Comments

1. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

   31 July 2015 at 8:01 pm

   Thanks for creating this thread PZ.

   ****
   note to anyone reading: most of the stuff I link to will contain excerpts, but not the whole article. A large part of that is due to the issues with loading a page with tons of links. It’s extra annoying when you’re on phone trying to read this page.
   I may occasionally post the contents of an entire link, but I’ll make note of it.
   ****

   Hiring black prosecutors won’t fix the criminal justice system:

   The number of black prosecutors in the United States is shockingly low. Florida, a state where more than 16 percent of residents are black, has no black elected prosecutors. In most states that elect prosecutors, none are black. Nationwide, elected prosecutors are 95 percent white, and overwhelmingly male.

   These statistics are more skewed than the already-abysmal racial disparities among judges and lawyers. It is hard to think that any part of the law could be more racially exclusive than big law firms, where only 3 percent of attorneys are black, with even that number continuing to drop. But the realm of prosecution is the most white-dominated of all.

   These numbers are finally receiving the attention they deserve. The New York Times recently reported on a new study by the Women Donors Network, exposing just how racially exclusive these offices continue to be. The Times quotes criminal justice experts who point out that prosecutors wield an inordinate amount of power, since almost all criminal cases are resolved through plea bargains brokered by prosecutors. Thus, they reason, it is important to make sure district attorneys’ offices are not heavily racially skewed, since those offices play a large part in perpetuating racially biased criminal justice outcomes. Wouldn’t adjusting prosecutorial diversity go a long way toward rooting out that racism?

   Civil rights activists, too, have pointed out the dearth of black prosecutors. Former NAACP president Ben Jealous has said that because prosecution is a key “lever of power,” having more black prosecutors is essential in order to effect change. Melba Pearson, who heads the National Association of Black Prosecutors, says that unless defendants see “someone who looks like them” when they enter a courtroom, faith in the system is impossible. The authors of the new study emphasize that diversity is important because of the extreme concentration of power in prosecutors’ hands, from the choice as to whether to prosecute, to the ability to strike bargains with witnesses, to the plea process with defendants.

   It’s completely correct to say that prosecutors’ extreme power, combined with racial disparity, means white people end up almost exclusively in control over a large part of criminal justice decision-making. But minority representation does not automatically eliminate racism. Focusing on electing black prosecutors would be a mistake for those concerned about race and criminal justice, because the injustices inflicted by prosecutors will not disappear without far deeper change.

   To give a parallel example, some of the most brutal and unaccountable police departments in America have a majority black population of officers. The New Orleans police department is 60 percent black — exactly the same as the percentage in the city itself. Yet the department is responsible for countless infringements of civil rights, and a Justice Department investigation found that it consistently “engages in a pattern or practice of discriminatory policing in violation of constitutional and statutory law.”

   ****

   If you think racist Donald Trump is political, look at what the New York Times said about him in 1973:

   New York has known about Donald Trump for even longer. The city was introduced to him by the New York Times in 1973 when his comb over was still in its infancy and his looks were compared to Robert Redford. The headline, though, defined the real Trump: Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City.”

   Back then, his management company was accused of violating the Fair Housing Act for his 14,000 apartments in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island (he apparently hadn’t made it big enough to be in Manhattan). According to the report, Trump Management “refused to rent or negotiate rentals ‘because of race and color.’ It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not “available.”

   Naturally, Trump denied the claims. He said of the charges, “they are absolutely ridiculous. We have never discriminated and we never would.”

   He did finally come to an agreement to furnish the New York Urban League with a weekly list of vacancies and the opportunity for the Urban League to fill every fifth vacancy with qualified applicants.

   ****

   Why the police killing of Sam Dubose has Cincinnati on edge:

   Chief Jeffrey Blackwell of the Cincinnati Police Department had one major takeaway from the video that shows Samuel Dubose being killed: “The video is not good.”

   City Manager Harry Black had an equally dire assessment of the footage, according to WCPO: “It’s not a good situation. It’s a tragic situation. Someone has died that did not necessarily need to die.”

   The video had not been publicly released as of Wednesday morning. It was recorded on the body camera attached to University of Cincinnati police Officer Ray Tensing, who shot and killed Dubose, a 43-year-old unarmed black man, during an off-campus traffic stop July 19.

   In fact, Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters told reporters Wednesday that Tensing’s actions were “without question a murder,” and Tensing will face charges of murder as the result of grand jury deliberation, WCPO News reports. Tensing surrendered to Hamilton County on Wednesday afternoon.

   Two University of Cincinnati campuses have cancelled classes in anticipation of this decision, which even Tensing’s lawyer anticipated going poorly. “Given the political climate of the situation, I would not be astounded if an indictment is returned,” attorney Stuart Matthews told the Cincinnati Enquirer.

   But withholding the footage, which the Cincinnati Enquirer and other outlets have sued to have released, for this long is not sitting well with Dubose’s family, or their lawyers. The outcome of the grand jury threatens to undermine years of widely heralded progress in the city’s fraught relationship between its police and black residents.

   Author Zak Cheney-Rice goes on to lay out four reasons.

   ****
   #AllLionsMatter Parodies the Fact That People Are More Outraged Over Cecil the Dead Lion Than Slain Black People:

   You had to be living under a rock this week if you didn’t hear the sad story of Cecil, the lion in Zimbabwe who was lured out of his natural habitat, shot with an arrow and tracked for two days while he slowly died.

   Cecil was finally shot with a rifle, skinned and decapitated—a hunt reportedly orchestrated by an American dentist named Walter Palmer, who hired a local hunter to help him. People have been protesting online, widely condemning Palmer for the killing. Folks became even more enraged and saddened when they heard reports about the ripple effect the death would likely have on Cecil’s pride: Experts say that another lion will kill all of Cecil’s cubs in order to establish his dominance and make way for his own bloodline.

   But the widespread outcry made black Twitter wonder where this level of outrage and sympathy was regarding the killings of black people like Eric Garner and Walter Scott, since they, too, left behind children who are now at a disadvantage.

   That’s how the #AllLionsMatter hashtag was birthed. A takeoff of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, it sheds light on the irony that a lion’s death has sparked all of this activism, and yet some of the same people calling for Palmer’s head have tweeted nary a post, or marched nary a mile, for the lost lives of Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride.

   Take a look at some of the memes. Black Twitter created it, so you know it’s funny and insightful stuff.

   Just another demonstration of the brilliance of black Twitter.

   Following the above are several Tweets under the hashtag.

2. Haven Monahan says

   31 July 2015 at 9:05 pm

3. Ice Swimmer says

   31 July 2015 at 11:35 pm

   The McWhorter article was painfull to read. He used a lot of words to present very few facts.

4. Martin Lee says

   31 July 2015 at 11:45 pm

   Tony,
   I love your writing, and I think this is a very good idea for a thread – although I fear for its long-term stability given the nature of these online debates.
   I literally just picked up Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir today (the latest book was sold out – which is encouraging!), but I look forward to following this thread.

   I agree that hiring Black prosecutors in the US won’t change anything for the simple reason that this is a systemic issue. The SYSTEM needs to be changed, not just the pawns in it. It’s the same with the police – Black police officers aren’t the main problem – it’s the system of police they are operating in.

   I also don’t believe for a second that ‘racist’ Donald Trump is political, since this strategy seems far to short sighted to work for him in the political future.

5. rq says

   1 August 2015 at 1:41 am

   Martin Lee
   Please see here, that thread and its previous iterations, which have been going on for nearly a year, with no major upsets and loads of links. There’s hours of reading (I could say required reading) over there, and a lot of background information for things that will appear here.
   It would just be wonderful to have more people contributing.

   +++

   And on that note, I’m going to finish up there, so as not to inundate this clean new thread, and when that one dies its natural death (or until August 9, I’m not sure which comes first), I’ll move back over here. But I’ll be keeping an eye on this thread.

6. rq says

   1 August 2015 at 1:46 am

   I also don’t believe for a second that ‘racist’ Donald Trump is political, since this strategy seems far to short sighted to work for him in the political future.

   This made me laugh. Rob Ford really did happen to Toronto, you know. :D

7. Charles Sullivan says

   1 August 2015 at 2:25 am

   I’d like to recommend a book that Ophelia Benson mentioned a month or so ago. I’m reading it now. Very disturbing yet insightful.
   The book it called “Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow” by David Oshinsky.

8. Gar Lipow says

   1 August 2015 at 2:44 am

   I’d like to expand just a little on the first link. A big part of the problem is that prosecutors are dependent on the police to secure convictions. That means prosecutors mostly won’t prosecute police officers. Exceptions will be weeded out by police sabotage of their cases and opposition for reelections (or pressure on other elected officials where prosecutors are appointed). That is why, if we want to do something about police brutality and police racism, one piece of the puzzle is permanent independent prosecutors who do nothing but prosecute cases of police abuse, from petty harassment all the way to corruption and murder. There is on one sliver bullet, but prosecutors focuses on police abuses of power, separate from normal prosecutors offices, are an essential part.

   Body cameras are another, but only if there are penalties for turning them off improperly, and with someone other than the police having custody of the recordings. Otherwise, police will adapt, turning the cameras off at critical moments when they are planning to go “rogue” (scare quotes because part of the system). There was a case in Florida a few years ago where a welfare check by police turned into a police murder, and the police turning the camera off was recorded by a monitoring system that had initially summoned the police.

9. Gar Lipow says

   1 August 2015 at 2:45 am

   I meant to say “no one silver bullet” not “on one silver bullet”.

10. rq says

    1 August 2015 at 3:15 am

    I read the McWhorter article. I think I filled up an entire Bingo card: black-on-black crime, reverse racism, etc.
    It’s fine as an analogy until you remember that racism (institutionalized and often personalized) is real, unlike god(s). He separates current activism from policy changes, without realizing that these two things are fully entwined. And the comparison of acknowledging white privilege and self-flagellation… well, there’s something of the witch-hunt rhetoric in there – a bit over the top.
    Basically, he complains about Antiracism because it means white people have to care more than they currently do. Oh, the agony.

11. addicted44 says

    1 August 2015 at 10:05 am

    I couldnt finish that McWhorter article. Hopefully it got better in the 2nd half, because there were literally 0 points being made in the 1st half, other than making strained analogies to religious worship.

12. anbheal says

    1 August 2015 at 10:30 am

    http://remezcla.com/features/the-secret-history-of-how-mexico-pushed-baseball-toward-racial-integration/ — an interesting bit of arcana.

13. ledasmom says

    1 August 2015 at 12:40 pm

    The McWhorter article was pretty bad. I’m not sure there’s a single cliche he missed – black-on-black crime, Obama, IQ. I feel as if I could point people at it and say: Don’t.

14. treefrogdundee says

    1 August 2015 at 1:54 pm

    I think the biggest issue with racism in this country is that far too many people think that it just up and vaporized by the end of the 1960s. I don’t think this speaks to any inherent racist attitude among the population, more so their inability to focus for more than 15 seconds. This provides cover for those last lingering segments that do represent institutional racism (Ferguson, etc). Fortunately, as technology forces the aforementioned dreamers to come to grips with reality, I think these last vestiges will find it harder and harder to hide from sunlight. Then that will leave the massive socioeconomic disparity that leads to racism by default, but that is another story…

15. Martin Lee says

    1 August 2015 at 2:57 pm

    Hi rq – I’m new in here. I’m about to go read that thread over. Go gentle!

    That being said:

    This made me laugh. Rob Ford really did happen to Toronto, you know. :D

    You realize that Rob Ford ain’t mayor anymore…

    On the topic of Trump, the man has a clear history of making ridiculous racist comments which (from my point of view) all seem to stem from his clear position of white privilege. He views himself at the top of the pedestal, and views all those not on that pedestal as below him. This hasn’t changed since his run for the Republican nomination – it’s become more visible as he’s gotten press for it.

    His comments on Oprah in 1988 even sound like they’re coming from a racist point of view:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEPs17_AkTI

    United States-Third World Relations in the New World Order By Abbas P. Grammy, C. Kaye Bragg clearly points out that he’s completely wrong (during the 80’s Kuwait was starting to suffer from their worst depression in decades). But Trump is playing into the racist image of middle eastern people being affluent – wealthy oil tycoons.

    My point is that this isn’t a new image for Trump. This isn’t being put on for the media for the sake of the Republicans. This appeals to many of the Republicans because, like Trump, they hold these racist values and images.

    The question for me is how do we get them to recognize that it exists. It’s like arguing with a creationist who believes in microevolution, but not ‘real evolution’. They just cannot join the dots between the evidence and the final outcome.

    How do we bridge that gap?

16. rq says

    1 August 2015 at 3:15 pm

    Martin Lee
    I know Rob Ford isn’t mayor anymore. But he still got elected and managed to do some damage, which is the key point here. It might be a lot more difficult to get rid of Trump, is all I’m saying. :)
    Do you really think that Republicans are unaware that their views are racist? Because I’m inclined to think that they just don’t care.

17. addicted44 says

    1 August 2015 at 7:14 pm

    @14 “that will leave the massive socioeconomic disparity that leads to racism by default”

    I think you’ve got the causation backwards, for the US at least. It’s racism which leads to poor whites supporting policies that hurt them in order to benefit the extreme rich.

    Why Doesn’t the United States Have
    a European-Style Welfare State?

    Racial discord plays a critical role in determining beliefs about the poor.
    Since racial minorities are highly overrepresented among the poorest
    Americans, any income-based redistribution measures will redistribute
    disproportionately to these minorities. Opponents of redistribution in the
    United States have regularly used race-based rhetoric to resist left-wing
    policies. Across countries, racial fragmentation is a powerful predictor of
    redistribution. 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.

18. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    1 August 2015 at 8:56 pm

    Martin Lee @4:

    Tony,
    I love your writing, and I think this is a very good idea for a thread – although I fear for its long-term stability given the nature of these online debates.
    I literally just picked up Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir today (the latest book was sold out – which is encouraging!), but I look forward to following this thread.

    As rq mentioned already, there’s been a stable racism-based thread (in different incarnations) going for very nearly a year at this point. Granted that may not be your idea of ‘long-term’, but I’d think it is for a blog.
    Also, whenever I find myself employed again with some extra income, I really, really want to get Coates’ book.
    (btw, thank you for the compliment on my writing; if you haven’t checked it out, I have a blog which you can access through my nym)

    ****
    Speaking of Ta-Nehisi Coates, I am absolutely thrilled at the possibility that he might be writing a comic book for Marvel. It hasn’t been confirmed, but it seems to be a rumor with some strong legs.
    Is Ta-Nehisi Coates writing a new comic book for Marvel?
    He is a fan of Marvel Comics.
    In May 2015, he received an invitation by upper management at Marvel to talk about writing for them.
    Marvel’s Editor-In-Chief Axel Alonso recently said:

    Actions speak louder than words. We are experiencing a lull in African-American writers at this moment, but it is temporary. We will be announcing new series very soon that will prove that. I’m talking about new voices, familiar voices and one writer whose voice is heard round the world

    Again, none of this is set in stone. It is, I think, slightly more than a rumor. But dammit, the idea of one of the best journalists (and one with a strong social justice bent) of today writing comics-and most likely a comic book featuring characters of color-fills me with such joy. I was talking to a friend a few days ago about how I wish I had half the writing talent of Ta-Nehisi Coates. I’m in awe of his skills as a writer, but I also love how he communicates about racism (really, how he communicates on anything). He speaks in such a way that-as my mother put it when I was a child-a Martian could understand. To know that he loves comic books too? Dude can I have your autograph?!

19. Haven Monahan says

    1 August 2015 at 9:23 pm

20. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    1 August 2015 at 9:41 pm

    Haven Monahan,

    Please feel free to add to the conversation, but this is not the place for argument; increase the information, not the conflict.

    Your coments don’t add to the conversation, or increase information, They are something else.

21. Martin Lee says

    1 August 2015 at 9:55 pm

    rq,
    When Rob Ford was elected, his opponents largely didn’t go into his past drug abuses (Canadian politics can be so… nice). Your comparison between him and his election campaign and Donald Trump is, in my opinion, a big red herring. Donald Trump clearly holds racist opinions, and seems incapable of holding them to himself. His racism is not a display for election it’s just him. Rob Ford was clearly an addict, but was able to tuck it away for a while before it got the best of him.

    Tony,
    I have read parts of your blog (since spotting this thread), hence my comments! I haven’t read Ta-Nehisi yet, but I’m very much looking forward to it.

    Haven,
    Dr Ben Carson tropes out the same language used by the rest of the republicans:

    If we as a society could focus the same kind of attention on the everyday murderous carnage that threatens the vitality of many of our cities, perhaps some meaningful solutions could be found.

    Growing up in inner-city America, I witnessed many instances of premature death, usually inflicted by other inner-city residents.
    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/23/carson-rising-from-the-ashes/

    is CLEARLY making allusions to the old ‘black on black crime’ story which has been hashed out dozens of times.
    He appeals to the core conservative tropes of “you can just work your way out of poverty” with nonsense like “Even in an economy that is stagnant, it is still relatively easy to obtain a good job when one has acquired the requisite knowledge and skills. Many sophisticated jobs go begging or have to be filled by foreigners because we are not producing technical graduates in sufficient numbers.”
    I guess all the graduates working at supermarkets are just doing it wrong?

    I guess the three years I spent working security with my Ph.D in Chemistry were all just imaginary? Maybe I’ve failed some key life skill…

    Curiously, he advocates for better access to education here but then suggests that you should work for it yourself here.

    He’s Republican through and through, and his policies and comments miss the mark. They make no suggestion of improvements, merely point out the holes in the current policies. I’m less than impressed.

22. Haven Monahan says

    1 August 2015 at 9:55 pm

23. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    1 August 2015 at 10:02 pm

    How about posting your thoughts (or some interesting articles) on race in America and actually contributing to the discussion?

    Question, is your links to pure opinions by a conservative, or do they contain links to the academic literature found through places like Google Scholar? The former, is controversial, and not evidence.

24. Haven Monahan says

    1 August 2015 at 10:07 pm

25. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    1 August 2015 at 10:14 pm

    Haven Monahan:
    Ben Carson is relevant to this thread. Just not in the way I think you mean.
    On the one hand he is an example of an African-American man in the US who has achieved success and fame. He has risen to a place than many blacks can only dream of. He was a respected neurosurgeon and is a presidential candidate. That is something noteworthy.
    OTOH, he is misogynistic, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and a conservative fundie who thinks the United States is (or should be) a theocracy. For my part, the only type of links involving him that I would produce for this thread would be this:
    Ben Carson thinks Black Lives Matter is ‘silly’:

    Since the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York, Trayvon Martin in Florida, and countless others, “Black Lives Matter” has become a rallying call for a group of Americans unfairly targeted by police. Taking the message from protests to politicians, the movement has mounted pressure on 2016 presidential candidates to recognize the need for policies to address the disproportionate risk black Americans face of death in the hands of police.
    But not all candidates are receptive to that message. On Friday, Ben Carson, the only African American candidate from either party vying for the presidency, spoke at a conference organized by black conservative group Freedom’s Journal Institute (FJI) and titled “In Defense of Life: Why All Lives Matter.”
    Candidates on both the left and right have been criticized for their declaration of those words — “All Lives Matter” — diminishing the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement, which is asking people to recognize that black lives are devalued by our criminal justice system. Ben Carson, however, told ThinkProgress this week he sees the whole movement as divisive.
    “We need to talk about what the real issues are and not get caught up in silliness like this matters or that matters,” he said at a rally to defund Planned Parenthood Tuesday outside the U.S. Capitol, where protesters held signs reading “Unborn Lives Matter.”
    “Of course all lives matter. I don’t want to get into it, it’s so silly,” he continued, laughing to himself. “Black lives are part of all lives, right? When we’re talking about a culture of life, then we ought to be talking about a culture of life and not allow ourselves to get caught up in all the divisive rhetoric and terminology and political correctness. It’s the reason we can’t make any progress as a society.”

    Ben Carson is a modern-day Uncle Tom. His dismissive attitude towards the Black Lives Matter movement is in line with many, many white USAmericans who don’t see “what all the fuss is”. I don’t know why he doesn’t recognize the suffering of African-Americans in this country and how said suffering is intertwined with their race, but he does. And in so doing, he helps to perpetuate the culture of white supremacy in the United States by giving it a pseudo-legitimacy as a black man. He is that prominent black man that white people can point to and say-
    A: “I’m not racist, I love Ben Carson”
    and
    B: ” See, if a black man says Black Lives Matter is stupid, then it validates my thoughts on those thugs”.

    Along with the rest of the Republican contenders for the presidency, Ben Carson’s words and actions help to further the suffering of black people in this country and that is one of the many, many reasons I despise the fuck out of that man.

    ****

    As an aside, I don’t recommend you continue down this path:

    I know many people here might dismiss him outright because he is a Republican, but as he points out, liberal Democrats have run places like Detroit, Baltimore, Washington DC and New Orleans for decades and have not effectively helped improve conditions for People of Color who live in those cities.,

    Such rhetoric has been common among various conservative critics of this site as well as Libertarians. Discussions involving this inevitably turn into arguments and that’s exactly what PZ does not want in this thread. Please consider that before you add anything further.

26. Haven Monahan says

    1 August 2015 at 10:32 pm

27. echidna says

    1 August 2015 at 10:35 pm

    Haven,
    I read the first of articles linked to in #19. A brief synopsis of the article (which would have been a helpful thing for you to provide) is that government initiatives to combat racism have had unintended consequences, therefore (final paragraph):

    based on the history of failed socialist experiments in this country, entrusting the government to get it right can prove downright dangerous.

    My view is that Dr. Carson doesn’t propose a single helpful idea or insight – it’s just an anti-government screed. You clearly think differently, unless you are trolling. Why did you think it would be a useful link to share?

28. Martin Lee says

    1 August 2015 at 10:39 pm

    Haven,

    I’ve posted a commentary which uses your links to back up what Tony has said.

    Also, Tony’s the moderator (along with rq). It IS up to them.

29. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    1 August 2015 at 10:46 pm

    Haven @26:

    I think the conversation would be a lot more productive if you would outline your specific objections to Dr. Carson’s views, rather than dismissing him by the ad-hominem that he is a conservative and using vicious smears like “Uncle Tom”.

    He is misogynistic, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and a theocratic asshole. Those are many of my objections to the man.
    I did not engage in any ad hominem attack. To do that, I would have had to attack him or his character in an attempt to refute any of his arguments. I did not attempt to refute any of Ben Carson’s arguments.
    I also explained why I think he’s an Uncle Tom, and provided a link to elucidate why I feel that way. Do you even know what an Uncle Tom is?

    ****

    I take it by your final comment you feel that you, Tony the Queer Shop, are decreeing yourself the arbiter of what political opinions can be discussed in this thread. If that is the case, this is thread is not going to host a very interesting or productive discussion.

    I’m not the final arbiter of anything. That is the sole province of PZ. I simply think that your line of argument is likely to lead to arguing and that’s not what PZ has said he wants here.

    I’m not sure if you realize this, but this is a progressive space, so the overwhelming majority of people who comment and read here are people who oppose a great deal of the shit Carson espouses. I wasn’t going to continue interacting with you given that you support a man as reprehensible as Ben Carson, but I changed my mind somewhat. Since you’re clearly not aware of the man’s many failings, here:
    

    What Ben Carson Doesn’t Get About The Safety Net

    Carson’s humble upbringing is an important part of his narrative. His rise to becoming one of the top neurosurgeons in the country and a best-selling author is impressive because it starts in the poverty-stricken streets of Detroit and a fatherless home headed by a single mother with little education. Carson attempted to preemptively rebut those who would point out that his childhood experience of poverty doesn’t seem to inform his political positions.

    There were many people who were critical of me, because they say Ben Carson wants to get rid of all the safety nets and welfare programs, even though he must have benefitted from them. I have no desire to get rid of safety net programs for people who need them. I have a strong desire to get rid of programs that create dependency in able-bodied people.

    This is a blatant lie. Carson pointed out that his mother worked “extraordinarily hard,” often at two or three jobs, “trying to stay off welfare. And the reason for that,” Carson said, “was that she noticed that most of the people she saw on welfare never came off of it.” Carson either forgot or neglected to mention that his mother turned to the welfare system to meet family needs her earnings could not.

    In his book “Gifted Hands,” Carson writes that his grades improved after he got free eyeglasses from a government program:

    By the time I reached ninth grade, mother had made such strides that she received nothing but food stamps. She couldn’t have provided for us and kept up the house without that subsidy.

    What Carson doesn’t get about the safety net is that there are plenty of “able-bodied” people who receive some form of government assistance, and it doesn’t make them any more “dependent” than it made his mother. There are plenty of people who work “extraordinarily hard,” who have to rely on the safety net — not because they’re “dependent,” but because they don’t earn enough to afford essentials like shelter, food, medical care and transportation without assistance.

    If Carson is really concerned about “dependency,” he should take on the $70 billion per year we spend subsidizing the oil industry, or the $20 billion a year we spend on farm subsidies, before taking assistance away from families who are where he used to be.

    What Ben Carson Doesn’t Get About The “Turmoil In Our Cities”

    Carson alluded to the unrest in Baltimore; Ferguson, Mo., and other cities where unarmed black men have been killed by police.

    The past couple of weeks, there has been a great deal of turmoil in Baltimore. I spent 36 years of my life there, and we see the turmoil in cities all over our nation. We need to start thinking about how do we get to the bottom of this issue. I believe the real issue here is that people are losing hope, and they don’t feel life is going to be good for them no matter what happens. When an opportunity comes to loot, to riot, to get mine, they take it — not believing that there is a much better way to get the things that they desire.

    What Carson doesn’t get about “turmoil in our cities,” is that in cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, and Detroit, people lose hope because their isn’t much of any way to get the things, or the life, they desire. That’s because jobs have disappeared from these cities, in large part due to economic policies and trade deals that made it easier for businesses and corporations to ship jobs overseas, where labor was cheap and unorganized, and environmental protections were few or non-existent.

    In cities like Detroit and Baltimore, the loss of manufacturing jobs hit black communities the hardest — and black men in particular — because they were disproportionately represented in those jobs. Those jobs didn’t require a college education, but provided good wages and benefits that lifted many families into the middle class.

    Not only are those jobs gone, but they have been replaced by low-wage jobs that provide no pathway to the middle class. That’s unlikely to change as long as we subsidize businesses and corporations that don’t pay their employees a livable wage.

    What Ben Carson Doesn’t Get About Health Care

    He didn’t dwell on it in his announcement speech, but Carson is so opposed to the Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare, that he’s compared it to both slavery and 9/11.

    ● In a speech at the 2013 Values Voter conference, Carson said: “You know Obamacare is really I think the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery. And it is in a way, it is slavery in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government, and it was never about health care. It was about control.”

    ● Later, in an interview with the Daily Beast, Carson said that Obamacare was the worst thing to happen to the U.S. since the 9/11 terrorist attacks: “Because 9/11 is an isolated incident. Things that are isolated issues as opposed to things that fundamentally change the United Sates of America and shift power from the people to the government. That is a huge shift. You have to take a long-term look at something that fundamentally changes the power structure of America.”

    ● The health care plan on Carson’s website is about as sparse and vague as the GOP plans for Obamacare “replacements.” Beyond re-establishing “a strong and direct relationship between patients and their physicians,” the only idea he has is an old one: health savings accounts, which by definition favor the well and wealthy. Republicans have been pushing health savings accounts since 2006.

    What Carson doesn’t get about Obamacare is that, despite its imperfections, the health care reform law is popular with the majority of Americans. A recent Bloomberg poll showed that 63 percent of Americans think the law should be left alone, or allowed to work in order to find out how it should be changed. Only about 35 percent want Obamacare repealed, and most of them are people the who aren’t impacted by the law.

    That’s because it lowered the number of uninsured Americans, and increased the number of Americans with access to care without increasing spending on medical care. In fact, it’s coming in 20 percent under projected costs. The number of uninsured has fallen by more than 11 million since the law’s passage, and is now at a seven-year low. More than 16 million Americans now have affordable, quality health insurance thanks to Obamacare — including presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who once swore to repeal “every word it.”

    What Ben Carson Doesn’t Get About Climate Change

    For a man of science, Ben Carson doesn’t get what the big deal is about climate change. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that we have an obligation and a responsibility to protect our environment,” he said in an interview in Des Moines, Iowa. “You can ask it several different ways, but my answer is going to be the same. We may be warming. We may be cooling.”

    What Carson doesn’t get about climate change is what the GOP doesn’t get. Not only is there a consensus in the scientific community, but (as with the next issue) Americans have moved past the GOP on this issue. A Yale/Utah State University poll showed that 63 percent of Americans think climate change is happening, along with 99 percent of the counties in the country.

    What Ben Carson Doesn’t Get About Marriage Equality

    Despite the issue currently being before the Supreme Court, Ben Carson didn’t mention marriage in his announcement speech. Perhaps he finally learned his lesson. Carson managed of the biggest gaffes so far this campaign season when he told CNN’s Chris Cuomo how he knew that being gay is a “choice.”

    Ben Carson, the prospective 2016 presidential hopeful beloved by Tea Partiers, told CNN host Chris Cuomo on Wednesday that he believes homosexuality is “absolutely” a choice—because “a lot of people who go into prison, go into prison straight, and when they come out, they’re gay.”

    The former neurosurgeon went on, “So did something happen while they were in there? Ask yourself that question.”

    While the rest of the country cringed, the scientific community called Carson out, noting that decades of research shows that sexual orientation is inborn, not chosen. (Something so obvious that even Florida Sen. Marco Rubio can grasp it, or at least pretend to.)

    After becoming the focus of near universal ridicule, Carson decided that he just wouldn’t talk about the issue anymore. What Carson doesn’t get about marriage equality is that he won’t get away with that on the campaign trail. The GOP base is light years behind the rest of the country, and they will demand that he says something about it, especially when the court’s decision is announced this summer.

30. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    1 August 2015 at 10:47 pm

    Martin Lee @28:
    I appreciate that, but I think you’re mistaken. Neither rq nor I are *moderators*. We’re simply curators. We collect links and bring them here. That’s it. We have no power here. That doesn’t mean I can’t make suggestions that perhaps someone ought to cool it with their line of reasoning. Anyone can do that though.

31. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    1 August 2015 at 10:48 pm

    Also, Haven FtB is not responsible for the ads on the site. They have a third-party advertiser that provides the ads. Believe me, I don’t believe anyone at FtB would support Ben Carson.

32. Haven Monahan says

    1 August 2015 at 10:50 pm

33. Morgan!? ♥ ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ says

    1 August 2015 at 10:55 pm

    Haven Monahan,

    I can’t really say myself that I know of better alternatives, but the status quo is clearly failing. I don’t agree with everything Dr. Carson says but I think some of his ideas are worthy of consideration.

    Specifically, which ideas, and, specifically, why those ideas are worth consideration. If those ideas were implemented, who would benefit, how, and why. Who would foot the bill, how, and why. Please be specific in your reply.

34. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    1 August 2015 at 10:56 pm

    Haven @32:

    On that first article, I completely agree with Dr. Carson that the government programs intended to help have completely failed to better the lives of poor people and People of Color.

    Given that government assistance programs enable people to survive during times of economic downturn and provide food for their families-none of which would be possible without those programs, you have a curious idea of bettering the lives of socioeconomically disadvantaged people.
    You cannot simply take away government assistance programs and not replace them with a system that achieves the same or better results. As briefly mentioned in my link @29, there is a lot related to economics and the plight of poor people that Ben Carson does not understand. His views are in line with other conservatives who do not have the proper understanding of the complexities involved to have any hope of offering a solution to the economic woes of millions of USAmericans.

35. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    1 August 2015 at 11:13 pm

    Never Forget #020: Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat long before Rosa Parks:

    In 1955, a Black woman, on her way home after a long day of work, boarded a bus in Montgomery, AL. At one of the stops, several white passengers got on the bus, and the bus driver ordered four Black passengers to vacate their seats and move farther back. Three of those passengers complied. One, the Black woman, refused to move. She ignored the bus driver’s demands and was subsequently arrested.

    This is not the story of Rosa Parks, who was arrested on December 1, 1955. This is the story of Claudette Colvin, who also refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus…except she did it on March 2, nine months before the Rosa Parks incident.

    From elementary to high school, every history book I read told the story of Parks and how she was the first Black person to publicly challenge the segregation laws of the Montgomery bus system. “Rosa Parks is a hero,” we were told. Why did we never learn about Claudette Colvin?

    Short answer: Respectability politics.

    Claudette Colvin was a 15-year-old student who had been a member of the NAACP Youth Council. As such, she had been actively learning about and participating in the Civil Rights Movement. Her refusal to move that day was a deliberate act of civil disobedience and laid the foundation for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The only reason Colvin doesn’t receive the proper recognition today is due to the respectability politics of civil rights leaders, including E.D. Nixon and MLK.

    Colvin was young and outspoken, and like her peers, was mislabeled a troublemaker. She was also a few months pregnant at the time of her arrest. Because they believed that conservative Black churches wouldn’t rally behind her, civil rights leaders refused to organize a boycott or any kind of action around Colvin. Instead, they waited for an “ideal” representative for their protest and in doing so, they successfully shifted the narrative away from Claudette to Rosa Parks.

    ARGH!
    Advocates of respectability politics have evidently been telling African-Americans that they have to present themselves in a manner deemed acceptable to white people so that they may continue living for a lot longer than I thought.

    And wouldn’t you know it, Ben Carson is a fan of respectability politics:
    (via Ta-Nehisi Coates)

    My Times column today looks at the phenomenon that is Dr. Benjamin Carson. For kids like me who came up in Baltimore during the ’80s and ’90s, Carson has special importance. Whenever the black folks at our summer camps or schools wanted to have a “Be A Credit To Your Race” moment they brought in Dr. Carson. I saw him speak so many times that I began to have that “This guy again?” feeling. As an adult, knowing how much it takes to speak in front of people, I can recognize that Carson’s willingness to talk to black youth (and youth in general) came from a deeply sincere place. There were no cameras at those summer camps and school assemblies. No one had money to pay him. But he showed up. And that was what mattered.

    There’s nothing about “showing up” that is inconsistent with being conservative. Some of the most committed black people I know—in some other America—would be Republicans. But in this America, this conservative movement, has a fairly nasty romance with white racism. There are black conservatives (some Republican, some not) who manage to steer clear of this—Bill Cosby, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and possibly Tim Scott. And there are others who, to put it bluntly, profit from it.
    It’s perfectly respectable to think Obamacare is bad for the country. It’s less respectable to claim that Obama isn’t an African American. It’s perfectly respectable to believe in a flat tax. It’s less respectable to tell a room full of white people that Obama, isn’t “a strong black man” or that he has “never been a part of the black experience in America.” It’s respectable to believe that the Ryan Budget is the key to the future. It’s less respectable to believe that equating same-sex marriage with child-rape puts you on Harriet Tubman status.
    The corollary of that last metaphor—the idea of liberalism as a plantation—is especially noxious and deeply racist. It holds that black people are not really like other adult humans in America —people capable of discerning their interest and voting accordingly—but mental slaves too stupid to know what’s good for them.
    When Ben Carson uses this language he is promoting himself at the expense of the community from which he hails. More, he is promoting himself at the expense of the community in which I once saw him labor. That is tragic.

    The article is from 2013, which isn’t terribly old and I’ve seen nothing to indicate that Carson has changed his views for the better.

    More of Ben Carson’s ‘respectability politics’:

    THE TEA: In a radio interview on New Hampsire Public Radio last week, potential presidential candidate for the GOP, Dr. Ben Carson, stated his source for the problems facing the African American community – Hip Hop. Although the hosts and audience thought Carson was out of touch and wrong, he continued to explain how Hip Hop was bad and distracting from what he believes to be the solution: God.

    via The Grio:

    We need to reestablish faith in our communities and the values and principles that got us through slavery, that got us through Jim Crow, and segregation, and all kinds of horrible things that were heaped upon us.

    Why were we able to get through those? Because of our faith, because of our family, because of our values, and as we allow the hip-hop community to destroy those things for us, and as we grasp onto what’s politically correct and not what is correct, we continue to deteriorate

    CHECK, PLEASE: Ben Carson is slowly becoming the poster child for respectability politics and the real life version of Samuel J Jackson’s character in D’Jango. Out of all the real issues that strip blacks of economic opportunity, cause mass incarceration, and failed education systems, Ben Carson picked Hip Hop as the cause of problems in the African American community. I would prefer my next black president not to be someone who blames victims of oppression for their situation. You’re outta here, Dr Carson.

    Here is an article to aid people in understanding ‘respectability politics’- Why respectability politics is a sham:

    After comedian Chris Rock made news by posting a selfie of his third time being pulled over by cops in seven weeks this week, he received an outpouring of support on social media. But not from actor Isaiah Washington. Washington tweeted, “I sold my $90,000.00 Mercedes G500 and bought 3 Prius’s, because I got tired of being pulled over by Police.#Adapt@chrisrock.”

    Why should black people have to “adapt” to rampant racist policing?

    Even Don Lemon of CNN, who has a history of being on the wrong side of race questions, seemed skeptical of Washington’s position. On a segment on CNN Tonight Lemon asked Washington how Rock should adapt to police racially profiling him. Washington’s response was as asinine as his tweet.

    “I really feel he needs to look at the area he’s in,” the actor said. “And maybe even visit with the local police officers in that community, because I got pulled over so many times they should have remembered by driver’s license. So he should do that.”

    I’d like to explore Washington’s position that, essentially, encourages black people to change their behavior to avoid racism. For starters, I suspect that the disproportionate number of black drivers who are racially profiled by cops each year aren’t driving a Mercedes G500 and likely own relatively modest vehicles. I doubt Rock trading his car in for a hoopty will stop cops from pulling him over.

    And that Uber driver in New York City likely wasn’t driving a fancy taxi when an NYPD detective hurled abusive language towards him. If cops want to abuse their authority and abuse people, they will do it and there’s nothing we can do about it–except, record them if we can, sue them and fight their bigotry.

    Cops have to be forced to change their bullying ways to more humane engagement with us, not the other way around.

    But I am mostly troubled by the decades-old theme of respectability politics in Washington’s reasoning that demands that black people capitulate to their oppressors. And while I know that respectability politics has been used as a tactic, especially during the 1960s, to perform a particular kind of blackness that makes our grievances more acceptable to white people, it really doesn’t do much to blunt the violent resolve of racial profiling by law enforcement.

    In 2001, the state of New Jersey, where Rock lives and may have been pulled over, agreed to pay defendants $13 million in a lawsuit stemming from a 1998 racial profiling incident where state troopers shot and wounded passengers in a van they pulled over. The case, lead by late defense attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., revealed how pervasive racial profiling of black and Latino drivers was at the time.

    By the way, Mr. Washington, those gentlemen weren’t driving Mercedes G500s. See how white supremacy doesn’t care about the kind of car one drives, sir? The only conversation Rock needs to have with any officer is about the badge numbers of the cops who pulled him over, so he can sue them, if in fact they violated his civil rights.

    And what about those black people in Ferguson, Mo., who were pulled over 85 percent of the time, even though drugs were found on them 26 percent less often than white drivers? Yeah, I’m sure if black folks in Ferguson were to downgrade the types of cars they drove they, too, would feel less heat from the cops. Never mind such racist tactics were used to fund the city coffers. Sure. Downgrading their vehicles would have made a big difference.

    Please.

    Another issue with black people adapting to abusive police behavior is that it signals to racists that we will yield our dignity to their racist will. Often, black people adapting to racists never gets us anything in return.

36. Nes says

    2 August 2015 at 1:32 am

    I hope this is appropriate for the thread.

    I was reading Offworld and came across an article about the Invisibility Blues Kickstarter, which looks like it’ll be similar to Anita’s Tropes vs Women in Video Games series, but about racism. I don’t know much about the people behind it, but I did click through to their videos and watched the one about Cuphead, which was interesting. Just thought I’d give it a signal boost in case anyone else was interested in it and wanted to help fund it (they have already reached their goal).

37. rq says

    2 August 2015 at 1:58 am

    Haven Monahan
    re: Ben Carson
    Back when he entered the campaign, and every now and then since, the other thread had several opinions on Ben Carson and why his policies and ideas aren’t actually helpful. Including many from disillusioned black people who had held him up as an icon, and were disappointed. If you go to that link, and check all the pages, and Ctrl+F “Ben Carson”, you’ll come up with a few things.

    Martin Lee
    re: Trump/Ford
    Listen. I’m not going to just go right out and say Donald Trump is worse, or that he definitely won’t be elected, and yes, I base that on Ford, because he ran on some pretty silly platforms, never mind the drug addiction. That’s just the issue that got him out, but that doesn’t encompass everything that was wrong with him.
    As it is, this comparison is completely off-base for this conversation, so please just stop.

    Nerd
    Not looking for scholarly articles here. All media articles (preferably with your own commentary, as to why it is relevant to racism), personal stories, anecdotes, etc. can be shared. So please don’t bring in academic articles into the fray as an argument against someone posting on their own (if wrong) opinion*. I have been posting precious few myself, and that would make the vast, vast majority of past year’s work completely void.

    * I would say Haven Monahan’s issue is posting them up without explaining to us what we might find of value besides ‘Ben Carson has some good ideas’, rather than posting conservative crap. Because we can give them alternate reading material for that – some people just don’t get beyond that.

38. rq says

    2 August 2015 at 2:06 am

    Nes
    Thanks for those links!!

39. rq says

    2 August 2015 at 2:21 am

    Lawsuit: Black Employee of Cupcake Shop Fired After Reporting White Colleague’s N-Bomb

    Shayden Frazier, an African-American former employee of Jilly’s Cupcake Bar & Cafe in University City, is suing the shop for allegedly firing him after he complained about a white colleague’s use of a racial slur.

    To start at the beginning: Frazier got hired in August 2013 and worked at Jilly’s as a cashier and server.

    Frazier says that a few months after he was hired, a white colleague referred to a black female colleague as “nappy headed and ugly.” Frazier brought it up at a staff meeting and suggested racial sensitivity training, but management declined to arrange for such training.

    Frazier says that during his employment, he was instructed to wear a hairnet and shave his beard, while white employees didn’t have to.

    In April of 2014, Frazier claims, he was written up after calling in sick for two different shifts. But in July, a white colleague showed up an hour and a half late and wasn’t disciplined.

    Finally, Frazier alleges that in July 2014, a black female colleague named Kyron came to him “noticeably upset and shaken.” A white dishwasher named Alan had called her the N-word, she said.

    Frazier says that Jill Segal, the shop’s owner, held a staff meeting later that day. “The meeting got heated,” Frazier wrote in his complaint. Kyron admitted she’d used the term “white boy.” Frazier brought up the dishwasher’s long history of saying words like “bitch” and “Oriental.” Frazier said he felt sick and was sent home. He was fired three days later.

    The Missouri Commission on Human Rights issued him a right to sue in April. Frazier, who now lists a Pearland, Texas address, filed his suit in St. Louis County circuit court on Monday. He’s going after the cupcake shop and its owner, Jill Segal, for discrimination, harrassment and retaliation in violation of Missouri Human Rights law, and asking for at least $25,000 in damages.

    Teen Perfectly Illustrates The Problem With NBC’s Sam Dubose Tweet

    A University of California at Berkeley student called out NBC News on Twitter on Wednesday for its poor choice of photos in a tweet about Sam DuBose, an unarmed black man fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop.

    NBC’s headline announced that the officer, Ray Tensing, had been indicted for murder in Dubose’s death. However, the network’s photo choice — a smiling shot of Tensing in uniform and an old mug shot of Dubose from a charge totally unrelated to his death — implied that Dubose was more of a “criminal” than Tensing.

    “Hey @NBCNews, I went ahead and fixed this one for you. Do Better,” Rigel Robinson tweeted, along with a split image of a regular photo of Dubose alongside Tensing’s mugshot.

    “How we tell these narratives is important,” Robinson, 19, told The Huffington Post. “Digging up an old mugshot for the black man that got shot instead of the officer that was just indicted for killing him does a disservice to the memory of Mr. Dubose, it does a disservice to journalism, and frankly, it’s just racist.”

    Robinson was far from the only person to criticize NBC’s photo choice, but his visually striking commentary garnered more than 10,000 retweets.

40. rq says

    2 August 2015 at 2:24 am

    Lawsuit: Black Employee of Cupcake Shop Fired After Reporting White Colleague’s N-Bomb

    Shayden Frazier, an African-American former employee of Jilly’s Cupcake Bar & Cafe in University City, is suing the shop for allegedly firing him after he complained about a white colleague’s use of a racial slur.

    To start at the beginning: Frazier got hired in August 2013 and worked at Jilly’s as a cashier and server.

    Frazier says that a few months after he was hired, a white colleague referred to a black female colleague as “nappy headed and ugly.” Frazier brought it up at a staff meeting and suggested racial sensitivity training, but management declined to arrange for such training.

    Frazier says that during his employment, he was instructed to wear a hairnet and shave his beard, while white employees didn’t have to.

    In April of 2014, Frazier claims, he was written up after calling in sick for two different shifts. But in July, a white colleague showed up an hour and a half late and wasn’t disciplined.

    Finally, Frazier alleges that in July 2014, a black female colleague named Kyron came to him “noticeably upset and shaken.” A white dishwasher named Alan had called her the N-word, she said.

    Frazier says that Jill Segal, the shop’s owner, held a staff meeting later that day. “The meeting got heated,” Frazier wrote in his complaint. Kyron admitted she’d used the term “white boy.” Frazier brought up the dishwasher’s long history of saying words like “b*tch” and “Oriental.” Frazier said he felt sick and was sent home. He was fired three days later.

    The Missouri Commission on Human Rights issued him a right to sue in April. Frazier, who now lists a Pearland, Texas address, filed his suit in St. Louis County circuit court on Monday. He’s going after the cupcake shop and its owner, Jill Segal, for discrimination, harrassment and retaliation in violation of Missouri Human Rights law, and asking for at least $25,000 in damages.

    Teen Perfectly Illustrates The Problem With NBC’s Sam Dubose Tweet

    A University of California at Berkeley student called out NBC News on Twitter on Wednesday for its poor choice of photos in a tweet about Sam DuBose, an unarmed black man fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop.

    NBC’s headline announced that the officer, Ray Tensing, had been indicted for murder in Dubose’s death. However, the network’s photo choice — a smiling shot of Tensing in uniform and an old mug shot of Dubose from a charge totally unrelated to his death — implied that Dubose was more of a “criminal” than Tensing.

    “Hey @NBCNews, I went ahead and fixed this one for you. Do Better,” Rigel Robinson tweeted, along with a split image of a regular photo of Dubose alongside Tensing’s mugshot.

    “How we tell these narratives is important,” Robinson, 19, told The Huffington Post. “Digging up an old mugshot for the black man that got shot instead of the officer that was just indicted for killing him does a disservice to the memory of Mr. Dubose, it does a disservice to journalism, and frankly, it’s just racist.”

    Robinson was far from the only person to criticize NBC’s photo choice, but his visually striking commentary garnered more than 10,000 retweets.

41. echidna says

    2 August 2015 at 4:42 am

    Haven at 32:

    I completely agree with Dr. Carson that the government programs intended to help have completely failed to better the lives of poor people and People of Color

    Completely failed? I don’t think so. If it were not for government intervention, you would still have slavery and indentured servitude. The US is still too far in that direction compared to other developed nations. After all is said and done, God will not provide, due to lack of existence. The “invisible hand of the Market” has no incentive to do the job, nor are private charities sufficient. The solutions have to lie with something powerful enough to actually do it, such as government. Power is a two-edged sword, of course, but without government you end up with chaos and exploitation.
    As far as I can tell, Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican who understood this.

42. rq says

    2 August 2015 at 4:49 am

    … To add to echidna‘s 40, I think many government programs and policies have failed due to efforts to undermine them, or inconsistent implementation, or just plain whining. See: Voting Rights Act, as one example. Also that Supreme Court decision on discriminatory housing practices in Texas.
    And while yes, some of those efforts have come from government entities, this means a change in government (attitude) is required, rather than a change in policy as such.

43. PZ Myers says

    2 August 2015 at 6:22 am

    “Haven Monahan” shows up with no prior history here, dumps that controversial McWhorter article on us, and then disingenuously pours on links from Ben Carson, far right wing loon, claiming that they “hadn’t heard of him until recently”.

    I see TROLL writ all over that. Banned. Trollpoop deleted.

    Nerd of Redhead: You were successfully baited and gave the troll opportunity to bicker further; they were looking for a fight and you cheerfully plunged in to give them one. That is exactly the behavior I’m trying to squelch here. You made no comments until you saw someone you disagreed with and could take a slap at. I’m giving you a one day suspension. Stay out of the discussion threads if you can’t stop being pugnacious.

44. rq says

    2 August 2015 at 7:21 am

    Well, at least we got some nice Ben Carson rebuttals out of that.
    And considering that so far main discussion has been about two Republican candidates, I think Tony and I will work out a sort of directional statement for the thread, sort of a la Ibis3 over on the Feminism discussion.

45. Caine says

    2 August 2015 at 9:31 am

    Ferguson was mentioned in an article I linked for the Art thread:

    Thirteen leading museum bloggers joined forces to criticise museums for not doing more to respond to racial violence in Ferguson, Missouri, where rioting began last summer, and other US cities. This led to the Twitter hashtag #museumsrespondtoferguson, with one user alleging that many US museum staff find it “easier to care for a temple than build a forum”. In March, the Missouri History Museum in St Louis was criticised for scrapping a discussion forum intended to bring together speakers on Ferguson, Palestine and Ayotzinapa, Mexico, where 43 students disappeared, presumed killed, after a clash with police last September. The knee-jerk cancellation appears to have happened because of pressure from local Jewish groups that objected to the inclusion of Palestine on the agenda.

    X-posted Discuss Art

46. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    2 August 2015 at 11:06 am

    Never Forget #019: Concentration camps were perfected in Africa:

    The Holocaust is a well-known event in world history, but few people know that multiple imperial forces in Europe used their African territories to create and develop the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. In 1900-1902, during the Second Boer War in South Africa, the invading British forces set up refugee camps full of tents for Boer civilians affected by the war. In an effort to control guerrilla uprisings in the area, refugee camps became internment camps, and then the term “concentration camp” evolved. The camps, containing prisoners from both the white Boer and Black African populations, quickly became unsanitary, overpopulated and inadequately supplied. Over 26,000 people died from starvation and/or disease during that time.

    A few years later the Germans ran with the idea of concentration camps, and between 1905 and 1907 used the method to eradicate thousands of Namaqua and Herero people in present-day Namibia. The biggest camp was located on Shark Island where Herero and Namaqua prisoners lived in unsanitary conditions, malnourished, abused and forced to do dangerous physical labor that caused sickness and death for most of the prisoners. To add insult to injury, the women had to collect and clean the heads of dead prisoners so that they could be shipped to German universities for scientific study. Many of the German scientific and medical advancements were made at the expense of Black lives. Although the total death toll is unknown, estimates reach up to 4000 deaths, and only an estimated 245 people survived the camps.

    I noticed a lack of citations for the above article and left a comment (which is currently in moderation) at the site about that.

47. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    3 August 2015 at 2:10 am

    Me @46:
    I was mistaken about a lack of citations. The site refers to references as receipts and I was unfamiliar with the term. The article does list several citations.

    ****

    Lynette Holloway over at The Root writes about 40 new state laws sparked by Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson:

    Who said protesting is ineffective? Since Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen in Ferguson, Mo., was shot and killed on Aug. 9. by white ex-officer Darren Wilson, lawmakers in nearly every state have proposed changes to the way police deal with the public, according to The Associated Press.

    An analysis by The Associated Press shows that 24 states have put at least 40 new laws on the books to tackle police violence, including officer body-cameras, racial bias training, independent investigations, and limits on surplus military equipment for departments.

    Still, little has been done to change laws on when police are justified to use deadly force, even as more incidents continue to occur, the report says. While praising the changes, civil rights leaders said more work needs to be done to solve racial tensions and economic disparities that have driven protests in Ferguson, Baltimore, New York and elsewhere after episodes in which people died in police custody or shootings.

    Super-duper baby steps, but at least they’re steps aimed in the right direction.

    ****

    Also from The Root, an article by Kirsten West Savali, Jonathan Sanders case: Interview with the mother of the Mississippi man allegedly choked to death by cop:

    In an exclusive interview with The Root, Sanders talks about her son and her continued efforts to make sure his family receives justice in his name. The Root also spoke with attorneys Chokwe Antar Lumumba, who is representing the Sanders family, and C.J. Lawrence, who is representing the witnesses. They both said that it’s past time for the national spotlight on injustice to shine on Mississippi.

    The Root: Tell us about Jonathan.

    Frances Sanders: Jonathan was a very soft-hearted, understanding person. You could go to him with any problems and he would try to help you in the best way. That’s the way I taught him. He would try to help everybody in the community.

    Jonathan’s kindness is what brought all those people to his service. Jonathan’s memorial service had a thousand people in a town with a thousand people.

    TR: How are you feeling?

    FS: I hate this. I wonder why this happened to my son. I’m wondering why things are coming to a halt and why things are coming to a standstill. Somebody is going to have to tell us something. If it’s 10 years from now, somebody is going to have to tell me something.

    [His] babies are something else. They are cranky. Today, the little girl was from one person’s lap to another person’s lap. It was like she couldn’t get comfortable. It’s heartbreaking to see. The night before the funeral, she was going from one door to the other door looking at all these people in the room, she placed her face against the window with her hands above her forehead looking because she didn’t see who she was looking for. She was looking for her daddy. That broke my heart. They took a piece of these children’s heart.

    His son would see his dad’s face and he would have a grin that was out of this world. Their daddy saw them every night. She used to fall asleep on his chest every night. She would wrap her arms around his neck and just fall asleep. They took that way from these babies.

    TR: What does justice look like for you?

    FS: I want Kevin Herrington to go through the judicial system. I want him to be tried through a court. I want them to find him guilty for the death of my son. That’s just a little justice because ain’t nothing going to bring him back. But that would help if [Herrington] had to pay in some type of way for what he did to my son.

    I sincerely hope that he gets his day in court and that the courts find him guilty.

    TR: There was so much social media buzz surrounding #TakeItDown, the push to get the Confederate flag removed from the South Carolina Capitol Building. Yet, when faced with the state-sanctioned violence that often goes unchallenged in the Deep South, there is a lot of silence. Why do you think that is?

    C.J. Lawrence: Thank you for asking this. To be quite honest, the dilemma is quite perplexing. As we witness the phenomenon of black men and women and boys and girls being killed while unarmed only to be later [character] assassinated and have their killings justified across this nation, it seemed inevitable that this type of injustice would make its way back to Mississippi.

    I say back, because Mississippi is the place that perfected injustice through systematic racism and oppression. Look no further than Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, and Goodman, Cheney, and Scwherner to realize the history is real here. You have to drive through a confederate cemetery to get to Stonewall, Miss. There are houses with rebel battle flags hanging outside. You can feel the weight of oppression bearing down on the place.

    I can’t even imagine what it’s like for African-Americans to live every day of their lives in cities and towns that revere the Confederacy. I lived in Alabama for 15 years from the age of 12 until 27, but my consciousness hadn’t been raised enough, nor was my education sufficient to be aware of any of the racist imagery all around me.

    This is small-town Mississippi – a town of about 1,088 people – often when people from outside the state think Mississippi–they immediately think perpetual injustice–but if there was ever a place where we could establish the blueprint for how to beat state-sanctioned violence – I think this is the place to do it. And if we do it here, we can do it anywhere. We have been in contact with several of the players on the national scene. It would be great to feel their presence here as well. Black lives matter in Mississippi too.

    TR: How will you get the community involved in fighting for Jonathan?

    Lumumba: We are certainly going to galvanize the people. This is different from Ferguson or Baltimore. The conditions are different. The nature of the oppression is different and so how we get people involved will be different from those areas.

    In Ferguson and Baltimore, you had two places where violence, oppression, poverty and a multitude of in-your-face systematic conditions were at play. Here, you have that deliberate Southern oppression. It’s passive, in-your-place type oppression. When we had the citizens hold up their fists at town hall, I had no doubt that it was the first time in history that in Stonewall, Miss., that many people were standing together for the purpose of showing black power. We intend to empower the community and show them just how powerful they already are.

    ****

    From John Walker at Fusion–
    St. Louis juvenile court biased against people of color:
    Is there any aspect of USAmerican society that isn’t biased against people of color?

    The Department of Justice has found that St. Louis County consistently violates the constitutional rights of the low-income juveniles in its family court system, the Associated Press reports.

    The report, issued by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division following a 20-month investigation, also found that young black defendants received systematically worse treatment than their white peers.

    For example, there’s only one juvenile public defender tasked with representing every low-income juvenile in the entire county—which comprises the Missouri suburbs of St. Louis, but not the city itself. The New York Times says that this one defender handled 394 cases last year alone. The Times also notes that many young people are encouraged to confess—which violates their right against self-incrimination—in order to receive a warning and avoid formal legal proceedings.

    One defender for 394 cases in a year. IANAL, but wouldn’t even half that load be nigh-impossible for one person?

    Not every young person in St. Louis County’s family court system is encouraged to take this literal get-out-of-jail-free card, however unconstitutional it might be. The Times reports that black defendants were 47 percent more likely than their white counterparts to enter formal legal proceedings—and that’s far from the only piece of evidence indicating racial bias in the investigation’s findings.

    Move along, nothing to see here. Nope. No white bias whatsoever.

48. birgerjohansson says

    3 August 2015 at 3:32 am

    Norway’s police haven’t killed a single person in nearly 10 years http://www.rawstory.com/2015/08/norways-police-havent-killed-a-single-person-in-nearly-10-years/

    ….but surely, lethal shootings by the police has nothing to do with racism (sarcasm) ?
    Nowegian (and British) police are less into force and more into face-to-face interactions.

49. Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened says

    3 August 2015 at 6:03 am

    @ birgerjohansson

    A 2006 survey found that Police Federation members were overwhelmingly (82%) in favour of frontline police officers being “routinely unarmed” (in terms of firearms). There are few moments when I have been prouder of our Police Force as a whole. The Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police cited the US as an example of why giving frontline Police Officers firearms as a matter of course is a bad idea, and said that “Sadly we know from the experience in America and other countries that having armed officers certainly does not mean, sadly, that police officers do not end up getting shot.”

    The UK Police force (particularly the Met, it seems) do have a problem with systemic racism of course, but it seems to be nowhere near as serious, and they can’t act on it by shooting people. This seems to me to be a far preferable way of doing things.

50. katybe says

    3 August 2015 at 7:01 am

    Not specifically racism in America, but I just read this on the BBC, and this seems the least tangential place to share it – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-33735177

    Link is to a story about a twitter bot created to discourage people from using the word illegal when talking about immigrants.

51. cicely says

    3 August 2015 at 10:55 am

    Dear White America: Your Toxic Masculinity is Killing You
    –
    Sarah Lee Circle Bear Died While in Police Custody; Family Seeks Justice
    –

52. Crimson Clupeidae says

    3 August 2015 at 11:01 am

    addicted44@17:

    I think you’ve got the causation backwards, for the US at least. It’s racism which leads to poor whites supporting policies that hurt them in order to benefit the extreme rich.

    Agreed. Race is used as the excuse/dogwhistle/whatever to keep people at each other’s proverbial (and all too often, literal) throats and propr up the wealthy.

    And…it works. :-(

    RE: Cecil the lion and all of the eeming conflict with the black lives matter.

    The best thing I saw was someone recommending that all black people dress up as lions. It was funny, in that sad, kind of painful way. I might run in different circles (I get most of my news online, and rarely, if ever, watch main stream news outlets of any kind), but the reaction to me seemed pretty even (i.e. the people I know/follow seemed just as outraged by both acts). Unfortunately, many of the responses also had that Dear Muslima vibe, as if people can’t be outraged about both things.

53. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    3 August 2015 at 11:27 am

    Awww, former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson cannot find a job and rarely leaves his house-
    A New Yorker profile of the police officer who shot unarmed teen Michael Brown to death in Ferguson, Missouri revealed that he is living in virtual anonymity and is deeply incurious about the larger events around the killing and the unrest that it spawned.

    Former officer Darren Wilson now lives in a quiet neighborhood filled with houses “clad in vinyl siding.” He has a baby daughter who was born in March, a little sister to his two stepsons with wife Barb, another ex-cop.

    The New Yorker‘s Jake Halpern said that Wilson has been unable to find police work, that departments consider him too much of a potential liability. So, he is living on donated money, screening visitors with a series of cameras connected to his cell phone and answering the door in a hat and sunglasses.

    When asked if he has read up on the systemic injustices and entrenched departmental racism highlighted in the Justice Department’s report on the Ferguson Police Department, Wilson shrugged it off.

    “I don’t have any desire,” he told Halpern. “I’m not going to keep living in the past about what Ferguson did. It’s out of my control.”

    A grand jury cleared Wilson of wrongdoing in Brown’s killing and a Justice Department report on the killing said that Wilson had fired on the youth in self defense. While the agency found that the Ferguson police were carrying out racist policies and preying on the city’s black population, Wilson himself was twice found to have acted within official protocol.

    Later in the profile, Wilson said he believes that blacks on his beat are using the racism of the past as an excuse not to do better in the present.

    “I am really simple in the way that I look at life,” Wilson told Halpern. “What happened to my great-grandfather is not happening to me. I can’t base my actions off what happened to him.”

    Police officers, Wilson said, “can’t fix in thirty minutes what happened thirty years ago. We have to fix what’s happening now. That’s my job as a police officer. I’m not going to delve into people’s life-long history and figure out why they’re feeling a certain way, in a certain moment…I’m not a psychologist.”

    Now, Wilson and his family continue to keep a low profile, rarely venturing outside and choosing locations for outings carefully, like restaurants.

    “We try to go somewhere — how do I say this correctly? — with like-minded individuals,” Wilson said. “You know. Where it’s not a mixing pot.”

    Dude, just say you hang out with only white people.

54. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    3 August 2015 at 11:28 am

    Crap. Everything but the last line in my comment above should be blockquoted.

55. Saad says

    3 August 2015 at 11:38 am

    From Tony’s quote in #53

    “We try to go somewhere — how do I say this correctly? — with like-minded individuals,” [Darren] Wilson said. “You know. Where it’s not a mixing pot.”

    Oh my god…

56. anteprepro says

    3 August 2015 at 12:12 pm

    Tony!’s quotes at 53:

    So, he is living on donated money

    That may be the most depressing part of this all. The people enthusiastically throwing money at the cop who lost his job after killing a black teenager. What a noble fucking charity.

    Later in the profile, Wilson said he believes that blacks on his beat are using the racism of the past as an excuse not to do better in the present.

    What a hideous old trope that is. By fucking god.

    “We try to go somewhere — how do I say this correctly? — with like-minded individuals,” Wilson said. “You know. Where it’s not a mixing pot.”

    Like minded individuals. Not a mixing pot. The culmination of a long series of dog whistles.

    This isn’t just saying that he just prefers to hang around other white people. This is saying he prefers to exclusively hang around people with the same ideas as him too. You know, the kind of people who agree that racism is an issue of his grandfather’s time, that blacks are failures just blaming their problems on The Past, that money should be showered on a poor old cop who got yelled at for murdering a black teenager, and that Mixing Pots are Bad Things. In other words, not just white people, white racists.

57. Marcus Ranum says

    3 August 2015 at 12:48 pm

    I’ve just been listening to this week’s “This American Life” podcast. It’s here:
    http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with
    “The problem we all live with”
    Right now, all sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids. But there’s one thing nobody tries anymore, despite lots of evidence that it works: desegregation. Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at a district that, not long ago, accidentally launched a desegregation program.

    It’s stomach-churning to listen to. The tl;dr form is: education is not broken, education has been broken. What works is integration/desegregation but the US’ reaction has been to back away from it and re-segregate. Connecting the dots is easy.

58. Martin Lee says

    3 August 2015 at 6:22 pm

    http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/02/donald-trump/donald-trump-black-income-unemployment-worse-now-j/

    Sadly, because president Obama has done such a poor job as president, you won’t see another black president for generations!

    Why is it that, because he’s Black, Obama’s record must speak for all possible Black presidents?!

    Did anyone suggest that because Bush lead us into a global recession, and two unnecessary wars, that we’d never have a White president?! What about Andrew Johnson, who allowed white southerners to completely eradicate any progress in the Black community after the Civil War, giving them reign to enact “Black Codes” and silently support the formation of the KKK. Did we declare that there’d not be a White president for generations?!

59. rq says

    4 August 2015 at 12:11 pm

    40 New State Laws Sparked by Michael Brown’s Death in Ferguson. The Root. I think the article posted by Tony over on the discussion thread.

    Dylann Roof, Ray Tensing and their audacity to plead not guilty, from Blavity.

    Within the span of 24 hours, two white male millennial murderers have pleaded not guilty for charges for crimes they clearly committed. Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old who entered Mother Emmanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17th and explicitly stated he was there to kill black people and left one person alive to tell the truth of his horrors has plead not guilty to the 33 federal charges against him, including committing a hate crime. Similarly, Ray Tensing, the 25-year-old former officer of the University of Cincinnati who was charged for murder in killing Sam Dubose on July 19 during a traffic citation has plead not guilty, despite body camera footage released to the public concurrently with his indictment.

    Something is wrong here.

    Roof, who spent months coordinating his mass murder, whose hateful ideations were extrapolated online on a personal website called “the last Rhodesian” as an homage to the violent and racist apartheid regime of contemporary Zimbabwe, stood in court, lawyer by his side, to look the judge in the eye on the firm belief that he can prove without doubt that he is deserving of absolution in the eyes of the law. Tensing did the same, later freed from handcuffs to go home after posting the $100,000 of his $1 million bond in less than eight hours.

    Based on the information and evidence available, both men, quite frankly, have little grounds to stand on to assert innocence.

    And yet what is the necessity of proof when placed against the propositions of white skin? We know that Lady Justice is blind, but as two cold-blooded killers dare the law to tell them they committed any wrongdoing, we must ask how she got that way and how Roof and Tensing predict she’ll hold their lies and imagined truths in the balance.
    […]

    The rule of law is rather the audacious assumption that legality becomes circumstantially flexible when the perpetrator is white.

    After Charleston, an NRA board member had the audacity to blame Rev. Clementa Pinckney for his death and the eight other congregants in the Wednesday night bible study for not having someone there who was armed. And Sandra Bland and Sam Dubose, within the past two weeks alone, show how black people who die at the hands of the law are subjected to the death penalty long after their last breath has passed. Mainstream media, rather than investigating obvious inconsistencies around the circumstances of the deaths of black victims, are more concerned with seeking out potential records of criminality and the accompanying mugshots.

    Meanwhile, acrobatic maneuvers are deployed to turn a blind eye to white people who kill. Headlines garner them empathy, either by wrongfully deploying mental illness and “troubled” parenting as an excuse or by offering Roof a bulletproof vest for his protection.

    Not only is this a matter of being innocent until proven guilty, but this is also about the bold ways the color line demarcates who it is always unfathomable to imagine at fault within and without the law.

    These men shamelessly believe they have a right to claim no wrongdoing and what adds insult to the injuries they have created against many of us is the fact that, despite their own confessions and being caught on camera, our culture and the justice system have been prepared to allow them to do just that.

60. rq says

    4 August 2015 at 1:42 pm

    Next time someone says racism isn’t real, show them this 3-minute video

    If systemic racism isn’t real, why are black people nearly four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana use than their white counterparts despite using drugs at similar rates, about twice as likely to be pulled over while driving, or half as likely to get a call back after they mail their resume to an employer?

    The video above, by Brave New Films, breaks down these stats and more in a takedown of the idea that systemic racism isn’t a real problem in America.

    When looking at events like the unrest that unfolded in Baltimore over Freddie Gray’s death, the focus typically falls on police — since, in the case of Gray, they’re the ones protesters blame for the 25-year-old’s death due to a spinal cord injury after an allegedly brutal arrest. And while racial disparities in the criminal justice system and police use of force exist, this Brave New Films video demonstrates that the problem goes much deeper — affecting black Americans even when they’re applying for jobs, purchasing a car, or trying to buy a house.

    Dear white Facebook friends: I need you to respect what Black America is feeling right now

    Dear White America,

    It is somewhat strange to address this to you, given that I strongly identify with many aspects of your culture and am half-white myself. Yet, today is another day you have forced me to decide what race I am — and, as always when you force me — I fall decidedly into “Person of Color.”

    Every comment or post I have read today voicing some version of disdain for the people of Baltimore — “I can’t understand” or “They’re destroying their own community” or “Destruction of Property!” or “Thugs” — tells me that many of you are not listening. I am not asking you to condone or agree with violence. I just need you to listen. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to, but instead of forming an opinion or drawing a conclusion, please let me tell you what I hear:

    I hear hopelessness
    I hear oppression
    I hear pain
    I hear internalized oppression
    I hear despair
    I hear anger
    I hear poverty

    If you are not listening, not exposing yourself to unfamiliar perspectives, not watching videos, not engaging in conversation, then you are perpetuating white privilege and white supremacy. It is exactly your ability to not hear, to ignore the situation, that is a mark of your privilege. People of color cannot turn away. Race affects our lives every day. We must consider it all the time, not just when it is convenient.

    As a person of color, even if you are privileged your whole life, as I have been, you cannot escape from the shade of your skin. Being a woman defines me; coming from a relatively affluent background defines me; my sexual orientation, my education, my family and my job define me. Other than being a woman, every single one of those distinctions gives me privilege in our society. Yet, even with all that privilege, people still treat me differently.

    For most of my childhood, I refused to allow race to be my most defining feature. I actually chose for most of my childhood to refuse race as my most defining feature. But I found that a very hard position to maintain, given the way the world interacts with me and the people I love. Because I have to worry about my brother and my cousins getting stopped by the police. Because people react to my wonderful, kind, intelligent father differently, depending on whether he’s wearing a suit or sweat pants. Race has defined the way I see the world like no other characteristic has.

    This can be hard to understand, if you never experienced it firsthand. So again, for just one more moment, reserve your judgments and listen. This is what you might come to realize, if you spent your days in my skin.

    In childhood: People regularly ask “What are you” instead of “Who are you?” This will not end, either. In high school, one kid even asks if you are “Mulatto,” which, according to some scholars, originally meant “little mule.”

    A few years later: Go on a road trip with your mom. Refuse to get out of the car at a gas station in the boondocks, because you are sure the person with the Confederate flag bumper sticker is going to realize your white mother married a black man and hurt her (and you too, being the byproduct of said union). He’s carrying a rifle on a gun rack. Now even more terrifying.

    As a teenager: Be the only person of color in the majority of your Advanced Placement classes, even though there are a decent number of brown and black people at your school. For years following 9/11, get “randomly” selected for the additional screening at the airport.

    In college: People assume you got into Princeton because of affirmative action. They refuse to believe it could be because you are smart.

    In adulthood: Your younger brother has been stopped in his own neighborhood — the neighborhood he has lived in all his life – and asked what he could possibly be doing there.

    At your workplace: For two years in a row the NYPD shows up randomly at the school you work at, which has a 100 percent minority student body. The first time the police don’t even tell the school beforehand. The cops just show up early in the morning, set up a metal detector and X-ray scanner, and fill the cafeteria with dozens of policemen. As your young students file in in the morning, the NYPD scans them like they’re going through airport security right after 9/11. They confiscate cellphones, and pat some of students down, particularly the older-looking boys. As you watch this, you feel anger welling up in your chest and almost start to cry. You think, “Why are you treating my kids like criminals?!” Children are in tears. The screenings are not due to any specific threat, but rather as part of a “random screening program” — but one that never seems to make its way to the Upper East Side. White America’s children are told they can go to college, be anything. These students are treated like suspects. And that is exactly what society will tell your children one day, unless something changes.

    Today, tomorrow, every day: White people around you refuse to talk about what is happening in this country. The silence is painful to experience.

    These are my experiences. They have deeply affected who I am. And I am SO PRIVILEGED. Mine has been a decidedly easy life for a person of color in America. I try to conceptualize what it is like for my students who got wanded by the NYPD, my students who have been stopped and frisked, my students whose parents work multiple jobs, my students on free and reduced-price lunch, my students whom white adults move away from because they look “scary.”

    I try, when I can, to listen to them, because only by validating their feelings can we begin to find a way to overcome the challenges they face. That doesn’t mean I let them off easy when they do something wrong. But I try to understand the why.

    I don’t need you to validate anyone’s actions, but I need you to validate what black America is feeling. If you cannot understand how experiences like mine or my students’ would lead to hopelessness, pain, anger, and internalized oppression, you are still not listening. So listen. Listen with your heart.

    If you got this far, thank you. By reading this, you have shown you are trying. Continue the conversation, ask questions, learn as much as you can, and choose to engage. Only by listening and engaging can we move forward.

    Black is Beautiful and Black Lives Matter,

    Julia

    Black Lives Matter, all of them (Content Note: Transphobia) – yes, Tony’s blog post on the matter, one more time! Because we’re here for all black lives.

    Dear NBC, BBC, CNN, and others: Mugshots are for criminals and murderers, not their victims – a look at how victims and killers are portrayed.

    A grand jury in Cincinnati indicted University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing yesterday for the murder of Sam DuBose, an unarmed black man, during a traffic stop a few weeks ago.

    “This is without question a murder,” Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said yesterday. “It was a senseless, asinine shooting.”

    But to look at some of the images chosen by media outlets yesterday, it would be hard to say who was the killer and who was the victim.

    Here’s what NBC decided to use, an old mug shot of murder victim Sam DuBose, alongside a photo of Ray Tensing in full police regalia, with a U.S. flag nicely positioned in the background [pair of photos]

    Here’s what a mugshot of an accused murderer next to his victim should look like [pair of photos]
    […]

    Using a mugshot that has no relevance to the circumstances in which Sam DuBose was killed—up against a fully-uniformed photo of his accused killer—suggests that DuBose did something criminal to instigate the cop in his shooting. As yesterday’s grand jury decision confirms, this is blatantly not true. It warps the real story: a cop who allegedly killed an innocent man for no good reason.

    Let’s say this together: murder victims are not perpetrators. Don’t portray them as if they are. #dobetter

    More examples at the link.

61. rq says

    4 August 2015 at 2:27 pm

    A Brave Interview: Raising A Black Child In America

    Headlines are again blanketing us with images of an unarmed black man being killed by a white police officer. Not for doing something wrong, but for simply being black.

    The question hanging as 25-year-old Officer Ray Tensing faces spending much of his life in prison for the murder of 43-year-old Samuel DuBose is how many more black people are yet to be killed, murdered, as a direct result of racism before something changes? I don’t know. No-one can.

    I often wonder how different my life would be if had not been born white. And, as a mother of four children (including three teenage sons), I wonder what it must be like to be raising black children in America. How would I parent them differently? What if I had to warn my playful, outgoing sons to never carry a toy that may be mistaken for a gun? What if I had to teach them to arm themselves against prejudice and implicit bias? What if I could not let them risk the mistakes of the white children they go to school with without putting their very lives at risk?

    Ending racism will take courage. Courage to look ourselves in the mirror and to ask where by our action, inaction, denial or sheer indifference we are complicit in the racism that we see around us. Finding that courage first demands recognizing that regardless of our position, power or even the hue of our skin, we are more powerful than we think and never underestimating the ripple effect we set in motion when we decide to be the change we wish to see in the world around us.

    And as a parent, I believe that we have an obligation to amplify that ripple effect by raising the next generation of children to be more tolerant than those which have gone before them.

    So as part of my Brave Interview Series, I reached out to Clint Smith, a black poet and Harvard doctoral candidate whose TED Talk, “Raising A Black Son In America,” helped those of us who have never had to worry about such things to see with new eyes. I hope his answers will help you do likewise, because the only way we will ever end the racism that still runs deep in American culture, and in other countries around the world, is when white people care about ending it as deeply as black people do.

    Interview at the link. Clint Smith is excellent. And he has some beautiful poetry out there, too. I recommend.

62. rq says

    4 August 2015 at 2:32 pm

    The Continuing Reality of Segregated Schools

    Most black children will not be killed by the police. But millions of them will go to a school like Michael Brown’s: segregated, impoverished and failing. The nearly all-black, almost entirely poor Normandy school district from which Brown graduated just eight days before he was killed placed dead last on its accreditation assessment in the 2013-2014 school year: 520th out of 520 Missouri districts. The circumstances were so dire that the state stripped the district of its accreditation and eventually took over.

    In the months following Brown’s death, I traveled to Normandy and wrote a piece called “School Segregation, the Continuing Tragedy of Ferguson” for ProPublica and The New York Times, published last December.

    But I couldn’t stop reporting this story, as I had found something there that seemed straight out of a history book. A Missouri law had inadvertently created a new school integration program in one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the country by allowing Normandy students to leave their unaccredited school district and transfer to white, high-achieving ones.

    I teamed up with Chana Joffe-Walt, a producer for the radio program “This American Life,” to tell the story of Michael Brown’s school district through the students who remain there. It is a story of children locked away from opportunity, what happens when those children are given a chance to escape failing schools and what happens to those children left behind. It is a story of how powerful people decided to do something only when the problems of the worst district in the state were no longer contained. And above all, it is a story of the staggering educational inequality we are willing to accept.

    I believe the article has a link to the audio.

63. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    4 August 2015 at 10:23 pm

    Alabama man says cop threatened him with murder:

    A white Alabama police officer was caught on a secret recording discussing ways to kill a black man and cover it up, it was revealed Tuesday.

    The 2013 incident was quietly settled out of court and ended with the officer keeping his job, according to legal documents and interviews with lawyers and officials involved in the case.

    Man, cops get to keep their jobs for doing and saying shit that would get civilians in a load of trouble.

    The recording, first reported by the Guardian and obtained by NBC News, captures Alexander City Officer Troy Middlebrooks during a May 2013 visit a home where the suspect, Vincent Bias, was visiting relatives.

    At one point, the officer pulls Bias’ brother-in-law — who is white — aside and tells him he doesn’t trust Bias. Middlebrooks had arrested Bias on drug charges weeks earlier, and seemed to be frustrated that he had made bail.

    Middlebrooks tells Bias’ brother-in-law, that if he were the suspect’s relative, he would “f—ing kill that motherf——” and then arrange the crime scene to “make it look like he was trying to f—ing kill me.”

    But I’m sure he has nothing against black people. He’ll probably even let a black person use his restroom.

    A month after that incident, Bias’ lawyers told the city it intended to sue the city of 14,875 people for $600,000. They drafted a lawsuit that accused Alexander City police of harassing him, and included the contention that Middlebrooks also called Bias the N-word.

    Bias’ legal notice was passed to the city’s insurance company, which arranged a settlement of far smaller amount: $35,000, according to Alexander City’s attorney, Larkin Radney.

    With that agreement, Bias never sued. The unfiled complaint was obtained by both the Guardian and NBC News.

    Bias lawyer Eric Hutchins has called for a state and federal investigation.

    Middlebrooks, meanwhile, remains on the job. He could not be reached by NBC News for comment.

    Alexander City Mayor Charles Shaw and Police Chief Willie Robinson did not respond to calls seeking comment.

    Chief Robinson, who is black, told the Guardian that Middlebrooks was disciplined, but he declined the paper’s request for details.

    Robinson defended Middlebrooks, saying, “He was just talking. He didn’t really mean that.”

    Dude, you don’t know that. More importantly, this is police officer. This kind of language is unbecoming of cops who are entrusted with authority and power. They are supposed to serve and protect. How can this guy be trusted to serve and protect black people if he’s going to say hateful, racist crap like this?

    The chief also told the paper that he personally disagreed with the city’s decision to settle with Bias.

    “It’s a whole lot different if you hear both sides,” Robinson said.

    Both sides?
    Both motherfucking sides?!
    There is no justification for a cop saying such things, no matter *what* the “other side” is.

    Middlebrooks exchanged text messages with a Guardian reporter in which he said he had been cleared in a state inquiry. But the state Bureau of Investigation told the paper it had no record of looking into the case.

    Bias, 49, told NBC News that he took the money in hopes of moving away from Alexander City, where he claims he was unfairly targeted by police, in part because of his race.

    But he said that after the recording surfaced, and he threatened a lawsuit, the police added to the drug charges against him until he felt he had no choice but to plead guilty. “They forced my hand,” he said.

    Bias said he served 14 months in a county jail, and was released two months ago.

    He said he has only discussed the allegations with his lawyers. He said he was never interviewed by internal affairs investigators.

    So chances are the cop wasn’t cleared, bc there doesn’t seem to have been any inquiry. Does this mean ::gasp:: that he lied?

64. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    4 August 2015 at 10:35 pm

    <a href= "http://www.theroot.com/articles/news/2015/08/lawsuit_details_brutal_attack_on_innocent_man_by_shreveport_cops_who_allegedly.html?wpisrc=topstoriesLawsuit details brutal attack on innocent man by Shreveport cops who allegedly beat and sodomized him:
    (note: that’s the actual title of the article)

    A Houston man has filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Shreveport, La., and several police officers who he alleges falsely arrested and brutalized him, including sodomizing him with a nightstick while he was in the back of a patrol car, the Shreveport Times reports.

    According to the lawsuit, Desmond Lewis was walking away from Walgreens Pharmacy on the evening of July 12, 2014, when he was approached by two police officers (identified in the lawsuit as Officer Bordelon and Officer Owen) in a patrol car.

    They were allegedly in the area responding to a burglary call and demanded that Lewis come toward the vehicle.

    Lewis alleges that he ran away out of fear and that Bordelon and Owen, along with a third officer identified in the lawsuit as Officer Hayes, chased him “without cause.” Once they caught up to him, they allegedly took him down with a “straight-arm bar tactic” and handcuffed him.

    According to the lawsuit, the officers admitted that Lewis was not the suspect they were looking for in the area. Still, they allegedly insisted that he must be arrested for something, since they had used force in apprehending and detaining him.

    It got even worse from there.

    After pushing Lewis face-first into a patrol car, Officer Bordelon allegedly punched Lewis several times in the face without provocation and beat him across the legs with his nightstick. It was then that Bordelon is reported to have sodomized Lewis, who was then facedown in the patrol car.

    Lewis was allegedly bleeding so profusely through his shorts that after he received medical attention from paramedics with the Shreveport Fire Department, they recommended that he be transported by ambulance to the Louisiana State University hospital for “required treatment.”

    (bolding mine)
    1- More cops being fucking vile assholes
    2- Why is this referred to as ‘sodomy’, rather than what it was- rape?

65. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    4 August 2015 at 10:37 pm

    Well I messed *that* HTML up…

66. abb3w says

    6 August 2015 at 11:48 am

    I presume that at least some of the previous threads have brought up Altemeyer’s RWA and Pratto’s SDO scales, and their correlations to prejudice.

    I’ve also previously noted that they seem to shed some light on the social justice controversy within the Freethought movement. RWA is strongly correlated to religiosity; SDO is uncorrelated. So, while the skeptic movement seems to tend light on xenophobes, there’s just as much contempt-based prejudice as in the wider society. Possibly more so, among organized groups. Some of the institutions arising in Ingersoll’s era had by the mid-20th century seem to have fallen to this.

    The racist/sexist faction seems to have been swept even more thoroughly under the rug than the communists, but howsoever much the contemporary humanist faction might wish it to have never existed, it seems to have been one of the major strains.

67. Caine says

    8 August 2015 at 10:54 am

    Art and Activism:

    http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/ferguson-artists-blur-boundaries-between-activism-and-art

    http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/damon-davis-hands-reach-ferguson-ladue-hope-racial-justice

    http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/how-broad-brush-ferguson-transformed-local-arts-scene

    http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/st-louisan-s-photos-sheldon-challenge-jim-crow-depictions-african-americans

    http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/and-then-ferguson-happened-unrest-opportunity-drew-rac-head-felicia-shaw-home

68. Caine says

    8 August 2015 at 11:01 am

    Nona Faustine’s White Shoes Series, beautiful and powerful: http://blackgirllonghair.com/2015/07/black-woman-artist-poses-nude-at-former-new-york-slave-trade-sites-including-wall-street-and-city-hall/

    As for the white shoes in Faustine’s photography, they represent “the white patriarchy that we cannot escape.”

     
    X-posted Discuss Art

69. rq says

    8 August 2015 at 3:12 pm

    Issa Rae: Hollywood Wanted to Lighten Awkward Black Girl—I Said No, also worthy of cross-post to the Discuss: Art thread.

70. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    9 August 2015 at 3:50 pm

    Note:
    Today is the one year anniversary of the extrajudicial execution of Michael Brown, Jr. at the hands of ex-police officer Darren Wilson.

    ****

    A children’s illustrator is getting hate for her anti-racist art:

    Illustrator Mary Engelbreit has made many fans for her work in stationery, home goods, and children’s books for over 30 years.

    But today, some of those fans are not so happy with anti-racist artwork she’s posted on her Facebook as a tribute to Michael Brown, who was killed nearly a year ago.

    The first, posted early this morning, shows a mother and child in front of a newspaper (from “Everywhere, USA”) that reads, “Hands up! Don’t shoot.”

    The second post seems to be a response to reactions to the previous picture.

    It reads, “I will not stay silent so that you can stay comfortable.”

    The posts have indeed resulted in a lot of backlash from fans renouncing the artwork (though Engelbreit has also received a bunch of support).

    Click the link for screencaps of the backlash as well as the support she has received.

    Also, note the amount of fucks she gives:

    “There are no words to express how little I care if I lose every bigoted, racist, homophobic and/or sexist follower I have.”

71. Anne, Cranky Cat Lady says

    9 August 2015 at 5:43 pm

    Tony!,

    It’s so nice to see that ME still has that edge when she wants to bring it out. She seemed to have gone all Christianitish, but it looks like there’s still more to her.

72. Pen says

    9 August 2015 at 10:06 pm

    Can I do a ‘casual racism of the day’ anecdote here? Even if it’s technically for Toronto, just over the border? This one’s really exemplary of how casual racism happens – and how its entangled with the personality of the deliverer to the point where you can’t quite pin racism down on them. Also, nobody gets killed fortunately, but two people get embarrassed and irritated while the perpetrator goes scot free.

    So there I am at the car rental counter in Toronto, and the white woman behind it really was a grumpy old whatever, but she was treating me fairly civilly. Then a black guy comes along and he has one of those questions that require a one-second answer, so he butts in with it during a quiet moment. I give him a big welcoming smile because, yeah, it’s a pain to wait for 15 minutes when your question takes 1 second, and I was all for her dealing with it. People do that all the time. Not with this employee. She tells him in the nastiest tone she can muster that she’s with a customer and he’ll have to wait. Not content, she starts trying to catch my eye while she pulls disapproving faces about him. Yuck! Before she was done, I needed a shower, not a car. I had a really bad feeling about her. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone treat a reasonably well-dressed white guy that way AND try to drag another customer into it – heck, in Chicago, I just waited 45 minutes to sign a form while another white woman discussed shopping opportunities with the employee! But what do I know? Toronto-car-rental-person did have a grumpy personality. It’s not like I have enough to file a complaint against her. I’m just left with a bad feeling.

    ‘Kay, I’ll leave you all to the really heavy stuff now.

73. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    10 August 2015 at 2:14 am

    Shots fired in Ferguson after mostly peaceful Michael Brown, Jr. anniversary:

    “Multiple shots fired in Ferguson. Please leave the area of Ferguson and West Florissant,” the St. Louis County Police Department tweeted just after 11:15 p.m. local time. It was not immediately clear whether anyone was injured. Later, the police department confirmed in a statement that a police officer was involved in a shooting “after officers came under heavy gunfire.”
    Hours earlier, hundreds of people gathered at the memorial for Brown, an unarmed black teen who was shot dead in the middle of the street by a white police officer exactly one year ago.

    Teddy bears and candles now mark the memorial on Canfield Drive where the community’s outrage over Brown’s death planted the seeds for protests that would grow into a national movement decrying police violence.

    Flanked by other families who have lost loved ones at the hands of police, Michael Brown Sr. led the crowd to pause in silence at 11:55 a.m. CT – the exact time the unarmed teen was shot and killed. He stood in silence for four and a half minutes, representing each hour his son’s body was left in the street.

    Fuck. I just had a chilling thought. How many black families have lost a loved one due to police brutality within the last year? The last 5? The last 10? Could we fit them all in a civic center? A massive football stadium?

74. Pen says

    10 August 2015 at 5:01 pm

    @ Tony #73 – “How many black families have lost a loved one due to police brutality within the last year? The last 5? The last 10?”

    The Guardian is attempting to count them: How many black families have lost a loved one due to police brutality within the last year? The last 5? The last 10?

    Apparently, the total for all races killed this year is around 550, with black people twice as likely to die. Let’s round that to about 400, with a projected figure of 800 this year? And it probably isn’t unreasonable to multiply by however many years… I don’t know how many people fit in a civic center or football stadium. Whatever, it’s still too many.

    The Guardian also notes that black people are not only twice as likely to die, but about twice as likely to be unarmed and doing nothing very much at the start of the incident.

75. Pen says

    10 August 2015 at 5:02 pm

    #74 – Sorry, forgot to add a link : http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/01/us-police-killings-this-year-black-americans

76. Pen says

    10 August 2015 at 5:06 pm

    #74 & 75 – Whoops, I did my maths wrong. Black people being twice as likely to be killed needs to take population demographics into account.

    Of the 547 people found by the Guardian to have been killed by law enforcement so far this year, 49.7% were white, 28.3% were black and 15.5% were Hispanic/Latino.

    So, actually, the projected figure for black deaths in one year is around 200, about half what I first thought.

77. Pen says

    10 August 2015 at 5:08 pm

    – 400!!! Could the curators please just correct that last post, and i’m going to go an do something about the jetlag.

78. awakeinmo, Ruiner of Things says

    11 August 2015 at 4:51 pm

    Hiya.
    Can I drop this link here?
    Armed “Oathkeepers” Show Up in Ferguson

    In the midst of a spasm of tension in Ferguson, Missouri, on the one-year anniversary of the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, several heavily armed men carrying assault rifles and flak jackets appeared, and they weren’t cops.
    Instead, they said they were members of the Oath Keepers. The group, led by a man identified only as John, told reporters they were in Ferguson to protect a journalist for InfoWars.com, a conservative website run by radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

    Yeah, this should end well.

79. rq says

    12 August 2015 at 1:54 am

    Pen
    There’s two counts, I believe the other one is by the Washington Post, but I could be wrong. Their count is much higher, over 600 (might be near 700 by now). The two counts have slightly different criteria.
    Either way, both are projecting something near 1000 deaths by police for the year (last year, I believe, it was around 1100, but these are memory-numbers so may not be accurate. I’ve been posting occasional updates on the Count (when I remember) here.

    +++

    In any case, for those switching over from the Look At All the White People thread, here we are.
    I know this comes late in the thread, but here’s a Welcome! comment from me and Tony:

    Here’s a quick note from your Friendly Neighbourhood Curators (NOT moderators!). First, we are curators, not moderators, which means we can only indicate the direction we would like to see in this thread, and rely on PZ to wield the Banhammer in case of trolls. See example above.
    So. We would like to encourage everyone to comment and/or post things of racist relevance (as they come up, so no need to go out of your way, but if you see something…), and since it says ‘America’ and not ‘USAmerica’, posts re: Canada, Brazil, Haiti, etc. and all other American (north and south) countries are most welcome (I emphasize because upthread someone apologized for posting about Canada – sorry, as Canadians, no apologies allowed! :) ). There is a focus on USAmerica, since it seems to be in a unique and tragic state of affairs, but this is not an absolute requirement (stories from the UK and Australia and pretty much anywhere else are also welcome, for compare-and-contrast).
    This thread is, however, a continuation of threads looking at the various ways systemic racism manifests in the United States (esp. criminal justice). This will continue to be a focus, but not an exclusive one (entertainment, arts, personal blog, sports, etc. stories are also most welcome).
    Most importantly: GOOD NEWS re: racism is ALSO most welcome. On occasion one does come across such.

    We do encourage sharing of stories of observed or noticed racism. Or positive stories about racism being called out, in big or small ways, or of people working to change things either within their community, or working to help another community. Because it’s important also to note the small, individual manifestations along with the larger, more visible events and actions.

    And just a small request from me (rq) to my fellow white people: for those of us who are white, can we please refrain from comments about how ‘police were aggressive to me once, so I totally understand / so I can believe it’s a lot worse for black people’? I can understand the desire to try and empathize in this way, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last year of curation, it’s that we, as white people will never understand, and it’s useless to express our own experiences, as if this is necessary for us to believe and listen to black voices. I don’t think we will ever (barring an absolute police state) have the same all-encompassing, visceral anxiety re: police brutality, as white people. There was that cartoon where the white guy says ‘I’m scared of police’ and the black guy replies ‘I’m scared to death of police’. Let’s keep that difference in mind.

    (Here I would like to separate individual, terrible experiences with police (esp. regarding things like rape) that have a similar (if not the same) effect (which means ‘individual’ might be a bad word, because sexual assault victims as a group, I think, are treated terribly by the justice system, in general). But these particular experiences, I think, would be a better fit for the Through a Feminist Lens thread – though, without a doubt, there will be overlap.)

    And as a reminder of where it all started, here’s PZ’s first post on Michael Brown Jr, though first mention goes to Tony in the Lounge (comment 448), with a link to one of the first news stories at 449. I believe PZ’s post then connects to all subsequent posts – if it doesn’t, the next place to look is “Good Morning, America“. Other posts from PZ and a few other FtB bloggers are usually linked through as well.

    And to finish off, here’s Dana Hunter on Bernie Sanders fans, with some advice (and links!) on who to listen to and who to read to achieve some clarity re: BLM.

    Onwards.

80. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    12 August 2015 at 3:08 am

    Be nice if this could spread throughout the country:
    California Governor Jerry Brown signs bill banning grand juries in police use-of-force cases:

    Gov. Jerry Brown has signed legislation prohibiting the use of grand juries in California in cases where police officers use lethal force, a response to distrust of the grand jury process following the deaths of unarmed black men in other states.

    Proponents of Senate Bill 227 argued the grand jury process is too secretive and allowed prosecutors to avoid decision-making responsibility in politically charged cases.

    “One doesn’t have to be a lawyer to understand why SB 227 makes sense,” the bill’s author, Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, said in a prepared statement after Brown announced signing the bill Tuesday. “The use of the criminal grand jury process, and the refusal to indict as occurred in Ferguson and other communities of color, has fostered an atmosphere of suspicion that threatens to compromise our justice system.”

    Law enforcement groups representing district attorneys and police chiefs opposed the bill. The Democratic governor signed the measure without comment.

    Brown also signed Senate Bill 411, clarifying that people can shoot video of police.

    “Today, California makes it unequivocal – you have the right to record,” Sen. Ricardo Lara, the bill’s author, said in a prepared statement.

    After the decisions in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, I have found I’m not happy with the secrecy of grand jury proceedings.

81. rq says

    12 August 2015 at 5:28 am

    Quebec considering removing N-word from 11 place names – yep, it’s there, even in la belle province!

    A stretch of the Gatineau River that has officially been called Nigger Rapids for decades could be renamed — along with 10 other sites in Quebec whose names include the racial slur.

    But the provincial body that manages Quebec’s place names says there has been little public pressure to rename the sites.

    The rapids are located in the municipality of Bouchette about 120 kilometres north of Ottawa. They were named in memory of a black couple who drowned there in the early 1900s, said Jean-Pierre LeBlanc, spokesman for the Quebec Toponymy Commission.

    After decades of being known by their informal name by the locals, the commission officially recognized the name in 1983.

    “It was meant to describe the people who died,” LeBlanc said. “There was no pejorative connotation then as there is now.”

    LeBlanc said that no formal request by residents has been made to change the name of the rapids but that the commission is considering whether it should rename all 11 sites that include the racial slur.

    Okay, I get descriptives, but to say there was no pejorative connotation back then…? I think… I think he’s wrong. What’s nice is that the commission is considering the name-change without any actual outcry from the public – which means that someone in that commission is being so PC as to actually think ahead of the crowd! And that is a good thing.

    From Tuesday, about Monday night: Ferguson unrest: More than a dozen arrests in 4th night of Ferguson protests; also on Monday, Michael Brown anniversary: State of emergency declared after shooting, protests.

    From Monday, about Sunday: Ferguson braces for nightfall after state of emergency declared.

    More recently, Christian Taylor shooting: Texas police officer fired – I wonder if he will be able to live on donations from now on, too?

    A police officer who killed an unarmed college football player during a suspected burglary at a Texas car dealership was fired for making mistakes that the city’s police chief said caused a deadly confrontation that put him and other officers in danger.

    Arlington officer Brad Miller, 49, could also face criminal charges once police complete their investigation, Police Chief Will Johnson said.

    Called to the scene of a suspected burglary early Friday morning, Miller pursued 19-year-old Christian Taylor through the broken glass doors of a car dealership showroom without telling his supervising officer, Johnson said.

    Instead of setting up a perimeter around the showroom, Miller confronted Taylor and ordered him to get down on the ground, Johnson said. Taylor did not comply. Instead, he began “actively advancing toward Officer Miller,” Johnson said.

    Miller’s field training officer, who had followed Miller into the showroom, drew his own Taser. The training officer heard a single pop of what he thought was Miller’s Taser, but Miller actually had drawn his service weapon and fired it at Taylor, Johnson said. He fired his gun three more times, Johnson said.

    “Decisions were made that had catastrophic outcomes,” Johnson said.

    And they’re still calling it a suspected burglary.

    Ferguson unrest: Protesters gather for peaceful demonstration

    About 100 protesters gathered along West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson late Tuesday in a demonstration that was decidedly smaller and calmer than others on recent nights.

    Attendees mostly mingled quietly along the side of the road. Some chanted, and a few held signs. Police officers, most wearing riot gear, appeared to outnumber protesters.

    The St. Louis suburb has seen demonstrations for days marking the anniversary of the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, whose shooting death by a Ferguson police officer sparked a national “Black Lives Matter” movement. Tuesday was the fifth consecutive night a crowd gathered on West Florissant, the thoroughfare that was the site of massive protests and rioting after Brown was killed. Other nights drew hundreds of people, and one protest earlier in the week was disrupted by gunfire.

    Larry Miller, 58, organizer of the protest group Ferguson Freedom Fighters, said late Tuesday that it was clear the latest round of demonstrations were dying down. He wasn’t convinced much was accomplished.

    “We already know what needs to be happening is not happening,” Miller said. “We’re still bothered over the killing of Mike Brown because we still need police reform, criminal justice system reform.”

    The St. Louis County executive, Steve Stenger, declared a state of emergency Monday. Stenger said the state of emergency could be lifted as soon as Wednesday, depending upon how Tuesday night unfolded.

    Oath Keepers controversial

    Earlier Tuesday, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar was critical of an armed militia group patrolling the streets of Ferguson, saying the overnight presence of the Oath Keepers, who wore camouflage bulletproof vests and openly carried rifles and handguns along West Florissant Avenue, was “both unnecessary and inflammatory.” Stenger expressed a similar view.

    The far-right anti-government activist group is largely comprised of past and present members of the military, first-responders and police officers. John Karriman, an Oath Keepers leader from southwest Missouri, said members plan to remain in Ferguson at least through the end of the week.

    Late Tuesday night, a handful of members arrived. None appeared to be carrying long rifles.

    Belmar was ‘critical’ of them. What would he say if it was a group of black men exercising the same right?

82. rq says

    12 August 2015 at 9:36 am

    Ha! CTV journalist Tom Walters charged one year after Ferguson protests.
    I had a whole other comment with more Canadian media links but I think moderation et it all up. I forgot to remove some bad words.

    Also, here’s an article from August 5 of last year. Earlier this year – I believe in July? – we saw a number of articles on the threat white supremacist organizations pose to USAmerican domestic safety. It seems to be a recurring theme, and yet the authorities don’t seem to be taking these people with the seriousness they deserve. See also: Oath Keepers (tangentially related).
    Anyway, here’s the article: Nonpartisan Study: Sovereign Citizens Pose Bigger Threat To USA Than Islamic Extremists.

83. rq says

    12 August 2015 at 9:41 am

    And from CTV News itself,
    CTV’s Tom Walters nearly a year after Ferguson arrest.

    Other stories from there:
    ‘I have a dream’ speech warm-up recording discovered in North Carolina, which is neat!

    Before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Washington in 1963, he fine-tuned his civil rights message before a much smaller audience in North Carolina.

    Reporters had covered King’s 55-minute speech at a high school gymnasium in Rocky Mount on Nov. 27, 1962, but a recording wasn’t known to exist until English professor Jason Miller found an aging reel-to-reel tape in a town library. Miller played it in public for the first time Tuesday at North Carolina State University.

    “It is part civil rights address. It is part mass meeting. And it has the spirit of a sermon,” Miller said. “And I never before heard Dr. King combine all those genres into one particular moment.”

    King used the phrase “I have a dream” eight times in his address to about 2,000 people at Booker T. Washington High School in Rocky Mount, eight months before electrifying the nation with the same words at the March on Washington.

    He also referred to “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners,” saying he dreamed they would “meet at the table of brotherhood.” On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King changed that to “sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” In both speeches, “Let Freedom Ring” served as his rallying cry.

    “It’s not so much the message of a man,” the Rev. William Barber, president of the state chapter of the NAACP, said Tuesday. “It’s the message of a movement, which is why he kept delivering it. It proves once again that the ‘I have a dream’ portion was not a good climax to a speech for mere applause, but an enduring call to hopeful resistance and a nonviolent challenge to injustice.”

    Miller discovered the recording while researching “Origins of the Dream,” his book exploring similarities between King’s speeches and the poetry of Langston Hughes. His ah-ha moment came when he learned through a newspaper story about a transcript of the speech in state archives. If there’s a transcript, then there must be a recording, he thought.

    After 2 nights of tension, a peaceful protest with no arrests in Ferguson;
    Police chief fires Texas officer who killed unarmed college football player.

84. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    12 August 2015 at 3:05 pm

    Over at Ferris State University, the Jim Crowe Museum of Racist Memorabilia has their Question of the month up:

    Q: After seeing the Philadelphia 76ers new alternative logo, I wondered how many African Americans have been depicted as team logos and mascots?

    The answer is long and involved.
    Here’s an excerpt:

    A:
    My hope in responding to this question is to generate interest in research by friends of the museum. Because there have been thousands of sports teams from high school to minor leagues to professional leagues, it is virtually impossible to search all the historical logos and mascots to find African American representations, either positive or negative. However, I was able to find some logos and mascots designed after African American imagery. I hope our audience will help lead us to more.

    Considering the numerous caricatures of African Americans in advertising, marketing, toys, games, and entertainment. I was rather relieved that I was not able to find hundreds of caricatured images of black Americans used as logos and mascots. That is not to say they don’t exist, I just wasn’t able to find many.

    There are over 2000 Native American mascots, logos, or references for athletic teams in the United States (Native American mascots). Some are blatantly offensive, some are “honoring,” and some are a bit ambiguous. Many have changed their names, but still the controversy rages over the remaining teams using Native American heritage and images as logos and mascots.

    76ers Logo
    As far as African Americans used as mascots, logos, or referenced, I found many that were associated with the Negro leagues, (football, basketball, and baseball leagues), and some used African countries and tribes in the team names. For example, the Indianapolis Clowns franchise had previously been called the Miami Ethiopian Clowns (History of Indianapolis Clowns). Teams like the Ethiopian Clowns, the Zulu Cannibal Giants from Louisville, Kentucky, and the Borneo Cannibal Giants, were famed for their comedic style of play and vaudeville type routines (Black Ball). In some contests, the players “painted their faces, put rings in their noses, and played in straw dresses” (I was Right on Time). One theory is that the popularity of the Harlem Globetrotters could be attributed to the popularity of the “pepperball and shadowball” performances of these teams. (Black Ball).

85. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    12 August 2015 at 4:41 pm

    Bernie Sanders lets civil rights activists open Los Angeles campaign event:

    “There is no president that will fight harder to end institutional racism,” said Sanders, who was answered with a deafening roar and chants of “Bernie” from a packed Los Angeles Sports Arena, whose usual capacity is about 16,000 people.

    The rally began taking on the issue head-on as Symone Sanders — Bernie Sanders’ new national press secretary who is not related to the candidate — opened the program and talked at length about racial injustice.

    Symone Sanders is a black criminal justice advocate and a strong supporter of Black Lives Matter movement, and said Sanders was the candidate to fight for its values.

    “It is very important that we say the words ‘black lives matter,’ Symone Sanders said. “But it’s also important to have people in political office who are going to turn those words into action. No candidate for president is going to fight harder for criminal justice reform and racial justice issues than Senator Bernie Sanders.”

    On Saturday, protesters from Black Lives Matter took over a microphone at a Sanders event in Seattle and forced him to abandon an afternoon speech.

    On Monday night Comedian Sarah Silverman gave the night a Hollywood touch for Sanders, who had begun the day in front of a much smaller but still significant group of a few hundred nurses in Northern California whose national union gave Sanders its endorsement.

    The nurses in Oakland warmly welcomed Sanders, along with his message of taxing the wealthy, better health care for all, and free college tuition for students.

    In a short speech, Sanders railed against the one percent who he says are gobbling up property at the expense of everyone else. He said it’s crazy that people go to jail for drugs while Wall Street speculators have faced zero punishment. And he said that the U.S. health care system is a global embarrassment.

    “This land does belong to you and me, it belongs to all of us and not a handful,” Sanders said to members of National Nurses United who were at the site and also listening by phone and web.

    National Nurses United, the largest organization of nurses with 185,000 members, formally endorsed him at the event.

    Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is considered the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in 2016. But Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, has gained a fervent following among people energized by his populist campaign and his plain talk.

    Sanders in his California appearances mostly avoided criticizing Clinton directly as he has in most campaign events.

    Sanders and other Democrats have had recent struggles with activists from the Black Lives Matter movement, who want much more from presidential contenders on racism and race relations.

    At a town hall for Democratic presidential candidates in Phoenix last month, protesters took over the stage and disrupted an interview with Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

    A nurse in Oakland on Monday asked Sanders by phone how he would address racism within the criminal justice system. His answer was prompt.

    “When we talk about creating a new America, at the top of our list is the end of racism in all its ugly forms,” he said. “All of us were nauseated, when we have seen the videos … we know that if those folks were white they would not be dragged out of cars and thrown into jails.”

    Sanders’ response received generous applause in Oakland. A woman in the crowd yelled, “Senator, do black lives matter to you?”

    “Yes,” he said.

    (bolding mine)

    ****

    Marissa Johnson speaks out about taking the mic from Bernie Sanders:

    Last Saturday, Johnson and fellow Black Lives Matter of Seattle protester Mara Jacqeline Willaford disrupted a rally in support of Medicaid expansion in Washington state as Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was getting up to speak. When the two women grabbed the microphone and screamingly insisted they were being reasonable by refusing to let the rally proceed, Sanders left the stage.

    The stunt has left many on the left at odds. Johnson and Willaford’s supporters claim that the two women are acting with the urgency required in a situation where black people’s lives and bodies are being destroyed by police on a daily basis.

    Critics say that the interruption amounted to little more than a clownish tantrum that drove as many people away from the Black Lives Matter cause as it could have attracted.

    Johnson says she doesn’t care, ultimately, whether the tactics are alienating.

    “I feel good,” she said by phone. “I helped launch a national conversation around race and electoral politics and respectability that’s still going strong two days later. I could not be better.”

    Going after Bernie Sanders is “super important,” Johnson said, because “Sanders is supposed to be as far left and progressive as you can possibly get and in Seattle’s political context? I know that really, really well, right? We have hordes and hordes of white liberals and white progressives and yet we still have all the same racial problems. So for us locally in our context, confronting Sanders was the equivalent of confronting the large, white, liberal Democrat leftist contingent that we have here in Seattle who not only has not supported BLM in measurable ways but is often very harmful and is upholding the white supremacist society that we live in.”

    I implore her critics to keep the bolded portion (my doing) in mind.

    Johnson said she and her group have not disrupted any Hillary rallies because “Hillary has better Secret Service than Obama.”

    “She’s doing these private dinners that are invite-only,” agreed Gandi. “It’s positively ludicrous for people to think that these activists would not be protesting Hillary if they could get to her.”

    “The work that I do in particular is agitation work,” Johnson said, when asked why she never contacted the Sanders campaign to ask for a spot in the rally’s program. “People are having these conversations, people are forced to do their own work and do their own reforms because of work that I’ve done on the ground.”

    “Well, what would you say to the people who say that you’re hurting your cause?” White asked.

    “I don’t give a fuck about the white gaze,” Johnson replied. “I don’t. I literally don’t.”

    When asked about her admission that she once supported former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), Johnson explained that her parents, an interracial couple, are Tea Party supporters and that she was a supporter of the former vice presidential candidate when she was a high schooler in 2008.

    “Clearly that’s not where I am, because people leave high school and go to college and [change their views],” she explained, adding that she was a “devout evangelical Christian.”

86. tonysan says

    15 August 2015 at 2:55 am

87. opposablethumbs says

    15 August 2015 at 4:52 am

    Oh go away, troll #86. You’re transparent and tedious.

88. tonysan says

    15 August 2015 at 5:10 am

89. tonysan says

    15 August 2015 at 5:32 am

90. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    15 August 2015 at 6:51 am

    In case there is any doubt, the fool posting above is not me, nor are they related to my blog. They are a troll trying to stir up shit, so please don’t listen to them. PZ will happily ban this latest fool posting where they know they are not wanted.

91. tonysan says

    15 August 2015 at 7:09 am

92. CaitieCat, Harridan of Social Justice says

    15 August 2015 at 8:14 am

    Lol, I was thinking I should write a children’s book: The Saddest Troll of Them All.

93. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    16 August 2015 at 10:28 am

    Sandra Bland: Talking while black:

    excerpt:

    As linguists trained in analyzing variation in people’s speech, including the distinct ways African Americans talk, we believe that language and linguistic discrimination played a role in the failure of the interaction between Sandra Bland and Officer Encinia. In particular, we believe that Officer Encinia’s (mis)perception of Bland’s language style contributed to the escalation of the situation: Encinia’s perception of Bland’s “non-compliance”, which led to his pulling her from the car, was triggered not just by what Bland said, but also by how she said it. Several conservative commentators and proponents of respectability politics have blamed Bland for this escalation, essentially claiming that had she talked more “politely” she would still be alive today. That argument is problematic since it doesn’t hold the officer accountable for his actions and over-emphasizes the little control Bland had over the outcome of the situation. Instead, we argue that officer Encinia suffered a series of racially-influenced misreadings of Bland’s speech that led him to see her as especially emotional and uncooperative. It’s clear from Bland’s choice of of words that she was unhappy with the stop, but we claim that it was her tone, and not just her words, that was perceived by the officer as hostile, defiant, and threatening.

    Sandra Bland’s traffic stop occurred in a social context where African Americans suffer racial discrimination in everything from employment opportunities to interactions with the police. And as has been well-documented, language often plays an important role in this type of discrimination. Research shows that not only can listeners tell the difference between someone who “sounds black” and someone who “sounds white”, but that this ability to guess someone’s race based on how they talk has profound social consequences. Linguist John Baugh has shown that, for example, sounding black can be detrimental to a housing search, with landlords telling a caller that they hear as black that an apartment had already been rented out, but then later offering to show the still-vacant property to a caller who they hear as white-sounding. Much as African Americans are racially profiled (e.g. “driving while black”), many are also profiled on the basis of their speech.

    One element that varies between voices which are perceived as black and those which are perceived as white are differences in rhythm and melody. For example, scholars who study African American English (a cover term for a wide variety of ways of speaking commonly associated with African Americans; sometimes known as “ebonics”) have shown that black speakers may use more words with stressed accents on them (which we’ll write in ALL CAPS), and that those accented words are often louder and higher in pitch. This results in a variety of English that sounds distinctly African American, even if a speaker doesn’t use many of the stigmatized grammatical features commonly associated with African American English: a person can say a sentence that, on paper, is quite standard, but still be heard as sounding black. Sometimes this distinctive way of speaking is praised and seen as powerful: both Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama use features of African American English in their speech. But often, the distinctiveness of African American English is heard negatively, feeding into stereotypes that African Americans are “loud” or “dramatic”. These stereotypes are often aimed at black women in particular, and this can have negative effects: for example, a recent paper has shown that black girls are twice as likely to be suspended for the nebulous crime of “defiance”, a category that includes “talking back” and “having an attitude”, perceptions that were likely fueled by their distinct speech patterns.

94. blf says

    16 August 2015 at 10:52 am

    US civil rights activist Julian Bond dies aged 75. Mr Bond was one of the founders of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who played an incredibly important role in the Civil Rights movement), and also a founder of the SPLC, and later, president of the NAACP.

95. Morgan!? ♥ ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ says

    16 August 2015 at 1:20 pm

    US civil rights activist Julian Bond dies aged 75

    Damn, damn, damn and damn. We need our wise elders to live forever. We need as many as we can get. We need to stop murdering our young who could become wise elders. We need to stop murdering.
    RIP Julian Bond.

96. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

    16 August 2015 at 10:50 pm

    Huge piece of black history found: Martin Luther King Jr’s first recording of ‘I Have A Dream’ speech found:

    English professor, Jason Miller, discovered the historical 55-min tape from Nov, 27, 1962 in a town library. He also had the honors of playing it for the first time at North Carolina State University.

    ”It is part civil rights address. It is part mass meeting. And it has the spirit of a sermon. I never before heard Dr. King combine all those genres into one particular moment,” said Miller.

    The phrase I have a dream was used by Dr. King eight times during his speech where he addressed approximately 2000 people. Miller found the recordings while researching, “Origins of the dream”, his book exploring the comparison of Kings’s speeches and poetry of Langston Hughes.

    While reading the newspaper, he learned there was a transcript of the speech in state archives. He figured if there was a transcript, there must be a recording too. After sending many emails and making a lot of calls, he finally got a response from Braswell Public Library in Rocky Mount.

    There were three people who were present during King’s speech in 1962 who were privileged to hear the recording play back thanks to Miller. One of those three people said, “this newly available recording is just as inspiring today.”

97. rq says

    17 August 2015 at 3:36 am

    Here’s a piece by Tony, listen to the song within.
    Black Lives Matter? Not to NBC
    Chills. The good kind. I think.

98. peesutease says

    17 August 2015 at 4:35 am

99. peesutease says

    17 August 2015 at 5:20 am

100. peesutease says

     17 August 2015 at 5:40 am

101. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     17 August 2015 at 11:42 am

     Sorry, Not sorry: Bernie Sanders nixes aides apology to Black Lives Matter :

     BuzzFeed’s Darren Sands reported Saturday that Sanders’ African-American outreach director, Marcus Ferrell, emailed a group of activists asking them to have a “more formal” meeting with the senator.

     “I apologize it took our campaign so long to officially reach out,” Ferrell wrote the activists. “We are hoping to establish a REAL space for REAL dialog between the folks on this email and our campaign.”

     The email also said that the campaign wanted to “have a more formal interaction with the movement. We wanted to let you know that we hear you, we want to do a better job speaking out on the issues, and as a sitting U.S. Senator, possibly introducing legislation and making a constitutional change.”

     But when asked on the NBC show whether he felt an apology to Black Lives Matter was necessary, the Vermont senator told Todd, “No, I don’t. I think we’re going to be working with all groups. This was sent out without my knowledge.”

     Before that, Sanders had flatly said, “We will meet with everybody,” then rattled off the names of different constituencies, indicating that Black Lives Matter is no more or less important than any other group he may or may not meet with.

     The exchange between Sanders and Todd was a study in how black advocates are treated by some progressives in a Democratic Party that depends on black votes to win on the national level. In the case of Sanders, his campaign avoids any specific endorsement of policies of concern to black advocates—in this case the specific policy agenda of Black Lives Matter. Meanwhile, progressives have had no problem loudly endorsing, supporting and repeating the concerns of other groups under the Democratic Party’s wide umbrella—even though those groups are less loyal. It’s hard to imagine Sanders saying that he’d meet with immigration or LGBT advocates just as he’d reach out to “all kinds of groups,” in a clear effort to negate their relative importance.

     ****

     Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad sparks latest n-word debate with Ta-Nehisi Coates book review:

     “On July 31, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad published a review of several books on race and racism in the United States,” Karen Attiah reported Thursday for the Washington Post.

     “The series, written by the paper’s Washington correspondent Guus Valk, leads with a review of Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book, ‘Between the World And Me.’ Somewhere along the editorial process, the editors thought it would be a good idea to headline the article, ‘N*gger, Are You Crazy?’

     “If the headline weren’t appalling enough, the article compounded the offensiveness factor with its accompanying blackface figures . . .”

     Attiah quoted Michel Krielaars, editor of the Book supplement for NRC. She wrote, “In response to questions about the editorial decisions made with the piece, Krielaars said in e-mails that the headline was a quote from Paul Beatty’s satirical book ‘Sellout,’ which was reviewed.

     Krielaars also responded, “No, we didn’t assume it would offend Dutch readers (black or white), otherwise we wouldn’t have chosen it. Also we didn’t think about possible reactions by non-Dutch readers, because the article is in Dutch and it does not aim at non-Dutch readers.

     “The fact that, through the web, this article travels across the world we consider a good thing. But we don’t think it’s fair if the title travels by itself, without the context of the language in which the article was written. Having said that, we may have underestimated the possible impact on the image of a newspaper spread with these illustrations and this headline. We do regret this. . . .”

     Coates told Journal-isms by email that he would have no comment on the development.

     Coates has defended use of the N-word, employing it freely in his memoir, “A Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood” and writing a 2013 essay for the New York Times headlined, “In Defense of a Loaded Word.”

     However, Coates argued, the offensiveness of the word depends on who is using it.

     “A separate and unequal standard for black people is always wrong,” he wrote. “And the desire to ban the word ‘n*gger’ is not anti-racism, it is finishing school. When Matt Barnes [of the Los Angeles Clippers] used the word ‘n*ggas’ he was being inappropriate. When Richie Incognito [of the Miami Dolphins] and Riley Cooper [of the Philadelphia Eagles] used ‘n*gger,’ they were being violent and offensive.

     “That we have trouble distinguishing the two evidences our discomfort with the great chasm between black and white America. If you could choose one word to represent the centuries of bondage, the decades of terrorism, the long days of mass rape, the totality of white violence that birthed the black race in America, it would be ‘n*gger.’ . . .”

     (to prevent this post from being held in moderation, I have tweaked the n-word as it appeared in the original article by replacing the ‘i’ with an asterisks)

     They didn’t assume it would offend Dutch readers? Are there no black people in the Netherlands familiar with the N-word (and that read the paper)?

102. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     17 August 2015 at 12:09 pm

     White supremacist Craig Cobb wants to name latest all-white enclave after Donald Trump:

     The 63-year-old Cobb bought $10,000 in property last month from a man in Antler, near the Canadian border, in hopes of setting up a church for his racist Creativity Movement and homes for like-minded white supremacists, reported WDAY-TV.

     He planned to rename the town to “Trump Creativity” or “Creativity Trump” to honor the Republican presidential frontrunner — who Cobb deeply admires.

     However, local residents and elected officials do not want Cobb or his associates in the town, so the city outbid him and closed a deal with the property owner — who has tried to return a down payment made by the white nationalist.

     Cobb complained that the property owner was pressured to back out of the original deal, and he said he doesn’t want his money back but he instead wants a deed to the property.

     He denied that he and other church members were “trying to rule over other people,” but he admitted that he hopes to draw enough white supremacists to his enclave to outnumber the town’s voting population — which he estimated to be 20 people.

     Cobb also denied that his community would exclude non-white residents, although he conceded that he might not welcome black people.

     “‘Welcome’ is a strong word,” Cobb said. “We understand that they have a legal right.”

     I think Cobb’s community would have to be NOT welcoming to Mexican-Americans for this to appeal to Trump.

103. rq says

     17 August 2015 at 2:32 pm

     I have some week-old articles that I said I’d put up. And I’m slowly trying to find a groove within which I can do things here and still do everything else in meatspace.
     Anyhow, onwards.

     A Year After Michael Brown, People Are Sharing Tough Truths With #FergusonTaughtMe

     As thousands around the nation gathered Sunday to mark the one-year anniversary of the killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri, police, the hashtag #FergusonTaughtMe spread over social media like wildfire.

     In a year that saw a seemingly unending string of police violence against black men and women, activists and ordinary Americans took to Twitter in a sober assessment of the lessons learned.

     [examples of tweets]

     While protests and vigils in Ferguson were largely peaceful on Sunday, the anniversary was marred by gunfire when officers critically injured 18-year-old Tyrone Harris. According to St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar, Harris had approached a police van with a gun and opened fire on officers. The teenager was shot multiple times when cops returned fire as he attempted to flee. According to his father, Harris had previously been close with Brown.

     He unloaded a “remarkable amount of gunfire” with a stolen handgun, Belmar told CNN, adding ordinary demonstrators were not the problem and were performing a valuable public service. “Protesters are people who are out there to effect change.”

     Since Brown’s death, the toll of police violence has been documented in grim detail by the website Killedbypolice.net. Walter Scott, Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray were just three of the approximately 714 men and women killed by police in 2015.

     One thing I haven’t kept up with is twitter, hence I have no idea what the alternate narratives for Tyrone Harris currently are. I do think the official one has changed in the meantime. The “remarkable amount of gunfire” may not have been unloaded by Harris himself, but by police firing pretty much into a crowd. Annnnyway.

     Police Have Killed at Least 1,083 Americans Since Michael Brown’s Death – note: that number is already a week old.

     While the bulk of those killed from August 2014 to August 2015 were white, black people per population were more than twice as likely to be killed by cops than any other race, the data showed. African Americans are also more than three times as likely to be killed by police than white people, according to the statistics.

     Brown’s death was a seminal moment in arousing US consciousness of structural racial bias in police departments around the country, and the grand jury’s decision three months later not to indict Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who killed him, proved to many that that bias permeates every facet of the criminal justice system.

     “We need to recognize that the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation,” President Barack Obama acknowledged at a press conference immediately after the Ferguson grand jury decision in November. “In too many parts of this country a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color. Some of this is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country.”

     Since Brown’s death, there have been signs of progress. In the wake of the nationwide protests that gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement, roughly 24 states have instituted at least 40 new laws or policies in place to stem officer-perpetrated violence and killings. In some cities, police departments have outfitted officers with bodycams to increase accountability, while in others, cops have been trained in impartial and community-based policing.

     The fast indictments of the cop who shot and killed Cincinnati man Sam Dubose last month, and of the six Baltimore officers involved in Freddie Gray’s death, were also welcomed by activists across the country. But in the data gleaned on civilian deaths by police in the last 12 months, VICE News came across only 22 cases where officers were indicted or charged with crimes for killing citizens, while a significant number more — at least 257 deaths — had been either ruled an accident or investigators found the officers were justified in their use of fatal force. The majority of incidences are still under investigation.
     […]

     Tory Russell, co-founder of Hands Up United, a Ferguson-based social justice nonprofit set up in the wake of Brown’s death, told VICE News that the response to calls for accountability have been lethargic and lukewarm in the city.

     “On the police side there’s been zero accountability,” Russell said from the sidelines of a peaceful march led by Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., in St. Louis on Saturday. Hands Up United has come together with a body of other groups to coordinate four days of events and civil disobedience actions, which began Friday. Organizers have dubbed it the “Ferguson Uprising Commemoration Weekend.”

     “All that DoJ report did was put our grievances and our pain on paper,” Russell said, adding that he found VICE News’ figures on the number of people killed by police “just staggering.”

     “If any other place [outside the US] were killing three of their citizens a day, America would go over there and go rescue them,” he said. “It’s scary — with so much technology and money — that the government can’t even collect the data on how many people its police are killing every year.”

     Despite Obama’s recent announced reforms to the country’s criminal justice system across America’s “communities, courtrooms, and cellblocks,” many civil rights groups are calling for even greater pushes from the nation’s leaders to bring about police accountability and prosecutorial justice.

     “It’s high time our national leaders — President Obama and Attorney General Lynch — match the courage of everyday people risking their life and liberty to end discriminatory policing,” Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorOfChange.org, said in a statement Friday. “Why is there still no national database on police use of force? Why are indictments of those responsible for the tragic deaths of victims like Sandra Bland still so rare?”

     A huge stack of visuals at the link, too – great infographics for more visual readers. With all requisite numbers, too, of course.

     Yankees Affiliate: Timing Of Blue Lives Matter Day An ‘Unfortunate Coincidence’. Considering the origin of the phrase as a direct response to last year’s resurgence of #BlackLivesMatter, I really doubt that. I’m pretty sure there’s a team of people who are supposed to look into such things.

     On Sunday, one year to the day after 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, people from the community gathered to remember and reflect.

     At the same time, halfway across the country in Staten Island, New York, baseball fans were made a part of a “Blue Lives Matter” event at a Staten Island Yankees-Brooklyn Cyclones game, which took place less than a mile away from where Eric Garner was choked to death by a New York City police officer.

     Playing off of “Black Lives Matter,” a movement launched to bring attention and advocacy to black Americans suffering against police brutality, Blue Lives Matter was launched less than a year ago to “help law enforcement officers and their families during their time of need.”

     In effect, however, “Blue Lives Matter” serves as a corollary, as many other police charities exist without having to stand on top of its namesake, the rallying cry of “Black Lives Matter.” The co-opting of this phrase and popular hashtag has come under much criticism from the black community.

     The Staten Island Yankees, a minor-league affiliate of the New York Yankees, first announced “Blue Lives Matter Day” in March, advertising that a $25 ticket would get entrants a “Blue Lives Matter” wristband with the SI Yankees logo and concessions.
     […]

     In a letter to Staten Island Yankees senior director of marketing Michael Holley, a reader of TheRoot.com succinctly laid out criticisms of the event:

     On the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, this is what the SI Yankees organization chooses to do? This is beyond poor judgement. Did it occur to anyone at the SI Yankees how alienating this is to fans who have been deeply affected by the events that spurred the “Black Lives Matter” movement, including those right here in Staten Island?

     Holley responded by apologizing for the seemingly political stance the Yankees took by hosting Blue Lives Matter and added that “our goal is to support those in need, and NOT to provide ammunition for the political and social battles that we are all facing.”

     He also defended the SI Yankees’ decision to host “Blue Lives Matter Day,” responding to The Root with an email that read, in part:

     We put a lot of thought into whether or not to hold this promotion when Blue Lives Matter originally approached us. We try our best to accurately represent the interests of our community, and this issue is so divisive that it seemed like people wanted us to draw a line in the sand. But the more we thought about it, it came to down to this: Blue Lives Matter is an organization that supports the families of those who have been killed in action. I can’t pretend for a minute to understand who is right and who is wrong when something like that happens, but I DO know that families should NOT have to suffer. And for that reason, anyone who wants our help in raising resources to help those in need in our community will always have our ear.
     I’m comfortable with the decision to support an organization that helps those in need, and I will continue to seek opportunities for the Staten Island Yankees to do so in the future.

     When reached by The Huffington Post on Monday morning, SI Yankees president Jane Rogers said, “There was never any intent to cause controversy or ill-will feelings toward anyone in the community or outside the community.”

     “It’s how we treat any group that comes to the ballpark for fundraising efforts,” she continued. “We do this constantly with many, many groups. It was never a matter of favoring one group over another.”

     “We wanted to raise money for the families,” added Holley over the phone on Monday. “[Blue Lives Matter] weren’t handing out any propaganda. There were no political motives.”

     The Yankees may have been ignorant of the date (far too ignorant, in my opinion), but the Blue Lives Matter organization most certainly was not. I’m placing bets on that.

     Officials Declare State of Emergency in Ferguson – it’s week-old news, I’m mostly wondering, has it been lifted yet? Mid-week I heard it was extended…

     Ferguson Protesters Report Police Opening Fire On Wall of Protesters

     It sounds almost reminiscent of the Kent State University massacre in 1970. But this is not a protest from the civil rights era, it is happening as we speak. Two protesters have just been shot in Ferguson, and many activists on the ground say the police are to blame.

     The demonstrators had gathered to commemorate the one year anniversary of the Mike Brown murder at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson. But in the middle of a late-night confrontation Sunday night between police and protesters, two activists were gunned down – apparently by police officers.

     Police said they were just “trying to disperse a crowd” after some of the protesters were accused of “blocking traffic.”

     Apparently police believe that the appropriate way to disperse a crowd is by firing live ammunition at them.

     The Raw Story reports that “anniversary commemorations for Michael Brown had begun with a quiet march through the St. Louis suburb following a moment of silence for 18-year-old Brown, whose slaying on Aug. 9, 2014, ignited months of demonstrations and a national debate on race and justice.”

     But then cops with helmets and body armed moved in and confronted what formed into a line of protesters. The police ordered them to disperse, and when they did not, the cops opened fire according to reports on the ground coming in from several demonstrators.

     The protesters, locking arms and edging closer to the police cordon, began throwing water bottles and shouting, “We are ready for war!” Both sides held their ground, and police did not move immediately to make any arrests as clergy members and activists circulated between the two sides appealing for calm.

     “The St. Louis County Police Department was involved in an officer-involved shooting after officers came under heavy gunfire,” county police spokesman Shawn McGuire read from a prepared statement.

     The police are claiming that “two unmarked” police cars were also hit by gunfire.

     So there you have a non-police version of that night’s events.

     Bernie Sanders Announces New Policy Platform Aimed at Making Police Reform a Reality – which is all nice and good, right, especially considering his rather… lukewarm stance as posted by Tony just previous.

     After #BlackLivesMatter protesters co-opted a Bernie Sanders speech in Seattle in honor of Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson one year ago in Ferguson, Sanders responded in an admirably progressive way. On Sunday, ahead of a massive event in Portland which ended up drawing at least 20,000 supporters, Sanders unveiled a new campaign policy via his website under the heading “Racial Justice.”

     The detailed platform addendum takes aim at what the Sanders campaign is calling the “four central types of violence waged against black and brown Americans,” i.e. physical, political, legal, and economic. The call for change mentions Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and many others by name, adding that Americans “should not fool ourselves into thinking that this violence only affects those whose names have appeared on TV or in the newspaper.” Sanders also makes a point to categorize acts of violence instigated by white supremacists as “racist terrorism,” a subtle though remarkable act of accurate labeling.

