocent people of color, and just one more factor that leads people of color to feel unsafe around police.

35. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    17 June 2015 at 1:20 am

    rq @33:
    I’ve got some more unbelievable bullshit for you. I’m reading the Everyday Feminism article I linked to above, and I came across a link to this 2013 article, which discusses the story of Bill Winters:

    This past August, the Lafayette-based IND Monthly published a story about a 54-year-old man named Bill Winters, incarcerated at a medium-security prison in Epps, Louisiana. Winters, who is black, was arrested in June 2009, after he drunkenly entered an unlocked oncologist’s office on a Sunday morning, setting off a security alarm. When police arrived, he had rummaged through a desk drawer, and was in possession of a box of Gobstoppers candy. Winters was convicted of simple burglary a week before Thanksgiving, and given a seven-year prison sentence—hardly a slap on the wrist. But a few days later, the prosecutor in his case, Assistant District Attorney Alan Haney, sought additional punishment for Winters, under the state’s habitual offender law. Based on his record of nonviolent offenses, which went back to 1991 and ranged from cocaine possession to burglary, the trial court resentenced Winters to twelve years without any chance of parole. But Haney was still not satisfied. He appealed the ruling, arguing that the court had imposed an “illegally lenient sentence” and that the rightful punishment was life without the possibility of parole.

    At a subsequent hearing, Lafayette Police Chief Jim Craft estimated that Winters had been arrested more than twenty times, calling him a “career criminal who victimized a lot of citizens in our city.” But it seemed clear that he was more of a thorn in the side of law enforcement than a looming threat to society. His brothers, Dennis and James, testified that Winters had been homeless at the time of his offense and that he had a history of addiction; James had overcome his own drug problems and said that he would be willing to “take [Winters] in and work with him.” A former Lafayette police officer who had once worked at a correctional facility where Winters was held, said that although he did not know him well, Winters “didn’t cause problems” and had potential for rehabilitation. But this past summer, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals issued its decision: “The state asserts that because of the defendant’s particular multiple offender status, the law mandates a minimum sentence of life in prison without benefit of parole, probation, or suspension of sentence. We agree.”

    Dennis Winters was incredulous when he heard the news about his brother. “What? This makes no sense,” he told IND Monthly. “I don’t understand what these people are trying to do. He’s not a violent person. He’s fragile. He wouldn’t hurt anybody, except maybe for himself. I just don’t get how they’re going to give him life for some Gobstopper candy.”

    Life in prison for nonviolent offenses?! Yet Darren Wilson gets to kill Michael Brown, Jr and doesn’t even get charged with a crime!

36. WMDKitty -- Survivor says

    17 June 2015 at 2:14 am

    So.

    This Rachel Dolezal thing.

    “Transracial”.

    She keeps using that word. I do not think it means what she thinks it means.

    It’s NOT about “transcending race”.

    Michael Jackson jokes aside, you can’t change your race.

    The term “transracial” is an adoption-specific term. All it means is that a family of race X has adopted children who are not-X

    TBH, this whole thing is alternately confusing me, and upsetting me. On the one paw, I’m sitting here making that flat-what face and saying “What. the. fuck.”

    On the other, I’m kinda angry, because deception just makes me angry. I don’t like to be lied to, and outside of extreme life-and-death circumstances (like hiding Jews in Germany), I feel I am obligated to speak the truth.

    Ms. Dolezal would have been just fine presenting as White and doing everything in her power to help. Her “playing black” is offensive on so many levels, I don’t know where to start. I feel like it’s analogous to someone claiming to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, etc., just to get attention or because they perceive it as “trendy”. (Right, it’s so trendy to be the target of haters, ranging from mild slurs to all-out violence. So cool, all the kids are doing it. Yep. /s)

    Anyway, uh, other people have written about it far more eloquently than I’ve done, and I probably ought to leave it to actual POC to hash this one out.

37. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    17 June 2015 at 9:18 am

    Over in the Lounge, Okidemia had a question about ‘blackface’. I searched for a few informative links to aid in their understanding and I thought this information might be welcome over here as well (especially given the actions of Rachel Dolezal), so here’s a cross-post:

    I’m going to post a few links and excerpts from them to illustrate what blackface is and why it’s bad. This could be informative not just for you, but also for anyone who may not understand why Rachel Dolezal’s years of blackface are insensitive and steeped in racial bigotry.

    This may help in understanding of blackface:
    (excerpt)

    The proliferation of Halloween blackface may be scary, but it’s not particularly surprising. As Austen put it, Halloween is a holiday in which “you’re supposed to have irreverence. That’s what masking is about—you’re doing something that’s daring or dangerous.” But this is the wrong kind of dangerous—people like Hough and Dell’Acqua are worryingly ignorant about their makeup’s historical context. “I think that we’re getting farther away from people understanding the history of blackface,” Austen said. “The reason it’s stupid to put on blackface is because you can’t separate that from the history of minstrelsy, and minstrelsy involves dehumanizing, insulting caricatures of black people.”

    These caricatures were borne in part out of slavery. “A lot of slaves would protect themselves from punishment by being beloved,” Austen said. “But it wasn’t just protection. It was, in a lot of ways, subversion. If you pretend to be simple and lazy, you get out of work. A lot of songs that survived slavery also seem to have a lot of coded messages—a code to escape or a code that was a subversive way to insult your masters.”

    The masters had their own reasons for imbuing blackface roles with goofy character traits. “They have to dehumanize or they can’t treat people like they’re not humans,” said Austen. “Inventing this idea of this carefree person who is simpler, it was a fantasy that not only allowed you to not think that you were punishing these people because they were happy, but it also allowed America this fantasy to be what they wished they could be.”

    White working class and immigrant Americans used blackface as an outlet to deal with “profound” social change, said Matthew Pratt Guterl, Chair of the Department of American Studies at Brown University and author of Seeing Race in Modern America. These changes included an emerging factory system that turned Americans into assembly line workers with reduced rights and individuality. “The demonization of black people in popular working-class culture is one way to work through anxieties about class,” Guterl said. “It’s a way for them to position themselves above black people.”

    Though the practice lost popularity during the early 20th century, the release of Al Jolson’s hit musical The Jazz Singer in 1927 heralded what Austen referred to as “blackface nostalgia.” But 30 years later the Civil Rights Movement smothered any remaining sentimentality under the banner of equality. Despite appearances, Guterl believes young Americans still have a sense of this legacy. “They know full well that there’s a tawdry history to these forms, they just don’t think it matters to them,” he said. “They are unbound by our past.”

    That seemed to be the case at UC Irvine in April when the Asian American fraternity Lambda Theta Delta uploaded a YouTube cover of Justin Timberlake’s “Suit & Tie,” featuring Jay-Z, in which one member appeared in blackface. According to CBS Los Angeles, the video originally included the disclaimer, “No racism intended,” suggesting the students were aware of the makeup’s implications. But they included it anyway. Guterl considers this a perversion of contemporary society’s fluid approach to identity. “We live in a moment where people feel a certain degree of permissiveness—a willingness to be playful with identity,” he said. “And there are people who exploit that willingness to be playful with identity.”

    Here is another article which compares whiteface to blackface and explains why the former is not horrible, but the latter is.
    (excerpt)

    You get the gist. Basically, white people are freaking out over the “double standards” involved in whiteface versus blackface, and crying about how Julianne Hough was criticized after she wore blackface for Halloween. But hey! Everyone deserves an explanation. Here’s why it’s different, as per the RacismSchool Tumblr:

    Blackface evolved in a time when people of color were considered literally less than human. It originated when white people were still allowed to own black people.
    Blackface was used by white people to entertain other white people, the dominant and privileged group.
    Racism was ingrained in our legal system at the time when blackface was most popular.
    Blackface was done as a caricature of black people. It influenced how audiences saw people of color at the time; whiteface hasn’t had an extremely detrimental effect on how the world sees white people. White blonde women didn’t suffer an image crisis after White Chicks.

    and another:

    However, some white folks get it just because they’re informed, maybe through a close relationship with a person of color, maybe just because they’re astute and aware of how the world operates. But the bulk of the reaction, on this site and so many others, is that blackface is just not that serious. But oh, dear friends, it is.

    What’s interesting here is that, as women, we’ve all experienced some level of sexism or, at the very least, disrespect simply because we ARE women. We find fault in it. We gripe about it. We pen big, long diatribes calling it out for its unfairness and put its proverbial head on a pike. So why it’s so difficult to extend that outrage to matters of race is baffling. The basest of explanations is that it’s an inconvenience to be politically correct all the time. What’s a little giggle at a white dude dressed up like Trayvon Martin or a white woman decked out like an inmate or a group of kids chained and shackled like slaves?

    Answer: it makes a mockery of those people. All of them. Not just them, but the stories behind them. Not just them and the stories behind them, but the individual and communal suffering that resulted from their experiences. Just like putting on a headdress and yodeling like a maniac is a dis to Native Americans. Just like dousing your skin with white powder and donning a cheesy geisha costume will inevitably rub a Japanese woman the wrong way.

    And here’s one last link:

    The term “blackface” stems from a theater phenomenon called “minstrelsy” that began in the mid-1800s. White performers would dress as hyperbolic stereotypes of black people, painting their faces with a dark pigment.

    An example of blackface in an old advertisement. GothamNurse/Flickr

    Minstrel shows portrayed black people as lazy, as cheaters, and as a whole host of other ugly stereotypes.

    Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New York performer during that time, is regarded as the “father” of the American minstrel show. He was popular for his song “Jump Jim Crow” in which he would sing and dance in blackface.

    The chorus:

    Weel about and turn about and do jis so,
    Eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.

    Though the origin of the name Jim Crow is unknown, Rice portrayed an exaggerated negative stereotype of a black person onstage. (The name would later be used to describe a set of laws and practices that took away many constitutional rights from black citizens.)

    A postcard advertising a minstrel show. /WikiMedia Commons

    While this would be highly offensive today, Rice was performing during a particularly hateful time in this country’s history: before the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Minstrelsy became a popular form of American entertainment, and minstrel singing groups began to form. Blackface was also popular in vaudeville performances through the 1930s.

38. rq says

    17 June 2015 at 9:32 am

    I have… a weird feeling when people say something along the lines of ‘leave it to the actual POC to hash this one out’. I mean, yes, it’s up to them to explain how they feel about a white person appropriating their culture and lying about being black… but. It was a white person, and we as white people should be able to step up and offer an opinion and stand in solidarity with what our more-oppressed fellow citizens have to say about it. We do have some sort of responsibility, even if it is only the collective mantle of white privilege. Actions like ‘leave it to the actual POC to hash this one out’, with no actual condemnation or supportive voices offered by us, is exactly what leaves them feeling like we cause a problem and leave them to figure it out on their own. No, it isn’t just their problem – it is a problem with white privilege, and we have to be able to acknowledge that and offer our support, instead of just letting them deal with it. (This doesn’t mean jumping into every conversation, but it does mean recognizing the problematic aspects (as WMDKitty does, with the term ‘transracial’), and actually expressing some kind of condemnation for the lies and the fraud perpetrated in any instance – or some form of support that goes beyond ‘well, I don’t/can’t have an opinion on this, I’m white’. You sure as hell can have an opinion on racism and blackface, and if you don’t feel like you have enough info to form an opinion, well, there’s lots of articles out there to help you out – from a black perspective, from a trans person perspective, from intersections.)
    And for what it’s worth, there’s a whole set of divided ideas about Rachel Dolezal going around, I know I’ve posted several articles, not all of which agree with each other. From pretty major voices.

    Moving on.

    This is What a “Good Cop” Looks Like, Here’s the Video All Cops Should be Making

    A courageous Georgia police officer, identified as Billy Ray Fields, has taken a strong stance against the rampant police abuse of authority. In a viral video, originally posted on Mediatakeout, Fields states that he supports the police accountability movement as a means of ridding departments of the bad cops.

    In the video, Fields claims that people often tell him that “it’s a bad time to be a cop,” to which he tells them that now is a “perfect time to be a cop.” He then expresses his gratitude towards a movement that has begun to expose the illicit actions of rogue officers across the nation.

    The clearly frustrated Fields “keeps it professional, but real at the same time,” as he declares his support for the police accountability movement. He says the movement works to expose bad cops, and to hold them accountable for engaging in wrongdoing under the color of authority.

    He claims that good officers still exist but are being tainted by the actions of the bad officers. And while a common refrain from police accountability experts has been; if there were good officers, they would stop the bad ones from brutalizing people, Fields’ expression of gratitude for bad officers being held accountable shows that there are cops that want to change the culture of policing.

    Offering no excuses Fields lays down the gauntlet to other cops, stating:

    When I became a cop, I took an oath knowing what I would face in these streets… This young generation they’re our future and some of them don’t have a clue nor a plan. So it’s not only my job to uphold the law, but to show, guide and lead them in the right direction.

    He then provides a clear example of the type of quality of character that is necessary for those that engage in the profession of policing, as he states:

    I’m the same guy with the badge on as well as off. I give the dope boys and gang members the same amount of respect and courtesy as I would a judge or a lawyer.

    While some may scoff at the notion of giving any of the aforementioned groups respect, the idea that treating each individual you encounter with courtesy and respect is of great value, and in short supply in police state USA.

    Because at the end of the day we’ve all done bad at one time or another. It’s not my job to judge how you choose to live your life, as we are all one nation under god.

    He claims to fully understand that by even making this video and releasing it publicly he may be dooming his future in law enforcement, as officers which cross the “thin blue line,” and speak out about abuse and corruption, often find themselves blackballed from the profession of policing altogether.

    If there must be an institution of policing, it would surely be made more honorable if officers began to stand up and speak out about it rather than toeing the “thin blue line” in fear of retribution.

    More like this. Video at the link. Oh, and Fields is black – do you think that’s a coincidence?

    Hawks Sefolosha and Antic will face N.Y. trial. Got his leg broken by the NYPD.

    Hawks players Pero Antic and Thabo Sefolosha have a trial date of Sept. 9 in New York for the misdemeanor charges stemming from an arrest outside a nightclub in the city in April.

    The trial date was set in a hearing in New York City Criminal Court on Tuesday.

    Both players were charged with obstructing governmental administration. Antic also was charged with one count of disorderly conduct and one count of second-degree harassment. Sefolosha also was charged with one count of resisting arrest and one count of disorderly conduct. The players have remained steadfast in their innocence.

    Sefolosha suffered a broken right fibula and ligament damage during the arrest that led to season-ending surgery. He said the injuries were caused by the police. He appeared at the hearing in a walking boot and using a cane.

    The incident occurred about 4 a.m. outside the club 1OAK on April 8. Several videos of the arrest were obtained and posted by the website TMZ. Both Antic and Sefolosha have previously said the videos speak for themselves when declaring their innocence.

    Sefolosha’s recovery from the injury is progressing slowly.

    Virginia Police Union Freaks Out Over 3 Word Bumper Sticker, Says It May Get Cops Killed

    You remember all those times you have changed your vote, stance on gun control, or your religion while reading a bumper sticker on the back of someone’s car at a traffic stop?

    Well, a black BMW in Virginia has made the news over a sticker on their car with “Shoot A Cop” written on it, because the state Fraternal Order of Police thinks that bumper stickers are quite powerful, and worries someone may take the sticker’s advice.

    The station went to their legal expert to see if the bumper sticker was actually protected by the First Amendment, or if it constituted a terroristic threat.

    Of course, the legal expert asserted that no matter how inflammatory the sticker may be, it is still constitutionally protected by the first amendment.

    “As obnoxious and stupid and potentially dangerous as that might be,” said NBC12 legal analyst Steve Benjamin. “That’s the expression of a message, and that’s protected by the first amendment.”

    Benjamin also asserted that the Virginia police cannot legally pull someone over for exercising their right to free speech, even if it hurts their feelings.

    He also acknowledged that doesn’t mean they won’t, as we know- officers seem to make their own rules.

    “The police cannot detain a person for the legal exercise of their first amendment right to free speech. But you are inviting that kind of attention when you drive around with something that inflammatory.” Benjamin continued.

    The police union however, has some deeply hurt feelings, and aside from worrying that someone will be going about their day and see the bumper sticker, and decide to go shoot cops- he also worries that the one little bumper sticker may dissuade “good cops” from joining their ranks.

    “Officers make mistakes,” Carroll petulantly continued. “I understand that, but I did not know that it now has become fashionable to hate the police.”

    Apparently Carroll has missed the thousands of people in major cities all across the country taking to their streets to demand change from the violent police.

    Perhaps it is not “hating police” that has become fashionable, maybe police acting as judge, jury, and executioner, has just become unfashionable.

    As of Monday evening, 520 people have been killed by police since the first of the year, on average, 64 police officers per year are killed in the line of duty.

    Also, perhaps they’re talking about photography. It’s possible!

    WATCH – Community sends #LAPD Chief Charlie Beck off in style after today’s police commission meeting. Enjoy! – https://youtu.be/mk2y5lX3XaQ

    Oooooh, this one. The Paranoia of Police Unions. The mostly sound like whiny cry-babies, but maybe that’s how you protect your own authority.

    Police reforms embolden criminals: It’s a leap of logic that paints police as the victims of reform. Residents, too: Shape up police departments, and officers will become too fearful to enforce the law.

    So is it Cleveland that’s crazy, or the Cleveland Municipal Court, or the U.S. Department of Justice? Maybe its the chief of Cleveland’s police unions who’s lost touch with reality.

    Loomis issued his comments in response to a dangerous incident this past Sunday: An officer fired at a suspect during a foot chase. Other unseen suspects were trying to draw police officers into a field to fire on them from above, he said.

    Criminals are seizing the opportunity proffered by a public push for police reforms to strike within cities and at officers, goes the logic. Police-union chiefs in other cities have made the same paranoid leaps, and the fiction is being manipulated into a self-fulfilling pseudo-truth: Law-enforcement agencies in Baltimore and New York have matched their next-level concern-trolling with police drawdowns—or what strongly appear to be coordinated work slowdowns—creating a dangerous reality to match the pitched rhetoric.

    “The criminals are taking advantage of the situation in Baltimore since the unrest,” said Gene Ryan, president of the Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3. Ryan—who denounced peaceful protesters as a “lynch mob”—made the statement shortly after Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby indicted six Baltimore Police Department officers in the death of Freddie Gray.

    “Criminals feel empowered now,” Ryan said in a statement. “There is no respect. Police are under siege in every quarter. They are more afraid of going to jail for doing their jobs properly than they are of getting shot on duty.”

    Arrests in Baltimore subsequently dipped, just as shootings and murders skyrocketed. The proximate cause for this crime surge is the subject of intense debate, but the situation looks an awful lot like a police slowdown.

    New York saw an honest-to-goodness work stoppage to protest New York Mayor Bill de Blasio at the end of last year. It ended up being a bust, from the perspective of a police union hell-bent on forcing the public to side with police: Arrests fell by two-thirds, and New York City didn’t get any unsafer. Meanwhile, when New York’s police-union chief waved the bloody flag, it lost him public favor.
    “There is blood on many hands, from those that incited violence under the guise of protest to try to tear down what police officers do every day,” said Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association in New York, to the Associated Press. “That blood on the hands starts at the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.” […]

    “It’s going to get somebody killed,” Loomis told The Plain Dealer in response, meaning that any changes would put officers in peril. “There’s going to be a time when someone isn’t going to want to do that paperwork, so he’s going to keep that gun in its holster.”

    People are already getting killed: Timothy Russell, Malissa Williams, and Tamir Rice are three of them. And very few police officers are ever prosecuted in deaths like theirs. Paperwork seems like a small price to pay to bolster accountability in law enforcement. In fact, it seems like only the start.

    Kinda wish it was longer and more in-depth. I think there’s a lot that could be examined with that union attitude.

39. rq says

    17 June 2015 at 9:44 am

    I think what I meant to say with that intro previous comment was that we need to be able to say ‘white people, don’t do that’. And we need to say it.

    Annnnyway. Stream-of-consciousness commenting kind of loses something in translation. :/

    Prosecutors ask court to limit release of Freddie Gray evidence — or post it all online

    Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby wants a judge to block defense attorneys from selectively releasing evidence in the Freddie Gray case — or facilitate an agreement between the two sides to post all of the evidence online in one fell swoop.

    In an unusual Circuit Court filing this week, Mosby’s office requested a protective order barring defense attorneys for the six Baltimore police officers charged in Gray’s arrest and death from releasing any of the evidence due to them June 26 through court discovery, including Gray’s autopsy.

    Absent that order, however, prosecutors said in the filing they would rather accept a deal to post all of the evidence online than “remain silent” — as is required of them by law — while defense attorneys leak evidence that suits their needs, which Mosby’s office said they are inclined to do.

    “Indeed, if the Defendants were to consent and the court would so order, the State would have no objection to posting the entire autopsy report on the internet, along with all of the discovery in the case,” the prosecutors wrote. “Defendants, however, want to have it both ways. They want the freedom to publicize selected aspects of the discovery, while requiring the State to follow the law that prevents comments in order to ensure a fair trial.”

    It was unclear whether the suggestion in the court filing was a rhetorical device or if the defense attorneys would consider the offer. Both the state’s attorney’s office and defense attorneys for the accused officers declined to comment on the motion Tuesday.

    But outside legal observers said it was bizarre.

    Legal ethics are a matter of law, and it’s unclear if the standard requiring prosecutors to protect a defendant’s right to a fair trial could be ignored if the defendant gave consent to post evidence online, said Kurt Nachtman, a defense attorney and former Baltimore prosecutor.

    What’s more, he said, the different standards for defense attorneys and prosecutors on releasing information — which the state laments in its motion — are in place for a reason.

    “The same rules don’t apply to both teams, and there’s a reason for that. The state has a higher ethical obligation,” he said. “The state has more power over swaying the general public than defense attorneys do. When the general public hears a defense attorney talk, they just think, ‘Oh he’s just advocating for his client.’ The state has the power and the authority to protect the fight for justice.”

    Todd Eberly, a political scientist at St. Mary’s College, agreed.

    “There are limits on the prosecution, and there are limits because it’s funded by a government that theoretically has unlimited resources,” Eberly said. “And there are very few [limits] placed on the defense because we operate under the assumption of innocence.”

    The motion was the latest attempt by Mosby’s office to restrict information in the case, but the first to suggest that the state would hold a different stance in the unlikely scenario it could offload evidence in the case wholesale.

    Latest city police stats say shootings up 81%, robberies up 12%, but total crime flat…. (Baltimore) <- More on this increasing crime subject coming up.

    Police, Mayor butt heads with union over reform

    The Fraternal Order of Police said Tuesday that it was moving forward with an “after action report” of what occurred during the riots, but without command transmission tapes that it has requested from the Police Department. Union President Lt. Gene Ryan said in a statement that Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts “has missed an opportunity to regain the trust of the city as well as the rank and file police officers.”

    “The bottom line is simply that our leadership — Commissioner Batts and State’s Attorney [Marilyn] Mosby — has done nothing since the riots to investigate protocol shortcomings and better prepare our officers,” Ryan said. “This is obviously a concern to my members, but should also greatly concern the citizens of Baltimore City. The conditions that led to the riot are still present and any incident can serve, once again, as a flash point.”

    Police accused Ryan and his public relations staff of grandstanding, and said he had not objected to an end-of-the-week deadline for the agency to provide the records. Rawlings-Blake said the union’s statements were “without basis and do nothing to help our city heal.” […]

    On Tuesday, Ryan said the union has not been given “all written correspondence and radio transmissions between City Hall and the Baltimore Police Department during the riots.”

    “For more than a month, we have repeatedly requested that this information be provided to no avail,” his statement said. “The fact that we have not been supplied the appropriate information shows obvious inaction or, quite possibly, an intentional stall tactic on the part of both the [Baltimore Police Department] and City Hall.”

    Police officials objected to what they said was a union characterization that the agency wasn’t improving safety and working conditions. The department listed 11 reforms under way, including training and the purchase of new equipment. The agency also said the International Association of Chiefs of Police is doing an independent review of the police response to the riots.

    “There is no desire on behalf of the Baltimore Police Department to engage in a ‘war of words’ with FOP Lodge 3,” the agency said in its statement.

    Rawlings-Blake said she looked forward to sharing information and to the city’s own review, which will show “the full truth of what happened during the moments before and after the unrest.”

    “It will be made clear that I never ordered the brave men and women of the Baltimore Police Department to stand down,” she said.

    I dunno, I kinda think telling them to ‘stand down’ might not be a bad thing.

    Man lynched in Dominican Republic as tensions run high – from February of this year.

    The apparent lynching of a young man in the Dominican city of Santiago has reignited fears of a looming humanitarian crisis.

    The body of a man, apparently of Haitian descent, was found hanged from a tree in a city park, his body beaten and his hands and feet bound by rope.

    Police were quick to say his death was related to a theft, with preliminary investigations leading policy to identify two suspects. While authorities discarded racism or xenophobia as motives, the incident heightened tensions over people of Haitian origin in the Dominican Republic.

    “Nobody knows yet the reason behind the lynching, but it comes in the context of constant discrimination and violence against Haitians,” says Santiago Canton, of Robert F Kennedy Human Rights.

    The death of the man came just hours after a group of Dominicans in Santiago, the country’s second-largest city, publicly burned the Haitian flag. Elsewhere, human rights groups have reported that a man was recently denied access to a public bus because he “looked Haitian”.

    Anti-Haitian sentiment has been on the rise in the Dominican Republic since a 2013 court ruling, which denied children of Haitian migrants their citizenship retroactive to 1930, leaving tens of thousands of Dominican-born people of Haitian descent stateless and at risk of being deported.

    Bowing to international outrage over the ruling, the Dominican government passed a law last year that requires people born to undocumented foreign parents, whose birth was never registered in the Dominican Republic, to request residency permits, which will then allow them to apply for citizenship after two years.

    However, the 1 February deadline for registry passed with fewer than 7,000 requests – a fraction of the nearly 200,000 people believed to be entitled to make them. Bureaucratic obstacles, lack of information and opposition to the new requirement have been cited as reasons for the low registry.

    “They shouldn’t have to apply for residency. They are Dominicans,” said Canton.

    Erika Guevara Rosas, the Americas director at Amnesty International, agreed. “When the vast majority of these people were born, the Dominican law at the time recognized them as citizens,” she said. “Stripping them of this right, and then creating impossible administrative hurdles to stay in the country is a violation of their human rights.”

    The Dominican government has said the change to the nationality law was intended to tackle illegal immigration from neighboring Haiti. The two countries, which share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, have a troubled history, and anti-Haitian sentiment has run high in the Dominican Republic since the birth of the two nations.

    And now that deportation deadline is approaching. The government seems to be constantly delaying, but what they should be doing is just not deporting anyone.

    On June 15, 1921, Bessie Coleman became the first Black woman to receive an international pilot’s license. #edchat

    WNBA Star Tina Charles Donates Half Her $100,000 Salary To Charity

    WNBA players don’t earn a salary anywhere close to their NBA counterparts, but that’s not stopping New York Liberty center Tina Charles from sharing her wealth.

    Charles will donate half of her $100,000 WNBA salary to a charity she started to honor her aunt, who died from multiple organ failure in 2013, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday. This isn’t the first time Charles has done this either.

    Last season, she donated $50,000 to “Hopey’s Heart,” her foundation. Hopey’s Heart also honors Wes Leonard, a high school basketball player who died of a sudden cardiac arrest in 2011 after hitting a game-winning shot. It provides health education, CPR training and automatic external defibrillators (AEDs) for schools and community recreation centers.

    Over the past few years, Charles has bought 142 AEDs for communities in need. She plans to use this season’s $50,000 contribution to buy more and fund her expansion into Europe, where she will donate 16 AEDs in July. Because of Charles and Hopey’s Heart, all EuroLeague women arenas will be outfitted with life-saving AEDs. Charles played for Turkish club Fenerbahce this past winter.

    “People ask me why I want to do this and provide every team and I tell them that I think the best joy of humility is to put the interest of others over yourself,” Charles said in a FIBA press release at the time.

    Earning a living in women’s professional basketball isn’t an overly lucrative career, so for Charles to make such an impact without million-dollar paychecks only magnifies her commitment to her cause, and more importantly, her big heart.

    “Taking an interest in others is key in my life,” she told AP on Tuesday. “It’s my way of giving back. My passion of placing AEDs. Anything I can do to impact an institution with an AED is extremely important to me.”

    Fla. Grand Jury to Hear Evidence in Fatal Police Shooting of Jermaine McBean

    Homicide detectives have completed their investigation into the fatal police shooting of Jermaine McBean, the Florida man who was killed while carrying an unloaded pellet gun and who may have been wearing earbud headphones at the time, impairing his ability to hear the police. Detectives have turned the case over to the prosecutors, who will soon present it to a Florida grand jury, the Associated Press reports.

    This comes nearly two years after the shooting of McBean, a 33-year-old computer engineer. Witnesses saw him strolling along a sidewalk in Oakland Park, Fla., in July 2013 with what appeared to be a rifle. It was actually an unloaded pellet gun, which he had just bought at a pawnshop. Several people called 911, and the police responded promptly.

    Authorities say that Deputy Peter Peraza yelled for McBean to put down the gun. “It appeared like he was ignoring us,” Peraza said later, according to AP. The police report says that McBean pointed the weapon at the responding officers. And that’s when Peraza fired the deadly shots.

    One of the issues in this case is whether McBean was wearing earbud headphones when the police ordered him to turn around and drop the air rifle. McBean’s family says he could not hear the officers because he was listening to music. But the police deny that he was wearing the earpiece.

    But a photo recently emerged that appears to show earbuds in McBean’s ears. This evidence raises questions about why the headphones were later found in McBean’s pocket, NBC News reports.

    McBean’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court last month. Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel responded by blaming McBean for his own death, according to NBC.

    Israel asserts that the shooting was justified and even awarded Peraza a bravery commendation for shooting McBean.

    I’m glad it’s finally going to a Grand Jury, but I think that bravery commendation should be revoked…

40. rq says

    17 June 2015 at 10:17 am

    Moderation.
    I’m having counting issues past couple of days. I don’t like it.

    Charts: Baltimore Crime, Before And After Freddie Gray’s Funeral

    Baltimore saw 43 homicides in May — the city’s deadliest month in 40 years. Some commentators have attributed this rise to protests and increased scrutiny of law enforcement after the funeral for Freddie Gray, who died in police custody in April. This “Ferguson Effect” has supposedly spurred a decline in both police presence and action. Writing at the economics blog Marginal Revolution last week, Alex Tabarrok looked at Baltimore arrest and crime numbers over the past four months and found that homicides, shootings, robberies and even auto thefts had indeed risen while arrests had sharply dropped.

    But it’s necessary to look at these changes in context, and four months of arrest and crime data isn’t enough to determine a true trend. In particular, it’s useful to look back earlier than February, because seasonality has a significant impact on violent crime rates. We pulled arrest data from the Baltimore Police Department since 2013 and crime data since 2011.

    Weekly arrest counts in Baltimore aren’t particularly stable; the second half of 2014 saw major declines that received less attention. Nevertheless, the drop since Gray’s April 27 funeral is striking: [chart]

    During the week of May 3, the Baltimore police made 319 total arrests. That’s a 61 percent year-over-year decline and 41 fewer arrests than the previous low (since 2013), set last Christmas.

    While arrests were dropping, the city did see a sharp increase in homicides and nonfatal shootings: [chart]

    There were 12 homicides and nonfatal shootings in Baltimore the week before the funeral, nearly matching the weekly average from 2011 up to that point (11.3). The next week, that figure doubled to 25. Three weeks later, 39 people were killed or shot in the city, an average of more than five a day.

    There’s a wrinkle here, though. While declining arrests and spiking homicides might paint Baltimore as a city falling into lawlessness, overall violent crime data — which includes homicides and shootings but also robberies, rapes and assaults — shows a less dramatic trend: [chart]

    The four weeks from May 3 through May 30 — when the city saw 1,592 violent crimes — represented an enormous jump from the first three months of the year. Here’s how this span in 2015 compared to the equivalent weeks each year from 2011 to 2014:

    2014: 9.0 percent increase in violent crimes
    2013: 0.1 percent decline
    2012: 5.9 percent decline
    2011: 8.0 percent decline

    The beginning of 2015, a four-year low in violent crime, looks like the real outlier.

    This isn’t to say that Baltimore doesn’t have a serious problem. A 9 percent rise in violent crime is a reversal of an encouraging, multiyear trend. And though all violent crimes are destructive, a spike in homicides is a more serious issue than an equivalent spike in robberies. It’s also possible non-homicide violent crimes are going underreported, at least as compared to before the funeral.

    But the latest week of available data shows some evidence of a reversal: Homicides and shootings dropped 35 percent and violent crime dropped 25 percent from the previous week, while arrests climbed 32 percent.

    Another pool party: Video: White Cop Grabs Black Tween by Her Neck—And Slams Her Against His Squad Car

    Krystal Dixon dropped off her kids and nieces and nephews at the Fairfield, Ohio pool just as she’d done many times before. Not a half hour later, the family was being rushed to the hospital after a violent altercation with local police.

    The incident started so small. When one child didn’t have swimming trunks, staff demanded the family leave.

    Even though Dixon, pregnant and 33, said she had a swimsuit for the child, workers at the Fairfield Aquatic Center—about 25 miles north of Cincinnati—said it was too late.

    What was a minor breach of pool rules then descended into chaos: a white officer using pepper spray on black teenage girls, and one 12-year-old—Dixon’s niece—being slammed against a cop car. Her family claims she has a fractured jaw and broken ribs.

    Two adults were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. A 12-year-old girl was charged with assault and resisting arrest, while a 15-year-old was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

    The two sides paint a different picture of what happened. The family is accusing the cops of using excessive force in the incident. The police say they were just doing their jobs—and besides, the 12 year-old attacked them. But a 911 call by a pool employee reveals concerns over race.

    “Everything’s going crazy and they’re videotaping, trying to make it look like a racist thing and it’s not at all,” the caller said. “They were breaking our policy and we told them they couldn’t be here anymore and it’s really scary and I don’t feel safe.”

    On Tuesday, Dixon’s allies released shocking videos of the June 9 incident and claimed cops used excessive force because of racism. Bishop Bobby Hilton, a Cincinnati pastor who belongs to the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, came forward to present photos of the injured kids.

    “They’re saying a 12-year-old was assaulting somebody and resisting being arrested,” Hilton told The Daily Beast. “Please tell me, where is she assaulting somebody? Why did the officer have to grab her by the neck and push her against the car? It’s just not right.”

    Clyde Bennett, an attorney for Dixon, added: “I could surmise or opine on why [pool staff] wanted them out. They said they’re not appropriately dressed. I’m not convinced that’s why they wanted them out of the pool.”

    “There’s a lot of people in Cincinnati who believe they wanted them out … because they were black,” Bennett added. […]

    Dixon said she brought eight children to the pool at about 3 p.m. and left to pick up her sister, who also planned to spend the day there. One of her nephews didn’t have swimming trunks on and was told to leave.

    Three kids went into the pool, but the others called Dixon, who said she’d be back in 10 minutes with the missing swimsuit. When she arrived, staff told her the kid without the trunks broke the rules by swimming in his clothes.

    Staff then told her the teens still had to leave because of how they behaved when workers informed them of the rules breach.

    The mom decided to get the other kids and go. That’s when, according to Dixon, a park ranger followed her. When the teens came over to see what’s going on, the ranger took out handcuffs.

    The ranger said they’d be arrested if they didn’t leave. He asks for Dixon’s ID, which she doesn’t have on her, then grabs her arm. The children ask the officer to let Dixon go, and the scene escalates.

    The footage shows a group of officers trying to apprehend several teenagers at the scene. A random white civilian is pictured pushing up against a black teen in handcuffs. One teen girl is crying on the ground after being pepper sprayed. Another girl is crying as a cop grabs the back of her neck and pushes her into a squad car.

    The family claims they didn’t do anything wrong. Police provide a vastly different account.

    “They refused to leave and became even more verbally aggressive and belligerent,” Fairfield police officer Doug Day told The Daily Beast.

    When the park ranger put his hand on Dixon, the children and Dixon’s sister “started jumping on the park ranger’s back,” Day said, adding that the injured 12-year-old was striking and pushing one of the officers.

    Police say they weren’t informed of any injuries until after Tuesday’s press conference and denied the family’s claims of excessive force.

    “Our officers used great restraint,” Day said. “At one point, one of our officers felt his gun was being taken away from him. The only weapon he used was the OC spray, to get someone off the back of the officer.”

    “We completely support our officers in what they did,” the cop added.

    Day said witnesses have been supportive of the police and have come forward to share their own videos of the incident.

    “The U.S. is great because you can say anything you want and you’re protected,” Day told The Daily Beast. “But the reality is there doesn’t have to be any factual basis on what you say. They can look at the video and say all the ways we use excessive force. And we can point out all the ways we didn’t.”

    Interlude: Entertainment: Disney In Talks With Oprah Winfrey And David Oyelowo For ‘The Water Man’, Closes Deal With Writer Emily Needell

    EXCLUSIVE: Disney is in discussions with Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films and David Oyelowo’s Yoruba Saxon to come on board and produce feature project The Water Man, written by newbie writer Emma Needell. This is a fairytale moment for Needell, fittingly given she has now closed her deal with the studio. The Water Man is Needell’s first spec script.

    More at the link!

    ACLU of Colorado Statement on Denver DA Mitch Morrissey’s Decision Not to File Charges in Killing of Jessie Hernandez

    In what has become a disturbingly predictable pattern, Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey has once again refused to bring charges against Denver law enforcement officers following a police-involved killing, in this case the January 26th shooting of 17-year-old Jessie Hernandez.

    “Beyond the obvious questions about conflict of interest, it is impossible to trust the objectivity of Mr. Morrissey, given that he has not filed a single indictment following an officer-involved shooting during his tenure as District Attorney.

    “In 2011, the ACLU of Colorado called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the Denver Police Department’s ‘pattern and practice’ of using excessive force and violating the civil rights of Denver residents. We once again renew that call today.

    “A full independent review is necessary, now more than ever, as the community has lost its faith in Denver’s ability to hold police accountable in use-of-force cases.”

    Protesters chanting #Justiceforjesse #JusticeforRyan at the home of Denver DA Mitch Morrisey #EveryoneHasAnAddress
    Denver DA Mitch Morrissey didnt charge cops who killed #JessieHernandez so we are protesting his house. #DefendDenver

41. WMDKitty -- Survivor says

    17 June 2015 at 5:02 pm

    rq

    I am speaking up. I just feel like, you know, I don’t have a right to speak for POC. I don’t want to step on any toes.

42. rq says

    17 June 2015 at 5:08 pm

    Another look at the Ohio pool party: New video shows more of police incident at Fairfield pool

    In a news conference, Hilton said Krystal Dixon brought eight children to the pool last Tuesday, but one child was ordered to leave, because he didn’t have proper swim trunks.

    Hilton said Dixon went to get swim trunks but was told when she returned that the teen wouldn’t be allowed back in.

    At that point, Hilton said, Dixon went to get the other kids from the pool, passing an officer who told her she had to leave.

    Dixon told the officer that she had to get the rest of the kids and passed him. She retrieved the kids and was leaving when the officer grabbed her arm and said he had told her to leave, Hilton said.

    “It was one minute and 45 seconds from the time the mother entered the facility until the time she was turning around headed back to her car and the officer stopped her,” Hilton said.

    When that happened, Dixon’s kids demanded that the officer let their mother go. But Hilton said the video doesn’t show them assaulting any officer.

    In the moments that followed, Hilton said, an unidentified man assaulted a 15-year-old, while an officer injured a 12-year-old.

    After Dixon was handcuffed and put in a police cruiser, that cruiser camera recorded a woman saying, “I only came to get the kids. Could you have my daughter turn the car off?”

    Hilton said five people went to the hospital after the incident. He said Fairfield police’s reports don’t match what Dixon’s video shows and called police statements “lies.”

    Hilton said Fairfield police escalated the incident unnecessarily. He said police actions were horrible and despicable.

    But looking at those same images, officers get a different picture.

    What’s the psychology behind such different interpretations, I wonder?

    Performance art. See article within.

    #RachelDolezal Can Identify However She Wants Because She’s White

    I really thought that the Rachel Dolezal fiasco would go away pretty quickly. Honestly, I thought we’d all come together, make fun of her, get her out of the paint and go on about our lives trying to help the McKinney kids enjoy pool parties again. But the Devil’s Advocates and capes came out defending Dolezal, saying that she “can” identify however she wants.

    And that’s absolutely true – Dolezal “can” identify however she wants. She “can” do whatever she damn well pleases. Because she’s White. And White people live in a such a world of privilege that they can do whatever they want. They can take culture, entire nations and enslave whole swaths of people with zero consequence. So creating a new Black existence is just another level of privilege that Dolezal’s whiteness affords her.

    The question isn’t about what Dolezal’s privilege affords her (because the answer is “all of the above”). The question is can I identify as a White person if I want? What’s the application process for me enjoying all of the privileges Whiteness offers?

    If Mike Brown had yelled “Wait, I identify as White,” would Darren Wilson’s bullet reversed trajectory and gone back into his gun? Would the Baltimore Cops have called for medical help for Freddie Gray if he had a White ID card of some sort? I don’t recall the racist McKinney cop checking to see how the students identified themselves before pulling his gun out.

    If I get pulled over tomorrow, there’s no racial identification I can provide that would make a cop act more lenient towards me than any other person of color. Imagine a Black woman saying that she’d identify as a White woman. It’d be impossible because there’s no way for her to shed the injustices that America has burdened her Blackness with. So…

    1. Rachel Dolezal can call herself Black and not have to deal with injustices society places on Black women.
    2. There isn’t a single Black woman who can call herself white and erase the racism she’s undoubtedly faced.

    For these two reasons, Rachel Dolezal is engaging in, benefitting from, and basking in the unending glow of privilege that not a single Black person on this planet could enjoy. That, people, is White Privilege.

    And every time Rachel Dolezal speaks, announcing her desire to identify as Black while getting supported by a ton of Black men, she’s only proving that her privilege is real. And it’s a privilege that Blackness has never experienced.

    However, the most troubling form of White privilege Rachel Dolezal is benefiting from is the blind support of Black men. I hate to say it, but I’m disappointed by how many Black men have abandoned their posts as Black women supporters to defend a woman who treats Black womanhood like its a Halloween costume. We’ve seen Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, D.L. Hughley and a bevy of your everyday tweeters act as if Dolezal is some honorable woman who deserves the benefit of the doubt. At the same time, the actual Black women who are in the streets protesting the murders of dead black boys across the country are challenged to “prove” their worth as freedom fighters. But that’s the effect of White supremacy that Dolezal gets to bathe in; Black America’s tendency to see the faults in our Black women while uplifting Whiteness. It’s a debilitating characteristic of too many Black men. (By the way, what would happen if she were a White man trying to be Black?) And in the end, this only serves Dolezal’s goal of being some sort of Black-faced savior.

    It’s sad but I’m pretty sure how the story ends. Dolezal will become a wealthy woman in the end. She’ll have books deals, a reality show and a Tyler Perry movie. She’ll get her story trumpeted as a lesson on progress, sacrifice and commitment. And she’ll be able to identify herself as whatever she wants in some people’s eyes.

    Because she’s White. And she can do whatever the hell she wants.

    Supreme Court refines rules governing police conduct

    One of the recurring criticisms of aggressive or “zero tolerance” policing is that some officers stop people for little to no reason. The court recently weighed in on part of that controversy, taking a case about a traffic stop in North Carolina. An officer said he had a good reason for the stop – a broken brake light – and then he searched the car and found cocaine. But it is perfectly legal to drive with one brake light under state law, so a lower court threw out the cocaine evidence, reasoning it was discovered through an unjustified stop.

    The Supreme Court reversed, however, ruling that officers can be mistaken about the law and still perform a valid search. Chief Justice John Roberts held that it was “objectively reasonable” for the officer think the broken brake light was illegal, so that mistaken belief met the legal requirement to justify suspicion for the stop.

    While critics say that approach gives police even more power to conduct questionable searches, the decision was not very divisive within the Court.

    Most of the justices agreed with Roberts, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. The only dissent came from Obama appointee Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who questioned at oral argument whether such lax rules invite more racial profiling. At bottom, she stressed in her dissent, the defendant in this case was literally stopped “on suspicion of committing an offense that never actually existed” (emphasis added).

    The court reached a similar consensus backing San Francisco police in the shooting of a mentally ill woman inside a group home. Six justices, including Sotomayor and Ginsburg, ruled that the officers had qualified immunity for any injuries they inflicted on the woman, who had brandished a knife and threatened her social worker.

    While the court is often sympathetic to the judgment calls that police make in the field, it did also rule against police this term, tightening limits on certain traffic stops.

    RELATED: Mom of California man beaten by police: My son needed help

    A Nebraska officer pulled over a driver for veering onto the shoulder of a highway, issued a ticket, and then asked for permission to search the car with a police dog. When the driver exercised his right to refuse, the officer did the search anyway, unearthing 50 grams of methamphetamine.

    While the DOJ backed the police, proposing that routine traffic stops can be extended to include a dog search, six justices rejected that approach. In an opinion by Justice Ginsburg, the court essentially dialed back pre-textual searches, ruling officers can only detain citizens in a traffic stop for as long as it takes to check their information and issue a ticket – not to extend the stop into a wider search.

    Ginsburg singled out and rejected the DOJ argument that an officer who performs a quick stop “can earn bonus time” to conduct extra searches that would otherwise be illegal. Just like the court’s other decisions siding with police, the opinion was a lopsided six to three.

    Taken together, these cases suggest some of the gaps between the political disputes over policing and efforts at national legal reform.

    Even in an administration critical of excessively harsh policing, the traditional presumption in favor of law enforcement has led the Justice Department to argue in favor of police in nearly every Supreme Court appeal. […]

    The court’s police decisions have not been closely split, unlike the five-to-four decisions on politically charged issues such as gun rights and Obamacare, and today’s more liberal appointees do not seem automatically skeptical of the police practices before the court. That’s a contrast to the 1960s, when Chief Justice Earl Warren led a more liberal bloc of judges to expand protections in criminal procedure. Today, many of those precedents seem almost sacrosanct, from the basic right to a lawyer in a criminal trial (1963) or interrogation (1964), which most Americans take for granted, to Miranda rights during an arrest (1966) or the right to privacy on a phone used outside the home (1967). By the 1970s, however, crime, unrest and “law and order” politics shifted the public mood and, ultimately, the composition of the federal judiciary.

    Today’s debates over Ferguson and Baltimore may be nudging the pendulum back a bit, with leaders in both parties calling for at least some reform. But every police department is governed at the local level, making the Supreme Court the only institution that can swiftly change the national boundaries for police, and it doesn’t look like it will be doing that anytime soon.

    #RaiseTheAge #KaliefBrowder

    The Myth Of The ‘Ferguson Effect’, similar to the crime stats a few comments above.

    Ever since unarmed teenager Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, MO last year, people across the country have taken to the streets en masse to protest police brutality and the mistreatment of black men and women. At the same time, police officers and pundits have argued that demonstrators are jeopardizing community safety, pointing to rising violent crime rates in recent months. As the “Ferguson Effect” theory goes, police have slowed down enforcement due to public scrutiny, which has lead to more crime, including homicides. In the absence of tough policing, chaos reigns.

    But a new report from the Sentencing Project reveals the shooting of Brown and subsequent police backlash last August did not cause the uptick in St. Louis homicides last year.

    In 2014, there were 159 homicides in St. Louis, compared to 120 in 2013 — an increase of 32.5 percent. Drawing on local police data, the Sentencing Project discovered that the ratio of monthly homicides, from 2014 to 2013, was highest in the first quarter of the year. The ratio of homicides jumped between February and April, decreased in April and May, and rose again in June — months before Brown was killed. And while the number of homicides climbed after August 2014, the ratio was never as high as it was in April. In other words, homicides occurred most frequently in the first part of the year, and therefore, evidence does not support a causal relationship between the events that unfolded in Ferguson and subsequent homicides.
    sentencing project 2

    CREDIT: The Sentencing Project

    Additionally, little evidence supports the notion that non-homicide violent crimes, including robbery and assault, in St. Louis were instigated by police grievances in Ferguson. Although the ratio accelerated between September and December, it was also high at the beginning of the year. And similar to the ratio of homicides, the ratio of violent crimes decreased over a two-month period, but increased again in May, long before Brown was shot. If anything, the most promising evidence in support of the “Ferguson Effect” was the ratio of property crimes in St. Louis, which remained relatively consistent until August, and increased thereafter.

    But law enforcement officials and media outlets continue to make sweeping generalizations about the state of policing and increased criminal activity nationwide. Notably, a Wall Street Journal article written by Heather Mac Donald pointed to high rates of gun violence in Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City and police disillusionment in those cities. “Similar ‘Ferguson effects’ are happening across the country as officers scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric. Arrests in Baltimore were down 56% in May compared with 2014,” she wrote. “Even if officer morale were to miraculously rebound, policies are being put into place that will make it harder to keep crime down in the future. Those initiatives reflect the belief that any criminal-justice action that has a disparate impact on blacks is racially motivated.”

    The New York Times published another article about the spike in murders after Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore, MD, emphasizing officers’ hesitance to enforce the law. “At the time of her announcement, Ms. Mosby’s charges [for the officers involved] were seen as calming the city. But they enraged the police rank and file, who pulled back,” the article asserts. “The number of arrests plunged, and the murder rate doubled in a month. The reduced police presence gave criminals space to operate, according to community leaders and some law enforcement officials.”

    Two anonymous Baltimore Police Department officers told CNN that the latest murder rate can be attributed to calls for less aggressive policing in the wake of Gray’s death. Union leader and Lt. Kenneth Butler of the BPD also claims that fear of suspension and criminal charges has scared cops out of policing effectively in the city.

    In response to these claims, Executive Director Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project told ThinkProgress, “Every city is going to be unique. There are certain trends that can affect crime rates nationally, but we do know that crime is very much subject to local circumstances. It can be demographics, the proportion of young men in a given population, the size and the kind of policing that goes on, the employment rates, types of drug abuse. All those factors can vary quite substantially.”

    A couple of graphs and charts at the link.

43. rq says

    17 June 2015 at 5:17 pm

    I get that, WMDKitty. I just don’t like the phrasing of ‘let [them] hash it out’ – we need to do some hashing on the white privilege side of the line, too. I do appreciate your thoughts that you posted, very much. My response was less to you personally, more as a general response to white people stepping away from other white people doing shitty racist things. Sorry that it was unclear.

    +++

    Faces of Death Row

    Here is a look at the 261 inmates currently on Texas’ death row. Texas, which reinstated the death penalty in 1976, has the most active execution chamber in the nation. On average, these inmates have spent 13 years, 6 months on death row. Though 12 percent of the state’s residents are black, 42 percent of death row inmates are.

    And considering recent stories, how many are wrongfully convicted?

    Black Americans now see race relations as nation’s most important problem

    After a year that saw national attention on long-simmering tensions between communities of color and police officers, 2014 closed with more Americans — both black and white — ranking race relations as the most pressing problem facing the nation.

    While only 3 percent of black Americans ranked race relations as the most important problem facing the U.S. when asked at the beginning of 2014, by the end of the calendar year, that number had reached 15 percent and, halfway through 2015, remains at 13 percent, according to pollsters at Gallup.

    Since early 2014, white Americans’ mentions of race relations as a top problem have increased only slightly, from 1 percent to 4 percent.

    At 13 percent, race relations is currently tied with unemployment/jobs for the issue of most concern among black Americans polled by Gallup.

    “Just as blacks and whites differ in their views of race relations as a top U.S. problem, they also stand apart in their views on the fairness of the criminal justice system, confidence in police and the need for new civil rights laws,” Gallup’s Alyssa Brown noted in her analysis. “Gallup found last June that 68 percent of blacks said the American criminal justice system is biased against black people, significantly higher than the 25 percent of whites who said the same. And while 37 percent of blacks said they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police, 59 percent of whites said the same.”

    It’s also worth nothing that the last time this many Americans believed race relations to be the nation’s most pressing problem was the early ’90s, when the country was wrestling with issues of police brutality and urban riots.

    Think black boys face a rough road to college? Try being a black girl.

    To the casual observer, Rhonda Rogombe is a record-holding high school athlete with a bright future. Newly graduated from Washington High School in Charles Town, West Virginia, the 18-year-old track and field star will head to Rutgers University in the fall to pursue a degree in economics. In a family where college was always expected for her and her three siblings, Rogombe had to weigh multiple options in making her college decision. But when it came to college information “counselors don’t really say much and our teachers are kind of the same.”

    Rogombe’s story is not an isolated case, but represents a common predicament for students of color, whose obstacles range from access to experienced teachers and rigorous high school courses, to disproportionately harsh discipline and the availability of school counselors.

    This is the season of new beginnings. High school graduations, filled with proud parents clutching balloons and cell-phone cameras, mark the end of 12 years of education as young adults embark on an exciting new phase of life. Yet as we celebrate the completion of the race, we often give scant attention to the endurance and perseverance required to finish. This is particularly acute for black girls. When the emphasis is on crossing the finish line, we can overlook the unique struggle of black girls – how race, gender, and class combined create hurdles that can make their path to college a steeplechase.

    “It’s not in vogue to focus on black girls. That’s not where the energy and focus is centered,” says Kimberlé Crenshaw, co-founder of the African American Policy Forum, a New York City think tank with a mission to advance racial and gender equality. “Black girls are resilient – that should not be a justification for ignoring their needs.”

    Navigating high expectations with little guidance

    Research shows that encouragement and assistance from teachers and school counselors are critical as students of color pursue college admission. Those elements are frequently missing from black girls’ high school experience. They were indisputably missing from mine. A graduate of Girls’ High School, a public college-prep magnet school in Philadelphia, it was universally accepted that every student would go to college. As the oldest child of college-educated parents, it was universally accepted I would go to college. What was almost universally absent was the guidance to take “You’re going to college” from an ambition to a reality.

    Most teachers are overwhelmed and college counselors are a vanishing breed. This condition is not exclusive to black girls. But we know that vital resources – help with navigating the financial aid labyrinth, and assistance with college essays and booking college visits – are scarce at schools with large black student populations.

    This is validated by Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied and published on increasing college access for marginalized students.

    In black neighborhoods schools lack “the fundamental tools to get into college … we’re failing (black students) as educators, as support staff, as communities,” she explains, bolstered by a study examining gaps in college preparation. On key measures, such as the percentage of high schools with no counselor and student-to-counselor ratio, black students fare worse than peers in affluent, predominately white schools. Another piece of the puzzle is access to college-level courses. Black girls are more likely to attend segregated, high-poverty high schools where “a quarter…do not offer Algebra II; a third…do not offer chemistry,” putting the full range of college prep classes out of reach.

    More worrying information at the link.

    Kalief Browder’s Mom: The Whole System ‘Destroyed My Son’, video.

    Here’s another thought: And this is the last thing Ima say.

    I’m glad Rachel worked for some conception of black liberation. But my problem is that I don’t think black folk are the problem community. It’s white folks that need the liberation. And too many of the best of our artists, activists, witnesses spent too much time trying to liberate white folks. Rachel didn’t opt in to us; she opted out of reckoning with her people, and reckoning with whiteness directly, while taking positions that might have gone to a black woman. Note to white folks thinking of “opting in” to blackness: save your people. Save yourself. Yall are the ones burning up from the inside out. And that burning disproportionately impacts other folks and communities. But yall are burning and you don’t help us by not reckoning with that burning. Stop trying to find imaginative ways not to deal with whiteness, white power and white violence. Save yourself.

    FIRST LOOK. @KerryWashington as Anita Hill on the set of the HBO Film, CONFIRMATION.

44. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 1:05 am

    Not just white kids: Statement from the family of Deven Guilford, 17 years old, stopped for flashing his bright lights because the officer was driving a new cruiser with high-intensity headlights. Ended up dead at the roadside.

    Anniston Police Department Has Two Hate Group Members on the Force. Probably not the only ones.

    “It’s wonderful to be around sanity,” the founder and chairman of the League’s John C. Calhoun chapter in a video of the event posted to YouTube.

    It was a common speech for a League conference. But Doggrell wasn’t quite a common southern nationalist. He was a police officer, a lieutenant in the Anniston Police Department, and he wasn’t the only one. A second officer from his department, Lieutenant Wayne Brown, joined Doggrell at the convention, and they had come with good news –– good news for any self-respecting southern nationalist at least.

    “The vast majority of men in uniform are aware that they’re southerners,” Doggrell said, touching on gun rights and the perennial fear among extremist groups that the Second Amendment is under attack. “And kith and kin comes before illegal national mandates.”

    Doggrell knows a little bit about kith and kin. He joined the LOS in 1995 after meeting its president Michael Hill at the University of Alabama while Doggrell was a student, serving as the secretary vice chairman and chairman of the school’s LOS chapter before founding his own chapter in 2009.

    Kith and kin is part of an explicitly racist ideology called “kinism” that Hill has long promoted through the LOS. The Kinist Institute, an organization that promotes kinism, has called for laws against racial intermarriage, an end to non-white immigration, expelling all “aliens” (“to include all Jews and Arabs”), and restricting the right to vote to white, landholding men over the age of 21. In the past, LOS websites have referred to kinism as “a biblical solution for all races” that will save the South by preventing “white genocide.”

    It was an odd thing for a police officer to say, especially one from Anniston. Fifty years earlier, Klansmen firebombed several buses carrying civil rights workers, known as Freedom Riders, coming to the South to test a U.S. Supreme Court ruling ordering that buses be desegregated. On May 14, 1961, in Anniston, a mob of Klansmen, some reportedly still wearing their Sunday church clothes, attacked and firebombed the riders. Police did nothing.

    But Doggrell has never hidden his extremist ties, not from his family – in 2013, his two-year-old was already a League member – and definitely not from his employer. As Doggrell boasts elsewhere in the video, his superiors are well aware of his associations.

    “It’s always wonderful to go back and show my bosses all the radicals that I cavort with on the weekends,” he boasts.

    So just toget this straight, they knew about this, about his opinions, and they hired him / kept him on. This about sums up their reaction:

    After Hatewatch initially alerted the chief of the Anniston Police Department about Doggrell’s membership, further calls were referred to Brian Johnson, Anniston city manager, who told Hatewatch that even if the city was aware of police officers being a member of such “civic club,” there was only so much they could do.

    APD_Logo

    When posed with the hypothetical of a police officer being a member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Johnson elaborated by stating that, “We could not terminate an employee solely on his or her membership in a legal, lawfully formed, civic club or organization.” He added that it was “unfortunate” the city had to answer for Doggrell’s involvement in the LOS, especially at a time when policing practices are increasingly scrutinized amid a rash of stories of police violence and examples of biased, even racist officers. But, Johnson said, “I do not believe that someone could be terminated solely based on their private sector membership in a properly formed legal organization – as hateful as the KKK might be.”

    Other cities have not been so laissez-faire about extremists and racists in their ranks.

    In 2009 and again in 2014, officers were forced to resign after it was discovered they were high-ranking members of the KKK. Earlier this year, police officers in San Francisco were forced to resign because of racist text messages they were sending to each other. Also this year, in Ferguson, Mo., two officers were forced to resign after a racist emails were uncovered in the Justice Department inquiry surrounding the death of Michael Brown.

    Given the deep racism that is central to the LOS, it seems odd of the city to ignore the possible conflicts of interest when acting as a police officer. The League has in recent years taken on increasingly racist and violent antigovernment rhetoric. Early last month, Hill penned an article for the LOS website entitled “A few notes on an American race war.”

    “Negroes are more impulsive than whites,” Hill wrote. “Tenacity and organization are not the negroes [sic] strong suits. If [a race war] could be won by ferocity alone, he might have a chance. But like the adrenaline rush that sparks it, ferocity is short lived. And it can be countered by cool discipline, an historic white trait, and all that stems from it.”

    The cool discipline of the white cop that shoots before anything else in the face of a black person showing some kind of distress? Cool discipline, indeed!

    Can we talk for a bit about how @JanelleMonae has some of the coldest Afrofuturistic album art of all time?

    Mayor on police slowdown: ‘As long as they plan to cash their paychecks, my expectation is that they work’

    The mayor made clear she is concerned that some officers deliberately may not be doing their jobs.

    “We know there are some officers who we have some concerns about,” Rawlings-Blake said. “I’ve been very clear with the FOP that their officers, as long as they plan to cash their paycheck, my expectation is that they work.”

    The mayor said she didn’t want to paint all officers as not doing their jobs. Police have landed some major arrests in recent weeks, including filing charges against three suspects in the killing of 16-year-old Arnesha Bowers.

    “We need them there,” she said of the police. “We need them in partnership. We need them doing their jobs.”

    Arrests, which are one indicator of police activity, are down dramatically in recent weeks. Baltimore police arrested fewer people in May than in any month for at least three years, despite a surge in homicides and shootings across the city.

    Several neighborhoods saw declines of more than 90 percent from April to May, while arrests in the West Baltimore area where Freddie Gray was arrested dropped by more than half during the same period, according to a Baltimore Sun analysis of police data. Citywide, arrests declined 43 percent from April to May.

    “It’s clear that arrests are down and it concerns me and the commissioner,” Rawlings-Blake said. “I don’t want to paint all of the officers with a broad brush. … I encounter officers every day who are in the crime fight, who are out doing their jobs.”

    Ohio Family Accuses Police of Using Excessive Force in Fairfield Pool Incident , via The Root, repost?

    Tracking the cases of police brutality at Walmart

    For most American’s, Walmart is just a big box retail store. Some of us avoid it like the plague, others shop there if we must. Under constant scrutiny for how poorly they pay their workers while the owners are richer than Scrooge McDuck, few people argue that Walmart is amazing. For an increasing number of people, though, it’s deadly.

    Shelly Frey, John Crawford, William Chapman are in the article, but no doubt there are others.

45. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 1:16 am

    O’Malley, Carson confirmed for sheriffs presidential forum in Baltimore

    WASHINGTON — The National Sheriffs’ Association has confirmed four presidential hopefuls for a 2016 candidate forum in Baltimore that will focus on law enforcement — an issue the group says has received too little attention in past presidential campaigns.

    The Virginia-based group said it has confirmed attendance by former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, retired Hopkins neurosurgeon Ben Carson, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb. The group has invited “nearly 40 possible contenders.”

    Here are presidential candidates who have announced, talked about or drawn serious interest for possible runs in 2016. It’s a long list.

    Webb has not entered the presidential race, but the other three have.

    The event will offer candidates an opportunity to address the issue in the city that became a focal point of the national debate over policing after the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old man who died of injuries suffered while in police custody. O’Malley, Carson and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul have all spoken about criminal justice in Maryland since the riots.

    The group picked Baltimore for its annual meeting years ago, long before the Gray incident. But the presidential forum will be the first attempted by the group.

    “For the first time ever the presidential candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, will be able to speak directly to the elected sheriffs and other law enforcement officials of the nation,” Jonathan Thompson, the executive director and CEO of the group said in a statement.

    Candidates will be given 12 to 15 minutes to deliver remarks and will then answer a few questions chosen by the group. More than 3,000 sheriffs, deputies, police and other law enforcement officials are expected to attend.

    The event will take place on June 29 and June 30 at the Baltimore Hilton.

    Today, 1966 after 27th arrest & release activist & @HowardU alum Stokely Carmichael declares Black Power to crowd.

    Happy 35th birthday to one of my idols @Venuseswilliams. You continue to inspire me & others everyday. I love you.

    Gloria Richardson and the Cambridge Civil Rights Movement

    In 1963, racial unrest broke out in Cambridge, Maryland, and made headlines across the USA. The rioting was sparked by a civil rights campaign led by 40-year-old Gloria Richardson. Her radical approach was eventually successful in Cambridge and made her a role model for a later generation of African-American activists. She talks to Simon Watts. With thanks to Joseph R. Fitzgerald, Ph.D., Cabrini College, Pennsylvania.

    This sis definitely a repeat. I just fin it weird how the HuffPo only brings it up now. ‘Rat Cop’ Joe Crystal Shunned From Baltimore Police Department After Reporting Officer Brutality.

    Must police ‘run amok’ to preserve justice?

    In the wake of the rise in homicides in Baltimore, certain members of Baltimore’s police department are promoting a deceptive and dangerous narrative, translating the public’s demands for more humane policing as a request for impotent policing. Some believe that attempts to hold officers who caused injury to Baltimore residents accountable is “a disservice to law-abiding citizens” (“Baltimore police officers break silence on riots, murder spike and Freddie Gray,” CNN, June 10, 2015). The president of the police union is on record as saying that officers “are more afraid of going to jail for doing their jobs properly than they are of getting shot on duty.”

    The suggestion is that the people of Baltimore have to choose between a police force that inflicts harm and injustice to achieve public safety or a police force that stands down and lets the bad guys run amok. This is a false choice, one that the people of Baltimore should soundly reject and that the Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Police Commissioner Anthony Batts should publicly repudiate.

    In asking for accountability, the people of Baltimore are not asking for ineffective policing. Rather, Baltimore is demanding policing that reduces crime and respects the human and civil rights of those who come into contact with the police, regardless of race, ethnicity, social class or neighborhood. To assert that public safety can only be achieved through racial profiling, harassment and brutality of certain populations and neighborhoods is to assert that certain populations and neighborhoods must be sacrificed at the expense of others.

    This is not the Baltimore that any of us want. But this is the Baltimore we have, and will continue to have, unless there is a fundamental shift in the philosophy, culture and expectations of officers, the people who oversee them, and the people who look to them for protection. This shift will not come organically. We must remember that power concedes nothing without a demand. If we want change in Baltimore, we have to continue to make the demand, no matter the response.

    Institutional change is incredibly hard. It requires releasing old paradigms and adopting new mindsets, first at the organizational level and then at the individual level. It requires abandoning stereotypes and recognizing prejudices that drive everyday behavior. It requires admitting that the status quo is ineffective, even injurious, and developing a new “normal” that at first feels alien but that produces better results over time.

    Achieving this kind of culture shift is not new to Commissioner Batts. During his 27-year tenure with the Long Beach Police Department, he reduced excessive force complaints against Long Beach police while simultaneously reducing the homicide rate. His tenure in Oakland was rockier, and he resigned after only two years, citing disagreements with the city’s elected leaders.

    Nonetheless, Oakland primed Mr. Batts for what he is facing right now in Baltimore. People are being killed at an accelerated pace. The investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice is likely to result in recommendations that Commissioner Batts and his team will be obligated to operate under some form of monitoring. Elected officials across the city have yet to develop a common understanding with each other and, together, present a united front with the commissioner on how to stop the bleeding. These dynamics are challenging, but they also offer opportunities to make big bets and bold moves that transform Baltimore into a model of community policing that reduces violence while building public trust.

    Baltimore is hungry, even desperate, for this kind of change. There is a new generation of activists who will be allies and promoters of any solutions that bring about safety with accountability and equity. There is a robust philanthropic community — one that includes OSI-Baltimore — that is ready to commit needed resources, including access to experts and best practices. And there is a growing appetite for leadership that will confront the critics, leverage the impatience, make informed choices and reject anything other than a police department that serves and protects all Baltimoreans. That is the kind of policing we all need and deserve, and anything less is not an option.

    It’s the very first sentence, the one that the police unions seem to believe, that makes them sound like they’re purposely trolling.

46. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 2:16 am

    A senator’s murder should be met with a National Guard battalion executing a manhunt. But alas, that senator was BLACK.
    Church shooting in South Charleston, 9 people dead, including a senator, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. At Mother Emanual AME, a historically black church, a centre of black activism and political activity and revolt.
    White man came in to participate in bible study, then shot 9 people dead.
    I need a moment.

47. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 3:21 am

    Other things first.
    Music! Miguel Leaves Little To The Imagination In New Video ‘Coffee’ – I’m leaving out the article description this time, because I find it… off. If you watch the video, it’s actually very sex-positive and consentful, but some things in the description make it sound like it’s all about Miguel getting his kicks from some woman. I don’t like it, but the video is pretty good. If you like erotically-inclined music videos.

    Man feels threatened after Calverton Park officer cleans his gun in booking area

    One man told News 4 he felt threatened by a Calverton Park police officer after he was arrested during a traffic stop.

    Eric Foster said he was stopped and taken to jail for not having a properly registered license plate, but it was what happened in the booking area that left him feeling scared for his life.

    “I was going down Florissant and the cop was coming to the stop sign and all he saw was the side of my truck, and he looked at me and he just turned his lights on,” Foster said.

    Foster said he was on his way to work on May 22 when a Calverton Park Police officer took him to jail for not having a properly registered license plate.

    “I’m doing my paperwork and Officer Moore’s partner said, ‘how do you feel about racist white guy cleaning his gun in front of you?’ And he disarmed his gun and he started shuffling the bullets back,” he said.

    Foster added that he and the two officers were the only ones in the building at the time.

    “The way they had the cuffs off of me after I got done with my stuff, it’s like they wanted me to run or do like this or something real quick so they could have a reason, I guess, to harm me. I was scared,” he said.

    News 4 reached out to Calverton Park Police Chief Vince Delia, but he was not available for an on camera interview.

    He initially said he didn’t know anything about the incident, but after talking with one of the officers involved, he said the officer was having issues with his weapon and had taken it apart to see what the problem was.

    “I wasn’t racist, I didn’t have an attitude. I didn’t give them any type of reason to even act like that,” Foster said.

    Chief Delia confirmed that their policy doesn’t allow officers to have their weapons in the booking area, but he insists the officer wasn’t trying to scare Foster.

    Still, Foster says he hasn’t been able to get the experience out of his mind.

    “I just want the world to know that this is just not right,” Foster said.

    But no, his fear was totally irrational, and he was afraid of the gun. [/opencarrylogic]

    Dominican Republic extends residency deadline ahead of mass deportation. Still uncertainty, still extensions, still racism.

    Hundreds of people, mostly low-wage workers from neighboring Haiti, waited in line all night to submit residency applications under a registration initiative that began last June.

    Around 500,000 undocumented people living in the Dominican Republic face potential deportation under the plan. The country’s authorities have reportedly lined up a fleet of buses and established processing centers on the border with Haiti, prompting widespread fears of mass roundups of Dominicans of Haitian descent.

    On Wednesday, the Interior Ministry announced it will accept the applications until midnight, extending the initial deadline by five hours.

    The Dominican Republic has said migrants who can prove they entered the country before October 2011 can qualify for legal residency. Otherwise they could face deportation.

    The Dominican government says the changes to its nationality laws aim to tackle illegal migration from neighboring Haiti. Human rights groups say the move is rooted in racism and xenophobia in the Dominican Republic towards darker-skinned Haitians.

    Over the last century hundreds of thousands of Haitians have crossed into the more prosperous Dominican Republic to escape political violence or seek a better life, many ending up working as poorly paid sugar cane cutters.

    Human rights groups say the 2014 law could impact as many as 200,000 Dominican-born people of Haitian descent who lost their Dominican citizenship after a constitutional court ruling in 2013 that has come under international criticism.

    Tamir Rice activists asked to leave Cuyahoga County prosecutors office

    For the second day in a row, a handful of activists visited Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty’s office to ask questions about the investigations into the police killings of Tanisha Anderson and Tamir Rice.

    And for the second straight day, they said, they were told to “come back tomorrow.”

    The activists, which included Joshua Stephens, Don Bryant and two others, showed up at McGinty’s office in the Cuyahoga County Justice Center about noon Wednesday, hoping to find out when a grand jury will hear evidence in the two November deaths involving Cleveland police.

    “We just feel like (McGinty) is intentionally dragging his feet,” Stephens said in a phone interview.

    The quest began Tuesday, when four protesters sat in McGinty’s office for close to an hour. McGinty’s spokesman, Joe Frolik, told the group that if they came back Wednesday, McGinty might have time to meet with them, Stephens said.

    A Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Deputy asked the four protesters who showed up at the office Wednesday to leave immediately, Stephens said. The deputy said the group could be arrested for trespassing, arguing the office was a place of official business and they had no business there.

    Once the group explained they were asked to come to the office, the deputy agreed to let them stay for a few minutes, until they found out if they could meet with McGinty, Stephens said.

    A few more deputies showed up, and the process repeated.

    Eventually there were five sheriff’s deputies to the four protesters. Stephens said the protesters were not chanting, and were not combative with the deputies.

    Stephens exchanged some texts with Frolik, who eventually asked the group to come back Thursday. The group decided to leave, and three deputies followed them into the elevator and out of the building.

    “It was really overkill,” Stephens said. […]

    The group’s move comes days after McGinty’s office released hundreds of pages of partially redacted investigative material collected by sheriff’s deputies probing the death of Tamir. Cleveland police officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback shot Tamir in Cudell Recreation Center Nov. 22, after they responded to a report of a person with a gun.

    A Cleveland judge found probable cause that Loehmann and Garmback should be charged for their respective roles in the shooting.

    The group is also concerned about the status of the investigation into the death of Anderson, who died Nov. 13 while in police custody. The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner ruled her death a homicide, and that the mentally ill woman who suffered from obesity and heart disease was restrained during her arrest.

    Cleveland police handed their investigation of Anderson’s death to McGinty’s office in February, Frolik told Northeast Ohio Media Group at the time. McGinty has said his office will present both cases to a grand jury, but has declined to say when.

    “We just want some kind of vague time frame,” Stephens said.

    Frolik stuck to that no comment Wednesday, saying it would violate state rules of procedure to discuss grand jury proceedings, including when a grand jury may hear a specific case.

    He said his office is still reviewing both the Tamir Rice investigation and the Tanisha Anderson investigation, and declined to comment further.

    An American Kidnapping, with the subtitle, To understand race in the U.S. today, it’s Kalief Browder’s story, not Rachel Dolezal’s, that really matters. A lot of black women on twitter (and black men!) were disappointed with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ comparison and thought that it shouldn’t be depicted as a zero-sum game, and also that this sort of thinking, once again, erases black women’s struggles, which are also violent (though differently) and also real.

    In the case of Browder, the clock stopped for all sorts of reasons. In one instance a prosecutor claimed he was not ready because of “conflicts in my schedule.” In the other the excuse was jury duty. Another time the prosecutor was on vacation. In the meantime the courts repeatedly tried to exact a guilty plea from Browder—at first offering him three and half years (he was facing fifteen) and eventually offering him time served. Browder refused each time. From Gonnerman’s article, it seems Browder refused on principle, but there were also practical reasons for Browder to refuse. In New York, black men with criminal records represent an untouchable class in the job market. Accepting a guilty plea would not merely have been a symbolic act for Browder, but one with damaging long-term consequences. And Browder could take no comfort in the fact of having been a juvenile at the time of the alleged crime. Taking a guilty plea would not have been a harmless act. For Browder it would have meant being branded as a criminal at the very start of his adult life, which would forever injure his attempts to make a living.

    This threat to Browder’s life was birthed by the era of Willie Hortons, three strikes, and super-predators. Bragging about how many people you didn’t jail has, only recently, become supportable politics. It remains to be seen how well it shall endure. The politics which entangled Browder were of another era, the era of the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Those politics were not private, but public. It was through the urging, ascent, and endorsement of the public that mass incarceration was born. Kalief Browder’s case was entitled The People v. Kalief Browder not Despotic Autocrat v. Kalief Browder. The People themselves elected the politicians that saw no problem with Rikers, or with all the other Rikers across America.

    There are some unavoidable conclusions in this. At our implicit behest, a boy was snatched off the streets of New York. His parents were told to pay a certain sum, or he would not be released. When they did not pay, he was beaten and then banished to lonely cell. Browder’s captors then offered him a different way out—pay for your freedom in the political currency of a guilty plea. He refused. More beatings. More solitary. The sum was lowered. Browder still refused. He was subjected to the same routine. Browder defeated his captors. They tired, released him, and likely turned to perpetrate the same scheme on some other hapless soul.

    Browder’s victory came at the cost of martyrdom, and in his name we should be strong enough to speak directly about what he endured. Kalief Browder was kidnapped in our name. Kalief Browder was held for ransom in our name. Kalief Browder was tortured in our name. Kalief Browder was killed in our name. […]

    By some cosmic coincidence we are confronted with the death of Kalief Browder at exactly the moment American media is obsessing over the life of Rachel Dolezal. Coincidental as it may be, it is also instructive. Through duplicitous means, Dolezal was able to masquerade as a member of the black race. Such masquerades are neither novel nor original. What fuels the fascination is the way in which it taps into one of America’s greatest and most essential crimes—the centuries of plunder which birthed the hierarchy which we now euphemistically call “race.”

    Kalief Browder died, like Renisha McBride died, like Tamir Rice died, because they were born and boxed into the lowest cavity of that hierarchy. If not for those deaths, if not for the taking of young boys off the streets of New York, and the pinning of young girls on the lawns of McKinney, Texas, the debate over Rachel Dolezal’s masquerade would wither and blow away, because it would have no real import nor meaning. It is the killing of John Crawford III and the beating of Marlene Pinnock which elevates this charade beyond what Jeb Bush calls himself or what Elizabeth Warren called herself.

    “I think race is oppression,” writes Richard Seymour, “and nothing else.” Indeed. It is the oppression that matters. In that sense, I care not one iota what Rachel Dolezal does nor what she needs to label herself. I care solely, totally, and completely about what this society does to my son, because of its need to label him.

    Nonviolent drug offenders deserve a break. Marissa Alexander deserved a break. Eric Garner deserved a break. Response to headline, Why Rachel Dolezal needs break.

48. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 4:09 am

    On that shooting.
    9 die in shooting at black church in Charleston

    Nine people have died in a shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., police said early Thursday morning.

    “I do believe this was a hate crime,” Police Chief Gregory Mullen said.

    Eight people died on the scene at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and one person was pronounced dead at a hospital, Mullen said.

    Among the dead was the state senator who was pastor of the church, Democrat Clementa Pinckney, said South Carolina House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford, the Associated Press reported. Pinckney, 41, was married with two children and had served in the state Senate since 2000, according to online biographies.

    People were taking part in a prayer meeting at the time of the incident, Mayor Joe Riley said during the press conference.

    “This is inexplicable,” Riley said. “It is the most intolerable and unbelievable act possible … The only reason someone could walk into church and shoot people praying is out of hate.”

    Said Police Chief Mullen: “This is a tragedy that no community should have to experience. It is senseless. It is unfathomable that someone would walk into a church when people are having a prayer meeting and take their lives.”

    Emanuel is the oldest AME church in the South and has one of the oldest and largest black congregations south of Baltimore, according to its website. Denmark Vesey, executed for attempting to organize a major slave rebellion in 1822, was one of the founders.

    The shooting took place at about 9 p.m. ET, Charleston police said. The gunman is still on the loose, they said.

    The suspect is a clean-shaven white male about 21 years old with sandy blond hair, and is wearing a gray sweatshirt or hoodie, blue jeans and Timberland boots, officials said.

    Pinckney was a native of Beaufort, S.C., and graduated magna cum laude from Allen University in 1995. He received a master’s of divinity degree from the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary and a master’s degree in public administration from the University of South Carolina. He was elected to the South Carolina House in 1996, when he was 23, and was elected to the state Senate in 2000.

    Community organizer Christopher Cason said he believed the shootings were racially motivated, the AP reported. “I am very tired of people telling me that I don’t have the right to be angry,” he said. “I am very angry right now.”

    In a statement, Gov. Nikki Haley asked people to pray for the victims and their families.

    “While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,” she said.

    They say things like ‘unfathomable’ and ‘inexplicable’ and ‘intolerable’ and they say that they’ll never understand what motives such people to kill… do they really not see it? Are they being willful about it? A white man shoots 9 people in a black church, and they cannot fathom the reasons? Surely.

    9 dead in ‘hate crime’ shooting at prayer meeting at historic Charleston African American church. Please don’t put quotes around ‘hate crime’. It is a hate crime, not a ‘hate crime’.

    Police are searching for a gunman who opened fire and killed nine people Wednesday night during a prayer service at a historic African American church in downtown Charleston, S.C., in one of the worst attacks on a place of worship in recent memory.

    At least one other person was injured in the assault, which police described as a “hate crime.”

    Police launched a manhunt for the gunman, described as a clean-shaven white male in his early 20s, who has sandy blond hair and a small build. Police said he was wearing a gray sweatshirt, blue jeans and Timberland boots. He is believe to be the only shooter. Police in fatigues, some with K-9 dogs, said they were searching “near and far” for the gunman and pursuing “lots of tips.”

    At a nearby Embassy Suites, which was serving as an informal headquarters for church members, sobbing and screaming could be heard as people started to hear details of what had happened. “We just left speaking to members of the families,” Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley (D) said. “It was a heartbreaking scene I have never witnessed in my life before.”

    Though authorities did not provide the names of the victims, the church’s pastor, Clementa Pinckney, who is also a South Carolina state senator, was missing after the shooting and members of the congregation standing outside feared the worst. Indeed, friends were already posting “RIP” condolences on Twitter for Pinckney.

    “I do believe this is a hate crime,” Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said at a late night news conference, without explaining the basis for his conclusion. [i hate you, media, just for the second half of that statement.] […]

    Police said there were survivors but did not say how many there were or what condition they were in.

    South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (R) said in a statement late Wednesday night that she is praying for the victims and their families.

    “While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,” she said. “Please join us in lifting up the victims and their families with our love and prayers.”

    After the shooting, helicopters swarmed overhead and heavily armed police wearing bullet-proof vests moved out across the city to search for the suspect.

    “This was a very chaotic scene when we arrived,” Mullen said. “We were tracking this individual with canines. We were making sure that he was not in the area to commit other crimes. As all this was going on, we received information that there might be a secondary explosive device in the scene.”

    Crisis chaplains rushed to the scene as people started creating prayers circles to pray for the victims and their families.

    “I’m lost, I’m lost,” Jon Quil Lance told the Post and Courier. He had been told his grandmother was shot in the church. “Granny was the heart of the family.”

    “I don’t even know if she’s alive now,” he told the newspaper. “I don’t even know if my grandmother is alive.”

    Mullen said authorities are investigating the incident as a hate crime. Local law enforcement has joined forces with the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to track down leads. Mullen said police will soon announce a reward for information leading to the suspect’s capture.

    “We will continue to do that until we find this individual who has carried out this crime tonight and bring him to justice,” he said.

    Rumours is that one of the survivors is a 5-year-old girl whose grandmother told her to play dead. Will confirm later.

    After a white man sat in on a bible study, then killed everyone present save one so they could “tell the story”… #CharlestonShooting – also need confirmation on this.

    Charleston church shooting: nine people dead, suspect at large – latest updates – live updates on incoming information. There were also bomb threats phoned in, by the way, but those proved false (or just very rapidly defused?).

    Nine Killed in Shooting at Black Church in Charleston

    A white gunman opened fire Wednesday night at a historic black church in downtown Charleston, S.C., killing nine people before fleeing and setting off an overnight manhunt, the police said.

    At a news conference with Charleston’s mayor early Thursday, the police chief, Greg Mullen, called the shooting a hate crime.

    “It is unfathomable that somebody in today’s society would walk into a church while they are having a prayer meeting and take their lives,” he said.

    The police said the gunman walked into the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church around 9 p.m. and began shooting.

    Eight people died at the scene, Chief Mullen said. Two people were taken to the Medical University of South Carolina, and one of them died on the way.

    “Obviously, this is the worst night of my career,” Chief Mullen said. “This is clearly a tragedy in the city of Charleston.”

    City officials did not release information about the victims and did not say how many people were in the church during the shooting. Hospital officials declined to comment.

    Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. said the city was offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the gunman, whom the police described as a clean-shaven white man about 21 years old who was wearing a gray sweatshirt, bluejeans and Timberland boots. Chief Mullen described him as “extremely dangerous.”

    “To walk into a church and shoot someone, is out of pure hatred,” the mayor said as he walked away after the news conference.

    Law enforcement officers from the F.B.I.; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division; and other agencies were assisting. Chief Mullen said the police were tracking the gunman with police dogs.[…]

    Later, a group of church leaders gathered at the corner of Calhoun and King Streets, a few blocks from where the shooting occurred, and held an impromptu news conference. Tory Fields, a member of the Charleston County Ministers Conference, said he believed the suspect had targeted the victims because of their race.

    “It’s obvious that it’s race,” he said. “What else could it be? You’ve got a white guy going into an African-American church. That’s choice. He chose to go into that church and harm those people. That’s choice.”

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    The church is one of the nation’s oldest black churches. The pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, is a state senator. It was not clear whether he was at the church at the time of the shooting.
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    17

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    By The New York Times; aerial image by Pictometry

    The Gothic Revival church was built in 1891 and is considered a historically significant building, according to the National Park Service.

    The congregation was formed by black members of Charleston’s Methodist Episcopal Church who broke away “over disputed burial ground,” according to the website of the National Park Service.

    In 1822, one of the church’s co-founders, Denmark Vesey, tried to foment a slave rebellion in Charleston, the church’s website says. The plot was foiled by the authorities and 35 people were executed, including Mr. Vesey.

    The church houses the oldest black congregation south of Baltimore, the Park Service said.

    Gov. Nikki R. Haley said in a statement that she and her family were praying for the victims.

    “While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,” the governor said. “Please join us in lifting up the victims and their families with our love and prayers.”

    Late Wednesday, the campaign staff of Mr. Bush, the former governor of Florida who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, said he was canceling appearances planned for Thursday in Charleston because of the shooting. Mrs. Clinton was in Charleston on Wednesday, but an aide said she had left the city before the shooting.

    The governor… ah, there will be more on the governor in a moment. Or later this afternoon, whichever comes first!

    A state senator is among the dead tonight. This is a terrorist act, a hate crime AND an assassination. #CharlestonShooting

49. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 4:13 am

    Forgot to close a tag. Oops.

    On Pinckney, Charleston shooting: state senator Clementa Pinckney among victims

    Clementa Pinckney, a high-flying Democrat state senator who campaigned for police to wear body cameras, was one of those killed in the mass shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday.

    The 41-year-old was a pastor of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church where a gunman, believed to be white, opened fire in what officials are treating as a hate crime.

    Pinckney won election to the South Carolina senate in 2000 at the age of 27, becoming the youngest African American to do so. He had previously been elected to the state’s House of Representatives at 23. Reports said he met Hillary Clinton earlier on Wednesday at a fundraising event in Charleston.
    Clementa Pinckney
    Clementa Pinckney. Photograph: Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church

    In April Pinckney helped lead a prayer vigil for Walter Scott, a black South Carolina man who was shot dead by a police officer as he tried to run away. The veteran civil rights campaigner Al Sharpton, who was also involved in the vigil, tweeted on Wednesday night:

    Pinckney campaigned for legislation to require police officers to wear body cameras while working. He said: “Body cameras help to record what happens. It may not be the golden ticket, the golden egg, the end-all-fix-all, but it helps to paint a picture of what happens during a police stop.”

    The Rev Joseph Darby, the presiding elder at Beaufort AME Church, described Pinckney as “an advocate for the people”. He told MSNBC: “He was a very caring and competent pastor, and he was a very brave man. Brave men sometimes die difficult deaths.”

    The Emanuel church website said Pinckney began preaching at 13 and was first appointed as a pastor at 18. He had a degree in business administration, and master’s degrees in public administration and divinity.

    His profile on the church website included a quote from a Washington Post columnist, David Broder, who said Pinckney was a “political spirit lifter for surprisingly not becoming cynical about politics”.

    Pinckney is survived by his wife, Jennifer, and two children, Eliana and Malana.

    Hear him speak, YWCA “Requiem on Racism” 2015

    Press Release from the event that took place April 26, 2015

    Charleston, SC- The YWCA Greater Charleston presents Requiem on Racism: The Peoples Mass to End Hate and Bigotry, a church and musical service, to be held on 4:30 p.m., Sunday, April 26, at Mother Emanuel AME Church, 110 Calhoun Street. Top civic and clergy leaders, and performing artists will participate in the event, which is free and open to the public. For more information visit ywca-charlestonsc.org or call the YWCA at 843-722-1644.

    The local event is part of the YWCA USA’s Stand Against Racism campaign that began in 2007 and annually attracts some 300,000 persons to nationwide events held April 22-26. YWCA Greater Charleston is the first YWCA affiliate statewide to announce an event in coordination with this year’s national effort.

    According to Garcia Williams, interim executive director of the YWCA Greater Charleston, turnout on April 26 will be driven by “deep concerns about persistent allegations of race and gender-based discrimination reported nearly everyday in news and social media”.

    Some observers trace the continuing trend of clashes between opposing groups over social justice issues to the killings of Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012 in Sanford, Florida, and Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. Williams believes more recent local events such as the killing of Walter Scott on April 4 in North Charleston show a widening of the conflict.

    “The historic delay of Loretta Lynch’s confirmation as US Attorney General; racist chants on a bus-trip of University of Oklahoma fraternity students; and the LGBT, business, sports and civil rights communities’ stand against ‘religious freedom’ legislation in Indiana and Arkansas are just a few issues urgent to our April 26th event,” said Williams.

    State Senator and Rev. Clementa Pinckney of Mother Emanuel AME Church will preside at the service which also features appearances by United States Congressman James Clyburn, State Representative David Mack III, Rabbi Stephanie Alexander of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, and historian Dr. Millicent Brown. Performing artists will include singer Ann Caldwell, and the College of Charleston Concert Choir.

    “Clearly one event cannot reverse centuries of race, gender and ethnic biases, but it can be a powerful demonstration of how solidly the Lowcountry stands committed to social justice,” said Kerri Forrest, YWCA Greater Charleston’s board chair. “When everyday citizens are talking about Selma and Starbucks in the same breath, there’s more at stake than mere media hype. We maybe facing a more serious societal crisis,” said Forrest, who formerly worked as a television news producer for MSNBC, NBC and CBS.

    @deray Mayor also referred to the suspect’s crimes as “dastardly deeds”. More accurate phrases might be: “terrorism” and/or “mass murder”. Words apparently mean things.

    This happened at Denmark Vesey’s church on the eve of the anniversary of local white officials squashing his uprising. #CharlestonShooting

    I don’t understand why black folk feel the need to say “we’re peaceful” after experiencing violence… You just experienced violence.

    Black people needn’t worry about ISIS when we have police and vigilantes committing terrorist acts on us every 21 hours. #CharlestonShooting

50. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 4:23 am

    Probably a good time to remind y’all just 2 months ago unarmed #WalterScott, shot in the back by N. #Charleston PD

    & now Sharpton is telling black folk to be peaceful on MSNBC! I don’t even know why that message is being said now. #CharlestonShooting

    The CNN reporter is literally antagonizing Charleston residents, saying, “No one said this is about race.”

    Why did this community member just say “we want peace” in response to the #CharlestonShooting? What does that mean?

    Mass Shooting at Historic Black Church in Charleston South Carolina

    Multiple people were shot and at least 9 people have died at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Calhoun Street in downtown Charleston.

    A white man in his early 20’s entered the church and began shooting people about 9pm this evening during the churches Wednesday prayer service and bible study. The situation is still unfolding. The exact number of people with injuries is still unknown and the suspect is still at large.

    The historical Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church(AME) is part of the first independent black denomination in the nation and is known, along with co-founder Denmark Vesey, for it’s role in a planned slave uprising. The slave uprising was scheduled to begin on June 16th of 1822, it is being speculated that this is tied into the motive of the attack.

    Suspect is described as a clean shaven early 20’s white male of slender build, wearing a gray sweatshirt and blue Jeans.

    Police are saying there is currently a bomb threat and people are being moved away from the area.

    Update:

    Clementa Pinckney, South Carolina Senator and pastor at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church has died from his injuries.

    At the press conference Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley confirmed that 9 people have died.

    Charleston police chief stated that the shooting will be investigated as a hate crime or act of domestic terrorism. Police are asking anyone with information to contact them.

    Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen press conference.

    (with video, tweets and photos at that link)

    Nine shot, multiple fatalities reported in downtown church shooting, another source.

    The church’s history, so interwoven with Charleston’s, begins around 1816 when Morris Brown, a free shoemaker and devout Methodist, walked out of a predominantly white and racially segregated Methodist Church in Charleston.

    Brown formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston, now Emanuel AME Church on Calhoun Street. Since that day, the AME Church has proven pivotal in South Carolina in matters of faith and social justice.

    Denmark Vesey was a founding member who led failed slave rebellion that drove the church underground for decades, Darby said.

    Someone reported the plot to authorities and during the chaos and paranoia that ensued, the church was burned. Congregants slipped underground to worship until 1865 when the church formally reorganized and adopted the name Emanuel.

    As the shock of the shooting began to sink in, Riley said, “I know I speak to all the citizens of our community as I express my most heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of the Emanuel AME church members who were killed tonight. We will comfort and support them as we work through this time of great heartbreak.”

51. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 4:31 am

    A woman told me a 5-year-old girl was in the church and hid from the shooter. Not confirmed by police. Woman said she was covered in blood.

    Why is it always a white guy: The roots of modern, violent rage

    But these middle-class white men are right in one sense: the social contract that enabled self-made men to feel that they could make it, even if they somehow failed to realize their dreams, has, indeed, been shredded, abandoned for lavish profiteering by the rich, enabled by a government composed of foxes who have long ago abandoned their posts at the henhouse. That safety net, always thin, has been undone by decades of neglect since the establishment of the Great Society in 1960s. There’s a painful sense of betrayal from their government, from the companies to whom we give our lives, from the unions. There was a moral contract, that if we fulfill our duty to society, society will fulfill its duty to us in our retirement, taking care of those who served so loyally.

    Although the contract may have been shredded by greedy companies driven by greedier financiers, the sense of entitlement on the part of white men remains intact. Many white men feel they have played by the rules and expected to reap the rewards of that obedient responsibility. It’s pretty infuriating not to get what you feel you deserve. That’s the aggrieved entitlement that lies underneath the anger of American white men.

    They had played the game like real men—honorably, honestly. And if they were going to go down, they were going to go down like real men—making somebody pay. Even if they had to die trying. […]

    When the story of Matthew Beck was posted recently to a website, comments were guarded but compassionate. “I can sorta understand why he did it,” wrote one. “I don’t agree with his actions either,” wrote another. “But on some level I understand him.” “You can’t put people down and expect them to take it with a smile,” wrote a third. “I can’t help but feel some sympathy for the shooter. His life must have been hell and I can’t blame him for hating them.”

    But let’s be clear: these guys committed murder. Joe Stack flew his plane into the IRS building. This wasn’t just a minor case of road rage. This was an act of domestic terrorism. He attacked a government office, just as Timothy McVeigh had done. But in the aftermath, there was far more sympathy for him among ordinary Americans than there was for McVeigh in 1995. There are entire websites devoted to calling him “an American hero.” Why? For one thing, it wasn’t “political”—that is, Joe Stack wasn’t trying to start a revolution. He was just at the end of his rope, having been jerked around callously by those in charge.

    “Oh, c’mon,” says Bill, a patron at a local coffee shop, on the afternoon after Stack’s death, as the news feeds come in over the Internet. He’s sitting at the table next to me. Bill has his laptop open; his cell phone sits next to it on the table. Both are plugged into the only electric outlets nearby, monopolizing them. “Fuck, no,” he says, loud enough for me to hear. I look at him, curious. I hadn’t been anticipating an interview just then. He says it again.

    “Did you hear about this guy in Texas? Flew his plane into the IRS office. That’s not terrorism. Not like 9/11. I mean, the guy’d just had it. He was fed up, fucked. Probably thought he had no way out.”

    “But why do you think he just snapped that way?” I ask.

    “Look at what’s happening,” Bill says. “Everywhere you look, it’s downsizing, outsourcing, laying off. No more pension funds, no more health benefits, no more retirement. He was cornered, and he came out swinging.”

    “But he flew his airplane into a building, killing an innocent man and injuring many others. He killed a guy who was probably as trapped as he was. How can you justify that?”

    Bill sits for a moment. “I’m not justifying it. I’m not excusing it. But I’m trying to understand it. I think there are a lot of people who sorta feel like they’re at the end of their rope and don’t know what to do. They’re panicking, freaking out, you know? Back in the day, if you got screwed by your company, you could go to the government, get unemployment, get food stamps, whatever, get some help. Now there’s nowhere to go. The government does nothing; the corporations—well, they’re the problem. Nowhere to go.”

    “You know,” I say, “you sound like a socialist. The government is in the pockets of the big corporations that are ruled by greed and intent on screwing the workers.”

    “Hah!” says Bill. “A socialist! I’m as far from that as you could imagine. I’m an American. Heck, I’d even support the Tea Party if they could get the government out of my wallet. I don’t want to pay more taxes! And I don’t want a bigger government. I want a responsive one. I mean, just look at me, for Christ’s sake.”

    That’s just a short excerpt, the rest is an ode to understanding the Modern White Man and Why He Hurts SO BAD. With a nod to ‘not just white guys’.

    BREAKING: Mass Shooting At Black Church In South Carolina, a rather weak summary from Think Progress.

    The site of #CharlestonShooting is oldest black church in South. How many of its members have been lost to terrorist acts over the years?

    Pastor, 8 others, fatally shot at church in Charleston, SC

    Community organizer Christopher Cason said he felt certain the shootings were racially motivated.

    “I am very tired of people telling me that I don’t have the right to be angry,” Cason said. “I am very angry right now.”

    Even before Scott’s shooting in April, Cason said he had been part of a group meeting with police and local leaders to try to shore up relations.

52. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 4:36 am

    When they ask for proof that racism exists, we don’t have to point to 400 yrs ago. Or 40 yrs ago. We can point to days ago. Hours ago. Now.

    Tonight it is 1830 in #Charleston. We have come NOWHERE. We are going nowhere. #denmarkvesey

    9 killed in Charleston shooting, suspect still at large, just one final article for now.

    Other things.
    Video: Chicago cop opens fire on black teens in car

    In the video, recorded in December 2013, a Chicago police officer, identified in court documents as Marco Proano, shoots into a moving car of six unarmed teenagers at 95th and LaSalle streets on the city’s South Side. Two of the teenagers were shot – one in the shoulder and the other in the left hip and right heel, according to court documents.

    Retired Cook County Judge Andrew Berman was so troubled by the video that he provided it to the Reporter. Berman was the judge in a criminal case against one of the teenagers. He described Proano’s actions as the most unsettling thing he’d seen in his 18 years as a judge and 17 years as a public defender.

    “I’ve seen lots of gruesome, grisly crimes,” he said. “But this is disturbing on a whole different level.”

    This isn’t the first time Proano has been accused of using excessive force, but it is the only complaint against him in the past four years that involved a shooting, according to CPD and court records. Proano was cleared in six previous complaints filed against him between 2011 and 2015, one of which involved excessive force.

    The video is at the center of a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of the teens against the city and three police officers, which was settled in March. The City Council still must approve the $360,000 payout, which is expected in coming weeks. While it is a relatively small sum compared to some settlements to people who were killed by Chicago police officers, it is still more money than almost 90 percent of police misconduct payments by the city last year.

    City lawyers successfully convinced a federal judge to put the video under a protective order, which prevented parties to the lawsuit from releasing it publicly. Neither Judge Berman nor the Reporter are legally bound by the order.

    The Reporter’s calls to Proano were not returned and his lawyer declined to comment. Proano admitted in a federal court filing that he was the police officer who opened fire on the car filled with teenagers.

    That’s some real cool discipline.

    Thousands Of Haitians Facing Deportation In Dominican Republic. Still a thing.

53. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 4:46 am

    Witnesses to Gray protest submit nearly 1,000 works to Md. Historical Society

    In hindsight, the photograph taken on April 25 at Camden Yards seems to forecast everything that happened such a short time later.

    In the bottom center is the head of a little boy, perhaps 8 years old. Though his mouth and chin are outside the frame, you can tell by his downcast eyes and the slant of his brows just how angry he is. Directly behind him stand three Baltimore police officers, their hands on their hips. You can’t see their eyes because they’re obscured by dark glasses, but their mouths are grim.

    And from the right, someone is unfurling a black, green and red flag adopted by some African-American groups.

    In that image shot by Jerome Freeman, a 25-year-old Columbia resident, the divide between the police and the people protesting the death of Freddie Gray is evident at a glance. It seems almost inevitable that what began as peaceful demonstrations are about to erupt.

    And it’s one of nearly 1,000 images, oral histories and videos taken so far by everyday citizens documenting those transformative weeks in Baltimore that have been submitted to the Maryland Historical Society.

    This week marks the beginning of the second phase of the innovative project, which the historical society is operating with the University of Baltimore and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County to collect and preserve an online history of the unrest created not by professional pundits and journalists, but by the people who were there.

    Historical society staff began thinking how to respond to the upheaval on April 27, as staff members watched hundreds of protesters walk past the museum on Centre Street.

    “Freddie Gray’s death may be a watershed moment in the history of Baltimore,” said the museum’s president, Burt Kummerow. “For the first time in human memory, every man and woman can be their own chronicler.”

    The most famous of these photographers is West Baltimore resident Devin Allen, whose image of a man running down the street in front of a line of baton-wielding Baltimore police officers made the cover of Time magazine. Allen’s first solo show will open July 10 at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. […]

    In the project’s second phase, which begins this week, the museum will conduct workshops teaching educators and the public how to download digital materials directly to the project website. For now, the exhibit is not curated. All submissions are accepted.

    “I decided to establish a site that allows people to participate directly in the act of collecting,” Meringolo said. “When you study social movements from the past, sometimes what’s missing are the experiences and perceptions of the people who were in that moment. You find the official reports, but it’s very difficult to get a sense of what that protest was like viscerally from the ground view.”

    It’s hard to imagine any history of the upheaval that would exclude the voice of 18-year-old Laurell Glenn.

    In her oral history posted on the website, Glenn says she feels torn between her sympathy for the protesters and her love for her cousin, a Baltimore City police officer and the single mother of three. Not a day goes by that Glenn doesn’t worry about her cousin’s safety.

    “I’ll continue to protest,” Glenn says.

    “I want my cousin to know that I respect that she has chosen to try to make our city safe. But to do that, we need to build a better relationship between the police and the people of our community. This is the civil rights movement of my generation, and I want my voice in it.”

    The project, which may never exist in any form but online, is an example of a trend in which museums worldwide are beginning to redefine what a museum is and to conceive of their institutions as more than just warehouses of cultural treasures enclosed by four walls and located on a particular street.

    More at the link.

    Rest in power RT @keithboykin State Sen. Clementa Pinckney speaks out for police body cams https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=782650818499919 …

    We are holding a vigil for the victims of the Charleston #AMEShooting right now at the St. Paul AME church in STL.

    Nine Killed in ‘Hate Crime’ Shooting at Charleston Church, Wall Street Journal. Still looking for a suspect.

    White men are 31% of the U.S. population, but 71% of mass shooters. Can we talk about the white male culture of violence yet?

    Local NAACP official: Gunman told survivor he’d let her live so she could tell everyone else what happened. #CharlestonShooting

54. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    18 June 2015 at 7:54 am

    From Raw Story–
    Charleston terrorist reveals his motives: ‘You rape our women and you’re taking over our country-you have to go’:

    The white man in his early 20s opened fire on a prayer service Wednesday night inside Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, killing Pastor Rev. Clementa Pinckney – who is also a state senator – and eight other congregants.

    The lawmaker’s cousin said the shooter came into the church and sat next to Pinckney through the service and started shooting when it concluded.

    A survivor told reporters that the gunman reloaded five times during the massacre and ignored the pleas of one man to reconsider killing the worshipers.

    “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country — and you have to go,” the terrorist said, according to a survivor.

    Misogyny, racism, and xenophobia all wrapped up into one horrible package. And this guy is far from the only person in this country who thinks this way.

    And I agree with you rq-this act of terrorism is not inexplicable or unfathomable. The writing is on the wall. It’s very easy to understand why the shooter committed such a hateful, murderous act.

55. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 10:04 am

    They’ve just come up with a suspect in the shooting.
    And I keep looking at my twitter timeline and wondering why the world hasn’t stopped yet.
    So much wrong with the reporting, too – just saw a tweet, quoting CNN, which asks should white people be afraid of going to black churches now. WTF.

56. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 10:14 am

    Charleston, SC Church Shooting: Live Updates, to follow along, if anyone still needs a link.

    9 killed in hate crime shooting at historic black church in Charleston – there’s a short section on The Victims but they only mention the senator, but there’s 8 more people dead – someone on twitter seems to have found out her grandmother was killed.

    The suspect

    Authorities described the suspect as a white male, approximately 21 years of age, with sandy blond hair and “extremely dangerous.” He ran from the scene of the shooting and is currently at large.

    Speaking at a news conference at 6 a.m. ET, police told reporters they had obtained surveillance videos of the suspect and his car. They released a flyer with the man’s image and appealed for people with information to get in contact.

    They have a name, too. But funny, they won’t release it on the official flier, even though it appears elsewhere (will appear here, too).

    Charleston church shooting suspect from Columbia area

    The suspect in the mass shooting at a Charleston church is from the Columbia area, according to law enforcement sources.

    Law enforcement is pursuing 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof, of Eastover. An active manhunt is taking place in several locations in the Midlands.

    Public records show Roof was most recently arrested in March in Lexington County on drug charges.

    Roof is described as a white male, 21 years old with a bowl cut haircut, slender/small build, grey sweat shirt, blue jeans and clean shaven. He is considered armed and dangerous.

    He is believed to be driving a black Hyundai Elantra with South Carolina tag LGF-330. His last known address is in the 10,000 block of Garners Ferry Road in Eastover.

    There you go.

    Charleston church gunman sat with victims for hour, then went on racist rant before killing nine, the fucking terrorist. Oh, and yes, they’re already out calling him deranged. *spits* No mental illness required here, thank you, stop that shit.

    The FBI identified the gunman who shot nine people dead inside a black South Carolina church as 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof.

    Nine people died during the massacre inside Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME Church Wednesday night. Police are hunting for Roof, who fled the church in his dark sedan after the shooting.

    Roof was identified Thursday morning by the FBI, The Post Courier reported.

    The cold-blooded killer who slaughtered nine worshipers inside a black South Carolina church sat with his victims for about an hour before he told them, “You’re taking over our country,” and opened fire on the congregation, the family of one of the victims said.

    The unidentified shooter — a white man in his 20s who is still at large — reloaded his gun five times during the massacre inside the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston Wednesday night, witnesses said.

    Earlier that night, he attended a prayer meeting at the historical black church, Charleston police said Thursday. About an hour later, he began his gun rampage, which left six women and three men dead, police said.

    The Department of Justice and the FBI are investing the attack as a hate crime and police hunt for the on-the-loose gunman.

    The church’s pastor, State Sen. Clementa C. Pinckney, was among the victims, his family said.

    Just before the gunman started shooting, he told the congregation, “You have to go,” witnesses told Sylvia Johnson, Pinckney’s cousin.

    “He just said ‘I have to do it.’ He said, ‘You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country,’” she said on MSNBC, recounting what survivors told her.

    Yeah, it’s a bit of a repeat from the article Tony linked. Sorry. More:

    He reloaded five times as people inside the church begged him to stop shooting, she said.

    The gunman spared at least one woman so she could tell the world about the bloodbath inside the church, Charleston’s NAACP President Dot Scott told the Post and Courier.

    The gunman — identified as a white man between the ages of 21 and 25 — fled in a dark sedan after the massacre.

    He reloaded five fucking times. It’s like something out of a really, really, really bad movie – because it won’t end, will it.

    For Charleston’s Emanuel A.M.E. Church, shooting is another painful chapter in rich history. SOmethiing about that juxtaposition right at this moment bothers me, but whatever.

    When a gunman opened fire on Charleston’s Emanuel A.M.E. Church Wednesday, spraying bullets into a group of worshipers gathered for a mid-week prayer meeting, it was as though history repeated itself.

    This historic congregation, the oldest of its kind in the South, had already seen more than its fair share of tumult and hate. It was founded by worshipers fleeing racism and burned to the ground for its connection with a thwarted slave revolt. For years its meetings were conducted in secret to evade laws that banned all-black services. It was jolted by an earthquake in 1886. Civil rights luminaries spoke from its pulpit and led marches from its steps. For nearly two hundred years it had been the site of struggle, resistance and change.

    On Wednesday, the church was a crime scene — the street outside aglow with the flashing red lights of police cars and echoing with the screech of sirens. Nine people had been killed there, reportedly including the church’s pastor, Rev. Clementa Pinckney, though police had not confirmed his death.

    “I do believe this was a hate crime,” Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said at a press conference early Thursday morning.

    To those watching in Charleston and from afar, it was devastating.

    “It’s not just a church. It’s also a symbol … of black freedom,” said Robert Greene, who studies the 20th century South at the University of South Carolina. “That’s why so many folks are so upset tonight, because it’s a church that represents so much about the rich history and tradition of African Americans in Charleston.”

    In Charleston, the church is affectionately known as “Mother Emanuel,” a nod to its age and its eminence in the community. It is a place people take pride in, said Rev. Stephen Singleton, who was pastor there from 2006 to 2010 — all soaring ceilings and fine pinewood floors, with an antique pipe organ that had been shipped from Europe more than a century ago.

    “They’re just God-fearing people,” Singleton said of his former congregation. “People who lived in modesty in light of the history of the congregation they called home.”

    “Where you are is a very special place in Charleston,” the most recent pastor, Clementa Pinckney, told a group of visitors two years ago. “It’s a very special place because this site, this area, has been tied to the history and life of African Americans since about the early 1800s.”

    That history is a long and storied one. The congregation was founded in the era of slavery by Morris Brown, a founding pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1816, frustrated with the racism he encountered in Charleston’s segregated churches, Brown decided to form a Church of his own. About 4,000 parishioners followed him — more than 75 percent of the city’s black community, according to a history published by the College of Charleston.

    From the beginning, the congregation was a focal point of community organizing and anti-slavery activism — provoking fears and intense distrust among the city’s white population. According to a PBS documentary, white Charlestonians constantly monitored the church, sometimes disrupting services and arresting worshipers.

    They had some reason for alarm: Denmark Vesey, the organizer of one of the nation’s most notable failed slave uprisings, was a leader in the church. He fiercely and insistently preached that African Americans were the new Israelites, that their enslavement would be punished with death, and in 1822 he and other leaders began plotting a rebellion.

    The revolt was planned for June 16 — 193 years and one day before the shooting Wednesday night. But another member of the church, a slave named George Wilson, told his master about the plot. Nearly three dozen organizers — including Vesey — were put on trial and executed, while another 60 were banished from the city. Believing that “black religion” had caused the uprising, South Carolina instituted a series of draconian measures against African American churches and communities, including a ban on services conducted without a white person present. The Charleston A.M.E. congregation was dispersed and their building set ablaze.

    After the end of the Civil War, the A.M.E. congregation — which had been conducting services in secret for decades and worked as part of the Underground Railroad — was formally reestablished and adopted the name Emanuel. Parishioners rebuilt their church on Calhoun Street, a half mile away from Fort Sumter, where the Civil War’s first shots were fired and, a block from the square that had been a military marching ground during the Civil War and the site of a celebratory parade of African American residents once the conflict ended.

    When that wooden building was destroyed in a 1886 earthquake, the congregation replaced it with the stately gothic revival structure seen today.

    The church’s activism resumed along with services, and by the 20th century it had become a focal point of South Carolina’s civil rights movement.

    Booker T. Washington spoke there in 1909 to a large audience of both white and black admirers. In 1962, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speach about voting rights and making the “American dream a reality.” So did Roy Wilkins, as executive secretary of the NAACP. In 1969, as Charleston was in the midst of a massive strike aimed at creating a union for the state’s mostly black hospital workers, Coretta Scott King led a march from Emanuel A.M.E.’s steps while 1,000 state troopers and national guardsmen looked on.

    “If there was any sort of civil rights protest or activity in Charleston it was almost always centered around that church,” Greene said.

    Singleton, the former pastor of Emanuel A.M.E., said the church was still a place for political organizing when he was there. Politicians often dropped in, he recalled. Parishioners organized for community issues.

    Pinckney, 41, the current pastor who was in the church when the gunman opened fire, was even more active. For more than a decade he’d served as a member of the South Carolina State Senate. He was an advocate for a bill in the state legislature that would require police officers to wear body cameras, calling it “our No. 1 priority,” according to the Charleston Post and Courier.

    For many, the initial response was one of shock.

    “If we’re not safe in the church, God, you tell us where we are safe,” mourners at a prayer circle told a reporter for MSNBC.

    But Robert Mickey, a University of Michigan political scientist who studies race and politics in the post-War South, noted that activist African American churches have been targeted before.

    “They’ve been sites of black protest and community organizing, and they have long been targets as well,” he said, noting the long list of racist attacks on black churches, particularly the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.

    The gunman on Wednesday, who police said was about 21 years old, may not have been aware of that history, Mickey added. But the congregation at Emanuel A.M.E., as well as the thousands of people who watched the news of the killings there in horror, certainly did.

    “When you’re on the receiving end of the violence it’s pretty hard not to put it in that context,” Mickey said. “You can’t help but notice the continuities, the violence and fear that constantly these revisit these same communities.”

    But Singleton said that the attack on his old church “should be dealt with as an individual,” not as part of some broader trend.

    “I think the comparison that you can draw from it is, evil is real and it’s prevalent all over the place,” he said, adding, “I want to encourage people of faith to be prayerful. Embrace our faith and embrace each other.”

    Singleton, who preaches in Columbia, S.C., now, said he’ll heading back to Charleston in the next few days. He wants to visit his old congregation, he said, to pay his respects to those who were killed and the church that has had another painful chapter added to its history.

    “That church has a legacy, and it won‘t be destroyed because of this,” he said, firmly. “Chances are it’ll probably come out stronger.”

    Oh, and the shooter will probably be an atheist. Just saying.

    @CalBSU is having a vigil today at 6:30pm. Please join us. #CharlestonShooting

    Jeb Bush cancels Charleston visit after church shootings – as someone on Twitter said, because Jeb Bush doesn’t care about black people either!

    Bush, who formally announced his candidacy earlier this week, was to appear Thursday at the Charleston Maritime Center as part of his tour of some of the nation’s early-primary states. The city has a special connection to his family: His mother, Barbara Bush, was a 1943 graduate of Ashley Hall School.

    Earlier in the day, Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton spoke in North Charleston, her second visit to the state since declaring her candidacy.

    According to Columbia’s The State newspaper, the pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal church, Clementa Pinckney, who is also a state senator, was among those slain at the church.

    The 41-year-old Pinckney was first elected to the State House in 1996 at the age of 23; a biography on the church’s web site calls him “the youngest African-American in South Carolina to be elected to the State Legislature.”

57. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 10:23 am

    Just sent a comment into moderation – no biggie, going to be a lot of repeat information, but that one had a nice long article profiling the Emanuel church, where the shooting occurred. What history, what a thing to add to that…!
    And here is the NAACP statement re: the #CharlestonShooting. No greater coward than the criminal who enters the house of god and slaughters the innocent. Mourning, prayers, condolences.

    Boston bomber gets the entire city shut down. Escaped inmates chased by 800 officers. #CharlestionShooting “manhunt”

    ‘I have to do this. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country’: Chilling words of race-hate gunman, 21, as he reloaded while shooting dead NINE people at historic South Carolina black church . BUT IF MORE OF THE BIBLE STUDIERS HAD GUNS…. No. Just no.

    The white gunman sought by police for shooting dead nine people during a bible study meeting at an African-American church in South Carolina last night told one survivor he ‘had to do it’, it has emerged.

    The unidentified gunman, who remains on the run since the horrific massacre at the 150-year-old Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, reloaded his gun five times as he picked off his victims – killing six men and three women – according to one survivor.

    On Thursday, a cousin of one of the victims, Reverend and South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney, told NBC News that she had spoken to one of the survivors who recounted the gunman’s chilling words as they urged him to stop.

    ‘He just said: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go”,’ Sylvia Johnson said.

    The gunman spared one woman so she could ‘tell the world what happened’, eye witnesses recounted, while a five-year-old girl also survived the attack after her grandmother told her to play dead when the shooter started firing.

    Police have launched a massive manhunt for the gunman and have released surveillance images of the suspect and his car.

    Lots of photos at the link (not dead bodies, just general police, victims, speaking heads, etc.).

    The Speech That Shocked Birmingham the Day After the Church Bombing, about as applicable today.

    In the next few days, you are likely to be inundated with 50th anniversary reminiscences of the Birmingham church bombing of September 15, 1963, a blast that killed four young black children and intensified the struggle for civil rights in the South. This is as it should be. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church was the most terrible act of one of the most terribly divisive periods in American history, and it’s not too much of a leap to suggest that all that came after it—including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—would not have come as quickly as it did without the martyrdom of those little girls.

    What you likely will not hear about in the next few days is what happened the day after the church bombing. On Monday, September 16, 1963, a young Alabama lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr., a white man with a young family, a Southerner by heart and heritage, stood up at a lunch meeting of the Birmingham Young Men’s Business Club, at the heart of the city’s white Establishment, and delivered a speech about race and prejudice that bent the arc of the moral universe just a little bit more toward justice. It was a speech that changed Morgan’s life—and 50 years later its power and eloquence are worth revisiting. Just hours after the church bombing, Morgan spoke these words:

    Four little girls were killed in Birmingham yesterday. A mad, remorseful worried community asks, “Who did it? Who threw that bomb? Was it a Negro or a white?” The answer should be, “We all did it.” Every last one of us is condemned for that crime and the bombing before it and a decade ago. We all did it.

    He had written the speech that morning, he would recount years later after he and his family were forced to flee Birmingham because of the vicious reaction his words had generated from his fellow Alabamans. He had jotted down his remarks, he said, “from anger and despair, from frustration and empathy. And from years of hopes, hopes that were shattered and crumbled with the steps of that Negro Baptist Church.” He had had enough of the silent acquiescence of good people who saw wrong but didn’t try to right it.

    A short time later, white policemen kill a Negro and wound another. A few hours later, two young men on a motorbike shoot and kill a Negro child. Fires break out, and, in Montgomery, white youths assault Negroes. And all across Alabama, an angry, guilty people cry out their mocking shouts of indignity and say they wonder, “Why?” “Who?” Everyone then “deplores” the “dastardly” act. But you know the “who” of “Who did it” is really rather simple.

    There was little in Morgan’s early life to suggest that he would have the courage to speak out in this fashion—but you also can see signs of the civil rights lawyer to come. He was born in Kentucky, the son of parents who moved their family to Birmingham in 1945 and were always courteous to the “black help.” Like so many other local sons and daughters of the time, Morgan went to University of Alabama. By the time he got there he was interested in law and politics. He would spend his life enmeshed in both.

    The “who” is every little individual who talks about the “n*gg*rs” and spreads the seeds of his hate to his neighbor and his son. The jokester, the crude oaf whose racial jokes rock the party with laughter. The “who” is every governor who ever shouted for lawlessness and became a law violator. It is every senator and every representative who in the halls of Congress stands and with mock humility tells the world that things back home aren’t really like they are. It is courts that move ever so slowly, and newspapers that timorously defend the law.

    He was always a Democrat, which in Alabama in 1948 meant that he was present at the creation of the chasm on race that defines American politics to this very day. Tellingly, he was drawn first to James E. Folsom—”Big Jim”—who served two non-consecutive terms as governor from 1947 to 1959. Folsom was a populist, which wasn’t uncommon, but was also an early and ardent integrationist. “As long as the Negroes are held down by deprivation and lack of opportunity the other poor people will be held down alongside them,” Folsom had said, in 1949, the year after Alabama went Dixiecrat.

    It is all the Christians and all their ministers who spoke too late in anguished cries against violence. It is the coward in each of us who clucks admonitions. We have 10 years of lawless preachments, 10 years of criticism of law, of courts, of our fellow man, a decade of telling school children the opposite of what the civics books say. We are a mass of intolerance and bigotry and stand indicted before our young. We are cursed by the failure of each of us to accept responsibility, by our defense of an already dead institution.

    I suppose it was inevitable that a smart young man interested in law and politics would pass the decade of the 1950s in Alabama at the center of a constant storm of racial tension. And 1954 clearly was the dividing line. Before it there were the deplorable conditions that generated the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. After it there was the virulent opposition that the ruling generated in the South. What did Morgan say he learned during this tumultuous time? That voices of moderation must have the courage to speak up—or accept the pain of being left out.

    Yesterday while Birmingham, which prides itself on the number of its churches, was attending worship services, a bomb went off and an all-white police force moved into action, a police force which has been praised by city officials and others at least once a day for a month or so. A police force which has solved no bombings. A police force which many Negroes feel is perpetrating the very evils we decry. And why would Negroes think this?

    He got married. He became a lawyer. He was active in state and local politics. By 1958 he had his own firm. And through this era, of Citizens Councils and Little Rock, he struggled to reconcile his love of the South with his aversion to its racism, his loyalty to Birmingham with his frustration at its opposition to integration. What he learned during this time in both law and politics, he would later say, was that the topic of race was a trap and that “every white man in Alabama was caught up in it.”

    There are no Negro policemen; there are no Negro sheriff’s deputies. Few Negroes have served on juries; few have been allowed to vote; few have been allowed to accept responsibility, or granted even a simple part to play in the administration of justice. Do not misunderstand me. It it not that I think that white policemen had anything whatsoever to do with the killing of these children or previous bombings. It’s just that Negroes who see an all-white police force must think in terms of its failure to prevent or solve the bombing and think perhaps Negroes would have worked a little harder. They throw rocks and bottles and bullets. And we whites don’t seem to know why the Negroes are lawless. So we lecture them.

    In 1960, The New York Times’ correspondent Harrison Salisbury wrote a flammable piece on Birmingham titled “Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham. In a tone Morgan would echo three years later, Salisbury wrote of the city: “Every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest, every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, enforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state’s apparatus.” Furious, Alabama officials quickly sued the Times for libel.

    Birmingham is the only city in America where the police chief and the sheriff in the school crisis had to call our local ministers together to tell them to do their duty. The ministers of Birmingham who have done so little for Christianity call for prayer at high noon in a city of lawlessness, and in the same breath, speak of our city’s “image.” Did those ministers visit the families of the Negroes in their hour of travail? Did many of them go to the homes of their brothers and express their regrets in person or pray with the crying relatives? Do they admit Negroes into their ranks at the church?

    The libel lawsuit (remember, this was before the Supreme Court issued New York Times v. Sullivan, a decision that broadened first amendment protections for journalists) immediately impacted Morgan. He was asked to represent the Rev. Robert L. Hughes, a white Methodist minister who was a director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations, a group designed to act as a liaison between the white and black communities in Birmingham. Hughes had been served a subpoena to produce the records of all those who supported the council. And he had decided to fight the request.

    Who is guilty? A moderate mayor elected to change things in Birmingham and who moves so slowly and looks elsewhere for leadership? A business community which shrugs its shoulders and looks to the police or perhaps somewhere else for leadership? A newspaper which has tried so hard of late, yet finds it necessary to lecture Negroes every time a Negro home is bombed? A governor who offers a reward but mentions not his own failure to preserve either segregation or law and order? And what of those lawyers and politicians who counsel people as to what the law is not, when they know full well what the law is?

    Representing Rev. Hughes immediately made Morgan the target of the Klan. Its members accosted him in a courthouse at a hearing. There were anonymous nighttime phone calls. “How come you’d represent that nigger-lover Hughes?” he would be asked. “You better watch out, tough guy. Some night we’ll get you alone.” The experience made Morgan realize that he and Hughes, that all moderates seeking to foster equal rights in the South at that time, were “in the same boat.” Whether he had wanted to or not, he had chosen a side.

    Those four little Negro girls were human beings. They had lived their fourteen years in a leaderless city: a city where no one accepts responsibility, where everybody wants to blame somebody else. A city with a reward fund which grew like Topsy as a sort of sacrificial offering, a balm for the conscience of the “good people,” whose ready answer is for those “right wing extremists” to shut up. People who absolve themselves of guilt. The liberal lawyer who told me this morning, “Me? I’m not guilty!” he then proceeding to discuss the guilt of the other lawyers, the one who told the people that the Supreme Court did not properly interpret the law. And that’s the way it is with the Southern liberals. They condemn those with whom they disagree for speaking while they sit in fearful silence.

    He became radicalized—but only to a point and always within the structure of the law. He represented a black murder defendant named Boaz Sanders, a case that further opened his eyes to the state’s unequal justice under law. Then he sued the University of Alabama, his beloved alma mater, after it refused to admit two black men around the same time it was stalling the admission of Hood and Malone. These were formal acts of subversion against a culture he could neither abide nor quit. It was tough love. It was the tiny ripple of hope that Robert Kennedy, years later, would talk about in South Africa.

    Birmingham is a city in which the major industry, operated from Pittsburgh, never tried to solve the problem. It is a city where four little Negro girls can be born into a second-class school system, live a segregated life, ghettoed into their own little neighborhoods, restricted to Negro churches, destined to ride in Negro ambulances, to Negro wards of hospitals or to a Negro cemetery. Local papers, on their front and editorial pages, call for order and then exclude their names from obituary columns.

    The Alabama of the early 1960s was the Alabama of George Wallace and the Freedom Riders. It was the Alabama of Vivian Malone and James Hood and Eugene “Bull” Connor. It was the Alabama from which came many blacks and whites who believed in integration and in civil rights and who participated in the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. And then, just 18 days later, it was the Alabama that detonated a bomb inside a church on a Sunday. “My God,” a woman on the scene screamed, “you’re not even safe in a church.”

    And who is really guilty? Each of us. Each citizen who has not consciously attempted to bring about peaceful compliance with the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, every citizen who has ever said “they ought to kill that nigger,” every citizen who votes for the candidate with the bloody flag, every citizen and every school board member and schoolteacher and principal and businessman and judge and lawyer who has corrupted the minds of our youth; every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred, is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb.

    What’s it like living in Birmingham? No one ever really has known and no one will until this city becomes part of the United States. Birmingham is not a dying city; it is dead.

    And with those words—”It is dead”—Morgan sat down. In his powerful book, “A Time to Speak,” from which the speech has been transcribed, Morgan wrote: “There was applause, and then one member rose. He suggested that we admit a Negro into the club. There was silence. The motion died. Soon the Young Men’s Business Club of Birmingham, Alabama, adjourned its meeting of September 16, 1963. It was one o’clock. Downstairs, the troopers still laughed and talked, and blocks away the carillon again played ‘Dixie.'”

    Postscript

    Following the speech, the threats began almost immediately. The very next morning, at 5 a.m., Morgan received a call. “Is the mortician there yet?” a voice asked. “I don’t know any morticians,” Morgan responded. “Well, you will,” the voice answered, “when the bodies are all over your front yard.” Later, Morgan recounted, a client of his drove an hour to tell him to flee Birmingham. “They’ll shoot you down like a dog,” the client told Morgan. Little wonder that Morgan quickly closed down his law practice and moved himself and his family to safety.

    “Chuck told me that he received a stream of threats both by telephone and letter for weeks after his speech,” recalls Steve Suitts, the renowned author, scholar, and civil libertarian who was one of Morgan’s longtime friends. “Once we discussed the anonymous threats that Alabama-born Justice Hugo Black received from white Southerners after the Brown decision, and a note I had found in Black’s papers saying ‘Nigger-lovers don’t live long in Alabama.’ Chuck smiled and said he got the very same language in a note after his speech in 1963.

    “But, the threats that worried Chuck the most were those made against his wife, Camille, and his little boy, Charles,” Suitts told me this week via email. “He once told me that he had received a note that he did not share with Camille or anyone else. It listed all the places that Camille and Charles had been on a recent Saturday and said something like, ‘Wife and kid of a troublemaker ain’t always getting home. Next time?’ That one worried him the most, because it meant someone had actually followed his family all day.”

    What did he do when he left Alabama? A great deal. He led an extraordinarily vital life on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed and the accused. Here’s how the Times, in its 2009 obituary of him, described the impact of Morgan’s work upon the lay of the law:

    Among his many cases as a civil rights lawyer, Mr. Morgan sued to desegregate his alma mater, the University of Alabama; forced a new election in Greene County, Ala., that led to the election of six black candidates for local offices in 1969; and successfully challenged racially segregated juries and prisons. After the civil rights movement began to subside, Mr. Morgan, as a leader of the American Civil Liberties Union, fought three celebrated court cases involving protests against the Vietnam War.

    He represented Muhammad Ali in his successful court fight to avoid being drafted. He represented the civil rights activist Julian Bond in the early stages of an ultimately successful lawsuit after Mr. Bond had been denied a seat in the Georgia legislature because of his antiwar views. And he defended an officer when he was court-martialed for refusing to help instruct Green Berets headed for Vietnam.

    But it is Suitts, who in many ways carries on the tradition of the Southern moderate, who deserves the last word as we approach the golden anniversary of this remarkable act of personal courage. Of Morgan, Suitts told me:

    In many ways, Chuck took one of the key points in Dr. King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” written five months earlier, and extended it into the horrendous facts of the bombing. (Dr. King wrote: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice… who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait.”)

    Chuck’s speech carried this theme one step further by suggesting the white moderate was responsible for the worst of “disorder” as well as gross injustice … by asking” Who is guilty?” of the bombing of innocent little girls and answering “Each of us!” – not the Klan, not the extremist whites but every white person in Birmingham…
    There is no monument or commemoration of Chuck’s “Time to Speak” in Birmingham. Last time I was in the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum, I did not see any reference to Chuck’s speech. Birmingham’s Young Men’s Business Club still remembers Chuck’s speech occasionally, but it is not remembered all that often there or elsewhere in Birmingham.

    There is probably more than one reason for this fact. The bombing – not Chuck’s speech – was the event that rocked Birmingham and the nation. It is also very hard for anyone today, in Birmingham and elsewhere, to genuinely understand how often and how many good white people kept silent in the face of rank injustice and racial violence in the South during the era of Jim Crow.

    In fact, in one of the last conversation Chuck and I had, we laughed about how difficult it is nowadays to find a Southern white family that does not claim having done at least one heroic act on their part to end racial injustice during the civil rights movement.

    That there speech is worth reading in its entirety. And the article, too.

58. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 10:25 am

    Just sent a comment into moderation – no biggie, going to be a lot of repeat information, but that one had a nice long article profiling the Emanuel church, where the shooting occurred. What history, what a thing to add to that…!
    And here is the NAACP statement re: the #CharlestonShooting. No greater coward than the criminal who enters the house of god and slaughters the innocent. Mourning, prayers, condolences.

    Boston bomber gets the entire city shut down. Escaped inmates chased by 800 officers. #CharlestionShooting “manhunt”

    ‘I have to do this. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country’: Chilling words of race-hate gunman, 21, as he reloaded while shooting dead NINE people at historic South Carolina black church . BUT IF MORE OF THE BIBLE STUDIERS HAD GUNS…. No. Just no.

    The white gunman sought by police for shooting dead nine people during a bible study meeting at an African-American church in South Carolina last night told one survivor he ‘had to do it’, it has emerged.

    The unidentified gunman, who remains on the run since the horrific massacre at the 150-year-old Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, reloaded his gun five times as he picked off his victims – killing six men and three women – according to one survivor.

    On Thursday, a cousin of one of the victims, Reverend and South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney, told NBC News that she had spoken to one of the survivors who recounted the gunman’s chilling words as they urged him to stop.

    ‘He just said: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go”,’ Sylvia Johnson said.

    The gunman spared one woman so she could ‘tell the world what happened’, eye witnesses recounted, while a five-year-old girl also survived the attack after her grandmother told her to play dead when the shooter started firing.

    Police have launched a massive manhunt for the gunman and have released surveillance images of the suspect and his car.

    Lots of photos at the link (not dead bodies, just general police, victims, speaking heads, etc.).

    The Speech That Shocked Birmingham the Day After the Church Bombing, about as applicable today.

    In the next few days, you are likely to be inundated with 50th anniversary reminiscences of the Birmingham church bombing of September 15, 1963, a blast that killed four young black children and intensified the struggle for civil rights in the South. This is as it should be. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church was the most terrible act of one of the most terribly divisive periods in American history, and it’s not too much of a leap to suggest that all that came after it—including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—would not have come as quickly as it did without the martyrdom of those little girls.

    What you likely will not hear about in the next few days is what happened the day after the church bombing. On Monday, September 16, 1963, a young Alabama lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr., a white man with a young family, a Southerner by heart and heritage, stood up at a lunch meeting of the Birmingham Young Men’s Business Club, at the heart of the city’s white Establishment, and delivered a speech about race and prejudice that bent the arc of the moral universe just a little bit more toward justice. It was a speech that changed Morgan’s life—and 50 years later its power and eloquence are worth revisiting. Just hours after the church bombing, Morgan spoke these words:

    Four little girls were killed in Birmingham yesterday. A mad, remorseful worried community asks, “Who did it? Who threw that bomb? Was it a Negro or a white?” The answer should be, “We all did it.” Every last one of us is condemned for that crime and the bombing before it and a decade ago. We all did it.

    He had written the speech that morning, he would recount years later after he and his family were forced to flee Birmingham because of the vicious reaction his words had generated from his fellow Alabamans. He had jotted down his remarks, he said, “from anger and despair, from frustration and empathy. And from years of hopes, hopes that were shattered and crumbled with the steps of that Negro Baptist Church.” He had had enough of the silent acquiescence of good people who saw wrong but didn’t try to right it.

    A short time later, white policemen kill a Negro and wound another. A few hours later, two young men on a motorbike shoot and kill a Negro child. Fires break out, and, in Montgomery, white youths assault Negroes. And all across Alabama, an angry, guilty people cry out their mocking shouts of indignity and say they wonder, “Why?” “Who?” Everyone then “deplores” the “dastardly” act. But you know the “who” of “Who did it” is really rather simple.

    There was little in Morgan’s early life to suggest that he would have the courage to speak out in this fashion—but you also can see signs of the civil rights lawyer to come. He was born in Kentucky, the son of parents who moved their family to Birmingham in 1945 and were always courteous to the “black help.” Like so many other local sons and daughters of the time, Morgan went to University of Alabama. By the time he got there he was interested in law and politics. He would spend his life enmeshed in both.

    The “who” is every little individual who talks about the “n*gg*rs” and spreads the seeds of his hate to his neighbor and his son. The jokester, the crude oaf whose racial jokes rock the party with laughter. The “who” is every governor who ever shouted for lawlessness and became a law violator. It is every senator and every representative who in the halls of Congress stands and with mock humility tells the world that things back home aren’t really like they are. It is courts that move ever so slowly, and newspapers that timorously defend the law.

    He was always a Democrat, which in Alabama in 1948 meant that he was present at the creation of the chasm on race that defines American politics to this very day. Tellingly, he was drawn first to James E. Folsom—”Big Jim”—who served two non-consecutive terms as governor from 1947 to 1959. Folsom was a populist, which wasn’t uncommon, but was also an early and ardent integrationist. “As long as the Negroes are held down by deprivation and lack of opportunity the other poor people will be held down alongside them,” Folsom had said, in 1949, the year after Alabama went Dixiecrat.

    It is all the Christians and all their ministers who spoke too late in anguished cries against violence. It is the coward in each of us who clucks admonitions. We have 10 years of lawless preachments, 10 years of criticism of law, of courts, of our fellow man, a decade of telling school children the opposite of what the civics books say. We are a mass of intolerance and bigotry and stand indicted before our young. We are cursed by the failure of each of us to accept responsibility, by our defense of an already dead institution.

    I suppose it was inevitable that a smart young man interested in law and politics would pass the decade of the 1950s in Alabama at the center of a constant storm of racial tension. And 1954 clearly was the dividing line. Before it there were the deplorable conditions that generated the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. After it there was the virulent opposition that the ruling generated in the South. What did Morgan say he learned during this tumultuous time? That voices of moderation must have the courage to speak up—or accept the pain of being left out.

    Yesterday while Birmingham, which prides itself on the number of its churches, was attending worship services, a bomb went off and an all-white police force moved into action, a police force which has been praised by city officials and others at least once a day for a month or so. A police force which has solved no bombings. A police force which many Negroes feel is perpetrating the very evils we decry. And why would Negroes think this?

    He got married. He became a lawyer. He was active in state and local politics. By 1958 he had his own firm. And through this era, of Citizens Councils and Little Rock, he struggled to reconcile his love of the South with his aversion to its racism, his loyalty to Birmingham with his frustration at its opposition to integration. What he learned during this time in both law and politics, he would later say, was that the topic of race was a trap and that “every white man in Alabama was caught up in it.”

    There are no Negro policemen; there are no Negro sheriff’s deputies. Few Negroes have served on juries; few have been allowed to vote; few have been allowed to accept responsibility, or granted even a simple part to play in the administration of justice. Do not misunderstand me. It it not that I think that white policemen had anything whatsoever to do with the killing of these children or previous bombings. It’s just that Negroes who see an all-white police force must think in terms of its failure to prevent or solve the bombing and think perhaps Negroes would have worked a little harder. They throw rocks and bottles and bullets. And we whites don’t seem to know why the Negroes are lawless. So we lecture them.

    In 1960, The New York Times’ correspondent Harrison Salisbury wrote a flammable piece on Birmingham titled “Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham. In a tone Morgan would echo three years later, Salisbury wrote of the city: “Every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest, every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, enforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state’s apparatus.” Furious, Alabama officials quickly sued the Times for libel.

    Birmingham is the only city in America where the police chief and the sheriff in the school crisis had to call our local ministers together to tell them to do their duty. The ministers of Birmingham who have done so little for Christianity call for prayer at high noon in a city of lawlessness, and in the same breath, speak of our city’s “image.” Did those ministers visit the families of the Negroes in their hour of travail? Did many of them go to the homes of their brothers and express their regrets in person or pray with the crying relatives? Do they admit Negroes into their ranks at the church?

    The libel lawsuit (remember, this was before the Supreme Court issued New York Times v. Sullivan, a decision that broadened first amendment protections for journalists) immediately impacted Morgan. He was asked to represent the Rev. Robert L. Hughes, a white Methodist minister who was a director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations, a group designed to act as a liaison between the white and black communities in Birmingham. Hughes had been served a subpoena to produce the records of all those who supported the council. And he had decided to fight the request.

    Who is guilty? A moderate mayor elected to change things in Birmingham and who moves so slowly and looks elsewhere for leadership? A business community which shrugs its shoulders and looks to the police or perhaps somewhere else for leadership? A newspaper which has tried so hard of late, yet finds it necessary to lecture Negroes every time a Negro home is bombed? A governor who offers a reward but mentions not his own failure to preserve either segregation or law and order? And what of those lawyers and politicians who counsel people as to what the law is not, when they know full well what the law is?

    Representing Rev. Hughes immediately made Morgan the target of the Klan. Its members accosted him in a courthouse at a hearing. There were anonymous nighttime phone calls. “How come you’d represent that n*gg*r-lover Hughes?” he would be asked. “You better watch out, tough guy. Some night we’ll get you alone.” The experience made Morgan realize that he and Hughes, that all moderates seeking to foster equal rights in the South at that time, were “in the same boat.” Whether he had wanted to or not, he had chosen a side.

    Those four little Negro girls were human beings. They had lived their fourteen years in a leaderless city: a city where no one accepts responsibility, where everybody wants to blame somebody else. A city with a reward fund which grew like Topsy as a sort of sacrificial offering, a balm for the conscience of the “good people,” whose ready answer is for those “right wing extremists” to shut up. People who absolve themselves of guilt. The liberal lawyer who told me this morning, “Me? I’m not guilty!” he then proceeding to discuss the guilt of the other lawyers, the one who told the people that the Supreme Court did not properly interpret the law. And that’s the way it is with the Southern liberals. They condemn those with whom they disagree for speaking while they sit in fearful silence.

    He became radicalized—but only to a point and always within the structure of the law. He represented a black murder defendant named Boaz Sanders, a case that further opened his eyes to the state’s unequal justice under law. Then he sued the University of Alabama, his beloved alma mater, after it refused to admit two black men around the same time it was stalling the admission of Hood and Malone. These were formal acts of subversion against a culture he could neither abide nor quit. It was tough love. It was the tiny ripple of hope that Robert Kennedy, years later, would talk about in South Africa.

    Birmingham is a city in which the major industry, operated from Pittsburgh, never tried to solve the problem. It is a city where four little Negro girls can be born into a second-class school system, live a segregated life, ghettoed into their own little neighborhoods, restricted to Negro churches, destined to ride in Negro ambulances, to Negro wards of hospitals or to a Negro cemetery. Local papers, on their front and editorial pages, call for order and then exclude their names from obituary columns.

    The Alabama of the early 1960s was the Alabama of George Wallace and the Freedom Riders. It was the Alabama of Vivian Malone and James Hood and Eugene “Bull” Connor. It was the Alabama from which came many blacks and whites who believed in integration and in civil rights and who participated in the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. And then, just 18 days later, it was the Alabama that detonated a bomb inside a church on a Sunday. “My God,” a woman on the scene screamed, “you’re not even safe in a church.”

    And who is really guilty? Each of us. Each citizen who has not consciously attempted to bring about peaceful compliance with the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, every citizen who has ever said “they ought to kill that n*gg*r,” every citizen who votes for the candidate with the bloody flag, every citizen and every school board member and schoolteacher and principal and businessman and judge and lawyer who has corrupted the minds of our youth; every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred, is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb.

    What’s it like living in Birmingham? No one ever really has known and no one will until this city becomes part of the United States. Birmingham is not a dying city; it is dead.

    And with those words—”It is dead”—Morgan sat down. In his powerful book, “A Time to Speak,” from which the speech has been transcribed, Morgan wrote: “There was applause, and then one member rose. He suggested that we admit a Negro into the club. There was silence. The motion died. Soon the Young Men’s Business Club of Birmingham, Alabama, adjourned its meeting of September 16, 1963. It was one o’clock. Downstairs, the troopers still laughed and talked, and blocks away the carillon again played ‘Dixie.'”

    Postscript

    Following the speech, the threats began almost immediately. The very next morning, at 5 a.m., Morgan received a call. “Is the mortician there yet?” a voice asked. “I don’t know any morticians,” Morgan responded. “Well, you will,” the voice answered, “when the bodies are all over your front yard.” Later, Morgan recounted, a client of his drove an hour to tell him to flee Birmingham. “They’ll shoot you down like a dog,” the client told Morgan. Little wonder that Morgan quickly closed down his law practice and moved himself and his family to safety.

    “Chuck told me that he received a stream of threats both by telephone and letter for weeks after his speech,” recalls Steve Suitts, the renowned author, scholar, and civil libertarian who was one of Morgan’s longtime friends. “Once we discussed the anonymous threats that Alabama-born Justice Hugo Black received from white Southerners after the Brown decision, and a note I had found in Black’s papers saying ‘N*gg*r-lovers don’t live long in Alabama.’ Chuck smiled and said he got the very same language in a note after his speech in 1963.

    “But, the threats that worried Chuck the most were those made against his wife, Camille, and his little boy, Charles,” Suitts told me this week via email. “He once told me that he had received a note that he did not share with Camille or anyone else. It listed all the places that Camille and Charles had been on a recent Saturday and said something like, ‘Wife and kid of a troublemaker ain’t always getting home. Next time?’ That one worried him the most, because it meant someone had actually followed his family all day.”

    What did he do when he left Alabama? A great deal. He led an extraordinarily vital life on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed and the accused. Here’s how the Times, in its 2009 obituary of him, described the impact of Morgan’s work upon the lay of the law:

    Among his many cases as a civil rights lawyer, Mr. Morgan sued to desegregate his alma mater, the University of Alabama; forced a new election in Greene County, Ala., that led to the election of six black candidates for local offices in 1969; and successfully challenged racially segregated juries and prisons. After the civil rights movement began to subside, Mr. Morgan, as a leader of the American Civil Liberties Union, fought three celebrated court cases involving protests against the Vietnam War.

    He represented Muhammad Ali in his successful court fight to avoid being drafted. He represented the civil rights activist Julian Bond in the early stages of an ultimately successful lawsuit after Mr. Bond had been denied a seat in the Georgia legislature because of his antiwar views. And he defended an officer when he was court-martialed for refusing to help instruct Green Berets headed for Vietnam.

    But it is Suitts, who in many ways carries on the tradition of the Southern moderate, who deserves the last word as we approach the golden anniversary of this remarkable act of personal courage. Of Morgan, Suitts told me:

    In many ways, Chuck took one of the key points in Dr. King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” written five months earlier, and extended it into the horrendous facts of the bombing. (Dr. King wrote: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice… who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait.”)

    Chuck’s speech carried this theme one step further by suggesting the white moderate was responsible for the worst of “disorder” as well as gross injustice … by asking” Who is guilty?” of the bombing of innocent little girls and answering “Each of us!” – not the Klan, not the extremist whites but every white person in Birmingham…
    There is no monument or commemoration of Chuck’s “Time to Speak” in Birmingham. Last time I was in the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum, I did not see any reference to Chuck’s speech. Birmingham’s Young Men’s Business Club still remembers Chuck’s speech occasionally, but it is not remembered all that often there or elsewhere in Birmingham.

    There is probably more than one reason for this fact. The bombing – not Chuck’s speech – was the event that rocked Birmingham and the nation. It is also very hard for anyone today, in Birmingham and elsewhere, to genuinely understand how often and how many good white people kept silent in the face of rank injustice and racial violence in the South during the era of Jim Crow.

    In fact, in one of the last conversation Chuck and I had, we laughed about how difficult it is nowadays to find a Southern white family that does not claim having done at least one heroic act on their part to end racial injustice during the civil rights movement.

    That there speech is worth reading in its entirety. And the article, too.

59. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 10:30 am

    Charleston church gunman sat with victims for hour, then went on racist rant before killing nine, article at link, no new information.

    Authorities have ID’d the suspect as Dylann Roof, 21, of Columbia area, no new information, just going to pull this:

    Police revealed no motive for the 9 p.m. shooting. Photos of the suspect, who has not as yet been identified, and his vehicle were released early Thursday.

    “This tragedy that we’re addressing right now is undescribable,” Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said Thursday morning. “The law enforcement agencies that are working on this are committed and we will capture this individual.”

    “I do believe this was a hate crime,” Mullen said.

    Mayor Joe Riley called the shooting “a most unspeakable and heartbreaking tragedy.”

    “An evil and hateful person took the lives of citizens who had come to worship and pray together,” he said.

    Authorities did not identify the dead.

    Police revealed no motive for the shooting. The murderer provided motive himself, thank you. (Didn’t Elliott Rodgers also explicitly state his reasons, and they were still somehow… unseen?)

    Meanwhile, the Klan and Confederate flag flies over Charleston, SC, because the governor doesn’t see anything wrong with flying the Confederate flag. Seriously, it’s in one of the articles upthread. The fuck.

    Charleston church shooting: 9 killed in what officials call a hate crime, CNN, do you really want to read that?

    #CharlestonShooting on the anniv of a huge slave revolt that was being planned by the founder of the church in 1822. I wonder if that had any bearing on the particular date for the shooter?

    A 5yo black girl survived last night by playing dead. Surely my 6yo white son can survive a conversation about why she matters.

60. Ogvorbis: failed human says

    18 June 2015 at 10:33 am

    Just found out about this. Holy shit.
    Cue the ‘it was an isolated incident that has nothing to do with gun culture, it is not terrorism because [fill in the blank], we need more guns so this will not happen, he was crazy so we don’t have to look at society, this was the liberal’s/Obama’s/victim’s/atheist’s/abortion doctor’s/secularist’s fault’ from the national media, the older-conservative-white-rich-man-talking-head, and any conservative who wants to make money or get votes.
    I’m starting to get numb to it also, but at the same time, I have gotten so cynical about just how this type of shit will be used.
    Please, United States, can we actually have a serious discussion about gun violence now?

61. Ogvorbis: failed human says

    18 June 2015 at 10:37 am

    Sorry. Crossposted my #58 from the Drum.

62. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 10:48 am

    Dylann Storm Roof Identified As Charleston Shooting Suspect: Report</a, the Huffington Post.

    Did this man on MSNBC say that we need to catch Dylann before he “hurts a police officer?” Y’all, not today. Not today. #CharlestonShooting

    Thugs and Terrorists Have Attacked Black Churches for Generations

    Late Wednesday, after a gunman murdered 9 churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, many felt shock and anger that stoked memories of other mass shootings. Our violent nation has grieved for slain innocents at an elementary school in Newtown; a Tucson political rally; a movie theater in Aurora; a Virginia college campus; and other sites of mass killings, which are more common than many suppose. The possibility of falling victim to such attacks is a burden all Americans share.

    And the attack on the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and its congregation also stoked memories of an additional burden borne by blacks: the hate crimes and terrorist attacks that have targeted their places of worship for generations, each incident signaling virulent animus toward the entire black community.

    Most Americans learn in history class about the September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Church in Birmingham, Alabama, when Klu Klux Klan terrorists killed four girls. “They died between the sacred walls of the church of God,” Reverend Martin Luther King said. “And they were discussing the eternal meaning of love.”
    ADVERTISEMENT

    Black churches suffered at the hands of thugs and terrorists throughout the Civil Rights era, as they had for a century before, but such attacks aren’t a matter of remote history. As recently as the 1990s, a wave of fire-bombings hit black churches.
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    Congressional hearings were held in 1996 at the end of a two-year period when such arson spiked across the southeast. In South Carolina alone, black churches that suffered probable arson attacks included Mt. Zion AME Church in Williamsburg, Macedonia Baptist Church in Manning, Saint Paul Baptist Church in Lexington, Rosemary Baptist Church in Barnwell, St. John Baptist Church in Dixiana, Effington Baptist Church, Mount Olivet Baptist Church, and Allen’s Chapel. One member of Congress likened fire-bombings in those years to “the return of a biblical plague.” The most recent burning of a black church to make national headlines occurred in Massachusetts the day Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first black president. A white man was later convicted in what prosecutors called a racially motivated arson attack.

    One wonders how many black congregants are remembering bygone fires today.

    Article continues and includes FBI information on hate crimes and some stats. Closes with:

    Any one of us might die in a mass murder. But today, as the nation mourns the victims of Charleston and awaits details about the perpetrator of the attack, black Americans will be most awake to the reality that there are bigots who want to see them dead. What they’re owed by their fellow Americans is vocal solidarity, so that they’re as awake to the depth and breadth of the belief that black lives matter.

    Slain Charleston Pastor Fought For Police Accountability, Gun Control

    Pinckney, who had led the church since 2010, has also served in the state legislature since 1997. At 23 years old, he was one of the youngest individuals and the youngest African American to be elected to serve in South Carolina.

    There, he represented Jasper County, where he grew up and attended public schools. Over his years, he advocated for legislation to reduce violence committed by both civilians and police. In the wake of North Charleston officer shooting and killing 50-year-old Walter Scott, in which a bystander video disproved the officer’s account of the incident, Pinckney co-sponsored a bill requiring all officers to wear body cameras.

    “There are many who said there is no way a police officer would shoot someone in the back six, seven, eight times, but when we were able to see the video, see the gunshots…see him die face-down on the ground…we said, ‘I believe,’ he told his colleagues on the Senate floor. “Now, we as legislators have a great opportunity to allow sunshine into this process. Please give us new eyes for seeing.”

    The bill passed and was signed into law on June 10.

    In his other efforts, he was less successful. In 2013, Pinckney introduced a bill to mandate stricter background checks for gun purchases, specifically calling for firearms dealer to conduct a criminal background check, a family background check, a medical and psychological evaluation, and “a personal interview to determine if a person is mentally fit” before selling or otherwise transferring an assault rifle. It remained stuck in committee. Meanwhile, bills to allow people to carry weapons in more and more places have sailed through the South Carolina statehouse, which has voted to allow weapons in cars with children in them, on the State House grounds, and in any private home or business.

    Though concealed firearms are not currently allowed in churches, some of Pinckney’s colleagues had been pushing for that to change.

    Over his years in the state’s House of Representatives and Senate, Pinckney also authored bills to provide more resources for domestic violence survivors, raise funds for the school districts he represented and protecting the environment.

    The young lawmaker started out as an even younger preacher, beginning delivering sermons at age 13 and receiving his first pastoral position at age 18, following a family tradition that included four generations of A.M.E. pastors. Since taking over at Charleston’s Emanuel A.M.E. Church in 2010, one of the oldest churches in the South, he worked to keep the radical history of the congregation and the denomination alive, noting in a 2013 speech that A.M.E. was founded “in a fit of civil disobedience” reacting to racial inequality in the church.

    “What this denomination stands for is, really, is the universal vision of all people being treated fairly under the law as God sees us in His sight,” he said.

    What a loss for several different communities.

    Everything Known About Charleston Church Shooting Suspect Dylann Roof. And that is the only article profiling the killer I will post here, and no, I will not cite from it. If it is anything designed to make me feel sympathy for him, to feel his mental anguish and otherwise try to empathize with him, I do not have time or energy for that.

    Are you kidding me, @thedailybeast?! Who cares he has black Facebook friends?? He murdered 9 black people!!!!!!

    Source: Suspect in Charleston church rampage captured in North Carolina

    Dylann Storm Roof, the 21-year-old suspect in the killing of 9 people in an historic black church in downtown Charleston, was taken into custody Thursday in Shelby, N.C., WLTX reported, citing an unidentified law enforcement source.

    The Columbia, S.C., TV station said the circumstances surrounding the arrest were not immediately available. Shelby,N.C., is west of Charlotte and about 245 miles northwest of Charleston.

    Police said the suspect, from Columbia, S.C., had been sought in a black Hyundai with vehicle tag LGF330 and appealed to the public for any information on his whereabouts.

    A Facebook page for a Dylann Roof’ carries a photo of a young man in a bowl-like haircut similar to the image in a surveillance photo outside the Emanuel AME church just before the killings Wednesday night. The page says he attended White Knoll High School in Lexington.

    The Facebook page also carries a photo of Roof standing in in front of a swamp forest wearing a jacket with patches of the racist-era flags of South Africa and Rhodesia, the one white-ruled country now called Zimbabwe.
    But nooo, no motivation for the shooting can be found!!!

63. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 10:54 am

    Another in moderation, and I was so careful.

    Charleston church shooting suspect arrested in N.C., source says – my previous link said South Carolina, so who knows who is right, it’s all Carolina.

    Charleston, South Carolina (CNN)[Latest developments]

    • Charleston church shooting suspect Dylann Roof has been taken into custody in North Carolina, a senior law enforcement official briefed on the investigation told CNN’s Deborah Feyerick.

    • Roof, 21, of Lexington, South Carolina, is the suspect in Wednesday’s deadly shooting at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, city police said Thursday.

    • Witnesses say the suspect stood up and said he was there “to shoot black people,” a law enforcement official said. The shooter is also thought to have used a handgun, according to the official.

    Like I said before, they’re still having issues with his motive. Wonder why.

    He did not kill members of the congregation because they were Christian. He killed them because he is a white supremacist. #AMEShooting

    Race is “just a social construct” until it’s the reason a white man kills 9 black folk at a church. “Constructs” have impact, y’all.

    Dylann Roof, Suspected Charleston Church Shooting Gunman, Previously Arrested. Oh, he had a record!! Kind of you to mention that.

    Charleston terrorist reveals his motive: ‘You rape our women and you’re taking over our country — and you have to go’, Raw Story.

    It’s like clock-work to defend whiteness. Commeintg on an article which describes Roof as ‘quiet and softspoken’. HEY haven’t other spree killers been described as ‘quiet and softspoken’? Be suspicious of your ‘quiet and softspoken’ co-workers and friends, people. Be suspicious! Esp. if they’re white.

64. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 10:58 am

    Rachel can identify as Black. This WHITE-IDENTIFIED, murderer can’t be White because murderer. Total, help me sing – because people on twitter are arguing that he doesn’t look white (enough).

    Amnesty: U.S. doesn’t meet international standards for deadly police force

    A new report by Amnesty International that claims all 50 states and the District of Columbia don’t meet international standards for the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers has pitted the group against police advocates who argue that departments nationally have clear policies that meet accepted standards.

    A 41-page report released by Amnesty International on Thursday found that states lack statutes that require officers to use deadly force only as a last resort to protect officers or others against imminent threat of death or serious injury.

    The report also found that 13 states have laws that don’t comply with U.S. constitutional standards and that all states lack specific accountability mechanisms for officer-involved killings, including obligatory reporting that a firearm has been used and prompt, impartial investigations into killings.

    “Police have a fundamental obligation to protect human life,” said Steven Hawkins, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “Deadly force must be reserved as a method of absolute last resort. The fact that absolutely no state laws conform to this standard is deeply disturbing and raises serious human rights concerns.”

    However, at a time when the nation is fixated on claims of police brutality, racial profiling and use of force, law enforcement experts say Amnesty’s report is deceiving.

    They said it fails to mention that virtually all police departments around the country have policies that only allow deadly force as a last resort. They add that a lack of state statutes does not mean that officers aren’t held to high standards and that in fact officer involved-killings are thoroughly and objectively investigated.

    Many of the recommendations made in Amnesty’s new report are old ideas that police unions have been working on and have supported for years, says James Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police.

    “They are criticizing out of ignorance rather than an informed position,” Pasco said of Amnesty International. “They would lead you to believe by inference that the United States operates totally without any controls over use of deadly force which is absolutely untrue.”

    DeRay McKesson, an activist and organizer who protested for months in Ferguson, Mo., disagrees vehemently with Pasco’s claims and said Thursday’s report highlights the systemic problems that are plaguing police departments across the country. He said police unions must be willing to support deep changes in laws governing lethal use of force and the culture of policing to protect lives.

    “Unions are having a visceral response to being questioned,” McKesson said. “For them, it is not about what is right and what is wrong. They are upset that people are asking questions of the way that they do the work. They have forgotten that they are public servants.”

    Hawkins argues that states across the country must change and create laws dealing with lethal force. His group believes state laws are too broad and that state legislatures and Congress should introduce or amend statutes that authorize the use of lethal force.

    “The use of lethal force by law enforcement officers raises serious human rights concerns, including in regard to the right to life, the right to security of the person, the right to freedom from discrimination and the right to equal protection of the law,” says the report, which cites several cases such as Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo. and Eric Garner’s death in New York City.

    Amnesty’s report also recommends that the president and Justice Department should create a national commission to review police policies and that Justice Department should publish nationwide statistics on police shootings.

    Pasco pointed out that the National Fraternal Order of Police and several other police groups have been working with the Justice Department for more than a year and Congress for more than four years to establish the sort of federal police review commission described in Thursday’s report.

    Pasco’s group has also publicly come out in support of federally recording all instances where officers kill people as well as all instances where officers are themselves killed or assaulted, he said.

    Eugene O’Donnell, a former police officer and prosecutor who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, called the report “disingenuous” because often police departments have much stricter guidelines for their officers than state laws.

    “Police agencies have often been trailblazers in creating policies that have reined in shootings,” he said. “It’s disingenuous to suggest that American police have a license to kill and that they are using it out there shooting with carte blanche. Many departments include a reverence for human life.”

    Yet, McKesson offered a different perspective. “The police have been hiding in plain sight,” he said. “This report sheds light on just how loose they have been able to be with people’s lives.”

    O’Donnell thinks it is unlikely that all 50 states will enact laws dealing with lethal use of force as Amnesty recommends.

    However, he said, Amnesty’s report can create a robust conversation that could possibly lead to data that would allow police departments with troublesome rates of deadly force to change. He also says the country should be concerned with the way U.S. police departments stack up against departments around the world.

    Pasco stressed that Amnesty’s report is misleading and will paint an unjust picture of officers because he doesn’t know of one police department that doesn’t require officers to use lethal force only as a last resort and only in the face of imminent danger.

    “Amnesty regrettably, in this case, adds fuels to a fire that responsible people are trying to control and address equitably,” Pasco said.

    Sorry, that article kind of comes out of nowhere. Consider it a break.

    I’ll wait RT @zellieimani: Please tell me again how this isn’t about race. #AMEShooting (see photo)

    Reports: Suspect in Charleston church shooting arrested in North Carolina – guess it was North Carolina. Not much new in that article.

    Shots fired into Saint Matthew Church on Pendleton Street, relatedly…

    Shots were fired into Saint Matthew Missionary Baptist Church in the 2000 block of Pendleton Street.
    Officers were told that one of the church’s pastors noticed a bullet hole in the front door of the building.

    It is unknown when the shots were fired, because no one else was at the church at the time.

    At this time, investigators say there is nothing indicating that the shooting is connected to the shooting in South Carolina.

    WMC Action News 5’s Jerica Phillips is on the scene now to learn more information.

    I… what? Fuck.

    Confederate plates on his car and apartheid era patches on his jacket, but let’s not rush to call it “race-related”, right? He had “issues”.
    

65. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 11:02 am

    Classmate: Dylann Roof Did a Lot of Drugs, Made a Lot of Racist Jokes, there, read about him some more. Gawker.

    1.) Mental Illness is not Racism
    2.) Racism is not Mental Illness
    #facts #CharlestonShooting

    Charleston Mayor says VP Biden spoke on phone; Biden knew pastor who lost his life in masscare #CNN #CharlestonShooting
    Wow, another loss for the Biden family.

    By my count, this will be at least the 14th time Pres Obama has made a statement on a shooting attack. I can’t tell if that’s a lot or just a few. :/

66. Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- says

    18 June 2015 at 11:17 am

    At least some Twitter outlets are calling a spade a spade

67. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 11:27 am

    Giliell
    Yes, three out of… eh.

    The latest American mass killing , from The Economist.

    WE DO not yet know why a gunman entered a church in Charleston, South Carolina on Wednesday and killed nine people at a prayer meeting, but in a sense it does not matter. One searches for reasons in order to assign responsibility and to devise solutions, but in this case no one will accept responsibility, and no solutions will be devised. One might blame radical ideology; given that the gunman was white and the victims black, it seems probable that the motives were rooted in racial hatred. But no modern American party, movement or politician embraces explicit racism. While some exploit more subtle forms of racial resentment, none would admit to any link to a mass killer; a South Carolina branch of the Ku Klux Klan has been on a last-ditch recruitment drive to save itself from extinction, but one expects even the KKK would dissociate itself from violence these days.

    Okay, because of the opening sentence? I am not citing anymore of this article. That whole paragraph that follows is just apologetics for… frankly, I don’t even know what. Fuck the Economist.

    
    ‘Good Guy With A Gun’ Plays Cop, Judge and Jury – Executes An 18-Year-Old

    This is a story that is sure to spark lively discussion, if not controversy, over the “good guy with a gun” issue. A man whose friend was working the overnight shift at a gas station in Knoxville, Tennesee on Monday was sitting in his car in the parking lot when he witnessed somebody walk into the store carrying a weapon. Rather than call the police, the man grabbed the gun he kept in his car and took the law into his own hands.

    When he entered the store, the bad guy was most definitely robbing it, forcing the good guy’s friend to open the register at gunpoint. Without hesitation, the good guy took out the bad guy with one fatal gunshot, and the incident was over.

    The robber, identified as 18-year-old Tamon Stapleton, won’t be living a life of crime; he won’t be living at all. The good guy who shot him won’t be facing any charges.

    This may seem like a cut and dry case of a friend defending a friend, which is technically legal in Tennessee, with what some may consider a happy ending. Whenever a life ends, especially one so young, there is nothing happy about it.

    Seems relevant to another gun thread we had recently.

    Will South Carolina fly its Confederate flag at half-staff? They should take it down.

    On Wednesday night, nine people were murdered by a white man in a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina. A hate crime.

    And someone has raised a good question: Will South Carolina honor the victims by flying its Confederate flag at half-staff?

    He’s 21 and a sweet kid, but Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin were teenage grown ass men with amazing negro super powers.

    https://twitter.com/deray/status/611570166590255104

    Vigil to honor those slain taking place on Morris Brown AME

    Hundreds are attending a noon prayer vigil Thursday for the nine people slain at Emanuel AME Church in downtown Charleston.

    Victims’ family members are expected to be in attendance at the vigil at Morris Brown AME Church on Morris Street.

    Hundreds more outside the church showed their support by singing “We Shall Overcome.”

    The Rt. Rev. Richard Franklin Norris, Rev. Juenarrl Keith and Rev. Charles Watkins Jr. will be speaking.

    Also expected to attend were other AME pastors, Gov. Nikki Haley, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and the Rev. Al Sharpton, a number of local officials and members of the community.

    The Rev. Jon Gillison told the capacity crowd at Morris Brown “We know that the devil is trying to instill hate in the hearts of people.”

    The suspect in the shooting is Dylann Roof, 21, of Lexington. Roof was arrested in Shelby, N.C., after a traffic stop, Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said before noon Thursday.

    Those slain were attending a prayer meeting Wednesday night, according to police. The victims have not been officially identified.

    State Sen. Clementa Pinckney, Emanuel AME’s pastor, was thought to have been inside during the shooting.

    Church members at Emanuel AME were gathered for a prayer meeting when gunfire erupted in the 19th-century building. A female survivor told family members that the gunman initially sat down in the church for a while before standing up and opening fire, according to Dot Scott, president of the Charleston NAACP.

    The attack is being considered a hate crime and is being investigated by FBI, as well as local law enforcement.

    No word on the DOJ yet.

68. Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- says

    18 June 2015 at 12:28 pm

    Cannel 4 with an overview of rightwing white terrorist attacks in the USA: http://www.channel4.com/news/charleston-shooting-far-right-murder-in-the-us

69. Ogvorbis: failed human says

    18 June 2015 at 12:32 pm

    rq:

    The FBI is the law enforcement arm of the Department of Justice so if the FBI is investigating the shooting as a hate crime, that is DOJ.

70. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    18 June 2015 at 1:02 pm

    From Fusion–
    The government may drop ‘race’ from the 2020 census:

    It’s one of the most confusing parts of the Census, and it looks like could finally go away: Politico’s Nick Gass reports the Census is considering dropping “race” from its 2020 survey, citing a note from the Pew Research Center.

    Right now, the Census separates “race” from “Hispanic origin.” As Pew itself recently reported, Hispanics themselves, not to mention most other people, use the term interchangeably. The Census seems to have realized this.

    “Federal policy defines ‘Hispanic’ not as a race, but as an ethnicity,” the group said. “And it prescribes that Hispanics can in fact be of any race. But these census findings suggest that standard U.S. racial categories might either be confusing or not provide relevant options for Hispanics to describe their racial identity.”

    The Census also came around to this view as early as 2013.

    “We recognize that race and ethnicity are not quantifiable values,” it said in a report published two years ago. “Rather, identity is a complex mix of one’s family and social environment, historical or socio-political constructs, personal experience, context, and many other immeasurable factors.”

    […]

    Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, says the move, if approved, is long overdue.

    “Combining race and Hispanic origin into a single question—with a multiple-checkoff option—is a change whose time has come,” he told Fusion in an email. “And adding a ‘Middle Eastern or North African’ category, if the testing supports it, is also a positive development, because these people have had trouble fitting themselves into the current scheme.”

    But Cohen did have one critique of the prospective new form provided by Pew:

    “I am concerned about using a single-word ‘Asian’ option, because some immigrants from countries in Asia may not identify with that term,” he said. “So I hope they have figured out a way to continue collecting national-origin information about people from Asia.”

    There are two images at the link-one that shows what the new form might look like and one that shows an image of the form ca. 2010.

71. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 1:13 pm

    Tony
    Can you please post the President’s speech here, too?

72. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 1:39 pm

    Nevmind, I got it. :)
    Obama on Charleston: ‘This does not happen in other advanced countries’ , full transcript of his speech.

    The President: Good afternoon, everybody. This morning, I spoke with, and Vice-President Biden spoke with, Mayor Joe Riley and other leaders of Charleston to express our deep sorrow over the senseless murders that took place last night.

    Michelle and I know several members of Emanuel AME Church. We knew their pastor, Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who, along with eight others, gathered in prayer and fellowship and was murdered last night. And to say our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families, and their community doesn’t say enough to convey the heartache and the sadness and the anger that we feel.

    Any death of this sort is a tragedy. Any shooting involving multiple victims is a tragedy. There is something particularly heartbreaking about the death happening in a place in which we seek solace and we seek peace, in a place of worship.

    Mother Emanuel is, in fact, more than a church. This is a place of worship that was founded by African Americans seeking liberty. This is a church that was burned to the ground because its worshipers worked to end slavery. When there were laws banning all-black church gatherings, they conducted services in secret. When there was a nonviolent movement to bring our country closer in line with our highest ideals, some of our brightest leaders spoke and led marches from this church’s steps. This is a sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the history of America.

    The FBI is now on the scene with local police, and more of the bureau’s best are on the way to join them. The attorney general has announced plans for the FBI to open a hate crime investigation. We understand that the suspect is in custody. And I’ll let the best of law enforcement do its work to make sure that justice is served.

    Until the investigation is complete, I’m necessarily constrained in terms of talking about the details of the case. But I don’t need to be constrained about the emotions that tragedies like this raise. I’ve had to make statements like this too many times. Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times. We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. Now is the time for mourning and for healing.

    But let’s be clear: at some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it. I say that recognizing the politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it. And at some point it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively.

    The fact that this took place in a black church obviously also raises questions about a dark part of our history. This is not the first time that black churches have been attacked. And we know that hatred across races and faiths poses a particular threat to our democracy and our ideals.

    The good news is I am confident that the outpouring of unity and strength and fellowship and love across Charleston today, from all races, from all faiths, from all places of worship indicates the degree to which those old vestiges of hatred can be overcome. That, certainly, was Dr King’s hope just over 50 years ago, after four little girls were killed in a bombing in a black church in Birmingham, Alabama.

    He said they lived meaningful lives, and they died nobly. “They say to each of us,” Dr King said, “black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely with [about] who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American Dream.

    “And if one will hold on, he will discover that God walks with him, and that God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.”

    Reverend Pinckney and his congregation understood that spirit. Their Christian faith compelled them to reach out not just to members of their congregation, or to members of their own communities, but to all in need. They opened their doors to strangers who might enter a church in search of healing or redemption.

    Mother Emanuel church and its congregation have risen before – from flames, from an earthquake, from other dark times – to give hope to generations of Charlestonians. And with our prayers and our love, and the buoyancy of hope, it will rise again now as a place of peace.

    Guns rarely used for self-defense in US — there are 32 criminal homicides for every 1 justifiable shooting

    Contrary to what the gun lobby argues, personal firearms in the United States are rarely used for self-defense, a gun control advocacy group said Wednesday.

    In an analysis of FBI and other federal government data, the non-profit Violence Policy Center said Americans are far more likely to hurt themselves or others when handling a lethal weapon.
    ADVERTISEMENT

    In 2012, it said, only 259 “justifiable homicides” involving a private citizen were reported, compared to 8,342 criminal homicides committed with a gun.

    Put another way, for every justifiable homicide involving a gun, 32 criminal homicides carried out with a firearm occurred. And that does not take into account “tens of thousands” of gun-related suicides and unintentional shootings.

    The influential National Rifle Association contends that “guns are necessary for self-defence,” said Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center in Washington.

    “But this gun industry propaganda has no basis in fact,” he said in a statement.

    “In fact, in a nation of more than 300 million firearms, it is striking how rarely guns are used in self-defense.”

    On its website, the NRA carries a running list of incidents in which it says firearms were successfully used in self-defense — in one case against a house intruder crawling through a doggie door in Texas, in another case against a “rabid fox” in Massachusetts.

    A Living Landmark, on the Emmanuel church.

    Emanuel AME isn’t just a church; it’s the oldest black congregation in the South (outside of Baltimore) and a historic symbol of black resistance to slavery and racism. Its founder, Morris Brown, was one of the first ordained pastors of the AME denomination, founded in 1816 in Philadelphia. Upon his return to Charleston, he started a branch that quickly changed the social and religious landscape of the city. Within two years, more than three-quarters of black Methodists in the city—more than 4,000 people—had left their segregated denominations to join the AME church.

    Now home to huge chunks of Charleston’s black population, Brown’s church was soon a site for organizing and anti-slavery activism. One of its earliest members was Denmark Vesey, a free black carpenter who preached a message of liberation. In 1822, he and other leaders plotted an uprising, drawing thousands—slave and free—into a plan to secure arms, commandeer ships, and kill slaveholders.

    Informed by hostile slaves, however, white officials discovered the plot and arrested Vesey and a host of other co-conspirators. They executed him; deported dozens of blacks (including one of his sons); restricted the manumissions that had added to Charleston’s free black population; and blaming “black religion,” destroyed the AME Church. Its congregants were scattered, and independent black churches were all but banned. Members and their families would meet in secret until after the Civil War, reorganizing, rebuilding near Fort Sumter—with a church designed by Vesey’s other son, Robert—and adopting the name Emanuel. An 1886 earthquake destroyed this building, however, and congregants replaced it with the structure we see today.

    In the 20th century, Emanuel AME welcomed leaders like Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., and Roy Wilkins, former executive secretary of the NAACP. During a 1969 strike for union recognition, Coretta Scott King led black hospital workers in a march from the church steps. State troopers, police, and nearly 1,000 National Guardsmen were on duty.

    This legacy of activism is still part of the church. As a state senator, the late Pinckney was a vocal advocate for police body cameras, urging them in response to the fatal shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston earlier this year. They are our “No. 1 priority,” he said in April.

    More at the link, more history, more on Pinckney.

    Clementa Pinckney discusses Walter Scott on the S.C. Senate floor, video.

    The pastor of Emanuel A.M.E. Church and South Carolina state legislator made remarks on the Senate floor on May 9, 2015 regarding the April 2015 shooting of Walter Scott by a police officer.

    How To Donate To The Emanuel AME Church In Charleston

    Last night, June 17th, a white gunman carried out a terrorist attack in Charleston, South Carolina, during a weekly prayer meeting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the largest and oldest black congregations in America.

    There is a tragic history in this country of black churches being targeted by racists, and it’s a lineage that Emanuel has combatted since its inception centuries ago. Emanuel was founded in 1816, following a dispute over a burial ground for free blacks and slaves outside another Charleston church. According to CNN, soon after, one of Emanuel’s first pastors and other church leaders were jailed for violating a law prohibiting slaves and free blacks from meeting without white supervision. In 1822, the church was burned to derail plans for a slave revolt, and 35 people were executed by the state, including the church’s architect, himself a former slave. At the time, black churches were outlawed, but services continued in secret until the end of the Civil War. Later, during the civil rights era of the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke there, and the church was also home to a protest led by Coretta Scott King at which 900 people were arrested, according to ABC News.

    Today, Emanuel AME Church’s senior pastor, state Senator Clementa Pinckney, is among nine congregation members dead.
    Here’s a link to the Paypal button on the church’s homepage.

    It was there before this tragedy happened, to process regular donations. As we watch this terrible and terribly familiar situation unfold, sending money to this remarkable church is one small way to do something.

    Block where Morris AME is located is being secured due to bomb threat. #CharlestonShooting

73. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 1:45 pm

    Sharonda Coleman-Singleton was high-school girls’ track and field coach who served as a reverend. #CharlestonVictims

    The confederate flag waves today at the #SC statehouse, while the other flags fly at half

    Charleston church shooting: Without gun control, racism will keep killing black people

    This time it’s different.
    Charleston church shooting: Obama calls for gun control in wake of tragedy
    Read more

    Mass shootings have become a banal fact of death in America. (Last year there were 283 incidents in which four or more people were shot.) The nation as a whole, meanwhile, has become newly sensitised to racial violence, with growing activism around police shootings. In April video of a white policeman shooting Walter Scott – an unarmed African American – eight times in the back in as he ran away in North Charleston, South Carolina, went viral.

    But the shooting of nine black church-goers in Charleston (not far from where Scott was killed) by a white gunman in what police are treating as a “hate crime” marks a doubling down on the nation’s twin pathologies of racism and guns. Both are deeply rooted in the nation’s history since its founding: neither are going anywhere soon.

    The timing of this particular tragedy, given the heightened consciousness and activism around the #BlackLivesMatter movement, provides a particular lens through which to view this massacre. When Barack Obama won the South Carolina primary in 2008 a huge multiracial crowd gathered in the state capitol of Columbia and chanted “race doesn’t matter”.
    Charleston church shooting: 21-year-old suspect captured as ‘holy city’ mourns
    Read more

    With each new well-publicised account of racial violence, be it at the hands of the state or the public, claims that the arrival of a black president signals the arrival of a post-racial era collapses under the weight of its own delusion.

    Racism isn’t dead. We know this because it keeps killing black people.

    The fact that Clementa Pinckney, a state senator, was among the dead indicates that nobody is safe. The fact that it took place in a church during a prayer meeting indicates that nowhere is safe.

    America does not have a monopoly on racism. But what makes its racism so lethal is the ease with which people can acquire guns. While the new conversation around race will mean the political response to the fact of this attack will be different, the stale conversation around gun control means the legislative response to the nature of this attack will remain the same. Nothing will happen.

    More at the link.

    When John Roberts Said There Isn’t Enough Racism In America To Justify The Voting Rights Act

    Two years ago next Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts walked into the Supreme Courtroom, took his seat in the Court’s center chair, and then, after waiting for his colleagues to dispose of some less-closely watched business, he began to tell a fairy tale about a nation redeemed.

    Once upon a time, Roberts began, “voting discrimination against African-Americans was so entrenched and pervasive in 1965 that to cite just one example, less than 7% of African-Americans of voting age in Mississippi had been able to register to vote.” But then, Roberts told the Courtroom, America set aside this past. “There are examples of progress, more poignant than the numbers,” the chief justice claimed. “During the Freedom Summer of 1964 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, three men were murdered while working in the area to register African-American voters. On Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama in 1965, police beat and used tear gas on hundreds marching in support of enfranchising African-Americans. Today, both Philadelphia and Mississippi and Selma, Alabama have African-Americans mayors.”

    “Our country has changed,” Roberts wrote in the opinion he delivered that day, Shelby County v. Holder. It has wiped away so much of its racist past that the “extraordinary measures” employed by a key provision of the Voting Rights Act could no longer be justified.

    Wednesday night, a white man walked into an historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. He sat inside the congregation for an hour, as churchgoers engaged in Bible study. Then he announced to the African American congregants that they are “taking over our country,” and he opened fire. This murderer killed nine men and women, more people than those who were killed in the Philadelphia murders and Bloody Sunday combined.

    The central premise of Shelby County is that, while America was once consumed by the kind of “‘pervasive,’ ‘flagrant,’ ‘widespread,’ and ‘rampant’ discrimination” that can justify a fully operational Voting Rights Act, our nation has sufficiently fixed its racism problem that the full-formed act can no longer exist. “[T]hings have changed dramatically” in the 50 years since the Voting Rights Act became law, Roberts wrote. Moreover, he reasoned, the central provisions that he and his fellow conservative justices struck down in Shelby County were “extraordinary measures to address an extraordinary problem,” and they could no longer be justified now that that problem had grown merely ordinary.

    It’s a sordid business, this divvying up the amount of racism in the United States to decide whether Congress is allowed to enact laws intended to fix it. Roberts’s premise, that there was less American racism in 2013 than there was in 1965, is undoubtedly correct. But that’s cold comfort to the families of the nine innocents killed in Charleston. It’s a fact that offers very little solace to James Bradfield, the partner of a black, gay man from Mississippi who was randomly targeted and killed by a band of white teenagers who, after a night of drinking, decided that it would be a good kind of early morning entertainment to “go fuck with some niggers.” It also offers little consolation for the voters in states like Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and North Carolina, who all moved forward with voter suppression laws shortly after Shelby County was handed down.

    The Constitution does not give the Supreme Court the power to decide how much racism is enough racism to permit so-called “extraordinary” measures intended to correct it. To the contrary, the Constitution provides that “[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” and that “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” The Court obviously plays an important role in enforcing the Constitution’s protections against race discrimination, but Congress may make independent judgments about how to cure discrimination as well.

    More at the link here, too.

    And PZ’s post, “I have to do it. You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go.”

74. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 1:46 pm

    Sharonda Coleman-Singleton was high-school girls’ track and field coach who served as a reverend. #CharlestonVictims

    The confederate flag waves today at the #SC statehouse, while the other flags fly at half

    Charleston church shooting: Without gun control, racism will keep killing black people

    This time it’s different.
    Charleston church shooting: Obama calls for gun control in wake of tragedy
    Read more

    Mass shootings have become a banal fact of death in America. (Last year there were 283 incidents in which four or more people were shot.) The nation as a whole, meanwhile, has become newly sensitised to racial violence, with growing activism around police shootings. In April video of a white policeman shooting Walter Scott – an unarmed African American – eight times in the back in as he ran away in North Charleston, South Carolina, went viral.

    But the shooting of nine black church-goers in Charleston (not far from where Scott was killed) by a white gunman in what police are treating as a “hate crime” marks a doubling down on the nation’s twin pathologies of racism and guns. Both are deeply rooted in the nation’s history since its founding: neither are going anywhere soon.

    The timing of this particular tragedy, given the heightened consciousness and activism around the #BlackLivesMatter movement, provides a particular lens through which to view this massacre. When Barack Obama won the South Carolina primary in 2008 a huge multiracial crowd gathered in the state capitol of Columbia and chanted “race doesn’t matter”.
    Charleston church shooting: 21-year-old suspect captured as ‘holy city’ mourns
    Read more

    With each new well-publicised account of racial violence, be it at the hands of the state or the public, claims that the arrival of a black president signals the arrival of a post-racial era collapses under the weight of its own delusion.

    Racism isn’t dead. We know this because it keeps killing black people.

    The fact that Clementa Pinckney, a state senator, was among the dead indicates that nobody is safe. The fact that it took place in a church during a prayer meeting indicates that nowhere is safe.

    America does not have a monopoly on racism. But what makes its racism so lethal is the ease with which people can acquire guns. While the new conversation around race will mean the political response to the fact of this attack will be different, the stale conversation around gun control means the legislative response to the nature of this attack will remain the same. Nothing will happen.

    More at the link.

    When John Roberts Said There Isn’t Enough Racism In America To Justify The Voting Rights Act

    Two years ago next Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts walked into the Supreme Courtroom, took his seat in the Court’s center chair, and then, after waiting for his colleagues to dispose of some less-closely watched business, he began to tell a fairy tale about a nation redeemed.

    Once upon a time, Roberts began, “voting discrimination against African-Americans was so entrenched and pervasive in 1965 that to cite just one example, less than 7% of African-Americans of voting age in Mississippi had been able to register to vote.” But then, Roberts told the Courtroom, America set aside this past. “There are examples of progress, more poignant than the numbers,” the chief justice claimed. “During the Freedom Summer of 1964 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, three men were murdered while working in the area to register African-American voters. On Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama in 1965, police beat and used tear gas on hundreds marching in support of enfranchising African-Americans. Today, both Philadelphia and Mississippi and Selma, Alabama have African-Americans mayors.”

    “Our country has changed,” Roberts wrote in the opinion he delivered that day, Shelby County v. Holder. It has wiped away so much of its racist past that the “extraordinary measures” employed by a key provision of the Voting Rights Act could no longer be justified.

    Wednesday night, a white man walked into an historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. He sat inside the congregation for an hour, as churchgoers engaged in Bible study. Then he announced to the African American congregants that they are “taking over our country,” and he opened fire. This murderer killed nine men and women, more people than those who were killed in the Philadelphia murders and Bloody Sunday combined.

    The central premise of Shelby County is that, while America was once consumed by the kind of “‘pervasive,’ ‘flagrant,’ ‘widespread,’ and ‘rampant’ discrimination” that can justify a fully operational Voting Rights Act, our nation has sufficiently fixed its racism problem that the full-formed act can no longer exist. “[T]hings have changed dramatically” in the 50 years since the Voting Rights Act became law, Roberts wrote. Moreover, he reasoned, the central provisions that he and his fellow conservative justices struck down in Shelby County were “extraordinary measures to address an extraordinary problem,” and they could no longer be justified now that that problem had grown merely ordinary.

    It’s a sordid business, this divvying up the amount of racism in the United States to decide whether Congress is allowed to enact laws intended to fix it. Roberts’s premise, that there was less American racism in 2013 than there was in 1965, is undoubtedly correct. But that’s cold comfort to the families of the nine innocents killed in Charleston. It’s a fact that offers very little solace to James Bradfield, the partner of a black, gay man from Mississippi who was randomly targeted and killed by a band of white teenagers who, after a night of drinking, decided that it would be a good kind of early morning entertainment to “go fuck with some n*gg*rs.” It also offers little consolation for the voters in states like Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and North Carolina, who all moved forward with voter suppression laws shortly after Shelby County was handed down.

    The Constitution does not give the Supreme Court the power to decide how much racism is enough racism to permit so-called “extraordinary” measures intended to correct it. To the contrary, the Constitution provides that “[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” and that “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” The Court obviously plays an important role in enforcing the Constitution’s protections against race discrimination, but Congress may make independent judgments about how to cure discrimination as well.

    More at the link here, too.

    And PZ’s post, “I have to do it. You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go.”

75. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 1:51 pm

    Six Victims From Charleston Shooting Identified,

    The names of five of the nine people killed during last night’s shooting in Charleston have been released. State Senator Rev. Clementa Pinckney and Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, a mother of three and a track coach, were identified this morning. Since then the names of three more victims have been released.

    Cynthia Hurd, a library manager at St. Andrews Regional Library in Charleston was among those killed. All public libraries in Charleston will be closed today in her honor.

    Ethel Lee Lance was also killed, according to her daughter, who spoke with ABC News.

    The youngest victim was also identified as Tywanza Sanders, a 2014 graduate of Allen University.

    UPDATE 2:12 pm: A sixth victim has been identified. Myra Thompson was reportedly killed as she taught bible class last night.

    Santorum Calls Charleston Shooting ‘Assault On Religious Liberty’

    Presidential candidate and former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) on Thursday called the attack by a white gunman on a historic black church in Charleston, S.C. part of a broader assault on “religious liberty” in America.

    “It’s obviously a crime of hate. Again, we don’t know the rationale, but what other rationale could there be?” Santorum said on the New York radio station AM 970.

    “You’re sort of lost that somebody could walk into a Bible study in a church and indiscriminately kill people,” he added.

    Santorum called for a broader pushback against the “assaults” on religious liberty.

    “You talk about the importance of prayer in this time and we’re now seeing assaults on our religious liberty we’ve never seen before. It’s a time for deeper reflection beyond this horrible situation,” he said.

    The shooting on Wednesday left nine people dead, including pastor Clementa Pinckney, who also served as a Democratic South Carolina state senator.

    Religious liberty. Yes, it was about religious liberty.

    Church Shooter Arrested As Vigils Are Held Across Charleston For Victims, periodic updates.

    CFI Statement on Charleston Shooting: We Must Find Our Common Humanity on Our Shared Journey

    In our day to day lives, it can be difficult to recognize the common humanity of those who are different from us, those who disagree with us, or those with whom we have little shared experience. In times of tragedy like this, with the senseless loss of nine of our fellow human beings in Charleston, those differences quickly evaporate into meaninglessness, and what we share in common shines brightly against the darkness. It is frustrating that it so often takes heartbreaking events such as this act of terror to make clear what unites us.

    The victims of the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church sought wisdom, strength, and community in a different way than those of us at the Center for Inquiry might. But regardless of our differing beliefs, these nine women and men were on the same journey as all of us, navigating our way through this life as best we can, weathering setbacks, celebrating triumphs, and trying to do so with kindness.

    Differences in beliefs, politics, and values can be debated vigorously, and these exchanges should be opportunities to learn from one another, and see things from new points of view. Sadly, outrageously, a dangerous few are unable to see the humanity in others. Instead, they use their differences from others to validate a false feeling of superiority—whether racial, religious, or ideological— and to justify acts of violence and terror. As we oppose violence and persecution against our fellow nonbelievers and secularists around the world, so we stand with the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and the people of Charleston in defiance of this attempt to strike fear into a community, and we call for those of all belief systems, naturalistic and theistic, progressive and orthodox, to make new efforts to find each other’s common humanity, and find ways to aid each other, no matter our differences, in our shared journey.

    Rather weak, in my opinion, but okay.

    Massacre in Charleston: 9 Shot Dead at Historic Black Church, Police Search for White Gunman – a bit out of date by now.

76. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 1:54 pm

    Reuters update thread: periodic updates. That bomb threat has been cleared, the one mentioned upthread.

    Suspect in custody after 9 killed in gun massacre at church, no new information.

    Charleston Newspaper Puts Gun Ad Over Shooting Massacre Headline. Charleston seems to be the definition of sensitivity.

    Terrorism in Charleston demands the government act like black lives matter

    When Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors created #Blacklivesmatter, their “love note to black people”, they couldn’t have had Wednesday night’s terrorist attack at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in mind. They were, however, mindful of the myriad ways in which black people throughout American history have been terrorized in their houses of worship, including the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. In the early 19th century, Mother Emanuel AME Church was itself destroyed by local white citizens who were committed to quelling the the embers of black rebellion sparked by Denmark Vesey.

    I thus pause when pundits label domestic terror attacks like this one “isolated”.

    There is nothing isolated about the violence exacted upon black people by law enforcement officers, vigilantes or terrorists. When police officers or extrajudicial neighborhood watchmen shoot dead descendants of this nation’s formerly enslaved population, they are recommitting themselves to the white American tradition of squashing out black life at every juncture possible. Over the past three years alone, I’ve learned that – in the social economy of white American supremacy – black people can’t walk to a convenience store, ask for assistance after a car accident, play with a toy gun or study the Bible without the looming reality of the violent white gaze.

    There is nothing isolated about the terrorism allegedly perpetrated by the peacefully-captured suspect, 21-year-old Dylan Roof, when the Ku Klux Klan members who bombed 16th Street Baptist Church 50 years ago walked away with no federal charges. It is now the responsibility of federal prosecutors to use the full power of the law to exact justice in the name of the nine black lives lost on the eve of the anniversary commemorating the suppression of Denmark Vesey’s planned uprising; it is our duty to stay focused and hold them to their obligations.

    But to deny the interconnectedness of white American terrorism and violence perpetrated on the bodies of black people is to linearize and domesticate time, and to ignore the oceanic, circular nature of history – a history that assures us that some cable-news pundits will more readily humanize Dylan Roof than his black victims, like the Reverend Clementa C Pinckney, Mother Emanuel’s pastor and a South Carolina state senator.

    In the wake of the lynching of Walter Scott in April, the Rev Pinckney assisted in presiding at a prayer vigil held in his honor. That the Rev Pinckney, an outspoken advocate against police brutality, died from gunfire in his own church is a testament to the potency of white supremacy in American life. That Dylan Roof, a young white man, was greeted with open arms in a predominantly black space, and yet reportedly used that hospitality as a catalyst for terrorism, is exactly why so many black people were suspicious of the white woman pretending to be black. Because, not even in black churches – havens of rest from the rigor of white supremacy – are we immune to white violence.

    While I would like to think federal charges in the eventual prosecution of Mr Roof is a probable and desirable outcome, I can’t allow my wishful thinking to get too far ahead of me. Back in April, documents were released that revealed the fact that National Guard officials referred to protesters in Ferguson, Missouri – American citizens – as “enemy forces”. When an armed facet of a government sworn to protect and serve the citizens of this nation is characterizing a group of mostly black protesters as “enemy forces”, I know that federal protection – from police brutality, gun violence and vigilantism – isn’t as practical or realistic as previously assumed. Therefore, a truly intersectional, multiracial, multifaith and secular movement for human rights must continue to put pressure on the federal government, until the federal government itself actually acts like black lives matter.

    SHE HAS A NAME: Cynthia Hurd worked for Charleston County Public Library for 31 yrs. Killed last night at AME Church

    This is TyWanza Sanders. Killed in the #CharlestonShooting. A great young brother. Recent Allen University grad.

77. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 2:04 pm

    The shameful right wing spinning of the Charleston shooting has begun

    It’s hard to know what to say in the wake of the Charleston church shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. There’s no words, really, that will make it make sense. It’s so terrible that even the usual suspects are dialing down the “nuh-uh!” responses that they whip out every time some horrible racist incident happens.

    Well, most of them, anyway. But there’s already some right wingers who are so practiced at immediately denying any and every accusation of racism, regardless of the evidence, that they just can’t stop themselves, not even today.
    ADVERTISEMENT

    Shame on you, Rick Santorum, for trying to imply this is about “religious liberty” and not about racism.

    Shame on you, Brian Kilmeade, for trying to confuse the issue and pretend that there’s any doubt about what happened here.

    Shame on Fox & Friends to try to exploit this incident to help gun manufacturers sell more guns.

    Also, shame on Fox & Friends for trying to spin this as an attack on Christians for being Christians, as if it had nothing to do with race.

    Man, before the week is out, it appears that the official right wing narrative on this will be that it was an attack on “faith” and the response needs to be to sell more guns and take away more birth control pills. For shame.

    Shame, indeed.

    Dylann Roof Had Confederate Plates. Here’s Why the Rebel Flag Still Flies in South Carolina.

    South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will almost certainly order flags across the state to be flown at half-mast this week in honor of the black parishioners murdered Wednesday night at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. But one flag will continue to fly as it always has—the Confederate flag in front of the Confederate Soldiers Monument on the grounds of the state Capitol in Columbia. In a photo posted by the New York Times, the alleged gunman, Dylann Storm Roof, is seen posing in front of a car with a license plate bearing several iterations of the flag. (In an odd twist, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Texas could refuse to offer specialty Confederate flag license plates that had been requested by the Sons of Confederate Veterans.)

    The flag, a symbol of the struggle by a white minority engaged in an armed insurrection to preserve its right to violently enslave the black majority, has long been a divisive issue in the state, and criticism of its continued display flared up again after Wednesday’s shooting. It was removed from the Capitol dome after massive protests in 2000, and as part of a compromise, relocated to the Confederate memorial. But the flag’s origins in Columbia are a remnant of segregation, not the Civil War—it was first flown over the Capitol in 1962 in response to the civil rights push from Washington.

    Despite the most recent incident of racial violence, don’t expect the flag to come down any time soon. When Republican Gov. Nikki Haley was asked about it at a debate during her 2014 re-election campaign, she argued that it was a non-issue:

    What I can tell you is over the last three and a half years, I spent a lot of my days on the phones with CEOs and recruiting jobs to this state. I can honestly say I have not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag…We really kinda fixed all that when you elected the first Indian-American female governor, when we appointed the first African American US senator. That sent a huge message.

    Um, they fixed racism…? Why didn’t they let the rest of America know?

    These Are The Victims Of The Charleston Church Shooting

    Sharonda Coleman-Singleton
    Reverend Clementa Pinckney
    Cynthia Hurd
    Tywanza Sanders
    Myra Thompson

    Those are the ones currently identified and on the list.

    Hundreds are outside church, turned away because church is full. #CharlestonShooting

    Denmark Vesey, Forgotten Hero (from 1999)

    Widespread recognition for Denmark Vesey has been a long time coming. In 1822, in Charleston, South Carolina, Vesey masterminded what would have been the largest slave revolt in American history. When an informer revealed the plans at the last minute and the revolt was nipped in the bud, Charleston authorities downplayed the story, claiming that they had “allowed” the plot to progress so as to ensure the capture of its leaders. Fearing future attempts at insurrection, Charleston slaveowners had Vesey and many of his co-conspirators put to death, and hid written records of the Vesey episode from their slaves. Vesey’s legacy was, for all intents and purposes, buried and forgotten.

    Now, one hundred and seventy-seven years later, we are witnessing a surge of interest in this forgotten American hero. Three books on Vesey and his plot have appeared in 1999—He Shall Go Out Free, by Douglas R. Egerton, Designs Against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Slave Conspiracy of 1822, edited by Edward A. Pearson, and Denmark Vesey, by David Robertson—and there is talk of television specials and a feature film in the works. Unknown to most people, however, is the fact that Vesey’s story has been recounted for posterity before—in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly. […]

    Vesey was no longer a slave at the time he planned the revolt—he had purchased his own freedom several years before, so his motives were not self-serving—and Charleston’s official report of the episode, as quoted by Higginson, made note of Vesey’s pride and the strength of his convictions. “Even whilst walking through the streets in company with another,” the report stated, “he was not idle; for if his companion bowed to a white person, he would rebuke him, and observe that all men were born equal.” At the trial, the sentencing judge was plainly astonished in the face of the stoic heroism displayed by Vesey throughout his ordeal. Higginson quoted the judge addressing Vesey:

    “It is difficult to imagine, what infatuation could have prompted you to attempt an enterprise so wild and visionary. You were a free man, comely, wealthy, and enjoyed every comfort compatible with your situation. You had, therefore, much to risk and little to gain.”

    As though responding to the judge four decades after the fact, Higginson posed a rhetorical question: “Is slavery, then, a thing so intrinsically detestable, that a man thus favored will engage in a plan this desperate merely to rescue his children from it?”

    Higginson’s goal was the preservation of Vesey’s story for future generations. “South Carolinians,” he wrote in conclusion,

    [now have] a distaste for the memory of the tale; and the official reports which told what slaves had once planned and dared have now come to be among the rarest of American historical documents…. This is why, to the readers of American history, Denmark Vesey and Peter Poyas have been heretofore but the shadows of names.

    Charleston Shooting: Speaking the Unspeakable, Thinking the Unthinkable

    What happened in a church in Charleston, South Carolina on Wednesday night is a lot of things, but one thing it’s not is “unthinkable.” Somebody thought long and hard about it. Somebody thought to load the weapon. Somebody thought to pick the church. Somebody thought to sit, quietly, through some of Wednesday night bible study. Somebody thought to stand up and open fire, killing nine people, including the pastor. Somebody reportedly thought to leave one woman alive so she could tell his story to the world. Somebody thought enough to flee. What happened in that church was a lot of things, but unthinkable is not one of them.

    What happened in a Charleston church on Wednesday night is a lot of things, but one thing it’s not is “unspeakable.” We should speak of it often. We should speak of it loudly. We should speak of it as terrorism, which is what it was. We should speak of it as racial violence, which is what it was.

    We should speak of it as an attack on history, which it was. This was the church founded by Denmark Vesey, who planned a slave revolt in 1822. Vesey was convicted in a secret trial in which many of the witnesses testified after being tortured. After they hung him, a mob burned down the church he built. His sons rebuilt it. On Wednesday night, someone turned it into a slaughter pen.

    We should speak of it as an assault on the idea of a political commonwealth, which is what it was. And we should speak of it as one more example of all of these, another link in a bloody chain of events that reaches all the way back to African wharves and Southern docks. It is not an isolated incident, not if you consider history as something alive that can live and breathe and bleed. We should speak of all these things. What happened in that church was a lot of things, but unspeakable is not one of them.

    Not to think about these things is to betray the dead. Not to speak of these things is to dishonor them. Let Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, look out her window at the flag of treason that is flown proudly at her state capitol and think about these things, and speak of them, before she pronounces herself so puzzled at how something like this could happen in South Carolina, the home office of American sedition.

    Let Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jeb Bush, both of whom want to lead this troubled country, consider what it meant to absent themselves from campaign events in Charleston and think of these things and speak of them before they turn to their consultants about whether or not staying in a grieving city was what a leader should have done.

    Let the elite political media that follows the two of them, roughly thrown into a maelstrom of actual news, look out onto the streets of Charleston and realize that politics exist for the purpose of governing a country, and not simply to entertain it.

    Let Squint and the Meat Puppet think about these things and speak of these things before inviting Donald Trump, who is a clown and a fool, to come on national television and talk about his hair. Not to think about these things is to betray the dead. Not to speak of these things is to dishonor them.

    Think about what happened. Think about why it happened. Talk about what happened. Talk about why it happened. Do these things, over and over again. The country must resist the temptation present in anesthetic innocence. It must reject the false comfort of learned disbelief and the narcotic embrace of concocted surprise. There is a ferocious underground fire running through American history. It rages unseen until it flares again from the warm earth. It has raged from the death of Denmark Vesey in 1822 to the death of the Reverend and state senator Clementa Pinckney on Wednesday night.

    This was not an unspeakable act. Sylvia Johnson, one of only three survivors of the massacre, is speaking about it.

    “She said that he had reloaded five different times… and he just said ‘I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.'”

    There is a timidity that the country can no longer afford. This was not an unthinkable act. A man may have had a rat’s nest for a mind, but it was well thought out. It was a cool, considered crime, as well planned as any bank robbery or any computer fraud. If people do not want to speak of it, or think about it, it’s because they do not want to follow the story where it inevitably leads. It’s because they do not want to follow this crime all the way back to the mother of all American crimes, the one that Denmark Vesey gave his life to avenge. What happened on Wednesday night was a lot of things. A massacre was only one of them.

    Don’t let it become unspeakable. Make it impossible, or as nigh to that as possible. But this must be spoken about, including the unpleasant motivations, facing the unpleasant truths. But never let it be unspeakable.

78. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 2:09 pm

    Games. Did he love pizza?? Cause we might have a Bingo here.. RT @ReaganGomez

    Regal Cinemas Has Fired @HyleyDiBona After She Blamed Minorities For Charleston Shooting

    Twitter troll Hyley DiBona went on a disgusting twitter rant in the wake of the Charleston, South Carolina terrorist attack,

    DiBona’s been blasted for her statements in which she goes on a long rant about minorities deserving poor treatment–mind you this is right after the Charleston mass shooting, she knew what she was doing. Gross stuff:

    But she has apparently been let go from her job.

79. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 2:11 pm

    Have a music. 9 of the Biggest Musicians Around the World That Americans Have Never Heard of.

80. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 2:40 pm

    In racially motivated crimes, African Americans are targeted more than all other groups combined.#CharlestonShooting , with graph.

    Don Lemon getting called an Uncle Tom on air. It happened. “@AronYohannes: @MasterStrib And you’ve got video:

    @jlforbes @GreatDismal Confederate flag is still at full, its the others that are half mast. WaPo sent a reporter over to check – some have been saying that the confederate flag is at half-mast. Maybe it was, for a little while…

    Coroner names 9 slain in downtown Charleston church shooting, and after a long intro about Roof:

    Charleston County Corner Rae Wooten identified the victims who died as:

    –State Sen. Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor.

    –Cynthia Hurd, 54, St. Andrews regional branch manager for the Charleston County Public Library system.

    –Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, a church pastor, speech therapist and coach of the girls’ track and field team at Goose Creek High School

    –Tywanza Sanders, 26, who had a degree in business administration from Allen University, where Pinckney also attended

    –Ethel Lance, 70, a retired Gilliard Center employee who worked recently as a church janitor.

    –Susie Jackson, 87, Lance’s cousin who was named by a relative and was a longtime church member.

    –Depayne Middleton Doctor, 49, who retired in 2005 as Charleston County director of the Community Development Block Grant Program.

    –Mira Thompson, 59, a pastor at the church.

    –Daniel Simmons Sr., 74, who died in a hospital operating room.

81. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 2:50 pm

    And there’s another bomb threat: BREAKING NEWS: County Council being evacuated due to bomb threat, same bldg where coroner just released victims names #CHSShooting. That’s three so far – one last night soon after the shooting, the church earlier today, now this one.

    Shooters of color are called ‘terrorists’ and ‘thugs.’ Why are white shooters called ‘mentally ill’?

    Police are investigating the shooting of nine African Americans at Emmanuel AME church in Charleston as a hate crime committed by a white man. Unfortunately, it’s not a unique event in American history. Black churches have long been a target of white supremacists who burned and bombed them in an effort to terrorize the black communities that those churches anchored. One of the most egregious terrorist acts in U.S. history was committed against a black church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. Four girls were killed when members of the KKK bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, a tragedy that ignited the Civil Rights Movement.

    But listen to major media outlets and you won’t hear the word “terrorism” used in coverage of Tuesday’s shooting. You won’t hear the white male shooter, identified as 21-year-old Dylann Roof, described as “a possible terrorist.” And if coverage of recent shootings by white suspects is any indication, he never will be. Instead, the go-to explanation for his actions will be mental illness. He will be humanized and called sick, a victim of mistreatment or inadequate mental health resources. Activist Deray McKesson noted this morning that, while discussing Roof’s motivations, an MSNBC anchor said “we don’t know his mental condition.” That is the power of whiteness in America.

    U.S. media practice a different policy when covering crimes involving African Americans and Muslims. As suspects, they are quickly characterized as terrorists and thugs, motivated by evil intent instead of external injustices. While white suspects are lone wolfs — Mayor Joseph Riley of Charleston already emphasized this shooting was an act of just “one hateful person” — violence by black and Muslim people is systemic, demanding response and action from all who share their race or religion. Even black victims are vilified. Their lives are combed for any infraction or hint of justification for the murders or attacks that befall them: Trayvon Martin was wearing a hoodie. Michael Brown stole cigars. Eric Garner sold loosie cigarettes. When a black teenager who committed no crime was tackled and held down by a police officer at a pool party in McKinney, Tex., Fox News host Megyn Kelly described her as “No saint either.”

    Early news reports on the Charleston church shooting followed a similar pattern. Cable news coverage of State Sen. and Rev. Clementa Pinckney, pastor of Emmanuel AME who we now know is among the victims, characterized his advocacy work as something that could ruffle feathers. The habit of characterizing black victims as somehow complicit in their own murders continues.

    It will be difficult to hold to this corrosive, racist media narrative when reporting on the shootings at Emmanuel AME church. All those who were killed were simply participating in a Wednesday night Bible study. And the shooter’s choice of Emmanuel AME was most likely deliberate, given its storied history. It was the first African Methodist Episcopal church in the South, founded in 1818 by a group of men including Morris Brown, a prominent pastor, and Denmark Vesey, the leader of a large, yet failed, slave revolt in Charleston. The church itself was targeted early on by fearful whites because it was built with funds from anti-slavery societies in the North. In 1822, church members were investigated for involvement in planning Vesey’s slave revolt, and the church was burned to the ground in retribution.

    With that context, it’s clear that killing the pastor and members of this church was a deliberate act of hate. Mayor Riley noted that “The only reason that someone could walk into a church and shoot people praying is out of hate.” But we need to take it a step further. There was a message of intimidation behind this shooting, an act that mirrors a history of terrorism against black institutions involved in promoting civil and human rights. The hesitation on the part of some of the media to label the white male killer a terrorist is telling.

    In the rapidly forming news narrative, the fact that black churches and mosques historically have been the targets of racial violence in America should not be overlooked. While the 1963 Birmingham church is the most historic, there also was a series of church burnings during the 1990s. Recognition of the terror those and similar acts impose on communities seems to have been forgotten post-Sept. 11. The subsequent Islamophobia that has gripped sectors of media and politics suggests that “terrorism” only applies in cases where the suspects are darker skinned.

    This time, I hope that reporters and newscasters will ask the questions that get to the root of acts of racially motivated violence in America. Where did this man, who killed parishioners in their church during Bible study, learn to hate black people so much? Did he have an allegiance to the Confederate flag that continues to fly over the state house of South Carolina? Was he influenced by right-wing media’s endless portrayals of black Americans as lazy and violent?

    I hope the media coverage won’t fall back on the typical narrative ascribed to young white male shooters: a lone, disturbed or mentally ill young man failed by society. This is not an act of just “one hateful person.” It is a manifestation of the racial hatred and white supremacy that continues to pervade our society, 50 years after the Birmingham church bombing galvanized the Civil Rights Movement. It should be covered as such. And now that authorities have found their suspect, we should be calling him what he is: a terrorist.

    (Some cross-posting happening with PZ’s thread on the Charleston shooting.)

82. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 2:59 pm

    Now I’m not sure if this is the fourth bomb threat, or the second or third in article format… Dear White America – this crap has to stop. “Bomb Threat At Greenville Vigil For Charleston Victims” (probably the second)

    Allen Temple AME Church in Greenville was evacuated after a bomb threat.

    People were attending a vigil for the Charleston church shooting victims.

    According to Greenville Police Chief Ken Miller authorities have been on the phone for the past hour with the person who made the bomb threat.

    The man told police a description of a container the bomb is in and when it will detonate.

    Bomb sniffing dogs have been also been called in.

    There have been road closures due to the bomb threat. Vardry St from Green Ave to Anderson St and Green Ave from Vardry St to Markley St have all been closed.

    I don’t want to hear any more white denial or excuses or minimizing. I don’t want to hear about how the Confederate Flag is merely a piece of cloth or how its legitimacy is for the people of South Carolina to discuss and determine.

    If it is a discussion for the people of South Carolina, are Black folks who live in South Carolina going to be part of that “discussion?

    You know, the ones whose grandparents and great grand parents were held captive in slavery?

    The folks whose family members had their children ripped away from them and sold for the highest price.

    The ones whose mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives were raped.

    Is any “discussion” about the place of the Confederate Flag open to the voices of those who died fighting against the South’s fight for the right to enslave others?

    Because that is what it was. That flag can be described in all the apologetics you wish – state’s rights, independence, freedom, honoring your ancestors, etc. But the dark twisted heart of what that flag will always embody is the South’s fight for the right to enslave human beings.

    It was a fight that almost destroyed our Nation and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands.

    And people are still dying. Nine were murdered last night in their church. Today, someone thought blowing up another church during a prayer vigil for last night’s victims would be a good thing to do.

    They wanted to blow up a church where people were praying. We shouldn’t be surprised. At least 40 African American churches have been fire bombed during the last half century.

    Sometimes When There’s Racial Hate . . . There’s Fire

    Extra-legal violence has been an effective means of communicating racial hatred throughout American history, especially as a method of social and physical control. Fire in particular was used not only to inflict physical harm upon disfavored persons in communities, but to send messages which threatened further harm to either persons or property. The pages of American-African history document an undeniable record of the racially motivated use of fire to either threaten or inflict harm upon African- Americans.

    During the Civil Rights Movement, “the church functioned as the institutional center” for Black mobilization. Churches provided “an organized mass base and meeting place,” for African-Americans to strategize their moves in the fight against racial segregation and oppression. As Black Churches became the epicenter of the social and political struggles for African-American equality, they increasingly became targets for racially motivated violence. Thus, a broad assault on members of a Black community could effectively take place by burning a Black church. The bombing and burning of Black churches translated into an attack upon the core of civil rights activism, as well as upon the larger Black community.

    The most infamous example of church destruction, occurred on Sunday, September 15, 1963. When the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was fire bombed, the explosion was felt by the entire Black community. Not only were four children killed in the attack and several people injured, but a community’s sense of security within their church was forever shaken.

    The racism that gave unholy birth to the Civil War has never stopped. Mother’s, Fathers, Grandparents, and Children are dying because of white racism. Mother’s, Fathers, Grandparents, and Children live in fear, knowing they or those they love could be next.

    Can you imagine living every day waiting to be pulled over for driving while black, for sitting while black, for walking home while black, for praying while black? Can you imagine living every day praying you don’t get a phone call informing you of the shooting of a loved one? Can you imagine going to church and wondering of you’ll be able to return home in one piece?

    How is this permissible? How do we walk away?

    None of it will stop until White America wakes up, finds it’s courage, and does something about it.

    All the crocodile tears and prayers won’t change that fact.

    Whether we like it or not, America’s white Racism that began at it’s founding must end with us.

    The ball is in our court, right where it has always been. Without us, the white supremacists win. Without us the shootings and bombings will continue. Without us, the attacks on voting rights continue. Without us, Justice dies. It’s that simple.

    Stand up. Be counted. Refuse to be silent. Join the NAACP. Join the Moral Monday’s Movement. Do something!

    (Yes, I’ve been citing a lot of full articles. I’ll stop that soon.)

83. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    18 June 2015 at 2:59 pm

    From Everyday feminism–
    What’s wrong with cultural appropriation? These 9 answers reveal its harm:
    (excerpt of the first 4)

    What Cultural Appropriation Is (And Isn’t)

    In short: Cultural appropriation is when somebody adopts aspects of a culture that’s not their own.

    But that’s only the most basic definition.

    A deeper understanding of cultural appropriation also refers to a particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.

    That’s why cultural appropriation is not the same as cultural exchange, when people share mutually with each other – because cultural exchange lacks that systemic power dynamic.

    It’s also not the same as assimilation, when marginalized people adopt elements of the dominant culture in order to survive conditions that make life more of a struggle if they don’t.

    Some say, for instance, that non-Western people who wear jeans and Indigenous people who speak English are taking from dominant cultures, too.

    But marginalized groups don’t have the power to decide if they’d prefer to stick with their customs or try on the dominant culture’s traditions just for fun.

    When the last living survivors of massacred Indigenous tribes are fighting to save their language before it dies when they do, and Native students are suspended for speaking in their own Indigenous languages, mirroring the abusive US boarding schools that tried to wipe out Native American cultures up until the 1980s, it’s clear that not every person who speaks English does so by choice.

    In other words, context matters.

    Which means it’s not about saying that you, as an individual, are a bad person if you appropriate someone else’s culture.

    It’s a complicated issue that includes our histories, our current state of affairs, and our future, as we act to eliminate oppression, instead of perpetuating it.

    So if you’re still baffled about why people would get upset about this issue, consider the following contexts.

    1. It Trivializes Violent Historical Oppression

    To you, it can feel like a big deal to have to give up something you’ve borrowed from another culture and incorporated into your life, especially if it’s meaningful to you in some way.

    For example, owners and fans of the NFL team the Washington Redsk*ns have largely come to the defense of the name, pulling out every reason including “honoring Indians,” “keeping to tradition,” and “you’re being too sensitive,” in reaction to Indigenous activists calling for the end of Indian mascots.

    The fans and the NFL are emotionally and financially invested in the name and don’t want to take extra time and money to change it. And that makes sense.

    But consider this: When violence systematically targets a group of people through genocide, slavery, or colonization, the resulting trauma lasts through generations.

    So here’s what’s at stake for the Native people: The term “redsk*n” comes from the time when the colonial and state governments and companies paid white people to kill Native Americans and used their scalps or even genitalia (to prove their sex), aka “red skins,” as proof of their “Indian kill.”

    Given that history, is it a surprise that so many Native people are angry about football fans who think they’re “honoring” Native people with this mascot and their excuses?

    We should be ashamed of this time in our history – and we should be working to heal the damage from it.

    But instead, the NFL (and other sports teams) insist on celebrating the attempted genocide of a people for fun and profit.

    2. It Lets People Show Love for the Culture, But Remain Prejudiced Against Its People

    White people don’t ask to be born with privilege, but what they choose to do with it is another story.

    In the San Francisco Bay Area, I witness people taking what they like without wanting to associate with where it came from all the time.

    Here, recent transplants to the area write Yelp reviews in search of “authentic Mexican food” without the “sketchy neighborhoods” – which usually happen to be what they call neighborhoods with higher numbers of people of color.

    The Yelpers are getting what they want, at least in terms of the neighborhood, as gentrification rapidly pushes people of color out of their homes, and white-owned, foodie-friendly versions of their favorite “ethnic” restaurants open up.

    That’s how it goes with cultural appropriation: not sharing so there’s more for everyone, but taking advantage of the power imbalance between groups to have more for well-off white people, and less and less for poor people of color.

    And this can happen because we live in a world in which racist white people can essentially say “We want your stuff, but we don’t like you” by taking people’s traditions while being biased against who they are as a person.

    Cultural appropriation shows that you don’t have to like a person or respect their identity to feel entitled to take from them.

    So is every non-Mexican who enjoys a good burrito guilty of cultural appropriation? Say it ain’t so! That would include me and nearly everyone I know.

    But now that you know that popularizing “ethnic” food can be one way to harm a group of people while taking from their traditions, you can think about ways to satisfy your international food cravings without participating in that harm.

    3. It Makes Things ‘Cool’ for White People – But ‘Too Ethnic’ for People of Color

    The US is a white-dominated society, and for proof of that, search no further than the way immigrants, Indigenous people, and people of color are criticized for the things that distinguish us from white Americans.

    For example, standards of professionalism hold back all kinds of people who aren’t white men. As a Black woman, there are many jobs that would bar me if I wore cornrows, dreadlocks, or an afro – some of the most natural ways to keep up my hair.

    So for me, wearing my hair naturally is a meaningful declaration that I believe in my natural beauty. It’s risky to make this declaration in a society that says I must aspire to whiteness have value.

    Compare that to fashion magazines’ reception of white teenager Kylie Jenner’s “epic” cornrows or “edgy” dreadlocks.

    When Black women have to fight for acceptance with the same styles a young white woman can be admired for, what message does that send to Black women and girls?

    It says that our natural beauty isn’t beautiful at all – and that our features are only appealing when they’re adopted by white women.

    4. It Lets Privileged People Profit from Oppressed People’s Labor

    Supposedly, in the good ol’ US of A, we’re all free to pursue the capitalistic American dream of building our own wealth.

    But in reality, it’s not that simple.

    For many people, barriers like classism, racism, and xenophobia mean they don’t have the right look, language, or position of privilege to earn income with their culturally specific tools – and yet oftentimes, white people can turn those same culturally specific tools into profit, thereby hurting the community they’re borrowing from.

    So, for example, say a middle-class white woman gets into Native American spirituality, and sees the chance to start a business based on what she’s learned. That might seem innocent enough. She has an interest, and she wants to make money off of it. That’s the dream, right?

    But the problem is that in order to sell her products, she has to participate in a discriminatory system. This system includes federal government policies that make it hard for Native people to start their own businesses, as well as a professional culture in which white women and middle class women can fit more easily than poor Native women.

    So while she profits, the Native women she adopted her products from live in deep cycles of poverty and unemployment.

    So white women dominate the industry of New Age materials with watered down versions of Indian spirituality practices, drowning out the Native voices speaking up about what Native communities need to survive.

    In her fantastic essay “For All Those Who Were Indian in a Former Life,” Andrea Smith breaks down how all this plays out when white feminists claim Indian spirituality and “want to become Indian without holding themselves accountable to Indian communities.”

    Someone with white privilege and class privilege has other options for earning income, so they don’t have to resort to profiting from someone else’s labor or culture. And the risks involved for marginalized people show that it’s more ethical to pursue another path.

84. rq says

    18 June 2015 at 3:34 pm

    The saga continues tomorrow.

85. LicoriceAllsort says

    18 June 2015 at 5:55 pm

    RE: “transracial” (as it applies to altering one’s race presentation)

    Thanks to Tony! and rq and any others I missed for the link dumps above related to the Dolezal discussion. I understand that people may want to move past this topic in light of the Charleston tragedy/hate crime, and so I don’t necessarily expect a response. But I wanted to post some thoughts after processing a lot of writing over the past week and, specifically, how I think this particular instance of a white woman’s race presentation is a terrible example of the larger discussion about whether someone can identify as black if they do not have black ancestry.

    What I think is most important is that Dolezal has established a pattern of using her race presentation (over the years, both white and black) for (1) financial gain, (2) claims of victimization (that are assumed to be false*), and (3) claims to authority. Notable examples:

    1. She sued Howard University for denying her a scholarship and teaching posts in part because of her race (white). She later claimed racial discrimination as a black woman as a reason for resigning from HREI.
    2. She filed multiple police complaints about race-related hate crimes* (a noose appearing in her yard, a swastika sticker being put on her office, racial hate mail, threats from white supremicists) that appear to be filed in bad faith or entirely fabricated.
    3. She appropriated experiences of family members—and, in the case of one of her siblings who she passed off as a son, appropriated the family member himself—to make herself seem like a more knowledgeable speaker on South Africa, black identity, black motherhood, and racial oppression*.
    4. She falsified her race and ethnicity on job/position applications where marking white may have put her at a disadvantage relative to other candidates.

    (*I don’t want to dismiss every single claim of discrimination that she made; it is likely, based on where she lived and the fact that a lot of people did accept her as a black woman, that she experienced some racism first-hand. Right now I am basing this on evidence that suggests that she falsified police reports and, further, that she did this to lend more credibility to her first-hand experience as a black person. I will gladly eat my words later, as necessary.)

    Given the above, she has established a pattern of behavior that seems more similar to instances where people fake illnesses or injuries to garner sympathy and disability benefits. In that instance, her race presentation seems a bit incidental to some underlying maladaptation. Which is why I do not think she presents a good example for discussions of racial identity. Unfortunately, with new revelations about her family I worry that a more relevant discussion is the long-term effects of growing up in an abusive fundy Xian household.

    And, notably, this sets her apart from comparisons that are being drawn to someone like Jenner, who, while not seeming to shy away from financial gain, came out to the world in spite of some risk (including financial), and who is not using her gender identity to speak as an authority on women or (trans)feminism.

    Lastly, I claim zero authority on any topics related to race, identity, or psychology. I sincerely hope I’m not creating splash damage to marginalized groups in my comments and have tried to frame them in a way that avoids that while participating in a discussion that I find to be interesting and helpful. I just hope I’ve been successful!

86. rq says

    19 June 2015 at 2:10 am

    Thank you, LicoriceAllsort, for that summary/opinion. I think I can agree that she seems to be troubled and looking for attention, which could be due to abuse in her upbringing, or anything else she has experienced in her life – but it doesn’t change the fact that her actions had very real effects, of appropriation, erasure, etc.
    I suppose I’m not without sympathy for her, but as an adult human being, she still had plenty of chances to realize that lying is wrong. And that she doesn’t need to be perceived as black in order to be a white ally (who often are targets of racist hate as well). Anyway, thank you!

    +++

    Girl who watched Wichita cops gun down her dad grows up to see cops gun down her war veteran son – on Icarus Randolph.

    When Beverly Alford-Allen’s son suffered a mental breakdown last summer, she was afraid to call 911 out of fear that it would mean a death sentence for the Iraq War veteran.

    But the desperate woman called police, anyway — and her worst fears were realized.
    ADVERTISEMENT

    As a child, Alford-Allen had watched a Wichita police officer shoot her father to death, and she did not want the same thing to happen to her 26-year-old son, Icarus Randolph – who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after returning from three tours in combat, reported The Wichita Eagle.

    Family members sought help July 4 from the Veterans Administration and local mental health associations after Randolph withdrew into himself and picked up a folding knife after being awoken by fireworks, but those caregivers all directed relatives to call police.

    Two officers responded to the family’s call, and relatives said they tried to warn the officers to remain alert because Randolph had a weapon – but they assured police he had not been violent, threatening, or suicidal.

    Relatives said one officer was helpful at first, but they said the second officer was surly and impatient upon arrival, the newspaper reported.

    When the second officer was told that a mental health professional recommended an ambulance take Randolph to a hospital for treatment, relatives said he folded his arms and complained that it was the Fourth of July.

    The officer said Randolph didn’t have to go for treatment if he didn’t want, and the man’s mother frantically tried to ask 911 dispatchers to send a supervisor – which the second officer refused to do.

    That’s when Randolph, who was still inside his mother’s house, started “roaring loudly,” throwing items around, and then kicked down a screen door and walked slowly outside with a vacant expression on his face.

    Relatives said he was not walking toward anyone or anything in particular, but they noticed he something in his hand, which he carried at his side, but they couldn’t see what it was.

    They begged Randolph to go back inside, but that’s when the second officer began walking toward the Marine Corps veteran.

    Relatives don’t recall either officer giving any commands before the second officer fired his Taser, yelled “knife,” then dropped the nonlethal weapon and pumped four rounds from his handgun into Randolph’s abdomen.

    The officer retreated back to his patrol car as Randolph fell mortally wounded on his mother’s lawn.

    When Alford-Allen ran toward her fallen son, the officer pointed his gun at her and threatened to shoot if she did not get back.

    Randolph lay bleeding in the grass for 10 to 15 minutes before police called for help or offered any assistance, family members said. […]

    Both officers were cleared earlier this month in the shooting, but Randolph’s family filed a lawsuit June 12 claiming that the police violated their own department policy on encounters with mentally ill people.

    The suit claims police did not de-escalate the situation, as they are trained to do in mental health calls, and took little or no time to assess the situation they encountered.

    “The reality of the situation is that the family called police for help, and rather than giving any help, that officer that showed up escalated the situation, argued and berated the family over the rights of their loved one and then killed him,” said local activist Djuan Wash, of Sunflower Community Action.

    Deadly Force: Police Use of Lethal Force In The United States, from Amnesty International.

    Hundreds of men and women are killed by police each and every year across the United States. No-one knows exactly how many because the United States does not count how many lives are lost. The limited information available however suggests that African American men are disproportionately impacted by police use of lethal force. While the majority of the unarmed African Americans killed by police officers are men, many African American women have also lost their lives to police violence. Police officers are responsible for upholding the law, as well as respecting and protecting the lives of all members of society. Their jobs are difficult and often dangerous. However, the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and countless others across the United States has highlighted a widespread pattern of racially discriminatory treatment by law enforcement officers and an alarming use of lethal force nationwide.

    Indeed, just 10 days after Michael Brown was fatally shot in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, St. Louis police officers shot and killed a young black man, Kajieme Powell, 25, who was reportedly holding a knife. Police claims that he was brandishing a knife were not borne out by the available video footage of the shooting. Some of the individuals killed by police in the United States include the following: Rekia Boyd, an unarmed 22 year old black woman was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer on March 21, 2012; Eric Garner, a 43 year old black man, died after being placed in a chokehold by New York Police Department officers after being approached by an officer who attempted to arrest him for selling loose, untaxed cigarettes on July 17, 2014; Ezell Ford, 25, an unarmed black man with a history of mental illness, was shot and killed by Los Angeles police officers on August 11 2014; Tamir Rice, a 12 year-old black boy, was shot and killed by officers in Cleveland, Ohio while playing in a park with a toy gun on November 22, 2014; Walter Scott, a 50 year old unarmed black man, was fatally shot in the back after a traffic stop for a broken light on his car in North Charleston, South Carolina on April 4, 2015; and Freddie Grey, a 25 year old black man, died from a spinal injury after being taken into police custody in Baltimore, Maryland on April 19, 2015. These are all cases that have received national media attention; however, there are many more including Hispanic and Indigenous individuals from communities across the country who have died at the hands of the police.

    The use of lethal force by law enforcement officers raises serious human rights concerns, including in regard to the right to life, the right to security of the person, the right to freedom from discrimination and the right to equal protection of the law. The United States has a legal obligation to respect, protect and fulfill these human rights and has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which explicitly protects these rights.

    One of a state’s most fundamental duties which police officers, as agents of the state, must comply with in carrying out their law enforcement duties, is to protect life. In pursuing ordinary law enforcement operations, using force that may cost the life of a person cannot be justified. International law only allows police officers to use lethal force as a last resort in order to protect themselves or others from death or serious injury. The United Nations (UN) Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms provide that law enforcement officials shall not use firearms against persons except in self-defence or the defence of others against the imminent threat of death or serious injury, and that, in any event, “intentional lethal use of firearms may only be made when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life.” Furthermore, international law enforcement standards require that force of any kind may be used only when there are no other means available that are likely to achieve the legitimate objective. If the force is unavoidable it must be no more than is necessary and proportionate to achieve the objective, and law enforcement must use it in a manner designed to minimise damage or injury, must respect and preserve human life and ensure medical aid are provided as soon as possible to those injured or affected.

    And that’s just the first page.

    “We’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter places of worship & take the life of another” white supremacy, SC governor’s statement attached.

    The Charleston Shooting in 60 Seconds – I believe she gets the shooter’s name wrong, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why. Also I find the text rather ableist.

    The Charleston Shooting is just another example in a long line of examples that proves Americans are still plagued by issues of race, mental illness and a fundamental misunderstanding of history and current events. When you have someone like Dylan Doff who suffers from all three it can turn into a deadly situation.

    Doff allegedly told the victims before the shooting, “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go,” said Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of the church’s slain pastor.

    It is clear from that statement alone that Doff is delusional and delusional people with guns don’t mix well.

    First, African-Americans didn’t ask to be here. While America likes to call herself a nation of immigrants, one thing African-Americans aren’t is immigrants. Immigrants don’t arrive looking for a better life shackled and in chains.

    Second, the last thing Blacks are doing is taking over anything. While I wish that were true, it simply isn’t the case. Our numbers are getting lower with each census.

    Third, on the subject of rape. Who was raping whose women first? Yes—that part. I seriously doubt there’s a contingency of Black men in South Carolina walking around stalking and hunting white women to rape. That’s the mental illness I spoke of earlier.

    Fourth, I think it’s fair to say ‪Rachel Dolezal just got bumped as being the nation’s most hated white person. In a weeks’ time, there are now two completely crazy and delusional white people who are bringing national and international shame to their race and who are an embarrassment to the good white people of America who get it.

    But still, Black folks everywhere need to be on alert. It’s clear we are still very much hated in every part of this country and that there are mentally ill people with guns willing to commit domestic terrorism to act on that hate.

    Note: there is still no specific, concrete evidence that Roof had a mental illness, just that he was a racist asshole.

    What You Need to Know About Deadly Force in the United States

    Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Ezell Ford, Tamir Rice and Michael Brown are among the countless lives that have been lost at the hands of law enforcement officers across the country. The reports of unnecessary or excessive force by police continue to mount, captured by body cameras, dashboard cameras, cell phones and eyewitnesses.

    In small and large cities across the country, we are also forced to confront the lack of accountability and the lack of adequate state laws that restrict the use of lethal force under international standards. State laws are either non-existent or lack the requirements to comply with either constitutional law or international standards to protect the lives of individuals, regardless of their race, socio-economic status or other aspects of their identity.

    From Ferguson to Baltimore, community members and civil society organizations have taken to the streets to shed light on the instances where officers have used lethal force outside of the need to protect life and before making efforts to deescalate the situation. While many of the nationwide protests have been in response to recent police killings, they are also asking for systemic changes by demanding what international law requires: accountability. As documented in numerous police killings, so-called “less than lethal” weapons like Tasers and chokeholds can also result in serious injury and sometimes death. These, too, should be subject to the same restrictions as lethal force and only be allowed for the purpose of preventing death or serious injury.

    Amnesty International’s report “Deadly Force” is a state-by-state legislative survey on police use of lethal force statues in the United States.

    The report highlights the urgent need for a comprehensive national review of police use of lethal force laws, policies, training and practices as well as a thorough review and reform of oversight and accountability mechanisms.

    This report demonstrates serious concerns regarding the lack of compliance of state laws with either US constitutional law or international standards on the use of force. As a result, we have witnessed what happens when no law is in place, or the standards are so broad that they open the door for misinterpretation, and human rights violations to occur.

    Some of the concerns highlighted in the report include legislation that allows for the use of lethal force

    – “to suppress opposition to an arrest,”
    – to arrest someone for a “suspected felony,”
    – to “suppress a riot or mutiny,”
    – or for certain crimes such as burglary.

    The report notes that a number of states allow for police officers to kill someone who is attempting to escape from a prison or jail. Others allow private citizens to use lethal force if they are carrying out law enforcement activities, but what is also startling is that no states require specific accountability mechanisms for the use of lethal force by officers, within their use of deadly force statutes.

    With the release of “Deadly Force,” Amnesty outlines a number of recommendations for every level of government, recommendations that include but are not limited to the creation of a National Crime and Justice Task Force to implement much needed reforms to the criminal justice system, including the use of deadly force by police, in addition to calling on the Department of Justice to require, collect and publish data on police killings.

    During the United States’s 2015 Universal Periodic Review in Geneva last month, more than half of the 117 countries represented raised concerns and made recommendations based on recent incidents of police killings. So while Amnesty International USA and other organizations across the country will continue to monitor and raise awareness about the unlawful use of lethal force by police, the international community also joins us trying to hold the U.S. government accountable.

    If you or someone you know is about to say “only a crazy person would do that”… Attached is a short documentation of the psych evaluations of several other known white (christian) mass murderers, all of whom were declared sane (though with a few individual quirks, but nothing approaching mental illness or ‘crazy’).

    Note the two very different ways that the @nytimes described Dylann Roof & Michael Brown (via @TheDaysofLore) (you can imagine).

87. rq says

    19 June 2015 at 2:17 am

    Starting the morning with a moderation, which had a reply to LicoriceAllsort’s comment above. *sigh*

    Moving along.
    Charleston Shooting: A Closer Look at Alleged Gunman Dylann Roof. Before I go on, let me and MediaDiversified point something out to you: White terrorists get bullet proof vests when arrested. the next time ppl deny white privilege exists show them this! Now the article.

    Dylann Roof, the alleged gunman authorities say is responsible for killing nine people in a predominantly black Charleston, South Carolina, church Wednesday night, had been “planning something like that for six months,” according to his roommate.

    Dalton Tyler, who said he has known Roof for seven months to one year, said he saw the white, 21-year-old suspect just last week.

    “He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Tyler said. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”

    Tyler said he met Roof, a Lexington, South Carolina native, through a good friend. He also said Roof’s parents, with whom he said the suspect was “on and off,” had previously bought him a gun but never allowed him to take it with him until this past week.

    Dylan Roof’s grandfather, Joe Roof, declined to comment to ABC News.

    Police said Roof was arrested today at a traffic stop in Shelby, North Carolina, about 250 miles north of Charleston.

    A citizen saw the suspect’s car and reported it to police, who responded and made the arrest, police said. Roof cooperated with the officer who stopped him, according to police.

    Officials said they believe Roof acted alone.

    “I am so pleased we were able to resolve this case quickly,” Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen said at a news conference.

    Until you own up to the racist motives of Roof, this case has not been resolved, not by any long shot.

    US police laws don’t comply with international standards, Amnesty International says, Christian Science Monitor (really?) looks at the Amnesty International report.

    The report comes at a time of vigorous national debate over law enforcement, race relations, and accountability, and just a month after President Obama released recommendations from the policing task force, which was convened after the shooting death of Michael Brown.

    Amnesty International reports that nine states and Washington D.C. currently have no laws on use of lethal force by law enforcement officers. The review also finds that thirteen states have laws on use of lethal force by law enforcement officers that the organization deemed unconstitutional.

    Amnesty USA Executive Director Steven Hawkins told the Guardian the report represented a “shocking lack of fundamental respect for the sanctity of human life”.

    “National and local laws play an important role in defining the understanding by law enforcement officials and the population alike of the extent of the police powers, and the conditions for accountability,” Hawkings said. “As such, there is a strong need to ensure that domestic laws worldwide comply with international standards. It is too late to attend to this when tensions arise.”

    On May 18, the day the police task force released its final report, Obama announced a $75 million investment over three years in body cameras for police officers and banned the transfer of some military weapons and hardware from the federal government to local police, The Washington Post reported. Obama also called for state and local police to report deadly force to the federal government. There is currently no such requirement to report and national statistics do not yet exist.

    In May, the national Fraternal Order of Police issued a statement saying that police unions are against racial profiling and police brutality, Vice News reported. “Nobody hates bad cops more than other cops,” the president of the order, Chuck Canterbury, wrote.

    The Amnesty International report points out a lack of consistent policy on police use of lethal force in the US.

    If you’re in DC and want to stop by, we’re at Union Square. #DeadlyForce

    More on that confederate flag… Despite mourning, statehouse Confederate battle flag remains at full staff

    The Confederate flag flying at the Statehouse in Columbia became part of the Charleston church shooting story Thursday after the U.S. and South Carolina flags were lowered in mourning but the rebel banner was left flying at its full height.

    State Sen. Clementa Pinckney, a black Democratic lawmaker and minister, was among the nine people killed by a lone gunman accused of committing a hate crime. The suspect, Dylann Roof, 21, also displayed Confederate sympathies in some social media photographs.

    Internet chatter lit up about the debate Thursday.

    “When you fly the Confederate flag in your state capital you are sanctioning this terrorism. Just FYI,” Roxane Gay said on Twitter.

    The “ubiquity of the Confederate flag in the South should be a source of shame/outrage. Not here for any lame-ass ‘history’ arguments,” said LadyHawkins, also on Twitter.

    Officials said the reason why the flag has not been touched is that its status is outlined, by law, as being under the protected purview of the full S.C. Legislature, which controls if and when it comes down.

    State law reads, in part, the state “shall ensure that the flags authorized above shall be placed at all times as directed in this section and shall replace the flags at appropriate intervals as may be necessary due to wear.”

    The protection was added by supporters of the flag to keep it on display as an officially recognized memorial to South Carolinians who fought in the Civil War. Opponents say it defends a system that supported slavery and represents hate groups.

    In a show of respect, a brief recognition ceremony was held in the Senate chamber Thursday. The U.S. and South Carolina flags were lowered from the dome. The square Confederate banner that’s in front of the building and on display at the Confederate monument was left alone.

    Really, though, what would it express, if anything at all?

    Not just USAmerica. ‘Afrikaner Blood ’ Learning to be racist in South Africa.

    Award-winning multimedia project on racist indoctrination by an extremist group in South Africa

    Kommandokorps in South Africa organises camps during school holidays for young white Afrikaner teenagers, teaching them self-defence and how to combat a perceived black enemy. The group’s leader, self-proclaimed ‘Colonel’ Franz Jooste, served with the South African Defence Force under the old apartheid regime and eschews the vision of a multicultural nation.

    Video at the link.

88. rq says

    19 June 2015 at 4:00 am

    BREAKING: Tip from Kings Mountain florists led to Charleston shooting suspect’s arrest

    Debbie Dills was running behind Thursday on her way into work at Frady’s Florist in Kings Mountain.

    It was God’s way of putting her in the right place at the right time, the Gastonia woman said.

    Dills and her boss, Todd Frady, made the initial calls around 10:35 a.m. that led to the arrest of suspected Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof in Shelby.

    Roof is suspected of killing nine people, including pastor and S.C. State Sen. Clementa Pinckney, during a prayer meeting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston on Wednesday night.

    Dills, driving from her home in south Gastonia into work, first spotted Roof on U.S. 74 near Sparrow Springs Road in Gastonia.

    She wasn’t sure at first why she recognized the car.

    “I saw the pictures of him with the bowl cut. I said, ‘I’ve seen that car for some reason.’ I look over, and it’s got a South Carolina tag on it,” Dills said Thursday afternoon. “I thought, ‘Nah, that’s not his car.’ Then, I got closer and saw that haircut. I was nervous. I had the worst feeling. Is that him or not him?”

    She called Frady to ask his advice.

    Frady said he made a call to officer Shane Davis of the Kings Mountain Police Department, who relayed to Shelby Police that the suspect’s black Hyundai Elantra was traveling west on the highway.

    “I had been praying for those people on my way to work,” Dills said. “I was in the right place at the right time that the Lord puts you.”

    Frady, who had Dills and Davis on two separate phones, acted as the intermediary.

    “She called me when she was at the exit for Kings Mountain on Highway 74,” Frady said. “I called Shane Davis, then he called Shelby PD.”

    According to Frady, the Shelby Police Department had officers near the Shelby Ingles on westbound U.S. 74, or West Dixon Boulevard and Polkville Road. Twenty short minutes after Dills’ initial call to her boss, Shelby officers pulled Roof over near Plato Lee Road.

    After first spotting Roof’s car in south Gastonia, Dills said, she followed him to the Kings Mountain exit on the U.S. 74 bypass, then exited to head to work at the florist shop in downtown Kings Mountain. Something didn’t feel right to her, so she headed back to the bypass and drove west to attempt to catch up to Roof to provide more details.

    “What if that really was him?” she thought. “I have friends going to the mountains this weekend, so if it that was him and something would happen again, what would I do? It kept eating at me, and something told me to keep following him.”

    She caught up to Roof’s Hyundai again near East Dixon Boulevard in Shelby and continued to follow him. She stayed on the phone with Frady. Dills saw Shelby Police officers begin to follow Roof at the Ingles on 74 and Polkville Road and at first stayed behind, knowing the situation was under control.

    But Dills wanted to see things through.

    When she caught back up with police, Roof was pulled over and apprehended. She had followed the wanted man for approximately 25 miles.

    Dills said Roof never increased his speed as he drove down the highway.

    “He wasn’t doing anything abnormal,” she said. “He wasn’t driving slow. He was just driving. He just kept going.”

    Dills, the minister of music at West Cramerton Baptist Church, said she had been praying for the victims in Charleston since the news broke last night.

    “I was in church last night myself. I had seen the news coverage before I went to bed and started praying for those families down there,” she said. “Those people were in their church just trying to learn the word of God and trying to serve. When I saw a picture of that pastor this morning, my heart just sank.”

    By Thursday afternoon, some of her tears were mixed with smiles. She was especially proud of the job done by local officers involved in Roof’s arrest.

    “Them boys knocked it down. They were on it,” Dills said. “Just after the arrest, three of them from Kings Mountain were standing right over there. Thanking me and shaking my hand.”

    Good for her for calling it in. Even if indirectly.

    Folks gathering for a solidarity vigil in DuPont Circle on DC. #Charleston

    RT @MelechT: Email just sent out from the AME Church where my father and mother serve as pastors. My heart dropped. Essentially, “do not open the front door unless you recognize the person or someone can validate their identity”. This is the fear with which people now have to live.

    Rikers Captain Gets Five Years For Denying Dying Prisoner Medical Treatment, amongst all this, other things.

    A judge has sentenced a former prison captain who let a mentally ill inmate die slowly for hours after eating a toxic detergent ball to five years in prison. Former Rikers jailer Terrence Pendergrass did not call a doctor after Jason Echevarria ingested the soap given to him to clean his cell after it flooded with sewage, a decision Manhattan federal Judge Ronnie Abrams excoriated Pendergrass for when announcing the sentence, according to the Daily News.

    Mr. Pendergrass, I don’t doubt how difficult your job as a correction officer was. But one thing would not have been difficult: to allow Mr. Echevarria to see a doctor. A man died here—a 25-year-old man—because of your indifference and your callousness. As a result of your refusal … he needlessly suffered for hours as his insides literally burned.

    The five-year prison term is twice the guideline-recommended sentence, but half the maximum possible, according to Newsday. A family member told the News he wished that Prendergrass would serve a longer bid.

    City of Charleston Announces Plans For Prayer Vigil To Be Held Friday, June 19, 2015 at 6:00 p.m.

    For a moment, NYC: Officer in Eric Garner death has 24-hour NYPD protection, panic button because of death threats, court docs reveal, all paid for by the tax-payer!

    The police officer under federal investigation for the choking death of Eric Garner is getting 24-hour protection from the NYPD because of death threats, according to court documents released Wednesday.

    In an affidavit filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, Daniel Pantaleo says the NYPD has stationed two cops in a patrol car outside his Staten Island home to keep him and his family safe. The department also installed surveillance cameras and a panic button in the house, he says.

    He also complains that he’s been “harassed, embarrassed and subjected to character assassination” — problems he blames on the Civilian Complaint Review Board, not his own actions in the notorious Garner case.

    Pantaleo, 30, made the disclosures in court papers urging state Supreme Court Justice Alice Schlesinger to reject a request by the Legal Aid Society to make public the number of complaints that have been made about him to the CCRB.

    Legal Aid lawyers also want to know if any of the complaints were sustained and if so, how many. […]

    A grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo on criminal charges in December, setting off a wave of protests around the country. He’s still being investigated by the feds.

    Legal Aid attorney Cynthia Conti-Cook told Schlesinger last month that the public should be able to know at least how many complaints there have been against Pantaleo, and whether any were sustained. She said that’s essential for there to be an informed public debate about whether the CCRB is functioning well as a vehicle for handling civilian complaints about alleged police misconduct.

    The review board and city attorneys oppose the release of any information, saying such complaints are part of an officer’s personnel records and state law prohibits their disclosure.

    Schlesinger said that before she decided, she wanted to hear from Pantaleo and his union lawyers and she agreed to make Pantaleo a party to the case. That means that if she rules against him, he will have a right to file an appeal.

89. rq says

    19 June 2015 at 5:09 am

    Officer Who Killed Eric Garner Has Taxpayer-Funded 24-Hour Bodyguards, the Gothamist on Pantaleo.

    Officer Daniel Pantaleo, the cop who last summer choked Eric Garner to the ground and, with several others, held him face-down, killing him, not only still lives in Staten Island and works for the NYPD, but he has an around-the-clock security detail, and a department-installed surveillance system with a panic button to press should someone get past his armed guards, according to a report by the Daily News. Pantaleo is fighting an attempt to make his Civilian Complaint Review Board record public, and in a court filing he cited the release of some of his record as the reason for death threats he has received (as opposed to his killing of an unarmed man).

    The Legal Aid Society is suing to get his disciplinary record released. A federal civil rights investigation into the killing is ongoing, as is an internal NYPD investigation, and a state probe of the lackadaisical response of emergency medical personnel. Revelation of Pantaleo’s security detail comes less than a week after the New York Times reported that a grand jury witness had been scolded by Staten Island prosecutors for testifying that what Pantaleo did was a chokehold.

    Headed to vigil for victims of #CharlestonShooting in Union Square NYC right now. Join us. [FB event link]

    This is said to be Dalton Tyler, roommate of Dylann Roof, from his FB page.

    Visiting a black church can be scary. If @ any time you feel you’re about to pull out a weapon & shoot people, step outside & dial 911. #CNN

    Charleston shooting: for ‘Mother Emanuel,’ a central role in black struggle (+video), another historical portrait of the church.

    The sacred space on Calhoun Street in Charleston, S.C. – a place where black Christians have come for more than a century to worship God with exuberant, joyful praise – had already been built on a history of suffering and blood.

    Born within the violence of America’s racist past, “Mother Emanuel,” the longest-standing African Methodist Episcopal congregation in the South and one of the oldest in the country, was an early-19th-century center for the black struggle. Since 1816, the church has witnessed its members hanged for resisting slavery, its first sanctuary burned to the ground by a white mob, its gatherings banned by official laws.

    Yet the congregation continued to meet secretly for decades, as ancient Christians and those in communist states once did. After the Civil War, members finally rebuilt – a new two-story house of worship in 1872. Fourteen years later, however, the wood-frame sanctuary collapsed during the devastating earthquake of 1886.

    On Wednesday, as members met to study God’s word in the basement of their current landmark church, a young man sat with members for nearly an hour before standing, declaring he was there “to shoot black people,” and opening fire, said law enforcement, citing eyewitnesses. Nine people were killed, including the church’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was also a state senator.

    “Churches such as Emanuel were born both as symbols of spiritual freedom as well as political freedom,” says Randal Jelks, professor of African-American studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence and an expert in the intersection of race and religion. “So to make an attack on this church – a full-scale terrorist attack, which is what this was – it’s an attack on a symbol of black freedom.”

    The suspect, identified by law enforcement as Dylann Storm Roof, reportedly wore white supremacist symbols before Wednesday’s shooting. “I have to do it,” he said, according to a cousin of the pastor’s, who spoke with survivors of the attack. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”

    Shootings by disaffected and troubled young white men have become a frequent occurrence in the United States: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in Columbine, Colo.; Jared Lee Loughner in Tucson, Ariz.; and Adam Lanza in Newtown, Conn., to name just a few.

    The massacre in the Charleston church, however, carries a different kind of shock and sorrow – given both the history of Mother Emanuel and the current political struggle, often called the “Black Lives Matter” movement, as black men have died at the hands of police officers.

    It continues at the link, and once again the article is headed by the photo of the killer, not a nice composite of the victims or a victim or even the church itself. Bloody hell. It’s not like they’re not out there.

    And Ta-Nehisi Coates on the confederate flag: Take Down the Confederate Flag—Now

    Last night, Dylann Roof walked into a Charleston church, sat for an hour, and then killed nine people. Roof’s crime cannot be divorced from the ideology of white supremacy which long animated his state nor from its potent symbol—the Confederate flag. Visitors to Charleston have long been treated to South Carolina’s attempt to clean its history and depict its secession as something other than a war to guarantee the enslavement of the majority of its residents. This notion is belied by any serious interrogation of the Civil War and the primary documents of its instigators. Yet the Confederate battle flag—the flag of Dylann Roof—still flies on the Capitol grounds in Columbia.

    The Confederate flag’s defenders often claim it represents “heritage not hate.” I agree—the heritage of White Supremacy was not so much birthed by hate as by the impulse toward plunder. Dylann Roof plundered nine different bodies last night, plundered nine different families of an original member, plundered nine different communities of a singular member. An entire people are poorer for his action. The flag that Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, does not stand in opposition to this act—it endorses it. That the Confederate flag is the symbol of of white supremacists is evidenced by the very words of those who birthed it:

    Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth…

    This moral truth—“that the negro is not equal to the white man”—is exactly what animated Dylann Roof. More than any individual actor, in recent history, Roof honored his flag in exactly the manner it always demanded—with human sacrifice.

    Surely the flag’s defenders will proffer other, muddier, interpretations which allow them the luxury of looking away. In this way they honor their ancestors. Cowardice, too, is heritage. When white supremacist John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago, Booth’s fellow travelers did all they could to disassociate themselves. “Our disgust for the dastardly wretch can scarcely be uttered,” fumed a former governor of South Carolina, the state where secession began. Robert E. Lee’s armies took special care to enslave free blacks during their Northern campaign. But Lee claimed the assassination of the Great Emancipator was “deplorable.” Jefferson Davis believed that “it could not be regarded otherwise than as a great misfortune to the South,” and angrily denied rumors that he had greeted the news with exultation.

    Villain though he was, Booth was a man who understood the logical conclusion of Confederate rhetoric:

    “TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN”:

    Right or wrong. God judge me, not man. For be my motive good or bad, of one thing I am sure, the lasting condemnation of the North.

    I love peace more than life. Have loved the Union beyond expression. For four years have I waited, hoped and prayed for the dark clouds to break, and for a restoration of our former sunshine. To wait longer would be a crime. All hope for peace is dead. My prayers have proved as idle as my hopes. God’s will be done. I go to see and share the bitter end….

    I have ever held the South were right. The very nomination of ABRAHAM LINCOLN, four years ago, spoke plainly, war—war upon Southern rights and institutions….

    This country was formed for the white, not for the black man. And looking upon African Slavery from the same stand-point held by the noble framers of our constitution. I for one, have ever considered if one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us,) that God has ever bestowed upon a favored nation. Witness heretofore our wealth and power; witness their elevation and enlightenment above their race elsewhere. I have lived among it most of my life, and have seen less harsh treatment from master to man than I have beheld in the North from father to son. Yet, Heaven knows, no one would be willing to do more for the negro race than I, could I but see a way to still better their condition.

    By 1865, the Civil War had morphed into a war against slavery—the “cornerstone” of Confederate society. Booth absorbed his lesson too well. He did not violate some implicit rule of Confederate chivalry or politesse. He accurately interpreted the cause of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, men who were too weak to truthfully address that cause’s natural end.

    Moral cowardice requires choice and action. It demands that its adherents repeatedly look away, that they favor the fanciful over the plain, myth over history, the dream over the real. Here is another choice.

    Take down the flag. Take it down now.

    Put it in a museum. Inscribe beneath it the years 1861-2015. Move forward. Abandon this charlatanism. Drive out this cult of death and chains. Save your lovely souls. Move forward. Do it now.

    I can only agree. Vehemently.

90. rq says

    19 June 2015 at 5:17 am

    Confederate flag wavers say it’s part of their history. We know. It’s part of your history of hating Black people. I really like that, for some reason.

    Reaping The Whirlwind, cartoon.

    The message, however subconscious or unconsidered, is clear: black lives are worthless, white lives are precious. Re: Roof in a bulletproof vest.

    Again the Amnesty report, All 50 states fail to meet int’l standards on lethal force by police – Amnesty

    All 50 US states and the District of Columbia fail to meet international standards for the use of lethal force by law enforcement, according to an Amnesty International report. It also found that 13 states have laws that don’t comply with US standards.

    The international standards, found in the United Nations’ Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials, call for lethal force to be used only as a last resort, to protect officers from death or serious injury. However, not a single state in the entire US has a law that supports such a notion.

    “Police have a fundamental obligation to protect human life,” said Steven Hawkins, executive director of Amnesty International USA, as quoted by USA Today. “Deadly force must be reserved as a method of absolute last resort. The fact that absolutely no state laws conform to this standard is deeply disturbing and raises serious human rights concerns.”

    Meanwhile, 13 states have laws that don’t comply with domestic constitutional standards, and all states lack specific accountability mechanisms for officer-involved killings – including mandatory reporting that a firearm has been used, as well as prompt and impartial investigations into killings.

    In addition, the 41-page report revealed that nine states currently have no laws that even deal with the issue of lethal force by officers.

    Hawkins has called on states to change and create laws dealing with lethal force.

    The Amnesty report also suggests that President Obama and the US Justice Department (DOJ) should create a national commission to review law enforcement policies, and that the DOJ should publish nationwide figures on police shootings.

    The report comes amid growing concern surrounding police overreach, after the highly publicized deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott and Freddie Gray.

    The deaths sparked protests and riots around the country, along with a nationwide debate about law enforcement and race relations.

    Why we should call Charleston attack ‘terrorism’ – video.

    “Until we call it what it is, we cannot move forward. This is not the time to be afraid of our actual, complete history,” Michaela Angela Davis says.

91. rq says

    19 June 2015 at 5:44 am

    The “we” here is important., in response to tweet that says “CAN. WE. JUST. ACKNOWLEDGE. THIS. COUNTRY. IS. RACIST. AND. CARE. ENOUGH. TO. WORK. ON. IT.”

    Historic “Mother Emanuel” is oldest AME church in South. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke there. #CharlestonShooting

    Charleston shooting victim posted Snapchat from Bible study moments before attack

    The youngest victim to die in the tragic shooting at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. shared a Snapchat video from the doomed bible study group in the moments before Dylann Storm Roof allegedly killed him and eight others.

    In Tywanza Sanders’s Snapchat video, which was obtained by Mashable and confirmed by four friends, a man is seen talking to the group seated around a large table covered with papers. Most of the participants at the bible study — and all of the victims — are black. But one man, seated at the far end of the table, is white.

    Friends of Sanders say that man is Roof.

    The bible study participants had welcomed the 21-year-old to sit with the group only to have him allegedly turn his gun on them after being there for an hour.

    “I didn’t notice until now that Dylann was just a few people away from Wanza,” one friend told Mashable after showing us the clip. “You can slightly see him in the right corner of the screenshot.”

    I take issue with that ‘allegedly’ up there. Very great issue.
    But the article at least concludes with a short yet touching and positive profile of Tywanza Sanders.

    Which one of these men is being arrested for a mass murder? #CharlestonShooting #WhitePrivilege Eric Garner vs. Dylann Roof.

    And now an editorial cartoon from @GlobeWasserman: Man in suit with microphone saying “Officials are still trying to fathom the roots of the shooter’s hatred” against a background of a giant confederate flag.

    @GreatDismal. To a European like me, it feels like a bunch of modern day Germans celebrating the romance of the fall of the Third Reich. On celebrating the confederate loss in the Civil War.

92. rq says

    19 June 2015 at 5:55 am

    Deep Racism: The Forgotten History Of Human Zoos

    Racism is deeply embedded in our culture. Slavery of African people, ethnic cleansing of Native Americans and colonialist imperialism are seeds that intertwine to create racism that still has impacts today. One example of the sad human history of racism — of colonizers seeing themselves as superior to others — is the long history of human zoos that featured Africans and conquered indigenous peoples, putting them on display in much the same way as animals. People would be kidnapped and brought to be exhibited in human zoos. It was not uncommon for these people to die quickly, even within a year of their captivity. This history is long and deep and continued into the 1950s. Several articles below with lots of photos so we can see the reality of this terrible legacy. KZ

    Several articles, indeed – and these zoos were all over Europe. Does this get taught in European history? I certainly never learned about it…

    #Louisville FOP in response to the protest community here in the city. @deray In short: the public is lashing out at the police while the police are utterly innocent of any wrongdoing and are merely trying to serve-and-protect.

    AME Church Shooting Victims Fund

    Humanists condemn the unspeakable shooting deaths of 9 people at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston Wednesday, 6/17. Violence motivated by hatred, intolerance, and racism has no place in our society today, and we want to extend our deepest condolences to the families of those who died.

    All funds from this campaign will go directly to the Mother Emanuel Hope Fund, which helps the families of the victims involved in the shooting. This campaign was organized through SC humanist groups, but all donations are welcome!

    They’re only a few hundred short of a $3000 goal, but I’m sure anything in excess of that will also go to the church!

    ‘why didn’t Dylann Storm Roof’s roommate contact the authorities about all the red flags?’ oh. that’s why. Screenshots of the friend’s facebook page.

    this is why the aliens won’t talk to us, people calling the shooter ‘cute’.

    Charleston mass shooting: Reminder of past racist attacks on black churches (+video)

    The suspect in the Charleston, S.C., church mass shooting, identified as 21-year-old Dylann Roof, has been arrested.

    At this point, motive or possible connection with any hate group has yet to be determined in Wednesday evening’s shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, which killed six women and three men gathered for Bible study and a prayer service.

    But the horrific massacre was a reminder that black churches in the South have been the target of racist attacks in the past. Bombed in the 1960s, when they served as organizing centers for the civil rights movement, they also saw a rash of arsons in the 1990s. Other congregations have survived shooting sprees.

    “Yesterday’s massacre confirms that for Black communities, there is no safe haven from the violence and brutality of racism, not even a house of worship,” Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorOfChange.org, said in a statement. “More than 52 years after the Birmingham Church bombing [killing four young girls], which galvanized the civil rights movement, we are forced to face the reality that Black life is under attack.”

    Speaking to reporters at the White House, President Obama also touched on racist violence directed at black churches.

    “Any death of this sort is a tragedy. Any shooting involving multiple victims is a tragedy. There is something particularly heartbreaking about a death happening in a place in which we seek solace and we seek peace, in a place of worship,” the president said.

    Wednesday night’s tragedy in Charleston was the deadliest mass shooting in the US since 12 people were killed at the Washington Navy Yard in September 2013.

    In his statement, Obama also touched on recurring gun violence in the United States and the political difficulty of enacting tougher gun control.

    “We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hand on a gun,” he said. “Now is the time for mourning and for healing. But let’s be clear. At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.”

    While the investigation has just begun in this most recent incident, officials say it involved a single attacker who entered the church, spent an hour there during the service, then began firing a .45 caliber handgun, stopping to reload several times.

    “We don’t have any reason to believe that anybody else was involved,” Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said at a press conference Thursday morning.

    [skipping sensitive profile of shooter]

    “It is a crime that has reached into the heart of that community,” she said. “Even as we struggle to comprehend this heartbreaking event, I want to tell the people of Charleston that we will do everything in our power to help heal this community and make it whole again.”

    Among those killed Wednesday night was the church’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was also a state senator. (Other victims have yet to be identified.)

    According to the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Reverend Pinckney “answered the call to preach at the age of thirteen and received his first appointment to pastor at the age of eighteen.”

    Pinckney, who was married and had two daughters, was elected to the state House in 1996 at age 23, making him the youngest member at the time.

    South Carolina House minority leader Todd Rutherford told the Associated Press that Pinckney served his flock as well as his constituents.

    “He never had anything bad to say about anybody, even when I thought he should,” Mr. Rutherford said. “He was always out doing work either for his parishioners or his constituents. He touched everybody.”

    At this point in the investigation, it’s unclear whether the suspect had any connection to hate groups.

    Heidi Beirich, director of The Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, Ala., says such groups have been growing over the past 10 years and “for several years South Carolina has been the place with the highest density of hate groups.” The SPLC maintains an interactive map of hate groups in the United States.

    The states with the highest number of hate groups by population density in the United States have traditionally been South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, Ms. Beirich says. “There’s been an ongoing backlash to the changes we’re seeing in society. We’re getting to be a more demographically diverse place…. So if you come from a tradition of racist beliefs and you see what’s happening in this society right now, you’re not happy about it.”

    But the president sounded a note of hope in his comments that hatred would not have the last word.

    “The good news is I am confident that the outpouring of unity and strength and fellowship and love across Charleston today, from all races, from all faiths, from all places of worship, indicates the degree to which those old vestiges of hatred can be overcome,” he said.

    Down the street from the church Thursday, a group of pastors gathered to pray, ABC News reported.

    “We need that peace, Lord,” members of the prayer circle were heard saying. “We need that peace you talk about in your word.”

    Yup, there is absolutely no evidence for the killer’s motive, absolutely none, except the alleged shooter’s own words, but since he can’t (currently) be connected to any hate group, it can’t possibly have been racialized violence.
    You know, for supposedly intelligent people, some journalists are pretty thick.

93. rq says

    19 June 2015 at 6:00 am

    white feminist it is your duty to reject the use of your honor and fragility to perpetuate racist & hateful agendas. say it! #NotInMyName
    white feminist speak out. the Charleston terrorist weaponized your womanhood against black people, majority women. Say it #NotInMyName

    .@NYCLightBrigade lighting up the streets of Harlem at the NYC AME church for the victims of the #CharlestonShooting.

    Cop Shot Into Car of Unarmed Black Teens

    Video has finally surfaced of a Chicago police officer was recorded on video firing over a dozen shots into a car filled with six unarmed black teenagers. The video was recorded in December 2013 but was only recently obtained by The Chicago Reporter thanks to an irate former judge who had it in his personal posession. Officer Marco Proano, the officer shown in the video, has been cleared of six previous complaints filed against him between 2011 and 2015, including one involving excessive force. The video was provided by retired judge Andrew Berman, who was the magistrate in a criminal case against one of the teenagers. Berman called the video one of the most unsettling things he’d ever seen in his 18 years as a judge. “I’ve seen lots of gruesome, grisly crimes,” he said. “But this is disturbing on a whole different level.” Two of the teenagers were injured.

    What, face consequences?

    A Guide to Mass Shootings in America

    It is perhaps too easy to forget how many times this has happened. The horrific mass murder at a movie theater in Colorado in July 2012, another at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin that August, another at a manufacturer in Minneapolis that September—and then the unthinkable nightmare at a Connecticut elementary school that December—were some of the latest in an epidemic of such gun violence over the last three decades. Since 1982, there have been at least 70 mass shootings across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii. Thirty-three of these mass shootings have occurred since 2006. Seven of them took place in 2012 alone, including Sandy Hook. A recent analysis of this database by researchers at Harvard determined that mass shootings have been on the rise.

    We’ve gathered detailed data on more than three decades of cases and mapped them below, including information on the shooters’ profiles, the types of weapons they used, and the number of victims they injured and killed. The following analysis covers our original dataset comprised of 62 cases from 1982-2012.

    Weapons: Of the 143 guns possessed by the killers, more than three quarters were obtained legally. The arsenal included dozens of assault weapons and semi-automatic handguns with high-capacity magazines. (See charts below.) Just as Jeffrey Weise used a .40-caliber Glock to slaughter students in Red Lake, Minnesota, in 2005, so too did James Holmes, along with an AR-15 assault rifle, when blasting away at his victims in a darkened movie theater. In Newtown, Connecticut, Adam Lanza wielded a .223 Bushmaster semi-automatic assault rifle as he massacred 20 school children and six adults.

    The killers: More than half of the cases involved school or workplace shootings (12 and 20, respectively); the other 30 cases took place in locations including shopping malls, restaurants, and religious and government buildings. Forty four of the killers were white males. Only one of them was a woman. (See Goleta, Calif., in 2006.) The average age of the killers was 35, though the youngest among them was a mere 11 years old. (See Jonesboro, Ark., in 1998.) A majority were mentally troubled—and many displayed signs of it before setting out to kill. Explore the map for further details—we do not consider it to be all-inclusive, but based on the criteria we used we believe that we’ve produced the most comprehensive rundown available on this particular type of violence. (Mass shootings represent only a sliver of America’s overall gun violence.) For a timeline listing all the cases on the map, including photos of the killers, jump to page 2. For the stories of the 151 shooting rampage victims of 2012, click here, and for all of MoJo’s year-long investigation into gun laws and mass shootings, click here. […]

    Our focus is on public mass shootings in which the motive appeared to be indiscriminate killing. We used the following criteria to identify cases:

    – The shooter took the lives of at least four people. An FBI crime classification report identifies an individual as a mass murderer—versus a spree killer or a serial killer—if he kills four or more people in a single incident (not including himself), typically in a single location.
    – The killings were carried out by a lone shooter. (Except in the case of the Columbine massacre and the Westside Middle School killings, which involved two shooters.)
    – The shootings occurred in a public place. (Except in the case of a party on private property in Crandon, Wisconsin, and another in Seattle, where crowds of strangers had gathered.) Crimes primarily related to gang activity, armed robbery, or domestic violence in homes are not included.
    – If the shooter died or was hurt from injuries sustained during the incident, he is included in the total victim count. (But we have excluded many cases in which there were three fatalities and the shooter also died, per the above FBI criterion.)
    – We included a handful of so-called “spree killings”—cases in which the killings occurred in more than one location over a short period of time, that fit the above criteria.

    For more on the thinking behind our criteria, see our mass shootings explainer. Plus: more on the crucial mental illness factor, and on the recent barrage of state laws rolling back gun restrictions across the US. And: Explore the full data set behind our investigation.

    The article opens with an update that includes the South Charleston church shooting. A lot of information to be found there.

    And there’s a ribbon for each victim. Emanuel AME. #CharlestonShooting

94. rq says

    19 June 2015 at 6:09 am

    I guess this goes under White Privilege, too – the ability to not be affected. With the city mourning a massacre, the Charleston RiverDogs say ‘play ball!’

    Nearly three years ago, I was sitting in Joseph P. Riley Jr. Park watching the Charleston RiverDogs play baseball. I was on a tour to visit minor league parks and the second largest city in South Carolina was the furthest point south. I did all the tourist things, visiting the historic district, where the ugly details of the state’s slave past is conveniently white-washed with phrases that make everyone feel like it was all okay.

    One tour guide called an old trading block downtown “the Internet of its era” and others would routinely throw around the phrase “most prosperous” or “most profitable” colony, as if there was a reason that farmers were making money beyond, you know, atrocious human rights activities that allowed them to enrich themselves on the backs of others. I visited seven cities that summer all across the American South.

    Charleston was the only place I felt physically uncomfortable just walking around, because the visual vocabulary of the place was so painfully unchanged from one of the most awful chapters of American history.

    That night at the park, I had a good time watching the Single-A Atlantic League squad. I bought a RiverDogs T-shirt and a throwback Charleston Rainbows hat in the gift shop, a souvenir of the team’s previous name. The next day, I watched the sun rise at Waterfront Park and had a genuinely pleasant time, weird feelings aside. Then something bizarre happened.

    At Goat. Sheep. Cow, a lovely little gourmet cheese, charcuterie and wine shop near downtown, a woman walked in from a dog walk. I was wearing my RiverDogs T-shirt, and the first thing she asked me is if I was on the team. At the time, I sort of laughed it off and said no, I’m just visiting. She appeared genuinely shocked. “And you came here?!” she said. Apparently, my entire existence in that store was so surprising to her that she felt the need to question my presence there.

    Today, after nine people were killed in a historically black church in town by a 21-year-old gunman, the RiverDogs are still going to play baseball.

    “We all personally feel the grief of the horrifying tragedy that struck our community last night,” said RiverDogs General Manager Dave Echols via a press release. “Our hearts and prayers are with the families of the victims involved and with the law enforcement agencies working tirelessly in the wake of last night’s appalling and shocking event. We feel it is our duty not to let the acts of one radical human being dictate our lives. The RiverDogs will continue on as scheduled in hopes of providing a sense of normalcy and comfort to the Lowcountry. We understand the donation is a small gesture during this terrible time; one for the families of the victims, the church family, and the entire community.”

    Team officials will be giving proceeds from the night’s game to the local charity set up for the church where the shootings occurred, and are doing a moment of silence before the game for not only the victims of the massacre, but also the “Charleston 9″ the nine firefighters who died fighting a furniture store door blaze today in 2007.

    But the RiverDogs, a Yankees affiliate, then go on to rather cravenly bring up the 9/11 attacks as reason to continue to play a kid’s game, even though an entire city and nation is in mourning.

    “Sports can serve as a necessary distraction in the days following tragic occurrences. In the wake of such tragic events like the Boston Marathon bombings and 9/11, sports, particularly baseball, brought communities and a nation together and helped to resurrect them in times of need. It is understood that sports take a back seat during times of tragedy. It’s very hard to think about something as trivial as playing a game, when disastrous events that once seemed impossible become all too real. However, sports often return to cities affected by tragedy long before reality does,” the release reads.

    The flaws in this logic are glaring to the point of insult. When planes took down the World Trade Center, Bud Selig canceled Major League Baseball games for a week. And even though that tragedy happened on a Tuesday, the following Sunday’s NFL and college football slates were canceled. Is the massacre congruent to 9/11? No. But that’s even more reason why using that day as a rationale makes no sense.

    Tonight should not be a night for baseball in Charleston. But in a state where the Confederate flag flies proudly on statehouse grounds, it’s clear that The American Way, however harmful that may be, is all that matters.

    Emanuel AME. #CharlestonShooting

    The Wildly Different Ways One Senator Responds To Terrorism: Boston Versus Charleston

    In response to the Boston bombing of 2013, Senator Lindsey Graham demanded that the government do everything it could to learn from the attack and prevent future attacks.

    This man, in my view, should be designated as a potential enemy combatant and we should be allowed to question him for intelligence gathering purposes to find out about future attacks and terrorist organizations that may exist that he has knowledge of, and that evidence cannot be used against him in trial. That evidence is used to protect us as a nation.

    Many people took issue with Graham’s claim that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is a U.S. citizen, could be designated as an enemy combatant. But Graham’s conviction that the attack was part of a more systemic problem, based on Tsarnaev’s Muslim faith, was unmistakable. Tsarnaev’s attack killed three people and injured over 250.

    Graham’s reaction to Wednesday’s attack on a black church in his home state of South Carolina was very different. (His niece, coincidentally, went to school with the shooter). Graham is adamant that the attack is not evidence of any larger problem.

    Graham, who is on his way to Charleston, said his niece did not recall Roof making any statements that were related to race.

    “I just think he was one of these whacked out kids. I don’t think it’s anything broader than that,” Graham said. “It’s about a young man who is obviously twisted.”

    We already know that the suspect, Dylann Roof, favored white supremacist symbols. Before murdering 9 members of an African-American church, Roof allegedly said “You rape our women and are taking over our country and you have to go.” Terrorism from white supremacist groups is a growing threat in the United States. A 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security warned of “lone wolf” terrorists and found “[h]eightened interest in legislation for tighter firearms…may be invigorating rightwing extremist activity, specifically the white supremacist and militia movements.” The report was subjected to harsh criticism from Congressional Republicans.

    Graham, while eager to tackle Islamic extremism, appears much less focused on terrorism motivated by white supremacy, even in his home state.

    Florist spots Hyundai at light, helps catch shooting suspect, another yay for her. I doubt it was god that put her there, and if she hadn’t seen him, someone else would have, but I’m glad she did and I’m glad she called. (God could have just not let the guy walk into his house, but that’s god I guess.)

    Here are the nine victims in the #CharlestonShooting RIP, in photos.
    We remember you. #CharlestonShooting – a list of the victims’ names, ages, occupations.

95. rq says

    19 June 2015 at 6:18 am

    @CalBSU is remembering those lives stolen by white terrorism. #CharlestonShooting

    The oldest AME church in Saint Louis. It’s been around since 1841. #CharlestonShooting #PrayersForCharleston

    Vigil beginning at UC Berkeley to mourn lives lost in Charleston to white supremacist violence. #CharlestonShooting

    Sense of security lost, says brother of Charleston shooting victim

    Numbing shock is slowly giving way to mourning in Charleston, where nine people were killed inside the Emmanuel AME church. The alleged gunman behind the massacre, 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof, is in police custody after being apprehended Thursday in North Carolina.

    Among the victims was Cynthia Hurd, a 54-year-old library manager. Her brother, former North Carolina senator Malcolm Graham, remembers her as the sibling who pulled the family together.

    “She loved her family, she loved her community, she loved her God,” said Graham in an interview with “CBS Evening News” anchor Scott Pelley.

    Graham said his sister was deeply committed to her faith and had a special bond with the church.

    “We were born and raised in the Emmanuel AME church, my mother and father attended that church, we were baptized in that church so it didn’t surprise me that on a Wednesday night she’d be there,” said Graham, holding back tears.

    Graham said the murder of his sister is a message which we have heard before, but not taken to heart, alluding to the shootings in Aurora, Colorado and Newtown, Connecticut.

    “I think anytime you can’t go into a house of a God and worship in peace there’s a problem with the morality of our country,” he said.

    “If you can’t go into a movie theater and watch a movie in peace, there’s a problem. If you’re a grade kid and you can’t go to class without being a victim to crime there’s a problem. I think we lost a sense of security, even being secure in the presence of God.”

    Baker apologizes for remarks on Confederate flag. Waiting for others to do the same.

    Governor Charlie Baker apologized on Thursday for remarks he made earlier in the day defending the rights of state capitols to fly the Confederate flag, initially calling it a matter of “tradition.”

    Baker said in an early-afternoon radio interview that states should be entitled to decide whether to fly the Confederate flag at their capitols, laying out a brief argument for local government. But he later backtracked and said he believed the controversial symbol should be removed.

    In a telephone interview on Thursday evening, Baker said he had “heard from some friends of mine.” Their message, he said: “Basically: What were you thinking?”

    “I take my job as governor of 100 percent of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts very seriously, and as I said, I’m sorry if I didn’t do a particularly good job representing that today,” Baker told the Globe on the Thursday evening call arranged hastily by aides.

    Baker, after an unsuccessful challenge to then-governor Deval Patrick in 2010, cultivated a significantly more moderate and upbeat profile during last year’s campaign, and won plaudits for his outreach to diverse communities of voters.

    The Confederate flag question has long tripped up politicians. As Republican presidential candidates, both Senator John McCain of Arizona and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney angered Southern voters by criticizing the continued use of the flag.

    During the radio appearance on WGBH, Baker said, “My view on stuff like this is that South Carolinians can make their own call.”

    The comment came at the end of a discussion about Wednesday night’s killing of nine black people inside a historic African-American church in Charleston, S.C. A white suspect was apprehended on Thursday.

    WGBH host Jim Braude, after complimenting Baker for his sensitivity on racial issues, asked the governor’s view of the Confederate flag that flies at the capitol in Columbia.

    Many people view the “stars and bars” as an emblem of racism and reminder of slavery and Jim Crow practices. Some defenders call it a symbol of Southern heritage.

    “As a citizen of this country and what’s happened, particularly to African-Americans in that state, what’s your reaction to that, in 2015?” Braude asked.

    Baker replied, “I like local government more than I like — the farther government gets away from the people, the more nervous I get about the way it behaves, and my view on stuff like this is that South Carolinians can make their own call. I do believe that the reason that flag still hangs there is, you know, what I would call sort of ‘tradition’ or something like that. And there’s certainly a heated debate that’s gone on over the years down there about that.”

    In Massachusetts, Baker, a Republican from Swampscott, has courted African-American voters far more aggressively than previous GOP politicians.

    In the telephone interview, Baker said he hoped those relationships would be unharmed.

    “I think I’ve put the time and the effort in to develop a sense of familiarity with a lot of folks in those communities,” he said.

    “I just want to be clear. I abhor the symbolism and the history of that flag as much as anybody, and I am more than cognizant of the fact that literally millions of Americans died over what it represents in the Civil War,” Baker said.

    Baker declined to say who had called him to take issue with his earlier remarks.

    “I think they should take the flag down,” Baker said, adding, “The symbolism of this one is important and I should have done a better job of appreciating that.”

    Baker has largely avoided national politics since the start of his campaign. He has attended some national Republican events, but he’s made clear that he wants to steer clear of the 2016 presidential primary and rarely comments on political issues outside the state.

    I’m amazed, though – a Republican willing to listen, learn and take the education of others to heart.

    All 50 US states fail to meet global police use of force standards, report finds, the Guardian joins the piling on.

96. rq says

    19 June 2015 at 7:11 am

    Lindsey Graham downplays race after black church shooting: People ‘looking for Christians to kill them’

    Republican presidential candidate Lindsey Graham reacted to a mass shooting at a historically black church in home state of South Carolina by suggesting that the shooter was “looking for Christians to kill them.”

    On Wednesday, Dylann Roof allegedly shot and killed nine people at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. A witness said that he told them that he was there “to shoot black people.”
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    According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, at least 19 hate groups are based in South Carolina, but it was not year clear if Roof was connected to any of them.

    Graham told hosts of The View on Wednesday that his niece had gone to school with Roof.

    “Strange, disturbed young man,” the senator noted. “Emily said in school he was just a quiet strange kid. Seems like one of these Newtown-type guys.”

    “Once thing it’s not — let’s talk about what it’s not, in my view — it’s not a window into the soul of South Carolina,” Graham insisted. “It’s not who we are, it’s not who our country is, it’s about this guy. This guy has got tons of problems.”

    He continued: “I can’t explain this. I don’t know what would make a young man at 21 get so sick and twisted to kill nine people in a church, this is beyond my understanding.”

    “Do you think it’s a hate crime or do you think it’s more mentally disturbed?” one of the co-hosts asked Graham.

    “Probably both,” he replied. “There are real people out there that are organized to kill people in religion and based on race. This guy is just whacked out.”

    “But it’s 2015, there are people out there looking for Christians to kill them,” Graham added. “This is a mean time we live in.”

    Yeeeeaaaaahhhh…

    Mark Sanford: Confederate flag use is an ‘intense debate’. Really? An ‘intense debate’? Amongst whom?

    Rep. Mark Sanford declined to weigh in on whether or not South Carolina should reconsider the place of the Confederate flag — either on license plates or at a memorial on the Statehouse grounds — in the wake of the massacre of nine African-Americans in a church, allegedly by a white man in a hate crime.

    The former Republican governor told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room” that “for some folks that represents heritage, for others of us it represents hate.”

    “I think you have to be attentive to where my brothers in Christ are coming from on this debate. (I have) a long list of friends who believe passionately that it still ought to come down from that place of memorial,” he said. “But I have an equal number of friends who say, ‘Wait a minute, my great uncle died in this particular effort, for me it wasn’t about slavery, it was about states’ rights.'”

    A picture has circulated of the alleged murderer, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, seen posing by a car featuring a South Carolina license plate depicting the Confederate flag. On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Texas can constitutionally reject proposals for similar license plate designs in its state without violating the First Amendment.

    Blitzer asked Sanford if it was time for South Carolina to rethink its use of the charged symbol. In his response, Sanford pointed to a compromise made in recent years, in which the flag flying above the Statehouse was removed, and instead featured on a memorial on the grounds.

    “It’s premature to go into an intense, exhaustive, emotionally draining debate of what we might do … before we first have time to mourn the passing of these families and the lives that have been impacted,” he said.

    Not much of a compromise. And I bet the majority of people in the ‘debate’ that Sanford knows are white. But I’m only guessing.

    Supreme Court Puts Stop to Group’s Confederate License Plates – that’s in Texas.

    The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Texas cannot be required to allow the Confederate flag on car license plates.

    The case dealt with how much control state governments can exert over slogans and messages on vehicle license plates.

    In the 5-4 ruling, the court said “just as Texas cannot require (Sons of Confederate Veterans) to convey ‘the state’s ideological message…(the Sons of Confederate Veterans) cannot force Texas to include a Confederate battle flag on its specialty license plates.”

    The case came from Texas, where a state agency refused five years ago to approve a specialty plate requested by a group called the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The design was to include the group’s logo — a square confederate battle flag surrounded by the words, “Sons of Confederate Veterans 1896.”

    After hearing public comments on the proposal, the state motor vehicle authority rejected the request, explaining that “many members of the general public find the design offensive,” and associate the flag “with organizations advocating expressions of hate.”

    The Sons of Confederate Veterans sued, and a federal appeals court ruled that license plate messages, other than official mottos such as “Lone Star State,” are free speech and cannot be restricted by the state even if some residents consider the words offensive.

    The federal courts have been divided on whether the message on a license plate is strictly government speech — in which case the government has more authority over what is said — or a mixture of government and private speech. Court battles have been fought over such messages as “Choose Life” on license plates.

    In the Texas case, the appeals court said the legal test is whether a reasonable observer would understand the message to be an expression of government or private speech.

    The Texas Governor, Greg Abbott, filed court papers as state attorney general urging the court to rule in favor of the state and against the confederate group.

    The court’s liberals were largely united in ruling that Texas cannot be required to allow the Confederate flag on car license plates. The fifth vote was Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s only African American.

    Let’s start taking seriously how Dylann Roof was “radicalized,” just as we do in homegrown Islamist attacks. Where did he learn his racism?

    And before anyone says “his point of view wasn’t rational,” please note “take back our country” is a mainstream right wing slogan. And the right wing, for the most part, is considered rational. Is it not? I mean, in the general public.

    Remembering the Charleston church shooting victims. Much longer profiles of each victim, with photo, and I shall quote in entirety:

    Sharonda Coleman-Singleton 45 years old

    By Arelis Hernandez

    All her life, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton pressed toward a goal.

    On a New Jersey high school track, she chased the finish so well that she sprinted her way to an athletic scholarship to South Carolina State University.

    As a speech pathologist, she pursued higher academic degrees to better help those who came to her wanting to be heard.

    But few things motivated the 45-year-old mother of three more than answering the upper calling to spread the gospel.

    And it came as no surprise to Coleman-Singleton’s family that she lost her life in the place where had she spent most of it. In the house of God, Coleman-Singleton was a leader, a motivator, and a teacher baptizing children, serving communion and encouraging her fellow believers.

    “She was probably there every day,” said Coleman-Singleton’s aunt Brenda Hargrove. “She was an exceptional, kind-hearted person.”

    Coleman-Singleton, known as “Tookey,” came from an extended family of women that instilled and nurtured her love of God and deep-seated drive to finish everything she started, according to three of her aunts. She grew up in New Jersey but spent her summers in the Deep South where her family had roots.

    Her aunt Loretta Chambers said she remembers her niece as a confident young woman who once convinced her that she was old and skilled enough to drive. Seeing that they were only a block away from their Georgia home, Chambers said she indulged the teenager, who was about 15.

    “She got into the driver’s seat, stepped on that gas and scared us so bad,” Chambers laughingly recalled. “It felt like she had gone 100 miles per hour.”

    Diligent in the classroom and meticulous with her work, Coleman-Singleton went on to earn a master’s degree and was working on her doctorate before she lost her life. Somehow, she found time to practice her motivational speaking at Toastmasters events, kept up with her Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters, work with and coach students at Goose Creek High school and study to become an ordained minister.

    Putting the word “reverend” before her name had been a longtime goal for their niece: “She did what she had to be better because she was a go-getter,” said Agnes Coleman, who is married to Coleman-Singleton’s uncle. “When she wanted something, she just went after it,” Chambers added.

    Coleman-Singleton extended her discipline to her children. Her oldest son, Chris Singleton, is an athlete like his mother and is a rising sophomore at Charleston Southern University where he plays baseball. Coleman-Singleton has two younger children, Camryn, 15, and 12-year-old Caleb, who along with the oldest adored their mother, family members said.

    After learning she was among the dead, Chris Singleton posted a photo of his mother at church with a note: “It’s funny how I always told you that you went to church too much,” he wrote. “You would laugh it off and say, ‘Boy you can never have too much of the Lord.’”

    DePayne Middleton Doctor 49 years old

    By Monica Hesse

    DePayne Middleton Doctor had a powerful voice, an alto belt that could fill a church and bring out calls of praise from her fellow parishioners when she soloed in the choir. In one online video of a performance at Mt. Moriah Missionary Baptist Church, Doctor, dignified in maroon choral robes, began the hymn “Oh, It Is Jesus” in a low whisper and ended in a soulful, shattering exultation.

    She was the mother of four daughters, she had warm brown eyes and a small gap between her front teeth, and she was 49 when she died in church.

    “My beautiful Songbird,” wrote Laurie Middleton, who appeared to be Doctor’s sister, on Facebook Thursday morning. “This is a hard one to swallow.”

    Doctor was “warm and enthusiastic,” said Todd Voss, the president of Charleston’s Southern Wesleyan University, where Doctor worked as the admissions coordinator for the learning center. “DePayne truly believed in the mission of SWU to help students achieve their potential by connecting faith with learning,” Voss wrote in a statement issued by the university. Doctor had received a graduate degree in management from SWU, and spent her career as a grant writer, a consultant, and a manager with the Charleston office of the U.S. Census.

    Before Doctor’s name was released along with those of eight other victims on Thursday afternoon, she appeared to have lived a quiet life, appearing only a few times in the news. Once, in her position with the Census, she was asked by a local newspaper whether she’d heard any protests from people who were upset that “Negro” had been added as a racial designation in the 2010 questionnaire. She said she hadn’t, yet.

    Her only other mention was in 2003, when she received a commendation plaque from the Charleston Police Department. She and her husband witnessed a burglary at a neighbor’s house and called the police, who arrived to find the two neighbor children bound and locked in a closet. The Post and Courier, which wrote about the commendation ceremony, recorded only a brief remark of Doctor’s.

    She said, “We’re just glad that no one was hurt.”

    Cynthia Hurd 54 years old

    By Fredrick Kunkle

    Cynthia Hurd dedicated her life to public service.

    As a librarian with Charleston County for 31 years, that meant introducing children to new books and showing adults how to navigate the worldwide Web or prepare a resume.

    As an officer of Charleston’s public housing authority and the president of a nonprofit organization, it meant fighting for affordable housing and helping low-income, mostly African-American children visit their own city’s historic district. As a participant in Women Build, a program of Habitat for Humanity, it meant she wasn’t afraid to get dirty.

    Above all, she loved connecting people to the world at large, colleagues said — but she also wasn’t above loving a stylish pair of shoes.

    “She had a fierce shoe game,” said Kim Williams-Odom, a library branch manager who said Hurd, also a branch manager, mentored her career. “She was definitely a stylish lady.”

    Hurd would have turned 55 on Sunday, according to local news reports. The Charleston County Public Library closed all its branches Thursday in her honor.

    Donald J. Cameron, chief executive of the Charleston Housing Authority, said Hurd had a fierce sense of justice. Having served on the authority’s board since 1995, she pushed for affordable housing as a way to keep lower- and moderate-income families from being pushed out of gentrifying neighborhoods in the city. She also backed programs that provided academic and vocational training for public housing residents.

    As president of Septima P. Clark, a nonprofit charity named after an educator and civil rights activist, she oversaw small grants that benefited housing authority residents, such as funds for young people to tour the city’s historic district.

    “[Septima Clark] was something that was near and dear to her heart,” Cameron said. “One of the things she used to say is she loved to ask questions, so as to prompt people to search for the answer.”

    If she were alive today, Cameron said, she might be asking questions herself:

    “Why? Why at all, number one? Why would somebody hate so deeply that they would have to act on that hate?”

    Former North Carolina state Sen. Malcolm Graham, in an interview with the Charlotte Observer, described his sister as a “mother figure” who brought people together. It was typical she was at church that night, he said.

    “She was just such a beautiful person,” he told The Observer.

    Graham told the newspaper that Hurd and his other siblings attended historic Emanuel AME Church during childhood. Their mother was a member of the choir. Hurd graduated Clark Atlanta University and received a masters in library science from the University of South Carolina.

    Williams-Odom, 44, said she and Hurd met at the John L. Dart library branch 17 years ago when Hurd was then its manager.

    Hurd encouraged her to pursue a career in the library system and obtain higher education. Eventually, Williams-Odom took over the John L. Dart manager’s position after Hurd became the branch manager of the St. Andrews Regional Library.

    She said Hurd, who had no children, was like a surrogate aunt to Williams-Odom’s children. Hurd’s husband — whose given name is Arthur but whom friends know as Steve — is a seaman who was out of country when the shooting happened, Odom said. She said she and her friend talked several times a day. Late Wednesday, Hurd called her at 8:48 p.m., but Williams-Odom missed it.

    “The most poignant thing she told me was destiny delayed is not destiny denied,” Williams-Odom said.

    Susie Jackson 87 years old

    Susie Jackson, 87, was the eldest of those who were killed during the Wednesday service. She was a longtime member of the church and a member of the choir and the usher board, her grandson, Tim Jackson, told a Cleveland television station. “It’s just hard to process that my grandmother had to leave Earth this way,” he said. “It’s challenging because I don’t believe she deserved to go this way. It hurts to process.” He said she has just visited family in Euclid, Ohio, for a family event. “Just her being here about two weeks ago gave us a chance to see her smiling and laughing and saying hi to the grandkids.”

    Ethel Lance 70 years old

    By Jacob Bogage

    Ethel Lance was practically always at her church, members said. She was a long-time sexton there, spending weekdays cleaning the grounds and nights at classes, with social clubs or in worship or Bible study. She worked as an usher during Sunday services.

    “We’re holding on and holding together and supporting each other the best way that we know how right now,” said Tim Brown, a member of the church who coordinates the college outreach committee.

    Lance, who was 70, was a constant presence around “Mother Emanuel,” as members call it.

    “A dear and sweet woman who worked very hard at the church,” Brown said.

    A former neigbor, Carolyn Swinton, grew up going to Emanuel AME and then joined a different congregation nearby. When she moved to an apartment in Charleston, she found she was two doors down from Lance, until she moved again two months ago.

    This spring, they saw each other at Emanuel at Swinton’s neice’s wedding, she said. They hugged and chatted in the parking lot .

    “You moved,” Lance told her. “I miss you.”

    Clementa C. Pinckney 41 years old

    By Todd C. Frankel

    Clementa C. Pinckney was busy Wednesday, not unusual for a man who was both a respected reverend and state senator in his native South Carolina.

    He began the day at home in Ridgeland, with his wife and two daughters, before driving to the statehouse in Columbia two hours away. He had a 9:30 a.m. Finance Committee meeting. They talked about scholarship funding. He left early to make it to North Charleston for a speech by Hillary Rodham Clinton at a community college. Then it was off to his congregation in downtown, the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, for the regular Wednesday night Bible study.

    Pinckney, 41, was leading the Bible group when a gunman opened fire inside the church. Nine people were killed, police said, and Pinckney was among the dead.

    “This is just devastating, to lose such a respected man” said state Sen. Larry Grooms of Charleston, who served with Pinckney for 15 years. “The whole thing is unbelievable.”

    Pinckney had long known the power of the pulpit.

    He had taken to preaching at age 13, following deeply rooted family tradition. His great-grandfather and uncle had been well-known AME pastors who fought to end whites-only political primaries and desegregate school busing.

    Pinckney soon discovered that the familial gift had not passed him by.

    “If you put him in a room of 20 people, he’d be leading it by the time you came out the door,” said Albert Kleckley, a county probate judge who knew Pinckney for years.

    Pinckney had his own church and a hand in the statehouse, following the example set by many black religious leaders in the South who found common cause with their beliefs in politics.

    He was first elected to the state House of Representatives in 1996, at age 23. In 2000, he made it to the state Senate, becoming, at age 27, the youngest African American in South Carolina to do so.

    Recently, said those who knew him , Pinckney appeared to have found a cause , the kind of galvanizing injustice that the pastors in his family had seized upon in the past. That came in April, when Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, was fatally shot by a police officer in nearby North Charleston.

    Pinckney spoke out against what he called a murder. He led vigils. He pushed for a state law to require police to wear body cameras.

    In early June, he organized a community prayer service with other church leaders in the area, recalled the Rev. Robert E. Kennedy. The event was held at Kennedy’s church, St. Peter’s AME in North Charleston.

    “He brought us together, the Methodist bishops, to address the problem of gun violence in light of Walter Scott,” Kennedy said. “It was all him.”

    Kennedy said he was struggling to understand what happened Wednesday. It just didn’t make sense. The incident made him doubt one of a church’s main principles: the open-door policy. The door had been unlocked for Bible study at Emanuel AME; anybody could come in, just as they could have at St. Peter’s AME, he said.

    “Now, we’ve got to go back and look at what we’re doing,” Kennedy said. “I know I will.”

    The mourning poured forth Thursday for the loss of a man who was widely respected, known for his big, imposing presence yet soft baritone voice. His desk in the statehouse was draped in black cloth, a single rose on top.

    “He was a talented and well respected Senator who represented the people of his church, his community and his state with great character and a servant’s heart,” State Sen. Harvey Peeler, Republican and majority leader, said in a statement.

    Vice President Biden decried in a statement “the senseless actions of a coward” and recalled that he last saw Pinckney at a 2014 prayer breakfast in Columbia.

    “He was a good man, a man of faith, a man of service who carried forward Mother Emanuel’s legacy as a sacred place promoting freedom, equality, and justice for all,” Biden said.

    Pinckney was married and had two children, Eliana and Malana, according to his church biography.

    In May, Pinckney stood up on the state Senate floor and gave a speech about the Scott shooting.

    Grooms recalled it as his colleague and friend’s finest moment in the statehouse.

    “Today, the nation looks at South Carolina and is looking at us to see if we will rise to be the body and to be the state that we really say that we are,” Pinckney (D-Jasper) said back then.

    He went on to note the pain caused by that incident — words that resonate anew after the tragedy at his church.

    “It has really created a real heartache and a yearning for justice — and not just in the African American community, but for all people,” he said.

    Tywanza Sanders 26 years old

    By Thad Moore

    Tywanza Sanders was a year out of college when he was killed in Wednesday’s shooting, remembered by his alma mater as a quiet, warm and committed student.

    Sanders, who was 26, earned a degree in business administration in 2014 from Allen University, a small, historically black university in Columbia, S.C. He was 26, according to Charleston County Coroner Rae Wooten.

    “He was a quiet, well known student who was committed to his education,” the university said in a statement. “He presented a warm and helpful spirit as he interacted with his colleagues.”

    Sanders was working as a barber and attended Emmanuel AME’s Bible study often, said Michele Gray, a friend, in an interview with WMBF, a Myrtle Beach, S.C., TV station.

    “You would never forget that big ol’ smile that he always had on his face,” Gray told WMBF. “Just to think I’ll never see that smile again in person is very heartbreaking.”

    Sanders was one of three Allen alumni killed in the shooting. Sen. Clementa Pinckney and Daniel Simmons also graduated from the university.

    Daniel Simmons 74 years old

    Daniel Simmons was a pastor retired from another church in Charleston who worshipped every Sunday at Emanuel AME and visited on Wednesdays for Bible studies, his daughter-in-law, Arcelia Simmons, told ABC. Simmons was alive when emergency crews reached the church, but died later at The Medical University of South Carolina, said Charleston County coroner Rae H. Wooten.

    Myra Thompson 59 years old

    By Joe Heim

    William Dudley Gregorie, a Charleston city councilman, chatted with Myra Thompson just hours before she was gunned down inside Emmanuel AME church Wednesday evening. He was leaving and she was heading into the historic church where both served as trustees.

    “She was her usual feisty, energized self,” Gregorie said Thursday. “We did our usual banter because we liked to banter. I had no idea it would be the last time that I would see and appreciate my good friend.”

    The church, Gregorie said, was a second home for Thompson, who often led the meetings of the trustees and was also studying to be a minister.

    “She was just an unbelievable woman,” Gregorie said. “She got the job done. Whatever you gave to her to do. She was thorough and she made sure things were done at a very high and superior level. I think Myra will be most remembered for her sincerity and her commitment to her religious ideals And her commitment to Mother Emmanuel.”

    The church that suffered staggering losses to its leadership must take on this new challenge, Gregorie said.

    “Now our church has to bury our dead, start the healing process, continue to pray. And forgive, so that we can cleanse, move forward and make sure that Mother Emmanuel continues to be the lifeline of African Americans in the city of Charleston, our state and our country. Because our church is just that significant in the history of our country.”

    Myra Thompson, 59, was was the wife of Reverend Anthony Thompson, a vicar at Holy Trinity REC in Charleston.

    She was a graduate of Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., as was her husband, and a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

    “We are asking all of our members to pray,” said Ella McNair, a spokesperson for the Washington-based sorority’s national president, Dr. Paulette C. Walker. “To pray for peace and compassion and to give our love and support to each other and to the Charleston community at large”

97. rq says

    19 June 2015 at 7:21 am

    The Problem with White Liberals

    When one has to live with oppression as an everyday facet of their existence, how does it feel?

    It feels isolating. It’s a parasite that clamps onto one’s self-esteem, and metastasises into a calcified affirmation that one is worthless.

    So what can be done to counter such an outcome? Maya Goodfellow recently wrote about Bahar Mustafa, who nearly lost her job as Welfare and Diversity Officer at Goldsmith’s University after arranging an anti-racism event in which only women of colour and non-binary people were permitted to attend.

    Mustafa was denounced for this in a number of places, ranging from the comments on Maya’s aforementioned piece, to The Spectator, to Ian Dunt – editor of Politics.co.uk. The notion of safe spaces was also called into question.

    Things then took an alarming turn. Dunt didn’t just “double-down”, but trebled-down, appearing on Channel 4 News to state such spaces “rules out the power of emotional [and moral] imagination”, while also penning a piece which lamented the rise of identity politics on the left. It included Dunt attempting – in eleven separate paragraphs – to explain what racism is, including the following[1]:

    “When Mustafa’s defenders say ‘racism’ they do not mean what most people mean. Most people mean: ‘negative thoughts towards another individual on the basis of their race’. That is the commonly accepted usage. But for many radicals – and particularly young radicals – racism is something different.”

    “We are saying that the race of the person speaking is more important than the content of their words.”

    “The idea racism does not affect the people it benefits, and that they must be separated out from those they wish to help, is a betrayal of that central left-wing idea.”

    Who are these “most people”, and is this what they think? If so, then “most people” are wrong. “Most people” have a misunderstanding of what racism is[2]. Why it matters that PoC lead conversations about race isn’t because they necessarily have additional knowledge to whites, but they have specific knowledge that whites can never attain.

    Then there’s this focus on the damage done to “the left”. Apparently the left is something that must be upheld, and kept safe from attacks on its credibility. The reason I single out Dunt is because he’s emblematic of Britain’s left[3]. A group that is dominantly cisgender and white.

    This doesn’t make them a monolith, but there appears to be an overall perception that the left are the “good guys”, fighting for the right cause. So when someone on the left commits an oppressive act, they get the benefit of the doubt, because they’re a liberal. To criticise them is to ostensibly turn on your own team.

    But why would I stand alongside anyone who refuses to listen when we speak? This is more important than identity politics. It’s about what people’s identity means in relation to how they are treated. The content of your character should be all that matters? Well, to castigate the admissions policy of safe spaces, rather than focus on why they’re needed, says a lot about the content of one’s character[4].

    Some appear to believe that we all start from an equal place of power and influence, so essentially, in any dialectic the best argument put forth will always prevail. Well we don’t. So it doesn’t. […]

    So what’s in it for the white liberal denouncing the safe space? An ego trip? A boost to one’s profile? A saviour complex? None of the above? All of the above?

    Or is it because having places that require the absence of whites ruins the cosy idea of societal harmony that some like to believe fully exists when it doesn’t? After all, what kind of country do we live in if its PoC residents don’t always feel safe around the white numerical majority? Not one that has values worth exporting.

    This doesn’t make dominant groups redundant from playing a role. But it should never be facilitated on their terms. Just because white people are asked to stay outside the circle isn’t because we’re secretly plotting to overthrow you. And to not respect the role safe spaces can play shows a total lack of… what’s that word Dunt used on Channel 4 News? Empathy.