     The article mentions ‘detail’ but I’ve read criticism that it’s mostly rhetoric and little concrete action-planing.

104. rq says

     17 August 2015 at 2:51 pm

     Photos: At Least 2 Protesters Arrested During NYC March For Michael Brown, some more of last week’s news.

     [FERGUSON FORWARD]
     1-Year-Anniversary of Brown’s Death Marked by Police Shooting, by Jamilah Lemieux, via Ebony.

     Serena Williams Looks Stunning on the Cover of ‘New York’ Magazine’s Fashion Issue. Here’s to positive images!

     “Ferguson Represents The Shot Heard Around The World…”

     Since capitalism is the primary function of America, it is impossible to lead a true revolution in this country without an absolute power shift which empowers the poor. The response ushered in by the community after the death of Brown was the most organic Black American revolt of our time. The people that shifted this conversation and created the moment are the dirt poor women and men of St. Louis , Mo.

     Today, as the dawn of Brown’s death re-enters into our lives, we must refocus our efforts and re-commit ourselves to the actual fight which brought us here. We must celebrate the individuals of all genders and sexual preferences that fought the occupation of a militarized police force while 365 days later we are virtually struggling to keep the word “fight” alive in this movement. When each and every person in your army is on one accord, fighting for their life the political minutia of the boardroom does not have much room to prosper.

     ‪I know for fact the Ferguson Uprising was created on the shoulders and backbones of the most undesired members of our society. The front liners that never stepped one foot inside the safe house when the drama between the police and the community reached its most combustible point. These are the heroes and sheroes that are seldom discussed or remembered. These same human beings are also our front line of defense against this capitalistic system of governance because they are the working class and they have no other option but to fight like hell to break loose from the oppressive bondage of police brutality. The police are the Gestapo for the state and poor people of color are this societies peasants. I worry that currently in this movement for black liberation we are straying away from the true soldiers that are willing to fight like none other for our freedom. We have an obligation to analyze class and the respective privilege attached to its origin in America.

     ‪The Black American freedom struggle is deeply attached to all forms of oppression on planet Earth. Our political education efforts must be purposefully connected to a global worldview that will assist people of color worldwide. We can choose to fight and scream for inclusion into the political paradigm of this country or we can align ourselves with the revolutionary principles of oppressed people all over the world. In my opinion, Ferguson represents the shot heard around the world as poor Black people in America fight to push back against the system and henceforth start a modern day revolution.

     The science of Black liberation in this country is the alchemy of liberty for the entire world. The media has overly worked to portray poor Black freedom fighters as nothing more than savage looters and petty thieves. I believe these men and women are the most critical members of our family tree. The fact is one brick being launched through a glass window did more than one single ballot being cast prior to Mike Brown’s murder. We can mystify ourselves with any other type of logic but the reality is poor people are the leaders of our Black uprisings. These working class soldiers were fired from their fast food jobs in the name of resistance. The audacity of poor people is the gasoline of this movement and must be valued above anything else. A year later we have a deeper understanding of the system we are battling and we now know that a movement without serious class analysis is not a movement whatsoever. We desire for our efforts to be viewed as more than a contemporary pop culture moment. Over the course of the next year this will only happen if we are capable of adding a true class analysis to our politics.

     “This Year Of Protests Has Been The Year Of Purpose…”

     Out of nowhere, a tweet put me in shock; the kind of shock that would abruptly wake one up from a deep sleep. A young man traumatized that he had witnessed a murder occur in front of him. Not only traumatized at the lifeless body, but confused about why it occurred. “I don’t know. He had his hands up” was all he could say when onlookers asked why was he slain. Reading those words pierced my heart. Eventually, I saw the first protest sign that started it all, “Ferguson Police Department just killed my unarmed son.” I heard the cry of his mother, felt her righteous indignation, and confusion as to why her baby couldn’t have simply been injured, instead of his life being stolen. I watched as unarmed civilians were being confronted with militarized weapons and police gear for objecting to the injustice that occurred in our city. Suddenly, the abyss I was falling in became a small pothole – I just stepped right out of it and into the streets in protest for Black life. I had no choice but to take action, and eventually I became that unarmed citizen looking down the gun barrels of those called to protect and serve me.

     I spent this past year spewing this idea that Black lives actually matter, in contrast to society’s generally held belief that they don’t. In August 2014, I shouted these words on behalf of Michael Brown Jr. That his life mattered, that he was loved, that I loved him and loved all that God intended for him to become. I shouted these words on behalf of my comrades that faced those assault rifles with me in response to our cries for justice. Their life mattered to me, because as a Christian, I knew that their lives mattered to God. As a Believer, I felt it was my sole duty to be willing to sacrifice my life for other people by courageously facing adversity, no matter if it looked like assault rifles, dogs, flash bombs, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and tear gas.

     Their lives matter to the One I serve, and that’s all I need to know about them. However, it took approximately nine months before I could say the words “Black Lives Matter” with a personal conviction about my own life.

     This year of protest has been healing and renewing for me. These protests revitalized me. “Love God and love people” have been the new thoughts to rule in my mind. This year has been the year of new definitions, how I define success, how I define myself, how I define all aspects of love, it’s all revolutionized now. I’ve navigated away from what society says we “should” value, keeping in mind that this is the same society that devalues me. This same society caused me to internalize that devaluation. This year of protest has been the year of purpose. The year of community. The year of democracy. The year of blackness. This year of protest is the year that I understood that Black Lives Matter, Black Love Matters, and Black Liberation Matters, and all of that that applies to me too.

     Bernie Sanders Unveils Sweeping Policy Platform To Combat Racial Inequality. Still last week’s news.

105. rq says

     17 August 2015 at 3:01 pm

     Still with last week’s news! Nathan Bedford Forrest statue vandalized.

     #BlackLivesMatter Activists Arrested in Ferguson Anniversary Protests

     A day after the city of Ferguson marked the first anniversary of the fatal police shooting that killed unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, nonviolent demonstrators, including activist and philosopher Cornel West and Black Lives Matter organizer Johnetta Elzie, were arrested in St. Louis. Demonstrators were seen jumping over police barricades outside a federal courthouse during a planned sit-in protest demanding the suspension of the Ferguson police department.

     According to MSNBC, demonstrators joined the #MoralMonday sit-in expecting to be arrested. Shortly before getting apprehended, Elzie tweeted a reference to the arrest of Sandra Bland, who died in police custody last month:
     [tweet]
     If I’m arrested today please know I’m not suicidal. I have plenty to live for. I did not resist, I’m just black.
     — ShordeeDooWhop (@Nettaaaaaaaa) August 10, 2015
     [/tweet]

     The arrests come just hours after St. Louis County issued a state of emergency in light of the violence that erupted late Sunday night after a police officer shot a man they say opened fire at them. Police charged 18-year-old Tyrone Harris with four counts of assault on law enforcement and other crimes. He remains in critical condition.

     Chicago Police Offer ‘Advice’ On How Not To Get Shot By Them. I bet most readers here can list police advice off the top of your heads. Which seem to work mostly for white people. I’ll test you on this later.

     Police organization’s ‘Darren Wilson Day’ in Columbia, Mo., sparks protest, criticism, as mentioned by awakeinmo upthread, too, via the St Louis Post-Dispatch.

     For white people to read and ponder to themselves. White people, what’s happening in #Ferguson is life and death. Please share this and think about it #BlackLivesMatter, see attached text for required reading.

     Social Media Reacts After 2 Prominent #BlackLivesMatter Activists and Cornel West Are Arrested During St. Louis Protests

     Johnetta “Netta” Elzie and DeRay Mckesson are among the handful of activists who stayed in Ferguson, Mo., long after the Michael Brown protests died down. They organized conference calls and panels and put together a newsletter to keep the nation and media outlets aware of the ongoing efforts to fight police brutality in the working-class community.

     Elzie was arrested Monday in St. Louis during protests to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Brown’s death. Her arrest was partially captured in a video clip released on Vine and Twitter.

     Eerily enough, Elzie had posted a message on Twitter earlier that day saying that if she was arrested and died, she was “not suicidal”—a direct reference to Sandra Bland’s arrest, a woman in Texas who died while in police custody in early July. Texas officials say that Bland committed suicide in her jail cell. Her family disputes that finding.

     […]
     A Huffington Post reporter explained that Elzie and Mckesson would be getting the legal equivalent of a slap on the wrist and would be released later Monday.

     Ah, but West…?

106. rq says

     17 August 2015 at 3:35 pm

     Something approaching ally-speak: I think it is best for me to stay ready to respond. If they silence the activists, I’ll be ready to step in for them.

     Sheriff taunts clergy keeping vigil at jail where Sandra Bland died: ‘Go back to the church of Satan’

     An United Methodist Church pastor in Texas said on Monday that the Waller County sheriff told her to “go back to the church of Satan” while she was keeping vigil outside the jail where Sandra Bland died.

     Hannah Adair Bonner explained on her Twitter feed that she went to the Waller County Jail on Monday just like she had for 27 days since Bland’s death. While she was sitting outside the jail, Sheriff R. Glenn Smith decided to confront her.

     Cell phone video uploaded by Bonner shows Smith walking by and asking if she needs his business card, presumably so he can be correctly identified.

     “Why don’t you go back to the church of Satan that you run?” Smith asks as he walks into the jail.

     Bonner later called on activists to contact Smith’s office for an apology.

     “Sheriff then went to my car, took pics of license plate and my face and threatened he is going to do something with them,” she noted.

     The racism banner suspended on balloons to drape the Arch was inspired. @LBPhoto1 photo 8/10

     [rq takes a break for a few days]

     Exclusion of Blacks From Juries Raises Renewed Scrutiny

     Here are some reasons prosecutors have offered for excluding blacks from juries: They were young or old, single or divorced, religious or not, failed to make eye contact, lived in a poor part of town, had served in the military, had a hyphenated last name, displayed bad posture, were sullen, disrespectful or talkative, had long hair, wore a beard.

     The prosecutors had all used peremptory challenges, which generally allow lawyers to dismiss potential jurors without offering an explanation. But the Supreme Court makes an exception: If lawyers are accused of racial discrimination in picking jurors, they must offer a neutral justification.

     “Stupid reasons are O.K.,” said Shari S. Diamond, an expert on juries at Northwestern University School of Law. Ones offered in bad faith are not.

     In Louisiana’s Caddo Parish, where Shreveport is the parish seat, a study to be released Monday has found that prosecutors used peremptory challenges three times as often to strike black potential jurors as others during the last decade.

     That is consistent with patterns researchers found earlier in Alabama, Louisiana and North Carolina, where prosecutors struck black jurors at double or triple the rates of others.

     In Georgia, prosecutors excluded every black prospective juror in a death penalty case against a black defendant, which the Supreme Court has agreed to review this fall.

     “If you repeatedly see all-white juries convict African-Americans, what does that do to public confidence in the criminal justice system?” asked Elisabeth A. Semel, the director of the death penalty clinic at the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.

     As police shootings of unarmed black men across the country have spurred distrust of law enforcement by many African-Americans, the new findings on jury selection bring fresh attention to a question that has long haunted the American justice system: Are criminal juries warped by racism and bias?

     Some legal experts said they hoped the Supreme Court would use the Georgia case to tighten the standards for peremptory challenges, which have existed for centuries and were, until a 1986 decision, Batson v. Kentucky, considered completely discretionary. (Judges can also dismiss potential jurors for cause, but that requires a determination that they are unfit to serve.)

     But many prosecutors and defense lawyers said peremptory strikes allow them to use instinct and strategy to shape unbiased and receptive juries. “I’m looking for people who will be open, at least, to my arguments,” said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Astoria, Ore.

     Jeff Adachi, San Francisco’s elected public defender, said peremptory challenges promote fairness.

     “You’re going to remove people who are biased against your client,” he said, “and the district attorney is going to remove jurors who are biased against police officers or the government.”

     Reprieve Australia, a group that opposes the death penalty and conducted the Caddo Parish study, said the likelihood of an acquittal rose with the number of blacks on the jury.

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     No defendants were acquitted when two or fewer of the dozen jurors were black. When there were at least three black jurors, the acquittal rate was 12 percent. With five or more, the rate rose to 19 percent. Defendants in all three groups were overwhelmingly black.

     Excluding black jurors at a disproportionate rate does more than hurt defendants’ prospects and undermine public confidence, said Ursula Noye, a researcher who compiled the data for the report.

     “Next to voting,” she said, “participating in a jury is perhaps the most important civil right.”

     There’s plenty more at the link.

     Failure factories, on schools and segregation.

     In just eight years, Pinellas County School Board members turned five schools in the county’s black neighborhoods into some of the worst in Florida.

     First they abandoned integration, leaving the schools overwhelmingly poor and black.

     Then they broke promises of more money and resources.

     Then — as black children started failing at outrageous rates, as overstressed teachers walked off the job, as middle class families fled en masse — the board stood by and did nothing.

     Today thousands of children are paying the price, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.

     They are trapped at Campbell Park, Fairmount Park, Lakewood, Maximo and Melrose — five neighborhood elementary schools that the board has transformed into failure factories.

     Every year, they turn out a staggering number of children who don’t know the basics.

     Eight in 10 fail reading, according to state standardized test scores. Nine in 10 fail math.

     Ranked by the state Department of Education, Melrose is the worst elementary school in Florida. Fairmount Park is No. 2. Maximo is No. 10. Lakewood is No. 12. Campbell Park is No. 15.

     All of the schools operate within six square miles in one of Florida’s most affluent counties.

     All of them were much better off a decade ago.

     Times reporters spent a year reviewing tens of thousands of pages of district documents, analyzing millions of computer records and interviewing parents of more than 100 current and former students. Then they crisscrossed the state to see how other school districts compared.

     Among the findings:

     ■ Ninety-five percent of black students tested at the schools are failing reading or math, making the black neighborhoods in southern Pinellas County the most concentrated site of academic failure in all of Florida.

     ■ Teacher turnover is a chronic problem, leaving some children to cycle through a dozen instructors in a single year. In 2014, more than half of the teachers in these schools asked for a transfer out.

     At least three walked off the job without notice.

     ■ All of this is a recent phenomenon. By December 2007, when the board ended integration, black students at the schools had posted gains on standardized tests in three of the four previous years. None of the schools was ranked lower than a C. Today, all the schools have F ratings.

     ■ After reshaping the schools, the district funded four of them erratically. Some years they got less money per student than other schools, including those in more affluent parts of the county. In 2009, the year after resegregation, at least 50 elementary schools got more money per student than Campbell Park.

     ■ Other districts with higher passing rates are doing far more to aid black students, including creating special offices to target minority achievement, tracking black students’ progress in real time and offering big bonuses to attract quality teachers to high-minority schools. Pinellas does none of those things.

     More at the link. TL;DR – segregation is bad.

     The Revolution Is Socialized: Organization ‘Live-Tweets’ Watts Riots on 50th Anniversary, a retrospective.

     To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Watts rebellion (Aug. 11-17, 1965), the California Endowment’s Sons and Brothers Campaign, in partnership with the Community Coalition of South Los Angeles, is “live-tweeting” the uprising, drawing clear parallels between the raw revolution of Watts, a South Los Angeles neighborhood, and its grandchild, the uprising in Ferguson, Mo.

     It hasn’t been marked with the pageantry of the 50th anniversary of the voting-rights march in Selma, Ala. (#Selma50), that took place in March of this year. There has been no romanticizing from politicians waxing poetic about how much we’ve overcome as a country. The Watts rebellion was sparked by the arrest of 21-year-old Marquette Frye during what was supposed to be a routine traffic stop by Officer Lee Minikus. It was sustained, though, by rage and pain induced by decades of systemic neglect, oppression and marginalization.

     These things were true of Selma, yes, but unlike Selma, revisionism hasn’t been able to reframe Watts as a study in racial reconciliation. NBC Los Angeles describes the Watts rebellion as “six days of fires, clashes with police and violence. … Thirty-four people died, more than 1,000 were injured and scores of buildings were damaged, looted or destroyed—causing an estimated $40 million in damage.”

     It wasn’t pretty. It was revolution. It was leader-less. A revolution that aligns with the #BlackLivesMatter movement, most specifically in the days following the state-sanctioned killing of 19-year-old Michael Brown, and again, after his killer, Darren Wilson, was absolved of any responsibility in his death and Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, urged protesters to “burn this b*tch down.”

     As with Ferguson, the Watts rebellion illuminated a city tired of being sick and tired.

     The emergence of social media, specifically Twitter, has played a huge role in amplifying each moment of the struggle against systemic inequality as evidenced and supported by the rampant police brutality of the past year, specifically in black and brown communities.

     Now imagine what the social-justice movement would have looked like if Twitter had been around during the Watts rebellion.

     The Root reached out to California Endowment program officer Evangeline Reyes, who said that those parallels are what motivated the group to create the #WattsRiots50 Twitter campaign as a “modern retelling of the historic timeline of the events known as the Watts Riots of 1965.”

     This and that else at the link, but please explain to me, are things so very different in this day and age?

107. rq says

     17 August 2015 at 3:41 pm

     See Julian Bond’s Life in Photos, from Time.

     President this AM on the death of civil rights activist Julian Bond, see attached text.

     A ‘Never-Ending Nightmare’ in Ferguson

     A year after the death of Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri was thrust back into the national spotlight, filtered through a lens of déjà vu: state of emergency, police aggression, arrests. But this spike in media serves as dark reminder, for residents of Ferguson and Saint Louis, that attention is not only transient, but often misguided. Brooke speaks with Saint Louis-based writer Sarah Kenzidor about how this week was “a rerun of a nightmare,” and what the media consistently miss.

     Audio at the link. And her last name is ‘Kendzior’, not Kenzidor.

     Oath Keepers to Arm 50 Black Protesters in Ferguson with AR- 15’s for an Epic Rights Flexing March. Is there any way for this to actually end well?

     The Missouri chapter of the Oath Keepers are planning to hold an open carry march through downtown Ferguson, Mo., which will reportedly involve arming 50 black protestors with AR-15 rifles.

     The decision to hold the event transpired after St. Louis County officials, in violation of Missouri’s open carry law, insisted that members of the group could not open carry long barrel rifles within the city. In a video uploaded to YouTube, police chief Jon Belmar is seen warning a number of Oath Keepers that open carrying long barrel rifles would be a violation of the law.

     “My only problem is with the long guns and inciting these guys out here,” Belmar said, referring to the Ferguson protesters.

     When one of the men questioned Belmar regarding Missouri’s open carry law, he responded by saying, “I have attorneys. I didn’t go to law school. I get what you guys stand for and probably agree with most of it. All I’m trying to do is manage this thing.”

     While trying to simply manage things is semi-understandable, it’s Belmar’s duty to assure that those he employs respect Missouri’s open carry law and the Constitutional rights’ of American citizens.

     Head of the St. Louis County, Mo. Oath Keepers group, Sam Andrews called Belmar out for his blatant disregard of the law.
     “He (Belmar) was thumbing his nose at the legislature of the State of Missouri. It was like he couldn’t give a crap about the Bill of Rights or state law.”

     Andrews told Red Dirt News that the march would be held in the next “couple of weeks,” as a means of demonstrating the veracity of Missouri’s open carry law to law enforcement.

     Andrews explained that he and members of his group spent almost an entire night speaking with black protestors about the events in Ferguson and the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.
     “Every person we talked to said if they carried they’d be shot by police. That’s the reason we’re going to hold this event and it will be a legal demonstration,” Andrews said. “I’m sick and tired of law enforcement who doesn’t think they have to abide by the law. They’re narcissistic and that guy (Belmar) discredited my men.”

     Oath Keepers are made up mainly of current and former military and law enforcement officers who have sworn to place their oath to the Constitution ahead of any law or command given that violates the rights of the citizens.

     This actually sounds quite terrifying.

     Race in the US: Know your history, via Al Jazeera.

     There will never be an acceptable explanation for what happened between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson in Ferguson but we will never fully grasp why the stage was set for such an encounter unless we know American history.

     We cannot fully comprehend why Dylan Roof murdered nine parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston unless we study the Civil War and the Confederacy.

     We cannot truly fathom how a minor traffic stop in Cincinnati could result in a white campus police officer blowing out the brains of an unarmed black man unless we delve into the role race has played in law enforcement from the enactment of the federal Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 to today’s mandatory minimum sentencing statutes.

     Examining American history provides us with the tools to analyse how the death of Michael Brown and the demonstrations on Florrisant Avenue became a tipping point and sparked a movement. Connecting the dots between the past and the present helps us to see the origins of our current national debate – about race, police misconduct, white supremacy, white privilege, inequality, incarceration and the unfinished equal rights agenda.

     A great history lesson over at the link.

     Locked in Solitary at 14: Adult Jails Isolate Youths Despite Risk

     Solitary confinement has long been a feature of the nation’s criminal justice system, either to punish or protect inmates, with about 75,000 state and federal prisoners in solitary across the country. Ke’jorium, though, is emblematic of a more select and far less visible group of prisoners in solitary — children or teenagers in isolation in adult jails for their own safety.

     “Juveniles are more vulnerable to abuse by adults, including sexual abuse, and they have rights to special protections,” said Ian M. Kysel, an adjunct professor and a fellow at the Human Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law Center. “In some places that might mean putting them in juvenile facilities.”

     Putting juveniles in solitary, though, brings its own complications. Solitary confinement is increasingly being questioned — by mental health officials, criminologists and, most recently, President Obama. But experts say its effects on juveniles can be particularly damaging because their minds and bodies are still developing, putting them at greater risk of psychological harm and leading to depression and other mental health problems. In 2012, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry called for an end to the practice.

     “There is plenty of research showing that solitary causes far more harm to kids than to their adult counterparts,” said Dr. Louis J. Kraus, the chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

     Dr. Kraus specifically mentioned solitary’s link to post-traumatic stress disorder. “It induces anxiety, and it increases the risk of suicide,” he added. “It is barbaric. I can’t emphasize that enough.”

     Dr. Kraus said that while the long-term mental health effects of solitary on juveniles were not well documented, isolating children is almost certain to deepen existing psychological problems.

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     Ke’jorium, in Mississippi, is among the more than 60 percent of juveniles who have been arrested who have some form of mental illness. Before he was 10, doctors diagnosed bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, Ms. Watson, his mother, said, and when he was 4, he set a fire that destroyed the family’s house.

     A bill introduced in the United States Senate this month by Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, and Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, among others, would prohibit almost all solitary confinement of juveniles in the federal system.

     Across the country, teenagers and children may be kept in solitary in either juvenile or adult jails and prisons. As many as 17,000 youths are held in isolation in juvenile jails nationwide, the Justice Department says, most for punishment for a rule violation or because they are on suicide watch.

     In adult jails, these youths, like Ke’jorium, are almost always held separately for their protection. There is no official count. Experts say the figure could range from dozens to thousands.

     More than 20 states either require or allow teenagers charged as adults to be put in adult jails while awaiting trial.

     More at the link.

108. rq says

     17 August 2015 at 3:48 pm

     America’s branch of Amnesty International could do better: Wow. @amnesty this is a WHOLE NEW set of Black folk. Making demands. AGAIN. I hope it makes it into the media again, because there was a lot of eye-opening stuff appearing on twitter re: this.

     Worn Dialogues: Gallery Conversations, a ROM event in Toronto.

     Dalton Higgins is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist, broadcaster and author who has written six books that interweave the worlds of digital culture, hip hop and popular culture into one potent mix. He is also one of Canada’s foremost experts on hip hop, the leading youth sub-culture of this generation.

     Mimi Joh currently teaches in OCAD University’s Continuing Studies program and writes on contemporary art. She received degrees in Art History from Cornell University and OCAD U, and worked for many years with German and Austrian Expressionist art in New York. Mimi Joh is an active volunteer in the arts, holding positions with multiple Toronto based arts organizations. Her varied art background gives her a multiplicity of viewpoints into contemporary art, ideas and themes. She is particularly interested in how art practices can critically reflect and respond to our society and how they ultimately shape our culture.

     Jessica Karuhanga is an artist currently based in Toronto, Canada. Her practice undulates between performance, video, drawing and sculptural processes. She holds a BFA Honors from The University of Western Ontario and a MFA from University of Victoria. Her visual art and performances have been presented at various centres nationally including Royal BC Museum, Deluge Contemporary Art, Art Mûr, Whippersnapper Gallery, OCAD U Student Gallery, Videofag, Electric Eclectics, Nia Centre for the Arts, and The Drake Hotel. Karuhanga was featured in FADO Performance Art Centre’s 2014 Emerging Artist Series at Xpace Cultural Centre. She has lectured for the Power Plant’s Sunday Scene Series and Art Gallery of Ontario’s Idea Bar Series. Most recently she presented her work at 2015 Black Portraitures Conference, a series organized by Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, in Firenze, Italy.

     Freelance writer Sarah Kendzior: ‘Geography is essential to understanding Ferguson’

     For journalists in St. Louis and some of us who’ve been watching from a distance, the last few days have felt pretty familiar. Once again, we’re seeing news about Ferguson, news about journalists injured while covering Ferguson and news of journalists facing issues with police there. Writer Sarah Kendzior has had some deja vu as well. On Tuesday morning, she tweeted “Getting daughter ready for first day of school. Like last year spent night wondering if canceled because of Ferguson again.”

     “We are living August 2014 again,” Kendzior wrote in a piece Tuesday for Politico. “We are living November 2014 again. We are living in a place where the only lesson learned seems to be how much people can get away with.”

     Via email, I spoke with Kendzior about her work, what’s changed in Ferguson in the last year and what hasn’t. You’ll also find headlines with links from some of Kendzior’s stories.

     This is part three in a week-long series checking back in with St. Louis-based journalists.

     Interview at the link.

     The Wire’s David Simon is feeling (slightly) optimistic for once. Here’s why. He’s making a series about de-segregating housing. Exciting? It just might be.

     This is a story about a government that is almost wholly white. Because of the way everything was districted, by the time Nick becomes mayor there isn’t a black member on that council. They’re governing the way they want to govern Yonkers, utterly independent of the thought that 20 percent of their city is unrepresented by the government, were unheard in the councils and government. That’s one of the reasons why things turn out as bad as they do. There’s this element of absolute white privilege in Yonkers in 1987.

     The government was entirely white until the houses get built. Then you’ll see in the last two episodes, some of these characters have real agency over their own lives. Some of them become community leaders. Some of them assert for their own dignity. Boy, it’s a relief when they do, because you’re absolutely right. They’re waiting for some governance that actually incorporates their basic aspirations for a better life, and they’re waiting and they’re waiting. These people are arguing, voting, speech-making. To me it’s infuriating, but I do understand that it’s hard to watch people without agency.

     More on white privilege past and present at the link.

     Emails Show Feds Have Monitored ‘Professional Protester’ DeRay Mckesson. Not that he’s making much money off it.

     Mckesson’s Twitter and other social media accounts were being monitored by DHS last May during the height of the protests in Baltimore that followed the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who was critically injured while in police custody. DHS took note when McKesson, a former Minneapolis public school official and an activist in the Black Lives Matter movement, posted details to his Twitter account about a planned protest in Baltimore.

     One email said DHS “social media monitors have reported that a professional demonstrator/protester known to law enforcement (Deray Mckesson) has post on his social media account that there is going to be a 3:00 pm rally at the FOP#3 lodge located @ 3920 Baltimore Ave, Baltimore, MD 21211 … This is early raw unevaluated and uncorroborated reporting at this time.”

     The subject line of the email was “FYSA,” which is short for “For Your Situational Awareness.” Kade Crockford, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Technology for Liberty project, told VICE News that the term “situational awareness” is a cover that allows police departments and federal law enforcement agencies such as DHS to conduct “surveillance of lawful, First Amendment-protected political speech,” which includes tweets.

     “Those two words don’t change what police are doing, however: spending precious public resources watching activists’ internet use, and sending out reports to other law enforcement officials tracking the protected political activity of law abiding dissidents,” Crockford said. “Apologists for this kind of chilling, wasteful government spying would likely say that Deray Mckesson’s tweets are public, and therefore he has no right to privacy in them. But just because police can do something doesn’t mean they should.”

     This and that else at the link.

     And here’s an interesting perspective: Could black people in the U.S. qualify as refugees?

     Over the past decade, I’ve represented and advised hundreds of noncitizens facing deportation. Many feared persecution in their home countries and sought protection in the United States. To win them asylum status and the right to stay, I showed that my clients had a well-founded fear of future persecution by the government or by groups that the government was unable or unwilling to control. In one case, I successfully argued that if my client returned to his home country, he could be unjustly imprisoned and physically harmed on the basis of his religious beliefs. Black Americans know the risk of unjust imprisonment and physical harm all too well.

     According to U.S. asylum law, that persecution must be on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion. In many cases, courts have said that violence by police officers, unjust imprisonment, rape, assault, beatings and confinement constitute persecution. Even nonphysical forms of harm, such as the deliberate imposition of severe economic disadvantage, psychological harm, or the deprivation of food, housing, employment or other essentials, help make the case. In one instance, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that an individual who had been arrested, held for three days and then falsely accused of a crime had been persecuted. In another case, it ruled that persecution included ethnic discrimination so severe that the petitioner was unable to find a job in his chosen field.

     Does this sound familiar?

     I encourage you to read it all.

109. rq says

     17 August 2015 at 3:56 pm

     Julian Bond, Former N.A.A.C.P. Chairman and Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 75, his New York Times obituary. Not going to cite much, but here, I’ll pull one problematic sentence that has seen a lot of twitter attention:

     Julian Bond’s great-grandmother Jane Bond was the slave mistress of a Kentucky farmer.

     See if you can figure out what’s wrong with it. To be honest, I’m not sure if I’d have known if a lot of people hadn’t pointed it out.

     Misty Copeland Wants Others to Understand What it Means to Be a Black Dancer, because we all love ballet. And ballet #NeedsMoreWhitePeople… NOT.

     Misty Copeland made history when she became the first African-American to be be promoted to principle dancer with the American Ballet Theater—and now she’s more determined than ever to make the most of her impact.

     “I wanted it to be an opportunity for me to educate people and get them to become ballet fans and to educate them on what it means to be a Black dancer—a Black ballet dancer,” she tells Essence, explaining how she plans on putting her new role model status to good use.

     Copeland, who currently serves as a board member for Project Plié​ (an initiative started at ABT in 2013 to “increase racial and ethnic representation in ballet and diversify America’s ballet companies”), has recently taken on the task of mentoring a number of young ballerinas. ​

     Wanting her students to achieve success like hers, she constantly reminds them: “It’s really just having a lot of confidence and belief in yourself. Everyone hears no at some point…I think it’s possible to find the right place to be and to fit in and to hear the word yes.”

     “I never knew it was going to get to this level,” she admits to the magazine. “There are a lot of times when I wish it wasn’t so much. But I wanted this type of exposure for the dance community.” Mission accomplished.

     I hope I have a chance to see her live one day, before she retires.

     Straight Outta Compton and the Social Burdens of Hip-Hop

     Straight Outta Compton reminds viewers that N.W.A. became famous for not holding back about what it was like to be young and black and terrorized by the police. And they did so at a time when the music industry was beginning to figure out how to sell rap music to a broader audience. In tracing the history of N.W.A., the film also highlights a divide that has since sprung up in mainstream hip-hop between the more explicitly political rappers, whose music could alienate many white consumers, and the rappers whose music doesn’t overtly tackle social issues and is agreeable to large swaths of listeners. At a time when the #BlackLivesMatter movement and increased coverage of police killings is dominating the public discourse, Straight Outta Compton raises questions about the responsibility of rap artists in bearing witness, as N.W.A. did, to the problems affecting their communities.

     * * *

     Hip hop has historically been one of the ways for black Americans to see a reflection of their lives in mainstream art, and the ’80s and ’90s were no different. “Rap was the black community’s CNN,” says Akil Houston, a hip-hop scholar, DJ, and assistant professor at Ohio University. In Straight Outta Compton, N.W.A. believes as much. “Our art is a reflection of our reality,” says Ice Cube (played by Ice Cube’s son, O’Shea Jackson Jr.) in the film. He even refers to himself as a journalist who’s “reporting on his community” more honestly than the media itself. When N.W.A.’s manager urges the group to work instead of watching a video of the officers on trial for the Rodney King beatings, they answer: This is the work.

     […]

     But the film also implicitly raises the question: What do the deaths of Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Sam Dubose, and countless others mean for hip-hop today? A new generation of rappers today is experiencing what it means to be young and black and have their communities suffer unwelcome surveillance from law enforcement, but where is the mainstream music that represents that struggle?

     Hip-hop has had a number of socially conscious champions. The genre was birthed out of politically personal storytelling, and artists from KRS-One to Nas to Talib Kweli to Tef Poe have been carrying that torch for decades. But all but a few of the most popular artists—Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, and Kanye West—seem to be shying away from offering commentary, or doing so with much more reserve and subtlety N.W.A. did. That’s because most rappers are incentivized to uphold the status quo and talk about more commercial-friendly things: money, sex, and partying, says Houston.

     The members of N.W.A. made a name for themselves by being outspoken, creating a genuine counterculture, and connecting to people with their honest experience. Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and J. Cole’s Forest Hills Drive are examples of artists who’ve channeled that purgative, venting style of rap. Some claim that Kendrick is the new king of hip-hop because he’s true to his experiences as a black kid growing up in Compton—which happened to be at around the same time N.W.A. was telling the same city to “Fuck Tha Police.” The chilling video for his single, “Alright,” shows a black teen lying dead in the street, another running from a Klan-like group, and officers slamming one more to the ground. Lamar performed the song on top of a graffiti-covered squad car at the BET Awards. Protesters at Cleveland State were shown chanting “We gon’ be alright,” the chorus to Lamar’s song, at police officers at demonstrations that followed the killing of Samuel Dubose. Slate’s Aisha Harris suggested that it had become the “new black national anthem.”
     […]

     So it’s perhaps unfair to expect all rappers, some of whom don’t have the lived experience to back up their two cents, to use their music to fight for a cause. “I think their biggest responsibility is to be a real person so that other people can respond to their genuine humanness,” says Irvin Weathersby, a professor at CUNY who uses hip-hop in his classes.

     And it’s here also—in capturing N.W.A.’s bare humanity—that Straight Outta Compton also succeeds. Sure, the film has the over-indulgent flair of any biopic: With the exception of showing how Eazy recorded his first song, the film takes a fairly romantic view of the way the group produced their music. One minute, they’re being harassed; the next minute, they’re in the booth making magic. It also leaves out many claims of misogyny against the rappers—perhaps expected of any biopic co-produced by its own subjects (Dr. Dre and Ice Cube). But overall the film manages to tell an entertaining story about N.W.A.’s origins, while making the rappers feel deeply relatable. Their pain, their humiliation, their anger, their fear, their exuberance are all the audience’s.

     The film doesn’t shy away from the seemingly unchanged nature of police brutality and the hardships of being black in America—it’s not trying to sell audience a comforting illusion about progress and reconciliation. But it does believe in the ability of artists and everyday citizens to be honest and critical about their situation. At a time when so little popular hip-hop music is eager to champion that same message, Straight Outta Compton and N.W.A. offer a welcome reminder of that collective power.

     Of course, there’s a lot else wrong with the hip-hop community, rampant misogyny among that else. So.

     Ferguson activists DeRay Mckesson, Johnetta Elzie among those arrested in St. Louis, Washington Post with last week’s news.

     My Anger is Justified: Why Black Women’s Rage is Necessary for Change, and not a reason to dismiss their words and/or actions.

     Throughout history we’ve seen how a black woman’s exasperation is paraded as crazy. This labeling is often connected to systems of power and who can question them. The recent death of Sandra Bland reminds us that we don’t have the right to confront white male patriarchal systems. When you are denied basic human rights as a Black woman, it seems only natural to be angry.

     The Angry Black Woman has existed in many iterations throughout history, including the well-known Sapphire archetype. She’s depicted as usurping a man’s role by being loud-mouthed, rude, and full of attitude. The most significant characteristic of the Angry Black Woman is that she’s seen as a danger to white society, because she oversteps her emotional “boundaries.” This is used to justify simplifying her into an accurate representation of all African-American women’s emotional states. By creating this cartoonish stereotype, mainstream white society strips us of our agency and silences our voices.

     We are prevented from reacting the way we truly feel, because doing so is seen as a serious threat. If we as black women aren’t allowed to have emotional autonomy, this disenfranchises our movements for liberation,which are largely spearheaded by black women. When we raise our voices in protest, assert our narratives, and hold it down for our brothers and sisters, we cannot just hide our emotions inside. It’s draining.

     Expressing our truths means taking ownership of our narratives by supporting each other in ways that are proactive—such as having discussions that help us deconstruct the myth of the Angry Black Woman. As African-American women, we cannot ignore the ways the stigmatizing role of the ABW is portrayed throughout media as well—from The Real Housewives to Shondaland.

     We can’t continue investing in the exploitation of a black woman’s emotions. We cannot afford representations that do not depict the full depth of who we are. Instead, we must hold up black women who like Bree Newsome, Marilyn Mosby, Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors, who have all used their anger to incite change. We must use our anger to fuel actionable plans that push past these false narratives. We must transform our rage into progress.

     Let’s recalibrate our minds to understand that our anger is justified. We no longer deserve to feel guilty. We no longer deserve for our emotions to be policed. We must free ourselves, and embrace the full force of our womanhood and our strength. If we need to cry, scream, or simply talk assertively, then we must do it. We need not offer any explanations.

     I refuse to make excuses for how I feel any longer. Too much at stake. It’s time we put our anger into words and action.

110. rq says

     17 August 2015 at 4:06 pm

     This: “We are making history today” First day of school at Hawthorn, Mo’s 1st all-girls public school focused on STEM. Should be in headlines. Somewhere. Everywhere.

     What if…?

     The pervasive influence of white bias is felt in all corners of society. From musicians to actors, politicians to police officers, firefighters to lawyers, CEO’s to teachers, there is no area of society free from the bias in favor of white people (and, more specifically, heterosexual, cisgender, white men). As a long-time comic book reader, I was long ignorant of this bias in the comic book industry. Growing up as a teen, and later as a young adult, race was never on my radar. It wasn’t until I began to pay attention to matters of race that I began to see the comic book industry through more enlightened eyes. Once I began to view the world with greater clarity and understanding, I began to see that the comic book industry has long been dominated by white men. And that explains why, for the vast majority of the history of USAmerican comic books, white men have been the primary protagonists, villains, and supporting cast members. The same holds true of the film industry. But what if things were different? What if white men were not the sole (or primary) guiding forces behind movies and comic books all these decades? What if people of color were involved as well? What might the result be?

     Alijah Villian is an artist who has tried to imagine just such a world. Using African-American celebrities, he re-imagines protagonists and antagonists from comic books and movies. Take a look:

     It’s impressive. There’s something especially poignant about a black man in the role of Captain America.

     This is a couple of years old, but probably just as relevant today. Forbes “If I Were a Poor Black Kid”–A Poor Black Kid’s Response

     Gene Marks wrote an article for Forbes Magazine entitled “If I Were A Poor Black Kid” and I found it to be completely out of touch.

     Youtube video; link to original article at the link.

     CNN guest blasts police for swarming ‘Straight Outta Compton’ showings: ‘We cannot racially profile movies’, though I’ve heard massive police presence at the movie theatre is the norm in some locations.

     Civil rights activist and author Kevin Powell blasted the Los Angeles Police Department and other agencies that had ramped security at the movie “Straight Outta Compton” over the weekend for “profiling” black films, and he slammed the filmmakers for omitting sexism by the rap group N.W.A.

     Last week, the LAPD announced that it was working with theater owners to increase policing at certain theaters screening the film about controversial rap band N.W.A. And Universal Studios said that it would help reimburse theaters for the cost of extra security.

     Powell pointed out to CNN on Saturday that this was not the first time police had singled out movies about rappers.

     “You know what, there were shootings at the ‘Batman’ screenings, we know about what happened in Colorado,” he noted. “There were shootings at the ‘Trainwreck’ screening. We cannot racially profile movies.”

     “We don’t want to racially profile people, we shouldn’t racially profile films,” he Powell insisted. “Yesterday, when I saw ‘Straight Outta Compton’ — black, white, Latino, Asian, multiple generations of people. They were all very peacefully seeing the film. So we’ve got to really think about what we’re saying when we make those kind of statements.”

     Powell also said that the filmmakers had been wrong to omit anti-woman comments made by rappers in the movie.

     “This is an opportunity to really examine, not just race in our country, but also violence against women and girls,” he said, adding that incidents where Doctor Dre abused women “really happened.”

     “Ice Cube, now in his forties, still refers to women by the B-word,” Powell observed. “We’ve got to make progress. If we’re going to talk about racism in America, which this film talks about, we also have to be willing to talk about sexism, which is equally oppressive to half the population in this country and on this planet.”

     “And I think that’s the glaring omission in the film,” he continued. “But I actually disagree with the director, F. Gary Gray, when he said that these are stories that are side stories. A woman’s life is not a side story. And we as men, if we’re serious — not just black men, but all men — if we’re serious about addressing any kind of inequities, we have to talk about the things that women deal with.”

     Well, those are words I can get behind.

     Sanders: Just Because He Has a Record of Civil Rights, Doesn’t Mean He’s Entitled to the Black Vote – nope, he’s not entitled to it. He should fight for it, just as he would fight for any other vote. C’mon, Bernie. You can do it.

     Talib Kweli is no stranger to the politics of the world. Kweli, who made his presence known last year in Ferguson, Mo., not only uses his music as a vessel to speak out against systemic racism, but during any point of the day, you can find him schooling people on Twitter.

     On Friday, the rapper appeared on Real Time With Bill Maher and discussed the Black Lives Matter movement and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

     Maher asked Kweli why protesters would hijack Sanders’ campaign during his Seattle stop, even though the NAACP has thrown its support behind the Democratic candidate.

     “The NAACP liked Donald Sterling, too,” Kweli stated. “Bernie Sanders is somebody who, just because someone has a record of civil rights, doesn’t mean they are automatically entitled to the black vote.”

     And that’s exactly what people seem to think is the issue. But just because you have a record of civil rights involvement, doesn’t mean you get an automatic “in.”

     Kweli also said that Sanders is an easy target because he’s accessible. Imagine a bunch of people trying to bum rush a stage while Hillary Clinton is speaking? Highly unlikely.

     “He might be the easiest because he’s somebody who’s dealing with the people more directly than a Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton. He might be the easiest to get to,” Kweli said.

     “Me personally, I’m friends with some of the people who started Black Lives Matter. My sensibilities, when I first saw what happened to Bernie in Seattle, I was like ‘Well, that’s not right,’ but I was corrected,” Kweli told Maher. “The job of activism is not to be liked or not to be polite; black women vote more than anybody in this country, and you have young black women who started Black Lives Matter, and they are forcing this discussion.”

111. rq says

     18 August 2015 at 2:15 am

     Racial bias, it turns out, is everywhere: Racial Bias Affects How Doctors Do Their Jobs. Here’s How To Fix It.

     Conversations about institutional racism in the United States have recently focused on police brutality and socioeconomic disparities that keep families mired in intergenerational poverty. But the issues go beyond that, affecting other sectors of society that many Americans may not associate with racial justice.

     For instance, implicit bias — attitudes that lead doctors or researchers to unconsciously treat people of color differently — permeates the health care system.

     “The problem lies in when we use such bias to make decisions in the workplace that advance the progress of some while hindering others. It happens when we have stereotypical assumptions about some groups,” Laura Castillo-Page, Ph.D., the senior director for diversity policy and programs at the American Association of American Colleges (AAMC), told ThinkProgress. “That makes us overlook their skills. It happens in faculty and student recruitment often.”

     This stark reality compelled members of Castillo-Page’s organization to partner with a leading consulting company to design a training program for medical professionals and faculty members at medical schools. The module, named the Every Day Bias Workshop, aims to teach doctors, researchers, and professors how their assumptions affect the decisions they make about communication, innovation, employment, and organizational culture.

     “This program helps people understand how to mitigate bias so they can make more equitable decisions,” Castillo-Page said. “We wanted to develop something that could be used in medical schools and teaching hospitals. Going through this training allows us to see how bias is in each of us.”

     For the second consecutive year, AAMC hosted sessions around the country that attracted human resources managers, executives, educators, and counselors. During a workshop at Stanford School of Medicine scheduled for October, participants will mull over how to practice self-realization. The goal is to help medical professionals become more aware of their bias so they can learn to stop themselves in situations when bias may adversely affect their decision-making.

     There’s more at the link, but it’s good to see positive steps.

     Why the Appeal to “All Lives Matter” is Bunk. Bookmark this to share with anyone who still believes #AllLivesMatter is a legitimate slogan (as used to counter #BlackLivesMatter).

     Calling It What It Is

     Whether one intends to or not, “all lives matter” and like misappropriating sentiments is an act of disregard and erasure of racialized discrepancies highlighted in the declaration Black Lives Matter. Stating “but, all lives matter!” attempts to hijack the 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.

     Appeals to the platitude “all lives matter” undermines the intention of Black Lives Matter, and is usually uttered by those who, for whatever reason, have difficulty comprehending the “too” or “also” implicitly attached. Black Lives Matter is not a repudiation of any other individual or group. It’s an affirmation, one that identifies a consistent inconsistency in relation to the way people of color are treated compared to their white counterparts.

     Why It’s So Common

     All humans possess a slew of biases. This is unavoidable, though it is possible to better manage or even allay some prejudices. Aside from the party line-toeing chicanery typical of Black Conservative types, most all misunderstanding or backlash related to Black Lives Matter have been from Whites. Root feelings of discomfort or offense when it comes to hearing or seeing Black Lives Matter usually emanates from what lauded academic Robin DiAngelo terms White Fragility. Professor of Critical Multicultural and Social Justice Education, DiAngelo’s area of expertise centers on critical race theory and whiteness studies. In her seminal work titled “White Fragility,” DiAngelo highlighted the following:

     “White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.” – Robin DiAngelo, International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, Vol. 3(3) pp. 54-70 *Non-academic breakdowns of her work on White Fragility is also available on The Good Men Project and Alternet.

     I left the final points out so you can go and read on your own.

     Here’s a way to tackle racism, from the UK! Scousers Corner Neo-Nazis At ‘White Man March’ In Liverpool

     Locals have not taken kindly to the Neo-Nazi ‘White Man March’ taking place in Liverpool City Centre today.

     Members of the controversial far-right group National Action took to the streets for the ‘biggest neo-Nazi rally in the UK’.

     Prior to the protests, National Action sent a sinister letter to Mayor Joe Anderson, threatening to cause race riots if he cancelled the racist march and promising the city “will go up in flames.”

     The White Man March when ahead, but it wasn’t long before hordes of scousers took the streets to let the white supremacist group know exactly how they felt about the demonstration.

     A video, posted by Zeke Tafari, soon went viral of a number of Liverpudlians mocking their racist opposition, with one guy shouting “you’ve got no fans!”, before throwing bananas at the cornered fascists.

     The locals also didn’t take kindly to the police that were protecting the racists.
     In total, six people were arrested and one man was treated for facial injuries during the protest. And something tells me National Action will think twice before coming to Liverpool again.

     Photos and tweets at the link. Wasn’t it in BC a few years ago something similar happened?

     Here’s some humour with a racist bent, with some good advice within to boot! 10 Ways To Prevent Getting Profiled By The Police If Driving While Black

     For the past few months, comedian Chris Rock has been documenting his run-ins with the police by taking a selfie each time he’s profiled and sharing it on social media. Isaiah Washington, an actor best known for his role as Mets pitcher Dwight Gooden in the Joe Torre biopic, Joe Torre: Curveballs Along the Way, tweeted that Rock needs to adapt to profiling, even mentioning that once he stopped driving a Benz and started driving a Prius, he received much less attention from the police.

     Predictably, Washington’s comments didn’t go over very well. But, I do think there was a lot of truth in what Washington was saying. My only gripe was that he didn’t go far enough. Following Washington’s lead, here are a few tips to remember if you’re Chris Rock or any other Black person and you happen to be driving and you don’t want to get profiled.

     1. Don’t be Black

     This is crucial. Nothing else on this list is as important as this detail. If you are a Black person and you happen to be driving and you don’t want to get racially profiled by the police, you need to do everything possible to just not be a Black person.

     2. Be White

     If you’re able to not be Black, it will definitely help your chances if you can somehow find a way to just be White.

     3. If you suspect you might be Black before you get behind the wheel, find a way to not be Black before you get behind the wheel

     Roughly 100% of driving while Black cases involve Black people who willingly got behind the wheel of a car despite knowing very well that they were Black. If this is you, and you’re thinking about driving, you need to find a way to not be Black before you start driving.

     4. If you suspect you might be Black and you’re already behind the wheel, pull over, put the car in park, take the key out of the ignition, and then do what you can to not be Black before you resume driving

     Note: It’s crucial to make sure you’re not Black anymore before you get back behind the wheel. Do not cut corners here.

     Numbers 5 to 10 can be visited at the link, but I suppose you get the idea.

     Get an education, we tell ’em, it will Make Things Better! Really? Racial Wealth Gap Persists Despite Degree, Study Says

     Economists emphasize that college-educated blacks and Hispanics over all earn significantly more and are in a better position to accumulate wealth than blacks and Hispanics who do not get degrees. Graduates’ median family income in 2013 was at least twice as high, and their median family wealth (which includes resources like a home, car and retirement account) was 3.5 to 4 times greater than that of nongraduates.

     But while these college grads had more assets, they suffered disproportionately during periods of financial trouble.

     From 1992 to 2013, the median net worth of blacks who finished college dropped nearly 56 percent (adjusted for inflation). By comparison, the median net worth of whites with college degrees rose about 86 percent over the same period, which included three recessions — including the severe downturn of 2007 through 2009, with its devastating effect on home prices in many parts of the country. Asian graduates did even better, gaining nearly 90 percent.

     To understand just how disappointing these results are, look at the impact during this period on comparable groups without college degrees. Blacks without degrees, in large part because they had much less to lose, experienced a 3.8 percent drop in wealth. Whites who didn’t graduate from college lost nearly 11 percent. The wealth of Asian nongrads fell more than 44 percent.

     There is not a simple answer to explain why a college degree has failed to help safeguard the assets of many minority families. Persistent discrimination and the types of training and jobs minorities get have played a role. Another central factor is the heavy debt many blacks and Hispanics accumulate to achieve middle-class status.

     The collapse of the housing bubble played havoc with college-educated black and Hispanic families, who on average accumulated a huge amount of debt relative to the size of their paychecks. They borrowed a lot to buy homes, only to see them plunge in value during the mortgage crisis. While the average value of a home owned by a white college graduate declined 25 percent, homes owned by black and Hispanic grads fell by about twice that.

     This loss was made more devastating by the fact that blacks and Hispanics tended to have more of their wealth concentrated in their homes than whites and Asians, who, on average, accumulated more assets in the stock and bond markets, primarily through retirement accounts.

     The housing boom and bust particularly whipsawed college-educated Hispanics: From 2007 to 2013, their net worth fell a whopping 72 percent.

     One lesson, according to economists at the St. Louis Fed, is that borrowing too much to get a piece of the American dream often undermines any hope of sustaining it.

     That notion applies equally to excessive college and housing loans, they say. “How you finance an asset is just as important as the asset itself,” said Ray Boshara, director of the Center for Household Financial Stability at the St. Louis Fed bank.

     Substantially narrowing the racial and ethnic wealth gap, Mr. Boshara and the study’s authors suggest, would require policy changes to expand the availability of a quality college education without forcing students into outsize debt.

     I’m sensing some subtle victim-blaming in there – those huge loans, all that financing, all the fault of those taking those loans! Nary a mention of the predatory nature of banks, and of all those implicit biases that actually got black people and hispanic people a worser deal than their white counterparts.

     Remember this guy? Fired Ferguson Spokesman Devin James Dubs Himself “Voice of the Voiceless” In New Book.

112. rq says

     18 August 2015 at 2:39 am

     Speaking of ‘but what about black-on-black crime?’, it’s not like it’s an issue that doesn’t get addressed: If interested, this @300MenMarch is to raise awareness so as to raise money to expand, not just cuz walking’s fun: http://gofundme.com/300emergencyplan …
     It’s an issue that doesn’t get media attention: Baltimore men march 35 miles to DC to protest inner city violence; national media hardly notices

     Late Sunday night, in what was called the 300 Men March, men from Baltimore who are frustrated with inner city violence began a 35-mile march from downtown Baltimore to Washington, DC, in a show of solidarity.

     The members of the 300 Men March, a grass-roots group that recruits city youth to walk the streets denouncing the hundreds of killings in Baltimore each year and the apathy that often follows, planned to take their message to the National Mall, where they will arrive Monday afternoon.

     Munir Bahar, the group’s founder, said the walk to Washington measures about four times the group’s previous longest march, a 10-mile hike across Baltimore on North Avenue in July. With breaks along the way, he said, the journey, the distance of which is longer than a marathon, should take about 20 hours, and end at about 2 p.m.

     Not taking as many breaks as they planned, the men arrived in DC a full two hours early.

     But here’s what I know…

     Had any one of these men carried a “Fuck the Police” sign, the march would’ve gone viral.

     Had any one of these men decided to throw a rock at a police car window, his picture would’ve been plastered all over the news.

     The truth, though, is that this bold march, from men and boys who had never marched anywhere near that distance in their lives, hardly made a whimper on the news cycle while black men doing bad shit seems to headline local and national news on a regular basis.

     Below are some beautiful images from the march.

     I don’t think this is the first such event – maybe the first of such distance, but these people have been out before, to absolutely no media noise.
     Now, what are white people doing about white-on-white crime?

     95% of Prosecutors Are White and They Treat Blacks Worse

     About one in three black men in the United States can expect to be incarcerated at some point in their lives. Black men comprise 6% of the U.S. population but 35% of the prison population.

     Along the way, they will meet a lot of white people.

     Local police forces are, on average, 88 percent white. Places like Ferguson, Missouri, are but the most extreme examples of nearly all-white police departments patrolling majority-nonwhite precincts.

     But the white cop is only the first responder. Throughout the criminal justice system, defendants will repeatedly encounter disproportionately white—sometimes all-white—agents of the law. Most importantly, the charges against them will be set by 95 percent white prosecutors, elected on state and local levels. In fact, two-thirds of states that elect their prosecutors have no black prosecutors at all.

     Since prosecutors convict 86 percent of the prison population, this means a nearly all-white cadre of attorneys is putting a disproportionately black cohort of defendants in jail.

     Now, do all these statistics really matter? Sure, it looks bad that prosecutors are almost entirely white, but that doesn’t make them racist, right?

     In fact, the racial divide among prosecutors correlates with how they unequally treat black and white defendants.

     Remember, the overwhelming majority of criminal cases never make it to judge or jury. A stunning 97 percent of federal convictions and roughly 95 percent of state convictions are the result of guilty pleas reached through plea bargaining between prosecutors and defense attorneys: If the defendant pleads guilty before a trial, he or she will receive a lesser sentence than what would likely result from a conviction after trial.

     In this environment, prosecutors have enormous leverage, unchecked discretion, and nearly absolute immunity. They decide initial charges, how to negotiate with defense attorneys, and whether to accept a given plea bargain or proceed to trial.

     Even initial charges can have enormous effects down the road. For example, prosecutors may apply a “gun bump” to the underlying charge, or decide whether a homicide is first-degree murder, second-degree murder, or something else like involuntary manslaughter. This totally unreviewed, discretionary decision sets the course of the entire case. (Yes, felony charges are technically presented by a grand jury, but prosecutors get the charges they ask for in an astonishing 99.9 percent of cases.)

     Two researchers, Marit Rehavi of the University of British Columbia and Sonja Starr of the University of Michigan, measured how federal prosecutors used this discretion, drawing on a wide pool of multi-agency data. The results are remarkable.

     In their meticulously researched report, and controlling for legally permitted characteristics (arrest offense, criminal history, etc.), they found an “unexplained” 9 percent disparity in sentencing between black and white defendants who committed the same criminal acts. (The disparity jumps to 13 percent when including drug cases.)

     In other words, if you’re black, your sentence will be 9 percent worse more than if you’re white.

     More at the link.

     The benefits of colorblindness? What Happens When Minority Kids Are Taught Not to Talk About Race

     Racial color-blindness sounds pretty good in theory. After all, aren’t we supposed to be judging people based only on the contents of their character, rather than the color of their skin? But critics of the idea say it has some serious downsides. They argue that since race is a major contributing factor in all sorts of societal outcomes, from who goes to jail to what educational opportunities a child has, to adopt color-blindness as an ideology is to ignore important discrepancies, thereby allowing them to fester. If you can’t really even talk about racism, in other words, how are you supposed to address it?

     An interesting new study in Social Psychology and Personality Science sheds some light on how color-blindness may affect minority kids. The authors, Kristin Pauker of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Evan P. Apfelbaum of MIT, and Brian Spitzer of NYU, start by explaining that there’s good reason to think minority kids don’t benefit from a color-blind approach: a body of research has shown that “race is central to their identities, a source of psychological well-being, and a lens through which others perceive them.” Ignoring race, then, may well have a negative impact on those for whom it’s most salient. (Make sure to read Lisa Miller’s piece from May on a school in New York taking the exact opposite approach — splitting kids up by race at a young age specifically to have conversations about it.)

     And yet these kids, like most American kids, are steeped in a milieu of color-blindness — many are taught at a young age that it’s wrong to point out or focus on racial differences. Pauker and her colleagues wanted to learn more about this, so they recruited a group of 111 9-to-12-year-olds from “urban public elementary schools that serve low-income and middle-class families near San Francisco” (three of their responses were unusable due to a researcher’s error, leaving a total sample size of 108 children).
     […]

     Among the kids who didn’t talk ask about race during the game, 58 percent of them (as coded by observers who reviewed the video and who didn’t know what the study was testing) said that doing so would be “inappropriate, rude, [or] offensive,” while a full 23 percent said it would be outright racist or prejudiced. “We were surprised to find that racial minority children also avoided race to the same extent [as the white kids] and espoused reasons such as trying not to appear prejudiced,” Pauker said in an email to Science of Us.

     It’s striking to compare the message these kids have internalized to the social norms color-blindness is supposed to be imparting. One of the ideas behind the concept is to teach kids not to interact in a discriminatory way with each other, that it would be wrong and unfair, of course, to exclude Benjamin from your game of tag because he’s black. Socializing kids against this sort of behavior is a totally reasonable, laudable thing to do. But it’s clear, at least from these two studies involving a diverse sample of students, that the concept has bled well beyond useful boundaries. Many of the kids apparently thought it would be rude or downright racist to even point out that half the people in the group of photos were racially distinct from the other half. Something about how we teach kids about race seems to have flown off the rails.

     And, as mentioned above, the researchers think this kind of schooling may hurt the kids it’s ostensibly designed to benefit:

     It is troubling that pressures to adhere to color-blind norms override talk of race, even among racial minority children. Research with adults has documented the potential for color blindness to facilitate the expression of racial bias and negative affect in intergroup interaction and to perpetuate group-based inequities (Knowles, Lowery, Hogan, & Chow, 2009; Richeson & Nussbaum, 2004; Vorauer, Gagnon, & Sasaki, 2009). Moreover, research with older adolescent and college samples has found that a ‘‘race doesn’t matter’’ socialization message can interfere with positive racial identity development among Black students (Lesane-Brown et al., 2005). Our results underscore the strength of color-blind norms in schools and highlight the need for future research to consider their impact on both majority and minority children’s social development. They also illuminate a fundamental challenge facing society: Issues of race continue to be a source of controversy and contention in American society, from education and business to policing and the law, yet it remains unclear how these issues can be resolved, much less articulated, if no one is willing to acknowledge race.

     There’s no easy way to solve the country’s vexing, centuries-old problems with race, but research like this highlights the serious problems and side effects that arise when you try to just sweep the problem under the rug.

     I guess not so benefits after all.

     Administrative error? Difference in priorities? Deliberate omission? Man who hanged himself in Jennings had been on suicide watch

     A man who hanged himself Oct. 4 in the Jennings jail had been on suicide watch for two days in the St. Louis Justice Center immediately before being transferred to Jennings on an arrest warrant, but jailers in Jennings did not take precautions to prevent a suicide after taking him into custody, an investigation has found.

     The investigator found no evidence that jailers in St. Louis had told Jennings jailers about the suicide watch.

     Neither Jennings nor St. Louis officials would answer questions about what led to the breakdown, which was uncovered by a St. Louis County Police investigation into the death of DeJuan Brison, 26.

113. rq says

     18 August 2015 at 2:48 am

     Notable Mississippians join chorus to change state flag. Racist symbol is still racist.

     In a letter appearing in a full-page ad in Sunday’s Clarion-Ledger, author John Grisham, actor Morgan Freeman, legendary quarterback Archie Manning, The Help author Kathryn Stockett and others are calling for removal of the Confederate emblem from Mississippi’s state flag.

     With other states removing their Confederate battle flags, Mississippi remains the last with the Confederate emblem flying over the statehouse.

     “It is simply not fair, or honorable, to ask black Mississippians to attend schools, compete in athletic events, work in the public sector, serve in the National Guard, and go about their normal lives with a state flag that glorifies a war fought to keep their ancestors enslaved,” the letter says. “It’s time for Mississippi to fly a flag for all its people.”
     […]

     But those who rallied Mississippi to vote nearly 2-to-1 to keep the flag in 2001 say the arguments that failed last time have yet to change.

     “Rap and hip-hop artists use the (Confederate battle) flag so that kind of sucks the wind out of the ‘offensive’ argument,” said Greg Stewart, administrator of Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library.

     Gov. Phil Bryant pointed out that voters spoke on the matter in 2001.

     Author Greg Iles, who signed the letter, said 14 years is a long time.

     “Think of America in 1931 and then in 1945 — that’s 14 years, and a tectonic shift in national identity. Think of 1961 and 1975,” he said. “The Confederate flag is no longer a viable state or national symbol in 2015.”

     He believes that “clinging to the past through symbols is hurting Mississippi now,” he said. “And it has the potential to cripple economic development going forward.”
     […]

     Stewart said he believes the only way a flag bill could make it through the Legislature would be “a raw power move in January, and they have to hope the public is stupid enough to forget, which they’re not going to.”

     If a change ever takes place, “it has to come from the people, otherwise it’ll cause more problems than it solves,” he said.

     He is already gathering signatures for a referendum, most likely in 2017, which would add Mississippi’s flag to the state Constitution.

     And then there’s basically a repetition of all the ‘heritage-not-hate’ and ‘flags don’t cause violence’ arguments we’ve heard before.

     What The Supreme Court Ruled On the False Arrest of Sandra Bland – could be a repost from the previous iteration, but the article is from July 24:

     In the case of Rodriguez v. United States it was determined that police were not allowed to extend the length of a routine traffic stop. That ruling effected lengths of even a few minutes, unless there was a clearly demonstrable safety concern or an additional crime that had been committed in the course of the stop.

     But what is clear now, from the video, is that there was no other crime, nor a safety concern. The officer was acting in violation of the law, as defined by the Supreme Court.

     Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg broke it down like this, saying that “[t]he tolerable duration of police inquiries in the traffic-stop context is determined by the seizure’s ‘mission’ — to address the traffic violation that warranted the stop, and attend to related safety concerns.” A police stop “may ‘last no longer than is necessary to effectuate th[at] purpose.’ Authority for the seizure thus ends when tasks tied to the traffic infraction are — or reasonably should have been — completed.”

     Encinia was clearly completing the traffic stop when he escalated things because of Bland’s refusal to put out her cigarette. He later even indicates in the video that she had been “trying to sign the fucking ticket” when things got ugly.

     That means his extension of the stop past that point – when there was no safety concern, nor any criminal offense that had been committed during the stop at that point – constituted illegal detention and a subsequent false arrest.

     Trooper Encinia broke the law and he is not being held accountable for it.

     I’m pretty sure he’s still not being held accountable for it.

     A Former Cop on the Subculture That Leads to Fatal Police Shootings

     August 9 marked the one-year anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager who was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in Ferguson, Missouri. A proliferation of similar incidents has made headlines in the months since. There was Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy gunned down in Cleveland, Ohio, after brandishing a fake gun at a recreation center. There was Walter Scott, a 50-year-old man shot to death in North Charleston, South Carolina. Most recently, there was Christian Taylor, the 19-year-old college student killed in Arlington, Texas. Like Brown, all of these victims were unarmed and black, and all of the shooters were white police officers.

     The guidelines that govern when and how a cop decides to fire a gun are opaque at best. To gain a better a understanding of the rules regarding the use of deadly force, The Trace spoke with Tom Nolan, a former lieutenant and 27-year veteran of the Boston Police Department. After leaving law enforcement, Nolan worked as a senior policy analyst in the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security. Now he runs the graduate criminology program at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, where he studies police subcultures, practices, and procedures.

     Interview at the link.

     A blast from the past: Black civil rights activist recalls white ally who took a shotgun blast for her.

     By all rights, Ruby Sales should have been killed on Friday, Aug. 20, 1965.

     She should have been hit by the shotgun blast fired by the enraged white man on the porch of the general store in rural Alabama.

     Her life should have ended at 17, an African American college student and civil rights worker, gunned down under a Coca-Cola sign in the fight for freedom and justice.

     But there she was Sunday morning, age 67, in St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Northwest Washington, given a half-century of life by a white seminarian named Jonathan Myrick Daniels who pushed her aside and died in her place.
     […]

     But she also said that it was deeply troubling that the same hate that killed Daniels in 1965 “is as alive and virulent today as it was then . . . 50 years after Jonathan’s death, my soul cannot rest.”

     Blacks own just 10 U.S. television stations. Here’s why.

     This month, a federal district court judge in California threw out media entrepreneur Byron Allen’s $20 billion lawsuit against Comcast and Time Warner Cable. The suit accused the cable giants of discriminating against black-owned media companies by creating and reserving just “a few spaces” for their channels at “the back of the bus.” A judge disagreed, dismissing the 71-page lawsuit in a snappy three-page decision.

     But just because this particular case fell flat doesn’t mean minority exclusion from broadcast and cable ownership isn’t a problem. It is – a big one.

     Minority owners are burdened by the legacy of racism. When the U.S. government first started giving away our airwaves in the 1930s, they were distributed exclusively to white, male owners. It mostly stayed this way until the 1970s, when the FCC tried to remedy the problem by implementing a “Minority Ownership Policy.” The measure offered tax incentives to people seeking to sell stations to minority owners.

     The policy worked. Within two years of its passage, the country went from one black-owned television station to 10. Over its total 17 year existence, minority ownership increased five-fold. But it was struck down by the newly-elected Republican Congress in 1995 and since then, its success has been mostly undone. In 2013, minorities owned just 6 percent of commercial television stations in the country, 6 percent of FM stations and 11 percent of AM stations.

     With a few notable exceptions (the cable network Black Entertainment Television launched in 1980 and TV One followed in 1995), African American ownership remains particularly low, hovering at less than one percent of all television properties, and less than 2 percent of radio. Last year in fact, just two television stations were owned by black owners. (That number is up to about 10 today).

     If representation in media is important, then media is failing. And people wonder why white people know nothing.

114. rq says

     18 August 2015 at 2:58 am

     WATCH: 14 police officers take down a one-legged homeless black man armed with crutches in San Francisco. He was also armed with blackness.

      What Julian Bond Taught Me

      Julian Bond was a titan of social justice leadership and a lifelong freedom fighter. But alongside that persevering voice for justice, one of his greatest gifts was that of a teacher and movement intellectual. To teach about the movement was a further way to carry it forward to a new generation — and he thrilled to this. When I was an undergraduate, I had the great good fortune to take his class on the civil rights movement, and then a few years later to serve as one of his teaching assistants for that class. For over two decades, he has been an extraordinary mentor and friend. A year ago we talked about the possibility of doing a book from those classroom teachings, but he wanted to work less, not more. His death feels ground-shifting and enormous — and so to honor that legacy, here are five things he taught me.

     Movements are made; they don’t just happen. It wasn’t “Rosa Parks sat down and the people boycotted the buses.” Those three class periods he spent on the bus boycott showed not just what happened but how it happened. They indelibly changed how I saw and now teach the civil rights movement. In the popular narrative, the movement arises. It just happens. It is the perfection of the American dream. What Julian Bond showed so vividly was that people made decisions. There was nothing predestined about it. America wasn’t naturally moving toward justice. People chose, amid searing conditions, amid threats to their person and their livelihood, to make it happen: Rosa Parks called Fred Gray called Jo Ann Robinson; E.D. Nixon called the ministers and reporter Jo Azbell; Jo Ann Robinson snuck into her office at Alabama State College and ran off 35,000 leaflets; and on and on. By showing how the civil rights movement happened, he showed us how to imagine how we do it again.
     The civil rights movement was not created by presidents or charismatic speakers but by the efforts and freedom visions of everyday local people possessing great courage and vision. And those local people have to be known, their particular contributions detailed and lifted up. And so he did: Annie Devine, Earl Steptoe, Johnnie Carr, Fred Gray, Unita Blackwell, the Rev. T.J. Jemison. And many, many of those people were young people, often teenagers themselves—Barbara Johns, Mary Louise Smith, Ernest Green, and Julian Bond’s many friends and colleagues in SNCC—who shone a mirror on the nation and began to force it to confront its original sin of systemic racial injustice. Young people lead, he would teach, and the nation will ultimately be forced to follow.
     Movements take years and decades. The civil rights movement began long before it was publicly recognized, long before the Brown decision and the Montgomery bus boycott, and continued long after the Voting Rights Act was signed and the TV cameras packed up and went home. And so did Julian Bond’s commitments: His ardent opposition to the Vietnam War and South African apartheid. His persistent, public support of gay rights, refusing to attend Coretta Scott King’s funeral because it was to be held not at the King family church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, but at a homophobic mega-church. His steadfast criticism of the Tea Party as the “Taliban wing of American politics.” His last arrest in 2013, tied to the White House fence protesting the Keystone pipeline. He rejoiced in this new movement of Dream Defenders and Dreamers and Black Lives Matter activists, saying they reminded him of himself when he was young.
     Learning is essential for movements and for teachers. Twelve-hour meetings, mistakes, disagreements—the civil rights movement was made by people who were figuring and thinking and acting and learning. He wasn’t afraid to talk about that process, about the learning that happened in the movement. They were young people. There were serious generational and ideological divides, and they didn’t always agree or get it right the first time. By learning and changing, the movement continued. And that didn’t just go for movements but for himself as well. Julian Bond could have stopped reading 25 years ago, and his classes would still have been great. But he didn’t. He thought scholarship on the movement was essential and necessary. Not wedded to a single truth, to his own version of the struggle, he read and rejoiced at the numbers of books, constantly recommending whatever new book he had just enjoyed. When I started working on my biography of Rosa Parks, he opened countless doors for me as I aimed to detail her post-Montgomery activism in Detroit, ruefully admitting, “I met her numerous times over her lifetime.… I just talked to her about innocuous things and never delved deeper…. I thought I knew everything to know about her.”
     Mentoring matters. A just and democratic struggle means enabling each person to find her/his voice. That was the leadership that SNCC embodied, Julian Bond taught us. Ella Baker mentored them. Highlander Folk School mentored them. Older NAACP activists in the Deep South mentored them. One of my favorite stories he told about Ella Baker was how she would sit with them in marathon meetings listening, asking the occasional question, helping them figure their way to their own answers. These meetings would stretch long into the night—and people would smoke. Miss Baker would sit there with a mask on because she had trouble breathing, but she was going to sit with them until they got to where they needed to go.

     Carrying on that tradition, Julian Bond mentored others. Like Ella Baker with her mask, Julian Bond was not a fair-weather mentor. He didn’t just write a blurb or letter of introduction — either of which would have been an incredible honor. He was a movement mentor, understanding what it takes to help someone find her voice. He spent years with me agitating for scholarly access to Rosa Parks’ papers (which have finally now opened at the Library of Congress), co-authoring an op-ed with me, making calls, sending letters, making more calls. He came to one of my early bookstore talks (even though he’d read the entire book months before) and then decided the NAACP board needed to hear this expanded story of Rosa Parks’ lifetime of activism and arranged for a talk. No question was too small or insignificant; he would email right back with advice or thoughts on ways to proceed and often sent notes of encouragement and delight.

      Julian Bond’s generosity was epic. Over the past twenty four hours, the Internet has filled with stories of the countless other activists and scholars, community leaders and students he inspired and aided in their efforts to press for social justice and tell this history. And the responsibility he leaves us to continue the struggle for justice is epic too. In one e-mail, as I grew discouraged by what seemed the futility of our efforts, he wrote, cajoling me onward, “I am a hopeless optimist; I always believe things will work out.” Rest in power, Julian Bond. Your lessons continue.

     What a loss for the community – for all the communities.

     Remembering Kajieme Powell. Him, too.

     Live updates: Defense rests in Charlotte’s police shooting case

     After finishing with a CMPD DNA expert, the defense for Kerrick rested on Monday afternoon.

     The defense made a motion for dismissal, claiming the prosecution had failed to prove its case. Such a motion is common, and was denied by Superior Court Judge Robert Ervin.

     Closing arguments are now scheduled for Tuesday morning. Afterward, the jury will receive its instructions and begin deliberations.

     The 12-member jury has two people who are Latino, three African-American and seven white. Eight are women and four are men.

     Four alternate jurors who have heard the entire case side-by-side with the regular jurors will likely be released from service after closing arguments. The alternates are all white, and consist of one man and three women.

     If convicted of voluntary manslaughter, Kerrick faces three to 11 years in prison. He has been on unpaid suspension since the shooting.

     I kinda have my fingers crossed.

     At least 1008 Black Lives Matter demonstrations have been held in the last 395 days, see chart!

     Grand Juror in Michael Brown Case Appeals Gag Order on Panel – still fighting that.

     A member of the grand jury that declined to indict a white Ferguson police officer in the shooting death of Michael Brown is challenging a federal judge’s dismissal of her lawsuit that sought to allow her to speak publicly about those secret proceedings.

     That woman, identified only as “Grand Juror Doe,” wants the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn U.S. District Judge Rodney Sippel’s May decision to toss her bid to speak out about her time on the panel.

     Sippel sided with lawyers for St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch in ruling the former grand juror needs to go to a state court for permission to talk publicly. Her lawsuit in state court is scheduled for a hearing Tuesday.

     McCulloch’s spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment Monday.

     The lawsuits have claimed McCulloch mischaracterized the jury’s findings when he announced last November that the panel declined to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the August 2014 shooting death of 18-year-old Brown, who was black and unarmed. That shooting — and the grand jury’s clearing of Wilson — fueled protests that at times turned violent in a case that spawned the national “Black Lives Matter” movement.

     Grand Juror Doe’s lawsuits, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri, allege McCulloch wrongly implied all 12 jurors believed there was no support for any charges. Under Missouri law, an indictment requires agreement by nine of the panel’s dozen members, and grand jurors are sworn to secrecy under the threat of contempt or other charges.

     Wilson, who since has resigned, also was cleared by a Justice Department investigation.

     Grand Juror Doe insists her experiences on the panel — it met on 25 days over three months, hearing more than 70 hours of testimony from about 60 witnesses — “could aid in educating the public about how grand juries function” and help advocate for changing how grand juries are conducted in Missouri.

     An unresolved lawsuit on behalf of a reporter for The Guardian newspaper is pressing a judge to force McCulloch’s office to make public his emails during the months the grand jury was empaneled. And four activists also are asking a Missouri appellate court to overturn a St. Louis County judge’s ruling last month that tossed out their lawsuit seeking a special prosecutor to review the way McCulloch oversaw the process.

     And yes, here’s more on Bernie Sanders: Why Are White Liberals Getting So “Berned Up” By Black Women Activists?

     Supporters of Sanders have asked: Why target Bernie? Sanders is a self-described socialist with a strong civil-rights record.

     The argument is that, of all the candidates, he can be the most effective for racial justice. “That argument really illuminates the limitations and failures of White liberal politics,” said Darnell L. Moore, a BLM activist based in New York City. “If you watch that crowd of liberal progressives, their responses to the sistas on that stage was telling. People in Seattle claim to be in a liberal state, but Black people have a different experience of what that means in that space.”

     Moore added: “Every time they say, ‘But Bernie Sanders marched for civil rights,’ that means you’re not listening to us. They are attempting to push forth a class analysis that lacks any analysis of race and anti-Black racism. What it does is center the Sanders campaign and the history of his involvement in civil rights, and it de-centers the voices and lived experiences of Black people.”

     Sanders reminded the activists of his record on civil-rights issues. The fact that he, along with several hundred thousand people, marched with Martin Luther King Jr., the fact that he is more progressive on civil rights than Donald Trump, isn’t saying much in light of persistent racial inequality. But more importantly, BLM is not targeting Sanders.

     In fact, BLM, which does not have a centralized leadership or organization, is not focusing on any one party or candidate. Some of the activists I interviewed last week said their agenda is not about influencing politicians or fostering change through traditional channels. These post-“Yes We Can”–era activists know that change is not coming from the political elite, irrespective of their populist rhetoric. They see the presidential rallies as staging grounds and spaces of organizing and community building.

     “There isn’t a thing against Bernie. The sistas heard he was coming to town, so they seized the opportunity. They were moved by the spirit of the moment and got up to talk about the issues specific to the local community,” said Moore.

     Moore explained that BLM has 26 chapters across the country. Each is organized around localized racial-justice issues that intersect with economic, sexual and gender concerns. And each chapter decides its own protest strategies.

     “The local chapters figure out on their own terms the best way to address their community’s needs. Black Lives Matter is not a bought movement. We have no allegiance to any political party. We are a leader-full movement holding elected officials accountable for the way Black people are being treated. This is about self- determination, our safety, and people trying to figure out how to live,” Moore said.

     The heckling, boos, and hate mail were not the only attempts at silencing these activists. Online rumors accusing Willaford and Johnson of being paid infiltrators working for Hilary Clinton or the Tea Party sought to discredit the women, turning the focus away from their message. Moore and others confirmed that both women are BLM activists, and that the movement gets no funding from political machines.

     Despite the criticisms of the activists’ tactics—which Moore attributes to respectability politics—he sees the value of public disruptions. “People think we should meet behind closed doors,” said Moore. “But if we didn’t disrupt and bring these conversations into public discourse, people wouldn’t be talking about these issues.”

115. rq says

     18 August 2015 at 3:00 am

     Previous in moderation, but I just wanted to add this from the final link in that set:

     Scott said he is not certain if we are witnessing a new brand of womanist politics or a new brand of Black feminist politics, but we are definitely witnessing a new paradigm. Historically, Black women were organizing, and working at a grassroots level, often behind the higher-profile Black male leaders. Now, they doing the work and are the face, and voice, of the movement.

     The politics of respectability, which required male clergy leaders, have been pushed aside; the walls of a media that sought after those leaders and credentials have been kicked over by this group of Black women who aren’t calling press conferences or asking for a microphone, but snatching it without care or concern of the optics. For this generation, there are no worries about “airing dirty laundry” or reinforcing stereotypes. These women are literally fighting for their lives and they could care less if that makes White people uncomfortable.

     BLM has made clear over and over again that its tactics don’t cater to White people’s feelings. It is no wonder that the Seattle disruption prompted so much outrage from those who say they support Black lives, but on White terms.

     “It is interesting to me that there has been a hyperfocus on two women activists and less on the vitriolic responses of the White liberal audience. I’m more interested—to what extent do Black lives matter to the White liberals. If that’s what they consider to be the most progressive contingent of White folks then that makes me really scared,” said Cullors-Brignac.

     The protest in Seattle sent the message that if you are an ally, if you support Bernie, if you live in Seattle, if you drink kale juice, if you love Cecil the lion, if you marched with Dr. King, you still will be held accountable. There are no passes in this movement.

     That’s right, no passes.

     Black Lives Matter Charleston: Surveillance started after Walter Scott shooting

     Black Lives Matter formed in December 2014 in the wake of the police-involved deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Shortly after the Scott shooting, it was one of the first local organizations to call for a citizens’ review board to oversee the actions of the North Charleston Police Department.

     Black Lives Matter Charleston organizer Muhiyidin d’Baha says the group had to introduce a no-cameras policy at its meetings after the Scott shooting when newcomers started showing up and snapping pictures.

     “We were aware that there were new people coming into the meetings that were asking a bunch of questions,” d’Baha says. “We were aware that there were people coming into our initial meetings right after Walter Scott that were just taking pictures.”

     Recently released emails from North Charleston city employees show that the actions of protest groups including Black Lives Matter Charleston were being monitored by the S.C. Law Enforcement Division (SLED) and the American Red Cross, both of which sent emails to city staff informing them about upcoming organizational meetings and the arrival of Ferguson, Mo., residents at a hotel in Summerville. D’Baha says he does not know if the newcomers at the meetings were working for a law enforcement agency, but the effect of their presence was palpable.

     “These things were definitely happening and definitely scared people away with the knowing or not knowing of who was behind these cameras and what their intention was,” d’Baha says. “There was a lot of fear, and there’s still a lot of fear, among the people that need to rise up right now.”

     North Charleston Police Department spokesman Spencer Pryor says the department did not send officers to monitor Black Lives Matter Charleston meetings or to attend the meetings in plainclothes. When asked if NCPD monitored the actions of protest groups on social media, Pryor wrote in an email interview, “Social media sites are often monitored by law enforcement agencies.” Pryor notes that this is not an uncommon practice, since it is used by potential employers and others.

     “Everybody does it”. Right.

     More later.

116. jackman says

     18 August 2015 at 5:32 am

117. rq says

     18 August 2015 at 7:25 am

     All 173 Confederate flag rallies since the Charleston massacre, mapped. Check for blatantly racist activity near you.

     The largest rally so far was held in Ocala, Florida, in mid-July, in support of a county’s decision to return a Confederate flag to a position on government property. It drew an estimated crowd of 5,000 people, as well as reports of sporadic gunfire. Other big rallies include a crowd of 4,000 in North Carolina, and the 2,000 supporters of a KKK rally held in Charleston in July.

     A common refrain of Confederate flag supporters is that the flag is about heritage, not hate. But historians of the South, as well as political scientists who study the motivations of people who wave the flag, generally dispute this claim. And a number of rallies tracked by the SPLC include the involvement of known hate groups, like the Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the League of the South.

     The state of Virginia has seen the most flag rallies so far, with 23. Texas comes in second with 19. There have been 17 rallies in Alabama and 16 each in Georgia and Florida. While rallies have been overwhelmingly concentrated in the South, they have been held as far north as Sandusky Michigan, and as far west as Redmond, Oregon. A total of 22 states have seen a pro-Confederate flag rally this summer.

     Here’s a couple by Dana Hunter:
     But A White Guy Who Attacks Cops Would Get Shot, Too, Right?
     Why Bernie Sanders Could Lose – And How You Can Help Him Win.

     Full video of both arrests at tonight’s weekly peaceful #BlackLivesMatter demo. Note chokehold used in second arrest https://youtu.be/6BEZhryd760 Yep, that’s happening.

     Prosecutors want subpoenas quashed in Freddie Gray case

     Prosecutors in the case of the six police officers charged in the arrest and transport of Freddie Gray are asking a judge to quash subpoenas that compel State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby and other prosecutors to appear as witnesses at the first court hearing in the case.

     In a court filing, they call the subpoenas sought by defense attorney Catherine Flynn “improper” and say they are part of an ongoing attempt to “bury the prosecution in frivolous” filings.

     The subpoenas obtained by Flynn, who represents Officer Garrett E. Miller, require Mosby and other prosecutors and investigators to attend the Sept. 2 motions hearing as witnesses in the case.

     That could cause key prosecutors to be sequestered from the proceedings. A subpoena was also sent to the state medical examiner who performed Gray’s autopsy.
     […]

     In asking Circuit Court Judge Barry Williams to revoke the subpoenas, prosecutors expanded on their responses to past defense allegations, including a claim that prosecutors steered police away from looking into whether Gray had a history of “crash-for-cash” schemes to injure himself in hope of collecting settlements.

     Prosecutors said they “wanted to keep police focused on uncovering what happened to Mr. Gray inside the transportation van and not on what may have happened to Mr. Gray in some past incident,” which they say requires no one to testify to explain.

     “One of the state’s legal obligations is to advocate for Mr. Gray as a victim and uncover how he was injured, not to stand blinded by the blue lights and conclude that he was to blame for his own fatal injuries because of some prior accusation of self-injury in police custody,” prosecutors wrote.

     They also addressed the issue of the knife Gray was carrying when he was arrested. Police have said it was a switchblade, which is illegal under city law. Prosecutors said they inspected the knife and determined it was not a switchblade.

     The sides have sparred over whether prosecutors wrongly looked to state law when determining if the knife was illegal.

     Prosecutors said the “more relevant matters” were “Gray’s injuries and what the defendants did to prevent and care for those injuries.”

     They also addressed again a defense accusation that either prosecutors have failed to turn over evidence from their independent investigation, or that “there was no investigation.”

     Prosecutors said the “mere fact that the State’s Attorney’s Office conducted an independent investigation of the events underlying these cases prior to charging them does not transform attorneys in that office into witnesses subject to being subpoenaed.”

     They said such efforts are typical of every case and produce material that would unnecessarily overwhelm the discovery process of turning over evidence.

     Prosecutors said no witnesses are scheduled to testify at the Sept. 2 motions hearing in the case, and that subpoenaing witnesses to a hearing where they would not be permitted to testify is “beyond disingenuous and abusive.”

     In a footnote in the motion, they suggest Flynn should be disbarred.

     That case just sounds dirtier and dirtier the longer it goes on. Courage to Mosby and her team, this is some fight. I’m glad they’re attempting to keep the focus on where it belongs, on Gray as a victim of police brutality – at most positive, police negligence – where his past as a criminal or saint should take a backseat to the fact that he was a human being worthy of care and dignity.

118. rq says

     18 August 2015 at 8:52 am

     Watson Coleman Statement on AG Investigation of Radazz Hearns Shooting

     Today, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ-12) issued the following statement on the New Jersey Attorney General’s office continuing investigation into Friday’s shooting of Radazz Hearns by New Jersey State Troopers and a Mercer County Sheriff’s Officer:

     “It is tragic to see any young person injured by gunfire, so I am deeply relieved at reports that Radazz is in stable condition, and I pray for his speedy and full recovery. Moving forward, I am committed to uncovering the details of this shooting, and I look forward to facilitating conversations between law enforcement and our community to shed light on these events.

     “Public safety is my primary and imminent concern; the public must have full confidence in the investigatory agencies that are tasked with uncovering the truth. I have been in communication with Attorney General Hoffman, Sherriff Kemler and Mayor Jackson. While they each have committed to and desire a thorough and transparent investigation, the lack of information to the public has resulted in public faith quickly eroding, requiring swift action to regain the confidence of the community. As such, I have requested a federal investigation so that the public can have additional independent assurances that we will find the truth. Moving forward we need to seek ways to prevent cases like these, but also ensure that when they do occur, the community has a voice in the process.

     “Across the United States, a number of unexplained and unnecessary deaths precipitated by interactions with law enforcement over the past several months have shaken our nation’s trust in police and the criminal justice system. When these cases are addressed swiftly with transparency and decisiveness, as in the Cincinnati shooting of Samuel DuBose, we restore faith in the process. When there is no communication, the public frequently feels misled and we see the kind of disruption and violence witnessed in Ferguson or Baltimore. By giving the public a vested interest in maintaining the legitimacy of investigations like this one, we can work together to guarantee that objective justice remains our goal.”

     U.S. Budgets Cash to Treat Heroin Abuse in Northeast

     Faced with a surge in heroin abuse in recent years, especially in the Northeast, the White House on Monday announced a program aimed at improving the government’s response to the drug across 15 states in that region.

     The Office of National Drug Control Policy said it would spend $2.5 million to hire public safety and public health coordinators in five areas in an attempt to focus on the treatment, rather than the punishment, of addicts.

     The funding — a sliver of the $25.1 billion that the government spends every year to combat drug use — will help create a new “heroin response strategy” aimed at confronting the increase in use of the drug. A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that heroin-related deaths had nearly quadrupled between 2002 and 2013.

     “The Heroin Response Strategy will foster a collaborative network of public health-public safety partnerships to address the heroin/opioid epidemic,” said the announcement by the policy office. “The aim will be to facilitate collaboration between public health and public safety partners within and across jurisdictions, sharing best practices, innovative pilots, and identifying new opportunities to leverage resources.”

     Once thought of as a drug used only by hard-core addicts, heroin has infiltrated many communities, largely because of its easy availability and its low price, officials said.

     The problem has become especially severe in New England, where officials have called for a renewed effort to confront it. Gov. Peter Shumlin of Vermont devoted his entire State of the State Message in January to what he called “a full-blown heroin crisis” in his state. Like the new White House effort, the governor called for a new, treatment-based approach to the drug.

     “The time has come for us to stop quietly averting our eyes from the growing heroin addiction in our front yards,” Mr. Shumlin said then, “while we fear and fight treatment facilities in our backyards.”

     The increase in heroin abuse, and its effect on middle-class communities, has been documented in the news media in recent years. A report by The New York Times showed how a mother on Staten Island became addicted to the drug. An article in The Washington Post focused on the drug’s impact in Maine.

     I get the feeling that this funding is available because heroin has become an issue in middle-class communities. The lower classes can go get fucked, eh? And I wonder about disproportionate application…

     Study Finds Education Does Not Close Racial Wealth Gap, audio at NPR.

     New research by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows education does not help black and Hispanic college graduates protect their wealth the same way it does for their white and Asian counterparts.

     Transcript at the link.

     A shattered foundation, “African Americans who bought homes in Prince George’s have watched their wealth vanish”.

     African Americans for decades flocked to Prince George’s County to be part of a phenomenon that has been rare in American history: a community that grew more upscale as it became more black.

     The county became a national symbol of the American Dream with a black twist. Families moved into expansive new homes, with rolling lawns, nearby golf courses and, most of all, neighbors who looked like them. In the early 2000s, home prices soared — some well beyond $1 million — allowing many African Americans to build the kind of wealth their elders could only imagine.

     But today, the nation’s highest-income majority-black county stands out for a different reason — its residents have lost far more wealth than families in neighboring, majority-white suburbs. And while every one of these surrounding counties is enjoying a strong rebound in housing prices and their economies, Prince George’s is lagging far behind, and local economists say a full recovery appears unlikely anytime soon.

     The same reversal of fortune is playing out across the country as black families who worked painstakingly to climb into the middle class are seeing their financial foundation for future generations collapse. Although African Americans have made once-unthinkable political and social gains since the civil rights era, the severe and continuing damage wrought by the downturn — an entire generation of wealth was wiped out — has raised a vexing question: Why don’t black middle-class families enjoy the same level of economic security as their white counterparts?

     Article continues at the link.

     40 men walked over 30 miles from Baltimore to DC in one night. Here’s why.

     Recently more than 40 members of the 300 Men March made an overnight, 35-mile walk to Washington D.C. to bring attention to the violence in Baltimore. This July, Baltimore saw a total of 45 homicides, making it the deadliest month since August 1972.

     The men began their on-foot excursion Sunday night, and didn’t stop until they reached the National Mall this afternoon.

     “We need men specifically to get off the couch, to get involved in these young peoples’ lives in the community and really take it as a personal thing,” Munir Bahar told WUSA9. “Take ownership of the violence. Take responsibility for your own community and step into these young folks’ lives, be the intervention that is needed to really guide them away from making these life altering decisions.”

     Let’s raise the signal a bit, hm?

     300 Men March Walks 35-Miles From Baltimore to D.C. to Address Violence

     About 40 men made their way to D.C. on foot Monday to bring attention to the issue of violence among young people in Baltimore.

     The 300 Men March group started the walk Sunday night in Baltimore. The organization says it wants to raise awareness about its effort to address gun violence in the city. The group had marchers as young as 15-years-old and and old as 65-years-old.

     WNEW’s John Domen caught up with the group as they were walking down Route 1 early Monday morning.

     Nathan Thomas, one of the group’s captains says they are having a measurable impact in areas like the Belair-Edison community.

     “Last year during the summer months this time it was 12 murders. This year it’s two,” says Thomas.

     Some men wore shirts that said, “We must stop killing each other.”

     “We have to do something now. Something has to happen immediately in order for these murders to be quelled,” said Sean Stinnett, a spokesman for the group.

     One of the group’s main goals is to reduce homicides by 50 percent in five of Baltimore’s neighborhoods by getting young people to participate in violence prevention programs and mobilizing citizens.

     “It’s becoming sad man. It’s a state of emergency I believe,” said marcher Jahi Faw.

     The group is also asking for donations to spread awareness to its cause on GoFundMe.

     The march ended at the White House around 2 p.m.

     Just please, please, please don’t let these efforts of addressing issues within the community overshadow those attempting to combat issues from without the community – police brutality against people of colour is a different issue from this one, but I put this here to counter those who believe that black-on-black crime is more of an issue, an issue not receiving attention from within the black community. Let’s face it, they’re both issues, both being addressed by (different members of) the same community. One does not cancel out the other.

119. rq says

     18 August 2015 at 8:56 am

     Here’s some words about an organization worth supporting. I believe they have a gmail address where they can be reached.
     I don’t resent one minute or dollar I’ve spent this past year working in this movement and in the communities we’ve serviced.
     However, I do know that some things have to change for the health and well-being of all of @ophelporhush’s “staff” and volunteers.
     For the projects we have and the level we want to go to and amount of people we want to service, we need grants.
     And over the next 90 days, we’re going to work hard to secure grants. Any info and help with this is much appreciated. @ophelporhush
     We want to continue to pay young folks for their work. We want to continue to provide a safe, clean space for them to bond and learn.
     We want our workers and volunteers to feel appreciated beyond a “thank you.” So we must locate the real money for the community work we do.
     So if there’s anyone reading this and who has advice or experience or anything they’d be willing to share, this might be a good cause.
     Incidentally, speaking of new organizations just taking off, Seven Scribes (a writing site for people of colour that I have often linked to and quoted from on these threads) is looking for (a) donations (though they reached their kickstarter goal) and (b) writers (who, thanks to current donations etc., they can now afford to pay). This is a subtle hint to some people on this network.

120. rq says

     18 August 2015 at 9:06 am

     Here’s The Root on the 300 Men March: 300 Men March Movement Arrives in DC

     Marchers coming from Baltimore as part of 300 Men March have reached the nation’s capital, WUSA 9 reports. According to the report, the group started off on Sunday and are expected to wind up at the White House as part of the initiative to raise awareness about community violence.

     The Washington Post reports that the group consists of just over 40 people, who started the grueling walk around 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, taking some rests.

     “The work to reduce violence is not going to be comfortable, it’s not going to be convenient, it’s not going to be a luxury activity, but it’s something that we have to do,” organizer Munir Bahar told WUSA 9.

     “We need men specifically to get off the couch, to get involved in these young people’s lives in the community and really take it as a personal thing,” he added. “Take ownership of the violence. Take responsibility for your own community and step into these young folks’ lives; be the intervention that is needed to really guide them away from making these life-altering decisions.”

     Faces of the Movement Meet Up, with exhibit of photography. Put a face and a personal story to protestors out on the street.

     The Faces of the Movement project is currently exhibiting five of its photographic portraits at the Regional Arts Commission as a feature of the IMPTXDESIGN.14/15 exhibition.

     On Thursday, August 20, we will host a meet-and-greet for the project, where you can hear from its creators, have drinks, and meet some of the leaders and “faces” featured in this beloved project.

     Here’s more about the project: New Favorite Tumblr: Faces of the Movement

     With numerous powerful Moral Monday actions across the United States this week, another declared state of emergency in St. Louis, and the continued arrests and harassment of countless activists, it only makes sense to take some time and recognize the individuals who keep this work going.

     Faces of the Movement does just that. It shares the faces of everyday people across the country. It highlights how they’ve poured their time, livelihoods, and lives into sustaining the nationwide efforts that have grown since last August 9th. It reminds us that activism is not reserved for some superhero we must wait for, but is an attainable goal responsibility for each of us — achieved through incremental steps. And it manages to achieve this monumental task beautifully through a simple means:

     A photo a day.

     Former Fairfax police officer charged with murder of unarmed Springfield man

     A former Fairfax County police officer was charged with second-degree murder Monday, nearly two years after he shot and killed an unarmed Springfield man who stood with his hands raised in the doorway of his home.

     The indictment of Adam D. Torres in the killing of 46-year-old John Geer, who had a holstered gun at his feet when he was shot, marks the first time in the 75-year history of the Fairfax County Police Department that an officer has faced criminal prosecution in connection with an on-duty shooting.

     Geer’s slaying in August 2013 sparked protests, shook trust in law enforcement and prompted county officials to begin a broad review of the department’s use of force and the way it communicates with the public about police shootings.

     “Justice is prevailing,” said Don Geer, John Geer’s father. “I figured it was going to eventually happen. It’s unfortunate we had to wait so long for it to take place. But our judicial system is going through its process, and we will see justice served.”
     […]

     Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh said he had requested a bench warrant for Torres. Fairfax County police said Torres turned himself in on Monday evening and is being held without bond at the county jail.

     Morrogh said Torres would probably be arraigned in Circuit Court as soon as Wednesday.

     Morrogh declined to discuss the significance of the first indictment of a Fairfax officer for an on-duty shooting.

     “I’m not permitted to characterize the case under the rules governing me as a prosecutor,” Morrogh said. “I’m grateful to the grand jury for their attention and taking time out of their personal lives to do this.”

     Torres’s attorney, John F. Carroll, did not return a call seeking comment on Monday.

     He’s already been fired from the force, though, which I find interesting – no longer under the wing of the police union, and possibly a washing of the hands? The officer who shot Christian Taylor was also fired quickly, and while I appreciate the move, I do wonder why.

     McCorkle Place’s Silent Sam memorial to the Confederacy has been spray-painted with the phrase “Who is Sandra Bland?”

     15 Heartbreaking Drawings Capture the #LastWords Spoken by Black Victims of State Violence, updated version.

     Barghi, an Iranian-born, New York-based artist, says she first encountered the Garner video in an article about another victim of police violence: Michael Brown, who was shot dead by former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson nearly a month after Garner’s death.

     “It drew a connection for me,” Barghi told Mic. “I didn’t expect this project to continue, or take off the way it did. Seeing these two incidents side-by-side helped me realized this was an ongoing phenomenon in America.”

     The project didn’t end there. In the year that has passed since Brown’s death, Barghi has been illustrating and tweeting her own creative depictions of the last words spoken by slain black male victims of state violence in the U.S. The result is a haunting tribute to the dead and a heartbreaking reminder of the toll American racism takes daily on black families and communities.

     In many ways, #LastWords has assumed a life of its own, she says. Artists and musicians have reached out to her about creating similar series’ focused on other topics, like the war in Yemen. Activists in Ferguson have also spoken to her about amplifying the last words spoken by black women who have died at the hands of American police.

     “I really want other people to continue this work,” Barghi says. “First, I’m not black, which I realize influences my perspective. Black pain [in the U.S.] is very real. So the first thing I try to do is educate myself, build an awareness.”

     […]

     The series was celebrated at the time by a variety of advocates and outlets for its topicality and starkly impactful rendering. None of this has changed in the year since, but the list of names has grown steadily longer, from a handful of then-notorious cases — including Garner, Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo — to a seemingly endless flood of new victims, which now includes Samuel Dubose, who was killed by a campus police officer in Cincinnati during a traffic stop last month, and Christian Taylor, who was shot dead by police at a car dealership in Arlington, Texas, on August 7. In this case, Barghi captured a tweet days before Taylor’s life was cut short.

     When asked what she hopes people will take away from the #LastWords series, Barghi is pensive. “I guess I would like people to educate themselves and really look into these people’s stories,” she says. “Because it did make me do that. And I hope people use this to learn what police violence in the U.S. really looks like.”

     “But really, there’s nothing inspirational here.”

     In the meantime, her work of documenting the last words spoken by black people killed by police continues unabated — and doesn’t look like it’ll be ending anytime soon.

121. rq says

     18 August 2015 at 9:18 am

     Slow Poison, “Even if the police don’t kill me, a lifetime of preparing for them to just might.”

     If stopped by the police, I thought to myself, I would set my phone to record audio and put it on the passenger seat. I would send a tweet that I was being stopped and had every intention of complying with the police officer. I would turn on Periscope and livestream the stop, crowdsourcing witnesses. I would text my family and tell them that I was not feeling angry or suicidal, that I was looking forward to seeing them soon. There would not be time to do all of these things, but maybe if I prepared in advance I could pull off one or two of them. What all of these plans had in common were that none of them were meant to secure my safety, but rather to ensure that my death looked suspicious enough to question.

     I was figuring out how to enter evidence into the inquiry of my own death.
     […]

     Though the plans I’d made were too new and ill-formed for me to remember to use, the tactics I use to avoid being arrested or killed by the police have been instilled too deeply in me for me to forget. It is a carefully calibrated etiquette that feels like a delicate dance, based on the centuries of received wisdom passed down by the parents of black children in America. Answer questions quickly, but not so quickly that you come off as snippy. If you have to move, move deliberately, but not so slowly that you look reluctant to obey or are stalling for time. Speak calmly and conversationally, but be polite and not too familiar. Answer questions, but don’t offer any information you don’t have to. And on it goes, each balance to be carefully struck, each parameter to be tuned in response to changing circumstances.

     This set of rules is often referred to as The Talk. My parents talked to me, but it wasn’t a single discrete conversation. Instead, I received The Talk as a series of mini-sermons my parents never failed to deliver in teachable moments. Neither were these restricted to how to manage the police. They were a guide to how to be alive and black in this world.

     You are not like the other children. You can’t get into the same juvenile mischief your white friends get into. You represent something more than yourself and your family when you are outside this house. You will have to be twice as good as other people to be as successful as them. Remember that the wind is against you, remember that you will never be allowed to be ordinary, and so you can never allow yourself to be ordinary.

     It is not a coincidence these lessons are accorded the same proper noun capitalization as is given to the discussion about sex that white parents have with their children. They are as essential and unavoidable.
     […]

     I left the park and patrolman and headed up the road, but I did not leave them behind, not entirely. I’d sloughed off a little lightness of heart, exchanged it for a tightening in my chest, a slow strangling. The fullness of racism’s cruel bounty is not found in the bodies of the dead alone, but also in the spirits of the living. Most of us will not be killed by police officers. White supremacy will not kill us so directly, so flagrantly. Instead it dogs our steps, wages niggling wars on our peace itself. Its power is in the daily theft of our joy, our dignity, our sanity. It is in the way we always have to weigh and calculate, how we can never assume good intentions and honest mistakes. Because it is always there, in swirling eddies around our ankles, waiting to drag us under.

     I can no more safely forget racism than a sea captain can forget about waves and weather. It must be heeded and understood to be navigated, and if I refuse, I will drown. I may drown anyway, despite my best efforts. That is not in my hands, and in a strange way it is freeing to know that even perfection might not be enough.

     “Don’t let yourself become bitter,” my mom once taught me. She did not say this to suggest I fulfill some idealistic piety, that I must forgive and forget. She said this because bitterness leeches out love, the love it takes to struggle, to fight, to live. James Baldwin once said that he could not afford the luxury of despair, and neither can I afford to maintain a deficit of love. It is a difficult accounting. I am doing my best.

     So much more in there worth the reading of. Worth every minute you spend on each word.

     Why Sheneque Proctor is NOT the Female Eric Gardner

     If you’re on this site then you already know Malcolm X was a prophet.

     He said 50 years ago that ”the most disrespected person in america is the Black woman, the most unprotected person in america is the Black woman, the most neglected person in america is the Black woman.”

     In the early moments of 2015, we’re left to ponder 18 year old Sheneque Proctor spending her last hours disrespected, unprotected, and neglected in a jail cell. Unfortunately she may be receiving the same treatment in her afterlife.

     Proctor was allegedly found dead in a cell by Bessemer, Alabama cops on Nov. 2, and the uncertainty of the circumstances surrounding her passing are troubling. The coroner’s office said she died of a drug overdose, but their recent track record gives that account as much validity as monopoly money.

     Proctor had asthma and according to one report the cops heard her “snoring loudly” at around 3AM. No one willing (or able) to talk truly knows what happened that night, but given her status as a Black youth and the cops’ reputation many are crying willful neglect at best and foul play at worst.

     What’s almost as troubling though is the coverage, or lack thereof. Her death has received no mainstream media attention. A brief sweep of mainstream news sites returns 0 mentions. Apparently Proctor and Gamble mulling whether to put Tiger Woods in commercials is more newsworthy than a young mother dying.

     There are a few sites that are discussing her story, but in a problematic manner and they need to be hit with a reality check:

     Sheneque Proctor is NOT the “female Eric Garner”. She is Sheneque Proctor, her own woman, her own person, another possible victim of the United States’ racist, draconian police system.

     Creating that tag and using it sharpens a double edged sword that marginalizes two Black lives and contributes to intersectionality that leaves Black women at the bottom rung of a society in the gutter.

     NYCLU Motion: Garner Grand Jury Records Must Be Public

     The New York Civil Liberties Union today requested that the New York Court of Appeals review a lower court’s decision to keep secret records from the Grand Jury which failed to indict an NYPD officer in the death of Eric Garner. The lack of accountability for Eric Garner’s death dramatically shook the public’s confidence in the grand jury system and subsequently prompted conflicting policy proposals, including and up to abolishing the grand jury system altogether.

     “New Yorkers have insisted on reform since the Eric Garner Grand Jury decision, and they and their representatives need to know what if anything is broken before they attempt to fix the problem,” said NYCLU Legal Director Arthur Eisenberg. “Without understanding how or why the Grand Jury reached its decision, major policy discussions on grand jury reform with potentially lasting implications are taking place blindly. So much is at stake regarding criminal justice reform in this case that the public’s need to know what happened outweighs any current interest in maintaining the secrecy of the Garner proceedings.”

     The NYCLU is seeking release to the public of the Grand Jury’s transcript, as well as the evidence presented and the instructions the jury was given. Today’s request to the State Court of Appeals contends that the public cannot make necessary decisions on major, wide-ranging reforms that have been proposed specifically to address the Garner grand jury’s conduct, without itself knowing exactly how the grand jury proceedings were conducted.

     “No one has been held accountable for the death of Eric Garner and the community doesn’t know why,” said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman. “As New Yorkers continue to demand answers and ask if black lives matter, we hope the court will put an end to the secrecy surrounding the Garner Grand Jury records and provide transparency that is a first step in rebuilding people’s trust in the criminal justice system.”

     Noose hanging this morning from prayer tower at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, OK. @deray @Nettaaaaaaaa Everyday racism.

122. Sili says

     18 August 2015 at 3:37 pm

     Noose hanging this morning from prayer tower at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, OK. @deray @Nettaaaaaaaa Everyday racism.

     Weelll …

     It could be this ubiquitous persecution of Christians we keep hearing about.

123. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     18 August 2015 at 3:40 pm

     Over at Sincere Kirabo’s blog, a commenter asserted that if you obey the law and the police, there will be no problem. One of my responses to him was to point out John Geer was compliant with cops for 50 minutes and was still shot and killed (thankfully the officer has been charged with second-degree murder). I’m likely to go back and ask him is if he thinks police officers are justified in killing a suspect who isn’t compliant. After all, non-compliance takes many forms. This is the story I had in mind:
     2 former Georgia copes have been charged with murder for the 2014 tasering death of a handcuffed black man who refused to walk. I wonder if said commenter feels that Towns’ refusal to walk is sufficient grounds for him to be murdered.

124. rq says

     18 August 2015 at 4:19 pm

     Stephanie Zvan: Democrats Can’t Win on the White Vote.

     From the CBC:
     How #BlackLivesMatter became a worldwide rallying cry

     #BlackLivesMatter was predicated on the populist logic of Silicon Valley — that anyone with an idea can harness communications technology to start a global social movement.

     Twitter users in the Middle East have also deployed these hashtags — like #BlackLivesMatter, #ICantBreathe (a reference to the death of Eric Garner by an NYPD chokehold) and #Ferguson — to show their solidarity.

     #HandsUpDontShoot was another hashtag that galvanized the new digital civil rights movement.

     But while the movement seems to have sustained its energy, it has not capped the growing list of black citizens killed by the police in the U.S.

     Most recently, several black women in the U.S. have died while in police custody, including Sandra Bland, sparking the hashtag #BlackWomenMatter. But their cases haven’t always sparked the same outpouring of media attention.

     In Ferguson, renewed violence broke out this week during events to mark the one-year anniversary of Brown’s death. Among other things, it showed the frustration of many young African-Americans who have not seen their relationship with police improve in the last year.
     […]

     Akio Maroon is a community organizer and human rights activist with The Network for the Elimination of Police Violence in Toronto. She says the #BlackLivesMatter unified people across the border over police brutality.

     “Ending police violence is not just an American thing,” she says.

     “Toronto can be more unified in how we tackle racial profiling, carding and police-sanctioned violence,” Maroon argues, pointing to Andrew Loku and Jermain Carby as two examples of unarmed black men killed in Canada by police in the last year.

     Black Lives Matter is doing a great job at keeping the attention focused on where it needs to be, Maroon says.

     But, she says, there are many “arms and legs and tentacles” working for one cause.

     “We need to shout as loud as we can. I want to know that if I’m pulled over by the police that there is not a chance of me becoming the next hashtag.”

     Also from the CBC:
     Compton no longer the stuff of gangsta-rap lore;
     John Geer shooting: Adam Torres indicted on 2nd-degree murder charge.

     Heina Dadabhoy: “Liberal” ≠ Get-Out-of-Everything-Free-Card – yes, with a focus on Bernie Sanders!

125. rq says

     18 August 2015 at 4:23 pm

     From Dana’s post, I’d like to highlight one of the links within: Interrupting Bernie Sanders, because it’s well worth the attention.

     Black people owe white “allies” absolutely nothing. We don’t owe you for being slightly less oppressive than Republicans – not even if you actively support black communities. Basic human decency, i.e. working towards the dismantling of racism and other marginalizing structures, is not something for which any person should expect acclaim or praise. If Bernie Sanders is the terrific democratic socialist and populist he claims to be, then why does he have such a difficult time engaging black community politics with and without interruption? Only after repeated protest and interruption did he publish his platform for racial justice (please tell me again that these protests are unsuccessful). It is easy to have economic populist politics in Vermont, a state that’s approximately 95% white and 1.2% black, and a state that maintains a historical legacy for supporting the countercultural social politics of the hippies who flocked to the state in the 1960s and 70s. But if Bernie Sanders becomes president, he will be responsible for governing not just Vermont and his legion of supporters, but also for overseeing the prison industrial complex and racist mass incarceration, segregatory housing policies, and all types of racialized institutional discrimination that permeates every level of government.

     Sanders supporters have asked why black people have not interrupted Hillary Clinton or any other politician “who deserves it.” It’s probably because many black folks have long dismissed Hillary Clinton’s liberal racism and her repeated iterations of “all lives matter” and her fixation on police body cams as a technocratic quick fix for reforming the white supremacist criminal justice system. “Why haven’t black people interrupted the GOP?” they also ask, to which I can’t even begin to respond.
     [..]

     Perhaps the biggest articulation problem of white liberals, one that I fundamentally disagree with, is the division of physical violence between state and extremist violence (and of course, Bernie Sanders does this on his website). Groups like the Ku Klux Klan and individuals like Dylann Roof are not extremists: terrorists yes, but not extremists. There is a massive epistemological gap in seeing racist violence as a product of extremism when it is merely another manifestation of the ideology that has underpinned the United States since the founding of the colonies. Failing to see this generally absolves white liberals from their own complicity in the maintenance of racial structures. Rather than isolating and attributing violence to these extremist “white supremacists,” we need to discuss structural white supremacy, because it is a political system of which all white people are beneficiaries and in which all white people actively participate whether they consider themselves to be racist or not. The difference between discussing white supremacists and white supremacy may seem semantic, but it demonstrates white folks’ willingness to take personal responsibility for their own role in these racial structures.

     A full understanding of the effects of racialized discrimination is impossible unless white folks take responsibility for their participation in white supremacy as individuals. Sanders says “we must put an end to discriminatory laws” with regards to voter disenfranchisement. He also wants to “ban for-profit prisons.” Both of these platforms link racial capitalism to institutional racism to state violence to individually perpetrated white supremacy, but he fails to explicitly name this link. He supports diversifying police forces and implementing body cameras as solutions to police brutality, neither of which are adequate ways of addressing racist police violence because racial diversity does not actually displace racist ideologies, and the seemingly unending video stream of unarmed black people murdered by the police has not galvanized institutional reform. His failure to bridge the interpersonal-social to the structural-institutional is a massive problem, but this is not just a Bernie Sanders problem: this is a white liberal and progressive problem.

     Rather than berate black people for their lack of enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders, perhaps you should ask us why. Black America has existed in a state of emergency for centuries now. We are gunned down in the streets without weapons, armed only with the “threat” of our blackness. We are subjected to interpersonal aggressions, structural discrimination, and the economic violence of racial capitalism, and forced to consider whether our next interaction with the police is the last we’ll ever have.

     And from the comments on Dana’s same post, a couple of articles from Shakesville (which, I’m sorry to say, I do not follow with the fervor it deserves, but that’s an issue of time rather than anything else):
     Primarily Speaking, which focusses on Clinton, but has a few things about other candidates.
     Also, Hillary Clinton and #BlackLivesMatter: The Videos, which has both videos as well as transcripts. So no, BLM isn’t just going for Sanders. The methods differ, but they’re seeking answers from everyone who might listen and care.

126. rq says

     19 August 2015 at 1:46 am

     Exhaustive new study finds black jurors struck from juries 300% more than their white peers, Shaun King from DailyKos.

     We already know that African Americans are disproportionately arrested/convicted for similar crimes committed by their white counterparts.

     We already know that Black women are arrested up to 13x the rate as other women.

     Blacks and whites use marijuana at the same rate, but African Americans are arrested at 4x the rate.

     Even unarmed African Americans are twice as likely to be killed by police than their unarmed white counterparts.

     Now a groundbreaking new study absolutely confirms much of what we’ve believed to be true for decades about African Americans being denied a jury of their peers is districts all over the country.

     In Shreveport, Louisiana where more black men are being sent to death row than any single district in the country, DA’s and prosecutors would routinely pre-emptively strike African Americans from juries at 3x the rate of their white counterparts. For pre-emptive strikes, no rationale reason is actually needed.

     Here are some reasons prosecutors have offered for excluding blacks from juries: They were young or old, single or divorced, religious or not, failed to make eye contact, lived in a poor part of town, had served in the military, had a hyphenated last name, displayed bad posture, were sullen, disrespectful or talkative, had long hair, wore a beard.

     Similarly disturbing rates and practices were actually found throughout the American south in Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama. The impact is staggering and often means the difference between life and death for those on trial.

     But I’ve seen arguments that there’s no systemic racism, as pointed out by Tony just a couple of comments up. This seems pretty systemic to me.

     Racial graffiti written on Haley grave

     The tombstone of a relative of author Alex Haley was defaced in a cemetery in Savannah earlier this week, according to Savannah Police Chief Gary Will.

     Will said Queen Haley, a black woman and grandmother of Alex Haley, author of “Roots,” had “White Lives Matter” spray painted on her tombstone in the past two or three days.

     Revenge graffitti?

     Kinfolks: a journal of black expression – Vol. 1 / Issue 3 – there’s a new Clint Smith poem inside, plus an array of other black authors. And you read it like a book on your screen!

     Kinfolks: a journal of black expression is dedicated to thinking about blackness in its infinite permutations by publishing the work of established and emerging black artists. The journal’s ethos is centered around the notion that black creative life and the cultures of the African Diaspora provide us with models of collectivity, commonality, and kinship that have been and will be central to the story of our world.

     It’s certainly worth returning to.

     This is a repost: We Are Our Heroes: On Activism In The Age Of Celebrity Worship.

     Ever since Mike Brown was murdered, I’ve seen people ask for the Kanyes and the LeBrons to speak out. And while their voices are welcome, the movement doesn’t live and die by their involvement. That’s why they’re called “movements.” They’re moving. And not moving only means you get left behind. For every Kanye West or Jay Z we’re begging to speak up in some profound way, there’s a Killer Mike or Jesse Williams whose comments are as impassioned, necessary and important as anyone else’s. I’d much rather embrace Killer Mike or Tef Poe’s messages than a celebrity who may only be speaking because he or she feels obligated by the fans to do so.

     While we clamored for LeBron to say something or wanted NBA players to stand up for Garner over All-Star weekend in New York, we didn’t praise the St. Louis Rams nearly enough for coming out of their tunnels with #HandsUpDontShoot gestures. None of those Rams players were stars, but their actions revealed a deeply racist community of businesses in St. Louis appalled by their cries for equality. The move was powerful, important and didn’t need an all-star to pull off.

     I think there’s something to be said for the opposite, too, esp. re: allies – don’t expect all-star treatment for one action, forever.

     Lena Dunham: Sandra Bland had big plans to help women before she died

     On July 13, #BlackLivesMatter activist Sandra Bland was found dead in a police holding cell, three days after being arrested by a Texas state trooper during a routine traffic stop. Her death led to calls for an investigation and protests across the country.

     At the time of her arrest, Bland was collaborating with longtime friend and writing partner Chenai Okammor on a website — called Woman4Woman — devoted to empowering women around the world to write and share their stories.

     Okammor spoke with “Girls” creator and Lenny newsletter co-founder Lena Dunham about Bland’s life and death, and their passion for helping women express themselves.

     Interview at the link.

     Charleston schools say no to Confederate flag displays

     The decision was announced on an plain white page inserted into the district’s Student Code of Conduct for 2015-16. The page reads in part that “in light of a year marred with racially divisive and tragic events” students would be prohibited from “wearing on campus clothing, jewelry or other apparel bearing the image of the Confederate flag.” It goes on to add that the image can’t be displayed prominently on vehicles driven to school.

     Students will be asked to remove the emblem and discipline will be on a case-by-case basis, the page says. Asked for comment, a spokesman for the district replied with a statement restating the white page. It was a staff decision, said Daniel Head, the spokesman.

     It takes nine dead people for schools to realize it’s a divisive symbol. What the hell are you teaching the kids?

     Something a bit more fun, while at the same time, not: 7 Things to Remember If You’re a White Person Dating a Person of Color.

127. rq says

     19 August 2015 at 3:41 am

     Here’s a few reviews of Straight Outta Compton.
     “Dr. Dre straddled me and beat me mercilessly”: Dee Barnes rejects “revisionist history” of “Straight Outta Compton” in powerful essay , which refers to this article from Gawker: Here’s What’s Missing From Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up. TW for sexist violence.

     I never experienced police harassment until I moved to California in the ‘80s. The first time it happened, I had just left a house party that erupted in gunfire. A cop pulled me over and ordered me out of the car. I was 19, naive, and barefoot. When I made a move to get my shoes, the cop became aggressive. He manhandled me because he supposedly thought I was grabbing for a weapon. I’m lucky he didn’t shoot me. There I was, face down on the ground, knee in my back. In June, I was reminded of what happened to me when I watched video of a police officer named Eric Casebolt grabbing a 15-year-old girl outside the Craig Ranch North Community Pool in Texas, slamming her body to the ground, and putting his knee in her back.

     Three years later—in 1991—I would experience something similar, only this time I was on my back and the knee was in my chest. That knee did not belong to a police officer, but Andre Young, the producer/rapper who goes by Dr. Dre. When I saw the footage of California Highway Patrol officer Daniel Andrew straddling and viciously punching Marlene Pinnock in broad daylight on the side of a busy freeway last year, I cringed. That must have been how it looked as Dr. Dre straddled me and beat me mercilessly on the floor of the women’s restroom at the Po Na Na Souk nightclub in 1991.

     That event isn’t depicted in Straight Outta Compton, but I don’t think it should have been, either. The truth is too ugly for a general audience. I didn’t want to see a depiction of me getting beat up, just like I didn’t want to see a depiction of Dre beating up Michel’le, his one-time girlfriend who recently summed up their relationship this way: “I was just a quiet girlfriend who got beat on and told to sit down and shut up.”

     But what should have been addressed is that it occurred. When I was sitting there in the theater, and the movie’s timeline skipped by my attack without a glance, I was like, “Uhhh, what happened?” Like many of the women that knew and worked with N.W.A., I found myself a casualty of Straight Outta Compton’s revisionist history.

     Dre, who executive produced the movie along with his former groupmate Ice Cube, should have owned up to the time he punched his labelmate Tairrie B twice at a Grammys party in 1990. He should have owned up to the black eyes and scars he gave to his collaborator Michel’le. And he should have owned up to what he did to me. That’s reality. That’s reality rap. In his lyrics, Dre made hyperbolic claims about all these heinous things he did to women. But then he went out and actually violated women. Straight Outta Compton would have you believe that he didn’t really do that. It doesn’t add up. It’s like Ice Cube saying, “I’m not calling all women bitches,” which is a position he maintains even today at age 46. If you listen to the lyrics of “A Bitch Iz a Bitch,” Cube says, “Now the title bitch don’t apply to all women / But all women have a little bitch in ‘em.” So which is it? You can’t have it both ways. That’s what they’re trying to do with Straight Outta Compton: They’re trying to stay hard, and look like good guys.

     There’s more at the link.

     And Ava DuVernay’s review: Ava DuVernay writes the only ‘Straight Outta Compton’ review you need to read

     DuVernay tweeted out a glowing and very personal review of the film (she grew up in Compton in the 1980s, so the film was pretty darn personal to her). It’s incredibly moving, to say the least, and it’s necessary reading even if you haven’t seen the film. We present it to you in its entirety:

     See her review tweets. She seems quite pleased with the film, even with the erasure of women.

     Judge: N.M. police officers will stand trial for 2014 fatal shooting of a homeless man

     Two New Mexico police officers facing murder charges for the 2014 shooting death of James Boyd will stand trial, a state judge said Tuesday.

     Pro Tem Judge Neil Candelaria said there was probable cause for the case against Dominique Perez and Keith Sandy, the Associated Press reported.

     The two officers were on duty with the Albuquerque Police Department in March 2014 when they fatally shot Boyd, a homeless man who was camping in the Sandia Mountains near Albuquerque. Police ended up in a four-hour standoff with Boyd after they attempted to confront him for illegal camping.

     “When Boyd brandished a knife in each hand, police opened fire, with two officers each firing several times,” The Washington Post has previously reported.

     Special prosecutor Randi McGinnn accused the officers of approaching the campsite with the intent of confronting the homeless man with a “paramilitary response” that created a dangerous situation. Lawyers for Sandy and Perez argued that Boyd put the officers in danger, and that their response was appropriate, the Associated Press reported.

     The killing was captured on a police helmet camera. That recording, released by the Albuquerque Police Department, appears to show Boyd complying with police orders when he was shot. Officers fired several times at Boyd; he was shot once in the back.

     Prosecutors charged the two officers with an open count of murder in January.

     Sandy was placed on administrative leave following the shooting and has since retired. Perez was placed on administrative assignment.

     Something approaching justice?

     Two former Ga. police officers charged with murder for stun gun death of handcuffed man – is this a developing pattern?

     Two former police officers from East Point, Ga. have been indicted on charges of murder in the April 2014 death of Gregory Towns, a 24-year-old unarmed black man who died after a stun gun was used on him while he was in handcuffs.

     Former Cpl. Howard Weems and Sgt. Marcus Eberhart were indicted on charges of felony murder, involuntary manslaughter, aggravated assault and several charges of violation of an oath by a public officer.

     While the death was being investigated, Eberhart resigned and Weems was fired by the department, which has a policy prohibiting officers from using stun guns.

     The two officers approached Towns as he left his mother’s apartment complex after allegedly having been involved in a domestic dispute. Towns ran, but was caught by officers after he tripped over a tree branch and fell. According to his family attorney, Towns then struggled to walk, tired from having fled. The officers handcuffed him and used a stun gun to prod him and keep him moving forward, the attorney said.

     “He was handcuffed behind his back when this happened, he didn’t have a weapon, he wasn’t the fighting the officers. He was tasered because he was tired and not getting up fast enough,” said Chris Stewart, the Georgia attorney who has been working with Towns’s family. “It’s not just against the law, it’s inhumane. You don’t use a Taser like a cattle prod.”

     Attorneys for the two officers could not be immediately reached for comment.

     I suppose we’ll have to wait and see how the trials turn out.

     ‘I don’t want to die in your cell:’ Police release video of Ralkina Jones taken prior to death

     “I don’t want to die in your cell.”

     Ralkina Jones spoke those words to Cleveland Heights police officers about 15 hours before she was found dead in the bed of her jail cell.

     Jones’ family is still awaiting the results of an investigation into her July 26 death. The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office has yet to release her cause of death, but said an autopsy found no suspicious injuries.

     In about a half hour worth of body camera footage released by Cleveland Heights police, Jones is seen discussing her various health issues with police officers at the jail. She expressed concern about her health, and emphasized that she needed to stay in contact with her family and take her prescriptions.

     Jones, 37, listed at least five medical conditions for which she was being treated.

     Jones told the officers she suffered from postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), which causes lightheadedness and fainting upon standing up. She also said she was taking medication for seizures, ADHD and depression.

     Jones also told police about a brain injury she received from abuse from her ex-husband, the man who Jones was accused of assaulting the night of her arrest.

     Jones’ sister in an earlier interview also said Jones had a heart murmur.

     The officers in the video were cooperative and friendly with Jones. One of them suggested moving her to a cell where she would have access to a phone to speak with her family. But he said her current cell was better situated for jail personnel to monitor her health.

     Jones was taken to a doctor a few hours after the recorded conversation. A jail employee found her appearing “lethargic” the evening of July 25. She was evaluated and released within a few hours.

     Police say they checked on Jones periodically throughout the night.

     The next morning at 7:30 a.m., the jail administrator found Jones unresponsive in the bed of her cell. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

     So even with all of that, something didn’t quite go as well as it should have.

128. rq says

     19 August 2015 at 3:43 am

     Here’s a few reviews of Straight Outta Compton.
     “Dr. Dre straddled me and beat me mercilessly”: Dee Barnes rejects “revisionist history” of “Straight Outta Compton” in powerful essay , which refers to this article from Gawker: Here’s What’s Missing From Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up. TW for sexist violence.

     I never experienced police harassment until I moved to California in the ‘80s. The first time it happened, I had just left a house party that erupted in gunfire. A cop pulled me over and ordered me out of the car. I was 19, naive, and barefoot. When I made a move to get my shoes, the cop became aggressive. He manhandled me because he supposedly thought I was grabbing for a weapon. I’m lucky he didn’t shoot me. There I was, face down on the ground, knee in my back. In June, I was reminded of what happened to me when I watched video of a police officer named Eric Casebolt grabbing a 15-year-old girl outside the Craig Ranch North Community Pool in Texas, slamming her body to the ground, and putting his knee in her back.

     Three years later—in 1991—I would experience something similar, only this time I was on my back and the knee was in my chest. That knee did not belong to a police officer, but Andre Young, the producer/rapper who goes by Dr. Dre. When I saw the footage of California Highway Patrol officer Daniel Andrew straddling and viciously punching Marlene Pinnock in broad daylight on the side of a busy freeway last year, I cringed. That must have been how it looked as Dr. Dre straddled me and beat me mercilessly on the floor of the women’s restroom at the Po Na Na Souk nightclub in 1991.

     That event isn’t depicted in Straight Outta Compton, but I don’t think it should have been, either. The truth is too ugly for a general audience. I didn’t want to see a depiction of me getting beat up, just like I didn’t want to see a depiction of Dre beating up Michel’le, his one-time girlfriend who recently summed up their relationship this way: “I was just a quiet girlfriend who got beat on and told to sit down and shut up.”

     But what should have been addressed is that it occurred. When I was sitting there in the theater, and the movie’s timeline skipped by my attack without a glance, I was like, “Uhhh, what happened?” Like many of the women that knew and worked with N.W.A., I found myself a casualty of Straight Outta Compton’s revisionist history.

     Dre, who executive produced the movie along with his former groupmate Ice Cube, should have owned up to the time he punched his labelmate Tairrie B twice at a Grammys party in 1990. He should have owned up to the black eyes and scars he gave to his collaborator Michel’le. And he should have owned up to what he did to me. That’s reality. That’s reality rap. In his lyrics, Dre made hyperbolic claims about all these heinous things he did to women. But then he went out and actually violated women. Straight Outta Compton would have you believe that he didn’t really do that. It doesn’t add up. It’s like Ice Cube saying, “I’m not calling all women b*tches,” which is a position he maintains even today at age 46. If you listen to the lyrics of “A B*tch Iz a B*tch,” Cube says, “Now the title b*tch don’t apply to all women / But all women have a little b*tch in ‘em.” So which is it? You can’t have it both ways. That’s what they’re trying to do with Straight Outta Compton: They’re trying to stay hard, and look like good guys.

     There’s more at the link.

     And Ava DuVernay’s review: Ava DuVernay writes the only ‘Straight Outta Compton’ review you need to read

     DuVernay tweeted out a glowing and very personal review of the film (she grew up in Compton in the 1980s, so the film was pretty darn personal to her). It’s incredibly moving, to say the least, and it’s necessary reading even if you haven’t seen the film. We present it to you in its entirety:

     See her review tweets. She seems quite pleased with the film, even with the erasure of women.

     Judge: N.M. police officers will stand trial for 2014 fatal shooting of a homeless man

     Two New Mexico police officers facing murder charges for the 2014 shooting death of James Boyd will stand trial, a state judge said Tuesday.

     Pro Tem Judge Neil Candelaria said there was probable cause for the case against Dominique Perez and Keith Sandy, the Associated Press reported.

     The two officers were on duty with the Albuquerque Police Department in March 2014 when they fatally shot Boyd, a homeless man who was camping in the Sandia Mountains near Albuquerque. Police ended up in a four-hour standoff with Boyd after they attempted to confront him for illegal camping.

     “When Boyd brandished a knife in each hand, police opened fire, with two officers each firing several times,” The Washington Post has previously reported.

     Special prosecutor Randi McGinnn accused the officers of approaching the campsite with the intent of confronting the homeless man with a “paramilitary response” that created a dangerous situation. Lawyers for Sandy and Perez argued that Boyd put the officers in danger, and that their response was appropriate, the Associated Press reported.

     The killing was captured on a police helmet camera. That recording, released by the Albuquerque Police Department, appears to show Boyd complying with police orders when he was shot. Officers fired several times at Boyd; he was shot once in the back.

     Prosecutors charged the two officers with an open count of murder in January.

     Sandy was placed on administrative leave following the shooting and has since retired. Perez was placed on administrative assignment.

     Something approaching justice?

     Two former Ga. police officers charged with murder for stun gun death of handcuffed man – is this a developing pattern?

     Two former police officers from East Point, Ga. have been indicted on charges of murder in the April 2014 death of Gregory Towns, a 24-year-old unarmed black man who died after a stun gun was used on him while he was in handcuffs.

     Former Cpl. Howard Weems and Sgt. Marcus Eberhart were indicted on charges of felony murder, involuntary manslaughter, aggravated assault and several charges of violation of an oath by a public officer.

     While the death was being investigated, Eberhart resigned and Weems was fired by the department, which has a policy prohibiting officers from using stun guns.

     The two officers approached Towns as he left his mother’s apartment complex after allegedly having been involved in a domestic dispute. Towns ran, but was caught by officers after he tripped over a tree branch and fell. According to his family attorney, Towns then struggled to walk, tired from having fled. The officers handcuffed him and used a stun gun to prod him and keep him moving forward, the attorney said.

     “He was handcuffed behind his back when this happened, he didn’t have a weapon, he wasn’t the fighting the officers. He was tasered because he was tired and not getting up fast enough,” said Chris Stewart, the Georgia attorney who has been working with Towns’s family. “It’s not just against the law, it’s inhumane. You don’t use a Taser like a cattle prod.”

     Attorneys for the two officers could not be immediately reached for comment.

     I suppose we’ll have to wait and see how the trials turn out.

     ‘I don’t want to die in your cell:’ Police release video of Ralkina Jones taken prior to death

     “I don’t want to die in your cell.”

     Ralkina Jones spoke those words to Cleveland Heights police officers about 15 hours before she was found dead in the bed of her jail cell.

     Jones’ family is still awaiting the results of an investigation into her July 26 death. The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office has yet to release her cause of death, but said an autopsy found no suspicious injuries.

     In about a half hour worth of body camera footage released by Cleveland Heights police, Jones is seen discussing her various health issues with police officers at the jail. She expressed concern about her health, and emphasized that she needed to stay in contact with her family and take her prescriptions.

     Jones, 37, listed at least five medical conditions for which she was being treated.

     Jones told the officers she suffered from postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), which causes lightheadedness and fainting upon standing up. She also said she was taking medication for seizures, ADHD and depression.

     Jones also told police about a brain injury she received from abuse from her ex-husband, the man who Jones was accused of assaulting the night of her arrest.

     Jones’ sister in an earlier interview also said Jones had a heart murmur.

     The officers in the video were cooperative and friendly with Jones. One of them suggested moving her to a cell where she would have access to a phone to speak with her family. But he said her current cell was better situated for jail personnel to monitor her health.

     Jones was taken to a doctor a few hours after the recorded conversation. A jail employee found her appearing “lethargic” the evening of July 25. She was evaluated and released within a few hours.

     Police say they checked on Jones periodically throughout the night.

     The next morning at 7:30 a.m., the jail administrator found Jones unresponsive in the bed of her cell. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

     So even with all of that, something didn’t quite go as well as it should have.

129. Social Justice Wizard of Oz, Gold Bricker of Yellow Roads says

     19 August 2015 at 5:19 am

130. rq says

     19 August 2015 at 3:05 pm

     Cost of Police-Misconduct Cases Soars in Big U.S. Cities. Yep, having badly behaved police ain’t cheap! Can’t get to the full article, but there seem to be a lot of large numbers in it.

     Podcast: We Still Rely On Volunteers To Tally The Victims Of Police Violence

     “How prevalent are police killings in America? Where are the places where there are hot spots of police violence? And where are the places that may be models for police being able to do their job without killing people? We couldn’t answer those questions without using the data, and so we had to collect it and analyze it ourselves. Now that we have the data it’s possible to hold police chiefs and policymakers accountable to actually reducing and ultimately eliminating the number of police killings.” — Samuel Sinyangwe

     APD officers will stand trial for murder in shooting of James Boyd, as seen previous via different channels.

     I think it’s important to have a reasoned response to unethical practice in order to avoid falling into the trap of being accused of being an angry (brown) girl on Twitter.

     I pitched a story to The Guardian* back in June 2014. It was about Muslim drag queens and it came after building a relationship with one of the queens. She felt open talking to me and granted me access to her world. I began to build relationships with others, who were mainly South Asian (like me) and we had some shared experiences, (not least the language, which many conversations took place in, but also where we lived in London, etc). It was commissioned.

     The director was bought onto the project as a replacement after the original director could no longer do it. The new director was bought on four months after the commission, by which time I had already, obviously, done a substantial amount of work on it. Helped by my storytelling, access, time in the edit, scripting and voiceover, we made a great film together. The film, for which I supplied research, contacts and – as the only Asian member of the production team – cultural insight and some measure of reassurance to the participants that their stories would be told in a sensitive and appropriate manner, was completed and published on the Guardian website in January 2015.

     It was a success (half a million views first week etc) and it no doubt brought a lot of praise for the commissioning editors.

     After the film was made, it transpired that Channel 4 would be making an hour-long doc with Swan Films and the director.

     (The Guardian and Channel 4 offered different accounts of who approached who for their TV documentary – but as all my communications with C4 were via confidential emails, I can’t divulge which way round it was).

     One of the Guardian commissioners had a previous professional relationship with the production company, and said director. The hour-long doc was commissioned. I was not part of any of these conversations. I was only made aware that this was happening a few weeks later by one of the queens got in touch to ask why I wasn’t involved. I emailed the relevant parties at The Guardian, Swan Films and C4 to let them know what had happened and aired my ethical grievances. I made the point of how crucial it is that minorities should be able to tell their own stories, and that I had been cut out. The emails, and responses are at the bottom of this post.

     A admittance that I should have been part of the conversations with Channel 4 was made, but it became clear that the Guardian’s view was that, as I had signed a commission form, I was bound by the terms of the Freelance Charter; and that under the Charter the Guardian has the right to take my story and sell it to a third party without involving me, asking my permission, or paying me. This stands up, and there is no legal case to be made against The Guardian multimedia. The only grievance I had was an ethical one, which has been flatly ignored. The doc is now led by a team of white men, has a white director, and is narrated by a high-profile (white) male actor. It is as if I never existed. It feels very much like a deliberate and concerted effort to take the research, contacts and ideas from a person of colour and to carve them out of a major subsequent development contract, simply because that person is young, relatively inexperienced in TV, and therefore exploitable.

     To reiterate, this story wouldn’t have existed without me. The director was bought on after I had pitched the treatment, 
with access I had already secured to the contributors, and the Guardian
 film relied heavily on my extensive research. The fact the story was told the way it was, and the director was able to get
 to access these people and spaces, was solely thanks to my understanding 
of the culture, as a minority very close to it.



     There’s more at the link, but if you ever wonder why writers of colour just don’t try harder to become visible? Maybe it’s not the writers.

     Tombstone Of ‘Roots’ Author’s Grandmother Vandalized: ‘White Lives Matter’, as seen previous.

131. rq says

     20 August 2015 at 1:43 am

     New book about Danziger Bridge carnage is powerful even for those who know the story: Jarvis DeBerry.

     On Sunday morning Sept. 4, 2005, two New Orleans teenagers competed in a foot race to Danziger Bridge. The week after Hurricane Katrina is not remembered for frivolity. But according to Jose Holmes Jr., “We were in a happy mood, making the best of out things, laughing and joking.” And so it was that Jose, 19, challenged his friend James Brissette Jr., 17, to race him.

     JJ, as Brissette was called, got dusted. He stopped halfway to the bridge to catch his breath. Jose was sure that cigarettes were the blame for his skinny friend’s slow speed and pathetic endurance. As the winner, Jose had plenty time for JJ and for his auntie and her family to catch up. He sat on a railing on Danziger Bridge. He bent to tie his shoe.

     Ronald and Lance Madison, a 40-year-old mentally challenged man and his protective older brother, walked past him. Jose’s group was headed to Winn Dixie to search for Glucerna, a nutrition shake for his auntie’s diabetic mother. The Madisons were headed to their brother’s dental practice.

     The New Orleans police arrive.

     Officers sprang from a Budget rental truck with two AK-47s, an M4 assault rifle, a .40 caliber Glock 22 semiautomatic pistol and a Mossberg shotgun.

     They killed JJ. They shot Jose. They shot Jose’s aunt, Susan Bartholomew. They shot her husband, “Big” Leonard Bartholomew III. They shot Jose’s cousin, Lesha Bartholomew, and they shot at (but missed) his cousin, “Little” Leonard Bartholomew IV. One officer chased down a bloody Ronald Madison on the other side of the bridge and killed him, too.

     After all that unprovoked bloodshed, the police arrested Jose and Lance Madison and accused them of trying to kill eight police officers.

     With what?!

     Well, that was new… and horrible. And read on, apparently the police might still get a chance to have their story become the official one.

     Two former East Point officers charged in death of handcuffed man, as seen previous.

     Three More Transgender Women Of Color Killed. Let’s hear it for all black lives matter.

     As LGBT activists continue to rail against what they say is a nationwide “crisis of violence” against transgender individuals, the bodies of three more murdered transgender women have been discovered this past week.

     The deaths of Tamara Dominguez, who was killed Saturday; Kandis Capri, who was killed in an attack Aug. 11; and Elisha Walker, who had not been seen since October 2014, but whose body was discovered Thursday, bring the nationwide toll of transgender homicide victims found in 2015 to 17. Fifteen of those victims were transgender individuals of color.

     In a statement to BuzzFeed News, Chai Jindasurat, co-director of community organizing and public advocacy at the New York City Anti-Violence Project, said the three killings were “terrible tragedies.”

     “This crisis of violence is killing transgender people, particularly transgender
     women of color, at alarming rates in 2015,” Jindasurat said.

     More on each victim at the link, but I was heartbroken by this:

     Gaines said her child’s transgender identity makes her wonder if Capri was killed as part of a hate crime.

     “He identified as transgender,” Gaines told the newspaper. “Initially I was against it, but eventually I determined that was my child and I still loved him and I accepted him as he was.”

     If she couldn’t use the right pronoun, did she really accept her child’s identity?

     DNA Shows Warren Harding Wasn’t America’s First Black President. Didn’t know this was in dispute, but congrats, Obama, you’re still the first!

     Ep 48: The Year of Ferguson, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and More!

     Join us with this week’s show as we discuss the year since Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson and how things have changed for our community. We also discuss Bernie Sanders and #BlackLivesMatter, Donald Trump, gun registration efforts, and football’s return.

     Audio at the link.

132. rq says

     20 August 2015 at 1:52 am

     The Short, Hard Life Of Freddie Gray

     Baltimore burned after Gray’s death because his demise was emblematic. He was one of many unarmed black men and women to die at the hands of police — not just in Baltimore, but across the United States. In more than one way, however, Gray’s life was even more representative than his death.

     According to the U.S. census, the poverty rate in Sandtown-Winchester, the West Baltimore neighborhood where Gray grew up and where most of his arrests took place, is roughly double the national average. At 51.6%, according to the Justice Policy Institute, its unemployment rate is twice that of Greece’s, a country widely acknowledged to be a paradigm of economic collapse. The Baltimore Health Department puts the neighborhood’s life expectancy at roughly 69 years — about the same as North Korea’s. And according to the Justice Policy Institute, residents of Sandtown-Winchester are incarcerated at rate 13 times higher than the national average.

     Beginning with a childhood marked by crippling poverty and a poisonous environment, Gray faced difficulties familiar to many black residents of America’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. The story of those difficulties is preserved in the archives of the Baltimore court system. It is a story that, according to several defense attorneys, two former police officers, and one former prosecutor, could belong to any number of young black men from West Baltimore.

     (Unless otherwise stated, all the facts in this article come from the court records for 16 criminal cases and one civil lawsuit. Gray was a defendant in 23 cases throughout his adult life, but several of those files were consolidated. His juvenile record is sealed. Billy Murphy, the attorney for Gray’s surviving family members, declined to make his clients available for an interview and did not comment on an extensive summary of this story. BuzzFeed News reached out for comment to every person mentioned in this story.)

     Court records show that Gray was arrested over and over again, for everything from possessing drugs to playing dice in a public housing development where he didn’t live. Over and over again, records show his family and friends accrued debts with bail agents to keep him out of jail. Over and over again, overworked prosecutors dropped all charges. On the few occasions when he was actually convicted, he was given relatively light sentences — mostly a reflection of the exhausted pragmatism of Baltimore’s overcrowded courts.

     “What you saw in Gray’s cases is systemic,” Marc Schindler, the executive director of the nonprofit Justice Policy Institute, told BuzzFeed News. “This is the front line of the failed drug war of the United States. This is the day-to-day — people getting chewed up and spit out by a failed public policy.”

     By the time of his final arrest, Gray had learned that a rational response to an arriving police car was to run away.

     There’s much more at the link.

     Martin Luther King’s hate mail eerily resembles criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement. Plus ca change…

     ‘Muslim-Free’ Gun Store Now Selling George Zimmerman’s Confederate Flag Paintings – seen around and elsewhere. As the subtitle says, it’s totally not about race, AMIRITE???

     ‘Muslim-free’ gun shop teams with George Zimmerman to sell Confederate flag prints, that’s just the Washington Post version.

     ACLU blasts St. Louis County for belatedly charging Ferguson demonstrators. They’re going after last year’s arrests.

     The American Civil Liberties Union and two other groups have blasted St. Louis County for belatedly filing criminal cases against demonstrators arrested during the 2014 unrest in Ferguson.

     “We condemn this action as a blatant violation of constitutional rights and an appalling misuse of our already overburdened court system,” the ACLU said in a statement released jointly with the St. Louis University Law Litigation Clinic and the lawyers group ArchCity Defenders late Tuesday afternoon.

     The ACLU estimates hundreds of charges could now be filed against those arrested during the protests that followed the Aug. 9, 2014, shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson.

     Those charged will be cited for violating county ordinances.

     Journalists included in those counts, too.

     Important read: Secret aid worker: there is still racism within humanitarian work

     I started my career as a humanitarian worker in Sudan. A year out of university, after a brief interlude teaching English, I volunteered for an aid agency. Despite being no more committed or able than my Sudanese colleagues, I found myself rising rapidly through the ranks. After a few months, I was put in charge of a team of sanitation engineers, and within a year I was logistics manager leapfrogging a dozen national staff and in charge of a £1m budget.

     The rationale for my promotion was that, as a non-national, I would be immune from participating in corruption that national staff may be vulnerable to; an unfortunate assumption of assuming the worst of national staff. So, having originally set off with ideals about creating global equality, I found myself in a scene often depicted in sepia colonial photos – white people in management seated at the front and Africans around the edges in junior roles.

     Personally, the impact was more subtle. I would find myself becoming testy with people twice my age or complaining about the tardiness of a cleaner. I was dimly aware of a gulf opening up between how I said I wanted the world to be and the conditions I heartily accepted. I had become a typically entitled white person.

     This uncomfortable taboo is rarely discussed among socially progressive NGO workers. As aid workers, we assure ourselves that we are “here to help” the people in our host countries. We call it a “post” or an “assignment”, as if we’re on a special secret mission, and forget that we’re guests. By seeing ourselves as the helpers, we often forget that the work we’re doing is more nuanced and complicated than an easy moral black-and-white.

     As a liberal progressive humanitarian worker, I entered the profession wanting to make the world less unfair, but found myself asking: can you be the beneficiary of a profoundly unequal society and it not affect you? What can one do about this? Those I know who have never let it affect them and have truly become part of the societies they work in have been missionaries and priests.

     And remember, these white-superior attitudes also infest local organizations. Sometimes it’s not inadvertent but an unwillingness to relinquish power to those who might wield it differently, those who are not like you.

133. rq says

     20 August 2015 at 2:17 am

     Virginia cop’s arrest reveals larger cracks in ‘blue wall of silence’

     The movement in the Torres case follows a series of more recent cases from Portsmouth, Va., to Los Angeles in which police leaders, realizing that lack of public trust in police ultimately puts officers at risk, have favored transparency over political expediency or concerns about officer morale. Gallup recently found that public trust of police is at a 22-year-low.

     “Many police chiefs are now reacting [by offering transparency] when it comes to procedures after a police shooting,” says Laurie Robinson, a law professor at George Mason University in Fairfax and co-chair of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. “Part of it is self-protection, but it’s also from a professional standpoint, to ensure that the community finds any investigation a credible one.”

     Among the recent high-profile cases:

     – In Los Angeles in May, civil rights activists commended Police Chief Charlie Beck after he publicly said he was “concerned” about the fatal police shooting of an unarmed homeless man that month.
     – In Portsmouth, Va., the police chief this spring quickly brought in an outside agency to investigate two officer-involved shootings, citing new national guidelines on police accountability and transparency.
     – After a university police officer in Cincinnati was accused of killing an unarmed motorist last month, a grand jury was quickly convened. In those proceedings, two other responding officers contradicted their colleague’s contention that he fired because he feared for his life. The now-fired officer, Ray Tensing, faces a murder charge in the death of Samuel DuBose.
     – This month in Arlington, Texas, police moved quickly to fire an officer-in-training named Brad Miller for breaking safety protocol. He is accused of killing Christian Taylor, an unarmed teen who was ransacking a car dealership.
     – On Tuesday, a judge in Albuquerque, N.M., found enough probable cause in the 2014 shooting death of a homeless camper to schedule a murder trial for Officer Dominique Perez and now-retired Officer Keith Sandy. Albuquerque police have killed 40 people in the past five years, and the US Department of Justice found last year that callous disregard for life had become part of a “pattern or practice” in the department. The shooting in question helped lead to an overhaul of Albuquerque’s use of force policy.

     In Fairfax, it took a judge to force the disclosure of information. In April, Fairfax County agreed to pay Geer’s family nearly $3 million to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit. On July 31, Torres was fired.

     His arrest this week marks the first time in the 75-year history of the Fairfax County Police Department that an officer has faced criminal prosecution in connection with an on-duty shooting.

     Undercover Police Have Regularly Spied On Black Lives Matter Activists in New York. Show of hands, who’s surprised?

     Documents obtained by The Intercept confirm that undercover police officers attended numerous Black Lives Matter protests in New York City between December 2014 and February 2015. The documents also show that police in New York have monitored activists, tracking their movements and keeping individual photos of them on file.

     The nearly 300 documents, released by the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the Metro-North Railroad, reveal more on-the-ground surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists than previous reports have shown, conducted by a coalition of MTA counterterrorism agents and undercover police in conjunction with NYPD intelligence officers.

     This appears to be the first documented proof of the frequent presence of undercover police at Black Lives Matter protests in the city of New York, though many activists have suspected their presence since mass protests erupted there last year over a grand jury’s decision not to indict Daniel Pantaleo, a police officer involved in the death of Eric Garner.

     The protest surveillance and use of undercover officers raises questions over whether New York-area law enforcement agencies are potentially criminalizing the exercise of free speech and treating activists like terrorist threats. Critics say the police files seem to document a response vastly disproportionate to the level of law breaking associated with the protests.

     The documents were released to activists after several requests under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, which asked for records from the MTA, MTA Metro-North, the New York State Police, and the NYPD pertaining to Black Lives Matter protests at Grand Central Terminal between November 2014 and January 2015.

     In the 118 pages released by the MTA, the names of undercover police officers are redacted at least 58 times in five December 2014 protests, 124 times at five protests in January 2015, and 10 times at one protest in February 2015. The Intercept has been unable to contact any of the undercover police reporting on protests because the MTA said it redacted the “names of undercover police officers,” citing the New York Public Officers Law stipulating that certain records, which “if disclosed could endanger the life or safety of any person,” may be withheld. Metro-North also redacted the names of undercover officers. Both entities also said they redacted location and contact information for regular MTA police named in the documents.

     Together the 118 MTA and 161 Metro-North documents also showed monitoring of an additional protest in November 2014, 11 protests in December 2014, nine protests in January 2015, and two protests in February 2015 by MTA officials and undercover police working at times in conjunction with NYPD officers.

     As a good person recently commented on FB, are they keeping as close tabs on the KKK and flag rallies and sovereign citizen groups?

     The Rebellious, Back-Flipping Black Figure Skater Who Changed the Sport Forever, because sports and fun!

     In the 1980s and ’90s, competitive figure skating enthralled me. The sport’s balletic arm movements and glittery-glam unitards, along with its powerful leaps and dizzying triple axels, guaranteed that I’d be seated in front of a TV during every Winter Olympics of my childhood. But not even in my most far-fetched girlhood fantasies did I ever imagine myself on the ice. Early awareness of my athletic limitations aside, figure skating just never seemed like a sport that was welcoming to black women and girls. If it were, I reasoned, more of us would’ve taken it up. Instead, I only recall seeing three black women figure skating on an Olympic level in my two decades of fandom: Tai Babilonia (who is of black and Filipino heritage), Debi Thomas, and the French Surya Bonaly—and none of them seemed to have an easy go of it. Babilonia battled substance abuse, after withdrawing from the 1980 Olympics due to her partner’s injury. Thomas was saddled with a late-career reputation for being “unsportsmanlike,” following the 1988 Olympics. And Bonaly—the brownest, strongest, and most convention-flouting of the three—was penalized for her daring.
     […]

     In the first half of the 20th century, figure skating needed to do more than “work on its diversity.” It needed to eliminate the blatant, de rigueur discrimination that barred black athletes in most U.S. sporting fields from participating.

     Mabel Fairbanks—who, in 1997 became the first African American woman inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame at the age of 82—was never allowed to skate competitively. Though she’s credited with breaking the sport’s color barrier, having toured with an overseas company and started her own integrated skating school upon return to the states, Fairbanks had to circumvent the segregation that barred her entry to practice rinks and to all U.S. competitions. She developed her own professional ice shows and performed for mostly black audiences in Manhattan before becoming a coach who worked with some of the earliest black competitive figure skaters, including Babilonia and Thomas.

     Even after black figure skaters were allowed to compete, other obstacles prevented an influx of aspiring black athletes. The hardest impediment to overcome was expense. In an interview with The Root, Bonaly mentioned the costs associated with training for competitive skating: “It’s starting to be a little better, but back in the day, skating was so expensive. I mean, it’s still an expensive sport. […] I was lucky because my mom was a skating coach, so it was easier for me, but that’s not the case for everybody.”
     […]

     In addition to pegging herself as a rebel during that practice session, judges seemed prejudiced against Bonaly. In his Rebel On Ice interview, Frank Carroll, a former U.S. Olympic coach, said, “Even though she was wonderful [and] spectacular and she did great performances, she didn’t look like the ‘ice princess.’” (Until recently, “ice princesses”—skaters who emphasize graceful artistry over raw athleticism—were preferred among judges. A recent ESPN article asserts that this may be changing.)

     Retta, who recalls watching Bonaly’s performances on TV as a child, also thought Bonaly’s appearance made her conspicuous on the ice. “She was shorter. She had a ‘black girl’s body,’ [which meant] thicker legs. She was never going to look like the other skaters.”

     In the documentary, Bonaly is candid about race. “I don’t know if race made it more difficult, but definitely it made me stronger, knowing that I [had] no excuse [for] making mistakes or being kind of so-so, because maybe I [wouldn’t] be accepted as a white person [would’ve been]. But if [I was] better, they had no choice but to accept it and say, ‘She did so well.’” Bonaly’s comments call to mind the “twice as good” narrative, in which black people aspiring to white-dominated fields have to continually exceed expectations to be as successful as their white peers.

     There’s more at the link.

     16 Trans Women Have Been Murdered This Year. Here’s One Theory Why Cops Haven’t Caught the Killers. The numbers aren’t the same from source to source, either.

     The media and the police were both quick to report the July 23rd killing. But they disagreed over one detail: whether Haggard was a man or a woman. Some news outlets described the incident as the 11th homicide of a transgender woman this year—and the second such homicide within the span of a week, after a transgender woman was found murdered in Tampa Bay, Florida, on July 21. In Fresno, members of the community gathered at the scene of the crime to honor Haggard, with placards that read, “trans rights” and “we are everywhere.”

     But when the local police put out a statement to the press, it referred to Kenton Haggard, also known as K.C. or Casey, as a man. “Officers located a 66-year-old male suffering from a wound to the neck,” Lt. Joe Gomez, a spokesman from the Fresno Police Department, told me, adding that Haggard had been identified as a man by the coroners.

     Three weeks later, the department has yet to arrest a suspect. Of course, it’s not uncommon for homicide investigations to take time or fizzle out, but Haggard’s homicide might be even harder than usual to solve, in part due to the discrepancy over pronouns. The gender and name used by the police to describe a victim can affect the success of an investigation, says Chai Jindasurat, a program coordinator for the Anti-Violence Project, a New York-based advocacy group that has tracked homicides of transgender women for decades.

     When investigators refer to a transgender woman victim as a man, Jindasurat says, it can confuse witnesses, who, in turn, may offer fewer tips for the investigation. “If [community members] see a report that doesn’t reflect the person they knew, in terms of gender and name, they may not associate the report with the actual person they knew,” Jindasurat says. Officer Albie Esparza, a spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department, agrees. If a transgender woman is killed, he says, “the witnesses would remember seeing a female, not a male.” If cops refer to her as a man, Esparza says, “it would contradict the investigation.”

     And yet, activists say police officers frequently “misgender” and “misname” victims. After a 20-year-old transgender woman was fatally shot in Detroit on August 8, law enforcement told media that a male had been killed, and the county medical examiner’s office released her male birth name. When India Clarke’s body was found near a basketball court in Tampa Bay last month, initial calls to 911 identified her as a woman, but a detective said investigators would not categorize her as transgender, and a local news report described her as a “man dressed as a woman.” On August 10, the Dallas police identified as male a 22-year-old transgender woman whose body was found badly decomposed in a field last month; in a separate statement, they noted that the victim had been wearing a blue-and-white tube top with straps, a black wig, and sunglasses, along with fake pink-tipped nails.

     The confusion over pronouns makes it difficult to know how many transgender women are murdered each year, and how many of these murders were hate crimes. “We know transgender people, particularly transgender women of color, experience disproportionate violence, deadly violence, and it can’t just be random occurrences—it’s often associated with their identity,” Jindasurat says. “When law enforcement refuse to recognize someone for who they were, it leaves out a huge piece of the story.” Some activists say at least five transgender women have been killed or found dead since the attack on Haggard in Fresno, including 35-year-old Kandis Capri, who was fatally shot in Phoenix on August 11, and 20-year-old Elisha Walker, whose body was discovered two days later in a crude grave in Johnston County, North Carolina.

     So there you go, police microaggressions that aren’t even micro, against transgender people. Do better.

     Virginia ex-cop charged with murder for killing compliant man standing in doorway of his home, Raw Story on the John Geer shooting.

     ‘Everybody’ Arrested In Ferguson Last August Is Being Charged, Lawyers Say. Don’t say why, though.

134. rq says

     20 August 2015 at 2:24 am

     Velda City recalls all warrants. Small steps forward?

     19 Science-Fiction And Fantasy Novels By Women Of Color You Must Read, because no matter how much we talk about them, they never seem to get enough exposure.

     The Bernie Sanders Kerfuffle, #blacklivesmatter, and White Progressive Colorblindess. At least we’re talking about Bernie, eh?

     The Pacific Northwest is so overwhelmingly white that some jokingly refer to it as the Great White North. In a region where white people are so overwhelmingly the majority, racism becomes all the more difficult for the white majority to see. Even when it becomes visible, it’s all to easy to ignore.

     In my years in the Northwest, I found that pointing out racism can result in retaliation, even from left-leaning whites. I was sometimes labeled a provocateur, or, worse, accused of creating fictions in order to use innocent people I was falsely accusing of racism as whipping boys on whom to vent my anger over something else.

     I say this to make a point: I know something about white progressives. I may even be something of an expert on the subject, though I can’t claim objectivity because, over the years, many of them have become close friends. More than anything, what I’ve learned is that we’re all just human after all.

     It was these years of experience that made the much discussed disruption of a mostly white rally in Seattle featuring Bernie Sanders by #blacklivesmatter activists last Saturday of such interest to me. The disruption catalyzed an exaggerated version of the same racial dynamics that loomed large in nearly every struggle I have been involved in in the Northwest. And, as usual, to no good end.

     Moreover, the discussion following that incident feels like it’s turned into a referendum on a whole movement, bordering even on a contest over the primacy of race or class in progressive politics; a contest that has been waged since, well, forever in terms relevant to this moment. All that incited by two Black women, just two, saying something that we should be listening to if we really do believe that Black lives matter, no matter how or to whom they said it, and maybe especially for just those reasons.

     We should be listening if we are concerned about the crisis of racism in America because acting on that concern must begin with consideration of our own racism. And isn’t that the demand that angered folks the most?

     If we don’t begin there, we are misunderstanding how deeply rooted and ubiquitous racism is in America. We are a profoundly racist state, founded upon native genocide and race slavery, divided by a civil war fought over the simple proposition that Black people are human beings, and today, still, a country deeply divided over issues that disproportionately affect people of color – issues like immigration, mass incarceration, drug criminalization, Islamophobia, the so-called war on terror, welfare, food stamps, educational equity, Obamacare (on which the deepest divisions are in the blackest states of the South). And the list goes on.

     In such a state, do we really suppose that racism is only a problem of other people?

     More at the link.

     St. Louis Cops Kill Another Teen, Massive Protests Sweep The Streets, with pictures of the streets last night (tear gas and armed cops). The anniversary of Kajieme Powell’s death.

     NYPD and NYC Transit Used Undercover Officers to Monitor Black Lives Matter Protesters: Report, The Root on protestor surveillance.

     Yes, It Is Time Teachers Start Actively Challenging Racism in the Classroom, and no, it’s not just the job of teachers of colour, but white teachers, too. Especially white teachers.

     In the shadow of the recent church killings of nine blacks at the hands of a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina, Education Week invited me—along with the Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, a UCLA professor, and two other distinguished educators—to write an op-ed answering this question: Are there steps the K-12 community can take to change the current narrative around race?

     My thesis was simple: The first step teachers can take to rid America of racial injustice is to self-assess to what extent, if any, they believe the racial lie. For example, if you would teach black children, but no-way-in-hell live next door to them, you probably believe the lie.

     You see, I have this radical view that teachers are just as human as anybody else, and that we sometimes give ourselves a pass because, after all, we’re overworking, self-sacrificing teachers. I founded the nonprofit Teachers Who Pray because I’ve discovered that even the most well-meaning educators sometimes fall subject to universal human failings, including racial prejudice. Teachers need healing too!

     Little did I know that my op-ed would set off a firestorm of controversy. While the majority of the feedback I got was supportive, a few educators wrote comments like this:

     … the leading cause of the huge disparity in social statistics for Blacks: a ballooning out-of-wedlock rate resulting from irresponsible/promiscuous sexual behavior.

     Recalling ‘white flight’ of 20 (more like 30), years ago really has no relevance today. The only thing that this type of rhetoric does is to reinforce the negative and mistaken opinions that some Blacks have about society today.

     If you are going to throw that kind of visceral indictment [that some teachers have low expectations for black students], you better have some empirical evidence, and [Marilyn] doesn’t have any…

     Forgive me, but for the purposes of a short opinion piece, my life as a black student and now teacher in a poor, racially isolated inner-city community was the “evidence.”

     I’m sure the Good Doctor is a great, charismatic guy, but he left me speechless when he informed me of my “victim mentality.”

     “Ms. Rhames, what the mind believes, the mind achieves,” he wrote. “I am waiting for one of my black colleagues to write an article pointing out how they do not see a need for racial definitions…”

     His words are the perfect illustration of white privilege—race doesn’t matter; race is neutral and has no historical context.

     Good Doctor, racial injustice is not merely a figment of black people’s collective imagination. It was the chains of our enslaved ancestors, and the handcuffs that disproportionately incarcerate African-American men today. It caused the whites to flee when blacks moved into the neighborhood, and it has no interest investing in the ghetto. It caused the bloodiest war in American history, and it keeps scores of Americans clinging to their beloved Confederate flags.

     My sincerest apologies if my op-ed assigned blame to my white colleagues. Guilt will never lead to racial unity, and shaming was not my intention. In fact I wrote, “Sadly, some [blacks] have internalized the lie and have surrendered any will to defy it.” I challenged ALL educators—black, white, and in between—to look within themselves to squash the racial lie before for expecting others to do it.

     More at the link.

135. rq says

     20 August 2015 at 8:34 am

     Here’s three different fundraising links to the same Ferguson organization, Millenial Activists United. Currently raising money for their legal defense fund. They’ve been out on the streets protesting and working for awareness since last year.
     any and all funds donated to our fundrazr account is strictly for legal defense.
     http://fnd.us/c/d120f1/sh/754Mq8 …

     or you can donate via Paypal for organizational support or legal defense. Paypal: [email protected]

     Crowdrise: https://www.crowdrise.com/millennialactivistsunitedlegalassistancefund/fundraiser/mausupport …

     Maybe someone out there can help them out a bit.

136. rq says

     20 August 2015 at 8:44 am

     St. Louis police fatally shoot teen while trying to issue search warrant, hopefully more and clearer information coming up about this, as police version is currently being doubted by protestors who were nearby when it happened.

     The killing of an 18-year-old black man by St. Louis police in the city’s Fountain Park neighborhood ignited protests once again Wednesday, with an angry crowd disputing police accounts of the incident.

     By nightfall, fires were set near the scene of the shooting near Page Boulevard and Walton Avenue, with at least one car and vacant dwelling consumed. Earlier, police used tear gas to attempt to clear crowds.

     Police say a young black man pointed a gun at officers about 11:30 a.m. after they arrived to serve a search warrant. Two officers, both white men, fired a total of four times.

     The St. Louis medical examiner’s office identified the man who was shot as Mansur Ball-Bey, 18, of the 1200 block of Redman Boulevard in the Spanish Lake area.

     The shooting almost immediately attracted protesters, many of whom had gathered downtown Wednesday morning to mark the one-year anniversary of the shooting of another young black man killed by police.

     Some of those who gathered to hear Police Chief Sam Dotson speak Wednesday afternoon grew angry at his account. As the crowd grew, so did the tension with officers, who arrived in large numbers. At least three people were taken into custody after police in SWAT gear and an armored vehicle told the crowd to disperse.

     “This is an unlawful assembly,” police warned.

     At least two officers were pelted with plastic water bottles during the tense few hours after the shooting.

     “Police officers are out doing their jobs,” Dotson told reporters. “We need support in the community.”

     Confrontations with police escalated in the hours that followed.

     Note: escalation included smoke bombs from police. Ghastly pictures.

     If you have any outrage left, muster it up now: Officer’s Lawyer: Sanders Death Not Racial

     Bill Ready Jr., the attorney for the white police officer who killed a black man after a traffic stop in July, has nearly four decades of experience handling civil-rights cases. His father, William Ready Sr., is also a lawyer and has worked on civil-rights cases for 50 years.

     #
     For these reasons, many in eastern Mississippi were surprised that the junior Ready took on the defense of Kevin Herrington, the Stonewall police officer who stopped 39-year-old Jonathan Sanders on a dark road on July 8, with Sanders then dying from asphyxiation. The events that preceded Sanders’ death are disputed. Many in Stonewall believe the incident was racially motivated; Herrington’s lawyer says that’s nonsense.

     #
     “I’ve been involved in cases where I can definitely tell you, ‘Oh, hell yeah, something was racially motivated,’ or (that) it was motivated because a person was homosexual. Oh yeah, I’ve been involved in those. This incident, I am convinced, was not racially motivated.”

     #
     Online news organizations have widely reported claims from Sanders’ family attorneys Chokwe A. Lumumba and C.J. Lawrence that Herrington used a racial slur when he encountered Sanders at the CEFCO gas station in Stonewall (an accusation the Jackson Free Press initially declined to report without further evidence, but has since become the central theme in the case).

     #
     “Everybody seems to be wanting to make it a race issue between a white police officer and a black man,” Ready said, “but what makes it a race issue? Because it’s a black man and white man? I don’t see any facts or issues in this situation that makes it racial.”

     Sounds like an idiot.

     ICE Officer Will Not Be Charged In Death Of Terrance Kellom, Killed During Detroit Arrest

     An officer who fatally shot a 20-year-old black man four times at his home will not be charged, Wayne County’s prosecutor said Wednesday.

     Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced during a morning press conference that U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent Mitchell Quinn’s shooting of Terrance Kellom was justified.

     A fugitive apprehension task force made up of Quinn and six other officers from local and federal agencies came to serve two arrest warrants for Kellom, a suspect in the armed robbery of a pizza delivery man, on the afternoon of April 27.

     Officers and Kellom’s father, Kevin Kellom, offer conflicting accounts of what happened during the attempted arrest. Quinn said Terrance Kellom advanced on him, holding a hammer, despite orders to stop, and he shot in self-defense while moving backwards. Kevin Kellom has said Terrance was unarmed and not resisting when he was shot multiple times.

     A, but armed with a hammer he surely deserved to be killed, right. Still not inclined to believe the police.

     Police shoot and kill suspect in north St. Louis – he’s an 18-year-old who just graduated high school, and he is a ‘suspect’. Everywhere.

     Chief Sam Dotson says two young armed male suspects ran out of the back of a home near the intersection of Page and Walton in north St. Louis on Wednesday. Two police officers executing a search warrant chased the suspects running from the home.

     Officers told the suspects to drop their weapons. Police say one of the suspects raised his gun and pointed it at officers. One of the officers then shot at the suspects. The other officer then fired three more shots. The injured man in his 20’s continued running until he collapsed. Police say the other suspect got away.

     A stolen gun from Rolla, MO was recovered near the suspect’s body.

     Oh, that ‘near the suspect’s body’ is apparently way up the street, according to witnesses who were nearby or present. And considering VonDerrit Myers, I think people have doubts about whether it was actually on the victim.
     In other words, police shot two young men, killed one of them, wounded the other, because they may have raised what could have been a gun. What if it was a phone, to film the police…?

     Somerville hangs ‘Black Lives Matter’ banner at City Hall. ANy bets on how long it will stay up? How many complaints do you think they’ve had by now…?

     “We see this as an important opportunity for an important national conversation” about race, Curtatone said. He said the move was “a very clear statement we are making to the community that we recognize that structural racism exists in our society; it exists in our public and private institutions.”

     By hanging the banner, Curtatone said, he is calling on other cities to foster conversations about improving race relations.

     The 4-foot-by-12-foot banner, a symbol of the beginning of a collaboration with the group, will stay up “as long as it has to” to drive the message home that Somerville is a city determined to strengthen trust between government agencies and people in the community and to treat everyone equally and fairly, Curtatone said.

     “I have a responsibility as the chief executive of public institutions in this city and our municipality to lead that,” Curtatone said. “If any one group feels that our public institutions are not treating them fairly, or our policies drive a certain structural racial overtone, I have a responsibility to lead that change.”

     When asked if he thinks racism is a problem in Somerville, he said, “Racism exists everywhere.”

     “In our public institutions, we can remove it,” he said.

     Somebody seems to get it. I wish him courage in the days to come.

     The White Folks Who Need “Proof of Racism”, yes, more white-folk reading! This is our issue!

     I will never again fall for the Show-Me-Proof-of-Racism gotcha-request that many white people resort to whenever a black person or another person of color expresses their experience with racism.

     You can dig up study after study, research after research, video after video, testimony after testimony, expert after expert, scholar after scholar, scientist after scientist from the most prestigious academic, journalistic, and scientific institutions in the entire world and it won’t matter a single, solitary bit.

     Whatever proof you show–whether it is evidence to demonstrate the presence of systemic racism or social racism; implicit racism or explicit racism; conscious racism or unconscious racism–will NEVER be enough. They will employ every move-the-goal-post, bait-and-switch, logical-fallacy, false-equivalence,appeal-to-the-absurd, beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt, bar-raising, unrealistic-expectation, persnickety-pseudo-science tactic at their disposal to deny that what you’ve brought forth is solid and correct or even mildly reasonable. And the shade is that if you don’t bring it forth, they’ll accuse you of being the racist. They think this is the perfect no-win situation in which to place you.

     They will ask you if you can read the minds of white people. Yes. That’s their favorite one. The only way you will be able to prove racism to these white folks is if you’re telepathic. And even then, they’d question the accuracy of your telepathic abilities and will request a white telepath to co-sign on your knowledge. Anything to avoid having to confront and admit that racism exists, that they benefit from it–and often participate in and perpetuate it.

     So I won’t oblige this request anymore. Beyond being a sign of intellectual laziness, psychological ineptitude, and a gross exploitation of unearned authority and privilege, it’s emotionally sophomoric and an insidious and pathological deflection strategy designed to protect white people from encountering any reality that doesn’t make them feel like the most special and innocent snowflake at the dead center of the crystalline universe.

     They don’t want the answers, Sway!

     Traipsing around, they sing the most inane and blighted of songs:

     There are no stars in the sky. There is no ground below the feet. There is no racism to be found anywhere–especially not in me.

     The entire purpose of the request for proof is merely an attempt to exhaust me and return to the white person the moments of reprieve they feel I stole from them–the moments in which they didn’t have to deal with me or my experience with racism. And they can go back to their lily-white, fairytale version of existence that my presence and my testimony threatened to undo. That they are asking for proof is, in its own way, proof of the very thing they think they are hiding so well.

     The whole point of them asking me to convince them is so that could pretend and tout that they made a good-faith effort all while hiding the fact that the goal was always to never be convinced.

     It’s a complete and utter waste of time of my time and energy. And I shall not indulge these sadists for another second.

     There’s more at the bottom from Toni Morrison. Stop asking for proof, white folks. Listen to what is being said to you, accept it, strive to do better, be the change you want to see. Don’t deny the experiences of others, especially if they’re so radically different from yours that you have trouble relating. You don’t have to relate, you have to listen and believe.

137. rq says

     20 August 2015 at 8:58 am

     Protesters march through downtown St. Louis to renew focus on killing of Kajieme Powell – this is prior to the shooting, of course.

     Holmes v. Garvey, from the ACLU.

     Roxbury resident Mary Holmes, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and Howard Friedman, filed a civil rights lawsuit on August 19, 2015 against two MBTA police officers for police brutality and the violation of her constitutional right to free speech. Ms. Holmes was pepper-sprayed, beaten, and arrested by the officers because she spoke out to prevent MBTA police from abusing a person in her community.

     In March 2014, Ms. Holmes was at the Dudley Square MBTA station in Roxbury when she saw Officer Jennifer Garvey scream at and shove an older Black woman. The situation worried Ms. Holmes so she tried to calm the woman and asked Officer Garvey to stop being so aggressive. When these efforts failed, she called 9-1-1 for help. In response, Officer Garvey and her partner, Officer Alfred Trinh, pepper-sprayed Ms. Holmes in the face, beat her with a metal baton, and arrested her, handcuffing her hands behind her back while forcing her to the ground.

     “The MBTA has signs everywhere telling people ‘if you see something, say something.’ This is exactly what Ms. Holmes did. She saw something wrong, and she spoke out. We need more people to follow Ms. Holmes’ lead and do the same,” said Jessie Rossman, staff attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts. “Unfortunately, the officers’ reactions are part of a broader, troubling trend, in which police officers mistreat individuals exercising their constitutional rights. It has to stop.”

     Civil War re-enactment canceled after Charleston slayings. That actually seems like a kind thing to do. Cue whiterage!

     ‘We’re surrounded by murders’: a day in St Louis’s most dangerous neighborhood, the kind of neighbourhood everyone loves to put down and point to as being what’s wrong with the black community, and never wondering what they can do to help.

     Rawlings-Blake says arrests up amid ‘domino effect’ of Baltimore crime. Did the police start working again?

     Zachary Hammond lawyer: police may need federal oversight after teen’s death. So it takes a white boy dying for police to need oversight and for this to be mentioned in a way that seems to be taken seriously? I mean, I agree, I definitely agree, but… maybe some earlier voices could have been listened to…

138. rq says

     20 August 2015 at 9:52 am

     Amy Poehler’s brand of feminism just urinated on black women worldwide

     Amy Poehler has recently been reprimanded by the media for featuring a joke about R&B singer R. Kelly urinating on Blue Ivy, Beyoncé’s child, in her upcoming show, Difficult People. The joke, which is spoken by Julie Klausner’s character, perpetuates the rape-culture plaguing Western societies and is bizarre, due to Poehler’s self-prescribed identity as a feminist. But, in the context of white feminism, her editorial behavior is nothing short of mundane.
     […]

     In action, white feminism ignores other forms of marginalization affecting women of color. They fail to recognize that women of color do not experience sexism the same way they do. White feminism is truly only concerned with freeing cis middle-class white woman from their single bond: sexism. They deny the extent to which women of color experience racism, transphobia and ableism. And, unfortunately, they are the faces people see when they hear about feminism in mainstream media. White feminists like Poehler, Allen and Taylor Swift are suffocating feminist spaces for women of color to reside peacefully.

     White feminists love to peddle the all-inclusive definition of feminism: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes. But they do not abide by their own philosophy. White feminists love to tell men to “check their privilege” when it comes to sexism, but when it comes to racism or transphobia, they rebuff all criticisms directed towards them. What they fail to realize is that, even when it is not intentional, their actions are damaging and degrading women of color. Black women’s perceptions is black women’s reality. Black women’s lived experience is much more valuable than white feminists perceptions. So instead of denying your racist actions, recognize that what you are doing and saying is real and devastating to women of color all over the world. Realize that calling out women for their racism and transphobia is not a form of pitting women against each other. It is an authentic attempt to derail a narrow form of feminism.

     Stop centering your whiteness — get real and get intersectional.

     Cross-posted to the discussion on feminism.

     How Black Reporters Report On Black Death

     In the 12 months since, the national conversation about police brutality has reached a higher pitch than we could have imagined. We’ve all become part-time cops reporters and part-time criminal justice reporters. We’ve interviewed weeping family members, scrutinized dash cam footage and witnesses’ YouTube uploads, and wrestled with the long-term political implications of what this moment might mean. At this point, I’m probably approaching 30,000 words on the subject of race and policing. It’s everything you want in a story — consequential, evolving, complicated. This work will matter in a way that so many other stories don’t or won’t.

     But this beat has also been distressing and unrelenting. I’ve come uncomfortably close to handing in my resignation, asking to cover anything but this. I can’t even remember which case or video got me to that point, but I just didn’t want to do it anymore. Over the past month, I’ve talked to a dozen other black reporters who’ve covered race and policing since Michael Brown’s death — or even further back, since Oscar Grant or Ramarley Graham — and it’s been a relief to learn that I’m not the only one. That sinking feeling when a hashtag of a black person’s name starts trending on Twitter, the guilty avoidance of watching the latest video of a black person losing his life, the flashes of resentment and irritation at well-meaning tweets and emails sent by readers asking me to weigh in on the latest development in the latest case. The folks I talked to for this story share many of the same, contradictory impulses I wrestle with when a new case comes to light, torn between wanting to jump on a plane — or start sketching out a long essay, as the case may be — and wanting to log out of Twitter and block out emails from my editors.

     Every black Ferguson resident I interviewed last year had his own story about an unfair encounter with local cops. And, unsurprisingly, nearly all black journalists I’ve talked to mentioned a similar story from their off-the-clock lives. Joel at BuzzFeed told me he’s been stopped three times a year by the police since he started driving two decades ago. Charles Blow of the New York Times wrote earlier this year about how his son, a Yale student, had a gun pulled on him by campus police who thought he didn’t belong at the school’s library. And so on.

     I have my own stories along these lines. These stories, these moments, pushed many of us into journalism in the first place. Today, a lot of us occupy desks in national newsrooms at a time when questions about policing and race have become arguably the biggest story in the country. At the same time, many of us are puzzling out what it means to be black reporters reporting on black death in an industry that’s traditionally operated like this: Some people tell the tough stories (white, upper middle class, mostly male), and other people have tough stories happen to them. It’s an industry that’s long boasted a nebulous ideal of “objectivity” without considering that the glaring homogeneity of its ranks helps make that claim believable.

     As calls for newsroom diversity get louder and louder — and rightly so — we might do well to consider what it means that there’s an emerging, highly valued professional class of black reporters at boldface publications reporting on the shortchanging of black life in this country. They’re investigating police killings and segregated schools and racist housing policies and ballooning petty fines while their loved ones, or people who look like their loved ones, are out there living those stories. What it means — for the reporting we do, for the brands we represent, and for our own mental health — that we don’t stop being black people when we’re working as black reporters. That we quite literally have skin in the game.

     Please read. So much in there. SO MUCH.

     Vultures, from Seven Scribes, in partnership with Kinfolks: a journal of black expression.

     It is 2012. In my second apartment since graduating college, with my third set of housemates, I am drinking wine at a socially unacceptable hour. José and I have known each other since high school. We are co-workers, we are friends (sometimes), and we are family, raised in different-colored poverties on opposite sides of the same city. José and I talk about family and what it means to be college graduates, to be artists, to be artists with college degrees, and what that means to our families, who are supportive of our career choices but still long for security. So we decide we’re going to get Pulitzer Prizes, so that our parents can breathe easy and loosen their grips on our degrees.

     It is today. I am in a workshop and José and I are no longer housemates, are still co-workers, still friends (sometimes) and are sitting across from each other writing about what we wish for. After a long list of things for my community, city and family, I scribble “Pulitzer Prize” and am somewhat ashamed for writing anything at all about myself.

     The day that José and I moved in together I purchase a movie called The Bang-Bang Club with no clue about the plot (Ryan Phillippe is the leading man, and I have worshipped him since Cruel Intentions). The film depicts four photographers active in South Africa during apartheid. One story in particular stays with me. Kevin Carter was a wartime photographer and journalist. In 1993 he sold a photo of a Sudanese child, bloated from starvation, laying in a fetal position, being preyed upon by a vulture. In 1994 he won a Pulitzer Prize for featured photography.

     I wonder how long before someone asked him if he took the time to feed the boy.

     From 2006 to 2011 I am in school at Grand Valley State University. In 2010, working on the last group project of my soon-to-be-ex-education major, I am with three white girls (one from Ann Arbor, one from Southfield, and one from someplace Americans can’t point to on a map) all wearing Uggs and North Face. We are discussing our pedagogy. They all want to go back to Detroit and save black kids (they didn’t say “save,” but they basically said save).

     And I wonder what they mean by “back.”

     And then I think, who am I to judge them? Born and raised on the North Side of Chicago, I live in privilege. I avoid seeing my family on the South Side as much as possible during the summer. I know what happens when niggas get hot.

     Keep reading.

     NOPD officers convicted in Danziger Bridge shootings will get new trial, mentioned in passing in the previous article about the book on the Danziger Bridge shooting.

     Mike Huckabee: MLK would be ‘appalled’ that #BlackLivesMatter is magnifying race issues. Yes, let’s appropriate MLK some more.

     Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) accused Black Lives Matters movement of approaching race relations in a negative way during an interview with CNN on Tuesday.

     “I understand that people had great passions, but I also understand that the way you begin to resolve them is you do it by loving people and treating people with dignity and respect,” Huckabee told host Wolf Blitzer. “You don’t do it by magnifying the problems, you do it by really magnifying the solutions.”

     The Republican presidential candidate’s remarks came in response to footage of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s meeting with members of the movement last week.

     Protesters affiliated with the movement have also disrupted appearances by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Huckabee’s fellow GOP candidate, ex-Florida governor Jeb Bush.

     Huckabee told Blitzer that he considered racism “more of a sin problem than a skin problem,” and said that he faced death threats while pushing to integrate an all-white church 35 years ago. According to reports, he was the pastor at Immanuel Baptist Church in Pine Bluff, Arkansas around that time.

     “When I hear people scream ‘black lives matter,’ I’m thinking, of course they do,” he said on Tuesday. “But all lives matter. It is not that any life matters more than another. That’s the whole message that Dr. [Martin Luther] King tried to present, and I think he’d be appalled by the notion that we’re elevating some lives above others.”

     Members of the movement have criticized the use of the phrase “all lives matter” as a response to their movement, arguing that it is a way for people to downplay police use of excessive force against black communities.

     In Mississippi, defenders of state’s Confederate-themed flag dig in. They would, wouldn’t they. Heritage not hate!!! Sickening.

139. rq says

     20 August 2015 at 10:26 am

     16 Trans People (That We Know Of) Have Been Murdered this Year, “At least 14 of them were black or Latina women.”

     A Curious Case: 9 Mysterious Details About Kendrick Johnson’s Death That Will Make You Go Hmmm…(LIST) No word yet on how the investigation into that is going.

     Family questions medical care in Pemiscot Co. jail after 33 year old dies

     Michael Robinson, 33, of Hayti, died early on Sunday, hours after being taken by ambulance from the Pemiscot County Jail.

     Now, Robinson’s family questions whether he received the medical treatment he needed behind bars.

     Robinson’s sister and fiancee say Kennett police arrested him early on Friday morning, August 14 on a warrant for back child support.

     They say officers transferred Robinson from Kennett to Caruthersville on Friday afternoon.

     Robinson is a severe diabetic, they say, and would have needed an insulin shot at least twice a day.

     While they are not sure when he had his last injection before being arrested, Robinson’s family questions if Pemiscot County jailers provided him with proper medical care.

     The family said Robinson was taken to the hospital in Hayti late on Saturday night, then eventually transferred to a hospital in Cape Girardeau.

     Robinson was pronounced dead in Cape Girardeau early on Sunday evening.

     Pemiscot County Sheriff Tommy Greenwell said he’s asked the Missouri State Highway Patrol to investigate Robinson’s time in his jail, and what kind of treatment he received.

     Decision soon in police shooting of Terrance Kellom. This came prior to the previous article posted here, which states that there will be no charges. Justice at work, eh?

     The Number of Cops Indicted for Murder Spikes Upward

     At least 14 cops have been charged in recent months with committing murder, homicide, or manslaughter while on duty. On Tuesday, a judge ruled that two Albuquerque policemen must stand trial for killing a homeless man as he appeared to surrender. The same day, “two former East Point police officers were indicted on charges that they murdered a 24-year-old father by repeatedly using their Tasers on him while he was handcuffed and sitting in a creek,” The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported.

     On Monday, The Washington Post reported that “a former Fairfax County police officer was charged with second-degree murder, nearly two years after he shot an unarmed Springfield man who stood with his hands raised in the doorway of his home.”

     At the end of July, prosecutor Joe Deters announced that University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing will face murder charges for shooting an unarmed motorist during a traffic stop. In June, a South Carolina grand jury indicted former officer Michael T. Slager for shooting 50-year-old Walter Scott in the back as he ran away from a traffic stop.

     In May, a Baltimore grand jury indicted six cops on homicide and assault charges in the death of Freddie Gray, who died in police custody. And a Tulsa deputy who grabbed his gun instead of his taser was charged with manslaughter in April.

     There are a couple of ways to contextualize these numbers.

     Observers have noted the fact that American police officers kill orders of magnitude more people than their counterparts in other western democracies. Now, the number of U.S. cops arrested for killings in the last five months exceeds the total number of people shot and killed by cops in England going back five years. This is particularly extraordinary given how reluctant many U.S. prosecutors are to file charges against police, and how much deference police reports are given in the absence of video or forensic evidence, like a bullet in the back, that blatantly contradicts their story.

     Are U.S. police now being charged at a higher rate than before? Maybe. Over a seven-year period ending in 2011, “41 officers in the U.S. were charged with either murder or manslaughter in connection with on-duty shootings,” The Wall Street Journal reported in 2014, citing research by Philip Stinson, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University. That figure works out to an average of 5.8 officers charged per year, but excludes officers charged in non-shooting deaths.

     More at the link.

     Private Prison Company Employees Profited From Unpaid Prisoner Labor, Former Inmates Say. Slavery by any other name…

     <a href="

140. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     20 August 2015 at 8:13 pm

     Before Ferguson, white cop shot black former athlete; jury weighs fate:

     In September 2013 Mr. Ferrell wrecked his fiancee’s car on his way home after an outing with friends and sought help at a house in a neighborhood east of Charlotte. The homeowner, afraid someone was trying to break in, called 911. Officer Kerrick and two other officers responded, and the deadly confrontation ensued.

     Kerrick fired 12 shots – eight of them at Ferrell’s fallen body.

     Following the shooting, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department released a statement calling the shooting unlawful. “The evidence revealed that Mr. Ferrell did advance on Officer Kerrick and the investigation showed that the subsequent shooting of Mr. Ferrell was excessive,” police said in a statement the day of the shooting. “Our investigation has shown that Officer Kerrick did not have a lawful right to discharge his weapon during this encounter.”

     During the trial, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Capt. Mike Campagna testified that Kerrick’s actions were not consistent with law enforcement training and department policy, as The Christian Science Monitor previously reported.

     A racially diverse jury, made up of eight women and four men, will decide whether Kerrick used excessive force when he fired 12 shots – eight of them at Ferrell’s fallen body – or whether he was justified because he thought Ferrell posed a deadly threat. If convicted, he could face up to 11 years in prison.

     Prosecutors say nonlethal force should have been used to subdue Ferrell, but Kerrick’s attorneys argue that the officer feared for his life when he shot and killed Ferrell.

     Before jurors began deliberation on Tuesday, prosecutor Adren Harris told jurors that unarmed Ferrell never made threats to Kerrick.

     “All they’re trying to do is demonize this young man, because it’s easy to say this person deserved what they got when you muddy them up,” Mr. Harris told the jury, according to the Associated Press.

     Since Ferrell’s death, high profile shootings in Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore, New York, and Los Angeles have sparked several waves of protests across the United States.

141. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     20 August 2015 at 10:12 pm

     Conservative assholes have targeted Black Lives Matter activist Shaun White (who blogs at Daily Kos) with accusations that he is lying about his race and is really white:

     King was responding to accusations first published by conservative blogger Vicki Pate, who has admittedly “stalked” King and his family. Pate began writing about King after a dust-up with conservative blogger Chuck C. Johnson over the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. Pate uses mostly circumstantial evidence to “prove” King is white, though King claims to be biracial.

     King, in turn, said his family is mixed to the point that “no two siblings in my family have the same set of parents,” then adding, “If you have known me from when I was in elementary school at Huntertown Elementary until now, you’ve known me as black or bi-racial.”

     He said he has never lied about his race, publicly or privately.

     “Out of LOVE for my family, I’ve never gone public with my racial story because it’s hurtful, scandalous, and it’s MY STORY,” he tweeted. Right wing bloggers don’t really care about his race, they just “want me to shut up.”

     He did not make any false claims to get into historically-black college Morehouse or to win an academic scholarship allowing him to go, he wrote.

     Pate, who runs the blog Re-NewsIt, claims to have tracked the lineage of King to a white father. King has claimed to be the son of a white mother and black father, according to the New York Daily News.

     Pate and another right wing blog, Breitbart, also claim that King falsified details of an alleged racially-motivated attack King suffered at a young age.

     “Over 20 years ago, when I was 15 years old, I was beaten so badly I missed the next 20 months of school recovering from fractures to my face and ribs, and severe injuries to my spine,” King responded via Facebook. “I had three brutal spinal surgeries during that time and it changed the entire course of my life. I received counseling for PTSD and have had multiple spinal surgeries and years of physical therapy since.”

     Breitbart cites the Daily Caller, another conservative website, in refuting King’s claim that he had serious injuries from the 1995 attack at his high school in Kentucky. The Caller’s Chuck Ross cites a police report that he says characterizes King’s injuries as minor.

     King has written a long, detailed piece at Daily Kos refuting the accusations, and revealing personal details of his life that he would have preferred to keep secret.
     Among them:

     My freshman year in high school, another student and I got into a huge fight at a football game. The fight ended up setting off a powder keg of racial tensions at our school. The school paper back then referred to me as black and him as white. We were suspended for three days and while we were out, racial tensions boiled over so much that hundreds of white students staged a walkout because they had just been banned from wearing Confederate flags.

     When I returned to school from that suspension, the collective anger of the racist white students was focused on me daily. Dozens of my close friends experienced this racist hate alongside me and it broke us down in the worst ways. I was consistently called nigger, spat on, had a jar of tobacco spit thrown in my face, forced into fights, and on two different occasions chased by pickup trucks attempting to maul us. In 2007, one of the students in one of those trucks wrote me a beautiful, moving apology for calling me a nigger and more on that scary dark night. I published it back then.

     In March of 1995, it all boiled over and a racist mob of nearly a dozen students beat me severely, first punching me from all sides, then, when I cradled into a fetal position on the ground they stomped me mercilessly, some with steel-toed boots, for about 20 seconds. That day changed the entire trajectory of my life. Thankfully, multiple credible, unbiased eyewitnesses to this traumatic day have come out publicly and spoken on my behalf in the past 48 hours. A few days after I was assaulted, I was at home recovering when a group of rednecks literally pulled up in my driveway at night, but were chased off by a neighbor with a big flashlight. That neighbor just posted his memory of it.

     I had fractures in my face and ribs, but most badly damaged was my spine. I ended up having three spinal surgeries and missed 20 months of school over it. My entire family endured this deeply painful time in my life ranging from the surgeries, the brutal recovery, physical therapy, and professional counseling. It was rougher than my words will ever do justice. Many people have said that in the police report it listed me as white—as if I checked the box and that was some deep admission. Today, that officer admitted to the New York Times that I never said I was white, but that he assumed so when he saw my mother. He and the school badly mishandled my case. We sued the school system for years because of their mishandling of it. They fought it tooth and nail and my mother and I eventually just gave up on it.

142. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     20 August 2015 at 10:16 pm

     Darnit. There’s a comment in moderation about the shitstorm brewed up from conservatives about Shaun King. I forgot there are words that will trip the filter in the post.

143. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     20 August 2015 at 10:28 pm

     African-Americans discriminated against in access to public services:

     The study finds that email queries coming from senders with distinctively African American names are four per cent less likely to receive an answer than identical emails signed by ‘white-sounding’ names.

     The difference in response was most evident in correspondence to sheriffs’ offices, with ‘black-sounding’ names seven per cent less likely to receive a response than ‘white-sounding’ names.

     Responses to ‘black-sounding’ senders were also less likely to have a ‘cordial’ tone, that is, respondents were less likely to address the sender by name or with a salutation (such as “Dear” or “Hello”).

     Co-author of the study Dr Corrado Giulietti, from the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), comments: “Despite the fact that prohibition of racial discrimination by the government is a central tenet of US law, our finding shows that not all citizens are treated equally by local public service providers.

     “Local services constitute the majority of interactions between government institutions and citizens and perform central functions, for instance in education. The discriminatory attitude that our study uncovers could be one of the factors behind the disadvantaged position of black people in American society and could be a major obstacle towards addressing racial inequality.”

     The researchers conducted what is known as a correspondence study, a well-established approach of detecting discrimination that has previously been used in contexts like job applications and the housing market.

     Using this strategy, the researchers sent emails soliciting information relevant to access a public service, such as office opening hours or documentation needed for school enrollment, from 19,079 local public offices around the country. Targeted services include school districts, local libraries, sheriff offices, county clerks, county treasurers and job centres in every US state. Four correspondent names (two to represent each ethnicity) were chosen as most distinctively recognisable to each group, based upon information from previous studies.

     While emails signed by ‘white-sounding’ names received a response in 72 per cent of the cases, identical emails signed by ‘black-sounding’ names received a response 68 per cent of the time – a four-percentage point difference. The difference was the largest for sheriff offices (seven percentage points), while small and statistically insignificant for county clerks and job centres.

     There was also a difference in the tone of the response; 72 per cent of responses to people with ‘white-sounding’ names addressed the sender by name or with a salutation, as opposed to 66 per cent of responses to people with ‘black sounding’ names.

     While discrimination is often thought of as being stronger in different regions of the country, the gap in the response rate is not concentrated in a specific area of the US.

     Co-author Professor Mirco Tonin, from the University of Southampton, explains: “We find similar levels of discrimination in each of the four regions defined by the Census Bureau (North-East, Mid-West, South and West). We do find a stronger racial gap in rural rather than urban counties. Moreover, it appears that discrimination is not solely due to the perceived lower socio-economic background of black senders. We obtain very similar results when we indicate the very same profession (real estate agent) in the signature of black and white senders.”

     Regarding possible interventions to address the problem, Dr Michael Vlassopoulos, also of Southampton, comments: “When trying to identify the race of the respondent, we find suggestive evidence that black respondents are less likely to ignore emails from black senders than white respondents. This suggests that increasing diversity among the public sector workforce, particularly in the services where we detect higher discriminatory attitudes, could be an effective way of addressing discrimination.”

     The paper, Racial Discrimination in Local Public Services: A Field Experiment in the US, was just published by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany, as IZA Discussion Paper No. 9290. It can be found online at: http://ftp.iza.org/dp9290.pdf

144. rq says

     21 August 2015 at 6:55 am

     Tony
     In 141, you call him Shaun White, not Shaun King – bit of a slip. :/

     +++

     ACLU, other activist groups blast county decision to charge protesters a year after events – because it makes sense, don’t it. To wait a whole year. :P

     Two different worlds. Two different scenes in #STL tonight: #SFvsSTL game at Busch .(via @nickpistor). #PageandWalton (via @Rebeccarivas). (Last night = two nights ago.)

     After Fatal Police Shooting, St. Louis Police Use Tear Gas on Late Night Protestors

     According to CNN, Police Chief Sam Dotson said that the tear gas was used to disperse crowds after they repeatedly ignored the officers’ requests. He also said that demonstrators threw bricks and bottles at the officers.

     People on the ground say the bricks and bottles were thrown after the teargas was deployed.
     In a residential neighbourhood.
     With children playing in nearby streets.
     With elders at a church.
     With people on their porches and in their backyards.
     Teargassed bad enough that yesterday, when they went to mow their lawns, the residue was lifted up and was enough to irritate anew.

     The name of the victim was not given, but Dotson said he was appeared to be in his early 20s. In regards to the demonstrators, Dotson said the police will “maintain an increased presence” tonight at the site of the protests.

     Ball-Bey was eighteen. “Appeared to be in his early 20s”. Well, I guess that’s close.

     #MansurBallBey. This is him.

     #MansurBallBey was the very first straight male friend that treated me like a human being while knowing i was gay. A true thug, indeed, neh? The police are pushing the drugs-and-crime narrative pretty damn hard, but the family seems to be resisting. Of course, the one does not negate the fact that he may have been a good human, too. But I think it’s important to remember the person behind these kinds of tweets, instead of the caricature the police are trying to paint.

     The cops shot #TyroneHarris the same day they killed #MikeBrown. When pol came together for #KajiemePowell the cops executed #MansurBallBey.
     A sick sort of anniversary.

145. rq says

     21 August 2015 at 7:13 am

     Here is Jason Flanery, the officer who killed #VonDerritMyers, in N. STL today after a black boy was killed by police.
     And on the subject, We received this an hour ago via email. It’s an unverified letter claiming that Flanery was put on duty in order to provoke protestors into violence. It also claims that the fires were set by police plants. About those fires, there’s a comment on that coming up.

     Being a good ally definitely DOES NOT include setting shit on fire, breaking anything in the presence of black people facing the police. Mm, lost the actual tweet I thought I had, but there were several, from several people, saying that all fires set that night were set by white people running away from the scene once things were burning.
     The police, of course, are using the fires as a convenient excuse to show how unruly and rowdy them there black folks are.
     It’s disgusting.

     Four different types of chemical warfare being used in St. Louis city right now against black bodies. If anyone wants to look at the pictures and tell us more.

     This family and all these kids were all tear gassed. Their crime. Living there. Not protesters, just living there. But the police just don’t care! I wonder how many of these people are more willing to stand up with the protestors now?

     STL City Police are shooting smoke bombs at protesters! Just a short video of what it looked like.

146. Anne, Cranky Cat Lady says

     21 August 2015 at 7:23 am

     rq and Tony, thank you for keeping this thread going. I don’t comment, but I do read.

147. rq says

     21 August 2015 at 7:31 am

     Missouri Supreme Court upholds release of internal police investigation documents – in other words, rules in favour of police transparency and possibly accountability.

     Justice Dept. Presses Civil Rights Agenda in Local Courts. This is good.

     Burlington, Wash., was a small city fighting what seemed like a local lawsuit. Three poor people said that their public lawyers were too overworked to adequately represent them in municipal court cases. The dispute went mostly unnoticed for two years, until the Obama administration became involved.

     Unannounced, the Justice Department filed documents in the case and told the judge that he had broad authority to demand changes in Burlington and nearby Mount Vernon. The judge quickly agreed and ordered the cities to hire a new public defense supervisor. He also said he would monitor their legal aid program for three years.

     That 2013 decision was a significant victory for the Justice Department in a novel legal campaign that began early in the Obama administration and has expanded in recent years. In dozens of lawsuits around the country involving local disputes, the federal government has filed so-called statements of interest, throwing its weight behind private lawsuits and, in many cases, pushing the boundaries of civil rights law.

     The federal government has typically waded into local court cases only when the outcome directly affected a federal interest, such as national security or diplomacy. Recently, however, the Justice Department has filed statements of interest in cases involving legal aid in New York, transgender students in Michigan, juvenile prisoners in solitary detention in California, and people who take videos of police officers in Baltimore. The government has weighed in on employment discrimination claims brought by transgender plaintiffs and a lawsuit over the right of blind people with service dogs to be able to use Uber, a car-sharing service.

     “The Justice Department is sending a clear message: that we will not accept criminal justice procedures that have discriminatory effects,” former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in February after filing documents in a case involving high court bonds in Alabama. “We will not hesitate to fight institutionalized injustice wherever it is found.”

     May this initiative find great success and little work.

     “1 Shot Fired by Officer”, “The shape-shifting story of a cop who pulled over a driver and ended up shooting himself.” Except he’s blaming the driver he stopped, of course.

     District Attorney Roger Echols, working closely with the police department, then launched a criminal case against Riley—claiming that Riley shot Stewart with Stewart’s gun. The DA kept mounds of evidence away from the jury that proved Stewart shot himself. And he pressed his case against Riley all the way to trial, where Stewart testified, under oath, that he did not shoot his gun.

     Earlier this month, a jury acquitted Riley of shooting Stewart, bringing a just end to a deeply troubling story. During the trial, defense attorney Alex Charns repeatedly described the prosecution’s strategy as “a shell game, a cover up, and a railroad.” Examining the evidence, it is nearly impossible to come to any other conclusion.

     From the start, Stewart’s attempt to detain Riley looked like bad policing. Stewart was driving an unmarked vehicle and dressed in plainclothes when he pulled Riley over—for “fishtailing” down the road, he alleges. Riley says he was pulled over for driving while black. Stewart claims the car slid forward during the stop, and he dove in to grab the emergency brake. Riley claims the officer pulled out his gun and screamed, “Get back, I’m gonna fucking shoot you!” At one point, Stewart claimed he was standing outside the car during the fight. Later, he claimed Riley wrestled him onto his back in the passenger seat then climbed on top of him.

     Both men agree about what happened at the end of the encounter: One bullet was fired from Stewart’s gun into Stewart’s leg. The officer made a quick recovery. Riley was sent to prison.

     Danny And The Human Zoo, upcoming entertainment.

     Danny And The Human Zoo is a 90-minute fictionalised account of Lenny Henry’s life as a working-class teenager in 1970s Dudley.

     The story centres round Danny Fearon, a talented impressionist, and his working-class Jamaican family, as he rises to fame as a stand-up comedian.

     It is a distinctive portrait of ordinary life in a first-generation Jamaican family, a world not often seen on British TV.

     Danny’s world is a series of complex minefields which he has to negotiate. His home life – which his ebullient mother rules with an iron fist in an iron glove; his love life – where the white Irish girl he’s in love with won’t give him the time of day until he wins his first competition – and finally the ups and downs of his emerging career.

     When Danny wins a talent competition at the local club he soon finds himself working the comedy circuit. Audiences can’t get enough and applaud Danny as he effortlessly morphs into Muhammad Ali, Tommy Cooper and Frank Spencer; eventually hitting the big time on TV, an unheard-of achievement for a young black boy. But an unscrupulous agent takes advantage of Danny and forces him to star in a show, which even by Seventies’ standards, was a byword for racism – The Black And White Minstrel Show. Danny hits rock bottom.

     Having made his name by becoming other people, Danny has to save himself by finding out who he really is.

     Danny And The Human Zoo is a drama about a kid trying to make it big. It’s a high-energy, nostalgic period piece about the decade we love to hate, and its music, fashion and television.

     Bail set at $1M for officer charged with attempted murder – just as an example of the privileges you get when you’re an LEO. Because he got the money paid, and is now out on bail. Or bond. However that works.
     Nice.
     Not.

     Second man sues Michael Slager, North Charleston over alleged wrongful use of Taser. Cops with a history of violence will continue to be violent unless they are explicitly stopped. But funny how nobody believes they are wrongfully or excessively violent until someone dies.

148. rq says

     21 August 2015 at 7:47 am

     Won’t be on CNN. Beautiful vigil for #CaryBall tonite on 2-year anniversary of murder #Ferguson

     Are Bernie Sanders’ Supporters His Biggest Problem? Some signs do point to Bernie himself being his own problem…

     The issue isn’t about Sanders’s politics in particular. The Sanders campaign has faced legitimate criticism for its rhetoric centering around economic justice on the grounds that it is an inadequate pathway for addressing specific racial justice concerns. But to Sanders’ credit, he has responded to those concerns with the beginnings of the very kind of race-specific written policy proposals that Netroots protesters demanded, such as specifically addressing the plight of black women and carving out actionable policy on police violence. As this kerfuffle has started to occupy whatever media spots are left exposed by the thin shadow of Donald Trump’s toupee, Sanders himself has done a decent job of responding and building momentum.

     But his supporters? Quite a different story.

     This “Bernie Bunch” has responded to all reservations towards their candidate by young black people with a deluge of condescension and racially tinged invective that seems absolutely chat-roomish in character. There are the white writers who lecture black protesters to trust their “best friend,” unaware of the racial politics behind generations of white people declaring themselves besties with unwitting black folk. There are the celebrity liberals with no political or activism experience somehow entitled enough to explain to protesters how protesting works. And there are the legions of Tea Party style copy-and-paste trolls that will flood my Twitter mentions after this. They all persist in direct contradiction to the fact that Sanders actually did respond to protests in exactly the way protesters wanted, and that his decision has pressured and will pressure other candidates to do the same.

     Their message, distilled: Shut the hell up if you want to sit with us.

     At first glance, much of this debate can be characterized—and critiqued—as a desire for civility. However, hidden in the language of civility is something deeper: silence. It is worth noting that the “Sanders is your best friend” line of defense existed long in advance of any protests as a response to general pre-existing black misgivings about the candidate. He’s your best bet, so shut the hell up and vote. He marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., so shut the hell up and vote. We voted for Obama, so you owe us one. Shut the hell up and vote. Civility is only the aim of the Bernie Bunch to the extent that it ensures silence from would-be protesters.
     […]

     The climate today is not unlike that surrounding the 1964 Convention. The south is re-segregating in many aspects and diluting the black vote. Black people are dying at the hands of police and being incarcerated at alarming and rising rates—so far 40 percent of all unarmed people killed by police in 2015 have been black and other inequalities have been found at virtually every turn in the criminal justice system. But a rich multitude of organizing voices has emerged to challenge all parties and people to create a more perfect union, not by being perfect or perfectly civil themselves but by being real and human. If Sanders supporters really want a shot in 2016, they’d do well to follow their candidate’s lead and actually listen to all of those voices instead of trying to silence them.

     There’s more at the link, but gadsdamn white progressive liberal Sanders supporters who are not fervent BLM supporters, get your shit together.

     The alarming effect of racial mismatch on teacher expectations

     Along with colleagues at American University and Johns Hopkins University, I begin to address these questions in a recent study. We find evidence of systematic biases in teachers’ expectations for the educational attainment of black students. Specifically, non-black teachers have significantly lower educational expectations for black students than black teachers do when evaluating the same students. We cannot determine whether the black teachers are too optimistic, the non-black teachers are too pessimistic, or some combination of the two. This is nonetheless concerning, as teachers’ expectations likely shape student outcomes and systematic biases in teachers’ expectations for student success might contribute to persistent socio-demographic gaps in educational achievement and attainment. As Ms. Peeples noted in her interview, it is important that all teachers maintain and convey high expectations for all students.

     Our study identifies systematic biases in teachers’ expectations using data from a nationally representative survey of U.S. tenth graders that asked two teachers per student how much education they expected the student to ultimately complete. The research design is motivated by the intuitive idea that if two teachers disagree about the expected educational attainment of a student, at least one of the teachers must be wrong. One possibility is that such differences are random in nature, owing perhaps to idiosyncrasies in the chance encounters that occur between students and teachers during the school year. However, if such differences in teachers’ expectations are related to the demographic match between students and teachers, this suggests that teachers have systematically biased beliefs about students’ educational potential for at least a subset of student-teacher relationships.

     Having two teachers provide their expectations for each student is central to our strategy for disentangling the causal relationship between student-teacher demographic mismatch and teachers’ expectations for students from other, possibly confounding factors. For example, student and teacher race may be correlated with school resources, which might influence the likelihood of being assigned to an other-race teacher, but also influence expectations about educational attainment. However, comparing two teachers’ expectations—one black and one non-black—for the same student at the same point in time eliminates such concerns.

     When looking at average effects across all students, we find small, statistically significant effects of student-teacher racial mismatch on teachers’ expectations. However, these relatively small average effects are entirely driven by much larger effects among black students. For example, when a black student is evaluated by one black teacher and by one non-black teacher, the non-black teacher is about 30 percent less likely to expect that the student will complete a four-year college degree than the black teacher.

     The question is, how do you point people towards this and then explain to them that they themselves are part of the problem, and then have them introspect deeply enough to change things?

     Murder suspect sought after San Jose cops kill 2 cohorts. Let’s pretend for a moment he is a murderer, not just a suspected one – did he really deserve to die?

     Jacquez crashed the car and took off running , Garcia said. Earlier reports that he had reached for his waistband before police fired on him were recanted, with Garcia instead saying the officer shot “based on public safety concerns” as Jacquez reached for the door of an unknown residence.

     Police did not find a weapon at the scene.

     So, was the woman actually in danger, if he took off running? Did he really deserve to die?

     And here’s another example of police excess: Police fired 600 ‘unnecessary’ shots, killed hostage in unprecedented car-chase shootout. The whole stories has echoes of ‘Brelo’ all over it.

     Ah, police can release this video: Police Video: Protesters Throw Rocks, Bricks at Police, but not the scenes prior that show them launching smoke bombs and tear gas at protestors. Skewed much?

149. rq says

     21 August 2015 at 8:08 am

     Why does a black person who reads & thinks have to be labeled “conscious”? As if the default for black is stupidity. The tweet links to a tweet with a link to the article itself, but I just wanted to put that thought out there. I’d never thought about that. Which is rather sad.

     Police Group Makes A Big Admission About ‘Justifiable’ Police Shootings

     The Police Executive Research Forum, a research and policy group whose members include commanders from the largest U.S. police departments, said officers generally receive far too little training in de-escalating conflict and often are embedded in a culture that encourages them to rapidly resort to physical force.

     Many recent high-profile police shootings have been legally justified, but there are sometimes “missed opportunities to ratchet down the encounter, to slow things down, to call in additional resources,” Chuck Wexler, executive director of the group, wrote in the report.

     It’s no wonder. Disengagement and patience, the report found, are “sometimes seen as antithetical” to traditional police culture.

     “Some officers, with the best intentions, think that their job is to go into a situation, take charge of it, and resolve it as quickly as you can,” Wexler wrote. “Sometimes there is a feeling of competitiveness about it. If an officer slows a situation down and calls for assistance, there is sometimes a feeling that other responding officers will think, ‘What, you couldn’t handle this yourself?'”

     The study found that many police agencies give officers extensive training on how to shoot a gun, but officers spend “much less time” learning the “importance of de-escalation tactics and Crisis Intervention strategies for dealing with mentally ill persons, homeless persons, and other challenging situations.”

     It seems a small admission, but given the general culture and atmosphere, it’s a big thing… and there’s a nice chart comparing how many hours they spend training in what, and firearms gets a whopping 58 hours (with self defense at 49), while first aid training takes up 16 hours, and de-escalation – 8. Frightening really.

     A Young Leader Gets Real on Ferguson, Police Brutality, and Why #BlackLivesMatter. Johnetta Elzie.

     I first met Johnetta Elzie earlier this year in the dead of winter. She had just landed in New York City on a flight from Chicago, and we were meeting on behalf of our respective social justice organizations. As many young activists are, we were both weary from the actions required of us on behalf of our causes. We were brought together by the highly publicized death of Michael Brown, the African-American boy who was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. I think of Johnetta — who is affectionately called Netta — today because of what happened last week, on the one-year anniversary of Michael’s death. Netta, a St. Louis native, and other activists returned to the streets of her hometown to commemorate the event. Clashes with police ensued, and, just as they had been a year ago during several weeks of civil protests in the wake of Michael’s death, Netta and her fellow activists were met with riot gear and tear gas. A state of emergency was again declared, and Netta was among those arrested for participating. She stepped over the police line while filming officers interacting with protestors on her cell phone. She was released four hours later, and no charges filed.

     But before Michael’s death on August 9, 2014, and before Ferguson put police brutality against black people in the headlines, Netta was just a normal 25-year-old mourning the recent death of her mother and figuring out how to take care of her younger sister. After the initial Ferguson protests, Netta has become one of our generation’s leading civil rights activists, with mentions and profiles in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Ebony magazine and O, The Oprah Magazine. In the Times story, she poignantly said, “Our demand is simple: stop killing us.”

     In addition to documenting and participating in the protests immediately following Michael’s death, Netta joined Mapping Police Violence, an interactive map of police violence, and We The Protestors, a resource that announces rallying events around the country. Both initiatives work from a simple premise: communities should be informed and engaged.

     After Michael, the soon-to-be college freshman, was killed, his body lay in the middle of the street in 90-degree weather for four hours. Neighbors and people passing by stopped and watched, they called their friends and soon all of Ferguson knew what had happened. The response was immediate. Conflicting narratives began, with some witnesses reporting that Michael’s hands were up at the time of the shooting, and others racing to the cop’s defense. But on social media, a rallying cry began, slowly at first, and creeping to a tenor so loud that all were forced to listen: Racial discrimination by police was a rampant problem in Ferguson, and this was the town’s boiling point.

     Netta’s story continues at the link. Please read. She has not only faced down the systemic racism of police and the justice system, but the rampant sexism within activist ranks themselves.

     Photos from last night. #MansurBallBey #STL

     ‘Death of My Career’ “What happened to New Orleans’ veteran black teachers?”

     “Death sticks out to me,” the former special education teacher says. “Death from the storm, death of a school system, death of my career.”

     Just five months after floodwaters engulfed her home in New Orleans East, Dolce, living in Dallas, got walloped again. She was fired. After more than 30 years of teaching, she, along with almost every one of the 7,000 employees of the New Orleans public schools, was dismissed.

     Dolce does not forget. She does not forgive, either, not least of all because she has never received an apology. Resentment remains, she says, because she lost her job under the pretense that she failed her students.

     “I resent the nation being told we weren’t good enough. You’re going to tell me I was a bad teacher, that we were not here to educate children?” Dolce says, the frustration in her voice rising. “Oh, hell no. You’re not going to say that to me and you’re not going to say that to the majority of the teachers. [That’s] a lie.”

     Dolce taught at the former Colton Middle in the city’s Faubourg Marigny neighborhood. A community art center in the storm’s aftermath, the campus now houses a Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, charter school.

     For thousands of teachers like Dolce, the decision to lay off educators was a financial blow and a deep insult to one of the pillars of the city’s black middle class. The mass firings—dealt in large measure to African-American women—continue to infuse the debate over the future of public education in New Orleans with a particular bitterness.

     When she was let go from the school system, Dolce, now 63, took a reduced set of retirement benefits and was able to get health-insurance coverage through her husband’s employer. But she has not found peace with what happened. Were it not for being fired, she’d still be teaching. Others didn’t fare as well.

     End of the Line?

     Last spring, a long and winding legal battle over the teachers’ lost jobs reached its likely end. After several years of wins and losses in the judicial system, the U.S. Supreme Court declined an appeal on behalf of the fired New Orleans teachers.

     The appeal stemmed from a class action brought on behalf of the fired educators by the Louisiana Federation of Teachers.

     Some separate lawsuits involving the dismissed teachers’ rights brought by the United Teachers of New Orleans were settled, but the class action continued on. It met some success in lower state courts where judges ruled that there had been due process violations and a failure to follow a state law that requires terminated teachers be placed on a two-year recall list.

     “It was a moral victory,” says Katrena Ndang, who taught in New Orleans for 17 years. “I remember telling people that they better enjoy it while they could.”

     Those wins carried enormous symbolic weight, even if it was unlikely to pay off monetarily .

     “It wasn’t about that darn suit and trying to get any money,” Dolce says. “We just wanted an apology.”

     Indeed, the victory was short-lived. Last fall, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled against the teachers and dismissed their case. The court held that local education officials had not broken the law when they did not give the teachers priority consideration for rehiring. The court also reasoned that the chance that any other teachers would actually be rehired appeared remote.

     In their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the dismissed teachers argued that the local Orleans Parish school board—the elected body that governed all schools in the district before the storm—and various state defendants “violated well-settled constitutional law regarding … due process rights of tenured public school employees.”

     The teachers “here had a reasonable expectation of resuming their pre-Katrina employment positions upon their return to New Orleans,” the appeal said.

     The Supreme Court handed down its denial on May 18.

     Obama Will Travel To New Orleans To Commemorate Hurricane Katrina Anniversary. I guess Obama does care about black people?

     President Barack Obama will travel to New Orleans on Aug. 27 to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

     Obama will meet with New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu (D) and residents throughout neighborhoods that were effected by the storm. Obama will also deliver remarks during his trip, according to the White House.

     Can’t believe it’s been 10 years already.

150. rq says

     21 August 2015 at 8:19 am

     Quiet start 1 day after fires, tear gas in wake of St. Louis police shooting of teen. They say Mansur Ball-Bey pointed a gun at police, and that’s why he died:

     Unrest followed the police shooting of an 18-year-old who they say pointed a gun at officers. He was fleeing a home where police were serving a search warrant for guns and drugs.

     (Current newest info is that he was shot in the back… and still a danger to police.)
     Well check this out under #CrimingWhileWhite: Standoff ends at St. Charles home where armed man barricaded himself in basement

     Police said the man pointed a handgun at officers from the basement. The officers retreated and left the home. SWAT officers were called in to assist.

     The man’s identity was not released but police said he is 48 and had an arrest warrant for violating parole.

     Oh and look he’s alive. This is bullshit, all this shooting of young black men. BULLSHIT.

     Times Regrets ‘Slave Mistress’ in Julian Bond’s Obituary

     After Julian Bond’s death on Saturday, The Times published a lengthy and well-written obituary summing up the life and work of the civil rights champion. But many readers were bothered by a single sentence in the front-page article:

     “Julian Bond’s great-grandmother Jane Bond was the slave mistress of a Kentucky farmer.”

     Many readers wrote to me to protest the phrase, on the grounds that a slave, by definition, can’t be in the kind of consensual or romantic relationship that the word “mistress” suggests. One of them noted it wasn’t the first time the phrase had appeared in a Times obituary.
     […]

     And a reader, Walter Lipman of Pawling, N.Y., wrote me: “One can be a mistress. One can be a slave. One cannot be both, for a mistress has the element of consent in what she decides to do. A slave does NOT.”

     I brought the concerns to the attention of Times editors on Wednesday; they were already aware of the complaints. After meeting with editors to discuss it, the executive editor, Dean Baquet, responded. (Mr. Baquet, it’s worth noting here, made history last year when he was named the first African-American editor to lead The Times newsroom.) He said that The Times regretted using the expression: “It is an archaic phrase, and even though Julian Bond himself may have used it in the past, we should not have.”
     […]

     There’s no question that Times editors heard readers’ voices loud and clear. Retiring this phrase and expressing regret about using it has nothing to do with political correctness. It’s about recognizing the history of slavery in America, at a time when race is at the forefront of the nation’s consciousness. Language matters. This is the right call.

     Cue anti-PC outrage.

     Breaking: Grand jury votes not to criminally charge two #SouthJersey cops in car stop shooting death of #JerameReid.

     Youth on bike seems to text in disbelief at police response to protests in North St. Louis. @LBPhoto1 8/19 Just a neat photo.

     St Louis 8/19/2015, a Storify of Antonio French’s tweets from that night.

151. rq says

     21 August 2015 at 8:27 am

     Teen killed by St. Louis police was in wrong place at wrong time, not a criminal: family

     The St. Louis teen whose death by police sparked violent protests Wednesday night was supposed to start college soon and was a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, his family and friends said.

     Mansur Ball-Bey, 18, was shot after police say he tried to run during the execution of a search warrant and pointed a stolen gun with an extended magazine at two cops.

     Officers said they found crack cocaine and stolen guns at the scene in a crime-riddled neighborhood. A teen who was with Ball-Bey escaped.

     The distraught family said they could not believe the police account because Ball-Bey, who went by Man Man, was not capable of those crimes: he had just graduated from high school, held a steady job and was heading to college.

     “They f—ed up. They shot the wrong person. And they know it,” cousin Tyren Cotton-Booker wrote on Facebook, noting Ball-Bey had no criminal background.

     Ball-Bey’s dad, Dennis, said he believes police made a mistake and is going to consult lawyers to investigate.

     “It was a bad loss, but he was a good son. All these people loved him. He wasn’t the type to run the streets or be disrespectful to the family,” Dennis Ball-Bey told the Daily News.

     Ball-Bey’s social media accounts show he was an aspiring music producer and rapper who held guns in pictures and music videos with friends. One picture was captioned, “Gang Gang” with the name Trakcistan Mafia, which Ball-Bey had previously referred to as his rap group.

     But his dad said Ball-Bey had the guns only to act in music videos, not because he was using them to commit crimes.

     “They make rap songs and videos and call it gangsta rap,” Dennis Ball-Bey said. “They was making music.”

     According to family accounts, Ball-Bey stopped by an aunt’s house to meet up with his cousins on his way home from his part-time job at FedEx. They were met by police in an unmarked car and Ball-Bey “got caught up in some bs being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Cotton-Booker said.

     He was still in his FedEx uniform when he got shot, family said.

     “But I’ll be damned if I believe that he left work stopping by, not even being there over 5 minutes and pulls a gun out on the police. Naw I’m not believing that one. Not at all!” Cotton-Booker wrote.

     He was 18, for fucks’ sake.

     Photos of Last Night’s Rainbow Reveal St. Louis’ Cultural Divide

     But as photos of the rainbow and following sunset spread across social media, they began to reveal a deeper truth about the state of St. Louis. Two groups were most likely to be outside and see the rainbow: baseball fans enjoying an unseasonably cool night at Busch Stadium and a crowd gathering five miles away, protesting the police killing of an African-American teenager in north St. Louis’ Fountain Park neighborhood.

     Two worlds, I say. Two separate worlds.

     Could A Middle-Aged White Man Ever Become President? *Facepalm* It’s about O’Malley.

     A young woman in a peasant skirt raised her hand. “As mayor of Baltimore, you oversaw an era of mass arrests of nonviolent offenders,” she told the candidate, citing statistics—“110,000 arrests were made in one year in a city of 620,000 people”—before getting to her question. “What are we supposed to expect from you on the issue of mass incarceration and institutional racism?”

     As he listened, O’Malley’s smile grew forced and his jaw began to bulge. He has a temper. Plus, he doesn’t like to be called out. As mayor, O’Malley once paid a visit to a couple of radio hosts criticizing him for being insufficiently concerned about crime. “Come outside after the show,” he scolded them, “and I’ll kick your ass.”

     Now, in Iowa City, O’Malley seemed on the verge of unloading again. He’d been on edge since April, when riots erupted in Baltimore after cops were implicated in the killing of an unarmed black man named Freddie Gray. Years of mistrust between the city’s police and its black citizens were glaringly exposed—and suddenly the two terms O’Malley spent as the city’s mayor from 1999 to 2007 were subject to brutal re-examination. O’Malley—who had always taken plenty of credit for slowing crime by employing tough “zero tolerance” policing techniques—found himself being blamed for the city’s racial acrimony.

     David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of The Wire, declaimed that “the stake through the heart of police procedure in Baltimore was Martin O’Malley.” On Meet the Press, Chuck Todd incredulously asked O’Malley, “Do you think you can still run on your record as mayor of Baltimore, governor of Maryland, given all this?” And when O’Malley launched his presidential campaign, protesters crashed the festivities, chanting “Black Lives Matter” and burnishing NOMALLEY signs. In the wake of police violence in Ferguson, Cleveland, New York, and now Baltimore, the old-school good-governance dictates about getting tough on crime seemed out of touch. Suddenly Democrats were scrambling to take up the mantle of police reform, and O’Malley was stranded on the wrong side of one of the defining issues for liberals today.

     “You weren’t in Baltimore in 1999, but I was,” he told the young woman, with more than a hint of contempt in his voice. “It looked more like Mexico City than an American city, and the gutters quite literally ran with blood.” There was no applause. These people didn’t get it, he seemed to be thinking. What he’d done in Baltimore was worthy of their respect and not, as the woman in the peasant skirt suggested, part of “the long history of brutalization” of “communities of color.” He was the guy, he wanted to tell them, who could save those communities—the guy who knows that you don’t stop criminals by asking politely and that turning around a city isn’t as easy as replacing open-air drug markets with shabby-chic condos. But that kind of talk had fallen out of fashion. The political hand O’Malley had been planning to play was now a loser. The man who wanted to be president swallowed hard and tried to pivot to something else.

     It’s going to be some tough questions about his time in Baltimore.

     August is the month of our discontent, by Deray McKesson. Not sure if it’s a video or what but it’s not showing up for me.

     Slay, Dotson call for calm, peace after St. Louis police shooting. Call off the cops, that might help.

     St. Louis judges want sculpture to honor slaves who sought freedom here

     The “Freedom Suits” memorial will be situated on the east side of the Civil Courts Building downtown, between it and the Old Courthouse, where most of the suits were tried, a statement says.

     Slaves filed “freedom suits” under Missouri’s “once free always free” laws, helped by pro-abolition lawyers, the proposal says. Missouri law said that if a slave was taken into a free state long enough for the slave owner to gain residency, the slave became free and stayed that way when they returned to Missouri.

     Many slaves won their freedom, but the ones who did not faced the prospect of being “sold down the river” to the more repressive states of Mississippi and Louisiana, the proposal says.

     Dred and Harriet Scott were among those who won, although their victory would later be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1857.

     The sculpture has a total budget of $200,000, and the St. Louis Bar Foundation will be raising funds, a statement said. The deadline for proposals is Nov. 9, and more information and the request for proposal can be found on the court’s website, stlcitycircuitcourt.com.

152. rq says

     21 August 2015 at 8:33 am

     The Loud Silence When Trans Women of Color Are Killed. This article gets its own comment.

     Eyricka Morgan, 26, was a black transgender woman. She was a student at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She was an activist. She was fatally stabbed in September 2013. She was my friend.

     I last saw Eyricka — alive and happy — in November 2011 at a Rutgers conference focused on the experiences of LGBTQ residents in Newark. There, she fearlessly shared her story with the packed room of attendees. She talked about the unique challenges she overcame in her home, schools and broader community. She shed light on a growing trend that is largely ignored: the brutal violence enacted upon trans women of color.

     On Saturday, Tamara Dominguez became the latest trans women of color to be murdered in the United States, when she was repeatedly driven over by a truck in Kansas City, Missouri. Dominguez is among at least 17 trans women of color who have been killed in the country so far this year.

     Like Eyricka, Dominquez’s life was violently taken from her with no widespread public outcry. Dominguez, Elisha Walker, Shade Schuler, Amber Monroe and Kandis Capri are just some names of the most recent casualties of the war against trans women of color, even as people like Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox break cultural barriers in mainstream media.

     Eyricka’s life was an intersection of identities and challenges. As a black woman, she was a target of the sexist and misogynistic actions of men — white, black and brown alike. As a black trans woman, invisibility and trans-antagonism were common in both cisgender LGB and heterosexual spaces. She also grew up under modest conditions in Newark, where her life was fraught with a range of economic challenges.

     The many harrowing stories of murdered trans women of color are also Eyricka’s story. After she was killed, one local news outlet misgendered Eyricka, referring to her as a “he”; Eyricka was burdened by trans-antagonism even in death. Misgendering transgender victims this way is a common practice of willful prejudice. Shortly after 21-year-old Islan Nettles was killed in New York City in August 2013, she, too, was repeatedly misgendered, even at the vigil held in her honor.

     Nettles’ friends spoke up against this mistreatment. After Eyricka died, we, her friends had two options: Speak up or remain silent. As cisgender allies we could choose to do our part to ensure Eyricka’s story was shared, or we could do nothing. But true allies are not absent when they are needed most.

     Many trans women of color are fighting just to live, and dream of stopping the onslaught of violence in their lives. Among LGBTQ communities, trans people are most susceptible to police violence; trans women in particular are most likely to be killed by hate violence homicides, according to the advocacy organization the Anti-Violence Project.

     “Black trans women should never have to live in fear that today will be their last day,” Elle Hearns, a field coordinator at the LGBTQ advocacy organization Get Equal, told AlterNet. “It is a national emergency that we must pay attention to by taking action to support and sustain the lives of trans women who are under attack.”

     Hearns is right. The public can no longer remain silent and still as trans women face economic vulnerability and violence. Trans women of color are our sisters, daughters, friends, partners, mothers and colleagues. But even when they bear no relation to us at all, they are human beings deserving of wellness, equity and life.

     It is impossible to realize this truth, however, if cisgender people refuse to name and demolish our biases. Cisgender people must be self-reflective enough to admit that our privileged vantage point often frustrates our ability to empathize with trans women of color. After Nettles’ murder, for instance, trans advocates and allies questioned the response of cisgender individuals who fit under the so-called LGBTQ umbrella. “I am ashamed of lesbian, gay and bisexual people right now,” Christian Fuscarino wrote at the Huffington Post. “We’ve had a great tragedy in our community, and few of us have reacted with even an ounce of the effort we’ve put into the fight for marriage equality.”

     Monica Roberts, curator of TransGriot, an online platform that has long been at the forefront of reporting on violence against trans women of color, wrote a similar piece in response to the recent killing of 25-year-old trans woman India Clarke in Florida: “Once again I ask the question of my African-American cis brothers and sisters: When will #BlackTransLivesMatter? When will your trans brothers and sisters see ministers and politicians decry the loss of these lives as loudly as you do for cisgender Black people?”

     Trans women of color need us all to listen to their stories when they are alive so that we are not grief-stricken when they are slain. We could all have fewer occasions to shed tears if we followed the lead of trans women of color in the fight to end trans antagonistic violence now. Eyricka, Tamara, Elisha, Shade, Amber, Kandis, Papi, Lamia, Ty, Yazmin, Taja, Penny, Kristina, Keyshia, London, Mercedes, India, K.C. and so many other trans women of color killed deserve more than silence. It takes self-reflection and determined effort to overcome complacency in a society that often treats those who defy rigid cultural norms — like gender nonconforming and transgender people — as unworthy of respect or safety, but it should not have to take a friend’s death to remind us to speak up.

     Cited in full.

153. rq says

     21 August 2015 at 8:37 am

     Florida bill would ban confederate flag on government property. About time.

     6 Police Officers Across the US Were Charged with Murder This Week, Proving Strength of Protests. Ill consider protests as ‘working’ once actual convictions start rolling in. A “bad week for killer cops”, indeed. Boo. Hoo.

     Justice Department reports on Ferguson could cost more than $1 million.

     And another example of getting it right, Nashville Hotel Boots White Supremacists!

     The Guesthouse Inn in Nashville has canceled rooms booked by the Council of Conservative Citizens for a planned annual event this weekend, supposedly after the hotel’s leadership was alerted to the group’s views. The CCC is the white-supremacist organization that has been linked to views espoused by accused Charleston Emanuel AME Church shooter Dylann Roof. Brad Griffin, a board member of the CCC, allegedly told his members not to come to Nashville for the weekend. “All [Dylann Roof] did was read our website. I’m sure he watches television, he reads newspapers like I do,” Griffin told The Tennessean.

     A Tale Of Two Cities. Same protest. Different neighborhoods. Different police response. via @oregon_girl3
     Yep, they took protest to a white neighbourhood, just six blocks away.
     I think they should do this first thing, next time.
     Because we all know there will be a next time.

     Response to Reports of Excessive Force by St. Louis Police Department Against Protesters – though AI has been criticized for a rather late and tepid response.

     The following can be attributed to Steven W. Hawkins, executive director of Amnesty International USA:

     “We are deeply concerned about reports of mass protest dispersal tactics, including tear gas, in residential areas of St. Louis last night,” said Steven W. Hawkins, executive director of Amnesty International USA. The St. Louis Police Department must immediately take all measures to prevent the unnecessary or excessive use of force.

     “We have seen this time and again in St. Louis and Ferguson, and again we call on the Department of Justice to conduct a full, impartial investigation of both the police-involved shooting of Mansur Ball-Bey and the response of the St. Louis Police to the ensuing protests.

     “As ever, we stand with the communities of North St. Louis, the community of Ferguson, and communities around the country who are demanding rights-respecting, accountable policing, and who are at risk from the very people sworn to protect them.

     “The St. Louis Police should be facilitating and not restricting the right to peaceful protest.

     “Nobody should have to fear for their safety when they attend a protest. No one should have to fear being tear gassed in their own homes.

     “Police officers have a right to defend themselves and a duty to protect the public, but in doing so, they must act with restraint and in accordance with international standards. Force should only be used when nonviolent means have been exhausted or proven ineffective, and lethal force should only be used in situations where it is necessary to protect life.

     “We call for an end to the unnecessary or excessive use of force by police in all jurisdictions throughout the country. We call on U.S. authorities to bring local, state, and federal laws in line with international standards.”

     “The world is watching, and so are we. Enough is enough.”

     The article includes background from last year:

     Amnesty International is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning global movement of more than 7 million people campaigning for human rights worldwide. The organization investigates and exposes abuses, educates and mobilizes the public, and works to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied.

     Last summer, Amnesty International USA was invited to Ferguson, Missouri to work with the community on nonviolent direct action in the wake of clashes between protesters and Ferguson police. Staff and members have continued to stay involved in the Don’t Shoot Coalition, and local Amnesty members in the St. Louis area have engaged in solidarity as legal observers, street medics, and jail support. Additionally, AIUSA sent delegations of human rights observers to Ferguson to monitor policing of protests in the weeks following Mike Brown’s killing, and in the weeks before and after the announcement of the St. Louis grand jury’s decision in the case in November.

     Those delegations found clear evidence of unlawful use of excessive force and lack of compliance with international law and standards with respect to policing and human rights. Those findings were documented in the reports On the Streets of America: Human Rights Abuses in Ferguson and in Deadly Force: Police Use of Deadly Force in the United States.

154. rq says

     21 August 2015 at 8:45 am

     I may be out for the weekend, I don’t know yet, but if I am, have a good one!

155. rq says

     24 August 2015 at 1:59 am

     Some behind stuff from Friday:
     Seattle Protest: Stop Denying White Privilege

     Note: Most of the Popular Resistance team participated in the anti-racism protest held in Seattle on August 17th at the end of the Localize This Action Camp organized by the Backbone Campaign. Our hope is that activists across the country will emulate this protest to highlight the reality of white privilege and the need for the people of the nation to continue to work for racial justice.

     We urge you to hold an event like this in your community, we can provide you with a pdf of the flier used, the elephant used can be shipped to you (it just goes in a suitcase) and below is the mic check we used to tell the story of racism in the United States. Of course, you can also modify all of these things and make your own version. The elephant does not have to be three dimensional, but can be a large cardboard cut out. However you want to do it, do it, we urge you to highlight the reality of racism continuing in the United States.

     Study shows African Americans discriminated against in access to US local public services, from the University of Southapton.

     The study finds that email queries coming from senders with distinctively African American names are four per cent less likely to receive an answer than identical emails signed by ‘white-sounding’ names.

     The difference in response was most evident in correspondence to sheriffs’ offices, with ‘black-sounding’ names seven per cent less likely to receive a response than ‘white-sounding’ names.

     Responses to ‘black-sounding’ senders were also less likely to have a ‘cordial’ tone, that is, respondents were less likely to address the sender by name or with a salutation (such as “Dear” or “Hello”).

     Co-author of the study Dr Corrado Giulietti, from the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), comments: “Despite the fact that prohibition of racial discrimination by the government is a central tenet of US law, our finding shows that not all citizens are treated equally by local public service providers.

     “Local services constitute the majority of interactions between government institutions and citizens and perform central functions, for instance in education. The discriminatory attitude that our study uncovers could be one of the factors behind the disadvantaged position of black people in American society and could be a major obstacle towards addressing racial inequality.”

     The researchers conducted what is known as a correspondence study, a well-established approach of detecting discrimination that has previously been used in contexts like job applications and the housing market.

     Using this strategy, the researchers sent emails soliciting information relevant to access a public service, such as office opening hours or documentation needed for school enrollment, from 19,079 local public offices around the country. Targeted services include school districts, local libraries, sheriff offices, county clerks, county treasurers and job centres in every US state. Four correspondent names (two to represent each ethnicity) were chosen as most distinctively recognisable to each group, based upon information from previous studies.

     While emails signed by ‘white-sounding’ names received a response in 72 per cent of the cases, identical emails signed by ‘black-sounding’ names received a response 68 per cent of the time – a four-percentage point difference. The difference was the largest for sheriff offices (seven percentage points), while small and statistically insignificant for county clerks and job centres.

     There was also a difference in the tone of the response; 72 per cent of responses to people with ‘white-sounding’ names addressed the sender by name or with a salutation, as opposed to 66 per cent of responses to people with ‘black sounding’ names.

     While discrimination is often thought of as being stronger in different regions of the country, the gap in the response rate is not concentrated in a specific area of the US.

     Co-author Professor Mirco Tonin, from the University of Southampton, explains: “We find similar levels of discrimination in each of the four regions defined by the Census Bureau (North-East, Mid-West, South and West). We do find a stronger racial gap in rural rather than urban counties. Moreover, it appears that discrimination is not solely due to the perceived lower socio-economic background of black senders. We obtain very similar results when we indicate the very same profession (real estate agent) in the signature of black and white senders.”

     Regarding possible interventions to address the problem, Dr Michael Vlassopoulos, also of Southampton, comments: “When trying to identify the race of the respondent, we find suggestive evidence that black respondents are less likely to ignore emails from black senders than white respondents. This suggests that increasing diversity among the public sector workforce, particularly in the services where we detect higher discriminatory attitudes, could be an effective way of addressing discrimination.”

     The article contains a link to the actual paper.

     Alabama officer accuses police chief of ordering black cops to work black protests

     A police officer in Homewood, Alabama has filed a complaint accusing the police chief of ordering every black officer in the department to come in and work a Black Lives Matter protest, even if they already worked that day or had it off.

     The complaint was filed by Officer Victor Sims, who also said he was turned down for a promotion after Police Chief Jim Roberson asked specifically if Sims had applied for one. The complaint was filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and named the City of Homewood Police Department as the agency that discriminated against him.

     “I believe I have been discriminated against based upon my race and color, and in retaliation for opposing discriminatory conduct in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended,” Sims’ complaint reads.

     It also cites “race,”“color” and “retaliation” as the causes of discrimination.

     Specifically, Sims said that the incident occurred on or near July 26, 2015, when he and other African-American colleagues were specifically called in to work a protest by a supervisor because they are black. The order officially came from Roberson himself, and the website AL.com obtained an audio recording of the command.

     “This is chief. Nobody thought to have any of the black officers come in to work. I gave them a direct order. I want them called. I want them there. I want them in uniform. ASAP. Make sure that gets done,” the recording states.

     While Sims said he worked the extra shift, he added that he complained about having to do so and that his complaint eventually made its way to Roberson. A few days later, the chief then called Sims and another officer into his office to apologize “if [our] feelings got hurt,” the complaint reads.

     Sim’s attorney, Mary-Ellen Bates, told AL.com that a white officer has also contacted her to say he was upset he did not have the chance to work the protest because he would’ve liked the extra money.

     Meanwhile, Sims alleged that he was passed over two promotions because of his race.

     Protesters call for police board to fire cop acquitted in fatal shooting. As if they will.

     Community activists and demonstrators shut down a Chicago Police Board meeting Thursday night as they angrily demanded the firing of Detective Dante Servin, an officer acquitted in the fatal shooting of Rekia Boyd in 2012.

     About 200 people packed the meeting at Chicago Police headquarters in the Bronzeville neighborhood, many wearing yellow shirts with black print reading: “Fire Police Officer Dante Servin.” The group comprised demonstrators from the Black Lives Matter, Black Youth Project 100 and We Charge Genocide groups.

     Boyd’s brother, Martinez Sutton, yelled at the board in tears as he pleaded for Servin to be terminated.

     Birmingham News lays off last black reporter. It’s not so much that they should keep them just because they’re black, but the fact that they’ve never hired enough other black journalists for this to not be an issue. In Birmingham.

     The big news from Alabama Media Group’s (AMG) recent announcement of more newsroom layoffs was that among those losing their jobs was Barnett Wright, the last black reporter at the Birmingham News. The moves were made as AMG makes a transition to more digital and video content. Birmingham, Alabama’s largest city, is 73.4 percent black according to U.S. Census data. Wright declined to comment for this story.

     “Staff reductions include 5 to 9 full-time journalists in each of our three main locations across the state,” wrote the Group’s vice president of content Michelle Holmes in a staff memo. “We know many of you will say goodbye to trusted colleagues and friends. We wish the best for those who leave our organization today and thank them for their dedication and good work.”

     Sherrel Wheeler Stewart is a founding member of the Birmingham Association of Black Journalists, a lifelong resident of the city who served as a reporter for the Birmingham News from 1982 to 1987 then again from 1998 to 2012. “Birmingham is synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement. I grew up hearing about the struggles of black journalists to cover the movement. It was tough,” she recalled.

     When Stewart started at the newspaper in 1982, she said it was trying to do a better job to reflect the blacks in the community. “There were six or seven black journalists. As the staff grew, there was a greater emphasis on recruiting African-Americans on staff,” she said. “We networked to make sure that the pool of candidates was always diverse.”

     There are still some great reporters at the Birmingham News that work hard to do their jobs, said Stewart. “But at the end of the day, you look at the faces and there are no African-American boots on the ground in Birmingham,” she stated. “I’ve gotten calls from people including a judge and a business leader asking ‘who do we call now?’ It’s definitely a concern for the black community. These are people who read the newspaper and are engaged in the community.”

     All that power? What Should Black Lives Matter Do with All That Power?

     At this point, Black Lives Matter could be a historic civil rights movement that significantly changes America. Or it could fizzle out like Occupy Wall Street, an exciting and disruptive political force that briefly rose to prominence and then flamed out without leaving an indelible mark on the political landscape. Or it could go in another direction entirely. The Black Lives Matter movement is at a crossroads, and how it spends its growing political capital will determine everything.

     The movement has acquired that political capital because of the moral importance of its cause. New stories of shocking and deplorable police behavior, and the dead black bodies left in its wake, seem to emerge weekly, faster than the media can absorb them. So before America has finished processing the tragic death of Sandra Bland, it’s suddenly forced to work through what happened to Sam Dubose before blam! it’s on to Christian Taylor. Then the prosecutor from some previous saga, maybe Tamir Rice or John Crawford, pops back into the news again, saying that another killer has been arrested or indicted—or, more often, that they’re free to go.
     […]

     It’s emotionally and spiritually exhausting, and the Black Lives Matter movement’s controversially disruptive tactics have flowed out of that exhaustion—flowed from that sense of being sick and tired of being sick and tired. Because the murders by police brutality is nothing new. Our parents and grandparents have their own stories of unarmed lives lost. The big difference today is technological—the ubiquity of cameras has made the stories undeniable and revealed just how often cops are lying.

     The disruptive tactics are appropriate given the dire nature of their cause, aimed at hijacking and redirecting a conversation that would not otherwise be about dead and endangered black bodies. They recall, for me, the ACT-UP protests of the late 80s, when gay-rights demonstrators disrupted all sorts of events in order to get the nation to focus on the AIDS crisis. To fixate on these tactics is to ask why communities that have long been ignored are being so impolite in the way they demand to not be unjustly killed. If you’re a so-called Black Lives Matter ally who has a problem with the movement’s tactics, then you’re not really an ally at all.
     […]

     The reality is, Black Lives Matter tactics are working. So far, this young group has shaped the Democratic presidential race more than any of the left’s old-guard special interest groups. Black Lives Matter activists have been extremely effective at forcing their concerns to the top of the Democratic agenda, forcing Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Martin O’Malley to take meetings with them and release policy ideas that address the movement’s concerns. But Black Lives Matter is poised to accomplish more.

     We are in an era of deep partisanship, in which the presidential race no longer boils down to a battle for the middle. There is no longer a persuadable center in American politics any more. Nowadays, elections are not about persuasion, winning over independent or centrist voters. They’re about motivation—turning out the people on your side, instilling voters with a sense of urgency and importance that forces them to show up to the polls.

     Democrats know that if too many black people stay home next November, the party could lose the White House. And in this election, the black vote cannot be taken for granted because Black Lives Matter has sharpened black political power to a knife’s edge.

     Now, finally, Democrats are calling for criminal justice reform, no longer afraid that it will come across as evidence that they are “weak on crime.” So the moment is ripe to shove the Democratic establishment as far leftward as it can on criminal justice reform. The moment is ripe to change Black America’s relationship with American police. The political system may or may not respond to specific demands—but as Occupy Wall Street learned, the generalized message of a need for change can be easily shoved aside.
     […]

     Of course, Black Lives Matter’s leaders understand this. “The goal of Black Lives Matter is to transform America’s systemic hatred against Black people,” Cullors writes in the Washington Post. “Yes, we will fight for policy reform, but we know that every gain in this area can be retracted if we do not change the anti-Black culture in this country.”

     But policy reform will be critical in making concrete gains—the killings can be stopped by changing deeply-held racial biases, but that will take a long time. I hope Black Lives Matter will put its muscle behind one particular idea and try to force that idea into the political conversation in 2016. An idea that I believe is at the heart of our policing problem—the reason why police are positioned as occupying forces in so many working class communities of color, why some young black and brown people end up working in an underground industry that inevitably leads to police confrontations, fueling suspicion and fear. To me, the core of our policing problem is the War on Drugs.

     The War on Drugs helps fuel the illegal drug trade, making drugs more lucrative and thus making that industry valuable for economically devastated areas where people need jobs and, and are also looking for ways to help soothe soul-deep pain. The failed War on Drugs positions America to see all black men as potential criminals, and positions the police to play whack-a-mole in the hood while getting lots of federal money in return, despite doing little to actually curb the drug trade. The War on Drugs, as Michelle Alexander explained in her seminal book The New Jim Crow, positions black people as resources to be used—mass incarceration has allowed police, prosecutors, judges, politicians, prison operators and others to make money from black bodies.

     The only thing that could fundamentally damage the illegal drug trade is to end the War on Drugs by creating a legal option to buy and sell drugs. Allow the private sector to sell drugs in a way that is organized and taxed by the government like almost any other product. Without that we cede control of drug trafficking to the most dangerous members of society and forfeit billions in potential taxation. Without that we continue to hold out hope that prohibition will work, when it hasn’t for decades.

     So, some of you might be asking, should we just let people do drugs? Yes. Why are we criminalizing the choices people make about what they put in their own bodies? In what other capacity do you like the government serving as a nanny state, telling you what’s best for you? Several state governments are already getting out of that business, either legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana.

     Prohibition will never work. We know this because we’ve tried. The US government has spent decades and trillions of dollars, and quintupled its prison population without lessening the availability of drugs. But what if we give drug dealers real competition from the private sector? It would make the entire arrangement less attractive, taking a significant swath of customers away from the underground economy, thus making the costs of smuggling and dealing drugs less lucrative, thus damaging and shrinking that industry and giving us a chance to refocus our policing. Ending the War on Drugs is essential if we are going to change the way the police interact with black men and women.

     Black Lives Matter could, in this political climate, with its current level of power, demand Democratic candidates start talking about ending the War on Drugs. If Sanders makes it a big part of his platform, then Clinton will have to discuss it, too. And if that happens then we may be on the way to seeing Black Lives Matter fundamentally change America.

     So that’s where that was going. Funny how, though, he never mentions anything about treatment programs or support programs for those who want to quit drugs. Needle-exchange programs and stuff. Sure, people can do the drugs they want – it’s their body – but they also need a network of support in case they want to get off the drugs and can’t do it on their own. And they should have the opportunity to do them safely – legalization does not necessarily mean regulation or adherence to health codes and the like.
     Anyway.

156. rq says

     24 August 2015 at 2:19 am

     14-Year-Old Shot By Cops After Fleeing Now Faces Assault Charge. Waistbands and guns.

     A Trenton, New Jersey, teen faces assault and weapons charges after fleeing from police officers who shot him multiple times.

     New Jersey’s Office of the Attorney General announced three charges against the teen, identified by his lawyer as Radazz Hearns, in a news release on Tuesday.

     Hearns was released from the hospital on Friday. He has been charged for unlawful possession of a handgun, aggravated assault and possession of a defaced firearm.

     The assault charge comes because, authorities say, the teen allegedly pointed a gun at police officers as they chased him.
     […]

     “Law enforcement witnesses and a civilian eyewitness” told investigators that Hearns was holding a gun as he ran, and that one of the officers yelled “gun” before they shot the teen, hitting him multiple times in the legs and buttocks, the attorney general’s office stated.

     The office’s initial statement after the incident didn’t mention that Hearns was holding a gun. It said only that “witnesses reported” that he “was reaching into his waistband” while authorities pursued him, and that “a .22-caliber automatic handgun containing three rounds of ammunition was later recovered underneath a vehicle at the scene.”

     The kid is lucky to be alive! Oh, and he’s black. In case you hadn’t guessed.

     Protesters unveil demands for stricter US policing laws as political reach grows – all that protesting? It’s changing something. Still can’t say how much or how significantly, but it’s making change happen.

     Leaders in the new civil rights movement campaigning against the killings of African Americans by police set out their most comprehensive set of policies and demands so far on Friday, as they moved to intensify their rapidly increasing influence on US politics.

     The coalition of protesters outlined proposals for new laws at federal and state levels such as restricting the use of deadly force by officers, outlawing the supply of military equipment to police departments, instituting training to prevent racial bias and forcing the US government to keep a comprehensive record of fatal incidents.

     “We must end police violence so we can live and feel safe in this country,” the group stated on a new website, Campaign Zero, which also establishes an issue-by-issue system for monitoring the policy positions of candidates for the Democratic and Republican US presidential nominations.

     The unveiling of the detailed policy platform followed a series of disruptions by protesters affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement of presidential campaign rallies held by presidential candidates across the country, including former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. The actions have succeeded in pushing police and criminal justice reform to the forefront of the race for the Democratic nomination.

     “America is finally waking up to this very necessary and critical conversation about race, equity and preserving the life and dignity of all citizens,” Brittany Packnett, one of the activists behind Campaign Zero, said in an interview.

     “These policies, like our resistance, will save lives and introduce a new way of viewing political strategy,” said Aurielle Lucier, the co-founder of the Atlanta-based activist group It’s Bigger Than You. “This is a blueprint for ending police violence,” said DeRay McKesson, another leading activist involved in the project.

     More on the platform at the link.

     At Hurley High, Confederate battle flag is everywhere and means everything. What a bunch of rebels, eh?

     Chris Spencer is the only African-American student at Hurley High School, where the front doors he walks through each morning are painted with the Confederate battle flag, the first of many he’ll see on any given school day.

     The helmets of his Hurley Rebels football team sport a stylized logo of the flag, flying from a saber. Equipment in the weight room is stamped with the image too. Crossed battle flags are on the wall in the school’s main office. Rebel Man, with a rebel flag, adorns center court in the gym.

     But Spencer needn’t wait until he arrives at school to see such images. He carries one with him wherever he goes. The senior running back has a battle flag tattoo on the underside of his right forearm, where he cradles the ball on each carry.

     “It doesn’t mean racism to me,” Spencer tells USA TODAY Sports. “I just look at it as a flag. It’s our mascot. It just means our school.”

     That’s the party line in Hurley, a tiny coalmining community tucked into the southwest corner of Virginia, south of Kentucky and west of West Virginia, where longtime citizens say they just want to be left alone to rally around a symbol that’s been with them for as long as they can remember.

     “It means heritage, not hate,” Hurley High principal Pam Tester says. “You won’t find a single person in Hurley who thinks different.”

     And that includes Spencer, who wears his heart on his sleeve and his tattoo under it. In a community that’s overwhelmingly white, the artwork on his arm is often offered as Exhibit A for the defense.
     […]

     Rebels is the nickname at roughly 200 high schools across the USA and these days several are reviewing the name and attendant imagery. Southside High in Fort Smith, Ark., is phasing out its Rebels name and ending Dixie as its fight song. Vestavia Hills High in Alabama is rebranding its Rebels, keeping the name but eliminating some of the symbols.

     No such introspection is apparent in Hurley, an unincorporated community in Buchanan County, one of Virginia’s poorest. The county was founded in 1858, just before the Civil War, and according to the 2010 census had a population of a little more than 24,000, roughly 97% white.

     Hurley’s population is estimated a bit above 3,000. On game nights, it can feel as if all of them are at The Cliff, a one-of-a-kind stadium where Smiley Ratliff Field is blasted out of rock. Behind one end zone, and behind most of one sideline, is sheer stone. You can get a stiff neck peering up to the tree-topped summit.

     Tester says dynamite cleared the way for this field of dreams sometime in the early 1980s. “We’re miners here,” she says. “We know how to do that.”

     It’s the sort of can-do spirit that animates mountain pride hereabouts: When you can’t find 100 yards of flat earth, you make it. But coal is disappearing as a way of life and that means less work in Hurley. Darwin Bailey is out of work just now. His friend, Roger Hurley, finds common ground between unemployment and anti-flag deployment.

     “The liberals and the tree huggers want to shut down the mines,” he says. “And next thing they’ll want to shut down our flag too.”

     Remembering the lynching of Leo Frank, 100 years later – kinda missed the actual anniversary day.

     One hundred years ago this week, on Aug. 17, 1915, a lynching took place in Georgia that was no more or less horrible than any other. It was unusual because the victim, Leo Frank, was a white Jew convicted and condemned to hang based on the testimony of a black man. When the death sentence was commuted to life in prison, he was taken forcibly from jail and lynched.
     […]

     Under what circumstance, if any, can we justify standing by — rather than standing up — when we witness injustice? The power of outspokenness was demonstrated just prior to the Frank case, when a vocal Jewish community and Emile Zola sparked the pardoning of Alfred Dreyfus, a French artillery officer wrongly convicted of treason based entirely on perjury and anti-Semitism. The power of turn-of-the century Americans to address injustice was demonstrated by the abilities of the then-newly minted NAACP and National Urban League to raise national consciousness regarding the far more common hate crimes against blacks.

     We need to remember the costs of silence now. The Internet and social media provide us with extraordinary abilities to document bigotry and injustice and to raise a ruckus to fight them. If there was little justification for silence a century ago, there is none today.

     In the cases of Freddie Gray, James Price, Eric Garner and many others, people have used this new power to participate in politics via social media. The #BlackLivesMatter movement has kept racist brutality in the public eye. Its members have met with Hillary Clinton and brought key issues regarding black America to the attention of other presidential candidates, such as Donald Trump and Ben Carson. The perceived power of silence and its potential for misuse are evident in a recent Drexel University study identifying politicians and industrialists who have spent over $1 billion to suppress scientific evidence around global warming.

     To be sure, Frank was only one of approximately 4,000 lynchings in America that occurred between 1877 and 1950 in the South. The fear to speak out against lynching can be seen in President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 failure to support an anti-lynching bill, the Costigan-Wagner Act, ostensibly for reasons of political exigency. I have trouble supporting Roosevelt’s silence or the quietness of the Atlanta Jewish community, but I can only read about the social pressures of those times. There is no uncertainty regarding those who wish to ignore or suppress our past and present difficulties in this millennium. Albert Einstein’s statement that “If I were to remain silent, I would be guilty of complicity,” still applies.

     Leo Frank, along with many others, was a victim of his community’s fear of using its First Amendment right to speak out against injustice. The mob psychology and legal chicanery that led to his death is immoral. The 100-year anniversary of Frank’s lynching reminds us that the more subtle, and more insidious, power of silence is just as dangerous.

     Chief Dotson defends tactics during unrest; autopsy shows Ball-Bey died of wound to his back – and the official story has changed over the weekend while I was away. Surprise, surprise. Locations have changed from alleys to backyards and now it appears that Ball-Bey wasn’t even at the property purportedly being investigated.

     St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson defended Thursday the tactics city police used the previous night during unrest that broke out in north St. Louis after the fatal police shooting of Mansur Ball-Bey. Later that night St. Louis police officers held back as a group marched to the intersection of Euclid and Maryland avenues and blocked traffic there for almost an hour.

     On Friday morning, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department released a statement saying that the city’s medical examiner’s preliminary autopsy “indicates Ball-Bey sustained a single gunshot wound to his back.”

     Last August Dotson criticized St. Louis County Police for using militarized tactics in Ferguson, but city police used tear gas and an armored vehicle Wednesday night to disperse protesters blocking the intersection of Page Avenue and Walton Boulevard after bricks and bottles were thrown at police.

     “I was getting calls from aldermen saying my residents are concerned. They’re hearing that individuals have gasoline, have charcoal lighter, talking about setting buildings on fire—which they did. We had to get control of the situation,” Dotson said. “Last night no police officers were injured, no protesters were injured. So we get caught up in the optics, but the idea is to keep people safe.”

     At least one building and one car were set on fire Wednesday night, but not until after police dispersed the crowd with tear gas.

     Dotson also disputed claims from protesters that his officers gave insufficient warning before using the tear gas.

     About those burnings, too. No word on what witnesses were saying about white people lighting them and running away.

     Police patrol Rosedale neighborhood after man who waved Confederate flag charged in assault. Just a flag. Heritage not hate!

     Pietrowski told The Sun he was in his driveway when Herold approached him. Herold threatened to kill people in the neighborhood — “especially these [expletives],” he said, pointing at homes where black families live, according to Pietrowski.

     Neither Herold nor his family could be reached for comment Thursday.

157. rq says

     24 August 2015 at 2:29 am

     Chris Ball-Bey wept for his brother Mansur at his vigil at Page & Walton in St. Louis. @LBPhoto1 photo 8/20
     March for Jamyla Bolden to Mike Brown memorial in Ferguson. @LBPhoto1 photo 8/20

     NEWS ROUNDUP: #BlackLivesMatter Activist Denies Lying About Race, Former President Jimmy Carter Has Brain Cancer…AND MORE I point you downstream towards the article that reads:

     Medical Examiner in Eric Garner Case is a Former NYPD Cop

     It was recently discovered that one of the medical examiners responsible for studying evidence for federal prosecutors in the Eric Garner case was a former NYPD officer. According to sources, Lieutenant Col. Philip Berran, who serves as a U.S. Army pathologist, worked on the case. “When I became a cop I never thought anything would get me out of the police world,” said Berran in his book. “Then I found something more interesting that combines all my skills, policing, law and medicine. My interest in pathology began with my admiration for the work of the New York City Medical Examiner.” Forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, who was hired by the Garner family, said he hopes Berran would realize the correct cause of death: asphyxiation at the hands of a police officer. “I would think that the military person (Berran) would agree that was the cause of death,” said Baden.

     Isn’t that a conflict of interest?

     From “teen” to “man”. From “pointed a gun” to “flourished”. The changing language of a public relations campaign. Re: language used in media to ref. Mansur Ball-Bey.

     Man killed by St. Louis police died from gunshot in the back. Note: “man”, not “teen”.

     An autopsy on Mansur Ball-Bey, whose death from police gunfire this week stirred protests, showed that he died from a single wound in the back, police officials said.

     Chief Sam Dotson said the wound’s location neither proves nor disproves the contention of officers at the scene that Ball-Bey refused to drop a gun and pointed it at them before being shot Wednesday.

     An investigation of the particulars continues, Dotson said.

     “Just because he was shot in the back doesn’t mean he was running away,” Dotson said. “It could be, and I’m not saying that it doesn’t mean that. I just don’t know yet.

     “What I do know is that two officers were involved and fired shots, but I don’t know exactly where they were standing yet and I won’t know until I get their statements.”

     It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy, but this has been a suspicious coincidence in the minds of many: Cumberland County settles suit over alleged jail assault of man later killed by police

     A settlement has been reached in a lawsuit that Jerame Reid — the man shot and killed by police during a traffic stop in Bridgeton — had pending against Cumberland County at the time of his death.

     Cumberland County recently approved a $340,000 settlement to be awarded to Reid’s estate, according to an official close to the case.

     The matter is headed to federal court for final approval and then a probate court will decide how the assets are to be distributed.

     The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Camden in January 2011, alleged Reid was assaulted while held in the Cumberland County Jail. It names the county, Cumberland County Department of Corrections, Warden Robert Balicki, and three corrections officers: Victor Bermudez, John Zamot and John Ballard.

     The attorney representing Reid — Mark Frost of Mark Frost & Associates, in Philadelphia — said he will be filing a petition to approve the settlement by June 26.

     “The settlement has already been agreed upon and approved by the Cumberland County Board of Chosen Freeholders,” Frost said.

158. rq says

     24 August 2015 at 3:01 am

     Are Traumatized Students Disabled? A Debate Straight Outta Compton

     An unprecedented, class action lawsuit brought against one Southern California school district and its top officials could have a big impact on schools across the country.

     On Thursday in Los Angeles, a U.S. District Court judge will preside over the first hearing in the suit against the Compton Unified School District. To understand the complaint, you need to understand Compton.

     The city, located just south of LA, has long had a violent reputation. Last year, its murder rate was more than five times the national average. Now, a handful of students say they’ve been traumatized by life in Compton and that the schools there have failed to give them the help they deserve.