    More on power differentials and who gets to be heard at the link.

    @jackson_park92 @WritersofColour @Kiiimbabwe Our role is to listen and use our privilege to amplify and support when we can. Not drown out. That’s us, white people.

    The one thing we know for sure is that we don’t know what to say.

    Burn baby Burn RT @TrillAC_: Word

    Baldwin. Rage. (via @JIJennings)

    Indigenous Woman used for target practice at the Saskatoon Police range… This is Reality. Yeah, that’s a random tweet about Canada…

98. rq says

    19 June 2015 at 7:25 am

    Oh, and it’s Juneteenth today.

    Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation – which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.

    Later attempts to explain this two and a half year delay in the receipt of this important news have yielded several versions that have been handed down through the years. Often told is the story of a messenger who was murdered on his way to Texas with the news of freedom. Another, is that the news was deliberately withheld by the enslavers to maintain the labor force on the plantations. And still another, is that federal troops actually waited for the slave owners to reap the benefits of one last cotton harvest before going to Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. All of which, or neither of these version could be true. Certainly, for some, President Lincoln’s authority over the rebellious states was in question For whatever the reasons, conditions in Texas remained status quo well beyond what was statutory.

    More at the link.

99. rq says

    19 June 2015 at 7:37 am

    we must be concerned not merely with who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.

    Somber Jon Stewart Delivers Scathing Monologue About Charleston Shooting

    Jon Stewart’s monologue tonight was an impassioned, frustrated meditation on the Charleston shooting and other recent tragedies. “I didn’t do my job today,” he said. “I’ve got nothing for you in terms of jokes and sounds, because of what happened in South Carolina.”

    Stewart went on to decry the frequency of this type of tragedy, observing exasperatedly that they always ends with the same result: nothing.

    “I honestly have nothing other than sadness that once again we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal yet we pretend doesn’t exist. I’m confident though that by acknowledging it—by staring into it—we still won’t do jack shit. That’s us. And that’s the part that blows my mind…What blows my mind is the disparity of response. When we think people that are foreign are going to kill us and us killing ourselves…We invade two countries and spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of American lives and now fly unmanned death machines over like five or six different counties, all to keep Americans safe. We’ve got to do whatever we can—we’ll torture people. We’ve got to do whatever we can to keep Americans safe. But nine people shot in a church— ‘Hey, what are you going go to do? Crazy is as crazy is, right?’ That’s the part that, for the life of me, I can’t wrap my head around. And you know it’s going to go down the same path.”

    Later, Stewart addressed the hypocrisy of South Carolina’s reverence for its Confederate and deeply racist past. “Nine people were shot in a black church by a white guy who hated them who wanted to start some sort of civil war,” he said. “The confederate flag flies over South Carolina. And the roads are named for confederate generals. And the white guy is the one who feels like his country is being taken away from him. We’re bringing it on ourselves. And that’s the thing—al Qaeda, ISIS, they’re not shit compared to the damage we can do to ourselves on a regular basis.”

    Video at the link.

    Who is the Charleston church shooting suspect? Go and find out more about him, if you like.

    #JeSuisCharleston, as North Charleston says flags will fly at half-mast for nine days. The confederate one, too?

    Why the Charleston AME Church Shooting was not a “hate crime”

    Dylann Roof’s bloody slaughter of nine Black church attendees should not be called a “hate crime”. To sit in a church for an hour before opening fire on its constituents because they simply exist is a calculated act of awesome terror. But this was not any church, it took place in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the site of the first independent Black denomination in the US. One of its founders, Denmark Vesey, a former enslaved Black man, was executed for planning what would have been America’s largest slave revolt. The symbolism of killing of Clementa Pinckney, the current Church leader and youngest ever elected African-American South Carolina State Senator is stark.

    When the authorities called this evil event, a “hate crime”, it was a relegation, a reduction of the significance of the horror. Many have compared the response to this incident to the response to the Boston Bombings and Charlie Hebdo murders. It was undoubtedly interpreted as the work of terrorists. Men motivated by a political ideology and grievance. There were vigils across the world and communities across each country took moments of silence to remember the lives taken and many more affected. There were international gestures of solidarity, it was recognised as an attack of all US/French citizens, an attack on Liberty itself.

    It appears that Liberty in the face of mass Black death, remains undisturbed. Dylann Roof has not been cast an existential threat to America, the manhunt for him was not accompanied with a lockdown. There has not been international condemnation, the white community have not been urged to find out what it is about their community that drives their young people towards these despicable acts. Whilst terrorism is often deployed to by elites to make political land-grabs, in this horrific instance both in terms of scale and spectacle, the label fits. This was born out of political ambition rather than interpersonal hatred.

    The use of “hate crime” here is as absurd as it is instructive. Political authorities and their acolytes in the media tell us that: White people do not do “terrorism”, white people do not coordinate terror among its marginalised populations. If white people massacre Black and Brown people, it is an isolated incident, it is a “hate crime”, something born out of an anachronistic irrationality. We watch how the perpetrator is quickly psychoanalysed by the media and other unqualified pundits to be suffering a “mental illness”. Terrorism and coordinated ideological violence is something only Black or Brown people do.

    If Dylann Roof was acknowledged as a terrorist then so would the history of the United States, along with European colonialism in the Americas, Asia and Africa. Not only their past but much of its present too. The history of US lynchings orchestrated by local white families and communities, is a history of white terror. The coordinated assassinations of political leaders from Patrice Lumumba to Salvador Allende is the history of white terror. The daily murder of unarmed Black people in United States by Police officers in 2015 is white terror. This is Dylann Roof’s ideology, demonstrated by his affiliation with Apartheid South Africa and Colonial Rhodesia.

    Much of Africa today is trapped by hyper-exploitation by European countries and their corporations working in tandem with tin-pot dictators. It is powerful American and British companies like Apple, Shell, Barclays and Lonmin who fund and perpetuate corrupt and powerful leaders in order to keep essential raw materials like coltan, oil, aluminium and more flowing to Western shores.

    From Charleston to Marikana, Black lives hardly matter when they are wealthy and certainly do not when they are poor. To make all Black Lives Matter, people of African descent racialised as Black have made significant progress but there is still a long struggle ahead.

    Murders in Charleston

    A week that began with public grappling with race as absurdity has concluded with shock, yet again, with race as the catalyst for tragedy. The existential question of who is black has been answered in the most concussive way possible: the nine men and women slain as they prayed last night at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, were black. The people for whom this new tableau of horror is most rooted in American history are black as well. The people whose grief and outrage over this will inevitably be diminished with irrelevant references to intra-racial homicide are black people. There are other, more pertinent questions, not all of them answerable. The most immediate: Who did this? Was it the act of an individual or was it an organized effort? What motivates someone to commit such monstrous acts and how do they rationalize such evil? How much longer can we live like this?

    There is a great deal that is still unknown about what transpired last night, but the immediate details—a single white male shooting; a horrific act of desecration; nine people, including the church’s pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, murdered during worship—are enough to inspire something beyond despair. Two months ago, the country saw video of Walter Scott, an unarmed African-American man, as he was fatally shot by police officer Michael Slager in nearby North Charleston. The two incidents seem like gruesome boomerangs of history until we consider the even more terrible idea that they are simple reflections of the present. The daisy chain of racial outrages that have been a constant feature of American life since Trayvon Martin’s death, three years ago, are not a copycat phenomenon soon to fade from our attention.

    At the same time, what happened at Emanuel A.M.E. belongs in another terrible lineage—the modern mass shooting. We have, quite likely, found at 110 Calhoun Street, in Charleston, South Carolina, the place where Columbine, Aurora, and Newtown cross with Baltimore, Ferguson, and Sanford. We periodically mourn the deaths of a group of Americans who die at the hands of another armed American. We periodically witness racial injustices that inspire anger in the streets. And sometimes we witness both. This is, quite simply, how we now live.

    For those who know the institution and its history, what happened on Wednesday evening conjures a particularly bitter irony. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1793, is the oldest denomination established by black people in the United States. It owes its origins to white discrimination against black Christians in the eighteenth century, and an incident in which black churchgoers were interrupted while worshipping and directed to the segregated section of an Episcopal church in Philadelphia. For black Christians, the word “sanctuary” had a second set of implications. The spiritual aims of worship were paired with the distinctly secular necessity of a place in which not just common faith but common humanity could be taken for granted. No matter the coming details about the shooting in Charleston, it seems almost inescapable that the assault on a single black church is an inadvertent affirmation of the need for an entire denomination of them.

100. rq says

     19 June 2015 at 7:40 am

     If somebody gets arrested for taking down the confederate flag in Charleston we can raise bail with Kickstarter in about 15 minutes. Not to suggest anything or anything like that.

     Via Giliell,

     The connection between terrorist Dylann Roof and white-supremacist regimes in Africa runs through the heart of US conservatism

     White supremacist terrorists are always constructed as isolated individuals who are not part of a general culture that encourages terrorist acts towards the “other” – be they immigrants, African-Americans, women. Their actions are largely explained as the result of mental-illness, and never carried out as part of a group or collective action. We do not wish to take responsibility for collective actions, and the general culture of white supremacy encouraged by the likes of Sean Hannity on television, Rush Limbaugh on the radio, and countless pastors on their church podiums.

     A commonplace explanation why the likes of Dylann Roof shouldn’t be termed “terrorists” is that their violence isn’t political since it isn’t tied to a broader ideological agenda. This is wrong. In Roof’s case, the photograph of him sporting a jacket embroidered with the flags of Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia shows this is especially implausible. Like the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik, Roof clearly understood himself to be fighting for a political cause — white supremacism.

     But Roof is by no means the first white American to find common cause with racist colonial regimes in Africa. That connection goes back a long way, and runs right from the top of the federal government to key figures in South Carolina politics.

     Much is being made in the media of Roof’s interest in white supremacists in Africa. The danger is that this draws our attention away from all the good ol’ white supremacy in his very own state.

     The white supremacist emblems on the terrorist’s shirt match the white supremacist emblem flying above the state capital of South Carolina, today as every day. Many people root the rise of the white, republican South Africa to the invention of the Dixiecrat party by South Carolina’s own Strom Thurmond, an arch-segregationist (with the typical secret mixed-race offspring) who ardently defended the apartheid South Africa government from the attacks of godless integrationists through the 1980s.

     The Rhodesian and Apartheid South Africa solidarity from the US goes back to the rise of the new right in the late 70s and in particular the rise of Reagan and the onset of the ‘second’ or new Cold War in the 1980s. Apartheid South Africa was portrayed as an outpost of Western values and civilisation against a sea of communist blacks in Angola, Zimbabwe and Mozambique in particular.

     Much money was channelled through libertarian and right-wing thinktanks and groups, by both the American government and the apartheid government, to fund a PR campaign aimed at creating sympathy for whites under siege in South Africa and those left in Rhodesia (soon, it was imagined, to become a communist dictatorship). In particular there was a focus on elevating Jonas Savimbi and Unita into anti-communist freedom fighters, and later the IFP as a moderate pro-capitalist alternative to the communist ANC. […]

     The Republicans later pretended not to have taken such reactionary stances on apartheid, but the influence of all this propaganda remained, later enhanced by a wave of reactionary expatriates leaving South Africa and Zimbabwe and makes homes in the South. They set up their own websites and genocide-watch bullshit, spreading myths about the Boer genocide, later enhanced by Zanu-PF’s land reform policies. In this they made links to the militia movement, websites like Stormfront and the fringes of the American right, many so-called libertarians and paleo-conservatives as well as Zionist trolls like Pamela Geller.

     Trawling the fringes of the internet, you find a lot of stuff connecting South Africa and Zimbabwe to the American experience, seen as examples of what happens when the government betrays whites to blacks who are then said to inflict savage violence on whites and destroy civilization. This stuff is found increasingly on the mainstream right these days, particularly with the rise of the Tea Party — but really they’re only tapping into a long tradition within white American conservatism.

101. rq says

     19 June 2015 at 7:46 am

     http://www.staywoke.org/
     For anyone thinking about getting involved.

     Umm, blockquote/cite fail above. :/ The link works, all text following is quoted from it, not my words at all!

102. Pteryxx says

     19 June 2015 at 11:17 am

     Transcript of Jon Stewart’s no-joking piece last night on Charleston, from sandandglass via tumblr.

     I didn’t do my job today. I’ve got nothing for you in terms of jokes and sounds because of what happened in South Carolina. And maybe if I wasn’t nearing the end of the run or this wasn’t such a common occurrence, maybe I could have pulled out of the spiral. But I didn’t.

     I honestly have nothing other than just sadness once again that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal yet we pretend doesn’t exist. I’m confident though, that by acknowledging it – by staring into that and seeing it for what it is…We still won’t do jack shit. Yeah, that’s us. And that’s the part that blows my mind.

     I don’t want to get into the political argument of guns and things. What blows my mind is the disparity of response between when we think people that are foreign are going to kill us and us killing ourselves…

     If this had been what we thought was Islamic terrorism, it would fit into our [narrative]. We invaded two countries and spent trillions of dollars and [lost] thousands of American lives and now fly unmanned death machines over like five or six different counties, all to keep Americans safe. We’ve got to do whatever we can – we’ll torture people. We’ve got to do whatever we can to keep Americans safe. But nine people shot in a church, what about that? “Hey, what are you going go to do? Crazy is as crazy is, right?”

     That’s the part that I cannot, for the life of me, wrap my head around. And you know it’s gonna go down the same path. “This is a terrible tragedy.” They are already using the nuanced language of lack of effort for this.

     This is a terrorist attack. This is a violent attack on the Emanuel Church in South Carolina which is a symbol for the black community. It has stood in that part of Charleston for a hundred and some years and has been attacked viciously many times – as many black churches have. And to pretend that – I heard someone on the news say – “tragedy has visited this church”. This wasn’t a tornado. This was a racist. This was a guy with a Rhodesia badge on his sweater. So the idea that – I hate to even use this pun – but this one is black and white. There’s no nuance here. And we’re gonna keep pretending like, “I don’t get it, what happened. This one guy lost his mind.”

     But we are steeped in that culture in this country and we refuse to recognize it. And I cannot believe how hard people are working to discount it. In South Carolina, the roads that people drive on are named for Confederate generals who fought to keep black people from being able to drive freely on that road. That’s insanity. That’s racial wallpaper. You can’t allow that.

     Nine people were shot in a black church by a white guy who hated them – who wanted to start some kind of civil war. The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina and the roads are named for Confederate generals. And the white guy is the one who feels his country’s being taken away from him. We’re bringing it on ourselves.

     And that’s the thing – Al Qaeda, all those guys, ISIS – they’re not shit compared to the damage that we can apparently do to ourselves on a regular basis.

103. Pteryxx says

     19 June 2015 at 11:31 am

     HuffPo: Racism Is Not A Mental Illness

     Racism is not a mental illness. Unlike actual mental illnesses, it is taught and instilled. Mental illness was not the state policy of South Carolina, or any state for that matter, for hundreds of years — racism was. Assuming actions grounded in racial biases are irrational not only neutralizes their impact, it also paints the perpetrator as a victim.

     Black people, on the other hand, do suffer actual mental health issues due to racism. Here are a few things to keep in mind as the media digs into Roof:

     Black people are often expected to “shift” away from our cultural identities, which can heighten our vulnerability to depression and other psychological issues, as well as cause us to internalize negative stereotypes.
     Racial discrimination, according to The Atlantic, increases the risk of stress, depression, the common cold, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, hypertension and mortality — all of which exist at high rates in my community.
     Race-related stress is a stronger risk factor for mental duress than stressful life events are.

     […]

     I understood what President Obama said Thursday. “I’ve had to make statements like this too many times,” he said. And I keep writing the same article. The context and names are different but the premise remains the same: To be black, specifically in America, is to be in a constant state of fear. There is no refuge. There is no escape. There is no sanctuary.

     Racism isn’t a mental illness, but the psychological, emotional and physical effects on those who experience it are very real. And I’m exhausted.

     Part of a conversation on #TWiBNation (the This Week in Blackness podcast):

     Can’t call this terrorism because you’d have to call all these things terrorism. Being a Black person in America is terrifying #TWIBnation

     #TWIBnation The idea that there’s an acceptable level of racism is maybe part of the reason this system is so hard to dismantle.

     There is no acceptable level of racism. There is no acceptable level of racism. There is no acceptable level of racism. #TWIBnation

     Vox – Yes, Charleston was terrorism. Denying that isn’t just wrong, it’s offensive.

     Today in this country, when we call something “terrorism” we are making a moral judgment about the odious wrongness of the perpetrator but also about the right of the targeted group to feel that they are under threat and thus to be protected.

     That makes the debate over whether white supremacist violence against African Americans counts as “terrorism” both a very important one and a very uncomfortable one.

     It requires us to acknowledge our history of politically motivated white violence against black communities, and to admit that this history is not fully over. It forces us to acknowledge that black communities are both reasonably afraid of this violence and rightly entitled to protection from it.

     When you understand that, the debate over whether to call it terrorism begins to make a lot more sense.

     […]

     Arguments that the shooter was no terrorist at all, but rather a mere criminal, end up speaking to more than just the definition of terrorism. It can be a way of denying that larger narrative of politically motivated violence, and a way of telling African Americans they are wrong to see this shooting as connected to that larger history, if such a history really exists at all.

     This is why the media’s hesitation to label the shooting as terrorism is, understandably and rightly, causing such offense. To paraphrase Edward Said, the Palestinian-American theorist of Orientalism, it is in some senses a question of which groups of people are and are not granted permission to narrate their own stories.

     If black Americans say they experience this attack as part of a trend of white terrorism against black communities, and the media says the attack was not really terrorism, that does not just ignore the experiences of black Americans, it denies them permission even to tell their own stories.

     […]

     As Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote last year, “We treat ‘terrorism’ in the common vernacular differently because it is ascribed to foreigners who are unlike us, whereas similarly savage behavior conducted by fellow Americans is a reflection of us.”

     To label what happened in Charleston an act of terrorism would compel us to look inward. We as a society may not feel ready for that. But if we are to respond appropriately to this violence, and prevent it from happening again, look inward we must. We owe the victims that much.

104. Pteryxx says

     19 June 2015 at 11:59 am

     Alternet: Idolization Of Rhodesia And South Africa Is Rooted In Right-Wing History

     Defending Racist Regimes Abroad

     As much of the world was turning against South Africa’s Apartheid regime and enacting boycotts and sanctions, the 1984 College Republican platform boasted that “socio-economic and political developments” there were “resulting in the betterment of the lives of all the peoples of South Africa.”

     Disgraced Republican super lobbyist Jack Abramoff traveled to South Africa and met with pro-Apartheid groups; he later helped open the think tank the International Freedom Foundation, which dedicated its resources to undermining the African National Congress’s Nelson Mandela. He moved to what is now called Namibia to produce a propaganda film titled Red Scorpion, which glamorized fighters in Angola who were allied to South Africa.

     Right-wing activist Grover Norquist, who today runs the powerful Americans for Tax Reform, also traveled to South Africa in a bid to undermine the boycott movement. He became a ghost-writer for pro-Apartheid Jonas Savimbi, and upon returning to the United States, he kept a “I’d rather be killing commies” bumper sticker on his briefcase, in a reference to the anti-Apartheid guerillas in Southern Africa.

     Another figure who allied himself to the white supremacist regimes was a young Jeff Flake. Flake, who is a Republican Senator from Arizona today, testified against an anti-Apartheid resolution in the Utah State Senate and later worked as a D.C. lobbyist representing the South African mining industry. He also represented a uranium plant in Namibia that was targeted by activists for discrimination.

     The Reverend Jerry Falwell, the godfather of the resurgent Christian Right, faced off with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who was mobilizing for the boycotts of South Africa, on the ABC News program Nightline. Falwell insisted that South Africa was making progress and that by targeting it for boycotts and sanctions, Jackson was ignoring atrocities in other countries and singling out a white-led country in South Africa.

     The case of Rhodesia represented a singular appeal to the global Christian right. As Norman H. Murdoch writes in his book Christian Warfare in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe: The Salvation Army and African Liberation, he explains the ideology of the country’s leader Ian Smith as believing that “to be Christian was, in his mind, to be white, European, and anti-Marxist.” It should be little surprise, then that William F. Buckley, the founder of the National Review, went on expenses-paid trips to Rhodesia and also made trips to South Africa. Of South Africa he wrote that the Apartheid system has “evolved into a serious program designed to cope with a melodramatic dilemma on whose solution hangs, quite literally, the question of life or death for the white man in South Africa.”

     Slate on Juneteenth, reprinted today from 2014: The Black American Holiday Everyone Should Celebrate but Doesn’t

     Juneteenth isn’t just a celebration of emancipation, it’s a celebration of our commitment to make it real.

     The first public Juneteenth events occurred in 1866, preceding any similar commemoration of the Confederacy legacy in Texas. At these events, former slaves read the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation—subversively honoring Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator at a time when white Texans saw the slain president as the destroyer of Southern “freedom”—sang spirituals, held games, and celebrated freedom.

     These celebrations would continue throughout the 19th century—growing in size and prominence—until the advent of Jim Crow and the aggressive repression of the early 20th century, when blacks were fully disenfranchised and outside the protection of law, vulnerable to the depredations of terrorists and lynch mobs. Put another way, it’s difficult to celebrate freedom when your life is defined by oppression on all sides. Still, the holiday remained in the civic life of black Texans, and began to expand beyond the state with the Great Migration of blacks from the South. As Isabelle Wilkerson writes in The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, “The people from Texas took Juneteenth Day to Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and other places they went.”

     With the growth of the civil rights movement in the middle of the 20th century, Juneteenth began to reclaim its space as a central holiday on the black American calendar. It experienced a resurgence in 1968, following the “Poor Peoples March” to Washington D.C., which coincided with the holiday. Attendees from the event brought the celebration back to their homes, creating new traditions in cities and towns across the country. Juneteenth was made a Texas state holiday in 1980, and in 1997, Congress recognized June 19 as “Juneteenth Independence Day,” after pressure from a collection of groups like the National Association of Juneteenth Lineage and National Juneteenth Celebration Foundation.

     Thursday marks the 148th anniversary of the first Juneteenth. [This year, Friday marks the 149th – Ptx] For now, it’s a niche holiday, celebrated by black Americans and a handful of others who know and understand the occasion. But it deserves wider reach. Indeed, I think we should add it to the calendar of official federal holidays.

     Insofar that modern Americans celebrate the past, it’s to honor the sacrifices of the Greatest Generation or to celebrate the vision of the Founders. Both periods are worthy of the attention. But I think we owe more to emancipation and the Civil War. If we inaugurated freedom with our nation’s founding and defended it with World War II, we actualized it with the Civil War. Indeed, our struggle against slave power marks the real beginning of our commitment to liberty and equality, in word, if not always in deed.

     Put another way, Juneteenth isn’t just a celebration of emancipation, it’s a celebration of that commitment. And, far more than our Independence Day, it belongs to all Americans.

105. Pteryxx says

     19 June 2015 at 12:35 pm

     Miscellaneous Twitter notes:

     Muslim shooter = entire religion guilty
     Black shooter = entire race guilty
     White shooter = mentally troubled lone wolf
     [rt’d from 2014]

     “We couldn’t have prevented this.” Meanwhile last week the FBI arrested a Muslim American for searching the internet.

     (twitter link) (NBC news link)

     When people don’t know the history of racist violence, every act is a one -time-thing. The ‘system’ in systemic racism becomes invisible.

     (twitter link)

     Wall Street Journal editorial page declaring that institutional racism no longer exists: (twitter with image), (MediaMatters link)

     A white man murdering black people in the South forces bad memories to the surface, and so it surely was appropriate for President Obama to note this in his remarks Thursday. Specifically, Mr. Obama recalled the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four black girls.

     […]

     Amid the horror of Charleston, it is also important to note that the U.S., notably the South, has moved forward to replace the system that enabled racist killings like those in the Birmingham church.

     Back then and before, the institutions of government–police, courts, organized segregation–often worked to protect perpetrators of racially motivated violence, rather than their victims.

     The universal condemnation of the murders at the Emanuel AME Church and Dylann Roof’s quick capture by the combined efforts of local, state and federal police is a world away from what President Obama recalled as “a dark part of our history.” Today the system and philosophy of institutionalized racism identified by Dr. King no longer exists.

     What causes young men like Dylann Roof to erupt in homicidal rage, whatever their motivation, is a problem that defies explanation beyond the reality that evil still stalks humanity.

     Bad memories of the past, which have absolutely nothing to do with this killer who spouted racist rhetoric and wore racist symbols actually shooting black people dead in their own historic church. Nope, that defies explanation. But it sure is a huge coincidence that happens to look exactly like the violent racism of the distant past, and evokes that violent racism without being part of a larger pattern of terrorism!

106. Pteryxx says

     19 June 2015 at 12:40 pm

     More from Twitter:

     Every American *recognizes* the Confederate flag. We are not that great w/ flags of any other former or existing states

     and a series from Jessica Luther: (twitter link)

     Fellow white ppl, today is the day to look at your white friends and family in the eye and say “Black lives matter.”

     Yesterday was the day, too. But if you aren’t already having this convo, start now.

     Don’t be cowards. You risk what, criticism? An argument? We are talking about black people’s lives at stake.

     I will be telling my 6yo white son what happened last night on our way to camp this morning and then I will tell him that black lives matter

     I’m not saying this for praise but just for you to know that I think white kids should be in convo now. Bc you know black kids are.

     A 5yo black girl survived last night by playing dead. Surely my 6yo white son can survive a conversation about why she matters.

107. rq says

     20 June 2015 at 8:40 am

     I hope I don’t repeat too much of what you put up, Pteryxx, but I have a lot of tabs. I’m going to try and keep my eyes open. :)
     Also, I hope Tony manages to put up some of those educational links he put up in The Mended Drum, if they haven’t been posted here already!

     +++

     RVA pastor: Man threatens churchgoers wielding weapon, screaming racist rants

     Richmond Police responded to a south Richmond church, where witnesses said a man threatened churchgoers.

     The threatening situation unfolded Thursday night at United Nations Church International on Midlothian Turnpike. This all happened just one night after the tragic shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

     “Lock the door!” screamed church members at United Nations Church International.

     Bible study took a terrifying turn when a man showed up screaming racial obscenities.

     “Useless *expletive*,” shouted the man in cell phone video.

     Pastor Orrin Pullings could not believe his ears.

     “You all are going to get killed tonight,” Pastor Pullings recalls the man saying. “And you *expletive* messed our country up.”

     The pastor ordered the doors of the church be locked, and church security came running.

     “I’m thankful for the Richmond Police Department backing us up tonight,” said Pastor Pullings. “Nobody worshiping God should have to deal with such an individual like this.”

     Witnesses say the man banged on the window with what they initially thought was a machete. They later learned it was an unidentified sharp object.

     “In light of what happened in the past 24 hours,” said Pastor Pullings. “For him to come to our service tonight and disrupt us like this and make those kind of terroristic threats that he is going to kill us…that’s just totally unacceptable.”

     Police worked late into the night working to determine what charges if any would be filed.

     “Police apprehended him and took him to jail,” said Pastor Pullings. “We are not sure where he is going, but he should be going to jail.”

     Police tell NBC12 the man was taken to the hospital for observation. Stay with NBC12 for updates on any possible charges.

     Charleston and ending white supremacy, a perspective I can agree with. And pretty much articulates why I’ve been feeling uncomfortable with the phrase ‘let’s talk about race’.

     Dear friends,

     We don’t need more conversations about race, we need conversations about white supremacy and how to end it.

     Nine Black lives were taken in Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church yesterday by a young white man carrying out the legacy of white supremacy. He sat beside them for an hour before he began shooting.

     May the families and communities of Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson, Daniel Simmons and DePayne Middleton-Doctor be supported in their grief and rage.

     In Charleston last night, a 5-year-old child survived the massacre by pretending to be dead. I ask my white people to take a moment of silence and imagine this child laying on the ground, among murdered adults, her body telling her that she had to lie as still as the dead in order to live. Five years old.

     Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old white male shooter, was apprehended today ‘without incident’ while still armed, having just shot and killed 9 people in a church. In contrast, remember the police murder of Tamir Rice, 12 years old and Black, sitting in a park with a toy gun.

     I hear Black people saying today, “What do we have to do to stay alive?” and asking where they can possibly be safe.

     The message, delivered at the barrel of a gun and then affirmed in the courtrooms of this country is that if you are Black: Don’t play. Don’t swim in a public pool. Don’t walk home alone at night in a hoodie with Skittles and Arizona iced tea. Don’t pray in a church. Don’t breathe.

     Is this how you want to live? Is this how you want your neighbors to live? BELIEVE that there is no being neutral on this moving train. You are either moving with the current, moving with white supremacy, or you are moving for collective healing and liberation.

     For those of us white people living in this time and place, who think that in apartheid South Africa we would have actively opposed white supremacist rule, who think that if we’d been alive during the civil rights era we’d have been Freedom Riders or at least supported the sit-ins, if you would have actively condemned the Birmingham church bombing as a terrorist act… don’t sleep on this moment we live in now in which you too are being called to take a stand.

     The killing of Black people in this country must stop, but it won’t until and unless we all rise up and demand it. Black communities are in motion for justice, like the national leaders of Movement for Black Lives convening right now in Detroit. For the rest of us, we must get on the right side of history putting our values into action.

     Some ways to take action:

     1 Send your condolences to the families of those lost and the people of Charleston via Color of Change
     2 Join tomorrow’s “White People Take Action for Charleston” call put on by SURJ, Friday June 19th at 5pm PST

     With urgency, from our hearts to yours
     Clare Bayard
     Catalyst Project

     I feel that the phrase ‘let’s talk about race’ shifts focus to black people in a way that burdens them to prove that they are as equal as white people, and white people are free to ignore them because hey, it’s a bunch of black people talking. When you say ‘let’s talk about white supremacy’, that puts the power differential and the attitude right up front, and I think it does more to force white people to think about how they participate or benefit from white supremacy, rather than placing the burden on black people to try and stop the oppression. I can probably word this better. I’ll probably try later.

     Mass Shootings Are Rising. Here’s How To Stop Them., general article on mass shootings.

     “It’s not a matter of if, but when and where the next mass shooting will happen,” Mother Jones editor Mark Follman wrote — eight months ago.

     He could’ve been writing on Wednesday night.

     Nine people were shot and killed in Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel AME Church.

     They had met at church for bible study. Their killer appears to have walked in off the street.

     “Tragedy” doesn’t do it justice.

     While a suspect is in custody, we still don’t know key details about the shooting, which police are calling a hate crime. But we do know that it’s emblematic of a deeper problem plaguing America.

     The frequency of mass shootings has skyrocketed — and no one has been able to stop it.

     It’s important to be clear here. Yes, mass shootings remain exceedingly rare compared to overall firearm deaths. (About 34,000 people died from being shot in 2013, versus 40-odd people killed in mass shootings.)

     But mass shootings can be so devastating because they frequently touch the youngest and most vulnerable members of our society. Take school shootings: Between 2000 and 2010, there were as many multi-fatality school shootings in the United States as there were in China, England, France, Germany, India, Russia and 30 other countries — combined.

     And the overall trend is very, very disturbing.

     According to a report released last October, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health found that the rate of all mass shootings in America had essentially tripled in the previous three years.

     Between 1982 and late 2011, mass shootings occurred about every 200 days. But after September 2011, the rate of mass shootings increased to about once every 64 days, according to the Harvard researchers.

     And they can’t explain why.

     “While many mass shooters had mental-health problems,” the researchers write, “there is no reason to believe that there has been an increase in mental illness rates in the last several years that could help explain the rise in mass shootings.”

     However, experts do think there are ways to stop mass shooters, or at least reduce their risk. Here are three of the leading ideas.

     1. Do better screening for risk factors.
     Psychiatrists say that it’s incredibly difficult to forecast potential killers, and we certainly don’t want to proactively arrest every angry person who happens to have a gun.

     But researchers say that with mass murderers, there are typically red flags in hindsight, which could have been identified through comprehensive screening and led to early interventions.

     Take Elliot Rodger, the troubled California student who went on a shooting spree at UC-Santa Barbara last May. Police had actually questioned Rodger in 2013, after Rodger reportedly attacked someone, and again checked in with him just three weeks before Rodger committed mass murder. Yet both times, they let Rodger go.

     “Police might have done more to find out about access to firearms, just given the family’s concern about Rodger’s emotional state,” Duke professor Jeffrey Swanson argued in an interview with the Washington Post last year. “There’s no reason that police responding to people in crisis couldn’t routinely address gun risk – talk about it, try to remove guns in various ways – instead of focusing on trying to predict when exactly somebody is going to be violent.”

     2. Don’t glorify the shooter.
     Mass shooters typically have personality disorders and feel marginalized by society. As such, there may be a copycat effect at work — some shooters want to revel in the massive media attention that comes with committing a horrible act.

     But withholding that attention may dim the appeal of mass shootings, experts say. Especially if killers are isolated from their potential audience and never publicized in the media, just as we would isolate someone with a contagious disease.

     “Treating mass killings as a kind of epidemic or contagion largely frees us from having to understand the particular causes of each act,” Ari Schulman writes at the Wall Street Journal. “Instead, we can focus on disrupting the spread.”

     3. Pass stricter gun controls.

     After a mass shooter murdered 35 people in Australia in 1996, the nation enacted strict gun control laws — and as of 2013, they hadn’t had a mass shooting since, Will Oremus wrote at Slate.

     The plan included many ideas that would be anathema in the United States: Australia repurchased more than 600,000 shotguns and rifles, nixed private sales of firearms, and dramatically raised the bar for would-be gun owners.

     Australia’s gun controls turned out to be wildly successful, but the nation’s prime minister doubted that Americans would have the will to make a similar move.

     “Millions of law-abiding Americans truly believe that it is safer to own a gun, based on the chilling logic that because there are so many guns in circulation, one’s own weapon is needed for self-protection,” Australia’s PM John Howard wrote in an op-ed.

     “To put it another way, the situation is so far gone there can be no turning back.”

     I feel that #1 is directly tied to ideas of white supremacy, that white people are less violent or less worthy of police attention than black people, simply because they’re white. Elliot Rodger, for example, raised some red flags, but they weren’t taken seriously enough because he was not dark enough. Dylann Roof raised some flags, not particularly red ones but flags nevertheless, but because he was white, he got a pass. So while #1 says develop better screening processes for risk factors, I believe the answer is far more simple: take the extant risk factors far more seriously.

     Charleston and the Age of Obama

     Between 1882 and 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, three thousand four hundred and forty-six black men, women, and children were lynched in this country—a practice so vicious and frequent that Mark Twain was moved, in 1901, to write an essay called “The United States of Lyncherdom.” (Twain shelved the essay and plans for a full-length book on lynching because, he told his publisher, if he went forward, “I shouldn’t have even half a friend left down [South].”) These thousands of murders, as studied by the Tuskegee Institute and others, were a means of enforcing white supremacy in the political and economic marketplaces; they served to terrorize black men who might dare to sleep, or even talk, with white women, and to silence black children, like Emmett Till, who were deemed “insolent.”

     That legacy of extreme cruelty and unpunished murder as a means of exerting political and physical control of African-Americans cannot be far from our minds right now. Nine people were shot dead in a church in Charleston. How is it possible, while reading about the alleged killer, Dylann Storm Roof, posing darkly in a picture on his Facebook page, the flags of racist Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa sewn to his jacket, not to think that we have witnessed a lynching? Roof, it is true, did not brandish a noose, nor was he backed by a howling mob of Klansmen, as was so often the case in the heyday of American lynching. Subsequent investigation may put at least some of the blame for his actions on one form of derangement or another. And yet the apparent sense of calculation and planning, what a witness reportedly said was the shooter’s statement of purpose in the Emanuel A.M.E. Church as he took up his gun—“You rape our women and you’re taking over our country”—echoed some of the very same racial anxieties, resentments, and hatreds that fuelled the lynchings of an earlier time.

     But the words attributed to the shooter are both a throwback and thoroughly contemporary: one recognizes the rhetoric of extreme reaction and racism heard so often in the era of Barack Obama. His language echoed the barely veiled epithets hurled at Obama in the 2008 and 2012 campaigns (“We want our country back!”) and the raw sewage that spewed onto Obama’s Twitter feed (@POTUS) the moment he cheerfully signed on last month. “We still hang for treason don’t we?” one @jeffgully49, who also posted an image of the President in a noose, wrote.

     South Carolina has undergone enormous changes in the decades since Jim Crow, but it is hard to ignore the setting of this rampage, the atmosphere. Seven years ago, as Obama was campaigning in South Carolina, the Times columnist Bob Herbert visited the state, encountering the Confederate flag flying on the grounds of the State Capitol building and, nearby, a statue of Benjamin (Pitchfork Ben) Tillman, a Reconstruction-era governor and senator, who defended white supremacy and the lynching of African-Americans, saying, “We disenfranchised as many as we could.”

     “We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will,” Tillman said, from the floor of the U.S. Senate. “We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.”

     The extent to which Roof was aware of the historical dimensions of his hideous act is not yet known; he is still a suspect, and we are just beginning to learn more about him. But no killer could have selected a crime scene more sacred. The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church was built to be the heart of the black community in Charleston, in the early nineteenth century, as black men and women sought to form a spiritual and political refuge divorced from the oppressive white institutions all around them. One of the founders of the Emanuel A.M.E. Church was Denmark Vesey, a preacher, carpenter, and former slave who had purchased his own freedom and who, in 1822, was executed for his role in planning a slave revolt in Charleston. The broader A.M.E. Zion church was not only the spiritual home to the three men and six women Roof gunned down but to the likes of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Eliza Ann Gardner, and Harriet Tubman.

     No small part of our outrage and grief—particularly the outrage and grief of African-Americans—is the way the Charleston murders are part of a larger picture of American life, in which black men and women, going about their day-to-day lives, have so little confidence in their own safety. One appalling event after another reinforces the sense that the country’s political and law-enforcement institutions do not extend themselves as completely or as fairly as they do for whites. In Charleston, the killer seemed intent on maximizing both the bloodshed and the symbolism that is attached to the act; the murder took place in a spiritual refuge, supposedly the safest of places. It was as if the killer wanted to underline the vulnerability of his victims, to emphasize their exposure and the racist nature of this act of terror.

     Watching Obama deliver his statement Thursday about the Charleston murders, you couldn’t help but sense how submerged his emotions were, how, yet again, he was forced to slow down his own speech, careful not to utter a phrase that would, God forbid, lead him to lose his equanimity. I thought of that sentence of James Baldwin’s: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in rage almost all of the time.” Obama’s statement also made me think of “Between the World and Me,” an extraordinary forthcoming book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which he writes an impassioned letter to his teen-age son—a letter both loving and full of a parent’s dread—counselling him on the history of American violence against the black body, the young African-American’s extreme vulnerability to wrongful arrest, police violence, and disproportionate incarceration.

     Obama never affords himself the kind of raw honesty that you hear in the writings of Baldwin and Coates—or of Jelani Cobb and Claudia Rankine and so many others. Obama has a different job; he has different parameters. But, for all of his Presidential restraint, you could read the sadness, the anger, and the caution in his face as he stood at the podium; you could hear it in what he had to say. “I’ve had to make statements like this too many times,” he said. It was as if he could barely believe that he yet again had to find some language to do justice to this kind of violence. It seemed that he went further than usual. Above all, he insisted that mass killings, like the one in Charleston, are, in no small measure, political. This is the crucial point. These murders were not random or merely tragic; they were pointedly racist; they were political. Obama made it clear that the cynical actions of so many politicians—their refusal to cross the N.R.A. and enact strict gun laws, their unwillingness to combat racism in any way that puts votes at risk—have bloody consequences.

     “We don’t have all the facts,” he said, “but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. … At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.” On race and politics, he was more subtle, but not stinting, either, lamenting the event’s connection to “a dark part of our history,” to events like the Birmingham church bombing, in 1963.

     Like many others, I’ve often tried to imagine how Obama’s mind works in these moments. After one interview in the Oval Office, he admitted to me that he was hesitant to answer some of my questions about race more fully or with less caution, for just as a stray word from him about, say, monetary policy could affect the financial markets, so, too, could a harsh or intemperate word about race affect the political temper of the country.

     Obama is a flawed President, but his sense of historical perspective is well developed. He gives every sign of believing that his most important role in the American history of race was his election in November, 2008, and, nearly as important, his reëlection, four years later. For millions of Americans, that election was an inspiration. But, for some untold number of others, it remains a source of tremendous resentment, a kind of threat that is capable, in some, of arousing the basest prejudices.

     Obama hates to talk about this. He allows himself so little latitude. Maybe that will change when he is an ex-President focussed on his memoirs. As a very young man he wrote a book about becoming, about identity, about finding community in a black church, about finding a sense of home—in his case, on the South Side of Chicago, with a young lawyer named Michelle Robinson. It will be beyond interesting to see what he’s willing to tell us—tell us with real freedom—about being the focus of so much hope, but also the subject of so much ambient and organized racial anger: the birther movement, the death threats, the voter-suppression attempts, the articles, books, and films that portray him as everything from an unreconstructed, drug-addled campus radical to a Kenyan post-colonial socialist. This has been the Age of Obama, but we have learned over and over that this has hardly meant the end of racism in America. Not remotely. Dylann Roof, tragically, seems to be yet another terrible reminder of that.

     Nearly all of South Carolina was in mourning Thursday. Flags were at half-mast. Except the Confederate flag, of course, which flew high outside the building where Tillman still stands and the laws of the state are written.

     WSJ editorial page thought today was the best day to declare that institutional racism no longer exists in the South, more on that upthread from Pteryxx. Smart move, WSJ. Smart move.

     “WHY?” asks the country with over 1000 White Power groups and 24/7 hate radio, with #FOXNews, the #NRA, & the #GOP backing them all.

108. rq says

     20 June 2015 at 8:53 am

     It’s not about mental illness: The big lie that always follows mass shootings by white males

     I get really really tired of hearing the phrase “mental illness” thrown around as a way to avoid saying other terms like “toxic masculinity,” “white supremacy,” “misogyny” or “racism.”

     We barely know anything about the suspect in the Charleston, South Carolina, atrocity. We certainly don’t have testimony from a mental health professional responsible for his care that he suffered from any specific mental illness, or that he suffered from a mental illness at all.

     We do have statistics showing that the vast majority of people who commit acts of violence do not have a diagnosis of mental illness and, conversely, people who have mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.

     We know that the stigma of people who suffer from mental illness as scary, dangerous potential murderers hurts people every single day — it costs people relationships and jobs, it scares people away from seeking help who need it, it brings shame and fear down on the heads of people who already have it bad enough.

     But the media insists on trotting out “mental illness” and blaring out that phrase nonstop in the wake of any mass killing. I had to grit my teeth every time I personally debated someone defaulting to the mindless mantra of “The real issue is mental illness” over the Isla Vista shootings.

     “The real issue is mental illness” is a goddamn cop-out. I almost never hear it from actual mental health professionals, or advocates working in the mental health sphere, or anyone who actually has any kind of informed opinion on mental health or serious policy proposals for how to improve our treatment of the mentally ill in this country.

     What I hear from people who bleat on about “The real issue is mental illness,” when pressed for specific suggestions on how to deal with said “real issue,” is terrifying nonsense designed to throw the mentally ill under the bus. Elliot Rodger’s parents should’ve been able to force risperidone down his throat. Seung-Hui Cho should’ve been forcibly institutionalized. Anyone with a mental illness diagnosis should surrender all of their constitutional rights, right now, rather than at all compromise the right to bear arms of self-declared sane people.

     What’s interesting is to watch who the mentally ill people are being thrown under the bus to defend. In the wake of Sandy Hook, the NRA tells us that creating a national registry of firearms owners would be giving the government dangerously unchecked tyrannical power, but a national registry of the mentally ill would not — even though a “sane” person holding a gun is intrinsically more dangerous than a “crazy” person, no matter how crazy, without a gun.

     We’ve successfully created a world so topsy-turvy that seeking medical help for depression or anxiety is apparently stronger evidence of violent tendencies than going out and purchasing a weapon whose only purpose is committing acts of violence. We’ve got a narrative going where doing the former is something we’re OK with stigmatizing but not the latter. God bless America.

     What’s also interesting is the way “The real issue is mental illness” is deployed against mass murderers the way it’s deployed in general — as a way to discredit their own words. When you call someone “mentally ill” in this culture it’s a way to admonish people not to listen to them, to ignore anything they say about their own actions and motivations, to give yourself the authority to say you know them better than they know themselves.

     This is cruel, ignorant bullshit when it’s used to discredit people who are the victims of crimes. It is, in fact, one major factor behind the fact that the mentally ill are far more likely to be the targets of violence than the perpetrators–every predator loves a victim who won’t be allowed to speak in their own defense.

     The designer of the second national flag of the #Confederacy, explaining what it stood for: “Heaven-ordained supremacy of the White race over the inferior or colored race”.

     Police-community tensions: A pressing issue that most presidential candidates don’t like talking about

     The many candidates running to lead America are saying little, if anything, about how they would handle one of America’s most pressing challenges.

     A string of deadly police encounters in cities across the country — including in Cleveland, where Republicans will gather next year to officially select their presidential nominee — demands questions about race relations and criminal justice reforms.

     But national reporters covering the crowded 2016 field have at times seemed more preoccupied with whether White House hopefuls would attend a gay wedding or, with the benefit of hindsight, whether they would have invaded Iraq in 2003.

     The asks are few. The answers are even fewer.

     A spokesman for Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, who delivered a significant speech on the subject following the Baltimore riots in April, declined the Northeast Ohio Media Group’s request for an interview. On the GOP side, an aide to top contender Marco Rubio replied quickly, though unhelpfully — “I don’t have anything on this,” he said via email — before punting to an equally unhelpful colleague.

     Clinton’s and Rubio’s teams were among the 15 presidential campaigns or campaigns-in-waiting that NEOMG reached out to in recent weeks in search of a conversation on the tenuous state of the criminal justice system. Most passed on the opportunity.

     The five exceptions:

     – Republican Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and the only high-profile black candidate in the race, answered questions after a speech last week in Cleveland.

     – John Kasich discussed the issue in an unrelated interview last month. And aides to the Republican Ohio governor emphasized his creation of a police-community task force.

     – A senior adviser to Rand Paul, who has been more vocal than most candidates on the subject, spoke on behalf of the Republican senator from Kentucky.

     – A spokeswoman for Democrat Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, answered questions via email. O’Malley’s record while mayor of Baltimore has come under fresh scrutiny in the wake of the unrest there, but he has not shied away from sharing his perspective.

     “He is the only candidate on either side with experience dealing with these issues as a big-city mayor and then as a governor, and he’s the only candidate with a forward-looking vision on these issues,” said his press secretary, Haley Morris.

     – A press secretary spoke for Republican Rick Perry, the former Texas governor.

     “After six years of a president who divided us along racial, economic and social lines, Americans are looking for a leader to unite us again and create opportunity for all,” said Travis Considine. “But unrest points to a bigger issue: lack of opportunity. Too many people are trapped in failing schools, not getting jobs, and locked away for minor offenses. This needs to change, and the policies put in place during Gov. Perry’s tenure in Texas can be a national model for creating opportunity for all.”

     As the Clinton and Rubio campaigns did, representatives for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — Republicans all — acknowledged NEOMG’s interest but declined to answer questions. At most, they pointed to past statements by their bosses.

     Five campaigns did not respond at all. Those whom NEOMG never heard back from include Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who at the moment is Clinton’s strongest challenger for the Democratic nomination. On the Republican side, no replies came from Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Sen. Rick Santorum.

     More at the link.

     White and black: talking race after a massacre. It’s a collection of views from actually a lot of different people on the shooting, and the racism angle. Note former Governor Sanford, who believes saying this is about race is taking the easy way out. Say what?

     The Charleston shooter killed mostly black women. This wasn’t about ‘rape’ – and I know the misogyny angle has been brought up before, and I’ve mentioned that the skewed numbers might be due to the demographics of who attends a bible study… but (brainwave) seeing as how Roof researched other things about the church, he probably researched that, too… So. Misogyny: check. Anyway, the article:

     Before opening fire – and reportedly reloading five times – the man who killed nine black people at the historic Emmanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina on Wednesday night, reportedly said: “You rape our women. And you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” (Dylann Roof has been arrested in North Carolina and is expected to be charged with the crime.) According to police, three of the people who died were male, including South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinkney, who served as the church pastor, and six were female.

     Six black women were shot to death during a community prayer service by a young white man who allegedly declared: “You rape our women.”

     These women and men welcomed a white man into their close-knit church, and likely encouraged others in their community to join and listen and pray and let God into their hearts. Black women, who are said to be the most religious demographic in America, have long been considered the backbone of black church – our backs are precious and sturdy, but have been weighted down for decades. You don’t attend Wednesday night services if you aren’t a devout churchgoer; you don’t go to Wednesday night services with a gun and the intention to murder if your true goal is to kill as many black men as possible.

     There is something inconsistent with the Charleston shooter’s alleged evocation of the historical myth of black man as beast and rapist of white women, and the fact that he killed mostly black women. Did he only shoot black women because there were no more black men to kill? Because black women birth, care for and love black men? Or because he didn’t see black women as women at all, and, as something less than women (and certainly lesser than white women), felt us undeserving of the same valiance he conjured on behalf of the women he claim to be protecting?

     The shooter allegedly used the salvation of white women’s bodies as a motivation for his acts, an old trope that was once used to justify the lynching of black men and the denial of rights to all black people. The idea that white women’s bodies represent that which is inviolable while black women’s are disposable hasn’t changed enough since it was first articulated by white men; but again, aimed at black men on Wednesday night, it was predominately black women who suffered by their invocation.

     In recent months, activists have urged us to #SayHerName on the streets and on Twitter, to acknowledge the loss of black women’s lives to police violence and white supremacy: already, Rev Sharonda Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson, Rev Depayne Middleton-Doctor and Myra Thompson have been named as victims of Wednesday’s massacre. That we have to urge people to say their names, to remember their names, as the shooter’s name is etched into our collective psyche, makes vividly clear what we value as unforgettable, and that which we deem disposable.

     As it goes with the murder of black bodies by white America, we are left to mourn, to mask our fear and to piece together the all-to-readily available clues that, more often than not, point us to the steady reality that we are not safe to exist as free black people anywhere. Sometimes, when you get sick and tired of being sick and tired, you go to church to pray, or to weep. Black women go to church to find comfort, strength and solace, and to mend from the cultural maintenance of our communities. Not to get murdered – though that’s happened before, too.

     In the opening scene from Ava DuVerney’s film Selma, she captured the innocence of four black girls detonated in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. Four black girls were just walking down the wooden steps to the basement for prayer meeting; DuVerney showed the light trickling through the stained glass window, let us listen to them talk about their hair and how they do it and how they like it, showed us their Sunday clothes pressed and colorful. And then, in the movie as in our history, they were just dead.

     The girls killed in Birmingham in 1963 are the child forebearers of the grown women killed in Charleston in 2015, in a country where our ancestors keep getting younger and younger because violence too often prevents us from getting older, from growing fully into our lives. Somehow, protecting the world from black men has, far too often, meant killing, beating and raping black women and girls. So we have prayed in solidarity and what we have looked upon as safety. On Wednesday, a white man took that from us, too. What remains to be seen is whether the law and this country will recognize that there is now nothing left to take from us.

     Dylann Roof charged in Charleston church shooting – I think you can watch the video.

     A South Carolina judge has set bond at $1 million for accused Charleston church shooter Dylann Storm Roof.

     Roof is charged with nine counts of murder and one weapon possession charge in shooting massacre inside a historic black church.

     The magistrate judge set the bond for a weapons charge but doesn’t have the authority to set bond on the counts. That will be left up to a circuit judge at a later date.

     Roof appeared by video and stared straight ahead stone faced as five victims’ family members gave statements, some of them saying “hate won’t win.” Roof showed no reaction as they told him they would have mercy on him and that they forgave him.

     And I think that’s the video with the judge’s comments that got further comment on twitter… and that’s coming up. Anyway, 9 counts of murder and a weapons charge, no word yet on domestic terrorism.

109. rq says

     20 June 2015 at 9:12 am

     Refusal to Call Charleston Shootings “Terrorism” Again Shows It’s a Meaningless Propaganda Term

     Stack was an anti-tax, anti-government fanatic, and chose his target for exclusively political reasons. He left behind a lengthy manifesto cogently setting forth his largely libertarian political views (along with, as I wrote at the time, some anti-capitalist grievances shared by the left, such as “rage over bailouts, the suffering of America’s poor, and the pilfering of the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants”; Stack’s long note ended: “the communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed”). About Stack’s political grievances, his manifesto declared that “violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”

     The attack had all of the elements of iconic terrorism, a model for how it’s most commonly understood: down to flying a plane into the side of a building. But Stack was white and non-Muslim. As a result, not only was the word “terrorism” not applied to Stack, but it was explicitly declared inapplicable by media outlets and government officials alike. […]

     By very stark contrast, consider the October 2014, shooting in Ottawa by a single individual, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, at the Canadian Parliament building. As soon as it was known that the shooter was a convert to Islam, the incident was instantly and universally declared to be “terrorism.” Less than 24 hours afterward, Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared it a terror attack and even demanded new “counter-terrorism” powers in its name (which he has now obtained). To bolster the label, the government claimed Zehaf-Bibeau was on his way to Syria to fight with jihadists, and the media trumpeted this “fact.” […]

     As it turns out, other than the fact that the perpetrator was Muslim and was aiming his violence at Westerners, almost nothing about this attack had the classic hallmarks of “terrorism.” In the days and weeks that followed, it became clear that Zehaf-Bibeau suffered from serious mental illness and “seemed to have become mentally unstable.” He had a history of arrests for petty offenses and had received psychiatric treatment. His friends recall him expressing no real political views but instead claiming he was possessed by the devil. […]

     That is the crucial backdrop for yesterday’s debate over whether the term “terrorism” applies to the heinous shooting by a white nationalist of nine African-Americans praying in a predominantly black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Almost immediately, news reports indicated there was “no sign of terrorism” — by which they meant: it does not appear that the shooter is Muslim.

     Yet other than the perpetrator’s non-Muslim identity, the Charleston attack from the start had the indicia of what is commonly understood to be “terrorism.” Specifically, the suspected shooter was clearly a vehement racist who told witnesses at the church that he was acting out of racial hatred and a desire to force African-Americans “to go.” His violence was the byproduct of and was intended to publicize and forward his warped political agenda, and was clearly designed to terrorize the community he hates.

     That’s why so many African-American and Muslim commentators and activists insisted that the term “terrorist” be applied: because it looked, felt and smelled exactly like other acts that are instantly branded “terrorism” when the perpetrator is Muslim and the victims largely white. It was very hard — and still is — to escape the conclusion that the term “terrorism,” at least as it’s predominantly used in the post-9/11 West, is about the identity of those committing the violence and the identity of the targets. It manifestly has nothing to do with some neutral, objective assessment of the acts being labelled.

     The point here is not, as some very confused commentators suggested, to seek an expansion of the term “terrorism” beyond its current application. As someone who has spent the last decade more or less exclusively devoted to documenting the abuses and manipulations that term enables, the last thing I want is an expansion of its application.

     But what I also don’t want is for non-Muslims to rest in their privileged nest, satisfied that the term and its accompanying abuses is only for that marginalized group. And what I especially don’t want is to have this glaring, damaging mythology persist that the term “terrorism” is some sort of objectively discernible, consistently applied designation of a particularly hideous kind of violence. I’m eager to have the term recognized for what it is: a completely malleable, manipulated, vapid term of propaganda that has no consistent application whatsoever. Recognition of that reality is vital to draining the term of its potency.

     The examples proving the utter malleability of the term “terrorism” are far too numerous to chronicle here. But over the past decade alone, it’s been used by Western political and media figures to condemn Muslims who used violence against an invading and occupying force in Afghanistan, against others who raised funds to help Iraqis fight against an invading and occupying military in their country, and for others who attack soldiers in an army that is fighting many wars. In other words, any violence by Muslims against the West is inherently “terrorism,” even if targeted only at soldiers at war and/or designed to resist invasion and occupation.

     By stark contrast, no violence by the West against Muslims can possibly be “terrorism,” no matter how brutal, inhumane or indiscriminately civilian-killing. The U.S. can call its invasion of Baghdad “Shock and Awe” as a classic declaration of terrorism intent, or fly killer drones permanently over terrorized villages and cities, or engage in generation-lasting atrocities in Fallujah, or arm and fund Israeli and Saudi destruction of helpless civilian populations, and none of that, of course, can possibly be called “terrorism.” It just has the wrong perpetrators and the wrong victims.

     Then there is all the game-playing the U.S. does with the term right out in the open. Nelson Mandela, now widely regarded as a moral hero, was officially a “terrorist” in U.S. eyes for decades (and the CIA thus helped its allied apartheid regime capture him). Iraq was on the terrorist list and then off it and then on it based on whatever designation best suited U.S. interests at the moment. The Iranian cult MEK was long decreed a “terror group” until they paid enough influential people in Washington to get off the list, coinciding with the U.S. desire to punish Tehran. The Reagan administration armed and funded classic terror groups in Latin America while demanding sanctions on the Soviets and Iranians for being state sponsors of terrorism. Whatever this is, it is not the work of a term that has a consistent, objective meaning.

     Ample scholarship proves that the term “terrorism” is empty, definition-free and invariably manipulated. Harvard’s Lisa Stampnitzky has documented “the inability of researchers to establish a suitable definition of the concept of ‘terrorism’ itself.” The concept of “terrorism” is fundamentally plagued by ideological agendas and self-interested manipulation, as Professor Richard Jackson at the the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in New Zealand has explained: “most of what is accepted as well-founded ‘knowledge’ in terrorism studies is, in fact, highly debatable and unstable” and is “biased towards Western state priorities.” Remi Brulin is a scholar who specializes in the discourse of “terrorism” and has long documented that, from the start, it was a highly manipulated term of propaganda more than it was a term of fixed meaning — largely intended to justify violence by the West and Israel while delegitimizing the violence of its enemies.

     What is most amazing about all of this is that “terrorism” — a term that is so easily and frequently manipulated and devoid of fixed meaning — has now become central to our political culture and legal framework, a staple of how we are taught to think about the world. It is constantly invoked, as though it is some sort of term of scientific precision, to justify an endless array of radical policies and powers. Everything from the attack on Iraq to torture to endless drone killings to mass surveillance and beyond are justified in its name.

     In fact, it is, as I have often argued, a term that justifies everything yet means nothing. Perhaps the only way people will start to see that, or at least be bothered by it, is if it becomes clear that not just marginalized minority groups but also their own group can be swept up by its elasticity and meaninglessness. There is ample resistance to that, which is why repulsive violence committed by white non-Muslims such as yesterday’s church massacre is so rarely described by the term. But that’s all the more reason to insist on something resembling fair and consistent application.

     The following are articles as examples from the right-wing that all push the ‘race war’ narrative in some capacity. TRIGGER WARNING for racist language within – no citing, but if people need an example of why and how and no, no racism to see here… you’re more than welcome to click any one (or all) of the following for links: Spike in black on white crime covered up by media;
     War Zone: Baltimore Erupts Into Violence, Chaos as #BlackLivesMatter Riots Rage;
     New Black Panthers call for race war — again;
     Glenn Beck: Obama Is a Racist. I believe they range in time from 2009 to 2015. Anyway.
     MOVING ON.

     IMPORTANT READ. 8 Things Black Folk Don’t Have to Do in Light of the AME Massacre, quoted in full.

     1. Justify or police our rage.

     We have the right to feel and express our rage in a manner we deem appropriate. My only ask is that Black folk aren’t harmed by other Black folk.

     2. Apologize for our trauma or anger.

     We do not need to further relinquish what little power we have. To anyone.

     3. Stay informed of every update or development.

     The triggers are real. If constantly being plugged in to this tragedy is causing mental, emotional, physical, and/or spiritual angst, it’s okay to power down and step back. Personally, I have not hate-watched any news coverage because I do not feel compelled to pad the pockets of white supremacist propaganda.

     4. Explain ourselves to anyone — especially white folk.

     Explanations given to those who don’t agree or understand your analysis takes up entirely too much emotional space. Especially when these explanations are given to white people who are comfortable benefiting from a system that literally hates us.

     5. Include or involve the feelings of white folk in our responses.

     The last thing on our minds should be how white people will respond to our expressions. If anything, they need to be concerned about how their expressions are received by us. We aren’t obligated to hold white hate, denialism, and guilt.

     6. Give up space.

     Space is yours to take. Especially if you’re from the most marginalized corners of Blackness.

     7. Be peaceful.

     Peace is a subjective, shallow term that upholds the status quo. Being “peaceful” — especially when mandated by the agents of white supremacy — is coded language which tells us to stay quiet, assimilate, and internalize our oppression. We are not obligated to be or remain peaceful when “peace” only exists to solidify racism.

     8. Forgive.

     Forgiveness does not make us more profound or conscious than our oppressors. This beast that was invited into Black space and murdered these gracious host does not deserve forgiveness. Forgiveness is not justice. Forgiveness — especially since we have not yet had room to decompress or process — is at best, an impediment and at worst, a distraction.

110. rq says

     20 June 2015 at 9:22 am

     Fox News and neo-Nazi site call racist massacre an attack on Christianity, because they would.

     Most people, including the police and the FBI, are calling 21-year-old suspected terrorist Dylann Roof’s message to black people (“You rape our women, and you’re taking over the country. And you have to go”) pure racist hatred.

     But Fox News says what Roof really meant when he made that threat and then carried it out by killing nine black people in a Charleston, South Carolina church was that he hated Christians.

     It was a “horrifying attack on faith,” said Fox & Friends co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck. “If we aren’t safe in our own churches, then where are we safe?” Her co-host Steve Doocy agreed, “Extraordinarily they called it a hate crime. And some look at it as, well, it’s because it was a white guy, apparently, and a black church. But you made a great point just a moment ago about the hostility toward Christians, and it was in a church, so maybe that’s what it was about.” Doocy told this to was a pastor on the show who said it would be a good idea for pastors to arm themselves in church.

     The level of reality distortion in this video clip from the show is extraordinary. This is one of the clearest examples I’ve seen that reveals Fox News’ true agenda as a racist hate network.

     The article includes a comment from Stormfront… “if the shooting should turn out to be an act of racism, the white nationalist movement would suffer”. Ummmmmm….

     The Dark History of Race and Terror, general racism throughout history!

     When the news broke Wednesday night of the horrific massacre at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, from the start people asked why this crime, which would have been labeled “terrorism” if the killer had been a Muslim, is merely a “hate crime” or the work of a deranged madman since the murderer is white. It’s a very good question and people are right to ask it. I think the word “terrorism”, as we’ve come to use it, is so clumsy that it might be better to retire the word altogether. But as long as we do use it, it definitely makes sense to apply the label to this crime. But there’s another meaning of the term, or another history, that I think helps us understand much more of the past and the present of what happened Wednesday night in Charleston.

     You’ve probably heard of The Citadel, one of the most storied military academies in the United States, which is located in Charleston. As Benjamin Parks explains in this piece from yesterday, the origins of The Citadel are directly linked to the reaction to the Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy that rocked the city in 1822. As you’ve probably also seen in the news coverage over the last two days, Vesey was one of the founders of the Emanuel AME Church. Nor is this connection between The Citadel and the attempted Vesey uprising some coincidence or oddity. It is a particular connection that illustrates a greater and sobering truth: the Southern military tradition, whatever it has evolved into in more recent history, has its roots in the institution of and particularly the preservation of slavery. Whether it is slave patrols, militias focused on putting down slave revolts or musters intended to overawe subject populations – while no institution has a single origin, this basic fact about the history of the American South is unquestionably true. It is particularly so about South Carolina.

     Here is one salient fact about South Carolina. It is the only American colony or state ever to have a black majority population. (See correction below, Mississippi eventually became black majority as well.) Except for a brief period just after the American Revolution, from the early 18th century until the first decades of the 20th century, a clear majority of the population of South Carolina was black. Indeed, the seminal history of early colonial South Carolina is entitled Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion.

     When we see a monster like Dylann Roof we rightly see the evil and brutality of racist violence. But to understand it, to understand its origins, it is critical to see that it evolved out of a deep rationality and logic. If you hold hundreds of thousands of people in a rapacious and brutal bondage, you are in perpetual danger.The intrinsic violence perpetrated on the slave can turn around on the slaveholder in an instant. The more brutal the slavery, the greater the danger. And this is all the more so if the slaves outnumber the free population. You cannot understand the history of South Carolina or the American South or for that matter the entire United States without appreciating this simple fact.

     If southern whites in the days of slavery were quick to horrific acts of violence against black slaves or the small free black population, this wasn’t born of a character flaw. It was rooted in a palpable knowledge of the intrinsic violence and danger of slavery. They were scared and they were right to be scared.

     To sustain that kind of regime requires not just violence but exemplary violence – violence used for the specific purpose of inspiring terror and ensuring compliance.

     If this all sounds too much like a college theory seminar, don’t kid yourself. Read the letters and laws of planters and settlers in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and the need to overawe and episodically terrorize subject populations is never far from the surface. It is frequently and explicitly discussed. Nor is it restricted to the American South. The difference is simply that it persisted in the South and intensified because of the way that chattel slavery evolved throughout North America.

     My familiarity with this comes not just from the South but even more from the part of the country we rightly identify as the cradle of anti-slavery, New England. Despite all the talk about Max Weber and the protestant work ethic and all the rest, the New Englanders wanted slaves too. It was simply for a mix of climate and other historical contingencies that their history didn’t turn out that way. At the very outset of settlement, the progenitor of one of Massachusetts most storied families, Richard Saltonstall (a Saltonstall was in the US Senate as recently as 1967), was brainstorming about ways to find a source of cheap labor to create an engine of true wealth. The obvious path forward was to acquire slaves. And a decade and a half later leaders of the Massachusetts enterprise could be found brainstorming a plan to start a war with the Narragansett Indians of what is now Rhode Island in order to enslave them en masse and swap them for ‘seasoned’ African slaves from Barbados.

     New Englanders never got the mass enslavement many wanted. But the form of brutal violence we know more in the South they practiced on the native population who they lived intermingled with for several decades during the 17th century.

     Only a few years earlier, the New Englanders had wiped out a potent nearby tribe, the Pequots, in what is now southeastern Connecticut. The main engagement of the conflict came when a settler army surrounded the main Pequot Village and massacred or burned alive some 500 men, women and children while the main Pequot fighting force was in the field. Hundreds more were killed in the ensuing weeks and the morale of the Pequot fighting force collapsed in the face of the deaths of so many of their families. This not only cleared land for new settlement. The first accounts also explicitly noted the salutory effect the massacre would and did have in overawing the region’s native population and making them compliant.

     “For having once terrified them, by severe execution of just revenge,” one settler wrote for an English audience, the settlers “shall never hear of more harm from them, except, perhaps, the killing of a man or two at his work, upon advantage, which their sentinels and corps-du-guards may easily prevent … They shall have those brutes their servants, their slaves, either willingly or of necessity, and docible enough, if not obsequious.”

     The reference to sentinels and corps-du-guards is notable for it captures the militarized nature of the early settlements and the importance, frequently noted by settlers, of regular military musters and displays of unity to inspire fear and terror.

     In New England the conflict was largely with native tribes since African slaves never amounted to a significant percentage of the population outside of a few pockets of Southern New England. But the patterns were similar. Servitude or forced compliance of any sort is not just intrinsically violent. It often requires exemplary violence to instill the terror that obedience and compliance are based on. This is particularly so in societies where state structures are weak. And societies based on this sort of pervasive violence are ones in which a vital rule of law has great difficulty taking root.

     As Gregory Downs noted yesterday in his article on Juneteenth and the end of slavery in Texas, as Southern planters drove slaves into Texas ahead of the Union armies or tried to keep them enslaved even as the slaves knew slavery had been abolished by the federal government, planters resorted to killing hundreds of African-American former (and, they hoped, future) slaves to terrify others into compliance, even as slavery was in its death rattle.

     We can see this in New England in the 1630s, more than two centuries later as planters desperately tried to preserve slavery on the run from the US Army. Terror of this sort of is by design and necessity brutal and public. Consider how lynchings are inherently and uproariously public, the carnival atmosphere of the killings, the bodies left to hang and be seen. And it is this thread that carries through with the history of mass terror campaigns white paramilitaries carried out during Reconstruction and the history of lynching and mob violence against African-Americans in the South through the late 19th century and well into the 20th century.

     This isn’t to suggest nothing has changed. The racial world we live in today is utterly transformed from what it was a century ago. Then white mobs in the South (and not only in the South) killed African-Americans with impunity and frequently with the passive or sometimes overt support of elected officeholders and the law enforcement of the day. Today a barbarity like the Charlestown church massacre – whatever racial injustices we have today and we have many – are roundly condemned almost universally, if sometimes awkwardly or feebly. Not to recognize this watershed difference is to dishonor the millions of Americans who have worked, suffered and in some cases died to effect the change. But Dylann Roof and his massacre are still the lineal descendent of these earlier horrors.

     You can call these artifacts and barbarities of our past evil. And they are evil. But calling them merely evil diminishes their gravity and awfulness because it obscures the fact that such barbarity is necessary to preserve certain social systems and racial orders. Racial violence in America has always been intrinsically connected to terror. And not “terror” in the modern sense of mass casualty attacks meant to drive press attention and fear by people who are not in power. But in a far more direct sense: violence to inspire terror to solidify control and dominance.

     Correction: A small but significant correction. I was wrong. South Carolina was not the only state with a black majority. I think I was projecting my knowledge about South Carolina’s colonial period – its unique status – on to the Ante-Bellum period. But TPM Reader AC wrote in to tell me that Mississippi also had a black majority in the early 19th century. And sure enough he’s right. I wasn’t able to check each census. But at least in the 1850 and 1860 censuses, Mississippi also was a black majority state. Louisiana had a bare majority as well. Not terribly surprising, considering that Mississippi was the top cotton producing state on the eve of the Civil War and was ground zero for racial violence throughout the 20th century.

     Long article, but I would like to note two things: 1) do not agree with dehumanizing Roof as ‘monster’ and 2) like and enjoy the emphasis placed on racism in the north.

     . @jojokejohn @milesjreed @ASTORIX23 @MikeLoBurgio @coopah “@androoshaw: Mic. Fucking. Drop. #CharlestionShooting “, a response to Nikki Haley, governor of South Carolina. Last sentence calls her ‘a profile in cowardice’.

     Charleston: Dylann Roof’s Cousin Claims Love Interest Chose Black Man Over Him (Intercept article). I’m just… going to leave that there as further evidence of possessive thoughts about women.

     NRA Board Member: Slain Pastor Is to Blame for Deaths in Charleston Shooting, which opinion we’ve already seen.

     We saw this coming, yet it is still shocking: Less than 24 hours after Dylann Storm Roof murdered nine people—including South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinckney—inside a Charleston church, NRA board member Charles Cotton blamed the deaths on… South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinckney.

     Writing on TexasCHLForum.com, a forum at which he is an administrator, Cotton stated, “[Pinckney] voted against concealed-carry. Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.”

     Since we’re dealing in hypotheticals, Mr. Cotton, what if the late Pastor Pinckney wasn’t a character from a lazily-written action film? What if he, as most human beings might when suddenly thrown into a disorienting maelstrom of random violence, had missed after pulling out his concealed handgun? And what if he’d hit another innocent church-goer?

     Or what if he’d dropped the gun while fumbling for it amid all the chaos? What if a kid or someone in shock from the mayhem had picked it up and tried to be a hero? What if someone walking by had heard the gunfire inside the church and stopped by with their Glock? How would the good guys have known whether this new guy was a good guy or a bad guy?

     How many bullets do we need to fire into a hail of bullets before we say enough?

     Black lawmakers announcing bills for next SC Statehouse session to bring down Confederate flag and enact hate crime laws.#CharlestonShooting

     Lots more lined up but it will have to wait, unfortunately.

111. Pteryxx says

     20 June 2015 at 9:47 am

     Thanks rq – I’m trying not to duplicate anything you’ve already posted, either, but there’s just so much material. At least it’s good that racial issues and history are even making it *into* the news and conversation… but this is what it takes?

     via Friendly Atheist, wtf. Arizona Sheriff Will Send Armed Guards to Black Churches Tomorrow Whether They Want Them or Not

     Tomorrow morning, when black congregations will once again gather for what will surely be emotional church services, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (who has a racist past of his own) has announced how he plans to protect those churches in his part of Arizona.

     He’s going to “send armed volunteer posse members” to those churches.

     […]

     In the Phoenix area, indications are that not all of the churches involved want posse members patrolling near their pulpits. When told of one pastor’s concerns, Arpaio said at a press conference, “But I’ll tell you, he’s going to get them whether he likes them or not.”

     If gay marriage is legalized, no one is going to force church pastors to perform such ceremonies against their will. Conservatives love to say otherwise, but liberals have no desire to force private churches to accommodate their wishes.

     And yet even though some of these church leaders are openly saying they don’t want armed guards to “protect” them tomorrow, a conservative government official is saying they have to accept it anyway.

112. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     20 June 2015 at 11:37 am

     A manifesto has surfaced online allegedly written by Dylann Roof. It hasn’t been confirmed AFAIK.
     http://www.vibe.com/2015/06/dylann-roof-manifesto/

113. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     20 June 2015 at 11:51 am

     Here is a portion of the Wikipedia entry on William Tappan Thompson:

     As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause. … As a national emblem, it is significant of our higher cause, the cause of a superior race, and a higher civilization contending against ignorance, infidelity, and barbarism. Another merit in the new flag is, that it bears no resemblance to the now infamous banner of the Yankee vandals.
     —William T. Thompson (1863), Daily Morning News

     That’s in reference to the design of the second flag of the confederacy.

114. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     20 June 2015 at 12:48 pm

     Cari Champion’s dream has come true.She is now the new anchor at ESPN’s Sportscenter:

     In a statement to The Wrap, Champion says, “I grew up watching ‘SportsCenter’ — it is the flagship show so I am living the dream. When I first started working here, I would casually petition for it — but there’s always a long line.”

     Champion, who joined ESPN in 2012, was a permanent member of the network’s First Take show alongside Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith. Her last day on the popular segment was Friday (June 19).

     In an interview with VIBE in 2012, Champion also spoke about working on First Take. “I’m part of something on television that is unique—the biggest show on ESPN—and virtually came out of nowhere. I knew I was somebody but they didn’t know it yet [laughs]. But it’s exciting. I just hope I’m representing as an African-American woman on TV trying to hold it down.”

115. rq says

     20 June 2015 at 1:35 pm

     I’m’ worried about the ‘armed volunteer’ bit, that doesn’t sound like actual law enforcement, but potentially trigger-happy open-carry advocates… though the situation being what it is, there’s a chance they’ll be less racist than others… Still. Nobody asked for your armed protection, Arpaio. Worried about how tensions plus armed people at a church will play out. :/

     Also thanks for the info on Thompson, Tony. Saw the twitter entry, didn’t have a chance to follow up. He sounds pretty… odious.

     +++

     NRA board member blames pastor for Charleston deaths, Politico link to that article.

     Me & my girl just left an offering at the Denmark Vesey Monument at Hampton Park in downtown #Charleston – I’m just glad to see that, among all the slaveholders honoured, Vesey has a monument all his own.

     NRA Board Member Blames Murdered Reverend for Congregants’ Deaths, another source for that.

     Reporters are now stating that Dylann Roof is in solitary confinement next to Officer Slager, who killed #WalterScott. #CharlestonShooting Can’t confirm, but ye gads, I bet they could have a conversation or two. :/

     Every S.C. Statehouse Flag Is at Half Staff–Except the Confederate One, Gawker on the flag.

     While the U.S. and South Carolina state flags that fly above the South Carolina state house were lowered to half-mast today in mourning for the nine victims of last night’s shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, the Confederate flag on display outside the building is still flying high and proud. Why? Because the bizarre display of racist symbolism is so closely protected that it would be impossible to move it without a legislative vote.

     According to Raycom Media reporter Will Whitson, the continued display is something of a technical issue: it’s affixed to the top of the flagpole, not on a pulley, meaning that it would be difficult if not impossible to lower it halfway without taking it down altogether—a proposition that presents its own set of problems. State law demands that the government “ensure that the flags authorized above shall be placed at all times as directed in this section and shall replace the flags at appropriate intervals as may be necessary due to wear,” writes Schuyler Kropf at the Post and Courier. In other words, the flag can’t be pulled down until it’s voted on.

     The state of South Carolina so reveres the memory of its armed defense of American slavery that lowering the Confederate Battle Flag that flies at full staff outside of its state house would require an official act of government—even after a racist murderer killed a state lawmaker and eight other residents in cold blood.

     This man lost his mother last night in #CharlestonShooting. Unbelievable poise and strength shown by Chris Singleton. Quick sound bite from the prayer vigil held (a couple more sound bites and I think photos in a bit).

116. rq says

     20 June 2015 at 1:48 pm

     No Quarter, No Sanctuary, No Succor

     A hated people need safe spaces, but often find they are scarce. Racism aims to crowd out those sanctuaries; even children changing into church choir robes in Alabama have been blown out of this world by dynamite. That is racism’s purpose, its raison d’etre, and it has done its job well. The black church hasn’t been safe since there has been a black church. On Wednesday night, around 9:00 pm, a young white terrorist went to a black Bible study. He spent an hour listening to the word of God with the nine people he would kill in cold blood, one after the other. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lee Lance, Daniel L. Simmons, Reverend Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Susie Jackson, and the church’s pastor and South Carolina state senator, Reverend Clementa Pinckney.

     The church where the murders took place, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, was an institution founded partially because the white-controlled Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston discriminated against its black members. In Black Heritage Sites: An African American Odyssey and Finder’s Guide, author Nancy Curtis wrote that the white members “capped the insult” by building a place to park their hearse atop the black burial ground. So the blacks broke away, founding a church that would become a haven not just for the peaceful worship of God and Jesus Christ, but also for the fight for black liberation.

     The AME Church was born from this struggle. Richard Allen’s Free African Society broke from traditionally white Methodist churches in Philadelphia years before Morris Brown, founder of “Mother Emanuel,” would do the same in Charleston. Speaking in the Emanuel sanctuary in 2013, Reverend Pinckney himself said the AME church came about “in a fit of civil disobedience and a little issue of theological fairness, if you will.” The first of these churches, Mother Bethel in Philadelphia, stands on the oldest plot of land that African Americans have owned. I began attending Mother Bethel 10 years ago, and eventually became an active member and trustee for several years. I met my wife, a lifelong AME parishioner, in its sanctuary.

     When I learned of the Wednesday night shooting, the first thing I did on Thursday morning was call the pastor of Mother Bethel, Reverend Mark Kelly Tyler. I needed to know that my pastor, the man to whom I have frequently turned to for strength, was himself holding up. It was an instinct rooted in my particular practice of Christianity; I need to pray, to worship, to seek guidance.
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     “As you know, Jamil, the AME Church is very close knit. When it comes to clergy, we’re extremely close. We all know one another, regardless of where you pastor. So it’s not like you’re calling strangers,” Pastor Tyler told me. “Reverend Pinckney was a very good friend of mine, so I’m just really devastated by it all.”

     I remember going to several Bible studies led by Pastor Tyler in Mother Bethel’s basement, and never thinking about why I needed to get someone to buzz me in.

     “I think the pure idea of sanctuary, at least the Biblical notion, where sanctuary was truly a safe place, and your enemies would respect sanctuary,” the pastor told me. “You got to the sanctuary and none of your enemies would try to come in and hurt and harm you. That notion has been long lost in our society.” […]

     A cousin of Reverend Pinckney who had spoken to one of the incident’s three survivors told a local NBC affiliate that the shooter, 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof, reloaded his weapon five times, even as pleas were made for him to stop shooting. There was evil in his heart. “He just said ‘I have to do it,’” Pinckney’s cousin said. “He said ‘you rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.’”

     Roof was a staunch racist, from the Confederate plates on his car to the apartheid-era South African flag sewn to his jacket, circulated in a widely tweeted photo. Even so, I’m less concerned with his racism than the fact that his racism and paranoid fear of a changing world and eroding white power structure led him to terrorism, to attack the traditional heart of Charleston’s black community.

     So how do we respond?

     Anger boils through my veins as I consume each additional morsel of news. My breath stops as I watch a now-murdered pastor thank God in a prayer two years ago, “for all persons who come, seeking to expand their horizons and seeking to learn more what our country is made of, and what makes us who we are as a people and as a country.”

     I am angry knowing that there are people like Roof who take advantage of the black church’s uniquely welcoming attitude in order to steal people’s lives. That anger is real, and legitimate. But it’s corrosive, too. In the midst of the interview, my own rage clouding my thoughts as I spoke, I found my pastor once again providing me—and others—direction.

     “I’ve been going back in forth from crying to trying to keep it together,” he told me. “But I do know one thing: that hate got us here. And we can’t use hate to get us out of here. There is something to be said about the ethics of love and that is not something people want to hear in moments like this. Because in moments like this we want to retaliate and we want to give back to the person that which they gave to us and then some on top of it. But that begins a vicious cycle, that’s exactly what that pure spirit of evil wants, is to get us caught up into that cycle that you can never win. There’s no way to win that battle.”

     I took his words in, and I ached for that congregation in Charleston that can no longer look to its own pastor for such wisdom, that congregation mourning its father and its brothers and its sisters.

     But it is becoming hard to hear that wisdom clearly through the gunshots. It gets harder to love thine enemy the more we come to know them. A church born of black liberation understands the inevitably scarring effects of racism; it understands how we react to American whiteness’ corrosive hatred, so often on display. I certainly hope the church can lead us in this moment, when our skin has been flayed, our bodies broken, and our beautiful souls spit upon. We find ourselves here again: A hated people holding each other tight as the space around us closes in.

     So many of these articles, I find myself this close to tears. Just under the surface. This is one of them.

     “The Appropriation of Cultures” by Percival Everett, bit of a literary break. I encourage everyone to read the story.

     The despicable news coming out of Charleston, South Carolina brought to mind Percival Everett’s short story “The Appropriation of Cultures,” which all of us at Graywolf felt we should share.

     Excerpt:

     “What in the world do you need a truck for?” Sarah asked. She stepped over to the counter and poured herself another cup of coffee, then sat back down at the table with Daniel.

     “I’m not buying the truck. Well, I am buying a truck, but only because I need the truck for the decal. I’m buying the decal.”

     “Decal?”

     “Yes. This truck has a Confederate flag in the back window.”

     “What?”

     “I’ve decided that the rebel flag is my flag. My blood is Southern blood, right? Well, it’s my flag.”

     Sarah put down her cup and saucer and picked up a cookie from the plate in the middle of the table. “You’ve flipped. I knew this would happen to you if you didn’t work. A person needs to work.”

     “I don’t need money.”

     “That’s not the point. You don’t have to work for money.” She stood and walked to the edge of the porch and looked up and down the street.

     “I’ve got my books and my music.”

     “You need a job so you can be around people you don’t care about, doing stuff you don’t care about. You need a job to occupy that part of your brain. I suppose it’s too late now, though.”

     “Nonetheless,” Daniel said. “You should have seen those redneck boys when I took ‘Dixie’ from them. They didn’t know what to do. So, the goddamn flag is flying over the State Capitol. Don’t take it down, just take it. That’s what I say.”

     “That’s all you have to do? That’s all there is to it?”

     “Yep.” Daniel leaned back in his rocker. “You watch ol’ Travis when he gets here.” […]

     Barb sighed and asked, as if the question were burning right through her, “Why do you want that flag on the truck?”

     “Why shouldn’t I want it?” Daniel asked.

     Barb didn’t know what to say. She studied her feet for a second, then regarded the house again. “I mean, you live in a nice house and drive that sports car. What do you need a truck like that for?”

     “You don’t want the money?”

     “Yes, we want the money,” Travis said, trying to silence Barb with a look.

     “I need the truck for hauling stuff,” Daniel said. “You know like groceries and—” he looked to Sarah for help.

     “Books,” Sarah said.

     “Books. Things like that.” Daniel held Barb’s eyes until she looked away. He watched Travis sign his name to the the back of the title and hand it to him and as he took it, he said, “I was just lucky enough to find a truck with the black-power flag already on it.”

     “What?” Travis screwed up his face, trying to understand.

     “The black-power flag on the window. You mean, you didn’t know?”

     Travis and Barb looked at each other.

     “Well, anyway,” Daniel said, “I’m glad we could do business.” He turned to Sarah. “Let me take you for a ride in my new truck.” He and Sarah walked across the yard, got into the pickup, and waved to Travis and Barb who were still standing in Daniel’s yard as they drove away.

     Sarah was on the verge of hysterics by the time they were out of sight. “That was beautiful,” she said.

     “No,” Daniel said, softly. “That was true.” […]

     Soon, there were several, then many cars and trucks in Columbia, South Carolina, sporting Confederate flags and being driven by black people. Black businessmen and ministers wore rebel-flag buttons on their lapels and clips on their ties. The marching band of South Carolina State College, a predominantly black land-grant institution in Orangeburg, paraded with the flag during homecoming. Black people all over the state flew the Confederate flag. The symbol began to disappear from the fronts of big rigs and the back windows of jacked-up four-wheelers. And after the emblem was used to dress the yards and mark picnic sites of black family reunions the following Fourth of July, the piece of cloth was quietly dismissed from its station with the U.S. and State flags atop the State Capitol. There was no ceremony, no notice. One day, it was not there.

     Look away, look away, look away . . .

     For accused killer Dylann Roof, a life that had quietly drifted off track. But not everyone who drifts off-track ends up a terrorist and murderer. So fuck you, sensitive profile.

     Affidavits spell out chilling case against Dylann Roof

     As a subdued Dylann Roof made his first official appearance Friday on charges of killing nine people at a historic black church, police affidavits offered grim details of the murder case, including an allegation that the gunman fired multiple shots into each victim and stood over them to issue “a racially inflammatory statement.”

     The documents also said that Roof’s father and uncle contacted police to positively identify the 21-year-old as the suspect after authorities issued photos of the gunman within hours of the attack at the Emanuel AME Church in downtown Charleston Wednesday evening.

     As those details trickled out, the suspect’s family issued a statement expressing sadness and offering condolences to the families of the victims:

     Dylann Roof’s father, according to the court documents, told investigators that his son owned a .45-caliber handgun. The documents note that .45-caliber casings were found at the scene of the shootings.

     The affidavits allege that Roof, wearing a fanny pack apparently to hide a weapon, spent an hour with the parishioners before opening fire on the group. Before leaving the scene of the carnage, he allegedly “uttered a racially inflammatory statement” over the bodies to a witness who was apparently allowed to survive to convey the message.

     Roof was returned to South Carolina after waiving his extradition rights following his arrest Thursday near Shelby, N.C., about 245 miles northwest of Charleston.

     He appeared at ease when he allegedly told investigators shortly after his capture that he had launched the attack that left nine dead, a federal law enforcement official said. The official, who is not authorized to comment publicly, said that the suspect expressed no remorse and appeared “comfortable” with what he had done.

     Authorities have determined that Roof legally obtained a .45-caliber handgun earlier this year, using money likely provided as birthday gift from his family, the official said. The weapon was purchased at gun store near Columbia, S.C.

     Statements made by some family members of victims were particularly powerful.

     Love the nod to the victims at the end there.

     World shocked at enduring racism, gun violence in US

     Often the target of U.S. human rights accusations, China wasted little time returning such charges following the shooting at a historic black church in South Carolina that left nine people dead. Elsewhere around the world, the attack renewed perceptions that Americans have too many guns and have yet to overcome racial tensions.

     Some said the attack reinforced their reservations about personal security in the U.S. — particularly as a non-white foreigner — while others said they’d still feel safe if they were to visit.

     Especially in Australia and northeast Asia, where firearms are strictly controlled and gun violence almost unheard of, many were baffled by the determination among many Americans to own guns despite repeated mass shootings, such as the 2012 tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults.

     “We don’t understand America’s need for guns,” said Philip Alpers, director of the University of Sydney’s GunPolicy.org project that compares gun laws across the world. “It is very puzzling for non-Americans.”

     A frontier nation like the U.S., Australia had a similar attitude toward firearms prior to a 1996 mass shooting that killed 35. Soon after, tight restrictions on gun ownership were imposed and no such incidents have been reported since.

     A similar effect has been seen elsewhere.

     “The USA is completely out of step with the rest of the world. We’ve tightened our gun laws and have seen a reduction,” said Claire Taylor, the director of media and public relations at Gun Free South Africa.

     Ahmad Syafi’i Maarif, a prominent Indonesian intellectual and former leader of Muhammadiyah, one of the country’s largest Muslim organizations, said the church shooting shocked many.

     “People all over the world believed that racism had gone from the U.S. when Barack Obama was elected to lead the superpower, twice,” he said. “But the Charleston shooting has reminded us that in fact, the seeds of racism still remain and were embedded in the hearts of small communities there, and can explode at any time, like a terrorist act by an individual.”

     This and that else at the link.

     Dylann Roof ‘Almost Didn’t Go Through’ With Charleston Church Shooting. You know what? “ALMOST” isn’t good enough.

117. rq says

     20 June 2015 at 1:55 pm

     Even Cosmo gets a word in: The Charleston Church Shooting Is Another Reminder That Racism Is Not a Thing of the Past

     When something is about race, we have to be able to say it out loud and with no equivocation. Last night, a 21-year-old white man named Dylann Roof walked into Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church’s Wednesday-night bible study and allegedly shot nine people dead.

     According to witnesses, before the shooting, Roof said to the people in the church, “I have to do it. You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go.” Then, after slaughtering nine people, he reportedly said to the survivors, “I’m letting you live so you can go tell people what I’ve done.”

     Greg Mullen, the police chief, told the media late Wednesday night that they were investigating the massacre as a hate crime. And yet despite the obvious racial implications of a violent attack on a black church in the South, many wondered what could have possibly caused this horrific tragedy, as if there were no precedent, or looked for other possible explanations.

     South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley responded in a Facebook post, writing, “While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.” Meanwhile, South Carolina’s statehouse still flies the Confederate flag out front. (It can’t be taken down without legislative vote.)

     There will be those in the media and in government who attempt to describe the gunman as “mentally ill” or “deranged,” or wonder about the shooter’s mental condition. Today South Carolina Senator and presidential hopeful Lindsey Graham rejected the idea that the Charleston massacre is related to race, saying, “I just think he was one of these whacked out kids. I don’t think it’s anything broader than that. It’s about a young man who is obviously twisted.” Contrast that with Senator Graham’s reaction to the Boston Marathon bombing when he said, “This man, in my view, should be designated as a potential enemy combatant, and we should be allowed to question him for intelligence gathering purposes to find out about future attacks and terrorist organizations that may exist that he has knowledge of, and that evidence cannot be used against him in trial. That evidence is used to protect us as a nation.”

     This impulse to blame the massacre in Charleston on everything but race — and not acknowledge that this is indeed a hate crime and is in fact about something broader than one individual — is based on a reluctance to confront America’s long and bloody past head on. Messages of #BlackLivesMatter are as much about recent killings of unarmed black people as they are about America’s consistent devaluation of black lives during and after death. As Selma director Ava DuVernay tweeted in response to cable news speculation about the shooter’s mental condition, “Interesting. The suspect is unknown and at large. But already he being discussed as mentally ill? Oh, okay. #CharlestonShooting.” While it’s true that we don’t yet know all the specifics, we do know enough relevant facts about the shooter and in the context of America’s history of racial terrorism that it’s not a seismic leap to call this racism. […]

     America has a history with this type of racially motivated domestic terrorism. “Mother Emanuel,” as Emanuel AME Church is called, is a symbol of black liberation and resistance. In 1822, Denmark Vesey used the church as a meeting place to organize and plan one of the largest slave rebellions in American history. When slaveholders found out about Vesey’s plot, he was arrested, tried, and executed. Over the course of generations, Emanuel has been the site for civil rights activism, with visits from Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.

     We don’t yet know all of the factors that drove Dylann Roof to kill. We do know America has a history of racialized terrorism, and so when we see violence targeted at a group of black men and women in a church with historical significance to the black community in this country, we must call it what it is: racism. The constant avoidance of the word “racism” in identifying the factors that led to this tragedy allows for us to continue on believing that there isn’t anything to be done to prevent the next massacre, that it was completely random or that there isn’t still systematic disenfranchisement of an entire group of citizens. To speculate on mental illness, without confronting first the fact that this church massacre can be added to a long list going back generations, is cowardly and disingenuous.

     This year many Americans were reminded, by DuVernay’s film, of the horrific bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 that killed four little black girls. This is our Birmingham. Racialized terror should never again be considered a relic of the past.

     Charleston victims’ families tell suspect of anguish, forgiveness

     In an extraordinary emotional display of raw pain and grace, the relatives of those slain in a shooting at a historic black church confronted suspected killer Dylann Roof in court on Friday. Through tears, some reached for forgiveness.

     “We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with open arms,” said Felecia Sanders, who survived the attack at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where her son, Tywanza, died. “You have killed some of the most beautifulest people that I know. Every fiber in my body hurts … and I’ll never be the same.”

     “Tywanza Sanders was my son, but Tywanza was my hero,” she said. “May God have mercy on you.”

     Anthony Thompson, the grandson of victim Myra Thompson, told Roof, “I forgive you, my family forgives you. … We would like you to take this opportunity to repent. Do that and you’ll be better off than you are right now.”

     Roof, 21, appeared on a video screen in the small courtroom in North Charleston, next door to the jail where he has been held since being captured in North Carolina on Thursday after an extensive manhunt. He stood with his hands cuffed behind his back and answered “Yes, sir” or “No, sir” in a flat voice to questions from Chief Magistrate Judge James Gosnell.

     The judge began the hearing with a statement of sympathy for those slain — as well as for Roof’s family.

     “We have victims, nine of them, but we also have victims on the other side,” Gosnell said. “There are victims on the other side, this young man’s family. No one would ever have thrown them into the whirlwind they have been thrown into.” [can i say i don’t like the judge?] […]

     In addition to Pinckney, 41, the other victims in the church shooting were Cynthia Hurd, 54; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Myra Thompson, 59; Ethel Lance, 70; Susie Jackson, 87; and the Revs. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49, Sharonda Singleton, 45, and Daniel Simmons Sr., 74. Three people survived.

     Middleton-Doctor’s sister also spoke to Roof in court, saying she is still struggling to forgive.

     “For me, I’m a work in progress, and I acknowledge that I’m very angry,” said Bethane Middleton-Brown. “We have to forgive. I pray God on your soul. And I also thank God I won’t be around when your judgment day comes.”

     Strike down the “troubled loner” “mental illness” narrative–and remember that white supremacists are organized. Link to article about South Carolina’s 19 active white supremacy groups. (Or was it hate groups? I can’t remember.)

     Hey white feminists (and White Feminists)! I see you’re, once again, silent about sexualized racism… See attached text.

     BREAKING: Anniston police officer filmed speaking at neo-Confederate League of the South conference to be fired. GOOD.

     #Black9 Is The Powerful Way Twitter Is Honoring The 9 Charleston Victims

     The country is mourning the nine African-Americans murdered Wednesday during bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston: DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton and Myra Thompson.

     And now, a Twitter hashtag is honoring them.

     The hashtag was started by writer and activist @FeministaJones, who asked her followers to name Black people who have inspired, taught and changed them using the hashtag #Black9.

118. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     20 June 2015 at 2:28 pm

     Here’s a post from a new resource I discovered a few days ago, Sociology In Focus– “I’m not racist, I’m colorblind”:

     Since the Civil Rights Movement’s slogan “Jim Crow Must Go” became a reality, overt racism has become socially unacceptable. The freedom fighters of the 1950s-1970s challenged that hierarchy of white domination and demanded changes in both law and attitude (though they weren’t the first or the last of such fighters). Some changes were granted, but to think that changing a few laws dismantled the entire centuries-long system of advantage based on race is naïve. As Timothy Tyson remarked in his book Blood Done Sign My Name, it is foolish to think that Southern bar owners and the like said to their black neighbors, “Well, integration done come. Y’all can come on in.” It did not happen this way. In fact, the backlash to these changes was horrifically violent, but that’s another story.

     With overt and in your face racism largely a thing of the past, many whites think racism and racial discrimination are behind us too. Sociologists call this the colorblind ideology. The idea of colorblindness supposedly brings Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous Dream to fruition: for people to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. This ideology is based on the belief that the successes of the Civil Rights Movement have removed all racial barriers to success – that race does not matter anymore.Wait a minute, don’t we live in a post-racial society 1, especially with the election of President Obama? No. Seeing Obama as evidence that we are in a post-racial society is too simple and intellectually dangerous. A better measure is the conditions of minority groups as a whole. Obama is one person who got through the door of opportunity. How many black people are still standing out in the cold, poor, incarcerated, unemployed, and/or poorly educated? When we look at these numbers, including increasing rates of racial segregation, it is clear that race still matters in our society.

     Race does exist and it does matter for what happens to people. Pretending not to see race does not make the problems of race go away. Instead, colorblindness maintains these problems because they do not get addressed as racial problems. If we ignore race – particularly the history of race and racism and its long term effects – we bring the wrong tools to the task of solving problems.

     King’s Dream was about achieving true racial equality, not racial blindness. To actually remove all racial barriers to success, not to remove some and ignore others. In the last speech he gave before he was killed, King rejected the false claim that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had truly or deeply removed racial barriers in any tangible way. “All we say to America is, ‘be true to what you say on paper,’” he said. The colorblind ideology perpetuates the cycle of racism by pretending the problem King and many other freedom fighters died fighting against no longer exists.

     Many whites today get uncomfortable even talking about race – especially around non-whites. They are terrified that they will say something that sounds racist. When they do talk, they try to avoid sounding racist by offering caveats such as “I’m not racist, but…” If race and racism are really a thing of the past, why do people give disclaimers before saying certain things?

     In a superbly titled study “The Linguistics of Colorblind Racism: How to Talk Nasty about Blacks without Sounding ‘Racist,’” sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva describes several verbal tricks whites use to avoid sounding racist. Yet these cloak profoundly racist ideas and beliefs. For example, have you ever heard someone say, “I’m not racist, but I think affirmative action unfairly benefits minorities?” You’ve probably heard a white person tell how they did not get into some college or get some job but they know some minority– who had lower SAT scores or fewer qualifications– got in or got the job. This white person claims that affirmative action is reverse racism.

     In most situations, from shopping to college professing to serving as President of the United States, whites are given the benefit of the doubt. They are not scrutinized as closely or assumed to want to push a race-based agenda when they problematize issues or experiences. Whites in power have been promoting white domination in this country since its inception, yet most of us don’t worry that whites in power will serve their own race. Whites are advantaged by the colorblind ideology because it serves as a justification for their successes in life. By attributing their successes to hard work, good networking, or even luck, whites deny that white privilege has benefited them throughout their lives in complex ways. The flipside of this is that –assuming (incorrectly) that racial barriers to success have been removed – people who are not successful are to blame (not racism).

     When whites continually pretend that racism is a thing of the past they are often baffled when a so-called “regular” white person does something racist. A white first grade teacher in New Jersey, for example, recently referred to her predominately black and Latino students as “future criminals.” While I am disturbed by this, I am not shocked.

     Racism is alive and well – it’s just wearing a disguise. In a society where blacks and Latinos are disproportionately economically disadvantaged, poorly educated, and incarcerated, this teacher’s comment should not shock us. She is a product of a racist environment – one that is supported by various institutions. If we lived in a society where the incarceration rate was not a sharp reality of race, this thought would not cross the teacher’s mind.

     By criticizing whites who break the norm of subtle racism, whites who maintain that norm are off the hook. Along with this shift to subtle racism from overt racism has come the belief that only people who are still overtly racist are racist. Most whites abhor the overt racist beliefs and behaviors of white supremacy groups and easily distinguish themselves from “those” white people. But this contest over who is racist and who is not, obscures how colorblindness perpetuates what racism really is – a system of advantage based on race.

     King didn’t mean that we should stop seeing race by becoming colorblind. Instead, he meant that we should make it so that race doesn’t matter. But first, we need to look race square in the face. Don’t be colorblind or even try to be. Don’t hide racist ideas with disclaimers. Talk about race. Deal with race. See race.

119. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

     20 June 2015 at 2:35 pm

     King didn’t mean that we should stop seeing race by becoming colorblind. Instead, he meant that we should make it so that race doesn’t matter. But first, we need to look race square in the face. Don’t be colorblind or even try to be. Don’t hide racist ideas with disclaimers. Talk about race. Deal with race. See race.

     This quote makes me think of only one response:
     http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/02/27/friday-cephalopod-clenched-ten/
     *salute*

120. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     20 June 2015 at 5:19 pm

     Well, well, well-
     If that manifesto was written by Dylann Roof (and at this point I’m confident-but not 100% sure-he’s the author), then Dylann Roof was radicalized by the website of a group that has been associated with GOP politicians:

     In a rambling manifesto uncovered by Twitter users @HenryKrinkle and @EMQuangel, Roof discusses his hatred of groups including Jewish and Latino people. But his deepest hatred is reserved for African-Americans.

     After noting his animosity over the Trayvon Martin protests, Roof writes:

     But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders.

     As of Saturday, the Council of Conservative Citizens’ (CCC) website had either been taken down or was experiencing technical problems and couldn’t be accessed. But internet archive site Wayback has a copy of it online.

     The website is a hodgepodge of re-written media stories with facts either twisted or fabricated to give the viewer an impression that there is a constant barrage of black-on-white crime.

     “Fifteen new black on white murders: Where is the outrage from the mainstream media?” a May 15 headline screams.

     “Racial spree shooting in Texas, 1 killed, 2 injured:
     Beautiful 19 year old woman slaughtered in racial hate crime attack,” reads another from May 6.

     The concentration of stories that cause the false perception whites are under attack by blacks is significant, because Roof told his victims, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”

     The SPLC procured a list of 38 politicians, most of whom are from Mississippi and all but three of whom are Republican, who had been involved with the CCC between 2000 and 2004. Some, like Republicans John Moore and Dean Kirby of Mississippi, are still in office.

     According to the SPLC:

     The CCC is the modern reincarnation of the old White Citizens Councils, which were formed in the 1950s and 1960s to battle school desegregation in the South. Today, the CCC idedicates itself to educating whites on what it sees as an epidemic of black on white crime in the United States. The CCC website has been a touchstone for the radical right to get “educated” on this issue – and it appears this was the first stop for Roof on his dive down the white nationalist rabbit hole.

121. Pteryxx says

     20 June 2015 at 5:59 pm

     As a fairly typical ignorant white USAnian, it’s been interesting coming up with my own list of nine Black people who are inspirational to me. Except for the big names like MLK, Harriet Tubman and GW Carver, only two of the names on my list were already familiar to me before starting to educate myself over the last few years… basically since the death of Trayvon Martin. (Those would be Octavia Butler and LeVar Burton… I’m an SF nerd, what can I say.)

122. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     20 June 2015 at 6:01 pm

     Pteryxx @120:
     Are you familiar with Ida B. Wells?

123. Pteryxx says

     20 June 2015 at 6:17 pm

     Unrelated to Charleston: extremely graphic shooting of another unarmed black man. BoingBoing: Unarmed man flags down LAPD seeking help. They shoot him in the head.

     At 6:35PM last night a man with his hand wrapped in a towel flagged down the police, apparently seeking help. The police thought he had a gun under the towel on his extended arm, and ordered him to drop it. At least one officer fired and hit the victim in the head, leaving him in critical condition. He was unarmed.

     Video below is extremely graphic.

     Original story at LA Times:

     LAPD Cmdr. Andrew Smith, a department spokesman, said the officers followed standard procedure in handcuffing the man when they did. At that point, Smith said, the man had not been searched and was considered a suspect.

     “We always do that,” Smith said. “That’s the policy … to handcuff someone in a situation like that.”

     Smith cautioned that the investigation into Friday’s shooting was still in its early stages. One of the key questions, he said, was why the man flagged down the two uniformed officers.

     The man was standing on the side of the road, Smith said, when he called out to the officers: “Police, police.”

     Smith said investigators would explore all possibilities, including whether the man needed some type of help from police. He said investigators would also look into the man’s background to see if there were any indications the shooting was an attempted “suicide by cop.”

     The man’s name has not been released.

     Because a black person calling to police wouldn’t need their help or for them to be serving and protecting or anything like that – they’re probably, *literally*, asking to be shot to death. Fucking hell.

124. Pteryxx says

     20 June 2015 at 6:19 pm

     Tony! #121 – Yes but only thanks to Hark A Vagrant’s comic and someone on tumblr.

     Ida B. Wells

125. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     20 June 2015 at 6:28 pm

     Could training stem police shootings? Las Vegas is a test.

     Las Vegas, now the first department in the country to complete a “collaborative” Justice Department review, has rewritten its use-of-force rules and ramped up training to de-escalate tense encounters. Some criticized it as not enough. But shootings by officers, which peaked at 25 in 2010, declined to 13 in 2013 and 16 last year. Through mid-June, Metro officers shot three people, killing one. Even critics credit the decrease at least partly to new training.

     Shootings by police recently led Ohio officials, dismayed that the state requires just four hours of annual police training, to recommend a ten-fold increase. A Missouri panel recommended training encouraging police to increase distance between themselves and suspects, though some critics say stepping back could heighten risk.

     Debate continues over how to stem shootings.

     “I think what has happened is the culture has changed now, as a result of the training and as a result of the policy, that you have officers who are … essentially avoiding situations where they have to make that split-second decision,” says William Sousa, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

     Others are skeptical, including Rondha Gibson, who won a $1.5 million settlement from Las Vegas police.

     “They can say we believe in training,” Gibson says. “But at the end of the day they are trained for the cops to go home.”

     ___

     Policing experts say training often falls short.

     A 2008 survey of more than 300 departments found one-third limited deadly-force training to requalifying in shooting skills, without focusing on judgment or tactics. More than three-fourths did not share findings from police shooting investigations with trainers.

     That raises serious “concerns about how prepared many police officers are” for encounters where they might use deadly force, concluded survey author Gregory Morrison, a professor of criminal justice at Ball State University.

     More departments have embraced “reality-based training,” using computer simulations or live scenarios. But there’s little research on what works, Morrison said.

     Meanwhile, calls for police to slow fast-moving confrontations and step back to defuse them have sparked tensions and concerns for officers’ safety.

     “How is it we can enter situations in a smarter way to create space between us and our adversaries?” says David Klinger, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who, as a rookie officer in California in 1981, shot and killed a man who was attacking his partner. “I think if we train officers in sound field tactics and hold them to a high standard of performance, that we can reduce shootings.”

     ___

     Critics long complained about aggressive policing in Las Vegas.

     But in late 2011, The Las Vegas Review-Journal published an investigation detailing 115 killings by officers over two decades. Weeks later, Stanley Gibson, short of medication for his mental illness, called police, demanding an officer come to his home. Over the next 37 hours, officers found him wandering through traffic and throwing chips from a casino table. He was arrested, released, briefly hospitalized, then refused an ambulance.

     Finally, police were called to an apartment complex next to one the Gibsons had moved to less than a month earlier, by a woman reporting two black men trying to break in.

     Officers blocked Gibson’s Cadillac. He ignored commands barked through bullhorns. Commanders devised a plan to fire a bean bag through the rear window and gas him out. But “a series of failures ensued,” the Clark County District Attorney found. When the bag shattered a side window, an officer fired, striking Gibson four times.

     Afterward, Metro and an arm of the Justice Department announced what they called “collaborative reform.”

     The resulting audit found many officers designated to deal with Las Vegas’ sizable mentally ill population had gone nine years without recertification training. Las Vegas had a history of traffic stops leading to shootings, and errors in situations involving large numbers of officers. But the department did little to prepare for those unpredictable scenarios, a Justice consultant found. Officers were getting no instruction in de-escalating tense situations.

     “We had to fix what we knew was not right,” says Capt. Matt McCarthy, who leads the department’s Office of Internal Oversight.

     Just an excerpt of a longer read.

126. Pteryxx says

     20 June 2015 at 6:46 pm

     in fact, Ida B. Wells was third on my list, and I only know anything about her thanks to nerdy folks on the internet. Unfortunately, the hate and demonization she spent her career highlighting is still relevant today:

     Rejected Princesses: Ida B. Wells

     Back? Good. Now, remember the Moss incident, the one with the marbles? It’s important for a couple reasons: it’s the first lynching that really grabbed Ida’s journalistic attention (Moss was a friend of hers); it caused a mass exodus of blacks from Memphis (Ida bought a gun and stayed); and it’s a useful microcosm to examine lynchings as a whole. Now, while it’s true that the inciting incident was a kid’s game of marbles, the real story was that the three men killed were associated with a thriving black-owned grocery store that was taking away business from a nearby white-owned one. The white grocery’s owner was the ringleader behind the mob that ended their lives. He orchestrated the horrifying murder of three people for… basically, a better financial quarter.

     So Ida got to work. The end result: Southern Horrors, a seminal pamphlet that blew the lid off of lynching myths. Prior to that, the widely-believed stereotype was that black men were out-of-control brutes who were constantly a hair’s breadth from assaulting white women – and somehow this was believable to a large swath of the population. I don’t know, man, they were still doing trepanning in those days.

     Anyway, the common wisdom about lynching was that it was in response to black men raping white women. Except that was unadulterated horseshit, and Southern Horrors proved it. By analyzing a huge number of cases and laying them out in an academic manner, Ida showed that rape had nothing to do with a majority of lynchings, and that most of the time the reason was either political, economic, or plain ol’ racist violence against loving interracial relationships.

     As you could imagine, this did not win her a lot of admirers in certain circles.

     A week after she first reported on this, while she was away on business, a mob broke into the offices of her newspaper, the Free Speech, and burnt it to the ground (yes, they were literally eradicating Free Speech). The mob threatened to lynch her if she ever returned to Memphis. In response, she looked into returning to Memphis – only to be informed that a group of black men were organizing to protect her, should she return. Wanting to avoid a race riot, she stayed away, but kept writing, madder than the devil and twice as eloquent.

     Her keeping away from Memphis is understandable – race riots were a recurrent problem of her era, and she didn’t want to be party to another one. Even calling them race riots doesn’t quite get at it, because it was usually more of a one-sided assault. A sampling of just a couple that occurred during her life (try and imagine any of this happening nowadays):

     1898: The city of Wilmington, North Carolina had its newly-elected biracial city government overthrown by white supremacists in a coup d’etat. President McKinley and the federal government just looked the other way. The white insurrectionists won, gunning down a great number of blacks in the process. That’s right, there was never any happy ending here: the black people of Wilmington just packed up and moved away.
     1908: In Springfield, Illinois, a 5,000-10,000 man mob of would-be lynchers, stymied from killing their intended targets by the county sheriff, rioted in black neighborhoods. They burnt down churches, business, and homes, killing many black citizens.
     1917: In St. Louis, after a confusing early back-and-forth that resulted in some black citizens accidentally killing a police detective, a mob of white people stormed the black part of town, cut the water lines, set black peoples’ houses on fire, and shot at anyone who exited the buildings. Between 40-200 people were killed.
     1919: In Chicago, 5 days of riots ended with 38 people dead, 537 injured, and over 1000 newly homeless. Arsonists took aim at black businesses and homes, laying steel cables across the street so the fire trucks could not pass.

     Despite all this, and the ever-present death threats, Ida continued putting herself in danger for the next forty years (!) by investigating and writing about lynchings. On more than one occasion, she passed herself off as a widow or a relative of the deceased in order to gain better journalistic access — an act which earned one of her contemporaries, who tried the same trick, his own lynch mob (thankfully, he escaped).

     And she would not tone herself down.

     Although people wanted her to! Oh, how they wanted her to! Early on, papers that championed her would slip in statements saying she’d “never get a husband so long as she lets those editors make her so hideous.” Even other activists asked her to quiet her fiery rhetoric. She never did.

     For a good thirteen years, she was practically the only person doing investigatory journalism into lynching. Once others gained interest in the subject – in no small part due to her herculean efforts, which included speaking tours abroad, the establishment of a great many civil rights organizations, and endless reams of articles and pamphlets – she was relegated to a footnote. Despite her massive contributions to the cause, she was almost left off the NAACP’s founders list, due in no small part to some wanting to distance themselves from her forceful language.

     Anyway, most of my list are writers or communicators of some sort and/or scientists, because that’s how I roll: N. K. Jemisin, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

127. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     20 June 2015 at 6:58 pm

     I’ve been cutting back on copying full articles, since I know it slows down the loading of the page for people, but this one is in full.
     ‘You are welcome:’ The night Emanuel opened its door to evil:

     When Angela Brown saw the Facebook post about a shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, her mind immediately leapt to her aunt. Whenever the doors to Emanuel were open to its flock, Ethel Lance was there.

     “This was her home,” said her niece, standing in the shadow of its soaring spire, tears streaming down her face.

     So many people felt that way about “Mother” Emanuel.

     Founded in 1818 by a free black shoemaker, the church stood as a beacon in a port city through which many legions of Africans passed on their way to bondage across the growing nation. Torched by angry whites after one of its organizers led a failed slave revolt, Emanuel rose from the ashes to serve as a stop on the Underground Railroad, even as state leaders banned all black churches and forced the congregation itself underground.

     The current brick Gothic revival edifice, completed in 1891 to replace an earlier building heavily damaged in an earthquake, was a mandatory stop for the likes of Booker T. Washington and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Still, Emanuel was not just a church for the black community.

     And so, when a young white man wearing a stained gray sweat shirt and a fanny pack walked into the Bible study Wednesday evening and asked for the minister, no one thought twice. The Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Emanuel’s senior pastor, even invited the stranger to take the seat beside him.

     “He wanted him to feel at home, comfortable,” says Sylvia Johnson, the minister’s cousin. “Nothing to be fearful of. This is the house of the Lord, and you are welcome.”

     But the visitor had not come to worship or to commune. Tempered by fire, its faith unshaken by temblors, Mother Emanuel was about to face perhaps its greatest test.

     ___

     “Is something missing from your life?” the church website asks under the Bible Study listing in “Notices and Announcements.” ”If you have a desire to learn more about God, then join us on Wednesdays at 6:00 p.m. in the lower level of the church. We look forward to seeing you!”

     DePayne Middleton-Doctor was a deeply spiritual woman who led the weekly classes at Mother Emanuel. At 49, the mother of four was juggling a new job as a college enrollment counselor along with caring for four daughters. But no matter how busy the days got, Doctor always made time for her faith — and Wednesday was an especially important moment in her journey with God.

     Already licensed as a deacon at a Baptist church, Doctor had begun attending Emanuel in January — and on this night Bible study was postponed for a quarterly church business meeting that saw Doctor licensed to minister at the church. The presiding elder, the Rev. Norvel Goff, asked Doctor to stand before the 50 or so people gathered. She presented her Bible, hymnal and a church handbook, and Goff signed them with a stamp of approval.

     The meeting lasted about an hour and a half, and then parishioners mingled during a 10-minute break. Doctor texted her eldest daughter, 19-year-old Gracyn, to wish her well on her first day on the job at a local retail store.

     Most of those gathered for the business meeting did not stay for Bible study. Willi Glee, a church member going back decades, was going to attend but decided to pass because he hadn’t eaten all day. Before he left, one of the part-time ministers at the church approached.

     “I need to give you a hug,” Sharonda Coleman-Singleton said, taking him into a big embrace. Glee would never know what prompted the gesture.

     At 7:30, he left. Not long after, the wooden door at the back of the church opened, and in walked Dylann Storm Roof.

     ___

     Roof had spent much of the last few weeks guzzling vodka in a haze of cigarette smoke. Bouncing back and forth between his dad’s home in Columbia, South Carolina, and the place his mother and her boyfriend shared in nearby Lexington, his life seemed to be slowly unraveling.

     In February, he was arrested at a Columbia shopping mall on a misdemeanor drug charge. He was picked up again for trespassing at the mall, despite being banned.

     About a month ago, Roof reached out to Joseph Meek Jr., a middle school chum. Meek said the formerly laid-back Roof had begun ranting about black people, and how “someone needed to do something about it for the white race.” He made vague references to a “plan” he was hatching. On his Facebook profile, Roof posted a photo of himself wearing a jacket adorned with the flags of the now defunct white-supremacist regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia.

     When Roof turned 21 in April, he used the money his parents had given him to buy himself a present — a .45-caliber Glock semiautomatic pistol with a laser sight. Disturbed by his friend’s behavior, Meek at one point took the gun and hid it, only to give it back.

     On Wednesday morning, Meek awoke to find Roof in front of his mobile home, asleep in his car. They talked about what they were going to do that day. Meek, his girlfriend and brother were going to the lake. Roof, who didn’t like the outdoors, said he’d drive them on his way to the movies. He had a $20 gift card, and he told them he planned on catching the summer blockbuster, “Jurassic World.”

     They said their goodbyes, and Meek figured he’d see Roof later that night.

     Instead, 120 miles away, a security camera at Emanuel captured the image of a slender man with a bowl haircut entering the fellowship hall.

     The time stamp read 8:16 p.m.

     ___

     In addition to Doctor and Pinckney, 10 others had gathered around a white-clothed table to study the New Testament book of Mark.

     There was the Rev. Coleman-Singleton, 45, a former college track star turned girls track coach at a high school where she also worked as a speech pathologist. Coleman-Singleton was fond of urging just about anyone who didn’t go to church to start.

     “God sees everything you do,” she often told her daughter’s friend, Maurice Coakley.

     There was Cynthia Hurd, a 31-year employee of the city’s library system. Due to turn 55 in days, the avid gardener had recently told her brother she needed to start making plans for retirement.

     Ethel Lance, 70, had been an Emanuel member most of her life. After retiring about five years ago from her housekeeping job at a performing arts center, Lance — mother of five, grandmother to seven and great-grandmother to four — signed on as church sexton, spending nearly every day helping to keep the historic building clean.

     Another old faithful was Susie Jackson, 87, who’d sung soprano in the church choir for six decades and who belted out her favorite hymn, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” in the kitchen while preparing her famous “crazy bean soup.” She loved to play the slot machines and was looking forward to a church-sponsored bus trip to Chicago.

     Also there were Jackson’s niece, Felecia Sanders; Sanders’ 26-year-old son, Tywanza, a barber who had graduated college last year after studying business; and Sanders’ 5-year-old granddaughter.

     For about an hour, they went about their work. The week’s lesson was to center on Mark’s chapter four, a series of parables meant to further spread the teachings of Jesus and help his flock understand the power of God. The chapter ends with Jesus and his disciples on a boat, facing a suddenly stormy and menacing sea. As his disciples worry about the dangers ahead, Jesus calms the winds and stills the waters.

     “And he said unto them, why are ye so fearful? How is it that ye have no faith?”

     It is a verse rooted in the power of clinging to one’s convictions in the face of adversity.

     ___

     Around 8:50 p.m., as Maurice Coakley would later recall, Coleman-Singleton texted her daughter, Leslie. She told her she loved her.

     Authorities have not yet detailed what Roof did or said in the hour he sat with the group. But at some point, they say, he stood and pulled out his pistol.

     Tywanza Sanders, the one in the room closest to Roof’s age, attempted to stop him.

     “You don’t have to do this,” he said. “You don’t have to do this.”

     “You rape our women. And you’re taking over the country. I have to do this,” the gunman replied.

     Felecia Sanders, one of three survivors, recounted the events later that night to Sylvia Johnson, Pinckney’s cousin. Her son, she told Johnson, was shot attempting to shield his great-aunt, Jackson. Sanders herself pushed her granddaughter to the floor, lay on top of her and told her to play dead.

     As gunshots echoed off the linoleum floor, parishioner Polly Sheppard prayed to God for salvation. And then, suddenly, the shooting stopped.

     Roof told Sheppard that he was “letting her live so she could tell what happened,” the 70-year-old would later share with her niece, Latrice Daniels. With that, Roof walked out.

     On the floor around Sheppard’s feet, eight lay dead: Tywanza Sanders, Doctor, Coleman-Singleton, Hurd, Jackson, Lance, parishioner Myra Thompson, 59, and Pinckney, who in addition to serving his church was a state legislator for 19 years. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74, a retired minister who’d became a regular attendee at Emanuel, died at the hospital.

     Coakley was supposed to meet Coleman-Singleton’s daughter, Leslie, that night but couldn’t reach her. Sometime after 9, he got a call.

     “My mama!” she screamed into the phone. “My mama!”

     Family members began gathering at a hotel around the corner from the church. Around midnight, Sylvia Johnson saw Felecia Sanders. She couldn’t tell at first because of the dark color, but she realized that the front of Sanders’ black dress was caked with blood.

     “That’s my son’s blood,” her friend said numbly.

     After a moment, a stunned Sanders spoke again.

     “He was a good boy.”

     ___

     As investigators combed the scene for clues, bouquets and cards began piling up outside the whitewashed church. Groups gathered to cry and pray and try to fathom how this could have happened in their city, to this beloved institution.

     “Mother Emanuel,” Alonza Washington, a Vietnam veteran and pastor of nearby Wallingford Presbyterian, said as he stared at the growing mound of flowers. “Great legacy, history. About justice and righteousness.”

     The church had suffered through many tragedies. But this, he said, seemed somehow different.

     “It has shaken the fabric of human nature and this nation and world, and certainly the foundation of the church,” he said. “But it’s going to stand. A great evil act has been done here, but I pray — and we pray and hope — that the lives will be a sacrifice for some good.”

     Roof was in custody within 13 hours of the shootings. On Friday, he appeared before a county magistrate in a North Charleston courtroom to have bond set. About four dozen people — relatives of the dead among them — turned out to see the man who, in the words of Charleston Mayor Joe Riley, had committed this act of “pure, pure concentrated evil.”

     The courtroom took on the air of a church service, with the grieving passing tissue boxes like collection plates.

     The assembled could see Roof — clad in a baggy, striped jumpsuit, his hands cuffed behind his back — over a closed-circuit television. He could not see the anguished crowd but could hear them.

     Roof’s blue eyes stared blankly ahead as one disembodied voice after another shared with him the lessons they’d learned at Emanuel, and from their lost loved ones. They had been taught to forgive those who trespass against them; to hate the sin, but love the sinner.

     Roof lowered his head slightly when Nadine Collier, Lance’s daughter, tearfully offered her forgiveness.

     “You took something very precious away from me,” she said, choking back her tears. “I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you and have mercy on your soul.”

     Anthony Thompson, Myra’s widower, pleaded with Roof to “take this opportunity to repent.”

     “Confess,” he said. “Give your life to the one who matters the most, Christ, so that he … can change your ways, no matter what happened to you. And you’ll be OK.”

     Then it was Felecia Sanders’ turn to once again face the man who had brought her world crashing down. Clutching a tissue in her hand, she reminded Roof how she and the others had “welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with open arms,” and how he had repaid that kindness.

     “You have killed some of the most beautifulest people that I know,” she said as he stood, eyes downcast. “Every fiber in my body hurts … and I’ll never be the same.”

     Tywanza was not just her son, she told Roof. He was “my hero.”

     Unlike the others, Sanders did not offer him her explicit forgiveness. But she reminded him how “we enjoyed you” for that brief time in their Mother Emanuel, their refuge, their home. “May God have mercy on you.”

     I spent Thursday and Friday reading about the terrorist act at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. I spent that time researching the awful act so that I could blog about it. I read article after article about how one violent, gun-toting, white supremacist cut short the lives of these 9 people:
     
     Sharonda Coleman-Singleton
     Reverend Clementa Pinckney
     Cynthia Hurd
     Tywanza Sanders
     Myra Thompson
     Ethel Lee Lance
     Rev. Daniel L. Simmons
     Rev. Depayne Middleton-Doctor
     and
     Susie Jackson.
     
     But through all of it, I didn’t cry. I felt emotions, oh boy did I. I felt anger, frustration, anger again, helplessness, and anger again. But I didn’t cry. Maybe it was because I was reading and learning and researching. about Dylann Roof’s act of terrorism and that kept other emotions in check. I don’t know. Hell, I probably shouldn’t try to figure out my emotions. After all, there’s no “correct” way to feel after such a huge tragedy. In any case, after reading the above article, I felt sorrow. I cried. I’m still weeping. And you know what else I feel?

     Fear.

     It’s awful enough to have to deal with the systemic, institutionalized, structural racism in this country. It’s scary enough thinking that being at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong cop could get a black person shot and/or killed. But to add this kind of shit on top of it? White supremacist assholes who want to start a race war and kill black people?! This is just…I don’t know. It’s like I can’t process it right now.

     So yeah, I’ll admit it. Just a little scared. Not just for myself, but for all other people of color. Not just in the South, but everywhere in this goddamn racist as fuck country. Greatest country on Earth my fucking ass. With the exception of a small few, our leaders have shown no interest in protecting all the citizens of the U.S. They have no interest in making the lives of *all* citizens of the U.S. better. They don’t care about improving the quality of life for *all* citizens of the U.S. To them, we’re unimportant. We’re trivial. We don’t matter.

     I know that Black Lives Matter. I really do.

     But sometimes, the message being shouted across the country is too much to bear. And right now is one of those times.

128. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     20 June 2015 at 7:45 pm

     Pteryxx:
     Thanks for that link to Hark A Vagrant’s comic. I’m sitting here trying to remember when I first heard of lynchings. It’s been 21 years since I was in high school, so my memory is a little hazy, but I don’t recall learning about lynchings in middle or high school. But I guess that’s to be expected when African-Americans have been erased from so much of USAmerican history.

129. Brony, Social Justice Cenobite says

     20 June 2015 at 8:14 pm

     @Tony 126
     If it helps, often when I comment the intent is to provide observations from what I have learned here that can help people like me (privileged and well-meaning) see what those filters do to us. The intent is to create weapons. I see your fear and it makes me plan…

130. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     20 June 2015 at 10:20 pm

     Brony @128:
     That does help a little. Thanks.

     ****

     From The Guardian–
     African-American family records from era of slavery to be available free online:
     (full article)

     Millions of African Americans will soon be able to trace their families through the era of slavery, some to the countries from which their ancestors were snatched, thanks to a new and free online service that is digitizing a huge cache of federal records for the first time.

     Handwritten records collecting information on newly freed slaves that were compiled just after the civil war will be available for easy searches through a new website, it was announced on Friday.

     The records belong to the Freedmen’s Bureau, an administrative body created by Congress in 1865 to assist slaves in 15 states and the District of Columbia transition into free citizenship.

     Before that time, slaves were legally regarded as property in the US and their names were not officially documented. They often appeared only as dash marks – even on their owners’ records.

     African Americans trying to trace family history today regularly hit the research equivalent of a brick wall prior to 1870, when black people were included in the US census for the first time.

     Now a major project run by several organisations is beginning to digitise the 1.5 million handwritten records from the Freedmen’s Bureau, which feature more than four million names and are held by various federal bodies, for full online access.

     All the records are expected to be online by late 2016, to coincide with the opening of the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington.

     Hollis Gentry, a genealogy specialist at the Smithsonian, said at the announcement of the project in Los Angeles on Friday: “The records serve as a bridge to slavery and freedom. You can look at some of the original documents that were created at the time when these people were living. They are the earliest records detailing people who were formerly enslaved. We get a sense of their voice, their dreams.”

     Gentry also said it could help people now find living relatives on their family tree, as well as records of forebears.

     “I predict we’ll see millions of living people find living relatives they never knew existed. That will be a tremendous blessing and a wonderful, healing experience,” Gentry said.

     The Freedmen’s Bureau made records that include marriages and church and financial details as well as full names, dates of birth and histories of slave ownership.

     They have been available for access by the public in Washington, but only in person by searching through hundreds of pages of handwritten documents.

     The project to put the documents online is a collaboration involving the Smithsonian, the National Archives, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, the California African American Museum and FamilySearch. The last-named body is a large online genealogy organisation run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – otherwise known as the Mormon church, based in Salt Lake City.

     Volunteers will help to digitise the handwritten records and they will be added to the website as they become available. The website is discoverfreedmen.org.

     The announcement was made by FamilySearch and some of the project partners in Los Angeles on Friday, the 150th anniversary of “Juneteenth”, the oldest known celebration of the ending of slavery which commemorates 19 June 1865, the day when it is believed that the last slaves held in US ownership were told of their emancipation.

     Sharon Leslie Morgan, founder of Our Black Ancestry Foundation, an organisation that provides research for African American genealogical research, said the indexing was important for history and for today.

     “In order for us to deal with contemporary issues that we have today – racism, black boys being shot down in the streets – you have to confront the past,” she told USA Today.

     “The land was stolen from the Native Americans. The labour was provided for free by African slaves. The entire foundation of American capitalism is based on slavery, on a free labour market. People don’t want to deal with that, and you have to.”

131. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 2:21 am

     I’m still catching up from two days ago…
     And thanks, Pteryxx, for posting on the LA shooting – just saw that. :(
     White Silence Kills 9 in Charleston

     Black people cannot change the hearts and minds of White racists, and we have exhausted ourselves beyond measure trying. We have spent years praying, marching, fighting, running, hiding, crying, attempting to prove that we were good enough, Christian enough, human enough to exist in a country to which we were forced to come as chattel—really, to exist anywhere in this world that has been touched by the rule of Westerners and Arabs who often share little but the conviction that the children of Africa are inferior.

     We cannot change Nikki Haley (a Sikh who somehow identifies with the Confederacy that probably wouldn’t have been so kind to her, but okaaaaay) to the point where she understands the infuriating racism that informs the proud Confederate flag waving Amurrricans of her state, and why having that banner flown officially in South Carolina is an insult to the souls of the enslaved Africans who built this country and their descendants who still suffer so.

     We can’t defend our humanity to That News Network that spends countless hours per day spreading half-truths and willful lies that help their viewers believe that Black people are soulless superpredators hell-bent on destroying property, raping White women, killing Whites and ourselves for sport, and enjoying lobster and malt liquor on our EBT cards all the way. (Marc Lamont Hill did a damn good job trying, though.)

     It would be unlikely that Black folks could cause a paradigm shift in someone like Dylann Roof that would have deaded his belief that the women of his race and the fate of his country were in danger, in danger, because we exist. It is equally unlikely that we can reach the dozens of White supremacists who come to this very website on a regular basis for no other reason but to call those of us who work and read here “monkeys,” “apes,” “coons” and “niggers,” or to suggest that we are the “real” racists because we have five Black magazines, BET and Black History Month. And frankly, I don’t have the energy to do it.

     In times like this, White people are quick to throw their hands up and dissociate themselves from racism and the person accused of the racist act. But how many of them can say they have actively worked to challenge the racism in the people around them? How many folks have sat quietly as Uncle Jimbo tells the story of the time he put that one nigger in his place at work? How many so-called liberal Obama voters couldn’t be bothered to even google “Black Lives Matter” to see what folks were talking about in August of last year? How many of the women with more Black exes than Rachel Dolezal refuse to say a word when they see a Black child being manhandled by an aggressive White cop—but may later become the mother of Black children themselves?

     White people, know this: your silence is consent. Your silence is complicity. Your silence is violence.

     While some of you may believe that Black people are unwilling to do anything to stop intraracial violence (a.k.a. the same sort of violence that is most likely to claim your own lives), there are many organizations and individuals that work tirelessly to combat both the crimes we perpetuate against one another and the structures of racism and oppression that make them so frequent. We have been fighting to protect Black life from all sides for a very long time.

     However, where is the mass movement of White folks organized under the banner of “I’m not a racist!,” where is exactly is the headquarters for the #AllLivesMatter movement of which you speak? Because from where I am sitting, minus a handful of allies (and “allies” who really ain’t, but they have convinced themselves and others of this somehow), you all aren’t doing anything but keeping the party going. Never has a White person been publicly accused of racism without defending themselves by saying, “I am NOT a racist, never!”

     Prove it then.

     The hypocrisy of America is, yet again, a punchline for the world to see: a place that touts liberty and peace, and shows up on foreign shores with guns to teach others how to properly realize those values, yet has steadfastly refused to acknowledge the legacy of slavery. A country that turns a blind eye to crimes against Black people committed in her name over and over again. Look at Jeb Bush’s refusal to even acknowledge why a man who allegedly said that he had to kill Black people because we rape White women and are taking his country committed such a crime—despite the fact that the shooter allegedly spared a life so that she could tell people why he did it.

     Dylann Roof is not an outlier, he embodies so much of what makes America, America: belief that Black people are inherently criminal and that Whites have a natural-born right to rule and a willingness to dismiss the facts and the history that clearly demonstrate otherwise. His methods may be extreme by comparison, but his attitude is as American as apple pie.

     If White Americans by and large wanted to end racism, they would. Period. Complacency may stymie some (I would imagine it’s hard to sum up the passion to do social justice work on behalf of Black liberation if the only Black people you ever encounter are on a television set); agreement is the culprit for others. But it’s time to acknowledge that White folks have to be the one to stop the future White-supremacist terrorists of the world, because the folks who hate us will never care about our tears.

     That’s not to dismiss the importance of the work we, Black people, must do to protect ourselves, in the streets, in the courts, in city halls, in the chambers of Congress and beyond. It is, as Assata Shakur said, “our duty to fight” and “our duty to win.” And if the past year has taught us a thing, it is that we are fighting harder than ever. But as far as I am concerned, those folks who will argue you to death about how “not racist” they are because of who they voted for, who they slept with, or what music they listen to, but have done nothing to challenge a system that literally kills us? They are as guilty as Dylann Roof.

     If you hate us, then hate us, and say it with your chest. Because know that you may not feel racist, but your silence tells a different story. Clean up your mess, or stand proudly behind it.

     Obama on Charleston shooting: ‘I refuse to act as if this is the new normal’ , the Grauniad on Obama’s speech. Funny, it’s always ‘too soon’ for gun-rights advocates to talk about gun rights. Always.

     The Deadly History of “They’re Raping Our Women”

     Amid his Wednesday night rampage at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina—killing nine people—21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof reportedly told churchgoers, “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”

     Of the assertions in that statement, it’s the first that has a long, deadly history. In the late 19th century, rape was a frequent justification for racist violence. “To palliate this record … and excuse some of the most heinous crimes that ever stained the history of a country,” wrote journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett on lynchings in her pamphlet Southern Horrors, “the South is shielding itself behind the plausible screen of defending the honor of its women.” Indeed, Wells points to a host of Southern newspapers that defended “lynch’s law” with reference to an alleged epidemic of black-on-white rape. In one editorial, published by the Memphis Daily Commercial, editors declared, “The commission of this crime grows more frequent every year,” and, “There is no longer a restraint upon the brute passion of the Negro.”

     As Wells-Barnett would show, however, there was no substance to the charge. “The world knows that the crime of rape was unknown during four years of civil war, when the white women of the South were at the mercy of the race which is all at once charged with being a bestial one,” she writes. In reality, these accusations of rape were often covers for consensual—and taboo—relationships between black men and white women. “Whites could not countenance the idea of a white woman desiring sex with a Negro, thus any physical relationship between a white woman and a black man had, by definition, to be an unwanted assault,” writes historian Philip Dray, describing Wells-Barnett’s argument in his book At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. In one instance, found Wells-Barnett, a black man in Indianola, Mississippi, was lynched for raping the local sheriff’s 7-year-old daughter. When Wells-Barnett went to investigate, however, she found something very different:

     Wells traveled to Indianola and met the alleged rape victim, who was no girl but a grown woman in her late teens. The “brute,” Wells learned, had worked on the sheriff’s farm for a number of years and was acquainted with every member of the family. The woman had been found in her lover’s cabin by her father, who led a lynch mob in order to save his daughter’s reputation.

     Make any list of anti-black terrorism in the United States, and you’ll also have a list of attacks justified by the specter of black rape. The Tulsa race riot of 1921—when white Oklahomans burned and bombed a prosperous black section of the city—began after a black teenager was accused of attacking, and perhaps raping, a white girl in an elevator. The Rosewood massacre of 1923, in Florida, was also sparked by an accusation of rape. And most famously, 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered after allegedly making sexual advances on a local white woman.

     It’s worth a look at the second part of Dylann Roof’s claim, which informs the first: “You’re taking over our country.” Behind the myth of black rapists was an elemental fear of black autonomy, often expressed by white Southern leaders who unhesitatingly connected black political and economic power to sexual liaison with whites. “We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men, and we never will,” said Sen. Benjamin Tillman on the Senate floor in 1900. “We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.”

     There’s a lot more at the link. How do people live with these lies? How can they believe them so much so easily? I would also just like to add this paragraph:

     It’s tempting to treat Dylann Storm Roof as a Southern problem, the violent collision of neo-Confederate ideology and a permissive gun culture. The truth, however, is that his fear—of black power and of black sexuality—belongs to America as much as it does the South.

     Take note, south-bashing people, it’s in your backyard, too.

     This Is A Mental Health Issue, And Has Absolutely Nothing To Do With Racism Or Guns – Comradde PhysioProffe with a short post.

     NAACP President wants Confederate flag removed, CNN video.

     Cornell William Brooks expressed his frustrations and disapproval of the Confederate flag still flying in Charleston, South Carolina, after the church shooting

     We came. We gathered. We prayed. We left, striving to put action behind those words. #Bmore4Charleston

132. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 2:24 am

     I’m still catching up from two days ago…
     And thanks, Pteryxx, for posting on the LA shooting – just saw that. :(
     White Silence Kills 9 in Charleston

     Black people cannot change the hearts and minds of White racists, and we have exhausted ourselves beyond measure trying. We have spent years praying, marching, fighting, running, hiding, crying, attempting to prove that we were good enough, Christian enough, human enough to exist in a country to which we were forced to come as chattel—really, to exist anywhere in this world that has been touched by the rule of Westerners and Arabs who often share little but the conviction that the children of Africa are inferior.

     We cannot change Nikki Haley (a Sikh who somehow identifies with the Confederacy that probably wouldn’t have been so kind to her, but okaaaaay) to the point where she understands the infuriating racism that informs the proud Confederate flag waving Amurrricans of her state, and why having that banner flown officially in South Carolina is an insult to the souls of the enslaved Africans who built this country and their descendants who still suffer so.

     We can’t defend our humanity to That News Network that spends countless hours per day spreading half-truths and willful lies that help their viewers believe that Black people are soulless superpredators hell-bent on destroying property, raping White women, killing Whites and ourselves for sport, and enjoying lobster and malt liquor on our EBT cards all the way. (Marc Lamont Hill did a damn good job trying, though.)

     It would be unlikely that Black folks could cause a paradigm shift in someone like Dylann Roof that would have deaded his belief that the women of his race and the fate of his country were in danger, in danger, because we exist. It is equally unlikely that we can reach the dozens of White supremacists who come to this very website on a regular basis for no other reason but to call those of us who work and read here “monkeys,” “apes,” “coons” and “n*gg*rs,” or to suggest that we are the “real” racists because we have five Black magazines, BET and Black History Month. And frankly, I don’t have the energy to do it.

     In times like this, White people are quick to throw their hands up and dissociate themselves from racism and the person accused of the racist act. But how many of them can say they have actively worked to challenge the racism in the people around them? How many folks have sat quietly as Uncle Jimbo tells the story of the time he put that one n*gg*r in his place at work? How many so-called liberal Obama voters couldn’t be bothered to even google “Black Lives Matter” to see what folks were talking about in August of last year? How many of the women with more Black exes than Rachel Dolezal refuse to say a word when they see a Black child being manhandled by an aggressive White cop—but may later become the mother of Black children themselves?

     White people, know this: your silence is consent. Your silence is complicity. Your silence is violence.

     While some of you may believe that Black people are unwilling to do anything to stop intraracial violence (a.k.a. the same sort of violence that is most likely to claim your own lives), there are many organizations and individuals that work tirelessly to combat both the crimes we perpetuate against one another and the structures of racism and oppression that make them so frequent. We have been fighting to protect Black life from all sides for a very long time.

     However, where is the mass movement of White folks organized under the banner of “I’m not a racist!,” where is exactly is the headquarters for the #AllLivesMatter movement of which you speak? Because from where I am sitting, minus a handful of allies (and “allies” who really ain’t, but they have convinced themselves and others of this somehow), you all aren’t doing anything but keeping the party going. Never has a White person been publicly accused of racism without defending themselves by saying, “I am NOT a racist, never!”

     Prove it then.

     The hypocrisy of America is, yet again, a punchline for the world to see: a place that touts liberty and peace, and shows up on foreign shores with guns to teach others how to properly realize those values, yet has steadfastly refused to acknowledge the legacy of slavery. A country that turns a blind eye to crimes against Black people committed in her name over and over again. Look at Jeb Bush’s refusal to even acknowledge why a man who allegedly said that he had to kill Black people because we rape White women and are taking his country committed such a crime—despite the fact that the shooter allegedly spared a life so that she could tell people why he did it.

     Dylann Roof is not an outlier, he embodies so much of what makes America, America: belief that Black people are inherently criminal and that Whites have a natural-born right to rule and a willingness to dismiss the facts and the history that clearly demonstrate otherwise. His methods may be extreme by comparison, but his attitude is as American as apple pie.

     If White Americans by and large wanted to end racism, they would. Period. Complacency may stymie some (I would imagine it’s hard to sum up the passion to do social justice work on behalf of Black liberation if the only Black people you ever encounter are on a television set); agreement is the culprit for others. But it’s time to acknowledge that White folks have to be the one to stop the future White-supremacist terrorists of the world, because the folks who hate us will never care about our tears.

     That’s not to dismiss the importance of the work we, Black people, must do to protect ourselves, in the streets, in the courts, in city halls, in the chambers of Congress and beyond. It is, as Assata Shakur said, “our duty to fight” and “our duty to win.” And if the past year has taught us a thing, it is that we are fighting harder than ever. But as far as I am concerned, those folks who will argue you to death about how “not racist” they are because of who they voted for, who they slept with, or what music they listen to, but have done nothing to challenge a system that literally kills us? They are as guilty as Dylann Roof.

     If you hate us, then hate us, and say it with your chest. Because know that you may not feel racist, but your silence tells a different story. Clean up your mess, or stand proudly behind it.

     Obama on Charleston shooting: ‘I refuse to act as if this is the new normal’ , the Grauniad on Obama’s speech. Funny, it’s always ‘too soon’ for gun-rights advocates to talk about gun rights. Always.

     The Deadly History of “They’re Raping Our Women”

     Amid his Wednesday night rampage at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina—killing nine people—21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof reportedly told churchgoers, “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”

     Of the assertions in that statement, it’s the first that has a long, deadly history. In the late 19th century, rape was a frequent justification for racist violence. “To palliate this record … and excuse some of the most heinous crimes that ever stained the history of a country,” wrote journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett on lynchings in her pamphlet Southern Horrors, “the South is shielding itself behind the plausible screen of defending the honor of its women.” Indeed, Wells points to a host of Southern newspapers that defended “lynch’s law” with reference to an alleged epidemic of black-on-white rape. In one editorial, published by the Memphis Daily Commercial, editors declared, “The commission of this crime grows more frequent every year,” and, “There is no longer a restraint upon the brute passion of the Negro.”

     As Wells-Barnett would show, however, there was no substance to the charge. “The world knows that the crime of rape was unknown during four years of civil war, when the white women of the South were at the mercy of the race which is all at once charged with being a bestial one,” she writes. In reality, these accusations of rape were often covers for consensual—and taboo—relationships between black men and white women. “Whites could not countenance the idea of a white woman desiring sex with a Negro, thus any physical relationship between a white woman and a black man had, by definition, to be an unwanted assault,” writes historian Philip Dray, describing Wells-Barnett’s argument in his book At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. In one instance, found Wells-Barnett, a black man in Indianola, Mississippi, was lynched for raping the local sheriff’s 7-year-old daughter. When Wells-Barnett went to investigate, however, she found something very different:

     Wells traveled to Indianola and met the alleged rape victim, who was no girl but a grown woman in her late teens. The “brute,” Wells learned, had worked on the sheriff’s farm for a number of years and was acquainted with every member of the family. The woman had been found in her lover’s cabin by her father, who led a lynch mob in order to save his daughter’s reputation.

     Make any list of anti-black terrorism in the United States, and you’ll also have a list of attacks justified by the specter of black rape. The Tulsa race riot of 1921—when white Oklahomans burned and bombed a prosperous black section of the city—began after a black teenager was accused of attacking, and perhaps raping, a white girl in an elevator. The Rosewood massacre of 1923, in Florida, was also sparked by an accusation of rape. And most famously, 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered after allegedly making sexual advances on a local white woman.

     It’s worth a look at the second part of Dylann Roof’s claim, which informs the first: “You’re taking over our country.” Behind the myth of black rapists was an elemental fear of black autonomy, often expressed by white Southern leaders who unhesitatingly connected black political and economic power to sexual liaison with whites. “We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men, and we never will,” said Sen. Benjamin Tillman on the Senate floor in 1900. “We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.”

     There’s a lot more at the link. How do people live with these lies? How can they believe them so much so easily? I would also just like to add this paragraph:

     It’s tempting to treat Dylann Storm Roof as a Southern problem, the violent collision of neo-Confederate ideology and a permissive gun culture. The truth, however, is that his fear—of black power and of black sexuality—belongs to America as much as it does the South.

     Take note, south-bashing people, it’s in your backyard, too.

     This Is A Mental Health Issue, And Has Absolutely Nothing To Do With Racism Or Guns – Comradde PhysioProffe with a short post.

     NAACP President wants Confederate flag removed, CNN video.

     Cornell William Brooks expressed his frustrations and disapproval of the Confederate flag still flying in Charleston, South Carolina, after the church shooting

     We came. We gathered. We prayed. We left, striving to put action behind those words. #Bmore4Charleston

133. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 2:32 am

     Nina Simone’s Time Is Now, Again

     The feminist writer Germaine Greer once declared: “Every generation has to discover Nina Simone. She is evidence that female genius is real.” This year, that just might happen for good.

     Nina Simone is striking posthumous gold as the inspiration for three films and a star-studded tribute album, and she was name-dropped in John Legend’s Oscar acceptance speech for best song. This flurry comes on the heels of a decade-long resurgence: two biographies, a poetry collection, several plays, and the sampling of her signature haunting contralto by hip-hop performers including Jay Z, the Roots and, most relentlessly, Kanye West.

     Fifty years after her prominence, Nina Simone is now reaching her peak.

     The documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?,” directed by Liz Garbus (“The Farm: Angola, USA”) and due on Wednesday in New York and two days later on Netflix, opens by exploring Simone’s unorthodox blend of dusky, deep voice, classical music, gospel and jazz piano techniques, and civil rights and black-power musical activism.

     Not only did she compose the movement staple “Mississippi Goddam,” but she also broadened the parameters of the great American pop artist. “How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?” Simone asks in the film. “That to me is the definition of an artist.” And in “What Happened,” Simone emerges as a singer whose unflinching pursuit of musical and political freedom establishes her appeal for contemporary activism.

     Simone’s androgynous voice, genre-breaking musicianship and political consciousness may have concerned ’60s and ’70s marketing executives and concert promoters, but those are a huge draw for today’s gay, lesbian, black and female artists who want to be taken seriously for their talent, their activism or a combination of both.

     “Nina has never stopped being relevant because her activism was so right on, unique, strong, said with such passion and directness,” Ms. Garbus said in an interview at a Brooklyn bakery. “But why has she come back now?” she asked, answering her own question by pointing to how little has changed, citing the protests over the police killings of unarmed African-Americans like Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray.

     While Simone’s lyrical indictment of racial segregation and her work on behalf of civil rights organizations connects her to our contemporary moment, those closest to her felt more comfortable telling Simone’s story after her death in 2003. As Ms. Garbus said, “From a filmmaking point of view, the answer for her return is also because of the estate, and people being ready to relinquish some control of her story.”

     In this case, it was Simone’s daughter, the singer and actress Lisa Simone Kelly, who shared personal diaries, letters, and audio and video footage with Ms. Garbus and has an executive producer credit on the film. Speaking by phone from her mother’s former home in Carry-le-Rouet, France, Ms. Kelly said: “It has been on my watch that this film was made. And I believe that my mother would have been forgotten if the family, my husband and I, had not taken the right steps to find the right team for her to remembered in American culture on her own terms.” […]

     Like the renaissance of interest in Malcolm X in the early 1990s, Simone’s iconography arises in yet another time of national crisis. However, her biography, as an artist who was proudly black but steadfastly rejected the musical, sexual and social conventions expected of African-American and female artists of her time, renders her a complicated pioneer.

     Born Eunice Waymon in 1933, Simone grew up in segregated Tyron, N.C. At 3, she was playing her mother’s favorite gospel hymns for their church choir on piano; by 8, her talents garnered her so much attention that her mother’s white employer offered to pay for her classical music lessons for a year. Determined to become a premier classical pianist, Simone trained at Juilliard for a year, then sought and was denied admission to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia — a heartbreaking rejection that led to a series of reinventions — renaming herself Nina Simone, performing in Atlantic City nightclubs and adopting jazz standards in her repertoire.

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     She would go on to have her only Top 40 hit with “I Loves You, Porgy” in 1959 off her debut album, “Little Girl Blue.” To further her music career, Simone moved back to New York, where she befriended the activist-writers Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Malcolm X. Influenced by these political friendships and the momentum of the civil rights movement itself, Simone went on to compose “Mississippi Goddam” in 1964 in response to the assassination of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the murder of four African-American girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., a year earlier. The song was Simone at her best — a sly blend of the show tune, searing racial critique and apocalyptic warning.

     Oh but this whole country is full of lies

     You’re all gonna die and die like flies

     I don’t trust you any more

     You keep on saying “Go slow!”

     “Go slow!”

     Simone’s growing political involvement affected both her professional and personal life. Though she was bisexual, her longest romance was her 11-year turbulent marriage to Andy Stroud, a former police officer who managed her career for most of the ’60s. Stroud would use physical and sexual abuse to limit Simone’s activism and friendships, and to control her unpredictable emotional outbursts. Unfortunately, it would take another 20 years for Simone’s “mood swings” to be diagnosed as a bipolar disorder. In the interim, Simone left her marriage and country, becoming an expatriate in Liberia, Switzerland, then France. (In the film, Ms. Kelly says that because her mother became more symptomatic and abusive toward her, she had to move back in with her father.)

     She had not only become more militant by aligning songs like “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” with Stokely Carmichael and the black power movement, but also found it increasingly difficult to secure contracts with American record companies. Looking back on this period in her 1991 memoir, “I Put A Spell on You,” Simone recalled, “The protest years were over not just for me but for a whole generation and in music, just like in politics, many of the greatest talents were dead or in exile and their place was filled by third-rate imitators.” She died in 2003 at her home in France.

     “Nina Simone, more than anyone else, talked about using her art as a weapon against oppression, and she paid the price of it,” said Ernest Shaw, a visual artist who last year painted a mural featuring Malcolm X, James Baldwin and Simone on the wall of a Baltimore home just two miles from the scene of Freddie Gray’s arrest.

     Today Simone’s multitudinous identity captures the mood of young people yearning to bring together our modern movements for racial, gender and sexual equality.

     This is a large part of the appeal of the documentary “The Amazing Nina Simone,” by Jeff L. Lieberman, which features more than 50 interviews with Simone’s family, associates and academics (including me), scheduled to be released later this fall. […]

     The two hip-hop artists most responsible for Simone’s current ubiquity are Kanye West and Lauryn Hill. Mr. West has rendered Simone hip-hop- and pop-friendly by sampling her in songs like “Bad News,” “New Day” and “Blood on the Leaves.” While he declined to comment on Simone, like her, he fashions himself as a controversial if not misunderstood rebel — a figure who wants to be appreciated as much for his refusal of artistic genres as for his musical virtuosity.

     Ms. Hill was one of the first rappers to mention Simone in song — on the Fugees’ “Ready or Not” in 1996 — and she recorded several songs for “Nina Revisited: A Tribute to Nina Simone,” an album (due July 10) tied to “What Happened, Miss Simone?”

     Jayson Jackson, Ms. Hill’s former manager and a producer of Ms. Garbus’s film, conceived “Nina Revisited,” and said that while working on the album, Ms. Hill told him, “I grew up listening to Nina Simone, so I believed everyone spoke as freely as she did.”

     Paradoxically, Simone’s comeback also reveals an absence. A majority of pop artists — with the exception of a few like D’Angelo, J. Cole and Killer Mike — have largely been musically silent about police violence in Ferguson, Mo.; New York; and Baltimore.

     John Legend, who covered Simone on his own 2010 protest album with the Roots, “Wake Up!,” and recently started Free America, a campaign to end mass incarceration in the United States, attributes this absence to artists unwilling or unable to take positions outside the mainstream. “I don’t think it is career suicide to take on these positions, but I think there is actually a limited number of artists who really want to say something cogent about social issues, so most do not even dive in,” he said in an interview.

     He added, “To follow in her footsteps, I think it takes a degree of savvy, consciousness, communication skills, and a vibrant intellectual community that most artists aren’t encouraged to cultivate.”

     Today, Simone’s sound and style have made her a compelling example of racial, sexual and gender freedom. As Angela Davis explained in the liner notes for the album, “In representing all of the women who had been silenced, in sharing her incomparable artistic genius, she was the embodiment of the revolutionary democracy we had not yet learned how to imagine.”

     What the Confederate flag really means to America today, according to a race historian

     In the aftermath of Thursday’s tragedy in Charleston, the U.S. and South Carolina flags flew at half-mast over the top of the South Carolina State House to honor the black victims of a hate crime. But flying high in front of the building was another symbol: a Confederate flag.

     Some argue that the flag is a symbol of slavery and oppression, while others insist that it is purely a matter of Southern heritage and pride.

     But too little of the conversation takes into account the flag’s complicated history, according to Matthew Guterl, a professor of Africana and American studies at Brown University who studies race in the aftermath of the Civil War. Given his research, which has touched frequently on the use of the Confederate flag, Guterl says that he finds it impossible to argue that it’s a neutral symbol.

     I spoke with Guterl to learn what exactly people misunderstand about the flag, its history, and how that affects what it symbolizes today. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

     Let’s start with what drives the mentality that has angered so many people. Why do people embrace the Confederate flag?

     There are at least two reasons why people embrace the battle flag or the stars and bars, which was first used by the army of northern Virginia.

     The first, which is a kind of surface explanation, is that they imagine that in that context the flag is a representation of Southern history, Southern heritage, and Southern culture. They tie it to questions of state’s rights, and the absence of federal oversight.

     People see it as a symbol of the South as a bound and discrete place. A part of the heritage that’s being celebrated with it is that the South is the South, that the region has clear borders that might collate with the borders of the Confederacy. It’s bound up, in this sense, in the question of the South as a once nation.

     But I also think that people invoke the flag because they want to endorse on some level, even if secretly or subconsciously, the very rationale for the Confederacy. When people say ‘heritage not hate,’ they are omitting the obvious, which is that that heritage is hate. When someone says it’s about history, well, that particular history is inseparable from hate, because it is about hate. It’s about racism, and it’s about slavery.

     Interview continues at the link.

     #BREAKING: DC Police tell me Terrorism Task Force is investigating a bomb threat made against DC AME Church. Not sure how that worked out.

     Mayor of South Carolina capital says Confederate flag should come down.

     The mayor of South Carolina’s state capital, Columbia, doesn’t want the Confederate flag flying back home at the capitol building to be lowered to half-staff. He wants it down completely.

     Mayor Steve Benjamin is here on the other side of the country for the meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. But he’s seen the pictures circulating Friday morning of flags lowered at the top of the state capitol dome in honor of the victims of Wednesday night’s church shooting, while the Confederate flag remains flying at the top of its own flagpole. That flag is part of a monument to the Confederacy on the grounds of the State House, built as part of a 2000 compromise to remove the flag from the top of the dome.

     “It’s probably the most crystal-clear example of the fact that the flag ought not be there,” Benjamin said in an interview. “The official flag of our state is flying at half-mast, the official flag of our country is flying at half-mast. This is a flag at a monument at the state capitol. Flying it at half-mast would indicate it’s an official symbol of our republic, and it is not. It shouldn’t be flying at all.”

     Benjamin said that there’s much deeper work to be done in response to Wednesday’s shooting to heal the state’s racial and social divides. But he said taking advantage of this moment to remove the flag — which was among the symbols embraced by the church shooter — would “serve as the greatest moral lift to the people of South Carolina.”

     “We have a fantastic museum in Columbia: it’s called the Confederate Relic Room. It’s a place where the flag belongs,” Benjamin said.

     I like that, confederate Relic Room.

     Obama to US Mayors on Guns: “We Need a Change in Attitude. We Have to Fix This.” Mother Jones on Obama’s speech. And note shift of focus to guns, not the racism.
     So far I’ve seen guns, drugs, religion and mental illness provided as reason, with fewer media outlets willing to blame the racism.

134. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 4:12 am

     Source: Roof talked ‘freely’ on video while in police custody

     According to a WBTV source, Dylan Roof was being held at the Shelby police department, he was videotaped the entire time.

     Roof spoke freely about what happened at the church while he was being held, according to the source.

     Roof reportedly told investigators he had been planning the attack on the church for a period of time. Roof said he had researched the church and targeted it because it turned out to be a “historic African-American” church, the source told WBTV.

     According to WBTV’s source, Roof told investigators he had a Glock handgun hidden behind a pouch he was wearing around his waist. He was wearing the pouch when he entered the church and it can be seen in surveillance photos released by police.

     Roof reportedly said he initially thought that someone would see the gun. He reportedly told police he had seven magazine clips with him at the time.

     When Roof entered the church, where a bible study was being held, he told investigators he filled out some type of form.

     According to the source, Roof sat with the group and told investigators he actually thought about not shooting anyone, but then determined that no one else was going to do it, so he decided to do it himself.

     Roof told investigators he thought he’d only shot a few people and when told he actually had killed nine people, he appeared to be somewhat remorseful, according to the source.

     During the recorded conversation, Roof reportedly told investigators he actually thought he would be caught in Charleston before he could get away. He said that he was going to Nashville, TN when he was captured.

     When asked why he was going to Nashville, he reportedly told investigators “I’ve never been there before.”

     Oxford University to give students workshops on ‘how not to be racist’

     Students at Oxford University will attend workshops on ‘how not to be racist’.

     The workshops will be targeted at incoming first year students as part of their freshers week timetable in a bid to eliminate racism within the university.

     The sessions are titled ‘Race 101 (or: How Not to be Racist).’

     Marc Shi, chair of the university’s Campaign for Racial Awareness and Equality, part of the student led initiative organising the sessions, told The Independent: “Race consciousness and anti-racism needs to be part of the way that the University is supporting its students, which is not the case right now.”

     The workshops will take place this October in the first week of the 2015-16 academic year.

     Mr Shi says the campaign hopes to make attendance at the sessions compulsory for staff as well as students: “We think that if these workshops are to be effective they need to be compulsory in colleges as well as for welfare and support staff.”

     That actually sounds like a really good idea. Together with workshops on sexual assault and harassment, this could be really good. Good luck to them!

     From the Other News file, Ferguson activists make last push to get mayor recall on ballot

     A group of Ferguson activists say they’re hopeful that they now have enough petition signatures to spur a recall of the top elected official in the Missouri city swallowed by unrest following the police shooting death of Michael Brown last summer.

     The petition drive aimed at ousting Mayor James Knowles came down to the wire, and it remains uncertain if organizers have enough valid signatures after reaching Friday’s deadline to garner the support of 15% of the city’s registered voters to trigger a recall.

     The St. Louis County Board of Election Commissioners now has five days to determine whether there are enough valid signatures to put the recall on the ballot.

     The group, known as Ground Level Support, said they turned in more than 1,160 additional signatories on an amended petition they filed on Friday with the Ferguson city clerk. If all the signatures are valid, they would have collected more than the roughly 1,830 signatures needed. The vote could take place perhaps as early as August when the St. Louis suburb is already scheduled to hold an election.

     Ferguson spokeswoman Daphne Dorsey confirmed that the city clerk’s office received the additional signatures on Friday. She declined to offer further comment.

     The group turned in more than 2,100 signatures late last month, but fell about 800 short of what they needed to spur the recall after the Election Board invalidated more than half of them. The bulk of some 1,100 invalidated signatures came from residents who were not registered to vote in Ferguson.

     Backers of the recall say that Knowles is responsible for endemic problems that have plagued the community long before Brown, an unarmed black teenager who was fatally shot after scuffling with a white police officer, put the national spotlight on Ferguson.

     Ferguson’s city manager, police chief and municipal judge were forced out of their jobs earlier this year as the Justice Department published a report that found that Ferguson police and city’s municipal court had engaged in systemic patterns of misconduct that disproportionately affected the city’s majority African-American community.

     Knowles also faced ridicule from protesters when he claimed early in the protests that Ferguson had no racial divide.

     Did you note how the manager, chief and judge were ‘forced out of their jobs’? Like they hadn’t done anything wrong and people just decided they should be gone? No mention of racist emails or racist jokes or nepotism or… weird, that, huh?

     In America, there is no sanctuary: Leonard Pitts Jr.

     Wednesday night, Emanuel AME church in Charleston, S.C., was a church without a sanctuary. Wednesday night, Emanuel AME was a killing ground.

     Authorities say a 21-year-old white man named Dylann Storm Roof entered the African-American church Wednesday during Bible study, sat with the black congregants for an hour, and then started shooting. Nine people died in the attack, including the church’s pastor, Clementa C. Pinckney, who was also a state senator.

     “I have to do it,” Roof is quoted as saying. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”

     If there is reason to believe Rev. Pinckney or any of his congregants guilty of raping anyone or plotting to overthrow the government, it has not yet come to light.

     But of course, when Roof said “you,” he did not mean “you,” singular. Rather he meant, “you,” plural. “You” people. “You” all. Individuality is, after all, the first casualty of racism. And indeed, an image circulated after the shooting shows Roof scowling at a camera while wearing a jacket with patches depicting the flags of two famously racist regimes: Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe) and apartheid-era South Africa. Roof was apprehended the following day not far from Charlotte, N.C.

     It was to seek sanctuary from people like him and beliefs like his that the church Roof shot up was founded in the first place. Emanuel AME, affectionately called “Mother AME,” was one of the earliest churches of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, which was started in the late 18th century by black worshippers fed up with the discrimination they faced in the white church. In 1821, one of its members, Denmark Vesey, organized a slave revolt that failed when an informant leaked word of the plot. Nevertheless, the people-traders of the South were galvanized by the audacity of the plan. The church was burned as a result.

     It was rebuilt. In 1834, black churches were outlawed in South Carolina. Emanuel went underground until the law was changed. An earthquake destroyed the building in 1886. The church was rebuilt yet again.

     Now, there is this.

     Roof’s alleged attack is being called many things. It is being called appalling and tragic, and it is. It is being called a hate crime and it is. It is being called an act of white extremist terrorism and it is that, too. But one thing, let no one dare to call it, and that is, “surprising.” This attack can be regarded as surprising only by the very innocent, the very ignorant, and those who have not been paying attention. […]

     There is a myth in this country, a fable some people cherish because it makes them feel good and demands no moral or intellectual heavy lifting. That myth holds that we are done with race and have been for a very long time; that we overcame, learned our lesson, reached the Promised Land and built luxury condos there.

     Bill O’Reilly believes that myth. Sean Hannity believes it. Rush Limbaugh swears by it. Indeed, for most of the people who are pleased to call themselves “conservative,” that myth is nothing less than an article of faith.

     Let them go to Charleston. Let them visit a church with no sanctuary.

     For that matter, let them go to Baltimore, let them go to Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, St. Louis, Miami. Let them go to any of a hundred cities and talk to black people who are sick of hearing how America overcame, learned its lesson, reached the Promised Land, yet somehow, sister can’t get a loan, dad can’t find a job, brother has to factor stop-and-frisk encounters into his travel time to and from school and Walter Scott gets shot in the back while running away. All for rapes they never committed and government takeovers they never planned.

     If what happened in Charleston was extraordinary, and it was, this is the ordinary, the everyday of existing while black that grinds your faith down to a nub and works your very last nerve. Especially when the background music is provided by a bunch of people who don’t know, don’t know that they don’t know, and don’t care that they don’t know, singing operatic praise to a faded myth.

     Solange Knowles, sister of Beyonce, put it as follows Thursday in a tweet: “Was already weary. Was already heavy hearted. Was already tired. Where can we be safe? Where can we be free? Where can we be black?”

     Where, in other words, can we find just a moment to breathe free of this constant onus? Where can we find sanctuary?

     What happened Wednesday night at a storied church in Charleston is a painful reminder that in America, no such place exists.

     UVA Names Building For Former Slave Couple, Starts Coming To Terms With Its History. More of this, please.

     A dorm opening at the University of Virginia this fall will be named for Isabella and William Gibbons, a former slave couple who lived at the university in the 19th century.

     While other colleges are refusing to rename buildings named after white supremacists, UVA is actively working to address the university’s role in slavery and oppression. Gibbons House is part of a larger initiative for the school to address its history with slavery as its bicentennial approaches in 2017.

     Slavery is unquestionably a part of UVA’s history. Slaves were used to help build the school, founded by Thomas Jefferson, and worked for students and professors on campus after it opened, as local historian Gayle Schulman documented in a 2003 paper. […]

     “One of the things we wanted to do was reinscribe the history of slavery and the lives of the enslaved back onto the landscape here in as many ways as possible,” Kirt von Daacke, a co-chair of the commission, told the Huffington Post. Von Daacke is a history professor and assistant dean at UVA’s College of Arts and Science.
     Isabella and William Gibbons were owned by two different UVA professors in the 1850s, Schulman reported. Following emancipation, the couple remained in Charlottesville, where Isabella became a teacher and William became “the first man of color to minister to the Charlottesville congregation now known as the First Baptist Church, West Main Street.”

     “Their lives are a testament to enslaved people’s resistance to slavery and racism,” von Daacke said, praising their “refusing to accept the confines of slavery and the labels put on them.”

     The Gibbons House will open in the fall and will house 200 students. At the entrance, there are detailed panels abut the Gibbonses and an overview of slavery at UVA. The building was officially dedicated June 12.

     The commission is working on other projects. Its members want students and visitors to reexamine their space and think differently about the campus. They are putting up panels and plaques on various grounds and buildings explaining how they were used during slavery. Students have already designed a mobile app that gives a tour of the campus highlighting these places and the commission is working on ways to improve on the idea.

     “We really want this to be a case where, when you stand in the lovely gardens behind the pavilions, you are likely to be confronted by panels and plaques that interpret how they really functioned,” von Daacke said.

     Emily McDuff, a rising senior who gives tours as part of the University Guide Service, is part of the movement to acknowledge the school’s slave-owning past. On these tours, she brings visitors to the Pavilion Gardens and asks them to point out what’s different between the gardens and the main campus lawn — namely that they are small and enclosed. McDuff then explains that the gardens housed slave quarters.

     “People are always very shocked that this space still exists,” she said. […]

     McDuff, for her part, is thrilled about the naming of the Gibbons House, calling it “a huge, huge step for the university,” though she added, “granted, it is one small step in changing our culture.” Still, she’s seen a lot of activism and it’s gratifying to have something tangible happen, she said.

     “This is the first building on grounds to not be named after a white guy,” McDuff said. “That in and of itself is such a big thing for UVA.”

     Why South Carolina’s Confederate Flag Is Still Flying at Full Staff

     If you’re the governor of a state that suffers a tragedy, the common sign of respect is to fly all the state’s flags at half-staff. It’s what Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy did in 2013, after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. It’s what Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper did in 2012 after the Aurora movie theater shooting. It’s also what South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley did today, after a white man in Charleston, South Carolina, allegedly shot and killed nine people at a historically black church in an act that is already being investigated by the FBI as a hate crime.

     Lowering the flag is a widely recognized gesture, a way to honor the dead as the state and country mourn. In South Carolina, however, one flag is a potent symbol of racism—and a symbol claimed by the alleged gunman himself in the form of a decorative plate on his car. So why is the Confederate flag, which flies over the grounds of South Carolina’s Capitol Complex, still waving in the breeze at its peak height?

     To understand what seems like a shockingly callous move, first you have to understand what the battle flag is doing there at all. (After all, it’s not South Carolina’s state flag, the palmetto flag, which features a rather beautiful tree and crescent design.) The Confederate flag used to fly proudly atop the State House dome itself, ever since the state’s then-all-white legislature voted that it be so in 1962 as a symbol of defiance against the Civil Rights movement. It would take nearly 40 years, a boycott by the NAACP that reportedly cost the state more than $7 billion, massive protests, and the condemnation of presidential nominee John McCain for the Legislature to reconsider flying such a flag on the building that represents their state government.
     ADVERTISING

     Finally, in 2000, the state passed a bill banning the Confederate flag from being flown over the State House dome as well as in the chambers of the Senate and House of Representatives. It was moved to the south side of the Confederate Soldier Monument, where it stands now. Along with the move came a new statute. “This flag must be flown on a flagpole located at a point on the south side of the Confederate Soldier Monument, centered on the monument, ten feet from the base of the monument at a height of thirty feet,” it reads.

     What that means is that in South Carolina, the Confederate flag abides by its own rules. While governors—as well as the president—can usually order that all state and national flags within their jurisdiction be flown at half-staff, this one is exempt. Instead, the Confederate flag’s location can be changed only by a two-thirds vote by both branches of the General Assembly. “In South Carolina, the governor does not have legal authority to alter the flag,” said a press secretary for Haley. “Only the General Assembly can do that.” That is why, while other flags under the authority of the state have all been lowered in mourning, this one is still flying so audaciously. Even if Haley could order it lowered, it’s not clear that she would; in the past, she’s actually defended keeping the flag on state grounds, reassuring voters that it’s done nothing to harm the state’s image.

     Since the General Assembly ended its 2015 legislative session on June 5, it’s likely the Capitol’s Confederate flag will continue to fly high, while the families of the shooter’s nine black victims mourn the carnage of this hate crime.

     Yes, the flag was put up as a form of resistance to the Civil Rights movement. But it’s only a symbol of southern pride.
     Indeed.

135. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 4:34 am

     Crowd gathering at Capitol for Remembrance March #Charleston2ATL #StandWithCharleston
     @Senatorfort “I don’t wanna hear that the Confederate Flag can’t come down.” #Charleston2ATL #StandWithCharleston

     Charleston’s Hometown Newspaper Is Putting Awful Cable News to Shame. I think this was noticed during the Ferguson protests, and possibly was a thing during Baltimore unrest in April – local news has better coverage, more accurate coverage, than the national media outlets.

     From Boston to Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston, one thing has become crystal clear: To get real reporting—and to get it fast—you’ve got to switch off cable and go local. It’s here you’ll find the scoops, the sense of place, the authentic compassion; it’s here you can avoid the predictable blather from a candidate, or pundit, or hack filling airtime. It’s here you’ll find out what’s really happening to a particular group of Americans who have just been shoved into a tragic spotlight. Turn off the TV and Google the local paper on your phone. Find their Twitter feed. Follow their journalists.

     Take Charleston. During the early hours of the story on Wednesday night, cable news frustrated viewers by coming late to the game, according to this breakdown by Adweek’s cable-addict Mark Joyella. (CNN was first to report the news just after 10 p.m., and it stayed with the story, Joyella writes—though it attracted criticism on social media for simulcasting a live feed from its global operations, CNN International, instead of staying domestic.) When Fox News and MSNBC got into the story on Thursday, their programs lined up the usual suspects to engage in a cliched debate over the national narrative: Was it guns? Was it race? Was it mental illness? And the nationally televised blame game began in earnest: While Fox mused about whether pastors should pack heat, and attacked President Obama for bringing up gun control, MSNBC commentator Michael Eric Dyson criticized the president for “obscuring” race with guns: “When will this president finally see that he doesn’t have to run from his race or run from blackness?” Dyson said. I could go on.

     Meanwhile, the Post and Courier, Charleston’s major daily newspaper—winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize—seized its hometown story immediately, posting an article just before 10 p.m. the night of the shooting. It hasn’t stopped pumping out sensitively reported articles from deep within the affected community since that first notice. The paper assigned somewhere between a half and two-thirds of its newsroom of 80 people to the task of covering the unfolding story, trying to patch reporters in on shifts as much as possible to keep them from burning out in the field. After covering the death of Walter Scott two months ago, the newsroom was experienced in switching into high gear, “though you’re never quite prepared for any of these things,” Mitch Pugh, the newspaper’s executive editor, told me on Friday.

     For this newsroom, it’s personal, and reporters have begun to feel the strain. “A lot of our folks know people who were either in the church or close to people in the church,” Pugh said. “We’re trying to get people more into a shift mode, and get some mental health breaks, and some downtime to get some rest.”

     Some reporters, he said, just “don’t want to let go of it.” That’s the nature of reporting in a city traumatized by an event of this magnitude.

     Much more so than the bigger guys who parachute in, the major advantage of being the hometown paper is that this newsroom gets it. The journalists “understand deeply the complex relationship this community has had with the issue of race,” Pugh said. “I think we’re able to report on those issues in a more responsible and authoritative way than some of the outside media.”

     Cable television has been on the ground in Charleston, doing reporting and making sure Lindsay Graham and other candidates answer tough questions about a Confederate flag flying near the statehouse. But not like the Post and Courier, whose coverage has sharply focused on the community—its grieving, the memorials, intensely moving profiles of the victims, and political reactions—rather than simply the obsessive speculation about the motivation of the alleged killer, 21-year-old Dylann Roof.

     It’s a way for the paper to “focus on our community, on the victims, on the efforts to come together and heal,” Pugh told me.

     That intimacy with the community has led to some extra caution. With the stakes so high, getting it wrong is simply not an option. The newspaper, for example, knew the names of some victims on Wednesday night, but waited until they were confirmed through more official channels before reporting them. Any error would be magnified under the strain of shock and anger. “We weren’t interested in being first on that,” Pugh said. “We were interested in being right.”

     But they could not get everything right. When newspapers hit the streets on Thursday, some were affixed with a jarring advertisement for a gun shop just above the headline: “Church attack kills 9”. The outraged reaction was immediate and the paper apologized. “I think that being forthright and honest and taking responsibility, most people will understand and accept that,” Pugh said of readers who called and wrote to complain. The paper now has policies in place “to ensure that does not happen again,” he added.

     The increased profile may have also led to unwanted attention in the form of a potential hacking attack against the paper’s website, which became inaccessible on Friday for “20 to 30 minutes at a time, sporadically,” across the morning, Pugh said. The companies responsible for hosting the website investigated the possibility of an attack. “It’s starting to look like someone tried to take our site down,” Pugh told me, though it was too early to confirm.

     The Post and Courier’s response to the massacre is reminiscent of other newspapers dominating the coverage when tragedy strikes in their communities: the Baltimore Sun’s relentless coverage of the protests after the death of Freddie Gray; the Boston Globe’s award-winning coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and manhunt; and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s forensic, visually powerful, and also award-winning coverage of the death of Michael Brown and the furious protests for justice in Ferguson. There’s little wonder there’s some camaraderie among these city papers. In April, the Boston Globe sent lunch to the Baltimore Sun’s newsroom, a way of paying forward another act of generosity when in April 2013, the Chicago Tribune bought the Globe pizzas during the bombing coverage.

     A letter from the Tribune to the Globe read: “We can’t buy you lost sleep, so at least let us pick up lunch.”

     In each of these papers: heartbreaking, personal stories, rendered powerfully, whether a national audience was watching or not.

     We were.

     The Post and Courier’s approach can be felt in the op-ed pages, too. A Thursday editorial read: “A shared revulsion for the killer’s inhumanity—and for the persisting poison of racism that apparently sparked his barbaric deed—unites us. A shared commitment for a better, more understanding future drives us.”

     Pipes and drums entrance to start tonight’s vigil at TD Arena. #charleston
     Family standing as each victims name is called. #CharlestonShooting
     Those two are short video clips from the prayer vigil held.

     Charleston Church Shooting Was Terrorism – blogs aren’t afraid to call it what it is.

     Nine black people massacred in a church by a white supremacist, who once posed wearing clothing with the apartheid era flag of South Africa and Rhodesia emblazoned upon. He deliberately kept one person alive, so they could bear witness to the terror he had inflicted. A child played dead, saving her life.

     By most measures this was an act of terror, designed to reverberate in US society. The Church in Charleston is where Martin Luther King had once spoken. This was more than a hate crime. It was a message, in line with political and social white supremacism.
     This was an act of terrorism.

     The arguments on twitter over defining this as such have descended into petty insults for some, bogged down with dictionary screenshots. We need to recognise racism when it becomes politically demonstrated in violence, is so much more than just hate.
     Whether police brutality at a teenage swimming pool party, police shooting unarmed men repeatedly, we see what institutionalised power can get away with. Being White is the best tailoring to be clothed in – the arbitrary birth suit of privilege in western society ready made to measure. It would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that.

     We can be forgiven for thinking rather than nearing Martin Luther King’s dream, it is closer to a nightmare. Despite the grief and emotion, the civil rights movement has made a huge stride in getting there in the last fifty or so years. Now is not the time to give up, to be full of recriminations. Where bitter words are traded and fault lines in society snap – just the way Roof wanted in the wake of his massacre.

     President Obama mentioned the church killing does not happen like this in other developed nations. Yet, recall the attempt by the Copenhagen cafe Islamist shooter trying to enter a synagogue – foiled by someone at the door who paid with their life. Or in Israel where this week the Church of the loaves and fishes (where the miracle is claimed to have occurred) burnt to the ground – with a Hebrew prayer sprayed on the side against false gods.

     The hatred is real and aimed at people by race or creed – and sometimes both. Political extremists are using violence to intimidate while we are being played on by various narratives in the media and blogosphere, whether we know it or not. Thus ever has it been.

     Today I am going to the British Humanist Conference in Bristol. Meeting with like minded people in celebration of ideas, discussion, and life. I cannot help but think the people at the church were doing the same. It is these things that make us human.

     Do not let the memory of those nine people count for nothing. We must face down the hate, and the prejudice we are all capable of. Some dreams are too important not to live for.

136. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 4:43 am

     My Confederate Flag

     I have a Confederate flag in my basement.

     No, it’s not hanging on the wall over my gun cabinet. It’s folded up and wrapped in plastic in a box, along with a bunch of WW2 era newspapers that my grandmother gave to me as a child. My grandmother told me that flag had “flown over Richmond.”

     Not long after I received this gift, my family took me to visit the Confederate Museum in Richmond, VA, and a staff member looked at the flag. He determined, based on the grommets and stitching, that the flag was not Civil War era, but likely from the early 1900’s. It wasn’t a real Civil War flag; it was manufactured at least 35 years after the war was over.

     According to my grandmother, one of my forebears served in the 10th Kentucky Cavalry CSA. Looking back, Granny was a wealth of Lost Cause mythology, and I loved the stories. I’m not entirely joking when I say I was nine or ten years old before I realized the south lost the Civil War. As a boy I was enthralled by the sad nobility of the Lost Cause– the gallant cavalry charges, outnumbered southerners repeatedly out-soldiering Yankee invaders until overwhelmed by the industrial might of the Union. My grandmother stressed that our family did not own slaves.

     It was all bullshit.

     I did not easily arrive at that conclusion. Granny turned me into something of a Civil War buff, and the vast majority of the books I read reinforced, to some degree, the Lost Cause narrative. I took up reading Civil War histories again about 20 years ago, and I learned that the preservation of slavery was indeed the central tenet of the Confederacy.

     Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, in his Cornerstone Speech, said this: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

     I also learned that Union generals weren’t as incompetent as I’d been taught, and Confederate generals weren’t as brilliant. It’s embarrassing to admit that, for a while, this part bothered me more.

     Why did my ancestor fight? His home, Kentucky, was a border state that contributed more than twice as many soldiers to the Union cause than to the Confederacy. Was he swayed by a convincing speech, or persuaded by a good friend? Did he believe Kentucky belonged in the Confederacy? Perhaps, in fighting for the Confederacy, he did the wrong thing for (as it seemed to him) right reasons. In that case he’s not different from young men throughout history who’ve been duped and enlisted into fighting wars in which they should have had no cause.

     Why did my grandmother have that flag, and what did it mean to her? I believe that, in most cases, we should not judge past generations too harshly, based on our more complete knowledge and progressive views. My grandmother was born in 1909. I’ll assume her love of that flag resulted from stories of a relative’s wartime heroism, and a misplaced Gone With the Wind style nostalgia for a past that never existed.

     I don’t know for sure about either of them, and I never will.

     Here’s what I do know. It doesn’t really matter what the Confederate flag meant to my grandmother, or my Confederate ancestor, or to me. I know that for African Americans it will always be a symbol of enslavement and oppression. I cannot imagine the pain it causes to see it flying from a government building, or incorporated into a state flag as in Mississippi or Georgia. For those who would offer some version of the “it’s not hate, it’s heritage” argument, I would ask this: why does the symbol of your “heritage” continue to be employed with such enthusiasm by self-avowed white supremacists? Does it not make you feel at least a little…ashamed?

     The first comment is short and worth a read.

     $1 Million Bond For Charleston Church Shooting Suspect, NPR. Article is basically on all the forgiveness offered and the judge including Roof’s family among the victims.

     Here’s more on the judge: Racist Talk From Dylann Roof’s Judge

     Charleston County Magistrate James B. Gosnell began Friday’s bond hearing for mass-murderer Dylann Roof by declaring that the killer’s family members were victims as well.

     At least he did not repeat an opinion that he offered in another proceeding a dozen years ago.

     “There are four kinds of people in this world—black people, white people, red necks, and n—rs,” Gosnell advised a black defendant in a November 6, 2003 bond reduction hearing.

     The comment led to a judicial disciplinary proceeding and a 2005 determination by the state Supreme Court. The court’s written finding reports Gosnell’s lame defense.

     “[Gosnell] represents he knew the defendant, the defendant’s father, and the defendant’s grandfather,” the finding notes. “[Gosnell] represents that when the defendant, an African-American, appeared in court for the bond hearing, [Gosnell] recalled a statement made to him by a veteran African American sheriff’s deputy.”

     That being the four kinds of people remark.

     “Gosnell alleges he repeated this statement to the defendant in an ill-considered effort to encourage him to recognize and change the path he had chosen in life,” the finding notes.

     The same finding addressed a second, unrelated ethical complaint. This case suggests that Gosnell feels there was in fact a fifth kind of person in the world, that being a fellow judge. […]

     Such favoritism accompanied by the commission of judicial fraud might have been expected to cost Gosnell his lofty position.

     The racist remark would seem to warrant even more serious sanctions.

     Here is what the state Supreme Court decided:

     “The Court deems a public reprimand appropriate. Accordingly, respondent is hereby reprimanded for his misconduct.”

     As a result, Gosnell was still on the bench as Chief Magistrate on Friday. He began by declaring Charleston to be a city of “big hearts.”

     “We’re a very loving community,” he said.

     He proceeded to startle many of us by announcing that Roof’s family members were also victims in the case.

     “There are victims on this young man’s side of the family,” Gosnell said.

     But the shock of that remark was forgotten when he gave the families of the actual murder victims an opportunity to address the court. Several did so and managed to speak of forgiveness despite pain beyond imagining.

     So, it would seem that we should forgive this judge for having been on the bench at all.

     tired of seeing the killer’s face on my timeline. I am, too.

     Charleston Shooting Victim Wore An “I Can’t Breathe” T-Shirt In Instagram Post, more on Tywanza Sanders.

     Maynard Terry, Sanders’ brother, revealed to BuzzFeed News via a Facebook private message that his 11-year-old daughter was one of the survivors in the church massacre, along with his mother, Felicia Sanders. He credits his brother with saving them.

     “He saved the lives of our mom and my 11-year-old daughter. For that I will always love and respect him,” he said.

     Terry is also a barber. He works at Smitty’s Super Seven Barber in North Charleston.

     He told BuzzFeed News that Sanders worked at another barbershop in North Charleston during the day. At night, he was a part-time employee at Steak and Shake.

     “We had talks of opening up a barbershop together,” Terry said. “But he always knew he wanted more.”

     Sanders had other aspirations beyond the barbershop, Terry said. He was especially interested in the performing arts, as well as furthering his education.

     “He was an aspiring rapper. He always said he would be famous and I brushed it off,” he said. “Now I find it ironic that he’s a nationwide icon in death.

     Terry added that Sanders was gearing up to star in a play at Royal Baptist Church in North Charleston.

     Tywanza and his bother had been discussing whether or not he should apply to graduate school; Terry said that cost was the main factor in the decision-making process.
     On March 27, Sanders posted to Instagram a photo of himself clad in a black shirt that reads “I Can’t Breathe,” a phrase borne out of the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man from Staten Island who died from a police chokehold.

     Sanders also appeared to have been following the story of Walter Scott, a black man from North Charleston, South Carolina, who was fatally shot in the back while running away from a white police officer.
     Sanders took a photo of the front page of the local paper, the Post and Courier, the day after Scott was killed.
     Sanders participated in the #BlackLivesMatter movement on social media, often posting relevant images to bring attention to the number of unarmed black people gunned down by police. […]

     Felicia Sanders, Tywanza’s mother, made a statement directed at Roof during the bond hearing on Friday. She was one of three survivors of the massacre.

     “We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with open arms,” she said. “You have killed some of the most beautiful people I know. Every fiber in my body hurts, and I will never be the same.”

     “Tywanza was my son, but Tywanza was my hero,” she added. “As we say in Bible study, we enjoyed you, but may God have mercy on you.”

     Dylann Roof, 21, was arrested June 18 and is being charged with nine counts of murder and a weapons offense. He reportedly confessed to the killings while in police custody on June 19, the same day he was scheduled to appear in court for a bond hearing.

     The Cross and the Confederate Flag, by Russell Moore.

     This week the nation reels over the murder of praying Christians in an historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina. At the same time, one of the issues hurting many is the Confederate Battle Flag flying at full-mast from the South Carolina Capitol grounds even in the aftermath of this racist act of violence on innocent people. This raises the question of what we as Christians ought to think about the Confederate Battle Flag, given the fact that many of us are from the South.

     The flag of my home state of Mississippi contains the Confederate Battle Flag as part of it, and I’m deeply conflicted about that. The flag represents home for me. I love Christ, church, and family more than Mississippi, but that’s about it. Even so, that battle flag makes me wince—even though I’m the descendant of Confederate veterans.

     Some would say that the Confederate Battle Flag is simply about heritage, not about hate. Singer Brad Paisley sang that his wearing a Confederate flag on his shirt was just meant to say that he was a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan. Comedian Stephen Colbert quipped, “Little known fact: Jefferson Davis—HUGE Skynyrd fan.”

     Defenders of the flag would point out that the United States flag is itself tied up with ugly questions of history. Washington and Jefferson, after all, supported chattel slavery too. The difference is, though, that the United States overcame its sinful support of this wicked system (though tragically late in the game). The Confederate States of America was not simply about limited government and local autonomy; the Confederate States of America was constitutionally committed to the continuation, with protections of law, to a great evil. The moral enormity of the slavery question is one still viscerally felt today, especially by the descendants of those who were enslaved and persecuted.

     The gospel speaks to this. The idea of a human being attempting to “own” another human being is abhorrent in a Christian view of humanity. That should hardly need to be said these days, though it does, given the modern-day slavery enterprises of human trafficking all over the world. In the Scriptures, humanity is given dominion over the creation. We are not given dominion over our fellow image-bearing human beings (Gen. 1:27-30). The southern system of chattel slavery was built off of the things the Scripture condemns as wicked: “man-stealing” (1 Tim. 1:10), the theft of another’s labor (Jas. 5:1-6), the breaking up of families, and on and on.

     In order to prop up this system, a system that benefited the Mammonism of wealthy planters, Southern religion had to carefully weave a counter-biblical theology that could justify it (the biblically ridiculous “curse of Ham” concept, for instance). In so doing, this form of southern folk religion was outside of the global and historic teachings of the Christian church. The abolitionists were right—and they were right not because they were on the right side of history but because they were on the right side of God.

     Even beyond that, though, the Flag has taken on yet another contextual meaning in the years since. The Confederate Battle Flag was the emblem of Jim Crow defiance to the civil rights movement, of the Dixiecrat opposition to integration, and of the domestic terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils of our all too recent, all too awful history.

     White Christians ought to think about what that flag says to our African-American brothers and sisters in Christ, especially in the aftermath of yet another act of white supremacist terrorism against them. The gospel frees us from scrapping for our “heritage” at the expense of others. As those in Christ, this descendant of Confederate veterans has more in common with a Nigerian Christian than I do with a non-Christian white Mississippian who knows the right use of “y’all” and how to make sweet tea.

     None of us is free from a sketchy background, and none of our backgrounds is wholly evil. The blood of Jesus has ransomed us all “from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers” (1 Pet. 1:18), whether your forefathers were Yankees, rebels, Vikings, or whatever. We can give gratitude for where we’ve come from, without perpetuating symbols of pretend superiority over others.

     The Apostle Paul says that we should not prize our freedom to the point of destroying those for whom Christ died. We should instead “pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding” (Rom. 14:19). The Confederate Battle Flag may mean many things, but with those things it represents a defiance against abolition and against civil rights. The symbol was used to enslave the little brothers and sisters of Jesus, to bomb little girls in church buildings, to terrorize preachers of the gospel and their families with burning crosses on front lawns by night.

     That sort of symbolism is out of step with the justice of Jesus Christ. The cross and the Confederate flag cannot co-exist without one setting the other on fire. White Christians, let’s listen to our African-American brothers and sisters. Let’s care not just about our own history, but also about our shared history with them. In Christ, we were slaves in Egypt—and as part of the Body of Christ we were all slaves too in Mississippi. Let’s watch our hearts, pray for wisdom, work for justice, love our neighbors. Let’s take down that flag.

     He’s a Southern Baptist preacher speaking out against the flag. Good on him. Unfortunately, I’m sure there are people using the bible to support keeping the flag flying.

137. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 4:50 am

     Obama thinks Confederate flag ‘belongs in a museum’

     Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), the Palmetto State’s former governor, said talking about removing the flag is like “opening Pandora’s Box.”

     Sen. Lindsey Graham (R), a 2016 presidential candidate, called the Confederate banner “part of who we are” as South Carolinians.

     NAACP President Cornell Brooks said Friday the flag must come down. He criticized those who say it’s simply a symbol of the state’s history, calling it an “emblem of hate.”

     “When we see that symbol lifted up as an emblem of hate, as a tool of hate, as an inspiration for hate, as an inspiration for violence, that symbol has to come down,” he said Friday in Charleston.

     Obama first called for the Confederate flag to be retired to a museum in 2007 during his campaign for president, months before the South Carolina primary.

     Rick Perry calls Charleston church shooting an ‘accident’, the Guardian on Rick Perry’s wonderful, wonderful insight.

     Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry on Friday suggested the fatal shooting of nine black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white male was a drug-induced “accident”.

     The former Texas governor was asked about the mass shooting at Emanuel AME church during an interview with the conservative NewsmaxTV. A spokesman for Perry later clarified that the Republican presidential candidate meant to say “incident,” but the soundbyte drew immediate attention and backlash.

     Perry, who announced this month that he is running for president again after a failed bid in 2012, said he didn’t know if the tragedy was an “act of terror”, but acknowledged it was “a crime of hate”.

     But Perry then pivoted to what he called the “real issue to be talked about” – drugs.

     “It seems to me – again, without having all the details about this one – that these individuals have been medicated. And there may be a real issue in this country, from the standpoint of these drugs, and how they’re used,” Perry said.

     Some acquaintances of Dylann Storm Roof, the 21-year-old gunman in the Charleston killings, have said he used drugs – a detail that has been seized upon by conservative conspiracy websites such as Infowars.

     But Roof, who was apprehended in North Carolina on Thursday, has confirmed that the killings were both premeditated and racially motivated. The shooting suspect told authorities he wanted to “start a race war”, after confessing to attending Bible study with the victims and then opening fire.

     In addition to steering the conversation away from race and terrorism, Perry also accused Barack Obama of trying to take firearms away from the American people by pushing for stricter gun laws in the wake of mass shootings like the one in Charleston.

     “This is the MO of this administration, any time there is an accident like this, the president is clear. He doesn’t like for Americans to have guns and so he uses every opportunity, this being another one, to basically go parrot that message,” Perry said.

     He added that pushing gun control was a “knee-jerk reaction” that would do little to change gun violence “as long as evil and cowardice is alive in the world”.

     Perry said he wasn’t ready to point to any policy changes that could prevent another Charleston, and said it was up to South Carolina to decide if the Confederate flag should continue to fly on the grounds of the state capitol in Columbia.

     Sorry, Rick Perry, but you’re kind of an asshole.

     The Charleston Church Shooting and the Meaning of Terrorism, Newsweek.

     An act of domestic terrorism, as defined by the FBI, must have three characteristics: “Involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law; Appear intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping; and Occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.” By this definition, Roof committed an act of terrorism: killing nine, intimidating the African-American community by attacking a historic black church in South Carolina. Yet, calling Roof a terrorist still invokes a squeamish feeling among some, including politicians.

     “I don’t know what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes,” presidential candidate Jeb Bush said. When asked if the shooting was racially motivated, Bush said he didn’t know. He called it an “act of raw hatred.” Indeed, the shooting has also been deemed a hate crime—but an act of violence can be both a hate crime and carried out by a terrorist.

     For many, Roof does not evoke the cultural norm of a terrorist. “We often have things labeled as hate crimes but there’s a big leap from the label ‘hate crime’ to ‘terrorism,’” explains Ibrahim Hooper, the communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “We always wait when these incidents are first reported to hear if it was carried out by a Muslim to find out if it will be labeled terrorism.”

     Hooper listed numerous instances of violence carried out by white men against minority communities that were not deemed terrorist acts. In one occurrence, a man worked with a militia organization to plot an attack on a mosque. “When someone who isn’t Muslim carries out acts of terrorism, it comes down to, ‘Oh, he was mentally deranged. He was just a loner,” Hooper said. “I think any terrorist has some mental issue. That’s a given. You can have both mental issues and be labeled a terrorist as well.”

     Roof, like James Holmes and Timothy McVeigh before him, meet the mold of what has been oft-labeled a “madman”—a lonely, white male. Their acts are thrown into the category of “crazy,” not terrorism. One reason for this, experts explain, is because they do not have an allegiance to a set organization, even if they sympathize with the views of a hate or terrorist group.

     “They were essentially a lone-wolf killer. It’s always a struggle for some people to believe that if a killer is not associated with a group or a movement that they could be something other than mentally ill,” Mark Pitcavage, the director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told Newsweek. “We see that going back to Lee Harvey Oswald. People refused to believe he did what he did because of ideological beliefs, even though he made this extreme beliefs clear. It was easier for people to accept that he was a madman. This is something that we have repeatedly encountered over the years.”

     Indeed, much of terrorism is associated with terrorist groups themselves. “It starts getting harder to define people as terrorists when they are literally lone wolves without any association to a proper group,” explained Stuart Gottlieb, a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

     Roof acted alone, insofar as authorities have been able to determine. Though Roof made white supremacist remarks and clearly sympathized with apartheid, his affiliation to any proper hate or terrorist group has not been disclosed, if it even exists. Reached by email, the leader of the Aryan Nation World Headquarters said he had not heard of Dylann Roof prior to the shooting, though it remains unclear if Roof was a member of a smaller sect of the hate group or a member of a division of the KKK in South Carolina.

     A 25-year veteran of the FBI who worked on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Don Borelli noted the discrepancies in how terrorists are labeled. “If you look at this from an international terrorism perspective, we have kids that go online and want to be part of ISIS, they go out and commit crimes and some attempt to go to Syria. We label those acts terrorism. But sometimes, these kids have never left the country and have never met any real terrorists,” Borelli told Newsweek. Borelli noted the importance the FBI places on a person’s affiliation to a group in labeling someone a terrorist.

     “We don’t need an institution to authenticate moments of domestic terrorism,” Robert Chase, a former public historian with the College of Charleston and current professor at Stony Brook University, told Newsweek. “The murderer did associate himself with symbols of white superiority and violence. The language he chose to use has always centered on white domestic terrorism: the fear that African-American men would sleep with white women. This is what animated lynchings since the 19th century and this is what animated his racial violence this week.”

     Following Roof’s first court appearance on Friday, the Justice Department announced the shooting would be investigated as both a hate crime and an act of domestic terrorism.

     Slavery records will soon be easily searchable online, as seen upthread.

     Wisconsin school district bans American Indian team logos – a small but significant thing. Perhaps not even so small. (Can’t cite, it’s msn, they protect against citing.)

     Dylann Roof And The Ceiling Of White Supremacy

     The actions of the 21-year-old man who is alleged to have killed nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, were aided and abetted by actions and attitudes of our racially biased society. The shooter, Dylann Roof, is not an anachronism, anathema to America’s past or present. This country is very much Dylann Roof’s home.

     Our culture, politics, and economic systems place a ceiling over the lives of African-Americans — who not only often literally can’t breathe, as we’ve seen in the countless shootings and stranglings of unarmed Black men by police officers — but often figuratively can’t stand up. In 2010, the median net worth of Black families in America was just $4,900 — compared to the median wealth of $97,000 for white families. That same year, the median net worth of single Black mothers was $5. Just $5.

     Study after study shows that résumés with Black-sounding names get called less for interviews than those with white-sounding names and that white high school dropouts have higher incomes than black college graduates — so it would be wrong to pin these discrepancies on individual fault. We are a racially biased society. We have statistic after statistic after statistic to prove it.

     Roof’s alleged crimes and apparent beliefs exist under the shelter of American racial oppression and white supremacy. But “we are too afraid to talk about obvious racial motivations,” observed Fusion’s Latoya Peterson in the wake of the massacre. Added Charles P. Pierce in Esquire, “If people do not want to speak of it, or think about it, it’s because they do not want to follow the story where it inevitably leads” — which is to the acknowledgment of our history of slavery and racial oppression, and how it still shapes America today.

     Superstructures of Black oppression and white supremacy are as American as apple pie. If you care to look, you can find these roofs and eaves of American racism everywhere. They’re in the discriminatory housing policies and racialized myths about black criminality that fuel white flight from cities to suburban cul-de-sacs. They’re in the conversion of public-education and public-aid programs from invaluable safety nets for whites into wasteful symptoms of weakness for Blacks. They’re in the swift expansion and privatization of the criminal “justice” system, which has taken momentarily freed Black Americans and returned far too many to bondage.

     These are not accidents. These are not aberrations. The superstructures of Black oppression and white supremacy are the standard operating procedure of America’s past and its present.

     If someone attacks a synagogue, especially if that someone is Muslim, our neighbors and political leaders don’t hesitate to talk about the scourge of anti-Semitism. When someone, especially a man, rapes or kills a woman, political leaders bring up sexism and misogyny. So why, in a land where slavery was practiced for 400 years, where since our nation’s founding the forced enslavement of Black people has been legally and culturally sanctioned for longer than not, and where not even a half-century ago we still practiced active and explicit racial segregation — why, or rather how, could any halfway observant human being not acknowledge the fact of racial bias? There’s still a goddamn Confederate flag flying at the statehouse in South Carolina. Still. Right now. Literally waving that history in our present-day faces.

     Many people are calling Roof a terrorist. I think they’re right. Terrorism is defined as the use of violence or intimidation in pursuit of political aims. Roof reportedly planned his attack, chose his target carefully, made anti-Black comments during his massacre, and left one woman alive to tell other people what he had done and why he had done it. If this isn’t terrorism, I don’t know what is.

     As The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb notes, the first anti-terror law in the United States was written in response to the Ku Klux Klan. White supremacy is a political aim, and Roof’s purported acts firmly fit within a history of white terror against the Black community in America, especially in the South. As I wrote when a young man went on a killing spree against women in California, we tend to not label these acts as terrorism because we give white men the benefit of individuality. When a Muslim or Black person commits a crime, the entire religion or race is somehow implicated. But white male criminals are just “bad apples” or “mentally troubled lone wolves.” Even before more was known about Roof, this was how some were characterizing him in the media.

     Black oppression and white supremacy have done more to construct and shape the past and present of the United States than Islamic fundamentalism ever will. And yet we perpetually look away from racial bias and put the burden of proof on those trying to point it our — or even accuse them of being part of the problem. Meanwhile, the fact that we don’t talk about it, that we bury our heads in the sand, is part of the problem. It is very much the roof of denial that gave cover to Dylann Roof.

     It’s also a metaphorical coincidence that one of Roof’s friends was named Joseph Meek. According to Meek, Roof had repeatedly and increasingly said racist things and talked about wanting “to hurt a whole bunch of people.” Meek told The New York Times that Roof would say “all this stuff about how the races should be segregated, that whites should be with whites” and was “planning to do something crazy.”

     But Meek himself didn’t do anything. After he says he initially hid a gun Roof had recently purchased, Meek returned it to him. And Meek didn’t come forward to police or other authorities — until after the slaughter. Mr. Meek was, in other words, true to his name, to say the least.

     Despite the widespread suspicion and Islamophobia cast upon the American Muslim community, since 2009 tips and informants from within Muslim communities have helped law enforcement prevent one out of every two al-Qaida-related plots in the United States. And yet, when it comes to speaking out against racism, let alone preventing acts of anti-Black violence, unfortunately, Mr. Meek is not alone. We are all Meek. Too many white people explicitly condone racial bias or implicitly do so by looking the other way. That is also part of the history of our nation, a shingle on an ugly roof of racial resentment and hatred under which Dylann Roof festered.

     Until we dismantle that history — including its lingering, stubborn systems of oppression — we are doomed to repeat it.

138. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 4:55 am

     Here’s a general note on police behaviour. 4-Year-Old Accidentally Shot By Columbus Police Officer. Note passive voice.

     Gary Parsley says the shooting that happened on Chandler Drive in Whitehall, Friday afternoon, happened in an instant.

     “Everything happened really fast,” he said.

     Parsley says a Columbus Police Officer came to his house to follow up on a hit-and-skip case Parsley says he was a victim of two weeks ago. He says when the officer stepped outside – a woman, two houses down, came running out and pleading for help.

     “She was wanting medical attention for her sister,” Parsley said. “That’s why she called the guy over there.”

     Parsley went back inside his house. A few seconds later he heard the gunshot.

     “I did hear the gunshot – it was very loud,” he said. “At first I thought maybe he’d shot the dog, because she was saying something about ‘Why would you try to shoot the dog?’ and he said something like the dog was attacking him, or something like that. Then, she started saying ‘You shot my kid!’.”

     According to CPD, when the officer approached the house the family’s dog charged him.

     “The officer fires one shot at the dog, misses the dog and accidentally shoots a four-year-old in the leg,” CPD spokeswoman, Denise Alex-Bouzounis, said.

     At least she’s not dead…

     Plugged In: Don’t Overlook Race Issue In Charleston Tragedy, video only.

     What These Religious Leaders Want America to Know in the Wake of the Charleston Massacre

     Many people across the country are infuriated and heartbroken because of fatal shooting of nine people Wednesday night at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. As we remember the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Daniel Simmons, the Rev. Depayne Middleton Doctor and Myra Thompson, let us also remember the generosity of spirit and hospitality they practiced before their lives were brutally taken by a lone white racial supremacist.

     One of the principle features of Christian theology is the notion of invitation. The slain graciously welcomed the man who would later murder them. This is the perverted irony of this terrorist act, and it is hard to make sense of it all. Because religion and spirituality are key features of social life in the U.S., Mic invited Christian leaders from across the country to respond to the shooting and offer words of encouragement to move us forward.

     The Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, of the Fellowship of Reconciliation:

     “They were killed because of their love. They welcomed a stranger and gave him home as he plotted their demise. This is the best of black church — unconditional love. To love in the face of white supremacy is a revolutionary act.”

     The Rev. Valerie Bridgeman, president & CEO of WomanPreach! Inc. and associate professor of homiletics & Hebrew bible at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio:

     “I’ve been glued to social media and corporate media since nine people were murdered in an historic AME church, Mother Emanuel. I can hardly turn my eyes and ears away. I honestly don’t know what I’m listening for or hoping to see. It’s not as if this incident actually was ‘unthinkable’ or ‘unimaginable.’ We live in a racist country, where racist-induced violence seems on the uptick. I am grieved. But I am not surprised. And that makes me sad.”

     “I am angry that people are being told to ‘heal’ and ‘move on’ and ‘recover’ when they (we) are still really in a state of shock. The full impact of these horrific racist terroristic murders haven’t sunk in yet. We rush too soon to forced ‘peace’ or ‘reconciliation’ or ‘forgiveness.’ It’s not healthy, physically or spiritually. … I’m righteously mad. Righteously angry. And it’s in my prayers and my thinking as I prepare to preach Sunday.”

     Damien Conners, executive director of Excel Bridgeport and former national executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference:

     “Rage is the only appropriate response to the tragedy in Charleston, South Carolina. The rage of witnessing black lives, time and time again, wiped away by the latent and profoundly overt manifestations of racism should consume the soul of our nation. Radical, righteous rage should call us to the type of love that will not allow us to rest until we awaken the slumbering conscience of a nation entranced by the fear-mongering othering of media outlets and the pacifying politicking of elected officials who make excuses for institutional racism.”

     Some more at the link.

     Westboro Baptist Church to Picket Funerals of Charleston Shooting. Can we have a nice loud chorus of ‘Fuck You, Westboro Baptist’? All together, now!

     The Westboro Baptist Church has promised to picket the funerals of Clementa Pinckney and the other victims of the Emanuel Church shooting in Charleston. Amid the group’s hateful and nonsensical Twitter stream of consciousness, the group wrote “Blood of Charleston Shooting dead is on Hillary Clinton’s hands. Get some signs and picket the funerals!” That message was accompanied with the hashtag “Warnliving.” […]

     The group had earlier written that Clementa Pickney was a “lying preacher” who used the pulpit to express support for Hillary Clinton. They added “Do not wast your prayers, they are abomination to God. #GodSentthe Shooter #CharlestonShooting was God’s judgement.”

     The “church,” which has made its name in protesting the funerals of victims of tragedies — somehow relating the deaths to acceptance of homosexuality in society — has proven time and again that no tragedy is safe from the group’s vile opinions.

     DC Solidarity action for #Charleston tomorrow[emojis] #IfWeAintSafeInChurch

     Man with towel-wrapped arm shot by LAPD in Los Feliz was unarmed, as noted by Pteryxx upthread.

139. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 5:06 am

     Some history:
     The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States
     Georgia (excerpts):

     Our Northern confederates, after a full and calm hearing of all the facts, after a fair warning of our purpose not to submit to the rule of the authors of all these wrongs and injuries, have by a large majority committed the Government of the United States into their hands. The people of Georgia, after an equally full and fair and deliberate hearing of the case, have declared with equal firmness that they shall not rule over them. A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia. The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. While it attracts to itself by its creed the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government, anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose. By anti-slavery it is made a power in the state. The question of slavery was the great difficulty in the way of the formation of the Constitution.

     While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all, it was plainly apparent that slavery would soon disappear from what are now the non-slave-holding States of the original thirteen. The opposition to slavery was then, as now, general in those States and the Constitution was made with direct reference to that fact. But a distinct abolition party was not formed in the United States for more than half a century after the Government went into operation. The main reason was that the North, even if united, could not control both branches of the Legislature during any portion of that time. Therefore such an organization must have resulted either in utter failure or in the total overthrow of the Government. The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the South not at all. In the first years of the Republic the navigating, commercial, and manufacturing interests of the North began to seek profit and aggrandizement at the expense of the agricultural interests. Even the owners of fishing smacks sought and obtained bounties for pursuing their own business (which yet continue), and $500,000 is now paid them annually out of the Treasury. The navigating interests begged for protection against foreign shipbuilders and against competition in the coasting trade.

     Congress granted both requests, and by prohibitory acts gave an absolute monopoly of this business to each of their interests, which they enjoy without diminution to this day. Not content with these great and unjust advantages, they have sought to throw the legitimate burden of their business as much as possible upon the public; they have succeeded in throwing the cost of light-houses, buoys, and the maintenance of their seamen upon the Treasury, and the Government now pays above $2,000,000 annually for the support of these objects. Theses interests, in connection with the commercial and manufacturing classes, have also succeeded, by means of subventions to mail steamers and the reduction in postage, in relieving their business from the payment of about $7,000,000 annually, throwing it upon the public Treasury under the name of postal deficiency. […]

     All these classes saw this and felt it and cast about for new allies. The anti-slavery sentiment of the North offered the best chance for success. An anti-slavery party must necessarily look to the North alone for support, but a united North was now strong enough to control the Government in all of its departments, and a sectional party was therefore determined upon. Time and issues upon slavery were necessary to its completion and final triumph. The feeling of anti-slavery, which it was well known was very general among the people of the North, had been long dormant or passive; it needed only a question to arouse it into aggressive activity. This question was before us. We had acquired a large territory by successful war with Mexico; Congress had to govern it; how, in relation to slavery, was the question then demanding solution. This state of facts gave form and shape to the anti-slavery sentiment throughout the North and the conflict began. Northern anti-slavery men of all parties asserted the right to exclude slavery from the territory by Congressional legislation and demanded the prompt and efficient exercise of this power to that end. This insulting and unconstitutional demand was met with great moderation and firmness by the South. We had shed our blood and paid our money for its acquisition; we demanded a division of it on the line of the Missouri restriction or an equal participation in the whole of it. These propositions were refused, the agitation became general, and the public danger was great. The case of the South was impregnable. The price of the acquisition was the blood and treasure of both sections– of all, and, therefore, it belonged to all upon the principles of equity and justice. […]

     With these principles on their banners and these utterances on their lips the majority of the people of the North demand that we shall receive them as our rulers.

     The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle of this organization.

     For forty years this question has been considered and debated in the halls of Congress, before the people, by the press, and before the tribunals of justice. The majority of the people of the North in 1860 decided it in their own favor. We refuse to submit to that judgment, and in vindication of our refusal we offer the Constitution of our country and point to the total absence of any express power to exclude us. We offer the practice of our Government for the first thirty years of its existence in complete refutation of the position that any such power is either necessary or proper to the execution of any other power in relation to the Territories. We offer the judgment of a large minority of the people of the North, amounting to more than one-third, who united with the unanimous voice of the South against this usurpation; and, finally, we offer the judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest judicial tribunal of our country, in our favor. This evidence ought to be conclusive that we have never surrendered this right. The conduct of our adversaries admonishes us that if we had surrendered it, it is time to resume it.

     The faithless conduct of our adversaries is not confined to such acts as might aggrandize themselves or their section of the Union. They are content if they can only injure us. The Constitution declares that persons charged with crimes in one State and fleeing to another shall be delivered up on the demand of the executive authority of the State from which they may flee, to be tried in the jurisdiction where the crime was committed. It would appear difficult to employ language freer from ambiguity, yet for above twenty years the non-slave-holding States generally have wholly refused to deliver up to us persons charged with crimes affecting slave property. Our confederates, with punic faith, shield and give sanctuary to all criminals who seek to deprive us of this property or who use it to destroy us. This clause of the Constitution has no other sanction than their good faith; that is withheld from us; we are remediless in the Union; out of it we are remitted to the laws of nations.

     A similar provision of the Constitution requires them to surrender fugitives from labor. This provision and the one last referred to were our main inducements for confederating with the Northern States. Without them it is historically true that we would have rejected the Constitution. In the fourth year of the Republic Congress passed a law to give full vigor and efficiency to this important provision. This act depended to a considerable degree upon the local magistrates in the several States for its efficiency. The non-slave-holding States generally repealed all laws intended to aid the execution of that act, and imposed penalties upon those citizens whose loyalty to the Constitution and their oaths might induce them to discharge their duty. Congress then passed the act of 1850, providing for the complete execution of this duty by Federal officers. This law, which their own bad faith rendered absolutely indispensible for the protection of constitutional rights, was instantly met with ferocious revilings and all conceivable modes of hostility.

     The Supreme Court unanimously, and their own local courts with equal unanimity (with the single and temporary exception of the supreme court of Wisconsin), sustained its constitutionality in all of its provisions. Yet it stands to-day a dead letter for all practicable purposes in every non-slave-holding State in the Union. We have their convenants, we have their oaths to keep and observe it, but the unfortunate claimant, even accompanied by a Federal officer with the mandate of the highest judicial authority in his hands, is everywhere met with fraud, with force, and with legislative enactments to elude, to resist, and defeat him. Claimants are murdered with impunity; officers of the law are beaten by frantic mobs instigated by inflammatory appeals from persons holding the highest public employment in these States, and supported by legislation in conflict with the clearest provisions of the Constitution, and even the ordinary principles of humanity. In several of our confederate States a citizen cannot travel the highway with his servant who may voluntarily accompany him, without being declared by law a felon and being subjected to infamous punishments. It is difficult to perceive how we could suffer more by the hostility than by the fraternity of such brethren.

     (Georgia was wordy.)
     Mississippi (excerpts):

     Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.

     The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.

     The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.

     The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.

     It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.

     It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.

     It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.

     It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.

     It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.

     It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.

     It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.

     It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.

     It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.

     It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.

     It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.

     It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.

     It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.

     Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.

     (Mississippi was a lot more concise and a lot more revealing, without the politico-speak.)
     South Carolina (excerpt):

     The parties to whom this Constitution was submitted, were the several sovereign States; they were to agree or disagree, and when nine of them agreed the compact was to take effect among those concurring; and the General Government, as the common agent, was then invested with their authority.

     If only nine of the thirteen States had concurred, the other four would have remained as they then were– separate, sovereign States, independent of any of the provisions of the Constitution. In fact, two of the States did not accede to the Constitution until long after it had gone into operation among the other eleven; and during that interval, they each exercised the functions of an independent nation.

     By this Constitution, certain duties were imposed upon the several States, and the exercise of certain of their powers was restrained, which necessarily implied their continued existence as sovereign States. But to remove all doubt, an amendment was added, which declared that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people. On the 23d May , 1788, South Carolina, by a Convention of her People, passed an Ordinance assenting to this Constitution, and afterwards altered her own Constitution, to conform herself to the obligations she had undertaken.

     Thus was established, by compact between the States, a Government with definite objects and powers, limited to the express words of the grant. This limitation left the whole remaining mass of power subject to the clause reserving it to the States or to the people, and rendered unnecessary any specification of reserved rights.

     We hold that the Government thus established is subject to the two great principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence; and we hold further, that the mode of its formation subjects it to a third fundamental principle, namely: the law of compact. We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties, the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other; and that where no arbiter is provided, each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences.

     In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.

     The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

     This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River.

     The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.

     The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.

     (South Carolina put a lot of history in.)
     Texas (excerpt):

     The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretences and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slaveholding States.

     By the disloyalty of the Northern States and their citizens and the imbecility of the Federal Government, infamous combinations of incendiaries and outlaws have been permitted in those States and the common territory of Kansas to trample upon the federal laws, to war upon the lives and property of Southern citizens in that territory, and finally, by violence and mob law, to usurp the possession of the same as exclusively the property of the Northern States.

     The Federal Government, while but partially under the control of these our unnatural and sectional enemies, has for years almost entirely failed to protect the lives and property of the people of Texas against the Indian savages on our border, and more recently against the murderous forays of banditti from the neighboring territory of Mexico; and when our State government has expended large amounts for such purpose, the Federal Government has refuse reimbursement therefor, thus rendering our condition more insecure and harassing than it was during the existence of the Republic of Texas.

     These and other wrongs we have patiently borne in the vain hope that a returning sense of justice and humanity would induce a different course of administration.

     When we advert to the course of individual non-slave-holding States, and that a majority of their citizens, our grievances assume far greater magnitude.

     The States of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa, by solemn legislative enactments, have deliberately, directly or indirectly violated the 3rd clause of the 2nd section of the 4th article [the fugitive slave clause] of the federal constitution, and laws passed in pursuance thereof; thereby annulling a material provision of the compact, designed by its framers to perpetuate the amity between the members of the confederacy and to secure the rights of the slave-holding States in their domestic institutions– a provision founded in justice and wisdom, and without the enforcement of which the compact fails to accomplish the object of its creation. Some of those States have imposed high fines and degrading penalties upon any of their citizens or officers who may carry out in good faith that provision of the compact, or the federal laws enacted in accordance therewith.

     In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color– a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.

     For years past this abolition organization has been actively sowing the seeds of discord through the Union, and has rendered the federal congress the arena for spreading firebrands and hatred between the slave-holding and non-slave-holding States.

     By consolidating their strength, they have placed the slave-holding States in a hopeless minority in the federal congress, and rendered representation of no avail in protecting Southern rights against their exactions and encroachments. They have proclaimed, and at the ballot box sustained, the revolutionary doctrine that there is a ‘higher law’ than the constitution and laws of our Federal Union, and virtually that they will disregard their oaths and trample upon our rights.

     They have for years past encouraged and sustained lawless organizations to steal our slaves and prevent their recapture, and have repeatedly murdered Southern citizens while lawfully seeking their rendition.

     They have invaded Southern soil and murdered unoffending citizens, and through the press their leading men and a fanatical pulpit have bestowed praise upon the actors and assassins in these crimes, while the governors of several of their States have refused to deliver parties implicated and indicted for participation in such offenses, upon the legal demands of the States aggrieved.

     They have, through the mails and hired emissaries, sent seditious pamphlets and papers among us to stir up servile insurrection and bring blood and carnage to our firesides.

     They have sent hired emissaries among us to burn our towns and distribute arms and poison to our slaves for the same purpose.

     They have impoverished the slave-holding States by unequal and partial legislation, thereby enriching themselves by draining our substance.

     They have refused to vote appropriations for protecting Texas against ruthless savages, for the sole reason that she is a slave-holding State.

     And, finally, by the combined sectional vote of the seventeen non-slave-holding States, they have elected as president and vice-president of the whole confederacy two men whose chief claims to such high positions are their approval of these long continued wrongs, and their pledges to continue them to the final consummation of these schemes for the ruin of the slave-holding States.

     In view of these and many other facts, it is meet that our own views should be distinctly proclaimed.

     We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

     That in this free government *all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights* [emphasis in the original]; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.

     By the secession of six of the slave-holding States, and the certainty that others will speedily do likewise, Texas has no alternative but to remain in an isolated connection with the North, or unite her destinies with the South.

     (They sound almost apologetic, some of the time.)
     Virginia (entire):

     The people of Virginia, in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in Convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under the said Constitution were derived from the people of the United States, and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression; and the Federal Government, having perverted said powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.

     Now, therefore, we, the people of Virginia, do declare and ordain that the ordinance adopted by the people of this State in Convention, on the twenty-fifth day of June, eighty-eight, whereby the Constitution of the United States of America was ratified, and all acts of the General Assembly of this State, ratifying or adopting amendments to said Constitution, are hereby repealed and abrogated; that the Union between the State of Virginia and the other States under the Constitution aforesaid, is hereby dissolved, and that the State of Virginia is in the full possession and exercise of all the rights of sovereignty which belong and appertain to a free and independent State. And they do further declare that the said Constitution of the United States of America is no longer binding on any of the citizens of this State.

     This ordinance shall take effect and be an act of this day when ratified by a majority of the votes of the people of this State, cast at a poll to be taken thereon on the fourth Thursday in May next, in pursuance of a schedule to be hereafter enacted.

     Done in Convention, in the city of Richmond, on the 17th day of April, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one, and in the eighty-fifth year of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

     (Direct, to the point, no flowery language.)
     So there you go: States’ rights = the right to slavery. Now don’t go ’round telling me the confederate flag is not about racism and maintaining the oppression of black people in USAmerica.

140. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 5:12 am

     Alabama Cops Fired for Palling Around with White Supremacists

     On Friday, Wayne Brown and Josh Doggrell, police lieutenants in Anniston, Alabama, were forced to leave the department after a blog post by the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that the two men belonged to a white-supremacist “Southern independence” organization. Anniston officials held a press conference to announce that Doggrell had been fired, and that Brown would retire.

     Last Wednesday, the SPLC blog “Hatewatch” posted video of Doggrell delivering a speech at a conference for the League of the South—a neo-Confederate group—in 2013, during which he addressed gun rights and his love for the League. (Doggrell mentions that Brown is in the audience.) “It’s always wonderful to go back and show my bosses all the radicals that I cavort with on the weekends,” Doggrell says in the video.

     “[Brown once] asked me, ‘What is the magic bean that would arouse our people to see exactly what was happening to them and how necessary the step of secession is?’” Doggrell recounts in his remarks.

     According to Hatewatch, Doggrell wrote a Facebook post in March that read, “When ‘minorities’ become the majority, why do we still call them minorities?” His Facebook account appears to have since been deactivated. Hatewatch also notes that Doggrell claims during a Q&A session at the conference that his police chief once told him, “we [at this department] pretty much think like you do.”

     The Anniston Police Department did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment regarding Doggrell’s account.

     When the SPLC alerted city officials to Doggrell’s association with the League, the news was initially met with shrugs. Hatewatch then asked Anniston city manager Brian Johnson what would be done if, hypothetically, a cop was found palling around with the Ku Klux Klan. “I do not believe that someone could be terminated solely based on their private sector membership in a properly formed legal organization–as hateful as the KKK might be,” Johnson replied. (Shortly after the story ran, the lieutenants were suspended and city officials opened an investigation into Brown and Doggrell’s associations with the League.)

     As for the League of the South, which unveiled a billboard in Tallahassee, Florida, last year encouraging secession in ALL CAPS, it is exactly as charming as you’d think. Following renewed debate over the Confederate flag following the racist mass murder in Charleston, South Carolina, the League’s leader Michael Hill wrote a post calling for the removal of the American flag instead.

     “We in The League of the South agree that a flag should be taken down,” he wrote on Friday. “Not the most recognizable historic flag of the South but the flag of our occupiers for the last 150 years. … That ugly gridiron now stands for multiculturalism, tolerance, and diversity—the left’s unholy trinity. It also stands for Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Dolezal, and every other fraud and pervert who is held up as an example of ‘courage’ in 2015 America.”

     Earlier this year, he wrote about how a “race war in America would be a bad idea for negroes.”

     The League of the South did not return a phone call from The Daily Beast. The organization’s voicemail greeting ends, “God save the South.”

     Video of LAPD Handcufffing Man After Allegedly Shooting Him in the Head Surfaces – is that the same shooting as previously noted?

     A startling and graphic video that surfaced on Twitter last night depicts two LAPD officers rolling over a profusely bleeding suspect, and handcuffing him. They’d reportedly shot at him four times, and the victim allegedly suffered a gunshot wound to the head.

     According to Lt. John Jenal, the officers stopped to investigate an incident after the shooting victim was flagging for help using an arm wrapped in a towel. When they arrived on the scene, they believed the man had a weapon, which they asked him to drop. Shortly afterwards, they fired at him four times, apparently striking him once in the head.

     To make matters worse, the officers immediately rolled him over, and handcuffed him, all of which was caught on camera by an onlooker who appeared to be stationed across the street.

     An investigation is reportedly underway.

     Yes, it is. And why do they keep handcuffing dead people????

     Charleston shooting suspect Dylann Roof’s apparent manifesto surfaces, feel free to click through if you want.
     Gawker on the same: Here Is What Appears to Be Dylann Roof’s Racist Manifesto. If any more appear, I will only be posting the links. I will not be excerpting the ‘manifesto’ here (I put that in quotes because it’s a racist rant, what makes it a manifesto? As someone on twitter noted, why does his angry racist ranting get additional depth by being called a ‘manifesto’?).

     Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz Weigh In on Confederate Flag at South Carolina Capitol

     The future of the Confederate flag that flies on the grounds of South Carolina state capitol consumed the Republican Party’s presidential field on Saturday after Mitt Romney, its nominee for president in 2012, demanded its removal, calling it a “symbol of racial hatred.”

     His unambiguous statement immediately intensified pressure on Republicans seeking the White House in 2016 to confront the thorny issue, which has long divided the state and bedeviled national candidates campaigning in it.

     Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, weighed in on Saturday afternoon in a post on his Facebook page.

     “My position on how to address the Confederate flag is clear,” Mr. Bush wrote. “In
     Florida, we acted, moving the flag from the state grounds to a museum where it belonged.”

     He added: “Following a period of mourning, there will rightly be a discussion among leaders in the state about how South Carolina should move forward and I’m confident they will do the right thing.”

     Prior to Mr. Bush’s statement, none of the party’s 2016 presidential candidates had gone as far as Mr. Romney in demanding that the flag come down.

     Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, however, demurred. In comments while he campaign in Iowa, Mr. Cruz said the flag is “a question for South Carolina. And the last thing they need is people from outside of the state coming in and dictating how they should resolve it.”

     He later said, “I understand the passions that this debate evokes on both sides. Both those who see a history of racial oppression and a history of slavery, which is the original sin of our nation. And we fought a bloody civil war to expunge that sin. But I also understand those who want to remember the sacrifices of their ancestors and the traditions of their states — not the racial oppression, but the historical traditions. And I think often this issue is used as a wedge to try to divide people.”

     Mr. Romney’s words were striking because many Republican leaders, including those now running for president, have seemed reluctant to discuss the role of race — and racism — in the killing of nine parishioners at a Charleston, S.C., church. And they stood out because Mr. Romney himself, as a candidate, struggled to connect with black voters in 2012, later blaming his loss in part on “gifts” that he said President Obama had given to minority voters.

     On Saturday, Mr. Romney took to Twitter to issue a firm message about the flag and race.

     With that, Mr. Romney became the most prominent Republican to make that demand since the Charleston shooting.

     The issue is not entirely new for Mr. Romney. He spoke out against flying the Confederate flag as far back as 2008, when he first ran for president. “That flag shouldn’t be flown,” he said at the time. “That’s not a flag I recognize.”

     Well done, Mr Romney and Mr Bush (not words I thought I’d ever say). Now please revise your other views. And Ted Cruz, your ‘both sides’ argument fails.

     Why Can’t Republicans Admit Dylann Roof Was Racist?

     The mysteriousness of Dylann Roof’s motivations for allegedly murdering a room full of African-Americans, rated on a scale of 1 through 10, is zero. Roof has been described by people who knew him as obsessed with racial hatred, has been photographed with racist symbolism, told his victims he planned to murder them because of their race, and even let one live specifically so that she could let the world know the reason for his crime. It is entirely possible that some form of mental illness or adverse life event caused Roof to embrace violent racism, but there is zero doubt that racism directly motivated his actions.

     Bizarrely, a number of conservative figures have treated Roof’s motives as unknowable. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley wrote, “we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.” The Wall Street Journal editorializes today, “What causes young men such as Dylann Roof to erupt in homicidal rage, whatever their motivation, is a problem that defies explanation beyond the reality that evil still stalks humanity.”

     Jeb Bush, appearing at the Faith & Freedom Coalition Conference, said, “I don’t know what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes.” When pressed for a follow-up by the Huffington Post, Bush continued to equivocate:

     “It was a horrific act and I don’t know what the background of it is, but it was an act of hatred,” Bush said.

     Asked again whether the shooting was because of race, Bush added, “I don’t know. Looks like to me it was, but we’ll find out all the information. It’s clear it was an act of raw hatred, for sure. Nine people lost their lives, and they were African-American. You can judge what it is.”

     What’s genuinely mysterious is not just why conservatives believe such nonsense but why they feel obliged to say it. After all, the Republican Party may be in general denial about the persistence of racism as a continuing force in American life, and openly racist whites may be a part of their constituency (just as they have long been part of the Democratic Party’s constituency).

     In 2000, George W. Bush gave a speech at Bob Jones University, which banned interracial dating. But Bush was competing in a Republican primary in South Carolina and really needed the votes of whites who opposed interracial dating. Neither Jeb Bush nor other Republicans need the votes of racist murderers to win an election. It would be very easy to identify a confessed white-supremacist murderer without doing violence to the overall conservative worldview. It is not like admitting the persistence of racial discrimination by police or employers or school administrators or courts, all of which put pressure on conservative policies. Just say there are still a small number of racist murderers in America!

     Roof’s actions are a completely sensible expression of his twisted worldview. It’s the failure to admit it that’s senseless.

141. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 5:23 am

     Dylann Roof Manifesto Found, Daily Beast.
     Dylann Roof Photos and a Manifesto Are Posted on Website, New York Times.
     Want more in-depth? See PZ’s post: A grim look into motive.

     Democrats are losing faith in police. Republicans, not so much. Funny, that, no?

     Americans are losing faith in police as more incidents of brutality against black people capture the national spotlight — but the drop is almost entirely pronounced among Democrats.

     A new survey by Gallup found confidence in police is at its lowest point since 1993, a year after the acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King led to riots in Los Angeles. About 52 percent of 1,527 Americans surveyed earlier in June said they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in police, down from 57 percent in 2013 and at the same rate as 22 years ago. Gallup pointed out that this is still some of the highest confidence Americans express toward any particular institution, but it is a historic low.

     What’s behind the drop? As with everything in America, partisan politics appear to be part of the issue. About 42 percent of Democrats reported confidence in police in a 2014-2015 period analyzed by Gallup, down from 55 percent in a 2012-2013 period. Confidence among Republicans remained about the same: 69 percent in the 2014-2015 period, compared with 68 percent in the 2012-2013 period.

     Some of the results reflect racial differences in the two parties. Black people are much more likely to report being Democrat, and only about 30 percent reported confidence in police over the past two years — well below the national average of 53 percent.

     But Gallup’s survey showed nonwhite Democrats are also losing confidence in police. While nonwhite Democrats reported a drop in confidence in police of 14 percentage points between the 2012-2013 and 2014-2015 periods, white Democrats expressed a fairly similar 11-point drop.

     Gallup found that Democrats of all races tend to take race issues more seriously, which helps explain the partisan difference. Concerns about police brutality have come about because of specific incidents in which police shot or otherwise used force and killed black men — Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Eric Garner in New York City, and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, as a few examples. If Democrats are more worried about race issues in general, it makes sense that they’re more worried about racial disparities in police use of force, as well.

     The #TakeDownTheFlagSC Rally will be held today at 6pm at the SC State House @CNN – that was yesterday, I believe my upcoming twitter catch-up will have photos.

     Here, have an onion. It’s almost enough to make you laugh. Georgia Adds Swastika, Middle Finger To State Flag. Warning for imagery at the link.

142. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 6:04 am

     In aftermath of Charleston church slayings, a day of forgiveness and thought

     Dylann Storm Roof stared at the camera in front of him and blinked occasionally.

     He saw a judge on a video screen and heard crying. But he couldn’t see the rest of the courtroom on the other end of the video link. He couldn’t see the people who fought through tears and stood up in the crowded room.

     Roof, Slager in same jail unit

     Dylann Storm Roof was placed into the same “segregation housing” at the Charleston County jail as former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager over concerns for his safety, Assistant Sheriff Mitch Lucas said Friday.

     Roof was assigned one cell near Slager, but Lucas said he wouldn’t call them “neighbors” able to talk with each other.

     Slager faces a murder charge in the April 4 shooting death of Walter Scott, a 50-year-old black man who was running away from the white officer during a traffic stop. The FBI is investigating whether any civil rights violations played into the episode.

     In the administrative segregation housing, Lucas said only one inmate at a time can be escorted in or out of the unit. Inmates can be placed into of its 124 cells for “various reasons,” he said, most notably for their own protection.

     Both Roof and Slager have been the targets of death threats since their arrests, though Lucas did not say whether any have come from inside the jail.

     “It’s complete segregation for anyone who … we’ve got to keep alive until they get to their court date,” Lucas said.

     He heard the words of Felicia Sanders as she rose and spoke. Roof had been accused of killing her son and eight others as Sanders watched two nights earlier at a downtown Charleston church.

     Roof family statement

     Dylann Roof’s attorneys, 9th Circuit Public Defender Ashley Pennington and Columbia lawyer Boyd Young, released this statement Friday on his family’s behalf:

     “The Roof Family would like to extend their deepest sympathies and condolences to families of the victims in Wednesday night’s shooting at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. Words cannot express our shock, grief, and disbelief as to what happened that night. We are devastated and saddened by what occurred. We offer our prayers sympathy for all of those impacted by these events.

     “Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of those killed this week. We have all been touched by the moving words from the victims’ families offering God’s forgiveness and love in the face of such horrible suffering.

     “Our hope and prayer is for peace and healing for the families of the victims, the Charleston community, and those touched by these events throughout the state of South Carolina and our nation.”

     “We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with open arms,” she said. “We enjoyed you, but may God have mercy on your soul.”

     The bond hearing Friday afternoon served as the first opportunity for family members to talk to the 21-year-old Eastover man suspected of fatally shooting the nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. They spoke of hurt, grief and longing for a chance to say goodbye to the people they loved. They also offered forgiveness, despite the accusation that Roof, a white man, had carried out one of the worst American hate crimes of the generation at the historically black church.

     Roof also could not see beyond the courtroom, where Charleston has been transformed by tragedy into a ground zero for the racial strife reignited in recent years by a call of “black lives matter.” He faces nine murder charges in the attack that some say exposed an underbelly of the Deep South that bubbled to the surface in a bloody way around 9 p.m. Wednesday at 110 Calhoun St.

     The Confederate battle flag still flies on the Statehouse grounds, despite calls from critics nationwide to take it down. And some pointed to the bond judge who faced Roof as another example of deep-rooted problems here. The judge, who has been reprimanded for using the N-word in the past, called Roof’s family members victims, too.

     “Saying that semblances of that ugly underbelly does not exist would be a disservice to the lives that were lost,” said Antonio Tillis, a longtime African studies professor brought to the College of Charleston amid the school’s turmoil over the hiring of a Confederacy memorabilia aficionado as its president. “We need to question our national identity and Americanism. Who gets to claim it? To hear a young man say that black people have taken over the country, we have to question that.”

     But that man also couldn’t see the wall of flowers being built on the sidewalk in front of the church, each bouquet with a message from people in Sheridan, Wyo.; Crawfordsville, Ind.; and Madison, Miss. Black and white visitors from other states knelt next to residents from Charleston and cried as they penned messages on a banner. Roof also couldn’t hear what they said.

     “Where is our country going?” Donna Lea Needham, 83, of Sanford, Fla., said as she cried. “How many times is hatred going to cause this kind of sorrow? This has gone on for long enough.”

     That call on Calhoun Street echoed from the courtroom with the victims’ families, to Charleston City Hall, to California, where President Barack Obama again spoke out against the violence.

     “It is not good enough to simply show sympathy,” he said. “We as a people have got to change. That’s how we honor those families.”

     Sidebar at that link:

     To help

     For those who want to help in the wake of the Emanuel AME Church shooting, the city of Charleston asks to give in one of two ways:

     Mother Emanuel Hope Fund

     Charleston’s fund will provide direct financial support for the funeral and burial expenses of the nine victims. Any funds remaining after the funeral and burial expenses are paid will be donated directly to the church for use as determined by its governance board. Donations to this fund are not tax-deductible. These denotations can be made in one of three ways:

     1. By sending a check to

     Mother Emanuel Hope Fund

     c/o City of Charleston

     Post Office Box 304

     Charleston, SC 29402

     2. By stopping by any Wells Fargo Bank nationwide and making a donation to the fund.

     3. Texting “prayforcharleston” to 843-606-5995 or go to bidr.co/prayforcharleston.

     Lowcountry Ministries — Pinckney Fund

     This fund will be administered by the Palmetto Project (a nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of South Carolinians). All of the funds donated will be used in this community to support local initiatives serving his home church, vulnerable populations and youth projects that the Rev. Clementa Pinckney was passionate about. Decisions on the use of these funds will be made by a task force made up of a member or members of Pinckney’s family, colleagues, representatives from Emanuel AME Church and other members of the community selected for their specific expertise. These donations will be tax deductible. Donations can be made by:

     1. By sending a check to

     Lowcountry Ministries – Reverend Pinckney Fund

     c/o The Palmetto Project

     6296 Rivers Avenue #100

     North Charleston, SC 29406

     2. Or by donating online at palmettoproject.org

     What We Know About Hate Crimes In South Carolina

     Federal investigators are looking into whether the fatal shooting of nine people at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white man Wednesday is a hate crime; the city’s police chief has already said it is one. If the shooting is classified as a hate crime, the federal government could prosecute the suspect.

     South Carolina has a long history of anti-black racism and violence, but it’s hard to say whether hate crimes are more common there than elsewhere. In recent years, the state doesn’t appear to have had an inordinate share of the country’s hate crimes, but that may be because of the limitations of hate-crime statistics and the inconsistency of hate-crime legislation.

     The Southern Poverty Law Center has compiled 4,121 hate incidents nationwide between January 2003 and May 2015. (The SPLC defines these as “incidents of apparent hate crimes and hate group activities … drawn primarily from media sources.” In addition to assaults and acts of vandalism, the count includes things like rallies held by hate groups as well as legal developments in hate-crime cases.) A little over 1 percent of those, or 47, were in South Carolina. Based on the state’s population in 2009, the middle of the period covered, that works out to 10.3 hate incidents per million people over the 12-year period. The national rate is 13.4 hate incidents per million people. South Carolina’s rate is the 31st highest among the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

     The latest crime statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation paint a similar picture. In 2013, agencies in every state but Hawaii, plus Washington, D.C., reported hate-crime statistics to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program. South Carolina had 51 reported hate crimes, 33 of them motivated by racial bias. That’s 10.7 hate crimes per million 2013 residents — which was the 34th highest rate among the 49 states and D.C. — and 6.9 motivated by racial bias, which was 33rd highest.

     Consistency across two different data sources might normally look like support for a finding, in this case of a below-average hate-crime rate in South Carolina. But these data sources don’t agree for many other states. For instance, Michigan has one of the highest rates of reported hate crimes and racially motivated hate crimes in the FBI data but a below-average rate of incidents according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. And Iowa has one of the lowest hate-crime rates in the FBI data but an above-average rate in the law center’s database.1

     There’s a third major source for hate-crime stats: the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey. The 2012 survey asked more than 160,000 adults about their experience as crime victims, an enormous sample — yet not big enough to reliably report hate-crime rates by state. Although the survey counted about 300,000 hate crimes in 2012, “it’s still a relatively rare event,” BJS statistician Lynn Langton said in a telephone interview.

     Hate crimes are rare enough that we can’t compare them across states using survey responses. That also makes it impossible to know whether reporting rates for hate crimes differ by state. The National Crime Victimization Survey counts far more hate crimes than the FBI’s UCR does, in part because 61 percent of hate crimes that respondents report on the survey haven’t been reported to police. If South Carolinians, for example, are less likely to report hate crimes to police, that might make the state look like it has lower than average hate-crime rates without it being the case. That’s one reason the FBI cautions against using UCR stats to rank states’ crime rates.

     6. Killer’s case is assigned to a judge who calls for help for his family, a judge who presides under the confederate flag, uses the n word. That twitter-person had a few more notes (this is #6) but I thought to highlight that one.

143. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 6:15 am

     Interlude: Science Fiction! As provided by AlexanderZ at the Mended Drum. DS9: Far Beyond the Stars and Judgment Day, video in two parts, a look at racism.

     Why Black People Can Use the N-Word: A Perspective, as borrowed from Tony at the Mended Drum.

     Why is it okay for African Americans to use the N-word but not others (or mostly not others)? Isn’t it racist to say that only some people can use the word while others can’t? Doesn’t this create some unfair double-standard?

     These are some of the questions one often hears in a discussion about the N-word and permissible use. There are really at least two questions that should be addressed. First, what is going on linguistically? Uses of the word by African Americans typically aren’t offensive, so-called appropriated uses, whereas uses by others (with some exceptions) generally are offensive. What explains that difference?

     The second question involves the morality of those uses: Should African Americans address each other with the N-word? To be clear, we are focusing here on a narrow part of the phenomena, namely, those camaraderie uses of the word. As was pointed out in an earlier post, the word has varied shades and uses in the mouth of African Americans, not all of them positive. In this post I mainly focus on the first question, while saying a few things briefly about the second at the end.

     That African Americans (and some Latinos) are able to use the N-word freely while others are not is, I take it, an obvious fact. In one particular form, the N-word carries connotations of camaraderie. The expression is used, as rapper Q-Tip has pontificated, “as a term of endearment.” However, it is also widely known that this use is typically not available to non-black language users. This is illustrated poignantly in this scene from Rush Hour where Lee (Jackie Chan) greets an African American bartender with the phrase, “What’s up my nigga?” essentially mimicking the way Carter (Chris Tucker) had addressed the same bartender moments earlier. For some, the use of an ‘a’ on the end of the expression marks a distinct contrast with the ‘er’ ending, the former denoting endearment or camaraderie and the latter racism. In spite of using the ‘a’ ending, Lee’s greeting was not well received, resulting in a brawl between him, the bartender and other African American patrons.

     So, what exactly was the difference between Carter’s use of the word and Lee’s? In order to say what the difference is we need to think about what makes terms like this, when used derogatorily, offensive. The obvious place to start is to say the N-word means something derogatory. The basic idea is that when some person addresses another by the expression, he or she is attributing certain characteristics and/or traits to the statement’s target. In the case of the N-word, one might think that when someone (and I am talking about cases where the speaker is being derogatory) addresses another with the N-word, the speaker is saying something along the lines of blacks are inferior because they are black.

     If this is how normal derogatory uses of the N-word work, then how do we explain appropriated uses? The most sensible thing to say is that appropriated uses have a different meaning from the derogatory use, like ‘buddy’ or ‘friend’. But notice this doesn’t tell us why Lee was not able to use the term in this sense. If the N-word has at least two senses, i.e. a derogatory one and a neutral one, then why can’t non-African Americans use it? I suggest there is a better way to understand what makes slur terms offensive in general and ultimately provides a way of explaining their appropriated uses.

     I think that slurs are prohibited terms whose occurrences are offensive. When enough people (or the right person or persons) say a word is not appropriate for referring to a particular group, then that word becomes a slur. However, the prohibition is not absolute. It does allow for some exceptions. Among those exceptions are non-derogatory uses by members of the targeted group. Immediately we can see why African Americans (and certain others) can use the N-word for camaraderie purposes while non-African Americans typically cannot. It is just built into the exception clause that the former can and the latter cannot.

     Analysis continues at the link.

     Republican State Representative Will Introduce Bill To Remove Confederate Flag From South Carolina Capitol. A thoughtful move, but I can’t help but be a bit leery of his reasoning – I’m glad he acknowledges the friendship, but did it really take a friend’s death for him to acknowledge to subtle and not-so-subtle harm that symbol causes?

     South Carolina State Representative Doug Brannon made news tonight by going where most other Republicans refuse to go. He said in unqualified terms that race was the reason for the shooting that took the lives of nine Black South Carolinians gathered for bible study in an historic Black Charleston church. Then he announced he would sponsor a bill in the next legislative session to remove the Confederate flag from the state house grounds.

     MSNBC’s Chris Hayes talked by phone with the obviously emotional Rep. Brannon, first confirming his plan to introduce a bill to remove the flag, and then asking him why he had decided to sponsor the legislation, which is sure to be controversial in the state.

     “I had a friend die Wednesday night for no reason other than he was a Black man,” said Brannon, with unmistakeable emotion in his voice.

     Rep. Brannon went on to speak of his friend, former state senator Clementa Pinckney, (photo right) pastor at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, who was killed in the Charleston massacre.

     “Senator Pinckney was an incredible human being. I don’t want to talk politics, but I’m going to introduce a bill for that reason.”

     Democratic State Senator Vincent Sheheen, who ran against Nikki Haley for governor last election, told Steve Kornacki he was not surprised by Rep. Brannon.

     Larry Wilmore’s Takedown of Fox News’ Charleston Coverage Was Exactly What We Needed, video at link.

     On Thursday night, Jon Stewart didn’t have any jokes to make about the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, but Larry Wilmore did—sort of. After beginning his opening monologue with an acknowledgement of the gravity of Dylann Roof’s terrorist actions—“What we’ve built [on the Nightly Show] wasn’t really built to handle this kind of tragedy”—Wilmore lit into Fox News’ incredible reactions to the news, namely, yesterday’s segment on Fox and Friends when co-host Steve Doocy tried to pull out a wacky religious persecution theory.

     To that, Wilmore said: “Nobody thinks Christians are going around raping everybody and taking over the country. That’s not a thing. Unless you’re a Duggar.” The host only grew more impassioned from there, critiquing the Fox and Friends guest, black pastor E.W. Jackson (who fed into the idea that race wasn’t the issue), and coining a new phrase in the process—“Black don’t distract.” From beginning to end, Wilmore is spot-on, and by the end of his monologue, it seems pretty clear that the Nightly Show had found a way to take even the most horrific, race-fueled crime and comment on it in a way that is at once funny, wistful, and hard-hitting. It’s a nice complement to Stewart’s (equally necessary) wearied and somber view on how the U.S. is going to deal with—or really, not deal with—race going forward.

     Anti-Klan activists march, burn Confederate flag in front of Old Capitol without incident, from April. Maybe more of that is needed…?

     A group of around 60 protesters marched from Florida State University to the Capitol this evening in a show of force against recent Ku Klux Klan-related activity in Tallahassee. The event, organized by Students for a Democratic Society, culminated in the burning of a Confederate flag near the steps of the Old Capitol building.

     Referring to recent reports of neglect and abuse in prisons overseen by the Florida Department of Corrections, chants of “DOC, KKK, how many people did you kill today?” and “Indict, convict, send these racist cops to jail; the whole damn system is guilty as hell!” filled College Avenue as the sun set over Downtown Tallahassee.

     A mixture of anti-racist exhortations, militant rhetoric and homespun political economy was voiced over a bullhorn as officers from the Tallahassee Police Department and Florida Department of Law Enforcement looked on, mostly unperturbed.

     Much to the officers’ relief, not in attendance were counter-protesters from the small Republic of Florida Militia, who had earlier threatened via social media to meet the protest with force.

     “They’re cowards, that’s why they’re not here,” said Naomi Bradley, representing a group called the Trans Liberation Front at the rally.

     Rumors were floated that some would-be militiamen had tried to come and were barred by police officers, but officers from the Capitol Police denied that account. TPD officers escorted the protesters along their route from the Westcott Building at FSU down to the Capitol.

     Near the event’s denouement SDS leader Regina Joseph was handed a “gift” in the form of a Confederate Naval jack. It was promptly spit and trampled upon before Joseph inquired whether anyone among the crowd had any hand sanitizer or Axe body spray, to aid in igniting the flag.

     “Do we smell like we wear Axe?” was one protester’s rejoinder as the mood grew festive.

     The fire piqued the interest of onlooking FDLE officers, who hovered more closely as the brief conflagration began. At one point one protester confronted an officer, telling him, “You have to take our concerns seriously; they have to resonate” because “you don’t want martial law. You might not be the cops anymore.”

     That incident, however, was out of step with the generally convivial atmosphere of the evening rally, where the focus centered more on organized hate groups than on law enforcement.

     Joseph and others among the SDS faithful vowed to continue to confront Klan elements, who she said were “everywhere” around the state capital.

     Christie: All you need is love, not laws, in wake of Charleston massacre. FFS.

     New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has dug deep and found his heart in the wake of the calculated murder of nine black people in a hallowed Charleston church. Caitlin MacNeal reports:

     “This type of conduct is something that only our display of our own love and good faith that’s in our heart can change. Laws can’t change this,” he said at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington D.C. “Only the goodwill and the love of the American people can let those folks know that that act was unacceptable, disgraceful, that we need to do more to show that we love each other.”

     Oh, now we get it—the guy who bullies reporters and shouts down constituents employed a message of love in service of deflecting against any legislative action. Read his lips: No new gun laws.

     It’s the goodwill and the love of the American people [goodwill and love towards a history and symbols of hate] (because those dead weren’t American enough…?) that got them shot. True.

144. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 7:30 am

     Frequent Fox guest: Whites might shoot up more black churches if Obama keeps calling them racist

     A black conservative warned black Americans that more white terrorists may be encouraged to take up arms against them after the Charleston massacre – if President Barack Obama continues to say racism is an ongoing problem.

     Jesse Lee Peterson, a frequent Fox News guest, appeared Thursday on Steve Malzberg’s Newsmax TV program to discuss the fatal shootings of nine black worshipers by an apparent white supremacist at a historic South Carolina church, reported Right Wing Watch.
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     The conservative pundit, who recently told Sean Hannity that Baltimore residents had overreacted to the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody, insisted that white racism against blacks no longer existed.

     “(Obama) implied that racism is still an issue in America today for black people from white folks, when it’s absolutely not true,” Peterson said. “You have the Department of Justice and others calling it a hate crime even before they knew — before the dust settled, they called it a hate crime, which is encouraging or verifying for a lot of angry black people that racism is a problem.”

     He urged angry white people to start lashing out against black critics by reciting racist tropes.

     “They need to speak out to the country, to black Americans, and tell them, ‘I am not a racist, I am not your problem — you need to take care of your own life, you need to get married, raise your own children, get away from the government taking care of you, (and) drop your anger so you can see that I am not your problem,’” said Peterson, summing up a month’s worth of Fox News programming in a matter of seconds.

     He said a “lack of moral character,” not racism, was to blame for racial disparities in the U.S. – but he said white Americans were victims of a racist double standard that would eventually lead to even more violence against blacks.

     “White people are feeling fear,” Peterson said. “If they should speak up, they’re called racists, and they are feeling guilt because they feel a sense of responsibility for what’s going on when they really have nothing to do with it

     “They have all this anger that’s starting to build up inside of them, and I am very concerned,” Peterson continued. “I’ve been concerned for a long time that if they don’t open up and express themselves and say, ‘No,’ when they’re called racists, we’re going to see more killing. I want to be wrong, but we are going to see – especially young white men and women – we’re going to see more of them carrying out acts like the one we just saw in South Carolina.”

     Two quick looks at racism in Canada, via William Gibson (the author) on twitter. A bit more from him later. Ku Klux Klan, at the Canadian Encyclopedia

     The Ku Klux Klan is an outlawed, racist, ultra-conservative, fraternal organization dedicated to the supremacy of an Anglo-Saxon, Protestant society. Although never successful across Canada, the Klan was briefly popular in Saskatchewan in the 1920s.
     Founding

     The Ku Klux Klan (the name comes from the Greek word kyklos, or circle — “Kyklos Klan”) was formed in Pulaski, Tennessee, in November 1865 by six ex-Confederate soldiers of the American Civil War. It was outlawed in the United States in 1871 because of violent and outrageous crimes against blacks and northerners, including murder and lynching.

     Revived in November 1915 in Atlanta, Georgia, the “KKK” drew its support from middle- and lower-class Americans who feared the loss of conservative and rural values.

     Klan members typically signalled their presence by burning a Christian cross. Their doctrines and violence were motivated by racial and religious hatred.
     Klan in Canada

     In 1921, the Klan was reported active in Montréal; by 1925, “klans,” or local branches, had been established all across Canada.

     Like their American counterparts, Canadian Klansmen had a fanatical hatred for all things Roman Catholic and feared that the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race was being jeopardized by new immigration. Moreover, they were not averse to committing crimes to achieve their goals.

     The Klan appealed to few Canadians and remained relatively obscure, except in Saskatchewan. American organizers stole approximately $100,000 of Klan funds from the Saskatchewan branch in 1927. The Saskatchewan organization regrouped and, at its height in the late 1920s, boasted having 40,000 members.

     In the 1929 provincial election, the Klan’s influence helped end 24 years of Liberal rule in Saskatchewan, with the defeat of Liberal Premier J. G. Gardiner by Conservative leader J.T.M. Anderson.
     Decline

     In the decades that followed, the Saskatchewan Klan declined rapidly, as did the organization in the rest of Canada. In the late 1970s, the Klan attempted once more to organize in Canada, notably in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.

     The organization’s avowed white-supremacist stance, and further crimes committed by the American Klan during this period, have done little either to increase membership or to establish the Klan’s credibility in the eyes of the Canadian public.

     Today the Klan has a fringe, underground following by members of some white supremacist groups.

     White Lunch Limited

     White Lunch Limited, Vancouver, BC, an advertising decal recently seen on eBay. The decal shows four locations on the back; 806 Granville, 439 Granville, 124 West Hastings, and 65 East Hastings. The 806 Granville location is shown in this Fred Herzog photograph, April Smith blogs about the rediscovery of the entrance tiles at 124 West Hastings here while Lani Russwurm cultivated a good deal of comments with this flickr photo. And yes, the name White Lunch Limited bears some cultural shame; it originally reflected a policy of serving and hiring only white people. But this is not the first time we have seen this, if you recall the Peerless Dry Cleaning Slogan.

     #RacismNorth

     The intersection of purity culture and white ‘Christian’ racism – feminists, listen up!

     Lisa Wade explores the long history of “the ‘benevolent sexism’ behind Dylann Roof’s racism.”

     Here I want to focus on what the suspected killer, Dylann Roof, said right before he gunned down a room full of black worshippers. Reportedly, Roof proclaimed: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”

     It is amazing all that can be said in three little sentences.

     To a sociologist who studies gender and its intersection with other forms of inequality, this statement spoke volumes.

     Roof’s alleged act was motivated by racism, first and foremost, but also sexism. In particular, a phenomenon called benevolent sexism.

     Wade traces the ugly lineage of the interconnection between these two ugly things, which have been intertwined in American culture — and in American religion — since 1492:

     When European colonizers first arrived on the shores of America, the country was a “she”: they saw “her” as open to discovery and exploration. …

     Roof is that colonizer. White women are his land. His land is a she. His relationship to this country and the white women in it is the same: both belong to white men like him.

     In his mind, apparently, black people are the interlopers, the rapists, the plunderers of his natural resources, female and otherwise. It’s a twisted but not an unusual way to think about the world; not then and not now.

     I read Wade’s essay shortly after reading Randall J. Stephens’ post on “Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, and Race in the Cold War Era” at Religion in American History.

     Seeking to explore “how [white] evangelicals and fundamentalists engaged with politics and culture in the 1950s and 1960s,” Stephens focused on “believers’ reaction to and understanding of civil rights legislation and race relations during the high season of the Cold War.”

     He studied newspapers and “evangelical and fundamentalist magazines like Eternity, Moody Monthly, King’s Business, various state Southern Baptist periodicals, Sword of the Lord, Christian Crusade, Christian Beacon, the sermons and press conferences of Billy Graham and a variety of other materials,” including “the flagship evangelical Christianity Today.”

     Stephens found a range of white evangelical and fundamentalist responses to civil rights legislation. On one end of that range was the timid neutrality of Carl Henry and Christianity Today.

     WhiteChristianityAnd at the other end were the multitude of viciously anti-civil-rights white Christians whose views can be summed up with this cartoon, reproduced by Stephens from the May 7, 1964, issue of The Christian Beacon. Stephens describes it as “Vic Lockman’s gendered and racialized rendering of state authority.”

     The Christian Beacon wasn’t a deep South publication, by the way. Its publisher was a “Bible Presbyterian” from Michigan who had relocated to New Jersey.

     Lockman’s cartoon is grotesque and repugnant, but it perfectly captures the anti-civil-rights ideology of the white evangelicals and fundamentalists Stephens was studying. It exemplifies the intersection and inseparability of racism, patriarchy and wealth.

     The white woman is a helpless object, one explicitly labeled “property.” The monstrous threat is a caricature of blackness — or, rather, of a white racist’s idea of blackness, an ogre that arises from the fevered imagination of fearful white men.

     This cartoon was published in a “Christian” magazine — a popular publication described by its publisher as committed to an agenda of “defending the faith, exposing the apostasy, and calling Christian people to a faithful witness in behalf of the infallible Word of God.”

     What does that fundamentalist word-salad actually mean? It means this cartoon. It means this hideous envisioning of precisely the diseased ideology that terrorist Dylann Roof described as he murdered nine faithful Christians at their Wednesday night Bible study.

     Here in America, the racism of this ideology is pervasively tangled up with the corresponding idea of protecting the virginal purity of white women as the unsoiled property of white men. This is where purity culture comes from and where it leads back to. As Wade writes, “Our hierarchies interconnect, interweaving, providing each other with support.”

     Some of the Most Significant Modern-Day Attacks on Black Churches

     Hours after President Barack Obama was sworn in as the nation’s first black president, a white man was dousing gasoline on a house of worship in Massachusetts because, he said, “it was a n–ger church.”

     Years before, the FBI managed to infiltrate a White Aryan Resistance group and discovered its attempt to kick off a race war by killing black churchgoers with machine guns.

     It wasn’t too long ago—in the 1990s, as a matter of fact—that the federal govenment felt compelled to do something about the string of arson fires that were being used to bring down black churches in the South. The National Church Arson Task Force was formed as a result. White arsonists who were acting with racist intent would be subject to harsh federal sentences.

     These incidents remind us that the massacre Wednesday in a black church in Charleston, S.C., that claimed the lives of nine people is but the latest in a long history of attacks in the U.S. targeting African-American parishioners.

     There’s a nice list at the link. And by ‘nice’ I mean ‘far too long’.

     That racist uncle you never confront is teaching your stupid racist cousins some bullshit. You gotta start confronting your racist uncle. First in a line of Advice for White People that I picked up this go-round.

145. Pteryxx says

     21 June 2015 at 7:45 am

     Vigils, services and rallies across the US for #StandWithCharleston, many today or this evening: Ferguson Response tumblr Note that some are no-allies, meaning they are black-only safe spaces for grieving. Plenty are allies-welcome and I’ve seen a few churches having one service of each type today.

146. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 12:09 pm

     So William Gibson has been sharing some of his experiences from growing up, incl. books seen around the house.
     Here’s an example of that:
     I also have a small book given to my grandmother in the 1920s, about how really wonderful the old plantation was for the childlike Negroes.
     That one creeps me out so badly that I’ve never been able to read more than a page or two. Privately printed.

     Maine’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission finds ‘evidence of cultural genocide’ – racism against American Indians, in this case. Still seems relevant.

     On Thursday, the Manitoba government apologized for the Sixties Scoop – the forced adoption and relocation of thousands of indigenous children.

     But in Maine, where indigenous peoples faced a similar problem with child welfare agencies – a different approach has been taken to facing a dark history.

     In 2013, the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission was launched, tasked with investigating why so many Wabanaki children ended up in child welfare.

     Although the Wabanaki are just four tribes with around 8,000 members, it was found that Wabanaki children are five times more likely to be apprehended by child welfare agencies than other children in the state.

     “At one point in the ’80s, Maine had the second highest rate of removal for native children in the United States,” said Charlotte Bacon, executive director of the Wabanaki TRC.

     Bacon said the commission also found one Wabanaki community where one in three children had been apprehended by child welfare during the 1970s.

     While Canada’s Sixties Scoop is considered to have lasted from the 1960s to the 1980s (some believe it started as early as the 1950s) – the Wabanaki TRC investigated the relationship with state child welfare between 1978 right up until 2013.

     Bacon said the sheer amount of apprehensions had the same effect that residential schools had on indigenous children in Canada – many Wabanaki children were sexually or physically abused. They also lost their language and culture.

     The Wabanaki TRC was created jointly between the state of Maine and Wabanaki peoples. It conducted research into child welfare and held public events where people were allowed to share their experiences in that system, much like the Canadian TRC. However, unlike its Canadian counterpart, the Wabanaki TRC had to do its own fundraising.

     After two years, the Wabanaki TRC released its final report at a ceremony in Hermon, Maine on June 14.

     “We really came to the heart-wrenching conclusion that was kind of interestingly and uncannily echoing what the Canadian TRC found, which is that we are calling this continued evidence of cultural genocide,” said Bacon.

     Tamir Rice’s Father Releases Statement On Eve of Fathers Day – please let’s not forget about that, too.

     Attorneys for Tamir Rice’s family released a statement today from Tamir’s father, Leonard Warner, on his son’s death on the eve of Father’s Day.

     The statement reads:

     “As Father’s Day approaches on Sunday, I think of the many fathers, who like me, will experience another wave of grief at the loss of a young child to senseless gun violence. Becoming a father to my son, Tamir, was truly a special gift. He was the pinnacle of love and a constant reminder from God that life could be beautiful. But after Tamir’s life was senselessly taken this past November, the thought of Father’s Day is just another unpleasant reminder of the worst day of my life.

     There is not a day that goes by that I do not think of my son, and the joy he brought to us all. Visiting his memorial each week breaks my heart. The pain is overwhelming at times,but I find comfort in the love of my community who continues to stand with my family and activist such as the Cleveland 8 who all seek to bring my son’s killers to justice. Witnessing my son’s brutal murder on videotape is one of the most difficult images I have been forced to cope with. I will never go back to “normal,” because I will never get my son back. I can only cherish his memory and join in the fight to ensure that everyone knows that #BlackLivesMatter.

     As I continue to hold onto my faith in God, I wanted to pray for all the fathers around the world, that you might never have the unfortunate experience of burying your child and sharing in this grief. Please keep me lifted up in your prayers as I hold on to hope that in due season, things will begin to change.

     I love you Tamir and I can’t wait to see your smiling face when we meet again in paradise.

     Now six months into the investigation, documents were released earlier in June by the prosecutor handling the case that detail the moments before the brief, deadly encounter — and how the responding officers seemed almost shell-shocked as Tamir Rice lay dying outside a rec center.

     Cleveland police have lied and said the officer who fired the fatal shots, Timothy Loehmann, had told Tamir three times to put his hands up, then opened fire when the boy reached for the pellet gun tucked in his waistband.

     An impossibility, when the entire interaction between Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann and 12yr old Tamir Rice takes place within two seconds.

     Huge crowd at South Carolina Statehouse wants the Confederate flag gone – tweet-pics coming up!

     Around 2,000 people showed up at the foot of the South Carolina’s Statehouse in the capital city of Columbia on Saturday to demand that the Palmetto state get rid of the Confederate flag that flies on capitol grounds.

     They spoke of the irony that people here can claim racism doesn’t exist while a symbol of slavery and black oppression flutters above a monument to the Confederate Army just steps from the Statehouse, and how it’s long been time for the flag to be removed.

     “We are a state divided by racism,” Darus Williams, a Columbia native who lives in Savannah, Georgia but drove up for the rally, told Mashable. “I think racism is an issue we don’t want to talk about.”

     The flag never flew at the Capitol during the Civil War, but first went up in 1962 in response to the Civil Rights Movement. It first flew atop the Statehouse dome, but in 2000 was replaced with a smaller version just across a short field from the building.

     “I was born here and raised here, and since I’ve been alive we’ve been trying to get this flag down,” Kristie Jordan, who lives in Columbia, told Mashable. “It’s unfortunate it took this tragedy for us to come out here.”

     Anger at the Confederate flag’s presence near the Statehouse in Columbia spiked after nine black people were murdered at the historically black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Wednesday night in Charleston, South Carolina, allegedly by a white supremacist. People have argued that the Confederate flag’s presence helps racism fester in the state.

     Nearly 375,000 people have signed a petition on MoveOn.org to take the flag down as of this writing.

     The Confederate symbol has also become something of a political football over the past few days, and many prominent politicians have avoided saying whether it should stay, though that’s not the case for all of them.

     Critics take to Twitter after FBI director says Charleston shooting was not terrorism – the original statement coming up, too.

     Critics pounced Saturday on FBI Director James Comey’s declaration that the fatal shooting of nine people in a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina this week is not considered a terrorist act at this time by the national security agency.

     The defining line is political motivation, Comey said Friday while in Baltimore.

     “Terrorism is [an] act of violence done or threatens to in order to try to influence a public body or citizenry so it’s more of a political act and again based on what I know so [far] I don’t see it as a political act. Doesn’t make it any less horrific … but terrorism has a definition under federal law,” he said, according to news reports.

     But when Dylann Roof killed nine black people after an hour of bible study at Emanuel AME Church on Wednesday, he said he did so because African Americans were “taking over our country.” A photo of him on a website registered to his name shows him burning an American flag. A Facebook photo shows him wearing a Rhodesian flag—a defunct African nation which once had white minority rule. He talked about starting a civil war, an acquaintance said. One of the 21-year-old’s victims was a state senator.

     All of that has political underpinnings, Comey’s detractors say.

     According to the FBI’s website, political motivation isn’t the only defining factor for domestic terrorism. Activities with the following characteristics are considered domestic terrorism:

     Involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law;

     Appear intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination. or kidnapping; and

     Occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.;

     Roof was arrested after an hours-long manhunt and has been charged with nine counts of murder and one count of possessing a weapon while enacting a violent crime. He remains behind bars.

     Well, in my opinion, Roof qualifies… but then, I’m not the FBI.

147. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     21 June 2015 at 12:09 pm

     Topeka residents awaken to receive messages from the KKK:

     Some Topeka residents woke up Monday with a strong message at their doors.

     Residents in more than one neighborhood found fliers from the Ku Klux Klan in clear zip-close bags weighted by rocks on their property.

     In the 1900 block of S.W. Cheyenne Road, Peggy Hanna said she saw bags at nearly every home on the east side of the road from S.W. 17th Street to Belle Avenue on her morning run. Some were in the gutter, others were in driveways and yards.

     Just before 7 a.m., Hanna picked up a bag in her own driveway and threw it away thinking it was trash, but after seeing other bags she went home to see what was inside the bag she threw away.

     She was shocked to find a message from the Ku Klux Klan.

     “It’s just odd, very, very odd,” she said adding that since moving into her home in the late 1980s, she has never heard of any KKK-related soliciting.

     The two different fliers both appear to have been distributed by members or supporters of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, an associated group of the KKK the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as being active in Alabama and Missouri.

     The Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed the KKK a hate group, but doesn’t list an active organization in Kansas.

     The Shawnee County Emergency Communications Center confirmed it received at least one call Monday morning about the fliers. While the number of neighborhoods that received KKK fliers is unclear, Topeka police Lt. Colleen Stuart, said the department is aware residents are concerned about Klan activity.

     “We went out this morning to a residence and picked one up that had been in their yard,” Stuart said.

     She said that while the fliers shouldn’t be a cause of concern for safety, Topeka police are still talking about whether a notice should be sent out to the public. Multiple commanders have been notified.

     “The flier doesn’t threaten,” Stuart said. “The fact that the KKK is on it I think is probably enough for some people to become concerned.”

     You think?!
     Geez. It’s the fucking KKK. They used to roam the countryside lynching black people. As recently as 1981.

     Nineteen-year-old Michael Donald was on his way to the store in 1981 when two members of the United Klans of America abducted him, beat him, cut his throat and hung his body from a tree on a residential street in Mobile, Ala.

     Angry that an interracial jury had failed to convict another black man for killing a white police officer in Birmingham, the Klansmen selected Michael Donald at random and lynched him to intimidate and threaten other blacks. On the same evening, other Klan members burned a cross on the Mobile County courthouse lawn.

     The two Klansmen who carried out the ritualistic killing were eventually arrested and convicted. Convinced that the Klan itself should be held responsible for the lynching, Center attorneys filed a civil suit on behalf of Donald’s mother, Beulah Mae Donald vs. United Klans. In 1987, the Center won an historic $7 million verdict against the men involved in the lynching.

     The verdict marked the end of the United Klans, the same group that had beaten the Freedom Riders in 1961, murdered civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo in 1965, and bombed Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963.

     The group was forced to turn over its headquarters to Beulah Mae Donald, and two additional Klansmen were convicted of criminal charges.

     http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/case-docket/donald-v-united-klans-of-america

     The KKK is not some hate group from far in the past. Though their membership has dwindled to a mere fraction of what it once was-they still exist. And while their actions have changed, they still remain a white supremacist organization.

148. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 12:19 pm

     Also, I would just like to state for the record that I understand the need for and support the holding of no-allies rallies and vigils. Seen some detractors around twitter, but I have to say, for fucks’ sake, shut up and SHUT UP. If there’s any moment to stop whining, this would be a GREAT one.
     I’m just going to stick around here and post some links.

     +++

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Summer_(1919) … – someone asked Ta-Nehisi Coates about the term ‘Red Summers’. I am…

     What white people can do in the wake of the #CharelstonShooting by the brilliant Ali Barthwell

     White people keep asking “what can I do to help you in times like this? What can I do to fight racism? Where can I start? I want to take action.”

     Here’s what you can do – collect the white racists in your life. Tell your dad he has to stop making racist jokes. Stop your roommate when he rants against black people in the city. Correct your girlfriends when they talk about bad neighborhoods. Educate your students when they bring in writing that features stereotypical or offensive black figures.

     Stop leaving the hard work of educating white people to the people who are suffering and grieving. Stop leaving it to black people to collect and educate. Don’t speak for us but if you abhor racism, get rid of it around you.

     The shooter in Charleston was able to do what he did because no one corrected him or stopped him when he ranted and raged against black people.

     Yes, it’s gonna be hard to correct your dad or your grandpa but if you want to count yourself as an ally, do this god damn work so I don’t have to.

     Apparently the confederate flag came down today in Charleston, I’m being told. It is still flying in Columbia.

     Till death do us part – on violence against women, mostly worth a read and watch (has a short video) for the obvious lack of action on the part of SC courts and judges in the system. Which can be applied in the case of racism, too, I bet.

     Read Derrick Weston Brown’s Devastating Poetic Response to Charleston

     Sometimes, in the immediate aftermath of a brutal tragedy like Wednesday’s massacre of nine black civilians in Charleston by an avowed white supremacist, artists don’t have the luxury of waiting for the blunt force of their creativity to go through publishers, managers, or anybody else. Instead, they take to the mediums most closely available—social media.

     Derrick Weston Brown, a prolific DC-based poet who counts being the first poet-in-residence at DC’s legendary Busboys and Poets among his numerous accolades, did just that when he took to Facebook and wrote a damningly beautiful and stark treatise to the desperation felt by so many black people living under American oppression. Already, the post has hundreds of shares across various social media platforms. Check out the poem below, and see a statement from Brown after the jump:

     We can’t have nothing. Not our skin. Not our peace. Not our sanctuary. Can’t have nothing. Can’t shop, can’t swim, can’t walk home. Can’t pray. Can’t worship. Can’t have candy. Can’t sit in a car with friends with the windows down, bathed in bass. Can’t be a free black girl, free black child, free black boy. Can’t have courtesy. Can’t ask for help. Can’t have nothing. Can’t get the benefit of the doubt. Can’t get called by the names we want to be called. Can’t sit in church, pray in church, have a church, mosque, temple. Can’t have nothing. Can’t have a nice day, Can’t have an uninterrupted ride home. Can’t have a day when you don’t have to look over your shoulder. Can’t have nothing. Can’t have a day where you KNOW without a shadow of a doubt the people you love will come home alive. Can’t. Have. Nothing. Can’t have a day when our everything isn’t in question. Can’t even die without an “assist”. Can’t even have a proper burial. Can’t even have a memorial that goes untouched.

     Can’t not be followed. In a store. For a block. For a mile. For a day. For days. For years. For life.

     Can’t even get an isolated incident.

     Can’t get an acknowledgement that the race card is manufactured, store bought, and made from our skin.

     Can’t have nothing.

     Can’t be a disappeared black girl found safe and in time.

     Can’t get a disappeared black girl’s name read on air.

     Can’t have an indictment, conviction, blah, blah, blah.

     Can’t have paid leave, unpaid leave,

     break
     stop.

     Can’t have nothing.

     Brown generously provided a statement to Colorlines on his work:

     “I am a black poet who will not remain silent while this nation murders Black People. I have a right to be angry” –The #BlackPoetsSpeakOut Movement Primary Statement.

     I was born in North Carolina, and raised in Charlotte, a few hours away from Charleston and a short hop skip from Shelby NC where __________ was captured. I needed to write that piece for me mostly. I posted it because I wanted share my anger.

     I have to open with this very deliberate and direct statement because in these times we have to continue to be deliberate and direct in our words and actions despite the silence from those who establish policy and enforce laws.

     I have to thank the engineers and founders of the #BlackPoetsSpeakOut movement; Poets ; Mahoghany L. Browne, Amanda Johnson, Jonterri Gadson, and Jericho Brown, for the call out for Black Poets to speak and speak again.

     I wrote this piece yesterday morning , in a few short minutes because I kept asking myself the question, “What Can We Have?” And the answer kept coming back, “Can’t have nothing”.

     Click here to learn more about Brown’s work.

149. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 12:23 pm

     Tony
     re: Topeka
     Is that recent-recent? Because there were stories of this end of last summer… is it happening again??

     +++

     The Lost Cause; A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, by Edward A. Pollard, 1866 – another book William Gibson grew up with (as in, ‘in one house with’).

     White parents…If your kid has a Confederate flag in his room, on his truck, on his jacket…it’s time to have a real sit down. Don’t wait.

     So you guys went with this picture instead of these others huh?? Interesting how that works. @NBCNews TW on those images, for racist CRAP.

     And here is the latest press conference from the @FBI and @CharlestonPD re: Dylann Roof. #CharlestonShooting re: the manifesto – no details to release.

     Listen to State Of Emergency (feat. Dacia Monet) by Kwame Rose #np on #SoundCloud @KwameRose https://soundcloud.com/kwamerose/state-of-emergency-feat-dacia-monet …

150. Pteryxx says

     21 June 2015 at 12:25 pm

     The Grio – Judge who showed support for Charleston shooter’s family will not oversee trial

     Charleston County Magistrate James Gosnell Jr., who sparked outrage this week after suggesting that the family of shooter Dylann Roof were ‘victims’ deserving of ‘help’, will not be responsible for overseeing the case at trial in South Carolina.

     According to official state protocol, circuit judges – not magistrates, are responsible for presiding over criminal trials, reports the New York Daily News.

     Same judge who was formally reprimanded for making a racist comment from the bench. Some folks are reporting that he’s been removed or pulled from the case, but as far as I can tell his job just doesn’t include responsibility for the trial aspect in the first place.

151. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     21 June 2015 at 12:27 pm

     From Yahoo News–
     Mormon Church to make available records of 4 million freed slaves:

     The Mormon Church will lead efforts to index records of about 4 million former slaves and their families in the hope of connecting African Americans with their Civil War-era ancestors, the Utah-based faith said on Friday.

     The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has sponsored a non-profit organization called FamilySearch, which made the announcement alongside senior LDS officials in Los Angeles on the 150th anniversary of “Juneteenth,” the day when word reached the last group of slaves that the Civil War was over and they were free.

     “One of our key beliefs is that our families can be linked forever and that knowing the sacrifices, the joys and the paths our ancestors trod helps us to know who we are and what we can accomplish,” Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the LDS Church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles told the launch.

     “I witnessed the healing and joy African Americans experienced as they discovered their ancestors for the first time in those records.”

     The Freedmen’s Bureau Project is named after the agency created in 1865 by the U.S. Congress to help freed slaves transition to citizenship, providing food, housing, education, and medical care. It also recorded their names, and some details about their relatives and backgrounds.

     In partnership with institutions including the National Archives and Records Administration and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), FamilySearch is coordinating the work of volunteers “indexing” more than one million handwritten records, making them searchable online.

     The records, which also include marriage registers, labor contracts, apprenticeship papers and others, were compiled in 15 states and the District of Columbia. The goal is to have the records fully indexed by the fall of next year.

152. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     21 June 2015 at 12:29 pm

     rq @147:
     The article at CJOnline is dated June 15, 2015 and mentions residents waking up on Monday, so I’m fairly certain this is recent.

153. Pteryxx says

     21 June 2015 at 12:30 pm

     Also, I would just like to state for the record that I understand the need for and support the holding of no-allies rallies and vigils. Seen some detractors around twitter, but I have to say, for fucks’ sake, shut up and SHUT UP.

     This. FFS, a black church just had a white person welcomed into their Bible study turn around and murder them. It’s fair for black folks to feel safer in church without us around!

154. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 12:37 pm

     Protest. Downtown Charleston. (via @alexkcolby)
     The South Carolina African-American History Monument. (Y’all, it’s tucked away. And tiny.)
     NOW: At South Carolina’s statehouse, thousands gather at #TakeDownTheFlag rally:
     Downtown Charleston. Protest. (via Alex Colby)
     There are two protests happening right now, one in downtown Charleston and one in Columbia re: the flag. Organized struggle.
     And this is the march in downtown Charleston. #CharlestonShooting

155. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 12:40 pm

     Tony
     Wow. They just won’t stop, will they?

     +++

     More from #TakeDownTheFlag:
     Big crowd gathering for #TakeDownTheFlag Rally in Columbia #SC. Protestors calling for removal of confederate flag.

     Confederate We Fall. #TakeDownTheFlag

     Protest. #TakeDownTheFlag

     Crowd a SC Capitol is several hundred people & about 65% white. Chanting “Take it Down.” #Charleston

     Protest. #TakeDownTheFlag

     Wedding party drops off flowers at Emanuel AME memorial just after wedding at Citadel Square. #CharlestonShooting
     For some reason that last really touched me.

156. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 12:42 pm

     Flags at restaurants in Columbia, SC are at half mast. #CharlestonSyllabus
     And the officers are out here. #TakeDownTheFlag
     not my flag. #TakeDownTheFlag
     Those are last few bits from the rally that I pulled.

     And in light of recent witch hunts and lynchings, this:
     What some modern privileged white males consider a lynch mob: http://dailym.ai/1K3ewhS

     What a lynch mob actually is: http://bit.ly/1K3ewhQ

157. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 12:48 pm

     Girl Scouts Speak Out About Animal Abuse At Public Meeting, Get Showered With Racial Insults

     Several young girls attended a public meeting recently to express their concern about the treatment of animals in Cecil County, Maryland. Adults responded to their participation by shouting racial insults at the girls.

     The girls were members of the Girl Scouts of the Chesapeake Bay Troop 176. During the public meeting, they expressed their concerns about the treatment of animals who were housed at the county’s animal control facility — an issue that was covered by local media.

     “I felt really bad for the animals because that wasn’t a really good home for them,” said Amaya Spurlock, 10.

     “They were saying, ‘Go back to Baltimore, where you belong,’ and they started pointing out me and my sisters,” said Arianna Spurlock, who is 13. None of the girls live in Baltimore, which is more than an hour away from Cecil County.

     The girls also allege they were called “animals.”

     The aftermath of the incident was captured on video, with the co-leader of the troop telling a group of adults, “You guys, no racial comments, okay?”

     The racial comments were allegedly made by “supporters” of the county’s animal control vendor, A Buddy For Life. The company denies any of their employees were responsible.

     But in an interview with ThinkProgress, Scout Leader Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich said that the comments were made by A Buddy For Life volunteers. (The facility has few paid employees.) Mitchell-Werbrich said that she went with a group of parents to file a police report but were told it was not possible because the individuals did not “use the n-word.”

     During the meeting, the co-director of A Buddy For Life asked the commission to ignore the Girl Scout’s comments.

     The county pays ‘A Buddy For Life’ $60,000 a month to manage their animal control facilities. The Cecil Times reported that a surprise visit to the facility “found unremoved feces, odors and many dogs with serious ‘mange’ and other skin conditions.” There were also allegations of “overstaffing at the Buddy operation at taxpayer expense.” The company has been repeatedly fined for violating state and federal law.

     Mitchell-Werbrich explained that the dispute started in October when she called the Buddy For Life facility about two dogs at a residence who appeared emaciated and mistreated. Despite repeated inquiries, Mitchell-Werbrich said the company refused to address the situation. On certain occasions, someone at the facility would tell Mitchell-Werbrich that they had addressed the abuse of the dogs but it turned out not to be true. She came to believe that the company was “untruthful.” She shared her experience with the girls in her troop, which prompted their interest.

     Despite their large monthly budget, A Buddy For Life spent just $877 over a three-month period for food.

     Mitchell-Werbrich said she and the girls’ parents requested a meeting with Cecil County Executive Tari Moore to discuss the incident but she did not respond to their request.

     Girl Scouts. Doing good work. Fuck that shit.

     Judge Who Called Dylann Roof’s Family ‘Victims’ Previously Made Racist Remark in Court – VICE news on the judge, previously mentioned above by Pteryxx.

     When alleged Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof appeared in court for a bond hearing on Friday, Charleston County Magistrate James Gosnell began the proceeding by declaring that Roof’s family members were also “victims” in the attack that killed nine people at the historic Emanuel AME Church.

     “There are victims on this young man’s side of the family. We must find it in our heart… to help his family as well,” Gosnell said.

     The remark triggered an immediate backlash on social media.

     It later emerged that Gosnell has a history of racist language in the courtroom.

     “There are four kinds of people in this world — black people, white people, rednecks, and n—rs,” Gosnell told a black defendant in a November 6, 2003 bond reduction hearing, according to the Daily Beast.

     After a judicial disciplinary proceeding over the comment, the South Carolina Supreme Court issued a determination in 2005. Gosnell reportedly tried to defend himself by claiming that he knew the defendant, the defendant’s father, and the defendant’s grandfather — connections that he believed made his “four kids of people” comment acceptable. The judge also claimed he first heard the comment from a black law enforcement officer.

     “[Gosnell] represents that when the defendant, an African-American, appeared in court for the bond hearing, [Gosnell] recalled a statement made to him by a veteran African American sheriff’s deputy,” the finding said.

     The court’s finding also added that, “Gosnell alleges he repeated this statement to the defendant in an ill-considered effort to encourage him to recognize and change the path he had chosen in life.”

     […]

     On Saturday, the South Carolina Supreme Court ordered a new judge in the case against Roof, announcing that Circuit Court Judge J.C. Nicholson will replace Gosnell and preside over Roof’s criminal charges.

     I hope the new judge adds charges of domestic terrorism.

     Manifesto attributed to Dylann Roof drew inspiration from hate group with local tie

     The website attributed to Roof was discovered Saturday, a day after a Charlotte TV station reported that he confessed to the Wednesday shooting during a videotaped interview with police in Shelby, N.C. The 21-year-old was arrested there a day after the church shooting that killed nine African-Americans.

     The document and photos on the site — some of them taken at several locations in the Charleston area — have not been authenticated, and it is uncertain whether Roof actually is the author. However, the document’s language is in line with what Roof’s friends say he told them and what survivors of the shooting say Roof told church members before allegedly opening fire.

     A federal law enforcement official told The Associated Press that the FBI is aware of the website and is reviewing it. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the case.

     Ashley Pennington, Roof’s court-appointed lawyer, could not be reached for comment.

     Mark Keel, head of the State Law Enforcement Division, said he’s been made aware of the document but declined to say whether SLED is investigating possible links between Roof and hate groups.

     “We’re continuing to run down leads to help Charleston police,” Keel said, adding that he is disappointed with leaked information coming from out-of-state law enforcement agencies.

     The FBI and Charleston Police Department released a joint statement Saturday night saying that investigators are aware of the website.

     “We are taking steps to verify the authenticity of these postings,” it states. Neither agency would release any more details because of the ongoing investigation.
     Web spurs racist views

     On the website, the author says his racist views stemmed from George Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012 in Florida, when Roof — a 10th-grade dropout — would have been 17 years old. The author complains about news coverage of the shooting that ignored what he terms “hundreds of these black on white murders” documented on a website run by the Council of Conservative Citizens.

     Summerville’s Rogers, the council’s webmaster and editor of its newsletter, wrote extensively about the Martin case and black-on-white crime for the website. The Southern Poverty Law Center described Rogers as a key member of the council’s new guard, using web-savvy and racist rhetoric to promote an agenda of white supremacy and societal division.

     In a 2012 interview with The Post and Courier, Rogers denied being a racist but said he supported his organization’s opposition to “all efforts to mix the races of mankind.” He also shared beliefs that black people ruin things for the rest of society and that “slaves who were taken to the United States hit the slave lottery” because they were brought to a country where they could thrive and prosper.

     On lastrhodesian.com, the author, purportedly Roof, states he visited the Council of Conservative Citizens’ website and “there were pages upon pages of these brutal black on white murders.”

     The author states, “I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on white murders got ignored?”

     The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog on Saturday was quick to link Roof’s alleged manifesto to the council and Rogers’ writings, saying “it seems the CCC media strategy was successful in recruiting Roof into the radical right.”

     The blog continues, “Before Root’s alleged manifesto was discovered, Rogers was quick to attack the Southern Poverty Law Center for our reporting on the Roof shooting. Rogers claimed ‘there is no evidence whatsoever’ of Roof being radicalized online. If authorities determine that Roof’s manifesto is authentic, Rogers’ words may well come back to haunt him.”

     After learning of the website and Roof’s connection to the Council of Conservative Citizens, the Rev. Joe Darby — an AME minister and presiding elder of the AME’s Beaufort District — said he hopes “that this manifesto is instructive to those who throw around reckless language for political gain … for votes.

     “They have to first wipe the blood from their hands,” said Darby, also first vice president of the Charleston chapter of the NAACP.

     More at the link.

     A state senator was assassinated in a church, @FBI, and that’s not the “political act” you require to fit your definition of terrorism? Yeah, that.

     Judge Who Presided Over Dylann Roof Bond Hearing Was Reprimanded for Racial Slur, that’s just more on his previous racial ‘missteps’. The article does add, though:

     An earlier version of this story was incorrect. Magistrate James Gosnell was not removed from the case. The Supreme Court ordered that a Circuit Court judge would preside over the case in the future, per standard procedure in South Carolina.

     Soooo…? I’m a bit confused.

     A Crime of Hate, a City in Mourning, and a Flag That Still Flies, audio.

     Jamil Smith, senior editor at The New Republic, discusses the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which left nine people dead and a 21-year-old white male in police custody facing hate crime charges.

     Then, Robert Chase, a professor of history at Stony Brook University and a former public historian for the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston, continues the discussion by explaining the historical significance of the church – and the Confederate flag – for the black community in Charleston and throughout the South.

     With tweets.

158. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 12:54 pm

     In comment @154, the entire last bit (incl. “what a lynch mob actually is” plus link) should be quoted, as all of that is in the original tweet. [/clarification]

     +++

     The Deeply Racist References in Dylann Roof’s Apparent Manifesto, Decoded. Some of this has appeared on the manifesto thread, so I’m not going to quote, but it goes into some detail of some of the symbolism and terms used in the ‘manifesto’.

     Bernie said “fuck a tweet” – quick collection of twitter statements from some presidential hopefuls, and Bernie Sanders’ slightly longer and more thoughtful response.

     Under Other News, Texas turns away from criminal truancy courts for students

     A long-standing Texas law that has sent about 100,000 students a year to criminal court — and some to jail — for missing school is off the books, though a Justice Department investigation into one county’s truancy courts continues.

     Gov. Greg Abbott has signed into law a measure to decriminalize unexcused absences and require school districts to implement preventive measures. It will take effect Sept. 1.

     Reform advocates say the threat of a heavy fine — up to $500 plus court costs — and a criminal record wasn’t keeping children in school and was sending those who couldn’t pay into a criminal justice system spiral. Under the old law, students as young as 12 could be ordered to court for three unexcused absences in four weeks. Schools were required to file a misdemeanor failure to attend school charge against students with more than 10 unexcused absences in six months. And unpaid fines landed some students behind bars when they turned 17.

     “Most of the truancy issues involve hardships,” state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, said. “To criminalize the hardships just doesn’t solve anything. It costs largely low-income families. It doesn’t address the root causes.”

     Only two states in the U.S. — Texas and Wyoming — send truants to adult criminal court. In 2013, Texas prosecuted about 115,000 cases, more than twice the number of truancy cases filed in juvenile courts of all other states, according to a report from the nonprofit advocacy group Texas Appleseed. An estimated $10 million was collected from court costs and fines from students for truancy in fiscal year 2014 alone, the Texas Office of Court Administration said.

     Texas Appleseed says the policies disproportionately affected low-income, Hispanic, black and disabled students. The group was also among several groups that filed a U.S. Justice Department complaint about Dallas County’s specialty truancy courts, which in 2012 prosecuted over 36,000 cases, more than any other Texas county. The Justice Department in March began looking into whether students had received due process, something spokeswoman Dena Iverson said will continue as the department evaluates the new legislation’s impact.

     In 12 of the state’s largest 15 counties, Texas Appleseed told The Associated Press, at least 1,283 teenagers were jailed for failure to attend school from January 2013 through April 2015. At least 910 of them spent at least one night in jail.

     Peyton Walker’s absences began piling up in seventh grade as she suffered from depression, anxiety and migraines, she said. After missing a court date in Dallas County truancy court at the age of 12, she said she was arrested and handcuffed at school in the Dallas suburb of Mesquite. Walker said the legal situation just made things worse.

     “It was more: No matter if I go (to school) or not, I’m going to go to court anyway,” said now 18-year-old Walker, who graduated from high school this spring. She and her mother, who is on disability, still have $2,000 in pending fines, and Walker won’t be able to get a driver’s license until they are paid.

     All past truancy convictions will be expunged under the new law. But what will happen to students’ pending fines will be up to the courts to decide, said David Slayton, executive director of the Texas Judicial Council.

     Districts will still have the option of sending students with 10 unexcused absences over six months to court, but it will be civil court, with treatment and community service among the sentencing options.

     “I feel like they need to find what is really going on before they send these students to court,” said Natasha Holloway, who has six children and spent a night in jail for failure to pay fines related to their absences.

     Her 16-year-old daughter Natod’ja Washington had about 20 unexcused absences — which she blamed on lacking a doctor’s note and school activities, among other things — when she was summoned to a Dallas County truancy court this spring. Holloway, a hair stylist, didn’t have an attorney and Googled advice on how her daughter should plead. Washington pleaded no contest and was fined $180, which her mother paid.

     Students’ fines for not completing their sentence will not exceed $100 under the new law. And though parents can still be charged with a misdemeanor under the new law, the fines are now graduated, with $100 for the first offense instead of up to $500.

     “Anything is better than what it was,” said Rose Comeaux, a single mother of four in the Houston area who has fines totaling about $2,600 for her children’s absences for reasons such as being tardy between classes, missing school during and after pregnancy and missing the bus.

     Comeaux, who earns $9 an hour working for a cable company, said she has lost out on better jobs because arrest warrants were issued for her failure to pay. Her 16-year-old daughter, Taqayisha, was fined $395 this spring for missing school after staying home with her 2-year-old when daycare fell through.

     “I know some teenagers skip school,” Comeaux said, “but some teenagers have good excuses to why they can’t attend school.”

     I don’t even see the point in criminalizing skipping school – why is that even a thing?

     And the last few thoughts from William Gibson,
     Long aware of having been raised by/among white racists, only now am I seeing that they were also, de facto, white supremacists.
     The distinction I perceived between racist and white supremacist having been part of my received culture. The WS viewed as ultra-bad, other.
     Distinction between a garden-variety racist (anyone) and the exotic skinhead nazi Klansman (movie villain) being purely one of degree.

159. rq says

     21 June 2015 at 1:01 pm

     Hillary Clinton: We can’t hide from hard truths on race. And I can’t help but feel that the Charleston church shooting will be exploited, ad nauseum, by presidential candidates… I mean, I want them to speak out, but at the same time, that line can be so blurry to some of them.

     Thank you! Thank you all so much.

     It’s great to be here with all of you. I’m looking out at the audience and seeing so many familiar faces, as well as those here up on the dais.

     I want to thank Kevin for his introduction and his leadership of this organization.

     Mayor Lee, thanks for having us in your beautiful city.

     It is for me a great treat to come back to address a group that, as you just heard, I spent a lot of time as senator working with — in great measure because of the need for buttressing Homeland Security, as well as other challenges within our cities during the eight years I served in the Senate.

     And it was always refreshing to come here because despite whatever was going on in Congress or Washington with respect to partisanship, a conference of mayors was truly like an oasis in the desert. I could come here and be reminded of what Mayor LaGuardia said, “There’s no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage. You pick it up, or you don’t pick it up.” And I loved being with people who understood that.

     I’ve learned over the years how important it is to work with city hall, to try to make sure we are connected up as partners and to get whatever the priorities of your people happen to be accomplished.

     So it pays. It pays to work with you, and I am grateful to have this opportunity to come back and see you.

     When I was Senator from New York, I not only worked with the mayor of New York City, of course, I worked with creative and committed mayors from Buffalo to Rochester to Syracuse to Albany and so many other places.

     And I was particularly happy to do so because they were always full of ideas and eager to work together to attract more high-paying jobs, to revitalize downtowns, to support our first responders, to try to close that skills gap.

     And I want you to be sure of this, whether you are a Democrat, a Republican or an Independent: If I am president, America’s mayors will always have a friend in the White House.

     Now, as I was preparing to come here, I couldn’t help but think of some of those who aren’t with us today.

     Tom Menino was a dear friend to me, and to many in this room, and I certainly feel his loss.

     Today, our thoughts are also with our friend Joe Riley and the people of Charleston. Joe’s a good man and a great mayor, and his leadership has been a bright light during such a dark time.

     You know, the passing of days has not dulled the pain or the shock of this crime. Indeed, as we have gotten to know the faces and names and stories of the victims, the pain has only deepened.

     Nine faithful women and men, with families and passions and so much left to do.

     As a mother, a grandmother, a human being, my heart is bursting for them. For these victims and their families. For a wounded community and a wounded church. For our country struggling once again to make sense of violence that is fundamentally senseless, and history we desperately want to leave behind.

     Yesterday was Juneteenth, a day of liberation and deliverance. One-hundred and fifty years ago, as news of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation spread from town to town across the South, free men and women lifted their voices in song and prayer.

     Congregations long forced to worship underground, like the first Christians, joyfully resurrected their churches.

     In Charleston, the African Methodist Episcopal Church took a new name: Emanuel. “God is with us.”

     Faith has always seen this community through, and I know it will again.

     Just as earlier generations threw off the chains of slavery and then segregation and Jim Crow, this generation will not be shackled by fear and hate.

     On Friday, one by one, grieving parents and siblings stood up in court and looked at that young man, who had taken so much from them, and said: “I forgive you.”

     In its way, their act of mercy was more stunning than his act of cruelty.

     It reminded me of watching Nelson Mandela embrace his former jailers because, he said, he didn’t want to be imprisoned twice, once by steel and concrete, once by anger and bitterness.

     In these moments of tragedy, many of us struggle with how to process the rush of emotions.

     I’d been in Charleston that day. I’d gone to a technical school, Trident Tech. I had seen the joy, the confidence and optimism of young people who were now serving apprenticeships with local businesses, Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, every background. I listened to their stories, I shook their hands, I saw the hope and the pride.

     And then by the time I got to Las Vegas, I read the news.

     Like many of you, I was so overcome: How to turn grief, confusion into purpose and action? But that’s what we have to do.

     For me and many others, one immediate response was to ask how it could be possible that we as a nation still allow guns to fall into the hands of people whose hearts are filled with hate.

     You can’t watch massacre after massacre and not come to the conclusion that, as President Obama said, we must tackle this challenge with urgency and conviction.

     Now, I lived in Arkansas and I represented Upstate New York. I know that gun ownership is part of the fabric of a lot of law-abiding communities.

     But I also know that we can have common sense gun reforms that keep weapons out of the hands of criminals and the violently unstable, while respecting responsible gun owners.

     What I hope with all of my heart is that we work together to make this debate less polarized, less inflamed by ideology, more informed by evidence, so we can sit down across the table, across the aisle from one another, and find ways to keep our communities safe while protecting constitutional rights.

     It makes no sense that bipartisan legislation to require universal background checks would fail in Congress, despite overwhelming public support.

     It makes no sense that we wouldn’t come together to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, or people suffering from mental illnesses, even people on the terrorist watch list. That doesn’t make sense, and it is a rebuke to this nation we love and care about.

     The President is right: The politics on this issue have been poisoned. But we can’t give up. The stakes are too high. The costs are too dear.

     And I am not and will not be afraid to keep fighting for commonsense reforms, and along with you, achieve those on behalf of all who have been lost because of this senseless gun violence in our country.

     But today, I stand before you because I know and you know there is a deeper challenge we face.

     I had the great privilege of representing America around the world. I was so proud to share our example, our diversity, our openness, our devotion to human rights and freedom. These qualities have drawn generations of immigrants to our shores, and they inspire people still. I have seen it with my own eyes.

     And yet, bodies are once again being carried out of a Black church.

     Once again, racist rhetoric has metastasized into racist violence.

     Now, it’s tempting, it is tempting to dismiss a tragedy like this as an isolated incident, to believe that in today’s America, bigotry is largely behind us, that institutionalized racism no longer exists.

     But despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America’s long struggle with race is far from finished.

     I know this is a difficult topic to talk about. I know that so many of us hoped by electing our first Black president, we had turned the page on this chapter in our history.

     I know there are truths we don’t like to say out loud or discuss with our children. But we have to. That’s the only way we can possibly move forward together.

     Race remains a deep fault line in America. Millions of people of color still experience racism in their everyday lives.

     Here are some facts.

     In America today, Blacks are nearly three times as likely as whites to be denied a mortgage.

     In 2013, the median wealth of Black families was around $11,000. For white families, it was more than $134,000.

     Nearly half of all Black families have lived in poor neighborhoods for at least two generations, compared to just 7 percent of white families.

     African American men are far more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms than white men, 10 percent longer for the same crimes in the federal system.

     In America today, our schools are more segregated than they were in the 1960s.

     How can any of that be true? How can it be true that Black children are 500 percent more likely to die from asthma than white kids? Five hundred percent!

     More than a half century after Dr. King marched and Rosa Parks sat and John Lewis bled, after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and so much else, how can any of these things be true? But they are.

     And our problem is not all kooks and Klansman. It’s also in the cruel joke that goes unchallenged. It’s in the off-hand comments about not wanting “those people” in the neighborhood.

     Let’s be honest: For a lot of well-meaning, open-minded white people, the sight of a young Black man in a hoodie still evokes a twinge of fear. And news reports about poverty and crime and discrimination evoke sympathy, even empathy, but too rarely do they spur us to action or prompt us to question our own assumptions and privilege.

     We can’t hide from any of these hard truths about race and justice in America. We have to name them and own them and then change them.

     You may have heard about a woman in North Carolina named Debbie Dills. She’s the one who spotted Dylann Roof’s car on the highway. She could have gone on about her business. She could have looked to her own safety. But that’s not what she did. She called the police and then she followed that car for more than 30 miles.

     As Congressman Jim Clyburn said the other day, “There may be a lot of Dylann Roofs in the world, but there are a lot of Debbie Dills too. She didn’t remain silent.”

     Well, neither can we. We all have a role to play in building a more tolerant, inclusive society, what I once called “a village,” where there is a place for everyone.

     You know, we Americans may differ and bicker and stumble and fall, but we are at our best when we pick each other up, when we have each other’s back.

     Like any family, our American family is strongest when we cherish what we have in common, and fight back against those who would drive us apart.