     The complaint is a terrifying read — of kids coping with physical and sexual abuse, addicted parents, homelessness and a constant fear of violence.°[…]

     Susan Ko of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress says exposure to violence can have a profound effect on the brain’s ability to learn.

     “That impacts concentration, the ability to just listen to what the teacher is saying, to understand what you’re reading, to remember something that you learned or what the teacher just said,” Ko says.

     Not only that, many traumatized students live in a state of constant alarm. Innocent interactions like a bump in the hallway or a request from a teacher can stir anger and bad behavior.

     The lawsuit alleges that, in Compton, the schools’ reaction to traumatized students was too often punishment — not help.

     “They were repeatedly either sent to another school, expelled or suspended — and this went back to kindergarten,” says Marleen Wong, who teaches at the USC School of Social Work and has spent decades studying kids and trauma. “I think we’re really doing a terrible disservice to these children.”

     The suit argues that trauma is a disability and that schools are required — by federal law — to make accommodations for traumatized students, not expel them. The plaintiffs want Compton Unified to provide teacher training, mental health support for students and to use conflict-mediation before resorting to suspension.

     “That’s a very strong mandate, and it needs to be funded,” says the district’s attorney, David Huff. He argues the suit uses too broad a definition of disability and sends the wrong message to kids living in other struggling neighborhoods.

     “A sweeping declaration would effectively tell these children that they have now been labeled as having a physical or mental handicap under federal law.”

     Compton Unified has asked the judge to dismiss the case.

     Now that’s the kind of caring attitude I expect from educational institutions. :P Fuck them.

     Here, in tweet format, more comparison in the Ball-Bey shooting story: #MansurBallBey. (Short video there.)
     In original version, officers were in alley. In new version, they are in 2 diff positions in backyard.#MansurBallBey (Side-by-side text comparison.)

     Police union slams circuit attorney over investigation into officer-involved fatal shooting. Well waddayano, the police union is being an asshole.

     The head of the city’s police union slammed Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce on Saturday about her decision to conduct an investigation separate from the ongoing police inquiry into the killing of Mansur Ball-Bey by an officer this past week.

     Ball-Bey, 18, was shot in the back.

     The killing, and the violent confrontation between police and protesters that followed, came less than two weeks after officers and protesters faced off on the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s killing by then-Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.

     Joyce’s decision is a departure from the usual protocol in which her office would wait until getting the results of the police investigation before conducting its own.

     The separate and simultaneous investigations did not sit well with Joe Steiger, president of the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association, who called Joyce’s decision politically motivated.

     “Jennifer Joyce’s announcement is a discredit to the members of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department,” Steiger said in a statement.

     Steiger also took exception to Joyce making her announcement while standing next to representatives from the NAACP.

     “The involved officers welcome an impartial investigation in which the sole purpose is to determine and report the facts of the incident,” Steiger said.

     Aligning herself with the civil rights organization, “suggests this investigation is motivated by political appeasement and not the pursuit of truth and justice,” he said.

     You can read her response, too: Statement from Circuit Attorney Jennifer M. Joyce in response to SLPOA

     I understand that this is an emotional and trying time for everyone, however, I am having difficulty understanding the position of the St. Louis Police Officers Association.

     Our announcement clearly indicated the Circuit Attorney’s Office would be conducting the exact same review as under normal protocol; the Office is simply beginning immediately and expediting the process. This does not change the review, nor does it change the open-minded and objective approach to the investigation. There will be no rush to judgment.

     I personally spoke with the Chief of Police prior to announcing the change in the process and he expressed no objections to the new timetable. Furthermore, a top member of my staff also spoke with the leader of the Department’s Force Investigative Unit who, far from being offended, expressed his desire to get started with us Monday morning, pledging full cooperation.

     The role of the Circuit Attorney’s Office is to conduct a meticulous, thorough and independent review of the facts and circumstances of officer-involved shootings. Our sole job is to determine if a violation of Missouri law occurred and if such violation can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Our review will be conducted independently of the police investigation. Differences of opinion will occur when agencies are independent. This helps ensure fairness and justice.

     I have great regard for the hard working men and women of the police department. I am fully aware that police are much safer on our streets when community tensions are calmed. Expediting the review process is a step towards promoting community trust and public safety.

     I am proud to stand with the President of the NAACP as he shares our desire to help bring the community together and encourage witness participation in this process. We appreciate the efforts of all those who work together to ensure safety for everyone in our great city.

     A fine statement.

     Black Man Shot by Police in St. Louis Died From Bullet to Back, the New York Times.

159. rq says

     24 August 2015 at 3:10 am

     Science Fiction Is Really, Really White. But we already knew that.

     The 2015 Hugo Awards, celebrating the year’s best works of science fiction and fantasy, will be held this weekend amid a giant squabble about diversity in the genre. A group of white writers who believe that the voting process has been manipulated to include too many minorities are fighting to steer votes towards authors that are truer to the genre.

     But if you crunch the numbers, it’s pretty hard to argue that white writers are being squeezed out at the Hugos. Vocativ tabulated every writer, editor and artist associated with the 65 works nominated this year in all 13 professional categories (there are four categories for fan work). Out of nearly 100 people responsible for those 65 works (some works had multiple authors), only three were non white.

     One of the three, Chinese writer Liu Cixin, became a nominee for Best Novel only after white author Marko Kloos withdrew in response to the controversy over diversity.

     We also added up all the nominees for Best Novel, the top honor, going all the way back through the Hugos’ 62-year history. Since 1953, there have been 300 nominations for Best Novel—and only five of those writers were non white. (There were three African Americans: Samuel R. Delany in 1969; Nalo Hopkinson in 2001; N.K. Jemisin in 2011; one Arab American writer Saladin Ahmed and one Chinese writer, Liu.) No minority writer has won the award yet.

     False alarm, Sad and Rabid Puppies, false alarm!

     New York over the weekend:
     #NicholasHeywardJr’s father speaks about his son, shot & killed by a NYC housing cop at 13-years-old.
     Five facts about #NicholasHeywardJr, a 13-year-old shot & killed by a NYC housing cop who was charged with NOTHING.
     It’s a police shooting dating back to 1994.

     One year ago: 2014: #Utah Cops Killed Black Anime Cosplayer With Toy Sword http://bit.ly/1WLBqAc #opDarrienHunt #BlackLivesMatter

     St. Louis Police Wives Association seeking donations. Maybe they can raise some funds and make some lunches for the black community, too. That would be a nice gesture.

160. rq says

     24 August 2015 at 8:34 am

     First Kerrick juror speaks after mistrial, so a mistrial there – not the result people were hoping for.

     On the dry-erase board in the jury room, Moses Wilson wrote a question:

     “What did Jonathan Ferrell DO to warrant death? 10 shots.”

     Wilson, one of the four jurors who voted to convict Randall “Wes” Kerrick, said Saturday he never got a satisfactory answer to that question through the three-week trial of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police officer.

     Wilson, 67, the only African-American male on the jury, moved to Charlotte in 2008 after retiring from a career as a court constable in Boston.

     Wilson said he didn’t care for a defense strategy that seemed to make Ferrell into a villain in the fatal encounter two years ago.

     “Randall Kerrick wasn’t on trial,” said Wilson, a Vietnam veteran who served as a medic. “You know who was on trial? Jonathan Ferrell.”

     Kerrick’s attorneys used every opportunity to demonize Ferrell, said Wilson – pointing out he’d had a few beers, smoked some marijuana before crashing his car the night of the shooting and noting that he wasn’t able to stay in college.

     But Wilson said that Ferrell held down a job and was invited to join his friends, showing he was a sociable man.

     Wilson said he would not speak for other jurors or reveal the dynamics of the deliberations, but would share his personal experience.

     There’s more at the link. But I guess that’s the typical thing, isn’t it, paint the victim in such a way that it looks like they deserved death in some way. Ugly.

     Appeals Court: Woman Pepper Sprayed by NYPD Can Sue for Excessive Force. Hope she wins!

     Rapper Wiz Khalifa Violently Arrested by Cops at LAX for Using a Hoverboard

     On Saturday night, the chart-topping 27-year-old rapper posted a video taken by an onlooker that depicts a swarm of border patrol agents and police officers confronting him at Los Angeles International Airport for allegedly refusing to get off a hoverboard.

     “This? I didn’t do nothing, anyway. What you want to do? Put me in jail because I didn’t listen to what you say?” he says to the cops. “We can have all the conversations you want to, you can end up on TMZ, destined to become as famous as you wanna be.”

     A further video of the incident shared by the emcee on his Instagram, whose time stamp reads that it was taken at 3:56 pm PT, shows Khalifa being slammed to the ground on his stomach by three officers yelling, “Stop resisting!” Khalifa doesn’t appear to be resisting at all in the video, and is shown lying still on the ground, calmly replying, “I’m not resisting, sir,” as the trio of cops continue to yell “stop resisting” at him whilst cuffing him and applying pressure to his back.

     Neither money, nor education, nor social standing, nor fame…

     St. Louis cop union mouthpiece Jeff Roorda’s idea of a “media” release. Note “To” line.
     I still don’t like Roorda.

     Angola Prison and the Shadow of Slavery

     A few years ago, I was on a panel at the Tennessee Williams Festival titled “Writing New Orleans: The Most Exotic place in America.” It was held in the largest room in the hotel where the annual literary festival is held, and the room was packed. This surprised me but shouldn’t have: people in New Orleans can be counted on to show an interest in New Orleans.

     My co-panelists were Nathaniel Rich, the New Orleans-based novelist and journalist; Kim Marie Vaz, a dean at Xavier University and the author of a book on the Baby Dolls, a women’s Mardi Gras organization; and Richard Campanella, the Tulane geographer and historian. After a lively panel discussion there was a Q. & A., at the end of which Jackie Clarkson, a longtime city-council member (and the mother of the actress Patricia Clarkson) took the microphone. She delivered a brief speech about the glory of New Orleans—how it was the greatest city in the world.

     Her remarks sounded to me like they were intended to sum up of the preceding discussion. I didn’t like the tidiness of the sentiment. When she was done, I leaned forward to the microphone in front of me and, almost to my own astonishment, said: “Hearing those words of praise for New Orleans makes me think of something that Stanley Moss, a poet I know, told me just before I moved down here. ‘New Orleans,’ he declared in his sonorous poet’s voice, ‘stinks of slavery.’ When I got here, I looked around and decided that this was not the case at all. If anything, race relations seemed more friendly than in the North. But the longer I am here, the more I see his point.”

     Immediately, most of the audience members went into bobblehead motion, half nodding vigorously in agreement, the other half shaking their heads. A wave of murmuring swept over the room. A few minutes later, the panel was adjourned. People crowded up to the table where we sat, some to praise my words, others to damn them. “You have it all wrong. Have you seen ‘The Princess and the Frog’?” one said, with a completely straight face, referring to Disney’s fairy-tale movie. “New Orleans is exactly like that!”

     Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick’s photographs from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, which were taken between 1980 and 2013, are a subset of their work in the same way that the prison is a kind of annex to the world of New Orleans. The prison farm, which is commonly known as Angola, is the country’s largest maximum-security prison, in a state that imprisons more people per capita than any other in the United States. Situated a hundred and forty miles northwest of New Orleans, the prison was taken over by the state in 1901, having been founded, twenty years before, on land consolidated from several cotton and sugarcane plantations, the largest of which was named Angola, after the country its slaves came from.

     From the beginning, it was a brutal, for-profit farming operation, a system in some ways reminiscent of slavery, but with less incentive to keep the workers alive. Since the prison’s current warden, Burl Cain, took over, in 1995, Angola has become a less violent place, with a reputation for reform and a faintly entrepreneurial aura. It is known today for an on-site museum and for a biannual prison rodeo, begun fifty years ago and professionalized in recent decades, which draws thousands of visitors a year. But the prison still draws controversy for its use of solitary confinement, among other things: recent lawsuits filed in Louisiana courts allege that Angola’s inmates receive inadequate medical care and that inmates on death row are subjected to unsafe temperatures .

     More at the link.

     Last year, the phrase repeated the most at #afropunk was “Hands up, dont shoot.” This year, it’s “Black trans lives matter.” #AfropunkFest15

     Mixon: “I stand with marginalized groups who seek merely to be seen as fully human. Black lives matter.” #HugoAwards

161. rq says

     24 August 2015 at 8:59 am

     Poll: Most black people prefer ‘all lives matter’. Though if you read, there’s no mention of how many black people were actually interviewed (as there were 1000 respondents, total). Just mentions a percentage: 64. Which, essentially, is meaningless.

     Group of black women ‘humiliated’ and kicked off Napa wine train for ‘laughing too loud’. The way the article presents it, it seems as if they were being awfully rowdy. I have a suspicion that they were being too happy and carefree for some of the white passengers – would they have been called out like this if it was a group of white women, out having fun together?

     MSNBC host crushes Huckabee: ‘Unsophisticated manipulation’ of MLK can’t stop ‘Black Lives Matter’

     MSNBC host Janet Mock shamed Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee over the weekend for trying diminish the “Black Lives Matter” movement with “unsophisticated manipulation” of Dr. Martin Luther King’s words.

     During a recent interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Huckabee had said that King would have been “appalled” by the “Black Lives Matter” movement because activists were “elevating some lives above others.”

     While guest hosting Melissa Harris-Perry’s show on Sunday, Mock addressed Huckabee’s remarks.

     “The message from BLM is that black people don’t have the power to stop the violence against them from agents of the state,” she pointed out. “It’s why they are appealing to people like you, people vying to represent the state.”

     “Offering ‘all lives matter’ in response to the assertion that ‘black lives matter’ diminishes the black lives that have an continue to be lost, and you should know that by now,” Mock insisted.

     She argued that Huckabee had “misrepresented” King in an attempt “to silence the very people and ideas that he fought to protect and died to protect.”

     “Because, yes, Martin Luther King Jr. was appalled by the notion that we are elevating some lives above others,” Mock said. “But you’re a little confused about the ‘we’ he was talking about.”

     “He was delivering a damning indictment against the United States government for it’s failure to secure for black people basic civil rights that relegated not only their citizenship, but their humanity to second class citizen status,” she continued. “When King watch [the Watts riots in Los Angeles] burn with fire and the indignation of black rage as we have seen in Ferguson and Baltimore in recent months, he saw in it not the wanton violence of looters and rioters, but a response to the systematic violence of institutional racism.”

     Mock recalled that King had explained the Watts riots by saying that “rage replaces reason.”

     “Did you get that governor?” Mock asked of Huckabee. “Because as long as you continue with your unsophisticated manipulation of King’s message, and as long as you and other candidates continue your rock-like resistance to the message of the movement, that is as long as you can expect to keep hearing those urgent screams of rage that ‘black lives matter.’”

     Video at the link.

     How The Hugo Awards Saboteurs Actually Disproved Their Own Best Argument – mostly tangentially related, but worthy of remembering, esp. since it was an official award that refused to acknowledge the attempts of white people to keep things white.

     Bernie Sanders meets with black voters in South Carolina: ‘We are going to end institutional racism’. How about he get that message out to his fan-base first? I mean in the sense that they better shut up and acknoweldge that institutional racism is an issue, period, and that black people have a right to be pissed off about it.

     Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders brought his progressive populism to deeply Republican South Carolina, and made a pitch to connect with the black voters that provide most of the Democratic support in the early primary state.

     It was the Vermont senator’s first visit to the state since announcing his candidacy in late April, in a challenge to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

     Sanders had canceled a planned appearance in Charleston in June in the wake of the massacre at the city’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church that left nine dead.

     In North Charleston, the last of five stops in the state, he invoked the names of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and Walter Scott, all unarmed black men who died in the hands of police officers in a little over a year.

     “We are going to end institutional racism and we are going to transform and make changes in the criminal justice system that isn’t working,” he said to loud cheering from a crowd of about 3,100. “When a police officer breaks the law, that police officer must be held accountable. We need new rules on the use of force.”

     He also mentioned the Charleston slayings, which authorities have called racially motivated.

     “I’m not just talking about somebody who walked into a Bible study class, prayed with the people in that group and then took out a gun and killed nine people. I’m talking about the hundreds of hate groups that exist in this country today whose only function is fomenting of hatred of African Americans, gays, immigrants, Jews.”

     Somerville Mayor Explains Why City Hung Up ‘Black Lives Matter’ Banner

     “We put it up this week. We shouldn’t have to. We shouldn’t have to put a banner up that says we are against police violence based on discrimination involving black people,” Curtatone wrote. “It shouldn’t be newsworthy when a government body says that it believes that all of our institutions should treat all people the same, regardless of the color of their skin. These aren’t ideas that should have to be proclaimed.”

     Institutional discrimination openly exists throughout the United States, the facts are backed by statistics and visual evidence. Curtatone feels it’s about time everyone bands together and faces the issue head on.

     “We put the banner up not to proclaim anything about Somerville or ourselves, but because we must stand in solidarity with the movement, acknowledge that painful reality, and work to change it,” Curtatone wrote.

     Curtatone added, “We know that “all lives matter,” but is it is black Americans who disproportionately are killed by those we entrust with upholding the law. It is black Americans who are disproportionately stopped, arrested, jailed and sentenced to longer prison terms.”

     According to Curtatone, the sign in no way is an indictment on the action of Somerville’s Police Department. He says Somerville chief of police, David Fallon, advocates for “fair, equal and community focused policing.”

     Somerville is in the process of instituting solutions by focusing on de-escalation training, true community policing, and planning for new training that will allow recognition of internalized prejudices.

     Curtatone says the banner is statement, but also a question regarding what Somerville can do to fix its part of the system.

162. rq says

     24 August 2015 at 9:34 am

     Families seek answers about loved ones’ deaths in police shootings. Story from the Indy Star, but it could be Anywhere, USA.

     The shootings unfolded, like many of them do, in brief chaotic moments filled with stress.

     • Lenon Henry, 52, a suspected burglar, reached for his waistband after police told him to raise his hands. Officers shot and killed him. They later discovered he had no weapon.

     • Duane Slentz, 49, led police on a chase to a Southeastside home where he barricaded himself inside. Police fired at the home and killed Slentz when they said they heard him cock his gun.

     • Mack Long, 35, armed with a holstered gun, ran from police and turned, obscuring his gun side. An officer shot Long, who then tussled over the officer’s firearm. Another officer shot and killed Long.

     These officer-involved shootings in Indianapolis — like the vast majority of those across the United States — have one thing in common: The investigations that cleared the officers are secret and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

     The routine use of grand juries to investigate officer-involved shootings keeps evidence and testimony secret, even from the families of the deceased. Many such families are left with unanswered questions, forced to fight the system or blindly accept the version of events laid out in secret hearings before anonymous jurors.
     […]

     Prosecutors say grand juries have a purpose. And some say confidentiality is important to protect the identities of witnesses who would otherwise be unwilling to testify, as well as the officers whose reputations could be tarnished, even if their actions do not cross legal lines.

     In the post-Ferguson era, however, when the fairness of numerous shootings have been called into question, some say it’s time to ask if that confidentiality comes at too high a price.

     I walked into a prison expecting to meet criminals. Instead, I found a community of men. By Clint Smith III. The video is a repost from a longer article, but the shorter description is well worth reading again.

     Who Won Science Fiction’s Hugo Awards, and Why It Matters. If you think it doesn’t matter, it does.

     Early this year, that shift sparked a backlash: a campaign, organized by three white, male authors, that resulted in a final Hugo ballot dominated by mostly white, mostly male nominees. While the leaders of this two-pronged movement—one faction calls itself the Sad Puppies and the other the Rabid Puppies—broke no rules, many sci-fi writers and fans felt they had played dirty, taking advantage of a loophole in an arcane voting process that enables a relatively few number of voters to dominate. Motivated by Puppygate, meanwhile, a record 11,300-plus people bought memberships to the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention in Spokane, Washington, where the Hugo winners were announced Saturday night.

     Just before 8 PM, in a vast auditorium packed with “trufans” dressed in wizard garb, corsets, chain mail and the like, one question was on most everybody’s minds: Would the Puppies prevail?
     […]

     Laura J. Mixon, who won for Best Fan Writer, gave by far the most stirring speech. Her winning blog post had meticulously described the venomous behavior of a female, left-leaning troll (an Internet troll, not a troll-troll). “There’s room for all of us here,” Mixon said. “But there’s no middle ground between ‘We belong here’ and ‘No you don’t.’ I believe we must find non-toxic ways to discuss our conflicting points of view.” In closing, Mixon, who is white, added, “I stand with people from marginalized groups who seek simply to be seen as fully human. Black lives matter.”
     […]

     [stuff about racism and Vox Day and Correia etc.]

     The mainstream press first started reporting on the gaming of the Hugos’ nomination system back in April, when fan-favorite authors who were women and people of color had been largely edged out of the final ballot. But few outside the field really cared. They treated it like nerd-on-nerd violence—unfortunate and ugly, but confined to one of literature’s crummier neighborhoods.

     It’s not inconsequential, though. Not by a longshot. The Puppies’ revolt did not merely push back against the gains traditionally underrepresented people have made in a maligned literary sub-genre. It was a backlash against gains they’ve made everywhere. Like the sound of starship engines, the Hugos don’t exist in a vacuum.

     And there’s a lot more reading to do there. It’s fun and informative!

     DuBose murder prompts college police force reviews

     A University of Cincinnati (UC) police officer’s fatal shooting of a motorist he stopped over a missing front license plate has grabbed other colleges’ attention, prompting discussions and reviews of their own police policies.

     News of the July 19 shooting of motorist Samuel DuBose spread quickly through the campus law enforcement community. It has become a major topic of discussion by the State Universities Law Enforcement Administrators group, which includes representatives from all of Ohio’s state universities.

     “This tragedy led some of us to determine that we should review our internal practices and find out whether or not they can be improved,” said group spokesman John Peach, the public safety director at Kent State University.

     Peach said Kent State found no major changes needed after its review. The police chiefs at the University of Akron and University of Toledo (UT) say they continually review policies and procedures, but were rechecking them in light of the Cincinnati shooting.

     “I don’t expect any major overhauls, but we’re looking at our policies related to traffic stops and use of force with a bit more of a discerning eye,” said Jeff Newton, UT’s police chief and public safety director.

     Campaign Zero: Solutions, worth a read. Campaign Zero is a new anti-police-brutality campaign launched by the same amazing people who brought you We the Protestors and the newsletter.

163. rq says

     24 August 2015 at 9:43 am

     American Airlines workers say they face racial taunts, discrimination. This feels like a repost. I feel like airline workers have recently been under scrutiny.

     Prominent Ferguson protesters publish anti-police violence policy platform. Oh, hey, it’s more on Campaign Zero!

     Prominent Ferguson protesters announced on Friday Campaign Zero, a policy platform to end killings by the police in the United States, and a website to help voters keep track of where political candidates stand on police brutality.

     “We can live in a world where the police don’t kill people by limiting police interventions, improving community interactions, and ensuring accountability,” the site says.

     The campaign was created by DeRay Mckesson, Johnetta Elzie and Brittany Packnett, three anti-police violence activists who rose to prominence after the unrest last year in Ferguson. It includes data analysis by Samuel Sinyangwe, a San Francisco-based civil rights activist who has published maps and graphics that visualize data on police brutality.

     One local urban policy expert called the campaign “sincere and sophisticated.”

     “This is an effort to put some policy meat on the protest bones and say, ‘We’re not simply for this or against that, but here’s what our policies would look like,’ ” said Terry Jones, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and an expert on urban politics and policies.

     “It’s an appropriate evolutionary step,” he added. “Anyone who says ‘I don’t think the world is right as it is’ should be prepared to answer the question, ‘Well, what do you want to do about it?’ ”

     Among the 10 policy changes proposed by the campaign are an end to racial profiling and “broken windows policing” that overcriminalizes minor offenses such as marijuana possession; establishing civilian oversight of police and bringing greater transparency to police discipline; and creating standards and reporting for police use of force.

     The campaign also calls for independent investigations of police shootings; greater diversity within police departments; and requiring police to wear body cameras.

     More at the link, and at their website itself.

     Proposal to rename Prairie View A&M thoroughfare ‘Sandy Bland Parkway’. It would be a nice gesture!

     Here’s What Black Lives Matter Activists Want Politicians To Do About Police Violence, Huffington Post on Campaign Zero.

     Fairfax, Va., police officer charged with murder in shooting of unarmed man

     A Fairfax County police officer was indicted by a grand jury Monday on second-degree murder charges two years after he fatally shot a Springfield man while responding to a domestic call at the man’s home.

     Adam Torres, who has since been fired from the Fairfax County Police Department, was charged in the killing of 46-year-old John Geer. It is reportedly the first time in the police department’s history that criminal charges have been brought against an officer as a result of an on-duty shooting.

     Probably reposted information.

     St. Louis, Missouri Slave Patrols Kill “Moor” After Racially Profiling him as “Black”

     Today, St. Louis Slave Patrols (Police) identified Mansur Ball-Bey, 18, after stripping him of his Race and Nationality i.e. characterizing him as “black” based upon his skin complexion, thus discrimiting against his Moorish Race and Nationality on the basis of his color a common practice of “White Slavers” in America. See the U.S. Congress Apolgoy for slavery recording that “Africans were subjected to the indignity of being stripped of their Names and Heritage”.

     A representative of the Moorish Community in St. Louis, Missouri, informed us that Mansur was wearing a Fedex uniform. Brother Mansur Ball-Bey was not a black suspect, he was a Moorish-American Moslem, which is a law abiding citizen of the Untied States of America! According to Milton Moore-Bey “He was a member of the Saint Louis Chapter of the Moorish Science Temple of America, Subordinate Temple #5 and was born and raised in a Moorish-American family with no priors, thus this Moorish brother was not a felon and did not have a rap sheet. He never had as much as a traffic ticket. He had just gotten off work at Fed Ex. So, please do not fall for the propaganda of the so-called News! The Police have alleged that he was armed and that he attempted to aim a firearm at them. The actual suspect whom the Police were looking for fled and was said to be a black man in his mid to late teens, and police were still searching for him.‪“

     Just a different, interesting perspective.

164. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     25 August 2015 at 2:41 am

     11 members of the Sisters of the Reading Edge Book Club were kicked off the Napa Valley Wine Train. Apparently, one guest thought they were too loud what with their laughing and having fun. And somehow the wishes of this one guest were treated as more important than the 11 women who were having a good time:

     The members — all black women — were removed from the Napa Valley Wine Train for laughing and talking too loudly as they sipped their wine. “This isn’t a bar,” one of the passengers who was on the train complained to the group, Lisa Johnson, 47, told the San Francisco Gate. “And we thought, um, yes it is.”

     Outrage over the removal of the 11 black women from the train has spread across social media, along with the hashtag #LaughingWhileBlack. Johnson posted a photo of a white woman on her Facebook page before the group was removed, pinpointing her as the one who “said our laugher annoyed her.”

     “It was humiliating. I’m really offended to be quite honest,” said Johnson. “I felt like it was a racist attack on us. I feel like we were being singled out.”

     Some people have taken to Yelp to complain:

     On Yelp, the user review site, a woman claimed to have witnessed the incident, recommending that others “steer clear” of the business “if you would like to be part of the solution, rather than the problem of white supremacy and racism.”

     “I can only conclude that it was discrimination,” she added.

     […]

     There are dozens of posts like this, from people who are giving negative reviews on the train based on the news of the day, but who have openly never ridden the train. In the long term, some of these kinds of reviews might get removed (they don’t jive with the company’s review guidelines, which maintain reviews should be both “passionate” and “personal”). There are also mechanisms in place for businesses to remove reviews from people who have never visited the business.

     But for now, these reviews are still live. In their defense, the Napa Valley Wine Train spokesperson told the San Francisco Gate that “The Napa Valley Wine Train does not enjoy removing guests from our trains, but takes these things very seriously in order to ensure the enjoyment and safety of all of our guests.” The spokesperson added that they “received complaints from several parties” about the women.

     In a since deleted post (Johnson captured screenshots and shared them), the company’s Facebook page said: “Following verbal and physical abuse towards our guests and staff, it was necessary to get the police involved.”

     On a positive note, the women seem to have bounced back very quickly:

     I wonder why they deleted that FB comment…
     I checked the Napa Valley Wine Train’s terms and conditions, and while they do state:

     For the comfort and safety of all our guests, we reserve the right to relocate or remove anyone that, in our sole opinion, is creating a disturbance within any of the Napa Valley Wine Train’s offerings

     I find myself bothered by the fact that the managers appear to have kicked out these women based on complaints from one woman. Again, why was she treated so preferentially?

165. rq says

     25 August 2015 at 8:33 am

     There’s also the fact that they said they talked to the women several times and told them to quiet down, when the women themselves say they were only spoken to once.

     +++

     NJ admits police killed Jerame Reid with his hands up, but he moved a bit, so, you know, no charges. Shaun King on Jerame Reid.

     After Hurricane Katrina, a Man-Made Disaster in New Orleans

     The worst of Katrina was an act of man, not an act of God.

     I heard something like that from every local I encountered in New Orleans earlier this year. No matter their age, race or religion, the people of this city pretty much agree that referring to Hurricane Katrina as a natural disaster is naive, even ridiculous. They all know it was a three-part storm. First, a Category 3 hurricane, then a massive failure of the levee and then the biggest disaster of all: the government’s involvement.

     Longtime residents of New Orleans were used to grappling with nature, but man was a harsher beast. Over 1,800 people across five states died as a result of the crisis in 2005, many because they were stuck in their homes. Thousands more suffered for days inside the Superdome before help arrived. The devastation that came after the storm was man-made: a combination of racism, opportunism, corruption and ignorance that has impaired the quality of life in this city for the past 10 years.

     In the months following Katrina, New Orleans became a battleground for vested business and political interests fighting for how they wanted the city rebuilt. Some saw a political opportunity, flying in from Baton Rouge and Washington, D.C. Some simply crossed over from the suburbs or nearby university campuses to declare their plans for the city to anyone in then-Mayor Ray Nagin’s office who would listen.

     In the midst of the lobbying, map redrawing and back-door meetings, few people bothered to ask New Orleanians how they would like to see their city rebuilt. It was—though soggy, busted up and run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—still their home, after all. It was their interests, their houses, their lives that needed rebuilding. But instead of transparency and aid, they got bureaucracy and ignorance.

     The article continues at the link.

     ‘This Week’ Transcript: Donald Trump , notable for this part:

     LLAMOS: This rally in Alabama, a strategic choice for the Trump campaign in an early primary state. A new poll shows him now beating Jeb Bush in Florida. And the billionaire’s new immigration plan the focus of the campaign.

     TRUMP: You look at your gov — you look at Baltimore, you look at Ferguson, you look at lot of these places, a lot of these gangs — and the most vicious — are illegals. They’re out of here. First day, I will send them people — we. Those guys are out of here.

     And this:

     STEPHANOPOULOS: So if there’s no idea, how are you going to round them all up?

     Where are you going to get the money, where are you going to get the forces?

     Exactly how are you going to do it?

     What are the specifics here?

     TRUMP: George, it’s called management. And the first thing we have to do is secure the border. But it’s called management. And we’ll get people back in, the really good ones, we’re going to expedite it, so they get back in, so they can at least come in legally.

     But we have to do it…

     STEPHANOPOULOS: You keep declaring how you’re going to do it…

     TRUMP: It’s management.

     STEPHANOPOULOS: — but you don’t say…

     TRUMP: We don’t…

     STEPHANOPOULOS: — how.

     TRUMP: Excuse me, George?

     STEPHANOPOULOS: You declare how you’re going to do it, but you don’t say how.

     TRUMP: George, I’m telling you, it’s called management. You can do this and we can expedite the good ones to come back in. And everybody wants that. But they have to come in legally.

     We have a country, we have to have — we’re a country of laws. We’re a country of borders.

     How can you have a country without a border?

     How can you have a country without laws?

     We have to do it. And by the way, what you said in your piece initially is the gang members. You look at the gang members in Baltimore, Chicago, in Ferguson, these people, a lot of them, are illegals. These are rough dudes. And we’re going to get them to hell out fast.

     STEPHANOPOULOS: I — I understand that you think it’s a huge problem, but I still don’t hear specifics on how you’re going to do this.

     Are you example…

     TRUMP: Well, you’ll see…

     STEPHANOPOULOS: — for example…

     TRUMP: — my specifics, George. But my specifics are very sample — I’m going to get great people that know what they’re doing, not a bunch of political hacks that have no idea what they’re doing, appointed by President Obama, that doesn’t have a clue. I mean that man doesn’t have a clue.

     People are walking across the border right now, right in front of these great people that we have. We have wonderful Border Patrol people. They can do their job. but they’re not allowed to do the job.

     People are walking right into our country totally un — nobody even knows where they come from. They walk right past guards that are told not to do anything.

     Family of man killed by Bridgeton police demands federal civil rights probe

     The family of a man killed by Bridgeton police during a 2014 traffic stop held a press conference Saturday to call for a federal investigation of the shooting.

     A grand jury decided this week not to pursue criminal charges against two Bridgeton police officers involved in the Dec. 30 shooting death of Jerame Reid.

     Reid’s mother, Shelia, was joined by members of her family and community activist Walter Hudson at a home on Cedarbrook Avenue Saturday afternoon to talk about the grand jury’s verdict.

     “I feel that justice was not served,” Shelia Reid said. “We want justice and peace. I want a thorough investigation.”

     I do hope they get it.

     Dear White America: I know it’s hard, but you have to acknowledge what’s happening in this country

     As we mark the one-year anniversary of the killing of young Mike Brown and the uprisings it sparked in Ferguson, much-needed conversations about race that have occurred as a result are increasingly on our lips and our smartphone screens. As an actress and writer who is black, and whose work often addresses race, I aim to contribute to the conversation, but today I’m pausing to do something I don’t usually do; I’d like to specifically address white people who continue to deny the existence of white privilege. Far too many of you refuse to simply state that white privilege is real, and I’m here to say something that might surprise you:

     I understand.

     First of all, I’ve seen people angry about the moniker “white privilege” in and of itself, bemoaning the very existence of this annoying two-word phrase (and even more so the three words “check your privilege”) as nothing more than the verbal folly of the Outrage Committee and Social Justice Warriors who want to ruin the Confederate flag and gay jokes and everything good about America. I can understand the fatigue at the sheer amount of times we say the phrase—I even get tired of saying/typing it. But can you allow for the possibility that we’re saying it so much because you haven’t heard us yet and it’s crucial that you accept it as reality?

     Some of you say we’re the confused ones; that when we speak of “white privilege” we actually mean discrimination or prejudice, that we should focus on the specific bad stuff happening to us instead of the good stuff we think you possess. Well, we’ve been trying that, and some of us think it’s not been working out so well.

     Besides, white privilege and racial discrimination are neither interchangeable terms nor mutually exclusive ideas, and it helps to understand that so much “specific bad stuff” might not be happening specifically and disproportionately to black people without systemic privilege as America’s societal foundation.

     Semantics work against us in this fight, because the word “privilege” has a traditionally positive meaning, conjuring up images of champagne wishes and caviar dreams, and the biggest obstacle for so many is that you feel you can’t experience white privilege because your own life is not “privileged.” Poor white people, and the rich white people who don’t care about them but seek to use them to bolster their argument, simply point to Appalachia and think the conversation is over.

     The intersection of class and race come into play here, but white privilege cannot be dismissed as just a mangling of what is solely a class struggle; conquering structural racism will never come down simply to who has the most money.

     You could be living in significant financial and social struggle, or you could just be one of the millions of Americans dealing with unemployment or living paycheck to paycheck, making ends meet but certainly not feeling “privileged.” I get it. Jay-Z has more money that you ever will, he’s married to the preternaturally talented and beautiful Beyoncé, Michael Jordan reigns supreme and you’re wearing his sneakers on your feet right now, and Oprah changed the world.

     Meanwhile, you’re facing everyday ordinary challenges and possibly trying to keep your checking account on the right side of overdraft, and I have the nerve to call you privileged?

     Yes. To add to those black luminaries, President Obama’s two terms in office are wonderful (to me, anyway), and symbolize progress, but the individual achievements of specific black superstars don’t disprove white privilege as a systemic ill. It would be reductive to say “the exceptions prove the rule,” but when you breathlessly point out exceptions in the form of rich black entertainers and athletes, you are agreeing that they are remarkable and literally exceptional.

     Just as individual achievement does not disprove systemic oppression, nor does your individual innocence. Asking you to simply accept the reality of your privilege does not mean saying that you, personally, are actively or even consciously A Racist.

     As a white person in America today, you may not have personally ever done anything “wrong.” You’ve certainly never owned slaves, and if you’re reading this, you’re likely not a member of an extremist white supremacist group. Yet you can be complicit in a system that is much larger than you without ever even knowing it, and your lack of initial awareness doesn’t excuse continued denial once it’s been pointed out.

     Even “innocent” and well-intentioned white allies do themselves and the notion of racial equality a disservice if they persist in resisting the concept of privilege, but I can understand those who never even considered it. To be able to carry on day to day and not have your race impact your life to the point of reflection or critical examination is the very essence of the thing. Your privilege blinds you to your privilege in a sort of Russian nesting doll setup of exponential denial. Until you accept it.

     As I’ve written here, “people who resist the truth of privilege feel [justified] because in a world where we constantly compare paychecks and skin color and scholarships and such, it’s difficult for them to comprehend that you could be benefitting from what you don’t have, what you don’t fear, what you don’t even know about.”

     There’s more at the link, a great discussion on privilege.

     America Has Freaked Out Over Birthright Citizenship For Centuries, because eliminating it is a form of racism.

     The controversy over whether children of undocumented migrants should be citizens may be heating up now, but it’s just the latest in a string of similar moments in U.S. history. The citizenship status of every non-white racial group has been challenged for literally centuries.

     The original Constitution said nothing about who was a U.S. citizen. It gave Congress the power, exclusive of the states, to grant citizenship by naturalization, but it neither addressed the requirements for naturalization nor described the legal status of those obtaining naturalized citizenship. In 1790, Congress linked race to citizenship by allowing only “free white persons” to naturalize; racial restrictions of one kind or another were in effect continuously until 1952. The Constitution also provided that only a “natural-born citizen” could be elected president, but here too, the document failed to explain who was a natural-born citizen, leading to repeated controversies about the eligibility of candidates born out of the United States, such as John McCain, George Romney and Ted Cruz.

     And yet, even in the earliest days of the Republic, there must have been U.S. citizens. As the Supreme Court and other courts recognized, U.S. citizenship was granted by unwritten law. As a “common law” legal principle, in general, children born in the United States were citizens. However, because the rule was unwritten, its precise contours were debatable. The Supreme Court’s notorious Dred Scott case, decided in 1857, turned on the majority’s conclusion that a person of African ancestry was not a U.S. citizen, even though born here. The Court essentially found an unwritten exception to the unwritten law—namely, that it benefited only whites.

     Dred Scott was overruled by the Civil War. First in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and then in the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, Congress extended citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The second clause retained the traditional denial of birthright citizenship to children of foreign diplomats and enemy soldiers. The first clause rejected the Dred Scott Court’s reasoning and result.

     After the Fourteenth Amendment, African-Americans born in the United States were technically citizens, but controversies remained. In Elk v. Wilkins, an 1884 decision, the Court determined that Indians who were members of tribes were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and therefore were not birthright citizens. While in 1924 Congress granted citizenship to all Indians who did not already have it, Elk v. Wilkins leaves open the argument that even Indians born in the United States are ineligible to the presidency, because they are mere naturalized citizens.

     There’s more on other ethnicities and when they were considered worthy of citizenship by birthright at the link.

166. rq says

     25 August 2015 at 8:50 am

     “A little girl is dead” – Frustrated mom’s #BlackLivesMatter Facebook rant goes viral

     Peggy Hubbard is frustrated with #BlackLivesMatter protesters in St. Louis. She is an African-American mother who says there is too much black on black crime.

     Hubbard says the demonstrators are marching for the wrong people. They should be standing up for innocent victims killed every night in the streets of St. Louis.

     A 9-year-old girl was shot and killed on Tuesday night while doing homework on her mother’s bed. On Wednesday night protesters took to the streets to march for an 18-year-old shot and killed by police. Officers say the teen pointed a gun at him.

     Hubbard’s commentary posted to Facebook has gone viral. Almost 30,000 people like the post and it has been shared over 131,000 times.

     This is a transcript of the six minute video posted from her account in Bellevile, IL. It has been edited for offensive language.

     Just so you know, there have been at least 2 marches now for the 9-year-old girl. Ball-Bey wasn’t a thug, he wasn’t even at the drug house (as per the changing police story, turns out he was sitting on the porch of a house two houses down). I can understand this woman’s pain and frustration in general, but that doesn’t mean she’s right about the protestors marching for the wrong people. And anyway, if Black Lives Matter, then ALL Black Lives Matter, even those of suspected criminals.

     Predicting police misconduct before it happens

     that connects data scientists with governments and nonprofits — are working to predict when officers are at risk of misconduct, the goal being to prevent problems before they happen.

     The effort’s part of the White House Police Data Initiative, which aims to increase transparency and community trust, while decreasing inappropriate uses of force. (That DSSG was approached by the White House wasn’t surprising; its program director, Rayid Ghani, was the Chief Data Scientist for Obama for America in 2012.)

     Police departments around the country — 21 in all — are participating in the national effort. (Chicago police were not one of the departments picked to participate.) The White House matched DSSG with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. Like many agencies, CMPD has early intervention systems. The challenge for DSSG was to find ways to improve them and avoid misconduct.

     “So we’re trying to identify these opportunities to give them the information and training they need to avoid these negative interactions,” said Joe Walsh, a mentor with DSSG overseeing the project.

     CMPD currently looks at measures such as use of force, accidents and injuries, and sets a number of incidents that should trigger a response from the department. Officers who are flagged by the system will meet with a supervisor to review an incident, receive counseling or additional training.
     […]

     To find common patterns, the DSSG team analyzed incidents and anonymized data of the officers involved. They considered things like: when and where an arrest or traffic stop occurred; had the officer worked extra shifts; how long had they been on the force; even what the weather was like at the time.

     “Because it’s sort of a new problem, we spent a lot of time trying to grasp what was important and what wasn’t, and that’s something we’re still working on,” said fellow Kenny Joseph, a computer science student at Carnegie Mellon.

     That explains why the group of data analysts got face-time with CMPD, meeting department top brass and even going on ride-alongs with officers.

     “We would not be able to do a good job had we not gone down,” said fellow Ayesha Mahmud, a demography student at Princeton University. “None of us had any idea coming in what the everyday life of a police officer was like.”

     Mahmud said she was struck by how much time a police officer spends during each shift just speaking with residents to gather information and diffuse problems.

     “I think we all came to the realization that the data can only capture a very small part of that story,” she said. “I think that really helped us think about this problem.”

     With the fellowship finishing up next week, DSSG has identified a few indicators they hope can identify possible problem officers — such as previous uses of force, working extra shifts, or responding to other stressful calls — all before they create problems.

     Still, each fellow was careful to point out they haven’t tested and refined the model enough to draw any causal conclusions just yet.

     I believe there is audio at the link, too.

     Arrests for minor crimes spur resentment in some Baltimore neighborhoods

     Baltimore police counter that they have abandoned the zero-tolerance strategy that led to mass arrests — and a 2006 lawsuit by the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union.

     Statistics bear out that assertion. The number of arrests for minor crimes such as failure to obey, loitering and disorderly conduct has dropped significantly across Baltimore — from 5,401 in 2005 to 2,016 last year. There are also fewer cases in which police make arrests only to see prosecutors release them without charges; there were 10,844 such cases in 2009 and 956 last year.

     Baltimore police are now targeting the “worst of the worst,” said Col. Darryl DeSousa, who until recently headed the patrol division. Minor nuisance offenses are increasingly addressed with citations rather than arrests, he said.

     Still, many Baltimoreans complain that police continue to enforce nuisance laws unfairly.

     Although police officials have disavowed the mass-arrest strategy, African-Americans are still being arrested disproportionately for minor crimes, according to a Baltimore Sun analysis of city data. Blacks make up 64 percent of the city’s population but accounted for 93 percent of loitering arrests and 84 percent of trespass arrests in 2014.

     “The reason why the arrest disparity is so high is that police are posted all over in our neighborhoods,” said the Rev. Cortly “C.D.” Witherspoon, a West Baltimore clergyman and president of the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “It’s like a police state.”

     Esther J. Cepeda: Ending the school-to-prison pipeline

     A recent poll seems to imply that the general public does not understand, and maybe has never heard of, the school-to-prison pipeline.

     It is a national trend in which children — more often than not, minorities — are caught up by “zero-tolerance” public school policies that criminalize minor infractions of school rules.

     In the past, such violations might have been handled by the principal. But the increase of law enforcement staff in schools has led to outsized punishments that set children at risk for further run-ins with the law and, ultimately, landing in the juvenile and criminal justice systems.

     In February, The Civil Rights Project at UCLA reported that across the country, an overreliance on suspensions to maintain discipline in public schools has led to U.S. kids losing almost 18 million days of instruction.

     In terms of expulsions, the Civil Rights Data Collection, compiled by the U.S. Department of Education, shows that while in 2011-12, black students made up just 15.9 percent of the total student population, they represented 36 percent of students who were expelled.

     Additionally, black students were 34.6 percent of those subjected to corporal punishment, 30.1 percent of those arrested at school and 27.4 percent of those referred to law enforcement.

     This led the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Education to publish a “Dear Colleague” letter in January 2014. It reiterated that school disciplinary policies can be determined by individual school districts, but: “Federal law prohibits public school districts from discriminating in the administration of student discipline based on certain personal characteristics. The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division (DOJ) is responsible for enforcing Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits discrimination in public elementary and secondary schools based on race, color, or national origin, among other bases.”

     More at the link.

     Black pitmasters left out of US barbecue boom

     After a morning of peeling potatoes, Daryle Brantley sits at the only table outside of his counter-service restaurant C&K Barbecue. His daughter Jamila emerges from the midcentury building, a barbecue outpost that has been perched on a corner in north St Louis county since 1963. She has two white Styrofoam containers in her hands – rib tips with a side of baked beans and coleslaw, and the combination sandwich, which is two pieces of white bread piled with rib tips and crispy baked pig snouts. The meat is smothered in a tangy tomato- and vinegar-based sauce, which the restaurant is known for. Everything is made fresh each day, in house.

     Since taking over from the original owner in 1983, the Brantleys have enjoyed a great deal of success with their traditional St Louis-style barbecue. There are lines out the door, as well as accolades from both local and national media, from Maxim magazine to PBS. There’s even a line in the 2002 movie Barbershop extoling the virtues of the ribs at a fictionalized “C&K on 75th”.

     “You just got to believe in what you’re doing and keep it consistent. That’s why we’ve survived over the years,” says Daryle, then gestures to the steaming boxes in front of him. “Once you taste that, you’ll see.”

     But things aren’t as good as they used to be. Daryle once had three locations and sold the sauce bottled at local supermarkets – today he only has the original shopfront.

     The decline happened as factory jobs left St Louis and the recession of the 1990s took its toll. Once the outlook improved and he wanted to expand or make improvements, he found no bank would loan to him.

     “All I ever heard is, they can’t help us because I don’t qualify. I don’t have enough assets. My credit isn’t good enough,” he says. “Come on.”

     Daryle believes he knows exactly why he’s had difficulty accessing capital.

     “Racism,” he says. “I didn’t want to say it, but it’s structured racism.”

     Why does he think so? Read on at the link.

     Why We Do What We Do to Make the SLMPD Great, from Chief Dotson’s blog!

     The Metropolitan Police Department is committed to conducting a fair and impartial investigation into all officer involved shootings. My unequivocal commitment to the citizens of this community is to have a process that is fair, transparent and based on facts and evidence of the law, not speculation.

     Friday, the Circuit Attorney announced her intention to conduct an immediate and parallel criminal investigation into the shooting of Mansur Ball-Bey. As Police Commissioner, I support any thoughtful and independent review by interested law enforcement partners. I welcome the Circuit Attorney’s investigation. But I want to be clear, police officers in the City work in some of the most challenging areas and, sometimes, with little support. They do great work and have great skills, extensive training and well-created policies. They are among the best around the country and should receive recognition for their hard work and professionalism. The Circuit Attorney assures me that her comments were not a criticism of the men and women of this Department.

     However, some have seized upon a subsequent exchange of statements to the media between the Circuit Attorney and the Police Officers Association to support an insinuation that the Circuit Attorney’s action reflects a problem with our policies, practices and training. Just as I would refute any unfair criticism of Department members, I must refute an unfair challenge to our policies.

     To ensure that this Department uses best practices, the Force Investigative Unit (FIU) was created in August 2014. The FIU’s primary responsibility is to investigate all officer involved shootings in the City of St. Louis. The unit was created from a very successful model used by the Los Angeles Police Department. The policies of the FIU were co-written and reviewed by this Department, Professor David Klinger of the University of Missouri-St. Louis and members of the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office. The agreed-upon policies include investigative steps and specific procedures for case transfer to the Circuit Attorney’s Office.

     The Department has made the FIU a priority and has invested tens of thousands of dollars to ensure the unit has the best training and equipment available for each investigation and includes highly qualified investigators.

     From the unit’s origins, it was agreed that at the conclusion of an investigation conducted by the FIU, the investigative findings are to be referred to the Circuit Attorney’s Office for an independent review. This process ensures a comprehensive and thorough review of each case.

     And he keeps insisting no investigations are necessary that are external to the police force. Nope, everything fine here!!!

167. rq says

     25 August 2015 at 9:59 am

     White supremacist convicted in plot to kill Obama with ‘death ray’ device, just, you know, to point out that it’s not black people who are posing a threat.

     The Worlds on Wheels: A Narrative Essay

     The autumn chill creeps into the blue-grey morning air as the season announces its presence. This world, at least, is a series of blocks and corridors, number streets and state avenues that loosely circumscribe a community of mostly black and brown families across town from new Camelot. It is a synergy of corner stores and bus stops and schools and salons. It is a mirror shard of the whole, both fragment and reflection.

     Before the sun finds time to rise, there’s a boy flexing out the stiff sleeves of a new jacket. Little brother walks a step to the right and a step behind, never leaving the security of his brother’s shadow and wrapped in the warmth and familiar smells of the hand-me-down jacket. The zipper doesn’t work, so big brother snaps the buttons closed over it so little brother don’t complain. They both hate the walk to the bus – who likes going to school?-but sometimes their neighbor drives them in that shiny new Benz. It ain’t so bad then.

     At the bus stop a mother frets over her daughter’s hair on the way to pre-school. It’s a losing battle. Life, death, taxes and her baby girl coming home with a fro. The young man beside them gets up when the elderly woman who works at a diner across town comes over. It’s as much politeness as fear: everyone knows about the Police Special she carries for safety on long walks home well after the sun has given up its vigil. She nods. She smiles. Eighty years worth of a hard life transmuted into the gold of joy radiate. Even in the desert, flowers bloom.

     The bus approaches.

     The driver has had this route everyday for years. Holidays, sick days. Even the day his own baby boy was born he put on the thick gloves and blue shirt and drove. Hundreds of thousands of miles. A legendary traveler circumnavigates the globe once in as many but did Magellan move as many men and women to and fro across the waves of time? Hundreds of conquistadores, big and small, Black and Brown and White, step aboard the noisy vessel daily and make their way to islands and familiar shores.

     This is the World, and like there are good sides of it. There are also bad. There’s a man who drinks too much. smells like it. He rides until it’s time to buy more. There’s a woman somewhere in another world whose grief expands to fill the void he created, an absence long before he was kicked out. There’s others. There’s violent men and women. There are addicts. There’s dealers. Crooks and thieves, But they are the margins. Like in any place, most people at any given time are in the center.

     Each world has a name. My world was the 64. It sometimes shared a space with the world inside the 63 and sometime I could see the faces of the women, men, children, children with children, who made up the manifest of the passing ship. Gravitic constants of narrow streets, the inertia of traffic jams. Traffic circles of elliptical orbits. People staring from the same glass bubbles into the same cold, howling world from which we had all taken refuge. Staring across the seas of silver stars, brake lights and traffic signals and bike reflectors, to our destinations. Bus stops or lonely ports back out in the world. Who knew the difference?

     There are other worlds. I’ve forgotten the names of more than I remember. But the X2 and the A4 and the A2 and the 72 and the whatever, regardless of the name, are all the biggest fragments of the big bang of the universe once known as Chocolate City. Poor people, rich people, homeless people, in between–mostly Black–wayfarers of the stars flung out into the far reaches at the edges of known space. They are the bold. They are the brave, the intrepid. The gravity of work, of school, of the dream of life unfettered draws them in daily, like cosmic moths to a cosmic flame. But when it grows dark and cold they board ships and return. The universe ain’t always such a kind place for them.

     Tomorrow the explorers set out again.

     ACLU says hearing on Officers’ Bill of Rights stacked against reform advocates, which just means the battle be that much more difficult.

     Tension escalates in a St. Charles County subdivision after a new neighbor moves in. Get this:

     Chamblee and others on the block point to a house behind them, where Maritha Hunter-Butler has lived since May 9. She moved in with her three sons, a female partner and their four dogs. The neighbors say the dogs bark at all hours of the night, visitors constantly come and go and Hunter-Butler has made threatening remarks.

     Hunter-Butler said the neighbors are trumping up charges against her because she is black and in an interracial lesbian relationship.

     She points to an anonymous report made to police four days after Hunter-Butler and her family moved in. The caller reported several black male subjects “walking down the street with dogs and a couple of them are snapping pics of homes. Caller (advises) that this is an all-white neighborhood and they do not belong.”

     After a police check, a notation was put into the report: “If caller calls back, (advise) them that a black family lives in the neighborhood.”

     Hunter-Butler said the move to St. Charles County from north St. Louis was to provide a dream home for her boys, 15, 18 and 21. But in the three months she has lived on the cul-de-sac of Brook Manor Court, the relationship with her new neighbors has continued to sour.

     White flight and all that.

     Autopsy indicates officer shot unarmed teen William Chapman from distance – in other words, not close enough to be a threat.

     An unarmed black 18-year-old was fatally shot in the face by a police officer from several feet away during their confrontation outside a supermarket in Virginia earlier this year, the findings of his autopsy indicate.

     The typical signs of a close- or body-contact shooting were not found around the bullet wounds William Chapman sustained in the head and chest when he was killed by Officer Stephen Rankin in the parking lot of a Walmart in Portsmouth on 22 April. Chapman was the second unarmed man to be shot dead by Rankin.

     “There is no evidence of close-range fire to visual inspection,” wrote Wendy Gunther, an assistant chief medical examiner for Virginia. Gunther said a definitive ruling would be made by the state’s department of forensic sciences.

     A copy of Gunther’s report was obtained by the Guardian from a source who was not authorised to release it to the media, along with a separate toxicology report from state forensic investigators that said Chapman’s blood showed no traces of alcohol or drugs.
     […]

     An inquiry into the shooting has been completed by Virginia state police and passed to Stephanie Morales, the Virginia commonwealth’s attorney for Portsmouth. The prosecutor also commissioned “additional investigative work” and tests by the state department of forensic science, according to Tamara Shewmake, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor.

     The spokeswoman said earlier this week that following a delay, Morales expected to have received all the forensic files by Friday 21 August.

     “Once all findings have been turned over to the commonwealth’s attorney, there will be a review and final prosecutorial determination,” Shewmake said.

     Sources familiar with the inquiry said the week-long delay was due to Morales commissioning an advanced type of forensic analysis that had never before been completed by Virginia state officials.

     The sources said Morales, who is 31 and newly elected earlier this year, had no intention of passing the case to an outside jurisdiction or special prosecutor, and that she had indicated she would present the case to a grand jury within Portsmouth, which is an independent city, if she decided to prosecute Rankin.

     Portsmouth police and Virginia state police still decline to confirm Rankin was the officer who shot Chapman. His identity was confirmed to the Guardian by Sean McGowan, the executive director of the Virginia Police Benevolent Association, Rankin’s union.

     Once Rankin’s name was published, McGowan denied he had confirmed it, then suggested he had not been authorised to confirm it, then said he would never again speak to a reporter from the newspaper. McGowan has refused to identify Rankin’s attorney or an alternative representative.

     Rankin, 36, is a veteran of the US navy who earned a grey belt in the the Marine Corps martial arts programme, which requires the ability to “stop an aggressor’s attack” with hand-to-hand combat.

     The officer was placed on administrative leave after shooting Chapman. In April 2011 he fatally shot Kirill Denyakin, a Kazakh cook, less than three miles from the site of Chapman’s death. Denyakin was shot 11 times by Rankin, who was responding to a 911 call about the 26-year-old aggressively banging at the door of a building where he was staying.

     Rankin said he shot Denyakin because the cook, who was drunk, charged at him while reaching into the waistband of his jeans. The officer said he feared Denyakin would pull out a weapon. No weapon was found.

     A grand jury declined to indict Rankin on criminal charges and a jury in a $22m civil lawsuit brought by Denyakin’s family found in Rankin’s favour.

     Black people should just get pants with no waistbands. Apparently they’re a danger to police. Or something.

     Misleading title. I’m actually discussing how I allowed I stopped catering to the white gaze. Links to great Salon article with terrible title.

168. rq says

     25 August 2015 at 10:13 am

     Here’s the previously mentioned article: I’m black, but I’m uncomfortable around black people

     But you see, my stylist embodies a certain Harlem black cool I’ve always been told (by white people) that I lack. Every time I walk into the black barbershop where she does hair, I feel like I’m going to be “found out.” In my mind when other black people see me, they’re thinking: “She may look black, but she’s not black black, if you know what I mean.”

     Where does this discomfort come from? And why do I think of Blackness as a test I am doomed to fail?

     Like most psychological problems, it all began in my childhood, specifically the eight years I spent living in all white towns in rural Wisconsin. If there was one phrase I heard more than “n*gg*r,” it was “You’re not black.” Talk about irony.

     Sometimes it was phrased as a “compliment,” meaning you’re one of the good black people. But other times it was meant so white people, whose sole interaction with black culture came through the distorted lens of racist media, could assert their own twisted version of blackness over me.

     “I’m blacker than you because I know more Tupac songs than you.”

     “You’re not black. Your lips aren’t even that big.”

     “You’re not even that black. Look, my ass is fatter than yours.”

     “I know so many white girls that can gangsta walk better than you.”

     “You’re not black, you can’t even dance!”

     It didn’t surprise me that Rachel Dolezal truly thought she was black. I’ve long known that, for many white people, being black is simply checking off a list of well-worn stereotypes.

     I always brushed off those comments, because I knew I was black enough to be called “n*gg*r.” I was black enough that white people stared at me everywhere I went in those lily-white towns. And I was black enough to be accused of stealing during shopping trips.

     But if you hear something enough, it can seep into your unconscious and start to guide your decisions. Somewhere along the way I started believing that I wasn’t black enough, whatever that meant. This is the clusterfuck of all realizations: Racism made me uncomfortable around my own people. Ain’t that some shit?

     How internalized racism can be psychologically damaging, I insist that you all read the rest of the article.

     
     “Stop F**king Crying!” SWAT Raids Wrong Home, Holds Naked Mom at Gunpoint in Front of Children, an example of the fine policing the SWAT team does sometimes.

     White people in New Orleans say they’re better off after Katrina. Black people don’t. Interesting how that works.

     A new Louisiana State University survey found that black and white people in New Orleans had starkly different assessments of their community’s strides since the storm.

     Nearly 80 percent of white residents of New Orleans say that Louisiana has “mostly recovered” since the storm, according to the survey from LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication’s Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs.

     But nearly 60 percent of black people say the opposite — that the state has “mostly not recovered” in their view.

     It isn’t just that white residents think things are better now than the day after the flood waters receded. Most white residents also believe the city is better than it was before the storm arrived. Most black residents, on the other hand, think the opposite.

     The responses reflect a truth about New Orleans that became impossible for the rest of the country to ignore once the levees broke: The city’s black residents were disproportionately affected by flooding. The African American population in New Orleans lived largely in the city’s low-lying eastern areas, which suffered massive flooding.

     Blacks accounted for 73 percent of the people displaced by the storm in New Orleans. And more than one-third of the black people in New Orleans displaced by Katrina were estimated to have been poor, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service. (About 14 percent of the city’s non-black population displaced by the storm was poor.)

     More at the link, but also a link coming up with more numbers and graphs.

     How Solitary Confinement Became Hardwired In U.S. Prisons, from NPR, audio and text at the link.

     How The U.S. Is Neglecting Its Smartest Kids, also from NPR, with text at the link.

     Ferguson Judge Orders Withdrawal Of All Arrest Warrants Before 2015. Recently nearby Velda did the same. A good first step.

169. rq says

     25 August 2015 at 3:05 pm

     Shaun King on American Airlines: American Airlines being sued by African-American employees for overtly racist patterns and practices.

     Sandra Bland’s Death Launches Hearings

     The death of Sandra Bland in a rural county lockup launched a new review of jail safety in Texas, but state lawmakers were noncommittal Tuesday about whether Bland’s family would be part of the process.

     Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick did not say Bland’s name while announcing that legislative hearings on jail suicides would begin in September. He said a new Senate committee is not focused on any one death, and when the question of whether Bland’s relatives would be involved was raised, noted that the family had recently filed a lawsuit.

     But Democratic Sen. John Whitmire, who will chair the committee, made it clear that Bland’s death July 13 in a Waller County jail was the impetus. Authorities say Bland hanged herself with a garbage bag, a finding her family has questioned.

     “There’s no question that Ms. Bland’s tragedy has led us to this point,” said Whitmire, who added that he has yet to determine who will be invited to the hearings.

     Bland’s family would welcome involvement in the panel’s study, family attorney Cannon Lambert of Chicago said.

     “I can tell you they are unequivocally interested in testifying to the committee,” he said Tuesday night.

     Read more on JetMag.com: http://www.jetmag.com/news/sandra-blands-death-launches-hearings/#ixzz3jrGg4G5M
     Follow us: @getjetmag on Twitter | GetJetMag on Facebook

     More on Texas jails at the link.

     Sandra Bland: Texas records show racial breakdown of those stopped by same trooper

     Trooper Brian T. Encinia, 30, was hired by the Texas Department of Public Safety in January 2014. He reported for on-the-job field training July 14 and started making traffic stops on Aug. 7, 2014, according to records released to the Los Angeles Times last week.

     “As is standard during this training period, a new trooper’s [field training officer] will take the lead on traffic stops during the initial phase of training. Therefore, a trooper would not conduct traffic stops immediately upon reporting to the field for duty,” said Summer Blackwell, a department spokeswoman.
     […]

     According to the records, Encinia had stopped 1,537 drivers since August 2014. He appears to have stopped about the same percentage of African American and white drivers: 34%. About 21% of those he stopped were Latino, 8% were of unknown race, 2% were Asian and one person was Native American.

     Encinia stopped 501 women, 187 of whom were African American (37%), 178 were white (36%), 88 were Latinas (18%), 44 were of unknown race (9%), three were Asian and one was Native American.

     The trooper stopped more than twice as many male drivers as female. Of the 1,036 males he stopped, 350 were white (34%) and 336 were African American (32%). Twenty-three percent of the males were Latino, 3% were Asians and 8% were of unknown race.

     Phillip Atiba Goff, president of the Center for Policing Equity and a visiting scholar at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, said he was struck by how many white drivers Encinia stopped, given that the area where he was working includes Prairie View A&M University, a historically black school in a city that is 89% African American.

     About 64% of stops by police in the area last year involved African American drivers, according to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, which gathers information under a state statute that prohibits racial profiling by law enforcement. Statewide last year, only about 10% of DPS traffic stops involved African American drivers.

     Goff, an associate professor of psychology at UCLA who researches racial profiling, said it’s difficult to draw conclusions from Encinia’s traffic stops alone.

     I bet they’re going to spin it so that the arrest itself had no racial motivations whatsoever.
     But so what? Acting like an entitled asshole while in uniform is also not cool.

     Michael Slager, officer charged in Walter Scott’s death, likely to wait longer for bond hearing. I thought that was already done.

     Charged with murder in the April 4 shooting death of Walter Scott, Slager asked a judge to postpone his bond hearing that had been scheduled for Thursday so lawyer Andy Savage could have time to recover from surgery.

     It wasn’t known when Circuit Judge Clifton Newman would rule on the motion for a continuance, but 9th Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson said she would not object to the move, according to court documents. Slager asked that a new hearing be set no later than Sept. 10.

     He has been in jail since April 7, when he was arrested after a cellphone video surfaced showing the patrolman shooting Scott in the back as the 50-year-old man ran away. The two had been struggling over a Taser.

     Note acceptance of official police version as fact. The struggle over the taser.

     60 years ago today, Emmett Till whistled at a white woman — and he was executed for it four days later – from yesterday. Trigger warning for a recap of the events, including violence and mutilation.

     St. Louis’ longest-serving jail inmate has been sentenced after 7 years in limbo. Can’t imagine 7 years like that.

     The longest-serving inmate in the St. Louis jail system will go to prison for the rest of his life without the chance of parole.

     Calvin D. Brown landed in jail in 2008 after being accused of killing his grandmother.

     That’s a long time to be waiting.

170. rq says

     25 August 2015 at 3:19 pm

     Comment in moderation.

     Two transgender murders, one city: US fails to track new ‘state of emergency’. Referring to Kansas City, where Tamara Dominguez was recently murdered, number 17 for the year. :(

     It is Mexican tradition to amass red and white flowers at a funeral for a woman.

     But there were no flowers on Saturday for Tamara Dominguez, the record 17th transgender person reported killed in the United States this year, because her brother planned the service. And her brother still refers to Dominguez as a man named Jesus – even after she was run over three times by a sport-utility vehicle in a church parking lot.

     When they found out, friends and advocates rushed to a nearby florist and returned to Mt Washington Mausoleum Chapel with bouquet upon bouquet for the closed casket. Dominguez’s partner, whom the Guardian will call Cristian as he fears for his safety in this city that has become the epicenter of America’s transgender violence, still does not know if his girlfriend of six years is wearing men’s clothing inside.

     “I couldn’t see her, but I knew she was there,” Cristian said through a translator on Sunday. “A lot of people still cried for her.”

     The killing of Dominguez, after being initially reported in local media as a homicide investigation into the death of a man, has drawn national attention: the actor Laverne Cox used it to call trans murders “a state of emergency”, and Caitlyn Jenner has said “no one should be killed simply because they are transgender”.

     But the Guardian has learned that Dominguez’s case is the second killing of a transgender woman of color in as many months in Kansas City: Jasmine Collins is at least the 18th transgender person, unreported until now, to have been murdered in the US this year.

     There are still few answers as the trans community begins to grapple with yet another near-forgotten tragedy, because friends and potential witnesses did not know if Collins was dead or alive and advocates say police considered her to be “some guy”.

     What a horrendous attitude. I wonder how hard they’re actually trying?

     Here’s a pledge, of a sort: TAKE THE PLEDGE

     – Take a picture of your commitment to the protection of #BlackTransWomen
     – Send your pictures to blacklivesmatterdmv[at]gmail.[dot]om subject #TBackInBlackDC OR
     – Tweet them to @DMVBlackLives with the Hashtag #TBackinBlackDC

     Complete this tweet & share:

     I commit to _________________________ because I love & support #BlackTransWomen. #TBackInBlackDC #BlackTransLiberation

     Where Black Lives Matter Began – bringing it back to Hurricane Katrina.

     On the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, in 2010, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu preached unity. “With the rising water, differences and divisions were washed away,” he said, asking the audience to listen to each other, and embrace their common aspirations. “We will hear and we will learn the beautiful truth that Katrina taught us all,” he declared, “We are all the same.”

     With this, Landrieu invoked our national memory of the hurricane—a catastrophe that devastated New Orleans for all of its residents. In his own address on the fifth anniversary, President Obama struck a similar tone, with a message of rebuilding and harmony. “Five years ago we saw men and women risking their own safety to save strangers. We saw nurses staying behind to care for the sick and the injured. We saw families coming home to clean up and rebuild—not just their own homes, but their neighbors’ homes, as well.”
     […]

     In our current remembrance, Katrina is a synonym for dysfunction and disaster, a prime example of when government fails in the worst way possible. It’s also a symbol of political collapse. George Bush never recovered from its failure, and “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” stands with “Mission Accomplished” as one of the defining lines of the administration and the era.

     But there’s a problem with this capsule summary of Katrina and its place in national memory. It assumes a singular public of “Americans” who understand events in broadly similar ways. This public doesn’t exist. Instead, in the United States, we have multiple publics defined by a constellation of different boundaries: Geographic, religious, economic, ethnic, and racial. With regards to race, we have two dominant publics: A white one and a black one. Each of them saw Katrina in competing, mutually exclusive ways. And the disaster still haunts black political consciousness in ways that most white Americans have never been able to acknowledge.

     White Americans saw the storm and its aftermath as a case of bad luck and unprecedented incompetence that spread its pain across the Gulf Coast regardless of race. This is the narrative you see in Landrieu’s words and, to some extent, Obama’s as well. To black Americans, however, this wasn’t an equal opportunity disaster. To them, it was confirmation of America’s indifference to black life. “We have an amazing tolerance for black pain,” said Rev. Jesse Jackson in an interview after the storm. Rev. Al Sharpton, also echoed the mood among many black Americans: “I feel that, if it was in another area, with another economic strata and racial makeup, that President Bush would have run out of Crawford a lot quicker and FEMA would have found its way in a lot sooner.” Even more blunt was rapper Kanye West, who famously told a live national television audience that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
     […]

     Among the first images of New Orleans after the storm were shots of low-income black Americans, stranded and desperate to escape the floods and debris. In the narrow sense, they were there because the city’s evacuation plan—which didn’t account for massive traffic out of the region—fell apart. Rather than bring remaining New Orleansians out, officials sent them to the Superdome and the convention center, which were quickly overcrowded and undersupplied. In a much broader sense, however, they were there because in a city defined by decades of poverty, segregation, and deep disenfranchisement, poor and working-class blacks (including the elderly, and children) would largely shoulder the burden of the storm.

     To black Americans around the country, this looked like neglect. In an ABC News and Washington Post poll taken shortly after the hurricane, 71 percent of blacks said that New Orleans would have been “better prepared” if it were a “wealthier city with more whites,” and 76 percent said the federal government would have “responded faster.” A Newsweek poll confirmed this sense among black Americans that the government responded slowly because most of the affected people were black. “I, to this day, believe that if that would have happened in Orange County, California, if that would have happened in South Beach, Miami, it would have been a different response,” said then Mayor Ray Nagin in a speech to the National Association of Black Journalists, a year after the storm.
     […]

     Instead, white Americans discounted claims of racial bias. According to the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of whites said the government response would have been the same if the victims had been white, and only 32 percent said the event showed that racial inequality was still a major problem (for blacks, 66 percent believed the response would have been faster had the victims been mainly white and 71 percent said it demonstrated racial inequality). Other polls confirmed these findings.

     In addition to disbelief that Katrina was a racial story, research and polling also showed a white public that held survivors in contempt. In a 2006 study that examined white and black attitudes toward Katrina victims, political scientists Leonie Huddy and Stanley Feldman found that 65 percent of white respondents blamed residents and the mayor for being trapped in New Orleans. In a CNN/USA Today survey, half of all whites said that people who broke into stores and took things were “mostly criminals,” compared to 77 percent of blacks who said they were “mostly desperate people” trying to find a way to survive. (Pew had similar findings.) If you turned to right-wing media, you’d find unvarnished disdain for those left behind in the city.

     The idea that black Americans had a legitimate grievance was dismissed. The result was a collapse in black racial optimism. The year before Katrina, according to Gallup, 68 percent of blacks said race relations were either “somewhat good” or “very good.” The year after Katrina, that declined to 62 percent. The next year, it declined to 55 percent, the lowest point of the decade. In broader surveys from the Pew Research Center, the period after Katrina is an inflection point, where the percentage of blacks who say they are worse off finally overtakes the percentage who say their lives have improved. Black optimism stayed on a downward trajectory for the three years after Katrina. In another Gallup trend-line, black satisfaction with society dips from a steady 41 percent in 2005, to 37 percent in 2006, to 30 percent in 2007.
     […]

     Since 2012, but especially since last year, a rapid and steady succession of high profile shootings has moved black opinion to its pre-Obama, post-Katrina state of pessimism. Between the incidents and the outcomes—where shooters escape with little punishment or sanction—blacks have become more pessimistic about their place in American life. From 2009 to 2013, notes a Pew survey taken on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, the percentage of blacks who felt a sense of progress dropped from 39 percent to 26 percent. As of this summer, reports the New York Times, just 28 percent of black Americans say race relations are generally good, which is in line with where they were in the months before Obama’s election.

     The Obama surge in black optimism is over. Now, black Americans are back to their post-Katrina consensus; a deep sense that America is indifferent to their lives and livelihoods. Indeed, when read in that light, a movement like Black Lives Matter seems inevitable. The disaster of Hurricane Katrina, and its impact on the collective experience of black America, sowed the ground for a reckoning. Yes, Obama’s election postponed it for a time, but the recent eruption of black death—at the hands of the state—gave it new urgency. And now, as we can all see, it’s here.

     There’s not a lot left in between to read, just a few more statistics and the glaring difference in perspectives by race.

     Powerful visual representation of what mainstream America wants to do with #BlackLivesMatter

     WATCH: White school board crowd boos NAACP, call blacks ‘racist’ over objection to ‘Dixie’ fight song

     Members of the NAACP were booed and called “racist” by white residents on Tuesday as they tried to make their case for removing Confederate symbols at Effingham County High School in Georgia.

     According the WTOC, over 500 people showed up at the Effingham County High School Board meeting on Tuesday to debate whether the school should stop using a Confederate soldier mascot and the pro-slavery anthem “Dixie” as a fight song.

     “We have come to make a petition to right the wrong that should have been corrected 60 years ago,” Effingham NAACP President Leroy Lloyd announced in front of the rowdy crowd.

     Also speaking on behalf of the NAACP, First Union Baptist Church Pastor Franklin Blanks, Jr. asked the school board to respect all citizens.

     “We asked that you discontinue the use of Dixie as a school fight song,” Blanks said, sending the crowd into an uproar.

     “You try to erase my heritage, you try to erase anything that you think is racist,” one supporter of the Confederate symbols told Blanks. “But the whole time you were over here, sir, I apologize, but everything you said was racist.”

     That sentiment earned a standing ovation from the mostly-white audience.

     WTOC reported that some of attendees were nearly escorted from the meeting by law enforcement, but it was not clear which was causing the disturbance.

     The school board said that a decision would be made at a later date.

     Katrina Washed Away New Orleans’s Black Middle Class, anotehr retrospective.

     New Orleans has emerged from a decade of destruction and rebirth as a changed city, smaller, wealthier and more diverse, but also more unequal than it was before the storm. Many locals, black and white, speak with pride about the city’s rejuvenated tourism industry, its ambitious (but contentious) overhaul of the school system, and the influx of educated, socially conscious young people who have turned New Orleans into a hub of entrepreneurship. But they also worry about rising rents, gentrification and the erosion of the culture that made New Orleans special in the first place.

     All of those changes are closely entwined with issues of race. More than 175,000 black residents left New Orleans in the year after the storm; more than 75,000 never came back.2 Meanwhile, the non-Hispanic white population has nearly returned to its pre-storm total, and the Hispanic population, though still small compared with other Southern cities, has grown by more than 30 percent. Together, the trends have pushed the African-American share of the population down to 59 percent in 2013, from 66 percent in 2005.3

     But it isn’t just that there are fewer black New Orleanians; their place in the city’s economic fabric has fundamentally changed. African-Americans have long accounted for most of the city’s poor, but before the storm they also made up a majority of its middle class and were well represented among its doctors, lawyers and other professionals. After Katrina, the patterns changed: The poor are still overwhelmingly black, but the affluent and middle classes are increasingly white.4 Moreover, what remains of the black middle class is graying. Many of the middle-class African-Americans who returned to the city were retired or nearing the end of their careers; younger black professionals, meanwhile, fled the city in search of better opportunities elsewhere.

     Much more at the link, including those graphs I mentioned earlier.

171. rq says

     25 August 2015 at 3:38 pm

     New Ferguson judge orders all arrest warrants issued before 2015 withdrawn, as seen previously.

     Campaign Zero: Black Lives Matter activists’ new, comprehensive policy platform, explained

     Black Lives Matter activists finally have an answer to critics demanding specific policy proposals.

     This has been a central question posed to the movement, which aims to eliminate racial disparities in the criminal justice system, since it rose to national prominence following the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. A lot of groups — from supporters to media to Hillary Clinton — have challenged the movement to define its policy agenda.

     “You’re going to have to come together as a movement and say, ‘Here’s what we want done about it,'” Clinton said in a meeting with Black Lives Matter activists last week. “Because you can get lip service from as many as white people as you can pack into Yankee stadium and a million more like it, who are going to say, ‘Oh, we get it, we get it. We’re going to be nicer.’ That’s not enough — at least in my book. That’s not how I see politics.”

     But now activists have an answer to Clinton’s call with the launch of Campaign Zero. The website details several proposals to limit police use of force, particularly shootings against black people who are disproportionately likely to die at the hands of police. The proposals aren’t particularly surprising for anyone who’s closely followed the Black Lives Matter movement, but it’s the most comprehensive set of ideas ever released by advocates.

     As the introductory tweet said, your move, Clinton.

     Analysis Finds Higher Expulsion Rates for Black Students, something that isn’t surprising given other articles in how they are perceived by teachers and other disciplinary actions.

     The analysis, which will be formally released Tuesday by the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, focused on states where more than half of all the suspensions and expulsions of black students nationwide occurred. While black students represented just under a quarter of public school students in these states, they made up nearly half of all suspensions and expulsions.

     In some districts, the gaps were even more striking: in 132 Southern school districts, for example, black students were suspended at rates five times their representation in the student population, or higher.

     Do not be fooled, though, as this does not mean the North isn’t racist. Just maybe a little less obviously so.

     Dyett parents in 8th day of hunger strike to save school

     As parents pushing a community-backed proposal for the former Dyett High School entered their eighth day of a hunger strike, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten announced she’ll lend her support to the cause Wednesday.

     “I’ll be in Chicago on Wednesday to stand w/ #FightForDyett, help raise up their story. Chicago communities deserve better than more closures,” Weingarten tweeted Monday.

     Members of the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett High School have lobbied for years on behalf of the neighborhood school, without success. After Dyett’s final class of 13 seniors graduated in June, Chicago Public Schools asked for other proposals without considering the coalition plan, which ultimately led to this month’s hunger strike.

     On Monday, the hunger-striking coalition also sent a letter to Little Black Pearl, a not-for-profit organization that has submitted a proposal for Dyett’s future use.

     “On behalf of the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett, we respectfully urge you to withdraw your proposal for Dyett High School,” the letter reads. “The Coalition has worked hard over the past 3 years to build a community process where input and collaboration was utilized to create the Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology academic plan. It reflects the vision of a broad cross-section of the community.”

     A representative from Little Black Pearl could not be reached for comment Monday evening.

     #PeoplesMonday has taken over the TKTS steps in Times Square to read the facts of #HenryGlover’s murder to the masses
     Five facts about #HenryGlover. NOLA cops shot & killed him, then burned his remains, as he fled Katrina.

172. rq says

     25 August 2015 at 4:31 pm

     Putting this one up at the top of the comment: #BlackLivesMatter organizers to rally for black transgender women

     Black Lives Matters organizers across the country will hold rallies on Tuesday calling attention to the number of black trans women who have been murdered this year. The rallies will be organized and led by organizers who are black and cisgender—men and women whose gender identities matched their sex when they were born.

     “Now is a call to action to get cis black people to stand up for black transgender lives,” said Aaryn Lang, a black trans woman based in New York who is calling on Black Lives Matter chapters across the country to organize rallies on Tuesday.

     At least 20 transgender women have been killed this year, 14 of them black women. Lang said organizers decided to call on the Black Lives Matter movement to speak out after three black trans women were found dead in the span of a week earlier this month.

     “Black trans women have been strategizing with the leaders of this movement but when we get killed there’s no outrage. Now is the time to shut it down for black trans lives,” said Lang in a telephone interview on Monday.

     The Black Lives Matter movement was founded by three black queer woman who have been explicit about including black trans women in their campaign. “Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum,” reads a sentence on the Black Lives Matter website ‘about me’ page.

     Currently there are rallies set in five cities: Houston, Dayton, Nashville, Chicago, Columbus, and Washington D.C. Organizers are also encouraging supporters online to participate by using the hashtag #BlackTransLivesMatter on social media.

     “We say the names of Mya Hall, Kandis Capri, Elisha Walker, Shade Shuler, Ashton O’Hara, India Clark, Amber Monroe. We say the names of the black trans women whose lives have been cut short and demand that our cisgender family acknowledge that all Black Lives Matter,” said Elle Hearns, Black Lives Matter strategic partner and a coordinator at GetEqual, an LGBT civil rights organization.

     Lang said more cities were expected to announce rallies later on Monday. Details about the currently listed events are listed below:

     Sorry for the late notice.

     Book club kicked off Napa Valley Wine Train, another article on that incident.

     As of Today, Black Lives Matter Activists Can Point to a Thorough Police Brutality Reform Plan, Slate on the Campaign Zero platform.

     Post-Dispatch Deletes Mention of Fingerprints, DNA Evidence from Coverage of Police Shooting, because the police story keeps changing.

     This morning, eagle-eyed Twitter user @tchop_stl pointed out a curious change in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch coverage of last week’s police shooting of Mansur Ball-Bey. Police say the eighteen-year-old pointed a gun before two officers opened fire, killing the teen, and the initial report from the Post-Dispatch included this detail:

     Police sources tell the Post-Dispatch that investigators found fingerprints and DNA on the gun police say Ball-Bey pointed at them, but the results are not yet available. Sources also say a witness has come forward who heard the officers’ shots, then saw Ball-Bey throw his weapon before running through a gangway and collapsing in the front yard.

     But the paragraph, preserved in a cached version of the story, was deleted without explanation sometime after the article was published.

     @tchop_stl tweeted his confusion about the missing, anonymously-sourced paragraph, rightly pointing out that the existence of DNA and fingerprints evidence is hardly a minor detail in this story. Lawyers for Ball-Bey’s family insist the teen was not armed when an officer shot him in the back on August 19, following what police say was a raid on a known drug house in the Fountain Park neighborhood. The existence of such evidence could add clarity to a police shooting that’s already the target of multiple investigations and intense public scrutiny.

     This wouldn’t be the first the time Post-Dispatch ran into problems with relying on “police sources.”

     When Dorian Johnson, a witness to Michael Brown’s death last year, was arrested in May during a block party, the Post-Dispatch initially cited unnamed police sources to report that Johnson was suspected of possessing a drink containing “cough medication mixed with what police believe to be an illegal narcotic.”

     When the drink was tested in a lab, however, no drugs were found.

     Another example can be found in the newspaper’s coverage of the November arrests of two local members of the New Black Panther Party. When the Post-Dispatch broke the news, the article cited “sources close to the investigation” to describe how the two men used a girlfriend’s Electronic Benefit Transfer card to buy pipe bombs.

     The detail was again mentioned up in followup story but disappeared from the Post-Dispatch’s later coverage. In June, we asked U.S. Attorney Richard Callahan about the matter, he said the “sources close to the investigation” were not from his office and that the details about the welfare card and girlfriend were flat-out false.

     As with the Ball-Bey article, no corrections were added to either story to acknowledge that the anonymously sourced police info wasn’t true.

     We’ve reached out to the two Post-Dispatch reporters bylined on the Ball-Bey story, Christine Byers and Jesse Bogan. We’ll update the story if/when we hear back.

     Some signs point to Roorda emailing advance (and false) information to a particular journalist.

     Here’s How Black People Actually Fare in Bernie Sanders’ Home State, because we’re still keeping an eye on him.

     But all is not well in the Green Mountain State. With a population that’s almost entirely white — 95.2%, according to 2014 Census estimates — and consists of just over 626,000 people, the brand of sequestered, small-scale liberalism that Vermont represents has rarely been tested by the strains of racial diversity. As such, a question arises: How does the state’s progressivism apply across racial lines?

     One answer lies in the numbers. According to data from Vermont’s Department of Corrections, this liberal enclave has one of the most disproportionate rates of black incarceration in the country.

     What does this mean? Black Vermonters make up just 1.2% of the state’s general population, but 10.7% of its incarcerated population. Meaning that, proportionally, there are nearly 10 times more black people locked up in Vermont’s jails and prisons on a given day than there are walking its streets.

     Few in Vermont seem able to explain how this happened. The black incarceration rate grew faster than any other in the state between 1993 and 2007, before it leveled out and stayed relatively constant. But shortly before its peak, the Sentencing Project reported that Vermont had the second-highest black-to-white incarceration rate in America — topped only by Iowa, another state with a small black population.

     Monica Weeber, administrative services director at the Vermont Department of Corrections, says it’s hard to parse where this disparity sources from. “I don’t really have the knowledge to speak to it specifically,” she told Mic. “But it’s clearly a systemic issue. Different people will give you different responses — but honestly, at the D.O.C., by the time people come to us the decision to incarcerate them has already been made.”

     Neither Matthew Valerio, Vermont’s defender general, nor Robin Weber, director of research at the Crime Research Group — a Vermont think tank — could point to specific policies that might have led to such rapid growth. “I have no information as to why,” Valerio told Mic. “The simple answer is that there’s bias in the system. But it could also be coincidental.”

     Weber adds, “We are concerned that there appears to be a racial disparity. But you’re also working with really small numbers here, so it’s hard to tell.”

     The confusion is felt on the ground level too. Curtiss Reed, executive director of the Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity, a state advocacy group, told Mic that it’s hard to draw anything conclusive from these figures because, “The devil is in the details. And we don’t have all the details.”

     Cop Fired For Being KKK Member, But Now He’s Working At Florida Elementary School, because teaching kids is exactly where they want him… right?

     Police Chief David Borst had resigned as the Fruitland Park deputy police chief back in July.

     That came after the FBI actually identified him as a member of the Klan.

     Officer George Hunnewell, was also fired for the same reason. Everyone had pretty much assumed they’d seen the last of him. That was until he showed up at Wildwood Elementary.

     “Kids are smart and they pick up on things. He might say a word or something and the child might hear it,” Yoma Isaac, a local parent said in an interview with local WFTV. “You never know what he could say.”

     Now, after only three days on the job, Borst has been fired. But parents want to know what their school district was thinking by hiring a notorious Klan Cop in the first place?

173. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     25 August 2015 at 5:39 pm

     The Black Lives Matter policy agenda is practical, thoughtful, and urgent.
     From the Washington Post.

     ****

     Don’t want to ride on the Napa Valley Wine Train? Here are 5 black-owned wineries.

     ****

     Oh, and look at this!
     Napa Valley Wine Train admits they were 100% wrong for kicking black women off:

     In a newly released statement, CEO Anthony Giaccio says his management teamed handled the incident poorly.

     “The Napa Valley Wine Train was 100 percent wrong in its handling of this issue,” he said. “We accept full responsibility for our failures and for the chain of events that led to this regrettable treatment of our guests.”

     Giaccio also penned an apology letter to the women who were kicked off the train.

     I want to apologize for your experience on the Napa Valley Wine Train on Saturday, Aug. 22. We accept full responsibility for our failures and the entire chain of unfortunate events you experienced.

     Clearly, we knew in advance when we booked your party that you would be loud, fun-loving and boisterous—because you told us during the booking process that you wanted a place where your Club could enjoy each other’s company. Somehow that vital information never made it to the appropriate channels and we failed to seat your group where you could enjoy yourself properly and alert our train’s staff that they should expect a particularly vibrant group.

     We were insensitive when we asked you to depart our train by marching you down the aisle past all the other passengers. While that was the safest route for disembarking, it showed a lack of sensitivity on our part that I did not fully conceive of until you explained the humiliation of the experience and how it impacted you and your fellow Book Club members.

     We also erred by placing an inaccurate post on our Facebook site that was not reflective of what actually occurred. In the haste to respond to criticism and news inquires, we made a bad situation worse by rushing to answer questions on social media. We quickly removed the inaccurate post, but the harm was done by our erroneous post.

     In summary, we were acutely insensitive to you and the members of the Book Club. Please accept my apologies for our many mistakes and failures. We pride ourselves on our hospitality and our desire to please our guests on the Napa Valley Wine Train. In this instance, we failed in every measure of the meaning of good service, respect and hospitality.

     I appreciate your recommendation that our staff, which I believe to be among the best, could use additional cultural diversity and sensitivity training. I pledge to make sure that occurs and I plan to participate myself.

     As I offered in my conversation with you today, please accept my personal apologies for your experience and the experience of the Book Club members. I would like to invite you and other members to return plus 39 other guests (you can fill an entire car of 50) as my personal guests in a reserved car where you can enjoy yourselves as loudly as you desire.

     I want to conclude again by offering my apologies for your terrible experience.

     ****

     Will an apology be forthcoming for a group of Latina women who were kicked off the Napa Valley Wine Train?

     Norma Ruiz, a graduate student in nursing at the University of California–San Francisco, said she and nine friends were celebrating her 28th birthday in April when another passenger told the group they were being annoying and loud, reported Slate.

     “We were kind of taken by surprise because we were just celebrating my birthday having normal conversation,” Ruiz said.

     A waiter told the group to carry on, and they decided to move to a dining car — where a train line employee told them to control their noise or be removed.

     “We were not making noise, (and) we felt very uncomfortable the way we were being approached and embarrassing our group in front of everyone,” Ruiz said.

     Ruiz said her group was entirely Latina, and mostly University of California–Berkeley graduates — and Saturday’s incident involving black passengers made her see it as part of a pattern of racial discrimination.

     “I think it was just that person complaining and then the manager seeing that we were Latino, basically decided to discriminate (against) us because we were Latinos and (a big) group,” she told Slate. “Now that I hear about this event with a group of African-American ladies being kicked out of the train, I’m seeing a pattern. I’m realizing that how I was treated was not normal.”

     A spokeswoman for the tourist attraction said the black women were ordered off the train last week after receiving several complaints about them laughing too loud.

     “After three attempts from staff, requesting that the group keep the noise to an acceptable level, they were removed from the train and offered transportation back to the station in Napa,” said spokeswoman Kira Devitt.

     The women, who are members of a book club and take an annual trip to wine country on the train, said they are considering a lawsuit.

     A company spokesman apologized to the women but defended their removal.

     White people who get together to drink and celebrate can be just as loud. I wonder how many instances can be found of any such group being kicked off…

174. rq says

     26 August 2015 at 2:19 am

     #SayHerName | Chapel Hill, NC

     Maryland attorney general recommends profiling standard for police

     Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh will recommend a new standard for police investigations Tuesday aimed at preventing the type of discriminatory profiling that activists have blamed for tensions between authorities and inner-city communities.

     Frosh (D) has prepared a “guidance memorandum” stating that police activities must be neutral with respect to characteristics such as race, national origin and religion, except when the traits are legitimate components in crime investigations.

     The document, scheduled for release during a news conference Tuesday morning, does not carry the weight of law or create enforceable rights, but it confirms that discriminatory profiling runs afoul of the U.S. and Maryland constitutions, according to the attorney general’s office. Local police departments would have to adopt the same guidelines in order to make it enforceable.

     “We believe that this standard will provide an important measure of fairness and respect for members of all these groups, while improving the environment in which law enforcement conducts its work,” Frosh said in prepared remarks.

     Several Maryland police officials and advocates for criminal-justice reform applauded the attorney general’s memo in prepared remarks for Tuesday’s news conference.

     Baltimore’s interim police commissioner, Kevin Davis, described Frosh’s actions as an “important step forward,” adding that his agency will be committed to incorporating the standard “for the benefit of our officers and our community.”

     Maryland NAACP President Gerald Stansbury said he was pleased that Frosh modeled his guidance on the federal guidelines, adding that “we know that good policing can be done without improper and discriminatory police tactics.”

     Vince Canales, president of the Maryland State Fraternal Order of Police, said Monday that discriminatory profiling is not a widespread issue in the state and that a task force appointed by the General Assembly to examine police practices in recent years has not identified any such problems.

     “The guidelines that the attorney general put forward are consistent with what law enforcement across the state of Maryland have been adhering to already,” he said.

     I love how the police union is all ‘no need for this’. Just being contrary, I suppose.

     Laclede Cab Fired Me for Black Lives Matter- My Response

     A friend of mine had been driving a cab for a long time for Allen Cab. Allen is now out of business; but back in the day was known as the “hood cab company”. He suggested I drive a cab. My friend Kelly Von Plonski from Subterranean Books also suggested cab driving may be good for me because I like to talk to people. I decided to talk to my grandfather who had been a cabbie in St. Louis in the 1950’s. Grandpa told me driving a cab was hard; but I should give it a try.

     I first applied to St. Louis County Cab. They told me I had to shave my beard. Not wanting to shave my beard I headed down to Laclede Cab and got hired immediately.
     […]

     One man runs Laclede Cab and that is Dave McNutt. It was his call to fire me after receiving complaints from racist trolls. While I’ve put hundreds of thousands of dollars into the pockets of Dave McNutt he wasn’t man enough to fire me face to face. Instead he had Kenny Whitehorn come in from vacation. I love Kenny, no hard feelings to him; because I know all he did is what Dave McNutt told him to do.

     My Twitter feed and Facebook inbox is flooded with support. I’m feeling the love. Now I just need to translate that into a new job with the quickness and if I can’t do that crowd-funding for the time being. Several people have remarked this may be a blessing in disguise. People say I’m over-qualified to be a cabbie. Why is an award-winning writer with bylines in The Guardian and Politico driving a cab?

     The truth of the matter is not only do I like driving a cab there hasn’t been a lot of full-time job offers on the table. Driving a cab you get to meet and talk to all sorts of people from low places to high places. I talk to them, listen to their stories, and they listen to mine. I’ll miss them.

     Ferguson Announces an Amnesty on Warrants, via the New York Times.

     The City of Ferguson, Mo., announced Monday that it was withdrawing thousands of arrest warrants for municipal violations and taking steps to prevent the incarceration of people who cannot pay fines and fees, a response to the sharp criticism of its court system that emerged after the killing of Michael Brown last year.

     The measures go beyond a state law set to take effect on Friday that limits the amount of money municipalities can keep from minor traffic offenses and imposes safeguards on the amount of time people can be locked up for failing to pay fines and fees. Several other municipalities in the region have announced similar warrant amnesties.

     “The hope is we can go through and have people come, get right, get rid of the excess fines and fees, and have people deal with the original issue that brought them before the law,” Mayor James Knowles III said.

     Yet court reform advocates, while applauding the measures as a step in the right direction, said the region’s municipal court system needed a complete overhaul. They questioned whether the changes announced Monday would withstand changing financial times and changing judges, and whether the new standards could be enforced.

     “Until we have full-time professional courts that don’t have conflicts of interest and can be meaningfully monitored, all of these municipalities are going to undo progress whenever they need the money,” said Brendan Roediger, a professor of law at St. Louis University School of Law.

     The changes, ordered by Judge Donald McCullin, who was appointed as Ferguson’s municipal judge in June, called for withdrawing all municipal warrants issued before Dec. 31, 2014. That should amount to nearly 10,000 warrants, the city said. It does not apply to state charges for more serious crimes.

     Defendants will get new court dates, according to the order, and may be put on installment plans to pay off their fines or ordered to perform community service instead. Some indigent individuals could have their fines commuted, according to the order.

     Defendants who continually fail to show up for court may have new arrest warrants issued, the order said, or they may get a setoff on their tax returns. People whose licenses were suspended solely because they failed to appear in court or pay a fine will have their licenses reinstated pending the disposition of their cases, the order said.

     Police Union: Circuit Attorney’s Investigation Undermines Police – yup, still unhappy!

     The St. Louis Police Officers’ Association is not backing down from accusations of political pandering by Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce.

     Joyce launched an investigation into last week’s fatal police shooting of Mansur Ball-Bey on Saturday. She contends her news conference with the NAACP was to encourage witnesses to come forward.

     “I have to do my job and I cannot do my job if I don’t have witnesses coming forward,” Joyce says. “And if there is misinformation out there, then I may need somebody other than a middle aged white lady telling people it’s safe to come down.”

     Association President Joe Steiger says the investigation is undermining the police department.

     “If she wants to make an announcement about speeding up the process then do that,” Steiger says. “The way she did it, does affect the perception of the public and certainly of the police office.”

     Joyce disagreed with claims that she doesn’t support local police and says she stands with anyone who wants to help witnesses come forward.

     I’m all for unions, but police unions just have to go. Or need a heck of a lot of reform.

     Here’s more union stuff, this time from Seattle: The President of the Seattle Police Union Believes the Obama Administration Has Created a “War on Cops”

     This is some pathetic news right here. Ron Smith, the veteran Seattle cop who represents about 1,200 Seattle police officers as the head of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, believes the federal government is waging a “war on cops.”

     On Sunday afternoon, someone from SPOG posted a link on its Facebook page to a video of commentary by Fox News contributor Kimberly Guilfoyle, who says, “The White House and this administration have created a war against police officers in this country with their allegations [and] false assertions that there is widespread and pervasive racism in the United States of America that lives in the heart and minds of the men and women in blue.” SPOG added the caption, “Truth.” It garnered 50 “likes.”

     Smith has since confirmed that he was the one who posted the link and wrote the caption. After I asked Mayor Ed Murray about the post, Smith (or someone) deleted it today. Murray said he strongly disagrees with Smith and said it “isn’t a good sign” for reform efforts.

     All the bells and whistles.

175. rq says

     26 August 2015 at 2:33 am

     San Jose police launch FAQ page for officer-involved shootings

     The FAQ page will include the department’s procedure for investigating officer-involved shootings, the department’s guidelines concerning use of force, the protocols and procedures for the department’s shooting review panel, officers’ duty manuals, the role of the Independent Police Auditor and the Santa Clara County District Attorney in an officer-involved shooting investigation and the Santa Clara County Police Chiefs’ Association Officer-Involved Incident Guidelines.

     “Transparency is one of the San Jose Police Department’s core principles,” the department stated in a news release. “We believe it is important for the community to understand the investigative process, oversight, monitoring and incident review process.”

     The FAQ page comes a week after two officer-involved shootings resulted in the death of two murder suspects believed to be connected to a Lundy Avenue homicide that left 38-year-old San Jose resident Christopher Wrenn dead.

     Link to the FAQ page itself is there. Not a bad idea.

     Mansur Ball-Bey was innocent bystander in police raid, family attorneys say

     Mansur Ball-Bey, 18, was not inside the house when St. Louis city police executed a search warrant on August 19 in a Fountain Park home, said attorneys representing Ball-Bey’s family at a press briefing today at the site where police shot and killed Ball-Bey.

     He was an innocent bystander watching the raid with his friend two houses away at 1233 Walton Ave., said the family’s attorney Jermaine Wooten.

     The story completely contradicts what police have said transpired when members of the police Special Operations Unit and Tactical Team searched for weapons and drugs at a home near Page Boulevard and Walton Avenue that Wednesday morning. The raid ended in Ball-Bey’s death on the front lawn of 1233 Walton Ave.

     Police said that Ball-Bey and a 14-year-old, both black males, fled out the back of the house that they were raiding and ran into the alley.

     However, Wooten said only two individuals were inside the house at the time of the police raid. One of them did not give a police statement, Wooten said, and the other told police and him that Ball-Bey was not in the house at the time of the raid.

     Sgt. Roger Engelhardt, head of the police department’s Force Investigation Unit, attended the attorneys’ briefing and confirmed with Wooten – away from the media – that the witness told police that Ball-Bey was not in the house, Wooten said. However, to the press, Engelhardt said he could not say what the witnesses told them. He said police had four witnesses but did not specify how many of them were police officers.
     […]

     [Ball-Bey and friend] were watching from the middle of the backyard when two police officers in plain clothes walked up and pointed guns at them, according to what the 14-year-old told Wooten. The boy also told him that the police didn’t say to stop or put their hands in the air, Wooten said, and they ran because they were afraid.

     Police have said that Ball-Bey pointed a gun at them and then ran. However, the attorneys said the two did not have weapons.

     “Mansur had just come from his job at Fed-Ex,” Christmas said. “Why would he have a gun? None of the witnesses we’ve talked with said he had a gun.”

     Wooten told the St. Louis American that Ball-Bey’s record was “squeaky clean,” and he was in the neighborhood to visit relatives.

     Police said they recovered the gun that they say Ball-Bey had. However, at the briefing, Engelhardt said the attorneys had witnesses that they have not heard from, and they would be interested in interviewing them as well. Police have not yet interviewed the 14-year-old who witnessed Ball-Bey’s death.

     Eh. I wanted to post this yesterday. #TransLiberationTuesday (August 25) Masterpost

     #BlackLivesMatter has consistently been supportive and in collaboration with black trans folks and especially with Black trans women. We have spent time developing principles,developing analysis,and creating deep practice that is full of love. There’s no action without practice. The time has come for us to practice what we have created. The time is now to resist in honor of Marsha P. Johnson. Islan Nettles. Cemia Dove. Amber Monroe. Penny Proud. Ashley Sherman and so many others. The time is now to join #BlackLivesMatter in action as we celebrate our sisters who are living- the very sisters who have fought next to us to sustain this declaration that has been heard around the world.

     A list of events and other things happening at the link.

     Amid national law enforcement debate, Md. attorney general condemns police profiling, Baltimore Sun on the new profiling standards.

     Marked as IMPORTANT: 24 Actions You NEED to Take to Help Trans Women of Color Survive

     K.C. Haggard. India Clarke. Mercedes Williamson. London Chanel. Kristina Gomez Reinwald. Penny Proud. Taja DeJesus. Yazmin Vash Payne. Ty Underwood. Lamia Beard. Papi Edwards. As of July 25th, this is the list of trans women murdered in 2015. However, this is merely the tip of the iceberg. The trans community knows that we lose our sisters to more than just murder. Suicide. Overdose. Domestic Violence. HIV/AIDS. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

     This isn’t just exhausting. This is intergenerational trauma, oppression, and maybe even genocide. This violence is specifically targeted against black and brown women, gender non-conforming folks, and especially trans women of color. Living at the intersection of blackness and browness and transcendence of gender normativity leaves us particularly visible and vulnerable to a lot of violence. We lose our jobs. Housing. Family. Support systems. We have to rely on sex work to get by. We have to rely on social services by nonprofits that fall short of meeting all of our needs. We welcome dangerous lovers into our lives because we don’t have intimacy or human touch. We think not using a condom will keep him with us and swallowing his cum will make him want to cuddle us a bit longer. (Not that all of us are straight or even attracted to men.) We are left starving for love, touch, intimacy, appreciations, and human contact. We might turn to drugs to escape the monstrous reality that awaits us when we wake up. This is the lived reality of trans women of color’s daily lives.

     With all of this in mind in one of the most visibly bloody years we’ve witnessed of violence against trans women of color, I wanted to make a list of things you can do to begin to change the culture of violence against trans women of color into one of love, appreciation, and transformative change.

     1. Listen. Trans women of color are brilliant, strong, powerful, and know our own experiences. When we tell you something has hurt us, you need to listen and work to understand what we’re saying instead of glossing over it. Also, listen to our stories, our histories, our tales of resilience and survival as well as our tales of violence and loss.

     2. Read. Read the books that have been written and published by trans women of color. There are a number of them that talk about the author’s history and life journey. Other books also capture the brilliance and raw emotion of academics and artists. Redefining Realness by Janet Mock is strongly recommended. Decolonizing trans/gender 101 by b. binaohan. Trauma Queen by Lovemme Corazon. Seasonal Velocities by Ryka Aoki. I Rise by Toni Newman. Cooking in Heels by Ceyenne Doroshow. Other writers include Morgan Collado, Micha Cardenas, Dane Figueroa Edidi, TS Madison, and soon Laverne Cox!

     3. Volunteer. There are numerous organizations across the country that serve trans women of color and are under resourced. Volunteering your time, energy, skills, ears, and money are all welcome to many of these organizations. You can also find one closer to home but these are some of my favorites:

     Transgender, Gender-Variant, Intersex Justice Project

     Trans Women of Color Collective

     Sylvia Rivera Law Project

     Audre Lorde Project

     Gender Justice LA

     Casa Ruby

     Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement

     4. Donate! Many organizations don’t receive grants, sustained funding, or major donors and have to rely on community wallets to sustain their programming. We can change this!

     5. Hire us. Give trans women of color jobs! Job security, benefits, consistency in schedules can help someone turn their life around.

     6. Nurture our brilliance. Give us professional development opportunities. Help us dream and manifest magic in the world. Trans women of color are some of the most brilliant, powerful, and biggest change-makers this world has ever seen. We need the opportunity to shine, grow, and create. If you work in a clinic give them a job or volunteer opportunity. Have them run your programs or intern for you. Teach us the process you go through to make things happen. Teach us the skills that you have learned.

     7. Allow us to be our full crazy-beautiful selves. So often we don’t want to know the entire person and we just want to know the ‘good’ parts. Employees. Partners. Friends. Family. We need to be there for each other and learn to fully accept each other for our flaws, troubled pasts, traumas, and insecurities that we all hold. These are sacred pieces that make the complete picture of who we are. Welcome our whole selves into the light.

     8. Increase stipends/gift cards for participation in studies. We offer up our lived experiences, trauma, blood, opinions, and thoughts for $50 gift cards. Non-trans women of color often make careers off of our struggles. Our lives are sacred and many of us are unemployed, living off social security, and/or sex workers. Bring trans women of color into the fold and teach us these skills/give us an opportunity to learn and conduct the research ourselves. Figure out a way to funnel more money into our pockets.

     9. Work against the erasure and white washing of our community history. Recently there has been a movie and a number of claims that white gay men played a significant role in Stonewall. The Stonewall riots were led by trans women of color, primarily Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. We have historical accounts and evidence that this is the case (shoutout to Reina Gossett, who has done the important work to save this herstory!) We also have a surviving veteran in Miss Major, who was there.

     10. Organize with us. There has been an increased effort from the amazing trans activists to organize die-ins and other actions bringing awareness to the epidemic of violence our community has faced. Fight for our federal and state protections in housing, employment, access to health care and more! We need YOUR help to bring this awareness to the mainstream consciousness. We need to begin to make a cultural shift towards valuing all trans women of color lives.

     11. Love us. Romantically. Platonically. Appreciate us. Fall in love with us. Be our best friend. Go out in public with us. Claim that you are dating/loving/friends with/attracted to a trans woman of color. And DEMAND that we are treated with respect.

     12. Refuse to give up on us. We all make mistakes. Given the pure amount of trauma, violence, and abuse we hold, we’ve often been unaware of the impact these moments have had on us, and our behaviors. Bring this behavior to light and if you’re able, help us work on creating healthier habits that are not destructive.

     There’s another 12 items on this list at the link. Most of it regular common sense stuff that can be boiled down to ‘treat us like people’.

     I would never date a man who hates Beyoncé, a bit of a fun read.

     In the past, my dating life was a mix of Frank Ocean’s Bad Religion and the sadder Mary J Blige songs that you can somehow still dance to. And yet, things have slowly but surely gotten better – a direct result of me making important changes. As I’ve gotten older, I have been more vigilant about noticing the signs that a man might be a loser and promptly taking the exit ramp.

     This includes things like never dating a man who doesn’t know how to use “your” and “you’re” correctly. I don’t want to be a snooty writer, but I also don’t want to invest in flirting with a person who didn’t pay attention in third grade. Similarly, though it may be a struggle, I will try my best to avoid checking a guy’s social media feeds before actually getting to know him. It’s like looking at a person through a filter that’s not as favorable as he thinks it is.

     But the one I most adamant about sticking to – and I have encouraged everyone I know to act accordingly: I will never date another person who does not like Beyoncé.

     If there is one mistake I made repeatedly in the past, it was looking past this fatal flaw. Of all the men I’ve dated, the worst have all disliked Queen Bey.

176. rq says

     26 August 2015 at 2:46 am

     Lonnie Johnson, Creator of the Super Soaker Awarded $72.9M in Royalties, article from April.

     Johnson Research and Development Co. and founder Lonnie Johnson have been in a royalty dispute with Hasbro since February, when the company filed a claim against the giant toy company. Hasbro underpaid royalties for the Nerf line toys from 2007 to 2012. The arbitration agreement resolves a 2001 inventors dispute in which Hasbro agreed to pay Johnson royalties for products covered by his Nerf line of toys, specifically the N-Strike and Dart Tag brands.
     […]

     Johnson, a nuclear engineer, Tuskegee University Ph.D. and former NASA scientist, founded his company in 1989. It was the same year he first licensed the Super Soaker, which generated more than $200 million in retail sales two years later. The toy was licensed to Larami Corp., which was later purchased by Hasbro.

     Johnson holds more than 80 patents, with more than 20 pending, the company said, which said sales of the Super Soaker have approached nearly $1 billion.

     Whoa.

     10 Years Later, There’s So Much We Don’t Know About Where Katrina Survivors Ended Up

     Hurricane Katrina made landfall in the city of New Orleans on the morning of August 29, 2005, swept in by winds traveling at 127 mph. But the true damage came after the levees broke, when about 80 percent of the city flooded. At least 400,000 residents, nearly the entire city, were displaced—some for a few days, some forever.

     Ten years later, there is still no single, comprehensive source of information on what happened to displaced New Orleans residents—on where they went, or why. Beyond FEMA and U.S. Census data collected a year or less after the disaster, neither the local nor federal government had systems in place to systematically track Katrina’s castaways.

     What we do have are a handful of individual studies, lists, and mapping efforts, that, taken all together, paint a portrait of a decade of dramatic upheaval.

     More on this New Orleans diaspora at the link.

     white person: *reaches to the outer borders of our known universe* See attached. Remind you of any other arguments you may have heard around?

     Donald Trump gets a boost from former Klansman David Duke, which of course is a stellar endorsement. Actually, it gives a pretty good idea of the scary attitudes that will be legitimized if he does end up president. Or even actual Republican candidate.

     St Louis’ sons, taken too soon

     There is a park near my house in St Louis, Missouri, where I walk every day. To get there I walk past empty stores and vacant lots, past a brick whitewashed church onto which the proprietor painted decorative windows to make it look like the kind of place it could be if anyone around here had money.

     The park is always busy. Families hold barbecues, children climb trees, young men shoot baskets, fathers coach sports. Almost everyone who goes to this park is black. When I walk through the park, white policemen ask me if anyone is bothering me. When I walk through the park, black men preface inquiries for directions with the phrase “Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you.”

     Those are the assumptions living in St Louis. Sometimes they are spoken, but usually they are just felt.

     At the far end of the park there is a teddy bear and a balloon tied to a tree. They were left there to commemorate a 20-year-old man who was shot and killed in July. Makeshift memorials like this line the landscape of St Louis. They remind passersby that the person who died was someone’s son: not an archetype or a statistic or a threat, but a son.

     Those the public are taught to fear are often the ones in danger.

     The shooting happened near a high school reunion in late July. It had nothing to do with the reunion, an annual park affair attended by enthusiastic graduates of a 90 percent black public school system. The shooting, which took place in another part of the park, seems to have been the violent outcome of a private feud.

     But around St Louis, on the internet, the chatter began. On websites, white St Louisans speculated on the inherent danger of such a large gathering of black citizens. They stated again and again that they were not surprised.

     A shooting in St Louis is never surprising, but it will always be shocking: that the cruelty of the act is complimented by the callousness of the reaction; that when a community cries, someone always finds a way to give it more to grieve.
     […]

     At my daughter’s bus stop in St Louis, the children would play games. They would chase each other and run, laughing and screaming, through neighbours’ yards. “You better watch it,” one child called to another. “I’m going to call the police. And it doesn’t matter what you do. They’ll put you in jail for nothing.”

     A white classmate asked the boy, who was black, what he meant. He said that had happened to his uncle. The white boy looked at the black boy blankly.

     You can live next to your neighbour and still exist in a different city, with different rights and rules. You can greet each other with sincere warmth, and never fathom the disparity of experience.

     In January, my daughter’s school held an event to celebrate the life of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. They called it “MLK: Not a Day, But a Way”. We marched through the neighbourhood, parents and children and local leaders, to show that the struggle against injustice was never over.

     But we all marched to different beats, to different histories, and it is foolish to pretend otherwise.

     In the auditorium, in a great public school that is, like so many majority black St Louis public schools, in danger of losing accreditation, we sang “We Shall Overcome”. My daughter clasped hands with a black boy, her partner in the afterschool science club. They sang a few bars then lost the words, and began whispering to each other about the movie “Frozen”.

     It was a scene of childhood innocence that advocates of a post-racial society like to promote: a black boy and a white girl, sweetly holding hands. But like all childhood innocence, it is an illusion. That boy will find danger when he ventures into the world unless St Louis – and all US cities – change their ways.

     There is a movement to heal St Louis. For St Louis to heal, we need to examine deep wounds: decades of discrimination and distrust. We need to protect the young black men who are threatened but portrayed as threats. Michael Brown is one of St Louis’ many sons taken too soon.

     50 years ago today, 58,000 new black voters registered in 4 Southern states after passage of Voting Rights Act on 8/6

177. rq says

     26 August 2015 at 2:50 am

     City of Prairie View weighs renaming street after Sandra Bland, possibly a repost.

     Unify or Die: Revolutionary Struggle and American Gangs

     The publicized deaths of young black men like Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray at the hands of the police has inspired a new generation of black liberation fighters in this country. This new wave of revolutionary consciousness is once again challenging the forces of systemic racism and the global capitalist system that supports it. As a result, local and national grassroots organizations like Black Lives Matter, Black Liberation and Heal the Hood have sprung up across the country. These movements have managed to attract a significant proportion of America’s youth from all racial, sexual and religious backgrounds. However a much less talked about trend is now happening on our streets: Organized street gangs like the Crips and Bloods are declaring truces and coming together to protect their communities. To many this may seem to be an unbelievable contradiction as many of these gang rivalries are generations old and still running. When one takes into consideration the revolutionary legacy that many street gangs come from, it becomes easier to understand. Similar truces between street gangs have come about during times of political revolt, such as the Watts riots of 1965 or the English riots in 2006. Understanding how and why these truces came about, and why they’ve fallen apart is crucial towards maintaining a sustainable, reliable and resilient self-defense against socio-economic and racial oppression. Towards that end we must first explore the history of America’s street gangs.

     Since America’s inception, its children have known violence to be their most effective method of communication. Much of that violence has been exported to far away lands who find themeselves unlucky enough to be part of America’s “national interests”. While billions of our tax dollars are spent supporting imperialist wars abroad, a much less publicized war is happening on our own streets. Like most wars this conflict has ravished and plundered the most disenfranchised, desperate and vulnerable communities. Heading the front lines are the organized street gangs who battle each other and the police for money, power and control. Yet hidden beneath the fog of war exists a hidden legacy of oppression and revolutionary struggle. A legacy which gangs share but are also tragically unaware of. It’s easy to forget this legacy when most of its story tellers are imprisoned or dead, and even easier when we can label them as nothing more than organized groups of ‘morally bankrupt’ thugs. However upon closer inspection, one will see that both the past and present have shown that there is a two-sided character to gangs. A two-sided character that comprises of both revolutionary politics and criminality.
     […]

     The civil rights era of the 1960’s would produce a radical change in Chicago’s gangs. It was during this time that the biggest African American gangs in the city: the Vice Lords, Blackstone Rangers and Disciple Nation (Gangster Disciples), began getting involved in local political organizing. Most of this organizing activity was conducted between the late 1950s and early 1970s. It was particularly during the civil rights era of the 60’s that the 3 largest gangs in Chicago formed an alliance called “Lords Stones and Disciples” (LSD for short). They began organizing rallies and marches against construction sites demanding that more black people from the local community be hired. These gangs would regularly hold meetings with Fred Hampton of the Illinois Black Panther Party to discuss how to further unite and organize the underprivileged communities of Chicago. Fred Hampton believed that only a multi-racial alliance of committed revolutionaries could destroy systemic racism. Hampton along with Jose Cha Cha Jimenez of the Young Lords, were instrumental in brokering a multi-racial ceasefire between Chicago’s most powerful gangs. At a press conference in May 1969, Fred Hampton would coin a truce called the “rainbow coalition” (a phrase that Jesse Jackson would later appropriate for use in his failed presidential bid 20 years later). This coalition initially included not just gangs but also the Black Panther Party, a white militant group known as the Young Patriots and a Puerto Rican gang known as the Young Lords. The Rainbow Coalition later expanded to include various left-wing organizations like the American Indian Movement and the Brown Berets.

     It’s pretty dense, but there’s a lot of great information in there.

     (2/3) Minimums are often related to firearms & drugs. Possessing a gun during a crime can lead to decades in prison.
     (3/3) Some states have revised their sentencing policies. The results are dramatic.
     I lost (1/3) somewhere.

     David Duke On Trump: He’s “Certainly The Best Of The Lot” Running For President – yeah, yeah.

     WATCH: ‘Not racist’ Louisiana man warns that renaming street for MLK will unleash his ‘racist ways’, because it’s the quiet, polite behaviour of his black neighbours that keeps his racism in check. So long as they behave according to his standards, he’ll be the least racist man you know!

178. Saad says

     26 August 2015 at 7:16 am

     Ben Ferguson: Hispanics don’t under English

     “If you like Univision and Jorge Ramos and illegal immigrants in this country, you’re not looking at any Republican candidate, so I’m not worried,” Ferguson said.

     He continued with the line that became contentious on social media, “And to be real honest, if you’re watching Jorge Ramos, the chances you even understand the words coming out of Donald Trump’s mouth tonight — I highly doubt you’re going to know what he was saying anyway.”

179. rq says

     26 August 2015 at 9:33 am

     Racist Fliers Reading ‘Let’s Get the Blacks Out’ Spark Outrage in Mich. Community. I certainly hope there’s outrage!

     There is a flier being distributed in Southfield, Mich., that shows a photo of a Klansman in a hood pointing his gun at the head of a black child who couldn’t be more than 6. The black child is wearing a white hoodie and is extending a bag of Skittles to the man.

     Another flier shows a photo of Trayvon Martin. The caption reads: “George Zimmerman was right. We will stop thugs like this.”

     And if the message wasn’t clear in the first two fliers, a third shows the photo of five white public officials, three of whom are expected to run for office in Southfield in upcoming elections, with these words: “Let’s get the blacks out of Southfield in November.”

     Angry residents told Fox 2 Detroit that the fliers begin showing up Sunday on the doorsteps of homes in the area.

     No one seems to be taking responsibility. How strange. You’d think all those white pride people would be ready to step up and be accountable.

     Despite strict voter ID laws, Alabama is in the process of closing 45 of 49 driver’s license offices, because who needs ’em, amirite?

     If you’re going to need a driver’s license in Alabama, you’re most likely going to have to figure out a way to get to one of only four driver’s licenses offices in the entire state:

     The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency said budget cuts will result in closing driver’s license offices across the state.

     The agency said the cut will be in phases, with 33 offices closed during the first wave.

     In January 2016, a further 12 offices will close. By March, all but four offices in the entire state will shut their doors.

     The offices that will remain open, ALEA said, are Huntsville, Montgomery, Mobile, and Birmingham.

     This will no doubt have a devastating effect on lower-income residents. Considering 18.7% of residents live at “poverty level” and another 8.4% at extreme poverty levels, it’s another blow that will surely leave more people behind. Can you imagine a single parent needing to take an entire day—or even two days—to travel to a driver’s license office and then wait all day for their turn to take the test?

     Perhaps most frightening about these closures is the effect it will have on voting in Alabama, where a conservative legislature passed a law in 2011 which requires a photo ID to vote. Alabama has already been on a steady decline (41% in November 2014) and these closures certainly won’t help to bring those numbers up.

     Intended or not, these office closures and the strict voter ID law will have an effect on government, policy and even safety (more people like to drive without a proper license) for a long time to come.

     We’ve all been told “driving is a privilege, not a right.” In Alabama, even securing a driver’s license is about to become a privilege many cannot afford.

     There’s a small update appended saying this may be an empty threat due to budget cuts upcoming, but still… I can just imagine the lines at these 4 locations.

     LAPD Police Commission Acts Like it Wants to Incite Riots. It’s a police commission. You were expecting a better attitude?

     On Tuesday, August 11, 2015, activists from Black Lives Matter issued a subpoena for Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck to appear before a people’s tribunal to answer to charges for the death of Ezell Ford. The very next day, LAPD officers shot and killed a woman named Redel Jones. A witness said Ms. Jones was shot in the back while running away, contradicting the official story that she moved toward officers with a knife.

     On Tuesday, August 18, 2015, Steve Soboroff was either ignoring or interrupting Los Angeles residents as they spoke during public comments. He did not have the self-control or respect to remain silent and pay attention for two minutes at a time to give the people who had concerns and criticisms about the LAPD a chance to speak. One person who spoke said, “When we calmly spoke the commissioners began to ignore us every time we used words like accountability.” The LAPD Police Commission callously disrespects people outraged at the continual unchecked murders of black and brown people by the Los Angeles Police Department.

     Activists from various groups were present, including Black Lives Matter, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, Youth Justice Coalition, LACAN, and Citizens Against Police Terror.

     But nope, apparently they’re not worth his time, patience, or respect. More at the link.

     BREAKING: #BlackTransLivesMatter protestors block traffic at 12th & Figueroa in #DowntownLA. Photo from last night.

     Iconic Ferguson Photo Subjects Are Being Charged A Year Later – we’ve read about the year-old charges being brought, but there’s more in the article on who, specifically, is being charged, and it’s not just those journalists.

     Why Ending Birthright Citizenship Would Be Terrible For Silicon Valley

     “We want the best and the brightest to be able to come to this country,” said Todd Schulte, executive director of tech lobbying firm FWD.us, in an interview with TPM. “So how does it make sense for the tech community or our country to tell people ‘please create jobs, please pay taxes, please grow the economy,’ but your children who are born here, they aren’t Americans?”

     Birthright citizenship foes target their criticism of the practice — widely believed to be enshrined by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution — towards so-called “anchor babies,” the derogatory term used for the children of undocumented immigrants. However, ending birthright citizenship would have broader implications for people of varying legal status in all areas of society, who can now take for granted that their children, if born here, will be considered U.S. citizens.

     “Getting rid of birthright citizenship would be chaotic in the United States. … It would create a whole new class of permanently undocumented or secondary citizens,” said Ben Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Council. “This would result in dramatic change for everybody: high-skill immigrants, low-skilled immigrants, families, business.”
     […]

     “That tech engineer who is an immigrant who goes on to have children here but realizes their children are stateless, they’re going to take their expertise and return [to their home country], therefore taking a prime contributor to our economy away from us,” Noorani told TPM. “So the net effect here is driving the best and the brightest away from us as a country.”
     […]

     The tech community — which otherwise aligns with traditionally conservative values like less regulation and lower taxes — has came out in full force in favor of immigration reform. FWD.us was founded by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates to push for an overhaul of the U.S.’s immigration system.

     To them, the push to repeal the 14th Amendment over largely unfounded concerns that birthright citizenship is a magnet for undocumented immigrants is the the latest sign of how far to the extremes the conversation has drifted since immigration reform legislation passed in the Senate but died in the House in 2013.

     “Why would we tell an engineer at a startup or a doctor or a small business owner, ‘You’re contributing, you’re paying taxes, you’re building a better life for your family but your child should forever be denied citizenship?’ It just flies in the face of everything we cherish about opportunity and American values,” Schulte said.

     I can’t help but think that this particular support for immigrant reform has racist under/overtones of its own. I may just be reading into it wrong at the moment, though.

     Pa. Judge Sentenced To 28 Years In Massive Juvenile Justice Bribery Scandal

     A Pennsylvania judge was sentenced to 28 years in prison in connection to a bribery scandal that roiled the state’s juvenile justice system. Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. was convicted of taking $1 million in bribes from developers of juvenile detention centers. The judge then presided over cases that would send juveniles to those same centers. The case came to be known as “kids-for-cash.”

     The AP adds:

     The Pennsylvania Supreme Court tossed about 4,000 convictions issued by Ciavarella between 2003 and 2008, saying he violated the constitutional rights of the juveniles, including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea.

     Ciavarella, 61, was tried and convicted of racketeering charges earlier this year. His attorneys had asked for a “reasonable” sentence in court papers, saying, in effect, that he’s already been punished enough.

     “The media attention to this matter has exceeded coverage given to many and almost all capital murders, and despite protestation, he will forever be unjustly branded as the ‘Kids for Cash’ judge,” their sentencing memo said.

     The Times Leader, of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., reports that the court house in Scranton was overflowing this morning. More than a dozen people who said they had been affected by the judge’s decision stood outside, awaiting the sentencing.

     Jeff Pollins was in that crowd. His stepson was convicted by Ciavarella.

     “These kids are still affected by it. It’s like post traumatic stress disorder,” Pollins told the Times Leader. “Our life is ruined. It’s never going to be the same… I’d like to see that happen to him,” he said.

     That is some vile human trafficking right there. “Kids for cash” – and this is why outsourcing prisons to private companies and signing contracts with them about how many spaces should be filled – it’s just wrong. WRONG.

180. rq says

     26 August 2015 at 9:41 am

     Keep an eye out for a new comment 179, I think I put in eight links instead of the maximum six.

     Road to Sandra Bland’s alma mater named for her. So they did it, yay!!

     ‘The wave has reached us:’ EU gropes for answers to migrant surge. Read within for a flavour of racism, European-style.

     Mom forced to quit as volunteer after complaining about youth cheer coach’s KKK shirt – shouldn’t the cheer coach be leaving? Let’s see:

     The head of an Alabama youth cheerleading squad resigned from his position after he showed up to a team practice wearing a KKK shirt. A photo of the team’s assistant vice president Brian McCracken and his friend was shared with parents and league officials after a mother went to the leaders to complain.

     “It’s awful, I mean, I don’t stand for it, I don’t want my kids around it. No one I know wants their kids around anything like that,” parent and former volunteer cheer coach Kayleigh Tipton said.

     So far so good. But then:

     Tipton thought the situation was over, but said the next time she went to practice, vice president for Boaz Cheer Melynnda McCracken asked her not to come back as a volunteer coach.

     Aha. What a great way to treat people who point out insensitivity and possible outright hatred within the community: ostracize them, too! Great decision there, McCracken. Stellar.

     High-profile STL cabbie says he was fired for political stances. I posted from his personal blog previously.

     Union on officer charged in shooting: ‘We could all be Adam Torres’. Yes, you could, and I wish you would all be charged in those situations where you shoot unarmed men for no reason at all. And convicted, too – you say it like it’s a bad thing!

     The Fairfax Coalition of Police Local 5000 released a long and sharply worded statement Monday, a week after one of its members, Officer Adam D. Torres, was indicted by a special grand jury in the fatal shooting of John Geer, 46, during a domestic-dispute call.

     “Officer Torres didn’t come to work that day looking to hurt or kill anyone,” the statement reads. “He didn’t get out of the car looking to hurt or kill anyone. What became abundantly clear soon after arriving on the scene that day almost two years ago was that he was dealing with an armed irrational subject that had made numerous threats to friends, family and police officers.”

     The statement, from President Sean Corcoran, later added of Fairfax County police officers, “we could all be Adam Torres.”

     The union also attacked Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh (D) for citing Torres’s “deteriorating” mental state at the time of the shooting in successfully arguing against bond for Torres at a hearing last week.

     Among other issues, Morrogh told a judge that Torres had told his supervisors that his wife was having an affair and that she had traveled to Hawaii to be with a boyfriend before the shooting. The union said the argument was based on “conjecture, rumor and fallacies.”

     “Hearing this salacious argument from what is supposed to be an officer of the court of the highest integrity was enough to make one retch,” the statement reads.

     The statement went on to ding the judge who denied Torres bond as well as the police department and county officials for failing to support Torres and other officers on the force.

     The statement is significant because it is the first from rank-and-file officers since Torres’s indictment and takes a sharply different tone from that of county leaders, who said Torres’s case should spur changes in how the department handles police shootings and communicates with the public.

     Well, that’s police unions for ya. They take it so personally.

     Police brutality in America should come as no surprise – Bryan Stevenson | Comment is Free , youtube video. Careful, though, it’s part of an automatic playlist. :)

181. rq says

     26 August 2015 at 9:53 am

     
     Judge rejects subpoenas for prosecutors to take witness stand at first Freddie Gray hearing. Well done, judge. That first hearing is coming up fast, too.

     A judge has rejected an attempt by defense lawyers to put Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby and other city prosecutors on the witness stand at the first motions hearing in the case against six Baltimore police officers charged in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray.

     Circuit Judge Barry Williams quashed the subpoenas sought by Catherine Flynn, an attorney for one of the officers, to put Mosby, five other prosecutors, two investigators and an assistant medical examiner on the stand at the hearing scheduled next Wednesday.

     Williams provided little explanation for his decision. He wrote that a letter Flynn sent to the court suggesting the hearing should consider evidence and therefore “take several hours to complete” was “inconsistent” with a court order that all communications in the case be filed through pleadings.
     […]

     “If the judge did not quash the subpoenas, then at the hearing, the conflict would be present,” Dillard said. “If the defense attorneys are allowed to call those witnesses that they have subpoenaed, then at that very hearing the judge would have to decide whether there is a conflict or an appearance of conflict between the Baltimore state’s attorney serving on a case in which she is also a witness.”

     “He would have been allowing the circumstances that could justify a recusal to actually happen in the hearing,” she said.

     How companies make millions off lead-poisoned, poor blacks. That sounds like a headline way too dated to be a thing in this modern world… unfortunately…

     The letter arrived in April, a mishmash of strange numbers and words. This at first did not alarm Rose. Most letters are that way for her — frustrating puzzles she can’t solve. Rose, who can scarcely read or write, calls herself a “lead kid.” Her childhood home, where lead paint chips blanketed her bedsheets like snowflakes, “affected me really bad,” she says. “In everything I do.”

     She says she can’t work a professional job. She can’t live alone. And, she says, she surely couldn’t understand this letter.

     So on that April day, the 20-year-old says, she asked her mom to give it a look. Her mother glanced at the words, then back at her daughter. “What does this mean all of your payments were sold to a third party?” her mother recalls saying.

     The distraught woman said the letter, written by her insurance company, referred to Rose’s lead checks. The family had settled a lead-paint lawsuit against one Baltimore slumlord in 2007, granting Rose a monthly check of nearly $1,000, with yearly increases. Those payments were guaranteed for 35 years.