     Mayors are on the front lines in so many ways. We look to you for leadership in time of crisis. We look to you every day to bring people together to build stronger communities.

     Many mayors are part of the U.S. Coalition of Cities against Racism and Discrimination, launched by this conference in 2013. I know you’re making reforms in your own communities, promoting tolerance in schools, smoothing the integration of immigrants, creating economic opportunities.

     Mayors across the country also are doing all they can to prevent gun violence and keep our streets and neighborhoods safe.

     And that’s not all. Across our country, there is so much that is working. It’s easy to forget that when you watch or read the news. In cities and towns from coast to coast, we are seeing incredible innovation. Mayors are delivering results with what Franklin Roosevelt called bold and persistent experimentation.

     Here in San Francisco, Mayor Lee is expanding a workforce training program for residents of public housing, helping people find jobs who might have spent time in prison or lost their driver’s license or fallen behind in child support payments.

     South of here in Los Angeles and north in Seattle, city governments are raising the minimum wage so more people who work hard can get ahead and support their families.

     In Philadelphia, Mayor Nutter is pioneering a new approach to community policing to rebuild trust and respect between law enforcement and communities of color.

     In Houston, Louisville and Chicago, the mayors are finding new ways to help workers train and compete for jobs in advanced industries.

     Cities like Cleveland and Lexington are linking up their universities and their factories to spur a revival of manufacturing.

     In Denver and Detroit, city leaders are getting creative about how they raise funds for building and repairing mass transit.

     Providence is helping parents learn how to become their children’s first teachers, and spend more time reading, talking, and singing to their babies at critical stages of early brain development.

     Kevin Johnson, who has led both Sacramento and this conference so ably, calls this renaissance of urban innovation “Cities 3.0,” and talks about “open-source leadership” and mayors as pragmatic problem-solvers.

     That’s what we need more of in America.

     And Kevin is right, we need to reimagine the relationship between the federal government and our metropolitan areas. Top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions rarely work.

     We need what I’ll call a new Flexible Federalism that empowers and connects communities, leverages their unique advantages, adapts to changing circumstances. And I look forward to working with all of you to turn this vision into a reality.

     I’ve put Four Fights at the center of my campaign:

     First, to build an economy for tomorrow not yesterday;

     Second, to strengthen America’s families, the foundation of everything we are;

     Third, to harness all of our power, our smarts, and our values to continue to lead the world;

     And fourth, to revitalize our democracy back here at home.

     Mayors are vital for all four of these efforts. You know what it takes to make government actually work, and you know it can make a real difference in people’s lives.

     But you also know that government alone does not have the answers we seek. If we are going to re-stitch the fraying fabric of our communities, all Americans are going to have to step up. There are laws we should pass and programs we should fund and fights we should wage and win.

     But so much of the real work is going to come around kitchen tables and over bedtime stories, around office watercoolers and in factory break rooms, at quiet moments in school and at work, in honest conversations between parents and children, between friends and neighbors.

     Because fundamentally, this is about the habits of our hearts, how we treat each other, how we learn to see the humanity in those around us, no matter what they look like, how they worship, or who they love. Most of all, it’s about how we teach our children to see that humanity too.

     Andy Young is here, and I want to tell a story about him because I think it’s as timely today as it was all those years ago.

     You know, at the end of the 1950s the South was beginning to find its way into the modern economy. It wasn’t easy. There were determined leaders in both government and business that wanted to raise the standard of living and recruit businesses, make life better.

     When the closing of Central High School in Little Rock happened, and President Eisenhower had to send in federal troops to keep peace, that sent a message of urgency but also opportunity.

     I remember Andy coming to Little Rock some years later, and saying that in Atlanta when folks saw what was going on in Little Rock and saw some of the continuing resistance to enforcing civil rights laws, opening up closed doors, creating the chance for Blacks and whites to study together, to work together, to live together, Atlanta made a different decision.

     The leadership of Atlanta came together, looked out across the South and said, “Some place in the South is really going to make it big. We need to be that place.” And they adopted a slogan, “the city too busy to hate.”

     Well, we need to be cities, states and a country too busy to hate. We need to get about the work of tearing down the barriers and the obstacles, roll up our sleeves together, look at what’s working across our country, and then share it and scale it.

     As all of us reeled from the news in Charleston this past week, a friend of mine shared this observation with a number of us. Think about the hearts and values of those men and women of Mother Emanuel, he said.

     “A dozen people gathered to pray. They’re in their most intimate of communities and a stranger who doesn’t look or dress like them joins in. They don’t judge. They don’t question. They don’t reject. They just welcome. If he’s there, he must need something: prayer, love, community, something. During their last hour, nine people of faith welcomed a stranger in prayer and fellowship.”

     For those of us who are Christians, we remember the words of the scripture: “I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

     That’s humanity at its best. That’s also America at its best. And that’s the spirit we need to nurture our lives and our families and our communities.

     I know it’s not usual for somebody running for president to say what we need more of in this country is love and kindness. But that’s exactly what we need more of.

     We need to be not only too busy to hate but too caring, too loving to ignore, to walk away, to give up.

     Part of the reason I’m running for president is I love this country. I am so grateful for each and every blessing and opportunity I’ve been given.

     I did not pick my parents. I did not decide before I arrived that I would live in a middle class family in the middle of America, be given the opportunity to go to good public schools with dedicated teachers and a community that supported me and all of the other kids.

     I came of age at a time when barriers were falling for women, another benefit.

     I came of age as the Civil Rights movement was beginning to not only change laws but change hearts.

     I’ve seen the expansion of not just rights but opportunities to so many of our fellow men and women who had been left out and left behind.

     But we have unfinished business. And I am absolutely confident and optimistic we can get that done.

     I stand here ready to work with each and every one of you to support your efforts, to stand with you, to put the task of moving beyond the past at the head of our national agenda. I’m excited about what we can accomplish together.

     I thank you for what you’ve already done and I look forward to all that you will be doing in the future.

     Thank you. God bless you, and God bless America.

     That’s her speech in entirety; you can also watch the video, at the link.

     How Twitter Sleuths Found Dylann Roof’s Manifesto

     It took two independent writers working together on Twitter and $49 to make what could be one of the biggest discoveries yet in the case of Dylann Roof. In a South Carolina courtroom on Friday, Roof was charged with nine counts of murder for the killing of nine black parishioners who invited him into their Bible study group. A webpage registered under Roof’s name contains a trove of photos of the suspected killer, and a white nationalist political manifesto.

     Emma Quangel, the nom de guerre of writer and Twitter user @EMQuangel, discovered the website that appears to contain Roof’s manifesto. After I congratulated her for her investigative work, Quangel told me that she saw it as her duty. “As a communist,” Quangel said, “it is my duty and obligation to spend at least $49 to help ruin this guy’s insanity plea.”

     Roof hasn’t entered any plea yet but speculation about his motives and mental state started before he was apprehended Thursday. Some of the speculation, including from politicians and presidential candidates, has downplayed the evidence that Roof was inspired by racial animus. Equivocation about Roof’s motives happened despite reports that he told his victims, “you rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”

     Roof’s writing, if it’s conclusively authenticated, won’t stop all debate about his motives, especially among his defenders online. But it will make it harder for public figures to suggest that a racist political ideology wasn’t the primary inspiration for his crime.

     The search for Roof’s last testament online started at 8:03 Saturday morning when Twitter user @HenryKrinkle, the pen name of a political blogger, pointed his followers to records of a website registered under Roof’s name.

     Krinkle had arrived at the site, he told me, in the course of “researching this guy’s Internet trail on a number of places.”

     As one of Krinkle’s Twitter followers, Quangel followed up on the lead. She paid the $49 needed to see what lay behind the web domain. “Holy shit” she wrote in response to what she found—a website registered to Roof called “lastrhodesian.com,” a reference to Rhodesia, part of what is now the country Zimbabwe in southern Africa, where white former colonists fought a war to establish a white separatist state lasting from 1965 to 1979. Photos of Roof, which surfaced just after the shooting, showed him wearing a Rhodesian flag, a common symbol of white supremacists, on his jacket.

     And it finishes with more on the manifesto. But seriously, people on the internet were faster than the FBI? Who are they hiring?

     What Draws People to White Supremacy

     In the wake of news reports that Dylann Roof, the suspect in this week’s horrific massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, had become attracted to the ideology of white supremacy, I decided to make a visit, albeit a virtual one, to that world.

     I came away shaken by the experience.

     This is a preliminary analysis, based on visits to seven sites, a couple of them difficult to track down. I’ll write later with more detail. For now, I want to record some general impressions. Note that there are no links, no site names and no direct quotes here. As regular readers know, I am pretty nearly a First Amendment absolutist, so I don’t believe the supremacists’ message should be squelched. That doesn’t mean it’s my job to make their message easy to find.

     I recognize that there are monitoring groups that visit these sites routinely, but I didn’t want to read someone else’s analysis. I wanted to see for myself.

     The first thing to understand is that most of the sites frame their welcome to visitors not in terms of supremacy but in terms of grievance. To those who are suffering, they offer succor. To those who are outcasts, they offer an explanation: The white race is being oppressed, and is in danger of extinction. Those feelings of being left out, they suggest, are being intentionally fomented. Every other race is encouraged to celebrate itself. Whites are encouraged only to feel guilty about themselves. They are blamed, the sites say, for all the world’s ills.

     A message so framed might prove attractive to an angry and frustrated young white loner. It’s not his fault that he’s feeling isolated and hopeless, his new friends tell him. Those feelings are being imposed upon him by others. And those others, the new recruit quickly learns, should be considered the enemy.

     Here, however, things get a little murkier. Although there is much talk of war, the means are not specified. And the enemy is not always explicitly named. White liberals often come in for more vituperation than members of other races. Many of the supremacist sites insist, on their home pages, that they are not supremacist at all. They simply want for whites the same right to racial pride that others take for granted. And it isn’t their black and brown countrymen who are denying them this right — it’s other whites, the liberals.

     To the struggling, isolated, unhappy young mind, it’s probably like being welcomed into a self-help group. And like every self-help group, they offer a way out: Let’s love each other and escape the people who are dragging us down.

     But then you read on, and here comes the hate. You discover that they see whites as victims of aggression — particularly black aggression. Some of the posts are about racial preferences — that job you lost, that college that didn’t admit you — but most are about crime. They trumpet questionable statistics about how much more likely it is that a black person will kill or assault a white person than the other way around. At the same time, immigrants (presumably nonwhite) are taking jobs away from white Americans, and schools (instructed by white liberals) are teaching children the histories of every nonwhite race.

     Probe more deeply into the forums, and you will find all the racist nonsense that the Charleston shooter was allegedly shouting, right down to the claim that black men are routinely raping white women. You don’t have to search hard to find female commentators who say they joined up precisely because they had been victims of assaults by black perpetrators.

     The organizations that run these sites insist that they are not supremacists but nationalists, and one common solution to the problems they see is the establishment of a separate white nation. This nation would be based on pride, not racism. It wouldn’t undertake foreign wars or conquests, and would have no reluctance to trade with nations of other colors. But it would be free from the aggressions of nonwhites against whites.

     The details of the separate white nation are hotly debated. African-Americans would be excluded. Some say that Asians would be welcome to join, because they are not anti-white aggressors. Others cite old World War II atrocities and say no. Some insist that Latinos, too, could come along, provided that they are not Hispanic supremacists.

     Or maybe Latinos wouldn’t be welcome. A poster on one discussion thread identified himself as a white Puerto Rican of European ancestry, and asked whether he could join the white side in the race war that he and many others seem to think is right around the corner. The thread exploded in vituperation, with many discussants describing him as “the enemy” and others suggesting that he was a liar or a plant.

     So the answer to his question would seem to be no.

     At the same time, although the sites are usually described by the monitoring groups as far right (and at least one of them seems proudly to accept the title paleo-conservative), their politics are complicated. Mostly, the groups like to describe themselves as neither of the left nor of the right, but above the political fray.

     The sites often link to commentary by mainstream conservative activists, but not conservatives alone. On foreign policy, the links are more likely to be to liberals who think the U.S. bends too far toward Israel in the Middle East.

     Indeed, it is particularly instructive to examine the approach to Israel (and by extension to Jews, because the sites do not seem to draw a clear distinction). Zionists, we are told, have too much power in U.S. foreign policy. The Obama administration is shot through with them. (There are passages aplenty where writers seem to hate President Barack Obama more for what they see as his pro-Israel tilt than for the color of his skin.) The U.S. Zionists, for example, are in charge of negotiating the Iran deal, and are taking their orders from Israel — which, by the way, they describe as a genocidal state intent on destroying its peaceful Arab neighbors.

     Then there is the economy. Globalization and profit-seeking multinational corporations are destroying the middle class. Economic policies are made by and for the big banks — which, incidentally, are also run by and for greedy Jews. As is the mass media.

     The point is that the enemies of the white race are everywhere.

     All of this frightening nonsense could well prove attractive to the right kind of disaffected loner. The supremacists offer someone to love and someone to hate, along with an assurance that the problem isn’t in you, but in “them.” Whether that’s what drew Dylann Roof we’ll eventually find out. Very likely it’s drawing other unhappy young people even as you read these words.

     Well I would say Roof was beyond ‘an unhappy young person’, and if he did start out as an ‘unhappy young person’ looking for succour, he had time to unlearn the hate. Which he didn’t do.

     Claiming the #CharlestonShooting was an “attack on faith” is like claiming the Boston bombing was an attack on jogging.

160. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     21 June 2015 at 2:05 pm

     From the LA Times–
     Charleston shooter tried to kill himself during his terrorist attack on EAME Church:

     “He pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger, but it went ‘click,'” because the chamber was empty, said Kevin Singleton, the son of 59-year-old Myra Thompson.

     “His plan was never to leave that church,” Singleton said.

     Singleton said he and his family were told the story by Polly Sheppard, 69, one of two adult survivors of the massacre that left nine people dead.

     A woman who answered the telephone at Sheppard’s house Saturday refused to comment.

     Singleton, 40, a magazine publisher in Charlotte, N.C., said it appeared that Roof’s original intent was to kill the church’s well-known minister, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney.

     But when the Rev. Daniel Simmons, 74 and retired, grappled with him, he unloaded on Simmons and the others, Singleton said.

     Felicia Sanders, 57, and her granddaughter survived by pretending to be dead.

161. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     21 June 2015 at 2:55 pm

     Boca Raton police officer fired over shooting that violated department policies:

     Boca Raton Police on Friday announced they fired the officer from his job after an internal investigation into Clark’s actions found he violated at least eight department policies on the night of the Oct. 16 shooting and pursuit.

     Boca Police Chief Dan Alexander said Clark was fired because he used excessive force without authorization, falsified his report about the traffic stop, and didn’t wait for backup officers to arrive before approaching the vehicle that Simmons was driving, among other policy violations.

     Alexander said dashboard camera footage of the encounter, in addition to the findings of the department’s inquiry, didn’t match up to Clark’s account of the incident. Alexander called the event “unusual and extraordinary.”

     “I think what you can see from this is it started off in terms of poor decisions and unfortunately unraveled for the officer,” Alexander said.

     The police department informed Clark of his termination on Monday. Clark, 36, couldn’t be reached for comment late Friday despite phone calls.

     On the night of the traffic stop, Clark stopped the driver of the stolen Honda on Camino Real near Federal Highway.

     Dashboard-camera video starts at 8:54 p.m. as Officer Clark pulled up behind the Honda on south Federal Highway, waiting to turn left onto Camino Real. Clark checked the license plate of the Honda and learned the car was stolen, causing several other officers to be dispatched to help.

     But before other officers’ arrival, Clark pulled the Honda over on Camino Real.

     “With the vehicle stopped on the side of the road, Officer Clark does not wait for additional officers to order the suspect out of the vehicle in a manner consistent with training and fundamental officer safety principles,” Alexander said.

     Clark walked toward the car with his gun pointed at the driver, 27-year-old Simmons. A microphone in his police car recorded him yelling, “Hands up!” police said.

     Clark grabbed the Honda’s door and opened it slightly before it slammed closed, and Clark hit the window with his gun. That’s when the driver sped off, and Clark took several steps before firing a shot at the car, the video shows.

     Clark told a dispatcher that he fired his gun, and when asked what other crime the driver committed besides stealing the car, Clark replied it was aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer.

     In the chase that ensued, Clark reached 109.5 mph as he drove southbound on State Road A1A, then dropped down to about 80 mph to 90 mph along Hillsboro Boulevard in Deerfield Beach, according to an internal affairs report.

     The car later was found abandoned in Deerfield Beach, and Simmons had vanished, police said. Simmons was arrested about a week later on charges of fleeing and eluding and grand theft.

     Records show Simmons pleaded guilty to fleeing and eluding. He spent 98 days in jail and had his license suspended for a year. But prosecutors opted to not pursue three other criminal charges against him, records show.

     A narrative of the incident written by Clark said he tried to open the Honda’s door but it was locked.

     He said he was standing beside the car and was afraid he would be hit or severely injured based on the driver’s hand position on the wheel and the suspect reaching for what Clark thought was a weapon, Clark wrote in his narrative.

     “Fearing for my safety, I fired my weapon in an attempt to stop the threat,” he said.

     Clark was interviewed March 9 as part of the internal investigation.

162. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     21 June 2015 at 10:38 pm

     From Entertainment Weekly–
     Whoopi Goldberg submits her resume to Wes Anderson, says his movies need more people of color:

     Actually, she gave the resumé to Anderson favorite Jason Schwartzman, who was there with Adam Scott to promote their new film The Overnight and promised to give it to the director that day.

     “I want to do this right, because you know I love all the Wes Anderson movies and that you starred in like, almost all of them, and you know like from Grand Budapest Hotel and Moonrise Kingdom and you know Rushmore and all of those okay,” she said to Schwartzman in her best valley-girl accent as she handed over an actual resume. “So, I noticed there’s not a lot of folks of color and I thought I would like to give you my resume to give to Wes Anderson and just to let him know I’m available. As you see, I’ve interned on The Late Show.’”

     Goldberg is hardly the first to point out Anderson’s homogenous casts. (He typically cast the same actors, and with the exception of a few in Anderson’s recent Oscar-nominated Grand Budapest Hotel, most of them are white.)

     After the exchange Raven-Symoné cut in to let it be known that Goldberg would not do full frontal nudity, however Goldberg announced enthusiastically, “Oh I will. Oh yeah.”

163. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 12:17 am

     :D Goldberg just cracked me up. Good for her!
     I’m at work all day today (for a change) but updates continue this afternoon.

164. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 7:02 am

     A few things relevant from FtB and Canadian media. Also, I didn’t have a chance to pull up every post, but Ophelia Benson has no few posts on Charleston, in case anyone wants to take a look.

     Mano Singham first, on both Charleston and Rachel Dolezal.
     Changing racial identities;
     Can you change your race?;
     Taking aim at those who stoke the fires of racism;
     When incendiary rhetoric provokes deadly actions.

     PZ has another two up:
     That moment of triumph was a little premature;
     Minnesota has a Confederate flag on display!

165. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 7:04 am

     First, The Toronto Star:
     Racist manifesto allegedly written by Charleston murder suspect;
     Hundreds of white Charleston marchers protest racist terror near Confederate Museum;
     Mitt Romney calls on South Carolina to remove Confederate flag;
     Charleston church celebrates first Sunday service since shootings;
     Charleston gunman should be put to death, says South Carolina governor.

166. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 7:06 am

     … And the CBC, which seems to be pretty low-key, though it may just be that I missed a few articles.
     Charleston church shooting: Confederate flag belongs only in museum;
     White supremacist cited by Charleston massacre suspect donated to Republicans;
     Charleston’s ‘Mother Emanuel’ church holds 1st service since shooting.

167. Pen says

     22 June 2015 at 12:05 pm

     Hate correlates with harm

     Probably someone already brought this one?

     Association between an Internet-Based Measure of Area Racism and Black Mortality

     The study looked at the prevalence of Google searches for the usual American term of racial abuse to decide which areas are most racist. Its design doesn’t allow it to decide whether Internet culture is at all responsible for promoting racism in areas, or whether it’s simply a reflection of pre-existing situations.

     After controlling for every possible variable, black mortality is 3.6% higher in racist areas. The actual study contains all the usual caveats and statistics. Interesting points are the discussion of causal pathways: direct discrimination and/or stress (they seem to think stress could be the main factor)? Also interesting, the map of which areas seem most racist is only partly what I would have expected. It might be that it very specifically identifies racism against black people.

168. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 1:41 pm

     Pen
     Never hurts to refresh those things – even if it’s been posted, probably a good long while ago, plus doubling up on posts never hurts. Thanks!

     +++

     Grandmothers

     The part that I cannot escape, the part that haunts me, and will haunt me until my dying days, is that he killed grandmothers.

     GRANDMOTHERS.

     Can you fathom this?

     GRANDMOTHERS.

     I don’t know about your family, but in my family, grandmothers are the sacred holders of wisdom, the gentle matriarchs of discipline, the hands of balm and healing, the fair judges, the joke tellers, the story gatherers, the put-your-foot-in-this-pot-of-greens warriors, the two-step-dance choreographers, the cosmic thinkers, the intuitive scientists, the-sing-you-to-sleep songstresses, the seamstresses of the unknowable and the how-can-that-be, the makers of dollars out of fifteen cents, the mothers of all mothers, the women of all women, the sweet honey in the rock, the color purple, the phenomenal of Maya’s words.

     If his goal was to destroy me, I must admit that he did it when he killed the grandmothers.

     Why is the whole world not weeping and not on fire?

     I need a minute.

     Oklahoma City, right now at an African American Juneteenth Celebration.

     Cartoon: A confederacy of denial, by Tom Tomorrow.

     A statue downtown that was vandalized earlier is already being covered up #chsnews #CharlestonShooting – pictures of the vandalism coming up. Though I’m tempted to say ‘vandalism’.

     Was the Co-Founder of Charleston’s Emanuel Church a Victim of Racist Paranoia, Too?

     “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” That’s what gunman Dylann Storm Roof reportedly declared before murdering nine African-Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday. Some have speculated that Roof chose the historic black church—and even the date of his horrific deed—because it was co-founded by Denmark Vesey, a former slave who was hanged for planning to lead a slave revolt in Charleston on June 16, 1822.

     That’s according to some historical accounts, but Joseph Kelley’s 2013 book America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Toward Civil War, suggests that Vesey never plotted any such revolt. Instead, he may have been the victim of racist paranoia, much like the nine African-Americans whom Roof has confessed to murdering. Racism is a form of imagination, not just of domination. And across our history, whites have imagined blacks conspiring against them.

     Denmark Vesey arrived in the United States as a teenager on a slave ship in 1781. Noticing the young man’s “alertness and intelligence,” the ship captain made Vesey his cabin boy and eventually his manservant in a well-appointed Charleston home. Vesey learned to read and write English and also spoke some French, both hallmarks of high status in South Carolina’s slave community.

     Vesey’s status changed abruptly in 1799, when he won $1,500 in a local lottery. He used $600 to purchase his freedom; then he married a free woman of color named Susan, who was about 30 years his junior. And shortly after that, Denmark and Susan Vesey joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
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     The AME had been founded by Philadelphia’s Richard Allen, who resented the racism and consdescension of white Methodists. Clearly, Charleston’s two AME congregations represented a threat to white supremacy. When Allen came to preach in Charleston in 1818, 140 black congregants were arrested for violating a city ordinance against worshipping without a white person present.

     But they continued to do so in private homes like the Veseys’, where Denmark occasionally preached. Given the AME’s emphasis on the Old Testament’s Exodus tale, where God frees the Israelites, it would not be surprising if Vesey used his pulpit to denounce slavery.

     But did he plot a wide-scale rebellion? The charge dated to an 1822 conversation between two slaves in the Charleston Harbor, after they spotted a ship bearing a flag that referred to the recent slave revolts in Haiti. One of the slaves then told his master about the discussion, which led fearful South Carolina authorities to interrogate and torture the other slave. Was he aware of any Haitian-style rebellions being plotted in South Carolina?

     The anguished slave denied any such knowledge for a week, but broke after his torturers threatened to hang him. Yes, he finally said, there was a plot. But its leader was a conjurer who possessed a charm that made him “invulnerable,” the slave said.

     The authorities then interrogated several other blacks in Charleston, who initially implicated one of the state governor’s slaves. According to one informant, the governor’s slave planned to march on Charleston with an army of 4,000 and “kill all the whites.” And “when we have done with the fellows,” the leader was reported to have said, “we know what to do with the wenches.”

     We still don’t know how South Carolina officials found their way to Denmark Vesey, because he was tried in secret. But at least one slave apparently told authorities that he heard Vesey speak of a “large army from St. Domingo [that is, Haiti] and Africa,” which gives you a sense of the wild tales that were spun around him.

     Indeed, the story of Denmark Vesey embodied almost every deep fear in the racist white mind. There’s Haiti, site of the biggest slave revolt in the New World. There’s a free man of color, who by his very freedom seems to threaten white supremacy.

     Then there’s the African Methodist Episcopal Church. After Vesey and 34 other alleged conspiracists were hanged, the AME church that he attended was burned to the ground. Revived after the Civil War, it was destroyed in an earthquake in 1891 and then rebuilt yet again.

     And it retained its status as a symbol of black freedom, which might be why Dylann Roof targeted it this week. Like Denmark Vesey’s tormentors, he believed that African-Americans were plotting wanton violence against white people. For most of our history, of course, it’s been precisely the opposite. But in the racist imagination, blacks are always just a heartbeat from domination. They’re taking over the country. And they have to go.

     ‘He was my hero’: Charleston mother hails 26-year-old killed shielding victims. Heartbreaking.

     Sanders’ actions stand in stark contrast to the alleged racial animosity of his assailant. Accounts originating from the three survivors of the attack indicate that the young man remained strikingly calm as he tried to talk the shooter out of what he was about to do.

     “You don’t have to do this,” Sanders said.

     When the shooter moved to pull the trigger anyway, saying he was going to kill everyone in the room, Sanders is said to have leapt in front of the gun, putting himself between the firearm and his great aunt. He took the first bullet, but the killer reloaded and they both died.

     Sanders’ mother, Felicia Sanders, was also at the Bible studies meeting on Wednesday. She survived by playing dead.

     At Roof’s bond hearing on Friday she put the loss of her child in the most simple terms. “Tywanza is my son, but he was my hero.”

     More at the link.

169. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 1:48 pm

     Confederate statue vandalized downtown

     A Confederate monument at White Point Gardens was vandalized with graffiti.

     According to a report from Charleston police, the graffiti was discovered around 8 a.m. Sunday morning by a patrol unit as thousands gathered downtown to honor the victims killed at Emanuel AME Church.

     The words ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘This is the problem #racist’ is spray painted on the base. The vandals also called out Mayor Joe Riley and Governor Nikki Haley scrawling “Riley and Haley -Why defend this evil -This the root of our evil.”

     A couple of local men moved quickly to cover the base with a tarp but it was just as quickly uncovered by other passers-by.

     A lively debate soon followed, attracting Barry Tighe from the organization Code Pink. He wrote up his own sign that read “Take down racist statues” and it was followed by a local man’s sign that read “All lives matter #CharlestonUnited.”

     “If you’re not here to help Charleston, pray for Charleston, bring Charleston together, then why are you here?” asked Xavier Rosado.

     Tighe and one of his colleagues are from Washington D.C. They said they came to the Holy City to attend the service at Emanuel AME Church. Medea Benjamin said they were on their way home when they saw the statue and decided to stop.

     “There’s nothing divisive or violent about saying ‘Take down that evil symbol’ or ‘Take down that evil symbol in front of the Statehouse that IS divisive,” said Tighe. “This is a divisive statue, not our argument to take this down.”

     “We’re trying to bring Charleston together,” said Rosado. “We don’t need people like him (Tighe) breaking it apart.”

     A spokesperson from the mayor’s office said clean-up of the statue started Sunday night by an outside vendor contracted by the city.

     The process will “take a couple of days” because the chemicals used need to set for several hours.

     There is not an estimated cost for clean-up at this time, nor a completion window.
     The monument, “To the Confederate Defenders of Charleston – Fort Sumter,” was placed in the southeast corner of White Point Garden by The United Daughters of the Confederacy.

     Sunday am before the Confederate Defenders of Charleston memorial was covered up #CNN #CharlestonShooting

     The Council Of Conservative Citizens: Dylann Roof’s Gateway Into The World Of White Nationalism

     Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof’s manifesto cited the hate group Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) as his gateway into the world of white nationalism. The CCC is the modern reincarnation of the old White Citizens Councils, which were formed in the 1950s and 1960s to battle school desegregation in the South.

     For decades, this racist group has had the ear of a number of prominent politicians, both state and federal, many of whom were members of the group and/or attended events put on the by CCC –a group that has referred to African Americans as a “retrograde species of humanity.”

     In 1998, a scandal erupted over prominent Southern politicians’ ties to the brazenly racist group. After it was revealed that former Congressman Bob Barr (R-Ga.) gave the keynote speech at the CCC’s 1998 national convention and that then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) had spoken to the group five times, both claimed they knew nothing about the CCC. As evidence of widespread association between Southern GOP officeholders and the CCC mounted, Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson took the unusual step in 1998 of asking party members to resign from the group because of its racist views. But six years later, many Southern lawmakers were still pandering to and meeting with the CCC — and still pleading ignorance. According to a 2004 Intelligence Report review of the Citizens Informer, no fewer than 38 federal, state and local elected officials had attended CCC events between 2000 and 2004, most of them giving speeches to local chapters of the hate group.

     Since the mid-2000’s the groups influence and access to politicians has dwindled considerably. In South Carolina, some influential CCC figures remain actively involved in the politics at the state level.

     Roan Garcia-Quintana is one of these characters. Garcia-Quintana is a lifetime member of the CCC and sits on the organization’s board. Despite these associations, the Cuban-born white nationalist has remained very active in the state politics. Garcia-Quintana ran for the South Carolina state Senate’s District 7 seat as the Republican nominee in 2008 and came in second with 27 percent of the vote. Garcia-Quintana also sat on S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley’s campaign re-election steering committee, before he was forced to resign in 2013 after his ties to the CCC were made public. In comments after his resignation from Haley’s committee, he went on to talk about her physical characteristics (she is the daughter of Indian immigrants) in relation to white people. “She has the features of a Caucasian: her nose, her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth. That’s really how you describe it.”

     CCC webmaster, white nationalist Kyle Rogers, is another South Carolina-based CCC member who was active in state politics until recently. Rogers served as a delegate to the Charleston County Republican convention in 2007, and Dorchester County, S.C., GOP officials confirmed to SPLC in 2013 that he was a member of that county’s Republican Executive Committee. Republican politicians there expressed embarrassment about Rogers’ participation, saying they had asked him to resign but were unable legally to eject him. Rogers also manages a flag store, Patriotic-Flags.com, which you can visit by clicking an ad on the CCC website. Rogers’ store sells the flag of the government of Rhodesia, the same flag sewn on the jacket worn by Roof in his Facebook profile.

     In the hours since the authorization of Dylann Roof’s manifesto, the CCC website has crashed and the group is remaining tight-lipped. The longtime CCC leader Gordon Baum died earlier this year and the CCC are yet to name his successor. That individual is going to have to answer to that fact that the hate group was named by Roof, a man who murdered nine African Americans on Wednesday, as the group that acted as his gateway to white nationalism.

     Here’s the racial joke the Israeli interior minister’s wife tweeted about Obama – racial or racist?

     Though she quickly deleted and apologized for the tweet, this is not the first time she’s gotten herself on trouble on Twitter. And this comes in a period of animus between the Israeli and US governments that can seem intensely personal, and from the Israeli side focused at times on Obama’s background.

     In March 2012, for example, Nir-Mozes tweeted in response to rocket fire coming from Gaza, “I hope that today they decide to destroy Gaza if they don’t stop shooting. Let them suffer as well.”

     A few months later, when her husband’s own Twitter feed was taken over by pro-Hamas hackers, she tweeted, “The murderers have taken over Silvan’s Facebook, Twitter and email. Our son Nimrod is trying to salvage. I wish they would die!” The fallout ended with Nir-Mozes leaving her honorary position with the United Nations Children’s Fund.

     There is an odd tendency among some elements of the Israeli political right, which currently holds power there, to reference President Obama’s race and heritage when explaining frays in US-Israeli ties.

     Online manifesto linked to Charleston suspect Dylann Roof shows evolving views on race. I would say ‘devolving’ but I am not a journalist.

     The 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black Florida teenager, apparently marked a turning point for Roof, fueling his obsession with racial issues. The website also reflects the strong influence of a white nationalist group called the Council of Conservative Citizens.

     One of the photos shows a seated Roof, wearing camouflage pants and holding an automatic pistol. In another, he stands shirtless, slender and pale, pointing the gun at the camera.

     “To take a saying from my favorite film, ‘Even if my life is worth less than a speck of dirt, I want to use it for the good of society,’” said the text on the website, which has been taken down. Roof apparently was referring to the 2011 Japanese movie “Himizu” — the story, according to the film site IMDb, of two youths in post-earthquake Japan who “embark on a campaign of violence against evil-doers.”

     The text went on: “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

     Racist: Black person pointing out systemic pro-white bias in US society. Not racist: White guy shooting 9 black people. #CharlestonShooting

170. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 1:56 pm

     It is important for ALL ppl to study the Soweto Uprising to see how power can be reclaimed by those who have had enough!
     The Soweto Uprising (16 June 1976) was one of the most important modern rebellions anywhere in the world.

     Soweto Uprising 1976.

     White Terrorism Is as Old as America

     My grandmother used to speak of Klansmen riding through Louisiana at night, how she could see their white robes shimmering in the dark, how black people hid in bayous to escape them. Before her time, during Reconstruction, Ku Klux Klan members believed they could scare superstitious black people out of their newly won freedom. They wore terrifying costumes but were not exactly hiding — many former slaves recognized bosses and neighbors under their white sheets. They were haunting in masks, a seen yet unseen terror. In addition to killing and beating black people, they often claimed to be the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers.

     You could argue, of course, that there are no ghosts of the Confederacy, because the Confederacy is not yet dead. The stars and bars live on, proudly emblazoned on T-shirts and license plates; the pre-eminent symbol of slavery, the flag itself, still flies above South Carolina’s Capitol. The killing has not stopped either, as shown by the deaths of nine black people in a church in Charleston this week. The suspected gunman, who is white and was charged with nine counts of murder on Friday, is said to have told their Bible-study group: “You rape our women, and you are taking over our country. And you have to go.”

     Media outlets have been reluctant to classify the Charleston shooting as terrorism, despite how eerily it echoes our country’s history of terrorism. American-bred terrorism originated in order to restrict the movement and freedom of newly liberated black Americans who, for the first time, began to gain an element of political power. The Ku Klux Klan Act, which would in part, lawmakers hoped, suppress the Klan through the use of military force, was one of America’s first pieces of antiterrorism legislation. When it became federal law in 1871, nine South Carolina counties were placed under martial law, and scores of people were arrested. The Charleston gunman’s fears — of black men raping white women, of black people taking over the country — are the same fears that were felt by Klansmen, who used violence and intimidation to control communities of freed blacks. […]

     I’m always struck by this hesitance not only to name white terrorism but to name whiteness itself during acts of racial violence. In a recent New York Times article on the history of lynching, the victims are repeatedly described as black. Not once, however, are the violent actors described as they are: white. Instead, the white lynch mobs are simply described as “a group of men” or “a mob.” In an article about racial violence, this erasure of whiteness is absurd. The race of the victims is relevant, but somehow the race of the killers is incidental. If we’re willing to admit that race is a reason blacks were lynched, why are we unwilling to admit that race is a reason whites lynched them? In his remarks following the Charleston shooting, President Obama mentioned whiteness only once — in a quotation from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. intended to encourage interracial harmony. Obama vaguely acknowledged that “this is not the first time that black churches have been attacked” but declined to state who has attacked these churches. His passive language echoes this strange vagueness, a reluctance to even name white terrorism, as if black churches have been attacked by some disembodied force, not real people motivated by a racist ideology whose roots stretch past the founding of this country.

     I understand the comfort of this silence. If white violence is unspoken and unacknowledged, if white terrorists are either saints or demons, we don’t have to grapple with the much more complicated reality of racial violence. In our time, racialized terror no longer announces itself in white hoods and robes. You can be a 21-year-old who has many black Facebook friends and tells harmless racist jokes and still commit an act of horrifying racial violence. We cannot separate ourselves from the monsters because the monsters don’t exist. The monsters have been human all along.

     In America’s contemporary imagination, terrorism is foreign and brown. Those terrorists do not have complex motivations. We do not urge one another to reserve judgment until we search through their Facebook histories or interview their friends. We do not trot out psychologists to analyze their mental states. We know immediately why they kill. But a white terrorist is an enigma. A white terrorist has no history, no context, no origin. He is forever unknowable. His very existence is unspeakable. We see him, but we pretend we cannot. He is a ghost floating in the night.

     Charleston: The terrible questions awaiting answers, with video.

     How, in 2015, could nine people attending a Bible study group be gunned down inside this historic black church in Charleston?

     Soon, the strange and awful story began to unfold of the young white man who sat for an hour with his victims before he shot them, reportedly uttering racial slurs and saying, “I had to do it.”

     OK, another mass shooting … another lone wolf gunman … another Aurora … another Newtown.

     Or was this something different?

     An ugly echo of the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four little girls were killed.

     “These churches were both targeted because they were used by black people,” said Mark Kelly Tyler, senior pastor at Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.

     “You say this young man is 21. I mean, 21? My God. He was born, you know, after the Huxtables. How do you get this about black people at 21 years old, except that somebody purposely teaches you this, and that this spirit and this mentality is still alive and is still out here in the atmosphere?”

     Yesterday a website surfaced showing photographs of Dylann Roof posing with a gun and burning the American flag. It includes a white supremacist manifesto. The writer says, “I was not raised in a racist home or environment,” but spews hatred for blacks, Hispanics and Jews, and says, “I chose Charleston because it is the most historic city in my state.”

     The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church — Mother Emanuel — might as well have had a bull’s-eye painted on it.
     […]

     Symbols of black power, black churches have often been targets. More than 300 were bombed in the 1960s.

     But weren’t we supposed to be past all that?

     In Chicago on the night Barack Obama was elected president, there was a sea of jubilant people, black and white. “I think a lot of people thought that was a turning point, that we had reached a post-racial America,” said Teichner.

     “I think that those people were fooling themselves,” said Jamil Smith, a senior editor at the New Republic. “The people in that crowd, celebrating, understood what a pivotal moment that this was, that Barack Obama — as a symbol — offered a lot of hope. But that said, it certainly didn’t make racism go away.”

     According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted in May during the unrest in Baltimore following the death in police custody of Freddie Gray, 61 percent of Americans — the highest percentage since 1992 — believe race relations in the United States are bad, up from just 38 percent in February.

     So does the race factor make the Mother Emanuel killings different from Adam Lanza’s massacre of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut? Should this latest incident instead be seen alongside the police shootings of black men, including Walter Scott in North Charleston, a few miles away, in April? […]

     “I don’t think that this tragedy is about the gun debate, personally, I don’t,” said AME pastor Tyler. “The Birmingham bombing, for example, it wasn’t a gun. It was a bomb.

     “It’s just eerie how all of these things, you talk about then and now, seem to kind of mirror those moments. So is it a turning point? I’ll simply say this: I hope that their lives have not been lost in vain, I really do. It’s already a tragedy, but it would be even more a tragedy if nothing good comes out of it.”

     Charleston, South Carolina, is known as the “holy city,” because of all of its churches. After Wednesday’s shooting, there may have been anger, but there was no violence — only people gathered together, peacefully, to mourn and pray.

     Most notable thing overheard outside Emanuel A.M.E. “Forgiveness has to be earned.” #AMEShooting #Charleston

171. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 2:01 pm

     Currently under ‘Other News’, Pasco officer resigns four months after deadly shooting

     One of the three Pasco police officers who shot at Antonio Zambrano-Montes has resigned.

     Ryan Flanagan’s resignation is effective July 2, said Pasco City Manager Dave Zabell.

     Flanagan — along with officers Adam Wright and Adrian Alaniz — has been on paid leave since Zambrano-Montes died during the Feb. 10 confrontation.

     The Mexican national, 35, was acting erratically and threw at least one rock at officers just before he was shot. Officers fired a total of 17 shots.

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     Kennewick attorney Scott Johnson, who represents Flanagan, said Friday the resignation was voluntary.

     “He had a job opportunity come up, and he just thought it was probably a good time to make that transition,” Johnson said. Flanagan will work in the local building industry.

     “It’s unfortunate that an officer felt he had to give up his career for what occurred,” said Police Chief Bob Metzger. “We’ll certainly miss him as an officer with the department and we wish him well in the future.”

     Many have called for the officers to be criminally charged, while community members, Tri-City groups and the state American Civil Liberties Union want the Pasco Police Department to be federally investigated.

     Shelby police chief describes arrest of Charleston shooting suspect

     Citing anonymous sources, the Washington Post said Roof showed no remorse and expressed racist views even as he confessed to the crimes. Relying on its own unnamed source, WBTV, the Observer’s news partner, said Roof told authorities he was on his way to Nashville, Tenn., and that he thought he’d killed only a few of the parishioners at Emanuel AME Church. Witnesses say the prayer group had asked him to join them. After he began shooting, Roof reportedly said, “I’ll give you something to pray about.”

     In Shelby, the FBI handled Roof’s initial questioning, Ledford said. Shelby police’s lone conversation with the mass-murder suspect was about food. Earlier in the day, Roof had bought water and chips at a south Charlotte gas station. Now he was hungry. Police bought him food from a nearby Burger King, Ledford said.

     “He was very quiet, very calm. He didn’t talk,” Ledford said. “He sat down here very quietly. He was not problematic.”

     Not problematic. I suppose being a mass murderer is not problematic, as long as you submit quietly and politely after the fact.
     And eat your fucking Burger King.

     Huckabee: ‘One Racist Lunatic’ Doesn’t Mean The Confederate Flag Is Problematic

     Amid widespread calls to take down the Confederate flag that flies outside the South Carolina statehouse, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday morning that he does not think presidential candidates should talk about it.

     “I still think it’s not an issue for a person running for president,” Huckabee said. “Everyone’s being baited with this question as if somehow that has anything to do whatsoever with running for president.”

     The flag has come to attention recently, after a white gunman shot and killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, last week. Pictures posted online show the alleged shooter, Dylann Roof, posing with a gun and a Confederate flag. The flag is widely considered a symbol of racism.

     “I don’t think [the American people] want us to weigh in on every little issue in all 50 states that might be an important issue to the people of that state but not on the desk of the president,” Huckabee said.

     On Saturday evening, hundreds of people reportedly gathered outside the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina, to rally for the flag’s removal.

     Shoot 9 people police buy you @BurgerKing. Black man leaves @BurgerKing gets pulled over. Gets shot by the police.

     Protip: elect a black person so you can do racist shit without criticism. See attached tweet, too.

     2 African American SC Hwy Patrol troopers assigned to protect base of SC Confederate flag #thestate
     Read that and let it sink in. Really sink in. Really sink in.

172. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 2:28 pm

     Texas firefighter sacked after congratulating the #CharlestonShooting suspect for killing nine black churchgoers

     Former East Texas firefighter Kurtis Cook allegedly posted the racist message onto the South Carolina newspaper’s Facebook page in response to the tragedy at Charleston Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Wednesday night.

     “He [Dylann Roof] needs to be praised for the good deed he has done,” he wrote.

     Mr Cook sparked a Mabank Fire Department investigation and uproar amongst social media users. The department quickly announced it would review the allegations.

     “The Mabank Fire Department Command Staff is in the process of investigating the allegations being made of Firefighter Kurtis Cook. The Command Staff wants the public to know that the MFD takes these allegations seriously and will take the appropriate actions.”

     And nearly one hour later, the MFD released a second statement confirming Mr Cook’s termination.

     “As of 11.23 hrs, after an investigation in the allegations being made of Firefighter Kurtis Cook, the Mabank Fire Department Command Staff has terminated Kurtis Cook as a volunteer Firefighter permanently and has trespassed him from all Mabank Fire Department property.”

     “The Mabank Fire Department does not condone nor promote these type of actions or thoughts. On behalf of all members, the Mabank Fire Department offers our deepest apologies to all that were offended by his actions and comments.”

     How Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church Triggered White Southern Militarism – that headline seems to have a rather distinct… edge of victim-blaming.

     “There is no greater coward,” Cornell William Brooks, president of the N.A.A.C.P, declared in a statement, “than a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people engaged in the study of scripture.”

     This experience is unfortunately far from new: While black churches have long been seen as a powerful symbol of African-American community, they have also served as a flashpoint for hatred from those who fear black solidarity, and as a result these edifices have been the location for many of our nation’s most egregious racial terrorist acts.

     Further, the very spot of land on which the Emanuel Church is built has witnessed much of this sobering history. In the summer of 1822, white residents of Charleston discovered that one of their worst fears had come true: a slave conspiracy to rise against their masters and slaughter all white residents was afoot in the city. The accused ringleader, Denmark Vesey, was a former slave who had been a free carpenter in Charleston for two decades. His insurrection was supposedly planned to take place on July 14—Bastille Day. Once the plot was uncovered, however, authorities were swift with retaliation: 131 men were charged with conspiracy, 67 were convicted, and 35, including Vesey, were hanged. While historians today debate the extent of the conceived rebellion, the event proved formidable in confirming southern angst over an “internal enemy,” and white supremacists knew they had to respond quickly and violently.

     More at the link, but I have to tone-troll – not a fan of the victim-blame-y tone. I may just be hearing things, though.

     Hear, warm your heart for a little bit: Local program helped Father of the Year winner become a better parent

     The Fathers’ Support Center is an organization that helps fathers become responsible parents. This year’s Father of the Year recipient, Maurice Spight, said he became the father he is today through the Family Formation program. Spight faced a mountain of obstacles in his life, unemployment, near homelessness, a troubled marriage, and very poor connections to his children. But he knew he wanted something better for his children.

     Why British coverage of Charleston wasn’t racist

     Nine people shot dead in church. “America’s Shame,” cries the Indy. Racism or terrorism? That’s one media debate. But there’s another – in Britain at least – as critics note some papers (the Telegraph and Times among them) didn’t exactly clear their front pages over Charleston. Because the victims were black? Because of some lurking racism?

     Try a much simpler reason. American mass gun atrocities are two a penny. Even Obama can’t stop them. They come and they bloodily go. American society shrugs them off. The 24-hour cable news cycle in a faraway land moves on to the next set of gory pictures. Big news, remember, is something different. But Charleston is and was just the same.

     Okay.

     I’m not here for the “it’s easy to get a gun” discussion either. They used to kill us WITH ROPE. The weapon isn’t the problem.

     DEVELOPING: @ChasCoSheriff says bomb unit is investigating suspicious package at Cannon Detention Center. #chsnews A lot of bomb threats lately.

173. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 2:33 pm

     Emanuel AME Church Opens Doors for Sunday Worship

     If Dylann Roof’s goal was to halt worship at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., it did not work. The church held service Sunday after police say Roof shot and killed nine people, including the beloved pastor, at the historically Black church last week in an effort to start a race war, according to CNN.

     The church was cordoned off as a crime scene after the Wednesday shooting until Charleston police released it Saturday, the report says. Roof, 21, of Lexington, South Carolina, reportedly admitted to police that he shot and killed the people he’d sat with for Bible study at the historically black church.

     The church’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, was one of the victims. The Rev. Norvel Goff, presiding elder of Emanuel AME, told CNN he will give the sermon at the service, the report says.

     Other churches will remember the victims as well, notes the report. At 10 a.m. Sunday, many churches plan to ring their bells, and Sunday night, a unity chain will be held on the 13,200-foot-long Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge in Charleston. Organizers hope to attract enough people to hold hands and stretch from Charleston to the town of Mount Pleasant on the other side of the Cooper River, the report says.

     Arizona sheriff sending armed posse into black churches – to the comfort of many. :P

     A sheriff on trial, accused of harassing some members of a minority community, will send armed volunteer posse members into 60 black churches Sunday in response to the racially motivated attack in South Carolina earlier this week.

     Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who already is under federal supervision because of a ruling two years ago that his office racially profiled Hispanics in its traffic and immigration patrols, is scheduled to go to trial in August in a separate lawsuit alleging additional discrimination against Latinos.

     He said the Rev. Jarrett Maupin, who describes himself as a Progressive Baptist preacher and civil-rights campaigner on his Facebook page, asked him to provide the protection because he was worried about problems with white supremacists in the area.

     “I am the elected sheriff of this county. He asked me to help, and I’m going to help,” Arpaio said Friday.

     Charleston’s inescapable history: The city’s police department began as a slave patrol — not just to guard against rebellion, but …
     … to enforce laws prohibiting educating slaves. (A master couldn’t be arrested for killing a slave. But he could for educating one.)

     Officers. Emanuel AME. #CharlestonShooting

     Attendees are many and diverse, so much so that in one pew you have conservative @RickSantorum and activist @deray.

174. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 2:40 pm

     Missouri group named in manifesto possibly penned by Charleston mass murder suspect

     Those who monitor extremist groups said the writer’s description of coming across the council’s website is significant, if indeed he is Roof.

     “It’s a very important piece of the overall equation,” said Devin Burghart, vice president of the Kansas City-based Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. “According to the manifesto, it was his entry point into the depths of white nationalism. It’s what changed him from being an ordinary racist to being a white nationalist killer.

     “This is probably the clearest example that we’ve had in years of someone saying, ‘Here is how it happened.’ It also shows that he was deeply mired in white nationalism. It’s not somebody who just had a surface understanding of this stuff. He was very deeply involved.”

     The organization was included in a series of articles The Star wrote this year about domestic terrorism.

     The group’s website appeared to be down Saturday.

     The Council of Conservative Citizens is the descendant of the White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, which organized opposition to the civil rights movement in the South. The group opposes affirmative action, quotas, race-mixing and immigration and has fought to preserve displays of the Confederate flag in southern states.

     Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article25073398.html#storylink=cpy

     So yeah, the CCC. It’s kinda funny, there’s a shoe store here called ‘CCC’ and I keep doing double-takes.

     Dylann Roof racist manifesto: What’s known about his motives (+video), Christian Science Monitor.

     DeRay Mckesson at centre of #GoHomeDeray Twitter storm. Yeah, that hashtag trended in the US, apparently. Post-racial, y’all.

     A prominent young civil rights campaigner was targeted in a divisive spat on social media, after joining crowds mourning the shooting deaths of nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina this week.

     The appearance at gatherings in the South Carolina city of DeRay Mckesson – who has played a prominent role in the national race relations debate sparked by a police shooting in Ferguson last summer – and his comments on social media about race and the Charleston shooting sparked a hostile “hashtag” on Twitter: #GoHomeDeray.

     On Sunday the subject was popular enough to be trending. It was not immediately possible to establish who generated the hashtag, which prompted race-tinged comments and then a backlash from users accusing those speaking positively about the hashtag of acting out of hatred. Other commenters praised Mckesson for having the power to rile those posting racist messages sufficiently to cause the hashtag to trend.

     “I wouldn’t be here [in Charleston] if those people had not been killed,” Mckesson told CNN when asked about #GoHomeDeray, referring to the church shooting.

     On Twitter, he said: “I continue to talk about race because race continues to impact my life and the lives of those who look like me. I’m not the enemy, racism is.” […]

     The increasingly heated Twitter exchanges included a post that appeared to show pictures of local businesses with anti-DeRay messages spelled out on public display boards, although the veracity of the images could not immediately be established.

     One carried the message: “The people of South Carolina have spoken.” Another post accused Mckesson of leading a “rent-a-mob”.

     Supporters hit back, telling the campaigner they were behind him and the trending hashtag was a compliment to the power of his voice.

     A Texas minister set himself on fire and died to ‘inspire’ justice – trigger warning for content.

     The Tyler Morning Telegraph obtained a copy of the suicide note from Grand Saline police. In it, Moore lamented past racism in Grand Saline and beyond. He called on the community to repent and said he was “giving my body to be burned, with love in my heart” for those who were lynched in his home town as well as for those who did the lynching, hoping to address lingering racism.

     In his letters, obtained by The Washington Post, he called his death an act of protest. He said he felt that after a lifetime of fighting for social justice, he needed to do more.

     “I would much prefer to go on living and enjoy my beloved wife and grandchildren and others,” he wrote, “but I have come to believe that only my self-immolation will get the attention of anybody and perhaps inspire some to higher service.”

     Those who knew him call it a tragedy.

     “It would have been nice to have had some sort of counseling, somebody to point out that his life had mattered, that he hadn’t failed,” Renfro told the United Methodist News Service. “He had done plenty.”

     Moore had gone on a two-week hunger strike in the 1990s to move the United Methodist Church to remove discriminatory language against homosexuals. While working with the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, he stood vigil in front of George W. Bush’s governor’s mansion to protest more than 100 executions. He served in the slums of India, Africa and the Middle East.

     Moore had “a conviction that if the Bible stood for anything, it stood for radical inclusiveness,” the Rev. Sid Hall, a former colleague, told the Dallas Morning News. “If you ever were on the side of powerlessness, if you were ever on the margins yourself and were looking for someone to help you, Charles was the person.”

     But for Moore, it wasn’t enough.

     More at the link.

     There are a few thousand people crossing the bridge in the city-sponsored unity march. Charleston.

     Statement from @ellington_b on ceremony w/ @ChuckBasye47 that saluted Confederate flag #moleg In short, disheartening to see, misguided ceremony, confederate flag is a symbol of hate and racism is real. Invitation for Basye to confront racism.

175. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 2:46 pm

     One comment in moderation.
     Hillary Clinton to make campaign stop in Ferguson area on Tuesday. Will she shake Knowles’ hand? Will she acknowledge protestors? NOBODY KNOWS!

     Hillary Clinton is planning to visit the Ferguson, Missouri, area on Tuesday and deliver remarks in the shadow of a city scarred by the fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old by a white police officer.

     The Democratic presidential contender is due to make a campaign stop in Florissant, a suburb of St Louis that neighbors Ferguson, where the death of Michael Brown last August led to months of protests and reopened a national debate on race and criminal justice.

     She will speak and appear with community leaders at Christ the King church, which is led by black clergy, according to a draft schedule seen by the Guardian. The Rev Traci Blackmon, the church’s pastor, is a member of the Ferguson commission, a taskforce established by the Missouri governor, Jay Nixon, to tackle the unrest prompted by Brown’s death.

     Clinton has been forthright in discussing disparities in the US, saying last week the country must discuss its “long struggle with race”. Her remarks on Tuesday are expected to focus on youth employment.

     Florissant shares a school district with Ferguson and has come under similar criticism for its criminal justice system, which is accused of disproportionately penalizing poor and African American communities over minor offences.

     Details of the event were provided to the Guardian by Pastor Karen Anderson of Florissant’s Ward Chapel AME church, who is scheduled to co-host Clinton with Rev Blackmon.

     Anderson, a prominent figure in efforts by regional clergy to embrace young civil rights activists, said the event’s proximity to Ferguson was intentional and that several protesters were being invited back to Christ the King, where several early meetings were held following Brown’s death.

     “We want to discuss issues with Secretary Clinton that are primary to our community,” said Anderson. “We want to talk about economic disparity, the school-to-prison pipeline, issues with court reform and law enforcement reform.”

     Anderson said one activist due to be invited was Rasheen Aldridge, the youngest member of the Ferguson commission, who was part of a delegation of young black activists to meet Obama in the Oval Office last year.

     “We have a huge problem about race in this country and we haven’t tackled the root – we’re continuing to knock on branches,” Aldridge said on Monday. “We want Secretary Clinton to look at the problems causing oppression and discrimination and tell the truth about them.”

     Clinton’s campaign is attempting to recreate a coalition of young, female and minority voters that twice carried Barack Obama to victory. While some activists are skeptical of her attention to black voters, others have described it as encouraging.

     The former secretary of state used her first major campaign address to call for a radical overhaul of the US criminal justice system. In the April speech Clinton was blunt about the issues: “We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.”

     So hey. You want to know how it feels to be a POC writing SF? Getting taken off a SF panel to get put on a diversity one. Yay us.

     Lemn Sissay announced as next University of Manchester Chancellor, a small good news from the UK.

     The 150,000 electorate – comprising University staff, registered alumni and members of the General Assembly – chose the award-winning poet from a shortlist of three nominees, which also included Hallé Music Director Sir Mark Elder and former Cabinet minister and Labour peer Lord [Peter] Mandelson.

     The election of a new ceremonial figurehead for the University followed the completion of the seven-year tenure of current Chancellor, Tom Bloxham MBE, the founder of Manchester-based property development company Urban Splash. Lemn will take up his new role on 1 August and an installation ceremony will take place at the University in October.

     Lemn is an associate artist at the Southbank Centre, patron of the Letterbox Club and fellow of the Foundling Museum. He is also the author of a series of books of poetry, alongside articles, records, radio documentaries, public art, and plays.

     University President and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, said: “The Chancellor of the University, while a ceremonial office, brings with it significant ambassadorial responsibilities in helping to promote the University’s achievements worldwide, which Tom has done with enthusiasm and dedication throughout his time in office.

     “I would like to pay tribute to Tom for his tremendous work over the past seven years and thank all three candidates in the election to be his successor for their interest in the Chancellorship.

     “Each one of the nominees had excellent credentials and would have made a fine ambassador for the University.

     “My warm and sincere congratulations go to Lemn on his election to be our next Chancellor. I look forward to welcoming him to the University community and working with him to promote our ambitious plans over the coming years.”

     Lemn said: “Reach for the top of the tree and you may get to the first branch but reach for the stars and you’ll get to the top of the tree. My primary aim is to inspire and be inspired.

     “I am proud to be Chancellor of this fantastic University and extremely grateful to everyone who voted for me.”

     Apparently there is not actually a confederate flag flying in Charleston. See also attached tweet.

     The n-word was a regular feature in Lyndon B. Johnson’s conversations. http://youtu.be/r1rIDmDWSms
     That’s an intro into the presidential use of the n-word that has suddenly become a thing.

176. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 2:54 pm

     Obama uses N-word, says we are ‘not cured’ of racism

     President Barack Obama used the n-word during an interview released Monday to make a point that there’s still plenty of room for America to combat racism.

     “Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say n*gg*r in public,” Obama said in an interview for the podcast “WTF with Marc Maron.”

     “That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”

     The jarring comment comes as the nation is engaged in a debate over the role of race after a white supremacist killed nine African-Americans last week in a historically black church in Charleston. They also reflect a growing willingness for Obama to discuss race during the final years of his presidency.

     Obama said there has been progress on race relations over the decades, citing his own experience as a young man who was born to a white mother and an African father.

     “I always tell young people, in particular, do not say that nothing has changed when it comes to race in America, unless you’ve lived through being a black man in the 1950s or ’60s or ’70s. It is incontrovertible that race relations have improved significantly during my lifetime and yours,” Obama said.

     But he added that “the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination” exists in institutions and casts “a long shadow and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on.”

     The White House released a statement saying that this is not the first time the President has used the N-word. “Truth is he uses the term about a dozen times in Dreams from my Father,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz said.

     And as noted on twitter, he’s something like the 44th president to use the term while in office. Big deal. … Right?

     Secret World War II Chemical Experiments Tested Troops By Race, with audio.

     As a young U.S. Army soldier during World War II, Rollins Edwards knew better than to refuse an assignment.

     When officers led him and a dozen others into a wooden gas chamber and locked the door, he didn’t complain. None of them did. Then, a mixture of mustard gas and a similar agent called lewisite was piped inside.

     “It felt like you were on fire,” recalls Edwards, now 93 years old. “Guys started screaming and hollering and trying to break out. And then some of the guys fainted. And finally they opened the door and let us out, and the guys were just, they were in bad shape.”

     Edwards was one of 60,000 enlisted men enrolled in a once-secret government program — formally declassified in 1993 — to test mustard gas and other chemical agents on American troops. But there was a specific reason he was chosen: Edwards is African-American.

     “They said we were being tested to see what effect these gases would have on black skins,” Edwards says.

     An NPR investigation has found evidence that Edwards’ experience was not unique. While the Pentagon admitted decades ago that it used American troops as test subjects in experiments with mustard gas, until now, officials have never spoken about the tests that grouped subjects by race.

     For the first time, NPR tracked down some of the men used in the race-based experiments. And it wasn’t just African-Americans. Japanese-Americans were used as test subjects, serving as proxies for the enemy so scientists could explore how mustard gas and other chemicals might affect Japanese troops. Puerto Rican soldiers were also singled out.

     More at the link.

     Social Media Hatemongers Create #GoHomeDeRay Directed Toward Activist DeRay McKesson During Visit to Charleston, SC

     They say an idle mind is the devil’s playground, but couple that with racism and social media and you have the hashtag #GoHomeDeRay, aimed at activist DeRay McKesson.

     On Sunday, McKesson attended Sunday service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., just days after Dylann Roof killed nine people during Bible study at the church. Shortly after a photo of McKesson sitting next to Rick Santorum went viral, #GoHomeDeRay was created.

     The users of the hashtag, who appear to be primarily white conservatives, alleged that McKesson was a race-baiter and compared him to Al Sharpton. Others stated that he was in Charleston to cause division among black and white people (as if Roof hadn’t already single-handedly done that himself). The hashtag glaringly showed how dense and racist a lot of people were who used it, but there were also those who were in support of McKesson’s presence in Charleston.

     […]

     “I wouldn’t be here if those nine people had not been killed. Racism is alive and well in places like South Carolina, and in towns across America. So I’m here in solidarity like many other people who’ve come to express their sympathy for the victims, and to figure out how we fight systems of oppression that continue to kill people,” McKesson replied.

     Once again, people on social media have proved that some people don’t deserve access to electricity and the Internet just so that their hate can be put on display.

     Charleston. Protest. (via @alexkcolby)

     Charleston. Unity Walk. (via @alexkcolby)

     @deray I kid you not, there is a big Confederate Flag flying here in Tampa right off I-75. Biggest slap in the face. Also available within: link to article about bill banning the sale of the confederate flag in California.

177. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 3:00 pm

     #StandWithCharleston March #STL

     San Antonio #StandWithCharleston #BlackLivesMatter

     For Progressives heritage & tradition isn’t reason enough: RT Plain and simple #TakeDownTheFlag (meme) via @buckwilde

     100+ #Ferguson protesters out marching in #STL in solidarity with Black victims of white supremacy.

     Azusa Police Fatally Shoot Man, that’s in California.

     Azusa police officers fatally shot a man as they responded to a report of a home break-in Sunday, officials said.

     The shooting took place about 1 p.m. in the 500 block of East Lee Drive in Azusa. Los Angeles County sheriff’s homicide detectives, who were investigating the incident, said the officers were responding to a report that “a person acting bizarre with unknown injuries” was breaking into a home.

     “A family member called 911 stating one of their family members was acting insane and had injured himself,” said sheriff’s Lt. Holly Francisco.

     When the officers arrived, a neighbor told them they heard a scream that came from inside one of the residences. The officers went into the home, encountered the man and shot him, sheriff’s detectives said.

     It was unclear what prompted police to open fire. Deputies said no gun was found at the scene.

     The man was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead, sheriff’s detectives said. He was identified only as a 24-year-old resident of Azusa.

     Another hashtag.

     FBI director says Charleston shooting isn’t terrorism because it’s not political. Ummm… Hello, FBI, this is Captain Obvious calling…

     FBI director James Comey has said his agency is investigating last week’s shooting of nine black parishioners at a historic Charleston, South Carolina black church as a hate crime. He explicitly disagreed with many in the country who are calling the incident a white supremacist terrorist attack.

     “Terrorism is act of violence done or threatens to in order to try to influence a public body or citizenry so it’s more of a political act and again based on what I know so more I don’t see [the Charleston shooting] as a political act,” Comey said.

     For the FBI, domestic terrorism is:

     The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof in furtherance of political or social objectives.

     According to his roommate, Dylann Roof frequently talked about his hatred for black people and desire to ignite a race war. He posted a manifesto on the internet in which he laid out his white supremacist philosophy and then explicitly stated:

     I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.

     The FBI isn’t going to investigate the incident as a terrorist attack, Jim Comey says, because it’s not a political act. To understand how this could be possible, we’ve got to look to history. Take an hour or two and watch the documentaries COINTELPRO: The FBI’s War on Black America (embedded above) and COINTELPRO 101, featuring interviews from black power and Puerto Rican independence activists. The information contained in that history is critical for every American to internalize, especially at moments like this one. The history of the FBI’s war on black America may provide the beginnings of an understanding for how the FBI director could so callously deny his own agency’s definition of terrorism and the accepted facts about this case.

178. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 3:07 pm

     Lifting up the #Charleston9

     Anti-intellectualism Is Killing America. Subtitle: “Social dysfunction can be traced to the abandonment of reason”. Okay, let’s take a look.

     The tragedy in Charleston last week will no doubt lead to more discussion of several important and recurring issues in American culture—particularly racism and gun violence—but these dialogues are unlikely to bear much fruit until the nation undertakes a serious self-examination. Decrying racism and gun violence is fine, but for too long America’s social dysfunction has continued to intensify as the nation has ignored a key underlying pathology: anti-intellectualism.

     America is killing itself through its embrace and exaltation of ignorance, and the evidence is all around us. Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter who used race as a basis for hate and mass murder, is just the latest horrific example. Many will correctly blame Roof’s actions on America’s culture of racism and gun violence, but it’s time to realize that such phenomena are directly tied to the nation’s culture of ignorance.

     In a country where a sitting congressman told a crowd that evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell,” (link is external) where the chairman of a Senate environmental panel brought a snowball (link is external) into the chamber as evidence that climate change is a hoax, where almost one in three citizens can’t name the vice president (link is external), it is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value. Our failure as a society to connect the dots, to see that such anti-intellectualism comes with a huge price, could eventually be our downfall.

     In considering the senseless loss of nine lives in Charleston, of course racism jumps out as the main issue. But isn’t ignorance at the root of racism? And it’s true that the bloodshed is a reflection of America’s violent, gun-crazed culture, but it is only our aversion to reason as a society that has allowed violence to define the culture. Rational public policy, including policies that allow reasonable restraints on gun access, simply isn’t possible without an informed, engaged, and rationally thinking public.

     Some will point out, correctly, that even educated people can still be racists, but this shouldn’t remove the spotlight from anti-intellectualism. Yes, even intelligent and educated individuals, often due to cultural and institutional influences, can sometimes carry racist biases. But critically thinking individuals recognize racism as wrong and undesirable, even if they aren’t yet able to eliminate every morsel of bias from their own psyches or from social institutions. An anti-intellectual society, however, will have large swaths of people who are motivated by fear, susceptible to tribalism and simplistic explanations, incapable of emotional maturity, and prone to violent solutions. Sound familiar?

     There’s more at the link. But plenty of intellectual people are racist. And sexist. And homophobic. So, no, I don’t agree with the author.

     Why Race Isn’t as ‘Black’ and ‘White’ as We Think

     People have occasionally asked me how a black person came by a “white” name like Brent Staples. One letter writer ridiculed it as “an anchorman’s name” and accused me of making it up. For the record, it’s a British name — and the one my parents gave me. “Staples” probably arrived in my family’s ancestral home in Virginia four centuries ago with the British settlers.

     The earliest person with that name we’ve found — Richard Staples — was hacked to death by Powhatan Indians not far from Jamestown in 1622. The name moved into the 18th century with Virginians like John Staples, a white surveyor who worked in Thomas Jefferson’s home county, Albemarle, not far from the area where my family was enslaved.

     The black John Staples who married my paternal great-great-grandmother just after Emancipation — and became the stepfather of her children — could easily have been a Staples family slave. The transplanted Britons who had owned both sides of my family had given us more than a preference for British names. They had also given us their DNA. In what was an almost everyday occurrence at the time, my great-great-grandmothers on both sides gave birth to children fathered by white slave masters.

     I’ve known all this for a long time, and was not surprised by the results of a genetic screening performed by DNAPrint Genomics, a company that traces ancestral origins to far-flung parts of the globe. A little more than half of my genetic material came from sub-Saharan Africa — common for people who regard themselves as black — with slightly more than a quarter from Europe.

     The result that knocked me off my chair showed that one-fifth of my ancestry is Asian. Poring over the charts and statistics, I said out loud, “This has got to be a mistake.”

     That’s a common response among people who are tested. Ostensibly white people who always thought of themselves as 100 percent European find they have substantial African ancestry. People who regard themselves as black sometimes discover that the African ancestry is a minority portion of their DNA.

     These results are forcing people to re-examine the arbitrary calculations our culture uses to decide who is “white” and who is “black.” […]

     Those of us who grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s read black-owned magazines and newspapers that praised the racial defectors as pioneers while mocking white society for failing to detect them. A comic newspaper column by the poet Langston Hughes — titled “Why Not Fool Our White Folks?” — typified the black community’s sense of smugness about knowing the real racial score. In keeping with this history, many black people I know find it funny when supposedly white Americans profess shock at the emergence of blackness in the family tree. But genetic testing holds plenty of surprises for black folks, too.

     Which brings me back to my Asian ancestry. It comes as a surprise, given that my family’s oral histories contain not a single person who is described as Asian. More testing on other family members should clarify the issue, but for now, I can only guess. This ancestry could well have come through a 19th-century ancestor who was incorrectly described as Indian, often a catchall category at the time.

     The test results underscore what anthropologists have said for eons: racial distinctions as applied in this country are social categories and not scientific concepts. In addition, those categories draw hard, sharp distinctions among groups of people who are more alike than they are different. The ultimate point is that none of us really know who we are, ancestrally speaking. All we ever really know is what our parents and grandparents have told us.

     I liked that closing bit.

     And this flag burns. Charleston.

     Protest. Charleston.

     I know I missed Father’s Day (the North American one), so here’s something for warming the heart: Black Fathers, Present and Accountable

     While these photographs depict everyday situations, they are in one sense unusual: Their subjects are black and counter mainstream media that typically depict African-American fatherhood as a wasteland of dysfunction and irresponsibility. These images appear in a groundbreaking new book, “Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood” (Ceiba), by Zun Lee, a photographer and physician based in Toronto. A reception and book signing to mark its release will take place Friday night at the Bronx Documentary Center.

     See the beautiful photos.

179. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 3:21 pm

     Republicans Tread Carefully in Criticism of Confederate Flag. Weren’t they recently looking for ways to win the black vote…?

     The massacre of nine African-Americans in a storied Charleston church last week, which thrust the issues of race relations and gun rights into the center of the 2016 presidential campaign, has now added another familiar, divisive question to the emerging contest for the Republican nomination: what to do with the Confederate battle flag that flies on the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol.

     And like some of their predecessors seeking to win the state’s primary, the first in the South, the leading Republican candidates for 2016 are treading delicately. They do not want to risk offending the conservative white voters who venerate the most recognizable emblem of the Confederacy and who say it is a symbol of their heritage.

     Jeb Bush issued a statement on Saturday saying he was confident that South Carolina “will do the right thing.” As Florida’s governor, Mr. Bush in 2001 ordered the Confederate flag to be taken from its display outside his state’s Capitol “to a museum where it belonged.”

     Senator Marco Rubio, also of Florida, told reporters that he thought the state would “make the right choice for the people of South Carolina.”

     But neither candidate would state explicitly whether he wanted South Carolina to stop displaying a flag that is a particularly searing reminder of slavery.

     Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin begged off from questions about what to do with the flag in South Carolina or whether it represents racism, saying he would not address any such matters until the victims of the mass shooting were buried.

     Even after online pictures of the suspect in the massacre, Dylann Roof, holding the Confederate flag and a gun surfaced on Saturday, none of the candidates who appeared on Sunday’s political television programs were willing to say flatly whether it should continue to fly at the South Carolina Capitol. The most prominent Democratic contender, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said in 2007 that the flag should be removed.

     The carefully calibrated answers were a vivid illustration of the difficulties Republicans face in trying to broaden their party’s appeal to minorities while also energizing white conservatives.

     “The politics of race rests at the most sensitive nerve of the G.O.P.,” said Bruce Haynes, a Republican strategist and South Carolina native. “All Republicans want to grow their share of the black vote. But it’s the chicken and the egg.”

     Mr. Haynes recalled the example of former Gov. David Beasley of South Carolina, a Republican who called for the flag to be removed from atop the Capitol dome, where it once flew. Mr. Beasley’s effort won him little black support and a backlash from some whites in his losing bid for re-election in 1998.

     But while the Republican presidential hopefuls are now mostly focused on a heavily white electorate for the primaries and caucuses, an increasingly diverse country looms for the eventual nominee.

     Washington and Lee University to remove Confederate flags following protests

     Washington and Lee University expressed regret Tuesday for the school’s past ownership of slaves and promised to remove Confederate flags from the main chamber of its Lee Chapel after a group of black students protested that the historic Virginia school was unwelcoming to minorities.

     President Kenneth P. Ruscio’s announcement was a surprising move for the small, private liberal arts college in Lexington, which has long celebrated its Southern heritage. Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee served as the university’s president after the Civil War, his crypt is beneath the chapel, and the school has gingerly addressed its ties to the Confederacy and its having profited from the possession and sale of slaves.

     The Confederate banners — battle flags that Lee’s army flew as it fought Union forces — have adorned the campus chapel that bears Lee’s name since 1930, and university officials said they were a nod to history and not a message intended to offend anyone. Others, however, see the flags as hate symbols representative of slavery, racism and grievous times in the nation’s history.

     Washington and Lee joins other U.S. colleges in examining its historical ties to slavery. In 2009, the College of William and Mary acknowledged the past ownership of slaves in its early years, and in 2006, Brown University, in Rhode Island, issued a comprehensive report on its ties to the slave trade.

     Founded in 1749, the school that became Washington and Lee was endowed in 1796 with a $20,000 gift from George Washington, the nation’s first president. The school was subsequently named Washington College in his honor. After Lee died in 1870, it became Washington and Lee University. The chapel was also renamed to honor Lee.

     Good for them, but they should think about changing the school’s name, too…

     From Ferguson to Charleston and Beyond, Anguish About Race Keeps Building

     Ferguson. Baltimore. Staten Island. North Charleston. Cleveland.

     Over the past year in each of these American cities, an unarmed black male has died at the hands of a police officer, unleashing a torrent of anguish and soul-searching about race in America. Despite video evidence in several of the killings, each has spurred more discord than unity.

     Grand juries have tended to give the benefit of the doubt to police officers. National polls revealed deep divisions in how whites and blacks viewed the facts in each case. Whites were more likely to believe officers’ accounts justifying the use of force. Blacks tended to see deeper forces at work: longstanding police bias against black men and a presumption that they are criminals.

     Then, on Wednesday night, a young white man walked into a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., and joined a group of worshipers as they bowed their heads over their Bibles. He shot and killed nine of them. In his Facebook profile picture, the suspect, Dylann Roof, wore the flags of racist regimes in South Africa and the former Rhodesia.

     The massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston was something else entirely from the police killings. But it, too, has become a racial flash point and swept aside whatever ambiguity seemed to muddle those earlier cases, baldly posing questions about race in America: Was the gunman a crazed loner motivated by nothing more than his own madness? Or was he an extreme product of the same legacy of racism that many black Americans believe sent Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Walter Scott and Tamir Rice to their graves?

     The debate has already begun. […]

     Bryan Stevenson, a black lawyer who has specialized in death-penalty cases and chronicled the legal system’s unfairness to African-Americans, sees deep and systemic connections between Mr. Roof’s actions and the police killings of black males, as well as the rough actions of a police officer breaking up a pool party in McKinney, Tex.

     “This latest violent act is an extreme and terrifying example, but not disconnected from the way black men and boys are treated by police, by schools, by the state,” Mr. Stevenson said in an interview. “The landscape is littered with monuments that talk proudly about the Confederacy and leave no record about the lynchings of the era.”

     America is living through a moment of racial paradox. Never in its history have black people been more fully represented in the public sphere. The United States has a black president and a glamorous first lady who is a descendant of slaves. African-Americans lead the country’s pop culture in many ways, from sports to music to television, where show-runners like Shonda Rhimes and Lee Daniels have created new black icons, including the political fixer Olivia Pope on “Scandal” and the music mogul Cookie Lyon on “Empire.”

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     It has become commonplace to refer to the generation of young people known as millennials as “post-racial.” Black culture has become so mainstream that a woman born to white parents who had claimed to be black almost broke the Internet last week by saying that she was “transracial.”

     Yet in many ways, the situation of black America is dire.

     “All of these examples in some ways are really misleading in what they represent,” Mr. Stevenson said. “We have an African-American president who cannot talk about race, who is exposed to hostility anytime he talks about race. These little manifestations of black artistry and athleticism and excellence have always existed. But they don’t change the day-to-day experience of black Americans living in most parts of this country.” […]

     “Many of the conditions — housing, food, police brutality — they’re not isolated, they’re all connected experiences,” said Lamont Lilly, 35, a black journalist and activist in Durham, N.C., a city about 300 miles north of Charleston. Greg Tate, a black writer and musician, said black people could not help but feel that they are under siege in a society afflicted with amnesia about its own history.

     “There has always just been a constant denial in America that racism really exists,” Mr. Tate said. “As James Baldwin says, there is just an incapacity of white Americans to look at themselves as bad people. We see with Dylann Roof there is already a rush to not only dissociate other white Americans from his violence but to distance he himself from his own stated investment in white supremacist ideology.”

     The era of instantaneously shared images holds out hope for change. Cellphone videos of police officers shooting unarmed black males shock the conscience of Americans, the theory goes, just as TV footage of peaceful black protesters menaced by vicious dogs and water cannons in the civil rights era troubled white Americans of that time.

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     Yet many black Americans today lament facing struggles reminiscent of the last century. Highly militarized police forces patrol their communities. State voter ID laws, along with laws barring felons from voting, are widely seen as efforts to disenfranchise black citizens. Some scholars argue that mass incarceration and harsh policing tactics have replaced Jim Crow laws as a way to control the black population.

     Life expectancy rates for black Americans lag those of white Americans, and infant mortality rates are higher. Black America, as the scholar Theodore R. Johnson has put it, “is a fragile state embedded in the greatest superpower the world has ever known.” […]

     “Younger people are much more ready to have the very hard complicated conversations around structural racism and inherent bias,” Ms. Davis said. “These are words that my parents’ generation were not using. I have hope that this new generation will force a change.”

     Here’s hoping.

     Read Michael Brown Sr.’s Emotional Father’s Day Letter

     CLICK.

     I’d just hung up on my son, Mike Brown Jr.

     The day was August 4, 2014. I was at the hospital with my wife, Cal. We’d been married only three weeks. She had been diagnosed with chronic heart failure. Shortly after hearing the news, Mike called my cell phone. He told me Cal was going to die.

     “Man, you need to watch your mouth!” I said before hanging up.

     Those were trying times, and I was in a no-nonsense mood. A month before our marriage, our house had burned down. We’d lost everything. Literally.

     I couldn’t imagine things getting any worse.

     They did.

     Mike’s predicting my wife’s death came way out of left field for me. But that was Mike. He was a jokester, a dreamer, and an aspiring rapper. You know how it is with 18-year-olds; they think they’re grown and can say whatever they want, whenever they want. Sometimes, depending on what you’re going through, you just don’t have patience.

     To be honest, sometimes it took me a minute or two to get Mike’s jokes or jive with his dreams. Like on April Fool’s Day last year, when he called to tell me he had a baby on the way. He hung up, leaving me fuming for the rest of the day.

     He got his dad good with that one.

     Mike would say things that would confuse me or piss me off. Then, after some time, I’d realize that when he said something, it usually had meaning. For example, on the day we celebrated his graduation from high school, he announced that he wanted to be a rapper. “That’s all fine and good,” I responded, “but you’re gonna stay in school and you’re gonna stay focused.”

     He got angry and told the family, “One day, the world is gonna know my name. I’ll probably have to go away for a while, but I’m coming back to save my city.”

     Like most parents, I wanted to support my child’s dreams, but I wanted him to be realistic, too.

     How in the hell was I supposed to know Mike’s prediction would come true?

     The same question applies to his call when I was at the hospital. A couple days after I hung up on him, Mike called another family member to explain what he had been trying to tell me: “Pop’s mad at me. Tell him I said what I said because I’ve been having these visions and images of death. Tell him I keep seeing bloody sheets.”

     That conversation was on a Thursday. Two days later, on Saturday, August 9, around 12:15 p.m., my cell phone rang. It was Mike’s grandma on his mother’s side. Mike was staying with her for awhile before going off to college. She rarely calls me, so I answered quickly.

     “Mike has been shot by a cop! He’s lying dead in the street,” she screamed hysterically.
     I went into a state of denial instantly. No way! I defended. No! I could not possibly have heard what I thought I heard. My head exploded with one all-consuming thought: I’ve got to get to my son!

     I don’t remember much: a vague recollection of the dreadful silence in the car as we weaved and zigzagged through traffic; a muddled memory of a large crowd as we pulled close to Canfield Drive, the narrow street where Mike spent many childhood days. Like a linebacker on a mission, I pushed my way through the massive crowd, ignoring the comments pinging off my head:
     “He had his hands up!”
     “It was cold-blooded murder!”
     “Why they leaving him in the street like that?”

     To this day, I don’t know how or why I didn’t explode into a murderous rage when cops held up their hands to stop me from getting to Mike.

     “That’s my son!” I screamed over and over, as if those words would mean something.
     They didn’t. I had to stand there like everyone else. Mike’s body was covered by that time. There I was, a semi truck’s length away from my son, seething with impotence and telling myself he wasn’t really dead. My mind insisted he was still alive under that ugly black tarp. I searched the eyes of policemen, praying that one of them—perhaps a cop with a child—would let me go hold my son’s hand while his body was still warm.

     I’ve heard about soldiers who block out the intensity of warfare until after the battle? I think I slipped into that state of mind. A couple weeks later, as my son’s casket was lowered into the ground, I came out of my fog. Standing at that grave site, it got very, very real. My firstborn son—the kid I’d had when I was just a 17-year-old kid myself—was gone forever. Never again would I hear his voice, his often incomprehensible jokes, or his strange predictions.

     Standing there, as they shoveled dirt on Mike’s casket, our last conversations blasted loud in my head. My boy hadn’t been talking about my wife’s condition on that day he’d called me at the hospital. He had been having visions of his own death.
     And I couldn’t hear it.
     Damn!
     ***
     As Father’s Day approaches, my emotions are like hot bubbles in a pot of boiling water—the disbelief, the rage, the grief crashing to the surface again and again. I miss my son. I’m still grieving.

     I feel like those soldiers I’ve read about with PTSD who can’t stop the traumatic memories from invading their dreams or hijacking their every waking moment. Like some returning from war, I have no peace. I feel betrayed and angry. The character assassination didn’t just apply to Mike. There were many nasty, evil stories about Mike’s mom and me. According to the media, it was our fault that Mike was killed by a cop. On top of my grief, I had to deal with accusations that I was an “absentee father.”

     How do you defend something that’s so far from the truth? I was always in Mike’s life. He lived with his mother or me throughout his years. Mike was the best man at my wedding. We stayed in constant contact and talked about everything and anything.

     But, like any good parent, I find myself questioning myself. Did I miss anything that might have spared his life? Did I do as good a job with Mike as my dad did with me?

     My dad was a hardworking, long-distance truck driver. My mom, in her 70s, still works in the hotel industry, the way she did all my life. I was a normal but hardheaded kid. Black men get painted as stereotypes even when we know they’re not true. I tried to walk in my daddy’s shoes. He wasn’t the sentimental type, but I knew he loved me—mostly because he stayed on my butt, just as I did with Mike when necessary.

     As a youngster, I got involved with gangs and drugs. I got into trouble with the law but I learned my lesson and have paid my dues. I tried to help Mike avoid the mistakes I’d made. He was a big kid, taller and heavier than me. He had been stopped before by cops who mistook him for a grown man. I’d had “the talk” with Mike: “If you’re stopped by police, don’t talk back, keep your hands visible, and, if you can, write down the officer’s badge number.”

     My biggest regret is that we hadn’t talked the day he was killed. I wish so bad that I had called him before he was stopped by the Ferguson cop who took his life. In my dream rewrite, I was there; I stopped things from getting out of control. My son walked away from that encounter, still joking, still rapping, still dreaming . . . still breathing.

     I’m often asked: “How are you doing?” People mean well, but that question just raises more questions for me: Am I really supposed to be better? Should I have moved on since Mike’s death? How do I do that?

     Before he was killed my son told us the world would know his name. That has come true. The name “Mike Brown” has become the national symbol of police shootings of unarmed Black men. For me, I feel obligated to keep stressing the deeper meaning of his words.

     Because of my son’s death and the justice we’re still seeking, hurting people, grieving people who’ve lost their children to gun violence or police brutality, reach out to me. They invite me to speak at gatherings. There is a small level of comfort in being in the company of the wounded, the lost, the other parents who understand that we can’t possibly “move on.”

     Connecting with them—especially black fathers—helps me cope. Many ask: “What can we do to protect our sons?” Some have issues with their children’s moms or are cut off from their kids because of late or unpaid child support. I meet ex-offenders who’ve been out of their children’s lives for so long they have no clue how to get back in.

     All I can do is share what’s weighing on my heart. Black men are so busy trying to be “hard” in a hostile society that we sometimes forget just to connect with our kids; to listen to them; to hug them; to simply “be” with them in their space, wherever that is. . . . How can you connect with your kids this Father’s Day? Don’t wait for them to honor you or call you. You call them. Don’t assume you’re connected just because you live in the same house—you’ve got to deep by any means necessary. If you’re not living together, do not wait for their call. You call them! If they refuse to answer, leave a message or send a text. All kids, especially teens, read text messages. And they’ll read yours.

     My single plea to my brothers and all fathers on this Father’s Day is to connect. Don’t let your kid’s attitudes, your relationship with their moms, the mistakes you may have made, or your kid’s sometimes strange behavior, attitudes or smart-mouth comments serve as an excuse to stay disconnected. Put aside your pride and your false sense of manhood and reach out to your kids. They need you. They need what only you can give them.

     God forbid you end up like me. Thank the heavens you still have a chance to hear your children’s voices on the other end of the phone. Cherish those moments when they confuse, anger, or mystify you. They are hidden opportunities to stay connected.
     Don’t be plagued by things left undone or words left unsaid. Reach out.

     Do it! Just do it.

     I’m going to end this comment with that. More in a minute. Need a break.

180. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 3:42 pm

     South Carolina’s Confederate flag is still flying. It’s an insult to Charleston’s victims. Repost, I think.

     “America is about freedom”: slain Charleston pastor Clementa Pinckney’s moving speech on justice

     Pastor and state Senator Clementa Pinckney was among the nine people murdered last night in a mass shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

     Pinckney was a revered leader in his community, and was considered a rising star in the South Carolina Democratic Party. But as this 2013 speech shows, he was also a thoughtful and moving advocate for the universal values of freedom and justice, someone who could articulate not only the benefits of liberty and equality, but also the price that was worth paying to achieve them.

     Pinckney began his speech by explaining to his audience that he considered the struggle for justice to be a fundamental element of his faith. “What our denomination stands for,” he explained, “is the universe of all people being treated fairly under the law.”

     He then went on to discuss how that philosophy tied into the beliefs of one of the founders of Emanuel AME church, Denmark Vesey, who was the leader of a failed slave uprising in South Carolina. Vesey, he said, understood the value of freedom, and that it was important enough to risk his life for:

     Could we not argue that America is about freedom whether we live it out or not? But it’s really about freedom, equality and the pursuit of happiness. And that is what church is all about: freedom to worship and freedom from sin, freedom to be full of what God intends us to be, and to have equality in the sight of God. And sometimes you got to make noise to do that. Sometimes you may even have to die like Denmark Vesey to do that. Sometimes you have to march, struggle and be unpopular to do that.

     “We don’t see ourselves as just a place people come to worship,” Pinckney said of his church, but “as a beacon, and a bearer of the culture, and a bearer of what makes us a people.”

     Last night, that beacon, that people, and that culture came under a devastating, violent attack.

     Some Republicans Can’t Seem To Admit That Racism Was Behind The Charleston Murders. “Some”. Huh. “Most”.

     Some people on the right, including most significantly several candidates for the Republican nomination for President, seem to be having a problem acknowledging the fact that the murder of nine people at an African-American church in South Carolina was motivated by racism:

     We live in an age where mass shootings are so common that there is now a template for politicians to plug in the victim’s names, the date and location of the massacre, and synonyms for words like “tragedy” and “horror.” In the last 36 hours, we’ve heard ersatz condolences filled with hollow words, anodyne phrases about “unimaginable” horrors.

     But the Charleston church shooting that left nine African-Americans dead while they prayed is not an inexplicable tragedy. It simply took white rage and racism and conservative political race-baiting to their logical conclusions. It echoes a disturbing trend in right-wing media inflaming fringe factions, encouraging maximum armament, and then turning around after a tragedy and saying “we had no idea this would happen.”

     On Wednesday night, South Carolina’s governor Nikki Haley trotted out a boilerplate statement, calling the shooting a “senseless tragedy.” One could excuse this choice of words as a rushed assumption issued in real time, but as more and more details about Dylann Roof surfaced, conservatives refused to face the music. One by one, politicians and pundits acted like this terrorist act was one of life’s great unsolvable mysteries.

     “We don’t know the motivation of the person who did it,” Rudy Guiliani said yesterday. “Maybe he hates Christian churches. Maybe he hates black churches or he’s gonna go find another one. Who knows.” Donald Trump, in a tweet yesterday, said the crime was “incomprehensible.”

     Last night, a Wall Street Journal columnist wrote: “What causes young men such as Dylann Roof to erupt in homicidal rage, whatever their motivation, is a problem that defies explanation beyond the reality that evil still stalks humanity. It is no small solace that in committing such an act today, he stands alone.”

     Things aren’t much better among the Presidential candidates. Rick Santorum was among the first candidates to chime, making the argument that the attack on the Emanuel AME Church was another example of an “attack on Christians” and attempted to tie it into the broader conservative claim that religious liberty is somehow under assault in the United States due to things such as the near complete acceptance of same-sex marriage. This is an argument that was picked up by others on the right, including several Fox News Channel pundits. In his initial comments on the massacre, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham seemed to echo Santorum when he suggested that the shooter may have be “looking for Christians to kill.” Rick Perry’s comments were particularly perplexing in that he has both suggested that the attack was caused by drugs and referred to the shootings as an “accident,” a comment which his campaign was quick to retract. Other candidates went off in different directions, such as Rand Paul, who said that there was nothing government could do to stop attacks like this, and Mike Huckabee, who said that the attack could have been prevented if one of the victims had been armed. After Roof was arrested, Rick Santorum tried to clarify his remarks by saying that the attack was “clearly” rooted in racism, but even at that point Jeb Bush said that he didn’t know whether racism was at the root of the murders. Things aren’t much better on the pundit side of the aisle, where Fox’s Steve Doocy expressed surprised that the attack was being called a hate crime, Bill O’Reilly blamed it on “far-left rhetoric,” and Erick Erickson somehow managed to tie Dylann Roof’s actions to Caitlyn Jenner. To their credit, both Ben Carson and John Kasich were quite forceful in their agreement with the idea that the murders were, at their core, a racially motivated hate crime. Additionally, there are many pundits on the right who have said much the same thing, and criticized those who have tried to divert the conversation over Charleston to something other than race. To a large degree, though, there is a significant segment on the right that seems unwilling to admit reality, including many Presidential candidates.

     It’s really quite incomprehensible how anyone could deny the fact that racism is at the core of Wednesday night’s attack. Even before we knew who the shooter, the fact that someone had chosen to attack an African-American church, and one with a fairly significant history at that, should have been a clue, as were the reports from survivors that the shooter had said that he was killing them because they were ‘taking over the country.’ Even so, I suppose that one could give a pass to people who were commenting at that point since we didn’t know for sure what the circumatnsces of the shooting were. Once Dylan Roof was arrested, though, anyone who was continuing to deny the truth was entering some questionable territory. Roof’s Facebook page depicted him wearing patches of the flags of two nations that existed because of racism. The front license plate on his car depicts the Confederate flag. His roommate has described Roof’s descent into the racist paranoia of “white nationalism.” Roof apparently has confessed to committing the crimes because he wanted to start a race war. Today, there is news of what appears to be a website that Roof maintained called “The Last Rhodesian” on which he spewed racist nonsense regularly, including the claim that he was motivated by the George Zimmerman case and material he found on the web from a hate group called the Council of Conservative Citizens. There’s also what seems to be a photograph of Roof as a teenager holding a Confederate flag and wearing a shirt with “88” on it, which is apparently code among that crowd for “HH” and “Heil Hitler.” The overwhelming evidence is that Roof is a racist and a terrorist, and any attempt to explain away what he did as something else is, at this point, just denying reality.

     Here’s Who Rick Santorum Sat Next to at the Charleston Sunday Service.

     The live coverage of Mother Emanuel AME Church’s first Sunday service since the deadly attack on Wednesday night was widespread and emotional. Every major broadcast and cable network spent time monitoring and discussing the event, and major figures like 2016 GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum were on hand for interviews.
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     Santorum had plenty to say (and not say) during his chat with This Week‘s Martha Raddatz, but it was where he sat during the service that caught many off guard. Why? Because, according to MSNBC reporter Trymaine Lee, the former Pennsylvania senator was right next to notable civil rights activist DeRay McKesson:

     ACTIVIST COOTIES!!!

     DeRay McKesson On #GoHomeDeRay: ‘Racism Is Alive and Well’ In SC

     During Sunday morning’s service at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, a tweeted photo of 2016 GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum and civil rights activist DeRay McKesson sitting next to one another went viral. So did the hashtag #GoHomeDeRay, which is still trending on Twitter as of this writing.
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     Many think that McKesson, who first gained fame as a protester during and after the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, only went to Charleston for his own self interests. Hence the hashtag, which is rife with “colorful” hot takes from all sides.

     The hashtag has mostly been turned into a pro-DeRay social media statement by Twitter users with big followings:
     [tweets]

     CNN’s Brian Stelter caught up with McKesson after the church services on Reliable Sources and asked him about the hashtag. Unsurprisingly, the activist immediately referenced the nine death churchgoers who were killed by Dylann Roof on Wednesday night:

     I wouldn’t be here if those nine people had not been killed. Racism is alive and well in places like South Carolina, and in towns across America. So I’m here in solidarity like many other people who’ve come to express their sympathy for the victims, and to figure out how we fight systems of oppression that continue to kill people.

     He’s not wrong. Santorum was there too, albeit with more focus on the possible anti-religious nature of Roof’s crimes than the suspect’s racist sympathies.

     @VSouza_STL let’s see the cops climb up there to get those signs down #TakeDownTheStatue @deray @KWRose @search4swag See the photos.

181. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 3:45 pm

     Interesting list of Board Members for the white supremacist group that inspired #DylannRoof #CharlestonShooting.

     https://bsd.sos.mo.gov/Common/CorrespondenceItemViewHandler.ashx?IsTIFF=true&filedDocumentid=10156948&version=1 …

     I thought I had seen it all…then there’s this #GoHomeDeray

     #BlackLivesMatter activist DeRay Mckesson on #GoHomeDeRay hashtag: It’s proof “racism is alive and well” in America , another look at his response.

     Some folks want “n*gg*r” to be the measure of racism, as Obama noted. Because this would allow them to “not be racist” by not saying it.

     UNHCR urges Dominican Republic to refrain from deportations of stateless individuals – by the way, that’s still a thing.

     This is a summary of what was said by UNHCR spokesperson Adrian Edwards – to whom quoted text may be attributed – at the press briefing, on 19 June 2015, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.

     UNHCR is today appealing to the Government of the Dominican Republic to ensure that people who were arbitrarily deprived of their nationality as a result of a 2013 ruling of the Dominican Constitutional Court will not be deported.

     In May 2014, the Dominican Republic adopted a naturalization law which provided for the re-issuance of nationality documents for some individuals born in the Dominican Republic and gave others the possibility to apply for special registration until February 2015, opening a path to eventual citizenship. In a welcome development, the Dominican authorities have concluded an audit of the first group whereby some 57,000 individuals could be reasonably presumed to have found a solution, but tens of thousands of people who were born in the Dominican Republic and are of Haitian descent remain stateless. The consequences of their eventual expulsion to Haiti could be devastating.

     UNHCR is concerned both about the human rights considerations for people who may be expelled and that people may end up being pushed into Haiti even though they are not considered as citizens of that country. This would have serious repercussions for all who are affected and be a serious setback to efforts worldwide to end the problem of statelessness.

     It is of the utmost importance that the Dominican Republic takes necessary action to prevent any expulsions of stateless individuals because of the human rights implications and to avoid creating a new refugee situation. The Dominican authorities have announced that they will conduct screenings of all individuals subject to deportation. UNHCR has offered its support to the Dominican authorities to identify and register these individuals.

     UNHCR reiterates its commitment to working with the authorities in the Dominican Republic to find an adequate solution for this population and to ensure the protection of their human rights.

182. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 3:51 pm

     Haley, U.S. Sen. Tim Scott calling for Confederate flag’s removal today – funny, what made her change her tune so hard?

     U.S. Sen. Tim Scott today will join the chorus of public officials calling for the Confederate flag to come down today.

     It is not known if he will attend Gov. Nikki Haley’s news conference in Columbia at 4 p.m. today at which, sources said, she will call for the Confederate flag to come down from the Statehouse grounds.

     But sources close to Scott said he is calling for its removal.

     The move comes as lawmakers are exploring if the removal can be done legislatively in the coming days, tying their heightened attention to the recent shooting deaths of nine members of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

     Haley’s office would not confirm what the discussion would be.

     Lawmakers have an unfinished budget, but are considering using the current extended session to address wording that would remove the flag from the Confederate monument as part of the 2015-16 state spending plan.

     Another avenue being explored is adding wording that would include legislation to remove the flag in the continuing work resolution.

     The flag was removed from the Statehouse dome and from inside the two chambers in 2000 as part of a compromise that put it on permanent display next the Confederate soldier’s monument. It would take a vote of two-thirds of both houses to remove it as the law was written.

     House Speaker Jay Lucas issued a statement today saying “the intense and difficult debate that took place in 2000 over the Confederate soldier flag was ultimately resolved by compromise. Wednesday’s unspeakable tragedy has reignited a discussion on this sensitive issue that holds a long and complicated history in the Palmetto State. Moving South Carolina forward from this terrible tragedy requires a swift resolution of this issue.”

     His message did not specify a targeted resolution or path.

     The Statehouse regular session closed June 4 but matters have lingered into a limited session to pass a budget compromise.

     SC governor expected to call for removal of Confederate flag, another anticipatory link. Heh. We’ll just have to wait and see!

     Creator of White Supremacist “Mantra” Lives in Dylann Roof’s Hometown …

     According to Ryan Lenz, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center who has studied hate groups in South Carolina extensively, the preoccupation with the former white nationalist colony of Rhodesia is characteristic of a particular white supremacist movement that demands geographic separation of the races. This movement has gained ground over the last five years and is strongly associated with Robert Whitaker, the organizer of Bob’s Underground Graduate Seminar, or BUGS, a white supremacist blog. Whitaker happens to live in Roof’s hometown of Columbia, South Carolina.

     Whitaker is a self-styled scholar and political activist who claims to have been a college professor, Capitol Hill staffer, Reagan Administration appointee and writer for the Voice of America. He is currently running for vice president of the United States on the ticket of the white supremacist American Freedom Party.

     “The words that Roof reportedly said during the shooting were reminiscent of an idea that Whitaker has created and has certainly become prominent among the racist right,” Lenz explained to The Intercept. “Many racists feel it is a magic tool against multiculturalism.”

     Whitaker’s persistent messaging has attracted many young followers, who call themselves “BUGSers” and claim they are part of a “swarm” dedicated to spreading the “Mantra,” an eight-paragraph racist diatribe that bemoans the “ongoing program of genocide against my race, the white race.” Whitaker’s rabid online community of followers consider him to be a propagandistic genius and flood the web with his short, simple message. His disciples have also organized demonstrations against white genocide and put up racist billboards around the country.

     Although no evidence has emerged that Roof had any contact with Whitaker, who is revered among the online white supremacist underground as a vanguard thinker, the geographical coincidence is remarkable. It’s hard to believe that an avid online consumer of white supremacy websites would be unaware of Whitaker’s presence in his hometown.

     Reached by telephone on Friday afternoon, Whitaker was eager to talk. He said he believed the Southern Poverty Law Center was trying to blame him for the shooting but denied knowing Roof. “South Africa made the same mistake that we do in the U.S. They tried to work with republican moderates,” Whitaker said, adding gloomily that “South Africa and Rhodesia were doomed from the start.” Whitaker believes that governments are plotting to dilute the white race and make everyone a “mud-brown color.”

     Whitaker denied that his message or racist organizing had any role in influencing Roof. “I’m against cold-blooded murder,” he said, and emphasized that he was simply exercising his right to free speech. Nonetheless, Whitaker implied that Roof’s actions were part of an ongoing conflict in society between the white race and the forces of diversity, which he says advocate white genocide.

     “When you see the mob, hear the mob constantly screaming, people like me respond with their voices,” Whitaker said. “When you have a screaming mob outside, most people are going to start screaming, but others respond with shooting.”

     Oh boy.

     8 things you didn’t know about the Confederate flag – PLEASE TELL ME MORE!

     1. The Confederate battle flag was never the official flag of the Confederacy.

     The Confederate States of America went through three different flags during the Civil War, but the battle flag wasn’t one of them. Instead, the flag that most people associate with the Confederacy was the battle flag of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

     Designed by the Confederate politician William Porcher Miles, the flag was rejected for use as the Confederacy’s official emblem, although it was incorporated into the two later flags as a canton. It only came to be the flag most prominently associated with the Confederacy after the South lost the war.

     2. The flag is divisive, but most Americans may not care.

     Roughly one in ten Americans feels positively when they see the Confederate flag displayed, according to a 2011 Pew Research Center poll. The same study showed that 30 percent of Americans reported a negative reaction to seeing the flag on display.

     But the majority, 58 percent, reported feeling neither positive nor negative. The poll also showed that African-Americans, Democrats and the highly educated were more likely to perceive the flag negatively.

     3. The flag began to take on a new significance in the 20th century.

     In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the battle flag was used mostly at veterans’ events and to commemorate fallen Confederate soldiers. The flag took on new associations in the 1940s, when it began to appear more frequently in contexts unrelated to the Civil War, such as University of Mississippi football games.

     In 1948, the newly-formed segregationist Dixiecrat party adopted the flag as a symbol of resistance to the federal government. In the years that followed, the battle flag became an important part of segregationist symbolism, and was featured prominently on the 1956 redesign of Georgia’s state flag, a legislative decision that was likely at least partly a response to the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate school two years earlier. The flag has also been used by the Ku Klux Klan, though it is not the Klan’s official flag.

     Five more flag facts await you at the link!

     Now here’s a good news: Ava DuVernay Tapped To Direct Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’

     It’s official. Marvel has tapped Ava DuVernay to direct “Black Panther,” a long-in-the-works courtship that was repearted earlier this year. Now, according to MCU Exchange, the deal is done.

     Per the report, Marvel moved to hire DuVernay ahead of the movie’s 2018 release to have her on set for the next Captain America edition to acclimate the “Selma” director to the Marvel Universe of characters and stories.

     “Black Panther” is set to star Chadwick Boseman and tell the story of the first Black superhero.

     In an interview with REVOLT, DuVernay hinted at the prospect of directing a big project but would not divulge the full news.

     Now let’s make a movie about Wonderwoman.

     ‘Meet the Press’ takes heat after airing gun video

     NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd defended a segment on his show Sunday that featured a clip of black prison inmates discussing regrets of their past gun violence.

     The timing of the segment spawned some criticism, as Sunday coverage on the news shows was dominated by the arrest of a white man accused of killing nine black individuals at a South Carolina church.

     “The original decision to air this segment was made before Wednesday’s massacre,” Todd said in a statement. “However, the staff and I had an internal debate about whether to show it at all this week. When we discussed putting it off, that conversation centered around race and perception — not the conversation we wanted the segment to invoke.”

     The video of the inmates at Sing Sing prison in New York was made independently by two NBC producers. It features a few emotional inmates addressing questions of what they would say to their younger selves.

     “Meet the Press should make all viewers uncomfortable at some point or we are not doing our job,” Todd continued. “I hope folks view the gun video as a part of the conversation we should all be having and not the totality of it.”

     Immediately after the clip aired, columnist Eugene Robinson, a panelist on the show said, “We should point out that this was not just an African-American problem.”

     “I thought that was a very powerful piece,” Robinson said. “One small thing I would mention — because I haven’t seen the whole piece — is it wasn’t a terribly diverse set of people who were talking. Right now, we’re talking about a horrific crime committed by a white man.”

     Todd tried to clarify on air that the segment “wasn’t intended to be that way.”

     Some on social media called the timing of the piece tone deaf.

     “Meet the Press” appeared to understand the controversy the segment could create. Todd prefaced the clip by noting the inmates’ circumstances were much different than last week’s shooting.

     “In this case, the inmates are African-American that you’re going to hear from. But their lessons remain important. And we simply ask you to look at this colorblind issue, as about just simply gun violence,” he said.

     I suppose no white inmates were available for interviews at the time.
     Colorblind issue my cold white ass.

183. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 3:58 pm

     Dylann Roof May Have Been A Regular Commenter At Neo-Nazi Website The Daily Stormer

     Despite the fact that only 2% of the document was identified as “unoriginal” by the software, a key 18-word passage in the section labeled “Blacks” bemoaning the alleged appropriation of white culture by the rest of the world, was identified as almost identical to a comment left on an article titled “Former Swedish PM Fredrik Reinfeldt: Sweden Belongs to the Hordes, Not the “Uninteresting” Ethnic Swedes” by the user “AryanBlood1488” at The Daily Stormer.

     The Daily Stormer is a neo-Nazi website run by Andrew Anglin that both generates original content and aggregates articles from other white supremacist sites across the Internet. Its comment section is much less moderated than its peer sites and hosts a diverse community of white supremacists from across the extremist spectrum.

     This is the letter taped to doors at LMPD #LouisvilleFOP – I can’t read it, maybe someone else can.

     It’s Time to Stop Blaming Black-on-Black Crime

     For every unarmed black man, woman or child killed by unrestrained police officers, there’s an intellectually impoverished response when black people get visibly upset about it: What about black-on-black crime?

     There was a time, in another surreal reality not so long ago, when conservative pundits reflexively grimaced at even the mention of it—and, oh, that whole notion that black people were unjustly shackled or slaughtered in advanced Western societies.

     Now black-on-black crime is a thing, with famous heavy-right rags embracing it as frequently as they knock the black president. It’s a fresh, new, nasty, stick-your-tongue-out retort to shut down any justifiable complaints from grieving black communities.

     Which means, sure, we can talk days on end about being black … so long as it pertains to black people hurting other black people. Others have signed on, too, including some prominent black celebrities and half-intelligentsia feeling ignored or irrelevant as the #BlackLivesMatter banner passes them by.

     Yesterday’s hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs (perhaps toying with comebacks through Republican politics) kicked dirt with his own misguided reflections on it. Black conservative columnist Jason Riley, on a quest for more Fox News hits, riffs incessantly about it. And Cleveland’s black police chief, Calvin Williams, ineffectual to the point that he can’t or won’t arrest his subordinates for killing a 12-year-old kid, likes to occasionally drop hints about it when confronted or, as activist Deray McKesson recently noted, just angrily drops it when protesters get in his face.

     Fortunately, we’re in the midst of a rhetorical shift that is generationally putting “black-on-black crime” 6 feet under. It was incorrect during its creation in the 1980s, when many black pundits, preachers and politicians raced to coin it in every speech instead of putting relentless pressure on the nefarious trickle-down policies of the Reagan regime at the time. Let’s not forget that black Generation X used it, albeit reluctantly; black Generation Y has been smart enough to spit on it outright.

     Despite the intense national obsession with it, however, we haven’t yet come to grips with the fact that it never really existed in the first place. To refer to “black-on-black crime” not only defies common sense but grabs at baseless white racist science that removes blame for systemic deeds. There’s no more reason to assert “black-on-black crime” than there is to coin terms like “white-on-white crime” or “brown-on-brown crime” or let’s-just-insert-random-color-or-race-here crime. And, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not using those terms.

     And we shouldn’t. Geography and basic population trends dictate that. Crime happens all around us, and it happens near where populations cluster. Over the past generation, we’ve allowed this unique, yet ugly designation of community crime patterns to stalk us like an angry ex-spouse, without any requisite understanding of how human beings live. That is to say, most African Americans generally live where other blacks live. So do whites. So do Latinos, and so on and so forth.

     More at the link.

     Step into barbershop, across racial divide. It’s a heartwarming story. I just wish it wasn’t so… I don’t know. But it’s nice, it’s really nice. I’m more impressed with the barbershop employees and others at the ‘shop, than the author’s bravery in overcoming xir own fear and prejudices at that moment.

     White Activists March On Charleston Confederate Museum, Chant ‘Black Lives Matter’

     In the wake of the horrific tragedy of the killing of nine black churchgoers at the historical Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, an amazing amount of strength is being shown. Mother Emanuel, as the church is known, held its first church service since the shooting this morning, despite the fact that they have not even buried their dead, and that they are still very much in mourning. As incredible as that is, perhaps the truly miraculous and unifying event happened Saturday night.

     Hundreds of activists protested racism and domestic racial terrorism by marching on Charleston’s Confederate museum. Their chant was the now-iconic “Black Lives Matter.” Also, it is very much worth noting that most of the marchers were white. The following slogans on signs were from white marchers showing their unity with their black brothers and sisters:

     “White supremacy is killing us.”

     “Stop white terrorism.”

     This is incredibly heart-warming and hope-inducing in these troubled times. A right-wing white supremacist shot up a black church, and now the entire community is coming together to protest this heinous act of terrorism and hatred, showing that despite the very deep issues surrounding race that plague this great country of ours, it is possible to progress and heal, that those nine people in that church in Charleston did not die in vain, and that they as a community and we a nation can raise awareness for the real problems that exist, and come back more united and stronger than ever.

     People came from all over to attend the march, including Sabine Doutrelepont, a South Carolina resident who spent much of her life in Montreal, who traveled more than three hours to attend the march. She said of the event:

     “I’m not a very religious person. But I’ve been a schoolteacher for years. And I always took the side of African-American kids.”

     Charleston resident Ariel Hayward’s word were perhaps among the most powerful:

     “The fact that I’m 20, and it’s 2015, and I have to go through this—I can’t just sit around and not do anything. Why would I be complacent? If I’m complacent, I’m with the oppressor.”

     She’s right, of course. Complacency is not an option when racist terrorists are literally murdering people for the color of their skin, even here in 2015. Anyone who is complacent or apologizes for complacency is a part of the problem.

     Kudos to all of these passionate people for taking a stand. Also, the significance of where they marched to should not be lost, as Dylann Roof, the man who killed those nine innocent worshippers, was photographed in front of a Confederate museum. Originally, the march was supposed to go from downtown to Mother Emanuel Church. Instead, at the time of assembly it was decided that it would be appropriate to go ahead and march to the museum. It seem the marchers concurred, as do I. Well done.

     A black man threatens whites and it’s labeled terrorism. But not when a white man kills blacks

     Are you familiar with the Family Research Council? It’s the conservative anti-gay group that Josh Duggar worked for before he stepped down recently after admitting he had molested his sisters and a babysitter. The FRC was designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center back in 2010.

     Well, in 2012, a black man with a gun and 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches walked into the offices of the Family Research Council and planned on shooting the employees and rubbing the sandwiches on their faces (here are the literal sandwiches). He didn’t do it and was disarmed by the security officer in the building who held him there until the police showed up.

     The federal government called that terrorism. The feds even prosecuted him as a terrorist, and he was the first person ever convicted under a 2002 anti-terrorism act and was sentenced to serve 25 years in prison:

     He pleaded guilty to the charges in February.

     U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen heralded the sentence as sending a strong message on terrorism.

     “A security guard’s heroism is the only thing that prevented Floyd Corkins II from carrying out a mass shooting intended to kill as many people as possible,” Machen said in a statement.

     OK? So, a black man walks into a building of conservative white folk with some chicken sandwiches and a gun, gets manhandled by security, and he’s a full-fledged terrorist sentenced to 25 years in prison for terrorism.

     But, a white man researches the most historic black church in South Carolina with a state senator as its pastor, speaks on his desire to start a civil war, goes into that church, kills a state senator and eight other African Americans, but it’s not terrorism?

     According to FBI Director James Comey, it isn’t.

     But look at the definitions of terrorism listed on the federal government websites and you see this below the fold:

     The search for a universal, precise definition of terrorism has been challenging for researchers and practitioners alike. Different definitions exist across the federal, international and research communities.

     Title 22 of the U.S. Code, Section 2656f(d) defines terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.”

     The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
     Both definitions of terrorism share a common theme: the use of force intended to influence or instigate a course of action that furthers a political or social goal. In most cases, NIJ researchers adopt the FBI definition, which stresses methods over motivations and is generally accepted by law enforcement communities.

     Something is terribly wrong here. It doesn’t add up.

     Glenn Greenwald is right. “The refusal to call the Charleston shootings ‘terrorism’ again shows it’s a meaningless propaganda term.”

     Furthermore, it appears that the reluctance to call a white man who terrorized not only the nine people he killed, but their church, their community, African Americans in general, and black churches across the nation, while calling an African American who almost did the same thing a terrorist is not preposterous—it is a racist application of the law.

     Our Racist History Isn’t Back to Haunt Us. It Never Left Us.

     In recent years, especially the years during which Barack Obama has occupied the White House, there have been many valuable meditations on the ways in which American policy structures that were shaped in and informed by the slave-holding and Jim Crow chapters of our nation’s story, continue to define today’s racial power imbalances. There’s been history, analysis, and contemporary commentary: Michelle Alexander’s indispensible The New Jim Crow, about our prison and legal systems; Isabel Wilkerson’s Warmth of Other Suns, about the Great Migration; Tom Sugrue’s books on integration and racism in northern cities and on housing policy in Detroit. At the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has produced a body of work—culminating (for now) with his Case for Reparations—showing how we have gotten from “there” to “here,” contemporary America, with its persistently unequal scales of opportunity. Throughout our history, racism has indeed found fresh manifestations: from real estate restrictions and usurious interest rates to physical segregation to job discrimination to stop and frisk and police brutality.

     There is usually the sense, however, that at least we’re changing, at least we’re moving in some direction, away from where we started. Except on days like today, when the reminder is that we have not moved one bit.

     In addition to new forms of subjugation and prejudice, we live in a country in which racist violence exists in precisely the same forms it always has—unabated, unreconstructed. We are not distant from the crimes and inhumanities and hatred of the past. We are still acting them out and still refusing to accept them for what they are: this country’s original and defining sin.
     ADVERTISEMENT

     What happened on Wednesday night is violence enacted on different individuals than the violence enacted on four little girls who were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, but it is a crime with the same shape and contours, a crime that leaves innocent people dead in their place of worship because of their race.

     Too often, we look at iconic images of our racist past with a kind of antiqued horror. We recall with distant dismay, if we’re old enough, how police turned dogs on innocent people. If we are younger, we suck in our breath and shake our heads with disbelief as we try to fathom a world inhabited by our parents, our grandparents, in which a city official, Bull Connor, ordered the use of fire hoses on peaceful protesters. But we also know that Bull Connor is long dead, a comfortable relic. We can just barely imagine that this happened to John Lewis. Lewis is now a long-serving congressman; his past is crucial, moving, but remote. That was then, look at him now.

     But this—a white policeman shoving a 14-year-old girl’s face to the ground, stepping on her, kneeling on her at a pool party in McKinney, Texas—is also now. It’s this month. This, in Fairfield, Ohio, is not simply an altercation “between police and teens” as the caption says, but between white police and black teens who scream in terror and anger. It is also this month, also at a community pool. Community pools, a locus for racial conflict. Does that sound distant? Or does it sound contemporary?

     It is contemporary.

     It is.

184. rq says

     22 June 2015 at 4:03 pm

     DAMN. Please keep an eye open for a new 183. That one has some really good reading.

     Should We Forgive the Charleston Killer?

     It was as if I were feeling the Charleston, S.C., massacre in my bones. I had been in the United States as a guest of the Brown University International Advanced Research Institute. I was scheduled to go back on June 21, but I insisted on going back as soon as I finished my talk on June 16. This was by no means a reflection on my hosts or the exciting program they had put together. Throughout the deliberations, I expressed a sense of vulnerability as a black man in the United States in a way that I did not feel in South Africa.

     This is not to say there is no racism in South Africa. Quite the contrary.

     I recently made headlines when I was chased out of the posh Haas Coffee Collective restaurant in Cape Town because I insisted on having an omelette the way I preferred. The white owner of the store came up to me and said, “I believe you don’t like the way we make our omelettes.” Before I could utter a word in response, he said, “Get out of my restaurant; people like you don’t belong in my restaurant.”

     When I inquired what he meant by that, he said, “Criminals like you don’t belong in my restaurant; I am calling the police.” I challenged him to do just that, which he never did. Instead I went over to the nearest police station to lay a charge of crimen injuria against him. I also called the local newspaper, the Cape Times, to report the incident and laid a complaint with the mayor of Cape Town.

     I told my hosts at Brown that although I could do something about racism in South Africa, I felt helpless in the U.S. Maybe the sense of agency in South Africa has to do with being a well-known newspaper columnist and academic. But that did not protect the distinguished Harvard academic Henry Louis Gates Jr. from a racist cop in Cambridge, Mass.

     Perhaps I feel a greater sense of political empowerment because black people run the government in South Africa. But I would have expected a similar sense of empowerment among African Americans in the U.S., given the presence of a black president. But this does not seem to have been Barack Obama’s impact on African-American political culture.

     African Americans are justifiably proud of having the first black president in the White House. Pride, however, is not the same thing as power. The president’s cautiousness may have rubbed off on the rest of the African-American community. It may well be this cautiousness that emboldens racists in America.

     And so I jetted out of the United States several days before my original departure date. No sooner had I arrived in Cape Town than white supremacy reared its ugly head in Charleston, leaving in its wake nine lifeless bodies. While I respect the decision of some of the bereaved families to forgive this monster, I also know that the discourse of “forgiveness” has done very little to improve race relations in South Africa over the past 20 years. Instead it has yielded a tendency to instinctively present the very perpetrators of evil in a sympathetic light.

     That is why the judge presiding over the bond hearing saw fit to privilege the feelings of the perpetrator’s family above the experiences of the black families in the room. In every discussion of racial injustice—whether in South Africa or the United States—the first consideration is to white feelings. […]

     I am told by those who know better that forgiveness is liberating to the persons involved. I don’t question that. I just worry that this expectation of instant forgiveness reproduces racism in the white community and places a denialist salve over the wound in the black community. But does the wound ever really heal because we forgive, because we tell ourselves we have forgiven? I am not so sure. In South Africa the results have been a combination of racist denial on the part of whites and intense anger among young black South Africans.

     I wonder, then, if there is no other language beyond the discourse of forgiveness. Given that forgiveness has not produced the results of reconciliation that were expected of it, in South Africa or the United States, we should perhaps consider giving accountability a chance in the fight against racism. Making accountability only the work of the courts is a form of self-absolution that leaves attitudes unchanged, until they blow up as they did in that church house in Charleston.

     Stop asking for forgiveness. Ask for accountability. That puts the onus on the oppressor to make changes, rather than the oppressed to diminish their own pain.

     Take down the confederate flag from the South Carolina Capitol, petition. PETITION.

     Why is this important?

     On Wednesday evening, a 21-year-old white South Carolina man murdered 9 black people at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. This was an act of violence reminiscent of the September 15, 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. For generations, the confederate flag has represented the terror and violence perpetrated on Black communities. Unfortunately, the confederate flag is still flying on the South Carolina Capitol Grounds today.

     The killer, Dylann Storm Roof, grew up in a South Carolina that still embraced the confederate flag — a flag that was born out of a government defending the enslavement of Black people and resurrected as an emblem for whites violently opposing racial integration. He attended high school in Columbia, just a few minutes from the state capitol grounds where that flag is waving. That flag sends a message that South Carolina still cherishes a legacy of racial violence. Even more disturbing, the flag allows those who decide to act out this history to justify their actions. Roof is one of those. While committing his act of terror he said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over the country.”

     He did not have to murder innocent churchgoers, but the racial culture that exists led him to believe that he could. But, he was mistaken – black people cannot take over a country that they have been a part of since the very beginning.

     The United States is our home. And, South Carolina is my home. In fact, my family has lived in the state for four generations now. We have witnessed racism, oppression and economic depression in our community for decades. We deserve better. And, we are demanding better. It’s time now for South Carolina to take down this terrible symbol of racial violence once and for all.

     And I’m not a huge Michael Moore fan, so this one’s too much clickbait for me. But. Michael Moore Nails Every Racist, War-Mongering, Pseudo-Christian, RW Gun Extremist – In One Tweet

     Filmmaker, director, writer, and Liberal activist, Michael Moore took to his Twitter page last week to give his thoughts on the Charleston shooting. The acclaimed filmmaker of the award-winning anti-gun violence documentary, Bowling For Columbine, tweeted a sentence that put the full scope of Right Wing extremism into its proper place of chronic, historical hypocrisy.

     He’s one of the most outspoken activists in America, and most people either love Michael Moore, or they hate him. He’s brash, brave, compassionate, intelligent, poignant, and funny, so it’s easy to see why many Republicans despise him. (They hate humor.)

     Moore is also a Daily Kos contributor and has been posting on the site since 2004. His profile and articles can be found: HERE.

     My respect and admiration for Michael Moore was solidified the night he walked onto the 75th Academy Award ceremony stage to pick up an Oscar for, ‘Bowling For Columbine,’ and then told America what time it was.

185. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     23 June 2015 at 12:28 am

     Most of the time I find the actions of racist fuckwads frustrating, angering, depressing, maddening…all those things. But here’s one incident that has me laughing my ass off. No one was hurt and no one’s property was damaged, which is probably why I can laugh at this stupid ass story-
     Woman with bad makeup job claims she was attacked by black men, fools nobody.

     You just have to click the link and see the image. I mean WOW. Who the fuck did she think she was going to fool with that piss-poor makeup job?!
     I needed a good laugh and this story provided it. Hee hee.

186. WMDKitty -- Survivor says

     23 June 2015 at 12:36 am

     Tony!

     BHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAaaaagh *cough* *cough*

     Looks like a bad attempt at Alice Cooper’s signature look…

187. Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- says

     23 June 2015 at 2:22 am

     Ivy League University finances itself via private prisons
     Yeah, poor black kids finance rich white kids’ education via the school to prison pipeline.

188. rq says

     23 June 2015 at 2:58 am

     America’s churches: often a reflection of the nation’s racial divide

     As bells tolled for the dead in Charleston on Sunday, Reverend Alfred Zadig, head of the predominantly white-membership St. Michael’s Church, asked forgiveness “for failing to be a pastor who reaches out beyond my world.”

     Speaking to about 60 worshippers in the large 17th century white stone church towering over City Hall, he said he did not know a single victim of Wednesday’s massacre, when a shooter authorities have identified as a 21-year-old white man killed nine African-Americans at a mainly black church a mile away.

     “You and I are so good at compartmentalizing grief,” he told congregants. “Today I’m asking you to feel the unthinkable pain.”
     ADVERTISING

     Last week’s attack at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church highlighted a truth about American religion and race that dates back to the 19th Century: Churches are among the most segregated parts of American life.

     The tradition of religious separation remained intact through the civil rights era, and has proven mostly immune to progress since, according to race and religion experts.

     About eight in 10 congregants in America attend services where a single racial or ethnic group makes up at least 80 percent of the congregation, according to Pew Research Center, using data from the 2012 National Congregations Study. In 1998, 85 percent of Americans reported worshiping in largely segregated congregations. “Until blacks and whites pray together, U.S. race relations are fundamentally unhealthy. There is no getting around this,” said Michael Emerson, provost at North Park University in Chicago, and author of “Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America”.

     “Segregated churches have been and will continue to be a direct reflection on America divided.”

     “THE MOST SEGREGATED HOUR”

     The story of this division began in America’s earliest moments, when slaves and freed African-Americans alike were often expected to pray in the same churches as whites, but in areas cordoned off, often called “slave galleries”.

     In 1816, an association of free men in Philadelphia seeking to escape racial bias in the church founded the African Methodist Episcopal church, the oldest independent Christian denomination founded by blacks in the world.

     “When you kneel to pray, you don’t want your humanity questioned,” said Tukufu Zuberi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, explaining their motivation. “It was the same master, but this time using the Bible to justify the enslavement of Africans.”

     The issue remained after the emancipation proclamation that ended slavery, North Park’s Emerson said, leading to an exodus of African-Americans from white churches to black denominations, and ultimately to a broad divergence in religious culture and worship practices.

     “One hundred and fifty years of this has led to the number one reason people today say why they worship in racially separate congregations: they just feel more comfortable with the worship and practices, and they know people there,” Emerson said.

     For decades, however, the Sunday divide has worried some religious leaders. In 1963, during the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. told an audience at Western Michigan University that 11 am on Sunday morning is “the most segregated hour in this nation” and called it a tragedy.

     “Now, I’m sure that if the church had taken a stronger stand all along, we wouldn’t have many of the problems that we have,” he said.

     Josef Sorett, Assistant Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Columbia University, said it is unsurprising that the tradition of segregated worship has lingered.

     “You can look across a variety of indicators, housing, income, incarceration, and you can see that racial inequality is still very prevalent,” he said. “To put it in the language of the church, it would be a miracle if we had resolved all the history within just a few decades.”

     More at the link.

     All 6 officers in #FreddieGray case have entered not guilty pleas; Judge Barry Williams assigned; trial set Oct. 13, per court records.

     Obama’s Use Of The N-Word To Open Discussion On Race Is Proving Nobody Really Wants To Have The Discussion At All

     During a Monday interview with comedian Marc Maron, President Barack Obama used the n-word to drive home the point that the shunning of the word in today’s society doesn’t magically make our society post-racial.

     If last week’s massacre at Charleston, South Carolina‘s Mother Emanuel AME Church is any indication, that’s public knowledge. Accused gunman Dylann Roof reportedly told victims he intended to kill them because they were Black, and friends of the high school drop-out have told numerous media outlets that he indeed had a racial bias. But the tragic shooting that left nine dead is an extreme example — for months, a Black liberation movement propelled by the creators of Black Lives Matter and many other newly minted activism groups has brought America’s attention to the injustices Black communities deal with daily. From police brutality to employment, housing and education, Black people are still disenfranchised and underrepresented in a country that has always held a contentious relationship with them.

     That’s something that isn’t lost on the president, who in the past year has made attempts to close those gaps with programs like “My Brother’s Keeper.” And on Maron’s podcast, “WTF with Marc Maron,” Obama dropped the n-word to get his point across.

     “Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior,” he said.

     Unfortunately, the comment, dubbed “jarring” by CNN, is taking on new life. The president using the n-word has become the news, not the conversation on race. That’s also not lost on the public, who took to Twitter to defend the president (who, it must be noted, is not the first president to use the term).

     Interestingly, the soundbite that could have opened a door to discuss race relations in this country, while shutting down that false post-racial utopia politicians like to think exists, became the soundbite now debated amongst talking heads on news networks for the word’s usage.

     Not the context.

     Obama, who also said that the legacy of slavery and racism is “still part of our DNA,” was on to something, but sadly, nobody really wants to talk about the complexity of racism. To admit that there’s even an issue is to open up a world of problems that need to be rectified.

     And right now, what’s more fun? Acknowledging the age-old systemic racism in America, or that the president actually said a “bad” word? We think the latter won.

     The White House speaks out about Obama’s language: White House: Obama stands by use of N-word

     President Obama has no regrets about using the N-word to make a point during a recent discussion on race, the White House said Monday.

     “He does not,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest. “The president’s use of the word and the reason he used the word could not be more apparent.”

     The president’s phrasing renewed a debate over who is allowed to use the word and when it’s appropriate to say.

     In a podcast released Monday, the president urged the nation to deal with the enduring problem of racism, saying it has not been “cured” simply because it is no longer acceptable to utter racial slurs publicly.

     “Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say n—– in public,” he said on Marc Maron’s “WTF Podcast.” “That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”

     Obama also said the United States has made great strides toward eliminating racial discrimination since the days of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s.

     “We’ve made progress, but more needs to be done,” Earnest agreed.

     Earnest acknowledged it is “understandably notable” that Obama used the word, a nod to the public debate it has spurred. But he said it helped illustrate a point the president has long made.

     “I don’t think he was surprised by” the public reaction, Earnest said. “But I think it has prompted careful consideration of what he said.”

     It’s not the first time Obama has used the word on the record. It was heard in an audiobook recording of his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, during a passage in which he imitated one of his high-school friends.

     His use of it and the reason for it could not be more apparent. Well said.

     Experts: Attacks Like Charleston Worry Cops More Than Islamic Extremism. WELL judging from the news media I wouldn’ta known that, seeing as how it’s always those furren terrorists with funny clothes and dark skin that seem to be freaking everyone out!!! Thank you, experts. Now who will listen to you?

     Charles Kurzman, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who helped conduct the survey, told TPM in a Friday phone interview that what we know now about the suspect in the Charleston shooting, a white, 21-year-old man named Dylann Roof, indicates that his crime fits into a larger mosaic of right-wing extremist threats that law enforcement agencies are most concerned about. That remains the case even as attacks linked to Islamic extremists, like that on the “Draw Mohammad” contest last month in Garland, Texas, dominate headlines.

     The survey, conducted last year by Kurzman and David Shanzer of Duke University, in collaboration with the Police Executive Research Forum, found that 74 percent of law enforcement agencies ranked anti-government extremism among the top three terror threats they faced.

     By contrast, threats linked to groups like al-Qaeda registered at that same level among only 39 percent of the 382 agencies surveyed.

     In an op-ed published in The New York Times just a day before the Charleston shooting, Kurzman and Shanzer wrote that counterterrorism officials at 19 law enforcement agencies maintained in recent follow-up interviews that they were more concerned about the threat of right-wing extremism than the treat of Islamic extremism.

     “Far-right extremism was not just anti-government folks, it included white supremacists and other forms of right-wing extremism as well,” Kurzman told TPM. “So it’s possible that [the Charleston shooting] is indeed part of the overall threat of right-wing extremism that we found law enforcement agencies quite concerned about.”

     It’s possible, yeah, it’s definitely possible.

     Solidarity with # Charleston vigil getting started outside the US Embassy #BlackLivesMatter – not sure which embassy, Ottawa…?

189. rq says

     23 June 2015 at 3:04 am

     Again, this is how a black newspaper responded to South Carolina’s legislature passing a Confederate Flag law 1958

     New: Trial of officers in #FreddieGray killing scheduled for October 13, 2015. Officers waive July 2 arraignments;
     Also, Baltimore Circuit Ct Judge Barry Williams has been assigned to oversee proceedings in the Gray case.

     George Washington, Slave Catcher. From February 2015, worth a re-read.

     On Charleston: Letters from the Scribes Pt. 1, “We Lean Towards Joy”.

     My soul lives below the Mason-Dixon line. I was born on Georgia soil, and, God willing, will die there. There is nothing like driving down the street that leads to my childhood home, where the road is lined not with streetlights or sidewalks, but countless trees that loom almost ceremoniously. It gives rise to an ache in my heart just thinking about it. I’ve been up here a decade now, but I am not a Northerner and I never will be.

     I’m not alone. Over half of the country’s black population lives in the South. Compare that to those places we consider to be bastions of progressivism. For example, Vermont – long considered the most liberal state in the nation — has the second-smallest black population, accounting for less than 1%. Meanwhile eight of the top ten blackest states are in the South, where white supremacy’s vitriol is most vocal.

     The church is part of the reason we’ve stuck around so long. Where there are black people, there are black churches. Growing up I went to my own black church, founded in 1867. White parishioners were warmly welcomed but rare. It was a blockish stone building downtown, with deep red carpeting and low-roofed ceilings. My mother, Assistant Superintendent of the Sunday school, dragged us there at 9 AM every Sunday. Our parents pushed us into everything – we were acolytes, in the Easter and Christmas plays, the youth choir, the handbell group, at bible study camp. The same faces were in the pews each week– the Cheeses with their four young boys, Ms. Simon, the somber Sunday school teacher who taught my mother college P.E. way back when, the Paschals and the Jordans and the Alstons and on and on and on.

     We were all black, Southerners, worshippers.

     My sister and I did not particularly like going to church. We would have rather been sleeping in, our parents always forced us to wear stockings, and more importantly we both lacked religious fervor. But there was no doubting that we were in the presence of a reverent and strong community. Even my mother, a constant fretter, did not worry about us in church. In church, we were safe.

     –

     Black people are believers. We’ve had to be. The persistence of injustice has eroded many a hope for earthly peace, and what has kept us joyful is our belief that we’ll be vindicated after death. Even during slavery, slaves would meet in secret to worship, which made slave owners especially paranoid. They knew that political action is often fermented in church, and they feared insurrection. “The white folks would come in when the colored people would have prayer meeting and whip every one of them,” one slave said. “Most of them thought that when colored people were praying it was against them.”

     Churches have housed us, soothed us, fed us. Churches are where our masses huddled. They have been a place to rest the weariest feet. They have kept us joyful, and if not joyful then at peace, and if not at peace then they’ve at least kept us alive. We have, for decades, lifted our voices to sing. We have worn through bibles. We have tithed our last few dollars. We have found a couple breaths of solace. We have found a few square feet of safety.

     Three of the victims that were killed at Emanuel AME Church on Wednesday were over seventy years old. One, Susie, was 87. I didn’t know her, but I know a few things. I know she didn’t have it easy. Almost ninety years of being Black and female in South Carolina means decades of degradation, belittling, devaluing. If she didn’t attend Emanuel AME, she may be alive right now. But I’m more inclined to believe that if she didn’t go, she wouldn’t have lived this long.

     You may think I speak of God. I don’t. What I speak of is faith. Your personal belief in God’s existence is beside the point, as is my own. What awes me about black faith is not the higher power, it is the black power.

     –

     If you are not a black southerner, I imagine it is hard to understand why we live there and why we stay. Yes, resentment runs thick. Yes, racism looms heavy, though I’m keen to believe that is the same in every state in the nation. And yes, too many remain dedicated to the Confederacy, that government of traitors run by arrogant and ignorant men, a pathetic display of cowardice that failed within just four years. They are dangerous, these people that idealize such failure. They fantasize about the South rising again.

     Yet we stay. And it’s not about the weather, nor the low property taxes. In part, it is out of love and belonging. The South understands me somehow, takes me for who I am with neither demand nor question.

     But we also stay because we believe. And in our belief, we define our space. We draw strength. We build history and community. We fight. We own the South, too. It is my land. It is my soil. I would not trade it.

     Racism and hatred that flow this deep require training and indoctrination. The depravity required to kill nine black people in a church at Wednesday bible study, even after they have invited you into the sanctuary to worship with them, is more vicious than I can comprehend. It is also reminiscent of a different time – a time where four little girls in their best Sunday dresses are murdered in a Birmingham church, a time when thousands of bodies hung from tree branches while faces below looked up at the body and grinned.

     The result of killing nine people in a church is not just death, fear, and loss. The result is also a further constraining of the southern black experience. A black experience that, to the rest of the world, continues to be defined in part by white violence. Acts like this make it virtually impossible for Blacks in the South and across the nation to be known by more than the acts of their oppressors. As long as white violence continues to terrorize the innocent, as long as crazed racial hatred persists, such tethering of Black life and white hostility is expected.

     It is still hard for the world to talk about us without talking about them. That is its own injustice.

     A bit more at the link.

     And the second piece at the link, “The Peace Has Been Breached”:

     By now, I have become resigned to the fact that American society is a hostile place for people who look like me. I have to be on guard in my workplace not to come across as the angry black woman. I try to avoid police interaction all together. I know that someday I will have to give my children a talk on how to interact with the police and other authority figures to avoid trouble. But in my mind, the church was still a place of refuge, an oasis of safety in a sea of white chaos. Now that last place of peace has been breached as well by a man who was welcomed with open arms by the members of Emanuel AME.

     The complete ignorance of the situation displayed by my white co-workers and friends compounded the trauma. June 18, 2015 will probably go down as one of the weirdest days I’ve ever experienced as an attorney. I’m the only African-American in my department so I’m used to standing out but yesterday was the first time that I felt truly invisible. My colleagues were either unaware of what happened or failed to comprehend the magnitude of the impact that the Charleston shooting had on me and Black America collectively. The one attempt to discuss the shooting was met with the statement of “oh is that what President Obama was discussing on television earlier today?”

     As someone who works in a majority white space and has a circle of friends who happen to be mostly white there is a small part of me that is always paranoid that they don’t see or acknowledge my blackness. The past few days have been a reminder; some of my paranoia might be legitimate.

     Why the Charleston Nine Are on My Heart and Mind

     The AME or African Methodist Episcopal Church fostered my earliest spiritual growth. Sunday services, Easter speeches, Mother’s Day programs, Men’s Day, Usher Appreciation Day, Vacation Bible School — all of these are part of my memories from childhood to adulthood. It’s been years since I’ve attended church (moving around and overall laziness of finding a new church home… I know, I know. I can hear my grandmother quietly disapproving of my excuse-making), but I can still recite AME Liturgy from memory. I know this banner with the African National Colors — red, black, and green framing the Christian Cross with the anvil – representing hard work – very well. […]

     I’m just tired. I’m tired of being anxious and afraid. I’m tired of greiving the lost of life of people who look like me. Who could have been me or my siblings or parents or nieces or cousins or grand parents or my neighbors or my students. I’m tired of bad shit dispropotionately impacting my community! These tragic events born of racist, disenfrachising policies and attitudes are too much for my soul and body and psyche to bear. I swear, most people have no effing idea how hard it is for people of color, black people in particular, to show up to work and be present, let alone continue to perform.

     Can you even imagine the weariness we endure when we show up to work, in the lab, in the field, in the office and try to go on with the day? Can you imagine how isolating it is to be at your desk surrounded by co-workers or fellow grad students and everyone is humming along about their day or weekend and you’re the one sitting in silence trying to not burst into tears or scream?

     Now can you imagine having someone say or suggest you just suck it up or that you should focus on ‘the science’ as if that’s all that matters? When people you (may) know or have connection to (via family, church, school, or greek letter affiliation) have been slain in the sanctuary? We can’t go to store and walk back home. We can’t stand on the corner. We can’t cross the street. We can’t go to the pool. We can’t play in the park. We can’t wait for the train. We can’t knock on a door or flag for help because our car brokedown on the highway. We can’t even pray in church…and feel safe.

     What other ways of performing do we need to demonstrate to feel safe? Why can’t we just be…safe and feel secure while we just minding our own business? I’m exhausted of performing, of going out of my way of instructing other students of color of how to perform in order to stay alive, safe, “off of the radar” and beyond suspicion. If this isn’t what terrorism feels like, then I’m completely befuddled. Racism is terrorism; and I swear Black folks in America have PTSD.

     I’ll be sure to stay focused on the science only when that’s all that matters in life. In the meantime, I have to focus on staying alive and keeping my family as safe as possible while I crank out what data I can.

     By DNLee.

190. rq says

     23 June 2015 at 3:29 am

     Via Dana Hunter, ‘Today is a Good Day to Deny’: The American Right Wing Refusal to Face Facts.

     American Malaise

     Some product of deplorable southern genetic fuckery succumbs to calculated indoctrination, walks into an iconic black church and sits through a service for like an hour with the unsuspecting he intends to murder. He quietly allows his rage to detonate and blows holes in people he doesn’t know at all but hates with the incandescence of racial animus. He believes the full throttle afterburner of lies forced down his neck at the optimum time for his aptitude to gulp them.

     He was about fourteen years old when Barack Obama was first elected president of the United States of America. Since then he’s been given specific purpose to fear and hate black people and allowed to blame all his own failures and shortcomings on people who’s only difference is the color of their skin.

     Not just one shit stain lost his mind, half the goddamn country has.

     The second it begins, the right wing religious assholes don’t even break stride in their relentless campaign of obfuscation to render culpable the first black president. It’s all his fault. How dare he get elected twice. They stop at nothing. Shame and hypocrisy are mere divots in a smooth green field to them. Such routine violence is ascribed to trends of acceptance and equality for everyone from gay and transgendered to immigrants and black Americans.

     It’s an attack on Christians and of course it is racism to point out the impetus was exclusively racist.

     It’s everyone’s fault but theirs.

     They relentlessly spin it away from anything to do with bigotry and the sick fetish for guns in our culture. They just can’t abide a lingering look at this latest horror. Any prolonged bearing of witness to the very worst of our kind slithering from under rocks and out of caves to visit misery. Any scrutiny of the those among us emboldened by the craven fantasy of a president on the verge of sending troops to confiscate anything resembling a firearm from every American household.

     It’s all about that fetish. They don’t give a mad fuck about protecting their families. They aren’t actually worried about the grid failing and battling their neighbors for sustenance. That’s all bullshit. The second amendment is nothing but a goddamn slogan to them. They only fear the potential emasculation writ large for them by the NRA of losing their guns to the n*gg*r in chief. […]

     The president is an asshole for confronting the ubiquity of guns in our country instead of just letting folks grieve. Somehow, he is the one politicizing it because he points out an ostentatiously aberrant problem with no equal anywhere else in the civilized world. He is chastised and pilloried by the media, our elected representatives and half the electorate for daring to point out the obvious carcinogen.

     Somehow, by being nothing but forthright and germane, he’s too soon and too much for pointing out this crazy fucker would have only been marginallysuccessful at the sporadic hematoma if he was limited to plastic spoons.

     I am done with you idiots that would suggest we talk about anything other than how we can realistically mitigate this problem. Regulation. Common sense. There is no substitute. There is no longer any excuse for eschewing responsibility. Fuck you if you want to whine about the looming potential of a home invasion because violent crime is at a historic low. Yeah yeah, criminals will always have guns. If you don’t live among criminals then piss up a rope. If you’re that worried about it, lock your doors and windows, get a home security system and keep a Louisville slugger by your bed. If you’re not crazy you can even have a gun. Seriously, despite the odds that you’ll die by it or kill your spouse being exponentially higher.

     No shit, if any of this happens to you it’s unlikely you’ll be wearing your holster.

     Open carry is absurd. I don’t automatically assume you’re hung like a gnat if you own a gun but I’m confident you resemble a Ken Doll sans underwear if you think it’s normal to strap your AR15 on before you go grocery shopping or out for ice cream. If you find yourself in the middle of some stick up, run or get on the floor like the bastard says because if you’re packing you’ll probably the first to taste your own blood. Stop fantasizing about being a hero. Life isn’t a comic book and you’re not in an action movie.

     So relax, and shut the fuck up, you can have your goddamn guns as long as you’re not a goofecock nutter planning to shoot up the local Starbuck’s and willing to prove it by submitting to an objective process. Nobody wants to take your precious guns away as long as you are sane and willing to prove it.

     There’s no way that’s too much to ask.

     And South Carolina, take down that stupid fucking flag.

     Drinks for my friends.

     I got that link from under this FB post: The Black Side, which I cite in entirety for those not in the thrall of Marc Zuckerberg:

     America should do today what it should’ve done on April 9, 1865, after crushing the Confederate rebellion and accepting their surrender; and that’s outlaw flying Confederate flags on [any] government property, whether Federal, State or County.

     We should outlaw naming any pubic structures, schools, or streets after any of the traitors who fought on the Confederate side, and it should be against the law to build memorials to them on public property. Nor should Confederate symbols be allowed on car tags, or on anything else produced by a Federal, State or County government.

     The Southern States that seceded were ENEMY COMBATANTS. The most deadly enemy combatants in the history of the United States. Some Southern generals were tried and hanged for war crimes, for abusing and starving Union troops.

     We’re not flying the sunburst flag of Japan on government property or the German Swastika, so why is it accepted to do so with these Southerners who did more damage to this country than Japan, Germany, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Vietnam, and ISIS combined.

     The biggest mistake of Lincoln’s term was choosing the Southerner Andrew Johnson to be his Vic-President. The sentiment was noble but the outcome was tragic. After President Lincoln’s assassination, with Andrew Johnson taking the seat of president, the undercurrent of Southern Confederates to retake America had begun. The “heritage” of the South is White Supremacy. That’s what they fought, killed and died for. That’s what they teach their kids, and that’s what that flag represents to them. They are a cancer on this society, that will eventually consume us if we allow it.

     Yes racism also exists in the North, the southern-style racism is particularly prevalent in small, rural northern cities and towns. But the South is the cradle of the most extreme, psychopathic racism in the world.

     JUST IN: @POTUS will deliver eulogy at Clementa Pinckney’s service this Friday at TD Arena, while @VP Biden will attend. #chsnews

     Baltimore County calls on Baltimore City to change the name of Robert E. Lee park

     Nikki Haley, South Carolina Governor, Calls for Removal of Confederate Battle Flag

     Gov. Nikki R. Haley called on Monday for South Carolina to do what just a week ago seemed politically impossible — remove the Confederate battle flag from its perch in front of the State House building here. She argued that a symbol long revered by many Southerners was for some, after the church massacre in Charleston, a “deeply offensive symbol of a brutally offensive past.”

     “The events of this week call upon us to look at this in a different way,” said Ms. Haley, an Indian-American, who is the first member of an ethnic minority to serve as governor of the state as well as the first woman.

     She spoke at an afternoon news conference, surrounded by Democratic and Republican lawmakers including both of the state’s United States senators, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, an African-American. “Today we are here in a moment of unity in our state, without ill will, to say it’s time to move the flag from the capitol grounds,” she said.

     It was a dramatic turnabout for Ms. Haley, a second-term Republican governor who over her five years in the job has displayed little interest in addressing the intensely divisive issue of the flag. But her new position demonstrated the powerful shock that last Wednesday’s killings at Emanuel A.M.E. Church have delivered to the political status quo, mobilizing leaders at the highest levels.

     On Monday, the White House announced that President Obama will travel to Charleston on Friday and deliver the eulogy for the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the slain pastor of the Emanuel Church and a state senator. The political aftershocks from the shootings were also felt in Mississippi, where the House speaker, a Republican, unexpectedly declared in a statement Monday night that the Mississippi state flag, which includes the Confederate banner, “has become a point of offense that needs to be removed.”

     Interviews suggested that Ms. Haley’s rapidly evolving position on the flag was shaped by several factors: the horror of seeing the unsmiling gunman posing with it in photos; her conversations with congregants at the church; intensifying pressure from South Carolina business leaders to remove a controversial vestige of the state’s past; and calls from leaders of her own party, including its leading presidential contenders, urging her to take it down once and for all.

     The result on Monday was a moment of political and racial drama, and a signature moment for Ms. Haley, who blended the traditional values of the South — faith, family, empathy — into a powerful call for taking down the flag as a gesture of unity, healing and renewal.

     She acknowledged that some South Carolinians respect and revere the flag not as a racist symbol but as “a way to honor ancestors.” However, she added, the flag, “while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state.”

     The suspect in the Wednesday massacre, a 21-year-old itinerant landscaper named Dylann Roof, had posed for numerous photos with the Confederate battle flag. In the aftermath of the shootings, protesters on the streets and on social media demanded that the flag — which was unfurled over the State House in 1962, largely as a symbol of defiance of efforts to expand the civil rights of black Americans — finally be removed. […]

     Some opposition remains within the legislature. State Senator Lee Bright, a conservative lawmaker from Spartanburg, said it was unfortunate that the flag issue was being taken up in the midst of so much grief. He said supports the flag as a symbol of the state’s history.

     “There are those of us who have ancestors that fought and spilled blood on the side of the South when they were fighting for states’ rights, and we don’t want our ancestors relegated to the ash heaps of history,” he said. “Through the years, the heroes of the South have been slandered, maligned and misrepresented, and this is a further activity in that.”

     However, a leader of the Sons of Confederate Veterans group in South Carolina, while signaling his disappointment in the governor’s recommendation, said the organization — which prominently features the battle flag at the State House on its website — said he expected his group’s members would go along with whatever decision was made.

     “With the winds that started blowing last week, I figured it would just be a matter of time,” said Ken Thrasher, the lieutenant commander of the group’s South Carolina division. “Whatever the legislature decides to do, we will accept it graciously.”

     Mr. Thrasher said he and others in his organization were “saddened, but we’re going to move forward.”

     “We’re not a racist group,” he added.

     Huh. Right. I believe you! (Not.)
     The article includes Mitt Romney, and there’s also a link to a transcript of Haley’s announcement in one of the right sidebars.

191. rq says

     23 June 2015 at 3:33 am

     Denver Tomorrow! 7PM “Rally Against White Supremacy” Colorado State Capitol #defenddenver #CharlestionShooting

     Compare: Confederate stars and bars (left) Current Georgia state flag (right)

     Live: We’re asking every member of the SC legislature about the confederate flag

     The Post and Courier has reached out to lawmakers across South Carolina to find out where they stand on removing the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse grounds. This is a work in progress, and we encourage you to keep checking back as we reach more legislators and update our results. We encourage any lawmakers reading this to get in touch with us and weigh in with their thoughts.

     We began polling lawmakers at about 9:00 am Monday, and have been updating this page with responses as we receive them. The collection of responses remains on-going.

     The page will update in real-time, no need to refresh.

     See the results in pie charts!

     Mississippi is up next. That flag gotta go.

     Slavery’s Long Shadow

     America is a much less racist nation than it used to be, and I’m not just talking about the still remarkable fact that an African-American occupies the White House. The raw institutional racism that prevailed before the civil rights movement ended Jim Crow is gone, although subtler discrimination persists. Individual attitudes have changed, too, dramatically in some cases. For example, as recently as the 1980s half of Americans opposed interracial marriage, a position now held by only a tiny minority.

     Yet racial hatred is still a potent force in our society, as we’ve just been reminded to our horror. And I’m sorry to say this, but the racial divide is still a defining feature of our political economy, the reason America is unique among advanced nations in its harsh treatment of the less fortunate and its willingness to tolerate unnecessary suffering among its citizens.

     Of course, saying this brings angry denials from many conservatives, so let me try to be cool and careful here, and cite some of the overwhelming evidence for the continuing centrality of race in our national politics.

     My own understanding of the role of race in U.S. exceptionalism was largely shaped by two academic papers.

     The first, by the political scientist Larry Bartels, analyzed the move of the white working class away from Democrats, a move made famous in Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Mr. Frank argued that working-class whites were being induced to vote against their own interests by the right’s exploitation of cultural issues. But Mr. Bartels showed that the working-class turn against Democrats wasn’t a national phenomenon — it was entirely restricted to the South, where whites turned overwhelmingly Republican after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Richard Nixon’s adoption of the so-called Southern strategy.

     And this party-switching, in turn, was what drove the rightward swing of American politics after 1980. Race made Reaganism possible. And to this day Southern whites overwhelmingly vote Republican, to the tune of 85 or even 90 percent in the deep South.

     The second paper, by the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, was titled “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-style Welfare State?” Its authors — who are not, by the way, especially liberal — explored a number of hypotheses, but eventually concluded that race is central, because in America programs that help the needy are all too often seen as programs that help Those People: “Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.”

     Now, that paper was published in 2001, and you might wonder if things have changed since then. Unfortunately, the answer is that they haven’t, as you can see by looking at how states are implementing — or refusing to implement — Obamacare. […]

     So will it always be thus? Is America doomed to live forever politically in the shadow of slavery?

     I’d like to think not. For one thing, our country is growing more ethnically diverse, and the old black-white polarity is slowly becoming outdated. For another, as I said, we really have become much less racist, and in general a much more tolerant society on many fronts. Over time, we should expect to see the influence of dog-whistle politics decline.

     But that hasn’t happened yet. Every once in a while you hear a chorus of voices declaring that race is no longer a problem in America. That’s wishful thinking; we are still haunted by our nation’s original sin.

     Every State-Sponsored Confederate Flag & Monument Should Come Down

     On this past Wednesday, nine amazing people were gunned down in Charleston, South Carolina by a white racist who killed them because they were black. He thought he was superior to them, and he was interested in starting a race war. The murders, one of the deadliest hate crimes against African Americans in the past 100 years, ripped the heart out of not just nine families, but out of good people all over the world.

     When an attack like this happens, our country not only wants justice, we want change. It seems, though, that nothing changes. Guns, hundreds of millions of them, are still everywhere and easy to obtain. Hate, both online and off, is on the rise, and we are simply biding our time until the next mass shooting or hate crime rips our heart out again. We have absolutely no indication that even one small impediment is going to keep this cycle from staying on a constant loop.

     Dylann Roof, the man who slaughtered these nine women and men, very much identified with the Confederacy. We now have a dozen photos of him holding the flag, posing with it on the license plate of his car, and standing in front of a Confederate museum. It was an enormous part of his identity.

     In the wake of this horrific attack in Charleston, the presence of the Confederate Flag outside of the Statehouse and the Confederate memorials and streets named after Confederate heroes all over the state, has enraged the nation. We don’t have to look at the photos of a mass murderer to see the flag, it’s all over South Carolina and indeed all over the South — on full display — paid for and protected by the state.

     For African Americans, the Confederate Flag is very much like the swastika. Its presence is deeply offensive. We would never see the swastika flown by the government of any country in the world — including Germany. One could argue that Hitler and the Nazi regime were great strategists, but we don’t see statues of him or his generals peppered throughout Berlin. One could argue, and they’d be right, that the World War was not just about the persecution of the Jews, but it was an essential part of the evil of that time, and this much is widely accepted — and respected.

     African Americans have stated, ad nauseum, over and over and over again, that the Confederate Flag is both offensive and painful, yet, these pleas are ignored and it remains. It bears repeating that the Confederate Flag did not fly in South Carolina for nearly 100 years after the Civil War and wasn’t reintroduced until the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Since then it has been widely used by the KKK, Skinheads, and now by a mass murderer. In South Carolina, while the flags flew at half-staff after the Charleston shooting, the Confederate Flag at the statehouse couldn’t even be lowered. It doesn’t lower. It’s locked, doesn’t even have a pulley system, and can only be lowered, by law, for maintenance.

     Symbols have power. They clearly had power and meaning for Dylann Roof. They clearly had power and meaning for Adolph Hitler. Does Germany still have struggles with anti-Semitism? Yes, but a part of overcoming who they once were has been removing the symbols of their past and replacing them with new ones.

     The bottom line is this: The Confederacy, as policy, believed in slavery and Charleston was one of the largest human trafficking ports in the world. South Carolina, through and through, was a slave state and its soldiers and politicians firmly believed in keeping it that way. This is indisputable history. Even if these happen to be your ancestors and this happens to be your heritage, the same could be said for any regime in the history of the world that subjugated human beings to torture and slavery. Fifty years from now, ISIS will be someone’s heritage. One hundred years from now Al Qaeda will be someone’s heritage.

     Every Confederate Flag in South Carolina and in this country that’s on forced public display — that is paid for by a state or local government — should be removed and placed into an optional indoor museum. Every statue of Confederate war heroes in the South should be placed in either cemeteries or indoor museums — and should never be forced upon the public or maintained with tax money from African Americans or other people of conscience who do not want to support such things. Public streets, which are paid for and maintained by tax dollars, by definition, should never be named after Confederate leaders — just as Germany should not have an Adolph Boulevard.

     Until they are taken down, people should try to take them down themselves. We have absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe that any politicians are going to do this. They never do. We should take matters into our own hands, and, as an act of civil disobedience, take them down or destroy them ourselves.

     Our country can never and will never heal from our painfully racist past as long as those who fought for it to remain that way are celebrated. Furthermore, by publicly celebrating those who fought to maintain racism, we create a culture where it’s only logical that what those Confederate heroes believed will be beloved as well.

     Bring them down. Bring them all down!

     Bring down every flag, every monument, every street sign.

     Do it for Charleston.

     Do it for America.

     Do it now.

     I’m glad the conversation is happening, but I’m sad it took the deaths of those 9 people for it to happen.

192. rq says

     23 June 2015 at 6:32 am

     I’m out for the next couple of days. This country ain’t religious but pagan – we get two national holidays for Midsummer. See you on the dark side.

193. David Marjanović says

     23 June 2015 at 1:12 pm

     The latest excuse for slavery. It’s one of the more breathtaking ones.

     “Sign the petition demanding that state governments remove Confederate symbolism and flags from government property.”

194. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     23 June 2015 at 10:01 pm

     All rightee…lots of links to share, much of it bc people said stupid shit. First up are links from If You Only News Mike Huckabee, thinks “god already solved racism” and wants us to talk about race issues less:

     Fox News host Ed Henry pointed out that Huckabee had failed to lead on the issue of taking the Confederate flag down, asking:

     You say voters want a leader, somebody who will stand up. A few days ago, I saw you asked right here on Fox about the Confederate flag issue down in South Carolina and you basically punted, and said it’s a state issue. Is that leadership?

     Huckabee had previously said that whether or not the racist hate flag should be flown is a state issue, and deflected from there.

     Huckabee responded to Henry by saying what he’s really being asked is if South Carolina is a racist state, and he declared that South Carolina must be racism free because the Governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, is of Indian descent and they have a black U.S. senator.

     Which is kind of like saying I’m not racist because I have black friends.

     Huckabee thought that the governor’s decision to take the racist/traitor/loser/hate flag down was a good decision by the state, but opined that he doesn’t think it’s an important issue for a presidential candidate to be speaking about.

     What Huckabee fails to understand is that when asked if he thinks the Confederate flag should come down, he’s really being asked if he cares for the civil rights of black people in the states where this flag symbolizing slavery is on display, and the fact that he has no real answer for that shows a lack of consideration for people he might be a leader for someday.

     Huckabee then tried to steer the conversation to his favorite subject: God.

     Huckabee said:

     I keep hearing people saying we need more conversations about race. Actually we don’t need more conversations. What we need is conversions because the reconciliations that changes people is not a racial reconciliation, it’s a spiritual reconciliation when people are reconciled to God.

     Because Christians are never racist. Duh.

     Huckabee continued:

     When I love God and I know that God created other people regardless of their color as much as he made me, I don’t have a problem with racism.

     It’s solved!

     Interesting. So was God on vacation when this country was colonized by Europeans and the Native Indians were slaughtered? Was he taking a bathroom break when African-Americans were enslaved in this country? Was he taking another call in some other universe when the US imprisoned Japanese-Americans during WWII? I mean, those are all clear examples of racism, and your deity did nothing. Perhaps it’s the whole ‘not existing’ thing.

     ****

     This explains so fucking much- CNNs Don Lemon is a black, gay man. He’s also a conservative:

     But something may explain Lemon’s irrational behavior. On Monday, Lemon joined Glenn Beck for a phone interview — one in which he admitted he is a conservative — though he did attempt to claim he was liberal on some issues.

     Beck played a clip of a statement Lemon recently made on a radio show (Beck assumed Lemon made the remarks on CNN) — one which we usually hear from Fox News Uncle Ruckuses:

     Political correctness has become dangerous. We have to stop looking for reasons to be offended. We have to allow people leeway to make mistakes in conversations without calling them racists, bigots, stupid, dumb, sellout, or whatever the word your word choice might be. On and on. Not everyone is going to — or should they have to agree with you. In fact, it’s better when people don’t agree with you. That’s how we learn. That’s what conversation is really about. It’s not supposed to be an agree fest. After almost 25 years in the news business, you know who is the most easily offended and the least tolerant? Liberals and progressives. Because many of them don’t really want to hear anyone else’s opinions, but their own. Here’s a tip: If you only agree with people who hold your same political affiliation or who are of your particular race, your particular gender, or ethnicity, you are part of the political correctness run amuck problem.

     “I’m glad you played that. I actually said that on the radio program that I’m on. I said much more interesting things on CNN,” Lemon told Beck. “I guess would be subversive from what you call mainstream media, but that’s what I believe. I really do believe that.”

     “Do your bosses know that you believe that?” the right-wing pundit asked.

     Lemon replied:

     Yeah, they do actually. They do know. I think that’s why I’m there. You know, I’ve been called a bigot and a racist by the right. I’ve been called a bigot racist by the left. Mostly on the left I’m a sellout or an uncle Tom. I don’t believe in pandering I believe in telling people the truth. And people don’t always want to hear the truth. And I believe many times liberals don’t want to hear the truth. You know, if you don’t see their world point of view, they get really vicious because, you know, what are you kidding me? You’re a black man, and you don’t believe certain things that I believe. You know, it’s just really interesting, that box that they put you in.
     Lemon said that he’s “conservative on some issues,” and “liberal on other issues.” While he identified as a social liberal in the interview with Beck, his previous remarks regarding his fellow African-Americans and rape victims call that claim into question.

     “I think the majority of people feel the same way we do, Glenn. That we should not be run by the right or the left or, you know, conservative versus liberal,” Lemon told Beck. “We should be — you know, we should listen to what is right. And I think it’s going to take people like us standing up and giving voice to that.”

     Lemon added that we shouldn’t be calling racists “racists.” According to the CNN anchor, we should be listening to their ideas:

     You don’t have to say, hey, you’re racist. Or you’re a fascist. It’s because you may have those particular qualities, but it doesn’t mean you’re of it. And I think we have to start listening to each other. And I think somehow — I don’t know how we’re going to do it. But all the people who have people sort of just wrapped around their fingers or in their heads and they continue to pander to those people, we have to somehow figure how to call out their lies and get people to realize that they’re being pandered to.

     Later in the conversation, he told Beck that he is all about “the truth” — “truth” like, when a man is overpowering and raping you, biting his d*ck is an option.

     This explains so much. I haven’t liked this House Negro for years.

     ****
     Oh look! It’s Don fucking Lemon again!
     Chairman of League of the South whines, says that removing the Confederate flag is “cultural genocide” against white people:

     Hines is the South Carolina chairman of the neo-Confederate group League of the South. The Southern Poverty Law Center identifies the group as an “extremist” group that advocates for “a second Southern secession and a society dominated by ‘European Americans.’”

     The conversation starts with Hines making the ridiculous claim that his ancestors “fought to stop an invasion of South Carolina by the United States.” Apparently he missed the part where some of those ancestors signed the constitution that made South Carolina part of the United States. You might think that’s a crazy statement, but it gets even crazier.

     Hines babbles something about a church that was burned, first during the American Revolution, then later by Union troops. He says that Governor Haley is “honoring those people that burned that church.” Well, it was a war, after all, and one his state started, at that. Things get burned and destroyed in war.

     After Lemon talks to state Senator Marlon Kimson, who observes that the Confederate flag belongs in a museum, Hines says that he doesn’t understand why the American flag flies over the capitol building in South Carolina. His rationale is that the South Carolina flag doesn’t fly at post offices and military bases, so why should the U.S. flag fly over a building belonging to South Carolina government? He was apparently asleep during his high school civics class.

     The state flag flies under the national flag to denote that South Carolina is part of the United States. The state flag doesn’t fly at federal facilities because those places belong not just to the people of South Carolina, but to all Americans. Hines seems to think that it is a great affront to South Carolina to have the state flag flying under the American flag, but the federal and state flags are flown that way in 49 other states, too.

     Lemon points out to Hines that “it’s one country.” Hines starts to respond. “No, actually, no,” he says. But unfortunately, Lemon cuts him off.

     Hines isn’t finished yet. When Lemon returns to him, Hines says that he doesn’t understand why Senator Kimson is “moving to do cultural genocide on the southern men and women.” He doesn’t say white southern men and women. But given that polls show that most black Americans consider the flag is a symbol of racism, Hines certainly isn’t talking about them.

195. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     23 June 2015 at 10:14 pm

     Now some articles from Raw Story–
     Hillary Clinton denounces Charleston shooting as act of racist terrorism:

     Hillary Clinton has branded the murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston an act of “racist terrorism” and linked the attack to America’s wider problem of entrenched racial inequality.

     Clinton was in South Carolina not far from the Emanuel AME church, last Wednesday, just a few hours before an accused white supremacist joined a Bible study in its basement and opened fire.

     “That night word of the killings struck like a blow to the soul,” Clinton said on Tuesday. “How do we make sense of such an evil act? And act of racist terrorism, perpetrated in a house of God?”

     Commentators have been divided over whether the atrocity, allegedly perpetrated by a 21-year-old South Carolina man, Dylann Roof, constituted an act of terrorism. The Justice Department said it was investigating the mass shooting as a possible case of domestic terrorism, while the the FBI’s director, James Comey, said he does not believe the atrocity fits that definition because it was not, in his view, “a political act”.

     However on Tuesday, Clinton adopted the language used by many other liberals since the comedian Jon Stewart compared Roof’s alleged massacre to terrorism committed by Islamic jihadists in a widely shared monologue .

     Clinton’s main rival for the Democratic nomination for president, Bernie Sanders, was quicker off the mark, labelling shooting an act of terror within 24 hours of the attack.

     The former secretary of state and first lady also suggested the shooting at the Emanuel AME church was connected to broader racial challenges in the country.

     “I know it’s tempting to dismiss a tragedy such as this as an isolated incident, to believe that in today’s America bigotry largely behind us, that institutionalised racism no longer exists,” she said. “But despite our best efforts and highest hopes, America’s long struggle with race is far from finished.”

     Clinton made the remarks during a visit to a suburb of St Louis, Missouri, not far from Ferguson, where rioting broke out last year following the police shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old, Michael Brown.

     Despite the shooting and its aftermath being brought up several times during a question and answer session, Clinton did not address the topic head-on. She did not mention Brown, or the civil disorder that spread through the St Louis area after his death in August – and again, in November, when no charges were brought against Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Brown.

     The only apparent reference to police shootings was a veiled reference. “We must do all we can to be sure our communities respect law enforcement, and that law enforcement respects the communities they serve,” she said.

     Clinton’s willingness to address the broader issues of racial disparities head-on has been contrasted with her failed presidential bid in 2008, which she lost to Barack Obama. During that race Clinton, who was politicised during the 1960s civil rights movement, fumbled over race issues, a controversy that was compounded when her husband, then p resident Bill Clinton, criticised Obama in terms that some believed were racially tinged .

     This time around, Clinton’s campaign believes she has found her stride on the issue of race, speaking forcefully about the need for reform of the criminal justice system, for example, shortly after rioting broke out in Baltimore.

     Surveys also show Clinton enjoying broad and deep support among black and minority communities, in contrast to Sanders, who trails far behind in polls of Democratic primary voters and gains most of his support from white, low-income and middle-class supporters.

     Despite being widely trailed in advance, Clinton’s speech at Florissant’s Christ the King United Church was brief – lasting around 20 minutes – and did not explore racial disparities in a huge amount of depth.

     The event was, instead, more in keeping with the intimate listening tour that marked the start of her campaign.

     “We need to confront the deep-seated biases and prejudices that still live within too many of us,” Clinton said in one exchange with local leaders gathered on stage with her at the church. “It is something that is hard to talk about. And honestly I think the vast majority of us could pass lie detector tests if we were asked. We’d say ‘of course not, I’m don’t have any prejudice of bias’, but we do. And we know we do if we’re really honest with each other.”

     ****

     Freddie Gray’s autopsy shows ‘high energy injury’ while in Baltimore police custody . Gotta have reprint permission for this article, since it was originally from the Baltimore Sun. I’m seeing this more and more at Raw Story and I don’t like it (though I imagine it’s not their fault).

     ****
     Rush Limbaugh: ‘Banning the flag of the Confederacy is part of the left’s anti-American agenda’:

     “I have a prediction,” Limbaugh announced. “It’s not going to stop with the Confederate flag because it’s not about the Confederate flag, it’s about destroying the South as a political force.”

     According to the conservative talker, liberals had a plan to paint everyone in the entire South as if they were the white supremacist who murdered nine black church members in Charleston.

     “Do not doubt me!” Limbaugh insisted. “And I’ll make another prediction to you. The next flag that will come under assault — and it will not be long — is the American flag.”

     “It makes perfect sense,” he continued. “The speed and rapidity with which the left is conducting this assault on all these American traditions and institutions, if you don’t think the American flag is in their crosshairs down the road, you had better stop and reconsider.”

     ****
     Bill O’Reilly freaks out when guest asks: ‘How many black friends do you have?:
     (I wonder if Don Lemon is one of them)

     “So how many black friends do you have?” Powers asked. “How many black friends do you have?”

     O’Reilly’s hand could be heard slapping the desk before he said, “If you think most Americans are racist, I’m ashamed of you. I’m ashamed of you.”

     “I’m asking you a serious question,” Powers said. “I didn’t say most Americans were racist.”

     “You just said it,” he shot back.

     But what Powers actually told him was, “There are actually a lot of people in this country who are racist.” Both O’Reilly and fellow panelist Monica Crowley argued that racism had been limited to the “lunatic fringe” of the country.

     O’Reilly, who has denied the existence of white privilege in the past, argued that people were being “sold” the idea that the US is dealing with white supremacy.

     “If you don’t get it, then you must be living in a hut somewhere with no electricity,” he told Powers.

     “I’m living in the real world where you can actually defend America and people don’t attack you,” Powers replied. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. You’re saying that you can’t defend America without people attacking you?”

     “I’m saying that the world is being told by anti-American haters that we are a rank racist society, and that is a lie,” he said.

     No fuckface, it’s not a lie. This country is steeped in racism. It was built on racism. It was built *by* the engine of racism.

196. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     23 June 2015 at 10:50 pm

     Here are some links from The Root–
     Black Texas woman whose birth parents are white outraged over Rachel Dolezal:

     “She lied about her race,” Byrd said. “I didn’t lie about my race because I didn’t know.”

     Byrd was born in 1942 to a man and woman she described as white transients. Her biological father, Earl Beagle, walked out on his family. Then Daisy Beagle, her birth mother, had five children to feed as a single mom. After she fell 30 feet in a trolley accident, the state of Missouri took the children, considering the mother unable to care for them.

     That’s how little Jeanette Beagle came to be adopted by a well-off black family from Newton, Kan.: Ray and Edwinna Wagner changed the child’s name to Verda, and she began her life as a black person, according to the news station. She was raised as a light-skinned black kid and the Wagners’ only child, living in comfort on Ray’s salary as a railroad porter.

     “My adoptive mother, Edwinna Wagner, never told me that she had adopted a white baby,” Byrd told the news station. “She took it to her grave that she had a white daughter.”

     Although Edwinna Wagner eventually revealed that Verda had been adopted, she did not share any other details.

     But Byrd eventually stumbled upon information she found shocking—that her birth parents, Earl and Daisy Beagle, and her siblings were white. She had lived for nearly 70 years without being told about her true heritage.

     Byrd does not feel any sadness or remorse at the discovery, though.

     “Jeanette Beagle does not fit Verda Byrd,” she said. “Jeanette Beagle does not have an education. Jeanette Beagle has no Social Security money because she does not work. She never went to kindergarten.”

     “I’m comfortable with being a black woman,” added Byrd, who gained her current last name through marriage.

     All told, Daisy Beagle ended up having 10 children and Byrd has recently been in contact with her siblings. According to Byrd, when she and her siblings meet, they don’t discuss race.

     ****
     Police brought Dylann Roof Burger King after he was arrested:

     North Carolina police talked about what it was like capturing and arresting Dylann Roof, including how eerily calm and cooperative he was. And when Roof said that he was hungry, Shelby, N.C., police bought him food from a nearby Burger King, the Charlotte Observer reports.

     Roof reportedly confessed to police that he was the gunman responsible for the shooting spree last Wednesday at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., that claimed nine lives.

     Shortly after a North Carolina florist tipped police off to Roof’s whereabouts in Shelby, Roof’s car was surrounded by police offficers with their weapons drawn. Roof lowered his window and presented his driver’s license, saying, “I’m Dylann Roof,” police told the Observer.

     The FBI swooped in and took over Roof’s detainment shortly thereafter. However, Shelby police revealed that one of their exchanges with Roof was about food. Shelby Police Chief Jeff Ledford told the Observer that police officers got him food from the fast-food chain restaurant.

     “He was very quiet, very calm. He didn’t talk,” Ledford said. “He sat down here very quietly. He was not problematic.”

     Roof also told Shelby authorities that he had been planning the church attack for some time because of Mother Emanuel’s significance to the African-American community in Charleston, a source told WBTV.

     I don’t have a problem with the guy eating. Even though he’s a racist, murderous craptastic human being, he is still human. Even in custody, he should be allowed to eat.

     My question is-do police officers do the same thing for black suspects? Hispanic suspects? Somehow I don’t believe they do. I suspect this is yet another benefit of being white.

     ****
     University of Texas students petition to remove statue of Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis:

     In accordance with the newly reignited disapproval of the Confederate flag since the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal massacre in Charleston, S.C. last week, students at the University of Texas are signing a petition demanding that the school remove a statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, from campus grounds, KVUE-TV reports.

     Hundreds of students have already signed on, saying that Davis’ support of slavery and white supremacy does not coincide with university values.

     “It is impossible to reach the full potential of an inclusive and progressive learning institution while putting an idol of our darkest days on a pedestal,” the petition, which was started on Sunday, reads.

     As KVUE-TV notes, the controversial statue has stood at the foot of the UT tower for decades.

     “Why is this icon … that represents slavery and bigotry toward so many people that now attend the University of Texas, why is it still here?” student-government Chief of Staff Tara Patel told the news station.

     By Tuesday, someone had spray-painted “Black Lives Matter” on the statue of Davis, as well as two other Confederate statues on campus, the news station reveals.

     Why would you want to honor a treasonous traitor and upholder of white supremacy and racism?
     I’m curious to see how far this justifiable outrage will reach and how effective it will be. There are a lot of monuments across the South (and I bet some up north), as well as a lot of flags. There are also a lot of streets with the names of Confederate soldiers or generals, as well as bridges.
     There’s also the fact that we honor past presidents on our money, and more than a few of them owned slaves (before and during their presidency). If we’re going to stop honoring Confederate soldiers and officials who were fighting to keep slavery around, we shouldn’t ignore the politicians who held slaves simply bc they fought for the Union.

197. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     23 June 2015 at 11:50 pm

     This next one is just…wow.
     Confederate flag store owner: “It’s not a flag issue, it’s not a gun issue, it’s a heart issue.”

     What doesn’t a contemporary American education teach?

     Facts. Well, one fact is that [the United States] was founded as a Christian nation. Another fact is that in 1865, the Constitutional Republic was assassinated, and a different time of framework was put in its place. Another fact would be prior to 1860, we had statesmen serving in public office often at their own—they served at their own cost. And after 1865, we no longer saw statesmen, we saw politicians. And politicians have developed into demagogues who will lie cheat and steal for their own purpose, and sell their loyalty to the highest bidder.

     To tell the true history—that’s what motivates me to keep going.

     What virtues does the Confederate flag denote?

     The values are virtue, loyalty, kindness, love, family, local administration of government. That’s a sufficient list for now.

     Why do you think the flag is now associated with slavery and white supremacy?

     Well, people perceive the flag the way the media portrays it, and the media has an agenda, and the agenda is the destruction of western Christian civilization. Now, with regards to slavery, slavery was introduced early on in the colonies, and it was the Northern colonies that practiced the trade. There was never a Southern flag flown over a slave ship. If the abolitionists were so intent on stopping slavery, why didn’t they shut down the slave ship operations? Why didn’t they stop the trading of rum or sugar cane in New England? Why didn’t they stop the root of the cause of slavery, which was greed, simple greed?

     We must recognize slaves were sold by black chieftains to white slave captains. These chieftains and Yankee captains bear the brunt of the responsibility. Now, we’re not taught about the literally hundreds of thousands of white slaves from Ireland and Scotland that were sent to Barbados—that’s a moot subject, you won’t hear about it. And at the same time, the term slave came from the Muslims who around the Mediterranean were going North, and capturing Slavic people. That’s why they’re called slaves.

     But there were slaves in the South.

     With regard to the Negro slavery, a very small percent—three to five percent—ended in the Southern colonies. The bulk went to the Caribbean and South America. When someone says that slavery was the cause of the war, I understand their maleducation—mal meaning defective and evil.

     How does Christianity factor into this?

     The issue is a heart issue. It’s not a flag issue, it’s not a gun issue, it’s a heart issue. When people have their hearts right and they are virtuous, they wouldn’t condone all these terrible acts. But because God has been kicked out of the marketplace and kicked out of the public square and out of the schools, we’ve got several generations of folk who were raised defectively, and when I say that, what I mean is, the human being is a triune being—a body, mind, and spirit.

     And so you don’t believe the Confederate flag to be a symbol of white supremacy?

     Not at all. Jefferson Davis, who was president of the Confederacy, came into a very large estate in Louisiana, and he and his brother had one too, and together, they set up a judicial system and education system for their charges, their slaves. Because in the old South, most slaveowners operated under the burden that they were responsible for the benefit and livelihood of their charges. He set up a judicial system, school system, and set up a number of systems to cause these recent savages from the part of Africa who were half-naked pagans, caused them to become what we would call civilized. Learning to control their base appetites, learning to control themselves and find themselves in a familial environment.

     And so if you look at the Negroes in the South prior to the war, the vast majority of black families had a mother and a father, and all the children lived with the mother and father, and contrary to what the novel Roots would cause people to think, they were far better off in the South than they were in their homeland inasmuch as they were either war captives, who if they weren’t sold they would’ve been slaughtered. And many of them praised their good fortune—but that’s a moot point, because nobody wants to hear that kind of talk. Everybody saw the movie Roots, and everybody wants to say that everyone in the South hates blacks.

     ****

     Related to the above is this article I found from the Huffington Post–
     Proof that the Civil War was fought over slavery:

     There’s actually a way to test whether or not the Civil War was about slavery. It involves reading the words that those Confederate leaders used when they wrote their reasons for leaving the United States. I was able to analyze four secession documents written by states: South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia and Texas.

     I tried to find the words “state’s rights” in any of them. I tried just about every spelling I could: “states rights,” “state rights,” “states’ rights” or “state’s rights.” Not a single secession declaration used these words.

     Now the word “rights” can be found 14 times, and “right” appear 32 times in these four state secession declarations. But in reality, when the word “rights” or “right” is used, it tends to be “the right to own slaves.”

     In fact, the word “slave” can be found 82 times in these four state declarations. At times, the states refer to themselves as “the slave-holding states.”

     Colson also brings up the argument that both sides were sparring over tariffs, but a search of the word “tariff,” or any other spelling (“tarrif,” “tarif,” “tarriff”) cannot be found. Tax is mentioned once, and economics or “economy” are not noted.

     This doesn’t mean that all Southerners approved of slavery. On the subject, General Robert E. Lee wrote of slavery as a moral and political evil, and called for its abolition by the Almighty, something fans of Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty, Ted Nugent and Cliven Bundy (who say slavery wasn’t so bad) might want to read. Not all Southerners owned slaves. Many of the poor ones fought to defend their small farms, hurt the most by large plantation owners whose nonexistent labor costs threatened to force them out of business. Those large plantation owners often filled the ranks of the Southern politicians who wrote the very secession documents that led to the Civil War.

     ****
     When I visited the links provided in the above article, I discovered that, in fact, the Civil War was fought over the right to own other human beings.
     Here’s Mississippi’s declaration of secession:

     A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.

     In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

     Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

     That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.

     The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.

     The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.

     The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.

     It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.

     It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.

     It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.

     It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.

     It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.

     It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.

     It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.

     It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.

     It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.

     It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.

     It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.

     It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.

     It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.

     Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.

     Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain our rights with the full consciousness of the justice of our course, and the undoubting belief of our ability to maintain it.

     South Carolina’s declaration of secession.
     Georgia’s declaration of secession.

198. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     23 June 2015 at 11:51 pm

     Probably the last one for the night-
     Courtesy of Jadehawk, comes the next link, which is a blast from the past from Brain Pickings–Visionary Vintage Children’s Book Celebrates Gender Equality, Ethnic Diversity, and Space Exploration

     For all their immeasurable delight, children’s books also have a serious cultural responsibility — they capture young minds and plant in them the seeds that blossom into beliefs about what is socially acceptable, what is right and wrong, and what is possible. This weight of possibility is both a blessing and a burden, given the terrible track record children’s books have of celebrating diversity — both ethnically and in terms of gender norms. Only 31 percent of children’s books feature female heroines, and even those consistently purvey limiting gender expectations; of the 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, a mere 93 were about black people. The ones that fully embrace cultural diversity or empower girls are few and far between, to say nothing of those rare specimens that get girls excited about science.

     One of the most heartening antidotes to this lamentable state of affairs comes from 1973. Four years after the historic moon landing, as the world was falling in love with space exploration, the education arm of the Xerox Corporation published Blast Off (public library) — an extraordinarily imaginative little book by two women writers, Linda C. Cain and Susan Rosenbaum, illustrated by the legendary duo Leo and Diane Dillon, best-known for illustrating the most popular edition of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.

     It is a story of space flight, whose protagonist is not only a girl but a black girl — and not a girl who is being mansplained about the way of the world, but a girl who does the explaining herself.

     “For as long as she could remember, Regina Williams wanted to become an astronaut,” the story begins. One day, as Regina is drawing a diagram of a rocket on the sidewalk by her house, two of her friends come by and inquire about the “funny-shaped thing.”

     I’m going to cut off the excerpt here, bc the synopsis is worth reading and the site worth supporting. Plus there are some nice images of the interiors of the book available at the link.

     ****

     From Fusion–
     The police are eerily calm in the Dylann Roof arrest video.

199. WMDKitty -- Survivor says

     24 June 2015 at 12:48 am

     rq @183 posted a link to this tweet, showing a letter addressed to the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department.

     I’ve taken the time to transcribe the letter for those interested in reading it, and have reproduced the formatting via HTML to the best of my ability.

     June 22, 2015

     Assistant Chief- Michael Sullivan
     Louisville Metro Police Department
     633 W Jefferson St
     Louisville, KY 40202

     Dear Mr. Sullivan:

     We the people, the concerned people of this community, are writing to you in response to the recent letter written by Dave Mutchler, president of River City Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 614 (FOP Letter). Although we felt threatened by the hate-filled letter, we will not allow that fear to silence our efforts to seek transparency and ensure accountability of government actors. We feel that the FOP Letter serves to destabilize the relationship that exists between the community and the police. We are neither “the sensationalists, liars [nor] race-baiters” that Dave Mutchler has painted us. We are educators, parents, social workers, community organizers and concerned community members advocating for a fair and just Louisville. As community members, we have both a constitutional right and resoonsibility to understand, and where appropriate, question the policies employed by our local police.

     We have been told repeatedly by Mayor Fischer and LMPD Chief Conrad that this is nothing more than an isolated act, and we ask that you stand with up by allowing these words to translate into action.

     To that end, as a leader within LMPD, we are asking you to personally and publicly denounce the FOP letter. Dr Martin Luther King Jr righteously stated, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” If we are all for building a more “compassionate Louisville,” our community needs to know that you stand with us, support our ability to exercise our constitutional rights and obligations as engaged citizens, and denounce the FOP Letter as, inter alia, disrespectful and instigative.

     Many of these requests are aligned with the goal and initiatives set forth in the January 2015 report, “Louisville’s Blueprint for Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods – Phase II: One Love Louisville.” We are all working, as set forth in Goal #12, to “Assist in creating a climate in which residents, LMPD and LMPD officers have a more favorable relationship that includes increased trust and positive perceptions of one another through the promotion of legitimate, transparent and just exercising of LMPD officers’ (discretionary) power during citizen-officer encounters.” We ask that you provide an update on where LMPD stands in connection with implementing all nine of the initiatives that are set forth under Goal #12.

     We also ask that you actively seek the implementation of the request below:

        1.  Complete overhaul of use of force policies to be more aligned with Amnesty International, Dept of Justice and United Nations Guidelines
        2.  When an officer-involved shooting occurs:
              a.  That officer and all responding officers need to give recorded statement within 24-48 hrs and complete an incident report immediately after involved shooting
              b.  Names of officers involved need to be released within 24-48 hrs
        3.  Police spend more time engaging the community outside of their cars
        4.  After all uses of deadly force cases, officer responding officers must be immediately screened by third-party and tested for drug and alcohol and complete a fit for duty physical
        5.  Assign special prosecutor for all deadly force cases
        6.  Speed up implementation of body cameras in West End neighborhoods
        7.  Dismantle VIPER squad
        8.  End over-policing in communities of color
        9.  Create a database for all police involved shootings
       10.  Restore and re-seat the Civilian Review Board, and provide it with subpoena authority.
       11.  Fire Mutchler by 5pm Friday (Pres of FOP and LMPD Sergeant)
       12.  Top 5 ranking officers to publically denounce letter

     We want to believe that this city has compassion, and we hope you do too.

     Sincerely,

     [Signature]
     Ashley Belcher        Attica Scott

200. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     24 June 2015 at 1:02 am

     WMDKitty @199:
     Thanks for transcribing that!

201. WMDKitty -- Survivor says

     24 June 2015 at 1:10 am

     NP! I’m happy to help in any capacity I can.

202. rq says

     24 June 2015 at 1:20 pm

     Thanks for that, WMDKitty! I usually don’t have time to transcribe, which is why I try to add a short summary, but for some reason I couldn’t see the text clearly enough this time. Many thanks!

     +++

     Going to catch up as much as I could, over the next day or so, thanks for keeping up, Tony!

203. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     24 June 2015 at 6:32 pm

     Here are some stories from Raw Story–
     Flag maker’s mostly black employees relieved company will stop producing Confederate flags:

     Employees, most of them African-American, were nearing the end of the their nine-and-a-half hour shift in a hot, low-ceilinged warehouse, sitting at sewing machines standing at cutting tables, or adding brass grommets to nearly finished flags.

     There was little sign of the landmark change that had occurred outside on Tuesday, beyond the listing chain link fence, in boardrooms of some of America’s largest flag manufacturers, including Valley Forge.

     The Pennsylvania-based flag company was on Tuesday the first major U.S. flag maker to halt production of the Confederate Flag, following the shooting of nine black churchgoers during a bible study in Charleston last week. Annin Flagmakers and Eder Flag, two more of the largest U.S. flag manufacturers, quickly followed suit, as calls grew to stop production of a flag that has been a divisive symbol in America and a reminder of the South’s slave-owning past.

     “I wish I had stopped doing it a long time ago,” said Scott Liberman, chief executive officer of Valley Forge, a company founded by his great grandfather in 1882 to make burlap bags and flags for the military. Liberman started in customer service for Valley Forge in his twenties, back when his father Michael ran the business.

     “If it has become offensive to people, I don’t want anything to do with it,” he said.

     It hasn’t become offensive. It has long been offensive. Its just that the voices of the people complaining the loudest-black people-were ignored in favor of the white people who like that damn rag.

     ****

     Oh. Joy.
     Another house negro steps up to place the blame for Dylann Roof’s actions on liberals:
     (quoted in full bc all the bullshittery is relevant to understanding his inane position)

     Conservative radio host Kevin Jackson told Fox News on Wednesday that liberals had “created” the white supremacist murderer who confessed to massacring nine people at a black church in Charleston, S.C.

     During a discussion about how Southern states were dealing with Confederate symbols following the South Carolina tragedy, Fox News host Martha MacCallum asked the author of Race-Pimping for his thoughts on the effort.

     “Well, let’s hope that it eradicates racism, Martha, I mean that’s essentially what the left is after,” Jackson said sarcastically. “You know, they never give up anything. This is such a red herring that takes away from the real issue that liberals created this kid that shot up this church.”

     “And South Carolina did what America does, which is they responded by saying, ‘We’re a family, we’re not going to buy into this nonsense. It may have been racially motivated but we’re not racially motivated here,’” he continued. “So blaming the flag is ridiculous. It’s not going to do anything. What essentially the left is trying to say is let’s eradicate history.”

     MacCallum speculated that the “hysteria” over removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds “in reality, it does absolutely nothing.”

     “If you’re going to go back in history and start eradicating things, let’s start with the Democrats,” Jackson argued. “They are the biggest racists on the planet. Their platform was begun with racist intentions.”

     The Washington Post‘s Eric Wemple later emailed Jackson and asked him to clarify his remarks blaming liberals for the church massacre.

     “He’s a Millennial, i.e. very non-racial according to all data,” Jackson said of the admitted killer. “He didn’t grow up in a white-supremacist family. So he’s a product of culture, a culture Liberals own. From the moment he hit school, in his generation, boys are bad. White boys are worse.”

     “While he played with all kids of all colors and got along, when the time for playing ended, and it was time to get his ‘higher education,’ he hit the wall of Affirmative Action,” the conservative radio host insisted. “Then, when it’s time to get a job, he gets more Affirmative Action.”

     According to Jackson, the shooter was forced to take medication “to deal with his Liberal-created psychosis.”

     “[A]nd policies of the Left won’t let him be called ‘insane’ and put away from the public. So he FED his psychosis with a healthy dose of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Gardner, and others, until he snapped,” Jackson concluded.

     ****

     Is the Confederate flag unconstitutional?:

     This is what is in front of the Sussex Courthouse in Virginia.
     Alfred Brophy, Author provided
     Note the inscription: “The principles for which they fought live eternally.”

     That makes me suspicious of the quality of justice that African Americans can receive inside that courthouse.

     Indeed, many people now see the rise of the use of the Confederate flag during the Civil Rights movement as a response to the increasing claims of African Americans to equality.

     And as Justice Alito recognized in the Summum case, monuments on public property will lead observers to “routinely—and reasonably—interpret them as conveying some message on the property owner’s behalf.”

     Violation of the 14th amendment?

     That leads to the question, then, of whether government speech that tells African Americans they are inferior – and perhaps that the era of slavery was right – violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

     This is a stretch of current equal protection doctrine, which is concerned with tangible questions like funding rather than speech.

     However, if a state legislature passed a statute proclaiming African Americans are inferior I can imagine that such a bold and vicious statement might rise to the level of a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

     Now take a further step: does the Confederate battle flag or a monument to the Confederacy tell African American citizens that they are inferior? And if so, does that violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?

     While the answer to the latter question may not be clearly yes, I don’t think it is clearly no, either.

     Ultimately, this is really more a question of whether a state – and its politicians – want to continue to fly a flag that is so closely associated with a war begun to maintain slavery.

     Many supporters of the flag say that the meaning for them is about southern heritage, not race hatred. And in this I am inclined to believe their statements about their motive.

     But at this point in American history the flag has become closely associated in the minds of many with white supremacy, slavery, and Jim Crow segregation. Whatever its meaning once was – or still is in the minds of some – in the minds of many it is time to realize that this is a symbol that is sending the wrong message to US citizens.

     Before this becomes a lawsuit, the Confederate flag should be taken down from in front of the South Carolina State House.

     Alfred L Brophy, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill

     Alfred L Brophy is Judge John J Parker Distinguished Professor of Law at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.

     ****

     And since some people may not be familiar with the term House Negro, here is Malcolm X to explain:

     When you want a nation, that’s called nationalism. When the white man became involved in a revolution in this country against England, what was it for? He wanted this land so he could set up another white nation. That’s white nationalism. The American Revolution was white nationalism. The French Revolution was white nationalism. The Russian Revolution too — yes, it was — white nationalism. You don’t think so? Why [do] you think Khrushchev and Mao can’t get their heads together? White nationalism. All the revolutions that’s going on in Asia and Africa today are based on what? Black nationalism. A revolutionary is a black nationalist. He wants a nation. I was reading some beautiful words by Reverend Cleage, pointing out why he couldn’t get together with someone else here in the city because all of them were afraid of being identified with black nationalism. If you’re afraid of black nationalism, you’re afraid of revolution. And if you love revolution, you love black nationalism.

     To understand this, you have to go back to what [the] young brother here referred to as the house Negro and the field Negro — back during slavery. There was two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negroes – they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good ’cause they ate his food — what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near the master; and they loved their master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master’s house quicker than the master would. The house Negro, if the master said, “We got a good house here,” the house Negro would say, “Yeah, we got a good house here.” Whenever the master said “we,” he said “we.” That’s how you can tell a house Negro.

     If the master’s house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, “What’s the matter, boss, we sick?” We sick! He identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and said, “Let’s run away, let’s escape, let’s separate,” the house Negro would look at you and say, “Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?” That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a “house nigger.” And that’s what we call him today, because we’ve still got some house niggers running around here.

     This modern house Negro loves his master. He wants to live near him. He’ll pay three times as much as the house is worth just to live near his master, and then brag about “I’m the only Negro out here.” “I’m the only one on my job.” “I’m the only one in this school.” You’re nothing but a house Negro. And if someone comes to you right now and says, “Let’s separate,” you say the same thing that the house Negro said on the plantation. “What you mean, separate? From America? This good white man? Where you going to get a better job than you get here?” I mean, this is what you say. “I ain’t left nothing in Africa,” that’s what you say. Why, you left your mind in Africa.

     On that same plantation, there was the field Negro. The field Negro — those were the masses. There were always more Negroes in the field than there was Negroes in the house. The Negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. In the house they ate high up on the hog. The Negro in the field didn’t get nothing but what was left of the insides of the hog. They call ’em “chitt’lin’” nowadays. In those days they called them what they were: guts. That’s what you were — a gut-eater. And some of you all still gut-eaters.

     The field Negro was beaten from morning to night. He lived in a shack, in a hut; He wore old, castoff clothes. He hated his master. I say he hated his master. He was intelligent. That house Negro loved his master. But that field Negro — remember, they were in the majority, and they hated the master. When the house caught on fire, he didn’t try and put it out; that field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze. When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he’d die. If someone come [sic] to the field Negro and said, “Let’s separate, let’s run,” he didn’t say “Where we going?” He’d say, “Any place is better than here.” You’ve got field Negroes in America today. I’m a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man’s house on fire, you don’t hear these little Negroes talking about “our government is in trouble.” They say, “The government is in trouble.” Imagine a Negro: “Our government”! I even heard one say “our astronauts.” They won’t even let him near the plant — and “our astronauts”! “Our Navy” — that’s a Negro that’s out of his mind. That’s a Negro that’s out of his mind.

     Just as the slavemaster of that day used Tom, the house Negro, to keep the field Negroes in check, the same old slavemaster today has Negroes who are nothing but modern Uncle Toms, 20th century Uncle Toms, to keep you and me in check, keep us under control, keep us passive and peaceful and nonviolent. That’s Tom making you nonviolent. It’s like when you go to the dentist, and the man’s going to take your tooth. You’re going to fight him when he starts pulling. So he squirts some stuff in your jaw called novocaine, to make you think they’re not doing anything to you. So you sit there and ’cause you’ve got all of that novocaine in your jaw, you suffer peacefully. Blood running all down your jaw, and you don’t know what’s happening. ’Cause someone has taught you to suffer — peacefully.

204. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     24 June 2015 at 6:35 pm

     Crap. I just posted a nice comment with a bunch of links, but I think it’s stuck in moderation. I didn’t check for prohibited words. Oh well. PZ will fish it out eventually I suppose.

205. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     24 June 2015 at 7:33 pm

     Some articles from The Root–
     Hillary Clinton at black church in Missouri: ‘All lives matter’:
     (SMH)

     Many in the Twitter universe aren’t happy that presidential candate Hillary Clinton declared on Tuesday, “All lives matter” in a speech at a black church near Ferguson, Mo., where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed, igniting a national movement to combat police brutality against African Americans.

     According to the Huffington Post, during a campaign stop in Florrissant, Mo., Clinton told the mostly black crowd at the Christ the King United Church of Christ, “America’s struggle with race are far from finished.”

     “We can’t hide from hard truths about race and justice,” the Democrat added. “We have to name them, own them and change them.”

     Clinton addressed racial inequality, the Confederate flag and forgiveness, tying her speech into the national conversation on those subjects that’s been building since last week’s horrific massacre of nine black people at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, S.C.

     While speaking about lessons she learned from her mother, Clinton said she had asked her, “What kept you going?” Clinton continued, “Her answer was very simple. Kindness along the way from someone who believed she mattered. All lives matter.”

     That last comment drew the anger of social media users, outraged at her reappropriating the popular phrase “Black lives matter” that has come to define a movement.

     It’s like she doesn’t really understand why “All lives matter” is offensive when discussing the systemic racism faced by PoC!

     ****

     Meet the Press: On NBC and racism in ‘progressive’ media spaces:

     Just days after nine African Americans were murdered inside Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., in what many agree was an act of anti-black terrorism, Chuck Todd and his producers decided that the expanding dialogue about gun violence and consideration of stricter gun control measures should become more “color-blind.” Read: less indicting of white supremacy, pathology and violence.

     So they aired a segment on gun violence that exclusively featured black men in Sing Sing who had been locked up on murder charges. All the men had used guns to commit their crimes.

     “The circumstances you are about to see are very different from the racist violence in Charleston,” said Todd. “In this case, the inmates are African American that you’re going to hear from. But their lessons remain important. We simply ask you to look at this as a color-blind issue, as about just simply gun violence.”

     Right, because what people need is a “very different” conversation, one that doesn’t reckon with the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow or the continued depraved and racist violence endured by generations of black Americans.

     Todd now claims to be—after first defending the segment—apologetic, but the message has already been issued loud and clear: To keep America safe, guns should be taken out of the hands of Scary Black Men.

     On the show, panelist and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson had noted the misleading lack of diversity in the prison clip and tried to steer the conversation back on course, but Todd quickly deflected such attention. He instead focused on how important it is to talk about the “culture” of guns, which makes it a more “politically difficult” conversation to have.

     Let’s be clear: Taking a detour onto a loop about black, male murderers at Sing Sing during a national conversation about white supremacist terrorism reeks of media manipulation of the implicit and explicit racist bias of viewers. And that’s what racism looks like in its most insidious form.

     ****

     Retired Baltimore cop Tweets about corruption in departments:

     It’s not every day you get an honest first-person perspective about the kind of corruption that goes on behind the scenes in police departments nationwide. The blue wall of silence is a notorious institution in the United States.

     However, on Wednesday on Twitter, one former Baltimore police officer cracked the seal of that code, opening up about some of the things he’s “seen and participated in,” while promising more to come in the days to follow.

     In a series of tweets, Michael A. Wood Jr. tells of a detective “slapping a completely innocent female in the face for bumping into him,” and how officers randomly “jacked up” and illegally searched thousands of people with no legal justification.

     Here are Woods’ Tweets:

     So here we go. I’m going to start Tweeting the things I’ve seen & participated in, in policing that is corrupt, intentional or not.

     Punting a handcuffed, face down, suspect in the face, after a foot chase. My handcuffs, not my boot or suspect

     Targeting 16-24 year old black males essentially because we arrest them more, perpetrating the circle of arresting them more.

     I don’t remember details of any particular person getting illegally searched, it was every day.

     Wood has promised to Tweet more later.

206. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     24 June 2015 at 11:39 pm

     From Forward Progressives–
     Amite: The Louisiana town with the Confederate flag on police cars:

     While lynchings are a thing of the South’s painful past, the recent massacre of churchgoers in Charleston, SC is a reminder that racial hatred is still alive and kicking. The Confederate flag which flies at South Carolina’s capitol building has received the majority of the attention, but it is also present in other forms throughout the South, including the town of Amite on police vehicles. There’s no mistaking the pattern of the Confederate flag which is emblazoned in the logo on police cruisers, and a petition has been created to ask the city to remove this reminder of the opposition to the end of segregation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The petition, created by Jade Patton of New Orleans, states the following:

     It has come to the attention of the community that decal adorning the side of Amite City Police vehicles bares a striking resemblance to the flag known commonly to represent the “Old South”. In light of the act of terrorism on Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church earlier this week as well as arising discussions about “racial wallpapering”, pressure on South Carolina and Walmart’s decision to pull all confederate flag merchandise from its stores now is a good time to take a closer observation and promote discussion about the symbolism allowed to decorate the community. There are many controversial opinions on what this flag represents to members of the community. To some it is “southern pride” but to many others it is a painful reminder of racial issues that still run rampant not only in the small town of Amite but the country as a whole. (Source)

     And the comments. Oh, the comments. People wringing their hands and moaning about how “this is just going too far”!
     I’m all like-NO! It’s not gone far enough!

207. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 1:54 am

     In Charleston, a Millennial Race Terrorist, Charlse Blow for the New York Times.

     There are so many threads to pull on this story that one hardly knows where to begin, but let’s begin here: Roof was only 21 years old. He is a millennial race terrorist. Roof was born in 1994, 30 years after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

     He had a white power flag fetish. He was once pictured wearing a jacket emblazoned with an apartheid-era South African flag and another flag of “Rhodesia, as modern-day Zimbabwe was called during a period of white rule,” according to The Times. Apartheid ended the year Roof was born, and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe long before that.

     Who radicalized Roof? Who passed along the poison? We must never be lulled into a false belief that racism is dying off with older people. As I’ve written in this space before, Spencer Piston, an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University, has found that “younger (under-30) whites are just as likely as older ones to view whites as more intelligent and harder-working than African-Americans.”

     Racism is to social progress what cockroaches are to nuclear fallout — extraordinarily resilient.

     Furthermore, there is a widely published photo of Roof sitting on his car with an ornamental license plate with Confederate flags on it. That is the same Confederate flag that flies on the grounds of the state Capitol. What signal is South Carolina sending?

     There is the thread of couching his cowardice as chivalry, framing his selfish hatred as noble altruism in defense of white femininity from the black brute. So much black blood has been spilled and so many black necks noosed in the name of protecting white femininity, and by extension, white purity. Roof is only this trope’s latest instrument.

     Then there is the question of whether to call this terrorism. Terrorism, as commonly defined, suggests that the act must have some political motivation. (By defining it this way, we conveniently exclude that long legacy of racial terrorism as a political tool of intimidation and control in this country.) And yet, this case may even reach that bar.

     Reuters reported Friday that the case “is being investigated by the Justice Department as a possible case of domestic terrorism.” But whether it reaches the legal definition of domestic terrorism (it has already passed the common sense definition), some conservatives have even been reticent to call it a hate crime, which it surely is, rather preferring to twist this massacre into their quixotic crusade to establish evidence of a war on Christianity in this country. […]

     Oh Fox, there is so much that needs explaining to you. First, Roof was a member of a Lutheran church in Columbia, S.C. As Rev. Tony Metze of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church confirmed to the Huffington Post, “He was on the roll of our congregation.” Lutheranism is one of the branches of Protestant Christianity.

     Beyond that, according to CNN, “a friend recalled a drunken Roof ranting one night about his unspecified six-month plan ‘to do something crazy’ in order ‘to start a race war.’ ”

     CNN also reported that Roof confessed his intention to cause a race war to investigators. This wasn’t a war on Christianity, but a war on black people.

     Roof was a young man radicalized to race hatred who reportedly wanted to start a race war and who killed nine innocent people as his opening salvo. If that’s not terrorism, we need to redefine the term.

     KKK members supporting Barry Goldwater, Republican National Convention, San Francisco, 1964. Also a link within. So the Republicans have long enjoyed the support of white supremacists.

     CNN Guest Defends Confederate Flag: Efforts to Remove Are ‘Cultural Genocide’

     South Carolina’s top politicians favor removing the Confederate flag from state house grounds, but there are some people still defending the flag as a symbol of Southern heritage. Pat Hines, the chairman of the South Carolina League of the South, attempted such a defense on CNN tonight.

     He told Don Lemon it’s a “memorial to our ancestors,” to the skepticism of South Carolina State Senator Marlon Kimpson and CNN’s Sunny Hostin. They and Lemon were baffled at Hines questioning the presence of the American flag at the capitol.

     Kimpson said it’s good that people are finally tackling this “divisive symbol,” but Hines shot back by saying people like him are “moving to do cultural genocide on the Southern men and women.”

     Hostin then proceeded to rip Hines a new one, calling that “so absurd” because the flag “represents terror and intimidation of African-Americans in that state.”

     Listen to Marc Maron’s WTF interview with President Obama, via BoingBoing.

     Marc Maron and President Obama had a relaxed and fascinating one-hour conversation in Maron’s Pasadena, California garage, where Maron produces his popular WTF Podcast. Obama used the “N” word (in talking about racism), gave his thoughts on voters’ expectations for rapid Hope and Change, discussed his interest in improving police-community relations, and much more.

     I learned more about how Obama thinks in this interview than any TV interview I’ve listened to.

     Vanity Fair ran an article about how Maron prepared for the interview, and the security precautions undertaken by the Secret Service.

     “A few days before the interview, the Secret Service started coming up, looking around the house, seeing what the perimeter was, figuring out how they can secure the house. They set up the isolated phone lines that are necessary for the president to have wherever he is. . . . They had to figure out how to do it in my garage, where [to place] the Secret Service. They had to have an archivist here recording it. They tried to put a sniper on the garage but it was too noisy. So they had to go on my neighbor’s house. They wanted everything out of the garage that was going to be in the path of the president—the boxes of books and piles of stuff that I had in here. They wanted anything that could be dangerous in the garage taken out.”

     Maron did not even have to worry about providing coffee.

     “The president actually traveled with White House catering,” Maron explained. “They travel with this huge motorcade that includes restroom facilities. It included a person in charge of the food. He left a cup here, a to-go cup. The president of the United States uses a to-go cup, with the presidential shield on it and a coaster napkin that they brought in for him.”

     Link to the actual show within the article.

     Charleston manifesto: Controversial blogger ‘hates violence’ – that’s the blogger who influenced Roof.

     Kyle Rogers has worked for years to broadcast a disturbing message about race relations. He may have had a reader, Dylann Roof, who took his lessons to a grim conclusion.

     Kyle Rogers stands under an oak tree in front of his house in Summerville, a town about 25 miles (40km) from Charleston, South Carolina, and talks about his work.

     He’s head of a website for the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), an organisation that says its members oppose “all effort to mix the races of mankind”.

     The CCC describes itself as “a conservative activist group”, but its worldview skews to the right of just about everything.

     The group is on the radar of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. They cite the group’s description of African Americans as “a retrograde species of humanity”.

     Mr Rogers, they wrote, was once “one of the brightest young stars of the white nationalist movement”.

     For years Mr Rogers has worked in relative obscurity. On Saturday, though, he found himself drawn into the biggest news story in the US, a horrific mass slaying in Charleston.

     Dylan Storm Roof has been charged with nine counts of murder after the shootings at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

     Over the weekend, a website registered in Roof’s name came to light. It featured several photos of him along with a written manifesto. Authorities are still determining the authenticity of the site.

     The manifesto specifically cited the discovery of research the Council of Conservative Citizens had done on “black-on-white crime”.

     “I have never been the same since,” the manifesto author wrote.

     Mr Rogers says he was surprised to find his research cited in the manifesto.

     “I was devastated,” Mr Rogers says. “I hate violence.” […]

     Mr Rogers, 38, is a computer engineer from Ohio who’s been writing about race for more than a decade. He’s worked mainly as an editor and writer for the Council of Conservative Citizens.

     He says he started writing about race for one reason: “I didn’t like how the media would hype certain things.”

     He’s careful in the words he chooses, and makes sure none of the language he uses is inflammatory. Instead he downplays the divisive – and destructive – messages his writings convey about race.

     “There’s just issues that need to be addressed,” he says.

     By his account he’s simply trying to help the public understand that white people also suffer from racially motivated crimes, and that the media coverage of these issues has been unfairly slanted. He says, for example, reporters often don’t tell readers the colour of a perpetrator’s skin, a detail he sees as important.

     He has personally interviewed white people who say they’ve been victimised by black criminals, he tells me, and told journalists about these cases.

     He’s written extensively about the Trayvon Martin case, which he sees as a case of media bias in favour of Martin, who was black, and against George Zimmerman, the man who shot Martin dead. Mr Zimmerman’s background is white and Hispanic. […]

     The news put Rogers’ site in the media spotlight. “We were totally blindsided by this,” he says.

     He tells me repeatedly he doesn’t believe media accounts about Mr Roof. Nor does he believe what the Southern Poverty Law Center says about his work, or its influence on the manifesto, saying their researchers have been “hyping this”.

     “They just make stuff up.”

     He says it isn’t clear, either, what the manifesto author learned from Rogers’ website, or how much he relied on it for his argument.

     “It just says, ‘the first site I came across’,” says Mr Rogers, referring to the manifesto.

     He says the author may have looked quickly at his work and then gone to other sources,

     Perhaps.

     The manifesto, however, seems to indicate much more than just a passing familiarity with Rogers’ work.

     “The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders,” wrote the author of the manifesto. “At this moment I realized that something was very wrong.”

     Mr Rogers says he knows his work has made some difference.

     “I know I’ve had an impact,” he says. “There’s stories I’ve helped draw attention to.”

     Besides writing, Mr Rogers runs a company, Patriotic Flags, that sells Confederate flags, pirate flags, and flags from the government of Rhodesia.

     Mr Roof wore a Rhodesian flag patch on his clothing in pictures taken before his arrest.

     “I’ve never sold him a Rhodesian patch,” Mr Rogers says. “He’s never ordered products from me.”

     As he talks about the accused, Mr Rogers is wearing glasses and his dark hair is cut short. His T-shirt is soaked in sweat, and on the front of it you can see the outline of a flag.

     He looks down at his shirt. “It’s got an American flag on it,” he says.

     Ms Page, who lives with her parents in Summerville, says Mr Rogers has been “dragged through the mud” because of the manifesto and its reference to his work.

     She and Mr Rogers both seem stunned by the attention and are struggling to make sense of the role his work has played in the shootings.

     “Kyle and I have been close friends not a terribly long time,” she says. She’s been trying lately to keep up with the news, though she says she finds it hard.

     “It’s all bad,” she says. “There have been so many hate crimes.”

     She says: “Everyone just wants to turn the blame on somebody else.”

     Down the street neighbours have come out of their houses. They’re also grappling with the horror of the shootings and the role their neighbour may have played.

     Herman Bradley, a retired postal worker, points to motion-detector lights over Mr Rogers’ garage, recently installed for security.

     “He may not even have a firearm,” says Mr Bradley. “If he’s going to get one, he ought to get a shotgun.”

     He adds: “With a shotgun, you can’t miss.”

     And that’s how they do it, folks, the racists among us. They’re quiet, polite, non-violent, and hold some of the most abhorrent, hate-inducing, divisive views out there.

     Step Aside, Reverend Al: The Next Generation of Race-Baiters Has Arrived – you can click through for the actual link if you want, but… Oh, later, a definition of ‘race-baiter’. Used to have more to do with white people being asses than black people talking about race issues. *sigh*

208. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 2:07 am

     1) Sorry for misspelling your name, Charles Blow!! :/ I blame morning!
     2) I like the new slogan – “Racism – the Cockroach of Social Progress!”
     3) Once again apologies for any significant overlap.

     +++

     This is from 1998, and I think I have it saved because that legislator (Altman) appears later. Or is on the list of those currently unwilling to remove the confederate flag. I don’t remember, but here’s the newsbite: S.C. Tackles Interracial Marriage Ban

     Thirty years after South Carolina’s attorney general issued an opinion calling the state’s ban on interracial marriages unconstitutional, state legislators moved to strike the law Tuesday. Charleston Republican John Graham Altman III cast the only dissenting vote as the state House Judiciary Committee approved a full House vote to remove the ban on interracial marriage from the state constitution. Altman called the measure “the 1998 Confederate battle flag issue.”

     In 1998. Also, confederate battle flag issue. Interracial marriage. The logic. Is missing.

     Second violent arrest at #StandWithCharleston march in NYC right now. They grabbed this guy off his bike. From a couple of days ago.

     Back Up! Back Up! We want freedom! Freedom! All these racist ass cops, we don’t need em! Need em!’ at NYPD 24 PCT – from a couple of days ago. I liked the chant.

     Officers plead not guilty in Freddie Gray case as judge and trial date selected

     Judge Barry G. Williams, a former city prosecutor and civil rights litigator with a no-nonsense reputation, will preside over the high-profile criminal cases against six Baltimore police officers indicted in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray.

     Williams’ appointment Monday came as each of the officers asked for a jury trial and entered not-guilty pleas in writing — a legal maneuver that allows them to avoid appearing at court arraignments that had been scheduled for next week.

     “We look forward to trying this case before Judge Williams,” Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby said in a statement. “The defendants have all entered not guilty pleas, which is their right. All defendants in this case are presumed innocent, until, or unless they are found guilty.”

     Defense attorneys for the officers either declined to comment or could not be reached.

     Administrative Judge W. Michel Pierson set a trial date of Oct. 13, with motions hearings scheduled for Sept. 2. Pierson also assigned Williams to the case and allowed for written pleadings, which are rarely entered in Baltimore City Circuit Court.

     Williams could not comment, as judges in Maryland “cannot talk about their pending cases nor their deliberative process,” said Terri Charles, a Maryland Judiciary spokeswoman.

     Williams, 53, has been an associate judge in Baltimore Circuit Court since 2005, according to his official biography. He led the court’s criminal division from 2012 until January and chaired the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council for Baltimore from 2012 until 2014.

     Warren Alperstein, an attorney who represents the city’s bar association on the council, praised Williams’ selection for a case that he said could turn into a spectacle under a less commanding judge.

     “He is a no-nonsense, fair and practical judge who will no doubt control that courtroom,” Alperstein said. Williams is “neither state- nor defense-oriented” by reputation, he said.

     “The reality of it is there are certain judges that the state would prefer and there are certain judges that the defense would prefer,” but Williams is neither, Alperstein said. “He will not be persuaded by media. He will not be influenced by public sentiment. He will rule as the law will require him to do. Period. There will be no outside influences.”

     Take Down the Confederate Flag, Symbol of Hatred

     Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina acted in the interest of her state and the nation on Monday when she called on the Legislature to remove the Confederate battle flag from the State Capitol grounds, after a white man charged with killing nine African-Americans was seen waving the flag in photographs.

     Ms. Haley avoided the long-running controversy over the flag in the days after the massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. But on Monday, in acknowledging that this horrendous act of violence required a new response, she said, “The State House is different, and the events of this past week call upon us to look at this in a different way.”

     Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. of Charleston, a voice of sanity throughout this tragedy, framed the matter in exactly the right way when he said that, even though the battle flag symbolized “Southern pride” to some people, it had a much more sinister meaning to others. “When it is so often used as a symbol of hate,” he said, “of defiance to civil rights, to equal rights, equality among the races, a symbol used by the Klan, a symbol you saw at every protest event during times of integration and racial progress, then, in front of the State Capitol, for those who harbor any of those kinds of feelings — and we hope they are very few — it nonetheless sends the wrong kind of message.”

     Those who have defended keeping the Confederate flag flying at the Capitol have often described it as merely a commemoration to the Civil War dead. But as the writer K. Michael Prince documents in “Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys!,” flags were not used in this way at the Confederate memorial on the Capitol grounds in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Only in later decades was the flag introduced — and steadily elevated in importance — to bolster the idea of white supremacy at moments when South Carolina’s Jim Crow-era government came under federal pressure to allow black citizens even nominal civil rights.

     Hence, the Confederate battle flag was displayed in the South Carolina State House in 1938, after angry Southerners in Congress managed to defeat a bill that would have made lynching a federal crime. They saw that law as an intrusion on what was often called “the Southern way of life.” The flag was brought into the State Senate two years after the Supreme Court struck down school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

     The flag was quietly moved up to a position of pride on the dome on the Capitol in 1962, after President John F. Kennedy called on Congress to end poll taxes and literacy tests for voting and the Supreme Court struck down segregation in public transportation. By this time, of course, the flag had been closely associated with racial tyranny. […]

     Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican presidential candidate from South Carolina, who initially said the flag was “part of who we are,” urged the Legislature to remove the flag from the Capitol grounds. He said, “I hope that, by removing the flag, we can take another step toward healing and recognition — and a sign that South Carolina is moving forward.” State lawmakers who must vote on removing it need to do that now and show the nation they understand the pain this symbol of hate and brutality causes to this day.

     Can’t read this one as I’m at the limit of NYTimes articles I can read, but the title was intriguing: Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof, by Roxane Gay.

209. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 2:25 am

     National conversation on Confederate symbology lands in Baltimore, scrawled in yellow paint

     Amid a national conversation about Confederate symbology following the fatal shooting of nine black church members by a white man in South Carolina — an attack authorities say was racially motivated — a statue honoring Confederate soldiers in Baltimore had a singular message scrawled across its side.

     “Black Lives Matter,” the message read in yellow paint Monday, five days after the shootings at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston became the latest flashpoint in a growing national dialogue around race.

     The words covered an etched message on the statue in Bolton Hill that was erected by the Maryland Daughters of the Confederacy in February 1903 and reads, “To The Soldiers and Sailors of Maryland In The Service Of The Confederate States of America, 1861-1865.”

     The “Black Lives Matter” message, invoked often during recent protests against police brutality in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, was also spray-painted this week on the stone pedestal of a Confederate statue in Charleston.

     Hundreds of people have marched in Charleston and in South Carolina’s capital, Columbia, this week to protest the Confederate flag’s placement in front of the Capitol building there, reviving long-debated arguments about whether Confederate symbology represents heritage, racism or state rights.

     On Monday, those who live, work and study in Bolton Hill had mixed reactions to the “Black Lives Matter” message being written on the statue across the street from the campus of Maryland Institute College of Art near the intersection of West Mount Royale and West Lafayette avenues — one of several such statues devoted to the Confederacy in Baltimore. […]

     Before moving to Baltimore, the Confederate flag was just something she grew up seeing, and it “never really bothered” her, she said. Now, in the wake of the shootings and the nation’s broader dialogue around race, she thinks differently, she said.

     “Until this, I very clearly saw the flag as a symbol of state rights, because that is what I was taught,” she said. “Now I’m able to see past that and see that it’s more a symbol of hate.” […]

     Clyde Johnson, MICA’s assistant dean of diversity and intercultural development, said he has already been working the subject of “how we deface” public spaces in our society into plans for student discussions next semester, following the unrest after Gray’s death and an incident this year in which a racial epithet was written in an elevator.

     The writing on the Confederate statue will be another example to use, he said. “Even with a positive message, it isn’t good,” he said.

     Johnson said he seeks to turn horrible incidents like the shootings in Charleston into teachable moments, to talk with students about how to be “politically active” but also “politically savvy,” to protest without destruction.

     It’s paint on a stone monument. Don’t know if I qualify that as ‘destruction’, especially in this case…

     Wal-Mart announces they’ll stop selling any items w/ Confederate Flags on them – nationwide. Their security will still kill you though.

     Fists up, fight back! at #StandWithCharleston NYC right now.
     Black Lives Matter Why is it only terrorism when it happens to white people? NYC #StandWithCharleston rally right now

     Walmart, Amazon, Sears, eBay to stop selling Confederate flag merchandise

     America’s leading merchants have spoken: The Confederate flag is coming off the shelves.

     Walmart, Amazon, eBay and Sears all announced bans on the sale of Confederate flag merchandise, amid an intensifying national debate over the use of the controversial flag.

     The announcements are the latest indication that the flag, a symbol of the slave-holding South, has become toxic in the aftermath of a shooting last week at a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina. Gov. Nikki Haley announced in a Monday afternoon news conference that she supports removing the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds.

     “We never want to offend anyone with the products that we offer. We have taken steps to remove all items promoting the confederate flag from our assortment — whether in our stores or on our web site,” said Walmart spokesman Brian Nick. “We have a process in place to help lead us to the right decisions when it comes to the merchandise we sell. Still, at times, items make their way into our assortment improperly — this is one of those instances.”

     A spokesperson for Amazon told CNN Tuesday afternoon that the company would also remove Confederate flag merchandise.

     Johnna Hoff, an eBay spokesperson, said that the Confederate flag has “become a contemporary symbol of divisiveness and racism.” It is banning the sale of Confederate flags and “many items containing this image,” Hoff said.

     A bit more at the link.

     Not just South Carolina: Leaders across U.S. call for removal of Confederate monuments

     As South Carolina governor Nikki Haley gave the press conference in which she called for the Confederate flag to be removed from South Carolina’s capitol building, lawmakers and activists in other states pressed for similar changes in their respective districts.

     In Maryland, Baltimore County leaders called on Baltimore city officials to give the County approval to change Robert E. Lee Park, named for the Confederate Civil War general, to Lake Roland Park. In a letter to the City of Baltimore, county leaders said, “In a region as diverse as the Baltimore Metropolitan area, the new name is much more sensitive to the diverse population that visits and utilizes the park.”

     In Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. congressman Jim Cooper, a democrat, took to Twitter to call on state leaders to remove a bust of General Nathan Bedford Forrest from the state capitol.

     Other movements across the South are also gaining steam. Petitions are being circulated to remove the image of the Confederate flag from the Mississippi state flag. While its and South Carolina’s prominent use of the Confederate flag has caused the greatest furor over the last few days, an interesting story at The Washington Post examines how its design has been incorporated into the flags states across the South.

     A Change.org petition with 1,634 signatures asks school officials to remove the statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, from the University of Texas’ main campus in Austin.

     “Given Jefferson Davis’ vehement support for the institution of slavery and white supremacy,” it reads, “we believe this statue is not in line with the university’s core values — learning, discovery, freedom, leadership, individual opportunity, and responsibility.”

     On Tuesday morning, the statue of Davis at the University of Texas was apparently vandalized with red spray paint.

     In Virginia, Governor Terry Terry McAuliffe began the process to remove the Confederate flag from state-issued license plates. He asked the state Attorney General office to take steps to reverse a previous order requiring the Confederate flag be placed on state license plates and directed the Secretary of Transportation to develop a plan to replacing the currently-issued plates.

     While speaking at an event in Richmond, McAuliffe said, “Although the battle flag is not flown here on Capitol Square, it has been the subject of considerable controversy, and it divides many of our people.

     “Even its display on state issued license tags is, in my view, unnecessarily divisive and hurtful to too many of our people,” said McAuliffe.

     A recent push was made to rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

     The bridge is most remembered of being the site of the Bloody Sunday Civil Rights march in 1965, and was named after Confederate General and KKK Grand Dragon Edmund Pettus. In an interesting twist, Congressman John Lewis (D-Georgia), one of the Civil Rights leaders attacked on the bridge during the historic march, asked that the bridge’s name be preserved in a recent editorial.

     “Renaming the Bridge will never erase its history. Instead of hiding our history behind a new name we must embrace it —the good and the bad,” he wrote. “The historical context of the Edmund Pettus Bridge makes the events of 1965 even more profound. The irony is that a bridge named after a man who inflamed racial hatred is now known worldwide as a symbol of equality and justice. It is biblical — what was meant for evil, God uses for good.”

210. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 2:50 am

     Huckabee: Confederate flag-waving South Carolina can’t be racist because it has an ‘Indian’ governor. Guy’s just a paragon of education and intelligence.

     Appearing on Meet The Press, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee refused to condemn the state of South Carolina for flying the Confederate flag, instead saying the state can’t possibly be racist because they elected an ‘Indian’ governor.

     Speaking with host Chuck Todd, the possible Republican presidential nominee continually avoided offering a personal opinion on the flag, failing to answer whether he would ever display one. Instead he turned the questions about flying the flag representing the Confederacy into a defense of the people of South Carolina.

     “We’re asking, ‘Is South Carolina a racist state because of the flag on their capital grounds?’” Huckabee said. “Here’s what I can tell you. As a frequent visitor to South Carolina, this is a state that largely white people elected a female governor of Indian descent and the first ever African-American senator from the South.”

     Huckabee went on to compare the diversity of South Carolina’s lawmakers to liberal bastions such as New York and Massachusetts, before Todd attempted, once again, to turn the discussion back to the flag.

     Link to Rawstory story within.

     Coroner releases autopsy results for man who died after police use TASER on him

     East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner William “Beau” Clark says the cause and manner of death for 32-year-old Kevin Bajoie is undetermined.

     The Baton Rouge Police Department said on June 20, 2015, officers were called to an apartment complex on Avenue C at Woodpecker Street in the Scotlandville area because two people were reportedly fighting outside.

     Responding officers said a suspect, later identified as Bajoie, was seen lying on his back and as they approached him, he jumped up and allegedly tried to attack them.

     A police report released Saturday night called Bajoie’s actions “unprovoked,” “aggressive” and “erratic.”

     The coroner, William “Beau” Clark, M.D., D-ABMDI says a drug screening showed Bajoie had multiple, illicit drugs in his system. He also had evidence of blunt force trauma to the head. It is not known at this time if the injury happened before or during the incident with the two officers. Clark says it is possible the injury happened during the fight police were originally dispatched to handle.

     The coroner also says it is not known if the blunt force trauma to the head was a fatal wound.

     Final results are pending a histology and an additional toxicology study.

     The two officers were placed on paid administrative leave while the incident is investigated. The officers have been identified as Jace Ducote and Maurice Duke.

     Police say Ducote has been employed with the department for six years. Duke has been employed with the department for five years. Both are currently assigned to the Uniform Patrol Bureau.

     The Simple Truth about Gun Control. This one, too, I’ve run out of my articles for this time period, but there was definitely a reason it was relevant.

     For white feminists: I Don’t Want to Be an Excuse for Racist Violence Anymore

     We cannot talk about the violence that Dylann Roof perpetrated at Emanuel AME last Wednesday night without talking about whiteness, and specifically, about white womanhood and its role in racist violence. We have to talk about those things, because Roof himself did. Per a witness account, we know that he said: “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country.” “Our” women, by whom he meant white women.

     There is a centuries-old notion that white men must defend, with lethal violence at times, the sexual purity of white women from allegedly predatory black men. And, as we saw yet again after this shooting, it is not merely a relic of America’s hideous racial past. American racism is always gendered; racism and sexism are mutually dependent, and cannot be unstitched.

     As Jessie Daniels writes at Racism Review, white womanhood has been and remains essential to the logic of American white supremacy. In anti-black racism, and particularly in the south, the defense of white womanhood was, in the recent past, used as a justification for the most horrific violence against black people, and particularly black men. Daniels quotes Photography on the Color Line, Shawn Michelle Smith’s book about photographs of public lynchings, in which the 1935 lynching of a black Fort Lauderdale man named Rubin Stacy is described. Stacy, described as “a homeless tenant farmer,” approached the home of a white woman named Marion Jones to ask her for food.

     “On seeing Stacy,” Smith writes, “Jones screamed. Stacy was then arrested, and as six deputies were transporting him to a Miami jail, a mob of over one hundred masked men seized and murdered him. Finally, Stacy’s corpse was hung in sight of Jones’ home.” Stacy, Daniels argues, was murdered because he supposedly represented a threat to the sexual purity of a white woman, a perception that also depends on the centuries-old belief that black men are more sexually powerful, and more sexually predatory, than white men. And white men were all too ready to enact that racist violence in the name of protecting Jones’s fragile and immensely valuable white womanhood. “All an individual white woman like Marion Jones had to do to activate the network of white fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins who would come to her ‘defense’ and murder a black man who was asking for help was scream,” Daniels writes.
     ADVERTISEMENT

     That lynching happened in 1935. If you have a parent or grandparent who is 80 or older, it happened in his or her lifetime. Daniels notes that contemporary examples of the defense of white womanhood look horribly similar to the murder of Rubin Stacy. She points to the 2013 shooting of Jonathan Ferrell in Charlotte, North Carolina as an example. After crashing his car, Ferrell extricated himself, and knocked on the door of the first house he came upon, to ask for help—as any of us might do in such a situation. “A white woman, thinking it was her husband knocking, answered,” Daniels writes. “When she saw Ferrell she shut the door, hit her alarm and called the police. Ferrell, who was unarmed, was shot ten times by a Charlotte police officer.”

     There is an important distinction between white women, a people, and the concept of white womanhood—one that holds that a white woman is the best thing you can be in America after a white man, and that it is the responsibility of white men to protect your virtue at any and all costs. This white supremacist and benevolently sexist ideology depends both on the subjugation of white women by white men, and on the subjugation of all people who are not white—by white people (including white women).

     It isn’t just black Americans who are policed by this dual invocation of racism and sexism, and by the holding up of white womanhood as a paragon of purity. When Donald Trump announced his bid for the presidency last week, he dredged up a common fear about immigrants crossing the border from Mexico: “They’re rapists.” To protect the women of America—the white ones, because when we say “women,” we usually, by default, mean “white women”—we must practice this exclusion on the basis of race, Trump implied. This highly selective concern about preventing sexual violence is dependent on the peril of white women; Trump failed to mention that 80 percent of girls and women crossing that border are raped as they make the journey. Those girls and women aren’t white. Gender is always raced, and race is always gendered.

     That said, the distinction between women and womanhood should not let individual white women off the hook for how we benefit from and participate in racism. That we are victims of sexism does not erase our culpability in American racism. If anything, the powerlessness we feel as a result of sexism too often urges us to hold on to, and exert over others, what remaining power we have. For white women, that means the power gifted to us by the color of our skin. Few white women resisted lynching in the early 20th century. A gendered and raced pedestal isn’t always comfortable to stand on, but it comes with a lot of perks and not a small amount of power. When contemporary black feminists critique white feminists for failing to recognize, interrogate, and cede their own racial privilege, that complaint is rooted in history. The bonds of sisterhood can be strong, but too often, they have been weakened by some sisters’ willingness to continue benefitting from whiteness (or worse, their stubborn refusal to recognize that they do). While white women are people and white womanhood is an idea, it’s an idea that white women reinforce.

     It was, and remains, necessary for white women to decry the violence that is done in our name. It is on us to dismantle racism with just as much commitment as we dismantle sexism, for one cannot happen without the other.

     This is also not to say that we should make this horrific event all about white women, or all about white womanhood. It’s not. So often, the defense of white womanhood against black men results in violence against black women, and this time is no different. Six black women were shot dead in Charleston this week because of the centuries-old and still going strong perception that white women are in peril from black men. The reality is that rape, like most violent crime, is more likely to be intraracial than interracial. If we’re genuinely concerned about a sexual threat posed by black men, we should be focusing our energies on the safety of black women. A five-year-old girl is alive because she played dead, and, as Dr. Kali Nicole Gross wrote in Jet last week, “that the girl had the presence of mind to play dead among the bodies of likely family and friends, perhaps more than anything else speaks to the perils of being Black in America and the violence that Black people, especially Black women and girls face daily.” Six black women—Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lee Lance, Rev. Depayne Middleton-Doctor, and Susie Jackson—are dead because Roof claimed to want to protect white women. White womanhood might be an abstract idea; the murder of black people is not.

     In this raced and gendered hierarchy, black women continue to be the least valuable, the lowest rung on the ladder. As Rebecca Carroll argued last week in The Guardian, those women were shot because the belief that white women must be protected at all costs depends on the belief that black women aren’t truly women, that they’re barely people. That they’re disposable. Racism is always gendered, and gender always raced.

     What Roof did on Wednesday was the latest in the long line of acts of violence against black churches; of American mass shootings by white men with guns; of anti-black terrorism designed to make black Americans and their families and friends live in perpetual fear. What was perpetrated at Emanuel AME was all those things.

     It was also the latest in an unbearably long line of lethality meted out in the name of white womanhood—in my name, and maybe in yours. In the name of my purity and virtue and perfect femininity. We must not ignore the role of white womanhood in this act of white supremacist violence, or in any other. We must not find a way, yet again, of avoiding talking about whiteness. And until white women decide that we will no longer be used as an excuse for violence, until we decide that we will no longer tacitly condone and benefit from the violence, we will continue to have blood on our pale, “perfect” hands.

     Quoted in full.

     Just a better-news story: Supreme Court rules in favor of inmate with excessive force claim

     Four Republican hopefuls return money after ‘Dylann Roof manifesto’ revelation. Oooouuuuu…

     Four presidential hopefuls are among 23 Republicans who have given up more than $36,000 in campaign contributions from the leader of a white nationalist group said to have influenced the Charleston church shooting suspect Dylann Roof.

     Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum led a GOP group spanning Congress and statehouses who said they would donate to charity or return money from Earl Holt, following the publication of a Guardian article on Sunday.

     Many other Republicans who took money from Holt declined to comment on the contributions. Josh Mandel, Ohio’s state treasurer, said he would not return $1,500 Holt gave to his failed 2012 US Senate campaign, as it had been spent. Mandel’s campaign still has almost $50,000 in the bank.

     Holt, the president of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC), has contributed more than $74,000 to Republican candidates and committees in recent years, according to public filings, while making dozens of racist statements online.

     His organisation, which is labelled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, was cited by the author of an extremist manifesto posted on a website registered in Roof’s name and hosting photographs of the 21-year-old.

     Walker, the Wisconsin governor, will pass the $3,500 Holt gave his state campaigns to a charity, AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman, said in an email. Walker is expected to officially announce a campaign for president in the coming weeks.

     His decision followed 2016 candidates Paul, a senator for Kentucky, Cruz, a senator for Texas, and Santorum, a former senator for Pennsylvania, passing a total of $14,250 they received from Holt to a memorial fund for Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine people were shot dead last week.

     […]

     Jared Taylor, a spokesman for the CoCC, said in a statement on Monday that its leaders “utterly condemn” Roof’s alleged killings, but said the shootings “do not detract in the slightest from the legitimacy of some of the positions he has expressed”.

     Taylor said: “Ignoring legitimate grievances is dangerous.”

     Another $12,000 in Holt campaign contributions are to be donated to the church fund from senators Joni Ernst of Iowa, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Jeff Flake of Arizona, Rob Portman of Ohio, Dean Heller of Nevada, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, along with representatives Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Steve King of Iowa, Ryan Zinke of Montana, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Kenneth Buck of Colorado, and Mark Sanford of South Carolina.

     Spokespeople for the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, and senators Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Jim Risch of Idaho, who received a combined $6,000 in campaign contributions from Holt, according to filings, said they would be giving the money to charity.

     Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Representative Thomas Emmer of Minnesota and Representative Mia Love of Utah – the first black female Republican in Congress – said they would be returning a total of $3,000 in contributions to Holt. “I do not agree with his hateful beliefs and language and believe they are hurtful to our country,” Cotton said in a statement.

     In a statement published on Sunday, Holt said it was “not surprising” that Roof was apparently informed by the group’s website as it reported race relations “accurately and honestly”.

     However, he added: “The CofCC is hardly responsible for the actions of this deranged individual merely because he gleaned accurate information from our website.”

     Current members of congress, state officials, or candidates who received campaign contributions from Earl Holt, president of Council of Conservative Citizens, according to FEC and state filings:

     Senator Ted Cruz of Texas* – $8,500 – donating $11,000 to Charleston church fund

     Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin – $3,500 – donating to charity

     Governor Greg Abbott of Texas – $3,000 – donating to Salvation Army in Austin

     Representative Steve King of Iowa – $2,500 – donating to Charleston church fund

     Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska – $2,000 – donating to community centre

     State representative Chris McDaniel of Mississippi, former US senate primary candidate – $2,000

     Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky* – $1,750 – donating to Charleston church fund

     Former Senator Rick Santorum – $1,500 – donating to Charleston church fund

     Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas – $1,500 – returning contributions

     State treasurer Josh Mandel of Ohio, former US senate candidate – $1,500 – will not return or donate money

     Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas* – $1,250 – donating to Charleston church fund

     Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin – $1,250 – donating to Charleston church fund

     Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa – $1,000 – donating to Charleston church fund

     Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona – $1,000 – donating to Charleston church fund

     Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina – $1,000 – donating to Charleston church fund

     Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana – $1,000 – donating to Charleston church fund

     Representative Mia Love of Utah – $1,000 – returning contributions

     Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin* – $1,000 – donating to Charleston church fund

     State representative David Simpson of Texas – $750

     State senator Konni Burton of Texas – $750

     Representative Thomas Emmer of Minnesota – $500 – returning contributions

     Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana – $500 – donating to Charleston church fund

     Senator Dean Heller of Nevada – $500 – donating to Charleston church fund

     Senator Jim Risch of Idaho – $500 – donating to charity

     Representative Kenneth Buck of Colorado – $500 – donating to Charleston church fund

     Senator Rob Portman of Ohio – $250 – donating to Charleston church fund

     Representative Mark Sanford of South Carolina – $250 – donating to Charleston church fund

     State representative Matthew Schaefer of Texas – $250

     Texas supreme court judge Jeff Brown – $250

     Former candidates and members of congress who received campaign contributions from Holt

     Todd Akin, US Senate candidate in Missouri – $3,500

     Michele Bachmann, US representative for Minnesota and US presidential primary candidate – $3,200

     Richard Mourdock, US Senate candidate in Indiana – $2,500

     Mitt Romney, US presidential candidate – $2,000

     Charles Djou, US House candidate in Hawaii – $2,000

     Linda McMahon, US Senate candidate in Connecticut – $1,500

     Allen West*, US representative for Florida – $1,250

     Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia gubernatorial candidate – $1,000

     George Allen, US Senate candidate in Virginia – $1,000

     Rick Berg, US representative and US Senate candidate for North Dakota – $1,000

     Dennis Rehberg, US representative and US Senate candidate for Montana – $1,000

     Mark Neumann, US Senate candidate in Wisconsin – $1,000

     Sharron Angle, US Senate candidate in Nevada – $1,000

     Paul Broun, US representative and US Senate primary candidate for Georgia – $1,000

     Rob Maness, US Senate primary candidate in Louisiana – $1,000

     Quico Canseco, US representative and US House primary candidate for Texas – $750

     Peter Hoekstra, US representative and US Senate candidate for Michigan – $500

     Tom Smith, US Senate candidate in Pennsylvania – $500

     Dan Liljenquist, state senator and US Senate primary candidate in Utah – $500

     JD Hayworth, US representative and US Senate primary candidate for Arizona – $500

     Dino Rossi, state senator and US Senate candidate in Washington – $500

     Philip Eby, state house primary candidate in Texas – $500

     Jeff Bell, US Senate candidate in New Jersey – $500

     Donald Webb, US House candidate in North Carolina – $500

     Joe Miller, US Senate primary candidate in Alaska – $500

     Jim Oberweis, state senator and US Senate candidate in Illinois – $500

     Steve Lonegan, US Senate candidate in New Jersey – $500

     John Raese, US Senate candidate in West Virginia – $500

     Conservative campaign committees that received contributions from Holt

     Senate Conservatives Fund Pac – $1,000

     Actright Pac – $1,000

     TeaPartyExpress.org Pac – $800

     Madison Project Pac – $250

     Not all are incredibly huge sums, but they’re significant, and I applaud those willing to either return or donate the money they received from Holt. If they actually do that.

211. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 3:04 am

     Slack CEO explodes over editorial about the South Carolina shooting, says ‘f— you’ to Wall Street Journal

     Stewart Butterfield, cofounder of Flickr and CEO of the office-communication software Slack, lashed out against a Wall Street Journal editorial in a tweetstorm Sunday night.

     The Journal editorial in question addressed the recent killings of nine people at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, saying the event was caused by a “problem that defies explanation.”

     President Obama had compared the shooting to the September 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young black girls.

     But the Journal editorial says the comparison is inadequate: “Today the system and philosophy of institutionalized racism identified by Dr. King no longer exists.”

     Butterfield spoke out against the column’s logic and ended by directly insulting The Journal’s editorial board, writing “So, WSJ editorial board: f— you!”

     His twitter rant and a grand admission of enjoying white privilege is at the link, and worth a read.

     The ‘Southern Avenger’ Repents: I Was Wrong About the Confederate Flag

     As a Charleston, South Carolina-based conservative radio personality known as the “Southern Avenger,” I spent a decade defending the Confederate flag that is yet again the center of so much controversy.

     I said the flag was about states’ rights. I said it stood for self-determination. I said it honored heritage.

     I argued the Confederate flag wasn’t about race. I believed it. Millions of well-meaning Southerners believe it too.

     I was wrong. That flag is always about race. Whatever political or historical points the flag’s defenders make, there will never be a time—and never has been a time—in which millions of Americans have looked at that symbol and not seen hatred.

     We can argue for the rest of time whether this is fair or not. And for the rest of time, that symbol will still be seen in an overwhelmingly negative light.

     Those who see hatred have political and historical reasons too.

     This has always been the Confederate flag debate game. One camp’s arguments are supposed to trump the other’s.

     I’m not here to settle those arguments. I tired of them years ago.

     But I am here to say there is something at stake far more important than this symbol.

     Heritage might not be hate. But battling hate is far more important than anyone’s heritage, politics, or just about anything else. We should have different priorities.

     I now have different priorities.

     Dylann Roof is a reminder of what’s at stake.

     ***

     The week before a white supremacist murdered nine black men and women in my hometown of Charleston, I was angry at my fellow conservatives.

     A 14-year-old black girl attending a pool party in McKinney, Texas, had been manhandled and thrown to the ground by a police officer. The girl had done nothing except talk. She was just standing there with other teenagers.

     It was revolting to watch. I asked others to imagine it was their daughter.

     The overwhelming response was that she was a “thug” who was “no saint” and needed to be taught “respect.” The comments were as revolting as the act—an adult mob praising the assault of a 100-pound, half-naked and scared black kid. I pleaded again for people to stop defending this. It got uglier.

     It bothered me greatly, probably because at one time I might have done the same thing.

     In my role as a conservative radio personality, I would’ve likely joined in in calling a group of excited black teenagers, or protesters, “thugs.” I might have called illegal immigrants criminals or worse. Muslims would’ve been slandered as terrorists.

     Ugliness was a stock-in-trade.

     I thought a big part of being conservative meant picking a “side” and attacking the other. I thought not caring what others thought or felt was part of it. Some of my Confederate flag debates certainly reflected that mentality.

     This is something ideologues do and is by no means exclusive to the right, as evidenced by the way some liberals cartoonishly portray conservatives, Christians, and, yes, Southerners.

     Ideologues ridicule and dehumanize people at the expense of their personhood. Ideologues believe some groups must be attacked, and although the groups are comprised of flesh-and-blood human beings, it’s better not to think of them as people too much—it could get you off message.

     It’s crude collectivist thinking. It’s an intentional lack of sympathy. It’s dehumanization. It’s at the heart of everything that’s wrong with our politics and culture.

     In its most extreme form, it’s what’s wrong with Dylann Roof.

     Between the reports of his racist words and manifesto, we know Roof had a mission: to murder black people. Entering the Emmanuel A.M.E. Church Wednesday and sitting with the group for an hour, Roof confessed that he “almost didn’t go through with it because everyone was so nice to him.”

     But instead he chose to “go through with his mission.” He had to shrug off their kindness. These weren’t people. They were just “blacks.” They were on the wrong side.

     Roof’s hateful tunnel vision led him to commit pure evil.

     What is the polar opposite of such hatred? The forgiveness demonstrated by Roof’s victim’s families. Said the daughter of Ethel Lance, “I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you.”

     “And have mercy on your soul. You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people but God forgives you, and I forgive you.”

     This is humanity. It is a rejection of collectivist thinking. It is the epitome of sympathy. It’s grace. It’s love.

     My attraction to libertarianism a number of years ago began a journey of rejecting groupthink and placing primacy on the individual. Once you start down the path of putting individual human beings above whatever group they belong to, it puts politics—and everything else—in a new light.

     Putting people before an agenda or broad prejudices puts us all in a much better place. It can, and should, make us repentant of our past behavior. It did for me.

     A 14-year-old girl at a pool party isn’t a “thug” who deserves abuse. She’s a child. Decent people should view her as such.

     We can be more decent.

     As a native of Charleston, I was touched, but not surprised by some of the victims’ families’ responses to Roof. My hometown is filled with loving men and women of all races. You’ve seen them in the streets and at the vigils in the last week throughout the South Carolina Lowcountry, holding hands and sharing this grief.

     They are also the kind of Southerners who would be attacked in another context for their religious or traditional beliefs. They are the kind of people who are being attacked right now by pundits living thousands of miles away from this heartbroken city, who know nothing about Charleston and choose to impose their own politics on this tragedy. Peggy Noonan is right, “Why don’t you leave the grieving alone right now? Why don’t you not impose your agenda items on them? Why don’t you not force them to debate while they have tears in their throats?”

     Some of the people you’ve seen join hands with their Charleston brethren in recent days likely have supported the Confederate flag. Support for this symbol is hard for most outside the South to even understand.

     I would ask readers to at least try to understand these folks. Many are not coming from a place of hate.

     Others are. Too many have for a very long time. One hateful man did so again last week in a way our nation will not soon forget.

     This is why it’s finally time to take down the Confederate flag.

     ***

     As a Southerner, I long stuck up for my “side.” The South was right. The North was wrong. The Confederate flag was right and those who attacked it were wrong.

     Those who defend the Confederate flag always have to add the caveat that others have “appropriated” it for racist causes. This is true.

     Dylann Roof appropriated it precisely for this reason. He didn’t choose a random symbol and make it his own. He chose the Confederate flag precisely because of the negative light in which most view it.

     I’m writing this column in a restaurant I frequent and am conscious every time a particular black server I’ve come to know walks by. I don’t want him to see the words “Confederate flag” and think I’m writing about it positively.

     I have no intention of stopping him to educate him about the “true” meaning of the Confederate flag, as I might have years ago. I’m certain as a black American he already has a pretty concrete idea of how he feels about that symbol.

     Black Americans have too many reasons to despise the Confederate flag. From slavery, to Jim Crow, to last week—it is so bloodstained today that it can only be thought of primarily as a symbol of terror.

     Confederate flag supporters have argued for years that everyone should understand them. But black Southerners have tolerated something most of them consider intolerable for a century-and-a-half.

     That’s time enough for understanding.

     Understand this: Imagine your great-grandfather was a slave. Imagine your great-grandfather was lynched. Imagine your grandfather was forced to drink from a separate fountain. Imagine your father or mother was murdered by a deranged man with the Confederate flag all over his website.

     Imagine these kinds of horrors were your American heritage. Imagine every time you saw a Confederate flag it reminded you of this.

     Now imagine being told you don’t understand what the flag “really” means.

     It’s an insult.

     I care about moving beyond groupthink where right and left stop dehumanizing people more than I care about a flag. I care about white and black Southerners and Americans coming together, as we’ve seen on the streets of Charleston, more than I care about a flag. I’d like to see more coming together.

     We will have a future that can be so much better than what a lot of Southern and American heritage represents, but only if we stop thinking of each other as separate camps constantly at war. We can only improve to the degree that we begin viewing one another not as enemies to be attacked but brothers to be loved.

     Dylann Roof reminds us how hate destroys. The families of those he murdered remind us of the love we’re capable of.

     The Confederate flag will always be a roadblock to the betterment of our natures. Let’s take it down so that we might all rise up.

     I quoted that one in full, too, even though it’s really long. People can learn and change.

     President Obama, first lady, vice president to attend Pinckney’s funeral Friday, which is tomorrow, which means I have a whole lot of tabs to get rid of until then.

     President Barack Obama will deliver the eulogy Friday at the Rev. Clementa Pinckney’s funeral, a White House official said.

     First lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden also will travel to Charleston to attend the services for the fallen Democrat, who also served as a state senator, the official confirmed Monday.

     Pinckney was one of nine people fatally shot Wednesday night during a Bible study at Emanuel AME Church.

     Sources say Obama also is expected to meet with the other victims’ families during his visit.

     No consensus possible. “Conf Flag is a symbol of White Supremacy” is only slightly less true than “Earth is round.” Ta-Nehisi Coates responding to what is, essentially, a ‘both sides!!!’ argument.

     FACT: Nazi’s in Germany are prohibited from flying a swastika so they use the confederate flag. #TakeDownTheFlag

     The Media’s Disgusting Racism and Shameful Betrayal of Laura Robinson, shift to racism in Canada.

     Let’s look at her “questionable story” with fresh eyes:

     1. Robinson discovers that John Furlong, the head of the Vancouver Olympics, a celebrated member of the Canadian establishment and a recipient of the Order of Canada, has a secret past. He emigrated to Canada five years before he claimed to arrive here in his biography, a fact that he kept hidden even from his co-author. What was he hiding?

     2. Through multiple trips to John Furlong’s birthplace in Ireland, Robinson learns that he was a missionary, a “Frontier Apostle” who, as a teenager, taught phys ed to Native kids in Burns Lake, a village in rural BC.

     3. Robinson visits Burns Lake and collects the stories of over forty Native Canadians who allege either experiencing or witnessing physical abuse by John Furlong. Eight of them sign sworn affidavits, exposing themselves to criminal liability if what they tell her turns out to be false. Here’s some of what they said:

     “He punched me in the back of the head and I went flying. I was unconscious for 15 minutes.” – Paul Joseph

     “I was slow and weak. I got hit by a ball, whipped in the calves, yardstick thrown at me—all by John Furlong.” – Cathy Woodgate

     “I was hit on the head all the time. I was hit with a ruler: a metre stick in the legs. I remember one day talking to another Native person in my language…John Furlong hit me for that.” -Richard Perry

     Hutchison doesn’t mention any of Furlong’s First Nations accusers in his hit-piece on Robinson. It’s far easier to denounce one white woman as an “obsessive” with a grudge.

     “Frankly, it smacks of a vendetta,” wrote the National Post’s Chris Selley, in a 2012 column where he accepted the possibility that Furlong may have indeed punched children, but brushed aside such behaviour as “not really shocking,” since he himself was yelled at by teachers when he was enrolled in private school.

     Selley offered nothing to support his accusation that Robinson was on a vendetta against Furlong, presenting not a shred of evidence in his column that the two had anything to do with each other prior to her investigation. Yet his article was entered into evidence by John Furlong’s defence attorney last week, who used it during cross-examination as a weapon to discredit Robinson as a journalist.

     Other statements made by Robinson’s fellow journalists have been used against her. Her story was originally scheduled to run in The Toronto Star along with The Georgia Straight, but the Star chickened out. […]

     Maybe it’s not all that surprising. John Furlong is entitled to a defence, and it’s not that shocking that he’s chosen to double-down on his pundit-supported narrative of an obsessed white woman on a reckless vendetta against male authority figures.

     But let’s demand that those who lend support to this argument have the basic honesty to connect their own dots. Laura Robinson, after all, has never accused John Furlong of abuse. She is a reporter, and what she reported on were the words and memories of over forty Native Canadians who swear that John Furlong was a racist, violent bully who made the lives of children a living hell.

     If you think that they are all a bunch of lying Indians, Brian Hutchison, then write that too.

212. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 4:31 am

     Charleston communities unite in solidarity ahead of week of funerals

     The church massacre that killed nine people last week may have shocked Charleston residents, but it has not shaken their resolve.

     More than a thousand people turned up at a service at the reopened Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Sunday, ahead of what is expected to be a week of funerals and memorials for the victims. Gatherers repeated messages of solidarity and love, hoping to drown out the hate that embodied the slayings, the Associated Press reported.

     “The doors of the church are open,” the Rev. Norvel Goff said at the first Sunday service since the killings, according to CNN. “No evildoer, no demon in hell or on Earth can close the doors of God’s church.”

     […]

     Later, thousands more gathered to march across the city’s iconic Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge — named after a former state lawmaker and supporter of the Confederate flag — in a show of solidarity and healing. Beneath the two-mile span, boats gathered and blew their air horns in support, while cars honked as they passed on the bridge.

     […]

     “There’s bitterness, but there’s also a very strong spirit of working together and being part of a long movement for change,” the Rev. Jeremy Rutledge, pastor for the Circular Congregational Church a few blocks from Emanuel, told The Christian Science Monitor. “There is something going on in Charleston.”

     “We must go forward in uniting the community against this kind of hatred,” civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton said in a Thursday press conference. “It is clear this nation has to deal with hate and it has to deal with race, and to continue to castigate and demonize those that raise the issue is not going to solve the problem.”

     And in Baltimore: City, county leaders demand change to address Confederate symbols in Maryland

     Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake called for Maryland to stop issuing specialty license plates with the Confederate flag, and Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz has moved to rename the popular Robert E. Lee Park.

     The calls for change came as some South Carolina leaders demanded the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the State House in Columbia after nine black people were killed last week by a white gunman in a historic African-American church in Charleston.

     The killings sparked renewed debate nationwide about the role of Confederate symbols in the modern era.

     On Monday, Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, announced it would remove all merchandise bearing the Confederate flag from its stores. A top Republican lawmaker in Mississippi called for the removal of the Confederate flag from its prominent place in the state flag. And the words “Black Lives Matter” were painted on a Confederate memorial in Baltimore’s Bolton Hill.

     “All of these movements underscore the levels of intense frustration that exist because our country has really not yet fully dealt with our history of slavery and the structural racism that is it’s legacy,” said Susan Goering, director of the ACLU of Maryland.

     While the massacre inside the Charleston church has refocused the debate, Maryland leaders must weigh the decisions to remove historic symbols carefully, said Tessa Hill-Aston, president of the Baltimore NAACP.

     She said she will meet with state and local leaders to discuss whether to petition the state legislature or governor to recall the Sons of Confederate Veterans license tags that feature an image of the battle flag on the left side.

     Group That Fueled Dylann Roof’s Hate Is Subsidized by U.S. Taxpayers. To be specific, it pays no taxes as it is ‘for the common good’. Actually, just see the article for details:

     Alleged Charleston gunman Dylann Roof wrote that he was never the same after discovering a website with “pages upon pages of these brutal black on white murders.”

     The pages that left Roof in disbelief were the product of a white-nationalist group subsidized by American taxpayers.

     The Council of Conservative Citizens Inc. is listed by the Internal Revenue Service as a nonprofit organization that promotes social welfare, also known as a 501(c)(4). Such groups pay no federal taxes, a form of government subsidy. As the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative arm, noted, tax exemptions “have the same effect as Government payments to favored taxpayers.”

     The council is now under fire for allegedly inspiring racial hatred in Roof, a 21-year-old high school dropout. He is charged with nine counts of murder.

     Tax-exempt social welfare groups are supposed to “primarily promote the common good and general welfare of the people of the community as a whole,” according to IRS documents.

     The Council of Conservative Citizens explains on its website that its members believe “that the American people and government should remain European in their composition and character…. We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind.”

     Groups that espouse hate can be stripped of their tax-exempt status, said Marcus Owens, who ran the IRS’s exempt organizations division in the 1990s. That happened to the neo-Nazi group National Alliance in 1982. The Council of Conservative Citizens has been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “notorious, racist hate group.”

     However, Owens says Republicans in Congress have made it virtually impossible for the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of political groups after the recent, so-called Tea Party scandal. Republicans criticized the IRS for what they said was inexcusable targeting of conservative 501(c)(4)s. And the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said the agency had employed “inappropriate criteria” in scrutinizing some groups’ tax-exemption applications.

     The Council of Conservative Citizens has had tax-exempt status since 1985. In its most recent tax filing in 2013, the group reported revenues of $67,000.

     Owens said the small amounts of money involved may also deter the IRS from taking action.

     “The ability of the IRS to deal with organizations that are not a significant revenue drain is very limited these days,” he said.

     A spokesman for the IRS did not respond to requests for comment.

     The Council of Conservative Citizens said in a statement that it “unequivocally condemns Roof’s murderous actions.” Its spokesperson, Jared Taylor, said, “I think it would be a big mistake to say that he was inspired (by the group’s website.) He was informed.”

     Informed, inspired, it’s all the same, innit?

     Freddie Gray’s Death Was Homicide, Autopsy Says – going to have a few articles on this, in addition to the one above from Tony.

     A medical examiner found that Freddie Gray sustained a “high-energy injury” while riding in a Baltimore police van and that the failure of the officers to follow procedures meant the death was a homicide, according to an autopsy report obtained by The Baltimore Sun.

     The police arrested Mr. Gray, 25, on April 12, and he died a week later, prompting protests and rioting.

     A grand jury indicted six police officers on various charges; one of the officers faces the most serious charge of second-degree ”depraved-heart” murder. All have pleaded not guilty.

     The Sun reported Tuesday that the autopsy found the injury, similar to those sustained in shallow-water diving, was probably caused when the van suddenly decelerated. The report said Mr. Gray’s death could not be ruled an accident and was instead a homicide because officers did not follow safety procedures “through acts of omission.”

     A spokesman for the Maryland medical examiner and for the prosecutor’s office declined Tuesday to release the report, and Marilyn J. Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore, condemned the leak in a statement.

     “As I have repeatedly stated, I strongly condemn anyone with access to trial evidence who has leaked information prior to the resolution of this case,” she said.

     Lawyers for the officers released a statement saying they had not received the report, although Ms. Mosby is expected to turn it over to the defense by Friday. The newspaper reported that it had obtained a copy of the autopsy, and sources who verified it for The Sun requested anonymity because of the high-profile nature of the case.

     Although the officers loaded Mr. Gray into the van on his abdomen, the medical examiner surmised that Mr. Gray may have made it to his feet and then been thrown into a wall when the van abruptly changed direction. Because he was not belted and he had his wrists and ankles shackled, he was “at risk for an unsupported fall during acceleration or deceleration of the van.”

     The police and a lawyer for the Gray family have said Mr. Gray sustained a severe spine injury.

     The thing is, such injuries may be treatable (depending on the specific injury), if attended to quickly and correctly. (I know because I know someone who survived such an injury. Due to shallow diving.) Freddie Gray’s death, in all sense, was a preventable death.

     This is where we’ve gotten in a week. Murders in a church -> Confederate flag debate -> Obama says “nigger” -> this. “Should Obama apologize for slavery?”

     cHoly shit. An elected official just blamed his own constituents – the Charleston 9 – for their own death, CNN clip available at the tweet.

213. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 5:00 am

     Charleston communities unite in solidarity ahead of week of funerals

     The church massacre that killed nine people last week may have shocked Charleston residents, but it has not shaken their resolve.

     More than a thousand people turned up at a service at the reopened Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Sunday, ahead of what is expected to be a week of funerals and memorials for the victims. Gatherers repeated messages of solidarity and love, hoping to drown out the hate that embodied the slayings, the Associated Press reported.

     “The doors of the church are open,” the Rev. Norvel Goff said at the first Sunday service since the killings, according to CNN. “No evildoer, no demon in hell or on Earth can close the doors of God’s church.”

     […]

     Later, thousands more gathered to march across the city’s iconic Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge — named after a former state lawmaker and supporter of the Confederate flag — in a show of solidarity and healing. Beneath the two-mile span, boats gathered and blew their air horns in support, while cars honked as they passed on the bridge.

     […]

     “There’s bitterness, but there’s also a very strong spirit of working together and being part of a long movement for change,” the Rev. Jeremy Rutledge, pastor for the Circular Congregational Church a few blocks from Emanuel, told The Christian Science Monitor. “There is something going on in Charleston.”

     “We must go forward in uniting the community against this kind of hatred,” civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton said in a Thursday press conference. “It is clear this nation has to deal with hate and it has to deal with race, and to continue to castigate and demonize those that raise the issue is not going to solve the problem.”

     And in Baltimore: City, county leaders demand change to address Confederate symbols in Maryland

     Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake called for Maryland to stop issuing specialty license plates with the Confederate flag, and Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz has moved to rename the popular Robert E. Lee Park.

     The calls for change came as some South Carolina leaders demanded the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the State House in Columbia after nine black people were killed last week by a white gunman in a historic African-American church in Charleston.

     The killings sparked renewed debate nationwide about the role of Confederate symbols in the modern era.

     On Monday, Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, announced it would remove all merchandise bearing the Confederate flag from its stores. A top Republican lawmaker in Mississippi called for the removal of the Confederate flag from its prominent place in the state flag. And the words “Black Lives Matter” were painted on a Confederate memorial in Baltimore’s Bolton Hill.

     “All of these movements underscore the levels of intense frustration that exist because our country has really not yet fully dealt with our history of slavery and the structural racism that is it’s legacy,” said Susan Goering, director of the ACLU of Maryland.

     While the massacre inside the Charleston church has refocused the debate, Maryland leaders must weigh the decisions to remove historic symbols carefully, said Tessa Hill-Aston, president of the Baltimore NAACP.

     She said she will meet with state and local leaders to discuss whether to petition the state legislature or governor to recall the Sons of Confederate Veterans license tags that feature an image of the battle flag on the left side.

     Group That Fueled Dylann Roof’s Hate Is Subsidized by U.S. Taxpayers. To be specific, it pays no taxes as it is ‘for the common good’. Actually, just see the article for details:

     Alleged Charleston gunman Dylann Roof wrote that he was never the same after discovering a website with “pages upon pages of these brutal black on white murders.”

     The pages that left Roof in disbelief were the product of a white-nationalist group subsidized by American taxpayers.

     The Council of Conservative Citizens Inc. is listed by the Internal Revenue Service as a nonprofit organization that promotes social welfare, also known as a 501(c)(4). Such groups pay no federal taxes, a form of government subsidy. As the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative arm, noted, tax exemptions “have the same effect as Government payments to favored taxpayers.”

     The council is now under fire for allegedly inspiring racial hatred in Roof, a 21-year-old high school dropout. He is charged with nine counts of murder.

     Tax-exempt social welfare groups are supposed to “primarily promote the common good and general welfare of the people of the community as a whole,” according to IRS documents.

     The Council of Conservative Citizens explains on its website that its members believe “that the American people and government should remain European in their composition and character…. We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind.”

     Groups that espouse hate can be stripped of their tax-exempt status, said Marcus Owens, who ran the IRS’s exempt organizations division in the 1990s. That happened to the neo-Nazi group National Alliance in 1982. The Council of Conservative Citizens has been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “notorious, racist hate group.”

     However, Owens says Republicans in Congress have made it virtually impossible for the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of political groups after the recent, so-called Tea Party scandal. Republicans criticized the IRS for what they said was inexcusable targeting of conservative 501(c)(4)s. And the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said the agency had employed “inappropriate criteria” in scrutinizing some groups’ tax-exemption applications.

     The Council of Conservative Citizens has had tax-exempt status since 1985. In its most recent tax filing in 2013, the group reported revenues of $67,000.

     Owens said the small amounts of money involved may also deter the IRS from taking action.

     “The ability of the IRS to deal with organizations that are not a significant revenue drain is very limited these days,” he said.

     A spokesman for the IRS did not respond to requests for comment.

     The Council of Conservative Citizens said in a statement that it “unequivocally condemns Roof’s murderous actions.” Its spokesperson, Jared Taylor, said, “I think it would be a big mistake to say that he was inspired (by the group’s website.) He was informed.”

     Informed, inspired, it’s all the same, innit?

     Freddie Gray’s Death Was Homicide, Autopsy Says – going to have a few articles on this, in addition to the one above from Tony.

     A medical examiner found that Freddie Gray sustained a “high-energy injury” while riding in a Baltimore police van and that the failure of the officers to follow procedures meant the death was a homicide, according to an autopsy report obtained by The Baltimore Sun.

     The police arrested Mr. Gray, 25, on April 12, and he died a week later, prompting protests and rioting.

     A grand jury indicted six police officers on various charges; one of the officers faces the most serious charge of second-degree ”depraved-heart” murder. All have pleaded not guilty.

     The Sun reported Tuesday that the autopsy found the injury, similar to those sustained in shallow-water diving, was probably caused when the van suddenly decelerated. The report said Mr. Gray’s death could not be ruled an accident and was instead a homicide because officers did not follow safety procedures “through acts of omission.”

     A spokesman for the Maryland medical examiner and for the prosecutor’s office declined Tuesday to release the report, and Marilyn J. Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore, condemned the leak in a statement.

     “As I have repeatedly stated, I strongly condemn anyone with access to trial evidence who has leaked information prior to the resolution of this case,” she said.

     Lawyers for the officers released a statement saying they had not received the report, although Ms. Mosby is expected to turn it over to the defense by Friday. The newspaper reported that it had obtained a copy of the autopsy, and sources who verified it for The Sun requested anonymity because of the high-profile nature of the case.

     Although the officers loaded Mr. Gray into the van on his abdomen, the medical examiner surmised that Mr. Gray may have made it to his feet and then been thrown into a wall when the van abruptly changed direction. Because he was not belted and he had his wrists and ankles shackled, he was “at risk for an unsupported fall during acceleration or deceleration of the van.”

     The police and a lawyer for the Gray family have said Mr. Gray sustained a severe spine injury.

     The thing is, such injuries may be treatable (depending on the specific injury), if attended to quickly and correctly. (I know because I know someone who survived such an injury. Due to shallow diving.) Freddie Gray’s death, in all sense, was a preventable death.

     This is where we’ve gotten in a week. Murders in a church -> Confederate flag debate -> Obama says “n*gg*r” -> this. “Should Obama apologize for slavery?”

     cHoly shit. An elected official just blamed his own constituents – the Charleston 9 – for their own death, CNN clip available at the tweet.

214. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 5:13 am

     Bless you @deray – see attached picture, with comments on whiteness and the humanization thereof.
     And the omission and erasure of the victims in such humanization.

     Dangerous to assume that you are a better human than slaveholders. Misses the great power of structures, and furthers myth of individual. He had some great tweets in this series, about all those people who say they’d never have owned slaves, forgetting that it would be an entirely different historical context, and there’s no way to know… This one tweet sort of encapsulated that for me.

     Warner Bros. scraps Dukes of Hazzard car toys over Confederate flag controversy o.o And apparently the car will no longer bear the flag, but I wonder, will it still be named ‘General Lee’?

     The Confederate flag may or may not be removed from government buildings in South Carolina, but the relic is definitely being removed from at least one southern icon. Warner Bros. today announced that it was halting production of toys and replicas of the General Lee, the car from the Dukes of Hazzard, which famously bore the flag on its roof. The company follows in the footsteps of retailers Amazon, Sears, eBay, and Walmart, all of whom elected to ban sales of the Confederate flag and its image this week after the racially motivated murders in Charleston on Sunday.

     As recently as 2012 Warner Bros. quashed rumors that it was planning to remove the Confederate flag from toy versions of the General Lee. “We were not and are not planning to change design of the General Lee on merchandise,” the company said at the time, after a Tomy sales representative reportedly indicated production would cease in 2013. Ben Jones, the actor who portrayed Cooter in the 1970s Dukes of Hazzard TV show and an ex-Democratic congressman, responded to the rumors in a press release. “Some unnamed genius at the company feels that the flag is ‘offensive to some’ and therefore it has no business on a classic TV comedy about a bunch of good ol’ boys and girls in the Southern mountains,” he wrote. “This is a new level of ‘P.C.’ idiocy. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of being insulted by morons.”

     It’s not clear whether Warner Bros. will continue to sell versions of the car with the flag removed, and if so, whether the company will need to change the General Lee’s name. The muscle car’s moniker is, after all, also a reference to the Confederacy, being named after the leader of the losing side’s armies.

     Sales of Confederate Flags Are Booming Because of Supply, Demand, and Racism – get yours, while supplies last. Huh.

     In recent hours Sears, eBay, and Amazon have joined Walmart in announcing that they will no longer sell (or facilitate the sale of) Confederate flag merchandise in the aftermath of Confederate sympathizer Dylann Roof’s massacre of black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. Yahoo Finance has put together a convincing case that the seemingly imminent difficulty of buying Confederate memorabilia has created a run on the historic-symbol-of-racism bank, as it were:

     On Monday, before Haley announced her change in position on the flag (which still must be approved by the state assembly), Amazon listed two Confederate flags among the 60 bestselling items under “Outdoor Flags and Banners”: one at the No. 5 spot, and one at No. 43. The following morning, five of the top 20 bestsellers in the category were Confederate flags, including the No. 1 bestseller, a 3-by-5 foot polyester model made by Rhode Island Novelty and sold by a company called Anley. Among the top 60, 12 were versions of the Confederate flag.

     A small Nevada company told Yahoo’s reporter it sells five Confederate flags in the typical week and has sold nearly 250 this week. The article also notes that many such flags are actually manufactured in China, which means that (at least in the short term) a controversy related to the United States’ 19th-century civil war is enriching the capitalists who work within the communist system of one of the United States’ longtime 21st-century antagonists. We live in strange times.

     Flag Supporters React With a Mix of Compromise, Caution and Outright Defiance

     It has been quite a few years since the lost cause has appeared quite as lost as it did Tuesday. As the afternoon drew on and their retreat turned into a rout, the lingering upholders of the Confederacy watched as license plates, statues and prominently placed Confederate battle flags slipped from their reach.

     “This is the beginning of communism,” said Robert Lampley, who was standing in the blazing sun in front of the South Carolina State House shortly after the legislature voted overwhelmingly to debate the current placement of the Confederate battle flag. “The South is the last bastion of liberty and independence. I know we’re going to lose eventually.”

     “Our people are dying off,” he went on, before encouraging a white reporter to “keep reproducing.”

     Confederate sympathizers across the country have insisted over the last few days that the racism-fueled massacre of nine black people in a Charleston church had nothing to do with their symbols, even though Dylann Roof, charged in the killings, embraced those symbols in photos and in his speech. But such arguments have had limited effect, as politicians all over the South have reacted to the shooting by welcoming the elimination of such symbols, or at least some high-profile ones, from state property.

     Resistance to this push has varied, with some hard-core Confederate sympathizers who swore defiance to politicians explaining that they simply thought things were moving too quickly. Lawmakers in South Carolina who voted against opening the placement of the flag to debate said they were concerned that the flag’s rushed removal would lead to the renaming of countless streets and the destruction of Confederate monuments that are strewn across the state.

     “We want to proceed and make sure that we’re doing it properly and we don’t have unintended consequences,” said State Representative Craig Gagnon, who is originally from Lowell, Mass. — with forebears who fought for the Union — but represents a conservative district. “We don’t want to just trash everything and take everything away.”

     He thought a good compromise would be to replace the battle flag at the State House with another flag from the Confederacy, one that had not become so associated with contemporary racist movements. Others were not inclined to talk compromise at all.

     “You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters,” said Greg Stewart, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the executive director of Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis.

     […]

     Those who sold Confederate goods said efforts to remove the flag from stores were based on a misunderstanding of its current meaning to many Southerners. Freddie Rich, the owner of RebelStore.com from Kings Mountain, N.C., which sells Confederate flags and bumper stickers (including one that reads, “I Believe the South Was Right, and I Don’t Believe in Slavery — Then or Now”) said his customers bought Confederacy-themed merchandise as an expression of regional pride and admiration for Civil War veterans.

     “There’s nothing racial about it,” he said of the flag. “This is history to us.”

     Still, it was a mixed day. With Walmart and Sears ceasing to sell Confederate merchandise, Mr. Rich said his store had around a 2,000 percent increase in sales in the last 24 hours. Told that eBay had also announced a ban, he let out a whoop.

     Finally, there were some who were resigned to surrender.

     In Austin, Tex., a tall bearded man went into the tattoo parlor where Kelly Barr works with a request: the removal of a 10-year-old tattoo of the Confederate flag.

     He told Mr. Barr that he had decided to get the flag removed when he saw the pained look on a middle-aged black woman at his gym on Monday.

     “ ‘If South Carolina can take theirs down,’ ” Mr. Barr recalled him saying, “ ‘I can take mine down.’ ” I told him, “ ‘Right on.’ ”

     Welcome to USAmerica, communism. :P

     For a bit of WTF, It’s really hard to be a Kanye West fan at times, from October 2013.

     It’s really hard these days to be someone who roots for Kanye West. On one hand, when he’s just being himself, he’s rightly pushing against the glass ceilings for minorities and the stereotypes of rap entertainers in America. He’s inspirational (sometimes unintentionally) when he speaks his mind or creates brilliant music – or has a grandiose marriage proposal.

     But when West really tries his hardest to spark a revolution or “rage against the machine”, he often misfires. His latest album Yeezus is an attempt to fight against corporate America and racism, but he falls into contradictions and non-sequitur detours on sexual depravity that didn’t garner much acclaim or sympathy. He undermines his own efforts.

     Which brings me back to the frustration of wanting to support Kanye West. Two weeks ago, when he vented to the BBC about how the presumed glass ceiling in preventing him from stretching his influence to the fashion industry, it was easy to see the broader issues playing out in his head.

     But then he turns around and tries to peddle merchandise adorned with the Confederate flag (and skulls with Native American headdresses on them) to his Yeezus tour concertgoers. The shirts, designed by artist Wes Lang, are provocative to say the least and counterproductive to any revolutionary message Kanye would hope to perpetuate.

     Kanye has yet to explain exactly what he was hoping to accomplish with the use of the flag, but he’s not the first to try to appropriate it in some sort of ironic or subversive manner. In fact, rappers have been wearing Confederate flags in various videos and album covers for years in attempts to somehow change the flag’s original meaning, transforming it into something that goes against its racist symbolism.

     There’s been a long-standing debate over the Confederate flag and its place in modern America. To some, the flag symbolizes a rich southern history dating back generations. For these people, the Confederate flag is as much a part of the south as shrimp and grits.

     For others, though, it’s impossible to separate the Confederate flag from a dark history of slavery in America. The Confederacy and its flag also represent a time when half of the country would rather become its own separate country than give up the “right” to own slaves. The Confederate flag is as much a symbol of slavery as it is a symbol of southern culture. Which is why appropriating it is a seemingly fruitless endeavor.

     In fact, the idea of appropriating racist symbolism is a worthless endeavor generally. For years, rappers have argued that they’re using the n-word to lessen the word’s impact, as if there’s an offensiveness bank that would eventually run dry after enough withdrawals. This attempt to de-power the n-word hasn’t achieved much – I don’t imagine too many people laughing off being called an n-word any time soon.

     It’s probably best to let offensive words and phrases die on their own, as it seems impossible to take away a word’s innate ability to offend if said with the proper confrontational intention. There will never be a time when racist, homophobic, or misogynistic words completely lose their meaning. History is too potent and tangible to be able to overlook.

     So no matter what Kanye West is intending with his shirt, selling the Confederate flag image is in bad taste and ineffective in advancing any sort of faux-activist goal Kanye is attempting to champion. In the end, West is just profiting off of the circulation of one of the most racist symbols in American history.

     Kanye West is pushing the envelope, as he tends to do, with his Yeezus tour – I haven’t even mentioned his use of a guy dressed as Jesus to help him rap his lyrics on stage – but he’s falling again into the trap of inciting controversy and outrage without a true connection to any deeper purpose.

     Using the Confederate flag for shirts trivializes its history and creates yet another morally vapid revenue stream for yet another celebrity. If Kanye West is indeed seeking to lessen the impact of the Confederate flag, he should know that he’ll fail. Certain words and symbols will always hurt, no matter how hard and in what manner we try to change them.

215. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 5:22 am

     Haven’t missed this one yet:
     We are hosting a community meeting on June 25 @ 7pm EDT about our civil rights investigation of the Baltimore Police Dept. 1/4
     Where: University of Baltimore Law School Moot Court Room, 1401 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21202. 2/4
     DOJ reps available to speak privately with anyone wishing to provide info about their experiences with Baltimore Police Dept. 3/4
     If you cannot be at this meeting, you can contact us at: Community.Baltimore[at]usdoj.gov or 1-844-401-3733. 4/4

     #JusticeforNick #BlackLivesMatter #NicholasThomas

     First known use of race-baiting was 1923, according to OED. Race-baiting was historically used to label white racism.

216. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 5:42 am

     Eight South Carolina Lawmakers Explain Why They Are Opposed To Removing The Confederate Flag

     The racially motivated shooting that killed nine in Charleston last week has sparked a national debate about the presence of the Confederate flag, which symbolizes racism and hatred to many, at the Capitol grounds. On Monday, Republican Gov. Nikki Haley called for the removal of the flag. She said it was time for the flag to be taken down and put in a museum, and that South Carolinians were welcome to display it on their private property.

     Only a simple majority vote is needed to remove the flag, contrary to what many media outlets have reported. On Tuesday, Charleston newspaper The Post & Courier asked lawmakers what they think about the Confederate flag. Many said they would vote to remove it and some wouldn’t answer or were undecided, but eight House representatives said they were sure they would vote no. Here’s a closer look at those eight.

     Rep. Mike Burns (R-Greenville)
     Burns, a South Carolina native, said the flag shouldn’t be taken down because people view it as a way to honor their heritage and their ancestors who fought in the Civil War.

     Rep. Bill Chumley (R-Greenville, Spartanburg)
     A member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Chumley said the issue of the flag didn’t need to be discussed further, as it was decided in a 2000 compromise to move the flag from the Statehouse dome to the Capitol grounds. “This needs to go no further,” he told the Post. “It has been settled already. A compromise is a compromise.”

     Christopher Corley (R-Aiken)
     The 35-year-old former attorney made his opinion on the flag clear. “I’m for leaving it where it is — absolutely,” he said. “If I have to put 500 amendments on this thing to keep it there, then I will do it. This is a non-issue that’s being made an issue by certain groups trying to take advantage of a terrible situation.”

     Craig A. Gagnon (R-Abbeville, Anderson)
     Gagnon, a Massachusetts-born former chiropractor, told the Post he sees no reason to take the flag down. “I don’t think the flag at the monument at the Statehouse was a part of the reason for doing these heinous murders,” he said.

     Mike Gambrell (R-Abbeville, Anderson)
     This former fire department chief, along with other representatives from his county, said it was not an appropriate time to debate the issue of the flag. They told the Anderson Independent Mail that discussions about the Confederate flag should wait until after funerals for the nine victims are held.

     “There is a time and place for that decision,” he said. “I don’t think it is right now.” Gambrell is the chairman of the county’s legislative delegation.

     Jonathon D. Hill (R-Anderson)
     Hill told the Independent Mail he will oppose any effort to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds and added that he was “pretty disappointed” with the governor’s “misguided attempt to combat racism.”

     “You defeat it with love,” Hill said. “You don’t defeat it with politics.”

     Michael A. Pitts (R-Greenwood, Laurens)
     When asked about the Confederate flag on the day after shooting, Pitts said, “I think it’ll bring up talk about possibly moving it because that talk is just below the surface forever. But I don’t see that this incident has any bearing on the flag or the flag has any bearing on the incident. This kid had drug issues and mental issues and I think that’s the root of the problem. Racism exists no matter whether you try to use the flag as a symbol for that or not.”

     Mike Ryhal (R-Horry)
     Former businessman Ryhal has spoken a few times about his belief that the flag is “no problem.” “I don’t think it should be removed,” he told the Post. “It is a part of the South Carolina history. It is on the grounds. I think it’s fine where it’s at.” He also said removing the flag “wouldn’t change the way people feel about race.”

     “We have numerous monuments all over the Statehouse grounds reflecting the history of South Carolina and I see that flag as a piece of our history,” he said to the Myrtle Beach Sun-News.
     “The fact is it’s part of the history of the South. There’s no problem with having it out there.”

     Funny, they’re all white. And they’re all Republicans.

     Poll: Senate within striking distance of majority supporting Confederate flag removal – so those eight are in the minority? Yay!

     The Legislature’s 61 Democrats adopted a unified front in support of taking the flag down. A number of Republicans signed on, as well, including Charleston Sen. Paul Thurmond, son of legendary Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond.

     Republican Sen. Katrina Shealy of Lexington said Tuesday she has come out in favor of removing the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds after praying on the matter. She joined fellow GOP representatives Chip Limehouse of Charleston and Robert Ridgeway of Manning in leaving the undecided camp and pledging their support for taking the flag down.

     Still, 44 lawmakers continue to duck questions from The Post and Courier as to where they stand on the issue. […]

     Starting at about 9 a.m. Monday, a team of Post and Courier reporters reached out to all House and Senate members in an attempt to determine how much support existed for removing the flag.

     By 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, 87 House members and 37 senators had weighed in on the issue, with a majority of those surveyed indicating their support for taking the flag down.

     In the House, about 73 percent of those surveyed were in favor of the move, compared with 9 percent opposing it. The remainder were undecided or wouldn’t state a position.

     Twenty-nine senators supported the flag’s removal, while eight others indicated they were undecided or wouldn’t say how they felt. Two senators have indicated opposition to removing the flag.

     The Post and Courier plans to continue calling, emailing and tweeting to those folks in attempt to pin down their positions on the matter.

     The article includes comments from some of the senators on their reasoning.

     Miss. police: Open carry laws kept us from arresting shotgun-toting man who terrorized Walmart shoppers –

     The police chief of Gulfport, Mississippi, expressed his frustration with his state’s open carry laws after a man strolling through a Walmart Sunday night menaced shoppers by loading and racking shells into his shotgun, causing police to dispatch a SWAT team and evacuate the store.

     According to Police Chief Leonard Papania, he would have arrested the unidentified man and his companion if he could for stretching the city’s police forces thin while panicked Walmart employees huddled in a safe room, WMC reported.
     ADVERTISEMENT

     “If I were in a situation where I’m in the store shopping with my family and I see an individual loading a 12 gauge, and racking it, I’m not coming to the conclusion this is good,” said Papania. “While the actions of these two men are sanctioned by state laws, what they did negatively impacted our community.”

     According to police they received multiple calls about the men who had possibly done the same thing at a local Winn-Dixie, forcing police to divert officers to the Walmart to form a perimeter as the SWAT entered and searched the store. By the time police had arrived, the two men had left.

     Using surveillance video police were able to track the men down and speak with them, but due to Mississippi’s open carry laws, the chief said his hands were tied after conferring with city attorneys.

     CAN WE HAVE A BIG ROUND OF APPLAUSE FOR CRIMING WHILE WHITE? #CrimingWhileWhite
     At least, that’s what I’m betting on because (a) no photos at the link, (b) no mention of race and (c) EVERYONE IS ALIVE and free.

     Here’s Kalief Browder’s Heartbreaking Research Paper On Solitary Confinement. Kalief Browder, who spent 3 years at Rikers accused of stealing a backpack and recently committed suicide.

     Bronx Community College was proud of Kalief Browder.

     At the end of the 2014-15 school year, the 22-year-old had an impressive 3.55 grade point average. He led study groups. He tutored other students. And on June 5 — just one day before Browder died by suicide in his mother’s Bronx home — he volunteered at a graduation rehearsal for other students.

     “He was so happy,” Elizabeth Payamps, a Bronx Community College faculty member who worked closely with Browder, remembers of his last day at the school. “He was acting completely normal.”

     Years earlier, Browder had been robbed of an education. When he was just 16, he was arrested on a burglary charge that would ultimately be dismissed. While his high school classmates went to prom and graduation, Browder languished for three years in New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail.

     There, he suffered appalling violence at the hands of guards and fellow inmates, and spent an accumulated and torturous two years in solitary confinement — where the teen was locked alone in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day.

     Browder reflected on the use of solitary confinement in the United States in a research paper for his community college English class this spring.

     “Instead of solitary confinement rehabilitating inmates there is evidence of it actually causing severe mental problems for inmates and in the long run leaving the mental disorders for their families to deal with,” Browder writes in the paper, a copy of which was obtained by The Huffington Post.

     Browder, of course, knew firsthand the horrific mental health consequences of solitary confinement. After being released from Rikers, he struggled to adjust to the outside world. He suffered deep bouts of depression, became increasingly paranoid, spent time in a psychiatric hospital, and made multiple attempts to end his own life.

     “Ma, I can’t take it anymore,” Browder reportedly told his mother shortly before his death. According to his family, it was the demons Browder developed while in solitary confinement that would eventually lead to his suicide.

     But in his paper, “A Closer Look At Solitary Confinement In The United States,” which he turned in to his professor on May 11, Browder makes no mention of this personal anguish. Like any good academic, he keeps to the third person.

     Citing a study from University of Toronto professor Brett Story, Browder’s paper traces the history of solitary confinement in America to the early 19th century, when the Quaker church in Philadelphia implemented it as a means of rehabilitating inmates instead of punishing them.

     The practice was meant, Browder writes, as a way for inmates to “reflect on the misbehaviors they conducted in the jail or prison and change their behavior.”

     Solitary confinement then spread throughout American prisons. “However,” Browder adds, “many health defects were beginning to present themselves within inmates. According to Story, ‘As early as the 1830s, reports had started to materialize about the various mental disorders isolated prisoners were exhibiting. These included hallucinations, dementia, and monomania.'”

     “By the late 1800’s,” Browder continues, “solitary confinement began to be frowned upon because of the adverse mental health issues it continued to cause to inmates and by the early 1900’s it was abolished.”

     Browder’s attorney, Paul Prestia, read a copy of the research paper before going to Browder’s funeral, at which he delivered the eulogy.

     “I learned something from [the research paper] and I’m an expert of sorts on solitary confinement,” Prestia told HuffPost.

     “I don’t believe there’s any place for solitary in our society,” he added. “It’s inhumane and I wasn’t aware of its history, and now I am, and I learned it from Kalief Browder, who was the face of [solitary confinement] in this city.”

     More at the link, including a link to the entire research paper.

     #‎CharlestonSyllabus‬ is your new reading list for race relations in America

     Last Friday, like the rest of us, historian Keisha Blain was scrolling through her social feeds, watching the renewed “national conversation” on race and hate crimes play out in real time, following the tragic shooting of nine black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

     There was one post out of all of them that caught her eye. Chad Williams, associate professor and chair of the African and Afro-American Studies Department at Brandeis University, tweeted the following:

     That tweet turned out to be the beginning of a new intellectual resource for race relations in America—a crowdsourced guide to dispelling racial ignorance, if you will.

     “I liked it, and I quickly responded and said, ‘Great idea, we really should do this,’” Blain told Fusion about Williams’ tweet in an interview. The two exchanged emails a few minutes after the tweet was posted, and they quickly decided that even though he was just venting, compiling a list of resources for people to read to properly contextualize the Charleston shooting would indeed be a great idea. By then, others had already started responding to the original tweet, using the hashtag to make reading suggestions.

     Since she blogs for the African American Intellectual History Society, Blain decided to start compiling the suggested readings on its website, under the title #CharlestonSyllabus. “I started making the list, and as I started making it, I would say about an hour passed, and I looked up to the Twitter feed, and I see about 500 new tweets, and at that moment I realized this wouldn’t be just a list of maybe a hundred sources,” she said. Over 10,000 tweets have been posted under the hashtag over the last week, according to Topsy, a social media analytics website.

     “This was going to be something much, much bigger, and more definitive than I originally could have imagined,” Blain said.

     Thanks to the input of historians, librarians and activists from across the country, the effort has pulled together definitive reads on pressing topics, ranging from “Readings on Slavery in the U.S. South” to historically significant poems, explainers on the racist history of the Confederate flag and “Readings on White Racial Identity.”

     Most of the works has been linked to an entry on World Cat, a resource that shows the nearest library where the you can pick up a copy, free of charge. For instance, if you click on The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, a 2014 book by Edward E. Baptiste which I selected completely at random, you get this screen:

     And since I’m in Miami as I write this, it shows the nearest library that has copies available. In ten minutes time, if I drove down the street to my alma mater, I could be reading through it at the school library:

     “I literally spent all day Saturday taking all the suggestions, organizing them, and adding links to World Cat to allow people to access them easily,” Blain said. “It just happened like that, it grew exponentially.”

     It’s too early to get into details, but Blain said she has purchased the domain CharlestonSyllabus.com. “In the coming weeks we’re going to start looking at the website at a way to further organize and to keep a dialogue with the community, beyond just the text themselves,” she said.

     “What we see here is an opportunity to connect with people who are committed to social justice, and who are committed to activism in a terrible, pressing time like this, and help them fill in their knowledge gaps,” she said.

     “#Charlestonsyllabus is more than a list,” writes Williams, founder of the concept of the syllabus, on the main website. “It is a community of people committed to critical thinking, truth telling and social transformation.”

     What an awesome resource. There was a #FergusonSyllabus, too – maybe there should be a #SyllabusSyllabus eventually!

     Nas Pens Open Letter About Race & War In America

     Recently we’ve seen a few rappers, some political-minded and some not, speak out in the wake of the tragic Charleston shooting. Lupe Fiasco and Killer Mike shared their thoughts and broached the topic of racism. Kanye West did similarly during his freestyle at the Atlanta Birthday Bash event. Late last night Nas got a few things off his chest, and while not directly tied to the events in Charleston, it was likely influenced by it.

     Taking to his Instagram page, Nas wrote about race and war in America, and how America has put its focus on wars abroad, neglecting those of their very own cities. He also broadens the discussion from simply Black versus White. Read his full post below.

     America has spent so much time, money & resources fighting wars abroad and completely fell asleep at the wheel of the war brewing within our cities, neighborhoods & blocks. We are supposed to stand for freedom & equal opportunity. That’s supposed to mean MORE than just words but the actions of late just don’t speak to what we are supposed to stand for. This is BIGGER than BLACK and WHITE. This is about America selling a false dream. Now we’ve obviously progressed since the inception of this nation but we took our eye off the ball and it feels as though things are moving backwards. As a black man, I find it difficult to understand that our biggest export (our American culture) comes from us. The people in the streets… The way the world dresses, talks, what they listen to, what they watch… That all comes from us. How can we be the ones responsible for America’s biggest export & fear for our lives like we shouldn’t belong here. I don’t have all the answers nor do I believe anyone does, but we need to have conversations around how to improve as a nation. How do we show any ounce of progress that keeps hope alive. This is too big of a problem to be solved overnight but there needs to be some questions answered to get things back on the track of righteousness. Amazing people died for this country. We owe it to the past, present & future to come together and move this country in the right direction. This is my home just like it is anyone else’s. RIP CRISPUS ATTUCKS. FIRST MAN TO DIE IN AMERICA’s FREEDOM WAR & HE WAS BLACK! GOD BLESS EVERY OUNCE OF INNOCENT BLOOD SHED FOR THIS NATION & MY FAMILY.

     I had to look up Crispus Attucks. I encourage everyone else to do the same.

217. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 5:52 am

     Black churches taught us to forgive white people. We learned to shame ourselves.

     “These white folks, they think the world belongs to them,” Grandma told me 12 hours after Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Depyane Middleton Doctor, Daniel Simmons and Myra Thompson were murdered in a black Charleston church by a cowardly white American thug. “White folks been misusing us since I been in this world, if you wanna know the truth, Kie. If you expect any thing more after all they done, you the world’s biggest fool.”

     I am one of the world’s biggest fools. I am also a fat black boy raised by a village of fat black women practiced in surviving, forgetting and forgiving the raced and gendered violence of holy American rooms. One of these fat black women – my grandma – taught me how to outlast southern white folks, how to serve, pray, read, write, cuss, listen, laugh and how to properly fear and praise Jesus Christ.

     When I was a child, Grandma and I spent hours in Concord Baptist Church in Forest, Mississippi, at revival, in Home Mission and in Sunday school, hoping that we’d learn to walk with Jesus and protect our insides from what white folks had done, were doing and would do. But in far way more ways than either of us want to admit, in our healing spaces in Concord – the place where we were taught to love, honor and remember humungous parts of ourselves – we were also taught to become the world’s biggest fools to and for white folks and white supremacy.

     We members of Concord were supposed to love white folks because they knew not what they did. We were supposed to heal them because they knew not who they were. We were supposed to forgive them because salvation awaited she or he who could withstand the wrath of the worst of white folks. We were supposed to pray for them, often at the expense of our own healthy reckoning.

     Grandma and her church taught me that loving white folks in spite of their investment in our terror was our only chance of not becoming them morally.

     As a child, I wasn’t sure I could question Grandma’s God, or the white picture of Jesus hanging in Concord, but I knew I could question Grandma’s Bible. Grandma never shut my questions down. She’d ask me to read verse after verse, and fill college-lined notebooks with all the biblical questions that fit. By 12, I knew my Bible like I knew every episode of Good Times.

     Still, I hated actually going to church. My slacks were too tight on my thighs. My shirt choked my esophagus. My clip-on tie looked like a clip on tie. No matter the temperature, Grandma made me wear a polyester vest. My feet grew so fast that my penny loafers never fit. Plus, she stopped me from putting dimes or nickels in my penny loafers because was something only mannish boys did.

     I was 12-years-old. All I wanted to be was mannish.

     Inside Concord Baptist church, I loved the attention I got for being a fat black boy from the older women: they were the only women on earth who called my fatness “fineness”. I felt flirted with and, like most fat black boys, when flirted with, I fell in love. I loved the organs bended notes, the aftertaste of the grape juice, the fans steadily moving through the humidity, the anticipation of somebody catching the Holy Ghost, the unsure lawd-have-mercy claps after the little big head boy who couldn’t read so well was forced to read a greeting to the congregation.

     But as much as I loved parts of church, and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t love the holy word coming from the pulpit. The voices carrying the word were gaspy, slick, directed and sure of themselves in ways I didn’t believe. There were no black men in my immediate family and the word at Concord was always carried by the mouths of Reverend Weathersby, deacons or other visiting preachers who acted like they knew my Grandma and me better than they did.

     The village of black women who raised me conjured words like yesterday’s magic, and those black women, like the other black women in the church, made up the majority of the audience. But their voices and words were only heard during songs, in ad libbed responses to the preacher’s word and during church announcements. While Grandma and everyone else amen’d and well’d their way through shiny hollow sermons, I just sat there, usually at the end of the pew, sucking my teeth, feeling super hot, super bored, and really resentful because Grandma and her friends never told the long-winded sorry preachers to shut up and sit down.

     My problem with church was that I knew what could have been. Every other Wednesday – and Grandma took me with her most of the time – the older women of the church had something called Home Mission: they would meet at alternate houses, and bring food, their Bibles, notebooks and their testimonies. There was no set music at Home Mission, but those women, Grandma’s friends, used their lives and their Bibles as primary texts to boast, confess and critique their way into tearful song every single time. They revealed the partial truths of their lives, connected those partial truths to everyone in that room, wandered in some of the closets of those partial truths, and wondered if those partial truths held for women not in the room. They made space for everyone listening to share.

     Long before I wanted to write like Morrison, Baldwin or Andre 3000, I wanted to write like the women in Home Mission spoke to each other. Their word was black love.

     Sometimes, Kie, at five in the morning, we had to go to white folks’ house and wash they clothes outside, no matter how hot or cold it was. Sometimes they might pay in you in some change. Most of the time, they pay you in a little cornmeal. Anyway, we sometimes would be behind they great big houses washing they clothes in the tub out there, and hanging them up before school. And the little white children who was no older than us would be in the house pointing and laughing.

     Grandma paused and I heard the beginnings of unspoken words pushing against the back of her throat. “We would walk to school after doing all that work, and every single day, a school bus of white folks would pass us and some of them same kids who was laughing at us in they backyards would be on that bus pointing and laughing at us because we dressed like we just got done working, and because we was walking to school instead of driving.”

     I asked Grandma if she wished she could be on that bus too.

     “Naw,” she said. “That’s what breaks my heart. The truth is that we ain’t never even thought being on that white folks’ bus, or not cutting that cane, or not picking that cotton, or not washing them white folks’ clothes. We knew that was the kind of work niggers had to do. Our thing was that we knew that the white folks didn’t need to be laughing at us for trying.”

     Trying what, I asked her.

     “Well, trying to make it to tomorrow with food in our belly, and clothes on our back. Shit, trying to not hit them upside they head. That’s when I knew something wasn’t right with the insides of them folks. How you got damn near every man-made thing we wish we had, and you laughing at us for trying to get less than a thin slice of what you got? It makes me sick,” Grandma said.

     “And let me tell you one more thing about these folks. Sometimes, we do the same work for them on Sunday mornings,” she said. “And instead of driving by and laughing while we walking home so we could put on some church clothes, the white folks would drive right by us, slow down, say hello, and keep driving while the kids in the back steady laughing.”

     Laughing at what, I asked her.

     That’s what I’m saying. You supposed to be on your way to church. What you laughing at? Church don’t mean nothing to these folks, Kie. Nobody in they cars, or on they buses told them to stop laughing. Do you hear me? They love to watch the devil. If church meant something to them, they would have made them stop laughing. They would have paid us right. They wouldn’t be throwing us off in jail for doing the same thing they do. The education would be different, too. That boy over in Charleston, he wouldn’t walk up in no church and killed those folks either if they believed in church. They just wouldn’t treat us like they do. Why they ain’t blaming that boy’s parents? Or his community? If you shot up one of they churches, those white folks woulda killed you as soon as they found you. And every nigger in America, at least the ones who got some sense, would be ashamed. These folks ain’t never ashamed of themselves, Kie. Hard to be ’shamed when you think you own the world. It makes me sick.

     I’d never heard my Grandma talk like that. I asked her why she made us spend so much time in church, why she was so kind to white folks, if she really felt this way.

     “Well, I try to take it to God,” she said.

     And what does God say, I asked her.

     “God says you must forgive them for they know not what they do. Shit. Maybe God says something else. I haven’t been to church since I they got my foot in this boot. It’s hard for me to get to church and feel good about myself now that I’m this wheelchair. I like to look good in church, you know. So I just sit up under this TV, watching the news and eating whatever ain’t nailed down.”

     We both laughed.

     Grandma grabbed an apricot off the counter and did something she’d only done three other times in my life: she asked me what I thought about what she is saying.

     “Am I making sense to you?”

     I told her that loving white supremacists in the face of white supremacy is a hallmark of American evil, and a really a fundamental part of the black American experience in this country.

     It’s what we’re supposed to do, I said.

     Many of us have made a life of hoping to get chosen for jobs, chosen for awards, chosen for acceptance from people, structures and corporations bred on white supremacy. We’re hoping to get chosen by people who can not see us. Knowing that they hate and terrorize us doesn’t stop us from wanting to get chosen. That’s the crazy thing. Everything about this country told Grandma, a black woman born in Central Mississippi in 1920s, to love, honor and forgive white folks. And this country still tells me, a black boy born in Mississippi in the 1970s, to titillate and tend to the emotional, psychological and spiritual needs of white people in my work.

     I told my Grandma that we should have chosen ourselves. I tell her that we should have let us in. We should have held each other, and fallen in healthy love with each other, instead of watching shame make parts of us disappear.

     What do we make of the shameful work of being chosen? Our family eats that shame, quite literally. Other families drink the shame. All the work that we put into forgiving white supremacy, white power and white people, and then hoping to be chosen by those people, should have gone into talking about – and collectively reckoning with – our familial experiences with sexual violence, food, and trauma.

     Shame strangles, I told Grandma; truth sets free. But what does any truth set free look like? I know that I don’t know.

     What I do know is that love reckons with the past and evil reminds us to look to the future. Evil loves tomorrow because peddling in possibility is what abusers do. At my worst, I know that I’ve wanted the people that I’ve hurt to look forward, imagining all that I can be and forgetting the contours of who I have been to them.

     Like good Americans, I told Grandma, we will remember to drink ourselves drunk on the antiquated poison of progress. We will long for “shall’s” and “will be’s” and “hopes” for tomorrow. We will heavy-handedly help in our own deception and moral obliteration. We will forget how much easier it is to talk about gun control, mental illness and riots than it is to talk about the moral and material consequences of manufactured white American innocence.