     “It’s been sold?” Rose asked, memories soon flashing.

     She remembered a nice, white man. He had called her one day on the telephone months after she’d squeaked through high school with a “one-point something” grade-point average. His name was Brendan, though she said he never mentioned his last name. He told her she could make some fast money. He told her he worked for a local company named Access Funding. He talked to her as a friend.
     [skeevy person ingratiating himself and winning her trust]

     The reality, however, was substantially different. Rose sold everything to Access Funding — 420 monthly lead checks between 2017 and 2052. They amounted to a total of nearly $574,000 and had a present value of roughly $338,000.

     In return, Access Funding paid her less than $63,000.
     […]

     Traditional settlements are paid in one immediate lump sum. But these structured agreements often deliver monthly payments across decades to protect vulnerable recipients from immediately spending the money. Since 1975, insurance companies have committed an estimated $350 billion to structured settlements. This has given rise to a secondary market in which dozens of firms compete to purchase the rights to those payments for a fraction of their face value.

     What happens in these deals is a matter of perspective. To industry advocates, the transactions get money to people who need it now. They keep desperate families off the streets, pay medical bills, put kids through school.

     “What we do is provide equity for those people to buy homes,” said Access Funding chief executive Michael Borkowski. He said his organization had no reason to think Rose was cognitively impaired, pointing to her high school degree, driver’s license and written documents in her name. He said Access Funding has no record showing that Brendan, whom he praised for “the highest level of professionalism,” took Rose out to eat, and he disputed that she’d been promised a vacation. “We’re trying to bring better value to people,” Borkowski continued. “. . . We really do try to get people the best deals.”

     But to critics, Access Funding is part of an industry that profits off the poor and disabled. And Baltimore has become a prime target. It’s here that one teen — diagnosed with “mild mental retardation,” court records show — sold her payments through 2030 in four deals and is now homeless. It’s here that companies blanket certain neighborhoods in advertisements, searching for a potentially lucrative type of inhabitant, whose stories recall the legacy of Freddie Gray.
     […]

     Every case spells out the deal’s worth. It lists the aggregate value of the lead victim’s payments, their present value and the agreed purchase price. A random survey of 52 of those deals shows Access Funding generally offers to pay around 33 cents on the present value of a dollar. Sometimes, it offers more. And sometimes, much less. One 24-year-old lead victim sold nearly $327,000 worth of payments, which had a present value of $179,000, for less than $16,200 — or about 9 cents on the dollar. Another relinquished $256,000 worth of payments, which had a present value of $166,000, for $35,000 — or about 21 cents on the dollar.

     Taken together, the sample shows Access Funding petitioned to buy roughly $6.9 million worth of future payments — which had a present value of $5.3 million — for around $1.7 million.

     Presented with these findings, Borkowski said Access Funding doesn’t target lead victims and that Baltimore’s glut of lead-paint lawsuits has artificially inflated that aspect of its business. He said interested investors set the purchase prices, which are lower than the payments’ present value because various factors — such as a life-contingency clause that stops payments if the holder dies — diminish their worth.

     “When you get all the way until 2052, that’s pretty far out there,” he said, adding that his company, which does 80 percent of its work outside Maryland, survives only by offering better deals than other firms.

     Still, Borkowski urged stricter legislation and more oversight. “These questions you raise touch on fundamental things we are going to be doing differently now,” he said. “We want to secure ourselves in the future from any potential questions like this again, so we can say, ‘No, that’s not us.’ ”

     There’s more to read, but it’s just so damn depressing…. Ruining families and honestly these people don’t give a shit. Gray was one of their victims, too, as was his sister, but this company just brushes it off with declarations of a good relationship with the family.
     It’s revolting.

     What We Don’t Know About Policing, Race and Mental Illness

     Witnesses reported hearing White yelling, repeatedly, “In the name of Jesus Christ” and “Help me.” They described his behavior as “bizarre” and “crazy.” Police dispatchers alerted officers to an assault with a deadly weapon — the cinderblock — but also warned that this was a potential 5150 call, the code for someone who’s mentally ill and poses a danger to himself or others.

     When police arrived, White was standing on a sidewalk and hitting a parked van with the jagged end of the broom handle. Five officers surrounded him — four with guns drawn, one with a police dog — yelling at him to drop the stick. He didn’t. Less than a minute later, at 1:30 p.m., White lay dying on a patch of dirt from a gunshot wound to the chest. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

     Michael Astorga, the San Diego County sheriff’s deputy who shot White, told investigators that he was holding the stick “like a spear” and had lunged at another officer. But no witnesses, including the four other officers, corroborated this account fully. Neither did the forensic evidence. This past June, during proceedings in a federal wrongful-death lawsuit filed by White’s parents, a county medical examiner testified that the bullet’s path — through White’s right forearm and into his chest — showed he was gripping the stick like a baseball bat when he was shot, holding it close to his torso, the thumb of his right hand facing up and turned inward. The four other officers said they saw White step forward, but the stick remained vertical.

     There were no attempts to use less-lethal force. The police dog wasn’t released because, his handler testified, he didn’t want the dog to get hurt — even though the dog had been trained to disarm suspects. The dog’s handler called out “less lethal” and “we need a beanbag” to Astorga, who had a beanbag rifle in the trunk of his car, but Astorga didn’t retrieve it. Astorga testified that he’d at first drawn his Taser, but decided against using it because it was too windy. The National Weather Service, though, showed the wind that day blowing at just 4 mph, according to evidence presented at trial.
     […]

     Hicks and co-counsel Carl Douglas never argued that White didn’t pose a threat to public safety. The question was whether, at the moment Astorga fired his gun, White posed such a threat that deadly force was the only option. To prevail in the case, the defense had to convince the jury to ignore the forensic evidence, ignore the witness testimony and believe Astorga’s version of events. “I just think fear permeated the courtroom and the jury box,” Hicks told this reporter recently. During closing arguments, a county attorney hoisted the stick in his right hand, held it above his shoulder — as one would hold a spear — and stepped toward jurors with a loud, aggressive stomp.

     On June 22 the jury — all white except for one Latina woman — deliberated for an hour before finding the shooting justified.

     More background at the link.

     Defense attorney says teen not under arrest after officer involved shooting

     The attorney for a seventeen year old who was shot several times by a police officer in Longview said his client is in the hospital and not under arrest as of Tuesday evening.

     Joshua Thomas was shot around 3:45 a.m. on Tuesday as he was leaving This Our Store on Mobberly Avenue. Surveillance video from the store shows Thomas turning a corner before police confronted him. Seconds later, the video shows Thomas fall to the ground after one of the officers opens fire.

     Assault? Well, he did, apparently, reach for his waistband….

     Woman dies in county jail; investigation under way. Another lengthening list.

     A woman has died in custody in the San Joaquin County Jail, the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office reported this evening.

     Celestine Allen, a 50-year-old woman, was found unresponsive sometime Wednesday evening, according to a news release from the sheriff’s office. The discovery happened during standard inmate checks.

     Attempts were made to revive her, but they failed.

     Allen was being held on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon. She had been arrested by Stockton police on Tuesday, according to the sheriff’s office.

     An autopsy is being performed, and a protocol investigation into Allen’s death has begun, both standard in such cases, according to a news release from the sheriff’s office.

     Phantoms Playing Double-Dutch: Why the Fight for Dyett is Bigger than One Chicago School Closing. Those parents are, as far as I know, still on hunger strike.

     The first thing that struck me when I walked up King Drive to 35th Street, where the throng of people sat in front of the fourth ward alderman’s office, was the heat. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve been a Chicagoan since the day I was born, which means I was born for bad weather. I lived through the heat wave of 1995, when over 700 people died, and through the blizzard in 2011, when the cars sat stacked on Lake Shore Drive, still, like terracotta warriors. So it wasn’t the fact of the weather that got me; it was the old folks there in it. And the babies. And then, when my eyes lingered a bit longer, it was the mothers, and the teenagers, and—well, everybody. They sat in folding chairs under the scant, moving shade of skinny trees, or leaned against the wrought iron fence, or sat on the steps of the alderman’s office. They were gathered in the name of Dyett, the high school that the leaders of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) announced in 2012 would be shuttered at the end of 2015. This group of parents, community members, and students—many of them affiliated with the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), one of the oldest black organizing groups in the country—sat in the 95-degree heat to demand a meeting with the alderman, Will Burns. They wanted him to consider their proposal to re-open Dyett as an open-enrollment, community-based school.

     I shared some bottles of water and sat for a while. It was hot. We moved the chairs periodically as the sun shifted across the sky. A city worker drove by in a pickup truck, hauling a trailer laden with park maintenance equipment. He raised his fist out the window and gave a cheer, and the folks gathered cheered back. I listened to Mrs. McCall1 talk about how her grandfather owned a store in Mississippi, how she moved north when she was 12 years old and spent her summers traveling back to visit him. She told me how to make the best of my time in graduate school. “What is your passion?” she asked me. “What do you love the most?” My gaze traveled across the street, to the King Branch library where I had once hosted afterschool research sessions so that my students could have help finding reference books, where many of them stayed in the afternoons because it was a safe, free place to do homework until their parents got off work, where if I stopped to just borrow or return a novel they would grin broadly, excited to see me outside of school. I pretended I had x-ray vision, and squinted my eyes to look through the library, to peer west one block and north three blocks, to where that school was, the school where I taught. What do you love the most?

     That day, that hot day, that was a year ago. Last week, I saw some of those same old folks, those same babies, in front of Dyett, at the northern end of the South Side’s sprawling Washington Park. And unlike all the other times I had seen them, they were not demanding a meeting. They were through with meetings. Today, twelve of them were beginning a hunger strike. I knelt in the grass next to Irene Robinson, a grandmother of nine children, who I saw get escorted away by police in City Hall a few weeks ago when she showed up to protest the closing of Dyett; every time I see her, she strikes me with the same two memorable traits—she wears fantastic purple or fuschia lipstick and, when we part, bids farewell by saying “I love you!” so enthusiastically that I am moved to say it back.

     “Are you scared, Ms. Irene?”

     “I’m scared,” she tells me, looking past me to the behemoth black building that stands empty behind my shoulders. “I’m scared for my grandchildren.”

     Tonight, as I write this, it is Sunday, day seven of the hunger strike. This morning, I attended a special service at Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, where the pastor has joined the strike in a show of support. Ms. Robinson and the other hunger strikers sat in the front pews, across the aisle from where I sat with my niece, Leila, who at two (almost three) is nevertheless remarkably good at sitting quietly in church. She watched, wide-eyed, as KOCO’s lead education organizer, Jitu Brown, stood at the pulpit. I split my time between watching him and watching her, thinking about the nights I have spent scouring the internet for an affordable, high-quality place for her to go to preschool (spoiler alert: there aren’t any). I think about the map I saw recently in a report from the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall Center for Children, charting the availability of state-licensed childcare in Chicago, community by community. Our neighborhood was noted as having .07 – .21 slots for every child aged 0-5, meaning that quality childcare would be out of reach for 79-93% of young children in the area. I think about how I wish Leila could at least get to three before the worry set in about where and how she would get access to a good education, before I am jolted back to the present by Jitu.

     “Even when we were in slavery,” he is saying into the microphone, “black people fought for schools. And “our ancestors evacuated the South to come here, to find a better life for their children…. The institution that our ancestors fought for and won—we’ve got to reclaim it.” As for why the time has come to lay his body on the line for Dyett, after years of meetings and proposals and arguments and civil disobedience, Brown says it plainly, tugging at the waistband of pants that have become looser in the last week. “You stop playing somebody else’s game when you realize the game is rigged.” I look back at Leila, who has fallen asleep in the pew next to me.

     Keep reading at the link.
     And see if there’s anything you can do to help save the school.

182. rq says

     26 August 2015 at 10:00 am

     Something in this comment won’t post, here’s hoping it’s only in moderation because it has some excellent links.
     
     Judge rejects subpoenas for prosecutors to take witness stand at first Freddie Gray hearing. Well done, judge. That first hearing is coming up fast, too.

     A judge has rejected an attempt by defense lawyers to put Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby and other city prosecutors on the witness stand at the first motions hearing in the case against six Baltimore police officers charged in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray.

     Circuit Judge Barry Williams quashed the subpoenas sought by Catherine Flynn, an attorney for one of the officers, to put Mosby, five other prosecutors, two investigators and an assistant medical examiner on the stand at the hearing scheduled next Wednesday.

     Williams provided little explanation for his decision. He wrote that a letter Flynn sent to the court suggesting the hearing should consider evidence and therefore “take several hours to complete” was “inconsistent” with a court order that all communications in the case be filed through pleadings.
     […]

     “If the judge did not quash the subpoenas, then at the hearing, the conflict would be present,” Dillard said. “If the defense attorneys are allowed to call those witnesses that they have subpoenaed, then at that very hearing the judge would have to decide whether there is a conflict or an appearance of conflict between the Baltimore state’s attorney serving on a case in which she is also a witness.”

     “He would have been allowing the circumstances that could justify a recusal to actually happen in the hearing,” she said.

     How companies make millions off lead-poisoned, poor blacks. That sounds like a headline way too dated to be a thing in this modern world… unfortunately…

     The letter arrived in April, a mishmash of strange numbers and words. This at first did not alarm Rose. Most letters are that way for her — frustrating puzzles she can’t solve. Rose, who can scarcely read or write, calls herself a “lead kid.” Her childhood home, where lead paint chips blanketed her bedsheets like snowflakes, “affected me really bad,” she says. “In everything I do.”

     She says she can’t work a professional job. She can’t live alone. And, she says, she surely couldn’t understand this letter.

     So on that April day, the 20-year-old says, she asked her mom to give it a look. Her mother glanced at the words, then back at her daughter. “What does this mean all of your payments were sold to a third party?” her mother recalls saying.

     The distraught woman said the letter, written by her insurance company, referred to Rose’s lead checks. The family had settled a lead-paint lawsuit against one Baltimore slumlord in 2007, granting Rose a monthly check of nearly $1,000, with yearly increases. Those payments were guaranteed for 35 years.

     “It’s been sold?” Rose asked, memories soon flashing.

     She remembered a nice, white man. He had called her one day on the telephone months after she’d squeaked through high school with a “one-point something” grade-point average. His name was Brendan, though she said he never mentioned his last name. He told her she could make some fast money. He told her he worked for a local company named Access Funding. He talked to her as a friend.
     [skeevy person ingratiating himself and winning her trust]

     The reality, however, was substantially different. Rose sold everything to Access Funding — 420 monthly lead checks between 2017 and 2052. They amounted to a total of nearly $574,000 and had a present value of roughly $338,000.

     In return, Access Funding paid her less than $63,000.
     […]

     Traditional settlements are paid in one immediate lump sum. But these structured agreements often deliver monthly payments across decades to protect vulnerable recipients from immediately spending the money. Since 1975, insurance companies have committed an estimated $350 billion to structured settlements. This has given rise to a secondary market in which dozens of firms compete to purchase the rights to those payments for a fraction of their face value.

     What happens in these deals is a matter of perspective. To industry advocates, the transactions get money to people who need it now. They keep desperate families off the streets, pay medical bills, put kids through school.

     “What we do is provide equity for those people to buy homes,” said Access Funding chief executive Michael Borkowski. He said his organization had no reason to think Rose was cognitively impaired, pointing to her high school degree, driver’s license and written documents in her name. He said Access Funding has no record showing that Brendan, whom he praised for “the highest level of professionalism,” took Rose out to eat, and he disputed that she’d been promised a vacation. “We’re trying to bring better value to people,” Borkowski continued. “. . . We really do try to get people the best deals.”

     But to critics, Access Funding is part of an industry that profits off the poor and disabled. And Baltimore has become a prime target. It’s here that one teen — diagnosed with “mild mental retardation,” court records show — sold her payments through 2030 in four deals and is now homeless. It’s here that companies blanket certain neighborhoods in advertisements, searching for a potentially lucrative type of inhabitant, whose stories recall the legacy of Freddie Gray.
     […]

     Every case spells out the deal’s worth. It lists the aggregate value of the lead victim’s payments, their present value and the agreed purchase price. A random survey of 52 of those deals shows Access Funding generally offers to pay around 33 cents on the present value of a dollar. Sometimes, it offers more. And sometimes, much less. One 24-year-old lead victim sold nearly $327,000 worth of payments, which had a present value of $179,000, for less than $16,200 — or about 9 cents on the dollar. Another relinquished $256,000 worth of payments, which had a present value of $166,000, for $35,000 — or about 21 cents on the dollar.

     Taken together, the sample shows Access Funding petitioned to buy roughly $6.9 million worth of future payments — which had a present value of $5.3 million — for around $1.7 million.

     Presented with these findings, Borkowski said Access Funding doesn’t target lead victims and that Baltimore’s glut of lead-paint lawsuits has artificially inflated that aspect of its business. He said interested investors set the purchase prices, which are lower than the payments’ present value because various factors — such as a life-contingency clause that stops payments if the holder dies — diminish their worth.

     “When you get all the way until 2052, that’s pretty far out there,” he said, adding that his company, which does 80 percent of its work outside Maryland, survives only by offering better deals than other firms.

     Still, Borkowski urged stricter legislation and more oversight. “These questions you raise touch on fundamental things we are going to be doing differently now,” he said. “We want to secure ourselves in the future from any potential questions like this again, so we can say, ‘No, that’s not us.’ ”

     There’s more to read, but it’s just so damn depressing…. Ruining families and honestly these people don’t give a shit. Gray was one of their victims, too, as was his sister, but this company just brushes it off with declarations of a good relationship with the family.
     It’s revolting.

     What We Don’t Know About Policing, Race and Mental Illness

     Witnesses reported hearing White yelling, repeatedly, “In the name of Jesus Christ” and “Help me.” They described his behavior as “bizarre” and “crazy.” Police dispatchers alerted officers to an assault with a deadly weapon — the cinderblock — but also warned that this was a potential 5150 call, the code for someone who’s mentally ill and poses a danger to himself or others.

     When police arrived, White was standing on a sidewalk and hitting a parked van with the jagged end of the broom handle. Five officers surrounded him — four with guns drawn, one with a police dog — yelling at him to drop the stick. He didn’t. Less than a minute later, at 1:30 p.m., White lay dying on a patch of dirt from a gunshot wound to the chest. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

     Michael Astorga, the San Diego County sheriff’s deputy who shot White, told investigators that he was holding the stick “like a spear” and had lunged at another officer. But no witnesses, including the four other officers, corroborated this account fully. Neither did the forensic evidence. This past June, during proceedings in a federal wrongful-death lawsuit filed by White’s parents, a county medical examiner testified that the bullet’s path — through White’s right forearm and into his chest — showed he was gripping the stick like a baseball bat when he was shot, holding it close to his torso, the thumb of his right hand facing up and turned inward. The four other officers said they saw White step forward, but the stick remained vertical.

     There were no attempts to use less-lethal force. The police dog wasn’t released because, his handler testified, he didn’t want the dog to get hurt — even though the dog had been trained to disarm suspects. The dog’s handler called out “less lethal” and “we need a beanbag” to Astorga, who had a beanbag rifle in the trunk of his car, but Astorga didn’t retrieve it. Astorga testified that he’d at first drawn his Taser, but decided against using it because it was too windy. The National Weather Service, though, showed the wind that day blowing at just 4 mph, according to evidence presented at trial.
     […]

     Hicks and co-counsel Carl Douglas never argued that White didn’t pose a threat to public safety. The question was whether, at the moment Astorga fired his gun, White posed such a threat that deadly force was the only option. To prevail in the case, the defense had to convince the jury to ignore the forensic evidence, ignore the witness testimony and believe Astorga’s version of events. “I just think fear permeated the courtroom and the jury box,” Hicks told this reporter recently. During closing arguments, a county attorney hoisted the stick in his right hand, held it above his shoulder — as one would hold a spear — and stepped toward jurors with a loud, aggressive stomp.

     On June 22 the jury — all white except for one Latina woman — deliberated for an hour before finding the shooting justified.

     More background at the link.

     Defense attorney says teen not under arrest after officer involved shooting

     The attorney for a seventeen year old who was shot several times by a police officer in Longview said his client is in the hospital and not under arrest as of Tuesday evening.

     Joshua Thomas was shot around 3:45 a.m. on Tuesday as he was leaving This Our Store on Mobberly Avenue. Surveillance video from the store shows Thomas turning a corner before police confronted him. Seconds later, the video shows Thomas fall to the ground after one of the officers opens fire.

     Assault? Well, he did, apparently, reach for his waistband….

     Woman dies in county jail; investigation under way. Another lengthening list.

     A woman has died in custody in the San Joaquin County Jail, the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office reported this evening.

     Celestine Allen, a 50-year-old woman, was found unresponsive sometime Wednesday evening, according to a news release from the sheriff’s office. The discovery happened during standard inmate checks.

     Attempts were made to revive her, but they failed.

     Allen was being held on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon. She had been arrested by Stockton police on Tuesday, according to the sheriff’s office.

     An autopsy is being performed, and a protocol investigation into Allen’s death has begun, both standard in such cases, according to a news release from the sheriff’s office.

     Phantoms Playing Double-Dutch: Why the Fight for Dyett is Bigger than One Chicago School Closing. Those parents are, as far as I know, still on hunger strike.

     The first thing that struck me when I walked up King Drive to 35th Street, where the throng of people sat in front of the fourth ward alderman’s office, was the heat. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve been a Chicagoan since the day I was born, which means I was born for bad weather. I lived through the heat wave of 1995, when over 700 people died, and through the blizzard in 2011, when the cars sat stacked on Lake Shore Drive, still, like terracotta warriors. So it wasn’t the fact of the weather that got me; it was the old folks there in it. And the babies. And then, when my eyes lingered a bit longer, it was the mothers, and the teenagers, and—well, everybody. They sat in folding chairs under the scant, moving shade of skinny trees, or leaned against the wrought iron fence, or sat on the steps of the alderman’s office. They were gathered in the name of Dyett, the high school that the leaders of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) announced in 2012 would be shuttered at the end of 2015. This group of parents, community members, and students—many of them affiliated with the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), one of the oldest black organizing groups in the country—sat in the 95-degree heat to demand a meeting with the alderman, Will Burns. They wanted him to consider their proposal to re-open Dyett as an open-enrollment, community-based school.

     I shared some bottles of water and sat for a while. It was hot. We moved the chairs periodically as the sun shifted across the sky. A city worker drove by in a pickup truck, hauling a trailer laden with park maintenance equipment. He raised his fist out the window and gave a cheer, and the folks gathered cheered back. I listened to Mrs. McCall1 talk about how her grandfather owned a store in Mississippi, how she moved north when she was 12 years old and spent her summers traveling back to visit him. She told me how to make the best of my time in graduate school. “What is your passion?” she asked me. “What do you love the most?” My gaze traveled across the street, to the King Branch library where I had once hosted afterschool research sessions so that my students could have help finding reference books, where many of them stayed in the afternoons because it was a safe, free place to do homework until their parents got off work, where if I stopped to just borrow or return a novel they would grin broadly, excited to see me outside of school. I pretended I had x-ray vision, and squinted my eyes to look through the library, to peer west one block and north three blocks, to where that school was, the school where I taught. What do you love the most?

     That day, that hot day, that was a year ago. Last week, I saw some of those same old folks, those same babies, in front of Dyett, at the northern end of the South Side’s sprawling Washington Park. And unlike all the other times I had seen them, they were not demanding a meeting. They were through with meetings. Today, twelve of them were beginning a hunger strike. I knelt in the grass next to Irene Robinson, a grandmother of nine children, who I saw get escorted away by police in City Hall a few weeks ago when she showed up to protest the closing of Dyett; every time I see her, she strikes me with the same two memorable traits—she wears fantastic purple or fuschia lipstick and, when we part, bids farewell by saying “I love you!” so enthusiastically that I am moved to say it back.

     “Are you scared, Ms. Irene?”

     “I’m scared,” she tells me, looking past me to the behemoth black building that stands empty behind my shoulders. “I’m scared for my grandchildren.”

     Tonight, as I write this, it is Sunday, day seven of the hunger strike. This morning, I attended a special service at Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, where the pastor has joined the strike in a show of support. Ms. Robinson and the other hunger strikers sat in the front pews, across the aisle from where I sat with my niece, Leila, who at two (almost three) is nevertheless remarkably good at sitting quietly in church. She watched, wide-eyed, as KOCO’s lead education organizer, Jitu Brown, stood at the pulpit. I split my time between watching him and watching her, thinking about the nights I have spent scouring the internet for an affordable, high-quality place for her to go to preschool (spoiler alert: there aren’t any). I think about the map I saw recently in a report from the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall Center for Children, charting the availability of state-licensed childcare in Chicago, community by community. Our neighborhood was noted as having .07 – .21 slots for every child aged 0-5, meaning that quality childcare would be out of reach for 79-93% of young children in the area. I think about how I wish Leila could at least get to three before the worry set in about where and how she would get access to a good education, before I am jolted back to the present by Jitu.

     “Even when we were in slavery,” he is saying into the microphone, “black people fought for schools. And “our ancestors evacuated the South to come here, to find a better life for their children…. The institution that our ancestors fought for and won—we’ve got to reclaim it.” As for why the time has come to lay his body on the line for Dyett, after years of meetings and proposals and arguments and civil disobedience, Brown says it plainly, tugging at the waistband of pants that have become looser in the last week. “You stop playing somebody else’s game when you realize the game is rigged.” I look back at Leila, who has fallen asleep in the pew next to me.

     Keep reading at the link.
     And see if there’s anything you can do to help save the school.

183. Morgan!? ♥ ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ says

     26 August 2015 at 10:37 am

     I appreciate the yeoman’s effort required by rq and Tony to keep this thread current. It is heartbreaking though. The sheer volume of racism is awful. In my wandering around the ‘net I discovered the site Understanding Prejudice.org. From their homepage:

     UnderstandingPrejudice.org was established in 2002 with funding from the National Science Foundation (Grant Number 9950517) and McGraw-Hill Higher Education. The purpose of the site is to offer educational resources and information on prejudice, discrimination, multiculturalism, and diversity, with the ultimate goal of reducing the level of intolerance and bias in contemporary society.

     Although UnderstandingPrejudice.org is organized to supplement Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination (a university-level anthology published by McGraw-Hill), all pages and features of the site are freely available to teachers, students, and other visitors regardless of whether they purchase the McGraw-Hill anthology.

     There is a wealth of links, research, information etc. It as a wonderful effort to concretely DO something about prejudice and racism. And it has been available for a long time. I’d welcome the response of educators out there if they are familiar with this resource and if it is useful. I suspect the topic is not addressed academically at any level below university.

184. Morgan!? ♥ ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ says

     26 August 2015 at 11:34 am

     How many people are aware that there is a protest march taking place right now, sponsored by the NAACP?
     From The Campaign For America’s Future at ourfuture.org

     From Selma to Washington, NAACP’s New Journey for Justice by Larry Cohen

     The NAACP’s “Journey for Justice” began in Selma, Ala., on August 1. The march is scheduled to arrive in Washington, D.C. on September 15, followed by an “advocacy day” at the Capitol on September 16. NAACP national president Cornell Brooks has walked much of the first 330 miles himself, inspiring hundreds to join in the march for at least a day. The journey is designed to focus on four key issue areas – our votes, lives, jobs and schools.

     On one level the Journey’s goals are modest – reenactment of the Voting Rights Act, criminal justice reform that addresses the killings of unarmed African Americans, full and sustainable employment, and a commitment to good public education at all levels. But in today’s America, much like that of 50 years ago, these modest goals require both a mass movement and massive reform of our democracy.

     The Democracy Initiative (DI), a coalition of 60 national organizations, is one of the co-sponsors of the Journey. The NAACP is one of the 4 original conveners of the Democracy Initiative and Cornell Brooks is one of the six executive board members. Along with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (LCHR), the DI is cosponsoring the advocacy day in Washington on September 16. That’s when marchers and delegations from these organizations will ask members of Congress what they are going to do to end business as usual, reenact voting rights, and take up legislation from the three other issue groups.

     When Dr. King was murdered in 1968, he was organizing a similar march and developing a populist movement designed to link the issues of economic and racial justice. The Journey promises to recapture that spirit in these increasingly critical times. Marchers are currently headed through Georgia before entering the Carolinas. Teach-ins occur almost daily across the region – including one recently in Raleigh, N.C., where the North Carolina NAACP is suing the state’s governor in federal court for violating what remains of the Voting Rights Act.

     North Carolina has turned back the clock on voting rights in the last few years, enacting new barriers to registration and limiting voting access in every possible way. For two years the Moral Mondays movement, which is led by North Carolina NAACP president Reverend William Barber, has mobilized tens of thousands of people to its cause. That energy will join the journey when it comes to N.C. in two weeks.

     Marchers walk about 20 miles on a typical day, talking about the issues with each other and with onlookers along the way. Some congregations offer places to sleep at night, while others offer food and water.

     On June 25th the NAACP, the Leadership Conference and the Democracy Initiative rallied in Roanoke, Va., to demand that House Judiciary chair Robert Goodlatte hold hearings on the two voting rights bills stalled in his committee. Goodlatte represents Roanoke. Local citizens and national leaders were there to tell him that he would be held accountable for preventing consideration of voting rights just as he had previously on immigration reform.

     More than 30 million members belong to the organizations represented by the Democracy Initiative and the Leadership Conference. Environmental, labor, community, immigrant rights, LGBTQ, civil rights and democracy groups – all are working together on voting rights, money in politics and other obstacles to democratic change. The challenge for the September 16th advocacy day and beyond is this: Can we mobilize millions for real reform, or are we stuck in the much smaller silos that define our core issues?

     For the past 10 years, impediments to democracy have prevented congressional action on issues ranging from economic justice to climate change. And yet all too often we keep talking as if we simply need to convince more people on our varied issues. That’s not enough. Unless we enact reform that provides easy access for all voters, we will continue to miss 30 million voters from working families. If we don’t root out big money in politics, the oligarchy of the wealthy will increasingly control our government.

     Voting rights, and the other three issue areas on the Journey for Justice platform, provide a good basis for this discussion as the presidential race heats up. With 500 miles to go, and a large gathering at the Capitol on September 16, the days and weeks ahead should provide more focus for the movement-building we so clearly need.

185. Saad says

     26 August 2015 at 10:30 pm

     Did anyone else see this from Facebook today?

     That drawing doesn’t go with the text above it.

186. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 August 2015 at 12:02 am

     Saad @185:
     I missed that image, but I saw a text meme going around about pretty much the same thing. It noted that black, Asian, and Indian women did not gain the right to vote at that time. There was no mention of when Latinas gained the vote though. I did some digging, but I’m none too clear on when they gained the right. Technically, all citizens-female and male-of the United States gained the right to vote with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In practice though, it wasn’t until the 1975 Amendment to the Voting Rights Act that the right to vote was fully extended to certain minority groups:

     The 1975 amendments also expanded voting rights for minority groups that traditionally had fallen outside the Act’s protections. Civil rights organizations representing Hispanic, Asian American, Native Alaskan, and Native American interests argued before Congress that such groups often were the victims of discriminatory voting practices, particularly in areas where English was not the dominant language.[17]:1350 After Congress heard testimony of language discrimination in voting, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan (D-TX) successfully led an effort to amend the Act to protect language minorities.[2]:211 Specifically, Congress amended the definition of “test or device” to prohibit laws requiring ballots and voting information be provided exclusively in English in jurisdictions where a single-language minority group comprised more than 5% of the voting-age population. This in turn expanded the coverage formula to reach states such as Texas that Congress wanted to cover. Congress also enacted bilingual election requirements, which require election officials in certain jurisdictions to provide ballots and voting information in the language of language minority groups.

     In any case, no, not all female citizens of the US gained the right to vote in 1920.

187. katybe says

     27 August 2015 at 12:54 pm

     With apologies for it being a link to a Facebook post, I thought this might be relevant/interesting here: https://www.facebook.com/amightygirl/posts/894578273911820:0

     Here’s the first paragraph for link context, but the full thing is worth reading.

     “Amelia Boynton Robinson, a matriarch of the Civil Rights Movement and one of the organizers of the famous Selma March known as “Bloody Sunday,” died yesterday at the age of 104. Born in Savannah, Georgia, Boynton Robinson spent decades registering African Americans to vote in Alabama and, in 1964, she became the first African American woman in the state to run for Congress. However, it was a now iconic photograph taken of Boynton Robinson during the first Selma March, where she is collapsed in a young man’s arms after being beaten and gassed, that brought national attention to her pivotal role in the movement. Five months later, she was a guest of honor at the White House when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act into law.”

188. rq says

     27 August 2015 at 1:48 pm

     katybe
     I think I have an article coming up on her life. Thanks for posting!

     +++

     10 Stunning Portraits Show Redheads Come in More Skin Colors Than White – a strange form of racist thinking, but it exists:

     There’s a lot of mythology surrounding redheaded people, but one ignorant assumption trumps them all: Redheads are white.

     The reality? They’re not.

     Photographer Michelle Marshall is raising awareness of this fact through her photo series “MC1R.” The series, named after the gene variant responsible for red hair and freckles, features individuals of Afro-Carribbean descent who carry this gene and, therefore, embody certain aesthetic traits associated with redheads.

     Another iconic life gone: Marcy Borders, subject of iconic 9/11 ‘Dust Lady’ photo, dies after battle with stomach cancer.

     Black Lives Matter organizers hold rally in D.C. for black trans women

     Selenite was one of about 150 people who participated in a rally on Franklin Square downtown Tuesday evening, calling for an end to the violence of transgender women in the country, particularly black transgender women. Nearly 20 transgender women have been murdered across the country in 2015, most of them women of color.

     The idea of the rally, which was organized by Black Lives Matter activists, was to call on black men to join the fight to stop violence against transgender women in the country. Queer and transgender women, the protesters emphasized at the rally, have been at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter fight nationwide.

     “Black men need to to show up. We have to do more, we have to do better,” said Aaron Goggans, a black male and member of the regional chapter of Black Lives Matter, noting that only a small portion of the rally attendees were black men. “We need to put ourselves on the line like they put themselves on the line for us.”

     The event in D.C. was one of a handful of Trans Liberation Tuesday rallies throughout the country. Supporters also gathered in Houston, Brooklyn, Dayton, Los Angeles, Nashville and San Francisco.

     In D.C., protesters carried signs with the names and faces of murdered transgender women under the hashtag #sayhername. Together, they said the names of Elisha Walker, Islan Nettles, Kandis Kapri and the other transgender women who have been murdered, releasing balloons for each of them. Afterward, participants moved from the park and rallied in downtown streets.

     Would that more people had shown up in support.

     D.C. mayor to ask for expanded police powers amid homicide spike. Doesn’t bode well, in my opinion.

     LAPD’s long-awaited body cameras will hit the streets on Monday. And it’ll be a while before there’s any data on whether they change the behaviour of police.

     Friend of Mansur Ball-Bey gives statement to police, circuit attorney. In other words, things moving forward there, too.

     Shaken and tearful, the 14-year-old friend of Mansur Ball-Bey, who was shot and killed by St. Louis city police on Aug. 19 in Fountain Park, gave his testimony to police and the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s office on Tuesday afternoon (August 25), according to attorneys representing Ball-Bey’s family.

     Both the boy’s mother and Jermaine Wooten, one of the family’s attorneys, were present as he told them that Ball-Bey, 18, was not inside the house when police executed a search warrant at 1211 Walton Ave. on Aug. 19 – nor were they carrying guns, said Wooten about the boy’s statement.

     The story contradicts what police have said transpired when members of the police Special Operations Unit and Tactical Team searched for weapons and drugs at the home near Page Boulevard and Walton Avenue that Wednesday morning. The raid ended in Ball-Bey’s death on the front lawn of 1233 Walton Ave.

     Police said that Ball-Bey and a 14-year-old, both black males, fled out the back of the house that they were raiding and ran into the alley. Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce said she could not confirm that her office took the boy’s statement because she can’t comment on the investigation. Police did not respond to the St. Louis American’s request for comment by press time.

     According to Wooten, the boy told both investigative teams that Ball-Bey had stepped off the bus at Page Boulevard and Walton Avenue, after getting off work from Fed-Ex that morning. Ball-Bey and he went to the corner store and then walked to 1211 Walton Ave., where Ball-Bey’s aunt lived.

     Ball-Bey had knocked on the door, probably about 10 minutes before the raid, but no one answered, Wooten said. They then walked over to 1233 Walton Ave., where his cousin lived. They were walking around in the backyard and then in the alley right behind 1233 Walton, Wooten said of the boy’s interview, because that’s an area where people congregate in the neighborhood.

     At around 11:30 a.m., Ball-Bey and the boy saw two men with guns coming towards them in the alley from Page, and they took off running in different directions. The men did not identify themselves as police, Wooten said. Ball-Bey ran down the gangway at 1233 Walton, and the boy ran towards Bayard Avenue. At some point, the boy turned back and saw the words “police” on the vests, but by that time he thought he had already heard gunshots fired, Wooten said.

     The boy hid in a stairwell and then ran home. According to Wooten, the mother said that he ran into the house crying that police had killed his friend. He had not seen him shot dead, but he just had a feeling, Wooten said.

     After some encouragement from Wooten, the mother agreed to bring her son forward to give a statement, he said. The boy said he had known Ball-Bey all of his life. Although Ball-Bey did not live in the neighborhood, he would frequently visit his relatives. The two were supposed to work on a music project together later that afternoon, Wooten said.

     Quite a difference from the official story.

189. rq says

     27 August 2015 at 2:03 pm

     Ferguson protester who threw back tear gas cannister in iconic photo is charged

     The St. Louis County counselor has filed charges against Edward Crawford, who was featured in an iconic Post-Dispatch photo hurling a tear gas container back toward police during Ferguson protests last year.

     Crawford, 26, was cited under two county ordinances: interfering with a police officer and assault. His court date is set for Sept. 9.

     The assault charge, filed Aug. 3, alleges that he threw “a burning gas canister at police officers,” knocking one to the ground. The other charge claims he repeatedly failed to comply with police commands to show his hands.

     Because throwing a canister in the general direction of police is assault, yet those firing into neighbourhood backyards will never be penalized for their horrendous actions.

     Guilty of being black in a white world: The ludicrous reason these women were thrown off of a train last weekend

     It would be exceedingly hard for a group of 11 friends of any race or gender to travel together to a social event and remain quiet and inconspicuous. However, according to Lisa Johnson, one of the organizers and attendees of the event, after passengers began complaining about the group, they were forced to take their belongings, march through the length of the train, and disembark, where they were met by the police. Later, the Napa Valley Wine Train posted on Facebook that the women were verbally and physically abusive toward staff and other guests.

     Both a spokesperson and the C.E.O. of the Wine Train have since retracted the incendiary statement, which they say was written by a “junior staffer,” and have admitted that it was factually incorrect. These women did not physically or verbally abuse anyone. Company executives also admit that it was unnecessary to force the women to march through the train.

     Their biggest “crime” was being “disruptive” to other guests. And for that, they were subject to an encounter with police. Being too loud on the way to a wine tasting is not worthy of an encounter with law enforcement. As Johnson argued on her facebook page, these women were treated like criminals and humiliated for the “crime” of enjoying themselves too much in the presence of predominantly white train riders.

     Because no racial epithets or references were used when the complaints were lodged, it would be easy to attempt to see this incident as non-racial. This was just, as many would like to believe, the case of persnickety elite passengers complaining about other passengers, who were not respectful of the space. But such thinking betrays an inchoate and facile understanding of the ways that racism works. In April, a large group of Latino passengers were threatened with removal from the very same train for being too loud as well. Black and non-white bodies in white spaces are fundamentally disruptive. Even when they say nothing at all. If they dare to speak too loudly, punishment is frequently swift.

     And we know this. Black people are exceedingly self-conscious about being perceived as too loud, too demanding, too anything in the upscale, usually white spaces that we sometimes have occasion to frequent. If you are Black and middle class, or aspire to the middle class, one of the things you learn early is how to navigate white spaces so that you are as inconspicuous as possible, so that you blend in. When my mother took me to restaurants as a child, I always had a tendency to speak a bit loudly. My mother would always lower her voice, look at me intently, and say, “keep it down! Your voice carries.” She was fastidious about training me never to encroach on the space of others, particularly in white space. I always understood the training to be about manners, rather than about race.

     But everything is about race. It is about race because while being a loud person in shared space annoys most of us, being a loud Black person in shared, public space is read through a different order of magnitude. Being a loud Black person is perceived as not only annoying but as potentially threatening. For instance, a predominantly white women’s book club most likely would have been met, at most with angry or annoyed stares. Their being loud would at best have been understood as a dilemma that the train company and other passengers needed to make allowances for and accommodate.

     More at the link.

     I really wish images of Black people being killed were this guarded and regarded as too explicit and traumatic for mass consumption. Seems relevant.

     Megyn Kelly demands Cornel West explain why #BlackLivesMatter doesn’t protest black-on-black violence – you know, besides the small fact that Black Lives Matter has a different focus and that there are otehr groups protesting black-on-black violence – with the participation of BLM, I am sure. It’s called overlap.

     In her return to television Monday night, Megyn Kelly discussed the #BlackLivesMatter movement with Cornel West, but because she’s still on Fox News, she had to frame the conversation in terms of black-on-black violence.

     To this end, Kelly opened by playing the video of Peggy Hubbard that went viral this weekend, in which the Navy veteran excoriated the black community for not protesting the death of 9-year-old Jamyla Bolden.

     “They’re hollering police brutality,” Hubbard said in the video viewed by over 7 million people. “Are you fucking kidding me? Police brutality? How about black brutality. You black people, my black people, you are the most violent motherfuckers I have ever seen in my life. A little girl is dead. You say black lives matter? Her life mattered. Her dreams mattered — yet you trifling motherfuckers are out there tearing up the neighborhood I grew up in.”

     West ventured that Hubbard’s “traumatized, terrorized, and is certainly right to have the kind of empathy she does in terms of the death taking place in black communities. But we have to distinguish between state-sponsored violence and violence against black people owing to actions black people do to each other. Both are important, but they’re not the same thing.”

     West continued, saying that the black community is in a “state of siege, a state of emergency like the brother Dr. Carson talks about” in his recent USA Today op-ed.

     “You agree with Ben Carson?” Kelly asked.

     “He’s right about the state of emergency, he’s right about the need for quality education, and he’s certainly right that we must have jobs with a living wage,” West replied. “But at the same time, we can’t get that with the way society is organized at this point. This is where brother Bernie Sanders comes in.”

     Kelly noted that Carson specifically said black people shouldn’t focus on Bernie Sanders, to which West retorted that “Sanders is the only one who’s going to provide a living wage.” He also noted that, like Sanders, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Democratic socialist who focused on issues like education and a living wage.

     Anyway, Megyn Kelly is full of shit.

     First State Legalizes Taser Drones for Cops, Thanks to a Lobbyist

     With all the concern over the militarization of police in the past year, no one noticed that the state became the first in the union to allow police to equip drones with “less than lethal” weapons. House Bill 1328 wasn’t drafted that way, but then a lobbyist representing law enforcement—tight with a booming drone industry—got his hands on it.

     The bill’s stated intent was to require police to obtain a search warrant from a judge in order to use a drone to search for criminal evidence. In fact, the original draft of Representative Rick Becker’s bill would have banned all weapons on police drones.

     Then Bruce Burkett of the North Dakota Peace Officer’s Association was allowed by the state house committee to amend HB 1328 and limit the prohibition only to lethal weapons. “Less than lethal” weapons like rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, sound cannons, and Tasers are therefore permitted on police drones.

     Becker, the bill’s Republican sponsor, said he had to live with it.

     “This is one I’m not in full agreement with. I wish it was any weapon,” he said at a hearing in March. “In my opinion there should be a nice, red line: Drones should not be weaponized. Period.”

     The future is here. And I don’t like it.

     From Computers to Leaders: Women at NASA Langley. Let’s hear it for all the NASA women, especially the NASA women of colour. Don’t hear nearly enough about them.

     In fact, “Hidden Figures,” a book Shetterly is writing about the history of the African-American women who came to work at NASA Langley starting during World War II, is slated to land on bookstore shelves sometime in 2016.

     But on a recent visit to NASA Langley, Shetterly’s focus wasn’t on her book. She was at the center to give a Women’s History Month talk on the female mathematicians — or human computers — who worked behind the scenes at NASA Langley to support the men so often credited with making major advances to America’s aeronautics and space programs.

     Much of what Shetterly discovered about the human computers came to light as she was researching her book. She was intrigued enough by her findings to begin working on an entirely new project. Along with Duchess Harris, a professor of American Studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., Shetterly is collecting oral histories, photos, research reports and other artifacts from human computers and compiling them into something called The Human Computer Project.

     “Really, the importance of what I’m doing, I think, is to put the stories of these women on the historical record so that we can all celebrate the foundational work that they did,” she said.

     And it was important work. Today, a quick glance at NASA’s organization structure reveals a number of women in key roles, including Lesa Roe, who has served as NASA Langley’s center director and is currently detailed as a deputy associate administrator for the agency; Ellen Stofan, who serves as chief scientist; and Elizabeth Robinson, who serves as chief financial officer.

     “The reason these women are able to be in the positions they are and influencing the policy and the science that’s being done at NASA today has very much to do with the female pioneers who came to NASA, and to its predecessor the NACA, back in the 1930s, the 1940s, through the 1950s and ’60s,” Shetterly said.
     […]

     Langley also began recruiting African-American women as human computers in the 1940s, but due to segregation laws these “West Area Computers” were kept separate from their white counterparts.

     This began to change in the 1950s. Katherine Johnson, who was in attendance at Shetterly’s talk, joined the West Area Computers in 1953, but spent only a few weeks there. By 1958 she had become an aerospace technologist and eventually joined the Space Task Force, where she calculated trajectories for some of the Mercury missions, including MA-6, John Glenn’s first U.S. orbital flight.

     A bit wary of the calculations coming from the actual physical computers of the time, Glenn famously said, “Get the girl to check the numbers.” He was referring to Johnson.

     “This is a really strong example of how women rise to the occasion in a very high pressure scientific endeavor,” Shetterly said. “All eyes on this man as he’s going into space and this is the woman who stood behind the man and checked the numbers. You can’t have a better example of what women are capable of doing in a scientific organization.”

     Johnson was one of several women who worked their way out of the computer pool and into actual engineering jobs — something that began happening with increasing frequency through the 1950s and into the 1960s.

     In the dwindling days of human computing, as actual computers became a part of day-to-day life, one of the last women to climb out of the pool and into the ranks of NASA’s engineering elite was Christine Darden.

     Darden, who was also in attendance at Shetterly’s talk, started her career at NASA Langley’s computing pool in 1967, but fought to become an engineer and ended up being one of NASA’s preeminent experts on supersonic flight and sonic booms. She was also the first African-American woman at NASA Langley to be promoted into the senior executive service.

     Shetterly thinks stories like Darden’s have helped to illustrate that “women are more than capable of not only doing the most intense technical work, but managing that work.”

     And women have been doing this since time immemorial, yet for strange reasons their stories seem to be lost to the public.

190. rq says

     27 August 2015 at 2:14 pm

     4 ‘Reverse Racism’ Myths That Need To Stop. So let’s stop them, fellow white people. This is our work.

     Reverse racism isn’t real. No, really.

     The “reverse racism” card is often pulled by white people when people of color call out racism and discrimination, or create spaces for themselves (think BET) that white people aren’t a part of. The impulse behind the reverse racism argument seems to be a desire to prove that people of color don’t have it that bad, they’re not the only ones that are put at a disadvantage or targeted because of their race. It’s like the Racism Olympics. And it’s patently untrue.

     It really all comes down to semantics. At some point, the actual meaning of “racism” got mixed up with other aspects of racism — prejudice, bigotry, ignorance, and so on. It’s true: White people can experience prejudice from black people and other non-whites. Black people can have ignorant, backwards ideas about white people, as well as other non-white races. No one is trying to deny that. But racism is far more complex.

     Before you cry outrage and send me a nasty email about how reverse racist this article is, calm down. Listen.
     […]

     There have been so many explainers on why the concept of reverse racism is inherently wrong, so many breakdowns, but perhaps another way to tackle this discussion is to address some of the main topics and issues that get called out as reverse racism. Here are four common arguments that have no merit:

     1. Affirmative Action takes jobs and scholarships away from white people.

     The affirmative action debate has been raging for decades, with many people arguing that it’s a prime example of reverse racism. They believe deserving white students are discriminated against while academically unqualified students are given highly coveted college or company positions — just because they happen to tick the “ethnic minority” box. This argument ignores the fact that affirmative action did not come out of nowhere — there was a need for a system that would address the decades of underrepresentation of people of color both academically and in the job world.

     Affirmative action does not favor people of color over whites, but ensures that they are considered equally. Even now, white college students are 40% more likely to get private scholarships than minorities, and although 62% of college students in America are white, these students receive 69% of all private scholarships. Someone with a “white sounding” name is 50% more likely to get a job call back than a person with an “ethnic” sounding name. Affirmative action doesn’t take anything away from anyone. It levels the playing field.

     2. White culture can be appropriated, too.

     Recently, I wrote an article explaining why it’s problematic for white women to wear black hairstyles. I got hundreds of messages from angry people asking, “Well, what about black women straightening their hair or dyeing their hair blonde?” First of all — there are, gasp, black people in the world with naturally blonde hair and blue eyes. But that’s besides the point. The need to flip the script when it comes to cultural appropriation is wrong because it willfully removes context and history from the equation. Black people conforming to white or Western standards of beauty is the product of a need to survive in a society in which wearing hair in its natural state can cost black men and women their jobs and even their educations.

     “So is it appropriation if black people use math or fly in airplanes?” No. [emoji] . Aspects of modern civilization are not hallmarks of white culture, and anyone who thinks they are has a skewed vision of the world.

     Two more specific items addressed at the link, plus a great review of the definition of racism. Worth a bookmark.

     Video: Chicago Cop Says ‘Mike Brown Deserved It’

     After a video published online last week depicted a white, plainclothes police officer telling a black man that “Mike Brown deserved it,” the Chicago Police Department is now investigating the cop and his racially-charged remarks.

     The comment referred to Michael Brown, the black, unarmed teenage who was fatally shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, last year, sparking national outrage and weeks of protests.

     As the Sun-Times reported Tuesday night, the Chicago officer who can be seen in the video taunting a black man about how policing works is now under investigation, according to a department spokesman.

     “I’ve got no choice but to fucking pull over black people. You don’t like it, move,” the officer says on the tape, published by the site Mediatakeout.com.

     “We don’t know what you all gonna do to us, you all might shoot us,” the man responded, “We don’t trust you all. You heard about Mike Brown?”

     “Mike Brown deserved it,” the officer, who appears in the video wearing a bullet proof vest and standing in an un-identifiable street, can be heard replying.

     Charming.

     DeRay McKesson on Police Reform and Community Relations, C-Span video.

     DeRay McKesson talked about his work and efforts to reform policing following several high-profile fatal shootings of unarmed African-American men by police.

     Police to start handing out ‘info cards’ after frisking suspects. I… I’m not sure what to think of this. Sure, good for complaints, but is this going to reduce the number of stop-and-frisk incidents? Or what? Just more paperwork, a clearer paper trail? Collectibles?

     7 Women of Color Who Fought for Gender Equality

     August 26 is Women’s Equality Day. The date commemorates a historic step for women’s equality: the passage of the 19th Amendment, which secured women’s right to vote, on August 26, 1920. Women’s Equality Day is a time to celebrate the women who fought for the right to participate in the democratic process, but it’s also a day to acknowledge that the amendment didn’t further the equality of all women.

     Women of color routinely faced racism within the women’s suffrage movement. After the passage of the 19th Amendment, state laws and racial discrimination continued to keep women of color from voting. It wasn’t until 1956 that any Native Americans could vote in Utah, and black women remained effectively disenfranchised until the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Even today we continue to see passage of a variety of laws that threaten to prevent women, especially women of color, from voting.

     Of course women of color haven’t remained silent in the face of these setbacks. Although they have often been the leading voices and innovators in the fight for equality, history has a tendency to erase their legacy and voices. So in honor of Women’s Equality Day, here are seven amazing women of color who have helped fight for — and win — greater equality for women.

     A small selection of heroes. Sojourner Truth (I can’t get over how much I like her name), Ida B. Wells, Dorothy Height, Patsy Mink, Dolores Huerta, Wilma Mankiller, Vanzetta Penn McPherson.

     
     Criticisms of Media’s Treatment of Filmed Black Death vs White Death

     While the video circulated on social media, various media outlets began to become heavily criticized for airing the footage. CNN, said it would no longer air the footage after announcing it would show the video “once every hour”.

     Users on twitter quickly noticed how the media and public treated visuals of white victimhood as opposed to Black victimhood. For many, it was a continuation of protecting the sanctity and humanity of Whiteness. Images of Black death however were products for media consumption. The same outlets who opposed airing the shootings, have played and replayed footage of Blacks being the victims of police violence.

     Makes you think…

191. rq says

     27 August 2015 at 2:28 pm

     Man shot by St. Louis police had severed spine, raising question of how he ran

     Mansur Ball-Bey, shot last week by police, suffered a severed spinal cord, officials disclosed Wednesday, leading to questions of whether such a wound would have permitted him to run a short distance, as officers have said.

     Dr. Michael Graham, the medical examiner, arranged a re-examination of the body Wednesday and told a reporter that Ball-Bey’s spinal cord may have survived the impact but unraveled as he ran. In any event, the bullet also pierced his heart, which still would have been fatal.

     Attorney Jermaine Wooten, who is representing Ball-Bey’s family, said the second examination at Graham’s office is “suspicious.”

     “That’s a clear indication to me that given the initial results they learned from the initial autopsy, it doesn’t support the position the police laid out at first as it relates to Bey being shot and running, so they want to take a second look to modify those findings,” Wooten said. “These things should have been addressed early on and I don’t see why they are taking a second look when it should have been thorough and complete the first time.

     “It makes me a bit suspicious as to what really could be going on here. But until we get the results, it would be premature to give a strong statement either way.”

     Photographer highlights the beautiful diversity of redheads, just Mashable on the same photography before.

     These Are The Schools That Hurricane Katrina Destroyed

     When Hurricane Katrina came roaring through New Orleans in August 2005, it took nearly 2,000 lives, displaced more than a million people along the Gulf Coast from their homes, and caused significant damage to 110 of the city’s 126 public schools — some of which were never replaced.

     Ten years later, most public schools in New Orleans look quite different, both physically and in terms of how they operate, than they did the day Katrina hit. In the wake of the storm schools in the city were essentially rebuilt from the ground up, with the state-run Recovery School District taking over most and making them charters or closing them. It appears as though student achievement in the city has risen as a result of these measures.
     […]

     Below are some of the photos from Filardo and Alexander. Two of the documented schools — Helen S. Edwards Elementary School and Johnson C. Lockett Elementary School — no longer function, said New Orleans education consultant Nash Crews. Other highlighted schools — Robert R. Moton Elementary School and Edward Hynes Elementary School — have been rebuilt.

     I wonder if predominantly white schools received disproportionate attention and care?

     Ah, here we go, as per katybe‘s comment upthread: Amelia Boynton Robinson, Civil Rights Activist, Dies At 104

     Amelia Boynton Robinson, a civil rights activist who nearly died while helping lead the “Bloody Sunday” civil rights march in 1965, championed voting rights for blacks and was the first black woman to run for Congress in Alabama, died early Wednesday at age 104, her son Bruce Boynton said.

     Boynton Robinson was among those beaten during the voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in March 1965 that became known as “Bloody Sunday.” State troopers teargased and clubbed the marchers as they tried to cross the bridge. A newspaper photo showing Boynton Robinson, who had been beaten unconscious, drew wide attention to the movement.

     Fifty years later, Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, pushed her across the span in a wheelchair during a commemoration.

     Boynton Robinson, who was hospitalized in July after having a major stroke, turned 104 on Aug. 18. Her son said she had been living in Tuskegee and was hospitalized in Montgomery. Boynton Robinson’s family said in a written statement that she was surrounded by relatives and friends when she died around 2:20 a.m.

     In January, Boynton Robinson attended the State of the Union address as a special guest of Democratic Alabama Rep. Terri Sewell, who said Boynton’s 1964 run for Congress paved the way for her. Sewell is Alabama’s first elected black congresswoman. Boynton was the first woman to run on a Democratic ticket in Alabama and the first black woman to run for Congress in the state, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

     “Mrs. Boynton Robinson suffered grave injustices on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma at the hands of state troopers on Bloody Sunday, yet she refused to be intimidated,” Sewell said in January. “She marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, my colleague Rep. John Lewis and thousands of others from Selma to Montgomery and ultimately witnessed the day when their work led to the passage of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965.”

     Boynton Robinson had asked Martin Luther King Jr. to come to Selma to mobilize the local community in the civil rights movement. She worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and helped plan the Selma to Montgomery march. She was invited as a guest of honor to attend the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
     Her role in the event was reprised in the movie “Selma,” where she was portrayed by actress Lorraine Toussaint.

     “The truth of it is that was her entire life. That’s what she was completely taken with,” Bruce Boynton said of his mother’s role in shaping the civil rights movement. “She was a loving person, very supportive — but civil rights was her life.”

     104. Wow. I wonder if she was happy with the state of today’s civil rights?

     Post-Dispatch responds to Riverfront Times article

     Journalists at the Post-Dispatch write, rewrite and edit stories all day long. Stories that are posted online often are updated as more information becomes available. Many of our initial online stories are replaced in the evening or overnight by the final print versions, which have been further edited for clarity, style and length. The particular story about the police shooting of Mansur Ball-Bey was posted online Friday afternoon Aug. 21. It included a sentence that read: “Police sources tell the Post-Dispatch that investigators found fingerprints and DNA on the gun police say Ball-Bey pointed at them, but the results are not yet available.”

     After reporters talked with more sources and attended a news conference by Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, the story’s length had increased and it was edited further for the print edition. That version, in turn, became the final online version. The earlier sentence attributed to police sources about the DNA and fingerprints on the gun was left out of this version. Frankly, the sentence was not very informative given that test results for that evidence were not available. Even if police knew there was DNA and fingerprints on the gun, it wasn’t clear at that point whose DNA and fingerprints they were. The sentence added very little information to the story even though we accurately described information from an informed source. It added no clarity without knowing testing results. There were no nefarious motives. There is no conspiracy.

     As for the assertion concerning the article about the arrest of Dorian Johnson on suspicion of drug charges and resisting arrest: In an initial online story on May 6, 2015, and the print version of the story on May 7, the Post-Dispatch did attribute to an unnamed source this sentence: “Johnson allegedly had a cough medication mixed with what police believe to be an illegal narcotic on him.” In fact, jail records showed that Johnson had been booked at the jail on May 6 on “suspicion of possession of narcotics” among other allegations. The sentence provided more detail on a vague narcotics allegation and made clear that police were making the accusation without knowing if it was a narcotic. By the afternoon of May 7, the Post-Dispatch reported online that Johnson was charged that afternoon by prosecutors with resisting arrest and the assault of an officer, and the newspaper was the first to report that “an analysis did not find any narcotics.” The same update was included in the print version on May 8. Your article failed to mention that. Hardly a coverup. We reported the facts as they developed.

     Lastly, the Nov. 27, 2014, online and print article on the arrest of two members of the New Black Panther Party did include the line, “The men wanted to acquire two more bombs, the sources said, but could not afford to do it until one suspect’s girlfriend’s Electronic Benefit Transfer card was replenished.” That statement was based on a recorded conversation of the suspect by an informer. At a June 2, 2015, court hearing, authorities later characterized suspect Brandon Orlando Baldwin as saying on Nov. 19, 2014, to an informer that he was “inactive” until he received his unemployment benefits. Again, the Post-Dispatch reported that information as soon as it was public. Nothing was covered up. Moreover, your reporting failed to describe how amid a national media frenzy about a possible plot to bomb the Arch and assassinate key law-enforcement officials, the Post-Dispatch, through its reporting staff, was able to lay out a balanced and detailed description of the alleged plot and the plotters, including information from sources who acknowledged that the suspects may not have had the ability to carry through on their plans and were limited in their organization and finances.

     We are not above criticism, but we are passionate about our work. We strive to keep our community informed each and every day as best we can. Along the way, we may make mistakes. But we also try to be wary of being spun by sources or misled by social media and to be as fair and accurate as possible.

     So, sorry for printing wrong or inaccurate information that sounds good in the heat of the moment? Gotcha.

     No charges against D.M. officer who fatally shot man. Waddayano.

     No criminal charges will be filed against a Des Moines police officer who fatally shot a man through her squad car window while she was seated inside, but an internal investigation continues.

     She won’t return to active duty until that investigation is completed, police say.

     A seven-member grand jury decided Wednesday that charges weren’t warranted against seven-year veteran Vanessa Miller, who shot 28-year-old Ryan Keith Bolinger June 9. The West Des Moines man had led officers on a slow pursuit through northwestern Des Moines, exited his vehicle and approached Miller’s squad car.

     “After reviewing every piece of available evidence, they decided not to indict,” Polk County Attorney John Sarcone told the Register.

     And everyone is so pleased.

192. rq says

     27 August 2015 at 2:58 pm

     A guide to debunking ‘black-on-black crime’ and all of its rhetorical cousins, another valuable resource.

     Hello, and welcome to the guide to debunking “black-on-black crime” and all of its rhetorical cousins. Black-on-black crime may no longer be the right-wing media’s slogan du jour, but its replacements express the same sentiment.

     Inevitably, when there’s an uptick of homicides in cities with sizable black populations, or to deflect from movements calling attention to the killings of black people by law enforcement, headlines like these crop up: “Black Lives Matter only When They Are Killed by White Cops”, “#SomeBlackLivesDontMatter,” and “Murder Capital Homicide Explosion in wake of Freddie Gray case dwarfs rate of similar cities.”

     So we here at Fusion have put together a comprehensive list on what to do when someone you love, hate, or feel so-so about goes on about “but what about that black crime in the black community” as an alternative to talking about the deaths of black people by police. We got you. Start with: “Nah, chill. Here’s what’s actually going on.”

     1. First thing to debunk? The term “black-on-black crime”:

     Gary Younge over at the Nation writes:

     “America is very segregated, and its criminality conforms to that fact. So the victims of most crimes are the same race as those who commit them. Eighty-four percent of white people who are killed every year are killed by white people. White people who buy illegal drugs are most likely to buy them from white people. Far from being extraordinary, the fact that black criminals are most likely to commit crimes against black people makes them just like everybody else. A more honest term than “black-on-black crime” would be, simply, ‘crime.’”

     Read the full piece here

     2. Gun violence in black communities is a matter of public health, and it depends on a variety of structural inequalities.

     Jonah Birch and Paul Heideman break it down in Jacobin:

     “Research suggests that violent crime rates are driven by a variety of social factors which tend to make American cities particularly prone to gun violence against black residents. Among the most of these factors are very high levels of neighborhood segregation, concentrated un- and underemployment, poverty and a dearth of adequate social services or institutional resources. Fundamentally, gun violence has to be treated like other kinds of public health problems — not as the basis for continuous, empty calls for an introspective discussion about ‘black on black violence.’ And like other kinds of public health disparities, tackling high rates of inter-personal violence requires confronting the social context in which it occurs.”

     Read the full article in Jacobin here.

     There’s a few more items in between, but in closing, here’s the conclusion of the article itself:

     6. Perception is everything. And frankly, the perception of crime in black communities is wrong.

     The Sentencing Project, an organization whose mission is to reform sentencing policy came out with a report on racial perceptions of crime:

     “White Americans overestimate the proportion of crime committed by people of color, and associate people of color with criminality. For example, white respondents in a 2010 survey overestimated the actual share of burglaries, illegal drug sales, and juvenile crime committed by African Americans by 20-30%. In addition, implicit bias research has uncovered widespread and deep-seated tendencies among whites – including criminal justice practitioners – to associate blacks and Latinos with criminality.”

     Read the whole report here.

     How about starting to care for black people as people?

     Maryland is First State to Ban Broad Class of Discriminatory Profiling in Law Enforcement. Here’s hoping it works. I hope they’re providing extra training and support resources for officers, as well as a process for those who feel that they still have been profiled to file complaints.

     The state of Maryland took a step in the battle to address discriminatory profiling by law enforcement. On August 25, 2015, the state’s attorney general, Brian Frosh, issued guidelines that clearly define the characteristics that officers may not legally use as guidance when interacting with citizens; this makes Maryland the first state to do so. Per the memo, “officers in any law enforcement agency in Maryland may not consider race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability or gender identity to any degree during routine police operations.”

     “Police do a dangerous, difficult job, and they do it well. But experience shows us that improper profiling by police does terrible damage,” Attorney Frosh said in a statement about the guidelines. “It discourage[s] cooperation by law-abiding citizens, it generates bogus leads that turn attention away from bona fide criminal conduct, and it erodes community trust. The memorandum we are issuing today is meant to put an end to profiling of all kinds, which will help repair the frayed relationships between police and many in the community by making mutual respect the norm in everyday police encounters.”

     The guidance is in response to the U.S. Department of Justice’s December 2014 adoption of a racial profiling policy, which only impacted federal officers and agencies. The state attorney general’s office notes that it is not a law that can be enforced on the state level, but rather a set of recommendations that police departments around the state should adopt and incorporate. There is already a state law that addresses racial and ethnic profiling at traffic stops, but the new guidelines expand both the classes that can’t be discriminated against and the relevant interactions to which they apply.

     Woman killed in Illinois is 19th transgender homicide reported this year – another one too many.

     Mihalopoulos: CPD investigating cop for saying ‘Mike Brown deserved it’ – well, at least they’re investigating.

     You’re a bright one, you are, Mr Paul!! Rand Paul: Black Lives Matter Should Change Its Name

     Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul said on Wednesday night that the Black Lives Matter movement should change its name.

     “I think they should change their name, maybe — if they were ‘All Lives Matter’ or ‘Innocent Lives Matter,’” Paul said during an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. “I am about justice, and frankly I think a lot of poor people in our country, and many African-Americans, are trapped in this war on drugs, and I want to change it. But commandeering the microphone and bullying people and pushing people out of the way I think really isn’t a way to get their message across.”

     “I’ve appeared with many members of the Congressional Black Caucus to talk about criminal justice, I’ve been to Howard University, I’ve discussed it in Chicago and other cities, and so I’m more than willing to discuss it, but having people take the microphone — they need to go somewhere else and they need to rent their own microphone,” Paul said.

     Hannity had asked Paul about comments he made in an interview with a local Seattle TV station in which he criticized the tactics some activists have used on the campaign trail. Paul had said in the interview, “Do I think it’s a good idea for people to jump up and commandeer the microphone? No, and I wouldn’t let them take my microphone.”

     For the record, he also lets his black friends use the toilet in his house.
     But seriously, ‘innocent lives matter’? No. The guilty ones matter, too. That’s the whole point of being pro-life!! :P

     Oh and heeeeey look, Bernie Sanders ‘why-are-they-picking-on-him’ fans! Here’s one for you! BLM and GetEQUAL Call on Clinton to Stand with Black Trans Women

     Moments ago, organizers with GetEQUAL and Black Lives Matter disrupted Hillary Clinton’s grassroots campaign event in Cleveland, OH, demanding that she divest from private prisons and invest in the liberation of black transgender women.

     The organizers interrupted Clinton’s speech in order to name the three black trans women who have been recently murdered in the state of Ohio including Cemia Dove, a black trans woman murdered in Cleveland, carrying signs that read: “Hillary: Divest from Private Prisons, Invest in Black Trans Women.” The action was part of a series of demonstrations happening this week across the country celebrating black transgender women and demanding accountability for the violence that Black transgender women face on a daily basis.

     “Bankrolled by private prison companies and lobbyists like Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, Hillary Clinton is part of the system of violence that criminalizes and kills Black trans people — how can we take her policy suggestions to curb mass incarceration and detention seriously while she’s accepting this money?” asked Angela Peoples, co-director of grassroots LGBTQ network GetEQUAL and a disruptor of the event.

     Peoples continued, “These companies and their lobbyists profit from the incarceration and abuse of Black people, especially Black trans women — an overwhelming 41% of Black trans women report having been arrested at some point in their lives, often after having been profiled by the police.”

     “Hillary Clinton must stand with Black people, especially Black trans women, by refusing to accept funds from or bundled by executives of or lobbyists for private prison companies — and investing the money she’s already accepted from those companies in the work toward Black trans liberation,” said Rian Brown, GetEQUAL state lead and local Cleveland organizer taking part in the disruption. “Until that happens, we cannot for a moment think that Hillary believes Black Lives Matter.”

     Brown added: “The actions that took place across the country on Tuesday were a call for cisgender Black folks to show up for Black trans people; we’re here to demand that Clinton divest from private prisons in solidarity with our Black trans family.”

     If Bernie Sanders has such issues taking #BlackLivesMatter on – head-on, honestly and with no back-tracking – how do you think he would fare with #BlackTransLivesMatter? Seriously? I don’t think he could handle it. Though he may yet surprise.

193. Morgan!? ♥ ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ says

     27 August 2015 at 4:09 pm

     I am frustrated, and angry and sad. I’ve been following closely this “Racism in America” thread and in addition to all else, I am overwhelmed. I know that PZ wants to encourage guided discussion on these dedicated threads, but particularly re racism, there is simply too, too much. I can barely formulate one coherent response to an incident before there are four others that deserve response. Urgh.

     I have been spending time searching for resources and commentary from qualified people and institutions who are attempting to tackle our huge racism problem. I’ve found no shortage of concern. But what I need to investigate now is the location of the roadblock. Why, if so much is being done to tackle America’s racism problem intellectually and academically is none of that good information filtering down to the levels at which something can actually be DONE to effect the problem? I think I know the answer to that, but it needs more research and thought before I burble something stupid.

     End of rant.

194. rq says

     28 August 2015 at 3:12 am

     Morgan!?
     I feel ya. I’m not even getting everything, I’ve started skipping articles that seem only peripherally related, and there’s still so much stuff – I could cut down, but then I have to pick and choose. Even just the topic of police brutality would have so, so much, but that’s kind of useless without the wider of discussion of racism, and that… well, here we are. Hard to have a discussion, I agree. :( Looking forward to your researched burbling (thoroughly enjoyable always, by the way).

     +++

     Baltimore preparing for protests during next week’s hearing in Freddie Gray case

     Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said Wednesday that city officials are preparing for protests as court hearings ramp up in the Freddie Gray case by coordinating with law enforcement agencies around the state, upgrading riot gear and conducting crowd-control training.

     The mayor also said officials plan to hold educational sessions in schools to explain the justice system to students.

     Over the next two weeks, court hearings will be held to consider several key issues in the Gray case, including whether charges should be dismissed, whether Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby should be recused and whether the trials should be moved out of Baltimore. The first is scheduled for Wednesday.

     Rawlings-Blake, who has defended the city’s response to the unrest and rioting that followed Gray’s death in April, stressed that most protests over police brutality have been nonviolent.

     “We’ve identified potential flash points over the next year, and the motions hearing is one of those,” Rawlings-Blake said. “While we’re preparing, I don’t want people to lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the protests were peaceful. The challenge is when a few people hijack the peaceful protest.”
     […]

     “This is communication and making sure that everyone who needs to have a seat at the table and be involved is involved,” he said. “We hope we’re preparing for no reason, but we need to prepare, and that’s the responsible thing to do for public safety.”

     Also Thursday, Rawlings-Blake, interim Police Commissioner Kevin Davis, Schools CEO Gregory Thornton and law enforcement representatives from the Maryland Transit Administration and City Schools Police plan to announce “improvements and changes” made over the summer regarding students’ safety. The mayor asked those agencies to improve coordination and communication after the unrest.

     Rawlings-Blake said city and school officials are planning educational sessions during the first week of school, which begins Monday. The idea is not only to explain the justice system but to temper young people’s expectations of what might happen during the motions hearing, she said.

     It’s always nice to prepare, I just hope they’re properly engaging the community, too.

     The Meaning of Serena Williams, “On Tennis and Black Excellence”.

     There is a belief among some African-Americans that to defeat racism, they have to work harder, be smarter, be better. Only after they give 150 percent will white Americans recognize black excellence for what it is. But of course, once recognized, black excellence is then supposed to perform with good manners and forgiveness in the face of any racist slights or attacks. Black excellence is not supposed to be emotional as it pulls itself together to win after questionable calls. And in winning, it’s not supposed to swagger, to leap and pump its fist, to state boldly, in the words of Kanye West, ‘‘That’s what it is, black excellence, baby.’’

     Imagine you have won 21 Grand Slam singles titles, with only four losses in your 25 appearances in the finals. Imagine that you’ve achieved two ‘‘Serena Slams’’ (four consecutive Slams in a row), the first more than 10 years ago and the second this year. A win at this year’s U.S. Open would be your fifth and your first calendar-year Grand Slam — a feat last achieved by Steffi Graf in 1988, when you were just 6 years old. This win would also break your tie for the most U.S. Open titles in the Open era, surpassing the legendary Chris Evert, who herself has called you ‘‘a phenomenon that once every hundred years comes around.’’ Imagine that you’re the player John McEnroe recently described as ‘‘the greatest player, I think, that ever lived.’’ Imagine that, despite all this, there were so many bad calls against you, you were given as one reason video replay needed to be used on the courts. Imagine that you have to contend with critiques of your body that perpetuate racist notions that black women are hypermasculine and unattractive. Imagine being asked to comment at a news conference before a tournament because the president of the Russian Tennis Federation, Shamil Tarpischev, has described you and your sister as ‘‘brothers’’ who are ‘‘scary’’ to look at. Imagine.

     The word ‘‘win’’ finds its roots in both joy and grace. Serena’s grace comes because she won’t be forced into stillness; she won’t accept those racist projections onto her body without speaking back; she won’t go gently into the white light of victory. Her excellence doesn’t mask the struggle it takes to achieve each win. For black people, there is an unspoken script that demands the humble absorption of racist assaults, no matter the scale, because whites need to believe that it’s no big deal. But Serena refuses to keep to that script. Somehow, along the way, she made a decision to be excellent while still being Serena. She would feel what she feels in front of everyone, in response to anyone. At Wimbledon this year, for example, in a match against the home favorite Heather Watson, Serena, interrupted during play by the deafening support of Watson, wagged her index finger at the crowd and said, ‘‘Don’t try me.’’ She will tell an audience or an official that they are disrespectful or unjust, whether she says, simply, ‘‘No, no, no’’ or something much more forceful, as happened at the U.S. Open in 2009, when she told the lineswoman, ‘‘I swear to God I am [expletive] going to take this [expletive] ball and shove it down your [expletive] throat.’’ And in doing so, we actually see her. She shows us her joy, her humor and, yes, her rage. She gives us the whole range of what it is to be human, and there are those who can’t bear it, who can’t tolerate the humanity of an ordinary extraordinary person.

     This is why Samuel DuBose’s mother was asked if she forgives the shooter within a day of her son being murdered, while the father of Alison Parker was allowed the negative emotions associated with the death of a child. Because black people’s emotion is somehow dangerous? Good lord… Shut the fuck up and suck it up, that they might express negative and passionate emotions – ha, and positive and passionate ones, for that matter! – and none of it is for white people’s benefit, because they do not exist or live or suffer or win for white people’s benefit. So there!

     Policing the Police: Who’s Been Investigated by the Feds? [Interactive Map]

     Ferguson and Baltimore are the most recent of the nearly 70 police departments investigated by the Justice Department for police brutality, racial bias and other civil rights violations.

     Although only a tiny percentage of the the nearly 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies around the country, some of these departments are among the nation’s largest, serving nearly one in five Americans, according to a recent analysis.

     DOJ investigations of police forces, from Detroit to the U.S. Virgin Islands, are the outcome of a federal law prompted by a 1991 incident involving Rodney King, an unarmed black man savagely beaten by Los Angeles police officers during a traffic stop. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, enacted three years later, includes a provision — Section 14141 — that gives the DOJ authority to investigate systemic civil rights abuses. It’s one of the few federal tools that can compel widespread change in local law enforcement agencies, empowering the DOJ to take legal action against a police department unless it enters into a negotiated settlement — such as a consent decree or memorandum of agreement — and makes proposed reforms under a specified timeline.

     The tactic has its naysayers: some critics call it a blatant form of government overreach that places unrealistic expectations and financial burdens on already strapped local police departments. Others question its effectiveness, pointing to instances where the DOJ’s mandates were ignored or where reform efforts after federal oversight ended, as in the case of Cleveland’s department, which has undergone two DOJ investigations.

     But advocates point to numerous examples of success that have led to sustained reforms and significantly improved police-community relations.

     Yep, interactive map included at the link!

     Hurricane Katrina Anniversary: 11 Quotes That Sum Up the Aftermath of Gulf Coast Disaster

     In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as the flood waters receded from New Orleans, they took with them any sense of normalcy the city had before the storm. The monster 2005 hurricane wrecked levee systems, flooded entire neighborhoods, damaged homes and businesses and hit residents like a wrecking ball.

     Ten years after Katrina made landfall in Louisiana on Aug. 29, 2005, some parts of New Orleans have bounced back and look practically unscathed. However, many residents whose lives were overturned by the storm haven’t forgotten the floods that brought New Orleans to its breaking point.

     Along with images and news footage, the things that have stuck in the country’s collective memory are what people were saying at the time. Words carried great weight as the nation’s leaders, the public and even celebrities tried to make sense of the utter devastation that was New Orleans in the wake of Katrina.

     Let’s hear it for Mr West.

     Please keep spreading this @Medium post. If you still think Donald Trump is only a joke you’re not paying attention. <- An intro, to this article: Donald Trump’s Rapidly Growing Fan Base of White Supremacists. And this is why even entertaining him as a potential candidate is so dangerous: imagine all those people, previously forced to consider their racist views and attitudes unacceptable, now wallowing in the endorsement of one of the top candidates for presidency… Imagine the amazing feelings of relieved validation that hey, it’s okay to be racist! Except, of course, they don’t say ‘racist’, they say ‘facts’ and ‘reality’. :P ANyway, the article:

     I’ve been watching various hate groups on social media for a year and when I saw many of them respond positively to Donald Trump’s announcement for his presidential bid, I knew I’d need to pay close attention to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, especially his stance on immigration because it affects me as a first-generation Mexican-American US citizen.

     This post documents my research into various White Supremacist groups and their open support for Donald Trump’s campaign for President of the United States. This is less an article, but more a comprehensive, structured information dump with citations. I will be updating this post regularly, as I come across new sources. Content warning: racism and bigotry.

     So it’s not just Duke (as seen upthread), it’s really the endorsements of all endorsements for Trump: if you see these hate-filled people starting to high-five each other left and right, this isn’t the man you want.

195. rq says

     28 August 2015 at 3:30 am

     Prosecutor releases Olympia officer-involved shooting documents

     The Thurston County Prosecutor’s Office has released the majority of the documents related to the investigation into the officer-involved shooting on May 21 in response to a public disclosure request.

     Accounts from police officers, witnesses, victims and the investigators paint a picture of what happened early that morning, when Olympia police Officer Ryan Donald shot and injured theft suspects Andre Thompson and Bryson Chaplin on Cooper Point Road.

     An investigation of the incident by the Critical Incident Task Force, a team of local law enforcement agencies, began almost immediately, with the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office taking the lead. Because the Olympia Police Department was involved in the shooting, the department didn’t participate in the investigation.

     The documents released do not include medical records that might provide information about the gunshot wounds to Thompson and Chaplin.

     Thurston County Prosecutor Jon Tunheim’s office received a copy of the investigation report Aug. 6, and charging decisions for Donald and the two men are expected sometime in the next two weeks.

     Thurston County Detective David Claridge drafted much of the report, summarizing interviews and evidence.
     […]

     He said that one of the men charged at him, raising a skateboard over his head. Donald said he believed that the man was going to strike the hood or windshield of the patrol car. He said that he took his gun out of its holster, and identified himself as an Olympia police officer. The man lowered his skateboard, and Donald put the gun back in its holster and walked toward the back of the patrol vehicle.

     Donald said that he stepped toward the two men to interview them, and the man in the light shirt grabbed his uniform sleeve, and he said he felt like he was being pulled to the ground with his arm pinned against his chest.

     He said he saw the man in the dark shirt stand over him and raise his skateboard above his head. Donald said he believed the man was preparing to strike him with the metal trucks of the skateboard, he said.

     Donald said he believed that he was being overpowered, and that he could be injured or killed. He said he believed that his gun was the only tool he could use to defend himself.

     He fired at the man in the dark shirt, who lowered his skateboard. The other man let go of him.

     He reported that the men ran off along Cooper Point Road, then entered the woods. Donald said he walked to where he had last seen the men.

     The man in the dark shirt reappeared, and charged at Donald with the skateboard held over his head. Donald said he commanded the man to stop, but he kept charging toward him. Donald fired several rounds at the man.

     He said the man in the light shirt began to run toward him, yelling. When he was about five feet away, the man tried to grab the gun. Donald said he believed that the man was going to overpower him, take his gun and kill him.

     Donald said he fired at the man, according to Claridge’s report.

     Note officer’s fear of being overpowered, because Teh Negro, as we all know, possesses super-human strength that manifests itself in moments when opposed with a white man with a gun. There is no mention of whether the man in the light shirt or the man in the dark shirt ever said a word at the police officer (except for some general yelling), like all this happened in an eerie sort of silence. No mention of whether the men tried to surrender (so he happened to have a skateboard in his hands), whether they said not to shoot, whether, at the last, the man was yelling because one of them was already wounded and needed medical help. Whether the ‘charge’ was a single step forward in order to make oneself heard. Nope, check out that language, and you will see how Dangerous! and Frightening! it is to confront two essentially unarmed young black men.

     A Katrina survivor’s tale: ‘They forgot us and that’s when things started to get bad’

     Hundreds of well-meaning journalists have flocked to New Orleans in the past weeks, each thinking to put his or her stamp on the quintessential “New Orleans: 10 Years After Katrina” story. On top of it, Barack Obama arrives today, the miserable George “Good work, Brownie” Bush arrives tomorrow, and Bill Clinton will be here on Saturday.

     Enough already.

     We are not bar graphs, or pie charts, or vari-colored maps, or race analyses, or income tables. We are not any of that. We are individual human beings, and at this point we don’t give a damn about any grand plan.

     We are who we were, and who we remain.

     Ten years later, the things that matter are still the singular human experiences. I’ll not elaborate any further, but rather offer one man’s story, a narrative that came into my life here in my own home about a month after the storm.

     […]

     “Not too bad,” he said, with only the slightest hesitation. “Well, we lost our house, but we’re all here and OK now. I got a picture here,” he said as he pulled out a wallet and began searching the various pockets, “a picture of my wife and baby.” He found the photograph, a rough trapezoidal fragment cut out of a larger Polaroid and then laminated with thick clear plastic. His wife looked quite young and content in the snapshot. “Alisha,” said Andre. Beside her was a boy in a blue T-shirt, reaching for the photographer. “Andre Jr,” Andre pointed.

     “We stayed,” he continued. “My fault. Gotta say that first. We got a solid two-story brick house out in Gentilly. Had it for six years and it never flooded before, never got the least bit of water since we been there. Plus I laid the new shingles myself, and the roof’s solid, three-quarter-inch treated plywood underneath, so I figured we’d be fine. We was, until the levees broke, then the water started coming up so fast we had to scramble upstairs from the first floor.

     “That water came right behind us, waltzing up the stairs like it owned the place, and quick as a wink got to swirling around our ankles on the second floor.

     “Then the lights went out. Flash of light and popping of sparks when the transformer down the block blew. I was stacking stuff in the dark on the beds and chest of drawers, and hauling stuff to the attic best I could, thinking it would never stop.

     “But the water finally topped out around my waist. Just stopped. I kept watch. It filled my pants pockets and then stopped like it had what it wanted.

     “’Bout midnight, it was. I waded out on to the upstairs balcony from our bedroom to get a look. The water was running by my house just below the balcony railings, and I could see this black, oily surface going all around the block, filling streets and yards. People was yelling, banging on the roofs of houses from the inside. They’d climbed up to get away from the water and got themselves stuck in their attics with no way to break out.

     “Two days earlier some politician had told everybody staying to make sure they had an axe in their house, especially in their attics. The news people, and the president even, had acted like the man was some sort of farm boy for saying such things. ‘Take your axes upstairs,’ he’d said, and those news folks had laughed. But here it was a-flooding, and that nasty water was drowning folks like rats in they own houses, and you better know them folks wished now that they had them axes.

     “I couldn’t tell where exactly the yelling was coming from, because everything was echoing off the water and spinning from every which way. I went inside to make sure Alisha and Junior was OK. They wasn’t, but I talked to ’em for a bit and they calmed down. We drunk some water out of the upstairs bathroom sink, figuring the water hadn’t had time to get bad yet.

     “‘Twadn’t that bad. Not that part. Because late the next morning a motorboat full of guys in uniform come along and got us out of there. I still don’t know who they was, but got us out of our house and they took us to the Broad Street overpass, where there was maybe 200 folks already waiting around. Nothing to do, no food, no water, no blankets, but I figured somebody would come directly. They wouldn’t just leave us there, nossir.

     “But they did, they left us. Then they up and forgot us, and that’s when things started to get bad. Really bad.

     “‘Cause there was some no-account folks up there, and they were hassling the people who looked weaker and taking their money and food if they had any. They didn’t bother us, at least for the first two nights, but I know they was looking to. Especially after that second night and into the third morning with no food, no water at all, more and more folks just wading and swimming up there and floating in on rafts and plastic swimming pools and wheelbarrow tubs and all kinds of stuff. Folks were getting desperate and mean.

     “Now all this time I been calling my sister uptown on my cellphone and it’s going down and she’s saying ‘Get on up here right now. There ain’t no flooding and I got running water and electricity and a working real phone.’ But I’ve been looking down, and the water is deep at the end of the overpass. I know neither my wife nor baby can swim, and I ain’t in the best of shape. So up to then we was sitting it out, just waiting and hoping and trying to stay invisible to the Bad Guys.

     “Then in the morning, it happened. Some kid, maybe eight years old, climbed up on the overpass railing, and as soon as he got to the top, he just slips and falls right over. Down maybe 50ft and into the water. Everybody rush to that side and look for him, but he don’t come up. And nobody goes down to try and get him, because even if you jumped off and didn’t get killed, you’d have to swim a good half mile to the ramps to get back where you started. So we just saw that baby die and nobody did a thing. I could see the faces of the people that was stealing and robbing from folks. They saw that baby go down, and you could tell it didn’t mean nothing to them. Not a thing.

     “That’s when I decided we had to go.

     The story goes on, but it’s a stark contrast to a white woman’s story I read yesterday and decided not to post here. SO many stories about overcoming and rebuilding, but they’re all about the white community… so here you go, here’s the tragedy of Katrina, and no, it hasn’t ended for many people.

     Men Who Kill – on gun culture and patriarchy.

     Patriarchy does all of us dirty in varying ways. This includes men. We live in a society that often does a piss-poor job at teaching men emotional literacy. It does an even worse job at teaching men how to handle rejection. Even tiny moments of perceived slight are enough to deeply wound and necessitate avenging. And it is other people, often women, who bear the brunt of that.

     I do not suggest, of course, that all men lack these skills, but I am suggesting that many do, and that it manifests itself in various, troublesome ways. It seems to me that we must do a better job of teaching our children, especially our sons, that your ego does not own you and the world does not owe you. That a woman has the right to not be interested. That you might get fired. That your ex-wife might meet someone else. That your ego may not only bruise but shatter, and you will be okay. That it is not anyone’s job to protect it, only your job to make sure it is durable. Your job is to practice humility.

     Of course, these deaths cannot in any way be blamed entirely on ego. People like Bryce Williams, Dylann Roof, James Holmes, and Adam Lanza have other serious mental ailments besides outrageous entitlement. And I realize that this is a very binary heteronormative frame.

     But that is the frame that many of us are trapped under. I think about the female superiors I know who have been harassed and disrespected by threatened male subordinates, the women who have been verbally denigrated for saying no to someone on the street, others who’ve been abused by partners for what are perceived to be even slight dismissals. I think about the number of arrests, assaults, and even murders that have happened because someone in law enforcement felt quote unquote disrespected.

     I think about how early in life women are conditioned to live through our own bruised egos and rejection and how early we are taught the importance of soothing, wrangling, and navigating the male ego. And while that has its own downsides; it did arm me with some tools I’m glad I have now. I just wish it went both ways.

     So yes, gun control and yes, treatment for mental illness. But this also bears addressing.

     Down with toxic masculinity, in other words. For everyone.

     Prison Guard ‘Beat Up Squad’ Is Blamed in New York Inmate’s Death. Prisons. Another place for power-hungry people to exercise authority over those subordinated to them for whatever reason. That culture needs a change, too.

     Movement Generations: On Julian Bond

     The old saying about sausages and congressional bills, how it’s better if you don’t see how they’re made? Movements are the same. There is nothing glamorous about the struggle. Big change is complicated, confrontational, wearisome. Stakes rise beyond expectation. By definition, adversaries of a movement are powerful, with seemingly limitless resources. Victory is rarely in eyesight, revolution always a tenuous and blurry goal.
     And that’s just the external. There’s all the mess within, too – factions, resentment, and clashes. Tiny divergences of opinion that balloon into unbridgeable divides. Allies that turn out to be enemies. Eternal balancing of both forgiveness and skepticism.
     None of this is avoidable – in fact, on the contrary. It is all actually inherent to the process of movement building, the required burdens of change. After all, the best and most just of us are flawed – mere mortals reaching for superhuman goals.
     Speaking of movements – here we are. All the wide-eyed questioning of whether the current movement for black justice was “just a moment” was for naught. The movement for black liberation, racial equality, police reform – the call for critical restructuring, accountability, societal reckoning – is here to stay. There is no stasis here. The pressure will only mount. The streets will fill with more and more bodies, bodies that look like us. The demand for change will accelerate, even in the face of accelerated retaliation.
     What a terrible time for Julian to die.

     Keep reading at the link!

     And this one, I posted it but the comment went into moderation and I haven’t checked if it’s out (I know, I know). But it’s an important read so I expect it won’t suffer much for the repost!
     Phantoms Playing Double-Dutch: Why the Fight for Dyett is Bigger than One Chicago School Closing. It is on the lengthy side, but from what I understand, those parents are still on hunger strike. And yes, this is important enough.

196. rq says

     28 August 2015 at 3:39 am

     Did Police Arrest Juvenile For Rapping N.W.A. Lyrics At Them? (Video) Sure looks like it.

     Important: Californians: Contact your legislators & tell them to vote YES on #AB953 so we can put an end to profiling! #YesAB953

     This language of demonization absolves this city and nation of its 500 years structural looting and genocidal trauma. See attached text, I’m pretty sure this is out there in article format, too. Haven’t found it, but I did find this: Morgan State prof: Whites should put their ‘unearned wealth’ in black bank accounts, which leaves a strong whiff of the Republican rightwing fanatics.

     City of Jennings settles with civil rights lawyers on major reforms

     Civil rights lawyers have reached a proposed settlement with the city of Jennings on sweeping changes to the city’s municipal court.

     If it is approved by a federal judge, the agreement would far surpass reforms on municipal courts in St. Louis County that are due to go into effect Friday under a change to Missouri state law.

     Among the most significant changes: The Jennings court will no longer set cash bail for most cases filed in municipal court, will immediately release people on their first arrest, and will use civil debt collectors to get people to pay fines instead of issuing arrest warrants and incarcerating people, according to an agreement filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in in St. Louis.

     Some slow good news coming out of the entire area.

     Off-duty HPD officer shoots combative person at hospital. He was already in the hospital, so why not, I guess? Admittedly, a taser doesn’t seem to have had any effect on the man. But still… shooting, in a hospital? Hmmm.

197. rq says

     28 August 2015 at 4:02 am

     Life after being a violent asshole – teach others to be a violent asshole! Ex-Cop Who Killed Six People Now Teaches Other Officers When to Use Their Guns. I dunno if I’d trust his judgment…

     It’s hard to imagine a better cautionary tale about police use of force than that of James Peters, a former Scottsdale police officer who shot and killed six people between 2002 and 2012. But instead of being taught to fresh-faced academy students as an example of what not to do, Peters himself is teaching police departments how and when to use their guns.

     The Arizona blog Down and Drought reports that Peters now works as “Regional Director of International Business Development and Law Enforcement SME/Trainer” for VirTra Systems, manufacturers of virtual-reality equipment used by over 200 global law enforcement agencies to train officers on use of force. Fortunately for Americans, Peters’ role with the company appears to be limited to assisting police departments overseas.

     Peters was never found criminally at fault for a shooting, but in 2012, Scottsdale paid a $4.25 million settlement to the family of John Loxas, who Peters shot and killed while Loxas was carrying his nine-month-old grandson and had his back turned. The officer was a responding to a call alleging that Loxas had threatened a neighbor with a handgun, and later said that he fired because he saw a black object that might have been a gun in Loxas’s pocket. It turned out to be a cell phone.

     Peters retired on disability five months after the shooting and was hired at VirTra less than a month after that, according to his LinkedIn profile.

     This is the culture that needs to change.

     Yesterday was all about redheads who happen to be people of colour. Today: High Cheekbones and Straight Black Hair?

     I wish you could have seen my inbox the morning after the episode of African American Lives aired in 2008, in which we revealed my genetic admixture. To my own surprise, I have to confess, the results showed that I had a surprisingly high amount of European ancestry (50.5 percent) but only 0.8 percent Native American ancestry. (I am 48.2 percent sub-Saharan African.) No one seemed to mind all that white ancestry, but the low level of Native American ancestry caused something of a family crisis. I thought my computer was going to explode. I didn’t realize I had so many cousins who were so deeply committed to being “part Indian.” And the venom those emails contained! These were some very angry cousins.

     “Skippy, how could you embarrass our family like that, in front of the nation?” ran one line of attack, while another questioned the accuracy of the tests. “That test is one big fat lie.” After all, Big Mom herself had told us all about her Indian ancestry, and how could “science” be more authoritative than Big Mom, your own grandmother. Boy. Then followed the mountain of photographs of our ancestors that my cousins sent, demonstrating, prima facie, that all you had to do was to look at those faces and that hair to know that that test wasn’t worth a bucket of spit, the same spit geneticists used to analyze your DNA in the first place. You need to correct these aspersions you have cast on our family, Skippy. Right now.

     I would soon learn that my cousins’ reactions were typical of the reactions I get all across the country when I lecture about our people’s genetic composition. When I ask black people to raise their hands if they believe they have significant amounts of Native American ancestry, almost everyone raises their hands. Here are the facts, according to geneticists Joanna Mountain and Kasia Bryc at 23andMe: The average African American is 73 percent sub-Saharan, 24 percent European and only 0.7 percent Native American.

     So most of us have quite a lot of European ancestry and very, very little Native American ancestry. And if this Native American DNA came from exactly one ancestor, it surfaced in our family trees quite a long time ago—on average, perhaps as many as 10 generations, or 300 years, ago, which means about 1714. (This date is very important in terms of the numbers of Africans who had even arrived in the United States by then, and I will return to this point when I try to explain why most of us don’t have much Native American ancestry.)

     Bottom line? Those high cheekbones and that straight black hair derive from our high proportion of white ancestors and not, for most of us, at least, from our mythical Cherokee great-great- grandmother. Sorry, folks, but DNA don’t lie.

     Despite these averages, however, some African Americans do have significant amounts of Native American ancestry, though almost no black American person today has as much Native American ancestry as they do European ancestry, by quite a long shot. (This does not include black people of Hispanic origin, in that Hispanic Americans tend to have far more Native American ancestry than African Americans do.)

     Again, here are the statistics: Whereas virtually all African Americans have a considerable amount of European ancestry in their genomes, only 19 percent have at least 1 percent Native American ancestry, and only 5 percent of African American people carry more than 2 percent Native American ancestry. How do these percentages translate into ancestry? Well, if you have 5 percent Native American ancestry in your admixture result, that means you had one Native American ancestor four to five generations back (120 to 150 years ago). If you have 2 percent Native American ancestry, you had one such ancestor on your family tree five to nine generations back (150 to 270 years ago). One percent of Native American ancestry means that this ancestor entered your bloodline six to 10 generations back (180 to 300 years ago).

     The article is from 2014, and goes more into ancestry, etc. And the interesting (and understandable) fact that it’s easier to accept native ancestry than European.

     Mich. Man Allegedly Robbed Bank to Pay for Daughter’s Chemo – not necessarily within the scope of racism here, but a sad sorry state of affairs, if that is the only option people have to ensure medical care for their loved ones.

     Maajid Nawaz: ‘Treat Islamist extremists like the BNP — like racists’. Unfortunately, I am not subscribed.

198. rq says

     28 August 2015 at 8:59 am

     The Mayor of DC has a plan to deal with the rising number of murders: It’s clearly evident that you’ve talked to the respectability politics crew. This. Ain’t. It. Girl. See attached.

     Someone suggested this to her: Did This City Bring Down Its Murder Rate by Paying People Not to Kill?

     It was a crazy idea, but Richmond, California, wouldn’t have signed off on DeVone Boggan’s plan if it had been suffering from an abundance of sanity. For years, the Bay Area city had been battling one of the nation’s worst homicide rates and spending millions of dollars on anti-crime programs to no avail. A state senator compared the city to Iraq, and the City Council debated declaring a state of emergency. In September 2006, a man was shot in the face at a funeral for a teenager who had been gunned down two weeks earlier, spurring local clergy to urge city hall to try something new—now. “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten,” says Andre Shumake Sr., a 56-year-old Baptist minister whose son was shot six times while riding his bicycle. “It was time to do something different.”

     Richmond hired consultants to come up with ideas, and in turn, the consultants approached Boggan. It was obvious that heavy-handed tactics like police sweeps weren’t the solution. More than anything, Boggan, who’d been working to keep teen offenders out of prison, was struck by the pettiness of it all. The things that could get someone shot in Richmond were as trivial as stepping out to buy a bag of chips at the wrong time or in the wrong place. Boggan wondered: What if we identified the most likely perpetrators and paid them to stay out of trouble?

     Boggan submitted his proposal. He didn’t expect the city to come back and ask him to make it happen. “They asked me for a three-year commitment and told me to put on my seatbelt,” he recalls.

     In late 2007, Boggan launched the Office of Neighborhood Safety, an experimental public-private partnership that’s introduced the “Richmond model” for rolling back street violence. It has done it with a mix of data mining and mentoring, and by crossing lines that other anti-crime initiatives have only tiptoed around. Four times a year, the program’s street team sifts through police records and its own intelligence to determine, with actuarial detachment, the 50 people in Richmond most likely to shoot someone and to be shot themselves. ONS tracks them and approaches the most lethal (and vulnerable) on the list, offering them a spot in a program that includes a stipend to turn their lives around. While ONS is city-funded and has the blessing of the chief of police, it resolutely does not share information with the cops. “It’s the only agency where you’re required to have a criminal background to be an employee,” Boggan jokes.

     So far, the results have been promising: As this story went to press, 65 of the 68 “fellows” enrolled in the program in the previous 47 months were still alive. One had survived a shooting and three had died. In 2007, when Boggan’s program began, Richmond was America’s ninth most dangerous city, with 47 killings among its 106,000 residents. In 2013, it saw its lowest number of homicides in 33 years, and its homicide rate fell to 15 per 100,000. Rates are dropping nationwide, but not so steeply. (In 2013, nearby Oakland’s homicide rate was 23 per 100,000; Detroit’s was 47 per 100,000.)

     Read on.

     The mayor got some flak, though. Black Lives Matter activists disrupt Bowser speech on how to stop killings

     Anger over a rising murder rate and the District’s response to it boiled over into a shouting match Thursday as Mayor Muriel E. Bowser struggled to tell a crowd about a new initiative to fight crime while being shouted down by protesters.

     Bowser (D) planned to announce a wide-ranging, $15 million plan to boost both community programs and police presence in response to a 43 percent spike in killings this year. The plan includes financial incentives to keep police on the force despite a looming retirement bubble, as well as legislation that would increase some penalties for violent crime and give police the power to search the residences of violent ex-offenders.

     But protesters linked to a nationwide movement that has mobilized over allegations of police misconduct erupted at her first mention of putting more officers on the streets. Community activists quickly joined the chants of “Black Lives Matter” with their own demands for jobs and recreation centers.

     Bowser fought back, at times acknowledging the voices of dissent and at other times simply raising her voice over the roar. “I will not be shouted down or scared away,” she said as her supporters stood and cheered over the din of protest, effectively splitting the room into opposing sides.

     The tense standoff was the latest indication that the city’s spike in violence has become a political challenge for Bowser, a first-term incumbent who campaigned at a time when crime was not a major concern and whose chief focus had been managing gentrification in fast-changing neighborhoods and moving beyond the ethics scandals of her predecessor.
     […]

     The mayor left the stage after her nearly 30-minute speech Thursday to a mix of applause and boos. She later huddled with reporters in a hallway — with her security detail keeping others away — to answer questions and finish outlining her agenda.

     She chose a shuttered school in Congress Heights, east of the Anacostia River, as the backdrop to lay out her plan. That area of the city has seen the greatest increase in homicides, which are up 95 percent in that area from this time a year ago.

     The choice of the venue also put Bowser before a crowd where her support remains most fractured. Some of the protesters Thursday were also vocal critics of LaRuby May, Bowser’s choice to succeed Marion Barry in representing the ward on the D.C. Council.

     “Some critics have said that today’s event will be about arresting black men,” Bowser said. “We’re not here to talk about arresting black men — but about how we can save their lives.”

     Thursday’s announcement focused heavily on police action, however, that would be geared toward reining in repeat violent offenders, who Bowser said have been involved in an “inordinate” number of crimes.

     According to police, 10 of the nearly 60 people arrested on suspicion of homicide this year had prior homicide charges, and nearly half had arrests on prior gun-related charges.

     Bowser also promised to increase the penalties for violent crimes committed on Metro, and she said she will propose legislation to make it harder for suspects awaiting trial to violate the terms of their pre-trial release. She said she would create a tax incentive to encourage businesses and property owners to install security cameras. And she said that the city would use micro-grants to fund nonprofits that work with people who live in high-crime areas of the city.

     Dunno, but without any mention of community or improving relations, I’m not sure she’s going the right way.

     DC @MayorBowser plan to fight violence: more cops on street; more cameras: get tough w repeat offenders. @wusa9

     .@MayorBowser THIS is what got 7yr old #AiyanaJones killed by police! Children live in these homes! This is TERROR. The attached tweet reads: “.@MayorBowser says she’s not proposing stop-and-frisk, just searches of homes of former violent offenders on parole.”

199. rq says

     28 August 2015 at 9:12 am

     No, no racism to see here!
     The Border Force Just Had One Of Those Days Where Everything Went Wrong, a story from Australia. Worth a read.

     Palestinians salute Black solidarity, call for joint struggle – transcending borders and boundaries.

     Palestinians have welcomed the declaration signed by more than 1,000 Black activists, artists and scholars in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

     This comes as an Israel lobby group is expressing concern at the growing cooperation between Black activists and Palestinians.

     The statement, whose endorsers include scholar-activists Angela Davis and Cornel West and Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, urges full support for the Palestinian-led campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on Israel.

     First appearing in Ebony earlier this month, the statement emphasizes “return to their homeland in present-day Israel” as “the most important aspect of justice for Palestinians.”

     Mahmoud Nawajaa, general coordinator of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) said that the Black activists’ “support for BDS against Israel’s regime of occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid is particularly inspiring as it translates principled positions into morally consistent actions that are capable of righting injustices.”

     The BNC is the broad Palestinian civil society coalition that leads the BDS movement.

     “The US civil rights movement has always been a key inspiration for us in the BDS movement,” Nawajaa added in a statement from the BNC. “We are deeply moved by this powerful proclamation that evokes the spirit of that heroic civil rights struggle.”

     Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the BDS movement, called the statement “a poignant testament to the organic links that connect the Palestinian struggle for self-determination with the struggle of the oppressed around the world, including ongoing struggles for racial and economic justice by Black people in the US and across the world.”

     “Despite the obvious differences, there are compelling similarities between the forms of oppression that both Palestinians and African Americans live under,” Barghouti added. “Dehumanization, dispossession, racial injustice and discrimination, state violence, criminalization of entire communities and impunity are all key characteristics of the oppression faced by Black Americans and Palestinians.”

     The Black activists’ statement calls for joint campaigns against G4S, the multinational security firm that works in Israeli prisons in the occupied West Bank and runs detention centers that are part of the US system of mass incarceration that targets people of color.

     More on the alarm felt by Israeli agencies at the link.

     Report: 13 Southern states suspend black students at much higher rates

     Black students in Southern states are suspended and expelled at a rate much higher than anywhere else in America, a new report finds.

     Of the 1.2 million black students suspended from K-12 public schools across the country, 55 percent occurred in 13 Southern states, according to a report by Edward Smith and Shaun Harper, researchers at the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

     While public schools in those states average more black students than the rest of the country, black students were suspended or expelled at a disproportionately higher rate than black students in other states, according to this analysis of data from the 2011-12 academic year.

     The report, released earlier this week, finds that black boys made up 47 percent of suspensions and 44 percent of expulsions from K-12 public schools across those 13 Southern states, while they represented only 35 percent of suspensions and 34 percent of expulsions from those schools nationally.

     The initial figure of 1.2 million black student suspensions in a school year was “horrifying,” says Dr. Harper, executive director for the center and a professor at the university’s Graduate School of Education.

     “But what surprised us most is that 55 percent of those suspensions occurred in just 13 states, and those states were in the South,” he adds.

     In a bid to encourage reform, the authors present their results by district within each state to highlight “inequities in racial discipline.”

     “Our aim is to equip anyone concerned about the school-to-prison pipeline and the educational mistreatment of Black youth with numbers they can use to demand justice from school boards, educational leaders, and elected officials,” they write.

     Good luck!

     Black Lives Matter halts DC mayor’s speech proposing more police powers, as seen before!

     Orlando Police Department responds to video of bloody scuffle

     The Orlando Police Department is investigating claims one of their officers attacked a homeless man, resulting in a bloody fight video being shared on social media.

     Witnesses said Officer James Wilson and Terre Johnson, 44, started arguing in a vacant lot near the corner of Ossie Street and Parramore Avenue Wednesday afternoon.

     “Him and Terre are standing on the edge of the road, face-to-face, talking and arguing, and all of a sudden, he just grabs Terre and slammed him into the ground,” said one of the witnesses.

     The cell phone video shows Officer Wilson straddling Johnson, pulling his hair and hitting him in the face.

     It also shows Johnson trying to hit the officer.

     More officers showed up to the scene and helped subdue Johnson, who was hospitalized and transferred to the Orange County Jail.

     “All you are seeing is one small piece of an incident, and that is it,” said Orlando police spokeswoman Sgt. Wanda Ford.

     She told Local 6 Wilson’s body camera captured the events that happened before the cell phone cameras started rolling.

     She said it was Johnson who started attacking Wilson, and the officer was trying to subdue him and put him in handcuffs.

     “This is one of those instances, where the suspect was aggressive. He’s known to be aggressive. He’s been arrested before for battery and for resisting against an officer,” Ford said.

     The fact that he has previously been arrested for this? Doesn’t exactly make police claims sound more legit, considering how easy it is to arrest black people for being aggressive. Comes automatically, I suppose.

     Police in Vermont city strip searched black men as they stepped off the train – wait, what??

     Rutland is a small city in Vermont—as of the 2010 census, it had a population of about 16,000—that has a big problem. Not only is the city plagued with heroin, but the way in which authorities try to battle that beast perpetuate the long-standing issue of institutional racism, The Boston Globe’s Farah Stockman points out.

     Stockman agrees that police there must have a difficult job, but says there’s a right way and a wrong way to carry that out.

     “Rutland chose the wrong way,” she writes. “Two white police officers — Sergeant John Johnson and Officer Earl Post — began strip-searching black men coming off the Amtrak train.”

     Andy Todd, the only black officer on Rutland’s force, filed a lawsuit, and that led to an internal affairs investigation that showed when Johnson found white people with drugs, he arrested them 12 percent of the time. When he found black people with drugs, he arrested them 87 percent of the time.

     Stockman notes that whatever your thoughts on racial profiling, studies show the practice actually makes police less effective. And officers who “abuse their authority over black people,” she writes, tend to not take issue with abusing their authority in general.

     Those are some of the most astounding numbers. Holy shit.

200. rq says

     28 August 2015 at 9:20 am

      August 27, 1963: W.E.B. Du Bois Dies – 52 years ago.

      Du Bois died on this day in 1963, a day before the March on Washington. He had contributed to The Nation for many decades, perhaps most notably with his essay from 1956, “I Won’t Vote,” excerpted in our recent 150th anniversary issue. The magazine first took notice of Du Bois in 1903 when he published The Souls of Black Folk, a searching and unsurpassed examination of what it means to be black in America. The Nation, founded by abolitionists but led, for most of the ensuing three decades, by men who hoped the whole question of the role of black people in American society would just go away, nonetheless gave the book a very positive review. While dabbling in obviously antiquated stereotypes and “other”-ing Du Bois to a now-embarrasing degree, the anonymous appraiser nonetheless lavishes praise on Du Bois and his work.

     Mr. Du Bois has written a profoundly interesting and affecting book, remarkable as a piece of literature apart from its inner significance. The negrophobist will remind us that Mr. Du Bois is not so black as he has painted himself, and will credit to the white blood in his veins the power and beauty of his book. But the fact is, that the features of Mr. Du Bois’s mind are negro features to a degree that those of his face are not. They are the sensibility, the tenderness, the “avenues to God hid from men of Northern brain,” which Emerson divined in the black people. The bar of music from one “Sorrow Song” or another which stands at the head of each chapter is a hint (unintended) that what follows is that strain writ large, that Mr. Du Bois’s thought and expression are highly characteristic of his people, are cultivated varieties of those emotional and imaginative qualities which are the prevailing traits of the uncultivated negro mind. Hence one more argument for that higher education of the negro for which Mr. Du Bois so eloquently pleads. Such education of ten thousand negroes would be justified by one product like this….

     Clearly, the burden of Mr. Du Bois’s complaint, not explicitly, but implicitly at every turn, is made more grievous by the denial of social equality to himself and his people. In the urgency of this note is there not possibly a lack of the profoundest self-respect? If Mr. Du Bois can sit with Shakespeare and Plato, and they do not wince at his complexion, why should he care so much for the contempt of Col. Carter of Cartersville [i.e. a typical white Southerner]? Why not trample on it with a deeper pride? A society based on money values may reject such a man as scornfully as one based on the tradition of slavery, but a society based upon character and culture will always welcome him though he were blacker than the ace of spades, not as showing him a favor, but as anxious to avail itself of his ability.

     Grand jury to consider charges against man shot by police during struggle at Marymount Hospital, just upthread is the incident itself.

     The man was not combative when Cleveland police officers and paramedics brought him to Marymount Hospital at 10:40 p.m. Wednesday. He was placed in a psychiatric room as a precaution, police said.

     The man remained calm for two hours before he attempted to grab the Garfield Heights officer’s gun.

     A Marymount Hospital spokeswoman said in a statement that no other patients or visitors were involved. The hospital’s emergency department remained open.

     “Our caregivers have received medical care and are being provided with supportive resources,” the spokeswoman said. “This matter remains under investigation and we are cooperating fully with the Garfield Height Police Department.”

     Hmm, high on some unknown drug (though placid for 2 hours) and then went for the officer’s gun… Hmm.

     Broke Me in Half

     Someone told me today that ‪#‎SandraBland‬ was queer-antagonistic and that information broke me in half.

     (SOURCE: http://revjeffhood.com/the-homophobia-of-sandra-bland/; H/T Marlon Châteauneuf)

     It’s not even a question–not for me anyway–that her life mattered and that what the State did to her was in every way wrong.

     Me posting this status isn’t a call for people to stop fighting on her behalf. Please don’t interpret it that way.

     This post is only about my heartbreak over the revealed information.

     Whether or not she saw me as a full person deserving of rights, justice, and liberation, I see HER as a full person deserving of all of those things.

     I still love my sister.

     Black queer people often find themselves in the precarious position of fighting for a movement for black liberation that oftentimes leaves them out of the equation; a movement that, in fact, sometimes, religiously, means to keep them chained up.

     (Thank goodness for ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬)

     It ain’t much better for black queer people in queer movements, either. We’re seen as black and, therefore, suspect. We’re seen as second-class, good for satiating sexual desires or stealing culture from, but not for fighting on behalf of. Like Ronaldo Jones said: “Too gay to be black and too black to be gay.”

     May we find a way to heal this horrific situation.

     Because, indeed, #AllBlackLivesMatter.

     Obama to New Orleans 10 Years After Katrina: ‘You Inspire Me’. Another positively inspirational piece.

201. rq says

     28 August 2015 at 10:05 am

     #BlackLivesMatter Activists Call For Charges In Brutal Death Of Prisoner Samuel Harrell

     #BlackLivesMatter, and #BlackPrisonersMatter too.

     That’s the message protesters and family members of Samuel Harrell sent to an upstate New York district attorney Thursday. They’re demanding that Dutchess County District Attorney Bill Grady bring charges against the 20 or so corrections officers who brutally beat and killed Harrell, a 30-year-old black inmate, earlier this year inside the Fishkill Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison 60 miles north of New York City.

     Why should this even be under discussion? They killed him. Why aren’t they already charged?

     Baltimore police announce plans to create information center in case of future unrest

     Baltimore police will establish a command center to coordinate and release emergency communications should the city face future unrest, interim police Commissioner Kevin Davis said Thursday.

     The creation of a Joint Information Center — a gathering place for public information officers from city, state and federal agencies, hospitals, churches, universities, businesses and other institutions — addresses a key criticism that surfaced after rioting erupted in April: the lack of communication from and between government agencies.

     Davis said all agencies “that we may call upon to assist with unrest scenarios” will be invited to the center, as a way to streamline communication, relay factual information and ensure rapid delivery of emergency announcements.

     “In the event unrest visits the city,” Davis said, the agency representatives “will physically be in the same room and will literally, face to face, be sharing information.”

     Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said the decision to establish the center is an example of steps the city is taking in advance of potential protests as court hearings in the Freddie Gray case near.

     “We’ve studied the tapes. We’ve studied our operations. We’ve ordered equipment and increased training,” the mayor said at a news conference outside City Hall, flanked by Davis and other top officials. “The collaboration that was in place before has been strengthened. We’re ready.”

     Are they going to help the community, too? Answer its questions and assist in crisis?

     On the same day as the horrific shooting deaths of two journalists in Virginia, Hootie & the Blowfish frontman Darius Rucker dedicated “Amazing Grace” to Charleston, South Carolina, his hometown that suffered through a mass church shooting in June.

     Rucker performed an a cappella rendition of “Amazing Grace” and delivered heartfelt words to Charleston residents at his beachside taping for CMT’s Instant Jam.

     “We went through a lot of crap recently — the tragedy broke my heart,” Rucker, 49, said. “The greatest feeling I’ve had in a long time is when that played out and our city didn’t divide. We said this is us. We said to that guy …

     ‘You wanted to mess with our city and instead you brought us together.'”

     “We realized how much we love each other, that someone who is not like me is there, and we still love them,” he added. “This song goes out to our city.”
     For the listens.

     We’re Black in Havana, and Still Can’t Breathe

     As we entered our embassy, which is supposed to serve as our “safe haven,” we found ourselves displaced.

     As we nervously walked through a barrage of bulletproof doors and body scanners, the face of a black man on the wall – our Commander in Chief – provided us momentary relief before we entered the main lobby. There, we were reminded of the threat that black women pose to the system.

     Posted on the edifice walls, we saw nothing more than a freedom fighting black women labeled a “TERRORIST.” She fought – and continues to fight – against the system so we can breathe.

     One million dollar reward for anyone who could return the women in “traditional African clothing” who was part of an “extremist terrorist organization,” read the sign for Assata Shakur.

     Mother Assata’s words have saved our lives. When we flood the streets to demand an end to black genocide, her written word is now our battle cry.

     “It is our duty to fight for our freedom.

     It is our duty to win.

     We must love each other and support each other.

     We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

     We can’t call Cuba home, and yet we’re weary at the thought of returning to the country that gave us a prerequisite passport to see the world. And within our own embassy, on Cuban soil … we feel displaced.

     WANTED.

     With tears in our eyes, we ran out the embassy, gasping for air — fearful that we will never be free as long as the United States of America is hunting us.

     We now realize that, while our passports make us American, our black experience within the territory is the noose around our necks and the bullets in our backs. Our persecution prevents us from proudly claiming the nationality forced upon us. The daily questions of “where are you from?” have often left us silent and filled with uncertainty.

     We are two black women studying in Cuba, and we cannot help but feel displaced. We are here in the midst of an extremely historic time; tourists from all over the world are rushing here to smoke cigars, to see Cuba before the “changes” begin. They’re here to say they witnessed history.

     We came here with different intentions.

     Please keep reading at the link.

     Father Robs Bank to Pay for Daughter’s Chemo After Insurance Canceled, sorry, can’t get over it – there’s a GoFundMe link within the article for the little girl’s treatment.

     William Chapman: state official will seek to prosecute officer who killed teenager

     A state prosecutor in Virginia will pursue criminal charges against a police officer who shot dead an unarmed black 18-year-old outside a supermarket in the city of Portsmouth earlier this year, it was announced on Thursday.

     Stephanie Morales, the commonwealth’s attorney for Portsmouth, will request an indictment against the officer who fatally shot William Chapman, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor said in a statement. The officer has been identified by the Guardian as Stephen Rankin.

     “The Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office has reviewed all evidence and will seek an indictment before the next grand jury,” the spokeswoman, Tamara Shewmake, said, adding Morales “will provide an update following grand jury presentment”.

     Progress, of a kind.

202. rq says

     28 August 2015 at 11:34 am

     “I Need to Know What Your Plan Is Going to Be to Protect My Life”, “Black Lives Matter activists Brittany Packnett and Johnetta Elzie explain Campaign Zero, a new effort to end police violence, and why presidential candidates need to move past talk to action.”

     For the past year, those who stand with the Black Lives Matter movement have worked hard to bring attention to the hundreds of black lives harassed, beaten, and slain at the hands of police each year through protests and social media campaigns. Their tenacity has won them audiences with several presidential candidates, and it’s likely that more politicians will have to face them. But one thing has remained unclear: How will the group’s demands translate to changes in policy?

     Campaign Zero, a new ambitious proposal to end police brutality put forth by organizers DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta “Netta” Elzie, Ferguson Commission member Brittany Packnett, and data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe, turns the rallying cries of peaceful protest into a comprehensive legislative agenda. The website presents a strategy to reduce police violence in America, focusing on 10 major areas of improvement that include ending broken windows policing, demilitarizing police forces, and improving diversity within the police force. Using input from communities of color nationwide, the Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and other justice organizations, Campaign Zero creates specific policy change proposals at the federal, state, and local levels, and even tracks presidential candidates’ records on the vital issues.

     Cosmopolitan.com spoke to Packnett, 30, and Elzie, 26, about Campaign Zero, its significance in the Black Lives Matter movement, and whether it’s fair to compare this to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

     Interview itself is at the link, highly recommended reading.

     What Is the Place for Black People in Post-Katrina New Orleans? A good question, considering all the white people recovery stories.

     Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst catastrophes in American history, and no neighborhood was more affected than the Lower Ninth Ward. Many of the people whose families owned homes here for generations haven’t returned—partly because they can’t afford to, or because they’ve settled in Houston, Atlanta, and points in between. “It’s sad,” Johnson tells me.

     In the last decade, much of New Orleans has been recovering at an astonishing pace. Billions of government and philanthropic dollars have been pumped into the recovery, and the city has been called a boomtown, for good reason. Construction clogs the streets. Nearly $2 billion is being spent on new schools. Downtown office buildings that largely sat empty for decades are being turned into condos for the newly moneyed young—a dramatic shift for a city that for much of the last half-century exported talent. Rents are soaring. Now, New Orleans is one of America’s fastest-growing cities—and the envy of places like Detroit. All of this helps explain why last spring, the mayor, Mitch Landrieu, declared: “Nearly 10 years after Katrina, we are no longer recovering, no longer rebuilding. Now, we are creating.”

     If you never left downtown New Orleans, you’d be forgiven for believing the hype. Yes, New Orleans has bounced back, and has never been better—if you’re young, college-educated, relatively wealthy, and white. But if you’re black, low-income, or middle-class—whatever that means, these days—you might be blocked from the new prosperity. There’s another side to the post-Katrina story, and it’s one of severe inequality. New Orleans’ black population has declined by nearly 100,000 since Katrina. The share of white households considered middle or upper class is growing—and black poverty is expanding. Forty-four percent of black households in New Orleans earn less than $21,000. The truth is, for black people with roots in this city, the recovery isn’t complete. And many of us are asking ourselves: What is the place for black people in post-Katrina New Orleans?
     […]

     My family was committed to rebuilding. By November 2005, they’d returned to New Orleans. Like so many people who lost everything, they briefly lived in a federal government–issued trailer. Because our house stood in 10 feet of water, it was structurally unsound, and was eventually demolished. By July 2010, my parents had moved into a new house. Some good things had come out of Katrina. “It was an opportunity to start from scratch,” my mom says, “and I built the house of my dreams.” It is, of course, impossible to forget what’s been lost: The people who never returned. The people who died.

     Only recently had I begun to process all that’s happened in the last decade, mainly because I’ve been busy working. My folks rarely discussed the details of what they endured. There’s some guilt about not being more fully engaged in the city’s recovery. That’s partly why I had to come back, to bear witness, and come to terms with my city.

     In late July, I found myself driving through some of New Orleans’ historically black neighborhoods—New Orleans East, Gentillly, and the Lower Ninth Ward. Ten years ago, I rode in a police boat down Read Boulevard. Our boat bounced against the tops of submerged cars. We saw one or two bloated bodies floating. Now, it’s amazing how much the neighborhoods had been transformed—and what their stories say about the different New Orleans recoveries.

     Gretchen Bradford is carefully tracking the progress. Since the 1950s, her Pontchartrain Park neighborhood had been home to many black professionals. And before Katrina, there were roughly 1,200 residents. Now, there are barely 800. Bradford, who is president of the Pontchartrain Park Neighborhood Association, is happy about the new school and restored golf course. She’s concerned about the influx of renters. “When you don’t know who your neighbor is,” she says, “crime can go up.” But she’s grateful to be back home—and in a stable community.
     […]

     But there was a troubling pattern. Counselors at the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center noticed that many of their African American clients received smaller grants than white clients from neighborhoods where homes were appraised at a higher value—even when the homes had similar square footage, had sustained comparable damages, and were estimated to need the same amount of money to repair. Many homes in places like the Lower Ninth Ward hadn’t been appraised in years. Your home may have been valued at $50,000, and it would take $150,000 to rebuild. But you’d have to find a way to make up the $100,000 difference. “The lack of ability to fill that large gap played a part in whether homeowners were able to return to their homes,” Cashauna Hill, head of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, says.

     In the Lower Ninth Ward, some people were able to live below the federal poverty line because they owned their homes outright—often, because they’d been passed down across generations—and didn’t have to pay 40 percent of their income on rent. They had a reasonable standard of living, even if they had little or no savings.

     Bell found the Lower Ninth Ward Homeownership Association, which helped her navigate the onerous Road Home program. Bell’s initial Road Home grant wasn’t enough to cover her estimated rebuilding costs. So she fought. In the meantime, she used the money for housing, food, and medicine for her cancer and diabetes. By 2011, the federal government had reached a $62 million settlement in a lawsuit that alleged the Road Home program made it difficult for black homeowners to return to New Orleans. Earlier this year, Bell was awarded roughly $100,000, and she will soon begin rebuilding an 800-square-foot home in the Lower Ninth Ward. “It’s small,” she says, “but at least it’s mine.” She plans to return to New Orleans—most of her doctors are here—and live in the house full-time.

     There’s little doubt in Bell’s mind about why it’s taken so long to rebuild. “The government was sitting on that money, hoping the black folks wouldn’t come back,” she says. She’s skeptically watching city officials fix neighborhoods as the Katrina anniversary approaches and steer reporters to some of the Lower Ninth Ward’s success stories—like a gleaming new community center. “If they made a left-hand turn and go where I lived, where all those people drowned,” she says, “they’ll see a whole different story.” In a week or two, when the cameras leave, life here will probably return to normal. She knows the city will probably stop cutting grass as frequently in the Lower Ninth Ward. The police may not roam as frequently. Organizations will still be rebuilding—because there’s so much work to do, so many people who still want to come home.

     There’s more at the link, but I think you get the idea.

     FYI, the responses from Black people to this tweet have shown me how internalized oppression is for us, see attached tweet-as-photo because it’s not a link to the article.

     Jennings settles federal lawsuit over its municipal court; voluntary reforms coming elsewhere, same info, different source.

     Emmett Till, 14-year-old Chicago Youth, Abducted and Murdered in Mississippi Delta

     On August 20, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till boarded a train in Chicago, Illinois, headed for Money, Mississippi, to spend two weeks with his great-uncle and cousins. A few days into his visit, Till and a group of friends went into a nearby store to buy candy. While there, Till allegedly acted “familiar” when speaking to the white female storekeeper, Carolyn Bryant. This was a dangerous transgression in the racial caste system of the Mississippi Delta, a system of which Chicago-bred Emmett Till was largely unaware. Within a few days, word of the interaction reached Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy.

     On August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, abducted Emmett Till at gunpoint from his great-uncle’s home and drove him to a storage shed on Milam’s property in Drew, Mississippi. Each man took turns torturing and beating Till with a pistol, then took the battered boy to a nearby ginning company and forced him to load a 74-pound fan into the back of their pick-up truck. The men then drove Till to the edge of the Tallahatchie River, ordered him to remove his clothes, and shot him in the head. Bryant and Milam then attached the heavy fan to the child’s neck and rolled his body into the river.

     On August 31, 1955, Emmett Till’s corpse was discovered by two young boys. Devastated by her son’s brutal murder and badly disfigured body, Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, defiantly held an open-casket funeral in Chicago, where thousands gazed in horror at his mutilated body. To show the world the fate that had befallen Emmett, Mrs. Bradley also distributed a photograph of his corpse for publication in newspapers and magazines, later explaining that “the whole nation had to bear witness to this.”

     Sixty years ago.

203. rq says

     28 August 2015 at 12:44 pm

     A Decade After Katrina, One Campus Still Struggles to Recover.

     It was fitting that he has enrolled at nearby Southern University at New Orleans, a public, historically black university whose 11 buildings were submerged in as much as 11 feet of water after the city’s levees burst on August 29, 2005.

     Like Mr. Blackmon, SUNO is a survivor, though it has struggled more than any other college in the city in the decade since Katrina.

     As wealthier, uptown institutions like Tulane University and Loyola University New Orleans celebrated their recovery from the storm, SUNO has waited for a decade for the money to replace buildings damaged by mold and rot. The ground floors of some of its buildings are still uninhabitable, and faculty members working upstairs question whether the air might still be contaminated.

     “It’s taken a lot of patience and resilience as we move from phase to phase,” says the chancellor, Victor Ukpolo. “Everyone talks about the progress the city has made, but sometimes that’s hard to see when we still don’t have all of our buildings back.”

     The university’s recovery is further challenged by the changing demographics of a city that is whiter and more Hispanic than before the storm. Black residents, who made up two-thirds of the city’s pre-Katrina population, account for less than 60 percent today.

     Many couldn’t afford to return to the gentrifying neighborhoods where their families had lived for generations. Mr. Blackmon recalls being scared when he returned from his family’s refuge, in Houston, to find their possessions strewn in the dark and gloomy mess that stunk of rotten food. His mother’s co-worker made room for them in her home, and he switched to a new middle school, where he threw his energy into football. “Most of my relatives and friends never came back,” he says.

     More on the changes since Katrina at the link.

     Commonwealth’s attorney clears officer in fatal shooting inside Portsmouth home

     The officer who shot Walter Brown III to death in March was justified in doing so because Brown fought with officers and had a gun, the commonwealth’s attorney said Thursday.

     Brown, 29, was shot five times in his bedroom on March 24 after leading police on at least a 5-mile chase through the city to his house, where he ran inside, fought off two stun gun shots and bolted to a bedroom, Commonwealth’s Attorney Stephanie Morales said in a four-page report.

     Days later, Portsmouth police Chief Ed Hargis asked state police to investigate the shooting, which provided the basis for Morales’ report.

     “There was overwhelming evidence to show that Mr. Brown was an immediate threat to law enforcement and other persons in the dwelling,” Morales said in the report.

     No officers will be charged, she added.

     When reached for comment Thursday night, Brown’s father, Walter Brown Jr., said he doesn’t know why three police officers couldn’t subdue his son without killing him.

     “I don’t understand why they’re saying it’s justified,” Brown Jr. said.

     Justice at work!!

     Native traditional methods revived to combat California drought, wildfires… but of course, when times were good, these methods were probably considered unnecessary and useless. Funny that.

     Ohio cop tells black man he tailed him and pulled him over for ‘direct eye contact’, a case of having eyes while black. Clearly a potentially criminal offense.

     “As suspicious as ‘making direct eye contact’ may be to a police officer, doing the exact opposite — that is, avoiding eye contact with a police officer — could be considered equally suspicious by an officer,” Pakman noted. “In other words, both making eye contact and not making eye contact with police could, conceivably, be grounds for a traffic stop, if you agree with the general principle suggested herein.”

     The motorist, John Felton, posted the video online after the encounter earlier this month, saying he started recording as soon as the officer started tailing him as he drove to his mother’s house in Dayton.

     “He saw Michigan plates,” Felton says. “He just needed a reason. Why would you follow me every step of the way, every turn I make?”

     The officer is seen telling Felton he pulled him over for not signalling a turn 100 feet before doing so, before asking for both his driver’s license and his passengers. When Felton asks why the officer needs the other man’s license, the officer says, “I can identify who’s in the car.”

     Later, the officer tells Felton he is letting him off with a warning.

     “Like I said, it’s a violation if you don’t turn your turn signal on,” the officer says, before Felton cuts him off.

     “You’ve been tailing me for how long? You just needed a reason to pull me over,” Felton says. “No disrespect, I don’t have nothing against police officers, but all this sh*t that’s going on now? That’s some scary sh*t. To have a police officer just tail you, and then you pull me over, ’cause you said I didn’t signal — what? Do you know how it looks?”

     Felton then asks the officer again why he would pull him over.

     “Because you made direct eye contact with me, and you held on to it while I was passing you,” the officer admits.

     “What?” Felton asks incredulously. “I didn’t even see you.”

     “I’m not gonna argue about it anymore, sir,” the officer tells him. “If you want to keep talking, though, I’ll just get your license back and give you a citation for the violation, and we can take it to court. I’m not gonna argue about it anymore.”

     “OK, sir,” Felton says. The video ends with him telling the passenger, “This is bullsh*t” as the officer walks away from his car.

     Stopped for failing to signal a turn. I can’t imagine the thoughts that went through that driver’s head.

     Meet the Artist Who Put Images of White People on Helmets Where Native Mascots Usually Go, with a warning for racist imagery.

     It’s not hard to find racism in American sports. Just took at team names: football’s Washington Redskins and Kansas City Chiefs, baseball’s Cleveland Indians and at the college level, the Florida State Seminoles, complete with an on-field “tomahawk chop” to get fans riled up.

     Redskins owner Daniel Snyder has become public enemy No. 1 in Native American activists’ fight against racist team names. Some of that has to do with the fact that the Redskins are among the most profitable and well-known of all NFL organizations, but more of it has to do with Snyder himself, who has refused to even consider a name change.

     That doesn’t mean that Native American activists have just stood idly by. Matthew Bearden, for instance, is an Oklahoma-based artist whose latest project, “Sacred Mascots,” turns white Americans’ long fetishization of Native culture on its head by instead making them the subject of sports fans’ gaze: Bearden, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation tribe, is painting white people on football helmets as mascots.

     He explained that his whole project started after trying to explain to his wife why mascots modeled after Native Americans are offensive, and decided to put the pope on one of his helmets.

     “My example was the Notre Dame [Fighting Irish],” he told Mic. “If they put the pope on their helmet — he’s kind of a chief and wears a holy relic on his head like a head dress — it would offend a lot of people. Notre Dame would never do that.”

     A bit more at the link. But for the record, one of his created helmet designs does have the pope.

     Previously, I brought up the Australian Border Force – here’s a few more questions about them: If Border Force acts like this in Melbourne, what do they do offshore?

     Remember, the Abbott government recently allotted the Border Force more than $6m to kit themselves out like Emperor Palpatine’s bodyguards. Meanwhile, as Fairfax’s Nicole Hasham pointed out, detainees in Nauru don’t even have sufficient clothes to cover themselves, with parents resorting to cutting holes to make their kids’ shoes fit.

     The ABF is, in other words, an outfit exerting extraordinary power over some of the most vulnerable people imaginable and usually it operates in complete secrecy. If this is how it behaves in the middle of one of Australia’s biggest cities, how does it conduct itself when shrouded behind the secrecy of “on water operations”?

     “We consider the border not to be a purely physical barrier separating nation states, but a complex continuum stretching offshore and onshore, including the overseas, maritime, physical border and domestic dimensions of the border.”

     That sounds like something one stoner might mutter to the other (The borders are in our heads, man!) while blazing up a joint. But it’s actually part of the Australian Border Force’s mission statement – and you can see how its vagueness could easily offers scope for the kind of mission creep that seems to have led Smith to crash Victoria Police’s party.

     The creeping force of police rapidly advances. All ostensibly to keep people safe, but I dunno…

204. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     28 August 2015 at 1:26 pm

     Young black man jailed since April for alleged $5 theft found dead in cell:

     Jamycheal Mitchell , who had mental health problems, was discovered lying on the floor of his cell by guards early last Wednesday, according to authorities. While his body is still awaiting an autopsy, senior prison officials said his death was not being treated as suspicious.

     “As of right now it is deemed ‘natural causes’,” Natasha Perry, the master jail officer at the Hampton Roads regional jail in Portsmouth, said of his death in an interview. Perry said there were no obvious outward signs of injury to the 24-year-old’s body.

     Mitchell’s family said they believed he starved to death after refusing meals and medication at the jail, where he was being held on misdemeanour charges of petty larceny and trespassing. A clerk at Portsmouth district court said Mitchell was accused of stealing a bottle of Mountain Dew, a Snickers bar and a Zebra Cake worth a total of $5 from a 7-Eleven.

     “His body failed,” said Roxanne Adams, Mitchell’s aunt. “It is extraordinary. The person I saw deceased was not even the same person.” Adams, who is a registered nurse, said Mitchell had practically no muscle mass left by the time of his death.

     A few hours after Mitchell was arrested on April 22 by Portsmouth police officer L Schaefer for the alleged theft, William Chapman was shot dead by officer Stephen Rankin outside a Walmart superstore about 2.5 miles away in the same city. State prosecutor Stephanie Morales said on Thursday she would pursue criminal charges over Chapman’s death.

     Except for a brief item stating that an inmate had been found dead , the story of Mitchell’s death has not been covered by local media in Virginia, and is reported for the first time here.

     Adams said in an interview that her nephew had bipolar disorder and schizophrenia for about five years. Nicknamed Weezy, he lived with his mother Sonia and had been unable to hold down work. “He just chain-smoked and made people laugh,” said Adams. “He never did anything serious, never harmed anybody.”

205. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     28 August 2015 at 1:30 pm

     11 years-that’s how long a mother says her black son was racially profiled by police officers in Denver, Colorado:

     One mother from Denver, Colorado is coming forward with her story about how racially based police harassment affected her young son far beyond the years that he was subjected to the practice. Lisa Calderon told ABC 7 News that police officers began approaching her teenage son for merely walking to school everyday, beginning at the age of 15. Over the course of 11 years, Lisa filed multiple complaints against the Denver police department in hopes of something being done to rectify the problem, but she says her actions were to no avail.

     Lisa says her son eventually moved away from the neighborhood once he became an adult because the constant police harassment and being treated as a criminal in his own neighborhood for over a decade was too much to bear.

     I hate, Hate, HATE the fact that I live in a country that penalizes black people for existing. And to be so helpless in the face of that. Fuck!

206. rq says

     28 August 2015 at 1:41 pm

     Police chief talks about officer cleared in fatal shooting case

     Wingert said he wouldn’t comment about whether he was surprised by the grand jury’s decision, but said he respects the process that is an independent review of facts, testimony and evidence.

     Wingert emphasized that this was not a routine traffic stop.

     Bolinger got out of his vehicle and moved toward officer Miller’s patrol car after leading officers on a slow chase through the northwestern part of Des Moines. Miller fired her gun and killed the unarmed man.

     Wingert points to Iowa law, which looks at what a reasonable person would do in the same situation. He said police officers are held to the same standard as the public.

     “We are still human beings with emotions, fears, reaction. All of us, just like you, compare all of that to the evidence and lay it down next to the law that’s how the grand jury will make its decision,” said Wingert.

     North Side woman found guilty of interfering with police duties. Wanna know what she was doing? Observing. Form fifty feet away. Not even filming. Interfering with police duties? More like interfering with police privilege to do things their own way unobserved.

     Newport News officer who fired fatal shot on July 4 was also involved in 2012 shooting. Why are they always repeat offenders? Maybe they haven’t all shot someone before, maybe they all haven’t killed before, but the vast majority have a string of complaints against them.

     Watch Live: George W. Bush Delivers Remarks In New Orleans For Katrina Anniversary. Will he mention black people?

     Emmett Till’s cousins recall historic murder, and it’s a painful story to read. I can’t imagine what it would be like to relive. And remember. Even sixty years later.

     Johnson: A deeply conservative appeal

     JOHNSON feels some trepidation writing this column. What more can be said about what some consider the greatest speech of all time? On August 28th 1963—50 years ago on Wednesday—Martin Luther King, junior spoke on the occasion of the March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, DC. Every year his resounding words ring out from family speakers on the occasion of King’s birthday, an American national holiday. And every year they draw tears from your columnist’s eyes.

     The moral power of King’s speech is unimpeachable. Its historical role is similarly unquestionable. His revolutionary words delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial would leave America changed. But what is striking is something that is largely lost to modern rhetoric: King’s constant evocation of ancient laws and age-old values. With radical intent, King appealed to America with a deeply conservative speech.

     To have invented rights would have been preposterous. Instead, King reminded his audience what Thomas Jefferson wrote: “That all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” King had come to redeem a two-century-old debt, a “promissory note” that America had defaulted on, or, riffing further, “a bad check”. Again, the conservatism: responsible people do not write checks they cannot cover.

     But the preacher in King reached back further, into the source of morality that nearly all Americans of his time held dear to their hearts, and the book they read and quoted memorised passages of. While the Baptist Bill Clinton, the born-again George Bush and the black-church-influenced Barack Obama have all salted their speeches with Biblical allusions, for King faith was not an added bit of spice but the meal itself, the base of his thinking—as it was for his listeners.

     Mr Obama, for example, often names the passage of the Bible he is about to cite. For King, as for most of his audience, there was no need to cite the book of Amos in saying “we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The book of Isaiah was so familiar to King that he had already begun ad-libbing when he quoted the prophet in looking to a future when “every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight.”

     Even the famous “I have a dream” riff speaks not only to King’s aspirations for his children, but to his role as an Old Testament figure. Dreams and visions recur in the Bible: Jacob’s ladder, Joseph’s seven fat cows and seven lean ones, the “feet of clay” in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream interpreted by Daniel. A dream was not, to the pastor King, a mere aspiration, but something prophetic.

     Article from 2013, so add 2 years to every number. Still relevant.

207. rq says

     28 August 2015 at 3:15 pm

     The article found me: Why aren’t these hairstyles suitable for the office? White middle-aged women model cornrows and weaves to address racial prejudice in the workplace. They should wear them to work, too.

     White middle-aged professionals model black hairstyles, from cornrows to weaves, in a new photography series.

     The quirky portrait shots were captured by North Carolina-based artist Endia Beal, who told MailOnline that she’s often made to feel like ‘the other’ in corporate environments because of her large Afro.

     In a bid to challenge people’s perceptions of appearance, the 28-year-old took a group of white female office workers to an African-American salon and documented the finished results.

     One woman named ‘Charlotte’ is seen looking defiantly at the camera, with her shoulder-length gray hair braided into corn rows.

     While ‘Ann’ sports a tough facial expression as she shows off side braids in her red-colored crop

     Taking inspiration from one of this year’s hottest hair trends, ‘Christina’ got finger waves put into her pixie cut.

     Once the hour-long makeovers were complete, Miss Beal said the women couldn’t get over how different they looked and some wanted to wear their hairstyles home.

     She got inspiration for the photo project while interning at Yale University’s IT department during her Master of Fine Arts program.

     Being five-foot-ten-inches tall and with a red Afro, she said that she ‘stuck out like a sore thumb’.

     Feeling like ‘the other’ got her thinking about how people are ‘forced to change who they are to fit into corporate environments.’

     ‘Why is my natural hair a problem?’ she said, adding that Afros are often viewed as ‘militant’.

     She titled her project Can I Touch It?, because it’s a question she often gets asked by those fascinated with her hair.

     Her hope is that it will open a dialogue among people of different gender, race, and generations about the ways in which we express ourselves, specifically in the workplace.

     Oath Keepers Accuse Own Leaders of Racism after Withdrawing Support for Black Open Carry March. I’m wondering at the layers of irony in this one. Upper Devonian or merely antedeluvian?

     The national leadership of the Oath Keepers movement has pulled support from a Missouri chapter’s planned open carry march, in which the group planned to arm 50 black Ferguson protestors with AR-15s and march through downtown Ferguson.

     These actions have reverberated through the movement as scores of members have since left the organization to reorganize and create their own groups, perceiving the actions of the national leadership as a symptom of something far more ominous.

     The organizer of the armed march, Sam Andrews, who ran a tactical team called the “YETIs,” said that after the national leadership refused to support the armed march in Ferguson, he resigned from the organization.

     Andrews stated that the group’s decision to not stand up for the constitutional rights of the citizens of Ferguson was largely related to race.

     “I can’t have my name associated with an organization that doesn’t believe black people can’t exercise their First and Second Amendment rights at the same time,” Andrews told The Fifth Column News.

     According to Andrews, Oath Keeper’s new board of directors is made up almost solely of former police officers. Since the group has removed the web page that once featured biographies of the board of directors, it has become difficult to discern which individuals are actually in control of the organization, and what their backgrounds entail.

     “Almost this whole board-of-directors are retired cops. This whole board of directors was OK with Oath Keepers at Bundy Ranch pointing rifles at feds, but not OK with a black open carry march.”

     The YETIs tactical team, operating under the OK banner, was responsible for the majority of operations credited to Oath Keepers in Ferguson, including recently protecting reporters on the ground, according to Andrews.

     In an interview with The Fifth Column News, Andrews was asked if the march would still take place.

     “Absolutely,” Andrews said.

     Honestly, I still don’t think it’s a good idea, but I’m impressed with the stand some of these members have taken. I would not have expected any of them to even care. Which sort of means I have to reconsider their motives and reasons for showing up in the first place – maybe. But I’m impressed.
     Still don’t support open-carry, though.

     Viola Davis Says She Will Star in a Film Adaptation of ‘Fences’ Directed by Denzel Washington

     The age-old story on a long-stalled film adaptation of August Wilson’s award-winning play is that, the playwright insisted to the studio (Paramount Pictures at the time – this was in the late 1980s when talk of a film adaptation all began) that the director of the film be black.

     Of course Paramount didn’t feel that was necessary, stating that they wanted “the best director for the job.” Even Eddie Murphy, who was then attached to star in, and co-produce the film adaptation, told Wilson that he wasn’t going to hire a director just because he/she was black.

     Wilson reiterated that he wasn’t suggesting that a black director be hired simply because they are black, rather a black director who was qualified for the job.

     Veerrrrrryyy interesting, that they actually believed a black director capable enough wasn’t out there… good luck to the project!

     Ohio board establishes state’s first-ever standards for police use of deadly force. That’s kind of the only thing that appears at the link. Hopefully there will be a story later.

     Spike Lee To Be Honored At Oscars With Lifetime Achievement Award

     Spike Lee may not have been granted an Oscar for “Do The Right Thing” or “4 Little Girls” (his only two nominations) but the Brooklyn filmmaker is finally in line for his golden trophy, which will be presented to him on November 14.

     On Tuesday (August 25), Lee was voted in for a Governors’ Award by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. It’s a big deal—there’s a maximum of six slots available per year and Lee is one of only three recipients for 2015 along with Debbie Reynolds and Gena Rowlands.

     The Governors’ Award is particularly special because since its inception in 2009, the honor is well-respected by those within the film industry. Lee has been grinding for more than 30 years, working independently as well as with major studios in Hollywood—the Academy may not have a specific award for that, but we can’t think of a better choice for the trophy.

     At least he’s gotten some acknowledgement.

     Could teen have run with severed spine after being shot by St. Louis police? I have my doubts, but apparently the police don’t!

     The St. Louis police shooting death of 18-year-old Mansur Ball-Bey sparked days of protests earlier this month, and now one searing question has risen to the forefront: How could Ball-Bey have run from police after his spinal cord was severed?

     Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Michael Graham determined last week that Ball-Bey’s spinal cord was severed after police shot him in the back, though that information was not released to the media at the time. Then, this week, Graham decided to reexamine part of the black teenager’s body after seeing the police evidence in the case.

     The medical examiner told CNN that he decided on his own to take a second look because of questions he had about the evidence and police statements that Ball-Bey ran after being shot in the back, relative to the condition of the body during his examination. The bullet also pierced Ball-Bey’s heart, which was fatal, Graham said.

     “It’s a matter of the physical evidence as it’s been preliminarily portrayed,” Graham told CNN. “It made me question how could a body be in this place if this happened?”

     After his second examination, Graham said his findings can’t answer whether Ball-Bey could have run immediately after being shot in the back.

     “At the time his body was found, I determined the spinal cord was severed,” he said. “That is not necessarily the way it was immediately after he was shot.

     “Potentially, the natural progression of the damage to the spinal cord could have been a delayed separation instead of instantaneous.”

     But the lawyer for Ball-Bey’s family believes this all amounts to a “suspicious” reversal of what he says Graham told him last week:

     “When I initially spoke to Dr. Graham, he indicated that Mansur — after being shot — would have gone down immediately or that his momentum may have carried him no more than five feet before he would collapse,” said attorney Jermaine Wooten. “But when that narrative didn’t line up with the police officer’s narrative I feel we are dealing with a revisionist theory.”

     The family is hiring a pathologist to take a second look.

208. rq says

     28 August 2015 at 3:38 pm

     The Definitive History Of ‘George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People’

     Up to that point, the charity telethon for Hurricane Katrina’s victims had gone as well as could have been expected, considering that it had been slapped together in a matter of days. That it happened at all was a credit to executive producer Rick Kaplan’s team. Kaplan and his crew had worked hard to make sure things would go smoothly on the set, and celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Harry Connick Jr. and Lindsay Lohan, had agreed to say whatever needed to be said and play whatever needed to be played.

     “All the stars we contacted — Aaron Neville, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill — I mean, everyone came in and was willing to do whatever they could do,” Kaplan remembers now. “Everyone was totally cooperative.”

     West was cooperating, too. The hip-hop sensation’s second studio album, “Late Registration,” had come out that week. West, who was scheduled to appear on stage alongside comedian Mike Myers, went over his lines with the show’s senior producer and music director, Frank Radice. Like the other celebrities on the telecast, West was slated to provide the audience with facts — the amount of damage brought by Katrina, the amount of relief aid needed, and so on.
     […]

     Myers’ opening lines completed, West took a moment and a breath. Hands in his pockets, he cleared his throat, licked his bottom lip, blinked his eyes and opened his mouth.

     “I hate the way they portray us in the media,” he said. “If you see a black family, it says, ‘They’re looting.’ You see a white family, it says, ‘They’re looking for food.’ And you know that it’s been five days because most of the people are black. And even for me to complain about it, I would be a hypocrite — because I’ve tried to turn away from the TV because it’s too hard to watch. I’ve even been shopping before, even giving a donation. So now I’m calling my business manager right now to see what’s, what is the biggest amount I can give, and, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help with the set-up, the way America is set up to help the, the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. I mean, this is — Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way — and they’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us.”

     At that moment, Radice noticed something odd. Until then, he had heard celebrities chattering in the background throughout the show. But now all the famous people had gone quiet. All eyes were fixed on West.

     Mark Traub, a senior stage manager for the show, remembers exchanging an “Oh my God” glance with show host Matt Lauer.

     Myers looked petrified. The comedian had glanced away from the camera no less than eight times during the minute-plus it took West to deliver his preliminary thoughts. Shaken but still on the air, Myers lifted his right index finger to his face, rubbed below his eye and started through his final lines, this time at a quickened pace.

     “And subtle, but in many ways even more profoundly devastating, is the lasting damage to the survivors’ will to rebuild and remain in the area,” he said. “The destruction of the spirit of the people of southern Louisiana and Mississippi may end up being the most tragic loss of all.”

     There was barely a moment between Myers’ final words and the moment the man in the White House would later call the low point of his presidency. It was a moment that would lead to songs and skits, academic debates and calls to change the way Americans think and talk about race.

     “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” West said. The camera had not cut away in time. Millions of Americans heard his words. A somewhat shaken West walked off stage, leaving actor Chris Tucker to try to follow that and Myers to come to terms with what had just happened.

     “He just seemed not appalled but almost flabbergasted,” Radice recalls of Myers. “I’ve always thought Mike might have felt that he got sandbagged,” Radice added.

     “Myers looked like he had been shot in the head,” Kaplan said.
     […]

     One producer, who requested anonymity, told HuffPost he had warned his colleagues before the telecast that West was known for “making everything about himself.”

     Afterward, some producers worried West had done just that. “People were not happy,” Traub said. “We had worked our asses off on this,” said Frank Fernandez, an associate producer for the show. “We didn’t even talk about titles. In the credits, that’s when we found out what the titles were.” [question: how is Kanye talking about the plight of black people ‘making it about himself’?]
     […]

     Harry Connick Jr. went further. The singer and actor, a New Orleans native, had been instrumental in the show’s success, gathering musicians together to figure out last-minute arrangements. After West’s comments, Connick, along with country singers and couple Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, walked up to Kaplan and told him something the producer would never forget: that West’s comments wouldn’t ruin the show’s legacy but would ensure it had one — that West’s comments were important and correct.

     “The three of them took me aside privately and said, ‘[We] know you’re probably upset by what Kanye said, but we’ve all been down there and we promise you that when the dust settles and what Kanye said is thought about and what people learn is learned about, [we] promise you’re going to be proud that Kanye ended up saying that on the show,'” Kaplan remembers. “They said, ‘We were down there, and [we’re] telling you it’s not good what the government’s doing there. They’re not being good. They’re not acting properly.'”

     “It floored me,” he said. “In the end, Faith and Harry and Tim made my night.”

     NBC’s head honchos did not share Kaplan’s sense of relief. Without alerting the show’s top producers, the network decided to cut West’s remarks from a tape of the telethon set to air three hours later on the West Coast. In a tersely worded statement, the network distanced itself from West, stating that “his opinions in no way represent the views of the networks.”

     So there you go. Black voice (no matter how obnoxious) speaks the truth of what happens to black people, and they get shut down and shut up.
     There’s more on what West said and the impact it had on different people at the link, well worth a read.

     Terrible Writing About Hurricane Katrina: A Scourge Unto Itself

     This was a flood of biblical proportions.

     And it was accompanied by another one. Before the water had receded, before the people of the Gulf South had time to even find—much less mourn—our dead, a textual flood had begun. Writers of all types—poets, essayists, activists, and, of course, journalists—were recording the history of the hurricane in real-time. They were writing up a storm.

     And now, on the brink of Katrina’s 10th anniversary, as the people of New Orleans and other communities devastated by the storm commemorate, celebrate, mourn, and remember, we’re also reliving that textual flood, as are audiences across the nation.

     We’re all drowning in Katrina coverage.

     And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s important that we remember what happened, that we recognize our resilience, that we continue to hold our leaders and our countrymen accountable for abandoning us even as we express our continued gratitude for those who came to our aid.

     But. Well. There’s been some pretty shitty writing.

     At this point in the nonstop anniversary coverage, bad Katrina writing has become a genre all its own. Perhaps the best example is the word salad of horror Kristen McQueary wrote for the Chicago Tribune, a piece in which the author explains that she’s finds herself “praying for a real storm” like the one that left “the residents of New Orleans climbing onto their rooftops and begging for help and waving their arms and lurching toward rescue helicopters.”
     […]

     Almost as soon as McQueary’s op-ed was appeared on the internet, the Gulf South came. For. Her. Via social media. She offered up a (weak ass tea non-)apology in which she explains that she was “sickened” to learn that her use of “metaphor and hyperbole” was “read to mean [she] would be gunning for actual death and destruction.” What was shitty, McQueary seems to say, was her bad writing.

     But here’s the thing: even “good” Katrina writing can be shitty.

     Take, for example, the work of investigative journalist Sheri Fink, who won a Pulitzer for her 2009 article, “The Deadly Choices at Memorial,” which was funded and published simultaneously by The New York Times and ProPublica. In the article, Fink recounts the storm and its aftermath at a New Orleans hospital where medical staff allegedly euthanized patients who they thought could not be evacuated.
     […]

     Outsider audiences loved this fucking book.

     But responses from audiences with local ties haven’t been so positive. A commenter on a local news site writes that “Fink has effectively capitalized on this tragedy. I can’t figure out why she hasn’t been exposed. She’s a vulture, picking at the bones of patients who died and swooping down to sully the reputations of the doctors and nurses who stayed in hell to help.”

     I’ve yet to find a single New Orleanian who read Fink’s book by choice (I read it while working on a Master’s Thesis on Katrina literature). And, when I’ve asked my diverse resident friends and family members for their take on sections of Five Days, their responses have been overwhelmingly negative, a mixture of anger, frustration, and exasperation. How can someone who did so much research get so much wrong?
     […]

     Now, before you start to argue that it’s just a name, that it doesn’t matter, that it’s not that big a deal, you need to understand something. People. Literally. Died. because of this name.

     As Fink explains in her book, staffers at the hospital had access to satellite phones even after the levees broke, and were in contact with Tenet officials, FEMA, and other state and national agencies trying to coordinate evacuation and rescue. But the people passing along information, giving helicopter pilots their orders and clearances, coordinating ambulance service and transportation for NICU babies and elderly people on life support, didn’t know the city. They didn’t know the region. And, on top of that, they were trying to navigate using maps that had streets, highways, and landmarks on them, but they were flying over 350 square miles of water and rooftops. So, when outsiders sent rescue teams to pick up stranded patients, they gave orders to go to “Memorial.” But things move slowly in New Orleans, and, even though the hospital had been owned by Tenet for over a decade, its signs—and, perhaps most importantly, its helipad—still said “Baptist.”

     Doctors and nurses stood on a roof in the dog days of August waving shirts and sheets as helicopters that could transport their fragile patients to safety flew over them. These were patients who had been carried through dark, hundred degree hallways up multiple flights of stairs (no power means no A/C or elevators), patients sitting in their own shit and piss (clean water and bedding don’t last long in an emergency), dialysis patients whose bodies were filling with toxins. And the helicopters that were their only hope flew over them. And left them. Because the pilots had orders to go to “Memorial.”

     Sheri Fink reenacts through her writing a use of language that killed people. And she won a Pulitzer for it.
     […]

     If you’re going to tell a story of New Orleans—and not the story of New Orleans, because there is never a single story, and it’s dangerous to act like there is—you have to focus on the local.

     But I want to be clear that I’m not trying to argue that people who aren’t from New Orleans or who didn’t experience the storm shouldn’t be allowed to write about it. It’s perfectly possible for outsiders to listen to us, to hear us, and to champion our voices as they tell our stories. And there are lots of outsiders who have done just that.

     Take, for example, Chicago native Patricia Smith, whose heartbreakingly beautiful collection of Katrina poems, Blood Dazzler, was published in 2008. Like Fink and McQueary, Smith isn’t from New Orleans or the Gulf South. She didn’t experience the storm. But unlike Fink, whose prioritization of official, verifiable (and often outsider) sources hides local knowledges, and McQueary, who just straight up doesn’t seem to give a shit about what the people here experienced—she just uses us as clickbait for an article about urban reform in her city—Smith centers the voices of those who experienced Katrina. She writes persona poems in the voices of people like Ethel Freeman, who died in her wheelchair outside of the Convention Center. Ms. Freeman’s body, which her son, who was ordered to leave her there, had covered with a poncho, sat for days. Abandoned. Rotting. Alone. Smith channels Freeman in a poem, Ethel’s Sestina. Smith gives her Freeman a voice.

     Ethel Freeman isn’t the only holder of local knowledge to get a voice in Blood Dazzler. Smith offers poems in the voice of the city, in the voice of Katrina herself as well as other historical storms like Betsy and Camille. There’s a dog Luther B. She includes that the voices of New Orleanians are different races, classes, and ages and from different neighborhoods. Smith channels the voices of people who are doubly and triply marginalized, even inside the city, when she writes a poem in the voice of a trans woman wading home through flood water. She writes about the most vulnerable members of society, like the 34 residents of St. Rita’s nursing home—34 people who, because they were old and feeble, were left to die. And she writes about about the powerful, channeling the voices of George W. Bush and the man he appointed to be director of FEMA, Michael “Heck of a Job” Brown.

     Smith gives so many voices so much space to tell their stories.

     I don’t think people will stop writing about Katrina. This time next year, we’ll all be talking about it again—though maybe, because the 11th anniversary isn’t as round and notable as the 10th, coverage will be slightly less ubiquitous. I’m sure that two years from now, when New Orleans celebrates its bicentennial, Katrina will loom large. The storm was, after all, the catalyst for the creation of what lots of people are calling a “new” New Orleans.

     The textual flood that began when the levees broke will, I have no doubt, continue.

     But I hope this time around, the textual flood is different. I hope that we can be a little more careful about how we write about the storm and people and places it devastated. I hope that the journalists and activists and thinkers who are investigating the people of the Gulf South have gotten better at listening. I hope we have fewer Kristen McQuearys and Sheri Finks. I hope we have more writers like Patricia Smith. I hope they’re more able to hear us.

     Well, that’s another book to look into (I mean the one by Smith, not Finks).

     Frank Petersen, first African-American Marine aviator, dies. Seems like a lot of trailblazers out of history have been coming to that point in life where it ends. Seems like a bad time for them to go.

     Are we afraid to watch white people dying? A perspective on what deathvids get shown on repeat and which ones don’t.

     Whether or not to show those videos — and how — has become a topic of debate on social media. So, too, have the races of the shooter and the victims. Both victims were white, and the gunman was black. Some Internet commenters have criticized news outlets that did not emphasize the shooter’s race, accusing them of hiding a trend of black violence.

     But others ask whether major media outlets hesitated to show the footage because the victims who were dying on camera were white.

     Online, some are questioning the conversations that happen in newsrooms before we post, share or edit videos. Are news outlets simply less troubled by the deaths of black people, and thus making the rest of America so?

     The question is complicated — both because of the nature of the footage and because, in fact, white deaths have been shown. Last week, for example, the Los Angeles Times published footage of the fatal police shooting of John Berry, who was white (the moments of the shooting itself are not visible in the footage).

     The Times’ article on the Virginia shooting includes a screen shot of the gunman’s Facebook page, including a screen shot of footage of the shooting, apparently taken by the gunman himself. The Times also decided to post a clip that stops just before the actual shooting.

     Other media outlets have taken a cautious approach to the WDBJ-TV footage. The New York Times links to a YouTube video of the live broadcast during which the shooting occurred but did not embed it on its website. In an emailed statement, the Times explained that it wanted to “give readers the option of viewing it” but did not want to force a “disturbing video on anyone who came to our site.”

     The article describes, but does not link to, the gunman’s own footage.

     But in the New York Times’ July 30 story on the shooting of a black man named Sam DuBose by a University of Cincinnati police officer, there is an embedded video just below the headline and before the first sentence. This video is also in first person, from the officer’s body camera. As with the WDBJ-TV shooter’s footage, the viewer can see a hand holding the gun. The video plays in its entirety, though DuBose’s head is blurred as the fatal shot is fired.

     Dan Abrams, founder of Mediaite and a former MSNBC general manager, tweeted that he had seen the video posted by the shooter but that his site would not run the footage.

     But like the New York Times, Mediaite did run footage of DuBose being shot in the face last month.

     And as with the New York Times, that footage was integrated into Mediaite’s website — not simply linked to YouTube. The video is embedded with Mediaite’s custom-branded player, including the Mediaite logo in the bottom right corner. The video is grainy but uncensored. Viewers see the incident from start to finish.

     Abrams later clarified that Mediaite would “run video leading up to [the Virginia] shooting but not the part that just scarred me for life.”

     That has led to this question on social media: Are the deaths of black people not scarring?
     […]

     A cautious approach is understandable. Violence is traumatic, and it is especially so when you are watching the death of one of your own.

     But the question remains: What of the millions of black people who have watched the on-camera deaths of so many of their own?

     What of their trauma?

     Think about that question for a moment, and the media coverage… And how it has all gone down.

     Why isn’t New Orleans Mother’s Day parade shooting a ‘national tragedy’?

     On 3 September 2005 – less than a week after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast – I began to understand that America cared little about what was happening in New Orleans.

     I was an undergraduate at Davidson College in North Carolina at the time, worried out of my mind because my family in Mississippi was still without electricity and friends and family in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast were still missing. The images of families stranded on rooftops were trickling in via news outlets, but it was obvious that the response from the government would be slow.

     But it really hit me on 3 September. I was driving around and noticed all the American flags at half-mast. Because Supreme court chief justice William Rehnquist died.

     At the time, the Gulf Coast death toll was rumored to be in the thousands with nobody knowing for sure. But flags stayed at full mast until a chief justice died. To me, this was a slap in the face to what was going on in New Orleans and a sign that the city just didn’t matter to the overall fabric of the country.

     Year after year, I watched the anniversary for Katrina pass while people gathered around flagpoles two weeks later to mourn the deaths from 9/11. Both were horrible tragedies, but only one seemed to stay in the nation’s consciousness.

     Years after Katrina, I lived in Evanston, Illinois and learned about the warm weather massacres in Chicago that happen every spring break or beginning of summer where dozens of high school kids get shot within matters of hours. And how nobody seemed to care. Living in New Orleans and near Chicago has left me jaded to what America prioritizes or chooses to ignore.

     So I shouldn’t be surprised that the Mother’s Day Parade shooting has largely been forgotten. On Sunday, shots were fired into a crowd during a parade in the New Orleans 7th ward. Police said they saw three suspects running from the scene.

     This is the largest mass shooting in the United States where the shooters were still at large after the crime was committed. Think about that for a minute. From Columbine to Virginia Tech to Fort Hill to Aurora, all the shooters were either killed or apprehended on site. But the person or people responsible for shooting 19 Americans are still free.

     So why am I allowed to go outside? Where’s the city quarantine or FBI and Homeland Security presence for this act of “terrorism”?

     Because this is an act of domestic terrorism right? Just because the alleged shooter was wearing a white tee and jeans does that suddenly make the shooting a gang-related affair? And we all know how irrelevant gang-related shootings are in America. The Mother’s Day shooting is so irrelevant that politicians haven’t even bothered to mention it to further their anti-gun agendas. If the shootings aren’t even important enough for politicians to spin, then it’s truly reached a black hole of irrelevance.

     Did I mention the shooter is still on the loose? I have? Just checking. Police have released photos and video of one of the suspects, but he is still at large.

     Another to provoke the thoughts. There’s more at the link.

209. rq says

     28 August 2015 at 4:02 pm

     Unpaid internships and a culture of privilege are ruining journalism. Among other things worth reading, it touches on this:

     So why should you, the reader, care about unpaid internships for jobs you don’t want? These practices have gone a long way to damage the fabric of journalism, and have changed the way issues are reported and the quality of the product you consume on a daily basis.

     Recently, I wrote about how stories of crime in New Orleans or Chicago’s Southside are under-reported on the national level, and one of the reasons is the fact that voices from these areas aren’t making it to the national conversation to influence the direction of national discourse. Media workplaces are becoming populated by those who can afford the jobs. Those who can’t are being shut out.

     After the Boston bombings, it seemed like every news station had someone present who could talk about the Boston suburbs. How many outlets had employees at the ready to explain a New Orleans second line, or what it was like growing up during those scary Chicago summers?

     As a consumer, I find opinions or perspectives reflecting my own come few and far between. How many journalists can say they have firsthand knowledge of the mentality of someone from the inner-city? Many of these voices have been muted just because they simply can’t navigate the landscape of privilege that most modern journalism encourages.

     The journalists who can tell my story – the story of urban or inner-city America – have taken a job in marketing while disseminating their opinions on blogs, which only small portion of the general public ever see. This is a loss to the art of journalism and its ability to tell the whole American story.

     Until publications find that more well-rounded reporting is more important than cutting financial corners, they’ll continue to alienate a large portion of the American population, and the stories that lay in the shadows of America’s dark corners will never come to light.

     The Cold Cases of the Jim Crow Era or, as the introductory tweet put it, 500 Emmett Tills.

     IN March 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt received a letter from a desperate mother. Her son, who was black, had been killed two years earlier, his body pulled from a river near Pickens, Miss.

     “I am sending a contract in regards to the lynching of my son Willie Jack Heggard,” wrote Jane Heggard. “I have tried every way to have a trial, but no lawyer will accept the case, because a white man killed an innocent man.”

     Despite her plea, it is unlikely we will ever know who killed Ms. Heggard’s son. Roosevelt’s assistant attorney general said it was up to the state of Mississippi, which apparently failed to investigate the crime. Like the thousands of Latin American “desaparecidos” who were terrorized in the 1970s and ’80s, Willie Jack Heggard is among America’s “disappeared,” one of hundreds of black Americans who were victims of racial violence from 1930 to 1960.

     Our opportunity to capture their stories — and an important part of our nation’s history — is quickly vanishing as memories fade, witnesses die and evidence disappears. Time is running out to achieve some measure of justice.

     For the past seven years, we have traveled throughout the South to document these cold cases. Many of the documents — sworn statements, court transcripts and coroners’ reports — are stored in dusty courthouses, threatened by fires, floods and rodents. Compared with the relatively robust archive on lynchings between 1882 and 1930, researchers have not fully explored the social and political costs of racial violence during the 30 years before 1960.

     In 2008, Congress acknowledged this gap in our historical knowledge and passed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, named for the 14-year-old boy who was pulled from his bed in Mississippi on Aug. 28, 1955, tortured and thrown in the Tallahatchie River. His case has not been fully resolved, although his killers confessed to a magazine in exchange for $4,000. The Emmett Till act authorizes the Department of Justice to coordinate with local authorities and investigate racially motivated homicides that occurred before 1970.

     The problem is, the act has not been adequately funded, and its narrow focus on viable prosecutions limits its efficacy. Many homicides can no longer be prosecuted. In some cases, the government has limited federal jurisdiction. In others, witnesses and perpetrators have died. This year, the Department of Justice reported that it had completed just 105 investigations and three prosecutions over the past several years.

     Clearly, the federal government needs to expand the act’s focus. Even if they are largely symbolic, prosecutions themselves are a form of truth telling, and require local governments who often ignored or sanctioned the killings to help re-examine this history.

     Article continues, but we all know how difficult it is to re-examine history, especially racist history. People would rather forget or ignore and pretend it’s in the past, rather than realizing that this past affects the present and the future, more than they could ever know.

     Eyewitness Of The Emmett Till Kidnapping Shares Story, Honors Martin Luther King Jr. In St. Louis. Audio at the link.

     High-speed car chase ends with a quick dance party. Let’s hear it for #CrimingWhileWhite.

     Sojourner-Douglass College loses bid to restore accreditation, due to a lack of funding.

     A federal judge has denied a request for an injunction to temporarily restore the accreditation of troubled Sojourner-Douglass College.

     U.S. District Judge Ellen L. Hollander ruled Thursday against restoring Sojourner-Douglass’ accreditation while the Baltimore-based college’s lawsuit against the Middle States Commission on Higher Education moves forward.

     The financially-troubled college remains closed.

     “Had we gotten the injunction, we would have started classes in either winter or spring or late fall,” said Charles W. Simmons, president of the Baltimore-based college.

     Simmons said he has some staff still working and others on call. Former students and prospective students continue to inquire about when classes might resume, he said.

     Without accreditation, Sojourner-Douglass is not allowed to receive federal funding that it needed to stay open. About 80 percent of the college’s students used federal financial aid to pay their tuition.

     Sojourner-Douglass served predominantly black students and adult students before it was shut down following its loss of accreditation on June 30. At its peak, it enrolled 1,400 students at several campuses in Maryland and the Bahamas and had about 100 employees, Simmons said.

     But the school faced financial difficulties — including a $5 million lien from the Internal Revenue Service. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education cited the financial woes when it moved last year to revoke accreditation and again this year when the college appealed.

     The college sued the commission the day before the accreditation was revoked, claiming racial discrimination, breach of contract, violation of due process and negligence.

     In addition to denying the request for an injunction, Hollander dismissed two of those counts in the lawsuit – racial discrimination and breach of contract. She gave the college 17 days to revise the lawsuit.

     And a project worth looking into, EMMETT TILL PROJECT

     On 24 August 1955, inside Bryantʼs Grocery and Meat Market located in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till allegedly whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant.

     Four days later, Roy Bryant, Carolyn Bryantʼs husband, and his half brother J.W. Milam drove to the home of Tillʼs great-uncle, Mose Wright, and took Till away.

     The two men brutally beat Till, dragged his body to the edge of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head and tied him to a metal fan before pushing his body into the river.

     The sheriff of Leflore County acted quickly to take Milam and Bryant into custody on kidnapping charges in connection to Till’s disappearance.

     On 31 August 1955, Tillʼs tortured and decomposed body floated to the surface of the Tallahatchie River.

     After Tillʼs mother, Mamie Till Mobley, convinced Mississippi officials to send her sonʼs body to Chicago, she insisted on an open casket service for ʻall to see what they did to my baby’.

     Till’s murder unavoidably became a big news story across Mississippi and in the national press as Bryant and Milam were charged with murder.

     At the end of the trial, the all-white jury took 67 minutes – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – to deliver a not-guilty verdict.

     Through its coverage of Till’s case, the African-American press helped bring to light the structural flaws of racial prejudice for the world to see.

     The African-American press connected Tillʼs case to larger issues such as racially motivated violence, demanded legislative changes such as anti-lynching laws, and the African-American journalists covering the trial were essential in getting exclusive interviews and searching for key missing witnesses.

     Till’s story broke many silences and aversions to the truth about the systematic reality of violence and oppression that was bred throughout the Jim Crow south.

     The murder of Emmett Till is an American story of racial injustice that continues to be replicated today.

210. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     28 August 2015 at 11:51 pm

     DuSable Museum unveils exhibit of African-American experience:

     Chicago’s DuSable Museum unveiled a new exhibit Friday that is 200 years in the making.

     It’s called “Freedom, Resistance and the Journey Toward Equality.”

     Officials said it’s designed to take visitors on a historic journey through the African American experience.

     Artifacts on display spotlight the transatlantic slave trade, the Civil Rights Era and black power movements.

     ****

     Museum honoring black baseball players to open in Birmingham, AL:

     A museum honoring black baseball players who formed their own league during segregation is set to open in Birmingham.

     Mayor’s spokeswoman April Odom says the Negro Southern League Museum will open to the public Friday at 4 p.m. Officials say the space is a tribute to the Birmingham Black Barons and other players in the league.

     Birmingham Barons officials say on the team’s website, the Black Barons became members of the Negro Southern League in 1920 and played its last game in 1963. The team won three pennants in the 1940s, and its roster included baseball legends Satchel Paige and Willie Mays.

     Odom says the museum will be open Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and noon to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

211. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     29 August 2015 at 9:21 am

     The Democratic National Committee passes resolution supporting Black Lives Matter:

     The Democratic National Committee passed a resolution Friday afternoon supporting the Black Lives Matter movement at the party’s summer meeting. The national party also affirmed a resolution supporting same-sex marriage in every state and another honoring the son of Vice President Joe Biden, Beau Biden, who passed away in May.

     Activists with the Black Lives Matter movement have roiled Democratic politics in recent months, interrupting speeches by the party’s presidential candidates as they try to force the party to prioritize their issues.
     “[T]he DNC joins with Americans across the country in affirming ‘Black lives matter’ and the ‘say her name’ efforts to make visible the pain of our fellow and sister Americans as they condemn extrajudicial killings of unarmed African American men, women and children,” the resolution states.

     It also calls for Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and calls for minimizing the use of “weapons that were used to police peaceful civilians in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri” last summer.

     The resolution passed the party’s resolutions committee Thursday afternoon, and then was affirmed by the larger meeting of hundreds of DNC delegates Friday.

     Racial justice was also the key theme of the invocation given Friday morning by Rabbi Michael Adam Latz, who said “we’ve replaced Jim Crow with mass incarceration.”

     The resolution honoring Biden, who was attorney general of Delaware and slated to run for governor, comes as his father takes a closer look at a White House bid that would pit him against Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, who addressed the party meeting Friday.

212. rq says

     29 August 2015 at 1:19 pm

     Before Emmett Till’s Death, Willie James Howard, 15, Was Murdered in Florida

     Eleven years before Emmett Till’s bloated and brutalized corpse was displayed on the pages of Jet magazine as proof of the South’s atrocities against African Americans, there was Willie James Howard.

     The difference was that in 1944, there was no Jet magazine to tell Willie’s story, of how the 15-year-old’s crush on a white girl who worked with him in a Live Oak, Fla., dime store became lethal after he sent her a Christmas card and a note expressing his affection.

     “I love your name. I love your voice. For a S.H. [sweetheart] you are my choice,” he wrote.

     But those words sounded more sinister than sweet to the girl, Cynthia Goff. She showed the note to her father, Phil Goff, who rounded up two other men and paid Willie a visit on Jan. 2, 1944.

     They dragged the youth away at gunpoint as he clung to his mother, bound his hands and feet, and took him and his father, James Howard, to the edge of the Suwannee River, where they forced Willie to jump in—and his father to watch.

     Willie’s body was pulled from the river the next day.

     Almost immediately, the slaying triggered efforts to get justice. Harry Moore, who was field secretary for the NAACP, took sworn statements from Willie’s parents, who had quickly moved to Orlando after the crime, and to push for a federal investigation.

     That was a pragmatic move, considering that Thurgood Marshall, who was then general counsel for the NAACP, was told by Florida Gov. Spessard Holland that he would have a hard time getting a grand jury to believe Willie’s father over Goff and his two accomplices, and possibly Cynthia.

     Holland was right.

     A Live Oak grand jury refused to indict Goff and his companions, and the Justice Department refused to intervene, saying it had no jurisdiction. Moore continued to push for justice for Willie almost up until the time he and his wife, Harriette, were murdered by Klansmen who bombed their home Christmas night in 1951.
     […]

     It took Walter Scott’s being fatally shot by a white police officer, Michael Slager, in North Charleston, S.C.—and the shooting being captured on cell phone video—for people to begin to believe that police targeting of black people may be real.

     It took Samuel DuBose’s being fatally shot in the head by University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing—and the killing being captured on video—for even more people to begin to believe that law enforcement targeting of black people may be real.

     So the lesson now, as it was 71 years ago in Willie’s case, and 60 years ago in Emmett’s case, is that we still have a ways to go as a country when it comes to believing black people who suffer or die from what systemic racism has wrought.

     And many times, when we finally see the truth, it is way too late.

     Court Decides Civil Rights Protections Don’t Apply To Kids In Prison. And guess who is disproportionately affected!

     LAPD Officers Who Shot Unarmed Man With Autism Awarded Millions In Discrimination Lawsuit. Being a horrible person pays off.

     Two LAPD officers who fatally shot an unarmed man in 2010 were awarded a total of nearly $4 million last week in a discrimination lawsuit that accused the department of treating them unfairly because they are Latino.

     Officers Allan Corrales, 35, and George Diego, 34, simply did “what they were trained to do” when they shot and killed an unarmed man with autism, their attorney, Gregory W. Smith, told The LA Times.
     […]

     The cops’ lawsuit, which was filed in 2012, charges that the officers were barred from returning to the field, and also refused transfers or promotions. The suit alleges that they were discriminated against because they are Latino and Washington was black.

     LAPD Chief Charlie Beck maintains that race was totally unrelated to department’s decisions, the Associated Press reports.

     Smith told the LA Times that officers “get blamed for making spot decisions” when they have not been properly trained to handle a situation. “You put officers on the streets to do a job, but they are not social workers,” he said.

     He also told the LA Times that a white LAPD officer fatally shot an unarmed Latino man was allowed to return to the field after only a six-week probation. [a completely different, though related, issue]
     […]

     The same year Corrales and Diego initially filed their suit, Washington’s mother received a settlement from the city for $950,000.

     So they got more than the family of the man they killed.
     Justice at work.

     Confederate Flag-Vest-Wearing Ohio Police Chief Won’t Apologize. HERITAGE NOT HATE!!!

     An Ohio police chief isn’t really addressing the controversy that has unfolded since he was seen in photos wearing a Confederate flag vest while vacationing in South Dakota, WKYC reports.

     Port Clinton Police Chief Robert Hickman said that he doesn’t “look at the Confederate flag as a racist symbol,” with some residents defending him, saying he doesn’t have a “racist bone” in his body.

     “I think he was just wearing a shirt,” Port Clinton resident Bryan Meek told the news station. “Out having a good time one day, and that is basically it.”

     “I have known Rob since before kindergarten, basically my whole life,” he added. “And I could tell you, that there is not a racist bone in his body.”

     However, some aren’t very impressed. Sandusky, Ohio, NAACP President Jim Jackson told the Sandusky Register that the attire was inappropriate in light of the controversy surrounding the flag, particularly since the Charleston, S.C., church shooting.

     “There are likely very few Americans who don’t understand that symbol,” Jackson told the news site. “You can’t be ignorant because every individual in America understands what that flag means.”

     “With all of the things that have transpired in the news recently you have to know what that flag represents,” Jackson continued.

     That ‘not a racist bone in their body’? Pretty much 100% of the time, FALSE. Whether by ignorance or by intent, false.

     Shooting by Dover police under investigation

     A three-year Dover police veteran shot a 21-year-old in the thigh during a chase in downtown Dover early Friday afternoon that ended with the man lying on pavement next to a city day care and community action center in the 100 block of South Governor’s Avenue.

     He may or may not have actually been carrying a gun.
     As per the usual.

     Inmate found dead at Hampton Roads Regional Jail, as posted by Tony above. Going to put up several of the same story, as it appears the family has been trying unsuccessfully to gain some media attention. Think of it as a signal boost.

213. rq says

     29 August 2015 at 2:33 pm

     Meet #Jamychealmitchell killed in a VA jail cell His crime Stealing a Snickers Bar.- its true #BlackLivesMatter

     Let’s hear it again for non-lethal force: ‘This Instrument Can Kill’: Tasers Are Not as Harmless as Previously Thought.
     Oh.

     Young black man jailed since April for alleged $5 theft found dead in cell. Yup, there he is again.

     Mitchell’s family said they believed he starved to death after refusing meals and medication at the jail, where he was being held on misdemeanour charges of petty larceny and trespassing. A clerk at Portsmouth district court said Mitchell was accused of stealing a bottle of Mountain Dew, a Snickers bar and a Zebra Cake worth a total of $5 from a 7-Eleven.

     “His body failed,” said Roxanne Adams, Mitchell’s aunt. “It is extraordinary. The person I saw deceased was not even the same person.” Adams, who is a registered nurse, said Mitchell had practically no muscle mass left by the time of his death.

     “Natural causes”, indeed. I get refusing meals, but what about medical attention? Oh right, he had no rights (see previous comments).

     Don Lemon Criticizes CNN, Suggests Its Coverage of the Va. Gunman Was Slightly Homophobic. May he pay the same attention to how CNN covers blackness.

     Stop Blaming Me for Hurricane Katrina. No one’s blaming you for the hurricane, dude. You’re being blamed for the response. Screw your excuses. You had the power to act, and you should have had the guts to do so. Some leadership.

     The Making of Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen”

     We’ve seen the rise of the viral rapper already. An artist releases a song that takes him or her from buzzing to Billboard’s Hot 100 and is presumed to be a success. And while plaques are cool, longevity is more important. Take Paterson, N.J.’s Fetty Wap—real name Willie Maxwell—who saw what it’s like to skyrocket to fame after the success of his 2014 summer anthem, “Trap Queen.” Alongside his label, RGF Productions, and crew, Remy Boyz 1738, the song’s SoundCloud numbers hit six figures within weeks of its release—without initial blog love, radio play, or industry support. But his squad saw firsthand how a song goes viral in the Tri-State area—first you hear it in the streets, and then enough people search for it online that by the time Hot 97 gets to it, it’s already inching its way up the charts.

     But what Fetty has done with the Tony Fadd and Brian “Peoples” Garcia-produced banger has broken records—and he’s gone on to show he’s no one-hit wonder, either. This week, Fetty has four songs in the Billboard Hot 100—”679” at No. 8, “Trap Queen” at No. 9, “My Way” at No. 11, and “Again” at No. 40. But the story of where it all began—on the streets of Paterson, N.J., with a few friends, a few studio sessions, and a free beat Fetty’s manager found online—hasn’t yet been told. We spoke to the 25-year-old new star along with RGF’s Monty, Nitt Da Gritt, Brian “Peoples” Garcia, and the song’s original producer, Tony Fadd, for the stories behind the biggest song of the last year.

214. rq says

     29 August 2015 at 2:45 pm

     Black Man Held For Months For Stealing $5 Worth Of Snacks Found Dead In Jail Cell – yep, BuzzFeed on that!

     Charts Show How Hurricane Katrina Changed New Orleans

     Since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans ten years ago, data has played a central role in tracking how the city has transformed.

     The storm greatly changed the physical and demographic makeup of New Orleans. Monitoring these changes is important, since the needs of the city and it’s people are much different today. “After any disaster, applicable data is wiped away—all information becomes uncertain,” says Allison Plyer of The Data Center, a data collection and analysis group that serves Southeast Louisiana.

     What major trends can data reveal about how current New Orleans compares to pre-Katrina New Orleans? Many of the changes are notable: The traditional school system was overhauled; some neighborhoods are still relatively empty; demographics have shifted; and startup businesses are rampant.
     Schools

     The New Orleans public school system is arguably the single-most transformed institution in the city. Since Katrina, most public schools have become public charter schools, which are independently run.

     [chart]

     With a higher proportion of students enrolled in charter schools than anywhere else in the country, New Orleans is the first public education system made up mostly of charters. Today, nearly 95 percent of students attend public charter schools. Less than five percent did before Katrina.

     Katrina certainly accelerated this switch, but the legislation that enabled it to happen was passed in 2003. Known as Recovery School District legislation, the law let the state turn failing schools into public charters. After Katrina, the state expanded its definition of failing, allowing it to take over even more schools. Katrina provided something of a blank slate to reopen schools as charters.

     Has the move to public charter schools been successful? New Orleans parish went from being one of the worst school districts in the state to nearly on par with the state average. Charters have been instrumental in closing the achievement gap: 62 percent of students are now performing at their grade level versus only 20 percent 15 years ago.

     [chart]

     For Michael Stone, co-CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, the success of charters is tied to a new governance system. “The state and local government aren’t involved in the day-to-day operations of schools, so principals and teachers have the autonomy to make quick decisions,” Stone explains. That’s helped schools respond faster to students’ needs.

     In many ways, the move to public charter schools has been beneficial, but it’s not without critics: Some dislike how far children have to travel to school, since neighborhood schools no longer exist. Others find the application process too complicated. And, the rankings are still relative: New Orleans moved up from the second-worst school system in the state to match the state average, but Louisiana still has one of the lowest ranked school systems in the country.

     There’s plenty more charts at the link, but just to pause here on schools, I wonder what the racial make-up of the existing charter schools is? And also, why the hell were the public schools in such poor financial condition that they didn’t have the resources to make sure more of their students were up to standards?

     Canadian researchers offer university courses studying Beyonce, in case anyone is interested in studying black excellence in the music industry.

     Family of man shot, killed by Pleasanton police wants federal investigation – this time, a young white man. Where’s the #AllLivesMatter crowd to raise some noise about this?

     This Black Driver’s Mistake Was Looking a Police Officer in the Eye, as seen previously, but here’s an update:

     Update, Aug. 28, 5:10 p.m.: The city of Dayton put out a statement about the incident, acknowledging that “making direct eye contact with an officer is not a basis for a traffic stop.” The statement implies—but doesn’t say outright—that in pulling Felton over for not signaling within 100 feet of a turn, the officer was complying with a Dayton police initiative called “Safe Communities Through Aggressive Traffic Enforcement,” aimed at reducing traffic-related fatalities. The statement also says that the police department “is in contact with Mr. Felton,” and that he “has agreed to a conversation with the officer, facilitated by the Dayton Mediation Center” that will “allow Mr. Felton and the Officer to discuss the specifics of the incident.”

     “Safe Communities Through Aggressive Traffic Enforcement” is, as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it so well, just another way of saying “Municipal Plunder Because Blacks”.

     Spike Lee to get honorary Oscar 25 years after Do the Right Thing. 25 years too late, but at least he’s getting some recognition.

     “The board is proud to recognise our honorees’ remarkable contributions,” said academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs in a statement. “We’ll be celebrating their achievements with the knowledge that the work they have accomplished – with passion, dedication and a desire to make a positive difference – will also enrich future generations.”

     Funny how they couldn’t honour him at the time. Celebrate his achievements and all that… not that they’re irrelevant now, but it’s nice to hear all the good things while on the upswing, as it were…

215. rq says

     29 August 2015 at 2:54 pm

     Here’s to less guns for police: Bystander Shot by Undercover Police Officer Dies

     A bystander accidentally shot by an undercover New York City police officer on Friday afternoon during an illegal firearms sting gone awry has died, the Police Department said on Saturday.

     The bystander, identified as Felix Kumi, 61, was shot twice in the torso as the officer fired at a man involved in the botched sting. That man, a 37-year old who was not immediately named, was hit three times and hospitalized in serious condition. Mr. Kumi died early Saturday at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, according to the police.

     I thought they get lessons on when and where to use their firearms – would’ve thought that proper aim, and not shooting while other people are nearby or within the potential line of fire, would have been at the top of the list of skills acquirable. I mean, how do you accidentally shoot someone twice in the torso?

     TW for horrible racist language within the next two links.
     Zimmerman brags about killing Trayvon Martin: ‘We all know how it ended for the last moron that hit me’ – not citing, the headline alone is vomit-worthy.
     Here’s another source on that: ‘We all know how it ended for the last moron that hit me’: George Zimmerman brags about killing Trayvon Martin in racist Twitter rant and refers to Obama as an ‘Ignorant Baboon’. Jesus fuck, can they just not give him the widespread media attention? I can’t even laugh at him. There’s nothing funny or attention-worthy in repeating his words for a wider public. Jesus fuck, media.

     It’s the 10th anniversary of Katrina, and I don’t know how to feel

     Last month, my mother mentioned that she would be out of town on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. When my sister admonished her to stay home, my mother replied, “Why? I wasn’t here when it hit.”

     I share my mother’s ambivalence. For weeks, I’ve been overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of commemorative events. In addition to dozens of Katrina-related articles, my inbox has been filling with invitations to Katrina conferences, Katrina art exhibits, Katrina poetry readings, Katrina book signings, dedications of memorials and prayer services. A friend told me about a Katrina-themed cocktail party featuring blue Army Corps of Engineer tarps as decorations. [okay, kind of tasteless…]

     The city has even given “Katrina at 10” (K10 for short) a navy blue logo crowned with fleurs-de-lis and a brand: “Resilient New Orleans.” It is offering “Resilience Tours” by land, air and sea. K10 tote bags and glossy programs of events were distributed to the media. Vinyls with the K10 logo stretch across hotel windows and elevators.

     “K10” scrubs the muck and trauma off the disaster, but it does make it easier to market the city’s recovery.

     I wearily delete the city’s repeated call for volunteers for a K10 Day of Service on the 29th, since I consider all 3,620 days since we returned from the evacuation to work, live and raise our kids in this damaged and difficult city days of service to the recovery. We’ve mourned loved ones, gutted houses, started nonprofits, navigated an ever-morphing school system and cleaned up plenty of messes. We can leave that Day of Service to the new arrivals and energized millennials, for whom Katrina is part of the exotic glamour of the city. I think one of them must be responsible for the tone-deaf “Katrina Films!” flier I saw at the wine shop the other day.

     But what is the right tone? Some consider “anniversary” too celebratory and “commemoration” too elegiac. Even in a city known for jazz funerals, it’s confusing. Obviously we need to remember and to remind. And obviously we need to be grateful that we’re still here. But I’m at a loss over how to feel. Last week at a Katrina book event, an acquaintance approached me with a cheery “Happy K10!” and a hug. We lost nearly 2,000 people to that K. I didn’t know how to respond.

     Even though the 10th year won’t look much different than the ninth, there’s a lot of pressure being put on this moment to reckon with both the past and the future, which is an overwhelming prospect to many people. Like my mom, some friends are planning to leave town and stay away from it all. A few people have suggested that we wait until after the clamor of the 29th to have the painful conversations and quiet remembrances, away from the anxiety-producing gaze of the media.

     A clinical social worker and colleague, Amy Alvarez, recently suggested that some of us were being re-traumatized by the anniversary. She said that in addition to the triggering deluge of images and stories, there’s also the sense of external forces commandeering a narrative that’s become inextricable from one’s own personal trauma.

     “Everyone was touched by the storm and the recovery differently,” she said, “so I think that some people have concerns that there is only one narrative being put out there, which threatens to invalidate their own.”

     I can think of a few stories that I have read that are in danger of just that.
     Anyway, to continue:

     With the anniversary has come the hard data and research that reveal a troubling truth behind these divergent narratives. Not everyone has benefited from the recovery. A majority of blacks think the quality of life is the same or worse since the storm, while a majority of whites think it’s better. Black men are making 50% of what white men are making, and half of the black men in the city are unemployed. Gentrification is displacing scores of people from their longtime neighborhoods. The people and places responsible for producing our famous culture are seriously threatened.

     Our city was unified after the storm, and now the old fissures are widening. This can be the moment we acknowledge them and commit to solving them.

     Personally, I know I’ll stay in town, but I have no real plan for the 29th. I’ll probably cry. Maybe just haul out the rusted corrugated metal that my husband and I used to board up the house when we evacuated, and show our young sons the search-and-rescue X left by those first responders, who worked in fetid waters and 90-plus-degree heat to look for survivors. Remind them of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers from all over the world who came to help us rebuild the city.

     My mother was right. Most of us fled 10 years ago. How fitting it would be if we held another mass evacuation in commemoration of the storm, and left the place to the media and dignitaries (three presidents!) who will soon descend on our home. Or maybe we should all stay, in solidarity with those who could not evacuate. Then the mayor could give a short speech about resilience and sustainability and throw an oversized ceremonial switch, cutting off all power and cellphone connection to the region, so we could observe a moment of digital silence. That would truly bring us back to the day 10 years ago when the city went dead.

     Teens Nearly Killed After Police Mistook Telescope for a Rifle and Sweater for a Tactical Vest. “Nearly killed” because, most likely, they were white.
     Imagine that.

216. rq says

     30 August 2015 at 4:03 pm

     Breaking: Die-In in downtown #Chicago calling for community control of police #ChiRisingAug29 #cpac #BlackLivesMatter

     New York police officer shoots dead bystander, 61, during gun sales sting, I know, seen before.

     DNC Adopts Resolution Supporting ‘Black Lives Matter’, also seen previously on this thread, but consider that a refresher – here’s the response from the Black Lives Matter network

     The following is a statement is response to the Democratic National Committee resolution expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and can be attributed to the Black Lives Matter Network, including our 26 chapters nationwide.

     “A resolution signaling the Democratic National Committee’s endorsement that Black lives matter, in no way implies an endorsement of the DNC by the Black Lives Matter Network, nor was it done in consultation with us. We do not now, nor have we ever, endorsed or affiliated with the Democratic Party, or with any party. The Democratic Party, like the Republican and all political parties, have historically attempted to control or contain Black people’s efforts to liberate ourselves. True change requires real struggle, and that struggle will be in the streets and led by the people, not by a political party.

     More specifically, the Black Lives Matter Network is clear that a resolution from the Democratic National Committee won’t bring the changes we seek. Resolutions without concrete change are just business as usual. Promises are not policies. We demand freedom for Black bodies, justice for Black lives, safety for Black communities, and rights for Black people. We demand action, not words, from those who purport to stand with us.

     While the Black Lives Matter Network applauds political change towards making the world safer for Black life, our only endorsement goes to the protest movement we’ve built together with Black people nationwide — not the self-interested candidates, parties, or political machine seeking our vote.”

     Vandals graffiti around 17 homes & cars, in 2 metro Atlanta neighborhoods. With both racial & sexual comments. So many axes of hate.

     EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Fatal deputy-involved shooting

     The video shows the deputies follow the man to the edge of the driveway.

     “He kind of just put his hands in the air. After he put his hands in the air, they shot him,” Thomas said.

     The man was shot twice and died a short time afterward, the sheriff’s officials said.

     The Sheriff’s Office held a press conference Friday evening to address the shooting. Watch the full press conference here.

217. rq says

     30 August 2015 at 4:28 pm

     How Whiteness tells the Story of Katrina 10 Years Later

     Malcolm Gladwell’s essay on New Orleans ten years after Hurricane Katrina is but one of the many narratives that center whiteness as the protagonist of the city during and after Katrina. The purchase this essay has by virtue of its publication in The New Yorker, a nationally renowned news, politics and culture magazine, holds lessons not just about how whiteness craves and tells the story of black vulnerability but the fertile reception there is still for this mythic rendition. Whiteness is a default to white people as the referent for intelligence, beauty and objective truth. It operates by naming these explicitly. But it also works, arguably far more impactfully, by implicitly communicating white ideals not as specific but simply the norm, barely uttering it. Gladwell’s essay, “Starting Over,” is an abject lesson in this overt naming and whispering.

     Gladwell begins his essay through the perspective of a phenotypically white sociologist, an outsider to the city. Gladwell names this person, qualifies him as an expert sociologist through his pedigreed institution, and includes quotes from this man about his take on being a newcomer to the city after Katrina. Why would the first move to discussing New Orleans be to position a white transplant first? Answer: whiteness. By framing this essay on the effects of Katrina on what is widely known as the Blackest city in the United States through the portal of a white outsider, Gladwell basically pulls the same whiteness move that launched Orange is the New Black, and countless other works of fiction and nonfiction. The sociologist here is parallel to white upper class Piper in the TV series; we have to know her first to then know racially minoritized characters. It must have seemed impossible to tell the story of the city through the eyes and perspectives of the city’s thousands of current and former Black residents, residents who emphatically do not use the words “random” and “natural” to describe the breaking of the levees, as Gladwell does. In fact, the only instances in which readers hear from Black New Orleanians, their words are siphoned through Gladwell’s piecing of research done by social scientists that he validates through affiliation. It is an egregious erasure through layered annotating.

     Gladwell samples from published studies and available data while making sweeping statements about social science that work to erroneously delimit what social science is and benefit inquiries that play fast and loose with how context operates on large and small scales. Several of Gladwell’s statements stand out in this way, for example:

     “If a group of poor Americans are stuck in a bad place, then either the place they are stuck in needs to be improved or they need to move to a better place.”

     In this statement, Gladwell, works from the premise of the social science he’s chosen to represent as Science with a capital S. It starts its analysis of generational poverty by erasing the generational, policy-created and durable nature of poverty. While that is itself reason enough to dismiss this statement, which acts as the basic thesis of the essay, it is deeply troubling to continue reading the details of this thesis exploration with the slimmest grasp of U.S. history and its ongoing investment in attempting to contain and limit Black life. This superficial analysis relies on a claim made early in the essay that it’s not so much national policies (e.g., minimum wage laws, housing policies, healthcare) but just the specific neighborhood you might find yourself in that determines “how you turn out.”

     Continue reading at the link. The best is still to come.

     Sneers and looks of indifference from the people that were caged up for their “safety”. #BlackFair What’s that all about? Stay tuned. Probably until tomorrow.

     The Black Panthers were fighting for the same rights as Black Lives Matter, because apparently some things don’t change.

     The Black Panthers came to rise in Oakland, California in the late 1960s. A northern answer to the civil-rights movement, the Panthers were tackling issues very similar to today’s Black Lives Matter protesters: Police brutality, housing discrimination, high levels of poverty, and unequal education.

     The group wasn’t just a pro-black militant organization taking up arms to intimidate what they viewed to be oppressive and violent police forces. They started free breakfast programs, sickle cell anemia research, and nutrition classes in their communities, among many other programs. The Panthers were a movement, an ideology, a way of living.

     In a forthcoming documentary, Director Stanley Nelson chronicles the rise and fall of the party, its leaders—and its eventual destruction by the U.S. government.

     Watching the film, it is impossible not to be struck by the similarities between then and now, to compare Panther tactics to Black Lives Matter tactics. Below is a conversation about those similarities, and of the internal and external factors that wrecked a movement.

     Interview at the link. Excerpt:

     Watching this film, you realize how relevant it is to now. So I’m going to ask you right out the gate: has anything changed for black people since the peak of the Black Panther movement?

     Obviously things have changed since 1966. For a few African American people, things have changed a great deal. But for a vast majority, things haven’t changed that much. What’s striking and relevant is that most of the Panther’s 10-point program is so relevant today. The Panthers started as a way to fight against police brutality, and the reason it spread across the country so quickly is because other African Americans were experiencing the same thing too.
     The reactions of white lawmakers to the Black Panthers arming themselves was to try and disarm them. And they ended up successfully changing gun laws in California, formerly an open carry state. If black Americans took up weapons now, in states with open carry laws, do you think the same thing would happen?

     One of the saddest and [most] telling things in a screening we had early on was when one audience member stood up and said, “You couldn’t have the Panther movement today like you did back then, because immediately seeing black people carrying guns would lead to violence.” What does that say? To me it says things have gotten worse, not better. The patrols Black Panthers went on worked, and they were actually nonviolent. There was never a shootout as a result of them.

     Ironically, one of the things that might cure open carry laws is if you had groups of armed black people patrolling.
     Freedom, education, housing, and police brutality were all part of the 10-point platform. And Panthers were targeting the “brother on the corner.” Are Black Live Matter organizers trying to find “the brother on the corner,” or are they trying to appeal more to the media?

     My understanding is that they’re very focused on African Americans getting involved and getting their message across. Part of that is grabbing media attention. The Panthers believed that you engage with some people who won’t like you or what you’re doing, but that doesn’t matter. And maybe that was something so brilliant for the Black Panthers to realize: There were gonna be some people who were gonna be pissed off, but that that didn’t matter. You don’t have to win everybody. You have to win the people who sympathize with your cause. And that’s similar to Black Lives Matter. They’ve seized upon the media and said here are our issues and we don’t care what you think.

     Democrats Make A $15 National Minimum Wage An Establishment Principle. Now let’s see some action, because we all know who is disproportionately affected by the minimum wage.

     Check Out America’s Worst Police Departments. Failing grades and all. Not a flattering picture. Of course, what do these people know, anyway, it’s not like any of the respondents are police officers or anything like that. Just members of the community.

     The hero of this comic book is a single, black mother raising her super-powered son – because this kind of representation is important.

     In the comic book Raising Dion, Nicole, a widowed, black single mother, dedicates her energy to raising and chronicling the life of her son, Dion, a seven-year-old boy with a bevy of inexplicable superpowers. With Dion, getting dressed in the morning turns into a frantic chase as he teleports around the apartment, playtime involves bouts of uncontrolled telekinesis, and timeouts are thwarted by the boy’s ability to render himself invisible.

     Though she loves her son to death, Nicole realizes that unless she guides him properly, his abilities could easily overwhelm her and expose their secret to the world. Rather than freak out, Nicole does what she can to teach Dion about what she means when she says that he could be a superhero one day.

     “How do you protect him from the world?” Nicole asks in the cinematic trailer for the comic book. “First, never take your eyes off of him; his powers can be unpredictable.”

     One of these days, one of these comics starring a young black boy/man will end with him getting shot in the street by a white cop. Now wouldn’t that be the ending of all endings.

218. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     30 August 2015 at 8:10 pm

     One month later, here’s how that nude lingerie for women of color is doing:

     Brown and beige bras aren’t the kind of lingerie that typically get attention (lace, animal prints, cutouts, flowers — pretty much anything else ranks above). But a collection of solid-colored bras and panties grabbed the Internet’s attention this past year, for finally addressing a customer who’s been long ignored.

     Nubian Skin finally gives women of color “nude” underwear and bras that actually match their skin tones. The line, the brainchild of British entrepreneur Ade Hassan, raised money on Indiegogo and launched online and in Europe last September. It took until this July for the line to reach the U.S., when Nordstrom finally introduced Nubian Skin’s brown bras and underwear to its shelves.

     One month later, how has it fared? Just check in with women on Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram:

     There are multiple enthusiastic Tweets.

     “The feedback has been incredible so far – we are really grateful for how supportive people have been! People tweet us things like ‘I’m shopping for Nubian Skin in Nordstrom this weekend!’ which gets us excited. It’s great to know that people want to see our products,” Amy Lodder, a Nubian Skin marketing executive, told Mic.

     The brand wouldn’t reveal sales numbers, telling Mic, “We can say that we’re very pleased with our launch at Nordstrom so far.”

     But dollars aside, the more telling thing is the online enthusiasm, the kind not witnessed with most clothing brands — and clearly reflects a long-awaited desire of shoppers that Nubian Skin finally fulfills.

     The industry standard for lingerie has long used “nude” as a shorthand, offering up miles and miles of light beige (read: white) items that completely ignored women of color. But the tide is turning, as black shoppers both get retailers attention and create their own solutions.

     As Mic’s Theresa Avila reported, more companies are springing up to provide panty hose, shoes, makeup and even Band-Aid-like bandages catering to darker skin tones.

     “I think that a lot of people are starting to realize that ‘nude’ isn’t just one colour, and a few other brands are making progress on this front too – like Christian Louboutin,” Lodder told Mic. “It’s great because it gives women of color the chance to embrace their color in a way that wasn’t previously recognized – to finally get their own ‘nude.'”

     Imagine that. Women of color are a demographic that buys stuff. Who could have imagined that? I mean I thought only white women bought stuff.

219. rq says

     31 August 2015 at 3:10 am

     Women of colour are a demographic that buys stuff tailored to women of colour! AMAZING! Now someone needs to bring back vari-toned band-aids and put them in the visible shelf of the band-aid aisle.

     +++

     In New Orleans, a Black Feminist Opera With a Touch of Afrofuturism

     On the surface, a five-movement experimental opera set in various New Orleans neighborhoods called “Ecohybridity” doesn’t present as the most accessible form of theatre.

     But creator Kai Barrow, a Durham, North Carolina, transplant to New Orleans, says the so-called “visual opera” will resonate with disenfranchised people of color who birthed much of what we love about New Orleans yet remain the city’s most neglected residents.

     “Opera was originally a people’s form that would go from community to community. It was a way to articulate what was going on through art. But somewhere along the line, it became an elitist form, and poor people of color were locked out of the medium,” she explains over a crackling phone line from New Orleans. “But our conditioning right now, how we’re managing to exist, is opera in its largest sense. It’s comedy, it’s tragedy, it’s all of these different parts.”

     “Ecohybridity” springs from Barrow’s experiences with eviction in Durham. That dislocation was made more resonant in post-Katrina New Orleans, where her Gallery of the Streets provides space for highlighting artists of color.

     While organizers call “Ecohybridity” an opera, the show is much more immersive and fluid. It incorporates contemporary music, paintings and the open canvas of New Orleans. It’s Afrofuturist in its presentation but classic at its core.

     Take a look at the cast of characters and you’ll get a sense of how the show is creating something new. One character, named Madame Sankofa (The People’s Diva), requires the performer to channel Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, Laurie Anderson and Lauryn Hill. Another, O.G. Falcon (The Butch of the Ashes) is rooted in Bessie Smith and the Sex Pistols, among others. These more contemporary influences ground the opera in something relatable despite the high-mindedness of the concept.

     All of this is couched in Barrow’s and her colleagues’ tacit understanding of what it means to be contemporary black creatives (particularly as black women) in New Orleans, to deal with the pressures of municipal and cultural exploitation.

     Nice. Very nice!

     #BlackLivesMatter Interrupts MN State Fair w/ List of Demands, Vimeo video.

     From B.L.M. St. Paul:
     “What we want:
     -Department of Justice investigation regarding the St. Paul Police execution of Marcus Golden.
     -End of Jury proceedings for police Homicides and shootings.
     -Body cameras on all officers.
     -Police carry liability insurance as the primary insurance.
     -Immediate video recorded statement by officers involved in or witnessing police shootings, beatings, homicides.
     -Community control of hiring and firing.
     -Real representation of African American and other minorities at the State Fair.
     -Drop all charges against Black Lives Matter Minneapolis by the City of Bloomington.”

     Katrina wasn’t over when the storm ended, for some: ‘You’re one of us now’

     It had been a decade since they arrived in Nebraska, a state they had known nothing about until Hurricane Katrina stripped their New Orleans home down to its floorboards on Aug. 29, 2005. They had traveled with their five children to shelters, church basements and an overcrowded motel, where one day a FEMA official announced that a church in Nebraska was offering to sponsor a family and asked whether anyone wanted to go. Nine hours later, they were on their way to the airport, a family of seven with a single carry-on bag and no idea where they were headed. They landed in Omaha, where the streets were wide and quiet; and then they were driven into the surrounding farmland, which started to smell of manure; and then they came into tiny Nebraska City, which at least had a Wal-Mart; and then they continued through 25 more miles of absolute emptiness until they arrived at what looked like nothing more than a junction in the road. One bar. Two gas stations. A main street of vacated shops and a squat municipal building decorated with a freshly painted sign. “Welcome Home Katrina Evacuees!” it read.

     The town of Auburn, population 3,200, had provided them with a car, a four-bedroom house, job leads and free medical checkups. The Ladies Club stopped by with homemade casseroles. Goodwill delivered jeans and pearl-snap shirts.

     “You’re one of us now,” a city councilman had written to them, even though no one else in Auburn was black, Southern, urban and poor. “We’re a close community that leaves no one behind in a time of need. You’ll be taken care of here.”

     In the days after Hurricane Katrina, this was what Auburn wanted to believe of itself, and what so many Americans wanted to believe of their own communities, too.

     A decade later, the councilman’s note was at the bottom of a closet, buried underneath the paperwork of what the Williamses’ time in Nebraska had become: police reports, doctor’s bills, grievance letters to the NAACP and dozens of collection notices. They owed the city for water, gas, trash collection and school supplies. They owed $15,000 to the hospital for Troy’s first round of cancer treatments, which he was supposed to be getting every week but instead was receiving only every three months at a clinic in Lincoln that had agreed to give him infrequent treatments at no charge.

     “This matter concerning the Williams’ family has exhausted our patience,” read one bill, for $60, from an appointment to check Troy’s blood levels.

     “We cannot and do not operate as a charity,” read another.
     […]

     How quickly had some people in town started expecting them to leave? How suddenly had so much generosity begun to unravel? During their third week in Auburn, the dealership had replaced their new Expedition with a used minivan, explaining that the Expedition had been a short-term loan. During the fifth week, their oldest son had been sent home from school for wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt. “A drug culture we don’t embrace here,” the administrator’s note had read. During the seventh week, the city had asked them to start paying rent on the four-bedroom house, $520 a month, which they couldn’t afford on Troy’s salary as a machine operator. During their eighth week, vandals had carved “N*gg*rs” into the Halloween pumpkins on their front porch, and they had gone for the first time to see the police.

     The community newspaper published all police activity each week in a section called “The Docket,” and soon the Williams family had become regulars. There was Andrea, ticketed for speeding 7 mph over the limit. There was Troy for failing to pay the trash. There was Troy again for driving under the influence, his first offense.

     “Blow,” the breathalyzer machine said. Andrea drew in her breath. She exhaled into the machine.

     “Troy, you idiot,” she said.

     “Pass,” the machine said.

     He had gotten his first DUI at an Auburn gas station, when he was idling in the car and a police officer pulled up alongside him. Troy had rolled down his window to say hello. The officer had smelled whiskey on his breath. “We are the targets of constant racism,” Troy had written not long after that, to the president of the NAACP chapter in Omaha, because he said the police were constantly following him and his sons, even if he sometimes did give them cause. He got his second DUI on the way back from Lincoln, his third coming home from a club in Omaha, then his fourth. He had been a drinker in New Orleans, too, but there it was different. He was popular. He owned a small clothing store. He DJ’d at parties. In Auburn, he drank to escape. He was always venturing farther out, staying away for a few nights at a time, until finally he left to stay with a friend in Nebraska City and begged Andrea to come, too. Nebraska City was twice as big as Auburn, a onetime stop on the Underground Railroad where Troy thought there was at least a semblance of diversity. “Aren’t you tired of living in a fishbowl?” Troy had asked her. “Aren’t you losing your mind in that place?”

     Story continues at the link.

     The Combat Jack Show: The Tef Poe Episode, audio.

     We hear about the #BLM movement but rarely about its artists. Ferguson, Missouri native Tef Poe shares his music, talks about how his life changed the day Michael Brown was murdered by Darren Wilson, what happened on the front line of Ferguson and how that city’s changed after a year. Tef Poe also has BARS. Like he once said, “this ain’t your grandparents’ civil rights movement.” His album ‘War Machine III’ is available on itunes now.

     California Voters Want Policing Reforms That Politicians Won’t Deliver, on the poison that is police unions.

     My sister was the only black ballerina at Joffrey. She played the role of “black iris”.

220. rq says

     31 August 2015 at 3:18 am

     Here’s more about the ballet piece: Black Iris by Jeremy McQueen.

     Matt Black’s ‘moral’ photography of America’s sprawling poverty, for the story behind the photography. Less racism so much as a look at class, but heck, we know that intersection.

     45 murders in 31 days The victims of July violence

     July saw 45 homicides across Baltimore, a toll that matched the deadliest month in the city’s modern history and came amid a violent crime surge that has stretched the entire summer. The killings occurred across the city, overwhelmingly in historically impoverished neighborhoods. The victims included a 5-month-old boy and a 53-year-old grandmother, a teen stabbed to death in a dispute over a cell phone and a carryout deliveryman killed in a robbery. The Baltimore Sun sought to profile each victim, through interviews with relatives, friends, neighbors and police, as well as information on social media — and to chronicle the impact on those left behind.

     From Baltimore.

     Details emerge, questions remain in case of Albany Taser death. Non-lethal force, indeed.

     The death of a mentally ill Albany man who was repeatedly shocked with a Taser during a struggle with three police officers last spring has been declared a homicide, according to the results of a coroner’s report shared with the Times Union.

     The revelation of the coroner’s determination comes as a possible grand jury review of the death of Donald Ivy Jr. has stalled after Albany County District Attorney David Soares recently asked Gov. Andrew Cuomo to assign the case to state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

     The request by Soares stems from an executive order Cuomo signed in July authorizing the attorney general’s office to investigate cases in which unarmed citizens are killed in confrontations with police.

     People close to Ivy, meanwhile, said his family remains concerned about what led the officers to confront, chase and repeatedly shock him with a Taser. New details about the confrontation, gleaned from interviews with law enforcement officials and people close to Ivy, whose family was briefed on the department’s internal investigation, also raise questions about whether the officers should have let Ivy go when they determined he was unarmed.
     […]

     The white officers who confronted him were curious that his hands were hidden from view and also stated that there was something unusual about his gait, although it’s unclear what they meant.

     There was no crime unfolding and Ivy did not fit the description of anyone wanted for questioning. They asked for his identification. A third officer, Michael Mahany, who had been with the department for 21 months, joined Sears and Skinkle as they questioned Ivy.

     “I believe that, from the perspective of the family, what we have is a racial profiling gone wrong,” said the Rev. Tre’ Staton, pastor of the church attended by some of Ivy’s family members. “What is it that drew them to a point of suspicion to such a degree that they wanted to basically interrogate this non-threatening citizen? That’s the issue with the family and the fact that, the family, knowing Donald’s condition, it’s almost as if they scared him to death.”

     Twizzlers, Skittles, and keeping one’s hands warm on a cold night… suspicious.

     Trump, in Tennessee, downplays police brutality, promises to get rid of gangs. Read on, if you like, but honestly, I’m not going to cite him here.

221. Saad says

     31 August 2015 at 7:55 am

     Confederate Flagger is shocked that hardly anyone showed up to her secession rally in Montgomery
     (NOTE: Video at the end of article autoplays)

     A 5-hour secession rally at the Alabama Capitol building in Montgomery was called off after two hours on Saturday when only about 30 people showed up – far short of the 300 expected by the rally organizers, reports the Montgomery Advertiser.

     “This is really shocking me that these people aren’t here,” said puzzled event organizer Freda Mincey-Burton.

     The event, which had been promoted on the Alabama Flaggers Facebook page, was intended as a call to arms for Alabama citizens who are “tired of being walked on.”

     “We are rallying for the secession from the United States of America. Brings [sic] your flags, bring your secession flags, bring your secession signs,” the Facebook post encouraged supporters, with over 300 promising to attend.

     The reality was something else entirely with approximately 30 attendees showing up, including the event organizers who had moved the rally to Saturday from Friday in the hopes of attracting a larger crowd.

     [. . .]

     Supporter Thomas Taunton defended the Confederate flag, saying: “It’s not a slavery flag. It’s not a racist flag. It’s to represent our forefathers who died fighting for the Confederacy, and we stand beside them.”

     After a few brief speeches before the supporters who showed, the rally ended less than halfway though as a steady rain drenched the would-be secessionists and they straggled away.

     And they got rained on… *snicker*

222. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     31 August 2015 at 9:54 pm

     Napa Valley Wine Train may face a $5 million lawsuit:

     “There must be compensation for the humiliation suffered” their lawyer Waukeen McCoy told the San Francisco Chronicle.
     The Wine Train apologized to the book club members and offered a 50-seat private car to the club for a future trip.

     “That’s not going to get this resolved at all,” McCoy said. “This was clearly racial discrimination.”

     “We’re standing our ground on this issue. I really don’t feel that it was a true apology because basically I feel that they’re just being directed by their PR person,” book club member Lisa Johnson said in a statement to CBS.

     Kevin Keane, a spokesman for the Wine Train, did not comment on the potential lawsuit and said that train officials had not yet been contacted.

223. rq says

     1 September 2015 at 10:07 am

     Hurricane Katrina Was a Nightmare for Inmates in New Orleans

     Sunday was deceptively peaceful, as Katrina whirled closer and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued the first-ever mandatory evacuation of the city. Governor Kathleen Blanco added that the storm was “very serious,” and “we need to get as many people out as possible.” In spite of this, Sheriff Marlin Gusman announced, “The prisoners will stay where they belong.” He had generators, he said, and a loyal staff, so the city’s inmates would hang tight.

     The grouping of buildings that comprise Orleans Parish Prison render it something of a crown jewel in what some call the world’s incarceration capital—Louisiana—and at the time of Katrina, one of America’s biggest jails. Because OPP earns roughly $25 a day per prisoner from the state, city cops don’t do a whole lot of catch-and-release. In August 2005, the majority of OPP’s roughly 6,800 prisoners hadn’t been convicted of a serious crime. They were people who couldn’t pay traffic tickets, drunk tourists who’d pissed on Bourbon Street, kids caught smoking pot. The robust jail and regressive criminal justice policies made for a perfect storm for what was to come.

     Katrina soon made extra clear the many drawbacks of over-enthusiastically caging so many people at once. “It took us six hours to evacuate about 300 prisoners from St. Bernard out to OPP the night before Katrina hit,” recalls one guard who worked in the jail at the time of the hurricane and asked to remain anonymous since he is still employed by the city’s corrections system. “All of our inmates were put in one big gymnasium at OPP—we’d thought we’d have cells, or structure. We [guards] were stationed on the outside of the gymnasium, unarmed, cause no one can bring weapons into OPP.”

     When Katrina hit on Monday, August 29, OPP’s generators failed. All the lights went out, and the under-ventilated jail became stifling. “When the storm hit, it sounded like the building was gonna come down,” the guard recalls.

     “My attorneys and the bail bondsmen were all leaving the city. Then the electricity went off and the water started rising,” says Bright, who was being kept inside OPP’s Templeton building. With no power, the electric cell doors remained stubbornly shut as the facility filled with water.
     […]

     Downstairs, the water rose from the prisoners’ ankles, to knees, to waists. Though they experienced the hurricane in separate OPP buildings, both Dan Bright and the guard say that by Monday night, most OPP officials had fled the scene to save themselves. “The prisoners thought we were all planning to leave them to die locked in there,” said the guard, “and I can’t say I blamed them for thinking that.”

     Keep reading at the link.

     Hype surrounds hearing as Freddie Gray case heads to court, and the BPD are apparently getting ready for riots.

     Blipster Life: Some Sheroes Don’t Wear Capes, featuring Netta, audio at the link.

     This week, we welcome Netta (@Nettaaaaaaaa) onto the program to talk about Campaign Zero, protesting against police violence, standing up for black lives, dealing with internet trolls and more! All this, plus another hilarious edition of Dave’s Story Time is on deck.

     After Katrina, New Orleans Cops Were Told They Could Shoot Looters. Define “looter”. Article from July 2012. Worth a reminder.

     Minnesota State Fair. You. Can’t. Stop. The. Revolution. #BlackFair #StopPoliceCrimes #BlackLivesMatter, for the photo.

     NYPD undercover cop fires at suspect armed with fake gun, fatally shoots bystander, mostly on the excessive aggressiveness of the NYPD.

224. rq says

     1 September 2015 at 10:18 am

     In Louisiana, 59% of blacks say it has “mostly not recovered,” while 78% of whites say it has “mostly recovered”.

     An Artist Turned An Abandoned New Orleans Complex Into A Tribute To Black History

     Over the past two months, an unheralded public art project in New Orleans has morphed into arguably one of the most powerful, provocative, and ambitious civil rights statements in this city’s history. Housed in an abandoned apartment complex in the low-income Algiers neighborhood, Exhibit Be initially wasn’t even supposed to last more than a day. But this weekend will be its last; the dilapidated buildings infused with painted tributes and installations will likely soon be buffed or destroyed.

     “It’s a wrap,” said Brandan Odoms, also known as Bmike, the curator of the project. “I haven’t had the moment to really witness what’s happening because I’m constantly in it. One day I’m going to sit down and really think about the beauty and the singularity of how this all happened by chance.”

     It happened by chance earlier this fall when property manager Bill Thomason caught Bmike illegally painting a Tupac mural in one of the five buildings at De Gaulle Manor, a complex built in the 1960s that had been run down and eventually abandoned post-Katrina. Instead of calling the cops, Thomason made Odoms a proposal.

     “I’ve been looking for you,” Thomason, 55, said. “I’d like to see if we can do something together.”

     Soon thereafter Exhibit Be opened and has hosted car shows, poetry slams, dozens of school groups, myriad photographers, artists, and locals, most of whom heard through word of mouth. It’s also been interactive; the kids who have come through the space are asked to paint and leave their mark.

     On Monday, Jan. 19, Exhibit Be will close by hosting a block party; rappers Dead Prez will be performing live, there will be food trucks, marching bands, and people will celebrate. Before it’s ghosted, here are a few of the stories and images from this uniquely New Orleans project.
     […]

     On a cold mid-January morning, former Black Panther Malik Rahim stood beside a life-size mural of his face accompanied by the words THESE ARE OUR HEROES. At 65, he had just shown up on his bicycle unannounced and began giving a history lesson to a group of black high school kids.

     “We must learn our history,” he said to the group, pleading with them to get an education, to be self-sufficient, to not become a statistic. After, two girls turned to each other, “Let’s give him a hug.” Instead, they each posed for a photo. Rahim has spent his life fighting for fair housing. He stayed in the city during Katrina, fought the flood. “No one will accept you as an equal if you come begging,” he told the kids. “A beggar is never equal.”
     […]

     Kenneth Murdock, 17, stood away from the pack, looking disinterested and on the defensive when Rahim and Bmike addressed his classmates. But Murdock had been listening. He approached me toward the end of his tour and asked me to look at what he painted. His painting read LIFE IS ME in orange, his initials and neighborhood tagged at the end. Murdock said that on the bus over they were talking about how they’d probably learn about the Black Panthers, “how it all started,” he put it. “It’s something to see. It might change a lot of people’s views,” he said. Why? “It may help them know what they stand for and who they are and what they can be.” He blinked a hint of emotion. Is that what he was feeling?

     Murdock took a long pause as he surveyed the courtyard. “I wish I knew how to draw and paint.”

     Oodles of powerful art.
     °One of my favourites: #ExhibitBe. NOLA. Am I Next?
     Another favourite: #ExhibitBe. NOLA. #SayHerName.
     And another: #ExhibitBe. NOLA. Gordon Parks.

     This needs a gotdamn trigger warning. Link to a link for slave tetris. Because that’s a thing. A real thing.

     <a href="

225. rq says

     1 September 2015 at 10:57 am

     Family of Valley Man Shot in Houston Speaks, with video.

     We are hearing from the family of a valley man shot at a Houston hospital.

     The man is now breathing on his own and regained consciousness. Still, his lawyer says he remains mostly incoherent.

     CHANNEL FIVE NEWS told you Friday about Alan Pean. Pean was a patient at Saint Joseph Medical Center. He was there to get treatment for his mental health.

     “I was relieved that he was in a hospital where I thought he was safe. I was very disheartened and grief-stricken to find out that instead of getting treatment, he got a bullet in the chest,” Christian Pean, Alan’s brother said.

     Investigators say he came “combative” with hospital staff. The staff called for help. 2 off-duty police officers answered the call. They were working security at the hospital. The officers initially used a stun gun to subdue him. It didn’t work and the struggle escalated. One officer says he feared for his life so he shot Pean.

     Pean’s father is a doctor. His brother is studying medicine.

     “We both entered the profession of doing no harm of helping people. We hoped to steward patients and their families through times like these, times when they are most vulnerable, times when they’re powerless. In a strange twist of irony and fate we had our brother come into contact with that same system that we have entered as physicians. The system failed him,” Christian Pean said.

     Here’s the full statement from Pean’s lawyer:

     “Alan Pean is now breathing on his own, and he has regained consciousness, although he remains mostly incoherent. It appears that the gunshot wound is beginning to heal, but recovery will be a long, slow process. He has been charged with two counts of aggravated assault on a peace officer, and I will be working with the family to navigate through this difficult matter. Please keep Alan and the two officers who were also injured in your prayers. There is no doubt that these were extraordinary circumstances and that Alan was experiencing a severe mental health episode at the time of the event. In the meantime, we will be investigating how this tragedy could have occurred and how it could have been avoided.”

     One of the officers got a concussion. The officers are now on leave. Police and the DA are investigating.

     Ah, another incident of police unable to deal with mental illness properly.

     Here’s one for the WTF???? file: Women sues NYPD for repeatedly trying to arrest her dead husband

     Jordan Sr., died from diabetes at age 46, and was last arrested in 1996 for turnstile-jumping. Fennell and her son claim they repeatedly told the officers he had passed, even as they flipped over the furniture in the house looking for him.

     However, law enforcement continued to show up to the apartment; four times in 2014 alone.

     “I can’t hide anyone in my apartment. It’s not big enough for that. But they keep coming and insisting that he’s in my house.”

     The widow was also confused as to why authorities were so aggressively persuing a petty offense.

     “He was a hardworking man, and he took care of eight kids,” she said. “It isn’t right for them to be coming after him like this. There’s no reason for it.”

     The city explained that Fennell was visited by different sets of officers each time they came looking for Jordan, and therefore weren’t aware he was dead.

     Fennell’s attorney, Ugochukwu Uzoh, told The Post her client accepted the modest settlement to avoid a stressful trial.

     “She just did not want to go through a trial,” Uzoh said. “She wanted to resolve the case and move on so she accepted their offer.”

     Isn’t there like a list of dead people somewhere so they can verify these things? Perhaps a death certificate somewhere on file?

     Death of a young black man in a Virginia prison sparks outrage. He was 24.

     Local activists are incensed over the death of Jamycheal Mitchell, 24, in a Portsmouth, Va., jail this week. Mr. Mitchell had a history of mental illness, said local paper The Virginian-Pilot, and he was being held awaiting transfer to a mental hospital.

     … But apparently wasn’t under any particular watch. Or extra medical attention. Or anything.

     Young black man jailed since April for alleged $5 theft found dead in cell, via the Grauniad.

     University of Texas at Austin Moves Confederate Statue – the more, the merrier! And by ‘more’ I mean ‘more removed’.

     MTV Airs Rebel Wilson’s “F— Tha Stripper Police” T-Shirt. In addition to some of the ‘jokes’, it was in rather poor taste.

     Rebel Wilson delivered an uncensored moment at the MTV Video Music Awards.

     The Pitch Perfect star took the stage wearing a cop costume before stripping it off to reveal a “F— Tha Stripper Police” shirt.

     Wilson, who presented the award for best hip-hop video, began by saying that “a lot of people have problems with the police,” suggesting that she was going to say something about police brutality and recent, controversial police-involved killings.

     But instead she went on a humorous rant about disappointing police strippers, ripping off the costume to reveal her obscene shirt. MTVs censors likely weren’t laughing though as the “F word” in Wilson’s shirt wasn’t censored, and while MTV tried to avoid frontal footage of her from the top of the shirt down, the writing on her shirt could be seen on monitors on the stage and from side and distant shots. Furthermore, the top of the “F word” was also seen from the main camera on Wilson.

     “They come to your house. You think you’re getting arrested, and you just get a lap dance and it’s usually uninspired,” Wilson said. “I hired a police stripper for my grandma’s 80th and he wouldn’t even feel her up…I hate this injustice, hence the shirt.”

     I’m thinking Rebel Wilson herself was rather… uninspired.

226. rq says

     1 September 2015 at 1:27 pm

     Skywriter spelling out #BlackLivesMatter over downtown Seattle.

     Whites Quit Working With Black Mississippi Judge, Then He Got Sacked, “Rickey Thompson started a drug court to start treating offenders and stop imprisoning them. Then he says officials quit sending him offenders altogether.”

     Justice Court Judge Rickey Thompson of Lee County—named for Confederate general Robert E. Lee—is the first and only black judge in the county’s 149-year history. In May, the Mississippi Supreme Court removed him from the post that he’s held since 2004 over a slew of misconduct allegations.

     “It came to the point where they couldn’t beat me at the ballot, so they had to find another direction,” he said.

     Thompson said the sheriff quit sending him suspects and fellow judges quit sending the accused to his drug court. Warrants he signed for the sheriff’s department went unserved. A bailiff even once refused to open his court.

     Officially, Thompson was found by Mississippi’s highest court to have violated several rules, including what amounts to making clerical errors like using the wrong form when filing paperwork. That should not be surprising given Mississippi requires only a high school diploma to be a justice court judge. (Thompson, a registered nurse with an associate degree, has more education than that of his fellow justice court magistrates.)

     Thompson’s crimes include speaking up for a bail bondsman who had been previously suspended from operating by the sheriff; preventing a drug court defendant from choosing her own attorney over one he advocated for; keeping some people in drug court longer than the two years allowed by state law; wrongly incarcerating four people.

     The last charge is the most important: When a handful of offenders violated the drug court’s rules, Thompson found them in contempt of court and sent them to jail. The longest sentence was six months.

     If Thompson hadn’t created his drug court in the first place, the four people he locked up for contempt would have almost surely been in prison longer than they would have been for their drug offenses. That means Thompson was kicked off the bench, in part, for not locking up drug offenders for longer than he did.

     Personally, I think his biggest crime was being popular among black people. But what do I know?

      Serena Williams Is Today’s Muhammad Ali, an interesting read on sports and representation. A sample:

      Serena Williams is our Ali, and before defending that statement, I want to break down what, in my view, makes Ali “Ali.” To be in Muhammad Ali’s tradition of athletes, there are three basic boxes one would need to check: The first is that the sportsperson in question would need to be amongst “the greatest” in their field. As mentioned above, Serena more than checks that box. Secondly, one would have to be polarizing in a way that speaks to issues beyond the field: thrilling some people politically and enraging others with every triumph. Similarly, a loss would feel like more than “just a game” to their fans: more like a punch to the gut. Lastly, to even be in this conversation, one would have to not just “represent” or symbolize a political yearning but actually stand for something, and risk their commercial appeal by taking such stands. Serena doesn’t only check these boxes. She has, I would argue, confronted—and overcome—more obstacles than even the great Muhammad ever had to face. Her political powers of representation, every time she emerges victorious, is off the meter.

     Symbolically, the very audacity of Serena Williams—a black woman from Compton who has owned a country-club sport with style, flair, and the occasional leopard suit, is without comparison. She is “peak Tiger Woods” in skill, but cut with Ali’s transgressive style: the equivalent of the Champ telling the craggy, macho world of boxing that he was “so very pretty.” But not even Ali had to achieve in an atmosphere as inhospitable as Serena’s athletic setting. This is about the very particular intersectional oppression she has faced as a black woman. This iconic body she proudly inhabits—her shape, her curves, her musculature—has been the subject of scorn, regardless of the results. Even at his most denigrated, Ali’s loudest detractors conceded that his physical body was a work of athletic sculpture. As a man—a black man—he was objectified with a mix of admiration, longing, and envy, in the ways black male athletes have always been seen since the days of plantation sports. It was his mind and mouth that truly made him threatening. People wanted Ali to “shut up and box” for years before finally stripping him of his title. But as that phrase implies, they still wanted him to box. Not Serena. Instead, she has had to face a tennis world that has made it clear in tones polite and vulgar that it would be so nice if she wasn’t there. But she has shut them all up with the same wicked power that defines her game. She, like Martina Navratilova before her, has forced sportswriters and fans to confront what a female athlete’s body can look like, and they have often responded as terribly as we would both expect and fear. While overwhelmingly male sports media and many tennis fans mocked and continue to belittle her appearance, Williams brushes them off—at least publicly—like so much shoulder dust. The greater her stature, the more pathetic they look. The higher her profile, the lower they seem. In Ali’s day, William F. Buckley saw it as his “white man’s burden” to tear him down. Serena has Buckley’s media spawn attempting the same and they look just as small, just as pathetic.

     What ethnic group is mostly likely to be shot by police in the USA? You may not guess right, though.

     Spoiler: Native Americans.

     POLICE LIVES MATTER, AUSTIN

     After recent events in Houston with the senseless murder of HCSO Deputy Goforth, enough is enough! Its time that the community leaders, the community, law enforcement, family, friends, and all others who support law enforcement take a stand. For too long, we have taken for granted that the loud minority of the anti-police movement would just go away. It is our turn to show that the silent majority is fed up with this criminal movement. We will peacefully gather at the Main police headquarters at 715 E 8th street on the 8th street side of the PD.

     We will start the march at 10am heading west on 8th street from the main to Congress. Taking a right on Congress towards the capital. Ending the march at the capital steps. We will have a moment of silence for Deputy Goforth and all officers. Please come out and show your support.

     This is roughly a 15 minute walk or .07 mile long. This is still in the early stages of planning thus many things including route may change. Keep in mind, as of now that you will have to walk back to where you parked once event is concluded. All supporters of law enforcement are welcomed.

     Suggested: Wear blue, bring water, signs showing support. No anti police signs or anti law enforcement are invited to attend.

     I can get behind supporting officers, as long as they listen to those offering suggestions, complaints and other general commentary in good faith.

     Strangers in our Home: Why Writing about Hurricane Katrina is Both Impossible and Necessary

     The moment we opened the door, the escaping stench nearly knocked us out cold. I looked to my father for the go ahead, but could not read his eyes beneath the gas mask he wore over his weary face. His slow, heavy breathing created disappearing and reappearing clouds of fog, as if his eyes were small planets hidden behind the billows of their atmospheres. My sister and mother’s full-bodied, yellow rubber suits rendered them strangers to me in our home. I saw my reflection in my mother’s mask, and was startled to find I also did not recognize myself beneath the post-apocalyptic garments that weighed me down.

     It was October 2005, and we were among the first to receive permission to return to our home in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Our neighborhood, Gentilly, located in the seventh ward of the city, was among the last to drain, after sitting beneath more than eight feet of water for weeks on end.

     We entered the house. The kitchen stool dangled precariously from the light above where our dining room table used to rest, its wood frame eaten away by the weeks of water. The walls were stained with a muted green mold, omnipresent across the house, having swelled and festered amid the sewer water. The floor was littered with picture frames swept from their mantles, books stripped from their shelves, plates broken into pieces. All of them, spread out across the floor with asymmetrical indifference. We made our way through the wreckage, each heavy footstep an effort to circumnavigate the fallen memories beneath our feet.

     And yet, the paragraphs above feel inefficacious. For the past decade, my attempts to construct some sort of language to describe what I saw that day has seemed a wrought and largely futile effort. I’ve struggled with analogies, euphemisms, and descriptions to express what I saw with the veracity it deserved. But it was not a bombsite. It was not the lost city of Atlantis. It was not a plundered village rotting in the residue of war. It was only what it could be, which was something that felt beyond the capacity of words.

     I remember, years later after the storm, reading Elie Wiesel’s memoir, “Night,” in which he describes the way that language failed to effectively convey the totality of images, emotions, and destruction he had experienced in Auschwitz concentration camp:

     …while I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my intentions, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language…all the dictionary had to offer seemed to be meager, pale, lifeless.

     While this is certainly not to suggest that the Holocaust and Hurricane Katrina are comparable historical tragedies, the idea of a writer seeking, and ultimately failing, to capture the full essence of destruction is not uncommon. We see this today, in the psychological toll exacted on black journalists who are constantly forced to report on black death at the hands of police. They find themselves writing the same story merely with different victims, unsure if they are doing justice to the families and communities. We’ve seen this over centuries with writers that have sought to transport their readers into the pillage and ruination of war, knowing that nothing will fully capture what it means to be in such close proximity to state-sanctioned slaughter. This is not new, and yet, here I am, attempting to use words to describe what simply cannot be described.

     Continue reading at the link.

227. rq says

     1 September 2015 at 1:35 pm

     Attorney General’s office says not naming officers who shot Radazz Hearns over ‘security concerns’

     Under mounting pressure from political leaders, news outlets, the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and outraged city residents, the state Attorney General’s Office on Friday cited unspecified “security concerns” as the reason it has not released the names of the two officers who shot 14-year-old Radazz Hearns in Trenton this month.

     An AG spokesman declined to comment when asked whether there have been any specifics threats against the officers, who remain on administrative leave while the investigation is ongoing into the Aug. 7 shooting on Louise Lane near Calhoun Street.

     “The identities of the officers who discharged their weapons are being withheld due to the safety and security concerns and because the incident remains subject to an ongoing investigation by the Attorney General’s Shooting Response Team,” Paul Loriquet, spokesman for the AG’s Office, told The Trentonian in an emailed statement.

     This is the first time the AG officials have cited the officers’ safety as a reason for not releasing their names.

     These particular ones, maybe – but I do believe they didn’t release Darren Wilson’s name initially because of ‘safety concerns’. Though how many of these actually guilty officers have ever been in direct, actual danger, who knows?

     Details emerge, questions remain in case of Albany Taser death. Tasers are non-lethal weapons, though, so why worry, right?

     The death of a mentally ill Albany man who was repeatedly shocked with a Taser during a struggle with three police officers last spring has been declared a homicide, according to the results of a coroner’s report shared with the Times Union.

     The revelation of the coroner’s determination comes as a possible grand jury review of the death of Donald Ivy Jr. has stalled after Albany County District Attorney David Soares recently asked Gov. Andrew Cuomo to assign the case to state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

     The request by Soares stems from an executive order Cuomo signed in July authorizing the attorney general’s office to investigate cases in which unarmed citizens are killed in confrontations with police.

     People close to Ivy, meanwhile, said his family remains concerned about what led the officers to confront, chase and repeatedly shock him with a Taser. New details about the confrontation, gleaned from interviews with law enforcement officials and people close to Ivy, whose family was briefed on the department’s internal investigation, also raise questions about whether the officers should have let Ivy go when they determined he was unarmed.

     Contributing factor: mental illness. More training for cops, please.

     City appeals order to release Garner cop’s complaint records, may they win.

     Fox News Graphic Calls Black Lives Matter The “‘Murder’ Movement”. A picture is worth a thousand words, but you can read about the bad vocabulary at the link.

     Black Lives Matter And The Death Of Felix Kumi, the dude accidentally shot and killed in New York.

     On Friday August 29th, an undercover NYPD officer with the Firearms Investigation Unit sat in his car in Mt. Vernon NY, just north of NYC, waiting to purchase a gun from a supplier he had bought firearms from at least 10 times prior.

     At this point, a different individual, later identified as Alvin Smothers, allegedly approached the officer’s vehicle, put a gun to his head, and robbed him of the cash he was going to use to buy the gun(s).

     The NYPD has not described what happened next – if the officer identified himself, pulled his weapon, fought back, attempted an arrest, or what – but we know that Alvin Smothers fled from the vehicle.

     Alvin fled far enough from the vehicle that the officer had to fire a reported 11 to 21 shots to hit him. Two of the officers bullets hit an innocent bystander, Felix Kumi, killing him.

     Presumably, the shots were intended for Alvin. Or perhaps the officer mistook Felix for Alvin, and shot him dead, before realizing his mistake.

     Either way, the officer never should have opened fire, and Felix should still be alive.

     More at the link.

     A White Teen Was Killed By A Cop And No One Took To The Streets. Is That A Problem? Yes, especially in the light of #AllLivesMatter.

     It was just after sunset on a muggy Friday evening earlier this month, and my wife and I were standing outside a Hardee’s in Seneca, S.C. We were at a vigil for Zachary Hammond, a white teenager killed by a police officer during an attempted drug arrest in the restaurant’s parking lot, three miles from where we live and teach at Clemson University. Over the past two years, I’ve been to protests over police killings in Ferguson, New York, Charleston and Philadelphia. Now the problem had come home.

     It was a modest memorial: about 50 people — including family members and journalists — a little wooden podium, a few white candles. Zachary’s aunt Kimberly recalled the time she taught him the colors of the traffic light and he thought green meant go and red meant “go faster.” Sad smiles brightened the dimming parking lot.

     As the vigil wound down, I offered my condolences to Zachary’s uncle. We stood over the spot where Zachary was shot, and he turned to me and asked a question that I knew was coming.

     “Don’t you think that if Zachary had been black, that there would be more media attention?” he said.

     Don’t blame the media for white people unable to stand up for one of their own. Oh wait, the media is white. I guess they’re culpable, too.

228. rq says

     1 September 2015 at 2:29 pm

     In the Execution Business, Missouri Is Surging

     Since Texas carried out the country’s first lethal injection in 1982, the state has performed far more executions than any other state. To date, 528 men and women have been put to death in Texas, more than the total in the next eight states combined.

     But viewed from a slightly different angle, Texas has lost its place as the epicenter of the American death penalty, at least for the moment. Since November 2013, when Missouri began performing executions at a rate of almost one per month, the state has outstripped Texas in terms of the execution rate per capita. In 2014, both states executed 10 people, but Texas has more than four times the population of Missouri. This year, the difference is not quite as stark (Texas: 10, Missouri: 5) but Missouri still ranks number one. The state that has become the center of so many conversations about criminal justice through the courts and cops of Ferguson is now the center of one more.

     Why?

     The politicians, judges and prosecutors who keep the system running at full steam simply say the death penalty is a good thing and the pace of executions is a sign that nothing is gumming up the pipes of justice. Defense attorneys are more eager to talk about the reasons for the current situation. They tend to use the word “crisis.”

     Keep reading at the link.

     [KATRINA 10] Mental Health Professionals Balance Recovery and Resourcefulness

     The need for support services increased more than ever following the storm. “There were many, even some in my own family, who had to walk over dead bodies in the water to get to safety.” As a result of over a million people displaced, keeping track of who needed what was almost impossible and that left some of the area’s most vulnerable in even more need.

     The Center for Disease Control’s 2006 report, “Assessment of Health-Related Needs after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita” offers startling numbers. About 7 weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, almost half of the adult residents showed emotional distress and the possible need for mental health services. Another study found that over 52% of residents continued to experience poor mental and physical health 15 months after Katrina. “Trends have been that people were homeless, displaced unable to continue their mental health or physical treatment as they knew it prior to Katrina,” Jones added.

     With Louisiana in such dire need for mental health service, it would be expected that the former Secretary for Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals would ensure adequate and consistent funding for the mental and physical needs for his state. However, under the Presidential hopeful’s administration, several mental health hospitals have been shuttered. Jones noted, “Mental health services in Louisiana have been affected by the cuts Governor Jindal has made. Many services have been consolidated and, in many cases, made it even more difficult for people to receive treatment.”

     Immediately following Katrina, mental health services in New Orleans were non-existent for at least a month. Because neighboring Jefferson Parish received far less damage, it was able to provide services and function as a base for those in mental health. “Many of us who worked in mental health in Orleans [Parish] often met in Jefferson to make plans for returning services to the citizens of New Orleans,” Jones reflected.

     Considering where New Orleans is today over the course of a decade of rebuilding, Jones would give the city’s recovery a “B.” She says that although she loves her city and has lived there since the age of 5, she’s concerned about the seemingly daily murders.

     “For me, sometimes it’s emotionally draining. It’s like when we make one step forward, we take two steps back.”

     A good case for increasing mental health resources.

     I’m a black activist. Here’s what people get wrong about Black Lives Matter. A good review and overview, in case anyone has been forgetting.

     Andrew Young — Mayor Young if you grew up within the wide loop of 285, Ambassador Young if your grandma had any of those “We Shall Overcome” posters with sepia photos of movement leaders, and one of King’s greatest friends — stood before us.

     He was nearly 80 years old, but he still had the gravity of the sun. He told us — a class entirely made up of young black men — about how important it was to carry on the movement that he and Dr. King had championed. He told us how this meant becoming well-dressed paragons of respectability, Spartans in suits, the kind of men required to continue his movement. It was a lecture of respectability politics: the idea that marginalized groups best solicit compassion by affecting a hyperfocused version of mainstream values instead of challenging the mainstream to accommodate the culture they already have. Young taught us we had to become less hip-hop in our speech and dress; he told us to scrub the “ain’ts” and “finnas” from our public language. We had to work twice as hard as white folks to get their sympathy — that was the torch Young passed to my class.

     A week later, we had a different visitor. Another civil rights champion, he shared Young’s air of gravity and wisdom. But something about him seemed closer to our young sensibilities; he had a touch of rebellion and mischief that Young lacked. And his advice was entirely different from what we had been told before.

     This visitor was Julian Bond. In 1960, Bond helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a coalition of younger student activists that often operated alongside King and Young’s group of church-based activists, the SCLC. He told us that while the enemy — racism — was the same, the battlefield had changed. To carry on the movement, we would have to be modern warriors. We would have to adapt and innovate for the times. Maybe we would have to let go of some of the respectability, he said. Maybe we had an innate sense of its limits in a society that found a way to dehumanize even our greatest suit-wearing leaders. There’s one line I remember verbatim: “A nice suit is a nice suit. Get one,” he told us. “But it won’t stop a bullet, son.”

     Bond’s recent death gave me cause to reexamine these questions.
     […]

     I’m part of a new capital-M Movement: Black Lives Matter. My role has changed over time. In the early stages, I was an activist with a desire to write. Now I’m a writer striving to chronicle the movement and provide space for its voices. Part of that has involved exploring the different aspects of the civil rights movement, and seeing how the movement’s history shapes my own. What I’ve found is at odds with many critiques of Black Lives Matter, even those by luminaries of the civil rights movement.

     Most recently, Barbara Reynolds, a prominent black journalist, civil rights movement activist, and biographer of Jesse Jackson Sr., wrote in the Washington Post about the elements of BLM that she believes are unbecoming of a proper movement. In her essay, Reynolds takes the BLM movement to task for a litany of sins against the legacy of civil rights, from rejecting many of her generation’s protest strategies to refusing to dress in church clothes like Dr. King did. She blasts BLM for sometimes using rage instead of respectability, for wearing sagging pants, even for cursing at rallies.

     Reynolds’s essay echoes other cases of intergenerational chafing since BLM began to coalesce after Trayvon Martin’s death in 2013. Reverend Al Sharpton shrugged off Black Lives Matter protesters as attention-seeking amateurs. In January 2015, Oprah Winfrey gave an interview to People magazine in which she chided the leadership of BLM and told activists “to take note of the strategic, peaceful intention required when you want real change.” This line of criticism isn’t specific to famous people. It is echoed by several members of the older generation of black folks, many who remember the civil rights movement or even participated in it.

     At bottom, they’re all saying the same thing: The old way was best.

     But which old way? In her essay, Reynolds cites both Bond and Young as evidence. Does she really think their way was the same, that there was a singular method to the civil rights movement that worked then and would still work now?

     When I first read Reynolds’s piece last Monday, my response wasn’t very productive. “It’s just flat-out wrong,” I told a similarly incredulous friend. In that moment, I was operating on instinct, the same impulse to protect my own generation’s movement that Reynolds no doubt felt about her own. But I’ve reflected over a few days now, and my mind hasn’t changed much: Reynolds’s critique is ahistorical. It is especially seductive because of her clout, but it’s reductive of the richness of both the present movement and the past she compares it with.

     More at the link. A long read, but a great lesson in history, and the contemporary.
     About a kind of white-washing, a kind of respectabilitization of the past, in views of keeping the present tamer, more polite, and a heckuvalot quieter.

     Dallas man dies after deputy is seen with knee on his neck during arrest. I posted about this above. Did I ask about the #AllLivesMatter crowd with respect to bringing attention to this?

     Deray McKesson Checks Comedienne for Mocking Police Violence at VMAs. He wasn’t the only one, though.

     Comedienne Rebel Wilson performed a skit wearing the words “F— tha Police Strippers” on a T-shirt at the VMAs Sunday night before presenting the best hip hop video award to Nicki Minaj. The act poked fun at police violence, but the joke fell flat with many activists and supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement who felt Wilson made too much light of a serious issue.

     “A lot of people have problems with the police,” Wilson said. She wore a police uniform on stage at first. “But I really hate police strippers,” she continued before taking off the costume to reveal a T-shirt mocking a popular protest song by rap group N.W.A. The popular 1988 record was based on the group’s real-life frustrations dealing with police officers in Compton, Calif.
     […]

     There were other racial mishaps during the show last night such as the airing of MTV’s “White Squad” commercial. The parody company created by the network is basically a dial-a-white-person service for people of color who need help in situations where they face racial inequality. But that was also not very funny to many, including author Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay.

     To add insult to injury, VMAs host Miley Cyrus also referred to rapper Snoop Dogg as her “real Mammy.” The term mammy was often used in the South to refer to Black women who were housekeepers or nannies to white families. In general, mammy was a role Blacks played to provide comfort to whites in order to survive. Some tweeting, including Michaela Angela Davis, were taken aback by this moment.

     Overall, many Black people watching and tweeting were not pleased with the show because of these questionable moments and rightfully so as the wounds from being mistreated for their skin color throughout history and in present times are not close to being healed.

     Sample tweets can be found at the link.

     Hulk Hogan: Don’t Let One Racist Slur on Tape Define My Lifetime of Repeatedly Using Racist Slurs. That headline pretty much covers the entire article. Stop thinking you’re not racist or that you can’t be or talk or act racist, white people. We do it all the time, we do it unconsciously. Own up, make a conscious decision to change, and let’s move forward by listening and learning from the black voices speaking out around us. Not by denying that we could ever be racist in word or deed – this kind of thinking is a shameful lack of accountability on our part. Do better.

229. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 4:51 am

     James Bond Author Says Idris Elba Is ‘Too Street’ to Play James Bond. Apology forthcoming.

     Black Utah Man Says He Is Being Terrorized by Racist Neighbors, becaus these things actually happen.

     It all started when Sam Smith tried to buy a home in his Taylorsville neighborhood about 13 years ago. Smith says he spent the better half of six months trying to buy his house but was told each time by the homeowner that it was already sold. Smith finally called a friend to ask about the house.

     That friend, who is white, was quickly given a meeting with the homeowner and was sold the house the next day. The friend purchased the home with Smith’s money and then handed over the residence to Smith. Smith says he believes the homeowner didn’t want to sell to him because he is black, but says he didn’t think much of it once he had successfully purchased his new home.

     Things, however, went downhill from there, Smith says. He said neighbors have complained about him over the slightest infraction, with a handful of complaints each year. Smith says he doesn’t understand the problem, since, he says, he minds his own business.

     “I’m not bothering nobody, and then I get all of this,” he told the news station.

     ABC 4 Utah reports that what Smith is specifically referencing is an Aug. 4 encounter while he was out working in his yard. According to the report, a neighbor came up and inquired as to what he was doing. When Smith answered, the neighbor allegedly began using racial slurs.

     More details at the link.

     One Easy Thing All White People Could Do That Would Make The World A Better Place. Watch the video (from 2013) if you can, it’s a good example of using white privilege the right way.

     Racist Slave Trade Video Game Prompts Social Media Backlash

     Imagine a video about the Holocaust starring Hitler as the main character. That probably wouldn’t go over too well, now, would it? Now imagine a video game about the slave trade and the atrocities millions of African slaves faced. You’d also think that would never fly in today’s world, right? Well, you’d be wrong.

     In an online-gaming community called Steam Community, there’s a game that has lived quietly in the background for the last two years. In “Playing History: Slave Trade 2,” you’re able to “travel back in time and witness the horrors of slave trade firsthand. You will be working as a young slave steward on a ship crossing the Atlantic. You are to serve the captain and be his eyes and ears. What do you do when you realize that your own sister has been captured by the slave traders?”

     Read on at the link.
     There’s ways to educate and then there’s ways sto reinforce stereotypes and everything that goes with ’em.

     To Hasselbeck and Others: Here Are a List of Hate Groups, None of Which Are Black Lives Matter Activists or the Organization. Yeeeep, BLM is apparently a hate group.

     To label an organization a “hate group” isn’t something that should be taken lightly, especially in the U.S. But over the last year, with the rise in the Black Lives Matter movement, many people have tried to label the organization and those who stand with it as such.

     By definition, provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center, hate groups are those that “have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”

     In the United States alone in 2014, according to the SPLC, there were 784 active hate groups, with California having the highest concentration. Of the 784 active hate groups, 72 were active Ku Klux Klan groups and 142 were neo-Nazi groups.

     And guess what? None of these 784 active hate groups is the Black Lives Matter organization.

     Maybe someone should tell the likes of Elisabeth Hasselbeck this, because according to the Fox host, Black Lives Matter should be labeled a hate group.

     You can watch the video at the link.

     Tenn. Teen Badly Beaten After Reportedly Using the N-Word. Will this be treated as reverse racism, or an attack on free speech? The school has an interesting response, though:

     Ethan was suspended three days for his role in the altercation, but Raw Story notes that the school declined to comment on whether or not others involved in the incident were disciplined.

     So I’m going for the reverse racism, because of a lack of due discipline arising from the victim’s whiteness.

230. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 5:08 am

     I love this story, out of Canada: UPDATED: Cree Woman Wins Beauty Pageant, Immediately Turns Spotlight to Stephen “Missing and Murdered Women Not a Priority” Harper – nothing better than having a voice and a platform from which to use it! I don’t know if this will actually improve any action or increase motivation to investigate these disappearances and murders, but the attention is necessary.

     Canada needs a new prime minister, says Ashley Burnham.

     After first striking a blow for representation of Indigenous women in the mainstream media, the newly crowned Mrs. Universe, from Cree Enoch First Nations in Alberta, made politics her first order of business.

     Canada’ s new crush – the first First Nations and Canadian woman to ever win the Mrs. Universe pageant – set the political sphere ablaze when she called on Indigenous people to vote out Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

     “It’s so crucial that we vote a new prime minister in, because we need a new prime minister,” Burnham (formerly Callingbull) told Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN). “I believe we need to fight for our rights and we need to vote.”

     “This government is very controlling of our people and soon enough our rights might be taken away,” Burnham continues. “And if I have that voice to bring awareness, I’m going to use it.”

     In the words Indigenous feminist Naomi Sayers, it may be a statement that will earn Burnham a spot on Harper’s enemies list. But no matter: in her pursuit of the Mrs. Universe crown, the badass beauty queen has already had to put up with the full might of the Interweb’s hate and shaming spiral, with onlookers mocking her: “What will her talent be, drinking Lysol? Signing welfare cheques with her toes?”

     Side-bar: So much for Canada smugly calling itself post-racial – take a long, hard look: this is what ignorance and racism looks like. But I (only mildly) digress.

     As any woman in the public eye will tell you: if you can ignore your haters online, you can take on the Harper government.

     And the Harper Government has been particularly prickly thorn in the side of Indigenous groups in Canada. From Harper himself referring to an inquiry into the more than 1,200 missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada as “not a priority;” his refusal to implement any of the 94 recommendations put forward by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools; a roll-back on meager environmental rights of Indigenous communities in the face of foreign-owned mining and oil companies; ignoring Idle No More activists; cuts to First Nations health research; failure to address a fledgling Northern nutrition program; and, oh yeah, failure to design a quality Aboriginal education bill. Ad nauseam.

     You know what would be awesome? If the CBC invited her for an interview and she had a chance to repeat these same statements there. To the white people of Canada.

     PBS NewsHour Launches a Yearlong Conversation on Race, Diversity and Intolerance, something to look forward to!

     “I am so pleased that a program with such gravitas as the PBS NewsHour is paying serious attention to America’s most enduring challenge: racism. My conversations focusing on solutions come at a time of growing concern raised by disturbing events in places like Charleston, Ferguson, Baltimore and New York over the past year,” Hunter-Gault told The Root. “It is my hope that these conversations will lead to greater understanding and narrowing of the racial divide.”

     Tuesday’s broadcast will feature Harvard University visiting professor Raj Chetty, who will be speaking about his research into race and community.

     “We hear a lot about racism during these challenging times,” Hunter-Gault said. “But rarely do we hear any solutions. I hope my conversations on the PBS NewsHour will provide some solutions to this, America’s most enduring problem.”

     Police in San Antonio fatally shot man with hands up, unaware they were being filmed, Shaun King for the DailyKos.

     This past Friday, after a domestic dispute, police were called to a San Antonio home. When they arrived there, the police claim they confronted the man who was involved in the dispute, but that he resisted arrest.

     We have no idea if this really happened, but what we do see is that same man, in his own front yard, peacefully surrendering to police with his hands up in the air. This much is a fact. From all indications, he appears to be unarmed, motionless, and nonviolent when, suddenly, he is shot and killed by county police.

     That normally would’ve been case closed. The police would’ve told us that this man rushed them, or went for their gun, or something else, but a young black college student who heard the disturbance decided he had to film it.

     So you can watch the video at the link, if you like.

     Racism turns up everywhere. Porn’s Race Problem

     The last four times porn star James Deen tried to cast a black male performer in a scene for his website, the female star or her agent refused. In one case, an agent using the shorthand for “interracial” texted him to say that his client “does not do IR yet.” In another, Deen asked up front via text message whether a female performer had “issues with black dudes.” She wrote back, “Personally no. Sexually, I’d rather not at this time lol.” He responded: “Racist,” then added, “I will find someone else for this scene.” She tried to save face, writing, “I’m only 5 months in. Havnt done IR yet.”

     In the porn business, working with black male actors is often viewed as the final, most extreme frontier in a white starlet’s career. Popular industry wisdom has it that a female performer must slowly expand the range of things that she does on camera—going from standard “boy-girl” scenes to anal sex to gang bangs, for example—in order to build intrigue and keep her star from burning out too quickly. This hierarchy usually proceeds according to which sex acts are considered most taboo and, sometimes, most physically demanding for the female performer. But “interracial” porn, which is frequently seen as the ultimate feat for an actress, is held out as more extreme not because of which body part goes where but because the adult industry reflects the old attitude society still holds on to that the color of a sexual partner’s skin can by itself make the act forbidden.

     “It’s gross and racist, and I’m just sick of it,” says Deen. “It’s rampant shit that’s making it really difficult to actually get any sort of interesting scenes or to actually have a diverse group of performers because what ends up inevitably happening is every scene just turns into a bunch of white people and it’s getting really frustrating.”

     The term “interracial” porn is misleading—hence the scare quotes—because it generally isn’t applied to scenes between a white woman and, say, an Asian man. “It simply means ‘a black person,’” says Isiah Maxwell, an African-American performer. And, Maxwell says, it can simply mean a black man, regardless of the woman’s race. “It don’t make any sense when a mixed girl tells me she don’t want to do IR,” says Maxwell. “I’m like, you’re already IR! What are you talking about?”

     More at the link. It’s pretty atrocious.
     The article also speaks about black women in porn, and how much they get paid versus their white counterparts. It’s disgusting.

     I know Chris Brown is problematic for reasons, but here’s another aspect of him: Chris Brown and Why Its Easy to Ignore Rape of Black Boys

     The UK paper The Guardian recently published an interview with Chris Brown in which the superstar reveals his first sexual experienced occurred at the age of 8 with a 14 year old girl. While Brown labeled this sexual act as him “losing his virginity” the reality is less innocent.

     Brown is a victim of child abuse.
     […]

     It’s a grim reality that male victimization is under-reported compared to female victimization. A heternormative patriarchal culture makes it easy to hide male victimization in our society.

     And it is worse for our Black boys.

     Black male sexuality in America is shaped by the dominant sexual myths of black men and patriarchal notions of manhood. Coupled with the historical racist violent acts of lynchings, castration and mutilation, a distorted depiction of black masculinity was formed. In her essay “It’s a Dick Thing”, bell hooks states, “Because this society has deemed black males hypersexual, the sexual abuse of black boys is simply not acknowledged. Or when it is acknowledged the presumption is that it has not been traumatic.” This is despicable act Jezebel writer, Doug Barry, is guilty of when earlier in the week he claimed that Chris Brown recounted merely a “vaguely traumatic incident from his childhood.”

     Why is male child abuse, especially of Black boys, downplayed or often ignored? Sexual abuse is equally harmful to boys and girls. But the idea that boys cannot be victims of sexual abuse is central to masculine gender socialization.

     The image and fear of emasculation fuels notions of black maleness. Patriarchy sex, is not merely an act of pleasure or procreation, but becomes a tool to prove one is not homosexual. To prove, reaffirm and reassert one’s manhood. It is why men brag of sexual experiences at an early age with the opposite sex and why one may hide sexual experiences at an early age with the same sex.

     There is more on this particularly toxic aspect of culturally-accepted masculinity at the link.

     Ooooh! Another playing fast and loose with their opinions and prejudices, rather than looking at the facts! Sheriff links “Black Lives Matter” movement to slain deputy. Note: there hasn’t been much of an investigation yet.

     After a white Houston sheriff’s deputy was ambushed and fatally shot by a black man at a gas station, the sheriff linked the killing to heightened tension over the treatment of African-Americans by police, citing the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
     […]

     “Our assumption is that he (Goforth) was a target because he wore a uniform,” the sheriff said.

     Hickman and Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson pushed back against the criticism of police.

     “We’ve heard Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter. Well, cops’ lives matter, too,” Hickman said Saturday.
     […]

     Deray McKesson, a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement, told the Houston Chronicle: “It is unfortunate that Sheriff Hickman has chosen to politicize this tragedy and to attribute the officer’s death to a movement that seeks to end violence.”
     […]

     This is not the first time the issues of racial tension and anti-police sentiment have emerged following a fatal shooting of an officer. Authorities said the man who ambushed and killed two NYPD cops in Brooklyn last year made online posts that were “very anti-police” and cited Ferguson. The suspect, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, wrote on an Instagram account: “I’m putting wings on pigs today. They take 1 of ours, let’s take 2 of theirs.” He used the hashtags Shootthepolice RIPErivGardner (sic) RIPMikeBrown.