     We will lament the numbers of folks killed in mass murders in the United States. There’s a number for that. We will talk about the numbers of people killed in black-on-black murder. There’s a number for that. We will never talk about the number of unemployed and underemployed hard-working black folks living in poverty. We will never talk about the numbers of black folk in prison for the kinds of nonviolent drug-related offenses my white students commit every weekend. We will never talk about the number of human beings killed by young American military men and women draped in camouflage, or the number of human beings murdered by drones across the world. We will never talk about the specific amount of money this country really owes Grandma and her friends for their decades of unpaid labor. We will never talk about the moral and monetary debt accrued by the architects of this Empire. There are shameful numbers for all of that, too.

     I know that President Obama knows all those numbers.

     I know those number keeps him up at night. I also know that President Obama wakes up every morning afraid of what white people, white power, white supremacy will do to him and his family, and what they have done to this country.

     He knows how he has encouraged it. In this twisted way, we all know.

     Tomorrow, President Obama will smile and sit down with white people, white power and white supremacy. I know that, like most of us, he will let them in again and again because was elected to have faith in tomorrow. He was elected to have faith in tomorrow. And even after he is no longer president, he will still want to be chosen as someone who represents a better tomorrow for people who hate him.

     I wonder sometimes what he does with his pain and his shame.

     A day after Charleston, I asked my Grandma directly about her experience with using food to cope with the aftermath of sexual violence in our family. She asked me to wheel her around to the side of the house. Pushing the wheelchair, I realized that Grandma was heavier and shorter than I remember: she has gone from 5’9” to 5’4” [1.75m to 1.62m], from 188 pounds to 284 [85kg to 129kg].

     I kneeled down. “Grandma, I’m still recording this,” I told her. “Can we talk about another kind of violence?”

     Grandma let go of my hand and rubbed the sides of her head. “Baby, I can’t hear this right now,” she said. “We remembered enough for today. I just can’t. I’m sorry for not protecting you better. I don’t even know what to do with the shame.”

     I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing.

     Instead, my grandma and I held each other like our lives depended on it. We held each other because we are afraid of what happened at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, afraid of the familiar thug who murdered us, afraid of the thugs who watched. We know those thugs sadly better than we know ourselves. Those people are cowards with blood in their eyes, absolution in their guts, and the wind at their backs. We have hoped to be chosen by them. We know that they are way closer to us than we let on. We let them in. We hold each other because we are in love. But not even that deep down, we are afraid and ashamed of where and who we’ve been with these people, and we are tragically hopeful that tomorrow our shame won’t weigh so much.

218. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 5:57 am

     Black churches taught us to forgive white people. We learned to shame ourselves.

     “These white folks, they think the world belongs to them,” Grandma told me 12 hours after Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Depyane Middleton Doctor, Daniel Simmons and Myra Thompson were murdered in a black Charleston church by a cowardly white American thug. “White folks been misusing us since I been in this world, if you wanna know the truth, Kie. If you expect any thing more after all they done, you the world’s biggest fool.”

     I am one of the world’s biggest fools. I am also a fat black boy raised by a village of fat black women practiced in surviving, forgetting and forgiving the raced and gendered violence of holy American rooms. One of these fat black women – my grandma – taught me how to outlast southern white folks, how to serve, pray, read, write, cuss, listen, laugh and how to properly fear and praise Jesus Christ.

     When I was a child, Grandma and I spent hours in Concord Baptist Church in Forest, Mississippi, at revival, in Home Mission and in Sunday school, hoping that we’d learn to walk with Jesus and protect our insides from what white folks had done, were doing and would do. But in far way more ways than either of us want to admit, in our healing spaces in Concord – the place where we were taught to love, honor and remember humungous parts of ourselves – we were also taught to become the world’s biggest fools to and for white folks and white supremacy.

     We members of Concord were supposed to love white folks because they knew not what they did. We were supposed to heal them because they knew not who they were. We were supposed to forgive them because salvation awaited she or he who could withstand the wrath of the worst of white folks. We were supposed to pray for them, often at the expense of our own healthy reckoning.

     Grandma and her church taught me that loving white folks in spite of their investment in our terror was our only chance of not becoming them morally.

     As a child, I wasn’t sure I could question Grandma’s God, or the white picture of Jesus hanging in Concord, but I knew I could question Grandma’s Bible. Grandma never shut my questions down. She’d ask me to read verse after verse, and fill college-lined notebooks with all the biblical questions that fit. By 12, I knew my Bible like I knew every episode of Good Times.

     Still, I hated actually going to church. My slacks were too tight on my thighs. My shirt choked my esophagus. My clip-on tie looked like a clip on tie. No matter the temperature, Grandma made me wear a polyester vest. My feet grew so fast that my penny loafers never fit. Plus, she stopped me from putting dimes or nickels in my penny loafers because was something only mannish boys did.

     I was 12-years-old. All I wanted to be was mannish.

     Inside Concord Baptist church, I loved the attention I got for being a fat black boy from the older women: they were the only women on earth who called my fatness “fineness”. I felt flirted with and, like most fat black boys, when flirted with, I fell in love. I loved the organs bended notes, the aftertaste of the grape juice, the fans steadily moving through the humidity, the anticipation of somebody catching the Holy Ghost, the unsure lawd-have-mercy claps after the little big head boy who couldn’t read so well was forced to read a greeting to the congregation.

     But as much as I loved parts of church, and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t love the holy word coming from the pulpit. The voices carrying the word were gaspy, slick, directed and sure of themselves in ways I didn’t believe. There were no black men in my immediate family and the word at Concord was always carried by the mouths of Reverend Weathersby, deacons or other visiting preachers who acted like they knew my Grandma and me better than they did.

     The village of black women who raised me conjured words like yesterday’s magic, and those black women, like the other black women in the church, made up the majority of the audience. But their voices and words were only heard during songs, in ad libbed responses to the preacher’s word and during church announcements. While Grandma and everyone else amen’d and well’d their way through shiny hollow sermons, I just sat there, usually at the end of the pew, sucking my teeth, feeling super hot, super bored, and really resentful because Grandma and her friends never told the long-winded sorry preachers to shut up and sit down.

     My problem with church was that I knew what could have been. Every other Wednesday – and Grandma took me with her most of the time – the older women of the church had something called Home Mission: they would meet at alternate houses, and bring food, their Bibles, notebooks and their testimonies. There was no set music at Home Mission, but those women, Grandma’s friends, used their lives and their Bibles as primary texts to boast, confess and critique their way into tearful song every single time. They revealed the partial truths of their lives, connected those partial truths to everyone in that room, wandered in some of the closets of those partial truths, and wondered if those partial truths held for women not in the room. They made space for everyone listening to share.

     Long before I wanted to write like Morrison, Baldwin or Andre 3000, I wanted to write like the women in Home Mission spoke to each other. Their word was black love.

     Sometimes, Kie, at five in the morning, we had to go to white folks’ house and wash they clothes outside, no matter how hot or cold it was. Sometimes they might pay in you in some change. Most of the time, they pay you in a little cornmeal. Anyway, we sometimes would be behind they great big houses washing they clothes in the tub out there, and hanging them up before school. And the little white children who was no older than us would be in the house pointing and laughing.

     Grandma paused and I heard the beginnings of unspoken words pushing against the back of her throat. “We would walk to school after doing all that work, and every single day, a school bus of white folks would pass us and some of them same kids who was laughing at us in they backyards would be on that bus pointing and laughing at us because we dressed like we just got done working, and because we was walking to school instead of driving.”

     I asked Grandma if she wished she could be on that bus too.

     “Naw,” she said. “That’s what breaks my heart. The truth is that we ain’t never even thought being on that white folks’ bus, or not cutting that cane, or not picking that cotton, or not washing them white folks’ clothes. We knew that was the kind of work n*gg*rs had to do. Our thing was that we knew that the white folks didn’t need to be laughing at us for trying.”

     Trying what, I asked her.

     “Well, trying to make it to tomorrow with food in our belly, and clothes on our back. Shit, trying to not hit them upside they head. That’s when I knew something wasn’t right with the insides of them folks. How you got damn near every man-made thing we wish we had, and you laughing at us for trying to get less than a thin slice of what you got? It makes me sick,” Grandma said.

     “And let me tell you one more thing about these folks. Sometimes, we do the same work for them on Sunday mornings,” she said. “And instead of driving by and laughing while we walking home so we could put on some church clothes, the white folks would drive right by us, slow down, say hello, and keep driving while the kids in the back steady laughing.”

     Laughing at what, I asked her.

     That’s what I’m saying. You supposed to be on your way to church. What you laughing at? Church don’t mean nothing to these folks, Kie. Nobody in they cars, or on they buses told them to stop laughing. Do you hear me? They love to watch the devil. If church meant something to them, they would have made them stop laughing. They would have paid us right. They wouldn’t be throwing us off in jail for doing the same thing they do. The education would be different, too. That boy over in Charleston, he wouldn’t walk up in no church and killed those folks either if they believed in church. They just wouldn’t treat us like they do. Why they ain’t blaming that boy’s parents? Or his community? If you shot up one of they churches, those white folks woulda killed you as soon as they found you. And every n*gg*r in America, at least the ones who got some sense, would be ashamed. These folks ain’t never ashamed of themselves, Kie. Hard to be ’shamed when you think you own the world. It makes me sick.

     I’d never heard my Grandma talk like that. I asked her why she made us spend so much time in church, why she was so kind to white folks, if she really felt this way.

     “Well, I try to take it to God,” she said.

     And what does God say, I asked her.

     “God says you must forgive them for they know not what they do. Shit. Maybe God says something else. I haven’t been to church since I they got my foot in this boot. It’s hard for me to get to church and feel good about myself now that I’m this wheelchair. I like to look good in church, you know. So I just sit up under this TV, watching the news and eating whatever ain’t nailed down.”

     We both laughed.

     Grandma grabbed an apricot off the counter and did something she’d only done three other times in my life: she asked me what I thought about what she is saying.

     “Am I making sense to you?”

     I told her that loving white supremacists in the face of white supremacy is a hallmark of American evil, and a really a fundamental part of the black American experience in this country.

     It’s what we’re supposed to do, I said.

     Many of us have made a life of hoping to get chosen for jobs, chosen for awards, chosen for acceptance from people, structures and corporations bred on white supremacy. We’re hoping to get chosen by people who can not see us. Knowing that they hate and terrorize us doesn’t stop us from wanting to get chosen. That’s the crazy thing. Everything about this country told Grandma, a black woman born in Central Mississippi in 1920s, to love, honor and forgive white folks. And this country still tells me, a black boy born in Mississippi in the 1970s, to titillate and tend to the emotional, psychological and spiritual needs of white people in my work.

     I told my Grandma that we should have chosen ourselves. I tell her that we should have let us in. We should have held each other, and fallen in healthy love with each other, instead of watching shame make parts of us disappear.

     What do we make of the shameful work of being chosen? Our family eats that shame, quite literally. Other families drink the shame. All the work that we put into forgiving white supremacy, white power and white people, and then hoping to be chosen by those people, should have gone into talking about – and collectively reckoning with – our familial experiences with sexual violence, food, and trauma.

     Shame strangles, I told Grandma; truth sets free. But what does any truth set free look like? I know that I don’t know.

     What I do know is that love reckons with the past and evil reminds us to look to the future. Evil loves tomorrow because peddling in possibility is what abusers do. At my worst, I know that I’ve wanted the people that I’ve hurt to look forward, imagining all that I can be and forgetting the contours of who I have been to them.

     Like good Americans, I told Grandma, we will remember to drink ourselves drunk on the antiquated poison of progress. We will long for “shall’s” and “will be’s” and “hopes” for tomorrow. We will heavy-handedly help in our own deception and moral obliteration. We will forget how much easier it is to talk about gun control, mental illness and riots than it is to talk about the moral and material consequences of manufactured white American innocence.

     We will lament the numbers of folks killed in mass murders in the United States. There’s a number for that. We will talk about the numbers of people killed in black-on-black murder. There’s a number for that. We will never talk about the number of unemployed and underemployed hard-working black folks living in poverty. We will never talk about the numbers of black folk in prison for the kinds of nonviolent drug-related offenses my white students commit every weekend. We will never talk about the number of human beings killed by young American military men and women draped in camouflage, or the number of human beings murdered by drones across the world. We will never talk about the specific amount of money this country really owes Grandma and her friends for their decades of unpaid labor. We will never talk about the moral and monetary debt accrued by the architects of this Empire. There are shameful numbers for all of that, too.

     I know that President Obama knows all those numbers.

     I know those number keeps him up at night. I also know that President Obama wakes up every morning afraid of what white people, white power, white supremacy will do to him and his family, and what they have done to this country.

     He knows how he has encouraged it. In this twisted way, we all know.

     Tomorrow, President Obama will smile and sit down with white people, white power and white supremacy. I know that, like most of us, he will let them in again and again because was elected to have faith in tomorrow. He was elected to have faith in tomorrow. And even after he is no longer president, he will still want to be chosen as someone who represents a better tomorrow for people who hate him.

     I wonder sometimes what he does with his pain and his shame.

     A day after Charleston, I asked my Grandma directly about her experience with using food to cope with the aftermath of sexual violence in our family. She asked me to wheel her around to the side of the house. Pushing the wheelchair, I realized that Grandma was heavier and shorter than I remember: she has gone from 5’9” to 5’4” [1.75m to 1.62m], from 188 pounds to 284 [85kg to 129kg].

     I kneeled down. “Grandma, I’m still recording this,” I told her. “Can we talk about another kind of violence?”

     Grandma let go of my hand and rubbed the sides of her head. “Baby, I can’t hear this right now,” she said. “We remembered enough for today. I just can’t. I’m sorry for not protecting you better. I don’t even know what to do with the shame.”

     I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing.

     Instead, my grandma and I held each other like our lives depended on it. We held each other because we are afraid of what happened at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, afraid of the familiar thug who murdered us, afraid of the thugs who watched. We know those thugs sadly better than we know ourselves. Those people are cowards with blood in their eyes, absolution in their guts, and the wind at their backs. We have hoped to be chosen by them. We know that they are way closer to us than we let on. We let them in. We hold each other because we are in love. But not even that deep down, we are afraid and ashamed of where and who we’ve been with these people, and we are tragically hopeful that tomorrow our shame won’t weigh so much.

219. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 6:07 am

     Couple of blockquote fails above, two paragraphs in that article should be double-quoted: The one that starts with “Sometimes, Kie, at five in the morning…” and “That’s what I’m saying. …”

     +++

     take down all #racist statutes, flags, laws. #Ferguson #ICantBreathe #BlackLivesMatter #boycottallraciststates

     Mother of Man Slain by Police Said Calling For Peace Was a Mistake

     For three years, Genevieve Huizar has been peacefully protesting alongside many other families who have lost loved ones to police murder. She has seen no justice and no change. Her son, Manuel Diaz, was shot in the back of the head by Anaheim police officer Nick Bennallack on July 21, 2012.

     Last Saturday, families of people murdered by police gathered at the Long Beach Police Department to speak out and march against police brutality. Genevieve Huizar, mother of Manuel Diaz, spoke at the rally.

     “First of all, I want to give my condolences to every family member here and across America. I don’t know if every one of you have [heard of] this but I want to say it just in case you don’t. There is something on Facebook called Killed by Police. If you don’t have this already on your Facebook, you just like the page Killed by Police. Every time there’s a murder (by police) across America, it’s gonna pop up. Well, let me tell you, they are popping up every single day. Every day across America people are being murdered by police.

     My son, my only son, 25 years old for eight days, four o’clock in the afternoon on Anna Drive in Anaheim, he was talking to his friends at a truck or a car. Police pull up and they point at him. He had been in jail before so when they pointed at him he ran. He had his cell phone in his hand, a black one. We all have black cell phones. The cops said it was a gun. The first shot was to his lower back and as he was falling to his knees the second bullet was to the back of his head. He wasn’t married. He did not have any children. My son Manuel Angel Diaz, in Anaheim, if you look it up, there were ten days of uprising. At that time, I called for peace. I regret it. I regret calling for peace because maybe if there would have been more of an uprising there wouldn’t have had to be Baltimore. There wouldn’t have to be New York. There wouldn’t have to be Atlanta, Georgia. There wouldn’t have to be Long Beach. Too many murders, too many families suffering. Never forget, Never stop fighting. Even in the courts, don’t stop fighting. I don’t care what these lawyers say, keep the fight until the very end. You cannot give up. These lives mean so much. My son means so much and I will see him again. God says.”

     After three years of peaceful protests it is clear to Genevieve Huizar and many others that peaceful protests do not bring change. Nick Bennallack still walks free.

     Activists in Orange County along with Genevieve are planning an event on July 18th, commemorating the three year anniversary since Manuel was murdered by Anaheim police. Follow @LAPeoplesMedia on Twitter or Los Angeles Peoples Media on Facebook for more details.

     Congressional Democrats to introduce new Voting Rights Act fix

     Congressional Democrats are expected to unveil new legislation this week, possibly as soon as Wednesday, that if passed would restore the requirement for federal approval for voting procedure changes in some states, a provision of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court two years ago.

     The legislation, titled “The Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015,” would force any state that has had 15 or more voting rights violations in the last 25 years to be subject to federal preclearance for any change in voting procedure or law.

     That criterion would initially subject 13 states to preclearance: New York, California, Arkansas, Arizona, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, according to a copy of the legislation obtained by the Washington Post. Those states would be able to free themselves of the preclearence provision by going 10 consecutive years without a voting rights violation.

     The bill is the latest in what has been an ongoing effort to restore the preclearence provision of the Voting Rights Act, which required many southern states to have any change to voting laws cleared by federal officials. The Supreme Court, in its 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision, tossed the formula used to determine which states need preclearence, effectively ending the federal government’s role as a monitor to state voting changes until a new formula is approved by Congress. […]

     So, rather than crafting another bill aimed at compromise with the GOP, civil rights groups and top Democrats set out to assemble a proposal that would serve as a comprehensive replacement to the formula struck down by the high court.

     “What we looked at are states that have ongoing histories of discrimination,” said Katherine Culliton-González, senior attorney and director of voter protection for Advancement Project, a civil rights group that was instrumental in crafting the new legislation. “More states will be covered than in the 2014 proposal, and it will include states where we have seen ongoing discrimination since the Shelby decision.”

     Key to any Voting Rights Act fix, however, will be gaining the support of congressional Republicans, who control both the House and the Senate.

     While the compromise bill that failed last year had a Republican co-sponsor, the lawmakers expected to introduce the new legislation this week are all Democrats.

     The Senate version of the bill is expected to be sponsored by Sens. Leahy (Vt.), Dick Durbin (Ill.), Chris Coons, (Del), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.). In the House, the legislation is expected to be introduced by Reps. John Lewis (Ga.), Terri Sewell (Ala.), Judy Chu (Calif.), and Linda Sanchez (Calif.).

     “In this 50th anniversary year, Congress can’t let the few who dispute the reality of voting discrimination stop the majority from doing what it knows is right,” said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, in a statement. “This year, Congress must work together to pass historic voting rights legislation.”

     An interesting idea – earn your lack of federal supervision.

     Dear @NASCAR :: We appreciate you wanting South Carolina to remove their Confederate Flag, but will you ban them from fans at the track?
     Because: NASCAR endorses call for removal of Confederate flag from South Carolina capitol

     NASCAR has released a statement endorsing the call by South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley on Monday for the removal of the Confederate flag from its statehouse in Columbia. The action comes in the wake of the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston that left nine dead.

     South Carolina is the home state of the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway, which is located about two hours north of Charleston.

     NASCAR’s statement:

     As we continue to mourn the tragic loss of life last week in Charleston, we join our nation’s embrace of those impacted. NASCAR supports the position that South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley took on the Confederate flag on Monday. As our industry works collectively to ensure that all fans are welcome at our races, NASCAR will continue our long-standing policy to disallow the use of the Confederate flag symbol in any official NASCAR capacity. While NASCAR recognizes that freedom of expression is an inherent right of all citizens, we will continue to strive for an inclusive environment at our events.

     John Saunders, president of International Speedway Corp., which operates 12 tracks that host NASCAR Sprint Cup races, including Daytona International Speedway, Talladega Superspeedway and Darlington Raceway, issued a statement about the Confederate flag on Tuesday:

     “We join NASCAR in support of South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s position on the Confederate flag. ISC strives to ensure all fans are welcome to enjoy our events and maintains an inclusive environment at our facilities nationwide. ISC will continue our long-standing practice to prohibit the sale of Confederate flag material on our property.”

     Scott Cooper, vice president of communications for Charlotte Motor Speedway, issued a statement on behalf of Speedway Motorsports Inc., which owns eight tracks that host Cup races, including Charlotte, Bristol Motor Speedway and Atlanta Motor Speedway:

     “Our facilities do not fly the Confederate flag nor do we sell flags or souvenirs with the image, and we ask any third-party vendors to remove such items from their inventory on our property. Our thoughts and prayers continue to go out to the families and friends of the Charleston shooting victims, and we will recognize the victims with a moment of silence at our Summer Shootout Series this evening at Charlotte Motor Speedway.”

     In a 2005 interview with “60 Minutes,” NASCAR CEO and Chairman Brian France said of the Confederate flag, “It’s not a flag I look at with anything favorable. That’s for sure.”

     About the presence of the flag at tracks, France said, “These are massive facilities and I can’t tell people what flag to fly,” France said. “A lot of flags fly off property, but they’re in and around the facility.”

     France was asked if he could ban the Confederate flag at his tracks.

     “I think that you get into freedom of speech and all of the rest of it,” France said. “All we can do is get behind the most important flag, the American Flag.”

     The next year, Dale Earnhardt Jr. was the only driver of about 30 asked by Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports who spoke on the record about the Confederate flag.

     “We live in a country where you can speak freely and do as you may,” Earnhardt said. “I don’t know [if] what that flag stands for is the same for me as it is the guy who might have it flying out there.

     “I am not going to agree with everything everybody does all my life. So I don’t have any control over it.”

     In 2012, NASCAR barred pro golfer Bubba Watson from driving his replica of the “General Lee” at Phoenix International Raceway. The car, made famous in the 1980s TV show “The Dukes Of Hazzard,” has the Confederate flag on its roof and is named after Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

     Interesting, this sounds like it is right in character for NASCAR… which, to be honest, I wasn’t expecting.

     Racist flyers outrage neighborhood residents

     Homeowners in a Rockdale County neighborhood are expressing outrage over recruitment flyers dropped on their yards and driveways calling for volunteers to join the Ku Klux Klan.

     “It’s terrible. It upsets me because I don’t look at color.” said resident Cynthia Hospodarsky.

     More than 1o0 flyers, promoting hatred toward black and homosexuals, were distributed in the Cedar Lake Drive area of Rockdale County late Sunday night. Investigators are seeking security camera video in hopes of identifying who dropped the flyers.

     “It’s very disturbing to me personally. We are going to try to identify this individual or individuals to at least see why they did this.” said Rockdale County Sheriff Eric Levitt.

     The sheriff said he is exploring whether those responsible could face misdemeanor charges, including trespassing and littering. He believes the goal was to exploit the shooting massacre in an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina that left nine dead.

     “I don’t think they have a heart if they are using the tragedy in Charleston, South Carolina for any personal gain. Or even if this was a prank, this is nothing to use as a joke,” said Levitt.

     The flyers, stuffed into zip lock bags with a piece of candy, also were left on cars at a shopping center. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights advocacy organization, said similar flyers where left in neighborhoods in other southern states, including Alabama.

     I think it’s a different neighbourhood than the one brought up by Tony waaay upthread. Which means more KKK activity. Or someone ‘joking’. Spooky.

220. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 6:21 am

     McConnell: Remove Statue Of Confederate President From KY Capitol (VIDEO)

     Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on Tuesday that a statue of Jefferson Davis, the Civil War president of the Confederate States, should be removed from the Kentucky state capitol.

     McConnell’s suggestion comes after politicians in other states considered removing the Confederate symbols from state capitol grounds after last week’s mass shooting in Charleston, S.C., which appeared to have been racially motivated.

     “With regard to my own state, we curiously enough have a statue of Jefferson Davis in the capitol in Frankfort,” McConnell said at a Senate news conference. “Davis’ sole connection to Kentucky was he was born there, he subsequently moved to Mississippi. And Kentucky of course did not secede from the union.”

     McConnell took issue with “the appropriateness of continuing to have Jefferson Davis’ statue in a very prominent place in our state capitol.”

     He suggested that perhaps “a better place for that would be the Kentucky History Museum, which is also in the state capital.”

     Kentucky Republican gubernatorial nominee Matt Bevin earlier Tuesday released a statement saying that removing the Davis statue would be “appropriate,” according to Bloomberg Politics.

     Video at the link.

     I am thrilled so many companies are pulling the #ConfederateFlag but am also like “jesus christ a lot of you sold the confederate flag”

     JUST IN: #Charleston City Council unanimously approves ordinance banning protests within 300 feet of #CharlestonShooting victims’ funerals. And while that may seem a pretty blanket statement, it’s more in response to Westboro Baptist’s intentions to picket the funerals of the victims.

     Hillary Clinton, At Black Church Near Ferguson, Says ‘All Lives Matter’

     Hillary Clinton on Tuesday told a crowd at a black church near where the police killing of an unarmed teen propelled the “Black Lives Matter” movement that “all lives matter.”

     During a campaign stop minutes from where a white police officer fatally shot black teenager Michael Brown last summer, Clinton told a mostly African-American crowd at Christ the King United Church of Christ that “America’s struggles with race are far from finished.”

     “We can’t hide from hard truths about race and justice,” she said. “We have to name them, own them, and change them.”

     Clinton, running for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, was criticized last year for not immediately speaking about Brown’s killing. On Tuesday, she addressed racial inequity, the Confederate flag, forgiveness, and last week’s racially motivated massacre at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

     She said her mother, abandoned by her parents and forced to work as a teenager, taught her the importance of “kindness along the way from someone who believed she mattered.

     “All lives matter,” Clinton said.

     The phrase garnered most of Twitter’s attention about her speech, much of it negative.

     Freddie Gray autopsy likely to be hotly debated in criminal cases against officers

     An autopsy that ruled Freddie Gray’s death a homicide is likely to be a controversial piece of evidence in the criminal case against six police officers who are facing a range of charges.

     The state medical examiner’s officer concluded in the autopsy, obtained by The Baltimore Sun, that Gray’s death could not be ruled an accident. The homicide ruling was based on the failure of officers to follow safety protocols. The 25-year-old Baltimore man died in April, a week after suffering a severe spinal cord injury while in police custody.

     Legal analysts said the autopsy could be used by prosecutors to show that officers took Gray on a “rough ride,” in which prisoners are intentionally jostled in the back of transport vans driven erratically, and failed to take steps to ensure his safety and provide medical assistance.

     Defense attorneys, however, could argue that the autopsy depicts a series of errors that could be construed as an accident and that the officers aren’t culpable in Gray’s death, analysts said.

     “I would support a definition of homicide, but I think you would get other medical examiners that would certify this case as an undetermined case or an accident,” said pathology professor Jeffrey M. Jentzen, director of autopsy and forensic services at the University of Michigan Health System.

     Jentzen also noted that more information is needed to understand the officers’ intentions. The autopsy doesn’t discuss motives, and Jentzen said he’d like to understand why officers restrained Gray but didn’t put him in a seatbelt, why they put him on his belly in a “prone” position in the back of the van, and whether they intended to give Gray a “rough ride.”

     Gray’s autopsy could provide important insights into how prosecutors plan to handle the case against the six officers charged in his death, legal analysts said, and some clarity in an incident that has provoked almost as much confusion as it has outrage.

     The 13-page report provides an account of Gray’s 45-minute journey inside the police van on April 12, laying out when he mostly likely suffered the fatal neck injury and the opportunities officers had to intervene.

     Dr. Cyril Wecht, a veteran forensic pathologist, said the report outlines a series of errors that officers made, from leaving him vulnerable in the van by only putting shackles on his legs and hands, to failing to act when it looked like he was hurt.

     “This is unacceptable conduct and behavior for these officers,” Wecht said.

     Ferguson working group recommends big structural changes to municipal courts

     A working group studying how to improve municipal courts in St. Louis is specifically recommending that the state Supreme Court force those courts to consolidate.

     It was one of several recommendations finalized Tuesday by the Ferguson Commission’s working group on municipal courts and governance. Members of the group considered consolidation at the request of Rich McClure, a co-chair of the Ferguson Commission.

     The policy recommendation reads:

     “The Supreme Court of Missouri should take direct jurisdiction of municipal court functions through the associate circuit court, and consolidate them into an appropriate number of municipal courts for the efficient administration of justice.”

     “I think it’s a very big deal, but I think it was the direction we were going in anyway,” said Brendan Roediger, a professor at Saint Louis University School of Law who has been involved in litigation against municipal courts. “Until we have full-time professional courts, it’s going to be really hard to do any of the other creative, innovative things that we’re talking about in terms of community justice.”

     Everyone present at the meeting agreed that consolidation was a worthy goal. But Monica Huddleston, the former mayor of Greendale, was not happy that commission members had interfered in the smaller group’s work.

     “We have been meeting as a working group talking about municipal court reforms,” she said. “There are many municipal court reforms that have been made, not very many of which have either been acknowledged or discussed by the group, and we had all voices at the table at the last meeting where we voted on which recommendations we all thought were reasonable enough.”

     Huddleston said she was particularly concerned that many of the recommendations are now coming across as mandates on the cities when there will be no additional funding for them. The Ferguson Commission’s suggestions will not have the force of law.

     Municipal court and government officials are on the working group, but none was at Tuesday’s meeting. There will be one additional meeting to tackle some of the remaining points of contention.

     More on the details of the project at the link.

221. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 6:37 am

     Two protestors of Michael Brelo verdict plead not guilty to aggravated rioting charges

     Two people pleaded not guilty Tuesday to charges stemming from protests following the acquittal of Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo.

     Jeremy Brustien, 60 of Shaker Heights, and Iris Rozman, 20 from Cleveland, each face one count of aggravated riot.

     According to court records, police were trying to arrest a third person, Julius Omar Bell, when Brustein and Rozman “held onto Bell to block his arrest.” Rozman is also accused of striking a police officer.

     Confederate, Jim Crow tributes go well beyond battle flag

     South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley called for removing the Confederate battle flag that flies in front of her state’s Capitol. But she hasn’t said the Confederate veterans’ monument alongside the flag should go.

     Nor has she called for moving a nearby statue of Benjamin Tillman, an unapologetic white supremacist who served as governor and U.S. senator during the early decades of Jim Crow segregation.

     On Wednesday morning, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley ordered the immediate removal of four flags attached to an 88-foot-tall Confederate monument that stands outside his office at the Capitol. But the monument itself remains.

     Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal says his state will redesign a vanity license plate that features the battle flag. But the Capitol complex where he works is replete with portraits, statues and busts of Confederate figures and subsequent segregationist leaders.

     That’s all part of a complicated reality across the Old Confederacy: State-sponsored tributes to the Southern rebellion go well beyond the familiar star-studded ‘X’ overlaying a field of red. And they aren’t likely to disappear anytime soon, even amid the renewed attention to the battle flag after Dylann Roof, the suspect in the fatal shooting of nine parishioners at a historic black church, is seen in photographs brandishing it as a symbol of hate.

     “It’s a very delicate subject here,” said historian Stan Deaton of the Georgia Historical Society. “Let’s not kid ourselves: So much of it has to do with race. … People will say, ‘It’s our history,’ but really most of it was placed by particular groups … to present a very selective interpretation of what the Confederacy and the (Old) South were.”

     Many statehouse grounds around the region include at least one Confederate monument, along with imposing statues of Southern war heroes. So does Arlington National Cemetery, built on land once owned by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

     Same goes for dozens of courthouses, more than a few in counties named for figures including Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, an early Ku Klux Klan leader. Forrest has a bust at the Tennessee Capitol, though Gov. Bill Haslam endorsed its removal Tuesday.

     Two public high schools near the Alabama Capitol are named for Lee and Davis; both campuses now serve almost exclusively black student bodies. Lee, Davis and other Old South luminaries have their names emblazoned on streets: Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, site of the massacre in Charleston, is on Calhoun Street, named for John C. Calhoun, pre-Civil War slavery defender and secession advocate.

     Several Southern states recognize Lee’s and Davis’ birthdays. In a few, Lee’s is recognized on the same day as the federal holiday honoring slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

     In Kentucky, a border state during the Civil War, a Davis statue stands in the Capitol rotunda, positioned so that the Confederacy’s only president appears to be looking over the shoulder of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th U.S. president whose statue stands in the rotunda’s center.

     Many of the commemorations were established in the early decades of Jim Crow segregation at the behest of groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Sons of Confederate Veterans and their forerunners.

     Confederate heritage leaders say political leaders’ statements this week worry them.

     “First it’s the flags, then the monuments, then the streets’ names, then the holidays. I feel like it’s open season on anything Confederate,” said Kelly Barrow, commander in chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Barrow says his organization shouldn’t be tainted by Roof’s actions and apparent racist philosophy.

     The Sons organization calls the Civil War “the second American revolution.” The United Daughters of the Confederacy states in one of its creeds that “the War Between the States was not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery.”

     Deaton, the Georgia historian, said those views, often reflected in the monuments, are part of how elected officials avoid potential controversies over the displays. He called it “the lost-cause narrative” that obscures the reasons for secession that Southern leaders plainly stated at the time.

     “The monuments are never about slavery. They’re never about treason,” Deaton said. “They’re always about noble virtues like honor and valor. They didn’t have a problem acknowledging the reasons for the war in 1861. Their descendants have a problem with it today.”

     As Tony posted above, and as I did several comments before that, every state of the confederacy mentioned slavery as one of the primary reasons, if not the primary reason, for seceding. There’s no use in denying it, the words have been passed down and can still be read today. This is the beauty of language.

     .@HillaryClinton’s STL speech had some strong, important statements on race, overshadowed by the ill-fated use of “all lives matter.”

     5 other things we learned from the Freddie Gray autopsy

     An autopsy obtained by The Baltimore Sun Tuesday revealed that Freddie Gray’s death was caused by a single “high-energy” injury — like those seen in shallow-water diving incidents — most likely when the police van in which he was riding suddenly decelerated, according to the medical examiner.

     It also contained some other details that provide some insight into Gray’s death on the morning of April 19 at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center:

     – Gray’s cause of death is listed as a “neck injury, homicide.”
     – The circumstances that led to his injury — which were the subject of separate investigations by Baltimore police and the state’s attorney’s office — were determined to be that Gray was an “unbelted occupant of a police transport van.”
     – Gray was pronounced dead at 5:59 a.m. on April 19, and the medical examiner was notified at 8:18 a.m.
     – The autopsy was performed at 9 a.m. the following day, Monday, April 20.
     – Gray’s listed address is not in Gilmor Homes, where he was arrested, but the 2400 block of Callow St., in Reservoir Hill.

     Beautiful. “White supremacy kills. We will defend ourselves.” On Adam Clayton Powell memorial at #StandWithCharleston. Beautiful photo, too.

     Meet The 63rd Black Woman In American History With A Physics Ph.D.

     Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a 32-year-old theoretical astrophysicist. Her academic home is arguably the nation’s most elite physics department, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

     In one sense, she is among a dying breed. Prescod-Weinstein is a pen-and-paper theorist. “Basically I do calculus all day, on paper,” she told HuffPost. “I’m a little bit of a hold-out. There are things I could be doing by computer that I just like to do by hand.”

     But she is also part of a vanguard, a small but growing number of African-American women with doctorates in physics.

     Just 83 Black women have received a Ph.D. in physics-related fields in American history, according to a database maintained by physicists Dr. Jami Valentine and Jessica Tucker that was updated last week.

     By comparison, the physics programs at MIT and UC Berkeley alone grant nearly as many Ph.D.’s each year. In total, U.S. universities awarded over 1,700 physics Ph.D.’s in 2013. The number of African-American faculty at U.S. physics departments remains similarly low; only two percent are Black, according to a report issued last year by the American Institute of Physics, and half of those faculty members are employed by historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). […]

     Prescod-Weinstein recounts teaching herself calculus and physics when her high school ran out of classes at her level; she grew up reading the New York Times each morning on the school bus, and spent a year carrying around the complete works of William Shakespeare. She identifies as queer/agender, and has written about the collapse of her first marriage “under the pressure of many things, including my wife’s family’s homophobia.”

     Prescod-Weinstein’s parents were both political activists, and she has followed their path. Most of her public social media posts focus on social justice, in the world of science and beyond. She has highlighted the professional challenges of investing her time in activism:

     For my part, as a Black woman, I would ask my white (and male) peers to remember that many of us (though not all) experience our differences as a negative in this environment. Where I see it as a Black cultural tradition to lend a helping hand even as I continue to achieve my own dreams, others see my commitment to [the National Society of Black Physicists] as a signal that I am wasting my time not doing science. Do my friends who play music in their spare time get this same signal? Moreover, many of us who are women or people of color or both are often involved in efforts to change the face of science. When we are challenged about that by our peers, not only are they standing in our way, but they are also failing to recognize that for many of us, this investment in the community is necessary to our survival, much like someone else might say playing music is for theirs.

     §

     We spoke to Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein for Sophia, a HuffPost project to collect life lessons from fascinating people. She shared insights about her early life and influences, the challenges faced by marginalized communities in science, how she finds personal fulfillment and what she’d do differently if she had the chance.

     Interview at the link.

222. Pteryxx says

     25 June 2015 at 7:50 am

     Lots of valuable material on science as a field in Dr. Prescod-Weinstein’s interview. Those of us who work and teach in science should listen. She gave one of the best interviews by a scientist that I have ever heard. (That link again)

     [Interviewer]: I want to ask about your experience in higher education. You’ve studied and researched at a variety of schools. Looking back, would you have handled your own education differently in any way?

     My husband likes to ask me this question periodically. [Laughter] I think because I have a tendency to be very critical of how higher education is delivered, particularly in STEM, and particularly to people from marginalized communities. This is something that I think about a lot. I think if I had to go back in time, I would maybe have younger Chanda apply to some HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities).

     In particular, Spelman does a phenomenal job producing Black women who go on to Ph.D.’s in STEM. They’re not given a lot of credit for that. They don’t get awards for it. You don’t hear President Obama coming and giving commencement speeches and thanking them for their service to the country—which it really is a service they provide—but they’re one of the top three producers of Blacks who go on to Ph.D.’s in STEM.

     Going to an HBCU can be a different experience for Black students. What I’ve read is that Black students come out of HBCUs with higher levels of self-confidence than ones who go to predominately white institutions. So when I’m talking to Black high school students who are interested in going on to do STEM, that is something that I tell them about, that there are some significant advantages to going to HBCUs. I believe one third of the physics majors in the United States who are Black are produced by HBCUs. That’s actually fairly recent, it used to be over half of them were. That’s actually a change that’s just happened in the last 10 years.

     […]

     I have two degrees in physics and two degrees in astronomy. There’s a lot of discussion about women in astronomy. For decades, this discussion about women in astronomy has centered essentially on white women. They don’t say white women, but when the statistics are trotted out, they don’t disaggregate for race. The trends for underrepresented minority women, Asian-American women, and white women are different. Because white women are a much larger number, they dominate overall trends for the word “women”.

     I have struggled to get people within the astronomy community to understand that. It has involved some really ugly discussions sometimes. I remember when I was planning with a delegation of women in astronomy to go to the White House to talk to Tina Tchen, who at that point was the head of the White House Council on Women and Girls. I said, “We should really make a point of saying something about the experiences of women of color and people who live in the double binds. A white woman who is a well-known advocate for women in astronomy turn to me and said, “I know that that stuff is really important to you, but we need to focus on things that matter to everybody else.”

     Now, this is someone who’s known for being supportive in the community. Another example was: I’m trying to get people who do collect the data—like the American Institute of Physics, they have a statistics team—and we wanted to talk about the importance on surveys of women about asking about their race. In one conversation, an advisor who was a scientist at one of the top five institutions in the country, she said, “Well, I don’t really see what my race has to do with anything.”

     It was like, “Of course you don’t, which is kind of the point.” We need to ask about race because there are lots of women who do feel that way about it. So, it’s very hard to have people regularly and repeatedly remind you that your experiences are invisible, that they don’t matter, that nobody has noticed in any serious way until recently when diversity has become kind of en vogue, that there are no Black women—like anywhere. We’re a rarity and that also means that we’re incredibly precious, in my opinion.

     The United States, the federal government, has spent an extraordinary sum of money educating me. The Pell Grant, I was an NSF research fellow, which is prestigious and expensive. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on me and I am a rarity. I’m the only Black woman in theoretical physics.

     I say this about me because I can talk about it for myself. But it applies to every single Black woman who gets her foot into the door and gets that far—gets a master’s degree, gets a Ph.D. Part of what I wanted to say to people with that tweet is: Each of us is special right now. We are barrier breakers, and I do think that the community has a responsibility to promote our success in a very particular way because it is hard to produce one of us.

     […]

     I don’t think that because I have a Ph.D., I’m in some upper echelon of society. I actually have a major problem with the elitism and the classism that goes on in academia. I think everyone has something to contribute. Everyone is precious in their own way. But I think it’s obvious that, structurally, American society has a persistent problem with recognizing not just Black people, but Black people as human beings who are just as deserving of the opportunity to think about big picture questions.

     There’s been a lot of research recently, and in particular there was a study by Kenny Gibbs Jr. and some other people about why underrepresented minorities choose the area of science that they go into. One of things that they emphasize is that minorities like to choose fields where they think that they will be helping people.

     I think it’s great to want to help people, and it’s certainly the case that when I was thinking about doing theoretical physics, I had this wild idea that if we could understand how the universe worked and what the fundamental principles of operation of the universe were, that this could somehow help humanity end up in a better place—that we could derive some ideas or principles of peace from that. I was a very idealistic teenager I guess.

     Even when thinking about cosmology, I felt, I’m going into a field where I’m going to help people because cosmologists are dreamers, and cosmology is also something that humans have done since they were really able to look up at the sky and have thoughts about it.

     But I do think that there is a pressure when psychosocial resources and physical and fiscal resources are scarce. That when we have a success, that that success has to be fed back into the community. So it’s easy to understand why people think, “I’m going to be a doctor,” or “I’m going to be a researcher that thinks about Sickle-cell”—”I’m going to think about Black women’s mental health”—because these are all things that have not been thought about enough, or problems that haven’t been solved. But my dream is for Black children, and Native American children, and Latino children, and Asian children to be able to make the choices that White children seem to sometimes be able to make, which is that, “I’m going to think about this because it interests me.” Not because, “I owe it to the community.” Not because, “I see this problem in my community that doesn’t get solved because of the color of our skin, so I’m going to try and solve it.” But for them to say, “Hey, dark matter’s a weird thing. Why don’t I think about that?” I want everybody to have that equal opportunity to dream, and dream big, and not dream in the context of the duress of racism, and transphobia, and a host of other things.

     I understand that I don’t live in that society, and I understand that to make sure that some generation lives in that society will require more than just doing theoretical physics. But I hope one day that that’s not the case for people like me anymore.

223. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     25 June 2015 at 8:08 am

     Corrections officer arrested in connection with NY prison break.

224. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 8:14 am

     Let’s enjoy a bit of ballet before continuing: Cheers, bouquets for Misty Copeland at her ‘Swan Lake’ debut

     “Swan Lake” is always one of the most popular ballets for dance fans. But the whoops and cheers from a packed crowd at the Metropolitan Opera House signaled something more this time.

     There was palpable emotion and a clear sense of history in the air as Misty Copeland made her New York debut Wednesday in the lead role, a key moment for the popular ballerina who many hope will soon become American Ballet Theater’s first black principal dancer.

     Copeland, 32, earned loud ovations after her every solo in the dual role of Odette/Odile, one of the most challenging roles in ballet and one considered an essential part of a star ballerina’s repertoire.

     The dancer, who has become a leading voice for diversity in her art form and amassed a following inside the dance world and out, had performed the role with ABT on tour in Australia, and as a guest with the Washington Ballet. But Wednesday’s performance was considered huge because it was at ABT’s home, and signaled a clear step on the path to her stated goal: making history as a principal dancer.

     The fact that this was no simple “Swan Lake” was clear at the curtain calls, with Copeland greeted onstage by two fellow black dancers who’ve made their own history.

     First came Lauren Anderson, a retired dancer with Houston Ballet, who became the first black principal there in 1990. After Anderson, 50, had lifted Copeland off her feet in a hug, out came Raven Wilkinson, who danced with the famed touring company Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in the 1950s and later joined the Dutch National Ballet. Wilkinson, 80, curtseyed to Copeland, who returned the gesture.

     Wendy Perron, author and former editor of Dance Magazine, said she felt Copeland more than delivered under great pressure.

     “I was especially impressed by her Odette,” Perron said, referring to the delicate, frightened swan dressed in white who entrances the prince in the first act. “She completely inhabited the role. She was able to show that vulnerability.”

     Damian Woetzel, director of the Vail International Dance Festival, called the performance “a long overdue milestone in ballet.”

     “With elegance and seriousness, Misty made a historic breakthrough,” said Woetzel, a former principal at New York City Ballet. “It was an honor to be there.”

     The Missouri-born Copeland’s recent rise to fame includes being named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People this year. The magazine put her on the cover and called her “ballet’s breakout star.”

     She also came out last year with a best-selling memoir, “Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina,” in which she recounted the challenges she faced on the road to her hard-won perch in ballet, and which has been optioned for a movie. She also was the subject of a documentary at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

     #BlackLivesMatter banner in front of Gracie Mansion, home of the mayor who just funded 1.3K new cops. #NoNewNYPD

     #BlackLivesMatter #Defenddenver

     Here Are All The Places Looking To Drop Their Confederate Symbols

     In the wake of a massacre at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, a bipartisan mix of officials across the country is calling for the removal of Confederate flags and other symbols of the Confederacy.

     Here’s a look at what’s happening and what’s being proposed:

     South Carolina

     Lawmakers took the initial steps Tuesday toward removing the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse grounds, a day after Republican Gov. Nikki Haley reversed course and called for the divisive symbol to come down. The flag has flown in front of the state Capitol for 15 years after being moved from atop the Statehouse dome. The momentum in South Carolina sparked further calls from politicians across the state and country for flags andConfederate symbols to be removed from public displays in other states.

     Kentucky

     Republican U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that his state of Kentucky must remove a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from the state Capitol’s rotunda. The statue stands a few paces from that of another native Kentuckian, Abraham Lincoln. McConnell said Davis’ only connection to Kentucky is that was born there. Davis moved to Mississippi, and Kentucky never officially joined the Confederacy. McConnell suggested a better place for the statue would be the Kentucky History Museum.

     Republican Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers said Tuesday that he now favors removing the statue. The Republican nominee for governor, Matt Bevin, also agrees. Democratic nominee Jack Conway, state attorney general, said he agreed with Haley’s call to remove the flag but said he would have to think about whether to remove the Davis statue.

     Mississippi

     Leaders of the Republican-controlled state are divided on whether to alter the Mississippi flag, a corner of which is made up of the Confederate battle flag. House Speaker Philip Gunn said Monday that the emblem is offensive and must be removed. Mississippi voters voted 2-to-1 in 2001 to keep the flag. Gov. Phil Bryant has said he supports those election results. Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves said Tuesday that he thinks voters should decide on any changes.

     The Commercial Dispatch newspaper in Columbus ran a front-page editorial Tuesday, saying that the state flag should change and that the Confederate symbol “represents a disgusting period of our history.” It was accompanied by an image of the flag with a black X drawn over it.

     More examples at the link.

     How The South Lost The War But Won The Narrative

     In the mid-1990s such materials were widely available and I kept them as a sort of reliquary of an unapologetic racism I believed would soon go extinct. Last week’s massacre in Charleston proved me wrong. Dylann Roof often photographed himself with rebel battle flags and cited the Council of Conservative Citizens as one of the sources for his race hatred and obsession with black-on-white crime. Before opening fire he spoke about the black rape of white women.

     It now appears that Roof’s fusillade backfired. Seeking race war, he’s instead spawned racial reconciliation and calls for the rebel flag to be removed from the capitol grounds in South Carolina, from shelves in Walmart, and from the annals of Ebay. But listen carefully in coming days as legislators and others debate the flag’s fate. You’ll hear over and over again that the flag represents “heritage, not hate,” and that if the banner must now be furled, it’s because Roof, the Klan, and other extremists have hijacked and tarnished its meaning. What you’re unlikely to hear, at least from whites, is an honest and historically accurate reappraisal of the Cause for which Southerners fought.

     Some of those who invoke the “heritage, not hate” mantra are disingenuous. On the day of the shooting, I was in rural east Texas, touring a small town with a businessman who displayed the rebel flag on his truck. After telling me “it’s heritage, not hate,” he proceeded to refer to a black neighborhood as “N*gg*rtown” and rant against the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.

     Most flag defenders, however, are sincere when they say they cherish the banner as a symbol of their ancestors’ valor. About 20 percent of white Southern males of military age died in the Civil War. In South Carolina the toll was even higher, and thousands more were left maimed, their farms and homes in ruins. For many descendants of Southern soldiers, the rebel flag recalls that sacrifice, and taking it down dishonors those who fought under the banner. No one wants to be asked to spit on their ancestors’ graves.

     Flag defenders also note, correctly, that what we now call the rebel flag served only as a battle standard in the Civil War. The political flag of the Confederacy had a different design, and in any event, it flew over Southern statehouses for only four years. The Stars and Stripes, by contrast, waved above government buildings during the 80-plus years that slavery was legal and Constitutionally protected in the United States.

     In the decades after the Civil War, the rebel battle flag appeared mainly at historical and memorial events honoring Confederate veterans and the dead. Not until the 1940s did it frequently serve as a baldly racist banner, brandished by segregationist Dixiecrats and by the Klan and other groups during the Civil Rights era. It was also at this time that the flag appeared atop Southern statehouses, first in South Carolina and then in Alabama, where Governor George Wallace raised it ahead of a hostile meeting in 1963 with Robert F. Kennedy, then U.S. Attorney General. A few months earlier, Wallace stood beside a rebel flag as he took his oath of office at the precise spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as Confederate president.

     “From this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland,” Wallace declared, “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” […]

     But a deeper problem remains, and not just among those who cherish the Confederacy. Nationwide, Americans still cling to a deeply sanitized and Southern-fried understanding of the Civil War. More often than not, when I talk to people about the conflict, I hear that it was about abstract principles like “state sovereignty” and “the Southern way of life.” Surveys confirm this. In 2011, at the start of the war’s sesquicentennial, the Pew Research Center asked more than 1500 Americans their view as to “the main cause of the Civil War.” Only 38 percent said the main cause was slavery, compared to 48 percent who answered states’ rights.

     This belief also seems to be growing. According to Pew, respondents 30 and younger were the likeliest to cite states’ rights, by a margin of 60 percent. And there was no difference between northern and southern whites in the plurality citing states’ rights as the war’s main cause.

     It would take a book to explain the history behind this belief, and some excellent ones have been written (to name one, David Blight’s Race and Reunion). The very short version is that white Southerners lost the war but won its aftermath and the battle for how the conflict would be remembered. Violent Southern intransigence and Northern war-weariness killed Reconstruction; the nation chose regional reconciliation over racial justice; and ex-Confederates constructed a potent ideology—the Lost Cause—that romanticized plantation life and cast the war as a noble, doomed defense of Southern freedom and an agrarian way of life.

     In the 20th century, mass culture and commerce spread the Lost Cause nationwide, most notably in movies like Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind. The moonlight-and-magnolia virus grew so strong that the U.S. Senate approved the construction of a Mammy monument in Washington in the 1920s, and after World War II the rebel flag became a faddish adornment on vehicles, beach towels and other products, a generalized emblem of independence, Southernness or good ol’ boyism.

     With the Civil Rights struggle, scholars of the Civil War era gave new emphasis to race and slavery, and this trend has continued ever since. The evidence is overwhelming that Southern states seceded and fought to maintain slavery. Don’t believe me; believe the words of secessionists and Confederate leaders. Among the most often cited is Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens who in 1861 declared the Founders “fundamentally wrong” in judging all humans equal. “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—the subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”

     The same view was expressed by the secessionist conventions in Southern states that published their reasons for leaving the Union. The authors sometimes couched their declarations in Constitutional arguments about sovereignty, but left no doubt about the state right at issue. Mississippians bluntly declared, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.” Texans cited a Northern “crusade” against the “beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery,” and Texans’ conviction that bondage “should exist in all future time.”

     There are countless such statements, scores of scholarly works documenting the cruelties of the slave economy and how much it was bound up with Southern life and politics. Most textbooks follow suit. Yet the prevailing popular view of the Civil War still reflects a strong Southern bias: that the Confederacy fought for vaguely defined “states’ rights,” and its battle flag isn’t intrinsically racist, it’s an anodyne emblem of Southern “heritage.”

     I’m not very optimistic that the debate over South Carolina’s flag will bring a deeper reckoning. Furling the statehouse flag may bring temporary relief to South Carolinians, but what we truly need to bury is the gauzy fiction that the antebellum South was in any way benign, or that slavery and white supremacy weren’t the cornerstone of the Confederacy. Only then, perhaps, will we be able to say that the murdered in Charleston didn’t die in vain, and that the Lost Cause, at last, is well and truly lost.

     Ferguson residents petition for police body camera rules

     A group of residents in Ferguson, Mo., announced Tuesday that they are launching a petition drive to amend the city charter to mandate that the city’s police officers wear police body cameras while on duty and establish other rules regulating the use of the devices.

     The St. Louis suburb was where a white police officer last summer fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen whose death ignited months of protests throughout the country and spurred calls for police departments to equip officers with cameras.

     The cameras are attached to an officer’s clothing, helmet or glasses and capture footage of arrests, traffic stops and other police encounters with the public.

     The Ferguson officer, Darren Wilson, was not wearing a body camera at the time of the incident. Wilson said he fired at Brown after he was attacked by the teen, while a friend of the teen, Dorian Johnson, said that Brown was “shot like an animal.” A St. Louis County grand jury last November opted not to indict Wilson, who later resigned from the department.

     Nick Kasoff, who is organizing the drive, said that he and six other residents are hoping to gather the roughly 1,300 signatures, or roughly 10% of city residents, needed to get the issue on the ballot for the April 2016 municipal election. His group is being advised by the Liberty Initiative Fund, a group in northern Virginia that assists groups throughout the country with citizen initiatives.

     “Whichever side of the debate you are on, you have video footage of what happened and things can be done properly,” Kasoff said in a telephone interview.

225. Pteryxx says

     25 June 2015 at 8:18 am

     Looking into the better-news story in #210, bolds mine: Supreme Court rules in favor of inmate with excessive force claim

     Kingsley filed a suit claiming that the tasing was objectively unreasonable — an instance of “excessive force” in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. The officers countered that the relevant standard is a subjective one, akin to whether the action constituted a “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

     Initially, the jury found in favor of the officers who said that at the time they subjectively believed the force was necessary to control Kingsley. But Kingsley appealed and at oral arguments Wendy Ward, arguing on his behalf, warned of the consequences of instructing the jury to employ a subjective standard.

     “[J]uries give a lot of deference to officers,” she said. “If [juries are] allowed to inject their subjective good faith…that would result in a lot more findings and verdicts in favor of guards, even in instances where objectively unreasonable, unjustified force is used.”

     Justice Stephen Breyer, writing the majority opinion, agreed and said that an objective standard, set by the facts and circumstances of each case, should determine whether or not the force was excessive or necessitated by the circumstance. He added that jury instructions which ordered jurors to consider whether the guards “reasonably believed there was a threat to the safety of staff or prisoners” was “erroneous.”

     That might be important because officers so frequently claim that they feared for their life or felt threatened by some unarmed black kid that they brutalize or kill.

     Also from #210, the New Yorker: The Simple Truth About Gun Control from December 2012, immediately after the Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting.

     e live, let’s imagine, in a city where children are dying of a ravaging infection. The good news is that its cause is well understood and its cure, an antibiotic, easily at hand. The bad news is that our city council has been taken over by a faith-healing cult that will go to any lengths to keep the antibiotic from the kids. Some citizens would doubtless point out meekly that faith healing has an ancient history in our city, and we must regard the faith healers with respect—to do otherwise would show a lack of respect for their freedom to faith-heal. (The faith healers’ proposition is that if there were a faith healer praying in every kindergarten the kids wouldn’t get infections in the first place.) A few Tartuffes would see the children writhe and heave in pain and then wring their hands in self-congratulatory piety and wonder why a good God would send such a terrible affliction on the innocent—surely he must have a plan! Most of us—every sane person in the city, actually—would tell the faith healers to go to hell, put off worrying about the Problem of Evil till Friday or Saturday or Sunday, and do everything we could to get as much penicillin to the kids as quickly we could.

     We do live in such a city. Five thousand seven hundred and forty children and teens died from gunfire in the United States, just in 2008 and 2009. Twenty more, including Olivia Engel, who was seven, and Jesse Lewis, who was six, were killed just last week. Some reports say their bodies weren’t shown to their grief-stricken parents to identify them; just their pictures. The overwhelming majority of those children would have been saved with effective gun control. We know that this is so, because, in societies that have effective gun control, children rarely, rarely, rarely die of gunshots. Let’s worry tomorrow about the problem of Evil. Let’s worry more about making sure that when the Problem of Evil appears in a first-grade classroom, it is armed with a penknife.

     and from #208, Roxane Gay in the NY Times: Why I Can’t Forgive Dylan Roof

     Over the weekend, newspapers across the country shared headlines of forgiveness from the families of the nine slain. The dominant media narrative vigorously embraced that notion of forgiveness, seeming to believe that if we forgive we have somehow found a way to make sense of the incomprehensible.

     We are reminded of the power of whiteness. Predictably, alongside the forgiveness story, the media has tried to humanize this terrorist. They have tried to understand Dylann Roof’s hatred because surely, there must be an explanation for so heinous an act. At the gunman’s bond hearing, the judge, who was once reprimanded for using the N-word from the bench, talked about how not only were the nine slain and their families victims, but so were the relatives of the terrorist. There are no limits to the power of whiteness when it comes to calls for mercy.

     The call for forgiveness is a painfully familiar refrain when black people suffer. White people embrace narratives about forgiveness so they can pretend the world is a fairer place than it actually is, and that racism is merely a vestige of a painful past instead of this indelible part of our present.

     Black people forgive because we need to survive. We have to forgive time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive. We have had to forgive slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching, inequity in every realm, mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, inadequate representation in popular culture, microaggressions and more. We forgive and forgive and forgive and those who trespass against us continue to trespass against us.

     Mr. Roof’s racism was blunt and raggedly formed. It was bred by a culture in which we constantly have to shout “Black lives matter!” because there is so much evidence to the contrary. This terrorist was raised in this culture. He made racist jokes with his friends. He shared his plans with his roommate. It’s much easier to introduce forgiveness into the conversation than to sit with that reality and consider all who are complicit.

     What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a traumatized community is absolution. They want absolution from the racism that infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile America’s racist sins. They want absolution from their silence in the face of all manner of racism, great and small. They want to believe it is possible to heal from such profound and malingering trauma because to face the openness of the wounds racism has created in our society is too much. I, for one, am done forgiving.

226. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 8:35 am

     Thanks, Pteryxx!!!

     +++

     Bryan Stevenson on Charleston and Our Real Problem with Race

     Bryan Stevenson has spent most of his career challenging bias against minorities and the poor in the criminal justice system. He is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Ala., an advocacy group that opposes mass incarceration and racial injustice. Stevenson is a member of The Marshall Project’s advisory board. He spoke with Corey Johnson. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

     CJ: When you saw the news about the Charleston shootings, what were your thoughts?

     BS: Anytime I hear news of this kind of extreme violence targeting innocent people, I think immediately about the ready access to guns that so many people in this country have, and I mourn our nation’s failure to act more responsibly on limiting access to these weapons. I think it was pretty clear early on that a young white man going into a historic black church and slaughtering people in this way couldn’t be understood outside the context of our racial history of violence and terror directed at black people. And so, my thoughts about our failure to deal more effectively with that history were also right on the surface. And then, when more information came about the racially motivated character of this assault, it just confirmed all of my fears about what our failure to deal more honestly with our history of racial injustice, where that has left us.

     CJ: Why do you think we keep failing on these fronts?

     BS: I actually think we’ve never really tried to succeed. I really do believe that this country never committed itself to a conversation about the legacy of slavery. At EJI, we’re really focused on what slavery did to America, what lynching and terrorism did to America, what segregation and Jim Crow did to America, and we’re focused on these historical eras because we’ve just never had the conversation we needed to have. Very few people in this country have any awareness of just how expansive and how debilitating and destructive America’s history of slavery is.

     The whole narrative of white supremacy was created during the era of slavery. It was a necessary theory to make white Christian people feel comfortable with their ownership of other human beings. And we created a narrative of racial difference in this country to sustain slavery, and even people who didn’t own slaves bought into that narrative, including people in the North. It was New York’s governor — in the 1860s — that was talking about the inferiority of the black person even as he was opposed to slavery. So this narrative of racial difference has done really destructive things in our society. Lots of countries had slaves, but they were mostly societies with slaves. We became something different, we became a slave society. We created a narrative of racial difference to maintain slavery. And our 13th amendment never dealt with that narrative. It didn’t talk about white supremacy. The Emancipation Proclamation doesn’t discuss the ideology of white supremacy or the narrative of racial difference, so I don’t believe slavery ended in 1865, I believe it just evolved. It turned into decades of racial hierarchy that was violently enforced — from the end of reconstruction until WWII — through acts of racial terror. And in the north, that was tolerated.

     You don’t have to have owned a slave to be complicit in the institution of slavery, to have benefitted and have cheaper food to buy, cheaper materials, cheaper services, because the providers of the foods and services were using free slave labor. We were all complicit in the institution of slavery, and the same is true in the era of racial terror and lynching. The North and the Congress basically gave up on equality for African Americans, and that set us on a course that we have not yet recovered from. We’ve been really focused on redefining that era — at the beginning of the 20th century and the end of the 19th century — as an era shaped by terrorism1. Lynchings were not acts directed at particular individuals, they were acts directed at the entire African American community. And in that respect it was racial terror. A white person being hanged was not the same as an African American being lynched. The violence against African Americans was a message to the entire black community. I think we’ve got to deal with that a lot more honestly.
     era shaped by terrorism 1
     Equal Justice Initiative’s latest project has been to document the sites of lynchings – 3,959 in 12 southern states.

     There are very few people who have an awareness of how widespread this terrorism and violence was, and the way it now shapes the geography of the United States. We’ve got majority black cities in Detroit, Chicago, large black populations in Oakland and Cleveland and Los Angeles and Boston, and other cities in the Northeast. And the African Americans in these communities did not come as immigrants looking for economic opportunities, they came as refugees, exiles from lands in the South where they were being terrorized. And those communities have particular needs we’ve never addressed, we’ve never talked about. We’ve got generational poverty in these cities and marginalization within black communities, and you cannot understand these present-day challenges without understanding the Great Migration, and the terror and violence that sent the African Americans to these cities where they’ve never really been afforded the care and assistance they needed to recover from the terror and trauma that were there.

     And even moving closer to the present day, even the era of the civil rights movement — in my judgment — has been recast as moments where great heroism and courage took place that we can all celebrate. Everybody gets to celebrate the courage that it took to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, everybody gets to celebrate the march on Washington, everybody gets to celebrate the legacy of Dr. King and Rosa Parks, and no one is accountable for all of the resistance to civil rights, all of the damage that was done by segregation. I hear people talking about the civil rights movement and it sounds like a three-day carnival. Day One: Rosa Parks gave up her seat on the bus. Day Two: Dr. King led a march on Washington, and Day Three: we just changed all these laws. And we tell our history as if it’s the true history when in fact that’s not the true history. The true history is that for decades, we humiliated black people in this country every day. For decades we did not let them vote, we did not let them get full education, we did not let them work for pay, we did not let them live as full human beings with dignity and hopefulness, we denied all of these basic opportunities to African Americans, and we’ve never really talked about the consequences of that era of apartheid and segregation.

     And so we are very confused when we start talking about race in this country because we think that things are “of the past” because we don’t understand what these things really are, that narrative of racial difference that was created during slavery that resulted in terrorism and lynching, that humiliated, belittled and burdened African Americans throughout most of the 20th century. The same narrative of racial difference that got Michael Brown killed, got Eric Garner killed and got Tamir Rice killed. That got these thousands of others — of African Americans — wrongly accused, convicted and condemned. It is the same narrative that has denied opportunities and fair treatment to millions of people of color, and it is the same narrative that supported and led to the executions in Charleston. And the South — to be honest — is a region where we are particularly vulnerable to the way in which this narrative of racial difference still haunts us, and infects our economic, social and political structures, because we have in the South done something worse than silence, we’ve actually created a counter-narrative and invited people to take pride in their southern heritage. We’ve basically minimized the hardships of slavery and extolled its virtues — as if there’s any virtue at all to being owned by another human being. We’ve ignored the lynchings and the struggles and the violence and terror that kept people of color from having any opportunities for fairness and equality, and we haven’t really addressed all of the pain and injury that was created by decades of segregation. So, I think we’re not going to make progress until that changes.

     MUCH much more good reading at the link.

     Rep. William Chumley ‘regrets’ self-defense comment. Taking bets: apology or notpology?

     State Rep. William Chumley, R-Woodruff, told CNN that it was wrong to debate the flag and hate groups in the wake of the killings.

     “We’re focusing on the wrong thing here. We need to be focusing on the nine families that are left and see that this doesn’t happen again,” he said. “These people sat in there and waited their turn to be shot. That’s sad. Somebody in there with the means of self-defense could have stopped this, and we would have had less funerals than we’re having.”

     Chumley released a statement Wednesday that said many who saw his CNN interview interpreted it as him blaming the victims for their own murder.

     “I deeply regret using those words and giving that impression,” he said. “My view, which I was clumsily trying to express, was that it is painfully regrettable that someone was not able to intervene in this demented killer’s life to stop him right up to the moment he squeezed the trigger.

     “Please let me be clear: The responsibility for the despicable murders in Charleston rests solely on the murderer. If any of my remarks suggested differently, I am deeply sorry.”

     Notpology.

     Casket of Rev. Pinckney being taken past the Confederate Flag. Despicable that they didn’t take it down today. I lack the words.

     Sen. Clementa Pinckney’s family looks on as his casket is carried inside the S.C. Statehouse. #CharlestonShooting

     Alabama Governor Orders Removal of Confederate Flags From Capitol, Time on that.

     Bentley made the order Wednesday morning as calls to remove the flag from government buildings and stores mount following the Charleston, S.C. shooting at a black church last week, the Associated Press reports.

     “The Governor ordered flags removed from the Capitol this morning,” his office said in a statement to TIME. “He does not want the flags to be a distraction from other state issues so he ordered them removed.”
     The statement echoes what Bentley told AL.com as he was leaving the Capitol on the way to an event Wednesday.

     “This is the right thing to do,” he said. “We are facing some major issues in this state regarding the budget and other matters that we need to deal with. This had the potential to become a major distraction as we go forward. I have taxes to raise, we have work to do. And it was my decision that the flag needed to come down.”

     Bentley said he checked to see if there were any state laws preventing the removal of the flag and found none. Workers also removed three other Civil War-era Confederate flags from the Confederate memorial on the Capitol grounds, AL.com reports.

     A distraction? He had to check the laws? …

     Jonathan Fleming spent 25 years in prison for murder he did not commit, will receive $6.25 million

     Mr Fleming, 51, originally sued the city for $162 million after he was wrongfully convicted of fatally shooting Darryl Rush in Brooklyn in 1989. He settled with New York City for $6.25 million.

     Newly discovered evidence — a phone receipt — proved that Mr Fleming was vacationing with his family at Disney World in Bay Lake, Florida during the time of the murder.

     Mr Fleming was released from custody with no job, home or plan — and had just $93 and food stamps to his name. He told The Guardian that he never gave up his faith in prison and despite the injustice, he isn’t bitter or angry.

     “I’m not angry. But I think about all the things I could have accomplished during that time and I come out to nothing. No housing. No nothing.

     “I missed the opportunity to raise my sons to be young men. I missed being there with my mother. Her health is real bad and I know she doesn’t have much time left since she is very ill. All those things were running through my head,” he said.

227. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 8:43 am

     Haley says she won’t violate law by temporarily removing Confederate flag

     – and yet she couldn’t do it for the moments that Sen. Pinckney was being carried past that damn flagpole. Will she take it down for his funeral, tomorrow?

     The Confederate battle flag will continue to fly on the Statehouse grounds today, despite efforts to remove it temporarily.

     Gov. Nikki Haley said she still wants to see the flag removed permanently, but doesn’t want to break the law by claiming it’s down for repairs, said Haley’s spokeswoman Chaney Adams.

     “Based on the 2000 law, (Haley) does not have the authority to remove the flag herself, today or any day, and rather than violate that law, she will continue to work to change it,” Adams said.

     Haley does not have the authority to remove the flag from the grounds. A two-thirds vote by both chambers of the General Assembly is needed to tamper with any of the monuments that are part of the Statehouse complex. That includes the battle flag, which flies as part of the Confederate Soldier Monument that commemorates those who died during the Civil War.

     House Democrats have argued that state law allows for the replacement of flags “at appropriate intervals as many be necessary due to wear.” Tyler Jones, spokesman for state House Democrats, said Wednesday that provision would have allowed Haley to remove the flag during the viewing for Sen. Clementa Pinckney, which takes place between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. […]

     On Wednesday, four former state governors issued a joint statement supporting Gov. Haley’s call to remove of the flag.

     “Last week’s tragic events at Mother Emanuel AME Church have reminded us of the important bond we share as South Carolina citizens,” the note said. “We should fly only the United States and South Carolina Flags on our Statehouse grounds- flags that represent us all.”

     It was signed by former Govs. Fritz Hollings, Dick Riley, David Beasley and Jim Hodges.

     Let me just say I care way more about the black people Dylann Roof killed in that church than the symbol of racism aka the confederate flag.
     Taking down that symbol of racism doesn’t dismantle the systematic oppression that happens to black ppl in this country.
     I’m black, and I’m not forgiving Dylann Roof. Or Darren Wilson. Or Dante Servin. Or George Zimmerman. No. And never.
     And you know what these tweets of hers among others actually brought home? That while yes, it’s awesome to be having a conversation about the flag, the victims have been lost and erased in all of this… I know there have been a few – a few! – tribute articles, for maybe 3 of the victims (that I can remember off the top of my head). But not for all of them, and not in nearly enough volume. So that’s something to think about.

     Moving to Hawaii or Alaska. Chart showing active hate groups in USAmerica in 2014.

228. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 8:52 am

     Major blockquote fail, but it seems clear enough what’s what.

     +++

     Alabama Gov. Bentley removes Confederate flags from Capitol grounds, just another source on that.

     Black Alabama state legislators arrested in 1988 for trying to climb the capitol’s cupola & remove Confederate flag. Archive link <a href="http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1988/02/03/page/7/article/legislators-arrested-over-confederate-flaghere.

     Alabama governor orders Confederate flags taken down. By 10am, all four flags at the Capitol were gone. #sweethome #Selma #Charleston

     A couple on white terrorism.
     Homegrown Extremists Tied to Deadlier Toll Than Jihadists in U.S. Since 9/11

     In the 14 years since Al Qaeda carried out attacks on New York and the Pentagon, extremists have regularly executed smaller lethal assaults in the United States, explaining their motives in online manifestoes or social media rants.

     But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.

     The slaying of nine African-Americans in a Charleston church last week, with an avowed white supremacist charged with their murders, was a particularly savage case.

     But it is only the latest in a string of lethal attacks by people espousing racial hatred, hostility to government and theories such as those of the “sovereign citizen” movement, which denies the legitimacy of most statutory law. The assaults have taken the lives of police officers, members of racial or religious minorities and random civilians.

     Non-Muslim extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11, according to the latest count, compiled by David Sterman, a New America program associate, and overseen by Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert. By comparison, seven lethal attacks by Islamic militants have taken place in the same period.

     If such numbers are new to the public, they are familiar to police officers. A survey to be published this week asked 382 police and sheriff’s departments nationwide to rank the three biggest threats from violent extremism in their jurisdiction. About 74 percent listed antigovernment violence, while 39 percent listed “Al Qaeda-inspired” violence, according to the researchers, Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina and David Schanzer of Duke University. […]

     If terrorism is defined as ideological violence, for instance, should an attacker who has merely ranted about religion, politics or race be considered a terrorist? A man in Chapel Hill, N.C., who was charged with fatally shooting three young Muslim neighbors had posted angry critiques of religion, but he also had a history of outbursts over parking issues. (New America does not include this attack in its count.)

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     Likewise, what about mass killings in which no ideological motive is evident, such as those at a Colorado movie theater and a Connecticut elementary school in 2012? The criteria used by New America and most other research groups exclude such attacks, which have cost more lives than those clearly tied to ideology.

     Some killings by non-Muslims that most experts would categorize as terrorism have drawn only fleeting news media coverage, never jelling in the public memory. But to revisit some of the episodes is to wonder why.

     In 2012, a neo-Nazi named Wade Michael Page entered a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and opened fire, killing six people and seriously wounding three others. Mr. Page, who died at the scene, was a member of a white supremacist group called the Northern Hammerskins.

     In another case, in June 2014, Jerad and Amanda Miller, a married couple with radical antigovernment views, entered a Las Vegas pizza restaurant and fatally shot two police officers who were eating lunch. On the bodies, they left a swastika, a flag inscribed with the slogan “Don’t tread on me” and a note saying, “This is the start of the revolution.” Then they killed a third person in a nearby Walmart.

     And, as in the case of jihadist plots, there have been sobering close calls. In November 2014 in Austin, Tex., a man named Larry McQuilliams fired more than 100 rounds at government buildings that included the Police Headquarters and the Mexican Consulate. Remarkably, his shooting spree hit no one, and he was killed by an officer before he could try to detonate propane cylinders he drove to the scene. […]

     William Braniff, the executive director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, said the outsize fear of jihadist violence reflected memories of Sept. 11, the daunting scale of sectarian conflict overseas and wariness of a strain of Islam that seems alien to many Americans.

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     “We understand white supremacists,” he said. “We don’t really feel like we understand Al Qaeda, which seems too complex and foreign to grasp.”

     The contentious question of biased perceptions of terrorist threats dates back at least two decades, to the truck bombing that tore apart the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Some early news media speculation about the attack assumed that it had been carried out by Muslim militants. The arrest of Timothy J. McVeigh, an antigovernment extremist, quickly put an end to such theories.

     The bombing, which killed 168 people, including 19 children, remains the second-deadliest terrorist attack in American history, though its toll was dwarfed by the roughly 3,000 killed on Sept 11.

     “If there’s one lesson we seem to have forgotten 20 years after Oklahoma City, it’s that extremist violence comes in all shapes and sizes,” said Dr. Horgan, the University of Massachusetts scholar. “And very often, it comes from someplace you’re least suspecting.”

     Funny how mainstream media hasn’t caught up yet.

     White Americans Are Biggest Terror Threat in U.S.: Study, NBC

     The New America Foundation found that twice as many people have died in attacks by right-wing groups in America than by Muslim extremists since 9/11.

229. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 9:05 am

     More on white supremacists:
     On Web, white supremacists stir up a growing and angry audience

     Born amid a backlash against the post-Trayvon Martin movement drawing attention to racial bias, the site [the Daily Stormer] has exploded to prominence among white supremacists as #BlackLivesMatter protests stretched coast to coast. According to the website traffic tracking site SimilarWeb, by the end of 2013 Daily Stormer had more visitors than the rival Vanguard News Network, which has been around since 2003.

     The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, said in a March report that during the previous six months Daily Stormer’s Web traffic on some days even surpassed that of Stormfront.org, the oldest and largest hate site.

     Anglin, in an interview Tuesday with The Times, attributed his website’s popularity to his approach, which avoids long, online essays in favor of short, catchy posts.

     “I wanted something punchy and funny and enjoyable to read,” Anglin said. “My ideology is very simple. I believe white people deserve their own country…. There’s not really anything that can happen that can affect my ideology because it’s so simple and straightforward.” […]

     The Daily Stormer, named in homage to the Nazi tabloid Der Sturmer, aggregates articles from other supremacist sites, organizes lurid stories into sections titled “Race War” and “Jewish Problem,” and gives posts chatty headlines that scream millennial authorship, like “LOL: Ferguson Cop Shooter Says He was Shooting at Someone Else” and “Black Church Shot Up in Charleston by Bowl-Cut Sporting Weirdo.”

     The Southern Poverty Law Center does not count such websites but says the number of hate groups across the country has increased by 30% since 2000. In 2012, the center counted 186 Ku Klux Klan groups, with 52 separate websites, in addition to hundreds of other groups described as white nationalist, neo-Nazi and skinhead groups, most with websites. […]

     Jared Taylor, a spokesman, said the group could not be blamed for Roof’s rampage. “The impact on Roof obviously was terrible and unfortunate, and we completely, unequivocally condemn any kind of violence and illegality,” Taylor said in a telephone interview. “But does that mean the council’s website has some sort of responsibility for its actions? The answer is unequivocally no. We put forward information. What he did with this information is his responsibility.”

     Therein lies the danger of such sites, said Heidi Beirich, who heads the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. Most make a point of condemning overt acts of violence, even as they post reams of material aimed at fueling white rage and paranoia, she said.

     “They’re smart enough not to make open calls for violence,” she said. “It’s all 1st Amendment-protected speech.”

     But, Beirich added, “people are reading this stuff, they’re sucking it in, and they’re getting enraged, and we’re having lone-wolf violence.”

     On Tuesday, Anglin too disavowed responsibility for the Charleston shooting and condemned violence in general.

     “This is a news site. We report the news,” Anglin wrote on the Daily Stormer. “We have an angle, just as everyone has an angle, but we are no more responsible for the actions of our readers than the Daily Beast is responsible for the actions of their readers.”

     FBI officials said they routinely monitor the websites to determine whether any are calling for a particular act of violence, which could lead to a criminal charge. […]

     On Friday, the day Roof was arraigned, Anglin had this to say:

     “I don’t support what Roof did, in any way, but there is now no going back from it,” he wrote on his site. “We are in the middle of a race war. The random murders of Whites are going to begin any minute now, across the country. The media will try to cover it up, but there will be too many murders to hide.”

     Maybe not violence-inducing words, but definitely fear/paranoia-inducing. But no, they’re not responsible for the effects, it’s just words.
     Also, excuse me, but you name your news site (etc) in honour of the fucking Nazis. And yet you profess no violence against those deemed less-than. … Logic isn’t these people’s strong point, is it?

     Clinton breaks with FBI director on calling Charleston shooting ‘terrorism’

     When Hillary Clinton on Tuesday described the fatal shooting at a historic church in Charleston as “an act of racist terror perpetrated in a house of God,” she made a notable break with FBI Director James Comey, who said that he did not think the murders constitute terrorism. Clinton’s take puts her out front of the FBI, which has the authority to investigate all domestic terror attacks.

     The distinction matters, since terrorism is a federal charge prosecuted in federal courts. The man who perpetrated the shooting, Dylann Storm Roof, is currently in the South Carolina state court system, being held on homicide and guns charges. Meanwhile, federal authorities are conducting a parallel hate crimes investigation.

     “Terrorism is an act of violence done or threatened to in order to try to influence a public body or the citizenry, so it’s more of a political act, and again based on what I know,” Comey said at a press conference on Friday. “I don’t see it as a political act.”

     Despite the FBI director’s comments, the Obama administration has emphasized that the federal investigation is ongoing and could expand to include other potential charges. The White House referred to a Friday statement by Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s spokesperson, Emily Pierce, stating that the Justice Department is “looking at this crime from all angles, including as a hate crime and as an act of domestic terrorism.”

     While the debate turns on a legal definition, it also carries palpable racial and religious overtones. While the U.S. defines terrorism as violence intended to intimidate or terrorize to advance a political goal, many critics and legal experts note that it is more quickly and vociferously applied to certain suspects — such as Muslim attackers — than others.

     In the wake of the Charleston murders, Brian Phillips, a researcher on terrorism, raised this tendency. “Terrorism is already used without hesitation for many non-white — especially Muslim —actors who carry out violence consistent with [its official] definition,” he wrote in The Washington Post. “Few media sources use the term for violent actors motivated by, for example, white supremacy or anti-government rage,” he argued, “to avoid the term becoming simply an insult, or worse a racist insult, it should be used whenever the basic criteria apply, or not at all.”

     #Confederate monument in @ForestPark4Ever vandalized overnight w/ the words #BlackLivesMatter
     .@SLMPD told me jogger reported vandalism @ 7:30. @ForestPark4Ever crews already cleaning #Confederate memorial @kmov
     Vandals who targeted #Confederate memorial in @ForestPark4Ever used red paint to make it look like blood @KMOV

     Freddie Gray autopsy: excerpt from the report

     The following is an excerpt from Freddie Gray’s autopsy report, which was obtained by The Baltimore Sun:

     OPINION:

     This 25 year old, African American male, Freddie Carlos Gray Jr., died of a Neck Injury sustained as an unbelted occupant of a police transport van. The cause and manner of death are based on autopsy findings, review of medical records and the investigation of the circumstances surrounding the death, including available witness statements, captured scene videos and examination of the police transport vehicle. By report, the deceased was taken into custody following a police bike and foot pursuit on 4/12/2015. Upon being apprehended, Mr. Gray placed himself on the ground and his hands were cuffed behind his back. He reportedly asked for an inhaler, but none was found on his person. He was assisted to the police van on Presbury Street (1st stop), exhibiting both verbal and some physical resistance. Mr. Gray is seen on video entering the right hand compartment of the van, bearing weight on his legs and actively speaking. He was reportedly placed on the metal bench running from front to back along the outside wall of the van (the bench measures approximately 13″ wide and 8′ long allowing for 19″ between the metal wall dividing the van into two discrete compartments and the bench edge). After the inner and outer doors were closed, it is reported that Mr. Gray could be heard yelling and banging, causing the van to rock. Originally the destination of the van was Central Booking; however, several intervening stops were made before it was finally diverted to the Western District headquarters. The 2nd stop was several blocks down (on Baker Street) to place an identification band and leg restraints on Mr. Gray. Reportedly, Mr. Gray was still yelling and shaking the van. He was removed from the van and placed on the ground in a kneeling position, facing the van doors, while ankle cuffs were placed, and then slid onto the floor of the van, belly down and head first, reportedly still verbally and physically active. The 3rd stop was captured on video at Mosher Street and North Fremont Avenue, where the van driver stopped the van, got out and looked in the back of the van. The van proceeded to the 4th stop (at Dolphin Street and Druid Hill Avenue) where the van driver called for assistance to check on Mr. Gray. The assisting officer opened the doors and observed Mr. Gray lying belly down on the floor with his head facing the cabin compartment, and reportedly he was asking for help, saying he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get up and needed a medic. The officer assisted Mr. Gray to the bench and the van continued on its way until it was diverted to pick up another individual who was in custody. At this 5th stop (at North Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue), Mr. Gray was found kneeling on the floor, facing the front of the van and slumped over to his right against the bench, and reportedly appeared lethargic with minimal responses to direct questions. The second individual was placed in the left hand compartment of the van and the vehicle was driven to the Western District headquarters. By report, this second detainee said that he heard Mr. Gray banging and kicking through the metal divider. On arrival, Mr. Gray was found in a kneeling position, unresponsive and not breathing. Emergency medical services were activated and he was transported to University Medical Center with active resuscitation.

     At the hospital resuscitation attempts were successful with the return of spontaneous circulation. Mr. Gray exhibited dilated pupils and showed no motor response to stimuli. No obvious external injuries, except for an abrasion (skin scape) on the top of the left shoulder were identified on initial examination. Admission toxicological testing was positive for the presence of opiates and cannabinoid in the urine. A computed tomography scan (CT) of the head and neck was negative for intracranial bleeding or fractures of the facial bones or skull, but demonstrated an unstable C4/C5 fracture/dislocation with high grade spinal canal compromise as well as a left vertebral artery injury. A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study, performed revealed a tiny left interventricular hemorrhage, near transection of the spinal cord, rupture of multiple stabilizing ligaments at the level of C4/C5, extensive edema of soft tissues of the posterior neck region and a small fluid collection anterior to C3 through C7; no other abnormalities of the uninjured cervical vertebral column, spinal cord or adjacent soft tissues were described in the report. Mr. Gray was stabilized and closed reduction of the vertebral dislocation was attempted without success. He was taken to the operating room on 4/14/2015 for C3-C6 laminectomy and fusion of C4 and C5. The operative note made no mention of healed or healing scars on the neck or evidence of previous injury or surgical interventions. Mr. Gray remained in a comatose state with continual electroencephalogram monitoring that indicated diffuse cerebral dysfunction. Follow up CT and MRI scans showed extension of the spinal cord edema into the brainstem and into the distal cervical spinal cord. On 4/19/2015 as Mr. Gray was being positioned he had an episode of severe hypertension and tachycardia followed by hypotension and bradycardia and eventually, pulseless electrical activity. Despite resuscitative efforts, Mr. Gray was pronounced on 4/19/2015.

     At autopsy, the external examination was significant for generalized edema and evidence of medical therapy. A healing, patterned abraded laceration (scraped skin tear) was on the right temple, a healing abrasion on the left temple, small healing abrasions on the left cheekbone, and healing linear abrasions on the wrists and right ankle. Reflection of the scalp revealed a subscalp hematoma on the lateral aspect of the left side of the back of the head just superior to the neck region, and focal scalp hemorrhage under the abraded laceration on the right temple. Reflection of extensive areas of skin of the torso and the upper and lower extremities identified areas of hemorrhage on the lateral aspects of the wrists and ankles, consistent with placement of wrist and ankle restraints. Faint areas of subcutaneous hemorrhage were over the left scapular and right postero-inferior costal margin. No deep muscle hemorrhage of the torso or extremities or fractures of the long bones of the extremities were identified. * No injuries that would suggest the use of a neck hold, Taser deployment or physical restraint, other than wrist and ankle cuffs, were identified. Examination of the brain showed edema and other secondary changes due to interruption in oxygen/blood flow, which were more prominent in the parietal and occipital lobes and the medulla of the brainstem. The spinal cord was intact, but showed extensive edema, traumatic contusion (bruising) and necrosis of the cervical spinal cord, extension of the necrosis into the lower brainstem and high thoracic regions, and secondary, non-traumatic changes due to probable re-perfusion injury of the entire spinal cord. The internal examination showed no evidence of injury to the ribs, thoracic or lumbar vertebral column, pelvic bones or the internal organs. An anterior neck dissection showed an intact hyoid bone and laryngeal cartilage.

     Review of the chronology of the events from the when Mr. Gray was taken into custody in the context of a severe and unstable cervical spine fracture/dislocation that would be immediately symptomatic, is most consistent with Mr. Gray sustaining the injury in the police van sometime after the 2nd stop where ankle restraints were placed and before the 4th stop when the driver called assistance. At this 4th stop, Mr. Gray was displaying symptoms of a high spinal cord injury: difficulties in breathing and movement. The type of fracture/dislocation documented in imaging studies on admission is a high energy injury most often caused by abrupt deceleration of a rotated head on a hyperflexed neck, such as seen in shallow water diving incidents. While it cannot be excluded that this injury could occur while lying on the floor and sliding back and forth with the movement of the van, the likelihood of sufficient acceleration/deceleration to generate the energy needed is less likely in this position. Further, the most significant impact to the head and the impact consistent with the neck injury is on the left lower back area of the head, is not consistent with injury in this prone position. Although Mr. Gray was placed belly down on the floor of the van at the 2nd stop, he would have been able to get to his feet using the bench side and the opposite wall. As the clearance between the interior floor and roof was approximately 4 feet (Mr. Gray measured 5’9″ in length), he would have been hunched over with his neck in a flexed position if he had risen off the floor. Mr. Gray was restrained with his wrists behind his back and at the ankles, was not belted with the safety belts that were present in the van, and due to an obstructed view of the roadway would have had trouble anticipating the van’s motion; therefore, he was at risk for an unsupported fall during acceleration or deceleration of the van. An unexpected turning motion, acceleration or deceleration of the van would have precipitated him into the side walls, the door or the front of the van depending on his position, resulting in the left posterior impact to his head with injury to the spinal cord in his flexed neck. If the motion/acceleration/deceleration of the van was abrupt enough, given the confined space in the vehicle, it is possible that his neck injury occurred with him in a partially reclining position or as he was changing his position on the floor of the van. As the fracture/dislocation was considered very unstable, it is unclear whether the spinal cord lesion was complete, as documented in admission imaging studies, or in the spectrum of spinal concussion or contusion at the time of the fracture/dislocation in the van with evolution of the spinal cord injury during the movement of Mr. Gray to the bench, the subsequent stops and the motion of the van. Injury at this level of the spinal cord would have caused loss of function of the limbs and have direct effects on the mechanics of respiration through partial to near total paralysis of the diaphragm, the full function of which depends on the nerves associated with the part of the spinal cord that was damaged. Therefore, the time the injury most likely occurred was after the 2nd but before the 4th stop of the van, and possibly before the 3rd stop when a video showed the driver stopping, getting out, and looking in the back of the van. The reported kicking heard after the 4th stop would not have been possible; however, a seizure resulting from decreased oxygen supply to the brain may have caused the banging noise reportedly heard from Mr. Gray’s compartment.

     Based on the sequence of events and the described progressive alteration of mental and physical status, Mr. Gray’s neck injury occurred while in custody, in and during transport in the police van. Safety equipment was available but not used. Therefore, it was not an unforeseen event (a medico-legal definition of an accident) that a vulnerable individual was injured during operation of the vehicle, and that without prompt medical attention, the injury would prove fatal. Due to the failure of following established safety procedures through acts of omission, the manner of death is best certified as Homicide. Prolonged hospitalization precluded relevant postmortem toxicological testing.

     [Signed]
     Carol H. Allan, M.D.
     Assistant Medical Examiner

     [Signed]
     David R. Fowler, M.D.
     Chief Medical Examiner

     Date signed: 4/30/2015

230. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     25 June 2015 at 9:09 am

     More from Michael Woods, Jr. the former Baltimore cop blowing the lid on some of the awful shit he saw cops do:

     Wood, a PhD candidate and author of police training manuals, served with the force from 2003 to January 2014, when an injury forced him into retirement.
     His Twitter storm started: ‘So here we go. I’m going to start Tweeting the things I’ve seen & participated in, in policing that is corrupt, intentional or not.’

     First, he alleged: ‘A detective slapping a completely innocent female in the face for bumping into him, coming out of a corner chicken store.
     ‘Punting a handcuffed, face down, suspect in the face, after a foot chase. My handcuffs, not my boot or suspect.
     ‘CCTV cameras turning as soon as a suspect is close to caught.’

     He added: ‘P***ing and sh***ing inside suspects homes during raids, on their beds and clothes… jacking up and illegally searching thousands of people with no legal justification.
     ‘Having other people write PC statements, who were never there because they could twist it into legality.
     ‘Targeting 16-24 year old black males essentially because we arrest them more, perpetrating the circle of arresting them more.’
     The nine allegations attracted the attention of thousands of Twitter users, demanding names.

     Wood responded: ‘I’m one person relying on a flawed memory system. This is an indictment on the culture of the profession, not a witch-hunt. Sorry.’
     He added: ‘What’s really hard to convey is that some things are so common place, they didn’t register until I was on the other side.’
     Baltimore Police told the New York Daily News that the lack of specific names and places brings many of the allegations into question.

     Ah, I’ve forgotten what it’s like to go a week without hearing ‘witch hunt’.

231. rq says

     25 June 2015 at 9:25 am

     As revenue from court fines drops, so does Ferguson’s budget

     The Ferguson City Council approved a budget on Tuesday that seems to suggest that the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting is exacting a significant financial toll: a reserve fund stripped down to $2.7 million and a $3.2 million deficit.

     But those numbers could change substantially over the next year — for better or worse — as the city is dealing with several unknowns.

     For starters, Ferguson is in the middle of negotiating a deal with the Department of Justice for reforming its police department and municipal court, which were the subject of a blistering report published more than three months ago.

     Despite hiring one of the nation’s most prominent attorneys, Dan K. Webb, the city has budgeted $500,000 for the negotiations and implementing any proposed reforms, Jeff Blume, Ferguson’s finance director, said at a meeting two weeks ago. The city is paying Webb $1,335 per hour.

     The cost of a federal monitor to oversee the implementation of any agreement between the city and the Justice Department could be in excess of $1 million.

     But in an interview this week, Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III indicated the city may not have to pay for a monitor, saying that the $500,000 could be sufficient.

     “There’s never been any doubt that if the federal government wants to bankrupt us they could,” Knowles said. “The question is, is that what they want to do? Do they want to fix the problems that they have outlined in the report? Or do they want to come down from Washington and punish us and bankrupt us? … From the conversations we have had, they are very cognizant of our financial situation.”

     Councilman Brian Fletcher said the city has been working to reform its courts and implement a community policing program as a show of good faith before any agreement is in place.

     The cost of a federal monitor would likely force the city to disband its police department, Fletcher said.

     “That’s why we have hired a high-priced attorney to try and prevent that from happening,” Fletcher said.

     The hope, said Fletcher, is for the city to negotiate a memorandum of understanding rather than a decree that requires a federal monitor.

     Confederate-Themed Store Worker Launches Profanity-Laced Tirade At CNN Reporter

     If you’re in the business of selling Confederate flags and other Confederacy-themed merchandise, it hasn’t been a good week. In the wake of the shooting deaths of nine people at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the South is finally waking up to the fact that the Confederate flag is a racist symbol. After calls by John Oliver, The Daily Show and even NASCAR to remove Confederate flags, the country is listening. Walmart, Sears, and eBay — among others — are pulling Confederate-themed merchandise, South Carolina and Mississippi are calling for removal of Confederate flags in their states, and even Warner Bros. is scrapping Dukes of Hazzard car toys. Even Glenn Beck — GLENN BECK — is calling for its removal.

     However, not everyone is happy about the removal of confederate flags. Anne Coulter, for one, has attacked South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley as “an immigrant” who doesn’t understand Southern history for calling for the Confederate flag’s removal.

     Then, there’s the guy in the video above, who sells Confederate-themed memorabilia in South Carolina. On the one hand, his industry is being attacked all over the country. On the other hand, with Confederate flags being pulled at major retailers, his business is probably BOOMING right now with racist hangers-on clinging to the past, hoarding Confederate-themed merchandise while it’s still available.

     In either respect, he wasn’t happy to be interviewed by CNN, going on a profanity-laced tirade against a CNN reporter, accusing the networking of “stirring sh*t up,” and following them around in a futile attempt to get them to stop filming, as though trying to stop CNN from documenting racism.

     Thanks to the First Amendment, however, this guy can continue selling Confederate flags as long as he wants. On the other hand, his customer base is — hopefully — rapidly dwindling.

     And yes, of course the video ended with the man flipping off the camera, saying that “you’re all part of the problem.”

     How Turbans Helped Some Blacks Go Incognito In The Jim Crow Era

     There’s a weekly trial on the Internet about who may be stealing culture from whom. Earlier this week, the defendants were Iggy Azalea and white gay men. A while back, it was Macklemore and the Harlem Shakers.

     Now, we have come across a story from the Jim Crow era about cultural mimicry between people of color.

     In mid-20th century America, the turban was a tool that people of color used for “confounding the color lines,” writes Manan Desai, board member of the South Asian American Digital Archive.

     At the time, ideas of race in America were quite literally black and white. In some places, if you could pass yourself off as something other than black, you could circumvent some amount of discrimination. People of color — both foreigners and African-Americans — employed this to their advantage. Some did it just to get by in a racist society, some to make a political statement, and others — performers and businessmen — to gain access to fame and money they wouldn’t have otherwise had.

     ‘A Turban Makes Anyone An Indian’

     Chandra Dharma Sena Gooneratne was getting a doctorate at the University of Chicago in the ’20s. Originally from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), he traveled around America lecturing on the need to abolish the caste system and on India’s push for independence from the British, among other topics.

     In a recent article about Gooneratne, Desai notes that visiting scholars from Asia and Africa, like Gooneratne, were startled to encounter anti-black discrimination. But some of these people, who were lugging around colonial baggage from their own countries, found a way around racism.

     Gooneratne, for one, used his turban while traveling in the Jim Crow South to avoid harassment, and advised others to do the same, Desai writes.

     “Any Asiatic can evade the whole issue of color in America by winding a few yards of linen around his head,” Desai quotes Gooneratne as saying. “A turban makes anyone an Indian.”

     And there is more informative and interesting stuff at the link.

     Huckabee. Huck’s Free Pass

     Gov. Mike Huckabee made the following unambiguously racist and demagogic appeal in Myrtle Beach, S.C., last week:

     You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell ’em what to do with the pole; that’s what we’d do.

     This is a straightforward racist appeal for the following reasons:

     1 The South Carolina flag is a perfectly nice flag, featuring the palmetto plant, about which no “outsider” has ever offered any free advice.
     2 The Confederate battle flag, to which Gov. Huckabee was alluding, was first flown over the South Carolina state Capitol in 1962, as a deliberately belligerent riposte to the civil rights movement, and is not now, and never has been, the flag of that great state.
     3 By a vote of both South Carolina houses in the year 2000, the Confederate battle flag ceased to be flown over the state capitol and now only waves (as quite possibly it should) over the memorial to fallen Confederate soldiers.

     Thus, as well as crassly behaving exactly like someone “from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag,” former Gov. Huckabee of Arkansas deliberately aligned himself with the rancorous minority who are still not reconciled to the idea that South Carolina may not officially consecrate racism and slavery and secession. “Your flag”? What an insult, not just to the descendants of slavery but to the many, many other loyalists and Unionists who fought and died to bring their state back into the Union. And what is the point of the “outside the state” slur? Wasn’t this exactly what Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas used to say, as if to make it seem that all was hunky-dory in his own tight little dominion until them goddam “outside agitators” arrived? In the end, as Gov. Huckabee may or may not recall, the 101st Airborne Division, most of them “outsiders” not from Arkansas, had to be sent by a Republican president to integrate the schools of Little Rock. That was a lot of trouble and expense that the big-mouth rednecks put us all to, but it was worth it. It’s insufferable to hear this glib idiot make a mockery of it now in order to try to get the Klan vote in South Carolina. […]

     But when real political racism rears its head, our easily upset media fall oddly silent. Can you guess why? Of course you can. Gov. Huckabee is the self-anointed candidate of the simple and traditional Christian folk who hate smart-ass, educated, big-city types, and if you dare to attack him for his vulgarity and stupidity and bigotry, he will accuse you of prejudice in return. What he hopes is that his neo-Confederate sickness will become subsumed into easy chatter about his recipes for fried squirrel and his other folksy populist themes. (By the way, you owe it to yourselves to watch the exciting revelations about his squirrel-grilling past; and do examine his family Christmas card while you’re at it.) But this drivel, it turns out, is all a slick cover for racist incitement, and it ought not to be given a free pass.

     And not merely racist incitement. So slack is our grasp of history and principle that we seem unable to think of the Confederacy as other than “offensive” to blacks. But there are two Republican candidates in this election—the absurd and sinister Ron Paul being the other—who choose this crucial moment in our time to exalt those who attempted to destroy the Union by force, and those who solicited the help of foreign powers in order to do so, and whose treason led to the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Should their patriotism be questioned? I would say most definitely yes, and questioned repeatedly, at that, perhaps especially if they are seeking the nomination of the party of Lincoln.

     In Washington, D.C., Gov. Huckabee has hired as smooth and silky a pair of big-city insiders as you could meet in a day’s march: Ed Rollins and James Pinkerton. Elegant ornaments of many a past administration and many a well-heeled think tank (Pinkerton describes himself loftily as “a Burkean conservative and a Nixonian foreign-policy realist”), they know exactly what calculation lies behind their boss’ smarmy appeals to the uneducated racists and losers and to the fools who believe that Adam and Eve were real (and recent) people. But do they endorse his street tactics as well? I, for one, would rather like to find out. Here’s a genuine scandal about racism, and waddaya know? My great profession is absolutely determined to overlook it.

     FBI: Terrorism charges not ruled out in Charleston shooting, which is a relief.

     The FBI indicated Wednesday that its ongoing investigation into the Charleston shooting could lead to domestic terrorism charges, depending on the facts uncovered by investigators.

     After the shooting at Emanuel AME Church last Wednesday, federal authorities immediately announced a hate crime investigation. Many have questioned whether the inquiry should investigate the murders as domestic terrorism, from presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to the Republican Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes.

     “Both hate crime and domestic terrorism investigations afford investigators the same set of tools and techniques,” FBI Spokesman Paul Bresson told msnbc on Wednesday. “Any eventual federal charges will be determined by the facts at the conclusion of the investigation, and are not influenced by how the investigation is initially opened.” […]

     On Friday, a spokesperson for Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the DOJ was investigating the shooting as both “a hate crime and as an act of domestic terrorism.” Ultimately, it is up to Justice Department prosecutors to decide what federal charges to bring. The FBI also struck that note earlier this week, telling The Daily Beast its goal was to “follow the facts and learn more about the incident itself and what was behind it.”

     Today’s FBI statement goes a bit further, directly acknowledging the potential case for applying the model of “domestic terrorism investigations” to the Charleston attack.

     Landrieu says Lee Circle should not honor Robert E. Lee any more

     Lee Circle may not be Lee Circle much longer… if the mayor gets his way, it will no longer honor Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

     Mitch Landrieu says it is time to reevaluate the monuments around New Orleans.

     “Now that’s not to say that we ought to take these icons that represent a part of our historical past and just ignore them,” Landrieu said. “I think the bigger questions is: Should they be put in places of prominence?”

     Landrieu says he started thinking about Lee Circle some time ago.

     “One of my friends who is African American, his name happened to be Wynton Marsalis, said to me; ‘Have you ever thought about that thing?'”

     The mayor says there is a place for things like the statue of Lee.

     “I think that it’s probably in a museum,” he told WWL TV.

     He says perhaps Lee Circle should not be dedicated to one person.

     “It should be something that edifies us and brings us together.”

     The New Orleans Tricentennial Commission is considering the future of Lee Circle as well as other statues like Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

     Landrieu says, “That’s something that we should talk through. It’s part of racial reconciliation. It’s part of really having a discussion as part of our tricentennial… We’re building the city back, not the way it was, but the way it would have been if we had gotten it right the first time.”

     Landrieu and the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation today are hosting a Welcome Table event involving a citywide initiative that focuses on race, reconciliation and community building.

232. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     25 June 2015 at 11:09 am

     (Via Iris Vander Pluym)
     From Medium–
     How white people got made:
     (excerpt)

     There’s a perception that whiteness is working for white people. It’s not. Whiteness is one of the biggest and most long-running scams ever perpetrated.
     It started in the late 1600s in America, but like so many scams, it spiraled out of control until it had a life of its own.

     Not long after Europeans started arriving on the east coast of North America and the Caribbean Islands they found themselves rich in land but desperate for labor to work the land. The answer they struck upon was importation of bond labor, initially mostly Irish. The Irish had not been considered fully human under English law for centuries, and they ended up in plantations and working sugar under the Caribbean sun. The easy part of importing Irish (and Scottish) slave labor was that they were right next to England. The downside is there wasn’t enough of them for the amazing amounts of land laid before the eager English settlers, and thus the Atlantic slave trade with Africa was born. This is the story we hear in school, but the abridged version we get, intentionally or not, hides the scam of it. Initially the bond terms of convict, Scotch-Irish, and African labor was a set period of time, at the end of which they received bond money and their freedom in this new land. In fact, not that many bondsmen and women lived to be free, but some did, and established themselves as a mixed-race, free peasantry of the new world. If you’ve ever wondered where the free blacks of so many stories of early America came from, a large number were the families of freed African bond laborers.

     The white cry, from the 17th century, to George Wallace, and still alive in the present day.
     As time went on, the labor needs of the land holders continued to grow, and desperate to cultivate the land, they were loathe to let go of their bond servants and the bondsmen and bondswomen’s children (whom they kept in bondage for a legally defined time as well). In the mean time, a growing American peasantry was proving as difficult to govern as the European peasantry back home, periodically rising up in riot and rebellion, light skinned and dark skinned together. The political leaders of the Virginia colony struck upon an answer to all these problems, an answer which plagues us to this day.

     The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the whites. They gave the whites certain rights, and took other rights from blacks. White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the 1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of America.

     As of the 18th century whites could not be permanently enslaved as they sometimes had been before, and black slaves could never work their way to freedom. The whites were told this was because God had made the blacks inferior to the whites, just as the whites were inferior to the superior classes that owned property. It’s worthwhile to remember that they didn’t give whites political rights, they didn’t give whites the vote — that would not happen then nor at the revolution and independence. Whites didn’t get the vote until the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Property owners, both of land and slaves, were the only ones who could vote. That included black land and slave owners until various states passed laws in the early 18th century to take their franchise away.

     This Reconstruction era election poster is free of any content that is not inarticulate blind fear of black people.
     This plan worked gorgeously. It broke all efforts of the majority of people, African or European, to fight for civil and political rights in America against a landed class that literally ruled everything. It reduced a portion of the people to the status of the negro slave, and gave the poor but now white people a precious and entitled inch to stand above the permanently enslaved on the social ladder. The next thing the politicians did sealed the deal: they paid poor whites a bounty for runaway slaves, and often made them overseers for slaves, turning every poor white in America into a prison guard against the people who had once been their neighbors and allies.

     Racism drafted every intellectual endeavor to reinforce the idea of an intrinsic superiority to the upper class European. When Darwinism came along, it was immediately adapted as a justification for exactly the same message that had been presented as the will of God previously.
     If this seems like a crazy way for people to behave, it’s important to think about what was believed about the natural order of things back in the 1600s. Nowadays, we don’t really think about class as a thing that often, and certainly not a natural thing. But when white and black people were conceived, the idea of class was literally believed to be handed down from God. Aristocracy flowed from the divine right of kings, and by their blood or elevation. The poor were poor because God so wished it. Keeping peasants in line and using them to their fullest was what the aristocracy was for, and the tactics that accomplished this were considered wise stewardship. Sometimes that meant concessions, and sometimes divide and conquer, but as long as you didn’t have peasant rebellions, you were doing a good job. This view of the world, never universal but powerful and prevalent, held on in one form or another for a very long time. It infected the views of British, Spanish, Dutch, and French imperial masters all over. The powerful were those God had chosen, and those in their power were chosen by God to be of use. While fainter, this idea is so strong it still leaks into the modern era in places like the atheological ideas of Prosperity Christianity. In the frame of mind of aristocracy and a divinely ordained ruling class, such a plan to reorder people and make them pliant was understood to be a move of genius blessed by god and king, if it worked.

     This plan worked, in fact it worked so well it became the blueprint for the next few centuries of colonization, revised and spread all over the world, even beyond the conception of white and black.

     As the aristocrats and their successors traveled around the world through the colonial age, Europeans all over would find or define a group within the colonial territory and elevate it above the other groups, give it some privileges, though never enough to challenge the intruding rulers. In exchange for this slightly elevated status, the rulers would make those people do the colonial dirty work, and usually keep them slightly more well off than their fellows. Over time, these slightly elevated people often tried to keep their European masters in power even after the people realized how evil colonialism was, maintaining the system both to keep above their fellows and out of fear of retaliation for the dirty work they’d done. The most familiar contemporary case of this practice people will recognize is the Belgian categorization of Tutsis and Hutus, and the tragedy that still hangs over that arrangement over a century later. But really, the idea started in Virginia.

     While the perception of race riots is often of black rioting, the worst and most frequent race riots were whites against blacks. The worst such riot in US history was the New York Draft Riot, which killed 119 blacks and scarred the city of New York forever.
     The invented category of white people is still the largest case of this colonial strategy in the world. Whiteness was not always invented in opposition to chattel slavery, even in America. As the newly invented whites pushed West, they were reinvented in opposition to the existence of other people inconveniently on the land the newcomers believed God had ordained to them as their destiny. Elsewhere, they were reinvented as the able administrators, the teachers and ministers, and God’s own technocrats, both bettering and properly using the non-white world. Each invention of whiteness was a new permutation, but each one also harkened back to the ur-form of Virginia: God made the whites to serve kings, and everyone else to serve whites. Today, corporations and the remains of colonial systems have reduced the vast majority of those in the arbitrary category of white people to drafted screws for a global forced-labor prison camp.

     ****
     From Business Insider–
     A Georgetown law professor just perfectly captured the absurdity of Confederate pride:

     On a Monday episode of “The Diane Rehm Show,” a caller said her Confederate ancestors deserved respect, even though the Confederate flag represented “racial hatred.”

     To which Butler replied:

     I have no respect for your ancestors. As far as your ancestors are concerned, I shouldn’t be a law professor at Georgetown. I should be a slave. That’s why they fought that war. I don’t understand what it means to be proud of a legacy of terrorism and violence.

     Last week at this time, I was in Israel. The idea that a German would say, you know, that thing we did called the Holocaust, that was wrong, but I respect the courage of my Nazi ancestors. That wouldn’t happen.

     The reason people can say what you said in the United States, is because, again, black life just doesn’t matter to a lot of people.

233. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 1:12 am

     Fearing a ‘Catastrophic Incident,’ 400 Federal Officers Descended on the Baltimore Protests

     The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was worried when people took to the streets of Baltimore to protest the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who died after being injured while in police custody. Specifically, they worried that protestors would vandalize a facility that housed three containers holding liquid natural gas and “cause a catastrophic incident.”

     “Given the current scope of activity and expected protests this upcoming weekend, the potential exists for these containers to be targeted for vandalism or worse,” says a DHS intelligence update dated April 30.

     The facility in question, located in South Baltimore, is owned by energy company Exelon Corporation, which maintained a “small security presence in the area.” But given that the protests over Gray’s death turned violent, the company feared that security could be “breached by protestors” — so it alerted the FBI. […]

     Baltimore was not the only city to which DHS turned its attention in the wake of Gray’s death. Documents also reveal that the department monitored solidarity protests around the country, such as those that occurred in Washington, DC. A DHS message to officials there read:

     All,

     We are monitoring two separate protests scheduled for this evening. The first will begin with a gathering at the DuPont Circle fountain (1900 P St.) at 6pm. Their call for action on Facebook states:

     “Every 28 hours a Black person is killed in America by law enforcement officers. This statistics includes Black women and girls as well. Join us on Wednesday for a speak-out as we remember Rekia Boyd and honor the lives of the many Black Women, Transwomen, and Girls impacted by state-sanctioned violence…. There is no current intel that these marches will be anything but peaceful. However, MPD will be prepared for all contingencies.”

     It is not uncommon for DHS to keep tabs on protests around the country, particularly in cities where federal buildings and parks are located that could attract the presence of protesters. The presence of the Federal Protective Service in Baltimore, which is DHS’s police force, was named “FPS Operation Straw Temple.”

     An internal document from another DHS component, the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), said Operation Straw Temple resulted in the “national deployment” of personnel to support FPS’s regional division and protect federal facilities in Baltimore.

     “FPS HQ [headquarters] Quick Reaction Force (QRF) on standby for deployment, if required,” the document read.

     An April 27 document says more than 400 FPS officers and FPS protective security officers were on duty in Baltimore during the protests “protecting high-risk federal facilities.”

     By comparison, the documents say 1,783 National Guard troops were assigned to Baltimore City and 298 were “deployed on the streets ‘on mission.'” More than 400 state troopers from Montgomery, Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Howard, Prince George’s, and Harford counties were there. As were about 300 law enforcement officers from Pennsylvania, 150 from New Jersey, and 45 from Washington, DC. […]

     The April 30 intelligence document says the threat information DHS obtained came from “Internet Chatter.” It also said “various threats exist towards law enforcement as such a high level of situational awareness is warranted.”

     One alleged threat derived from the media office of the Baltimore Police Department, which claimed that “members of various gangs including the Black Guerilla Family, Bloods, and Crips have entered into a partnership to ‘take out’ law enforcement officers.” Baltimore police issued a press release on April 27, the day of Freddie Gray’s funeral, and the story was widely reported in the media. The alert was also distributed to police officers nationwide.

     But an email sent that day by a DHS employee who works in intelligence & analysis at the Maryland Fusion Center to DHS intelligence officer Earl Rose IV called into question the integrity of the Baltimore Police Department’s [BPD] threat information.

     “The gist of this alert asserts that the BGF [Black Guerilla Family], the Bloods, and the Crips, have partnered to ‘take out’ law enforcement. The alert says this is a credible threat, but, I do not know if that ‘credible threat’ means that they actually have specific information or that the 3 groups involved have credibility in taking that kind of action against law enforcement, I would assert that it’s the latter,” wrote the fusion center employee named Brian. DHS redacted his surname.

     The fusion center employee, whose name is Brian, said it was “curious that the alert came out from BPD media relations section instead of BPD Intelligence Unit, which is where we typically receive this kind of info…. The tensions have heightened here in Baltimore over the last 72 hours so this alert cannot be considered without that context.”

     Hours later, in the same email chain, another DHS employee said, “FBI Baltimore has interviewed the source of this information and has determined this threat to be non-credible,” apparently marking this the first time that it was debunked since the threat first surfaced. […]

     The intelligence bulletin said the information the FBI collected was not intended to “associate otherwise protected First Amendment activity with criminality or a threat to national security, but instead is included only for the purpose of providing situational awareness of activities that may lead to violent action, such as use of force, destruction of property, or expression of true threats, as has occurred recently within the region.”

     Remember that supposed gang war the Baltimore police was worried about? The one against police? See bolded bits (my bolding).

     Why are people comparing vandalizing Civil War monuments to ISIS destroying ancient idols, not to Eastern Europeans toppling Stalin statues?

     Ted Cruz’s South Carolina Leadership Team Defends Confederate Flag

     Two of the state legislators chairing Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) presidential campaign in South Carolina defended the Confederate flag this week after the state’s Republican governor called for its removal from state Capitol grounds.

     State Sen. Lee Bright (R), a member of Cruz’s leadership team, said that removing the flag would dishonor the memory of those who fought for South Carolina during the Civil War, according to the Spartanburg Herald Journal. He added that the media was trying to create conflict by turning the flag into a wedge issue, characterizing the movement to do away with it and other symbols of the Confederacy as a “Stalinist purge.”

     In a later interview with Politico, Bright said that he hadn’t spoken with the Cruz campaign about the issue and would “encourage presidential candidates to let us deal with this.”

     A spokesman for Cruz’s presidential campaign told Business Insider that the candidate would be leaving the matter of the flag up to those local lawmakers.

     “What Senator Cruz has said is that this is an issue for the state of South Carolina and South Carolinians to sort out and I think that’s what you’re watching happen,” Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler told the news site.

     Another of Cruz’s campaign co-chairs in the Palmetto State, state Rep. Bill Chumley (R), voted against opening debate on the flag. Chumley also told CNN on Tuesday night that he believed it more urgent to debate the fact that no one present at the massacre of nine black Charleston churchgoers was armed.

     “We need to be focusing on the nine families that are left and see that this doesn’t happen again,” Chumley said in the CNN interview. “These people sat in there, and waited their turn to be shot. That’s sad. But somebody in there with the means of self defense could have stopped this. And we’d have had less funerals than we’re having.”

     Nearly three dozen S.C. lawmakers avoid taking stand on removing Confederate flag – this may have changed in the meantime.

     A two-thirds majority is needed in both the House and Senate to remove the flag from its current location.

     By Wednesday night, just 34 lawmakers have failed to respond to The Post and Courier poll to state their positions on the flag’s future. Some who responded earlier in the day said they would not make their positions known until those killed in the shooting were buried.

     “I’ll be releasing a statement after the funerals,” Rep. Neal Collins, R-Easley, tweeted. “I’m keeping my focus on the victims until.”

     The Post and Courier plans to continue calling, emailing and tweeting to those who have not responded to the poll in an attempt to pin down their positions.

     Alabama governor orders Confederate flags removed from state capitol, BoingBoing on what is now old news.

     Eh? Presidential Hopeful Jim Webb Defends Confederate Soldiers

     Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb said on Wednesday that the Confederate flag has been wrongly used as a racist symbol, but stopped short of condemning the flag outright. He also added that Americans should remember “honorable” Civil War veterans, “including slave holders in the Union Army.”

     “The Confederate Battle Flag has wrongly been used for racist and other purposes in recent decades. It should not be used in any way as a political symbol that divides us,” said Webb in a statement responding to questions about whether the Confederate flag should be removed from Virginia license plates in the wake of the Charleston shooting.

     “But we should also remember that honorable Americans fought on both sides in the Civil War, including slave holders in the Union Army from states such as Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware, and that many non-slave holders fought for the South,” said Webb.

     Webb is also the only 2016 candidate not to condemn the Confederate flag outright or support a push to remove it from the South Carolina capitol grounds. Republicans Scott Walker, Rand Paul and Jeb Bush as well as all the other Democratic candidates have spoken out against the flag.

     A likely candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination who counts two relatives among Confederate Army veterans, Webb has a long history of defending Dixie soldiers and the flag. He is the last 2016 presidential hopeful to speak publicly about the flag.

     I… yeah.

234. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 1:23 am

     I’m surprised this hasn’t been put up yet: East Charlotte church fire being investigated as arson, several articles on that.

     The Charlotte Fire Department is investigating an early morning Wednesday fire at Briar Creek Road Baptist Church as arson, Senior Fire Investigator David Williams said.

     A 911 emergency call from a resident in a nearby apartment complex received at 12:52 a.m. turned into a third alarm by 1:21 a.m., with a total of 14 engines and 75 firefighters on hand to quell the flames. Williams said it took around an hour to get the fire under control.

     “The Baptist church on Briar Creek Road right before Central, it’s on fire,” the caller told dispatchers. “It’s really big.”

     Firefighters realized when they arrived that it was a “monumental task,” Williams said.

     Two firefighters were injured and treated for heat-related injuries. Williams said they don’t believe anyone was in the building at the time of the fire.

     “When I got here I was even amazed to see that the flames were so high,” Mannix Kinsey, the pastor at Briar Creek Road Baptist Church, told WBTV. “I am thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, this church is going to be destroyed.’”

     The church building sustained excessive damage to its back left wing, used as an education building. Williams said it is close to a total loss.

     The rest of the property, including the sanctuary and gymnasium, has smoke damage. He said they estimate total damage is more than $250,000.

     Kinsey’s wife, Rhonda, is the co-pastor. Both are African-American. About 100 people, most of them black, attend the church. It also shares the campus with two or three immigrant churches, including one whose members were born in Nepal.

     Butler’s awesome quote again, in article form above by Tony, just the quote here.

     On terrorism: In California, Diddy Is an Alleged Terrorist. Under U.S. Law, Charleston Shooter Dylann Roof Is Not.

     Sean Combs — the rap mogul’s real name — was arrested by the UCLA Police Department Monday for attacking Sal Alosi, a coach on UCLA’s football team. Diddy’s son, Justin Combs, is a redshirt junior on the squad, which means he can participate in Bruin practices but not games. According to TMZ (sorry, but they’re the best source on this), Biggie Smalls’s onetime hype man swung a kettlebell at Alosi after the coach rode his son in practice a bit too hard.

     Diddy was arrested after the altercation. He’s been charged by UCPD with three counts of assault with a deadly weapon, one count of battery, and one count of making a terrorist threat.

     That’s right. A terrorist threat.

     For the record, Charleston shooter Dylann Roof was charged with nine counts of murder and one count of possession of a firearm during the commission of a violent crime for allegedly killing nine black parishioners at an African American church in the historic South Carolina city. He faces the death penalty.

     On Saturday, FBI Director James Comey said Roof is not a terrorist.

     There’s a bit more at the link, but that’s the key info.

     Giving Up on Gun Control

     Last weekend, the world saw white supremacist and mass murderer Dylann Roof posing stone-faced with Confederate flags and license plates. Sometime after the pictures were taken, Roof allegedly shot dead nine parishioners at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, using a legally acquired 45-caliber Glock handgun after passing a background check. On Monday, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley announced that the Confederate flag would be removed from State House grounds, calling it “a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally offensive past.” In the space of 24 hours, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Walmart all stopped selling products featuring the Confederate banner. Google stated Tuesday that it would scrub the flag from ads and Google Shopping. Several flag makers say they will stop manufacturing the flag. Today, the governor of Alabama has ordered the removal of the flag from state Capitol grounds.

     Almost literally overnight, the chimera of consensus around the Confederate flag as a divisive but misunderstood symbol of “heritage” or “Southern pride” fell away, revealing the banner for what it is. The obscenity of the flag and the murderous racism it represents have dominated a national conversation about the American way of hate and violence for all the right reasons.

     The flag has also dominated the conversation for a single wrong reason, which is that most Americans have given up on achieving meaningful gun control in their lifetimes or in their grandchildren’s lifetimes.
     ADVERTISING

     Up to and including the December 2012 mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, Americans could be certain that every time a crazed man emptied a weapon inside a church or movie theater or first-grade classroom, the aftermath would produce a national conversation—just like the one we’ve been having about Confederate symbolism—about strengthening America’s gun control laws. The conversation happened because we believed it would lead somewhere.

     After Newtown, we realized that the conversation would never lead anywhere, and so we found other things to talk about.
     […]

     When 20 dead first-graders cannot result in new and meaningful national measures on gun control or even in weak and largely symbolic national measures on gun control, then perhaps—if you are of a certain cast of mind—that is the moment to retreat on gun control.

     And we have. People will still talk about it. Michael Bloomberg will always have more money to spend on it. Karl Rove can propose the repeal of the Second Amendment. Manchin and Toomey can discuss reviving their push on background checks. Gabby Giffords can continue to fight, and when, say, North Carolina decides not to repeal permits for handgun purchases, she can treat this maintaining of the status quo as a victory—which, in its grotesque context, it is. Mostly, though, we find other things to talk about.

     In May 2014, when Elliot Rodger killed six people, three of them by gun, and wounded 14, seven of them by gun, in Isla Vista, California, we talked about misogyny, and we coined hashtags like #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen.* Now, we’re talking about the Confederate flag.

     And the next time a crazed man commits mass murder, and the next time, and the next time, we will talk about gun control a little, but we will also find a second conversation. Because those conversations are worthy and potentially fruitful, and also because we have given up.

     Did anyone else get her point? Because it sounds like she doesn’t believe that racism is a factor here, or that misogyny was a thing for Elliot Rodgers.

     Tonight #Ferguson protesters were watching a film on patio at @MoKaBes. 100yds away @chicanapoet1 was arrested while #CopWatch.ing an arrest
     The same aggressive cop who sprayed, hit, and jumped on me on May 19 showed up with OC Spray already in his hand.
     The Ferguson PD just… isn’t getting any better, is it.

235. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 1:31 am

     Heavily white crowd protesting “white silence is violence” & “black lives matter” – not sure where, though.

     Baltimore City settles false imprisonment suitThe city’s spending panel approved an $80,000 settlement Wednesday in a false imprisonment suit against Baltimore police.

     Antonio Smittick sued the city after, he said, he lost his job as a building engineer and grounds maintenance worker stemming from an incident with police in May 2012. He sued five officers on the force.

     Smittick said he’s remained unemployed since he was arrested after city police charged him with drug distribution and having a handgun on his person.

     For some entertainment relief. Raven-Symoné Says Black Twitter Hates Her.

     Some might wonder if Raven-Symoné really could see the future, why she’d say certain things aloud, but the former Cosby star remains candid and seemingly unapologetic. Last week, Symoné affirmed her support of Rachel Dolezal, suggesting that the former president of Spokane’s NAACP — a white woman who posed as black for several years — simply needs a “better foundation.” That support, which rubbed many the wrong way, came on the heels of several other disappointing statements from the star.

     In March, before Symoné was named an official co-host of The View, she sparred with Whoopi Goldberg in defense of modern-day use of the ‘n-word.’ Two months later, she shared her disapproval of Harriet Tubman as a top choice to earn a place on U.S. currency. “I don’t like that idea,” she said. “I think we need to move a little more forward.” According to Symoné, Rosa Parks would have been a better choice because she is “closer to the progression that we’re doing now.” Granted, Rosa Parks wouldn’t have had the opportunity she had without Harriet Tubman, but we won’t get into that right now.

     Prior to making all of these outspoken statements, Symoné sat down with Oprah Winfrey for an episode of Where Are They Now? on OWN. During this conversation they discussed Symoné’s sexual orientation and her racial identity. Her comments on the latter shocked Winfrey and many of her viewers. “I’m tired of being labeled,” Symoné said. “I’m an American. I’m not an African-American, I’m American.” While Winfrey modestly warned her about how the black community might respond, Symoné sheepishly laughed it off. Now, Us Weekly reports that the opinionated TV star admits that Winfrey was right.

     In an exclusive video for the site, Symoné shares 25 unknown facts about herself, including what it was like to meet Oprah. Though it was clear Oprah’s prophecy would pan out the moment the words slipped out of Symoné’s mouth, the young star confesses that Winfrey called it. “She told me that black Twitter’s going to hate me forever. She was right,” she says. Symoné also talks about her former Disney show, That’s So Raven, and her favorite characters from Saved by the Bell. Take a look at the video below.

     Youtube video clip, At Pastor’s Viewing, Mourners Show ‘Who We Are’

     The Confederate flag flew high Wednesday outside the South Carolina Statehouse, but a large drape kept mourners from seeing it as they filed past the open casket of a veteran black lawmaker and pastor.

     St. Louis to consider mortgaging city buildings to lure National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Funny how they don’t propose the same sort of methods to help rebuild poorer neighbourhoods.

     Dirty Laundry. Person labelled “South” saying ‘Okay, okay’ while taking the confederate flag out for a wash.

236. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 1:39 am

     Text between second and third links above should be blockquoted.

     Black People Are Feared, Black Teachers Are Threats

     Black members of Teach For America (TFA) know the real reasons conservatives and progressives alike attack them. Black folk aren’t supposed to seek justice on our own terms. Black teachers, especially from Teach For America, aren’t supposed to protest in the streets of Ferguson, Baltimore or McKinney, Texas. But whether in school or in the streets that surround them, black corps members of TFA are teaching the rest of us where a great education and the pursuit of justice should take you.

     Let’s be clear. Black people are certainly feared. But being young, gifted and black and committed to social justice makes you a threat.

     I, for one will have your backs.

     The latest person to target their fear of Black uprightness is conservative columnist Michelle Malkin who all but brands Teach For America as an incubator for terrorists because the teacher organization had the audacity to back some of their own who see a need for justice beyond a classroom. […]

     To support her claim that TFA is a splinter cell, Malkin aims at Brittany Packnett, executive director of TFA-St. Louis, who’s credited with widely amplifying the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, which became an effective social justice movement. Packnett’s radicalism can easily be seen by her passing out newsletters at protests and making hashtags.

     Malkin also targets former TFA teacher DeRay Mckesson who through social media has been narrating and facilitating on-the-ground activism in Ferguson, Baltimore, McKinney, Texas, and other places where civil liberties don’t seem to apply for black folk.

     Malkin slyly quoted one of “[Mckesson’s] fellow peace-loving instigators” as saying, “[W]e’re setting the stage for a terrorist attack in this country, and the group is not going to be ISIS.” Malkin makes no real connection between Mckesson and the “fellow peace-loving instigators,” but she’ll rest on black fear to make TFA into an incubator of social upheaval.

     Packnett and Mckesson have grown accustomed to attacks; black and brown TFA Corps members are criticized from all sides. Progressives regularly accuse them of naively providing black faces for a white agenda. Now they are charged with being the source for race riots in America.

     At least Malkin credits blacks for being the masterminds of something. Black and brown corps members in TFA know too well that deficit thinking—the practice of making decisions based on negative assumptions about particular socioeconomic, racial and ethnic groups—usually casts them as sellouts, militants and/or pawns to someone else’s master plan. […]

     Now that TFA is browner—more than 50 percent of new members are people of color—will the money and prestige still pour to TFA? Will the organization and students still be considered smart?

     Certainly, people like Malkin will attack.

     But, I will never give up on young people of color wherever they are. Will you?

     I have your back.

     The Past. South Carolina. Person labelled ‘South Carolina’ looking at a sign labelled ‘Past, Present, Future’ with a ‘You Are Here’ dot beside ‘Past’.

     Racism. America. The shadow of racism blocking out the light.

     ISIS. Soldiers looking out saying “Keep an eye out for ISIS” while behind them a person wears the confederate flag, brandishes a gun, and waves a flag saying RacISm RacISm.

     Federal Hate Crime Charges Likely in South Carolina Church Shooting

     Dylann Roof, 21, already faces nine counts of murder in state court, where he could be sentenced to death, and a conviction there would make federal action largely symbolic. It was not clear whether state prosecutors, who did not return calls seeking comment, would defer to a federal case.

     Analysts at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have concluded “with a high degree of certainty” that Mr. Roof posted a racist manifesto online, which could be crucial to a hate crime prosecution, a law enforcement official said. The website was registered in February under his name, though the person controlling it tried the next day to make it anonymous. […]

     When a crime can be prosecuted under either state or federal law, the Justice Department often refrains from acting, particularly when a suspect faces severe state penalties.

     But Justice Department and F.B.I. officials agreed that the Charleston shooting was so horrific and racially motivated that the federal government must address it, law enforcement officials said. South Carolina does not have a hate crimes law, and federal investigators believe that a murder case alone would leave the racial component of the crime unaddressed.

     “This directly fits the hate crime statute,” one law enforcement official said. “This is exactly what it was created for.”

     More of other things at the link.

     Matthew Ajibade: 2 ex sheriff’s deputies, 1 nurse indicted for involuntary manslaughter in jail death of Savannah man Mathew Ajibade

     Two former sheriff’s deputies and a contract health care worker at the Chatham County jail were indicted Wednesday on felony involuntary manslaughter and related charges stemming from the Jan. 1 death of Mathew Ajibade, 21, at the jail.

     But despite the nine-count indictment in the well-publicized case, some were upset at the grand jury’s lack of felony murder charges, and protesters downtown Wednesday pressed for accountability and larger community discussions about racism — while also calling for Sheriff Al St Lawrence to step down.

     “(The indictments are) nowhere near enough,” said attorney Mark O’Mara of Orlando, Fla., who represents Ajibade’s family. He said the grand jurors should have had more time to make decisions, and he believed the district attorney could have presented a better case.

     “(The district attorney) failed to get a felony murder indictment, and that is her responsibility,” O’Mara said.

     He said members of Ajibade’s family shared his sentiment.

     “They are disappointed that nine out of 12 people involved in their son or cousin or brother’s death have gotten away without any criminal liability,” O’Mara said.

     The grand jury said Jason Paul Kenny, 31, caused Ajibade’s death during the commission of “reckless conduct … without any intention to do so by tasing him while he was restrained,” Chatham County grand jurors said in the indictment.

     The grand jurors alleged he committed “cruelty to an inmate, a felony, by causing the death of (Ajibade) … by using excessive force.”

     …. And more at the link.

237. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 1:58 am

     Off-duty St. Louis officer dragged blind woman and dog out of bar, suit says

     The suit against off-duty officer William Clinton says he was working a security job at Caleco’s Bar & Grill, at 101 North Broadway, on Oct. 28, 2013. The suit says that Marvelena Quesada had left the bar as it was closing, but returned to help her friend settle her bill.

     As she was paying the bill at the bar, Clinton “told her to ‘get out and get out now,’” the suit says, and refused to wait while she stowed her debit card and wallet in her purse. Clinton told her “I said now,” used an expletive, and added, “You’re going to jail,” according to the suit.

     Clinton handcuffed her and pulled her off her chair, causing her to hit her head on the floor, the suit says. He then dragged her out the bar and down the sidewalk on her back, the suit says. The leash for Quesada’s guide dog was on her arm, the suit says, and the dog was dragged into chairs and tables.

     Outside Caleco’s, as Quesada screamed for help, her friend and other patrons successfully urged Clinton to release her, the suit says.

     Quesada suffered cuts and bruises, a back injury, depression and loss of sleep due to nightmares, according to the suit. She was confined to her bed for weeks afterward, the suit says. The two-count lawsuit seeks unspecified compensation for unreasonable seizure and assault and battery.

     Clinton could not be immediately reached for comment.

     Quesada lawyer Stephen Ryals declined to comment on anything outside the details contained in the lawsuit.

     St Louis finest.

     The Tears of Mother Emanuel. (via @JIJennings) See painting within.

     Feds says BPD’s claim that gangs formed pact to ‘take out’ officers was ‘non-credible’, as outlined above in the Vice article.

     Using documents acquired from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the article addresses the Baltimore Police Department’s April 27 announcement they had evidence of a “credible threat” posed by members of the Black Guerilla Family, Bloods, and Crips joining together to “take-out” law enforcement officers. Members of the Bloods and Crips told City Paper and other media outlets that, while there was a truce, it wasn’t made to target Baltimore Police officers; rather, it was to stop the violence while protesting the death of Freddie Gray and police brutality. The documents that Vice News acquired show that the FBI in Baltimore didn’t find the supposed threat credible

     Nothing particularly new. BPD lied.

     Gov Nikki Haley will attend all 8 funeral services planned for the 9 victims of Emanuel AME Church murders. Two are being addressed together. Kind of her. But she couldn’t take the flag down for Pinckney?

     At rural South Carolina flag factory, sadness and pride

     Mitchum, 60, is one of more than 100 employees at Valley Forge’s South Carolina factory, located about 65 miles north of Charleston on a rural back road among cotton and corn fields. The production line was running fast this week, as huge raw bolts of red, white and blue nylon were expertly cut, sewn and stitched into hundreds of American flags per day in advance of the July fourth holiday.
     ADVERTISING

     Employees, most of them African-American, were nearing the end of the their nine-and-a-half hour shift in a hot, low-ceilinged warehouse, sitting at sewing machines standing at cutting tables, or adding brass grommets to nearly finished flags.

     There was little sign of the landmark change that had occurred outside on Tuesday, beyond the listing chain link fence, in boardrooms of some of America’s largest flag manufacturers, including Valley Forge.

     The Pennsylvania-based flag company was on Tuesday the first major U.S. flag maker to halt production of the Confederate Flag, following the shooting of nine black churchgoers during a bible study in Charleston last week. Annin Flagmakers and Eder Flag, two more of the largest U.S. flag manufacturers, quickly followed suit, as calls grew to stop production of a flag that has been a divisive symbol in America and a reminder of the South’s slave-owning past.

     “I wish I had stopped doing it a long time ago,” said Scott Liberman, chief executive officer of Valley Forge, a company founded by his great grandfather in 1882 to make burlap bags and flags for the military. Liberman started in customer service for Valley Forge in his twenties, back when his father Michael ran the business.

     “If it has become offensive to people, I don’t want anything to do with it,” he said. […]

     Many of the workers here, she said, are related or attend the same church. They are close, bringing in food to share on breaks. And last week’s attack in Charleston hit close to home.

     “Everyone here is disturbed,” Mitchum said. “We are praying people, church going people.”

     Workers at the factory, she said, take pride in what they do. Valley Forge flags have covered coffins of American presidents since John F. Kennedy. And, according to the company website, its flags were flown during the Normandy Beach landings in World War Two.

     Now, the workers are proud, too, of their company’s decision to discontinue making a flag many saw as a direct affront to African-Americans.

     Mitchum paused when the bell rang for the end of the day’s shift. The walls of her small office shook as workers came and went from the front door down the corridor.

     But before leaving for the day, she tried to sum up what the American flag means to her.

     “Coming up, I didn’t have it good,” she said, tears welling up. “When the wind blows, a flag is free, it can go left and right.”

     “If it has become offensive”. Was there ever a time when it wasn’t offensive? I mean well and truly, considering the reasons it was flown? Or was it just that those offended weren’t ‘people’ back then?

     Court’s order replacing Charleston County chief magistrate criticized for #CharlestonShooting bond hearing comments. Basically a bunch of ‘it is ordered’ and ‘it is decreed’ and there’s a new judge.

238. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 2:11 am

     Hundreds Gather At Wake For Charleston Church Shooting Victim Sen. Clementa Pinckney

     Hundreds of people lined up in front of the South Carolina Statehouse in Columbia Wednesday morning to pay their respects at the viewing of state Sen. Clementa Pinckney.

     Senator Pinckney was one of the nine people killed in the Charleston church shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last week.

     Sen. Pinckney’s body was brought to the front of the Statehouse in a horse-drawn wagon after making a procession through the town.

     His casket was followed by a troop of uniformed officers, who carried it from the carriage into the Statehouse for a public, open casket viewing.

     He is reportedly the first black person whose wake was held under the capitol dome since the Reconstruction era.

     Sen. Pinckney’s family stood on the State House steps as his casket was carried into the building.

     During the hours-long viewing, Pinckney’s wife stood at the entrance, reportedly greeting each of the hundreds there to pay their respects.

     The line for the viewing stretched throughout the Statehouse, through the nearby park, and down the blocks of Columbia.

     The viewing, which is expected to last for hours, was attended by a wide range of people of varying ages and races

     President Obama is expected to give the eulogy at the senator’s funeral in Charleston on Friday.
     […]

     After Sen. Pinckney’s procession passed directly under the flagpole in front of the Statehouse flying the Confederate flag, many took to Twitter and Facebook to call this a sign of disrespect.

     In the wake of the Charleston shooting, many politicians and public figures have recently requested to have removed due to its symbolic history involving slavery, and the murder and mistreatment of African Americans.

     A black drape was reportedly placed over the window inside the State House, blocking mourner’s view of the flag outside.

     Gun Homicides, Mass Violence And Racism In The U.S.

     Investigators continue to sift through evidence about the man who gunned down nine parishioners Wednesday inside an historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. What is already clear is that this horrific event lays bare longstanding and lethal contradictions in this country: Mentally deranged individuals have no trouble getting guns, and more than 150 years after the Union defeated the confederacy and freed its slaves, racism lives on. Can this tragedy galvanize the personal and political will needed to face these issues directly and make change across the country?

     Guests

     Paul Butler professor, Georgetown Law School
     E.J. Dionne Jr. senior fellow, Brookings Institution; columnist, The Washington Post; author of “Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent.”
     Daniel Webster director, Center for Gun Policy and Research, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

     Audio at the link, with transcript – it’s the entire interview where Butler made his (I believe it should be ‘now-famous’) statement about having no respect for confederate ancestors.

     Forrest statue land owner fires back at blocking efforts

     The owner of property along Interstate 65 where a long-debated Nathan Bedford Forrest statue has stood for nearly two decades says a new effort to block it from view is a “knee-jerk” reaction and that doing so would hurt Nashville’s tourism.

     Bill Dorris, who owns the 3.5-acre private land where the Forrest statue was erected in 1998, told The Tennessean on Tuesday that some of his supporters have advised him to put the statue on stilts to overcome efforts to obstruct its view from the interstate.

     At-large Metro Councilwoman and Nashville mayoral candidate Megan Barry and others are seeking to hide the statue from interstate view by getting the state of Tennessee to plant trees and brush on public property along I-65.

     But Dorris said there’s probably not much he could do if the state, which owns the nearby right-of-way, chooses to build a tree canopy — though he made clear he doesn’t think it would be a wise move.

     “The No. 1 thing that disturbs me about the whole situation is, what about the 70,000 people that come here to study Civil War history every year?” he said in a telephone interview. “You’re taking away one of the reasons they’re coming to Nashville. They do support the restaurant industry, the lodging industry — and how many blacks work in those industries, work (as) tour guides and what have you?”

     Barry, one of seven candidates for mayor of Nashville, said she’s had encouraging conversations with Republican Gov. Bill Haslam about the possibility of using private funds to restore trees and brush along the stretch of Interstate 65 in Crieve Hall where the 25-foot, fiberglass statue is visible. Barry has said the statue “serves as nothing more than a symbol of division.”

     More at the link – but it’s a really freaky statue. Also, did he just say black people working in the tourism industry would suffer if the statue is taken down?

     Va. gov: Leave Confederate statues alone

     “I am sticking just with the license plates because I do think that is a message that is so hurtful, that flag, to folks,” McAuliffe told MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on Wednesday.

     “But not statues. I mean, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, these are all parts of our heritage,” he added. “And the people that were in that battle, the Civil War, many of them were in it obviously for their own reasons that they had for that. But leave the statues and those things alone.”

     The governor ordered the Sons of the Confederacy to redesign its commemorative license plate without the image in the wake of a mass shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C. […]

     McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee chairman who won the governorship in 2013, noted that Virginia used to house the capitol of the Confederacy and said that the state is in a “very unique situation.”

     But he was resolute on his opposition to flying the Confederate flag and called for a renewed effort to pass gun control legislation after the South Carolina shootings.

     “There’s just no place for it today. We have to all work together, we have to build, as I say, the new economy. You can’t do it with divisive symbols and words,” he said of the Confederate flag.

     “I’ve fought hard, I’ve tried to get comprehensive gun restrictions that make common sense. We ought to have background checks,” he added.

     (Is everyone forgetting that Roof’s gun was gifted to him by his father? Where’s the background check? How would that have helped in this case?)

     Papa Pope re: race and the confederate flag.

     Charleston victim funerals begin, as Confederate flag falls in other states

     The body of Pastor Clementa Pinckney returns home Thursday evening, where his flock has been preaching love in the face of the hate crime that took his life and those of eight others.

     The wake for the late reverend and state senator shot dead teaching a Bible class over a week ago will commence in the house of worship where he was felled – Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

     And mourners in Charleston, South Carolina, will begin committing to the ground the remains of the people whom Dylann Roof, 21, killed in a racist shooting spree on June 17.

     On Thursday, they say goodbye to Ethel Lance and Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton. […]

     South Carolina legislators are taking steps in the direction of removing the battle flag that flies at a Confederate memorial, but the process appears complicated and slow.

     A law protecting it and other Civil War symbols requires a two-thirds supermajority vote in each chamber of the legislature to take it down. But critics say it could go much faster if lawmakers would just strike down that law with a simple majority vote.

     While they still grappled with it, the Confederate flag flapped nearby on Wednesday as Sen. Pinckney’s body went on public view in the State House.

     He will be buried on Friday. President Barack Obama will give his eulogy.

     Bunch of stuff in between, too.
     Those two funerals that happened yesterday.

239. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 8:07 am

     Fire At Black Church In North Carolina Ruled Arson. Please make it a hate-crime, too (HuffPo article).

     St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay suggested renaming Confederate Dr. in Forest Park to Freedom St. or Justice Dr. @FOX2now

     Bernie Sanders Walks A Fine Line On Gun Control. Apparently he talks real well on racism and police matters, too. I’ve heard. That part doesn’t seem to be in this article.

     Comedian Repeatedly Attempts to Get Arrested to Illustrate White Privilege (VIDEO)

     We’ve covered comedienne and filmmaker Jessie Kahnweiler before – specifically, her film about taking ownership of her struggle with bulimia, The Skinny – but her most recent video tackles something a little more timely.

     Kahnweiler’s latest video, “Jessie Gets Arrested,” is a playful but still trenchant look at just how hard a white woman has to work to get arrested in this day and age.

     The video shows footage of Kahnweiler trying really hard to get arrested on the streets of L.A. – she swims in a fountain marked “No trespassing,” jumps into a parade to take pictures with police officers and at one point offers to sell her antidepressants to two on-duty cops. (They politely inform her that she’d be committing a crime, at which point, she feigns ignorance – they just release her afterwards.)

     But no, no racism, we’re all post-racial now.

     Unarmed man shot, killed by Baltimore County officers in Owings Mills – because he was holding ‘what police believed to be a gun’. Can we just meditate on that thought for a moment?

     Baltimore County police officers shot and killed an unarmed man in Owings Mills early Thursday while responding to a report of domestic violence at a home they had visited more than a dozen times over the past three years.

     Spencer Lee McCain, 41, died about 8 a.m. at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, police said.

     Baltimore County Police Chief Jim Johnson said officers believed McCain was armed. They did not find a weapon on him.

     Police received a 911 call about a possible domestic disturbance at the condominium in the 3000 block of Hunting Ridge Drive in Owings Mills shortly after 1 a.m., Johnson said. He said a 10-year-old child who lived at the home called a grandmother, who dialed 911. […]

     As the officers went inside, Johnson said, they encountered a man in a “defensive position” making movements that led officers to believe he had a weapon.

     The man was later identified as McCain, Johnson said. He would not elaborate on the man’s actions or why police believed he was armed.

     All three officers fired at the man and hit him several times, Johnson said. Nineteen shell casings were found on the floor in the area where the officers shot the man, police said.

     Tony Fugett, president of the NAACP’s Baltimore County branch, said he was briefed by police on the shooting. McCain was black, as was one of the three officers.

     “Whenever there is a police-involved shooting, there’s always a concern of what happened,” Fugett said. “Typically, what we do is we will look into the matter and we will see what the report says. We don’t like to jump to any conclusions.”

     Police did not release the names of the officers. All three have been placed on administrative duty, Johnson said. Under the union contract, officers involved in shootings are not identified until 48 hours after the incident.

     Arson At Black Church In North Carolina Investigated As Possible Hate Crime – oh good.

     Authorities are looking into whether an arson at a predominantly black church Wednesday morning in Charlotte, North Carolina was a hate crime, local TV station WBTV reported.

     The fire at Briar Creek Road Baptist Church came a week after gunman killed nine parishioners at a historic black church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. The suspect, Dylann Roof, a white, 21-year-old with apparent white supremacist leanings, was charged with nine counts of murder and is being held without bond.

     The Charlotte Fire Department ruled that the blaze, which did $250,000 worth of damage, was an arson, according to the news station. The department was also investigating whether the fire was a hate crime.

     The pastor of the church told WBTV that he hopes the fire doesn’t turn out to be racially motivated.

     “We are still talking about this same issue and this is 2015,” the Rev. Mannix Kinsey said. “We all have to consider what else do we need to do to actually be able to work together.”

240. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 8:24 am

     The Supreme Court saved the Fair Housing Act of 1968

     In a close 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that stated the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs was guilty of housing discrimination.
     The case, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., focuses on the disparate impact portion of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prevented housing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, in an effort to combat residential segregation during the civil rights era.
     A disparate impact claim means that regardless of intent, a law results in discrimination. This means that appellants only have to prove that a law’s impact results in discrimination, and not the additional claim that the writers of the law intended it to have that impact. Disparate impact is a key component of the Fair Housing Act, and is an important tool for the federal government in prosecuting instances of discrimination. The Supreme Court affirmed this component in its decision.
     The case was brought by the Inclusive Communities Project, a Dallas-based nonprofit that works to improve racial and socioeconomic integration within neighborhoods. Inclusive Communities, as they are known, sued Texas in 2008, on the grounds that the agency encouraged racial segregation in its support of low-income housing projects.
     The decision came as somewhat of a surprise to civil rights advocates who were concerned that the Roberts court, if given the chance, would rule against a disparate impact claim, thus taking the teeth out of the Fair Housing Act. In 2013, the Court invalidated a key portion of the Voting Rights Act, another nondiscrimination law from the civil rights era.

     Yay!

     Fists Up, Fight Back’ Solidarity With Charleston

     After the June 17 white supremacist attack at Emanuel AME Church, in Charleston, South Carolina that left nine African American parishioners dead, the Black Liberation Action Coordinating Committee (BLACC), Students for a Democratic Society and the Trans Liberation Front held a rally, June 19 in front of the Old Tallahassee Capitol. 30 community members attended the rally and vigil, which started with nine minutes of silence, one minute for each victim.

     During the moments of silence, the Tallahassee Police Department interrupted the vigil, stating the candles were a fire hazard and those in attendance needed to move off the Old Capitol steps and into the grass. The emcee, Regina Joseph, stated it would only last nine more seconds, and, “The police care more about property rights than Black rights.”

     After the moments of silence, the first speaker was Ellena Fisher of BLACC, who told the crowd about Black women and their role in the liberation movement. The next speaker, Selestria de La Cruz, said, “We need to continue to grow in solidarity. Without people standing together, there will be no change. The more people that demonstrate their frustration, the further it can be spread that white supremacy is real. Too many people are ignoring it and it must stop.”

     Other speakers included Katherine Draken and Naomi Bradley.

     All of the speakers spoke about the role of Black women as leaders and how people can become more involved in the movement. The event ended with chants such as “Black lives matter,” and “Fists up, fight back!”

     Supreme Court Rules That Disparate Impact Claims Are Allowed Under Fair Housing Act, BuzzFeed on the 5-4 Texas decision.

     The Supreme Court Thursday ruled that claims of “disparate impact” can be brought under the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

     The 5-4 closely divided decision — authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by the four more liberal justices — was a victory for civil rights advocates, who have been long concerned about how the high court would resolve the issue.

     In January, the justices heard arguments in the case — which was brought back in 2008 by the Inclusive Communities Project against the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs.

     The question that ultimately reached the Supreme Court is a relatively simple one: Whether “disparate impact” claims are able to be brought under the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

     “Disparate impact” claims address policies that are not discriminatory on their face but have a “disparate impact” on a particular race, and civil rights advocates have said they are a key tool in addressing housing discrimination.

     While the FHA makes no specific mention of whether such claims are covered by the law, every court of appeals to decide the issue and the federal government — through the Department of Housing and Urban Development — agree that such claims are permitted under the act.

     “Congress’ use of the phrase ‘otherwise make unavailable’ [in the FHA] refers to the consequences of an action rather than the actor’s intent,” Kennedy wrote for the court on Thursday. “This results-oriented language counsels in favor of recognizing disparate-impact liability.”

     The “disparate impact” question is one the court has been trying to review for several years now. Twice previously the justices have accepted a case to address the issue only to have it settle out of court before the justices could rule.

     Confederate and American flags burned at Denver anti-racist rally

     Around 50 people gathered to rally against white supremacy in the wake of the Charleston shooting. It was a loosely organized event, drawing from various groups committed to anti-racism. Coffee Not Cops — an anti-cop group that meets weekly for coffee and anarchist agitation — and the Denver Branch of the International Socialist Organization (Denver ISO) were hosts of a Facebook event billed as a “Rally against White Supremacy!” until the page was deleted promptly after the event.

     “America has always celebrated murderers,” said KGNU DJ and founder of Denver Cop Watch Shareef Aleem. “Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, all of ‘em murderers and killed Indians. This cracker right there with the rifle in his hand —” Aleem gestured to the iconic statue of a Civil War cavalryman standing alone in front of the State Capitol. At this point, the protestors had taken shelter under trees. “Why do you think he got a rifle right there in the middle of Denver, Colorado? ‘Cus he murdered Indians. He killed ‘em and made the way for white people to come right here,” Aleem said.

     Since the Charleston shooting, people in South Carolina and all over the country have questioned whether the confederate flag — a symbol associated with a long history of racial violence — should still fly in public. Aleem questioned whether Colorado’s own Statehouse statue is any better. A plaque beneath it explains that the cavalryman was part of a Union army attack on Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians on the banks of Sand Creek that left 150 men, women and children dead.

     “This statue is such a clear example [of white supremacy]” said Josie, a community organizer. “It commemorates a soldier who is essentially a racist militia man who massacred indigenous people — a murderer. And here, you know, people don’t want to talk about the state sanctioned violence against indigenous people that still happens today.”

     Aleem told the crowd that “indigenous” doesn’t just refer to Native Americans. “We’re all indigenous. We all come from Africa, no matter what shade you are, what color you are. You come out of Africa.” So race relations in America is not a black and white issue, he said: “When we’re talking about white supremacy, whiteness is not the color of someone’s skin. I want to make that clear. It is a legal, political, social, religious status.”

     That’s an interesting point.

     Tamir Rice’s father on dealing with tragedy. I believe yesterday was Tamir’s birthday. Video at the link.

     In an interview with msnbc’s Trymaine Lee, Leonard Warner say it’s “tough” to feel Tamir Rice in his heart, but not here. Leonard says the cops “need to be punished,” “they did something wrong.”

241. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 8:31 am

     File under General Cruelty. The 80,000-Volt Handcuffs That Let Cops Shock Prisoners

     Here’s how the devices work: A prisoner’s wrists or ankles are cuffed––and then, if the person holding the transmitter desires, he or she can send tens of thousands of volts of electricity coursing through the prisoner’s body from a distance of up to 100 yards. As the brochure puts it: “A demonstration of this in front of a prisoner and they will know if they are out of compliance the Single Cuff model will drop them.”

     All that for $1,500 plus $400 for the transmitter. There’s also a pricier model. Here’s a weirdly eager man testing it out at a National Sheriff’s Association meeting: [video]

     The way that the man taking the video laughs as the other man writhes on the ground in uncontrollable spasms and painful screams adeptly captures the part of human nature that leads me to believe that these devices will spread with terrible results.

     They’re already used on prisoners in some jurisdictions. The company itself lists some testimonials on its web site. A detention center in San Juan County, New Mexico, demonstrated the device on a prison guard back in 2012. A Missouri sheriff’s department tested a similar device from a different manufacturer in 2013. They too found it extremely amusing to debilitate colleagues with painful shocks. Lots of young men would react similarly, hence my reluctance to let them put devices they approach with jocularity rather than seriousness on people that they disdain.

     I am hardly alone in finding stun-cuffs creepy and suggestive of evil––for goodness sakes, Darth Vader seems to have pioneered their use on the Death Star.

     Back in the real world, there are a depressing number of news articles about parents arrested for putting shock collars intended for dogs on their children. Of course, no one would equate kids with prisoners acting up in custody. But the stories are narrowly relevant for two reasons: they’re written as though the shocks are self-evidently cruel, though they’re far weaker and less painful than what stun-cuffs deliver; and in at least one instance, a man was arrested for putting a shock collar on his kid that he never used, suggesting that on some level, even law enforcement understands that it isn’t just being shocked that matters in these situations––the burden of knowing that someone has a finger on a button that could deliver a shock at any moment matters too. When these stun-cuffs are preemptively placed on prisoners, those who don’t misbehave will still suffer that psychological trauma; and recall that many prisoners have not yet been convicted of any crime.

     Those problems would give pause even if America’s police officers and prison guards were not prone to excessive force and prisoner abuse. In the real world, these devises are bound for a profession where both problems are epidemic. “Here at Myers Enterprises, Inc., we like to say our devices turn bad boys into choir boys,” the company told Police One magazine in what is either a sponsored post or a softball interview with a sponsor. “Once the device has been explained, dry fired, and then applied to the individual, 99.9 percent of the time the prisoner is calm and complies with all orders. This allows officers to be professional in their duties.”

     There’s more at the link, but geeeeez I didn’t think the cops needed even more tools to shame and abuse arrested people.

     Arsonist Targets Predominantly Black Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, NBC on the burned church.

     South vs. North, cartoon. Southern racism vs. northern racism, in other words.

     Westboro Baptist Church threatened to picket funerals of Charleston victims. Big mistake.

     The Westboro Baptist Church has been served a warning by hacktivist group Anonymous after threatening to picket the funerals of the nine people who were shot dead in Charleston last week.

     The church group (formerly led by hate preacher Fred Phelps and his immediate family) regularly grab headlines for spewing warped religious ramblings at those in mourning, often claiming that deceased soldiers are killed because “god hates fags”.

     In several messages on Twitter this past week, Westboro has even claimed that Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old charged with the massacre in South Carolina, was sent by God.

     And while Anonymous has targeted the group several times in the past, they have decided to ramp up the pressure in light of Westboro’s threats this week.

     In a statement released online, the hackers vowed to “entirely” destroy Wesboro’s cyber infrastructure and to work “on the ground” to peacefully prevent protesters getting near any of the funerals:

     This sustained campaign against the Westboro Baptist Church will continue until all the funerals in Charleston, South Carolina are finished.

     Anonymous calls upon all Anons, allied crews, hacktivists and supporters worldwide to join with us in attacking every known cyber asset of the WBC.

     The group says it will be sharing intelligence about the movements of Westboro protesters via the hashtag #TrackWBC and is posting successes of its cyber-attacks via the hashtag #OpShutDownWBC.

     To the grieving people of Charleston, South Carolina: we ask that you put these hateful people from your mind entirely. Anonymous has this for you.

     We know how to deal with these animals, and we will do so. Forget them. Let us handle this for you as our gift of condolence for your unspeakable loss.

     I take issue with the dehumanizing use of labelling Westboro members as ‘animals’. But that’s about it.

     Man who bombed Colorado Springs building occupied by NAACP signs plea

     A man accused of igniting a pipe bomb outside a building in Colorado Springs occupied by the NAACP has entered a plea agreement with federal prosecutors in the case.

     A federal court document indicates that Thaddeus Cheyenne Murphy has agreed to change his not guilty plea in connection to a Jan. 6 bombing.

     A change-of-plea hearing has been scheduled for Aug. 3 in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge William Martinez.

     Jeffrey Dorschner, spokesman for U.S. Attorney John Walsh, said Wednesday he could not comment about the plea agreement.

     Before the plea, Murphy faced up to 20 years in prison for a federal charge of igniting an incendiary or explosive device that damages or destroys a building and 10 years for a charge of being a convicted felon in possession of a weapon. He is being held without bail.

     The Colorado Springs man had told investigators he was angry at his accountant, but there are at least two major problems with that scenario.

     Henry Allen Jr., president of the Colorado Springs branch of the NAACP, has said he is suspicious of Murphy’s claimed motivation.

     For example, the accountant Murphy had referred to, Steven Douglas DeHaven, had died six months earlier. Second, building tenants say there were no tax preparation businesses there for at least 17 years. In fact, records indicate DeHaven worked out of his house, not in the building that was bombed.

     Allen said he believes Murphy had targeted the NAACP office.

     Well, at least there’s some movement in that case.

     Audit: 30 percent of police dashboard cams in Prince George’s are broken

     A Prince George’s County police internal audit has determined that about a third of the more than 1,000 dashboard cameras installed in department cruisers are malfunctioning.

     The department plans on Thursday to release details of the audit, which will show that most of the problems stem from a particular camera model the county adopted in 2004 that has become obsolete. As a result of the audit, the department has developed steps to ensure that a majority of the broken dashboard cameras are replaced or fully operational by the end of the year.

     The county’s maintenance contract with Kustom Signals, the maker of the now-obsolete camera, was set to expire in May, said Capt. William Alexander, a commander in the department’s internal affairs division.

     The audit was launched in April, weeks after Officer Brennan Rabain died in a March 12 crash. As investigators tried to determine how Rabain lost control of his patrol car, they found that the cruiser’s dashboard camera was broken.

     “The driving point of this audit was to figure out if this is fiscally responsible to engage in a contract for cameras that aren’t repairable,” Alexander said. “But I can’t discount the fact that Officer Rabain’s death highlighted the need to assess the current status of our fleet.”

     The county began installing in-car cameras 15 years ago. Today, 1,048 marked cruisers have the devices, Alexander said.

     The cruisers are either equipped with newer Panasonic cameras or with older DVD-based cameras from Kustom. The Kustom cameras have become difficult to maintain, and parts are no longer being made to fix the devices.

     “In the last half of 2014, the parts issue really began to rear its head,” Alexander said. “We were using cruisers longer than anticipated to be fiscally responsible, with the life of the cars lasting longer than the life of the cameras.”

     Thomas C. Mooney, a defense lawyer who practices­ in Prince George’s, said that in many instances he’ll request cruiser video from the county for a case but is told that video footage couldn’t be found or is not available because of a broken camera.

     How convenient. How very convenient.

242. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 8:40 am

     Australia: Aboriginal girl, 3, ‘tried to SCRUB her skin off’ after being told she couldn’t be Queen Elsa from Frozen because she is black

     The little girl subjected to racist abuse at a Disney event in Melbourne after she dressed up as a character from the animated film Frozen was so ‘traumatised’ she reportedly tried to scrub her black skin off.

     After taking her daughter Samara, 3, to a Disney-themed children’s event at Watergardens shopping centre in Taylors Lakes, Victoria, Indigenous mother Rachel Muir was annoyed enough at having to wait two hours in line – but much worse was to come.

     Ms Muir wrote on Facebook that while the pair were waiting in line a mother and her two daughters also in the queue racially abused her daughter, telling her: ‘Queen Elsa isn’t black’.

     ‘The lady in front of us turned around to Samara and said “I don’t know why you’re dressed up for because Queen Elsa isn’t black”,’ Ms Muir was quoted telling local newspaper The Courier.

     ‘I asked the woman what she meant by the comment and then one of the woman’s young daughters screwed up her face, she pointed at Samara and said “you’re black and black is ugly”.

     On Tuesday, Ms Muir told NITV that the widely publicised incident had consequences for little Samara.

     ‘She was asking to have baths every day and she was soaping up to look white. But then she got the glove and scratched herself until it was red.

     ‘I had to tell her skin colour isn’t going to come off. You are born that way and it isn’t going to come off.’

     Ms Muir told the broadcaster her daughter has since expressed pride in her skin and background.

     And that, folks, is how children learn to be racist.

     The Confederacy is not our heritage

     But the Confederacy is not my heritage. It’s not anyone’s heritage. The Confederacy is our shame. In the whole of the Confederacy, there is not one thing to be proud of. Not the men. Not their actions. Certainly not the ideals.

     You’ll see people today proclaiming that the Confederacy was launched over an issue of “state’s rights,” or on some esoteric principle. No. That idea didn’t even appear until decades after the hot portion of the Civil War turned into the cooler years that have followed. You’ll also see it expressed simply that the war was fought for slavery. But that’s not quite right, either.

     The Confederacy was launched not on a platform of slavery, but on a foundation of racism. That it maintained slavery as an institution was a feature. That it upheld racism was the design. Read the words of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, speaking at the Athenaeum in Savannah, Georgia:

     The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. … Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the “storm came and the wind blew, it fell.”

     Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.

     . . . look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgement of the truths upon which our system rests? It is the first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society. Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws.

     Head below the fold for just a reminder of what that all means. […]

     There is, in the whole Confederate enterprise, not one admirable notion. Is it part of our history? Yes, it is, to our everlasting shame. It’s a part of our history the same way that the apartheid state is a part of South African history. It’s a part of our history the same way that the Nazi Reich is a part of German history. It’s a part of our history that should embarrass us.

     It’s the part of our history in which traitors who not only didn’t believe in the American union, but also didn’t believe in the basic ideals of America, formed a state whose core was nothing less than pure racism.

     It should be no more acceptable to wave a Confederate flag in the United States than it is to fly a swastika. No more acceptable to proclaim yourself sympathetic to the Confederate cause than to proclaim yourself a supporter of ISIS. There is no moral difference. None. These are the banners of the enemies of our nation and of our ideals—enemies whose existence is based on inequality and subjugation.

     Romanticizing these causes isn’t admirable, it’s an illness.

     I’m going to let y’all read what I left out below the fold on your own, but suffice it to say, that’s a good breakdown.

     Helper Whitey, a short clip from the Daily Show.

     Fashion Chain Zara Profiles Black Shoppers As Potential Thieves, Workers Allege In Report

     In early June, Spanish fast fashion chain Zara hit headlines when the longtime in-house lawyer for their American stores sued for $40 million in damages, alleging anti-Semitic, anti-gay discrimination.

     Zara called their former counsel’s allegations “shocking,” adding that the company intends to “respond strongly and vigorously” in court.

     A report released on Monday suggests the clothier may have deeper troubles, starting with a corporate culture steeped in racism.

     Labor advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy surveyed Zara retail employees at six of the chain’s seven New York City stores this past spring following a handful of scandals involving insensitive designs by the fashion company, like a child’s shirt that resembled a Holocaust uniform.

     The union-backed group secured the participation of 251 of the approximately 1,500 Zara store workers in Manhattan, describing the chosen respondents as a “random sample.” Zara’s corporate powers that be did not participate in the survey — in fact, they refute the findings, calling the report “baseless.”

     Among the study’s claims: black customers are far more likely to be targeted as potential thieves than white customers.

     The report describes a practice within Zara of referring to suspected shoplifters as “special orders,” leading to the racial profiling of black shoppers as soon as they enter the store.

     “Most employees broadly defined the term ‘special order’ as a code that is used when someone ‘suspicious’ — ‘a potential thief’ —walks into the store,” reads the study. “Once a ‘special order’ has been called and the customer is described over the headset, employees and managers follow that customer.”

     Forty-three percent of the Zara workers surveyed did not answer questions referring to ‘special orders’ or said they were unfamiliar with the term. Of the 57% who did respond, however, 46% claimed black customers were called special orders ‘always’ or ‘often’, compared with 14% of Latino shoppers and 7% whites.

     “The majority of employees believe that Black customers are coded as potential thieves at a higher rate than white customers,” it reads. “Employees stated that special orders are identified by ‘dressing a certain way’ and are ‘mostly African-American.’ Special orders were also defined as ‘Anyone who looks Black, not put together or urban.’”

     The Center noted that racial profiling in retail settings is nothing new, describing suspicion and discrimination as part of the experience of ‘Shopping While Black’. “This prejudice stands despite the fact that whites represent 68% of the adult arrests for larceny-theft,” reads the report, citing FBI data.

     Veterans, writers, ‘committed Christians’: Meet the leaders of the League of the South

     The firing of Aniston, Alabama police officer Josh Doggrell last week for his links to the League of the South prompted The Raw Story to see which officials in the neo-Confederate group held similarly prominent positions in their own communities.

     Here’s a primer on the LOS’ six board members:
     ADVERTISEMENT

     1. John Cook

     Cook is a former Army General, a Christian pastor, and a dermatologist in South Carolina.

     A practicing physician at “Southern Dermatology” in Aiken, Cook also holds the title of “Ruling Elder” at the New Hope Presbyterian Church.

     According to a directory of board certified dermatologists, Cook “is a member of the American College or Physicians, American Academy of Dermatology, American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery, American Society for Dermatologic Surgery, and the Augusta Dermatology Society.”

     2. Michael Hill

     A resident of Alabama, Hill is the author of two books on Irish and Scottish military history, as well as the LOS’ president.

     Hill does a considerable amount of white supremacist PR in major media outlets. According to Hill’s official LOS biography, he has made to the case for his organization on BBC Television, Fox News, and other radio and television talk shows.

     3. Eugene Case

     After 22 years as a Christian reverend in Mississippi, Case retired from his pastoral position last year.

     The Aquila Report, a conservative evangelical publication, wrote that Case received a standing ovation from parishioners during after a resolution in the pastor’s honor was read aloud at his retirement ceremony.

     The resolution thanked Case for his decades of “faithful service” and expressed hope that God would “continue to bless Gene as he continues to serve the Kingdom.”

     Case holds a master’s degree in divinity.

     You can read about another 3 at the link.

     Out of Canada, Bill C-304: Hate Speech Clause’s Repeal Gives White Supremacists Rare Moment Of Glee

     A Conservative private members’ bill that repeals part of Canada’s hate speech laws has passed the House of Commons with scant media attention, and even less commentary. But it’s being cheered by many Canadian conservatives as a victory for freedom of speech. And it’s being cheered most vocally by another group: White supremacists.

     Bill C-304, introduced by Conservative backbencher Brian Storseth, repeals Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which bans hate speech transmitted over the Internet or by telephone. It passed third reading in the House of Commons on Thursday and is now headed to the Senate.

     “This is a huge victory for freedom in Canada,” a poster calling him or herself “CanadaFirst” posted on the website of StormFront, a notorious white supremacist group. “However, we still have other unjust Zionist ‘hate’ laws that need to go.”

     “Way to go, Harper. I know we can’t get everything we want, but I stand a little taller today as a Canuck,” wrote “OneMan.”

     The new law doesn’t make hate speech legal on the web or by phone — hate speech remains illegal under the Criminal Code. But by removing it from the Canadian Human Rights Act, it takes away the authority of the country’s human rights commissions to investigate online hate speech and request that violating websites be taken down.

     That has alarmed the Canadian Bar Association, which said in a recent report it’s concerned that the law may be the start of a campaign by the Conservatives to weaken Canada’s human rights laws.

     “The debate surrounding the expediency of section 13 has become the proxy for an open assault on the very existence of an administrative framework to protect human rights in this country,” the CBA stated.

     “Over the years, human rights commissions have remained at the vanguard of eliminating discrimination based on race, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and other grounds, and advancing equality,” the CBA added.

     Other supporters of the commissions say taking away their authority over hate speech will embolden racists and lead to more racial violence.

     I really, really don’t like Harper. Or any of his conservatives.

243. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 8:51 am

     Racial profiling survey Ontario Human Rights Commission, for anyone currently residing in Canada. And possibly others.

     The Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) is developing a new Policy on preventing discrimination based on racial profiling.

     The OHRC currently defines racial profiling as: “any action undertaken for reasons of safety, security or public protection that relies on stereotypes about race, colour, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, or place of origin rather than on reasonable suspicion, to single out an individual for greater scrutiny or different treatment” (OHRC, Paying the Price: The Human Cost of Racial Profiling, 2003, p. 6).

     We want to hear from members of the public about their perceptions and experiences of racial profiling. We are also interested in hearing about how organizations succeed or fail when addressing and preventing racial profiling.

     For more information about the OHRC’s current efforts to address racial profiling through policy development, see the OHRC’s Towards a new OHRC policy on racial profiling.

     NOTE: By submitting this survey, you agree to let us use your responses. The OHRC will protect your privacy and personal information. Survey responses will only be reported on in groups to make sure individuals remain anonymous. No individuals or specific organizations will be identified in OHRC analysis and reporting of survey results.

     Help out and fill it out! They kind of messed up the gender categories (male, female, transgender, other…).

     Whoa and here’s an IndieGoGo that might be worth it: Brown Girl in the Ring – The Prequel

     first caribbean canadian sci fi feature film inspired by nalo hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring

     Nalo Hopkinson, sci-fi movie – what could be better?? Lots more info at the link!

     And we have to get back to the depressing stuff. White nationalists condemn church killings, identify with shooter

     Leaders of America’s core white supremacist groups have a laundry list of perceived grievances. They say the media ignore black on white crime; that desegregation has led to poorer schools for white students; that white people in the United States have lost power to black people.

     And while they don’t condone last week’s shootings of nine black worshipers at a Charleston church, many of the leaders say they understand the motivation behind the attack – and predict more violence to come.

     Interviews with half-a-dozen prominent white nationalists reveal a movement that they say has been re-energized by such things as the election of America’s first black president and, more recently, what movement leaders describe as “a siege” against white police officers.
     ADVERTISING

     “A lot of the whites in the U.S. are starting to wake up,” Robert Jones, grand dragon of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina, said in an interview. White people, he said, are getting “fed up” with the lack of attention paid to crimes against white people by blacks. […]

     Bradley Griffin, a Council board member, called the Charleston attack “horrifying,” And attempted to distance the organization from the killings. “No one in our group has ever said, ‘Go pick up a gun and shoot random people.’ I don’t know where this guy got that idea from,” he said in an interview.

     But he also said he’s sympathetic to Roof’s anger. “If anyone touches a hair on a black person, it’s international news, whereas the most horrific crimes imaginable are inflicted on whites all the time, and I think the media kind of wants to downplay that,” he said. The Council’s website, which has since been taken down, described the group “as the only serious nationwide activist group that sticks up for white rights” and warned against “modern Negro thuggery.”

     Kyle Rogers, a South Carolina member of the Council since 2001, estimated the group’s membership at 10,000, though he said only a fraction are active. He operates a flag-vending website from his home in leafy Summerville, South Carolina, and his business includes selling patches of the Rhodesian and Apartheid-era South African flags, similar to the ones displayed on a jacket Roof wore in a widely circulated photograph.

     “We’re seeing a lot of young people wearing patches like that in the white nationalist world,” said Stephen Piggott, a campaign coordinator at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “If you were walking down the street, the average person wouldn’t have a clue what that patch is. But if he was walking down the street wearing a Nazi swastika, it would be completely different.”

     Griffin, whose father-in-law founded the Council, frets about the tendency of younger people to keep their separatist beliefs private.

     “They hide on the Internet. They don’t organize,” he said. Violence could be avoided, he added, if “people have older men above them to show them discipline like they used to.”

     Asked how he formed his views, Griffin pointed to his childhood in Eufaula, Alabama, a short drive from the birthplace of George Wallace, a former Alabama governor who tried to block desegregation at the University of Alabama in 1963.

     “The political, the cultural views that I have are not surprising at all considering where I’m from,” he said. “There’s a long history of this.”

     Leaders of the white power movement warn that last week’s shootings could presage a rise in violence by disaffected whites who see their world changing in ways they can’t accept.

     “I expect that you’re going to see an uptick in those types of attacks,” said Brian Culpepper, a Tennessee chapter leader of the National Socialist Movement, the largest Neo-Nazi organization in the United States, referring to the shooting in Charleston.

     “Open borders is a huge problem,” he said in an interview, causing white people to be displaced by “third worlders,” and generating “resentment among the whites and among the nationalists.”

     More at the link. None of it particularly happy-making.

     Dylann Roof reportedly wanted a race war. How many Americans sympathize?

     But just how prevalent is this brand of racism? And how many others might feel the same way as Roof? The problem is it’s really hard to say.

     There are 784 hate groups operating in the United States, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Montgomery, Ala.-based organization that tracks and analyzes hate groups and hate crime in the United States. That figure includes neo-Nazi organizations, local and regional arms of the Klu Klux Klan, white nationalists, neo-Confederate and racist skinhead groups, as well as border vigilante and black separatist organizations. Its definition also includes some well-known social conservative groups that oppose homosexuality and LGBT rights, which some on the right dispute constitutes a “hate” group. But white supremacists comprise the bulk of these groups.

     Of course, hate group tallies and membership can paint only a partial portrait of racism in the United States. Some racists don’t understand themselves as such. Others would never adopt a white supremacist label or join a white supremacist group. And others still might be all of the above but would stop well shy of violence and “race wars.”

     And then, there’s the matter of just how readily racist sentiment can even be measured. In October 2012, an Associated Press survey conducted by researchers from Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago found what many Americans of color already suspect: Anti-minority sentiment is part of the American tapestry, no matter what structural moves toward equality have been made.

     A full 51 percent of Americans expressed explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. And when researchers used tests to measure implicit and sometimes unconscious bias, the share of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent in 2008.

     And the way that Americans think about Latinos was not better. A 2011 AP survey found that 52 percent of non-Hispanic whites expressed explicit anti-Hispanic attitudes. And a stunning 57 percent did the same in an implicit bias test. The AP did not conduct previous studies on attitudes about Latinos.

     Of course, these studies are testing for racist tendencies that people might not even be aware of — not avowed white supremacism or anything close to it.

     But whatever the limits of a hate group data and attempts to measure the feelings of Americans, the combination might be the best information available when it comes to just how many Americans have deep-seated racist feelings. And that’s likely to be the case for the foreseeable future.

     In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security released a report analyzing, among other things, participation in domestic hate groups and recruiting efforts. The report revealed that some hate groups focus their recruiting energy on veterans and those entering the military, and it described veterans struggling after a return from war and those affected by the recession as particularly vulnerable to these outreach efforts.

     Conservative critics of the report described it as an insult to a whole range of anti-abortion and anti-immigration groups as well as an unnecessary attempt to smear veterans. […]

     The full list of reasons that Roof entered a South Carolina church and, according to his confession, shot and killed nine people, might never be known. But just how many race-war seeking Americans walk among us seems just as elusive.

     Uh, he wrote about his reasons. FYI.

     Internal Investigation Clears Colo. Officer in Videotaped Traffic Stop – is anyone surprised??

     A police investigation has concluded that a Colorado Springs, Colo., officer acted properly when he pulled a black man from his car. The police sent a letter (pdf) notifying Ryan Brown that the officer is cleared of wrongdoing, despite what’s shown in the video of the encounter.

     The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado said the letter fails to explain the police decision in what the organization considers to have been a racially biased traffic stop on March 25. According to the Denver Post, the ACLU is formally requesting the entire file of the police investigation.

     “The internal affairs decision makes it clear that, when officers removed Ryan and Benjamin [his brother] from a vehicle at gunpoint and Taser point, handcuffed them, searched them and detained them, all stemming from a traffic stop for a cracked windshield, it was just business as usual,” ACLU of Colorado Legal Director Mark Silverstein said in a statement.

     Ryan Brown began recording the stop when officers were frisking Benjamin Brown outside the car. On the recording, Ryan Brown asks the police why they have been stopped and repeatedly asks an officer to identify himself but receives no answer. The video ends with a policeman pulling Ryan Brown from the vehicle and forcing him to the ground. The cllp has been viewed more than 150,000 times on YouTube.

     The police cited Benjamin Brown for a cracked windshield, and Ryan Brown for resisting and interference.

     “The message to the community, especially young people of color, is that they should expect this kind of treatment from Colorado Springs police during the course of routine traffic stops,” Silverstein said. “That is unacceptable.”

     And Marilyn Mosby. Marilyn Mosby: ‘I’m Not Conflicted About Charging the Freddie Gray Cops. I Did the Right Thing’

     In an interview with Vogue, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby made it clear that she meant every single word she uttered at her May press conference, when she announced the charges her office would bring against the six officers who arrested and detained 25-year-old Freddie Gray. That detainment resulted in Gray’s death and sparked outrage about police brutality in African-American communities.

     It was a tense moment, but Mosby described how she was cool about it and more concerned with getting the job done.

     “I don’t think I felt the weight of the case stepping up to that podium,” Mosby told Vogue. “I was thinking, ‘I’m doing the right thing.’ ”

     When asked about the criticism that public opinion compelled Mosby to overcharge the case, Mosby begged to differ. “The unrest had nothing to do with my decision to charge,” Mosby said. “I just followed where the facts led. This is not something that was fast, or in a hurry.

     “From the time that this incident occurred, we were out there conducting our own investigation and working with the [Baltimore] Police Department. There is nothing that we’ve done differently in this case,” Mosby said.

     Mosby wants to help foster a better relationship between law enforcement and working-class communities. And contrary to what some may think, she says she doesn’t have a personal vendetta against cops. In fact, she comes from a family of police officers, with her mother, grandfather and uncle among them.

     “I’m not conflicted about charging these police officers,” she said. “I believe in applying justice fairly and equally, and that is what our system is built upon. That is why I do what I do.”

     Go you, Mosby.

244. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 12:57 pm

     I’m black, and I just went to a reunion at my Confederate flag-loving high school, via Tony (As will be the next link, and a few of the above).

     My ten-year high school reunion happened this past Saturday in Florence, KY. That’s in Northern Kentucky — near Cincinnati, Ohio — close to what many consider the physical border between the North and the South. I didn’t even understand how racist the school was until I was on the plane and I suddenly remembered that our school mascot is a Confederate general. The trip brought back a lot of tough memories and forgotten anxieties from growing up in an area bubbling with racial tension.
     My high school memories

     When I was in high school, I was one of maybe 80 black kids (and that’s being generous), out of a total student population of around 2,000. Seeing other black students was rare, and having class with more than one was bordering on impossible. When you’re the only black kid, you are the diversity, and in high school, nothing is more important than camouflaging and assimilating — which was patently impossible given the nature of melanin.

     I’ve never publicly put into words the debates we had in class (regardless of subject or teacher) about the Confederate Flag. In my “History of American Pop Culture” class, upon the request of the teacher, a kid refused to remove the rebel flag from his BCHS lanyard, citing it as less of a statement of racism, but rather, a proud emblem for his “heritage.” (Which more than likely included slave ownership, but I digress.)

     In AP Psychology, a student wearing a “The South Will Rise Again” T-shirt spoke loudly and confidently — with the support of almost everyone in the room — about how racism didn’t exist anymore and how anyone opposed to the Confederate flag was a “pussy.” In addition, he spewed a lot of racist vitriol about welfare queens and “the ghetto.”

     I’ll never forget the time in Western Civ when the teacher — who taught at the school in the 1980s — recalled the “overreaction” to the flag’s use by the “real racists” who “make everything about race.” The class agreed, and took notes as if her problematic opinions were fact. […]

     The Boone County High School reunion was held at the Florence Freedom minor league baseball stadium. I noticed that I was one of maybe five black people in the entire ballpark. When you’re used to being outnumbered significantly — in ideology and race — you learn to approximate your allies in unsafe spaces upon entry. An intimidatingly large police officer resting his hand near his gun holster was the bouncer for the evening, giving out drink wristbands after reviewing IDs.

     There were no Confederate flags in the ballpark. Mr. Rebel was nowhere to be found.

     After a little liquid courage, I walked to the BBQ buffet and said hi to the 30-40 or so alumni who had decided to attend — most of whom I know from Facebook more than from high school friendships. None of whom were people of color.

     What I found was that everyone was friendly and genuine. We have all grown up, we’re doing our own things. The conversation was light; there were a few babies in attendance. I talked and laughed with some of the people who were likely to have worn Confederate flags to football games or to have used racial slurs with their families at home.

     Why did I go? I went because it’s what you’re supposed to do. I went because I wanted to know how I’d feel all these years later after leaving and having met and befriended tons of people of color. I went because I wondered if the people were still the same.

     The former classmates I spoke to didn’t seem outwardly racist — maybe they’d grown out of it, or maybe just interacting with me, a black person, was enough to temporarily silence the deep-seated hatred they’d grown up with.

     But: We did not discuss the fact that nine people had just been murdered in South Carolina, a Southern state that flies the Confederate flag. Despite being the biggest news event of the week, it never came up, and I didn’t want to be the one to start that conversation.

     And some of the people I talked to were friends with the racist kids from high school. I got updates on a few former students who didn’t attend the reunion — students who, when we were in class together, had seriously problematic views — who have gone on to teach at BCHS.

     I wonder about the students of color attending the school now, who have to isolate themselves from their peers to find peace and acceptance. Like I did.

     While I may have left Mr. Rebel and those Confederate flag-wavers behind, the reunion, coinciding with the events in South Carolina, was a startling reminder that these issues are actually not so ten years ago. There are many people who still believe the Confederate flag is a symbol of heritage, not hate, and I went to school with those people. There are people of color still living in the oppressive environment I was in 10 years ago. I moved out, I moved on, but for others, it’s still a daily reality.

     This Is How They Teach South Carolina Students About Slavery

     South Carolina’s 2011 academic standards for what students should know in social studies classes uses fairly positive language to describe settlers by labeling their actions as “accomplishments.” A grant funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History program, Teaching American History in South Carolina, includes many examples of possible lesson plans on its website.

     The grant program ended in 2009 but it’s still provided as guidance for teachers on the South Carolina Department of Education’s website. For example, one lesson plan is to “summarize the motivation and accomplishments” of the Vikings and the Portuguese, Spanish, English and French explorers, including Lief Erickson, Christopher Columbus, Hernando de Soto, Ferdinand Magellan and Henry Hudson, to name a few.

     Some of the other lesson plans included comparing inventories for two colonial plantations, those of Thomas Drayton and Charles Moore. The students would choose five categories, such as “slaves,” “furnishings,” “farm tools,” and “total estate value” to compare inventories.

     Some of the other lesson plans that were more focused on the perspectives of slaves were having children watch the 1977 television miniseries “Roots,” which follows the story of an enslaved family, and discussing the miniseries afterwards or learning about the separation of enslaved families. On the Stono Rebellion, however, there is an example lesson plan on the a teacher-led discussion on, among other things, “the economic necessity of slave labor.” The lesson plan focuses on the viewpoint of slaveowners, rather than the viewpoint of the rebelling slaves or their plans during and after the rebellion.

     Guiding questions for the discussion included, “What happens to people when they misbehave at school?” and “What happened to the slaves who were involved in the rebellion?” Then the students were supposed to discuss whether the punishment was fair and what actions plantation owners can take to prevent another revolt. After the discussion, students could gather in small groups and record a list of actions planters could take to avoid further slave rebellions.

     Although some of the lesson plans on the website mentioned the horrible circumstances in which slaves lived, the way slavery and slaves were described uses a lot of passive voice and describes why certain African slaves were chosen to do plantation work, as if Europeans would have done the work themselves had they possessed the skills. One of the lesson plans posted on the Teaching U.S. History in South Carolina page explains why West African slaves were chosen:

     “Due to the omission of this crop in their European culture, English colonists who settled the rich North American land lacked the expertise required for the production of rice. Thus, the huge task of cultivating, processing, and packaging rice on South Carolina Plantations was commonly assigned to slaves. This task, though foreign to European colonists, proved to be quite common to the slaves who had been purposely imported from the rice growing region of West Africa. Where many English planters had failed in their previous attempts at growing and processing rice, the knowledge and rice-growing skills possessed by West Africans gave them a newfound success at cultivating the crop.”

     Another lesson plan, which covers South Carolina rice plantations, focuses on the plantation owner and his family. The discussion focuses on the prominent slaveowning family, the Draytons. One teacher chose to dress as the fourth wife of John Drayton, the builder of Drayton Hall, in full historical dress:

     “I began telling my story in personal narrative form; and, as I did, I shared the trunk’s contents: a Betsy doll; a sandalwood fan; two pair of cotton carders; several cotton boles; raw rice; an indigo plant; my chatelaine which held the keys to the house, a small birch mirror, snippets, and a silver thimble box; an ‘old’ dress of mine in the polonaise style; several 18th C toys; and various 18th C tools. I had them hooked. By the end of that first session, the students had developed a pleasant rapport with John’s young wife.”

     The Education Improvement Act of 1984 was supposed to increase students’ exposure to African American history. It stipulated that by the 1989-90 school year, all public schools in the state had to “instruct students in the history of black people as a regular part of its history and social studies courses.”

     For third through eighth grade, students were supposed to understand the socioeconomic and cultural lifestyles of African Americans through the state’s history, their influence on the state’s economy and struggle for political equity. For U.S. history in general, schools are to cover the role of black people in science and technology, the literary and cultural history of black people, the civil rights movement and the contribution of black women throughout U.S. history.

     Implementation of those standards is often a different story, however, and depends on what issues teachers are pressured to cover or stay away from and how culturally competent teachers are.

     The subtle comparison between kids misbehaving in school, and slaves participating in rebellion… Something’s a bit off with the context here.

     Apple Removes Civil War Games From App Store Over Confederate Flag Usage [Updated]

     Apple has removed seemingly all Civil War games from the App Store for displaying the Confederate Flag in “offensive and mean-spirited ways,” our sister website TouchArcade has learned. Apple has sent a removal letter to affected developers to inform them that their app does not comply with Section 19.1 of the App Store Review Guidelines.

     “19.1 Apps containing references or commentary about a religious, cultural or ethnic group that are defamatory, offensive, mean-spirited or likely to expose the targeted group to harm or violence will be rejected.”

     MacRumors did a spot check of the App Store and can confirm that Apple has removed dozens of Civil War games depicting the Confederate Flag, which has been at the center of a racial controversy ignited by a Charleston, South Carolina church shooting last week. Most educational or generic Civil War apps remain available on the App Store. […]

     Update 12:10 p.m. Pacific Time: In a statement provided to Buzzfeed, Apple has confirmed that it is removing apps that use the Confederate flag in “offensive or mean-spirited ways.” Apple is also said to be working with game developers to get the affected apps back in the App Store after replacing the Confederate flag.

     “We have removed apps from the App Store that use the Confederate flag in offensive or mean-spirited ways, which is in violation of our guidelines,” an Apple spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “We are not removing apps that display the Confederate flag for educational or historical uses.”

     See the photos! 9 Iconic Photographs from African American History

     Through the African American Lens: Selections from the Permanent Collection serves as a view into the dynamic history of Americans of African descent. The book featuring 60 photographs from a broad range of African American experiences, each thematic volume includes introductions by some of the leading historians, activists, photographers, and writers of our times. Many of the images in the series are by famous photographers such as Spider Martin, Gordon Parks, Ernest C. Withers, Wayne F. Miller, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

     “The book essentially reflects the vastness and the dynamism that is the subject matter for the museum,” says Rhea Combs, Curator of Film and Photography at the museum, who led the team that distilled a collection of 15,000 images into the 60 photographs that make the book. While future books will delve into more specific themes in African American history, like the civil rights movement and African American women, the first book takes a sweeping look at more than 150 years of the vast and varied set of African American experiences in America.

     Here, TIME magazine has selected 9 iconic photographs from the book.

     Don’t take down the Confederate statues. Let @tanehisicoates curate a series of informational plaques to be mounted in front of them. I love this.

     Baltimore police rebuked for ‘uncorroborated’ gang threat report on day of Freddie Gray funeral

     City leaders questioned Thursday why the Baltimore Police Department issued a public warning, on the morning of Freddie Gray’s funeral, that gang members had teamed up to “take out” police officers.

     Police announced on April 27 a “credible threat” that the Bloods, Crips and Black Guerrilla Family had joined together up to target officers, but other law enforcement agencies concluded within hours that they couldn’t verify the claim, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Baltimore Sun.

     “I knew all along it was a bunch of baloney,” City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young said. “They owe the council and the public an explanation for why they put this false information out there.”

     The police warning was circulated in a news release at 11:27 a.m. on the day of Gray’s funeral, two days after protests over his death turned violent.

     Also that day, police were assessing rumors of teenagers planning an after-school “purge” — a reference to widespread violence as depicted in a movie of that name. Within hours, the city descended into a night of rioting and looting. […]

     Police defended their decision to spread word of the threat, arguing that it was “imminent and consistent with previous threats.”

     The department acknowledged that the threat was later determined to be “non-credible” but said other threats continued to be received as the unrest went on.

     “This threat came less than 48 hours after officers were attacked by protestors and a short time before more attacks would take place,” police spokesman Capt. Eric Kowalczyk said in a statement. “Due to the exigency of the circumstances, the credibility of the threat at the time it was received, extraordinary action was taken.

     “The department acted out of an abundance of caution rather than see an officer injured or killed and would do so again.”

     City Councilman Brandon Scott wrote an email Thursday to police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts and other top leaders in the department, saying that if reports that the FBI discredited the claim were true, “it is extremely unacceptable and put the lives of citizens, officers and others in danger.”

     “Falsifying a threat of this magnitude during a highly tense time should result in the strongest penalty possible,” Scott wrote. “If we are going to repair our city, this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated.”

     I hope they face some sort of consequences for this.

     Shayne Buchwald, an FBI spokeswoman, said Thursday that agents interviewed their gang sources at the request of Baltimore police and were unable to corroborate the threat.

245. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 1:09 pm

     Farrakhan Announces a Sequel to the Million Man March 20 Years Later

     Two decades ago, scores of black men gathered in the nation’s capital to pledge support to family and community. Some of the leaders of that original rally are planning another march—one that will include black women this time.

     Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan announced on June 24 that he plans to hold a Millions for Justice March in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 10, the Washington Post reports. He delivered the announcement to a packed assembly of Christians and Muslims at Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Washington.

     Farrakhan, 82, said that the 20th-anniversary march on the National Mall will focus on a demand for justice and an end to police brutality and racist violence, like last week’s church attack in Charleston, S.C., that killed nine black worshippers. His supporters are united under #JusticeOrElse.

     “These are not the times for weak people, for cowardly people,” he said, according to the Post.

     The outspoken Muslim minister chastised the eagerness to forgive the accused Charleston gunman, Dylann Roof. “He didn’t ask for forgiveness,” Farrakhan admonished, according to the Post.

     The Associated Press reports that former NAACP Executive Director Benjamin Chavis, who helped organize the Million Man March, is optimistic that the turnout in October will exceed a million participants—an attendance figure at the 1995 event that many disputed.

     “What ultimately will be a success is seeing improvements in the communities where these people are going to come from,” said Chavis, who helped organize the original march. “We want to make sure our public policy demands are aligned with those challenges.”

     #WakeUp: 7 Classic Revolutionary Reads for Black Millennials, for anyone who needs extra material on the reading list!

     Some of us have had that experience of awakening to what’s going on in the world. Whether it’s from watching a movie documenting the civil rights movement or reading about the life of Malcolm X, there comes a point in time when young black Americans “wake up” and start reading and researching about the issues of institutional and systemic racism. For some, that moment happens when they’re about to start college. The seven classic revolutionary reads listed here will give you a head start on that path:

     Includes: the autobiography of Malcolm X, Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis, books from Assata Shakur, Martin Luther King Jr., and Huey Newton, Die N*gg*r Die by H. Rap Brown and a book compiling the prison letters of George Jackson.

     BREAKING:Jefferson Davis statue on Monument Ave. vandalized. We’ll have the details next on @8News at 9 #RVA

     The ‘Great Migration’ Was About Racial Terror, Not Jobs

     The story of the “Great Migration” of African Americans throughout the 20th century is often framed as one of blacks heading North from the South seeking jobs and better wages. In Michael Goldfield’s book 1997 The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics, he writes:

     There is, to be sure, some dispute over the degree to which conditions in the South pushed African Americans away from the South—these conditions being the decline of the cotton economy, mechanization, boll weevils, the AAA policies of the 1930s, and the general suppression of African-American rights—and the degree to which it was mostly a product of the pull caused by the calculated potential gains from the higher-paying northern labor market.

     For Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the legal nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Alabama, there is no dispute. As he told told The Marshall Project Wednesday, African-American migration was and is premised more accurately on racial terror:

     There are very few people who have an awareness of how widespread this terrorism and violence was, and the way it now shapes the geography of the United States. We’ve got majority black cities in Detroit, Chicago, large black populations in Oakland and Cleveland and Los Angeles and Boston, and other cities in the Northeast. And the African Americans in these communities did not come as immigrants looking for economic opportunities, they came as refugees, exiles from lands in the South where they were being terrorized. And those communities have particular needs we’ve never addressed, we’ve never talked about. We’ve got generational poverty in these cities and marginalization within black communities, and you cannot understand these present-day challenges without understanding the Great Migration, and the terror and violence that sent the African Americans to these cities where they’ve never really been afforded the care and assistance they needed to recover from the terror and trauma that were there.

     This framing can’t be emphasized enough. His organization has been leading an effort to map where the close to 4,000 lynchings of African Americans happened in America between 1880 and 1940.

     Racial disparities seen today, including housing segregation and the ways we continue to fail black youth, can be explained in no small part by how cities received African Americans during those “Great Migration” periods. Stevenson ties the “generational poverty” suffered today by African Americans to cities not providing “the care and assistance needed to recover” for black migrants escaping the plagues of lynchings, burned black churches, burned black towns, rapes of black women, and other racialized atrocities throughout the 20th century.

     […]

     Black families who stayed behind in the South during that time period could have been identified as internally displaced peoples. The prompt resolution of the Civil War that Union government officials hoped would happen during Reconstruction collapsed under the terrorism enacted by white Southern police, government officials, vigilante mobs, and the Ku Klux Klan—all often one and the same.

     Northern cities were of little sanctuary because they often perpetuated the systems and attitudes that kept African Americans classified as inferior citizens. As examined in a recent CityLab piece on the term “black-on-black crime,” Northern whites believed that African-Americans migrants were criminal by nature, which was a justification for why these cities did not offer the assistance the new migrants need.

     As Stevenson told The Marshall Project:

     We created a narrative of racial difference in this country to sustain slavery, and even people who didn’t own slaves bought into that narrative, including people in the North. It was New York’s governor—in the 1860s—that was talking about the inferiority of the black person even as he was opposed to slavery.

     You don’t have to have owned a slave to be complicit in the institution of slavery, to have benefitted and have cheaper food to buy, cheaper materials, cheaper services, because the providers of the foods and services were using free slave labor. We were all complicit in the institution of slavery, and the same is true in the era of racial terror and lynching. The North and the Congress basically gave up on equality for African Americans, and that set us on a course that we have not yet recovered from.

     How Cleveland Police May Have Botched a 911 Call Just Before Killing Tamir Rice – “may have”? Seriously? “MAY HAVE”???

     At 3:22 p.m. last November 22, just minutes before 12-year-old Tamir Rice was fatally wounded by a Cleveland police officer at a neighborhood park, a man called 911 to report “a guy in here with a pistol…pointing it at everybody.” During the two-minute conversation, the caller described a person in a gray coat, “probably a juvenile,” who was sitting on a swing and holding a gun that was “probably fake.” Before hanging up, the caller reiterated his uncertainty about the gun: “I don’t know if it’s real or not.”

     Those presumably important details would never go past that call.

     Constance Hollinger, a Cleveland police dispatcher of 19 years, was on the other end of the line that day. Hollinger entered information from the caller’s description of the scene into the dispatch computer system, according to an official investigation of the case. A few minutes later, dispatcher Beth Mandl read Hollinger’s notes from a computer screen as she transmitted the information to police officers over the radio: “In the park by the youth center is a black male sitting on the swings. He is wearing a camouflage hat, a gray jacket with black sleeves. He keeps pulling a gun out of his pants and pointing it at people.”

     Mandl relayed it as a “code one,” indicating the highest priority level and the need for immediate response. By 3:30 p.m., officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback pulled up in front of Rice in the park, and within two seconds Loehmann jumped out and fired his gun at Rice at close range, striking him in the abdomen. For the next several minutes, Rice lay bleeding on the ground while the two officers stood by without giving him aid—inaction that may have potentially been criminal according to one policing expert—until other responders arrived, tended to Rice, and took him to a hospital, where he died the next day.

     Recordings of the initial 911 call and the radio dispatch to officers, released by the Cleveland police department in November (listen below), showed that the details about Rice’s suspected age and fake gun never reached Loehmann and Garmback. After a five-month probe into the shooting by the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department, which culminated in a 224-page report released in mid June, investigators concluded that these details did not make it from Hollinger to Mandl. The report did not specify why.

     According to a county official familiar with the investigation who spoke to Mother Jones, the details were not relayed because Hollinger did not enter them into the dispatch computer system. Why she did not do so is one of several key questions still hanging over the case seven months later. The ongoing investigation is now in the hands of Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty, who took over the case on June 3.

     If they’re going to make the dispatcher take the fall for the death of Tamir Rice, I just… Yes, the dispatcher deserves quite a bit of the blame for not passing on relevant details, but ultimately the choice to approach the situation in the way it was approached was up to the attending officers. And their actions are the ones that resulted in Tamir Rice’s death.
     There’s a lot more information at the link.

     Feds: Baltimore jail illegally keeping juveniles in solitary

     A federal review found some improvements at the detention center, but concluded that eight years after entering into an agreement with the state of Maryland, the embattled jail is still violating state laws and the U.S. Constitution when it comes to handling teens in custody:

     — Very few staffers have any training in adolescent development, trauma, and mental health and developmental disabilities, the review found.

     — The jail is failing to provide its teens with drug treatment, anger management programs, education, rehabilitation or even exercise, which the federal prosecutors described as their constitutional right.

     — When juveniles are accused of breaking a rule, they are put into seclusion for 7 to 14 days for a first offense, and must wait roughly 80 days before a disciplinary hearing is held.

     “This is grossly excessive and violates basic principles of Due Process,” reads a Feb. 19 Justice Department letter to jail officials. “It is even more troubling for the 24 percent of juveniles in seclusion who are ultimately found not guilty under the disciplinary process.”

     Asked for their response, state corrections officials told The Associated Press they are committed to improving the situation.

     “The department takes these issues very seriously, and is committed to drastically improving the overall environment for juveniles charged as adults and committed to our care,” its statement said.

     The Baltimore jail is not unique in this regard — the American Civil Liberties Union estimated last year that at least 17,000 of the roughly 100,000 juveniles held in adult prisons across the country have been subjected to solitary confinement.

     Juveniles are often held in isolation in adult jails so that institutions can comply with the “sight and sound separation” requirement under the Prison Rape Elimination Act, a federal law whose final standards went into effect in 2012.

     But the Baltimore jail already keeps its juveniles separate from adults, and has been on notice for years to stop isolating them.

     The Justice Department began investigating the jail 15 years ago, concluding that among other civil rights violations, its practice of keeping youths in cells for lengthy periods was “excessive and potentially harmful.”

     Eight years have passed since the jail promised the state to change its procedures.

     This most recent letter reminded jail officials that “the use of seclusion on juveniles is itself misguided. Separating juveniles and housing them in isolated, harsh conditions merely suppresses behavior on a temporary basis. In the long term, such practices may result in mental deterioration, lead juveniles to engage in self-harm, or exacerbate behavioral issues.”

     See also: Rikers.

246. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     26 June 2015 at 1:33 pm

     Fires at black churches in Georgia, North Carolina were arson, officials say

     Authorities say a fire that damaged a predominantly black church in middle Georgia has been ruled arson.

     The fire was reported at God’s Power of Christ Church in Macon early Tuesday morning. Macon-Bibb County Fire Sgt. Ben Gleaton told local media outlets that investigators determined the fire was intentionally set but didn’t provide details on what led to that conclusion.

     Gleaton says there’s no evidence indicating that the fire was a hate crime.

     Authorities have said electronics and other equipment also had been stolen from the building in two burglaries.

     Firefighters in Charlotte, North Carolina, have said a blaze at a black church Wednesday also was intentionally set.

     The fires come roughly a week after nine churchgoers were fatally shot at a Charleston, South Carolina, black church.

     The Charlotte Fire Department said it took about an hour to get Wednesday morning’s fire at Briar Creek Road Baptist Church under control. Two firefighters were treated for heat-related injuries.

     The department’s statement said a resident from a nearby apartment complex called 911 just before 1 a.m. and reported the fire.

     “We completed our work on the scene and determined this was intentionally set,” Charlotte Fire Department Senior Investigator David Williams said. “Now we’re asking the public to call us if they have any more information about the fire.”

     Williams didn’t say what evidence exists to show the fire was intentionally set.

     The church’s congregation is predominantly black, and there are about 100 members. Investigators are not sure if the fire was racially motivated.

     The church building, which dates back to the 1980s, sustained excessive damage to its education building. The rest of the property, including the sanctuary and gymnasium, has smoke damage. Total damage is estimated at more than $250,000, the department said.

247. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 1:55 pm

     I think this has appeared on the thread previously: 1.5 Million Slavery Era Documents Will Be Digitized, Helping African Americans to Learn About Their Lost Ancestors

     The Freedmen’s Bureau Project — a new initiative spearheaded by the Smithsonian, the National Archives, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — will make available online 1.5 million historical documents, finally allowing ancestors of former African-American slaves to learn more about their family roots. Near the end of the US Civil War, The Freedmen’s Bureau was created to help newly-freed slaves find their footing in postbellum America. The Bureau “opened schools to educate the illiterate, managed hospitals, rationed food and clothing for the destitute, and even solemnized marriages.” And, along the way, the Bureau gathered handwritten records on roughly 4 million African Americans. Now, those documents are being digitized with the help of volunteers, and, by the end of 2016, they will be made available in a searchable database at discoverfreedmen.org. According to Hollis Gentry, a Smithsonian genealogist, this archive “will give African Americans the ability to explore some of the earliest records detailing people who were formerly enslaved,” finally giving us a sense “of their voice, their dreams.”

     You can learn more about the project by watching the video below, and you can volunteer your own services here.

     After the Confederate flag, statues and monuments also get a second look

     As South Carolina lawmakers moved closer to possibly removing the Confederate flag from a monument on the Statehouse grounds, some wondered what might be next.

     The Lowcounty and South Carolina has a host of memorials and streets named in honor of those who led and fought for the Confederacy, but there was not immediate calls to action for revaluating their place in the public realm.

     Nationally, however, the debate continued to rage.

     The National Park Service announced it is pulling items featuring the Confederate flag from its gift shops, including the one at the Fort Sumter Visitors Center. Director Jonathan Jarvis said books, educational materials and DVDs still could include the flag, but added, “Any stand-alone depictions of Confederate flags have no place in park stores.”

     In New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu called for removing a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from its column in the center of that city’s Lee Circle.

     And some Congressmen called for removing from the U.S. Capitol statues of Confederate leaders and fighters. South Carolina’s two statues there include John C. Calhoun, who died before the Civil War but whose writings helped South Carolina justify its secession, and Wade Hampton, a Confederate general.

     U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, one of the South’s first black senators since Reconstruction, supported removing the flag from the Statehouse but was not eager to extend the debate to the U.S. Capitol’s statues.

     “I don’t think there should be another look on this, to be honest with you,” he told The Associated Press. “The South has a rich and provocative history which includes a lot of things that were good and a lot of things that were not.”

     Charleston’s two most prominent monuments associated with the South’s secession and the resulting Civil War — its Defenders’ of the Confederacy monument at White Point Garden and John C. Calhoun’s statute in Marion Square — were vandalized with spray paint earlier this week, but no elected officials have called for their removal.

     But even the Sons of Confederate Veteran’s shield on Mount Pleasant’s welcome sign near Patriot’s Point has been called into question, and Mayor Linda Page said it’s unclear what action the town ultimately might take.

     “Where those conversations go from here is all welcome to me,” she said. “I’m so impressed with my community and am just humbled by the way the families of the victims have moved forward.”

     More at the link.

     More on racial experiments in WWII, America’s broken promise to veterans who survived race-based chemical weapons testing in WWII

     NPR this week reported about secret chemical experiments performed by the U.S. military during World War II that grouped men by race. White soldiers were considered the “normal” test subjects. Black, Puerto Rican, Japanese, and other non-white populations were singled out, and sometimes used as proxies for “the enemy.”

     The formerly classified government program that tested chemical weapons on our own troops was first made public in the early 1990s, but the revelation that the experiments segregated participants by race is sparking new outrage.

     When records of the tests were declassified in the early 1990s, the Veterans Administration promised it would find some 4,000 veterans who survived, and offer them compensation. Very few of these survivors, who experience serious health problems and disabilities, have received any aid.

     Some of these men were literally locked inside gas chambers and tortured with poison gas, then told that if they spoke to anyone about what happened, they’d end up in a military prison.

     NPR reports that while the Veterans Administration has responded to the story, the radio news organization is still waiting for the government to hand over documents related to the experiments done on some 60,000 soldiers. Still, NPR has “for the first time” tracked down some of the men who survived the race-based gassing. […]

     A total of 60,000 veterans participated in the tests, which sought to reveal what clothing, barriers, or ointments might protect U.S. soldiers attacked with mustard gas by foreign forces. The tests were conducted at bases like Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, Camp Sibert in Alabama, as well as research institutions like the University of Chicago.

     Confederate Sons Commander Leland Summers says Dylann Roof has succeeded in starting a race war. Yah, but… did the race war ever end?

     More good news for book-readers: Spiegel & Grau Moves Up Ta-Nehisi Coates Book

     Spiegel & Grau is pushing up the publication date of Atlantic correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, Between the World and Me, from September 8 to July 14.

     While the publisher didn’t directly link the updated schedule to the shooting in Charleston, S.C., Theresa Zoro, senior v-p, director of publicity and communications at Random House, confirmed that the move was due to a “combination of solid advance reviews and issues brought up by recent events.”

     In the book, written as a letter to his 15-year-old son, Coates confronts the concept of race, the history of racial violence in the U.S., and, per the publisher, what it is like “to inhabit a black body in America.”

     The publisher pointed to the events in Charleston, as well as Ferguson and Baltimore, as ones that “have become synonymous with a movement that is demanding a fresh confrontation with this country’s history and ideals.” The statement continues, “That confrontation is ultimately about the status of the black body: exploited to create the country’s foundational wealth, violently segregated to unite a nation after a civil war, and, today, still disproportionately threatened, locked up, and killed in our streets.”

     Advance praise includes that from Toni Morrison, who said, “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’ journey, is visceral, eloquent and beautifully redemptive.” She added that the book’s “examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory.”

248. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 2:16 pm

     Ken Burns: Confederate flag isn’t about heritage. It’s about resistance to civil rights.

     Ken Burns, the documentarian behind PBS’s acclaimed The Civil War series, blasted the myth that the Confederate flag isn’t a symbol of racism and white supremacy during a Thursday appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

     “I think what happens is that we build up over time the sense of an excuse about why it came,” Burns said. “If you read … South Carolina’s articles of secession in November — after [Abraham] Lincoln’s election of 1860 — they don’t mention states’ rights, they don’t mention nullification. They mention slavery over and over again.”

     He later added, “Those [Confederate] flags came in after Brown v. Board of Education. This is not about heritage. This is about resistance to civil rights.”

     With these two points, Burns is demonstrating how the Confederate battle flag has always been a symbol against efforts by black Americans to gain equal rights. When South Carolina became the first state to secede after Lincoln’s election, it explicitly singled out attempts to abolish slavery and grant rights to black Americans as “hostile to the South” and “destructive of its beliefs and safety.” And as Vox’s Libby Nelson explained, Southerners used the flag to intimidate civil rights advocates and defend segregation. So while some Southerners might not see the Confederate flag as a racist symbol, the truth is the flag’s history is mired in racism.

     Video at the link.

     This is… worth a watch. The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes.

     Usually, when we say “American slavery” or the “American slave trade,” we mean the American colonies or, later, the United States. But as we discussed in Episode 2 of Slate’s History of American Slavery Academy, relative to the entire slave trade, North America was a bit player. From the trade’s beginning in the 16th century to its conclusion in the 19th, slave merchants brought the vast majority of enslaved Africans to two places: the Caribbean and Brazil. Of the more than 10 million enslaved Africans to eventually reach the Western Hemisphere, just 388,747—less than 4 percent of the total—came to North America. This was dwarfed by the 1.3 million brought to Spanish Central America, the 4 million brought to British, French, Dutch, and Danish holdings in the Caribbean, and the 4.8 million brought to Brazil.

     This interactive, designed and built by Slate’s Andrew Kahn, gives you a sense of the scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade across time, as well as the flow of transport and eventual destinations. The dots—which represent individual slave ships—also correspond to the size of each voyage. The larger the dot, the more enslaved people on board. And if you pause the map and click on a dot, you’ll learn about the ship’s flag—was it British? Portuguese? French?—its origin point, its destination, and its history in the slave trade. The interactive animates more than 20,000 voyages cataloged in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. (We excluded voyages for which there is incomplete or vague information in the database.) The graph at the bottom accumulates statistics based on the raw data used in the interactive and, again, only represents a portion of the actual slave trade—about one-half of the number of enslaved Africans who actually were transported away from the continent.
     ADVERTISING

     There are a few trends worth noting. As the first European states with a major presence in the New World, Portugal and Spain dominate the opening century of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, sending hundreds of thousands of enslaved people to their holdings in Central and South America and the Caribbean. The Portuguese role doesn’t wane and increases through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, as Portugal brings millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas.

     In the 1700s, however, Spanish transport diminishes and is replaced (and exceeded) by British, French, Dutch, and—by the end of the century—American activity. This hundred years—from approximately 1725 to 1825—is also the high-water mark of the slave trade, as Europeans send more than 7.2 million people to forced labor, disease, and death in the New World. For a time during this period, British transport even exceeds Portugal’s.

     In the final decades of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Portugal reclaims its status as the leading slavers, sending 1.3 million people to the Western Hemisphere, and mostly to Brazil. Spain also returns as a leading nation in the slave trade, sending 400,000 to the West. The rest of the European nations, by contrast, have largely ended their roles in the trade.

     By the conclusion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade at the end of the 19th century, Europeans had enslaved and transported more than 12.5 million Africans. At least 2 million, historians estimate, didn’t survive the journey.

     The animation is mind-blowing in the sheer number of ships (and therefore captive people) shown.
     And how many of them went to Brazil. And South America. And how many didn’t make it.
     Things really pick up in the 1600s. And it’s actually really hard to watch until the end.

     Baltimore Co. police kill unarmed man after suicide threat. That’s Spencer McCain, mentioned above.

     An unarmed black man killed by Baltimore County police told his daughters’ grandmother that he was going to commit suicide as officers were on their way to his home after reports of domestic violence, the grandmother said Thursday.

     Officers shot Spencer L. McCain, 41, about 1 a.m. at a condominium in Owings Mills. Also in the home at the time were two of his young daughters and their mother, Shannon Sulton, who told police McCain beat and threatened her, Baltimore County Police Chief Jim Johnson said at a news conference.

     Three officers were on the scene, and all fired as McCain was in a “defensive position,” holding his arms and body in a manner that suggested he was armed, Johnson said. He said the officers thought he had a weapon, but none was found.

     The oldest child present, a 10-year-old girl, called her grandmother, Rochelle Byrd, early Thursday because she heard fighting in a bedroom and was scared, Byrd said. Byrd called 911.

     “I called (the child) back to tell her to open the door for the police, and he took the phone. He said, ‘I’m going to have to commit suicide,’” Byrd said. “I called back the police and told them he was going to commit suicide.”

     Byrd said she thought at that point that McCain could kill his family and then himself.

     Johnson said an officer who responded to Byrd’s calls heard screams coming from inside the second-floor condo and called for backup, Johnson said. The officers forced their way into the home, where McCain was shot. Johnson said 19 casings were found at the scene, but it wasn’t clear how many times McCain was hit.

     Funny how white men threatening suicide don’t get their wishes fulfilled like that.

     Every state flag is wrong, and here is why

     As long as we’re on the subject of flags that should and should not be flown in states, let’s take a moment to talk about state flags.

     Every state flag is wrong. If you don’t believe me, look at them. Here are the 50 worst.

     So it took me a moment for that joke to sink in.
     Anyway, while none is particularly eye-catching, you can actually go through them all and see the colonial, racist imagery and symbolism. The article concludes:

     In conclusion, every flag is awful and needs to be fixed. Just not all for the same reason.

     PBS’ ‘Finding Your Roots’ Suspended Due to Ben Affleck Slave-Master Drama

     Fans waiting for new episodes of PBS’ “Finding Your Roots” have Ben Affleck and host Henry Louis Gates Jr. to blame for the show’s suspension. In April, it was revealed that the show—which traces celebrity family trees—uncovered that one of Affleck’s relatives owned slaves. “Embarrassed,” the actor asked producers to leave that information out of his October 2014 episode. Leaked e-mails showed that they complied.

     After an internal review, PBS found that Gates and his production team “violated PBS standards by failing to shield the creative and editorial process from improper influence, and by failing to inform PBS or WNET [the member station involved in production] of Mr. Affleck’s efforts to affect program content.”

     Production of the third season of “Finding Your Roots” has officially been suspended, pending required updates that will give PBS and season-three producing station WETA more oversight, including the addition of another staff researcher and an independent genealogist to review all episodes for factual accuracy. Affleck’s episode has also been recalled and season four is up in the air until the team can prove its ability to meet editorial standards.

     Gates issued an apology on Wednesday saying, “I sincerely regret not discussing my editing rationale with our partners at PBS and WNET and I apologize for putting PBS and its member stations in the position of having to defend the integrity of their programming.”

     HA!

     Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia, this month 1967, ended bans on interracial marriage (Mildred & Richard Loving): That photo, in honour of today’s SCOTUS ruling. It is so ordered.

249. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 2:27 pm

     By the way, in order to catch up, I skipped on pulling tweets and focussed more on articles – but the next few comments will also contain (a) tweets from Pinckney’s funeral, (b) tweets from homeless people being evicted and (c) possible other tweets. FYI. Not guaranteeing anything is in chronological order anymore.

     Court hears case for secrecy of report on police shooting of unarmed black teen

     More than three years after two Pasadena police officers fatally shot an unarmed black teen, a state appeals court heard arguments Wednesday from the police union, which is trying to block release of an independent report on the killing.

     Portions of that report released during the legal battle so far have called the slaying “troubling” and said the shooting was preceded by tactical mistakes.

     For about two hours Wednesday, three judges from the 2nd District Court of Appeal questioned an attorney for the Pasadena Police Officers’ Assn. and attorneys representing those who want the report released, including the Los Angeles Times and the teen’s mother.

     Richard Shinee, an attorney for the union, told the justices that the two officers involved gave voluntary statements to criminal homicide investigators. But, he said, the department used those statements in a subsequent personnel review.

     “The chief of police relied on those statements to decide if they violated [administrative] policy,” Shinee said.

     The report conducted by an independent consultant for the city used the private personnel information, which means the entire report should be withheld from the public, he said.

     The report has been kept secret since it was completed last summer. The Pasadena police union representing Officers Jeffrey Newlen and Matthew Griffin, who shot and killed Kendrec McDade on March 24, 2012, sued to block the report’s release. The union contended the assessment of the officers’ actions was legally protected personnel information.

     But the justices on Wednesday during oral argument seemed to question the notion that anything garnered from elsewhere and put into a personnel file is prohibited from disclosure.

     Justice Jeffrey Johnson wondered if the phone book gets protection if it was put into the personnel file of an officer.

     “It like is a black hole into which everything gets sucked,” he said of the personnel file idea. He suggested that by the union’s construction, no shooting investigation should be public.

     Presiding Justice Francis Rotherschild suggested it would be stretch to withhold the entire report, noting the privacy protection is for officers, not an entire department.

     The appellate case stemmed from a ruling in November when Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James Chalfant decided that most of the independent consultant’s report could be made public, with limited redactions. The police union filed a petition with the appellate court to stop the release.

     I really don’t get the feeling that police unions work for justice.

     This is how you become a white supremacist, from a former white supremacist.

     Since I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of being a warrior. I learned to read early and would sit in the library poring over books of Greek and Norse myths, gravitating to the parts about monsters and violence. In middle school, I played Dungeons & Dragons, fancying myself as an unstoppable fighter who made his own rules. Art was equally as fascinating as violence, and the two combined in my drawings of battle scenes from ancient Vikings cracking skulls to spaceships blowing each other to bits.

     I grew up in an alcoholic family and developed an adrenaline habit that drove me to lash out at the world in increasingly drastic ways. By the time I turned 16, I was an alcoholic and very comfortable with hate and violence. I hated the town I lived in. I hated my school and most of the teachers and other kids. I hated the police. I discovered racist skinhead music through the punk scene and learned that the swastika is an effective way of angering others — the hostility I radiated was reflected by the people around me, validating the paranoid ideology that had become my identity. Eventually I became a founding member of the Northern Hammerskins, which went on to become part of Hammerskin Nation.

     I spent seven years as a leader of hate groups, perpetrating wanton violence against innocent people and twisting the minds of other hurt white kids to do even worse. We would comb the city, looking for the “anti-racist skinheads” and beating up whoever we could find. Though we did attack people because of skin color or suspected sexual orientation, we most often attacked random white people, claiming after the fact that they were race-traitors. Aside from trips to Chicago and Minneapolis to brawl with their anti-racists, the bulk of the violence we committed was relatively spontaneous. We had a tendency to start assaulting each other if we didn’t go on a manhunt.

     At our most organized point, the group had weekly meetings at which the many threats we faced were lamented and our dedication to eliminating our enemies was sworn. By enemies, I mean everyone except violent, racist white people. Jews were seen as the masterminds of an ongoing genocide against the white race. “Non-white” people were seen as lazy, stupid savages that the Jews kept integrating into white society to destroy it. White people who weren’t violent racists were seen as the greatest enemies of all: race-traitors complicit in our destruction.

     This sick mindset was constantly reinforced with racist music and literature. Any sort of media that didn’t support white supremacist ideology was forbidden. The resulting intellectual and spiritual isolation made fertile ground for hate and violence.

     We recruited other angry white people by littering areas of racial tension with fliers bearing swastikas and slogans telling black people, in the crudest slur possible, to “beware,” along with our post office box. Luckily for us, Milwaukee was a hotbed of racial strife during the late 1980s, thanks to a severely depressed inner city and a black alderman who let his righteous anger drive him to threaten violence against whites. You could pretty much throw a rock and find a disgruntled white person. We also recruited through word of mouth with white co-workers, family and friends. Though nine out of 10 people would be repulsed by what we had to say, there were always those who liked to hear it.

     When everything is going wrong in your life, it’s much easier to blame Jews/Muslims/blacks/Mexicans/gays/anyone-but-yourself than it is to face your flaws and begin the hard work to account for them. The teenage outcast kid is told that it’s the Jews’ fault he doesn’t have a girlfriend — the media they control tells white girls to be attracted to black boys. The middle-aged guy who lost his job has “illegal” immigrants to blame, and take a wild guess who the racist narrative says brings them into our country.

     […]

     I’ve been beat up as often as I’ve beaten others, and in no case did being on the receiving end of violence make me any less violent. It was actually the kindness of brave people who refused to lower themselves to my level that changed the course of my life, to put me in a position to follow their example and promote the practice of loving-kindness myself. We cannot hate violent extremism out of existence.

     Love is the most effective means to draw people from hate. Kumbayas aside, there are dynamics as sound as any law of physics to back this up. Hate and violence are cyclical things. More of either can only fuel the cycle. This is not a problem that we can punish our way out of. As righteous as the anger we feel may be when facing horror like the murder of nine wonderful people in their place of worship, it can never bring us toward a more peaceful world if we let it poison our hearts.

     This doesn’t mean we throw Dylann Roof a parade, and it doesn’t mean that we don’t need to put him somewhere where he can’t hurt anyone else. This does mean that if we seek to see him suffer, we are perpetuating the harm he has done and diminishing our own ability to bring love to the world.

     Within 36 hours of the Emanuel AME Church community losing their precious sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and mothers and fathers, I was on the way to Charleston with Amardeep and Pardeep Kaleka, two brothers whose father was killed in the 2012 Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin. Arriving at the church after a 20-hour car ride, we joined what we were not surprised to see was a celebration outside. People of all ethnicities, from across the nation, had gathered to combine broken hearts in the spirit of human oneness. The experience was overwhelming in its beauty and defiance of hate. I broke down sobbing.

     Before my tears could hit the ground, black members of the Emanuel AME congregation embraced me and held me. I had come to comfort them, but it was their love that comforted me, sending an immensely powerful and indisputable message: When we rebel against the construct of race and love each other as a great human family, hate cannot win.

     Baltimore set to repay $4 million in misspent homeless funds, an intro for some context into some of the tweets that will follow.
     Next comment.

     Obama will speak at Rev. Pinckney’s funeral. Line to get in wraps around a good chunk of downtown Charleston.
     And the clergy has assembled in the street near Emanuel AME as the hearse passes. Charleston.
     And the members of Mother Emanuel walk behind the clergy, walking to the funeral.

250. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 2:31 pm

     Homeless advocates now blocking MLK BLVD, by homeless encampment facing eviction this morning. Pics via @rousseau_ist
     The City is on site, just watching the homeless move their own belongings.
     Rather than helping the homeless find affordable housing, the City prefers to spend more $ on fencing them out.
     #MLKBlvdHomeless Eviction Fencing around the camp about to happen #Baltimore

     300,000+ Documents To Be Turned Over Friday In Freddie Gray Case

     Tomorrow will be a big day in the Freddie Gray case as prosecutors are due to respond to defense allegations and turn over evidence to the officers’ legal teams.

     WJZ Investigator Mike Hellgren has more on what’s next on the road to justice.

     There’s a staggering amount of information prosecutors must give to these officers and they’ve been trying to keep it under wraps–despite a high-profile leak this week.

     More than 300,000 digital files. The equivalent of 5 million emails, or watching 300 hours of video on YouTube. Prosecutors must turn over that massive amount of evidence to defense attorneys within the next 24 hours as they build their cases for the six officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray.

     Despite the state’s attorney’s push to stop any of it from becoming public, there have been leaks, including the autopsy to the Baltimore Sun, which reported Gray likely suffered the injury that killed him when the van moved suddenly–and he was not buckled in.

     In a recent interview, law professor Doug Culbert cautioned against rushing to judgement.

     “Speculation is interesting, but it’s irresponsible. None of us know the facts.” Culbert said.

     Defense attorneys argue Mosby’s press conference announcing the charges on the steps of the war memorial, prejudiced the jury pool against their clients.

     Mosby’s team has several other critical deadlines to meet by Friday. Prosecutors must respond to a defense motion to move the case from Baltimore.

     “I think it’s an uphill battle, and I think judges are going to be reluctant to move this trial,” said Andy Levy, legal analyst.

     And a motion to remove Mosby from the prosecution. Prosecutors must respond to another defense motion to dismiss charges against the officers altogether.

     “We want to make sure the officers receive a fair trial, and we also want to make sure the people who care,” said Culbert.

     About Freddie Gray and all the Freddie Grays in our city, that they too receive justice.

     @deray this was created out of the state flag in honor of the Emmanuel 9

251. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 2:39 pm

     #WeHelpOurselves Lets the World Know Black Women Don’t Need Help from Appropriators

     In the midst of the Rachel Dolezal scandal, Professor Blair L. M. Kelley used twitter to help change the conversation to focus on black women who have helped our own community.

     And yesterday I started the hash #WeHelpOurselves to dispute the notion that Rachael Dolezal has done more than most black women to help…
     — Blair LM Kelley (@profblmkelley) June 17, 2015

     #WeHelpOurselves is a way for black women to uplift each other and show that we don’t need help from appropriators.

     That link is tweet after tweet of this hashtag. Go and be impressed.

     Fire at black Georgia church was arson, officials say; Tony already clarified this for this church and the one burned in North Carolina. I do understand, though, that neither is being treated as a hate crime…?

     Baltimore to take 4 years to fully implement body camera program, sparking criticism. What’s with the dragging feet fashion?

     According to newly disclosed documents, Baltimore officials will take four years to fully implement an agency-wide police body camera program — sparking criticism from City Council members who accuse the Rawlings-Blake administration of dragging its feet.

     “It’s totally unacceptable that we cannot have this body camera program implemented immediately,” said City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young. “Our citizens want it. Our police officers want it. It will protect the citizens, and it will protect the police.”

     City Councilman Nick Mosby said he’s planning a hearing to demand that the administration “immediately” allocate funds so that cameras are placed on officers and in police vans.

     “I don’t understand this haphazard approach of going so slow,” he said. “Baltimore City needs body cameras. Four years is just too long. They’re dragging their feet.”

     The disclosures about the city’s plans came from documents soliciting bids for contractors to work on the body camera program.

     In a request for bids on the program, city officials wrote this month that the pilot program will last at least 60 days and include 155 officers, including 15 from the special enforcement section and 140 from the Eastern, Western and Central police districts.

     City officials wrote that each shift would equip 11 or 12 officers with body cameras during the pilot program.

     After the cameras are tested, city officials would begin to fully implement the program, equipping 500 officers over each of the next three years and 1,000 in the fourth year, for a total of 2,500 cameras.

     Despite the language in the documents, a spokesman for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said the mayor wants the program implemented “much faster.”

     “The mayor has made body cameras a priority,” spokesman Howard Libit said. “The way the [request for proposals] is written is to afford the city the maximum flexibility. … She wants to do it right and in a way that doesn’t waste taxpayer dollars.”

     Rawlings-Blake said in February her goal was to have a citywide program by July 2016.

     North Charleston police chief fires officer for Confederate Flag photo found on Facebook. There were calls on twitter to see the underwear. What underwear?

     A North Charleston police officer who posted a photo of himself wearing Confederate Flag boxer shorts to Facebook has been fired.

     The photo spread across the Internet on Thursday after the post had been online for a few days.

     Police Chief Eddie Driggers issues a termination letter to the officer, Sgt. Shannon Dildine, saying the photo undermines the officer’s “ability to improve trust and instill confidence when working with our citizens.”

     “Your posting in this manner led to you being publicly identified as a North Charleston Police officer and associated both you and the Department with an image that symbolizes hate and oppression to a significant portion of the citizens we are sworn to serve,” Driggers wrote.

     Dildine has ten days to appeal the decision.

     I dunno, covering someone’s ass might be the only good place for that flag.

     Justice officials outline how they will investigate the Baltimore Police Department.

     “We are going to be very thorough and fair,” Vanita Gupta, head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, said to the crowd at the University of Baltimore. “The community has a very important and central role in this process.”

     The Justice Department will not take a “cookie-cutter” approach to the probe, she said. Investigators will look for constitutional violations, such as use of force, illegal stops, searches and arrests and discriminatory policing, Gupta added.

     Residents and activists have called for years for a probe that puts the weight of the law behind the findings. The investigation, which is expected to take more than a year to complete, could lead to a consent decree and years of oversight by the federal government.

     Tim Mygatt, who will oversee the investigation, said federal officials will spend months interviewing elected leaders, officers and residents.

     Gupta and Mygatt implored residents to come forward with information about police encounters. More community meetings will also be held.

     “We are looking at the whole department, Mygatt said. He said investigators will follow up on every complaint, and information will remain confidential.

     Federal attorneys plan to examine police policies and procedures, misconduct claims, brutality allegations and excessive-force complaints, including those that have resulted in injury or death.

     […]

     The Justice Department started a collaborative review of the Police Department last fall. The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services agreed in October to work with police and began an expected 18-month effort in January. But that type of review doesn’t carry the weight of the law.

     Officials began the collaborative review after The Baltimore Sun reported last year that city taxpayers had paid nearly $6 million in court judgments and settlements in 102 lawsuits alleging police brutality and other misconduct since 2011.

     Officers battered dozens of residents during questionable arrests, The Sun reported, resulting in broken bones, head trauma, organ failure and, in some cases, death.

252. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 2:55 pm

     Would CIA Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling Be in Prison If He Were White? A good question.

     Last week CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling went to prison. If he were white, he probably wouldn’t be there.

     Sterling was one of the CIA’s few African-American case officers, and he became the first to file a racial discrimination lawsuit against the agency. That happened shortly before the CIA fired him in late 2001. The official in Langley who did the firing face-to-face was John Brennan, now the CIA’s director and a close adviser to President Obama.

     Five months ago, in court, prosecutors kept claiming that Sterling’s pursuit of the racial-bias lawsuit showed a key “motive” for providing classified information to journalist James Risen. The government’s case at the highly problematic trial was built entirely on circumstantial evidence. Lacking anything more, the prosecution hammered on ostensible motives, telling the jury that Sterling’s “anger,” “bitterness” and “selfishness” had caused him to reveal CIA secrets.

     But the history of Sterling’s conflicts with the CIA has involved a pattern of top-down retaliation. Sterling became a problem for high-ranking officials, who surely did not like the bad publicity that his unprecedented lawsuit generated. And Sterling caused further hostility in high places when, in the spring of 2003, he went through channels to tell Senate Intelligence Committee staffers of his concerns about the CIA’s reckless Operation Merlin, which had given Iran some flawed design information for a nuclear weapons component.

     Among the U.S. government’s advantages at the trial last winter was the fact that the jury did not include a single African-American. And it was drawn from a jury pool imbued with the CIA-friendly company town atmosphere of Northern Virginia.

     Sterling’s long struggle against institutionalized racism is far from over. It continues as he pursues a legal appeal of his three-and-a-half year sentence. He’s in a prison near Denver, nearly 900 miles from his home in the St. Louis area, making it very difficult for his wife Holly to visit. […]

     While it’s vital that Sterling hear from well-wishers, it’s also crucial that the public hear from him. “The Invisible Man: CIA Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling,” released the day after he was sentenced in mid-May, made it possible for the public to hear his voice. The short documentary (which I produced for ExposeFacts) was directed by Oscar nominee Judith Ehrlich.

     More recently, journalist Peter Maass did a fine job with an extensive article, “How Jeffrey Sterling Took on the CIA — and Lost Everything.”

     It should be unacceptable that racism helped the government to put Jeffrey Sterling in prison.

     The SC Senators who don’t want to take down #ConfederateFlag want to establish “Confederate History & Heritage Month”

     The simple idea that could transform US criminal justice, an ode to better justicing. Oh, and the judge implementing this method? Happens to be black and a woman.

     Municipal court in the US works like this: the accused stands with his attorney in front of the bench, looking up at the judge on high. The accused is effectively invisible, a bystander to the back-and-forth between judge, prosecutor and defence attorney, who speak in jargon that ordinary people do not understand. The judge may wish the accused good morning when he is first brought in, but he will not be addressed again until the end, when the judge announces his decision and what happens next. Do you understand? Yes, the accused says, although he might well not. Do you agree? Yes.

     “If you’re lost in a big-city court, you’ll stand there until you’re kicked out at the end of the day by the security guard,” said Kevin S Burke, a Minneapolis judge and a leading critic of the humiliations inflicted by the US court system. “Even Walmart has a greeter.”

     In the courtroom known as Part Two, on the second floor of the Newark Municipal Courthouse in New Jersey, things are done differently. It looks like a typical municipal court – shabby and industrial, with fluorescent lights and linoleum tile floors. Old tables and desks are strewn with manila folders, stacks of paper and rubber stamps. Each day, dozens of people sit on long wooden benches at the back of the room. Almost all are defendants awaiting their time before the judge. Almost all are sitting alone. There are a few women and a few white people, but most are young and middle-aged men of colour.

     Newark is a city of 250,000 people, across the Hudson River from New York City. It is marked by high rates of poverty and crime. Victoria F Pratt, chief judge of the Newark Municipal Court, who presides over Part Two, estimates that 85-90% of her defendants have substance abuse problems, and more than 40% have mental health issues. Many have both. These are the people who sleep in the train station, buy small bags of weed or wraps of heroin, or commit petty burglaries. Some have been jailed and released dozens of times – a life sentence served in 30-day instalments. Pratt recently saw one woman with 101 previous arrests.

     Part Two is a pioneer of procedural justice, an idea that in recent months has become central to the debate about reforming the US criminal justice system. The idea behind procedural justice is that people are far more likely to obey the law if the justice system does not humiliate them, but treats them fairly and with respect. That begins with the way judges speak to defendants.

     […]

     Victoria Pratt, 42, grew up in the suburbs of Newark, the daughter of an African American father and a mother who emigrated from the Dominican Republic. Her mother, Elsie, was a hairdresser, who eventually ran her own beauty salon, the Curly Comb, in downtown Newark. As a child, Pratt spent her weekends there, taking rollers out of clients’ hair and running to the beauty supply store a few blocks away for hair dye and perm kits.

     After college at Rutgers, New Jersey’s state university, Pratt applied to law school, unsuccessfully. She spent a year teaching jazz and African dance to children in a Hispanic community centre and teaching English as a second language. A year later, she got into Rutgers School of Law in Newark. She graduated in 1998, then worked in various state offices and as counsel to the president of the Newark Municipal Council, Mildred C Crump. Pratt provided legal advice, researched legislation and analysed budgets.

     One day in 2006, Crump put a fat blue notebook on Pratt’s desk. “Tell me what you think. The mayor is interested,” she said. Inside was a report about the Community Justice Center in Red Hook, a neighbourhood of Brooklyn that Life magazine once dubbed “the crack capital of America”. (It is still a rough area; the lack of a subway stop has kept it from gentrifying at the frantic pace seen in the rest of north Brooklyn.) In 2000, a non-profit organisation called the Center for Court Innovation had established a community court in Red Hook, in a building that once housed a Catholic school. Court Innovation works with jurisdictions to set up new models of courts, tweaks them until they work, and then encourages others to adopt them.

     The Red Hook court and its judge, Alex Calabrese, dealt with civil, housing and criminal cases – everything except the most serious crimes. The approach, however, was different from that of a traditional court. Instead of jail, most defendants got rapid sanctions aimed at stopping the cycle of people going in and out of jail: community service, social services such as anger management and conflict resolution, or longer-term drug treatment. (Anyone in the neighbourhood, not just criminals, could get these services.)

     Compliance was monitored with regular urine tests, and it was obligatory for defendants to come back to court often, to discuss their progress. If they completed the mandate, they stayed out of jail. If they skipped appointments or flunked a drug test, however, they could be given jail sentences that were much longer than the initial sentences they would have received in other courts.

     As Pratt read the report on Red Hook, she felt a growing excitement. “Newark really needs this,” she reported to Crump. A few months later, Pratt went to Red Hook to see the court in action. It wasn’t just what Judge Calabrese did that was different – it was how. Calabrese, a big man whose instinctive mode of interaction is a verbal bear hug, sat at eye level with defendants. He congratulated them on each victory, no matter how small. He explained things clearly, in plain language. He asked defendants to tell the court how they had ended up there. He quizzed them on their plans for the future. Over the years, Calabrese became famous in Red Hook as the judge who actually went into the public housing buildings when handling housing matters. He asked defendants: what do you think is best for you? “I had never seen anything like that,” Pratt said.

     Calabrese was using what have become the four principles of procedural justice: first, that people who come before a judge trust that the process is impartial; second, that they are treated with respect; third, that they understand what is going on and what they are expected to do; fourth, that they have a voice. Defendants find the procedure fairer when they are allowed to state their views. Experimental evidence shows that this is true even when they are allowed to speak only after the judge has announced their decision. No one likes to lose a court case. But people accept losing more willingly if they believe the procedures used to handle their case are fair.

     […]

     In the last few months, however, procedural justice has moved near the top of the criminal justice reform agenda. The catalyst was the shooting of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, and the subsequent decision of a grand jury not to indict the officer who shot him. Brown’s death came after Eric Garner, who had suffocated in New York City a month earlier. It was followed by those of Walter Scott, who was shot eight times in the back in South Carolina; and Freddie Gray, who died of spinal injuries in Baltimore. Those are the widely known victims; there are others, including Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy shot in Cleveland when police mistook his toy gun for the real thing.

     Police abuses and judicial inequity are not new, of course. What is new is mainstream awareness of the system’s deficiencies. (One reason for this is the rise of smartphones – videographers are now everywhere.) White America now knows what black America already knew: the crime-control strategies of the last few decades have degenerated in many cities into deterrence based on fear and intimidation. There are mass arrests of young men of colour for simply hanging around, courts that harass the poor and hand down long and racially discriminatory sentences for relatively minor offences, and prisons that are seemingly designed to break and alienate inmates.

     Although most victims of violent crime are themselves poor people of colour, many people in these communities have come to see the criminal justice system as oppressor, not protector. And that has an enormous cost.

     Research on procedural justice shows that it can repair relationships between the criminal justice system and the community and, in doing so, reduce crime. After Ferguson, the Obama administration established a task force on 21st-century policing. In May it issued its final recommendations. First on the list was this: “Law enforcement agencies should adopt procedural justice as the guiding principle for internal and external policies and practices.” Tyler’s ideas are at the heart of the national debate.
     * * *

     Victoria Pratt’s visit to Red Hook in 2007 was the beginning of what became a several-year process to adapt its court model for Newark. In November 2009, Mayor Cory Booker (now senator) appointed Pratt to the Municipal Court bench, where she joined 10 other judges. After eight months in traffic court, Pratt learned that she was being assigned to Part Two. At first, it seemed like a punishment: Part Two had the largest volume, the hardest cases and the highest frustration level, as the same defendants came back time after time. But Newark had an ambitious plan for Part Two. It was, chief judge Richard Nunes told Pratt, where Newark was going to put its own version of Red Hook – and she was to become the city’s Alex Calabrese.

     Court Innovation, the non-profit that helped set up the Red Hook court, had been working for several years to set up Newark Community Solutions, the agency that would provide alternatives to jail similar to those in Red Hook: psychological screening, counselling, therapy groups and so on. But when Pratt moved into Part Two in May 2010, nothing was in place. There were no services. What she could do on her own was turn to procedural justice. She could talk to defendants the way Calabrese did.

     Just a few days after she took over Part Two, a man about her father’s age came into the court on heroin charges. Pratt asked him how long he had been addicted. When he told her he had been addicted for 30 years, Pratt veered into the kind of personal territory that judges do not usually explore. “I wanted to get to the human side and not just the old, dried-up, drug-addict side,” she said, recalling the exchange. She asked him if he had a family. He had one son, who was 32.

     “Then you haven’t been a father to your son for most of his life,” Pratt said.

     The man started to cry. Ordinarily, Pratt would have jailed him. He had unpaid fines, warrants for his arrest, and had been skipping out on court appearances. But she took a chance on releasing him, telling him to come back in two weeks. Pratt asked Kelly Mulligan-Brown, a resource coordinator for Newark Community Solutions, to find a treatment programme for him.

     Pratt did not know if the man would show up, but two weeks later, there he was. “You showed me more love than I have for myself,” she recalled him saying. “So I came back, to get some help.” Pratt was startled. “I didn’t use the word ‘love’. I just talked to him about his son,” she said. “I thought, ‘I could do this all day.’”

     Now she does. In court, Pratt’s demeanour is that of a no-nonsense mother who happens to host a high-speed chat show. She switches back and forth between English and Spanish. She comments on a new hair colour, asks about family members. “This court is going to treat you with dignity and respect, and we expect you to treat us the same way,” she tells defendants. “If you show up late or don’t show up at all, you will serve a jail sentence.”

     Pratt applauds at every possible opportunity: if someone completes his mandate, clears a debt, sends off a school application, or just pays for a bus ride instead of jumping the turnstile, she gets the room to clap. When I was there, one man got four rounds of applause. She sentenced one lethargic young man to do 25 pushups and film it on his phone.

     One of Pratt’s favourite moves is to assign essays, an idea she picked up from Calabrese in Red Hook, as a way to make defendants think. But where Calabrese simply read the essays himself, Pratt asks the writers to read them out loud. It is partly practical – bad handwriting – but Pratt believes that knowing that they have to read the essay out loud makes defendants take the exercise more seriously. “Those things she has me talk about I never thought I would go into,” said Tamuir Battle, who has been in Part Two repeatedly for nonpayment of traffic fines. “For me to sit down and write about that – it kind of hits you. Five years from now I’ll be 33 years old. It made me think about what I would like to be. You sit there and get into something, and it turns into three pages.”

     “A lot of people say they don’t like her – she’s mean,” said Battle. “They say she’s always going off on people. But I sit in her courtroom from nine in the morning till one, and everything always goes good with Judge Pratt, until someone plays on her intelligence like she’s dumb. That’s when you see the side of her you don’t want to see.”

     Come in high, display attitude or miss an appointment, and that side comes out. One day in April, Pratt saw a defendant who had missed a court date because, she said, she did not have the bus fare. “Don’t tell me about the bus,” Pratt told her sharply. “You walk. My father used to walk me from East Orange to Newark and back again.”

     “I’ve seen many defendants who, after having talked to the judge, feel there’s some personal connection,” said Ashlie C Gibbons, Part Two’s longtime public defender. (Because of the volume of cases, Part Two has its own public defender, who represents people who want an attorney and do not have their own.) According to Gibbons, sometimes when defendants receive a piece of good news or have achieved something, “they want to go in and tell the judge. They don’t want me to say it. It’s: ‘No, I want to tell the judge myself.’”

     […]

     It should not be difficult to convince judges to use procedural justice. It is a reform that costs virtually nothing. It is something every jurisdiction, or even individual judge, can do right now. Judges care about ensuring that defendants do what they tell them to do and show up in court, which procedural justice does well. This also saves money, as no-shows cause trial postponements and police must spend time looking for the truants. (This is also a huge problem beyond the US. In 2013, according to the Centre for Justice Innovation, Court Innovation’s British sister organisation, in England and Wales more than 4,500 trial sessions in magistrate’s courts, and 2,000 in crown courts, were cancelled because witnesses or defendants failed to show up.)

     Except in special instances such as drug courts, procedural justice is not widespread in the US. Some states – including California, Alaska, Utah, Colorado and Delaware – have taken it on statewide, with varying degrees of commitment, intensity and effectiveness. The largest programme, in California, fell victim to budget cuts after the recession of 2008.

     Why is it not more widespread? Intellectually, the idea has no real opponents. “It’s a big judicial world, so maybe some argue that it’s bad policy, but I have never heard or read about them,” said Burke, the Minneapolis judge. Mainly, the judges who object to procedural justice say that it is impractical, requires a special personality type to do well, or argue that the concept is fuzzy and indistinguishable from simple good judging.

     [..]

     Changing a culture that has been embedded for centuries takes more than training. “Under the press of business and time constraints, it’s easy to revert back to previous ways of doing things,” said Rottman. Courts that are serious about procedural justice need to build in systems to keep it going.

     That, however, requires a shift in thinking. Tyler also speaks to groups of judges around the country. “I hear a lot of, ‘It’s not my job,’” he said. Judges and lawyers are trained to value outcome, not process. Pratt faced similar obstacles in Newark – other judges were sceptical. “I heard a lot of, ‘You’re supposed to be a judge, not a social worker,’” she said. Some people who started working in Part Two did not like its methods. Others did not want the heavier workload – defendants are easier to deal with if they plead guilty, pay a fine and go home.

     It took time, but Pratt found people who got it. Police officer Miguel Carrillo, Pratt’s security officer, had worked on Newark’s gang and narcotics squads. He used to chase down and lock up people on drug charges. Now he finds himself applauding some of those same people.

     Gibbons was there from the outset, as was Herbert Washington, the court’s dapper, soft-spoken prosecutor. (The original three are an artistic group: Pratt is a dancer, Gibbons was a professional opera singer, and Washington writes music.) Gibbons always approved of Part Two’s methods – most public defenders would. It was more difficult for Washington. “Some of my colleagues don’t think that what we’re doing is real prosecutorial work,” Washington said. “But I am comfortable. Justice is not the same as help. Justice means giving the appropriate punishment for the crime. The prosecutor in Part Two has to have a different mindset: it’s looking for a way to help the person up out of the situation.”

     The hardest part for Washington was applauding. “At first I wouldn’t,” he said. “This is a criminal. Let’s just be clear. This isn’t somebody graduating from college. But I think I got used to it because it seems to help. The defendants probably don’t get much of what this judge is giving them from anyone. The person has to say, ‘Wow, maybe I’m not who I thought I was.’”

     “We’ll get a card or note: ‘Judge, I’m doing good.’ They were touched by something we’re doing as a courtroom, something Judge Pratt said,” Gibbons said. “If you want to say that’s not the function of the courtroom, you have that right. I believe it is.”

     Long read, lots of skipped bits, but damn.

     Breaking: Hattiesburg, Mississippi, removes MS flag from police and fire stations.

     North Charleston officer fired for posing in rebel flag underwear, Post and Courier on that story.

     Baltimore County Police Fatally Shoot Unarmed Black Man Spencer McCain, Thought He Had A Weapon, Huffington Post on that story.

     Southern Wesleyan University is offering full tuition scholarships for DePayne Middleton-Doctor’s 4 children. @SWU_edu #CharlestonShooting That’s a good news.

     The TD Arena is filling fast Not sure all will get in, Pinckney’s funeral.

253. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 2:58 pm

     Previous comment went to moderation. There’s a long read in there, please look for a new 252 soon.

     @deray “black lives matter” spray painted onto a statue of a confederate officer in downtown Lexington, Kentucky.

     Lynch Compares Charleston Shooter to ISIL Recruits. There might be something to that.

     The social forces that have assisted in the Islamic State’s radicalization of dozens of Americans are very similar to what drove Dylann Roof to embrace an extreme racist ideology before he allegedly launched an attack that left nine dead inside an iconic African American church, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said.

     Lynch, in an interview with USA TODAY late Wednesday as she returned from a trip to Birmingham, Ala., said the themes of social disconnection and an attraction to radical thought expressed on online are common in the recent stream of cases involving recruitment of U.S. citizens by the Islamic State and other homegrown violent extremists.

     “(It’s) very similar to Roof,” Lynch said. “People disaffected, people being radicalized online. Roof picked this racial hatred theme and that’s what fueled him. Others picked the ISIL theme, and that’s what fuels them.”

     The similarities, the attorney general said, also are contributing to a public debate over whether the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., should be characterized as “terrorism.”

     The federal government and state authorities are conducting investigations into the murders. Federal authorities are pursuing possible hate crime offenses, though Lynch said that all charging options would be considered, including domestic terrorism.

     While the attorney general declined to comment on what, if any, charges would be filed, she has suggested that crimes prompted by hate reflect the earliest definitions of domestic terrorism in the U.S.

     “Hate crimes are the original domestic terrorism,” Lynch said, referring to the early hate-inspired criminal campaigns waged by the Klu Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups.

     This and that else at the link.

     Sweet, sweet letters from his daughters Eliana and Malana. @ABCNews4 #charlestonstrong See attached photos and texts. :/

     Additional seats brought out as TD Arena on brink of capacity @ABCNews4 #chsnews #chs #sctweets #ClementaPinckney

254. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 3:16 pm

     More from the funeral, backwards.
     Notice: Obama did not say “God bless America.” He said “God give America your grace.” Wow.

     “That call Johnny back for a job interview by not Jamal line” is grounded in this great research (research here)

     As his second term comes to an end, President Obama is beginning to own & use the bully pulpit to speak truths about race and racism.

     The funeral service for Rev. Clementa Pinckney is happening now, and viewable here. @POTUS will deliver the eulogy. http://on.msnbc.com/1BSKV9X
     I think that’s a livestream link.
     Eulogy up next. Here, in the comments.

255. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 3:25 pm

     President Obama delivers eulogy for Charleston’s Rev. Pinckney, slain in racist massacre – there’s video at the link (of the entire service), I believe Obama’s bit starts about 1 hour and 20 minutes in. And if you get to the part where he sings Amazing Grace, just watch his body language. I do believe he is holding himself together.
     No real text to quote, I hope there will be a transcript later. It seems to have been an excellent speech.

     white gay men are literally playing oppression Olympics right now see picture, see appropriation – but I can’t exactly condemn them (white gay men) for it just at this moment.

     Donald Trump on Black Youths: ‘There’s No Spirit’. He’s just hanging out with the wrong black youths. I mean… Oh.

     At a June 23 Maryland Republican Party fundraiser, reporters asked GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump about his views on race relations.

     Trump said that black youths are at “a point where they’ve just about never done more poorly. There’s no spirit, there’s killings on an hourly basis, virtually, in places like Baltimore and Chicago and many other places,” according to The Independent.

     The real estate magnate didn’t stop there, adding, “I thought that President Obama would be a great cheerleader for the country. And he’s really become very divisive.”

     That was in addition to his comments about Mexican immigrants.

     Nigerian-born scientist wins award for his cancer-seeing glasses

     A Nigerian born scientist, Samuel Achilefu, has won the prestigious St. Louis Award for 2014 for creating cancer-visualizing glasses.

     Dr. Achilefu, a professor of radiology and biomedical engineering, and his team developed the imaging technology in cancer diagnosis into a wearable night vision-like goggles so surgeons could see the cancer cells while operating.

     “They basically have to operate in the dark,” Bloomberg Businessweek quoted Dr. Achilefu, 52, as saying.

     “I thought, what if we create something that let’s you see things that aren’t available to the ordinary human eye.”

     Dr. Achilefu won a scholarship from the French government to study at the University of Nancy, according to St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a regional newspaper in St. Louis, U.S., and is the 87th person to receive the annual award since it was established in 1931.

     Married with two young children, Dr. Achilefu moved to St. Louis after he was hired by Mallinckrodt to start a new research department.

     “Our efforts start with two words: ‘What if?’” Dr. Achilefu said during his acceptance speech.

     “These words may sound simple, but they embody the belief that each person has the potential to make a difference, if only he or she can take the time to understand the problem.”

     According to Bloomberg, the researchers’ technology requires two steps: First, surgeons inject a tiny quantity of an infrared fluorescent marker into the patient’s bloodstream. The peptides contained in the marker enables it to locate cancer cells and buries itself inside.

     After the tracer flows through a patient’s body and clears from non-cancerous tissue – which lasts about four hours – the operation would begin. Wearing the goggle, the doctor can inspect tumours under an infra red light that reacts with the dye, causing cancer cells to glow from within.

     This month, the goggles have been used on humans for the first time by surgeons at the Washington University School of Medicine.

     Four patients suffering from breast cancer and over two dozen patients with melanoma or liver cancer have been operated on using the goggles since they were developed.

     “The goggles function fantastically,” says Ryan Fields, a surgical oncologist who is collaborating with Dr. Achilefu to improve on the technology.

     “They allow us to see the cells in real time, which is critical. Because the marker has not yet been FDA-approved, doctors are currently using a different, somewhat inferior marker that also reacts with infrared light.”

     Well done, Dr Achilefu!!!!

     Map Shows Which American Cities Are Most Racially Segregated

     The mapping technique was pioneered by the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. To create a visual representation of how some cities and neighborhoods divide along lines of race, the Cooper Center’s data scientists assigned each person counted in the census a dot, with different colors denoting the person’s race.

     In the patterns of dots on the map, “there’s a confirmation of segregation that may contribute to racial tensions,” says demographer Qian Cai, director of demographics research at the Cooper Center. “After 50 to 60 years [since the Civil Rights Act], some cities are still starkly segregated.”

     Some American cities, primarily those on the East Coast, show an almost binary level of segregation between white and black. Sometimes—for example, in Detroit—that split can be seen along a single street. In Washington, D.C., the upper-income quadrant known as Northwest has historically been predominantly white while the adjacent quadrant, Northeast, remains mostly black. Cities on the West Coast appear generally more integrated, owing in large part to alternate patterns of settlement, racial history, and economic growth.

     Integration is a slow process, demographers say, when it happens at all. A 2012 New York University study on integrated communities found that shifts tend to be tied to population increase, and that mostly white neighborhoods are far more likely to become integrated than largely minority ones.

     Dustin Cable, the data scientist who devised the racial dot map (and now works for Facebook), says he doesn’t expect the racial dynamics to appear dramatically different in the 2020 census. The newest colors on the map may come from growth in Hispanic communities and among those identifying as multiracial, an option only recently added to the census.

     Explore the racial demographics on dot maps of America’s five most populous cities below. Find your community on the full Racial Dot Map.

     And remember, some of the most diverse cities are also the most segregated.

     Mrs. Millett and Mr. Cross teaching our reading class. This summer’s theme: Black is Beautiful.

256. rq says

     26 June 2015 at 3:26 pm

     This Is Why Everyone Cheering Gay Marriage Should Stand With the White House “Heckler” Now

     This past Wednesday, my trans latina sister, Jennicet Gutierrez, made national headlines when she interrupted President Barack Obama during the White House Pride reception. As a trans latina myself, seeing the way that the mostly white, gay community responded to her was the most painful and outrageous aspect of the event. Trans women of color like Jennicet have been on the front lines of the struggle for queer and trans liberation since the birth of our movement.

     While many in our community post about how Caitlyn Jenner is so courageous for transitioning, they are somehow blinded to seeing the real heroes before them. Real courage is being the lone voice in a room full of fake allies and still speaking up. Real courage is putting your immigration status and life on the line to fight for your immigrant trans sisters. Real courage is crashing a party at the White House to demand liberation for your people.

     I am very concerned with the direction our movement is going in. It seems as if so many in our movement are willing to sell their souls once they are recognized by power. All it takes are a couple of crystal chandeliers and the Deporter-in-Chief shaking their hand and suddenly they forget about the blood of both our ancestors and our transcestors that was spilled to even allow them entrance to the White House in the first place. Our modern movement suffers from severe memory loss.

     Those people who silenced my sister forget about Jasmin Vash Payne getting stabbed 18 times and then lit on fire in my own neighborhood. They forget about Deshawnda Sanchez getting shot to death while she was begging for help in Compton. They forget about 22 year old Bri Golec getting stabbed to death by her own father. They forget about 24 year old Ty Underwood being shot by her boyfriend and left for dead. They forget about Taja De Jesus who was stabbed multiple times and left to die in a stairwell.

     They forget that Marsha P. Johnson, that Miss Major, that Sylvia Rivera were real heroes, and that mainstream gay and lesbian organizations, such as the Human Rights Campaign, pale in comparison.

     I believe that there is a big divide in our “LGBTQ community,” to the point that I no longer believe we can authentically call ourselves one movement or community. There are those of us who want to enjoy privilege and exploit others just like white straight men, and there are those of us who seek liberation from the exploitative system itself.

     This morning, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage. But for those of us who seek liberation, I believe that we must destroy the notion that marriage will save us. Gay marriage, marriage equality—whatever you want to call it—is a distraction from what is killing us. We can no longer wait for the white gay establishment to recognize us, and instead do whatever it takes to take back our movement. We must leave behind respectability politics and take upon ourselves the following three demands.

     1) #BlackTransLivesMatter

     We will never get free until black trans women get free. All individuals, organizations and collectives must center their work on black trans women. We need black trans women to have leadership positions, to have access to employment, and to guide our organizations in ways that are not tokenization. If you have no black trans women in your organization, it is not because there are none. It is because you are not taking the time to invest in their lives. We must also recognize the multitude of ways that we already benefit from the labor of black trans women, such as Marsha P. Johnson and Miss Major.

     2) $15 minimum wage for trans and queer workers

     Working class trans and queer people deserve access to jobs that start at $15 an hour. We need to fight for jobs that are unionized, provide healthcare, and have clear protections in the union contract from harassment, discrimination, and illegal firing. Trans people, especially trans women of color, report unemployment at twice the rate of the general population. If we are lucky enough to be employed, then we are living in severe poverty, as we are four times more likely to report a household income of under $10,000 a year. And, we have to deal with verbal and physical violence on the job, all the time. We need access to jobs, and jobs that pay us a living wage.

     3) #Not1More LGBTQ Deportation

     As Jennicet stated, trans women in detention centers are “misgendered, exposed to assault, and put in detention centers with men.” She reminds us that “transgender immigrants make up one out of every 500 people in detention, but we account for one out of five confirmed sexual abuse cases in ICE custody.” We need to demand the release of all detained trans women, and an immediate end to all deportations.

     The future of our movement is in our hands. And we have a responsibility to use every platform we have to declare that black trans lives matter, that we need access to good jobs, and not one more queer or trans deportation. We can either continue to allow white gay male supremacy to silence us, or we can fight back and demand that we be treated with dignity. A line has been drawn and a question has been posed to all who identify under the queer and trans umbrella. Will you rise up and do whatever it takes to fight for our liberation?

     Yes, this article gets its own comment.

257. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 June 2015 at 1:18 am

     President Obama delivers eulogy for Clementa Pinckney. I think President Obama good orator and I wanted to listen to the entire thing, but there was just too much god talk. I don’t want to fucking hear “God works in mysterious ways” when you’re there to eulogize and honor Clementa Pinckney.

     Southern Wesleyan University offers full scholarships to children of DePayne Middleton Doctor.

     Philadelphia man holding his infant daughter is arrested for not paying $2.25 for her train fare, despite the fact that children under 4 are free and she’s clearly under the age of 4! And even if they aren’t free, the fucking fare is fucking $2.25! Argh!

258. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 1:40 am

     No, more guns are not the answer: Mayor of Charleston drops the mic on Huckabee and gun culture’s fantasy of arming everybody.

     The Huckster has called for arming parishioners to prevent more shootings.

     The Mayor of Charleston is not remotely amused.

     The mayor of Charleston, South Carolina questions the sanity of Mike Huckabee’s argument that better-armed parishioners could have stopped a deadly, racist terrorist attack that took place last week inside a church.

     “That is so insane. That is so nutty I can’t even talk,” Joseph Riley told radio host Alan Colmes on Wednesday. “It’s crazy. Absolutely crazy. We want everybody to carry a gun and then you have everybody carrying a gun and then somebody gets upset and pull it out because they got it handy and they got mad all of a sudden and rather than argue, or take a swing at somebody, they just kill them. It’s crazy, that is insane.”

     “I mean I knew these people,” Riley said. “I’m looking that their pictures right now in front of me. They weren’t going to be carrying handguns. You want an 87-year old retired lady or you want a minister to be carrying a handgun or a 78-year old retired lady that used to work for the city of Charleston? … You want those elderly people carrying handguns? Is that the best we can do in America?”

     He demolishes Huckabee in particular but also smashes the NRA gun myth that more guns somehow equals more safety, which is the snake oil Huck’s a-hawkin’..

     There are no actual technical talking points for responding to Huck and this mythological belief system hawked by him and the NRA: data doesn’t help, they merely ignore it.

     I applaud the mayor for coming out and putting it plainly.

     Now may he address racism just as directly.

     3 Black Churches burnt in North Carolina, Georgia and S.Carolina in the past 5 days. – It’s actually four now (maybe more), the article points out at the end: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. The article is more a summary with quotes from other articles on the arsons.

     Clarence Thomas’s Disgraceful Definition of Human Dignity

     During a break on my reporting trip to Ferguson, Missouri this spring, I visited the museum inside the Old Courthouse, a magnificent, green-domed federal-style building that sits in the shadow of the St. Louis Arch. It houses artifacts and displays relating to the Dred Scott case, tried there in 1847; ten years later, in 1857, the United States Supreme Court would hand Scott—an enslaved man suing for freedom for himself and his family—his final judicial defeat. In arguably the worst decision ever handed down by any American court, in words that are displayed today inside that museum in large, bold, white letters, Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that African Americans were “beings of an inferior order,” so much so that they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

     Taney’s statement is anathema to the very idea of equality. But he asserted that the Founding Fathers, as indicated in the Constitution itself, would have thought the same of people who looked like Scott, or me. In historical terms, Taney wasn’t far off. The Constitution needed correcting, and it wasn’t until the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, eleven years after the Scott decision, that this got cleared up.

     But I wondered again this morning, as marriage equality became the law of the land, what Constitution Clarence Thomas is reading, and in what America he lives. On Friday, Thomas—a black man who grew up in the Jim Crow south, a man who should know precisely the meaning of equal protection under the law—issued one of four individual written dissents in the case, Obergefell v. Hodges. It begins in the strict constitutionalist vein that Thomas is known for, but broadens to cover not only the Constitution but also the nation as a whole. For Thomas, the decision isn’t so much about laws as it is about principle:

     The Court’s decision today is at odds not only with the Constitution, but with the principles upon which our Nation was built. Since well before 1787, liberty has been understood as freedom from government action, not entitlement to government benefits. The Framers created our Constitution to preserve that understanding of liberty. Yet the majority invokes our Constitution in the name of a “liberty” that the Framers would not have recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they sought to protect. Along the way, it rejects the idea—captured in our Declaration of Independence—that human dignity is innate and suggests instead that it comes from the Government.

     Let’s consider this passage literally, and let’s consider the kind of liberty that the “Framers” recognized. The Constitution was ratified in 1787, in a new nation in which the enslavement of kidnapped Africans and their descendants—to say nothing of the abuse, murder, and rape they suffered—was already a national institution. Their notion of liberty didn’t include folks who looked like Dred Scott, me, or Thomas himself; Thomas’s “liberty” wasn’t open to gay or lesbian Americans in that day and age, either.

     […]

     What I can’t stomach, however, is Thomas’s tendency to ignore the systemic effects of prejudice, and in the process serve as an agent to foster them. By not recognizing what plagues so many, he allows hatred and ignorance to swell. Thomas clearly wants marginalized people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, all while he’s committed to taking those same bootstraps away. This is his legacy, a disgraceful sequel to the term of the man he succeeded, Thurgood Marshall. Granted, Thomas sometimes interprets symbols—such as burning crosses or Confederate flags—as offensive. But the actual, institutional bias those symbols promote escapes him. Thomas frequently infuses respectability politics into his rulings, which demonstrates his continued obliviousness to reality: It is not the responsibility of a vulnerable people to convince the powerful they are worth protecting. It is not the duty of the weak to prove they have dignity and therefore become worthy of being treated as equals; that task lies squarely across the shoulders of the rulers. And, in this regard, Thomas’s blindness shows. This is a person who, during the demonization of black people in the Reagan era, thought we were the main problem.

     […]

     Dignity is, by definition, a two-way street. You can consider yourself worthy of honor or respect, as Oxford defines it, all you wish. But if institutional discrimination deprives you of such basic human rights as health care, education, and the right to marry whomever you love, honor and respect is not afforded you. Sometimes, in the course of history, states and people need to be bound by law to respect you. Relying upon human nature, or the Founders’ supposed intentions is ridiculous when you consider yesteryear.

     Thomas, having lost the argument over marriage equality, chose to offer a pernicious, unsympathetic dissent that gives short shrift to the forces of discrimination and subjugation legalized by government while further emboldening his self mythology, this legendary story he keeps feeding us. Thomas would have you believe that because he himself could survive the indignities forced upon him by Jim Crow—a system of legal discrimination that eventually came to be made illegal, after a variety of Supreme Court decisions very much like today’s ruling—and that somehow, others should be able to endure something similar without the benefit of the very legal recourse that he can deliver from his perch. Using himself as the basis for a legal argument is asinine. Doing so in the service of discrimination is inexcusable.

     I left a lot of bits at the link.

     Group trying to recall Ferguson Mayor is 27 signatures short. Just 27.

     A group gathering signatures to force a recall election of Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III was 27 signatures short of the 1,814 needed, according the St. Louis County Board of Elections.

     Eric Fey, the election board director, said the group submitted a total of 3,336 signatures.

     Phillip Gassoway, the leader of Ground Level Support, the activist group trying to get Knowles out of office, said the recall election should still move forward because the city missed a deadline in certifying them.

     According to the City Charter, Ferguson had five days to verify the signatures, Gassoway said. The group handed the signatures in on Friday, he said, so that deadline passed on Wednesday.

     “Ferguson should still lose any rights to object to the validation of any signatures,” Gassoway said.

     Mayor James Knowles did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

     Jeff Small, a city spokesman, said Ferguson would issue a statement this afternoon.

     “This will challenged and litigated,” said Nick Kasoff, a member of a committee of five residents formed to recall Knowles. “We are confident that when a full review is conducted the petition will be certified.”

     Dispatch From Charleston: The Cost Of White Comfort

     How hard can it be to hold hands with someone, even a stranger, if you know it’s just for a couple minutes? For a few terrible moments in Charleston last week, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

     It was Friday night, and I was at a city-sponsored vigil in an arena on the College of Charleston campus with 4,000 other mourners. I had driven down from Clemson, S.C., where I teach, the morning after the shooting. I made the same sad four-hour trip not long ago; in April, my wife and I came for Walter Scott’s funeral, 10 miles up the road.

     A reverend led a prayer for the Emanuel AME victims, asking people to take the hand of the person next to them and join in singing “We Shall Overcome.” The person next to me was a kind-looking white woman with a small white rose pinned to her T-shirt; lots of people were wearing white ribbons in honor of the victims. She offered me a sad smile and a gentle nod, lifting her hand.

     That’s when I froze. I just couldn’t bring myself to take this woman’s hand, and I knew exactly why. It’s because she was white.

     Seriously, Chenjerai?! You’re gonna do this now? The voice of one of my mentors, an older black man who ran a diversity program at my college, boomed in my head. Get over yourself and your racial baggage and support this community. You will hold this white woman’s hand. Now!

     My arm didn’t move. I had no doubt that this woman was at the vigil because she cared and wanted to help. And, just like me, I’m sure she was hurting that night. As a college professor and activist on diversity issues, no one needs to convince me that there are genuine, engaged, committed white people in this fight. I’ve marched next to thousands of them over the years, I’ve worked through hundreds of tough conversations with them in workshops on race, and I get to know them every day in my classes.

     I have reached across the aisle. I have broken bread. I fully believe we all need healing in these moments, and that night, the symbolism was clear: a white person and a black person holding hands in the face of horrific racial violence, singing songs of freedom. What could be more comforting?

     But thanks to something I experienced the previous night in Charleston, I couldn’t shake a paralyzing feeling: When black people and white people clasped hands in the arena that night, the comfort wouldn’t be evenly distributed. The healing wouldn’t flow both ways.

     […]

     At that moment, I had to fight down two conflicting instincts. The first was to spit. (I didn’t.) The other urge was to appease this white officer. To put him at ease. To make sure he felt validated and in charge and, above all, comfortable.

     There’s a long history to this urge. It’s what my mother told me to do and what my father showed me how to do whenever he was pulled over. Shrink down into yourself around white people in command, make yourself small and quiet and do whatever it takes to keep them comfortable.

     And it goes back much further. Survival for black folk during slavery, Jim Crow and well beyond necessitated thousands of small demonstrations of pleasant compliance toward white people. This didn’t just mean crossing the street when a white person approached; it meant keeping your eyes down while you did it. It didn’t just mean stepping off the curb for a white person; it meant smiling as you did it.

     Today, it means that when I discuss these shootings with my white students and my heart is bursting at the seams with outrage and grief, I must keep my voice and gestures gentle and calm and validate my students’ most hurtful comments so they don’t feel personally indicted.

     And it means not just acquiescing to unwarranted police interrogation and arrest. It means being friendly, even gracious, throughout the ordeal. Black survival has so often depended on white comfort.

     In the arena the next night, I did, of course, finally take the hand of the woman by my side. She smiled gratefully, her face flushed. Just half a minute had passed, but it had been an awkward encounter for both of us. I joined in the singing — We’ll walk hand in hand, we’ll walk hand in hand. We’ll walk hand in hand someday — but I was thinking about the heartbroken men I met in front of Emanuel AME Church the night before, who spent energy they did not have on appeasing yet another white police officer.

     And I was thinking about a black woman I’d met earlier that day, a housekeeper at the Quality Inn where I was staying in North Charleston. It was 100 degrees outside, and we talked while she folded laundry in a barely air-conditioned room. She said she desperately wanted to take her family to church on Sunday but didn’t know if it would be safe. What if other white supremacists were feeling inspired?

     In a state where black people still have to drive down roads named for generals willing to spill rivers of blood — black and white — to keep their kin in chains, church is one of the few places that feel truly comfortable. And now, even that was taken away.

     Looking out over the smiling, swaying, overwhelmingly white audience singing in the arena that night, I realized that with the simple act of extending my hand — literally, not even metaphorically — I could offer so many of them a heartfelt feeling of racial unity, the promise of healing. But what can I offer the black men and women I spoke to earlier that day? I can’t promise them that things will change, that their sons and daughters will make it to happy, healthy adulthoods, that one day they won’t have to work in brutal heat for insultingly low pay or that a police officer or angry young white man won’t snuff out their happiness in a single instant. I could offer them a hand, too, but I can’t offer real comfort.

     A few moments after taking hold of my neighbor’s hand, I let go again. That didn’t feel good, but maybe we’re not all supposed to feel good right now. Not yet.

     See article for obvious case of racial profiling (that ended in nothing, but still).

259. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 June 2015 at 2:51 am

     From The Root–
     9 trans men of color you should know
     Kye Allums

     The Minnesota native made headlines when he came out in 2010 while playing on the women’s basketball team at George Washington University. Allums became the first openly transgender Division I athlete in NCAA history. After graduation, he decided to focus on LGBT activism and has spoken at more than 32 colleges and universities about the trans* athlete experience. He has also written his first book, Who Am I? Allums identifies as a queer, fluid trans* and prefers the pronouns “he” or “him” and “they” or “them.”

     The Rev. Lawrence T. Richardson

     Richardson grew up in St. Paul, Minn., and felt compelled to serve in the ministry from the time he was a youth. After spending years trying to fit in at churches, he saw a commercial featuring a community of diverse people being rejected from the church. The commercial ended with “God doesn’t reject people and neither do we.” Richardson became an ordained minister and joined the United Church of Christ community. In 2010 he medically transitioned from female to male and now identifies as a transgender, queer-identified person. He says, “I used to be a miserable person … physically sick and depressed all the time; and if I can be transformed and made whole by the love of God, anyone can be!”

     Kylar Broadus

     Broadus, who transitioned more than 20 years ago, is an attorney who focuses on LGBT law and transgender rights. He is the founder and director of the Trans People of Color Coalition, the only national organization dedicated to the civil rights of transgender people of color. The former Lincoln University of Missouri professor is also co-founder of the think tank the Transgender Law and Policy Institute. The Missouri native is the first transgender American to testify before the U.S. Senate in favor of the Employment Nondiscrimination Act. During his 2012 speech he said, “For me, the physical transition was about letting the outer world know my internal sense of self, of who really was inside this body. … My transition was a matter of living the truth and sharing that truth for the first time in my life.”

     Kai M. Green

     Green is a writer, poet, scholar and filmmaker born in Oakland, Calif., who is dedicated to raising consciousness around self-care, self-love, sexual and emotional health, sexual and state violence, healthy masculinities, and black feminism. Green’s short film It Gets Messy in Here examines the lives of transgender men and masculine-identified women of color and their bathroom experiences. Green is a professor and postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in sexuality studies and African-American studies.

     I want to give the site some traffic, so if anyone wants to read the rest of the men on the list, click away. I’m out for the night folks. Have a good day/night all.

260. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 3:03 am

     Tony
     Clementa Pinckney was a reverend, and many of those attending were his parishioners. They’re in the equivalent of a church setting.
     “God works in mysterious ways” are words that they understand, and probably expect to hear.
     And I hope you go back and listen to the rest of the eulogy, because it isn’t a quiet speech of sorrow and acceptance and forgiveness. Even the use of the words ‘God grant America your grace’ rather than ‘God bless America’ have a different theological meaning that’s actually a lot better than asking for forgiveness and moving-forward. A blessing implies things are okay the way they are; granting grace implies things need to be fixed. (This is my super-short interpretation as a former catholic.) And then he says grace is fine, but now is the time for action (my paraphrase). Anyway. It’s not the religious aspects that were important in this speech, he said a lot about systemic racism, the confederate flag, poverty…
     Full speech here: President Obama Delivers Eulogy at Charleston Shooting Funeral of Clementa Pinckney [FULL SPEECH]

     Obama eulogizes pastor in Charleston shooting. Obama sings Amazing Grace at funeral of Charleston shooting victim Clementa Pinckney.
     Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama on Friday eulogized the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, one of the victims in last week’s church massacre, calling him a “man of God who lived by faith.”

     “We are here today to remember a man of God who lived by faith,” Obama said. “A man who believed in things not seen. A man who believed there were better days ahead, off in the distance. A man of service who persevered knowing full well he would not receive all those things he was promised, because he believed his efforts would provide a better life for those who followed.”
     The President’s remarks both memorialized the victims and touched upon the current controversy surrounding the Confederate flag and what he said was a need for more gun control in the wake of the tragedy.

     “By taking down that flag we express God’s grace,” he said.

     Obama finished his remarks by breaking into song, leading the assembled in a rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

     Friday’s funeral service for Pinckney isn’t the first time Obama delivered a high-profile eulogy, and with a year and a half remaining in office, it may not be the last.

     But when the President stood in historic downtown Charleston to remember the slain pastor and eight others shot down in their church last week, his speech moved beyond just grief for the victims — Obama stepped directly into a national conversation about race in which he plays a central role.

     President Barack Obama ended his at times solemn, at times rousing eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed along with eight other African-American churchgoers last week, by leading the congregation in “Amazing Grace.”

     After repeating those words, “Amazing Grace,” several times, the president paused before launching into the song as the mourners joined him.

     Note: As a white person who used to go a lot to white church, it was so interesting to hear people actively participating and responding during the eulogy, esp. all the applause. I like it, even though that was something that would never be done in any of the churches I went to. Obedient silence for us white folk!

     And the Amazing Grace sung at the end has a very relevant significance. It was written by John Newton, a British abolitionist who turned to abolitionism only towards the end of his life, and after spending years in the slave-trade himself. While the song may not actually live up to its legend (instant conversion on a slave-ship mid-storm), Newton himself spent the last few years of his life fighting against slavery. So I think that’s of significance in this case.
     Anyway. I love some of the headlines for the speech: passionate, unvarnished, race lecture.

     In Charleston Funerals, Remembering Victims of Hate as Symbols of Love

     In life, they did not mingle with the powerful, leading modest lives centered on family and church. In death, the powerful turned out Thursday, along with the people who knew Ethel Lance and Sharonda Coleman-Singleton best, to celebrate a different kind of power they wielded.

     “She has to represent something we all know is there — love,” said Brandon Risher, a grandson of Ms. Lance. “She is a victim of hate, but she can be a symbol for love. That is what she was in life. Hate is powerful but love is more powerful.”

     For a region grieving since a gunman killed nine people in a Charleston church last week, a new phase of mourning began Thursday, with the first of the victims’ funerals, for Ms. Lance, 70, and Ms. Coleman-Singleton, 45.

     Gov. Nikki R. Haley, Senator Tim Scott, Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. of Charleston, and the civil rights leaders Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton all attended one or both funerals. They sat with the victims’ friends, families and fellow parishioners of Emanuel A.M.E. church — the church the victims loved, and the place where they died.

     […]

     Speaking at the service for Ms. Coleman-Singleton, at Mount Moriah Missionary Baptist Church, Mr. Sharpton noted the contradiction of watching Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, a black woman, formally sworn in on the morning of June 17, and then hearing that evening of the church massacre that he called “racial terrorism.”

     “That morning I saw how far America had come,” he said. “At night, I saw how far we yet have to go.”

     The victims, all of them black, were shot to death during Bible study at Emanuel, a church so central to black Charleston’s history that it is known as “Mother Emanuel.”

     The man charged with the killings, Dylann Roof, 21, has been linked to white supremacist views, and officials have said the crime was racially motivated.

     Yet in the face of profound loss, the funerals Thursday were jubilant, the overflow crowds swaying, singing and cheering, doing the syncopated “Lowcountry clap.” Speakers recalled both women as pillars of their families and their church.

     The victims’ family members have drawn national attention for the grace they have shown, offering blessings, love, and even forgiveness to the man accused in the killings — an example they say was set by the people who were suddenly ripped from their lives.

     One by one, Ms. Lance’s five grandchildren stood in front of the congregation at Royal Missionary Baptist Church, where her body lay before the altar in a shimmering silver gown, and praised her spirit of generosity, which they hoped would be embraced by all. One of her granddaughters said the family wished her legacy to stretch beyond the bullets and bloodshed at Emanuel.

     […]

     Mr. Sharpton put the church massacre into the context of a long history of racism-fueled violence, including a reference to both Ms. Coleman-Singleton and the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four black girls. “There’s four little girls in Birmingham that need a coach,” he said, a remark that drew the cheering, applauding congregation to its feet.

     Ms. Coleman-Singleton’s body lay clad in the letters and pink and green colors of her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, the oldest Greek-letter organization founded by college-educated black women. The sorority’s crest adorned the satin lining of her coffin, and 200 sorority sisters formed a ring around the perimeter of the sanctuary floor during a ceremony before the service. Reverberations from the killings continued, spread around the state and the nation.

     In Washington, the Very Rev. Gary Hall, dean of the Washington National Cathedral, called for the removal of stained glass windows installed there in 1953, honoring the lives and legacies of the Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and displaying the image of the Confederate battle flag. The cathedral’s governing board must decide whether to act on his recommendation. And leaders of the South Carolina legislature said members of both houses would return in two weeks to consider business that would include removal of the Confederate battle flag from the State House grounds.

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     Politics intruded momentarily on the service as well, when Mr. Sharpton said he had never met Governor Haley, but had led a protest outside the State House and had seen her looking down from her window.

     When her turn came to speak, Ms. Haley said, “If you were protesting outside my window, if you would have come inside and held out your hand, I would have hugged you.”

     “I’ll be back,” Mr. Sharpton yelled out, to laughter from the pews.

     Funeral services will be held Saturday at Emanuel for Tywanza Sanders, 26; his aunt, Susie Jackson, 87; and Cynthia Hurd, 54, a librarian and longtime church member. Witnesses said Mr. Sanders tried to talk the gunman into surrendering, and then tried in vain to shield his aunt.

     Other funerals will be next week. Services for DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49, will be on Sunday and for Myra Thompson, 59, on Monday. There will be a service in Charleston on Tuesday for the Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr., 74, a traveling preacher, and another in Columbia later in the week.

     Moving on.

     A note: Rather than saying “predominantly white institutions we should call them what they are: historically white institutions” #afamedsummit

     I Am Black and Gay, But I Refuse to Be Proud This Weekend

     The Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage Friday and I should be euphoric. But I am not.

     I am enraged. The coffin of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, South Carolina state senator and the pastor of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, will be buried Friday. Eight other coffins — flanked by grieving loved ones, covered with meticulously arranged flowers and filled with the lifeless bodies of black people shot by a white racial supremacist wielding a .45-caliber Glock — will be transported from “Mother Emanuel” to a graveyard throughout the coming week.

     On June 17, Cynthia Hurd, 54; Susie Jackson, 87; Ethel Lance, 70; DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49; Clementa Pinckney, 41; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45; and Myra Thompson, 59, faced a savage death not unlike that of black folk before them who were lynched or assaulted because of the color of their skin.

     While so many Americans shed joyful tears because same-sex marriage has been ruled constitutional at last, once-alive black bodies will be placed in the dirt.

     I am gay. I understand the historic importance of this moment. But I know, whether I am legally married or not, the rainbow flag of LGBTQ equality will never shield my black body from a reckless police officer’s bullet. I cannot summon enough pride to prevent my black, gay body from being the target of white racial supremacy. I cannot selectively choose which fight I can show up for, because mere survival requires me to fight for racial, sexual, gender, economic and social justice at once.

     That is why this otherwise celebratory moment feels bittersweet. To be honest, mostly bitter. I’ve been here before. When the Supreme Court gutted the historic Voting Rights Act in 2013, an act originally ratified because of the work of black leaders who fought to prevent racial discrimination in voting, I was incensed in a way many of my white LGBTQ friends were not. I was hoping for queer outrage, but confronted apathy. Then again, I never expected big protests or social media campaigns; the “movement” might care about my queerness, but it certainly does not value my blackness.

     The LGBTQ movement has been likened to the black civil rights movement of our past, with “gay” even being called the “new black” (“black,” in this summation, serving as a synonym for “lack” — a lack of access and rights). Thus gay liberation has often been fueled by the rhetoric of black liberation. In April, for example, joyful proponents of same-sex marriage gathered outside of the nation’s highest court, singing “We Shall Overcome.” But I wonder, who is the “we” they imagine?

     It was convenient for same-sex marriage advocates to position the fight for LGBTQ liberation as the “new black,” only until it began winning victories. The trope of blackness doesn’t necessarily work as a metaphor in the current iteration of the LGBTQ movement, because “black” never signified progress in the queer imagination. Gay was only the “new black” when gay people were denied equal protections and privileges under the law. And as the LGBTQ movement wins victories like same-sex marriage, black folks, including black LGBTQ folks, are still engaged in a struggle for our lives.

     I refuse to take pride in a “movement” singularly invested in gay liberation while black and brown folk continue to die at the hands of the state and white vigilantes. LGBTQ celebration should not overshadow the tragedy of black death and inequity. Not while white LGBTQ people refuse to confront the anti-black racism within their liberal communities. Not while marriage equality work can amass more money than programming for trans women of color and LGBTQ youth. Not while undocumented LGBTQ people continue to be detained and abused by the state. Not while I must daily argue for the mattering of black lives.

     Same-sex marriage is a win. The mattering of black lives is a loss. Now how will the LGBTQ movement respond to this equation of injustice?

     And onto that background, aside from the unnecessary appropriation of a historic moment, this image also oversimplifies one critical element – an explanation of the historic photo and why it isn’t as simple as its remake makes it appear. (There’s a short text at that first link explaining how the silver medallist, Australian Peter Norman, was also expressing his support in that moment.)

261. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 3:47 am

     Picked this up off twitter. Nina Simone ~ Who knows where the time goes, with an intro – a contemplation on time by Ms Simone herself – worth listening to.

     Link to a documentary appearing locally in STL (I believe), The Injustice System, on police, the justice system, etc. Don’t know if anyone’s in reach of this, might be worth a watch.

     And the Texas housing decision: Supreme Court upholds broad housing discrimination claims, where the Supreme Court says that discrimination doesn’t have to be overt in order to exist, is another victory-like point we can add to this week.

     6 Ways White Supremacy Takes a Toll on the Mental Health of Black People

     Officially, Kalief Browder died as a result of suicide at his family’s home in the Bronx this weekend. Yet it’s not a stretch to say the racist criminal justice system that locked him up for more than three years without a trial was likely the main culprit for the young man’s death. In 2010, the cops arrested 16-year-old Browder after another teen accused the boy of robbing him of his backpack. Browder has always denied the accusations. His family couldn’t afford the $10,000 bail, so Browder was forced to stay in Rikers for three years. While there, he was held in solitary confinement for 400 days, beaten by jail guards, abused by other inmates and attempted suicide several times.

     Black people make up just 14 percent of the U.S. population, yet 38 percent of those locked up, according to a recent report; 60 percent of those in solitary confinement are black. A fact sheet from Solitary Watch reports that solitary confinement can create or exacerbate mental health issues. Browder never had a chance.

     This is what white supremacy does. It disproportionately targets black people and uses its system (jails, police, unsupportive work environments, white privilege at universities and other institutions) to break them. But it is not just about jails. Even young black kids who attend pool parties are at risk. As AlterNet previously reported, Officer Eric Casebolt from the McKinney Police Department was captured on video violently putting 15-year-old Dajerria Becton on the ground and pulling his gun on other teens who came to her aid. The psychological trauma from that experience will surely follow her for some time. That is part of the quintessential state violence that black people endure on a daily basis.

     Racism, in all of its forms, takes a heavy toll on black people’s mental health, according to practicing therapists and psychologists who spoke with AlterNet. “Research has shown that racism has negative psychological consequences for African Americans such as increased symptoms of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress,” says Erlanger Turner, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Houston-Downtown. He was one of three mental health professionals, along with Kira Banks, assistant professor of psychology at Saint Louis University, and Lisa Jones, a licensed clinical social worker based in New York City, who spoke to AlterNet about the ways in which racism can literally make black people ill.

     “While racism comes in various forms, be it through personal experience or media portrayals, black people tend to feel hopeless and give up mentally, often feeling as if they are not good enough,” Jones said. “Living in a society where there is constant portrayal of racial injustice (forms of microaggressions, ongoing discrimination, unarmed black people killed by law enforcement) can lead to chronic feelings of despair. Many, at times, will feel like racial issues will never be solved. Such negative and consistent thoughts can trigger severe depressive symptoms.”

     In 2011, the American Psychological Association released a study that found a correlation between racism black people self-reported and subsequent mental and physical health issues.

     “The relationship between perceived racism and self-reported depression and anxiety is quite robust, providing a reminder that experiences of racism may play an important role in the health disparities phenomenon,” Alex Pieterse, lead author of the study, said. “For example, African Americans have higher rates of hypertension, a serious condition that has been associated with stress and depression.”

     The sis ways can be found at the link, but include: videos and photos of black people killed by police; parenting a black son; not being valued or being abused at work; microaggressions; being attacked for standing up for civil rights; and treating black girls like criminals.

     And this was good: Darius Simpson & Scout Bostley – “Lost Voices” (CUPSI 2015)

     5 black church arsons in 6 days: Knoxville 6/21, Macon, GA 6/23, Charlotte, NC 6/24, Warrenville, SC 6/26, and Tallahassee 6/26.
     Shit.

262. Dalillama, Schmott Guy says

     27 June 2015 at 4:24 am

     “Terrorism is an act of violence done or threatened to in order to try to influence a public body or the citizenry, so it’s more of a political act, and again based on what I know,” Comey said at a press conference on Friday. “I don’t see it as a political act.”

     So what the fuck would you call it, you blithering ninny? For fuck’s sake, how the hell did this jackass end up in charge of the primary Federal law enforcement agency in the U.S.?

263. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 6:05 am

     Buh-buh-but Dalillama, he made a nice statement about racism in policing last autumn!!
     More seriously, if the head of the FBI can’t see the political motivation behind Roof’s killing spree, I just… I think he needs to check some of his priorities. And biases.

     +++

     1960 to Now :::: 3 different generations of Self Taught Black photographers ::: #History

     June 26th : The homeless were removed from MLK with no warning, Some have been in the same spot for years :: #DVNLLN
     Already homeless so you Destroy the little bit they do own :: #Baltimore ::: #DVNLLN Whatever they couldn’t carry got dumped.
     In #Baltimore our homeless people were removed from MLK this morning with no fair warning ::: #DVNLLN
     Speaking of this photographer, I lost the article I had on him, where he spoke about his rise to photography prominence and how he wants to help other budding photographers learn and be better known.

     This African-Themed Show Had Zero Black Models

     The ongoing conversation around cultural appropriation in fashion (and beauty) just got a new talking point. Japanese designer Junya Watanabe showed his men’s collection in Paris today, at the Museum of Immigration. The collection drew on African influences — including colorful Dutch wax fabrics and Masai-style layered necklaces — while managing to feature exactly zero black models. Much noted on social media was the hair — several white models appeared to wear dreadlock wigs. (Watanabe has done this before, as seen in his spring 2014 women’s collection.)

     NowFashion said, “Much like Vampire Weekend’s ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,’ Watanabe’s collection reflected on colonialism, and exploited the in-roads between preppy and native African culture,” while WWD conceded, “Some might see the Masai necklaces, wooden masks and metal spears as overkill, and insensitive to the darker side of colonialism. Yet the beauty of Watanabe’s pattern mixes and the placement of the scraps — along with the jauntiness of his summer tailoring in rumpled, sun-faded fabrics — delivered a powerful tropical punch.”

     Some twitter reaction at the link.

     FYI: You should know: The flag cartoon going around is a photoshopped version of Bob Englehardt’s original. (Via @susie_c)

264. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 6:59 am

     This happened:
     BREAKING: The confederate flag no longer flies over South Carolina. #KeepItDown #BlackLivesMatter
     BREAKING: Activists in South Carolina are in process of taking down the confederate battle flag. #keepitdown
     And… BREAKING: SC has ordered the flag be put back up. Just in time for the white supremacist rally at 11AM today.

     The story: Woman removes Confederate flag in front of SC statehouse

     The Confederate flag has been temporarily removed from in front of the South Carolina Statehouse.

     An unidentified black woman was about halfway up the more than 30-foot steel flagpole just after dawn Saturday when State Capitol police told her to come down. Instead, she continued up and removed the flag before returning to the ground.

     The woman and another man who had entered the wrought-iron fence surrounding the flag were arrested.

     The flag, which is protected by state law, was raised again a short time later. A rally by flag supporters was scheduled for later Saturday.

     Calls for removing the flag have been renewed since nine black churchgoers were killed in what police characterized as a racist attack at a Charleston, South Carolina church last week.

     Here she is: When you capture the flag of white supremacy and need to replenish that #BlackGirlMagic

     And in sadder news, via PZ, String of Nighttime Fires Hit Predominately Black Churches in Four Southern States. Church count is up to 6 right now.

     In what may not be a coincidence, a string of nighttime fires have damaged or destroyed at least six predominately black churches in four southern states in the past week.

     Arsonists started at least three of the fires, while other causes are being examined in the other fires, investigators say.

     The series of fires – some of them suspicious and possible hate crimes — came in the week following a murderous rampage by a white supremacist who shot and killed nine people at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.

     The fires also occurred at a time when there is increasing public pressure to remove the Confederate flag – one of the last hallmarks of white superiority — from government buildings and public places as well as banning assorted Confederate flag merchandise sold in retails stores and online.

     Even if the fires are deemed arson, it takes additional proof under reporting standards to conclude the act was a hate crime, investigators say.

     “As the nation grapples with the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., one of the oldest Black churches in the South, other Black churches have become recent targets of arson,” writer David A. Love said today at Atlanta BlackStar.

     “From slavery and the days of Jim Crow through the civil rights movement and beyond, white supremacists have targeted the Black church because of its importance as a pillar of the Black community, the center for leadership and institution building, education, social and political development and organizing to fight oppression,” Love wrote.

     “Strike at the Black church, and you strike at the heart of Black American life,” the writer added.

     The most recent fires occurred early today at the Glover Grover Baptist Church, in Warrenville, S.C., and at the Greater Miracle Apostolic Holiness Church in Tallahassee, Fla.

     More background on the other fires at the link.

265. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 7:02 am

     And just because, here’s a couple more about the flag removal:
     Black, southern, female, and unafraid. #BlackLivesMatter #Columbia #TakeItDown
     Look at her smile: Nothing could be finer. #Columbia #KeepItDown #BlackLivesMatter I believe her name is Bree.

     And this: It means something that this woman took down the Confederate flag. It may mean more that she forced South Carolina to opt to put it back up.

266. HappyNat says

     27 June 2015 at 9:02 am

     @BreeNewsome is a motherfucking badass.

     From Shaun King https://twitter.com/ShaunKing

     UPDATE: @BreeNewsome did not do this for any money.
     Her team asked that we support her bail and that all other funds go to Charleston.

267. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 June 2015 at 9:57 am

     rq @260:
     Ok. I’ll go back and watch the rest of it.

     ****

     Bree Newsome is the shit!

268. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 10:24 am

     Bree Newsome is absolutely the shit. I love the photo of her smiling while arrested. Just… wow. WOW.
     There’s a petition up to drop all charges against her (link left at home :( ). And I left some other additional photos and articles at home, but apparently there’s a flag-supporter rally going on right now, with cars, trucks and people circulating with the flag and singing Dixie and such.
     AND apparently it’s Newsome’s birthday today.

269. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 1:31 pm

     This is a catch-up-around-FtB post and catch-up-on-Canadian-media post, because I’m a procrastinator at heart.
     First, Mano Singham:
     The suddenly toxic confederate flag;
     A possible end to long-term solitary confinement?
     The absurd fuss over Obama’s use of the n-word;
     What to do about the confederate flag;
     How could people do something like this? (on the WWII military experiments on people of colour);
     The ‘lone wolf’ theory implicates us all, a point of view I hadn’t actually considered (and definitely a cultural trap those right-wing pundits are walking into), so here’s a quote:

     People seem to think that the lone wolf theory absolves everyone else from complicity in his actions, but actually it makes it much worse because people do not get their ideas totally out of nowhere. There must be some seed that that was planted and later germinated. This killer’s thinking and actions were not based on some murderous impulse that can be dismissed as a momentary aberration but cold-blooded and premeditated and based on a fairly concrete set of beliefs. If someone has been part of a group that actively propagates a doctrine of racial hatred, then one can understand where their ideas came from.

     But if the killer was not being systematically indoctrinated by a group of people, then from where did he arrive at his conclusion that black men are raping white women and that black people are taking over the country and that white people are in danger of being subjugated? Those ideas had to have been planted in his brain from somewhere and in the absence of an identifiable group of people, this means he arrived at them by a process of osmosis, from it seeping into him from the general culture. That is a very disturbing thing to contemplate because that means these poisonous ideas are present in the general culture and thus are being propagated widely and much more subtly than crude propaganda directly targeting individuals. They are thus likely to infect even more people though one hopes that they will not be manifested in such a terrible way.

     Many of the so-called Muslim ‘terrorist plots’ in the US that the authorities with great fanfare claim to have foiled turn out to be those that required a lot of coaxing and bribing by government informants and agents to persuade the alleged perpetrators to even become involved in the planning (see here and here). On occasions when individuals in the US decide seemingly on their own that they want to join ISIS or some such group, it is assumed that they have been influenced by some kind of pervasive ideology that has infected the Muslim world. But when we have a killer who does not fit that mold, we are reluctant to ascribe a similar indirect influence.

     The existence of ‘lone wolf’ killers means that they get their ideas from the environment unlike those who were entrapped by the government or those who were systematically targeted and indoctrinated by others. The fact that someone is a lone wolf does not exonerate the community at large from responsibility for his actions. If at all, it makes it worse, because not only does it tell us something disturbing about our culture, its diffuse nature makes it much harder to counteract.

     I had to think about that for a while, because it makes a lot of scary sense.

270. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 1:42 pm

     PZ’s post The blame game!, which indirectly ties into Mano Singham’s post just above.

     Something from the CBC (a bit dated, sorry, I only bother catching up when at work because Twitter is blocked to me here):
     A black president speaks about race and no one hears

     “Racism, we are not cured of it,” Barack Obama said in an interview with U.S. comedian Marc Maron broadcast on his podcast, WTF, Monday. “And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say n*gg*r in public.”

     It was a deliberate, calibrated reference.

     The “N-word,” now a fixture in American and Canadian English, is just a slippery proxy that allows the speaker to piously claim distance from and distaste for racist language while at the same time triggering the actual epithet in the listener’s mind.

     Just because we’re not mouthing the word, Obama is saying, doesn’t mean we aren’t thinking it.
     […]

     “The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination” still exists in institutions, he said, and it casts “a long shadow and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on.”

     One suspects the president has been listening to some of the more depressingly stupid post-Charleston discourse, and just couldn’t take it anymore.
     […]

     Or maybe Obama was thinking of the South Carolina legislators who left the Confederate Stars and Bars, a flag that practically screams “We want Jim Crow back,” flapping insultingly in front of the state legislature in Columbia.

     Perhaps he just couldn’t stand listening to the cowardly Republican presidential candidates who, eyeing the eventual primary in South Carolina, couldn’t bring themselves to say it’s time that flag was taken down.

     “This is not a time to discuss that, this is a time to grieve, this is something for the people of South Carolina to decide,” blah blah, blah.
     […]

     Barack Obama actually grew up black in America. He knows a thing or two about being judged by the colour of his skin, rather than the content of his character.

     But he clearly also decided as a young politician that most white folks, at least the ones who live outside San Francisco and Massachusetts, aren’t too keen on being lectured by a black man about race.

     Hence the elliptical tone he’s used to discuss race for most of his six-plus years in office.
     […]

     So now, nearing the end of his second term, Obama has clearly decided to just state the obvious. At last.

     There is no more powerful bully pulpit in America than the presidency, and on this particular topic, no one more capable of stirring serious discussion. Or so you would think.

     The reaction? His remarks today made news. But tentative, nervous news, and probably not what Obama was hoping.

     “Obama uses N-word,” said CNN’s gormless website headline. As though any further irony were needed, a graphic accompanying the audio of Obama’s remarks substituted “n***r” for the word as the president spoke it.

     An editor added the helpful warning that the article “contains language that some may find offensive.”

     Well, good. Hadn’t anyone thought that maybe, for once, Barack Obama actually set out to offend?

     A disclosure here: Some initial CBC News broadcasts chose to bleep out the word “n*gg*r,” too, actually censoring the U.S. president as he spoke about race.

     The network’s journalistic policy maven, David Studer, quickly sent out a missive: “While we normally don’t use the word in our coverage, reports on this story need not bleep or disguise the word ‘n*gg*r.'”

     The note, Studer explained later, was to “advise people to cease messing with the president’s choice of words.”

     And maybe even listen to them. Although it’s hard to imagine there won’t be a certain type of South Carolinian smiling to himself, saying he never had a problem with the word in the first place.

     CBC again, Confederate flag: 10 facts about the controversial symbol, in case anyone’s interested.

     And one more from the CBC this comment, Michael Wood, ex-Baltimore officer, tweets about alleged police brutality, as posted about above by Tony.

     Wood, now a PhD candidate at Capella University studying business management, explained why he didn’t report any of the alleged behaviour he tweeted about during an interview with the Washington Post Thursday.

     “To an extent, I’m totally guilty,” he said. “I should have done more. My excuse isn’t a good excuse, but it’s reality: You report that stuff, and you’re going to get fired. I mean, of course you’re going to get fired. Or they’re going to make your life miserable.”

     “It all goes back to this whole us versus them thing. You suit up; you get out there; you’re with your brothers. You’re an occupying force,” he continued. “Your job is to fight crime, and these are the guys you do it with. So you just don’t see the abuse. It doesn’t even register, because those people are the enemy.”

     […]

     The former officer also spoke about his reasons for attempting to expose corruption within the Baltimore police force, pointing to both his academic work and to the manyrecenthigh-profile news stories about law enforcement issues in the U.S.