     See? Black people are a monoli… Oh.

231. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 5:17 am

     I missed “Nicki Minaj fires back after Miley Cyrus aims White privilege at her,” got a link? What is she talking about, you ask?
     This: MTV Video Music Awards 2015: Miley Cyrus fires back after Nicki Minaj aims vulgarity at her. Whew! What a title.

     Blind people can be racist, too, study says. Which proves what, that it’s not about the colour you see, but the biases you hold? Sounds about right.

     The findings come from interviews conducted in person and over the phone with 25 people who were either born blind or severely visually impaired, or who lost their sight as children or adults. A researcher asked the participants, most of whom lived in the northeast United States, about whether they thought about race and also how it affected their feelings about a person.

     The study found that blind people can still have racial stereotypes, but “in all cases it takes them longer to categorize people by race and there is more ambiguity,” said Asia M. Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at University of Delaware, who conducted the study.

     The study was presented Tuesday at the American Sociological Association annual meeting, but has not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

     Friedman found that five of the nine respondents who were blind since birth or early childhood reported that they did not think at all about a person’s appearance. And according to some respondents, the inability to know a person’s race kept them from making snap judgments about them, which is a “good thing,” Friedman said. One person she interviewed explained that being blind makes it harder to “judge someone visually right off the top of your head.”

     However, the study participants said even as they don’t think about physical attributes, they put people into racial categories based on nonvisual cues, such as voices and names. Those mental calculations sometimes led them to make predictions about a person’s lifestyle, behavior and socioeconomic class. As one respondent put it, being blind does not mean that they were “absolved from being a racist.”

     “I think blind people are inculturated into ideas about class and race,” just like anybody else, Friedman said, and the ideas can come from a whole range of places, including news, family, teachers and peer groups.

     No shit.

     Miley Cyrus Uses the Term “Mammy” on Stage at the 2015 MTV VMAs. If you’re not clear about why this is wrong, google the term.

     The 2015 MTV Video Music Awards have thus far been full of especially racially-loaded, tense moments. But perhaps the most offensive moment came when host Miley Cyrus used the term “real mammy” on stage.

     In a pre-recorded backstage bit with Snoop Dog, he and Cyrus consumed brownies which he claimed were baked by her grandmother, who, we all learned Sunday night, she apparently calls “mammy.”

     The “mammy” is the “most well known and enduring racial caricature of African-American women” known for devotion to their white slaveowners and were promoted as “evidence of the supposed humanity of the institution of slavery,” according to Ferris State University.

     Feminist, my white ass. She should at the very least, as a feminist, recognize the sexist implications in the term, even if she is willfully blind to the racist ones.

     Fox News declares #BlackLivesMatter a “murder movement”. They’re pissing off the white right-wing, so I guess… they’re doing something right?

     On “Fox & Friends” Monday morning, co-host Brian Kilmeade spoke to Milwaukee County Sheriff and let’s-be-honest-de-facto-Fox News contributor David Clarke about the murder of Texas Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Goforth, which Clarke attributed to the Obama administration’s ongoing “war on police.”

     Clarke is no fan of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, having testified before Congress in May of this year that the group was part of a “wrecking ball” effort to “kick white America in the teeth,” but even so, it was surprising that Fox News chose to use a chryon reading “‘Murder’ Movement” when it brought him on to speak about the death of Deputy Goforth.

     No connection between the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the suspected gunman, Shannon Miles, has been established, but that didn’t stop Sheriff Clarke from railing against black activists and anyone else who doesn’t offer unadulterated support to members of law enforcement.

     “Let me start here,” he said, “the headline is ‘Black man shoots white defenseless police officer.’ I get sick and tired of seeing it the other way around when an officer defends his life. They always point out that it’s a white officer shooting an unarmed black suspect.”
     […]

     Kilmeade offered that all President Obama did was “shed light” on law enforcement’s problematic relationship with the black community, but Sheriff Clarke would have none of it.

     “That’s a lie,” he said. “If there is anything that needs to be straightened out in this country, it is the subculture that has risen out of the underclass in the American ghetto. Fix the ghetto and you’ll see a lesser need for assertive police officers, or policing in these areas, and then you’ll see less confrontation. Stop trying to fix the police. Fix the ghetto.”

     Better n better.

     Activists planning protests around Freddie Gray hearings, as police prepare. First one’s today, if I recall correctly. The police are preparing, too.

     Activists plan to protest at the courthouse and elsewhere in the city as hearings begin Wednesday in the case against six Baltimore police officers charged in Freddie Gray’s arrest and death.

     Prosecutors and defense attorneys are set to argue whether Judge Barry Williams should dismiss the case or recuse Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby. They also will discuss whether the six officers — who have pleaded not guilty — will be tried separately or together.

     The attorneys are then set to argue whether to move the case out of Baltimore at a second hearing scheduled for Sept. 10.

     “Our message is pretty obvious. Do not drop the charges. No change in venue. Do not recuse Marilyn Mosby,” said Sharon Black of the Baltimore People’s Power Assembly, an organization known for its protests against alleged police brutality. It is planning the demonstration at the downtown Circuit Court.

     “Our demands are pretty simple. We want to keep the attention on those three issues.”

     Police and city officials have been preparing for protests — and possible unrest — in light of the hearings. The Police Department canceled leave to maximize availability of city officers for both hearings, a police spokesman said on Monday.

     The Baltimore Sheriff’s Office, which is responsible for safety at the Calvert Street courthouse, also said it will have “an increased presence” in and around the courthouse.

232. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 5:28 am

     The Prison Guard Who Couldn’t Escape Prison. Considering how good cops get treated in the end, how do you think this will end? TW for suicide.

     Scott had loved working at High Desert at first but hated it by the end. Over his nine years as a prison guard, he had seen terrible things. He had seen his fellow guards abuse inmates and when he reported their misconduct up the chain of command, they turned on him. He broke what one former prison guard called “the green wall of silence” — the code of silence that has turned California’s state prisons into insular and isolated facilities of unconstitutional conditions, where what happens on the Inside stays on the Inside. It is an unwritten rule meant to protect the men and women tasked with overseeing the state’s 130,000 inmates, and Scott had to pay for violating it.

     Over the last decade, at least three High Desert COs who were bullied by colleagues have killed themselves, according to two guards and a 2012 lawsuit against the state’s corrections department. The lawsuit claimed that a guard who killed himself in 2008 and a guard who killed himself in 2012 had each faced “harassment” and “retaliation” for complaints they filed. Supervisors, the suit stated, “tolerated and ratified such a harassing environment.”

     Bill Sessa, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations said: “We cannot know the motivations of any officer who commits suicide. There are many factors that lead someone to such a tragic decision and we are not in a position to speculate on that.”

     Two High Desert COs said they watched their colleagues harass Scott, and they watched how it changed him.

     “I saw those guys turn on Scott,” said a High Desert CO. “They wanted to take him out. They pecked on him like a bunch of chickens to try to break him and they did. It just makes me so mad because these guys, they won. They got him to do exactly what they wanted him to do, which was to shut up.”

     A lot of maintenance going into that green wall of silence. Too much. Way too much.

     Social Media Threat Against Black High School Students in Texas Spurs Mass Absences. So disadvantaged students get disadvantaged even more. Congratulations, white supremacists, you are all assholes.

     A violent social media threat against black students at a Killeen, Texas, high school on Friday prompted parents to keep their kids home from school, reports the New York Daily News.

     The move came in response to since-deleted Instagram posts on Thursday by user “jakedajesus254,” including a picture of a man holding a gun and another with this message: “This is a final warning to all the n–gers out there. I’m gonna beat UR asses I wanna fight every n–ger who thinks he can take me. I will be fighting everyone I can tomorrow after school in front of the school,” the report says.

     Although the late-night posts and the account have been removed from Instagram, the report says, they resurfaced on social media as a warning for parents to keep their children home Friday. As a result, concerned parents removed their kids from school on Friday, leading to 352 absences out of the school’s roughly 2,000 students, the report says.
     […]

     In a statement Friday morning, Killeen Independent School District Superintendent John Craft said the school district, its Police Department and the Killeen Police Department are investigating the “social media posting pertaining to the safety of the school environment.”

     “At this time, appropriate measures have been taken to ensure the safety of the campus and classes will proceed as scheduled,” Craft said. “All entities are dedicated to ensuring appropriate security measures are in place, and the safety of our students and staff remain a top priority.”

     Apparently it’s super-hard to track who owns an instagram account, when the owner is white.

     The NFL is going to hate Will Smith’s new movie ‘Concussion.’ Watch the trailer. I hope he’s prepared for extra white hate.

     Traumatic brain injury is the skeleton that the NFL has tried to keep in its closet for far too long. Now that’s coming to light on the brightest stage possible. Will Smith’s new movie Concussion will expose people who don’t care about football to the plights of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

     Smith plays Dr. Bennet Omalu, the former NFL and NCAA doctor who first identified chronic brain injury common factor in the deaths of several former NFL players, including Junior Seau following his death in 2012. The trailer presents the NFL as a dangerous syndicate working to discredit, disavow and coerce a doctor into hiding his research, while Omalu strives to present the truth.

     It’s going to be fascinating to see this movie hit theaters.

     Oh maaaan, white football-loving USAmerica, you’re going to hate this one.

     Federal court to consider if California death row delays violate US constitution. How about doing away with death row?

     The disrespect of black bodies at the VMAs went too far

     There were a lot of things that annoyed me about the VMAs this year; Miley Cyrus wearing dreads, Iggy Azalea performing, the list goes on. But the most upsetting and problematic thing was Rebel Wilson making a joke about police brutality.

     For those that were fortunate enough to not watch the ceremony this year, Wilson came on stage wearing a police uniform. It was there and then that I knew I wouldn’t like what was coming next. Instead of making a positive statement regarding police brutality, Wilson instead decided to make a joke on how she doesn’t like police strippers. Then she proceed to take off her jacket and had a “F*** Tha Stripper Police” t-shirt. Of course, the joke didn’t stop there and she even mentioned that “I hate this injustice, hence the shirt.”

     There are many things that made me uncomfortable with this joke. The fact that Wilson had the audacity to make the joke in the first place when almost every day another person of color is left dead on the streets. The fact that MTV thought it would be okay to have this joke aired live on their awards show. And the fact that people in the audience were laughing made everything even more unsettling.
     […]
     The VMAs disgusted me in ways I couldn’t even imagine. An awards show I used to love because of all the performances and corny but funny jokes it provided wound up leaving me angry. As I sit here angrily typing, trying to funnel all this anger into a semi-eloquent article, I fight back the tears as I think of those who have been killed. I fight back the tears as I realize all those that can still be killed. I fight back the tears knowing that one day something could happen and I wouldn’t see my friends or family again. I fight back the tears knowing that one day I might not come back.
     Police brutality is no laughing matter. As you laugh and joke, another person of color has been shot to the ground. would you laugh about that?

     Exclusion of Blacks From Juries Raises Renewed Scrutiny. “Renewed”? So there was scrutiny, and someone decided Eh, no, things are fine?

     Here are some reasons prosecutors have offered for excluding blacks from juries: They were young or old, single or divorced, religious or not, failed to make eye contact, lived in a poor part of town, had served in the military, had a hyphenated last name, displayed bad posture, were sullen, disrespectful or talkative, had long hair, wore a beard.

     The prosecutors had all used peremptory challenges, which generally allow lawyers to dismiss potential jurors without offering an explanation. But the Supreme Court makes an exception: If lawyers are accused of racial discrimination in picking jurors, they must offer a neutral justification.

     “Stupid reasons are O.K.,” said Shari S. Diamond, an expert on juries at Northwestern University School of Law. Ones offered in bad faith are not.

     Much more at the link.

233. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 5:41 am

     Asari Kente Cloth tribute to African American Astronauts. Thx @ourshadesofblue for inspiring our kids to soar higher.

     No convictions over 500 black and Asian deaths in custody, this in the UK.

     More than 500 black and ethnic minority individuals have died in suspicious circumstances while in state detention over the past 24 years, but not a single official has been successfully prosecuted, a report examining institutional racism has revealed.

     The report, by the Institute of Race Relations, concludes that too little has changed to prevent black and Asian people dying in detention and that seemingly racist attitudes remain a concern, with a “large proportion of these deaths involving undue force and many more a culpable lack of care”.

     It concludes: “Despite narrative verdicts warning of dangerous procedures and the proliferation of guidelines, lessons are not being learnt: people die in similar ways year on year.”

     If anything, it says, the situation is worsening, with the privatisation and subcontracting of custodial services making it harder to call agencies to account. Almost 1,000 people have died in police custody alone since 1990. The report says that some of the deaths in prison revealed a “lack of care and disregard for human life that is so blatant that it often appears as deliberate acts and omissions by individuals and institutions”.

     Read on at the link. Contrast and compare to the US situation. Maybe less deaths on the streets, but in prison…?

     Apple Launches Scholars Program with Thurgood Marshall College Fund for HBCU Students

     The program includes 30 scholarships awarded during the recipient’s senior year, an internship at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino and mentorship from Apple employees. The scholarship program is open to students in their final year of study from all of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and Predominately Black Institutions (PBI).

     Nice move. As long as it comes with no strings.

     Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly vows to “put #BlackLivesMatter out of business”. #BlackLivesMatter is a business?

     On Monday evening’s episode of “The O’Reilly Factor,” host Bill O’Reilly vowed to “put #BlackLivesMatter out of business” after a group in Minnesota protested against police brutality days after Shannon Miles allegedly shot a police officer in Texas.

     The protesters were chanting “pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon,” which is admittedly not the most rhetorically effective means of bringing people to the cause, but O’Reilly behaved as if they were doing so as a direct response to the murder of Deputy Darren Goforth.

     Fox News contributor Juan Williams argued that he “didn’t think it was connected, they were in Minnesota, the cop was in Houston,” but O’Reilly insisted that “everybody knew about it.” Williams also noted that the Minnesota protest was related to the use of excessive force by the St. Paul Police Department, to which O’Reilly retorted, “you’re giving them the benefit of the doubt.”

     He turned then to Mary Katherine Ham, asking her whether #BlackLivesMatter is a hate group. “No,” she replied, “I don’t think they’re a hate group,” adding that the only way they could be classified as such is if conservatives use the same standards liberals do when assigning the label “hate group.”

     Oh I like that dig about standards. There’s a subtitle where O’Reilly says: “Any media person who supports them, I’m going to put them on this program and put a picture of them on the air”, which, if you think about it, could backfire on him rather nicely.

     Editorial: Police and the use of (political) force, with specific reference to unions.

     Item One: Last week, in what amounted to an exercise in Kabuki theater, St. Louis city government began dancing with the issue of equipping its 1,300 police officers with body cameras.

     Item Two: A couple of weeks earlier in Clayton, Peter Krane, the St. Louis County counselor, began issuing the first of what could be 100 summonses to people arrested a year ago in the protests that followed the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

     The developments in St. Louis city and county share one important element: the political clout of police officers.

     St. Louis police officers don’t want to wear body cameras at all, but if they have to, they want to make sure that the cameras don’t violate their privacy. Because of the political clout of officers, city politicians are pretending that the $2 million cost of the cameras is the major obstacle.

     In Clayton, county police officers who put their personal safety on the line night after night in Ferguson don’t want the arrests they made to simply disappear. The county tried to finesse the politics on both sides of the issue by sitting on the arrest reports for as long as it could.
     […]

     Here’s the thing: If the police officers union wasn’t opposed to the idea, there would be no problem finding the $1.5 million for the cameras and the $750,000 a year to operate them.

     There’s lots of private money around for good causes. Body cameras are a good cause. But who needs grief from the police officers union for donating to the cause?

     So Mr. Slay directed city budget Director Paul Payne to look for funding. Mr. Payne is a master of shifting money under one sofa cushion to another, so there’s no doubt he can pull this off.

     The city can go ahead and order a camera system, but it will take at least two years until the officers actually clip on the cameras. The POA’s contract with the city has two more years to run, and its “use committee” gets a say on how equipment is deployed. Internal department politics are as Byzantine as the external politics.

     More at the link. Police unions have got to go, if they plan on continuing in the modern guise. They just can’t.

     Idris Elba is ‘too street’ to play 007, says James Bond author. Again, the photo editor disagrees: “He thinks the actor isn’t ‘suave’ enough”, and the photo is as suave as they come, staring over the rims of his glasses and all. *palpitations*

234. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 6:03 am

     Video Suggests Suspect in San Antonio Shooting Had Hands Raised When Shot, seen via Shaun King previously.

     Police: Friendly fire likely wounded officer in wrong-house encounter. Wrong house. Shot the dog. Shot each other. Can the cops get any more incompetent in this case? Something tells me they’re less worried about getting the facts right than about making a spectacular arrest.

     Suspect in Texas Cop’s Shooting Death Has History of Mental Illness. I suppose it’s better than linking him automatically to BLM, but I’m not sure if mental incompetence is really the way to go, either.

     God bless the photo editor who was like “Let’s clear up right away that the man who said this is a complete moron”. This photo.

     Alabama police admit officer’s body camera was turned off before shooting man holding spoon

     In the long list of those who needed medical intervention, but met their death by police, we now add Jeffory Tevis. Having a full-fledged mental breakdown, Tevis, a 50-year-old white man with a history of mental illness, began cutting himself, but called police to state that he had been assaulted. After struggling with Tevis and using a Taser on him, the officer retreated 25 feet away from the man.

     Tevis, with a serving spoon from his kitchen, began moving toward the officer, when he was fatally shot twice. The police have now admitted four damning details about the case.

     1. They admit that Tevis was mentally ill. This had to have been a painfully obvious observation from the start, but should’ve triggered a different method of policing.

     2. The police now admit that the officer shot and killed Tevis from at least 24 feet away.

     3. The police now confirm that the only “weapon” Tevis held was a serving spoon.

     4. Last, and perhaps most disturbing of all, police now claim that the officer who shot and killed Tevis did not have his body camera turned on.

     So, really, the point of those body cameras…?

     Man Found Unconscious in SDPD Patrol Car Dies

     Homicide detectives are investigating after a 42-year-old man was found unconscious in a patrol car and later died, San Diego Police officials said.

     The incident happened just before 3 a.m. Sunday morning when SDPD officers received a call about a man trying to jump a fence and cause a disturbance downtown outside the House of Metamorphosis, a drug rehabilitation home.
     […]

     “We do take this very seriously hence we do have a full homicide team out here with personnel from the lab conducting a full investigation. The officers [involved] will have to undergo a full investigation and they’ll be interviewed. They did have body worn cameras, where we have the entire incident on video. We’ll be investigating that as well,” said Del Toro.

     The man had a criminal history, police said. It is unclear whether he was a patient at the House of Metamorphosis or not.

     Could very well be just a suspicious coincidence, but I’d like to point out two things:
     1) Why is his criminal history important that it even needs to be mentioned? Even as a few-worded aside at the end, where it seems tacked on and irrelevant?
     2) House of Metamorphosis? Kafka…?

235. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 6:17 am

     Jamarion trial: 2 moms on opposite sides of tragedy

     Anita Lawhorn’s son, Jamarion, was 12 when he stabbed a 9-year-old boy to death.

     Dani Verkerke’s son, Connor, was 9 and out playing that day when he was stabbed at a playground and later died on his parents’ porch.

     On Tuesday, both expect to be in a Kent County courtroom for the start of the trial of Jamarion Lawhorn, now 13, the youngest ever charged with murder in West Michigan.

     The trial is expected to last through Thursday or Friday. Jamarion is being tried as an adult in juvenile court, which means that if convicted, he could go to prison once he becomes an adult.
     […]

     Jamarion stabbed Connor — a boy he did not know — in August 2014 at a Kentwood playground. He said he did it because he wanted to die himself. No one is disputing that.

     The question for this trial: Was he criminally insane?

     The stabbing opened a window into Jamarion’s life — a victim of abuse living in squalor, with a stepdad who whipped him with an electrical cord and a mom still awaiting trial for abuse.

     The case led to changes at Children’s Protective Services, which should have taken steps to remove Jamarion from his home before the stabbing.

     Jared Verkerke called the insanity defense a “cop-out.”

     “He planned it. He premeditated it,” Verkerke said. “He set it up so that way he could make this happen. Those aren’t the actions of somebody that’s insane. That’s somebody that’s rationally thinking about doing horrible, evil things.”

     But even a year later, Connor’s parents don’t know what should happen to Jamarion.

     “It’s a constant struggle and this is something we live with every day,” his father said. “What happened goes through our minds every single day. It’s something we wake up to, we go to sleep to, we eat lunch to it. It’s something that continues to play out through our minds.”

     There’s more at the link, but I don’t hold out much hope for Jamarion. He’s a black boy who stabbed a blue-eyed, blonde white boy. Everything is stacked against him.

     Idris Elba Is Too ‘Street’ to Play James Bond, Says Latest 007 Author. Still coming up on the apology, don’t worry!

     Who is the judge in the Freddie Gray hearing? Meet Barry Glenn Williams.

     Here’s more about the judge presiding over the hearings this week:

     Barry Glenn Williams

     Age: 53

     Title: Associate judge, Baltimore City Circuit Court, since December 2005

     Career highlights: Led court’s criminal division from 2012 until January. Chaired Criminal Justice Coordinating Council for Baltimore, 2012-2014. Special litigation counsel for the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department, 2002-2005. Trial attorney in the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice, 1997-2002. Assistant state’s attorney in Baltimore, 1989-1997

     Education: Bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Virginia, law degree from the University of Maryland School of Law

     Eh. I was kinda hoping they’d have more on his trial history and suchlike.

     There’s nothing linking Black Lives Matter to a Texas cop’s death. Fox News did it anyway. Because it’s Fox News.

     Despite any solid leads and facts about the motives in the shooting of 10-year deputy veteran Darren Goforth, some conservative media outlets and local law enforcement officials have already settled on the real culprit: Black Lives Matter.

     Sparkly bright police work right there.

     Interview with man picked by Kennedy administration to be the first black man in space. Except, oddly enough, he never went to space.

     President Kennedy wanted a white man, a black man, and an Asian man to be the first men on the moon. Obviously, it didn’t happen.

     In this episode of The Memory Palace podcast, Nate DiMeo interviews Captain Edward Dwight, the first African American to be trained as an astronaut. Dwight was a United States Air Force test pilot in the 1950s, and in 1962 the Kennedy administration selected Dwight to join the astronaut program. He faced horrible discrimination from other white astronauts, but stayed in the program. When Kennedy was assassinated, racist government officials zoomed in and bullied Dwight until he retired in 1966. He never went into space.

     And now the story is that anyone who wasn’t white just couldn’t make the cut. BULLSHIT.

     Georgia teenager dies after being shot with stun gun by police. Them there non-lethal weapons at work again.

236. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 6:32 am

     Former Police Chief: National Anti-Police Trend is Growing

     Former St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch says an anti-police sentiment is growing across the country. The latest proof, Fitch says, is the killing of an officer at a Houston-area gas station over the weekend.

     Fitch puts partial blame on White House administration for its silence on the trend.

     “What have we heard from the White House?” Fitch asks. “We’ve had seven officers killed in the line of duty in the last nine days. Fourteen of them in August. I don’t think we’ve heard anything from anybody in the White House administration, have we?”

     He says the anti-police movement was fueled by U.S. Attorney Eric Holder’s remarks calling for “wholesale change” in the Ferguson Police Department before there was an investigation of the Michael Brown shooting.

     So calling for change in a single police department is enough to turn all of USAmerica (or, you know, at least the black folk) anti-police police murderers (potential or actual)? Maybe he should question why the situation was so volatile before he speaks to the press about it.

     Idris Elba is ‘too street’ and ‘too rough’ to play James Bond, 007 author says. Just sayin’, the story got around. Though maybe the author just doesn’t personally like Elba, but would be okay with someone like, say, Chiwetel Ejiofor. Perhaps one should ask…?

     Cop kills six people in 12 years, now teaches other cops how to use their guns. I lack the appropriate words. I wanted to make a joke about teaching from experience and the like, but… no.

     Three Shootings In Vallejo, “Residents of a Bay Area town wonder how one police officer could gun down three men in five months and earn a promotion.” Yep. A story from March 2015, but it serves as a clear look into police culture.

     Family of man killed by Oakland police to sue after seeing video

     Jamon Hicks, the Beverly Hills attorney who represents the mother and three children of Demouria Hogg, said his clients were “heartbroken” after watching video taken by several police body cameras during the June 6 incident.

     It began when police officers responded to reports of an unresponsive driver in a BMW on the Interstate 580 Lakeshore off-ramp, with a gun in his passenger seat.

     Police say 30-year-old Hogg did not react when they tried for more than an hour to wake him, firing beanbag rounds at the car and yelling commands through a loudspeaker. Hogg didn’t wake up until officers broke the driver’s side window with a metal pipe, and then tased and shot him when he reached toward his weapon.

     Hicks said the footage he saw shows that less than 10 seconds passes between the moment police break the car window and the time the gunshot goes off. He said the video raises questions about whether the lethal force was justified. He helped Hogg’s family file a wrongful-death claim against the city on July 7, seeking more than $10,000 in damages for emotional distress and civil rights violations.

     He believes the body-camera footage will only help bolster their case.
     […]

     Police have withheld the name of the officer who fatally shot Hogg, but that officer’s attorney defended the shooting.

     “There’s no problem with the shooting as far as I’m concerned,” said attorney Steven Betz. “My client did nothing wrong, and there’s all these conspiracy theories out there that she did.”

     There should be criminal charges.

     Retrial for five New Orleans cops convicted of shooting dead two unarmed civilians in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina because leaks by prosecutors ‘tainted’ judgement -in what way? Aaaah…

     They were convicted in 2011 and yesterday, the court ordered re-trials on the basis that the prosecution made anonymous posts online that tainted the judicial process.

     It was held that leaks to the press and posts on newspaper websites by state prosecutors involved stirred up an ‘online 21st century carnival atmosphere’ that meant the officers couldn’t get a fair trial.
     […]

     All five former officers were convicted in 2011 and received sentences of between six and 65 years in what was described as a push to clean up the New Orleans Police Department.

     Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Anthony Villavaso and Robert Faulcon were convicted of federal firearms charges that carried mandatory minimum prison sentences of at least 35 years.

     Faulcon, who was convicted on charges in both fatal shootings, faces the stiffest sentence of 65 years. Bowen and Gisevius each face 40 years, while Villavaso was sentenced to 38.

     Kaufman received the lightest sentence at six years.

     But they will now all get a retrial after a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision made by a judge in 2013 that the process was prejudiced.

     Prosecutors had argued that there was no evidence the verdict was tainted. The 5th Circuit majority strongly rejected their arguments.

     ‘The reasons for granting a new trial are novel and extraordinary,’ Judge Edith Jones wrote on behalf of herself and Judge Edith Clement.

     ‘No less than three high-ranking federal prosecutors are known to have been posting online, anonymous comments to newspaper articles about the case throughout its duration.

     Stupid legal points in this case – I mean, holy shit, look at the case.
     I just hope the verdict is the same, in the end – with harsher penalties.

237. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 6:47 am

     Wrong-house shooting in DeKalb: ‘Why did they shoot me? My dog?’

     DeKalb police responding to a burglary entered the wrong home, shot and killed a dog, wounded the homeowner and seriously injured a fellow officer, the GBI said Tuesday morning.

     A preliminary investigation into Monday night’s shooting inside the Boulderwoods Drive home also determined there was “no indication of criminal activity” at that house, GBI spokesman Scott Dutton said.

     “Responding officers likely entered a residence unrelated to the initial 911 call although it matched the given dispatched description,” he said.
     […]

     “I hear Leah screaming, I see Chris walking out, ‘They just shot me, they just shot me, and they killed my dog,’” Colson said. “So I got him to lay down, took my shirt off and rendered first aid. And Chris just kept saying, ‘Why did they shoot me? Why did they shoot my dog?”

     I’ll give you two guesses!

     Study: People Are Quicker to Shoot a Black Target Than a White Target. And shooter bias increases in states with lax gun laws (as per the subtitle)! Imagine that!

     According to a new report from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, racial bias can affect the likelihood of people pulling the trigger of a gun—even if shooters don’t realize they were biased to begin with. Researchers found that, in studies conducted over the past decade, participants were more likely to shoot targets depicting black people than those depicting white people.

     A team led by researcher Yara Mekawi looked at 42 studies that used first-person-shooter tasks to identify shooter bias. In the lab, images of black or white people were shown to participants, who then had less than a second to decide whether they would shoot the target. In some images the people were armed, and in others they were holding another object, like a cellphone.

     The meta-analysis showed that the participants were quicker to shoot when an armed person was black, slower to choose not to shoot when an unarmed person was black, and more trigger-happy toward black targets in general.

     There was little difference between false-alarm shootings between black and white targets overall; however, in states where gun laws are less strict, shooter bias against black targets increased—unarmed black targets were more likely to be shot. The bias only got worse in areas that were more racially diverse.

     “What this highlights,” Mekawi told NPR, “is that even though a person might say, ‘I’m not racist’ or ‘I’m not prejudiced,’ it doesn’t necessarily mean that race doesn’t influence their split-second decisions.”

     That’s why it’s called subconscious bias.

     okay y’all—time for @tejucole to write the James Baldwin biopic starring @TheOrlandoJones, & we all know this is true – also another Bond candidate, in my opinion.

     Panel may look at how pretrial practices affect disparities in justice

     A panel reviewing ways to reduce recidivism and lower prison costs in Maryland is being urged to examine pretrial detention, bail and other parts of the justice system that inmates encounter before entering state prisons.

     The push to expand the scope of the Justice Reinvestment Coordinating Council is coming from some of its members who recently were presented with data that show black men serve longer prison sentences in Maryland than white men who commit similar crimes.

     Christopher B. Shank, the chairman of the council and executive director of the Governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention, called the figures “disturbing.” He said the council will take a “deeper dive” into the data presented by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which eventually could lead to proposals for new laws or policies.

     “We can’t solve problems unless we know what they are,” said Shank, a Republican who during his time as a state senator from Washington County worked close­ly with Democrats on ­marijuana-decriminalization legislation.

     “Right now, what we know is there is a disparity,” he said. “We’re asking the research team, ‘What is driving this?’ ”

     I know a few people they would do well to listen to.

     There Is No Ferguson Effect

     The Times has a story today on the rise in homicide in some American cities. It’s an important story—one which is hurt by the utterly baseless suggestion that those who protested against Ferguson may well have blood on their hands:

     Among some experts and rank-and-file officers, the notion that less aggressive policing has emboldened criminals — known as the “Ferguson effect” in some circles — is a popular theory for the uptick in violence.

     “The equilibrium has changed between police and offenders,” said Alfred Blumstein, a professor and a criminologist at Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University.

     Others doubt the theory or say data has not emerged to prove it. Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said homicides in St. Louis, for instance, had already begun an arc upward in 2014 before a white police officer killed an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, in nearby Ferguson. That data, he said, suggests that other factors may be in play.

     One might defend these paragraphs on the grounds of objectivity. But the writing here is not so much objective as it is vague. Note the deployment of qualifiers and weasel words—“some experts,” “some circles,” “other factors.” Note the juxtaposing of one expert opinion unhampered by facts (“the equilibrium has changed”) with another expert opinion directly rooted in one crucial fact (the rise in homicides in St. Louis precedes the Ferguson protests.)

     As my colleague Brentin Mock points out, to observe that homicides began increasing in St. Louis before the protests is not to make a subjective interpretation, but to offer a knowable and verifiable fact. If the “Ferguson Effect” is real, how can it be that it started before the Ferguson protests?

     Neglecting this question is neither dispassionate nor high-minded. It is the sort of insidious “false equivalence” that so rightly irks my colleague James Fallows. “False equivalence” runs contrary to the mission to journalism—it obscures where journalists are charged with clarifying. A reasonable person could read the Times’ story and conclude that there is as much proof for the idea that protests against police brutality caused crime to rise, as there is against it. That is the path away from journalism and toward noncommittal stenography: Some people think climate change is real, some do not. Some people believe in UFOs, others doubt their existence. Some think brain cancer can be cured with roots and berries, but others say proof has yet to emerge.

     The absolutely inimitable Ta-Nehisi Coates.

     Bond Author Apologizes for Calling Idris Elba “Too Street” to Play 007

     Still, it’s great that Horowitz can admit that his choice of words was what really caused the outrage. There have been plenty of people jumping to Horowitz’s defense and pointing out that he was merely suggesting a different actor if there were to be a black James Bond, but that doesn’t suddenly erase the racial implications of his word choice or seeming gut feeling concerning Idris Elba. We hope that those so quick to defend the statement—and then get angry at those who were offended by it—see how much easier it can be to just say, “Wow, I’m sorry. I can see how using that word was offensive. I didn’t mean any harm and therefore must admit that it was a mistake,” and move on with your life.

     Well, I wouldn’t have been quite so enthusiastic about the apology, as nice as it is. Also he never mentions about how he’s going to think about his choice of words or the effect that ‘gritty’ has vs. ‘street’, or that he has realized that he needs to pay closer attention to his words. I mean, as a start, the apology is nice.
     But it should have been more.

238. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 6:52 am

     FOP backs law for police anonymity

     The labor union representing Philadelphia police officers is working with a Republican state representative to introduce legislation that would grant anonymity to most cops involved in on-duty shootings.

     John McNesby, president of the city’s Fraternal Order of Police, is expected to join state Rep. Martina White Wednesday to outline a bill to prevent the release of officers’ names and identifying information – except in cases where they are charged with a crime as a result of the shooting. White plans to introduce the bill on Friday.

     “It puts our officers in jeopardy because anyone can Google names,” said Bob Ballentine, the FOP’s recording secretary.

     White won a special election in March in Northeast Philadelphia, taking the seat formerly held by Democrat Brendan Boyle in a district where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

     A key factor in that upset? The FOP split from other labor groups and backed White over her Democratic opponent Sarah Del Ricci.

     Funny, police unions and Republicans working together.
     Not funny at all.

     Woman convicted for standing somewhat close to a police officer. You can read the details at the link, but the headline is a pretty good summary.

     Mass march against apartheid culture @StellenboschUni #Luister #OpenStellenbosch
     #Luister “we are here to disrupt White privilege”

     W. E. B. Du Bois with the Fisk University class of 1888. Love the photo. Just wish there’d been a bigger class.

     Pine Lawn in talks with St. Louis County about turning over policing. Uh-oh for Pine Lawn! Though I don’t know if county police would be that much of an improvement.

239. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 6:59 am

     Is the FBI monitoring this guy, too? Texas Bounty Hunter, Nathan Ener threatening domestic terrorism against #BlackLivesMatter activists. https://youtu.be/nGTRtcT9EUU

     STATE OF THE TROUT: 6 minute long rant about Miley Cyrus, plus other various newses

     Hey everybody! Do you remember back in the day when D-Rock and I had a weekly show here on the blog? We called it Roadhouse and we talked about a lot of random shit. Well, it isn’t back, because D-Rock lives all the way across the country now. But someone on Tumblr was like, “Hey, I like that you’re doing more videos lately,” and I was like, “Yeah, why did I stop?” so here. Have a video in which I rant about how fucked up it is that Miley Cyrus can run around all over the place talking about weed and co-opting black culture when she’s not in any danger of being treated the way black people are treated by our drug laws. And I also touch on why abled people shouldn’t try to center themselves as the loudest voices in the pro-legalization movement.

     Cleveland police officer goes on trial in civil case over 2012 fatal shooting

     The civil case against an off-duty police officer who shot and killed a Euclid man in downtown Cleveland in 2012 began Tuesday with attorney Terry Gilbert telling a jury what that man could have accomplished had he lived.

     Gilbert said 20-year-old Kenny Smith was an aspiring rapper with a record contract. He showed the jury a photo of Smith with headphones on in what appeared to be a recording studio, writing on a notepad.

     Smith did not have a criminal record, Gilbert said, and should not have had to pay for merely being in the car with a man police were looking for at the time. He said Cleveland police patrolman Roger Jones should be held liable in Smith’s death.

     “He had a goal. He had a vision,” Gilbert told the jury. “He loved his life, but those dreams all vanished on March 10, 2012.”

     Smith was fatally shot in the head at close range by Jones, who had just gotten off his shift and was downtown to get a drink. Smith was in a Saturn — along with Devonta Hill and another man — that police stopped because officers believed Hill fired into a crowd and helped cause a disturbance outside of Wilbert’s Food & Music on East Huron Street immediately beforehand.

     At the time, four officers surrounded the car and Jones kicked in the Saturn’s passenger-side window to try to apprehend Smith before shooting him.

     Sounds like a nice, proper de-escalation technique from off-duty officers. More at the link.

     Hey, remember this case? 3 San Bernardino County deputies charged in televised beating It’s nice to hear that there will be charges.

     Soon after the April 9 incident, the county approved a $650,000 settlement to be paid to Pusok, the FBI launched a civil rights investigation and 10 San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies were put on administrative leave.

     Three of those deputies have now been charged with assault by a peace officer in connection with that beating. Nicholas Downey, 33; Charles Foster, 34; and Michael Phelps, 29, could face up to three years in prison.

     “I believe the deputies that were filed on today crossed the line under the color of authority,” San Bernardino County Dist. Atty. Mike Ramos said Tuesday.

     Ramos said the decision to prosecute was bolstered by the KNBC-TV video, which staff members examined frame by frame. One still — enlarged and on display in the district attorney’s office — showed Pusok lying on the ground with his hands behind his back as a deputy kicked him in the groin, Ramos said.

     Downey and Phelps were among the first deputies to arrive. Foster arrived after Pusok had been handcuffed, prosecutors said.

     The deputies each posted $50,000 bail Tuesday and were expected to be arraigned Tuesday. Their attorneys said their clients used the appropriate amount of force. One said that it was important to note that the video showed only an aerial view of the incident.

     “The officers had a head-on view, so to speak,” said Steven D. Sanchez, who represents Phelps. “Their vantage point is a lot different than what is seen on the helicopter camera.

     “What you don’t see in the video is the terrain, the bumps, the hills, the shrubbery, the dust that’s flying in the air from the propellers of the helicopter — there’s a lot of moving parts that are affecting the ability of the officers to perceive what’s going on.”

     Prosecutors said other evidence was also considered, including belt recordings made by at least two of the accused deputies. Ramos indicated that information relayed by deputies on those recordings, which were also being broadcast to arriving officers, was misleading.

     Sure, we don’t know what it’s like because all we have is a bird’s-eye view.

     Three Deputies Face Criminal Charges in Horseback Pursuit Takedown, NBC on the same.

240. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 7:49 am

     Old ‘White Only’ sign removed from St. Louis Goodwill’s online shopping site after complaint

     MERS/Goodwill posted a “White Only” cast-iron sign on its online site last week, thinking it would catch the eye of a collector who favors items that highlight the history of the country’s segregation.

     But after only a few days on the site, it is no longer being offered for sale. Over the weekend, a shopper called to say it was offensive.

     “With all that is going on in the country right now, there is a heightened sensitivity,” said MERS/Goodwill district manager Latrice Clayborne.

     The caller thought that the nonprofit group was being insensitive “or we hadn’t thought that far into it” by offering the sign for sale, she said.

     “We saw historical value in it. It shows how far we have come from then to now,” Clayborne said on Tuesday. “It was not intended to offend anyone, or, by any means, segregate our community.”

     BART Police Say Man Shot Himself During Confrontation With Officers At West Oakland Station. An eye-witness on twitter says the cops claimed this after the man who was shot was yelling ‘they shot me’.

     Trains did not stop at the West Oakland BART Station for several hours Tuesday night after police said a man shot himself in the stomach during a confrontation with officers.

     According to BART police, the incident occurred when two BART officers approached a man who was smoking a cigarette on the platform. Police told him to put out the cigarette, which he did. When they asked for his ID, he began to fight with the officers.

     “Officers felt that he was being aggressive. He started moving away from officers, they grabbed him. At that time, a fight ensued. The suspect fought back the officers aggressively, had two officers on him. He started reaching for his waistband at this time,” said Jeffrey Jennings, BART Police Deputy Chief Of Operations

     “They went to taze him. At the same time he was tazed, we are not quite sure of the time frame yet, he shot himself in the stomach,” Jennings said.

     BART police say the officers’ weapons were checked and it does not appear either weapon was fired in the incident. The officers were wearing body cameras at the time.

     What you need to know for today’s Freddie Gray hearing, a re-cap.

     Sony Altered ‘Concussion’ Film to Prevent N.F.L. Protests, Emails Show. Ooooh, they did, did they? I bet it will still piss off football fans, the white ones especially.

     When Sony Pictures Entertainment decided to make a movie focusing on the death and dementia professional football players have endured from repeated hits to the head — and the N.F.L.’s efforts toward a cover-up — it signed Will Smith to star as one of the first scientists to disclose the problem. It named the film bluntly, “Concussion.”

     In the end even Sony, which unlike most other major studios in Hollywood has no significant business ties to the N.F.L., found itself softening some points it might have made against the multibillion-dollar sports enterprise that controls the nation’s most-watched game.

     In dozens of studio emails unearthed by hackers, Sony executives; the director, Peter Landesman; and representatives of Mr. Smith discussed how to avoid antagonizing the N.F.L. by altering the script and marketing the film more as a whistle-blower story, rather than a condemnation of football or the league.

     “Will is not anti football (nor is the movie) and isn’t planning to be a spokesman for what football should be or shouldn’t be but rather is an actor taking on an exciting challenge,” Dwight Caines, the president of domestic marketing at Sony Pictures, wrote in an email on Aug. 6, 2014, to three top studio executives about how to position the movie. “We’ll develop messaging with the help of N.F.L. consultant to ensure that we are telling a dramatic story and not kicking the hornet’s nest.”

     (A Sony spokeswoman, who did not make Mr. Caines available for an interview, said late Tuesday, after this article was published, that the consultant cited in Mr. Caines’s email was not an N.F.L. employee, but was hired to deal with the N.F.L.)

     Another email on Aug. 1, 2014, said some “unflattering moments for the N.F.L.” were deleted or changed, while in another note on July 30, 2014, a top Sony lawyer is said to have taken “most of the bite” out of the film “for legal reasons with the N.F.L. and that it was not a balance issue.” Other emails in September 2014 discuss an aborted effort to reach out to the N.F.L.

     Well, shit.

     Cop sues NYPD, claims locker vandalized after blowing whistle on quotas. He tried to be a good cop.

     A cop charges that his locker was plastered with pictures of a police union boss after he blew the whistle on an NYPD quota system, a new lawsuit charges.

     Adhyl Polanco, who is Latino, says he first complained to the media in 2009 about how arrest and summons quotas impact communities of color.

     That earned him a bad reputation among his colleagues, and sometime after October 2014 his locker was vandalized with pictures of Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch, he charges in a new suit in Brooklyn Federal Court.

     An officer at the 94th Precinct in Brooklyn, Steven Trugilio, allegedly called Polanco a “fu—– bi—” in January, his suit claims.

     Polanco is also among a dozen black and Latino officers who filed a separate class action suit against the city and Commissioner Bill Bratton Monday, charging an internal quota system forces them to make “discriminatory and unwarranted” arrests against people in their own communities.

     The suit cites testimony and news articles dating to 2010 that provide evidence of a quota system under former Commissioner Ray Kelly.

     Mayor de Blasio’s hire of Bratton raised hopes that numbers-driven arrests would end, but that has not been the case, the Manhattan Federal Court suit says.

     #Amita – screenshots at the link.

     I saw Amita’s screenshots on Twitter last week and my jaw dropped. I replied to her, asking was it for real. She said yes, even had a recording of her initial contact with Waller County Sheriff’s Department. I sent a direct message to Amita, said I was in the area, and asked if she was safe. She said yes.

     I introduced myself. Normally I tell young people not to accept unsolicited help from strangers on the internet but I wasn’t letting go. I gave Amita my telephone number and email and she contacted me. She explained everything. She was terrified. She kept asking me, “Am I going to die?”

     I called the police station nearest to Amita and introduced myself, and was able to establish a rapport with the officer. He told me he had filed a very similar complaint three days prior. After research he determined that report had no connection to Amita’s, and told us to come and file. Although I was late getting there, I drove down and picked her up and took her to police station. She was afraid of the police, and why wouldn’t she be?

     Miami security guard blames George Zimmerman for arrest in killing of unarmed man

     Lukace Kendle, the security guard who fatally shot an unarmed black man and wounded another outside a North Miami-Dade strip club, took to the lecturn to act as his own lawyer.

     “The reason the evidence was fabricated is because I’m white,” the pony-tailed, pointy-goateed Kendle said to jurors during the start of his murder trial on Tuesday.

     Seconds later, Kendle went where the judge had warned him not to go.

     “The subjects I shot were African American. I can prove that,” Kendle said. “What they’re not allowing me to tell you is that I was arrested because of the George Zimmerman shooting.”

     Prosecutors howled in objection. Relatives of the slain man, 29-year-old Kijuan Byrd, shook their heads. Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Dava Tunis chastised Kendle.

     “We discussed this at length,” Tunis said. “This is the only warning I’m giving. I ruled according to the law.”

     So began the trial of Kendle, whose case again casts scrutiny on Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law — and the racial friction that surfaced when Zimmerman fatally shot Miami Gardens teen Trayvon Martin near Orlando in February 2012.

     And so it goes. That’s just the beginning.

241. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 7:59 am

     Comment in moderation. There will be a new 240.

     Black Lives Matter, ACLU Call out LAPD for Trampling First Amendment Rights

     The Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) Board of Police Commissioners was set to vote today on rules that would govern public attendance and participation at their meetings to, in the commission’s words, “establish an appropriate level of safety, decorum and efficiency in the meeting room.” But following a morning of protests, Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles activists say that the board took the vote off the agenda at the last minute.

     Activists who regularly attend the meetings and demand action against officers who have killed unarmed citizens, including Ezell Ford and Redel Jones, are concerned that the proposed rules are subjective and designed to limit their First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly. Police reform advocates—including those affiliated with Black Lives Matter—have clashed with the commission in recent months. At a meeting last month, the police declared their attendance an “unlawful assembly,” which meant they could be arrested if they didn’t immediately disperse.

     Among the proposed rules:

     – No visitors are allowed to stand in the board room; when capacity is reached, people will be sent to an overflow room.
     – Audience members may not “engage in loud, threatening or abusive language, whistling, stamping feet or other acts which cause a disruption.”
     – All requests to speak must be submitted to the Sergeant-at-Arms before the public comment period begins.
     – Attendees are to “behave in a civil manner at all times.”
     – Signs that “disturb” or “disrupt” meetings are prohibited.
     – Speakers must address the board in an “orderly manner” and refrain from making “repetitious, personal, impertinent or profane remarks.”

     ​If passed, those who are deemed in violation of the rules will be warned, then removed from the room or charged for subsequent offenses. The commission would also be able to decide to clear the space and continue the meeting with only press in the room.

     A bit more at the link.

     Oakland police review process examined after first fatal shooting in two years, again on waking a man up in his car and not giving him time to wake up.

     The family of Demouria Hogg, 30, said Monday they’re still unclear why police, after finding Hogg unresponsive early Saturday morning with a gun nearby, shot him more than an hour later after Hogg awoke.

     What is the department’s current protocol for investigating a shooting? When will the officers’ body camera footage be released? Which outside agencies are involved in the review?

     This newspaper asked Oakland police Chief Sean Whent to explain the process:

     * The officer, who Whent described as a female rookie cop, will be identified soon, likely within the next day. The agency tries to release officers’ names within 72 hours but occasionally withholds an officer’s name for safety purposes, Whent said.

     * Two Oakland police units are reviewing the shooting. Homicide detectives are running the criminal investigation, looking at whatever crimes Hogg, an ex-felon who was wanted for a parole violation, might have committed that night.
     […]

     Separately, Oakland police’s internal affairs unit will review the shooting on a broader level, Whent said, looking at the shooting but also the tactics of the officer and her incident commanders. About a dozen officers at the scene have been interviewed, or will be soon. Those statements are considered internal and aren’t public.

     * What’s that about video? It’s true that the department has been touted by state and national officials for being one of the earliest adopters of body-worn police cameras, but that doesn’t mean the public gets full access.
     […]

     * Rashidah Grinage, a local police critic, said the department should have a firm policy on releasing body camera footage following a police shooting.

     The issue hasn’t come up lately, she said, “because there hasn’t been a shooting for awhile.”

     Hm. Wondering how Hogg’s criminal past (the extremely recent one, at that may be relevant to the actual actions taken by police prior to shooting him.

     Idris Elba cant be James Bond, he wont be able to drive an Aston Martin without being pulled over every 15 minutes. That will ruin the movie.
     Actually, that would be an interesting type of Bond movie… Constantly being side-tracked and obstructed by police and having to show his ID again and again… And STILL managing to outsmart, outwit and outmaneuver the bad guys.

     And in a resonant salute to #AllLivesMatter, ‘A thug’s life don’t matter’: Texas racist threatens mob violence against Black Lives Matter to avenge deputy’s death.

     A white Texas man has apparently internalized the conservative media message blaming civil rights activists for the fatal shooting of a sheriff’s deputy.

     Now the former prison guard in Hemphill is threatening to track down and kill Black Lives Matter activists to avenge the death of Deputy Darren Goforth.

     “It’s going to end, and it’s going to end with that,” said Nathan Ener in a Facebook video. “That’s not going to happen anymore. That’s the end of it. Y’all have pushed us to the limit, and we ain’t going to take it anymore. There’s stuff that us citizens can do, and we’re fixing to do them — starting now.”

     He said alleged gunman Shannon Miles, who was found incompetent to stand trial in an unrelated 2012 assault case, was not to blame for the deputy’s slaying.

     “The one that killed him was these Black Panthers and all these black thugs that comes to your town and marches and hollers ‘oink-oink, bang-bang,’ and all that retarded sh*t, you know, they’re the ones that’s responsible for it,” Ener said.

     Read more of his filth at the link.

     California Agrees to Overhaul Use of Solitary Confinement, which is a good step and some kind of progress, I suppose.

     Black Employees at a Trump Casino Were Reportedly Removed Whenever the Donald Arrived. Just another reason amongst the myriad to hate Trump.

242. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 8:28 am

     Comment in moderation. There will be a new 240.

     Black Lives Matter, ACLU Call out LAPD for Trampling First Amendment Rights

     The Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) Board of Police Commissioners was set to vote today on rules that would govern public attendance and participation at their meetings to, in the commission’s words, “establish an appropriate level of safety, decorum and efficiency in the meeting room.” But following a morning of protests, Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles activists say that the board took the vote off the agenda at the last minute.

     Activists who regularly attend the meetings and demand action against officers who have killed unarmed citizens, including Ezell Ford and Redel Jones, are concerned that the proposed rules are subjective and designed to limit their First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly. Police reform advocates—including those affiliated with Black Lives Matter—have clashed with the commission in recent months. At a meeting last month, the police declared their attendance an “unlawful assembly,” which meant they could be arrested if they didn’t immediately disperse.

     Among the proposed rules:

     – No visitors are allowed to stand in the board room; when capacity is reached, people will be sent to an overflow room.
     – Audience members may not “engage in loud, threatening or abusive language, whistling, stamping feet or other acts which cause a disruption.”
     – All requests to speak must be submitted to the Sergeant-at-Arms before the public comment period begins.
     – Attendees are to “behave in a civil manner at all times.”
     – Signs that “disturb” or “disrupt” meetings are prohibited.
     – Speakers must address the board in an “orderly manner” and refrain from making “repetitious, personal, impertinent or profane remarks.”

     ​If passed, those who are deemed in violation of the rules will be warned, then removed from the room or charged for subsequent offenses. The commission would also be able to decide to clear the space and continue the meeting with only press in the room.

     A bit more at the link.

     Oakland police review process examined after first fatal shooting in two years, again on waking a man up in his car and not giving him time to wake up.

     The family of Demouria Hogg, 30, said Monday they’re still unclear why police, after finding Hogg unresponsive early Saturday morning with a gun nearby, shot him more than an hour later after Hogg awoke.

     What is the department’s current protocol for investigating a shooting? When will the officers’ body camera footage be released? Which outside agencies are involved in the review?

     This newspaper asked Oakland police Chief Sean Whent to explain the process:

     * The officer, who Whent described as a female rookie cop, will be identified soon, likely within the next day. The agency tries to release officers’ names within 72 hours but occasionally withholds an officer’s name for safety purposes, Whent said.

     * Two Oakland police units are reviewing the shooting. Homicide detectives are running the criminal investigation, looking at whatever crimes Hogg, an ex-felon who was wanted for a parole violation, might have committed that night.
     […]

     Separately, Oakland police’s internal affairs unit will review the shooting on a broader level, Whent said, looking at the shooting but also the tactics of the officer and her incident commanders. About a dozen officers at the scene have been interviewed, or will be soon. Those statements are considered internal and aren’t public.

     * What’s that about video? It’s true that the department has been touted by state and national officials for being one of the earliest adopters of body-worn police cameras, but that doesn’t mean the public gets full access.
     […]

     * Rashidah Grinage, a local police critic, said the department should have a firm policy on releasing body camera footage following a police shooting.

     The issue hasn’t come up lately, she said, “because there hasn’t been a shooting for awhile.”

     Hm. Wondering how Hogg’s criminal past (the extremely recent one, at that may be relevant to the actual actions taken by police prior to shooting him.

     Idris Elba cant be James Bond, he wont be able to drive an Aston Martin without being pulled over every 15 minutes. That will ruin the movie.
     Actually, that would be an interesting type of Bond movie… Constantly being side-tracked and obstructed by police and having to show his ID again and again… And STILL managing to outsmart, outwit and outmaneuver the bad guys.

     And in a resonant salute to #AllLivesMatter, ‘A thug’s life don’t matter’: Texas racist threatens mob violence against Black Lives Matter to avenge deputy’s death.

     A white Texas man has apparently internalized the conservative media message blaming civil rights activists for the fatal shooting of a sheriff’s deputy.

     Now the former prison guard in Hemphill is threatening to track down and kill Black Lives Matter activists to avenge the death of Deputy Darren Goforth.

     “It’s going to end, and it’s going to end with that,” said Nathan Ener in a Facebook video. “That’s not going to happen anymore. That’s the end of it. Y’all have pushed us to the limit, and we ain’t going to take it anymore. There’s stuff that us citizens can do, and we’re fixing to do them — starting now.”

     He said alleged gunman Shannon Miles, who was found incompetent to stand trial in an unrelated 2012 assault case, was not to blame for the deputy’s slaying.

     “The one that killed him was these Black Panthers and all these black thugs that comes to your town and marches and hollers ‘oink-oink, bang-bang,’ and all that ret*rded sh*t, you know, they’re the ones that’s responsible for it,” Ener said.

     Read more of his filth at the link.

     California Agrees to Overhaul Use of Solitary Confinement, which is a good step and some kind of progress, I suppose.

     Black Employees at a Trump Casino Were Reportedly Removed Whenever the Donald Arrived. Just another reason amongst the myriad to hate Trump.

243. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 11:16 am

     M.E. identifies woman who died while in custody at North Braddock police station

     The medical examiner has determined that a woman who died while in police custody at the North Braddock police station Monday night hung herself.

     Sources told Channel 11 News that Dana Thompson, 43, of Turtle Creek, was put in a holding cell for public intoxication the night that she was found dead, so she couldn’t pose a danger to herself or others.

     North Braddock police and county homicide detectives are investigating to see if there’s any wrongdoing on the part of the officer on duty.

     “The Allegheny County Police investigate when there are deaths in police custody, or officer-involved incidents, for communities outside of the city of Pittsburgh, when requested,” Allegheny County Police Supt. Charles Moffatt said. “As that is the case here, ACP will investigate and will provide the results of their investigation to the district attorney’s office and medical examiner. It would be up to the district attorney to determine if further action is necessary.”

     Meanwhile, her family is demanding answers.

     “I have a lot of questions,” Mitch McTeir, Thompson’s former brother-in-law, said.

     McTeir said Thompson was trying to turn her life around and had recently received a settlement from a medical procedure.

     Sooo… we’ll see?

     Here’s How New Texas Public School Textbooks Write About Slavery – do you really want to know?

     In 2010, the Texas Board of Education approved a revised social studies curriculum that, wrote The New York Times that year, would “put a conservative stamp on history” once going into effect in 2015. In advance of their debut in Texas classrooms last week, it was widely reported that the new textbooks, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Pearson, “whitewashed” slavery by downplaying the brutality of the facts and treating it as a “side issue.”

     Jezebel has obtained digital copies of some of the new “conservative” Texas textbooks (the books are available to education professionals but not the general public), and while they certainly aren’t the abomination some activists and educators feared, their contents demonstrate a troubling creep away from teaching actual history—and the unpleasant truth of America’s legacy of racism—and toward a sanitized fable of historical white morality.

     Initially, some news outlets reported the textbooks omitted Jim Crow laws and the KKK altogether, but, as Texas Monthly pointed out in its September issue, that wasn’t exactly the case.

     Happily, though, publishers mostly ignored the board, according to Dan Quinn, of the Texas Freedom Network, an organization dedicated to countering what it sees as far-right activism. “I think publishers did a good job of making sure of the centrality of slavery,” he says. Quinn, who perhaps more than anyone has sounded the alarm about the board’s bias, was distressed to read national reports asserting incorrectly that Texas children wouldn’t be reading about the KKK and Jim Crow. “The textbooks cover all of that,” he says. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s eighth-grade U.S. history textbook, for instance, includes a section on KKK terror and the postwar black codes that created “working conditions similar to those under slavery.”

     The magazine reassured its readers that the “travesty” of “partisan fiction” had been avoided and that the textbooks, though flawed, were far from an affront to the study of history. But, after examining copies of the 7th grade, 8th grade, and high school-level books obtained by Jezebel, it was clear that this curriculum is riddled with omissions, making frequent use of convenient, deceptive juxtapositions of slaveholder violence and the slave resilience. Sure, Texas’s new textbooks aren’t an outright travesty. But that doesn’t mean they’re anywhere close to good.

     Slavery is mentioned only briefly in HMH’s 7th grade textbook. It’s not until 8th grade that the subject is expanded upon in a tone that suggests a general unwillingness to clearly state just how horrific of an institution it was. Passages that reference violence often transition to characterizations of slaves as a hopeful, god-fearing bunch whose faith and sense of community when not working or being punished almost negated the nightmarish realities of their daily lives. And, though the violence of slaveholders is mentioned—often with quotes by former slaves—it’s generally followed by a reminder that their lives weren’t all bad. Slavery, the book suggests, was only truly miserable some of the time. For adults, this combination of half-truths and omissions makes for an unpleasant read. For children, it’s something worse: a disservice.

     Concrete examples at the link! And yeah… not pretty.

     Ex-Eutawville chief pleads guilty to lesser charge, will serve no time for killing black motorist

     Ex-Eutawville police chief Richard Combs avoided a prison sentence Tuesday by pleading guilty to misconduct in office, a misdemeanor, in connection with his 2011 fatal shooting of an unarmed African-American man.

     “Guilty, your honor,” Combs, his face a picture of despair, told Judge Edgar Dickson after the judge read him the misconduct charge, which said the ex-chief used deadly force when it wasn’t necessary.
     Dickson then sentenced Combs to 10 years in prison, suspended upon service of five years’ probation and one year in home detention with a GPS monitor. He will serve no time behind bars, a far cry from what he faced with his earlier charges of murder and voluntary manslaughter.

     His face was a picture of despair! O, the anguish! O, the agony! However will he survive… *whispers* house arrest…?

     Should Cops Who Shoot Civilians Be Named? Seriously? Yes. They should also face charges in all situations, because if it was self-defense, then that will out in court.

     Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey announced in July that the department would name the cops involved in most police shootings, which was a victory for activists who have been calling for greater police accountability. But mere hours after Ramsey unveiled the new policy, the city’s police union challenged it, arguing that it both puts officers’ lives at risk and violates collective-bargaining rights.

     Now, state Rep. Martina White plans to introduce legislation that would put the kibosh on the Ramsey’s policy. The Philadelphia Daily News reported this morning, “John McNesby, president of the city’s Fraternal Order of Police, is expected to join state Rep. Martina White Wednesday to outline a bill to prevent the release of officers’ names and identifying information — except in cases where they are charged with a crime as a result of the shooting.”

     More at the link.

     Palm Springs to pay $2.5 million to family of Marine shot by police. Because the uniform is no protection or refuge.

     A pair of officers on bicycles suspected Cpl. Allan DeVillena was drunk as he began to pull his car out of a downtown Palm Springs parking garage in November 2012.

     DeVillena didn’t respond to the officers’ demands for him to stop, so one officer pulled his gun and dived into the moving car through an open window.
     cComments

     @derekgrrrrr Show respect to a drunk Marine? If he was sober, yes. Drunk? No.
     California Sun
     at 2:40 AM September 02, 2015

     Add a comment See all comments
     19

     His partner said he didn’t know if the officer voluntarily leaped into the car — he thought he might have been pulled in. So, fearing for his partner’s life, he opened fire.

     DeVillena was shot six times and died at the scene.

     The DeVillena family’s attorney, Dale K. Galipo, said that in addition to the money, the Palm Springs Police Department has agreed to discourage officers from shooting at moving cars and to work with the Marine Corps to get potentially inebriated service members back safely to the nearby base at Twentynine Palms.

     The Police Department did not take disciplinary action against either officer, and ruled that the shooting was within the department’s use-of-force policy.

     Wellp, a job well done, innit?

     Confederate flag debate raises safety concerns at Harrisburg High School

     Several parents in Harrisburg, Illinois chose to take their high school students out of classes on Monday after widespread rumors of armed students and school lockdowns.

     “We aren’t taking any of these lightly,” explained Harrisburg Schools Superintendent Michael Gauch. “We investigated each and every rumor, and haven’t found any threat to our student body… I think it’s being blown into something that it shouldn’t be.”

     Parent Angel Murrow called the district office after hearing of the rumors. She was told there wasn’t any danger, but she still decided to pick up her children.

     “If there’s a 1 percent chance that they’re going to be in danger, then I want them out,” Murrow explained. “A lot of my friends have come to pick up their kids as well.”

     Harrisburg Police Chief Whipper Johnson said on Monday that as many as five police officers at a time maintained a presence at the high school that day, and no issues were reported.

     “I want the parents and kids to know that they are safe here,” Johnson explained. “At this point, the only guns we’ve found are the ones on my officers’ belts.”

     Superintendent Gauch said it all started last week, when one student was told by his teacher to turn his confederate flag-bearing shirt inside out, or go home.

     “It was not a disciplinary action,” Gauch said. “He chose to leave, and we will mark that as an excused absence… but to prevent future issues we told the student body about the situation, and we will take disciplinary action in the future.”

     Administrators say the request on Friday was made after some students and parents raised concerns about racist symbolism those individuals claim is connected with the banner.

     “It’s our job to make sure there aren’t any unnecessary distractions to the environment we teach our students in,” Gauch explained. “I’m not taking a side on this, but it has become such a contentious issue that some students feel threatened by it. We felt that was big enough of a disruption to try to eliminate that situation.”

     Others in the community heard of the situation and say they took the matter personally.

     “When we came in this morning there was a confederate flag being flown at the high school,“ Gauch added. “We don’t know who did it, but it was just a prank. We took it down and hoped to move on.”

     “I put this flag on my truck this morning, after hearing about what happened,” explained Harrisburg High School graduate Hunter Peckinpaugh. “There’s so much more behind the flag then just racism and hate… and people just fail to realize that.”

     “If you gonna wear it, wear it,” said Rajah Peacock as he was signing out his child from school in the middle of the day. “But don’t wear it in intentions to just piss somebody else off, or to make them mad. Leave my kids out of it.”

     HERITAGE NOT HATE I TELL YOU!!!

244. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 11:27 am

     I left a sample comment by accident in the blockquote of that one link. Let that be a warning to anyone who wishes to delve deeper.

     Schneiderman declines to take Mount Vernon bystander case. So, no special investigation in the case of an innocent by-stander shot by a trigger-happy police officer. Great!

     Speaking of trigger-happy, Trigger-Happy Cop Shot One of His Own and Kept Blasting Away. The heat of the moment, I guess? (I know this is a thread mostly for the racism, but it’s the cops, too! Both sides!)

     More than 30 people killed in Bexar County by law enforcement officers since 2010. Sounds a bit much.

     Law enforcement officers in Bexar County have killed more than 30 people since 2010, according to San Antonio Express-News archives and Fatal Encounters, a nonprofit that tracks officer-involved deaths.

     News archives and Fatal Encounters — which uses reports from the media, public, and law enforcement to maintain its data, going back to 2000 — show that law enforcement officers operating in an official capacity in Bexar County have killed at least 35 people since Jan. 1, 2010.

     Officers with the San Antonio Police Department have killed an estimated 24 people since that time, according to archives and Fatal Encounters.

     Four people have been fatally shot by SAPD officers so far this year: two veteran officers shot and killed Roger Albrecht, 43, on Saturday after he lunged at officers with a knife, police said.

     More on police-related deaths at the link.

     Missouri auditor will review municipal court practices to look for abuses. Oh good. I hope they have training in how to spot these abuses and how to listen to those experiencing these abuses. That would be a good start.

     And all eyes on Baltimore, Protest at Pratt and Calvert during #FreddieGray preliminary hearing #BaltimoreUprising
     It was not yet 10am when I snapped this photo. Told by officers they’re “preparing”.

245. rq says

     2 September 2015 at 11:35 am

     The U.S. has 35,000 museums. Why is only one about slavery?

     The United States is home to more than 35,000 museums that memorialize our nation’s culture and history. Revitalized plantations that commemorate the old South are popular among them, celebrated as “bastions of genteel culture,” in the words of an official New Orleans Web site, and monuments to the rural beauty of a bygone era. Many have been romanticized as tourist attractions and wedding venues. But none were dedicated to telling the story of the people who sustained them — slaves.

     In fact, the United States did not have a single museum devoted entirely to slavery until last December, when I opened the very first one. It’s housed at the Whitney Plantation, a former indigo and sugar farm that I had purchased 15 years earlier outside of New Orleans. The 250 acres on the Mississippi River had been largely neglected since the 1970s and they were at first nothing more than an investment to me. But as I researched the property’s history, it became clear that this was not going to be one of my usual real estate projects.

     More than 350 individuals had been enslaved on that land before 1865. That realization began my education on the history of the Atlantic slave trade, from its origins in the 1400s through the lives of the people who worked on the Whitney Plantation. As a lifelong Southerner, I realized that there had been a glaring omission in my education of the nation’s history, and that I was not alone in my ignorance. While everyone knows that slavery existed in America, for many people, the details are sorely lacking. For instance, many Americans do not realize that religious institutions supported slavery. From the papal order in 1452 permitting the king of Portugal to keep Africans in “perpetual slavery” to the published lectures of an American Protestant doctor of divinity in the 1850s justifying slavery as an “appropriate form of government,” religious institutions were complicit in this atrocity.

     Likewise, many do not fully understand the economic impact of slavery on the developing United States economy. The web of people who profited from the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants stretched from New Orleans to New England. Beyond the obvious fortunes made by slave traders, cotton planters and sugar cane farmers, businesses that profited from American slavery extended far beyond the boundaries of the Confederacy. In the North as well as the South, lawyers and notaries created documents for the sale, lease and manumission of slaves; insurance companies wrote policies on slaves and slaving voyages; and northern shipyards built vessels to transport slaves and plantation cotton. New England textile mills used cotton picked by slaves and New York manufacturers produced what was designated as “Negro clothing.” In the 1850s, the I.M. Singer Company in New York advertised the development of a “new, improved sewing machine especially adapted to the making up of Negro clothing.” New England distilleries manufactured rum from from molasses produced on Louisiana sugar plantations. That cheap rum was used as currency in West Africa to purchase people. Every region of the U.S. and arena of American prosperity owes a debt to the forced labor of African slaves.

     Read on at the link. One man making use of his white privilege.

     Blood Plasma, Sweat, and Tears, “When cobbling together a livable income, many of America’s poorest people rely on the stipends they receive for donating plasma.” And guess who is disproportionately affected!

     Police line advancing on protestors #FreddieGray Baltimore again.

     Baltimore Police Arrest Injured Protester Near Freddie Gray Court Hearing

     During the pre-trial hearing, prosecutors and defense lawyers argued on key motions in the case before the Judge Barry Williams, including a request to force Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby to recuse herself from the case and motions on alleged prosecutorial misconduct.
     The police arrested one protester, identified by witnesses as Kwame Rose, who was apparently injured after being hit by a car.
     […]

     Police initially handcuffed him and placed him in a van. They later removed him and put him in an ambulance, where he is being treated.
     […]

     Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis later alleged the protester assaulted the police officer, who suffered minor injuries.
     […]

     Police later said that the protester was arrested for blocking a roadway and failing to leave after a warning.

     Both sides, I tell ya.

     We’re creating great content at @sevenscribes and highlighting young writers of color. If you’re with that, back us: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1394424784/seven-scribes …
     I post articles from them regularly. Never been disappointed so far, always provoked to think and see things a bit differently, through eyes not mine. If you have anything to spare, I recommend supporting them.
     Also, I know at least one person who should try to write for them. :)

246. rq says

     3 September 2015 at 12:47 am

     ‘This is a threat to me and my family’: Man furious after waking up to find ‘N*****’ in three-foot letters burnt into his front lawn with weed killer in Florida

     Racists used weed killer to burn a racial slur into a man’s lawn in Florida, leaving his family feeling unsafe in their own home.

     Courtney Gordon, from Palm Bay, Florida, was furious when the man who maintains his lawn told him that the word ‘N*****’ had been burnt into it with what is believed to be weed killer.

     Mr Gordon said that he is both furious and embarrassed by the attack.

     He told WeshTV: ‘I feel like this is a threat to me and my family, so I’m not too happy about it.

     ‘You can see them slowing down when they go by my house, so everybody’s just driving by and reading it.’

     Mr Gordon believes he knows who did the attack, and branded them as ‘cowards’, claiming they wouldn’t dare make such comments to his face because of his size.

     He added: ‘I’m a big guy, so they’re not gonna come to me and say that. They did it like the way they did it, behind my back and at night.’

     If the vandalism is classified as a hate crime, those responsible could face longer penalties than if charged for vandalism under normal circumstances.

     However, police say it is unlikely they will catch the culprit unless they confess. Mr Gordon has a surveillance camera but it was switched off at the time.

     The article goes on to mention that the shooting of the two reporters last week should be classified a hate crime. Which seems rather unrelated to this story, but okay.

     Judge denies motions to dismiss charges, recuse Mosby in Freddie Gray case. So yay Mosby, may things proceed accordingly.

     Judge Doesn’t Dismiss Charges in Freddie Gray Case. Yep, it turns out that the defense wanted the charges dismissed altogether. Is this a typical legal dance?

     Defense lawyers had accused Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby of prejudicing their clients in her public comments about the case and of conflicts of interest stemming from her personal relationships. Ms. Mosby’s office dismissed the allegations as a ploy by the defense to stir up negative pretrial publicity to taint potential jurors.

     Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams denied motions to dismiss the case and to remove Ms. Mosby and her office from the case, though he said some of Ms. Mosby’s comments were “troubling.”

     The six police officers have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

     Fox News says Black Lives Matter incites violence. Critics said the same of MLK. Small comfort.

     On Tuesday, conservative pundit Katie Pavlich told Fox News’s Megyn Kelly that Black Lives Matter is now “a movement that promotes the execution of police officers.” The day before, Bill O’Reilly and a Fox & Friends segment suggested Black Lives Matter is “a hate group.” And last weekend, a Texas sheriff linked a deputy’s death to “out of control” rhetoric from Black Lives Matter.

     This criticism of Black Lives Matter, which aims to squash racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and its protests is becoming increasingly standard, with pundits on Fox News and elsewhere blaming Black Lives Matter for inciting violence against both police and civilians — despite the lack of evidence for the claims.

     But this isn’t a new tactic for opponents of nonviolent civil rights movements. Four decades ago, detractors tried the same type of argument against Martin Luther King Jr.

     King, who’s now widely seen as an advocate for peaceful protest, wasn’t quite viewed that way by everyone during the 1960s.
     […]

     In retrospect, these types of warnings and preparations seem ridiculous. The march and King’s speech are now viewed as part of the most successful peaceful protests in US history, leading to significant changes like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

     But these fears are very similar to those faced by civil rights protesters today. The Black Lives Matter protests have been largely peaceful, resulting in violence in only a very few occasions: While the Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, protests resulted in some rioting, the marches and demonstrations in dozens of other cities were so peaceful and event-free that they by and large didn’t make the news. Yet that hasn’t stopped Fox News pundits and other critics from labeling Black Lives Matter a “hate group.”

     So stop invoking MLK as the etalon of peaceful protest. It is with the white eye of retrospection that we can label him such, but at the time, as peaceful as he may have been, he wasn’t seen as such. A white fear of black equality.

     Whitworth students pose in blackface, University promises action. University students, so intelligent and educated. So ignorant.

     A social media post from students at Whitworth University is getting backlash online by people asking the University to respond.

     An Instagram post showing members of the Whitworth University women’s soccer players dressed up in blackface and afro wigs surfaced on social media Tuesday. The caption read: “Oh baby, give me one more chance. #Jackson5 #thisiswhitworthsoccer.”

     The photo was shared multiple times on Whitworth University President Beck A. Taylor’s Facebook page, urging the administration to respond.

     And the university responded quickly.

     “We understand how offensive and damaging blackface is to a number of people, many racial backgrounds, of course particularly to African Americans,” said Whitworth’s Associate Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Dr. Lawrence Burnley.

     Dr. Burnley explained the issue goes beyond five students dressing in blackface; it’s also about a lack of awareness of our country’s history of oppression.

     “In talking to some students, they have shared with me personally that they were not aware of the history of black face,” Dr. Burnley said. “Now, for some that’s hard to believe; how can you not be aware of this history? And if in fact you are not, (and I believe some people quite frankly are not), what does that say about [our] educational system? I’m not talking about Whitworth, I’m talking about education in the United States.”

     The students will be held accountable, but I especially like the condemnation of the educational system of the United States: these (blackface, the word ‘mammy’, etc.) are not things that should be swept under the rug and ignored like they’re just harmless forms of self-expression. They come with a huge amount of baggage, and for any kind of racial justice to occur, people need to know this. They need to know this not in the passing way of ‘heard it once in history class’, but know it enough to remember it. And to call each other out when someone suggests such things. I’m surprised that there wasn’t anyone to say anything out loud on an entire soccer team, but I guess it happens.

     .@DanPatrick, the Lt. Governor of Texas, has released this statement re: appreciating police. 2015. (h/t @stjbs) See attached text, a letter in support of police. Basically, they have dangerous jobs, they are underappreciated, and everyone should make sure to donate some extra time and/or money to make them feel more cherished!

247. rq says

     3 September 2015 at 12:52 am

     YES!!! #AB953 #RiseUpAB953 #CAleg Amid protest for black lives in the capital, a nod to trans lives, too. See photo.

     Second video said to show man holding knife when shot by deputies… but they won’t release it? Hmm.

     Authorities are refusing to release details or images Wednesday from a second video captured during a fatal shooting last week on the Northwest Side in which two Bexar County Sheriff’s deputies gunned down a man who appeared to have his hands raised in his front yard, citing an ongoing investigation.

     Officials have said that 41-year-old Gilbert Flores had a knife when deputies Robert Sanchez and Greg Vasquez arrived at the Walnut Pass subdivision around 11:30 a.m. on Aug. 28 for a domestic disturbance, but have not said whether he was armed when shot.

     On Tuesday night, Sheriff Susan Pamerleau told the Express-News that the deputies believed Flores was holding the weapon in his hand when they opened fire.

     “From the beginning we believe he had a knife when he was shot,” said Bexar County Sheriff’s Office spokesman James Keith on Wednesday. “We are evaluating the evidence to confirm or deny that belief.”

     So why not release it? They’re so quick to release other videos, ones that have more bearing on the character of those they shoot rather than the actions of their officers… Somehow, they’re never particularly transparent with those.

     Wrongly convicted brothers each get $750,000 in compensation. Which is nice, but for three decades of wrongful imprisonment, I would have expected more…

     When two brothers were released after three decades of wrongful imprisonment, they struggled to adapt to an outside world neither had experienced since they were teenagers. The older one has managed to adjust and keep his “head up high,” but the younger one, according to his family, is a broken man.

     On Wednesday, the state of North Carolina sought to make amends, awarding each man $750,000 for the time they spent behind bars after they falsely confessed to taking part in the killing of an 11-year-old girl.

     Henry McCollum, 51, appeared calm as a state official approved the maximum payout under the law to him and half-brother Leon Brown, 47. Brown did not attend the hearing; he is in the hospital, suffering from mental health problems including post-traumatic stress disorder, the brothers’ lawyer said.

     McCollum and Brown were released last September after a judge threw out their convictions, citing new DNA evidence that points to another man in the 1983 rape and slaying of Sabrina Buie. McCollum had been the longest-serving inmate on North Carolina’s death row. Brown had been sentenced to life in prison.

     They were pronounced innocent in June by Gov. Pat McCrory, who issued pardons that made them eligible for compensation.

     McCollum, who has been living with his sister in the Fayetteville area, said the money will enable him to support himself and help his family.

     “My family, they have struggled for years and years,” he said. “It’s hard out there for them, and I want to help them.”

     Their attorney said the money will be put in a trust and invested so that the brothers can live off the earnings and won’t have to work.

248. rq says

     3 September 2015 at 3:53 am

     And because we do need to hear his own perspective on the matter, Idris Elba Lets ‘the Street’ Do the Talking. Basically, he doesn’t say much about it.

     This couple got ‘Black lives matter for target practice’ written on their house

     The top line read “Dumb Niger” [sic] in graffiti. Below it, “Black lives matter for target practice.” The message, spray painted on the side of Wayne and Marilyn Scott’s home in Florida, was discovered and reported to the police by a neighbor Tuesday morning.
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     “Honestly, I started shaking and crying. I couldn’t believe somebody would do that to us,” said Marilyn. The couple was out of town when it happened.

     Wayne Scott purchased the house in Pinellas Park, Florida, nearly seven years ago. An Iraq veteran, he was in truck that was hit by a roadside bomb and flipped over. Scott suffers chronic pain.

     “We deal with [the pain] day by day,” said his wife, who has been married to him for nearly a year. Scott said she was upset about the vandalism, but was more concerned about its effects on her husband. “He’s in the military, he served the United States,” she said. “I couldn’t believe somebody would do something that horrible to him.”

     This isn’t the first time property has been vandalized by racist messages in this community. According to Bay News 9, a local news station, a serial vandalizer has also spray painted “KKK” and ““impeach Obama stupid ni—er” on cars and homes in the neighborhood that the Scotts live in.

     A pattern of intimidation, one might say. Where are the consequences? Are the police doing everything to investigate?

     Mosby’s chief deputy steps forward to defend her

     Michael Schatzow is the very serious man with the curly white hair who stands behind Marilyn Mosby at news conferences. On May 1, when the state’s attorney loudly announced charges against the Freddie Gray Six — now the Freddie Gray One-At-A-Time-Times-Six — the nation got its first look not only at Mosby, but also at Schatzow, a longtime attorney who came out of retirement from a prestigious law firm to become her chief deputy.

     Wednesday morning in Baltimore Circuit Court, it was Schatzow who took the lead, defending Mosby against accusations of professional misconduct. It was as if Schatzow had assumed the role of her defense counsel, and Mosby needed every bit of his help.
     […]

     When it was his turn, Schatzow rose from the prosecution’s trial table and did all the talking for the state. Mosby did not say a word. She sat behind her chief deputy and listened to him argue in her defense.

     Mosby’s statements had been twisted by the attorneys for the officers, Schatzow told Judge Barry Williams. “She never expressed a personal opinion of the officers’ guilt,” Schatzow said. All she did on that day at the War Memorial was read a statement of charges; the rules allow that.

     “She did not ask the crowd to go home and convince their neighbors to convict the officers,” he said.

     Schatzow noted Mosby’s expression of hope that “everyone will respect due process and refrain from doing anything that would jeopardize our ability to seek justice.”

     Said Schatzow: “That’s hardly an invitation for a lynch mob.”

     More at the link, but the tone is very much ‘white man saves black woman’. While I appreciate the necessity, it still doesn’t leave one with a comfortable feeling.

     Gov. Nikki Haley criticizes ‘yell and scream’ strategy of ‘Black Lives Matter,’ but also says GOP needs new tone – yeah, maybe Trump should tone it down a bit, hey?

     In a broad address about race relations, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley on Wednesday affirmed that “black lives do matter,” but accused the protest movement identified with that mantra of inhibiting racial harmony with its strategy to “yell and scream.”

     The star Republican governor also called on her party to change the way it talks about minorities — the GOP’s current approach is “shameful,” she said — and criticized its presidential front-runner, Donald Trump, for what she characterized as hurtful language about immigrants.

     Say it louder, I don’t think Trump heard you.

     Police in Ferguson gave a lesson in how not to respond to protests, says report – a lesson, apparently, few have learned.

     The police response to unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer offers lessons in how not to handle mass demonstrations, according to a Justice Department report that warns such problems could happen in other places roiled by mistrust between law enforcement and the community.

     The report fleshes out a draft version made public in June, creating a portrait of poor community-police relations, ineffective communication among the more than 50 law enforcement agencies that responded, police orders that infringed first amendment rights, and military-style tactics that antagonized demonstrators.

     The final version, which is to be released on Thursday, was obtained in advance by the Associated Press.

     The report focuses on the regional police response in the 17 days that followed the 9 August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, by a white police officer. In a detailed chronology, it tracks missteps that began almost immediately after the shooting when police wrongly assumed that crowds would quickly dissipate, withheld information from the public and were slow to grasp community angst over the hours-long presence of Brown’s body beneath white sheets in the street.

     It details more flaws over the next two weeks, including the improper use of police dogs, armored vehicles and snipers to monitor the crowds; the decision by some officers to remove their nameplates; arbitrary orders to demonstrators to keep moving after five seconds; and poor communication among agencies about which policy to follow and who was in change.

     Several law enforcement agencies whose actions were studied said they have learned from the events.

     Police officers interviewed for the report complained of inconsistent orders from commanders, with some saying “there was no plan in place for arresting people” or that they “were unclear who they could arrest”. Community members, meanwhile, described poor relationships with the police that long predated – and were made worse by – the shooting.

     “Having effective relations and communications with the community, recognizing that endemic problems were at the base of the demonstrations, and understanding how the character of the mass gatherings was evolving and spreading beyond the initial officer-involved shooting would have all aided in incident management decisions,” the report states.

     It also makes clear that the situation in Ferguson was not unique, particularly in a year of heightened tensions between police and minority communities nationwide.

     The Justice Department cautioned in its report that while much of the world sees the St Louis suburb “as a community of division and violence”, the protests and unrest that occurred there could happen in other places “in which fostering positive police-community relationships and building trust are not a priority”.

     Federal officials hope the report will be instructive to other police departments confronting mass demonstrations.

     Plenty more at the link.

     You May Not Know These Black Millennials, But They’re Helping Detroit Make Its Comeback

     Stories of Detroit’s revival have continually left out the black residents working to improve the city they’ve called home for decades.

     Young black Detroiters have chosen to stay in the majority African-American city or have returned from other places to take part in revitalization efforts — they’re working in the large organizations and foundations steering the ship, starting the new businesses, educating the generation following them, participating in the vibrant art scene and drinking the pour-over coffees. But their contributions go largely unmentioned.

     “Whenever we see the positive side, the evolution of the city, it’s always white faces,” said Chase Cantrell, a 32-year-old lawyer. “There are young black people who are doing great things to help the revitalization of the city, and no one’s talking about them.”

     Cantrell is one of the millennials who grew up in Detroit and believes in the city’s resurgence. But he and some of his peers are increasingly concerned about their lack of representation, a phenomenon that has real-world harm, according to Donyale Padgett, associate professor of diversity, culture and communication at Detroit’s Wayne State University.

     “It really does alter and affect one’s concept of self,” Padgett said. “I think one of the questions it brings up is, where do I see myself and where do I fit in, in this new Detroit.”

     In some ways, that lack of representation speaks to a real and troubling lack of diversity among those with power and capital in the city, but there are still many native Detroiters playing a part in its revival. And while the white artists and entrepreneurs coming to Detroit often get praise for the creativity and courage that entails, there are black millennials showing just as much innovation and hustling just as hard — and they deserve recognition, too.

     Below, hear from 11 native Detroiters who are deeply passionate about the place they call home and are making sure they are included in the city’s future.

     Eleven people making a difference at the link, and that’s only a handful of those doing the work. Go, black millennials!

249. rq says

     3 September 2015 at 4:10 am

     ‘Provocative’ Police Tactics Inflamed Ferguson Protests, Experts Find, HuffPo on the latest DOJ report coming out today.

     Racism manifests in all spaces: Geosciences in the United States: The Stats (stats actually from May 2014)

     I’m sure most of you are wondering what this map of the United States of America is all about. You can see all the little rock hammers. But can you see the one little blue rock hammer inside? Well that lil blue rock hammer represents the 1% of all geoscientists that are black. That lil guy is BlackGeoscientists.

     Here’s the raw data of what geosciences looks like based on data provided by the National Science Foundation (for those of you analytic-type people that like looking at data tables).

     [table showing the lack of corresponding representation in those obtaining a bachelor’s degree in earth (or related) sciences, as well as those employed in the field, compared to the US population]

     As for me, I’m a visual person that enjoys looking at maps. So, I’m going to break down that data table in the following maps.

     This is what America looks like. In this map are 100 little rock hammers, therefore a single rock hammer represents 1%. The rock hammers have been scattered randomly over the US, and do not represent actual geographic locations of people. Please note that Others (including American Indians) are not represented on this map. Here we can see why people of color are referred to as minorities. But also notice there is a certain level of interconnectedness amongst those blue, green, and purple hammers. In most instances you wouldn’t have to jump more than one white hammer to reach a hammer of color. It may not be perfect, but this lil baby is ours. Our America.

     Then we reach this map…

     Our fairly colorful map has lost a lot of it’s color! And it’s lost almost all of it’s racial interconnectedness. What’s interesting about this map is this is what it actually felt like for me during my undergrad. I would see other people of color at conferences, but at my own home institution I was the only one. I always felt welcomed and included by my classmates and my professors. But no matter how deep the friendships were, I couldn’t shake this sense of alone-ness, of other-ness. I would walk the quad of my university and see scores of people that looked just like me, and then I would walk into my geology classes and I was an alien. Maybe an alien like Alf, loved by most, but still an alien.

     But this is where it gets interesting…Who get’s employed in the geosciences?

     Welp…It’s clear someway somehow those few hispanic and black students that were awarded a bachelors degree in geosciences don’t go on to employment. Do they switch careers? Or is it they can’t find employment with their geoscience degree? This is where geography is an important part of the story. I won’t be discussing that in this blog post but I will cover it later, I promise. Just know for now, that there is a huge discrepancy between where students of color are awarded their degrees in geosciences and where the actual jobs are. Please note that there is an overrepresentation of White and Asian geoscientists that are employed.

     And this map is what geoscience feels like to most black people.

     We’re back to our original infographic. If you were paying attention I just said this “is what geoscience feels like to most black people.” Not most black geoscientists, but most black people. Whether they’re a chef, teacher, writer, nurse, lawyer, or actor there is a widely held (unspoken) belief that geology isn’t for black people. And unfortunately, the statistics turn that belief into a fact.

     This is actually where my struggle starts. See part of my alone-ness, my other-ness, my isolation, isn’t just that I’m black in a sea of non-black, it’s that even my fellow blacks look at me like I’m Alf! I am an alien amongst my own people, no matter who those people are. I’m an alien amongst geoscientists, and I’m an alien amongst black people.

     The BlackGeoscientist problem isn’t as simple as a leaky pipeline. To a lot of people of color, the pipe seems to be capped with a semi-permeable membrane, one in which they were never meant to go through. Geoscience has to change it’s image and tackle the underlying belief system if anything is going to change.

     More links to sources and other resources at the link.
     I doubt much has changed in the intervening year.

     Andre Green’s family hires high-profile attorney, plans to file lawsuit against IMPD

     The family of a 15-year-old killed during a shooting with Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Officers has hired a high-profile attorney to represent them in a potential lawsuit against IMPD and the city.

     Jamon Hicks with Douglas Hicks Law in Beverly Hills, California will be representing the Green family.

     Hicks told FOX59 the family is still dealing with the heartbreak of losing Andre Green.

     “We’re just hoping to get answers for this family and hopefully give them the little bit of piece of mind that we can under these circumstances,” Hicks said.

     A tort claim is expected be be filed this week as a notice of injury claim. Hicks said IMPD and the city will have the opportunity to accept or reject the clam. He said in his experience, most police departments would reject the claim. A lawsuit against IMPD for improper use of deadly force would then be filed.

     “Our goal is to just to try to find out and engage in a fact finding process so that we’re able to provide as many answers as possible,” said Hicks.

     While the law firm is just beginning their own investigation, Hicks said they have secured witnesses who give conflicting statements from what was reported by IMPD the night of the shooting. IMPD has said Green, who was a suspect in an armed carjacking, rammed into a police cruiser and tried to run over an officer.

     After receiving word of a potential lawsuit, IMPD said:

     “Now that the family has made notice of their intent to sue, we cannot formally comment on this case.”

     Hicks did not detail what witnesses reports stated. He did say they are looking into IMPD protocol when it comes to use of deadly force.

     “I’m looking at this case from a tactical standpoint, so once I know their training, hopefully we’ll be able to see if they acted in conformity with that training or if they deviated from that training or if there’s no training about that at all,” Hicks said.

     Besides the usual horrible shit that comes with the cops killing a teenager, you know what bothers me here? That he’s looking at the case from a tactical standpoint. Not community relations, not improved training in non-lethal force, not resources for stressed-out officers, but the fucking tactical standpoint.

     Justice Department report finds uncoordinated police response to Ferguson protests, St Louis Public Radio on that.

     How the Federal Government Built White Suburbia

     “We’ve all forgotten how federal, state, and local governments consciously segregated our metropolitan areas by race,” Rothstein said.

     His speech is a potent reminder. Rothstein delivered his address on modern residential segregation last year at The Atlantic’s “Reinventing the War on Poverty” conference. It’s worth your time to read the full talk. The rough outline below covers many of the policy levers that leaders at all level of government used to build and safeguard white residential areas.

     The Federal Government Built Exclusively White Neighborhoods

     – Federally funded public housing got its start in the New Deal. From the very beginning, public housing was segregated by race. Harold L. Ickes, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior and the most liberal member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust, proposed the “neighborhood composition rule,” which said that segregated public housing would preserve the segregated character of neighborhoods. (This was the liberal position. Conservatives preferred to build no public housing for black people at all.)
     – After World War II, the Federal Housing Administration (a precursor to HUD) and the Veterans Administration hired builders to mass-produce American suburbs—from Levittown near New York to Daly City in the Bay Area—in order to ease the post-war housing shortage. Builders received federal loans on the explicit condition that homes would not be sold to black homebuyers.
     – The Housing Act of 1949, a tentpole of President Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, greatly expanded the reach of the public housing program, which was then producing the most popular form of housing (!) in the country. In an effort to kill the bill, conservatives tried to tack on a “poison pill” to the legislation: an amendment that would have required public housing to be integrated.

     Government Policy Guided Segregation at the Neighborhood Level

     – Way back in 1917, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down certain segregation rules, Baltimore launched an official Committee on Segregation as a workaround. The committee organized neighborhood associations in order to promote restrictive covenants and otherwise intimidate white homeowners or real-estate agents who were selling to black buyers.
     – In St. Louis, segregated housing developments replaced neighborhoods that were roughly 55 percent white and 45 percent black.
     – San Francisco wanted to build integrated public housing near the Hunters Point Shipyard development, but the Navy wouldn’t allow it.
     – In 1984, The Dallas Morning News surveyed federally funded housing projects in 47 metro areas. All of them and their 10 million residents were segregated by race. The white projects that remained by the 1980s had better facilities, amenities, and maintenance than the others.

     There’s more at the link, on this government-sponsored type of discrimination. Plus links to more reading on the subject.

     10 criticisms and lessons from the DOJ report on Ferguson response

     A U.S. Department of Justice dissection of last year’s police response to Ferguson describes how a sometimes disjointed command during an uncharted emergency withheld information from the public and antagonized crowds with military-style tactics.

     The report also offers a candid look into the politics among police leaders and the toll the protests and riots took on officers.

     Ultimately, the DOJ intends the 185-page document to serve as a guide for agencies to respond if ever faced with crises like the conflicts that followed the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, 18, on Aug. 9, 2014. It will officially be released Thursday, according to a Justice official.

     The Post-Dispatch obtained an outline of the document in June, and has since obtained the complete report, which analyzed the 17 days between the shooting of Brown and the day of his funeral.

     The report will critique, compliment and derive lessons from the actions of the officers and department leaders to the events of Ferguson.

     Public officials — including those from the DOJ and regional police departments — would not grant interviews on the report. Some issued prepared statements.

     St. Louis County Chief Jon Belmar wrote that he is proud of his staff, and, “will remain forever indebted to the sacrifices they and their families endured.” He called the report “critically important” but “only a snapshot.”

     “It falls short as a complete lesson for others in our profession to follow as a guide,” he wrote, adding that researchers could have “immeasurably benefited” from analyzing how police have responded to subsequent protests.

     The report is based largely on interviews with unnamed officers, protesters, political leaders and clergy.

     The seven-member research team from the Florida-based nonprofit Institute for Intergovernmental Research who authored the report caution readers to “recognize that this assessment has the benefit of hindsight and contemplation not afforded to police decision makers on the ground in Ferguson. The end result is not to judge police decisions in Ferguson but to learn from them.”

     The report notes that Belmar invited the federal review, and applauded the willingness of the other leaders to participate.

     “In asking for this review, these leaders recognized that the truth often hurts, but selective ignorance is fatal to an organization,” according to the report.

     You can view the ten lessons learned at the link.

250. rq says

     3 September 2015 at 4:24 am

     Diversity strikes again! RONNY CHIENG, DESI LYDIC AND ROY WOOD JR. JOIN COMEDY CENTRAL’S® “THE DAILY SHOW WITH TREVOR NOAH” AS THE NEWEST CORRESPONDENTS ON “THE BEST F*&#ING NEWS TEAM EVER!”

     Born in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, and raised in Manchester, NH and Singapore, stand-up comedian and actor Ronny Chieng (www.ronnychieng.com) has been a rising star on the comedy scene in Australia where he moved to attend the University of Melbourne. Embarking on a stand-up comedy career after graduating with a degree in commerce and a degree in law, Chieng’s career began to take off in 2012 when he was named one of the “Top 10 Rising Comedians in Australia” by The Age, the Herald Sun and The Sydney Morning Herald and received the “Best Newcomer” award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for his debut stand-up special, “The Ron Way.”

     Since then, Chieng (@ronnychieng) has continued his meteoric rise, performing sold-out tours in Australia and appearing at numerous international comedy festivals, including the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the New Zealand International Comedy Festival. Last year, Chieng won the “Directors’ Choice” award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and “Best Show” at the Sydney Comedy Festival. He has appeared in and performed on numerous TV shows in his adopted home of Australia and has opened for both Dave Chappelle (2014) and Bill Burr (2015) during their nationwide stand-up tours in Australia. Earlier this year Chieng made his US television debut on “The Late Late Show.” Chieng is repped by Century Entertainment Australia and APA.

     Desi Lydic (@DesiLydic) is a professionally trained and seasoned improvisational and comedic actress who studied and performed at the famed and prestigious theater schools The Groundlings and Improv Olympic. Most recently, she had a starring role on MTV’s hit comedy series “Awkward.” Lydic’s feature film credits include Cameron Crowe’s “We Bought A Zoo” opposite Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson and “The Babymakers” directed by Jay Chandrasekhar and opposite Olivia Munn. Other television credits include “Two and a Half Men” (CBS), “The Odd Couple” (CBS) and “The League” (FX). Lydic is repped by UTA, Underground and attorney is Stone, Meyer, et al.

     A native of Birmingham, AL, Roy Wood Jr. (www.roywoodjr.com) began his comedy career in 1998 at the age of 19 while attending Florida A&M University. He has been called “A Standout” by The Hollywood Reporter, and Entertainment Weekly described his comedic style as “charismatic crankiness.” Wood’s thought-provoking comedy crosses cultural lines and has entertained millions nationwide via stage, radio and television. In 2006, he appeared in the “New Faces Showcase” at the Montreal Just for Laughs Comedy Festival and made his network television debut on “The Late Show with David Letterman” the same year. Wood (@roywoodjr) most recently starred on “Sullivan and Son” (TBS) and regularly appears on “Conan” and ESPN’s “SportsNation.” Wood’s stand-up album, “Things I Think, I Think,” was released in 2013.

     No stranger to Comedy Central, Wood was one of ten national finalists in Comedy Central’s 2002 “Laugh Riots” competition, has been featured on its “Premium Blend” stand-up series and is a regular guest on the current late-night hit “@midnight.” He has also appeared on “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” “The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” HBO’s “Def Comedy Jam” and finished third in the 2010 season of NBC’s “Last Comic Standing.” Wood is repped by UTA and MacDonald Entertainment.

     Judge: Separate trials for six officers in Freddie Gray case – this sort of makes sense to me, but sort of not. Do separate trials have an impact on the chance of convicting all officers involved? Would one trial for all six have an impact on these chances?

     A Baltimore judge ruled Wednesday there will be separate trials for each of the six police officers charged in connection with the death of Freddie Gray.

     The ruling represented a small victory for the defendants on a day that Circuit Court Judge Barry G. Williams earlier denied two key defense motions in the case — one seeking its dismissal for alleged prosecutorial misconduct and another calling for prosecutor Marilyn Mosby to recuse herself.

     Prosecutors had asked that three of the six officers be tried together; defense lawyers argued for separate trials for each

     Williams said holding the trials together as the prosecution requested “is not in the interest of justice.”

     I’m wondering who on the defense is interested in justice.

     Officials were wrong to jump to conclusions in deputy’s slaying. Is this in relation to the link to #BlackLivesMatter?

     Three days after Harris County Deputy Darren Goforth was gunned down at a gas station in a senseless attack that has left this community shocked and grieving, the district attorney offered reassuring words.

     “This crime is not going to divide us; this crime is going to unite us,” Devon Anderson told reporters, citing the diverse crowds of people who have held vigil for Goforth following the murder.

     If only that message had come sooner. If only Sheriff Ron Hickman had echoed it.

     If only Harris County’s top law enforcement officials hadn’t turned a white deputy’s death, allegedly at the hands of a black man, into yet another wedge between police and communities of color.

     With a motive still unclear, Hickman seemed to cast early blame on a civil rights movement known as #blacklivesmatter, which attempts to raise awareness about racial bias in policing. It was inspired by a string of high-profile police shootings of unarmed black men.

     “We’ve heard black lives matter, all lives matter. Well, cops’ lives matter, too, so why don’t we just drop the qualifiers and just say lives matter and take that to the bank,” Hickman said in a news conference.

     Anderson made a similar point, albeit more subdued: “It is time for the silent majority in this country to support law enforcement,” she said. “There are a few bad apples in every profession; that does not mean there should be open warfare on law enforcement.”

     It is Shannon Jaruay Miles, 30, who stands charged with capital murder in Goforth’s death, and it’s still unclear what motivated him. If authorities have linked him to Black Lives Matter, they haven’t said.

     They have unofficially linked him – shouldn’t that be enough?

     Why I Don’t Date White Men, a personal account of enduring racism and refusing to become an educator to one’s partner. Excerpt:

     The thing was, as a child of immigrants in the 80s, the good Bangladeshi Muslim boys in my age range were few and far between. The crushes I developed were the same crushes that all the girls in my grade school developed: on blond, blue-eyed, athletic, popular boys.

     By the time I was in high school, this taste was fully developed. Of course, I never acted on my crush – dating was haram, and my parents would never allow it. But what did it matter anyway? As a brown girl, I wasn’t attractive to these boys either. They were drawn to the tall, blonde cheerleaders. I was always the sidekick to the pretty girls – the geeky, nerdy, student government, asexual, “other” Muslim brown girl. I was the girl that guys would talk to so that they could get closer to my pretty best friends.

     By the time I graduated from high school, I did not find Bangladeshi men attractive – only white guys were cute. I would later learn about internalized racism and conditioning and how this shapes our preferences and self-worth. I would later learn how living in a society where positive or attractive images of brown men and women were marginalized or non-existent would affect who I thought was attractive. But as a teenager – all I knew was that I was rebelling against my parents’ traditional ideas. As far as I was concerned, I would only marry a white guy – if I was to get married at all. And, I’d get married when I was old, maybe when I was 28.

     Weird how life works out.
     […]

     During those years, I was also learning about what it means to be a person of color and how white supremacy plays out in the U.S. In the petri dish of our relationship, I noticed how his white privilege compared to my lack thereof. I had overwhelming student loans, made much less money then him, and in those years right after September 11th, I stopped being able to fly and was harassed on those Washington, D.C. streets. Though it was comforting to be in a relationship, I still had to explain a lot of what it meant for me to feel exoticized, persecuted, and marginalized. Even I couldn’t quite grasp what was happening to my South Asian and Muslim communities – how could he could ever understand?

     Around the 2004 election season cycle, our relationship started getting tense. We had both founded organizations to get out the vote for young voters – except mine was to get out the vote for young South Asians and his was to get out the vote for “the youth”. I saw how easily he navigated it all. How he gained access to power, funding, resources. How I had to struggle twice as hard to raise a quarter of the funding. How his funders didn’t want me to support a joint conference for fear that I would rally the people of color attendees. How they were scared of communities of color gaining power, even in a progressive organizing space.

     Our relationship came to an explosive end near election day, 2004. I promised myself that I would never actively date a white man again. I needed to get on solid ground on what it meant to be a Desi, an American, and a racial justice activist. I hated the feeling of constantly being reminded of how little power I had as a woman of color. It felt hypocritical to my political beliefs to be dating white.

     Most importantly, my career was about training and educating people on social justice issues. The last thing I wanted to do was come home to a space where I had to continue to educate. I wanted to be in a relationship where I could be my full self, no explanation or education needed. He embodied privilege: white privilege, class privilege, gender privilege, education privilege. How could I be in a relationship with a person who constantly reminded me of how much I was lacking?

     Worth a read, all of it. She also touches on how the racial aspect intersects with poverty. Which, as we know, often occurs.

251. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

     3 September 2015 at 11:47 am

     Gawker
     A monument of racism to be abolished!!! Racism is over!!!
     ugh
     It is amazing that this monument in NOLA is finally being removed.
     Inscription on which:

     United States Troops Took Over the State Government And Reinstated The Usurpers
     But The National Election November 1876 Recognized White Supremecay In The South And Gave Us Our State.

     [inscription is all caps, BTW]
     The story goes on to describe their attempts to add “footnotes”, by attaching various plaques here and there disclaiming it as [paraphrased]: “this monument is historical artifact only, not representative of current attitudes”.
     Better to just eliminate it, than try to keep denying that a stone monument glorifies something to be ashamed of.
     one commentator to the story, notes that it is often defaced with graffiti, so it’s also an eyesore, best removed.

252. rq says

     3 September 2015 at 1:39 pm

     Anthony Batts says police ‘took a knee’ after Baltimore riots

     Batts, who was fired in July as homicides mounted following the unrest, said during a panel discussion at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg that he is one of several police chiefs who have been met by opposition from their rank-and-file as they tried to implement reform.

     “They felt that I wasn’t standing up for them,” Batts said. “They want — anything they do — for the chiefs to stand up and say, ‘My guys are right.'”

     Washington, D.C., Police Chief Cathy Lanier recently faced a vote of no confidence from her officers, Batts noted, as she tried to implement changes in that department.

     “Is this going to be the tactic, where police don’t feel supported, so they allow the crime rate to go up, and the reformers lose their job?” Batts asked.

     A spokesman for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said the mayor “couldn’t disagree more.”

     “Our officers have served admirably both during and following the unrest, as was again demonstrated with their management of [Wednesday’s] peaceful demonstrations,” spokesman Kevin Harris said. “Arrests are up, and officers are committed more than ever to making Baltimore a safer city.”

     The Police Department did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday night.

     An interesting and rather frightening prospect, that, when faced with reforms that may reduce their power and privilege, police refuse to do their duties at all.
     What an attitude.

     Sandra Bland activists maintain jail vigil despite dimming media spotlight. Still no real answers there.

     The hourlong drive from Houston to the Waller County jail has become a regular commute for Hannah Bonner.

     Since the death of Sandra Bland on 13 July, the United Methodist reverend has kept vigil outside the building almost every day, joined by others who are determined to honour Bland’s life and promote her legacy, long after the national media’s gaze moved elsewhere.

     No one could deny that Bland’s death has prompted visible change at the jail. New barriers were erected in front of the building, eliminating the ability to sit or stand by the wall where protesters tended to gather because the overhanging roof made it the best place to find shade.

     Bonner sometimes sat in a folding chair and strummed a guitar. Others brought posters, food and water. They used the jail’s restrooms. There were candles and statuettes of angels, and photographs of Bland. Bonner said people sought refuge from the summer sun and 100F temperatures under a tree in the parking lot. Last month, it was cut down.

     Now, signs either side of the reflective-glass entry doors insist on “no loitering in the lobby”. The sheriff’s patience appeared to run out after 9 August – the one-year anniversary of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri – when protesters entered and chanted for several minutes until officers forced them outside.

     Two days later, Bonner filmed the sheriff, Glenn Smith, telling her: “Why don’t you go back to the church of Satan that you run?” The next day she found temporary barricades had been erected by the wall along with signs saying “no one beyond this point”. Later in the month they were replaced with yellow and brown metal railings. She said the sheriff has taken pictures of her license plate.

     A spokesman for the Waller County sheriff’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

     On 13 August, armed members of the Black Panthers marched outside the jail. Bonner said she heard rumours that she had called in the Panthers – “which is impossible for a white woman to do” – and that the tree was cut down because of fears it might be used by snipers.

     But most days are quiet now. On Tuesday, Bonner and Karisha Shaw, a Houston-based school worker, were there in the rain. “Our presence here is to keep the attention on Sandra Bland,” Bonner said. “We don’t really have answers to what happened to Sandra Bland and we might never know, but we do know she should never have been in this jail.”

     Bonner said she has made the journey from Houston on all but four or five days since activists started showing up at the jail 50 days ago, emphasising that she is not a protester but part of a “peaceful prayer vigil here to honour Sandra Bland’s life and to ask the questions in person that her family and friends are asking”.

     More at the link, but attention to the case seems to be waning. I hope they get some answers, whatever they may be.

     On Taylor Swift and her cringeworthy obsession with blackness

     At her concert a few weeks ago, Taylor Swift, a Horcrux for white mediocrity, invited new hip-hop sensation Fetty Wap on stage to perform his hit record “Trap Queen” with her. This just added another item to the long list of things Taylor Swift has done to annoy me.

     Unfortunately, because of Twitter, Vine and Instagram, sites that thrive off of exposing the bizarre happenings of the celebrity world, I bore witness to this performance. Despite Swift singing loudly and off-key and dancing awkwardly (as she does at every awards show), my main concern was Fetty Wap’s presence at her concert in the first place.

     Hip-hop and the blackness associated with it is tokenized in white pop culture by artists who otherwise ignore the complexities and challenges embedded in black culture. Swift is an obvious example of this harmful trend.

     She wants a peek inside of the fun of hip-hop and rap, but shies away from the social, economic and political realities expressed within the music. Swift uses her veil of “I’m-just-an-innocent-white-girl-with-a-guitar-and-a-basic-singing-voice” to shield herself against conflict and controversy with the creators of the same black music she uses as a prop at her concerts. Last year, she took pictures of Jay-Z and Beyoncé at her birthday party, seemingly in an effort to ratchet up her cool points. Yet in 2009 Swift played victim to Kanye’s epic interruption speech at the VMAs, where he hinted at the racism that allowed Swift to beat Beyoncé for the Video of the Year award. Swift wants Beyoncé as a “friend,” but would never publically acknowledge how her own privileges, afforded to her through whiteness and white femininity, hurt black female artists such Beyoncé. In fact, Swift is clearly still preoccupied with the “Imma let you finish…but” moment, as she whined about it again at this year’s VMAs when she presented Kanye with the Video Vanguard award. It’s like the girl can’t let anything not be about her.
     […]

     A song like “Trap Queen” includes almost no aspects of a world that Swift can likely identify with or understand. So when she performs it on stage with its curator, the whole thing looks like a weird attempt to get Wap’s magical blackness to somehow rub off on her and permeate her vast whiteness. She uses Wap as a tool to appear hip — but still innocent. Still innocent enough to play the potential victim (both figuratively and literally) of a black man like Fetty Wap, if he were to ever interrupt her on an awards show stage or, heaven forbid, did not want to be her friend.

     And therein lies the problem. Blackness is not a costume or a prop. It is not an elixir for lameness that white people can take in doses when they want to have fun. Being black has real consequences and comes with challenging lived experiences. So, if a person like Swift wants to interact with it, she better respect and try to understand it, instead of treating the music and culture like a play thing.

     Ex-Baltimore Police Commissioner Discusses Tenure, Firing

     Former Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts says the police department failed to improve public trust under his leadership.

     Batts discussed his tenure and July firing during a panel Wednesday evening at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg.

     The Frederick News-Post reports Batts told the crowd other crime metrics were improving last year, but he believes the department didn’t pay attention to “warning signs” in its relationship with the public.

     Batts was fired as the city saw a major increase in violent crime following Freddie Gray’s death in April from a broken neck he suffered in police custody. Six officers have been charged in his death, which led to widespread protests and some rioting.

     Batts also discussed the “embarrassment” that came along with being fired.

     He declined to comment to a reporter after the panel.

     Rather sparse on the details there,CBS Local.

     Moving Targets, “US police have fatally shot 30 people in moving vehicles this year, despite federal guidelines advising them not to. Why have police departments pulled the trigger on drivers rather than reform?”

     The US Department of Justice, prominent international policing experts and most major police departments across the US agree: police officers should not fire their guns into moving cars. The shots are widely viewed as ineffective for stopping oncoming vehicles, and the risks to innocent parties are seen as overwhelming.

     But a Guardian investigation has found US police have carried out at least 30 fatal shootings into moving vehicles they claimed were being used as weapons so far in 2015. More than a quarter of those killed were black men, a group that according to the US Census Bureau makes up just 6% of the driving-age American population.

     In all cases, officers said the vehicle posed a threat either to their own lives, to those of police colleagues, or to bystanders. In almost all incidents, however, their decisions to shoot appeared to run counter to federal guidance instructing officers to open fire only if a driver presents a separate deadly threat, such as a gun. None of those killed were accused of pointing firearms at police, and in only three cases did police appear to be aware of a gun being inside the vehicle.

     Like thousands of other law enforcement agencies around the US that have declined to reform their internal policies in line with DoJ standards, Alexander City has a rulebook that says officers may fire into moving vehicles “as the ultimate measure of self-defence” when “the suspect is using deadly force”. Implicit is that the vehicle itself may be considered the deadly weapon.

     Rulebooks obtained by the Guardian from 20 of the departments whose officers have fired deadly shots into moving vehicles in 2015 showed that a majority had similarly lax rules. Even departments with ostensibly more restrictive policies consistently provided a caveat ultimately privileging the officer’s judgment call.

     Is anyone surprised? See Denver PD for more details. Jessie Hernandez comes to mind. As one example.

     Ex-Police Chief Who Fatally Shot Unarmed Black Man Sentenced to House Arrest. Mentioned previously, I believe. But seriously. House arrest. Fuck that shit.

253. rq says

     3 September 2015 at 2:18 pm

     School Protesters Force Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel To Shut Down Budget Meeting

     A group of protesters caused Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to shut down a budget meeting on Wednesday evening after he refused to answer their questions regarding the future of a city school.

     According to local news reports, Emanuel was holding a public hearing about the city’s 2016 budget when residents protesting the closure of Dyett High School pressed him about the city’s plans for the future of the school.

     After he repeatedly declined to answer their questions, the protesters swarmed the stage, demanding an answer from him “right now.” Chicago police quickly escorted Emanuel out of the meeting. The mayor’s office then ended the meeting early.

     Dyett High School closed in June due to low test scores and enrollment rates, part of a wave of school closures in Chicago over the last two years. City officials have yet to make permanent plans for the school, but neighborhood residents want it to reopen next year as an open-enrollment, science-focused school called Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology High School.

     Some of the protesters have been part of a hunger strike that reached its 17th day on Wednesday. That same day, two of the protesters, Jitu Brown and April Stogner, took their fight to Washington, D.C., and delivered a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, asking him to intervene. The hunger strikers have insisted that they will not stop until city officials decide to keep the school open and select the community’s proposed plan.

     “We’re going to do whatever is necessary to keep this school and have an open-enrollment school in our community,” Stogner said at a press conference. “I’m hungry. But I’m not really hungry for food — I’m hungry for justice. I’m hungry for justice for my grandbabies, for all the kids in my community.”

     Justice Department report criticizes military-style police tactics in Ferguson, Los Angeles Times.

     Those of us white folks that say we are “colorblind”, create erasure that race benefits or disadvantages in the U.S. Links to infographics.

     Ambitious new African American Initiative aims to improve climate. So they mean to say climate change is real? No, wait, they’re talking about a different sort of climate.

     “For too long, African Americans on our campus have faced obstacles to feeling fully included in the life of our university,” says Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, explaining the impetus behind the just-announced UC Berkeley African American Initiative. The initiative — a comprehensive effort to address the underrepresentation and campus climate for African American students, faculty and staff — includes plans for a $20 million endowed scholarship fund, as well as a number of steps aimed at boosting recruitment and yield for black undergrads, and at improving the campus’s social, personal and academic support to current and future African American students.

     While the initiative is “predicated on our collective determination to engage and improve the campus climate for African Americans across every sector of our community,” progress “cannot and will not happen solely as the result of administrative dictate,” notes Dirks. “The success of this initiative will depend on effective and ongoing collaboration among all of us here on the campus and, crucially, our alumni and friends, whose support will be essential if we are to make good on our aspirations.”

     For a closer look at the initiative, Berkeley News met recently with three of the campus officials responsible for its creation and future success: Claude Steele, executive vice chancellor and provost; Gibor Basri, outgoing vice chancellor for equity and inclusion; and African American studies chair Na’ilah Nasir, who takes over from Basri on Nov. 1.

     Interview at the link.

     ‘Shut the Hell Up!’: Roland Martin Thoroughly Demolishes Bill O’Reilly’s Ignorant Argument About #BlackLivesMatter; sadly, only video at the link.

     Andy Roddick On The Ugly Truth Behind How We Treat Serena Williams

     Roddick, who’s been best friends with Williams since they were 8 years old, reflected on their journey together, noting that he faced far less criticism over the years for his outlandish behavior compared to her (emphasis ours).

     To see her come from the 10-year-old with beads in her hair — I mean [expletive], just to see her become just this complete icon and the best female athlete of all time. I love the respect she’s getting this week in the lead-up too. She has the support of an entire country. We threw lots of fits on the court. I was a [jerk] a lot of the time, and I didn’t get a quarter of the criticism that she ever got. To see her at this moment, and on the precipice of doing something great, and that will be remembered forever, it’s just so cool. I’m so happy for her, and I hope she does it.”

     Throughout his professional tennis career, Roddick was poorly tempered and indignant to entire legions of tennis officials. He even tried to fight Novak Djokovic in the U.S. Open locker room in 2013. In press conferences and at events, Roddick was known for brushing it all away with self-deprecating humor, escaping harsh media criticism while he racked up fines for his antics. Generally, any time Roddick had displayed disrespectful behavior, he’s been able to simply exit the moment by leveraging his privilege as a white male in a sport that’s long been dominated, culturally and in terms of record holders, by white males.
     […]

     As Roddick pointed out to The New York Observer, Williams simply gets criticized more for doing less. Claudia Rankine dutifully explored why that is in her August New York Times Magazine piece on Williams, noting attacks on Williams and her body have often come in the form of blissfully wrapped and coded racist sentiments.

     Imagine that you’re the player John McEnroe recently described as ‘‘the greatest player, I think, that ever lived.’’ Imagine that, despite all this, there were so many bad calls against you, you were given as one reason video replay needed to be used on the courts. Imagine that you have to contend with critiques of your body that perpetuate racist notions that black women are hypermasculine and unattractive. Imagine being asked to comment at a news conference before a tournament because the president of the Russian Tennis Federation, Shamil Tarpischev, has described you and your sister as ‘‘brothers’’ who are ‘‘scary’’ to look at. Imagine.

     What Rankine describes is not impossible to imagine, because, as Roddick inferred, this shit’s been happening. Time and time again.

     It just took one black woman, a 21-time Grand Slam winner, and her imminent future as tennis’ G.O.A.T. for us to earnestly talk about it.

254. rq says

     3 September 2015 at 2:38 pm

     Hot Air exclusive: Scott Walker speaks out on cop murders and American leadership

     Over the last week, we’ve seen a disturbing trend of police officers being murdered on the job. Texas Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Goforth was killed Friday, gunned down while pumping gas for no apparent reason other than the uniform on his back. And just yesterday, in my neighboring state of Illinois, police Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz was assassinated by three men, who are still on the run.

     This isn’t the America I grew up in or that I want my children to grow up in. When the very people responsible for keeping us safe are targeted because they are law enforcement officials, we have a serious problem.

     In the last six years under President Obama, we’ve seen a rise in anti-police rhetoric. Instead of hope and change, we’ve seen racial tensions worsen and a tendency to use law enforcement as a scapegoat. This kind of attitude has created a culture in which we all too often see demonstrations and chants where people describe police as “pigs” and call for them to be “fried like bacon.” This inflammatory and disgusting rhetoric has real consequences for the safety of officers who put their lives on the line for us and hampers their ability to serve the communities that need their help.

     In Wisconsin we acted to protect both police officers and citizens through a first-in-the-nation law that requires an independent investigation when a suspect dies in police custody.

     And I will continue to support efforts to ensure officers receive proper training at the local level to help make sure force is only used in appropriate circumstances.

     There’s more at the link. I’m wondering if the name ‘Hot Air’ is tongue-in-cheek at all…

     Wrong-house shooting: Not the first time a 911 call puts homeowner in peril. And even when visiting the correct house, not the first time officers shoot the people requesting their help. There’s a short list of five people, at least two of whose names we have seen in these threads, with a link to more.

     Family of man killed by Philly police lodges federal class-action suit

     A civil-rights lawsuit was filed Wednesday in federal court against Philadelphia and two police officers in the death of Brandon Tate-Brown, who was fatally shot by one of the officers during a struggle following a traffic stop in December.

     The suit, filed on behalf of Tate-Brown’s mother, Tanya Brown-Dickerson, seeks to be certified by a judge as a class action, opening the door for other people who were subjected to excessive use of force by Philadelphia police to seek nonmonetary relief.

     Tate-Brown, 26, was driving a Dodge Charger from the rental company where he worked when he was stopped Dec. 15 by Officers Nicholas Carrelli and Heng Dang in the 6600 block of Frankford Avenue in Mayfair. Police alleged that he had a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol with eight rounds inside the car and that a struggle ensued. He was shot in the back of the head by Carrelli and died at the scene.

     In April, attorney Brian R. Mildenberg filed a similar complaint in Common Pleas Court, and that was amended in July after the Police Department identified the officers and released surveillance video that showed part of the confrontation.

     The new complaint contains civil-rights claims, and seeks to be linked to a settled case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union that monitors the city for racial profiling.

     Good luck.

     Solicitor Scarlett Wilson to seek death penalty against Dylann Roof. Not exactly the path to racial reconciliation. I… kind of don’t get it, though. The victims’ families were asked, straight off the bat, if they forgave Roof. Which they did, sort of, at least publicly saying the words. My question is, if the death penalty is not necessary legally, and the family has “forgiven” Roof, why bother at all?

     Portsmouth police officer indicted on first-degree murder charge in shooting death of William Chapman II

     The officer who shot and killed an 18-year-old outside a Walmart earlier this year was indicted Thursday by a grand jury on charges of first-degree murder and use of a firearm in commission of a felony, said Circuit Court Clerk Cynthia Morrison.

     William Chapman II was shot about 7:30 a.m. April 22 in the parking lot of the Walmart on Frederick Boulevard. Portsmouth Commonwealth’s Attorney Stephanie Morales announced last week that she would seek to indict Portsmouth Officer Stephen D. Rankin. The city’s grand jury met today.

     According to an autopsy obtained by The Virginian-Pilot, Chapman was shot twice, once in the face and once in the chest, and pronounced dead at the scene. His body was taken to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner with his hands cuffed behind his back.

     A separate state toxicology report indicated Chapman’s blood showed no traces of alcohol or drugs.

     Rankin shot Chapman less than a month after another Portsmouth officer shot and killed 29-year-old Walter Brown III in his house after a car chase. Prosecutors said last week that they would not pursue charges in that case.

     Here’s a profile of Rankin from June 1 of this year: Stephen Rankin: the military-trained officer who killed two unarmed men.

255. rq says

     3 September 2015 at 2:53 pm

     Miley Had it Coming: Why Nicki Minaj Has No Duty to be Nice About White Privilege, another commentary on Miley’s blatantly obvious white privilege.

     First of all, who asked Miley for advice? Miley’s statements point directly to white privilege. It shows in her unsolicited advice she offered Nicki, and her comments urging Nicki to be more ‘polite and loving’ despite the fact black people have had to endure racist for centuries in the media. She seems to be more concerned with how Nicki said what she did (a derailing technique called “Tone-Policing” ) while neglecting the underlying system of racist injustice that Nicki is pointing out.

     Basically, Cyrus was all ‘Angry Black Woman Alert!’ without turning on her brain and listening.

     Racial Injustice Fatigue: Coping with the Toxicity of Well-Meaning White People. It’s listen-up time for white people!

     It’s been hard to start my morning routine simply because Black people have been daily/weekly/monthly murdered by the state/vigilante/whomever wants to murder a Black person. Viewing a whole cadre of folks beaten would sour anyone’s taste for cereal, but I have bills to pay. Calling in black is sometimes not an option. On my morning commute, I can’t even check social media. The psychological ramifications make it hard to focus.

     Inevitably, I catch a glimpse of AM New York or someone’s iPad. Yet another person has been harassed, hazed, abused or murdered as people dryly debate the merits of that person’s life while waiting in line for a bagel. I pretend I can’t hear and do my absolute best not to meet anyone’s eye. I wait for the conversation to transition to updates on what Kylie Jenner had for dinner. Sometimes I am lucky. As a middle class Black person, I have the ability to often be invisible in arenas where no one looks like me. Most times it’s a dehumanizing experience, but sometimes I get a break. Sometimes, but not often.

     It’s more likely that after my colleague/neighbor/acquaintance freely gives their opinion on the latest bout of racial unrest, there will be an awkward pause where my trusty invisibility cloak suddenly dissolves. I am suddenly THE person that has ALL THE ANSWERS to every injustice between the Civil Rights Act and today and I must spill the secrets NOW.
     […]

     I want to scream, but I can’t. I brace myself as the anger/resentment/grief washes over me. It passes, leaving a little more bitterness and angst than the time before. I’m demoralized by the fact that that I am assumed to be a griot of all racial injustice because I know this is another milder, more insidious facet of racism. As a student of history, I try to keep perspective. I know social movements started and maintained by the blood of marginalized peoples ultimately gain more traction once a tipping point of the majority begins to agree.

     It’s a sad fact; we need all the well-meaning white people we can get. I mutter the absolute amount of minimum words in a bleak effort to make them think differently, but I know that if they were capable of thinking differently, this exchange wouldn’t have happened in the first place. I effectively hide my skepticism that racialized income inequality and the violence that results will never end without totally restructuring the educational system, abolishing the prison industrial complex, and burning capitalism to the ground. That too would make them uncomfortable. Back to square one.

     What some of my favorite Caucasians don’t understand is that blackness is a part of me. I can’t take it off; it grows to the root. For those of us who work in social justice, racial equity, social work, or education, having to address systemic inequality is what we are paid for. It is a quantifiable, reimbursable skill. Sadly, it’s a skill that must be employed even when I am not on the grounds of my employer. Let me give a benign example: I volunteer with an organization to strategize innovative ways to increase food access in a Black neighborhood that has little options for healthy food, then I got stressed out about what to cook for dinner because I live in a Black neighborhood that has little options for healthy food. For me it’s all in a day of being. How can that I explain that to you? And why do I even have that obligation?

     No, she does not have that obligation. Nope.

     Justice Department report: Police seriously botched their response to Ferguson protesters, Vox. Link to the report itself at the link. Also here.

     <a href="

256. rq says

     3 September 2015 at 3:21 pm

     Comic book fans, arise! Amandla Stenberg’s New Project Is A Tribute To All Badass Black Women

     The 16-year-old actress, who is widely-recognized for her activism around social and cultural issues — is, yet again, speaking up and speaking out for women of color who often go under- and misrepresented. This time, Stenberg is using her talent to create an exciting new comic centered around the experiences of a young black warrior woman named Niobe Ayutami.

     The comic, titled “NIOBE: She is Life,” follows the protagonist on her adventures to help save the world. Along the way, Niobe, who is half elf and half human warrior, is also on a journey of self-discovery to find out exactly who she is and all the powerful things she can do.

     In fact, Stenberg says Niobe’s journey is very similar to her own.

     “I was drawn to give voice to Niobe and co-write her story because her journey is my journey. I connect to her mixed racial background and quest to discover her innate powers and strengths, to learn who she truly is,” Stenberg said in a statement obtained by The Huffington Post.

     The similarities don’t stop there — Niobe is busy breaking barriers just as Stenberg is doing in reality. Together, the two are a powerful duo who proudly represent women of color through all dimensions.

     “She is on a path to a destiny that will test her faith and her will, something we can all relate to. But there’s never been a character quite like her — one who shatters the traditional ideal of what a hero is. We need more badass girls!” Stenberg said.

     I was all ‘woo! an elf parent and a black parent!’ and then I thought ‘heeeeeey… what if her elf parent is a black elf???’ So anyway neat thoughts.

     Millis gun attack story fabricated, official says, because this is what officers doooo…

     The Millis police officer who claimed he was fired upon by a man in a pickup truck on Wednesday fabricated his account, will be fired, and likely will face criminal charges, Millis police said Thursday.

     The officer’s report triggered a massive response of heavily armed police officers who conducted an hours-long search for a suspect. The town closed its public schools Thursday as a precaution after the police dragnet on Wednesday.

     The officer was driving a marked police SUV when, he said, he was fired upon by a white man in a pickup truck, which forced him to drive his SUV off the road and into a tree, where the vehicle caught on fire. He claimed he had fired back at the suspect.

     But Millis police said Thursday the officer, whom they declined to identify, shot up the marked cruiser himself.

     At least he had the decency to describe the suspect as white. Can’t imagine if he’d said black.

     Did I mention I wanted to see her on the CBC? New Mrs. Universe says Tory government treats First Nations people ‘like terrorists’

     The first Canadian and First Nations woman to win Mrs. Universe is using her new fame to urge aboriginal people in Canada to vote to oust the Conservatives in the federal election.

     Callingbull-Burnham, who is from Alberta’s Enoch Cree Nation, west of Edmonton, won the Mrs. Universe contest Aug. 29. The international beauty pageant started in 2007 and focuses on married contestants.

     Since her win, Callingbull-Burnham has been vocal about First Nations concerns in Canada.

     “I believe that this government was created to work against us and not for us,” said Ashley Callingbull-Burnham in an interview with Rosemary Barton on CBC’s Power & Politics on Wednesday.

     “There’s just so many problems with it for First Nations people. We’re always put on the back burner,” she said.

     It’s like USAmerica and Canada were colonized by the same people or something. They seem to be doing the same things.

     William Chapman: state official will seek to prosecute officer who killed teenager – from last week, as it now turns out the officer has been charged. Let’s hear it for the trial!

     Family: Jamycheal Mitchell was in cell covered in his own feces, urine. So, basically, no basic human care. No medical care. And they blame everything on his mental illness.

257. rq says

     4 September 2015 at 7:25 am

     ‘Dope,’ One Of The Summer’s Best Films, Returns To Theaters Friday

     The film stars Shameik Moore, in a classic “if he were white it would be a star making turn” performance, as the kind of character that hasn’t been highlighted on screen that much, the minority geek. The film could simplistically be described as a 1980′s-style “one crazy night” coming-of-age story but starring a black kid, but frankly that would be accurate in a thematic sense. The skin color and environment of the protagonist really does shape the story in unexpectedly compelling ways. Without going into spoilery details, the film’s plot involving mix-ups, set-ups, and accidental criminal mischief carries a greater sense of weight and dread because we know full-well that the negative consequences that could await Malcolm are that much more severe because of the color of his skin and the neighborhood in which he lives. Yes, the film is technically a comedy, but it never forgets the inherent drama of the story it is telling.

     The film’s often garden-variety hijinks are infused with a greater sense of tension, suspense, and dread both because of the more dangerous environment and because of the more realistic consequences than presented in an Adventures In Babysitting-type movie. The sick joke is that Malcolm doesn’t need to learn valuable life lessons or partake in this crazy caper as a form of character growth, and in-fact it threatens the very worthwhile future which he has planned from himself. The film eventually becomes outright heartbreaking in how it views the standard “man up” moments of the sub-genre with a tragic eye or as an example of a systematic failure.

     We Trust Black Women to Stand Up, Speak Out, and Lead, on the importance of (a) listening to black (and other minority) women and (b) meeting their (even basic) needs.

     Black women have led our communities in the fight for health and dignity throughout the course of history. We have worked to build strong families in the face of ignorance, hate, and structural oppression.

     Sadly, many of our elected officials either stand in the way or fail to help. They claim that Black women can’t be trusted. But it not us that can’t be trusted, it is lawmakers who fail to address the very real problems facing our community who should not be trusted. And as we look ahead to the 2016 election, and beyond, we at SisterSong, and our committed colleagues in the field, agree that the time has come for these politicians to stand with us or move out of our way.