     “It’s been a gradual progression. I got my master’s degree.… It taught me to think about things differently, to evaluate information in different ways,” he said. “Then I think the national discussion after Ferguson really drove it all home for me. That whole discussion was so divisive, but it was also instructive. So much of it goes back to a lack empathy. You start to see how neither side is able to see things from the other’s perspective.”

     Wood has been tweeting prolifically since Wednesday, returning to the platform several times since his rants began to issue another set of shocking observances.

     Another of Mano’s posts, More on the confederate flag under fire.

     And PZ’s post on Obama’s eulogy for Pinckney: Another moment for the history books.

271. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 1:50 pm

     And a few more from the CBC, of various ages. Going to try and go chronologically by topic. :P
     Charleston church shooting: NRA official blames slain minister for deaths, this story we’ve seen.

     Gun culture runs deep in the U.S. and won’t change soon, with the subtitle “And it is not just white males from the South who keep the gun culture alive, polls show”. (Will they blame gangs?)

     A 2014 Pew study looking into the demographics of gun ownership found that about a third of all Americans with children under 18 at home have a gun in their household.

     And it’s all types of Americans who have guns. Republican Americans and Democrat Americans, male Americans and female Americans, blue state, red state — a cross-section of Americans have guns.

     Sure, guns are much more prevalent in some demographics (white, male, from the South, twice as many Republicans as Democrats, but a significant number of Independents.)

     But Pew found that, regionally anyway, there wasn’t much difference. “Southerners were just about as likely as those living in the Midwest or the West to have a gun at home (38 per cent 35 per cent and 34 per cent, respectively),” its study found. Men were more likely than women to be gun owners, but not by much (38 per cent vs. 31 per cent).

     And even those who may not have guns, support gun rights. A Gallup poll last year found that nearly three-quarters of the Americans surveyed said there should not be a ban on the possession of handguns.

     You know what’s interesting about those stats? There isn’t a by-race category. Sure, the poll says Democrats and Republicans and women and men, but it never seems to address race. I find that very interesting, making the subtitle… somewhat misleading.

     Confederate monuments the target of graffiti in 6 states. As many have noted on Twitter, the results have much improved the original statues.

     One of the defaced monuments was the Confederate Memorial in St. Louis’ Forest Park, 16 kilometres from Ferguson. The same graffiti was reported on memorials in Charleston; Baltimore; Austin, Texas; Asheville, North Carolina; and Richmond, Virginia. No arrests have been made.

     I’m pretty sure the actual list is much longer.

     South Carolina lawmakers vote to debate Confederate flag – sure, let’s talk about it some more!!!!!

     Obama eulogizes Charleston shooting victim Rev. Clementa Pinckney, sings Amazing Grace. The article focusses on the ‘eulogy’ parts of the speech, and less on the ‘race lecture’ parts of the speech. Disappointing. And I find that interesting, given the previous article on Obama speaking about race and nobody hearing or listening.

     Confederate flag removed by South Carolina protester

     The Confederate flag was temporarily removed from the front of the South Carolina Statehouse on Saturday when a woman climbed the flagpole and — despite calls by police to get down — removed the banner.

     Bree Newsome, 30, of Charlotte, N.C., was about halfway up the more than nine-metre steel flagpole just after dawn Saturday when officers of the South Carolina Bureau of Protective Services told her to get down. Instead, she continued climbing to the top and removed the banner.

     She and a man who had climbed over a 1.2-metre wrought-iron fence to get to the flag were arrested.

     The flag, which is protected by state law, was raised about 45 minutes later. Flag supporters planned a rally at the monument later on Saturday.

     [..]

     A staff member at the Alvin Glenn Detention Center where the two were taken said she did not know if the two had attorneys. About the time of her arrest, Newsome released an email statement to the media.

     “We removed the flag today because we can’t wait any longer. We can’t continue like this another day,” it said. “It’s time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality.”

     Authorities said Newsome was from Raleigh. However, Mervyn Marcano, a spokesman for the small group of activists who worked together to take down the flag, said she had recently moved to Charlotte.

     Tamika Lewis, another member of the group, said taking down the flag “was done because we were tired of waiting for the judicial system to make the decision they have been prolonging for a very long time.”

272. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 June 2015 at 1:59 pm

     An Indiegogo was set up to raise bail money for Bree Newsome. The goal was $20K. Within four hours, $35,000 has been raised.

273. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 2:03 pm

     And from the Toronto Star (all links this comment):
     Woman climbs flagpole, removes Confederate flag at South Carolina Statehouse , shorter article than the one at CBC.

     Confederate flag debate echoes Germany’s postwar struggle over swastika

     “It would be like having the swastika flag flying on your next-door neighbour,” said Whoopi Goldberg, on ABC’s The View this week. “If [the flag] continues to fly, the statement that’s being made . . . is that ‘We miss this really crappy part of history.’”

     Nazi Germany was a vastly different political entity than the Confederacy, in a vastly different historical context.

     But the growing backlash against the Confederate flag does suggest that, a century and a half later, Americans are finally accepting what Goldberg and many others believe it has represented all along: not heritage, nor pride, nor a badge of Southern identity, but a regime of white supremacists who went to war against the Union to preserve the inhuman institution of slavery.

     That’s a legacy and ideology that does not deserve to be honoured by government institutions in the 21st century. And it’s in that sense where the comparison to the Nazi swastika is most apt.
     […]

     Never will you find a serious German politician, let alone one contending for the leadership of the country, insisting in 2015 that the Nazi swastika is “part of who we are.” There are no vainglorious monuments to Nazi leaders lining German city squares; instead, in the heart of the capital, sits a painful testament to collective guilt and the horrors of the past.

     The contrast between this and the way some American states still commemorate Confederate leaders, name roads after Confederate generals and fly Confederate flags could not be more stark.

     The Civil War may have put slavery to an end, but as the shooting in Charleston, S.C., made clear, cultures of hatred remain. The Confederate battle flag, now at the heart of so much controversy, was revived almost a century after the war by Southern groups opposed to desegregation.

     It became an enduring emblem of the country’s systems of inequity.
     […]

     In Germany, the censorship of Nazi symbols is still a matter of debate – with many wrestling over the dual necessity of preserving liberal freedoms while also recognizing the evils of the Third Reich. Far-right and even neo-Nazi groups exist and organize in the country, but raising the Nazi swastika is a red line that no one can cross.

     Instead, at times, some European fringe groups have come up with another symbol to represent their hateful creed: the Confederate flag.

     Obama sings ‘Amazing Grace’, delivers eulogy in Charleston for pastor slain at black church

     Eulogizing Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Obama said it would be a betrayal of everything the pastor stood for “if we allowed ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again once the eulogies have been delivered, once the TV cameras move on.”

     He pleaded with Americans not “to go back to business as usual.”

     Obama, in his 40-minute address, spoke of all that Pinckney had done in his life, then confronted the hard questions raised by his death and the deaths of eight others slain by a white man.

     He said it was time to remove the Confederate flag from American flagpoles, saying that action would “not be an insult to the valour of Confederate soldiers” who fought for the rebel South in the Civil War, but an acknowledgement that “the cause for which they fought, the cause of slavery, was wrong,” as were the imposition of discriminatory laws and further resistance to civil rights efforts.

     Removing the flag, he said, “would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history, a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds.”

     Obama also urged Americans to acknowledge the more subtle ways that racism pervades society, expressing hope that the tragedy might prompt to people to think about “how racial bias can infect us even when we don’t realize it.”

     “So that we’re guarding against not just racial slurs but we’re guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal,” he said.
     […]

     First lady Michelle Obama, along with Vice-President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, joined the president for the funeral at the College of Charleston. Among the members of Congress who accompanied Obama to Charleston was House Speaker John Boehner, making his first trip aboard Air Force One of the Obama presidency. Also in attendance was Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.

     Following the service, Obama met privately with families of the victims. The president got to know Pinckney during the 2008 presidential campaign, when he was an early supporter of Obama.

     And then this: Barack Obama, lame-duck president, takes a stand: Burman

     Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty that Barack Obama is acting like a man who is finally free at last.

     America’s eloquent mourner-in-chief, as he helps his nation recover from another tragedy involving race and guns, is doing it with a directness rarely evident in the earlier years of his presidency.

     Along the way, Obama seems determined in the final 18 months of his mandate to take on the three enduring domestic challenges that still plague the United States. Obama knows more than anyone else that, in spite of his election in 2008 as the country’s first black president, he presides over a society that is still strongly racist, awash in guns and governed by a political system increasingly corrupted by money.
     […]

     The grieving this week throughout the United States was intense, and it climaxed on Friday with the funeral of the church’s pastor, Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Obama was invited to give the eulogy.

     In recent months, Obama’s growing bluntness on the issues of race and gun violence has been evident. He explained it in an interview this week by suggesting he is no longer reluctant to speak out as his presidency comes to an end: “I know what I’m doing and I’m fearless. … Not pretending to be fearless.”

     In earlier times, he often resisted being overly critical, focusing instead on the progress that has been made. But he knows that his presence has also been a flashpoint for racial anxiety among some Americans.

     His tone since the Charleston massacre has been sharp. In his first remarks after the killing, he lamented the frequency of these tragedies in the United States. In a thoughtful hour-long interview with comedian Marc Maron broadcast last Monday, Obama went further: “Racism, we are not cured of. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say ‘nigger’ in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination.”

     It was this excerpt that received all of the media attention. The rest of the interview was virtually ignored, including what he said later: “When you look at how to deal with racism, I’m less interested in having an ideological conversation than looking at what has happened in the past, and applying it and scaling up.”
     […]

     Fortunately, Obama would have none of this. In the wake of the Charleston killing, his remarks instead focused on those causes that — if not dealt with — will ensure that similar massacres will happen.

     According to the New York Times, the pattern of terrorist violence in the United States since the Al Qaeda attacks in 2001 has been clear: Nearly twice as many Americans have been killed by white supremacists and other U.S. extremists than by radical Muslims.

     Obama and other black Americans know that it is only a matter of time before it happens again.

274. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 2:08 pm

     Wow, work computer ate my comment.
     Just four articles from the Toronto Star:
     Confederate flag debate echoes Germany’s postwar struggle over swastika;
     Woman climbs flagpole, removes Confederate flag at South Carolina Statehouse;
     Obama sings ‘Amazing Grace’, delivers eulogy in Charleston for pastor slain at black church;
     Barack Obama, lame-duck president, takes a stand: Burman.
     That’s the unblockquoted version. I guess I missed a few bad words in the previous. (If it’s stuck in the spam trap, maybe PZ can release it, as it had some nice blockquoting work. As nice as usual.)

275. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 2:08 pm

     Tony
     That is awesome.

276. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 June 2015 at 2:26 pm

     (From Cracked)
     In response to complaints by people about Apple’s decision to ban some of their games depicting the Confederate flag comes this article-
     How casual racism ruined free speech forever:
     (excerpt)

     “They’re Rewriting History”

     Well, let’s be clear that Civil War video games aren’t history textbooks; they’re entertainment, and entertainment rewrites history constantly. Movies about specific historical periods insert characters with contemporary values constantly, which is why Mel Gibson’s character in The Patriot is an 18th Century southerner who is just all about racial equality, and Kingdom Of Heaven wrote their historical figures with modern, secular values, even though they lived during the crusades.

     For a clearer parallel, the World War II-themed board game Axis & Allies doesn’t put a swastika on the Nazi pieces, because winning the game as Germany shouldn’t be upsetting. They’re not rewriting history; they’re just making a strategy game fun by ensuring nobody has to play as the avatar of human cruelty. And I’m pretty sure we’ve all managed to remember WWII pretty well. I mean, I learned about it in middle school. Leave a comment if I’m dating myself.

     On a broader scale, many U.S. states have laws against displaying a noose in public, because it’s a symbol of lynching and makes black residents feel unsafe, because holy shit it’s a symbol of lynching, and in small towns with tiny black populations, it’s basically the same as hanging a sign that says “Kevin L. Thomas, I am going to run you and your family down with my jeep (this is a legitimate threat and not a joke)” in your front yard. Are they rewriting history with that law, or are they being smart about these symbols in the same way a responsible gun owner knows when to say, “Hey, maybe I don’t need to own an automatic rifle”?

     It’s the latter. That’s the one they’re doing.

     “This Is Censorship; We Have To Protect Freedom Of Speech”

     I wanna point out that Apple isn’t the government. It’s just a company, so it can’t technically “censor” you — it can only refuse to provide you a platform. But that’s splitting hairs, because Apple is such a monster in the mobile-gaming industry that they can effectively censor people. But if that’s really your concern, then let me just ask, where the fuck have you been?

     Apple censors sexual content in apps all the time. They even ban apps that have anti-sweatshop messages because they want to avoid controversial political opinions. So why are people now using the Confederate Flag — a symbol of slavery, oppression, and treason — as the rally point for their Free Speech Army? Why not sex or political freedom or something not horrible? Theoretically, that censorship should’ve pissed off the same people for the same reasons, right?

     There’s a loose rule in comedy that says you shouldn’t “punch down.” The simplest explanation of this rule is that it’s less funny to mock someone who’s beneath you than it is to mock someone above you — mocking a powerful, wealthy politician is going to get more laughs than mocking a child who was just diagnosed with leukemia (unless you’re going for shock humor, in which case the joke is actually how horrible you, the comedian, are). I bring this up because I only ever hear the “free speech” argument trotted out when someone wants to defend punching down. Which leads to the last point …

277. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 June 2015 at 2:49 pm

     Michael Moore has offered to pay for bail and legal fees for Bree Newsome.

     He may not have to because donations for her have risen to $46,650.

278. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 June 2015 at 2:57 pm

     Here’s one Confederate flag that shouldn’t be taken down:

     In the wake of the tragedy in Charleston, South Carolina, one might not expect to see a Confederate battle flag solemnly hanging in the heart of New York City. But along with reflecting a history of hatred, racism, and violence, this particular flag—on display with tattered, red, white, and blue threads dangling—tells a different story.

     Beside it sits the remnants of a separate flag, now reduced to red, white, and blue piles of fabric. The two pieces on display at the Mixed Greens gallery, called “Unraveling” and “Unraveled,” were pulled apart by hand by artist Sonya Clark to symbolize the work needed to be done to undo the legacies of racism, prejudice, and injustice, emblemized by the flags.

     “Sometimes it is really hard to undo cloth and sometimes it is a little easier,” Clark tells Mother Jones. “But no matter what it is slow-going. That seemed to be a fitting metaphor for where we are. It is happening—but it is slow going. It is better now than it was—but it is slow going.”

     Clark, a textile artist who serves as the Department Chair of Craft and Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, often tackles issues of race and identity in her work. Compelled by the news of police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, Clark was inspired to make a piece that would speak to both the current issues and the long history of racism in America.

     Then, during a tour of the Museum of the Confederacy in Virginia, she came face to face with one of the original battle flags of the Confederacy. She took a photo of the tattered flag, capturing her own reflection in the protection glass—and it sparked an idea.

     On April 9, on the 150 year anniversary of the end of the Civil War, she began pulling apart a Confederate flag. Piece-by-piece, string-by-string, she and her studio assistants undid the heavy woven fabric until it became something unrecognizable. The result, and the act of unraveling, serve as an important metaphor.

     “We understand cloth in a way,” she explains. “We are all wearing cloth. But we actually don’t understand how it is made. We live in the United States of America and we are used to a kind of injustice because it is part of the fabric of our nation. There’s a way in which unraveling a cloth—using that metaphor, using that sense that a material that we are so familiar with, but we don’t actually understand how it was constructed. Undoing it helps us understand that.”

     The fully undone flag, named “Unraveled,” now reduced to piles of thread, sits next to “Unraveling,” the flag that still remains mostly intact. That piece serves a related but separate purpose. It represents the collective work needed to be done to unravel racism, and the dialog that help will facilitate that work. Starting with a flag that had only partially been unwoven, 50 volunteers joined Clark in pulling apart the heavy cotton threads on opening night of the exhibit. In an hour and a half they were only able to dismantle about an inch, but Clark says the exhibit helped ignite important discussions.

     “I don’t think we are going to get far in terms of undoing the deep history of racism and the legacies of prejudice and injustice without having dialog,” she explains. “It allowed me to stand next to people who volunteered, to undo the flag together. One on one. So we were having conversations about the process, about our lives, about ourselves.”

     Click the link to learn more about her past efforts to use the flag to make an important point about how the nation’s wealth was built on the back of slave labor.

279. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 3:03 pm

     Tony
     If he does, then all those donations can simply go to Charleston, as per Bree’s request.

280. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 June 2015 at 3:31 pm

     NASCAR chairman wants Confederate flag eliminated at all races.

     “We want to go as far as we can to eliminate the presence of that flag,” France told The Associated Press on Saturday. “I personally find it an offensive symbol, so there is no daylight how we feel about it and our sensitivity to others who feel the same way.

     “We’re working with the industry to see how far we can go to get that flag to be disassociated entirely from our events.”

     Earlier this week, NASCAR said it backed South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s call to remove the Confederate flag from state capitol grounds, and noted that it bars the flag symbol in any official NASCAR capacity.

     But banning it on race track property is a much larger task for NASCAR, which began as a Southern sport and many of its fans still embrace the flag. It flies atop campers and at camp sites at many races as fans spend entire weekends in either the infield or surrounding areas of track property.

     The size of the crowd, and NASCAR’s own acknowledgment that fans have a right to freedom of expression, would make it difficult to police the presence of the flag.

     But France insisted NASCAR is exploring its options.

     “That’s what we’re working on — working on how far can we go,” he said. “If there’s more we can do to disassociate ourselves with that flag at our events than we’ve already done, then we want to do it. We are going to be as aggressive as we can to disassociate ourselves with that flag.”

281. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 4:37 pm

     Southern Wesleyan University Offers Full Scholarships to Children of Employee Killed in Emanuel AME Massacre, previously seen in tweet.

     While acknowledging that the scholarships could not compensate the children—Gracyn, Kaylin, Hali and Czana—for the loss of their mother, the school said that it was invested in their future success and honoring their mother’s service.

     “We realize the scholarships won’t ease the pain of loss that the children are dealing with now and in the future; however, it is our desire as a community for each of them to know we care about them,” SWU vice president Chad Peters said. “DePayne often spoke about her children and their accomplishments with co-workers.”

     “Right now, more than anything, we want DePayne’s children to know we love them,” SWU President Todd Voss told the site. “We want to honor DePayne’s service to SWU and her belief in Christian higher education as an important element in Gracyn, Kaylin, Hali and Czana’s future success.”

     Here’s an interview with Bree Newsome, from a couple months ago: ToD: Bree Newsome Interview

     Bree Newsome is a woman of all trades from being a singer, writer, activist, producer and much more that many girls and women of color should look up to. When she came by ToD we spoke about recent happenings in the black community, as a community what we can do to rise above oppression, her empowering track “Stay Strong” and her community involvement. Listen now and follow her on Twitter.

     Audio at the link.

     For an hour, SC’s hate flag was gone, thanks to @BreeNewsome’s bravery. SC has sided with hate today.

     Some thoughts: When ppl learn the truth that there are over 750 documented slave rebellions ranging in size and magnitude of impact, they get scared;
     It disrupts the narrative that our ancestors just accepted their plight or that we don’t know how to fight back and for our freedom;
     It also disrupts the idea that we are too lazy and ignorant to work together towards obtaining freedom intentionally.

282. rq says

     27 June 2015 at 4:44 pm

     Confederate flag pulled from SC capitol grounds by activists

     The Confederate flag was removed from a pole on the South Carolina capitol grounds early Saturday morning by activists, but state employees returned the flag to its position within several hours of the incident.

     An activist group claimed responsibility for taking the flag down. Witnesses said two people were arrested by authorities almost immediately after one of them scaled the flag pole on the north side of the State House grounds and pulled the Confederate banner down.

     The Confederate flag has been at the center of a debate in Columbia the past week in the wake of the massacre of nine African Americans in a Charleston church by a white supremacist.

     Activists calling themselves “concerned citizens” said in a news release that they removed the flag about 5:30 a.m. Saturday. A woman identified by the group as “Bree” climbed the poll and pulled the flag down, the group said.

     “Deciding to do what the SC Legislature has thus far neglected to do, the group took down the symbol of white supremacy that inspired the massacre, continued to fly at full mast in defiance of South Carolina’s grief, and flew in defiance of everyone working to actualize a more equitable Carolinian future,” the group said in a news release distributed to the media about 6:30 a.m.

     The state Bureau of Protective Services confirmed that it had arrested two people at the State House about 6:15 a.m. The two, whose names were not immediately available, were charged with defacing a monument, according to a protective services news release.

     A woman who said she is associated with the group, Tamika Lewis of Charlotte, said those detained by police were fellow group members Brittany “Bree” Newsome and Jimmy Tyson, who also are from the Charlotte area. A Brittany Newsome was listed in Richland County jail records Saturday morning. She was being detained on a vandalism offense, records show.

     The Protective Services release said authorities saw a woman use climbing gear to scale the flagpole, which is beside the Confederate soldier monument at the end of Main Street on the north side of the State House. The woman refused to come down until she unhooked the flag. She was arrested when she came back down, the release said. A man was with her inside the wrought iron fence surrounding the flag pole, police said.

     Both of them were taken to the county’s Alvin S. Glen Detention Center, the Bureau of Protective Services said. The climbing gear was still on the flag pole after the arrests were made.

     They are charged with defacing a monument, the Bureau of Protective Services said. The charge is a misdemeanor that carries penalties of up to three years in prison or a fine up to $5,000 or both.

     At about 7:45 a.m., a maintenance worker and a state security officer, neither of whom would give their names or comment, raised a new banner after removing it from a plastic sheet. The two state employees who arrived on the State House grounds to put the flag back up were African-Americans.

     Group member Lewis said she had hoped her organization’s action would prompt state leaders to keep the flag down. Lewis said her group consists of North and South Carolina residents.

     “We did not expect that it would be raised again,” Lewis said, noting that state leaders “should just leave it down. They were having this hard decision whether or not to take it down. A lot of them are concerned about their political value and their political careers and all worried about losing their constituencies and their voters if they vote for the removal of this flag.

     “So we …. took it upon ourselves to do the hard part and take it down. All they had to do was keep it down.”

     I guess they had spares at the ready.

     Just a note. @BreeNewsome isn’t a “ninja.” She is a Black woman with purpose. Write that down. #FreeBree #BlackGirlsAreMagic

     Here’s that petition: Drop any charges against Bree, activist arrested for taking down the Confederate flag at South Carolina capitol

     Early Saturday morning, a multiracial group of Carolinians led by teachers and activists took down the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds — within an hour the state had raised the hateful banner once again in time for an 11 A.M. white supremacist rally.

     Bree Newsome, the Black woman who climbed the pole and cut down the flag, was arrested and taken into custody by Capitol Police. She should be promptly released from jail, any charges should be dropped, and the legislature should immediately vote to permanently remove the flag.

     According to a statement from the activists they took down the flag because:

     “We could not sit by and watch the victims of the Charleston Massacre be laid to rest while the inspiration for their deaths continue to fly above their caskets.”

     The confederate flag was born out of a government defending the enslavement of Black people and resurrected as an emblem for whites violently opposing racial integration. Any government that recognizes the flag is declaring that it cherishes a history of racial terror.

     Taking down the flag is just one step but a symbolically meaningful one. Make no mistake about it, however, racism isn’t just a flag or words it’s baked into our economy and inequities in our democracy and criminal justice system.

     In Bree’s own words:

     “It’s time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality.”

     South Carolina officials have sided with white supremacists in choosing to restore the flag before a planned rally. The legislature must immediately vote to permanently remove the Confederate flag from the capitol and all state buildings.

     ColorOfChange stands with Bree and the courageous activists who took down South Carolina’s confederate flag. You can add a comment using the box provided.

     UPDATE 10:01 AM: Bree Newsome was arrested along with a white ally, James Tyson. We will update this page with more information as it becomes available.

     RIGHT NOW: Over a dozen cars and trucks flying Confederate flags are circling the State House @WLTX
     About 30 #ConfederateFlag supporters at #SCStateHouse now. Many singing Dixie. Some taking selfies. #sctweets #wis10

     Let’s Start Calling Police Brutality “Police Terror” Instead

     The word “terrorism” has been thrust into the national conversation once again, this time in the wake of the horrific shooting of nine black churchgoers at bible study in Charleston, South Carolina by 21-year-old Dylann Roof.

     There are four major reasons many blacks have described the massacre as an act of terrorism:

     The historical significance of Emanuel AME Church.

     The targeting of State Senator Rev. Clementa Picnkney.

     Roof’s well-documented white supremacist political ideologies.

     The very blatant bias in which the federal government uses the term terrorism.

     Let’s talk about that last one.

     The Western world defines terrorism through an almost exclusively Islamophobic narrative. In 2002, the first terrorism case tried under the newly-created anti-terrorism law charged a black man with terrorism for attempting to shoot fifteen people and rub Chick-fil-A sandwiches on their faces.

     Yes. He was charged with terrorism.

     And yet, FBI Director James Comey recently made this statement regarding the Charleston shootings: “Terrorism is an act of violence…to try to influence a public body or citizenry, so it’s more of a political act. And again, based on what I know so far, I don’t see it as a political act.”

     Director Comey’s statement clearly conveys limitations of what American society considers terrorism. In an attempt to maintain control of the rhetoric around terrorism, Comey rejects Dylann Roof’s white supremacy as a political ideology, as well as the killings as a political act. Comey’s statement rebuking the use of the word terrorism was critical, because if a white man admitted that the racially-motivated attack targeting a historically black church and killing exclusively black people is considered an act of terrorism, America would be forced to recognize the fact that its historic repression of black communities is also terrorism.

     Within the last year, we have seen hundreds of protests in response to police brutality. In 2014, The Department of Justice released scathing reports on Cleveland and Ferguson Police Departments that exposed a level of corruption easily depicted in film but unimaginable in reality to most Americans. These reports showed that an alarming number of officers were virtually untrained for de-escalation, they disproportionately targeted black people, and otherwise abused their power.

     Not a single thing found in either report came as a shock to black Americans, who live these experiences every day and have done so for centuries. The modern American police force developed from slave patrols instituted during the transatlantic slave trade to protect white property, tactics of which included terrorizing slaves and returning them to slaveowners. These slavecatchers indeed bludgeoned and brutalized black bodies in an attempt to maintain a white supremacist institution that commodified black people. As the abolition movement gained traction, slave patrols developed into actual police forces employing Klu Klux Klan members adopting rhetoric and culture of quelling uprisings from blacks and white sympathizers. […]

     Again, Matthew Fogg’s story is no surprise to black Americans, but the United States still refuses to acknowledge the intentional repression of black people in so many ways. It continually denies that policies created with colorblind language are developed with racialized intent and enforced to oppress black communities. State-sanctioned violence extends far beyond police activity: black communities find themselves victims of state violence in the form of mass displacement in gentrification, disenfranchisement, the deprivation of educational resources, and the lasting effects of housing discrimination. Police simply function as the brutal arm of state-sanctioned violence, murdering hundreds, locking up thousands, and essentially locking millions of black people out of mainstream society. Today, police, much like slave patrols, suppress black communities by quelling uprisings and sustaining systems of oppression.

     It then becomes clear that the videos of police dehumanizing, brutalizing, and destroying black bodies depict an age-old tradition. It’s a continuation of anti-black political ideologies cloaked in “law and order” rhetoric using things like the war on drugs as pretext for terrorizing black communities. This keeps the narrative of terrorism in a chokehold such that the world cannot recognize America’s own domestic terror on its citizens. It’s painfully obvious that, when a country’s law enforcement both occupies and abuses black communities to sustain a white supremacist power structure, the place is neck-deep in centuries of terrorism.

     The problem the black community faces is not police brutality — it’s police terror.

283. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

     27 June 2015 at 4:48 pm

     I didn’t see you post the video, rq.

     Here it is.

     She’s fucking awesome.

284. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

     27 June 2015 at 4:55 pm

     Oh, and speaking of Bree Newsome and terrorism –

     would anyone bet ***any money at all*** that she hasn’t already been called a terrorist? On twitter or elsewhere?

     Roof? Hates god and is out to kill christians, but isn’t political and isn’t a terrorist, we know this because of his white supremacist ideology and his public embrace of symbols that have nothing to do with political anything – like the flag of Rhodesia.

     Newsome? She’s a terrorist because she desecrated property as a political act. We know it was a political act because she said, “I come at you in the name of God” and recited psalm 23 as her explanation of her rationale/motivation.

     :puke:

285. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 June 2015 at 5:20 pm

     Southside High School principal ‘blindsided’ by committees decision to ban ‘dixie’ and mascot:

     Principal Wayne Haver spoke with 5NEWS Wednesday (June 24), a day after a Fort Smith School Board committee voted unanimously to ban the song “Dixie” and mascot Johnny Reb in the next two years.

     “I literally felt blindsided,” Haver said.

     Haver has been the principal of Southside High School for 33 years.

     “The Confederate flag and ‘Dixie’ and the Rebels and all that started in 1963, 1964,” he said.

     According to Haver, the flag was banned on campus in 1990. Now, 25 years later there’s a change the song and mascot will go too.

     “I do not personally think it is needed,” Haver said. “Our kids see our fight song and our mascot like any other school sees their fight song and mascot. It is just something to rally around and to promote school spirit. They do not see it as a racist thing at all.”

     Current and former students had mixed reactions to the committee’s decision. Nancy Leonard went to Southside in 2011.

     “I understand why people want to keep the mascot,” Leonard said. “It does represent tradition, the good old ways, but I think there are other better ways that you can do that.”

     They don’t see anything racist about it bc they aren’t thinking about why and when it was written.

     ****
     Speaking of the Dixie song:

     Dixie, or Dixie’s Land as it was also known, was originally written for a minstrel show. Performers in minstrel shows often blacked their faces and pretended to be slaves. They would speak or sing in accents so thick they could hardly be understood. The lyrics here are not written in dialect (the way it would be spoken) but the grammar is true to the original. The catchy tune soon turned the song into one of the most popular patriotic songs in the Confederacy.

     The previous link offers one version of the song:

     The lyrics are:

     I wish I was in the land of cotton,
     Old times there are not forgotten;
     Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie land.

     In Dixie land where I was born in
     Early on one frosty mornin’
     Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie land.

     Then I wish I was in Dixie, Horray! Horray!
     In Dixie land I’ll take my stand.
     To live and die in Dixie,
     Away, Away, Away down south in Dixie,
     Away, Away, Away down south in Dixie,

     ****

     The origin of mistrel shows.

     Although the structure of minstrel shows changed over time, the images — blackface — and the content — caricatures of Blacks — continued. Prior to the Civil War (1861-1865), pro-slavery Whites used the racist stereotypes as a way of countering the abolitionist movement. Performers defended slavery by presenting denigrating stereotypes of Blacks who supposedly needed the civilizing influence of slavery to keep them in check. Black slaves were portrayed as happy and content with their lot in life and fearful of life outside of the plantation.

     One of the important things to remember about minstrel shows is that they served to mock black people. They were performed by white actors donning blackface and used racist stereotypes in the course of their shows.
     So yeah, the “Dixie” song is rooted in racism.

     Incidentally, the above link discusses the spread of minstrel shows around the world:

     One of the first Blacks to perform in blackface for White audiences was William Henry Lane, the inventor of tap dancing who was known to audiences as Master Juba. When Blacks began to work as minstrels in the mid-1840s, becoming established as performers by the 1860s, their contribution ironically did little to alter the tradition. Indeed, it only reinforced the racist Black stereotypes already ingrained both in the theater and in the society.

     Initially, Blacks were able to participate in minstrel shows only by declaring themselves “real coons.” To meet the expectations of both White and Black audiences, Black minstrels donned burnt cork to blacken their already dark skin and performed comedy routines using the traditional caricatures and racist stereotypes.

     Some of the most popular songs in American history began as minstrel songs — “Dixie”, “Oh! Susanna”, “Camptown Races”, “Old Folks at Home” (“Swanee River”), ” Polly Wolly Doodle”, “Hard Times Come Again No More”, “My Old Kentucky Home”, “Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair”, and “Blue Tail Fly”. All were written by Stephen Foster, the most famous songwriter of the 19th century in the United States.

     From 1850 to 1870 minstrelsy was at its height, and in the 1850s ten theaters in New York City alone were devoted almost solely to minstrel entertainment. After 1870, the popularity of the minstrel show declined rapidly, and in 1919 only three troupes remained in the U.S. However minstrel show acts continued to be depicted in the cinema and on television well into the 1950s.

     Amateur minstrel shows continued to be performed in the 1960s and high schools, fraternities and local theater groups would usually perform the shows in blackface. The amateur minstrel shows in blackface finally died out in the US in the late 1960s as African Americans asserted more political power, but even today minstrel shows are still used as a theme for amateur productions.

     And blackface minstrel shows lived on in other parts of the world. One hundred years after minstrel entertainment began in London’s music-halls, the convention was revived on television in the form of The Black And White Minstrel Show. This variety series was first screened on BBC Television in 1958 and it was on the air until 1978. At the height of its success, The Black and White Minstrel Show was watched by 18 million viewers a week and had become one of the world’s best known musical/variety shows on television.

     ::spits::

286. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 June 2015 at 7:01 pm

     From Fusion–
     7 Things you need to know about Confederate flag slaying Beyonce enthusiast Bree Newsome:

     In case you thought that Bree Newsome—the woman who scaled the flagpole outside the South Carolina State House to remove the Confederate flag flying high atop it—couldn’t get any more incredible, check this out. It turns out that Newsome, along with being a North Carolina-based activist and youth organizer, is also a filmmaker, musician, and possible card-carrying member of the BeyHive.

     1. Bree Newsome is a staunch defender of voting rights.
     Newsome told Charlotte’s Levine Museum of the New South that the nationwide and statewide dismantling of voting rights legislation—an effort that largely serves to disenfranchise black voters—coupled with George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin “activated” her to “[move] from being a sideline supporter to an activist.”

     2. She’s also an accomplished musician…
     According to her website, Newsome’s been playing piano and singing since, like, forever, with past stints in the Peabody Conservatory and the Baltimore Choral Arts Society. Listen to “#StayStrong” above, a song about being “young, black, and gifted/ Tryna stay lifted/ In a world that keeps [you] stinted/ Just ’cause [you’re] pigmented” that was inspired by her voting rights activism in North Carolina.

     3. …and (ALLEGED) member of the BeyHive.
     Here’s a video of Bree Newsome performing Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” with her Charlotte-area funk band, POWERHOUSE.

     4. THERE. IS. STILL. MORE.
     Newsome’s also a super talented filmmaker—because why not at this point. Her website says that she graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Film & Television, and after that she served as ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi’s first-ever Artist-in-Residence.

287. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     28 June 2015 at 2:54 am

     From France 24–
     Racial tensions linger in LA, city of Rodney King riot (video).

288. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     28 June 2015 at 2:59 am

     Ornette Coleman, saxophonist & jazz innovator, dies at 85:

     His death was confirmed to AFP by his publicist, Ken Weinstein. Coleman was born and raised in Texas but died in New York, where he spent much of his career and was a dapper fixture on the social circuit.

     Coleman, along with John Coltrane, was one of the original forces behind so-called “free jazz” that broke down traditional structures of harmony and allowed a more free-flowing form of expression.

     Best known as an alto saxophonist, Coleman cast aside traditional notions that a musician needed to stay within chord progressions and instead pursued solos that detractors considered chaotic but gradually became mainstream in jazz and rock.

     Coleman said that the free form of solos came spontaneously to him, as he believed that jazz playing should feel like any natural human activity.

     “I think jazz should express more kinds of feelings than it has up to now,” he said at the time.

     “The Shape of Jazz to Come” stunned the jazz world – with leading artists including Miles Davis among the critics – through its lack of harmonic convention as well as the absence of any guitar or piano to accompany him.

     The album featured the intense song “Lonely Woman,” written by Coleman about a high-society shopper he spotted when he was working at a Los Angeles department store, which went on to become a standard among jazz musicians.

     Coleman followed up the next year with the album “The Change of the Century,” also recorded in young-spirited California rather than one of the more established jazz capitals.

     Coleman, who eventually headed to New York, grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, where he said that he originally thought that a saxophone was a toy when he saw one.

     His mother gave him his first saxophone as a gift after Coleman had helped save up money by working as a shoeshine boy.

     His survivors include Denardo Coleman, a prominent jazz drummer who often recorded with his father.

289. rq says

     28 June 2015 at 3:01 am

     This one’s for fun: 7 Ways To Treat Your #ActivistBae.

     Ain’t I Black? On The Historical Erasure Of Black Female Leaders

     During the abolitionist movement, Sojourner Truth used her infamous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention to force white feminists and male abolitionists to recognize the humanity of her Black womanhood. Sojourner challenged the white supremacist attitudes of those present, demanding the inclusion of Black women’s identities in their fight for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery.

     Angela Davis wrote extensively about Black women being locked out of mainstream feminism during the 19th and 20th centuries in her book Women, Race, Class. Mainstream feminism centered white women’s leadership in the abolitionist movement and white women’s issues in the efforts towards women’s suffrage. Known as a ‘woman’s rights man,’ Frederick Douglass lobbied for Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to work towards getting Blacks the vote due to the shocking levels of indiscriminate violence Blacks faced. But even in white feminists’ anti-rape campaign, Black women’s intersectionality was not respected; Black feminists could not support a campaign employing racist rhetoric that perpetuated the damaging erroneous narrative of Black male rapist chasing white women. This myth was used as a pretext for lynching and terrorizing thousands of Black men and women.

     In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, many Black women found their leadership subsequently erased from history while Black males have been hoisted up and championed as leaders and vocal visionaries. Rosa Parks for example, is largely lauded as a seamstress who refused to give up her seat on a bus, not as the skilled and strategic organizer with an executive board position of her NAACP chapter. Dorothy Irene Height, the “godmother of the Civil Rights Movement,” was literally cropped out of images where she is pictured with Martin Luther King, Jr. and other male leaders.

     Repeatedly, and painstakingly so—Black women find themselves written out of narratives around liberation work. Organizing spaces are designated as safe spaces for activists, but in actuality many are not safe for Black women as the intersectionality of our oppression is neglected and our critiques ignored.

     Even in writing this blog, I struggled with articulating the unique challenges Black women face in trying to center ourselves as victims of oppression as well as leaders of liberation due to the perceived divisiveness of the topic. As a very active Twitter user, I know firsthand the negative and cruel responses some Black men spew when Black women share our cries for inclusiveness.

     […]

     As a Black, cis, hetero woman, I cannot imagine the suffocation from erasure that my Black queer and trans sisters must endure. Perhaps the most mind-boggling thing about this is Black Lives Matter is founded and led by three Black women: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, two of whom identify as queer. And yet as 150+ cities across America were flooded last year with people shouting the phrase, it appears many did so without recognizing identities outside of Black, cis, hetero males.

     Centering the narrative of state sanctioned violence on Black, cis, hetero males erases the fact that Black women risk the same brutality. It also disregards the particular vulnerability for state sanctioned sexual violence Black women face. (Such as Daniel Holtzclaw, an Oklahoma City Police officer who faces 36 charges for sexually assaulting 13 Black women while on duty. The ills of white supremacy and patriarchy so often intersect against Black women. We are systematically targeted by sexual abusers as they are more-than-aware that communities infamously, again and again, do not and will not go to bat for us. And yet we bare the risk of being assaulted again at the hands of those designated to help us when reporting the incident.

     The weight of combating oppression while facing misogyny that perpetuates the toxic patriarchal system feels overwhelming.

     Patriarchy teaches us that men’s (read: white men) issues are the community’s problems, women’s (read: white women) issues are women’s problems, and Black men’s issues are the Black community’s problem. Meanwhile Black women are typically laden with stereotypes of ‘strong Black woman’ burdening the plight of the entire Black community even further as it forces us to choose between fighting for the entire Black family or ourselves.

     Thus, Black women’s issues are often considered no one’s problem.

     However, things have not become this way by choice. Black men have been conditioned from Slavery to Jim Crow into shutting their eyes and closing their ears to Black women’s cries as the price for protecting us has been lethal. Black men have endured lashes and been hung from trees for coming to the defense of Black women. They have historically been attacked and jailed for voicing dissent against the mistreatment of Black women.

     And yet, the purpose of our work in movement building is to free us all from the chains of oppression, which cannot be done if we are not combating oppressive ideologies that have permeated activism spaces. As activists, we are charged with creating spaces in the name of liberation that empower us to do things that have never been done—including re-entering the fray and fighting for Black women.

     White Reverend Refuses To Offer ‘Cheap Grace For White America’ Following Charleston Shooting

     Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, a professor of Theology at Chicago Theological Seminary, told HuffPost Live on Wednesday she originally “opposed” the forgiveness practice because it is often used as a “get out of jail free card.” She cautioned against using forgiveness as way to avoid confronting the tough realities of racial violence in America:

     I think white America craves this language of forgiveness because they want to forget. And I want to remember the faithful courage of the families who … specifically [told Dylann Roof to] repent. And he’s got to figure out, with fear and trembling, his relationship to God. But I specifically want to say, [as a white American speaking to white Americans], you want absolution. But you don’t want to confess. You don’t want to repent and you don’t want to change.

     She told host Marc Lamont Hill that throughout history, all three Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — have struggled with providing avenues for “repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation” in an attempt to respond appropriately to a wrongful act. But unless forgiveness and repentance exist in tandem, forgiving just amounts to “cheap grace.”

     ”Faiths have always wrestled with how to respond to wrongdoing. But specifically in a Christian context, I want to say, no cheap grace. No cheap grace for white America,” she said.

     I’m told bond for Jimmy and Bree has been PAID, and they will be released within the next 2 hours. #FreeBree (tweets on Newsome will be reversed chronologically)

     Non-POC ask often how they can be an ally. James Tyson, who stood at the base of the flag pole as @BreeNewsome climbed. THAT’S an ally.

     Rep. Cummings requests DOJ information on Baltimore arrests

     Rep. Elijah E. Cummings has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to clarify when Baltimore police can make arrests — a move designed to address concerns that officers have voiced since prosecutors charged six members of the force in the death of Freddie Gray.

     The Baltimore Democrat said Saturday that he met recently with 25 city officers and several community leaders to hear their concerns. Several officers said they wanted assurances about when they can arrest suspects.

     “They were looking for clarification. They were reluctant to arrest people under certain circumstances,” Cummings said. “To me, that’s a major concern. They need to be clear about what their powers are.” […]

     Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has told the police union that officers need to do their jobs or face internal discipline.

     Cummings said he asked the Justice Department, which is also conducting a civil rights investigation of city police, to provide a response about the arrest issue soon. He plans to meet with Commissioner Anthony Batts on Tuesday and will reach out to State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s office to discuss the matter.

     Cummings said officers at his meeting expressed confusion about whether they could handcuff someone to ask questions. He described an example in which an officer pursues someone believed to be dangerous, and wants to handcuff the suspect for safety reasons.

     “They thought it was OK do that. Apparently they received information that that was not the case. They were confused,” Cummings said.

     Cummings said he requested the meeting, asking the Police Department to provide a group of officers of various ranks from across the city. He said they did not explicitly refer to the six officers charged following Gray’s arrest and death, but Cummings believes the arrest sparked the issue.

     “I think it’s a legitimate concern. They have gotten mixed messages,” he said.

     If the police are so badly trained that they don’t know what their job entails, and where the limits are, you need to look at how you’re training them. Very, very, very closely.

290. rq says

     28 June 2015 at 4:04 am

     At 9pm #Chicago will take action of our own against the Confederate Flag. We’ll burn it. Facebook event link within.

     Judge denies #LAMayor & Chief Beck’s request for protective order against #BlackLivesMatter activists today – text from the FB link:

     A judge denied a request by the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office today to restrict two Black Lives Matter protesters from going near Los Angeles police Chief Charlie Beck and Mayor Eric Garcetti, after they tried to crash a meeting earlier this week.

     Spokesman Rob Wilcox confirmed that the office requested a stay away order to prevent Evan Bunch, 28, and Luz Maria Flores, 23, from being near Beck and Garcetti.

     The office filed charges this morning against Bunch, alleging battery of a police officer resulting in injury, battery of a police officer, resisting arrest, and preventing public officials from doing their job, while Flores was charged with resisting arrest and misdemeanor battery of officers, Wilcox said.

     The city has “no good cause,” and “should not ask for protective order,” said Bunch and Flores’ attorney Nana Gyamfi who said most of the actual charges were made in relation to the police officers, and not with Garcetti or Beck.

     Only one charge refers to Garcetti and Beck and alleges that Bunch was preventing public officials from doing their job in a public place, which Gyamfi said is a charge that is rarely made and a tactic to support the stay away order request.

     Gyamfi added the charges filed by the City Attorney’s Office are “based on spite and retaliation.”

     “When you file criminal charges, they have to be based upon a violation of the law, and cannot be based on the fact that you don’t want to be bothered by people,” Gyamfi said. “That is an abuse of the process.”

     Gyami said an injury suffered by a Los Angeles police officer that was shown in court was an abrasion the size of a nickel. She would not discuss details about what occurred in the scuffle between her clients and the police.

     Los Angeles police said the incident occurred about 5 p.m. Wednesday at Mt. Carmel Recreation Center, 830 W. 70th St., where Beck and Garcetti were meeting privately with backers of the city’s Summer Night Lights youth program on its opening night.

     Bunch allegedly injured a police officer during the scuffle, and Flores allegedly tried to pull Bunch free from the custody of police, while trying to enter and disrupt the meeting, police said.

     Black Lives Matter activists have told City News Service they are trying to gain a meeting with Garcetti, and want Beck and two officers who fatally shot Ezell Ford, an unarmed black man last year, to be fired.

     And here is the @NAACP statement re: @BreeNewsome. #FreeBree In short, state prosecutors should consider the moral inspiration behind the civil disobedience of this young practitioner of democracy.

     Woman Briefly Removes Confederate Flag from State House – another link to the story.

     Marilyn Mosby Wants Separate Trial for 2 Cops in Freddie Gray Death

     Marilyn Mosby has asked a judge to order a separate trial for two of the six officers charged in Freddie Gray’s death, according to the Associated Press.

     For reasons that are unclear, the Baltimore state’s attorney filed court documents Friday asking a judge that the officers, William Porter and Lt. Brian Rice, to be tried separately from their co-defendants, the report says.

     Both men are charged with reckless endangerment, misconduct in office, second-degree assault and manslaughter, a felony, writes the news outlet.

     Sgt. Alicia White faces the same charges as Porter and Rice, as does Caesar Goodson, who also faces a “depraved-heart” murder charge, notes the report. Officers Garrett Miller and Edward Nero face misdemeanors.

     A History of Childhood Trauma Matters … When the Killer Is White

     Over the weekend, hip-hot artist Jasiri X posted this image on his twitter feed. It’s taken from the front page of the New York Daily News’ website. Note the screaming headline and the sympathetic caption: “Accused killer Dylann Roof had one chance at a stable family life — and his abusive dad ruined it for him.”

     The image and the accompanying article bring to mind a discussion I had on Twitter last week, a discussion which the TWiB! Prime crew touched upon in Episode 706, “White People Please Be Peaceful,” about the differences in the media’s treatment of criminals based on their race. It’s worth expanding on that discussion here.

     When I started my legal career at a firm called Jenner & Block in Chicago, the firm handled a few death penalty appeals, and I was fortunate enough to be able to help out with legal research on some of those cases. That was in the mid-to-late 1980s, long before former Illinois Gov. George Ryan imposed a moratorium on the death penalty here, and longer still before the Illinois General Assembly abolished the death penalty altogether. Yet, because of certain personnel changes on the Illinois Supreme Court, there was a chance – albeit a slim one – that the judiciary would strike down the death penalty under our state constitution, as it had come close to doing in the early 1980s.

     In any event, in those appeals, one of the issues we explored was the mental health of the men (and at that time, there were only men) on Illinois’ death row. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most, if not all, of them had suffered significant trauma in their past. They had been through physical, mental, and emotional abuse, and in some cases, sexual abuse, as children. They had been exposed to extreme violence at a very young age, witnessing horrible crimes committed against friends and family members, including rape and murder. Many of the men on death row had been victims of or had witnessed extreme domestic violence, and many of them had been had been introduced to drugs and alcohol – often by family members or family friends – as teenagers or preteens.

     Naturally, that sort of trauma impacts a person’s mental health. It’s safe to say few of us could have endured these things as children and come out unscathed. And please note, in these appeals we were not arguing that childhood trauma and its effects on the mental health of death row inmates somehow excused the crimes for which they had been convicted; only that it should have been considered by the judges or juries who decided to impose the death penalty in their cases. That is, in the sentencing phase of a capital case, the judge or jury ordinarily is required to consider a series of aggravating and mitigating factors to determine whether the death penalty is appropriate, and we were arguing that this sort of childhood trauma and its mental effects should have been considered as factors in mitigation. That’s it.

     Ultimately, however, those arguments fell on deaf ears. Nobody – not the state, not the judges handling those appeals, and certainly not the media – cared one whit about what these men had been through (as children, mind you); and certainly nobody thought it should have excused their actions, or should even have been considered as a factor mitigating against the imposition of death sentences. Needless to say, none of those men had his story of childhood abuse and trauma splayed across the front pages of daily newspapers, or talked about by newscasters with furrowed brows.

     But so here’s the point. The vast majority of the men on Illinois’ death row in the 1980s were Black and Latino, because the death penalty has always been imposed disproportionately on people of color. And that, of course, explains why the childhood trauma they suffered was never so much as a blip on anybody’s radar screen.

     Poor Dylann Roof, though. He’s white, so his childhood trauma matters. He can’t just be a racist terrorist who killed innocent people. There has to be something more to his story. Why is that, I wonder?

     No, actually, I don’t. I’m pretty sure I know why.

291. rq says

     28 June 2015 at 4:26 am

     Upthread, Crip Dyke posted a video of Bree Newsome climbing the flag – and then someone went and set it to Newsome’s own music! We set #BreeNewsome’s Confederate Flag Takedown video to her #StayStrong song. #FreeBree, youtube link here: #BreeNewsome’s Confederate Flag Takedown feat. her song #StayStrong.

     Large crowd at the Confederate memorial voicing their displeasure with the removal of the flag from the Capitol.
     Not sure the KKK marching with the Confederate Flag is the best way to prove the SC flag is not about racism. Pretty sure it’s not.

     Yeah, I can’t help but to feel this wouldn’t be his comment if a Black man took down the flag. See attached text, Newsome taking down the flag is a ‘distraction’ from all the ‘real issues’.

     At Florida Confederate memorial, giant flag still flies, defiantly so

     By the time Marion Lambert arrived at the base of the massive Confederate battle flag he helped erect within view of Interstate 75, a small crowd had gathered.

     Billed as the nation’s largest Confederate flag at 50 by 30 feet, the banner flies from a 139-foot-tall flag pole at the manicured Confederate Memorial Park. In the crowd was 64-year-old Greg Wilson, a first-time visitor from northern Florida who recognized Lambert and approached with his family.

     Wilson, who had met Lambert at a Sons of Confederate Veterans meeting years earlier, had donated money to help create the memorial. He wore a Confederate flag ring, belt, hunting cap and a T-shirt that read “It ain’t over.”

     “I don’t know how it just happened overnight,” Wilson said of the backlash against the flag, adding that he intended to keep selling flags at local festivals as a sideline. “I’m not going to let them control me,” he said.

     That’s pretty much the sentiment here at the memorial, which includes granite plaques detailing episodes and figures from the Confederacy. Lambert and the Sons of Confederate Veterans built the park after raising $150,000 six years ago.

     “It’s just a preservation of heritage, of what the war was really about,” said Lambert, 67, a wiry farmer, welder and native Floridian.

     “Why does it resonate so strongly with us?” he said. “Because we know the history.”

     Not well enough, it seems. More:

     Now U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, a Democrat who represents the area, wants to remove the flag near I-75.

     “The owners of that property and that flag should have respect for their neighbors and understand its symbolism,” she said. “It just flies in the face of the values we hold dear.”

     Natasha Goodley, vice president of the Hillsborough County NAACP, remembers having to drive past the flag twice a day for work after it was first erected.

     “To see that every day, as big as it is: What is the purpose? Is it just to honor the soldiers? Because there’s other ways to honor them,” she said. “My heart says the purpose was to get a rise out of people like me.”

     Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, also a Democrat, called the I-75 flag “a symbol of hate, a symbol of treason, of man’s inhumanity to man.”

     “If the governors of Alabama and South Carolina and Mississippi can agree that that flag’s time has come and gone, then I would think that some guy in central Florida could have that same reaction if he found it in his heart to do it,” Buckhorn said.

     That’s not likely.

     […]

     A sign on the wall reads “Confederate Way” and another on the porch advises customers they can pay for eggs, milk and butter by check or “genuine Confederate cash.” There’s a Robert E. Lee commemorative plate in his computer room (Lambert has a desktop but no television), and a print of Gen. Jubal A. Early, namesake of his Sons of Confederate Veterans group or “camp.” He has refrigerator magnets of various generals and Mammy, the maid in “Gone With the Wind.”

     He does not consider himself a racist. He condemns slavery. A battle flag hangs over the milking parlor outside, where one of the half a dozen cows is named Dixie. A bumper sticker on his Ford F250 says, “Free the south.”

     “The culture is something that needs to be kept alive,” he said.

     Um, no. Okay, aspects of the culture – food, drinks, music styles, etc. But the flag? It’s not the flag that’s going to keep the rest of that alive. The South isn’t going to lose its culinary heritage because the confederate flag gets taken down. … Or is it?

292. rq says

     28 June 2015 at 4:56 am

     Open letter to Hillary Clinton by Bassem Masri

     For the last eleven months, the movement of our generation that manifested itself in Ferguson, Missouri over the sudden death of Mike Brown has also spread nationwide. Because Black people are being murdered by police or vigilantes on a daily basis,there are also way more like Rekia Boyd in Chicago, Freddie Gray in Baltimore and to the horrific bloodbath in Charleston, racially charged violence has dominated the national mainstream headlines,and social media has relentlessly discussed the topic for almost a year.

     You would think that the top Ddemocratic Party front-runner, Hillary Clinton, would have listened closer to the voices and paid more attention to this revolution. But she is consistently demonstrating that she does not comprehend the core issue at hand But it seems she just did not care at all. Today, she made a statement in a Black church in St. Louis, less than a week after the Charleston massacre, saying “All Lives Matter”. Now let me clear things up for you, Ms. Clinton and everyone else that does not understand the concept of Black Lives Matter – All lives do NOT matter because Black lives don’t matter.

     When Dante Servin can walk free after shooting unarmed Rekia Boyd in the head because he didn’t like how much noise her friends were making as they walked to the store, Black lives don’t matter. When Michael Brelo can walk free after murdering Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams in a hail of 49 gun shots, 15 of which he shot through their windshield after Brelo jumped on their car hood, all because the car backfired, Black lives don’t matter. When police give Dylan Roof a bullet proof vest, a meal at Burger King and a private plane escort back to Charleston after slaughtering 9 people in the sanctuary of church, Black lives don’t matter. When Black lives start to matter, then all lives will truly matter. If Hillary Clinton had paid more attention to the largest movement of our time, she would have understood this issue and she would not have made those comments. It’s obvious Mrs. Clinton doesn’t get it and has not been shrugging it off.

     When white supremacists showed up and hosted a pro police rally in front of the Ferguson Police Department, their main chant was “All Lives matter”. I labeled them white supremacists because of the racial slurs thrown at me, and my comrades, when we were passing through. It was on Twitter because the Rracist trolls continuously use “All Lives Matter” on Twitter to basically and insinuate that there is no problem. Meanwhile the Black Llives Matter movement is repeatedly condemned in all ways by media and politicians continually calling Peaceful protesters and clergy looters, race baiters and rioters when we did nothing of the sort. We were assaulted, arrested, and humiliated by the racist Ferguson Police Department. Which has been corroborated by the Department of Justice report on Ferguson.

     This means that the core issue raised by the Black Lives Matter movement has fallen onto deaf ears to those in power. They shrugged us off as if everything we are some kind of joke. We started a conversation about police brutality and accountability for officers that has had little to no progress because the state does not want to be held accountable.

     This conversation started on the streets of Ferguson – many expected Mrs. Clinton to address the issues where the movement started. State Rep. Courtney Curtis tweeted his disappointment that Clinton did not go far enough, tweeting: “Going to Florissant isn’t the same as going to #ferguson. Close, but no cigar”. He also added, “Don’t follow the GovJayNixon playbook, he went to Florissant and you see how that worked out,” in response to the Clinton camp’s invitation to her speech.

     If Clinton wishes to win the DNC over Senator Bernie Sanders, she really needs to win over the black voters. Ignoring the basic elements in the largest movement since the Civil Rights era is not a great way to do that. The fact is the Black Lives Matter movement is a political talking point. The protesters in Ferguson and all over America have demanded the conversation about police brutality and institutional racism be addressed on the national stage. Anyone hoping for the support of this powerful movement needs to come over into Ferguson, MO and face the issues head on. Saying Black Lives Matter will not cost a candidate votes – it will win them. Rep. Courtney Curtis said it best, “You want to be President? Go to #Ferguson.”

     Mrs. Clinton, you have alienated yourself from the national movement that has mobilized all over the nation. The Movement has become increasingly more politicized over the last eleven months. We will be voting in droves this next election season and, and these voters are young passionate voters that want their voice heard. We will be voting for candidates that support the Black Lives Matter issue along with the reformation of the prison industrial complex. Although you Clinton haves previously spoken out about the “era of mass incarceration” we currently live in before, you must do better to show you comprehend the problem and demonstrate how you will reconcile it through action it should remain a constant talking point.

     Force Used On SEPTA Fare Evader Holding Daughter, Chief Takes Blame. That actually sounds… appropriate. It’s a weird format article, can’t cite.

     Here’s a good news: Council of Conservative Citizens Suspended From PayPal

     In the wake of revelations that Dylann Roof, the alleged Charleston, South Carolina, shooter, was “awakened” to the epidemic of “black-on-white crime” by the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), PayPal — one of the world’s largest online money transfer services — has suspended the white nationalist hate group’s account after being contacted by Hatewatch. […]

     The CCC’s website’s singular purpose is to propagate this false narrative of a victimized white majority under siege by allegedly violent people of color in the United States. Stories regularly feature gruesome images of victims accompanied by sensationalist rhetoric about the attacks designed to generate outrage.

     In the wake of the death of unarmed, black teenager Trayvon Martin, the CCC’s website, disguised as a mainstream news source with domains like “Top Conservative news” and “Conservative-Headlines,” exploded with web traffic. Kyle Rogers, the site’s webmaster has publicly boasted about changing the narrative around the story, as well as the fact that his coverage brought 170,000 unique visitors to the site in a single day.

     Rogers also uses PayPal to process transactions for his personal business, Patriotic Flags, an apparel store that supplies flags and T-shirts to several hate groups. Among the items sold by Rogers is the Rhodesian flag — a symbol that adorned Roof’s jacket in pictures taken before the shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

     Cue angry white tears.

     In the streets of Istanbul: “You are my brother Mike” as @deray would say, the movement lives [fist emoji] #BlackLivesMatter

     Bree is a “domestic terrorist” for pulling down a flag of treasonous backwards slaveholders Dylan Roof kills 9 in a church and is “troubled” – a reflection of Crip Dyke’s observation upthread. I can’t confirm that that is one of the actual charges brought against her.
     But neither would I be surprised.

     Two Black parks employees raised the flag back up. They could choose to protest & lose their jobs or be complicit in their own oppression. And this. Fucking this.
     And yeah, people were mad on twitter that they put it up – but if their other option is to quit or be fired, what then? Many noted that they don’t have much of a choice, as they might be one paycheck from poverty. And that many, many black people work in jobs that make them overtly or subtly complicit in their own oppression – should everyone leave their jobs? And, nobody was offering to put up a fundraiser for those black employees. Which would be the least, if they really think they should not put the flag back up.

293. rq says

     28 June 2015 at 4:59 am

     Woman Removes Confederate Flag Flying at South Carolina Statehouse, Time on Newsome.

     This is @BreeNewsome’s music on @SoundCloud. Support her by downloading it today. #FreeBree #TakeItDown, Soundcloud link: https://m.soundcloud.com/breenewsome

     Churches Are Burning Again in America

     Jeanette Dudley, the associate pastor of God’s Power Church of Christ in Macon, Georgia, got a call a little after 5 a.m. on Wednesday, she told a local TV news station. Her tiny church of about a dozen members had been burned, probably beyond repair. The Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco got called in, which has been the standard procedure for church fires since the late 1960s. Investigators say they’ve ruled out possible causes like an electrical malfunction; most likely, this was arson.

     The very same night, many miles away in North Carolina, another church burned: Briar Creek Road Baptist Church, which was set on fire some time around 1 a.m. Investigators have ruled it an act of arson, the AP reports; according to The Charlotte Observer, they haven’t yet determined whether it might be a hate crime.

     These fires join the murder of nine people at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church as major acts of violence perpetrated against predominantly black churches in the last fortnight. Churches are burning again in the United States, and the symbolism of that is powerful. Even though many instances of arson have happened at white churches, the crime is often association with racial violence: a highly visible attack on a core institution of the black community, often done at night, and often motivated by hate. […]

     In recent years, it’s been harder to get a clear sense of the number of church fires across the country. The National Fire Protection Association reports that between 2007 and 2011, there were an average of 280 intentionally set fires at houses of worship in America each year, although a small percentage of those took place at other religious organizations, like funeral homes. One of the organization’s staffers, Marty Ahrens, said that tracking church arson has become much more complicated since reporting standards changed in the late ‘90s. Sometimes, fires that are reported to the National Fire Incident Reporting System are considered “suspicious,” but they can’t be reported as arson until they’re definitively ruled “intentional.” Even then, it’s difficult to determine what motivated an act of arson. “To know that something is motivated by hate, you either have to know who did it or they have to leave you a message in some way that makes it very obvious,” she said. “There are an awful lot of [intentionally set fires] that are not hate crimes—they’re run-of-the-mill kids doing stupid things.”

     The investigations in North Carolina and Georgia are still ongoing, and they may end up in that broad category of fires of suspicious, but ultimately unknowable, origin that Ahrens described. But no matter why they happened, these fires are a troubling reminder of the vulnerability of our sacred institutions in the days following one of the most violent attacks on a church in recent memory. It’s true that a stupid kid might stumble backward into one of the most symbolically terrifying crimes possible in the United States, but that doesn’t make the terror of churches burning any less powerful.

     Someone fixed it. That picture from the Olympics. It is now Awesome.

     Is it me, or does it feel like America is turning into the Hunger Games? You know, like when the Districts TURN UP! *giggle*

294. rq says

     28 June 2015 at 5:43 am

     Black women on frontline for decades: my mom took down a confederate flag in 1980/NC; @BreeNewsome 2015/SC. #FreeBree

     Bree Newsome is what courage and bravery looks like. Bravo, bravo, bravo, @BreeNewsome! #FreeBree – I love the photo.

     ‘We need co-conspirators, not allies’: how white Americans can fight racism

     In America, where 62% of the population identifies as Caucasian, white people are easy to find.

     But white people have not been as visible in the aftermath of the Charleston massacre last week, where a young white man and his white supremacist ideals entered a historically black church and shot nine churchgoers dead.

     “People who are not black can no longer sit on the margins. They can no longer just express their sympathy: those are shallow words,” Arielle Newton, a 23-year-old black blogger said at a rally in Harlem in New York City on Monday.

     “They have to act intentionally, from a point of pro-blackness. To work to make sure that black people are given the equity that we deserve.”

     About 100 mourners and #BlackLivesMatter protesters attended the rally.
     Despite the protest area explicitly being defined as a “black-centered space” by organizers , much of the dialogue that ensued was focused on white people, white ideologies and conversations white people may – or may not – be having at their dinner tables.

     Standing towards the back of the gathering, carrying a poster that stated “Black Lives Matter” on one side and the names of black women and girls killed by police on the other, Babbie Dunnington, a 29-year-old white teacher, was one of just a few white faces in Tuesday’s majority black crowd. She said that the change had to come from white people.

     “Black people didn’t enslave themselves. It shouldn’t be on them to correct that. White people have the responsibility to understand that they live in a racist society, a racist society they have created.” […]

     “What I need is for people to come and work with us in the trenches and be there alongside us. It’s not about being on the outside and saying ‘yes, I support you!’ It’s about ‘not only do I support you, but I am here with you, I am rolling up my sleeves. What do I need to do?’”

     Annie Schoening, a 33-year-old social media manager for Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, a black- and brown-led social justice organization created to protect and empower young people of color, is white, and has been put in charge of the mission to engage white supporters.

     Her organization has put up a set of rules online, inviting non-black people to take the pledge for racial justice.

     The rules outlined in the pledge involve acknowledging the existence of racism whether or not one is a regular victim of it, to denounce new forms of it, including the use of words “thugs” and “riots” to define black people and their protest, to identify the exclusion of black perspectives in many forms of media and seek them out, to confront anti-black racism within closed circles (including schools, friendship circles and families), and to pledge to participate in the overall black-led fight to end racial injustice.

     “Look to black leaders, listen to what they are telling you,” she says of potential mixed messages white people might feel they are hearing as to when to step back and give space versus when to proactively intervene and help.

     Discomfort, or anxiety about making faux pas, may be a reason some white people are still sitting on the sidelines in terms of uprooting racism, but Dante Barry, executive director of the Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, points out the disparity is so stark, white people may just need to get over their anxiety.

     “Black folks are readily risking their lives every day purely by existing,” he says, while the risk being taken by white communities to be in solidarity with black liberation is “getting over that uncomfortable feeling”.

295. rq says

     28 June 2015 at 8:13 am

     Bush: New gun limits not way to prevent shooting tragedies

     Bush, who plans to meet with black ministers in Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday, said identifying potentially violent people before they commit such crimes is a better approach than further restrictions on gun ownership.

     “We as a society better figure out how we identify these folks long before they feel compelled to take up a gun and kill innocent people,” the former Florida governor said at a town hall meeting.

     Afterward, he told reporters gun control was an issue that should be sorted out at the state level.

     “Rural areas are very different than big, teeming urban areas,” he said.

     The comments came less than a day after President Barack Obama eulogized one of the nine people shot to death June 17 at Emmanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston. During his remarks, Obama recalled episodes in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown Connecticut, to again, suggest Americans seek tighter restrictions.

     “For too long, we’ve been blind to the unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation. Sporadically, our eyes are open,” Obama said. “But I hope we also see the 30 precious lives cut short by gun violence in this country every single day.”

     Bush also told reporters that he was disappointed in both Supreme Court rulings from the last week that upheld President Obama’s health care overhaul and legalized gay marriage nationwide.

     He said he would repeal the health care law if elected, replacing it with high-deductible, low-premium catastrophic coverage.

     As for gay marriage, Bush said he believes in traditional marriage between a man and a woman but indicated he wouldn’t fight the court’s ruling.

     With that attitude, he plans to meet with black ministers in Charleston. No mention of racism.

     Welldone @OUTandPROUD 4 having banners of #African #PrideHeroes They don’t get the recognition they deserve sometimes.

     On USAmerica’s prison system, The right choices

     No country in the world imprisons as many people as America does, or for so long. Across the array of state and federal prisons, local jails and immigration detention centres, some 2.3m people are locked up at any one time. America, with less than 5% of the world’s population, accounts for around 25% of the world’s prisoners. The system is particularly punishing towards black people and Hispanics, who are imprisoned at six times and twice the rates of whites respectively. A third of young black men can expect to be incarcerated at some point in their lives. The system is riddled with drugs, abuse and violence. Its cost to the American taxpayer is about $34,000 per inmate per year; the total bill is around $80 billion. […]

     Unstoppable though the system’s growth has seemed at times, in the past five years it has reached a plateau. In 2009, for the first time since the 1970s, the total prison population declined slightly. One reason is that, faced with budget pressures, many states—particularly big ones such as California, New York and Texas—have been trying to cut their prison populations. Reforms to sentencing policy introduced by Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney-general from 2009 to 2015, may explain the very small recent fall in federal prison numbers.

     Another reason for the plateau in prison numbers is that crime is on the retreat—and with it people’s fears of crime. According to polling by Gallup, the proportion of Americans who worry “a great deal” about crime and violence has fallen dramatically since 2001 (though this year it ticked up from its previous low). That makes reform easier. American electorates have been widely assumed always to favour measures that look tough and punitive; but in California voters passed a ballot initiative last November that was designed to keep some non-violent criminals out of prison.

     The trend could continue. Indeed, it could and should accelerate; this problem needs fixing. But even with a political appetite for reform and a public mood conducive to it, a comprehensive cutting back will be hard. The expanded prison system has built itself into the fabric of society. Judges, district attorneys, state- and county-level politicians, police forces, prison-guard unions, federal agencies and private firms that build and run prisons: all have contributed to the rise of mass incarceration, and many benefit from it. In rural parts of America prisons are now the biggest employers in many towns. […]

     The case for change is manifest; the opportunity real. Outrage at the deaths of black Americans at the hands of the police has prompted a new look at the way the rest of the justice system treats them. Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee for president, gave a speech in April arguing that “there is something profoundly wrong when African-American men are still far more likely to be…sentenced to longer prison terms than are meted out to their white counterparts.” Some sort of reform is popular with a number of Republicans, too. In the Senate several Republicans are joint sponsors of bipartisan bills intended to reform the federal prison system.

     The war on drugs is now being wound down. In four states and the District of Columbia cannabis has been legalised; in many more, its possession has been decriminalised. New York reformed the Rockefeller drug laws in 2004 and again in 2009. In 2010 Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the historic 100:1 disparity between the amount of powder cocaine and the amount of crack that would trigger federal penalties. Drugs courts have been widely introduced to direct non-violent drug-users into treatment, not prison.

     John Whitmire, a Democrat in the Texas state Senatewho is a prominent advocate of prison reform, says his state is at last learning “to distinguish between who you’re afraid of and who you’re mad at.” The state’s Right on Crime movement—a Republican group—argues that reducing prison populations is both fiscally conservative and in accord with the Christian principle of forgiveness. Rick Perry, until January Texas’s governor and a Republican presidential candidate for 2016, likes to boast about closing three prisons during his time in office.

     But substantially reducing the prison population is difficult. Reducing the flow into prison of non-violent, non-sex-offender prisoners who have committed relatively minor crimes—which is much of what has been done so far—is politically palatable, but has only a limited impact. John Pfaff of Fordham Law School in New York points out that such offenders have been a diminishing proportion of the prison population for some time. Violent offenders make up around half of all prisoners in state and federal prisons, sex offenders 12%. There are 165,000 murderers in America’s state prisons and 160,000 rapists: if everyone else were released, America’s incarceration rate would still be higher than Germany’s. Over time this pattern seems certain to strengthen: even for dealers, drug sentences tend to be relatively short, but violent criminals are sent away for decades. There is little appetite for releasing them early, even if they have aged and mellowed in prison.

     Another problem is that the people who run the system have substantial incentives to protect it. “If it wasn’t for district attorneys, we would have passed so many more bills already,” says Ana Yáñez-Correa, the head of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a prison-reform pressure group. The backlash to be faced if a criminal who could have been, or stayed, locked up does something heinous gives elected prosecutors—and judges—a strong incentive to err on the side of stiff penalties. Mr Pfaff sees a ratchet effect at work over time, with prosecutors seeking ever tougher charges. Private prisons, which account for just 8% of all prison beds but are growing fast, also produce a constituency with an interest in seeing those beds filled. Many prison-management firms insist on minimum-occupancy terms in contracts. […]

     New York’s adjustment to the system has been brought about largely by prosecutors in New York City, who have become more careful about how they use the toughest charges. Cy Vance, Manhattan’s district attorney, is a fan of what he calls intelligence-driven prosecution. Under his tutelage, a Crime Strategies Unit collects information on the most persistent criminals, which can inform prosecutors even if it does not form part of a case. “If I know someone who is involved in shootings or violence, even if he is arrested for shoplifting, I want to charge it as aggressively as possible,” says Mr Vance.

     The rationale behind this strategy is that most people who turn up in front of a judge are fairly harmless; even in the most violent neighbourhoods, a tiny number of criminals, often ones good at intimidating witnesses, account for most violent crime. If the book is thrown at the second lot and more leniency show to the first, prison populations and crime rates could both fall. The intelligence lies in throwing the books correctly.

     And some money that could have been spent on prosecutions is instead being spent on crime prevention. At a gym in a relatively poor neighbourhood of Harlem teenagers are taught basketball skills by professional coaches—all under the watchful eyes of police officers and staff from Mr Vance’s office. Similar sessions take place every weekend at ten different sites across Manhattan. In a city where zero-tolerance policing makes many young black teenagers suspicious of any uniform, the teenagers seem happy with the prosecutors and cops present. The hope is that by building trust, prosecutors will find out about arguments between teenage gangs before they erupt into violence.

     If prison is to be less of a part of American life, the philosophy behind such schemes needs to spread. Reform in police forces like those of Los Angeles and New York City, which in the 1990s started trying to prevent crime as well as react to it, is one of the things that has made America less violent. But the rest of the criminal-justice system is only slowly catching up to the idea of being proactive. A system that has been designed to react to crime, and to punish it, needs to prevent it instead. That will take a broad change in culture, not just tweaks to laws.

     In his cell block, Mr Peace complains that for most of the time he has spent in prison, he has never been treated as someone with a problem, but rather as a problem himself. He has earned qualifications as a plumber and a welder—both paid for by his mother. He is hopeful that when he leaves, he will never come back. If America is to be the land of the free, it will have to learn to forgive a lot more men like him.

     Drive-By Truckers, Lynyrd Skynyrd on the Confederate Flag’s Meaning

     Three years ago, Gary Rossington, a founding member of iconic Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, made a bold statement. The band, he said, were no longer going to use the Confederate flag in their merchandise because hate groups had “kidnapped” it.

     “Through the years, people like the KKK and skinheads kinda kidnapped the Dixie or Southern flag from its tradition and the heritage of the soldiers,” Rossington told CNN. The decision, he said, was to avoid associating their music and their fans with any of “the race stuff” or “the bad things” associated with the flag. “We’re proud to be American,” Rossington said, explaining that they were more comfortable displaying the American flag.

     At the time, such a proclamation didn’t go over well with their fans (“Imposters, frauds, fakes, wannabes, shadows, skeletons, posers,” ran one of many comments).

     The band eventually backpedaled a bit. For instance, when I interviewed Rossington, singer Johnny Van Zant and longtime guitarist Rickey Medlocke in 2012, Rossington said the band hadn’t actually gotten rid of the flag entirely after all. “Johnny still puts the Dixie flag around his microphone for ‘Sweet Home Alabama,’ and we put a whole flag over the piano,” he explained. “We don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. But we’re still so proud to be Southern and to fly the Dixie flag.”

     Medlocke expounded on the issue. “Here’s the deal,” he told me. “It’s not about hatred. The Confederate flag [issue] has been so blown out of proportion. If the South had won the war, that’d be the national flag. But they didn’t. It’s heritage and not hate.” But, he conceded: “The world is bad enough as it is. If we end up fighting amongst ourselves, that’s not where it’s at.”

     […]

     Many Southerners wave/carry/wear the Confederate flag as a personal symbol; they see it as representing a heritage that’s an integral component of their identity. They’re from the South and they’re proud of it. But from another, truer perspective, the flag symbolizes decades—centuries, actually—of hatred, prejudice and oppression.

     Interestingly, the flag’s widespread use is relatively recent. Originally the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia (and often incorrectly referred to as the ‘Stars and Bars’), it didn’t gain popularity among Southerners until the mid-20th century—nearly 100 years after the Civil War had ended.

     Even some of the states that display it prominently only started doing after World War II. According to a 2000 report by the Georgia State Senate research office, Georgia incorporated the Confederate logo into their state flag in 1956 as a symbol of resistance against the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which ruled that segregating schools was unconstitutional. The same report said that in 1961, Alabama Governor George Wallace raised the Confederate flag over the State Capitol dome in Montgomery to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. The same year, South Carolina raised the battle flag on the grounds of its Capitol.

     The Atlantic wrote in 2012 that “the flag’s most lasting legacy—and the source of much of the controversy today—can be traced to its use as a symbol of ‘Massive Resistance’ by the Dixiecrats beginning in 1948.” This legacy, writer and Civil War historian Kevin M. Levin adds, continued on “through the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.”

     With the rise of Southern rock in the 1970s, the flag found a new audience among music fans, too. Lynyrd Skynyrd often flew the flag during shows, and others picked up on it as well. The 1970s also saw the flag emblazoned on the General Lee, the famous muscle car on TV show The Dukes of Hazzard.

     Lynyrd Skynyrd were unavailable to update their comments in 2012 regarding the Confederate flag. However two members of another band from the region, one that perhaps embodies Southern rock more than anyone over the past decade and a half, were available: the Drive-By Truckers.

     Singer/songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley have plenty to say on the topic, and their perspective is decidedly different from that of the average Skynyrd fan.

     “I’m from Alabama,” says Patterson Hood, “I lived in the South my entire life. I have ancestors who fought in that ill-begotten war, but it’s way, way past time to move on … That [Civil] War was what, 150 years ago? It’s time to move on. It should have been a moot point years ago. The flag represents an act of war against the United States.”

     […]

     “People say ‘The South will rise again,’” Hood says. “The South will never rise again as long as we keep our heads up our asses. I feel very strongly about it. I’m from Alabama. I lived in the South my entire life. I have ancestors who fought in that ill-begotten war, but it’s way, way past time to move on.”

     But that “moving on” likely will take a while. Local and federal government can make any number of laws and proclamations to get rid of the Confederate flag from state buildings, and that’s a great start, because as the members of both the Drive-By Truckers and Lynyrd Skynyrd point out, that symbol has represented hate and prejudice for too long. However, it’s going to take more than a few proclamations to change how people feel about something that is so central to their personal identity.

     To really heal the divide in this country, we can’t break our collective arms patting ourselves on the back for moving past Confederate symbolism. We all need to take a hard look at the causes for racism, and at what is driving those who stand on either side of the issue. Part of that will surely entail the recognition that anyone and everyone—Southerners included—be able to express their pride in their faith and values.

     Or to return to Gary Rossington’s quote: “We don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. But we’re still so proud to be Southern.”

     A review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me

     In the scant space of barely 160 pages, Atlantic national correspondent Coates (The Beautiful Struggle) has composed an immense, multifaceted work. This is a poet’s book, revealing the sensibility of a writer to whom words—exact words—matter. Coates’s bildungsroman shows the writer as a young man, in settings that include Baltimore’s streets, Howard University’s campus, and Paris’s boulevards. It’s also a journalist’s book, not only because it speaks so forcefully to issues of grave interest today, but because of its close attention to fact. (The real-life killing of unarmed Howard student Prince Jones, in 2000, by an undercover police officer gradually becomes a motif, made particularly effective by the fact that Coates knew Jones, and his conversation with Jones’s mother, which concludes the book.) Coates intimately presents the text as a letter to his son, both an expression of love and a cautionary tale about “police departments… endowed with the authority to destroy his body.” As a meditation on race in America, haunted by the bodies of black men, women, and children, Coates’s compelling, indeed stunning, work is rare in its power to make you want to slow down and read every word. This is a book that will be hailed as a classic of our time.

     And the Wall Street Journal on Bree Newsome. Maybe now institutionalized racism is over…? Woman Removes Confederate Flag From South Carolina Capitol.

296. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     28 June 2015 at 11:27 am

     Senegalese inventor builds plane with salvaged parts:

     Baila Ndiaye has already built a car entirely out of recycled materials, but the Senegalese virtuoso has set himself a new challenge. He’s now in the process of putting together an ultra-light aircraft using only second-hand parts with the same goal as before: to prove that it’s possible “to make what we want using only what we’ve got”.

     Fifty-one-year-old Baila Ndiaye settled in France after finishing high school. He set up a company in Mulhouse that specialised in electronics, before returning to Senegal 15 years later. That’s where, three years ago, he built ‘Syndiély’: a single-seater car made entirely from used parts.

     Building on this first success, he threw himself a new challenge. He started to build an ultra-light aircraft, before personal reasons compelled him to return to France, where he runs an engineering company in Strasbourg. However, he hopes to return to Senegal to complete his project in the near future.

     “When complete, it should have a wingspan of 13 metres”

     In Africa, we need more machines in order to develop. That leaves us two solutions: either buy them and get into debt, or build them ourselves with materials that we already have. That’s what I wanted to do when I built the Syndiély car. I named it after the daughter of ex-Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade, who often took part in the Dakar Rally.

     When I was 6 or 7, as I didn’t have any toys, I had crafted a little car using pieces of iron wire. In a way, I rebuilt the car of my childhood when I built Syndiély.

     To build it, I went to ask people if they had the parts that I needed. At the beginning, they made fun of me and thought it was just a pipe dream. That’s the reason why I worked alone on the project at the time. In the end, I finally managed to salvage all the materials I needed. The car and motorcycle parts came from all kinds of models and were originally headed for the scrap yard. For example, I re-used the motor of a broken motorbike, and the front axles of a Peugeot 205.

     I wanted to show that it’s possible to make what we want by using only what we’ve got. Of course, my car isn’t perfect, but people now know that we can build a car properly with next to nothing.

297. rq says

     28 June 2015 at 2:40 pm

     Watch Bree Newsome climb a 30-foot flagpole to take down South Carolina’s Confederate flag, Vox.

     Chicago burning the confederate flag at the Lincoln Monument

     Long Taught to Use Force, Police Warily Learn to De-escalate

     Across the country, police departments from Seattle to New York and Dallas to Salt Lake City are rethinking notions of policing that have held sway for 40 years, making major changes to how officers are trained in even the most quotidian parts of their work.

     The changes that departments are considering include revising core training standards and tactics, reassessing when and how to make arrests, and re-evaluating how officers approach and interact with members of the public during street and traffic stops.

     At the forefront are de-escalation tactics, the variety of methods officers use to defuse potentially violent encounters, such as talking and behaving calmly and reasonably with sometimes unreasonable people.

     But some of the officers’ reactions in Seattle show just how hard it might be to change entrenched ideas about what their job involves.

     For police departments, the question is whether today’s standard model of aggressive policing — based in part on the broken windows theory of making arrests and issuing citations for even the most minor offenses — is compatible with a more progressive goal of simultaneously catching criminals and building greater trust within neighborhoods.

     “I was trained to fight the war on crime, and we were measured by the number of arrests we made and our speed in answering 911 calls,” said Kathleen O’Toole, the Seattle police chief, who is overseeing the department’s changes as part of a consent decree with the Justice Department.

     “But over time,” she continued, “I realized that policing went well beyond that, and we are really making an effort here to engage with people, not just enforce the law.”

     The efforts nationwide are largely a response to a series of fatal police shootings of unarmed African-American men and boys during the past year, and to pressure from both the White House and the public for local law enforcement agencies to become more transparent in their operations. They are also a recognition that as the high crime rates of the 1980s and 1990s have ebbed, the country’s appetite for a continuing war on crime seems to have diminished.

     Officers at police academies have always been trained in de-escalation, but there has been less emphasis on such methods over the past 20 years. A recent Police Executive Research Forum survey of 281 police agencies found that the average young officer received 58 hours of firearms training and 49 hours of defensive tactical training, but only eight hours of de-escalation training.

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     The training regimens at nearly all of the nation’s police academies continue to emphasize military-style exercises, including significant hours spent practicing drill, formation and saluting, said Maria R. Haberfeld, a professor of police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

     Many police officials now say that even while these approaches might have helped reduce crime, they have also impeded officers’ ability to win the public’s cooperation and trust.

     “What is the collateral damage after that policing strategy?” asked Charles H. Ramsey, the police commissioner in Philadelphia, where the department is also under a federal order to make extensive policy changes, including in training. “Have we alienated people? Yeah, you solved the problem and lowered the numbers, but if you’ve alienated people, have you served your purpose?”

     Officials say that given the combination of lower crime and elevated public mistrust of the police, defusing heated situations is simply better policing.

     Here’s hoping the cultural climate changes for the better.

     Racist Idiots Hold Pro-Confederate Flag Rallies Across the South

     While rest of the country took the day to celebrate yesterday’s historical win for inclusiveness and equality, a bunch of racist idiots in the South decided to fight for their allegiance to a fallen, unrecognized confederation whose founding principle was the ability to own other humans as slaves.

     Just as quickly as the authorities were able to undo Bree Newsome’s noble handiwork from earlier in the day, the 150-years-late separatists showed up to have their voices heard. Which is, admittedly, just like every other day of the week—except this time, they brought flags.

     Lots of photos and videos at the link.

     Who’s burning black churches? Arsonists hit at least 3 Southern congregations in the last 7 days – I suppose it’s just 3 so far where arson has been confirmed.

     Last week’s shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel AME was perhaps the deadliest attack on a black church since the 1963 church bombing by the Klan in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four children. Since then, another specter from America’s violent racist history is again rearing its head – setting black churches ablaze.
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     At least three have been intentionally set on fire in recent days, according to a survey of news reports compiled by the Daily Kos.

     On Tuesday, God’s Power Church of Christ in Georgia was intentionally set on fire, authorities told ABC News. Electronics and other equipment were also stolen in early morning fire. Authorities told reporters there is “no evidence” of a hate crime.

     On Wednesday, Briar Creek Baptist Church in North Carolina burned in the middle of the night, causing $250,000 in damage, NBC News reports. Authorities are investigating whether the blaze was a hate crime. It took 75 firefighters to bring it under control.

     On Friday, Glover Grove Missionary Baptist Church in South Carolina, was virtually destroyed in an overnight blaze, the Aiken Standard reports. While the cause of the fire is still under investigation, the FBI has been called in.

     Another blaze on Friday morning in Florida at predominantly-black Greater Miracle Apostolic Holiness Church caused $700,000 in damage. The fire is under investigation but fire officials believe it to be accidental, the Tallahassee Democrat reports.

     Burning black churches has historical significance that harkens back to the civil rights era, according to the Atlanta Black Star.

     “From slavery and the days of Jim Crow through the civil rights movement and beyond, white supremacists have targeted the Black church because of its importance as a pillar of the Black community, the center for leadership and institution building, education, social and political development and organizing to fight oppression,” David Love writes.

     The Ku Klux Klan has ramped up recruiting activity in the days since the Charleston shooting. Residents in California, Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Georgia woke last weekend to find bags in their lawns filled with candy and Klan flyers seeking new members.

     “…while the inspiration for their deaths continues to fly above their caskets.” -@BreeNewsome’s statement See more at attached text.

298. rq says

     28 June 2015 at 2:55 pm

     What This Cruel War Was Over

     Roof’s belief that black life had no purpose beyond subjugation is “sick and twisted” in the exact same manner as the beliefs of those who created the Confederate flag were “sick and twisted.” The Confederate flag is directly tied to the Confederate cause, and the Confederate cause was white supremacy. This claim is not the result of revisionism. It does not require reading between the lines. It is the plain meaning of the words of those who bore the Confederate flag across history. These words must never be forgotten. Over the next few months the word “heritage” will be repeatedly invoked. It would be derelict to not examine the exact contents of that heritage.

     […]

     It is difficult for modern Americans to understand such militant commitment to the bondage of others. But at $3.5 billion, the four million enslaved African Americans in the South represented the country’s greatest financial asset. And the dollar amount does not hint at the force of enslavement as a social institution. By the onset of the Civil War, Southern slaveholders believed that African slavery was one of the great organizing institutions in world history, superior to the “free society” of the North.

     […]

     Nikki Haley deserves credit for calling for the removal of the Confederate flag. She deserves criticism for couching that removal as matter of manners. At the present moment the effort to remove the flag is being cast as matter of politesse, a matter over which reasonable people may disagree. The flag is a “painful symbol” concedes David French. Its removal might “offer relief to those genuinely hurt,” writes Ian Tuttle. “To many, it is a symbol of racial hatred,” tweeted Mitt Romney. The flag has been “misappropriated by hate groups,” claims South Carolina senator Tom Davis.

     This mythology of manners is adopted in lieu of the mythology of the Lost Cause. But it still has the great drawback of being rooted in a lie. The Confederate flag should not come down because it is offensive to African Americans. The Confederate flag should come down because it is embarrassing to all Americans. The embarrassment is not limited to the flag, itself. The fact that it still flies, that one must debate its meaning in 2015, reflects an incredible ignorance. A century and a half after Lincoln was killed, after 750,000 of our ancestors died, Americans still aren’t quite sure why.

     SO MUCH in that article about the confederacy and how the flag was adopted, and how people have viewed the reasons for war. So much material in there.

     NJ Flag Manufacturer Stops Production of Confederate Flag

     The nation’s oldest and largest flag manufacturer has decided to stop making and selling the Confederate flag.

     Annin Flagmakers announced its decision Tuesday. The northern New Jersey company’s announcement comes amid calls for South Carolina to remove the flag from its statehouse in the wake of a shooting that killed nine at a historic black church in Charleston.

     Company President Carter Beard tells NJ.com the flag has become a symbol of a negative aspect of the country’s past.

     Beard says the flag represents only a small portion of its business. He says those who value the flag as a symbol of state or regional history will be able to find it through other sellers.

     What’s with SCOTUS lately? Supreme Court Strikes Down Key Portions Of Federal ‘3 Strikes’ Sentencing Laws

     While the country was busy celebrating the Supreme Court’s long-awaited marriage equality ruling, the justices issued another ruling in the Johnson v. United States case that dealt a crucial blow to the prison industrial complex. The SCOTUS ruled that a key provision of the Armed Career Criminal Act, which lengthens the sentences of “career criminals,” is unconstitutionally vague. The ruling paves the way for thousands of prisoners to have their sentences reduced and will cause the private prison industry to lose millions of dollars in profits.

     In 1984, Congress passed the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA), the law required judges to sentence people to 15 years to life if they have three prior convictions for “serious drug offense” or “violent felonies.” However, what exactly qualified as a “violent felony” was frustratingly vague and was used as a sentence enhancer in many non-violent cases. A “residual clause” in the ACCA allowed third time felons to be sent to prison for any crime that ” presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another.” That potential risk could include drunk driving, fleeing police, failing to report to a parole officer and even attempted burglary. It seemed to be used as a catch-all sentence enhancer for the sole purpose of throwing people in prison for years longer than they deserved to be. This practice has become increasingly more common as more states allow for-profit prisons in their states.

     In the Johnson case, the government used the ACCA to enhance Samuel Johnson’s prison sentence because of a prior conviction of possession of a sawed off shotgun. Johnson argued that he shouldn’t be subjected to a harsher sentence, because the definition of what was considered “violent” was unconstitutionally vague. The SCOTUS agreed with Johnson and issued a 7-1 ruling in his favor.

     Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion for the court and ruled that the residual clause of the ACCA is a violation of due process:

     “Nine years’ experience trying to derive meaning from the residual clause convinces us that we have embarked upon a failed enterprise. Each of the uncertainties in the residual clause may be tolerable in isolation, but “their sum makes a task for us which at best could be only guesswork.” United States v. Evans, 333 U. S. 483, 495 (1948). Invoking so shapeless a provision to condemn someone to prison for 15 years to life does not comport with the Constitution’s guarantee of due process.”

     This was the fifth time since 2007 that the Supreme Court had to issue an opinion on the constitutionality of the clause; with a court that only hears about 75 cases a year, it is extremely rare for them to revisit something so many times.

     Now, prosecutors across the country will have to figure out who qualifies to have their sentences reduced, a move that is probably making private prison CEOs weep in despair. The private prison industry has been a long-time supporter of harsh mandatory minimum sentences because that means higher profits for them. The two biggest private prison corporations–GEO and Corrections Corporation of America— make about $3 billion annually off of incarcerated Americans; in turn they spend millions of dollars on lobbying efforts.

     The lawmakers in many states are contractually required to fill up the beds in private prisons; so it’s not too hard to figure out why the ACCA is such a popular sentence enhancer. Private prisons have even been known to sue state governments if they aren’t filed to capacity- making taxpayers foot the bill for low crime rates. It’s an absolute travesty and a key piece in the conservative war against minorities and the poor, perpetuating the cycle of poverty and destroying communities around the country. Today’s ruling means Congress will have to clarify the law and you can bet that private prison lobbyists are about to throw even more money at lawmakers, but hopefully it sounds a death knell for mass incarceration in our nation.

     Anne Arundel police: One-third of 2014 complaints against officers were valid

     Anne Arundel County police investigated 78 complaints against its officers last year — including 31 for excessive force — and determined a third were valid, a department report shows.

     The department details the number of complaints and statistics on use of force in a series of reports posted on its website. Although the reports have previously been available online, the county recently took steps to make them more easily accessible as it works with African American community leaders on a number of concerns.

     “It’s a valid question — how many complaints you get, what kinds of complaints, how many are sustained or unsustained,” Police Chief Timothy Altomare said.

     But the reports on the website do not include information on disciplinary actions against the officers who were the subject of complaints. Their privacy is protected by a state law known as the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights.

     Maryland’s highest court upheld that protection Thursday, ruling that an officer’s right to privacy outweighs the public interest in police transparency.

     In a majority opinion by Justice Lynne A. Battaglia, the court held that internal investigation records by police departments, even those prompted by complaints ultimately sustained, qualify as “personnel records” and are exempt from disclosure under the Maryland Public Information Act.

     “What this case means is that when a police officer is involved in conduct that is clearly offensive, the public does not have a right to know what the discipline was,” said Carl Snowden, convener of the Caucus of African American Leaders.

     Snowden’s group has been working with County Executive Steve Schuh and Altomare to shed light on complaints about police actions and the use of force by officers.

     Of the 78 complaints filed with the department’s Internal Affairs Division against officers in 24, 32 percent were found to be sustained, according to the report.

     “Southern Lives Matter.” Even when showing their hate for Black people they manage to appropriate from Black people.

     ‘I got to witness history’: 6 new photos of Bree Newsome’s Confederate flagpole climb, interview with a witness, see the amazing photographs!!!

299. rq says

     28 June 2015 at 3:07 pm

     White supremacist who inspired Dylann Roof calls Charleston ‘a preview of coming attractions’

     One of the shadowy figures who appears to have influenced alleged Charleston killer Dylann Roof is Harold Covington, the founder of a white separatist movement and, within supremacist circles, an influential sci-fi author. Covington, the latest in a long line of rightwing sci-fi writers, has been linked to racist crimes in the past and this week called the massacre “a preview of coming attractions”.
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     The racist manifesto and photos apparently posted by Roof makes mention of the Northwest Front, created by Covington, a former member of the American Nazi party who traveled to South Africa and Rhodesia in order to agitate for white power. In the accompanying photos, Roof wore patches with Rhodesian and apartheid-era South African flags on them.

     Covington, if you believe his website, runs a growing enclave of white supremacists near Seattle called the Northwest Front. The non-profit group is reflected in a series of sci-fi novels, authored by Covington, about a dystopian future in which a white nation is the only answer to US economic and racial woes.

     American science fiction has long had a rightward tilt, from the contemporary strain of small-press sci-fi Tea Party fantasias swarming the Hugo Awards nominations all the way back to libertarian deity Ayn Rand. But Covington’s novels are a breed apart.

     His followers see conspiracy in Covington’s connections to Roof. “And why did this young man have a flight jacket with flag patches from the old White ruled southern African countries, which is where HAC spent part of his early days in the Cause, hmmm,” wrote a commenter called Wingnut under a recent podcast on the Northwest website. “Wonder if they’ll ‘find’ a pile of NF-HAC stuff in this young man’s home? Then they can pull one of those ‘the devil made me do it’ numbers on HAC.”

     Covington doesn’t advocate for randomized violence; he wants revolution, to the extent that he calls his followers “comrades” and lectures them on “the purpose of revolution” among other phrases more characteristic of the left than the right. While it was clear Roof knew about the Northwest Front and seemed familiar with it, Covington condemned Roof’s shooting on his Tuesday podcast because “it doesn’t work.”

     “People, don’t do this shit, this flipping out with a gun lunacy,” he said. “No, this is not just ritual disclaimer, Harold trying to cover is ass, this is what Harold really thinks.”

     More on Covington at the link. To be honest, he scares me.

     Protest against Rikers today (I guess yesterday):
     “Rikers is full of innocent ppl, suspected of committing a crime, which when you’re black or brown, can mean nothing”
     Earlier: reading demand that the US ratify the UN child’s rights treaty & remove all children from Rikers.
     And the Corrections Dept. has brought the attack dogs to the peaceful #ShutDownRikers march. #KaliefBrowder
     Casket for #KaliefBrowder being delivered to Rikers Island and the Correction Dept. that killed him. #ShutDownRikers
     They’ve put barricades around the Rikers sign we dropped a banner over last time. #KaliefBrowder #ResistRikers

300. rq says

     28 June 2015 at 4:31 pm

     Ugh. Updates continue tomorrow.

301. rq says

     29 June 2015 at 1:13 am

     “Southern Bastards” Rip Apart the Confederate Flag in Variant Cover

     Spurred by Newsome and Tyson’s actions, artist Jason Latour shared an upcoming variant cover for “Southern Bastards” #10. “We were going to wait till next week to post this,” Latour wrote on Facebook, “but in light of stuff happening at the SC capitol today, Jason and I think the timing is right.” The powerful image sees a dog ripping the Confederate stars-and-bars and features the phrase, “Death to the Flag, Long Live the South.”

     According to Latour, he and writer Jason Aaron are “presently working on a way to offer proceeds from this SOUTHERN BASTARDS #10 variant to Charleston Shooting victims.” Take a look at the cover below:

     More cartoons: This is so dope. #BreeNewsome

     College Heights Baptist Church sanctuary in Elyria destroyed by fire

     Fire crews battled a large fire at College Heights Baptist Church in Elyria Saturday.

     The fire broke out at 7:15 a.m. at the church on North Abbe Road.

     Flames could be seen shooting from the roof shortly after the fire started.

     The fire destroyed the church’s sanctuary. Fire officials estimate the damage to be $1 million – $500,000 in contents and the other half in structural damage.

     IMPORTANT: Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Dept is now investigating the death of Tanisha Anderson, who died at hands of Cleveland cops 7+ months ago. 7 months to start an investigation – how well, do you think, will everyone involved remember the details? Though better late than never, huh?

     Fire At Black South Carolina Church Investigated

     Local media outlets report the fire destroyed the Glover Grove Missionary Baptist Church in the small town of Warrenville on Friday morning.

     Aiken County sheriff’s deputies and agents from the S.C. State Law Enforcement Division and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are looking into the fire.

     Capt. Eric Abdullah, public information officer for the Aiken County Sheriff’s Office, said no cause has been determined, and his office has given the case to investigators from SLED.

     Recent fires have already caused damage to predominantly black churches in Charlotte, North Carolina and Macon, Georgia. In those instances, investigators say the fires were deliberately set.

     Warrenville is 15 miles northeast of Augusta, Georgia.

302. rq says

     29 June 2015 at 1:34 am

     So I thought this was new, but apparently it’s not – though it’s still important to remember, because all black lives matter, everywhere: Uganda, where they wanted the death penalty for gays, held its first Pride this weekend. This is real activism. The story is from last year.

     BREAKING NEWS: College Heights Baptist Church, a predominantly black church in Elyria, Ohio has been set on fire. Not a new one, just one of the many on the list.

     Who’s Keeping Their Confederate Flags, Who’s Not, a look at the states.

     Charleston shooter Dylann Roof apparently hoped his church massacre would start a new civil war. But the attack seems to have instead united the American public definitively against the central icon of the Confederacy. The Confederate flag is fast becoming toxic both for politicians who have long avoided the controversy that surrounds the flag, as well as for large retailers that carry products emblazoned with the symbol. Below is a roundup of who is reconsidering their affiliation with the Confederate flag — and who isn’t.

     Efforts to remove: Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, Idaho?, and the National Park Services – and several states will remove the flag from license plates, and a few others will discuss confederate memorials.
     No efforts: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee – these will be keeping the confederate symbolism in their flag. Other states will keep the flag on license plates, including South Carolina and Mississippi.
     And commercially,

     Retailers:

     In the business world, multiple news outlets report that Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, as well as Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Overstock.com, and Sears (which also operates Kmart) have all pledged to stop selling merchandise that displays the Confederate flag. Prior to Amazon’s announcement today, sales of the Confederate flag had gone up as much as 3,000 percent in the last 24 hours. It’s also worth noting that eBay, which allows the sale of potentially offensive items (like Nazi artifacts) if they possess some historical value, might still allow Confederate symbols to be sold in their marketplace should they fit that criteria.

     In addition, three of the country’s major flag-makers have now discontinued their Confederate flag products, according to Reuters. Also, Warner Bros. announced Tuesday night that it would cease licensing replicas of the “General Lee,” the car with a Confederate flag on its roof that was made famous in the TV show the Dukes of Hazzard. The decision will only affect one company.

     Straddling Old and New, a South Where ‘a Flag Is Not Worth a Job’

     In a region where church and faith are woven into every strand of society, prayer was one common, almost instinctive, response. But just as a Hispanic woman from Chicago might not be the first image to spring to mind of the Citadel, long a male bastion of Southern traditionalism, the South last week felt barely recognizable, as many of its politicians called for longstanding Confederate symbols to come down.

     It was as if one horrendous act — and the response in Charleston and across the South — had thrown all the contradictions and changes defining and redefining the South into stark relief. They revealed a place that is at once reinventing itself on the fly while, remarkably, keeping up with many of its traditional values.

     To many, it became abruptly clear how out of place the iconography of the Old South had become in this, the nation’s fastest-growing region. It is a place of Japanese and German auto plants and polyglot international communities, where the Democratic mayor of Houston is openly lesbian, two governors are Indian-American and the junior senator from South Carolina is an African-American Republican.

     Yet some realities have endured. Whites hold nearly all the statewide levers of power, much as they always have. The South is still struggling with high poverty and ill health, with little state assistance for those left economically behind, many of them black. And last week, officials throughout the region spoke defiantly of the United States Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage, invoking the same states’ rights language that has echoed in Southern halls of power for decades.

     “It’s pretty remarkable, and I think we’re all trying to digest it,” said Chris Kromm, executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies, a Durham, N.C., nonprofit founded in 1970 by veterans of the civil rights movement. “I think the difference, this time around, is that the South is undergoing this period of rapid and dramatic change. That’s changing the South and the very idea of what it means to be Southern.”

     Ms. Bonete said her adopted state had not fully cured itself of racism. “I have seen it, especially at the Citadel,” she said. “People who were from the South, they were more about being Confederate, and the whole representation of the flag.”

     But she also said she was comfortable in South Carolina. After graduating in 2011, she landed a good job at a Charleston bank. She joined an interdenominational congregation called Awaken Church, which, while mostly white, has been keen to attract minorities and make them feel at ease.

     “And now that this whole thing has happened,” she said about the church massacre, “I feel now more than ever that this is where God wants me.”

     […]

     Defenders of the Confederate flag, of which there are many, have reacted to the events of last week by insisting that history should not simply be forgotten.

     “I think this is one of the most cowardly things I’ve seen done since I’ve been in office,” State Representative Clay Scofield of Alabama told The Sand Mountain Reporter of Governor Bentley’s decision to remove the flags. “It is part of our history.”

     But many critics of the flag say they are not urging Southerners to look away from history, but rather to fully reckon with it, and with the persistent legacy of white supremacy.

     “We’ve never had a frank discussion of race,” said Jerry N. Govan Jr., a Democratic state representative in South Carolina.

     Mr. Govan, who is black, bears a literal scar of the South’s legacy. It is just under his left eye.

     When he was 6 years old and fishing in a creek by the roadside, a truck full of white boys rode by, brandishing the Confederate battle flag and shouting racial epithets, and threw a bag of nails at his face. That kind of vicious racism Mr. Govan had not seen in years, at least not until the massacre in Charleston.

     What Mr. Govan sees today is more subtle.

     He recalled an episode at the State House during the last debate over the Confederate flag in 2000. A young white lawmaker approached him after an intense discussion one afternoon, telling Mr. Govan that he had been moved by the talk of slavery and Jim Crow. But, the white legislator concluded, “I believe after all these years that you’ve had time to catch up.”

     While Southern states are among the poorest in the country, with some of the starkest levels of income inequality, the safety nets administered by these states are thin.

     White Americans Support Protests, But Not So Much When Protesters Are Black

     A new study found that a majority of white Americans believe that protests improve the country — that is, unless those protesting are black.

     According to a recent survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, 67 percent of white Americans believe protesting against the government’s unfair practices are good for the nation. However, when a separate sample of white Americans were asked the same question, but specifically about protests led by black people, that number dropped to 48 percent.

     “Most white Americans generally believe that protests are good for the country, but they hold significant reservations about protests led by African Americans,” Dr. Robert P. Jones, CEO of Public Religion Research Institute, said in a press release.

     “Among white Americans, strong support for protesting government mistreatment drops dramatically among whites when protesters are identified as black Americans.”

     The survey also gauged attitude from non-white Americans, which yielded the complete opposite response. Results showed that 56 percent of non-white Americans believed protests helped the country while 65 percent of a different group of non-white Americans held the same belief when protesters are black.

     “We expected to see some differences along racial lines when we asked these questions, but we certainly had not expected a gap that size, a gap that large,” Dan Cox, research director at Public Religion Research Institute, told the Washington Post.

     Many critics have condemned the media for biased coverage of protests. One recent video by Brave New Films highlighted the distinction between white rioters and black protesters and how the two are portrayed differently.

     The narrator asked, “Why is it that the leadership of the black community is always called into question? But no one ever questions the leadership of white parents who let their kids burn down and vandalize a college campus?”

303. rq says

     29 June 2015 at 1:43 am

     Local flag rallies also happening: Confederate flag sparks opposing rallies in Salisbury

     Just before 1 p.m., a group of two dozen people, toting and waving flags, gathered near Salisbury’s Confederate monument on West Innes Street in support of a flag that’s provoked heated discussion across the country. Passersby both cheered and denounced the group’s display of Confederate flags.

     Hours later and four blocks away, an opposing, second rally sprung up near the intersection of East Innes and Long streets. The second rally, likewise, drew cheers and jeers. Some passersby chanted with the second rally. Others sped off and revved engines, leaving clouds of car exhaust.

     Participants in the Confederate rally expressed varying views, but said the flag shouldn’t be, and isn’t, tied to racism.

     “It has nothing to do with the racism,” said Gold Hill area resident Lee Wonnacott. “It has everything to do with minority politics and politicians pushing agendas that have nothing to do with race.”

     Bystanders, who took photos and recorded the Confederate rally, called the public display of the flag on one of Salisbury’s busiest streets unnecessary.

     East Spencer resident Greg Vanzant, who organized the second rally, called the hours-long Confederate rally a “blatant disrespect of cultural differences.”

     Various Pride parades happened yesterday, and the participation of Black Lives Matter activists was… interestingly received.
     So it’s starting to become apparent that @pridestl is timing our QTPOC #BlackLivesMatter group to be the last in the parade. #NotOurPrideSTL
     Our summer interns are getting amped 4 #SFPrideParade, in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter & to #ProtectTransLives
     BREAKING: #BlackLivesMatter die-in disrupts #PrideParade in #Chicago at Addison and Halsted. “Disrupts”.
     An infinitely significant point, a point that does feel very missed, via @ophelporhush #Pride2015 #BlackLivesMatter, statement attached on the first Pride parade held, the Stonewall riot, and the emphasis on the participation of queer and trans people of colour in that and as victims in the previous police violence Cooper’s Donuts and Compton Cafeteria. “#BlackLivesMatter is crucial to honoring the legacy of all those who fought for queer rights.”

     Let’s stand TOGETHER. Let’s fight TOGETHER. We need you! #Pride #Pride2015 #LoveWins #Solidarity #BlackLivesMatter

304. rq says

     29 June 2015 at 9:07 am

     Dale Jr. says the Confederate flag is ‘offensive to an entire race’

     Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s viewpoint that the Confederate flag is offensive has not wavered over the years, and NASCAR’s most popular driver again left no room for interpretation speaking Friday at Sonoma Raceway.

     “I think it’s offensive to an entire race,” Earnhardt said. “It belongs in the history books and that’s about it.”

     This was not the first time Earnhardt was critical of the Confederate flag. In his 2001 autobiography, he said the flag “represents closed-minded, racist views that have no place in today’s society.” And Earnhardt in a 2006 interview with Yahoo! Sports said, “I don’t know [if] what that flag stands for is the same for me as it is the guy who might have it flying out there.”

     Debate about the Confederate flag, often used symbolically by white supremacy groups, has come under intense condemnation following the shooting deaths of nine African-Americans by a white gunman inside a Charleston, S.C., church last week. Dylann Storm Roof, the alleged killer, has been seen in photographs posing with a Confederate flag promoting racist viewpoints.

     In response to the slayings, several states have either already removed Confederate flags from public areas or debating doing so. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley called for the flag to be taken down outside its statehouse on Monday, while Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley ordered the removal of four flags from a State Capital memorial on Wednesday.

     Use of the Confederate flag is still frequent in the south among the states that formed the Confederacy during the Civil War and is a common site at NASCAR races with many spectators flying the flag on top of motor homes stationed in the infield.

     NASCAR issued a statement in support of Haley’s decision Tuesday. The sanctioning body already prohibits the sale of any merchandise bearing the Confederate flag at its races.

     However, NASCAR does not have an outright ban on fans displaying the flag within its tracks. NASCAR CEO and Chairman Brian France cited free speech as the reason why fans could continue flying the flag in an interview with 60 Minutes in 2005.

     “(Hendrick Motorsports) have eliminated the ability to use it in anyway or it show up in any of the things that we are involved with,” Jeff Gordon said Friday. “I think that is the stance I see that NASCAR has taken and have had that stance for several years. To me, I’m in support of what they are doing. It’s a delicate balance. We race all over, but the South is an area where we have a lot of fans. Everyone has different opinions and expression of that.

     “I support NASCAR and the stance that they are taking.”

     There was a BET Awards ceremony last night, and apparently they were socially proactive.
     Here’s only a very few excerpts that suggest that good things were shown:
     .@BET, that was a solid memorial tribute to the victims in Charleston. #BETAwards2015
     “@deray: “I Am A Classic Man” signs referring to the Civil Rights Movement are well done, @Jidenna. #BETAwards2015”
     Michael B. Jordan and #BETAwards honor Black Lives Matter protesters for demanding “the justice we so richly deserve”
     .@OGMACO made a helluva statement today #BETAwards (check out his shirt)

     Calls to Drop Confederate Emblems Spread Nationwide

     What began as scattered calls for removing the Confederate battle flag from a single state capitol intensified with striking speed and scope on Tuesday into an emotional, nationwide movement to strip symbols of the Confederacy from public parks and buildings, license plates, Internet shopping sites and retail stores.

     The South Carolina legislature, less than a week after nine parishioners were shot to death in a black church in Charleston, voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to debate removing the Confederate flag from its State House grounds.

     In Charleston, the board that governs the Citadel, the state’s 173-year-old military academy, voted, 9 to 3, to remove the Confederate Naval Jack from the campus chapel, saying that a Citadel graduate and the relatives of six employees were killed in the attack on the church.

     In Tennessee, political leaders from both parties said a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and an early Ku Klux Klan leader, should be moved out of the State House. In Virginia, Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, ordered that the Confederate flag no longer appear on license plates, and political leaders in Maryland, North Carolina and Tennessee vowed to do the same.

     And in Mississippi, the state’s House speaker, Philip Gunn, a Republican, called for taking a Confederate battle cross off the upper corner of his state’s flag, the only remaining state banner to display the emblem.

     “We must always remember our past, but that does not mean we must let it define us,” Mr. Gunn said in a statement that stunned many in Jackson, the capital, and was seen as adding a highly fraught issue with statewide elections there this year. “As a Christian, I believe our state’s flag has become a point of offense that needs to be removed,” Mr. Gunn said.

305. rq says

     29 June 2015 at 9:11 am

     FBI Investigating Black Church Fires

     The FBI and ATF are cooperating with local authorities to investigate the recent spate of fires at black churches, a spokesperson for the FBI confirmed Sunday.

     In recent days, there have been four fires at churches across four states — Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia. Three of the four have been ruled arsons by investigators; a cause for the fourth, at Grover Grove Baptist in Warrenville, S.C., had not been determined by investigators on Friday.

     “They’re being investigated to determine who is responsible and what motives are behind them,” said FBI spokesperson Paul Bresson. “I’m not sure there is any reason to link them together at this point.”

     The cause of a fifth fire, at College Heights Baptist Church in Elyria, Ohio, was still being investigated Sunday.

     The fires come just days after Dylann Roof allegedly went on a racially-motivated killing spree at a black church in Charleston, S.C. The shooting left nine dead and sparked a nationwide outcry against racial intolerance, and even a nationwide debate about the symbolism of the Confederate flag. The alleged shooter was seen in multiple photos posing with the flag.

     Ten Days in June, and my free articles have run out. :(

     Baltimore. #FreddieGray
     Baltimore. Protest. #FreddieGray

     Afrofuturism series based on Octavia Butler. Kindred Necklace, Anyanwu earrings (Wild Seed) Patternmaster necklace

306. rq says

     29 June 2015 at 9:14 am

     And a few more from various Pride parades:
     In Chicago (I think?), there were arrests: #BlackoutPride Protestors in handcuffs. #PrideParade

     In STL, just… bullshit, specifically referencing the fourth tweet in this list.
     #Ferguson Protesters walking through #PrideFestSTL chanting #BlackTransLivesMatter #NotOurPrideSTL
     Marching but really it’s #NotOurPrideSTL #BlackLivesMatter #PrideStl #BlackTransLivesMatter #ABanks #stl #Pride
     #Ferguson protesters march in #Pride2015 demanding #PrideFestSTL recognize #TransLivesMatter. Hashtag #NotOurPrideSTL
     Just read at STL Pride the MC said “all lives matter” as the black QTPOC BLM funeral march went through the parade.

     And there was a flag: Because we want #MoreThanMarriage and we remember #stonewallwasarebellion we believe #BlackLivesMatter

307. rq says

     29 June 2015 at 9:35 am

     July. August. @ophelporhush x @freedomsummer15! Community. Culture. Celebration. #FreedomSummer15

     Charleston Council Renames Library To Honor AME Shooting Victim Cynthia Hurd

     Renaming the Charleston library she served for 30 years is a fitting tribute to Cynthia Hurd, one of the nine churchgoers killed during the AME Shooting last week.

     On Thursday, the Charleston County Council unanimously voted to rename the St. Andrews Regional Library the Cynthia Graham Hurd St. Andrews Regional Library, The Post & Courier reports. Hurd worked in the city’s library system from 1990 to 2011, before being given the managerial title at the St. Andrews Regional Library. Her husband Arthur called the commemorative title fitting for the woman who dedicated her life to books and helping others.

     Hurd was the longest-serving part-time librarian in the county.

     Shortly after suspected gunman Dylann Roof took the lives of Hurd and eight others in Mother AME Emanuel Church last week, friends and former classmates from her alma mater, Clark Atlanta University, paid their respects with a candlelight vigil.

     The College of Charleston also showed their gratitude to Hurd by renaming their academic scholarship the “Cynthia Graham Hurd Memorial Scholarship.” Formally known as the Colonial Scholarship, 12 full academic scholarships are handed out every year to in-state students.

     Hurd’s wake will be Friday, from 8:30 to 10 p.m. at Emanuel AME Church, a day after the viewings for Sen. Clementa Pinckney. Her funeral will also take place there on Saturday at 11 a.m.

     I’m so glad she is getting that recognition.

     An unusual concept in Freddie Gray case: Homicide by omission, but what else are you going to call it?

     When six Baltimore police officers go to trial over the death of Freddie Gray, prosecutors will focus not on what the officers did, but on what they failed to do.

     Unlike most criminal cases involving homicides — where someone is charged with shooting, hitting, stabbing or choking a victim — the one headed for trial in Baltimore in October involves an unusual and complicated concept: homicide “through acts of omission,” to quote the medical examiner in Maryland who performed Gray’s autopsy, according to a report obtained by the Baltimore Sun last week before it became public.

     The medical examiner concluded that Gray, without a seat belt and handcuffed in the back of a police van, lurched when the van sped up or turned, striking his head and suffering a fatal neck injury. When Gray, 25, repeatedly asked for help, authorities said, he was ignored.

     The autopsy report will be key to both sides in a closely watched case that is being scrutinized by legal experts and residents. Gray’s death in April sparked rallies that turned violent the day of his funeral, when riots, looting and fires forced authorities to declare a state of emergency and put Baltimore under curfew.

     Legal experts said the challenge for prosecutors will be convincing a jury that each officer bears some responsibility in the death. The officer who drove the van is charged with depraved-heart murder, and three others face charges of involuntary manslaughter. Two others are accused of lesser crimes. Prosecutors said in court filings that investigators have amassed 300,000 digital files of evidence.

     “Homicide by omission is a difficult legal theory in the criminal law,” said José F. Anderson, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. “You have to show criminal responsibility by inaction.”

     He added: “The real questions are going to be how can they pinpoint when the traumatic injury occurred or when [Gray] might have called out for help and for how long those cries were ignored.”

     Definitely a challenge, but I have faith in Mosby!

     Baltimore Co. police name 3 officers who killed unarmed black man

     Baltimore County police are identifying three officers who shot and killed an unarmed black man who had threatened to kill himself.

     Continue reading

     Officers shot 41-year-old Spencer McCain Thursday in Owings Mills, about 15 miles northwest of Baltimore.

     On Saturday, police identified the officers by last name. They are Officer Wilkes, a six-year veteran of the department; Officer Besaw, an eight-year veteran; and Officer Stargel, a five-year veteran.

     A police spokesman says the department cannot release their first names due to a police union contract. The officers are on administrative leave.

     Police Chief Jim Johnson said Thursday that three officers all fired as McCain was in a “defensive position.” Johnson says McCain was holding his arms and body in a manner that suggested he was armed. No weapon was found.

     He was black. I guess that was weapon enough.

     Joe Biden Makes Surprise Visit To Charleston Church

     Vice President Joe Biden worshipped and spoke at the Sunday service of the historic African-American church where nine people were gunned down during Bible study earlier this month just hours before a funeral was held for another of the shooting victims.

     The vice president’s surprise appearance came on the second Sunday the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church held regular services following the June 17 shooting. Police contend the attack was racially motived and have charged a 21-year-old white man.

     Biden said he’d visited Emanuel before and knew the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of the church who was among those killed.

     “We came back because my family and I wanted to show solidarity with the families and with the church,” said Biden, wearing a purple tie, a traditional color of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

     Biden, a Catholic, showed the congregation the rosary beads he wore around his wrist and spoke about the feeling of loss within his own life.

     The vice president’s son, Beau, died late last month of brain cancer. Beau Biden narrowly avoided death as a young boy in a 1972 car crash that killed Joe Biden’s first wife and his daughter.

     “The reason I came was to draw strength from all of you,” Biden said. “I wish I could say something that would ease the pain.”

     Biden received a standing ovation during the 2 ½-hour service after reading a selection of scripture. He later joined the congregation in holding hands and singing, “We Shall Overcome.”

     The Sunday morning service came hours before the church held a funeral for shooting victim DePayne Middelton-Doctor. The 49-year-old pastor and mother of four decided in January to return to her childhood roots in the AME faith and attend Emanuel after years attending a Baptist church.

     Longtime friend Karen Williams said in a eulogy that Middleton-Doctor was a devoutly religious person, a trait that helped foster the pair’s friendship.

     “She believed every word” in the Bible,” Williams said. “There was no compromise.”

     But Middleton-Doctor also encouraged forgiveness, Williams added, and often juggled her ministerial duties with her kids’ participation in basketball, dance and band, as well as her own love for singing.

     The crowd of family and friends was so large at the funeral that many watched the service on closed-circuit TV from the church’s first floor, where the shooting took place. The mood in the overflow space was enthusiastic and many stood to clap, sing and even shake a tambourine along with the music being played at the service one floor above.

308. Pteryxx says

     29 June 2015 at 9:41 am

     rq, here’s that New Yorker article in #305. Mostly it’s a short revisiting of a 2014 interview the author had with Obama: Ten Days in June

     Obama described himself to me then in terms of his limits—as “a relay swimmer in a river full of rapids, and that river is history.” More than a few columnists believed that Obama was now resigned to small victories, at best. But pause to think of what has happened, the scale of recent events.

     On Thursday, the Supreme Court (despite an apocalyptic dissent about “pure applesauce” and “interpretive jiggery-pokery” by Justice Scalia) put an end to years of court cases and congressional attacks against the Affordable Care Act, which means that millions of Americans will no longer live in a state of perpetual anxiety about health costs.

     On Friday, the Supreme Court (despite a curiously ill-informed dissent about Kalahari, Aztec, and Han mating rites by Chief Justice Roberts) legalized same-sex marriage nationally—a colossal (and joyous) landmark moment in the liberation of gay men and lesbians.

     Meanwhile, throughout the South, governors and legislatures are beginning to lower the racist banner of the Confederate flag. Cruelty on a horrific scale—slaughter committed in the name of racism and its symbols—has made all talk about the valuable “heritage” of such symbols absurd to all but a very few. The endlessly revived “conversation about race” shows signs of turning into something more serious—a debate about institutional racism, and about inequities in the criminal-justice system, in incarceration, in employment, in education. The more Obama leads on this, the more he sheds his tendency toward caution—his deep concern that he will alienate as many as he inspires—the better. The eulogy in Charleston, where he spoke as freely, and as emotionally, as he ever has about race during his Presidency, is a sign, I think—I hope—that he is prepared, between now and his last day in office, to seize the opportunity.

     […]

     “I think we are born into this world and inherit all the grudges and rivalries and hatreds and sins of the past,” [Obama] continued [in 2014]. “But we also inherit the beauty and the joy and goodness of our forebears. And we’re on this planet a pretty short time, so that we cannot remake the world entirely during this little stretch that we have. … But I think our decisions matter. And I think America was very lucky that Abraham Lincoln was President when he was President. If he hadn’t been, the course of history would be very different. But I also think that, despite being the greatest President, in my mind, in our history, it took another hundred and fifty years before African-Americans had anything approaching formal equality, much less real equality. I think that doesn’t diminish Lincoln’s achievements, but it acknowledges that, at the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.”

     It turns out that this was not, for Barack Obama, a rhetoric of resignation at all, but a kind of resolve.

309. rq says

     29 June 2015 at 10:15 am

     Law enforcement seeks to bar release of video showing Gardena police shooting

     The Los Angeles County Police Chief’s Assn., California Police Chiefs’ Assn., California State Sheriffs’ Assn. and California Peace Officers’ Assn. in court papers filed last week said that sealing such evidence is common practice nationwide. They cited concerns about violating the privacy of the officers involved and the possibility of interfering with investigations.

     Dashboard cameras from three police cars recorded parts of the June 2, 2013, shooting of Ricardo Diaz-Zeferino, who was struck eight times and died from his injuries. Another man, Eutiquio Acevedo Mendez, also suffered a gunshot wound to his back, leaving bullet fragments near his spine.

     Several news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, are seeking to make public the footage under seal in a federal civil rights suit, arguing that by not releasing it, Gardena violated the public’s right to information. The Associated Press and Bloomberg are part of the effort.

     At the center of the dispute over the videos is whether Diaz-Zeferino moved his hands in a way that gave officers the impression he was reaching for a weapon in the seconds before he was shot, as investigators concluded. An attorney representing the families of both men who were shot has said that the videos show that Diaz-Zeferino’s right hand was clearly empty and in front of his body when the shots were fired.

     The city has paid $4.7 million to the families of Diaz-Zeferino and Mendez to settle a civil rights lawsuit over the shooting.

     Attorneys for the law enforcement organizations warned that disclosure of the videos could discourage the use of cameras by police agencies and could undermine trust in the police. An attorney for the state chiefs association noted that Gardena settled the civil rights case believing the videos wouldn’t become public.

     “The defendants paid over $4 million to buy their peace,” the attorneys said in a statement.

     Wow, a price on transparency?

     Why Are So Many Mass Shootings Committed by Young White Men?

     When trying to decipher gun violence, it’s tempting to focus on impoverished minority neighborhoods defined by structural woes like mass incarceration, poverty, lack of education, and so on. But research shows that mass shootings are primarily committed by white males—the most privileged class in society. So why are they the ones who snap? And is calling them “mentally ill” a way to avoid talking about race?

     “If you look at how the James Holmes case has played out, it’s amazing how the themes [of other shootings] line up,” true-crime author Stephen Singular, who collaborated with his wife, Joyce, on the new book The Spiral Notebook: The Aurora Theater Shooter and the Epidemic of Mass Violence Committed by American Youth, tells VICE. “Most of these young white shooters—they’re not underprivileged, they have so many advantages, particularly in the Holmes case. He was dealing with an inner reality that he didn’t know how to contend with.”

     As Mother Jones reported, “Since 1982, there have been at least 70 mass shootings across the country… Forty four of the killers were white males. Only one of them was a woman.” So white men have been responsible for about 63 percent of mass shootings in that span, despite comprising a far smaller portion of the total population. And while the motives for mass murder vary from perpetrator to perpetrator, since the Columbine school shooting in 1999, there has been a remarkable consistency—if not uniformity—in the age, gender, and race of the people who carry out these egregious crimes.

     According to FBI arrest data, the peak ages for violent crime is 16–24. “This is a period of substantial transition in an individual’s life, when they’re less likely to have significant attachments in their life that deter them from criminal violence,” Pete Simi, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska, tells VICE. “Those of us who are not committing crimes on a regular basis, [it’s] largely because there are constraints in our lives—we have things to lose.”

     When attempting to prove Holmes was insane at the time of the Aurora, Colorado, movie-theater shooting in April, his defense team pointed out that he was the typical age at which schizophrenia tends to present itself in young men—teens to late 20s.

     In their book, the Singulars write that Holmes knew he was ill before the shooting, had sought out therapy—where he admitted having obsessive, homicidal thoughts—and was given medication as a remedy. “If you look at the list of mostly male shooters, they were all on some type of antidepressant or anti-anxiety drugs,” Stephen Singular says.

     If you read that, it sounds like a subtle argument for the ‘But mental illness!’ crowd. Don’t know if I like that.

     SIX black churches stretching from Georgia to Ohio are burned down in seven days: Fears of tide of ‘racist’ violence as three are confirmed as arson, more reading on that.

     Investigators Probe Fires At 6 Black Churches In 5 Southern States, with audio.

     Fires in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Knoxville, Tennessee, are both being investigated as arson. Authorities in Macon, Georgia, are investigating another there as “suspicious.” A fire at a Tallahasee, Florida, church was likely caused by electrical problems, authorities have said. Another in Gibson County, Tennessee, may have been caused by lightning. One burning in Charlotte is being investigated to determine if it could have been a hate crime.

     Adonica Simpkins lives in a trailer home right next to Glover Grove Baptist Church. “I actually think it might be a hate crime,” she said, looking across a field to the church’s remains on a sticky, sunny South Carolina afternoon. “The way things are happening these days, you never can say. Look how they went up there and shot someone in the church, or other churches burning down. It’s just so much going on in the world. You never know.”

     […]

     Richard Cohen is the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and he says the recent burnings of black churches throughout the south are “very, very suspicious.”

     “Black churches have long been the focus of civil rights activity,” Cohen told NPR. “And for this reason they’ve been targeted historically.”

     There was a string of them in the 50s and the 60s, during the civil rights movement. Perhaps the most notorious was the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963, which killed four young black girls.

     A wave of church burnings swept the nation again in the 90s, prompting then-President Bill Clinton to sign the Church Arson Prevention Act, a law that increased jail time for people who burn churches.

     As to this recent wave of church burnings, Cohen said, “It’s not unreasonable to suspect that what we’re seeing [now] is a backlash to the taking down of the Confederate flag, the determination of our country to face its racial problems.”

     Whatever the cause of the Glover Grove fire, Adonica Simpkins says she will still be afraid. We asked her what it’s like to be a black person in South Carolina.

     “I tell you what, I wouldn’t walk down this road. I wouldn’t walk down this road,” she said, sighing as she pointed down the road where Glover Grove sits. “It’s so much hate. You might walk down the road and hear the word n*****, for nothing. People used to be riding by, and just throw bottles at black folks.”

     Less than half a mile from the church and Simpkins’ home, a Confederate flag waves on a front porch.

     State investigators told NPR on Sunday that they have not yet determined a cause in the Glover Grove Baptist Church fire. The Aiken County Sheriff’s department has turned over its investigation to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, and the FBI is investigating as well.

     Jones is confident he’ll rebuild. But this kind of tragedy isn’t totally new to him.

     “We had another church that burned down, over across the woods there,” he said. “That’s been, what, maybe 30, 32 years ago, no 34 years ago. I believe that was an arson.”

     Jones says before that church burned, he’d often find offensive messages written on the outside walls. Often, three letters, he said. “They put KKK.”

     Affordable Housing, Racial Isolation – another look at the housing market, segregation and ‘non-discriminatory’ practices that have a discriminatory effect.

     A Supreme Court ruling last week forcefully reminded state and local governments that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 forbids them from spending federal housing money in ways that perpetuate segregation. Communities across the country have been doing exactly that for decades.

     Instead of building subsidized housing in racially integrated areas that offer minority citizens access to jobs and good schools, local governments have often deepened racial isolation by placing such housing in existing ghettos.

     Justice Anthony Kennedy delivered this timely message in the majority opinion, ruling that the law allows plaintiffs to challenge housing policies that have a discriminatory effect — without having to prove that discrimination was intentional.

     He traces the problem of racial isolation back to the mid-20th century, when restrictive covenants, redlining and government-sponsored mortgage discrimination undercut black wealth creation, accelerated ghetto-ization and walled off black families in the urban communities that exploded in the riots of the 1960s.

     The ruling comes at a time of growing tension between civil rights lawyers and affordable housing developers over where low-income housing should be built and whether locations (often the path of least resistance) perpetuate segregation.

     Congress hoped to end historic patterns of segregation by passing the Fair Housing Act, which required governments getting federal money to “affirmatively further” fair housing goals. But for decades, federal, state and local officials declined to enforce the law, leaving the fight to civil rights groups, who often filed lawsuits on behalf of discrimination victims.

     The current case, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, concerns a federal tax credit program used by states and local governments to build affordable housing. The plaintiff, a nonprofit group, sued Texas, arguing that the state had violated the Fair Housing Act and perpetuated segregation by allocating too many tax credits to projects in predominantly black inner city areas and too few in predominantly white suburban areas.

     The Supreme Court ruled that a discrimination charge could be based on the fact that a policy had a “disparate impact” on black citizens and sent the case back to the lower court for further proceedings. […]

     As Justice Kennedy wrote, the Fair Housing Act has an important role to play in the country’s struggle against racial isolation and avoiding the grim prophecy that President Lyndon Johnson’s Kerner Commission enunciated five decades ago, when it said that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” It’s the duty of the federal and state governments to ensure that affordable housing policies do not make racial isolation worse.

     I used to lead tours at a plantation. You won’t believe the questions I got about slavery.

     Lots of folks who visit historic sites and plantations don’t expect to hear too much about slavery while they’re there. Their surprise isn’t unjustified: Relatively speaking, the move toward inclusive history in museums is fairly recent, and still underway. And as the recent debates over the Confederate flag have shown, as a country we’re still working through our response to the horrors of slavery, even a century and a half after the end of the Civil War.

     The majority of interactions I had with museum guests were positive, and most visitors I encountered weren’t as outwardly angry as that man who confronted me early on. (Though some were. One favorite: a 60-ish guy in a black tank top who, annoyed both at having to wait for a tour and at the fact that the next tour focused on slaves, came back at me with, “Yeah, well, Egyptians enslaved the Israelites, so I guess what goes around comes around!”)

     Still, I’d often meet visitors who had earnest but deep misunderstandings about the nature of American slavery. These folks were usually, but not always, a little older, and almost invariably white. I was often asked if the slaves there got paid, or (less often) whether they had signed up to work there. You could tell from the questions — and, not less importantly, from the body language — that the people asking were genuinely ignorant of this part of the country’s history.

     The more overtly negative reactions to hearing about slave history were varied in their levels of subtlety. Sometimes it was as simple as watching a guest’s body language go from warm to cold at the mention of slavery in the midst of the historic home tour. I also met guests from all over the country who, by means of suggestive questioning of the “Wouldn’t you agree that…” variety, would try to lead me to admit that slavery and slaveholders weren’t as bad as they’ve been made out to be.

     On my tours, such moments occurred less frequently if visitors of color were present. Perhaps guests felt more comfortable asking me these questions because I am white, though my African-American coworkers were by no means exempt from such experiences. At any rate, these moments happened often enough that I eventually began writing them down (and, later, tweeting about them).

     Taken together, these are the most common misconceptions about American slavery I encountered during my time interpreting history to the public:

     See link for those. :)

310. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     29 June 2015 at 7:17 pm

     A former cop who killed shares lessons on deadly force:

     (reprinted in full)

     “Shoot him,” Azevedo cried out to his rookie partner.

     Deadly force by police has made headlines from Ferguson, Missouri, to Baltimore. Just this month, a Los Angeles police officer was found “unjustified” in shooting and killing a 25-year-old mentally ill man. Across the country, most officers are exonerated. But more and more people are calling for strategies to make such incidents less common, notably through improved police training.

     For Klinger, it has long been a very personal issue — one that led a young cop who entered the “kill zone,” as officers call it, to become a researcher seeking to understand the dynamics of confrontation. In doing so, he hopes to be a voice of reason in an emotional national debate, and an advocate for change.

     When Klinger showed up in his ranks on the night shift, Tim Anderson, then an LAPD sergeant, wasn’t sure he was the kind of recruit who’d make it in neighborhoods plagued with gang warfare.

     Klinger, a quiet, devout Christian, whose dad was a classical clarinet player, had moved to California from Miami, at age 13, with his mom and two sisters after his parents split up. “Here’s a kid from a very mild-mannered side of life who ends up here,” Anderson says.

     But Klinger was determined. “I actually asked for this to be my assignment out of the academy,” he says, sitting in a restaurant north of Los Angeles after revisiting the scene of Randolph’s shooting.

     That night in 1981, he was teamed with Azevedo when they were called to a home where an armed burglar had been reported. As a police helicopter circled overhead, a large crowd gathered to watch across busy Vernon Avenue.

     “Get out of here!” the officers yelled. Most spectators ran, except Randolph.

     Azevedo says he didn’t think Randolph could hear him, or maybe didn’t speak English. So he ran across the street to try to get him to move.

     “In the blink of an eye,” Azevedo recalls how Randolph lunged forward and stabbed him in the lower chest with a blow stopped — just barely — by his protective vest. Stunned, Azevedo tried to draw his gun, but he tripped on uneven pavement, he says — and Randolph jumped on him with the knife raised.

     Rushing over, Klinger grabbed Randolph’s left wrist, but Randolph broke free. Klinger pulled his own gun and fired at close range.

     “I blamed myself for 20 years for not being able to wrest the knife from him,” he says.

     Investigators ultimately determined the fatal shooting was justified and that the rookie officer had saved Azevedo’s life. But Klinger still found it difficult to rest easy.

     In the year that followed, there were nine more times he says he could have shot a civilian — and believes he would have been justified in doing so. But he but didn’t shoot because the suspects dropped guns, or other officers intervened.

     Feeling like a “magnet” for trouble, he moved to a smaller department in Redmond, Washington. But he found no better fit there. It was time for something new.

     Today, the 57-year-old Klinger is a professor in the department of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He earned a doctorate and has written a book, “Into the Kill Zone,” telling the stories of officers who’ve shot and killed people.

     He also has done research on methods officers can use to avoid deadly force. This spring, testifying at a U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearing on deadly force, one topic he discussed was “tactical positioning,” a strategy in which officers keep a safe distance, unless there is imminent danger.

     “Often times, officers find themselves in too close, too quickly, and they don’t have any option other than to shoot their way out of it,” Klinger says. “That’s where I really think we fall down in American law enforcement.”

     He uses last year’s police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, as an example. Though he agrees that Officer Darren Wilson was justified in shooting Brown, he also says that shooting might have been avoided if Wilson had waited and called for backup.

     Such assessments anger some. But Klinger says police agencies must ask, “What can we learn from this?'”

     Even now, there is disagreement among Klinger’s own former colleagues about whether the 1981 killing of Edward Randolph could have been avoided. They agree that Klinger was justified in the shooting.

     But Anderson, their sergeant, says Azevedo should have ignored Randolph and let him take his chances as they pursued the burglar, who ultimately got away. “He should’ve never engaged this suspect by himself,” says Anderson, a former SWAT team supervisor, who’s retired and now advises police departments on tactical operations.

     Azevedo, also retired after a long law enforcement career, stands by his decision. He says it was his duty to try to protect a person he thought was an innocent bystander.

     Either way, Klinger has let go of his guilt with the help of a counselor who, as he puts it, helped his heart accept that he “did what he had to do.”

     Speaking of Randolph, he says, “He’s 26 years old. His whole life was driven by other people besides me. So why should I blame myself for my inability to control him for that one second that I was in physical contact with him?”

     It has been, perhaps, the most difficult lesson the professor has learned.

311. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

     29 June 2015 at 8:42 pm

     From rq’s #304:

     The South Carolina legislature, less than a week after nine parishioners were shot to death in a black church in Charleston, voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to debate removing the Confederate flag from its State House grounds.

     I am ever so proud of you, SC. Ever so proud.

312. rq says

     30 June 2015 at 1:24 am

     Confederate flag hung from Boston memorial for black soldiers

     A Confederate battle flag was attached Sunday night to a Boston memorial that commemorates one of the first all-black regiments to fight for the union during the Civil War, hanging there for over an hour before a woman removed it.

     Melissa Carino, 37, of Lowell said she saw the flag hanging from the Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial across the street from the State House at about 8 p.m. Carino said she left and returned to the location later, angered that it had not been removed.

     The 54th Regiment was commissioned by Governor John A. Andrew shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation. It was the inspiration for the 1989 movie “Glory.’’

     Late Sunday night, the flag appeared ripped and torn from attempts to remove it. But it remained tied to the monument until 10:30 p.m., when Carino finally untied it and took it down, placing it in a trash can.

     “It makes me angry to have to do this in my own town,” she said. “I was like, really? Is that for real?”

     A squad car carrying two Boston police officers arrived at the monument at 10:45 p.m., after the flag had been taken down. As a national monument, the memorial is managed by the National Park Service. Earlier in the evening, a Boston police spokesman said he thought the monument was under state jurisdiction while a State Police spokesman said it was on city property.

     Timothy Buckley, a spokesman for Governor Charlie Baker’s office, said rangers from the Department of Conservation and Recreation had been notified and were sent to the scene to remove the flag.

     The memorial has a history of vandalism. It was splashed with paint in 2012, and a man was arrested for trying to remove a sword from the statue in April 2015.

     Passersby expressed displeasure at what they called a racially motivated act, with some citing the outrage over the controversial flag after the murder of black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., earlier this month.

     “Such an expression of hate is not acceptable,” said Dara Poulten, 34, of Medway.

     “Obviously it’s pretty upsetting to see,” said Jonathan Krieger, 29, of Jamaica Plain. “When somebody puts something in a spot like that, obviously they are trying to send a message, and it’s an upsetting message.”

     African nurses could be told to leave the UK

     A new immigration policy in 2016 in which migrants from outside of Europe ‘have to earn £35,000’ to settle in the UK after staying on more than six years will affect many job industries relying on Africans, South Asians and Latin Americans, including nursing.

     The pay threshold will apply to people wanting to remain permanently in the UK after working for more than six years.

     Given that under the policy nurses with rejected visas will have to return back to their home country, it could also mean that the NHS has wasted £20 million on staff who can no longer work for them. Cuts in nurse training places in which 37,000 potential nursing students were turned away last year has meant even more reliance on overseas recruitment to fill in skills gaps.

     The policy is thought to affect hundreds of African nurses working in the UK; particularly Zimbabwean, Nigerian, Ghanaian and South African nurses. Dr Peter Carter, Chief Executive of the RCN said that ‘losing their skills and knowledge and then having to start the cycle again and recruit to replace them is completely illogical.’

     A Home Office has said that ‘there are exemptions to this threshold of occupations where the UK has a shortage, but the independent Migration Advisory Committee recommended against adding nurses to the Shortage Occupation List.’

     Well, now well-trained nurses will be going back to Africa, right? … That’s how this works, right?

     Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth’s Bethel Street Baptist Church Bombed

     Early in the morning of Sunday, June 29, 1958, a bomb exploded outside Bethel Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, located on the north side of town in one of the segregated city’s African American neighborhoods. The church’s pastor, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, was a civil rights activist working to eliminate segregation in Birmingham.

     The church had been bombed before, on December 25, 1956, and since that date several volunteers had kept watch over the neighborhood every night. Around 1:30 a.m., Will Hall, who was on watch that night, was alerted to smoke coming from the church. He discovered a paint can containing dynamite near the church wall and carried it into the street before taking cover as it exploded.

     The can contained between fifteen and twenty sticks of dynamite. The blast blew a two-foot hole in the street and broke the windows of houses in the vicinity as well as the stained glass windows of the church, which were still being repaired from the previous bombing. Police said there were few clues as to the culprit’s identity, but a passerby reported seeing a car full of white men pass by shortly before the bomb was discovered. Rev. Shuttlesworth praised Mr. Hall for his brave actions, saying that if he had not moved the dynamite, it probably would have destroyed the entire church. “This shows that America has a long way to go before it can try be called democratic,” he said.

     A long way to go, back in 1958. Still a long way to go.

     July. August. @ophelporhush x @freedomsummer15! Community. Culture. Celebration. #FreedomSummer15

     The True History of the Confederate Flag, cartoon.

     Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH the true history of the Confederate flag is revealed. And it’s all about Culture and Heritage!

313. rq says

     30 June 2015 at 1:36 am

     Yesterday, Myra Thompson’s funeral: Large gathering waiting to say goodbye to Myra Thompson, while strangers show support #Emanuel9 @ABCNews4 #chsnews

     #McKinney police arrests unarmed black man at gunpoint in his front yard https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=asu8z-s0gLs …

     That’s McKinney, always proportionate in their response!

314. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     30 June 2015 at 1:38 am

     The Mission is a regular column at Comic Book Resources. It is written by Joseph Illidge (who is black) and focuses on diversity in comic books and pop culture. I’ve come to really enjoy reading Illidge’s perspective on matters of racial diversity, and I look forward to his column each week. Here is Illidge’s short bio that follows his column:

     Joseph Phillip Illidge is a public speaker on the subjects of race, comics, and the corporate politics of diversity. In addition to his coverage by the BBC and Publishers Weekly, Joseph has been a speaker at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Digital Book World’s forum, Digitize Your Career: Marketing and Editing 2.0, Skidmore College, Purdue University, on the panel “Diversity in Comics: Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Sexual Orientation in American Comic Books” and at the Soho Gallery for Digital Art in New York City.

     Joseph is the Head Writer for Verge Entertainment, a production company co-founded with Shawn Martinbrough, artist for the graphic novel series “Thief of Thieves” by “The Walking Dead” creator Robert Kirkman, and video game developer Milo Stone. Verge has developed an extensive library of intellectual properties for live-action and animated television and film, video games, graphic novels, and web-based entertainment.

     His graphic novel project, “The Ren,” about the romance between a young musician from the South and a Harlem-born dancer in 1925, set against the backdrop of a crime war, will be published by First Second Books, a division of Macmillan.

     This weeks column is Rise of the black woman, revisiting DC’s ‘Grayson’ revelations:

     (excerpt)

     On Friday, June 24, I visited Midtown Comics in New York City and picked up the batch of seven comic books I reserved two days earlier.

     One of them was Dark Horse’s “Grindhouse: Drive In, Bleed Out” #6, featuring Lady Danger: Agent of B.O.O.T.I., written by Alex de Campi, illustrated by Mulele Jarvis and colored by Marissa Louise. The second part of the introduction of the Black female superhero secret agent Lady Danger, the tongue-in-cheek story used various references from Black culture to help inform and support the lead character’s ethnicity.

     Another book was Valiant Entertainment’s “Imperium” #5, the science fiction series written by Joshua Dysart. Illustrated by Scot Eaton and colored by Brian Reber, one of the more mysterious and dangerous characters in the story is Angela Peace Baingana, the Chief Science Officer for a government organization called Project Rising Spirit. Angela is seemingly killed and invaded by an alien intelligence, and reborn/repurposed as a superbeing devoted to scientific exploration without waste or morality.

     Angela is Black, quite possibly Ugandan, as her last name may be a nod to Doreen Baingana, the author and editor. Doreen is Ugandan, and the writer of “Imperium,” Joshua Dysart, lived in Uganda for some time.

     A third book was DC Comics’ “Grayson” #9… but I’ll get back to that later.

     On Saturday, June 25, when my friend, DJ Ben Hameen from The Fan Bros Show podcast suggested I pick up Marvel Comics’ “The Infinity Gauntlet” starring a Black family armed with the technology of the Nova Corps, I decided to do it.

     Within two hours, I visited my neighborhood store Bulletproof Comics, and picked up the first issue. The store had already sold out of the second issue, which was released only three days before.

     The store’s owner, whom I blame for getting me hooked on Image Comics’ “Southern Bastards” by creators Jason Aaron and Jason Latour, convinced me to buy the second volume of the Image Comics series.

     He didn’t have to try hard, because I love the series.

     Spoiler alert ahead, because it’s the right thing to do.

     After sweeping through “Southern Bastards” in record time, I was thrilled to see that Roberta Tubb, the Black daughter of the main and slain character of volume 1, Earl Tubb, was prepping to head home to see her father.

     Roberta’s parentage was slickly revealed in one panel of the first volume of “Southern Bastards,” in a way that catches your eye, speaks to the real point of view of memory, and enhances the cliffhanger shocks of Roberta’s presence in the storyline populated almost exclusively by White characters.

     But the real event of that day, Saturday, June 25, 2015, happened in the morning, before I had the time to acquire and read all of the aforementioned comic books.

     Writer, musician, and activist Bree Newsome climbed up the flagpole in front of the South Carolina statehouse in Columbia, SC, and pulled down the Confederate flag. In response to the mass murder in Charleston, SC on June 17 of Black churchgoers, on the part of a man with admitted racist ideologies, and the aftermath of that murder, a Black woman who believed in the power of action took action, and became a hero to many and a symbol.

     This confluence of events, in the real world and the fictional world, the repeated exposure to Black woman in comic books produced by the three top American comic book publishers, resonated with me…

     …and took me back to DC Comics’ “Grayson” series co-starring Helena Bertinelli, the Afro-Italian assassin.

     In the ninth issue of the series, Helena reveals herself to the secret powers running the world as the head of Spyral, the secret organization for which she works. She killed the former Spyral leader in a previous issue.

     A few weeks ago, I wrote a column in which I expressed doubt about Helena Bertinelli’s ethnic background as an Afro-Italian woman.

     I read every issue of the series and saw no mention of anything telling me that was so, or anything in her life helping to support that.

     I expressed my belief that the publisher of “Grayson” was taking advantage of the character aesthetic as a way to be both non-committal and exploitative of the growing marketability of interracial couples.

     The day my column hit the net, “Grayson” co-writer Tim Seeley reached out publicly on Twitter, where we had a debate that moved off Twitter to e-mail, in an attempt to lead to a phone conversation.

     Tim and I never had that conversation, but our correspondence revealed two men who were respectful and casual with each other, but with lives too packed to easily connect.

     During this time, I thought about the need for exposition on character and ethnicity.

     Yes, that’s the same Southern Bastards comic book referred to upthread @301. Incidentally, SB writer Jason Aaron is also the guy who came up with the idea of passing the mantle of Thor to a woman (and he still writes the series).

315. Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- says

     30 June 2015 at 3:42 am

     Artists reimagine Bree Newsome as superhero

316. rq says

     30 June 2015 at 5:58 am

     Black Lives Matter Protesters Took Over The Ritzy 21 Club, Served Justice

     On Friday, Black Lives Matter activists with the Never 21 collective infiltrated the ritzy 21 Club in Midtown Manhattan. Two members of the group posed as waiters and distributed “menus” to all of the patrons. The menus opened not to food and drink selections, but to lists of black children killed by police before the age of 21:

     Simultaneously, another member distracted the host while others climbed to the balcony of the Club and hung signs from the arms of the iconic lawn jockeys on the facade, spelling out “Black Lives Matter.”

     The action took less than 20 minutes, but left the entirely white, wealthy patronage of the 21 Club digesting their message much longer. “I’ll take the VonDerrit Meyers Jr.” said one patron in response, visibly uncomfortable and trying to make a joke.

     “I’m not racist. I don’t need this,” said another, throwing his menu onto the table.

     The signs remained up after the action inside the club was over and tourists could be seen snapping photos of the iconic club. The Never 21 collective also created a website that mirrors that of the 21 Club, where they have posted a statement, including:

     The recent McKinney, Texas pool party incident serves as a prime example of what Never 21 has been and will continue fighting again. This was not intended to be an attack on the 21 Club itself. In contrary, it was an opportunity for the iconic cuisine to support a movement that needs all of the allies it can get.

     Within the diverse landscape of the Black Lives Matter movement in NYC, Never 21 is focusing specifically on black children who have been killed by police, using creative direct action to keep their memories alive. This is the group’s second action. For their first, they took over the Forever 21 in Union Square, putting Black Lives Matter t-shirts on the mannequins in the store windows and hanging a banner from the second floor.

     I love it.

     On Friday, #BlackLivesMatter activists took over the ritzy “21 Club” in NYC, served justice: that links to the same article, but I love the photo attached.

     The Atlanta Cyclorama & Civil War Museum will close permanently Tuesday. The famous oil painting will be relocated.

     Homicide detectives investigating fatal shooting by Portland police in NE Portland

     Homicide detectives are investigating a Portland police officer-involved fatal shooting in the parking lot outside the WinCo Foods off Northeast 122nd Avenue, just south of San Rafael Street.

     One man is dead at the scene. No officers were injured, police said. It marks the second Portland police officer-involved fatal shooting this year.

     About 11:30 p.m. Sunday, two East Precinct night shift officers, riding together in one patrol car, contacted a man at or near a car parked in the lot of the WinCo Foods, by the west wall of the store.

     Portland police Sgt. Pete Simpson said he did not know whether the man was in the vehicle or outside of it, or why the officers approached him.

     “During that contact, shots were fired,” Simpson said.

     Simpson said police fired shots, and called for immediate cover from both North and East Precincts, and for an emergency medical response.

     The call for emergency medical came in at 11:58 p.m., according to dispatch records. Police officers tried to provide emergency aid to the man shot before medical arrived. Emergency medics took over but the man was pronounced dead in the lot, Simpson said.

     Police recovered a gun at the scene. Witnesses said it was found on the ground near the parked car.

     Simpson said he did not know if both officers fired shots, or what prompted them to fire their weapons.

     “What exactly led up to that is still an open question for the investigators,” Simpson said.

     And for all that they found a gun presumably near the person who was killed, I can’t bring myself to trust that story outright and directly.

     Live: We’re asking every member of the SC legislature about the Confederate flag, update: they now seem to have a 2/3 majority.

     Update 5:45pm Monday: We had been using 83 as the threshold for achieving a two-thirds majority in the House, but we are revising that to 82 due to a vacancy in the house. Meanwhile, one more representative has spoken with us, indicating that they will vote to remove the flag. As of Monday afternoon, there were two-thirds majorities in both chambers of the legislature in favor of removing the flag, according to our poll. A two-thirds majority in both chambers is required by state law in order to take the flag down.

     Evidence in Freddie Gray case is vast and varied, and once again, the article is headed with a composite of the six officers charged, and not Freddie Gray himself.

     Prosecutors have turned over a vast trove of evidence to lawyers representing six police officers accused in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, including about 8,000 pages of the officers’ emails, 44 surveillance videos and more than a dozen statements by civilians.

     The officers’ attorneys now have the job of wading through the evidence, which prosecutors estimated amounts to 52 gigabytes of digital files. An itemized evidence list was included in documents prosecutors filed Friday.

     […]

     The evidence list includes:

     •Statements made by 15 civilian witnesses.

     •44 closed-circuit television videos and four cellphone videos.

     •Photographs of a knife.

     •Images of suspected blood found in the back of a police van.

     •More than 8,000 pages of the accused officers’ emails.

     •Two binders detailing the Baltimore Police Department’s investigation.

     •Gray’s autopsy report and photographs.

     •Cellphone data connected to four of the officers.

     The defense also received a list of 32 state’s witnesses, including detectives, doctors and civilians. Among them is Kevin Moore, a West Baltimore resident who filmed part of Gray’s arrest, helping to draw national media attention to the case.

     The evidence itself is not included in public court files, and prosecutors have asked Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry Williams, who is presiding over the case, to impose a protective order that would prevent defense lawyers from sharing the evidence publicly. Williams has yet to rule.

     Attorneys for the six officers either could not be immediately reached or declined to comment.

317. rq says

     30 June 2015 at 6:11 am

     Something we all can do: Family and friends of Bree request words of encouragement to be sent to her as she is now receiving death threats. Freebree2015[at]gmail[dot]com

     Ida B Wells may have coined the phrase “white supremacy” in her 1893 speech Lynch Law in All its Phases as seen here. With text excerpt.

     Sanctuary of Elyria church destroyed in fire, though that one is currently not classified as arson.

     EXCLUSIVE: Bree Newsome Speaks For The First Time After Courageous Act of Civil Disobedience

     EDITOR’S NOTE: Over the weekend, a young freedom fighter and community organizer mounted an awe-inspiring campaign to bring down the Confederate battle flag. Brittany “Bree” Newsome, in a courageous act of civil disobedience, scaled a metal pole using a climbing harness, to remove the flag from the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol. Her long dread locks danced in the wind as she descended to the ground while quoting scripture. She refused law enforcement commands to end her mission and was immediately arrested along with ally James Ian Tyson, who is also from Charlotte, North Carolina.

     Earlier this week, social justice activist and progressive blogger Shaun King offered a “bounty” on the flag and offered to pay any necessary bail bond fees. Newsome declined the cash reward, asking that all proceeds go to funds supporting victims of the Charleston church massacre. Social media users raised more than $75,000 to fund legal expenses. South Carolina House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford, a renowned defense attorney, has agreed to represent Newsome and Tyson as they face criminal charges.

     Newsome released the following statement exclusively to Blue Nation Review:

     Now is the time for true courage.

     I realized that now is the time for true courage the morning after the Charleston Massacre shook me to the core of my being. I couldn’t sleep. I sat awake in the dead of night. All the ghosts of the past seemed to be rising.

     Not long ago, I had watched the beginning of Selma, the reenactment of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and had shuddered at the horrors of history.

     But this was neither a scene from a movie nor was it the past. A white man had just entered a black church and massacred people as they prayed. He had assassinated a civil rights leader. This was not a page in a textbook I was reading nor an inscription on a monument I was visiting.

     This was now.

     This was real.

     This was—this is—still happening.

     I began my activism by participating in the Moral Monday movement, fighting to restore voting rights in North Carolina after the Supreme Court struck down key protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

     I traveled down to Florida where the Dream Defenders were demanding justice for Trayvon Martin, who reminded me of a modern-day Emmett Till.

     I marched with the Ohio Students Association as they demanded justice for victims of police brutality.

     I watched in horror as black Americans were tear-gassed in their own neighborhoods in Ferguson, MO. “Reminds me of the Klan,” my grandmother said as we watched the news together. As a young black girl in South Carolina, she had witnessed the Klan drag her neighbor from his house and brutally beat him because he was a black physician who had treated a white woman.

     I visited with black residents of West Baltimore, MD who, under curfew, had to present work papers to police to enter and exit their own neighborhood. “These are my freedom papers to show the slave catchers,” my friend said with a wry smile.

     And now, in the past 6 days, I’ve seen arson attacks against 5 black churches in the South, including in Charlotte, NC where I organize alongside other community members striving to create greater self-sufficiency and political empowerment in low-income neighborhoods.

     For far too long, white supremacy has dominated the politics of America resulting in the creation of racist laws and cultural practices designed to subjugate non-whites. And the emblem of the confederacy, the stars and bars, in all its manifestations, has long been the most recognizable banner of this political ideology. It’s the banner of racial intimidation and fear whose popularity experiences an uptick whenever black Americans appear to be making gains economically and politically in this country.

     It’s a reminder how, for centuries, the oppressive status quo has been undergirded by white supremacist violence with the tacit approval of too many political leaders.

     The night of the Charleston Massacre, I had a crisis of faith. The people who gathered for Bible study in Emmanuel AME Church that night—Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson and Rev. Clementa Pinckney (rest in peace)—were only doing what Christians are called to do when anyone knocks on the door of the church: invite them into fellowship and worship.

     The day after the massacre I was asked what the next step was and I said I didn’t know. We’ve been here before and here we are again: black people slain simply for being black; an attack on the black church as a place of spiritual refuge and community organization.

     I refuse to be ruled by fear. How can America be free and be ruled by fear? How can anyone be?

     So, earlier this week I gathered with a small group of concerned citizens, both black and white, who represented various walks of life, spiritual beliefs, gender identities and sexual orientations. Like millions of others in America and around the world, including South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and President Barack Obama, we felt (and still feel) that the confederate battle flag in South Carolina, hung in 1962 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, must come down. (Of course, we are not the first to demand the flag’s removal. Civil rights groups in South Carolina and nationwide have been calling for the flag’s removal since the moment it was raised, and I acknowledge their efforts in working to remove the flag over the years via the legislative process.)

     We discussed it and decided to remove the flag immediately, both as an act of civil disobedience and as a demonstration of the power people have when we work together. Achieving this would require many roles, including someone who must volunteer to scale the pole and remove the flag. It was decided that this role should go to a black woman and that a white man should be the one to help her over the fence as a sign that our alliance transcended both racial and gender divides. We made this decision because for us, this is not simply about a flag, but rather it is about abolishing the spirit of hatred and oppression in all its forms.

     I removed the flag not only in defiance of those who enslaved my ancestors in the southern United States, but also in defiance of the oppression that continues against black people globally in 2015, including the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the Dominican Republic. I did it in solidarity with the South African students who toppled a statue of the white supremacist, colonialist Cecil Rhodes. I did it for all the fierce black women on the front lines of the movement and for all the little black girls who are watching us. I did it because I am free.

     To all those who might label me an “outside agitator,” I say to you that humanitarianism has no borders. I am a global citizen. My prayers are with the poor, the afflicted and the oppressed everywhere in the world, as Christ instructs. If this act of disobedience can also serve as a symbol to other peoples’ struggles against oppression or as a symbol of victory over fear and hate, then I know all the more that I did the right thing.

     Even if there were borders to my empathy, those borders would most certainly extend into South Carolina. Several of my African ancestors entered this continent through the slave market in Charleston. Their unpaid toil brought wealth to America via Carolina plantations. I am descended from those who survived racial oppression as they built this nation: My 4th great grandfather, who stood on an auction block in South Carolina refusing to be sold without his wife and newborn baby; that newborn baby, my 3rd great grandmother, enslaved for 27 years on a plantation in Rembert, SC where she prayed daily for her children to see freedom; her husband, my 3rd great grandfather, an enslaved plowboy on the same plantation who founded a church on the eve of the Civil War that stands to this day; their son, my great-great grandfather, the one they called “Free Baby” because he was their first child born free, all in South Carolina.

     You see, I know my history and my heritage. The Confederacy is neither the only legacy of the south nor an admirable one. The southern heritage I embrace is the legacy of a people unbowed by racial oppression. It includes towering figures of the Civil Rights Movement like Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers and Ella Baker. It includes the many people who rarely make the history books but without whom there is no movement. It includes pillars of the community like Rev. Clementa Pinckney and Emmanuel AME Church.

     The history of the South is also in many ways complex and full of inconvenient truths. But in order to move into the future we must reckon with the past. That’s why I commend people like Sen. Paul Thurmond for having the courage to speak truth in this moment.

     Words cannot express how deeply touched I am to see how yesterday’s action inspired so many. The artwork, poems, music and memes are simply beautiful! I am also deeply grateful to those who have generously donated to the defense fund established in my name and to those who have offered to cover my legal expenses.

     As you are admiring my courage in that moment, please remember that this is not, never has been and never should be just about one woman. This action required collective courage just as this movement requires collective courage. Not everyone who participated in the strategizing for this non-violent direct action volunteered to have their names in the news so I will respect their privacy. Nonetheless, I’m honored to be counted among the many freedom fighters, both living and dead.

     I see no greater moral cause than liberation, equality and justice f­­or all God’s people. What better reason to risk your own freedom than to fight for the freedom of others? That’s the moral courage demonstrated yesterday by James Ian Tyson who helped me across the fence and stood guard as I climbed. History will rightly remember him alongside the many white allies who, over the centuries, have risked their own safety in defense of black life and in the name of racial equality.

     While I remain highly critical of the nature of policing itself in the United States, both the police and the jailhouse personnel I encountered on Saturday were nothing short of professional in their interactions with me. I know there was some concern from supporters on the outside that I might be harmed while in police custody, but that was not the case.

     It is important to remember that our struggle doesn’t end when the flag comes down. The Confederacy is a southern thing, but white supremacy is not. Our generation has taken up the banner to fight battles many thought were won long ago. We must fight with all vigor now so that our grandchildren aren’t still fighting these battles in another 50 years. Black Lives Matter. This is non-negotiable.

     I encourage everyone to understand the history, recognize the problems of the present and take action to show the world that the status quo is not acceptable. The last few days have confirmed to me that people understand the importance of action and are ready to take such action. Whether the topic is trending nationally or it’s an issue affecting our local communities, those of us who are conscious must do what is right in this moment. And we must do it without fear. New eras require new models of leadership. This is a multi-leader movement. I believe that. I stand by that. I am because we are. I am one of many.

     This moment is a call to action for us all. All honor and praise to God.

     #TakeItDown #BlackLivesMatter #FreeBree

     Following that with this: KKK chapter to hold rally on South Carolina Statehouse grounds

     The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’s Pelham, North Carolina, chapter have reserved the Statehouse Grounds in South Carolina for a rally next month.

     James Spears, the Great Titan of the chapter, said the group would be rallying to protest “the Confederate flag being took down for all the wrong reasons.”

     “It’s part of white people’s culture,” he added.

     Brian Gaines, who runs the South Carolina Budget and Control Board, which oversees reservations, confirmed the scheduling in an email to POLITICO Monday. He added that the group submitted the request on June 23 and, because his office allows any group, regardless of ideology, to reserve the grounds on a first-come, first-serve basis, the KKK will be able to hold its rally.

     The event is planned for July 18 from 3-5 p.m.

     Diversity in books: Daniel José Older creates female black heroes to make fantasy more real

     Until 2014, Older worked by day as an emergency medical technician in Manhattan. He wrote mostly at night. And he sees himself, explicitly, as an outsider to the literary and publishing scene: “I entered the writing work clearly and strategically to do this thing, to write these books, to get them into the world and fuck with people, and to generally fuck shit up,” he says at a restaurant in Brooklyn.

     Shadowshaper is set in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn, where Older lives. The protagonist, a young Afro-Latina named Sierra, learns about her family’s history of supernatural powers. She can, as it turns out, interact with the spirit world. Her family has gone to great lengths to conceal that fact from her, but now it’s Sierra’s responsibility to protect them from what’s coming.

     Older’s imagined Brooklyn is full of danger, less gentrified than the real-life version, and decidedly diverse. “We’re doing something very political by deciding whose life matters, where we’re going to focus things, and who we erase from the picture,” he says. This kind of diversity, he feels, is lacking in most other fantasy YA novels. “When we create worlds based on this world that don’t include diversity, we’re lying,” he says. “We’re not being honest as authors. Even if it’s infused with magical powers, or zombies, or whatever you’ll have, we should still be trying to tell the truth. Then, it becomes a question of what truth, how are we telling it, and whose truth do we take the time to repeat?”

     Older is critical of books that he says fail to include racial diversity – such as, he says, The Hunger Games. He chalks it up to a “phenomenal lack of imagination” on the part of the author, and a laziness, he feels, that is designed to keep some people out of the picture. “To be able to figure out all these quirky things about what you imagine the future will be like, and not somehow have any folks of colour doing anything heroic or worthwhile in it, what happened?” he asked. “Where did we go?”
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     This disappointment, he says, made him more engaged as an author. He teaches writing to children and speaks on multiple panels for book conferences and writers’ conventions. Last year, he wrote for the Guardian about his attempt to get the World Fantasy Award to replace the bust of HP Lovecraft as its statuette with one of the black science fiction writer Octavia Butler.

     Older also values the supportive community of fellow writers of colour. His mentors have been black female fantasy and science fiction writers like Sheree Renée Thomas and Tananarive Due, who pointed out to him that black women are rarely positioned as protagonists. With Sierra, Older is trying to live up to what he feels is his responsibility to change that.

     An author to look into.

318. rq says

     30 June 2015 at 7:02 am

     Entire documentary: The Injustice System, via KMOV in St Louis. It’s not really working for me, but might for someone else!

     Susie Jackson remembered as family and church matriarch

     The silver casket, with its enormous bouquet of pink and lavender flowers, rolled into place first. Pallbearers opened the top section and arranged the linens inside to permit family members to view Susie Jackson one last time before she was laid to rest forever.

     The dark brown casket of Tywanza Sanders was positioned next to that of his beloved aunt.

     Through the warm, humid sanctuary of Emanuel AME Church family members processed, pausing at the foot of the altar to bid farewell then take their seats. The Rev. Norvel Goff, interim pastor of Mother Emanuel and presiding elder of the AME Church’s Edisto District, read from the Psalms.

     “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

     […]

     Jackson was remembered as a gentle, loving figurehead.

     “She was a mother to so, so many, this matriarch of the Jackson family,” church member Carlotta Dennis remarked.

     Jackson, who was 87 when she died, sang in the choir, was a member of the Woman’s Missionary Society, attended Bible study regularly, was a trustee of the church and volunteered in myriad ways over her many years of constant faith and fidelity, Dennis said. She gave generously, to her church, to her family, even to strangers.

     Jackson was deeply rooted in Charleston. She lived in an old single house within walking distance of her church. She attended Buist Elementary School and Burke High School and worked as a beautician and home health care provider. She was always thinking of others, her family said.

     Her grandson Walter Jackson Jr. spoke of God’s call and his grandmother’s readiness to heed it.

     “For all those who knew Susie Jackson, ‘no’ wasn’t really in her vocabulary,” he said. “I have a feeling God called on her: ‘I’ve got a mission for you Susie Jackson!” That mission surely left behind mourning friends and family, including eight grandchildren, but it was for a purpose “bigger than life,” Walter Jackson said. It was to call her higher and to inspire a nation.

     Mourners, dampened by a burst of heavy rain, entered the church and waited nearly an hour for the service to begin. Many who could not secure a seat in the pews of Mother Emanuel were directed to Second Presbyterian Church, which was equipped for an overflow crowd.

     The service included unprogrammed remarks by Mayor Joe Riley and Gov. Nikki Haley, as well as a prayer by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. It drew to a close with the climactic singing of a gospel song, “I Can’t Give Up Now,” by Minister Jarell Smalls, who brought the church to its feet.

     @aclu_mo is hosting LEGAL OBSERVER Training TOMORROW in #STL from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at the ACLU of Missouri Office (454 Whittier St., 63108).

     NYPD Cops Terrified of New Bills that Will Stop them from Choking and Illegally Searching People

     People who attempt to assert their rights in police encounters many times learn that officers will rarely actually respect the rights of others. More often than not, they will do whatever they want to people regardless of how much someone expresses their natural born rights.

     The most common examples are police searches, which are a clear violation of an individual’s right to protection from unjustified searches and seizures. Officers will notoriously search a person’s belongings with absolutely no probable cause, even if the person is clear that they do not consent to any searches.

     Police all over the country have become comfortable with this situation and have a total disregard for the rights of the people who they encounter on a day to day basis. In the wake of growing police accountability activism, many suggested reforms are targetting unwarranted searches, in an attempt to prevent cops from conducting illegal searches.

     The city council is also proposing bills that would imprison police for using chokeholds, and require cops to give out the Civilian Complaint Review Board’s phone number.

     Similar reforms were recently suggested in New York, which would force police to actually get consent from a suspect before a search. However, NYPD officers and union representatives are already attacking the proposed measures.

     Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch was furious that someone outside the police force could decide how police should be allowed to behave.

     ““These proposed laws — which cover everything from officer’s identification, rules for searches and the use of physical force — are unnecessary and redundant and could have a further chilling impact on law enforcement that will make our streets more dangerous. While they may be well-intentioned, these pieces of legislation have been proposed by individuals who have neither the expertise nor the experience to establish policy in the dangerous business of fighting crime and maintaining public safety. Policing policies must be left to the police management who understand the intricacies and difficulties of complex legal issues and the appropriate use of crime fighting tactics,” Lynch said in a statement this week.

     Lynch went on to praise the failed practice of “broken window policing” in which officers seek people out for nonviolent infractions in an attempt to get them wrapped up in larger and more serious cases.

     “These proposals are neither practical nor workable and simply do not recognize the inherent dangers police officers face as we try to get illegal guns off the streets and fight crime. Our main concern is that proactive law enforcement, the type of policing that has made this city safe, will cease and will not return until the over regulation and onerous burdens already placed on police officers are rolled back. The City Council’s consideration of further misguided laws and regulations in the face of clear damage already inflicted on public safety is sheer recklessness. Instead of placing additional restraints on police officers, the City Council should be working to protect our police officers so that they can proactively fight crime without fear of persecution and prosecution,” he added.

     According to the New York Post, the bills up for vote this week include the following controversial measures:

     – Requiring that uniformed cops provide their full name, rank and precinct, as well as the CCRB number, during any traffic stop or property search

     – A measure that would allow police to use “injurious physical force” only “as is proportionally necessary,” but that does not define how proportionality will be determined

     – Making the NYPD report the precincts of the 200 cops with the most CCRB complaints filed against them

     The new measures do not seem very extreme at all, and they are policies that many people would assume are already in place, however, the cops are not ready to give up their licence to search and attack with impunity.

     Detroit Police Hit Five Children During Car Chase, Leaving Two Dead –

     Detroit police continued a high speed chase even after two children were struck and killed. As they continued the chase, three more children were struck because of the officers’ reckless actions. These three were seriously injured as well.

     A witness reports that the police “there was no need for the police to be that close. I yelled ‘WATCH OUT’ but it was too late. When the car hit them, both of them just looked at me. They screamed. It just keeps re-playing in my head.”

     The police are blaming the driver who was fleeing, but the eye-witnesses say that the police rammed the driver into the kids.

     She said she heard tires squeal. That would indicate that the car hit their breaks. But the chase was at too high of a speed for the driver to control the vehicle once hit. The police never bothered to stop to help any of the children hit.

     The police say they only “tapped” the bumper, but all eyewitnesses make it clear that this caused the vehicle to go further out of control. All eyewitnesses agree that it was the police who caused these children to be hit, ramming into the vehicle and running over the children in the process.

     A candlelight vigil was held for the children on June 25th, but the mainstream media has not seen it fit to cover this case of blatant police abuse.

     Detroit Police Chief Craig, for his part, has changed the “official” police narrative of these events no less than three times! The local news is going with whatever he says, even when it contradicts both eye-witness accounts, and the earlier versions of the police narrative.

     A History Of Racism At Sigma Alpha Epsilon, a fraternity 159 years old. Say…

     Sigma Alpha Epsilon was born, in secret, on March 9, 1856, “in the late hours of a stormy night” by the “flicker of dripping candles” in a mansion in Tuscaloosa, home to the University of Alabama. The original intent of the eight founding members, an SAE brother wrote decades later, was “to confine the fraternity to the southern states.”

     Instead, SAE grew far beyond its Southern redoubt. It took 27 years to open the first Northern chapter, because “to go to a northern college would mean to lower the standard of the fraternity by taking unworthy men,” William C. Levere, a devoted SAE member, wrote in his 1916 book A Paragraph History of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. Its notable alumni list grew to include author William Faulkner, U.S. President William McKinley, and scores of professional athletes. Today, the fraternity boasts 15,000 members at 219 chapters and 20 colonies around the nation. Upon induction, pledges have to memorize the creed, called “The True Gentlemen,” part of which reads, “A true gentleman is a man … who thinks of the rights and feelings of others.”

     […]

     To partly understand that chant’s place in history, look back to the University of Georgia 54 years ago. A version of the chant was sung on January 9, 1961 – the day Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter became the first black students to step onto the campus after a judge’s ruling.

     That evening, hundreds of well-dressed and white students — including fraternity brothers — watched a smiling student carry a black-faced effigy across campus. It was then hung from a noose slung over the the school’s historic black iron archway.

     The students chanted, “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate…eight, six, four, two, we don’t want no jigaboo” — a popular rallying cry for whites protesting desegregation in schools around the nation. They also yelled, “There’ll never be a n****r in the [fraternity] house,” inserting various fraternities’ names, according to Robert Cohen, a professor of history and social studies at New York University who wrote a paper on the chant. (While many fraternities attended, it’s unclear if SAE was there.)

     After the cell phone video depicting the University of Oklahoma students was discovered earlier this year, outrage spread fast and discipline was swift. Administrators shut the fraternity down. Two students were expelled and later publicly apologized. The fraternity’s headquarters announced investigations into all reported racist acts, started a hotline, and appointed a director of diversity. “The song is horrific and does not at all reflect our values as an organization,” Executive Director Blaine Ayers said in a March statement.

     But as more stories of alleged racism in different SAE chapters nationwide subsequently came to light, SAE was forced to publicly confront the idea that the incident at the University of Oklahoma was not isolated and that the quick action taken was a rarity.

     The incidents stretch back to more than 150 years ago — when one of SAE’s earliest members argued in Congress in support of slavery — and continue up to March 2015.

     The fraternity hosted minstrel shows in the 1900s, “Martin Luther King Jr. trash” parties in the 1980s, and “n*****s and hoes” parties in 2010. Blackface was used in the 1930s, and a white brother impersonated Tiger Woods in the 2000s. Confederate flags were draped proudly in some SAE houses from at least 1950 to 2015. The institution of slavery, supported by an SAE member in the 1860s, was celebrated as part of a chapter’s party in 1987.

     And the segregationist chant sung at the University of Oklahoma was apparently longstanding tradition. The university’s investigation of the incident found that older brothers taught the chant to the younger ones during a “leadership cruise.”

     “While there is no indication that the chant was part of the formal teaching of the national organization,” OU President David Boren said in March, “it does appear that the chant was widely known and informally shared amongst members.”

     “This is not an accident,” Cohen, the NYU professor, told BuzzFeed News. “It shows that a larger fraternity milieu that existed during the desegregation era has been preserved. You put in a time capsule and half a century later it exists in its pristine form.”

     Cohen said that such racist chants must have been preserved by the fraternity’s alumni who “were never really happy about desegregation and resisted it.”

     There’s a whole section on segregation and confederate nostalgia. A lot of overlap between the KKK and the SAE. Is anyone surprised?

319. rq says

     30 June 2015 at 8:15 am

     And then there’s the Netherlands: Arubian man beaten to death by Hague police

     Witnesses said that Henriquez was making jokes with friends after the festival, when a group of officers tackled him. Henriquez fell into a coma, and died today at the hospital. According to bystanders and his family, police officers used a lot of force to arrest him. According to the “official” statement from the OM, Henriquez supposedly yelled that he had a weapon and then resisted arrest, leading to the use of force. Henriquez only began to feel unwell on the way to the police station. Eyewitnesses and a newly released video tell a completely different story. Henriquez was joking around with his friends, and was warned by the police and walked further. Lila also says that he was possibly being a bit loud and boisterous, but not toward the police. […]

     A short time later, he and his friends are attacked by the police, and 4 officers jumped on his neck. It is clear from the videos that Mitch Henriquez was laying lifeless and handcuffed in the grass while agents were sitting on him. This does not fit with the story from the OM, which claims that Henriquez only began to feel unwell in the police van. […]

     The Hague police department has for years been at the center of many scandals because of (racist) police brutality. On November 24, 2012, 17 year old Rishi Chandrikasing was shot dead at Holland Spoor station as he ran away from the police. Racist police brutality is also a daily reality in the Schilderswijk and Transvaal neighborhoods in The Hague. In these neighborhoods, seemingly everybody knows somebody who has been a victim of police brutality, or even have even been victims themselves. Victims stated earlier to the local media: “I am often asked to show ID, for no reason. If I ask why, I get taken away and getting beaten up and abused in the police car. It continues at the station. They threw me into the cell and beat me while I was still handcuffed. Afterwards, they sprayed me with the fire hose and left me for the whole night soaking wet in the cell.” Even ex-officers speak of a culture of violence and racism in the police unit. These are only a few examples of the racist and violent culture of the police in The Hague, which has always been denied and covered up by police top brass and Hague mayor Jozias van Aartsen.

     Protesters demand police to come out of station to address demands in Justice for #MitchHenriquez #Holland #TheHague

     Back in New York, #PeoplesMonday has taken over Bryant Park screening of “The Killers” to inform NYers of NYPD Killers still on-duty.

     #PeoplesMonday has begun, reading the facts of black LGBTQ survivors of State violence. #GrandCentral, NYC.

     At least two black churches in South damaged in arson fires, investigators say. I think last count arson was confirmed in three, the list within includes all 6 churches that have burned, including those deemed accidents.

     After Freddie Gray death, cop-watchers film police to prevent misconduct

     The scene illustrates the tension-filled encounters playing out in Baltimore and across the nation, as camera-toting residents seek to document examples of police brutality or other misconduct. Activists like Whitt, who is from Ferguson, Mo., the scene of unrest last year, are linking with residents in Baltimore, Charleston, S.C., and other cities to create a network that can expose problems with lightning speed through social media.

     Among those who have signed on is Kevin Moore, who gained nationwide attention in April for capturing the arrest of Freddie Gray on a cellphone video. In the aftermath of Gray’s death, Moore created WeCopwatch Baltimore and has accumulated dozens of hours of police footage and begun “Know your Rights” discussions with fellow residents of West Baltimore.

     Similar groups around the nation go by various names, including Cop Block, Peaceful Streets Project and Communities United Against Police Brutality. But they have a common weapon: candid video that can capture police violating regulations.

     The power of such video clips is clear, even when they do not originate from cop-watching groups. In North Charleston, S.C., an officer was charged with murder after he was filmed shooting a fleeing suspect in the back. In McKinney, Texas, an officer resigned after he was filmed slamming a bikini-wearing teenager to the ground. In Baltimore, at least two officers have been suspended in the past year after surveillance video raised questions about brutality.

     Rachel Lederman, a California lawyer who has worked with cop-watchers through the National Lawyers Guild, said, “Filming the police is one of the most crucial ways to stem racist police and misconduct.”

     But policing experts say such cop-watchers sometimes go too far. “I think law enforcement by and large understands and respects the bounds of the First Amendment,” said Ron Hosko, a former assistant FBI director and president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. “The friction develops when those folks step beyond simply being passive observers to encouraging action criticizing police. To me, that is where the line is between observing and interference.”

     The movement, which dates as far back as the 1991 police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, has accelerated in recent years thanks to social media tools such as Facebook and cheap, unobtrusive video recording devices. Even Anonymous, an informal association of activists and hackers, has posted an “Operation Copwatch” video on YouTube that asks its more than 4.5 million online followers to record police interactions.

     And now groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union are promoting technologies that will allow video to be posted online instantly — innovations that could further intensify the tug of war between police and residents, and the legal battles that follow.

     Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts has criticized local cop-watchers for mobbing officers and sticking cameras “inches” from their faces. “When you have 50-60 people, it makes it difficult to get eyewitnesses, it makes it difficult to get information,” he told a group of reporters last month.

     Police departments around the nation have acknowledged the right of residents to film police in public areas, and many are beginning to equip officers with body cameras. Baltimore’s body camera program, which will start later this year by testing cameras on 155 officers, will take four years to fully implement.

     Meanwhile, Moore keeps filming. He and other activists want to expose incidents of misconduct and stop police from disproportionately arresting African-Americans for petty offenses. He said of the problems that lead him and others to point cameras at police, “It’s deep. It’s much bigger than Freddie Gray.”

320. rq says

     30 June 2015 at 8:24 am

     TODAY, we are launching http://www.powerbehindthepolice.com and the #UnveilTheProfit Week of Action. We’ll be outting the #STL 1% for the next few months, I guess FYI?

     Protesters targeting ‘good old boys’ network they say runs the St. Louis region

     A coalition of activist groups launched a week of protests before the city’s annual VP Parade on the Fourth of July, calling attention to area business executives who they say reinforce the region’s white power structure.

     The Veiled Prophet organization started an annual parade in St. Louis in 1878 “to promote the city of St. Louis,” according to the group’s website.

     Protesters say the group is really just a “good old boys” club that influences policy for the region, often to the detriment of the downtrodden. They plan to protest in various locations all week.

     Campaigning in South Carolina, Jeb Bush calls Confederate flag ‘racist’

     The Confederate flag is a “racist” symbol, Jeb Bush said Monday during his first visit to South Carolina since a deadly church shooting here.

     Bush, a former two-term Florida governor, explained that in 2001, “I decided to do something politically incorrect” and ordered the removal of a flag that included the Confederate symbol from the Florida State Capitol grounds.

     “The symbols were racist,” he told workers at a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant here. “If you’re trying to lean forward rather than live in the past, you want to eliminate the barriers that create disagreements.”

     I like it when people get things right. I just wish some people were right more often.

     The Quality Of Health Care You Receive Likely Depends On Your Skin Color

     More than a decade after the Institute of Medicine issued a landmark report showing that minority patients were less likely to receive the same quality health care as white patients, racial and ethnic disparities continue to plague the U.S. health care system. That report, which was published in 2002, indicated that even when both groups had similar insurance or the same ability to pay for care, black patients received inferior treatment to white patients.

     This still hold true, according to our investigation into dozens of studies about black health across multiple disciplines. More than any other single group, the black community is most likely to have negative health outcomes, including higher rates of breast and prostate cancer, high incidence of HIV/AIDS, higher rates of infant morality — along with high rates of childhood obesity and asthma in young adults.

     According to Karen M. Winkfield, a radiation oncologist and assistant professor in the department of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School, racial disparities in health care and health outcomes exist across almost every single disease or condition. […]

     Socioeconomic inequality accounts for much of the difference. Twenty-seven percent of people living in poverty are black, and studies consistently show that the least educated and lowest income people are the most likely to be unhealthy.

     “Financial status directly impacts health status,” Winkfield said. “They are inseparable. That’s the problem in this country — people make the assumption that people can just do. Well, you can’t. If you don’t have the resources, you’re not going to be able to care for your health in the appropriate way.”

     This is a Catch-22: People need education and information in order to make these good personal health decisions, two resources that economically disadvantaged individuals are less likely to have. Education is also a factor in making health changes on a community level. It takes education and political connections to effectively lobby local grocery stores to carry fresh fruits and vegetables, or fight to prohibit corner stores from selling tobacco to neighborhood youth.

     But inequality alone doesn’t account for the difference. Policy can address differences in access and income, but research finds that unconscious racism is far more insidious and harder to legislate against. Fully two-thirds of medical professionals display unconscious racial bias. And research has also shown that racial bias can lead to reduced trust between patients and their doctors, and causes black patients feel less respected by their doctors.

     “Layered on top of those social class inequities are racial inequities,” said Dr. M. Norman Oliver, director of the University of Virginia Center on Health Disparities. “While a poor, working-class white or a poor Appalachian white might have the same poor health standards as folks in inner-city Baltimore, the population attributable risk of being in that poor status is much higher in the African-American community. That’s a result of that racist discrimination being layered on top of the class inequities that we have.”

     More at the link.

     Supervisor tried unsuccessfully to call off Detroit police chase that killed two kids. Weren’t there efforts to curb the Brelo chase, too? Efforts that were ignored?

     Detroit police say the red Chevrolet Camaro that led officers on a short, dangerous chase through neighborhood streets Wednesday, ultimately striking six people and killing two children, reached speeds in excess of 70 mph.

     According to the Associated press, Detroit Police Chief James Craig said Thursday the patrol unit’s supervisor attempted to call off the pursuit over the radio but was unsuccessful.

     The tragedy has since garnered criticism from neighbors, relatives and the Detroit Police Coalition Against Police Brutality.

     Craig said the officers believed they saw a gun in possession of one of the suspects, leading to an attempted stop.

     “No gun was recovered,” Detroit Police Officer Dan Donakowski of the Media Relations Department said Thursday. Donakowski says, according to the chief’s statements, a witness did claim to have seen a weapon in one of the suspects’ possession following the crash.

     See that? They thought the saw a gun and now two children are dead because they couldn’t just let it go, even though they knew who it was.
     Also note witness narrative above (with police cars ramming and pushing suspect car). Next comment is an article from the police point of view.

321. rq says

     30 June 2015 at 8:33 am

     This sounds like an officially police-accepted version of events. Prosecutors charge driver with murder after 2 kids struck, killed during Detroit police chase

     They were playing on the sidewalk outside a home Wednesday evening when they were struck and killed by a speeding Chevy Camaro. The car continued traveling through front yards along the residential street, eventually hitting three more children and a 23-year-old woman before crashing into a porch.

     Detroit police are investigating whether officers involved in the pursuit and their supervisor followed protocols, Chief James Craig said Thursday.

     Craig said the chase started after an officer in a marked squad car reported seeing someone in the Camaro with a handgun. The chase lasted just 62 seconds and spanned 1.64 miles, with the Camaro averaging a speed of 95 mph, according to Craig.

     Craig said a supervisor reported making several attempts to verbally stop the pursuit, but it’s not clear if the orders were heard over police radio traffic.

     Texas Town Is Charging Us $79,000 for Emails About Pool Party Abuse Cop. Remember how Ferguson also charged thousands to release documents? Yeah, McKinney, too.

     Days after McKinney, Texas, police officer Eric Casebolt was filmed pointing his service weapon at a group of unarmed black teenagers at a pool party this month, Gawker submitted a Public Information Act request to the city of McKinney asking to see Casebolt’s records and any emails about his conduct sent or received by McKinney Police Department employees. Today, we received a letter from the city’s attorneys claiming that fulfilling our request would cost $79,229.09.

     The city arrived at that extraordinary figure after estimating that hiring a programmer to execute the grueling and complex task of searching through old emails would cost $28.50 per hour, and that the search for emails about Casebolt would take 2,231 hours of said programmer’s time. That only comes to about $63,000; the bill also includes $14,726 “to cover the actual time a computer resource takes to execute a particular program.” In other words, the operating cost of the computer used to search the emails is nearly 15 grand on its own. Another portion of Gawker’s request, for copies of Casebolt’s personnel file and any internal investigations into his conduct, costs $255.04.

     How could finding a few emails possibly be so expensive? Casebolt, who has since resigned from McKinney PD, joined the department in 2005, and Gawker requested copies of all correspondence regarding his conduct dating back to that year. According to the letter, emails maintained by the city before March 1, 2014, “are not in a format that is searchable by City personnel,” and making the emails searchable would require “Programming Personnel to execute an existing program or to create a new program so that requested information may be accessed and copied,” to the tune of the aforementioned $63k. But since when are year-old emails not searchable? Is the city of McKinney still corresponding via telegram?

     It’s just possible. Actual breakdown of costs at the link. It’s impressive.

     Survey: S.C. legislators show enough support for removal of Confederate flag, as seen before via the live survey.

     A survey of South Carolina legislators shows there is enough support to remove the Confederate flag from Statehouse grounds if all supporters cast a vote.

     The Post and Courier newspaper, the South Carolina Press Association and The Associated Press asked all lawmakers how they intend to vote. At least 33 senators and 82 House members say the flag should go.

     That appears to meet the two-thirds majority needed from both chambers to move the battle flag. That rule is part of the 2000 compromise that took the flag off the Statehouse dome and put a smaller, square version beside a monument to Confederate soldiers.

     So now they can vote, not just talk about it.

     Justice Department faults Ferguson protest response – I’m not sure if this is official or a leak, but it’s been appearing on the timeline.

     Police trying to control the Ferguson protests and riots responded with an uncoordinated effort that sometimes violated free-speech rights, antagonized crowds with military-style tactics and shielded officers from accountability, the Justice Department says in a document obtained Monday by the Post-Dispatch.

     “Vague and arbitrary” orders to keep protesters moving “violated citizens’ right to assembly and free speech, as determined by a U.S. federal court injunction,” according to a summary of a longer report scheduled for delivery this week to police brass in Ferguson, St. Louis County, St. Louis and Missouri Highway Patrol.

     They already have the summary, still subject to revision, that was obtained by the newspaper.

     It suggests that last year’s unrest was aggravated by long-standing community animosity toward Ferguson police, and by a failure of commanders to provide more details to the public after an officer killed Michael Brown.

     “Had law enforcement released information on the officer-involved shooting in a timely manner and continued the information flow as it became available, community distrust and media skepticism would most likely have been lessened,” according to the document.

     It also says that use of dogs for crowd control incited fear and anger, and the practice ought to be prohibited. And it complains that tear gas was sometimes used without warning and on people in areas from which there was no safe retreat.

     Moreover, it finds inconsistencies in the way police used force and made arrests.

     “The four core agencies dedicated officer training on operational and tactical skills without appropriate balance of de-escalation and problem-solving training,” it reads.

     The Justice Department examined the response of the four agencies in the first 16 days after Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson shot Brown, 18, in a controversial confrontation Aug. 9. Those departments were the key players in managing unrest that drew help from about 50 jurisdictions across the region.

     In all, the full report is expected to contain about 45 “findings,” with recommendations for improvement on each point.

     I guess a pre-report leak, but it doesn’t sound good!!! Is anyone surprised?

     Being a Black Atheist in So-Called Post-Racial America, something of especial relevance following Obama’s religious community-building speech in Charleston.

     Though Obama’s inauguration was christened as proof of an age wherein racism was somehow magically “over”—not surprisingly, heralded as such by those not subject to the insidious tentacles of racism—the real-lived texture of Blacks in America has quite another thing to say regarding this fanciful sentiment. This insistence to have closure on a matter that is virtually anything but foreclosed is reminiscent of yesteryear when it was assumed that, because Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, that the indelible and ever-present expressions of racism were instantaneously cauterized. The Watts riots, an issue very much steeped in racial tensions, occurred six days after Johnson’s landmark legislation.

     What we see here is a fundamental difference between lived experiences and sociopolitical rhetoric or commonly touted markers of progress. While the Voting Rights Act illegalized discriminatory voting requirements, it did nothing to combat social marginalization, inadequate housing, economic deprivation, police brutality, lynchings and general malaise due to an intersectional process of racial stratification. This contradiction of expectation pitted against real world interface mimics the discussion sparked by Obama’s presidential victory.

     Though it’s been proven profoundly false on numerous occasions—evidential in, among other things, educational apartheid, wealth gap, arrest rate, housing discrimination, employment, racial profiling and incarceration statistics—the idea that the U.S. has achieved this post-racial pinnacle persists. This mainly emanates from a tendency of rushing to conclusions, as its harbor can be a haven for those tired of examining or reflecting further on any given matter. Despite being a biologically invalid concept, dialogue centering on race causes discomfort, resentment and hostility. Thus, it’s more desirable—particularly for those unaffected—to ignore, dismiss or diminish its impact on individuals and society. From this lackadaisical mindset flows “I don’t know, therefore god!” and like modes of thinking that prefers resignation, content with uncritical assessment or even willful ignorance.

     The rest of the article is here at Patheos, and continues:

     Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, racism is omnipresent within our society, and this includes the subculture of atheist and humanist circles. This past April I attended the American Atheists Conference in Memphis. It was a very pleasant occasion, though this bias that disregards the pervasiveness of racism reared its ugly head at a workshop titled, “Intersectionality & Atheism”. As the presenters discussed matters that affected people of color, women and the LGBTQIA communities, there was one individual in the audience who declared that atheists were the most persecuted group. His outlook struck a chord with several or more present. Had I rolled my eyes any harder, they would have plunged from my body.

     My hand surged into the air. The speakers saw the urgency in my body language and signaled me to speak. I responded to this idea of atheists being hated, oppressed and feared—which is all true, to be sure—by contrasting this truth with a broader picture centered on examples in which people of color, LGBTQIA and women are continuously discriminated against on a more intensified level. As well, if need be, an atheist could simply not announce their disbelief and observe the status quo, but those from certain marginalized groups, like non-whites and many transgender people, cannot and because of this the potential for mistreatment is ever-looming.

     I don’t discount the “stats” that suggest atheists are among the most distrusted groups, as a few (who unsurprisingly happened to be cis-gendered, hetero, able-bodied white males) at this workshop readily referenced. However, this general distrust and misunderstanding of atheists isn’t at all comparable to the systematic oppression some other marginalized groups face, particularly Blacks. No, it isn’t about “comparing struggles”, but perspective is a wonderful thing to possess.

     […]

     The very foundation of the United States was established upon racist ideas. These attitudes were rife during the formation of our social systems, and have been transmitted through generations to the present. Nobody is beyond the infectious nature of racism, and I would argue an elevated sense of intellect may be more susceptible to blind spots and may propagate its potentially harmful effect due to obliviousness. Over the course of decades and even centuries, the conscious and unconscious biases interconnected with racism has played a role in shaping our today’s institutions and environment. It’s imperative we acknowledge this and take a more concerted effort to confront this reality.

     The Baltimore uprising (the murder of Freddie Gray ostensibly a catalyst) revealed underlying problems that surpassed rhetoric and commonly touted markers of progress. This is akin to how, for example, those within present-day LGBTQIA communities are yet stigmatized and oppressed despite the customary yardstick for progress wedded to the growing appeal of gay marriage equality. I am a Black man. I am also an atheist. As a Black atheist I feel as though I am double-scorned, both by the world in general, but also within atheist circles, a community that prides itself on possessing logic and reason.

     Our national discourse on race is incredibly impoverished. Ignoring issues pertaining to race relations—just like snubbing any other chronic dilemma—only exacerbates the perpetuating problem. Broad, consistent social engagement provides better chances of heightened awareness, mutual understanding and racial equality. It’s past time the atheist community realized this.

     The stuff in between is good, too.

322. rq says

     30 June 2015 at 8:51 am

     Serious Trigger Warning on the following.
     On Slaveholders’ Sexual Abuse of Slaves

     For many enslaved African Americans, one of the cruelest hardships they endured was sexual abuse by the slave-holders, overseers, and other white men and women whose power to dominate them was complete. Enslaved women were forced to submit to their masters’ sexual advances, perhaps bearing children who would engender the rage of a master’s wife, and from whom they might be separated forever as a result. Masters forcibly paired “good breeders” to produce strong children they could sell at a high price. Resistance brought severe punishment, often death. “I know these facts will seem too awful to relate,” warns former slave William J. Anderson in his 1857 narrative, “. . . as they are some of the real ‘dark deeds of American Slavery.’”

     Presented here are selections from two groups of narratives: 19th-century memoirs of fugitive slaves, often published by abolitionist societies, and the 20th-century interviews of former slaves compiled in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Slave Narrative Project (reproduced here as transcribed by the interviewers).

     Humanism and the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

     A few months ago, I was interviewed on The Humanist Hour podcast on issues related to U.S. race relations, social justice, and privilege. Continuing thoughts expressed during the interview, there are a few more things I’d like to mention for us all to contemplate.

     #BlackLivesMatter is more than a hashtag—it’s a movement. I don’t think it’s right to put it on par with the African-American civil rights movement of yesteryear due to the dissimilar sociopolitical constraints and cultural context. However, there are obvious similarities. Both movements highlight a glaring racial disparity issue. Both seek a remedy that is equitable toward all human life.

     Thus, the #BlackLivesMatter movement is a call to action, a plea for the populace to recognize, “There’s work yet to be done—we must own it and evolve accordingly.”

     Let’s short-circuit one notion out the gate—the reactive “#AllLivesMatter” retort and the sentiment behind it. Perhaps those who feel the urge to make this statement don’t recognize how it’s facile in nature. It’s “wrong” in the sense that it’s a truism, a platitude so self-evident that it isn’t even worth mentioning.

     Realize that, when using this counter—whether meaning to or not—you diminish the purpose of #BlackLivesMatter. This movement, which thrives despite not getting proper coverage, underscores a recurring theme within our societal narrative that sees a surplus of significance attached to certain groups of people, and a markedly deficient significance assigned to others.

     #AllLivesMatter attempts to hijack this conversation and “steal the thunder” that rumbles for a specific cause, which is to bring awareness to an issue that has overarching ethnocultural, political, and social implications. A challenge is levied with #BlackLivesMatter, and it is that challenge—which encroaches upon preconceived notions of “reality” (i.e., that we’re living in a post-racial era, etc.)—that certain people have a problem with.

     Understand that this is not a new issue whatsoever. It only seems new to those who, for whatever reason, haven’t been paying attention. The difference now is that the unevenness rendered across this nation’s social systems is coming to the forefront of concern (again). It’s always been cooking, the plate’s just been promoted from the back burner to the foreground due to exasperation.

     As we reflectively season this dish that is long overdue on the table, it is important that the principles of humanism guide our endeavors to be more civil, fair, and charitable with one another. We are all in this (life, existence) together, regardless of color, sex, political affiliation, level of wealth, creed, age, or sexual orientation. Coexistence marked by equitable rapport and reciprocity only makes sense, does it not?

     Therefore, for those who consider themselves humanists—those who promote unfettered, egalitarian human welfare; those who desire a humane society and seek to humanize all individuals through a rational philosophy—I offer the following tips on ways to be allies regarding the Black Lives Matter movement:

     Which are: observe constancy, granting a platform, having a perspective (removing oneself from one’s comfort zones). Essentially – becoming informed, remaining informed, and being supportive but not taking over the conversation.

     The Ku Klux Klan has reserved SC Statehouse Grounds on July 18 for a Confederate flag rally, via Daily Kos.

     FBI investigating as six black churches burn down in seven days

     Federal investigators are investigating a string of fires at black churches in the US – at least three of which have been named as arson.

     The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives are involved in the investigation into the incidents — though the FBI says it’s too soon to tell if they’re at all connected. The churches targetted have majority black congregations.

     “They’re being investigated to determine who is responsible and what motives are behind them,” FBI spokesperson Paul Bresson told BuzzFeed News. “I’m not sure there is any reason to link them together at this point.” […]

     Six churches have burned in the past week, according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre. Three of them have been certified as being acts of arson. While investigators are still probing a possible link, the SPLC said the incidents may not be a coincidence.

     Some push for change at Austin campuses named for Confederates

     A committee of the Austin school board will start talks this summer about changing names of schools named after Confederates — among other possibilities.

     At least four schools in the Austin school district are under scrutiny:

     – Eastside Memorial High School at the Johnston Campus, named after Gen. Albert S. Johnston.
     – Sidney Lanier High School, named after the noted Southern poet who fought for the Confederates.
     – Robert E. Lee Elementary School, named after the lead general and arguably most famous Confederate.
     – John H. Reagan High School, named after the postmaster general for the Confederate States.

     “Honoring and memorializing a general of the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee, is honoring and memorializing the Civil War and the support of slavery,” said Teresa Griffin, a Hyde Park resident whose kids attended Lee in the 1980s and ’90s. “He was a complex man and he belongs in the history books and museums and not on the front of a school.”

     Griffin has rekindled the conversation on her neighborhood association’s online forum over the past week after a similarly robust discussion fizzled years ago.

     Local calls for changes have become louder in the wake of the Charleston shooting that killed nine African-Americans this month. The events have prompted national debate on whether Confederate iconography is appropriate in public spaces.

     Feige Explains Black Panther’s Role In “Captain America: Civil War”

     “The reason we introduced him in ‘Civil War’ is because we needed a third party,” said Feige. “We needed fresh eyes who wasn’t embedded with the Avengers and who has a very different point of view than either Tony or Steve. We said, ‘We need somebody like Black Panther… why don’t we just use Black Panther?’ That’s how it went in the development process.”

     The African nation of Wakanda, which T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) calls his kingdom, was mentioned in “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” paving the way for his inclusion in “Civil War.” Feige talked a bit about the role “Ultron” plays in bringing Black Panther out into the larger world.

     “Today, pre-‘Civil War,’ post-‘Ultron’ I think he and his father [T’Chaka] are saying, ‘A bunch of vibranium just got out of here and wreaked a lot of havoc. Maybe we can’t stay behind these borders anymore, maybe we have to stick our heads out and make at least an attempt to be a part of the rest of the world right now, while at the same time protecting our people.’ That’s sort of where we meet him in ‘Civil War.'”

323. rq says

     30 June 2015 at 12:15 pm

     Trump: Fountain of Wisdom. It’s opposite day. Donald Trump says cops should be tougher on Chicago crime

     But much of his remarks to the Tribune focused on crime in Chicago, which he said is damaging the city’s reputation.

     “Crime in Chicago is out of control and I will tell you, outside of Chicago, it’s a huge negative and a huge talking point, a huge negative for Chicago,” he said.

     “You’ve got to stop it. You’re not going to stop it by being nice. You’re going to stop it by being one tough son of a b*tch,” Trump said.

     Trump acknowledged there have been cases of police brutality but said he believed police today are not as tough as when he was growing up in the mid-1960s.

     “You need tough cookies. These are tough kids. These are not babies. These are tough, tough kids. If they saw you walking down the street, they wouldn’t give a damn about you,” he said. “You can’t be so gentle with these people.”

     “I’m a big fan of the police, but I think the police now are afraid to act. They’re afraid to be tough.”

     He recalled how police dealt with gangs when he was in his late teens in the mid-1960s, when he said he and his father would regularly visit a White Castle in Brooklyn.

     “They were very good,” he said of the well-known burgers. “I don’t know if they’re even still around.”

     Trump said gangs would inhabit the restaurant “and these cops would walk in there and they had sticks in those days and they’d break up those gangs and those gang members were petrified of those guys. Petrified,” Trump said.

     “You have some rough cops, but the cops aren’t so rough today, to put it mildly, OK? And today the kids are shouting at the cops and calling them all sorts of names and laughing at them like it’s a joke. Different world.

     “Today if the cops ever did that they’d have ’em arrested and given the electric chair,” Trump said. “They didn’t do wrong. They were just forceful. They were strong. And today it’s not even politically correct to say that.”

     Any illusions on who he means when he says ‘those people’ or ‘gang members’?

     Dawkins, Fount of Wiseness. It’s still opposite day. (PZ’s post on it.) No more compliments, thank you very much.

     Six predominately black Southern churches burn within a week; arson suspected in at least three. I think it’s a repost so I’ll leave it at the title.

     At least two black churches in South damaged in arson fires, investigators say – so there’s some disagreement on whether it’s two definite arsons or three.

     Washington Post also updates its police fatality counter: 461 people shot dead by police this year. They have a list of names and ages at the link. More details on what the Washington Post is doing that the FBI isn’t: How The Washington Post is examining police shootings in the U.S..

     Police Department to Redefine Chokehold to Match City Council Bill

     The New York Police Department is poised to narrow its definition of a chokehold, adopting language from a City Council bill aimed at criminalizing police use of the maneuver.

     The department, however, has not dropped its opposition to the bill; in fact, it intends to provide exemptions from what had been a blanket prohibition on the use of chokeholds by officers, in place since 1993.

     The changes — under discussion since last year, when a police chokehold led to the death of Eric Garner — were announced by Commissioner William J. Bratton at a nearly three-hour City Council hearing on Monday.

     For Mr. Bratton, it was his first trip before the Council since last week’s surprise budget agreement adding nearly 1,300 new police officers. Council members had pushed to give him 1,000 new officers for more than a year, and Mayor Bill de Blasio appeared resistant to any increase until the deal was announced.

     But while Mr. Bratton applauded the agreement to add new officers, calling it “a historic document” in his opening remarks on Monday, he quickly assumed what has become the conventional role of a police commissioner before the Council: waving off any effort to change police activity through new laws. Mr. Bratton voiced objections to a raft of proposed police reform bills that touched on everything from how officers identify themselves on the street to what data the Police Department makes public.

     The nine bills under discussion — including one that would make chokeholds, already banned under department rules, illegal — are redundant, are not necessary, or address issues of police behavior and departmental transparency that are already in the process of being changed, Mr. Bratton said.

     If they’re so redundant and unnecessary, why are chokeholds still an issue?

324. rq says

     30 June 2015 at 12:26 pm

     Previous in moderation.

     Ferguson Commission looking at having state attorney general act as special prosecutor in police fatal shootings or injury

     The state attorney general would serve as a special prosecutor in cases of police use of force that end in death or shooting injury. That’s one recommendation working its way through Ferguson Commission.

     Monday night at the University of Missouri St. Louis a commission subcommittee endorsed that idea and others, including the formation of a highway patrol task force to lead investigations into use of force deaths, officer involved shootings or in-custody deaths.

     The recommendations will be taken up by the full Ferguson Commission next month.

     The commission is due to present its final findings to Governor Nixon in September.

     Millersville Sued for KKK Note in Black Police Officer’s Mailbox. HAHA it was a JOKE!!! HAHA.

     A KKK magazine left in an African-American police officer’s mailbox last year has led to an almost $6 million dollar lawsuit against the City of Millersville.

     This federal lawsuit names the City of Millersville and 11 people, including a former police captain accused of racism in the workplace. The ‘Klansmen’s Voice’ is the KKK literature that was put in the black officer’s work mailbox.

     A post-it note attached to it read, “This was left for you.

     Don’t let your subscription run out”. “We wanted to get to the bottom of it,” said Robert Mobley, Millersville’s former city manager.

     The former Millersville city manager said that last May but he is now getting sued along with the City of Millersville, accused of condoning racism in the workplace.

     According to the lawsuit, a police captain put the KKK note in Officer Anthony Hayes’ box.

     It claims the captain admitted to it but the department didn’t take enough action, only giving him 3 days suspension.

     On top of that, that same police captain, Mark Palmer, is accused of taking Hayes for an “unexplained and unofficial visit to the home of a former KKK leader and subjecting him to an extended conversation around KKK memorabilia.”

     The lawsuit claims Palmer also used the n-word, saying ‘he didn’t like’ them, in the black officer’s presence.

     Former Police Chief Ronnie Williams is accused of meeting in secret with the captain in question, all while the department investigated Palmer.

     Hayes is suing the City for $5.6 million dollars for, in part, failing take action against a hostile work environment. The accused captain is still on the job.

     The current police chief says that captain has since been demoted and put back on patrol but the lawsuit contends he still makes the same pay and has same authority.

     Not much of a joke, overall.

     Ku Klux Klan to protest removal of Confederate flag on July 18 at Statehouse, as seen before.

     The Ku Klux Klan has been approved to hold a protest rally at the Statehouse next month against removing the Confederate battle flag, with the group calling accused mass murderer Dylann Roof a “young warrior.”

     The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan applied for the permit last week to hold a rally for 100 to 200 people on July 18 on the north side of the Statehouse.

     That’s where the Confederate battle flag presently flies.

     Brian Gaines, spokesman for the S.C. Budget and Control Board, said the state provides rally space at the Statehouse site when space is available or previously not reserved.

     The move was not endorsed by Gov. Nikki Haley. “This is our state, and they are not welcome,” she said in a statement issued by her press office.

     In its application permit, the Klan lists equipment needs as a podium and public address access. The group is headquartered out of Pelham, N.C.

     Robert Jones, grand dragon for the group, said on Monday that the Klan is a civil rights organization dedicated to white culture and history as symbolized by the rebel banner.

     But not racist at all!

     Irmo man arrested at Statehouse after confrontation with anti-Confederate flag protesters

     An Irmo man was arrested Monday night after confronting a crowd of anti-Confederate battle flag protesters, according to the S.C. Department of Public Safety Bureau of Protective Services.

     Nicholas Thompson, 25, is charged with disorderly conduct.

     About 30 protesters, who oppose the flying of the Confederate battle flag, were on Statehouse grounds when a group of about 15 vehicles with pro-flag supporters pulled up on Gervais Street and stopped in the middle of the road, according to a media release.

     The group of vehicles were headed toward Sumter Street when about eight to 10 occupants exited and began to engage in an altercation with the crowd at the Statehouse.

     BPS and additional law enforcement were able to contain the situation. The S.C. Highway Patrol, University of South Carolina Police and Columbia Police Department also responded to the scene.

     Protesters remain on Statehouse grounds with an increased law enforcement presence to monitor the situation, the release states.

     Job opportunity: Grist is looking for a justice fellow

     Are you an early-career journalist looking to tell stories about compelling people and communities? Are you equally obsessed with justice for all and whatever Kendrick Lamar drops next? Then Grist wants you!

     We are now accepting applications for a justice fellowship.

     With the mentorship and support of Grist’s editorial staff, the justice fellow will report on the issues, communities, and people that don’t get enough play in the environmental movement. You’ll be called upon to make connections among the news, the environment, justice, policy, and pop culture. You will write multiple posts a week and work on one big project during the fellowship. You’ll have the option to work out of your home community. And you’ll get paid.

     Head here for a full job description and application instructions.

     Good luck!

     Aryan Nations throws its support behind Dylann Roof, and they’re horribly open and shameless about their racism. TW for some of the material within.

     The Aryan Nations, whose messages of hate and white superiority have fueled violent crimes and domestic terrorism for decades, is applauding the murderous acts of accused racist killer Dylann Storm Roof.

     Only hours after the 21-year-old was arrested for brutally shooting nine people at Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., Aryan Nations leader Morris Gulett offered praise and urged others to follow Roof’s example.

     “I, for one, am very glad to see young people like Dylann Roof acting like men instead of the old 60’s era hippies stoned on weed and interracial love,” Gulett posted on his web site.

     “We had better see much more of this type of activism if we ever expect to see our America return to it’s [sic] rightful place in the world and our children grow up in a clean safe healthy enviroment [sic],” Gulett wrote.

     Other racists individually have offered support or praise for Roof in comments posted on a forum hosted by Stormfront, the world’s largest hate site.

     Gulett’s inflammatory comments came in response to a statement by Mark Pitcavage, the director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism. He was quoted in a slate.com piece as saying the idea idea of black on white crime “is one of the staples that white supremacists harp on over and over again.”

     Pitcavage spoke of flags worn by Roof — the Rhodesian flag and the flag of Apartheid-era South Africa – which have become symbols for white supremacy in the United States and around the world.

     “Whites actually were persecuted in Zimbabwe after the end of white rule and so white supremacists dating back all the way to the early 1970s have had a fascination with or concern over Rhodesia/Zimbabwe,” Pitcavage told Slate writer Jeremy Stahl.

     Gulett responded with a headline reading: “Us Bad Ole White Supremacists and our Harps.”

     “Oh really?” Gulett said of Pitcavage’s comments. “Maybe we ‘harp’ on black on white crime because it is a genuine and valid concern for our people.”

     “I don’t see Mark Pitcavage saying these sort of things about Al Sharpton and the blacks in Baltimore, or Ferguson, or Trayvon Martin’s Florida or even Texas where Black Panthers are calling for a wholesale killing of Whites including our children,” Gulett said.

325. rq says

     30 June 2015 at 2:27 pm

     Justice Department Report Says Police Exacerbated Violence In Ferguson

     Almost one year ago, the shooting death of Michael Brown sparked a wave of protests over the teen’s death and the general mistreatment of black lives in Ferguson. Police responded with riot gear and tear gas, leaving many demonstrators wounded — including an 8-year-old boy.

     Now, a DOJ document obtained by the Post-Dispatch faults Ferguson police for their aggressive response to protesters last August. In a summary of its third Ferguson report, which is soon to be released, the DOJ contends officers from Ferguson, St. Louis County, St. Louis and Missouri Highway Patrol “violated citizens’ right to assembly and free speech, as determined by a U.S. federal court injunction.”

     According to the document, “vague and arbitrary” orders, combined with a “highly elevated tactical response,” including the use of military-grade equipment, resulted in “limited options for a measured, strategic approach.” For instance, several tactics exacerbated tensions during the uprising, such as using dogs to intimidate protesters, using rifle sights on armed vehicles to watch over civilians, and throwing tear gas at demonstrators who had no means of fleeing the scene. Tactical operations used during the day time were unjustified, and the four law enforcement agencies that responded to the protests used inconsistent and ineffective methods to de-escalate crowds. Officers with varied levels of training were “ineffectively” controlled, and Ferguson officials further inflamed civil unrest by releasing details about Brown’s shooting too slowly.

     On the flip side, the report says officers removed their name tags because they “were not prepared for the volume and severity of personal threats on themselves and their families, which created additional emotional stress for those involved in the Ferguson response. This includes threats of violence against family members and fraud associated with technology based attacks.” That stress caused poor judgment and unsatisfactory officer performance.

     Responding to the latest DOJ findings, St. Louis Chief Sam Dotson told the Post-Dispatch. “I don’t know if I agree with them or not, because I don’t have enough information.” After the 200-page report is released, the DOJ will release a fourth report about the St. Louis County Police Department.

     Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party, but throwing a confederacy overboard just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

     Who really won the Civil War? The first hint at how deep the second mystery ran came from the biography Jefferson Davis: American by William J. Cooper. In 1865, not only was Davis not agonizing over how to end the destruction, he wanted to keep it going longer. He disapproved of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and when U. S. troops finally captured him, he was on his way to Texas, where an intact army might continue the war.

     That sounded crazy until I read about Reconstruction. In my high school history class, Reconstruction was a mysterious blank period between Lincoln’s assassination and Edison’s light bulb. Congress impeached Andrew Johnson for some reason, the transcontinental railroad got built, corruption scandals engulfed the Grant administration, and Custer lost at Little Big Horn. But none of it seemed to have much to do with present-day events.

     And oh, those blacks Lincoln emancipated? Except for Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, they vanished like the Lost Tribes of Israel. They wouldn’t re-enter history until the 1950s, when for some reason they still weren’t free.

     Here’s what my teachers’ should have told me: “Reconstruction was the second phase of the Civil War. It lasted until 1877, when the Confederates won.” I think that would have gotten my attention.

     It wasn’t just that Confederates wanted to continue the war. They did continue it, and they ultimately prevailed. They weren’t crazy, they were just stubborn.

     […]

     The first modern war. The Civil War was easy to misunderstand at the time, because there had never been anything like it. It was a total mobilization of society, the kind Europe wouldn’t see until World War I. The Civil War was fought not just with cannons and bayonets, but with railroads and factories and an income tax.

     If the Napoleonic Wars were your model, then it was obvious that the Confederacy lost in 1865: Its capital fell, its commander surrendered, its president was jailed, and its territories were occupied by the opposing army. If that’s not defeat, what is?

     But now we have a better model than Napoleon: Iraq.

     After the U.S. forces won on the battlefield in 1865 and shattered the organized Confederate military, the veterans of that shattered army formed a terrorist insurgency that carried on a campaign of fire and assassination throughout the South until President Hayes agreed to withdraw the occupying U. S. troops in 1877. Before and after 1877, the insurgents used lynchings and occasional pitched battles to terrorize those portions of the electorate still loyal to the United States. In this way they took charge of the machinery of state government, and then rewrote the state constitutions to reverse the postwar changes and restore the supremacy of the class that led the Confederate states into war in the first place. [2]

     By the time it was all over, the planter aristocrats were back in control, and the three constitutional amendments that supposedly had codified the U.S.A’s victory over the C.S.A.– the 13th, 14th, and 15th — had been effectively nullified in every Confederate state. The Civil Rights Acts had been gutted by the Supreme Court, and were all but forgotten by the time similar proposals resurfaced in the 1960s. Blacks were once again forced into hard labor for subsistence wages, denied the right to vote, and denied the equal protection of the laws. Tens of thousands of them were still physically shackled and subject to being whipped, a story historian Douglas Blackmon told in his Pulitzer-winning Slavery By Another Name.

     So Lincoln and Grant may have had their mission-accomplished moment, but ultimately the Confederates won. The real Civil War — the one that stretched from 1861 to 1877 — was the first war the United States lost.

     The missed opportunity. Today, historians like Eric Foner and Douglas Egerton portray Reconstruction as a missed opportunity to avoid Jim Crow and start trying to heal the wounds of slavery a century sooner. Following W.E.B. DuBois’ iconoclastic-for-1935 Black Reconstruction, they see the freedmen as actors in their own history, rather than mere pawns or victims of whites. As a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina, and a substantial voting bloc across the South, blacks briefly used the democratic system to try to better their lot. If the federal government had protected the political process from white terrorism, black (and American) history could have taken an entirely different path.

     In particular, 1865 was a moment when reparations and land reform were actually feasible. Late in the war, some of Lincoln’s generals — notably Sherman — had mitigated their slave-refugee problem by letting emancipated slaves farm small plots on the plantations that had been abandoned by their Confederate owners. Sick or injured animals unable to advance with the Army were left behind for the slaves to nurse back to health and use. (Hence “forty acres and a mule”.) Sherman’s example might have become a land-reform model for the entire Confederacy, dispossessing the slave-owning aristocrats in favor of the people whose unpaid labor had created their wealth.

     Instead, President Johnson (himself a former slave-owner from Tennessee) was quick to pardon the aristocrats and restore their lands. [3] That created a dynamic that has been with us ever since: Early in Reconstruction, white and black working people sometimes made common cause against their common enemies in the aristocracy. But once it became clear that the upper classes were going to keep their ill-gotten holdings, freedmen and working-class whites were left to wrestle over the remaining slivers of the pie. Before long, whites who owned little land and had never owned slaves had become the shock troops of the planters’ bid to restore white supremacy.

     Along the way, the planters created rhetoric you still hear today: The blacks were lazy and would rather wait for gifts from the government than work (in conditions very similar to slavery). In this way, the idle planters were able to paint the freedmen as parasites who wanted to live off the hard work of others.

     The larger pattern. But the enduring Confederate influence on American politics goes far beyond a few rhetorical tropes. The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries.

     That worldview is alive and well. During last fall’s government shutdown and threatened debt-ceiling crisis, historian Garry Wills wrote about our present-day Tea Partiers: “The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to majority rule.”

     The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change.

     When in the majority, Confederates protect the established order through democracy. If they are not in the majority, but have power, they protect it through the authority of law. If the law is against them, but they have social standing, they create shams of law, which are kept in place through the power of social disapproval. If disapproval is not enough, they keep the wrong people from claiming their legal rights by the threat of ostracism and economic retribution. If that is not intimidating enough, there are physical threats, then beatings and fires, and, if that fails, murder.

     That was the victory plan of Reconstruction. Black equality under the law was guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. But in the Confederate mind, no democratic process could legitimate such a change in the social order. It simply could not be allowed to stand, and it did not stand.

     […]

     Unbalanced. This is not a universal, both-sides-do-it phenomenon. Compare, for example, the responses to the elections of our last two presidents. Like many liberals, I will go to my grave believing that if every person who went to the polls in 2000 had succeeded in casting the vote s/he intended, George W. Bush would never have been president. I supported Gore in taking his case to the Supreme Court. And, like Gore, once the Court ruled in Bush’s favor — incorrectly, in my opinion — I dropped the issue.

     For liberals, the Supreme Court was the end of the line. Any further effort to replace Bush would have been even less legitimate than his victory. Subsequently, Democrats rallied around President Bush after 9/11, and I don’t recall anyone suggesting that military officers refuse his orders on the grounds that he was not a legitimate president.

     Barack Obama, by contrast, won a huge landslide in 2008, getting more votes than any president in history. And yet, his legitimacy has been questioned ever since. The Birther movement was created out of whole cloth, there never having been any reason to doubt the circumstances of Obama’s birth. Outrageous conspiracy theories of voter fraud — millions and millions of votes worth — have been entertained on no basis whatsoever. Immediately after Obama took office, the Oath Keeper movement prepared itself to refuse his orders.

     A black president calling for change, who owes most of his margin to black voters — he himself is a violation of the established order. His legitimacy cannot be conceded.

     […]

     It’s not a Tea Party. The Boston Tea Party protest was aimed at a Parliament where the colonists had no representation, and at an appointed governor who did not have to answer to the people he ruled. Today’s Tea Party faces a completely different problem: how a shrinking conservative minority can keep change at bay in spite of the democratic processes defined in the Constitution. That’s why they need guns. That’s why they need to keep the wrong people from voting in their full numbers.

     These right-wing extremists have misappropriated the Boston patriots and the Philadelphia founders because their true ancestors — Jefferson Davis and the Confederates — are in poor repute. [4]

     But the veneer of Bostonian rebellion easily scrapes off; the tea bags and tricorn hats are just props. The symbol Tea Partiers actually revere is the Confederate battle flag. Let a group of right-wingers ramble for any length of time, and you will soon hear that slavery wasn’t really so bad, that Andrew Johnson was right, that Lincoln shouldn’t have fought the war, that states have the rights of nullification and secession, that the war wasn’t really about slavery anyway, and a lot of other Confederate mythology that (until recently) had left me asking, “Why are we talking about this?”

     By contrast, the concerns of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its revolutionary Sons of Liberty are never so close to the surface. So no. It’s not a Tea Party. It’s a Confederate Party.

     Our modern Confederates are quick to tell the rest of us that we don’t understand them because we don’t know our American history. And they’re right. If you knew more American history, you would realize just how dangerous these people are.

     I think I learned more American history in that one post than I have over the past several months. And I skipped a lot, a lot of the good bits.

     It’s Time To Look Away, Dixieland

     As a born and bred Southerner (7th generation Alabama native), I’m told I come with a ready-made set of assumptions when I mention that fact to someone from another part of the country. Well, when you “assume” anything, you make an “ass” out of yourself surely, but leave me out of that equation. I waited over a week to write anything about the Charleston shootings because it was just too horrible to talk about – walking into a church, gaining peoples’ trust, praying with them… And then gunning them down seemingly without remorse.

     But here goes….. I was born in North Alabama in 1963, a few hours before a bomb planted by domestic terrorists blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. There were no TVs in hospitals rooms then, but when my mother woke from anesthesia, the first thing she heard was about the bombing. As she held her newborn daughter, five families a hundred miles to the south were mourning the loss of their daughters.

     Diane McWhorter, author of “Carry Me Home”, a history of the MLK and the Civil Rights struggle in Birmingham, recounts how that bombing changed her family. Her father, up until that point had been a segregationist, although not a KKK-type. But the bombing “broke him,” she says. (I’d include the exact quote, but I loaned my copy to a friend who hasn’t returned it). He sat at the table and wept, horrified by what had happened and his dawning realization that his city had gotten to the point that people thought it was ok to kill little girls in church on a Sunday morning.

     Sure: that should have been obvious to anyone watching the events unfold before that point, but at least he finally opened his eyes and acknowledged the rot underlying the whole Southern narrative history.

     Another long, educational article.

     White Culture’s Thug Youth, a cartoon that’s probably a repost.

     MLK Statue to Be Placed on Ga. Statehouse Grounds – one thing (of many) that the South should take pride in.

     A statue of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. is scheduled to be erected on the Georgia Statehouse grounds, a short distance away from the newly opened Liberty Plaza, where demonstrations are now held, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

     The 8-foot statue will be set on a 3-foot base and will include King quotes on all four sides, the news site notes. It will also overlook a road named in the civil rights leader’s honor. Georgia artist Andy Davis has been commissioned to design the statue and is expected to take six to seven months to complete. The total cost of the monument is currently estimated at $350,000.

     “Georgia has stepped up. Dr. King’s statue is in so many places of prominence around the country, and it will soon be where it belongs on the Statehouse grounds,” Georgia state Rep. Calvin Smyre, who is tasked with arranging the details of the statue, told the news site. “It sends a signal that we want to do the right thing.”

     According to the AJC, the statue is “long overdue,” first announced by Gov. Nathan Deal just last year, after years of lobbying by black leaders. Deal signed an order in 2013 to remove a statue dedicated to segregationist U.S. Sen. Tom Watson. The AJC notes that since then, Democrats have been pushing to have a statue of King replace it.

     Heading to Ferguson Court to support friends and staff who were arrested on 8/13 protesting my arrest hours earlier:, includes video from August 13 of last year. Somehow it didn’t seem as bad in memory. Seeing what it was like again just reinforces how… how twilight zone it must have been.

326. rq says

     30 June 2015 at 2:36 pm

     Here’s a good news, in two different articles:
     Grit and limbs propelled Misty Copeland’s improbable rise through ballet’s ranks – this from almost a year ago, a portrait of Misty Copeland. And now… DUNDUNDUNNNN!!!
     Misty Copeland becomes the first black female principal dancer in American Ballet Theater’s history. Yay!!

     Misty Copeland made history this week when she was promoted to principal dancer of the American Ballet Theater, making her the first African American woman to hold the position in the company’s 75-year history.

     Copeland has spoken candidly about issues of race in the ballet world before, which earned her a great deal of new fans and introduced more people to ballet, and her performances were some of the most popular at the company in the past few years.

     From The New York Times:

     “My fears are that it could be another two decades before another black woman is in the position that I hold with an elite ballet company,” she wrote in her memoir, “Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina,” published last year. “That if I don’t rise to principal, people will feel I have failed them.”

     Copeland, 32, had fans waiting for her outside the Met when the decision was first announced. She waved to the cheering fans and thanked them for being there.

     Congratulations to Copeland. Huge congratulations!!!

     Our count as of this morning – that’s the Guardian. Stands at 547. Which differs from the Washington Post’s 461, so I wonder how each of them are doing their counts.

     Show me what domestic terrorism looks like…. #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches

     Federal report faults police actions during Ferguson unrest, ABC on the subject.

     Upthread, I mentioned a YA author who writes books with black women/girl protagonists. Here’s more about his book (Shadowshaper): About The Book

     Sierra Santiago planned an easy summer of making art and hanging out with her friends. But then a corpse crashes the first party of the season. Her stroke-ridden grandfather starts apologizing over and over. And when the murals in her neighborhood begin to weep real tears… Well, something more sinister than the usual Brooklyn ruckus is going on.

     With the help of a fellow artist named Robbie, Sierra discovers shadowshaping, a thrilling magic that infuses ancestral spirits into paintings, music, and stories. But someone is killing the shadowshapers one by one — and the killer believes Sierra is hiding their greatest secret. Now she must unravel her family’s past, take down the killer in the present, and save the future of shadowshaping for generations to come.

     Full of a joyful, defiant spirit and writing as luscious as a Brooklyn summer night, Shadowshaper introduces a heroine and magic unlike anything else in fantasy fiction, and marks the YA debut of a bold new voice.

     Will have to look into it somehow.

327. Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- says

     1 July 2015 at 1:54 am

     Questions asked to a guide on a plantation
     Excerpt:

     Still, I’d often meet visitors who had earnest but deep misunderstandings about the nature of American slavery. These folks were usually, but not always, a little older, and almost invariably white. I was often asked if the slaves there got paid, or (less often) whether they had signed up to work there. You could tell from the questions — and, not less importantly, from the body language — that the people asking were genuinely ignorant of this part of the country’s history.

328. rq says

     1 July 2015 at 4:09 am

     Status of Confederate statues to be reviewed in Baltimore

     Some would keep them, some would tear them down. The mayor said Tuesday the city needs to talk about the future of Confederate monuments in the city.

     Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced that she will convene a commission of experts representing art, history and community organizations to lead research and public conversation about the city’s Confederate monuments and other historical assets.

     “I believe it is important for us to take a thoughtful, reasoned approach to these Confederate-era monuments, rather than rush to simply ‘tear them down’ or ‘keep them up’ in the heat of the moment,” Rawlings-Blake said in a statement.

     The panel would be charged with making recommendations that could include preservation, new signs, relocation or removal by the end of the year.

     The measure plays into a dialogue taking place nationally after the shooting of nine black members of a South Carolina church by a white man who was photographed with the Confederate battle flag and reportedly said he wanted to start a “race war.”

     The mass shooting sparked conversations and action to address racism — and its symbols — across the country, including calls for the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol and the renaming of the city-owned Robert E. Lee Park in Baltimore County.

     Baltimore has at least nine monuments with ties to the Confederate era among 80 military statues, according to a 2014 state catalog of such monuments.

     African-American “flagger” says Confederate flag isn’t about race: “Slavery was a choice” – that’s via Tony, and I have to say, I’m probably not nearly as confused about that stance as he is, but I’m still confused…

     In the interview — which is part of an ongoing documentary project about the meaning of the Confederate battle flag — Karen Cooper claimed that she was raised in the North as a member of the Nation of Islam, but “felt more welcome in the South” where, she said, “the races are more together.”

     She said that she was introduced to the “flagger” movement by friends of hers in the Tea Party on Facebook. “Most of the people in the Tea Party had Confederate ancestors,” she added as if most people would be surprised to learn that.

     “I know what people think about when they see the battle flag — the KKK, racism, bringing slavery back — so I knew it would be something for people to see a black woman with the battle flag.”

     Cooper insisted that she’s not “advocating slavery,” because she isn’t. Moreover, slavery “wasn’t just something that happened in the South, it happened worldwide.”

     She added that she believes “slavery was a choice, because of what Patrick Henry said, ‘Give me liberty, or give me death.’” Slaves, she argued — in a serious manner, unlike Eddie Izzard’s famous “Cake or Death?” routine — should have opted for “death.”

     Sure, death seems like a perfectly valid alternative option. And it’s the slaves’ own fault they continued to be slaves, since they didn’t commit mass suicide. In which case the slave-owners would just have rolled over and said ‘well, there goes that idea’ and not have transported thousands and millions more from African countries… Sounds about right.
     I’m just speculating!!!

     Misty Copeland Is the First African-American Principal Ballerina at ABT, because I love ballet and this is amazing.

     Jeb Bush: Mentorless Young People Caused Ferguson, Baltimore Protests

     Yesterday, GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush, one of whose siblings is a war criminal (not saying which!), told a crowd in South Carolina that heated protests against police brutality in Ferguson and Baltimore were incited by “aimlessly wandering” kids without mentors.

     When asked by an audience member how Bush planned to get “diehard Democrat” teachers to vote Republican, he brought up teachers’ unions, and how the school system is not focused on “outcomes for kids” but instead on the “economic interests of adults.” And then ended with:

     “If you have kids, as we do in this country that are aimlessly wandering around in their lives because they’ve never been told that they were capable of learning. They’ve never been challenged to achieve far better. They’ve never really had the kind of mentoring and nurturing that gives them the sense their lives could be better. You see what happens in Baltimore and Ferguson. You see the tragedies play out. You see people that become so despondent they take actions that are horrific. And I think education is the answer to a lot of those problems.”

     Bush’s statement is troubling for a number of reasons, the first of which is that it is mind-bogglingly stupid. It feeds the toxic right-wing cycle of thinking about underserved black communities in the US, the one that goes: If only kids like Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Oscar Grant, Reykia Boyd, and Jonathan Ferrell had someone—anyone!—to guide their hopeless lives down the right path, some father who was not absent, some mother who was not busy working two jobs to pay rent, a community that truly cared more for its young, then perhaps they would still be alive.

     When Bush remarks, “You see what happens in Baltimore and Ferguson. You see the tragedies play out. You see people that become so despondent they take actions that are horrific,” he ignores—whether out of ignorance or political convenience—the real circumstances that led to these deaths, and subsequent protests: a system that mentors police to abuse power, and one that, for centuries, has prospered on lies, racism, and injustice.

     Education is one answer, sure. But the real answer to these “tragedies” and “horrific” events is putting an end to an establishment that condones police violence and excessive force on innocent citizens. The solution is actually quite simple, Jeb: it is about putting an end to an establishment that fully believes in the destruction of black and brown bodies as a means of maintaining power.

     If you follow Sarah Kendzior on twitter, she introduced this article with an ‘Assumed he meant the riot cops’ (paraphrase).

     The DeRay Mckesson Episode on the Combat Jack Show.

     The times are changing, and DeRay Mckesson stopped by to talk his transformation from educator to fighting full time for social justice in this digital age. And yes, he rocked his blue vest. #BlackLivesMatter

     Audio at the link.

     Charleston police trying to identify man from flag burning incident in Marion Square

     Charleston police are asking for the public’s help to identify a man involved in a flag burning incident at Marion Square on June 21.

     He apparently has a speech impediment that is noticeable, according to a Tuesday media release. Spokesman Charles Francis said the man is not wanted, that police are currently just trying to identify him.

     The flag burning incident involved members of the Black Lives Matter Charleston group burning an American flag in Marion Square.

     Video posted on social media by activist DeRay McKesson captured the burning. A small group of onlookers watched as flames ate away at a flag held by two men.

     “We are under a terrorist American state,” a third man can be heard saying in the background. “We are under a terrorist attack.”

     A still image that also surfaced shows one of the men talking with Charleston officers, who reportedly intervened.

     While there is a law in South Carolina that makes burning a U.S. or Confederate flag a crime, the Supreme Court struck down the Flag Protection Act of 1989, ruling it is constitutionally protected speech, according to Texas v. Johnson.

     There is a city ordinance, however, that prohibits open burning within city limits.

     “‘Open burning’ means the intentional burning of materials wherein products of combustion are emitted directly into the ambient air without passing through a stack or chimney from an enclosed chamber,” the ordinance states.

     Violations of that particular city code are punishable by a fine of up to $500.

     So basically they’re going to charge him with something, as long as he gets charged.
     Nice.

329. rq says

     1 July 2015 at 6:18 am

     Family: Girl, 4, shot by officer firing at dog is recovering

     Ava’s parents, Andrea and Brad Ellis, and their attorney disputed the police account Tuesday and alleged the policeman fired unnecessarily and acted recklessly with children nearby on the porch. They say the roughly 40-pound dog, a bulldog mix named Patches, was retreating inside from the porch when the officer fired.

     “The dog may have barked at the officer; however, the officer should not have shot,” attorney Michael Wright said. “There was absolutely no reason for him to shoot. He was within 10 (or) 12 feet of the children.”

     And then the officer drove off without offering help to the injured girl.
     I hear he’s on paid leave right now.

     ‘Finding Your Roots’ Production Stopped After Revealing Ben Affleck’s Ancestors Had Slaves – I think I mentioned this upthread via another short article.

     ‘Finding Your Roots’ season three production has been halted by PBS according to Newsone reports. The program received backlash after an investigation which proved Ben Affleck’s ancestors owned slaves violated ethical guidelines.

     During an October 2014 episode, Affleck found out information about his great-great-great-grandfather and wanted the information omitted. After some email hacking between company executive and the show’s host Henry Louis Gates, he made it clear that the omission would violate the rules, however it was done anyway.

     In April, Affleck apologized and felt embarrassed. Gates released an apology and said, “I sincerely regret not discussing my editing rationale with our partners at PBS and WNET and I apologize for putting PBS and its member stations in the position of having to defend the integrity of their programming.”

     Since this incident Affleck’s episode has been removed from the website.

     Funny how it’s black people who should get over slavery, but someone who finds evidence of slave-holding in their past (five generations removed) is allowed to erase that information. If slavery wasn’t so bad and people should get over it, then slaveholders have nothing to be afraid or embarrassed about, right? :P

     Fewer police officers shot and killed over first half of 2015 than 2014. Not that police unions worry about stats when they go around proclaiming how dangerous it is to be an officer.

     [Kim] was one of 16 police officers shot and killed in the line of duty by a suspect over the first six months of the year, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, a nonprofit organization that tracks all line-of-duty fatalities.

     A day after Kim was killed, Daryle Holloway, 45, a New Orleans police officer, was shot and killed while driving someone to a city jail. Police identified the person being transported as Travis Boys, 33, and authorities said he managed to shoot Holloway during the trip. Boys was arrested after a two-day manhunt.

     Holloway is the most recent officer killed this year. The number of officers shot and killed by suspects over the first half of 2015 is down from the 23 officers killed over the same period last year, according to records kept by the Officer Down Memorial Page.

     […]

     Overall, though, statistics suggest that being a police officer has gotten much safer over the past few decades. While the FBI reported this year that the number of officers killed in the line of duty nearly doubled last year over the year before — rising to 51 — that number still dramatically falls below what the country saw in previous decades.

     About 50 police officers have been fatally shot on average each year over the past decade, and that number has fallen by more than half since the 1970s, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. In addition, federal statistics show that the uptick in 2014 came after a year with the fewest officers killed in the line of duty (27) in any year since 1980.

     Still, interviews this year with current and retired law enforcement officers, as well as their family members, show that the sustained protests over deaths at the hands of police have left many officers feeling assailed.

     “If you imagine someone with a cellphone recording every moment … it’s tough,” said Don Costa, 58, who spent two decades as a detective in Waterbury, Conn. “Are you going to make that one slip? It’s very difficult.”

     Some officers pointed to the rise in ambush attacks — like the two Las Vegas police officers gunned down while eating lunch last year — as a particularly worrisome trend. Others pointed to the dangers they may be called to without realizing it.

     … And all those non-dangers they get called to where they end up killing the person asking for help or simply under mental duress of some kind.

     Man flying Nazi flag outside his home says he will take flag down soon, says he is not racist, just likes flags. I can’t tell, is he trolling confederate fans?

     Angela Bassett’s Emancipated Ancestors, an older episode from October 2014.

     Angela Bassett follows her ancestors, the Stokes family of Georgia, on their harrowing journey from slavery through the Civil War and into the era of emancipation.

     McKinney police releases use of force policy

     The City of McKinney, Texas — which captured national attention earlier this month when a police officer pulled his gun and threw a teenage girl to the ground at a community pool — has released its guidelines on use of force by police officers. The policy does not leave decisions to the “unfettered discretion” of officers but mandates that they use only “objectively reasonable” force.

     Per the policy, officers must use force “which a reasonable, prudent officer would use under the same or similar circumstances.”

     Less than a week after video of the incident was posted online, the chief of McKinney Police Department announced that the officer in question had resigned, and called his actions “indefensible” under department guidelines.

     “Our policies, our training and our practice do not support his actions,” Chief Greg Conley said of Cpl. Eric Casebolt, who was put on administrative leave immediately following the incident.

     “He came into the call out of control and as the video shows was out of control during the incident,” the chief summarized.

     The policy released by McKinney police outlines a “use of force spectrum” for officers to consider when attempting to gain control over an incident.

     This spectrum ranges from verbal commands, to non-deadly force options such as pepper spray, electrical control devices and batons, to deadly force via firearm.

     Among other factors, the McKinney Police Department requires officers to consider the age and physical condition of the subject when determining the appropriate level of force.

     McKinney police officers must also weigh whether alternative actions are feasible to gain control of a situation, as well as the behavior of the subject.

     Media outlets have reported that the teenage girl whom Casebolt threw to the ground and aggressively restrained was either 14 or 15 years old.

     Lawyers for the city of McKinney petitioned the state attorney general for permission to withhold portions of the policy. Since state records officials had already determined in 2013 that police could withhold only select portions of its entire manual, the department was forced to release the policy without further delay.

     I’m guessing Casebolt didn’t exactly abide by the policy.

330. rq says

     1 July 2015 at 6:29 am

     Westlake police officer indicted on charges of excessive force, obstruction

     A federal grand jury has indicted a Westlake police detective for using excessive force on a suspect who was in custody and trying to cover up his actions, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

     Robert Toth, who was hired by Westlake in 1992, faces one count of excessive force and two counts of obstruction. He was put on unpaid leave on Tuesday and will remain on leave while the case is pending, police Capt. Guy Turner said.

     Toth, 48, of North Olmsted, harmed suspect “T.A.”, who was already under arrest, on April 24, 2014, the release states.

     He then falsified a report regarding his encounter with “T.A.” on April 25, 2014 and May 1, 2014, the indictment says.

     Toth also lied to an FBI agent on May 3, 2014, the indictment states.

     So officers can face consequences if they lie enough times about their ‘interactions’ with suspects, but not for the interactions themselves. Did I get that right?

     KKK Gets ‘OK’ for Cross Burning, Confederate Flag Rally in South Carolina, Sputnik News.

     Watch the entire documentary Slavery by Another Name and “Making of” the documentary special. Of course, ti’s blocked in my country. But it sounds interesting.

     Killer Mike Asks Fans To Vote For Him In Atlanta Election

     Listening to Killer Mike talk, or rap, for one minute should be enough to convince you he’s a born political leader. While he’s always been very vocal about his views, Mike has never attempted to enter politics, but it seems the day has finally come.

     Posting on Instagram today, the rapper asked fans in Atlanta to go to the polls and write his given name (Michael Render) on the ballet to replace former state rep Tyrone Brooks.

     According to Pigeons and Planes, there are already seven candidates for the position, so it might be tough for Mike to wedge his way in at this point, but then again, he has a considerable influence.

     Check out Mike’s post below. Would you vote for him?

     Less (Tennis) Can Be More: Why Serena Williams Is A Better Athletic Role Model Than Tiger Woods

     Serena Williams made a silly, charming, wholly unnecessary tribute video recently, dancing to Beyonce’s “7/11.” She took the time to do a photo shoot for a Vogue cover. Just a few days ago, she was on stage with Taylor Swift at a concert in London. And it was hard to tell if Williams was just having fun, because on one hand she kept giggling, but on the other she admitted to being on a competitive dance team, too.

     “Our dream is to perform on Ellen,” she said.

     Add it up, and life sometimes seems to be one distraction after another for Williams. And that’s a problem. After all, this is the biggest time of the year for professional tennis players. Wimbledon starts today, followed by the summer hard court season and the U.S. Open. So here’s some free advice for Williams: if you have any interest in making it in tennis, ixnay on the videos and photo shoots. Buckle down and commit.

     Oh, and yes, that just might be the dumbest thing anyone has ever written.

     A decade ago, however, it didn’t seem that way. Not when Chris Evert wrote Williams a public letter in Tennis magazine in 2006, all but pleading with the world’s top player: “I wonder whether 20 years from now, you may reflect on your career and regret not putting 100 percent of yourself into tennis.”

     At the time, that was not an outrageous sentiment. Tennis fans knew Williams was great. They wanted her to be great all the time. Meanwhile, Williams didn’t always appear to want the same. Only now, years later, that debate has been settled. And some of Evert’s words merit a closer look.

     Putting 100 percent of yourself into your tennis.

     The 33-year-old Williams has won the past three majors, is ranked No. 1 and is arguably the greatest player of all time. (To me, she’s No. 2 behind Steffi Graf, but closing fast). Williams has meant so many things over the years about strong women in sports, about diversity in tennis, about female body-image issues. But there is one other angle that goes overlooked, where the message of Williams’ historic career doesn’t seem to click with others, no matter how strongly—and repeatedly—she proves the point.

     Williams always pushed for variety in her life, for activities and hobbies and an identity beyond the court, explaining to critics when she was younger that if she focused 100 percent on tennis all the time, she would burn out. Well, she is now in her mid-30s and still dominating: 32-1 this year, 4,421 points ahead of No. 2 Petra Kvitova in the WTA rankings, a winner of seven Grand Slam titles since turning 30—two more majors than Graf, Evert and Martina Navratilova won after age 30 combined.

     Contrast that to Tiger Woods, who also has done plenty for sports, and meant many things to many people. Among those things? Woods changed sports parenting. All of us saw Earl Woods groom his son, essentially from birth, to be the world’s best golfer. It worked. Woods won his first Masters in 1997, and on that day, too many would-be Earls took the wrong lesson. Freaky sports parenting became more common. Pushed by their Tiger Dads and Moms, our children became underage athletic specialists, little professionals. In the old days, little kids used to climb trees. Now, they work on their curveball or their sand wedge.

     One sport, one skill, one motion, one thought.

     I’m not sure any Tiger Parents have noticed this, or if they even realize anymore whose model they’re still following, but the Tiger Woods model has failed. Woods has failed. His life is a mess. He seems sullen. Unhappy. His entire tabloid unraveling read like a classic case of rebellious acting out. At 39, he can’t even play golf anymore, not with his overtaxed body constantly breaking down.

     Meanwhile, Williams owns a sport typically owned by younger people, and is on stage with Taylor Swift, giggling and seemingly having the time of her life.

     More at the link.

331. rq says

     1 July 2015 at 6:43 am

     Black Churches Are Burning, and We Need to be Asking Why

     For those familiar with the long history of racist violence in the U.S., the recent fires at six predominantly black churches across the South might provoke painful memories of bigotry.

     The fires all occurred within a week and a half of the murder of nine black parishioners by a white racial supremacist at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (“Mother Emanuel”) in Charleston, South Carolina. Officials are investigating at least three of the fires — in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia — as arson.

     Because the investigations are not complete, it cannot yet be determined whether any of these fires were the consequences of racially motived terrorism. Nevertheless, the specter of racial bigotry in America’s past haunts our present. White racial supremacists have long targeted black churches in the U.S.

     “Across the diaspora, black spiritual and religious spaces — whether a clearing in the woods or a stone and mortar church — have nurtured rebellion, and that’s why they continue to be under siege,” J.T. Roane, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Columbia University, told Mic.

     Here we are, in the summer of 2015, bearing witness to events that are eerie reminders of our past. The recent fires, especially in the aftermath of the Charleston massacre, thus have been interpreted by some black Americans as signaling the advent of another era of calculated anti-black animus.

     Yet broad public response to clear patterns of violence is often tempered by apprehension. What will it take to talk more openly about the very real potential for violent responses to the current push for racial equity and progress?

     Article continues with a historical look at church burnings and the context in which they occurred previously.

     Relevenat for the militarization: Before the horsey part of the RCMP Musical Ride began on Saturday — its famous Sunset Ceremony — out came members of the force’s Emergency Response Team in two vehicles.

     “Is there no place now where Canadians can be spared the Conservative government’s jingoistic militaristic bleating with its conjured-up images of dangers lurking around every corner, nurturing the fear that “others” are out to rob us of our freedoms?”

     Noting the presence of RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson in the grandstand, Koller wrote that the display of police hardware had some young children spooked and many adults bewildered.

     “But Commissioner Bob Paulson, really,” he concluded the entry, “who takes their children to a horse show on a Saturday evening expecting a scene from an average day’s viewing on CNN of heavily-armed police working the streets of Ferguson, Missouri?

     “The RCMP should be embarrassed.”

     Koller is a musician, author and retired CBC broadcaster. He lives not far from the Musical Ride Centre on Sandridge Road and has often seen the ceremony, but not this version.

     “I looked around and there were a lot of furrowed brows on parents,” Koller said on Monday of the crowd reaction. “We looked at each other thinking, ‘What the hell is this?’”

     He said the youngest child in their party “cowered” in her mother’s arms. “You don’t do this in front of a bunch of little kids.”

     He thought it was particularly inappropriate because it feeds into the “incessant militarization” of police responses all over North America to emergencies or crises in public order.

     It was put to Koller that maybe this is the modern face of the RCMP, no longer a mounted force with lances and stetsons, but a para-military organization tasked with fighting terrorism in all its forms. The slaying of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial and the attack on Parliament Hill, after all, were a mere eight months ago.

     He countered with two arguments:

     “Don’t start demonstrating threat-management skills in a modern society at a horse show, with that audience.”

     And secondly, we don’t need to be constantly told — incorrectly — we have to be afraid or hyper-vigilant. “Barring one or two categories, every crime stat has been going down in this country for 30 years.”

     I like the musical ride, it’s a fine example of horsemanship and training and yadda yadda yadda. I kind of wish it would be removed from the police context, though, considering the RCMP and its history, even celebrating the pageantry seems like an erasure of a not-so-shiningly-justice-filled past.

     The Teen Who Designed Her African-Print Prom Dress Whipped Up a Dress for Naturi Naughton to Wear at the BET Awards

     Kyemah McEntyre, that 18-year-old prom-dress slayer we told you about a few weeks ago, put her designing skills to use once again. And this time, her work was featured on a more prominent stage.

     Power actress Naturi Naughton showed up on the 2015 BET Awards red carpet rocking a dress designed by McEntyre. Like McEntyre’s prom dress, Naughton’s dress also was made with an African-print fabric.

     McEntyre, who says she designed her prom dress to promote versatility and combat negative stereotypes she’s endured, told Necole Bitchie that Naughton contacted her after seeing her prom dress online.

     “Naturi contacted me through e-mail, and we talked over the phone about her ideal dress,” McEntyre explained. McEntyre posted a lengthy explanation on Instagram about what prompted her to design her prom dress, and that inspired Naughton.

     “She explained to me that she wanted to connect with her African roots as well,” McEntyre said. Plus, both Naughton and McEntyre are from East Orange, N.J., so Naughton wanted to show a young girl from her hometown some love.

     McEntyre described how she was a bit nervous and apprehensive about the process because her prom dress was the first dress she had designed ever in her life, and Naughton’s would be the second.

     But McEntyre said that Naughton had a “beautiful soul” and reassured her. The actress spoke about wanting to “shed light on young people from her community” in East Orange.

     “People ask me all the time how does it feel, and I tell them it’s just amazing to be celebrated for just being myself. I consider myself to be an artist, fashion designer and self-identity activist,” McEntyre told Nicole Bitchie.

     McEntyre designs the dresses and then gets a local seamstress to make them. It looks like McEntyre may have jump-started a wonderful career for herself.

     Can I say WOW and I hope she has a bright future ahead, because she already has an amazing feel for colour, design, and what can stun an audience (in a good way).

     SC Church Burns Second Time in 20 Years – that’s just the Daily Beast headline, here’s a story:
     Greeleyville AME church seventh burned across South in wake of Emanuel shooting. Yes, yes, a couple may have been accidents, but they’re awfully coincidental accidents. And even as accidents, they add to the general climate of fear and unsafety.

     Flames engulfed a historic African-American church Tuesday night that was already destroyed once by a blaze ignited by the Ku Klux Klan in 1995.

     Mount Zion AME Church in Greeleyville is the seventh black church to burn across the South in the wake of the killing of nine worshipers at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church.

     State Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel said several agents responded to the fire and that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other federal agencies were notified. The cause was not immediately known Tuesday night.

     Cezar McKnight, D-Kingstree, watched as heavy smoke billowed from the church and bright orange flames shot into the air. The church is located at 564 MacKey Road.

     “It’s gone,” he said. “They don’t know the cause yet, but I am hoping for the best.

     “South Carolina has been through a lot the last two weeks and we’ve made the best of a terrible situation. I would hate for this to be something somebody did on purpose to try to poison the love and fellowship.”

     Keel said that a fire investigation likely couldn’t begin until the blaze was extinguished, which was not the case at 10 p.m. The fire was out by midnight, according to Williamsburg County Sheriff’s Office investigator Alex Edwards. He late Tuesday said that it began about 8:30 p.m. and it was unknown if foul play was suspected.

     A storm blew through the area just before the fire, Keel said, speculating that lightning could have ignited it, but adding that he did not know for sure. He said recent events, however, were cause for concern.

     “Certainly, I think we all are concerned about those things,” he said.

     […]

     Mount Zion AME is one of two churches that was torched in June 1995 by two KKK members. The other was Macedonia Baptist Church in Bloomville.

     The response to a string of church fires 20 years ago was similar to the response to the Emanuel shootings in Charleston. Then-President Bill Clinton even visited Mount Zion AME as it was being rebuilt and spoke at the dedication. His remarks then were hauntingly familiar.

     “The men and women of Mount Zion have shown us the meaning of these words by refusing to be defeated and by building up this new church. Others have come together with you,” Clinton said on June 12, 1996. “The pastor told me he got contributions from all over the world to help to rebuild this church. In just a few days we’ll have a joyful noise coming out of this church. … I want to ask every citizen, as we stand on this hallowed ground together, to help to rebuild our churches, to restore hope, to show the forces of hatred they cannot win.”

     Imagine? They just rebuilt in the mid-90s, and now its gone again. Someone mentioned that this is the church that Clinton visited during that spate of church burnings. Awfully suspicious coincidence. (But yes, it could still be a coincidence! And an accident!)

     9 Black people executed in church by a White supremacist, then seven Black churches burn and people refuse to call this terrorism. Wow. And as someone else said, too – where are all those crying ‘Attack on Religion!!!’? When 9 people were killed in a church, they were loud, but now, when churches are actually burning… silence.

332. rq says

     1 July 2015 at 6:54 am

     Black Churches Are Burning, and We Need to be Asking Why

     For those familiar with the long history of racist violence in the U.S., the recent fires at six predominantly black churches across the South might provoke painful memories of bigotry.

     The fires all occurred within a week and a half of the murder of nine black parishioners by a white racial supremacist at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (“Mother Emanuel”) in Charleston, South Carolina. Officials are investigating at least three of the fires — in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia — as arson.

     Because the investigations are not complete, it cannot yet be determined whether any of these fires were the consequences of racially motived terrorism. Nevertheless, the specter of racial bigotry in America’s past haunts our present. White racial supremacists have long targeted black churches in the U.S.

     “Across the diaspora, black spiritual and religious spaces — whether a clearing in the woods or a stone and mortar church — have nurtured rebellion, and that’s why they continue to be under siege,” J.T. Roane, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Columbia University, told Mic.

     Here we are, in the summer of 2015, bearing witness to events that are eerie reminders of our past. The recent fires, especially in the aftermath of the Charleston massacre, thus have been interpreted by some black Americans as signaling the advent of another era of calculated anti-black animus.

     Yet broad public response to clear patterns of violence is often tempered by apprehension. What will it take to talk more openly about the very real potential for violent responses to the current push for racial equity and progress?

     Article continues with a historical look at church burnings and the context in which they occurred previously.

     Relevenat for the militarization: Before the horsey part of the RCMP Musical Ride began on Saturday — its famous Sunset Ceremony — out came members of the force’s Emergency Response Team in two vehicles.

     “Is there no place now where Canadians can be spared the Conservative government’s jingoistic militaristic bleating with its conjured-up images of dangers lurking around every corner, nurturing the fear that “others” are out to rob us of our freedoms?”

     Noting the presence of RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson in the grandstand, Koller wrote that the display of police hardware had some young children spooked and many adults bewildered.

     “But Commissioner Bob Paulson, really,” he concluded the entry, “who takes their children to a horse show on a Saturday evening expecting a scene from an average day’s viewing on CNN of heavily-armed police working the streets of Ferguson, Missouri?

     “The RCMP should be embarrassed.”

     Koller is a musician, author and retired CBC broadcaster. He lives not far from the Musical Ride Centre on Sandridge Road and has often seen the ceremony, but not this version.

     “I looked around and there were a lot of furrowed brows on parents,” Koller said on Monday of the crowd reaction. “We looked at each other thinking, ‘What the hell is this?’”

     He said the youngest child in their party “cowered” in her mother’s arms. “You don’t do this in front of a bunch of little kids.”

     He thought it was particularly inappropriate because it feeds into the “incessant militarization” of police responses all over North America to emergencies or crises in public order.

     It was put to Koller that maybe this is the modern face of the RCMP, no longer a mounted force with lances and stetsons, but a para-military organization tasked with fighting terrorism in all its forms. The slaying of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial and the attack on Parliament Hill, after all, were a mere eight months ago.

     He countered with two arguments:

     “Don’t start demonstrating threat-management skills in a modern society at a horse show, with that audience.”

     And secondly, we don’t need to be constantly told — incorrectly — we have to be afraid or hyper-vigilant. “Barring one or two categories, every crime stat has been going down in this country for 30 years.”

     I like the musical ride, it’s a fine example of horsemanship and training and yadda yadda yadda. I kind of wish it would be removed from the police context, though, considering the RCMP and its history, even celebrating the pageantry seems like an erasure of a not-so-shiningly-justice-filled past.

     The Teen Who Designed Her African-Print Prom Dress Whipped Up a Dress for Naturi Naughton to Wear at the BET Awards

     Kyemah McEntyre, that 18-year-old prom-dress slayer we told you about a few weeks ago, put her designing skills to use once again. And this time, her work was featured on a more prominent stage.

     Power actress Naturi Naughton showed up on the 2015 BET Awards red carpet rocking a dress designed by McEntyre. Like McEntyre’s prom dress, Naughton’s dress also was made with an African-print fabric.

     McEntyre, who says she designed her prom dress to promote versatility and combat negative stereotypes she’s endured, told Necole B*tchie [I’M SORRY I have to put that there else the spam trap gets the comment!!!] that Naughton contacted her after seeing her prom dress online.

     “Naturi contacted me through e-mail, and we talked over the phone about her ideal dress,” McEntyre explained. McEntyre posted a lengthy explanation on Instagram about what prompted her to design her prom dress, and that inspired Naughton.

     “She explained to me that she wanted to connect with her African roots as well,” McEntyre said. Plus, both Naughton and McEntyre are from East Orange, N.J., so Naughton wanted to show a young girl from her hometown some love.

     McEntyre described how she was a bit nervous and apprehensive about the process because her prom dress was the first dress she had designed ever in her life, and Naughton’s would be the second.

     But McEntyre said that Naughton had a “beautiful soul” and reassured her. The actress spoke about wanting to “shed light on young people from her community” in East Orange.

     “People ask me all the time how does it feel, and I tell them it’s just amazing to be celebrated for just being myself. I consider myself to be an artist, fashion designer and self-identity activist,” McEntyre told Nicole B*tchie.

     McEntyre designs the dresses and then gets a local seamstress to make them. It looks like McEntyre may have jump-started a wonderful career for herself.

     Can I say WOW and I hope she has a bright future ahead, because she already has an amazing feel for colour, design, and what can stun an audience (in a good way).

     SC Church Burns Second Time in 20 Years – that’s just the Daily Beast headline, here’s a story:
     Greeleyville AME church seventh burned across South in wake of Emanuel shooting. Yes, yes, a couple may have been accidents, but they’re awfully coincidental accidents. And even as accidents, they add to the general climate of fear and unsafety.

     Flames engulfed a historic African-American church Tuesday night that was already destroyed once by a blaze ignited by the Ku Klux Klan in 1995.

     Mount Zion AME Church in Greeleyville is the seventh black church to burn across the South in the wake of the killing of nine worshipers at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church.

     State Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel said several agents responded to the fire and that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other federal agencies were notified. The cause was not immediately known Tuesday night.

     Cezar McKnight, D-Kingstree, watched as heavy smoke billowed from the church and bright orange flames shot into the air. The church is located at 564 MacKey Road.

     “It’s gone,” he said. “They don’t know the cause yet, but I am hoping for the best.

     “South Carolina has been through a lot the last two weeks and we’ve made the best of a terrible situation. I would hate for this to be something somebody did on purpose to try to poison the love and fellowship.”

     Keel said that a fire investigation likely couldn’t begin until the blaze was extinguished, which was not the case at 10 p.m. The fire was out by midnight, according to Williamsburg County Sheriff’s Office investigator Alex Edwards. He late Tuesday said that it began about 8:30 p.m. and it was unknown if foul play was suspected.

     A storm blew through the area just before the fire, Keel said, speculating that lightning could have ignited it, but adding that he did not know for sure. He said recent events, however, were cause for concern.

     “Certainly, I think we all are concerned about those things,” he said.

     […]

     Mount Zion AME is one of two churches that was torched in June 1995 by two KKK members. The other was Macedonia Baptist Church in Bloomville.

     The response to a string of church fires 20 years ago was similar to the response to the Emanuel shootings in Charleston. Then-President Bill Clinton even visited Mount Zion AME as it was being rebuilt and spoke at the dedication. His remarks then were hauntingly familiar.

     “The men and women of Mount Zion have shown us the meaning of these words by refusing to be defeated and by building up this new church. Others have come together with you,” Clinton said on June 12, 1996. “The pastor told me he got contributions from all over the world to help to rebuild this church. In just a few days we’ll have a joyful noise coming out of this church. … I want to ask every citizen, as we stand on this hallowed ground together, to help to rebuild our churches, to restore hope, to show the forces of hatred they cannot win.”

     Imagine? They just rebuilt in the mid-90s, and now its gone again. Someone mentioned that this is the church that Clinton visited during that spate of church burnings. Awfully suspicious coincidence. (But yes, it could still be a coincidence! And an accident!)

     9 Black people executed in church by a White supremacist, then seven Black churches burn and people refuse to call this terrorism. Wow. And as someone else said, too – where are all those crying ‘Attack on Religion!!!’? When 9 people were killed in a church, they were loud, but now, when churches are actually burning… silence.

333. rq says

     1 July 2015 at 7:04 am

     South Carolina church fire: Mt. Zion AME burns in Greeleyville, CNN.
     Another Prominent Black Church Burns In The South Amid FBI Investigation, BuzzFeed.

     The First Black Female Astronaut On Fear, Audacity, And The Importance of Inclusion

     On paper, Mae Jemison’s accomplishments are so varied and groundbreaking, you would never stop to consider that she—like most all of us— isn’t completely fearless.

     Jemison studied chemical engineering at Stanford before going to medical school at Cornell. From there, she went into the Peace Corps as a medical officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia before becoming a general-practice physician in Los Angeles. An itch to keep exploring, something that Jemison admits has been with her since childhood, led her to NASA, where she became an astronaut and the first woman of color in the world to go into space, aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, for its STS-47 Spacelab-J mission in 1992. Among her more recent ventures, Jemison’s taught environmental science at Dartmouth, leads 100 Year Starship, an initiative to get humans to travel beyond our solar system within the next 100 years, started the Earth We Share science literacy project, serves as Bayer Corporation USA’s national science literacy advocate, and is on the boards of Kimberly-Clark, Scholastic, and Valspar.

     Along the way, she’s learned a lot, from complex technical engineering to soft skills like patience.
     Fear Isn’t Always A Weakness

     According to Jemison, she’s learned it’s what you do with that fear that makes the difference. She suffered from a fear of heights, but once she got into the astronaut training program, Jemison says, “There was no way I was not going to get through because of my fear of heights.” Instead, she relied on the strength of her ego to push forward.

     “It’s a weakness only if it keeps you from doing stuff,” Jemison explains, adding that derring-do is not necessarily a strength. She believes as you learn your strengths and work on weaknesses, the key is more an issue of balance than to focus on one in hopes the other will disappear.

     “You can rely on strength so much, you don’t build up your other capabilities,” says Jemison. Having too much empathy can hold you back as much as not having any and not be able to read a room, she points out. As for herself, she always tries new things to see what she could do better, something as simple as switching which hand she uses to do something. “I do things with my left hand just to see if I can,” she explains. The change in perspective is enough to shake things up a bit. “We are all tasked to balance and optimize ourselves,” she underscores.

     […]

     Camaraderie Makes A Difference

     Jemison doesn’t discount the effect that women-only schools and professional organizations can have on encouraging women to pursue male-dominated jobs. “The level of confidence women are able to build in women-only groups is important,” she believes, because every role is filled by a female. “You don’t have to be as brazen as I was,” says Jemison.

     “Camaraderie makes a difference,” she says. That’s why she organized Celebrating Women of Color in Flight, Jemison says. Not only did she feel it was her responsibility to raise awareness about these women’s achievements. When female pilots, a master electrician aboard an aircraft carrier, a technical officer from a submarine, and others came together to meet for the first time, it was just as important to see them share stories and bond in a way they don’t get to do with their mostly male colleagues.

     Blocking Internal Biases

     But just as she was given multiple chances by teachers and colleagues to try and fail or succeed, Jemison says the one major thing she’s learned works to get more women to complete STEM degrees and go on to jobs in those fields is tackling the bias of appearance.

     In her work with Bayer, a survey asking department heads of research universities about interactions with young women revealed that incoming female students were prepared to complete a STEM degree but they were not phased by the dwindling number of those who actually did it.

     The typical reasons were cited: The women either weren’t competitive or confident enough to see it through. “I am impatient with that because that is foolish,” says Jemison. She cites studies that found professors often discourage their young female students, in part because they can’t visualize them becoming their colleagues eventually. “People graduate and go into fields in spite of the professors, not because of them,” Jemison contends. Success in part comes from what you give people permission to do, she argues.

     Organizations that want to make a difference and be more inclusive need to shed their internal biases, too, she posits. As an example, she calls out companies that encourage staffers to play golf in order to belong. “I don’t know how to play,” says Jemison. “But my lack of ability should not preclude me from talking to people.”

     Talking to people and educating them is what Jemison continues to do. She gets asked to make a lot of professional appearances given her track record and the fact that she’s still one of the few black women astronauts. But at one recent conference on getting more girls into tech, she felt like a fish out of water.

     “We needed a woman who decided to major and go all the way through in computer science to have this make sense,” she recalls suggesting. Then she was told that such a person would only want to talk about algorithms and that might be boring or off-putting. “These are women who are trying to get more women in IT who had a negative view of women in computer science, and they didn’t even see the block,” Jemison remembers.

     “We get different results when we are inclusive,” she says, and not just to reach the stars but to accelerate the pace of equality. Her recommendation: Balance inclusion and audacity. “And be a little impatient,” she adds with a hearty laugh.

     Rand Paul Privately Pow-Wows With Anti-Gov’t Rancher Cliven Bundy. Errrmm…

     Baltimore officer will not face charges for hitting handcuffed suspect. You win some, you lose some.

     A Baltimore Sun investigation into police misconduct revealed last fall that McSpadden, who joined the force in 1993, had been sued five times after allegedly beating suspects during arrests. Taxpayers have paid more than $624,000 to settle those lawsuits; neither the city nor McSpadden acknowledged wrongdoing in those settlements.

     At the time, The Sun also found that a security camera video had recorded much of the June 17, 2012, incident involving McSpadden and Bolaji Obe of Baltimore. Police leaders suspended McSpadden minutes after The Sun asked for comment about the video, which showed a version of events that was at odds with McSpadden’s official account.

     Rochelle Ritchie, a spokeswoman for State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby, said Tuesday in a statement: “Despite the fact that the statute of limitations for the most serious offenses expired during the previous administration, the State’s Attorney’s Office conducted a thorough review of the evidence pertaining to all remaining potential criminal charges in this case and has determined that we could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt any additional criminal acts, thereby we have declined to prosecute Officer Michael McSpadden.”

     Nice. Very nice. :P

     ‘You’re Really Being an Asshole, Officer.’ An article about cursing at cops.

     Yesterday the Washington State Supreme Court threw out an obstruction conviction against a juvenile who had insulted police and refused to go away when they were detaining his younger sister. The juvenile, with the initials E.J.J., directed the word “motherfucker” at Seattle police officers, according to pleadings in the case. He used other names, too.

     E.J.J., concerned for his sister’s safety, had also insisted on staying and watching, refusing a police command to go inside the family’s house and shut and lock the wooden front door behind him while officers dealt with his intoxicated sister in the driveway.

     For the conviction of obstructing police, E.J.J. was sentenced to four days of detention (served on a work crew), two months of community supervision, and 18 hours of community service.

     His appellate attorney, Lila Silverstein, told The Marshall Project: “We all know that speech does not have to be pretty to be protected.” And the state Supreme Court agreed. Ruling that E.J.J.’s conviction violated the First Amendment, the court wrote: “While E.J.J.’s words may have been disrespectful, discourteous, and annoying, they are nonetheless constitutionally protected.”

     The court’s finding reaffirmed a principle with a long and geographically sweeping history in the United States, to wit: People are allowed to call the police names, even really bad names, and really, it’s hard to imagine a name much worse than “motherfucker.” (Editor’s note: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.)

     There are exceptions to this, of course. But in general – as the examples below attest – as long as people don’t resort to conduct that threatens violence, or use “fighting words” likely to incite a violent response, they can go ahead and tell police what they think of them, be it through profanity, gesture, or donut reference.

     The article goes through a variety of bad words and combinations, such as ‘asshole’, plus ‘stupid’; ‘muttonhead’ and ‘czar’; ‘why don’t you pick on somebody your own size?’ and, of course, the middle finger. Along with others.

334. Pteryxx says

     1 July 2015 at 7:25 am

     via jack lecou in the No more compliments thread:

     And the “Oregon” part of the Oregon territory became a state in 1859 – with a “bill of rights” that banned black people from living there.

     If anyone’s not familiar with the astounding history of official racism in Oregon, this was the first thing that came up on google when I looked for something to refresh myself on the details. It’s a thorough — and thoroughly disturbing, summary.

     That article appears in Gizmodo this past January: Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia

     When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859, it was the only state in the Union admitted with a constitution that forbade black people from living, working, or owning property there. It was illegal for black people even to move to the state until 1926. Oregon’s founding is part of the forgotten history of racism in the American west.

     […]

     America’s history of racial discrimination is most commonly taught as a southern issue. That’s certainly how I learned about it while going to Minnesota public schools in the 1980s and 90s. White people outside of the South seem to learn about the Civil War and civil rights movements from an incredibly safe (and often judgmental) distance.

     Racism was generally framed as something that happened in the past and almost always “down there.” We learned about the struggles for racial equality in cities like Birmingham and Selma and Montgomery. But what about the racism of Portland, Oregon, a city that is still overwhelmingly white? The struggles there were just as intense — though they are rarely identified in the history books.

     […]

     This is not to pick on Oregon in particular as being particularly racist and terrible. The de facto exclusion of any non-white people from a number of businesses, institutions, and communities occurred throughout the Northeast, Midwest, and West. Oregon seems to have been just a bit more vocal and straightforward about it.

     I spoke over the phone with Walidah Imarisha, an educator and expert on black history in Oregon and she was quick to explain that the state is only really exceptional in that it bothered to proclaim its goals of white supremacy so openly.

     “What’s useful about Oregon as a case study is that Oregon was bold enough to write it down,” Imarisha told me. “But the same ideology, policies, and practices that shaped Oregon shaped every state in the Union, as well as this nation as a whole.”

     While the voters of Oregon rejected slavery, they also rejected having non-white people in the state at all. (I guess accepting slavery would have meant, necessarily, having black people around, so this isn’t necessarily a contradiction.) Much more detail at the link, from an 1844 order for flogging of any free blacks who didn’t leave, through the KKK’s heyday in local politics in the 1920’s, Jim Crow-style segregation in the 50’s, to the current presence of white separatists escaping from the south.

     The segregation in Portland was as stark as anything in the Jim Crow-era South. And Portland’s bizarre dearth of black people (bizarre to outsiders who were unaware of the climate) really came to a head during World War II, when an influx of black workers came looking for the plentiful jobs offered by the Kaiser Shipyards.

     “Portland was called the most segregated city north of the Mason-Dixon line,” Imarisha tells me. “And so the question became where would these [newly arrived black workers] go? Suddenly you have tens of thousands of black folks pouring in when in Portland there was only one tiny neighborhood called the Albina neighborhood that was already overfull with about 2,500 black folks.”

     The company worked with the city to create Vanport, an enormous new housing development halfway between Vancouver, Washington and Portland — thus the name Vanport.

     “At its height there was 100,000 people there and it was 40 percent black, which for anything to be 40 percent black in Oregon was astounding, Imarisha explains. “Vanport was built incredibly shoddily because it was never meant to last.”

     This temporary insta-town would become Oregon’s second largest city, second only to Portland during the second World War.

     “In fact the housing authority in Portland called it a blight and wanted Vanport obliterated. And in 1948 they got their wish when Vanport was completely flooded.” Imarisha says. Amazingly, the flooding actually started modestly and people had time to leave. But Portland officials insisted that there was nothing to worry about when the first cracks started letting water into the community.

     “Remember: Dikes are safe at present,” a bulletin from the Portland Housing Authority read on May 30, 1948. “You will be warned if necessary. You will have time to leave. Don’t get excited.”

     People were not warned in time and the city was flooded as the dikes fully gave way. Fifteen people would die in the floods. Less than two weeks later President Truman would travel to Vanport to see the extent of the damage firsthand.

     “Because it was made with shoddy material, houses literally washed away off their foundations. All of Vanport was destroyed and about 18,000 people who were living there were left homeless.”

     —

     “There is and was some sense that the Pacific Northwest could amount to some form of utopia,” Benjamin tells me referring to the white supremacist movement in the region. “And Richard Butler knew this himself, the old founder of Aryan Nations.”

     Butler died in 2004, but was obsessed as so many other white nationalist militants were, with establishing a white utopia in the area. Butler, much like the founders of Oregon, bothered to write it down.

     “He identified the Pacific Northwest as what would become an Aryan homeland,” Benjamin says. “So the Pacific Northwest has always had a utopic quality to white separatists.”

     “On the one hand, I saw a lot of can-do spirit, therefore one shouldn’t be surprised by all of the technological start-ups both in Oregon and in Washington State. But I also saw a lot of Confederate refugees, to be frank,” Benjamin tells me.

     “I remember driving through swaths of Washington and Oregon and seeing a lot of Confederate flags,” he says. “There are a lot of refugees from the South who I guess are attracted to Oregon not because they’re racists but Oregon had a racial homogeneity and a conservatism and a gun culture that they really appreciate.”

     —

     The title of Imarisha’s most commonly given presentation is Why Aren’t There More Black People in Oregon? A Hidden History. She has given the presentation to thousands of people around Oregon over the past four years and she’s understandably frustrated that so few Oregonians are aware of something so fundamental to the state’s founding. Oregon’s history simply isn’t being taught in most Oregon schools. And it’s because even the teachers have no idea.

     “It’s still a hidden history today. It’s not part of the curriculum that’s being taught in public schools in this state. I, in fact, gave a presentation that was mostly public school administrators and public school teachers and I asked them how many of them had known about the exclusionary law before they came to the presentation. Seventy to eighty percent didn’t know that Oregon had racial exclusion laws,” she tells me.

     “The image that the rest of the nation has about Portland is founded a lot on the show Portlandia, right? Keep Portland weird — this sort of idea of this being a white liberal playground. And it’s predicated on racial exclusionary laws and the surplus resources that were purposefully kept from communities of color that were redirected into the white community.”

     The Pacific Northwest, and also California, reliably vote for some of the most progressive policies and best safety nets in the entire US. I wonder how much of that stems from willingness to enact such policies for the benefit of a population with very few black people. As we’re seeing, an awful lot of voters will reject their own support structures if those are helping too many of the ‘wrong sort’.

335. Pteryxx says

     1 July 2015 at 7:32 am

     whoops, forgot the link to Walidah Imashara’s presentation: Why Aren’t There More Black People in Oregon? A Hidden History. (youtube link) It’s an hour and 45 minutes long.

336. Pteryxx says

     1 July 2015 at 7:48 am

     WaPo today after yet another church burned yesterday: Why Racists Burn Black Churches Disturbingly familiar.

     Since at least 1822, when the first recorded burning of a black church occurred in South Carolina, church arson has been the default response of racists frustrated with progress — or even the faint specter of progress — on civil rights. More than even lynching, burning houses of worship remains a go-to weapon in hate groups’ arsenal. Torching churches such as Mount Zion persisted decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, 100 years after Booker T. Washington dined at the White House and 150 years after the end of the Civil War.

     What’s the enduring appeal of this very specific terrorist act for those who wish to express hate?

     The reason black churches remain a target: Because black churches have always remained a symbol of hope in the darkness.

     […]

     Like their predecessors during slavery, these churches provided more than just spiritual solace. They facilitated an explosion of black literacy in the South — from 5 percent in 1870 to approximately 70 percent by 1900, according to Maffly-Kipp — and fostered a wide array of black cultural and political leaders. For example, more than a third of black legislators in Georgia during Reconstruction were ordained ministers. To the north, the First Congregational Church in Great Barrington, Mass., raised funds to send one its promising young parishioners to college: W.E.B. DuBois.

     That tradition continued into the 1950s and 60s, when churches served as training grounds for the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and shelters for its foot soldiers. Protests were planned beneath their roofs, rallies were launched from their steps, leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. preached equality from their pulpits. They were command posts in the fight for civil rights — and that made them targets.

     “The bombing and burning of black churches translated into an attack upon the core of civil rights activism, as well as upon the larger black community,” Michelle M. Simms-Paris wrote in her 1993 law review article “What does it mean to see a black church burning?” “A broad assault on members of a black community could effectively take place by burning a black church.”

     […]

     Elsewhere, bombings and burnings at black churches were often overlooked — except by their victims, whom they terrified. In her article, Simms-Paris recounted more than a dozen attacks on activist black churches between 1957 and 1968. These congregations were active in the Civil Rights Movement —registering people to vote, hosting Head Start programs, organizing protests against segregated schools — and the burnings scared them into silence. In Meridian, Miss., where two churches were bombed and two more burned in the course of a single year, the congregation at a fifth church vetoed a proposal to launch a Head Start program there, scared they would be next.

     Though church fires never really stopped, they surged in the mid-1990s, when a spate of more than 600 incidents across the South finally held the nation’s attention. Among them was Mount Zion AME, a modest church in Greeleyville that suddenly went up in flames one night in June 1995. The sheriff initially dismissed the incident as an electrical fire even though the church’s pastor said the breaker box had been turned off. When a second local church was burned two nights later, it was deemed an act of nature.

     […]

     Still, for many the church remains “the beating heart” of the African American community, as President Obama put it in his eulogy for Emanuel AME pastor Clementa Pinckney in Charleston last week. Obama’s remarks echoed those of President Clinton at the dedication of the new Mount Zion AME church in Greeleyville 19 years ago — the same building that was ravaged by flames Tuesday night.

     At the ceremony, Clinton presented the congregation with a plaque that read: “We must come together as one America to rebuild our churches, restore hope, and show the forces of hatred they cannot win.”

     That plaque was inside Mount Zion AME while it burned last night.

337. rq says

     1 July 2015 at 8:55 am

     Ferguson police antagonized Michael Brown protesters, DoJ report finds

     Police antagonized crowds who gathered to protest in Ferguson after Michael Brown’s death last summer, violated free speech rights and made it difficult to hold officers accountable, according to a Justice Department report that found across-the-board flaws in law enforcement’s response.

     The report summary, which covers the two-week period of unrest that followed a white officer fatally shooting the unarmed black 18-year-old in August, also faulted officers for inappropriately using teargas, withholding information that should have been made public and relying on military-style equipment “that produced a negative reaction” in the community.

     The summary is part of a longer after-action report to be released in the coming weeks focusing on the actions of police in Ferguson, St Louis city and county and the Missouri state highway patrol.

     Details of the summary were first reported by the St Louis Post-Dispatch on Tuesday. The Associated Press later obtained a copy.

     The report suggests that the protests after Brown’s death on 9 August were aggravated by the community’s hostility toward Ferguson police and worsened when authorities didn’t quickly divulge details of his death.

     “Had law enforcement released information on the officer-involved shooting in a timely manner and continued the information flow as it became available, community distrust and media skepticism would most likely have been lessened,” according to the document.

     A grand jury and the Justice Department both declined to prosecute officer Darren Wilson, who is white and later resigned, but another Justice Department report released in March was critical of Ferguson police and the city’s profit-driven municipal court system.

     […]

     More broadly, though, the report chastised the Ferguson police department for failing to manage the community reaction and develop a long-term strategy, as well as for maintaining poor relationships with the black community – a problem that “over time led to devastating effects”.

     “The protests were … also a manifestation of the long-standing tension between the Ferguson (police department) and the African American community,” the report summary stated.

     The report was prepared by the Justice Department’s community oriented policing services office, a component that works to build trust between police departments and the communities they serve. The office, which also conducts after-action reports on high-profile police responses, said Tuesday it’ll release its final report on the Ferguson response in coming weeks.

     Representatives from the police agencies who were analyzed either declined to comment Tuesday or did not return messages from the AP seeking comment.

     St Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson told the Post-Dispatch that he didn’t have enough information yet to comment on the report, but that he hopes that it provides a blueprint for dealing with similar situations in the future.

     Among the problems singled out in the report summary is the “highly elevated tactical response” that police used from the beginning, which set a tone that “limited options for a measured, strategic approach”. It acknowledges that a tactical response was sometimes called for, but an “elevated daytime response was not justified and served to escalate rather than de-escalate the overall situation”.

     The report also found that police “underestimated the impact social media had on the incident and the speed at which both facts and rumors were spread and failed to have a social media strategy”.

     White on White Crime: An Unspoken Tragedy, a repost, but can be re-read!

     6 Startling Things About Sex Farms During Slavery That You May Not Know. Excuse the click-bait-y title. It’s basically a milder version of the pdf I posted yesterday.

     California vs. Cannick: The Pretrial

     Just a quick update on my case and since anything I say can and will be used against me, I’m not going to elaborate much. Besides, honestly there isn’t that much to tell.

     Today I appeared in court for my pretrial hearing on charges that I resisted an officer. I am charged with three counts of resisting an officer P69, P148a1 and V2800 (a) stemming from the protest that occurred in downtown Los Angeles on November 26, 2014.

     The hearing was continued until the end of the month so that some business could be handled. See, I told you, not much to tell.

     I did participate in a press conference with attorney Nana Gyamfi prior to my hearing calling attention to the fact that the City Attorney’s office is engaged in selective and retaliatory prosecution of Black Lives Matter Activists and others and trying to criminalize Black civic engagement.

     This has a lot to do with the fact that with somewhere near 500 protest related arrests since last year’s Trayvon Martin protests up to today, less than 10 percent of those arrested have actually been charged. Almost all of the people selected or targeted for criminal charges are connected to or are believed to be connected to Black Lives Matter.

     Although I know it is assumed by the police and the media that because one is Black they are automatically inducted into Black Lives Matter at birth, lol, that’s not the case with me. I’ve never been a member of the group. My charges, I believe have to do solely with Chief Beck, his daughter and that horse–of course.

338. rq says

     1 July 2015 at 10:04 am

     A few sources are saying it’s the eighth, but most media still say it’s the seventh church to burn in the span of about 10 days. Mt Zion AME Church Fire: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know,

     A fire has destroyed a black church in South Carolina that was rebuilt after it was burned down by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1995.

     The fire began at about 8:40 p.m. at the Mount Zion AME Church in Greeleyville, South Carolina, according to reports on Twitter.

     No one was injured. The cause of the fire has not yet been determined, but a source told the Associated Press it does not appear to have been intentionally set.

     It is at least the seventh black church in the South to burn since nine churchgoers were fatally shot June 17 at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina by a racially motivated gunman.

     Five quick facts at the link.

     Missouri woman who said Confederate flag isn’t racist has ties to KKK

     A Missouri woman who operates a Confederate merchandise store was recently outed as having ties to the Ku Klux Klan.

     In a story appearing in the Springfield News-Leader, Anna Robb claimed the media misrepresents the meaning of the rebel flag, adding that it’s really a symbol of Southern culture and has nothing to do with “slavery, racism or white supremacy.”

     Days after conducting that interview, the News-Leader learned Robb’s husband and co-owner of the store, Nathan, once tried to adopt a portion of an Arkansas highway on behalf of the KKK. The paper also discovered Nathan’s father, Thomas Robb, is the national director of the KKK.

     When asked about that familial connection to a designated hate group, Anna Robb said she and her husband have not had contact with Thomas Robb in years. She admitted to attending KKK events in the past, but said that was in the past and has nothing to do with her store or the current issues.

     ‘Hold the line’ commands protected lives during riot, police say. Apparently it’s been a big discussion whether the police were told to ‘stand down’ or not. Appears they were told to ‘hold the line’ instead.

     Baltimore police commanders acknowledge that they ordered officers not to engage rioters multiple times on the day of Freddie Gray’s funeral but said they did so to protect officers and citizens as they prioritized life over property.

     In an interview with The Baltimore Sun, police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts and six top commanders who directed deployments on April 27 denied that they gave blanket orders to do nothing as rioters looted, raided businesses and even attacked officers with impunity.

     More than two months after riots broke out across Baltimore, top brass and rank-and-file officers continue to spar over how platoons of officers were deployed that day. About 160 officers were injured in the riots and businesses suffered millions of dollars in damage.

     Batts has repeatedly denied issuing a “stand down” order — akin to ordering a withdrawal — while officers say they were in effect given such an order, either over the radio or in person, when they were told “do not engage” or “hold the line.”

     Commanders told The Sun that they asked officers to “hold the line” as part of an overall deployment strategy to create a barrier between rioters and police operations and potentially vulnerable people. If officers broke lines during a face-off with rock-throwing protesters, for instance, they could be isolated and surrounded by mobs. And if officers broke the line to make arrests, they might have been forced to guard them amid all the chaos when transport vans weren’t available.

     I wonder what would have happened if htey hadn’t been told to hold the line.

     Female pastors in Clarendon County receive letters threatening their safety

     Two Clarendon County pastors say they have been targeted with threats of violence just because they are women.

     The two pastors received letters where the writer used Bible verses to threaten the women, leaving them concerned about their safety. One letter was left on the front door of Society Hill AME Church on June 10th for Pastor Mary Rhodes.

     “Whoever wrote this letter has taken the rime to find out who I am which means you may know my children, my grandchildren, and I have no clue who you are” Pastor Rhodes said.

     Four days later, Pastor Valarie Bartley received the same letter at Reevesville AME Church.

     The writer, who identifies as Apostle Prophet Harry Leon Fleming, says in the letter that “the woman cannot be head of the man in church, home and the world.”

     “A lot of people do not respect female pastors,” Pastor Rhodes said. “Sexism in the church has been around for the longest time and it always gets, to my opinion, sort of hidden under the other issues that are there.”

     Investigators from the Clarendon County Sheriff’s Office say that one other church led by a female pastor also received the letter.

     Pastor Bartley says she worried about their safety because all three churches are located in rural areas.

     “We have great concern about who is doing this and we pray they will stop,” Pastor Bartley said.

     Clarendon County Sheriff Randy Garrett says he is taking the letters seriously.

     “The Clarendon County Sheriff’s Office is continuing their quest in attempt to locate the person or persons responsible for distributing the letters and will have deputies posted at every church that received the letter,” Garrett said in a statement. “The citizens of Clarendon County will be able to worship in peace…”

     That, on top of everything else.

     Why racists target black churches, Washington Post.

     Since at least 1822, when the first recorded burning of a black church occurred in South Carolina, church arson has been the default response of racists frustrated with progress — or even the faint specter of progress — on civil rights. More than even lynching, burning houses of worship remains a go-to weapon in hate groups’ arsenal. Torching churches such as Mount Zion persisted decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, 100 years after Booker T. Washington dined at the White House and 150 years after the end of the Civil War.

     What’s the enduring appeal of this very specific act of terror for those who wish to express hate?

     The reason black churches remain a target? Because they have always remained a symbol of hope in the darkness of American racism and a source of leadership, political and religious, in the African American community.

     Though it may seem the black church has always been a part of American culture — as essential as the Fourth of July or “The Star-Spangled Banner” — it was not always so. When human beings were held in servitude and meetings among slaves were banned, founding a black church was considered an act of rebellion.

     […]

     Among enslaved people, religious gatherings were called “hush harbors” — a phrase evoked by President Obama during his impassioned eulogy for the slain pastor of Emanuel AME last week. These secret meetings were the birthplace of African American spirituals, which always carried a double meaning of religious salvation and freedom from slavery, and of the inextricable link between black spirituality and black liberation.

     “Part church, part psychological refuge, and part organizing point for occasional acts of outright rebellion … these meetings provided one of the few ways for enslaved African Americans to express and enact their hopes for a better future,” Maffly-Kipp wrote.

     Beyond the confines of slave quarters, black congregations saw threats of their own. White society was deeply suspicious of these churches and their gospel of liberation, which they feared would foment revolt. They weren’t entirely wrong: Nat Turner, who led a famous but short-lived rebellion in Virginia in the 1830s, was a Baptist preacher. And Denmark Vesey, who was executed for his alleged role in plotting an insurrection, was a prominent figure at Charleston’s African Church who preached that black slaves were modern-day Israelites and God’s chosen people.

     States responded with draconian laws intended to shut down the churches but mostly just succeeded in driving them underground. Black congregations remained a spiritual and social force — the places slaves learned to read in secret and escapees took refuge along the Underground Railroad.

     After emancipation, the church remained the center of African American life. Northern black religious leaders launched a huge missionary effort, sending representatives south to set up congregations among free slaves who could now finally worship in the open. Within a few decades, the African Methodist Episcopal and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches, both founded in the North, claimed hundreds of thousands of followers south of the Mason-Dixon line. The National Baptist Convention, founded in Alabama at the end of the 19th century, soon followed.

     Like their predecessors during slavery, these churches provided more than just spiritual solace. They facilitated an explosion of black literacy in the South — from 5 percent in 1870 to approximately 70 percent by 1900, according to Maffly-Kipp — and fostered a wide array of black cultural and political leaders. For example, more than a third of black legislators in Georgia during Reconstruction were ordained ministers. The first African American in the U.S. Congress was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. To the north, the First Congregational Church in Great Barrington, Mass., raised funds to send one its promising young parishioners to college: W.E.B. DuBois.

     That tradition continued into the 1950s and 60s, when churches served as training grounds for the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and shelters for its foot soldiers. Protests were planned beneath their roofs, rallies were launched from their steps, leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. preached equality from their pulpits. They were command posts in the fight for civil rights — and that made them targets.

     […]

     Though church fires never really stopped, they surged in the mid-1990s, when a spate of more than 600 incidents across the South finally held the nation’s attention. Among them was Mount Zion AME, a modest church in Greeleyville that suddenly went up in flames one night in June 1995. The sheriff initially dismissed the incident as an electrical fire even though the church’s pastor said the breaker box had been turned off. When a second local church was burned two nights later, it was deemed an act of nature. [note: it is currently being treated as an accident, too!!! along with a couple of others.]

     […]

     The Rev. Terrance Mackey, pastor of Mount Zion AME, told the Los Angeles Times then that racism was rampant in the community.

     “Racial inequity and intimidation are the norm in this part of South Carolina,” the newspaper reported at the time. “Last week, Gov. David Beasley even cited the local animosities as one of the reasons he believes the Confederate battle flag should no longer fly atop the state Capitol, the last statehouse to fly it.”

     That was in 1996 — but to many today, it sounds achingly familiar.

     Later, two young white men who were members of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter admitted to the Mount Zion attack. And President Bill Clinton’s National Church Arson Task Force, established in 1996 to examine the spate of burnings, prosecuted dozens of others. More than 100 people were arrested in connection with 225 attacks at African American churches between 1995 and 1998 — ultimately, 25 of them were charged with hate crimes.

     […]

     Still, for many the church remains “the beating heart” of the African American community, as Obama put it in his eulogy for Emanuel AME pastor Clementa Pinckney in Charleston last week. Obama’s remarks echoed those of President Clinton at the dedication of the new Mount Zion AME church in Greeleyville 19 years ago — the same building that was ravaged by flames Tuesday night.

     At the ceremony, Clinton presented the congregation with a plaque that read: “We must come together as one America to rebuild our churches, restore hope, and show the forces of hatred they cannot win.”

     That plaque was inside Mount Zion AME while it burned last night.

     Officials, Communities React to Church Burnings in the South

     When a string of fires at predominately black churches in the South began last winter, the U.S. Department of Justice began an investigation. During the next six months, as arsonists set fires across the South and as far north as Delaware and Oklahoma, others began to get involved. One bank offered a reward for information about who set each fire. The U.S. Historic Trust put historic black churches on its endangered list. The Christian Coalition announced it would work with church leaders to help squelch fires. President Clinton spoke on the topic several times during visits to the South and in campaign speeches across the nation. In May, the Justice Department’s investigators announced they found no evidence of a widespread conspiracy. But some Southerners say they see the burnings as part of a larger epidemic: persistent racism and hate.

     Followed by other articles on church burnings… in the 1990s. Seems like nothing has changed.

339. rq says

     1 July 2015 at 10:13 am

     2nd hearing today at 10:30 on resolution to review #STL policies re: police shootings. Here’s the 1st hearing: https://youtu.be/OX2bSK_0AI4

     It’s 2015 right? This happened today in Painesville, OH. In the neighborhood where my family lives #BlackLivesMatter

     Preliminary Investigation: Fire At South Carolina Black Church Not Believed To Be Arson

     The cause of a fire that destroyed a predominantly black church in Greeleyville, South Carolina, on Tuesday, does not appear to be arson, a source told the Associated Press, citing a preliminary investigation.

     The Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church, destroyed 20 years ago by Ku Klux Klan members, burned again Tuesday evening. It was the latest in a series of recent fires at black churches across the South.

     According to preliminary indications, the fire was not intentionally set and was not arson, the AP reported a source as saying. The fire is still under investigation.

     At a press conference today, an official from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) said, “We haven’t ruled anything in or anything out at this time.”

     Officials said giving out any information from the preliminary findings would be “premature.” The ongoing investigation is being conducted by ATF officials and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED).

     A firefighter that was hospitalized due to heat exhaustion was released at 4 a.m. this morning, officials said.

     Fire officials learned of the blaze at 8:30 p.m., according to a statement from the Williamsburg County Sheriff. By the time crews arrived, the flames were already burning through the roof. A resident called in the fire, authorities said at Wednesday’s press conference.

     A Williamsburg County Emergency Management spokesperson told BuzzFeed News the fire was under control by 11 p.m.

     The church is a “total loss” and will have to be rebuilt, authorities said. The congregation will move to a temporary worship site.

     For those who can help: Rebuild the Churches Fund

     At the end of June, four predominantly black churches were burned down by arsonists in a clear attempt to strike a blow at the heart of the black community. As fellow children of God, we stand with our sisters and brothers to help them rebuild these buildings — which are not just houses of worship but centers of ministry for their community.

     To that end, the Rebuild the Churches Fund has been established to collect donations from all over the world for the rebuilding of these churches. We have set an initial goal of $25,000. All money received will be divided equally among these congregations:

     Glover Grove Baptist Church, Warrenville, SC

     College Hill Seventh Day Adventist Church, Knoxville, TN

     Briar Creek Baptist Church, Charlotte, NC

     God’s Power Church of Christ, Macon, GA

     If other black churches are burned or previous fires are deemed to be arson, they will be added to the distribution list.

     The fund is being managed and funds will be disbursed by Christ Church Cathedral (Episcopal) in St. Louis. All contributions are tax deductible.

     Those wishing to give can also make a check out to Christ Church Cathedral with “Rebuild the Churches Fund” in the memo line and send it to:

     Rebuild the Churches

     c/o Christ Church Cathedral

     1210 Locust Street

     St. Louis, MO 63103

     Communities of all faiths are invited to hold special offerings as a sign of interfaith solidarity against racism and with our sisters and brothers of faith. The following congregations have already agreed to have a special collection for these churches at least once during July:

     [list]

     US police killings headed for 1,100 this year, with black Americans twice as likely to die

     Police in the United States are killing people at a rate that would result in 1,100 fatalities by the end of this year, according to a Guardian investigation, which recorded an average of three people killed per day during the first half of 2015.

     The Counted, a project working to report and crowdsource names and a series of other data on every death caused by law enforcement in the US this year, found that 547 people had been killed by the end of June.

     In total, 478 of those people were shot and killed, while 31 died after being shocked by a Taser, 16 died after being struck by police vehicles, and 19 – including 25-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore – have died after altercations in police custody.
     The Counted: people killed by police in the United States in 2015 – interactive
     The Guardian is counting the people killed by US law enforcement agencies this year. Read their stories and contribute to our ongoing, crowdsourced project
     Read more

     When adjusted to accurately reflect the US population, the totals indicate that black people are being killed by police at more than twice the rate of white and Hispanic or Latino people. Black people killed by police were also significantly more likely to have been unarmed.

     Brittany Packnett, an activist and member of Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, described the continued disproportionate killing of unarmed black Americans as “appalling”.

     “It is something we should be deeply ashamed of and committed to changing urgently because it is very literally a life-or-death situation for so many people, and many of those people look like me,” Packnett said on Tuesday.

     The US government does not currently keep a comprehensive record of people killed by police. Instead the FBI runs a voluntary program for law enforcement agencies to submit numbers of “justified homicides” if they choose.

     When the federal government last published a full year’s worth of data, it found 461 “justifiable homicides” by law enforcement for the entirety of 2013; at the current crude rate, the Guardian’s count has law enforcement on track to kill 1,109 people in 2015.

     Forecasting how the total number of officer-involved deaths will stand at the end of 2015 and how this compares with past years is complicated by the fact that a comprehensive count for an entire year, taking into account seasonal changes and other variables, has not yet been produced.

     Over a period spanning from 2003 to 2009 and 2011, the FBI counted 383 such homicides as an annual average. The actual average, as estimated by a March study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics which even that agency’s accountability researchers admit is incomplete, was 928.

     More at the link.

340. rq says

     1 July 2015 at 10:20 am

     Latest Church Fire in SC Does Not Appear to Be a Criminal Act, Sources Say – but I wonder, how hard did they try?

     The latest church fire in South Carolina does not appear to be a criminal act, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.

     Officials said investigators from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were on scene at Mt. Zion AME Church in Greeleyville, but the cause of the Tuesday night fire is unclear. State and federal authorities are involved with the investigation.

     The preliminary assessment, which includes some eyewitness accounts indicating there may have been a lightning strike, will be enhanced when the forensic examiners are able to make more conclusive assessments.

     Another Black Church Burns in the South, the 8th in 10 Days. See? Time says 8!

     Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church, a prominent African-American church in Greeleyville, S.C., caught fire late Tuesday. It is the eighth black church in the Southern U.S. to burn in 10 days.

     Greeleyville, about 60 miles northwest of Charleston, S.C., has seen similar fires before, the Charleston Post and Courier reports. Mount Zion was burned to the ground by the KKK in 1995, part of a string of 30 fires in black churches that spanned two years.

     An investigation into the fire’s cause will begin after it is safely extinguished, chief of the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division Mark Keel told the Post and Courier. He noted that the thunderstorm that pounded the town of 375 on Tuesday evening could have ignited the church. Meteorologist Pete Mohlin of the National Weather Service told the paper that there was a lot of lightning in the area around 7 p.m., but he could not say if it had caused the fire.

     Parishioners across the South are surveying the damage that a string of similar fires has caused this week, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports, starting in Knoxville, Tenn., on June 21 and moving to Macon, Ga., and Gibson County, in Tennessee, on June 23; Charlotte, N.C., on June 24; Elyria, Ohio, on June 25; and Tallahassee, Fla., and Warrenville, S.C., on June 26.

     Three of those fires have been ruled arson, one was determined to be caused by a falling branch and faulty wiring, and the others remain under investigation. Several have been blamed preliminarily on lightning; weather in the South this week has been turbulent.

     Turbulent, indeed. Not just the weather.

     Gary Younge: Farewell to America

     For the past couple of years the summers, like hurricanes, have had names. Not single names like Katrina or Floyd – but full names like Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown. Like hurricanes, their arrival was both predictable and predicted, and yet somehow, when they landed, the effect was still shocking.

     We do not yet know the name that will be attached to this particular season. He is still out there, playing Call of Duty, finding a way to feed his family or working to pay off his student loans. He (and it probably will be a he) has no idea that his days are numbered; and we have no idea what the number of those days will be.

     The precise alchemy that makes one particular death politically totemic while others go unmourned beyond their families and communities is not quite clear. Video helps, but is not essential. Some footage of cops rolling up like death squads and effectively executing people who posed no real threat has barely pricked the popular imagination. When the authorities fail to heed community outrage, or substantively investigate, let alone discipline, the police, the situation can become explosive. An underlying, ongoing tension between authorities and those being policed has been a factor in some cases. So, we do not know quite why his death will capture the political imagination in a way that others will not.

     But we do know, with gruesome certainty, that his number will come up – that one day he will be slain in cold blood by a policeman (once again it probably will be a man) who is supposed to protect him and his community. We know this because it is statistically inevitable and has historical precedent. We know this because we have seen it happen again and again. We know this because this is not just how America works; it is how America was built. Like a hurricane, we know it is coming – we just do not yet know where or when or how much damage it will do.

     Summer is riot season. It’s when Watts, Newark and Detroit erupted in violence in the 1960s, sparked by callous policing. It’s when school is out, pool parties are on and domestic life, particularly in urban centres, is turned inside-out: from the living room to the stoop, from the couch to the street. It’s when tempers get short and resentments bubble up like molten asphalt. It’s when, to paraphrase Langston Hughes, deferred dreams explode.

     Much more at the link, I feel I can’t do it justice as I’m rushing off to work. Please read.

     Misty Copeland’s mentor: The courageous black ballerina who defied racism. Ah! Another fearless black ballerina!

     When Raven Wilkinson made it into the illustrious Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1955, she was told to blend in. The Civil Rights Movement was barely underway, and she was a black ballerina — the company’s first black ballerina — touring the Jim Crow South. She was told to wear white makeup and stand near the foreign dancers.

     “I didn’t want to put the company in danger, but I also never wanted to deny who I was,” Wilkinson, now 80, told Pointe Magazine in 2014. “If someone questioned me directly, I couldn’t say, ‘No, I’m not black.’ Some of the other dancers suggested that I say I was Spanish. But that’s like telling the world there’s something wrong with what you are.”

     Early in her career, Wilkinson faced overt racism. Whites thought she had no place in the ballet. Southern blacks resented her for trying to pass for someone else. She was a target — called out for her color and banished to segregated taxis and motel rooms. And, by the late 1950s, she was face-to-face with the Ku Klux Klan.

     “I remember one time in Montgomery, Alabama, the tour bus rolled into town, and everyone was running around with white robes and hoods on,” she told Pointe Magazine. “They stopped traffic, there were so many of them. There was a rapping sound on the bus door, and this man jumped on in his hood and gown. Several big strapping male company dancers got up and moved toward him. He threw a fistful of racist pamphlets all over the bus before they chased him out.

     “That afternoon, when we got to our hotel in Montgomery, a bunch of us went down to the dining room for dinner. When we walked in, it was full of lovely couples, families with little children — a wonderful family atmosphere. Then, as I pulled out my chair, I realized that they all had Ku Klux Klan robes on the seats next to them. I remember thinking, here are people who can be so cruel and ugly, and yet they’re so loving toward their own families.

     “In a way it made me less frightened of them. They lost some of their power in my eyes.”

     It’s Wilkinson’s plight, perhaps, and her determination to overcome it that has inspired many black ballerinas. Misty Copeland, who just became American Ballet Theatre’s first female African-American dancer to reach principal status, has called Wilkinson a mentor.

     “She experienced a lot more severe, life-threatening racism than other minorities experienced in the ballet world at this point,” Copeland told NPR last year.

     Copeland’s children’s book called “The Firebird,” which was released last year, is about a young girl who, with Copeland’s help, finds the confidence to succeed. The story was inspired by her relationship with Wilkinson, she told the Los Angeles Times.

     “A similar relationship to the one that I have with Raven, that mentor-mentee relationship,” she told the newspaper last year, “except that I would be the mentor and it would be a young brown girl who’s looking up to me.”

     More on Wilkinson at the link!

     Fire at South Carolina black church followed NAACP warning

     Arson is suspected in relation to at least three of the fires. A federal law enforcement source told the AP that preliminary indications are that the fire at the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Greeleyville was not intentionally set and was not arson. However, the fire is still under investigation, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

     Officials say the fire at Mt. Zion AME Church Tuesday was brought under control before midnight, and a local meteorologist told the Post and Courier that heavy storms brought lightning to the area, possibly setting the blaze. Another said the lightning had passed by the time the fire was first reported.

341. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     1 July 2015 at 7:57 pm

     The least diverse jobs in America:

     Earlier this year, Deborah Rhode, a professor at Stanford Law School, lamented the state of diversity in the legal profession. Rhode wrote that despite what it looks like from the outside, statistics show that there are few lawyers who aren’t white. Data from the U.S. Census supports this claim, showing that 81 percent of lawyers are white, down from 89 percent in 2000. Further, only 7 percent of partners at law firms are blacks, Hispanics, Asians, or Native Americans. Rhode attributes the problem partly to the lack of diversity at law schools, but also to unconscious bias and lack of access to networks.

     These days, criticisms about the lack of racial diversity are perhaps most focused on the tech sector. But usually, these criticisms of diversity at top tech companies exclude Asians and focus on the low percentage of blacks and Hispanics in the tech industry. Data from the Census bureau shows that while blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented in the computer workers category, Asians are overrepresented (Asians make up 5.3 percent of the U.S. population). In the spirit of transparency, companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have all revealed internal data about the racial makeup of their employees, but in general information about the racial composition of many companies can be difficult to come by, and is often incomplete. The best guess is data compiled by the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

     BLS data has a more detailed dive into which professions are the whitest. Overall, 81 percent of the workforce is white, but there are 33 occupations in America that are more than 90 percent white. When it comes to professions with outsized shares of minorities, blacks are overrepresented in community and social-service occupations (as well as barbers and postal-service clerks). Asians make up a large share of computer workers, medical scientists, and personal appearance workers—a category that includes manicurists, makeup artists, and facialists. Hispanics are overrepresented in construction, maintenance, and agriculture work.

     Another important question is whether these statistics include undocumented workers. BLS data states that it’s likely that at least some undocumented immigrants are included, but it’s impossible to say how many because the survey is not designed to identify the legal status of workers. One report by Pew found that the majority of undocumented workers work in low-skill, though not necessarily low-paid, jobs. In fact, the share of unauthorized immigrants holding white-collar jobs has risen significantly in recent years.

     The racial transparency trend at America’s private companies is a good thing, even if the numbers can be depressing. It highlights the fact that the American workforce has been divided by race for decades. While the occupational gap seems to have improved between whites and blacks—Brookings reports that the percent of blacks in high-paying technical professions quintupled between 1968 and 2014—the racial income gap still persists. One report found that for black and Hispanic families, their median family income levels are 40 percent lower than that of white families. Furthermore, Pew found that the wealth inequality racial gap has widened since the recession. Occupational diversity is no doubt one part of this story, and pressure for employers of high-paid professions to increase diversity is one way minorities can close the gap.

342. Pteryxx says

     1 July 2015 at 8:19 pm

     Jezebel: As Black Churches Burn, Feds Close In on Suspect in CVS Arson

     We don’t know whether these latest church fires were arson. I’m more interested in the fact that there’s a wide mainstream refusal to categorize them as such alongside a general desperation to know that they were arson—that these fires were what they feel like. Every fire happened at night, under cover of darkness. If the church is symbolic, its destruction is too. Just like the wrecked Quiktrip howled with the wreckage of respectability, these burned churches are telling us something. Seven of them in the two weeks after Charleston. Does it feel like lightning, a squirrel chewing into some wiring—these fires, one by one?

     One of the reasons these burnings can’t feel accidental is the way we treat them, the way these buildings are different from a Quiktrip or a CVS. The estimated monetary damage to these churches starts at $250,000 and goes on up to a million. But this is mentioned only in passing in most articles, where there is an entire dismaying genre of miniature news stories devoted to estimating the possible damage to the Ferguson and Baltimore convenience stores, breathlessly and regretfully guessing about when and how these little temples can rebuild. There was no such follow-up for the community center in Baltimore that burned on the night of the riots; I doubt there will be CVS-level diligence about these churches, either.

     Anyway, QuikTrip is a company with recent revenue of $11.2 billion per year; CVS Caremark’s current market cap is $117.4 billion. There is no equivalent corporation for the church, so as always, it will be the community, endlessly scrapping together, that rebuilds. “It was the church that saved the people until the civil rights revolution came along,” said Bill Clinton, in a 1996 speech at the restoration of Greeley’s Mount Zion AME.

     The black church, like the Americans it’s synonymous with, is accustomed to having to brace and pray. NAACP has issued a warning to black churches to “take necessary precautions.” 29 other black churches have burned within the last 18 months. In a way, it’s impossible to know the meaning of those numbers, and still they mean something all the same. Jim Campbell, a history professor at Northwestern, writes at the LA Times: (link)

     So far, investigators have yet to uncover evidence of a “national conspiracy.” The bulk of the attacks appear to be “random” acts of vandalism, the work of “teenagers” and “copycats” rather than hardened conspirators.

     It is worth observing that the absence of any organized conspiracy may make the phenomenon of church burning more, rather than less, disturbing. Far easier to abide the idea of a tight-knit group of racist fanatics than to accept the alternative that we live in a time when a substantial number of individuals, unconnected with one another or with organized white supremacist groups, regard burning black churches as a plausible act, worthy of emulation.

     He adds: “Indeed, for as long as there have been black churches, there have been whites determined to destroy them.”

     […]

     Who is setting fire to black churches, and why does nobody seem to care? The answer is clear, and the same for both questions. It’s the poison in the power of whiteness that addled the policemen who killed Freddie Gray and Michael Brown; it’s the same poison that electrified the protestors who fucked up the Quiktrip and burned the CVS. Whiteness is the reason, but it doesn’t fit on a wanted poster, and in the end it’s still black bodies that end up on the gravel and in the grave, scattered as inconsequentially for us as candy wrappers in our precious American sanctuaries, forever and ever, amen.

343. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     1 July 2015 at 8:57 pm

     Photographer James Lewis undertook a project to re-imagine and bring to life the Orisha, ancient African Yoruba deities.

     Photographer James C. Lewis went out on a creative limb to re-imagine ancient African Yoruba dieties- the Orisha, using striking models, expert photography, and inventive photo editing techniques. While the true essence of the Orisha is likely poorly understood by most people in the modern world in comparison to their ancient and rich roots in African culture, Lewis creates a stunning visual world that is sure to spark the imagination.

     As a culture we are quite use to the artistic treatment of religious, spiritual, and mythical entities from Greek ancestral lore, various world religions, and other cultural heroes, yet rarely is the fascinating world of the Orisha the topic of discussion. These images are gorgeous, shocking, and of course an artists interpretation, but hopefully they get your wheels turning in regards to the power, complexity, and richness of Yoruba spiritual symbology and life:

     All told, he created nearly 2 dozen images of these gods. And the art is amazing!

344. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     1 July 2015 at 9:11 pm

     Here is some background on the Santeria religion, whose deities are the ones James Lewis reimagined above.

345. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     2 July 2015 at 1:04 am

     Black Women Speak About Their Experiences with Police Harassment in New York (video)

346. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     2 July 2015 at 1:36 am

     Google photos identified black people as ‘gorillas’, but racist software isn’t new.

     Google has come under fire recently for an objectively racist “glitch” found in its new Photos application for iOS and Android that is identifying black people as “gorillas.”

     In theory, Photos is supposed to act like an intelligent digital assistant. Its underlying algorithms can categorize your entire camera roll based on a number of different factors like date, location, and subject matter. Apparently, however, at least one black user has reported that the app categorized him and a black friend as “gorillas,” as opposed to people.

     On Sunday, Google Photos user Jacky Alcine tweeted out a screenshot of the application that displayed a number of pictures organized into different albums. While the app’s algorithm was able to correctly identify pictures of a “graduation,” “skyscrapers,” and “airplanes,” it labeled photos of Alcine and a female friend as gorillas.

     Yontan Zunger, a senior software engineer for Google, quickly tweeted back at Alcine, assuring him that the mistake was a bug that would be fixed immediately. Alcine, to his credit, explained that he understood how algorithms can misidentify things in ways that humans don’t, but he questioned why this type of issue in particular was still such a problem for a software giant like Google.

     “We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened,” an official Google statement on the matter read. “There is still clearly a lot of work to do with automatic image labeling, and we’re looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future.”

     As nice as it is of Google to assure us that something like this is a freak instance of coding-gone-wrong, it’s hardly the first time that we’ve seen software show an implicit bias against people of color.

347. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     2 July 2015 at 2:48 am

     Laurence Fishburne is starring as author Alex Haley in A&E’s ‘Roots’ remake:

     Deadline reports that Laurence Fishburne will be playing the role of author Alex Haley in A&E’s upcoming remake of Roots. The original eight-episode miniseries adaption, which debuted in 1977, is based off Haley’s novel, Roots: The Saga of An American Family — a narrative of American slavery and the life of the character Kunta Kinte, who’s captured in the Gambia and sold into slavery once on American soil.

     The new series will be produced by original cast members Will Packer and LeVar Burton, along with Mark Wolper; it is expected to incorporate new plot lines from the novel that the original series didn’t touch on.

348. rq says

     2 July 2015 at 5:03 am

     Distraught people, Deadly results – less on police interactions with black people as police interactions with those mentally distraught (for one reason or another), but the two categories probably have significant overlap.

     Nationwide, police have shot and killed 124 people this year who, like Page, were in the throes of mental or emotional crisis, according to a Washington Post analysis. The dead account for a quarter of the 462 people shot to death by police in the first six months of 2015.

     The vast majority were armed, but in most cases, the police officers who shot them were not responding to reports of a crime. More often, the police officers were called by relatives, neighbors or other bystanders worried that a mentally fragile person was behaving erratically, reports show. More than 50 people were explicitly suicidal.

     More than half the killings involved police agencies that have not provided their officers with state-of-the-art training to deal with the mentally ill. And in many cases, officers responded with tactics that quickly made a volatile situation even more dangerous.

     The Post analysis provides for the first time a national, real-time tally of the shooting deaths of mentally distraught individuals at the hands of law enforcement. Criminal-justice experts say that police are often ill equipped to respond to such individuals — and that the encounters too often end in needless violence.

     “This a national crisis,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, an independent research organization devoted to improving policing. “We have to get American police to rethink how they handle encounters with the mentally ill. Training has to change.” [..]

     For this article, The Post analyzed 124 killings in which the mental health of the victim appeared to play a role, either because the person expressed suicidal intentions or because police or family members confirmed a history of mental illness. This approach likely understates the scope of the problem, experts said.

     In many ways, this subset mirrors the overall population of police shooting victims: They were overwhelmingly men, more than half of them white. Nine in 10 were armed with some kind of weapon, and most died close to home.

     But there were also important distinctions. This group was more likely to wield a weapon less lethal than a firearm. Six had toy guns; 3 in 10 carried a blade, such as a knife or a machete — weapons that rarely prove deadly to police officers. According to data maintained by the FBI and other organizations, only three officers have been killed with an edged weapon in the past decade.

     Nearly a dozen of the mentally distraught people killed were military veterans, many of them suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of their service, according to police or family members. Another was a former California Highway Patrol officer who had been forced into retirement after enduring a severe beating during a traffic stop that left him suffering from depression and PTSD.

     And in 45 cases, police were called to help someone get medical treatment, or after the person had tried and failed to get treatment on his own.

     […]

     The dead range in age from 15 to 86. At both ends of that spectrum, the victim was male, suicidal and armed with a gun. On average, police shot and killed someone who was in mental crisis every 36 hours in the first six months of this year. On April 25, three mentally ill men were gunned down within 10 hours.

     That afternoon, David Felix, a 24-year-old black man with schizophrenia, was killed by police in the New York apartment building where he lived with other men undergoing treatment for mental health problems, according to police reports. Police said he struck two officers with a heavy police radio after they tried to serve him with a warrant for allegedly punching a friend in the face and stealing her purse.

     Two hours later, sheriff’s deputies in Clermont, Fla., fatally shot Daniel Davis, a 58-year-old white man who had recently been released from a mental health facility, according to police reports. Police say he threatened his stepfather and then a deputy with a hunting knife.

     And shortly before midnight, police in Victoria, Tex., shot Brandon Lawrence, a 25-year-old white man, a father of two toddlers and an Afghanistan war veteran who suffered from PTSD. Police officers said Lawrence approached them in an “aggressive manner” with a two-foot-long machete. They said they ordered him to drop it more than 30 times.

     Of course, the official story is under dispute.

     Is This 5-Year-Old’s Haircut Too Extreme? Seriously. It was called ‘distracting’ and he was sent home.

     Jalyn Broussard couldn’t wait to show off his new ‘do. The kindergartener got a haircut he saw on a basketball player and thought he looked pretty good: a “modern fade” that’s longer in the middle and shorter on the sides.

     Even the principal chirped, “Nice haircut!” when he arrived at his Bay Area Catholic school. But a half-hour later, his teacher said his hairstyle violated policy and called his mother to pick him up.

     Jalyn, who is African-American, couldn’t return to Immaculate Heart of Mary School in Belmont until his two-inch top was gone, the teacher said. His parents shaved his head that night so he could attend his Christmas concert.

     “I thought I misheard when they told me to pick him up,” his mother, Mariana Broussard, told The Daily Beast of that fateful day in December. “It’s something that’s so small but it represents something larger. He had increased visibility to these teachers.”

     Last week, Broussard filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for racial discrimination.

     School administrators deemed his haircut “extreme” and “distracting,” but approved similar styles on white and Asian students, she argues. One eighth-grade student with spiky hair was allowed to read Mass in front of the entire school.

     […]

     In the coming days, Broussard highlighted the potential double standard and, the complaint claims, Immaculate Heart “was unable to provide any non-discriminatory reason for its selective enforcement” of the hairdo policy against Jalyn.

     Broussard says she showed Grosey pictures of African-American professionals with the ‘do— including an image of Kelly Ripa’s cohost Michael Strahan.

     Broussard says Grosey told her in an e-mail that she and the Archdiocese had discussed the policy and that a stripcut that goes from the top of the forehead to the base of the neck is “distracting to the learning process.”

     But “the modern blunt cut style, which several students have, differs in that the hair is longer on the top, the crown only and blended through the sides,” Grosey wrote, according to the complaint. Broussard says the principal never stipulated whether Jalyn’s hair would be OK if the back was trimmed.

     When the mom asked Immaculate Heart of Mary parish’s reverend for help, he told her to “have faith” in the principal and “give it some more time,” the complaint reveals.

     Broussard eventually decided to pull Jalyn and his second-grade brother, Noah, from the school.

     “If there was such a blatant double standard when we’re dealing something as insignificant as a haircut, what happens in the classroom?” Broussard told The Daily Beast. “How can we trust them with our child’s education and well-being?”

     It’s. A. Fucking. HAIRCUT. On a five-year-old.

     As intro, The most violent thing in this picture isn’t Kendrick Lamar.
     The article with the afore-mentioned picture, Fox News segment says Kendrick Lamar’s BET performance incites violence

     Kendrick Lamar opened up the BET Awards on Sunday night with a phenomenal performance of “Alright.” He stood on a cop car covered in graffiti and the American flag flew behind him as he rapped to the crowd, “We gon’ be alright.” But not everyone was moved by his appearance.

     During an episode of Fox News’ “The Five,” pundits claimed Lamar’s performance “incites violence” by rapping lyrics like, “We hate po-po/ Wanna kill us dead in the street fo sho.”

     “This is why I say that hip-hop has done more damage to young African Americans than racism in recent years,” said Geraldo Rivera, who made similar comments in an appearance on HuffPost Live. “This is exactly the wrong message. Then to conflate what happened in the Charleston church in South Carolina with the tragic incidents involving excessive use of force by cops is to equate that racist killer with these cops. It’s so wrong. It’s so counterproductive.”

     “It incites violence,” said one pundit, whose face wasn’t pictured when she made the comment.

     Huh. Buncha white people deciding rap is bringing down the black children. Who is surprised?

     Activist Calls CNN Out On Racism In The Media: ‘Whiteness Gets Nuance, Blackness Doesn’t’ (VIDEO). The title is similar to material previously seen, and within it’s basically a transcript of the video that went around at the time.

     With all the totally-not-racist murder, mayhem and punditry going on, it’s easy to miss stuff…Like that time Black Lives Matters activist Deray McKesson politely but very firmly schooled CNN’s Brian Stelter on racism in the media.

     During their May 22 interview, McKesson challenged Stelter to explain why black victims of police brutality and blacks who protest the racism, poverty and cruelties against their communities are dehumanized and portrayed as “thugs,” while white people who have actually committed violent crimes are given more sympathetic treatment. And really, there was no way for Stelter to wiggle out of this one: The perfect stories for comparison had been running back-to-back almost non-stop recently: The Waco/Twin Peaks biker shootings and the Baltimore protests.

     How to help restore the black churches ravaged by fire

     Many other churches, communities of faith and individuals have begun to donate online in an effort to help rebuild several of the churches marred by fire, some of which burned to the ground.

     The “Rebuild the Churches Fund” started by Christ Church Cathedral in St. Louis, Missouri has collected more than $14,000 so far, already more than half their initial goal of $25,000. You can donate here.

     “We saw it as an opportunity for churches to step up,” Mike Kinman, dean of Christ Church Cathedral, told Mashable. “The rest was putting up a real simple website and setting it loose on Facebook and Twitter.”

     The donation website has also compiled a list of other faith communities that have agreed to collect money from their own constituents to donate to these churches. The communities—48 as of this writing—range from St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California to the Islamic Community Center in St. Louis.

     A separate fundraiser for the Briar Creek Baptist Church—which sustained $250,000 in damage—has so far raised around $1,700.

     The website for Briar Creek Baptist Church links to another page asking for food donations to be delivered to the former Green Memorial Church site or the Metrolina Baptist Association building. The MBA is also accepting checks.

     “Most people see these black churches burning and are outraged and feel helpless and want to do something,” Kinman said. “We just want to give a chance for people to be their best selves.”

349. rq says

     2 July 2015 at 6:09 am

     There’s going to be quite a bit more on the church burnings, just FYI.
     After another church burns in the U.S., many asking #WhoisBurningBlackChurches?

     Following the string of fires, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) issued a statement “alerting black churches to take necessary precautions.”

     The Associated Press, citing an unnamed source with the FBI, reported the Mount Zion fire is not believed to be arson and could be related to lightning strikes in the area.

     But investigators told reporters during a press conference Wednesday morning they were not ruling anything out as they continue their investigation. In 1995, the same African-American church was burned to the ground by two members of the Ku Klux Klan, part of a series black churches being targeted over a two-year span.

     While the Mount Zion fire appears unintentional, investigators have said at least three of the fires over the past two weeks were clear cases of arson.

     The fires at the churches has evoked painful memories for communities across the southern U.S. and come in the wake of debate over the removal of the Confederate flag — a symbol of racial oppression to some, but a reminder of Southern pride to others.

     Concern over the fires has led to more than 180,000 tweets with the hashtag #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches, according to Topsy – a social search and analytics company.

     […]

     Local newspaper the Post and Courier reports that the Loyal White Knights, a chapter of the KKK based in Pelham, N.C., had their application to hold a rally on the State House grounds in Columbia approved.

     Attempts to reach the Loyal White Knights for comment were unsuccessful. A recording at a phone number for the group be heard confirmed members are planning to stand up for “Confederate history.”

     “Our government is trying to erase white culture and our heritage right out of the pages of history books,” the recording said. “If you’re tired of all the Liberal nonsense that is being spewed out by your leaders and government then please stand with us on July 18. If you’re white and proud, join the crowd.”

     Update: How You Can Help Rebuild and Where to Speak Out About the 8 Burned Black Churches

     As of last night, seven reportedly black churches have been set ablaze following the June 17, 2015, massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The churches are:

     – College Hills Seventh Day Adventist Church (On June 22 in Knoxville, Tenn.)

     – God’s Power Church of Christ (On June 23 in Macon, Ga.)

     – Fruitland Presbyterian Church (On June 23 in Gibson County, Tenn.)

     – Briar Creek Baptist Church (On June 24 in Charlotte, N.C.)

     – Greater Miracle Apostolic Holiness Church (On June 26 in Tallahassee, Fla.)

     – Glover Grover Baptist Church (On June 26 in Warrenville, S.C.)

     – Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal (On June 30 in Greeleyville, S.C.)

     No congregants have been reported injured in any of the fires. Investigators have concluded that at least three of them—Knoxville, Macon and Charlotte—were likely the result of arson. Hate crime investigations are underway in both Charlotte and Macon, but there have been no official determinations and no reports of arrests. Officials in Gibson County have ruled that lightning caused the Fruitland Presbyterian Church fire, and a tree limb that fell onto power lines is said to be at fault in Tallahassee. In Warrenville, investigators say the cause is still “undetermined.”

     […]

     For those interested in helping to rebuild the fallen churches, Christ Church Cathedral, an Episcopal church in St. Louis, has started the Rebuild the Churches Fund. All donations are tax-deductible and will be dispersed equally to the churches whom investigators conclude were destroyed by arson. At press time, it had raised more than $22,000.

     Thousands Of Black Students Attend Schools Honoring Racist Leaders

     All across the country, young African-American students attend schools that pay homage to those who fought to keep their people enslaved.

     Following last month’s racially charged shooting at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, there have been renewed calls to limit the display of the Confederate flag and rename public spaces named for Confederate leaders. At least 189 public schools around the country have names that memorialize Confederate soldiers, leaders or politicians, according to a Huffington Post analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data from the 2012-13 and 2013-14 school years.

     This list is likely incomplete. There are probably other schools named for lesser-known leaders. We included schools we could conclusively determine were named after notable Confederates — for example, because the school used a general’s full name or its mascot was related to the Civil War — not simply those that included a Confederate soldier’s last name. However, we did count schools named after towns, counties or other locations that were themselves named after a Confederate.

     Below is a map breaking down the locations of schools named after Confederate leaders.

     We also looked at the demographics of the over 118,000 students in these schools, which includes a disproportionately high number of nonwhite students. More than half of students who attend schools named after Confederate leaders are black or Hispanic. About 22 percent of students who attend these schools are black and 29 percent are Hispanic.

     Since the Charleston shooting, some community leaders and advocacy groups have taken a stand against public spaces that celebrate the legacy of Confederate leaders. A San Diego assemblywoman is calling on her local school board to change the name of its Robert E. Lee Elementary School. Former San Antonio mayor and United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro is also calling for a name change for Robert E. Lee High School in a San Antonio district.

     “There are other, more appropriated individuals to honor, and spotlight as role models,” Castro wrote on his Facebook page about the issue last week.

     In recent years, a number of school boards and districts have taken steps to eliminate racist symbols from their campuses and change the names of buildings named after racist historical figures. In 2014, a school board in Jacksonville, Florida, voted to change the name of Nathan B. Forrest High, which had been named for a Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader.

     A petition that promoted the name change received over 160,000 signatures.

     “I don’t want my daughter, or any student, going to a school named under those circumstances. This is a bad look for Florida — with so much racial division in our state, renaming Forrest High would be a step toward healing,” said the petition, written by a local parent. “Now is the time to right a historical wrong. African American Jacksonville students shouldn’t have to attend a high school named for someone who slaughtered and terrorized their ancestors one more school year.”

     Some graphs at the link.

     Another black church burns after NAACP warns about suspected arson attacks, LA Times.

     Sheila Dixon Officially Announces She’s Running For Baltimore Mayor

     Two of the most well-known political figures in Baltimore face off in the 2016 race for mayor.

     Former Mayor Sheila Dixon says today she will run for mayor against incumbent Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

     There have been rumblings about a Dixon comeback ever since she was forced out of office in 2010.

     […]

     “For the last two years people have come up to me and encouraged me to go back in public office,” Dixon told WJZ in May.

     Dixon was forced to leave office in 2010 after a misdemeanor conviction for using gift cards intended for the needy, which is when Rawlings-Blake took over.

     “I can tell you that when I took office Baltimore was in crisis, nobody was looking for the previous mayor to be in leadership here or anywhere,” said Mayor Rawlings-Blake.

     In a statement today Mayor Rawlings-Blake said, “I look forward to an aggressive campaign that clearly lays out the choice between where Baltimore was when I took office and how far we’ve come under my leadership.

     Both candidates were city council presidents who took over the mayor’s office. Dixon replaced Martin O’Malley when he became governor, and Rawlings-Blake automatically became mayor when Sheila Dixon was forced to leave–each went on to win election.

     How interesting, two black women in the race!

     June 2015 Police Violence Report. With infographic.

350. rq says

     2 July 2015 at 8:12 am

     Detroit Police Cruiser Involved In Chase That Killed 2 Children Had Broken Dash Cam. How convenient.

     The case regarding a Detroit police chase that killed two children has taken a turn, after it was discovered the officers’ dash camera was not working at the time of the deadly incident, USA Today reports.

     Michaelangelo Jackson, 6, and his younger sister, Makiah Jackson, 3, were killed when three police officers riding in a squad car began chasing 29-year-old parolee Lorenzo Harris (who was thought to have gun) in a Chevy Camaro. While driving through the city’s East Side, the Chevy Camaro allegedly clipped police, causing the squad car to fly into the air and hit the children.

     Harris is the only party involved facing multiple charges, including second-degree murder.

     The squad car’s dash cam was not operating during the chase, Detroit Police Chief James Craig informed reporters during a news conference on Monday.

     Police response to Ferguson protests, in a word, failed, federal draft report says

     Police in Ferguson, Mo., delivered an “ineffective response” to the riots that followed the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown last year, did not understand the gravity of the public anger and fired “Stingerballs, PepperBalls, bean bag rounds and baton rounds” in failed attempts to quell the escalating disturbance, the U.S. Justice Department has concluded.

     A draft report by Justice Department officials, sent to four police agencies in the Ferguson area and obtained Tuesday by The Los Angeles Times, strongly indicates that federal officials will expect local authorities to make sweeping changes in how they handle similar public outbursts.

     […]

     Marked “Internal Review Only – CONFIDENTIAL” and “NOT FOR DISSEMINATION,” the draft report determined that the Ferguson, St. Louis County and St. Louis police departments as well as the Missouri State Highway Patrol failed in dozens of areas to keep the peace, ease tension and end the rolling nightly violence.

     “It proved to be an ineffective response,” the report says. “There were no effective protocols in place to handle an event like this.”

     The report adds, “For the first two days, the St. Louis County PD and the Ferguson PD believed the Ferguson incident would be short-lived and focused only on immediate tactical responses. They did not effectively plan for a long-term operational strategy.”

     […]

     In a statement, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department said that it was “willing to engage in constructive dialogue about best practices” but that it had seen only a 16-page draft of the report.

     “The department reached out to COPS to inquire about a blueprint for handling similar situations. We were told none exist and we were forging new ground,” the department said. “Now, agencies around the country look to our region for input on issues relating to civil unrest.”

     The review examined the 17 days between Brown’s death on Aug. 9 and his funeral on Aug. 25, and in 46 areas that were studied found deep problems with the way local authorities handled the violence.

     The draft findings were sent to local officials for their formal response, with a final report expected from Washington soon.

     “This is a working draft and may differ from the final report,” said a source close to the investigation.

     3 female South Carolina pastors sent sexist threats: ‘You and your children will die’, I don’t know if it’s the same article as posted before.

     20 Years Ago, Mount Zion AME Was Set On Fire. Last Night, It Burned Again, CodeSwitch. With more on the first burning (incl. a video of Clinton) and a short history of church burnings.

     In Boston,

     (S)Heroes / “Vandals defaced an iconic statue of Christopher Columbus in Boston’s North End by covering it in red paint and tagging it with the phrase, “Black Lives Matter”

     And of course, all the white people in the video have no idea what the connection is. Ending white supremacy means ending “America” – Jabar

     It’s a youtube video via FB, but it’s the usual ‘Black Lives Matter’ plus a huge splash of red paint. Except this time, it’s Christopher Columbus.

     Phila. police to release names in police shootings, a policy change.

     Philadelphia police will begin releasing the names of officers in police-involved shootings, Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said Wednesday.

     The move – a first for the department – is in line with recommendations issued by the Department of Justice and the presidential policing task force Ramsey led.

     Under the new policy, the department will release the officer’s name within 72 hours of a police-involved shooting, unless there is a threat against the officer or family members.

     The department has long declined to release the names of officers involved in shootings, citing safety concerns.

     In a memo obtained by The Inquirer and sent to each police district – to be read at roll call for three consecutive days – Ramsey wrote that the department will now “evaluate each incident to determine that no threats are made to the officer or members of their family prior to the release of this information.”

     Ramsey said that the department plans to release a more formal directive that outlines policy on releasing the names of officers involved in shootings. The policy does not apply to shootings that took place before the memo was issued, police said.

     The department does not plan to release witness statements or documents related to shootings in that 72-hour period, police said. It will continue to post preliminary reports on the incident on its website.

     Kelvyn Anderson, head of the city’s Police Advisory Commission, a citizen oversight board, called the new policy “a big step” but still “another item on a very long list that needs to be dealt with.”

     “This has been a major issue for a lot of the protests that have occurred in our city,” he said. “People believe, rightfully, that the public has a right to know who these officers are.”

351. rq says

     2 July 2015 at 8:24 am

     TV Land pulls Dukes of Hazzard episodes off its schedule – imagine the outcry!

     The network did not comment further or say why the episodes were removed, but the news comes as the show became part of the growing national debate over use of the Confederate flag, which is displayed on the roof of the Duke boys’ car.

     Last week, Warner Bros. Consumer Products said it would no longer license toys or models of the iconic 1969 Dodge Charger, dubbed General Lee, joining a number of other retailers vowing to stop selling Confederate flag merchandise in the wake of the deadly shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, earlier this month.

     Baltimore to put cameras in police vans, review riot gear. Some say they’re preparing for the verdicts in the Freddie Gray case, though that seems a bit premature.

     “We’re working through a process that will place cameras with recording capabilities in the backs of all our police vans, to ensure that we have a more complete record of what occurs there,” Rawlings-Blake told reporters.

     The van in which Gray was transported had a non-recording camera that the driver could use to monitor the passengers, but it was not working at the time.

     The city also is reviewing riot gear used by police during the unrest, when some of it failed to work. Baltimore needs the right equipment in case trouble breaks out following trial verdicts in the Gray case, she said.

     Alabama Shows Why Civil Rights Shouldn’t Be Put to a Popular Vote, a general look at popular acceptance (or not) of civil rights in Alabama (and elsewhere).

     Consider for a moment what would have followed if the Supreme Court had left laws that prohibited interracial marriage “up to the states.”

     This is a perfect time for such reflection, as June 12, 2015, marks the 48th anniversary of the court’s historic ruling in Loving v. Virginia, a unanimous decision that struck down the laws of Virginia and 15 other states that in 1967 still prohibited interracial couples from marrying. Loving is of particular relevance right now, with the court soon to decide, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the fate of state laws that deny same-sex couples the freedom to marry. Most important, of course, and as I’ve discussed elsewhere, is the fact that Loving provides two independent bases for the court to invalidate those laws. One is that they violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equality under the law to all persons, and the other is that they also deny gay men and lesbians the fundamental right to marry.

     But Loving is also important because it debunks a key argument the states defending their discriminatory marriage laws have made to the court in Obergefell, namely, that marriage equality for same-sex couples should be decided by state voters or state legislatures. According to defenders of these laws, the “democratic process,” not the courts, should determine the issue. This argument is wrong—in our system of federalism, the U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and the fundamental rights of minorities are not subject to a majority vote. Loving is an excellent example of why.

     When Loving was decided in June 1967, nearly one-third of the states in this country prohibited an African American from marrying a white person. That’s right, in 1967. Indeed, it was only 19 years before Loving was decided that the first state court—the California Supreme Court—held that state’s ban on interracial marriage to be unconstitutional. And while 14 states repealed their own laws in the intervening two decades, 16 states were still clinging to their interracial marriage bans in June 1967. In fact, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that a majority of Americans “approved” of interracial marriage. These examples alone show why our governmental system wisely does not leave the constitutional rights of minorities up to the whims of a majority vote but instead obliges the courts to step in when those rights are violated.

     Of course, there’s no way to know how long those 16 states would have continued to ban interracial marriage absent the ruling in Loving, but it’s a good bet that in some of them, there was no quick end in sight. The history of just one, Alabama, provides good evidence of that. After the court’s ruling, the affected states began to remove the now-unenforceable but still offensive interracial marriage bans from their state codes and constitutions. Astonishingly, however, the remaining years of the 20th century ticked away and still the Alabama Constitution proclaimed that, “The legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro, or descendant of a Negro.” In 1998, a measure that would have set in motion the repeal of that language “died in a legislative committee.” Died in committee in 1998!

     More at the link. Up to the individual states, indeed!

     Ah, this. Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? Because our textbooks and monuments are wrong.

     The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about. We are still digging ourselves out from under the misinformation that they spread, which has manifested in both our history books and our public monuments.

     Take Kentucky. Kentucky’s legislature voted not to secede, and early in the war, Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston ventured through the western part of the state and found “no enthusiasm as we imagined and hoped but hostility … in Kentucky.” Eventually, 90,000 Kentuckians would fight for the United States, while 35,000 fought for the Confederate States. Nevertheless, according to historian Thomas Clark, the state now has 72 Confederate monuments and only two Union ones.

     Neo-Confederates also won western Maryland. In 1913, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) put a soldier on a pedestal at the Rockville courthouse. Montgomery County never seceded, of course. While Maryland did send 24,000 men to the Confederate armed forces, it sent 63,000 to the U.S. Army and Navy. Nevertheless, the UDC’s monument tells visitors to take the other side: “To our heroes of Montgomery Co. Maryland / That we through life may not forget to love the Thin Gray Line.”

     In fact, the Thin Grey Line came through Montgomery and adjoining Frederick counties at least three times, en route to Antietam, Gettysburg and Washington. Lee’s army expected to find recruits and help with food, clothing and information. They didn’t. Maryland residents greeted Union soldiers as liberators when they came through on the way to Antietam. Recognizing the residents of Frederick as hostile, Confederate cavalry leader Jubal Early demanded and got $300,000 from them lest he burn their town, a sum equal to at least $5,000,000 today. Today, however, Frederick boasts what it calls the “Maryland Confederate Memorial,” and the manager of the Frederick cemetery — filled with Union and Confederate dead — told me in an interview, “Very little is done on the Union side” around Memorial Day. “It’s mostly Confederate.”

     […]

     Perhaps most perniciously, neo-Confederates now claim that the South seceded for states’ rights. When each state left the Union, its leaders made clear that they were seceding because they were for slavery and against states’ rights. In its “Declaration Of The Causes Which Impel The State Of Texas To Secede From The Federal Union,” for example, the secession convention of Texas listed the states that had offended them: Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa. These states had in fact exercised states’ rights by passing laws that interfered with the federal government’s attempts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Some also no longer let slaveowners “transit” through their states with their slaves. “States’ rights” were what Texas was seceding against. Texas also made clear what it was seceding for: white supremacy.

     There’s more at the link, but hey, how many Union memorials are there around the country? How common are they?
     And that bit about the states’ rights, that’s an interesting way of looking at it!

     I thought this was pretty cool: Queen of the single: Rihanna is the first artist to pass 100M sold and streamed.

     The 27 year-old singer has topped the Recording Industry of America (RIAA)’s Digital Single Awards list, making her the first artist to cross the 100 million singles threshold. It’s a huge number, but we’re also talking about a singer who’s released mega hits We Found Love (with Calvin Harris), Stay, Only Girl (In the World),Umbrella, and six other chart-topping singles in the US. It has now been a decade since Rihanna’s first single, 2005’s Pon de Replay, and she’s still going strong.

     Not the first black artist, or the first black woman artist, but the first artist, period. Woo!

     RT @ANIMALNewYork: A Confederate flag burns in Brooklyn in Fort Greene Park. A couple more pictures form this action upcoming.

352. rq says

     2 July 2015 at 9:17 am

     What is going in Fort Greene park right now? Flag burning, bikers, cops everywhere….
     Here’s the same in article form: Protesters Burn American Flag In Fort Greene Park; Opponents Rush In

     A group made good on a plan to burn at least one American flag during a protest in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn Wednesday night.

     But dozens of opponents of the protest stepped in and prompted the protesters to scatter.

     The group Disarm NYPD announced that it would burn both American and Confederate flags at the protest, and called them both objectionable symbols.

     “We maintain, unwaveringly, that both the Confederate flag, and the American flag are symbols of oppression,” the group said.

     The organization plans to burn them both at Fort Greene Park, “to demonstrate for the Charleston nine and all of those killed by racist violence in America.”

     More than 350 people had indicated that they would be attending the flag burning. But 1010 WINS reported only about half a dozen people were seen setting fire to an American flag.

     The flag was burned away from the area where people were gathered. Defenders of the stars and stripes noticed smoke up the hills in the park and ran to see what happened — only to find the flag burning inside a small grill, CBS2’s Dave Carlin reported.

     […]

     But after the demonstration went ahead and a flag was burned, Golden issued a new statement denouncing the protest.

     “As a proud American, I was disheartened to learn that the American flag was burned tonight in historic Fort Greene Park. It is a sad day for all of us to watch this despicable act of hatred take place on sacred Brooklyn ground,” he said in the statement. “I salute the many pro-Americans who showed up and stood tall in the name of our rights and liberties.”

     Mayor Bill de Blasio issued a statement through his deputy press secretary, Monica Klein, also denouncing the protest.

     “This protest is a divisive, disrespectful way to express views, and does not reflect the values of our city. The American flag represents national unity, our shared ideals and honors the brave women and men who have served our country,” said the Mayor’s office statement, issued before the protest.

     The Mayor’s office had urged the organizers to call off the protest.

     Ah, the warm smell of free speech!

     Prince’s music removed from all streaming services except Tidal, in case anyone’s interested.

     Kendrick Lamar’s Disturbing “Alright” Video Tackles Police Brutality

     Alright,” a track off Kendrick Lamar’s second studio album, To Pimp a Butterfly, carries a motif that appears throughout the album.

     At the beginning and end of various songs from the L.P., Lamar says parts of the following verse:

     “I remembered you was conflicted / Misusing your influence, sometimes I did the same / Abusing my power full of resentment / Resentment that turned into a deep depression / Found myself screamin’ in the hotel room / I didn’t wanna self destruct, the evils of Lucy was all around me / So I went runnin’ for answers.”

     The verse appears in full on “Alright,” the video for which was released on Tuesday. The video is embedded above, so watch before you continue reading if you don’t want the plot spoiled. (Lamar also performed the song live at Sunday’s BET Awards, rapping on top of a police car covered in graffiti.)

     In the visuals, Lamar and friends are seen riding in a car. As the camera pans, the viewer sees that the car is actually being carried by white police officers.

     Throughout the rest of the video, Lamar flys around Los Angeles. There’s something angelic, or almost fairy-like about the way he floats through different neighborhoods. Here he is in the hills, there he is in downtown. Scenes of dancers and other young black Angelinos permeate the video—there’s dancing, including on cop cars; skateboarding; tossing dollars into the sky.

     There’s something foreboding about it, and the repeated insistence of the lyrics: We gon’ be alright. That proves warranted. Lamar, defying gravity and dancing on a streetlight, catches the eye of another white policeman.

     The officer exits his squad vehicle with a rifle, but doesn’t lift it. He picks off Lamar with his hand, pantomiming a gun with his fingers. A real bullet seems to rip through Lamar, leaving a trail of blood in the sky.

     The video, thus, sees Lamar, a performer who has centered politics in his work, using his “influence” to comment on the ongoing discussion about the killing of black men by white police officers. In the final scene of the video, Lamar, back on the ground, smiles. We gon’ be alright, he seems to say, but not just yet.

     Couldn’t watch the video. :( But apparently his performance at the BET Awards was similar. Inciting violence and all that.

     I’ve already spent more time in jail for unhooking a confederate flag from its post than the cop who assaulted a black girl in #McKinney, a short message from Bree. She noted that she’s already spent 10 hours in jail, facing up to 3 years – while that cop has done no time at all.

     Board votes to remove Confederate monument from Linn Park. Just seems like they’re falling, one-by-one.

     The Birmingham Parks and Recreation Board has taken the first step to remove a Confederate monument from Linn Park.

     The board voted to remove the monument during a meeting on Wednesday.

     Members also agreed to get the city’s legal deparmtent to research any legal impediment in moving the monument.

     The monument was placed in Linn Park in 1905 by the Pelham Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

     That group does not exist any more, so the board said it will contact five other chapters in Birmingham to see if they will assume the cost and resposibility of moving the monument.

     Board member and former Birmingham mayor Benard Kincaid said he wants to be respectful of history, but in light of the church shootings in Charleston, South Carolina he does not believe a Confederate monument should be in a city park in Birmingham.

     May it stay down.

353. rq says

     2 July 2015 at 9:50 am

     @paulfeig After 45 years on Sesame Street, Maria, (Sonia Manzano) to retire. And no mention in the trades. TV Legend. Just a note.

     The End of the Death Penalty?

     On the surface, the Supreme Court’s opinion in Glossip v. Gross appears to give death penalty proponents something to celebrate. After all, the court allowed states to continue to use the sedative midazolam as part of a multidrug formula for lethal injections, despite Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s warning that such executions “may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake.” But the bitterly divided 5–4 opinion has implications that extend far beyond the narrow question. This case may become an example of winning a battle while losing the war.

     In a dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg concluded that it is “highly likely” that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments. While acknowledging that the Supreme Court settled the constitutionality of the death penalty 40 years ago, Breyer wrote that the “circumstances and the evidence of the death penalty’s application have changed radically since then.”

     They are not the first sitting justices to call capital punishment’s constitutionality into question. Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan routinely dissented from decisions upholding a death sentence on the grounds that capital punishment is always a cruel and unusual punishment. Shortly before his retirement, Justice Harry Blackmun famously wrote that he would “no longer tinker with the machinery of death.” Justice John Paul Stevens similarly concluded that the death penalty is an excessive punishment.

     But Glossip feels different. Breyer’s dissent is more of an invitation than a manifesto. “Rather than try to patch up the death penalty’s legal wounds one at a time,” he wrote, “I would ask for full briefing on a more basic question: whether the death penalty violates the Constitution.” It also feels different because it is no longer unthinkable that there are five votes for ending the death penalty.

     Part of this plausibility stems from a political mood far more favorable to abolition than at any other point in the modern era. In the past few years, a number of states—Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Nebraska—have formally abandoned capital punishment. The governors of four other states—Colorado, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington—have vowed not to execute anyone. And a number of states, including the four moratorium states and also places like Kansas, Montana, New Hampshire, and Wyoming, have performed one execution or fewer per decade over the past half-century. It is no surprise, then, that death sentences have reached historic lows nationally. The death penalty is disappearing even in the Deep South, as Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina have seen major drops, such as 70 percent declines in new death sentences. Texas, a state that reached a high of 48 death sentences in a single year, had no new death sentences in the first half of 2015.

     Prince reportedly pulls music from all streaming services except Tidal, so apparently it’s big news.

     Birmingham city officials take steps to remove Confederate monument at Linn Park, as mentioned before.

     A 110-year-old monument to Confederate veterans at Birmingham’s Linn Park would be removed and given to a Confederate heritage group under a proposal approved this morning.

     The Birmingham Park and Recreation Board unanimously approved a resolution to ask city attorneys to research the issue and report back to them.

     Today’s action comes after monument was bought into the spotlight by activist Frank Matthews. […]

     Matthews thanked the board for the quick action, including its offer to find a more appropriate place for the monument.

     “I don’t appreciate that history, but I can respect that history,” he said.

     Matthews also said today’s action does not represent an effort to purge the city of all connections to the Civil War or the Confederacy. For example, Linn Park itself is named for Charles Linn, an early Birmingham civic leader, who also served in the Confederate Navy.

     Still, Matthews said Linn’s contributions to the city’s development are not overshadowed by the Civil War service and would not rally to change the name of the park.

     “But that monument with knives and swords on it, it’s very offensive,” he said.

     Army resist calls to change names of bases honoring Confederate leaders

     As Confederate flags come down at state houses across the country and disappear from the shelves of popular retailers, discussion has now turned to places named after Confederate leaders and soldiers.

     Amid the ongoing furor over legacy of the Confederate flag and its place in American culture today, many have proposed stripping the names of Confederate leaders like Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Stonewall Jackson from public schools and other government installations.

     This discussion has begun to zero in on a number of major U.S. Army installations named after soldiers who fought for the pro-slavery South during the Civil War.

     “There are 10 U.S. Army bases named after Confederate officers,” writes USA Today columnist Jamie Malanowski. “On the face of it, this notion seems absurd: How could the U.S. Army maintain bases named after generals who led soldiers who fought and killed U.S. Army soldiers; indeed, who might have killed such soldiers themselves?”

     It’s a question being asked directly of Army leaders and Pentagon officials. This week, the U.S. Army explained why it has no plans to change the names of its bases.

     “Every Army installation is named for a soldier who holds a place in our military history,” the Army’s chief spokesman, Brig. Gen. Malcolm Frost, told McClatchy News Service. “Accordingly, these historic names represent individuals, not causes or ideologies.”

     Hmm. I suppose Germany could use the same rationality to rename its bases after Nazi generals, right?

354. rq says

     2 July 2015 at 1:07 pm

     Black Supporters of the Confederate Flag: ‘Don’t Let Cowards in Bedsheets Hijack Its Meaning’ – I find this so weird.

     There’s Karen Cooper, the Virginia woman who described how the Confederate flag, to her, represents defiance in the face of oppression.

     “I actually think that it represents freedom,” Cooper, a black woman, says in a webisode of Battle Ground. “It represents a people who stood up to tyranny.”

     According to the Washington Post, Cooper takes her support for the controversial flag—once flown by states that fought to maintain slavery—to the next level. She’s a member of an advocacy group called the Virginia Flaggers that is striving to rebrand the flag because, its members say, contrary to popular opinion, it doesn’t represent racism or hate.

     Then there’s Byron Thomas, an African-American student at the University of South Carolina, who argues that one’s intentions and actions dictate what the Confederate flag stands for. He described how he doesn’t use it to convey prejudice.

     “Dylann [Roof] decided to use his Confederate flag for racism,” Thomas said, referencing the reportedly self-confessed gunman who fatally shot nine people in a historically black church in Charleston, S.C., June 17.

     “My Confederate flag that I own I do not use for racism,” Thomas said. Thomas told CNN that even after the Charleston church shooting, he still does not find the flag to be racially offensive, since he thinks people are co-opting the image for their own personal racist agenda.

     “I’m entitled to my beliefs and how I choose to use a symbol,” Thomas said. He argues that if the Confederate flag is denounced and banished, then Americans are letting the racists win.

     Courtney Daniels, an Alabama Marine, shares Thomas’ views. He warns that people shouldn’t let “cowards in bedsheets”—a reference to the Klu Klux Klan—”hijack” the true meaning of the Confederate flag.

     Huh. An interesting interpretation, to say the least. I also think the swastika is about good luck and protection from evil. It’s long been a traditional symbol in traditional Latvian art. Should I keep wearing it?

     ‘Completely justified’: Illinois cops defend drawing weapons on black child during arrest over toy gun

     Illinois’ Granite City Police Department stands by its decision to arrest a child at gun point for playing with a toy gun in his neighborhood, without reading him his rights, KMOV reports.

     Police accosted the 11-year-old boy, Chris Fulton, near a laundromat close to his home. At the time, he was playing outside with other children. Fulton was in possession of an air soft pistol that contained no plastic ammunition.
     ADVERTISEMENT

     “I was fake shooting with my brother and others,” Fulton tells KMOV reporters. When police arrived, “they pointed a gun at me and took my fingerprints.”

     “How did you feel?” a journalist with the network asks.

     “Scared,” the 11-year-old replies earnestly.

     Police Chief Richard Miller admits to the local news outlet that “officers on the scene drew their weapons.” Miller defends the cops’ actions. “As they pulled on the lot they did not know his age, they did not know it was toy,” the chief tells KMOV.

     Fulton is black. Miller is white.

     Officers claim they responded to a call from a driver, who said Fulton had pointed his toy gun in the car’s direction while walking slowly across the street. Fulton denies the claim.

     “I never did threaten anybody,” Fulton tells KMOV solemnly. The boy’s family believe police accusations against their child are false.

     According to the St. Louis-based news network, the Granite City Police Department consider their armed arrest of Chris Fulton “completely justified.”

     I’m so relieved he’s not dead.

355. rq says

     2 July 2015 at 1:16 pm

     Ugh, didn’t finish that previous comment. Here’s more links!

     PETITION: We are calling to action of the renaming of San Antonio’s “Robert E. Lee” high school and any affiliations with the name to be removed. Replacing the name with civil rights leader George W. Lee. That’s a very small change needed… And seems fitting.

     The school is named after a Confederate general who not only fought to preserve the enslavement of human beings but fought against the United States. We often forget that the Confederacy was doing an act of treason, an act of betrayal. Therefore, in no way is the naming of the school “patriotic”. Robert E. Lee owned slaves himself and fought greatly to keep them, and had he won, the owning, selling, raping, and lynching of black people would of prevailed. Such a thing should not be honored.

     In the wake of the Charleston shooting, where a racist man shot up a black church, people have called for the removal of the confederate flag which still flies on the South Carolina capitol grounds. Even though Lee high school has long removed the confederate flag from flying, the confederate flag still remains paved into the ground of Lee high school. This flag represents decades of hate and racism, as did Dylan Roof, the man responsible for the Charleston shooting. So any affiliation to do with Robert E. Lee and confederacy should be removed as well.

     Although we can not erase our past, we must not celebrate parts of our past that were most treacherous, and continuing to let the Robert E. Lee name live on is condoning slavery and treason.

     This is not the only time a school has been changed. The Jefferson Davis middle school, now know as Stonewall Jackson Davis, was changed because many believe it condoned slavery, like the naming of Robert E. Lee. So it was thought best the replacing of the name would be in honor of the civil rights leader George W. Lee.

     The NEISD has refused to consider changing the name because of ” no complaints”. Please sign and help try to make a change to this name.

     Future Reveals Why He Didn’t Perform At BET Music Awards [VIDEO]

     Looks like BET has upset quite a few artists this past weekend and Future has just added his name to the list!

     _________________________________
     Basically while doing an appearance at Supper Club in LA, Future had some words for the network.
     _________________________________
     He basically went off on BET because he was supposed to perform but only under the condition that he do a publicity stunt for BET. Being the man that he is, he didn’t want to “sell his soul” for publicity and decided not to perform.

     I guess the point is, black people aren’t a monolith?

     Just some art. Some pretty awesome art, actually. Have a look-see!

     This Is Not A Test, more art, with a total of 25 fantastic images to view! Mostly black artists and musicians.

     Speaking of artists and musicians, Painting BB King

     Hi all! It’s been a while since the Five Points Jazz Festival where I started painting a memorial piece of BB King. Some of you were there that day to see the beginning of it, and some of you saw the progress shots on Facebook and Instagram. If you missed all of that, you are in for a treat!

     First, I laid down the base colors. After the D’Angelo painting, I was really feeling some Rose Madder, which is weird, since I usually hate pink, but something about it made that image pop, so I couldn’t resist.

     Next came the Yellow Ochre layer. This gives the piece that opaque, orangey color and starts to develop into skin tone.

     After that, I hit it with the blues. I begin with the face, developing the darker shadows of his eyes, nostrils mustache and lips. I love this phase, because this is when the image really starts to come to life. The blues make all that orange feel more natural, and provide the shadow colors. I almost never use black, so for the deepest shadows, I like to mix Prussian Blue with Cadmium Red for a beautiful transparent dark tone. Once I’ve worked on the face for a little while, I move on to the background. Here, I use a Prussian Blue/Cobalt Blue mixture to push the background back, moving his head forward so that he stands out the way he should.

     A bit more of the process at the link, it’s really fascinating!!

     Georgia family seek arrest of Stonecrest Mall guards for punching boy. Just something about putting on a uniform that seems to allow people to overstep certain boundaries.

356. rq says

     2 July 2015 at 1:21 pm

     A bit of history, possible myth: July 2, 1822: Denmark Vesey hanged #todayinblackhistory in Charleston, for plotting slave rebellion. Founding member of Emanuel AME Church.
     Upon being told he would hang, Vesey allegedly whispered “the work of insurrection would go on” #todayinblackhistory

     Find Out How You — Specifically, YOU — Can End Racism

     Heroically scaling flagpoles isn’t for everyone. Neither is protesting, for that matter. If you’ve every wished you could get involved with the fight for social change in other ways, you’re not alone — and you’re in luck.

     WeTheProtesters, the same Black Lives Matter activists who developed the Mapping Police Violence project have launched a new website, StayWoke.org, which aims to help people get involved with the movement in the ways that best match their unique skill set.

     The survey asks questions like, “Are you interested in advocating for policy solutions to end racism and police violence?” and then lets you choose the specific types of advocacy projects you’d be interested in working on, with options including everything from tracking legislation, to researching policy solutions, to grading city policies, collecting data, and getting involved with direct actions.

     It also asks whether you’re interested in helping to create digital platforms and tools that “build community, raise awareness, and empower people to change the system.” If you answer yes to this question, you can choose what specific types of digital projects you’re interested in, from designing websites and graphics, to reimagining platforms, making videos, taking photos, and helping with cyber security.

     One example of the sorts of digital platforms and tools that are needed is the recently-launched #CheckThePolice tool that’s designed to help users rate the system of policing in their own community, identify new policies that could help end police violence, and reveal the big picture when it comes to knowing where we have strong policies in place to address police violence, and where those policies are lacking across the US.

     If you specify that you’re interested helping to educate students, concerned citizens, and the broader American public about issues of racism and police violence, and the survey asks how you might use your book smarts to help contribute, with options like finding books/articles, hosting or joining a book club, or lesson planning. If you say you’re interested in supporting local or national activists and organizers, you’ll be asked whether you’d prefer to help fundraise or mentor organizers.

     There are also options for those interested in working on elections/political campaigns to “help elect local, state, and federal officials who will uphold the value of black life,” including helping to identify key elections, evaluate candidates, produce ads, or get out the vote.

     You’ll also be asked how many volunteer hours you can commit to per week, what you think would make the biggest impact on ending racism and/or police violence in America, what sort of work you’re most interested in doing, and what sort of skills and experiences you can contribute. Once you’ve completed the survey, organizers will follow up with you to help you get involved in whichever ways interest you the most and match up best with your skill set and availability.

     Pretty brilliant, if you ask us.

     3rd night, 2nd demonstration. Today the coroner confirmed: death #MitchHenriquez due to chokehold. 5 cops suspended. That’s in the Netherlands.

357. rq says

     2 July 2015 at 3:40 pm

     So apparently Dylann Roof’s sister set up a fundraiser… for her dream honeymoon.
     This may be one of the most selfish, tone-deaf things I’ve ever read–#DylannRoof’s sister on her cancelled wedding. See attached photos for details.

     Mind-boggling.

358. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     2 July 2015 at 9:30 pm

     Megalyn Echikunwoke cast as CW Seeds’s ‘Vixen’

     Vixen Varsity reports that “CSI: Miami” actress Megalyn Echikunwoke has been cast as the titular character in the CW Seed’s upcoming six-part animated series “Vixen,” which takes places in the same world as “The Flash” and “Arrow.”

     The series focuses on Mari McCabe, who after the death of her parents inherits a magical totem that bestows upon her the ability to access the inherent attributes of animals, from the speed of a cheetah to the powerhouse charge of a rhino and more. As the superhero Vixen, McCabe seeks to protect the world from the greed, corruption and violence that took the lives of her parents.

     “Vixen” takes place in the same reality as “The Flash” and “Arrow” and along with prominently featuring characters from those shows also features the voices of the actors themselves, with Grant Gustin as the Flash, Stephen Amell as the Arrow Oliver Queen, Emily Bett Rickards as Felicity Smoak and Carlos Valdes as Cisco Ramon.

     “Vixen” premieres this Fall on The CW’s digital platform CW Seed.

     ****

     A wakeup call for Hispanic media from Charleston shooter Dylann Roof:

     On a website that was confirmed by law enforcement officials to belong to Charleston shooter Dylann Roof sits a manifesto on race and ethnicity with a disturbing “compliment” for Spanish-language media.

     The site, lastrodhesian.com, was registered on February 9 in Roof’s name, and features photos of him with the Confederate flag, visiting slave museums and confederate battle sites, among other racist fanboy idiocy. It also contains a screed, nearly 2,500 words long, explaining the author’s thoughts on various ethnic and racial minorities. Only 86 of those words are devoted to Hispanics, no doubt because the author’s exposure to Latinos was limited mostly to television. But that, apparently, was enough for him to figure out race relations in Latin America.

     “I remember while watching hispanic television stations, the shows and even the commercials were more White than our own. They have respect for White beauty, and a good portion of hispanics are White. It is a well known fact that White hispanics make up the elite of most hispanics countries. There is good White blood worht saving in Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and even Brasil. [sic],” Roof wrote on the site.

     Now, I hate to pick a bone with Univision just a few days after they stood up to Donald Trump for saying that Mexican immigrants, and later all Latin American immigrants, are “rapists” and “criminals” who “bring drugs” to the U.S. But when a mass-murdering racist gives their industry a shout-out for their mighty white-casting, it’s a little hard to let it slide. Of course, it isn’t just Univision that’s guilty of this. The same goes for Telemundo, Galavision, Azteca and any other Spanish-language network airing in this country.

     How many Spanish-language TV shows have multi-ethnic cast members? Has there ever been a show on Spanish-language television with an entire non-white cast?

     Of course, the other point raised in the manifesto is true, too. The majority of wealth and power in Latin America is concentrated in the hands of those who are of European descent, Carlos Slim notwithstanding. When media moguls choose to narrow cast to only this demographic, they reflect back to society that this group of white people is the only one that matters.

     That’s why Trump’s words are so dangerous. He went on national television and reinforced a racist myth we hold dear in the U.S. — that Mexicans by and large are corrupt, criminal predators. In fact, he accused them of the very crime — rape — that Roof accused black men of before gunning down nine African Americans in cold blood.

     Of course, I have little hope of Trump changing his ways, but please let this serve as a wake-up call for Spanish-language media companies. Stop affirming the same tired worldview in your casting choices and in your character choices. A mass-murdering racist has looked at your creative choices in this arena with great admiration. It’s time to rethink the way you do business.

     ****

     The Journey to Wakanda: Afrofuturism and Black Panther:
     (excerpt)

     What makes Black Panther interesting isn’t just his race. He’s the latest in a series of on-screen Marvel superheroes of color, including Halle Berry as Storm in the X-Men franchise, Wesley Snipes as Blade, and Anthony Mackie as Captain America’s literal wingman, Falcon, in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
     Though this space could always use some sprucing, (I’m looking at you, Halle), it’s an area where we’ve generally seen slow and steady progress. What makes Black Panther an especially vital character to bring to a broader audience is his pedigree and the introduction of his native homeland, Wakanda.
     Created by Marvel heavyweights Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Black Panther appeared in 1966’s Fantastic Four #52. He was one of the first Black superheroes in mainstream American comics. T’Challa, Black Panther’s alter ego, is imbued with strength and agility by the Panther God. Because of his divine connection, which runs through his ancestors, he’s the chieftain and ruler of Wakanda.
     Ordained by the Panther God, T’Challa is in some ways a religious leader, as well as a monarch and the protector of the kingdom. That elevates him above the sort of dual identity problems that most superheroes have to endure. This triple role has always been one of my favorite aspects of the Black Panther canon, not only making him a fierce Black hero, but a polymath as well.

     Read More: The Journey to Wakanda: Afrofuturism and Black Panther | http://comicsalliance.com/afrofuturism-black-panther/?trackback=tsmclip

     […]

     Mainly in part to its abundance of vibranium, Wakanda is considered one of the richest and most scientifically advanced countries in Marvel’s fictional landscape. Due to the country’s intentional isolationism, Wakanda is ahead of it’s surrounding countries in technological advancements, creating computer systems impervious to external attack. Wakanda also specializes in advanced medicine and healing, as a by-product of a strong religious order — an equally intriguing counterpart to its savvy for tech and science.
     The religious practices of Wakanda are intertwined with the monarchy of the nation, making for no separation of church and state. There’s something distinctly otherworldly about Wakanda; it is in some ways lightyears ahead of the rest of the human race, while maintaining ancient religious and cultural values. The attire is of ancient African garb, similar to Kenyan and Ethiopian tribal wear, and serves a significant cultural purpose with its associations to the ruling deity, the Panther God.
     But more importantly, in establishing Wakanda Marvel strayed away from the usual “primitive” and “wild” tropes associated with Africa, as seen in books like Tarzan, creating a self-sustaining, futuristic power-house that never felt the effects of colonialism or white imperialism.

     Read More: The Journey to Wakanda: Afrofuturism and Black Panther | http://comicsalliance.com/afrofuturism-black-panther/?trackback=tsmclip

     […]

     Interestingly, Black Panther’s Atrofuristic environment was crafted way before the genre’s name was coined. In 1994, Mark Dery first used the term “Afrofuturism” in his essay, “Black to the Future.” As a style, the term refers to art that retells the experiences and realities of black people through a sci-fi lens. For example, Marvel’s Truth: Red, White and Black takes the historical Tuskegee experiments and reinvents its victims as the original subjects used for the Super Soldier serum that created Captain America. Other fictional takes include inventive retellings of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, showcasing slave narratives as alien abduction stories.
     Afrofuturism transcends fictional literature, influencing musical artists such as Parliament, Janelle Monae and Outkast, all of whom explore alien abduction and android/human interactions in their work.
     But sadly, it’s a sub-genre that’s rarely acknowledged in larger pop culture. More often than not, people of color are excluded from sci-fi and fantasy worlds, and when they are included, it’s often in token roles, as with Idris Elba’s Heimdall in the Thor movies. When a fictional Africa is illustrated in print or on screen, it’s stereotypically presented as a war-ravaged, poverty-stricken continent. Aside from Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America, few fictional African nations are shown celebrating an abundance of culture and achievements.
     The Black Panther film heralds more than just a superhero of color. He brings with him a movement rarely seen in mass media. In fact, Black Panther and his homeland of Wakanda may be Hollywood’s first blockbuster foray into Afrofuturism, challenging audiences to see a cast of all-African characters who aren’t defined by crime and subservience, but instead by pride and excellence. If nothing else, it shows Marvel’s potential to stand at the vanguard of change and innovation.

359. rq says

     3 July 2015 at 1:01 am

     Via FB, African American history in North Portland, a gallery of five pictures. As an example of why some of it is history:

     North Williams and Russell Street in Portland, Oregon. Photo taken if 1962. Williams and Russell streets, shown here in 1962, were at the heart of Portland’s Albina district, the home of numerous jazz clubs. The district was wiped out by construction of I-5, the Memorial Coliseum and a plan to expand Emanuel Hospital that ran out of money after the land was cleared.

     SO many black communities wiped out or separated in order to fit highways through them or over them.

     The Klan Desperately Trying To Rise Once More

     It’s about heritage ya hear

     The chapter’s grand titan, James Spears, told Politico that the group will protest “the Confederate flag being took down for all the wrong reasons.”

     “It’s part of white people’s culture,” Spears said.

     Not about racism ya hear

     “He should have actually aimed at the African-American gang-bangers, the ones who are selling the drugs to white youth, the ones who are robbing and raping every chance they get,” Jones said.

     What, selling drugs to the crackers making meth?

     We all know the Klan was a cultural organization, true, if you count white supremacy as some form of cultural expression. Their crimes were just artistic expression?

     Here is a link to an SPLC report on the Klan

     Anyone could put on a sheet and a mask and ride into the night to commit assault, robbery, rape, arson or murder.

     During the period of its most uncontrolled violence, the Klan also experienced unprecedented political gains. In 1922 Texas voters sent Klansman Earl Mayfield to the U.S. Senate, and Klan campaigns helped defeat two Jewish congressmen who had headed the Klan inquiry. Klan efforts were credited with helping to elect governors in Georgia, Alabama, California and Oregon. In Colorado, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Indiana, and Ohio, the Klan also achieved major power between 1921 and 1924. And there were pockets of strength in many other areas.

     Have a read, now when you hear these racist yahoos talking about heritage and white culture, now you know exactly what they mean.

     Yeah but the White Knights of David Duke are all soft and cuddly and just love mom’s homemade apple pie.

     When you hear “Heritage” spoken by men that like to wander around in hoods, think violence and oppression and above all white supremacy.

     Like many vicious and mindless thugs when victory was not forthcoming they turned upon themselves. Eventually so will our religious right, when they find that they have no place in our culture.

     So when you hear the likes of Huckabee talking about resisting Imperialism. When you hear talk of second amendment solutions. When you hear reference to secession.

     What you really are hearing, is the voice of the Klan echoing down through history.

     The rhetoric is designed to scare, the actions to terrorize.

     Now what is that called again, oh yes

     Terrorism.

     Did I miss posting about this? History Has Been Made. Female Genital Mutilation Banned In Nigeria.

     Nigeria made history by outlawing female genital mutilation. The ban falls under the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015 that was passed in Senate on May 5 and recently enacted into law.

     This was one of the last acts by the outgoing president, Goodluck Jonathan. His successor, Muhammadu Buhari, was sworn into office this past Friday, May 29.
     […]

     With the help of community activism, campaigns and numbers of organizational efforts to end this practice, UNICEF reported that teenage girls were now one-third less likely to undergo FGM/C today than 30 years ago.

     Now with the new law criminalizing this procedure, the hope is the ban will fully eliminate this practice and be strongly enforced to combat any existing societal pressures.

     The World Health Organization cites immediate harmful effects of FCM/C that include hemorrhage (bleeding), bacterial infection, open sores, and long-term consequences that include infertility, childbirth complications and recurring bladder infections.

     In another UNICEF report, communities who practice FGM often do so to reduce sexual desire in women and to initiate girls to womanhood, among other purposes.

     According to “The Guardian’s” analysis of 2014 UN data, a quarter of the women in Nigeria have undergone FGM.

     Stella Mukasa, director of Gender, Violence and Rights at the International Center for Research on Women, explains the complexity of the implementation of the new law banning FGM/C.

     “It is crucial that we scale up efforts to change traditional cultural views that underpin violence against women,” she wrote in an article for “The Guardian.” “Only then will this harmful practice be eliminated.”

     The Mystery of St. Louis’s Veiled Prophet, an article from September of last year, but worth a re-read, because this event is coming up again at the end of summer.

     According to historian Thomas Spencer in The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration: Power On Parade 1877-1995, the primary goal of the VP events was to take back the public stage from populist demands for social and economic justice. More than just a series of gaudy floats traversing the city streets, the parade and all its pomp was meant to reinforce the values of the elite on the working class of the city. The symbol of a mystical, benevolent figure whose identity is a mystery—only two Veiled Prophets have ever had their identity revealed—was meant to serve as a sort of empty shell that contained the accumulated privilege and power of the status quo.

     In fact, to underline the message of class and race hegemony, the image of the first Veiled Prophet is armed with a shotgun and pistol and is strikingly similar in appearance to a Klansman. On October 6, 1878, the Missouri Republican reported, “It will be readily observed from the accoutrements of the Prophet that the procession is not likely to be stopped by street cars or anything else.” Spencer takes “streetcar” to be a reference to the labor strikes. The message was clear: We, the bankers and businessmen, have a monopoly on violence and wealth. We are grand and mysterious, and also to be feared. The first Veiled Prophet, the only one ever willingly revealed by the organization, turned out to be St. Louis Police Commissioner John G. Priest, an active participant in quelling the railroad strikes the year before.

     Of course, few things struck as much fear into the hearts of city fathers as white/black labor cooperation. Cooperation between black and white workers during the 1877 strike led anti-labor newspapers to label a parade thrown in support of the strikes a “riot.” Inevitably, after a few minor looting incidents lead to the theft of bread and soap from a few local stores, the St. Louis Dispatch “characterized the strikers as ‘tramps and loafers’ who were ‘anxious to pillage and plunder’,” Thomas Spencer writes. The specter of the interracial flexing of labor muscle inspired to an armed citizens militia that marched in a counter-protest to the working-class demonstration. It sounds tragically reminiscent of recent events in St. Louis.

     The first Veiled Prophet took the theme of progress and wisdom, and, according to Spencer, “equated wisdom with wealth.” While many 19th century parades were fairly democratic and celebrated a sort of play or reversal of social order, a major element of the Mardi Gras parades that inspired it, the Veiled Prophet proceedings emphasized the existing power structure. The 1878 parade displayed a tableau of inevitable “progress” over 17 floats, beginning with the icy desolation of early Earth and culminating in the grand excess of Gilded Age industrialism with all of its attendant pomp. This notion of progress was portrayed as the inevitable result of unfettered capitalism, instituted by its white, male leaders. Slayback, the organizer of the proceedings, also threw in a grab bag of odd mythological references to properly mystify the throngs of people gathered to witness the procession.

     More at the link.

     This is a general article on how our race and gender have an effect on where we might stand on social justice issues (and the environment): Race and Gender Shape Views of Science in Surprising Ways, via NatGeo.

     If you’re a Republican and a fan of Sean Hannity, global warming is a scam. If you’re a Rachel Maddow-watching Democrat, you fret about ways to reduce your carbon footprint. Scientists produce report after report about the threat of climate change, but, like so many other issues in science, political ideology ultimately determines where people stand.

     Or does it?

     A survey published Wednesday by the Pew Research Center reveals that Americans’ views on many science-related policies are more likely to be shaped by demographics—age, race, gender, religion, and education—than by political beliefs, often with surprising results.

     “The broad pattern is that climate and energy issues are highly politicized,” writes Pew, “whereas issues tied to biomedical science, food safety, and space policy often are strongly tied to other, nonpolitical, factors.”

     The extent to which those factors—either alone or combined with others—influence people’s views varies by topic (see chart at bottom).

     […]

     Other science-related issues reveal wide differences among racial and ethnic groups. A majority of Hispanics (70 percent) in the Pew report are certain that human activity is driving climate change, in contrast to 44 percent of whites and 56 percent of blacks. That data tracks with other surveys, including one conducted last year by the polling firm Latino Decisions, which found that Hispanics were deeply concerned about the impact of extreme weather not only in the United States, but among their communities in Latin America and the Caribbean.

     The issue of overpopulation also exposes a racial rift. A majority of whites (61 percent) and Hispanics (65 percent) believe that there won’t be enough food and resources for the growing number of people in the world. But African Americans are more optimistic, with 57 percent saying that population growth won’t be a major problem because we’ll find ways to stretch natural resources.

     Brentin Mock, a journalist at CityLab who writes about racial issues in the United States, says that population growth is a topic that has unique resonance within the African American community. Although he’d like to take a thorough look at Pew’s data, he speculates on three reasons why blacks might diverge from other racial groups on this question.

     “Right now, we’re a minority—13 percent of the United States—and we could stand to use a lot more people,” he says, noting that gerrymandering has put a lot of African Americans in jurisdictions where they don’t have the numbers to elect officials who will represent their interests. So, some respondents, whose worldviews are informed by their local experiences, may see population expansion, on measure, as a positive development.

     And then, there’s the historical context, dating back to when slave owners sought to manipulate the birth rates of their “property.” In the 20th century, Mock points to alarmist rhetoric such as the bestselling 1968 book, The Population Bomb, by Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich, which warned that the world was on the brink of disaster unless countries undertook drastic birth control measures.

     Such thinking, both implicitly and explicitly, sometimes placed the blame on people of color, at home and abroad. (In 1969, biologist Walter Howard published a widely read article attributing racial unrest to “surplus individuals.”) As such, says Mock, when a pollster asks whether population growth is problematic, some African Americans immediately associate that question with population control and respond with a positive counter-narrative.

     Lastly, Mock says, there are those in the African American community who feel the issue is not being framed properly and see a solution within reach.

     “Population is not a problem; consumption by the wealthy is a problem, and we just need a more equitable allocation of resources,” Mock says.

     There’s a weird chart with funny symbols at the bottom.

     Public Enemy Tackle #BlackLivesMatter on New Album [INTERVIEW]

     When you’re a 55-year-old MC, icon and leader of one of hip-hop’s most celebrated and polarizing groups of all time, who has time to mince words? Chuck D, the booming, authoritative voice of the legendary, socially conscious Public Enemy is in the middle of spirited sermon preaching the gospel of his band’s 13th release, Man Plans, God Laughs.

     “On this album, I think we set the standard for how a 45- to 55-year-old MC should spit,” he says. “People tell me, ‘Chuck, you sound like somebody’s older uncle.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, I am somebody’s older uncle. Who the f*ck you talking to? I am that dude.’ [laughter] But as an elder, I’m not into blaming the youth about anything. I think blaming the youth is a waste of time.”

     Instead, Man Plans, God Laughs goes after the usual suspects and then some: the racist power structure; bullsh*t politicians; a music industry and Instagram-obsessed culture that has little use for elders; the continuing breakdown of the Black community. “There’s a category above youth that can be accountable,” Chuck explains. “And that’s who we are talking about on this album. That 41-year-old who should know better.”

     EBONY caught up with the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer to discuss the inspiration behind Man Plans, God Laughs, his thoughts on the confederate flag, the passion of Kendrick Lamar, how President Obama has found his mojo, and why Public Enemy still matters in 2015.

     […]

     EBONY: Of course everyone is discussing the tragic massacre of the nine churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina by the racist hands of Dylann Roof. The fallout has been very telling, sparking debate about the confederate flag and President Obama’s own role when it comes to such painful events. What comes to mind when you hear confederate flag supporters say it’s part of their Southern heritage?

     Chuck D: People, especially the younger generation, throw the word hate around too liberally. But the murder of those innocent Black people in that Charleston church was the clearest indication of true hate. I’ve played in arenas with the confederate flag hanging. One time I was in Augusta, Georgia, in a place that would later be renamed James Brown Arena. I spent damn near 15 minutes in the middle of a concert talking about that damn flag!

     EBONY: How surreal was that?

     Chuck D: It was crazy! [laughter] And of course you had people that was affiliated with far-right organizations, whether it was the Klan or whatever. They were part of the crew that did a lot of the stage work around the arena. So Public Enemy made sure to make a statement, because you have to stand up for something or you will fall for anything. Not only am I old enough to remember when the confederate flag was a symbol of a turbulent time, I was there years later when people were still saluting that flag while we were doing our damn shows. Symbols are powerful. And eliminating those painful symbols is very important. You don’t see anyone walking around with a swastika on their head.

     EBONY: What was your take on President Obama’s eulogy of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney?

     Chuck D: I think what President Obama spoke about was quite poignant. You really couldn’t get no better than him as far as the eloquence he presented. We’ve had great speakers over the years, like Minister Farrakhan, who has a truly radical point of view that I accept. But clearly Obama is mad that he has gray hair. You can feel the anger in his words like, “Yo dude, this job, man. I don’t want to hear nothing about what I did or didn’t do! All I know is I got the grays to show all the bullsh*t I’ve had to go through!” [laughter] And let’s keep it real. Michelle Obama is probably biting 500 holes in her lip. I can picture Mrs. Obama like, “I’m only doing this… I’m only smiling because I don’t want to be a problem for you, Barack.”

     EBONY: So with all the talk of Black and White race relations, how do we go about getting a better understanding of one another?

     Chuck D: The only way we will bring about change is if everybody knows the f*cking deal. That means you can’t be shallow and say there’s no such thing as Black and White, that we are human beings. Because although older people may know the racist history of this country, a lot of kids today don’t know. Your son or daughter is going around saying ni**a this, ni**a that, using the same language as somebody’s grandfather. Now they might use it in a different context, but that’s how a Dylann Roof happens.

     EBONY: Can you expound on that?

     Chuck D: Roof happens because he grows up thinking, “Oh, I know Black people. I’ve never gotten along with them. I’ve gotten beaten down by them and I got some Black friends that’s funny with it. They are all the same.” So when you got that going on, it’s like, damn, we are living in a different time. But if you check out Roof’s language, it’s the same racist stuff somebody’s White grandfather said.

     EBONY: Public Enemy recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of Fear of a Black Planet. Is it possible to make an album that called out everything from Black self-hatred to responding to detractors that labeled PE as anti-Semitic in this very politically correct era we are in today?

     Chuck D: I think Kendrick Lamar just did it [with To Pimp a Butterfly]. He made an important album for this era, for his demographic. I think Kendrick Lamar is the anger of a young generation trying to figure it out. He’s even extended an olive branch to the older generation by using older sounds and working with older artists.

360. rq says

     3 July 2015 at 1:24 am

     Mural for Juneteenth celebration at DMAE. Done with students of Dwight morrow HS and of the Academies@Englewood NJ (art)

     How unfair pretrial release practices affect black defendants in San Francisco

     In May, the release of racist text messages between San Francisco police officers drew the kind of attention to the relationship between African Americans and law enforcement there that traditionally only comes after a high profile police-involved death.

     A study conducted by the W. Haywood Burns Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to criminal justice equality, and published last week in a report by the Reentry Council of the City And County of San Francisco, took a close look at criminal justice disparities in the city. It concluded just as in Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore; and New York City; the differences between the ways in which black and white citizens there interact with law enforcement and courts are shocking. For example, African Americans are 7.1 times as likely as whites to be arrested in San Francisco.

     But one of the even more shocking areas of inequality had to do with what happens after arrest — who’s released and who ends up behind bars. The Reentry Council concluded that black adults are less likely to be released, although they’re more likely than white adults to meet the conditions for release. And this happens at every single step of the process:

     Black adults are less likely to be released at all process steps: Black adults are less likely to receive an “other” release (i.e., cited, bailed, and dismissed); less likely than White adults to be released by the duty commissioner; and less likely to be granted pretrial release at arraignment.

     Could it be that black people aren’t being released because of other factors that weigh against release, like prior felonies or prior misdemeanors? Did education make a difference? No.

     The study controlled for these things and found that, no matter how you slice it, black people are more likely to remain in custody while white people are more likely to walk free. [emphasis mine – rq]

     Out of all adults who meet the criteria for pretrial release (the entirety of the SFPDP database):

     39 percent of Black adults had prior felony(ies) compared to 26 percent of White adults, however, White adults with a prior felony were almost always more likely to be released at arraignment than Black adults with a prior felony

     44 percent of Black adults had prior misdemeanor(s) compared to 45 percent of White adults, however, White adults with a prior misdemeanor were almost always more likely to be released at arraignment than Black adults with a prior misdemeanor; and 62 percent of Black adults had a high school diploma or GED compared to 66 percent of White adults, however, White adults with a HSD/GED were almost always more likely to be released at arraignment than Black adults with a HSD/GED.

     Public Defender Jeff Adachi told SF Weekly that the way black San Franciscans are treated — especially when it comes to pretrial release — puts an enormous burden not just on the people who are arrested, but their families and their entire communities.

     “There is a direct correlation between being denied pretrial release and being convicted,” he said. “People in jail are more likely to plead guilty just to get out, even if they’re innocent. Being allowed pretrial release means being able to hold onto your job, your housing—even your children.”

     More at the article on the racist tweeting done by San Francisco police officers.

     Southern Poverty Law Center calls for end to holidays honoring Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee – I can hear the cries of What about white history??? all the way from here.

     The Southern Poverty Law Center has launched an online petition asking that Alabama and four other states drop holidays honoring Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.

     “It’s time to stop the celebrations,” the petition says. “We should honor those who represent American ideals, not those who led the fight to preserve slavery.”

     The other states listed are Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi.

     The petition follows other calls to remove symbols honoring the Confederacy since the murders of nine African-American worshipers at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., two weeks ago.

     […]

     SPLC President Richard Cohen said it was a good time to act on the organization’s concerns about holidays honoring Confederate President Davis and Lee, the South’s top general.

     “We thought that now, while the public is sensitive to these issues and in some sense has a broader understanding of the nature of these kinds of symbols, that it would be a good time to put this issue on the public agenda,” Cohen said.

     He said the petition was a way to start conversation.

     “Why we honor people who fought to preserve slavery is a question I think the public has to ask itself,” Cohen said.

     Gary Carlyle, Alabama division commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said the call for ending the holidays was divisive.

     Carlyle said slavery was terrible but pointed out there was slavery in the north at the time of the nation’s founding.

     Carlyle said if a holiday should be eliminated for slavery, it should be the Fourth of July because he said there were slaves in every state in 1776.

     “People have suffered, black, white and Hispanic, and we need to get along,” Carlyle said. “There’s no hate here.”

     Cohen said the SPLC has no plans to call for the elimination of Confederate Memorial Day, which commemorates those who died fighting for the Confederacy.

     “The overwhelming majority of them did not own slaves, and the fact that they died was tragic,” Cohen said.

     Note careful use of the ‘but they did it too!’ argument. (I mean, the North did have slaves, that was the thing – but who was fighting to keep slavery as a right? Hmm?)

     More on NASCAR pushing the envelope, so to speak. NASCAR and its tracks ask fans to stop displaying Confederate flag

     NASCAR asked its fans to refrain from displaying the Confederate Flag at its race, releasing a statement Thursday signed by tracks that host the Sprint Cup, Xfinity and Camping World Truck series.

     The statement comes the day after Daytona International Speedway announced it would offer a flag exchange as it prepares to host Sunday’s Coke Zero 400. Track president Joie Chitwood said fans wouldn’t be banned from having the Confederate flag in the infield this weekend.

     Last weekend, NASCAR Chairman Brian France said the sanctioning body would go “as far as we can” to eliminate the Confederate flag from its events.

     Thursday’s statement:

     “As members of the NASCAR industry, we join NASCAR in the desire to make our events among the most fan-friendly, welcoming environments in all of sports and entertainment.
     “To do that, we are asking our fans and partners to join us in a renewed effort to create an all-inclusive, even more welcoming atmosphere for all who attend our events. This will include the request to refrain from displaying the Confederate Flag at our facilities and NASCAR events.
     “We are committed to providing a welcoming atmosphere free of offensive symbols. This is an opportunity for NASCAR Nation to demonstrate its sense of mutual respect and acceptance for all who attend our events while collectively sharing the tremendous experience of NASCAR racing.”
     SIGNATORIES

     International Speedway Corporation (ISC)

     Auto Club Speedway

     Chicagoland Speedway

     Darlington Raceway

     Daytona International Speedway

     Homestead-Miami Speedway

     Kansas Speedway

     Martinsville Speedway

     Michigan International Speedway

     Phoenix International Raceway

     Richmond International Raceway

     Route 66 Raceway

     Talladega Superspeedway

     Watkins Glen International

     Speedway Motorsports Inc. (SMI)

     Atlanta Motor Speedway

     Bristol Motor Speedway

     Charlotte Motor Speedway

     Kentucky Speedway

     Las Vegas Motor Speedway

     New Hampshire Motor Speedway

     Sonoma Raceway

     Texas Motor Speedway

     Dover International Speedway

     Indianapolis Motor Speedway

     Pocono Raceway

     Iowa Speedway

     Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course

     Road America

     Canadian Tire Motorsport Park

     Eldora Speedway

     Gateway Motorsports Park

     You know what? I admit: I’m completely surprised by NASCAR being so behind this. I’d always associated NASCAR with a pretty specific demographic (though not exclusively) and wouldn’t ever have thought they’d be so vocal and pro-active in removing the confederate flag. Just goes to show, stereotypes is stereotypes.

     A Couple Of Dixie Flags Come Down At Ft. Sumter, And Rebels Bring Civil War To Internet (IMAGES)

     Recent Dixie demonstrations in South Carolina aren’t limited to state capitol grounds alone. Some Neo-Confederates are digging their old floppy disk computers out of the back closet of their mobile homes, setting their dial-up connections, and fighting a new Civil War online!

     For example, consider their comments on a recent news article about the rebel flag’s removal from the state’s historic Fort Sumter, where the Civil War officially began. The Post & Courier’s Robert Behre reported:

     On (June 25), the National Park Service, which runs the fort, issued a directive to remove Confederate flag items such as banners, belt buckles and other souvenirs from its gift shops, though books, DVDs and other materials showing the flag in a historical context may remain for sale.

     On the same day, the Park Service also instructed its parks and related sites to not fly flags other than the U.S. flag and respective state flags outside their historic context.

     In short, the Stars & Bars will still be on Fort Sumter, but only on one of the many masts that display the different flags that flew there over time.

     But that doesn’t sit right with Bubba and Daisy Mae. Old Dixie is heritage, not racism! And if it doesn’t get returned, dammit – the South’s gonna rise again!

     That was the clear sentiment of the many Neo-Confederates plaguing the page, who apparently didn’t read the entire article (or are too stupid to understand that the flag will still be there). In the process, they defeated their “heritage” argument, though, by taking a trajectory rife with racism – and stupidity, too.

     Examples at the link. o.O

361. rq says

     3 July 2015 at 6:07 am

     Ferguson Prosecutor Accused Of Misconduct Is Still Crusading Against Ferguson Arrestees

     Seated at one end of the dais, at the same level as the judge, is Ferguson Prosecuting Attorney Stephanie Karr, who has held that part-time role since April 2011 and who also serves as Ferguson’s city attorney. Shortly after Karr was hired as Ferguson’s top prosecutor, according to a Justice Department investigation, Mary Ann Twitty, who was then Ferguson’s city court clerk, complained in an email to Ferguson’s municipal court judge and police chief that the fines Karr was recommending for certain offenses — like “derelict vehicle” and “failure to comply” — were not high enough. “We need to keep up our revenue,” Twitty wrote.

     Twitty is now gone, fired for sending racist emails. Also gone is former Ferguson Municipal Court Judge Ronald Brockmeyer, who, it turned out, owed tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes even as he was jailing people who couldn’t afford Ferguson’s stiff fines. Former Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson, who supervised the court employees and bragged about the revenue the municipal court was bringing in, has retired.

     But Karr — who by day works for Curtis, Heinz, Garrett and O’Keefe, one of several St. Louis law firms that profit off of the county’s network of tiny municipalities desperate for revenue — is still around. This week, the part-time prosecutor was going after three people who were arrested under questionable circumstances outside the Ferguson Police Department in the early morning hours of Aug. 14, 2014, just days after Darren Wilson, who was then a Ferguson police officer, shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. In the court proceedings this week, Karr was seeking hundreds of dollars in fines for minor violations of Ferguson’s municipal code.

     Many of the people who were arrested in Ferguson, figuring it was unlikely they’d receive fair treatment in a municipal court that was essentially a massive shakedown, ended up taking plea deals and forking over some cash to avoid wasting time and money on fighting the charges. The three who had their day in court this week — Michael Powers, Meghan Flannery and Liz Peinado — chose to take the more difficult route.

     […]

     In Ferguson Municipal Court this week, the unconstitutional police tactics of Aug. 13 and early Aug. 14, tactics that suppressed the free-speech rights of American citizens, didn’t seem to strike Karr as a big deal. She objected when John Ammann, a law professor at Saint Louis University School of Law who represented all three defendants, brought up the issue of intimidation. Karr instead kept the focus on the “violent protesters,” even though all three defendants were only charged with noise ordinance violations and failure to comply.

     Ammann, seated at a plastic folding table about a foot lower than the judge and the prosecutor on the elevated platform, objected when Karr asked Ferguson police Officer Sean Gibbons whether protesters had yelled “Fuck the police.” Judge Donald McCullin sustained the objection, finding that Karr’s question was improper.

     Gibbons, who was first hired by the Ferguson Police Department in 1996, admitted that he never actually saw the defendants yelling or actively protesting, even though he sought to charge them with noise ordinance violations. He claimed that Powers, Flannery and Peinado were told via loudspeaker that they were under arrest, but he acknowledged that it was possible they did not hear the announcement. He also said it was “very possible” that protesters were intimidated by the sight of heavily armed St. Louis County Police officers on top of armored vehicles.

     Powers testified that he was trying that night to comply with police orders to disperse, but that he was barricaded in by armored vehicles. Powers said he asked a police officer how he should leave the area. Instead of offering assistance or instructions, Powers said, the officer told him to turn around and then arrested him.

     Karr appeared unsympathetic.

     “You couldn’t walk out of the area?” she asked Powers. “If you had done your research, you would have known that street was Tiffin.”

     “We were not able to safely leave the area, in my judgment,” Powers replied.

     […]

     Flannery, who described Karr’s pursuit of her case as a waste of resources, could be seen shaking her head several times during the trials. She said Karr was picking out “irrelevant” details.

     “If they’re trying to make a show of persecuting somebody for being in Ferguson, I mean, I guess I could understand that,” Flannery said. “But I don’t understand why it’s been this long and this drawn out of a process.”

     Flannery and Peinado are not the only ones critical of Karr, who as Ferguson’s city attorney has demanded tens of thousands of dollars from media organizations seeking city records. In fact, the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson’s municipal court accuses Karr of abusing her power.

     The DOJ report says that Karr and her assistants “officially prosecute all actions before the court,” but that most cases are resolved “without trial or a prosecutor’s involvement.” It notes that in 2013, Karr — who also worked as a prosecuting attorney in Hazelwood, Missouri — had a red-light camera ticket dismissed there for Ronald Brockmeyer, the municipal court judge who would later be found to owe the government tens of thousands of dollars. That same year, Karr also had a prosecutor from another municipality dismiss a speeding ticket for the relative of a Ferguson Police Department patrol supervisor. Also in 2013, Karr had a parking ticket dismissed for the employee of a nonprofit day camp at the request of Ferguson Mayor Knowles.

     Lawsuit says that recall of Ferguson Mayor should move forward

     A resident seeking to oust Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III has filed a lawsuit against the city clerk and the St. Louis County Board of Election Commissioners, claiming a number of signatures on a petition to recall Knowles were improperly invalidated.

     Last week, the Board of Election Commissioners announced that a group trying to remove Knowles was 27 signatures shy of the 1,814 needed to force a recall election.

     In the lawsuit, filed late Wednesday, Robert Hudgins argues that more than 28 of the signatures that were not accepted by the election board “were actually, in fact, valid signatures.” Hudgins, an unsuccessful City Council candidate last April, is a member of a committee of five residents formed to remove Knowles.

     Tony Rice, a leader of the group Ground Level Support, which gathered the signatures, said it appeared some weren’t counted because they were printed, not written in cursive.

     On Thursday, Rice produced a handful of petitions where signers had printed their names in a jagged script, as if their hands were shaking at the time they signed. The signatures weren’t counted, according to notations made on the petition by the election board, Rice said, an offered one explanation for why some voters signatures may have changed over time.

     “This is an elderly population,” Rice said. “People have strokes.”

     The suit asks for a judge to determine the validity of the signatures and to order Ferguson City Clerk Megan Asikainen to initiate a recall election.

     Gary Fuhr, St. Louis County’s Republican election director, declined to comment on the lawsuit, but he said voters’ signatures on a petition are checked by comparing them to those on file in a state database.

     The signatures in the database are updated regularly with voter registration cards filled out after a change of address.

     But Fuhr acknowledged that some signatures may not be up to date, particularly if the voter stays at the same address for a long time and votes regularly.

     If there’s only about 27 that need to be checked, can’t they actually go to those people – especially if they’re elderly – and have them sign in front of a judge? I know, that requires work. Anyway, good luck to the suit!

     Ferguson activists file lawsuit after recall effort falls short, same story, different source.

     Flagging Hate Speech

     I’ve spent my whole life in the Northeast, but I have Southern roots. My late grandfather came from a long line of sharecroppers who toiled in the fields of Decatur, Georgia for generations. Their history of hardship was common in the South.

     Where my grandfather grew up, poor whites often blamed their misfortune on the only group of people less fortunate than they: black people. For these marginalized whites, the Confederate battle flag came to symbolize what might have been.

     To me, the Confederate battle flag represents the dehumanization of black people. Renewed calls to banish it from public spaces across the South pit a national drive to stamp out prejudice against the region’s pride in its history — even if that particular history is nothing to be proud of.

     Many Southerners insist that the emblem merely salutes Southern heritage. But lynch mobs have never rallied behind sweet tea and collard greens.

     Separatist flags signified white defiance during the Civil War. A century later, they were embraced by the millions of whites who refused to acknowledge black people’s rights amid the racist backlash against the civil rights movement.

     Dylann Roof, who was fond of photographing himself with the rebel flag, made his sentiments clear when he allegedly murdered nine African Americans in a historically black Charleston church. Extremist groups that burn crosses on front lawns, set black churches on fire, and commit violent hate crimes often fly the same banner.

     Confederate flags, in short, epitomize white supremacy.

     In the Charleston tragedy’s wake, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley called for the Confederate battle flag to be taken down from state property. As far as Haley is concerned, South Carolinians should retain the right to fly the flag on their own property, but “the State House is different.”

     Most South Carolina lawmakers agree, though the flag still flew as President Barack Obama delivered a rousing eulogy for the late Reverend Clementa Pinckney — the most prominent of the nine people killed in Charlestown.

     Alabama governor Robert Bentley banned the flag from his state’s capitol. Other states, like Mississippi, are considering whether to drop Confederate symbols from their state flags. Virginia and Georgia are phasing out their Confederate-themed specialty license plates.

     What exactly are they waiting for?

     How many more churches must be spattered with bullets, or set on fire, before more Southern politicians admit that Confederate flags represent hatred and incite violence? It shouldn’t have taken 150 years — and the recent deaths of nine innocent churchgoers — for Southern states to renounce this symbol.

     Furling those flags won’t bring back lives or end systemic racism. But it will send a message that our state governments at least reject symbols of racist brutality.

     As states remove the flag from public property, they should raise up the ideals of liberty and equal rights. Southern governments have an opportunity to shatter their racist reputations and prove that Southern hospitality is second to none.

     Ah, nice tactic: pitting two southern stereotypes against each other – racism vs. hospitality. I vote for hospitality to win.

     St. Louis muni court cancels 56,000 warrants issued for failure to pay. Is that a good news? This is a good news!

     Defendants in St. Louis municipal court who face the risk of being arrested because they didn’t pay a fine or fee are getting a second chance.

     The city announced Wednesday it is cancelling a total of 56,000 warrants that had been issued to individuals who failed to pay. Those 29,000 people will get a letter offering them a new court date and a chance to explain why they did not pay the initial fines and court costs.

     “This is the most ethical and fair thing to do,” said Mayor Francis Slay in a statement. “We want people to fulfill their obligations to the law, but when a person’s only remaining commitment is to make a payment on their case, doing so shouldn’t create an undue stress or burden.”

     Also starting Wednesday, defendants who fail to pay in future cases will also get the warning letter asking them to come to court. Warrants could be issued if people skip their new court date or ignore the letter.

     A bit more at the link, but did you notice? 56 000 warrants to 29 000 people… that’s an average of almost 2 per person, and I have no doubt that there’s no few people with more than that to their name.

     Dustin Brown dominating tomorrow’s papers in the UK… (via @suttonnick) Congratulations, and did you notice how he’s at least 3 different shades of brown?

362. rq says

     3 July 2015 at 8:20 am

     So Rihanna has a new video out.
     Here’s two views on it –
     One, white feminist:
     Rihanna’s “BBHMM” Video Is Not Suitable For Work, Or Feminists

     Rihanna’s video for “Bitch Better Have My Money” has it all. Eric Roberts (who really must have some clause insisting that he get cast in every single smarmy role in a music video) and Hannibal’s Mads Mikkelsen provide celebrity cameos. There are enough nipples and T&A on display to crash Instagram. There’s violence, gore, and stomach-turning scenes of torture. Disappointingly, 99% of it is directed at an innocent woman.

     There’s only three more paragraphs in the review, summarizing the story-line.

     Here’s a more in-depth look: Rihanna’s ‘#BBHMM’ Video Is Brilliant, Terrifying, Complicated

     The new, highly anticipated video for Rihanna’s “#BBHMM” is an epic, 7-minute visual kaleidoscope of style and excess and, as was clearly intended, it’s generated a lot of buzz since debuting online at midnight today. In the video, we watch Rih, accompanied by two silent minions, kidnap the modelesque wife of an accountant (surprise! Mads Mikkelsen) who owes her some serious coin. The sexualized violence in the video is graphic and disturbing (we’ll get to that in a minute), but overall the video is everything we love about Rihanna — it’s ballsy, edgy, explicit, and unapologetic.

     When the “#BBHMM” single first dropped in March, it was lauded by many as a feminist banger that deftly reclaimed the phrase “Bitch better have my money,” once synonymous with pimps bossing around their hoes. With the song, Rihanna flipped the script, subverting the original connotation.

     […]

     And yet, I can’t pretend that it wasn’t jarring, even a little disturbing to see this motif expanded in the video. Here, the wife is stuffed into a Louis Vuitton chest, which is then stuffed into the trunk of a car. She’s dragged into an abandoned building, hung upside down and naked. Later, she’s hit over the head with a bottle; and forced to consume an excess of drugs and alcohol by Rihanna and her crew.

     It all sounds pretty terrible, and I can’t pretend that my first reaction wasn’t one of extreme discomfort with the depiction of violence and sexualized violence in the video itself, and the reaction some people, especially women, had to it — reveling in its imagery, talking about how awesome it would be if Rihanna kidnapped them. The celebration and applause of a black woman from viewers of the video was beautiful to see, and yet one can’t shake how incredibly triggering some of the imagery in this video might be — how ultimately, it’s a cool looking video, but also pretty messed up.

     But there’s so much at play here. There’s a desire to make some large and sweeping declaration about how “un-feminist” the video is, but to dismiss it based solely on my own discomfort would be to do it a disservice. The feminism of Rihanna, the feminism of black women in general, is consistently scrutinized and policed in a way it isn’t with white women. It’s important to be aware of that in any discussion about the video’s feminist merits or failings.

     Shortly after the video premiered, one online commenter said, “I’m not a feminist. I’m a rihannaist,” and it’s that idea that’s at the core of what makes this video so distinct. This video isn’t about feminism, and yet it is about feminism. It isn’t about race, and yet it’s so very much about race. (And money. Don’t forget the money.)

     […]

     It’s the kind of video that, quite simply, would be lauded and never questioned if a white man (a man like Tarantino) made it. Does the discomfort some are feeling, the discomfort even I initially felt (and still do, faintly, with every rewatch), really have only to do with an aversion to violence? Or does it stem from this idea that a black woman could not only take ownership of this kind of stylized cinematic violence and rage, but also execute it in a way that rivals and challenges the mostly white men who are usually praised for it? Of course, there are people who are triggered and upset by the work of Tarantino and directors like him, who criticize their use of sex and violence. But in spite of all, these men are able to cloak themselves with the title of auteur and visionary, and are very rarely ever held truly accountable.

     […]

     Rihanna has always been a difficult artist, a difficult woman. And it’s Rihanna’s difficultness that has always made her so compelling, especially juxtaposed against the almost saint-like status of Queen Bey. The #BBHMM video is peak Rihanna in that respect — difficult, because it’s imagery is so extreme, and difficult because there’s as much to praise in it as there is to condemn. It is difficult, and unselfconscious about that. There’s no hesitation, no pandering, but the full unbridled artistic expression. There’s power in that. This video proves to be the perfect companion to Kendrick Lamar’s video for ‘Alright’ which dropped yesterday. Both are brilliant visually and conceptually and both, even as they entertain and feed the pop culture beast, are saying brilliant, terrifying, and complicated things about race and gender.

     But with #BBHMM, perhaps it’s best, ultimately, not to overthink it. By its last shot, with a naked Rihanna, covered in blood, laying in a trunk full of money, the video is asking you to do only one thing: ease into your discomfort. Embrace it.

     It is exactly like all the gangster/revenge/murder movies that I hate (Tarantino’s among them). And it is excellent.

     We’re five of Africa’s most renowned writers – any questions for us? MORE BOOKS!

     Think African literature and who springs to mind? Chinua Achebe, “the father of modern African literature”? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the writer whose voice was famously sampled in Beyoncé’s Flawless and recently sparked nationwide discussion on sexism in Nigeria.

     But who else? Despite the talent of and calibre of African writers, most struggle to get the international recognition they deserve. The Caine Prize, now in its 16th year, seeks to remedy this with an annual celebration of the continent’s best writers.

     Focused on short-stories the accolade has been awarded to some of the most prominent names from the continent today, including Kenya’s Binyavanga Wainaina, Sierra Leone’s Olufemi Terry and Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo.

     But why do African writers struggle to get noticed? Is the “African literature” grouping a help or hindrance? What, if anything, links these writers together? Is there really such as “African literature”?

     We’ve asked the five shortlisted writers from this year’s Caine prize – Segun Afolabi, Elnathan John, FT Kola, Masande Ntshanga and Namwali Serpell – to join our panel to discuss these questions; offer tips for budding writers and talk about their work.

     Any questions?

     They’ll join us live on Friday 3 July March between 12.30-1.30pm BST, post your questions in the comments below or tweet them at @GuardianAfrica

     That’s tomorrow!!!

     Diversity and the Ivory Ceiling

     According to the data available from the National Center for Education Statistics, faculty members of color make up a very small percentage of all associate professors. As the figure suggests, Asian men have made the most notable progress over this time period; while Asian women are less well represented, they have made progress since 2005. Black men, who were not far behind Asian men in 1995, have lost ground. Native American associates have made no progress, and progress is slow for black women, Hispanic men and Hispanic women.

     While these numbers are low, they are more distressing when compared to change over time for full professors. If faculty of color were moving through the ranks, we should expect to see change in the composition of full professors. Yet most groups have barely increased their representation among full professors. Asian men’s gains at the full level have recently slowed, despite their steady increase among associate faculty. Native American men and women, black men and women, and Latinos also have stalled. Only Asian and Latina women continue to make gains, and these are slight.

     […]

     In a recent publication, Mari Castañeda and Michael Hames-García reflect on these issues. Faculty members of color face challenges in convincing their colleagues that their scholarly record merits promotion. Implicit bias, or unconscious assumptions that minorities are less qualified, often discussed with regard to faculty hiring, also operates in faculty promotion. Institutional racism can work against faculty of color, making tenure and promotion processes feel like running the gauntlet. It can be challenging to find external letter writers knowledgeable about the intellectual contributions that faculty of color make. Castañeda and Hames-García note this is particularly challenging for faculty members who focus on issues of race, ethnicity and gender in their scholarship.

     Even when faculty members of color win tenure successfully, some may have experienced a lack of support, microaggressions or outright discrimination in their bid for tenure. Among these faculty members, the most successful often leave their institutions, while those who stay feel alienated and may experience “psychological departure.” These issues are particularly pronounced in predominantly white institutions.

     Associate professors of color, particularly black, Latino and Native American faculty members, also may find themselves condescended to and otherwise made to feel that they do not belong. This can even include being threatened, profiled by the police and arrested. For example, Kiese Laymon wrote a powerful essay about his experience at Vassar College that describes the police profiling he and his brown and black students have been subjected to, as well as a wide range of aggressive and unconscionable behaviors from his colleagues, who questioned his every accomplishment. Eve Dunbar similarly describes the constant hazing she experienced as an African-American woman. These challenging conditions help explain lower retention rates for midcareer faculty of color.

     […]

     What are some institutional approaches to helping midcareer faculty of color? In addition to the recommendations that we made for midcareer faculty more generally, we would note that universities need to institute clear guidelines that ensure that faculty of color are not held to higher standards than white faculty. Universities also need to promote diversity training as well as awareness among personnel committees and administrators of implicit bias, so that they consider how bias may affect external letters and student evaluations in promotions, as well as their own readings of the case. This may include training in soliciting and interpreting external letters.

     Mutual mentoring programs aimed at faculty of color should also be supported, to help them recognize and address the biases they may face. Universities also need to develop strategies aimed at addressing the particular service burdens borne by faculty of color, including course releases for unusual committee service and recognition of increased time spent mentoring and on community service. In addition, universities need to consider the broader community and whether it is welcoming to diverse faculty, developing programs aimed at bettering faculty of color’s experiences. For example, universities should be engaged in discussions with campus and community police about implicit bias and racial profiling, and should send strong public messages in support of faculty and students of color when profiling occurs.

     In addition to recruiting faculty of color, universities need to give more thought to retention as well, including those at midcareer. Investment in our faculty makes good sense. Diversity creates the conditions for greater creativity, and allows for much greater institutional change. Yet too many faculty of color are derailed in midcareer. We can make a difference, with recognition of the challenges and concentrated focus on solving the problems that limit the advancement of faculty of color.

     Lots of graphs at the link!

     That was for professors; here’s on students. On Being A Black Female Engineering Student: Street Harassment and Microaggressions At School

     My sister has told me so many stories of annoying experiences of harassment and racial microaggressions that she’s dealt with being a Black woman in an engineering program. When teachers applaud White students for doing well on complicated exams, they ask her if she “got lucky.” When she arrives to a new class at the start of the semester, she’s repeatedly asked if she is in the right class, when White students are not asked this. When it is time to take an exam, the TA often ignores her, then when she tries to pick up an exam packet herself, the TA places a hand over them and questions her right to take the exam, as if she has not been in the course the whole time. It’s the binary of being extremely visible as a stereotype but also insistently ignored. Black women know this all too well.

     Imagine dealing with endless racial microaggressions but on top of people questioning your abilities, despite excellent grades and amazing critical thinking skills, having to deal with street harassment in the classroom.

     People whine and whine about women and men of colour, as well as White women not entering STEM fields as much as White men (while of course ignoring the institutional/structural racism and sexism at play…) ignoring the fact that once Black women, for example, are in these fields, even in the classes, there is a great deal of psychological warfare to navigate through for years on end (most Engineering students spend more than 4 years in college) just to later enter a career field where the same things will be repeated. It is not easy.

     I am angered that my baby sister is dealing with the street harassment that I deal with, well…everywhere, in her classrooms. She’s trying to concentrate on complicated material and is PAYING to be there, and shouldn’t have to deal with this ignorance on top of all of the microaggressions and other nonsense that she deals with as a Black woman studying Engineering.

363. rq says

     3 July 2015 at 8:25 am

     So Rihanna has a new video out.
     Here’s two views on it –
     One, white feminist:
     http://www.refinery29.com/2015/07/90121/rihanna-b*tch-better-have-my-money-video (please make necessary correction in order for link to work) Rihanna’s “BBHMM” Video Is Not Suitable For Work, Or Feminists

     Rihanna’s video for “B*tch Better Have My Money” has it all. Eric Roberts (who really must have some clause insisting that he get cast in every single smarmy role in a music video) and Hannibal’s Mads Mikkelsen provide celebrity cameos. There are enough nipples and T&A on display to crash Instagram. There’s violence, gore, and stomach-turning scenes of torture. Disappointingly, 99% of it is directed at an innocent woman.

     There’s only three more paragraphs in the review, summarizing the story-line.

     Here’s a more in-depth look: Rihanna’s ‘#BBHMM’ Video Is Brilliant, Terrifying, Complicated

     The new, highly anticipated video for Rihanna’s “#BBHMM” is an epic, 7-minute visual kaleidoscope of style and excess and, as was clearly intended, it’s generated a lot of buzz since debuting online at midnight today. In the video, we watch Rih, accompanied by two silent minions, kidnap the modelesque wife of an accountant (surprise! Mads Mikkelsen) who owes her some serious coin. The sexualized violence in the video is graphic and disturbing (we’ll get to that in a minute), but overall the video is everything we love about Rihanna — it’s ballsy, edgy, explicit, and unapologetic.

     When the “#BBHMM” single first dropped in March, it was lauded by many as a feminist banger that deftly reclaimed the phrase “B*tch better have my money,” once synonymous with pimps bossing around their hoes. With the song, Rihanna flipped the script, subverting the original connotation.

     […]

     And yet, I can’t pretend that it wasn’t jarring, even a little disturbing to see this motif expanded in the video. Here, the wife is stuffed into a Louis Vuitton chest, which is then stuffed into the trunk of a car. She’s dragged into an abandoned building, hung upside down and naked. Later, she’s hit over the head with a bottle; and forced to consume an excess of drugs and alcohol by Rihanna and her crew.

     It all sounds pretty terrible, and I can’t pretend that my first reaction wasn’t one of extreme discomfort with the depiction of violence and sexualized violence in the video itself, and the reaction some people, especially women, had to it — reveling in its imagery, talking about how awesome it would be if Rihanna kidnapped them. The celebration and applause of a black woman from viewers of the video was beautiful to see, and yet one can’t shake how incredibly triggering some of the imagery in this video might be — how ultimately, it’s a cool looking video, but also pretty messed up.

     But there’s so much at play here. There’s a desire to make some large and sweeping declaration about how “un-feminist” the video is, but to dismiss it based solely on my own discomfort would be to do it a disservice. The feminism of Rihanna, the feminism of black women in general, is consistently scrutinized and policed in a way it isn’t with white women. It’s important to be aware of that in any discussion about the video’s feminist merits or failings.

     Shortly after the video premiered, one online commenter said, “I’m not a feminist. I’m a rihannaist,” and it’s that idea that’s at the core of what makes this video so distinct. This video isn’t about feminism, and yet it is about feminism. It isn’t about race, and yet it’s so very much about race. (And money. Don’t forget the money.)

     […]

     It’s the kind of video that, quite simply, would be lauded and never questioned if a white man (a man like Tarantino) made it. Does the discomfort some are feeling, the discomfort even I initially felt (and still do, faintly, with every rewatch), really have only to do with an aversion to violence? Or does it stem from this idea that a black woman could not only take ownership of this kind of stylized cinematic violence and rage, but also execute it in a way that rivals and challenges the mostly white men who are usually praised for it? Of course, there are people who are triggered and upset by the work of Tarantino and directors like him, who criticize their use of sex and violence. But in spite of all, these men are able to cloak themselves with the title of auteur and visionary, and are very rarely ever held truly accountable.

     […]

     Rihanna has always been a difficult artist, a difficult woman. And it’s Rihanna’s difficultness that has always made her so compelling, especially juxtaposed against the almost saint-like status of Queen Bey. The #BBHMM video is peak Rihanna in that respect — difficult, because it’s imagery is so extreme, and difficult because there’s as much to praise in it as there is to condemn. It is difficult, and unselfconscious about that. There’s no hesitation, no pandering, but the full unbridled artistic expression. There’s power in that. This video proves to be the perfect companion to Kendrick Lamar’s video for ‘Alright’ which dropped yesterday. Both are brilliant visually and conceptually and both, even as they entertain and feed the pop culture beast, are saying brilliant, terrifying, and complicated things about race and gender.

     But with #BBHMM, perhaps it’s best, ultimately, not to overthink it. By its last shot, with a naked Rihanna, covered in blood, laying in a trunk full of money, the video is asking you to do only one thing: ease into your discomfort. Embrace it.

     It is exactly like all the gangster/revenge/murder movies that I hate (Tarantino’s among them). And it is excellent.

     We’re five of Africa’s most renowned writers – any questions for us? MORE BOOKS!

     Think African literature and who springs to mind? Chinua Achebe, “the father of modern African literature”? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the writer whose voice was famously sampled in Beyoncé’s Flawless and recently sparked nationwide discussion on sexism in Nigeria.

     But who else? Despite the talent of and calibre of African writers, most struggle to get the international recognition they deserve. The Caine Prize, now in its 16th year, seeks to remedy this with an annual celebration of the continent’s best writers.

     Focused on short-stories the accolade has been awarded to some of the most prominent names from the continent today, including Kenya’s Binyavanga Wainaina, Sierra Leone’s Olufemi Terry and Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo.

     But why do African writers struggle to get noticed? Is the “African literature” grouping a help or hindrance? What, if anything, links these writers together? Is there really such as “African literature”?

     We’ve asked the five shortlisted writers from this year’s Caine prize – Segun Afolabi, Elnathan John, FT Kola, Masande Ntshanga and Namwali Serpell – to join our panel to discuss these questions; offer tips for budding writers and talk about their work.

     Any questions?

     They’ll join us live on Friday 3 July March between 12.30-1.30pm BST, post your questions in the comments below or tweet them at @GuardianAfrica

     That’s tomorrow!!! That’s today, the calendar tells me. And already over. :(

     Diversity and the Ivory Ceiling

     According to the data available from the National Center for Education Statistics, faculty members of color make up a very small percentage of all associate professors. As the figure suggests, Asian men have made the most notable progress over this time period; while Asian women are less well represented, they have made progress since 2005. Black men, who were not far behind Asian men in 1995, have lost ground. Native American associates have made no progress, and progress is slow for black women, Hispanic men and Hispanic women.

     While these numbers are low, they are more distressing when compared to change over time for full professors. If faculty of color were moving through the ranks, we should expect to see change in the composition of full professors. Yet most groups have barely increased their representation among full professors. Asian men’s gains at the full level have recently slowed, despite their steady increase among associate faculty. Native American men and women, black men and women, and Latinos also have stalled. Only Asian and Latina women continue to make gains, and these are slight.

     […]

     In a recent publication, Mari Castañeda and Michael Hames-García reflect on these issues. Faculty members of color face challenges in convincing their colleagues that their scholarly record merits promotion. Implicit bias, or unconscious assumptions that minorities are less qualified, often discussed with regard to faculty hiring, also operates in faculty promotion. Institutional racism can work against faculty of color, making tenure and promotion processes feel like running the gauntlet. It can be challenging to find external letter writers knowledgeable about the intellectual contributions that faculty of color make. Castañeda and Hames-García note this is particularly challenging for faculty members who focus on issues of race, ethnicity and gender in their scholarship.

     Even when faculty members of color win tenure successfully, some may have experienced a lack of support, microaggressions or outright discrimination in their bid for tenure. Among these faculty members, the most successful often leave their institutions, while those who stay feel alienated and may experience “psychological departure.” These issues are particularly pronounced in predominantly white institutions.

     Associate professors of color, particularly black, Latino and Native American faculty members, also may find themselves condescended to and otherwise made to feel that they do not belong. This can even include being threatened, profiled by the police and arrested. For example, Kiese Laymon wrote a powerful essay about his experience at Vassar College that describes the police profiling he and his brown and black students have been subjected to, as well as a wide range of aggressive and unconscionable behaviors from his colleagues, who questioned his every accomplishment. Eve Dunbar similarly describes the constant hazing she experienced as an African-American woman. These challenging conditions help explain lower retention rates for midcareer faculty of color.

     […]

     What are some institutional approaches to helping midcareer faculty of color? In addition to the recommendations that we made for midcareer faculty more generally, we would note that universities need to institute clear guidelines that ensure that faculty of color are not held to higher standards than white faculty. Universities also need to promote diversity training as well as awareness among personnel committees and administrators of implicit bias, so that they consider how bias may affect external letters and student evaluations in promotions, as well as their own readings of the case. This may include training in soliciting and interpreting external letters.

     Mutual mentoring programs aimed at faculty of color should also be supported, to help them recognize and address the biases they may face. Universities also need to develop strategies aimed at addressing the particular service burdens borne by faculty of color, including course releases for unusual committee service and recognition of increased time spent mentoring and on community service. In addition, universities need to consider the broader community and whether it is welcoming to diverse faculty, developing programs aimed at bettering faculty of color’s experiences. For example, universities should be engaged in discussions with campus and community police about implicit bias and racial profiling, and should send strong public messages in support of faculty and students of color when profiling occurs.

     In addition to recruiting faculty of color, universities need to give more thought to retention as well, including those at midcareer. Investment in our faculty makes good sense. Diversity creates the conditions for greater creativity, and allows for much greater institutional change. Yet too many faculty of color are derailed in midcareer. We can make a difference, with recognition of the challenges and concentrated focus on solving the problems that limit the advancement of faculty of color.

     Lots of graphs at the link!

     That was for professors; here’s on students. On Being A Black Female Engineering Student: Street Harassment and Microaggressions At School

     My sister has told me so many stories of annoying experiences of harassment and racial microaggressions that she’s dealt with being a Black woman in an engineering program. When teachers applaud White students for doing well on complicated exams, they ask her if she “got lucky.” When she arrives to a new class at the start of the semester, she’s repeatedly asked if she is in the right class, when White students are not asked this. When it is time to take an exam, the TA often ignores her, then when she tries to pick up an exam packet herself, the TA places a hand over them and questions her right to take the exam, as if she has not been in the course the whole time. It’s the binary of being extremely visible as a stereotype but also insistently ignored. Black women know this all too well.

     Imagine dealing with endless racial microaggressions but on top of people questioning your abilities, despite excellent grades and amazing critical thinking skills, having to deal with street harassment in the classroom.

     People whine and whine about women and men of colour, as well as White women not entering STEM fields as much as White men (while of course ignoring the institutional/structural racism and sexism at play…) ignoring the fact that once Black women, for example, are in these fields, even in the classes, there is a great deal of psychological warfare to navigate through for years on end (most Engineering students spend more than 4 years in college) just to later enter a career field where the same things will be repeated. It is not easy.

     I am angered that my baby sister is dealing with the street harassment that I deal with, well…everywhere, in her classrooms. She’s trying to concentrate on complicated material and is PAYING to be there, and shouldn’t have to deal with this ignorance on top of all of the microaggressions and other nonsense that she deals with as a Black woman studying Engineering.

364. rq says

     3 July 2015 at 8:32 am

     Statement by Justice Department Spokesperson on Recent Church Fires Across Five States

     The following statement is attributable to Justice Department spokesperson Melanie Newman regarding recent church fires across five states:

     “The federal law enforcement team of ATF, FBI, the Civil Rights Division and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices are actively investigating several church fires across five states that have occurred over the past two weeks. Preliminary investigations indicate that two of the fires were started by natural causes and one was the result of an electrical fire. All of the fires remain under active investigation and federal law enforcement continues to work to determine the cause of all of the fires. To date the investigations have not revealed any potential links between the fires.

     “If in fact there is evidence to support hate crime charges in any one of these cases, the FBI, in coordination with the ATF and local authorities, will work closely with the Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to bring those forward.”

     Five Cleveland police officers to face charges in deadly 2012 pursuit, this is on top of Brelo, who got off.

     Lt. Paul Wilson, Sgt. Patricia Coleman, Sgt. Randolph Dailey, Sgt. Michael Donegan and Sgt. Jason Edens “failed to do to their duty to limit and manage the chase” that left Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell dead on Nov. 29, 2012, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty said in a statement.

     The five officers were indicted in May 2014, but they will now be prosecuted in East Cleveland rather than Cuyahoga County Superior Court. Joe Frolik, a spokesman for McGinty’s office, said the prosecutors from Cuyahoga County would still serve as lead counsel on the case, even after East Cleveland’s prosecutor filed charges in her own jurisdiction.

     “East Cleveland has long wanted to have some say in how this matter was adjudicated because it culminated in their community,” he said.

     […]

     The reason charges against the five officers were filed in East Cleveland was not immediately clear. Last year, the five were indicted on dereliction-of-duty charges by a Cuyahoga County grand jury. McGinty has said he wanted to try the officers with Brelo, but the officers’ attorney argued against that.

     “Now the supervisors can be tried in a misdemeanor court for these misdemeanor offenses in the city where their misconduct reached its tragic culmination in the deaths of Mr. Russell and Ms. Williams,” McGinty said in a statement Thursday.

     Frolik said the prosecutor was not trying to benefit in any way from the change of venue, though any jury convened in East Cleveland is likely to have a majority of black citizens. According to U.S. census data, 93% of East Cleveland’s population identifies as black, and East Cleveland Municipal Judge William Dawson is black.

     The racial makeup of a jury was a key argument in pretrial motions before Brelo’s prosecution. Brelo requested, and was granted, a bench trial over the objections of prosecutors, who contended that he was trying to avoid facing a jury that almost certainly would have had black members.

     Brelo is white. Both Williams and Russell were black.

     Loomis, the union president, told the Los Angeles Times that he believes McGinty did not want to try the supervisors in front of Judge John P. O’Donnell, who acquitted Brelo in May.

     “He needs to let this go,” Loomis said. “He is absolutely desperate for a win.”

     The five officers were offered a plea deal this week, under which they would have received no jail time or fines as long as they admitted guilt on the dereliction-of-duty charge, Loomis said. All five immediately rejected the offer, Loomis said.

     Frolik said the prosecutor’s office does not comment on plea deal negotiations.

     “You’re not going to admit guilt if you’re not guilty of anything,” Loomis said.

     Note interaction between prosecutor, police, and police union.
     I don’t hold high hopes, though – even if they’re actually convicted of these charges, Brelo was not – and I think that will make this that much more difficult. If these were tried first (and convicted), and then I think it would be easier to convict Brelo, too – but then I don’t know all the legal ins-and-outs.
     So is the prosecutor desperate for a win? Perhaps, but honestly, considering how little the system is stacked in his favour (basically, not at all), I’m not surprised and I wish him all the best.

     Baltimore authorities investigate ‘Enjoy your ride’ sign on door of police van

     Baltimore authorities are investigating after photos emerged showing a sign inside the door of a police van that reads, “Enjoy your ride, cuz we sure will!”

     The photos are circulating amid simmering tensions over the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, which set off protests and riots in Baltimore this year.

     Prosecutors say Gray suffered a critical neck injury in April after being left handcuffed and shackled in the back of a Baltimore police transport van that made several stops. Six police officers have been indicted on charges connected to his death.

     The city’s police department was quick to criticize the sign on the van door after the photos came to light Thursday.

     “The nature and the posting of the wording is both concerning and unacceptable,” Baltimore City Police Sgt. Jarron Jackson said, adding that the department is taking the issue “very seriously.”

     “Deputy Police Commissioner Dean Palmere has ordered that an inspection of all departmental vehicles be conducted,” Jackson said. “Internal investigations will be initiated when appropriate.”

     CNN affiliate WBAL reported that the photos were taken Tuesday near the Central District Police Station. It said police department officials had authenticated the photos, which it received from a viewer.

     Baltimore City Paper reported that it had spoken to the photographer, who asked not to be identified by name. She sent the newspaper an original version of a photo of the sign from her phone, it said.

     WBAL said it was unclear who had posted the sign or how long it had been in place.

     And yes, I’m only posting this for the photo! Congrats to the extraordinary #MistyCopeland. The first ever Black principal ballerina at American Ballet Theater.

     Puff Daddy’s Felony Charges Against That UCLA Football Coach Have Been Dropped, the ones that would have made him a terrorist.

     Like his new song goes, Puff Daddy finna get loose tonight. After a productive day in court, Sean Combs’ felony charges against the UCLA football coach he allegedly attacked with a kettleball have been dropped. Combs was facing three counts of assault with a deadly weapon, one count of making terrorist threats and one count of battery but the Los Angeles County District Attorney has rejected the case, as TMZ reports. It’s worth noting, however, that he could still face misdemeanor charges.

365. rq says

     3 July 2015 at 9:28 am

     The Combined Black Workforces of Google, Facebook, and Twitter Could Fit on a Single Jumbo Jet. Just look at that diversity!!!

     We already knew that Google, Facebook, and Twitter employed relatively few African Americans, but new details show that the gap is truly striking. All three companies have disclosed their full EEO1 reports, detailed accounts of their employees’ race and gender demographics that the law requires them to submit to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The reports show that out of a combined 41,000 Twitter, Facebook, and Google employees, only 758, or 1.8 percent, are black. To put this in perspective, all of those workers could fit onto a single Airbus A380. […]

     Race and gender gaps in tech hiring have been hot-button issues as of late. Since last May, when Rev. Jesse Jackson showed up at Google’s shareholder meeting, he has won some serious diversity concessions from major tech companies—but the pace of minority hiring remains slow. As the Guardian noted yesterday, Facebook hired 1,216 new people last year, and only 36 were black. Since last year, the percentage of black Google workers has not changed.

     It should be easier to shift workplace demographics at smaller companies. Twitter, with fewer than 3,000 employees in 2014, has a huge black user base that is sometimes referred to as “Black Twitter.” Jackson wants the company to do more to move the needle. “I am very disappointed,” he told the Guardian. “We are becoming intolerant with these numbers. There’s a big gap between their talk and their implementation.”

     There’s a graph at the link, and for those who don’t read graphs, a nice diagram with airplanes.

     Woman Charged With Hate Crime After Allegedly Leaving “Racist, Alarming” Message on New York Church Voicemail

     A 66-year-old woman was arrested for allegedly leaving a “racist and alarming” message on the voicemail of a Long Island church, police said.

     Elisa Pellino, of Farmingdale, was arrested at her home Thursday in connection with the message left at New Hope Institutional Baptist Church in Amityville a day earlier.

     The pastor of the church called police after getting the voicemail and detectives with Suffolk County’s hate crimes division launched an investigation.

     The specific nature of the voicemail wasn’t clear.

     Pellino was charged with aggravated harassment as a hate crime.

     She was expected to be arraigned Friday. It wasn’t immediately clear if Pellino had an attorney.

     On a more positive business note, Black Women-Owned Businesses Skyrocket By 322 Percent In Less Than 20 Years

     The 2015 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report released this week found that the number of women-owned businesses grew by 74 percent between 1997 and 2015. That’s 1.5 times the national average of business growth to be exact.

     Meanwhile, the growth in the number of businesses specifically owned by black women is outpacing that of all women-owned firms, the report says. The number of black women-owned businesses has grown by a whopping 322 percent since 1997. Today, black women own roughly 14 percent of all businesses in the country owned by women, which tallies to around 1.3 million businesses, according to the report.

     “While nationally African American women comprise 14% of all women-owned firms, African American women comprise a greater than average share of all women-owned firms in Georgia (35%), Maryland (33%), and Illinois (22%),” the report says.

     Statistics show that throughout these 1.3 million companies, nearly 300,000 workers are employed and the businesses generate an estimated $52.6 billion in revenue. When digging into the number of black-owned businesses overall, 49 percent are owned by women.

     Businesses owned by black women also top the charts in revenue growth when compared to other minority women-owned firms proving that their economic clout is ever-growing.

     The call from the black community to support black-owned business is one that has been made clearly and consistently. Now, amid a national neglect of black women from conversations around race and diversity, this news is particularly significant.

     But in the end, we all know what this really means: #BlackGirlsAreMagic.

     Kendrick Lamar Responds to Geraldo Rivera: ‘Hip-Hop Is Not the Problem, Our Reality Is’, Geraldo Rivera being the one who said his video (and performance) incite violence.

     “How can you take a song that’s about hope and turn it into hatred?” asked Kendrick Lamar in a response to Geraldo Rivera’s criticisms of his BET performance and hip-hop in general. “The overall message is ‘We gonna be alright.’ It’s not the message of I want to kill people.”

     The Compton rapper spoke to TMZ Thursday after Rivera and other Fox News anchors slammed his powerful performance of “Alright” at the 2015 BET Awards.

     “This is why I say that hip-hop has done more damage to young African-Americans than racism in recent years. This is exactly the wrong message,” Rivera said, specifically pointing to the “Alright” line: “And we hate po-po/ Wanna kill us dead in the street, fo sho.”

     But Lamar called this sort or rhetoric an attempt to delude the real problem: “the senseless acts of killings of these young boys out there.”

     “For the most part it’s avoiding the truth,” he said in the video interview. “This is reality, this is my world, this is what I talk about in my music. You can’t delude that. Me being on a cop car, that’s a performance piece after these senseless acts.”

     Lamar continued, “Hip-hop is not the problem. Our reality is the problem of the situation. This is our music. This is us expressing ourselves. Rather [than] going out here and doing the murders myself, I want to express myself in a positive light the same way other artists are doing. Not going out in the streets, go in the booth and talking about the situation and hoping these kids can find some type of influence on it in a positive manner. Coming from these streets and coming from these neighborhoods, we’re taking our talents and putting ‘em inside the studio.”

     Link to full interview at the link.

     Finally. Fighting Chance: How Johnetta Elzie Became a Civil Rights Crusader

     It was more than empathy that connected Johnetta Elzie to the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. “My mother used to work on the street where Mike was killed,” says Elzie, who was then living in St. Louis. “That could have been one of my brothers.”

     Brown’s death was a call to arms for the 26-year-old, who at the time was taking a break from college to care for her younger sister. The day of the shooting, she jumped on Twitter to challenge inaccurate headlines. That same night, she headed to Ferguson. “I was spreading the word about where to drop off food or care packages and gathering people to clear away tear gas canisters.”

     Though Elzie wouldn’t have called her actions “organizing,” she’s now at the helm of a nonviolent civil rights campaign. This Is the Movement, the newsletter she coedits with fellow activist DeRay Mckesson, keeps its approximately 15,000 subscribers updated on police brutality cases and protests across the country. Last spring it earned the duo the Howard Zinn Freedom to Write award from the literary association PEN New England.

     At first, Elzie, who now lives in Chicago, felt apprehensive about being a face of a movement—”It was hard to hear people’s stories and still have the energy to fight”—but she says she’s since embraced the role. “I want to be an inspiration and a truth teller.” Next up: a workshop with young women to teach them what she’s learned—and help them find their own causes to be passionate about.

     I’d love to read a longer piece about her.

366. rq says

     4 July 2015 at 4:59 pm

     Americans believe false things about the Civil War because even our textbooks bow to the apologists

     Loewen also reiterates a point that cannot be made often enough: Modern notions that the Civil War was fought over ephemeral notions of “states’ rights” or other high-minded considerations, as opposed to an unapologetic battle for the right to keep human slaves, is a product of segregationist forces in the civil rights era. It’s hardly a coincidence that so many memorials of the war date conspicuously to the days of George Wallace, rather than Jefferson Davis.

     For example, South Carolina’s monument at Gettysburg, dedicated in 1965, claims to explain why the state seceded: “Abiding faith in the sacredness of states rights provided their creed here.” This tells us nothing about 1863, when abiding opposition to states’ rights as claimed by free states provided South Carolinians’ creed. In 1965, however, its leaders did support states’ rights. Indeed, they were desperately trying to keep the federal government from enforcing school desegregation and civil rights. The one constant was that the leaders of South Carolina in 1860 and 1965 were acting on behalf of white supremacy.

     It’s a good read, and a reminder that we shouldn’t be surprised that a good chunk of the public doesn’t think the Civil War was fought over slavery when a half-century effort has sought to whitewash that history and give it a more noble-sounding sheen. But yes, maybe that ought to be the next thing we take a good, long look at.

     @deray 905 days ago Kendrick Johnson was killed inside Lowndes HS in Valdosta, GA. We WAIT for Justice! #4thofJuly – a reminder.

     The Paragraph On Slavery That Never Made It Into The Declaration Of Independence

     As with so many debates in our 21st century moment, the question of race and the Declaration of Independence has become a divided and often overtly partisan one. Those working to highlight and challenge injustice will note that Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration and its “All men are created equal” sentiment, was like many of his fellow founders a slave-owner, and moreover one who might well have fathered illegitimate children with one of his slaves. In responses, those looking to defend Jefferson and the nation’s founding ideals will push back on these histories as anachronistic, overly simplistic, exemplifying the worst form of “revisionist history.”

     If we push beyond those divided perspectives, however, we can find a trio of more complex intersections of race and the Declaration, historical moments and figures that embody both the limitations and the possibilities of America’s ideals. Each can and should become part of what we remember on the Fourth of July; taken together, they offer a nicely rounded picture of our founding and evolving identity and community.

     For one thing, Jefferson did directly engage with slavery in his initial draft of the Declaration. He did so by turning the practice of slavery into one of his litany of critiques of King George:

     He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither … And he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

     Like so much in the American founding, these lines are at once progressive and racist, admitting the wrongs of slavery but describing the slaves themselves as “obtruding” upon and threatening the lives of the colonists. Not surprisingly, this complex, contradictory paragraph did not survive the Declaration’s communal revisions, and the final document makes no mention of slavery or African Americans

     […]

     In his speech “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” delivered at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall on July 5th, 1852 and later renamed “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” Douglass lays into the hypocrisies and ironies of the occasion and holiday. “Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?” he inquires, adding “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” .

     More at the link.

     And here, @GovernorPerry discusses the importance of the black vote. 2015. America.

     Anonymous donors give $3M for Clementa Pinckney scholarship fund

     Charleston Mayor Joe Riley and the Rev. Norvel Goff announced Thursday that it prompted an out-of-state group of anonymous donors to raise $3 million for a scholarship in the name of the church’s fallen pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney.

     “I don’t know how many, all I know is they’re generous, loving Americans who wanted no credit, simply wanted to do their part in responding to this hateful (attack),” Riley said, adding that they were from “a good distance away.”

     “These people will never get a pat on the back and they’ll never know a recipient of these scholarships; they’ll just know in their heart that in a moment of tragedy in America, they responded in such a positive and generous way.”

     The Reverend Pinckney Scholarship Fund, a nonprofit, will provide college and advanced-degree scholarships for members of the extended Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church community, including the families of the victims of the June 17 tragedy. It also will be used for children of the extended Charleston community, Riley said.

     In the sidebar of that article,

     A statement from the anonymous donors

     “We do not pretend to understand the pain caused by this unimaginable tragedy. We simply want members of the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church community to know that the burdens of perseverance and empathy, which they have demonstrated with such dignity, do not fall exclusively on their shoulders. We want them to know that others, most of whom do not share their race or religion, who do not come from South Carolina, abhor the injustices from which they have suffered and admire the ways the African-American community has enriched our nation. We honor Reverend Pinckney who so profoundly embodied the values that bind us together as Americans.”

     And this: The White Ally Playbook

     Allies often carry a host of faulty assumptions. We think being an ally means we are “helping” black people. We think we are “needed” because no one will listen to black people. We imagine we have a better understanding of how things work, and therefore we should be included in important conversations. We think we set the rules of our allyship, like what time the protest starts or what color the flyer is going to be.

     What I have learned over the years is that the best ally to the black community is one who accepts black leadership and follows their playbook in solving the critical issues of our time. This is the same when it comes to the Latino community, or the LGBTQ community or the feminist movement. No matter who we are in allyship with, those we support determine the rules to the game themselves.

     If you’re white like me, you might ask the question, “Where do we, white people, find ourselves at the table of justice and human equality?” First, it’s best to receive an invitation. But even if you just show up, it’s best to put your head down and do the work. When you go to marches and rallies, fill in the gaps in the middle of the crowd. No need to grab the megaphone and lead the cheers up front. Engage in dialogue on social media with honesty and openness to being challenged about your privilege. Don’t be afraid to be uncomfortable. And when you go to sleep at night, realize that you have the freedom to fight for justice, but never have to worry about the system’s unjustness turning towards you.

     The best ally commandments I’ve ever heard were articulated a few years back, during an early morning teaching on the Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC. During the show, Perry broke down the science:

     1. Don’t demand that those you are supporting produce proof of the inequality they are working to resist.

     2. Do recognize that the shield of your privilege may blind you to others’ experience of injustice.

     3. Don’t offer up your relationship with a member of the marginalized group as evidence of your understanding.

     4. Do be open to learning and expanding your consciousness by listening more and talking less.

     5. Don’t see yourself as Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves or Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai. You are not the savior riding to the rescue on a white horse. Do notice that you are joining a group of people who are already working to save themselves.

     6. Do realize the only requirement you need to enter allyship is a commitment to justice and human equality.

     Remember that often, your place is at your own table, with your friends and family, who may not understand their own experience of privilege, who may even ask why “you talk like you’re black.” You might be the one to help them better appreciate that you are part of a struggle for justice and human equality that has implications for all of us, because our future — as a nation, as a people — is intertwined.

367. rq says

     5 July 2015 at 1:37 am

     Charges possible against church shooter’s associates

     A joint state and federal investigation into the activities of accused Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof has widened to include other persons of interest, according to multiple sources familiar with the ongoing investigation.

     The expanded scope of the investigation now includes people with whom Roof associated in the weeks before the June 17 shootings of nine African-Americans at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, the sources said. Roof, 21, of Columbia, is white.

     Although it appears Roof traveled alone to and from Charleston on the day of the killings, it is possible others had some knowledge of what he planned to carry out, said the sources, who are not being identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation.

     Investigators began to explore how much Roof’s associates knew, and when they knew it, after reviewing his cellphone and computer records, the sources said.

     Prosecutors are still studying exactly what charges, if any, some of those associates might face, the sources said.

     Asked Friday about the Roof case, U.S. Attorney Bill Nettles said, “As the Attorney General (Loretta Lynch) said, ‘We have opened a file on this and are continuing to investigate this tragedy.’ ” He declined to elaborate.

     One possible charge could be misprision of a felony, which means a person had knowledge of a crime to be carried out and did not inform law enforcement. Other charges might be lying to a federal law enforcement officer.

     Officer’s defense team again asks that police shooting trial be moved from Charlotte, in the shooting of one Jonathan Ferrell.

     Lawyers for a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer charged in the 2013 shooting death of an unarmed black man have again asked a judge to move the case outside the county.

     In doing so Thursday, Randall Kerrick’s defense team accused the city of Charlotte of “blatant attempts” to intimidate and sway potential jurors as part of a prolonged effort to undermine Kerrick’s right to a fair trial. They also asked Superior Court Judge Robert Ervin to place a gag order on those connected to the upcoming trial.

     […]

     But Laughrun said Weaver’s hiring was the city’s latest effort to undermine Kerrick’s defense. He derided Weaver as “a hired gun” brought in “to put a pro-city spin on everything that happens.”

     The lawyers also criticized the timing of the city’s “rushed” settlement of a lawsuit filed by Ferrell’s family in May for a record $2.25 million. And in their motions, they again accused the city of attempting to release the so-called “dash-cam” video last year shot at the scene of the shooting. A judge placed the video under the control of the attorney general’s office.

     On Thursday, Laughrun and Greene intensified their attacks against the city, describing Weaver’s hiring as the city’s “insurance policy to ensure that Officer Kerrick is convicted … and that the city can justify the $2.25 million burden it placed up the tax-paying citizens of Charlotte.”

     They went on to say that City Manager Ron Carlee’s decision to hire Weaver “is a blatant attempt to place fear in Mecklenburg County jurors and to make illusions to the public that if Officer Kerrick is not found guilty .. there will be uprisings, public disturbances and/or violence in Charlotte.”

     From Nautilus, Are Mass Killings A Kind Of Contagion?

     Mass killings and shootings appear to be contagious, according to a new study that applied epidemiological principles, such as those used to trace the flu, to high profile attacks in the United States. By looking at these events within a set time frame, researchers found that an attack involving the deaths of four or more people created an average “period of contagion” of 13 days in which similar attacks were more likely to occur. Researchers say that this means up to a third of these events could be the result of contagion— very deadly disease.

     Policing and social media just don’t mix! Recently promoted Cleveland sergeant’s social media use under fire

     The Cleveland Council on American-Islamic Relations is calling for an internal investigation into Sgt. Frank Woyma’s posts on Twitter, arguing they violate the Cleveland police department’s social media policy.

     Woyma, hired by the department in 1996, was one of 40 officers promoted among the department’s leadership ranks in a Monday morning ceremony in Cleveland City Hall chambers.

     Several posts on Woyma’s Twitter account, @2495Blast, are supportive of law enforcement and not inflammatory. But his account also contains a string of retweets that the Cleveland Council on American-Islamic Relations consider anti-Muslim.

     Many of the posts are critical of President Barack Obama, take issue with protesters who are calling for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse and the “mainstream media.”

     One tweet Woyma re-posted contains an image of an armored knight hoisting a sword and shield on horseback, with the words “I will turn back the Muslim hordes. I will protect America at all cost. There will be no Sharia Law here.”

     The tweet links to a website with articles including “Road Raging Muslim forgets he’s in Texas, gets taste of Southern Hospitality, CAIR cries hate crime.” The article references the fatal shooting of a Muslim man during an argument on a Texas highway.

     “While Sergeant Woyma is re-tweeting racist and anti-Muslim materials on a private account, his clearly bigoted views can only serve to cast a negative light on the Cleveland Division of Police and harm relations with the community he is supposed to serve and protect,” CAIR president Julia Shearson said in a press release.

     By 4 p.m. Wednesday, Woyma’s tweets were hidden from public view.

     Wisconsin passes bill banning poor from buying ketchup, pickles, potatoes and more. Potatoes? My starchy Latvian heart doth protest mightily…

     In what looks like a disturbing trend among Republican lawmakers, Wisconsin has recently taken steps to ban poor people who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits from purchasing certain foods.

     Last week, GOP officials introduced Assembly Bill 177 which will effectively prohibit those who use SNAP benefits from buying items on a long list of foods including ketchup, potatoes, and shellfish.

     As outlandish as these seemingly growing in popularity initiatives are, Republicans maintain the idea behind them is not to punish people for being poor, but to help people eat healthier.

     “We as a country are spending a fortune on health care costs for largely preventable diseases, and a lot of that relates to our habits as people — we’re consuming the wrong foods,” says Wisconsin GOP state Rep. Scott Allen.

     Unfortunately for Republicans, the “healthy” argument doesn’t exactly hold much water.

     According to nutritionist Joy Bauer, a frequent contributor on “The Today Show,” some of the fish and shellfish that could be banned are essential parts of a balanced and healthy diet:

     Some fish and shellfish are high in vitamins and minerals like selenium, vitamin B12, niacin, iron, and zinc. The selenium in seafood is an antioxidant that can help manage arthritis and maintain healthy skin, while vitamin B12 may help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and slow memory decline. Niacin is a B vitamin that may aid in cataract prevention. Iron-rich clams, oysters, and shrimp can help maintain healthy hair. The zinc in oysters and crab can also contribute to healthy hair and beautiful skin, while reducing the risk of macular degeneration.

     Bauer goes on to reveal that some foods that would be allowed by the law, such as canned fish, are high in sodium and can be bad for people, so Republicans may need to fine-tune their argument.

     MLK Statue Will Replace White Supremacist On Georgia Capitol Grounds

     Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal and Rep. Calvin Smyre (D-Columbus) announced this week that the state has selected artist Andy Davis to create the piece. The sculpture will be placed on the northeast quadrant of the Capitol grounds overlooking Liberty Plaza, replacing a likeness of 19th century politician and newspaperman Tom Watson, a white supremacist. Watson’s statute was removed from the Georgia Capitol lawn in November 2013, reports local station WMAZ-13.

     “Placing a statue of Dr. King at the Capitol of his home state is a long overdue honor,” Gov. Deal said in a statement. “I am confident that Andy Davis’ past works, including a statue of Ray Charles in the singer’s hometown of Albany, have prepared him well for this historic project. I commend Rep. Smyre for his diligent efforts and leadership on this project and I look forward to seeing the final work of art.”

     The new statue will be built with private money. Its final cost has not yet been determined, though estimates amount to $350,000 reports the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

368. rq says

     5 July 2015 at 3:17 am

     Some art:
     the jump rope girls. (by @danatoddpope) #EssenceFest
     piano bar. (by @lcampbellart) #EssenceFest

     Five fatal shootings by police yesterday in CA, MA, WV and FL x 2. @thecounted total for all 2015 killings is now 558, link at the tweet.

     Taxicab Commission Chair Says Uber Outrage is ‘White Privilege’

     The man in charge of negotiations with Uber says, legally, he cannot cut a compromise with the smartphone-based ride service regarding background checks.

     Louis Hamilton also calls the local debate an example of “white privilege.”

     On Monday, Uber offered to give free rides over the long Fourth of July weekend. On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Taxicab Commission said it was considering the proposal. On Wednesday, the MTC laid out a series of conditions for UberX drivers, like fingerprint background checks and cheek swab drug tests. Thursday, Uber cancelled its plans.

     […]

     St. Louis is the largest area in the country without the wildly-popular ride service. When asked if that hurts the city’s attempt to be recognized as a tech hub, Hamilton shook his head.

     He added: “We’re defending the ultimate white privilege here, driving in the Uber vehicles, while we’re letting the rest of the world burn down around us.

     “While we are sitting here, having a debate on whether a young person driving an Uber vehicle should have a background check to make sure they’re not a drug dealer or a child molester, we’re having no discussion about 90 murders on the streets of St. Louis,” he said.

     After Uber cancelled its free-ride weekend, frustrated tweets began to fly. Hamilton began responding to critics, sending them links to the aforementioned state statute.

     There was a follow-up article, which I lost, but it turns out Hamilton has ties to… Roorda! And thus the police union. He’s a supporter of both. So that talk about white privilege as a cover to point fingers at black-on-black crime? Yeah…

     Video: Harlem Cop Boxes With Man Who Refuses To Be Arrested

     A Facebook video posted yesterday shows a Harlem street stop by two plainclothes officers turn into a boxing match after the cops refuse to say why they stopped the man and he refuses to be arrested. The fight took place on Frederick Douglass Boulevard between West 130th and West 131st streets in Harlem, though it’s not clear when. The man who posted the video wrote this description to accompany it:

     Police brutality, Me and my men Goodbrotha Saykou just came from the pizza shop walking home got stop by the cops. They didn’t tell him why he got stop in the first place ,they ask for his ID, he gave it to them.. ya watch the rest of it and let me know if the stop or arrest was justify

     A bit more and the video at the link.

     Black Church Burnings and the FBI’s Leadership Fail

     Start with the obvious: The burning of 6 black churches in 5 southern states in the span of a week, coming as they have on the heels of the racially-motivated Charleston church massacre, is not just a “tragedy,” but a huge problem. And the response of law enforcement — particularly at the federal level, including the FBI — has had its own problem: a lack of leadership.

     Although two of the fires may have been caused by lightning and a tree limb falling on power lines, according to a CNN report, that would still leave four. Investigators haven’t ruled out a link among the burnings, but had “no reason at this point to link them,” CNN said it heard from a federal investigator, and no evidence that any of these were hate crimes.

     For a moment, give investigators the benefit of the doubt. Trying to determine the cause of fires can be difficult. According to the FBI, a hate crime is a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.” In other words, if there isn’t some specific evidence, like racial slurs or symbols left at the scene, law enforcement may not be able to treat a church burning as a hate crime. And the widespread actions could be a series of copycat actions and not necessarily part of some single conspiracy.

     Those are the technicalities. But leadership has to move beyond technicalities. Both the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives have failed terribly as citizens look for answers. The problem is not that they haven’t yet found the perpetrators, as investigations take far more effort and time than we’ve come to expect from prime time police procedural dramas. But the two agencies have done a terrible job at leadership basics.

     […]

     We’re living in a time when people of color, whether black, Native Americans, or Hispanic, still on the average face worse economic conditions than whites. The national economic recovery has moved far more slowly for them. They are far more likely to spend time in prison or be killed by police. There is a reasonable climate of distrust and suspicion. The FBI and ATF, as parts of the government, should cultivate good relationships with all law-abiding citizens. Part of a relationship is hearing and understanding the concerns of the other party and at least acknowledging them. To say there is no evidence of hate crimes without underscoring what that would technically mean and recognizing that the events could still be racially motivated is to appear as though the agencies don’t take the concerns seriously. That drives additional mistrust and makes it impossible to lead. Perhaps the agencies are making that point with black civic leaders, but what good would that alone be when most people aren’t privy to such discussions?

     Leadership requires strong communications

     That brings the other major flaw. Communications on the part of the FBI and ATF are atrocious. Go to the home page on the FBI’s website, for example, and you’ll see no mention of ongoing investigations. Of course there are limits to what investigators can and should say, but to have no mention is to effectively say, “We’re not that concerned.” It’s even worse. Use Google to look for the words churches and burnings or arson during the last year on the FBI’s site and you don’t even get a statement or press release. The ATF is no better with apparently no mentions available on its site.

     Again, both the AFT and FBI are likely working hard to uncover what has happened. But if they don’t obviously appear to care, they can’t lead and be effective.

369. rq says

     5 July 2015 at 3:44 am

     New York bans ‘poor doors’ in win for low income tenants

     New York City is banning “poor doors” in a move one city official on Monday called a “big win for dignity”.

     Thanks to a little talked about provision in New York’s rent-stabilization law, builders who receive a tax break for offering some units to low-income tenants will no longer be allowed to build separate entrances for the rich and the poor.

     The controversial two-door rule came to an end after New York City mayor Bill de Blasio inserted a provision into a tax bill that was approved by the New York state senate late last week.

     “I think that the state legislature and the city are now doing the right thing in terms of treating people in every socioeconomic group with the same level of respect and dignity,” New York City councilwoman Helen Rosenthal told the Guardian.

     Rosenthal’s district on the Upper West Side is home to one of the buildings that have a built-in “poor door”.

     “Our legislators heard the human cry from constituents who were very dismayed to see that there was a loophole in the previous legislation that allowed the developers to build a segregated building even though taxpayers’ dollars were involved,” Rosenthal said. “Now that indignity won’t happen.”

     Ironically, while serving on the New York City council De Blasio originally voted in favor of the bill that allowed for “poor doors” to exist.

     […]

     Thanks to the new provision, all buildings with affordable housing units in the future have to make all entrances accessible to all tenants – rich and poor.

     “Affordable units shall share the same common entrances and common areas as market rate units,’’ states the bill.

     The provision does not apply to buildings such as 40 Riverside Boulevard and 1 West End Avenue that already have been built with separate entrances. While 1 West End Avenue will still require its low-income residents to use the “poor door”, it will allow them to use amenities such as the courtyard and the river-view roof deck will be made accessible.

     No more hiding the poor away!

     Why I Stopped Identifying with the Struggle

     In identifying so strongly with struggling as a method of progress, it became increasingly uncomfortable to enjoy anything which came easily. 50 Cent, when asked about his beefs with other rappers, once said that because he came from an aggressive environment, he was most comfortable when he was in conflict with other rappers. Not having a beef with someone made him feel weird. I felt the same way if I wasn’t struggling to achieve something. I became anxious whenever life was going too good, things were happening too “rightly,” or the universe took a break from spinning powerful whirlwinds of fuckery into my life. During a self-discovery phase, I realized this reliance on struggling as a way to feel comfortable started in my childhood.

     […]

     Because I grew up without a great deal of resources, being able to “hustle” was a necessary skill for survival. It’s uncanny the way my mind automatically starts to focus on creating solutions when I’m presented with a problem. The mental gymnastics resembled an Olympic gold medalist during a floor routine in how my mind tirelessly worked out problems and probabilities of success while simultaneously imagining the results. This caused me to have a carefree and almost flippant attitude about life obstacles, because I knew I could rely on myself to weather the storm. What I hadn’t counted on, however, was how being comfortable in this constant state of tension had handicapped me from operating under “normal” circumstances.

     I lived my life with the tacit notion it’d be filled with an innumerable amount of complications. On the rare occasion the universe decided to stop meddling in my affairs, I often found myself unfulfilled with things accomplished during that period. My skills were most formidable in the midst of crisis, and best used when deconstructing life’s impediments. With nothing to fight against, at best, I was a drifter. A man with no purpose. A wandering spirit in search of something of which to attach myself . At worst, I was a junkie looking for his next hit. If there was no struggle, I’d create one.

     In hindsight, “if there’s no struggle to fight against, I’ll create one” reads nuttier than squirrel shit. At the time however, it made perfect sense. People frequently take refuge in places they know they’ll have the most success. While some get off on being challenged at every turn, others want little more than the ability to exist in an environment where everything is suited to their needs, tastes, and talents. Forcing myself into overwhelming situations in order to do what I was good at seemed sensible. I’m now aware it’s not.

     […]

     In the end, I’m thankful my early experiences in life gave me the ability to hustle, no matter what life throws in my direction. Being able to think clearly in the midst of life’s fantastically horrible things happens have saved me on more occasions than I can possibly think of. Judging myself by my ability to handle those situations wasn’t wrong, but I took it overboard and nearly ruined my development as a person in the process.

     Suffice it to say, the struggle is now more distant cousin than close relative. And I’m better for it.

     Republicans Don’t Find Racism To Be As Serious A Problem As The Rest Of America. Well, well.

     According to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, 77 percent of Americans nationally say that racism is a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem. Twenty-one percent say it’s a “not very serious” or “not at all serious” problem.

     But just 57 percent of Republicans say racism is at least a somewhat serious problem, compared to 93 percent of Democrats and 72 percent of independents who say the same. Although Republicans are equally as likely as the rest of the country to put the problem of racism in the “somewhat serious” category, they’re far less likely to say it is “very serious”: 19 points less likely than Americans as a whole, 36 points less than Democrats and 14 points less than independents.

     Even among white Americans, the gap in opinion persists between Democrats and Republicans. Fifty-two percent of white Democrats say racism is a “very serious” problem, compared to 17 percent of white Republicans and 26 percent of white independents.

     A recent CNN poll that asked a similar question produced almost the same results, with Republicans 37 points less likely than Democrats to say racism poses at least a “somewhat serious” problem. The results mark the highest percentage of Americans to acknowledge racism as a problem that CNN has recorded since it began asking the question in 2008.

     US town emblem criticised for ‘racist’ Native American imagery, see attached image and article.

     Why blacks see Dylann Roof as a terrorist and whites don’t

     In the two weeks since a gunman walked inside a historic black church in Charleston and, after some prayer, shot and killed nine people, two competing narratives about what happened have emerged.

     Was the shooter a terrorist? Or was he simply a lost and animus-filled individual who committed a one-off hate crime?

     Apparently the answer depends in large part on whether you are black or white. A CNN/ORC International poll released Thursday revealed a pretty stark racial divide.

     […]

     But explaining why so many white Americans seem so firmly wedded to the more-minimal description of Roof’s alleged crimes or his intent is not an easy task.

     Perhaps a bit of history would be helpful here.

     Though many might not know it, white supremacists are a central part of America’s history of labeling, combating and responding to terrorism. I’ll repeat what I wrote the morning after the shooting because I believe it important.

     In 1871, Congress passed a law known as the “Ku Klux Act,” giving President Ulysses S. Grant broad latitude, including martial law, to track down and punish members of the Ku Klux Klan. At the time, the group had made a habit of harassing and often brutally murdering African Americans, but also Republicans of all races because of their views on political issues involving race.

     One of the group’s favored tactics involved the singling out of outspoken black individuals and community leaders, subjecting them to horrific torture and then, leaving behind said person’s mutilated corpse. The tactic had two aims: (1) to silence the outspoken; (2) to discourage those left alive from emulating the dead. It was a form of organized physical violence with strong psychological elements. It was domestic terrorism.

     And blacks who challenged white supremacy are the very reason that the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination and Emanuel AME exist.

     […]

     Now, if you subscribe to the idea that history does not inform the present or believe that this country’s racial wrongs are the definition of this rule, it might be worth your while to read what terrorism experts are saying about the events in Charleston. The brief summary: Violent white supremacists have been a more deadly force in recent American history than radical Islamic terrorists.

     So, the plausible reasons that so many Americans do not see what happened in Charleston as both a hate crime and an act of terrorism cannot be comforting.

     Maybe some Americans are reluctant to use the term terrorism because they fear that this will make the events in Charleston a sustained and central part of the country’s identity, much like Sept. 11.

     Maybe some people have a harder time believing the deaths of black Americans in these tragedies are as senseless. We have grim confirmation that these people exist in the many fake photos, biographies and online commentaries posted after the deaths of unarmed black teens like Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis. The court testimony offered in these cases could form a case study in the role that race plays in fear and perceptions of danger.

     Maybe some Americans fear that the biggest baddest label of all crime — terrorism — will bring new attention to long-stalled gun control ideas.

     But this CNN poll ultimately should make reasonable people wonder, how would the Charleston massacre be described if the shooter were black and the nine victims white people who came to church on a Wednesday night to pray?

     Interesting perspective… On congratulating the black community for having such a peaceful reaction to the Charleston massacre, while missing the point: that it was meant to incite white violence (against black people).

370. rq says

     5 July 2015 at 3:58 am

     Obama’s Eulogy, Which Found Its Place in History

     Barack Obama’s eulogy for the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., was remarkable not only because the president sang the opening refrain of “Amazing Grace” on live television, and not only because of his eloquence in memorializing the pastor and eight other parishioners killed by a white gunman. It was also remarkable because the eulogy drew on all of Mr. Obama’s gifts of language and empathy and searching intellect — first glimpsed in “Dreams From My Father,” his deeply felt 1995 memoir about identity and family. And because it used those gifts to talk about the complexities of race and justice, situating them within an echoing continuum in time that reflected both Mr. Obama’s own long view of history, and the panoramic vision of America, shared by Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as a country in the process of perfecting itself.

     Mr. Obama’s view of the nation’s history as a more than two-century journey to make the promises of the Declaration of Independence (“that all men are created equal”) real for everyone, his former chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, suggested in an email, is “both an American and a religious sentiment” — predicated upon the belief that individual sinners and a country scarred by the original sin of slavery can overcome the past through “persistent, courageous, sometimes frustrating efforts.”

     […]

     A draft of the Charleston eulogy was given to the president around 5 p.m. on June 25 and, according to Mr. Keenan, Mr. Obama spent some five hours revising it that evening, not merely jotting notes in the margins, but whipping out the yellow legal pads he likes to write on — only the second time he’s done so for a speech in the last two years. He would rewrite large swaths of the text.

     Mr. Obama expanded on a short riff in the draft about the idea of grace, and made it the central theme of the eulogy: the grace family members of the shooting victims embodied in the forgiveness they expressed toward the killer; the grace the city of Charleston and the state of South Carolina manifested in coming together in the wake of the massacre; the grace God bestowed in transforming a tragedy into an occasion for renewal, sorrow into hope.

     As he’s done in his most powerful earlier work, Mr. Obama drew upon his own knowledge of Scripture and literature and history — much the way Lincoln and Dr. King did in their writings — to create a musical narrative that uses biblical and historical allusions to widen the dimensions of his storytelling, while moving between the vernacular and the metaphorical, between particular issues (inequities in the criminal justice system, the need for gun control, the hurt and hate represented by the Confederate battle flag) and larger moral and spiritual imperatives.

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     He also inserted lines from his favorite hymn, “Amazing Grace,” as a refrain, and, on the way to Charleston aboard Marine One, he told his advisers that he might sing some of those lines “if it feels right.”

     It did feel right. Mr. Obama, now in the final quarter of his presidency, has grown increasingly assertive and outspoken about issues close to his heart: In a recent podcast interview with the comedian Marc Maron, he spoke of how experience and the “fearlessness” that comes from having survived being in “the barrel tumbling down Niagara Falls” have brought a sense of liberation. At the same time, the eulogy he delivered that Friday afternoon in Charleston turned out to be the capstone to a dizzying and momentous week in which Southern politicians began calling for a renunciation of the Confederate battle flag, while the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act and found that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage.

     It was a week in which a lot of Americans felt they were actually watching the arc of history bend in front of their eyes, and it was a eulogy that both spoke to the moment and connected that moment to the past and the future of what Mr. Obama calls the great “American experiment.”

     More at the link, including an overview of Dr King’s speeches and Lincoln’s, too.

     .@tanehisicoates on police reform & race in America for @NewsHour’s #BriefButSpectacular

     In our latest #BriefButSpectacular, Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent at The Atlantic, gives us his take on race, violence and police reform in America.

     Three minutes and a bit of Ta-Nehisi Coates speaking. Must-watch.

     The boldness of Bree Newsome: Some thoughts, regrets, dreams, and $10,000 one week later

     When I began discussing the forceful removal of the Confederate Flag, five different friends of mine, four of them leaders of successful companies and the other a well-known actress wrote me privately to say that they would each provide funds to support the first person who took it down – be it bail, legal fees, equipment costs, whatever. At first they pledged about $5,000 altogether.

     Without a lot of thought, I then tweeted something that frustrated a lot of people when I said I had $5,000 for the first person who would bring down the flag. After I tweeted it, more pledges from my friends came in, and I tweeted that I had $10,000 for the first person to take down the flag. More pledges came in, but the backlash was pretty swift. To be clear, people didn’t start sending me checks or cash through Western Union, they were just texting and emailing and direct messaging me that they would help.

     Some people loved the idea and wanted to chip in. Hundreds shared it, but by in large, the response was negative. In my haste to get the idea out into the open, I framed it poorly from the start. I made it sound like a bounty or a reward someone could just blow, when it was really meant to help whoever did it with the legal expenses they’d surely incur from such an act.

     I made up in my mind that it was worth it and fully planned on leaving the tweets I wrote and the offer up. My thought was that it was hard to take it back once it existed and could be screenshotted and shared widely and that taking it back would be nearly impossible. Finally, two members of my personal advisory board wrote me and said it was in bad taste and was more of a distraction than anything else. I removed it, apologized for being careless and a somewhat foolhardy, and openly said I’d accept whatever criticism came my way for the idea.

     Privately, later that evening, a really good man emailed me and said he fully planned on traveling to South Carolina and taking it down himself. For him it wasn’t about the money either, but about the principle of seeing a symbol of hatred fly so boldly in our country. He had already purchased the climbing harness, set the date, found a friend to travel with him, and was ready to go. I let him know that I’d still help him with support for bail, attorneys, and more.

     In anticipation of his climb, I contacted a good friend of mine, a classmate from Morehouse, who is an attorney in South Carolina to see if he was willing to represent this young man after he would surely be arrested. He agreed to represent him. That was the day before Bree Newsome so boldly did it herself.

     My family and I had already planned an out of state trip for months. As a general rule, in part because of the intensity of my work, when I take a vacation with my family I have a no-tech policy where I don’t even take my devices or stay on the net, so that I can fully plug into the wife and kids. This was no different.

     […]

     At the time, I didn’t know if she was alone, if she did it at all because of the tweets I had put there a few days earlier, if she was expecting me to help. All I knew was that some brave woman scaled the pole and took down the flag.

     I didn’t know her team, her plan, anything. From social media I saw her first photos and learned that it was Bree Newsome. We had interacted a bit on Twitter over the past year, but didn’t know each other personally.

     Immediately, I called my attorney friends in South Carolina and we agreed that State Representative Todd Rutherford, the minority leader of the state house, a respected defense attorney in Columbia, and a personal friend of Rev. Clementa Pinckney would be the best person to represent Bree. At the time we didn’t even know that James Stone had been arrested with her.

     […]

     At that time Bree’s team wrote me specifically and said that people online were suggesting Bree took down the flag for the money. She hadn’t. I knew she hadn’t. Her team directly communicated to me that she didn’t want the money, didn’t do it for the money, and never would have. I regret that my comments a few days earlier ever clouded that for Bree or anyone else.

     Her bravery, courage, strength, and clarity have all stood alone and have, thankfully, far outshone anything I’ve said that could’ve gotten in her way. The truth is, I don’t think anything or anybody could’ve stood in the way of what Bree did. For me, as I reflect back on a year that includes the murders of nine women and men in Charleston as well as Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Tanisha Anderson, Eric Garner, Monroe Bird, Akai Gurley, Freddie Gray, and so many others, the boldness of Bree Newsome stands out as a shining light, a beacon of hope, an act of courage in face of systemic oppression. Bree – thank you so much for your courage and resolve.

     It’s hard, nearly impossible even, to judge history while you are in. During the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956, they weren’t calling it the Civil Rights Movement yet. It just was. Right now, we are in something. I don’t know what it will be called, but the protest movement against police brutality and systemic racism from our government is historic. Bree Newsome stepped into history when she scaled that flag pole in Columbia and boldly took down a symbol oppression that should never have flown on the capitol in the first place. I think the images of her taking it down will stand for generations as one of the best examples ever of what it means to decide you are sick and tired of being sick tired of injustice and are willing to take direct action against oppression.

     I’ve spoke with Bree and offered her my full and unwavering support – private or public. She is my hero and is already a legend in the eyes of my entire family. I don’t have any money that is “owed” to her and never did. Most of the women and men who pledged it in the first place, all through email and Twitter direct messages, not through bank accounts, have quietly given it elsewhere and will continue to do so.

     Devastated to learn that young brother #MonroeBird has died. So many people failed this young man. Hurt & furious.
     He died at home after being shot in his own neighbourhood and the hospital wouldn’t care for him anymore.
     That’s a very badly-worded synopsis.

     Private prisons and all that. Riot at Arizona prison sparks transfer of 700 inmates.

     Arizona Department of Corrections Director Charles Ryan issued the order to move 700 inmates following unrest that resulted in minor injuries for eight detention staff members at Arizona State Prison-Kingman, according to an agency statement issued Friday.

     The prison was on lockdown until further notice, according to the statement, and the agency said the rioting caused severe damage to the facility.

     “The prison is secure and the situation is under control,” the statement said. “All employees and inmates are safe and accounted for. However, since two of the five housing units are uninhabitable, inmates will have to be relocated.”

     Details about the transfers were not made available Friday, and DOC representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

     The first instance of unrest this week occurred Wednesday evening, when six corrections officers were injured during what agency officials described as a “major disturbance” among minimum-security inmates.

     A “small group” of inmates had been attempting to harm another inmate in the Cerbat Unit, according to Issa Arnita, a spokesman for Management & Training Corp.

     Detention officers suffered minor injuries while protecting the target of the attack, Arnita said.

     Five officers were treated at the prison, according to a DOC spokesman, and one was transported to a local hospital for treatment and later released. Arnita said no inmates were hurt in the attack.

     The Thursday incident was said to be a full-scale riot involving many more inmates. It began after a medium-security inmate became aggressive with a correctional officer in the Hualapai Unit and the disturbance spread to involve two of the prison facility’s five housing units, Arnita said.

     The rioting resulted in “severe property damage” to the housing units and injury to two staff members, according to the DOC statement. Arnita said three officers were treated for minor injuries at a local hospital and released, and no inmates were harmed.

     “Since two of the housing units in the Hualapai Unit are damaged, 700 inmates will be transferred to other facilities until repairs can be made,” Arnita said. “For security purposes, we are unable to disclose the locations.”

     The prison, which is in Golden Valley and houses about 3,600 minimum- and medium-custody inmates, opened in 2004. It has had several high-profile security breaches in recent years.

     Remember that good news about Ava DuVernay? Marvel’s Black Panther Loses Ava DuVernay Over Creative Differences.

     Marvel has lost yet another exciting director over creative differences: Ava DuVernay has decided not to direct the 2017 Black Panther feature.

     In an interview with Essence, the Selma director revealed that while she did meet with Marvel executives about helming the Chadwick Boseman flick, they failed to see eye to eye.

     “I think I’ll just say we had different ideas about what the story would be,” DuVernay said. “Marvel has a certain way of doing things and I think they’re fantastic and a lot of people love what they do. I love that they reached out to me.”

     She continued: “I loved meeting with Chadwick and writers and all the Marvel execs. In the end, it comes down to story and perspective. And we just didn’t see eye to eye. Better for me to realize that now than cite creative differences later.”

     It’s a shame Marvel and DuVernay weren’t able to find a compromise for telling the story of T’Challa, the first mainstream black superhero. Had DuVernay taken the position, she would have become the first black female director of a superhero movie.

     But it’s no surprise that Marvel lost DuVernay. Last year, the studio announced that Edgar Wright would no longer direct Ant-Man, citing creative differences, and Avengers: Age of Ultron will be the last film for Joss Whedon, who has spoken at length about the difficulties he had working with Marvel on the film.

371. rq says

     5 July 2015 at 4:07 am

     Charleston Suspect Was in Contact With Supremacists, Officials Say. Does that count as stating the obvious?

     Investigators uncovered that information as they have pieced together where the gunman, Dylann Roof, 21, received his inspiration, and whether anyone else should face charges in connection with the murders.

     “To understand what happened, you have to understand who he talked to and who may have known what,” said one law enforcement official briefed on the case. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a continuing investigation.

     So far, the authorities have determined that people around Mr. Roof were aware that he held some racist beliefs.

     If the authorities find that any of Mr. Roof’s associates knew about his plans, they would most likely try to prosecute them. In the case of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, at least two men who were friends of the bombers were charged with helping them dispose of evidence from the bombing and from a subsequent shooting of a police officer. Three other men associated with the bombers were charged in connection with lying to the authorities or obstructing the investigation.

     LeBron James Leads Yoga at 2015 Nike Basketball Academy

     LeBron James: four-time NBA Most Valuable Player, two-time NBA champion, 11-time All-Star, one of basketball’s greatest players…and yoga instructor.

     Yes, the King led young prospects at the Nike Basketball Camp in yoga exercises on the beach Monday morning in Santa Monica, California, before the day’s workouts:

     While campers have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn from the NBA’s best, one would have to imagine LeBron leading them in yoga would make the top of the list of their experiences this week.

     Yay for positive role models!

     Concentrated areas of black church burnings and the dates. #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches See map.

     #STL #STLLunch Donation Drive this Sunday 7/5… @MoKaBes @IsaiahQualls @ophelporhush @freedomsummer15 List of items at the link.

     Deprogram: Episode 9, includes a segment on Bree Newsome.

     In music news, Dr. Dre will debut a Beats 1 radio show on Apple Music tomorrow night

     Days after Apple Music launched to the public, it’s becoming clearer where Dr. Dre fits. The hip-hop mogul, who joined Apple after the company bought up Beats, announced today that he’s about to launch a regular radio program exclusive to Apple Music. The hour-long show, called “The Pharmacy,” airs its first show tomorrow night on Apple’s live Beats 1 radio station, and will focus on “West Coast music,” according to the Associated Press. Tune in at 6pm ET if you’re curious, and thereafter you can catch it every other week.

372. rq says

     5 July 2015 at 4:33 pm

     All catching up to occur tomorrow. I don’t have the spoons right now.

373. rq says

     6 July 2015 at 2:15 am

     All that lovely 4th of July stuff, you will get today!
     Also, I did not know that black people usually celebrate on the 5th.

     But here we go!

     Hartford Police Officers Rap With Youths to Erode Stereotypes – but the question is, WHICH stereotypes? The ones that cops are evil, as held by young black children? Or the ones that black boys and girls are dangerous, as held by cops? Because I don’t know if this one is working both ways… (Can’t cite or read, my free articles have ended.)

     Exclusive: How Wonder Woman Bree Newsome Made Civil Rights History

     I’d like to call her Superwoman, but Wonder Woman might be more fitting to describe civil rights activist, Bree Newsome.

     Not in a mythological, omnipotent, untouchable way. In a way that makes her real to me, like so many of the woman that have touched my life, acted as mentors, rose to the occasion, and fought for what is right. Women like my mother, former basketball coaches or teachers, and countless role models who keep me focused. I just want to say, “thank you.”

     Brittany “Bree” Newsome of Charlotte, North Carolina, is a modern-day warrior. She fights for what she believes and in an unintended way creates a fearless image of #blackgirlmagic.

     Everything worth doing starts with a decision to be true to yourself. It’s as simple as that — a choice.
     For over 48 hours, the world waited in awe to hear from the organizer who strapped on her climbing harness, scaled the flagpole in front of the South Carolina State Capitol Building, and removed the Confederate flag from its post.

     On Monday, June 29th, in a statement to Blue Nation Review, Bree shared a written piece providing in-depth details about her historic actions, the plan that went into place, and her response to the outpouring of love, hope, and faith that ensued from her followership.

     Bree Newsome spoke with Slant in exclusive interview to speak on her literal ascension into civil rights history.

     Here’s a fragment:

     There have been several words to describe your actions, but I want to talk about your feelings. What one word describes the feeling you had that morning?

     BN: Empowerment. If I broke it down to one word, that’s really what it was, empowerment. I think that the act of unhooking it, because it’s such a simple thing, right? You think of just that, all I did was unhook this piece of fabric that is attached to a metal pole. But it’s such a huge thing because it carries with it such fear and intimidation. I mean it’s a symbol of intimidation that has for so long been undergirded by violence.

     It wasn’t simply that black people were told that they couldn’t vote or that you couldn’t sit here. If you tried to defy that, you were met with violence and oftentimes, that violence would be supported by the police and the state. Black people could be killed and there would be no consequence.

     We’ve seen that recently and the same thing happening with Trayvon Martin, I mean that’s why the Trayvon Martin case elicited such strong feelings. It’s kind of a reminder of the same old, same old stuff of the past of black life being discounted or being counted for nothing.

     So that part of why it was such a powerful moment, especially to see a black woman do that. It was a moment of essentially conquering that kind of intimidation and fear and saying like… to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. It’s like, we can take this thing down. We can do it, people can work together and if we can work together to take this flag down, there are other ways we can work together. We have more power than we think we do.

     What about when you got down and you were in those handcuffs, what one word would describe that moment?

     BN: Free. I just felt so free. I’ve been arrested once before with protesting. It’s kind of a similar thing, I don’t even quite know how to explain it to you. This feeling of transcendence when the system can put its cuffs on you and take you into jail, but you know that you’re free because you’re free mentally and you’re free spiritually. It seems ironic but honestly when I was throwing my head back and looking into the sky, I just felt so free.

     Every Serena Williams win comes with a side of disgusting racism and sexism, a repeat from June. But I hear she’s up against her sister Venus sometime today, in what should be some amazing tennis (for those who follow).

     Here’s the local-news announcement on the scholarship fund in honour of Pinckney: Donors Announce Reverend Pinckney Scholarship Fund

     The donors have committed in excess of $3 million to the Reverend Pinckney Scholarship Fund, a non-profit corporation registered in the State of South Carolina. The Fund will provide college and advanced degree scholarships for members of the extended Mother Emanuel AME Church community including the families of the victims of the June 17, 2015 tragedy. Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr., Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and William M. Lewis, Jr. have agreed to serve as the initial board members of the corporation. The Board and the Mother Emanuel AME Church leadership will establish the grant making process.

     Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. said, “To know that the children of this community will have increased access to an excellent education is so very heartwarming. We are grateful for this gift for their future. The grace and courage of this church and its members is a light in the darkness of this tragedy. The generosity of these anonymous donors has touched all of us. This scholarship honors Reverend Clementa Pinckney in a way that provides building blocks for the future of our community and I know that he would be greatly honored. This gift will be an enduring legacy in his name.”

     Reverend Dr. Norvel Goff, Sr., Interim Pastor and Presiding Elder, Edisto District of the 7th Episcopal District of South Carolina offered that, “It is so appropriate to have a scholarship fund in the name of Reverend Pinckney as he highly valued education. It is our hope that the recipients of this gift will value education themselves further along in life.”

     “There is no better way to honor Reverend Clementa Pinckney–a man of such profound accomplishments in the church and in politics–and a man of even greater potential before tragedy struck, than to endow a scholarship fund in his name,” said William M. Lewis, Jr. “The anonymous nature of the initial contributions appropriately focuses attention on the victims while demonstrating that the Mother Emanuel AME community’s struggle resonates across geographic, religious and racial boundaries.”

     “The loss of Rev. Pinckney and the death of the faithful eight who perished with him cuts deep, but through this educational fund, Rev. Pinckney’s already rich legacy will ripple across time, promoting the values of learning and public service he so nobly embodied in word and in sterling deed,” said Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

     The link includes information on contributing to the fund.

     This weekend was a black music festival. Usher wore this. . @usher’s shirt has July Fourth crossed out and “Juneteenth” on the bottom. Love it. #EssenceFest

     2015, y’all. Fancy all-white float vs. pick-up truck for the black council members. #Ferguson

374. rq says

     6 July 2015 at 2:33 am

     White Southern hate, stripped bare for all to see.

     The history of the flag sheds important light on the fight over it. The flag at the heart of today’s struggle is not the official Confederate standard. It is a piece of the battle flag of Gen. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and it came to represent the South primarily during Reconstruction.

     And finally I understand the significance of this, of using the battle flag today and not the actual confederate flag – because for them who want to leave it up, the war hasn’t ended. Or, at least, has been re-started.
     Anyway, more flag history at the link!

     While folks are getting $3K for art supplies from the Ferguson Fund, Ferguson residents like #DornnellaConner get $0. She lost an eye to a rubber bullet last year.

     Police Brutality Death Followed by Mass Arrests in Netherlands

     Thursday was the third day of protest in the Netherlands over the police killing of a Black Caribbean man. With a Dutch ban on public assembly, security forces have arrested over 200 people related to the demonstrations so far. Protesters have been clashing with police in the west-coast city of the Hague since Monday following the death of Caribbean man Mitch Henriquez, who died from asphyxiation after being pinned down by five white police officers and held in a chokehold.

     […]

     Citing a police statement, Reuters reports that unrest continued overnight Thursday and police detained protesters. Some of them started fires, hurled bottles and rocks, and broke windows. Over 100 people were arrested after allegedly defying a ban prohibiting public assembly in the immigrant neighborhood that has become the stage for protests. The ban prohibits scooters, carrying “dangerous objects,” and the assembly of more than three people in the neighborhood known for its high tensions between police and residents.

     I’ve heard the case being called the Dutch Ferguson. More Eric Garner, but still… is this in the news anywhere? It doesn’t seem to be, locally (for me).

     This is #Ferguson stupid idea of community building. Free eat zone for them…Free speech zone for us.

     What St. Louis Union members say about their supportive black female Senators @deray @tanehisicoates @akacharleswade – you have to read the attached screenshots, but be warned for racist material!

     Protest in Greensboro invokes Frederick Douglass: #WhatToASlave #FredrickTaughtUs #BreeTaughtMe #KeepItDown

375. rq says

     6 July 2015 at 5:05 am

     Protest happening now in Durham, NC. No such thing as freedom in a nation w/ mass incarceration & New Jim Crow

     This truck’s been parked in front of the State Capitol since Gov. Bentley gave orders to take down confederate flags.
     And these people are out here walking around the confederate monument in the State Capitol lawn.

     And here’s Libby Anne on partiotism in USAmerica. Being Patriotic on the Fourth of July

     My more nuanced understanding of our nation’s past and present has often left me unclear about where I stand on holidays like today. In many ways patriotism has become a thing of the political Right, as conservatives wave flags and seek to rewrite our nation’s history while progressives and others on the political Left feel uncomfortable as they grapple with our nation’s often troubling past. But I worry about this positioning, because it aids conservatives as they claim to be true Americans while I and others like me are somehow less American.

     What does patriotism mean, exactly? Is it love for one’s country? Admiration for one’s country? Devotion to one’s country? Does being patriotic require one to agree with all of the actions of one’s country? Or is it possible to be both patriotic and dissent from the action’s of one’s country? I think part of the problem is that those on the political Right have defined patriotism to mean not questioning one’s country or its past. This makes those on the political Left uncomfortable with the term patriotism altogether. But does it have to be defined that way?

     Our history is not just a history of oppression or injustice. It is also a history of lively and spirited dissent. Men like Frederick Douglass, women Ida B. Wells—these people are part of our history too. Eugene V. Debs. Pearl Buck. Claudette Clovin. Mary Beth Tinker. These individuals were American too, even as they were discontent with the state of their national and fought to change it. Is there any greater act of love toward one’s country than working to improve it, believing that it can be better than it is—more inclusive, more fair, more just?

     Rather than allowing conservatives to paint us as unpatriotic dissenters, let’s point out that dissenting is both patriotic and a central part of our national heritage. Let’s not let conservatives win the debate through defining its terms. On this Fourth of July, let’s celebrate the movers and shakers, the people who stepped out and put their lives on the line to make this country a better place. That battle continues today, through efforts to bring about immigration reform, through the movement surrounding Black Lives Matter, and through efforts to improve transgender rights. We, my friends, are part of a grand American tradition—and we are part of history.

     A tweeter recommends this essay by Malcolm X for reading on July 4th (under the hashtag #whattothenegroisthe4th)
     “The Fire Next Time” by Baldwin is good too. Don’t have a copy? It was based off this essay: link here – A Letter to My Nephew. This essay has been posted before, but I heartily recommend a re-read.

     Excerpt from Malcolm X:

     On the other hand, some of you think you came here on the Mayflower. So as you can see brothers and sisters this afternoon, it is not our intention to discuss religion. We’re going to forget religion. If we bring up religion, we’ll be in an argument, and the best way to keep a-way from arguments and differences – as I said earlier – put your religion at home – in the closet. Keep it between you and your God. Because if it hasn’t done anything more for you than it has, you need to forget it anyway. Whether you are a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Nationalist, we all have the same problem. They don’t hang you because you’re a Baptist; they hang you ’cause you’re black. They don’t attack me because I’m a Muslim; they attack me ’cause I’m black. They attack all of us for the same reason; all of us catch hell from the same enemy. We’re all in the same bag, in the same boat. We suffer political oppression, economic exploitation, and social degradation – all of them from the same enemy. The government has failed us; you can’t deny that. Anytime you live in the twentieth century, 1964, and you walkin’ around here singing “We Shall Overcome,” the government has failed us. This is part of what’s wrong with you do too much singing. Today it’s time to stop singing and start swinging. You can’t sing up on freedom, but you can swing up on some freedom. Cassius Clay can sing, but singing didn’t help him to become the heavy-weight champion of the world – swinging helped him become the heavy-weight champion. This government has failed us; the government itself has failed us, and the white liberals who have been posing as our friends have failed us. And once we see that all these other sources to which we’ve turned have failed, we stop turning to them and turn to ourselves. We need a self-help program, a do-it-your-self philosophy, a do-it-right-now philosophy, a it’s-already-too-late philosophy. This is what you and I need to get with, and the only way we are going to solve our problem is with a self-help program. Before we can get a self-help program started we have to have a self-help philosophy.

     Black nationalism is a self-help philosophy. What’s is so good about it? You can stay right in the church where you are and still take black nationalism as your philosophy. You can stay in any kind of civic organization that you belong to and still take black nationalism as your philosophy. You can be an atheist and still take black nationalism as your philosophy. This is a philosophy that eliminates the necessity for division and argument. ‘Cause if you are black you should be thinking black, and if you are black and you not thinking black at this late date, well I’m sorry for you. Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behaviour pattern and then you go on into some action. As long as you gotta sit-down philosophy, you’ll have a sit-down thought pattern, and as long as you think that old sit-down thought you’ll be in some kind of sit-down action. They’ll have you sitting in everywhere. It’s not so good to refer to what you’re doing to do as a sit-in. That right there castrates you. Right there it brings you down. What goes with it? Think of the Image of someone sitting. An old woman can sit. An old man can sit. A chump can sit. A coward can sit. Anything can sit. Well you and I been sitting long enough, and it’s time today for us to start doing some standing, and some fighting to back that up.
     […]

     When this country here was first being founded there were 13 colonies. The whites were colonized. They were fed up with this taxation without representation, so some of them stood up and said “liberty or death.” Though I went to a white school over here in Mason, Michigan, the white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot, and George Washington, wasn’t nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington. Liberty or death was what brought about the freedom of whites in this country from the English. They didn’t care about the odds. Why they faced the wrath of the entire British Empire. And in those days they used to say that the British Empire was so vast and so powerful when the sun – the sun would never set on them. This is how big it was, yet these 13 little, scrawny states, tired of taxation without representation, tired of being exploited and oppressed and degraded, told that big British Empire “liberty or death”. And here you have 22 million Afro-American black people today catching more hell than Patrick Henry ever saw. And I’m here to tell you in case you don’t know it that you got a new generation of black people in this country who don’t care anything whatsoever about odds. They don’t want to hear you old Uncle Tom handkerchief heads talking about the odds. No. This is a new generation. If they’re gonna draft these young black men and send them over to Korea or South Vietnam to face 800 million Chinese – if you’re not afraid of those odds, you shouldn’t be afraid of these odds.
     […]

     So it’s the ballot or the bullet. Today our people can see that we’re faced with a government conspiracy. This government has failed us. The senators who are filibustering concerning your and my rights, that’s the government. Don’t say it’s Southern senators. This is the go-vernment; this is a government filibuster. It’s not a segregationist filibuster. It’s a government filibuster. Any kind of activity that takes place on the floor of the Congress or the Senate, it’s the government. Any kind of dilly-dallying, that’s the government. Any kind of pussy-footing, that’s the government. Any kind of act that’s designed to delay or deprive you and me right now of getting full rights, that’s the government that’s responsible. And any time you find the government involved in a conspiracy to violate the citizenship or the civil rights of a people, then you are wasting your time going to that government expecting redress. Instead, you have to take that government to the World Court and accuse it of genocide and all of the other crimes that it is guilty of today. So those of us whose political, and economic, and social philosophy is black nationalism have become involved in the civil rights struggle. We have injected ourselves into the civil rights struggle, and we intend to expand it from the level of civil rights to the level of human rights. As long as you’re fighting on the level of civil rights, you’re under Uncle Sam’s jurisdiction. You’re going to his court expecting him to correct the problem. He created the problem. He’s the criminal. You don’t take your case to the criminal; you take your criminal to court. When the government of South Africa began to trample upon the human rights of the people of South Africa, they were taken to the U.N. When the government of Portugal began to trample upon the rights of our brothers and sisters in Angola, it was taken before the U.N. Why even the white man took the Hungarian question to the U.N. And just this week Chief Justice Goldberg was crying over 3 million Jews in Russia about their human rights, charging Russia with violating the U.N. charter because of its mistreatment of the human rights of Jews in Russia.
     Now you tell me how can the plight of everybody on this earth reach the halls of the United Nations, and you have 22 million Afro-Americans whose choices are being bound, whose little girls are being murdered, whose leaders are being shot down in broad daylight. Now you tell me why the leaders of this struggle have never taken it before the United
     Nations. So our next move is to take the entire civil rights struggle problems into the United Nations, and let the world see that Uncle Sam is guilty of violating the human rights of 22 million Afro-Americans. Uncle Sam still has the audacity or the nerve to stand up and represent himself as the leader of the free world. Not only is he a crook, he’s a hypocrite. Here he is standing up in front of other people, Uncle Sam, with the blood of your and mine mothers and fathers on his hands, with the blood dripping down his jaws like a bloody-jawed wolf, and still got the nerve to point his finger at other countries. You can’t even get civil rights legislation. And this man has got the nerve to stand up and talk about South Africa, or talk about Nazi Germany, or talk about Deutschland. Why? No more days like those. So, I say in my conclusion the only way we’re going to solve it – we’ve got to unite in unity and harmony, and black nationalism is the key. How we gonna overcome the tendency to be at each others throats that always exists in our neighbourhoods? And the reason this tendency exists, the strategy of the white man has always been divide and conquer. He keeps us divided in order to conquer us. He tells you I’m for separation and you for integration to keep us fighting with each other. No, I’m not for separation and you’re not for integration. What you and I is for is freedom. Only you think that integration would get you freedom, I think separation would get me freedom. We both got the same objective, we just got different ways of getting at it.

376. rq says

     6 July 2015 at 5:15 am

     Beh, moderation.
     Anyway. Audre Lorde on July 4th. Recommended reading.

     Celebrating the revolution that freed America? Then you should have support for the movement for black lives. #LiberationForAll #4thOfJuly

     What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass’ famous July 5th speech in full.

     The papers and placards say, that I am to deliver a 4th [of] July oration. This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for it is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to address many who now honor me with their presence. But neither their familiar faces, nor the perfect gage I think I have of Corinthian Hall, seems to free me from embarrassment.

     The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable — and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you.

     This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.

     […]

     Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born! It was a startling idea, much more so, than we, at this distance of time, regard it. The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it.

     Such people lived then, had lived before, and will, probably, ever have a place on this planet; and their course, in respect to any great change, (no matter how great the good to be attained, or the wrong to be redressed by it), may be calculated with as much precision as can be the course of the stars. They hate all changes, but silver, gold and copper change! Of this sort of change they are always strongly in favor.

     These people were called Tories in the days of your fathers; and the appellation, probably, conveyed the same idea that is meant by a more modern, though a somewhat less euphonious term, which we often find in our papers, applied to some of our old politicians.

     Their opposition to the then dangerous thought was earnest and powerful; but, amid all their terror and affrighted vociferations against it, the alarming and revolutionary idea moved on, and the country with it.

     On the 2d of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease, and the worshipers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution; and as we seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help my story if I read it. “Resolved, That these united colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, dissolved.”

     […]

     Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history — the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.

     Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.

     From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day — cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.

     […]

     Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

     Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

     But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. — The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

     […]

     Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

     But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man, (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!

     For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!

     Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. — There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

     What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

     What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.

     At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

     What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

     Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

     There’s more at the link, but goddamn.

377. rq says

     6 July 2015 at 5:24 am

     Oh, and that was supposed to be introduced by this:
     The Best Fourth of July Speech in American History, as posted by Lynna in the Lounge.

     The speech that deserves our notice, and did truly thunder, came not at the centennial but a quarter of a century earlier, in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852. Rochester was the epicenter of the so-called burned-over district, a region along the Erie Canal swept repeatedly by religious revivals and reform. There, the former slave and ardent abolitionist Frederick Douglass published his newspaper the North Star. Douglass was a good friend of Susan B. Anthony, whose family farm was located on Rochester’s outskirts. His paper had been one of the few to support the women’s rights convention in nearby Seneca Falls, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1848.

     So it was natural enough that the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester asked Douglass to provide an oration for Independence Day. Since the Fourth that year fell on a Sunday, commemorations were held a day later. That suited Douglass perfectly, as African Americans had been celebrating the Fourth a day later for over two decades. Many blacks found the idea of joining in the festivities problematic at best, so long as white Americans continued to keep millions of slaves in chains. In any case, white revelers on the Fourth had a history of disrupting black processions. Many blacks made July 5 their holiday instead.
     […]

     In Rochester, Douglass stalked his largely white audience with exquisite care, taking them by stealth. He began by providing what many listeners might not have expected from a notorious abolitionist: a fulsome paean to the Fourth and the founding generation. The day brought forth “demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm,” he told them, for the signers of the Declaration were “brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age.” Jefferson’s very words echoed in Douglass’s salute: “Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country … ”

     Your fathers. That pronoun signaled the slightest shift in the breeze. But Douglass continued cordially. “Friends and citizens, I need not enter further into the causes which led to this anniversary. Many of you understand them better than I do.” Then another step back: “That is a branch of knowledge in which you feel, perhaps, a much deeper interest than your speaker.”
     […]

     His task must have seemed nearly hopeless at a time when the new Fugitive Slave Act, put in place by the Compromise of 1850, allowed Southern planters to pursue runaway slaves in the free states—slaves like him—and even forced Northerners to aid in that pursuit. As a devout Christian, it particularly galled Douglass that so many Northern ministers refused to join the abolitionist cause. So in reading his words, we must understand that it was not merely a facile rhetorical device when he asked listeners whether they meant to mock him, in asking him to deliver an Independence Day oration. In a sense, deep in his bones, he was truly offended.

     Yet he did deliver the address, in a manner fiery and uncompromising yet patriotic and uplifting. Has there ever been another Independence Day speech to match it?

     Greeting Obama’s motorcade as he leaves Nashville, July 1 of this year.

     Arthur Ashe: 40 Years After His Historic Wimbledon Win, His Legacy Lives Beyond the Tennis Court

     Tennis was our introduction to Arthur Ashe and he took over from there. He used the platform to become a civil rights activist, human-rights champion and a model for black thinker-athletes.

     The sport turned our attention on the native of Richmond, Va., and he forced us to consider more pressing matters, such as apartheid, HIV/AIDS and the barriers of poverty, privilege and racism.

     But the tennis came first and he was atop the game July 5, 1975, when he became the first black man to win Wimbledon.

     “After 40 years, his legacy still lives on in one of the greatest ways,” Serena Williams told reporters at Wimbledon last week. “That was just an amazing match that he played against [Jimmy] Connors. … It’s been [important] for African Americans, not just in tennis, but in all sports, for breaking barriers.”

     More at the link.

     General police misbehaviour, Watch video that got NOPD officer fired for ‘unauthorized’ force on 16-year-old girl.

     Documents: SLED missed bullets at Walter Scott scene, deleted other evidence

     But it was how the State Law Enforcement Division handled other evidence that has prompted a point of legal contention and a motion by Michael Slager’s attorney for a court inquiry into the agency’s destruction of evidence.

     After collecting the projectiles, an agent reported that he redid three-dimensional scans of the scene because the originals had been deleted, according to a SLED document included in the motion.

     The attorney, Andy Savage of Charleston, said this week that it cannot be known whether the destruction of the scans made on the day of the shooting will have any impact on the case until SLED provides a more detailed explanation for the action.

     SLED spokesman Thom Berry said he could not comment on any specifics of the agency’s ongoing investigation or on court documents. Ninth Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson also did not immediately discuss whether the recent development would affect the prosecution.

     Savage said Wilson has cooperated with his attempts to get information.

     “We think that everything that has to do with this case should be preserved for follow-up,” he said. “We won’t know if it’s meaningful until we get some answers.”

     […]

     The recent developments brought to light through court filings came on the heels of a Post and Courier investigation, titled “Shots Fired,” that revealed shortcomings in SLED probes into 235 officer-involved shootings since 2009. Basic information sometimes was never collected, and police officers often were never pressed for answers to key questions.

     […]

     The private investigators hired by Savage, Steve Russell of Mount Pleasant and John Paolucci of Brewster, N.Y., came across the bullets on April 20 while walking through the same area. They called deputies to the site, and SLED agents later collected the evidence.

     Lab experts matched one of the bullets to Slager’s .45-caliber pistol, Savage said, but the other was in such poor condition that it could not be linked to a specific firearm.

     Two days after the discovery and 19 days after the shooting, agents again returned and used a FARO laser scanner to create a 3-D rendering of the site.

     An agent had started to scan the scene on the day of the shooting, Savage said, but another told him to stop. “The first scan was deleted due to the scanning process not being completed,” the SLED document stated.

     The deletion flouted SLED’s obligation to preserve all evidence, Savage contended. It also raised more concern about SLED’s handling of the case because the agency had “aggressively crafted the narrative of this incident and its investigation by way of documents and statements released to the press,” his motion stated.

     “The prosecution of Michael Slager has attracted a high degree of local interest, as well as nationwide media scrutiny,” the filing added. “Even the most unsophisticated law enforcement agency knows that it has a duty to preserve all potentially relevant evidence under these circumstances.”

     Savage asked Circuit Judge Clifton Newman, who has been assigned to preside over the case, to order agents to preserve other evidence and to look into why the scans were deleted.

     Scott’s family has praised SLED for its swift arrest that led to a June 8 indictment. Justin Bamberg, a state representative and attorney for the family, said he had not been aware of concerns about the probe.

     “Given the physical evidence that would have been at the scene that day and given the video that surfaced, SLED … was aware of the severity of the situation,” Bamberg said. “I have no reason to believe they haven’t done the absolute best they can.”

     And on one of the great American traditions, Barbecue is an American tradition – of enslaved Africans and Native Americans

     Barbecue is a form of cultural power and is intensely political, with a culture of rules like no other American culinary tradition: sauce or no sauce; which kind of sauce; chopped or not chopped; whole animal or just ribs or shoulders. And, if America is about people creating new worlds based on rebellion against oppression and slavery, then barbecue is the ideal dish: it was made by enslaved Africans with inspiration and contributions from Native Americans struggling to maintain their independence.

     The common cultural narrative of barbecue, however, exclusively assigns its origins to Native Americans and Europeans; the very etymology of the word is said to derive from both Carib through Spanish (barbacoa – to roast over hot coals on a wooden framework) or from western European sources (barbe-a-queue in French – “head to tail” – which fits nicely with contemporary ideas of no-waste eating and consuming offal). Some American barbecue masters have taken to attributing the innovation of barbecue to their German and Czech ancestors.

     If anything, both in etymology and culinary technique, barbecue is as African as it is Native American and European, though enslaved Africans have largely been erased from the modern story of American barbecue. At best, our ancestors are seen as mindless cooking machines who prepared the meat under strict white supervision, if at all; at worst, barbecue was something done “for” the enslaved, as if they were being introduced to a novel treat. In reality, they shaped the culture of New World barbecuing traditions, from jerking in Jamaica to anticuchos in Peru to cooking traditions in the colonial Pampas. And the word barbecue also has roots in West Africa among the Hausa, who used the term “babbake” to describe a complex of words referring to grilling, toasting, building a large fire, singeing hair or feathers and cooking food over a long period of time over an extravagant fire.

     […]

     Enslaved Africans and Native Americans had a lot in common, culinarily-speaking: they had been cooking and eating in similar ways. despite an ocean between their civilizations. It only makes sense that, when their foodways, crops, cooking methods and systems of preservation, hunting, fishing and food storage collided, that there would be deep similarities and convergences of technique, method and skill. And West and Central Africans had always had their own versions of the barbacoa and spit roasting of meat. While living in a tropical climate, salting, spicing and half-smoking meat upon butchering was key to ensuring game would make it back to the village with minimal spoilage. Festivals were marked by the salting, spicing and roasting of whole animals or large cuts of meat.

     Thus, in colonial and antebellum North America, enslaved men became barbecue’s master chefs: woodcuts, cartoons, postcards and portraits from the period document the role that black chefs played in shaping this very American, and especially Southern staple. Working over pits in the ground covered in green wood – much as in West Africa or Jamaica – it was enslaved men and their descendants, not the Bubbas of today’s Barbecue Pitmasters, that innovated and refined regional barbecue traditions. If anything, German, Czech, Mexican and other traditions in South Carolina, Missouri and Texas were added to a base created by black hands forged in the crucible of slavery.

     In some ways barbecue is true Independence Day food. As European Americans acclimated themselves to the custom of forsaking utensils and even plates to eat more like enslaved Africans and Native Americans – from spareribs to corn on the cob – they used their hands in an unprecedented break with Old World formalities. It is not without some irony that enslaved people, the earliest barbecue pitmasters, were called upon to avail slaveholders and politicians with Fourth of July barbecues meant to win over neighbors and constituents. When they obtained their own freedom, the formerly enslaved celebrated Juneteenth with none other than their favorite freedom food – barbecue.

378. rq says

     6 July 2015 at 8:30 am

     So my South Carolina relatives are getting robocalls from desperate pro-Confederate flag group, audio at the link.

     @deray So this is happening in my town right now. #heritageofhate (Arizona).

     White family with black house guest wake up to find their truck covered in hateful ‘KKK’ graffiti

     A white Texas couple who were hosting their black friend over the holiday weekend awoke to find their truck covered in racist graffiti and hateful pictures.

     Darren and Hayli Franke were horrified and humiliated on Friday morning when the sun rose over their white pickup to reveal it spray-painted in the letters ‘KKK’ as well as vulgar messages and pictures.

     ‘My black friend, he’s been here for two days,’ Darren told KHOU. ‘Me and him hung out in the yard and just mowed the grass and hanging out around the house yesterday. We woke up this morning and he goes, ‘Man you need to go look at your truck!”

     A trip to the car wash, in an attempt to remove the graffiti, made things even worse on the couple.

     ‘People stared and pointed,’ Hayli Franke told KTRK. ‘They thought we did it. I think it is hateful and disgusting. Anyone who knows us knows we would never do anything like that.’

     Adding insult to injury, there was nothing the folks at the car wash could do. Luckily, the Frankes were advised to use nail polish remover to take off the paint.

     And they had help. Neighbors in the ethnically diverse neighborhood pitched in to help scrub the messages away.

     All the messages but one. The Frankes left behind one word as a message to the vandals: ‘Love.’

     However, the couple remain extremely concerned and say they’ve sent their son to stay with family elsewhere and will be installing a surveillance camera.

     ‘We won’t be spending the night here,’ the couple said.

     I love the neighbourhood response.

     @deray Racist statues at @UNC are getting exposed. “Black Lives Matter” and “murderer” graffitti on confederate statues.

     League of the South holds July 4th rally against ‘cultural genocide of the Southern people’. And I look that the photos of families, and all the kids that they bring along, and wonder exactly what are they learning…

     Members of the League of the South rallied in Arkansas over the weekend to protest same-sex marriage and recent opposition to the Confederate flag, which they called “cultural genocide.”

     Arkansas League of the South Chair Robert Miller told KLRT that an effort to banish Confederate flags flying at the South Carolina statehouse and at government buildings was “removing our heritage, removing our history.”
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     “It’s cultural genocide and nothing less,” Miller insisted.

     On the anniversary of America’s birth, League of the South members gathered alongside Highway 65 in Harrison for a combined rally for the Confederate flag and so-called “Christian marriage.”

     “We’re rallying in support of traditional Christian marriage. We’re also rallying in support of the Confederate flag, and standing against the cultural genocide of the Southern people that’s been waged by the leftists in Washington,” Miller explained. “To claim that Southerners have ill will or malice toward people for arbitrary reasons is not accurate.”

     “The charge of racism is an overused and nowadays irrelevant charge meant to do nothing but silence the enemies of the left,” he added. “We don’t cower at such a charge.”

     A follow-up on one of the burned churches, Knoxville black church stands strong after arson, ‘ultimate act of cowardice’

     College Hill, which experienced tens of thousands of dollars in damage but avoided total destruction, was the first of the latest string of church burnings across the American south. At least eight predominantly black churches have gone up in flames since 21-year-old white gunman Dylann Roof is said by authorities to have shot to death nine black men and women inside a historic church in Charleston, South Carolina, on 17 June.

     Investigators, who have confirmed arson as the cause of at least three of the black church fires, have not yet found any to be hate crimes. But the church burnings, which have also happened in states like Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, have occurred amid tremendous pressure for the Confederate flag to be removed from prominent public facilities, much to the ire of some southerners who consider the flag a part of their heritage.

     […]

     “I don’t have proof it was a hate crime,” Hodby says. “But you know a burnt-down church really leaves no sign that says ‘we hate you’. It’s a burnt church that says ‘we hate you’.”

     Over a five-year period ending in 2011, the National Fire Protection Association found arsonists each year had set fire to about 280 houses of worship from all faiths.

     The report also shows arson to responsible for about 16% of all church fires.

     Valarie Cooper, associate professor of black church studies at Duke University, says church burnings can be particularly harmful to religious communities given the lack of closure in what are often anonymous attacks that go unsolved.

     “It’s often difficult to find the perpetrators,” Cooper says. “So arsons are underreported and under-investigated. If churches are insured, what’s the difference?”

     The College Hill fire destroyed the church’s side metal doors, soffit, ceiling insulation, and carpet, all of which will require an estimated $50,000 in repairs. In the parking lot, arsonists also torched a used Chevy Astro van recently acquired for community outreach events. Church leaders expect the insurance company to cover the damages.

     Marshall Henley, a church elder who’s attended College Hill’s services for more than three decades, says arsonists ignited piles of straw that were stuffed inside wire cages used to grow tomatoes in the children’s garden at the church. He says the side entrance is located on an isolated part of the building, one that’s not visible to potential passersby.

     “We don’t really know what happened,” Henley says. “

     The more I think about it, the more I think may have been hate-related and a racial terrorist kind of thing.”

     Gilda Hendricks, a longtime pianist at the church, says the arsonists also spread bags of soil outside two other entrances. She thinks they likely had mistaken the soil for mulch, which can be extremely combustible, and made an error that prevented the damage from being far worse.

     […]

     “On the Fourth of July, we should embrace our freedoms,” Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist church pastor Chris Buice told College Hill church members. “Those freedoms are our freedom to worship and our freedom from fear.”

     Though College Hill’s services have continued as planned, Hodby says, his congregation is now on guard for future attacks. According to Hodby, some churchgoers have asked for the installation of metal detectors to ensure suspects don’t “come back and finish what they started”. Others have asked him for permission to bring their own guns to their services.

     For now, he’s stopped short of letting guns into the house of worship. But he’s pledged to soon install video cameras, increase security personnel, and properly train church staff on how to react to future attacks. At several upcoming weekly services, Hodby plans to have his entire congregation walk through church safety protocol, partake in fire drills, and learn other safety precautions.

     “You can’t go back,” Hodby says. “Who would’ve ever thunk it that a church has to respond to these [shootings] and burnings? It’s the ultimate act of cowardice. It’s going to be a new normal.”

379. rq says

     6 July 2015 at 9:02 am

     Fire truck flies Confederate flag alongside U.S. flag in Albert Lea holiday parade

     The nation’s pitched and passionate debate over the display of the Confederate flag has found its voice in the northern state of Minnesota, where a firefighter flew the most enduring symbol of the Civil War South alongside Old Glory on a fire truck in a July 4th weekend parade in Albert Lea.

     The Confederate flag flew at the same height as the U.S. flag from the back of the truck belonging to the Freeborn County town of Hartland during the “3rd of July Parade” on Friday, which was organized by the Chamber of Commerce. Also over the weekend, the Confederate flag fluttered on a vehicle in a small-town July 4th parade south of Pelican Rapids, Minn.

     The flag’s display in the South and elsewhere has been widely questioned since the June 17 mass killing in a predominantly black church in Charleston, S.C. The alleged shooter has posted photos of himself with the flag in the past on social media.

     Government officials and others have been pressured in recent weeks to remove the flag and its likeness from displays ranging from outside the South Carolina Capitol to NASCAR auto race events to retail outlets.

     The Hartland fire truck was driven by Brian Nielsen, a firefighter for about 10 years with the department. Nielsen said Sunday that he was not endorsing slavery but was fed up with what he views as “political correctness” attacking a symbol that is part of history.

     “My view is that PC is going too far taking things out of history,” said Nielsen, who added that his actions led to his being suspended by his chief. “It has nothing to do with slavery. I don’t see color, black or white. We’re all equal.”

     As far as I know, there will be no repercussions, but he (the firefighter) is very firmly against everything PC, so I’m betting he’s of the ‘I have black friends, I’m not racists, it’s just facts’ strain.

     Just going to introduce this with ‘Ta-Nehisi Coates!!’: Letter to My Son, from July 4.

     Son,

     Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote studio on the far west side of Manhattan. A satellite closed the miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world and the world for which I had been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week.

     The host read these words for the audience, and when she finished she turned to the subject of my body, although she did not mention it specifically. But by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history.

     There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. This defiance is not to be much dwelled upon. Democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies—torture, theft, enslavement—are specimens of sin, so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely being aspirational. At the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. As for now, it must be said that the elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land.

     That Sunday, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of an 11-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about “hope.” And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indistinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.

     That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 p.m. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.

     It continues at the link. It’s also very long. And I also encourage everyone to read it in full. Because Ta-Nehisi Coates.

     Here’s a bit on Rihanna’s video: Let’s talk about Rihanna’s video

     Apparently, unlike all other artistic output ever, writers are not supposed to respond to Rihanna’s video for B*tch Better Have My Money. Yesterday, I read a discussion of it on a music website where one of those involved said: “To those currently drafting your thinkpiece about how it wasn’t very #feminist of Rih to torture that poor rich lady: nooooo one cares about your basic-ass probably non-intersectional praxis. Rihanna doesn’t need to spell it out for you if you still don’t get it yet; time is money, b*tch.”

     Time is indeed money, and although technically I am being paid to write this, I should really be writing something else  right now— something which isn’t even a “thinkpiece” (the hot new internet way to dismiss anyone having an opinion you don’t agree with, like when you describe “pieces people want to read” as “clickbait”). My other article has got, like, interviews in it and shit. It talks about workforce structures, equal pay, childcare entitlements and how they disadvantage women throughout society, and — yet, here we are.

     So I’ll try to keep this brief. Or at least hammer it out and move on with my life. It was not very feminist — not even very hashtag feminist — of Rihanna to “torture that poor rich lady”. That is because it is not very feminist to torture women. Even if they are white. Even if they are rich. Even if you are a woman yourself. Sorry if this comes as a surprise. (Scotty, gimme me more power! The hot take machine cannae take it!)

     I respect Rihanna as an artist, and as a woman in a male-dominated world. And not every action can, or has to be, feminist — I hate this stupid fashion for asking “are high heels feminist”, “is the hijab feminist” , like those are binary categories and you can just bang your gavel and declare one way or the other. I am, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir: “Half-victim, half-accomplice; like everyone else.” So is Rihanna. We all make our accommodations with the status quo.

     It’s also perfectly possible for a music video not to be feminist and still to be artistically worthwhile, or ground-breaking, or satirical, or hard-hitting, or emotionally affecting, or a multitude of other positives. I recently wrote about the film Ex Machina, which is explicitly concerned with the objectification of women. To achieve its artistic aims, it actually has to objectify several women. This is not very hashtag feminist, on the surface, but it is artistically interesting — and the result of a conscious artistic choice.

     […]

     I tried looking for a bit of back story to explain this video yesterday, and then came to the conclusion — you know what, it doesn’t matter. Not to get all first-year undergraduate, but the meaning of the video is primarily in the actions and images contained within the video. That’s how most people will experience it. It’s possible there is some amazing explanation that puts a totally new spin on what happens here. If so, I’m all ears. (Well, and a bit of frown.)

     Because to me, here is what it looks like is happening here. This video uses one of the most tired tropes — using a woman’s pain to hurt a man. There was once a noble tradition of this in newspaper stories: the linguistics professor Deborah Cameron cited a great example from the 1980s in one of her books: MAN FORCED TO WATCH WIFE’S RAPE. The poor bloody guy, eh? That must have really put a downer on his day.

     So, I don’t like that. From the way the video narrative progresses, it’s implied that the ultimate object of Rihanna’s ire is the man, but she uses his woman to get to him. This is pretty much “fridging”, and there is a big body of work about what a tired trope it is, particularly since it implies that only men have feelings worth bothering about, and women’s pain is only interesting insofar as it makes men’s lower lips go wobbly to think about their delicate little flowers being hurt. (I’m looking at you, Liam Neeson.)

     Then there’s the sexualisation of the violence. I’ve had a couple of people raise the BDSM scene — bondage, domination and sado-masochism —  and how images of sexualised violence might be OK in that context. They seem to have missed the fairly massive point that the main thing about BDSM, the KEY THING about BDSM, if you will, is that it’s supposed to be consensual. Non-consensual BDSM is just assault. Even if you’re wearing an excellent latex outfit.

     […]

     I want to finish up by talking about race, which I am think I am definitely not meant to do. This is where the basic-ass nature of my praxis is really going to be revealed. I’ve read some suggestions that the video is supposed to be disturbing — it’s a comment on how black women’s bodies are routinely sexualised and objectified in our culture in a way that is both racist and misogynist. Ah, goes this line of argument, you don’t like it when it’s a rich white woman dangling on the hook? Where were you when worse things happened to black women?

     Yeah, this is true. No one should deny it. There is a hierarchy of victimhood in our society —  if you get kidnapped, raped and murdered, you will make more front pages if you’re white, pretty and “virginal” than if you are black/Hispanic, a mother, an older woman, an immigrant, a sex worker or any other category that apparently downgrades your death from a tragedy to a commonplace.

     But the answer to that is to make more noise, to raise our voices louder, when women who are doubly disadvantaged are objectified and marginalised — not even up the score with a bit of rich-white-lady torture. In Catharine MacKinnon’s searing essay on this subject, she speaks of the white woman as a “‘woman, modified’ . . . meaning she would be oppressed but for her privilege”. As she points out, being white does not exempt a woman from sexism — it merely means that she does not also experience the oppression of racism too.

     […]

     So yes, I’m going to read more about the racial angle from better-qualified people than me. And I’m going to reiterate: a music video doesn’t have to be feminist to be a worthwhile artistic expression. But I think that if the video is making a point about race, then the fact that a white man and a white woman receive such different treatment is worth exploring. Trying to be more intersectional – to explore the way that different oppressions overlap and modify each other – should not mean we end up arguing that sexism does not exist as a force in its own right. I’ve seen sexism; I know it exists. Sometimes it looks like a naked woman in pain, hanging from a rope.

     More on feminism than on race, but worth a thought.

     Gucci Mane Announces “The Stars of Trap” Tour, but beyond an announcement, there’s no actual information.

     Obama Plans Broader Use of Clemency to Free Nonviolent Drug Offenders

     The expansive use of his clemency power is part of a broader effort by Mr. Obama to correct what he sees as the excesses of the past, when politicians eager to be tough on crime threw away the key even for minor criminals. With many Republicans and Democrats now agreeing that the nation went too far, Mr. Obama holds the power to unlock that prison door, especially for young African-American and Hispanic men disproportionately affected.

     But even as he exercises authority more assertively than any of his modern predecessors, Mr. Obama has only begun to tackle the problem he has identified. In the next weeks, the total number of commutations for Mr. Obama’s presidency may surpass 80, but more than 30,000 federal inmates have come forward in response to his administration’s call for clemency applications. A cumbersome review process has advanced only a small fraction of them. And just a small fraction of those have reached the president’s desk for a signature.

     “I think they honestly want to address some of the people who have been oversentenced in the last 30 years,” said Julie Stewart, the founder and president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a group advocating changes in sentencing. “I’m not sure they envisioned that it would be as complicated as it is, but it has become more complicated, whether it needs to be or not, and that’s what has bogged down the process.”

     Overhauling the criminal justice system has become a bipartisan venture. Like Mr. Obama, Republicans running for his job are calling for systemic changes. Lawmakers from both parties are collaborating on legislation. And the United States Sentencing Commission has revised guidelines for drug offenders, so far retroactively reducing sentences for more than 9,500 inmates, nearly three-quarters of them black or Hispanic.

     The drive to recalibrate the system has brought together groups from across the political spectrum. The Center for American Progress, a liberal advocacy organization with close ties to the White House and Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, has teamed up with Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the conservative brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, who finance Republican candidates, to press for reducing prison populations and overhauling sentencing.

     Dominican Plan to Expel Haitians Tests Close Ties, because that’s still a thing.

     For decades, the people of Barrio Cementerio, a neighborhood divided evenly between Dominicans and Haitians, have shared a peaceful coexistence. Proximity smothered prejudice: Working side by side and raising families together helped keep tensions in check.

     That is changing now. A government plan that could deport tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people of Haitian descent from the Dominican Republic has started to tear at the unity that once bound this place, forcing residents to pick a side.

     A bitter landlord stopped renting to a Haitian tenant. The head of the local Red Cross says the deportations are long overdue, while a gang leader promises to hide his Haitian friends from the authorities. A Dominican husband fears losing his wife and their children, who have no papers. A police officer agonizes over the prospect of having to deport his best friend, who came to this country illegally from Haiti.

     “I have no choice,” said John Tapia Thomas, the police officer, outside his friend’s makeshift Internet cafe. “It saddens me to think about being ordered to detain someone I really care about. It will be hard not to make exceptions, but I have to go about my job as professionally as I can.”

     […]

     The Dominican government’s threat to deport Haitians has been popular domestically, playing on the frustrations many Dominicans feel toward their poorer neighbors on the island of Hispaniola.

     The politics are pretty straightforward. President Danilo Medina recently announced his campaign for re-election next year. Many praise his efforts to register migrants and expel those in the country illegally.

     Sporadic deportations have happened, but so far, with the world watching, the Dominican government has not carried out the mass expulsions many Haitians fear.

     Still, the threat of being seized has led more than 31,000 Haitians to leave on their own, according to government figures, opting to cart their belongings across the border rather than risk losing everything in a sudden deportation.

     Others say that not all of these departures are voluntary.

     “People returning are telling me that the police are working with street gangs to force out immigrants in the big cities,” said one Haitian border guard, clutching a clipboard with the names of Haitians who had crossed that day. “Strangers are going door to door late at night and threatening to burn people’s houses down.”

     More at the link, pay inequities and all.

380. rq says

     6 July 2015 at 9:22 am

     More Ta-Nehisi Coates! Ta-Nehisi Coates Reads From Between the World and Me, video.

     Black Woman Artist Poses Nude at Former New York City Slave Trading Sites, Including Wall Street – I know I’ve posted this before, but it’s worth anotehr look.

     #YouMightBeARacist if you’re a Men’s Rights Activist. See attached text.

     The Nightly Show – Bree Newsome, youtube video. Woo!

     ‘Murderer’ tagged on the ‘Silent Sam’ Confederate soldier statue on UNC’s Chapel Hill campus #TakeItDown

     Revenge Killing, on race and the death penalty in Louisiana. The first part of that story is just heart-breaking.

     The only structure on the front lawn of the Caddo Parish courthouse, in downtown Shreveport, is a monument to the Confederacy, which includes the busts of four Confederate generals. A large stone slab on the ground is inscribed with the Confederate flag and a tribute to the “deeds and valor of the men who so gallantly, nobly, and conscientiously defended the cause.”

     In the decades after the Civil War, Caddo Parish—home to the last capital of the Confederacy—had more lynchings than all but one county in the South. Several men were lynched in front of the courthouse. In 1914, when some Louisiana newspapers called for the abolition of the death penalty, an editorial in the Shreveport Times warned that without capital punishment the number of lynchings would rise: black criminals wouldn’t be able to reach the jail before they were overwhelmed by the “vengeance of an outraged citizenship.”

     Juries in Caddo Parish, which has a population of two hundred and fifty thousand, now sentence more people to death per capita than juries in any other county in America. Seventy-seven per cent of those sentenced to death in the past forty years have been black, and nearly half were convicted of killing white victims. A white person has never been sentenced to death for killing a black person.

     Since 2011, Dale Cox, a jowly sixty-seven-year-old man with thinning white hair, has been responsible for more than a third of the death sentences in Louisiana. When I met him at his office, which overlooks the courthouse, I asked him if he worried about the possibility that the parish’s fraught racial history and its approach to capital punishment were related, but he said that he didn’t see the connection. “People have played the race card in this country for so long, and at some point we really need to stop and say, ‘O.K., that was a long, long, long time ago. It’s different now.’ ” He said, “Yeah, a lot of terrible things have happened in the world everywhere. And in some places it gets better, like here. And in some places it doesn’t, like Africa or Kosovo.” He told me, “I don’t get this discrimination business, I really don’t.”

     Cox, who is Catholic and went to a Jesuit school, was opposed to the death penalty at the start of his career, and in 1983, after working in the district attorney’s office for six years, he left, because he didn’t feel comfortable pursuing capital cases. He believed that it was God’s decision when to end someone’s life. He joined a civil firm while working part time as a special prosecutor. By 2011, when he returned to the office full time, he said that his thinking had evolved. After constant exposure to violence, he began to reinterpret the Bible. He thought about passages in which Christ was judgmental and unforgiving—Christ’s belief that it would be better if Judas Iscariot had never been born, for instance—and saw Him as retaliatory in ways that he hadn’t appreciated before. After the Church’s pedophilia scandals, Cox no longer felt obliged to follow its teachings precisely. He told me that “we just exclusively use the Old Testament over here,” and that he had ripped the New Testament out of all the Bibles. He quickly added, “That’s a joke!”

     Last March, a former colleague of Cox’s published a letter in the Shreveport Times apologizing for causing an innocent black man to spend thirty years on death row. “We are simply incapable of devising a system that can fairly and impartially impose a sentence of death,” he wrote. When a journalist with the paper, Maya Lau, asked Cox for his response, he said that he thought courts should be imposing the death penalty more, not less. “I think we need to kill more people,” he told her. “We’re not considered a society anymore—we’re a jungle.”

     Cox does not believe that the death penalty works as a deterrent, but he says that it is justified as revenge. He told me that revenge was a revitalizing force that “brings to us a visceral satisfaction.” He felt that the public’s aversion to the notion had to do with the word itself. “It’s a hard word—it’s like the word ‘hate,’ the word ‘despot,’ the word ‘blood.’ ” He said, “Over time, I have come to the position that revenge is important for society as a whole. We have certain rules that you are expected to abide by, and when you don’t abide by them you have forfeited your right to live among us.”

     Lots more at the link. On the ‘justice’ system and how it works in complicated cases.

381. rq says

     6 July 2015 at 9:34 am

     This Is What Rihanna’s BBHMM Video Says About Black Women, White Women and Feminism

     The innanetz are all abuzz over Rihanna’s new #BBHMM video. White Feminists™ are especially upset, many of them calling the video “misogynist”. It’s been called “torture porn” and “incredibly violent”. I watched the video and…well…I see why White Feminists™ are so upset.

     Yes, there is violence (not nearly as much as an R-rated movie, tho. Almost all of the violence is implied). Yes, there are images of a woman being kidnapped, held hostage, and even hung upside down from the ceiling while topless. These are the kinds of images we see a lot in violent revenge films. They can be upsetting and harmful. I didn’t like seeing them here. But they’re also not the entire story.

     Let me tell you what I see when I watch this video: I see a black woman putting her own well-being above the well-being of a white woman.

     Let’s be clear: white women put their own needs and well-being above those of black women every day and call it “feminism”.

     Here, Rihanna flips the script: if a white woman has to suffer some so that she, a black woman, can survive, so be it. After all, white women have been surviving on our suffering for hundreds of years.

     Black women are always expected to put our needs last on our list of priorities. Behind everybody else’s. A black woman saying “my well-being (which is what money is—the ability to pay rent, feed ourselves, stay alive, etc.) is more important to me than the well-being of this random white woman” is what white feminists are really losing their shit over.

     Imagine if instead of kidnapping the accountant’s wife, Rihanna and her crew kidnapped his brother? Would White Feminists™ be so upset? I doubt it. Because they understand that revenge fantasies wherein women hurt men are pushing back against the harm men do to us. But here’s what white feminists don’t get (and what has them fucked up): black women often see white women as the same as white men. The harm done to us by white men and white women isn’t vastly different to many of us. White women have been unapologetically violent towards black women for centuries. They’ve used the power of the state, of the police, of the courts, of the media, and of individual white men to harm black people, including black women, time and time again. They are as harmful to us as white men are. So, for many of us, kidnapping the white brother or the white wife is all the same.

     In this video, Rihanna is unconcerned with the well-being of a white person (who is a woman), when her own well-being is at stake. In fact, she’s willing to do harm to her in order to survive. That’s the thing about this video that makes white feminists so very, very uncomfortable.

     I’m not saying it’s okay for black women to harm white women. I’m saying that most of the time, we don’t. I’m saying we are harmed by white women much, much more often and this is a revenge fantasy video that understands that, even if white feminists don’t.

     (Sidenote: if you believe that Rihanna meant everything in the video literally, and nothing metaphorically or allegorically, examine why you believe this black woman isn’t capable of creative and socio-political vision. Did you think every aspect of Madonna’s videos were literal? How about Lady Gaga?)

     I can understand that point.

     And here’s our very own Giliell:
     On Rhianna, White Feminsm and Racism

     As John Fiske notes in Understanding Popular Culture, items of popular culture only become popular if the “contain resources out of which the people can make their own meanings of their social relations and identities”. As a white woman, the video offers me nothing. The discourse on white women is not deconstructed. She still only exists as an extension of the white man, is used to hurt him, and when he apparently doesn’t want her back, she can be discarded. In other words, it’s Monday.

     But it’s also OK, because not everything has to be about me. And even though I want a bigger share of the popular culture cake for white women, I don’t want it at the expense of women of colour. I want a piece of the dudes’ share. Rhianna and other women of colour don’t have to use their platform to do white women’s work. That’s our job. When did we ever lend a hand to women of colour? To the contrary, our feminist history is full of very, very racist individuals and could you please look the other way while we celebrate their other achievements?
     But what about the discourse of black women, on women of colour? Reading my Twitter feed, Rhianna struck a nerve with them. Apparently, whatever there isn’t in the video for me, it’s in there for them. I’m not going to do a thorough analysis of the discourse on black women. Not because I don’t care, but because I’m not qualified. Please read this excellent essay on Media Diversified on the subject. Obviously, Rhianna’s persona isn’t taking shit from white people in the video. They wrong her, she gets them. She doesn’t need a guy to avenge her, she doesn’t ask or beg. I can imagine how this can feel. It’s the feeling you get when your heroine kicks ass. […]

     Quite obviously, there’s more than one discourse going on here. There always is. No cultural text will ever be perfect. Some oppressive discourses are challenged, others are reinforced. And, really, what did you expect from a product of consumerist mass culture? It’s not a medium know for it’s revolutionary tendencies. As I said, in terms of the discourse on white women, it’s Monday. It’s everywhere. Which gets me to the small herd of elephants in the room: the thinly veiled racism of white feminist critics.
     Yes, I’m talking about you, Helen Lewis and friends. Helen Lewis who literally had to drop whatever she was doing to yell at Rhianna for a while. She tells Rhinna that torturing rich white women isn’t very feminist. Because what is and isn’t feminist is decided by White Feminists. Because suddenly there’s this mythical unified entity called “women” again. What you’re doing to one of them, you’re doing to all of them. Provided the one of them is white. As if Judith Butler’s analysis that “gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts and … intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual and regional modalities of discursively constructed identities” never happened. We’re all in this together, right? Except when we aren’t.
     The problem isn’t criticising Rhianna’s video. The problem is that black women are the only ones who are ever being criticised. For things that are a dime a dozen in popular culture. They are held to a different standard than rich white women. Helen Lewis cries about Rhianna not protecting white womanhood. About Rhianna not being perfect. But here’s what Helen Lewis had to say about Lena Dunham not being perfect:

     The point is not that this criticism is unfounded but that, as ever, women are held to a standard that men are not. From some of the commentary, you would think that because Dunham wrote and directed the show, she should have been able to dismantle the entire racist, sexist structure of the US media single-handedly.

     Such a sense of proportion. So many excuses. So much understanding! Funny, when Lena Dunham writes and directs an entire show that erases women of colour, a form of violence many people don’t even realise exists, it’s something that can be excused on accounts of nobody’s perfect. But Rhianna, now Rhianna should be able to do so, right? By the way, that article is about Dunham’s autobiography. Not a word on Dunham’s transgressions towards her younger sister and the further violation of her by publishing those accounts.

     The whole post is worth reading, but I will still pull, once again, the mandatory advice for white people (in this case, white feminists):

     Dear White Feminists, if you would like black women to consider your tender feelings when they’re producing cultural texts, I have some suggestions for you:

     1. Speak up. Do your fucking job and throw some intersectional feminist critique at the next pretty white woman who erases women of colour, who appropriates their work, who uses their bodies as props. Maybe if black feminists saw you doing that once in a while, they would be willing to discuss the intersectional construction of womanhood with you.

     2. Shut up. Quite obviously you don’t know about the discourses on black women. Because if you did you’d probably understand that you’re simply not very qualified to analyse them beyond the most rudimentary levels. It’s OK to leave that critique to people who are qualified. Here’s a hint: they’re not white. Use your clout to give them a platform.

     3. Learn something. I know, those matters are complicated, discourses intersect, they change. But you’re being paid to be cultural critics. It’s your job, ok?

     My boy @stoneythadealer the realest of all time for this!!! #oneflagatatime

     South Carolina Gov. Haley says church shooting will forever change her outlook

     For five years, Gov. Nikki Haley, South Carolina’s first minority governor, dismissed calls to remove the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse lawn as a divisive issue far from her agenda.

     In her 2010 campaign, she said the two-thirds legislative approval required to move the flag from its 30-foot perch was too high a hurdle to allow for real debate. When her re-election opponent called last fall for it to be removed, she branded it a desperate stunt.

     None of that mattered, she said, after nine people were killed last month at a black church in Charleston, including its pastor, State Sen. Clementa Pinckney, in a crime she called “pure hate.” When Haley arrived at the church, she found strangers hugging and weeping, and the grief was overwhelming.

     At the June 19 bond hearing for suspected shooter Dylann Roof, the victims’ families offered him forgiveness. That night, Haley said, she made a decision.

     […]

     Randolph said Haley had little choice. With the world watching, he said, “There was nowhere else to go.”

     She then publicly called on legislators to send the battle flag to a museum in an announcement that brought about mixed reactions.

     “I give her credit for stepping out there and doing what’s right,” said House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford who stood with Haley during the announcement. “I wish it had been done a long time ago.”

     While the flag for many South Carolinians stands for noble traditions of history, heritage and ancestry, she said in her speech, for many others it’s a “deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past.”

     Lewis Gossett, president of the state Manufacturers Alliance, said he began speaking with his board members about pushing to bring the flag down following a memorial to the victims but didn’t notify Haley about it until after her announcement.

     “The governor got out in front. I’m glad she did,” he said. “She helped define the issue in our terms and not somebody else’s.”

     It only took nine dead people.

     NASCAR fans fly Confederate flags at Daytona, defend its usage. Ah, those NASCAR fans, always leaving that awesome impression!

     Rebenstorf and others staunchly defended their Confederate flags at NASCAR’s first race in the South since the racing series and its tracks urged fans to no longer wave the banner. Dozens were scattered throughout the vast infield all weekend leading to Sunday’s race.

     “It kills me that NASCAR is jumping on the bandwagon,” said 55-year-old Paul Stevens of nearby Port Orange. “They should just let it pass, let everything die down. But NASCAR is too quick to try to be politically correct like everybody else.”

     NASCAR took a stance on the Confederate flag after last month’s South Carolina church massacre. It backed Gov. Nikki Haley’s call to remove it from the Statehouse grounds and noted it doesn’t allow the flag on anything it sanctions. The series stopped short of banning fans from displaying the flag at its events, but Daytona and 29 other tracks asked fans to refrain from flying them.

     Not everyone obliged. Daytona also offered to exchange Confederate flags for American flags this weekend, and track officials said a few made the swap Sunday morning.

     “I think the voluntary exchange program for us right now was appropriate with the limited window that we had coming into this event weekend,” track president Joie Chitwood said. “And more importantly, I think it’s important to trust our fans, asking our fans to display a flag that we should all be proud of. Everybody should be proud of the American flag.”

     Indeed, the American flag is prominently displayed all around Daytona — no surprise given the Fourth of July holiday and the patriotism that NASCAR routinely promotes.

     But spotting a Confederate flag is easier than finding a souvenir shop, restroom or beer stand.

     The first motorhome located inside the Turn 4 tunnel has one flying high above it, and it doesn’t take long to reach double figures when counting them on a stroll through the infield. They’re on clothing, coolers and cars, and even tattooed on skin.

     I guess there’s no removing those, but all the rest?

382. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     6 July 2015 at 9:15 pm

     Time to make America’s dream real-for all:

     Equal and independent

     This moral imperative was an animating force behind the Declaration of Independence itself, and the proclamation that “All men are created equal.” In his first draft of the document, Thomas Jefferson was in fact more expansive and specific, writing that all were created “equal and independent.”

     The declaration was a statement of America’s independence from Britain, but also of the independent stature of each and every American. Needless to say, at this time in U.S. history, this meant every white male, and we are still living with the consequences of this deep hypocrisy. But the ideal remains. Recent survey evidence suggests that black, Hispanic and Asian Americans are more fervent believers in the American Dream than their white peers.

     The United States was to be a self-made nation comprised of self-made citizens. Alexis de Tocqueville recounted in his Democracy in America the young nation’s “passion for equality,” while Abraham Lincoln extolled the American “genius for independence.”

     Egalitarian individualism

     This ideology, which I’ve elsewhere dubbed “egalitarian individualism,” is one reason America never cultivated a strong socialist movement. The class hierarchies of the Old World were not part of the American experiment. As Chris Hayes writes in his book, Twilight of the Elites, upwardly mobile Americans “rise from their class, not with it.”

     This individualist ethos frustrates many on the left, but the truth is that there is little sign of it losing its grip on the collective imagination. The real problem is not that America is failing to live up to European egalitarian standards—as set out in recent treatises by Frenchman Thomas Piketty and Englishman Anthony Atkinson—but that we are failing to live up to American egalitarian standards, as judged by equality of opportunity.

     The chances of moving up the income ladder from the bottom are no higher in the United States than in other advanced economies. All the talk about Horatio Alger is just that: talk. And, if anything, the perpetuation of elite status at the top of the ladder is stronger in America than elsewhere. When position on the top and bottom rungs is a strongly inherited condition, the idea of America is in trouble.

     There are of course a huge array of factors standing in the way of greater social mobility: family stability, parenting, contraception, schooling, community norms, skills, post-secondary education, access to jobs, employment security, geographical mobility, zoning and affordable housing wage volatility…the list goes on and on. The lack of social mobility in the United States is a complex, multidimensional, multigenerational problem.

     Race gaps in opportunity

     But one issue bears particular attention, one that intersects with and reinforces many of the others: the distinct mobility patterns of black Americans. There has been an enormous expansion of opportunity for black Americans in the last half century, but given the starting point, it would have been almost impossible for there not to have been. But the remaining gaps look stubborn. The gap in real household income between whites and blacks has barely moved for a couple of decades, and the wealth gap has in fact widened as a result of the recession.

     Surprisingly, most black children born into a middle-income family will fall down the income ladder, while most white children will not. Recent events in cities around the country have shone a light on a deep, and deeply uncomfortable, problem: being born black matters very much more than it ought to for life chances in 2015.

     ****

     Since 2009, the FBI has recorded just one racially motivated church burning:

     In the South between 2009 and 2013, there were a total four cases of arson against places of worship recorded as hate crimes, according to Fusion’s analysis of the FBI’s most recent data. The database is compiled by the agency through reports filed by local law enforcement. None was deemed to have come from an anti-black motivation.

     Three of the South’s reported hate crimes took place in North Carolina, and one took place in South Carolina. Three were recorded as crimes against minor religious groups, and one was driven by an “anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender” bias, according to the FBI’s data.

     Across the country during that period, only one arson at a place of worship—against a church in Bakersfield, California, in 2013—was deemed to be burned out of an anti-black bias. In that case, a historically black congregation was the victim of two fires and racist graffiti.

     Data shows that Southern California and New York were the capitals of arson aimed at places of worship between 2009 and 2013. California had 19 cases of arson aimed at a place of worship. New York had eight cases, all of which took place in New York City.

     […]

     There were 14 arson attacks with anti-Jewish or anti-Protestant biases between 2009 and 2013—seven each. Most of the anti-Semitic attacks took place in New York and New Jersey, while the anti-Protestant crimes happened across the map, from Utah to Oregon and Maryland.

     Little is known of the offenders who commit hate crime arsons, as police and witnesses were unable to identify the race of 70 percent of the perpetrators by the time the crimes were reported.

     Of those that are known, almost every perpetrator during that period was white. There were only two case in which whites alone were not responsible for the crime: an Asian man who set fire to a building in New York, and a “Group of Multiple Races” that set fire to a building in North Carolina.

     ****

     Ruben Navarrette: The Donald vs. television, and why he’s losing

     Maybe Univision is a proxy for our neighbor to the south. His comments about Mexico were full of hate and hostility. Maybe he’s channeling some of that vitriol toward the behemoth television network that many Mexicans watch.

     Or maybe this is about settling an old score. According to media reports, there is a legal dispute between Trump and two Mexican businessmen who the billionaire claims owe him as much as $12 million for agreeing to host the 2007 Miss Universe Pageant and then backing out of the deal. Is Trump now transferring his anger and frustration over a business deal that went sour to the entire country of Mexico? There is no way of knowing.

     In any case, the slugfest between Trump and Univision is surreal. After all, let’s remember, this whole thing started because Trump sees Mexican migrants as inferior — a view that, judging from its own regular programming, the nation’s largest Spanish-speaking television network seems to tolerate and perpetuate.

     Have you ever seen one of those popular Mexican soap operas that make Univision so much money? Or taken a good look at the anchors and reporters who deliver the news on the network? Generally speaking, you won’t find a more light-skinned and fair-haired bunch. These are hardly the sort of folks who get doors slammed in their faces in Mexico and can’t wait to migrate to the United States. These are the kind of people who are content to stay in Mexico. The network stars might give lip service to supporting migrants, but I don’t see how they could possibly relate to them.

     It’s both ironic and sad that a network that made billions broadcasting throughout Latin America looks nothing like most of Latin America. Now Univision, in its war with Trump, emerges as the de-facto savior for Mexican immigrants. How did that happen?

     Unlike Trump’s relationship with NBC, his telenovela with Univision is not likely to end soon. So both parties have plenty of time to get out and meet more Mexicans, confront their biases and broaden their world views.

383. rq says

     7 July 2015 at 1:56 am

     NOW: Confederate flag protest at Walmart near 19th Ave & Dunlap

     Just for fun, Mickey Guyton, A Black Woman, May Be the New Face of Country Music.

     Yet, new country star Mickey Guyton is joining the long (even if overlooked) list of African-American country music acts, including famed names like Ray Charles, Charley Pride, and Linda Martell.

     Police Union Fights To Keep The Names Of Officers Who Shoot Civilians Secret. Those police unions, really looking out for their own!

     “This unilateral change is contrary to decades of past practice between the parties whereby the privacy rights of officers were valued and protected,” says the complaint, filed by Stephen J. Holroyd, a lawyer for the Fraternal Order of Police, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. “The city unilaterally implemented these changes in working conditions without first bargaining with the FOP or, indeed, even requesting bargaining with the FOP,” the complaint read.

     Ramsey didn’t shirk from such legal action, releasing the names of two officers involved in a May shooting incident on Friday – his first time doing so since announcing the rollout of the policy changes. Those officers — Michael Minor and Robert Hoppe – shot and wounded a man after he allegedly hit an officer’s car and fled the scene. Ramsey took similar action in December when he announced the name of an officer who shot a 25-year-old man during a traffic stop, after ensuring that no threats existed to his family.

     The new 72-hour disclosure policy counted among more than 90 recommendations outlined by the Justice Department in a March report on police-community relations. Other suggestions included the change of use-of-force policies and training for officers that touts de-escalation techniques. The Justice Department also recommended the creation of a special investigative unit for officer-involved shootings. In its report, Justice Department officials said the city’s investigations into officer-related shootings “lacked consistency, focus, and timeliness.”

     While Ramsey said the union has the right to file the complaint, he told reporters that “we’re within our rights to take the steps we took, have taken, and are going to take.”

     5 Contemporary Black Ballerinas Who Are Breaking Barriers. See them dance!

     Like many girls, I wanted to be a ballerina when I was young. I imagined my head adorned with a glistening tiara as I danced and pranced around in a pretty, frilly tutu. My dancing dreams were cut short when my mama yanked me out of my ballet classes after only one year, because of the unrelenting sea of whiteness and its implications on a little black girl in the South. I was the only brown face, the only Black girl, in my class. That was back in the 1980s.

     Sadly, the same idea still persists today in the world of professional ballet. It has long been known that ballet has a serious diversity problem—both in terms of letting Black women be center stage and promoting more than one ideal body type. But there are some Black women who have dared to thrive, often being the only one in the spaces they occupy within their dance companies. This, despite the lack of support and encouragement, and despite the difficulties of what it is to be a Black ballerina.

     Here are some of these beautiful, graceful, strong Black women who have achieved their dancing dreams and deserve to be celebrated.

     Because black people want to be astronauts, too: From Touchdowns To Takeoff: Engineer-Athlete Soared To Space

     You may recognize retired astronaut Leland Melvin from his famous 2009 NASA portrait with his two dogs, Jake and Scout. Or maybe you’ve seen him on the Lifetime channel hosting Child Genius.

     But his first claim to fame wasn’t in space or on screen — it was on the field. Melvin, who is part athlete and part engineer, was drafted in the NFL in 1986.

     He was signed to the Dallas Cowboys the same year he enrolled at the University of Virginia, studying materials science and engineering.

     “They videotaped the courses and mailed them to me in Dallas,” Melvin says. “So by day, I’m catching balls for America’s team and at night, I’m watching materials science and engineering courses in a master’s program.”

     But when Melvin suffered a severe hamstring injury during practice, his NFL career was over.

     So he fell back to a career in science. He says he heard that NASA was looking for astronauts. With his athletic background and engineering experience, he thought he might be perfect for the job.

     “So I applied the next selection and I got in,” Melvin says. “It was pretty incredible.”

     […]

     Melvin’s first mission was in February of 2008 aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis.

     “We’re looking at each other, we’re pointing to the books and things and we’re pointing to the computers and we have these huge smiles on our faces,” he says. “Just like, ‘Yeah, we’re about to go to space!’ ”

     The countdown began.

     “The three main engines light, that’s when the solid rocket boosters ignite,” Melvin says. “It was this incredible surge of force and sound and your head is starting to shake.”

     The shuttle roared into the sky.

     “I had a mirror on my wrist and I could look out the overhead window and see where the plume connected back to the ground. About three miles from where that plume was, was where my family was sitting,” he says. “And it made this connection with me that they were with us.”

     Just 8 1/2 minutes later, the crew aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis made it into space.

     “We’re floating and the things that you dropped are now floating around you,” Melvin says. “Seeing this blue marble below us with no borders as we go around the planet every 90 minutes at 17,500 miles per hour.”

     “Looking at places where there’s unrest and war and we’re working together as one team to help advance our civilization — that’s just an incredible, incredible moment for me.”

     From Australia, but applicable elsewhere. Say no to racism: How to intervene when witnessing a racial attack

     Bystander intervention training is emerging as a way to equip people with strategies to challenge apparent racism when they come across it on public transport, in the workplace or among family and friends.

     Councils in three distinctly multicultural areas of Melbourne are offering the training.

     “We want to encourage people to try and engage the person as another good human being and appeal to their better instincts,” said Ananth Gopal from the training organisation Polykala.

     “Try not to approach people as the enemy, but find some point of connection.”

     Bystanders are encouraged to ask questions to cool the conversation, or rally other witnesses to demonstrate that racist behaviour is not broadly accepted.

     The sessions are being offered in the the cities of Darebin, Moreland and Wynham.

     Emily Paddon-Brown is one participant who has witnessed ugly behaviour on trains and hopes bystander training will empower her to act.

     “I certainly do feel as a female alone that there is only so much I can do to help, because I need to assess my own safety as well,” she said.

     […]

     “Silence can send the message that bigotry and prejudice are acceptable in our public life,” said Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane.

     “By speaking out against racism you are making a major difference to changing attitudes and challenging behaviours. It doesn’t have to be a big intervention.”

     The Mayor of Moreland, Meghan Hopper, agreed that bystander intervention training will help get the message out that racism is not acceptable.

     “Over a third or our community was born overseas. And 40 per cent of our community speaks a language other than English at home,” she said.

     “So it is really important that we address some of the problems that might arise.”

     What action could I take?

     – Comfort the person targeted
     – Confront or disagree with the perpetrator
     – Seek the help of other bystanders
     – Express upset feelings
     – Interrupt or distract the perpetrator
     – Use humour
     – Report the incident to police and give a witness statement
     – Gather evidence – film or take photos of the incident

384. rq says

     7 July 2015 at 2:20 am

     Serena Williams rolls past sister Venus at Wimbledon, in case anyone is following tennis.

     Confederate controversy heads north to Yale and John C. Calhoun

     Debate is still raging over the propriety of flying the Confederate battle flag after last month’s shooting at a black church by an alleged white supremacist in Charleston, S.C. And as that debate continues, other Southern figures are being drawn in — even ones who didn’t survive to see the South secede.

     The latest target: John C. Calhoun, U.S. senator from South Carolina and vice president under Presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Calhoun’s name adorns a residential college at Yale University. And though the Confederacy didn’t exactly capture the imagination of New Haven, Conn., — and Calhoun, who died in 1850, didn’t serve among the men in gray — some want his name off.

     “Like the official display of the Confederate flag in South Carolina, Calhoun College represents an indifference to centuries of pain and suffering among the black population,” a petition circulating online for Yale students and alumni reads. “It conveys disrespect toward black perspectives, and serves a barrier toward racial inclusiveness. Calhoun College will always preclude minority students from feeling truly at home at Yale.”

     Do not doubt: Calhoun was indeed a racist.

     “A mysterious providence had brought the black and the white people together from different parts of the globe, and no human power could now separate them,” he said in a speech against deporting slaves to colonies in 1837. “The Whites are an European race being masters, and the blacks are the inferior race and slaves. He believed that they could exist among us peaceably enough, if undisturbed, for all time.”

     But is extending the “de-Confederatization” of the United States to those who lived and died before the Civil War necessary? Some think so.

     “John C. Calhoun, for whom the college is named, was respected during his time as an extraordinary American statesman,” the petition read. “But he was also one of the most prolific defenders of slavery and white supremacy in American history. At a time when many of his southern colleagues viewed slavery as a necessary evil, Calhoun infamously defended the institution as ‘a positive good.’ His legacy is built on his vociferous defense of a state’s right to enslave blacks.”

     More than 1,200 people had signed the petition by early Monday. For its part, Yale welcomed the debate.

     More at the link.

     Do they know what “indigenous” means!?! RT @KwameRose: Probably the most ridiculous picture of 2015 so far. “Equal Rights for Indigenous Whites”. Sure, it rhymes…

     Man Talks Of Flying Confederate Flag At Albert Lea Parade

     Brian Nielsen is a volunteer firefighter in the town of Hartland. He said he was demonstrating against political correctness when he flew the flag at Friday’s parade in Albert Lea. But as Nina Moini reports, he got a stronger reaction than he ever expected.

     He’s used to putting out fires, not starting them.

     “I take full responsibility for what I did,” Nielsen said.

     Volunteer firefighter Brian Nielsen says he didn’t mean to offend anyone when he attached a Confederate flag onto a city of Hartland fire truck during this past Friday’s parade in nearby Albert Lea.

     “Probably shouldn’t have done it with our fire truck,” Nielsen said.

     He says he doesn’t even own a Confederate flag. He borrowed it from a friend because he feels politicians have gone too far to please some voters.

     “Where are they going to stop? We’ve got to change everything, we’ve got to change history,” Nielsen said.

     S.C. Lawmakers to Debate Stars & Bars – and as this is a somewhat aged article, S.C. has voted to take the flag down.

     South Carolina lawmakers will debate Monday whether to remove the Confederate flag from the state’s capitol grounds, after a deadly shooting at a historically black church in Charleston put the symbol of division in the spotlight. “You always want to think that today is better than yesterday—that we’re growing as a state, we’re growing as a country,” Gov. Nikki Haley told NBC’s Today show. “When something like this happens, you reflect, and you say: Have we changed enough?” The proposal to remove the flag appears to have enough votes to pass, but pro-Confederate robocalls reportedly targeted lawmakers over the weekend, and condemned the attack on “our values.”

     AMAZING – man apologizes for unabashedly displaying the confederate flag in the past. It’s really tiny type. :( But it’s a good story.

385. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     7 July 2015 at 2:45 am

     H/TFeminist Batwoman for this-
     Nubian Skin is, in their words:

     A nude bra and skin tone hosiery are the basics of every woman’s wardrobe, at least in theory. For many women of colour, finding suitable skin-tone hosiery and lingerie has not been an option. Frustrated by the lack of skin-tone choices to go with her ever-expanding wardrobe, Nubian Skin founder, Ade Hassan, decided it was time for ‘a different kind of nude’.

     Inspired by trail blazing women, Eunice W. Johnson and super model Iman, who created Fashion Fair and Iman cosmetics, Ade took the leap and created Nubian Skin. It’s been an uphill battle, but every revolution starts somewhere.

     Nubian Skin launched with a carefully edited collection of lingerie and hosiery to provide the essential underwear needs of women of colour. Headquartered in London, Nubian Skin delivers worldwide and looks forward to growing the company’s offering and expanding its reach.

     So for all you beautiful women, next time you need a nude pair of hold-ups or maybe a nude strapless bra to go under that stunning white halter dress, Nubian Skin is only a few clicks away.

     Empowering Women. Embracing our Colour.

386. rq says

     7 July 2015 at 3:03 am

     What Abigail Fisher’s affirmative action case is really about, because it’s not about racism against white people.
     Only going to cite this bit:

     In the Fisher case, while the young woman may have lent her name to the lawsuit, the case before the Court has very little to do with her. Her name appears just five times in the thousands of words that make up the body of the complaint. She has already gone on to graduate from Louisiana State University, her second choice, and is working in finance at a firm in Austin.

     Asked by a news reporter what harm she had suffered, she cited only her inability to tap into UT’s alumni network and possibly missing out on a better first job. If she wins, Fisher seeks only the return of her application fee and housing deposit — a grand total of $100 in damages.

     So while the Fisher case has been billed as a referendum on affirmative action, its backers have significantly grander ambitions: They seek to make the case a referendum on the 14th Amendment itself. At issue is whether the Constitution’s equal protection clause, drafted by Congress during Reconstruction to ensure the rights of black Americans, also prohibits the use of race to help them overcome the nation’s legacy of racism.

     The Supreme Court has never ruled that the Constitution bars any and all laws and government programs that consider race. But Blum and his supporters, seeing an opening with the current Court, seek to overturn more than a century of precedent.

     The true crux of the suit is not Fisher’s failed application, but that government officials violate the constitutional rights of white Americans when they consider race in a way that might help African-Americans and Latinos.

     “An argument can be made that it is simply impossible to tease out down to the last student who would have been admitted, and who would have not been admitted, had they been a different skin color,” Blum said. “What we know is skin color is weighed and ethnicity is weighed by the University of Texas in their admissions process, and that alone is enough to strike down the plan.”

     Blum and his supporters say the reasoning is simple. The Constitution is colorblind and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment prohibits the government from treating people differently because of race.

     It’s an argument first successfully championed by the NAACP and other civil rights groups, most notably in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the Supreme Court declared the notion of “separate but equal” to be a fallacy.

     “In its history, colorblindness has this progressive, anti-racist push behind it,” said Ian Haney-López, a constitutional scholar at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

     But following the Brown decision, the very groups that had ardently — and violently — defended laws mandating separation by race used the notion of a colorblind Constitution to challenge court orders to integrate schools.

     “They began to say, yes, the Constitution is colorblind, and so the state cannot distinguish between races when it tried to remedy segregation,” he said.

     Whitewash: New Texas history books will downplay slavery, omit KKK and Jim Crow

     Social studies books for Texas public schools will minimize the importance of slavery in the Civil War and omit any mention of both Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan, the Washington Post reported.

     Lessons covering the Civil War will list the reasons behind the conflict as being, “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery,” in that order.
     ADVERTISEMENT

     As Business Insider noted, the new textbooks come five years after the state board of education revised the curriculum. Republican board member Pat Hardy stated at the time that he considered slavery “a side issue” in the war.

     The books are set to be issued to the state’s 5 million public school students not long after the renewed debate regarding the Confederate flag, spurred by Dylann Roof’s terrorist attack inside a South Carolina church last month that killed nine people, including state Sen. Clementa Pinckney.

     “It’s the obvious question, it seems to me,” Texas Freedom Network spokesperson Dan Quinn told the Post. “Not only are we worried about the flags and statues and all that, but what the hell are kids learning?”

     Neither Hardy nor board chair Donna Bahorich has commented on the new curriculum. Publisher McGraw-Hill addressed concerns over whether the materials downplaying slavery would be distributed outside Texas in a short statement, saying, “Content that is tailored to the educational standards of states.”

     Currently, students in Texas schools are required to read Jefferson Davis’ inauguration speech when he became president of the Confederate States of America. But according to the Post, they are not required to read a speech by Davis’ vice president, Alexander Stephens’ “Cornerstone speech” of 1861, so named because he called slavery the “cornerstone” of the Confederate government, while stating, “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.”

     Former FDNY Employee Who Posted Several Bigoted Tweets Gets His Job Back

     According to the New York Daily News, Joseph Cassano, 26, was still on FDNY probation in 2013 after several derogatory statements were found on his personal Twitter account. Cassano was only out of the Emergency Medical Services Academy for some five months when the tweets were discovered. He resigned shortly afterward.

     On Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Cassano tweeted, “MLK could go kick rocks for all I care, but thanks for the time and a half today.” Another post read, “Getting sick of picking up all these Obama lovers and taking them to the hospital because their Medicare pays for an ambulance and not a cab.”

     Another post stated: “I like Jews about as much as hitler #toofar? NOPE.”

     Cassano told the Daily News that his tweets were “very ignorant and very immature.”

     “I am very grateful to get an opportunity like this,” Cassano said of his rehiring. “I’ve apologized for those comments and I am still apologizing for them today.”

     Not everyone is convinced that Cassano has been reformed.

     John Coombs, the former president of the Vulcan Society of black FDNY firefighters, told the Daily News in April, when news first broke that Cassano might be reinstated, “He doesn’t care about a large segment of New Yorkers.”

     And so he goes back to work.

     The Race Factor in the Charleston Killings You Haven’t Heard – I admit, I was baited!

     If racial tables were turned and 21-year old Dylann Roof had been, say, 16-year-old Kalief Browder of New York City, nine people might be alive today.

     The case of domestic terror at a Charleston, S.C., church almost three weeks ago is something of a cautionary tale on what happens when society fails to keep its white privilege in check. A look at Roof’s prior interaction with the criminal-justice system is typical of the more favorable treatment afforded white criminals simply because of their skin color, and this time a terrorist was put back on the street.

     Just four months before the slaughter of nine parishioners engaged in Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Roof had already spent two days in jail on a drug-possession charge before his release on $5,000 bond.

     Columbia, S.C., police arrested the creepy bowl-haircut teen with a pocket full of painkillers after he was stalking local mall employees and asking “unusual” questions. He was ordered to stay away from the mall and banned from the premises.

     Had all cases truly been equal, there’s a chance that Roof would still be in jail—considering that only a month after his arrest he returned to the same spot. Yet quiet as the Columbia Police Department’s action is kept in this episode, it appears that Roof didn’t see the inside of a jail cell for the violation (although he did get a trespassing charge). Probably because, well, Roof didn’t look suspicious, like, say, Browder or Tamir Rice or Eric Garner or any number of other black men or boys who ended up either arrested, shot or choked on the spot for much, much less. Move on, nothing to see here.

     Instead, Roof’s next few months were spent mapping out one gruesome act of terrorism while awaiting the court’s next move on a felony drug-possession charge. Imagine that.

     Clearly, there are numerous unanswered questions for the local Columbia cops, prosecutor and judge who oversaw Roof’s felony case. But what’s clear is that Roof was afforded a level of heightened leniency that’s not all that surprising. As studies commissioned by the Pretrial Justice Institute show, had Roof been black, his $5,000 bond would have been, on average, 35 percent higher. Black defendants are also twice as likely to be detained while awaiting trial for a nonviolent drug arrest, since the pretrial system in most states relies heavily on cash for bail. According to the Pretrial Justice Institute, “Those held pretrial [because they couldn’t afford bond] receive harsher punishments than those able to purchase pretrial freedom.”

     So it’s very bet-your-bottom-dollar likely that had Roof been black, not only would he have been detained in the pretrial phase awaiting his fate, but he’d also be sitting up in a musty South Carolina prison convicted and sentenced.

     Police say New Mexico forfeiture reform leaves them short-changed. Remember forfeiture? Where cops can basically take anything from you and add it to their own budget? Now they’re crying about it. I guess they can’t afford military equipment anymore (not that they ever paid for it, anyway).

     Civil rights activists hailed New Mexico’s ban on civil asset forfeiture, the notorious practice of police seizing property from suspects not convicted of any crime. Some cops worry the reform will hurt the war on drugs – and their bottom line.

     The new law took effect on July 1. Known as HB 560, it prohibits police from seizing a suspect’s property without proof that a crime was committed. If and when they do seize property legitimately, the cops won’t be able to keep the profits: all proceeds from auctioning off the forfeited goods now have to go to the state government in Santa Fe.

     Agents of the Region II Narcotics Task Force, a multi-agency team operating out of the city of Farmington, are worried the reform will cut into their operating expenses. Approximately a quarter of their $100,000 annual budget was funded through sales of seized property, Task Force director, Sgt. Kyle Dowdy, told the Farmington Daily Times.
     […]

     No police chiefs were asked about the impact of the law, or gave testimony to the legislature, said Farmington Police Chief Steve Hebbe. Furthermore, the law requires local law enforcement to shoulder the expense of storing the seized items and shipping them to Santa Fe.

     “I don’t think that they anticipated how much it’s going to hit local law enforcement, and we’re still trying to figure out how bad it’s going to hit us,” Hebbe said. As a result, he added, “We’re going to try not to seize.”

     The law’s supporters say that’s working as intended.

     “Should people’s property be seized and potentially even sold without there being a trial and proof of guilt?” asked Rod Montoya, Farmington’s representative in the state legislature, adding that the answer was “no.” When the HB 560 was up for consideration earlier this year, no one voted against it. Governor Susana Martinez, a former prosecutor, signed it into law on April 10.

     Forfeiture reform also went into effect in Montana, requiring the police to first obtain a criminal conviction before taking and keeping someone’s property. Federal and state forfeiture laws across the US typically require the individual to prove his or her innocence in order to get the property back. Montana’s reform shifted that burden of proof to the state.

     Minnesota and North Carolina are the only other states that require a criminal conviction before property can be seized.

     South Carolina bill to remove Confederate flag advances. Like I said, news this morning was that they voted yes.

     It was put forward after the flag was linked to a gunman who killed nine people at a Charleston church in June.

     The bill must now pass by a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives before being sent to the governor for approval.

     The flag is seen by some as an icon of slavery and racism while others say it symbolises US heritage and history.

     The flag was originally the battle flag of the southern states in the American Civil War when they tried to break away to prevent the abolition of slavery.

     The debate over its use was reignited after Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old charged with killing nine black people on 17 June, was pictured flying the flag.

     Of course the article gives a confederate supporter equal voice, as it’s ‘all about the southern heritage’ with nary a word on what that heritage actually is…

387. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     7 July 2015 at 3:32 am

     Holy fuck!
     Texas officials: Schools should teach that slavery was a ‘side issue’ of the Civil War

     Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.

     And when it comes to the Civil War, children are supposed to learn that the conflict was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery” — written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict, according to some members of the state board of education.

     Slavery was a “side issue to the Civil War,” said Pat Hardy, a Republican board member, when the board adopted the standards in 2010. “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”

     The killings of nine black parishioners in a South Carolina church last month sparked a broad backlash against the Confederate battle flag , to some a symbol of Southern heritage but to others a divisive sign of slavery and racism.

     There is also a call to reexamine a quieter but just as contentious aspect of the Civil War in American society — how the history of the war, so central to our nation’s understanding of itself, is presented in public school classrooms and textbooks.

     “It’s the obvious question, it seems to me. Not only are we worried about the flags and statues and all that, but what the hell are kids learning?” said Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, a left-leaning advocacy organization that has been critical of the state’s academic standards in social studies.

     If teaching history is how society shows younger generations who they are and where they came from, the Civil War presents unique challenges, especially because of the fundamental differences in the way the cause of the war is perceived 150 years after its last battle.

     Nowhere is the rejection of slavery’s central role more apparent than in Texas, where elected members of the state board of education revised state social studies standards in 2010 to correct for what they said was a liberal slant.

     Students in Texas are required to read the speech Jefferson Davis gave when he was inaugurated president of the Confederate States of America, an address that does not mention slavery. But students are not required to read a famous speech by Alexander Stephens, Davis’s vice president, in which he explained that the South’s desire to preserve slavery was the cornerstone of its new government and “the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”

     Rod Paige, a Republican who served as education secretary under President George W. Bush, was among those who criticized the Texas board for minimizing difficult parts of the nation’s past.

     “I’m of the view that the history of slavery and civil rights are dominant elements of our history and have shaped who we are today,” Paige told the board at the time, according to the Texas Tribune . “We may not like our history, but it’s history.”

388. rq says

     7 July 2015 at 5:36 am

     Race and education: The Racial Imbalances of Special Education

     Is special education racist? That was the question posed in a recent New York Times op-ed by two researchers who claimed their study overturned 40 years of thought on the topic. Conventional wisdom has always held that, for decades, African American children have been overrepresented in special education. Some claim this has been in part due to a racially biased educational system that relegates kids of color to classes where less is expected of them.

     But Paul Morgan and George Farkas’s report argues that there aren’t too many minority children in special education. In fact, there might not be enough, according to their findings.

     The report has triggered responses from professors and other academics across the country. Even civil-rights lawyers and the federal government have grumbled about the report’s claims.

     “It borders on ridiculous, really,” says Russ Skiba, the director of The Equity Project at Indiana University.

     “They egregiously overstate their findings,” wrote Daniel Losen, the director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

     […]

     What upset everyone was this: Six million disabled children in the U.S. receive special education. However, African American children do so at a much higher rate—1.4 times that of white children. So in a school where, say, 15 percent of students are black, they may make up 20 percent of special-education students. Many educators and experts see a problem with that imbalance.

     For almost half a century, researchers have attributed this overrepresentation to conscious or unconscious biases that define minor behavioral problems, different speech patterns, or slower learning performance as disabilities. As a result, the federal government flags and corrects states and school districts with abnormally high rates of black or Latino students in special education.

     And that practice is what the new study says is incorrect.

     “If well-intentioned but misguided advocates succeed in arbitrarily limiting placement in special education based on racial demographics,” Morgan and Farkas wrote in their op-ed, “even more black children with disabilities will miss out on beneficial services.”

     Their study looked at more than 21,000 students across the nation from when they started kindergarten in 1998 through eighth grade. This sample allowed the researchers to look at family poverty, race, language, and low birth weight so they could control for those factors. They looked at categories of disability including emotional disturbance, intellectual disability, and speech impairment.

     The results found that minority children, when compared with their white peers, were less likely to be identified as having a disability—which, the report claims, means there are more who belong in special-education classes. Morgan, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, told National Journal that while the finding was surprising, other fields like pediatrics help explain why this might be.

     “We know that minorities are much more likely to be exposed to health risk at a young age,” Morgan says. “Low birth weight or being exposed to lead can have consequences on your cognitive growth. Poverty itself can have an impact.”

     That, Morgan says, may be why the percentage of minority children who should be in special education is larger than the percentage of minority children in the school population as a whole. More of them live in poverty, which causes health problems in childhood. In the op-ed, Morgan and Farkas pointed out that 35 percent of black children in inner cities have elevated levels of lead in their blood, compared with just 4 percent of white children. And African American children are about twice as likely to be born prematurely. Another thing that may prevent black and Latino kids from being identified as disabled is that fewer have health insurance or regularly visit doctors.

     The problem with these new conclusions, critics say, is the data they began with.

     […]

     Perhaps the reason this is so sensitive for some is that the high concentration of black and Latino students in special-education classes echoes a narrative that they are less educationally capable. Howard University’ Toldson wrote in an email, “Is special education racist? Special education is a system that too often offers a substandard curriculum to students who need the most academic enrichment … Decades of research, [which] includes the entire public-school population, has demonstrated that special education has been used to segregate unwanted students.”

     All too often, Toldson writes, those unwanted students are Latino and black.

     More data and analysis at the link.

     Judge Rules LAPD Chief Must Answer Questions About Ezell Ford Shooting

     The Los Angeles police chief will have to answer questions about the fatal officer-involved shooting of an unarmed black man last year.

     Monday’s ruling comes from a federal judge presiding over a lawsuit by the parents of Ezell Ford, 25, against the Los Angeles Police Department and the officers involved in his fatal shooting.

     Magistrate Judge Margaret Nagle ruled that police Chief Charlie Beck will have to answer questions from attorney Federico Sayre, who represented Ford’s parents in a deposition.

     Nagle cited contradictory findings by Beck and the Los Angeles Police Commission.

     Speaking to reporters, Sayre said it’s critical for Beck to weigh in on the incident in order to resolve lingering questions.

     “The chief is the person who promulgates … policy. He’s the one who knows what the policies are for training,” he said.

     Last month, the commission found that officers had no reason to stop and question Ford, and that violation of department policy led to an altercation that ended with Ford’s death.

     Beck has said the officers in the shooting acted appropriately.

     A date for the deposition was not immediately announced.

     SC Senate votes to remove flag from Statehouse grounds

     The South Carolina Senate voted Monday to pull the Confederate flag off the Capitol grounds, clearing the way for a historic measure that could remove the banner more than five decades after it was first flown above the Statehouse to protest integration.

     A second vote will be needed Tuesday to send the proposal to the House, where it faces a less certain future. But Monday’s 37-3 vote was well over the two-thirds majority needed to advance the bill.

     If the House passes the same measure, the flag and flagpole could be removed as soon as Gov. Nikki Haley signs the papers. The flag would be lowered for the last time and shipped off to the state’s Confederate Relic Room, near where the last Confederate flag to fly over the Statehouse dome is stored.

     The vote came at the end of a day of debate in which several white senators said they had come to understand why their black colleagues felt the flag no longer represented the valor of Southern soldiers but the racism that led the South to separate from the United States more than 150 years ago.

     As the senators spoke, the desk of their slain colleague, Clementa Pinckney, was still draped in black cloth. Pinckney and eight other black people were fatally shot June 17 during Bible study at a historic African-American church in Charleston. Authorities have charged a gunman who posed for pictures with the rebel banner. Police say he was driven by racial hatred.

     Several senators said the grace shown by the families of the victims willing to forgive the gunman also changed their minds.

     “We now have the opportunity, the obligation, to put the exclamation point on an extraordinary narrative of good and evil, of love and mercy that will take its place in the history books,” said Sen. Tom Davis, a Republican.

     After the vote, Sen. Vincent Sheheen, a Democrat whose suggestion that the flag be taken down while running for governor last year was called a “stunt” by Haley, was given a high-five from a fellow legislator.

     “I thought it would happen, but never this fast,” Sheheen said.

     Republican Sen. Larry Martin, who for decades fought off attempts to remove the flag from Statehouse grounds, said the church shooting drew him to the same conclusion that his black colleague arrived at long ago — that the rebel flag “has more to do with what was going on in the 1960s as opposed to the 1860s.”

     Well done, SC senate. Well done.

     An experience with police: Police add insult to injury after mugging

     Aside from WWIII or nuclear attack, there is no excuse for an urban police station to be closed for 12 hours a day. I felt violated and disrespected, and I’m a young white male who had his bike taken from him. I can’t imagine walking up to that door as a black female rape victim, or a recent immigrant, or a domestic abuse survivor and having Bazooka Joe rudely inform me that he wasn’t really interested in taking visitors at this time.

     Either open your doors or open those job opportunities for officers capable of respecting the citizens of Baltimore and recovering the dignity of an institution that has proven itself to be nothing more than a joke.

     And the joke is on us.

     NASCAR Fans Ignore Request To Leave Confederate Flags At Home. Because NASCAR fans are that awesome.

     Confederate flags flew in full force at NASCAR’s Coke Zero 400 race last weekend despite event officials asking fans to keep the controversial banner away from the event.

     While several major retailers stopped carrying the flag after a white gunman apparently obsessed with the racist symbol allegedly slaughtered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, earlier on June 17, Florida’s Daytona International Speedway and 29 other NACAR racetracks stopped short of an outright ban and asked fans to voluntarily keep them away from future events.

     […]

     It’s just our heritage and our Southern way of life. And it makes us happy when we’re able to show something that represents us,” attendee Jason Clark told First Coast News, adding that he’s flown the Confederate flag at the Daytona race for 25 years. “People with the Confederate flag are not just going to give it away.”

     Going forward, NASCAR might be less flexible. Daytona speedway president Joie Chitwood hinted to ESPN that he may consider imposing a ban.

     “[Banning it] is definitely an option that we have to look at, but also understanding the nature of our event, and when you have people that actually have purchased tickets, they’re attending and in terms of policies that are in place when they purchase their tickets — all those elements come into play,” he said. “We want to do what’s right. But we have to be thoughtful and have a good plan to get there where it’s appropriate for everyone.”

     Eric Holder says he wouldn’t serve on the Supreme Court

     Former Attorney General Eric Holder has returned to his old stomping grounds at Covington & Burling after more than six years with President Barack Obama’s administration.

     Holder told the National Law Journal, in an interview published Monday, that this is the “last stop” of his career. He also ruled out the possibility of being nominated to the Supreme Court, saying that if Hillary Clinton were elected president and offered him a spot, he would politely decline.

     “I’d say, ‘Madame President, with all due respect, you need to pick somebody who’s a) younger and b) who’s a lot more interested,’ ” Holder said.

389. rq says

     7 July 2015 at 5:42 am

     The Troubling Link Between Ferguson and Charleston

     Since August 2014, when an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown was shot dead by Police Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, MO, the use of force by police—particularly against minorities—has become the focus of national attention. Similar incidents in places ranging from Cleveland, Ohio to New York City—and last month’s church shootings in Charleston SC—have reinforced a national movement, #blacklivesmatter, as well as a spurred a debate that has drawn in every sector of American life.

     But Ferguson continues to serve as the watchword for an ongoing national examination of policing strategies as well as the lingering racism in American society. A Department of Justice (DOJ) review confirmed a grand jury’s conclusion that Officer Wilson was not culpable in the killing, but a subsequent analysis released month reportedly found fault with police actions to control protests in Ferguson following the incident, suggesting citizens’ rights to free assembly were violated.

     This month, the review of the incident by the DOJ Civil Rights Division of the Ferguson shootings was published as a book by the New Press, a not-for-profit publishing company, along with a searing introduction by famed civil rights attorney Theodore M. Shaw. The former president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who has worked for decades to bring about police reform, spoke with The Crime Report’s Managing Editor, Cara Tabachnick, about what is important in the Ferguson report, the role of young people in bringing the issue to national attention, and why America is still a long way from achieving a “post-racial” society.

     Interview at the link.

     Judge halts legal effort to oust St. Louis County prosecutor McCulloch from office.

     Judge Joseph Walsh on Thursday dismissed what’s known as a quo warranto action filed by four North County activists. The group was asking Walsh to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the way McCulloch handled the Darren Wilson grand jury. That prosecutor could have officially challenged McCulloch’s right to hold office if misconduct was discovered.

     An attorney for the activists, Jerryl Christmas, said he was not surprised by Walsh’s ruling.

     “I don’t think he understood the issue,” Christmas said. “He was always one step ahead, asking if quo warranto was needed. We just wanted him to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate.”

     Christmas said he will appeal the ruling, and expects to be successful.

     “[Walsh] is just so pro-McCulloch, he couldn’t even look at it in a non-biased fashion,” Christmas said.

     A spokesman for McCulloch did not immediately return a request for comment.

     I hope they win the appeal.

     Architect Finally Gives Us What We Want: A Beyoncé-Inspired Skyscraper. Because the one thing about Beyonce that they could think of commemorating was… her curves.

     The SC Senate has tabled an amendment by pro-Confederate flag Republican Lee Bright calling for a statewide referendum on the flag. That’s not going to happen anymore, but… a referendum? That would have been… interesting.

     Presidential candidates continue to stun. Rand Paul Philosophizes On Tax Rates: “If We Tax You At 50%, You Are Half Slave, Half Free”

     Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul, speaking last week in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said he believes a 50% tax rate leaves individuals “half-slave, half-free.”

     “Now you can have some government, we all need government,” the Kentucky senator said while discussing Thomas Paine and the role of government at the local public library. “Thomas Paine said that government is a necessary evil. What did he mean by that?”

     Paul said he believes that “you have to give up some of your liberty to have government,” saying he was “for some government.”

     “I’m for paying some taxes,” continued Paul. “But if we tax you at 100% then you’ve got zero percent liberty. If we tax you at 50% you are half slave, half free. I frankly would like to see you a little freer and a little more money remaining in your communities so you can create jobs. It’s a debate we need to have.”

     Paul, who was discussing his recent tax proposal, described his plan to “leave more money in Iowa” and “send less money to Washington.”

     I hear that argument all the time, that taxes are like slavery, that we are slaves to our jobs, that we have no freedoms… but, seriously?

     The Counted stands at 573 right now, via The Guardian.

390. rq says

     7 July 2015 at 5:52 am

     A volunteer firefighter is suspended after flying the Confederate flag at a parade, Washington Post on the poor fellow.

     We Are Still Asking: Who Is Burning Black Churches? Attention seems to have died down…

     In the days following the June 17th massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, at least six predominantly and historically Black churches were set ablaze. It has only been a few days since the last Black church in the South was burned. Sadly, the brief reprieve from church burnings inspires both relief and foreboding as one has to wonder if the trend will resume in the coming weeks. Given that there has been little to no coverage from mainstream media outlets, many on social media have asked: Who is burning Black churches? Unfortunately, this is a question we may never see answered. Here is what we do know right now:

     1. The first church burned was College Hill Seventh Day Adventist Church in Knoxville, Tenn. The church was determined to have been attacked by arsonists just four days after the massacre at Emanuel AME Church. However, investigators believe it was not a hate crime because there were no signs left behind indcating that the church was targeted for hate.

     2. The second church fire was at God’s Power Church of Christ in Macon, Georgia on June 23rd. Like the first fire, this event was determined to be an act of arson yet officials chose not to comment on why exactly the fire was set.

     3. Briar Creek Road Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina was the third Black church to catch fire in the days following the Emanuel AME massacre. Investigators revisited this case after several other church fires denoted a pattern. They have not yet determined if this incident on June 24th was a hate crime.

     4. On June 26th, nine days following the massacre at Emanuel AME Church, Glover Grove Baptist Church in Warrenville, South Carolina was set on fire in the wee hours of the morning. After originally suggesting the fire might have been caused by an electrical problem, further investigations of the cause of the fire were inconclusive.

     5. Also on June 26th, Greater Miracle Temple in Tallahassee, Florida was burned down. State officials determined that this event was an accident rather than an act of arson.

     6. The last church (we know of) which has burned in the last two weeks is Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Greeleyville, South Carolina. The fire, which happened on June 30th, has been attributed to lightning. Officials have specifically stated that there was “no criminal intent” involved in this incident.

     While fire investigators and officials have determined several of these church burnings to be accidental and non-criminal in nature, many people looking on struggle to see how these events could possibly be disconnected. Given this country’s long history of racism and intimidation from hate groups like the KKK, it seems odd that there would be any question as to who is behind the burning of Black churches in the South. Some congregants and pastors of Black churches have spoken out concerned that this issue has not been addressed in a more material way by mainstream news outlets.

     These are all of the documented cases of Black churches burnings as of July 5th. This story will be updated as additional information becomes available.

     Hey @AAAauto does this truck at CarQuest Auto in Friday Harbor, WA represent your brand? Because they say they do.

     Detroiter, SVSU student facing felony waited to pull over in brightly lit area

     DaJuawn Wallace said he didn’t stop immediately when prompted by police at 2 a.m. Feb. 19 because he was taught to pull into a well-lit and safe area before doing so.

     The Detroit native who is a commuter student pursuing a master’s degree at Saginaw Valley State University believes he did not commit a crime, since he pulled over in a Sam’s Club parking lot about 1.5 miles up the road from where police activated their lights.

     The Saginaw County prosecutor’s office disagrees, however. Wallace faces one felony count of fleeing and eluding.

     “I live in Detroit, and I know some people who were robbed by fake police officers,” Wallace said. “I was taught to find a well-lit area to pullover in.”

     Wallace said he was making a store run to get medicine for his girlfriend when he saw headlights in his rearview mirror, accelerating behind him.

     Wallace signaled and moved into the right lane to let the vehicle pass. The police car activated its lights and sirens to initiate a traffic stop.

     “I was not speeding up, turning off my lights or trying to get away,” said Wallace, 24.

     Police dash-cam video shows Wallace sticking his hand out the window and signaling. He said he did so to show police that he was going to pull over in the Sam’s Club parking lot.

     […]

     Outside the Sam’s Club, police arrested Wallace on a charge of felony fleeing and eluding.

     “I feel that if I was an older individual, it wouldn’t have been a problem,” Wallace said. “I feel like if I was of a different sex, they would’ve probably thought that I was just trying to find somewhere safe to pull into.”

     Saginaw County Chief Prosecutor Christopher Boyd said that when a police officer in full uniform in a vehicle identified as an official police vehicle has directed a motorist to stop, the motorist must stop.

     “You don’t get a driver’s license and get to pick what rules you are going to follow and what rules you are not going to follow,” Boyd said.

     Boyd also said that prosecution heard Wallace’s reason for not immediately stopping and noted that he did not travel at a high rate of speed. For that reason, Boyd said, the prosecution decided to offer to dismiss the felony charge in exchange for a misdemeanor charge with a delayed sentence.

     Wallace at a June 12 preliminary hearing in District Judge Terry Clark’s courtroom, was offered attempted fourth-degree fleeing and eluding, a one-year misdemeanor with a delayed sentence – meaning that after he completes probation, the charges will be dismissed.

     Wallace rejected the offer.

     The deal is available for a reasonable amount of time, Boyd said.

     Wallace said he has no interest in any deal of any sort short of dismissal.

     “I’m very certain I can stay out of trouble for a year, but I question whether they think I can,” Wallace said.

     “Most people will say fine, thank you for not sending me to jail. Well, that will be detrimental to me.

     “If I had to take a plea for a felony, I would be forced to resign my job, and I wouldn’t be able to get financial aid, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything with my degree. Even still with the misdemeanor.”

     Wallace is in a master’s program for health administration and has a May 2016 graduation date.

     “I feel like I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “I feel as if it’s a way to get me on papers.”

     Sadly, he’s probably right.

     Is this something white people could just not do, please? Nick Kyrgios praises fans smearing Vegemite and Nutella on their faces in support of Wimbledon star. What a waste of Nutella.

     Nick Kyrgios is a divisive tennis player, winning and losing fans in seemingly equal measure with his expletive ridden on-court rants, unpredictable petulance (which on Friday saw his racket go flying into the crowd) and uncompromising press conferences.

     But by reaching the fourth round at Wimbledon, in which he will play Richard Gasquet on Monday, the Australian is beginning to back up his sometimes arrogant attitude with the skill to warrant it.

     But just as the 20-year-old wins over some of the haters and begins to be taken more seriously, some of his supporters appear to have lost the plot.

     They don’t seem to be intending to go around in blackface… it just sort of comes across that way… Maybe try mayonnaise next time?

     Still two days left on this, would love to see this made: Brown Girl in the Ring – The Prequel.

391. rq says

     7 July 2015 at 6:00 am

     At @RCAA_NOLA PD today, educators discussed freedom/justice re: teaching using songs & Paolo Freire readings.

     Important read: Why My Son Needs Feminism

     Black feminism in particular has been accused of dividing the black community and tearing apart the black family, but I know that my understanding of it has many important lessons for raising a son. What follows is by no means a definitive exploration of black feminism and black manhood, but are my first thoughts as I consider why my son needs feminism.

     #1: For His Mental Health

     According to The Mental Health Foundation, the most common form of death for all men under the age of 35 in the UK is suicide while less than half as many men seek support for mental health issues as women. Research from both the leading mental health charity, Mind, and the Samaritans suggests that stereotypes about what it means to be a man in our society have an effect on men’s mental health and self-esteem. Many feel the pressure of the Alpha Male archetype, where any form of emotion other than aggression is seen as a form of weakness, and expectations from others about acceptable forms of masculinity often linked to control, domination and invincibility are not conducive to good mental health for both those who willingly subscribe to these ideas as well as the men who do not. In tandem with those pressures, the NHS acknowledges that disproportionate exposure to social inequality and racism can also have a detrimental effect on the mental health of black men, while black men are seventeen times more likely to diagnosed with a psychotic mental illness that their white counterparts, according to Lambeth Council’s ‘Black Health and Wellbeing Commission’ report from June 2014.

     On both fronts black feminism provides a tool with which to understand and challenge narrow perceptions of masculinity and the racist society that they exist within. The intersectional nature of black feminism also addresses the social constructs that perpetuate racism and inequality and that contribute to negative outcomes experienced by black men within the mental health system, such as more drastic responses to signs of mental distress such higher rates of seclusion, physical restraint and section orders. Feminism also challenges gender expectations perpetuated by patriarchy; questioning what it means to be a woman also requires addressing what it means to be a man and ultimately harmful stereotypes about womanhood and manhood are called into question. This isn’t about exchanging roles or replacing one set of expectations or ideals for another, this is about allowing people to embrace the full spectrum of possible expressions of identity without being confined by the narrow expectations of others.

     #2: For His Personal Safety

     Police brutality is nothing new, and neither are the statistics showing the disproportionate amount of deadly force used against black and brown people compared to white people. Personal experience of the institutionalised nature of racism in the police force has me concerned about what experiences await my son, but I am encouraged and inspired by the very vocal activism of (black) feminists in exposing injustice and holding the police and lawmakers to account for state-sanctioned violence against black and brown men and women. While so often the media is saturated with news about black victims of police brutality in the US, the names of men and women in Britain who have suffered at the hands of police brutality and misconduct is tallying up, with Sheku Bayoh being the most recent. The mainstream media rarely covers these cases in depth, if at all, but from Ferguson to London, black feminists in particular are some of the most prominent voices amongst the rallies and discussion, bringing the issue of abuses of power and accountability to the forefront of public consciousness.

     Though still an uphill march in many respects, there is still hope amongst the heartbreak and I’m grateful that my fellow feminists have shown me that.

     Some more important stuff at the link.

     White Supremacists Extend Their Reach Through Websites

     Still, the authorities say, Mr. Roof had clearly embraced their worldview. As investigators comb through the data streams of Mr. Roof’s electronic equipment, a four-page manifesto apparently written by him before the killings offers a virtual road map to modern-day white supremacy. It contains bitter complaints about black crime and immigration, espousing the virtues of segregation and debating the viability of an all-white enclave in the Pacific Northwest.

     That manifesto has refocused attention on a shadowy movement that, for all its ideological connections to the white racists of the past, is more regionally diverse and sophisticated than its predecessors, experts say.

     They say it is capable, through its robust online presence, of reaching an audience far wider than the small number of actual members attributed to it.

     “There’s really not a lot out there as far as membership organizations,” said Don Black, who runs Stormfront.org. “But there is a huge number, I think more than ever, as far as people actively working in some way to promote our cause. Because they don’t have to join an organization now that we have this newfangled Internet.”

     Experts dispute the number of movement supporters but agree about its efforts to modernize. While the virulent racism of old can still be found online, the movement today also includes more button-down websites run by white nationalism think tanks with vanity publishing units. Most of the best-known organizations also claim to have disavowed the violence of groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

     […]

     There are also two prominent groups with deep ties to the South: the Council of Conservative Citizens, which evolved from the pro-segregationist White Citizens Councils, and the League of the South, a sparsely trafficked site for hard-core secessionists. The manifesto attributed to Mr. Roof cited the council’s website as a source of information about black-on-white crime.

     Many groups are said to be financially challenged. For instance, Stormfront.org struggles to raise $7,500 a month from about 800 “sustaining members” to cover expenses, Mr. Black said.

     The exceptions are found among the highbrow organizations: The National Policy Institute and the Martel Society were founded and have been aided by William H. Regnery II, heir to a far-right publishing empire who also oversees a brace of anti-immigration lobbying groups. The Pioneer Fund, a 78-year-old nonprofit foundation that has stoked controversy with its interest in eugenics, also has aided the policy institute and American Renaissance.

     In 2004, leaders of the movement met in New Orleans, ostensibly to celebrate the release of David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who had been imprisoned for fraudulent fund-raising. There, eight major organizations signed an agreement intended to define the modern supremacist movement according to three unifying principles: honorable behavior among all signatories, a high tone in public presentations and zero tolerance for violence.

     The degree to which followers of those groups have maintained the nonviolence pledge remains in dispute.

     But the manifesto attributed to Mr. Roof included a chilling complaint about the movement’s disavowal of violence. “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the Internet,” the paper read. “Well, someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

     Supremacist groups remain divided by rivalries and philosophical disputes. Those differences sometimes obscure a common goal: to re-establish exclusive white control of the United States or, should that prove impossible as many groups now concede, to build an all-white enclave with its own government and an army to defend it.

     The League of the South seeks a second Southern secession. The Daily Stormer’s Mr. Anglin last month proposed building a white city, possibly in a foreign venue.

     Mr. Spencer, who runs the National Policy Institute, said in an interview that he fantasized about an Aryan revival in the style of the Roman Empire. Others have proposed a white enclave in the Pacific Northwest, or “little Europe” towns across America.

     Stormfront’s Mr. Black does not just talk about such aspirations: He spent two years in federal prison for an ill-fated attempt in 1981 to seize the Caribbean island of Dominica for conversion into an all-white paradise, financed by brothels and casinos. The authorities stopped him and his group as they were boarding a yacht with plans to stage a Dominica coup.

     Where the masses will be found to establish such audacious and widely condemned ventures is not clear, even to their proponents. But Mr. Spencer noted that Karl Marx had founded communism with no adherents and a simple manifesto. Mr. Black said he believed the online supremacist movement was not merely large but growing.

     The Anti-Defamation League has identified some 10,000 white supremacists on websites and on social media like Facebook. But many more are said to be more like Mr. Roof, invisible and surfacing online only to make anonymous comments. Stormfront claims 300,000 registered members, although Mr. Black said only a small fraction were active on the site. Some 95 percent of the site’s visitors, he said, are anonymous outsiders.

     Among the dozen or so main white supremacist websites, daily page views range from fewer than 1,000 to as many as 40,000, although that figure includes repeat page views.

     More at the link.

     EXCLUSIVE: NYPD accused of destroying summons quota evidence, so yeah, to serve and protect their own asses. Not the public.
     <
     .@Shell gas station in southern Missouri sells confederate bed sheets/dream catchers and hats. Note: she later corrected and said they were in northern Arkansas at the time.

     South Carolina senate votes to remove Confederate flag from statehouse grounds, Raw Story story.

392. rq says

     7 July 2015 at 9:06 am

     Why Are Some Black Men Dismissing Black Women’s Criticism of Bill Cosby? An article from November 27 2014 that is said to be relevant still today.

     Black women have always taken our claims—of being victims of state-sponsored brutality—at face value, yet we often struggle to return that same benefit of the doubt when they discuss sexual violence directed at them. This is a serious issue we have to confront in our community because we have to challenge whether we really honor black womanhood, as many of us would like to believe.

     Emphasis on the word “womanhood.”

     A recent example of black male betrayal of black women took place last weekend when comedian Faizon Love responded to black women who dared to challenge his Twitter tirade in defense of Bill Cosby, by calling them “bitches” and “hos” and repeating the same illogical refrain of other Cosby apologists: that neither the national press nor social media has allowed “due process” to investigate the allegations against him.

     It’s a peculiar argument, given that black men as a whole often don’t trust “due process” to work to our benefit. In central New Jersey, for example, 99 percent of police-brutality cases go uninvestigated. According to the Cato Institute, most of the 17,000 local and state law-enforcement agencies don’t self-report acts of police misconduct, and many states have laws that won’t allow agencies to release results of misconduct investigations.

     If black men aren’t expected to trust such a system, why should we expect women to trust “due process” when 40 percent of college sexual assault cases in America go uninvestigated? Or consider New Orleans, where detectives followed up on only 179 of 1,290 sex cases between January 2011 and December 2013. Do we really have to ask why only 60 percent of sexual assault cases are reported to begin with?

     Are we really that shocked that women are often left with no recourse other than the court of public opinion, when data show that their alleged perpetrator will probably never see the inside of a courtroom to begin with, much less a jail cell?

     And even when women are brave enough to file charges of assault, the media tears them apart. Earlier this year, radio host D.L. Hughley referred to Columbus Short’s wife as a “thirsty bitch” during an off-air recording that was posted on his station’s website after she reported the actor to the police for allegedly beating her. Hughley also talked down to his female co-host when she tried to tell him that he was being unduly harsh.

     Would he have called a mother seeking justice for a son who had died at the hands of a cop a “thirsty bitch”? I doubt it.

     Civilian oversight board for St. Louis police moves one small step closer to operating

     The clerk of the Board of Aldermen officially sent the names of people who wish to serve on the board to Mayor Francis Slay. He will nominate individuals from that list to fill the seven seats on the board, which was created to oversee internal affairs investigations of civilian complaints against St. Louis Metropolitan Police officers. The board may also conduct its own internal investigations if it believes the Internal Affairs Division falls short, and can recommend changes to the police department’s policies.

     A spokeswoman for Mayor Slay said 30 people submitted official applications to the mayor’s office. Twenty-one people submitted a different application to the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression. It’s unclear how many overlap, and anyone who wants to serve on the board has to submit that official application. The document has faced criticism for asking about such things as social media accounts and criminal charges that did not result in convictions.

     Coalition co-chair John Chasnoff said Slay is committed to getting a cross-section of the community on the oversight board.

     “But I also think that his application will tend to skew things in a certain direction, a safer direction,” Chasnoff said. He said teachers, for example, were hesitant about applying because their schools tell them no keep their Facebook or Twitter information private, and the applications that ask about it could become public.

     Interlude: Music Sometimes

     “Sometimes” is the first single from my forthcoming album PHATASS. Like the other songs on the album, “Sometimes” was recorded at the Apple Store in Soho and I made the beat with my voice.

     It is really something.

     June 26 2015 and April 9 1968. #ThisMustStop #BlackLivesMatter

      Trying to Forgive the Black Church, by Jamilah Lemieux.

      Regardless of one’s personal religious affiliations or leanings (or lack there of), any person with even a cursory knowledge of black culture understands why the location of Dylann Roof’s terrorist attack was particularly cruel—and why the spate of church fires that have followed are so troubling. No matter how distant you are from actual houses of worship and the beliefs that fill their pews, if you are African-American, the black church is likely tied in some way to who you are.

     And yet as someone who was raised outside of the church, my own relationship to Christianity and its role in black life is a complicated one. Minus a brief stretch as a frequent guest at my best friend’s church while in third grade—visits that were the result of feeling left out from what my peers were doing on Sundays—I never had any real desire to be a churchgoer.

     […]

      So when something happens that puts the black church in the blindingly white glare of national spotlight, a number of complicated emotions follow. I can’t help but feel protective and defensive at times, when media makers and their consumers treat black churches like museum instillations at best, zoos at worst, dissecting rituals and over simplifying historical context. From the televised funeral of Whitney Houston to the massive homegoing for State Senator Clementa Pinckney, something about allowing the world access to these sacred expressions of black grief just feels uncomfortable.

     At the same time, the AME massacre also triggered my own anxiety and frustration around the black church—and then guilt for allowing myself to experience anxiety and frustration on the occasion of such a horrific loss of life. The Christian institution of forgiveness is one I have found to be particularly cruel to my people; it seems that we are compelled to forgive our transgressors almost immediately and in a way that does nothing to demand accountability and change.

     Members of the immediate families of Dylann Roof’s victims publicly forgave him less than 36 hours after he’d killed nine people in a church that had welcomed him. This act has prompted much soul searching and debate about the toll and the power of black forgiveness. Roof had not apologized, after all, nor asked to be forgiven. As much as I desperately want to affirm and support those most directly impacted by this horrific crime, I was horrified by how the families’ words transformed the media narrative into one of healing for black Americans, as opposed to examining and identifying the Dylann Roof who lives in the hearts of far too many white Americans, even if their hatred may never compel them to go as far as Roof took his. At a moment when our entire race had cause to be angry, we were reminded that we are loving, forgiving people—a people that are required to be hyper-moral and superhuman in our tolerance of abuse.

     […]

      I have come to realize black folks are my church, preaching the value of black life is my ministry and blackness is my sanctuary. That requires me to open my arms and accept my people even when I can’t co-sign their values. Wanting nothing more than to affirm us during these difficult times and to keep us focused on our true enemies (white supremacy and structural racism), I am working to take a cue from my religious brothers and sisters, and to forgive our people for being so forgiving.

     I will never forgive Dylann Roof and the country that made him. But I will release my anger at how other black folks find a way to keep themselves sane in the face of madness, and I will provide the unforgiving rage towards our enemies that others simply can’t.

     Win some, lose some. Court Says Maryland Police Can Keep Their Disciplinary Records Secret

     Months after the rough ride that killed Freddie Gray in Baltimore, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that officers’ disciplinary records can remain hidden from the public. The decision comes more five years after an officer accidentally left a racially-charged voicemail, and the phone’s owner tried to investigate if and how he was disciplined.

     Back in 2010, Sergeant John Maiello left a racist message on Teleta Dashiell’s voicemail, believing he’d hung up his phone. In the message, he used the n-word several times. Dashiell filed a complaint, but when she inquired about how it was dealt with, state police declined to release Maiello’s disciplinary record. She then submitted a records request under the Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA), but was told “personnel records” don’t have to be disclosed — a decision that a lower court in Baltimore supported. And in June, that ruling was upheld by the appellate court.

     “Mandatory disclosure of personnel information related to sustained findings could chill the disciplinary process, rendering those in control less willing to sustain a finding of misconduct,” the court concluded.

     Efforts to keep officer information private in Maryland come in stark contrast to a recent push in Philadelphia — authorized by Police Chief Charles Ramsey — to disclose information about officers involved in shootings within 72 hours. Despite backlash from the Philadelphia Police Department union, Ramsey contends, “we’re within our rights to take the steps we took, have taken, and are going to take.” Doubling down on the departmental move last Friday, he revealed the names of two officers who shot and wounded a man who hit their vehicle and drove off. The policy is one of many recommended by the DOJ, which found an increased use of force in the department, due in large part to training failures.

     Still, failure to disclose officer information is one of many hurdles to holding police accountable. Internal investigations of officer misconduct are often obscured from the public as well. When that is the case, investigations aren’t thorough and many aren’t pursued at all. Few result in disciplinary action.

     Body cameras are also touted for their ability to hold officers accountable for using excessive force, but that footage is typically withheld from the public. In D.C., for instance, Mayor Muriel Bowser wants camera footage exempt from public records. Cops can also turn cameras on and off at their will, and many destroy surveillance cameras and cameras and phones belonging to people who film them. In other cases, videos submitted to police disappear altogether.

393. rq says

     7 July 2015 at 9:09 am

     Why Are Some Black Men Dismissing Black Women’s Criticism of Bill Cosby? An article from November 27 2014 that is said to be relevant still today.

     Black women have always taken our claims—of being victims of state-sponsored brutality—at face value, yet we often struggle to return that same benefit of the doubt when they discuss sexual violence directed at them. This is a serious issue we have to confront in our community because we have to challenge whether we really honor black womanhood, as many of us would like to believe.

     Emphasis on the word “womanhood.”

     A recent example of black male betrayal of black women took place last weekend when comedian Faizon Love responded to black women who dared to challenge his Twitter tirade in defense of Bill Cosby, by calling them “b*tches” and “hos” and repeating the same illogical refrain of other Cosby apologists: that neither the national press nor social media has allowed “due process” to investigate the allegations against him.

     It’s a peculiar argument, given that black men as a whole often don’t trust “due process” to work to our benefit. In central New Jersey, for example, 99 percent of police-brutality cases go uninvestigated. According to the Cato Institute, most of the 17,000 local and state law-enforcement agencies don’t self-report acts of police misconduct, and many states have laws that won’t allow agencies to release results of misconduct investigations.

     If black men aren’t expected to trust such a system, why should we expect women to trust “due process” when 40 percent of college sexual assault cases in America go uninvestigated? Or consider New Orleans, where detectives followed up on only 179 of 1,290 sex cases between January 2011 and December 2013. Do we really have to ask why only 60 percent of sexual assault cases are reported to begin with?

     Are we really that shocked that women are often left with no recourse other than the court of public opinion, when data show that their alleged perpetrator will probably never see the inside of a courtroom to begin with, much less a jail cell?

     And even when women are brave enough to file charges of assault, the media tears them apart. Earlier this year, radio host D.L. Hughley referred to Columbus Short’s wife as a “thirsty b*tch” during an off-air recording that was posted on his station’s website after she reported the actor to the police for allegedly beating her. Hughley also talked down to his female co-host when she tried to tell him that he was being unduly harsh.

     Would he have called a mother seeking justice for a son who had died at the hands of a cop a “thirsty b*tch”? I doubt it.

     Civilian oversight board for St. Louis police moves one small step closer to operating

     The clerk of the Board of Aldermen officially sent the names of people who wish to serve on the board to Mayor Francis Slay. He will nominate individuals from that list to fill the seven seats on the board, which was created to oversee internal affairs investigations of civilian complaints against St. Louis Metropolitan Police officers. The board may also conduct its own internal investigations if it believes the Internal Affairs Division falls short, and can recommend changes to the police department’s policies.

     A spokeswoman for Mayor Slay said 30 people submitted official applications to the mayor’s office. Twenty-one people submitted a different application to the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression. It’s unclear how many overlap, and anyone who wants to serve on the board has to submit that official application. The document has faced criticism for asking about such things as social media accounts and criminal charges that did not result in convictions.

     Coalition co-chair John Chasnoff said Slay is committed to getting a cross-section of the community on the oversight board.

     “But I also think that his application will tend to skew things in a certain direction, a safer direction,” Chasnoff said. He said teachers, for example, were hesitant about applying because their schools tell them no keep their Facebook or Twitter information private, and the applications that ask about it could become public.

     Interlude: Music Sometimes

     “Sometimes” is the first single from my forthcoming album PHATASS. Like the other songs on the album, “Sometimes” was recorded at the Apple Store in Soho and I made the beat with my voice.

     It is really something.

     June 26 2015 and April 9 1968. #ThisMustStop #BlackLivesMatter

      Trying to Forgive the Black Church, by Jamilah Lemieux.

      Regardless of one’s personal religious affiliations or leanings (or lack there of), any person with even a cursory knowledge of black culture understands why the location of Dylann Roof’s terrorist attack was particularly cruel—and why the spate of church fires that have followed are so troubling. No matter how distant you are from actual houses of worship and the beliefs that fill their pews, if you are African-American, the black church is likely tied in some way to who you are.

     And yet as someone who was raised outside of the church, my own relationship to Christianity and its role in black life is a complicated one. Minus a brief stretch as a frequent guest at my best friend’s church while in third grade—visits that were the result of feeling left out from what my peers were doing on Sundays—I never had any real desire to be a churchgoer.

     […]

      So when something happens that puts the black church in the blindingly white glare of national spotlight, a number of complicated emotions follow. I can’t help but feel protective and defensive at times, when media makers and their consumers treat black churches like museum instillations at best, zoos at worst, dissecting rituals and over simplifying historical context. From the televised funeral of Whitney Houston to the massive homegoing for State Senator Clementa Pinckney, something about allowing the world access to these sacred expressions of black grief just feels uncomfortable.

     At the same time, the AME massacre also triggered my own anxiety and frustration around the black church—and then guilt for allowing myself to experience anxiety and frustration on the occasion of such a horrific loss of life. The Christian institution of forgiveness is one I have found to be particularly cruel to my people; it seems that we are compelled to forgive our transgressors almost immediately and in a way that does nothing to demand accountability and change.

     Members of the immediate families of Dylann Roof’s victims publicly forgave him less than 36 hours after he’d killed nine people in a church that had welcomed him. This act has prompted much soul searching and debate about the toll and the power of black forgiveness. Roof had not apologized, after all, nor asked to be forgiven. As much as I desperately want to affirm and support those most directly impacted by this horrific crime, I was horrified by how the families’ words transformed the media narrative into one of healing for black Americans, as opposed to examining and identifying the Dylann Roof who lives in the hearts of far too many white Americans, even if their hatred may never compel them to go as far as Roof took his. At a moment when our entire race had cause to be angry, we were reminded that we are loving, forgiving people—a people that are required to be hyper-moral and superhuman in our tolerance of abuse.

     […]

      I have come to realize black folks are my church, preaching the value of black life is my ministry and blackness is my sanctuary. That requires me to open my arms and accept my people even when I can’t co-sign their values. Wanting nothing more than to affirm us during these difficult times and to keep us focused on our true enemies (white supremacy and structural racism), I am working to take a cue from my religious brothers and sisters, and to forgive our people for being so forgiving.

     I will never forgive Dylann Roof and the country that made him. But I will release my anger at how other black folks find a way to keep themselves sane in the face of madness, and I will provide the unforgiving rage towards our enemies that others simply can’t.

     Win some, lose some. Court Says Maryland Police Can Keep Their Disciplinary Records Secret

     Months after the rough ride that killed Freddie Gray in Baltimore, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that officers’ disciplinary records can remain hidden from the public. The decision comes more five years after an officer accidentally left a racially-charged voicemail, and the phone’s owner tried to investigate if and how he was disciplined.

     Back in 2010, Sergeant John Maiello left a racist message on Teleta Dashiell’s voicemail, believing he’d hung up his phone. In the message, he used the n-word several times. Dashiell filed a complaint, but when she inquired about how it was dealt with, state police declined to release Maiello’s disciplinary record. She then submitted a records request under the Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA), but was told “personnel records” don’t have to be disclosed — a decision that a lower court in Baltimore supported. And in June, that ruling was upheld by the appellate court.

     “Mandatory disclosure of personnel information related to sustained findings could chill the disciplinary process, rendering those in control less willing to sustain a finding of misconduct,” the court concluded.

     Efforts to keep officer information private in Maryland come in stark contrast to a recent push in Philadelphia — authorized by Police Chief Charles Ramsey — to disclose information about officers involved in shootings within 72 hours. Despite backlash from the Philadelphia Police Department union, Ramsey contends, “we’re within our rights to take the steps we took, have taken, and are going to take.” Doubling down on the departmental move last Friday, he revealed the names of two officers who shot and wounded a man who hit their vehicle and drove off. The policy is one of many recommended by the DOJ, which found an increased use of force in the department, due in large part to training failures.

     Still, failure to disclose officer information is one of many hurdles to holding police accountable. Internal investigations of officer misconduct are often obscured from the public as well. When that is the case, investigations aren’t thorough and many aren’t pursued at all. Few result in disciplinary action.

     Body cameras are also touted for their ability to hold officers accountable for using excessive force, but that footage is typically withheld from the public. In D.C., for instance, Mayor Muriel Bowser wants camera footage exempt from public records. Cops can also turn cameras on and off at their will, and many destroy surveillance cameras and cameras and phones belonging to people who film them. In other cases, videos submitted to police disappear altogether.

394. rq says

     7 July 2015 at 1:45 pm

     Black NC Woman Denied Library Card in 1942 Returns at Age 92 to Get One

     Pearl Thompson was a student at Shaw University in 1942 when she walked over to a public library in Raleigh, N.C., to check out a book she was assigned to read for class.

     But instead of issuing a library card to Thompson and allowing her to check out the book, the library staff at the Olivia Raney Library—a library intended only for whites at the time—sent Thompson to the basement and told her that she had to read the book there and couldn’t take it out of the library.

     More than 70 years later, Thompson, now 92, is being honored in Raleigh, N.C., as a lifelong educator, and she has made it a point to return to get the library card that was denied her so long ago.

     Thompson told the News & Observer that she knew that the Olivia Raney Library, Raleigh’s first public library, was only for white patrons, but she was on a mission to get the book that she needed.

     “I expected to go in and get a book,” Thompson said.

     That thirst for knowledge and determination to break down racial barriers in educational spaces stayed with her. Thompson went on to teach in Raleigh’s segregated black schools for more than a decade. In an emotional video showing the Raleigh event that honored her work, Thompson described how she vowed that she would work hard to give children opportunities to learn, and to expose them to the resources they would need to succeed.

     For Toronto-and-vicinity folk, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, an event at the ROM July 18 (afternoon).

     A documentary about how African American communities have used the camera as a tool for social change from the invention of photography to the present. This epic tale poetically moves between the present and the past, through contemporary photographers and artists whose images and stories seek to reconcile legacies of pride and shame while giving voice to images long suppressed, forgotten and hidden from sight.

     Director Thomas Allen Harris will be in attendance.

     Even as Museum Piece, Confederate Flag Is in Dispute

     One floor below street level in the Museum of the Confederacy here, at the end of a cinder-block hallway behind two sets of locked double doors, a climate-controlled vault contains the world’s largest collection of some of the most revered and reviled objects in American history: Confederate-era flags.

     Here, painstakingly preserved and cataloged, are more than 550 wartime silk, wool and cotton flags. One, fashioned from bridal clothes, has the word “Home” in blue appliqué, encircled with blue stars. Another features an oil painting of Pocahontas. Still another, the now-controversial Southern Cross battle flag, was once owned by Tad Lincoln, a son of President Abraham Lincoln. It hangs in a gallery upstairs.
     Continue reading the main story
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     As the museum’s chief historian and author of a scholarly book on the flag, John M. Coski, a slender and slightly rumpled 56-year-old, works hard to bring its various versions to light — part of what he calls a “conscious effort” by officials of the 119-year-old institution to “modernize from a shrine” to the Old South into “a modern, Smithsonian-like museum.”

     As debate rages over how and where to display Confederate flags — the South Carolina Senate voted overwhelmingly on Monday to remove the battle flag from the grounds of the State House, and the debate will shift to the House of Representatives there — critics insist that the flags must be relegated to museums. But here in Virginia, it is clear that even museums cannot escape the fray.

     “They like to hide theirs in the basement,” complained Grayson Jennings, a founder of the Virginia Flaggers, whose members were waving modern replicas of the battle flag recently to protest another Richmond museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which in 2011 removed the flag from a Confederate chapel on its property.

     Of the Confederacy museum, Mr. Jennings said, “Most of us real Southerners dropped their membership quite a few years ago.” [which means they’re doing something right? – rq]

     […]

     The venture (technically “a consolidation,” not a merger) has two chief executives: a black museum specialist, Christy Coleman, 50, who led the Civil War Center, and S. Waite Rawls, 66, a white retired investment banker and descendant of Confederate soldiers, who ran the Confederacy museum. Both risked the wrath of donors, and neither is a stranger to tough questions about the flag.

     “People ask me, ‘Why don’t you fly the Confederate flag?’ ” Ms. Coleman said. “I say, ‘Which one?’ Are we talking about the one with Pocahontas on it? Or are we talking about the one that has blue and white stars and says the word ‘Home’?”

     When the Museum of the Confederacy opened a satellite at Appomattox in 2012, with Lee’s sword as its centerpiece, Mr. Rawls came under attack for flying the flags of individual Confederate states, but not the divisive square Southern Cross pattern, carried into battle by Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, or the elongated rectangular Naval Jack pattern used by the Army of Tennessee — both symbols of racism or Southern pride, depending on one’s point of view.

     “They hide behind the first national flag,” said Mr. Jennings, referring to the so-called Stars and Bars, adopted in March 1861 by the Confederate government, and loosely patterned on the Stars and Stripes. “They’re just scared of the battle flag.”

     Visitors to the museum in downtown Richmond are greeted at the entrance by a stylized version of a different flag, one that flew at Lee’s headquarters.

     But in the hushed galleries of the second floor, eight fraying Southern Cross battle flags, captured at Gettysburg 152 years ago, hang in custom-made conservation frames.

     “When people see this flag, this is what they think of as the Confederate flag,” said the exhibit’s curator, Cathy Wright. “But we wanted to explain that there are really a plethora of patterns and designs.”

     To that end, the next gallery over features a flag fashioned from a fringed burgundy shawl. On display there, as well, are samples of what Mr. Coski calls “endless kitsch” — a comic book showing a black woman wearing a Confederate flag uniform, a pair of flag shorts, a photograph of RuPaul, the drag queen, in a long sequined flag gown.

     Allen University establishes scholarship honoring church shooting victims

     Allen University in Columbia has created the Simmons, Pinckney and Sanders Scholarship to honor the lives of three alumni who were killed last month in a mass shooting at Emanuel AME Church.

     Former Allen students state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, the Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Jr. and Tywanza Sanders were among the nine black parishioners killed during Bible study at Mother Emanuel on June 17.

     The church’s head pastor, Pinckney, graduated magna cum laude from Allen in 1995 with a degree in business administration. The Simmons received his bachelor’s degree from Allen in 1967, having majored in social science and minored in psychology. Twenty-six-year-old Sanders, the youngest victim of the church massacre, graduated from the university last year with a degree in business administration.

     The Simmons, Pinckney and Sanders Scholarship will help the private, historically black college “continue the legacy of developing leaders who make a difference in their communities where they live and work,” according to a press release announcing the new fund.

     Link for contributions at the link.

     Protesters Clash Over Confederate Flag At Arizona Walmart

     The Arizona Republic reports that Jon Ritzheimer organized the Sunday afternoon protest of Walmart’s decision. Ritzheimer is a former Marine who staged a contentious rally outside a Phoenix mosque in May.

     His group of self-proclaimed “patriots,” some of them armed, waved the rebel flag alongside the American one while chanting “U-S-A.”

     Counter-protesters clashed with Ritzheimer’s group. They called the flag racist and lauded Walmart’s decision to remove it from shelves.

     An unofficial police count estimates that the event drew about 100 people. Phoenix police spokesman Lt. Randy Force says 11 officers were at the event after Walmart management called police.

     Ritzheimer sounds like someone on whom an eye should be kept.

     9 Things to Know Before You Get Your Swirl On, a guide to interracial dating.

395. rq says

     7 July 2015 at 1:55 pm

     FOUND: Black Panther Party Founder Huey Newton’s Surprising 45-Year-Old Pro-Gay Speech, article actually posted February 18 of this year.

     Nearly 45 years later, this surprising Huey P. Newton speech on Women’s Liberation and the Gay Equality Movement still resonates now more than ever. The founder of the Black Panther Party spoke these words on August 15th, 1970, just a year after the infamous Stonewall Riots in New York City between Gays and the Police.

     On surface, one would assume that a 1960’s African American group historically perceived as “militant” would be against Gay Rights and possibly treat women as inferior to men. Newton’s words prove this not to be the case…at least, not with Newton himself. It sounds as if he he wrote this speech in an attempt to guide his more homophobic and patriarchal brothers into remembering that oppression of any kind is wrong, even if its directed towards gays and women.

     The speech, in full text:

     During the past few years strong movements have developed among women and among homosexuals seeking their liberation. There has been some uncertainty about how to relate to these movements.

     Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion.

     I say ”whatever your insecurities are” because as we very well know, sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the mouth, and want a woman to be quiet. We want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid that we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the women or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start with.

     We must gain security in ourselves and therefore have respect and feelings for all oppressed people. We must not use the racist attitude that the white racists use against our people because they are Black and poor. Many times the poorest white person is the most racist because he is afraid that he might lose something, or discover something that he does not have. So you’re some kind of a threat to him. This kind of psychology is in operation when we view oppressed people and we are angry with them because of their particular kind of behavior, or their particular kind of deviation from the established norm.

     Remember, we have not established a revolutionary value system; we are only in the process of establishing it. I do not remember our ever constituting any value that said that a revolutionary must say offensive things towards homosexuals, or that a revolutionary should make sure that women do not speak out about their own particular kind of oppression. As a matter of fact, it is just the opposite: we say that we recognize the women’s right to be free. We have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing. And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppressed people in the society.

     And what made them homosexual? Perhaps it’s a phenomenon that I don’t understand entirely. Some people say that it is the decadence of capitalism. I don’t know if that is the case; I rather doubt it. But whatever the case is, we know that homosexuality is a fact that exists, and we must understand it in its purest form: that is, a person should have the freedom to use his body in whatever way he wants.

     That is not endorsing things in homosexuality that we wouldn’t view as revolutionary. But there is nothing to say that a homosexual cannot also be a revolutionary. And maybe I’m now injecting some of my prejudice by saying that “even a homosexual can be a revolutionary.” Quite the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary.

     When we have revolutionary conferences, rallies, and demonstrations, there should be full participation of the gay liberation movement and the women’s liberation movement. Some groups might be more revolutionary than others. We should not use the actions of a few to say that they are all reactionary or counter-revolutionary, because they are not.

     We should deal with the factions just as we deal with any other group or party that claims to be revolutionary. We should try to judge, somehow, whether they are operating in a sincere revolutionary fashion and from a really oppressed situation. (And we will grant that if they are women they are probably oppressed.) If they do things that are unrevolutionary or counter-revolutionary, then criticize that action.

     If we feel that the group in spirit means to be revolutionary in practice, but they make mistakes in interpretation of the revolutionary philosophy, or they do not understand the dialectics of the social forces in operation, we should criticize that and not criticize them because they are women trying to be free. And the same is true for homosexuals. We should never say a whole movement is dishonest when in fact they are trying to be honest. They are just making honest mistakes. Friends are allowed to make mistakes. The enemy is not allowed to make mistakes because his whole existence is a mistake, and we suffer from it. But the women’s liberation front and gay liberation front are our friends, they are our potential allies, and we need as many allies as possible.

     We should be willing to discuss the insecurities that many people have about homosexuality. When I say “insecurities,” I mean the fear that they are some kind of threat to our manhood. I can understand this fear. Because of the long conditioning process which builds insecurity in the American male, homosexuality might produce certain hang-ups in us. I have hang-ups myself about male homosexuality. But on the other hand, I have no hang-up about female homosexuality. And that is a phenomenon in itself. I think it is probably because male homosexuality is a threat to me and female homosexuality is not.

     We should be careful about using those terms that might turn our friends off. The terms “faggot” and “punk” should be deleted from our vocabulary, and especially we should not attach names normally designed for homosexuals to men who are enemies of the people, such as [Richard] Nixon or [John] Mitchell. Homosexuals are not enemies of the people.

     We should try to form a working coalition with the gay liberation and women’s liberation groups. We must always handle social forces in the most appropriate manner. And this is really a significant part of the population, both women, and the growing number of homosexuals that we have to deal with.

     ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

     I think it was Cuttlefish (the Digital one!) on Twitter that mentioned the dated language, but the sentiment is still relevant. I would also add that women’s liberation movements, and gay liberation movements, (and trans liberation movements) should be willing to partner with the black liberation movement.
     This means paying attention to intersections.

     New Web Series, MisSpelled Casts More Than Magic For Women of Color in Horror

     MisSpelled, created by writer and actress Lindsey McDowell is a brand new web series where five enchanted young women at a community college grapple their unique abilities and discover each other. She was inspired by some familial roots to develop a series for herself and friends who were being unfairly typecast in the industry. MisSpelled debunks size two standards and shows, quite refreshingly, multiplicitous ethnic backgrounds.

     In the promologue, Gladys, Emma, Quinn, Stella, and Nina are well established and intriguing enough to tap into the essence of a teaser. You desire to see more in admiration of a fun, well-paced, well-written story. Its technical savvy is impressive and shows care for the product. Overall, MisSpelled manages to successfully market itself as the answer to women of color in witchcraft stories, conjuring character traits that are relatable and exploratory. – See more at: http://www.graveyardshiftsisters.com/2014/07/new-web-series-misspelled-casts-more.html#sthash.urjvgH5P.dpuf

     SC Senate votes to remove flag; bill goes to House, Charlotte Observer.

     Why Does the Senate Honor a White Supremacist? It’s Time to Ditch Richard Russell for Bob Dole

     As I write these words on Monday, the South Carolina State Senate is poised to remove the Confederate battle flag from its capitol grounds entirely. These developments in the Palmetto State and elsewhere are all positive, and of course it’s high time for them. But Confederate battle flags on capitol grounds do not constitute the most conspicuous symbolic tribute to white supremacy in our political-architectural landscape.

     No, the symbol I have in mind isn’t to be found in Columbia or Montgomery or Baton Rouge or Jackson. It’s right here in Washington, 2.6 miles from where I sit typing these sentences.

     Hey, United States Senate: What in the world are you still doing with a building named in honor of Richard Russell?

     As I trust you know, Richard Brevard Russell was a senator from Georgia from 1933 until his death in 1971. In his day, he was respected and revered. When you read about him you often read sentences like “the Senate was Russell’s mistress, his true and only love”; and indeed he never married, bore no children, and seems to have spent his waking hours thinking almost exclusively of how to bring honor and dignity to what we’ve long since stopped calling the world’s greatest deliberative body.

     And sometimes, he did bring honor upon that body. His chairmanship of a special joint committee into President Truman’s firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur is considered a model of deliberative bipartisanship. It was a highly sensitive time that carried a Seven Days in May kind of whiff about it—MacArthur wanted to invade China and enjoyed a huge popular following. It was an easy situation to demagogue, and Russell did not. So yes, he did good.

     But: He was a racist and a segregationist who, precisely because of the esteem in which he was held high even by Yankees for other reasons, may have done more to hold back civil rights and integration in this country than any other single individual, including Strom Thurmond and anyone else you care to name. Thurmond wrote the initial draft of the infamous 1956 Southern Manifesto, the resolution signed by Southern senators and House members stating their support for segregation and their refusal to obey Brown v. Board of Education. But Russell rewrote a lot of it and was a key or even the key figure in rounding up the votes against civil rights legislation.

     He was a white supremacist—not a cross-burning white supremacist, but a white supremacist all the same. Does that sound harsh? Well, here (PDF) is something Russell said while campaigning in 1936, when his opponent was accusing him of supporting New Deal programs that would promote integration: “As one who was born and reared in the atmosphere of the Old South, with six generations of my forebears now resting beneath Southern soil, I am willing to go as far and make as great a sacrifice to preserve and insure white supremacy in the social, economic, and political life of our state as any man who lives within her borders.”

     He opposed every piece of civil rights legislation that came his way. In fact, he had participated in his first anti-civil-rights filibuster the year before that 1936 election, when he helped block an anti-lynching law. He helped block another anti-lynching law in 1938. After the war, according to political scientist Robert D. Loevy in his To End All Segregation, Russell was the leader of the Southern bloc. Want to understand how committed he was to that position? In 1952, he could have become part of the Democratic Party’s Senate leadership structure. But going national in that way meant, as he knew, that he would have to soften his views on race. He refused.

     And that’s a person who deserves to be honoured in Washington itself?

     Defense attorneys repeat call to remove Freddie Gray case from Baltimore, citing ‘media frenzy’. Personally, I think they’re just scared.

     “The feeling of unrest among city residents is still chillingly evident as violent crime continues to climb to the highest level in decades, police and community relations remain embattled, and Freddie Gray remains fresh in the minds of Baltimore City citizens,” the officers’ attorneys wrote.

     Mugshots for the six officers “continue to frequent the local newspapers and TV news broadcasts,” they wrote, and publicity surrounding the case and the associated unrest “has not subsided and shows no signs of stopping.”

     The filing is the latest in a back-and-forth argument between attorneys about whether the case should be heard outside Baltimore, where the officers arrested Gray in April.

     […]

     The defense attorneys said that prejudices in the community about the unrest that came following Gray’s death can’t be separated from the case against the officers, even if prosecutors are right that several factors contributed to the unrest.

     “Although there is no question that the general unrest and disenfranchisement of Baltimore City residents stems from a number of social and economic issues, there is no doubt that but for the arrest and subsequent death of Freddie Gray the protests and riots would not have taken place in Baltimore City,” the officers’ attorneys wrote.

     They also reasserted that there are only 276,029 eligible jurors in Baltimore, while prosecutors have cited a much larger regional population total. They included in their filing a letter from Robb Holt, of the Court Operations Department of the Administrative Office of the Courts, corroborating the number.

     Race and Poverty, via the Equal Justice Initiative.

     The history of racial inequality and economic injustice in the United States has created continuing challenges for all Americans and we believe more must be done to advance our collective goal of equal justice for all. EJI’s calendar, A History of Racial Injustice, focuses on African American history and is part of an EJI series of forthcoming reports and documents that explore the legacy of racial bias in the United States and its continuing impact on contemporary policies and practices.

     The lives of African Americans have been profoundly shaped by the era of slavery, the era of racial terror that continued from the end of Reconstruction until World War II, the era of Jim Crow and racial apartheid that produced the civil rights movement, and now the era of mass incarceration. Too often we have appropriately celebrated black achievement and triumph in the face of these obstacles without exploring the very difficult reality of racial inequality and subordination. EJI believes a deeper understanding of this history is necessary for us to achieve the truth and reconciliation that overcoming historic injustice requires.

     EJI’s race and poverty work focusing on mass incarceration continues. In America, one out of every three black men born in 2001 will go to jail or prison if current trends continue. Black men are more than six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men. Nearly a third of black men in Alabama have lost the right to vote after being convicted of a felony. Without reform, it is estimated that 40% of the black male population in the State of Alabama will be permanently disenfranchised due to a criminal conviction.

     During the last 40 years, mass incarceration policies have devastated poor and minority communities. Disenfranchisement of offenders and the erection of permanent barriers for employment and re-entry have created a growing underclass of largely poor people.

     EJI is committed to challenging racially discriminatory policies, sentencing, and tactics that have made mass imprisonment a crisis in many communities of color. Indigent defense reform and providing legal assistance to the poor is vital to alleviate the problems caused by unfair criminal justice policies. EJI addresses these issues through education, community outreach efforts, litigation, and policy reform.

     Paula Deen Criticized for Posting Photo of Son in “Brownface”

     Paula Deen is garnering criticism after she posted a photograph of herself and her son Bobby dressed up like I Love Lucy’s Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. Deen’s son’s face is painted brown, presumably in order to look like he is of Latino descent.

     The caption accompanying the photo reads, “Lucyyyyyyy! You got a lot of esplainin’ to do!” with the hashtag “#TransformationTuesday.” People on Twitter were quick to respond with their complaints. “Oh god you did not,” said one Twitter user. “Paula, *you* have a lot of esplainin’ to do,” said another.

     “Holy shit is that brownface,” said a Twitter user who prompted a conversation about the “brownface” term.

     More at the link.

396. rq says

     7 July 2015 at 2:08 pm

     We can confront and overcome bias and discrimination. Please join us in this conversation. http://youtu.be/r4e_djVSag4 #SlaveryEvolved, that link is to a youtube video from the Equal Justice Initiative.

     Grand jury adds 3 attempted murder charges for Charleston church shooting suspect Dylann Roof

     Dylann Roof will face at least three more charges in state court after a grand jury indicted him Tuesday morning in the attempted murder of the three people who survived the mass shooting last month at a historic black church in Charleston.

     Roof, 21, had already been arrested on nine murder counts and a charge of using a firearm in a violent crime after authorities said he opened fire during a June 17 Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Calhoun Street.

     He was indicted on those charges, but authorities sought and received three attempted murder counts as well, 9th Circuit Solicitor announced Tuesday morning.

     Twelve people were in the room when Roof started shooting, investigators said. The three who survived were not injured. He reportedly told one of them that he would let her live so she could tell everyone what happened.

     28 people and publications you can trust for reliable and accurate news

     It’s no secret that most mass news outlets lack dedication to reporting accurately, especially when it comes to black news. Luckily, social media has helped to bring pertinent news to the forefront. Below is a list of social media journalists, news anchors, contributors and online news outlets that have a track record of reporting the news accurately.

     Goes through various media, like twitter, media hosts and regular contributors, and online news sources.

     Judge wants Confederate flag removed from car tags

     Montgomery County Judge Steven Reed plans to ask Gov. Robert Bentley to go a step further in the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the Capitol by proposing the symbol be removed from any state-issued license plate.

     Reed made the announcement in front of the County Commission and a large audience during the public session Monday.

     “It’s past due, and it’s something that is overdue and I think it’s a past relic that really shows division,” Reed said. “Many of us find it to be offensive and in bad taste.”

     Bentley quietly removed four Confederate battle flags from the State’s Confederate War Memorial following the Charleston massacre of nine people at a church in South Carolina.

     Questions over the display of the Confederate flag began after photos surfaced of the accused shooter, a young white man, posing with symbols of white supremacy, including the Confederate battle flag.

     Although the County Commission has no power to change the design of the tags, Reed wanted to ask Bentley in a public forum to discontinue tags with the Confederate flag on them, saying the governor has the authority.

     Tags displaying the symbol are for the Sons of the Confederate Veterans organization.

     The only other way to discontinue a state license plate is if it fails to sell a minimum requirement of tags.

     That’s in Montgomery.

     Now Marion County: Confederate flag flies again in Marion County

     Marion County commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday to once again fly the Confederate flag at the county’s government complex.

     The flag was taken down last week and temporarily replaced with a flag with the seal of Marion County.

     Commissioners on Tuesday said they planned to meet with the county’s historic commission to discuss placing markers near the flag to explain its historic significance.

     The Civil War-era flag has been under attack since nine black men and women were gunned down at a historic church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17. The suspect, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, had posed with a Confederate flag in photos posted on a website that displayed a racist manifesto attributed to him.

     The Confederate flag is one of five flags often displayed in Florida. The other four are Spanish, French, British and American flags.

     “We live in America, and last time I checked it was a democracy. So, here in Marion County, which has what 300,000 people, how can one man decide to take it off a flagpole?” pondered David Stone, with the Florida Southern Pride Ride.

     “I think it should be removed,” said Monaco Benjamin. “What value does it have to us now? That was years ago, and so many things have changed.”

     So the Marion County seal isn’t good enough, for some reason.

397. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     7 July 2015 at 5:46 pm

     rq @395:
     Holy wow! That promo for MisSpelled was amazing. They found some diverse actresses, both in body size and ethnicity and they all had distinct personalities. I was drawn in from the first 5 seconds. I could totally watch that show.

398. WMDKitty -- Survivor says

     8 July 2015 at 12:38 am

     rq @384

     AMAZING – man apologizes for unabashedly displaying the confederate flag in the past. It’s really tiny type. :( But it’s a good story.

     Josh Clark’s apology letter reads as follows.

     Something has been weighing pretty heavily on me the past few days. I have had a few small discussions on the issue, but haven’t gotten too fr into it. I wanted to share this, not for attention, but because I thought it needed to be done.

     It’s no big secred to my friends that I love to hunt, fish, camp and do pretty much anything outdoors. I have always considered myself to be a country boy stuck in the city. One of the ways that I used to show pride for my lifestyle was wearing t-shirts with the Confederate/Rebel flag on them. In high school, I even had a bumper sticker on my truck that read “Keep It Flying”. I had grown up seeing the flag regularly, and although I had seen it used in negative ways on occasion, I chose to accept the “Heritage not Hate” and “Pride not Prejudice” interpretation of the flag. If you had asked me back then, I would’ve told you that it was a symbol of southern pride and had nothing to do with racism.

     I was raised pretty close to downtown Nashville and grew up with kids of all races with all kinds of backgrounds. I played baseball, basketball and football on teams where sometimes whites were minorities. I am very thankful for this. As I continue to grow and learn, I realize that we tend to fear things just because we don’t understand them. Because of where and how I was raised, I never feared people of other color or background. I was able to realize that we are all the same underneath. I have had white friends, black friends, Asian friends, Middle Eastern friends, Latino friends, Christian friends, Muslim friends, Atheist friends, etc. Thankfully, I have never had a racist bone in my body.

     It wasn’t until well into my college years when I began to start thinking for myself. I no longer let the people I was raised by tell me how to view every issue and tried my best to be more open-minded. I believe that one of the most important things for us to do as humans is to try putting ourselves in others’ shoes before we make any kind of judgement.

     Although I never meant anything racist by sporting the Confederate Flag, I couldn’t help but think of what some of my black friends thought about it. I really can’t think of a time that I was confronted about it. Did it not offend them? Were they too nice or afraid to confront me about it? The more I researched about the history of the flag, the worse I felt. What I had been told about history was wrong. Thousands of southerners still fly the flag with no racist intent. They still defend the good things they’ve been told about the flag. They, like I once was, are WRONG. The flag is a symbol of a way of life that was wrong. Not that it needs to be stated, but slaver is one of the most evil and cruel things this world has ever seen. The Confederate flag represents this evil. Where is the pride in that? The Confederate flag is also a sign of division. How can you truly be a patriot of this country and fly this flag? Do we really need to fly a flag to show that we are southern, or that we like to hunt and fish, especially when it’s offensive to so many? It is not a kind thing, a good thing, or the right thing to do.

     To those against removing the flag, I do not think you are a bad person. I know what it once meant to me. I do, however, challenge you to do your research. Step outside of what your family taught you and be open-minded. Even if you believe in a different history lesson, is fly a flag worth the pain it causes others? Please try to view these issues from the other side of the argument.

     To those I may have offended in the past, who never confronted me, I apologize. I was WRONG.

     As our country continues to move forward on equality issues, I believe that the only place for the Confederate flag is in our history books.

     The post itself is on his facebook page

399. rq says

     8 July 2015 at 2:19 am

     Haha Thanks, WMDKitty, you and your eyes!! :) (Or Facebook, whichever.)

400. WMDKitty -- Survivor says

     8 July 2015 at 3:01 am

     I’ll admit to sometimes using the screen magnifier. I don’t have super-good eyesight, just some pretty nifty adaptive technology at my fingertips.

     If there’s one thing I have to love about Microsoft, it’s their Accessibility features. Things like voice recognition are built in to the OS, right there and ready to use.

401. rq says

     8 July 2015 at 4:52 am

     Why Memorializing America’s History of Racism Matters

     Driving back to Washington, D.C., from Richmond, Virginia, this Independence Day weekend, I decided to take U.S. Route 1, also known as Jefferson Davis Highway—named for the one and only president of the Confederate States of America. Along the way, my family counted no less than a dozen monuments and markers commemorating areas where important Confederate soldiers marched, defended forts, were maimed, or were killed.

     Along the same Richmond-to-D.C. route, we spotted one marker honoring an African American, located in Fredericksburg, Virginia, distinguishing where civil rights leader James Farmer once lived (long after the Civil War). We wondered why there weren’t more markers identifying places where African Americans had also put in footwork and shed blood. Most of the monuments we found had the United Daughters of the Confederacy stamp and/or a Virginia state seal on them.

     An L.A. Times article reminded me that people including Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the legal nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, are working on plans to have more monuments erected across America memorializing sites of black oppression and resistance to racial terrorism. Earlier this year, EJI released a report documenting the locations of close to 4,000 lynchings, mostly during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War. One of the key findings of that report:

     We observed that there is an astonishing absence of any effort to acknowledge, discuss, or address lynching. Many of the communities where lynchings took place have gone to great lengths to erect markers and monuments that memorialize the Civil War, the Confederacy, and historical events during which local power was violently reclaimed by white Southerners. These communities celebrate and honor the architects of racial subordination and political leaders known for their belief in white supremacy. There are very few monuments or memorials that address the history and legacy of lynching in particular or the struggle for racial equality more generally. Most communities do not actively or visibly recognize how their race relations were shaped by terror lynching.

     L.A. Times reporter John M. Glionna wrote of the lynchings described in the EJI report, “The spectacles were as vicious as any modern Islamic State video.”

     The realization of the plan to erect monuments at lynching sites has been “slow going,” writes Glionna, due to “low-level hostile, menacing resistance” Stevenson says he’s met in certain cities where he’s proposed this idea. He was able to convince the city council of Brighton, a small municipality outside of Montgomery, Alabama, to place a marker for a black worker lynched in 1908.

     […]

     Will bringing down Confederate flags and monuments actually change anything?

     The short answer to that is, “Yes,” even if it is only a change to design and landscape, and how that affects quality of living. If Jefferson Davis’s name was stripped from the highway and it was cleared of all Confederate markers, that wouldn’t solve racism. Then again, the people who live and drive along that stretch wouldn’t be reminded daily of the efforts of an army militarized primarily for the cause of enslaving African Americans.

     On our drive to back to D.C., my wife and I had to fill in the blanks for our 12-year-old son on all of the history missing between each Confederate marker we encountered (Thanks, iPhone and Google!). We didn’t mind doing this, but our mobile history-telling efforts would have been helped greatly had there been more monuments along the route honoring African Americans—a glaring omission that was much more difficult to explain away.

     Muslim charities are helping to raise money for burned black churches in the US

     Eight black churches have been burned down since the Charleston shootings, and Muslim charities have succeeded in their goal to raise $20,000 in an effort to rebuild them.

     At the time of writing the project, launched last Thursday, has raised $21,688 (£14,000) from 495 contributors, making the mean donation in the region of $44.

     A statement on the fundraising page said:

     All houses of worship are sanctuaries, a place where all should feel safe, a place we can seek refuge when the world is too much to bear.

     We are calling on you to help add our support to faith communities across the country pooling their resources to rebuild these churches.

     As Muslims we know the importance of protecting the vulnerable and respecting people who call on God in their various tongues.

     We must always keep in mind that the Muslim community and the black community are not different communities.

     We are profoundly integrated in many ways, in our overlapping identities and in our relationship to this great and complicated country.

     Three of the church burnings have been ruled arsons and the others are still under investigation.

     And people ask, What does the black community do to combat black-on-black crime? ‘Army of Moms’ Starts Patrolling South Side After Shooting

     An army of mothers started patrolling their neighborhood on Monday, gathering on corners after a shooting.

     Mothers Against Senseless Killings volunteers in pink shirts were sitting in folding chairs and leaning against a mailbox at 75th Street and Harvard Avenue on Monday, hoping to prevent a violent retaliation after the death of Lucille Barnes a week ago.

     “People are very emotional about it, and we don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Tamar Manasseh. “If people say there will be violence, there likely will be violence, and you go where you’re called.”

     […]

     “If you’re trying to shoot someone and we’re out here, you’re not getting off the block,” said Manasseh, who grew up on the northern edge of Englewood at Garfield Boulevard and Bishop Street.

     The group plans to plant itself on the corner for four hours, beginning at from 4 p.m., and return every day until Labor Day.

     When the next shooting happens and there’s chatter of retaliation, the “army of mothers” as Manasseh calls them, will move and make sure the neighborhood knows that moms are watching.

     The group brought grills and hot dogs, but no police. The idea was to show in unmistakable terms that the message to would-be shooters is coming from within the community.

     “This is about mothers reconnecting with children that haven’t been mothered that much,” Manasseh said. “Take away the guns, and they’re just kids.”

     […]

     The Mothers Against Senseless Killings view is that guns are a symptom of a bigger problem: Parents have given up their authority to their children and now fear them when after seeing what teens will do with that power.

     “It has to be a change in mindset; it can’t just be taking the guns away,” Manasseh said. “What is the alternative? What does it look like if it gets worse? A bulletproof vest in 2T at Target for your 2-year-old?”

     To see that mindset in action doesn’t look like much. It turns the volume down dramatically from anti-violence marches and protests.

     The women chatted and groused about the grills being late and there only being mediums of the T-shirts. But they also transmitted authority, vigilance and presence.

     “A mother’s love is selfless, annoying and always there,” Manasseh said. “This is what mothers do best, get in the way.”

     I’m just wondering how easy it is for some mothers to mother (and fathers to father) if they’re struggling to hold down jobs and the like. I’m glad these women are trying to do something to keep the community safer, but I’m afraid that maybe some of their criticism lacks depth.

     4 Black Woman-Produced YouTube Cooking Channels You Watch Right Now, for anyone interested in healthy recipes!

     After Charleston-Letters from Our Readers, with 5 pages of letters.
     Excerpt page 1:

     When the last Confederate flag is pulled down from its lofty perch atop a Southern capitol building, the Emanuel 9 will not rise from the dead. We know this. Yet, the call for the removal of the Confederate flag has dominated the reaction to the June 17, 2015, massacre of the nine Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church members. Americans have since engaged in debates around whether the flag represents the hatred of alleged killer Dylan Roof or genteel Southern heritage.

     And none of it actually matters.

     The clamor to take down the Confederate flag across the South has little to do with the Emanuel 9. It is rather a reactionary move to assuage the national conscience. I pondered the sudden push to re-evaluate the flag’s meaning. Surely, I thought, the flag meant the same the day before the attacks as it did the day afterward.

     On October 14, 2014, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley indicated in a gubernatorial debate that she did not believe the Confederate flag should stop flying—business owners weren’t offended by it. Apparently commerce was her rubric for racism. As is her right, Governor Haley changed her mind after the shooting at Mother Emanuel. She was the first public official on June 22 to call for its removal. A stampede of politicians have followed her lead, as well as businesses like Walmart, Target, Etsy, Amazon, and Apple.

     All this jockeying to be right happened because it is politically expedient. Officials cannot in good conscience find a defense for flying a flag associated with the suspect of a massacre. The reactive move for change is nothing new. In fact, the reactions to the Emanuel 9 tragedy mirror the history of Black martyrdom spurring White American justice.

     […]

     Perhaps what is most grievous about this pattern of reactionary redress is the fear that White Americans will never willingly fulfill America’s promise of “justice for all.” Too many White Americans must see their own violence enacted on Black bodies before they believe inequity. And Black people must die by 1,000 cuts until one death blow awakens the national White conscience. This is how justice has always been handed down to Black folk in the US: slowly, painstakingly, tardily, and with the smug self-congratulations of White people who think they are doing Black people a favor by giving us a fraction of restorative justice. And it will ever be so, as long as we look to them in supplication.

     Excerpt page 2:

     I was just taking a friend home after prom, but we both knew anything was liable to happen. Looking back on it now, especially given that my car broke down in the middle of that same foggy night, I don’t know how I got us both in potentially the stupidest and most dangerous situation of our lives. We should have just stayed at my house. The Rebel Flag told us that we should have, and it was now the Rebel Flag that was reminding us precisely why. Pickup trucks covered with racist bumper stickers and symbols passed us up in a very Samaritan fashion until a police car quietly inched up behind the vehicle.

     “Ya’ll havin’ car trouble?” she said with a smile. I let her know there was no way my iPhone 3GS had service and she let me call my aunt to pick us up. I’m not sure if the blur is the result of my memory or not, but flashes of red and blue followed us all night.

     I’m telling this story simply to help you understand how I, a now 23-year-old young black man, see the Confederate Flag. I see it both literally and metaphorically as a racist symbol in the fog of Blackjack, GA. And this symbolism extends beyond the borders of Georgia, as the entire southern half of the United States is peppered with racist memorabilia. My thoughts on the Confederate flag are simple: it symbolizes racism, anarchy, and failure, and should be regarded as such. The symbol itself belongs nowhere but in a museum, where it can truly be understood in context. And by “nowhere but” I mean in not one U.S. capital, not one public office, and all southern flags bearing the likeness of it need be redesigned. If we’re going to stamp it out, let’s stamp it out.

     Excerpt page 3:

     It’s hard being the only black person in a predominantly white space sometimes. I did it for much of my life with little friction, but in this period of American history it’s harder. I wish my colleagues had said something. Something at all. Something that made me believe that they understand or are at least cognizant of the reality of black people in America in 2015. I’m hard-pressed to believe that you can serve people without knowing or caring about the context that colors their lives.

     I finally confided in my manager as I let her know I was taking the afternoon off and she listened. She acknowledged the shittiness of the situation and said she understood why the past few days had been less than stellar for me. She looked as if she was at a loss for words, rightfully so, and asked what I would want to hear. I paused.

     I wasn’t going to tell her about the countless Wednesday night services that I attended when I was younger or how this later murder hurts because I can imagine me, myself, or my family and friends in that service or how this past year has been a barrage of names and pleas for black lives to matter. I just told her I wanted people to acknowledge the enormous wrong that took place not across the ocean, but in our country. I just wanted people at a minimum to acknowledge what happened. I’m still waiting.

     Excerpt page 4:

     Though we often regard police brutality as the modern day lynching, which is a totally valid comparison, actual lynching and its legacy has not left us. This very year a 54 year old man name Otis Byrd was found hanging from a tree in Mississippi. May we never forget James Byrd Jr. who in 1998 was beaten, chained to the back of truck by white supremacists, and dragged for 3 miles. Or Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chanting about lynching earlier this year. In August of 2014, a 17 year old Lennon Lacy was found hanging from a tree in North Carolina. In April of this year a Duke student admitted to hanging a noose from a tree outside of a student center. Also this year, Robert Tomanovich placed a Confederate flag and two nooses outside of his business. He refused to apologize and said that the did it to “honor” a friend who hung himself, which is, of course, absurd.

     Excerpt page 5:

     If you listen with intent, you can still hear the Friendship Nine calling for freedom and liberty. But you have to listen. If you listen just enough, you can hear Strom Thurmond’s Carolina drawl, spitting the language of segregation. South Carolina has forever been in the business of oppressing black voices and bodies. The shooting at Emanuel AME was an act of terrorism. But nothing about that night is novel. And the state of South Carolina must own up to this. The state has to come to terms with its white supremacist heritage and its unending violence against black bodies, and own it the way it does its “southern charm. South Carolina, if monuments and symbols are any indication, never really stopped being a Confederate state. The confederate flag, the symbol of American sedition, accompanies a memorial to Confederate soldiers who fought to maintain slavery as law.

     Nine beautiful and amazing souls were killed in one of the most important black churches in our history—the site of freedom dreams for thousands of blacks in the state—under the purview of a Confederate heritage the state refuses to let die. South Carolina seceded from the Union because it did not want to stop owning, brutalizing and raping black bodies. It is that simple. South Carolina wanted impunity for its treatment of black bodies as profit.

402. rq says

     8 July 2015 at 5:11 am

     Demonstrators chanting “take down the flag,” while delivering signed petitions to governor. #ConfederateFlag

     New SWAT Documents Give Snapshot of Ugly Militarization of U.S. Police

     The documents include after-action reports from 79 SWAT operations between August 2012 and June 2014 by the Northeastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council, or NEMLEC, a consortium of police departments covering 925 square miles in Middlesex and Essex Counties outside Boston. According to NEMLEC, its SWAT team exists to respond to “critical incidents,” mainly “active shooters, armed barricaded subjects, hostage takers, and terrorists.”

     However, an examination of the records by the The Intercept demonstrates that such critical incidents are few and far between in Northeast Massachusetts. Nonetheless, SWAT teams frequently roll out in “NEMLEC Communities,” carried in BearCat armored response vehicles and armed with flash-bang grenades.

     Just one of the 79 SWAT deployments in 2012-14 — assistance with the search for the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing — involved terrorism. Other SWAT actions during that period show no hostage situations, no active shooters and only 10 non-suicidal barricaded subjects.

     About half of the remaining cases involved everyday and often mundane police activity, including executing warrants, dealing with expected rioting after a 2013 Red Sox World Series game, and providing security for a Dalai Lama lecture. In one mission, 15 SWAT team members roved through Salem’s Halloween celebrations looking out for unspecified “gang-related activity,” but were warned by their commanders to maintain a “professional demeanor” given that “everyone has a camera phone and you don’t want to be on YouTube or the news later.”

     The remaining 37 SWAT actions were either proactive drug operations, initiated by local police, or suicide response operations.

     […]

     Indeed, of the 21 SWAT narcotics warrant operations detailed in the documents, only five of them even mention recovering drugs. And the largest of these finds was five ounces of cocaine and 61 grams of heroin — hardly the stash of the next Sinaloa Cartel.

     And despite the pettiness of their operations, the NEMLEC SWAT teams’ forceful tactics would make one think they were on the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

     More than half of the SWAT teams’ drug operations were initiated at 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. Furthermore, of the 22 narcotics operations detailed in the documents over the two years, 14 included warrants authorizing SWAT teams to conduct “no knock” raids and four authorizing “knock and announce” raids — both of which are forceful entry options that have made national headlines for the accidental killings, injuries, and trauma they can produce.

     […]

     In fact, though police departments often cite dangerous armed threats to justify SWAT involvement in seemingly low-level warrant operations, data from the NEMLEC documents suggest this danger is exaggerated. Of the 33 search or arrest warrant operations conducted by NEMLEC’s SWAT units between 2012 and 2014, only four found any firearms — all of them pistols, handguns, or revolvers.

     And even in these four cases the response sometimes appears disproportionate to the risk. For example, in a December 2013 “emergency call-out,” a 28-person SWAT team used a BearCat vehicle in an operation to “contain” a disabled, wheelchair-bound man who had been accused of shooting at a woman’s car with a revolver in a dispute over pain medication.

     Armed with tasers, long arms, a shotgun, 40mm less-lethal rounds, shields and battering rams, the SWAT unit rolled up to his apartment and were let in by one of the suspect’s associates. When the suspect did not open his bedroom door despite promising to do so, a shield team smashed their way in, only to find the suspect having difficulties getting up from his bed due to physical disabilities. The report reads, “The suspect was contained by the team and given the opportunity to get dressed and remove his catheter.” (The team later found the revolver between the head of the bed and the wall.)

     NEMLEC did not respond to several requests for comment. In a peculiar twist, when the SWAT documents were first requested by the ACLU in 2012 under Massachusetts’ open government laws, NEMLEC claimed it was a private corporation and hence beyond the laws’ reach. The ACLU filed a lawsuit last year, and in a recent settlement NEMLEC reversed its position and released the records. According to Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty project at the ACLU of Massachusetts, “It’s critical for the public to have reports like this on a routine basis. There’s been a pretty robust debate about the militarization of the police, but it’s very difficult for the public to have an accurate picture of raids because we don’t hear about the day-to-day grind of SWAT teams in the drug war. Transparency is absolutely critical for oversight.”

     Robert E. Lee HS student starts petition to rename school

     After hearing Housing and Urban Development Secretary and former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro weigh in on the name last month, she started a petition to try to make it happen.

     She hopes to get 1,000 signatures on her online petition by August’s school board meeting. So far, she has more than 600.

     “Our mascot is a Confederate soldier, and also the name of our dancers and cheerleaders — Dixie Drillers and Rebel Rousers — I just think that’s a little bit inappropriate,” said Kayla Wilson. “I have been contacted by alumni and people in San Antonio and they (agree that) the name should have been changed a long time ago. It’s long overdue for a name change.”

     She said she also wants the mosaic Confederate flag removed from the school’s courtyard.

     Aubrey Chancellor, executive director of communications at North East Independent School District, in which Lee High School is located, said the mosaic flag was a gift from the class of 1970, and its future is up in the air due to a construction project in the courtyard area at the school.

     She also said the name change is not up for discussion.

     “Generations of families have graduated from Lee High School since 1958. It has a rich tradition, a long-standing history, and the alums have really made their voices clear that they do not want to change the name,” Chancellor said. “There are many petitions circulating right now. One of them is in favor of keeping the name, not changing it, and it has more than 2,000 signatures.”

     Wilson said she hopes to change only part of Lee High School’s name to George W. Lee, a civil rights activist.

     54 yrs ago today I was released from Parchman after being arrested in Jackson for using “white” restroom #goodtrouble

     White men are: 31% of Americans. 66% of police officers. 95% of prosecutors. 65% of all elected officials. Institutional. Racism.

     Cosby-Free Ben’s Chili Bowl Opens Wednesday on H Street NE

     Ben’s Chili Bowl will begin serving half-smokes at its largest location yet on Wednesday. A full-service dining area on the second floor and a rooftop bar are coming in the next two to three months.

     Like the Rossyln location that opened last year, the newest Ben’s has framed photos of bold face names who’ve visited the original outpost over the years as well as a timeline on the wall of the restaurant’s history. Notably missing is Bill Cosby, whose image is prominently featured on a similar timeline at the Rosslyn location. The TV star, who has been the subject of multiple rape allegations, admitted to obtaining drugs to give to sexual targets, according to court documents, the Associated Press reported yesterday.

     Co-owner Nizam Ali declined to comment on anything related to Cosby, including whether the longtime Ben’s patron will continue to eat free. The restaurant has long had a policy that Cosby, whose face is painted on the side of the U Street location, is the only person who eats for free. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the Obama family was also added to that exclusive list. Cosby was also present at a ribbon-cutting for the Rosslyn opening. Ali declined to comment on whether Cosby was invited to tomorrow’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, which will feature the Chuck Brown Band and Mayor Muriel Bowser.

403. rq says

     8 July 2015 at 5:22 am

     ‘My Mother Told Me Never To Marry A Black Woman’: How Race Works In The Dominican Republic, on racism in the Dominican.

     Like most Dominicans, Roque Feliz has skin that, while dark, is not quite what his countrymen would call “black.” A heavyset man with full lips and close-cropped gray hair, Feliz says his mother told him never to marry a black woman, even though his father was black.

     “‘We have to refine our race,’ she used to tell me,” Feliz said in an interview with The WorldPost.

     Feliz, the director of a social justice and education institution called Centro Bonó that has played a key role in advocating for Haitian migrant rights, doesn’t endorse that view. But he stops short of using the word “racist” to describe the society he lives in, and the government that presides over it. Instead, he describes these aspects of Dominican life as the lingering vestiges of a society that once privileged European culture and race above the Dominican Republic’s mixed-race and largely Afro-descended majority.

     “In the Dominican Republic, we don’t have racist policies,” Feliz said. “Nevertheless, there are remnants of racist practices, just like in the rest of Latin America.”

     Maribel Núñez, who is black, has another way of describing the same phenomenon: “I live in an apartheid state.”

     Núñez, an independent journalist and the director of the activist group Afro-Dominican Action, sees the evidence of racism at every level of Dominican society, from the atypically light skin of its presidents to the beauty salons that spend much of their time ironing out hair so it won’t look kinky like hers. Bouncers at clubs sometimes tell black people that there’s no room inside while letting lighter-skinned people through, she says. She feels suspicious eyes following her when she enters upscale stores.

     “The oligarchy that runs this country is a white oligarchy,” Núñez told The WorldPost. “There’s a lot of rejection of blackness in this country… It’s a form of self-hatred.”

     […]

     A nationalist group has burned Haitian flags at protests. Reporters sympathetic to the plight of immigrants and their stateless children have received death threats. In February, as the controversy over a plan to naturalize the children of undocumented Haitians reached a climax, the body of a Haitian man was found hanging in a park in the city of Santiago, apparently the victim of a lynching.

     Less extreme signs of racially or nationally motivated anti-Haitian sentiment are also easy to spot. Graffiti stenciled along a main artery in the capital reads, “No more Haitians = more work and less crime.” A widely held conspiracy theory posits that the United States, in concert with France, aims to unify the island under one Haitian-dominated government.

     Some see Haitians and Dominicans as fundamentally different types of people. Carlos González, a 25-year-old resident of Santo Domingo who runs a gas-supply company, says that while he has several Haitian friends, he doesn’t fully trust them.

     “I’m not racist, I don’t discriminate,” González told The WorldPost. “I have lots of Haitian friends, including undocumented ones whom I’ve helped to get their papers in order. I can go to their homes, spend time with them. But I can’t completely trust them, because you help a Haitian today and he hurts you later. It’s in their blood.”

     Others say their animosity toward Haitians is based on politics, not biology — although their disparaging tone is the same.

     […]

     Danilo Contreras, a postdoctoral fellow who studies race and ethnicity in the Dominican Republic at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, also pinpoints the early 20th century and the era of Trujillo as the time when anti-Haitian sentiment changed fundamentally, becoming “racialized.” In addition to Trujillo’s often overtly racist rhetoric, he said, Haitians became closely associated around this time with low-wage labor, especially in the sugar industry, after the U.S. invasions of the Dominican Republic and Haiti in the early 20th century.

     Still, Contreras urges people to avoid taking a narrow view when trying to understand the role of race in the conflict over the place of Haitians and their descendants in the Dominican Republic.

     “It’s a very complicated issue,” Contreras told The WorldPost. “Nation and race in the Dominican Republic have been intertwined for many years. Oftentimes we get these kind of one-dimensional explanations, in which it’s either all about race or it’s all about nationalism. Anti-Haitianism is about race in some respects, but anti-Haitianism has not always been racialized. And it’s also a classic immigration problem.”

     Baltimore police order stations to stay open 24/7 after citizen complaint, that’s in response to the complaint I posted up yesterday.

     Baltimore police commanders on Tuesday ordered all city police stations to stay open around the clock after the story of a man who said he was robbed of his bicycle and found the nearest station closed drew concern from community leaders and elected officials.

     Col. Darryl DeSousa, the department’s patrol chief, ordered all nine of the city’s district stations to “maintain lobbies that are accessible to the public 24-hours a day” — with someone there to speak to anyone who shows up.

     Police would not say how much the change would cost in money or manpower. The department spends tens of millions of dollars each year on overtime.

     […]

     “It’s just hard to live in the city and pay taxes and buy a house next to the police station because you want that security, and then this is how they treat you,” Meek said in an interview Tuesday. “It’s just an us-versus-them mentality, police versus the citizens.”

     His story struck a chord among officials. City Councilman Ed Reisinger — who represents parts of Southwest and South Baltimore — said stations are a “sanctuary” for people in trouble, and shouldn’t close overnight like a business.

     “This ain’t no damn restaurant,” he said. “That is stupid with a capital ‘S.’ That jeopardizes public safety when you do that. What’s next, the hospitals? The ambulances?”

     Councilman Brandon M. Scott, vice chairman of the council’s public safety committee, said police stations “should have always been 24/7,” and Meek’s efforts to get help should have been handled differently.

     “Telling him to go away is unacceptable,” Scott said.

     Police officials said they agreed. Detective Jeremy Silbert, a police spokesman, called the incident “alarming and disappointing,” and said the department is investigating.

     “We want to assure our communities the Baltimore Police Department is here to serve them and ensure their safety, regardless of the time of day,” he said in a statement.

     “Some districts have had to temporarily close their front desks during the overnight hours due to manpower shortages,” he said, but that will end.

     Howard Libit, a spokesman for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, said the mayor “agrees that this is something that should be looked into, and that it is unacceptable.”

     Police stations in Baltimore, Howard and Harford counties are open at all hours, officials there said.

     “Because public safety issues can arise at any hour of the day or night, our precincts are accessible to the public at any hour of the day or night,” said Elise Armacost, a Baltimore County police spokeswoman.

     Police stations in Baltimore have been open around the clock in the past, city officials said, but hours have changed over the years.

     And something else that might impact poor communities disproportionately, Rising cost of overdose treatment drug alarms city

     Baltimore officials and others are alarmed at a nearly a fourfold jump in the cost of a drug used to save the lives of people who have overdosed on heroin — a price spike that has prompted calls for state and federal action.

     City Health Commissioner Dr. Leana S. Wen says a leading manufacturer of naloxone has since spring raised the 10-dose cost from $97 to $370, with the most recent hike coming last week.

     In a letter this week to a congressional committee, Wen said the increase by Amphastar Pharmaceuticals has contributed to a near-doubling in the overall cost of delivering more than 1,000 doses annually of naloxone, which she calls a “miracle drug” for preventing overdose deaths.

     “This means we can only save half the lives of patients we were able to before,” Wen told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

     […]

     Jason Shandell, president of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.-based Amphastar, defended his company’s price increases.

     “Like other companies in the industry, manufacturing costs for our entire portfolio of products, including naloxone, have been steadily increasing due to the continued rise in costs for raw materials, energy, and labor over the recent several years,” he said by email.

     The drug has become an increasingly important component in a national, state and local response to the wave of overdose deaths from heroin and related drugs that has swept the country in recent years.

     Wen said that as an emergency room doctor she has administered naloxone to dozens of patients whose lives have been saved as the anti-opiate drug took hold in seconds.

     “There are very few poisons in the world for which there is a complete antidote,” she said. But for heroin, fentanyl, oxycontin and other opioid drugs, naloxone is just that, Wen said.

     “For me it’s a very visceral issue,” she said. “We should not delay in getting this medication available to everyone.”

     Kelly E. Dunn, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Medicine’s department of psychiatry and behavioral services, said price increases and shortages have been hampering nationwide efforts to reduce overdose deaths. She said the matter has raised concerns at the Food and Drug Administration.

     “It could be a supply issue, a production issue or just an opportunity to drive the price up,” she said. “Whatever is causing the price increases … it is a very real and serious problem.”

     Wen called it “a federal problem that requires a federal response,” though she did not suggest what that would be.

     Athletes allege abuse and racism at University of Illinois

     They called it the “dog pound.”

     It was a separate practice for women’s basketball players at the University of Illinois, a majority of them black, where athletes were often allegedly harassed and attacked for things that had nothing to do with basketball.

     Like the neighborhoods where they grew up. Or their family life.

     It was common, these women told CNN, for an assistant coach to refer to race, and to tell them their “culture” was “poison” or “toxic” to the starting team, which was predominantly white. During road games, the players say they were segregated — black players separated from the white ones in hotel rooms.

     It was so bad, the women said, four players from this past season transferred out of the program at the University of Illinois to other schools.

     Nearby, at the university’s Memorial Stadium, some members of the football team say they were being harassed too. They recalled two instances where players were physically hit by their coach.

     Another player, with Type 1 diabetes, said he was shamed about his weight.

     […]

     The women’s basketball team lost four girls to transfer this year — all for the same reasons: They allege pervasive emotional abuse.

     Eight former players — seven of them have since sued the university — talked to CNN, and all said that assistant coach Mike Divilbiss verbally attacked players daily, going after them for personal issues such as learning disabilities, family life or the neighborhood in which they grew up. Divilbiss could not be reached for comment.

     “The way he would attack you personally was just horrible,” said Jacqui Grant, a former player.

     “He came after my character,” said former player Alexis Smith, claiming that Divilbiss reprimanded her for moving into the same apartment as two of her teammates who were Bollant’s recruits. “He said, ‘I feel like you are trying to poison these girls. Why did you even move in with them? You are trying to poison them.’ ”

     “When I tried to defend myself,” she added, “he was like, ‘Don’t try to come after me, I’m the wrong person.’ ”

     Kierra Morris, who left the team after being put on medical disability, said the coaches told her they didn’t want her “culture carrying over” to their new recruits.

     Another former player, Amarah Coleman said that race was a constant underlying distinction and that Divilbiss often said things like, “you know how black people play.”

     And another former player, Taylor Tuck, said Divilbiss made a comment about three black players sitting together at a restaurant, saying, “All the black girls are sitting together, that’s segregated.”

     Divilbiss left the university after coming to what administrators call a “mutual understanding” with Bollant, following complaints from some parents, but Bollant remains in his position.

     […]

     The players said those in the “dog pound” were called “crabs,” which, on a conference call, seven of the players explained like this: “Crabs can never get out of a bucket because they always pull each other down. That is how he explained it in practice. … They all just climb on top of each other and pull each other down. Like, bums, we are just dragging everybody down.”

     Coleman said she felt uncomfortable when her team was preparing to play one that was majority African-American, “because coach Divilbiss would single out the blacks on the team to talk about what the other black team was thinking. … The division of the team during that time made it feel like coach was thinking all blacks think alike.”

     She continued with more examples: “In practice when a black player would do a certain move, he (Divilbiss) would make a comment stating ‘that’s the West Side coming out’ (referring to Chicago’s predominantly black West Side). People should be proud of where they are from, but coach was saying it to make fun of where they are from.”

     There’s more at the link, but it sounds like those coaches need to be dismissed.

     Texas Is Debuting Textbooks That Downplay Jim Crow and Frame Slavery as a Side Issue in the Civil War, Slate.

     The embarrassments started five years ago, when the Texas Board of Education (as of last month chaired, incidentally, by a religious homeschooler who has never sent her kids to public school) voted along party lines to sanitize American history from a conservative standpoint. Or, as the leader of the board told the New York Times at the time, “We are adding balance. History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

     The board’s revisions are a very big deal, because Texas isn’t just large in landmass but in population: Three of the 10 largest cities in the country are there. In the new standards passed, said “balance” consisted of upping the Founding Fathers’ commitment to Christianity, referring to capitalism (a term that the board believes has a “negative connotation”) as the “free enterprise system,” and offering a softer take on McCarthyism. And that’s just in social studies; we’ll leave the never-ending campaign to replace the “controversial” subject of evolution with a more measured conversation about intelligent design for another day.

     Most egregious of all was Texas’ recasting of the slave trade as the “Atlantic triangular trade.” The textbooks based on these new standards, which will debut in Texas schools next month, barely touch on the subject of segregation, much less Jim Crow or the KKK, according to a report Sunday in the Washington Post. And the causes of the Civil War get the most distorted treatment of all. From the Post story:

     [C]hildren are supposed to learn that the conflict was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery” — written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict . . . .

     That’s the totally unskewed perspective that will be presented to almost five million Texas students the same summer that Confederate flag-brandishing Dylann Roof gunned down black worshippers at their church in Charleston.

     For fun, A superfan broke onto the ‘Orange is the New Black’ set and recreated some amazing scenes.

404. rq says

     8 July 2015 at 5:42 am

     Jeremiah Wright’s Words Hauntingly Relevant Today

     How best to do that than to use a couple of soundbites by Obama’s then-pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Jr.? The soundbites showing Wright preaching were chosen precisely because his words and his presentation would feed into the fear of black people that racists know well. Surely, the strategists thought, if they could show that Obama was listening to an angry black man who appeared not to buy into the myth of American exceptionalism, the country would be swayed, Obama would lose the election, and things would go back to normal.

     The plan did not work, and although Obama distanced himself from Rev. Wright in order to help his chances of winning the election, the fact of the matter is that Wright’s message of the pervasiveness of racism was spot on… and it still is. America’s refusal to deal with its racism is eating away at its very core, but nobody wants to talk about it.

     Today, however, we see racism in rare form. The shootings of black people by white officers with no accountability, the massacre of the nine innocent people in Charleston, South Carolina, and the burnings of black churches gives the actions of racism front and center stage once again.

     Jeremiah Wright’s ministry was about addressing racism in the context of theological expectations on how to handle it. The power of Wright’s ministry was that he was able to talk and teach about the reality of racial oppression. Black people in America, if the truth be told, really do not want to talk about or hear about racism; the church experience has been, too often, one that celebrates and pushes personal piety in a relationship with Jesus the Christ. Politics and history, and their impact on black people have historically been largely ignored.

     In spite of the fact that racism finds its way into every aspect of American life, blacks and whites have been reluctant to talk about it. The sentiment has seemed to be that if America ignores her racist history, that history will dissipate and disappear. So many black families have refused to talk about the painful experiences due to racism their ancestors have endured, and of course, white America has insisted that racism was “back then” and has complained that black people bring it up too often. To talk about or to acknowledge that something happening is due to racism only draws wrath and impatience from white Americans, and many blacks, who charge that any mention of race is playing “the race card.” Nobody wants to be blamed for doing that and too often, remain silent even when the effects of racism are causing horrific emotional pain and societal ruination.

     Wright, however, refused to be silent. Before him sat people who constantly lived lives of racial discrimination. They were American veterans who had been deemed good enough to fight for America in her wars, but who were discriminated against and often times lynched when they returned home, still in uniform and were refused loans to buy homes. They were the ones who were passed over for jobs or for promotions on those jobs. They were the ones whose children were stuck in second and third rate public schools, or the ones whose children were being arrested and killed in this nation by those who were supposed to protect them, with scarcely a mention in the news. They were, in effect, suffering because of their race, but were not supposed to admit it or talk about it. They were strangers in a land whose economy they helped build. They were in the Midwest, the north, and west, because they had fled being lynched in the South …and they were bruised. The only thing they had to hold onto was God.

     Wright’s messages made their relationship with God different, stronger, and empowering. He gave the history of what had been happening, related it to the oppression which happened throughout the Bible, and even taught that Jesus himself had been a Palestinian Jew, oppressed as they had been, yet forever faithful to Yahweh. Wright had to preach a message that helped African-Americans keep their heads above and out of the putrid waters of racism, so that they could keep on pushing through the oppression to freedom, dignity, and some semblance of success.

     He was angry, as are most African-Americans and others who read about and study what racism has done in this nation. It is a righteous anger, a righteous indignation, no less justified than the anger of Jewish people who were brutalized by Nazism. Any people, or group of people, who are marginalized by their government are angry; the earliest Americans were angry at the British. The anger of African-Americans, however, has been consistently criticized as being unfounded. That being the case, many African-Americans have tried to hide that anger, but that effort has not erased the ugliness of the experiences they have endured..

     The brilliance of Wright’s ministry was that he addressed that anger. He put it in historical, sociological and theological context, and in so doing, freed African Americans to acknowledge the anger and move past it. Wright’s ministry was (and is) one which empowers a people who have endured much and who have kept on beating against the gates of oppression. Wright did not preach hatred. He preached liberation and empowerment. Black people were strangers in a land they helped build; the oppressors required of them a song, and they wondered how they could sing the Lord’s song ..regardless. Wright’ message was that one responds to oppression by following the Gospel — to love one another, to forgive one another, and above all, to love and trust God above all else, in spite of the oppression. Being oppressed did not give anyone a ticket to hate; being a Christian demanded that even and perhaps most especially, the oppressed were to show that God is real and that the Gospel, observed and practiced, is the only effective way to fight racism.

     It’s quite the religious piece, but I think there’s some good stuff to take away from it.

     NY mayor defends village seal showing man choking Native American: It’s really a ‘friendly wrestling match’ – ummm, okaaaay….

     The mayor of a village in New York State is defending his community’s seal amid increased scrutiny spurred on by the debate surrounding the Confederate battle flag, and insisting that the seal — depicting a white man seemingly strangling a Native American man — is not racist.

     “If they looked at the seal and went with an opinion based solely on what they’re looking at, I could understand why people would have concern about it,” Whitesboro Mayor Patrick O’Connor told the Village Voice. “I think you have to take all the facts into consideration. And if people take the time to do that and they reach out to us, or they do the research themselves, it’s actually a very accurate depiction of friendly wrestling matches that took place back in those days.”

     But if people’s first impression is different… perhaps you’re not getting that point across?

     FINALLY FINISHED: How Is Your Bill Cosby Defense Holding Up Today?, a look at the black (male) community’s response to Cosby.

     Being mindful of the fact that Cosby has never been convicted of a crime, we can look at this deposition and the veritable clown car of alleged victims that provided very similar stories to what he offered in a sealed deposition 10 years ago and make the reasonable assumption that most, if not all, of these women are likely telling the truth. And if for no other reason but the sheer number of women who came forward, there are many, many reasonable human beings who came to this conclusion long ago. (That Beverly Johnson wasn’t enough for folks blows my mind, but my mind is often blown by patriarchy’s poisons.)

     Alas, there were holdouts—Jill Scott, one of the most famous and most painfully tone-deaf among them, has now admitted that she was wrong—who refused to abandon the idea that this wasn’t an intricate plot to take down a pillar of Black manhood. Why someone would wait until he was in the twilight of his life to do so wasn’t made clear in most cases, but half-cocked fables developed to protect patriarchy aren’t as much grounded in logic as they are in the idea that certain men are infallible or above reproach. (Though there was no public information out there that suggests Cosby was attempting to purchase NBC, the YouTube University, Department of Hotep Studies theory on the matter relied upon this being true.)

     Cosby has spent the past 15 years telling Black people that we’re our own worst enemy (ironically, his status as “moralist” is part of the reason the court documents were unsealed in the first place), shifting blame for our challenges away from White supremacy and promoting some of the most shortsighted respectability narratives around. You’d be more likely to sell me on the idea that there was a grand conspiracy to hide the rape allegations so that he could continue to do so. The nuanced examination of Black life we got via A Different World (and the genius of Debbie Allen) and the loving, though somewhat narrow, look at Black family life provided by The Cosby Show are not what we got from this man in recent years.

     No TV executive was in fear of what Cosby may be capable of shifting in Hollywood in the 21st century, trust me.

     As far as past false accusations from White women against Black men, let our need to defend innocent brothers not cloud our common sense. When the number of accusers outnumbered the Huxtable children… and the Hillman College crew… combined? Pretty safe to assume something in the Jello wasn’t clean. And that it was put there to turn a “no” into an “I can’t say no, I’m drugged.”

     One of the most heartbreaking parts of this decades-long mess is that there are folks who believe Cosby to be guilty, but think that he deserves a pass because of his contributions to Black culture and Black colleges. We know how one can buy oneself out of jail, but the idea that you can “achieve” your way out of the idea of rape simply being wrong? That Black women are among those attempting to either rationalize past defense of Cosby, or continue to make excuses, is absolutely devastating.

     We are tasked with defending the indefensible and protecting men who would never do the same for us, even when they don’t deserve it. And that a man who couldn’t stand up for Trayvon Martin (and who made a Notre Dame graduate cry because he finished with average grades) still has loud and proud Black male defenders speaks a terrible volume, to say the least.

     For the record: if you need more proof here, but you side with male victims of police violence who have been abused or killed by officers who were legally exonerated, this is an excellent time to do some soul searching on which Black lives matter to you.

     There’s more at the link.

     City Council unanimously approves removal of Nathan Bedford Forrest remains from municipal park – going beyond just taking the symbols down.

     The Memphis City Council approved a resolution to move the remains of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest.

     Mayor Wharton said this is a movement designed to honor Forrest’s will and testament, in which his last wish was that he and his wife be buried at Elmwood Cemetery.

     The Forrests were originally buried at Elmwood, but the city created Forrest Park in 1904, removing the Forrests’ bodies from Elmwood and relocating them to Union Avenue. The park has since been renamed Health Sciences Park.

     Opponents to uprooting the monument and remains said the Tennessee General Assembly’s passage of the Heritage Protection Act in 2013
     prohibits the renaming, removal, or relocating of any military monument or item.

     “That Protection Act, I feel, would also apply to the bust at the State Capitol, and the State Legislature is now making plans to remove that,” said Memphis City Council Chairman Myron Lowery. “If they can remove their bust, why can’t we remove the Forrest statue?”

     To move the statue, Wharton would need approval from the Tennessee Historical Commission, and possibly the County Commission.

     Wharton would also need the green light from Forrest’s descendants and a Chancery Court.

     Tuesday, the council voted on a companion resolution and ordinance triggering the following:

     – Condemnation of the equestrian statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest
     – Assignment and Sale of equestrian statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest
     – Relocation and Removal of equestrian statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest
     – Removal And Reinterment of Remains of All Deceased Persons Buried In The Burial Ground At Health Sciences Park

     The resolution only required a majority vote, but the ordinance required a two-thirds majority vote. Read the RESOLUTION here; Read the ORDINANCE here.

     “What’s happening here is we are seeing political entities such as the County Commission, the State Legislature are all taking a stance on what is politically correct, and that is removing symbols of racism and bigotry away from public property,” Lowery added.

     However, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and Forrest’s descendants will fight the ordinance and the resolution to the very end.

     “Forrest Park didn’t exist at the time, but Forrest was such an inspiration to Memphis, to Mid-Southerners, to military throughout,” said Sons of

     Confederate Veterans Leader Lee Millar. “Had Forrest Park been around, I’m sure he would have wanted to be buried in Forrest Park.”

     I love the mind-reading.

     Zambian writer Namwali Serpell to share Caine prize money

     Ms Serpell told BBC Newsday that the promise to share the winnings was “an act of mutiny”.

     “I wanted to change the structure of the prize.

     “It is very awkward to be placed into this position of competition with other writers that you respect immensely and you feel yourself put into a sort of American idol or race-horse situation when actually, you all want to support each other.”

     Congratulations for receiving the prize, and I commend her desire to share it!!

405. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     8 July 2015 at 5:37 pm

     Oh, this is funny and depressing at the same time:
     Cutting all the white people out of many Hollywood films makes them under a minute long:

     So often, I get to the end of a movie and then think, “Yep. That film was entirely white people.”

     Actor and writer Dylan Marron is doing a project that helps make the lack of people of color on-screen clear: He’s editing down Hollywood films to be just lines spoken by people of color. Often, the resulting videos wind up being 10-60 seconds long.

     Marron’s cut of Her, for example, is just 46 seconds long.
     […]
     His cut of The Fault in Our Stars is 41 seconds and includes only one actress.
     […]
     Meanwhile, Moonrise Kingdom and Into the Woods clock in at 10 seconds.
     […]
     The videos, posted on the Tumblr Every Single Word, speak to a problem that’s well-known and documented, though rarely in such a striking way. In 2013, the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism analyzed speaking roles in 500 top-grossing films released from 2007 to 2012. All together, the study looked at 20,000 characters. The results are clear: whiteness dominates the screen. Roughly 75 percent of all speaking characters are white—only 10.8 percent of speaking characters are Black, 4.2 percent are Hispanic, 5 percent are Asian, and 3.6 percent are from other (or mixed race) ethnicities. Clearly, Hollywood is missing the mark here—and they’re also ignoring audience demographics. While only 25 percent of speaking roles go to people of color, 44 percent of movie tickets in the US are bought by people of color.

406. rq says

     9 July 2015 at 2:35 am

     A couplathings via Tony’s Facebook. Because he has some awesome links there.
     Do We Really Need a Documentary About White Privilege?

     On July 22, MTV is premiering a documentary titled White People about “what it means to be young and white” in America, a question to which we already know the answers.

     And yet here is a film that explores white privilege and exposes willful ignorance through the lens of five white people. In the above trailer, prominent undocumented journalist Jose Antonio Vargas asks his documentary subjects questions like, “How might your life be different if you weren’t white?” And, “When you say ‘white,’ what does that mean to you?”

     A few quotes from white people in the trailer:

     “If you say the wrong thing, then suddenly you are a racist.”

     “I don’t want to offend people.”

     “We’ve never had to internalize what white people have done in America.”

     “It feels like I’m being discriminated against.”

     “You kind of get this feeling that things belong to you.”

     The non-cynical approach is to assume this film comes with good intentions of forcing white people to confront race—and to acknowledge that, potentially, the idea of watching white people squeamishly articulate their privilege is sufficient entertainment in itself. The documentary also consciously plays off the belief that since black people are inherently, publicly forced into race discussions, it’s white people who should be having these conversations for a change.

     I’d like to see it.

     Another from the entertainment files, and yeah, please correct URL as appropriate: a href=” http://b*tchmagazine.org/post/cutting-all-the-white-people-out-of-many-hollywood-films-makes-them-under-a-minute-long ” Cutting All the White People Out of Many Hollywood Films Makes Them Under A Minute Long

     So often, I get to the end of a movie and then think, “Yep. That film was entirely white people.”

     Actor and writer Dylan Marron is doing a project that helps make the lack of people of color on-screen clear: He’s editing down Hollywood films to be just lines spoken by people of color. Often, the resulting videos wind up being 10-60 seconds long.

     Marron’s cut of Her, for example, is just 46 seconds long.

     […]

     The videos, posted on the Tumblr Every Single Word, speak to a problem that’s well-known and documented, though rarely in such a striking way. In 2013, the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism analyzed speaking roles in 500 top-grossing films released from 2007 to 2012. All together, the study looked at 20,000 characters. The results are clear: whiteness dominates the screen. Roughly 75 percent of all speaking characters are white—only 10.8 percent of speaking characters are Black, 4.2 percent are Hispanic, 5 percent are Asian, and 3.6 percent are from other (or mixed race) ethnicities. Clearly, Hollywood is missing the mark here—and they’re also ignoring audience demographics. While only 25 percent of speaking roles go to people of color, 44 percent of movie tickets in the US are bought by people of color.

     Beyond Classically Beautiful: A Photo Series Celebrating Black Women’s Flawlessness

     If I told my 13-year-old self that one day I would launch a photo project and campaign that celebrates the diverse beauty of Black women, that young woman wouldn’t believe it. During my adolescence, beauty was a sensitive topic for me. The stain that colorism often leaves on many young Black girls had taken a toll on my self-esteem by then.

     I remember looking in the mirror and recognizing my beauty, but not having the courage to fully embrace it because of society’s narrow standards. However, the more I invest into Beyond Classically Beautiful, a beauty project I launched after years of learning self-acceptance, the more I fully understand that our pain is indeed our power, our teacher, and our liberator.

     Having the ability to push through hardship and pain is the reason I love and admire Black women. We are dynamic, strong, and resilient. Time and again we rise above all the jabs that mainstream media throws our way, and the idea that our place within society is at the bottom. All of this we’ve done by using our pain to propel us beyond the boundaries that are set before us. Our trials continue to manifest into our greatest triumphs.

     “The Power Behind Our Pain” inadvertently became the concept for this installment of Beyond Classically Beautiful. The models in the series come from diverse backgrounds, yet they share one thing: They’ve mastered the idea of using their past struggles to enhance their lives and inspire others—through their participation in this project and in their life’s work. For example, take Pamela Nanton. She’s the founder of PLY Apparel, a high-end line of plus-sized clothing. As a ten-year breast cancer survivor, she’s made it a point to use her brand and designs to raise proceeds for breast cancer awareness.

     […]

     “Be Classic” is the message nestled within Beyond Classically Beautiful. It is my hope that this message will encourage women of color to continue to use their light to redefine what it means to be a classic beauty.

     Read the full photo story, featuring our awesome models, below. And check out our behind the scenes video. We encourage you to leave comments and feedback on the Beyond Classically Beautiful movement and feel free to share your own personal stories.

     And the latest in police brutality, WATCH: 26 cops kick, beat and Tase subdued, unarmed black man

     A video posted to YouTube on Wednesday shows a massive and violent police response to one black man, who is seen on the ground as he is punched, kicked, Tased, and cursed at by police officers.

     The video, posted by Los Angeles blogger and journalist Jasmyne Cannick, reportedly documents the arrest of Tyree Carroll, a 22-year-old Philadelphian who the camerawoman and witness says was stopped while riding his bike.
     ADVERTISEMENT

     It starts with the man being held down by four cops. He is struggling or writhing, screaming and calling out for his grandmother. A bicycle can be seen a few feet away. A cop punches him repeatedly. Then another police car pulls up and an officer gets out yelling, “I have a f*cking Taser, here I come! You’re getting the f*cking Taser!”

     An officer can then be heard saying, “Tase that motherf*cker.”

     Multiple officers can then be seen pummeling the man with fists, another screams, “you f*cking bit me you piece of sh*t!”

     The woman holding the camera says to a companion that the man was Tased four of five times. By the end of the video, at least two dozen officers are on scene. The camerawoman counted 11 police cars and 26 officers – most of whom appeared to be white.

     “Four cops had him, he wasn’t going no where,” the videographer says to her companion. “Thank God he lived — right now.”

     It’s an incident from April. Cannick is facing drug-related charges. What else?

     Scandal: Cornelius Smith Jr. Returning as a Series Regular in Season 5, for fans of the show.

     Three South Carolina Senators Voted to Keep the Confederate Flag Flying. Here’s Their Reasoning.

     On Monday afternoon, the South Carolina Senate passed a bill to remove the Confederate flag flying on statehouse grounds. While 37 senators voted in support of the measure, three voted against it: Harvey S. Peeler, Jr., the Senate majority leader, as well as Lee Bright and Daniel B. Verdin, III.

     None of the three senators could be reached for comment, but their arguments on the senate floor reveal their reasoning. Bright objected to the bill three different times during the debate. “Members of the Senate,” he said the first time, “I heard our president sing a religious hymn, and that Friday night, I watched the White House be lit up in the abomination colors.” He continued:

     This nation was founded on Judeo-Christain principles and they are under assault by men in black robes who are not elected by you… What I would like to see is these folks that are working in the positions that are doing … marriage certificates do not have to betray their faith or compromise their faith and in order to subject [themselves] to the tyranny of five… Our governor called us in to deal with the flag that sits out front. Let’s deal with the national sin that we face today. We talk about abortion, but this gay marriage thing I believe we will be one nation gone under, like President Reagan said.

     Bright concluded his remarks by urging South Carolina to “push back against the federal government like our forefathers did.” When he spoke a second time, he argued that the people of South Carolina should get to vote on whether or not to take down the flag. The third time, he admitted that the men who fought under the Confederate flag were white supremacists. “You read what these men said, by today’s standards they were white supremacists,” he said. “And they were! They believed in the supremacy of the white race.” And yet, he insisted that actions of the racist Charleston mass shooter should not be connected to the Confederate flag:

     Is it about that flag [or] is it about that lunatic that was waving that flag… I can’t imagine it was over a flag. I think it was just pure evil incarnate. What happened out in Colorado? There wasn’t a Confederate flag. What happened in New Jersey? There wasn’t a Confederate flag. Any time there’s a mass shooting, this is the first time I’m aware of that the Confederate flag is the culprit.

     Senator Verdin called for a Confederate Memorial holiday in early May, when the flag could fly for 12 hours, from “sunrise to sunset.” The senator also argued that a bare pole for the flag should remain up the other 364 days of the year. It’s hard to imagine that the bare pole wouldn’t itself serve as a constant reminder of the flag.

407. rq says

     9 July 2015 at 12:10 pm

     Bree Newsome and the Myth of the Strong Black Woman

     On June 27th, I saw the image of activist and filmmaker Bree Newsome clinging to a pole with the Confederate Flag held out triumphantly in her right hand. The South Carolina State Capitol building was behind her, adding a powerful element to her legendary act of civil disobedience. As Newsome was escorted away from the State Capitol grounds in handcuffs, she smiled at a camera, almost basking in her act of resistance.

     Time and time again, from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter, black women have been on the front lines risking their lives, comfort, and sanity for black people even as our own men fail to rally and protest with the same intensity we do for them. What Newsome accomplished on that quaint Saturday morning was not only a form of a protest, but also a continuity of power subversion. A part of me wanted to call Newsome “a strong black woman.” But I know that the stereotype of the “strong black woman” has compromised our ability to be seen as tired or weak or anything but patient in the face of injustice – to be seen as human.

     Is there a possibility of reconciling this narrative of the “strong black woman” with the reality that often coincides with it? Growing up, I thought that being called a “strong black woman” was a compliment. Strength is a virtue, after all. Who doesn’t want to be strong? Strong means that no one messes with you. Strong means that you can do the extra work when others cannot due to inability or lack of will. Yet as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that the notion of the “strong black woman” often feels like little more than another box in which society tries to hold black women captive. We aren’t allowed to be vulnerable, to ask for help. Our strength is seen as a mask that hides our suffering, the full range of our emotions.

     Until late last year, I agreed that this kind of unwavering strength is impossible to maintain for an extended period of time. However, in the face of police brutality and white supremacist attacks, I’ve noticed that this “impossible” strength is being shown every day through the work of black female activists across the country. As a result, I’ve become more lax in criticizing the label of “strong black woman,” sometimes experiencing a kind of cognitive dissonance as I reconsider the term.

     […]

     At times it’s extremely difficult not to view these women as “strong black women” – because the amount of strength, restraint, and grace they exhibit in the face of much condemnation is both amazing and formidable. Images of Bree Newsome as a superhero are empowering, even as they contribute to the notion of the strong black woman. Arguably, black female activists have created their own myths, defying the odds and going the extra ten miles, even when there might be no one in their corner. As Newsome mentioned, she faces three years in jail, and the McKinney, Texas officer who assaulted Dajeeria has yet to be arrested. The life of a black woman can in fact be stranger and more fantastic than fiction.

     This interaction between reality and fantasy is what confounds me the most when we talk about stereotypes, for stereotypes usually do not arise from complete and utter lies. Stereotypes can also be half-truths, distorted and used to paint others with large strokes or create division. But in a time like this, when it often seems as though we are regressing rather than progressing in race relations, how can we separate the stereotype from the reality and rewrite this idea of what it means to be a strong black woman?

     […]

     Being called “strong” as a black woman is not necessarily an insult or a misunderstanding of who we are. It can be, instead, a realization that we’ve had to be mavericks, we’ve had to be strong, because there were no other choices. We’ve never had the privilege of being coddled, respected, or even understood. The most iconic people fighting for freedom are those who’ve been nurtured in adversity. Black women are constantly faced with a struggle, but we aren’t bound to it – instead we wrestle with it. The battle is ongoing, ever-changing, as oppression mutates, presenting itself in new ways. This invigorates my own spirit and propels me to join the fight, because I have power, too.

     So I cannot say whether I resent or dislike the concept of the “strong black woman,” especially when it’s employed as praise. Because I know that there are far too many examples of black women who have been strong when they literally had nothing and no other choice. We’ve had to fight when our own needs were cast away. We’ve always fought with less recognition than our black male counterparts. I’m not interested in whether the label of “strong black woman” is “right” or “wrong,” because to try and make that clear-cut argument is to construct yet another strict dichotomy for black womanhood.

     Nevertheless, when we see women like Bree Newsome and the unknown woman on the Time Ferguson cover immortalized through images, it’s hard to ignore how much larger than life — almost mythical — they seem, how their stories will be the stuff of legends in black households for years to come. If I ever have a daughter, I want to tell her about these women. I want her eyes to have stars in them as I tell her these stories, in the hope that she’ll do the same for her own children someday. These women, who seem so grandiose and powerful, are fighting evil for all of us. The best part is that they aren’t stereotypes at all. They are real. These are our modern-day strong black women. These are our heroes, and they should be seen and honored as such.

     They are real, and they are ordinary – they just happen to be doing extraordinary things under extraordinary circumstances.

     These 17 black fashion Instagrams will have you grasping for your edges, for funsies!

     13 Young Black Poets You Should Know

     April was is in full swing last month and the air is filled with poetry and spring. In honor of National Poetry Month, here’s a list of young black poets you should know. Follow them on Instagram and Twitter, and let their poetry fill you with inspiration to jot down (or shout out) your own verses.

     Some names for which to keep an eye out.

     NYC Doesn’t Fly Confederate Flags, But It’s Still A Shrine To Slaveowners & Slave Profiteers

     In the two weeks since white supremacist Dylann Roof allegedly murdered nine people in a South Carolina church, activists, politicians, and everyday anti-racists have taken up the cause of removing Confederate flags and monuments from the public landscape. The campaign is a noble one—the flag was, after all, created explicitly for Southern white people to start a war to preserve slavery, and Roof posed with it in photos before reportedly trying to incite his own race war—but for some liberal New Yorkers, it has served as a self-congratulatory reminder that the South is a uniquely racist place with a disgusting past that has nothing to do with them.

     Of course, the problem with this line of thinking is that the whole country was built on slavery, not just the South, and we have yet to deal with its horrors on anything approaching the way, for instance, South Africa has reckoned with apartheid, or Germany has atoned for the Holocaust. Today, Americans can visit a national Holocaust museum in their own country, but not a national slavery museum.

     An 1895 Harper’s New Monthly article described slavery as “part and parcel of [colonial New York’s] economic organization,” and at one time New York was home to the most slaves of any city except Charleston. Yet, it wasn’t until last month that Wall Street got a marker memorializing the municipal slave market where, from 1711 to 1762 prospective buyers made enslaved men flex to assess their fortitude, and grabbed women’s genitals when considering a purchase. The African Burial Ground near City Hall didn’t get a memorial until 2010, and it almost didn’t get one at all because the developer building a tower on top of it tried to breeze through the regulatory process without acknowledging the site’s historical significance. Few other reminders of this past exist in New York.

     Monuments to prominent slaveowners from New York’s history, on the other hand, are plentiful, though they’re seldom presented as such.

     Examples at the link. So there you go, “we’re less racist” Northerners.

     Eric Holder: ‘Act Of Terrorism’ In Charleston Should Serve As A ‘Wake-Up Call’

     Holder said that based on what we know about 21-year-old Dylann Roof, who allegedly confessed to shooting and killing the members during a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, the incident should be considered terrorism.

     “We have a young man who apparently becomes radicalized as the result of an incident and becomes more radicalized as a result of what he sees on the Internet, through the use of his computer, then goes and does something, that by his own words apparently is a political/violent act,” Holder said. “With a different set of circumstances, and if you had dialed in religion there, Islam, that would be called an act of terror. It seems to me that, again on the basis of the information that has been released, that’s what we have here. An act of terror.”

     […]

     Holder, who stepped down earlier this year after the confirmation of Attorney General Loretta Lynch and this week joined the law firm of Covington & Burling, said that domestic terrorism was one of his “primary concerns” as the nation’s top law enforcement official.

     Holder said he was always worried about a “self-radicalized lone wolf with access to guns” doing something horrific, and said law enforcement agencies like the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were “very sensitive to the domestic threat that we have to confront,” and took actions that “people are not generally aware of.”

     He said the American public, however, wasn’t as willing to consider the threat of homegrown extremists, who have killed more people than jihadists within the U.S. since Sept. 11.

     “I think as a nation, we as a people have not focused on the domestic threat. We have thought that the threat is from without, and that the threat to the extent that it exists within the nation is only based on ideologies that come from outside of the United States,” Holder said.

     “I think that the Charleston incident is a wake-up call,” Holder continued. “It is a wake-up call for the American people to understand that the hate that has bedeviled this nation almost since its inception continues to be an active and negative force.”

     Police leaders, DOJ officials have marathon meeting regarding review of Ferguson response. Maybe the DOJ can get through to the DOJ officials in denial. No racism here, folks.

     Federal officials met with local law enforcement leaders Thursday for close to seven hours to discuss an upcoming review of the initial police response in Ferguson, according to police sources.

     Representatives from the Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services division along with police leaders from Ferguson, St. Louis and St. Louis County and the Missouri Highway Patrol went through a 16-page outline of a nearly 200-page report during the meeting, sources said.

     The Justice Department examined the response of the four agencies in the first 16 days after Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown, 18, during a confrontation Aug. 9. Those departments were the key players in managing unrest that drew help from about 50 jurisdictions across the region.

     At Thursday’s meeting, federal officials listened to concerns from the leaders of the agencies involved in the report, but no promises were made to make any changes, the sources said.

     The Post-Dispatch obtained a summary of the report June 29, which said police trying to control the Ferguson protests and riots responded with an uncoordinated effort that sometimes violated free-speech rights, antagonized crowds with military-style tactics and shielded officers from accountability.

     The summary is subject to change.

     Police leaders are expecting to get a copy of the full report, but when it will be delivered and whether federal officials will return to St. Louis to deliver it to the top brass is unclear.

     […]

     This will be the third of four Justice Department reports in the wake of Ferguson unrest.

     The first two were released simultaneously in March. One said Wilson was justified in shooting Brown; the other criticized past practices by the Ferguson police and municipal court and triggered a continuing effort toward enforcing changeseither by negotiation or lawsuit.

     The fourth report will be an analysis of the St. Louis County Police Department’s practices.

408. rq says

     9 July 2015 at 12:24 pm

     Huh, I counted six links but I apparently counted wrong. Previous in moderation.
     Pine Lawn mayor sentenced to 33 months in prison, Pine Lawn being one of the communities near Ferguson.

     Pine Lawn Mayor Sylvester Caldwell, 55, has been sentenced to 33 months in federal prison. He was also ordered to pay $5500 in restitution.

     Prosecutors say Caldwell took money from the owner of a towing company in exchange for sending city business to that company. He’s also charged with extorting money from the owner of a convenience store. Caldwell plead not guilty.

     […]

     From February 2013 to September 2014 the mayor also extorted numerous payments from a convenience store known as Pine Lawn Market. Investigators say the mayor disguised the payments as donations. The owner of the store worried that the mayor would make trouble for the store.

     The judge says Caldwell abused his position as mayor. He called his corrupt actions arrogant and says he violated public trust.

     The prison time is the longest sentence within judge’s guidelines.

     Corruption all the way to the top.

     Going beyond just protesting: Group of former protesters helping Ferguson youth

     A group of former protesters is offering a new option to help youth in Ferguson.

     The group opened the Center of Hope and Peace, located on Chambers Road. It offers meals, summer youth programs such as drill team and sports. It also offers math and tutoring.

     “We’re just trying to make it so they have an outlet instead of something negative, something positive,” said Tonja Bulley with the Center of Hope and Peace.

     The center is being paid for by organizers who are hoping to get funding from the community. If you want to donate, please click here.

     Fl. Woman Is Arrested After Reportedly Telling Teens: ‘I Hang Your Family From My Tree’ – but she’s not racist, oh no, she probably has black friends.

     A 16-year-old teen told police that he and his friends got into a heated exchange with Elberson’s husband Sunday. When the teens walked by Elberson’s home sometime later that day, they began arguing again, except this time, a police report claims, Elberson picked up a baseball bat to chase the group away.

     One of the teens recorded the incident and police say Elberson can be heard being racially offensive, saying, “I hang your family from my tree.”

     Elberson was arrested and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, child abuse and simple battery. Her bond was set at $5,000

     DeRay McKesson Offers a Ray of Hope Despite Criticism That Surrounds Him

     Walking through the crowd at Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign kickoff last month in New York, I ran into someone I hadn’t expected to see. There under a canopy of trees on Roosevelt Island stood a familiar face. The Twitter bird on his T-shirt confirmed his identity. It was DeRay McKesson, a leading activist in the Black Lives Matter movement.

     We had never met before, but I immediately recognized the face that had become so ubiquitous in social and mainstream media. He was scrolling through tweets on his cell phone when I approached. “You’re everywhere,” I told him.

     We had seen each other once before last August in Ferguson, before we knew of each other’s identities. Since that time, McKesson had set up a base camp in St. Louis and stayed busy traveling the country, chronicling and curating the movement from Cleveland to Baltimore to McKinney, Texas.

     But why was he in New York City? He was an observer, he told me, who had come to hear what Clinton had to say. Similarly, I was covering the event for BET, I told him. We had a brief conversation and took a selfie, which I posted on Twitter with his permission. By the end of the hour, I had gotten a glimpse into the sometimes snarky world of online cynicism and critique that follows DeRay’s every public move.

     “I hope [DeRay] is protesting [Hillary] because her husband is partly responsible for the largest drop in the median wealth of Black households in a generation,” one angry Tweeter responded. “Black Americans putting support behind this clown, who is a puppet,” another replied. Others attacked Hillary Clinton as a liar who had never done anything for the Black community.

     All these responses came from a simple post of a photo. And neither of us was attending the event to endorse or support Clinton. DeRay even posted a critique of her speech after she finished. “So, Hillary Clinton’s speech has ended. I heard a lot of things. And nothing directly about Black folk. Coded language won’t cut it,” he wrote.

     […]

     “What does winning look like?” I asked. The movement has largely succeeded, DeRay told me, in convincing people and exposing the problem, but the next step is doing something about it. Here, the former math teacher and school administrator spoke with the precision one might expect from an academic. “The strategies we used to convince people of the problem will be different from the strategies we need to solve the problem,” he said.

     “We can actually live in a world where the police don’t kill people. That is a real and tangible goal,” DeRay said. “And what does it mean to end racism,” he continued, “to figure out culturally and structurally how to end racism? If those are what we posit the goals to be, then how do we get there?”

     “We won’t undo 400 years of oppression in 300 days,” DeRay acknowledged. “But what can we accomplish in your lifetime?” I asked. “I think that we can definitely get to zero on police killings,” he said. “And I think we can take a huge dent in racism.”

     It was the same hopeful message one might expect from the man who sleeps with his phone and stays up late to send out the same tweet to his followers almost every night. “Sleep well, y’all. Remember to dream.”

     Baltimore community coalition to call for Anthony Batts’ resignation. Latest news is that the mayor fired him.

     A coalition of Baltimore-based faith groups are calling for Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts’ resignation.

     Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development, or BUILD, is expected to formally call for the commissioner to step down Thursday at a news conference. Batts has been under fire since the riots in late April after Freddie Gray’s death. The 25-year-old sustained severe injuries while in police custody.

     “At a time of an unprecedented level of violence in Baltimore, Commissioner Batts clearly does not have a visible plan to stop the violence,” the group said in a statement. “BUILD has met with Commissioner Batts twice since the unrest in the aftermath of the death of Freddie Gray. Both times, he committed to publicly announce his plan to address the crisis of violence plaguing Baltimore. He has failed.

     “If he has a plan, it clearly is not working.”

     The Rev. Andrew Foster Connors, BUILD co-chair, said what’s also concerning is that many officers have said publicly “they will not follow him. And they do not have the necessary guidance or training.

     “His officers have lost confidence in him. The faith community, business leaders and residents have lost confidence in him. He is a leader without a following. And the community is suffering. He should recognize this and do the right thing and step down.”

     BUILD represents 40 congregations made up of 20,000 people. It bills itself as the most diverse interfaith, multi-racial constituency in the city.

     The Sun has reached out to both Baltimore Police and the mayor’s office for comment.

     Interlude: Music! Drake is at Wimbledon this week, and he’s making plenty of friends. Okay, music and tennis.

     Drake’s dalliances with the sports world’s hottest stars have gone well documented over the years. After Kentucky won its Final Four game over Wisconsin in 2014, he was seen in the Wildcats’ locker room. After the Heat won the NBA Finals in 2013, he was seen with them at a Miami nightclub.

     He’s sported everything from Jonny Manziel gear to attire supporting the soccer clubs Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea.

     We don’t know, however, where his tennis allegiances lie. While it’s safe to conclude that Drake is rooting for Serena, he hasn’t been seen publicly with her after winning a major tournament.

     Of course, that could change if Drake stays in London for the week. He sat in Serena’s guest box again Tuesday, this time with her sister Venus, and watched her defeat Victoria Azarenka 3–6, 6–4, 6–2.

     Yay for black people with multiple interests, I suppose?

409. rq says

     9 July 2015 at 12:41 pm

     Los Angeles Times hires ‘Black Twitter’ reporter

     A leaked internal memo from Los Angeles Times Managing Editor S. Mitra Kalita alerted the newspaper’s staff that journalist Dexter Thomas was recently hired to cover “Black Twitter,” along with other online communities including “Black Medium” and “Latino Tumblr.”

     Why all the fuss over an online community?

     “Black Twitter” (sometimes referred to by the hashtag “#BlackTwitter”) is an online neighborhood of black Twitter users where discussion frequently focuses on race and issues of particular interest to the African American community.

     […]

     Media, pundits and researchers have tried to wrap their heads around the phenomenon that is Black Twitter with varying levels of success.

     “Black people — specifically, young black people — do seem to use Twitter differently from everyone else on the service,” Farhad Manjoo, who is not black, wrote at Slate five years ago. “They form tighter clusters on the network — they follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often, and more of their posts are @-replies — posts directed at other users. It’s this behavior, intentional or not, that gives black people — and in particular, black teenagers — the means to dominate the conversation on Twitter.”

     The quest for understanding from outsiders drew controversy last year. A team of researchers at USC’s Annenberg Lab launched a study to explore the trends and implications of Black Twitter, with what many felt was a lack of nuance. First, the study’s apparently only black member was not recognized on the project’s Web site, then people took issue with the language researchers used, saying it treated black people too much like observational subjects.

     […]

     “I want to work with people to tell their own stories, not make things like listcicles on the top 10 things people think about Beyonce’s hair,” Thomas, a.k.a. @dexdigi, told alldigitocracy.org. “You also see people take tweets on a subject and build an article out of it, and sometimes that’s helpful. But I’m more interested in working with people to tell their stories, using my access to resources that others don’t have.”

     In addition to Black Twitter, Black Medium, and Latino Tumblr, Thomas also said he will be looking at Black Tumblr and the memo announcing his hire also referenced the community of Line users in Japan.

     ‘Los Angeles Times’ Recognizes Black Twitter’s Relevance

     Black Twitter has a prominent online presence. It has become so important, a major newspaper has hired a reporter to cover the news that comes from African-American tweeters.

     Audio at the link.

     APNewsBreak: NYC to offer non-bail option for some suspects

     The $18 million city plan, detailed to The Associated Press ahead of the announcement on Wednesday, allows judges beginning next year to replace bail for low-risk defendants with supervision options including daily check-ins, text-message reminders and connecting them with drug or behavioral therapy.

     Bail has long been criticized by inmate advocates for unfairly targeting poor people. And reforms were recommended by a mayoral task-force last year after the AP reported on the case of a mentally ill homeless man who was unable to make $2,500 bail for trespassing and died in a sweltering hot Rikers cell.

     More calls for reform gained traction after the suicide last month of 22-year-old Kalief Browder. When he was 16 years old, Browder was unable to make $3,000 bail on charges he stole a backpack. He ended up being held in Rikers for three years, beaten by inmates and guards alike and held in solitary confinement before charges against him were eventually dropped.

     “I think the basic principle is that Kalief Browder and other cases have begun to signify this (need for reform) in the public eye,” said Elizabeth Glazer, the mayor’s criminal justice coordinator. “We want to focus on risk to be the determining factor to decide if someone will be in or out; and it has to be risk, not money.”

     Currently, about 41 percent of criminal defendants who pass through New York City courts annually are released on their own recognizance and another 14 percent, or 45,500 people, are held on bail.

     About 87 percent of the 1,100 people on supervised release in already-existing city pilot programs return to court when they’re supposed to, officials said.

     Initial funding, provided by the Manhattan district attorney, allows for as many as 3,000 defendants charged with misdemeanors or non-violent felonies to bypass bail, letting them live with their families and keep their jobs while their cases wind through the courts. Officials say they would like to expand non-bail options to include thousands more.

     Releasing defendants to community supervision based on so-called risk-assessment tools that gauge a person’s threat to public safety is increasingly done in cities and states throughout the country.

     Cuomo to Appoint Special Prosecutor for Killings by Police

     With pressure mounting from families whose loved ones have died at the hands of a police officer, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Tuesday that he was preparing to issue an executive order naming the state attorney general as a special prosecutor for police-related civilian deaths.

     The governor called the order “a major step forward” and stressed his hope that independent investigations would help restore public faith.

     “A criminal justice system doesn’t work without trust,” Mr. Cuomo said. “We will be the first state in the country to acknowledge the problem and say we’re going to create an independent prosecutor who does not have that kind of connection with the organized police departments.”

     He said that he thought he had assuaged New Yorkers calling for greater oversight of police-related deaths when he announced last month that he was directing Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman to investigate all such cases over the next year. The governor had pushed for legislation to create an independent monitor to review cases in which unarmed people were killed by officers. But he failed to reach an agreement with legislators before the session ended. As a result, the governor said, he was appointing Mr. Schneiderman by executive action.

     […]

     The governor has said that he plans to renew the order after one year, which he said was the limit for an executive order, but he has not specified that the order would include all police-related civilian deaths.

     Advertisement
     Continue reading the main story

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     Continue reading the main story

     “The special prosecutor will kick in for cases where a law enforcement officer in the conduct of their duty kills an unarmed person, or a person where there is a significant question if the person was armed and dangerous,” the governor told reporters on Tuesday.

     Later on Tuesday, at a news conference outside Mr. Cuomo’s office in Midtown Manhattan, Ms. Carr and other family members of people killed by New York police officers expressed their appreciation for the governor’s order along with their insistence that it be carried out in full strength.

     “Thank you, Governor Cuomo,” Ms. Carr said, clutching a framed photograph her son. “Do the right thing for us.”

     While families and advocates have called for greater police oversight, the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the city’s largest police union, dismissed the governor’s action as “unnecessary” and pandering to public pressure.

     “Given the many levels of oversight that already exists, both internally in the N.Y.P.D. and externally in many forms, the appointment of a special prosecutor is unnecessary,” the union’s president, Patrick J. Lynch, said. “The rules of law apply regardless of who is investigating a case, but our concern is that there will be pressure on a special prosecutor to indict an officer for the sake of public perception, and that does not serve the ends of justice.”

     I am no defender of Commissioner Batts. But I am wary of the @FOP3 attempting to blame him solely for the deep corruption of the police.

     Obama administration to unveil major new rules targeting segregation across U.S.

     When the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, it barred the outright racial discrimination that was then routine. It also required the government to go one step further — to actively dismantle segregation and foster integration in its place — a mandate that for decades has been largely forgotten, neglected and unenforced.

     Now, on Wednesday, the Obama administration will announce long-awaited rules designed to repair the law’s unfulfilled promise and promote the kind of racially integrated neighborhoods that have long eluded deeply segregated cities like Chicago and Baltimore. The new rules, a top demand of civil-rights groups, will require cities and towns all over the country to scrutinize their housing patterns for racial bias and to publicly report, every three to five years, the results. Communities will also have to set goals, which will be tracked over time, for how they will further reduce segregation.

     “This is the most serious effort that HUD has ever undertaken to do that,” says Julian Castro, the secretary of the department of Housing and Urban Development, who will announce the new rules in Chicago on Wednesday. “I believe that it’s historic.”

     Officials insist that they want to work with and not punish communities where segregation exists. But the new reports will make it harder to conceal when communities consistently flout the law. And in the most flagrant cases, HUD holds out the possibility of withholding a portion of the billions of dollars of federal funding it hands out each year.

     The prospect of the new rules, which will also cover housing patterns that exclude other groups like the disabled, has already spurred intense debate. Civil rights groups pushed for even tougher rules but say HUD’s plans represent an important advancement on what’s been one of the most fraught frontiers of racial progress.

     “Housing discrimination is the unfinished business of civil rights,” says Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. “It goes right to the heart of our divide from one another. It goes right to the heart of whether you believe that African American people’s lives matter, that you respect them, that you believe they can be your neighbors, that you want them to play with your children.”

     Of course, conservatives have already sounded the alarm. Whatever that means.
     More at the link.

410. rq says

     9 July 2015 at 1:36 pm

     Speaking of DeRay McKesson, he recently visited the Whitney Plantation.
     Goree Island. #WhitneyPlantation
     Children of Whitney. #WhitneyPlantation
     Children of Whitney. #WhitneyPlantation
     I’d never heard of the Federal Writer’s Project before and its role in collecting the narratives of the enslaved. #WhitneyPlantation
     Memorial. #WhitneyPlantation
     There were 22 slave quarters for approximately 200-250 slaves. #WhitneyPlantation
     That’s a small abbreviated intro to his visit.

411. rq says

     9 July 2015 at 2:00 pm

     Cleveland officers claim Tanisha Anderson contributed to her own death following mental health call. In other words, in Cleveland, you’re always at fault for your own death at the hands of police.

     Two Cleveland police officers accused of using excessive force leading to the death of 37-year-old Tanisha Anderson claim the mentally ill woman contributed to her own death and are asking a federal judge to dismiss the case.

     In court documents filed Wednesday , Cleveland police officers Scott Aldrige and Bryan Myers deny claims that they “pushed on her and then slammed her to the ground and put pressure on her back while handcuffing her”.

     They also deny they “unduly delayed calling for medical assistance.”

     Instead, the officers claim in their defense “contributory and/or comparative negligence” by Anderson and claimed “qualified immunity” from prosecution.

     The officers admit that Anderson experienced “a mental health episode” while responding to a call for help on November 12, 2014 and that Anderson passed away.

     But officers deny that they used excessive force that resulted in Anderson’s death.

     Attorneys for the officers have asked the case “be dismissed with prejudice.”

     The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office asked the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office last month to begin an investigation into Anderson’s death.

     Family files lawsuit over officer-involved shooting death. Can’t get no criminal justice.

     Two Bay Area officers are facing a lawsuit from family members who say their relative was unarmed and naked when police fatally shot him in the back.

     The San Francisco Chronicle reports the civil rights lawsuit filed Monday by siblings of 29-year-old James McKinney names Hayward police Officers Kenneth Landreth and Ricardo Flores and the city itself as defendants.

     Hayward police say officers responded in July 2014 to a report that McKinney was behaving erratically at a Phoenix Lodge and wouldn’t leave a tenant’s room.

     Officers say they entered to convince McKinney to leave, and he lunged for their weapons.

     The lawsuit says officers shot McKinney seconds after entering the room.

     Unspecified damages are being sought by siblings Diane McKinney, Deborah McKinney, Richard McKinney, Jacqueline Taylor and Michael McKinney.

     The @FOP3 is dangerous and corrupt. And certainly not focused on any modicum of public safety. Link links to a link to FOP statement (counting on WMDKitty to read this one, too!! ;) )

     The Bill Cosby Scandal Proves Why Black Women’s Lives Still Don’t Matter, and that’s why this matters here.

     After trailblazing black model and actress Beverly Johnson publicly alleged in an emotional and stirring Vanity Fair essay that she, too, had been sexually assaulted by Bill Cosby, she was ridiculed and discredited by many.

     The backlash wasn’t surprising. Devoted fans and celebrity friends of Cosby have long stood by the beloved symbol of (caricatured) black heterosexual manhood, even as the list of women accusing him of sexual assault has grown to include more than 40 names.

     After Johnson’s story ran, for example, black male commentator Cleo Manago postulated that Cosby might actually be the victim of an ostensible white-woman coup to take a good black man down, or of the “guilty until proven guilty” rhetoric historically aimed at black men. Boyce Watkins, a black scholar and social commentator, expressed similar views, noting that while his thoughts about Cosby were “deliberately mixed,” the growing number of allegations were akin to a “modern day lynching” and “too consistent and orchestrated … to believe that it’s all happening by chance.” Attorney Monique Pressley similarly questioned the “sheer volume of accusers” and stated “you’ll have some people who will come forward and join the band wagon” during a News One Now Straight Talk episode with Roland Martin.

     The support of Cosby by black men and women who might otherwise consider themselves freedom fighters in the struggle for black liberation has been perplexing at best and hypocritical at worst, especially when considering that some of Cosby’s alleged victims were black, too. It reveals the dangerous limitations of a black politic of liberation that is concerned with white racial supremacy but not cued into the violent reality of intra-community misogyny and sexual assault. This lack of dual focus has harmed black women throughout history.

     To be fair, U.S. history provides much proof of the extent to which white people, and the state, have gone to protect white women from the archetypal dangerous black male. But Cosby’s case should not be upheld as a contemporary example of white supremacy’s attempt to take down a black man, especially not now that Cosby has admitted in court documents dating back to 2005 that he obtained prescription Quaaludes for women he wanted to coerce into having sex with him. Cosby is no Emmett Till.

     Beverly Johnson, Lachelle Covington, Michelle Hurd, Angela Leslie and Jewel Allison are just some of the several dozen women Cosby allegedly abused. And they, just like those Cosby supporters who have claimed the sexual assault allegations are a consequence of white media’s fascination with the demise of the black man, are black. In the case of those black people who publicly fight in support of Cosby, loyalty to race thus seems to also be an implicit allegiance to the cult of black patriarchy — black women’s lives, well-being and safety be damned.

     […]

     Manago, Watkins, Pressley and others saw Cosby as a victim, but viewed the women who publicly shared painful stories of sexual violence as guilty of trying to take down a black man — one who, ironically, is notorious for disparaging black people.

     A black freedom fighter who claims to care for all black lives but supports alleged rapists who harm black women is not truly fighting for freedom. Black women deserve a black liberation ethos that also destroys male dominance, sexual violence, rape culture, sexism and patriarchy, especially when these show up within black communities.

     #FreedomSummerBaltimore #FreedomSummer15 Bring a friend! Donate to support! http://operationhelporhush.org/donate @ophelporhush

412. rq says

     9 July 2015 at 2:07 pm

     University Of Oklahoma Will Use Shuttered Fraternity House For Human Relations Center

     The University of Oklahoma announced Wednesday that it would use the former house of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity (SAE) — which was shuttered in March after its members were caught on video singing a racist chant — for a social justice and human relations organization.

     In a statement provided to BuzzFeed News, the university said its Southwest Center for Human Rights and the Disability Testing Center would use the building that once belonged to SAE.

     OU’s President David Boren severed all ties between the university and SAE and asked all its members to leave the house in the immediate aftermath of the video showing SAE brothers chanting racial slurs with references to lynching. The SAE letters were also removed from the fraternity’s facade.

     The Southwest Center for Human Rights Studies, which will move into SAE’s former house, is a university-based human relations and social justice organization that “promotes understanding and cooperation among those of different racial, ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds.”

     Sounds appropriate.

     Dylann Roof Indicted for Murder in Charleston Church Massacre

     A South Carolina grand jury has indicted Dylann Roof on nine counts of murder for the massacre at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston last month. He was also charged with one count of weapons possession and three counts of attempted murder in connection with church members who survived the attack.

     “My office cannot comment on the merits of the case,” Solicitor Scarlett Wilson said in a statement announcing the indictments, which said he shot the victims with “malice aforethought.”

     Roof, 21, who is being held without bail, is also the subject of a federal hate-crime probe. All of his victims at the historically African-American church were black, and his friends have said he wanted to start a race war.

     The State of Diversity in Today’s Workforce

     A diverse economy is a strong economy. Businesses that embrace our nation’s changing demographics reap the economic benefits of a diverse and inclusive workforce.

     Businesses that recruit from a diverse workforce are better able to find the best and the brightest talent needed to compete in an increasingly competitive economy. By bringing together our different backgrounds, skills, and experiences, businesses are better able to breed the type of innovative and creative solutions needed to succeed in an increasingly competitive economy. Businesses that embrace diversity also realize significant increases in workforce productivity and job performance. More broadly, a diverse workforce drives economic growth, as more women, racial and ethnic minorities, and gay and transgender individuals enter the workforce.

     In short, diversity is key to fostering a strong and inclusive economy that is built to last. This issue brief examines the state and strength of diversity in the U.S. workforce. Specifically, we look at the number and proportion of people of color, women, gay and transgender individuals, and people with disabilities in the workforce today.

     More at the link.

     Study Finds 95 Percent of Prosecutors Are White, which, I would say, is a problem.

     A new study has found that about 95 percent of the 2437 elected state and local prosecutors in the United States in 2014 were white.

     Even though white men make up 31 percent of the population nationwide, the study released Tuesday found that 79 percent of elected prosecutors are white men. Sixty-six percent of states that elect prosecutors have no African Americans in those offices.

     Prosecutors exercise vast influence in our criminal justice system: they decide whether to bring charges in most criminal cases, and because so many cases are resolved by plea bargain, they also determine what sentences defendants receive. The data shows that “we have a system where incredible power and discretion is concentrated in the hands of one demographic group,” said Brenda Choresi Carter of the Womens Donor Network, who led the study.

     Researchers examined all elected city, county, and judicial district prosecutors, as well as state attorneys general, in office across the country during the summer of 2014. It found that fifteen states had exclusively white elected prosecutors. Nationwide, 16 percent were white women, 4 percent were minority men, and 1 percent were minority women.

     EJI Director Bryan Stevenson said the number of African American prosecutors has not increased alongside the growing number of black mayors and police. “I think most people know that we’ve had a significant problem with lack of diversity in decision-making roles in the criminal justice system for a long time,” he told the New York Times. “I think what these numbers dramatize is that the reality is much worse than most people imagine and that we are making almost no progress.”

     Eighty-five percent of incumbent prosecutors are re-elected without opposition, and they tend to serve long tenures. In order to diversify the ranks of prosecutors, Mr. Stevenson said, sitting prosecutors will need to start making diversity a priority in vetting their successors or the system will need to be significantly altered to give state bar associations and other legal entities more of a say.

     Melba V. Pearson, president of the National Black Prosecutors Association, said that African Americans need to be represented in prosecutorial roles to ensure fair outcomes. She said the absence of black prosecutors contributes to mistrust in the criminal justice system by African Americans and other minorities: “When you walk into a courtroom and no one looks like you, do you think you are going to get a fair shake?”

     Cleveland activists ask for arrest warrants in Tamir Rice case in open letter. If anything actually occurs in the Tamir Rice case that resembles (even remotely) justice, I think it can be chalked up to all the hard and heavy work done by the local activists there.

     The Fox 8 I-Team obtained this video of an open letter by eight Cleveland activists, asking for arrest warrants to be issued for two city police officers involved with the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

     A motion is now pending by the activists in the Eighth District Court of Appeals.

     “We are working to ensure procedural justice is not derailed as we saw with the abuse of the grand jury process in Ferguson and Staten Island,” said Julia Shearson, a member of the Cleveland 8 and executive director of the Cleveland chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a news release on Wednesday.

     Last month, Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Ronald Adrine found probable cause the two officers should face charges for the shooting death of Rice. However, he did not issue arrest warrants. Instead, he referred the case to the prosecutor’s office.

     Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty said he will review the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s investigation of the shooting and then take the case to a grand jury to determine if any charges should be filed against the officers.

     McGinty released a statement Wednesday night:

     “The Grand Jury does not issue indictments based on letters from political activists, even well intentioned ones. That would be an affront to our Constitution. That jury of citizens will hear all of the evidence from the witnesses and experts under oath and make a decision based on the law — not politics. That has been the policy and practice since 2012 of this County Prosecutor’s Office in all fatal use of deadly force cases involving law enforcement officers, and it will not be compromised for political expediency.”

     Tamir’s mother, Samaria, has said she wants justice for her young son.

     […]

     Below is a transcript of the Cleveland 8’s open letter:

     “Reform of the criminal justice system cannot solely focus on transforming law enforcement. It also must ensure that procedural justice – the fair evaluation and administration of legal procedures, the decision-making process, and quality of treatment – is upheld to avoid both the appearance and the existence of partiality.

     “On Tuesday, June 9, we, a group of activists and clergy here in the City of Cleveland, in accordance with the Ohio Revised Code, filed citizen affidavits calling for the charging and arrest of two officers in the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. In a letter dated June 18, we called upon the Cleveland Law Department to uphold the law and Judge Ronald Adrine’s findings of probable cause by issuing warrants for the arrests of officers Frank Garmback and Timothy Loehmann.

     “The City of Cleveland law director Barbara Langhenry and Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty have said that they support reform, yet their inaction on this issue sends a signal to the people that they are not upholding the very laws they want the people to respect.

     “Following the probable cause findings, the county prosecutor continues to state that he will bring the matter before a grand jury and leave it to them to decide whether there is enough evidence against these officers to bring indictments.

     “The actions by chief law enforcement officials in the City of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County are clear examples of abuse of discretion and the unequal administration of law that breeds distrust in our criminal justice system.

     “First, the decision to not issue warrants for the arrests exhibits an arbitrary and selective application of the law. By ignoring the law, the state is acting contrary to the interests of the people. While Judge Adrine’s findings were not acted upon with regard to arrest warrants for Garmback and Loehmann, his and other judges’ consideration is regularly sought and acted upon against private citizens as we see with search warrants. This is unacceptable.

     “Second, the county prosecutor’s approach of using the grand jury as a forum to determine whether charges will be filed in the Tamir Rice case is not only another example of disregard of the judiciary, but also an unequal application of the grand jury process. We are not trying to circumvent the grand jury process for Garmback and Loehmann. However, a step is being bypassed. It is not the grand jury’s role to file the initial charges.

     “For the vast majority of people, charges have already been filed against them prior to a prosecutor seeking an indictment before the grand jury.

     “When the prosecutor uses the grand jury as a body to determine probable cause for charging and indicting, it is problematic in two ways: (1) It gives police officers the opportunity to provide exculpatory (exonerating) testimony without cross examination, as took place in the Michael Brown case in Ferguson and the Eric Garner case in Staten Island. This approach suggests a ‘secret trial’ out of public view, which, while serving the interests of the officers, does not serve the interests of justice. (2) The idea that rules of the grand jury can be altered at will depending on who is suspected of committing a crime is itself unconstitutional and discriminatory against every other individual subject to the grand jury but without the apparent entitlements that come with wearing a badge.

     “Thirdly, the fact that the county prosecutor has stated he needs to conduct his own investigation raises the question of what else is required to file charges and whether he deems police officers as a special class exempt from being subject to normal criminal procedures. Here is the evidence the county prosecutor already has in his possession: (1) a video of Tamir Rice being killed at close range in less than 2 seconds and being left for more than 4 minutes without any first aid; (2) a detailed report by the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s department resulting from a five-month investigation; and (3) a finding of probable cause by a respected judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court with more than 30 years on the bench. The county prosecutor may have his own rationale for proceeding in this manner. However, regardless of his reasons, none would truly seem fair or equitable considering that the ordinary resident or citizen is not granted such deference.

     “If we as a community and a nation are going to truly transform our criminal justice system, the public must see the system as legitimate and trust that elected and appointed officials will abide by the law and apply it equally throughout the legal process. This goes not only for police officers, but also for judges, law directors, and prosecutors. We the people should not, and must not, stand for anything less.

     “Respectfully Submitted, The Cleveland 8″

     Police officers shot and killed more people so far in July than during any other week this year. In case you were wondering.

     Police in the United States shot and killed 31 people during the first week of July, making it the deadliest such week of the year so far.

     This stretch ended Tuesday with officers across the country shooting and killing eight people, the most police shootings that have occurred on any single day in 2015 — ending the deadliest week so far with the deadliest day.

     These deaths push the total number of people fatally shot by police this year to 494 in a little over six months, according to a Washington Post analysis. That number easily exceeds the figures reported by the FBI for any single year since 1976, pointing to the incomplete nature of federal data, which relies on voluntary reporting and patchy information.

413. rq says

     9 July 2015 at 2:22 pm

     Ah, here we go. Baltimore mayor sacks police chief months after riots, via the BBC.

     Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said she was replacing Police Commissioner Anthony Batts with his deputy, Kevin Davis, for an interim period.

     The city was rocked by riots in April when a black man died after suffering injuries in police custody.

     Six officers were charged over the death of the 25-year-old, Freddie Gray.

     Speaking at a news conference on Wednesday, Mayor Rawlings-Blake said Mr Batts had “served this city with distinction” since becoming police chief in October 2012.

     But referring to the city’s high homicide rate, she said “too many continue to die”.

     “The focus has been too much on the leadership of the department and not enough on the crime fighting,” she told reporters, adding: “We need to get the crime surge under control.”

     The city has seen a sharp increase in violence since Freddie Gray’s death on 19 April, with 155 homicides this year, a 48% increase over the same period last year.

     On Tuesday, the police department announced that an outside organisation will review its response to the civil unrest that followed Mr Gray’s death.

     With Kevin Davis, ‘what you see is what you get’

     The cop who was in charge of the police investigation into the circumstances of Freddie Gray’s fatal injuries is a relative unknown in Baltimore: Deputy Police Commissioner Kevin Davis.

     Davis arrived in Baltimore in January after a year and a half leading the Anne Arundel County Police Department, where he won praise for boosting the image of an agency tarnished by scandal.

     And before that, he had a long career in Prince George’s, where he helped the department emerge from federal oversight related to officers’ use of force.

     Davis’ supporters are confident he’s the right man for the job in Baltimore.

     “He’s the perfect choice, in my opinion,” said Prince George’s Police Chief Mark Magaw. “Commissioner [Anthony] Batts is lucky he’s there. He’s a tremendous investigator and administrator.”

     […]

     Laura Neuman also has been watching Davis with pride. After she was appointed Anne Arundel County executive in 2013 in the wake of a police-involved scandal that brought down the previous county executive, John R. Leopold, she needed a top cop who could right the ship.

     “He understood what it took to manage during a crisis time,” Neuman said.

     Leopold was accused of ordering his executive protection officers to carry out personal and political tasks for him, including uprooting campaign signs and keeping watch while he had liaisons with a county employee in the back seat of a police car. Leopold was convicted of misconduct in office and resigned. Leopold’s chief of police, James Teare, was never charged but resigned amid the investigation.

     In Davis, Neuman said she found a quiet leader who emphasized the need to move past the scandal and forge strong connections with the community.

     “His leadership is subtle,” Neuman said. “He’s soft-spoken and he delivers.”

     Davis established community and business advisory councils, quadrupled enrollment in the citizen’s police academy, put the department on social media and frequently visited with crime victims.

     “To really be that connected with the community is pretty extraordinary,” Neuman said.

     When he was hired, Davis said he thought it was important to work regularly with local residents in order to “put some good will in the bank” for when crises arise.

     Davis’ brief tenure in Anne Arundel was not without controversy, however. He riled the rank-and-file offices when he criticized their union’s donation to support Darren Wilson, the police officer in Ferguson, Mo., who fatally shot teenager Michael Brown — an incident that sparked many of the same complaints and frustration as the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore.

     The president of Anne Arundel’s Fraternal Order of Police lodge declined to comment Friday.

     Still, Neuman said Davis handled himself well during controversies, including when an officer shot and killed a dog while canvassing a neighborhood during a robbery investigation. Davis didn’t shy away from criticism and sought ways to improve his department’s policing, Neuman said.

     “He’s as transparent as you’ll find,” she said.

     Anyone who riles up the local police union must be a good person. Right?

     Firing Batts was easy, b/c it’s the appearance of change. But it’ll take more than his removal to undo the terror of the @BaltimorePolice.

     ‘I’ll hang your family from my tree’: Florida woman chases black kids with bat while shouting slurs, Raw Story on that.

     Space to destroy

     What is almost certainly the most widely repeated and hotly debated utterance of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s career takes center stage in the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police’s report on how officers were equipped and deployed during the rioting that preceded and followed Freddie Gray’s funeral in April. It’s right there on the title page: “We also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that.” And it strikes to the heart of the central question many officers and ordinary citizens alike have asked in the weeks since: Did the mayor or command staff give orders to front-line police that allowed the unrest to billow out of control into full-scale violence and destruction?

     The mayor has insisted that the quote has been misconstrued, that what she meant was that a decision to give space to peaceful protesters had the unfortunate and unintended result of affording those with malicious intent the ability to cause mayhem. But the accounts the FOP compiled add weight to the accusations that the mayor’s remark reflected more than an inartful turn of phrase but a deliberate strategy. It demands a much more thorough and transparent response than police commanders and City Hall have provided so far.

     The FOP has had a legacy of tension with Mayor Rawlings-Blake, including a years-long dispute about changes to pension benefits that the union took to federal court and opposition to her efforts to reform state laws governing officer discipline. It is in that sense not necessarily the ideal entity to take on the task of analyzing how she and her police commissioner, Anthony Batts, handled an event that left many officers literally and figuratively wounded. The mayor pounced on that history to discredit the report as “a trumped up political document full of baseless allegations, finger pointing and personal attacks.” (Speaking of personal attacks, the statement accuses the FOP of “choosing to be their lesser selves.”) But the assertions the union makes about what instructions officers were given and how they were trained and equipped are too specific and detailed to be dismissed so easily.

     In particular, the report says that Commissioner Batts and other top commanders told hundreds of officers during a roll call on April 25, the Saturday when the Freddie Gray protests first turned violent, that they should allow some level of destruction of property before intervening “so that it would show that the rioters were forcing our hand.” The report describes protocols in which officers were required to get approval from the department’s civilian lawyers before making arrests and communications over police radio channels in which officers were told to allow looting to take place. The report claims officers were told not to wear helmets, gloves and other protective gear so as not to appear too “Billy badass” and that they were ordered to use non-lethal crowd control equipment in ways that were ineffective.

     The mayor and commissioner have acknowledged some shortcomings in the city’s response to the riots. Ms. Rawlings-Blake recently promised new riot gear before the verdicts in the cases against the six officers involved in Freddie Gray’s death — the FOP report details myriad faults with the equipment officers were given — and Mr. Batts has apologized for having failed to provide officers with more training in crowd control. Last week, he acknowledged widespread confusion about the meaning and purpose of orders to “hold the line” during the unrest rather than to engage the rioters and make arrests. But the portrait of the city’s civilian and police leaders that emerges from the FOP’s report is far more damning, suggesting indecisiveness and a greater concern with how the police response looked on TV than with how effective it was in protecting officer safety and private property.

     The FOP’s report is based on interviews with police who were on the front lines, focus groups and surveys, and it consists largely of accounts by officers who are not named. (In fairness, the union had little choice there, as officers would surely have faced discipline had they lent their names to the project.) But it is rich for the mayor’s spokesman to tut-tut that “the FOP continues to issue baseless and false information instead of working with us to find solutions that will protect our officers.” The FOP filed a Public Information Act request for reams of information that could have shed some objective light on the situation — tapes of radio transmissions, emails, text messages and the like — but the city has handed over very little of it.

     This report has its limitations and biases, but more than two months after the fact, it’s the only report we’ve got. Neither the police nor the mayor’s administration have issued anything like a comprehensive assessment of what happened on those nights of violence, and a third-party review by the Police Executive Research Forum is only slated to begin today. If what the FOP reported is wrong, Mayor Rawlings-Blake and Commissioner Batts need to prove it.

     The Baltimore @FOP3 is a dangerous, corrupt organization more interested in “protecting” its members than the public.

414. rq says

     9 July 2015 at 2:53 pm

     .@BaltimorePolice Commissioner Batts has been fired. Media release attached.

     Re @deray ‘s recent posts showing #WhitneyPlantation:Few years back I toured #OakAlley outside Baton Rouge. Sobering.

     Wall Street was founded on slavery

     New York City was a Dutch settlement known as New Amsterdam in the Dutch colonial province called New Netherland during much of the 17th century. Through the Dutch West India Company, the Dutch utilized labor of enslaved Africans who were first brought to colony around 1627. The African slaves built the wall that gives Wall Street its name, forming the northern boundary of the colony and warded off resisting natives who wanted their land back. In addition, the slaves cleared the forests, built roads and buildings, and turned up the soil for farming. Slavery was not a phenomenon limited to the southern American colonies. Northern colonies, such as Boston and New York, participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

     In 1664, control of the colony was handed over Britain and New Amsterdam was renamed New York in honor of James II, the Duke of York. The Royal African Company had a royal monopoly on the British slave trade and James II was a major shareholder. With the Dutch gone, the British maintained the system of slavery in New York. They immediately created a series of laws to protect it. In 1665, a law was passed that legalized slavery. In 1682, slave masters were given the power of life-and-death over their slaves. Twenty years later, in 1702, New York adopted its first comprehensive slave code and it equated slave status with being African. The entire system of slavery was justified by an ideology of white supremacy that considers black Africans inferior and white Europeans superior — an ideology that still exists.

     Slavery became the backbone of New York’s economic prosperity in the 1700s. To normalize this massive trade in human beings, in 1711, New York officials established a slave market on Wall Street. Slave auctions were held at Wall Street selling African slaves as property to traders wanting to buy them. Between 1700 and 1722, over 5,000 African slaves entered New York, most of whom came directly from Africa, while the rest from British colonies in the Caribbean and southern colonies. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, as Phyllis Eckhaus points out, New York had “the largest urban slave population in mainland North America”. Therefore, New York was a crucial location in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which established it as the world’s financial capital.

     Many well-known companies and financial institutions benefitted from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. They include Lehman Brothers (which went bankrupt in 2008), J.P. Morgan Chase, Wachovia Bank of North Carolina, Aetna Insurance, Bank of America, and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Banks, such as Wachovia’s predecessors Bank of Charleston, South Carolina, and the Bank of North America, and J.P. Morgan Chase’s predecessor banks, made loans to slave owners and accepted slaves as “collateral”. When the slave owners defaulted on their loans, the banks became the new owners. The Lehman family members who established Lehman Brothers started their company to trade and invest in cotton, a cash crop produced by African slaves. Aetna sold insurance to slave owners who wanted to protect their investments in slaves aboard slave ships in case one of them died (this was a very common occurrence as millions of African slaves died on ships carrying them from Africa to the Americas). The insurance company’s policies compensated slave owners for the loss of people who were considered “property”. To this day, there are lawsuits against these corporations to seek reparations for their participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

     More at the link. A LOT MORE. Including stuff on mortgages and all kinds of other things.

     Wall Street Was a Slave Market Before It Was a Financial Center

     The Wall Street wealthy are equal opportunity buyers of influence, contributing mightily to both major political parties. In the 2008 presidential election, political action committees (PACs), employees, and owners of major Wall Street firms gave money to both Democrats and Republicans. The Obama campaign received over a million dollars from PACs, individuals, and groups associated with Goldman Sachs, $800,000 from Morgan Chase, $700,000 from Citigroup, and $500,000 from Morgan Stanley. The McCain campaign, while it did not fare quite as well, received over $300,000 from PACs, individuals, and groups associated with Morgan Chase and Citigroup, a quarter of a million dollars from Goldman Sachs, $200,000 from Wachovia, and over $350,000 from Merrill Lynch.

     According to the non-partisan Americans for Campaign Reform, individuals and PACs in finance, insurance, and real estate contributed over $2 billion to federal campaigns between 1990 and 2008. “Members of the U.S. House and Senate received an average $142,663 and $1,042,663, respectively, in Wall Street contributions as of July 28, 2008.” The total Wall Street “contribution” to people running for federal office in 2008 was over THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS.

     Wall Street influence, and the battle between main Street and Wall Street stretches way back in United States history. Mary E. Lease was a well-known “stump” speaker for the Farmers’ Alliance and the Populist Party. They called her and her colleagues stump speakers because they stood on tree stumps to be seen over the crowd. Between 1890 and 1896 she toured the country making speeches telling farmers to “raise less corn and more hell.” Some scholars believe Mary E. Lease was the model for the character Dorothy in Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In one of her best-known speeches she told her audience:

     “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master… Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.”

     But the sordid history of Wall Street is actually much older and darker. December 13, 2011 was the three hundredth anniversary of the law passed by the New York City Common Council that made Wall Street the city’s official slave market for the sale and rental of enslaved Africans.

     Gives some slavery-related background on banks. o.o

     St. Louis County Admits It Has A Jail Problem, Is Finally Getting Help. Oh good.

     Using police departments and courts to generate revenue, unsurprisingly, has ruined relationships between officers and the citizens they are supposed to serve. But things didn’t really hit rock bottom until August, after a police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, sparking protests against police that at times turned violent.

     After years of denial about the extent of St. Louis County’s problems, some leaders are ready to take inventory and make amends. When they learned about the Safety and Justice Challenge from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, officials saw their chance to rehabilitate their approach to incarceration.

     On Wednesday, the MacArthur Foundation will announce that St. Louis County is one of just 20 jurisdictions across the country that will receive $150,000 to develop a multi-step plan to improve the local justice system, with the goal of reducing unnecessary over-incarceration. As part of the effort, 10 of those 20 jurisdictions will receive up to $2 million annually for two years to bring their plan to fruition.

     St. Louis County was one of 191 jurisdictions from 45 states that applied. Along with several other counties across the country, the cities of Philadelphia, New York and New Orleans were also selected for the initial round. Combined, the selected jurisdictions have a jail capacity of nearly 100,000 and hold 11 percent of those in jails nationwide, according to the MacArthur Foundation. Laurie Garduque, director of justice reform for the MacArthur Foundation, said St. Louis County made the cut because it demonstrated that leaders in several components of the government were interested in helping with the problem.

     “You had to have leadership commitment, motivation and the acknowledgement that you have a problem and that you were seeking solutions,” Garduque said. “That’s what made [St. Louis County] competitive among the similarly situated jurisdictions.”

     Their Flag and Ours

     The stubborn attachment of traditional Southern whites to the flags, statuary, and street names of the Confederate past is usually explained to the puzzled rest of us as an anthropological quirk or regional ancestor cult, which outsiders cannot possibly fathom. But there is another explanation, which bears on a rival cult elsewhere in the United States. This is the cult of the flags and statuary and street names of the Union army and its own generals and their war against the Confederacy. The two cults, Union and Confederate, arose in tandem in the immediate aftermath of the war and, in both cases, did so for the purpose of mourning the dead, which was a vast obligation. But the two cults also arose because the war had failed to settle any of the underlying disputes over ideas and principles. The contending sides had every reason to go on slugging it out, which they went about doing in various ways; and one of those ways was by conducting a different sort of war, civic and otherwise, over how to commemorate the military war. This was a war of rituals and symbols, a morbid war, a war of cemeteries against cemeteries. And in the morbid war of symbols, the partisans of the Confederacy turned out to enjoy a certain advantage, which was visible from the outset—an enormous advantage, telling for the long haul.

     The outset means 1866, when soldiers from the disbanded Union armed forces organized a veterans’ fraternal order called the Grand Army of the Republic, or GAR. The GAR’s purpose was to ensure that sacrifices and sufferings by the Union soldiers were appropriately recognized. The GAR was also something of a Republican party front, and it campaigned for Republican candidates. For a few years it campaigned for the voting rights of African-American veterans, until it gave up. But mostly the GAR marched in parades and listened to oratory, and these activities attracted hundreds of thousands of members. The GAR campaigned to make Memorial Day a holiday, and, on this issue, it enjoyed a lasting triumph. The GAR inscribed itself into the national geography. U.S. Route 6, which runs from California to Massachusetts, is officially called the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, than which nothing could be grander. Gen. John A. Logan of the Union army was an early commander of the GAR, and, in Washington, D.C., an equestrian statue of General Logan will preside forevermore over Logan Circle: another triumph. Those were the victories of a conventional fraternal organization.

     In the South, veterans of the Confederate army meanwhile put together a fraternal organization of their own in the first months after the war—only their organization, more of a terrorist army than a civic association, was the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK faithfully served the Southern Democratic Party (the racist party in those days) precisely for the purpose of denying voting rights to African-Americans, along with obstructing anything else that might lead to a more democratic society. The Klan’s murders and violence were terrible, and similarly the violence of the Knights of the White Camelia and other Southern terrorist groups, and the federal government eventually responded by sending troops. The KKK was suppressed. But the damage was undeniable. A mythic aura attached to the terrorists. And in the 1920s, when a revived Klan burst back into bloom, the membership expanded to several million people, which made it one of the largest mass organizations in the history of the United States—a movement that was not merely anti-black but was also, on grounds of religious bigotry, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic.

     The KKK in those years was America’s counterpart to the fascist movements of Europe, drunk on its white-sheeted cult of Confederate ghosts and its parades and the sentimental hoodoo about virtuous womanhood and its ability to terrorize. And the Klan and the United Daughters of the Confederacy and their allies went about inscribing their own movement into the national geography. The original Grand Wizard of the Klan was Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who presided over the massacre of African-American Union soldiers surrendering at Fort Pillow, a shameful military record; and dozens of statues, busts, and official markers celebrating the Grand Wizard were erected across Tennessee and the South, together with street names, school names, and buildings: a Southern rejoinder to the Northern insistence on attaching the names of Lincoln and Grant and other generals to every possible thing.

     Article continues at the link.

415. rq says

     9 July 2015 at 3:03 pm

     Teach black students they can change communities – they don’t have to escape

     My students are black and brown, living in communities that have been subjected to generations of underinvestment and discrimination. As a teaching artist in Boston public schools and a former high school English teacher just outside Washington DC, I’ve seen how the violence against people of color in the past year has left many in fear that their lives are in perpetual danger.

     As it happened, we did escape. The news came on the eve of a long-planned school trip to France. Hours later, when we met at the airport, we hugged one another and exchanged words – a reminder that we mattered, if not to the rest of the world, then at least to each other.

     When we arrived in Paris, I was reminded of the American writer James Baldwin. His departure from Harlem in 1948, aged 24, with only $40 (£25) in his pocket was an attempt to escape the pernicious racism of the US. This decision, he claims, saved his life. “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France – it was a matter of getting out of America,” he said in a 1984 interview with the Paris Review. “My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail; I was going to kill somebody or be killed.”

     For my entire life, I have watched the realities of racism slowly kill those around me. I have watched food insecurity and unequal access to healthy meals saturate black communities with diabetes and heart disease at disproportionate rates. I have watched the residue of federally-sanctioned redlining create small apartheids in cities for decades, generating breeding grounds for crime and poverty. In Baltimore, for example, local policies have existed since 1910 to isolate the city’s black population. To the present day federal housing subsidy policies still result in low-income black families being segregated from richer neighbourhoods.

     With all of that said, a part of me struggles to accept that Baldwin, a literary hero of mine, felt the only thing he could do was leave. When I discuss Baldwin with my students, the questions surrounding his departure inevitably arise. It is a difficult yet necessary conversation. I tell them it is a choice he made, one he had the right to – one they have the right to as well. In the midst of these conversations, however, I do not want to suggest to my students that the only way to be successful, or to have value, is to escape.

     This is a message already deeply embedded in the social fabric of schools in poor communities. Teachers, administrators and others propagate a “do well so you can leave this place” narrative. I have witnessed this in the schools where I have taught and been on the receiving end of it growing up. As someone not currently living in my own hometown of New Orleans, I even wonder to what extent I internalised such a message as a child.

     Education, at its best, gives students the option to make a life however and wherever they choose. That is different, however, to defining one’s ambition or dreams by how far removed they are from the places of their childhood. A child in Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, or any other city across the country, should not have to dream of escaping their neighborhood to make a meaningful life for him or herself. How will our communities ever grow into their true potential if we continue to tell our most successful students to leave?

     House Passes Ban On Confederate Flags In Federal Cemeteries. OooooOOOOoooo.

     The House on Tuesday evening passed an amendment that would prohibit Confederate flags from being displayed on graves in federal cemeteries, The Hill reported.

     Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) proposed the ban as an amendment to the Interior Department spending bill.

     Currently, the National Park Service allows individuals to place Confederate flags on Civil War veterans’ graves on Confederate Memorial Day, according to The Hill.

     The House on Tuesday also passed an amendment that would prohibit concession stores on National Park Service land from selling items featuring the Confederate flag, according to The Hill. The National Park Service in June asked that stores refrain from selling Confederate flags after numerous businesses stopped selling the flags in the wake of the shooting at a historic black church in South Carolina.

     Plantation Jail. Each cell held 4 “prisoners.” #WhitneyPlantation
     One of the largest slave revolts happened in Louisiana and it was intentionally left out of all history texts. #WhitneyPlantation

     House votes to ban sale of Confederate flag in Park Service stores. Not even at historical parks?

     The House voted Tuesday to affirm that stores on federal lands operated by the National Park Service cannot sell Confederate flags, in light of a new policy announced in the aftermath of the shooting in Charleston, S.C.

     Adoption of the amendment to the 2016 Interior Department appropriations bill came easily on a voice vote after just six minutes of debate, where no one spoke in opposition. The amendment reflects a policy announced by the National Park Service in June to ban the sale of Confederate flag merchandise from its gift shops and bookstores.

     Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), the author of the amendment, said it was important that Congress prevent the sale of the Confederate image on federal property.

     “This House now has an opportunity to add its voice, by ending the promotion of the cruel, racist legacy of the Confederacy,” Huffman said. “While many concessionaires have agreed to do this, I am dismayed by reports that some will continue to sell items with Confederate flag imagery.”

     […]

     Under the National Park Service policy, Confederate symbols in educational items like books or historical documentaries would still be allowed for sale. But standalone items depicting the Confederate flag would be prohibited.

     The Pros And Cons Of Flying The Confederate Flag – from the Onion.

     A South Carolina bill to remove the Confederate flag from its position in front of the state house is gaining momentum, with the House of Representatives currently reviewing the bill and preparing to vote. Here are the pros and cons of flying the Confederate flag:

     PROS

     – Bold way to display distorted, painstakingly cherry-picked heritage
     – Stirring symbol of South’s never-surrender attitude 150 years after South’s surrender
     – It’s already all the way up there on flagpole
     – Simplest way to let others know your state ranks in bottom quintile of all quality-of-life metrics
     – Eliminates uncomfortable feeling of having to say aloud what you think of African Americans
     – Political correctness should not get in the way of being on the wrong side of history
     – Without it, nation might forget racism ever happened in U.S.

     CONS

     – Can’t fully grasp its incredible grandeur like you can on a bedspread or garage door
     – May arouse negative feelings among blacks regarding 19th-century states’ rights, currency inflation, and sectarianism
     – U.S. flag already represents history of entrenched prejudice just as well
     – Eliminates tedious raising, lowering, and triangular-folding tasks
     – Has always been sad reminder of The Dukes Of Hazzard’s cancellation
     – Could give accurate representation as to what kind of person is flying it
     – There still plenty of other ways to make nation’s black population feel despised, derided, and inferior

416. rq says

     9 July 2015 at 3:16 pm

     Congress Might Finally Overhaul No Child Left Behind. Here’s What That Means For Kids.

     On Tuesday, the Senate debated its version of a No Child Left Behind rewrite, called the Every Child Achieves Act. Later this week, the House of Representatives is set to do the same with its version, called the Student Success Act. It is currently unclear where a final bill may land, but civil rights groups, politicians and teachers unions agree — it is time for an update.

     The No Child Left Behind Act, a 2002 bipartisan law enacted by Bush, emphasizes standardized tests and penalties for bad scores. Since 2011, the Obama administration has offered waivers to states, allowing them to elude some of the law’s most stringent requirements. Amid this patchwork of state waivers, previous attempts to overhaul the law have failed.

     This time around, Congress appears determined to make something work. Here are three things you should know about the Senate and House bills that are up for debate.

     1. The bills maintain an emphasis on standardized testing.

     Under No Child Left Behind, states are required to test students in reading and mathematics every year in grades three through eight, and once in grades nine through 12. This would not change under the Senate or House bills.

     2. Both bills give more control to states.

     Both the Senate and House bills give more freedom to states than the No Child Left Behind Act. Both versions allow states to define their own systems of accountability that hold schools responsible for their test scores, as opposed to No Child Left Behind, which allowed the federal government to impose a top-down accountability system.

     Still, the Senate and House bills are vastly different, and the Senate version seems to have garnered more bipartisan support. While the House bill — sponsored by Republican Rep. John Kline — was supposed to come to a floor vote in February, the vote was delayed after Republican leaders decided the bill did not have enough backing.

     Indeed, some groups are upset about a provision in the House bill that they say will underfund schools with high numbers of disadvantaged students. The provision allows Title I funds — federal funds given to local education agencies with high levels of low-income students — to follow disadvantaged students to the public school of their choice.

     This “portability” concept would “divert much needed funds from the highest poverty schools and districts, and would undermine critical targeting of limited Title I funds. As a whole, the bill would thrust us back to an earlier time when states could choose to ignore the needs of children of color, low-income students, ELLs, and students with disabilities,” says a letter released this week from the The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

     3. President Barack Obama supports neither bill.

     The Obama administration does not support either the Senate bill or House bill, but it especially does not support the House bill.

     Both bills lack accountability, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a call with reporters Monday.

     “The Senate bill is missing key pieces, and we cannot support it as it currently stands,” he said.

     The White House has previously suggested that it would veto the House bill, notes The Associated Press.

     I don’t know if giving more control to the states, as opposed to federal guidelines, is really the best way to go…

     The kid from the ’hood who snapped an iconic Baltimore image. That’s Devin Allen.

     Devin Allen plans to get the word “smile” tattooed on his trigger finger.

     It will be a nod to his West Baltimore ’hood — where more friends and peers than he can count on all his fingers have died in gun violence. It will also be a wink to his craft, the one he uses to capture this city, his “beautiful ghetto,” in powerful black-and-white photos that have made him a surprise media sensation.

     In late April, the then-26-year-old shot his Fuji X-T1 over and over again as demonstrators took to the streets to protest the death of Freddie Gray, who suffered a fatal injury in police custody. Marching alongside the protesters, Allen snapped portrait after portrait that offered a view from the front lines in the days after Gray’s death.

     Using the WiFi on his camera, he uploaded dozens of his raw photos onto Instagram and Twitter, sharing them with his several thousand followers in real time. Soon enough, Rihanna and rapper King Los reposted a few of his snaps.

     Then Time put one on the cover.

     […]

     Allen also captured something that others didn’t: He stuck around after the violence, taking photos of the community coming together again. “They was doing cookouts on some blocks since a lot of stores were closed,” he says. “Kids playing basketball, dancing and singing, the day after Freddie Gray’s funeral. No news reporters.”

     “He gives a holistic picture of what was happening,” says Skipp Sanders, the museum’s executive director. Not just the looting or the smashed police cars.

     Museum exhibits manager Dave Ferraro calls Allen a “social documentarian,” more digital than fine art, since he doesn’t sweat it when his photos need to be cropped or altered slightly. Allen uploads nearly every shot from his camera onto his iPhone (recently upgraded to 128 gigabytes, he declares proudly) and barely uses Photoshop anymore, let alone opens his laptop.

     More at the link, but I wish all the best to this bright young artist.

     MTV Forces White People to Face Their Whiteness in New Documentary ‘White People’

     Guys, it’s time to clear the air. There are some rumors going around in the comments sections of Complex dot com that I am literally out to get all white people (see: here, here, here, and here). But I promise that’s not true! I have white friends, I promise! There is a white dude coworker sitting in front of me as I write this, and I’m very fond of him!

     If you’re white and have ever felt uncomfortable or offended whenever I have called out the American entertainment industry’s long history of racism, then 1) wow I feel very sorry for you and 2) get ready to squirm in your seats. On July 22, MTV is premiering a documentary called White People (lol I know) in which white people are forced to think about how white they are. Check out the trailer below (warning: lots of white people tears lie ahead).

     I can’t tell if this is actually supposed to be funny or serious but it’s kinda hard not to laugh when a white dude exclaims, “You say the wrong thing and suddenly you are racist!” before the words “WHITE FRUSTRATION” flash on the screen. But in all seriousness, I think it’s important for white people to have racial discussions, and then maybe they’ll understand that WHEN I START DISCUSSING THESE THINGS, I’m not just out here white-bashing.

     The doc actually feels less like a joke when you realize that it’s made by Pulitzer-winning journalist and filmmaker Jose Antonio Vargas (who was awarded for his reporting on the Virginia Tech shootings). Still, it’s always a good time poking fun at white people. (And hell ya, I’m going to watch White People—do you even have to ask?)

     South Carolina House votes to remove Confederate flag from statehouse grounds

     The Confederate flag flying on South Carolina’s statehouse grounds is set to come down after the House voted 94-20 to remove it. The bill, passed early Thursday morning, now heads to Republican Gov. Nikki Haley’s desk and she is expected to sign it.

     After more than 13 hours of debate — which became increasingly contentious as the night wore on — House Republicans and Democrats agreed not to amend the legislation with a proposal that threatened would make final passage more difficult.

     Just before 1:00 a.m. the lawmakers approved the legislation 93-27 in a critical second reading vote. Minutes later, the bill easily cleared the two-thirds threshold needed for it officially pass the chamber, a hurdle the Senate cleared earlier this week.

     “Today, as the Senate did before them, the House of Representatives has served the State of South Carolina and her people with great dignity,” Haley said in a statement following Thursday’s early morning vote. “I’m grateful for their service and their compassion. It is a new day in South Carolina, a day we can all be proud of, a day that truly brings us all together as we continue to heal, as one people and one state.”

     South Carolina votes to remove Confederate flag, BBC on the same.

     American Muslims raise $30,000 to help repair black churches destroyed by fire

     When Faatimah Knight reached out to her Muslim friends and acquaintances to try and help black churches that had been destroyed by fire, she had no idea how much they could collect.

     Today, they have managed to raise just under $30,000 – money that will be used to help up to seven churches that were destroyed in the American south in the aftermath of the Charleston shooting and the campaign against the Confederate flag.

     “We have been overwhelmed by how generous people have been,” Ms Knight, 23, told The Independent. “We will stop it today…We will figure out how to distribute the money.”

     Ms Knight’s campaign – carried out as Muslims around the world marked the festival of Ramadan – followed a smaller, more modest enterprise she had set in motion in the days after the shooting dead of nine people at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17. She and some friends wanted to gather $500 to send flowers; they ended up raising $900.

     And when she and the same friends read about the series of churches that were burned down and the probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, they similarly wanted to act. At least three of the fires were said to have been arson – with fears they may have been destroyed by people disgruntled by moves against the Confederate flag.

     A number of Muslim organisations have responded to her call, including the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, the Arab American Association of New York and Ummah Wide, but she said people of other faiths had also donated.

417. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 2:29 am

     So remember how Black Lives Matter and all this protesting is supposed to bring all this attention to police brutality and racism? Police Misconduct and More Killings Go Largely Ignored

     While the nation is wrangling over the fate of a Confederate flag still flapping, high-and-mighty, outside South Carolina’s Statehouse, no one seems to have noticed that July is barely into its first full week, and already 26 people across the nation have been killed by police. That’s according to The Guardian’s authoritative “The Counted” project.

     While the national outrage over law-enforcement killings of unarmed black people has been replaced by ongoing rage over Southern antiques, too many trigger-happy officers are still busily engaged in the suspiciously wanton deaths of too many citizens. Clearly, the widening spotlight on police violence hasn’t done much to decrease the number of police-driven killings.

     Until the next viral video of violent cops gone wild bubbles to the top of a trend list, a still-nascent second civil rights movement shouldn’t get caught up in a dangerous pivot of present preoccupation with symbols over substance.

     That matter of police misconduct didn’t go anywhere. Much of it is still unanswered, largely unlegislated and frustratingly unresolved.

     This past June alone witnessed three alarming studies on police misconduct that dropped with little mainstream fanfare or legislative response: Amnesty International’s “Deadly Force” report (pdf) showed all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, flunking international policing standards; the Justice Department put blame squarely on Missouri police departments, namely Ferguson’s and St. Louis County’s, for instigating last year’s unrest; and a recent Washington Post investigation discovered that more than a quarter of civilians fatally shot thus far by police in 2015 were mentally ill.

     If anything, the collective mood of some cops is frighteningly emboldened. Since the beginning of 2015, The Guardian’s “The Counted” project has already picked up 572 deaths by law enforcement with, not surprisingly, a disproportionate share being black. While the majority of persons killed by cops thus far this year have been white, the rate at which African Americans are killed (per million) is four times that of whites.

     Yet, strangely enough, there are few calls—and even less policy or political muscle—for a national policing standard by which every armed American officer answers to the same set of regulations. Instead, the nation seems content with its awkward kaleidoscopic patchwork of 18,000 state, local and federal law-enforcement agencies. Not only does each agency wear a different brand and color, but each proudly dances to its own tune and respective state legal standards, which means local norms and systemic quid pro quo hold more precedence than basic constitutional obligations.

     The White House’s own Task Force on 21st Century Policing was supposed to offer some guidance on fixing that. But while its elaborately written final report (pdf) urged gun-slinging colleagues to create “clear and comprehensive policies on the use of force,” it came up short on keeping it simple and creating just one clear national policy.

     […]

     Many local and state agencies are putting either outdated or racially insensitive procedures ahead of federal civil rights statutes that could help them avoid trouble altogether. Some of that is misguided local pride; the rest of it is sloppy or corrupt cops covering up local dirt. As Vice’s Jonathan Blanks writes: “Between close relationships with prosecutors, secretive police culture and laws that protect officers from taking personal responsibility for their actions, the obstacles to police reform are stifling.”

     Yet, for multiple reasons, Washington has been left with the politically motivated (and intellectually lazy) notion that body cameras should just about clean up our national cop problem. Wash, spin and rinse, and all you need is more cameras watching poorly trained, poorly educated and nonsympathetic police. But when more than 80 percent of local police departments don’t require more than a high school diploma, and small city departments rely on half-baked training curriculum, Congress needs a better plan than simply catching the man or woman in blue red-handed on camera.

     Remember Nicholas Thomas? Shot in his car because it was too fancy for a black person? Grand Jury finds Smyrna officer justified in Nicholas Thomas shooting

     Cobb County District Attorney Vic Reynolds said that the Cobb Grand Jury reviewed the facts and the evidence in the March 24, 2015, shooting death of Nicholas Thomas by police and determined the shooting was justified.

     The Grand Jury recommended no further action be taken in the case.

     “The loss of life is unfortunate, and I sincerely sympathize with Mr. Thomas’s survivors. But when he drove the vehicle toward officers in the manner he did, the officer who fired the shots was justified under the law to use lethal force,” DA Reynolds said. “Police officers in Georgia are authorized to fire their weapons to protect themselves or others from immediate bodily harm. That is what happened in this case.”

     Police have said Smyrna police Sgt. Kenneth Owens shot Thomas outside the Goodyear store where Thomas worked in metro Atlanta. Police have said Thomas drove a Maserati toward officers as they tried to serve him with a warrant for a parole violation.

     Cobb County District Attorney Vic Reynolds said this was the second time that officers attempted to serve Thomas with a warrant. When he disobeyed orders, Owens fired at him.

     Smyrna police said that Thomas drove around the building several times at “a high rate of speed.” According to a statement from the police department, Owens fired into the moving car in fear that Thomas placed them “at risk to receive serious bodily injury or death.”

     Authorities said that after Owens opened fire, the car came to a stop. Officers then gave commands to Thomas, but received no response, according to police.

     The window tint was so dark on the luxury car, McDonald said police needed to see inside.

     “Looks like he used some sort of shotgun with no lethal rounds. It was an orange colored gun, trying to bust out the window,” said McDonald.

     Smyrna police said the orange colored gun had “less than lethal bean bag rounds,” and was used to break the passenger side window so they could see inside the car.

     Once police made contact, they said Thomas was unresponsive inside the car and later pronounced dead by personnel from the fire department.

     McDonald does not believe Thomas had a weapon.

     Oh, right and there was that warrant. Totally justifies what happened. I hear the witness version differs from that of the officers.

     Here’s an Ezell Ford version from the LA police. I think this is what they call ‘character assassination’. New information throws light on why Ezell Ford attacked LAPD officers

     Over the last several weeks, there has been a great deal of public discussion about the Ezell Ford incident, with people offering their opinions on the officers’ actions and Ford’s background and behavior that evening. Opinions may differ, but all should be tethered to the facts.

     First, Ford had a history of mental health issues. According to court records, in September 2011, a Santa Barbara judge found Ford incompetent to stand trial for stealing a car, and confined him to a mental hospital for several months. Among the most difficult situations police officers encounter is when they confront mentally ill suspects, who often display furtive or erratic behaviors and fail to respond to officers’ commands in a calm and rational manner. Ford’s mental illness provides an explanation for his failure to respond to the officers’ commands in this case and his erratic behavior in attempting to grab one of the officer’s weapons.

     Second, Ford had an extensive criminal record, with a history of convictions for drug offenses, possession of a weapon, trespass and vehicle theft. In fact, Ford pled guilty to aggravated trespass as recently as January of last year, just a few months before his encounter with the LAPD officers.

     Third, court records suggest that Ford was a gang member or affiliated with a gang. Two California Court of Appeal decisions describe Ford as “a member of the East Coast Crips gang,” and a 2008 arrest report references “66 East Coast Crip,” a violent criminal organization. In addition, Ford had a “C” tattooed on his face, which is another indication of gang affiliation. These court decisions reflect that Ford was shot by a rival gang in 2008, which sparked a gang war culminating with a drive-by shooting that left one man dead and another injured.

     Finally, a bench warrant for Ford’s arrest was outstanding at the time of his interaction with the LAPD officers. Ford had previously been convicted of stealing a car in Santa Barbara court, and was on probation in January of last year when he pleaded guilty to trespass in Los Angeles court. As a result, the Santa Barbara court revoked Ford’s probation and issued a warrant for his arrest.

     All of these factors—Ford’s history of mental illness, a lengthy criminal history, gang affiliation and an outstanding warrant—may help explain why Ford concealed his hands, refused to comply with the officers’ directions and reached for an officer’s weapon, ultimately resulting in the officers having to use deadly force. None of these factors have received adequate attention in the press, and it is unclear whether they were considered by the Police Commission.

     Opinions are heated on the Ezell Ford incident, which is understandable. But all the facts must be considered in order to make an informed judgment about the events leading to LAPD officers having to use their weapons to protect themselves during their encounter with an erratic and aggressive suspect.

     … And that is the version police sympathizers believe.

     Loyal White Knights of the #KKK: number of memberships has doubled over past weeks. #ConfederateFlag #wis10 #sctweets
     #KKK says rally will go on despite vote. Spokesman also says National Socialist Movement will be there. #sctweets #ConfederateFlag #wis10 (Re: the planned flag rally for July 18.)

     Have a little bit of black excellence: Serena Williams defeats Maria Sharapova to advance to Wimbledon final.

418. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 2:38 am

     Memphis, Tenn., Votes to Exhume Body of Confederate General, KKK Leader Buried in City Park

     “Nathan Bedford Forrest is a symbol of bigotry and racism, and those symbols have no place on public property,” council Chairman Myron Lowery told Fusion. “What we’re doing here in Memphis is no different from what’s happening across the country.”

     Forrest was a Memphis native who made his wealth in the slave trade and gained name recognition as a general for the Confederate Army. He later became the KKK’s first Grand Wizard in 1968 but eventually withdrew from the notorious hate group.

     As the news site notes, a Tennessee court and the Tennessee Historical Commission still have to approve the removal of the graves, and not everyone is thrilled with the idea.

     “I think it’s disgusting that people use the shooting in Charleston and use those victims to forward their own agenda and join this anti-Confederate hysteria that’s going on,” Sons of the Confederate Veterans spokesman Lee Millar told local news station WREG.

     Keep being disgusted, Millar, because you sure disgust me, too.

     [AME MASSACRE] They Are Us: Remembering the Victims

     They are us. Their spirits were connected with ours simply by being born gloriously Black and they are still us, the nine beautiful souls returned to God in the most blood-thirsty and animalistic kind of attack. This country’s obsession with finger-pointing terrorism turned inward on unsuspecting people in their most defenseless posture in the most unassuming place. They were studying the Word, doing what Black folks have had to do to survive, much less flourish in America since we got here. Their guards were down, their hearts were open, their eyes were watching God.

     There will be months to investigate the hate-mongering terrorist who unleashed his murderous evil after sitting with and praying with and absorbing the loving energy of people who welcomed him, even though he himself looked nothing like them. Had the scenario played out in the reverse, had a menacing-looking Black man with dead, cold eyes forced himself upon a gathering of good White Christians, the reactions would’ve been different. There would have been tension. Someone would have pressed a silent alarm or covertly alerted the police. The visitor would definitely have been profiled, may have been asked to leave because his presence caused such a heightened level of discomfort. But we, by nature, are a love-filled people and the members of historic Emanuel AME demonstrated that fully.

     They deserved to finish out their to-do lists for the next day—to grumble about laundry and do some last-minute grocery shopping—to attend graduation cookouts on Saturday and celebrate Father’s Day with their families on Sunday. They deserved to touch realized dreams and feel the exhilaration of goals accomplished. They should be celebrating milestones and birthdays and anniversaries and pivotal, game-changing moments of personal growth.

     We will honor them by confronting the hatred that presses in on us at public pools and on city streets, and demolishes the sanctity of our houses of worship. We are done with passive restraint and polite resistance. We’ll keep praying, but our fists will be balled. We are a people in the crosshairs of systemic, in-your-face, genocidal attack. We are fighting for our lives.

     Today we say their names because they are worthy, because their lives have value, because it is up to us to remember. We lift them up and offer their loved ones and our extended community condolences. And, most importantly, we will guarantee that their memories will be more than fleeting mentions in a 24-hour news cycle, but they will stick and remain in our spirits just like the Word did in theirs. God, welcome them into your eternal peace. These are our people, with love.

     The article contains tributes to each of the victims.

     Father of man shot by Smyrna officer says he’ll take case to FBI – that’s Nicholas Thomas’ father.

     Huey Thomas, the father of the 23-year-old Nicholas Thomas who was shot in the back by a Smyrna police officer in March, says his family plans to file a complaint with the Federal Bureau of Investigation if his son’s death is not investigated properly.

     Speaking to the Cobb County board of commissioners Tuesday night, Thomas produced a picture that he said shows Sgt. Kenneth Owens and another officer crouched behind a police utility vehicle with their weapons drawn. Thomas said the photograph proves that officers were not in fear for their lives when the fatal shot was fired.

     Police have said they opened fire when Thomas sped toward them in a Maserati, attempting to flee the scene as they tried to serve an arrest warrant.

     But an autopsy report, released last week, said that Thomas was shot in the back and died after the bullet tore through his torso and hit several major organs. At least one witness to the shooting has said the car was stopped when police opened fire.

     “I have never been so disgusted in my life,” Thomas told commissioners. “You mean to tell me (the officer) ran from behind that vehicle, shot my son, and ran back behind the vehicle? That’s not what happened. That is absolutely not what happened.”

     Cobb County District Attorney Vic Reynolds has said the case will likely be heard by a civil grand jury in July. Civil grand juries can recommend whether the case should be considered by a criminal grand jury.

     Thomas said he has “no faith whatsoever” that Reynolds’ office will fairly present the case, and said he doesn’t even know if Owens fired the fatal shot.

     Mawuli Davis, the attorney for the Thomas family, has said Reynolds should allow the family to see surveillance video that captured the shooting before it is shown to the civil grand jury. Thomas said Tuesday that the family still has not been allowed to see the video.

     “I’m just asking for the truth,” Thomas said.

     The article is from June 23, actually – so before the Grand Jury decision. And why did the officer fire? “He feared for his life”. *spits*

     Philadelphia Police Open Internal Investigation After Arrest Video Surfaces

     Philadelphia Police say they have launched an investigation after video surfaced of an arrest back on April 3rd.

     The video, which was posted on Wednesday July 8, appears to show a number of officers involved in a physical altercation with a suspect while trying to apprehend him.

     In the video, the man can be heard screaming during the apparent struggle.

     On Thursday, a police spokesperson told FOX 29 that the Department was made aware of the video overnight, and had sent it to Internal Affairs for investigation.

     Police are hoping to release more information later in the day Thursday.

     Riots In The Netherlands After Caribbean Man Mitch Henriquez Dies In Police Custody

     Dutch police fired warning shots and arrested 34 people during a third straight day of unrest on Thursday triggered by the death of a Caribbean man in police custody, and a temporary ban on public gatherings was imposed in a neighborhood hit by rioting.

     The death from apparent asphyxiation on Sunday of Mitch Henriquez, 42, from the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba, has been likened to incidents in the United States that sparked protests over excessive police use of force.

     Disturbances erupted anew overnight on Thursday and police on horseback charged protesters who set fires, hurled bottles and rocks and smashed shop windows, according to a police statement.

     Later on Thursday, the mayor of The Hague imposed a rare temporary ban on public assembly in the neighborhood, where more than 60 protesters have been arrested since Monday, to try to stem the violence, the Dutch news agency ANP reported.

     So that’s still going on, too…

     Placement of Children in Adult Jails and Prisons is Challenged, from the Equal Justice Initiative.

     This year Alabama Governor Bentley signed a law prohibiting the practice of housing children in the same cell with adults or housing children in solitary confinement. EJI urges swift enforcement of the new legislation.

     In June, the U.S. Justice Department opened an investigation in Alabama about juveniles being housed with adult detainees, being victims of sexual abuse, and being held for months in solitary isolation.

     “Isolation—particularly the prolonged and restrictive lockdown alleged in Jefferson County—can lead to paranoia, anxiety, depression and suicide, and exacerbate pre-existing psychological harms,” said Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The 2012 Report of the Attorney General’s National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence concluded that “nowhere is the damaging impact of incarceration on vulnerable children more obvious than when it involves solitary confinement.”

     The United States is almost alone among developed nations in incarcerating children under 18 years old with adult inmates in adult jails and prisons.

     A recent in-depth investigative report from theHuffington Post Highline reveals the horrific results of this abusive practice.

     In the 1980s and 1990s, overblown fears of a coming juvenile crime wave led many states to make it easier to prosecute children as adults. “Nationwide, between 1985 and 1995, the number of youth incarcerated in prisons and jails roughly doubled. As of 2013, almost 6,000 kids were held in adult facilities across the country.”

     […]

     Compared to kids in juvenile detention, those in the adult system attempt suicide much more often. The case of Kalief Browder, who committed suicide on June 8 after spending three years in the jail on Rikers Island for allegedly stealing a backpack at age sixteen, has drawn attention to the lasting damage inflicted by subjecting juveniles to solitary confinement and brutal assaults by other incarcerated people and prison guards.

     Children are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted in adult prisons than in juvenile facilities. Recognizing the heightened risk for youth, the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act stipulates that youth may not be held within “sight and sound” of adult inmates. But in 2015, only ten states reported that they were in full compliance.

     […]

     The decision to treat a child as an adult also tends to reflect the presumption of guilt and dangerousness attached to young people of color in this country. One national study found that in a single year, almost 10 times more black kids were committed to adult facilities than were white kids. EJI reported the results of another study finding that, out of 257 children prosecuted as adults in Chicago between 2010 and 2012, only one was white.

     “The decision to direct cases to the adult system is largely left to individual judges or prosecutors, who are often affected by their own ‘hidden biases’ — about skin color, economic class, parental history and other factors — that have little to do with public safety.” Indeed, a nationwide sample of cases sent from juvenile to adult court in 2013 shows that about half were related to property, drug or public order crimes, not serious violent offenses.

     EJI believes that confining children in adult jails and prisons is unnecessary, indefensible, and cruel, and is working to ban the practice nationwide.

419. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 2:55 am

     Interactive maps!
     Mapping Segregation, subtitle “New government rules will require all cities and towns receiving federal housing funds to assess patterns of segregation.” Some major cities that you can look at.

     How the Confederacy lives on in the flags of seven Southern states

     Defenders of the flag say it’s a symbol of Southern heritage. Detractors maintain that hatred and racism are an inextricable part of that heritage. With all the focus on South Carolina, it’s easy to forget that Confederate symbolism still adorns many official state flags in the South. Some states, like Georgia and Mississippi, have seen fierce political battles over explicit Confederate imagery in their flags. In other states, the references are subtler.

     As of the 2010 Census, these state were home to about 60 million Americans — including 12 million African-Americans, meaning roughly one third of the nation’s black population lives under a state flag that evokes, at least in the eyes of many, the Confederacy. Take a look below.

     This may be a repost. I forgot to check the date.

     Can the KKK adopt a highway in Georgia? A court will soon decide

     The Georgia Court of Appeals will soon decide a rather prickly question: Whether the Ku Klux Klan can “adopt” a stretch of highway in north Georgia.

     The white supremacy group sought in 2012 to receive recognition from the state for cleaning litter from a 1-mile span of Route 515 near the North Carolina state line. After Georgia transportation officials rejected the request to join the adopt-a-highway program, the KKK chapter sued.

     Their case, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, will be the focus of oral arguments at the appellate court on Thursday morning. The chapter claims the state’s rejection violated the group’s free speech rights. The state has cited public safety concerns and contended that the program is aimed at “civic-minded organizations” – not hate groups.

     Georgia officials are mindful of an irksome precedent. The state of Missouri blocked a similar request from the Klan in 1997, but lost their fight after a lengthy legal battle on free speech grounds. Missouri lawmakers tried to get the last laugh. They renamed that stretch of pavement after a rabbi who fled Nazi Germany and became a prominent civil rights advocate in the U.S.

     The timing of Georgia’s case, though, presents other problems. It comes amid renewed calls to bring down remnants of the Confederacy after the shooting deaths of nine black worshipers by a gunman suspected of wanting to incite a race war. Georgia officials don’t want to be put in a position where they’re forced to hoist a hate group’s sign even as neighboring South Carolina is poised to tear down its Rebel flag.

     Consider the kicker to the state’s legal brief:

     “Erecting an [Adopt-A-Highway] Program sign with the KKK’s name on it would have the effect of erecting a sign announcing that ‘the State of Georgia has declared this area Klan Country,’” it read. “Such a statement is absurd and would date this state back decades.”

     White House Hosts First-Ever Tribal Youth Gathering

     The White House is hosting the first-ever Tribal Youth Gathering in conjunction with the United National Indian Tribal Youth conference. The gathering will bring together more than 875 Native youth representing 230 Indian nations from 42 states to speak to first lady Michelle Obama, Cabinet officials, the White House Council on Native American Affairs and non-federal partners about a range of issues including education, health, justice, economic opportunity, climate change, cultural protection and language revitalization.

     The Tribal Youth Gathering comes at a moment of increased attention to Indian Country, particularly to the tremendous challenges faced by Native American youth. Last June, Obama visited the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe on the border of North and South Dakota, becoming only the eighth president to visit an Indian reservation while in office. During his visit, Obama met with Lakota and Dakota youth whose stories of forestalled opportunities, drinking and suicide moved him to tears.

     This Tumblr Is Exposing Hollywood’s Problem With People Of Colour, more examples of how few speaking lines people of colour get in Hollywood movies. It’s also interesting to see what kinds of roles they get…

     28 percent of whites say they favor a law allowing homeowners to discriminate

     When the Fair Housing Act first came into effect in the late 1960s and early ’70s, a substantial share of white Americans supported the kind of discrimination the landmark law made illegal. They believed that whites had a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods. They said in surveys that they’d prefer a housing law that protected a homeowner’s right to discriminate.

     While that era sounds long ago, these positions took many years to shift. And that slow trajectory helps explain why there has long been little political will for the kind of desegregation — originally envisioned by the law — that the Obama administration now says it wants to enforce.

     Since 1973, the General Social Survey has continuously asked whites which housing law they would vote for if they had two options: One saying a homeowner “can decide for himself whom to sell his house to, even if he prefers not to sell it to blacks,” and another saying a homeowner “cannot refuse to sell to someone because of their race or color.”

     The second choice has been the law in America since the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. But until the late 1980s, a majority of whites chose the first option:

     The reversal over the last four decades has been striking. But as recently as 2014, 28 percent of whites still said they’d chose the law allowing homeowners to refuse to sell their homes to blacks.

     On another GSS question, a third of whites in 1972 agreed with the statement “white people have a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods if they want to, and blacks should respect that.”

     When the GSS stopped asking the question in 1996, 12 percent agreed.

     More recently, since just 1990, the share of whites who say they’re opposed to living in a neighborhood where half their neighbors are black has fallen significantly, too:

     Notably, the share of whites who’d favor living in such a neighborhood has remained relatively stable for the last 20 years. Alexander Polikoff, a long-time civil rights lawyer in Chicago, made this observation to me that may help explain that last picture: “It’s not that people in the large harbor racial animus, although there are some who do,” he says. “It’s that people are fearful of inundation.”

     How is that ‘fear of inundation’ not a form of racial animus?

420. Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- says

     10 July 2015 at 3:39 am

     Every single word spoken by a person of colour in major films
     A tumblr.

421. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 5:07 am

     Trigger Warning for the imagery in this article.
     For those who need to see, this is what a modern-day lynching looks like. Funnily enough, there is no hashtag or twitter involved. 19 yr old Haitian in Dominican Republic hung in public square

     A Haitian man of 19 years was beaten and hung in the public square of Ercilia Pepin, near the Marìa José Cabral and Baez hospital in Santiago where he shined shoes. It is being described as a hate crime where no motive except that the man was Haitian. Demonstrations that included the burning of the Haitian flag did ensue.

     Dominican law enforcement retrieved the body which had welts and hands and feet bound. The victim was identified as “Tulile” and some who were familiar with him said that he shined shoes at the hospital. The Martelly regime has not said or done anything following national and international news reports about the crime.

     That blog, by the way, if you take a tour around, has some other good information, too.

     KKK Leader Disputes Hate Group Label: ‘We’re A Christian Organization’

     The leader of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is tired of “a few rogue Klansmen” ruining the group’s reputation, and argues that the group is a non-violent Christian organization.

     “We don’t hate people because of their race, I mean, we’re a Christian organization,” Frank Ancona, the group’s Imperial Wizard, told Virginia’s NBC 12 on Thursday. “Because of the acts of a few rogue Klansmen, all Klansmen are supposed to be murderers, and wanting to lynch black people, and we’re supposed to be terrorists. That’s a complete falsehood.”

     Ancona’s group has come under fire from residents of Chesterfield County, Va., about 20 miles south of Richmond, for distributing KKK recruitment fliers in people’s yards since January.

     “We picked ours up out of our driveway and threw it in the trash,” Sarah Peachee told NBC 12. “We weren’t interested in even reading about it.”

     Ancona defended the strategy, however, citing a boom in KKK membership across the country since 2008.

     “In the last six years that I’ve been president of this organization I’ve seen the numbers probably triple,” Ancona told NBC 12. “The funny thing is the same neighborhoods where you’re saying there are people who don’t want the flier are neighborhoods where our members live, and neighborhoods where people are sympathetic to our cause and are glad to hear from us.”

     Although Ancona insisted that the KKK is not a hate group, he added that “We just want to keep our race the white race.”

     “We want to stay white,” Ancona said. “It’s not a hateful thing to want to maintain white supremacy.”

     Uh… actually, it is.

     Poverty rates in every U.S. school district, in one map

     Anyone who cares about the plight of poor children in America should take a look at a new interactive map, below, put together by the new nonprofit EdBuild.

     The map shows Census Bureau poverty rates in each of the nation’s nearly 14,000 school districts nationwide. The darker the blue on the map, the greater the concentration of children living in poverty. It seems like the kind of map that should have been easy to find long ago — but it hasn’t been, at least not in the public realm.

     Zoom out, and you can see macro-level concentrations of poverty and wealth, like the dark blue swaths of impoverished districts along the Mississippi River in the Deep South and in rural parts of the West. Zoom in, and you see how school district boundaries often serve as stark lines of division between the poor and the affluent.

     EdBuild founder Rebecca Sibilia says that the map should serve as a wake-up call that gerrymandering is as much a problem for kids in public schools as it is for voters. The difference is that boundaries are drawn to contain poor families rather than to favor a certain political party, she said.

     Interview with Sibilia at the link.

     Florida woman arrested for spitting on black kids and saying she’ll hang their family from a tree

     No, this wasn’t 1955.

     No, this wasn’t an 80 year old woman from a different era.

     On July 5th, 2015, 29 year old Lisa Marie Elberson was arrested in Lake County, Florida for aggravated assault, child abuse, and simple battery after spitting on black children, chasing them with a baseball bat, calling them niggers, and saying she’ll hang their family from a tree.

     But racism is dead, right?

     See the video below that someone was able to record and hand deliver to the police. Without it, she’d still be free.

     It’s almost to the point where it’s advisable for everyone to keep cameras on at all times.

     Sigh.

     Racists cry bitter tears on Nikki Haley’s Facebook page after SC votes to take down Confederate flag. I bet those tears mix well with grenadine and some tonic water for a wonderfully refreshing summer drink.

     South Carolina lawmakers voted early Thursday morning to take down the Confederate flag, and Gov. Nikki Haley heard from hundreds of angry racists.

     The Republican governor announced the vote on her Facebook page and thanked lawmakers for serving the state with “great dignity.”
     ADVERTISEMENT

     However, many of her former supporters strongly disagreed.

     “I’ve never been so ashamed of my State as I am right now,” Cody Burr said.

     “Sad day in south Carolina because of you nikki haley. S.m.h. very disrespectful,” posted Jessica Hodge Summerlin on the governor’s Facebook page.

     “I don’t understand how such a republican governor can take away one of the important things for our state. Why? Because it offends people?” said Caitlyn Ainsley Foulker. “Well, a lot offends me, but I don’t see you banning that too. What about what the rest of most of this state wants?”

     “Dear Governor, if you really represent a unified South Carolina and are only here to serve her people how come no one in Columbia felt that this important and deep rooted issue was appropriate to be handled in referendum by the people who gave you your job?” Travis Crenshaw said.

     “I would not vote for you again. Ever,” Randy Smith. “Would you have so much ‘courage’ if you were in your first term? You’ve done more to divide SC than any single person in our history. To think i wasted my votes on you for SC House, and Governor, twice.”

     “Cowardice in the South Carolina Governors office and thy name is Nikki Haley,” Jim Madsen said.

     “Speak for your self, I don’t think you care about South Carolina, you are picking and choosing, must be going for a Senate seat, I screwed up and voted for you, but not again,” Becky Griffith Leapard said. “You are good at one think and that’s disrespecting Our Confedrate Veterans. Sad day in South Carolina, you are reminding me of Obama, ruining as much as you can while you are in office!!!”

     “You heal by executing Justice on the perp, not stripping law abiding citizens off their rights,” said Leslie Hicks Bennet. “You have set the precedent in your state, but it is very unlikely you have heard the last from your constituents.”

     “Nikki Haley, you have let a lot of the people in South Carolina down,” said Patsy Turner Welborn. “We voted for you, because we felt you would represent our State proudly. The flag did not kill anyone. It is part of the South’s Heritage. So if you do away with the flag then I can think of a lot of other things that need to be done away with.”

     “I am disappointed in you governor I will be so glad when your term ends,” said Nathaniel Nat Brown. “You are not the greatest governor I thought you were.”

     “I’m not proud of South Carolina,” said Kim Vaughn Myers. “Tell me how removing the flag is going to bring ‘us’ closer together and help heal anything… From what I’ve seen, it’s tearing ‘us’ apart…”

     “I’m afraid you have separated more than you have brought together that flag had no problem in the month of May but Obama called to take it down and our state leaders crumbled like a house of cards!” said Allen Brandon. “This tragedy had nothing to do with the flag but it was one young man that is mentally ill and full of hate! That massacre had nothing to do with the flag or the Second Amendment. This sick young man would have done what he did with out either!”

     A few more examples at the link.

     Muslim charities raise nearly $45,000 to rebuild burned-down black churches – previous article was written when that sum was $30 000. Well done!

     Three Muslim charities have since launched a “Respond with Love” crowdfunding campaign to damaged black churches rebuild and “stand united against hate.” The Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, Arab American Association of New York and Ummah Wide have raised nearly $45,000 since starting the fundraiser last week.

     “It’s Ramadan and we are experiencing firsthand the beauty and sanctity of our mosques during this holy month. ALL houses of worship are sanctuaries — a place where all should feel safe, a place we can seek refuge when the world is too much to bear,” campaign organizers said in a statement. “We want for others what we want for ourselves: the right to worship without intimidation, the right to safety and the right to property,” the statement also said.

     It’s like not all Muslims are blood-thirsty ISIS terrorists bent on taking down USAmerica (not to mention rapists and murderers), but are actual people with feelings who care about others!!! Weird, that!

422. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 5:10 am

     Trigger Warning for the imagery in this article.
     For those who need to see, this is what a modern-day lynching looks like. Funnily enough, there is no hashtag or twitter involved. 19 yr old Haitian in Dominican Republic hung in public square

     A Haitian man of 19 years was beaten and hung in the public square of Ercilia Pepin, near the Marìa José Cabral and Baez hospital in Santiago where he shined shoes. It is being described as a hate crime where no motive except that the man was Haitian. Demonstrations that included the burning of the Haitian flag did ensue.

     Dominican law enforcement retrieved the body which had welts and hands and feet bound. The victim was identified as “Tulile” and some who were familiar with him said that he shined shoes at the hospital. The Martelly regime has not said or done anything following national and international news reports about the crime.

     That blog, by the way, if you take a tour around, has some other good information, too.

     KKK Leader Disputes Hate Group Label: ‘We’re A Christian Organization’

     The leader of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is tired of “a few rogue Klansmen” ruining the group’s reputation, and argues that the group is a non-violent Christian organization.

     “We don’t hate people because of their race, I mean, we’re a Christian organization,” Frank Ancona, the group’s Imperial Wizard, told Virginia’s NBC 12 on Thursday. “Because of the acts of a few rogue Klansmen, all Klansmen are supposed to be murderers, and wanting to lynch black people, and we’re supposed to be terrorists. That’s a complete falsehood.”

     Ancona’s group has come under fire from residents of Chesterfield County, Va., about 20 miles south of Richmond, for distributing KKK recruitment fliers in people’s yards since January.

     “We picked ours up out of our driveway and threw it in the trash,” Sarah Peachee told NBC 12. “We weren’t interested in even reading about it.”

     Ancona defended the strategy, however, citing a boom in KKK membership across the country since 2008.

     “In the last six years that I’ve been president of this organization I’ve seen the numbers probably triple,” Ancona told NBC 12. “The funny thing is the same neighborhoods where you’re saying there are people who don’t want the flier are neighborhoods where our members live, and neighborhoods where people are sympathetic to our cause and are glad to hear from us.”

     Although Ancona insisted that the KKK is not a hate group, he added that “We just want to keep our race the white race.”

     “We want to stay white,” Ancona said. “It’s not a hateful thing to want to maintain white supremacy.”

     Uh… actually, it is.

     Poverty rates in every U.S. school district, in one map

     Anyone who cares about the plight of poor children in America should take a look at a new interactive map, below, put together by the new nonprofit EdBuild.

     The map shows Census Bureau poverty rates in each of the nation’s nearly 14,000 school districts nationwide. The darker the blue on the map, the greater the concentration of children living in poverty. It seems like the kind of map that should have been easy to find long ago — but it hasn’t been, at least not in the public realm.

     Zoom out, and you can see macro-level concentrations of poverty and wealth, like the dark blue swaths of impoverished districts along the Mississippi River in the Deep South and in rural parts of the West. Zoom in, and you see how school district boundaries often serve as stark lines of division between the poor and the affluent.

     EdBuild founder Rebecca Sibilia says that the map should serve as a wake-up call that gerrymandering is as much a problem for kids in public schools as it is for voters. The difference is that boundaries are drawn to contain poor families rather than to favor a certain political party, she said.

     Interview with Sibilia at the link.

     Florida woman arrested for spitting on black kids and saying she’ll hang their family from a tree

     No, this wasn’t 1955.

     No, this wasn’t an 80 year old woman from a different era.

     On July 5th, 2015, 29 year old Lisa Marie Elberson was arrested in Lake County, Florida for aggravated assault, child abuse, and simple battery after spitting on black children, chasing them with a baseball bat, calling them n*gg*rs, and saying she’ll hang their family from a tree.

     But racism is dead, right?

     See the video below that someone was able to record and hand deliver to the police. Without it, she’d still be free.

     It’s almost to the point where it’s advisable for everyone to keep cameras on at all times.

     Sigh.

     Racists cry bitter tears on Nikki Haley’s Facebook page after SC votes to take down Confederate flag. I bet those tears mix well with grenadine and some tonic water for a wonderfully refreshing summer drink.

     South Carolina lawmakers voted early Thursday morning to take down the Confederate flag, and Gov. Nikki Haley heard from hundreds of angry racists.

     The Republican governor announced the vote on her Facebook page and thanked lawmakers for serving the state with “great dignity.”
     ADVERTISEMENT

     However, many of her former supporters strongly disagreed.

     “I’ve never been so ashamed of my State as I am right now,” Cody Burr said.

     “Sad day in south Carolina because of you nikki haley. S.m.h. very disrespectful,” posted Jessica Hodge Summerlin on the governor’s Facebook page.

     “I don’t understand how such a republican governor can take away one of the important things for our state. Why? Because it offends people?” said Caitlyn Ainsley Foulker. “Well, a lot offends me, but I don’t see you banning that too. What about what the rest of most of this state wants?”

     “Dear Governor, if you really represent a unified South Carolina and are only here to serve her people how come no one in Columbia felt that this important and deep rooted issue was appropriate to be handled in referendum by the people who gave you your job?” Travis Crenshaw said.

     “I would not vote for you again. Ever,” Randy Smith. “Would you have so much ‘courage’ if you were in your first term? You’ve done more to divide SC than any single person in our history. To think i wasted my votes on you for SC House, and Governor, twice.”

     “Cowardice in the South Carolina Governors office and thy name is Nikki Haley,” Jim Madsen said.

     “Speak for your self, I don’t think you care about South Carolina, you are picking and choosing, must be going for a Senate seat, I screwed up and voted for you, but not again,” Becky Griffith Leapard said. “You are good at one think and that’s disrespecting Our Confedrate Veterans. Sad day in South Carolina, you are reminding me of Obama, ruining as much as you can while you are in office!!!”

     “You heal by executing Justice on the perp, not stripping law abiding citizens off their rights,” said Leslie Hicks Bennet. “You have set the precedent in your state, but it is very unlikely you have heard the last from your constituents.”

     “Nikki Haley, you have let a lot of the people in South Carolina down,” said Patsy Turner Welborn. “We voted for you, because we felt you would represent our State proudly. The flag did not kill anyone. It is part of the South’s Heritage. So if you do away with the flag then I can think of a lot of other things that need to be done away with.”

     “I am disappointed in you governor I will be so glad when your term ends,” said Nathaniel Nat Brown. “You are not the greatest governor I thought you were.”

     “I’m not proud of South Carolina,” said Kim Vaughn Myers. “Tell me how removing the flag is going to bring ‘us’ closer together and help heal anything… From what I’ve seen, it’s tearing ‘us’ apart…”

     “I’m afraid you have separated more than you have brought together that flag had no problem in the month of May but Obama called to take it down and our state leaders crumbled like a house of cards!” said Allen Brandon. “This tragedy had nothing to do with the flag but it was one young man that is mentally ill and full of hate! That massacre had nothing to do with the flag or the Second Amendment. This sick young man would have done what he did with out either!”

     A few more examples at the link.

     Muslim charities raise nearly $45,000 to rebuild burned-down black churches – previous article was written when that sum was $30 000. Well done!

     Three Muslim charities have since launched a “Respond with Love” crowdfunding campaign to damaged black churches rebuild and “stand united against hate.” The Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, Arab American Association of New York and Ummah Wide have raised nearly $45,000 since starting the fundraiser last week.

     “It’s Ramadan and we are experiencing firsthand the beauty and sanctity of our mosques during this holy month. ALL houses of worship are sanctuaries — a place where all should feel safe, a place we can seek refuge when the world is too much to bear,” campaign organizers said in a statement. “We want for others what we want for ourselves: the right to worship without intimidation, the right to safety and the right to property,” the statement also said.

     It’s like not all Muslims are blood-thirsty ISIS terrorists bent on taking down USAmerica (not to mention rapists and murderers), but are actual people with feelings who care about others!!! Weird, that!

423. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 6:20 am

     WATCH: South Carolina Republican Jenny Horne gives impassioned speech against Confederate Flag. While they did take the flagdown, it’s still a speech worth watching.

     Grand jury report rips Florida prison over deadly beatdown

     Matthew Walker was unconscious, handcuffed, face-down on the sidewalk, in front of a dorm at Charlotte Correctional Institution. The inmate had been beaten and his larynx was crushed so badly that his throat was swollen shut.

     Lt. Tyler Triplett, blood on his white shirt, stood over him.

     “Do you know who I am? I’m going to kill you mother——!” he shouted, so visibly angry that he had to be restrained by his supervisor, a corrections captain.

     But corrections officers were busy tending to the minor injuries of two guards hurt during a melee with Walker, so they let him lay there, thinking that he was faking.

     “Whatever game you’re playing, you need to get up and walk. My staff is too tired to do this,” the captain, David Thomas, told him, according to witnesses.

     But Walker, 45, had already asphyxiated and, according to a grand jury report released Tuesday, over the next few hours, prison staff removed, contaminated or cleaned up most of the crime scene evidence. The officers gathered in a room, wrote their reports and, a few days later, met again at a convenience store near the prison, ostensibly to support each other after the ordeal, the report said.

     In a blistering and graphic rebuke of the Florida Department of Corrections, the Charlotte County grand jury report stated that Walker’s death — ruled a homicide by the medical examiner — was “tragic, senseless and avoidable” and the result of a gross litany of failures by prison staff.

     The report concluded, however, that there was not enough evidence to bring charges against five corrections officers the panel suspected had beaten and stomped on him, largely because the prison staff failed to properly contain the crime scene and collect evidence.

     “Unfortunately, and to the frustration of this Grand Jury,” the report said, “there was a great deal of conflicting testimony regarding who and what was responsible for the injuries suffered by Walker.”

     More than a year after Walker’s death, nearly every officer involved in the incident remains employed by the department. Nine of them, fired last year, have won their jobs back and the warden, Tom Reid, remains at the helm of the prison, located in Punta Gorda. His two assistant wardens have been promoted to warden at other institutions.

     Let’s hear it for the status quo.

     You’re All Out

     Prosecutorial and police misconduct are often dismissed as just a few bad apples doing a few bad apple-ish things. But what happens when it’s entrenched and systemic and goes unchecked for years? That looks to be the case in Orange County, California, where the situation got so completely out of hand this spring that Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals issued an order disqualifying the entire Orange County District Attorney’s Office (that’s all 250 prosecutors) from continuing to prosecute a major death penalty case.

     After literally years of alleged misconduct involving jailhouse informants, as well as prosecutors’ repeated failures to turn over exculpatory material, Judge Goethals determined in March that the office can simply no longer work on the case of mass murderer Scott Dekraai, who pleaded guilty last year to killing his ex-wife and seven others at a beauty salon in 2011.

     Revelations of misconduct in the Dekraai case have raised questions about patterns of obstruction and deception that have unraveled various other murder cases in the county, which has a population larger than that of 20 different states. Other cases involving informants who were eliciting illegal confessions have emerged, entire cases have collapsed, and more may follow. The story goes way back to the 1980s, as R. Scott Moxley explains at length in the OC Weekly, to a prosecutorial scandal that ended in the execution of one defendant and a lengthy sentence for his alleged co-conspirator. Their convictions were based on the testimony of various jailhouse informants even though they told conflicting stories. That scandal rocked the area then, and this new one shows eerie parallels.

     All this is happening right up the road from Los Angeles, home of one of the most massive jailhouse informant scandals in history. In 1989, in an infamous interview with 60 Minutes and an explosive piece in the Los Angeles Times, former jailhouse snitch Leslie Vernon White demonstrated how he fabricated the confessions of other inmates, then leveraged them for reduced sentences. The White revelations led to a grand jury investigation that revealed that jailhouse snitches often lied, and that police and prosecutors—knowing they were lying—used them anyhow. L.A. has since enacted significant reforms of its jailhouse informant policies. Not so Orange County. And both the scope and scale of the Orange County shenanigans are remarkable.

     More at the link on a broken (abused) system.

     Missouri State Senator Says Racism Still Alive In St. Louis. Surprise, surprise.

     Missouri State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal appeared on The Allman Report Wednesday to address recent online attacks.

     Chappelle-Nadal was the focus of personal attacks over her support of a bill to create charter schools on a St. Louis pro-union Facebook page. Many posts used derogatory terminology and accused her of being racist.

     Video at the link.

     Beyoncé, Coldplay, Pearl Jam to Headline New York’s 2015 Global Citizen Festival, in case anyone wants to see Beyoncé live.

     Autistic Teen Beaten by Cops in Front of His NYC Home for No Reason, Lawsuit Claims

     An autistic teen’s family has filed a lawsuit against New York City alleging that police beat and arrested the then-17-year-old for no reason and then, without explanation, released him.

     According to the New York Post, two cops drove up and asked Troy Canales, now 18, what was he doing as he stood in front of his Bronx home.

     “[Canales] was extremely scared, but told the officers that he was just ‘chilling’ and was not doing anything,” the suit states, the New York Post reports.

     “[The officers] each grabbed plaintiff’s arms and forcefully threw him down on the sidewalk, smashing his head against the concrete. [The officers] kneed plaintiff in the back and punched him in the face as he screamed to his family for help,” the suit reads.

     “He’s screaming, ‘Help me, Mommy! Help me, Mommy!’ ” Canales’ mother, Alyson Aulet-Valentine, told the New York Daily News.

     Aulet-Valentine, 41, and Canales’ brother rushed from the house, telling the police that Canales was autistic, but to no avail as they watched him be taken into police custody.

     According to the Post, Canales was held for an hour until his mother spoke with a commanding officer who offered no explanation as to why her son was being held. The lawsuit claims that the only excuse the family was given as to why Canales was beaten and arrested was that one officer “feared for his life.”

     The family is seeking compensatory and punitive damages but also asked that the New York City Police Department be given guidelines on how to deal with autistic people.

     Also, maybe guidelines on how not to beat and/or arrest someone for standing on the sidewalk in front of their home. I guess it’s hard not to, when you’re a cop.

424. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 6:34 am

     
     Video shows cops beating E. Germantown man during arrest, no news in the story, just a different source.

     Breaking: South Carolina’s House votes, 94-20, to remove the Confederate flag from Statehouse grounds

     The South Carolina House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly early Thursday to remove the Confederate flag from the Capitol grounds.

     The final vote of 94-20 after some 13 hours of contentious debate is a stunning turn for the state that was the first to leave the Union and the site of the first shots in the Civil War.

     The effort to remove the flag from the Statehouse grounds gained new moment following the shooting massacre of nine black members of the historic Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church after a Bible study in Charleston last month. The alleged shooter, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, featured the Confederate flag prominently in photos on a white supremacist website, prompting a new round of calls for its removal from public sites.

     Some pretty incredible comments there, too, including pictures from right after the vote.
     And some hate mail.

     SC raised Confederate flag in 1961 to insult nine black protesters — and took it down to honor nine slain

     A peculiar historical symmetry exists between South Carolina’s decision to raise the Confederate flag in 1961 and the state’s overnight vote Thursday to bring it down.

     The flag was first hoisted over the Statehouse on April 11, 1961, as part of the centennial celebration of the firing on Fort Sumter, which opened the Civil War.
     ADVERTISEMENT

     The flag was flown at the request of Aiken Rep. John A. May, who introduced a resolution during the next legislative session to display the flag over the Statehouse, and lawmakers approved his measure March 16, 1962 – after the flag had remained flying for nearly a year.

     Just weeks before the Confederate battle flag was first hoisted, 10 black students from Friendship Junior College were arrested on Jan. 31, 1961, and convicted the following day after they refused to leave an all-white lunch counter in Rock Hill.

     Nine of those students, who became known as the Friendship Nine, revolutionized the civil rights movement by refusing bail.

     “The obvious advantage of ‘jail, no bail’ was that it reversed the financial burden of protest, costing the demonstrators no cash while obligating the white authorities to pay for jail space and food,” wrote Taylor Branch in the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Parting the Waters.” “The obvious disadvantage was that staying in jail represented a quantum leap in commitment above the old barrier of arrest, lock-up and bail-out.”

     The students spent 30 days doing hard labor at the York County Prison Farm, and other demonstrators followed their example at white-only businesses throughout the south.

     A York County judge tossed out the trespassing convictions against the former students – eight of whom are still living – on Jan. 28, 2015, saying the men, now in their 70s, should never have been charged in the first place.

     “We cannot rewrite history, but we can right history,” said Judge John C. Hayes III. “Now, as to the Friendship Nine, is the time and opportunity to do so. Now is the time to recognize that justice is not temporal, but is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.”

     Nearly five months later, on June 17, a white supremacist murdered nine black worshipers after a Bible study at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.

     […]

     Gov. Nikki Haley ordered the state and U.S. flags lowered to half-mast to honor the victims, but only the General Assembly has the authority to alter the Confederate flag as part of a 2000 agreement to move it to a war memorial on the Statehouse grounds.

     Public sentiment quickly turned against the Confederate flag, which was removed from states across the South and by retailers such as Walmart and Amazon.

     The South Carolina House voted 94-20 about 1 a.m. Thursday, after nearly 13 hours of debate, after the governor called a special session and asked for the flag’s removal.

     The approved bill called for the flag to be taken down 54 years after it was raised during the civil rights movement and moved to a relic room at a military museum in the state capital.

     Why a vitriolic Jim Crow advocate is still memorialized on S.C. statehouse grounds.

     Debate about the flag broke out in the wake of last month’s massacre, though some have noted that it is not the only public symbol that has drawn attention. Also mentioned in the conversation is a statue of Benjamin Tillman, a politician from the state. Here’s a brief guide to Tillman, and the discussion about his monument.

     Who was Benjamin Tillman?

     Ben Tillman was South Carolina’s governor from 1890 to 1894 and a U.S. senator from 1894 until 1918.

     “Ben Tillman was born into a wealthy slaveholding family in pre-Civil War South Carolina. By the time he reached adulthood, slavery was over,” Stephen Kantrowitz, a historian and author of a book on Tillman, wrote in an e-mail to The Post. “He spent the rest of his life trying to reassemble a world in which white landowners were the rulers and black people were subordinate. To do that, he built a social movement of white landowners, which he levered into two terms as governor, then four terms as a U.S. Senator.

     “He was frank about his belief that a racial caste system — what we call ‘Jim Crow’ — was necessary, and that only white men should govern,” Kantrowitz continued. “What he wasn’t frank about was that he didn’t much care whether poor white people suffered along the way; in fact, the way he and his colleagues finally disenfranchised black South Carolinians, through property and education qualifications, ended up stripping the vote from many white men as well.”

     The Associated Press recently described Tillman — who was once censured for his role in a Senate fistfight — as “a noted white supremacist who unapologetically advocated lynching any black who tried to vote.”

     […]

     Last year, the Charleston City Paper ran a piece about the monument, headlined: “Ben Tillman was a racist, terrorist, and murderer: It’s time to take down his statue.” In it, Will Moredock, creator of the Web site downwithtillman.com pushed for the statue’s removal.

     “Those are hallowed grounds,” Moredock wrote for Charleston City Paper. “They should be reserved for consecrating the noblest of our citizens, the proudest moments of our history. Clearly Tillman does not measure up.”

     What’s the latest?

     Tillman’s statue was vandalized with paint in late June. (You can see that in the photo above.)

     However, it’s unclear exactly what action — if any — will be taken in the future. A spokeswoman for South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley told The State newspaper that discussions about the statue and other markers like it were a “less pressing matter” than the Confederate flag, and she has previously separated statues like Tillman’s and the flag itself.

     “Monuments in themselves are somewhat museums,” Haley told The State. “If (flags are) flying, they’re living and breathing. … the Confederate flag is something – that if it’s flying – that represents the people, and the State House is supposed to be for all people.”

     Interim Police Commissioner Davis says he ‘certainly’ wants the job permanently

     Interim Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said on his first full day in the position that he “certainly” wants the job permanently, and wouldn’t have taken the interim post if he wasn’t ready for it.

     “This is something that I’ve prepared for my entire adult life,” Davis said. “I’ve been a police officer since I was 22 years old. My experiences in Prince George’s County and Anne Arundel County and now in Baltimore have prepared me for this opportunity, and I wouldn’t have taken this job if I thought for one second that I couldn’t do it.

     “It’s a great honor, it’s a great privilege and I’ll come to work every day, one day at a time, and work very hard for the men and women of this community.”

     Davis made his comments during an afternoon visit to the offices of Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby to talk with school children about law enforcement work.

     Davis was appointed interim police commissioner by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake on Wednesday after the mayor fired Commissioner Anthony W. Batts.

     Rawlings-Blake said she made the decision because too much attention was being placed on Batts at a time when the focus should be on violent crime.

     The mayor has not decided on the next steps for finding or appointing a permanent commissioner, or whether she is considering Davis for the job.

     […]

     “I’m looking at everything under the umbrella of the police department, and I’ll certainly make changes. I’m not going to make any knee-jerk changes or make changes for the sake of change, but I’m looking at everything,” he said.

     But he has made at least one change, he said — assigning Capt. Gordon Schlunderburg on Thursday to “be in charge of any and everything that has to do with civil disturbance preparation.”

     Batts was heavily criticized in the police union’s “after action review” for the department’s handling of the unrest for not giving officers enough direction and not allowing them to respond to dangerous situations during the unrest without the proper equipment, according to officers involved.

     Making Schlunderburg the department’s point man for civil disturbance issues, Davis said, will better prepare it for the future — even if it takes another half-century for such unrest to occur in the city again, as it did after the rioting here in 1968.

     “He’s in charge of the training, he’s in charge of the equipment, he’s in charge of the memorandums of agreement that need to exist with surrounding agencies,” Davis said. “He’s the single point person in the civil disturbance training and equipment preparations that are going on right now, and I hope it’s 47 more years before we ever need any of that stuff. But it’s our responsibility and duty to the citizens to be prepared.”

     Governor signs Missouri court reform bill in wake of Ferguson report

     Missouri cities can no longer treat their citizens like ATMs, a lawmaker said Thursday as the state’s governor signed a bill capping how much money local governments can collect from traffic tickets and fines.

     “For people who have lived in these communities that fear they are going to be pulled over and harassed because that city needs money, that’s going to change,” said Republican state Sen. Eric Schmitt, who sponsored the bill, told reporters.

     His comments came as Gov. Jay Nixon signed what he called a “landmark” municipal court reform bill. The measure came months after a U.S. Justice Department report on Ferguson found that officials repeatedly pushed police to increase city revenue through ticketing, resulting in disproportionate targeting of African-Americans.

     The federal investigation came after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson last August sparked allegations of excessive police force and bias against African-Americans.

     “Many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue,” the probe concluded.

     The law, known as Senate Bill 5, caps municipalities’ percentage of general revenue collected from traffic tickets and fines across the state. The law also requires police departments in St. Louis County to adopt specific written policies for pursuits and the use of force.

     “This landmark legislation will return our municipal courts to their intended purpose, serving our citizens and protecting the public,” Nixon said. “What we want is for people to respect the courts, respect the cops, follow the rule of the law, have a better relationship with police, and move this region forward. This is a big step forward to do that.”

     On Twitter before the law was signed, Schmitt explained why he’d pushed for it, describing what he called a “breakdown of trust” between people, governments and courts.

425. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 6:44 am

     Tyree Carroll Beating Video Sparks Internal Investigation By Philadelphia Police, same story, HuffPo. I would just like to point out that Carroll is facing assault charges. Yes. Assault charges for not submitting to a beating of this magnitude.

     ‘Empire’ Launches Singing Contest With Season 2 Appearance As the Big Prize, in case anyone feels up to participating!

     Activists in Ferguson Broaden Scope, Unveil ‘Power Behind the Police’

     It’s been 11 months since Michael Brown was shot and killed by Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson. In that time, a broad-based movement has grown in the area, one that goes beyond protesting police violence, and calls for deeper change to address the racial and economic inequalities rampant in the St. Louis region. The movement has garnered national attention and has won some important victories: the resignation of several local officials and a police chief, the passage of a state bill, currently awaiting Gov. Jay Nixon’s signature, that would reduce the amount of revenue municipalities can derive from tickets and fines, and the prospect of raising the minimum wage in St. Louis to $15 an hour.

     But activists think there’s much more that needs to change in the area. Many of the reforms that protesters called for have not come to fruition. The state legislature this session considered more than 100 bills designed to address the discrimination, poverty and violence faced by the area’s black residents, but only one passed. The reason, the activists say, is that – as is the case across the country – powerful interests like things the way they are.

     […]

     In St. Louis in particular, the civic elite is tight-knit and powerful, connected through a web of board memberships, charitable contributions and political donations, as well as through the secretive Veiled Prophet organization, which bills itself as “a 135-year-old civic, and philanthropic organization founded in 1878 to promote the City of St. Louis and enrich the quality of life for its citizens.” The organization puts on a yearly parade and a big public festival, now called the Fair St. Louis, on the Fourth of July. This year, activists took it as an opportunity to call out some of the area’s richest and most powerful individuals for profiting from prisons and jails, getting handouts from cash-strapped municipalities that then take up the slack by writing more tickets and charging higher fines, and backing politicians who’ve kept wages low and slashed public spending. These are the kinds of individuals — CEOs and other wealthy and/or powerful community members — who have in the past been a part of Veiled Prophets, though the group’s secrecy prevents us from knowing who’s a member today.

     […]

     The activists also launched a website, Power Behind the Police, with information about their targets. The site, which is expected to grow over the next few months, shows the networks and relationships of the CEOs of St. Louis’s biggest businesses, illuminating the ways power is interconnected — through membership organizations like Civic Progress, a group of executives from St. Louis’s biggest businesses; by serving together on the boards of the Federal Reserve branch, United Way and Washington University; and by serving on each other’s boards, as Peabody’s Gregory Boyce does on the board of Monsanto.

     Roz Brown, one of the activists who spoke at the protests, tells Rolling Stone that racism is “embedded in the infrastructures” of St. Louis, from business to education to the judicial system. She points to the way police lined up to protect business headquarters when the protesters arrived last week — the same police who, in Ferguson, stared down protesters behind armored vehicles and riot shields. Unequal systems reinforce each other, Brown says.

     Frankie Edwards says he’s troubled that these executives make a lot of money, but don’t put enough of it back into the community in ways that help people like him: young black men who are constantly harassed by police. To him, they have a responsibility to build a city that works for everyone.

     For many people in the area, the Fair St. Louis is an opportunity to celebrate, its origins rarely considered. But the organization that hosts it has long been controversial — the fair’s name changed in 1992 to distance it from the Veiled Prophet organization.

     Percy Green has been trying to draw connections between the elite organization and the lack of opportunities for black St. Louisans since the Sixties, when he led ACTION, a direct-action-focused civil rights group that called for good jobs for black people. The Veiled Prophet organization made an excellent target: It was made up of St. Louis’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals, and it was at the time explicitly all-white.

     […]

     ACTION disbanded in 1985, but Green remains active in the region, a sort of elder statesman or consultant to the city’s once again thriving protest movement. And the Veiled Prophet ball remains an easy target for protests. This past year, Ferguson activists passed around photos of St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson at the ball, criticizing the organization’s all-white origins and noting that it was another reminder of which “side” the police chief seemed to be on.

     “There’s a lot of old money in St. Louis,” says Kat O’Brian, a volunteer researcher who helped build the Power Behind the Police website. “There’s a whole culture of folks who live in a different world than the rest of us. I don’t think they see or understand why Ferguson happened.”

     Bakko says he had already been aware that the wealth in his city is extremely concentrated, but he learned through the project “how networked the power is.”

     They used a free web tool called LittleSis, created by the nonprofit Public Accountability Initiative, to trace the connections between powerful people and institutions and create maps to visualize that network. The site uses “publicly available free information that’s already out there,” O’Brian notes. “It’s information that folks will even brag about on the websites of the companies.”

     […]

     Roz Brown points out that these companies also benefit from subsidies paid with public dollars. Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefit management company with a facility in the Ferguson-Florissant area, is a $100 billion entity; its CEO, George Paz, made $12.9 million last year and is on the steering committee for Fix the Debt, a campaign that supports corporate tax breaks and cutting Social Security. According to Good Jobs First’s subsidy tracker, which uses government data, Express Scripts has gotten more than $132 million in state and local subsidies, including $24 million from Missouri; at least some of that money was spent to keep the company in the area. “They threatened to leave the St. Louis area, and then they created a massive bidding war among states,” Brown says. Because of the property tax abatements granted to Express Scripts, she says, “they’re cheating communities and they’re cheating the education system. We shouldn’t have to pay a business to stay in business.”

     Also on the list is Gregory Boyce, executive chairman of Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest private-sector coal company, which infamously spun off a subsidiary loaded with its retired miners’ pension obligations that promptly went bankrupt. The company spent years resisting payment of those pensions. (Boyce, however, made nearly $11 million last year.) The company is also a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which has pushed legislation like Stand Your Ground laws.

     Elites like these, Edwards says, get a lot of credit for investing millions in renovating things like the Gateway Arch grounds, while behind the arch the city is crumbling. He questions whether it’s healthy for a small handful of wealthy individuals to, as he sees it, drive the agenda in the city.

     But the real lesson, for Bakko, from this project was that it was surprisingly easy to do. “This is something that other communities can replicate, and I think they should. It’s something that any community group with access to the Internet can do. And that’s power,” he says.

     Power, indeed.

     Neo-Nazi Dreams of the Pacific Northwest Becoming Rhodesia

     The detail that completely caught me by surprise in Politico’s rather unsatisfying post “Want to Meet America’s Worst Racists? Come to the Northwest,” was not the Pacific Northwest’s ugly “racial legacy,” nor that the region is the home to “virulent online racists” the Northwest Front (a group apparently admired by the man accused of killing nine black Americans in a Charleston church, Dylann Roof). Nor did it surprise me to learn that the NF wants to make the PNW a country as white and pure as snow. No, the thing that I didn’t see coming is that the leader of NF, Harold Covington, wants the PNW to be “a Rhodesia regained.”

     I was born in this man’s paradise, Rhodesia, a country that is now called Zimbabwe. The transition from Rhodesia (ruled by whites) to Zimbabwe (ruled by blacks) was made possible by a brutal war that ended in 1980. But here is the thing: When I moved to the PNW in the ’90s, I had it in my mind to leave old Rhodesia and new Zimbabwe in the past. The future for me was Cascadia and its capital by the bay. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be. When you go west, you do not look back.

     Then in 2005, I had an experience on a Victoria Clipper that made it very clear that my past was here to stay. Not long after the boat left downtown Seattle, two middle-aged white women sitting in front of me pulled out of their bags mbiras (a traditional Zimbabwean instrument—also known as a thumb piano) and began to play the kind of ancient melody that communicates with the ancestors of black Africans.

     […]

     While a lot of white people in this region are dreaming of black Zimbabwe, others are apparently dreaming of its opposite, white Rhodesia. Politico explains Covington’s relationship with Rhodesia:

     In 1972, while a member of the U.S. Army, [Harold Covington] wormed his way into his first neo-Nazi organization. He soon found himself in Bulawayo, Rhodesia (a nation whose colors [Dylann Roof], coincidentally, didn’t hesitate to sport). While there, Covington managed to start both the Rhodesian White People’s Party and the South African Friends of the Movement. But Covington quickly outstayed his welcome, and his screeching anti-Semitism soon saw him deported from one of the most racist regimes extant.

     Covington was deported from white Africa (he was too racist even for that racist regime), settled in the PNW, and saw in the Douglas-fir forests, the snow-capped mountains and volcanoes, the thick and low clouds a place to revive a racist society that once roasted under a copper sun.

     It seems I left my country only to be surrounded by so many innocuous and toxic fantasies of my country.

     Slate on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book: Between the World and Me

     Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me checks in at a trim 152 pages but lands like a major work, a book destined to remain on store shelves, bedside tables, and high school and college syllabi long after its author or any of us have left this Earth. In recent years, Coates has staked his claim as one of the premier American essayists of his generation, a prize-winning correspondent for the Atlantic whose 2014 cover story “The Case for Reparations” was the most widely discussed piece of American magazine writing in recent memory.

     Between the World and Me was originally slated for an October release but was recently bumped up to July 14 in the wake of last month’s white supremacist terror attack in Charleston. The timeliness is grim, but a book like this will always be timely—not merely because its concerns are shamefully perennial, but because it is a work of rare beauty and revelatory honesty. Between the World and Me unfolds as a six-chapter letter from Coates to his 15-year-old son Samori, prompted by his son’s stunned and heartbroken reaction to last November’s announcement that no charges would be brought against Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. The framing device is an explicit homage to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, a similarly compact volume published in 1963 that begins with a prefatory essay titled “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.”

     Baldwin’s “Letter” runs just a few pages and is a work of ferocious urgency, words of anguished wisdom imparted from an elder (“I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times,” he writes in the opening line). Between the World and Me, in contrast, is not so much a work of counsel as a lovingly, painstakingly crafted inheritance, a reflection on fatherhood that often feels like a spiritual sequel to Coates’ first book, The Beautiful Struggle, a memoir of his childhood in Baltimore that focused heavily on his own father. If The Beautiful Struggle was Coates explaining his father to himself, Between the World and Me is Coates explaining himself to his son, and, in doing so, explaining as best he can what it means to be black in America.

     Much of this happens through snapshots of Coates’ life, both prior to fatherhood and during it. Some of these moments are immense and tragic, such as the murder of Coates’ college friend Prince Jones at the hands of police, an event that, Coates writes, “took me from fear to a rage that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.” Others are more quotidian if still wrenching, such as a brief and heated confrontation with a middle-aged white woman who shoves a 4-year-old Samori at a movie theater. Still others are warm and joyful: every description of Samori’s mother, for instance, or a fantastic meal shared with a new friend on Coates’ first trip to Paris.

     […]

     Coates is frequently lauded as one of America’s most important writers on the subject of race today, but this in fact undersells him: Coates is one of America’s most important writers on the subject of America today. This distinction might sound glib but is worth making, not least of all because Coates repeatedly informs us that he isn’t much interested in “race” as a subject of reflection in itself. “Race is the child of racism, not the father,” he writes—while race is a fiction of power, racism is power itself, and very real.

     It’s also worth making this distinction because for many white Americans the word race simply translates to not us, an invitation to defensive disavowal and aggrievement. Consider the amount of times that Barack Obama has been accused of “injecting race into the conversation” or “playing the race card” simply by making reference to his own body, as he did in the aftermath of the killing of Trayvon Martin. Or the inability of politicians and talk show hosts to describe the actions of Dylann Roof for what they were, a terrorist act committed on the imagined behalf of people who look like him. Or the way a statement like “black lives matter” becomes shouted over with “all lives matter,” a mass of people feeling insufficiently loved by people they fear. To paraphrase an essay Coates wrote for Slate in 2008, many white Americans now treat “racism” like it’s a racial slur directed at them.

     […]

     Between the World and Me is, in important ways, a book written toward white Americans, and I say this as one of them. White Americans may need to read this book more urgently and carefully than anyone, and their own sons and daughters need to read it as well. This is not to say this is a book about white people, but rather that it is a terrible mistake for anyone to assume that this is just a book about nonwhite people. In the broadest terms Between the World and Me is about the cautious, tortured, but finally optimistic belief that something beyond these categories persists. Implicit in this book’s existence is a conviction that people are fundamentally reachable, perhaps not all of them but enough, that recognition and empathy are within grasp, that words and language are capable of changing people, even if—especially if—those words are not ones people prefer to hear. Coates has written a book about immense and ongoing failures of humanity that is a triumph of humanism in itself, a book that renders the injuries of racism brutally near and real.

     […]

     Between the World and Me isn’t a perfect book, and given Coates’ prominence and a general tendency in contemporary culture to take shots at whoever’s reaping acclaim at a given moment, there will surely be critiques, and some will have merit. For starters, while Coates has been quick to credit feminist theory with inspiring his interest in the body, this is an inescapably male-centric text—let’s hope we might soon see a book of similar profile and prestige published with an eye toward daughters (or even nieces; The Fire Next Time isn’t passing any Bechdel Tests either). Furthermore, given the extent to which the menaces of “illegal immigrants” and “Islamic terrorists” have been used to stoke the fires of white fear in the 21st-century U.S., Coates’ analysis of the contemporary American racial imagination may strike some as overly black-and-white.

     FBI Director James Comey Still Unsure If White Supremacist’s Attack In Charleston Was Terrorism. Would another few weeks of pondering the matter be sufficient?

     FBI Director James Comey said Thursday he’s still not sure whether the killings of nine African-Americans inside a church in South Carolina last month meets the legal definition of terrorism.

     The FBI defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof in furtherance of political or social objectives.” Dylann Roof, 21, who is charged in the fatal shootings of nine people during a prayer service at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, apparently wrote a racist manifesto saying he wanted to “protect the White race” and had “no choice” but to kill innocent worshipers.

     […]

     I don’t know yet,” Comey said Thursday, when The Huffington Post asked him whether the Charleston shooting was an act of terrorism. “I was asked about that a day or so after and said that, based on what I knew at that point, I didn’t see it fitting the definition. Since then, we’re found the so-called manifesto online, so I know the investigators and prosecutors are looking at it through the lens of hate crime, through the lens, potentially, of terrorism.”

     The label “doesn’t impact the energy that we apply to it,” Comey added.

     “Given the nature of my business, I only operate in a legal framework,” Comey said. “I know there’s a definition of terrorism that all of us carry around as a colloquial matter. I know from having talked to them the investigators and prosecutors are looking at it through a bunch of different lenses to figure out what, if any … federal charges might make sense.”

     Comey said investigators “work very hard to try to understand the facts, and then Justice will figure out what charges to bring. So the answer is I don’t know yet, but I know that our folks will look at it from all angles.”

     Comey’s view contrasts with that of former Attorney General Eric Holder, who told The Huffington Post this week that Charleston was “clearly an act of terrorism.” It was a “political-violent” act, Holder said.

     “With a different set of circumstances, and if you had dialed in religion there, Islam, that would be called an act of terror,” Holder said. “It seems to me that, again on the basis of the information that has been released, that’s what we have here. An act of terror.”

     The Huffington Post asked Comey whether there would be a hesitancy to call the Charleston shooting terrorism if Roof’s manifesto had indicated his attack was inspired by the Islamic State.

     “I’d investigate it I think probably just as we’re investigating now, to understand what his motivation was and whether it was designed to coerce a civilian population,” Comey said. “So we’d investigate it the same, and then in deciding what charges to bring, we’d look at it through the framework of the individual statutory provisions to see whether they’d apply.”

     Comey objected to the suggestion that there was hesitancy to call the Charleston attack terrorism based on the accused killer’s white supremacist views that wouldn’t be present if the suspect were a Muslim extremist.

     “Where’s the hesitancy?” Comey asked. “This is where I struggle a little bit. The only world I live in is when you bring charges against someone and charge them with something under a particular provision that is a terrorism statute, and so that’s the framework through which I look at it, and I think that makes sense for someone in the government who is doing an investigation to look at it through that framework.

     “So I’m not hesitating to define it in any way, except to say that that we want to gather the facts and then find out which statutes make sense,” Comey said. “That would be the same whether his manifesto was written in Arabic or in English.”

426. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 6:55 am

     Another review of Coates’ book, from the New York Times: Review: In ‘Between the World and Me,’ Ta-Nehisi Coates Delivers a Searing Dispatch to His Son (funny, the web address says ‘desperate’ while the actual title says ‘searing’).

     Inspired by James Baldwin’s 1963 classic “The Fire Next Time,” Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, “Between the World and Me,” is a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today. It takes the form of a letter from Mr. Coates to his 14-year-old son, Samori, and speaks of the perils of living in a country where unarmed black men and boys — Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Walter L. Scott, Freddie Gray — are dying at the hands of police officers, an America where just last month nine black worshipers were shot and killed in a Charleston, S.C., church by a young white man with apparent links to white supremacist groups online.

     Mr. Coates’s expressionistic book is a sequel of sorts and a bookend to “The Beautiful Struggle,” his evocative 2008 memoir of growing up in Baltimore, the son of a Vietnam vet and former Black Panther — as compelling a portrait of a father-son relationship as Martin Amis’s “Experience” or Geoffrey Wolff’s “The Duke of Deception,” and a showcase for Mr. Coates’s emotional reach as a writer and his both lyric and gritty prose.

     “Between the World and Me” (which takes its title from a Richard Wright poem) offers an abbreviated portrait of the author’s life at home, focusing mainly on the fear he felt growing up. Fear of the police, who he tells his son “have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body,” and who also possess a dominion of prerogatives that include “friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations.” And fear of the streets where members of crews — “young men who’d transmuted their fear into rage” — might “break your jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that power, to revel in the might of their own bodies,” where death might “billow up like fog” on an ordinary afternoon.

     […]

     There is a Manichaean tone to some of the passages in this book, and at times, a hazardous tendency to generalize. After Sept. 11, he writes that he could “see no difference between the officer” who had gunned down his Howard University schoolmate Prince Jones a year earlier — firing 16 shots at the unarmed young man, who was on his way to visit his fiancée — and the police and firefighters who lost their own lives in the terrorist attacks: “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

     This startling passage seems meant not to convey a contempt for the first responders on Sept. 11, but to underscore the depth of Mr. Coates’s emotion over the loss of his friend and his anger at police killings of unarmed black men — killings that represent to him larger historical forces at work in American society, in which black men and women were enslaved, their families and bodies broken, and in which terrible inequities continue to exist. Yet it could be easily taken out of context, and it distracts attention from Mr. Coates’s profoundly moving account of Prince Jones’s brief life, and the grief of his mother, a woman who had worked her way up from the “raw poverty of her youth” to become an eminent doctor, trying to provide her children with comfortable — and most of all, safe — lives, which, in Prince’s case, would be cavalierly taken away one night by a police officer later found guilty of negligence and excessive force.

     Sometimes Mr. Coates can sound as though he’s ignoring changes that have taken place over the decades, telling his son that “you and I” belong to “that ‘below’ ” in the racial hierarchy of American society: “That was true in 1776. It is true today.” He writes that “the plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.”

     Such assertions skate over the very real — and still dismally insufficient — progress that has been made. After all, America has twice elected a black president. At other moments in this powerful and passionate book, Mr. Coates acknowledges such changes. In fact, his book often reads like an internal dialogue or debate.

     He points out that his son has expectations, hopes — “your dreams, if you will” — that he did not have at his age, and that he, himself, does not know “what it means to grow up with a black president, social networks, omnipresent media, and black women everywhere in their natural hair.”

     “The grandness of the world,” he tells Samori, sounding a more optimistic note, “the real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you.”

     1961: Friendship 9 arrested for sitting @ segregated lunch counter. Their convictions were overturned in JANUARY 2015

     Where are all the good cops, you ask? Here’s one!! We Need More Like Him: Watch Police Officer Put Another Cop In Check For Harassing Black Folks [Video], video only. It’s a 30-second video looped into a two minute video, one cop telling another that ‘he lives here’ and that he has a right to his property and a right not to be searched.

     Heroin use jumps in US as painkiller addicts switch drugs

     The number of heroin users rose by 63% between 2002 and 2013, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on Tuesday.

     Use among white Americans was mostly responsible for the jump, the CDC said.

     However, the report found increases among people of all income levels and most age groups.

     Oh, where are all the white parents to control their addicted kids?

     Va. bakery taking orders for Confederate flag cake. I’d eat that out of SPITE. ALL OF IT. It better be delicious. And if the icing is made of white supremacist tears.

     There is controversy involving a Virginia bakery and the ongoing Confederate flag debate. This shop in Fredericksburg makes crunchy cookies, gooey cinnamon rolls, creamy cupcakes and cake. But the bakery, Crumb and Get It, has made a cookie cake that features the Confederate flag.

     “It was for us a business decision to do that,” said Mike Sweeney.

     Why did they make it? Well, because somebody asked.

     “We had like a two-minute conversation about it,” he said.

     But the conversation on Facebook was much longer than that. Some wanted to rush right over to buy one and with people asking what their hours were.

     Others had just the opposite reaction with one person commenting on their page: “You are alienating a lot of your local patrons. I just find this disgusting.”

     Another wrote: “Ignorance, whether it be intentional or inadvertent, will taste sour when it finds itself on your dessert plate.”

     “Some of it was mean-spirited, but we didn’t let it bother us too much,” said Mike.

     Mike and Sarah Sweeney have owned the bakery for about eight months.

     “It should still be that you can agree to disagree with somebody, and if they don’t agree with you, you just move on and keep living your life,” Mike told us. “We had someone threatening to sue us and threaten to protest our store and making all these demands. To us, it just seemed like strong-arming, trying to get their way versus realizing that we’re all individuals with our own opinions.”

     Has making the Confederate flag cake helped or hurt their business? The Sweeneys said since they posted the photo of the original flag cake on Facebook last week, about 20 more people have ordered one.

     “There is a lot of Civil War history here in Fredericksburg,” said Mike. “We definitely had no idea that it would be as popular as it has gotten.”

     “The flag is just a symbol”. Uh-huh, and you do know the purpose of symbols? That they stand for something? And what this flag actually symbolizes, that might be something meaningful…?

     As an example of white privilege, Prosecutor spars with expert who says Colorado theater shooter is insane.

     Prosecutors continued a blistering attack Wednesday on the accuracy and thoroughness of a second defense expert who concluded James Holmes was so mentally ill he couldn’t tell right from wrong when he carried out a deadly attack at a Colorado movie theater.

     […]

     Gur’s testimony is crucial to the argument Holmes should be found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed indefinitely to the state mental hospital. But Brauchler, who is seeking the death penalty, suggested Gur came to a hasty conclusion about Holmes’ mind.

     Yeah, I don’t think someone’s mental state would be much in dispute if the killer in this case had been black. But that’s just wild speculation on my part.

427. Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened says

     10 July 2015 at 7:07 am

     Everyone needs to watch this video.

428. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 7:14 am

     Widow of Waco Shootout Biker Sues Twin Peaks Restaurant for Negligence

     Mary Rodriguez, whose husband Jesus Delgado Rodriguez died after he was shot multiple times during the May 17 incident, claims that Waco’s Twin Peaks restaurant was negligent in allowing a biker meeting to take place because they disregarded law enforcement warnings that tensions were rising between the clubs, the Associated Press reported.

     Walter Scott’s family visits place where he was shot and killed by police

     s South Carolina prepared for a historic day with Gov. Nikki Haley signing a bill to remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds, another story that’s been a source of racial tension wrote another chapter: Walter Scott’s mother visited the site of his death, just over three months after he was shot and killed by a North Charleston police officer.

     Judy Scott, other family members and the family’s attorney visited the spot where North Charleston Police officer Michael Slager shot and killed her son, Walter, in an incident that escalated from a daytime traffic stop to a police chase.

     Speaking to members of the media after the visit, Scott’s brother, Anthony, said, “We’re holding on, we’re going to remain strong… Hopefully the family will receive justice at the end of the day.”

     Scott family attorney, Chris Stewart, also addressed the media, saying the family intended not only to pursue the case against Officer Slager but also against his superiors, adding, “You have to have learned that from somewhere… so we’re going to get to the root cause of the situation.”

     “It’s important to fully close a wound by coming out here and seeing where it happened,” added Stewart.

     Later, Anthony addressed the family’s meeting with President Obama, saying the family found it “comforting,” but added, “Under the circumstances, meeting the President of the United States was not a good one and at the end of the day, that’s what I was thinking about.”

     Anthony also addressed both the Charleston killings, saying it was one reason the family decided to visit the site, and the recent Confederate flag debate, which he said won’t “bring any healing as far as this case is concerned.”

     After the April 4 shooting, Slager told authorities he initially tried to stun Scott with his Taser, but it didn’t work, and that as both men scuffled over the stun gun, he fired his handgun at Scott in self-defense. However, video shot by an eyewitness shows the men briefly scuffling over what appears to be a Taser before Scott runs away and the officer begins firing at Scott’s back.

     And the author has the fucking gall to call that shooting a ‘police chase’. There wasn’t any chasing involved, a black man tried to run away and a white officer shot him dead. That is not a chase.

     Florida Supreme Court orders redrawing of some U.S. congressional districts

     The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday ordered the redrawing of some of the state’s U.S. congressional districts before the 2016 elections.

     In a 5-2 ruling, the state’s high court found the legislature’s redistricting plan was tainted by “unconstitutional intent to favor the Republican Party and incumbents,” the latest decision in a long-running legal battle over gerrymandering in the state.

     The court identified at least eight congressional districts, out of the state’s 27, that need to be redrawn, including the seat currently occupied by Democrat Corrine Brown of Jacksonville. Adjacent districts also will be affected.

     The state’s congressional maps, and in particular Brown’s oddly-shaped district stretching from Jacksonville to the Orlando area, have been the subject of ongoing litigation.

     A circuit court judge ruled last year that the legislature’s 2012 maps “made a mockery” of anti-gerrymandering provisions in the state’s constitution.

     “The court has made it abundantly clear that partisan gerrymandering will not be tolerated,” said attorney David King, representing a group of plaintiffs led by the League of Women Voters of Florida and Common Cause.

     The state’s high court urged the maps to be redrawn on an expedited basis. It was not immediately clear whether that would require the state legislature to meet in special session.

     Birmingham starts Confederate monument removal process

     Birmingham, Alabama, officials voted to look into removing a Confederate memorial Wednesday as tensions over symbols of the nation’s racist history simmer over.

     The city’s parks and recreation board unanimously decided to have its lawyers examine the possibility of moving the monument from its 110-year-old home of Linn Park, a small downtown promenade.

     “At this point it’s in the hands of our legal department,” spokesman Stanley Robinson told the Daily News, noting it’s the first step in giving the monument the heave-ho.

     “The sentiment of the board is that it could be removed. If it plays out this way remains to be seen.”

     The board hopes to work with the United Daughters of the Confederacy, whose now defunct local branch erected the 35-foot monument in April 1905, to find a more appropriate place for it at the group’s expense.

     The vote comes after the murder of nine black churchgoers, allegedly at the hands of white supremacist Dylann Roof, in South Carolina forced the issue of the Confederate flag’s place into the spotlight.

     “The tenor of the times has changed in Birmingham and the country after Charleston,” board member and former mayor Benard Kincaid told the Daily News. “It’s created a tidal wave of opposition to such things as the rebel flag and the 110-year-old monument.”

     Birmingham leaders have already voiced their opinion about the Confederate flag, calling on South Carolina lawmakers to remove the banner from the statehouse.

     Activists called on Birmingham officials to dispose of the monument in a city whose name is almost synonymous with the struggle for civil rights.

     “My reaction is Hallelujah!” activist Frank Matthews, who spearheaded the effort, told the Daily News. “Hallelujah in the victory for my ancestors, those who died from (Confederate soldiers).”

     Judge denies gag order, change of venue in deadly police officer shooting trial

     A Mecklenburg County judge has denied a gag order and change of venue for a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police officer charged with voluntary manslaughter after allegedly shooting and killing an unarmed man in 2013.

     Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police officer Randall Kerrick is accused of shooting Jonathan Ferrell ten times during an incident in September 2013.

     A motion was filed last week to put a gag order in place for all of the players in the case. Judge Robert Ervin denied the motion Wednesday after he ruled that he would not allow for a change of venue for the trial to be held outside of Mecklenburg County.

     Kerrick’s lawyers suggested bussing jurors in or having the trial in an adjacent county.

     Wednesday’s ruling upholds Ervin’s ruling from May, where he also denied the defense’s request for a change of venue. The judge is leaving the door open to the possibility of selecting jurors from another county if necessary during jury selection.

     In the gag order motion filed, the defense listed a 26-point reasoning why Kerrick would not get a fair trial in Charlotte, including the city’s 2013 plan to release the dash cam video in the case, the city’s refusal to pay for Kerrick’s defense and the city’s $2.25 million settlement – with taxpayer money – of a civil lawsuit with Ferrell’s estate in May.

     One of the motions filed says city council met in closed-door session and agreed to settlement in the civil suit against the city of Charlotte, former Charlotte-Mecklenburg police chief Rodney Monroe and Kerrick without taxpayer input.

     That means more than 80 percent of potential jurors have been monetarily affected by the decision to settle civil suit. These will be same jurors already summoned to jury duty and asked to be fair and impartial.

     The defense mentions Monroe, saying he “abruptly retired.”

     A prominent communications expert from Ohio has been hired by the city of Charlotte to help plan media relations during the trial, another reason the defense says Kerrick won’t get a fair trial.

     Mark Weaver, founder of Communications Counsel in Columbus, Ohio, will be paid $15,000 to consult on city communications during the trial.

     Kerrick’s defense team reacted angrily to the announcement, calling it the latest effort by the city to undermine Kerrick’s right to a fair trial. In the motion, lawyers say city manager Ron Carlee got the taxpayer money without approval of the city council.

     Missouri Gov. Nixon signs bill to reform municipal courts

     Gov. Jay Nixon on Thursday signed a sweeping municipal court reform bill that will cap court revenue and impose new requirements in an attempt to end what the bill’s sponsor called predatory practices aimed at the poor.

     Nixon called the reform bill the “most sweeping” municipal court reform bill in state history, and the bill’s primary sponsor, Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Glendale, called it the “most significant.”

     Nixon said that “things need to change,” citing various court abuses, including a woman arrested for failing to pay a trash removal citation.

     Schmitt said that the bill would help address a “breakdown of trust” between people and both the government and the court system. “Healing that,” he said, “is something worth fighting for.” He said that people have the right “not to be thrown in jail because you’re a couple of weeks. . . late on a fine for having a taillight out.”

     Moving forward, there would not longer be a system of “traffic schemes and tricks” and a “system of taxation by citation,” Schmitt said.

     The bill limits fines to a total of $300 for minor traffic offenses and bans jail as a consequence for those offenses, in most cases. Cities are forbidden from adding charges for “failure to appear” for missing a court date. Municipalities in Missouri could generate no more than 20 percent of their general operating revenue from the courts. That limit is even lower in St. Louis County — 12.5 percent.

     Cities are required to provide an annual financial report to the state auditor, signed under oath by a representative. A municipal judge must also certify that the court is complying with required procedures. Police departments must be accredited, and must have written policies on use of force and pursuit. City ordinances must be available to the public. And the Missouri Supreme Court is now required to develop rules regarding conflicts of interest in the court system.

     Failure to file the reports, turn over excess money or comply with other provisions could trigger the transfer of all pending court cases to circuit court, the loss of sales tax revenue and even disincorporation.

     “Under this bill, cops will stop being revenue agents and go back to being cops,” Nixon said.

429. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 9:51 am

     Dear White Friends, If You Like The Confederate Flag, Then You Hate Me

     To many of my white friends, the concept of why the confederate flag is offensive to me mystifies them beyond measure. This concept confuses them because they misunderstand the Confederate flag’s association with slavery, segregation and suffering. This concept confuses them because they are too immersed within their white privilege to understand why it acerbates me and those like me.

     Although some of my friends may feel an undeniable attachment to the flag and its “southern pride,” it sickens me that my friends refuse to be aware of how that very same flag makes me feel inferior, unwanted and dehumanized.

     This is how a young black boy may feel when he encounters a Confederate flag.

     […]

     Being one of the only black faces prancing down the frosted roads of frat row, I had a slightly different experience. I went from house to house as happily as can be, like a child trick-or-treating. If only I knew the real treat in store for me that day.

     I had finally arrived at the house that I wanted to join the most. I was shuffled from room to room to give my canned speech to my (hopefully) new brothers. Each room was bigger than the last, and filled with better conversation — that is, until the final one.

     My eyes widened, my mouth dropped and my body felt paralyzed by the massive star-studded red, white and blue flag. This wasn’t the type of flag you pledged allegiance to in elementary school; it was the type of flag from which any young black boy in modern day America would run and never look back.

     “Oh, it’s not what it seems! Our fraternity was founded in the south. We want to show our pride!”

     It’s not what it seems?!?! This is what it seemed like to me: It seemed to me that no one in that fraternity was black. It seemed to me that no one in the fraternity minded that they were a part of a white-only fraternity. And, it seemed to me that the Confederate flag was put there to keep it that way.

     Immediately, I felt embarrassed. I felt degraded. I felt unwelcome. I felt stupid. I felt dirty. I felt unequal. I felt violated. I felt like a n*gger.

     On that cold winter night, going to college was my biggest accomplishment to date. I was the first in my family to go to college, not because of my ancestors’ lack of effort, but because of the burden this flag’s symbolism placed upon their backs, a burden that this flag had now put upon my shoulders, a burden I had hoped I would never have to carry.

     I carried that burden out of that house and into my dorm. I carried that burden as I walked across my university’s stage at graduation, and I carry that burden today. Whenever I see a Confederate flag, those same sickening emotions overwhelm me and, once again, I feel exactly how that flag is meant to me me feel — like nothing.

     So, I ask my white friends: Is there any equivalent symbol in this world from which your white privilege does not shield you? Would you ever want your child to feel how I felt? Would you ever want your friend to feel how I felt? Would you ever want me to feel how I felt?

     Do you dare carry the burden of black Americans? Do you dare to not only stand beside us, but stand up for us when we demand the South Carolina state capitol and others alike to “take down that flag”?

     Prosecutors continue push for protective order for Freddie Gray evidence

     The new motion in Baltimore Circuit Court comes weeks after the evidence in question was released to the officers’ attorneys, and repeats prosecutors’ concerns that the defense will leak only evidence that supports their clients’ defense.

     Prosecutors have said they would be willing to have all the evidence in the case posted online, if the defense agreed, but they oppose the piecemeal release of selected evidence by the defense while their office is prevented from releasing evidence in any form.

     “The State has no interest in restricting the public’s or the press’s rights of access to judicial proceedings and information,” Deputy State’s Attorney Janice Bledsoe wrote. “Certainly, the State expects that the defense will use pleadings to make only good-faith references to discovery material and not to accomplish by pleading what would otherwise violate the Protective Order and what they could not ethically accomplish by other means.”

     Prosecutors first requested a protective order on evidence last month. Depending on how it was written, the order could allow the court to hold defense attorneys in contempt if they shared evidence outside the order’s terms.

     Prosecutors filed their new motion in response to a defense filing opposing their request.

     The officers’ attorneys either declined to comment or could not be reached. Rochelle Ritchie, a spokeswoman for State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby, said Mosby’s office “will litigate this case in the courtroom and not the media” and declined to comment further.

     An orderly and raucous protest at the Stephen P. Clark…chants, drumming and speeches: Miami World Center unites.

     For lovers of Broadway, L. Steven Taylor & Jelani Remy to Join The Lion King Pride on Broadway as Mufasa & Simba

     Get ready to feel the love tomorrow night! L. Steven Taylor and Jelani Remy will join the cast of Broadway’s The Lion King on July 10 as Mufasa and Simba, respectively. The duo will replace current stars Alton Fitzgerald White as Mufasa and Aaron Nelson as Simba. Taylor is returning to the Broadway production after performing in the ensemble, and Remy will making his Broadway debut after playing Simba in the North American tour of the Tony-winning musical.

     […]

     Taylor and Remy join current stars Gareth Saxe as Scar, Gugwana Dlamini as Rafiki, Jeffrey Kuhn as Zazu, Ben Jeffrey as Pumbaa, Fred Berman as Timon and Chantel Riley as Nala. Catch the whole gang at Broadway’s Minskoff Theatre.

     St. Louis Aldermen Grill Police Chief on Rising Murder Rate

     With murder up 58 percent this year in the city, St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson faced questions about whether his redistricting plan has spread officers too thin.

     Dotson spoke before the Aldermanic Public Safety Committee, where Alderman Antonio French called redistricting a “failed policy.” French and other aldermen want more officers allocated to neighborhoods where most of the crime is taking place.

     “I hear what you’re saying,” Dotson told them. “I still believe that the redistricting distributed the workload fair and equitably through the city. And through the city-wide resources, we have the ability to go in and problem-solve.”

     Dotson said he’s planning to tweak the boundaries of the districts on the north edge of downtown, and in two north-side districts.

     The chief also blamed the murder rate on city circuit court judges for low bonds and frequent probations, saying that puts criminals back on the street where they can commit more crimes.

     I… still don’t really like Dotson.

     Via Media Diversified, a href=” http://mediadiversified.org/2015/07/04/so-were-still-all-talking-about-rihannas-b
     *tch-better-have-my-money/” (please adjust URL to get there, sorry, spam filters) So We’re All Still Talking About Rihanna’s B*tch Better Have My Money?

     Finally this morning I got around to watching Rihanna’s B*tch Better Have My Money (full disclosure: I am not a fan, have never been. I think I am too old). But I am an observer and analyst of pop culture, so here go some initial thoughts.

     First off the bat, yes, the video is disturbing for the violence against women. As a committed feminist and film scholar, I am particularly sensitive to the ‘Women in Refrigerators’ trope in films, games, comics, and books where violence against women is used as a plot device (Game of Thrones, I am looking at you!) so I must also note that BBHMM is far more complex, and more provocative for being so.

     While much is being said about BBHMM’s violence – especially the torture sequence – but it is hardly any more so than most videos, films, and even mainstream news reports. It is also shot in a way that is less fetishist than most current filmed violence. Indeed, it isn’t the violence itself that is disturbing but who perpetrates it, and the larger context of what kind of violence (and perpetrator) is deemed acceptable. BBHMM is different from most videos in that the violence is perpetrated BY women and with Rihanna in the lead, specifically by women of colour. In doing so, BBHMM becomes probably one of the most sophisticated pop culture takes on the complexity of how white and non-white women interact, in equal parts warning, nightmare, catharsis, and horror.

     […]

     Right to its end, BBHMM replicates but subverts historical tropes of interaction between white and non-white women while also individualising structural violence. The individualisation of that structural violence suffered – historically and in contemporary reality – through wars, economics, legal structures, and even narrative representations by women of colour, and complicity of white women in this violence – in part what gives the video its power. It is necessary to remember, once again, that the terror of people of colour turning deliberately violent against white people has a long historical trajectory in imperial and racist imaginary. Perhaps this individualised subversion (and reversal) of historical structural racialized and gendered violence is why BBHMM has upset so many (primarily white) commentators?

     Moreover the video emphasises another familiar trope: the apparently inherent ‘violence’ long ascribed to women of colour. Remember Kipling’s Afghan women who came out to torture the poor white soldier boy? Or innumerable references to Native American women in Western novels whose ability to torture outshone that of the men? Or the long racist history of violent tendencies attributed to African and African American women? There is a long and multifaceted racist and imperialist tradition of writing women of colour as capable of unimaginable violence against white bodies.

     However, as colonial history shows, the violence ascribed to non-white women has long been deployed firstly, to construct a particular kind of white femaleness – one marked by innocence, vulnerability, and thus desireability. At the same time, it has also been used consistently and constantly to rationalise – even justify – violence against women of colour themselves, as part of the western imperial enterprise as well as on-going structural racialized and gendered violence. This denial of vulnerability and the ascription of inherent violence to women of colour, accompanied by our erasure as women per se, ensure that our brutalisation barely registers even when it IS shown. Bodies – especially female bodies – of colour are historically so completely dehumanised so as to make any and all degree of violence not only possible but also acceptable.

     This is another point of subversion by BBHMM: by unabashedly ‘owning’ this historical trope and representing it from the point of view of a woman of colour, the historical gaze is challenged and inverted. Given that we have long been taught to value a particular kind of female body – white, affluent, blonde, attractive – especially in comparison to women of colour, the violence of video (and the dehumanisation of the aforementioned white female body) becomes especially disturbing. After all, neither its target nor its perpetrators are those we have been taught to expect.

     A bit more at the link. Oh, and some awesome if you click through to the link about the young Desi woman cast in Rihanna’s video.

     Shift for a moment to Canadam 13 POC of 21 ppl in mental crises killed by @TorontoPolice. #InDistressKilledByTPS #BlackLivesMatter #AndrewLoku

430. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 10:27 am

     I swear I counted my links again.

     South Carolina’s losing battle to rewrite its racist history

     For most of my life, a flag representing white supremacist violence against black people flew at the capitol of my native state. It is a very big deal that this emblem of hatred and oppression is finally coming down.

     Gov. Nikki Haley (R) was expansive after the state legislature finished action early Thursday on a bill consigning the Confederate battle flag to the museum displays where it belongs: “It is a new day in South Carolina, a day we can all be proud of.” I have to entertain the notion that she may be right.

     […]

     Haley, who is Indian American, made possible the “new day” she now proclaims by demanding that the state legislature vote to banish the flag. But it was another woman — Republican state Rep. Jenny Horne — who guaranteed success with a powerful speech telling her colleagues that enough was enough.

     “I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful, such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds on Friday!” Horne thundered. She wasn’t having any of the “noble heritage” cornpone that flag apologists were selling; Horne is a descendant of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, she said, and still she knew it was time for the flag to come down.

     Before Horne’s intervention, it looked as if the state House might cave to the latter-day Johnny Rebs who were seeking to stall the legislation into parliamentary oblivion. Afterward, it still took hours of contentious debate, but the House passed the bill around 1 a.m. and Haley signed it into law Thursday afternoon.

     […]

     Does this mean that South Carolina and other former Confederate states will take a new look at all the monuments and memorials dedicated to white supremacists who advocated slavery and fomented armed rebellion against the United States? Does it mean Southern towns will pull down all those town-square statues of rebel soldiers, their backs defiantly turned against the north?

     Probably not, or at least not anytime soon. Emanuel A.M.E. Church is on a street named for John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina “statesman” who defended slavery not as a necessary evil but as an absolute good, and who laid the philosophical groundwork for the treasonous act of secession. I’d love to see Calhoun Street renamed after the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the pastor who perished in the Emanuel massacre, but I don’t expect that to happen.

     The flag is more important, though, because of the way it has been used — not just as an instrument of repression but also as a way to deny history and thus avoid history’s judgments and responsibilities. What South Carolina’s governor and legislature have announced is clear: It’s time, finally, to stop pretending.

     Symbols matter. South Carolina should have brought down the Confederate battle flag long ago, but I’m proud that my home state is doing it now.

     The Guardian on the Nicholas Thomas shooting: Atlanta officer who fatally shot man in back was justified, grand jury says

     Cobb County district attorney Vic Reynolds said in an emailed statement that the loss of life was unfortunate and he sympathized with Thomas’ family.

     “But when he drove the vehicle toward officers in the manner he did, the officer who fired the shots was justified under the law to use lethal force,” the statement says. “Police officers in Georgia are authorised to fire their weapons to protect themselves or others from immediate bodily harm. That is what happened in this case.”

     Reynolds said both the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Cobb County police department concluded the shooting was “justified under the facts and the law”.

     Attorney Mawuli Davis, representing Thomas’ family, said on Thursday he was meeting the family to discuss next steps and had no immediate comment. He planned a news conference for Friday.

     The medical examiner’s report, released last month, said Thomas died from a gunshot wound after a bullet entered his upper back on the right side. The bullet hit his lungs and aorta before coming to rest in his upper chest on the left side.

     Davis said last month that the fact that Thomas was shot in the back “reinforces the position we have taken that he was not a threat to the officers”. It also seems to contradict the police assertion that Thomas was driving toward officers, according to Davis.

     In 15 years, Florida cops have killed 600 people and not a single one has been charged with anything.

     New Republic looks at Coates’ book: How to Live Within a Black Body

     Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, and his body of work concerns, in general, confronting that violence on its structural terms: racism’s history, the institutions that allow it to persist, and its economic and social consequences. Between the World and Me is something of a departure, as the book is unabashedly personal and concerns the pain that comes in violence’s aftermath. The book is a biographical letter to Coates’s son, Samori. Part memoir, part diary, and wholly necessary, it is precisely the document this country needs right now.

     Yet Coates isn’t writing to you, or to me, or for either of us. Between the World and Me1 is a father’s advice to his only child after four decades of living as a black man in America. Its creation was an intimate act, and Coates’s decision to publish the book—as America begins to confront the mundane brutality the country visits on 13.6 percent of her citizenry—reads as a necessarily urgent response to the social climate in the U.S.

     In Between the World and Me, Coates is characteristically sharp, but letter-writing has freed him to flense his subject: How to be a black man in America while bathed in the corrosive acid of the country’s prevailing belief in the supremacy of whiteness. “It must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials,” he writes, “but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.” Coates’s knives are deadly, and they strip away the fat from truths passingly familiar to many but lived by only a few. It is an indictment.

     […]

     This last part, Coates’s atheism, is necessary to understand his fixation on the holiness of the black body. The body is a sacred object and a site of devotion because, he believes, the here and now is all there is, and because those bodies have been historically devalued. The black body was currency in the antebellum South, and it is currency today; Coates concludes—not wrongly—that black lives are excluded from the calculation of acceptable risk. We dispose of them easily. Though his son will have a much more privileged childhood than Coates himself, the integrity of Samori’s body is in as much danger.

     America’s rules haven’t changed since Coates was a child in the crack-addled Baltimore of the ’80s. There, he learned how the foundations of this country—that all men are created equal, that we hold these truths to be self-evident—exclude him and those who look like him from its dreams, from its promises. “To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. … The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear,” Coates writes. “But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.” It’s a casually delivered insight. But the truth of the statement lingers: This is how the American system begins to fail black people. It ends in death. And when we die, there’s nothing left of us but a lesson to the next generation—a lesson that, before the widespread of adoption social media, rarely took place on a large stage. Black death is still banal, but now the wounds we leave behind are viral.

     Between the World and Me is a letter, but it is a twinned chronicle: It is the story of how Coates woke up to America, and it is also the story of passing his hard-won consciousness, as another student of history, down to his legacy, his only child. The book is primarily concerned with what Coates terms “The Dream.” “The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake,” Coates writes. “And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.” If you’re not white, if you’re not male, if you’re not relatively wealthy, Coates’s words resonate deeply, immediately. Black Americans—and other disadvantaged groups—were never intended to be a part of the Dream, and you need only to look at history to understand how fully they’ve been excluded. “You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold,” Coates writes to his son. Further along in the text, Coates mentions that African Americans have been free for less time than they were enslaved. He enjoins his son to never forget this, to always remember that there is no arc to the universe, much less a moral one. “[Y]our future peers and colleagues … might try to convince you that everything I know, all the things I’m sharing with you here, are an illusion, or a fact of a distant past that need not be discussed.”

     […]

     By writing for Samori, Coates addresses the problem that black artists before Ellison and after him have faced when they write from the specificity of their lived experience: He turns the individual into the general. Black life in America isn’t monolithic; there are so many shades of us, and exponentially more experiences. Between the World and Me is only the story of a single, quiet life. It never asks whether black lives matter, because that is a foregone conclusion. Its power is in the details, in the way it grants its reader the power to see black Americans as fully realized, as fully human. And in this, Coates finds his way into the universal.

     The skipped bits at the link. Very much worth reading.

     Another one cleared: JSO officer cleared of wrongdoing in deadly shooting

     Leo Little stood 5′ 9″, 273 pounds on the night he was shot dead by a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office officer.

     It started as a traffic stop for an expired tag along 103rd street in November 2014. Now, eight months later, the State Attorney’s Office has determined that Officer C.A. Grant’s actions were justified that night.

     According to the state attorney’s review, made public Thursday, Little first gave the officer false names to avoid arrest for a suspended license. He later confessed but resisted being put in handcuffs. Witnesses told police Little punched the officer in the face and ran, and according to the report, the officer tased Little four times but “the Taser had no effect on Mr. Little.”

     Instead, they said he grabbed the taser and approached the officer, who fired his gun twice, killing Little at the scene.

     We found Little had been arrested 13 times since 2000, but his family said he had put that behind him for the sake of his daughter and they believe there is more to the story.

     Action News received the following statement from the family’s attorney, John Phillips:

     “The family of Leo Little and I met with Prosecutor John Guy yesterday and were informed that the State Attorney would not be further investigating, empaneling a grand jury or pursuing charges against Officer Grant for the death of Leo Little. Last November, we retained an independent autopsy, but the State withheld records for 8 months so we have not been able to have the matter concluded or investigated further or otherwise get any answers to questions as to why this traffic stop had to end in death. We have conflicting evidence at this point, as well as evidence of protocol violations.

     “Jacksonville has had over 50 incidents of civilian death by cop and Florida has had over 600 in the past 15 years and not one has lead to charges against the officer. While officers face life and death situations every day, no one is that perfect. We simply want answers and this family has waited 8 long months to even get a meeting. We will finally be able to investigate and bring some closure to this family.”

431. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 10:45 am

     South Carolina took the flag down.
     Some coverage by me, including commentary from others.

     A couple other things first.
     New York Police Department Is Undercounting Street Stops, Report Says

     Some New York City police officers have been stopping people for questioning but not documenting the encounters as required, calling into doubt the official accounting of a significant decline in stop-and-frisk activity, according to the first report of the federal monitor overseeing the Police Department.

     The finding is included in an 87-page report that was filed on Thursday morning in Federal District Court in Manhattan by the monitor, Peter L. Zimroth, who was assigned to carry out the court’s orders after its 2013 decision finding the department’s stop-and-frisk tactics to be unconstitutional.

     The report also addresses new training and revisions to the policies that guide how stops are used, as well as the court’s call for greater involvement of supervisors in making sure stops are constitutional and free of racial bias, and the use of body cameras.

     […]

     The revelation about undercounted stops reflects the challenges city police leaders face in altering officer behavior and repairing tears in police-community relations. To address problems in how stops are being conducted, the department needs accurate measurements — a task that has proved to be challenging for the Police Department.

     During the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, when total stops numbered in the millions, a small fraction of them probably never occurred, city police leaders have quietly acknowledged. Under pressure to account for their activity, some officers may have simply filled out the forms with fictitious names and turned them in.

     Now, the opposite is happening, though the extent of the undercounting requires further study, the monitor’s report said.

     Late last year, the Police Department began auditing its figures to find instances when stops were conducted but not recorded. A limited review turned up 17, the number cited by Mr. Zimroth. Even before that, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent city watchdog for the department, tracked a rising percentage of stops that were never officially counted.

     In 2007, when the stop-and-frisk program was ramping up, the board, investigating complaints about stops, could not find documentation in 4 percent of cases. That increased to a high of nearly 20 percent in 2012, or 76 undocumented stops out of 383 that were investigated.

     Beyond that, police figures show such steep declines in street stops that in some corners of the city, an entire precinct has recorded an average of less than one stop each week.

     […]

     But the importance of accurately tracking stops is vital for understanding officers’ actions on the street, particularly in the minority neighborhoods that absorbed the brunt of the stop-and-frisk tactics that the court found often lacked legal justification.

     “Without that knowledge it will be difficult for the department’s policy makers to account for and perhaps respond to what communities are in fact experiencing,” Mr. Zimroth wrote. “It is essential in a democratic society that the public have confidence in what is being reported by the police.”

     The number of recorded stops fell to just over 46,000 last year from a height of 685,000 stops in 2011. That decline is regularly cited by Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, and the police commissioner, William J. Bratton, as the strongest proof of a waning era of rampant police intrusion into the lives of New Yorkers.

     Beyond the undercounting, the monitor’s report sheds light on another possible reason for the steep drop: Officers are holding back from conducting lawful stops because of a new uncertainty about the law and what is expected of them.

     On a recent night out on patrol, a supervisor watched people go in and out of a bodega that residents had flagged as a possible drug-dealing location. During the stakeout, officers passed up chances to stop several people whom the supervisor deemed suspicious.

     “Unless I know I’m going to find drugs on that person, I am not going to stop them,” said the supervisor, who insisted on anonymity to discuss elements of an investigation.

     “In the past, if we stopped somebody, to question them, we felt like we were doing our job, we were doing what the Police Department and the city wanted us to do,” he added. “Now, there is uncertainty over what the city wants.”

     That uncertainty, ‘unless I KNOW’? I think that’s a good thing.

     Nixon signs bill mandating municipal court changes and setting standards, STL public radio.

     The #ConfederateFlag shouldn’t have a guard of honor. It should be taken down by a dude smoking a Newport and holding a cup of coffee.
     Similarly, Alabama kind of just walked out in their house shoes to take down the flag. South Carolina with the dramatics…

     And this, so much this: .@nikkihaley I’ma let you finish but @BreeNewsome had the best Confederate Flag takedown of all-time. Perhaps they should have asked her to do it again. Without the arrest part at the end.

     “Stage set for lowering Confederate Flag – a month ago would have been politically impossible.” BBC’s @NickBryantNY

     Crowds chant ‘USA’ and sing ‘Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye’ as Confederate flag is removed in S.C.

432. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 10:57 am

     Hmm. Well, the previous has some tweets about taking the confederate flag down in S.C. But I miscounted.
     Some more:
     Now that the street is blocked off, the massive crowd has moved in #ConfederateFlag #News19 #OneSC
     Down it goes… #ConfederateFlag
     Flag is being rolled and taken away. #chsnews #scnews

     Confederate flag taken down from South Carolina capitol, BBC.
     Confederate Flag Removed From South Carolina Capitol Grounds, Huffington Post.
     Confederate flag is removed from South Carolina Capitol grounds, LA Times.
     I’m sure there’s a very good reason why I don’t really feel like citing articles making a giant deal about taking a stupid racist flag down. It seems like granting too much acknowledgement as is. But those articles have links to the videos, so someone might be interested.

433. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 11:24 am

     Confederate memorial statue in Charleston vandalized again

     The Confederate memorial statue at White Point Garden has been vandalized again.

     Black spray paint on the granite base Friday morning said, “The cause for which they fought the cause of slavery was wrong.”

     Yellow police tape was surrounding the monument, and drivers and pedestrians were stopping to stare at it. A crew arrived later to start cleaning it.

     The bronze statue on a granite base is dedicated to “the Confederate Defenders of Charleston — Fort Sumter 1861-1865.”

     The statue was defaced June 21 with red spray paint saying “Black Lives Matter” and “This is the problem #racist.”

     The John C. Calhoun statue in Marion Square has also been defaced with messages protesting racism.

     The incidents occurred after the fatal shooting of nine black people inside Emanuel AME Church in what police say was an attack by a white supremacist.

     A professional has to be called in when statues are vandalized, City Parks Director Jerry Ebeling said. The last incidents cost taxpayers between $600 and $1,300 each.

     Maintaining a confederate memorial on taxpayer funds – priceless.

     Republicans Yield as Confederate Flag Issue Roils Congress

     Coming less than 24 hours after the South Carolina House voted to remove the Confederate battle flag from the capitol grounds in Columbia , the spectacle of the United States House pressing for its continuing display was an embarrassment Republican leaders could not accept, and they withdrew the bill from the floor.

     “There’s not any room on federal property for the display of the Confederate battle flag,” said Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, a leader of the civil rights movement who in 1965 was nearly beaten to death at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., by club-wielding police officers, some of whom had Confederate flags painted on their helmets. “It represents the dark past as a symbol of separation, a symbol of division, a symbol of hate.”

     As a matter of substance, the Republican amendment was modest. It would have permitted displays of the flag in federal cemeteries on one day a year, Confederate memorial day, which is celebrated in nine states. It would also have allowed the sale of the flag on souvenir items that conform to National Park Service guidelines.

     But the debate it set off propelled the emotions and conflicts that have shaken the country since last month’s murder of nine black parishioners in Charleston, S.C., into the country’s most representative legislative body. And it came on the same day that Gov. Nikki R. Haley signed the law removing the flag from her State House’s grounds.

     “When you’re putting a flag on someone’s grave, to me it’s a little different from being racist. It’s more of a memorial,” said Representative Lynn Westmoreland, Republican of Georgia. “You can’t make an excuse for things that happened, but the majority of people that actually died in the Civil War on the Confederate side did not own slaves. These were people that were fighting for their states. I don’t think they had even any thoughts about slavery.”

     Asked if he could see the perspective of Mr. Lewis, Mr. Westmoreland responded, “I guess the question is, ‘Does he understand where I’m coming from?’ ”

     The fight developed slowly over three days, beginning Tuesday night when Democrats offered amendments to a spending bill to block the laying of Confederate flags at federal cemeteries and to ban flag images from gift shops and concession stands. With opponents caught unaware, the full House accepted the legislation without debate and without a roll-call vote.

     […]

     As national Republican leaders try to soften the party’s image among African-Americans, Latinos and women, many House Republicans — dominated by Southerners — continue to show they are willing to take on divisive issues — from immigration to the Confederate flag. On Thursday, though, no Republicans came to the floor to defend or oppose the amendment.

     Democrats did, however, and one by one they took to the House floor to express dismay. “Don’t Republicans understand that the Confederate flag is an insult to 40 million African-Americans and many other fair-minded Americans?” said Representative G. K. Butterfield of North Carolina, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

     Republican leaders realized that they did not have the votes to pass the amendment reinstating flag displays, or the votes to pass the spending bill without the amendment. So they were left to pull the underlying bill from consideration.

     Mr. Boehner then called for an informal working group to review all Confederate symbols at the Capitol, such as on flags and statues and in paintings, and beyond.

     “We all witnessed the people of Charleston and the people of South Carolina come together in a respectful way to deal with, frankly, a very horrific crime and a difficult issue with the Confederate flag,” Mr. Boehner said. “I actually think it’s time for some adults here in the Congress to actually sit down and have a conversation about how to address this issue.”

     The spending bill that had become the Confederate flag’s latest point of contention was sidelined indefinitely, and Mr. Boehner moved to assemble his working group on Confederate imagery, but it was unclear on Thursday what the timetable would be to convene it. He told reporters that he opposed the display of the flag on federal ground.

     Memphis to dig up Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader buried in city park. I guess that story will keep popping up until they do it.

     Next few on other racist and racial history in St Louis.
     The St. Louis Area Has a Long History of Shameful Racial Violence. An article from last year (last August, in fact). Worth a re-visit.

     The shooting of Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent riots, protests, and police crackdown have highlighted the area’s long history of racial strife. One chapter from that history, a century-old summer riot just fourteen miles away from Ferguson, in East St. Louis, Illinois, shows how black Americans were subjected to racial violence from the moment they arrived in the region.

     In 1917, East St. Louis was crowded with factories. Jobs were abundant. But as World War I halted the flow of immigration from Eastern Europe, factory recruiters started looking toward the American South for black workers. Thousands came, and as competition for jobs increased, a labor issue became a racial one.

     East St. Louis’ angry white workers found sympathy from the leaders of the local Democratic party, who feared that the influx of black, mostly Republican voters threatened their electoral dominance. In one particularly striking parallel to today’s political landscape, local newspapers warned of voter fraud, alleging that black voters were moving between northern cities to swing local elections as part of a far-reaching conspiracy called “colonization,” according to the documentary series Living in St. Louis.

     That May, a local aluminum plant brought in black workers to replace striking white ones. Soon, crowds of whites gathered downtown, at first protesting the migration, then beating blacks and destroying property. On July 1, a group of white men drove through a black neighborhood, firing a gun out their car window. (The perpetrators were never caught.) A few hours later, another car drove through the neighborhood. Black residents fired at it, killing two police officers.

     On July 2, as news of the killings got out, white residents went tearing through black neighborhoods, beating and killing blacks and burning some 300 houses as National Guard troops either failed to respond or fled the scene. The official toll counted 39 black and eight white people dead, but others speculated that more than a hundred people died in what is still considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in twentieth-century America. Afraid for their lives, more than six thousand blacks left the city after the riot.

     That the United States was then fighting in Europe to defend democracy while failing to protect its own citizens was not lost on Marcus Garvey, soon to become one of the most famous civil rights leaders of his time: “This is no time for fine words, but a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy,” he said to cheers at a speech in Harlem on July 8. “I do not know what special meaning the people who slaughtered the Negroes of East St. Louis have for democracy… but I do know that it has no meaning for me.”

     People & Events: The East St. Louis Riot, on the same event, via PBS. I believe there is a film…?

     Fairground Park: The History We Choose to Forget – an article from 2010. Did it come up after the McKinney pool party?

     On June 21, 1949, opening day for the city’s pools, about thirty African American children entered the pool and swam with white children without incident. However, as they were swimming, a group gathered outside of the pool’s fence shouting threats at the African American swimmers. City police were called in to escort the black children out of the park when the swimming period ended around 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Conflicting eyewitness reports suggest simultaneously that the children were not subject to violence while they were under the police escort and that despite the police escort, white teenagers would periodically strike the black children without police reprisal. Reports of violence against African American youths were called into the city police throughout the 3 and 4 o’clock hours on this day.3

     By 6:45 p.m., witnesses reported that a crowd of several hundred had gathered. Only 20 to 30 of the people gathered were African American youths. White boys with baseball bats surrounded a group of black boys, one of who was said to have a knife, and beat one of the African American youths until a police officer fell on top of the victim to stop the attack. At this point, the riot report suggests, the original crowd of several hundred swelled to the thousands as other park users and baseball fans on their way to Sportsman’s Park heeded the apparently false cry that an African American boy had killed a white youth. The violence that resulted required the involvement of nearly 150 police officers. Relative order was established by the 10 o’clock hour, though crowds did not disperse completely until after midnight.4 The mayor immediately reinstituted segregation policies in order to minimize the potential for future violence.

     Documentary “Always in Season” Aims to Shed Light on the Historical Impact of Lynching

     Jacqueline Olive is a documentary filmmaker living in Florida. Her most recent project is the feature film, Always in Season, which aims to explore the history of violence and terrorism that Blacks faced through lynching, as well as ongoing efforts to reconcile and seek justice for the heinous race-based murders of Black people for over a century.

     The film focuses on four communities affected by lynching, particularly relatives and descendants of both lynching victims and perpetrators. By doing so, the documentary hopes to show how each community is “grappling with how best to acknowledge the victims, repair the damage, and reconcile—all in the midst of pushback and heated national discourse about the value of black lives.”

     Olive is currently fundraising via IndieGoGo to secure funds to complete the film. On the film’s IndieGoGo page, she describes what motivated her to make Always in Season:

     As an African American mother of a 17-year old son—who I can remember sleeping next to me on the floor of the edit suite while I co-created my first film ten years ago—I am particularly alarmed by the number of vigilante and police killings of black and brown people today (4 times a week) that mirrors the rate of lynching at its height.

     On August 29, 2014, Lennon Lacy, 17, the same age as my son, was found hanging from a swing set in Bladenboro, NC. We recently traveled to Bladenboro to tell Lennon’s story and filmed with his mother Claudia, who grieves as she seeks justice for a son that she, and many others, suspect was lynched. Lennon Lacy’s life matters, as do the lives of the victims of lynching who were often brutalized out of their humanity. Their lives matter. The details of the circumstances of their deaths matter.

     Watch the trailers from Always in Season below. You can also visit the film’s IndieGoGo page to read more about the film and contribute to the fundraiser.

     IF YOU WATCH THE TRAILER BE WARNED. Includes a re-enactment of a lynching. Apparently it’s an annual event in Monroe, Georgia.
     I have no words. I seem to have lost them.

434. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 11:26 am

     Wow, I put 9 links in that previous comment. Heh.

435. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 1:00 pm

     Let’s make the Confederate flag a hate crime: It is the American swastika and we should recoil it from it in horror

     Early Thursday morning, the State House of South Carolina voted to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the State Capitol. Gov. Nikki Haley has pledged to sign the bill immediately, and the flag may come down as soon as today.

     Frederick Douglass, the former slave who escaped to freedom, and became a major abolitionist and civil rights leader a century and a half ago, foresaw this day. But he foresaw, too, that it would be a long time coming.

     Speaking in Boston just days before the South surrendered at the end of the Civil War, Douglass warned that the North’s victory would not mean that that war had truly ended: “That enmity will not die out in a year, will not die out in an age,” he predicted.

     […]

     Has the age of “enmity” finally ended? Has the “malignant spirit” finally died away? Has the “pestilence” finally abated?

     The answer to all of these questions is “no.” The hateful actions of Dylann Roof remind of us of that. So do the white supremacist websites Roof found appealing. So do the many Confederate flags displayed in places across the South — and beyond — today, emblazoning T-shirts, affixed to car bumpers, and worn as lapel pins in business suits.

     The Sex-Abuse-to-Prison Pipeline: How Girls of Color Are Unjustly Arrested and Incarcerated

     My organization, the Human Rights Project for Girls, along with the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality and the Ms. Foundation for Women, just released “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story” (pdf), a report that exposes how girls, specifically girls of color, are arrested and incarcerated as a result of sexual abuse.

     One in 3 juveniles arrested (pdf) is a girl. Girls tend to be arrested at younger ages than boys, usually entering the system at age 13 or 14. And while girls are only 14 percent of incarcerated youths, they make up the fastest-growing segment of the juvenile-justice system.

     Sexual abuse is one of the primary predictors (pdf) of girls’ detention. Girls are rarely arrested for violent crimes. They are arrested for nonviolent behaviors that are correlative with enduring and escaping from abusive environments—offenses such as truancy and running away. Many girls run away from abusive homes or foster-care placements, only to then be arrested for the status offense of running away. Whereas abused women are told to run from their batterers, when girls run from abuse, they are locked up.

     There is also the grim example of how girls are criminalized when they are trafficked for sex as children. When poor black and brown girls are bought and sold for sex, they are rarely regarded or treated as victims of trafficking. Instead, they are children jailed for prostitution. According to the FBI, African-American children make up 59 percent (pdf) of all prostitution-related arrests under the age of 18 in the U.S., and girls make up 76 percent (pdf) of all prostitution-related arrests under the age of 18 in the U.S.

     Another lens through which to understand the degree of sexual violence and trauma endured by justice-involved girls is their own histories. The younger a girl’s age when she enters the juvenile-justice system, the more likely she is (pdf) to have been sexually assaulted and/or seriously physically injured. One California study found that 60 percent (pdf) of girls in the state’s jails had been raped or were in danger of being raped at some point in their lives. Similarly, a study of delinquent girls in South Carolina found that 81 percent (pdf) reported a history of sexual violence: Sixty-nine percent had experienced violence by their caregiver, and 42 percent reported dating violence.

     It has to be pointed out, as the “Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline” report does, that this is, distinctly, a pipeline for girls of color. Youths of color account for 45 percent of the general youth population, but girls of color—who are approximately half of all youths of color—make up approximately two-thirds of girls who are incarcerated.

     There must be real questions raised about why girls of color are being imprisoned for their victimization. Why is the status of victim or survivor denied to girls of color at the margins? Why are they not contemplated as victims, and do entrenched racial mythologies that frame black and brown girls as oversexualized, promiscuous and sexually loose contribute to the denied status?

     We must surface the hidden and disregarded realities of how vulnerable black and brown girls are treated differently, and indeed punished, for their experiences of sexual and physical abuse. We cannot continue to leave them behind. Because their lives matter.

     St. Louis prosecutors drop charges against third City Hall protester

     Prosecutors agreed to drop charges against a third person arrested after a Nov. 26 protest at City Hall, her lawyer said Thursday.

     Chelsea Carswell, of Austin, Texas, was facing misdemeanor charges of assault of a law enforcement officer and interfering with an arrest. Her lawyer, Greg Kelly, said in an email that prosecutors dismissed charges in exchange for 20 hours of community service as part of a diversion program.

     Charges against Zachary Chasnoff and Ferguson Commission member Rasheen Aldridge Jr. were dropped last month, also as part of the diversion program.

     1 Day Down – Billboard Sit-In to Stop St. Louis Killings Has Begun

     Thursday was the day he climbed a ladder to live on a billboard, not coming down until a week has gone by without a killing in St. Louis.

     The billboard where Fuller, the owner of a billboard company, is living is on Washington Avenue and Sarah Street.

     “It’s quite courageous. I don’t know if it’s going to help any, but you know, I guess he’s more than welcome to try,” one man said.

     Fuller is hoping the sit-in is no longer than seven days.

     “I think this could highlight how easy it would be to say to somebody, ‘Hey, calm down. Don’t shoot your neighbor,’” Fuller said.

     Yes, it’s a white man making a statement on black-on-black crime. May not look like that on the surface, but if you look at some of his comments, that’s what it comes down to. Well done, billboard-sitter.

     Family, city officials react to allegations of conflicting body cam video in Skid Row police shooting (LA)

     A GQ article disputing LAPD’s account of the fatal shooting of a homeless man on Skid Row in March has provoked reaction from the man’s family and city officials who are reviewing the incident.

     On Thursday, Los Angeles Police Commission President Steve Soboroff said he’s asked the Inspector General, who independently investigates all officer-involved shootings for the commission, to fact-check the article line by line.

     “It’s important for me and the other commissioners who will eventually adjudicate this case that we have as much good information as possible,” Soboroff said.

     The article, which appeared in GQ this month, alleges police were the ones to escalate the tension and violence in the incident, which contradicts the narrative LAPD officials gave in the early aftermath of the shooting.

     LAPD said at the time that Charly Keunang, who had a serious criminal record and was living under a stolen identity, defied police commands, scuffled with officers and reached for an officer’s holstered gun. Part of the incident was captured on cellphone video and the story drew international attention.

     At a press conference in the days after the shooting, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck showed reporters a photograph of the officer’s gun — which had a round partially discharged — as evidence of a struggle over the weapon.

     Jeff Sharlet, the author of the GQ article and an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College, said he reviewed footage from body cameras worn by police officers, but declined to say how he got access. He wrote the video shows the officer unholstering and re-holstering the gun three times after the struggle, which may negate Beck’s presentation.

     He additionally alleges it looks like Keunang is trying to put his hands up before being shot.

     The PD, of course, refuses to comment.

     July 10th, 1887 – Hinds County Grand Jury Reports Horrible Prison Conditions in Mississippi

     On July 10, 1887, the grand jury of Hinds County, Mississippi, released a report revealing the horrific conditions faced by state prisoners under the convict leasing system, which permitted private companies to lease prisoners from the state for use as laborers.

     The grand jury observed that many prisoners who had been leased were emaciated due to inadequate food provided by leasing companies. Most exhibited scars and blisters that were an indication of severe beatings. Many suffered from tuberculosis and some bore signs of frostbite. Of 204 prisoners leased in January 1887, twenty had died by June of the same year. Twenty-three additional leased prisoners were returned to the state penitentiary due to illness or disability, where they found no relief:

     “We found twenty-six inmates of the hospital, of whom several have been lately brought there off the farms and railroads. Many of them are afflicted with consumption and other incurable diseases, and all bear on their persons marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment. … They are lying there dying, some of them on bare boards, so poor and emaciated that their bones almost come through the skin; many complaining for the want of food. … One poor fellow burst out crying and said he was literally starving to death. We actually saw live vermin crawling over their faces, and the little bedding and clothing they have is in tatters and stuff with filth.”

     The grand jury’s report concluded, “God will never smile on a State that treats its convicts as Mississippi does.”

     Similar convict leasing systems operated for decades in Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Most of the prisoners subjected to convict leasing were black and many were convicted of dubious offenses such as vagrancy or changing employers without permission. Because the Thirteenth Amendment permitted involuntary servitude as “punishment for crime,” convict leasing was a legalized form of slavery that continued into the 1940s, forcing hundreds of thousands of African Americans to work under atrocious conditions at hundreds of sites throughout the South. For many of those leased, the sentence proved deadly.

     1887, and people were already concerned about prison conditions. Have things really changed?

     Here’s the Equal Justice Initiative on Death Penalty

     3095 people in the United States currently are under a death sentence. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, 1369 men, women, children, and mentally ill people have been shot, hanged, asphyxiated, lethally injected, and electrocuted by States and the federal government.

     Mounting evidence shows that innocent people have been sentenced to death and that serious legal errors infect the administration of capital punishment. For every ten people executed in this country, one innocent person on death row has been identified and exonerated. In response to growing concerns about reliability, many states have suspended executions or experienced a decline in the use of capital punishment, but most southern states have continued to condemn and execute large numbers of people who disproportionately are poor and racial minorities.

     Alabama currently has 192 men and women on its death row. Alabama sentences more people to death per capita than any other state, due in part to elected judges who are allowed to override a jury’s verdict of life. Alabama is the only state in the country that allows elected state court judges to override jury verdicts of life imprisonment and impose death sentences without strict limiting standards. Nearly 20 percent of the people on Alabama’s death row received a life verdict that was overridden by a trial judge.

     Alabama is also the only state in the country without a state-funded program to provide legal assistance to death row prisoners. Nearly half of the people currently under sentence of death in Alabama were represented at trial by appointed counsel whose compensation for trial preparation was capped by law at just $1000.

436. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 1:09 pm

     Honestly, I can’t count. That was 7. Please check back later for a bunch of new comments.

     In case anyone’s interested, Constitution of the Confederate States; March 11, 1861.

     New EJI Report Finds Arbitrary, Biased, and Unreliable Death Sentencing When Alabama Judges Override Jury Verdicts of Life

     Allowing elected trial judges in Alabama to override jury verdicts of life in capital cases and impose the death penalty has resulted in some of the most arbitrary and unreliable death sentencing in the United States according to a new study by EJI. A new report released today by EJI reveals that – unlike in any other state – elected Alabama judges overwhelmingly use their virtually unrestricted override power to impose death in cases where death-qualified Alabama juries have returned verdicts for life imprisonment without parole.

     Of the 34 states with the death penalty, Alabama is the only jurisdiction where judges routinely override jury verdicts of life to impose capital punishment. Since 1976, Alabama judges have overridden jury verdicts 107 times. Although judges have authority to override life or death verdicts, in 92% of overrides elected judges have overruled jury verdicts of life to impose the death penalty.

     Twenty-one percent of the 199 people currently on Alabama’s death row were sentenced to death through judicial override. Judge override is the primary reason why Alabama has the highest per capita death sentencing rate and execution rate in the country. Last year, with a state population of 4.5 million people, Alabama imposed more new death sentences than Texas, with a population of 24 million.

     Override is legal in only three states: Alabama, Delaware, and Florida. Florida and Delaware have strict standards for override. No one in Delaware is on death row as a result of an override and no death sentences have been imposed by override in Florida since 1999. In Delaware and Florida, override often is used to overrule jury death verdicts and impose life – which rarely happens in Alabama.

     Alabama’s trial and appellate court judges are elected. Because judicial candidates frequently campaign on their support and enthusiasm for capital punishment, political pressure injects unfairness and arbitrariness into override decisions.

     Override rates fluctuate wildly from year to year. The proportion of death sentences imposed by override often is elevated in election years. In 2008, 30% of new death sentences were imposed by judge override, compared to 7% in 1997, a non-election year. In some years, half of all death sentences imposed in Alabama have been the result of override.

     There is evidence that elected judges override jury life verdicts in cases involving white victims much more frequently than in cases involving victims who are black. Seventy-five percent of all death sentences imposed by override involve white victims, even though less than 35% of all homicide victims in Alabama are white.

     Some sentencing orders in cases where judges have overridden jury verdicts make reference to the race of the offender and reveal illegal bias and race-consciousness. In one case, the judge explained that he previously had sentenced three black defendants to death so he decided to override the jury’s life verdict for a white defendant to balance out his sentencing record.

     Some judges in Montgomery and Mobile Counties persistently reject jury life verdicts to impose death. Two Mobile County judges, Braxton Kittrell and Ferrill McRae, have overruled 11 life verdicts to impose death. Former Montgomery County Judge Randall Thomas overrode five jury life verdicts to impose the death penalty.

     There are considerably fewer obstacles to obtaining a jury verdict of death in Alabama because, unlike in most states with the death penalty, prosecutors in Alabama are not required to obtain a unanimous jury verdict; they can obtain a death verdict with only ten juror votes for death. Capital juries in Alabama already are very heavily skewed in favor of the death penalty because potential jurors who oppose capital punishment are excluded from jury service.

     Justice ain’t blind, in other words. Definitely not colour-blind.

     20 Philly Cops Beat Him, Say He Injured Himself, and the DA says he won’t investigate.

     The video’s release has triggered an investigation by the Philly PD’s Internal Affairs Division. Police spokesman Lt. John Stanford said it was a drug bust in which the suspect violently resisted and even bit several officers.

     “Beating someone while you call them a piece of shit, there’s no explanation for that, unless you want to admit you’re a racist,” Cannick told The Daily Beast.

     On April 3 Carroll was riding his bike to his grandmother’s home in the northwest Philly neighborhood of East Germantown, where he lives, before officers said they stopped him for drugs. The official, preliminary police version of events released Thursday afternoon is as follows:

     Undercover narcotics officers say at 11:44 p.m. they attempted to stop Carroll for an unspecified “narcotics violation.”

     “As the officers stopped the defendant, he began to fight with the officers, biting one of the officers a total of three times.” The video doesn’t show Carroll starting the virtually one-sided fight.

     Police say Carroll bit another officer during the melee, and that eventually “other responding officers arrived on location and were finally able to get the male into custody.” According to police, Carroll was carrying more than 5 grams of crack cocaine.

     Police claim that Carroll was transported to the hospital to be treated for self-inflicted wounds “after intentionally striking his own head against the protective shield located in the police vehicle” —just like the spurious claim made against Freddie Gray.

     Carroll is in jail awaiting his next court appearance on charges of aggravated assault, simple assault, reckless endangerment, resisting arrest, and possession of crack cocaine. (Carroll is in ineligible for bail because he was on probation at the time of his arrest.)

     A family spokesperson told CBS News that Carroll admits to biting officers because they had him in a chokehold, which as an ashtmatic caused him to fear for his life.

     […]

     When The Daily Beast asked the D.A.’s office if it had reviewed the Carroll video, and if it had any plans for its own investigation, spokesman Cameron Kline responded succinctly: “The easy answer is, no.”

     Kline explained that the D.A.’s procedure was to wait until Internal Affairs had completed its own investigation or until Internal Affairs or the department asked the district attorney to assist. Simply put: the police department is being left to investigate itself by the district attorney despite clear video evidence of excessive force.

     The video of Carroll’s arrest proves at the very least that Philadelphia cannot simply take the word of its police or even trust the D.A. to watch the watchmen. An external review, perhaps by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, may be Carroll’s only chance of being cleared of trumped up charges and getting justice against the men who are sworn to protect and serve.

     Predictive Policing, like Minority Report or The Avengers, comes to New York City…for real.

     The NYPD and the Miami PD have now contracted out a company named Hunchlab to help them institute what they call “predictive policing intelligence.”

     On the Hunchlab website, they describe their service like this,

     HunchLab is a web-based predictive policing system. Advanced statistical models automatically include concepts such as aoristic temporal analysis, seasonality, risk terrain modeling, near repeats, and collective efficacy to best forecast when and where crimes are likely to emerge. This all lets you focus on one thing: responding.

     In other words, using their pre-existing data on arrests and crime, the technology is going to predict new locations for crime so that police can be there to respond before it happens.

     I only have one question, and of course it’s rhetorical, and we all know the answer, does this system account for widespread racism in policing?

     If the data that Hunchlab is given by the NYPD and the Miami PD to predict future crimes is skewed by wrongful arrests and illegal detentions, which, accounting for the reality that racism in policing has never been properly detailed on any massive scale, must be the case, then we can reasonably ensure that the predictive policing technology will simply predict more racist police interventions.

     This is wrong and unethical on a hundred different levels.

     More at the link.

     And in case you thought (black) women have it easy, Black group defends Bill Cosby from ‘opportunistic’ women.

437. Saad says

     10 July 2015 at 1:51 pm

     FBI: Dylan Roof should not have been able to buy a gun

     (CNN)Dylann Roof, the man who allegedly killed nine people in a Charleston church last month, should not have been able to buy a gun, the FBI has now determined, contradicting earlier assertions that the background check was done properly, a law enforcement official tells CNN and FBI’s director told reporters in Washington.

     FBI Director James Comey told reporters Friday “this rips all of our hearts out” and “we are all sick this happened.”

     Comey said he felt confident enough in facts last night and that was when he concluded FBI made a mistake. He said the FBI made a clerical error due in part between a breakdown in paperwork between police departments and counties.

     Due to a prior arrest when Roof admitted to possessing drugs, he should not have been permitted to buy the gun he used in the massacre. However, the NICS agent who was performing the background check on Roof was unable to determine which county the arrest had been made in and whether Roof had been convicted of the crime. Due to the fact that Roof’s background check took longer than three days to complete, the gun shop owner was allowed to sell the gun to Roof.

     Did not know this was a rule. It makes absolutely no sense. If it cannot be determined within three days that you cannot be trusted with a firearm, they give you a firearm? Yup, stricter gun laws sure aren’t needed…

438. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 3:36 pm

     Saad
     In addition? Roof’s dad gifted the gun to him. Dylann Roof never went through a background check. He did not purchase a gun.
     So I don’t know what the rules are for that.

439. Saad says

     10 July 2015 at 3:54 pm

     Roof’s dad gifted the gun to him. Dylann Roof never went through a background check. He did not purchase a gun.

     Oh, I did not know that. I’m confused. So does CNN have their facts horribly wrong or have they written a misleading article about Roof hypothetically being able to buy a gun?

440. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 4:25 pm

     Saad
     Actually, now I’m not sure – I know after the shooting, initial articles said it was a gun his dad gifted to him about a month or so before (a short while, anyway). But I haven’t actually seen any follow-up on that, so… there’s all these articles coming out about the background check, though (NY Times has one now, too). So I’m confused, too, as are many people on twitter.

     Mr. Roof first tried to buy the gun on April 11, from a dealer in South Carolina. The F.B.I., which conducts background checks for gun sales, did not give the dealer approval to proceed with the purchase because the bureau needed to do more investigating about Mr. Roof’s s criminal history.

     Under federal law, the F.B.I. has three days to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to deny the purchase. If the bureau cannot come up with an answer, the purchaser can return to the dealer and buy the gun.

     In the case of Mr. Roof, the F.B.I. failed to gain access to a police report in which he admitted to having been in possession of a controlled substance, which would have disqualified him from purchasing the weapon. The F.B.I. said that confusion about where the arrest had occurred had prevented it from acquiring the arrest record in a timely fashion.

     Mr. Roof’s application was not resolved within the three-day limit because the F.B.I. was still trying to get the arrest record, and he returned to store and was sold the gun.

     (From the NY Times – no mention of the previous story, was that an attempt at cover-up by the family?)

441. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 4:45 pm

     South Sudanese Model Rips ‘Racist’ Fashion Industry

     Nykhor Paul—a South Sudanese model who has graced the campaigns of Calvin Klein, Balenciaga, Diane von Furstenburg and the like—took to Instagram Monday to give the fashion industry a piece of her mind about the “ratchet” ways in which dark-brown models are treated in the industry.

     Paul made it very clear to whom she was directing her ire, kicking off her post ever so ceremoniously with the introduction, “Dear white people in the fashion world!”

     “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s time you people get your [s–t] right when it comes to our complexion!” Paul continued, going on to reference her dark-chocolate complexion that, yes, is a rarity in high-end fashion shows and campaigns, but, Paul argued, shouldn’t be treated as an inconvenience nonetheless.

     “Why do I have to bring my own makeup to a professional show when all the other white girls don’t have to do anything but show up? Wtf! Don’t try to make me feel bad because I am blue black,” Paul wrote.

     “[I]ts 2015 go to Mac, Bobbi Brown, Makeup Forever, Iman Cosmetic, Black Opal—even Lancôme and Clinique carry them, plus so much more,” Paul said.

     Paul said that makeup artists who go on to apologize for not being prepared to work with dark-chocolate complexions are not making the situation any better, and should instead be prepared to work with a variety of skin hues.

     “Stop apologizing; it’s insulting and disrespectful to me and my race it doesn’t help, seriously! Make an effort at least! That goes for NYC, London, Milan, Paris and Cape Town, plus everywhere else that have issues with black skin tones.”

     While on the subject of modelling, Naomi Campbell Has A Support Group for Young Black Models

     In 2013, Campbell, Iman, and Bethann Hardison, teamed up to start a campaign to call out anti-blackness in the fashion industry. Campbell says she uses the app “WhatsApp” to creat solidarity for black models, The group includes models Jourdan Dunn, Joan Smalls, Malaika Firth, Riley Montana and more,

     “I have to watch out for my babies,” she says, “A lot of them, their hearts were broken this time in Paris. I got the calls, I got the texts,”

     Black man who can’t pay bail has spent 6 years behind bars — but hasn’t been convicted of anything, just another story.

     SAE’s New Director of Diversity is a Black Woman. We Spoke to Her About Her New Job. Oof. What a job.

     Sigma Alpha Epsilon national headquarters recently announced the hiring of Ashlee Canty in the role of Director of Diversity and Inclusion. This is the first position of its kind for a national Greek organization. Canty will oversee “development, promotion, and implementation of strategies that lead to enhanced diversity” within the SAE organization.

     SAE is well known to most as the fraternity behind the racist chant heard recited with glee in a shocking video that got the University of Oklahoma chapter banned both on campus and nationally.

     Canty has an extensive background in student affairs and campus fraternity and sorority offices, and she herself joined the Zeta Phi Beta sorority during her undergraduate years at North Carolina State University. We spoke with her about her role promoting diversity and inclusiveness within the SAE organization, her motivation, how she reacted to the original video, and changes she intends to make.

     Interview at the link.

     An ally in STL has raised $150k, so far, to help rebuild the Black churches that were burned. Love to @MKinman. People can be amazing.

     Mississippi police accused of choking unarmed man to death with flashlight

     State officials in Mississippi are investigating the death of an unarmed black man who was killed in a physical struggle with a police officer while saying “I can’t breathe”, according to his attorney.

     Jonathan Sanders suffered “some kind of asphyxiation” during an altercation with white officer Kevin Harrington on Wednesday night, in the small town of Stonewall, in the eastern part of the state, said the attorney, J Stewart Parrish.

     Sanders, 39, was a father of two children including a one-year-old, according to his family.

     Parrish told several local media outlets that Harrington pulled Sanders from a horse and choked him to death with a flashlight. Parrish told the Guardian on Friday that allegation had come from relatives who live beside the site of the struggle and witnessed it.

     But Stonewall police chief Michael Street denied the details of the attorney’s allegations, telling the Guardian the two men engaged in “a fight” without weapons after Sanders voluntarily stepped down from a horse-drawn buggy.

     “We won’t know until the autopsy is over what was the actual cause of death,” said Street. “But there was no flashlight used to choke anybody – that’s false. And there were no shots fired by either man, there were no weapons at all, and he was not dragged off a horse.”

     Parrish described the chief’s denial as “a difference without a distinction” because Sanders “was choked to death”, according to the relatives. “Towards the end of the incident, he was telling the officer ‘Let me go, I can’t breathe,” Parrish said they had recalled.

     Its not enough to keep track of police shootings. They should be keeping track of all fatalities involving police.

     Aldermen approve $20 million loan to buy land for National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency – at the expense of those who have little, living in the areas where they want the agency to build. Nice.

442. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 4:52 pm

     Can’t count today at all. Doing worse than corvids right now.

     I’ve covered a lot of marches, but this was first w/ torches. Imagine how much @MayorSRB would shit to see this. Not sure if this is relevant, but I just love the image. As one of the responses says, where’re the pitchforks?

     We just launched our newest project, the first-ever collection of police union contracts, coupled with fact sheets: http://checkthepolice.org .
     There is a lot of information there. From the website,

     We are assembling the first open-source database of police union contracts and other documents related to police accountability for the 100 largest U.S. cities. In our review, we are examining the ways in which the methods that the police use to investigate themselves differ from those used to investigate members of the public. We are also examining the ways in which the police have changed the tools and techniques used to get to the truth when police officers violate rules, laws, or policies.

     A lot of stuff on police unions.

     Oh, and in SC, they didn’t just take the flag down: Pole and fence coming down. #thestate

     Nixon vetoes bill reining in local actions, including minimum wage restrictions

     Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed a bill Friday that would have prevented cities from setting minimum wages and rein in other local actions.

     Nixon said in his veto letter the bill “is a clear example of unwarranted government intrusion – in this case, interference with the policymaking of local governments and the abandonment of the principle of local control.”

     The measure vetoed by Nixon also would have stopped cities from banning stores from using plastic bags, for example.

     I keep being boggled, though, by things like this (not just in STL):

     St. Louis aldermen debated raising the city’s minimum wage at a meeting Friday. Originally proposed as a $15 an-hour minimum wage, Mayor Francis Slay is proposing a compromise bill of raising it to $11-an-hour by 2020.

     $11, by 2020. I’m pretty sure things like inflation will have made that increase pretty much worthless by 2020. But I could be wrong.

     Family Of Shot Los Feliz Man Wants Justice

     DeLeon was shot in the head after flagging down officers with a towel-covered arm. According to the LAPD, the officers believed he was holding a gun beneath the towel. DeLeon, a father of two, has been unable to make any statements due to his critical injuries. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the family explained that DeLeon, a construction worker, often carried a towel around with him to wipe off his sweat.

     The LAPD also reports that DeLeon approached officers “aggressively,” a claim which is disputed by family members, who state that DeLeon was never known to act aggressively. The reason behind DeLeon flagging down authorities is still unclear.

     On June 26, a week after the shooting, the LAPD released the identity of the officer who shot DeLeon as Cairo Palacios.

     Palacios has been an officer for nine years and graduated from the Los Angeles Police Academy in 2006, according to the press release. His partner has been an officer for eight years and was a Los Angeles Police Academy graduate in 2007. Both Palacios and his unidentified partner previously worked for the General Services Department, Office of Public Safety (OPS). The LAPD has refused requests to release the name of the second officer who was present at the scene, on the basis that he was not actually involved in the shooting.

     DeLeon family attorney Benjamin Meiselas has stated that this refusal violates a recent California State Supreme Court ruling.

     On May 29, 2014, the court ruled in a 6-1 decision that the names of all police officers involved in shootings must be released. It was determined that the officers’ names are considered public record, under the California Public Records Act (PRA).

     On June 27, family members and a small crowd of supports marched from William Mulholland Memorial Fountain on Los Feliz Boulevard to the site of the shooting. Many marchers held signs bearing the message, “Justice For Walter,” and others held towels over their arms.

443. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 5:03 pm

     Apparently this is a part of police training: E.g. of idiotic Tueller Drill Video that trains police officers to shoot people like #AndrewLoku. #BlackLivesMatter https://youtu.be/jwHYRBNc9r8
     Notice that the speaking to the suspect occurs after shots have been fired, and shooting continues after the suspect is down. What the film does show, though, is that a little bit of mobility (“some simple running”) can actually leave people alive.

     Obama to Make First-Ever Presidential Visit to a Federal Prison for VICE Special, that sounds pretty big.

     President Barack Obama announced today that he will visit the El Reno federal prison in Oklahoma next week to participate in a VICE special on America’s criminal justice system. It will make Obama the first sitting US president to visit a federal prison.

     As part of the VICE special airing this fall on HBO, Obama and VICE founder Shane Smith, host of the special, will tour the facility and meet with prisoners, prison staff, and law enforcement officials.

     […]

     “There’s an emerging consensus in this country — on both the right and the left — that the way we treat criminal offenders is utterly broken and weakening our society in profound ways,” Smith said. “Visiting El Reno with President Obama — the first-ever visit to a federal prison by a sitting president — will give our viewers a firsthand look into how the president is thinking about this problem, from the policy level down to one on one conversations with the men and women living this reality. It’s going to be fascinating.”

     In late June, after what the president described as a “gratifying” week that saw the Supreme Court legalize gay marriage and uphold a key part of the Affordable Care Act, he said that criminal justice reform would be a priority during the remainder of his time in office.

     “I am really interested in the possibilities, the prospect of bipartisan legislation around the criminal justice system,” the president told reporters on June 30. “And we’ve seen some really interesting leadership from some unlikely Republican legislators very sincerely concerned about making progress there.”

     The New York Times reported that in the coming weeks, Obama is expected to issue orders commuting the sentences of dozens of federal prisoners convicted of non-violent drug offenses.

     ‘Shadowshaper,’ by Daniel José Older, NY Times review.

     In the best urban fantasy, the city is not just a backdrop, but functions as a character in its own right, offering up parallels between personal histories and histories of place. That is certainly true in Daniel José Older’s magnificent “Shadow­shaper,” which gives us a Brooklyn that is vital, authentic and under attack.

     The book opens with Sierra Santiago painting an enormous mural of a dragon on the side of a building. “We hate the Tower,” Manny the Domino King tells her, explaining why her ­mural is important. “We spit on the Tower. Your paint is our nasty loogie, hocked upon the stupidity that is the Tower.”

     The building is a perfect metaphor for the threat posed to Sierra’s Brooklyn. It’s a “five-story concrete monstrosity” built by developers who never bothered to finish it. Now it blocks Sierra’s view, towering over the brownstones around it, useless and imposing. It’s also a good metaphor for the book’s villain, who appropriates what he doesn’t understand and can’t use, nearly destroying a community because of his own hollowness.
     […]

     Sierra herself is a compelling, refreshing hero, with a “fro stretched ­magnificently around her in a fabulous, unbothered halo.” Along with her brother Juan, a guitar player in a salsa-thrash band; the enigmatic Robbie, who draws so compulsively that his art covers “every surface of his clothes, his backpack, his desk”; her trickster figure of an uncle; and a collection of clever and funny friends, she has to discover who is ­murdering her abuelo’s associates and why other murals all over her neighborhood are fading.

     Some of Older’s most joyful prose describes Sierra and her friends being out in the world: “Tee cheered her girlfriend from the crowd. Bennie joined the circle, laughing along with each line. Izzy wrapped up with a triumphant and brutal verse rhyming ‘spastic,’  ‘sarcastic’ and ‘less than fantastic,’ and the crowd erupted in thunderous applause.”

     This is the Brooklyn that stands to be lost. The Brooklyn that is under threat from various directions, not all of them magical. “Vincent had been killed by the cops three years back,” Sierra tells us, identifying the young man in a portrait on a ­cement wall. In that elegantly understated line, Older establishes police ­violence as an almost environmental threat, unpredictable and inevitable as a storm.
     […]

     In urban fantasy, the city often takes the role of the dark forest of fairy tales, the place where magic can be found, often alongside great danger. The city is where the witches and the wolves live. In the city, we triumph or we get chewed up and spit back out. Not so, here. Older’s Brooklyn is a village, a community harassed by outsiders who want to rob from it, corrupt it or erase it. Menace lurks at the periphery — academics wanting to steal culture, policemen intending to steal lives and real estate agents pushing out ­residents.

     As Sierra and Robbie are able to channel spirits into their art, so Older is able to infuse “Shadowshaper” with the spirit of Brooklyn in the summer, where the possibility of magic hangs shimmering in the air. This is a world that readers cannot help wanting to live in and, as with all great urban fantasies, harboring a suspicion that perhaps we already do.

     EduColor

     At some point, we have to own up to the idea of civil disobedience as a change agent.

     This past week, the South Carolina House and Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill that would bring down the Confederate flag in front of the State House, something that was unthinkable until the tragic events at Charleston, SC. While the streets and the Internet have been abuzz in vocal resistance to the idea of the treasonous flag as “heritage” and not as a symbol of hate for centuries now, the one act of filmmaker / activist / educator Bree Newsome took the meaning of “Take It Down” to the next level. She literally climbed up the pole and pulled down the flag with her bare hands. It took over 130 South Carolinian politicians with their votes today to do what she did in a few minutes about two weeks ago.

     What flags and symbols need to come down in the education of our children?

     As believers in public education, we recognize that, ultimately, our current school systems are neither built for our liberation nor our citizenship. If so, we would equitably fund our schools across the board. We would create critical curriculum across the board that address the needs of the people. We would develop pedagogies that included student voice and consciousness in our classrooms. We would learn the names of Ida B. Wells, Yuri Kochiyama, and Dolores Huerta as readily as we do Alexander Hamilton, Meriwether Lewis, and, yes, Robert E. Lee. We would be less concerned with the idea of achievement as an abstract number that few people find useful except in oppressing disadvantaged children and more concerned with well-rounded, free, and loved individuals who could solve the problems we adults haven’t solved yet.

     In the meantime, it’s important for adults to disobey, because, for too many of us, civility has been a hindrance to our civilization, so breaking the codes is perhaps the most civil thing we can do.

     Basically, another resource in the fight against racism, with a focus on education.

444. rq says

     10 July 2015 at 5:06 pm

     And in good night, An Inside Out parody asks, “Was that Racist?”

     In this summer’s instantly beloved Disney film Inside Out, lead character Riley Anderson navigates the world with help from five internal captains: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. Living in Anderson’s subconscious, they help her decipher her experiences, and determine how to feel about them.

     This week’s episode of the newly launched MTV Decoded, a weekly examination of race and pop culture, writer and actor Franchesca Ramsay parodies this film. She’s got Weariness, Paranoia, Shade, Optimism, and Fury at the helm; they are helping her to determine if someone is being racist towards her or not.

     “We’ve all had those moments of ‘was that racist?’,” she explains in the comments of the video’s YouTube page. “Where we’re not sure if we’re overreacting or underreacting. So this week’s episode of Decoded parodies Pixar’s Inside Out and takes a peek at what goes on inside when those moments pop up.”

     In the end, it turns out that Fury was right about the barista in question the whole time, but it’s actually fun and educational to get a glimpse of how loaded everything is for Ramsey, as Fury and Hope duke it out to determine if we’re living in a post-racial world after all.

445. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     10 July 2015 at 7:19 pm

     From Terese Marie Mailhot at Indian Country Today Media–

     Pocahontas was a kidnap victim, not a Disney princess:

     “In Defense of Pocahontas: Disney’s Most Radical Heroine,” written by Sophie Gilbert and published by The Atlantic, defends Disney’s portrayal of the Powhatan historical figure, stating, “While its interpretation of history attracted considerable criticism, less was written about the fact that Disney had, for the first time, provided an independent and fearless heroine with a strong sense of self.” The article goes on and on, praising the film for its environmentalism and progressive storyline. A resounding, “What?” could be heard throughout Indian Country. Captain Save-a-Princess, stop trying to make Pocahontas happen. Let it go. Let it go.

     The Atlantic probably published the work thinking no Indian reads, or that no Indian would dare contest Gilbert’s flawless rhetoric. Defending Disney’s version of a tale Europeans invented in the 18th century is just bad form. Self-respecting Natives know Pocahontas, whose real name was Matoaka, couldn’t have been more than eleven when she supposedly saved John Smith. Also, she was abducted. We’re familiar with her story and maybe Gilbert should be too. Disney’s Pocahontas is about as progressive as it could have been considering that its about a native woman in tight buckskin who falls for a white dude and speaks English, all while talking to the birds and trees. Yep, progress.

     No wonder why The Rainbow Family of Living Light want to occupy the sacred Black Hills—they think we can talk to animals and trees. When they drink the mushroom tea, they think they can too. Natives have always been valuable sources for hippies. Rainbow Family member, Lillian Moore, writes in her letter to the editor at ICTMN, “My people are a community of orphans. Most of us don’t know our history or our own spiritual lineage, and have never been on the land of our ancestors. We are hungry to connect with the creator like everyone else and we are on the land that these lessons came from. Isn’t it natural that we would feel called to burn sage and sing songs about the hawks? It is good for everyone to pray. The prayer brings more awareness and compassion.”

     Why do hippies think our land is cultural gold to strike rich on? When I feel disconnected from the earth I take a walk. I don’t sing about the hawks. I only need to see a hawk to appreciate it. I’m sorry, but we don’t have Indian superpowers. If we did, I’m not sure we could transfer them to you, especially when you essentialize us. There are Indians who have no lineage documented. There are Indians who’ve lost their languages and practices thanks to Indian boarding school and laws which hindered practicing ceremony or having gatherings. I hardly doubt the majority of Rainbow Family members are orphans. They probably have parents who love them and are disappointed they think a hippie conquest is going to bring them closer to autonomy.

     What brings me closer to autonomy is the real story of Pocahontas. When I got tuberculosis, my mother told me about a Powhatan girl who got the European disease, just like me. My mother told me about an Indian girl who turned to Christianity, just like my grandmother did after being taken into boarding school. Disney perpetuated the ugly rumor that Pocahontas was a “gentle savage,” who co-signed colonization.

     The Atlantic’s Sophie Gilbert would like me to adopt Disney’s Pocahontas, while, on the fringe, there’s a call for submission for Native artists to “Take Back Tiger Lily.” Four Winds literary magazine is calling all Natives to reclaim Peter Pan’s Tiger Lily as our own. They say, “Many argue that we ought to eschew Tiger Lily altogether, valorizing a more authentic character. But she is still an Indian princess, the sort young girls on and off reservations across America look to as a model, having very few authentic representations of their lives in the public sphere.” I don’t want Tiger Lily back anymore than I want Disney’s version of Pocahontas in my house. Tiger Lily is Europe’s nineteenth century depiction of their eighteenth century “Squaw.” My kids have plenty of Indian women to look up to, and they will learn to abhor racist depictions just like I did.

     I’m working to obliterate Tiger Lily and Disney’s Pocahontas while The Atlantic and Four Winds magazines are trying to save every decaying romantic image of Indian femininity. I’m not some Captain Save-a-Princess. Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie was a creepy man who inspired Michael Jackson. His writing depicted Indians as savages adorned with scalps. I’m not a Captain Save-a-Hippie either. I want everything that intrudes on Indian’s right to live without racism or romanticism to die along with the old racists who invented them. Get your Disney Princesses and get out.

446. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     11 July 2015 at 1:54 am

     Trump Rally With Sheriff Joe Arpaio Will Be Single Most Anti-Immigrant Event of the Year:

     Donald Trump will hold a rally in Arizona this weekend with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the Arizona Republic reports, a function that has the potential to set a new high water mark for anti-immigration sentiment verbalized at a single Republican primary event. The gathering was moved from a Phoenix theater to the city’s convention center after what Trump’s campaign described as an “overwhelming” demand for tickets.

     I haven’t found an anti-immigrant bingo card yet, but when I do, I anticipate filling it up very, very quickly.

     ****

     Louisiana law makes saggy pants a criminal offense:

     A Louisiana law introduced in the parish of Jefferson Davis makes it a crime for people to wear their pants in any way that can be defined by police as “sagging.”

     We contacted the police in Jefferson Davis parish, and asked for specifics. They told us “anything that is too low.”

     We asked them what “too low” meant. They seemed to be short on answers.

     But local police jurors unanimously passed an ordinance which makes it illegal to appear in a public place with pants that are “below the waist” or which expose the “skin” below the waist, or “undergarments.”

     If that sounds well-defined to you, you haven’t seen how this plays out in practice.

     Citizens of the parish – particularly members of the African American community – tell us that the “waist” is an ill-defined concept that gives the police authority to issue you a citation if your pants are simply sitting loosely on your waist, without a belt.

     Even the smallest amount of boxers or briefs sticking above the pants-line can be defined by police as “criminal.”

     Police Juror Steve Eastman told local reporters that “saggy pants have been a long-running problem” in the Louisiana parish.

     “I had complaints from security guards around the courthouse that there was issues with people not being respectfully dressed in the courtroom area,” he said in an interview with local KPLC.

     ****

     Massachusetts police chief’s war on addiction: ‘No one starts out with a needle in their arm’:

     On 1 June, the Gloucester police department began a pilot program in which any opioid addict can walk into the police station at any time, surrender their drugs and related paraphernalia, and not be arrested. Instead, they are fast-tracked into a recovery program. No one is turned away, regardless of their income, where they are from, or what insurance they have.

     Thirty days in, 30 individuals have taken advantage of the new initiative and are now in rehabilitation. Though most of those who have entered the program in the past month are from Massachusetts, several have travelled from out of state, including one person who drove 11 hours from New Jersey, and another who flew in from California.

     “We try to place everyone as easily and quickly as possible,” says Leonard Campanello, the chief of police in Gloucester.

     When a person with an addiction first comes into the station seeking help, they are assigned an “angel”, someone whose duty it is to simply stand by their side, hold their hand and offer support while a treatment plan is formed.

     “Many of the people we have worked with have said having an angel made the difference,” Campanello says.

     If a local bed at an affordable rate cannot be found for someone seeking treatment, the Gloucester police department locates a recovery program that will offer its services at a serious discount or on a scholarship basis, with people in the initiative being sent to treatment facilities as far away as Florida.

     “It’s a dirty myth that there are not enough beds available,” Campanello says. “It’s a myth that has to do with stigma and money.”

     So far, the police department has partnered with more than 20 addiction recovery institutions across the country.

     When asked if he has received more personal feedback on the program, Campanello points to a corner of his desk, which is covered with a thick, colorful stack of “thank you” cards from people around the country. He then presses play on his answering machine, which transmits the trembling, tear-choked voices of parents of some of the individuals in the program.

     “You saved my son’s life,” says one man. “I don’t know if you are a father, but if you are, I’m sure you know what this means to me.”

     Chief Campanello – who is a father – has worked in law enforcement for 25 years, seven of which he spent as a plainclothes narcotics detective. During this time, his perspective on drug addiction has changed considerably.

     Thank you Chief Campanello!

447. Lynna, OM says

     11 July 2015 at 2:37 pm

     Cross posted from the Lounge.

     A Republican politician, Representative Steve King of Iowa, says stupid stuff:

     […] the Confederate flag was always a symbol of the pride of the South from where I grew up. And my family, my predecessors, my ancestors were abolitionists. They went to war to put an end to slavery.

     A huge price has been paid. It’s been paid primarily by Caucasian Christians. There are many who stepped up because they profoundly believed that they needed to put an end to slavery. This country has put this behind us. We’ve been through this brutal and bloody battle, we’ve gone back together for the Reconstruction and we’ve healed this country together, and I regret deeply that we’re watching this country be divided again over a symbol—a free country!

     When I go to Germany and they’ve outlawed the swastika, I look at them and I think: we have a First Amendment, that can’t happen here in the United States because because we’re open enough. We have to tolerate the desecration of Old Glory, the American flag, yet we have people who are here on the floor that say they’re offended by a symbol. They’re the ones that are putting it up for all to see, and then they’re saying we should outlaw that. So the American people don’t have a chance to see our heritage. […]

     Umm. Well, I’m not sure what to say. That’s the first time I’ve seen the use of “Caucasian Christians” as a way to differentiate christians of color from white christians … and with an all-caps presentation. What kind of fuckery is this?

     http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4543558/rep-steve-king-confederate-flag

448. rq says

     11 July 2015 at 3:32 pm

     Hate Group Says Harper Lee’s New Book Could Make White People Violent

     The leader of a prominent white nationalist group says the highly anticipated sequel to Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird could result in more “eruptions of horrible violence” like last month’s Charleston church massacre.

     “This new book is yet another instance of rubbing the noses of today’s whites in the sins of the past,” said Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance and a leading member of the Council of Conservative Citizens. He said Go Set A Watchman, set for release on July 14, “could be yet another small contributor to the increasing disaffection of young whites,” and it will make “more and more young whites angry.”

     Referring to the Charleston shootings, Taylor said: “Whether this anger results in more eruptions of this kind of horrible violence, I cannot say, but my feeling is that it will make it more likely. This constant drumbeat of racism as a one-way street is increasingly rejected by young whites, because it is false. Unless the greater ambiguities of the situation are recognized, unless blacks are urged to take some sort of responsibility for their own circumstances, I see no end to increasing frustration and potential violence.”

     Edison cop who sent ‘racist’ texts can’t do job — but can’t be fired, either. You may be wondering why. So am I.

     A police officer who allegedly sent racist text messages has been deemed by the county prosecutor as “not credible.”

     Any cases involving Officer David Pedana would be so compromised that prosecutors would have to dismiss any charges against defendants.

     Yet despite this inability to perform police duties, the 16-year veteran of the department will keep his job and continue to collect his $112,000 salary.

     Pedana recently was slapped with a 95-day unpaid suspension after township officials dropped efforts to fire him. Officials opted for the lengthy suspension after a departmental hearing officer determined that a 45-day suspension was more appropriate than termination.

     The development has led a Middlesex County lawmaker to propose a law that would allow prosecutors to remove municipal police officers from duty.

     “You now have an officer on duty in a respected town making a high salary who cannot perform the function of being a police officer. What do you do?” state Sen. Peter Barnes III said Thursday.

     Barnes intends to introduce a bill this summer that would allow prosecutors to fire bad cops. He also said he might consider proposing legislation that would allow departments to fire cops who are deemed not credible by a prosecutor.

     It is unclear what duties Pedana will perform once he returns to the job.

     […]

     This case comes amid a series of ongoing scandals involving Edison police, the most serious of which is the criminal case against Officer Michael Dotro, who’s facing five counts of attempted murder for allegedly firebombing his captain’s home in 2013.

     The township is very diverse, with 48 percent of the township having ties to various Asian counties, mostly India. The police department, however, is more than 90 percent white.

     This will be Barnes’ third bill aimed at police reform, and the second inspired by events in Edison, where he once served as councilman. He has proposed having Edison’s internal affairs investigation unit taken over by the state Attorney General’s Office on a trial basis as a result of allegations of misconduct by the department. He also has proposed mandating the Attorney General to impanel a state grand jury to review cases involving a death by a police officer.

     As with the previous proposals, his latest bill likely will be opposed by the law-enforcement community.

     Still not sure why they can’t just let him go. Is it because the department itself won’t let him go?

     A Beautiful Day in Baltimore :::: #DVNLLN, a couple photos from the 300 Men March.

     Family of James Boyd reaches $5 million settlement with city of Albuquerque in wrongful death lawsuit

     The family and estate of James Boyd has reached a $5 million settlement with the city of Albuquerque and Albuquerque Police Department in a lawsuit filed last June.

     The lawsuit, originally filed by Andrew Jones, Boyd’s brother and the trustee of his estate, was filed June 27, 2014.

     It made 17 demands that would force APD to change hiring practices and policies, better train officers and create a specialized group of health care professionals who respond alongside police when confronted with a crisis while dealing with homeless or mentally-ill people.

     Boyd was killed in March 2014 when APD officers took a call from a homeowner complaining about an illegal camper in the foothills of Albuquerque.

     “The main thing is to work on ending homelessness,” Jones said at the time the lawsuit was filed. “That’s the main part of the lawsuit. I was born and raised in New Mexico. That is my calling. And my brother lived there most of his life. The main thing is my family wants change.”

     Two APD officers – Keith Sandy and Dominique Perez – have since been charged with second-degree murder by a special prosecutor assigned to the case.

     Boyd’s family said in a statement to KOB Friday afternoon that they believe the city is taking steps to ensure such a situation can’t happen through training and policy changes.

     It also expressed gratitude to St. Martin’s Hospitality Center and other organizations in Albuquerque helping to give a voice to the homeless.

     Boyd family’s statement at the link.

     A road named for Confederate leader comes under fire 150 years after war

     More than 3,000 people have signed online petitions calling for a change in the name of Jefferson Davis Highway in Virginia, buoyed by growing national scrutiny of the Confederate flag and other symbols of the vanquished South.

     The name applies to the portion of U.S. 1 that runs from the Potomac River through Virginia to the North Carolina border, and to other highways elsewhere in the South. Those roads were named for the president of the Confederacy at the behest of advocates who wanted a Southern equivalent to the coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway, according to a history posted on the Web site of the Federal Highway Administration.

     “Davis was an unrepentant white supremacist who fervently believed the Southern cause, slavery and segregation were right and just,” wrote Vienna lawyer Daniel Zim on a Change.org petition that has collected more than 2,600 signatures. “It is therefore outrageous that a major Virginia thoroughfare . . . continues to bear the name of a morally depraved, non-Virginian who rejected the very idea of a United States.”

     While opposition to the highway’s name has festered for years in liberal Northern Virginia, petition organizers are hoping to build on national momentum created in the aftermath of last month’s mass killing of churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., allegedly by a white supremacist.

     “One hundred and fifty years of mollifying supporters of the Confederacy is enough,” said Diane Duston, a real estate agent in Arlington whose week-old petition has garnered more than 500 signatures. “We’re through with what the Confederacy stood for.”

     […]

     State Sen. Barbara A. Favola (D-Arlington) and Del. Patrick A. Hope (D-Arlington) said they would support a discussion of the issue, but both also said such a bill would be difficult to pass. They, like Ebbin, said renaming the highway would call into question the Confederacy-related names of many other roads, schools and buildings in the state.

     A spokesman for House Speaker William J. Howell (R-Stafford) declined to comment on the issue, and a spokesman for Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) did not respond to an interview request.

     Naming U.S. 1 for Jefferson Davis was the idea of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the same organization that owns the statue of a Confederate soldier in Alexandria and the flags that are raised near the statue on Confederate holidays each year. Members of the Alexandria City Council said this week that they want to end that practice.

     […]

     “It’s cultural genocide,” said Frank Earnest, past commander of the group’s Virginia division. “Everything about a four-year period where Virginia and other Southern states fought for their rights, we’re gonna eradicate any of that. That is something that’s done in dictatorial countries, not in the United States of America.”

     Right.

     Intersection: sexism and racism. What do you get? A discussion of Williams’ figure. Tennis’s Top Women Balance Body Image With Ambition. Article also contains what I would call not-so-thinly veiled transphobia.

     Despite Williams’s success — a victory Saturday would give her 21 Grand Slam singles titles and her fourth in a row — body-image issues among female tennis players persist, compelling many players to avoid bulking up.

     “It’s our decision to keep her as the smallest player in the top 10,” said Tomasz Wiktorowski, the coach of Agnieszka Radwanska, who is listed at 5 feet 8 and 123 pounds. “Because, first of all she’s a woman, and she wants to be a woman.”

     […]

     Williams, 33, who has appeared on the cover of Vogue, is regarded as symbol of beauty by many women. But she has also been gawked at and mocked throughout her career, and she said growing confident and secure in her build was a long process.

     “I don’t touch a weight, because I’m already super fit and super cut, and if I even look at weights, I get bigger,” she said. “For years I’ve only done Thera-Bands and things like that, because that’s kind of how I felt. But then I realized that you really have to learn to accept who you are and love who you are. I’m really happy with my body type, and I’m really proud of it. Obviously it works out for me. I talk about it all the time, how it was uncomfortable for someone like me to be in my body.”

     Good for her, for being comfortable in her own body – as she should be – and shame on those who try to put her down for it.

449. rq says

     11 July 2015 at 3:46 pm

     Thanks, Lynna!

     Defense attorneys request trove of documents from prosecutors’ Freddie Gray investigation

     Attorneys representing the six police officers charged in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray say Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby has not shared evidence from her office’s independent investigation into the incident.

     In a motion filed Friday in Baltimore Circuit Court, the attorneys sought a subpoena demanding that she turn it over.

     Mosby’s office conducted an investigation, with the help of the Baltimore City sheriff’s office, separate from the Police Department, which conducted its own probe. Gray died in April of severe spinal cord and other injuries sustained while in police custody.

     On the day Mosby announced charges against the officers, she said her team “worked around the clock — 12- and 14-hour days” — and recounted their work interviewing dozens of witnesses, watching hours of video footage, listening to hours of police videotaped statements, surveying the route of the van in which Gray was riding and reviewing voluminous medical records.

     But defense attorneys say Mosby didn’t include files from the investigation when her office turned over evidence it expects to use in the case to the defense last month.

     “It is the belief of undersigned counsel that the investigation conducted by the Office of the State’s Attorney will be relevant and necessary to the defense in this case,” the defense attorneys wrote.

     Rochelle Ritchie, a spokeswoman for Mosby, declined to comment.

     The defense attorneys asked that the subpoena require the evidence be turned over by July 24. All of the officers have pleaded not guilty, and a trial date has been set in October.

     […]

     Many viewed Mosby’s announcement as a watershed moment against police brutality — praising the young prosecutor for swiftly bringing charges against the officers. Mosby’s office also has promoted her actions, saying they restored order “before the entire city became an armed camp or was burned to the ground.”

     Others decried Mosby’s actions as misguided. Michael E. Davey, an attorney who works with the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3 — the local union representing Baltimore police officers — called the charges an “egregious rush to judgment.”

     Pissing off the police unions and their lawyers – not misguided at all.

     Alexandria mayor wants to remove all Confederate symbols from city. All?

     The mayor of Alexandria has been fighting since he was in high school to get the Confederate flag off every pole in this southern city. It is only flown twice a year on public grounds, but he is calling for that to end too.

     When Mayor Bill Euille was a high school senior in 1968, he led a protest to take down the Confederate flags that were flown on major holidays along King Street and other spots. Almost 50 years later, he wants the final battle flags taken down.

     “When the flag is flown, it just reminds people of the Confederacy and the hatred and slavery, and again, we are past that,” he said. “So all these many years later, I think the time has come for the flag to be stored. It can be in a museum for people to see, but it doesn’t need to be on public display.”

     The Confederate flags are put up on the poles at the corner of Washington and Prince Streets twice a year on General Robert E. Lee’s birthday in January and Confederate Memorial Day in May.

     In the center is the Confederate Statue of a soldier and the names of Alexandria citizens who died in Civil War are written on the monument.

     The mayor wants the statue removed too. He interprets the soldier’s expression as sad for losing the Civil War.

     “The statue — the soldier is there without a smile, somewhat sad-faced, looking down south towards Richmond,” said Euille.

     All. Sadly, some disagree:

     But Katie Fike, a citizen and history buff, sees the statue differently.

     “I think it epitomizes the feeling of the south after the Civil War,” she said. “[The statue] is sadly looking south remembering his comrades who died.”

     She said the mayor needs to slow down.

     “I would hate to see this be a knee-jerk reaction because South Carolina took their flag down and Alexandria has to take their flag down,” said Fike.

     It’s not knee-jerk after so many years, it’s utilizing an opportune moment. A Good Thing.
     Sadly looking south, at his comrades who died. Pssshhhh. Probably crying over the empire of slavery that never was.

     Review: Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’ Gives Atticus Finch a Dark Side. I have not read the first chapter that was released, and I’m not going to read this review, so sorry, no citing, but everyone’s welcome to read it! (And I’m still conflicted about the context in which that book is being published re: Lee’s own wishes about it, but the not-reading is mostly due to my dislike of reading bits and pieces of something if I can’t read it all at once.)

     Man pepper-sprayed during curfew won’t serve more jail time, not that he should have been serving any in the first place.

     Larry Lomax, who was pepper-sprayed by police during an encounter that went viral amid Baltimore’s post-unrest curfew in May, pleaded guilty Friday to a charge of disorderly conduct and will not serve additional jail time, court records show.

     Lomax had been charged with rioting, second-degree assault, disorderly conduct and a curfew violation, and was jailed for 26 days after being unable to post bail.

     Police said he walked toward an officer with his fists “balled up tight in an aggressive manner yelling obscenities at the officers and daring them to arrest him.”

     Video at the scene captured that encounter, as well as police blasting pepper spray into Lomax’s face and pulling him down from behind by his hair. Officers then dragged Lomax from the street to the sidewalk, where he was given water for his face.

     Police said in charging documents that Lomax’s behavior “incited the crowd causing multiple other arrests.”

     With his plea to the disorderly conduct charge, all other charges against Lomax were dismissed.

     “Mr. Lomax pleaded guilty today to avoid the further injustice of being sentenced to more time in jail,” said his attorney, Natalie Finegar.

     Oh shit. That’s why he won’t be doing more time? Because he pleaded guilty? Fuck. What a choice.

     Mississippi police accused of choking unarmed man to death with flashlight

     State officials in Mississippi are investigating the death of an unarmed black man who was killed in a physical struggle with a police officer while saying “I can’t breathe”, according to his attorney.

     Jonathan Sanders suffered “some kind of asphyxiation” during an altercation with white officer Kevin Harrington on Wednesday night, in the small town of Stonewall, in the eastern part of the state, said the attorney, J Stewart Parrish.

     Sanders, 39, was a father of two children including a one-year-old, according to his family.

     Parrish told several local media outlets that Harrington pulled Sanders from a horse and choked him to death with a flashlight. Parrish told the Guardian on Friday that allegation had come from relatives who live beside the site of the struggle and witnessed it.

     But Stonewall police chief Michael Street denied the details of the attorney’s allegations, telling the Guardian the two men engaged in “a fight” without weapons after Sanders voluntarily stepped down from a horse-drawn buggy.

     “We won’t know until the autopsy is over what was the actual cause of death,” said Street. “But there was no flashlight used to choke anybody – that’s false. And there were no shots fired by either man, there were no weapons at all, and he was not dragged off a horse.”

     Parrish described the chief’s denial as “a difference without a distinction” because Sanders “was choked to death”, according to the relatives. “Towards the end of the incident, he was telling the officer ‘Let me go, I can’t breathe,” Parrish said they had recalled.

     So Baltimore has that new interim police commissioner. Reports: Interim police commissioner has checkered work past. Sounds promising?

     In a 1999 case, a 19-year-old man claimed he was accosted, ordered into an SUV, driven to Howard County and grilled about his relationship with the niece of a police official. He was threatened before being let go, according to the Baltimore City Paper.

     A subsequent federal civil suit found that the police officials involved were guilty of violating the man’s constitutional rights, and he was awarded $90,000.

     In a 2013 Baltimore Sun article, Davis said he’d been given that assignment under “false pretenses,” that the officers believed the girl was in danger. He told the Sun that he learned from the incident and it “made me a better cop.”

     In 1993, Davis was named in a suit for allegedly throwing a man to the ground and handcuffing him without any cause. He was named in a lawsuit and the victim was awarded $12,500.

     WTOP contacted Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake’s office to ask about the incidents and how or whether they were considered in naming Davis to the post. Howard Libit, Director of Strategic Planning and Policy in the Mayor’s Office, said the reports are “old news.”

     […]

     In the weeks after the riots, Baltimore City experienced a dramatic spike in violent crime, and there were concerns that police were slower to respond to calls. That, and the discovery of a sign on a police door that read “Enjoy your ride, cuz we sure will!”, exacerbated tensions in the city.

     Davis told news outlets that he’s committed to restoring ties to local communities and increasing an emphasis on what he called “customer service” within the department.

450. rq says

     11 July 2015 at 4:53 pm

     Here’s a lingering comment on SC taking down the flag: “This flag was treated with more respect today than some of the people who fly that flag often treat their fellow citizens” @VanJones68 @CNN
     Truth.

     ‘Cleveland 8’ responds to appeals court’s refusal to force arrest warrants for officers in Tamir Rice case

     After the 8th District Court of Appeals declined to force a Cleveland municipal court judge to issue arrest warrants for the two officers involved in the shooting of Tamir Rice, the group of activists who call themselves the “Cleveland 8” said the dismissal was done “not on clear substantive grounds” in a statement released Friday night.

     In a 2-1 decision handed down Friday, the judges dismissed the activists’ request to have the appellate court force Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Ronald Adrine to issue arrest warrants for the two Cleveland police officers, Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback. In their decision, the judges said that the activists should have first appealed Adrine’s decision instead of asking a higher court to force the judge to issue the warrants.

     The one dissenting judge, Judge Anita Laster Mays, argued that the citizen affidavits filed by the “Cleveland 8” on June 9 met the legal standards required to have a judge issue the arrest warrants, the activists’ statement said.

     “This is not simply a dismissal,” said Ed Little, one of the “Cleveland 8” activists said in the release. “In fact, for the second time the court has affirmed that we are on the right side of the law.”

     The activists originally asked Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Ronald Adrine to review evidence compiled against Loehmann and Garmback. Adrine concluded in a decision June 11 that there is probable cause to charge the officers, but did not issue the warrants due to a conflict in the law.

     What’s the conflict with the law?

     I have nothing to say about this disgustingly inappropriate and disrespectful Mike Brown exhibit in Chicago except this: Shut. It. Down.
     Yep…
     Michael Brown exhibit opened in Chicago

     A new art exhibit about the Michael Brown police shooting in Ferguson is on display in Chicago.

     The piece features a life-size portrayal of Michael Brown after he was killed last year in Ferguson.

     It also includes a black statue of liberty, and a noose dangling from a neon sign.

     The exhibit also features a plaque with the words “I Can’t Breath”; referencing the Eric Garner police involved death in New York.

     A Brown family member praises the exhibit.

     The artist is a white woman from New Orleans.

     She says it represents white privilege in America and how it negatively affects the black community.

     The exhibit runs through August 10th.

     There’s a rather disturbing photo at the link.

     People see a body and memorialize it as a symbol. They forget he was a person and his death traumatized a community. #Ferguson
     Sarah Kendzior’s twitter also brought this back to my attention: The Body of Michael Brown–A Response to Kenneth Goldsmith

     It is likely that poet Kenneth Goldsmith and most of the audience last Friday night at Brown University have never attended an autopsy. For them, Goldsmith’s reading of his poem, “The Body of Michael Brown,” a creative editing of Brown’s autopsy report, was not tied to the physical experience of cutting into a human body, but rather to the political associations that surround this particular body. Indeed most of the discussion and heated reactions that have followed are not critiques of the poem as such, but relate to whether Goldsmith, as a white man, has the right to appropriate such a text.

     As a physician, I have a special relationship to the material Goldsmith read, a relationship that points to what is fundamentally wrong with his poem. My most acute memory of attending autopsies is the quiet awe, which arises from being in the presence of something at once quotidian and momentous. This something is not conceptual; whatever it is, it invokes a visceral sensation of an absent presence or a present absence: the being that this body contained. The gallows humor that inevitably punctures the stillness of the autopsy room arises from our inability to parse, describe, or translate this experience. The banal clinical language of the autopsy report is symptomatic of this. It succeeds in evoking the immensity of the absent being only in so far as it utterly fails to do so.

     In a statement put out on Facebook in response to the controversy, Goldsmith writes: “I altered the text for poetic effect; I translated into plain English many obscure medical terms that would have stopped the flow of the text; I narrativized it in ways that made the text less didactic and more literary.” The irony of this is that Goldsmith practices what he calls “uncreative writing,” specifically he writes conceptual poetry, a type of poetry in which the poet does not compose an original text, but rather reframes a pre-existing one. In his book, Uncreative Writing, he notes that, literary critic Marjorie Perloff has suggested that, “because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of genius — a romantic isolated figure — is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one’s mastery of information and its dissemination…She (Perloff) posits that today’s writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine.”

     The machine basis for conceptual poetry lends itself to the seductive illusion that, because they are associated with lifeless computers, these processes are somehow ahistorical and apolitical. The Internet, too, by providing access to millions of documents, anytime, anywhere, perpetuates this fallacy, that these have no material specificity. In truth, information originates and circulates within specific material, political and social circumstances. To forget this is to be lulled into thinking that the fluidity and flattening of information on the Web somehow erases the white male privilege of “real life.” Goldsmith’s Facebook statement that he “took a publicly available document from an American tragedy that was witnessed first-hand (in this case by the doctor performing the autopsy) and simply read it” reveals that either he has succumbed to this illusion or he is not telling the truth. Perhaps the best rebuttal to the poet’s pronouncement is his own decision to end the poem with the description of Michael Brown’s penis, a castrating gesture, which serves to show that “The Body of Michael Brown” is white male auteurship dressed in the drag of “uncreativity.”

     […]

     Mr. Brown is a symbol, no doubt, and no doubt he is being used for multiple purposes, but in the end, he is/was something more, something that the autopsy report points to in not pointing. Here was a singular being, a being that can no longer speak except through the words used by others to inscribe it. Goldsmith could have let the singular being that was Michael Brown, be heard, but, in the end, he did not have the compassion, the empathy, or the humility to do it. And because of this, he failed his art, he failed his audience and, he failed Michael Brown.

451. rq says

     11 July 2015 at 4:59 pm

     Serena Williams and the Fear of a Dominant Black Woman

     Serena Williams is on the cusp of cementing herself as the best, most dominant athlete of her generation, regardless of gender. At the age of 33—ancient by the norms of tennis’s attritive nature—Williams is by far the top-ranked player on the WTA tour and bested 20th ranked Garbine Muguruza in straight sets to claim the 2015 Wimbledon title.

     That means she now holds all the Grand Slam titles in tennis and will enter the 2015 U.S. Open with a chance to complete both a calendar year Grand Slam and tie Steffi Graf’s record of 22 Grand Slam titles in the open era.

     It’s an awe-inspiring accomplishment in the making, but one that will do little, if anything, to change the fact that Serena Williams’s legacy will be decided in the context of a society that has institutionally oppressed black women. This institutional oppression manifests itself across a broad spectrum of data.

     The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that black women earn $100 less per week than white women. Black women have a median wealth of $100 compared to a median wealth of $45,400 for white women, according to the Center for Global Policy Solutions. A study by the Sentencing Project finds that black women have a 1 in 19 lifetime likelihood of imprisonment, while the same measure stands at 1 in 118 for white women. There’s even a gap in life expectancy between black and white women. The data we have all points to the conclusion that black women are institutionally oppressed and disadvantaged.

     And one would need only to glance at the history of bankrupt accusations and bullshit levied against Williams for proof of how that oppression and its associated stereotypes play out in media. There was the time tennis great Chris Evert wrote an open letter to a then-24-year-old Williams chiding her for a supposed lack of commitment while Williams was battling through injuries.

     […]

     Clearly, this isn’t just another case of a big-name athlete making for an easy target. No, because Serena Williams is a wildly successful black woman in a white-dominated sport, she occupies a fraught space both within the sport itself and the society actively informing our perceptions.

     “American racist tropes tend to be constructed in ways that render black women one-dimensional,” says Mikki Kendall, a writer and cofounder of HoodFeminism.com. “So when Serena refuses to be the kindly self-effacing Mammy, the over-sexed Jezebel, or the harridan Sapphire, media organizations don’t know how to handle her. She is beautiful, strong, successful, and presents a model of femininity that is very familiar to black American communities, even if it is the antithesis of white expectations.”

     The idea that Williams transgresses against feminine beauty norms, particularly within the context of tennis, is readily proven. After all, the common mental image of a women’s tennis player is white and lithe, in perfect harmony with Western ideals of feminine beauty, while Williams is black and built like a powerlifter. She is an unprecedented affront to our collective notion of the beautiful female athlete.

     The cost of this transgression can be seen in Whitlock’s creepy sexualization and demonization of Williams’s body, a self-contradictory tactic that betrays a deep discomfort with Williams’s expression of femininity. Another more readily measured cost can be seen in the fact that Maria Sharapova—the 4th-ranked player in the world—is the highest paid athlete not just in all of women’s tennis, but in all of women’s sports. Naturally, Sharapova is tall, blond, and slender, a paean to the Western beauty ideals that net her endless endorsement opportunities regardless of her on-court performance.

     Meanwhile, despite quintupling Sharapova’s prize money and holding an 18-2 career record against her—including 17 consecutive wins head-to-head—Williams makes half of what her pseudo-rival manages in endorsements. The racist notions of feminine beauty playing out here are as subtle as a forehand to the throat.

     Further, because Williams’s body is itself so unfamiliar in a mainstream Western context, there is the sense that, like so many other black athletes, she has been gifted an unfair genetic advantage. This serves to obfuscate the fact that all elite athletes have some natural advantage of some sort while also minimizing the sacrifice and dedication it takes to become an elite athlete regardless of natural advantage.

     In Williams’s case, not even her life story—one that aligns perfectly with the narrative of the American dream and has seen her represent the U.S. on some of sports’ most mythic stages—grants her the humanity she is so routinely denied.

     In science news, #BLACKEXCELLENCE RT @PoCBeauty: First Black Woman to Graduate from Yale with a PhD in Astrophysics @JedidahIslerPhD Hopefully there will be an article profiling her soon, congratulations!!

     Imagine if Serena or Venus had said at any time they would work less hard to be the best so they could “look good.”
     They would have been ALL KINDS OF LAZY!!! Everything about that article was wrong INCLUDING pushing their own idea of what is “feminine”.

     Between Serena’s “muscular frame” and Viola Davis not being “classically beautiful,” @nytimes sure knows how to write about black women.

     There have been 500 people shot and killed by police in the U.S. so far in 2015

     Police officers in the United States have shot and killed at least 500 people so far in 2015, according to a Washington Post analysis.

     The 500th gun death at the hands of police officers came Thursday night in Boulder Creek, Calif., after officers were dispatched to a home on reports of a family fight. Police officials told local media that when they arrived, they encountered a man with two firearms whom they shot and killed.

     It was one of four fatal police shootings that occurred on Thursday — the others were in Chicago, Phoenix and Parowan, Utah.

     The 500th fatal police shooting comes amid a particularly deadly stretch — at least two people have been shot and killed by police every single day so far this month. At least 31 people were shot and killed by police officers during the first week of July, making it the deadliest such week of the year so far. On Tuesday, officers across the country shot and killed eight people, the most police shootings that have occurred on any single day in 2015.

     The number of people shot and killed so far this year tracked by The Post easily exceeds the figures reported by the FBI for any single year since 1976. The federal data, which officials acknowledge is incomplete, relies on voluntary reporting from just a sliver of the nation’s more than 13,000 state and local police departments. While the FBI has never recorded more than 460 fatal police shootings in an entire year, The Post identified 463 such shootings in just the first six months of 2015.

     There’s a second article on keeping a count coming up with slightly different numbers, so I wonder how each does the counting (what counts and what doesn’t).

452. rq says

     11 July 2015 at 5:16 pm

     Report: Nearly All of America’s Prosecutors Are White Men

     “While the nation’s prisoners are predominantly people of color, the officials who put them there are overwhelmingly white,” Emily Peck wrote Tuesday for the Huffington Post, “to an extent that surprises even those who study racial bias in the criminal justice system.

     “A stunning 95 percent of the nation’s elected prosecutors are white, a new report reveals. The data, compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Technology and Civic Life, was released Tuesday by the Women Donors Network, a group of about 200 female philanthropists dedicated to social justice issues.

     “White men constitute 79 percent of the country’s 2,437 elected prosecutors. Only 4 percent are men of color and only 1 percent are women of color.

     ” ‘I did not expect the numbers to be encouraging, but I did not expect them to be this stark, even knowing 90 percent of elected officials are white,’ Brenda Choresi Carter of the Women Donors Network said on a conference call Tuesday afternoon. ‘If we saw these kinds of numbers in another country, we’d recognize that something was very seriously wrong.’

     “The study looked at state and local prosecutors — not those on the federal level, who are appointed. . . . ”

     Lynn M. Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, told Journal-isms by telephone Wednesday that the study points to the need for journalists to ask hard questions of prosecutors. “The fastest growing group of people targeted for nonviolent drug offenses are African American women,” she said.

     […]

     “You can’t know what any individual will do by knowing their race, gender or class, but this disparity requires journalists to ask questions,” Paltrow added, speaking of the overwhelming number of white male prosecutors.

     “There are some things we do know — when 70 percent of the prosecutors are white men, you can safely assume they are never going to become pregnant, give birth, experience a miscarriage or stillbirth, have an abortion or be subjected to shaming because of a pregnancy.”

     Journalists might ask about prosecutors, “How will their experience and privilege affect what things they consider to be criminal and whether they will misuse the law to treat some women, especially women of color who become pregnant, as proper subjects of the criminal law? With arrests of women who have experienced pregnancy losses, attempted home abortions, refused cesarean surgery, or been in a dangerous location while pregnant, this is an important question to ask,” she added by email.

     “We also see male prosecutors use their wives as the basis for judging other women — who are likely of a different race and class from their wives — and deciding that women who they perceive as behaving differently during pregnancy from their wives — deserve to be prosecuted.

     “In addition to targeting low income African American mothers for arrest and prosecution that separates them from their children, prosecutors have also used their authority to obtain court orders to force women to have cesarean surgery over their objections.”

     There’s more at the link.

     Beaten Up, Arrested, Jailed – nope, not random black people, but witnesses to police misconduct.

     The need to speak out is evident because the cost of police brutality is crippling to taxpayers. Since 2011, Baltimore City taxpayers have paid nearly $6 million to settle 102 lawsuits alleging police brutality and other misconduct in Baltimore.

     Yet incidents persist, often without disciplinary action: Last month, former Baltimore Detective Michael Wood tweeted his confessions of police-brutality incidents specifically targeting black people—including, but not limited to, corrupt policing; a police officer slapping an innocent woman for accidentally bumping into him; “punting” a handcuffed, facedown suspect in the face; and urinating and defecating on black suspects’ beds and clothes during raids.

     But coming forward to report such incidents often doesn’t come with reward but, rather, with more pain and conflict. Here are some stories of what happened after individuals, one of them a police officer, witnessed police brutality and came forward:

     […]

     Police officers who speak out are also vulnerable. In the 1994 death of Anthony Baez, who died from a banned police choke hold, the “blue wall of silence” was broken by one officer, Daisy Boria.

     At the criminal trial in 1996, Boria testified that several cops met in the precinct parking lot after Baez’s death to concoct a story clearing Officer Francis Livoti, who delivered the choke hold. Afterward, Boria said that she received death threats and claimed she wasn’t backed up by other cops on jobs. Her locker was checked for bombs on the hour. She eventually retired, moved to another state and said she continued to get harassing telephone calls.

     […]

     And retaliation doesn’t just stop at individuals. Sometimes it can even be an entire city. As murders spiked after civil unrest following the death of Gray, arrests in the city were down by more than 50 percent, leaving citizens in Baltimore to wonder if police officers were taking a hands-off approach on purpose. Citizens had complained that some police stations were closed to the public after 7 p.m.

     Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake fired Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts this week, saying in a press conference that he was a “distraction” and “it is with the utmost urgency that we get the crime surge under control.”

     Council members in the city applauded the move for change, but many in the community say that the Police Department, and police departments in many parts of the country, need a systemic overhaul, not just new faces.

     New Confederate flag raised at Marion government complex

     A new Confederate flag is now up at the McPherson Governmental Complex in Marion County after a man was seen carrying the original flag off.

     A young man claiming to be from the local historical society brought a new flag to the “Nations” flag display at the complex in Ocala, took down one of the other flags and replaced it Confederate flag.

     Earlier today a man was seen carried the flag and pole to the front door of the government building and left it there.

     The man, who refused to give his name, claimed the flag fell down.

     A short while later, a city worker took the flag with the pole and drove away indicating it was for “safe keeping.”

     The banner was part of a five-flag display of “nations” flags that have flown over Florida. The flag was actually a national flag of the Confederate States of America, not the battle flag that was permanently removed in South Carolina on Friday. The flags of Spain, France and Great Britain also fly in the display, along with the American flag.

     The decision to keep a Confederate flag at the Marion County government facility sparked a protest of by people for and against the flag.

     So yeah, some guy came along and took the flag away… so they put it back up.

     Confederate Flag Treated Like Fallen Hero

     In June, the South Carolina Highway Patrol honor guard carried the mortal remains of the murdered Sen. Clementa Pinckney up the State House steps and into the rotunda.

     Members of the honor guard flanked the open coffin, spit polished and erect, eyes straight ahead in a silent show of respect as thousands of mourners filed past. A black cloth had been draped over one of the windows to spare anyone who might be offended by the Confederate battle flag flying out front.

     A bill called the Heritage Act passed in this very building prevented the flag from being lowered even to half-staff, much less taken down without a two-thirds vote of the legislature.

     But on Thursday, the legislature voted to do just that and set a 24-hour deadline on having it done.

     On Friday, the honor guard returned, this time to lower the Confederate battle flag, which had been designed by William Porcher Miles, a onetime mayor of Charleston who had been a prominent “fire-eater,” as the most ardent proponents of slavery and secession leading up to the Civil War were called.

     The honor guard had performed countless other ceremonies, but this one was a little different. And they had not been given much time to work out exactly how it should go.

     The flag was being taken down in the first place because it was seen by many people—African-Americans in particular—as a hateful symbol of slavery and oppression. Some rightly view it as a shameful banner of treason.

     But it had been hoisted there in the first place because it is viewed by others—none of them African-Americans—as a symbol of an idealized heritage and history.

     And the very fact that the honor guard had been chosen to lower it was an implicit nod to those people.

     At the appointed time on Friday morning, the guard went about lowering the flag with the same ritualistic respect as it would with the Stars and Stripes.

     Two of the officers took the lowered banner in their white gloved hands.

     And for a moment, it seemed as if they might fold it as they would an American flag that had covered the coffin of a fellow cop or a U.S. solider who had made the supreme sacrifice.

     Instead, they rolled it, presumably an echo of the way Confederate regiments furled their battle flags in surrender at the end of the Civil War.

     A black sergeant was the one who then took the furled banner. He had done this at American flag ceremonies where race was not issue, but it was hard to believe that he had been chosen by chance in this instance.

     He seemed to be an attempt to compensate for the bigotry associated with what he now carried so solemnly over to the State House steps. The director of the South Carolina Relic Room and Military Museum waited to receive it.

     For a second, truly terrible moment, the ritual was too much like that performed when the flag from a hero’s coffin is presented to a grieving loved one along with the words, “On behalf of a grateful nation.…”

     Thankfully, the sergeant uttered not a word. The director, Allen Roberson, was also silent as he took the furled flag.

     “Nothing was said,” Roberson later told The Daily Beast. “I felt like that was appropriate.”

     […]

     Back at the State House, the flagpole where the banner had flown was now bare, but a monument to the Confederate dead remained. The inscription on the north side reads:

     “This monument
     perpetuates the memory,
     of those who
     true to the instincts of their birth,
     faithful to the teachings of their fathers,
     constant in their love for the State,
     died in the performance of their duty:
     Who
     have glorified a fallen cause
     by the simple manhood of their lives,
     the patient endurance of suffering,
     and the heroism of death,
     and who,
     in the dark house of imprisonment,
     in the hopelessness of the hospital,
     in the short, sharp agony of the field
     found support and consolation
     in the belief
     that at home they would not be forgotten.
     Unveiled May 13, 1879”

     The fallen cause they glorified included sedition and slavery. The people at home included slaves who had suffered horrors that outdid even war.

     There is also an inscription on the north side:

     “Let the stranger,
     who may in the future times
     read this inscription,
     recognize that these were men
     whom power could not corrupt,
     whom death could not terrify,
     whom defeat could not dishonor
     and let their virtues plead
     for just judgment
     of the cause in which they perished.
     Let the South Carolinian
     of another generation
     remember
     that the State taught them
     how to live and how to die.
     And that from her broken fortunes
     she has preserved for her children
     the priceless treasure of their memories,
     teaching all who may claim
     the same birthright
     that truth, courage and patriotism
     endure forever.”

     The truth is they died fighting to deny fellow human beings the right to life and liberty. Their legacy is racism and hate.

     The flowery falsehoods on the monument remain, now that the flag has been taken down in somber ceremony with white gloved hands and tucked safely away by a very nice museum director in an acid-free box, locked and alarmed.

     Man dies after ‘altercation’ with Gwinnett cops; GBI investigating

     The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is probing the death of a Stone Mountain man killed Saturday morning during “an altercation” with Gwinnett County police officers.

     Gwinnett County police spokesman Sgt. Brian Doan said officers responded to the 5100 block of Rock Place Drive around 4 a.m. Saturday after a 911 caller “stated that there was a male neighbor that was locked in his garage who was irate and possibly armed.”

     Officers made contact with the man and “an altercation ensued,” Doan said.

     “The suspect went unresponsive at the scene and was transported to Eastside Medical Center where he was pronounced dead,” Doan said. “Due to this being an in-custody death, the GBI has been contacted and will handle the investigation.”

     Doan confirmed Saturday morning that no shots were fired. He said he could not yet release the deceased man’s identity.

     Gwinnett police did not provide any further information. Reached Saturday morning, a GBI spokeswoman also did not have additional information.

     Suspect dies after Tuscaloosa Police hit him with pepper spray – this is a different incident, but they both occurred within the past day.

     Sgt. Brent Blankley said TPD officers were called to the Crescent East Apartment Complex on 49th Avenue East after someone reported a man wanted for attempting to elude police was spotted there late Friday night.

     Blankley said the caller told officers the suspect was armed with a handgun.

     When TPD officers came to the area, the suspect fled into a wooded area nearby, Blankley said.

     He said police caught up with the suspect in the woods and he resisted arrest. Officers sprayed the suspect with oleoresin capsicum (OC) spray and were able to handcuff him, even as he continued to resist arrest, Blankley said.

     Blankley said the suspect collapsed as officers walked him out of the woods. He was given CPR by officers on the scene and medical personnel were called to respond. The man was taken to DCH Regional Medical Center in Tuscaloosa, where he was pronounced dead at 10:42 p.m. Friday night.

     Blankley said investigators of the Tuscaloosa County Metro Homicide Unit have been assigned to look into the death of the suspect, which is standard procedure for unnatural deaths in the Tuscaloosa area.

     He said the team responsible for investigating the death is made up of supervisors and investigators who are not associated with the Tuscaloosa Police Department, to prevent any conflicts of interest.

453. rq says

     11 July 2015 at 5:23 pm

     Wimbledon 2015: Serena Williams Defeats Garbiñe Muguruza and Closes In on Grand Slam. Black excellence.

     Police union: Cops who beat Miami man “did absolutely nothing wrong” – another day.

     The Miami police union president says that police who beat a man after a traffic stop “did absolutely nothing wrong” and behaved “professionally,” reports CBS Miami.

     No one is disputing that Brian White’s broken nose, black eyes, and heavy bruising were at the hands of Miami Police officers. But why he was left with those injuries is in question.

     White says he was simply the passenger in a car that led police on a chase and was the victim of excessive force. But the Miami Police chief and the union reportedly see it differently.

     “Our officers did everything professionally. They used a lot of restraint,” said Lt. Javier Ortiz, President of the Fraternal Order of Police.

     Ortiz says White brought the violence upon himself, an incident which was captured by a surveillance camera.

     “He made the wrong decision. He decided to fight police. We weren’t looking for a fight but we also have a duty to protect ourselves,” Ortiz told CBS Miami.

     According to his father, White was getting a ride to work from his longtime friend John Thomas last week, when police attempted to pull them over.

     The incident report shows Thomas was wanted for allegedly defrauding a woman out of cash.

     But instead of stopping, police say, Thomas led them on a chase, then jumped out of the car and lay on the ground as police approached. White did not exit the car.

     White’s father reportedly says that his son was urging his friend to stop the car and stop the chase. He also says his son stayed in the car and put his hands up out of fear. From the start, White insisted he did not resist police.

     “I did everything they told me to do. I put my hands up. They took me out of the car and they hit me. I never resisted. I never hit a police officer or pushed them. I did nothing,” White said in Spanish.

     Very professional officers, it seems.

     New HUD rules aim to ease segregation in housing

     The rules will require towns and cities to study patterns of segregation and how they are linked to access to jobs, high-quality schools and public transportation. Then, the municipalities must submit goals for improving fair access to housing. Steps could include integrating communities or more evenly distributing services.

     “A ZIP Code should never prevent any person from reaching their aspirations,” Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro said in announcing the regulations.

     The rules, another instance of the Obama administration using its executive power to take on an entrenched issue, clarify how grant recipients must meet a standard that was set in the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — but has been inconsistently enforced.

     Advocates also hope the rules will lead to the building of more affordable housing in wealthier areas.

     “Rules like this help us eliminate the still-existing obstacles to full integration in our society,” said NAACP Senior Vice President for Advocacy Hillary Shelton.

     Experts caution that the rules’ ultimate effect will depend on whether local communities actively pursue the goals they set for themselves, and what kind of standards HUD holds them to.

     Conservative critics call it federal overreach, and some Republicans in Congress have already made moves to try to block it.

     “HUD bureaucrats will be in a position to decide on their own whether your particular town meets their ideal of racial and income distribution,” said Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation.

     But advocates hope the rules will reduce long-standing inequalities tied to patterns of segregation.

     Anything that helps.

     Serena isn’t the Michael Jordan of tennis she’s the Serena Williams of tennis.

     Art exhibit inspired by Ferguson opens at Chicago gallery – yup, that’s the Michael Brown one!

     An art exhibit featuring the controversial police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri is on display in Bronzeville.

     The exhibit is in Chicago for one month and is raw, provocative, and timely.

     The artist, Ti-Rock Moore, a white woman from New Orleans, says the images represent white privilege in America and how it negatively affects the black community now and has for generations. She shows a black Statue of Liberty, a noose dangling from a neon sign and a life size portrayal of Michael Brown as he laid in the streets of Ferguson for hours after he was shot by a white officer almost one year ago.

     Moore says she believes art can be healing. She would like to see the healing begin. Keeping Michael Brown’s memory alive, Moore claims, is part of that process.

     The owner of Gallery Guichard, Andre Guichard, calls the exhibit “courageous” and hopes it sparks dialogue and breaks down barriers. He hopes “it creates something positive,” he says, “from incredibly negative images.”

     Brown’s mother is expected in Chicago to see the showing herself.

     The exhibit is free and runs through August 10th.

454. rq says

     11 July 2015 at 5:29 pm

     Two officers who arrested Freddie Gray ask for separate trials, statements to be suppressed

     Attorneys for Officers Edward Nero and Garrett Miller filed motions in Baltimore Circuit Court on Friday opposing the stated intention of Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby to try them alongside Officer Caesar Goodson and Sgt. Alicia White.

     Goodson, the driver of the police transport van in which Gray was injured, is charged with second-degree depraved heart murder, and White is charged with manslaughter. Nero and Miller, bicycle officers involved in Gray’s initial arrest, face lesser charges, including second-degree assault.

     In their opposition motions, the officers’ attorneys argued that trying Nero and Miller alongside Goodson and White would “severely prejudice” their clients’ right to a fair trial because the crimes with which they are charged “are substantially different and less serious than those of the other Defendants.”

     “Consequently, if the Defendants are joined for trial, there will be a substantial amount of evidence that would be admissible against the other Defendants but would be inadmissible against Defendant Nero,” wrote Nero’s attorney, Marc L. Zayon.

     Catherine Flynn, the attorney for Miller, made the same argument, verbatim, in her own filing on behalf of Miller.

     Both also argued that “it is anticipated that the State may seek to introduce statements made by co-defendants,” leaving them without “an opportunity to confront and cross examine these witnesses and challenge the substance of these statements.”

     Zayon declined to comment. Flynn could not be reached for comment.

     Albuquerque to pay $5m to family of homeless man killed by police, via The Guardian.

     The city of Albuquerque has agreed to pay $5m to the family of a homeless man who was fatally shot by police officers last year, in a case that has helped fuel major reforms within the police force.

     The settlement was announced on Friday by an attorney representing the family of James Boyd, who was killed during a March 2014 standoff in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains where he had been illegally camping.

     […]

     A special prosecutor announced that two police officers would be charged with second-degree murder in the case. The two officers have denied any wrongdoing, but each could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

     Even before Boyd’s death, the US Justice Department had been investigating the Albuquerque police department over allegations of excessive force. Federal officials harshly criticized the department but reached an agreement with the city to improve training and dismantle troubled units.

     Shannon Kennedy, a lawyer who represented the Boyd family in the lawsuit, said in a statement that “the family sought justice to ensure that what happened to Mr Boyd never happens to anyone else, and they believe the city is taking necessary steps to ensure officers are provided adequate training, supervision and support and that Mr Boyd’s death changes policing for the better in Albuquerque.”

     Meet Faatimah Knight, Muslim Woman Who Has Spearheaded Fundraising for Black Churches, via the Black Youth Project.

     Twenty-three year-old Faatimah Knight is the woman behind Respond With Love, a fundraiser for black churches destroyed by arson. The fundraiser has already surpassed its $50,000 goal.

     “We must always keep in mind that the Muslim community and the black community are not different communities. We are profoundly integrated in many ways, in our overlapping identities and in our relationship to this great and complicated country. We are connected to Black churches through our extended families, our friends and teachers, and our intertwined histories and convergent present,” reads the statement on the fundraiser’s page.

     You can donate here.

     27% of Alabama is black. 55% of people killed by police in Alabama this year have been black. @deray

     Killed By Police 2015 – here’s the conflicting count. Their tally stands at 604. Not sure about the discrepancy.

     Five Things You Should Know About Race in America, from August 2014.

     In the wake of the Michael Brown tragedy, my hometown of St. Louis is both literally and figuratively on fire. A gas station went down in flames on Sunday night. Concurrently a number of stores were broken into and looted as a riot broke out after hours of peaceful mourning, demonstrating, and protesting took place in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri–just 20 minutes from where I was raised in downtown St. Louis. The rioting may have garnered as much attention and national headlines as the killing at the heart of it, perhaps more. Mainstream media continues to magnify the transgressions of a few individuals, despite the fact that many more have good intentions and positive interactions. Given the media’s selective bias, I am deeply concerned that those who were not fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to digest the situation as it occurred (be it on the streets or via social media) will be misled by news outlets that are (1) primarily concerned with sensationalism and entertainment value over substance and/or (2) purposefully and willingly participating in a campaign to vilify and demonize blacks in America.

     At this point in time, I don’t think it’s appropriate to fully delve into the alleged criminal misconduct of the police officer who shot Michael Brown. The situation is extremely fluid and it’s hard to separate facts from hearsay. That being said, there’s a lot of dialogue happening in the aftermath that I find troubling–from friends and strangers alike. As such, I feel the need to unpack some of the ideas and constructs that are driving the discussion. My hope is to provide context and clarity to the salient issues that are related to the shooting of Michael Brown. I am very much interested in continuing, and improving the dialogue. So here it goes:

     Five Things You Should Know About Race in America

     The five things can be found at the link.

455. rq says

     11 July 2015 at 5:33 pm

     Racism of Atticus Finch in ‘Go Set a Watchman’ Could Alter Harper Lee’s Legacy. I swear these people are trying to ruin me. That headline is a spoiler extraordinaire.
     A comment on that article: Maybe this why she never published the book. After all, Mockingbird is a revision of this new book.

     Teens arrested in theft of Confederate flag in Glasgow

     Three Middletown teens have been charged with the theft of a Confederate flag in Glasgow earlier this week, according to New Castle County Police.

     Cameron Canty, Austin Maxwell and an unnamed teenager turned themselves into police. Canty was contacted by police after investigators found his fingerprints on the homeowner’s vandalized boat, according to Officer First Class Tracey Duffy.

     Homeowner Barry Binkley Jr. discovered on Wednesday the confederate flag he flew in front of his Frazer Road property had been stolen. The words “[expletive] u racist” were found spray-painted on a boat at the property and his Chevy truck window was also broken.

     The arrests came as a “relief” to the homeowners, said Janet Binkley, mother of Barry. The homeowners were notified of the arrests after the three teens turned themselves in to county police Friday.

     “It’s satisfying that they got caught,” she said. “Hopefully, it was just those people, whoever it was, and not a popular sentiment.”

     The theft came amid a turbulent national debate about the use of Confederate imagery and racial tension in the wake of the deadly South Carolina church shooting.

     Wow, what about praising those kids for using teenaged high jinx to do some good work, for once?

     Tuscaloosa officers involved in fatal pepper spray arrest not placed on leave

     Six Tuscaloosa police officers involved in a Friday night arrest that ended with a suspect dead have not been placed on leave, authorities said Saturday.

     Anthony Dewayne Ware, 35, died Friday in police custody. Police said Ware was pepper sprayed while resisting arrest.

     Sgt. Brent Blankley said investigators of the Tuscaloosa County Metro Homicide Unit have been assigned to look into the death of the suspect, which is standard procedure for unnatural deaths in the Tuscaloosa area.

     Fox 6 reports police do have video footage of the arrest and plan to release it when investigators complete their review.

     Breaking–Emergency resolution passed by the NAACP National Board of Directors at #NAACP106, ending the 15 year South Carolina boycott.

456. rq says

     12 July 2015 at 3:09 am

     Another on the history of the confederacy, just to drive the point home a little more: “It was always based on a flat lie”: Why neo-Confederates are finally losing the war for American history

     Clickbait headlines and the general hyperbole inflation of the media today has devalued the word somewhat, but on Friday morning, something truly amazing happened: South Carolina, the birthplace of the Civil War and Southern rebellion, finally removed the Confederate battle flag from its capitol grounds. It did so in broad daylight, with the full backing of its conservative governor as well as the clear majority of its legislature, itself also quite conservative.

     Of course, this was just the most conspicuous and shocking example of a trend that emerged after a white supremacist allegedly murdered nine African-Americans in a historic South Carolina church. The trend has included bastions of Southern pride like Mississippi, South Carolina and even NASCAR distancing themselves from a symbol that only a few months ago they would defend as representing “heritage not hate.” It appears that the Confederate battle flag, which lingered in the American mainstream for decades, is finally beginning to be widely understood for what it really is.

     With an interest in getting some perspective on this cultural shift, as well as some background on why this de-Confederatization is necessary in the first place, Salon reached out to historian James Loewen, the best-selling author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” and “Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong,” two books that helped lay the groundwork for this sea change. We touched on the events of recent weeks, Loewen’s work, and his hope for the future. Our conversation can be found below and has been edited for clarity and length.

     Interview at the link.

     The People of Palestine Have a Message for #BlackLivesMatter Protesters in the U.S.

     The connections between black people protesting state violence in the United States and Palestinians fighting occupation in Gaza and the West Bank have been well-documented.

     When armored trucks and riot officers stormed the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in August — days after white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown — some Palestinians used social media to communicate advice to protesters on how to cope with tear gas.

     In the subsequent months, this transnational solidarity has only grown stronger. Activist and scholar Angela Davis has spoken at length about its links, highlighting, for instance, how the multinational security company G4S has provided both material support for the Israeli occupation — a support they have vowed to scale down over the next three years — and for private prisons in the U.S., which profit from mass incarceration, a phenomenon that disproportionately impacts black and brown people.

     “Both communities share many of the same grievances, suffer from the same systematic forms of violations, and therefore also campaign against some similar actors that profit from these abuses,” Fadi Quran, an activist and educator in Palestine, told Mic. “[G4S] is just one example of many, and that’s why solidarity and connecting our struggles is not only important, but necessary if we want to put an end to injustice.”

     It doesn’t end there. Patrisse Marie Cullors-Brignac, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, in February expressed solidarity with the people of Palestine in a letter addressed to the students of Stanford University, some of whom were voting for their school to divest from “corporations that profit from the Occupation” in February (the university declined to divest shortly thereafter).

     “No studying could prepare me for the level of violence and trauma that exists inside Palestine,” Cullors-Brignac wrote of a recent visit she took to Palestine. “The Black Lives Matter movement can benefit greatly by learning about struggles outside of the U.S., but particularly the Palestinian struggle.”

     To further illustrate the degree to which these movements are mutually intertwined, Mic has asked people from across the Palestinian diaspora — students, artists, educators, Americans, Europeans and people currently living in Palestine — to create a set of visual responses to the question:

     “If you could say one thing to black American citizens about police brutality in the U.S., what would it be?”

     The answers come from Palestinians from all over the world, of varying backgrounds and spanning a 45-year age range. But they all have one thing in common: They depict, unambiguously, how the civil rights struggle in Palestine and that of black Americans aren’t as disconnected as one might presume.

     Here’s what they had to say:</blockquote.
     Read more at the link. One quick highlight due to poetry:

     “Salute to all black Americans struggling for justice. I know how you feel, just as Palestinian poet Tawfiq Sayigh does: ‘My feet are torn/And homelessness has worn me out/Park benches have left their marks on my ribs./Policemen followed me with their suspicious looks./I dragged myself from place to place, destitute except for day-long memories of a home that yesterday, only yesterday, was mine, and except for evening dreams of my dwelling there again.'”

     The End of Federally Financed Ghettos

     The Supreme Court issued an important ruling last month when it reminded state and local governments that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 bars them from spending federal housing money in a manner that perpetuates racial segregation.

     Last week, the Obama administration took an even more important step — one that has already changed the decades-long discussion about how to combat residential segregation. It rewrote the rules under the provision of the act that requires state and local governments to “affirmatively further” housing goals by making real efforts to cope with the cumulative results of the discrimination that confined black Americans to ghettos in the first place.

     For the new rules to be effective, federal officials need to make clear that local governments can lose federal housing aid if they persist in dumping subsidized housing into depressed, racially isolated communities instead of putting more of it in integrated areas that offer better schools and job opportunities.

     The fact that it has taken nearly 50 years since the law’s passage for these common-sense changes to materialize is all the more distressing, given that federally sanctioned housing discrimination has played a central role in racial ghettoization.

     The Fair Housing Act was intended to break down historic patterns of segregation. But it was undercut from the start by federal officials, including presidents who believed that segregation was the natural order of things. With the threat of sanctions almost nonexistent, many state and local governments confined subsidized housing to poor minority neighborhoods and found it quite easy to hide these wrongful practices behind ineffective, vaguely worded rules and loose oversight.

     […]

     The rule is a warning for governments and nonprofit housing developers that have an interest in building as much subsidized housing as quickly as possible and that have been roundly criticized for building too much of it in depressed areas and speciously calling the process “revitalization.” Builders will no longer be able to take the path of least resistance, avoiding better neighborhoods out of fear of not-in-my-backyard crusaders.

     Critics are already describing the new rules as an example of overreach by the Obama administration. Far from it. The responsibilities laid out in the new rules were part of the Fair Housing Act all along but were ignored over decades by governments at all levels. The tragedy is that this has left the country more divided than it otherwise would have been.

     Oh, those critics.

     Officer-involved shooting in north STL, gun found on scene. Shot a sixteen-year-old because he thought he was maybe pointing a gun at him. It’s hard to accept the ‘gun found on scene’ statement from police at face value.

     A suspect has been transported to the hospital after an officer-involved shooting involving an armed teenager in north St. Louis Saturday night.

     Police Chief Sam Dotson said in a press conference that the 16-year-old suspect was shot in the arm, stomach and grazed in the head after officers responded to a call for a stolen firearm. Dotson said the shot to the abdomen is the most serious wound. The suspect is in serious, but stable, condition.

     According to Dotson, two suspects were running through a gangway at the 2500 block of Hodiamont Avenue Saturday evening carrying an object that officers believed to be a gun. They saw police at one side of the building, so they turned around and ran the other way. That path also led the to officers. When officers saw the suspect running at them with the object, one of them fired four shots, hitting the suspect three times.

     The gun was first reported stolen from a neighbor Friday. After a preliminary investigation, police say the gun found on the scene was the stolen gun. Dotson said the gun was loaded and had a bullet in the chamber.

     Police held the press conference after Dotson reviewed security footage showing the incident. That footage will be a part of an investigation into the suspect.

     The officer involved is a 29-year-old, seven year veteran of the force. He has been put on administrative leave.

     Was the Civil War about Slavery? A new informative website.

     Police Commissioner Batts was fired amid riot review at Hilton

     Former Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts was pulled out of an all-day review at the Hilton hotel of the riot response to receive word of his firing.

     “We were finishing up, around 3 o’clock, and he asked me to see him outside,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which is leading the city’s review of the late April response to the unrest. “He said, ‘I just got a call from the mayor. I gotta’ go see the mayor.”

     Wexler said Batts didn’t tell him that he had been fired but he looked “solemn and disappointed.”

     Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced that Batts had been replaced at about 3:45 p.m. At a news conference, she told reporters that questions of Batts’ leadership had become a distraction from fighting crime.

     Batts has declined to comment on the mayor’s announcement.

     Kinda awkward.

457. rq says

     12 July 2015 at 3:22 am

     Blockquote fail; I hope everything is reasonably clear.

     Authorities: Man dies after being pepper sprayed by police, AP on Tuscaloosa.

     Mikulski Petitions For Harriet Tubman To Appear On New $10 Bill

     A Maryland senator give her two cents about who should appear on the new $10 bill.

     Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) is introducing legislation that would put Harriet Tubman on the currency.

     Tubman was born in Maryland as a slave before escaping in 1849 and leading hundreds of slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad.

     The U.S. Treasury is taking suggestions for the new tan dollar bill, which will be reissued in 2021.

     I like the typo at the end, does this mean USAmerican money will no longer be all the same green colour?

     Fresno police shootings: Excessive-force lawsuits piling up long after landmark settlement

     Close to four years ago, a prominent San Francisco attorney vowed to put the entire Fresno Police Department on trial over what he said was a pattern of unjustified police shootings.

     Arturo Gonzalez won a $1.3 million settlement from the city in that high-profile excessive-force case, which focused on the killing of Steven Vargas, an unarmed Fresno man who was high on drugs when a police sergeant shot him.

     More important than the money, Gonzalez said at the time, was a promise by Police Chief Jerry Dyer to change his department’s approach to officer-involved shootings. There had been 37 in the 31/2 years before the December 2011 verdict, and Vargas was one of 11 people killed in those shootings.

     In the ensuing 31/2 years, Fresno police have shot 30 people, killing 17, city records show. Some of the victims were unarmed. At least two were shot in the back.

     […]

     All of the shootings — except for the two most recent, which are still under investigation — have been ruled justified by the Fresno Police Department’s Internal Affairs Unit, meaning no officer was held criminally liable. The Fresno County District Attorney also has ruled most of them justified; nine shootings are pending a ruling from prosecutors.

     But in the civil arena, the shootings have sparked a new wave of excessive-force lawsuits against police and the city of Fresno. Two were filed by Gonzalez, who says nothing has changed since the Vargas verdict.

     The lawsuits could cost Fresno millions at a time it is emerging from years of budget struggles. Outside lawyers are being hired to defend the lawsuits.

     The new round of excessive-force lawsuits make Dyer bristle.

     “This is not about change,” he says, “this is about making money.”

     The vast majority of the people who were shot either aimed a gun or pulled a knife on officers, Dyer says. Many had criminal records. Some were identified as gang members. He stands by every shooting that has been cleared internally by his department investigators.

     Still, Dyer says many significant changes have been made to Fresno Police Department policies since the Vargas verdict. This not only includes changes he promised as part of a settlement agreement reached with Gonzalez, but additional policy tweaks above and beyond those pledges.

     […]

     The changes have made Fresno police a better unit, Dyer says, especially at a time when departments across the nation are being put under a microscope.

     “Our officers are expected to know the unknown, to see the unseen, and to make split-second decisions with limited facts, knowing full well that they are going to be second-guessed after the fact by those people who have all the facts,” Dyer says, “meaning facts that the officer didn’t have at the time, and that could include, in some cases, determining that what the person had in their hand was not in fact a firearm, but the officer believed it was based on a number of circumstances.”

     Dyer has the backing of Fresno City Hall.

     “While I can’t address ongoing legal issues, I can state emphatically that the city has made significant progress in addressing officer-involved shootings and have dramatically lowered those numbers over the past few years,” city spokesman Mark Standriff says. “At one time, we averaged more than one per month — but in 2014, the number of officer-involved shootings dropped 27% with no incidents reported for nearly eight months between October 2014 until June of this year. That’s encouraging news.”

     Of course, people who are not the police have a slightly dimmer view of the changes. More at the link.

     Baltimore Church Dedicating Youth Center To Freddie Gray

     The Freddie Gray Youth Empowerment Center is located just 10 miles from where Gray lived, serving as a memorial and symbol of hope. It will ideally set Baltimore’s youth up for success in a city working to rebuild after being rocked by violence and chaos following the death of Freddie Gray.

     “There’s another side of Baltimore that the uprising didn’t show,” said Dr. Jamal Bryant, Empowerment Temple Church pastor.

     Bryant’s Empowerment Temple Church dedicated the center to the city’s kids, giving them a place to prosper and secure a brighter future.

     “I really believe it’s got to be bigger than a new police chief—what is going to happen to the economic opportunities in our city and we hope this is going to be the epicenter for Sandtown Winchester,” Bryant said.

     Amid one of the most deadly years in Baltimore, the city has already seen more than 100 deaths—a major spike compared to this time last year.

     Community leaders and elected officials say now is the time to make a difference.

     “We’ve always needed these types of centers. It’s good to see…the faith community stepping in,” said Lieutenant Governor Boyd Rutherford. “There are things they can do that the government can’t do.”

     And Baltimore’s kids are already reaping the benefit.

     “Help us get our life together so we don’t go down the wrong path,” said Shakya Brown, who goes to the center.

     “Youth should be working or doing something positive instead of being in the streets,” said Dalonte Moore, who goes to the center.

     There are currently 95 kids at the center and another 100 on the waiting list but the director says there is still plenty of room if kids want to join.

     They also offer free meals for kids.

     In AL, only 6% of all murders involve black defendants and white victims, but over 60% of black death row prisoners killed someone white. Took me a while to wrap my head around that difference.

     Olympia. Remember? Police shot someone there, too, recently. @deray Demands presented to city last week which were ignored in favor of, as the Mayor said, “staying the course”. Attached is a list of sensible demands to improve police transparency (body-cams, policies, putting officers in schools to improve relations, release of documents, focus groups between police and people of colour, etc. – such terrible, terrible impossible things).

     Congressman John Lewis Might Have Just Won Comic Con. He went dressed as himself.

     And yes, that’s really him, as per his official Facebook page—he’s there promoting March, the graphic novel trilogy he co-wrote (one volume is still left to come, so maybe “is co-writing?”) about the civil rights movement. You go, sir. You go.

     See photo. Teaching history in fun, accessible ways.

     Detectives investigating officer-involved shooting in north St. Louis

     A St. Louis police officer shot a 16-year-old three times Saturday in north St. Louis as the juvenile ran toward the officer while holding a gun, Police Chief Sam Dotson said.

     The teenager was struck in the arm, grazed in the head and suffered a serious wound to his stomach. He remained at a hospital Saturday night in stable but serious condition, Dotson said.

     […]

     Upon arrival, officers in front of the complex saw two young black men running. They stopped when they saw police and ran the other direction, Dotson said.

     As the pair ran, they encountered more officers in the back of the building, Dotson said. One officer, a 29-year-old white male who has been on the force seven years, fired and hit the teenager three times.

     “He saw a gun in the suspect’s hands,” Dotson said of the officer. “He believed the gun was pointed at him. He feared for his safety.”

     Police said they recovered a gun at the scene.

458. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     12 July 2015 at 3:22 am

     JJ Abrams weighs in on diversity in the Star Wars universe:

     SAN DIEGO — During one of the most popular panel discussions here at Comic-Con 2015, a Friday event devoted to the upcoming film “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens,” director J. J. Abrams fielded a question from fans regarding cast diversity in upcoming Star Wars films.

     Two audience members jointly asked Abrams whether — given his track record of helping build a diverse cast as director of the “Star Trek” reboot films — he could confirm if there will be more Asian characters in the Star Wars universe. Asian characters are few and far between in the Star Wars franchise — one appears in the original trilogy’s last film, “Return of the Jedi,” but for only four seconds before dying in a fiery explosion.

     Abrams said that while he won’t be casting future films in the franchise, because he’s directing only Episode VII, he did include Asian characters in “The Force Awakens,” which opens December 18.

     “I think it’s important people see themselves represented in film,” Abrams said. “I think it’s not a small thing.”

     Diversity has become a hot subject when talking about the world of comics, science fiction and fantasy, as well as the subcultures and technology-driven industries surrounding them. Not only are we beginning to see iconic franchises like Superman, Thor and Spider-Man introduce new female leads and minorities as prominent characters and even titular superheroes, but it’s also becoming a subject no famous writer, director, actor or other celebrity can avoid addressing.

     For Star Wars, it’s a complex debate. The franchise has included prominent and strong female characters, like Princess Leia, as well as central characters played by black actors, such as Cloud City administrator Lando Calrissian, played by Billy Dee Williams, and Jedi Mace Windu, played by Samuel L. Jackson. On the other hand, Jar Jar Binks, a computer-generated alien in 1999’s “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace,” drew fire from some critics, who said he called to mind demeaning black film characters such as those played by Stepin Fetchit in the 1930s. Then there’s the conundrum of Darth Vader, famously voiced by black actor James Earl Jones but portrayed by white actor David Prowse.

     ****
     Story reversed: Whites joining, not attacking, black churches:

     For all the impressive and powerfully moving expressions of multiracial solidarity that came in response to June 17th, it is still hard to avoid deep dismay. Dismay over the scant enlightenment and abundant hatred that still remain in some truculent quarters of our society, seven years after we elected the first black American president.

     However… even though it’s not by deliberate design, I do find myself this week delivering some journalistic coverage that offers a strong contrast with the hate-filled racism and violence that could overwhelm our hopes of progress.

     For some time I’ve been noting some intriguing change among churches in the historically African-American enclave of Harlem, a couple of miles from my home.

     And this weekend the PBS Network carries a report I made several weeks before the Charleston horror. Its relevance for now is simple and direct — it’s a chance to consider the phenomenon of white Americans who want not to attack but to join a black church.

     I’ve concentrated on the First Corinthian Baptist Church (pictured), situated on Harlem’s Adam Clayton Jr Boulevard, a house of worship whose history places it four-square in the African-American Baptist tradition. Now, though, there is a small but significant number of whites joining this predominantly black congregation — and according to Pastor Michael Walrond Jr, “it’s growing every week.”

     I hope that number grows exponentially across churches across the country.

459. rq says

     12 July 2015 at 3:26 am

     And while the previous is in moderation (8 links!), please read up on reddit and hate.
     So long, Reddit

     I have been a Redditor on and off since its very beginning. Reddit is a business. And, it seems, a manifestation of the sincerely held extreme libertarian views of its founders on the subject of free speech.

     These are nice theories to debate. The practical reality is that Reddit seems to have overtaken Stormfront as the world’s largest White Supremacy community.1 And thus, every page view turns into some fraction of a dollar that powers a server that hosts hate.

     Hate for me and my children. Hate for my great-grandparents coming here. Hate that goes beyond talk, and becomes shootings and burning of churches, and “standing your ground” against teenagers. To others, hate is just “disagreement.” Or just “appalling talk.” Or just “people of colour with thin skins.”

     I grew up worshipping in a historically black church. There’s another just down the street from me. There’s also a Mosque and a Buddhist Temple, mind you. So when people talk about hate, it may merely be “offensive speech” when you, your children and your neighbours are not the people they want to exterminate.

     But it is more than that to me.

     […]

     The internet has free speech: You host your own web site, or your own forums. Choosing to run a business that hosts certain types of speech has nothing to do with making sure people have a right to speak freely: It’s inviting them to speak on your dime, and choosing to make money from their speech and their audience.

     So Reddit has made its choice, and now I must make mine.

     Sometimes, you think about all this and say, “I accept the responsibility, and the benefit I provide outweighs the bad things.” And sometimes you say, “No, the benefit does not outweigh the bad things, and I will not play along.”

     I am choosing to stop playing along. I’ve removed most of the links to reddit discussions from raganwald.com.2 My income will certainly go down. But for me personally, that is meaningless in the broader picture. I don’t want to make money from lung cancer, so I don’t do business with tobacco companies. I don’t want to do business with people who monetize hate, either.

     So I won’t.

460. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     12 July 2015 at 4:41 am

     One more before bed-
     NPR’s #RaceOnTech Shares Stories from Diverse STEM Innovators

461. Ichthyic says

     12 July 2015 at 5:25 am

     All reddit has ever done is create little fiefdoms for people with extreme authoritarian personalities to sort themselves into.

     Now, they are finally realizing this is not a growth model, but laughably late in the game.

     here’s hoping the board of directors of reddit continue trying to push for revenue growth on the site, and end up burning it down in the process.

     stupid, stupid people.

462. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     12 July 2015 at 11:33 am

     New Orleans mayor lays out broad plan to rid city of Confederate relics:

     Last week, Landrieu instructed the city council to begin the legal process to remove statues of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy; General Robert E Lee; General PGT Beauregard; and a monument honoring soldiers in the Battle of Liberty Place, an uprising of former Confederate soldiers in 1874. Landrieu also wants Jefferson Davis Parkway renamed to honor Dr Norman C Francis, the long-time president of Xavier University, an all-black Catholic institution.

     Landrieu, the first white mayor of New Orleans since his father, Moon Landrieu, left office in 1978, says the statuary does not represent a city rebounding from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina into one he insists is more inclusive of all races and identities.

     In a statement, he said New Orleans was “a place a where we celebrate life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not death, war and slavery” and that the statutes were “symbols of supremacy from places of reverence that no longer, if ever, reflect who we are”.

     All of the statues are prominent, and some have stood for more than a century. The 16ft Lee statute was erected in 1884 and sits atop a tall marble column in the middle of Lee Circle, a busy turnaround in the museum district.

     Proponents of the plan say now is the time for Landrieu to act, in step with political pressure to eradicate public symbols associated with Confederate history that contemporary hate groups have adopted.

     In the weeks following the Charleston killings, protesters in New Orleans targeted the statues. Dozens of activists burned a Confederate flag at Lee Circle and the Beauregard statue was vandalized: “Black Lives Matter” appeared on its side.

     Susan Glisson, executive director of the Winter Institute of Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi, which Landrieu tasked to conduct public forums on the statuary, said: “Symbols that are conflicting to some or perceived to be outright hateful are damaging to the public good.

     “It can create an environment that doesn’t feel welcoming to everyone. Especially in public spaces where we need to thoughtful to represent who we are as a people.”

     Naturally, this has pissed off the “we have to respect our ancestors” crowd, but really, what decent person cares what they have to say on the matter?

     ****
     GQ Story Casts Serious Doubt On LAPD’s Version Of How Charly Keunang Died

     The LAPD is still investigating the incident, but Police Chief Charlie Beck defended Keunang’s killing at a press conference shortly afterward.

     “Officers, on the face of it, took reasonable steps to avoid it,” Beck said of the shooting. “Had the individual not grabbed the officer’s pistol, we would not be having this discussion.”

     But that’s not what body cam videos show, according to reporter Jeff Sharlet, who told The Huffington Post he reviewed the unreleased footage “very carefully.” Sharlet detailed his findings in the new GQ story.

     What the currently available footage does not show, Sharlet said, is that before Keunang threw a punch, Officer Francisco Martinez tried to hit him with a Taser. Sharlet also said there’s no evidence in the body cam footage that suggests Keunang tried to grab any officer’s firearm.

     “There is no scene of him reaching for the gun,” Sharlet said.

     The LAPD said the altercation between cops and Keunang began after a robbery call. According to the department, in unreleased audio recordings of post-shooting interviews with the cops involved, Officer Martinez said that the robbery victim, Laru Jay Curls, told cops that Keunang kicked him and threatened him with a mini baseball bat. Sharlet reports that rookie cop Joshua Volasgis, whose name was first released in the GQ article, said during the recorded interviews that Curls was “in fear for his life.”

     But, Sharlet writes, in the body cam footage, “Laru sits quietly on the curb next to Charly’s tent” as the situation unfolds.

     Sharlet also said Curls told him he “doesn’t consider himself a victim” and that “he wasn’t in fear for his life.”

     Sharlet writes:

     The scuffle between them, Laru will tell me, was over a woman. Charly thought Laru had been harassing her. A conflict was documented by the Union Rescue Mission’s security camera: Charly tipped Laru’s tent into the street. Kicked it a couple of times. Then he sat down on his milk crate. Crawled into his tent. No bat, big or little.

     The conflict between officers and Keunang began when Martinez asked the suspect for his identification.

     Volasgis told detectives that Keunang “became very agitated and aggressive” after that, with “clenched fists” and “screaming,” Sharlet writes.

     According to Sharlet, Martinez told detectives he tried to question Keunang, but Keunang was “just talking, not making any sense.”

     But what the body cam footage shows, Sharlet writes, is a calm Keunang — without clinched fists — asking Martinez to “let me express myself.”

     “The number one thing is that the police are saying the man was out of control and reached for a gun and they had no choice,” Sharlet told HuffPost. “They double down on that in interviews. When you watch the body cams, you see a man who is standing still with his palms open trying to reason with police.”

     The police, lie? Those paragons of perfection?

463. rq says

     12 July 2015 at 3:33 pm

     Meet the black woman raised to believe she was white

     “Throughout my life, people have asked me why I look the way I do,” says Lacey Schwartz. “I would tell them that my parents were white, which was true. I wasn’t pretending to be something I wasn’t. I grew up being told, and believing, that I was the nice, white, Jewish daughter of two nice, white, Jewish parents.”

     But Schwartz, a 38-year-old film-maker, has brown skin, curly hair and full lips. It was only when she was 18 that her mother admitted the truth: that she had had an affair with a friend and former colleague who was black. And that, in all likelihood, he was Lacey’s biological father.

     The revelation not only shook her relationship with her mother to the core, but also led Schwartz to question everything she had believed about who she was, and eventually inspired her to make a documentary about the experience, called Little White Lie.

     “I started out wanting to make a film about being black and Jewish, because I was really struggling with my dual identity,” she says. “But I was living in a racial closet at the time that was all about my family secret. So I decided to use the film as a way to fully uncover the secret.”

     When we meet, last month’s reports about Rachel Dolezal, the American civil rights campaigner who made headlines around the world by claiming that, despite being white, she “identifies as black”, are still to break. But Schwartz tells me she believes that racial identity is “fluid and contextual”.

     “I think it can change depending on where you are and who you’re around,” she says. The film shows Schwartz and two black female friends discussing the “one drop rule”: the idea that if a person has even the smallest amount of black heritage, they are black. “Being bi-racial, mixed race, is a category of being black, not a category of being white,” Schwartz believes. “It’s an inclusive thing.”

     That’s an interesting concept, isn’t it? That it’s inclusive, so it isn’t white – which kind of defaults to white being not inclusive.
     More at the link.

     The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed

     It was precisely because slaves were reduced to property that they appear so regularly in historic documents, both in the US and in Britain. As property, slaves were listed in plantation accounts and itemised in inventories. They were recorded for tax reasons and detailed alongside other transferable goods on the pages of thousands of wills. Few historical documents cut to the reality of slavery more than lists of names written alongside monetary values. It is now almost two decades since I had my first encounter with British plantation records, and I still feel a surge of emotion when I come across entries for slave children who, at only a few months old, have been ascribed a value in sterling; the sale of children and the separation of families was among the most bitterly resented aspects of an inhuman system.

     Slavery resurfaces in America regularly. The disadvantage and discrimination that disfigures the lives and limits the life chances of so many African-Americans is the bitter legacy of the slave system and the racism that underwrote and outlasted it. Britain, by contrast, has been far more successful at covering up its slave-owning and slave-trading past. Whereas the cotton plantations of the American south were established on the soil of the continental United States, British slavery took place 3,000 miles away in the Caribbean.

     That geographic distance made it possible for slavery to be largely airbrushed out of British history, following the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. Many of us today have a more vivid image of American slavery than we have of life as it was for British-owned slaves on the plantations of the Caribbean. The word slavery is more likely to conjure up images of Alabama cotton fields and whitewashed plantation houses, of Roots, Gone With The Wind and 12 Years A Slave, than images of Jamaica or Barbados in the 18th century. This is not an accident.

     The history of British slavery has been buried. The thousands of British families who grew rich on the slave trade, or from the sale of slave-produced sugar, in the 17th and 18th centuries, brushed those uncomfortable chapters of their dynastic stories under the carpet. Today, across the country, heritage plaques on Georgian townhouses describe former slave traders as “West India merchants”, while slave owners are hidden behind the equally euphemistic term “West India planter”. Thousands of biographies written in celebration of notable 17th and 18th-century Britons have reduced their ownership of human beings to the footnotes, or else expunged such unpleasant details altogether. The Dictionary of National Biography has been especially culpable in this respect. Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from the Britain’s “island story”. If it was geography that made this great forgetting possible, what completed the disappearing act was our collective fixation with the one redemptive chapter in the whole story. William Wilberforce and the abolitionist crusade, first against the slave trade and then slavery itself, has become a figleaf behind which the larger, longer and darker history of slavery has been concealed.

     It is still the case that Wilberforce remains the only household name of a history that begins during the reign of Elizabeth I and ends in the 1830s. There is no slave trader or slave owner, and certainly no enslaved person, who can compete with Wilberforce when it comes to name recognition. Little surprise then that when, in 2007, we marked the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, the only feature film to emerge from the commemoration was Amazing Grace, a Wilberforce biopic.

     […]

     The compensation of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners was the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. Not only did the slaves receive nothing, under another clause of the act they were compelled to provide 45 hours of unpaid labour each week for their former masters, for a further four years after their supposed liberation. In effect, the enslaved paid part of the bill for their own manumission.

     The records of the Slave Compensation Commission are an unintended byproduct of the scheme. They represent a near complete census of British slavery as it was on 1 August, 1834, the day the system ended. For that one day we have a full list of Britain’s slave owners. All of them. The T71s tell us how many slaves each of them owned, where those slaves lived and toiled, and how much compensation the owners received for them. Although the existence of the T71s was never a secret, it was not until 2010 that a team from University College London began to systematically analyse them. The Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, which is still continuing, is led by Professor Catherine Hall and Dr Nick Draper, and the picture of slave ownership that has emerged from their work is not what anyone was expecting.

     The large slave owners, the men of the “West India interest”, who owned huge estates from which they drew vast fortunes, appear in the files of the commission. The man who received the most money from the state was John Gladstone, the father of Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. He was paid £106,769 in compensation for the 2,508 slaves he owned across nine plantations, the modern equivalent of about £80m. Given such an investment, it is perhaps not surprising that William Gladstone’s maiden speech in parliament was in defence of slavery.

     Lots more at the link, about how slavery got erased from British history (or at least, modern recognition), and the truly horrifying expanse of slavery in its hey-day.

     Black Girls Do Get Eating Disorders: I Did and I Survived. A perspective.

     Abigail Fisher, Please Stop Blaming People of Color for Your Mediocrity.

     Black people can’t afford to just roll their eyes and otherwise ignore this blatant expression of white privilege. We already know that white women have benefitted the most from affirmative action laws for decades. And now that they’ve benefitted from these laws socioeconomically, Fisher v. The University of Texas and cases made by other white women show us that they can now afford to attack what propped them up in the first place at the expense of people of color. White women—especially young ones like Fisher—seem to forget that a mere 30 years ago you could barely find a woman in a graduating class. In fact, a case like Fisher’s would have been simply dismissed in the 1970s, when discrimination was more or less an accepted practice against people of color and women alike. The fact that these women feel they can challenge affirmative action laws is a privilege unique to white women alone, as they are the only demographic to have both faced the discrimination necessary to qualify for affirmative action and have also benefitted from certain privileges, so that they rarely even need it anymore (which, of course, is the goal for everybody).

     The entire situation illustrates just how dangerous white entitlement can be. Abigail Fisher, of course, doesn’t see this sense of entitlement in herself at all. She opens her campaign video by telling us that she’s “dreamt about going to UT ever since the second grade.” She continues, “My dad went there, my sister went there, and tons of friends and family, and it was a tradition I wanted to continue.” This is supposed to make us sympathize with her, of course, but the implication is that because she had this dream, she automatically should have been able to live it. Meanwhile, many low-income Black and Latino students dream of simply going to college at all, and even with affirmative action, have to face the reality that their dreams may not be plausible. The core of Fisher’s argument assumes that because she is white, she automatically deserves a spot at the University of Texas, even though she did not present herself as a competitive candidate for admissions. Fisher’s argument assumes that, somehow, people of color with grades equal to hers are less qualified by default. And white supremacy agrees with her.

     Congressman John Lewis, or when a real hero goes to Comic-Con, some more photos of his excellent disguise.

     Rep. John Lewis is at San Diego Comic-Con to promote March, a graphic novel trilogy he co-write. The novel is about the civil rights movement and the first two volumes are out now. (Lewis co-write the trilogy with Andrew Aydin and illustrator Nate Powell.

     This isn’t the first promotional stop in Lewis’ book tour. In March, for instance, he gave an interview to John Stewart on The Daily Show.

     But, back to ComicCon where many fans of comics, movies, and pop culture flock to San Diego. Some cosplay their favorite super heroes and characters with impressive costumes.

     But today, a real hero shows up to the convention and does some ‘cosplay’ of his own. Taking a page from the cosplayers, Rep. Lewis wore a trenchcoat and backpack like he wore when he lead marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965.

     Lewis “wowed Comic-Con, RawStory, reported with his autobiographical graphic novel that brings civil rights heroics:

     “In America right now we’re just too silent,” Lewis said during a presentation for the second chapter of his autobiographical graphic novel March. “We need to make some noise.”
     […]

     The panel took place a day after South Carolina removed the Confederate battle flag from its state capitol, the mention of which drew applause from the audience. Lewis noted that many of the people who beat him and his fellow protesters during the “Bloody Sunday” march wore that same flag on their helmets.

     I said it before, but I’m going to say it again: this is excellent teaching.

     Eric Garner Anniversary Rally, coming up end of this week!

     July 17, 2015 marks the one-year anniversary of Eric Garner’s death after an NYPD chokehold. As of now, not a single person has been held responsible.

     On Saturday, July 18, join the NYCLU and other civil rights groups to demand accountability and justice for Eric Garner’s family and all the other New Yorkers who have suffered from police abuse.

     Email [email protected] to stand up with the NYCLU at the rally.

     12 pm-2 p.m., Sat. July 18
     U.S. District Court, 225 Cadman Plaza East (at Tillary St.)
     Downtown Brooklyn, NY

     Nearby trains: A/C to High St.; 2/3 to Clark St.; N/R to Court St.; 4/5 to Borough Hall; F to Jay St./Metrotech.

464. rq says

     12 July 2015 at 3:45 pm

     Fuck it, I put myself in moderation again. I’m in no shape to continue tonight. See y’all (y’all?) tomorrow. Promise there’s some interesting links. About white people, too. And white people’s tears.

465. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     13 July 2015 at 12:04 am

     CIA: Repeat After Me. The NYPD Is NOT A REAL Intelligence Agency.:

     [T]he law limits sharing of collected information about American citizens, resident aliens and other “US persons.” As one question on the quiz highlights, the CIA cannot share such information outside the intelligence community. It’s important, then, to know which agencies are within the fold.

     The National Security Agency, Coast Guard and Department of Energy qualify as “IC elements”, the latter two via their intelligence arms. As a local police force, the NYPD does not make the cut.

     This comes from a CIA quiz obtained by the ACLU as part of an FOIA lawsuit. That the CIA would single out the NYPD on its test is significant. The NYPD likes to believe it’s an intelligence agency on par with the FBI and CIA. Despite having zero reason to do so, the NYPD sends its officers all over the world to gather intelligence after terrorist attacks. No one has ever asked the NYPD to do this, but it continues to invite itself to various ground zeroes, where it is usually greeted with a mixture of befuddlement and anger.

     The CIA, however, remains inextricably (and perhaps, willfully) entangled with the Little Intelligence Agency That Isn’t. Two former CIA employees were instrumental in setting up its “Demographics Group,” which engaged in pervasive surveillance of New York City Muslims. The privacy and civil liberties violations this group engaged in made the “intelligence” gleaned so toxic not even the FBI would touch it.

     The CIA also expressed concerns about the gathered data — not so much out of concern for violated rights, but because the data gathering seemed to be its own end. A senior CIA official discussed partaking in the NPYD’s gathered info, but stated that the only thing “impressive” about the collection was its size, not its usefulness.

466. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     13 July 2015 at 12:38 am

     The long-lasting effects of Nazi indoctrination:

     Is it possible to change public opinions, attitudes, and beliefs, through schooling, advertisement, or any other means? A study published two weeks ago in PNAS shows that Nazi indoctrination of antisemitic attitudes in Germany was extremely effective.

     The researchers analyzed data from two waves of the General Social Survey for Germany (ALLBUS 1996 and 2006), which asked the following seven questions concerning attitudes about Jews:

     Do Jews have too much influence in the world?

     Are Jews responsible for their own persecution?

     Should Jews have equal rights?

     Do you feel ashamed about German crimes against Jews?

     Do Jews exploit their victim status for financial gain?

     How do you feel about a Jew marrying into your family?

     How would you feel about having a Jewish neighbor?

     Each of the questions required a numerical response ranging from 1 to 7. The scientists recoded the scale after the survey, so that 7 corresponded to the most anti-Semitic responses.

     The combined waves included responses from 5,300 people with German parents and grandparents, from 264 towns or cities. The results were disheartening: 17% of respondents indicated that Jews should blame themselves for their own persectution, 25.7% did not like the idea of a Jew marrying into their family, and 21.5% thought that Jews should not have equal rights to non-Jews (scores of 5 or higher). There were large regional differences in attitudes: whereas 10% of Hamburg respondents felt that Jews should not have equal rights, 48% of those in Lower Bavaria felta that way. Other questions produced similar results. Overall, the survey indicated that one quarter of the German population holds negative opinions of Jews, ranging from mild to strong.

     The researchers also identified commited anti-Semites, defined as those who answered 6 or higher to the questions asking, “Do Jews have too much influence in the world? Are Jews responsible for their own persecution?, and Do Jews exploit their victim status for their own advantage?”. Overall, 4% of the German population were classified as commited anti-Semites. Half of the 264 towns and cities surveyed had no committed anti-Semites, but in 10% of the locations they constituted 15% of all respondents.

     Next, the scientists wondered about the effects of growing up under Nazi rule on later-life attitudes about Jews. This was an important question, given the extensive indoctrination of racial hatred in Nazi schooling and extracurricular activities. Not only biology classes, but the entire academic curriculum was devoted to instill in the young a sense of the importance of race and the inferiority of Jews, blacks, and other groups. School attendance was mandatory for young Germans, as was joining the Hitler Youth. Racial ideology was the subject of 45 out of 105 pages in the Hitler Youth’s official handbook.

     (excerpt)

467. rq says

     13 July 2015 at 1:46 am

     This was pointed out by Lynna in the Lounge as a rather spooky pattern – and it probably not only influences officers at home, but also in the field. Cops, domestic abuse, and anabolic steroids

     Victims of domestic violence perpetrated by a member of law enforcement face a particularly difficult journey to safety.

     The first step is reporting the violence. The law enforcement community is very tightly knit, almost like a family, so the report is going to be made to a person who may very well be a friend of the perpetrator, making many victims less likely to file a report. Should the report be made and taken, the ensuing process strongly favors the cop, who knows the system, and how best to work it. Often, police who are found guilty of domestic abuse are retained on the force.

     Since her abuser is usually armed, she is also more likely to become a victim of homicide.

     Compared to homes without guns, the presence of guns in the home is associated with a 3-fold increased homicide risk within the home. The risk connected to gun ownership increases to 8-fold when the offender is an intimate partner or relative of the victim and is 20 times higher when previous domestic violence exists.

     According to a recent report from the Center for American Progress:

     Every day in the United States, five women are murdered with guns. Many of these fatal shootings occur in the context of a domestic or intimate partner relationship. However, women are not the only victims. Shooters have often made children, police officers, and their broader communities additional targets of what begins as an intimate partner shooting. In fact, one study found that more than half of the mass shootings in recent years have started with or involved the shooting of an intimate partner or a family member.

     Making the victim even more vulnerable is the fact that the police know the location of every battered women’s shelter in the local area. Estimates are that 40 percent of police families suffer domestic abuse and that the spouse of a police officer is two to four times more likely to suffer abuse than is the spouse of a civilian.

     […]

     In addition to being alleged domestic abusers and cops, the three men also share a striking physical similarity. Photos of Alejandro Flores, Jeremy Yachik and Rob Croner show big beefy men with thick necks and close-cropped hair. All three remind me of storm troopers, of thugs, when thugs were the enforcers for the Mafia. Most striking is the transformation of Rob Croner, as shown in photos from 2009 to 2013.

     It is possible, of course, that all three acquired their beefed up appearance by spending hours every day at the gym, but the increasing availability of anabolic steriods and testosterone supplements provide a much easier means of achieving those ends. Anabolic steroid abuse has been a growing concern of police departments across the country for a long time.

     Phoenix was the first to set up what became a model program of random testing for steroid abuse in 2006. The program was shut down last year with little fanfare, due to the high cost of the tests, said department administrators, as well as results that included legally acquired prescription medications like testosterone.

     As report after report after report of police officers using steroids builds, our police departments seem unable to address the problem, which has been estimated to affect 25 percent of police officers:

     “There’s no real way to stem the tide, so to speak, as far as access to steroids, and there’s no prospect in the near future that use of them is going to decline,” said Dr. Harrison G. Pope, director of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at Harvard’s McLean Hospital.

     “We are going to continue to see its use with law-enforcement officers,” he said.

     If professional sports can work to control the use of steroids by their players, I don’t understand why police departments can’t. Saying that it is too difficult or too expensive doesn’t cut it. ‘Roid rage is no myth, and these officers are on our streets, fully armed. They go home to spouses and children who are defenseless against the mood swings and aggression of anabolic steroid abusers. And they go home armed.

     Is it too much to ask that we make sure that the men charged with enforcing the law are adhering to it? Perhaps the answer will come when lawsuits are brought against police departments, and the cities they protect, by the victims of abusive cops who are juiced up on steroids.

     I also wonder how much of the elevated abuse is a symptom of living under constant psychological stress with little to no therapeutic help and support – policing may not be one of the top-10 most dangerous jobs, but they’re certainly told it is. Perhaps the whole police mentality needs to be toned down?

     Four articles on the Alabama man who died after being pepper-sprayed:
     Man Dies in Alabama Police Custody After Being Pepper Sprayed, ABC.
     Man dies after getting pepper-sprayed by police, CNN.
     Unarmed Black Man Dies In Police Custody After Being Pepper Sprayed For “Resisting Arrest”, Global Grind.
     Man dies after Alabama police pepper spray him in scuffle with officers, New York Daily News.

     TN Governor Signs Bill Giving Police Dogs Special Legal Protection. Now they can bite you with impunity!

     From Nashville’s News Channel 5:

     NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Governor Bill Haslam signed Aron’s Law Friday, which was named in honor of a police dog killed in the line of duty 17 years ago.

     The law now makes the intentional killing of a police, fire or search and rescue animal a felony offense.

     It was named after a Metro canine officer who was killed during a bank robbery in 1998. K9 Aron was shot as he tried to position himself between the suspect and his handler, Metro Officer Terry Burnett.

     On the surface, this may seem like a good measure for protection and a heartwarming way to honor a fallen police dog, but what happens when a police officer shoots your dog in the state of Tennessee? One family has been fighting legal battles for years over their dog that was killed by a Tennessee police officer in 2003 after they were pulled over and misidentified.

     The Smoak family from North Carolina was coming back home from their vacation in Tennessee when they were pulled over by three police officers. After police received 911 calls about money falling out of a station-wagon onto the interstate, they mistakenly identified the Smoak family as robbery suspects. In the video of the incident, police can be seen ordering the family out of the car and handcuffing them as they obediently exit the vehicle with their hands up.

     “I have a dog in the car and I don’t want it to jump out, sir.” James Smoak says in the video. A few seconds later, the dog exits the car from the open door and is shot in the head by officer Eric Hall.

     It was later discovered that the money falling onto the interstate was from the driver’s wallet that was left on the car roof.

     Eric Hall was never punished for the incident and was assigned to “administrative duties.”

     Minneapolis bike shop takes the lead on ditching Calhoun name

     Luke Breen is making a to-do list of all the signage, cards and documents he will need to change once he scraps the name of his bike shop, Calhoun Cycle.

     The two-decade-old bike shop, at 3342 Hennepin Av. S., is the first known business planning to change its name as part of a larger debate playing out across Minneapolis over whether to rename Lake Calhoun.

     The 3.2-mile lake just southwest of the Uptown area is named after John C. Calhoun, a former U.S. secretary of war who was also an impassioned defender of slavery. The origin of Lake Calhoun’s name has troubled residents for decades, but it has been given fresh energy by the national debate over the public display of the Confederate flag, which many view as a symbol of racism and slavery.

     “It’s some pretty horrible offenses we’re named after,” said Breen, whose original bike shop had a view of the lake.

     Business and organizations are wrestling with the naming question as Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board officials are trying to determine whether they have the authority to change the name. About 4,300 people have signed an online petition urging the lake’s name be changed, and if park officials find they have the authority, public debate over the name could begin later this summer.

     Since the Lake Calhoun debate erupted weeks ago, former Mayor R.T. Rybak has spoken strongly in favor of rebranding the lake, which has held its name since at least 1839. Mayor Betsy Hodges said local leaders should absolutely consider changing it.

     Owners of businesses and leaders of neighborhood organizations with Calhoun in their name are wrestling with the issue, too.

     […]

     Business owners aren’t the only ones with a name change to weigh. Three neighborhood associations near the lake bear Calhoun’s name. Ian Kees, board chair of the West Calhoun Neighborhood Council, said the topic hasn’t come up. The same is true for the Calhoun Area Residents Action Group (CARAG).

     However, there has not been a neighborhood meeting since the June slaying of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., renewed debate over such symbols as the Confederate battle flag.

     CARAG Board Chair Diana Boegemann said she wouldn’t be surprised if the issue is raised at an upcoming meeting. She anticipates that the neighborhood group likely would appoint an special committee to look into the issue. That’s what it did a dozen years ago when a proposal surfaced to rename the area after the late Democratic U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, a move that ultimately fizzled out.

     “Most people I know are pretty resigned to the fact that there are many things in our town that are named after people who were not politically correct,” Boegemann said.

     […]

     Breen’s bike shop doesn’t have a huge budget, so changing the name will take some time and money.

     “Reading the history of Calhoun was quite eye-opening to me,” he said. “It’s a big thing to wrap your head around and I do worry about the time spent building the brand. But it’s the right thing to do.”

     He’s not sure what the new name will be, despite some preliminary brainstorming. It might be something tinged with social commentary, something clever, or something reflecting the store’s niche selling to urban commuters.

     Parks Commissioner Brad Bourn, a strong advocate of changing the lake’s name, applauds Breen. “I think it’s pretty amazing that there’s a business that’s leading by example,” Bourn said.

     Other businesses aren’t so sure. At Calhoun Pet Supply, no change is contemplated, according to Larry Weaver, who helps run the store. “I’ve heard no comments,” he said. “There’s been that debate and I understand everybody’s point, but in that day and age everybody had slaves.”

     Sounds like excellent reasoning, there.

     Albuquerque Pays $5 Million to Family of Homeless Man Killed by Police, as told by Rolling Stone.

     Why the Obama administration’s new fair housing rules are a big deal for racial equality

     On Wednesday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced aggressive new rules designed to fight racial housing discrimination.

     Civil rights advocates consider this development an enormous victory.

     That’s because the regulations are designed to further the goals of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibits intentional discrimination (like refusing to show homes to African-American families or using race as a basis to withhold a loan). As The Hill explained, they give HUD the tools to address the effects of more subtle forms of discrimination that can come in the shape of government policies that unintentionally harm minority communities.

     As a result, two main things change for cities and towns that receive federal funds:

     1 They’ll have to analyze their housing patterns for racial bias and report the patterns they find to HUD.
     2 They’ll have to set goals to reduce housing segregation and propose remedies for how to achieve these goals.

     HUD will provide jurisdictions and housing authorities with data on patterns – of racial segregation and poverty, for example – so that they can get a clearer picture of how these things overlap. Implementing the new rules will cost communities $25 million yearly, and HUD will spend $9 million overseeing them, according to The Hill.

     Obama administration officials say they want to work with communities rather than punish them, but the rules do let HUD withhold its funding from areas that don’t comply. That’s part of the reason some Republicans don’t like the new rules and have threatened to block funding for them. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) told The Hill they represented “President Obama’s most aggressive attempt yet to force his utopian ideology on American communities disguised under the banner of ‘fairness'” and accused HUD of “punishing neighborhoods that don’t fall in line with [Obama’s] liberal agenda.”

     More at the link.

     Less Than 2% of Killer Cops in New York City are Indicted

     Many Americans are shocked that the officer who murdered Eric Garner was not so much as indicted by a grand jury ( an indictment is not a conviction). According to a comprehensive study by the New York Daily News, however, this lack of indictment was anything but a surprise.

     The Daily News studied on-duty police officer killings over the last 15 years and found that of 179 recorded deaths, only 3 officers were actually indicted or charged. That’s less than 2%.

     The data found that when race was known, an overwhelming majority of individuals killed-86%-were black or Hispanic. 27% were unarmed. 20% were mentally disturbed (one woman was escorted by cops for not taking her medication, but died after they suffocated her while they were supposed to be transporting her to an ambulance).

     Only one officer was convicted of “criminal negligence” when he shot and killed an innocent man. He was sentenced to just 500 hours of community service and 5 years of probation and never went to prison.

     Executive Director of the Prison Reform Project, Robert Gangi, pointed out that

     “There’s an inherent conflict of interest. . . . The police and DA work very closely together, and so they need each other to carry out their jobs.”

     Because of this relationship, many have suggested the creation of a special prosecutor to tackle police-involved crime, a view that has enjoyed some mainstream support.

     However, there is little appetite for change within the law enforcement establishment.

     The police union, Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, (predictably) defended police actions. Its chairman, Patrick Lynch, argued that

     “[Their] work has saved tens of thousands of lives by assuming the risk and standing between New Yorkers and life-threatening danger.”

     While this may be true, it does not excuse the fact that innocent (and even ‘guilty’) people who do not deserve to die are murdered due to the rash and aggressive behavior of cops trained to kill.

     In spite of extra programs and racial sensitivity training, the number of police homicides has stayed consistent over the 15 year period. So has the lack of indictments.

     […]

     In one case of a cop shooting an unarmed black man when he reached for his wallet, a grand jury surprisingly chose to indict. However, a judge threw out the indictment and ordered a new grand jury, which failed to press charges and let the cop walk free.

     While police brutality is a grotesque example of corrupt government, it is a symptom of deeper cracks in the system. When police know there will be no punishment for their violence, they are emboldened to commit to it more often and more brazenly. The tendency of the government to protect its own enables crime that extends beyond police abuse, from the indefinite detention of American citizens to the prosecution of whistleblowers.

     Though some claim it is rare for grand juries not to indict, the Daily News data suggests otherwise when it comes to cops. It suggests that law enforcement, the justice system, and the citizens invited to participate have no interest in justice. Rather, they are concerned with protecting the establishment and maintaining the stranglehold of authority.

     Unsurprisingly, the NYPD declined to comment on the Daily News’ findings.

     Daniel Pantaleo, the NYPD officer who put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold, is loathed, threatened and an outcast, but still can’t wait to get back on job

     Daniel Pantaleo, the NYPD officer who put Garner in a fatal chokehold, has received so many death threats a police detail guards his Staten Island home around the clock.

     He’s been stripped of his gun and shield. He’s loathed by some of his neighbors. And the video showing him dragging Garner to the ground by the neck has turned him into a national pariah.

     Yet, at least one thing hasn’t changed for the 30-year-old Pantaleo: His desire to keep working as a New York City cop.

     “The unbelievable part is this has not soured him one bit on doing law enforcement,” his lawyer Stuart London told the Daily News. “It hasn’t diminished his desire to help the citizens of this city.”

     That Pantaleo getting his job back is even a possibility enrages Garner’s widow.

     […]

     But with the approach of the one-year anniversary of Garner’s July 17 death, the fate of Pantaleo has become a subject of renewed debate.

     A Staten Island grand jury in December voted not to indict Pantaleo in Garner’s death. Ever since, the 43-year-old father’s infuriated relatives and supporters have pinned their hopes on a Justice Department probe.

     With the investigation ongoing, Pantaleo remains on desk duty. His lawyer is confident the eight-year NYPD vet will also elude federal charges.

     “They have to prove my client had a specific intent to deprive Eric Garner of a federally protected constitutional right,” London said. “Based on all the pertinent information I have, they don’t reach that threshold in this case.”

     The whole article skews incredibly sympathetic to Pantaleo, it’s kind of sleazy.

     EXCLUSIVE: Ex-con who alleges abuse at Rikers say cops targeting him with unfair charges, like loud headphones

     A Brooklyn man — who filed a suit against the city alleging he was abused while locked up on Rikers Island — claims he’s being unfairly targeted by law enforcement with frivolous charges like listening to music too loudly on his headphones.

     “It’s like every time I get stopped, they run my name, see my conviction or my pending lawsuit and must find a reason to try and arrest me,” Boris Racine (right) told the Daily News.

     “Every time I step out of the house, I’m in fear that I’m going to be harassed by the police,” said Racine, 23, as he shook his head in disgust.

     When Racine was a teen, he was charged with attempted robbery of an off-duty cop near his Sheepshead Bay home.

     Racine maintains he had nothing to do with the 2010 incident and was arrested because he remained on the scene after the crowd ran away, according to his 2012 Bronx Supreme Court suit.

     Facing a 15-year prison term, Racine decided to plead guilty to attempted robbery in exchange for one year behind bars.

     “My attorney said if I go to trial, it’ll be the cop’s word against mine and to take the deal,” said Racine.

     While incarcerated in general population at the scandal-plagued city jail, the then-18-year-old got into a fight with correction officers and broke his arm, according to his suit.

     With his arm confined to a sling, Racine was routinely assaulted by his fellow inmates during his eight-month stint, the suit said. He was given an early release in 2011. Since he filed the lawsuit, Racine has received six desk appearance tickets or summonses in Brooklyn and Nassau County that have all been dismissed.

     He’s currently fighting another in Suffolk County.

     An NYPD source said that when officers question a suspect, a background check would only reveal open warrants, not past convictions or pending suits against the city.

     But Racine’s lawyer said his client clearly is being given a hard time by authorities.

     “He’s 23 years old; he shouldn’t be going through this,” said Gary Rawlins.

     Racine’s charges include sitting on a bicycle in front of his friend’s house, marijuana possession and most bizarrely — playing his headphones too loudly at Atlantic Terminal. “For the headphones case, the judge looked at the paper, put his glasses on to see it better and threw it out and said, ‘This isn’t even a real charge,’ ” said Racine.

468. rq says

     13 July 2015 at 2:18 am

     So that’s two comments in one, because I forgot to press “Post comment” between them.

     Here’s a piece from April: Montana Bill to Help Block Federal Militarization of Police Signed into Law

     A bill that would heavily diminish the effect of federal programs that militarize local police was signed into law today.

     Introduced by Rep. Nicholas Schwaderer (R-Superior), House Bill 330 (HB330) bans state or local law enforcement from receiving significant classes of military equipment from the Pentagon’s “1033 Program.” It passed by a 46-1 vote in the state Senate and by a 79-20 vote in the state House. Today, Gov. Steve Bullock signed it into law.

     The new law will prohibit state or local law enforcement agencies from receiving drones that are armored, weaponized, or both; aircraft that are combat configured or combat coded; grenades or similar explosives and grenade launchers; silencers; and “militarized armored vehicles” from federal military surplus programs.

     But, as The Guardian reported last fall, handouts of such equipment from the Pentagon are far from the only way that the federal government has been militarizing local police. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grants used to purchase such equipment amount to three times the value of the equipment given away by the Pentagon.

     HB330 closes this loophole by banning law enforcement agencies from purchasing such military equipment with federal grants. They could continue to purchase them, but would have to use state or local funds, and the agencies would have to give public notice within 14 days of a request for any such local purchase.

     “This foundation sets a massive precedent in Montana and the country as to what kind of society we want to have,” Schwaderer said of his bill. “If you get to the point where you need a grenade launcher, we’ve got the National Guard.”

     More background on federal surplus and grant money at the link.

     Confederate Flag Debates Move To High School Sports… where I think it is as inappropriate, if not more.

     School districts and administrators have been dealing with the use of Confederate symbols in sports for years, and not just in the South. From New York and Massachusetts, to Texas and Florida, schools have disassociated themselves with nicknames like Rebels and logos that feature gray-clad Confederate soldiers and the battle flag itself.

     Since the Charleston massacre, the debates have resumed in several school districts. A school board committee in Arkansas voted last month to phase out Southside High’s Rebels nickname and immediately end its use of “Dixie,” the Confederate anthem, as its fight song. In Alabama, complaints from some residents prompted a community meeting about Vestavia Hills High School’s Rebels moniker. Local media have raised questions about symbols and mascots in Iowa and California, and the superintendent at Kentucky’s Allen Central High School, which also uses the Rebels name, last month removed old logos and photos that featured the Confederate flag from websites for the school and state athletic association.

     But in other places, there has been no discussion of Confederate symbols since the Charleston shootings. And there are no plans for change.

     […]

     It may be clear in some places that the flag’s roots are in a pro-slavery secession movement and that its resurgence came at the outset of the Civil Rights Movement. But in Hurley, residents see the current debate as “just about politics and ignorance about the true meaning of the flag,” according to Dotson, who described the school’s use of the flag as an honor to area soldiers who fought and died in the Civil War and a reminder of the area’s history.

     “The folks that chose our mascot were not pro-slavery. They were not racist,” Dotson said. “Nothing malicious or ill-minded was intended.”

     Buchanan County, home to Hurley, is 96.1 percent white, according to the Census Bureau. Just 2.9 percent of its 23,000 residents are African-American.

     Hurley High, Dotson said, has just one black student this year, an athlete who she said wears the Rebel uniform and the Confederate flag that adorns it with pride. She hasn’t heard any complaints from a black student in her three years as principal.

     “Never,” Dotson said. “They’ve been accepted with open arms as part of the family.”

     It’s so surprising that, when told the flag represents racism, people automatically default to ‘oh, but nothing malicious or ill-minded was intended!’. That’s not what was said – nobody’s saying that those who chose the flag as symbol were malicious or ill-minded – perhaps ignorant, or unwilling, to face the flag’s history. But what’s being said is the flag represents racism and the fight for slavery. Not that the people who chose it are necessarily racist (not necessarily).
     Some people are so quick to take offense.

     I promised white tears. White Tears, Explained, For White People Who Don’t Get It

     Yesterday, I wrote a short piece celebrating Serena Williams’s 2514th consecutive victory over Maria Sharapova; a win that took her to the Wimbledon final. Titled “Serena Williams Drinks, Bathes In, And Makes Lemonade With White Tears“, it acknowledged and made light of how Williams’s success grinds the gears of certain types of people upset that she — a woman so unambiguously Black — dominates a sport traditionally dominated by Whites. The reference to “White Tears,” however, upset quite a few people. Who, in turn, expressed their feelings in the VSB comments, on our Facebook fan page, and on Twitter.

     Example:

     There’s no denying Serena is currently the best player on tour and arguably the best ever. It’s disturbing how it seems many black people resent white people, when we all bleed the same color. How can we get to equality when there’s so many stirring the pot with hatred? Racism works both ways people.

     …and…

     only racist sports fan mentioned in this article is the author with all this talk of white tears. can’t you at least find some examples of white racists who don’t like Serena Williams? they can’t be that hard to find

     Of course, those familiar with the term know using “White Tears” in this context is not a reference to all White people. Or even the White people who aren’t fans of Serena Williams. Instead, it addresses (again) the type of person upset that Williams is stomping her entire Black-ass foot on the couch of a place traditionally ruled by Whites. But, to clear up any confusion, I’ve decided to interview an expert on the subject (Me) to provide some clarity.

     The author interviews the author at the link. Excerpt:

     So, what does “White Tears” mean? Where does it come from?

     “White Tears” is phrase to describe what happens when certain types of White people either complain about a nonexistent racial injustice or are upset by a non-White person’s success at the expense of a White person. It encompasses (and makes fun of) the performative struggle to acknowledge the existence of White privilege, and the reality that it aint always gonna go unchecked.

     A nationally prominent example of this is Fisher v. University of Texas, a court case that basically boils down to a slightly above average White woman upset her slightly above-averageness aint granting her the birthright privileges she believes she deserves. Instead of banging a gavel, the judge presiding over this case should just shake a Dasani bottle full of Abigail Fisher’s tears.

     Again, this doesn’t apply to all White people. Just the type who’d be frustrated that a person like Serena is dominating tennis.

     So don’t take it personally.

     I, Racist – another piece on white people!

     A couple weeks ago, I was debating what I was going to talk about in this sermon. I told Pastor Kelly Ryan I had great reservations talking about the one topic that I think about every single day.

     Then, a terrorist massacred nine innocent people in a church that I went to, in a city that I still think of as home. At that point, I knew that despite any misgivings, I needed to talk about race.

     You see, I don’t talk about race with White people. To illustrate why, I’ll tell a story:

     It was probably about 15 years ago when a conversation took place between my aunt, who is White and lives in New York State, and my sister, who is Black and lives in North Carolina. This conversation can be distilled to a single sentence, said by my Black sister:

     “The only difference between people in The North and people in The South is that down here, at least people are honest about being racist.”

     There was a lot more to that conversation, obviously, but I suggest that it can be distilled into that one sentence because it has been, by my White aunt. Over a decade later, this sentence is still what she talks about. It has become the single most important aspect of my aunt’s relationship with my Black family. She is still hurt by the suggestion that people in New York, that she, a northerner, a liberal, a good person who has Black family members, is a racist.

     This perfectly illustrates why I don’t talk about race with White people. Even– or rather, especially– my own family.

     I love my aunt. She’s actually my favorite aunt, and believe me, I have a lot of awesome aunts to choose from. But the facts are actually quite in my sister’s favor on this one.

     […]

     I don’t talk about race with White people because I have so often seen it go nowhere. When I was younger, I thought it was because all white people are racist. Recently, I’ve begun to understand that it’s more nuanced than that.

     To understand, you have to know that Black people think in terms of Black people. We don’t see a shooting of an innocent Black child in another state as something separate from us because we know viscerally that it could be our child, our parent, or us, that is shot.

     The shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston resonated with me because Walter Scott was portrayed in the media as a deadbeat and a criminal– but when you look at the facts about the actual man, he was nearly indistinguishable from my own father.

     Racism affects us directly because the fact that it happened at a geographically remote location or to another Black person is only a coincidence, an accident. It could just as easily happen to us- right here, right now.

     Black people think in terms of we because we live in a society where the social and political structures interact with us as Black people.

     White people do not think in terms of we. White people have the privilege to interact with the social and political structures of our society as individuals. You are “you,” I am “one of them.” Whites are often not directly affected by racial oppression even in their own community, so what does not affect them locally has little chance of affecting them regionally or nationally. They have no need, nor often any real desire, to think in terms of a group. They are supported by the system, and so are mostly unaffected by it.

     What they are affected by are attacks on their own character. To my aunt, the suggestion that “people in The North are racist” is an attack on her as a racist. She is unable to differentiate her participation within a racist system (upwardly mobile, not racially profiled, able to move to White suburbs, etc.) from an accusation that she, individually, is a racist. Without being able to make that differentiation, White people in general decide to vigorously defend their own personal non-racism, or point out that it doesn’t exist because they don’t see it.

     The result of this is an incessantly repeating argument where a Black person says “Racism still exists. It is real,” and a white person argues “You’re wrong, I’m not racist at all. I don’t even see any racism.” My aunt’s immediate response is not “that is wrong, we should do better.” No, her response is self-protection: “That’s not my fault, I didn’t do anything. You are wrong.”
     […]

     But racism is even more subtle than that. It’s more nuanced. Racism is the fact that “White” means “normal” and that anything else is different. Racism is our acceptance of an all white Lord of the Rings cast because of “historical accuracy,” ignoring the fact that this is a world with an entirely fictionalized history.

     Even when we make shit up, we want it to be white.

     And racism is the fact that we all accept that it is white. Benedict Cumberbatch playing Khan in Star Trek. Khan, who is from India. Is there anyone Whiter than Benedict fucking Cumberbatch? What? They needed a “less racial” cast because they already had the Black Uhura character?

     That is racism. Once you let yourself see it, it’s there all the time.

     Black children learn this when their parents give them “The Talk.” When they are sat down at the age of 5 or so and told that their best friend’s father is not sick, and not in a bad mood– he just doesn’t want his son playing with you. Black children grow up early to life in The Matrix. We’re not given a choice of the red or blue pill. Most white people, like my aunt, never have to choose. The system was made for White people, so White people don’t have to think about living in it.

     But we can’t point this out.

     […]

     But here is the irony, here’s the thing that all the angry Black people know, and no calmly debating White people want to admit: The entire discussion of race in America centers around the protection of White feelings.

     Ask any Black person and they’ll tell you the same thing. The reality of thousands of innocent people raped, shot, imprisoned, and systematically disenfranchised are less important than the suggestion that a single White person might be complicit in a racist system.

     This is the country we live in. Millions of Black lives are valued less than a single White person’s hurt feelings.

     White people and Black people are not having a discussion about race. Black people, thinking as a group, are talking about living in a racist system. White people, thinking as individuals, refuse to talk about “I, racist” and instead protect their own individual and personal goodness. In doing so, they reject the existence of racism.

     But arguing about personal non-racism is missing the point.

     Despite what the Charleston Massacre makes things look like, people are dying not because individuals are racist, but because individuals are helping support a racist system by wanting to protect their own non-racist self beliefs.

     People are dying because we are supporting a racist system that justifies White people killing Black people.

     We see this in the way that one Muslim killer is a sign of Islamic terror; in the way one Mexican thief is a pointer to the importance of border security; in one innocent, unarmed Black man is shot in the back by a cop, then sullied in the media as a thug and criminal.

     And in the way a white racist in a state that still flies the confederate flag is seen as “troubling” and “unnerving.” In the way people “can’t understand why he would do such a thing.”

     […]

     This, all of this, expectation, treatment, thought, the underlying social system that puts White in the position of Normal and good, and Black in the position of “other” and “bad,” all of this, is racism.

     And White people, every single one of you, are complicit in this racism because you benefit directly from it.

     This is why I don’t like the story of the good samaritan. Everyone likes to think of themselves as the person who sees someone beaten and bloodied and helps him out.

     That’s too easy.

     If I could re-write that story, I’d rewrite it from the perspective of Black America. What if the person wasn’t beaten and bloody? What if it wasn’t so obvious? What if they were just systematically challenged in a thousand small ways that actually made it easier for you to succeed in life?

     Would you be so quick to help then, or would you, like most White people, stay silent and let it happen.

     Here’s what I want to say to you: Racism is so deeply embedded in this country not because of the racist right-wing radicals who practice it openly, it exists because of the silence and hurt feelings of liberal America.

     That’s what I want to say, but really, I can’t. I can’t say that because I’ve spent my life not talking about race to White people. In a big way, it’s my fault. Racism exists because I, as a Black person, don’t challenge you to look at it.

     Racism exists because I, not you, am silent.

     But I’m caught in the perfect Catch 22, because when I start pointing out racism, I become the Angry Black Person, and the discussion shuts down again. So I’m stuck.

     All the Black voices in the world speaking about racism all the time do not move White people to think about it– but one White John Stewart talking about Charleston has a whole lot of White people talking about it. That’s the world we live in. Black people can’t change it while White people are silent and deaf to our words.

     White people are in a position of power in this country because of racism. The question is: Are they brave enough to use that power to speak against the system that gave it to them?

     So I’m asking you to help me. Notice this. Speak up. Don’t let it slide. Don’t stand watching in silence. Help build a world where it never gets to the point where the Samaritan has to see someone bloodied and broken.

     As for me, I will no longer be silent. I’m going to try to speak kindly, and softly, but that’s gonna be hard. Because it’s getting harder and harder for me to think about the protection of White people’s feelings when White people don’t seem to care at all about the loss of so many Black lives.

     That’s a black voice speaking to us white folk about what needs to be heard.

     Going to end the comment here in the hopes that it will not be moderated.

469. rq says

     13 July 2015 at 2:52 am

     Portraits of Katrina, ten year ‘anniversary’ this year.

     On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the United States Gulf Coast and became one of the most devastating storms in the country’s history. Failed levees in New Orleans, along with poor preparation and a slow governmental response, would have repercussions for years to come. The city became a focus of human tragedy and triumph that riveted the world.

     To mark Katrina’s ten-year anniversary, we selected photographs that tell a story of resilience—from views of destruction made soon after the storm to present-day portraits showing the vitality of the Mardi Gras Indian and second-line parades. The photographers who made these images show us loss, renewal, and survival. They remind us that New Orleans, iconic as ever, is still thriving in a precarious landscape.

     Anti-Media Journalist Facing up to 6 Months in Jail for Filming Police

     On January 18th, 2014, protests arose in Fullerton, CA, after the acquittal of Manuel Ramos and Jay Cicinelli – two Fullerton police officers who were put on trial for the beating of Kelly Thomas. Thomas, a 37-year-old homeless man who suffered from schizophrenia, died as a result of the beating.

     The protests of that day brought together people from different counties, cities, and even states. Hundreds, if not thousands, attended the demonstration held in front of the Fullerton police station and City Hall to protest the acquittal of the two officers, who were essentially able to walk free of any consequences for Thomas’s death.

     However, though the protests were absolutely peaceful in nature (one of the very reasons for the demonstrations was to show disdain for the violence and brutality that an innocent man suffered at the hands of authorities), Fullerton police suddenly felt the need, as the evening grew closer, to break out the riot gear and begin making arrests as part of a ‘dispersal’ order that was given by the head of the department.

     The Fullerton Police eventually made a handful of arrests – allegedly for ‘failure to disperse’ – and Patti “P.M.” Beers, a journalist that works with the Anti-Media, was one of those arrested that evening. P.M., as she is best known as on social media and other outlets, had been at the protest that day in order to perform her civil duty – as both a citizen and journalist – to document and film the events of that day in a raw and honest manner. P.M., who records and live-streams various events and demonstrations, was eventually targeted by the FPD – who had even been doing ‘snatch-and-grabs’ in undercover cop cars – arrested, and put in the back of a police van where she and others were threatened by an officer who said there were “12 officers waiting to smash (their) fucking faces in” once they got to the jail.

     […]

     Please keep in mind, the reasons as to why we are asking for support:

     1) P.M. is a journalist and a citizen, who has the right to film and document events as they occur. She was simply doing her job at the time of her arrest, and was not in any way, shape, or form, inciting further protests, and was certainly not inciting a riot. She was standing off to the side, nearly a quarter of a mile away from the scene of the protest and had technically dispersed.

     2) P.M., as well as the others, are granted 1st Amendment rights that allow freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom to assemble. These rights were almost completely disregarded at the time of her arrest.

     3) The demonstrations were essentially a public outcry for justice – justice that had not been granted to Kelly Thomas nor had been served to those responsible for his death – as well as to show disapproval of violence and forcefulness. Thus, in NO way was there any amount of violence acted out on behalf of the public, but rather the police that day.

     Lastly, if people like P.M. are arrested for journalism, then who will we entrust our media to, the lying mainstream corporate media? True media comes from the people – the citizens – who are actively reporting via cellphones and other devices and putting it out there for the rest of us to see in a raw and real manner. We ask you to support these citizens, either in person, or via donation. Please share this article with anyone who values independent media and freedom of speech. #FreePM #FreeThePress

     After reading about the KKK’s Confederate flag rally in South Carolina, I felt the need to post this photo… That rally is scheduled for Saturday, July 18.

     Jonathan Sanders Story: Clarion-Ledger He-Was-No-Angeled the Black Horse-and-Buggy Driver Killed by White Cop

     Sadly, it was only a matter of time before it happened here in Mississippi–a black man was killed by a white cop amid mysterious circumstances and officials are trying to keep tensions from simmering.

     It happened on late Wednesday night in tiny Stonewall when, according to various media outlets, a 39-year-old black man named Jonathan Sanders had some sort of altercation with a white officer named Kevin Herrington.

     Stewart Parish, an attorney for Sanders’ family, told Meridian television WTOK that Sanders was riding in a buggy exercising his horses when Herrington stopped Sanders, initiating an altercation that ended in Sanders’ death, reportedly by strangulation.

     The exact details are, of course, muddy. Early reports suggested that Herrington used a flashlight to subdue Sanders. Stonewall Police Chief Michael Street denied those reports, but hasn’t gone into much detail about the incident that happened between 10:30 and 11 o’clock at night, citing his department’s ongoing investigation. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation is handling the case.

     “We just ask that the citizens allow that to take place, not to try to take anything out in the streets. Our door is open,” Street told WTOK.

     Street’s comments are an obvious reference to protests sparked by the deaths of African American men by–often white–police officers in the past year. Sanders’ death is hauntingly similar to that of Eric Garner in New York City last summer. Like Garner, Sanders reportedly told Herrington that he couldn’t breathe in the moments before he died, Parish told the media.

     The Guardian reported that Chief Street said “Sanders had no active warrants against him and that Harrington did not know who he was when the confrontation took place.”

     […]

     Update: The Sanders family has hired the Jackson-based law firm of Lumumba & Associates as legal counsel and to serve as official spokesmen to the media. The attorneys handling the case, Chokwe Antar Lumumba and C.J. Lawrence, said in a letter that an official statement would be forthcoming pending the family’s approval.

     Lumumba is the son of late Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba; Lawrence worked on the late mayor’s communications staff and last year earned national media notoriety for starting the Twitter hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, which criticized mainstream media character assassinations of black victims of police violence — such as the recent Clarion-Ledger story about Jonathan Sanders.

     Of course, local media went to town about Sanders’ ‘checkered’ history with police, and emphasized that no one has ever complained about Herrington.

     Jonathan Sanders, Unarmed Black Man, Allegedly Strangled To Death By Mississippi Cop, Huffington Post on the same story.

     Gunfire startles neighbors at scene of officer-involved shooting

     This was the sixth person killed by Austin police this year and the third since July 5, when police killed a gunman in the Omni Hotel and a man in North Austin in separate events.

     […]

     Assistant Police Chief Brian Manley said the man was being questioned at the front door of his home in the 9400 block of Claxton Drive and that he fled when he was told to put his hands behind his back. He said officers saw — and that video from a patrol car shows — the man reaching into the back of his shorts as he ran away. Audio from the scene shows that officers yelled “put it down” and “he has a gun” before one officer shot and killed the suspect, Manley said.

     The man was being questioned after a woman called 911 at 11:22 p.m. Saturday to report that she was being followed by a man in a pickup, providing a license plate, he said. He said investigators learned that the suspect’s vehicle was registered to a man living at the address on Claxton Drive.

     Officers later went to the home and interviewed the man, who is about 60, on his front porch and were leaving when they noticed blood on the pickup, the assistant police chief said. The man approached the officers for further questioning in front of the home and they noticed he also had blood on his clothing, Manley said. When the man was asked to put his hands behind his back, he fled to the side of the house, where the shooting later occurred, Manley said.

470. rq says

     13 July 2015 at 1:29 pm

     Upthread, I’ve mentioned (via other people and articles) the Mike Brown art exhibit in Chicago. Activist and de facto movement leader (inasmuch as there are leaders – she’s one of the original Ferguson protestors) Johnetta Elzie went to see it. So here will be a few comments with her twitter impressions of the show, kind of like a virtual tour. One of the tweets has a periscope link (which is a new video-viewing application that you need to download) where she takes her viewers through the exhibit – I haven’t seen it, as you have to download the app in order to watch, which I haven’t done, but from the commentary I’ve seen, be advised of racism and misogyny within. And disturbing images.
     Anyhoooo, without any further ado, here we go.

     LIVE on #Periscope: Mike Brown exhibit. Chicago. https://www.periscope.tv/w/aHLMqTQyOTN8Mzg3NDcxNTlOzFIZTI-RVs3zcG8Hw3V1U1zGBmH7VjkyZrWbFLYF8A== …

     The owner of the exhibit is saying that he’s getting hate calls.

     Not only is it cultural appropriation all over this “exhibit” but the men inside are misogynists. Of the highest level.
     And, Mr. Misogynist also let me know that because I’m not apart of any organization I’m not apart of the movement.

471. rq says

     13 July 2015 at 1:32 pm

     “It’s about black men” “It’s not just Ferguson it involves Chicago too” Rekia Boyd was a black woman killed by police, in Chicago..
     And I saw nothing in that “exhibit” that referenced Chicago at all. Or the deaths of black people by the hands of Chicago police.

     Here’s a tour of the art:
     .@GalleryGuichard’s art gallery. @TiRockMoore is the artist. Chicago.
     .@GalleryGuichard’s art gallery. @TiRockMoore is the artist. Chicago.
     .@GalleryGuichard’s art gallery. @TiRockMoore is the artist. Chicago.
     .@GalleryGuichard’s art gallery. @TiRockMoore is the artist. Chicago.
     (Those are four different images; the next few links are also similar, but each has different photos.)

472. rq says

     13 July 2015 at 1:35 pm

     .@GalleryGuichard’s art gallery. @TiRockMoore is the artist. Chicago.
     .@GalleryGuichard’s art gallery. @TiRockMoore is the artist. Chicago.
     .@GalleryGuichard’s art gallery. @TiRockMoore is the artist. Chicago.
     .@GalleryGuichard’s art gallery. @TiRockMoore is the artist. Chicago.

     Here’s the conversation I had with @GalleryGuichard’s at the art gallery. @TiRockMoore is the artist. https://www.periscope.tv/w/aHLEbDQyOTN8Mzg3MjM5MTbEgDOqZ3CQis3Fe7CFSIw78XQ6jc55U_0_4Lg7l0H_RQ== …

473. rq says

     13 July 2015 at 1:42 pm

     Another perspective:
     In this exhibit, we see the continued appropriation of black pain for profit. #MikeBrownExhibit
     In the #MikeBrownExhibit, you see a white artist who is profiting from black pain while claiming to be doing us a favor.
     In the #MikeBrownExhibit, you’ll see triggering imagery that the white female artists got no permission to use and that is hurtful to us.
     In @Nettaaaaaaaa’s video of the #MikeBrownExhibit, you’ll see just how ageist patriarchy answers with ego and offense to a woman’s questions
     In the #MikeBrownExhibit, you’ll see a black-owned gallery that could have patronized a black artist, but didn’t.

474. rq says

     13 July 2015 at 1:47 pm

     Let’s look at some prices of the art:
     Prices for the “art” – four figures.
     More prices. Four figures.
     The Eric Garner “inspired” piece of “art” $5,000.
     The flags w/the names of the 9 black people killed in Charleston was sold for $4,500.

     I got called “combative” for asking if the profits from the Charleston 9 piece and the “I can’t breathe” piece are going to their families.

475. rq says

     13 July 2015 at 1:53 pm

     I know art is “subjective,” and dependent on “taste,” and shouldn’t be censored.But we’re not the government.We’re the people.Accountability.
     Our pain is not fodder for your art-for-profit, Ti Rock Moore. Our beauty is not fodder for your cheap imitation, Rachel & Iggy. STOP.
     If you actually want to use your white privilege to benefit marginalized people, you give it *away.* You don’t sell it for thousands. No.

     .@Nettaaaaaaaa Glenn Ligon, a black artist, already did all this. And better. [link – see below] @GalleryGuichard @TiRockMoore
     Glenn Ligon’s art. As an example, here’s Glenn Ligon: Come Out

     For his third exhibition at the gallery, Glenn Ligon has composed an ensemble of three monumental screen-printed paintings based on ‘Come Out’ (1966), one of Steve Reich’s early taped-speech works. In this visionary piece Reich, a pioneer of minimal and process music, used the voice of Daniel Hamm one of six young men charged with the murder of a shopkeeper in Harlem in the spring of 1964. The young men were severely beaten by the police while in jail and denied the use of their own lawyers. The case of the ‘Harlem Six’ quickly became a cause célèbre, with politicians, civil rights activists and artists commenting on indiscriminate police brutality against black citizens and wondering, in the words of James Baldwin, “where is the civilization and where, indeed, is the morality that can afford to destroy so many”.

     Reich became involved with the Harlem Six when he was asked to compose a piece for a benefit concert at Town Hall in New York City in 1966. He listened to the taped testimony of the defendants and focused on an excerpt of Hamm saying: “I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them”. Reich uses this as a repeated verse at the beginning of the piece. Reich then shortens and the verse to “Come out to show them”, repeated on two channels over and over again, first in unison and then with one channel gradually going out of synch with the other. As the phrases begin to shift they create an increasing reverberation that turns into a canon – a hypnotic ’round’- breaking further apart and destroying the intelligibility of the words.

     In the paintings that make up the exhibition Come Out, Ligon has isolated the same phrase as Reich and uses it to create densely layered canvases where “Come out to show them” is repeatedly screen-printed and super-imposed onto the picture plane. Echoing a characteristic of Reich’s music in which words are gradually shifting and re-positioning without any sense of climax but with a very controlled sense of ‘progression’, Ligon increases the number of silkscreen layers in each painting until the words verge on abstraction. By placing the three very large paintings in the exhibition in the order in which they were made, emphasizing the increasing density of the painting’s surfaces, Ligon references the ‘wall of sound’ musical production technique made famous in the early 1960s by record producer Phil Spector, as well as Reich’s interests in contrapuntal compositional technique and African drumming.

     The strategies employed in these paintings – where a visual continuum shifts little by little, inviting the viewer to concentrate on these slowly changing effects – is not new to Ligon’s work. For instance, some of his earliest text paintings use a single sentence repeated stenciled in black oilstick down the surface of door shaped panel, the text turns into abstraction by the same act of stenciling that creates it. The paintings in this exhibition also move speech towards abstraction, but in the end, the words remain legible, suggesting that the social conditions that prompted Reich’s composition remain, in some sense, unfinished business.

     Glenn Ligon lives and works in New York. Ligon received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University in 1982, and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1985. A mid-career retrospective of Ligon’s work, Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, organized by Scott Rothkopf, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in March 2011. The exhibition traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the fall of 2011, and to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in early 2012. Ligon has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the Power Plant in Toronto, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the Kunstverein Munich. His work was included in Documenta XI in 2002, and the 1991 and 1993 Whitney Biennials. Glenn Ligon will have an exhibition at Camden Arts Cenre, London in October 2014.

476. rq says

     13 July 2015 at 1:56 pm

     Last comment devoted to the exhibit:
     I couldn’t take photos of the Mike Brown “piece” it was the first thing you see when you walk into the room.
     “We’re not selling the Mike Brown pieces” no you’re not, but definitely using his death, name, and movement for attn to your “exhibit”
     And no you’re not selling pieces inspired by Mike’s death @GalleryGuichard. You’re definitely selling the ones “inspired” by Eric Garner tho
     Those 9 black people killed inside that AME church haven’t even been in the ground a month, and you’re selling “art” “inspired” by them.

     That exhibit sums the final moments of Black life up as objects that can be showcased to the world for its viewing pleasure.

477. rq says

     13 July 2015 at 2:37 pm

     All you need to know is that the world mocks the features of black people & PoC until you slap it on white folk. See link attached.

     “Black Lives Matter” written on a huge Confederate Memorial to Jefferson Davis in Richmond.

     And last night in St Louis, We are here. And #brandonclaxton’s family needs answers. Stop shooting us.
     Brandon Claxton is the 16-year-old shot by police in St Louis, still in hospital (not dead, as far as I know, but then I’m not caught up on today’s tweets).
     They have arrested at least 5 of our people. One is in an ambulance. They have abused us once again.
     It was a small, peaceful protest! No traffic blocked. Police came out with 15 cars! Ignored white folk, targeted arrests.
     They chased us and pepper sprayed us. They have arrested minors. But we will continue to come and demand justice.

478. rq says

     13 July 2015 at 2:47 pm

     Here’s a profile of a photographer who creates rather interesting photographs. Omar Victor Diop: ‘I want to reinvent the heritage of African studio photography’

     Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop’s latest work, Project Diaspora, is a series of elaborately staged portraits of himself in various historical guises. These are based on actual paintings from the 15th to the 19th centuries, but also refer to the contemporary world, particularly the world of football. The series is on show at the Arles photography festival (until 20 Sep) where he has been shortlisted for the Discovery award.

     Short interview at the link.

     Man shot at Denver mobile home park after coming at officers armed with a knife, police say

     A man was in critical condition Sunday evening after an officer with the Denver Police Department shot him at a mobile home park after they say he threatened two officers with a knife.

     The shooting happened following a short foot chase by the officers, Police Chief Robert White told media during a press briefing at the Capitol City Mobile Home Park, located near the corner of Morrison Road and West Kentucky Avenue.

     White said officers believe the suspect stabbed a woman in the neck. Her injuries appear to be non-life threatening. White also said the man got “dangerously close” to the officers before one of the officers shot him.

     The officer who shot the man will now be placed on administrative leave until the outcome of the investigation is released.

     The man has not been identified.

     So, no angel, right? Still deserves to be shot?

     State prisons are relying less on solitary confinement as punishment, which is, presumably, a good thing. A very good thing.

     Even as it prepares for a courtroom showdown over the use of prolonged solitary confinement to keep order in its prisons, California has adopted emergency rules to dial down such isolation.

     Inmates may no longer be put in isolation for refusing a cell assignment, for example, one of several prison infractions for which solitary confinement punishment has been reduced or dropped. And those being disciplined with segregation can cut that punishment in half with good behavior.

     “This is part of an ongoing evolution in how we manage inmates in segregation,” said Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the corrections department. “There will be more changes.”

     The new rules went into effect last month, ahead of public hearings scheduled for August. They come atop other changes that have cut the count of California prisoners held in near-constant lockdown from more than 9,800 in early 2014 to just under 8,700 last month.

     The revisions also have been made amid an escalating debate over solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, of which California has the largest share.

     Advocates for inmates are preparing to release research by a prominent corrections psychiatrist describing a malady he calls “SHU Post-Release Syndrome,” a reference to the Security Housing Unit, California’s name for long-term solitary confinement.

     The study documents some of the same psychiatric effects raised last month by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in an unusual opinion in a California death penalty case. He essentially invited a constitutional challenge to long-term isolation and the “terrible price” it extracts.

     At a congressional budget hearing this year, Kennedy opined that “solitary confinement literally drives men mad…. We simply have to look at this system that we have.”

     The jurist’s remarks came as California entered settlement negotiations with lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, representing prisoners who have sued the state over its practice of holding inmates accused of gang ties in solitary confinement indefinitely.

     Their lawsuit alleges that the resulting sensory deprivation causes psychological and physical torment.

     George Washington’s 1761 Ad Seeking Four Fugitive Slaves – but I hear he was progressive for his time.

     George Washington placed this ad, seeking four fugitives, in the Maryland Gazette, on August 20, 1761. At this point in time, Washington, who had been a slaveholder since his father died when he was eleven years of age, had just radically expanded the number of people he owned through his marriage to the widow Martha Dandridge Custis. When the two merged households in 1759, she brought 84 enslaved people with her to Mount Vernon.

     The description of the four runaways shows how close many people working on plantations in Virginia in the middle of the 18th century were to their African origins. Two of the fugitives, the ad stipulates, had just been bought “from an African Ship in August 1759” and spoke little English. Another was a “Countryman” of the two who were new to Virginia, and could have communicated with them to plan the escape.

     Their identifying characteristics, too, tied them to their African homes: “Jack” has “Cuts down each Cheek, being his Country Marks”: “Neptune”‘s “Teeth” were “stragling and fil’d sharp” and his “Back, if rightly remember’d, has many small Marks or Dots running from both Shoulders down to his Waistband.”

     The editors of the Papers of George Washington have annotated this ad, noting other appearances of these enslaved workers in Washington’s correspondence and accounts. (The annotations are available online.) Among their insights: Three out of the four people named in this ad can be found on lists of enslaved people at Mount Vernon a year after they tried to run.

     Reward: forty shillings. Is how much a runaway slave was worth.

     The Vast Majority of America’s Elected Prosecutors Are White Men, Mother Jones on information already posted upthread.

479. rq says

     13 July 2015 at 3:11 pm

     “I have become radicalized”: Ta-Nehisi Coates on his “low expectations” for white America

     In New York Magazine’s profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates — timed to coincide with the publication of his new book, “Between the World and Me” — the Atlantic writer spoke at length about his sudden, though demonstrably deserved, rise to national prominence as a uncompromising chronicler of the black experience in America.

     Benjamin Wallace-Wells met with Coates in the days after Dylann Roof shot and killed nine parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina church, and together they watched President Barack Obama eulogize Reverend Clementa Pinckney. “There’s a sister over here to the left, she’s natural, no perm, and a very black dude, and then an African-American president,” Coates said, before wondering what that would mean to a 4-year-old white child. “That’s the world as he knows it. So all these people saying that symbols don’t mean anything — that’s bullshit. They mean a lot.”

     Coates is seen by many as the intellectual heir to James Baldwin. Toni Morrison wrote of “Between the World and Me” that “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died” and “cleary, it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.” The comparison is apt, as Coates recounted reading Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” as he prepared to meet the president for the second time.

     He recalled being stunned by how elegantly Obama was handling the room full of white reporters. “The race aspect is not gone from this,” he said. “To see a black dude in a room of the smartest white people and just be the smartest dude in the room — it just puts into context all the stuff about ‘Let me see his grades.’” At the end of that meeting, Coates recalled, the president even pulled him aside and told him that a blog post he had written criticizing him had been unfair.

     […]

     Those expectations have become even lowered in light of recent events. “I have become radicalized,” Coates told Wallace-Wells, both by the high profile police killings of the past year and the response to them. The American dream as instantiated in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. or the title of Obama’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” is nothing more than white America’s “reveling in a specious hope…that what your ancestors did doesn’t matter. That you went out to the suburbs, and the houses grew from nothing and it’s not contaminated by anything. The idea that you’re entitled to it, and people who don’t have it are either pathological or lower than you. That nothing’s wrong.”

     “That’s the thing that linked Martin Luther King and Malcolm X,” Coates added. “People say Malcolm was a pessimist. He was a pessimist about America. But he was actually very optimistic. Malcolm very much believed in the dream of nationalism. He believed we could do it. And Martin believed in the dream of integration. He believed that black people could be successful if they did x, y, and z. I suspect they were both wrong. I suspect that it’s not up to us.”

     Hunger Games Star Amandla Stenberg Is Spending Summer Vacation Teaching White Chicks in Cornrows About Appropriation

     “In the 2010s, pop stars and icons adopted black culture as a way of being edgy and gaining attention,” Stenberg said. “In 2013, Miley Cyrus twerks and uses black women as props, and then in 2014, in one of her videos called ‘This Is How We Do,’ Katy Perry uses Ebonics and hand gestures and eats watermelons while wearing cornrows before cutting inexplicably to a picture of Aretha Franklin. So as you can see, cultural appropriation was rampant.”

     And she’s not finished.

     Over the weekend, Stenberg found her way to Kylie Jenner’s Instagram page and commented on a photo in which the youngest Kardashian was posing in cornrows.

     Stenberg left a comment for the world to see, proving her previous point in “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows,” and even mentioned the hashtag #whitegirlsdoitbetter:

     when u appropriate black features and culture but fail to use ur position of power to help black Americans by directing attention towards ur wigs instead of police brutality or racism #whitegirlsdoitbetter

     Of course the comment probably went over the youngest Jenner’s head, because her retort was nothing but playground rhetoric:

     @amandlastenberg Mad if I don’t, Mad if I do. Go hang w Jaden or something

     The Jaden Jenner is referring to is Jaden Smith, Will Smith’s son, with whom Stenberg went to the prom.

     And Stenberg’s writing can be read here: words by me. Good for her, for speaking out.

     Man calls cops after mostly black town ‘hurts’ his feelings by disrespecting Confederate flag parade

     Chris Oliver and his wife, Angela, told WWBT that they and about 100 other people took part in a flag run on Saturday that ran through Petersburg, which had a black population of over 77 percent in 2013.
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     While the parade of Confederate flags were passing through town, video captured what appeared to be a bottle of water being thrown at Oliver’s truck.

     “My initial reaction was, ‘What the hell?’” Oliver recalled, adding that he could not understand why he had not been welcomed into the community.

     “There was people protesting, throwing bottles, hit my truck, hit numerous other vehicles, people yelling, yelling racial slurs,” he insisted.

     Angela Oliver said that she was angry because the Confederate flag parade had come to Petersburg as a “peaceful ride.”

     “People throwing bottles at our vehicles, our property that we worked for,” she lamented.

     Oliver said that he was not happy by the response by Petersburg police, who claimed that they did not have sufficient evidence to catch the perpetrators.

     The Olivers insisted that they had a right to participate in Confederate flag events, and that law enforcement had a duty to see that justice was done.

     “The racial slurs are really what hurt me,” Oliver remarked. “You know, it’s uncalled for. There’s no need for that in today’s society.”

     A spokesperson for the Petersburg Police Department told WWBT that a report filed by the Olivers was being investigated.

     Wait… a bunch of (presumably white) people did a confederate flag run through a predominantly black town? How is this not a hate crime or at least racist harassment???

     Maryland governor cites L.A. riots in appealing federal denial of disaster aid

     Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is pointing to precedent — a federal decision to aid Los Angeles after the riots of 1992 — as he appeals the Obama administration’s decision to deny $19 million in assistance for Baltimore this year.

     In a letter asking President Obama to overturn the decision, Hogan provided several examples in which the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided aid to state and local governments hit by calamities other than natural disasters.

     The “most compelling comparison,” the Republican governor said, was the determination that Los Angeles was eligible for aid to rebuild after the civil unrest sparked by the acquittal of police officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, an unarmed African American man who had resisted arrest. The three days of riots resulted in 53 deaths and an estimated $1 billion in property damage.

     The governor argued that Baltimore should not be penalized because the damage during the unrest between April 25 and May 1 was far less extensive. Although national attention focused on the rioting that began after Freddie Gray — also an unarmed African American man — died of injuries suffered while in police custody, there were no deaths.

     “The disparity in overall impacts is, at least in part, due to the coordinated efforts of the city of Baltimore and the state of Maryland in mobilizing and directing the surge of resources to restore and maintain order,” Hogan wrote Obama on Tuesday.

     Maryland applied for more than $19 million to help the city, state and counties that participated in the response recover their costs. W. Craig Fugate, FEMA’s administrator, wrote to Hogan on June 12 saying federal disaster aid “is not appropriate” for such an event.

     In his letter to Obama, Hogan noted that in addition to the Los Angeles riots, FEMA has provided aid after such events as the 2001 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and New York’s World Trade Center, the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, and the 1980 Mariel boatlift of refugees from Cuba.

480. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 2:00 am

     A few things from a couple of days ago:
     90 days ago #FreddieGray was taken out of wagon, placed on ground and an officer kneeled on his neck. #NotARoughRide
     Remembering #FreddieGray 90 Days After #BPD Put Him in a coma resulting in his death 1 week later

     Suspect collapses, dies after being in police custody in Tuscaloosa, youtube video.

     Across the country in the past year there has been a lot of tension between communities and police, but here in the Crescent East neighborhood in Tuscaloosa, the death of 35-year-old Anthony Ware, had their community on edge.

     Teen suspect shot three times by St. Louis police officer

     St. Louis Metropolitan Police Chief Sam Dotson explained what the officer said happened next, “As the officers responded the subject started to run, saw police officers and turned and ran in another direction. Ran toward officers, the officers saw a gun in his hand, fearing for his safety the officer fired four shots. The subject was struck, a graze wound once in the head, once in the arm, and again the most serious wound is to his stomach.”

     The victim’s mother, Antoinette Liggins, told reporter, “It scared me because I lost my 14 year old in `08. She was killed …a little boy was playing with a gun and shot and killed her. And that and that is all I can think about. I don’t want anything to happen to another one of my children, y`know.”

     Security cameras belonging to the housing complex caught the shooting on video. Police said they recovered a gun at the scene.

     The police officer who fired is a 29-year-old white male who has been on the force seven years. The shooting will be reviewed by the department’s new Force Investigative Unit.

     Note story: teen ran from one set of cops, then ran from another set of cops back towards the first. Keep this in mind, that is from the official police story.

     More than 80 percent of delinquent girls in some states have endured sexual abuse, seen previously in another source; this is Washington Post.

     “When law enforcement views girls as perpetrators, and when their cases are not dismissed or diverted but sent deeper into the justice system, the cost is twofold: girls’ abusers are shielded from accountability, and the trauma that is the underlying cause of the behavior is not addressed,” the authors wrote.

     Minority girls are disproportionately represented in the country’s detention centers. Black girls, who make up 14 percent of the national youth population, comprise nearly a third of those held in female facilities, according to the study. Native American girls, about one percent of American youth, are three percent of all detained.

     Girls with rap sheets garner less public attention — and, therefore, less policy priority — than boys who commit crimes, Saada Saar said. That’s because they’re less likely than male peers to be arrested and less likely to have caused bodily harm to others.

     Entering the juvenile justice system sets off a chain reaction of negative economic impacts, said Nora Jones, director of Florida’s Pace Center For Girls. Children who wind up there are much more likely to later face prison time.

     “This often goes on to include economic dependency due to employment barriers, as well as further criminal justice involvement as an adult and dependency system involvement for her children,” Jones said. “The costs are immense.”

     Advocates recommend states invest in programs like Pace, a nonprofit that provides tuition-free academics and social services to especially vulnerable girls, aiming to deter them from trouble.

     A year in Pace, for example, costs about $28,000 per girl, Jones said — but a year in a juvenile detention center costs taxpayers between $42,000 and $62,000.

     Ah, more on Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates

     The only endorsement he had wanted was the novelist Toni Morrison’s. Neither he nor his editor, Christopher Jackson, knew Morrison, but they managed to get the galleys into her hands. Weeks later, Morrison’s assistant sent Jackson an email with her reaction: “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died,” Morrison had written. “Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.” Baldwin died 28 years ago. Jackson forwarded the note to Coates, who sent back a one-word email: “Man.”

     Morrison’s words were an anointing. They were also a weight. On the subject of black America, Baldwin had once been a compass — “Jimmy’s spirit,” the poet Amiri Baraka had said, eulogizing him, “is the only truth which keeps us sane.” On the last Friday in June, the day after Morrison’s endorsement was made public and then washed over Twitter, Coates sat down with me at a Morningside Heights bar and after some consideration ordered an IPA. At six-foot-four, he towers over nearly everyone he meets, and to close the physical distance he tends to turtle his neck down, making himself smaller: “A public persona but not a public person,” explained his father, Paul Coates. Ta-Nehisi said he thought ­Morrison’s praise was essentially literary, about the echo of Baldwin’s direct and exhortative prose in his own. The week before, The New ­Yorker’s David Remnick had called the forthcoming book “extraordinary,” and A. O. Scott of the New York Times would soon go further, calling it “essential, like water or air.” The figure of the lonely radical writer is a common one. A writer who radicalizes the Establishment is more rare. “When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I’m always surprised,” Coates said. “I don’t know if it’s my low expectations for white people or what.”

     […]

     The sudden shift after the massacre, in which southern politicians turned against the Confederate flag, filled Coates with both awe and perplexity. “I mean, I tweeted this out, but I didn’t expect it to happen: ‘You talk about how this makes you feel. Then take down the damn flag,’ ” Coates said. “And hell, they did it! It turns out that was actually what was in motion.” He shook his head. “Shit!”

     That Sunday, the Times would give Coates a small role in focusing attention on the flag. More essential, the paper reported, were the public gestures of forgiveness that family members of the victims had offered to Roof. “I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you,” the daughter of a slain 70-year-old woman told her mother’s murderer at his hearing. These gestures had moved conservative Christians in a very religious state. Coates believes in the power of social structures, not in the politics of emotion. The consensus account — in which Strom Thurmond’s son, State Senator Paul Thurmond looked into the eyes of black fellow citizens at a church service after the massacre and decided that he could no longer defend the flag — reeked of myth. Even the public forgiving, so soon after the slaughter, seemed unreal. “Is that real?” Coates said, watching the service. “I question the realness of that.”

     […]

     The fear that gives life to Between the World and Me is the fear of a parent for his child. Though the book went through many revisions, Coates said he was always sure that he would end it by describing his meeting with a woman named Mabel Jones, whose son, Prince, had been a friend of his at Howard and who was later killed by a police officer who tracked him from Maryland to Virginia in a case of mistaken identity — he had committed no crime. Mabel Jones was a sharecropper’s daughter who worked to become a radiologist, then sent her children to private schools and made sure to give them things like “jaunts off to Europe.” For Coates, Mabel Jones became not just an emblem of dignity, of “all of the odd poise and direction that the great American injury demands of you,” but also a signal of the impossibility of escaping the tragedies of race, even for well-off blacks. Her son was killed, and the police officer who shot him, a black man himself, was allowed to return to the force. Jones’s death so alienated Coates that when he watched 9/11, slightly stoned, on the roof of his Brooklyn building, he recalls that he felt nothing at all. “You must always remember,” Coates writes to Samori, “that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

     Coates has borrowed this language from feminist writing. For him, it contained a basic truth, that indignity is always physical. The vulnerability of African-American bodies has become a main theme of the racial protests over the past year under slogans like “I Can’t Breathe.” “Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed,” Coates writes. “Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.”

     Read more about Coates at the link – it’s quite a long read, but interesting, and well worth the time. Includes a short history of Coates’ writing career and his ‘war on white innocence’.

481. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 2:20 am

     About last nite. #freeFergusonFrontline @deray @TruthTellersUSA @davidragland1, an account of the first protest for Brandon Claxton in STL, the account of a white witness who was present.

     Thousands Of Inmates Await Obama Decision: ‘It’s Like Being In A Delivery Room’

     Obama is expected soon to grant clemency to a new batch of nonviolent drug offenders, an effort by his administration to counteract old, harsher penalties that are viewed as out of line with today’s approach to sentencing. This week, he will also reportedly become the first sitting president to visit a federal prison. But for the tens of thousands of federal inmates who have petitioned his administration, a shot at freedom is tantamount to a lottery ticket. The president, running into bureaucratic challenges and backlogs, will likely commute only a few dozen sentences.

     Jackson meets all the criteria prioritized by the U.S. Justice Department, according to his petition. A trucker who become involved in the drug trade in order to obtain the $150,000 he needed for his son’s treatments, he was convicted of being the ringleader of a drug conspiracy after the supplier testified against him.

     In the years following the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet Union was handing out what were known as “tenners” for many crimes — 10 years. When the standard number was bumped up 25 years, Soviet citizens were stunned. Such sentences, even under the new guidelines, can be routine in the U.S. Jackson’s attorney estimates that if he had been sentenced today, he likely would have received under 17.5 years.

     Thanks to stringent mandatory minimums and other laws, some nonviolent offenders have been slapped with lengthy prison terms for drug crimes. Low-level criminals have ended up with long sentences if found guilty of conspiracy, while high-level crooks have merited leniency because they have more information and can testify against others.

     What an upside-down system.

     Interlude: Music! The Best Rap Song, Every Year Since 1979

     At least twice each year at Complex—once in June, and again in December—we huddle in a conference room and yell at each other about the year’s very best songs.

     While the overall discussion of these mid-year and year-end rankings is contentious, rap’s so-called Song of the Year is, usually, pretty obvious. It’s whatever song has most blatantly dominated the radio playlists and radicalized the dance floor in a given year. It’s the song that you can’t escape and, in any case, wouldn’t want to. Like “In da Club” in 2003, for instance, when 50 Cent and G-Unit had a yearlong chokehold on the culture.

     Since we’ve only been publishing online content since 2007, however, these debates only go back so far. Until now.

     This year, we’ve debated the past all the way back to 1979, the year of hip-hop’s commercial birth, as we did for our Best Rapper Alive list. From the post-disco flex of the Sugarhill Gang, Soulsonic Force, and the Furious Five; through the big-bang, rock-rap explosion of Run-DMC and LL Cool J; and onward through a quarter century of continued evolution, regional rivalry, mass-market expansion, and post-Napster contraction—hip-hop’s core sounds, techniques, and audience have evolved with each passing year. Note that the best rap songs of 1979, 1989, 1999, and 2009 sound nearly nothing like one another.

     Megastars, they rise and fall, but their biggest, genre-defining hits are (hopefully) timeless. Here we present the Best Rap Song, Every Year Since 1979. These diamonds are forever.

     A great short-history of hip-hop, to boot! Interestingly, the vast majority are from men – with the few women (I may have counted two) appearing before the 1990s.

     .@POTUS @BarackObama will address the @NAACP Annual Convention on Tuesday & is expected to discuss criminal justice reform in his speech. Something to look forward to.

     Cops. Search warrant: APD officer wanted slain counselor Dean to abort child

     An Austin-area crime victims counselor shot to death in February wrote in her diary and told friends and co-workers shortly before her slaying that she feared an Austin police officer with whom she had a years-long affair was going to kill her, a court document unsealed Monday says.

     For the first time in the investigation, the 75-page search warrant affidavit links officer VonTrey Clark, 32, to the slaying and places him as a member of a conspiracy to kill Samantha Dean that includes a longtime Clark associate.

     You have to register for the full article.

     Have some happy somewhat awkward dancing: Foot faults all round as Serena and Djokovic’s dancing crosses the line

     People need to see the video of Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic dancing together after Wimbledon. It should be shown at schools, or at the end of particularly grim EastEnders episodes. During times of extreme global strife, the video should be beamed directly onto the surface of the moon. Because, no matter how hard you try, you will never see a more uplifting video so long as you live.

     Why? Because it shows Williams and Djokovic wheeling around joyously, gleefully liberating themselves of the self-imposed pressure it takes to become best in the world at something? Because it shows that even fiercely goal-fixated superbeings are able to cut loose and have fun sometimes?

     No. The video is life-affirming because Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic are rubbish at dancing. In fact, that doesn’t even do it justice. What they do barely even exists in the same galaxy as dancing. Here’s what happens: after they’ve both become Wimbledon champions, Williams and Djokovic find themselves onstage together. Night Fever by the Bee Gees is playing. The pair clasp hands and perform a jokey little victory dance. They stop, but the music doesn’t. So, foolishly, they start dancing again.

     Except it’s not dancing. Not really. It’s the sort of self-conscious imitation of dance that people reluctantly perform at wedding receptions before they get drunk enough to really hammer out some moves. Serena opts for the dead-armed two-steps-forward-two-steps-back style beloved by elderly aunties, while Novak half-heartedly performs what can only be described as a satirical interpretive performance art piece inspired by peak-era John Travolta.

     But the embarrassment is too much for him, so he quickly drops to his knees. The focus is now solely on Williams, who responds by awkwardly wobbling around and intermittently clapping her hands. He’s put this whole sorry saga on her shoulders.

     Eventually, after the longest six seconds of anyone’s life, he realises the scale of his transgression, clambers to his feet and brings the whole ugly saga to a messy conclusion. It’s the sort of video you can only really watch with your fingers over your eyes and your fist in your mouth.

     But it still needs to be watched, because it is beautiful. It’s a perfectly-timed reminder that these honed, hardbodied athletes, these intimidating reminders of humanity’s limitless potential, are regular people after all. For the smallest possible amount of time, they’re both plunged into terrifyingly unfamiliar territory. They’re raw and exposed, and the best they can hope for is damage control. For 24 wonderful seconds, they’re just like us. They’re us, pulling on a push-door in full sight of our employers. They’re us, asked to improvise a speech on a subject we know nothing about, or tripping up on a cobble in front of a girl we fancy, or accidentally calling our year nine science teacher ‘Mum’.

     Being forced to dance in front of people after a historic sporting victory is the perfect way to ground someone. After seeing the charming hash that Williams and Djokovic made of it, this sort of ego control should really become mandatory after any important accomplishment. Won Wimbledon? Dance. Crowned as King of England? Assemble a Billy bookcase for me. Cured cancer? Great, now ride this unicycle up a wet hill in your pants.

     Forget tennis, this video was the real victory of the weekend. It’s proof that nobody is good at everything. It’s proof that, no matter how red our cape, we’re all still Clark Kent inside. It’s proof that, if he had any sense whatsoever, Andy Murray deliberately threw the semi-final to avoid all of this. Serena, Novak, welcome to the human race.

     Hmm. Well, actually, that article echoes an article on genius and lovers that I recently posted in the Lounge. About how we want extraordinary people to be ordinary and approachable (in short). Heh, I don’t mind the awkward dancing, it’s kind of sweet – I hate how it needs to be over-analyzed and dissected into pieces. Just because some tennis stars can’t (or didn’t) really dance.

482. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 2:50 am

     The @BaltimorePolice & @MayorSRB now have a “War Room” to address crime, a space where innovative ways to further harass folks will be born.
     As @MayorSRB creates a “War Room” instead of re-opening the rec centers she closed, we are reminded that her time in office will end soon.

     Does this “deck” include re-opening rec centers? Creating jobs? Or is it new/creative ways to arrest people? See link within attached link.

     Arrests made after protesters gather in front of police headquarters

     Nine people were arrested Sunday night after protesters gathered in front of the St. Louis Police Department headquarters at the intersection of 19th street and Olive Boulevard.

     Roughly 30 protestors showed up in front of the police headquarters to protest after a teen was shot by police Saturday night. The teen allegedly charged police with a gun in his hand. The teen sustained multiple gunshot wounds and is currently listed in serious, but stable condition.

     News 4 was outside the department as the group of protesters moved into the street and attempted to block traffic.

     Police gave verbal warnings to those in the street, telling them to move. After the group did not comply, officers approached them and began to clear them from the street, taking nine people into custody during the process, according to authorities.

     According to police, seven arrests were for impending the flow of traffic and two were for failure to disperse. Police said four of the arrested individuals were additionally charged with resisting arrest. One protester was issued a summons and released, police said.

     Authorities have not released the names of the arrested suspects.

     Eye-witness accounts state that no traffic was impeded and that people were attempting to disperse when police showed up.

     LDF and South Carolina Leaders Ask U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to Open Federal Investigations in the Aftermath of the Police Killing of Walter Scott and the Emanuel Nine Massacre

     Today, on the heels of the South Carolina State Legislature’s vote to remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), in partnership with the North Charleston Branch of the NAACP and over two dozen South Carolina leaders, submitted a letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking the Department of Justice to open an investigation of the North Charleston Police Department to uncover any pattern or practice of racially discriminatory policing. It also asked the Justice Department to open a criminal civil rights investigation into former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager for the April 4, 2015 shooting death of Walter Scott, an unarmed African-American man.

     “While we are pleased that the Confederate flag has come down, we feel now, more than ever, that we must push for real structural change,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel of LDF, the nation’s leading civil rights and racial justice law firm. “The flag was a symbol of insensitivity to the concerns of African-American residents in South Carolina. But, no real reconciliation can happen without systemic, institutional changes that will result in the fair treatment of all residents. The killing of Walter Scott must be understood in the context of police problems and brutality in North Charleston.”

     The letter to Attorney General Lynch comes in the wake of a tide of violence against African-American residents, including the June 17, 2015 massacre of nine members of Charleston’s historic Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church by a self-proclaimed white supremacist. These murders serve as a stark reminder that the struggle to eliminate racial violence and intimidation nationwide, particularly by police, continues.

     The letter details numerous examples of alleged use of excessive or lethal force by North Charleston police officers over the past 15 years, including: a 2011 incident involving officers who allegedly handcuffed Sheldon Williams, an African-American man, and stomped on his face multiple times causing facial fractures; and, a 2000 incident during which officers shot and killed Edward Snowden, an African-American man, who was attacked by four white men.

     “These acts of police violence against African-American residents of North Charleston are not isolated incidents,” said Monique Dixon, Senior Policy Counsel at LDF. “The recent videotaped police killing of Walter Scott, while shocking, occurred within a seemingly normalized culture of racially-biased policing and excessive use of force that has long plagued North Charleston.”

     The letter also offers evidence of racial discrimination in traffic stops conducted by officers of the North Charleston Police Department. According to data collected by the South Carolina Department of Public Safety, since January 2011, 65% of all drivers stopped, but not ticketed or arrested by police were African-American persons, while 33% of were white individuals. African-American residents make up 47% of the population of North Charleston, and white residents make up 42% of the population.

     “North Charleston police officers pull over African-American drivers all of the time for the slightest infractions, such as failing to use a turn signal or having a busted taillight,” said Edward Bryant, President of the North Charleston, South Carolina Branch of the NAACP. “These discriminatory stops must end.”

     “It’s past time to take a deeper look at how racial bias has permeated our institutions in South Carolina,” said Victoria Middleton, Executive Director of the ACLU of South Carolina. “Longstanding complaints from the community, capped by Walter Scott’s tragic death, raise questions that can’t be brushed aside.”

     You can view the letter itself at the link.

     “Fuck White Supremacy” written on a Confederate Monument all the way up in Seattle, Washington.

483. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     14 July 2015 at 3:19 am

     rq @482:
     Before I head to sleep, here is a link to a local paper about that Seattle memorial- http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Group-calls-for-removal-of-Confederate-monument-in-Seattle-314468901.html?mobile=y

484. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 4:19 am

     Teen shot by St. Louis police paralyzed; mom laments gun violence – from the waist down.

     A teenager shot by city police is paralyzed below the waist, his mother said Sunday as her family copes with another episode of gun violence. Not seven years ago, her teenage daughter was accidentally shot to death.

     This time, a firearm in the hand of her son, Brandon Claxton, 16, prompted an officer to shoot him three times about 7:15 p.m. Saturday in a housing complex in the 2500 block of Hodiamont Avenue, officials said. Police encountered him while responding to a call about someone with a stolen pistol.

     Antoinette Liggins, 42, told the Post-Dispatch that she was still sorting through her feelings with her daughter gone, one son in critical condition and another, who had been with him, held on a probation violation.

     […]

     She said that she respected the police and that her son “shouldn’t have had the gun.” But from what witnesses have told her, she said, “They didn’t have to shoot him down like that.”

     Liggins is skeptical that Police Chief Sam Dotson said a surveillance camera did not provide a clear view. “I believe they are trying to cover up,” she said. “There is more than one camera back there.”

     And she complained that police would not let her see her son in a hospital because he was in custody.

     Liggins said a protest was planned sometime Monday at Police Headquarters.

     One of three witnesses interviewed Sunday told a reporter that Brandon did have a gun in his hand. But all three said that he did not point a weapon at anyone as he tried to run from officers.

     The witnesses also said they were concerned about the proximity of children on a playground nearby when the officer opened fire. One said a girl, about 6, even ran out of her shoes while trying to get out of the way. Nobody else was hurt.

     […]

     Liggins said police took in another son, Anthony Claxton, 15, who was with Brandon when he was shot. She said they told her he had violated his parole by missing curfew, and would be held. She said a GPS monitor was put on Anthony’s ankle last week for a juvenile charge last month of tampering with a motor vehicle.

     Her daughter, Brenda Liddell, was 14 when she was shot Nov. 5, 2008, as she sat on a porch in the 5900 block of Alpha Avenue. Brenda died the next day. Liddell said she had forgiven the boy, then 15, who shot her by accident. She said he was charged as a juvenile with reckless homicide, and held until age 18.

     Liggins said that the tampering charge was Anthony’s only brush with the law and that she had had no problems with Brandon until he was shot. He was about to start the 10th grade at Sumner High School and was recently hired at Goodwill.

     Police departments required to meet basic standards in new Missouri law. I like that, that there needs to be a law for them to follow basic requirements.

     A piece of the municipal court reform measure signed into law Thursday by Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon isn’t a reform on courts, but on the local police departments that keep them hopping.

     It establishes an accreditation process for police departments in St. Louis County, which have, until now, enjoyed the discretion to follow generally accepted standards, or their own standards, or no standards at all.

     The county’s 58 police departments now have six years to achieve accreditation from either the established Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, based in Gainesville, Va., or a much smaller credentialing program based in Jefferson City. Just 14 departments in the county are currently accredited by one of those groups.

     The process involves periodic reviews by auditors to ensure a police department has policies that set basic standards for every aspect of police work — and documents its successes and failures in following those policies. For example, the review will check if a department has a policy on when officers can use force. Having a policy isn’t enough; auditors require the department to prove a policy is followed and that people are held accountable when it isn’t.

     Vote for Serena Williams in the category “Best Female Athlete”.

     The Count is at 610, via the Guardian.

     The 5 Worst States for Black People, a repost from November, but since the governor of Wisconsin is putting in for candidacy, you should know that Wisconsin is #1 on that list.

     Next time someone questions America’s history of racism, show them this video.

     America has a long history of systemic racism: From the dehumanization of black people to justify slavery to the policies of segregation and mass incarceration that followed emancipation, the country has always made it difficult for many minorities to rise out of their literal and figurative shackles.

     The video above, from the advocacy group Equal Justice Initiative, paints that history. It goes from the moment slaves were first brought to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 to the thriving 19th-century slave trade of Montgomery, Alabama, to the Jim Crow policies of the 1870s through 1960s that segregated black Americans and kept them from voting — at times through pure terrorism. The video then goes into the subtler policies of today, which have racially disparate effects despite appearing race-neutral — including racial disparities in police use of force, the higher rates of incarceration among African Americans, and longer prison sentences black people tend to get when they’re convicted.

     The walk through history shows how black people have been consistently pushed down by US policy. The shackles of slavery deprived black Americans of any freedom, and then segregation ensured wealthier neighborhoods and better job prospects remained out of reach once they were free. When Jim Crow policies finally began collapsing under the civil rights movement, black communities were left mired in socioeconomic stagnation after decades of oppression — which led many to turn to crime as their only outlet for making ends meet. So as the war on drugs and tough-on-crime policies kicked in, black neighborhoods were more likely to be consumed by crime — and residents have faced the brunt of mass incarceration as a result.

     It’s this chain of history that groups like the Equal Justice Initiative point to when they say segregation and mass incarceration are an evolution of slavery. It’s not that the three policies are equally abhorrent and have the exact same effects, but rather that they have all helped perpetuate the systemic oppression of African Americans through US history.

485. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 6:00 am

     Curriculum for White Americans to Educate Themselves on Race and Racism–from Ferguson to Charleston

     When I teach about race and racism, I invite students to consider the following analogy: Think of racism as a gigantic societal-sized boot.

     “Which groups do you think are fighting the hardest against this boot of racism?” I ask them. Invariably, students of diverse races answer that those fighting hardest to avoid getting squashed by the boot are people of Color. (Keep in mind that I don’t ask this question on day one of our study of race. Rather, students come to this conclusion after exploring the concept of White privilege and studying the history of race and racism in the United States through multiple sources and perspectives.)

     “If that’s true,” I continue, “then who do you think is wearing the boot?” The students’ answer (though it often only reluctantly hits the air): White people.

     “If that’s true, then whose responsibility is it to stop the boot from squashing them? The people of Color already pushing upward and resisting the boot? Or the people wearing the boot–consciously or not–who contribute to a system that pushes downward?”

     Everyone has a role in ending racism, but the analogy shows how little sense it makes for only those facing the heel-end of oppression to do all the work. It’s time for White America to take on a far bigger role in taking off the boot.

     There are no doubt complexities that come with White Americans working for racial justice. White privilege can lead to a chronic case of undiagnosed entitlement, creating poor listeners, impatient speakers who talk over others, and people unaccustomed to taking orders. Nevertheless, the movement for racial justice needs more White Americans to get involved. And it’s our responsibility to help each other get involved–and get involved productively.

     I compiled this list to help White Americans do so. One positive to emerge from these difficult times is the wealth of resources now available for White Americans. Never have I seen so many ideas, options, and concrete steps to take action against racism. And we are making progress: Looks Like White Americans Are Finally Starting to Come Around on Race and Policing. A few police officers are even being held accountable–finally–for their devastating decisions.

     But so much work remains.

     Bookmark this link, there is so much material within. A lot of the articles have been posted here, but so many more have not, especially that list of articles written specifically for white people. A treasure-trove of material.

     U.S. Police Killed Someone in Mental or Emotional Crisis Every 36 Hours This Year, Report Says

     Reporting released by the Washington Post on June 30 depicts an apparently stark reality when it comes to confrontations between police and people with mental illness in the U.S. The article draws from the newspaper’s tracking of every fatal police shooting in the country in the first six moths of 2015 — 462 in all — to present an in-depth look at those confrontations involving disturbed or distressed individuals.

     During that time, police killed someone in mental or emotional crisis every 36 hours, including three men within 10 hours on April 25, the Post reports.

     In most of those cases, the paper says, officers were not called to the scene because of reports of a crime but were rather responding to concerned bystanders or loved ones. Out of the 124 shootings examined in the report, 50 involved explicitly suicidal individuals. In 45 cases, police were explicitly asked for medical assistance or called after the individual had attempted to get medical assistance elsewhere. Nearly a dozen of those killed were veterans, and several suffered from PTSD.

     Many of the responsible police agencies do not train their officers adequately to deal with distressed people, the article concludes. According to the Police Executive Research Forum, officers in training spend up to 60 hours learning to handle a gun and only eight hours each learning to neutralize taut situations and interact with mentally ill individuals. In fact, many of the tactics learned in training, such as shouting commands, can worsen the situation for already fragile people.

     “This a national crisis,” Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, told the Post. “We have to get American police to rethink how they handle encounters with the mentally ill. Training has to change.”

     Feels like a repost, but I think I had the Washington Post article (similar) previously.

     I never noticed how racist so many children’s books are until I started reading to my kids. It’s quite astounding.

     What happened to Little Black Sambo? As a white girl growing up in West Virginia in the 1970s, I remember it on my childhood bookshelf. It was on my friends’ shelves too. It may also have been in the dentist’s office, along with Highlights for Children and Joseph and His Coat of Many Colors.

     It was not on the shelves of the local day care, a center run by an entrepreneurial black woman who saw a business opportunity in the droves of young white mothers who were socialized in the 1950s and ’60s to be housewives and then dumped into the workforce by the 1970s economy.

     I remember the story primarily for its description of the tigers chasing one another round and round a tree until they melt into butter, butter that Sambo’s mother uses for a stack of crispy pancakes. In the 35 intervening years, I knew the book had been relegated to the dustbin of racist cultural artifacts, but I didn’t remember it well enough to know why.

     The young woman at the bookstore register flinched when I asked for the book and said she couldn’t order it for me; Amazon, until recently agnostic on race relations, dropped a copy in a plain brown wrapper on my doorstep. A quick skim revealed illustrations with the minstrel-show aesthetic — bright, white, round eyes, bulging red lips — of “darky” iconography.

     Before the package arrived, I had vaguely entertained the notion of reading it to my sons— I hate to waste a book — but a single glance drove the thought from my mind. One thing I hope to teach them, via reading, is sensitivity to other cultures, and this book is an ugly caricature of black history. I set it in a drawer, stuffed under some papers and hidden from my children forever.

     […]

     But a lot of these books, 35 years on, are startlingly racist, sexist, or culturally insensitive. I was enjoying our chapter-a-day of A Cricket in Times Square, for example, until I got to the stereotypical Asian dialect of the cricket-cage seller. I finesse this by simply refusing to read the dialogue in the spirit it’s intended — in our house, Sai Fong sounds like a middle-aged woman with a West Virginia accent and pretty good grammar.

     The Five Chinese Brothers, a tale of five identical brothers with slits for eyes, illustrated with broad watercolor strokes of yellow, joined Little Black Sambo in the drawer. In The Secret Garden, Mary’s maid says to her, “I thought you was a black too,” and Mary stamps her foot and says, “You thought I was a native! You dared! You don’t know anything about natives! They are not people. …” I skipped that whole book, setting it on a shelf for later, noting that it would have to be accompanied by an appropriate conversation about colonialism and ugly views of native peoples. Of the very few titles on my childhood bookshelf that featured minority characters, only Corduroy and A Snowy Day have stayed in our rotation.

     Even the stories about families — wholesome, all-American families — I now see through a different prism. A large number of the books I read in the ’70s and ’80s were written in the ’50s and ’60s. A surprising number equip the mother of the story with an apron and a broom, and confine her activities to the kitchen: In Bread and Jam for Frances, Frances’s mother is clad in a ruffled apron, tirelessly preparing all the meals Frances won’t eat. Lyle the Crocodile cooks with Mrs. Primm, also in an apron, while Mr. Primm looks on.

     Harry the Dirty Dog is tended to by a mistress with a broom, in an apron. Sylvester’s mother, also armed with an apron and a broom, stands by the dad in the wing chair. Ramona Quimby’s mother begins the series as a housewife in 1955; in the mid-’70s she goes back to work; by the mid-’80s she’s pregnant again and quits. (Evidently Mrs. Quimby starts with the problem with no name, transitions to The Second Shift, and finishes with the opt-out revolution.)

     […]

     Children’s books are indeed relentlessly white. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the School of Education, University of Wisconsin, reports that roughly 3 percent of children’s books published in 2014 were about Africans or African Americans; about 8 percent were about any kind of minorities. Lest you think this is due to so many kids’ books featuring trains and badgers and crocodiles, the director, Kathleen Horning, addresses those concerns here: In 2013, about 10 percent of books about human beings (as opposed to trains or badgers) featured people of color.

     Those numbers don’t reflect any improvement over the past couple of decades, either. Horning told me, “The numbers have been fairly stagnant over 20 years. They go up one year and down the next. We haven’t seen a steady increase.”

     Getting my boys to read books that feature minority protagonists can be challenging, simply because there aren’t that many: In a search through our local bookstore’s children’s section, I found several books that explicitly addressed race as a theme, but very few that depicted black children, for example, just doing ordinary things.

     And while there’s no shortage of books featuring female protagonists, it might be a hurdle to convince my boys to read Little Women instead of My Side of the Mountain, a “boys'” book. The YA writer Shannon Hale notes that when she speaks at school assemblies, the administrations often will grant girls permission to attend her lectures, but not boys. For male authors writing books with male protagonists, the school will allow both boys and girls to attend.

     Hale writes: “[T]he idea that girls should read about and understand boys but that boys don’t have to read about girls, that boys aren’t expected to understand and empathize with the female population of the world … this belief leads directly to rape culture.” It’s not a far leap to imagine that white children reading only about white children will stunt their empathy for people of other races.

     More at the link, including suggestions and where to find more suggestions.

     Black Twitter in Capital Letters

     Last week, the Los Angeles Times announced that it hired a reporter who is supposed to “both create stories with and pull stories from those worlds,” according to the announcement. But news of his hiring was met with two strong questions: What exactly is Black Twitter, and should a mainstream media source be let in?

     Next America turned to the man behind the popular @fivefifths. His real name is Vann Newkirk and he’s a policy analyst in Washington. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

     Excerpt:

     How does someone report on Black Twitter?

     There are two ways you can go about it. One way is the bad way, which is sort of being an aggregator. You take the surface level things, which already happens in a lot of media. I hope that he [Dexter Thomas] takes a deeper look at it. Black Twitter is not a monolith. The thing that most people call Black Twitter varies from the very specific to the greater Black experience on Twitter. It’s all part of a narrative of African-American history, African-American linguistics and anthropology. How does art develop? How do emojis and slang develop? That would have a lot of promise.

     When people say Black Twitter, does that mean specific people in conversation or is it different conversations happening amongst different people?

     I look at it as two different things. Black Twitter capitalized. And that is a very specific group of people. I always check when someone aggregates, “Black Twitter said this,” and see how many people I know. But when you look at the black experience on Twitter, there are millions of black people on Twitter that I don’t know. I only follow a couple thousand people. But there are kids in Chicago, in rural Georgia, all over the country where the slang filters through and the experience makes its way to this thing called Black Twitter in capital letters.

     Slang and culture filter through?

     That’s how you can identify Black Twitter’s influence. The example that comes to mind is the 100 emoji. Kids started using it to say, “Keeping it 100,” which is an old hip-hop phrase. They began using it. Now, it’s almost always—in a certain context—universally understood on its own as authenticity. Once it’s recognized by Black Twitter, it becomes part of mainstream culture.

     Interview continues at the link.

     Street Artists Paint Touching Tribute To Kalief Browder

     Kalief’s portrait is painted with the delicate brush strokes that Lmnopi has used to depict dozens of victims of state violence and social justice champions. The background is constructed with Gilf’s rigid, geometric lines, which she has used to create abstract maze-like patterns in many of her recent works, only here they are used to depict the image of prison bars. The words “Demand Justice” – the title of the piece – are bent into the bars next to Kalief’s gaze.

     “This is far more legible than my work often is,” Gilf told ANIMAL in a phone interview, “because I thought it was more important for the point to come through, to not be passive, to make a direct statement.”

     She said it was extremely powerful working with family, who told her that passing legislation was one thing, but having a piece like this to gather around touched them in a way that the legal process couldn’t

     “Art has the power to do that – to bring a community together around a subject like this – especially street art,” explained Gilf. “Since it is so hip right now, street art can engage people beyond the activist community, particularly when that is magnified through social media.”

     For her part, Gilf thinks the critical step in reforming Rikers and the prison system as a whole is accountability. “Some laws have been passed, but now we need to focus on enforcement. There needs to be a non-partial, third party on Rikers enforcing the laws for the guards.”

     Kalief’s brother, Akeem Browder, largely agrees. “All of the things that happened to Kalief were already illegal,” he said, “so why are we advocating to make them extra illegal? What we need to do is convict and reprimand those who have already broken the law.”
     […]

     Advocates close to Rikers think that the prison needs to be shut down completely for any reform to be successful. Five Mualimm-ak, CEO and Executive Director of the Incarcerated Nation Corporation, said that many of the successes celebrated in the current push for Rikers Reform are simply untrue. “We are told that everyone gets one hour of yard time per day, but we know how many people are in Rikers and how many people fit in the yard, and this promise is simply a mathematical impossibility. Even less possible is the promise that each inmate can have a visitor each day, and with visitation limited to an hour, most of that time is wasted transporting the inmate to the visitation, meaning people are denied access to their family, which is crucial for any type of meaningful rehabilitation.”

     Dakem Roberts, an organizer with Reform Rikers and the Jails Action Coalition, believes that internships and apprenticeships are critical for prison reform. Dakem says he’s a prison abolitionist, because prisons function as encampments of slave labor. By returning the value of people’s labor to themselves, he argues, you can begin to dismantle the prison industrial complex.

     For his part, Kalief’s brother wants everyone to stay engaged. “People have a tendency to move on from one story to the next in our culture, and each story becomes just a story, like a book or a movie. I’m asking people not to move on to the next story, but to move on to the next step. Join your community council, demand reform. From my family to everyone else’s: we appreciate this artwork and everyone’s thoughts, but what matters more is: let’s not let any other family go through this.”

     “Demand Justice” is on display in the garden of the Henley Vaporium in Soho through July.

     How Aggressive Policing Affects Police Officers Themselves. Because there shouldn’t be any doubt that it does.

     One of the questions at the heart of the national debate over race and policing is why minorities are routinely arrested for petty offenses—drinking on the sidewalk, hanging out in the park after it closes, driving with a suspended license. One reductive explanation for these arrests is that there’s simply more crime in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods. Another is that cops stereotype minorities as miscreants. But what if some of these arrests are motivated by something more official?

     That’s what a class-action lawsuit filed by several cops against the New York City Police Department alleges. The lawsuit, which was filed four months ago, takes issue with the department’s alleged implementation of quotas for arrests and court summonses. Such quotas are prohibited in New York, as well as in several other states, but the NYPD, the plaintiffs maintain, nevertheless holds officers to monthly goals for making arrests and writing tickets.

     The plaintiffs’ complaint carries troubling implications. As police officers, after all, they have great authority over the lives of other Americans. But their fundamental concern—how a focus on metrics can distort a job’s larger purpose—is not unique to police work. America’s workers are being monitored more and more closely by their managers. The number of hours worked, number of meetings attended, and even preferred Internet browser can be used to extrapolate productivity, possibly leading to an overemphasis on work that is quantifiable, to the exclusion of work that isn’t. The collection of data isn’t inherently problematic, but it does run the risk of fostering a system that rewards cops for filling jails without necessarily reducing violent crime or helping the community at large.

     The problem, the plaintiffs say, is that police commanders will often try to appease the department’s top brass by pushing their officers to make more arrests in poorer, minority neighborhoods. While there are often higher rates of serious crime in these areas, a quantitative approach means that police face pressure to respond to such crimes by arresting people for trivial reasons—or for no reason at all. If the cops don’t fulfill their quotas, according to the plaintiffs, their superiors penalize them, denying their vacation requests, assigning them to midnight shifts, or limiting their hopes of getting promoted.

     The plaintiffs, all of them minorities themselves, have been arguing that it’s tough to make a decent living and advance in their jobs without engaging in this aggressive, numbers-based style of policing. They complain that this means-to-an-end, results-based mentality can put them in a bind. Sandy Gonzalez, an officer in the Bronx and the lawsuit’s lead plaintiff, described the dynamic to me by imagining what he’d say to a hypothetical offender: “When it comes to the end of the month, and I need that number … dude, it’s your neck or mine.”

     If penalties such as denied vacation requests do indeed exist, it’s easy to see why some cops might do whatever they can to avoid them. In a city and a country where blue-collar jobs are harder and harder to come by, law enforcement still offers a clear path to the middle class and the nice things that come with it—the house in Staten Island, the two cars in the driveway, college tuition for the kids. Cops who receive positive evaluations can join specialized units and eventually rise to the coveted rank of detective, earning as much as six figures a year.

     But when officers fail to deliver the desired numbers, that path can close up quickly, some officers say. Gonzalez, for example, says he received a failing grade on an important evaluation because he hadn’t met a monthly quota. Another cop I talked to said the temptation to make unnecessary arrests can be overwhelming. The NYPD, she said, puts its own cops in “financial handcuffs.” […]

     So what’s the alternative to quotas? Unlike some critics, the plaintiffs in the NYPD lawsuit aren’t arguing for the decriminalization of minor violations. What they want is to be able to use their judgment when it comes to responding to these offenses. As Gonzalez put it, “Sometimes putting handcuffs on people isn’t the way to resolve something.”

     The opposition to quotas can transcend the usual ideological lines. It is one of the rare debates that finds Patrick Lynch, the outspoken leader of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Union, on the same side as the New York Civil Liberties Union. Even Bill Bratton, the commissioner of New York’s police force, who rose to national renown while championing numbers-based policing during his first stint as the head of the department back in the ‘90s, has recently said he intends to shift the department’s focus to “the quality of police actions, with less emphasis on their numbers, and more emphasis on our actual impact.”

     Not everyone finds this rhetoric persuasive, however. I recently talked to an officer who, speaking on the condition of anonymity because she feared repercussions at work, said she feels professional pressure to be more aggressive. She told me that her friends had been hiring her to do hair and makeup at their weddings, providing her with a little extra cash to supplement her veteran cop’s salary. Engaging in entrepreneurial efforts such as these, she said, are the only way she’s able to afford not to play the department’s numbers game.

     A woman in her forties with nearly 20 years on the job, she questioned the department’s sincerity when it came to favoring quality over quantity. “As much as they say they care about the people and the public, they don’t,” she said. “They’ll be at the community meeting saying, ‘We’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do that,’ but once roll call hits, it’s, ‘Hammer them. Give me 10 summonses.’”

     This is a problem. More at the link.

486. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 6:13 am

     Stonewall Community Remembers Jonathan Sanders

     The town of Stonewall came together as a community Sunday afternoon, to celebrate and remember the life of Jonathan Sanders. Sanders died last week, after an interaction with a police officer.

     “We’re just trying to get justice,” Franklin Allen who is a friend of Sanders said. “It’s not about black and white, it’s just about right and wrong. We’re just trying to bring Clarke County together as one.”

     Hundreds filled a ball park on River Rd. in Stonewall to gather for a celebration of the life of 39 year old Jonathan Sanders. It was a celebration that brought a community together.

     “I do understand that God, He’s got a perfect will for all of us,” Pastor of New Jerusalem Temple of God Paul Walters stated. “God decided to pull one of his flowers from us.”

     Horses, motorcycles, four wheelers, and vintage cars adorned with signs that reflected his life filled every space available. Friends say those were things Sanders enjoyed and there was no better way to celebrate his life than doing what he loved.

     “We as a community are here as one to celebrate and say that hey we understand that there are maybe some issues in our own community, but we are looking at our own community as a whole on how can we better ourselves,” Clarke County NAACP President Lawrence Kirksey said.

     People from all walks of life and races say justice is the answer they are striving for, when it comes to the death of Sanders, but that it’s important to let the judicial system work it out.

     “We’re just looking for answers,” Allen said. “I don’t think it’s no hatred or no attitude towards anybody, we want answers. Just do what’s right, that’s what’s we are looking for justice. It will take it’s course and everything will work out in the best that it could.

     “It means a lot, it’s not just the size,” Horse Riders Club friend Quashaine Morgan said. “We have people from the community, not even of our race telling us that we will get justice and we will get justice for Jonathan, that’s what we believe in.”

     Jefferson and Jackson removed as namesakes for Missouri Democratic Party’s biggest annual event

     The Missouri Democratic Party has changed the name of its longstanding biggest event, traditionally known as the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, to honor instead the state’s most famous Democrat: Harry S Truman.

     State Democratic Party chairman Roy Temple says the change was all about acknowledging Truman, a popular former president. But state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, who has called for the name-change for years, suspects the move also may be tied to her longstanding beef about naming the dinner after two presidents who owned slaves.

     Two years ago, Nasheed, D-St. Louis, had announced she wouldn’t attend the state party dinner until the name was changed. “These are two presidents that did … major harm to African Americans,’’ she said at the time.

     (Jefferson and Jackson were among 12 slave owners who became president. Missouri’s Ulysses S. Grant was the last slave owner to occupy the White House, although he no longer held slaves when he was elected president, since the practice had been outlawed by then.)

     Nasheed said someone with the state party had called her shortly before the latest state committee meeting to alert her about the planned change. “I thanked them for doing the right thing,’’ she said.

     No gun found on man who died after being pepper-sprayed, Tuscaloosa police say. As I gasp in unsurprise.

     Investigators have yet to recover a weapon from the wooded area where a suspect died Friday night after being pepper-sprayed while he allegedly resisted arrest.

     The deceased, Anthony Ware, was wanted for eluding arrest, and a caller tipped police off to his location late Friday night. The caller also said he was armed with a handgun.

     He fled into nearby woods when officers tried to approach him, and after a chase, officers were able to use pepper spray and handcuff Ware. He collapsed as police led him out of the woods, and despite CPR from officers on the scene, Ware was pronounced dead at DCH Regional Medical Center in Tuscaloosa shortly after.

     The city’s Chief of Police, Steven Anderson, said in a press conference Monday afternoon that the department is working to compile footage from TPD’s in-car and body cameras that captured the audio and video of the fatal arrest and will release it to the public and media after the family of the victim is able to see it first.

     “We hope that by doing this, we can shed some light on the incident itself, dispel some of the rumors out there, and show that we’re being as transparent as possible in our efforts to be as truthful and factual as possible about what happened,” Anderson said. “The footage will be raw and unedited, and include all the video footage from that night.”

     Anderson said some of the language and action in the videos may be disturbing to some viewers, but said the department will not edit that content out of the video.

     Anderson said he worries about the city’s response to Ware’s death in light of the deaths of several other suspects at the hands of police across the country in recent months, but said he is sure that the people of Tuscaloosa will be understanding after seeing the footage of the arrest.

     “I have great faith in the good citizens of this city,” Anderson said. “Once they have all the facts in front of them, they will understand what happened and hopefully they will not allow individuals from the outside, who are not vested and have no interest in this city, to come in here and destroy our city for their own personal gain.”

     Six officers were involved in Ware’s arrest, and none of them were placed on leave after his death.

     Note that veiled comment about ‘outside agitators’.

     ACLU, protesters sue city of Cleveland over arrests made following Brelo verdict

     A lawsuit filed against the city of Cleveland claims that police needlessly arrested protesters and retaliated against them for exercising their freedom of speech during demonstrations following Officer Michael Brelo’s acquittal.

     The protesters, all arrested on May 23, were jailed for 36 hours, though the city made plans with judges, prosecutors and attorneys to be on standby to make appearances, the lawsuit claims. While in jail, protesters heard from officers and jail guards that they were being held during the Memorial Day weekend because the city did not want disruptions of Cavaliers and Indians games that were taking place downtown that weekend, the lawsuit states.

     The lawsuit also says Deputy Chief Wayne Drummond said officers prevented the protesters’ release because it “doesn’t make much sense to cite and release the protesters and let them back out on the streets to protest again.”

     The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio filed the suit Monday on behalf of Robin Goist, Stephen McNulty, Jason Rodney and Khalil Weathers. The plaintiffs were four of the 71 people arrested in the protests that took place the day Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge John O’Donnell found Brelo not guilty in the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams in 2012.

     The protests were nonviolent but became increasingly disruptive as the day continued. By contrast, the numbers of those involved significantly dwindled by the next day, though some still protested throughout the long weekend.

     The ACLU claims that the arrests were a way to ensure that the protests became smaller and smaller.

     More details at the link.

     I’m asking white ppl to show up tonight at 6pm at SLMPD at 20th & Olive. We need to demand an end to their abuse. Last night, no more .

     Legacy of segregation lingers in Baltimore, in map form.

     Baltimore neighborhoods reflect a legacy of segregation more than half a century since the Civil Rights movement eliminated most barriers that were enshrined in law. Lines still divide the city, separating out areas where residents are overwhelmingly black from those that are diverse or mostly white.

     The differences between neighborhoods stand in contrast with the city’s average, where 30 percent of its 620,000 residents are white and 63 percent are black.

     The division is clearest in northern Baltimore, where neighborhoods west of York Road – including Guilford and Homeland – are majority white and those east of the road – including Greater Govans and Northwood – are majority black.

     The split is also evident in the neighborhoods flanking the city’s center – including Upton, Sandtown-Winchester, Oldtown and Jonestown – where the racial make-up rapidly shifts around Midtown and Downtown Baltimore.

487. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 6:24 am

     Alabama Death Row Prisoner Wins New Trial

     The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals on Friday granted a new trial to EJI client Carlos Kennedy because the trial judge violated Mr. Kennedy’s rights to due process and a fair trial.

     Carlos Kennedy was arrested in 2010 and charged with capital murder. When he first appeared in court for his arraignment, he asked for appointed counsel to be removed from the case and that he be allowed to represent himself instead. The trial court determined that Mr. Kennedy understood that representing himself would mean giving up his right to appointed counsel and granted his request. Nearly a year later, however, the trial court reversed its order and forced Mr. Kennedy to be represented by appointed counsel. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

     On appeal, Mr. Kennedy argued that his constitutional right to choose whether he wanted to represent himself at trial had been violated. In Faretta v. California, the United States Supreme Court explained that, because the defendant alone bears the consequences of a conviction, he must be free to decide whether counsel is to his advantage. The Court wrote that “his choice must be honored out of ‘that respect for the individual which is the lifeblood of the law.'”

     Accordingly, the law requires that a defendant must be allowed to represent himself if he “clearly and unequivocally” invokes the right to self-representation in a timely manner, unless he engages in “obstructionist” behavior or does not understand the right to counsel that he is waiving.

     The Court of Criminal Appeals observed that Mr. Kennedy “clearly and unequivocally” informed the trial court that he wished to represent himself at trial and did so in a timely manner, and he did not engage in any obstructionist behavior. The court unanimously ruled that the trial court abused its discretion when it forced Mr. Kennedy to be represented by appointed counsel.

     The appellate court noted that, in Faretta, the Supreme Court explained that “[t]o force a lawyer on a defendant can only lead him to believe that the law contrives against him.” Here, the court wrote, “because Kennedy had an inherent distrust of court appointed attorneys, the circuit court’s decision to force a lawyer on him put Kennedy in a position of believing that ‘the law contrives against him.'”

     The court reversed Mr. Kennedy’s conviction and death sentence and remanded for a new trial.

     President Barack Obama commutes sentences of 46 drug offenders – that doesn’t seem like a lot, considering the thousands in prison…

     President Barack Obama commuted the prison sentences of 46 drug offenders, saying in a video posted online Monday that the men and women were not “hardened criminals” and their punishments didn’t match the crimes they committed.

     Obama said the move was part of his larger attempt to reform the criminal justice system, including reviewing sentencing laws and reducing punishments for non-violent crimes. With Monday’s announcement, Obama has commuted more sentences than any president since Lyndon B. Johnson.

     “I believe that at its heart, America is a nation of second chances, and I believe these folks deserve their second chance,” Obama said in the video.

     The move brings the number of Obama’s commutations to nearly 90. Most of those have been for federal prisoners incarcerated for drug offenses who were slapped with long sentences mandated under guidelines set during a drug-and-crime wave in the 1980s. Under current sentencing guidelines most of those prisoners would have already finished serving time.

     Of the 46 prisoners whose sentences were commuted on Monday, 13 were sentenced to prison for life. Most of those commuted sentences will now end in November, a several month transition period that officials said allowed for arrangements to be made in halfway homes and other facilities.

     After they’re released, the former prisoners will be supervised by probation officers and subject to conditions that were set during their original sentencing, which is some cases includes drug testing.

     The new round of commutations comes after 22 prisoners convicted of drug crimes were granted release earlier this year. In late 2014, eight criminals were granted commutations.

     Unlike a presidential pardon, a commutation does not erase a criminal conviction, only reduces a sentence. In his presidency Obama has granted 64 pardons.

     The White House on Monday posted a letter Obama wrote to each of the 46 men and women whose sentences were commuted.

     “I am granting your application because you have demonstrated the potential to turn your life around,” Obama wrote. “Now it is up to you to make the most of this opportunity. It will not be easy, and you will confront many who doubt people with criminal records can change. Perhaps even you are unsure of how you will adjust to your new circumstances. But remember that you have the capacity to make good choices.”

     Later this week, Obama is expected to discuss his plans for criminal justice reform further. He travels Tuesday to Philadelphia to speak at the annual convention of the NAACP, and on Thursday will become the first president to visit a federal prison when he tours the El Reno facility in Oklahoma.

     Jail’s Error Allowed Charleston Shooting Suspect to Buy Gun. I’m so tired of all these excuses.

     An employee at the Lexington County jail entered the wrong information into a database of South Carolina arrests, allowing the man charged with killing nine people at a Charleston church to buy the gun authorities say was used in the attack.

     Lexington County Sheriff Jay Koon told The Associated Press on Monday the wrong information about which agency arrested Dylann Roof on a drug charge was corrected two days after his Feb. 28 arrest. That correction wasn’t sent to the State Law Enforcement Division, which maintains the records that the FBI checks.

     When the FBI did its check in April, an examiner called Lexington County deputies, who said the arrest took place in Columbia. Before the examiner could find the report, the waiting period expired and the gun was sold.

     Baltimore police contract hurts accountability, study says

     In an 11-page report, Samuel Walker, a professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, said the role of police union contracts has been ignored amid the nationwide debate and protests that erupted last fall over police and community relations.

     Walker said “offensive provisions” in the union contract, a three-year pact expiring next year, violate “best practices” across the country and should be revised to boost professionalism in the Baltimore Police Department.

     “In Baltimore, and in other cities and counties across the country, police union contracts contain provisions that impede the effective investigation of reported misconduct and shield officers who are in fact guilty of misconduct from meaningful discipline,” Walker wrote.
     […]

     Among the provisions Walker cited include the “do not call list,” the expungement of internal records and the makeup of hearing boards.

     The contract states that officers cannot be disciplined if prosecutors place them on the “do not call list” — a list of officers who are not called to testify due to credibility issues. The Maryland Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights, which provides procedural protections for officers accused of misconduct, also prohibits officers from being disciplined for being on the list.

     “Police officers possess the awesome power to deprive people of their liberty through arrest and to take human life,” Walker wrote. “The highest standards of integrity and honesty must be expected of all officers.”

     Walker said the union contract also allows officers to have unfounded, exonerated or unsustained complaints expunged after three years, violating “new best practices.”

     The Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3 declined to comment on Walker’s report. In the past, it has said that contract provisions protect officers against frivolous complaints and ensure that they receive due process when being investigated for wrongdoing.

     More on interacting with police unions at hte link.

     The Flow of Money and Equipment to Local Police, repost, lots of graphs!

     The anniversary is fast approaching. Take a look back to August of last year. A Few Horrifying Pictures From Ferguson Last Night.

488. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 7:49 am

     Here’s another from the early days of what started this thread: Enough is enough in Ferguson. It’s actually a really good reminder of the incompetence and lack of compassion and understanding displayed in Ferguson by the authorities.

     And another, with more photos. Ferguson or Iraq? Photos Unmask the Militarization of America’s Police.

     Back to today, it is no longer a local conversation, or even about one locality. Space reclaimed, history rewritten: #Columbus statue in Boston’s North End painted red, christened #BlackLivesMatter

     This is real. Police put these elementary school boys in handcuffs. Said they were robbery suspects. Then let em go.
     Not sure if there’s any more of a story than that behind it.

     Texts From Superheroes.

     Common Brings Out Foxy Brown At 2015 Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival, for a quick look at the Brooklyn hip-hop festival. Looks like a good time!

489. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 8:02 am

     509 people shot dead by police this year, and I finally get the discrepancy: Grauniad does death-by-police (all deaths) while WaPo does only those shot by police. The difference is 100 bodies.

     Revolutionary Spirit: Devin Allen, a profile of the young photographer in Baltimore.

     Devin Allen or #bydvnlln, as he is known on Instagram, went from being a guy who worked the graveyard shift at a facility for intellectually disabled people to the cover photographer of the weekly news bible, Time Magazine. I had seen his photo every five minutes in my Facebook timeline during the weekend before the now infamous CVS burning in Baltimore, and assumed that it was just another polished Reuters’ image, until an article showed up stating that 26-year-old Baltimorean Devin Allen took the photo.

     Who was this mystery photographer? Only those close to him knew what he actually looked like. Like most people, I first saw him via an image by Trae Harris that went viral, taken at a private party celebrating his cover. A lanky guy with a big afro in a simple gray t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. Its only been two months since Devin became a celebrity, and I wanted to know what it all means and feels like to him.

     The following is part of my conversation with Allen, in conjunction with his new exhibit at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum.

     Interview at the link!

     #BaltimoreUprising #baltimore #tyronewest #FreddieGray #DOJ “I never signed up for the type of brutality or discrimination that exists in our poice force today.” – Baltimore City Sgt. Lois Hopson

     the iconic image from when @blmla shut down Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. #BLM2Years #WeRememberTrayvon> Two year anniversary for #BlackLivesMatter

     Still No Answers Seven Months After Police Shoot and Kill Stephon Averyhart

     Seven months have passed since police officers from the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department shot and killed 27-year-old Stephon Averyhart during a wild chase, but the investigation is still ongoing and few details have been released. Now, the mother of the deceased wants to know why it’s taking so long — and why she has never been contacted by police since they called her to identify her son’s body.

     On February 12, Averyhart was fleeing police before he crashed his car into a telephone poll near the corner of Harney Avenue and Union Boulevard. He then jumped out of the car and ran as officers followed him on foot. Averyhart turned into an alley and then was shot dead by the officers. The officers say Averyhart pointed a gun at them first and a gun was found on the scene. But friends and relatives say he although he kept a gun for self-protection, he wasn’t the type to shoot at police; he was just running to evade getting arrested for warrants from unpaid tickets.

     The only blemishes on Averyhart’s criminal record are traffic tickets and a misdemeanor marijuana charge.

     […]

     The number of times Averyhart was shot, where on his body he was shot, whether there were witnesses, and if the police officers’ shooting was justified according to protocol are all questions she has that have not been answered by police. It’s a stark contrast to the handling of the Kajieme Powell shooting, which Chief Sam Dotson said he wanted to be as transparent as possible in order to avoid making the same mistakes the Ferguson Police Department made after the Michael Brown shooting.

     “The whole time I was thinking about the things that happened in Ferguson, and how to make sure the lessons learned in Ferguson were not lessons repeated here,” Dotson said at a hearing about the department’s use of force policy last week.

     Dotson made a point of releasing information about the Powell, including a video that captured the entire incident.

     But Averyhart was killed in February, six months before the Brown shooting that has led to increased scrutiny on police brutality — and information about Averyhart’s death is scarce.

     […]

     “I don’t think they’re investigating anything,” she says, adding that several months ago, a receptionist in the police department told her that the case was closed and ruled a “justifiable homicide,” which would run counter to what the SLMPD says today.

     Residents in the neighborhood where Averyhart was killed, including several who live in houses that are adjacent to the alley where the shooting occurred, say police haven’t talked to them. The fatal incident happened at around noon and many people were outside, including several of Averyhart’s friends, who were standing in front of a tire shop that is also adjacent to the alley.

     “The police never came around here to ask us anything,” says Paul Fields, a friend of Averyhart who lives in the neighborhood.

     That answer was repeated by several residents who live next to where the shooting occurred. At the Sharper Images barber shop on Union Boulevard where the shooting was a hot topic of conversation back in February, several men said nobody they know was ever questioned by police. The general consensus in the neighborhood seems to be that police didn’t ask anybody anything about the shooting.

     But the SLMPD denies that.

     “Homicide advised that an area canvas was conducted after the incident occurred and all witnesses who reported to officers that they saw or heard the incident were interviewed,” writes Freeman. “Investigators also went door to door in the area to determine if anyone else is the area may have witnessed the incident. If anyone knows of additional witnesses that have not spoken to investigators, they are urged to contact the Homicide Division at 444-5371.”

     Fields says he should have been talked to because he saw most of what happened.

     “Police were running with their guns drawn and when they turned the corner, they just immediately started shooting,” he says.

     As for whether Averyhart pointed a gun — Fields couldn’t have seen that because he could only see up to the corner where the fence starts. But from years of knowing Averyhart, he says the idea sounds ridiculous.

     “We are not those kinds of people and he most definitely was not,” Fields says of Averyhart, who had a reputation of being something of a mild-mannered gearhead and worked as a mechanic.

     “All Stephon did was fix cars, smoke some weed, and talk to women — that’s what he did,” says a friend at the tire shop. “He didn’t point a gun at the police. He was nonviolent.”

     But police did do some investigating in the days immediately after the shooting. What kind, exactly, is not certain.

     That is an article from September 2014. I don’t think any further investigating has been conducted.

     One Map Shows How Many People Police Have Killed in Each State So Far This Year. Three states win with a big fat ZERO each. Three states.

     In 47 out of 50 states, American police officers have killed at least one person so far this year. In some, the number of officer-involved homicides dwarfs numbers from entire countries.

     The map below, based on statistics the research collaborative Mapping Police Violence provided to Mic, shows all 605 deaths from police violence in the United States from Jan. 1 through July 10. As is evident, there’s a clear correlation between population size and the number of slayings, but certain states still stand out with particularly large numbers.

     Just three states (Rhode Island, South Dakota and Vermont) avoided any killings at all. Meanwhile, California reached a shocking 95 police killings, Texas clocked 64 and Florida was not far behind with 43. Arizona and Oklahoma are runners-up at 28 and 26, respectively.

     Keep in mind the year is only halfway over. Even the 605 killings that Mapping Police Violence tracked through July 10 alone would make the U.S. a total outlier among comparable democracies:

     […]

     [A]n Amnesty International analysis found laws regulating when and why police are allowed to kill someone in each of the 50 U.S. states fall far short of international standards. In a statement on Amnesty’s website, executive director Steven W. Hawkins said, “The fact that absolutely no U.S. state laws conform to this standard is deeply disturbing and raises serious human rights concerns. Reform is needed and it is needed immediately. Lives are at stake.”

     According to Vocativ, at current rates, U.S. police are on track to shoot dead more people per capita than the combined gun homicide rates of 19 out of 34 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group which encompasses most of the world’s richest countries.

     […]

     In almost all of these cases, however, victims face little recourse even when the circumstances seem to show officers were out of line. University of South Carolina criminologist Geoff Alpert told USA Today 98.9% of police homicides are ultimately ruled justifiable, and even those few charges of misconduct that go to court rarely result in conviction, let alone serious punishment like jail time.

490. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 8:22 am

     Thousands ride in support of Confederate flag at Marion County complex

     An estimated 2,000 vehicles, mostly motorcycles and trucks adorned with Rebel flags, took part in a rally and ride Sunday afternoon in support of keeping a Confederate flag flying in front of the McPherson Governmental Complex in Ocala.

     The event was organized by David Stone, of Ocala, and was called the Florida Southern Pride Ride. Police officials estimated participation at a couple thousand vehicles.

     The ride started about 1 p.m., and by 1:30 p.m. could be seen winding its way through Ocala.

     Participants were wearing shirts that said “heritage not hate” and talked of defending a way of life rooted in Southern traditions.

     […]

     Phil Walters, a member of the Confederate Sons of America, felt compelled to attend to defend history against what he calls “intellectual dishonesty.” Walters said the NAACP’s 1991 resolution “abhorring the Confederate Battle Flag” has set the tone for conflict and hatred.

     “According to the U.S. Congress, Confederate veterans are war veterans,” said Walters, whose branch of the Sons is named for Judah P. Benjamin, the Jewish secretary of state under Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

     “The South was fighting for states’ rights, and the Northern slaves were freed after Southern slaves. Slavery is a guilt across the human race.”

     […]

     Ocala Police Department Sgt. Erica Hay said the ride was rerouted away from the Northwoods neighborhood after some residents threatened to shoot into the procession.

     The ride was organized to support the Marion County Commission’s decision Tuesday to return the Confederate flag to a historical display in front of the McPherson Governmental Complex. The flag had been removed after a massacre at an African-American church in Charleston. The suspected shooter is a white supremacist who was photographed with Confederate flags.

     Two small protests were held last week at the county complex in opposition to the Confederate flag — which many see as a symbol of racial hatred.

     […]

     A handful of people who view the flag as a sign of disrespect also showed up at the ride, holding signs that explained why they are against the flag flying in front of a governmental building.

     Laila Abdelaziz, 23, who came to the rally from Tampa, held a sign with a quote from one of the flag’s defenders in the 1860s, whose defense of the symbol was rooted in white supremacy.

     “What if your heritage is rooted in hate?” Abdelaziz said. “You have to confront that.”

     Abdelaziz, who was born in Palestine and came to the U.S. with her parents as a child, said she is very familiar with dynamics of hatred. “I know what hatred does to people,” she said. “America has to confront the fact that someone younger than me killed people out of hatred.”

     Abdelaziz said she also came to protest the ride to speak for another part of Ocala, where her parents live and she also lived for some time.

     “This (ride) does not represent all of Ocala,” Abdelaziz said.

     In the aftermath of the Charleston killings, too much emphasis has been placed on the flag, she added. “Dylann Roof held the flag in one hand, and a gun in the other. We’ve heard more about the flag than the gun control problem in America.”

     Police plant drugs, kill couple’s dog, and nothing happens, a lawsuit alleges

     Catalano remembers how she took the dog around the perimeter of the yard on Grindon Avenue to teach him his boundaries after she rescued him. Tiny learned them, “except that he would jump the fence to play with the neighbor’s lab,” she says, speaking over the chain link fence in the back yard last week. “He wouldn’t have run into the street,” she says. On the day police shot him, Tiny was 9 years old and had hip dysplasia.

     “Tiny’s dead, Mike’s in jail,” she says the neighbor told her.

     Police had raided the house she shared with her boyfriend, Michael H. Williams. Backed by a seven-man squad from the department’s Violent Crimes Impact Division, police shot Tiny, tased another of their three dogs, and hauled Williams to jail on drug charges.

     The police found two baggies of white powder—suspected cocaine—in a flower pot on the back porch, they said. They seized a couple of hunting rifles.

     But it was all bogus, according to a lawsuit filed against the police officers. The drug raid was trumped up because a thief and confidential police informant named Terry Hubbell wanted his girlfriend—Catalano—back. And Hubbell’s pals and handlers—Detective Edgardo Hernandez and Johnson—went along with the plan to ruin Williams, the lawsuit alleges. The white powder turned out to be heroin.

     The lawsuit raises questions about the way Baltimore Police officers are trained and disciplined, about the use and monitoring of confidential informants, and about the competence of the department’s Internal Affairs Division which, despite finding none of either Catalano or William’s DNA on the drug bag, failed to make a case against any of the police involved.

     “I want those assholes to be charged with a felony,” Catalano says, “so they can never own guns, and never be police again.”

     Police lawyers had not yet responded to the court complaint when City Paper reviewed it. The department does not respond publicly to lawsuits, and the officers involved could not be reached for comment. “The 9 listed officers are active members of the police department,” Detective Rashawn Strong, a department spokesman, said in an email. “That’s all the information I have at this time.”

     […]

     Catalano arrived to find her dog dead and asked a neighbor to clean up the blood. Hubbell texted her: “Sorry to hear about tiny he was a good boy.”

     The drug charges caused Williams to be fired from his job. He went into a depression, the lawsuit says. He did not work for more than six months and, according to the complaint, “continues to suffer extreme depression, fear, embarrassment and emotional distress.” Catalano said she would ask Williams to speak to City Paper. Williams’ lawyer, Norman Smith, told the paper he advised his client not to speak to the press, and Williams did not.

     The day after the raid, Catalano found her other dog, Junior, whimpering on the street, still dragging the Taser wire a cop had shot into him the night before, the complaint says. She rushed him to the vet. Hubbell, meanwhile, texted Catalano: “I really hope jr is OK and sorry to hear about tiny but Mike is at fault not me.”

     Prosecutors dropped the drug case against Williams in November 2012, citing “a problem with the confidential informant,” the lawsuit says.

     By then the couple had taken the case to Baltimore City Police Internal Affairs. The IAD took DNA samples from Williams and Catalano to check against what was on the drugs Hernandez had claimed he found on the back porch. There was no DNA from either resident on the baggie or its contents, the suit alleges. This is what cleared Williams in the criminal case, according to the lawsuit, but “later still, the IAD informed Mr. Williams that there was insufficient evidence to proceed against the police officers.”

     Since then, Hernandez has made more than 130 criminal arrests, and Johnson has made more than 200, online court records indicate. Hernandez is assigned to the department’s Special Investigations Section. Johnson’s latest case at press time is an armed robbery case filed on June 9.

     The civil suit seeks $3 million in damages and names the nine cops on the raid, plus former Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld, who the suit alleges should have taken Hernandez’s badge for beating a suspect in another case years before (that case was settled in July of 2012—a month after the raid—for $175,000, court records indicate).

     “I didn’t own guns before this happened,” Catalano says. “We used to leave our doors and windows open. We don’t do that anymore. . . . I was raised to trust police officers, you know? Officer Friendly. It’s not like that now.”

     ‘Everybody Has a Killer in Their Family’: Growing Up Black in West St. Louis

     Low-income communities like Ferguson, located just five miles from my family’s home, were constructed so that racial supremacists could shut themselves off from black bodies. And wherever there is segregation, poverty, failing schools and menial service jobs, there will also be violence. Said violence comes from both the police state and from within, and the Black Lives Matter campaign has been rightfully confronting police brutality. But the morally messier problem of the intragroup violence that’s ravaging black folk goes virtually unaddressed on the national stage, other than the disingenuous invocation of “black-on-black crime” to deflect criticism from police departments.

     My family? We know more about such violence than any group of people I’ve ever encountered.

     All the murderers in my family have been men. Poor men, desperate men, molded in an urban enclave of poverty on St. Louis’ destitute west side. Chief among them was my father Donald. I look exactly like him with my dark skin, wide nose and prominent Adam’s apple. I’m slightly taller than he was, but extraordinarily less intimidating. Donald, who bore an uncanny physical and personality resemblance to Wesley Snipes’ New Jack City character, died in a 2004 car crash, while attempting to evade the police, a month before I became one of the few in my family to graduate from high school.

     Donald was an inconsistent presence, but a persistent nuisance in my mind. The thing that remains with me most is his murder victims.

     […]

     No one knows more about the effects of the drug war than my mother, who also battled her own drug addiction demons. I always blamed Donald, since he introduced her to drugs. When I was eight years old, the woman I still call Mommy was forced to leave our family for a few months to attend rehab. Then there were four of us kids, and I was the oldest. The family members who took us in split us up, with the two older boys going to my grandma, while my two younger sisters moved in with my auntie.

     In the fall our grandma took my siblings and me to visit Mommy two hours away in Jefferson City, Missouri. We spent a pleasant and much-needed day with our mother; we played board games, ingested some Happy Meals and cavorted in the park. But when we were forced to say our goodbyes, the tears came fast and hard. My four-year-old sister was so hurt that she began vomiting uncontrollably.

     As I got older and as I traveled and read, I realized my mother’s situation, along with that of the men in my life, were not coincidences. Our existence and our struggles were the direct product of years of anti-black socioeconomic oppression.

     Eight years after the Jefferson City trip I became aware of at least four people murdered by Donald. Botched drug deals were the typical catalysts for their deaths. “I was going around the corner and I just saw this body jumping [from the bullets] in the car,” my mother told me recently over brunch. In 2000, when my father was released from prison, after serving one of his many stints, he told me about his past. Although I already knew about his drug dealing, I was shocked when he informed me of his violent acts. I don’t remember Donald’s words verbatim, but I know he told me, “I smoked some niggas.”

     And then there was the time, when I was about nine years old, when Mommy and my stepfather were having relationship problems, I overheard Donald tell her, “You want me to take care of him? I can.”

     […]

     St. Louis police have a notorious reputation amongst the city’s black residents. One can understand why. Point an assault rifle at a poor black child caught up in a web of despair—who cares? Such recklessness by authorities is rampant in the St. Louis region. The federal investigation into the Ferguson police let non-black America see what white government officials think about poor black folk. Irresponsible. Genetically predisposed to crime. Shiftless. Doomed.

     […]

     It’s a jarring thing to realize that, while your family has lost two of its members to murder, most of the time your relatives ended the lives of other human beings. Unlike Michael Brown or Eric Garner or Walter Scott, their victims remain, for the most part, nameless and forgotten, not by their families, but by society generally. America, a country built on the lashed backs of black people, has overlooked black victims since its inception. Jill Leovy’s book, Ghettoside, highlighted the history of this circumstance. “In 1915, a South Carolina official explained the pardon of a black man who had killed another black: ‘This is the case of one negro killing another— the old familiar song.’ ”

     Yet despite the invisibility of black victims, there is a particular kind of guilt that weighs on their killers—not only are they taking the lives of individuals, they’re also fucking up the community. In 1984 my mother’s uncle, Tyrome, who was only six years older than her, was gunned down on the front stoop of her family’s house as she lay sleeping upstairs. As Leon recounted that day to me on the phone, he grew uncomfortable and eventually hung up on me; his excuse was that his favorite TV show was on.

     “That’s because your daddy, my brother Tyrome, and Leon was the reason the neighborhood was messed up,” Grandma told me, who was watching TV when the murder occurred. “They was all selling drugs and killing people.” Teddy will tell anyone who will listen that he sold drugs and committed other crimes to support a family that had been forgotten by the powers that be. On that phone call, Leon echoed Teddy: “You did what you had to do, Juan. Ain’t nobody proud, though.”

     Following Tyrome’s murder, the homicide rate in St. Louis shot up. “It was a nice neighborhood, but the same year Tyrome got killed was when all the killing started,” said my grandmother, recalling that annus horribilis.

     The legacy of violence has endured. Earlier this year the Violence Policy Center released a study that claimed Missouri was the country’s leader in black homicide victims. In 2012, Black Missourians, according to the VPC, were murdered at a staggering rate of 34.98 per 100,000—the highest of any state in the union and twice the national average. Black males, with an average age of 29, make up the vast majority of black homicide victims. This is the fourth time in the last five years that the Show Me State has garnered the grim honor. Last year Wells-Goodfellow, my home hood, saw more murders than any neighborhood in the city.

     […]

     Today, west St. Louis is just as bleak, though probably more isolated, as it was in the 1980s. The area is beset by crime and possesses all the staples of modern, urban poverty: liquor stores, storefront churches, shoddy bodegas, exploitative check cashing joints. A new crop of young, dispossessed men now run these streets, as much as one can control a dilapidated area long ignored by the city’s anti-black policies.

     My younger brother, 27, has in some ways followed in the footsteps of our kinfolk. He says he has sold drugs and harmed other poor black people, though he is apprehensive about sharing too much detail. Just a few years ago, while driving in West St. Louis with his young son in the backseat, a man with whom my brother was beefing shot at his car. “The bullet came through my two year old son’s window and hit me in the back,” my brother said. “If he [my son] had been bigger he woulda been shot in the head.”

     As he told me all this this past winter I couldn’t help but share the pain I heard in his voice. My brother, whom I love deeply, was victimized by the same sort of violence he has inflicted upon others. Worse, he has engaged in and been affected by the same sort of violence my father and our uncles perpetrated and experienced. A vicious cycle, which, it appears, won’t end anytime soon.

     The saga of Donald, Leon, Teddy, Nat, my brother, and even me are far from unique. As James Baldwin wrote, “For while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

     Ultimately—though I do sense bouts of despair in Wells-Goodfellow when I return home for visits—the people who live in the fires that defined me have managed to remain strong and resolute.

     Now I live a remarkably different life than the one I had just seven years ago. No longer do I struggle to put food in my mouth or work at a job I loathe. But my new advantages caused me to momentarily forget the spirit and fierce resilience of poor black folk—who, while lacking in treasure, are rich in hope. I can’t imagine loving a place more than that sliver of St. Louis because, despite all the hardships thrown our way, we’re still standing, sometimes just barely, but standing nonetheless.

     I asked my brother: “Are you hopeful about the future for you, St. Louis, and your son?”

     “Shit. Yeah,” he replied. “St. Louis is home. I been here all my life. I ain’t depressed about my life. It’s just a struggle.”

     Press Demands Release of Video in Fatal Calif. Police-Involved Shooting

     A lawyer for the three outlets is arguing that the public has the right to see video that was captured on the cameras in three police vehicles. The video was sealed in a federal lawsuit in which the city of Gardena, Calif., settled for $4.7 million with the family of Ricardo Diaz-Zeferino, who was shot to death by officers in June 2013, as well as a friend of Diaz-Zeferino’s who was wounded in the shooting.

     “The burden is theirs to show they’re entitled to an ongoing sealing,” Rochelle Wilcox, an attorney for the news outlets, said, according to the report. “We think they haven’t even come close to meeting their burden. … The public policy strongly supports disclosure of this video, which was taken on a public street.”

     The city’s lawyers, however, are arguing that releasing the video could lead to a “rush to judgment” against the four officers involved and cause law enforcement to reconsider use of cameras.

     “Public agencies will be forced to wrestle with the issue of whether they wish to deploy dashboard cameras and body-worn cameras for fear that this information could be obtained, released in a distorted and sensationalistic manner, and misinterpreted, leading to acts of civil disobedience, damage to property, and the potential loss of life,” the city claimed in court papers.

     Obama frees drug offenders whose terms ‘didn’t fit crimes’, via BBC.

     Crews work to remove concrete where Confederate Flag once stood at SC State House #abccola #sctweets

491. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 8:33 am

     It’s also interesting that KMOV has edited out the pepper spraying and the physical manhandling of protesters during the arrests.

     See here: Official StL Metro police version of the #BrandonClaxton protest last night. The 15-yo had her arm broken by police. Note phrase where teen allegedly charges cops with a gun, where previously he was just running away, trapped between two cop groups.

     President Obama Makes History by Commuting the Sentences of Dozens of Drug Offenders, Mic.

     Brandon Claxton: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

     A 16-year-old boy was left paralyzed after he was shot by a police officer Saturday night in St. Louis, Missouri, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.

     Brandon Claxton, who is black, was shot three times by a white officer, police said. He was holding a gun and pointed it at the officer, police claim. Claxton suffered a graze wound to his head and gunshot wounds to the arm and abdomen.

     Here’s what you need to know:
     1. Police Say the Officer Feared for His Safety After Claxton Refused to Drop the Gun

     […]

     2. Witnesses Say Claxton ‘Didn’t Point the Gun’ at the Officer
     […]

     3. His Mother Says She Hasn’t Been Able to See Her Son
     [..]

     4. His Sister Was Killed in a Shooting in 2008
     […]

     5. Protesters Gathered Outside the Police Headquarters & Some Were Arrested

     Eric Garner Case Is Settled by New York City for $5.9 Million. The current price for a black man’s life in New York City.

     New York City reached a settlement with the family of Eric Garner on Monday, agreeing to pay $5.9 million to resolve a wrongful-death claim over his killing by the police on Staten Island last July, the city comptroller and a lawyer for the family said.

     The agreement, reached a few days before the anniversary of Mr. Garner’s death, headed off one legal battle even as a federal inquiry into the killing and several others at the state and local level remain open and could provide a further accounting of how he died.

     Still, the settlement was a pivotal moment in a case that has engulfed the city since the afternoon of July 17, 2014, when two officers approached Mr. Garner as he stood unarmed on a sidewalk, and accused him of selling untaxed cigarettes. One of the officers used a chokehold — prohibited by the Police Department — to subdue him, and that was cited by the medical examiner as a cause of Mr. Garner’s death.

     […]

     The agreement came after months of halting negotiations. It was among the biggest settlements reached so far as part of a strategy by Mr. Stringer, to settle major civil rights claims even before a lawsuit is filed. He has said the aim is to save taxpayers the expense, and families the pain, of a long legal process. He said five lawyers from his office were involved in the negotiations, which ended on Monday.

     Advertisement
     Continue reading the main story

     But the resolution of the legal claim against the city did not provide any greater clarity on the actions of the officers that day or on the policing strategies that have come under criticism in the year that has followed.

     The relatives of Mr. Garner, along with Mr. Moore, are expected to discuss the settlement at a news conference scheduled for Tuesday morning at the Harlem offices of the National Action Network, led by the Rev. Al Sharpton.

     On Saturday, Mr. Garner’s family is expected to lead a rally outside the Brooklyn offices of the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York to call for a federal case to be brought against the officers involved in Mr. Garner’s death.

     […]

     The agreement with the city does not cover the private hospital that sent the responders, Richmond University Medical Center. As Mr. Garner lay on the ground, he was not given oxygen. While a hospital spokesman said there were no lawsuits against it over Mr. Garner’s death, Mr. Moore on Monday said the family had also reached a financial settlement with the hospital before a suit was filed; the amount of that agreement was confidential, he said.

     “It’s not ‘mission accomplished,’ but at least it brings a measure of justice to the family,” Mr. Moore said.Mr. de Blasio, speaking to reporters shortly before the settlement was reached, said the anniversary of Mr. Garner’s death was on his mind. “I think it’s on the mind of many New Yorkers,” the mayor said. “I think we’ve come a long way, even in the last year, in terms of bringing police and community together.”

     After the settlement, Mr. de Blasio said in a statement that he hoped “the Garner family can find some peace and finality” from it.

     “Here’s some money, case closed.” That’s what that sounds like. Almost 6 million, and still nobody’s held responsible.

     A Conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Slate.

     Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, Between the World and Me, takes the form of an open letter to the author’s son. In this short work, Coates focuses on the ways in which black Americans have been exploited and terrorized throughout American history. Like all of Coates’ work, it is passionate and occasionally angry, but tightly written and lyrical.

     Coates has been writing about race at the Atlantic since 2008. Last year, his cover story making the case for slavery reparations became one of the most read pieces in the magazine’s history. Despite his argumentative approach to journalism, Coates is, off the page, soft-spoken and solicitous. He is adamant that he is a writer, not an activist, and seems slightly bemused by his giant following on social media and among opinion-makers.

     We talked about the Charleston shooting, Obama’s forthcoming departure from the White House, and the legacy of To Kill a Mockingbird. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

     Interview at the link. Recommended reading.

492. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 8:45 am

     Double Fault in Article on Serena Williams and Body Image? I guess people complained about the racist misogyny re: Serena Williams!

     When The Times’s sports staff gave the green light to an article proposed by a frequent freelancer, Ben Rothenberg, intentions were good. Here was an opportunity to illuminate a pervasive problem in women’s sports, the old and troubling notions of what a female athlete should look like, and to do so through the views of the athletes themselves. Mr. Rothenberg even had the tennis superstar Serena Williams on the record with thoughtful quotes.

     Mr. Rothenberg and his editors said they took special pains to make the story balanced and sensitive.

     But by Friday afternoon, many readers were aghast. They were calling the article (and even The Times itself) racist and sexist. They were deploring the article’s timing, which focused on body image just when Ms. Williams was triumphing at Wimbledon. The article, they said, harmed progress in bringing equality and recognition to women’s sports — something happening that very day with New York City’s first ticker-tape parade for a team of female athletes, the World Cup champion United States soccer team.

     One longtime subscriber, Lisa Leshne, wrote to me: “Why is this even a story? Why does the newspaper feel the need to talk about Serena’s body type? What’s with the obsession over ‘perceived ideal feminine body type?’” From her point of view, “She’s a champion, she’s strong and successful, that’s the story.”

     Others were tougher still. Claire Potter, in a post on outhistory.org, wrote: “I don’t know why I am surprised that The New York Times would publish a piece that supports female body hatred, that a male reporter would support such a narrow beauty standard for women, or that women’s tennis players would be proud of their endless willingness to be gender police for each other. But I am.”

     I talked Monday morning to Mr. Rothenberg, who said he was “disappointed and surprised” by the negative reaction.

     “I knew it was going to be a touchy subject,” he said, but he was taken aback nonetheless. In retrospect, he told me, he sees some of the ways that the article could have been approached differently.

     “I wanted it to be a conversation starter,” he said. “But I should have challenged the norms rather than just stated them as a given.” He also said that a late decision to rewrite the top of the piece, putting more attention on Serena Williams, had the unfortunate effect of creating a “Serena versus everybody else” split.

     The sports editor, Jason Stallman, told me that The Times intended to present “a nuanced look at this issue, which we appreciated is a sensitive one.” He said that of the four editors who handled the piece, three were women. And he praised Mr. Rothenberg’s work, especially for his access to the players and his chronicling of Serena Williams’s dominance of the sport.

     Well aware of the criticism, Mr. Stallman said he still found the topic worthwhile: “In covering sports, we can’t not write about women’s bodies.” And, he said, male athletes come in for scrutiny, too, citing a front-page article just last week on Mets pitcher Bartolo Colon, focused on his 285-pound body, up about 100 pounds from 1997 when he joined the major leagues.

     Mr. Stallman, like Mr. Rothenberg, acknowledged that some aspects of the article might have been handled differently. The timing, coming just before Ms. Williams’s Wimbledon win on Saturday, created a “buzzkill” when fans were becoming “more and more buoyant” about the likelihood of the American player’s triumph, he said.

     […]

     Mr. Rothenberg had enviable access to top players and the kernel of an important, provocative idea. But the piece was “just so uncritical,” said Pat Griffin, professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the author of “Strong Women, Deep Closets,” and a consultant on sports and discrimination.

     “Sacrificing your femininity is a really old narrative in women’s sports,” Ms. Griffin told me by phone. “There is a whole new narrative breaking through — that women athletes come in all sizes, shapes and forms. So presenting Serena as some kind of freak, or animal-athlete, was appalling.”

     The Times article, she said, “didn’t get at the sexism and racism” just under the surface, or take into account the not-so-distant history of a sport where, for example, a lesbian tennis star like Amélie Mauresmo was derisively referred to by an opponent as “half a man.”

     And, as an aside, the author J.K. Rowling had something to say on that subject, responding to a tweet critical of Ms. Williams.

     Most of all, it’s unfortunate that this piece didn’t find a way to challenge the views expressed, instead of simply mirroring them.

     Including the perspectives of those who could have unpacked the underlying issues, while also considering the article’s timing and staying away from reductive social-media techniques – all of this could have made for a more productive conversation. And that conversation is still worth having.

     Cue cries of ‘witch hunt’ and ‘lynch mob’ against those criticizing the author of the original piece for not getting it, no matter how ‘nuanced’ he thought his article was.
     If there was nuance in it, I guess I just suck at reading.

     Robert Bates’ not guilty plea was the least interesting part of a wild morning at the courthouse. Remember Bates? Shot a man ‘by accident’, went on vacation.

     Supporters of Bob Bates ran into two obstacles heading into his arraignment Monday on second-degree manslaughter charges: They were drowned out by a street preacher and blocked from carrying signs into the courthouse.

     About 30 people stood quietly outside the Tulsa County Courthouse toting signs that read: “Families behind the badge. We support Bob Bates!” They declined to speak to media, and over their silence, a preacher yelled “Repent!” at his now-captive audience.

     Robert Bates, a former reserve Tulsa County deputy was charged with second-degree manslaughter earlier this year after he shot and killed a man during a botched undercover gun sting. The group hoped to take the signs into Bates’ hearing, but they were stymied at the courthouse entrance by none other than Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office deputies, who told them they could enter — but only if the signs stayed behind.

     It was a whirlwind day. So many supporters, opponents and reporters attended the hearing that deputies placed media members in the jury box. In most cases, such appearances are routine hearings held between a preliminary hearing and a trial. Bates pleaded not guilty, and tentatively has a trial date of Feb. 8.

     This and that else at the link.

     #PeoplesMonday in #StatenIsland #NYC marching thru streets chanting for justice for #EricGarner! #StillCantBreathe
     One year after his murder, people take the streets of Staten Island for #EricGarner. #StillCantBreathe ([photo emoticon]: @AshAgony)

     Man shot by officer while waving sword dies

     An officer shot a man who was swinging a sword at people in east Kansas City Thursday.

     The man, identified as 21-year-old Javon M. Hawkins, passed away overnight at the hospital.

     It happened in the 7800 block of Highland Avenue, just south and west of East Gregory Boulevard and The Paseo, about 4:45 p.m.

     A KCPD spokesperson said officers were told Hawkins was swinging a sword at passing vehicles and people.

     Officers found him in Blenheim Park. They said he refused officers’ commands to put the sword down.

     Spokesman Capt. Tye Grant said the man turned towards a female officer and she shot him because she feared for her safety.

     A witness said the object looked more like a metal bar than a sword, but also said the man was acting strange and she was worried for her safety.

     “I seen him down there just twirling in circles, screaming, taking off his clothes, just being strung out,” Kechelle Herring said.

     Hawkins was shot in the abdomen and taken to the hospital with critical injuries. The officer wasn’t hurt. She was placed on administrative leave, per department policy.

     Addressing the Use of Excessive Force in Baltimore: The West Coalition’s DOJ Panel Discussion, a storify.

     Saturday, July 11 The West Coalition held a panel discussing how Baltimore can address the excessive use of police force in our city. Here are video and media coverage from this rich panel discussion.

493. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 9:00 am

     Protest in St Louis continued last night: #Ferguson protesters to support #BrandonClaxton
     https://twitter.com/zahfu/status/620736847900225536“>Crowd at protest on Olive slowly growing, showin up showin out for #BrandonClaxton !
     Protest for Brandon Claxton at the St Louis PD Headquarters
     [photos]
     A legal observer here at @SLMPD counted 8 arrests. Some chanting on sidewalk starting again. #brandonclaxton

     Ferguson. One Year. #FightBack365

494. CaitieCat, Harridan of Social Justice says

     14 July 2015 at 9:30 am

     A word for you: misogynoir, misogyny aimed at Black women.

495. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 4:05 pm

     Cait
     I know the word. I don’t know if it’s mine to use. I feel weird about it when I use it, but I couldn’t really explain why.

     +++

     When the world’s largest monument to the Confederacy is now in a town with 75% African Americans

     There’s one little problem when permanent monuments to people and causes that deeply offend entire segments of the American population are built—towns change, sometimes drastically, and new generations of people arrive to either cringe at your offensive memorial or work to see it removed.

     When Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the KKK who proudly massacred hundreds of surrendered black soldiers in the Civil War, was buried with a public memorial in Memphis in 1877, little thought was given to the reality that in 2015, the mayor, the police chief, the majority of the city council, and 67 percent of the city would be African Americans. Or hell, maybe they did see it coming and the monuments were a big fuck you to the future?

     What we do know is this: the establishment of Stone Mountain Park, just a dozen miles from downtown Atlanta, the mecca of black America, was not some historically racist accident. Its origins are deeply rooted in violent racism. Now, though, the city of Stone Mountain is over 75 percent African American, in the middle of Southwest Dekalb County, which has one of the highest concentrated populations of wealthy African Americans in the nation.

     […]

     The KKK’s permanent agreement to be able to hold its meetings, rallies, and gatherings at Stone Mountain was actually in full force until the 1960s. By this time, its reputation as a racist and even dangerous place for people of color was firmly established.

     When Tyrone Brooks was a child growing up in rural Georgia, he learned from his elders that the freakish outcropping of granite east of Atlanta known as Stone Mountain was a frightful–even evil–place.

     The Ku Klux Klan marked its rebirth early this century by torching a cross upon its peak. And in olden times, his grandmother told him, black people had been lynched and thrown from the mountaintop. “I did not grow up with a good feeling about Stone Mountain,” Brooks said. “I still don’t have a good feeling about it.”

     Yet, there it stands today, the largest memorial to the Confederacy in the world.

     Now surrounded by African Americans on every side, Stone Mountain doesn’t even attempt to hide its racism. Hell, it’s damn near impossible.

     That’s why the Atlanta NAACP is calling for the entire monument to be removed:

     “My tax dollars should not be used to commemorate slavery,” Rose said.

     Rose said his group wants Confederate symbols removed from all state-owned buildings, parks and lands.

     Rose told Petersen he would start with Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

     “Those guys need to go. They can be sand-blasted off, or somebody could carefully remove a slab of that and auction it off to the highest bidder,” Rose said.

     Shackelford said she is all for a discussion as long as it’s not based on emotion.

     I agree.

     This monument was built with bad intentions. With good intentions, we can take it down and make it the universal natural wonder it was for 99.9999 percent of its history.

     Black Women Leading Change: How Evangeline Mitchell Is Tackling Diversity in Law

     Leaders are lead problem solvers. A leader’s vision moves beyond the limitations of a problem to a vision for creating change. Evangeline M. Mitchell, founder of the National Pre-Law Diversity Initiatives, Inc., is a lead problem solver who is promoting diversity and inclusion in the legal profession. For over a decade, she has committed her work to creating a pipeline for aspiring law students from diverse backgrounds to not only strive to reach their dreams of becoming an attorney but to thrive. Her publications, conferences, and summits provide students with the tools to work effectively, think critically, and advance social justice.

     Mitchell defines leadership as an action-oriented process. “Leadership is the ability to see a problem and then seek a solution and act, without sitting back and hoping and waiting for someone else to tackle it.” The process of leadership does not end here with discovery of your individual sense of agency. The next step is connecting with others and building new partnerships. Mitchell recognizes the importance of empowering others to lead. Her favorite leadership quote captures the essence of participatory leadership where each person plays an integral role in advancing a collective vision of change: “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader,” as stated by John Quincy Adams

     Mitchell’s area of passion is the law school diversity pipeline. Her fire comes from personal experience. She is a first-generation college and law school graduate. She recalls experiencing a lot of the same pitfalls as other law students who are from first-generation and socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. According to Mitchell: “The process of trying to become a lawyer was a very painful process – and when you don’t have the information and mentorship, you can feel blindsided. It was all overwhelming – from navigating the admissions process alone to the academic demands to not knowing how to process racial issues in law school and in legal work environments. My experiences and feeling very alone and alienated in them at a young age made me extremely sensitive to the issues that others from similar backgrounds face.”

     Her work disrupts this cycle of pain and frustration by providing the next generation with the tools to succeed in law school and beyond in their future careers. She made a promise and pledged a commitment to herself to make the sacrifices and do the necessary work to help others cross those hurdles through giving them early access to good insider information, resources and networking opportunities so they would fully understand what they were getting themselves into – and then if it was still something they wanted to do, they would have the tools and contacts needed to help them persist and succeed.

     More at the link.

     Dan Rodricks: From gang killing to Gray case, the book on depraved-heart murder

     The line from the murder of 15-year-old Adrian Edmonds on July 14, 1992, to the death in police custody of Freddie Gray runs from West Baltimore to the grand old courthouse on Calvert Street, to Annapolis and Maryland’s highest court, and from there into a trusted textbook on the various forms of homicide by a widely respected judge who lectures other judges on the subject.

     The common line in both cases is a legal principle that, barring a court decision otherwise, a jury will be challenged to grasp and consider this fall: depraved-heart murder.

     That is the most serious charge among those filed against the Freddie Gray Six. Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr., the driver of the Baltimore police van in which the medical examiner’s office has concluded Gray sustained his fatal injury, is alone charged with that crime. He faces several other charges, but the one that has drawn the most attention sounds like the stuff of Dickens’ Old Bailey or Calvert’s colony. But it is, in fact, a category of murder of relatively recent acceptance in Maryland.

     Don’t feel bad if you had never heard of depraved-heart murder before the charges against Goodson were announced. I hadn’t, either, and wrongly pronounced the term with emphasis on “heart,” as if the accused had been charged with attacking a vital organ.

     According to “Criminal Homicide Law,” written by Judge Charles E. Moylan Jr., a retired but still active appellate judge, it was a 1975 ruling by the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, that marked the first time Maryland identified depraved-heart murder by name, albeit in passing.

     Six years later, in another criminal case, depraved-heart murder received fuller analysis, with the Court of Appeals describing it as “a dangerous and reckless act with wanton indifference to the consequences and perils involved.”

     Additionally, the court said depraved-heart murder is “just as blameworthy, and just as worthy of punishment, when the harmful result ensues, as is the express intent to kill itself.”

     So it’s an offense more serious than, say, homicide that results from negligence.

     […]

     None of the facts of the deaths of Edmonds and Gray are the same; they are not even similar. And yet, the state has charged Goodson, the driver of the police van, with Gray’s death, suggesting that the officer exhibited the same “depraved heart” and engaged in the same malicious and reckless behavior as a gunman in a gang shootout.

     Given what we know about what happened to Gray on the day of his arrest, that strikes me as a stretch. And it likely explains why the state also charged Goodson with involuntary manslaughter, though I remain confused about the difference even after three readings of the chapter in Moylan’s book titled, “Conviction for involuntary manslaughter of the gross negligence variety not inconsistent with conviction for second-degree murder of the depraved heart variety.”

     Some of the terms to describe the two offenses are the same — “wanton,” “reckless disregard” — a fact owing to the evolution of law.

     “When the awareness of depraved-heart murder finally dawned,” Moylan notes, “most, if not all, of the choice adjectives had already been committed elsewhere.”

     The judge helpfully describes involuntary manslaughter as “junior varsity depraved heart murder.” That is, perhaps, something more palatable to a jury in the rare position of judging the criminal culpability of a cop.

     Interesting.

     Protesters arrested outside of St. Louis police headquarters for second night

     At least eight people were arrested Monday night and nine arrested Sunday night during protests outside St. Louis police headquarters downtown.

     At least one member of the clergy was arrested Monday and another was local rapper Tef Poe, who has been prominent in protests that have followed the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in August in Ferguson.

     Protesters were upset that an officer shot and injured a 16-year-old in the 2500 block of Hodiamont Avenue on Saturday night. Police say Brandon Claxton had a pistol and the officer who shot him saw the gun in the boy’s hand and believed it was pointed at him.

     On Sunday, seven were arrested for impeding the flow of traffic; two were arrested for failure to disperse. Four of the nine were also charged with resisting arrest.

     Police used pepper spray on the four who resisted arrest, said Leah Freeman, a spokeswoman for the police department. One of the protesters was taken to a hospital after she complained of an elevated heart rate after being sprayed, police say.

     The protest in front of the St. Louis Police Department headquarters, 1915 Olive Street, happened about 9:30 p.m. Sunday. A video released by police shows about 20 protesters taking part. They held a large “Black Lives Matter” sign, and a few carried American flags. They blocked traffic and threw a flag in the path of traffic, forcing westbound cars to drive over the flag or drive into the eastbound lanes.

     Eight of those arrested were adults; one was a juvenile, 15. Among them was Joshua Williams, 19, who was arrested for failure to disperse and resisting arrest. He had been arrested in December and charged with trying to set a QuikTrip on fire after a fatal police shooting in Berkeley.

     On Monday night, about 70 people gathered to protest. Protesters at times blocked traffic on Olive. Officers called the gathering an unlawful assembly.

     In addition to police violence, the protesters said they were demonstrating over the rough treatment of demonstrators arrested the night before. They said the arm of a teenage demonstrator had been broken.

     Texas officials: Schools should teach that slavery was ‘side issue’ to Civil War. Which Texas officials? Because it seems like there’s two sets of them: some for teaching history, and some for teaching a sanitized version of it.

     Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.

     And when it comes to the Civil War, children are supposed to learn that the conflict was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery” — written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict, according to some members of the state board of education.

     Slavery was a “side issue to the Civil War,” said Pat Hardy, a Republican board member, when the board adopted the standards in 2010. “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”

     The killings of nine black parishioners in a South Carolina church last month sparked a broad backlash against the Confederate battle flag , to some a symbol of Southern heritage but to others a divisive sign of slavery and racism.

     There is also a call to reexamine a quieter but just as contentious aspect of the Civil War in American society — how the history of the war, so central to our nation’s understanding of itself, is presented in public school classrooms and textbooks.

     “It’s the obvious question, it seems to me. Not only are we worried about the flags and statues and all that, but what the hell are kids learning?” said Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, a left-leaning advocacy organization that has been critical of the state’s academic standards in social studies.

     If teaching history is how society shows younger generations who they are and where they came from, the Civil War presents unique challenges, especially because of the fundamental differences in the way the cause of the war is perceived 150 years after its last battle.

     More at the link.

     Amandla Stenberg Calls Out Kylie Jenner For Cultural Appropriation

     Comment

     Amandla Stenberg Calls Out Kylie Jenner For Cultural Appropriation
     Headshot of Lilly Workneh
     Lilly Workneh
     Editor, Black Voices, The Huffington Post

     Posted: 07/12/2015 | Edited: 07/12/2015 12:52 PM EDT

     Again?

     Amandla Stenberg has schooled everyone in the past about the unfortunate reality of cultural appropriation — but it appears Kylie Jenner needed a personal reminder.

     On Saturday, Jenner — who has been busy promoting her new wig line — posted a picture to Instagram that showed the teen reality star in a crop top with her hair braided in cornrows. The caption read, “I woke up like disss.”

     The photo has since amassed more than 1 million likes — but don’t count Stenberg among the fans. Instead, the 16-year-old Hunger Games star called Jenner out by leaving a comment below the picture that blasted the reality star for appropriating black culture to her benefit.

     “When u appropriate black features and culture but fail to use ur position of power to help black Americans by directing attention towards ur wigs instead of police brutality or racism #whitegirlsdoitbetter,” Stenberg wrote, according to screenshots of her comments that were captured and shared online. (In the comment, Stenberg tagged Instagram user @novemberskyys, though it’s unclear why she did so. Stenberg’s publicist was not immediately available to clarify the context of the remark.)

     Jenner brushed off Stenberg’s criticism and responded moments later in a way that suggests she missed the point entirely.

     “Mad if I don’t. Mad if I do.. Go hang w Jaden or something,” Jenner reportedly wrote back, referring to Jaden Smith, who was Stenberg’s prom date this year.

     Jenner has been criticized for appropriating blackness before. Earlier this year, she was accused of wearing blackface in an Instagram photo she posted. The picture showed Jenner posing with much darker skin than usual above a caption that read, “What I wish I looked like all the time thank you.”

     Amid backlash, Jenner promptly deleted that photo altogether, only to upload another one from the same photo shoot soon after. The second photo addressed the earlier criticisms in its caption.

     “This is a black light and neon lights people lets all calm down,” Jenner wrote.

     As Stenberg’s criticism suggests, however, “calm down” is a tough order when a privileged and famous young white girl like Jenner parades around in cornrows and darkened skin without fully understanding that these features have been borrowed from black culture or that her actions have ramifications.

     A more important takeaway comes from Stenberg herself, who posted a video in April that reminded us all about cultural appropriation and what happens when white celebrities adopt blackness but fail to speak about the dangerous reality that comes with identifying as black.

     “Appropriation occurs when a style leads to racist generalizations or stereotypes where it originated but is deemed as high-fashion, cool or funny when the privileged take it for themselves,” she said in a video entitled “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows.”

     Before she signed off, Stenberg left viewers — and, hopefully, now Jenner too — to think about one crucial question:

     “What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture?”

496. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 4:12 pm

     Interesting, I was trying to highlight and cite only the second half of that last article.
     Protesters and police clash at police headquarters. “Clash”, they say, like it’s two equal sides in conflict, evenly matched and evenly aggressive.

     Protesters and police squared off in Downtown St. Louis Monday night.

     The clash came two days after a 16-year-old was shot by an officer over the weekend. Police said Brandon Claxton had a stolen gun and the officer feared for his life.

     At least six people were arrested at the protest outside the police station on Olive St.

     Police gave protesters several warnings before making the arrests.

     Some of those arrested were blocking traffic, some were chanting on the sidewalk.

     The spark that lit the fire was the shooting of Claxton. He was shot three times by an officer Saturday in North St. Louis.

     The Force Investigative Unit and St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office will be investigating the shooting.

     The 29-year-old officer is the standard on administrative leave.

     Claxton is charged with unlawful use of a gun and receiving stolen property. He is paralyzed, according to family members.

     #Ferguson/#MikeBrown protesters got a RESTRAINING ORDER against police last fall and police didn’t honor it properly. No consequences.
     The protest tonight for Brandon Claxton outside the SLMPD is evidence nothing has changed in St. Louis.

     Attorneys Recount Events in Jonathan Sanders Death

     Attorneys for the family of Jonathan Sanders, a black man killed last week after being stopped by a white Stonewall, Miss., police officer, recounted to the Jackson Free Press this afternoon the events leading up to Sanders’ death, based on witness testimony to investigators.

     Chokwe A. Lumumba and C.J. Lawrence, of Jackson-based Lumumba and Associates, told the Jackson Free Press that around 10 p.m. on Wednesday, July 8, Sanders, who was sitting in a buggy being pulled by a horse, observed Officer Kevin Herrington speaking with a man Sanders knew at the Cefco gas station in Stonewall.

     The attorneys say when Sanders rode by, he told Herrington to leave the man alone. The lawyers declined to identify the man at the gas station, except to say that he is white.

     Based on the testimony of other witnesses who live near where the scene played out, Herrington caught up with Sanders down the road and flashed the blue lights of his squad car. Sanders’ horse reared up, presumably frightened by the lights, knocking Sanders from the buggy and causing the headlamp he was wearing around his head to fall around his neck. The horse started to run off, and Sanders ran after him.

     According to the lawyers, witnesses say Herrington chased after Sanders, grabbing at the headlamp around his neck and pulled him to the ground, which the attorneys believe could be where early false reports came from about Herrington using a flashlight to subdue Sanders. From there, Herrington spun Sanders around and applied a headlock, they said.

     Witnesses told the lawyers that Sanders was face down with his hands underneath him; Herrington was on his knees in front of Sanders, they said. By then, several neighbors had gone outside, including a witness who told Herrington that Sanders would not be able to breathe with his face buried in the tall grass.

     The attorneys say that Herrington had a female companion with him in the police car, who was not an officer. As Herrington applied a chokehold, attorneys say, the officer instructed the female companion to remove his gun from its holster so that Sanders could not reach it; however, the woman could not unholster the weapon, but one of the witnesses was able to tell her how to remove it.

     Witnesses told the attorneys that Sanders said at least twice that he could not breathe, attorneys say. Another witness went home and got a mask that would enable them to perform CPR just in case it was needed. Attorneys say Sanders never fought the officer and did not move throughout the incident. Herrington did not let the witness perform CPR and maintained the headlock until backup and emergency-medical technicians arrived as much as 30 minutes later, the attorneys for the Sanders family say.

     The attorneys, Lumumba and Lawrence, said Sanders had no active warrants and cannot understand why Herrington would follow Sanders.

     “You can’t speed on a horse,” Lawrence said. “What crime could you have committed that would require a violent takedown?”

     Driving while black?

     An officer pulls rapper/activist @TefPoe out of a vehicle during today’s protest outside STLMPD. #BlackLivesMatter

     Michael Brown’s father says Chicago exhibit of his son is disgusting. I guess he was neither told nor asked about it by the artist (more on her next comment).

     It’s labeled as a work of art; an exhibit in Chicago featuring a life size portrayal of Michael Brown after he was killed last year in Ferguson. FOX2’s April Simpson sat down with Michael Brown Senior in an exclusive interview you will only be on FOX2.

     The new art exhibit now on display at an art gallery in Chicago is disgusting to Michael Brown Senior.

     The exhibit titled confronting truths; wake up features the works of New Orleans based artist Ti-Rock Moore.

     Among the works is a life sized mannequin of Michael Brown Junior laying face down after being shot and killed by then Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.

     Mike Brown Senior says the disturbing exhibit brings back painful memories.

     Brown says he still grieving while trying to move on.

     Demarco Davidson and Jana gamble are two of several helping Mike Sr. move on, while making a change in the community through a foundation called Chosen for Change.

497. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 4:22 pm

     Okay, so it’s less on the artist than the art.
     An Art Exhibit Revictimizes Michael Brown

     And I struggled mightily with that too-much-ness, allowing myself to get lost in my own cognitive dissonance. I have never believed in censorship, and as video after video of slain black people continue to populate my newsfeed, I have continued to voice my belief that we cannot hide from the viciousness of this white supremacist country; we cannot soften the blow of what has been done to us.

     We must stand in the tradition of Mamie Till and force this nation to reckon with its own grotesque nature, to look at the twisted mouths of our children and see what it’s capable of justifying and forgiving.

     See what it’s capable of forgetting.

     I tend to reject safe art and embrace what makes me step out of my comfort zone and feel something, so I have fought against my reaction to Moore’s piece. Some may read that as meaning that she has accomplished her mission, but they would be wrong.

     My reaction is to her having her white hands on Michael Brown’s black body when he’s not here to protect himself. It is eerily and unsurprisingly reminiscent of poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s having the audacity to read Brown’s autopsy report and call it poetry.

     Despite Moore’s assertions to the contrary, a working definition of white privilege is white artists’ belief that they can claim artistic ownership of black death, while disowning their white guilt and being applauded for their “courageousness.”

     Brown’s family, by all appearances, supports the exhibit. His mother, Lesley McSpadden, who traveled to Chicago to view it, thanked Moore and took a picture with her. His aunt, Sheila Morgan, insisted that her nephew’s story “needs to be told.”

     […]

     His death radicalized a new generation of activists who have shaped global conversations about institutionalized racism and police brutality—and the revolution is still unfolding. Though Morgan may not see it, and the white gaze grasps at distorted shadows of it through blurry vision, that has been Brown’s story since he was slain almost one year ago.

     Moore’s “art” is not original; it is a crude plagiarism of Darren Wilson’s brutality, nothing more. Memories of Brown’s desecrated body are already emblazoned across every home and every hood and every heart of every black person who has ever realized that this country never loved us at all.

     We do not need a “courageous” white artist to sign her signature on the body of our dead to understand that.

     I’m going to TW this one for dog attacks. Scarred: Bite stories reveal darker side of North Port’s award-winning police canine team

     But a Herald-Tribune investigation found that North Port’s police dogs bit at least 34 people from 2010 through 2014 — more than the combined number of bites reported by the police canine units of neighboring municipalities Sarasota, Bradenton, Palmetto, Venice and Punta Gorda during the same period.

     North Port handlers commanded their police dogs to attack unarmed juveniles and citizens whom police did not have sufficient evidence to charge with a crime. In at least two cases, police dogs bit unarmed, suicidal citizens.

     And they have department policies on their side.

     North Port’s police canine policies state canines may “assist in the pursuit, apprehension or prevent the escape of a person reasonably believed to have committed a crime.” That is an uncommon amount of leeway when compared to model policy set forth by the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

     Under North Port’s permissive policies, its police administrators who reviewed 27 bites inflicted from 2012 through 2014 found that the canine handlers and their dogs acted within department policy in each case. The one bite that was marked for further investigation resulted in a written reminder for a canine handler to “maintain control of his K9 at all times.”

     But in interviews, five city residents bitten by police dogs disputed the details in officers’ reports of their attacks. All said that North Port’s police canines maimed them.

     One man bitten in the leg claims he can no longer walk without pain. Another with a stomach puncture wound that became infected said he is in agony if he lifts 10 pounds above his head.

     Drake said she is plagued by migraines that last for days and memories that will not fade.

     “Sometimes I get flashbacks to wiping blood off my face,” she said.

     Drake and others who have been bitten say they are left with more than scars, debilitating injuries and emotional trauma — they also face crushing medical bills for which they are responsible, even though some were never charged with a crime.

     After analyzing more than 2,500 pages of police records, the Herald-Tribune discovered that 37 percent of apprehensions made by North Port’s police canine unit from 2010 through 2014 ended with a dog attack.

     […]

     North Port Police records show that more than half of the department’s bites in the last five years are attributed to police canine Tomy, the 5-year-old Belgian Malinois that bit Drake. Of the four suspects injured by North Port’s canines from January through May of this year, Tomy has bitten three.

     In 2014, 12 people were treated at local hospitals after being bitten by a North Port police dog. It was a five-year high for the department.

     North Port Police Chief Kevin Vespia declined an interview about the Herald-Tribune’s findings, citing pending litigation against the city. His department issued a written statement regarding the paper’s investigation.

     According to the statement, the police department has “reviewed all current legal authority” and found that its canine teams “have acted in accordance within the law and in keeping with best practices.”

     “K-9 usage by our Department is a result of the types of situations we encounter,” the statement read. “North Port has a much different terrain and demographics then even our immediate neighbors. The tens of thousands of wooded lots are tempting to those who want to run from the law.”

     More at the link, but do you see the subtle nod towards ‘demographics’? Closely tied to those tempted to run from the law?

     Thousands Of Inmates Await Obama Decision: ‘It’s Like Being In A Delivery Room’

     Obama is expected soon to grant clemency to a new batch of nonviolent drug offenders, an effort by his administration to counteract old, harsher penalties that are viewed as out of line with today’s approach to sentencing. This week, he will also reportedly become the first sitting president to visit a federal prison. But for the tens of thousands of federal inmates who have petitioned his administration, a shot at freedom is tantamount to a lottery ticket. The president, running into bureaucratic challenges and backlogs, will likely commute only a few dozen sentences.

     Clemency already granted. To forty-six.

     Tamir Rice: Judge Dismisses Group’s Efforts to Bring Murder Charges Against Cops In Fatal Shooting, repost, I think. About that shitty judge who won’t let the community move things forward even though official investigators are stalling like mad.

     Ferguson Commission approves 100 ‘calls to action,’ prepares to finish work by September – as Antonio French pointed out, ‘call to action’ =/= ‘action’.

     In a marathon meeting Monday night, the Ferguson Commission approved almost 100 “calls to action,” which will be part of a report sent to Gov. Jay Nixon when the commission’s work is finished in September.

     Among the measures backed by the commission were recommendations for municipal court reform. One measure said that the Missouri Supreme Court should supervise local courts, and that they be consolidated to “an appropriate number.”

     The recommendations came after Nixon signed a bill last week that further capped the amount of traffic fine revenue municipalities can take in as a share of their budgets. That bill also sets higher standards for accreditation of police departments.

     “We also gather this week with recognition of the successes that have been made,” said the Rev. Starsky Wilson, commission co-chairman. “The bill is an important step in addressing the systemic injustices that have occurred in our municipal courts.”

     After the remarks and a few presentations at the meeting held at the Emerson Family YMCA, the commission dived in to the proposals.

     The commission’s “calls to action” were divided into five categories: racial equity and reconciliation; citizen-law enforcement relations; municipal courts and governance; child well-being and education equity; and economic inequity and opportunity.

     All of the calls to action survived the scrutiny of the commission, but that was because the measures had gone through spirited debate in the preliminary phase, commissioners said.

     From here, the commission will decide which of the 100 calls to action, as well as those that were previously approved, will be presented to the governor as “signature priorities.” To make the cut, commissioners will decide which are the most “transformative, urgent and unflinching.”

     There were few sources of contention among the commissioners, besides changes to the wording of some measures.

     Speaking of activist-artists: Rapper Tef Poe returns with a new maturity, outlook on latest album

     St. Louis rapper Tef Poe knows all eyes have been on him since the shooting death of Michael Brown nearly a year ago, making his new album “War Machine III” his most important release yet.

     It’s out everywhere this week including iTunes and features the song “Hillary” on which it’s clear he’s not be casting a vote for the Presidential hopeful he calls a “Bill Clinton hand me down,” and “Prince,” which suggests the White House trembles at the mention of his name.

     In the past year, the St. Louis hip-hop favorite and LouFest veteran has assumed a very prominent role as an activist and protester in the wake of Brown’s death, a role that has taken him from a jail cell to the United Nations.

     “A lot of this music describes the paranoia and edgy emotions I have, being in certain positions with my name circulating in so many different spots. There’s a lot of stuff attached to my name and people having different assumptions about who I am and what I represent,” he says.

     Since his vocal role after Brown’s death, he says he’s assumed to be a “crazy radical cat” though he’s actually a socially awkward introvert. He has also been said to have political aspirations, which he denies.

     “When you sit down and talk to me you’ll discover I’m really not a politician. I’m not going to tell you all the different statistics about racism but I can tell you it’s wrong from a humanistic standpoint. I just show up to tell you it’s wrong, not to tell you who to vote for or what law to change. I just want to contribute what I can contribute for the betterment of our people,” he says.

     Since Ferguson he’s finding himself more than ever “chin-checking myself, making sure when I open my mouth I know what I’m talking about. I’m mindful of that fact, even before Ferguson. I’m always trying to give people the real about what’s happening in St. Louis.”

     The events in Ferguson haven’t changed Poe as an artist though he says he is a changed man.

     “I have a real strong clarity about what it means to be a black man from America and now I have a desire to educate myself.”

     With all this, he sees a different energy surrounding him now and all he can do is write about it, resulting in “War Machine III.”

     Might be worth a listen.

498. rq says

     14 July 2015 at 4:32 pm

     Police shoot man allegedly armed with knife outside Venice coffee shop

     Los Angeles police shot a man Monday afternoon outside a Venice coffee shop after he allegedly refused to drop the knife he was holding, authorities said.

     About 2 p.m., officers responded to the 600 block of Rose Avenue near Groundworks Coffee Co. following a report of disorderly conduct by a man carrying a knife, Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman Officer Jane Kim said.

     Officers ordered the man to drop a knife and he did not comply with officers’ commands, prompting police to open fire, said LAPD Officer Rosario Herrera.

     It’s unclear how many gunshots were fired or where the man was struck.

     A witness who declined to be identified told The Times that police fired twice at a man who appeared to be homeless. Video of the moments immediately following the shooting were shot by a bystander and posted on social media. The video showed a man lying on the ground, lightly waving his hands above his head before officers turned him over and handcuffed him.

     The man was taken to the hospital in unknown condition and is undergoing surgery, Herrera said.

     Protesters arrested outside of St. Louis police headquarters for second night, Post-Dispatch.

     At least one member of the clergy was arrested Monday and another was local rapper Tef Poe, who has been prominent in protests that have followed the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in August in Ferguson.

     Protesters were upset that an officer shot and injured a 16-year-old in the 2500 block of Hodiamont Avenue on Saturday night. Police say Brandon Claxton had a pistol and the officer who shot him saw the gun in the boy’s hand and believed it was pointed at him.

     On Sunday, seven were arrested for impeding the flow of traffic; two were arrested for failure to disperse. Four of the nine were also charged with resisting arrest.

     Police used pepper spray on the four who resisted arrest, said Leah Freeman, a spokeswoman for the police department. One of the protesters was taken to a hospital after she complained of an elevated heart rate after being sprayed, police say.

     The protest in front of the St. Louis Police Department headquarters, 1915 Olive Street, happened about 9:30 p.m. Sunday. A video released by police shows about 20 protesters taking part. They held a large “Black Lives Matter” sign, and a few carried American flags. They blocked traffic and threw a flag in the path of traffic, forcing westbound cars to drive over the flag or drive into the eastbound lanes.

     Eight of those arrested were adults; one was a juvenile, 15. Among them was Joshua Williams, 19, who was arrested for failure to disperse and resisting arrest. He had been arrested in December and charged with trying to set a QuikTrip on fire after a fatal police shooting in Berkeley.

     On Monday night, about 70 people gathered to protest. Protesters at times blocked traffic on Olive. Officers called the gathering an unlawful assembly.

     In addition to police violence, the protesters said they were demonstrating over the rough treatment of demonstrators arrested the night before. They said the arm of a teenage demonstrator had been broken.

     Before they marched in front of police headquarters, Bishop Derrick Robinson, a longtime protest leader, talked to the group about what happened Sunday night. “They didn’t arrest any of our white protesters last night,” Robinson said. “Even though they had white protesters in the street, they didn’t arrest any of them.”

     Is it the same text as above? Different headline, that’s for sure.

     Chokeholds, Brain Injuries, Beatings: When School Cops Go Bad

     As with the officer-involved killings that have been thrust into the national spotlight, government data on police conduct in schools is lacking. And while serious use of force by officers against school kids appears to be rare, experts also point to a troubling lack of training and oversight, and a disproportionate impact on minority and disabled students.

     Here are some of the recent cases, which Mother Jones has looked into further:

     – Chokehold and a brain injury: In March, Louisville Metro Police officer Jonathan Hardin was fired after his alleged use of force in two incidents at Olmsted Academy North middle school: He was accused of punching a 13-year-old student in the face for cutting the cafeteria line, and a week later of putting another 13-year-old student in a chokehold, allegedly knocking the student unconscious and causing a brain injury. In April, a grand jury indicted Hardin on assault and misconduct charges for the chokehold incident, and his trial is pending. The Jefferson County Attorney’s Office is also considering charges against Hardin over the punching incident, a spokesperson for the attorney’s office told Mother Jones. Hardin’s attorney declined to comment, citing the ongoing criminal litigation.
     – Beating with a baton: In May 2014, Cesar Suquet, then a 16-year-old high school student in Houston, was being escorted by an officer out of the principal’s office after a discussion about Suquet’s confiscated cell phone. Following a verbal exchange, police officer Michael Y’Barbo struck Suquet at least 18 times with a police baton, injuring him on his head, neck and elsewhere, according to the lawsuit Suquet’s family filed against the Pasadena Independent School District. In its response to the incident (which was captured on video according to court documents), the school district admitted that Y’Barbo struck Suquet but denied allegations of wrongdoing. Y’Barbo, in his response, denied striking Suquet on the head, stating that he acted “within his discretionary duties” and that his use of force was “reasonable and necessary.” A spokesperson for the school district told Mother Jones that Y’Barbo remains on regular assignment including patrol.
     – Taser-induced brain injury: In November 2013, student Noe Nino de Rivera was trying to break up a fight at Cedar Creek High School in Bastrop County, Texas, when two officers arrived and told Nino de Rivera to step back. Within moments, one of the officers, Randy McMillan, tased the 17-year-old, who fell to the ground and hit his head. Nino de Rivera was taken to a hospital, where he “underwent surgery to repair a severe brain hemorrhage and was placed in a medically induced coma,” according to the family’s lawsuit against McMillan, Bastrop County, and the school district. The teen remained in a coma for 52 days, a family attorney told CNN. Attorneys representing the county said that Nino de Rivera had failed to comply with orders and that McMillan “used the reasonable amount of necessary force to maintain and control discipline at the school.” In May 2014, a grand jury declined to indict McMillan, and that month he received a promotion. Three months later, the county agreed to pay Nino de Rivera’s family $775,000 to settle the lawsuit.

     – Shot to death: On November 12, 2010, 14-year-old Derek Lopez stepped off a school bus outside of Northside Alternative High School, near San Antonio, and punched another student, knocking him to the ground. Officer Daniel Alvarado witnessed the altercation and ordered Lopez to freeze, and then chased a fleeing Lopez to a shed behind a house, where he fatally shot him. Alvarado later testified that Lopez had “bull-rushed” him as he opened the shed door. Lopez, who was unarmed, died soon afterward. In August 2012, a grand jury declined to indict Alvarado. The Northside Independent School District school board later agreed to pay a $925,000 settlement to Lopez’s family. Alvarado has since been terminated from Northside for unrelated reasons, an attorney for the school district told Mother Jones.

     The US and state governments do not specifically collect data on police conduct in K-12 schools. But some data has been gathered at the county and state level by the ACLU and other advocacy groups, including in Texas and North Carolina. Using news reports, the Huffington Post identified at least 25 students in 13 states recently who sought medical attention after getting tased, peppersprayed, or shot with a stun gun by school resource officers.

     Sounds like a great learning environment.

     Last Minority-Owned Business on Wiped-Out Washington Heights Block Ordered to Close

     Punta Cana, the beloved Washington Heights restaurant that has stood at the corner of Broadway and West 162nd Street for at least 40 years, was ordered to vacate by August 15. The restaurant owners reached a settlement with the property owners that will let them stay until then without incurring any more rent or utilities charges. It proved to be little consolation for Jacelyn Santos, the daughter of Angel Santos, the restaurant’s owner.

     “We fought, we tried, but this is what it ends up being,” Jacelyn Santos told the Voice. “That was an uphill battle for us and we knew that the whole time.”

     In March, real estate investors Coltown Properties — which bought the building in 2012 — presented Santos and the owners of six other small businesses in the building with eviction notices and told them to vacate in 30 days. It appeared that when Coltown took ownership of the building, they declined to renew any of the commercial leases, which ultimately made it easier for them to evict the whole row of businesses. When a lease isn’t renewed, whether for a residential or commercial tenant, landlords can continue renting to the existing tenant under an implied month-to-month agreement until the tenant moves out or a new lease is negotiated. That’s essentially what happened here, says Jose Cotto, the Santos’s attorney.

     “When there’s no lease, the landlord can bring a petition to evict a commercial tenant,” Cotto tells the Voice. “Basically, there’s no defense to a holdover petition because there’s no lease. The bottom line is [Coltown] owns the building.”

     […]

     Punta Cana was given the option to stay if the family paid an extra $4,000 a month in rent and moved the restaurant to the back of the building in a narrower space. The current rent is $5,000 a month. The family couldn’t afford the extra money and moving from their storefront had no appeal.

     The restaurant, which occupies about 600 square feet and is more lunch counter than sit-down, serves family-style Dominican food until late into the night. You can order your food inside at the counter or from the window by the door. Santos remembers how they have been the go-to for the late-shift and early-morning workers — cab drivers, sanitation workers, cleaning crews. She says the property’s new owners should have taken all of that into consideration before making their demands.

     “The landlord was never ever lenient, considerate, for lack of better words, compassionate, towards us,” Jacelyn Santos says. “You can tell they weren’t working with me. They don’t take into consideration the time you’ve been there. We’re like a staple in the community; they don’t care. At the end of the day, none of that matters to them. It’s the dollar signs. Can you pay? If you cannot, then we have somebody else that can pay.”

     St. Louis police officer injured in Central West End ‘ambush,’ search on for shooter. How long until protestors are blamed?

     Louisville pair arrested after allegedly inciting riot in Shawnee Park

     Police say 21-year-old Terrell Gray was riding a motorcycle through Shawnee Park, driving through the grass, the basketball court and the food court. It was “very crowded,” with many children at the park, according to the arrest report.

     Police say they asked Gray to leave the area several times, and he responded by trying to ride the motorcycle through a crowded basketball court.

     When police told Gray his motorcycle would have to be towed, he allegedly refused to get off. An officer then tried to arrest him, and he threw his bike down and “took a bladed stance,” balling his fists, and pushing the officer a couple of times, according to the arrest report.

     At that point, police say a crowd of 60-70 people gathered around Gray and the officer and began throwing things at the officer. A woman, 57-year-old Pamela Morris, allegedly got between Gray and the officer and threw a beer can at the officer. Police say she yelled “[EXPLETIVE] the police!” and caused others to be inflamed.

     Gray allegedly yelled, “[EXPLETIVE] the police!” and made a crude sexual reference, refusing to allow officers to cuff him.

     You know what makes me glad?
     That no one was killed.

499. rq says

     15 July 2015 at 2:26 am

     Vandals scrawl ‘Charleston 2′ and wreck bishop’s car in third attack on black Florida church. But they took the confederate flag down!

     The truck belonging to the bishop of a predominantly black church in Florida was submerged, wrecked and the words “SS Charleston 2″ were scrawled on it before it was left outside the New Shiloh Christian Center over the weekend.

     Police have determined the attack, which included trashing the church’s foyer, ransacking the bistro, shattering glass and spraying fire extinguishers all over the floor, is a hate crime and are offering a reward for information leading to arrest of the perpetrators.
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     “They actually drove the vehicle into the pond, and the truck was submerged underwater,” Lashaunda Edwards, bishop Jacquelyn Gordon’s daughter, told local MyNews13. “The doors were wide open, and glass was just everywhere.”

     It’s not the first time the church in the coastal town of Melbourne has been hit.

     In March, parishioners arrived to find two of the church’s vans spray painted with threatening images and words. An eerie face with a noose around it, an upside down cross and the words “What’s the $ of ur soul” was scrawled on one.

     In February, someone set fire to the church’s storage shed and spray painted confused messages that included swastikas, the words “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great” and the words “We see U,” according to MyNew13.

     The previous two attacks were not called hate crimes, but in this weekend’s case, Melbourne police have reached out to the FBI.

     “It is a hate crime,” Melbourne police Cmdr. Dan Lynch told Florida Today.

     Umm… I would also include the previous attacks, but that’s just my opinion.

     Fire departments in America’s biggest cities are overwhelmingly white. Why?

     Sixteen percent of 2015 graduates were black, 23 percent were Latino, and 3 percent were Asian. By next summer, the department is set to have more black firefighters on its force than ever before, according to DNAInfo. And it’s no coincidence.

     The increase in diversity comes after a lawsuit filed by the Vulcan Society, a black firefighters organization, compelled the city to change its hiring practices, change entry exams, increase recruiting goals, and create a chief diversity officer position. (Last year, all parties involved in the suit were also awarded $98 million.)

     “The FDNY resisted change for decades,” said Gita Schwarz, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and an attorney in the case forced the FDNY to overhaul its hiring practices. Before the lawsuit, men of color in New York City’s fire department represented fewer than 6% of the force, according to PBS.

     The number of black firefighters “is actually lower today than it was 25 years ago,” said public advocate Betsy Gotbaum in an affidavit quoted in the Vulcan lawsuit in 2001. “The firefighter force is the least diverse ethnically, racially, and by gender of all the uniformed services in the City.”

     So, why is it important to have a diverse fire department?

     “A fire department that is open to all New Yorkers is a stronger and more competitive fire department,” said Schwarz. “The FDNY serves an extraordinarily diverse New York City community, and firefighters who reflect that diversity can develop stronger partnerships with the neighborhoods they serve.”

     A few numbers and improvements from a couple of other cities at the link.

     “On the Draft”: How Prisoners Suffer During and After Prison Transfers

     Prisoners are secretly moved through US cities every day by bus, van or even airplane. The longest trips can involve days in cramped seats with a limited range of motion; prisoners remain heavily shackled even on rest stops and during meals. Being transferred is already a disorienting experience for any prisoner, usually tearing them away from their families and friends. Prisoners are often forced to drop out of classes or lose some of their valued possessions like books or musical instruments.

     However, an issue that is rarely touched on is the brutality of the transport itself: The journey between prisons can be a traumatic experience that lingers long after the hours spent on the road.

     […]

     Officers often wait until the last possible minute to tell prisoners about an impending transfer, usually right before they are told to pack up the belongings in their cell. Most of their possessions will be transferred to their new prison, but some may lose belongings or be forced to ship them back to friends on the outside or face delays in which they arrive before their things.

     Transport sometimes begins almost immediately after packing, but often prisoners are held in solitary confinement, or in separate cells shackled to other prisoners awaiting transfer. Prisoners lose their phone and mail privileges from the time they are told they’re being moved until sometimes days after arrival at their new facilities. They aren’t allowed to communicate at any stops along the way, either, according to Martin.

     Although the prisoners are sequestered for security purposes, reducing the likelihood that outsiders will attempt to free a prisoner who’s outside a prison’s walls and in tight security, Martin explained it also rips them away from their family, especially since the trips themselves can take days, usually far longer than the time needed for a direct journey between the two sites.

     “I find it strange that I can drive from New York to Canada in a day if I really were interested in doing so, but for New York Corrections, it can take three or four days to go from New York City all the way up to Attica, which is 8 or 10 hours away,” Martin recalled.

     […]

     The buses, which are typically refitted passenger buses, often lack adequate heat or air-conditioning. Martin recalled being uncomfortably cold, but other prison buses can be dangerously hot. Last July, a prisoner from Texas sued Prisoner Transportation of America, a private transfer company, claiming she spent a two-day ride in sweltering temperatures without water.

     Of course, there are exceptions. Martin shared a rare, positive but illuminating experience from his time on the draft.

     “I was being transported from reception, which is Ulster Correctional Facility, maybe an hour and a half outside New York City, all the way up to Attica Correctional Facility,” he recalled. “I remember getting close to the prison earlier than the officers thought we’d arrive, and they pulled over at a rest stop and let us all off the bus, shackled; bought a pack of cigarettes; gave us all a cigarette and told us to ‘Chill out, smoke a cigarette because we don’t want to get there early.’ ”

     Martin explained that the correctional officers were more worried about losing the overtime pay they earned on the road than the security of dozens of prisoners. “I marvel at that attitude and what it took for them to be so bold as to stop a busload of prisoners by the side of a highway so they could get more hours out of it,” he said.

     Of course, experiences like that roadside smoke break are by far the exception. “The rest of it is horrible,” said Martin.

     More of that horribleness at the link.

     People are still burning candles for #MitchHenriquez (Netherlands)

     Eric Garner’s family demand criminal prosecution after $5.9m settlement

     The family of Eric Garner, whose death after being choked by a New York police officer spurred forward a nationwide protest movement, demanded on Tuesday that a $5.9m payout from the city be followed by criminal prosecutions.

     Speaking at a press conference in Manhattan, Garner’s relatives said the financial settlement would not quiet their calls for action from the federal government against those involved in his fatal arrest last July.

     “Don’t congratulate us,” said Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr. “This is not a victory. The victory will come when we get justice. Then we can have a victory party.”

     Garner’s daughter Erica said she would be satisfied “when we get indictments and when we get a fair trial”. She said: “This does not represent justice. We call on the Department of Justice and [attorney general] Loretta Lynch to deliver justice for my father.”
     [..]

     An attempt by media outlets and civil liberties advocates to unseal the traditionally secret transcripts of the grand jury process in Garner’s case was rejected by a judge earlier this year.

     Following the news of the settlement, Letitia James, the New York City public advocate, renewed her request for the documents to be released. “We must honour the memory of Eric Garner by ensuring a lasting legacy of reform that fixes a system that has been broken for far too long,” said James.

     The $5.9m deal will prevent the formal filing by Garner’s family of a threatened $75m lawsuit against city authorities. It was struck with just days to spare before the deadline of the first anniversary of his death.

     Garner’s family spoke on Tuesday morning at the Harlem headquarters of the National Action Network, the activist group led by the Rev Al Sharpton. “Money is not justice,” said Sharpton. “Money is a recognition of the loss of the family, but it does not deal with the criminal and other wrongs done to this and other families.”

     And I bet the authorities thought they’d just shut up once they got the money.

     The Latest Disturbing Twist in the Case of the 73-Year-Old Who Killed an Unarmed Black Man in Oklahoma

     On April 2, a 73-year-old reserve sheriff’s deputy named Robert C. Bates killed 44-year-old Eric Harris by shooting him in the back at point-blank range. On Monday, Bates pleaded not guilty to a second-degree manslaughter charge, arguing that he accidentally mistook his gun for a Taser.

     Harris’s death is unique among the bevy of recent cases involving unarmed black men being killed by law enforcement officers because Bates isn’t technically a cop, though he did reportedly serve in the Tulsa Police Department for about a year back in the 1960s. In fact, all the evidence suggests the senior citizen is an unqualified former insurance executive with a cowboy streak who’s tight with the Tulsa County Sheriff—in part because he has a history of showering gifts and political donations on the sheriff’s office.

     An affair that already reeked of cronyism got even more ridiculous on Tuesday morning, when the judge trying the case refused to recuse himself. Back on April 22, Tulsa County District Judge James Caputo disclosed that he worked at the sheriff’s for a total of six years, that his daughter is currently a civilian employee there, and that he’s known Tulsa County Sheriff Glanz for 23 years.

     “I’ve never shied away from a case yet, and I don’t intend to now,” Caputo announced in court Tuesday. Perhaps realizing how shady this all looks, Caputo put out an official statement as well.

     This might not be such an egregious conflict of interest if it weren’t for shocking revelations that have emerged in recent months about Tulsa law enforcement. For instance, as part of a 2009 internal report unearthed by theTulsa World, Sergeant Rob Lillard was assigned with finding out whether Bates was treated differently than other reserve officers. He concluded that Bates should never have been given a gun in the first place, and uncovered evidence suggesting he basically bought his way into action.

     According to the report, one internal affairs employee was told by Undersheriff Tim Albin to prepare a certificate saying that Bates had completed driver training, even though he hadn’t. Another was allegedly told by Albin that Bates only needed to complete 320 hours of field training rather than the normal 480. When asked if Bates was capable of functioning in the field, that employee told Lillard, “Nope.”

     The reserve coordinator for the sheriff’s office also had no idea what was going on. He didn’t even know Bates was in the program and tried to raise a fuss after he found out that Bates was driving a personal car equipped with police gear despite not having clearance to do so. Allegedly, he was told by Undersheriff Albin, “This is a shit sandwich, and you will just have to eat it but not acquire a taste for it.”

     Albin resigned after the 2009 report was unearthed in April. Activists have since called for Sheriff Glanz to do the same, and are also seeking a federal Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into Harris’s death. (VICE has reached out to the DOJ for comment and will update if they get back to us.)

     On June 29, Harris’s family sued Sheriff Glanz, Bates, and other officials. (Glanz has been re-elected six times since first winning the gig in 1988 but has promised not to seek another term.) The suit lays out Bates’s 50-year relationship with the Sheriff, which according to various media reports included vacations to the Bahamas and a $2,500 political donation in 2012. Bates also donated expensive forensic equipment and six vehicles to the office between 2009 and 2011, according to the complaint.

     And Bates the Reserve Cop is probably going to end up taking the fall for all those other officers who were on the scene and acting less-than-professionally.

500. rq says

     15 July 2015 at 2:37 am

     Vintage photo, c. 1940. When Harlem was in vogue. #NewYork #BlackHistory

     Witness account of officer-involved shooting in north St. Louis differs from police

     Police said several officers were called to the 2500 block of Hodiamont for an alleged larceny. Authorities said an officer on the scene fired several shots, hitting a 16-year-old male because he believed the teen was charging at him with a gun. The teen’s mother said he is paralyzed.

     Rita Collins said the teen did not run towards police, but was actually running away.

     “He was running away, he was not running towards them,” Collins said.

     Collins said police are getting more aggressive with their tactics and are putting children in danger.

     “They are shooting kids while they’re out there. When they shot that boy, there were kids out here. The little girl I was babysitting, her shoes were right where he fell,” said Collins

     And surveillance video is not being released to the public, so really, it’s police word against that of witnesses.

     Church Shooting Suspect Expected in Court Thursday

     A South Carolina prosecutor says the defendant in the Charleston church shootings is expected in court this week for a hearing on whether documents in the case will be released to the media.

     Prosecutor Scarlett Wilson tells media outlets and posted on her Twitter account that 21-year-old Dylann Roof is expected to attend Thursday’s hearing.

     Wilson says Roof will also be presented the indictments in the case. He faces nine counts of murder, three of attempted murder and a weapons charge in the June 17 shootings of nine black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church.

     Circuit Judge J.C. Nicholson has temporarily blocked the release of investigation documents, saying the release could affect Roof’s right to a fair trial.

     Media organizations, including The Associated Press, are seeking release of the records.

     Just learned the letters in the corner stand for International Association of Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors. Target picture at the range. “So I go to the range yesterday and this is the pic they had for target practice….. [young black man with gun and angry expression] I ask if he had any teenage white males I could practice shooting at and he told me I was a racist.” Reverse racism is REAL!

     Minneapolis NAACP wants reforms after police video surfaces

     The Minneapolis NAACP branch on Monday called for changes to law enforcement practices after video footage surfaced that showed a Metro Transit officer slamming a young man to the ground during a recent arrest for not paying the fare.

     In the video, an officer appears to be handcuffing a man who has his hands behind his back. When the suspect makes a slight movement, the officer is seen throwing the handcuffed man to the ground, where they both land. Other officers immediately surround the two men.

     The man in the video, Draon Armstrong, 21, of Minneapolis, is black. NAACP officials called the officer’s actions “excessive force,” which they said raises wider concerns about the treatment of black people by law enforcement in Minneapolis.

     “The video footage of Draon Armstrong being slammed to the ground by the Metro Transit officer further supports our claims that Minneapolis is one incident away from becoming Ferguson,” Jason Sole, chairman of the NAACP’s criminal justice form committee, said in a statement.

     […]

     Metro Transit Police Chief John Harrington told Fox 9 last week that the actions taken by the officer appeared to comply with department procedure.The station reported that Armstrong’s sister recorded the incident on a cellphone. She could not be reached on Monday.

     While the arrest is under review, a preliminary assessment did not find any violations of department policy,Monday.

     “The arrest in question was made after the suspect indicated they had no intention of addressing their alleged fare evasion and repeated refusals to follow the arresting officer’s lawful orders,” Drew Kerr said in a statement. “When a suspect resists arrest, officers are trained to maintain safety by bringing a suspect to the ground.”

     The NAACP said there are “more humane ways” to address those who don’t pay fares, which has become a growing problem for Metro Transit as light rail has expanded. The organization called on the Metropolitan Council to conduct an independent investigation, address concerns about racial profiling and revise Metro Transit policing procedures.

     “It is imperative that we are treated with dignity, equality and respect by Metro Transit police irrespective of race or socioeconomic status,” Minneapolis NAACP President Nekima Levy-Pounds said in a statement.

     Metro Transit officials have become more concerned in recent months about fare dodging.

     More on the Garner family demands to prosecute: Eric Garner’s Family Urges Justice Department To Prosecute Officer

     Having reached a $5.9 million settlement with New York City over Eric Garner’s death last summer, Garner’s family says they want a federal indictment of a police officer who helped restrain him. A county grand jury previously opted not to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo, who had his arm wrapped around Garner’s neck in a chokehold as Garner struggled to breathe.

     “They deserve to be prosecuted. They treated my husband like an animal,” Garner’s widow, Esaw Garner, said of the police officers who were involved.

     The U.S. Justice Department announced its own inquiry into Garner’s death last December; that inquiry is ongoing.

     Garner’s family held a news conference alongside the Rev. Al Sharpton on Tuesday, the day after their settlement with the city was announced. In addition to calling for U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to prosecute Pantaleo, the family is planning a rally Saturday to mark the anniversary of Garner’s death.

     Noting the settlement, Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, said: “Don’t congratulate us. This is not a victory. The victory will come when we get justice.”

     Sharpton said: “Money is not justice. Money is a recognition of the loss of the family. But it does not deal with the criminal wrong.” He later added, “They want justice, and they want to fight for justice for others.”