     That is why now more than ever Black women need to come together to speak out against attacks on our autonomy. We cannot allow another lawmaker to spout off about who we are or another community leader to talk about our families. We are here. We are making decisions every day to plan and care for ourselves and for our children. We deal with attacks on our ability to access reproductive health care and obstacles to raising our children—the need for better education, difficulty affording child care, a broken criminal justice system that perpetuates mass incarceration and police violence, continued health disparities, and a lack of access to high quality health services. We are struggling, but we are also striving to get by in a world that far too often wants to push us down.

     While legislators pass discriminatory limits on programs that support families and even try to control the reproduction of low-income women and women of color by limiting the number of children we can have, they also put up barriers to affordable health services.
     […]

     Black lives and health and dignity matters. For the work and organizing to also matter to our families and our community, we must ensure that Black women and Black transgender people are included. Black men must sometimes stand next to us and at times step aside so that other members of our community can step up and step out to push for the change that we all desperately need and that we deserve.

     Black women fight for ourselves and we fight to uplift our people. We will not stand by while decision makers pass law after law that is designed to control our decisions or that are based on racist stereotypes of Black women and our families. We will speak out when groups try to divide us—like SisterReach did when they responded to billboards pushing racist propaganda in Tennessee.

     More to read at the link, also speaks to the health needs and issues of black trans people.

     Man On Crutches Claims Cop Said “I Don’t Give A F***” Before Beating Him. Wait… another black man armed with crutches beaten by police?

     According to the lawsuit, J-Quan Johnson, 25, was in attendance at the “Love is Love” block party on Aug. 31, 2014 when cops arrived to break up the gathering. Johnson was on crutches at the time because he had stitches in his left ankle and an intravenous PICC line administering antibiotics to his chest as a result of a recent basketball injury. He claims in his lawsuit that he was following instructions to disperse when Officer Dwight Powell allegedly shoved someone into him.

     “Why are you being so aggressive?” Johnson says he asked the cop, before asking him to be careful because of his leg. That’s when Powell allegedly said, “I don’t give a f*** about your foot”— Johnson talked back, Powell allegedly slapped him in the face, and five officers then pounced on him. You can see video of the aftermath below.

     Yeesh.

     Something a bit more subtle: Arizona News Anchor Is Drawn Into Debate on Her Accent and the Use of Spanish

     An Arizona news anchor defended her pronunciation of Spanish words during English broadcasts, saying she delivers them the way the language is intended to be spoken.

     In a broadcast on Monday, Vanessa Ruiz, who works for 12 News here, waded into the running debate over the use of Spanish that has divided Americans in different ways for years, and has been percolating on the campaign trail.

     Ms. Ruiz, who was raised in a bilingual household, said some viewers had questioned her way of pronouncing Spanish words. Sandra Kotzambasis, the station’s news director, said viewers were asking why Ms. Ruiz “rolled her Rs.”

     In the broadcast, Ms. Ruiz said, “Some of you have noticed that I pronounce a couple of things maybe a little bit differently than what you are used to, and I get that, and maybe even tonight you saw a little bit of it.

     “I was lucky enough to grow up speaking two languages, and I have lived in other cities, in the U.S., South America, and Europe,” she continued. “So yes, I do like to pronounce certain things the way they are meant to be pronounced. And I know that change can be difficult, but it’s normal and over time I know that everything falls into place.”

     Vanessa Ruiz, you should know by now: Real White USAmericans know best.

     The Truth of ‘Black Lives Matter’

     The Republican Party and its acolytes in the news media are trying to demonize the protest movement that has sprung up in response to the all-too-common police killings of unarmed African-Americans across the country. The intent of the campaign — evident in comments by politicians like Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky — is to cast the phrase “Black Lives Matter” as an inflammatory or even hateful anti-white expression that has no legitimate place in a civil rights campaign.

     Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas crystallized this view when he said the other week that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., were he alive today, would be “appalled” by the movement’s focus on the skin color of the unarmed people who are disproportionately killed in encounters with the police. This argument betrays a disturbing indifference to or at best a profound ignorance of history in general and of the civil rights movement in particular. From the very beginning, the movement focused unapologetically on bringing an end to state-sanctioned violence against African-Americans and to acts of racial terror very much like the one that took nine lives at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in June.

     The civil rights movement was intended to make Congress and Americans confront the fact that African-Americans were being killed with impunity for offenses like trying to vote, and had the right to life and to equal protection under the law. The movement sought a cross-racial appeal, but at every step of the way used expressly racial terms to describe the death and destruction that was visited upon black people because they were black.

     Even in the early 20th century, civil rights groups documented cases in which African-Americans died horrible deaths after being turned away from hospitals reserved for whites, or were lynched — which meant being hanged, burned or dismembered — in front of enormous crowds that had gathered to enjoy the sight.
     […]

     The “Black Lives Matter” movement focuses on the fact that black citizens have long been far more likely than whites to die at the hands of the police, and is of a piece with this history. Demonstrators who chant the phrase are making the same declaration that voting rights and civil rights activists made a half-century ago. They are not asserting that black lives are more precious than white lives. They are underlining an indisputable fact — that the lives of black citizens in this country historically have not mattered, and have been discounted and devalued. People who are unacquainted with this history are understandably uncomfortable with the language of the movement. But politicians who know better and seek to strip this issue of its racial content and context are acting in bad faith. They are trying to cover up an unpleasant truth and asking the country to collude with them.

     Nice one, NY Times. Calling out Republicans and taking a stance, all at the same time. You liberals you!

     Davis says Baltimore police officers ‘take offense’ at Batts’ comments. His comments yesterday, as per several comments above.

     Interim Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said Thursday that city police officers are disappointed by his predecessor’s remark that they “took a knee” after the riots of April, as violence in the city began to spike.

     “I’m proud of them,” Davis said Thursday, the day after former Commissioner Anthony W. Batts said officers had let up on the job after the riots. “They’re working hard.”

     Davis pointed to a 44 percent increase in gun seizures since mid-July, as well as the department’s response to protests this week outside the first hearing for the six police officers charged in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray.

     Batts, who was fired in July, sought Thursday to clarify his comments.

     “My comments were not focused on Baltimore police under Davis,” he wrote in response to a query from The Baltimore Sun. “I referenced them taking a knee during the tail end of my tenure. I can’t speak for Davis’ term. I haven’t been connected to the department nor have been keeping up with the department under his tenure.”

     Batts made the initial remark Wednesday night during a panel discussion at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg. He said the rank-and-file officers felt he wasn’t supporting them.

     “They want — anything they do — for the chiefs to stand up and say, ‘My guys are right,'” Batts said.

     He pointed to District of Columbia police Chief Cathy Lanier, who tried to implement changes in that department and received a vote of no confidence this week from her officers.

     “Is this going to be the tactic, where police don’t feel supported, so they allow the crime rate to go up, and the reformers lose their job?” Batts asked.

     Davis said he thought “police officers generally, whether it’s in Baltimore or elsewhere, take offense to that type of simplistic statement.”

     Gene Ryan, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3, objected to Batts’ comments.

     “Officers did not ‘take a knee,'” he said in a statement. “He is right that our members felt unsupported by leadership, though.

     “We are headed in the right direction under Commissioner Davis and wish former Commissioner Batts well.”

     Honestly, if the police union supports Davis? I rather fear for the outcome.

258. rq says

     4 September 2015 at 7:52 am

     This article is rather lengthy but that’s mostly due to the wealth of information within. Much of it is more feminism-focussed, but there’s a good chunk that focusses on race and test results. Yep, it’s a long piece on stereotype threat: “Picture yourself as a stereotypical male”.

     Our guidance counselors always liked to talk about how we should take care to get eight hours of sleep and a nutritious breakfast on our testing days. Test prep was obviously first and foremost, but after that, there were a number of easily-Googleable studies that correlated sleep with test performance and nutrition with test performance. It was sort of like this ritual mantra among counselors and parents: study, sleep, eggs for breakfast. If you had the trifecta covered, your score would be up to some combination of fate and the will of the Greek gods and there was nothing much else of concern.

     Some time last month I was browsing the Internet and happened upon a number of papers that really disturbed me. This reaction, I would say, was both due to their content and to the fact that I was priorly ignorant of their actually enormous implications for anyone who regularly test-takes. I found it 1) absurd that this isn’t common knowledge, and 2) upsetting that educators spread these cute little test tips while ignoring factors that affect students on potentially magnitudes greater. How about “Zeus is a fucking racist, kids,” or else “stereotype threat exists.”

     You may be familiar with the concept of stereotype threat. The term refers to a theorized mechanism by which people underperform (on tests, competitions, etc.) in response to awareness of stereotypes about their demographic group. It’s related to a largely subconscious apprehension about confirming the given negative stereotype, which hinders cognition, impairs concentration, and under some conditions reduces preparation or effort. This concept was conceived in a breakthrough study in 1995 entitled “The Effects of Stereotype Threat on the Standardized Test Performance of College Students.” Its introduction explains: “Whenever African American students perform an explicitly scholastic or intellectual task, they face the threat of confirming or being judged by negative societal stereotypes about their group’s intellectual ability and competence… and the self-threat it causes – through a variety of mechanisms – may interfere with the intellectual functioning of these students, particularly during standardized tests.” The study analyzed the effect on black participants, although similar effects surely apply to Hispanic and Native American people and any other group with academic prejudices working against them.

     “When participants arrived at the laboratory,” states the paper, “the experimenter (a White man) explained that for the next 30 minutes they would work on a set of verbal problems in a format identical to the SAT exam.” Half of the participants were told that their performance on the test would be diagnostic of their verbal reasoning abilities, or in their words, “a genuine test of [their] verbal abilities and limitations” due to “various personal factors involved in performance.” This was an engineered induction of stereotype threat, under which the test takers were given the impression that their score on the test was associated with their personal academic aptitude. In contrast, the researcher’s explanation in the non-diagnostic condition made no reference to innate ability and instead implied that a given participant’s score was associated with the kinds of problems they’ve been exposed to in the past, along with test-induced “psychological factors.”

     I want to point out how closely test scores are associated with intelligence in our common thinking. Obviously, we reason, one scores an A on a Real Analysis test because they’re really smart. Man, those smart kids at MIT are faced with some of the most brutal exams in the country. But I got an easy question wrong on my 8.02 midterm, so I must be pretty stupid – or at least not destined for Physics. Such words and notions are thrown around so casually.

     With that said, I also want to show you exactly what happens when a test is perceived to be “diagnostic” of a negatively stereotyped person’s intelligence:

     See the graphs for more details.

     An off-duty cop shot my brother inside a hospital. I want to know why.

     Alan had just moved to Houston [from McAllen, Tx.] a few days prior to the shooting. Wednesday night, he got on the phone with my father and my younger brother Dominick and expressed a lot of concern, saying, “Hey I’m concerned. I’m feeling very anxious. I’m not feeling good. I think I need to go to the hospital. I’m not sure.”

     He said he wanted us to walk him through this, that he wanted treatment, and we stayed on the phone with him and we tried to talk him through. At some point we lost contact with him on the phone, and he decided that he was going to drive himself to the hospital in the midst of what was likely a break with reality, and an acute mental-health crisis. This had happened once before.

     This is late Wednesday night. He drives himself to the hospital and somehow, in the midst of very extreme circumstances, he arrives at the hospital in such a rush that he crashes into multiple cars and wrecks his car outside the emergency department. He’s taken into the hospital, and we receive a phone call saying, “Hey, your son is at the hospital,” and everyone in the family mobilizes and says, “Okay, we’re going to Houston to figure this thing out. Thank God he’s okay from this car accident, and hopefully they’re treating him for his mental-health crisis.”

     Alan is there overnight, and I think he is formally admitted into the hospital around 4 a.m., 5 a.m. (Some of these details aren’t clear, we’re waiting on the medical records.) He gets admitted into the hospital as a patient on the eighth floor. My parents fly in from McAllen, Tx. to Houston around 9 a.m. or so, and they go to the hospital. They speak with Alan. They speak with numerous hospital personnel and they say: “Alan is experiencing symptoms that we know are indicative of an acute mental-health crisis. This happened [before] in 2009. We know, we’re very worried, and we want to speak to a physician or someone who can get him something to calm him down and to treat this.”

     All of my parents’ concerns are dismissed.

     This is not much time before the shooting. Meantime I’m texting back and forth with them, planning how we’re gonna go ahead. If this hospital is not gonna treat him, we’re gonna have to transfer him. We’re looking for a potential inpatient mental-health facility.

     My parents get a call from the hospital just prior to the shooting. They say, “Hey, we’re ready to discharge Alan, he’s ready to go.” My parents say the same thing they’ve been saying the whole time. “Listen, we’ve seen this once before, we don’t want him to be discharged. Please give us references for another facility.” And the hospital staff says, “Yeah, just come in, he’s ready to go.” At some point someone says “he’s playing games” to my mother. That’s a quote.

     So my parents start walking over from the hotel to the hospital, and at some point from this short walk from the hotel to the hospital, this situation occurs.

     Somebody calls security. These two off-duty police officers encounter my brother, and he gets shot.

     By the time my parents get there, it’s only a little bit after the shooting at this point. They get there and they see police cars. They hear from other patients, “We think someone was shot here.” And they go up and they ask where Alan is, is he still in the hospital, is he doing okay, and somebody from the hospital says, “He’s here, but he’s not on the eighth floor, he’s in the intensive care unit now.” And my dad says: “Excuse me? The ICU? You just told me to come pick him up and discharge him.” So the hospital staff tells him to wait tight.

     Some time passes, at least an hour, maybe more, before somebody communicates to my parents that Alan’s been shot.

     No, it doesn’t get any better from there. Not at all. Seriously, did no one listen to his parents? To him? Another person who should. not. be. shot. Who should instead be receiving proper treatment for his mental health at a professional facility and looking forward to getting better. I sure am glad he’s alive, though. And recovering.
     I blame the hospital as much as I blame the security guard.
     Note this:

     Police come out and repeat the same story, and my father notes that throughout his interaction with these officers they repeatedly ask whether Alan has a criminal record or violent history. And my dad says “No, no. He doesn’t have a violent history. He doesn’t have a criminal record. I told you guys this was a situation that needed to be controlled. I said he needed help. No one listened to me.”

     Fuckers.

     What a Kanye Presidency Would Look Like, five vignettes that are apparently humourous in their representation of Kanye’s impending presidency.

     The Life And Death Of Influential Black Panther Fred Hampton

     The Black Panther party sprung up in 1966 as a response to the police violence black Americans faced in Oakland, Calif. As the party grew to different cities across the country, one organizer rose up the ranks as a proponent for solidarity across racial boundaries.

     His name was Fred Hampton and he quickly became an influential member and deputy chair of the Illinois chapter. He was later described as the Panthers’ “main voice for racial unity” and this recognition is noted in a new documentary, “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. In a HuffPost Live conversation on Tuesday, the documentary’s filmmaker Stanley Nelson Jr. remembered Hampton’s unique brand of revolutionary thinking.

     “He came out of the traditional civil rights movement. He had been the leader of the NAACP youth organization,” he told host Zerlina Maxwell. “He was trying to unite different groups in Chicago. So he was trying to unite poor white people, he was trying to unite Latinos, and he was being successful. They were uniting with the Panthers.”

     At just 21-years-old Hampton’s life was cut short during a police shootout on the west side of Chicago in 1969 — a raid some believe was a “pretext for killing” the young leader. According to Nelson, Hampton and the larger Black Panthers organization had drawn the ire of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who sought to suppress the party through COINTELPRO.

     “J. Edgar Hoover … looked at it as his charge to keep the status quo and he felt that any change was wrong. And so that’s what he was trying to do,” Nelson said. “Now I don’t think that was his charge, necessarily, from the president, but J. Edgar Hoover really operated autonomously from everyone else and did what he wanted to do.”

     Read on at the link.
     Huffington Post, on twitter, presented it as ‘the Black Panther you never knew about’ (I paraphrase). I mean, if you’ve never heard of Fred Hampton before, then… I dunno.

259. rq says

     4 September 2015 at 2:08 pm

     New London Prosecutor: Police Used “Appropriate” Force On Prisoner Who Later Died

     Police were justified in their use of force last year on a violent prisoner who later died, New London County’s top prosecutor has determined.

     Michael L. Regan, New London State’s Attorney, concluded that the officers did not use deadly force on Lashano Gilbert, 30, and that their use of physical force was appropriate. Gilbert died after being sprayed with a pepper-based spray and shot with a Taser.

     Oh okay!

     Low-Income Workers See Biggest Drop in Paychecks – guess who will be disproportionately affected!

     Despite steady gains in hiring, a falling unemployment rate and other signs of an improving economy, take-home pay for many American workers has effectively fallen since the economic recovery began in 2009, according to a new study by an advocacy group that is to be released on Thursday.

     The declines were greatest for the lowest-paid workers in sectors where hiring has been strong — home health care, food preparation and retailing — even though wages were already below average to begin with in those service industries.

     “Stagnant wages are a problem for everyone at this point, but the imbalance in the economy has become more pronounced since the recession,” said Irene Tung, a senior policy researcher at the National Employment Law Project and co-author of the study.

     Keep reading at the link.

     Man who allegedly terrorized African-American campers faces criminal charges

     Pictures and videos provided to ABC10 by Allen show young children playing in the lake and dancing to hip hop music at the group campsite, and she said family members ignored some racially intolerant remarks they heard from an adjacent campsite.

     “When you’re African-American, you have to do that sometimes to move forward,” she said.

     But on Saturday evening, the adjacent campers became increasingly belligerent, Allen said, apparently led by a man who arrived late in the day. She said after the family reported the campers’ conduct to campground management, the supposed ringleader turned violent and charged the family reunion campsite with what they thought was a shotgun.

     “All you could hear was ‘I’m going to kill you f’ing N’s’,” Allen said. “The guys in our campsite told us to run.”

     Allen’s 66-year-old mother tripped and fell while trying to escape and a photo provided by the family shows a gash on her face. In the dark, Allen’s fiance recorded the confrontation and male members of the family can be heard trying to de-escalate the situation.

     “We’ve got kids screaming ‘are we going to die? Why don’t they like us?'” Allen said.

     Allen said the supposed ringleader tried to leave the campground when he heard sirens coming, but campground management blocked the exit.

     Responding deputies questioned the man but found no weapon and released him pending further investigation.

     At least he’s facing criminal charges now. I hope they stick, and stick good!

     Here’s the Conservative Playbook for Tearing Down Black Lives Matter – we saw the NY Times support earlier in this thread. Here’s basically the same info in different words.

     In the wake of last Friday’s murder of a Harris County, Texas, police deputy, Fox News pundits have bent over backward to find a way to connect the killing to the Black Lives Matter movement. A guest on the Fox talk show The Five on Monday called the movement a “criminal organization,” and several hosts, including Bill O’Reilly, described it as a “hate group.”

     Harris County law enforcement officials have yet to determine a motive for the shooting, and suspect Shannon Miles had been found mentally incompetent to stand trial on a felony assault charge in 2012. But that hasn’t stopped Fox News from showing a recent clip of protesters at the Minnesota State Fair chanting, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon,” as pundits discussed the Texas killing, or from running inflammatory on-screen banners that read “Murder Movement” and “Black Lives Matter Taunts Cop Killings.”

     But this is not a new tactic from the right. Conservatives have long attempted to discredit black social movements by casting them as criminal. In fact, the law-and-order rhetoric they’ve espoused since the civil rights movement was invented to do just that.
     […]

     Conservative politicians, pundits, and voters continued using this language to rail against the Black Power movement in the 1970s and tie organizations like the Black Panther Party to neighborhood crime and increased drug use. They pointed to the ongoing race riots and the increase in urban crime that accompanied the migration of black Southerners to Northern cities during that period, as evidence that the Panthers’ philosophy of armed self-defense was contributing to violence and criminal activity. Nixon declared the war on drugs in 1971, prior to the explosion of the drug trade mid-decade, in a tough-on-crime move that functioned as a crackdown on the black people and communities that were supposedly “causing” crime, and the philosophy of racial equality that had contributed to it. (And similarly coded language was used to justify criminal-justice policies that targeted black communities and produced the nation’s mass incarceration crisis in the late 1980s and 1990s.)

     Now Fox News has targeted the Black Lives Matter movement in the same way. The movement is calling for an end to violence, and its national voices have condemned violence against the police on numerous occasions. But the right insists it is to blame for murders of police officers. The number of peaceful protests dwarfs the number that have seen looting and property destruction, but conservative pundits insist Black Lives Matter protesters are “thugs” and that the movement’s rhetoric encourages violence. Just as they sought to discredit the movement to upset the Jim Crow social order, these right-wing voices now seek to discredit the movement to upend the current system of racist policing.

     Murders of police aren’t the fault of the Black Lives Matter movement. But don’t expect to hear that on Fox News anytime soon.

     In other words, just a lot of hate.

     Ferguson police say they don’t have video from protester’s arrest – though the protestor was livestreaming, they don’t seem to have the footage…

     They were arguing about evidence, specifically the video from a police officer’s body camera recorded during De Mian’s February arrest.

     “If we have it, I’m going to get it to you,” Ferguson Prosecuting Attorney Stephanie Karr told De Mian’s lawyer last week. “I just don’t know if we have it.”

     On Thursday, in response to a records request for video from the body camera worn by the officer who arrested De Mian, the city released a statement from police saying the department has no video from that night.

     City officials have declined to explain what may have happened to the recording.

     In Ferguson’s version of events, De Mian, who is charged with assault, blinded an officer with a light on her phone and then struck him with it when he tried to push it away, cutting his left thumb.

     De Mian says she was the one assaulted. As police arrested several protesters, she was punched in the jaw and dumped out of her wheelchair, she said. She never saw who hit her because the person who did it approached her from behind. Her mother, who drove her to the protest, as well as other witnesses, have told her it was an officer.

     Well I know who I’m going to believe…

     Cop Fired After Indictment in Killing of Virginia Teen William Chapman, some more on Rankin. I hear rumours that it might be worth checking out the Portsmouth PD recruitment video. Apparently it ends with a grenade being lobbed into a house for no reason. Haven’t seen it yet, but would I be surprised? Not really. Goes with the attitude.

260. rq says

     4 September 2015 at 2:16 pm

     Black man arrested over a tweet, #NathanEner still free after video threatening to kill #BlackLivesMatter activists. Don’t believe Twitter?

     Partie le un: Maryland man arrested for Twitter threat to ‘kill all white people’

     Carlos Anthony Hollins, 20, allegedly shot off his racist threat to the town of La Plata on Twitter Wednesday while including the hashtag: “BlackLivesMatter.”

     “I’M NOT GONNA STAND FOR THIS NO. MORE,” Hollins, who is black, allegedly tweeted. “TONIGHT WE PURGE! KILL ALL THE WHITE PPL IN THE TOWN OF LA PLATA.”

     Hollins was arrested at his home in neighboring Waldorf, Md., about 25 miles south of Washington, D.C., and charged with threats of mass violence.

     Out of caution, La Plata’s Police Department said they’ve added extra officers to patrol the area.

     Somebody needs to review the definition of the word ‘racist’. But I continue with…
     Partie le deux: East Texas community leader, former jailer issues call to attack anti-police activists

     An East Texas community leader and former jailer posted a video rant Tuesday, encouraging viewers to attack black people with rocks, slingshots or firearms if they protest police issues, and pledging to target anti-police activists in their homes.

     Nathan Ener’s call is in reaction to the unprovoked shooting death of a Harris County sheriff’s deputy on Friday, and represents heightened national tensions over police relations with minority communities. The execution-style killing of the white deputy allegedly by a black suspect came after a year of many highly-publicized and protested killings of unarmed black men by white officers, and emotions run high on both sides today.

     On Wednesday, the Houston Police Officers Union also asked the FBI to investigate online videos promoting violence against police.
     […]

     The Texas Observer has highlighted Ener’s role as an activist in race-related issues in the East Texas town of Marshall. According to the Observer, Ener in 2014 had a tense shouting match with Houston activist Quanell X, captured on video, during a Hemphill protest by black groups over local law enforcement’s handling of a black man’s murder. Now he says he won’t allow such protests to happen again. If they do, he will lead an offensive, he said, encouraging “grandmas” and kids to buy a slingshot if they can’t use a gun.

     But he’s still free to go about his business. What could possibly be the difference?

     Students and alumni take to social media to protest Howard University, a traditionally black university.

     Their frustrations — often paired with affection and pride for the school — were both immediate and minute, longstanding and sweeping.

     They complained about the air conditioning breaking down, mold in dorms, bureaucratic run-arounds, high tuition, rats, and hassles with financial aid.

     University spokespeople and an alumni leader did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday evening.

     The university president posted a message on Twitter:

     The school has a storied history, it is anticipating its 150th anniversary in 2017, and is a leading producer of doctoral degrees for black scholars.

     It also has troubled finances.

     In recent years, staff have been laid off at the private university, which receives substantial federal funding. The school’s credit rating has taken a hit.

     Staff and students have made it clear that cuts have been felt.

     Lots of tweets with specific concerns at the link.

     Slavery Reparations Could Cost Up to $14 Trillion, According to New Calculation. Shoulda gone through with that whole 40 acres and a mule bit back when you had a chance, would’ve cost less!

     In 1865, toward the end of the Civil War, Union Army General William Tecumseh Sherman promised slaves that they’d receive 40 acres and a mule. Land was even set aside, but the promise was recanted by President Andrew Johnson. Ever since, the issue of reparations has come up many times, often fiercely debated. Although most Americans generally don’t support reparations, according to University of Connecticut researcher Thomas Craemer, it matters greatly how the question is worded, who would get reparations and in what form. For example, the idea of reparations paid in educational benefits are more popular than others, Craemer says.

     On the other hand, one of the cases often made against reparations is that it’d be impractically difficult to calculate how to fairly take and give so many years after the fact. But in a new paper, published in the journal Social Science Quarterly, Craemer makes the case that there are other examples of historical reparations paid many decades later after “damages” were incurred. He also has come up with what he says is the most economically sound estimate to date of what reparations could cost: between $5.9 trillion and $14.2 trillion.

     Craemer came up with those figures by tabulating how many hours all slaves—men, women and children—worked in the United States from when the country was officially established in 1776 until 1865, when slavery was officially abolished. He multiplied the amount of time they worked by average wage prices at the time, and then a compounding interest rate of 3 percent per year (more than making up for inflation). There is a range because the amount of time worked isn’t a hard figure.

     Previous estimates of reparations have ranged from around $36 billion to $10 trillion (in 2009 dollars), Craemer says. Those calculations mostly looked at wealth created by slaves as opposed to services provided, resulting in underestimates. Craemer believes that “the economic assumptions underlying [his method] are more sound” than those used in previous papers.

     The paper also illustrates several historical examples in which reparations were paid, many decades later, despite being initially unpopular—showing that repayment of age-old claims is not without precedent.
     […]

     “I grew up with this guilt complex about the Holocaust, and I remember kind of feeling good that my country paid reparations,” Craemer says. When the policy was first put forward, there was a lot of resistance, he says. He sees some parallels with slavery reparations in the U.S., and thinks that such a move has the potential to help race relations.

     “Reparations will never bring one life back, and it’s totally inadequate to the terror of the [past], but having a meaningful symbol of reparations is a good thing, not just for recipients but for the people who provide it,” he says.

     Both Craemer and Westley point out that the number is just an estimate and not set in stone.

     “To me the important point is not the number, but the dialogue” it starts, Westley says, “a negotiation about [righting] this historical wrong.”

261. rq says

     5 September 2015 at 12:49 am

     [UPDATED] Cop says photo of him saluting at KKK rally was “taken out of context”

     [Update: According to this Vice article, Mott was working as an informant against the KKK, and was fired for fighting against police corruption.]

     Lake Arthur, Louisiana police officer Raymond Mott doesn’t deny that he went to a KKK rally and giving a salute next to a KKK member wearing a hooded robe, but he is planning to sue the city for firing him. He’s on the left in the photo above.

     Mott said his termination is illegal and that he has an explanation for the photo that cost him his job.

     The former officer said the picture is being taken out of context.

     “The picture speaks for itself,” said Mott. “I’m standing at a rally against illegal immigration. There’s not much to be said about the picture. I’ve never denied it was me.”

     It looks like Mott and the guy to the right of the white robed man are wearing some kind of uniform in the above photo. Anyone know what it is?

     The article links to the Vice piece. And you know, even if he is telling the truth, I have a hard time taking it at face value… Because cops.

     Driving while fresh: Black man pulled over by Rhode Island cop for air freshener dangling from mirror. It’s like a really bad joke except it’s not funny at all.

     Ignoring his questions, the officer — identified as Brian Murphy — then asks for his insurance information while speaking into the radio mounted on his shoulder.

     After handing back the paperwork, Murphy points toward the car’s windshield and says, “You can’t have this obstructing your view.”

     “Come on, are you serious?” Harris replies.

     “Yeah, I’m serious, you can’t have that there.”

     “Air fresheners? … That’s the reason you pulled me over?” Harris asks.

     “Yup,” the officer says, not giving a ticket and the returning to his cruiser.

     “You’re bored, I can tell you’re bored,” Harris said as Murphy walked away. “Have a good day, man.”

     After the video went viral, Harris and two community activists met with police authorities who explained that Murphy was watching the Harris household, on the look-out for his stepbrother, 18-year-old Justice McLaren who has an outstanding warrant for breaking into a home. A detective explained that Murphy pulled Harris over looking for McLaren, and didn’t know if he could tell him about the warrant.

     A police spokesperson called the stop “justified” based upon “the totality of the circumstances.”

     Ooooh, excuses, excuses! So now they’re watching the entire family for one guy, who obviously doesn’t come around too often, and somehow the cop didn’t see that McLaren didn’t get into the car… I have some questions.

     I love a little smackdown in the morning. O’Reilly Asks Expert If Black Lives Matter Is To Blame For Police Murders. Then Things Got Awkward. (Don’t know about awkward. Just smackdown.)

     O’Reilly: Dr. Peter Moskos, professor at John Jay College Of Criminal Justice, former police officer. Do you believe that the Black Lives Matter Crew and other radicals are igniting violence against cops?

     Moskos: I think they are making the police job tougher. I think the police can handle that. It’s always been a tough job. But no, I don’t think… There’s not a result of cops getting killed from Black Lives Matter.

     O’Reilly: Ok, so despite the provocative, “pigs in a blanket” and all of this business. And every time there is controversy about an officer shooting a black person they’re out there stirring the pot. You don’t feel like disturbed individuals watch this and act out.

     Moskos: There are fewer cops shot this year than last year. Are you willing to give Black Lives Matter credit for that? Cops shootings are down.

     O’Reilly: I know they are down. Slightly.

     Moskos: Seventeen percent.

     O’Reilly: But in August they are up.

     Moskos: August was a bad month. In July there were none. Overall they are down. I don’t see an epidemic there.

     There’s more at the link, too.

     5 Things To Tell Anyone Who Blames Black Lives Matter For Violence Against Cops. For you, O’Reilly!

     Wondering is fine, but directly accusing Black Lives Matter of promoting violence against police without any evidence is stereotyping at its finest. A black man allegedly killed a police officer, and now all black people involved in the movement are being indicted for the crime.

     Black Lives Matter is an easy target because of its high-profile media presence and its ability to galvanize. Miles is held up as a representative of a group, rather than viewed as an individual — which frequently happens when it comes to race, for better or for worse. As Shaun King wrote for The Daily Kos: “Just because this man who killed Officer Goforth was black, doesn’t make him a part of this movement any more than being white qualifies you as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.”

     The argument that the Black Lives Matter movement is driving individuals to kill cops is specious, and if someone brings it up, here are five things you can tell them.

     The five things at the link. I’d just like to highlight these two little paragraphs:

     There’s a glaring double standard here. Police officers are heavily protected by the legal system: they are authorized to use force in ways civilians are not; their excessive force cases are often investigated by members of their own department; and most people are reluctant to second-guess an officer’s decision to use force — even in courtroom settings.

     Granted, at least 41 cops have been indicted on murder or manslaughter charges this year for killing civilians in the line of duty. But a 2015 Washington Post analysis found that of the thousands of fatal shootings by police since 2005, only 54 officers have been charged. Far fewer were actually convicted.

     Bolding mine. A kind of progress – now convictions have to be up, too.

     LeBron James Is Now Helping Akron Adults Get Their GED, but no, blacks are just destroying their own communities and they don’t care!

     Earlier in the summer, The LeBron James Family Foundation announced a program that would send over 2,000 Ohio-based children to college. Now, James, in a partnership with Project Learn of Summit County, is helping out the parents and guardians of the children enrolled in the foundation’s scholastic mentorship program who don’t have high school degrees or a GED by providing them with financial and emotional support to obtain high school equivalency credentials and learn other life skills.

     In a similar though more general vein, #BlackMenLove: We Should Cheer Academic Success the Same Way We Do Sports and Entertainment. Article from July of this year.

     Can you imagine the strength of our communities if we praised academic achievements as much as we celebrate and invest in sports and entertainment? What if we saw parents dancing in the stands at debates or academic decathlons, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s ACT-SO competition, or science fairs the way they dance during games or halftime shows?

     Can you imagine a country that provides every child with an opportunity to excel in school and in life? Think of an America in which children are encouraged to have dreams and are supported by the sort of system that helps them make those dreams come true. What if we made academic success the norm for every child in America? What if we made educational excellence the norm for every black child in America?

     We can discuss the many reasons that access to opportunity for far too many children of color is predicted by zip code or genetic code. And while I steadfastly work to dismantle the systems that prohibit our children from receiving the foundational support and care they need and deserve, I also challenge us to do what we can right here and right now—that is, to love.

     Loving our children, all of them, is the first step toward supporting the learning and development that is necessary to succeed in life. Love is the foundation upon which we should build every child’s education. Love of self. Love of family and community. Love of education. Love of possibilities. Love of diversity.

     Many of our children (and adults) go through life with few affirmations. No children in America should wake up questioning whether someone will be there to value and appreciate them, to love and support them, to encourage and protect them.

     Our job is to believe in our children before they even know how to believe in themselves.

     More at the link.

262. rq says

     5 September 2015 at 8:50 am

     17 Images That Destroy the Most Common Myths About the Black Panthers

     The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense has been inactive for 40 years, but its legacy is still mired in mythology. A new documentary by longtime filmmaker Stanley Nelson, titled The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, chronicles the party’s dramatic rise and fall, putting viewers face-to-face with some uncomfortable realities that boil down to the party’s history, which is far more nuanced than most people may think.

     There are moments of the party’s history that are etched into American’s consciousness: the gun-toting standoff at the California state Capitol building, the campaign to free co-founder Huey Newton after his imprisonment on trumped-up charges, Fred Hampton’s assassination in Chicago, J. Edgar Hoover’s ultimately successful COINTELPRO campaign that destroyed the party’s membership and leaders and Newton’s often erratic, drug-fueled and abusive relationships toward women. But the party itself was often meticulous about documenting its own history, notably through the world of its longtime minister of culture, Emory Douglas, whose artwork would go on to become the aesthetic pulse of the era. (Coincidentally, the party also had its own funk band, the Lumpen).

     Art for the people: It’s through this artwork and the stories that Nelson captures that another narrative of the party’s existence emerges. It’s one that’s far more redeeming, depicting a party that was inclusive of women, stood in solidarity with other liberation movements of the era and made the eventual turn to policy over provocation, with co-founder Bobby Seale running for mayor of Oakland. If you look closely, you can also see the groundwork laid for future movements, such as Black Lives Matter, whose leaders have often been vocal about their all-inclusive approach to political and cultural transformation:

     I believe there is information on where the film will be playing to be found via a link at the link.

     One Year Later: The Evolution of a Movement, from August of this year.

     One year ago, our nation got a wake-up call.

     The death of Michael Brown on Aug. 9, 2014 was the third in a string of five police killings of unarmed black men that occurred over less than one month, including: Eric Garner (Staten Island, NYC, July 17), John Crawford (Beavercreek, Ohio, Aug. 5), Ezell Ford (Los Angeles, Aug. 11), Dante Parker (Victorville, Calif., Aug, 12). The quick succession of these videotaped police-involved deaths — and the Ferguson Police Department’s militarized response to protestors — ignited the longest civil disobedience movement in American history. The Ferguson protests have been sustained for 368 days now.

     Some thought the protests would die out after the Darren Wilson indictment decision was announced. But the movement didn’t end — because the killing didn’t end.

     The latest killing happened two days before the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s death when Christian Taylor, 19, crashed his SUV through the window of a car dealership in Arlington, Texas. Officers shot him in the course of a struggle. In fact, as I write this, there have been 601 lethal police shootings in 2015, 24 of them unarmed black men, according to an ongoing independent analysis by Washington Post: That’s an average of three unarmed black men shot dead by cops per month since January. This number does not include police shootings of black women, police killings that did not involve gunfire, or deaths while in police custody. Freddie Gray’s and Sandra Bland’s deaths are not included in the Washington Post tally.

     More at the link.

     Portsmouth Police Officer charged with murder granted $75,000 bond. Just, you know, to compare with that young man in Baltimore whose bond was set quite a bit higher for breaking a window.

     ACLU to Justice Department: Don’t give LAPD money for body cameras

     The ACLU’s 11-page letter sent to Washington, D.C., on Thursday morning was the latest in which the organization has voiced its concerns about how the Los Angeles Police Department cameras — and their footage — will be used. A key issue: The LAPD has said it doesn’t intend to make video from the cameras public unless required through a criminal or civil court proceeding.

     “We believe that the LAPD’s policy does not promote — and in fact undermines — the goals of transparency, accountability and creation of public trust that body-worn cameras should serve,” senior staff attorney Peter Bibring wrote.
     “Accordingly, we respectfully request that the Department of Justice deny LAPD’s request for funding and instead direct federal support of body-worn cameras to agencies whose police align more closely with the objectives of the program and a better promise to build public trust,” he continued.
     […]

     The ACLU has said it generally supports the use of body cameras by police but withdrew its support of the LAPD’s program over a policy that Bibring wrote “suffers from serious flaws.” The ACLU has sent the Police Commission other letters outlining its concerns, including one submitted days before the first cameras were rolled out earlier this week.

     The policy — approved by the Police Commission’s 3-1 vote in April — allows officers to review the footage before writing reports or giving statements to internal investigators. The ACLU and other critics have said that giving officers but not the public a chance to see the footage undermines the accountability the cameras are intended to bring.

     So yeah, it’s not just about the bodycams as such, but about how they are used.

     Remember all that fear-mongering the police are doing? I went looking for the uptick in murders in U.S. cities. Here’s what I found.

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     Wonkblog
     I went looking for the uptick in murders in U.S. cities. Here’s what I found.
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     By Max Ehrenfreund September 4 at 10:38 AM

     Chapel Hill police officers investigate the scene of three murders in Chapel Hill, N.C. (The News & Observer, Al Drago)

     Crime appears to be on the rise in some cities, and that has cops and ordinary people concerned. Police chiefs from around the country met last month to talk about the situation. In Washington last week, there’s concern about a spike in murders. The alarming headline “Murder Rates Rising Sharply in Many Cities” appeared on the front page of the New York Times on Tuesday morning.

     Overall, though, things haven’t changed much from the past several years, at least judging by the number of homicides committed in major cities. While the number of homicides has increased in many big cities, the increases are moderate, not more than they were a few years ago. Meanwhile, crime has declined in other cities.

     Overall, most cities are still far safer than they were two decades ago, and virtually all of that improvement has remained. That’s when the rate of violent crime began a long, steep decline nationally. Although violent crime has been decreasing overall, the general trend hasn’t been uniform. The data on crime so far this year does not show clearly that the trend toward safer streets is ending or reversing.

     The total number of homicides in 2013 and 2014 in the 10 largest cities was 1,871 and 1,889 respectively. If current trends continue, there will be 2,178 homicides in those cities this year. That number would be less than the total for 2012 (2,224) and for any previous year since at least 1985 in those 10 cities.

     “Crime and violence in most big cities in the United States are pretty much as they’ve been lately,” said Franklin Zimring, a criminologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Boy, is that good news.”

     That said, there are at least three cities where the statistics so far this year are indeed deeply worrisome. If current trends continue, Baltimore, Milwaukee and St. Louis this year stand to lose more than 20 years of progress in preventing homicide. The dotted lines in these charts represent projections of murder trends based on the percentage change between the number homicides since January and the number during the same period last year.

     More at the link.

     St. Louis Rams Partner with City to Silence “Black Lives Matter”

     While some have hypothesized that this new “stadium policy” is to prevent fans from discrediting the organization as it considers a move back to Los Angeles, The Rams organization released a statement to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in response to Thomas’ tweet explaining that the policy was enacted late last season in response to fans waving signs related to the situation in Ferguson, Missouri and that they wanted to remind fans before the start of regular season games next week.

     Twice last season, a Rams home game became a very public scene of protest. First, by fans who unfurled a large banner reading “Black Lives Matter” during a game in October, and then by players entering the field paying tribute to Mike Brown during a game in November.

     Both events occurred on national television and were condemned by St. Louis government officials and the state police union.

263. rq says

     5 September 2015 at 9:10 am

     Oh boy, that was a terrible blockquote. Sorry!

     Alabama officer kept job after proposal to murder black man and hide evidence

     A police officer in Alabama proposed murdering a black resident and creating bogus evidence to suggest the killing was in self-defence, the Guardian has learned.

     Officer Troy Middlebrooks kept his job and continues to patrol Alexander City after authorities there paid the man $35,000 to avoid being publicly sued over the incident. Middlebrooks, a veteran of the US marines, said the man “needs a god damn bullet” and allegedly referred to him as “that nigger”, after becoming frustrated that the man was not punished more harshly over a prior run-in.

     The payment was made to the black resident, Vincent Bias, after a secret recording of Middlebrooks’s remarks was played to the city’s police chiefs and the mayor. Elected city councillors said they were not consulted. A copy of the recording was obtained by the Guardian.

     More at the link.

     Whitworth Soccer Players Suspended for One Game After Posing in Blackface

     A private Christian university in Spokane says five members of the women’s soccer team were suspended from a match after an image posted on Instagram of the players posing in blackface began to circulate on social media.

     “In light of the impact that these actions have had on Whitworth and the greater Spokane community, we feel it is in the best interest of all involved to take this action at this time,” head coach, Jael Hagerott said in a statement. “While their intentions were not malicious, the outcome of their actions was painful for many in our community. We feel that this punitive response is proportional to their actions.”

     Whitworth University says the players were suspended for one game following their actions at an off campus event. The athletics department announced no further disciplinary actions will be taken against the players, although a separate investigation involving student conduct is ongoing.

     “As a Christ-centered university that believes in the value of all individuals, we are seeking to use this situation as an opportunity to educate, redeem and restore,” said Whitworth Director of Athletics Tim Demant.

     The incident upset many within and outside the Spokane community. The Spokane NAACP issued a statement opposing the practice of blackface.

     Just the one game, huh?

     We Got Berned

     A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece headlined “The Bernie Sanders Surge Appears To Be Over.” The article (and, more emphatically, the headline) argued that Sanders’s rapid ascent in the presidential primary polls had slowed or stopped in polls of New Hampshire and Iowa, at least based on the polls we were seeing at that time. Ever since then, Bernie Sanders fans have been tweeting at me — sometimes kindly, sometimes not — after every new poll that showed their candidate doing well.

     And guess what? They sorta have a point. Although his gains may not be as great as before, polls in August showed Sanders continuing to pick up support in New Hampshire (the situation in Iowa is less clear). But the fundamentals of the race haven’t changed very much. In particular, Sanders has shown little sign of winning over votes from African-Americans or Hispanics, which would limit his growth as the race moves on to more racially diverse states.
     […]

     So why do I still think Sanders is a factional candidate? He hasn’t made any inroads with non-white voters — in particular black voters, a crucial wing of the Democratic coalition and whose support was a big part of President Obama’s toppling of Clinton in the 2008 primary. Not only are African-Americans the majority of Democratic voters in the South Carolina primary (a crucial early contest), they make up somewhere between 19 percent and 24 percent of Democrats nationwide. In the past two YouGov polls, Sanders has averaged just 5 percent with black voters. Ipsos’s weekly tracking poll has him at an average of only 7 percent over the past two weeks. Fox News (the only live-interview pollster to publish results among non-white voters in July and August) had Clinton leading Sanders 62-10 among non-white Democrats in mid-July and 65-14 in mid-August. Clinton’s edge with non-whites held even as Sanders cut her overall lead from 40 percentage points to 19.

     There are other indications that Sanders is unlikely to win the nomination. He hasn’t won a single endorsement from a governor, senator or member of the U.S. House of Representatives (unlike Obama at this point in the 2008 campaign). Sanders is also well behind in the money race (again, unlike Obama). These indicators haven’t changed over the past month.

     But even if you put aside those metrics, Sanders is running into the problem that other insurgent Democrats have in past election cycles. You can win Iowa relying mostly on white liberals. You can win New Hampshire. But as Gary Hart and Bill Bradley learned, you can’t win a Democratic nomination without substantial support from African-Americans.

     More about the horrible christian advice, but I’m pretty sure the portrayal of black women as being so susceptible and made to be examples of that particular ideology is harmful, too. Box-Office Hit War Room Made Me Shake with Rage.

     Black Man Brutalized by Security Guard at Whole Foods for Trying to Buy Food. He couldn’t possibly be actually buying food, amirite??

     A black man was beaten to a bloody pulp by a security guard at an Oakland Whole Foods Thursday night after an attempt to purchase groceries led to an argument.

     An eye witness to the attack, Zoe Marks, on visit from Edinburgh, Scotland where she lectures at the University of Edinburgh, gave an eyewitness account of the assault on her Facebook, posting graphic images of the victim. She told the Oakland Tribune that she saw the argument between the cashier and the victim as he was trying to use an EBT card (a food stamp card that works like a debit card), but said that the victim wasn’t “shouting,” nor was her “violent or disruptive.” In fact, Marks said the man wasn’t a threat to anyone and that she felt “safe” until the armed security guard came and “attacked him.”

     In a Facebook status Marks described the “violent assault,” saying the guard “slammed” the victim against “concrete pillars.” He also allegedly put the man in a chokehold and “suffocated” him before throwing him on the ground unconscious. Then the guard reportedly locked the man out of the store despite the fact that he was unconscious.

     She said none of the employees called the paramedics, instead they called for backup.

     Way to go. I hope Whole Foods has a good reply to this.

     Modern-day slavery: Lies, deceit and abduction staff Thailand’s fishing industry.

264. rq says

     5 September 2015 at 9:17 am

     Oh boy, that was a terrible blockquote. Sorry!

     Alabama officer kept job after proposal to murder black man and hide evidence

     A police officer in Alabama proposed murdering a black resident and creating bogus evidence to suggest the killing was in self-defence, the Guardian has learned.

     Officer Troy Middlebrooks kept his job and continues to patrol Alexander City after authorities there paid the man $35,000 to avoid being publicly sued over the incident. Middlebrooks, a veteran of the US marines, said the man “needs a god damn bullet” and allegedly referred to him as “that n*gg*r”, after becoming frustrated that the man was not punished more harshly over a prior run-in.

     The payment was made to the black resident, Vincent Bias, after a secret recording of Middlebrooks’s remarks was played to the city’s police chiefs and the mayor. Elected city councillors said they were not consulted. A copy of the recording was obtained by the Guardian.

     More at the link.

     Whitworth Soccer Players Suspended for One Game After Posing in Blackface

     A private Christian university in Spokane says five members of the women’s soccer team were suspended from a match after an image posted on Instagram of the players posing in blackface began to circulate on social media.

     “In light of the impact that these actions have had on Whitworth and the greater Spokane community, we feel it is in the best interest of all involved to take this action at this time,” head coach, Jael Hagerott said in a statement. “While their intentions were not malicious, the outcome of their actions was painful for many in our community. We feel that this punitive response is proportional to their actions.”

     Whitworth University says the players were suspended for one game following their actions at an off campus event. The athletics department announced no further disciplinary actions will be taken against the players, although a separate investigation involving student conduct is ongoing.

     “As a Christ-centered university that believes in the value of all individuals, we are seeking to use this situation as an opportunity to educate, redeem and restore,” said Whitworth Director of Athletics Tim Demant.

     The incident upset many within and outside the Spokane community. The Spokane NAACP issued a statement opposing the practice of blackface.

     Just the one game, huh?

     We Got Berned

     A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece headlined “The Bernie Sanders Surge Appears To Be Over.” The article (and, more emphatically, the headline) argued that Sanders’s rapid ascent in the presidential primary polls had slowed or stopped in polls of New Hampshire and Iowa, at least based on the polls we were seeing at that time. Ever since then, Bernie Sanders fans have been tweeting at me — sometimes kindly, sometimes not — after every new poll that showed their candidate doing well.

     And guess what? They sorta have a point. Although his gains may not be as great as before, polls in August showed Sanders continuing to pick up support in New Hampshire (the situation in Iowa is less clear). But the fundamentals of the race haven’t changed very much. In particular, Sanders has shown little sign of winning over votes from African-Americans or Hispanics, which would limit his growth as the race moves on to more racially diverse states.
     […]

     So why do I still think Sanders is a factional candidate? He hasn’t made any inroads with non-white voters — in particular black voters, a crucial wing of the Democratic coalition and whose support was a big part of President Obama’s toppling of Clinton in the 2008 primary. Not only are African-Americans the majority of Democratic voters in the South Carolina primary (a crucial early contest), they make up somewhere between 19 percent and 24 percent of Democrats nationwide. In the past two YouGov polls, Sanders has averaged just 5 percent with black voters. Ipsos’s weekly tracking poll has him at an average of only 7 percent over the past two weeks. Fox News (the only live-interview pollster to publish results among non-white voters in July and August) had Clinton leading Sanders 62-10 among non-white Democrats in mid-July and 65-14 in mid-August. Clinton’s edge with non-whites held even as Sanders cut her overall lead from 40 percentage points to 19.

     There are other indications that Sanders is unlikely to win the nomination. He hasn’t won a single endorsement from a governor, senator or member of the U.S. House of Representatives (unlike Obama at this point in the 2008 campaign). Sanders is also well behind in the money race (again, unlike Obama). These indicators haven’t changed over the past month.

     But even if you put aside those metrics, Sanders is running into the problem that other insurgent Democrats have in past election cycles. You can win Iowa relying mostly on white liberals. You can win New Hampshire. But as Gary Hart and Bill Bradley learned, you can’t win a Democratic nomination without substantial support from African-Americans.

     More about the horrible christian advice, but I’m pretty sure the portrayal of black women as being so susceptible and made to be examples of that particular ideology is harmful, too. Box-Office Hit War Room Made Me Shake with Rage.

     Black Man Brutalized by Security Guard at Whole Foods for Trying to Buy Food. He couldn’t possibly be actually buying food, amirite??

     A black man was beaten to a bloody pulp by a security guard at an Oakland Whole Foods Thursday night after an attempt to purchase groceries led to an argument.

     An eye witness to the attack, Zoe Marks, on visit from Edinburgh, Scotland where she lectures at the University of Edinburgh, gave an eyewitness account of the assault on her Facebook, posting graphic images of the victim. She told the Oakland Tribune that she saw the argument between the cashier and the victim as he was trying to use an EBT card (a food stamp card that works like a debit card), but said that the victim wasn’t “shouting,” nor was her “violent or disruptive.” In fact, Marks said the man wasn’t a threat to anyone and that she felt “safe” until the armed security guard came and “attacked him.”

     In a Facebook status Marks described the “violent assault,” saying the guard “slammed” the victim against “concrete pillars.” He also allegedly put the man in a chokehold and “suffocated” him before throwing him on the ground unconscious. Then the guard reportedly locked the man out of the store despite the fact that he was unconscious.

     She said none of the employees called the paramedics, instead they called for backup.

     Way to go. I hope Whole Foods has a good reply to this.

     Modern-day slavery: Lies, deceit and abduction staff Thailand’s fishing industry.

265. rq says

     6 September 2015 at 7:33 am

     These folks want to celebrate their Southern Heritage… Aka colonialism, slavery and Jim Crow.
     Now I’m not sure if this is Baltimore or Minneapolis, because it seems there were several flag and anti-flag protests.
     Thankfully, most also had this: Chant: “DC Means ‘Don’t Come’ Get the Phuck Out Now!” #HateNotHeritage

     On racism and attempted diversity in publishing, Contents of Maggie Stiefvater’s Brain. Here was the issue:

     ok. Maggie, i’m just going to say it. I don’t think you’re the right person to speak on a panel about writing the other. You’re not exactly Other, nor are most of your characters. There are lots of people from marginalized groups devoted to doing this education, and their voices should be the ones talking about this. Pls think about how that erases those voices in favor of maintaining the status quo–straight white voice talking. I hope you’ll reconsider doing this particular panel.

     And here’s her response (partial):

     I assumed I was asked to be on the panel because I’m write about magic and mental illness, and magic that sometimes is a metaphor for mental illness. As someone who is tired of seeing OCD and suicide treated flippantly in novels, I’m looking forward to talking about how I’d like to see writers who don’t have personal experience with those things tackle them respectfully without making the story an Issues story.

     But I also assumed I was asked to be on the panel because I, like every writer, write about things that I don’t know firsthand. Yes, the Other can mean race. It can also mean gender. It can mean sexuality. It can also mean writing about someone in a profession that is not yours, from any economic background that is not yours, living an age you have yet to be, possessing a skill that you know nothing about, dwelling in a city or country you’ve never visited. I wrote about horses and Irish music because I knew horses and Irish music, but I remember being a reader who ripped authors a new one because they got either of those complicated elements wrong in a novel — they clearly hadn’t lived it or researched it well enough and yet they tackled it anyway. Now I’m the writer who cautiously steps into lives that I myself have not lived. Fear of getting it wrong stops every writer from going literary places they can’t say they’ve put their hands on. That fear means that a lot of writers choose the safest option: only writing stories about people who are just like them.

     This panel is about that.

     Which means it’s related to your concern. Because yes, we need racially diverse voices talking about writing racially diverse experiences — the We Need Diverse Books movement is doing some amazing things on this front. But we also need to get people like me — white bestsellers — to write racially diverse novels. As I’ve noted before, I’ve done a shitty job with it, for a lot of reasons, some my fault, some from the establishment telling me not to write about “unpopular” races. I’ve also occasionally done a shitty job talking about how I’ve done a shitty job, because it’s easy for the first reaction to be going on the defensive. I’d like to talk about that.

     In other words, she’s a white person on a panel about writing diversity as a white person rather than leaving open opporunities for actual people of colour to have their voices heard.

     A response to her being on the panel: http://halfmonstergirls.blogspot.com/2015/09/to-this-b*tch-who-was-talking-about.htmlto this b*tch who was talking about Halsey in the press the other day, Maggie what’s good? The link is a bit redacted for obvious reasons, please make appropriate corrections to reach the site.

     Warning: I have totally reverted to my fifteen year old self in this post, as you can tell by the title. I’m angry and pissed off, and will probably regret this later. Proceed with caution.

     The publishing industry, like many other industries, is filled with white saviors. Basically, we knew this already, but I was sadly reminded of it when I woke up this morning and saw that Maggie Stiefvater wrote something about why she accepted an invitation to sit on a panel about the “other.”

     I’m honestly so appalled that I’m not even sure what to say. First of all, the fact that she mentioned something about “unpopular” races is just…I can’t. That alone is full of white privilege. So basically, all other races are boring until a white person writes about us. Right?

     I have no idea how this woman has not experienced racism or anything else that comes with being a racial minority, but presumes to sit on a panel and “educate” about it. Bullshit.

     Second, she said that, even though she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, she’s qualified to sit on the panel. Right. Because, you know, there has to be a token white author up there to validate everyone else’s words. That’s what she basically is saying, right?

     Also, this is just a bunch of issues with the publishing industry in general. Publishing seems to be this super white industry, even though there are campaigns to get more diversity. The thing is, though, now that there is a call for diversity, white people (and other majorities) think it means that they can make a lot of money/get a lot of recognition if they write diverse characters.

     (Sort of like how cis actors like Eddie Redmayne portray trans characters because of the recognition they hope to get, but I digress.)

     Look, sometimes white people write good characters of color. But the idea is that we don’t want them writing all of them. We want to write our own stories. And, since YA has this weird thing where they fixate on about five authors for ten years at a time, I have a feeling this is what will happen:

     Say John Green decides to write a book about a black kid. The kid is well written, I guess, but there are black authors writing black kids from their actual experience. John Green gets film adaptations and awards and NYT spots.

     Black authors sometimes don’t even get agents.

     There’s more at the link, but please read it there.

     Whole Foods’ security guard is fired after ‘slamming a customer into concrete pillars before choking him unconscious in bloody attack when he tried to pay with food stamps’. I hope they write a warning about him, or give him a bad reference. Anything that keeps him from getting another job as a security guard. And I hope he faces charges, too.

     White woman accidentally impregnated with black man’s sperm loses legal battle

     A white woman who sued after she was accidentally impregnated with the sperm of an African American man will be forced to refile the lawsuit after an Illinois judge tossed out her claim against the sperm bank.

     Jennifer Cramblett filed suit against Midwest Sperm Bank in 2014 because she was artificially inseminated with sperm from the wrong donor and gave birth to a mixed-race daughter.

     The sperm bank apologized and refunded part of the cost to Cramblett and her partner Amanda Zinkon. But Cramblett’s suit alleged that the mistake caused her and her family stress, pain, suffering and medical expenses. And, the suit said, in Cramblett’s predominantly white community, she feared that her daughter, Payton, now 3, would grow up feeling like an “outcast.”

     But DuPage County judge Ronald Sutter threw out the lawsuit Thursday, agreeing with attorneys for the sperm bank who argued that it lacked legal merit, according to the Chicago Tribune.

     Attorneys for the sperm bank had argued that “wrongful birth” suits typically apply to cases where the child is born with a birth defect that doctors should have warned parents about; in this case, the child was healthy. Cramblett had also sought damages for a “breach of warranty.” The judge rejected both claims but said that Cramblett could refile the suit as a “negligence claim,” the Tribune reported.

     At the heart of the lawsuit was Cramblett’s claim that she was unprepared to raise an African American child and that her community and her “unconsciously insensitive” family members might not be accepting of a child of a different race.

     I don’t really know what to say. I suggest she start using her white privilege to educate her family ASAP.

266. rq says

     6 September 2015 at 7:49 am

     PZ on the confederate flag: The incredible shrinking number.

     Family Of Man Fatally Shot By Police Files Federal Lawsuit Against City. Bonus points if you can identify which man in which city before reading the article.

     Viola Davis Just Called Out Hollywood For Ignoring Dark-Skinned Women. The question is, will Hollywood listen this time?

     Ratcheting Up the Rhetoric, Charles M Blow.

     But Hickman departed from proof and protocol to deliver a dangerous, unsupported political statement.

     Hickman suggested that Goforth “was a target because he wore a uniform,” but offered no evidence of this.

     Hickman said further: “At any point when the rhetoric ramps up to the point where calculated, coldblooded assassinations of police officers happen, this rhetoric has gotten out of control. We’ve heard ‘black lives matter.’ All lives matter. Well, cops’ lives matter, too. So why don’t we just drop the qualifier and just say ‘lives matter,’ and take that to the bank.” Hickman offered no evidence that the shooting was connected to Black Lives Matter protesters.

     The Harris County district attorney, Devon Anderson, said at the same news conference: “There are a few bad apples in every profession. That does not mean that there should be open warfare declared on law enforcement.”

     Again, no evidence was offered that the killing was part of any “warfare” on law enforcement.

     When a motive is discovered, the sheriff and district attorney may well be proved right, but you don’t make statements and then hope the facts support those statements. That’s operating in the inverse.

     At this point, the “war on police” rhetoric is not only unsupported, it’s dangerous and reckless.

     On one level, one might be able to understand the overheated language from these officials. A coworker had just lost his life in a brutal fashion. Emotions were high. The loss was still raw.

     Furthermore, there was a protest over the weekend — which apparently took place after Goforth was shot — by a group of Black Lives Matter protesters at the Minnesota state fair in which some protesters were captured on video chanting, “Pigs in a blanket; fry ’em like bacon.” An organizer of that demonstration, Trahern Crews, told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that the chant was chanted in a “playful” context as they joked back and forth with an officer monitoring the march.

     That context is not at all apparent from the video. How you view this movement will inform how plausible you find the “playful” explanation. But whatever the context, I think we can all agree that at the very least, chants like that are ill advised in protests against police brutality. Many people took the chant literally, as a terrorist threat. And one can hardly blame them.
     […]

     The thing that many people have criticized the protesters for — exploiting a tragedy, rushing to judgment, putting narrative ahead of facts — was precisely what they did.

     Over the weekend, the Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro asked her guest, Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. of Milwaukee County: “Is it open season on law enforcement in this country?”

     Clarke responded, in part: “I said last December that war had been declared on the American police officer led by some high profile people, one of them coming out of the White House, and one coming out of the United States Department of Justice. And it’s open season right now. There’s no doubt about it.”

     On Sunday, Harry Houck, Jr., a CNN law enforcement analyst and retired New York Police Department detective, said on the network that “of course there’s anti-police rhetoric out there, you know, based on lies and assumptions, helping to promote the assassination of police officers out there.” He cited the chant by the Minnesota protesters, then continued, “I put them on the same — on the same line as I would the Ku Klux Klan or Black Liberation Army.”

     On Monday morning, a co-host of “Fox and Friends,” Elisabeth Hasselbeck, asked the conservative commentator Kevin Jackson:

     “Kevin, why has the Black Lives Matter movement not been classified as a hate group? How much more has to go in this direction before someone actually labels it as such?”

     The Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said on his show on Monday that Black Lives Matter was a hate group and declared: “I’m going to put them out of business.”

     There seems to be a concerted effort to defame and damage Black Lives Matter, and one has to wonder why.

     It is impossible to credibly make the case that Black Lives Matter as a movement is a hate group or that it advocates violence. Demanding police fairness, oversight and accountability isn’t the same as promoting police hatred or harm.

     I actually believe that you have to peel back the vitriol to expose the fundamental, but unarticulated truth at the core of the opposition to this movement: It centers blackness in a country that “others” blackness. It elevates blackness in a country that devalues it. It prioritizes blackness in a country that marginalizes it.

     It demands fairness from a society rife with — and built on! — inequity. It forces America to confront its flaws rather than wishing them away. It drags the racial caste system this country created out of the shadows and into the light.

     Black Lives Matter makes America uncomfortable because it refuses to let America continue to lie to itself. It targets police brutality, but the police are simply agents of the state and the state is representative of the totality of America.

     Discomfort with Black Lives Matter, is, on some level and to some degree, a discomfort with blackness itself. It’s not only about the merits of individual cases, it is also about the collective, ingrained sins of the system committed disproportionately, and by design, against people of color. The movement convicts this country of its crimes.

     America has been engaged since its inception in a most gruesome enterprise: Like the mythological Cronus, it has been eating its children, the darker ones, and this movement demands — at least in one area, at least in one moment — that it atone for that abomination.

     Love his writing.

     Texas officer who killed football player was hired on 3rd try. One wonders how he managed to be hired at all.

     Brad Miller applied to the department in 2011 but wasn’t hired before his application expired a year later. He applied again but failed his medical examination and was told not to reapply for six months. Miller followed a fitness regime, applied exactly six months later and was accepted as a 48-year-old recruit.

     Funny that it’s comforting to know that he was not hired due to health reasons, rather than anything behavioural. Still, though…

     Attorney, NAACP skeptical of state’s attorney’s report on New London in-custody death. One can understand why.

     A day after the state’s attorney ruled that New London police used appropriate force against a man who died in police custody, the state and local branches of the NAACP are calling for an independent investigation and the attorney for the deceased man’s family said he will continue to pursue a civil lawsuit.

     Lashano Gilbert, 31, a native of the Bahamas, died Oct. 4, 2014, following a violent struggle with police after escaping from a holding cell at the New London Police Department.

     It took several officers and use of a Taser twice to subdue Gilbert. Police released video of the incident on Thursday.

     The attorney for his family, Jamaal Johnson of Hartford, questioned the legitimacy of an investigation conducted by a state’s attorney in the same judicial district of the police department.

     He said he also was concerned about the hospital’s and police department’s handling of Gilbert considering his “obviously altered mental state.”

     “I viewed the video. I think it clearly shows Lashano at the time was going through some mental health issues,” Johnson said.

267. rq says

     6 September 2015 at 8:02 am

     2015 may be one of the safest years for law enforcement in a quarter century. Some numbers and stats to put before those who insist that policing is more dangerous than ever.

     Black couple uses housing law to sue over slurs, threats. May they win.

     Citing a sliver of civil rights-era legislation more commonly used as protection against discriminatory landlords, a black couple is suing their former neighbor and a north Georgia city they say failed to stop him from harassing them.
     […]

     Roy Turner Jr., the white neighbor who worked for the city’s solid waste department, verbally assaulted them whenever he saw them outside, including sometimes while he was working, the couple contends. He also sometimes walked and made sounds like an ape when he saw them, the Bonds family asserts in a lawsuit filed last month against Turner and the city.

     Turner told The Associated Press he wasn’t aware of the lawsuit but that he never threatened anyone.

     “I said ‘porch monkey,'” he said with a chuckle. “That’s just a joking-around term.”

     Gainesville Mayor Danny Dunagan said he couldn’t comment on pending litigation.

     The lawsuit details more than a dozen specific instances of alleged harassment. Gregory Bonds said the final straw came in May: The family had company and Turner came out into his yard with a baseball bat and began hitting a tree aggressively and yelling more slurs. The family moved the next month.

     They cite a provision of the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 and a nearly identical section of Georgia law that says it’s illegal to coerce, intimidate, threaten or interfere with someone who is exercising or enjoying any right guaranteed by that law. Conceived to protect against violent actions such as cross burnings, bombs or other physical attacks, it also applies to verbal attacks, said Robert Schwemm, a law professor at the University of Kentucky who has decades of experience with the Fair Housing Act.

     “It’s specifically a separate section of the statute that was designed to apply to people who were not housing providers — neighbors and others,” Schwemm said.

     May. They. Win.
     White people have got to learn that there will be consequences for such blatant intolerance, and black families and those of other minority groups must be encouraged to make sure those consequences are felt. Precedents, please. Lots of them.

     Oakland Cops Investigate Guard’s Reported Attack on Whole Foods Shopper. The man got fired, but I hope the investigation comes up with charges and a trial and a conviction of assault. And, of course, actual consequences.

     Black Disabled Veteran’s Home Vandalized with Racial Threats of Violence. I think I had this as a twitter picture before, here’s more information.

     A disabled black veteran’s Clearwater, Florida home was recently targeted with racial threats of violence.

     Sergeant Wayne Scott is a retired and disabled veteran who proudly served his country for 17.5 years. When Sgt. Scott’s official enlistment period was over, he reenlisted as a member of the reserves. After his reenlistment, Sgt. Scott was activated and sent to Iraq in 2003, where he was injured by a roadside bomb and endured years of painful rehabilitation therapy.

     For Sgt. Scott’s admirable service, neighbors spray painted a hateful, racist message on his family’s home when he and his wife went out of state to visit his elderly mother and other family members. How patriotic. The message read (note the misspellings):

     “DUMB NIGER
     BLACK LIVES
     MATTTER FOR
     TARGET PRACTICE”

     Sgt. Wayne Scott and his wife Marilyn were kind enough to take some time out of their vacation to speak to Anti-Media about this incident.

     Never mind, I remember those typos, had an article – but this one has an interview with the resident family itself. I mean, more of one.

     Sydney Pollack’s ‘Amazing Grace’: The Tortured 4-Decade History of the Film Aretha Franklin Wants to Stop. There’s a lot to read in there, but honestly, it’s a bunch of white men (or at least, mostly white men) trying to overrule a black woman. I understand them wanting to complete the film and to fulfill the original director’s dream and all that, but seriously, the subject of the film is a woman, a black woman, who is a real person and human being, and she has a right to refuse. It’s so callous and insensitive of them not to realize both the sexist and racist overtones of what they are doing here. Absolutely despicable.

268. photoreceptor says

     6 September 2015 at 5:46 pm

     Been here a few times before, but I am an infrequent poster. I haven’t read many (most) of the replies but I wonder is there anything special about racism in America, I mean as compared to racism period? I guess each country has it’s own historical, economical and ethnic factors that influence how the different populations relate to each other, but I would see the problem as basic mistrust of other groups, the dark flipside of group identity. The systemic racism that is so pervasive today has accompanied your society throughout its evolution, just as it has in other societies. But how does one do anything to address the problem and eventually cure the disease? Equal education at an early age has worked pretty well in the UK, which has absorbed large numbers of people from the former colonial territories. Teachers in primary schools have to deal with kids coming from a trillion cultural backgrounds. It certainly didn’t work overnight, and there are still many problems, but it’s going in the right direction.
     Actually, not meaning to be argumentative, but the term “racism in America” is itself a bit – ahem, racist – since I presume Tony and rq mean “racism in the USA”, not in Central and South America. People in South America consider themselves the true “Americans”.

269. rq says

     7 September 2015 at 3:13 am

     Actually, not meaning to be argumentative, but the term “racism in America” is itself a bit – ahem, racist – since I presume Tony and rq mean “racism in the USA”, not in Central and South America. People in South America consider themselves the true “Americans”.

     1) It’s PZ’s title, not mine or Tony’s;
     2) See comment #79 for clarification on that ‘America’ bit (there’s a bolded bit that might interest you).

     Remember, this is a US-based blog with many US-based followers and therefore the focus will be US-based racism, even in a thread labelled ‘America’ since – surprise! – that’s a globally-recognized and accepted (though without doubt problematic) shorthand term for the United States of America. If you want to make the title more practically inclusive, go ahead and post examples of racism from Central and South America, too (conveniently omitting Canada from this list of non-USAmerican countries, I see – Canada is American, too!). That would be a great expansion on the current focus.

270. rq says

     7 September 2015 at 6:21 am

     State attorney declares Jacksonville police shooting justifiable, but family says it still has issues with evidence

     A lack of DNA on evidence at the scene and why the officers felt threatened by an unarmed man who had run to the bottom of a stairwell are points of confusion for the family after the meeting. They also have questions about the trajectory of the bullets and where they entered the body.

     “I would imagine there is a lawsuit coming,” said Eric Block, the family’s attorney.

     Block met with the media Friday after the family’s meeting at the Duval County Courthouse.

     He said the family is happy the people of Jacksonville have shown restraint in avoiding violent protests over the shooting because that’s not what D’Angelo Reyes Stallworth would have wanted.

     A few interesting points about the evidence are presented in the article.

     Confederates Cry Victim at D.C. March. The Daily Beast, apparently, has a category labelled “Tiniest Violin”.

     This Saturday, a quiet Labor Day weekend in Washington, D.C., became the sad center of that movement, as it hosted possible the feeblest pro-Confederate flag rally ever at the Upper Senate Park at 11 a.m. According to the event page that was set up for the demonstration, 1,400 people were planning to attend. As it turned out, roughly 75 people made it. People came all the way from Tennessee, Indiana, and Virginia. Of the 75, three of them were “security” guards wearing awkwardly fitting black suits.

     The only thing these Confederate flag enthusiasts truly did right was get a permit for their demonstration. This (almost) protected them from the nearly 200 counter-protesters who showed up with speakers, tubas, colorful signs, and infinitely more energy. D.C. law enforcement officials set up a barrier of about 100 yards using themselves as a fence between the “we’re not racist” Confederate flag demonstration and the counter-protesters.

     “I’m sick and tired of people lying about that flag and lying about us,” exclaimed Ginny Meerman, of Maryland. “I’m sick and tired of people lying about the Confederacy. We’re not racist. We’re not haters. They [pointing to counter-protesters] are the racists. They are the haters.”

     She also added, “There are black Confederates. I have black family members that are Confederates. What does skin color have to do with Confederacy?”

     During her speech, she referred to the larger group of people counter protesting “these goings on like this over here dills my pickle. I mean. I am restraining myself because I am a Southern belle. But bless their little hearts if I got a hold of them in a quiet alley somewhere.”

     Crowd laughs.
     […]

     Asked about Black Lives Matter:

     “Black Lives Matters is all racist. It’s all the thug life, the Bloods, the Crips, the Black Panthers—they’ve all joined [Louis] Farrakhann. They want to take down the American flag, they want to kill white people, they want to shoot cops in the back.”

     The Daily Beast reached out to Deray McKesson, seen by many as a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, to see what he had to say about this sentiment:

     “There is a tradition in this America of attempting to discredit those committed to civil rights work,” he said. “These unfounded attacks on the movement often come from those invested in and who benefit from sustaining a status quo predicated on the subjugation of black people and other people of color.”

     Despite his obsession with the Confederacy, Ron lacked knowledge about the fact that Robert E. Lee didn’t have any flags at his funeral. Ron also claimed that Barack Obama is petitioning Congress to change the 22nd Amendment so that he can get a third term.

     The speeches were long, dull, often repetitive and very dry. Each speaker got 15 minutes. One speaker was dressed up as an actual Civil War soldier. Some spice came when a speaker came to the podium and got the crowd to do a “rebel yell.”
     […]

     The Confederates were trapped with no safe way out. Police officials could be seen communicating with the Confederate leaders and decided that they would surround and escort the Confederates to Union Station, where a bus was waiting for them.

     Aand that’s how that ended.

     Cops Demand NFL Star Apologize for Speaking Out After Police Pulled a Gun and Illegally Searched Him

     Former NFL player Lamar Lathon had his car illegally searched and had a gun pointed at him by a police officer because he reached for his license during a traffic stop. Lathon got pulled over after midnight on September 1 for going 15 miles per hour over the speed limit while he was passing a vehicle in another lane. He was going 65 in a 50 mile per hour zone in the middle of the night when there was hardly anyone else on the road.

     The officer who pulled him over became aggressive and pulled his gun out when Lathon reached under his seat to grab his license. After running his information, the officer demanded to search his vehicle because he suspected him of having a gun. Lathon plainly refused the search multiple times, but the officer called for backup and searched the vehicle anyway. There was no gun or anything else illegal in the vehicle and eventually the police let him go after wasting his time.

     Days later, the Pearland Police Department released the dashcam video, bafflingly insisting that Lathon’s version of events is a fabrication. The video shows clearly that the police officer pointed a gun at him, searched his car illegally and found absolutely nothing, proving that the accusations of him having a gun were false.

     The Pearland Police Department issued a press release this week defending the officer, and calling Lathon a liar, even though the video confirms his story. In the statement the department said:

     Based on review of the video footage, it is the position of the Pearland Police Department that the response of the officers involved in this traffic stop was professional and within both the law and policies of this agency. The primary officer was tactically aware, maintained control of the scene and attempted to de-escalate a volatile situation brought on by a driver who refused to follow directions and whose primary complaint seemed to be the issuance of a citation.

     The local police union is going a step further and demanding that Lathon apologize for lying when he was telling the truth all along.

     The local police association, as per the article, really does have one of the most nauseating statements ever.

     Here’s What It’s Like Inside A Pro-Confederate Flag Rally. Is it going to be all about heritage? Is it? Is it?

     In interviews with ThinkProgress, members of the small crowd said they wanted the U.S. government to hear their messages: preserve Confederate symbols, and squash the Black Lives Matter movement.

     “This Black Lives Matter bull is racism that the government don’t see. It’s white genocide propaganda. They’re pushing folks to shoot cops and white people,” said Ron Feathers from Elliston, Virginia. Behind him, the crowd waved flags, let out “rebel yells,” and showed off their Confederate tattoos and belt buckles.

     Looking across the park at a cluster of anti-Confederate protesters — who far outnumbered his own group — Feathers added: “If Robert E. Lee was alive today, this shit wouldn’t be going on. That’s when we had a true American in office.”

     Feathers, a self-identified Democrat who believes President Obama is planning to declare martial law and “rule the whole world,” said he’s been organizing “flag rollings” across Virginia — where people drive together with Confederate symbols on their cars — to push back against those he feels are “taking [his] history away.”

     Unprompted, Feathers offered his thoughts about why “colored people in general” have a “ghetto lifestyle.”

     “It’s because their daddies ain’t in the picture. All these kids are latchkey kids. They’re not being taught the right way. And they only do things in groups. They’ve got so much hatred.”

     When DC artist and activist Sima Lee — who is black and indigenous — approached Feathers and yelled at him to get the Confederate flag out of her city, he repeatedly called her “babe” and told her, “Go back to that side where you belong.”

     There’s more at the link, but as an example of the love and welcome these people have for everyone in the country, this is a fiine example.
     And these are democrats, folks. And another quick example:

     “I brought my sweet tea and my signs and I’m here to say that hate may be our heritage, but it doesn’t have to be our legacy,” she said. “It’s important for white people to stand up to other white people and teach what it means to be anti-racist.”

     Umm, okay, then maybe don’t promote the confederate flag, because that one indeed has a rather harsh legacy of hate…? I’ll take the sweet tea, though.
     Unless that’s a euphemism for something else.
     Not also the frequent statements that Black Lives Matter is racist, probably the most racist of them all.

     Ex-Worker podcast #40: Struggles Against White Supremacy and Police Since Ferguson, with audio.

     It’s been a year since rage over Michael Brown’s murder catalyzed an anti-racist and anti-police rebellion that spread from Ferguson around the country. How can anarchists interpret the trajectory of the struggles against white supremacy that have unfolded over the last year? In Episode 40, we discuss the current state of police violence and both institutional and autonomous white supremacy, alongside an analysis of how anti-racist and anti-police resistance developed from Ferguson to Baltimore to South Carolina. A listener weighs in on the risks of militarism, from the Iron Column in the Spanish Civil War to the militias in Rojava today. Comrades from Korea share updates on state repression and issue an exciting call for international solidarity, and Clara and Alanis discuss the politics of the term “terrorism” and how to undertake assertive resistance to state repression without resorting to sports metaphors. {September 3rd, 2015}

     There is also a link to the transcript after this descriptive blurb.

     Cop Who Leaked Video of Fellow Police Beating Innocent Man Facing 7 Years in Prison. You may ask what for:

     Sergeant Rick Flori is being threatened with seven years in prison after the leaked video surveillance footage was released, which clearly showed his fellow officers beating a young father named Noa Begic.

     Begic was handcuffed in the Surfers Paradise Police Station basement during the entire ordeal. There was simply no way the officers could get away with claiming self-defense on this one…at least not once the video was released. That’s why they hoped it never would be.

     Officers for the Gold Coast, Australia Police Department had expected Sergeant Flori to be like the rest of them and cover up the police brutality. But instead, Flori took a stand – and now they are trying to lock him up for it.

     Flori leaked the footage to the Brisbane Courier-Mail. For this “crime” he was charged with “misconduct in public office.”

     The footage he revealed was taken in 2012, and it clearly shows police officers slamming Begic’s face into the concrete floor. They then shove him in the back of a van and punch him over and over while he is cuffed and being held down.

     Almost as disturbing is the routine way that the video shows Begic’s blood being washed away by a senior-sergeant after the incident is over.

     So his misconduct in public office is worth not gratitude or mild congratulations for exposing the kinds of officers one (presumably) does not wish to see on the police force, but seven years in prison… You rock, Australia.

271. rq says

     7 September 2015 at 6:34 am

     ‘Black characters are still revolutionary’: writers talk about the complexity of race

     I grew up with African American literature. My parents hustled and jived to the poetry of Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni, and my grandparents were captivated by the astuteness of James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. I absorbed all of it.

     These black literary giants drove the social commentary of their day, using their creative works as the vehicle. It’s not by accident that their writing is considered to be major work of American literature: their characters are trapped by the racist atmosphere in which they live, a context specific to the US.

     Yet despite feeling empowered by these books, I often wonder if literature written by black authors, in order to be considered successful or even “good”, must address the social ills of the day. As black writers, are we bound to the race narrative? Many prominent thinkers in black literary criticism think so.

     In fact, it’s commonly believed that “good” writing by black authors is birthed from oppression, and marginalization is viewed as a key marker for black literature. This implies a direct link between the authenticity of the literature and the sociological and political perspectives of African Americans. [I can see the argument now: How will they write good books if they’re not oppressed anymore?]

     After all, the recent evidence of police brutality and racial injustice against black people, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement, is likely one of the many reasons why Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me sits comfortably on the New York Times bestseller list.

     Is success defined only by whether black writers write about race? Or, is there room for a diversity of stories that don’t necessarily align with race issues?

     I reached out to three prominent black writers to share their thoughts.

     Three revealing opinions at the link.

     No, Police Defenders, There Is No ‘War on Cops’. Let’s hear it, once more, with feeling.

     First—and most importantly—there is no “war on cops,” if the term suggests increasingly brazen and numerous open “executions” of police officers. The National Law Enforcement Officers Fund, which tracks police deaths, finds that the number of police killed in assaults so far this year is 25, the same as last year. The FBI says that while the number of cops “feloniously killed” each year has fluctuated over the past decade, “it stands at about 50.” As my Reason colleague Ed Krayewski writes, “In 2007, there were 67 cops shot and killed in the line of duty. In 2007 there was no ‘national conversation’ about police reform, no sustained focus on criminal justice reform, nothing in the national zeitgeist that would suggest the number of murders were the result of anything more than the number of people who had killed cops that year.”

     Second, to the extent that there is serious discussion about reforming criminal justice practices, it is driven by highly publicized cases of overreaction or brutality by law enforcement that is increasingly visible due to smart phone cameras and social media. The 2011 case of Kelly Thomas, a 37-year-old schizophrenic drifter beaten to death by Fullerton, California, police, perfectly illustrates the real “new world” faced by police. It was only after Thomas’s father took gruesome pictures of his comatose son’s severely battered body and face and shared them via social media that public pressure grew for a full investigation and trial.

     In the past year alone, high-profile events in Ferguson, Staten Island, Troy, Ohio and elsewhere have sparked a nationwide movement to rethink not just policing strategies but also the ways in which race factors into law enforcement and how local governments abuse their power to levy fines and fees on their poorest residents. The rising use of body cameras all over the country isn’t being done to document a “war on cops” but to promote essential peace and trust between citizens and police.

     10 Insidious Ways White Supremacy Shows Up in Our Everyday Lives – only 10 of them, mind. There’s a whole lot more out there.

     If there’s anything our fraught national dialogue on race has taught us, it’s that there are no racists in this country.

     (In fact, not only do multiple studies confirm that most white Americans generally believe racism is over – just 16% say there’s a lot of racial discrimination – it turns out that many actually believe white people experience more discrimination than black people.)

     It’s a silly idea, of course, but it’s easy to delude ourselves into thinking that inequality is a result of cultural failures, racial pathology, and a convoluted narrative involving black-on-black crime, hoodies, rap music, and people wearing their pants too low.

     To admit that racism is fundamental to who we are, that it imbues our thinking in ways we wouldn’t and couldn’t believe without the application of the scientific method, is infinitely harder. And yet, there’s endless evidence to prove it.

     For those who recognize racism is real and pervasive, it’s also comforting to believe that discrimination is something perpetuated by other people, overlooking the ways we are personally complicit in its perpetuation.

     But fruitful conversations about race require acknowledging that racism sits at the very core of our thinking. By something akin to osmosis, culturally held notions around race mold and shape the prejudices of everyone within the dominant culture.

     People of color unwittingly internalize these notions as well, despite the fact that doing so contributes to our own marginalization. Most of us know the destructive outcomes systemic racism produces (higher rates of poverty, incarceration, infant mortality, to name a few). Accepting that implicit bias is happening at every level makes it awful hard to chalk those issues up to black and brown failure.

     Here’s a look at just some of the ways our internalized biases add up to devastating consequences for lives, communities and society.

     It all starts with college professors, with nine more list items at the link.

     The Architecture of Segregation, another on the housing market and discrimination in real estate.

     Fifty years after the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development — and nearly that long after the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — the fight against the interlinked scourges of housing discrimination and racial segregation in America is far from finished. Economic isolation is actually growing worse across the country, as more and more minority families find themselves trapped in high-poverty neighborhoods without decent housing, schools or jobs, and with few avenues of escape.

     This did not happen by accident. It is a direct consequence of federal, state and local housing policies that encourage — indeed, subsidize — racial and economic segregation. Fair housing advocates have recently been encouraged by a Supreme Court decision and new federal rules they see as favorable to their cause. Even so, there will be no fundamental change without the dismantling of policies that isolate the poor and that Paul Jargowsky, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University-Camden, and others call the “architecture of segregation.”

     As things stand now, federally subsidized housing for low-income citizens, which seems on its face to be a good thing, is disproportionately built in poor areas offering no work, underperforming schools and limited opportunity. Zoning laws in newer suburbs that rest on and benefit from infrastructure built with public subsidies prevent poor, moderate-income and minority families from moving in. Discriminatory practices exclude even higher income minority citizens from some communities.

     The economic expansion of the 1990s brought wage increases and low unemployment, diluting poverty and cutting the number of people living in high-poverty neighborhoods by about 25 percent. Many policy experts believed at the time that the era of urban decay was coming to an end. But as Mr. Jargowsky observes, that’s not how things worked out. In a new analysis of census data, he finds that the number of people living in high-poverty slums, where 40 percent or more of the residents live below the poverty level, has nearly doubled since 2000.

     Meanwhile, he writes, poverty has become more concentrated: More than one in four of the black poor, nearly one in six of the Hispanic poor and one in 13 of the white poor now live in a neighborhood of extreme poverty. Impoverished families are thus doubly disadvantaged — by poverty itself and by life in areas ravaged by the social problems that flow from it.

     The Fair Housing Act was supposed to overcome these problems. But presidents in both parties declined to enforce it vigorously, and governments at all levels simply ignored it. No one knows that story better than former Vice President Walter Mondale, a co-sponsor of the act, who spoke eloquently at a fair housing conference at HUD on Tuesday.

     “When high-income black families cannot qualify for a prime loan and are steered away from white suburbs, the goals of the Fair Housing Act are not fulfilled,” he said. “When the federal and state governments will pay to build new suburban highways, streets, sewers, schools and parks, but then allow these communities to exclude affordable housing and nonwhite citizens, the goals of the Fair Housing Act are not fulfilled. When we build most new subsidized housing in poor black or Latino neighborhoods, the goals of the Fair Housing Act are not fulfilled.”

     A bit more at the link.

272. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     7 September 2015 at 1:39 pm

     photoreceptor @268:

     Been here a few times before, but I am an infrequent poster. I haven’t read many (most) of the replies but I wonder is there anything special about racism in America, I mean as compared to racism period?

     I don’t think there is anything unique about racism in the US, no.

     I guess each country has it’s own historical, economical and ethnic factors that influence how the different populations relate to each other, but I would see the problem as basic mistrust of other groups, the dark flipside of group identity. The systemic racism that is so pervasive today has accompanied your society throughout its evolution, just as it has in other societies. But how does one do anything to address the problem and eventually cure the disease?

     I don’t think there is any one way to address the problem. I think a multiplicity of techniques is the best approach. Educating people, especially at a young age is key. But it’s not the only way. For instance, I (and many others at Pharyngula) have been educated on matters of race as adults. The whittling away of racist beliefs and prejudices is something that happens gradually, and sadly at a snail’s pace, bc it happens one person at a time. This is one reason why it is imperative that the government adopts policies to protect racial minorities-precisely because the social change needed to diminish the effects of racism takes so darn long. We need mechanisms in place to protect racial minorities while we continue to engage in the time-consuming, often arduous, but extremely necessary task of educating people.

     Actually, not meaning to be argumentative, but the term “racism in America” is itself a bit – ahem, racist – since I presume Tony and rq mean “racism in the USA”, not in Central and South America. People in South America consider themselves the true “Americans”.

     1- as rq mentioned, the title of this thread is PZ’s.
     2- asserting that the title is racist doesn’t demonstrate that it is. In fact, I don’t believe it is. I think you could make a case for the title being nationalistic, but not racist. There’s nothing inherent to the title that punches down on people of other races. Plus the title doesn’t speak to one racial group dominating other racial groups.
     3- Your comments about other regions are why I adopted the phrase USAmerica. I almost always use that term when discussing the United States, whether at FB, here, or on my blog. I think it important especially in the latter two cases to be specific, bc the readership is international (not that I’m comparing my blogs traffic to Pharyngula, merely that I know many of my readers are outside the U.S.), and I personally don’t believe the United States is the most important country in the world.

     ****

     California police shootings database reveals ‘clear racial disparities’:

     Statistics published by California attorney general Kamala Harris stated that about 19% of almost 1,000 homicides by law enforcement recorded between 2005 and 2014 were against African American men, who made up only about 3% of the state’s population.

     Harris said last week that “clear racial disparities” had emerged from the figures, which also showed African Americans were arrested and died in custody at disproportionately high rates.

     “I’m deeply concerned with what the numbers show,” congresswoman Karen Bass said at a press conference, alongside Harris. “The disproportionality that the [attorney general] referred to is frightening.”

     On Wednesday, Harris unveiled a new website containing what she called a “treasure trove of data” on interactions between police and the public. The Open Justice portal includes figures regarding arrest rates, deaths in custody and officers killed or assaulted. This year, several other states have taken action to release more information.

     “Instead of designing systems based on some blind adherence to tradition, let’s apply metrics, let’s count what is happening,” Harris said. She later added: “The bottom line is, the people have a right to know what’s going on.”

     Since 2005, police and law enforcement agencies in California have been required to submit to state authorities detailed reports about deaths in custody. But the information was made accessible and searchable for the first time last week.
     […]
     According to California’s data, 984 homicides by law enforcement officers in the state were recorded between 2005 and 2014. A homicide by law enforcement staff was defined as “a death at the hands of a law enforcement officer”, including pre- and post-arrest killings.

     Within this total, 196 or 19.9% of the people killed were black. According to the state, 5.8% of the population between 2005 and 2013 was black, giving African Americans a death rate – the percentage of homicides per percentage of population – of 3.4.

     About 43.8% of people killed in police custody were Hispanic, a group that made up 37.1% of the state’s population during the last nine years, giving a death rate of 1.2.

     White people were 30.2% of those killed by police and constituted 41.1% of California’s population, meaning a death rate of 0.7.

     The figures mean black people were killed by law enforcement at almost five times the rate of white people and almost three times that of Hispanic people.

     All but six of those black people killed were males, who made up 2.9% of the population between 2005 and 2013. The death rate for black males was 6.7 – eight times higher than the 0.8 rate recorded for homicides among everyone else.

     Among men only, African Americans were killed at roughly twice the rate of Hispanics and more than four times the rate of white males.

     Since 2005, the number of homicides by law enforcement officers has fluctuated. The deadliest years were 2012 and 2013, which recorded 136 and 132 deaths, respectively, according to the data.

     Harris said the data also showed African Americans accounted for 17% of total arrests and 25% of all deaths in custody. She also said black boys were arrested at far higher rates than white boys.

     Without looking at the comments, I wonder how many people attribute the higher percentage of homicides involving black folks to a greater propensity to commit crimes…

273. rq says

     7 September 2015 at 2:37 pm

     Something I never really thought about: White People Need to Stop Snickering at Black Names. I didn’t know that was a thing?? Sure, sometimes the spelling is a bit odd to my eyes, but they’re such wonderfully interesting and beautiful names, the sound combinations… Apparently, this is something to laugh at.

     White people snicker and use the situation as the impetus for telling stories about other black names that they thought were even more outrageous.

     It’s not that we’re trying to be hateful. I don’t think we even recognize it as racist, but it is.

     We use the situation as an opportunity for bonding. THOSE people who are not like you and me – THEY name their children things like THIS! Not like you and me who name our children more respectably.

     Make no mistake. This is racist behavior. We are emphasizing the otherness of an entire group of people to put ourselves over and above them.

     It’s bigoted, discriminatory, prejudicial and just plain dumb.

     What’s wrong with black names anyway? What about them is so unacceptable?

     We act as if only European and Anglicized names are reasonable. But I don’t have to go far down my rosters to find white kids with names like Braelyn, Declyn, Jaydon, Jaxon, Gunner or Hunter. I’ve never heard white folks yucking it up over those names.

     I can’t imagine why white people even expect people of color to have the same sorts of names as we do. When you pick the label by which your child will be known, you often resort to a shared cultural history. My great-great-grandfather was David, so I’ll honor his memory by calling my firstborn son the same. Jennifer is a name that’s been in my family for generations so I’ll reconnect with that history by calling my daughter by the same name.

     Few black people in America share this same culture with white people. If a black man’s great-great-grandfather’s name was David, that might not be the name he was born with – it may have been chosen for him – forced upon him – by his slave master. It should be obvious why African Americans may be uncomfortable reconnecting with that history.

     Many modern black names are, in fact, an attempt to reconnect with the history that was stolen from them. Names like Ashanti, Imani and Kenya have African origins. Others are religious. Names like Aaliyah, Tanisha and Aisha are traditionally Muslim. Some come from other languages such as Monique, Chantal, and Andre come from French. I can’t understand why any of that is seen as worthy of ridicule.

     Still other names don’t attempt to reconnect with a lost past – they try to forge ahead and create a new future. The creativity and invention of black names is seldom recognized by White America. We pretend that creating names anew shows a lack of imagination when in reality, it shows just the opposite!
     […]

     Countless studies have shown how much more difficult it is for someone with a black sounding name to get a job, a loan or an apartment than it is for someone with a white sounding name. It’s one of the most obvious features of white supremacy. You may not like black names, personally, but do these people deserve to suffer for embracing their own culture?

     Moreover, having a European or Anglicized name is no guarantee of fair treatment. It certainly didn’t help Michael Brown or Freddie Gray.

     If we’re really going to treat people equitably, an easy place to begin is with black names. White people, stop the laughter and giggles. I used to do it, myself, until I thought about it. Yes, I’m guilty of the same thing. But I stopped. You can, too.

     It’s not the biggest thing in the world. It’s not even the most pressing thing. It’s not a matter of guilt. It’s a matter of fairness.

     Because when the final role is taken of all America’s racists and bigots, do you really want your name to be on it?

     There’s a great Kay and Peel video at the link. Though I took issue with the portrayal of the teacher as angry black man, so maybe not that great. But. It did probably show an aspect of racism that black students feel over white students, namely, for pointing out simple mistakes, they are disciplined far more quickly than their white counterparts.
     Pointless off-topic confession: Because English is my second language but I started learning it at 5 without a lot of exposure to its actual pronunciation but I was also a precocious reader, for the longest time, I actually thought that ‘Aaron’ was pronounced ‘Ay-Ay-Rawn’. Yep.

     For all you fashion lovers out there (warning: focus on women’s fashion): 8 Ethical Fashion Brands with an Artisanal Touch. I found the jewellery at list number 5 (Abury) especially striking.

     A White Supremacist Holds an Entire American City Hostage. But seriously, he’s not a threat to anyone!

     When hate first arrived in rural Leith, North Dakota, late in the summer of 2012, denizens of the sleepy farming hamlet (pop. 24) barely took notice.

     “At first I thought he was a quiet, keep-to-himself kind of guy,” recalls the town’s cowboy-mayor Ryan Schock in the documentary Welcome to Leith, an unsettling case study of one quintessentially democratic American conflict.

     Bobby Harper, Leith’s sole African-American resident, remembers a stranger in a long coat coming around the neighborhood asking about land for sale.

     Even Schock’s wife, Michelle, strolled over with a welcoming hello when that newcomer, a loner with glasses and wild silver hair, took up residency in Leith and started buying up plots of property around town.

     It wasn’t until the ugliness of the outside world started to invade Leith’s city limits that locals realized who their new neighbor really was: Craig Cobb, the notorious white supremacist leader who’d been kicked out of Estonia and Canada and now had designs on turning Leith into his own personal Aryan utopia.

     Cobb’s documented history of incendiary missives and advocacy of hate crimes against minorities had already landed him on the radar of concerned watchdog groups. When he put his plan in motion to bring fellow white supremacists to live in Leith in order to take over the town’s electoral vote and slowly establish a home base for white nationalism in the heart of North Dakota, critics and national media descended en masse to protest and bear witness.

     Yep, he got kicked out of Estonia and Canada, those liberal socialist havens for communists!
     There’s more at the link, but it’s quite disturbing.

     Fla. Teen Flees Cop Because He Does Not ‘Like White People Touching’ Him – so where’s the issue?

     A 19-year-old Florida man reportedly tried to run from an officer with the Clearwater Police Department this week when he was suspected of possessing marijuana because, well, he doesn’t like “white people touching” him and “white people do weird stuff,” according to the Smoking Gun.

     Officer Joseph May was in a gas station convenience store in Clearwater, Fla., early Tuesday morning when Taurus Jabriel Brown, whom the officer recognized as a local gang member, approached him, the report says. Brown reportedly said that he would like to become an officer one day and offered to shake the officer’s hand. As the two shook hands, the officer noticed what appeared to be a marijuana “blunt” tucked behind one of Brown’s ears and allegedly retrieved it after obtaining the youth’s permission.

     “Is this weed?” May asked, according to the report. “How stupid are you?”

     He asked Brown to place his hands behind his back, but Brown reportedly “tensed, pulled away, and attempted to run out of the front door.”

     May says in the report that he chased the teen and used a take-down method to pull him to the floor. While on the floor, the teen allegedly said: “Damn, man, all this for weed. Wow, bro, you must want to make an arrest.”

     He also allegedly said, “I’ll plead guilty, I’ll go to court and plead guilty. Please don’t take me to jail,” the report says. “Can you tell the judge I plead guilty?”

     When May asked why he tried to run, the teen allegedly replied, “I don’t like white people touching me, white people do weird stuff.”

     He allegedly then went on to say he’d just been making a joke about being touched by white people.

     He was charged with marijuana possession and with obstruction, both misdemeanors, and taken to jail.

     I suppose about a clearcut a case of reverse racism as you can get, right right, huh?

     History Professor Denies Native Genocide: Native Student Disagreed, Then Says Professor Expelled Her From Course
     Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/09/06/history-professor-denies-native-genocide-native-student-disagrees-gets-expelled-course. This shit right here is what’s holding you back, racist USAmericans.

     Johnson says when she told her U.S. History Professor Maury Wiseman that she disagreed with his assessment that Native Americans did not face genocide, the professor said she was hijacking his class, and that she was accusing him of bigotry and racism.

     The professor then dismissed the class early, apologized for Johnson’s disruptions and told her she was disenrolled at the end of the class on Friday.

     “The whole thing started on Wednesday,” Johnson told ICTMN. “He was talking about Native America and he said the word genocide. He paused and said ‘I don’t like to use that word because I think it is too strong for what happened’ and ‘genocide implies that it was on purpose and most native people were wiped out by European diseases.'”

     Johnson, who was offended, did not at first respond to the professor’s comments.

     “I wrote it down. I was enraged for what I felt were obvious reasons. I didn’t say anything [on Wednesday] because I knew that if I didn’t have anything specific to back it up in terms of tangible or solid evidence that he would not take my comments into consideration,” she said.

     On Friday, Johnson presented her research to the professor after his discussion on the Iroquois Confederacy and the Portuguese expeditions.

     “He made it a point to say indigenous people were not peaceful. I was upset for obvious reasons. He’d mentioned how the French and the Dutch were allies and made it a point to say native people were killing each other before white settlers arrived.”

     Johnson says that she understands that there were native conflicts before settlers arrived, but when the professor talked about the bravery of Portuguese expeditions without emphasis on the slave trade she again grew upset.

     “On Friday, I raised my hand and I said, ‘I understand why we’re talking about the Portuguese people because it explains how they got to America. But I do not think it is fair to talk about Portuguese people as if they were only poor and brave. They became rich by raping and enslaving the indigenous lands and people that they “discovered,'” says Johnson.

     Johnson says that when she asked why the professor did not talk about any sort of Iroquoian technological advances or spirituality and then asked about her professor’s stance on genocide, the professor grew volatile and rolled his eyes several times.

     “I told him, ‘You said genocide implies the purposeful extermination of people and that they were mostly wiped out by European diseases.’ I said, ‘That is not a true statement.’

     “He said, ‘Genocide is not what happened.’ I stood up and started reading from an article by the United Nations that said: ‘Genocide is the deliberate killing of another people, a sterilization of people and/or a kidnapping of their children,’ and he said, ‘That is enough.’

     “I said, ‘No. You have to tell the truth.’

     “He said, ‘If you want to come talk to me after class, now is not the time, you are hijacking my class.’”

     After a bit more discussion which Johnson says became heated, the professor dismissed the class. Additionally, other students defended the professor.

     “He said, ‘You know what class? I am so sorry to everybody that this is happening. Please everyone come back on Wednesday have a good weekend.'”

     After the class was dismissed, Johnson said she was expelled from the course by her professor.

     “He said, ‘I do not appreciate this in my classroom.’ He began shaking his finger at me and said, ‘I don’t appreciate you making me sound like a racist and a bigot in my classroom. You have hijacked my lesson, taken everything out of context and I don’t care what kind of scholarship you have, or what kind of affiliation you have with the university, you will be disenrolled and expelled from this classroom.’”

     “Within 10 minutes of me asking these questions and trying to read pieces from the article, he shut me down. He wasn’t listening. He excused everyone out of the room and told me I was expelled from the class,” says Johnson.
     Update at the link insists she has not been expelled.
     Anyway, I thought that whole disease thing was because white Europeans deliberately spread disease? That’s not intentional? No…? Honestly I think all the students in that class would have benefited from Johnson’s information.

     Black Lives Matter Activists Confront ‘Southern Heritage’ Rally in Washington, DC, just another perspective on that.

274. Pteryxx says

     7 September 2015 at 2:42 pm

     Buzzfeed on the suicide of a prison guard who couldn’t get away from the prison culture: A Suicide on CO Row

     The home lies in a neighborhood that locals call “CO Row.” Scott’s old boss lives down the street. Other former colleagues not much farther. Three times a day, in the hour or so before each of the prison’s three shifts, the neighborhood stirs, garages opening, engines rumbling to life, a parade of pickup trucks snaking east toward High Desert prison.

     “It’s all correctional officers,” Janelle said. “That’s all it is everywhere you go. To watch my son grow up without his dad and try to understand this and grow up in a small little town where all you see is correctional officers — it’s been difficult.”

     After his dad died, Tyler had to switch schools. Many of his classmates had parents who worked at High Desert. Having a parent who works in corrections is valuable social currency around town, and the class hierarchy among both kids and adults is tied directly to the prison industry. There are the correctional families, then the working-class families, then the inmate families, who moved here to be close to loved ones serving long stretches at High Desert. “It’s sort of a status symbol here,” Janelle said.

     Scott had loved working at High Desert at first but hated it by the end. Over his nine years as a prison guard, he had seen terrible things. He had seen his fellow guards abuse inmates and when he reported their misconduct up the chain of command, they turned on him. He broke what one former prison guard called “the green wall of silence” — the code of silence that has turned California’s state prisons into insular and isolated facilities of unconstitutional conditions, where what happens on the Inside stays on the Inside. It is an unwritten rule meant to protect the men and women tasked with overseeing the state’s 130,000 inmates, and Scott had to pay for violating it.

     […]

     There are three prisons in the area — High Desert, which houses 3,400 maximum security state inmates; California Correctional Center, which houses 4,600 minimum security inmates; and Federal Correctional Institution, which houses 1,600 federal inmates 30 miles south of town. Those three prisons employ around half of the town’s adults. “If those prisons said they’re moving out of town, I don’t know what would keep this town alive,” said Police Chief Downing.

     […]

     Bob Hartner had worked at a state prison in Southern California before jumping to High Desert. Corrections was good work for him: a $50,000 or so starting salary with just a high school diploma required, room for advancement, a solid pension after 10 years, and after 20 years a pension that’ll take care of your family for life.

     “He almost never talked about work,” Janelle said. “He definitely didn’t stress about it.” And so she didn’t think much about the prison. It took her many months before she noticed that maybe half of her classmates at Lassen High School had parents who had the same employer her dad did. “And then you kinda realize that everybody on your street works at the prison,” she said.

275. rq says

     7 September 2015 at 2:47 pm

     Stupid auto-inserting link that I didn’t see. There will be a new 273 soon, please keep an eye out.

     History Repeats Itself With Backlash Against Black Empowerment

     What has made the 21st century so interesting is that, perhaps for the first time in American history, the right people are being studied. Examining “race in America,” now in vogue, used to be called grappling with “The Negro Problem.” Black leadership and luminaries were ignored when they repeatedly said during the last century’s white supremacist flare-ups: it’s white Americans that are beyond due for the collective, public microscope.

     We need to ask and answer the following questions: What makes white people the way they are? Why do they respond to every black freedom call with physical and psychic violence, smear tactics and diversionary moves, even when they now know that when black people push, all people ride?

     The answers to these questions have filled shelves of books—on American racism, on African-American history, on the nature of “whiteness” itself. The only way to give cogent answers here is to examine the present and the past simultaneously. “All history is current events,” John Henrik Clarke, the Pan-African historian liked to say.

     […]

     It always appears when blacks gain ground against white supremacy as America’s economic and social structures drastically change. Here’s the pattern: white socio-economic anxiety translates into oppression based on race, blacks respond against the oppression, white supremacy produces a backlash to the response, and the blacklash produces more black struggle.
     […]

     Like 50 years ago, when the Confederate battle flag re-emerged from the dusty attics of failed redneck dreams and flew high again, in response to Montgomery, Birmingham or Selma. Or when the Federal Bureau of Investigation privately decided that, as a mission, it would “prevent the rise of a Black messiah” by any means necessary.

     Like 150 years ago, when, in the South, more blacks were elected to office than at any other time in American history. Political and economic competition with blacks led whites to anger, which led to fear, which led to the white sheets and burning crosses—a strange kind of public hiding. The white sheets were eventually torn to shreds by the Black Panther, but that animal was shot down by the state while the sheet’s ashes arose, renewed, in business suits, a perversion of the Egyptian (African) Phoenix.

     There was a reason Martin Luther King—using Christian politeness and grace that may remind some of the devout families of the Charleston, S.C. church shooting victims—often referred to “our sick white brothers” in his speeches and sermons. The mid-20th century world that these whites knew—the one of their slow but steady economic advance, where gay marriages were invisible and not legal, where young Blacks and Browns would be grateful for their new and improved place—has been shot full of holes in recorded, rewind-able public spaces, not unlike unarmed black victims of police officers.

     These drifting Americans—soon to be America’s new minority, at least numerically—are being forced to actively confront a world they can’t hide from anymore. They are publicly lashing out because they are looking for mirrors they can no longer find: American fantasies from the last century that now only exist in the distorted primetime of their collective memories.

     N. Palm Beach church’s sign supporting Black Lives Matter vandalized. Because white people have to be the focus everywhere.

     Here’s a Guess the Race! challenge for ya. Teen Boy Will Be Charged As Adult For Having Naked Pics of a Minor: Himself In a case of straight-forward case of sexting-while teenaged, the story gets pretty ridiculous:

     But first, to recap: Copening and his girlfriend—now identified as Brianna Denson—are like other teenagers in that they have more than a passing interest in sex. Indeed, when they were 16, they exchanged racy sexy photos via text message. Denson sent pictures to Copening, and Copening sent pictures to Denson. It appears that no one else saw the pictures until local authorities searched Copening’s phone and discovered them.

     Why did they search his phone? It’s not clear, but local news reports claimed that it had nothing to do with the sexts themselves. The Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for comment. According to fayobserver[dot]com, there is no record of a search warrant being issued for Copening’s phone.

     Both teens were charged with sexual exploitation. Denson pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was given 12 months of probation.

     Copening, however, is still facing two counts of second-degree sexual exploitation and three counts of third-degree exploitation. As Ricochet’s Tom Meyer points out, the third-degree charges—which constitute a majority of the total charges—actually stem from the pictures Copening had of himself. The implication is clear: Copening does not own himself, from the standpoint of the law, and is not free to keep sexually-provocative pictures, even if they depict his own body.

     But consider this: North Carolina is one of two states in the country (the other is progressive New York) that considers 16 to be the age of adulthood for criminal purposes. This mean, of course, that Copening can be tried as an adult for exploiting a minor—himself.

     That bolded bit? That’s the worst part.

     #CrimingWhileWhite on a plane. Flight diverted after passenger becomes unruly over cat. Let’s look at the consequences she suffered:

     “She said that she was part of the mafia and that the mafia follows her around the world and that she was able to bring the plane down if that needed to be the case if she couldn’t see her cat,” said passenger Dashenka Giraldo.

     The FBI says the woman is not facing charges.

     Well then.

     Texas Cop Who Fatally Shot Christian Taylor Was Hired After 2 Rejections, old information by now.

     Confederate Flags Crash Nascar’s Plan for a Homecoming

     Throwback paint schemes on racecars and retro logos and signs welcomed Nascar fans when they arrived at Darlington Raceway this weekend for the Bojangles’ Southern 500 Sprint Cup race. The marketing campaign was designed to make one of the most storied tracks on the circuit look like the early 1970s all over again.

     Fans were more than happy to complete the picture, much to Nascar’s dismay. The Confederate flags they raised on R.V.s across the infield and outside the track dotted the sky above Darlington on Friday morning, as they have for decades here. The Southern 500, after all, was long known for playing “Dixie” as its anthem and used to feature a character named Johnny Reb — a man dressed as a Confederate soldier who stood atop the winning car with a rebel flag.

     As those Confederate flags waved once more on Friday, Nascar faced its recurring quandary: How could a sport so closely associated with its Southern roots broaden its appeal nationally without alienating that base?

     “I’d say we’re always looking to make sure we’re satisfying our core fans and our long-term fan at the same time as we are growing to a new audience,” Jim Cassidy, Nascar’s senior vice president for racing operations, said Thursday during a telephone interview. “It’s a balance.”

     And Darlington Raceway, as much as any track on the circuit, epitomizes the struggle Nascar has faced in trying to find that balance with an event that holds a special place in racing history.

     More at the link, but it looks like fans are ruining what looks to be a positive direction for Darlington. So sad.

276. rq says

     7 September 2015 at 3:16 pm

     #Blacklivesmatter and white progressive colorblindness, yep, another look at Mr Sanders and his followers!

     In my years in the Northwest, I found that pointing out racism can result in retaliation, even from left-leaning whites. I was sometimes labeled a provocateur, or, worse, accused of creating fictions in order to use innocent people I was falsely accusing of racism as whipping boys on whom to vent my anger over something else.

     I say this to make a point: I know something about white progressives. I may even be something of an expert on the subject, though I can’t claim objectivity because, over the years, many of them have become close friends. More than anything, what I’ve learned is that we’re all just human after all.

     It was these years of experience that made the much discussed disruption of a mostly white rally in Seattle featuring Bernie Sanders by #blacklivesmatter activists of such interest to me. The disruption catalyzed an exaggerated version of the same racial dynamics that loomed large in nearly every struggle I have been involved in in the Northwest. And, as usual, to no good end.

     Moreover, the discussion following that incident feels like it’s turned into a referendum on a whole movement, bordering even on a contest over the primacy of race or class in progressive politics; a contest that has been waged since, well, forever in terms relevant to this moment. All that incited by two Black women, just two, saying something that we should be listening to if we really do believe that Black lives matter, no matter how or to whom they said it, and maybe especially for just those reasons.

     We should be listening if we are concerned about the crisis of racism in America because acting on that concern must begin with consideration of our own racism. And isn’t that the demand that angered folks the most?

     If we don’t begin there, we are misunderstanding how deeply rooted and ubiquitous racism is in America. We are a profoundly racist state, founded upon native genocide and race slavery, divided by a civil war fought over the simple proposition that Black people are human beings, and today, still, a country deeply divided over issues that disproportionately affect people of color – issues like immigration, mass incarceration, drug criminalization, Islamophobia, the so-called war on terror, welfare, food stamps, educational equity, Obamacare (on which the deepest divisions are in the blackest states of the South). And the list goes on.

     In such a state, do we really suppose that racism is only a problem of other people?
     […]

     American white supremacy was invented as a system of labor exploitation. It is rooted in slavery, which classed blacks as chattels. But, slavery was the means, not the end, where white supremacy was concerned. Racism justified and greased that race-based labor exploitation system, but was not it’s primary intended product. White supremacy was created to produce profit.

     Under white supremacy, all are classed by race, not just those who are most exploited, but their exploiters as well. And within each class, all are equal by virtue of culture and biology, or at least that’s the original idea.

     So, that means that a poor white person is equal by race to Donald Trump, even if the gap in power and wealth between poor and even middle class white people and Mr. Trump is as wide as the wealth gaps of some whole countries. Relying on people to lean on white rather than push back against that inequity within the white class is the gambit of the elites who most benefit from white supremacy, and that makes the cause of ending racism an issue of economic justice for everyone, including white people.

     If white progressives can’t get with this idea, that gigantic, gaping hole of inequity, a hole leveraged in no small part by racism, will be next to impossible to close. In fact, believing that class trumps race limits our ability to close that gap. It is a form of blindness, of color blindness in fact, that is against the interests of white working people as much as it is against the interests of people of color.

     So, if you want to come good on this issue, listen up. Rather than sit paralyzed over the perception that the movement for Black lives isn’t making demands, isn’t organized in the way you’d like it to be, is, in fact, what all movements are, especially at this early stage, which is a cultural phenomena, not a single political organization, here is another way of understanding what went down in Seattle and is going down and will continue to go down all over the country.

     The movement for Black lives is a call for justice beginning with an end to state violence against Black people. That means police accountability among a wide array of other issues.

     Much more at the link.

     The Dirty War Against Youth, From Ferguson to Ayotzinapa, a global look. It’s quite the history lesson within. Well worth the time and the attention.

     WATCH: Woman berates restaurant staff ‘to get it right the first time,’ then gets instant comeuppance

     An irate woman captured in a viral online video throwing a tantrum got instant comeuppance when after lecturing a restaurant staff to get things right the first time, crashed right into the door on her way out. The video was posted online Thursday but it’s unclear where or when it occurred.

     The video shows the unidentified blond woman badgering the restaurant employees that they got her children’s kebab order wrong, because “my kids don’t eat … GREEN … THINGS!”

     “You know what? Like, I’m really glad you two can talk to each other in whatever language it is that you’re speaking but it’s really rude … and if you want to be polite to the customer then you speak English to the customer in America,” the woman, who knows a thing or two about being rude, said patronizingly.

     The two women behind the counter told her to calm down and offered to make a new meal with red peppers, but it only set the customer off more.
     […]

     She starts walking to the door and turns her head to make her point one last time.

     “Get it right the first time OK?”

     She then rams right into the door.

     The second time she tried to exit she was successful.

     Is it wrong for me to laugh a little bit?

     Cops: Police Chief Responded to Racism Complaint by Comparing Black People to Monkeys. Well, if you fight fire with fire, it’s only logical to fight racism with racism, right?

     A police chief in Oregon retired this week after officers say he responded to an accusation of racism by imitating a monkey, singing “Dixie” and pantomiming a beating, KOIN reports.

     In papers obtained by the station, officers allege that Clatskanie Police Chief Marvin Hoover made the racist display when they attempted to debrief him on the arrest of black woman who threatened to file a discrimination lawsuit.

     “I relayed several of the arrestee’s remarks such as, ‘When you look at me, my black and my nappy hair, all you see is animal,’” writes Officer Dustin Stone in his official report to the Oregon Department of Public Safety. “Chief Hoover interrupted me and said, ‘That’s what she is.’”

     More details at the link.

     The school-to-prison pipeline affects girls of color, but reform efforts pass them by

     As most education advocates know, zero-tolerance policies shut the doors of academic opportunity to students of color by funneling them into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. The combination of overly harsh school policies and the growing role of law enforcement in schools has created a school-to-prison pipeline, in which punitive measures such as suspensions, expulsions and school-based arrests are increasingly used to deal with student misbehavior. What many education advocates aren’t talking about, however, are the gender dynamics at play in this phenomenon.

     A recent report by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) entitled Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected, outlines how girls of color face much harsher school discipline than their white peers but are simultaneously excluded from current efforts to address the school-to-prison pipeline. The report states that nationally, black girls are six times more likely to get suspended than their white counterparts. In comparison, black boys are three times more likely to get suspended than their white counterparts.

     Despite the statistics, there are no initiatives like the My Brother’s Keeper program – a five-year, $200m program initiated by President Obama to support boys of color – to engage and nurture young women of color. Even though black girls are criminalized and brutalized by the same oppressive system, rarely does their brutalization make national news.

     More details and information at the link.

277. photoreceptor says

     7 September 2015 at 5:37 pm

     rq and tony, 269 and 272: answering the different points willy-nilly: I could have included Canada in the list, it wasn’t my intention to give a comprehensive list, just to point out the nationalistic (I will use Tony’s term) overtones of the title, even if it came from PZ himself. I won’t hark on about it, because I don’t want to digress from the serious subject of the thread, but in the spirit of pointing out unintentional biases in language use (which is encouraged at Pharyngula) it just comes across a tad superior to non-US americans.

     I am glad you agree that racism in the US is not fundamentally different from racism anywhere else: “It always appears when blacks gain ground against white supremacy as America’s economic and social structures drastically change. Here’s the pattern: white socio-economic anxiety translates into oppression based on race, blacks respond against the oppression, white supremacy produces a backlash to the response, and the blacklash produces more black struggle” I think that quote from rq’s 275 applies to many cases of racial discrimination, in Europe you have the “Polish plumbers”. These people were deliberately brought in to aid the countries (France, England) when they had insufficient local manpower and skills to handle, were initially welcomed but when the economy turned bad there were backlashes against them, branded as louts stealing the local women. This isn’t to belittle the problems in the USA, far from it – this is a very sweeping generalization but I lived in NYC for a couple of years and was struck by how these populations of whites and “non-whites” seemed to co-exist in the same space without interacting, averting eye contact at all times, whites using above ground mass transit (taxis, maybe buses) and non-whites going below ground (subway)… But I say it to advance my thesis that racism is a fundamental human behaviour, the result of social bonding within groups making the other groups always the enemy. The easier it is to recognise the “other” – skin colour, eye shape, whatever – just makes it easier. Maybe such mistrust and penalisation of the others once had an advantage, to further the interests and survival of your own group during times of hardship, much like animal behaviour during the arid seasons when food is scarce. But that is not to justify it or say we can do nothing about it, just how difficult the problem is. In a case like the US where the system has been long entrenched with whites at the top of a pyramid (just like here in Europe), nobody wants to relinquish any ground. I agree with Tony to say a multi-faceted approach will probably be necessary, dealing with harsh current realities while groundroot changes are implemented. One factor which has led to great progress in the UK, as I said before, is truely mixed classrooms, both in terms of ethnicity and economic situation. The parents are the hard ones to convince, and in the USA with a significant fraction of kids (I don’t know the actual numbers, I think it is higher in those Bible Belt states – but this phenomenon is quite exceptional in the UK) “educated” at home outside a mainstream system would be one more obstacle to progress. Maybe another aspect which could be considered rather specific to the USA is the lethal violence coming from your gun culture, mixed with racial tension it is a deadly cocktail.

     And to end up with some non-US american racism, as rq invited me, how about the poor “negres” in northern Argentina, treated as “blacks” by the mostly spanish descendants (following the successful genocide by the invading spaniards) in the cities to the south. But they are not of negro (used in an anthropological context) descent, they still have native american blood – the lone survivors of the butchery because they inhabited terrain that was difficult to access in order to exterminate them, not worth the effort. They live in abject poverty, are mistreated and abused in many ways.

     Another point for discussion: who fucked up this world the most, the english or the spanish?

278. rq says

     8 September 2015 at 3:48 pm

     Another point for discussion: who fucked up this world the most, the english or the spanish?

     I can’t tell if this is a serious question or not. At any rate, it’s way off-topic for this thread. You can email PZ and see if he can start a new thread on this topic, as curated by you. (Also you forget the other great colonists of the world: the Dutch, the French, the Portuguese, the Russians… and that’s maintaining the euro-centric view.)

     +++

     Students at Jamyla Bolden’s school are given Build-A-Bears, books to help them grieve. And they say the community doesn’t care.

     The 325 children attending Jamyla Bolden’s elementary school received books and teddy bears Monday as part of a community effort to comfort the students who are dealing with the shooting death of their classmate two weeks ago.

     “Today puts the focus solely on them, the children, to say we acknowledge you are going through these hard times,” explained Marva Robinson, head of the St. Louis Chapter of the American Association of Black Psychologists. “It lets the children know that for once, the conversation is truly about them, and so often they get lost in the conversation.”

     Robinson, who helped distribute the items at the school, said the gifts and teddy bears immediately demonstrated to the students that people care.

     “But we also can’t forget that their processing of this death will come for days and months to come, and having the teddy bear is something they can access by themselves even a year from now to help them cope and grieve.”

     These Stunning Images Show the Beauty of Black America in the Place You’d Least Expect. Please look.

     For 26-year-old Joshua Kissi, what stands out most is fear.

     Not his own. The Brooklyn-based artist and photographer grew up around the Bronx public housing facilities that constitute one of New York City’s poorest zip codes. It’s the fear from the people who’ve never actually walked these project hallways that he’s concerned with.

     “All the ills and wills of America are located in the projects,” Kissi told Mic in an interview. “People get scared of the them because of perceptions they have. They see artists like Nas rapping about them. They see the drug dealers in movies like Clockers. But there’s all types of people who live here — old people, kids, working people, people just trying to make it.”

     These people are the characters who populate Slumflower, the sumptuously rendered short film Kissi and a network of close collaborators have spent the past two years crafting.

     The film premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and it weaves a heartbreaking narrative out of a day in the life of an imaginative young boy from the projects.

     But its conceit is rooted in a simple premise. Two years ago, a visit to his old neighborhood prompted some questions in Kissi’s mind: What would it take to alter perceptions of these spaces that many people write off as “poverty-stricken” and “dangerous”? What if everyone who lived there looked different — a wardrobe change, perhaps?

     See link for more.

     Louisiana detective refusing to resign after photo of him at KKK rally last year surfaces, from Daily Kos.

     That image above is Detective Raymond Mott of the Lake Arthur Police Department (LAPD—but not that LAPD). He has admitted as much according to the Jennings Daily News. The photo began circulating on social media and was picked up by the newspaper starting quite a stir—since he’s straight up clearly in the Klu Klux Klan. The police chief of the Lake Arthur PD, Ray Marcantel is saying that if Mott doesn’t resign by today, Marcantel will ask the town council to fire him. Raymond Mott has an answer that is so frightening it begs the question how this guy got his job in the first place.

     “I refuse to resign,” the detective told the newspaper. “I have been baptized – after the events and have the documents to prove that – and a short while after my baptism, I have become an ordained minister and started a charity-based ministry in Lake Arthur.”

     Mott initially claimed he attended the Klan rally in Troy, N.C., while on a “secret mission” for the FBI, but he later said that wasn’t true.

     He’s an ordained minister guys. Nothing to see here. Makes you wonder about the police vetting process.

     Marcantel said he did a “thorough background” check prior to hiring Mott, checking with three other police agencies where Mott apparently worked. Those agencies weren’t publicly identified by the chief who said Mott’s “credentials showed no questionable history.”

     “Everything was clear with his background check,” the chief told the newspaper. “I did everything I was supposed to do then, and now I’m just trying to do my job and keep the peace.

     This isn’t surprising to anyone following the #blacklivesmatter movement. There are racists and Klansmen in our law enforcement agencies throughout the country.

     More at the link.

     It’s not enough for young black women to admire Serena. They need to emulate her will to win.

     One of America’s greatest champions, Serena Williams, took the court this week at the U.S. Open. And with 21 grand slam titles to her name — eight after turning 30; two wins in the past four days on a quest for 22; and recent profiles in New York magazine and the New York Times Magazine, in which she says, among other things, “I’m just about winning,” she doesn’t need any additional kudos from me. But I’m mindful of something that goes beyond her sports stardom: She’s an exemplar of what it takes to win, no matter the game.

     And we need her example, modeling perseverance in the face of obstacles, to balance out the negative messaging that inundates too many young women — particularly young, African American women.

     As an educator who has spent a substantial part of my career facilitating the professional development of young women, I can’t overemphasize the importance of the way she demonstrates what it takes to win, and to keep winning. Consider Serena’s will to win in the face of what Vox’s Jenée Desmond-Harris catalogues, and rightly describes, as the routine and barely-veiled “racism that underlies the characterizations of her as hypersexual, aggressive, and animalistic” to the point that “when she dares to express frustration” (also known as being human) “she’s stamped with the infamous ‘angry black woman’ stereotype.”

     Consider the attempts to diminish both her beauty and accomplishments that were thankfully shut down by another woman who knows how to win, Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling. Too many of the young women I’ve had the honor to teach and mentor come to the game of life burdened by similar stereotyping. They’ve absorbed the idea that this is a world in which they can probably hope to get by, but not reach for their highest aspirations.

     Even in an era of increasing gender equity, there are young women with unlimited potential who will still set their sights on becoming nurses — a noble profession in its own right — instead of taking the necessary risk to go for their true goal of becoming doctors. Others, talented poets and playwrights, feel compelled to take the “safe” career path to a government job or teaching position. There’s nothing wrong with the jobs they’ve chosen (hey, I’m a teacher), but there are already enough real societal challenges facing black women — in health outcomes, educational and employment opportunities — that it’s devastating when dreams are curtailed because of perceived limitations.

     What’s missing in many cases is Serena’s single-minded determination to push past those who would place a ceiling on what she’s expected to achieve — an attribute that’s essential for anyone who wants to succeed, however they define it.

     Serena Williams as role model? Yes. Victim-blame-y title and text (as in, if you’re not doing it like Williams, you’re not doing it right)? Not so much, perhaps?

     Anyone in the area? SAVE THE DATE!!
     Racial Equity Workshop October 9 and 10
     The REAL Team

     On October 9 and 10 we will have an exciting opportunity to explore our role, as individuals and as the UCE community, in building a world of racial justice, engagement and right relationship. Eileen Heineman and Donique McIntosh, the Racial Justice Program Co-Directors at the YWCA, will lead us in a workshop the evening of Friday, October 9 and all day on Saturday, October 10. They are expert at creating a wonderful learning environment, absent of shaming and nurturing of personal growth. Even if you think you already “get it” and are ready to jump in and do something about racial justice, plan to come. There is always more to learn, and practice, in order to become great partners with others working on this massive task. This weekend workshop is the centerpiece of our yearlong effort to live into the meaning of our Black Lives Matter sign and our broader role in the community.

     If you are reading this, we need your participation! We need UCE members from all parts of the congregation: board members, choir members, parents, religious education teachers, Rummage Sale wizards, Green Sanctuary leaders, Rainbow Alliance members, Crackerbarrel debaters, Food and Shelter Team, Addictions Ministry, Cancer Care group, dancers, covenant groups, yoga practitioners, Scrabble players, dancers of all ages, book group members, Common Threads knitters, bridge players, Hospitality Team members, Recently Retired Women, Peace and Justice Members, and even if you don’t belong to any of the above: we need your participation in this catalyst event.

     Watch the newsletter for more information, but in the meantime, please mark your calendar for October 9 and 10. We promise that it is an event worth making time for.

     More at the link itself, lots of information. It seems a laudable effort, and I can only hope that (a) they do it right and (b) that they educate those in need of this education.

     And if that was too positive an outlook for you, here’s a return to the darkened depths. Fatal officer-involved shooting in VA beach overnight

     Two people were killed Saturday night in an officer involved shooting outside of a 7-Eleven in Virginia Beach.
     According to our NBC affiliate WAVY, Virginia Beach police received information about a person of interest in a homicide case. Officers found the man in a car that was parked at the 7-eleven located at the corner of Lynnhaven Parkway and Salem Road.

     When officers approached the vehicle, the suspect shot at the officers. A bullet went through one officer’s shirt, he was not seriously hurt.

     The officers shot back at the car, hitting the male and the female driver of the car. Both the driver and suspect died at the scene.

     There was also an infant in the car. That child was not harmed and was turned over to Child Protective Services.

     Ruminate on that overnight. Back in the morning.

279. Pteryxx says

     8 September 2015 at 7:55 pm

     via Mano Singham in the sidebar, from NPR’s Code Switch: Mass Deportation May Sound Unlikely, But It’s Happened Before

     Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s proposal to deport all 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally, along with their U.S.-born children, sounds far-fetched. But something similar happened before.

     During the 1930s and into the 1940s, up to 2 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were deported or expelled from cities and towns across the U.S. and shipped to Mexico. According to some estimates, more than half of these people were U.S. citizens, born in the United States.

     […]

     It was the Great Depression, when up to a quarter of Americans were unemployed and many believed that Mexicans were taking scarce jobs. In response, federal, state and local officials launched so-called “repatriation” campaigns. They held raids in workplaces and in public places, rounded up Mexicans and Mexican-Americans alike, and deported them. The most famous of these was in downtown Los Angeles’ Placita Olvera in 1931.

     Balderrama says these raids were intended to spread fear throughout Mexican barrios and pressure Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to leave on their own. In many cases, they succeeded.

     Where they didn’t, government officials often used coercion to get rid of Mexican-Americans who were U.S. citizens. In Los Angeles, it was standard practice for county social workers to tell those receiving public assistance that they would lose it, and that they would be better off in Mexico. Those social workers would then get tickets for families to travel to Mexico. According to Balderrama’s research, one-third of LA’s Mexican population was expelled between 1929 and 1944 as a result of these practices.

     […]

     Despite claims by officials at the time that deporting U.S.-born children — along with their immigrant parents — would keep families together, many families were destroyed.

     Esteban Torres was a toddler when his father, a Mexican immigrant, was caught up in a workplace roundup at an Arizona copper mine in the mid-1930s. “My mother, like other wives, waited for the husbands to come home from the mine. But he didn’t come home,” Torres recalled in a recent interview. He now lives east of Los Angeles. “I was 3 years old. My brother was 2 years old. And we never saw my father again.”

     Torres’ mother suspected that his father had been targeted because of his efforts to organize miners. That led Esteban Torres to a lifelong involvement with organized labor. He was eventually elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and served there from 1983 to 1999.

280. rq says

     9 September 2015 at 1:18 am

     Officials were wrong to jump to conclusions in deputy’s slaying

     “This crime is not going to divide us; this crime is going to unite us,” Devon Anderson told reporters, citing the diverse crowds of people who have held vigil for Goforth following the murder.

     If only that message had come sooner. If only Sheriff Ron Hickman had echoed it.

     If only Harris County’s top law enforcement officials hadn’t turned a white deputy’s death, allegedly at the hands of a black man, into yet another wedge between police and communities of color.

     With a motive still unclear, Hickman seemed to cast early blame on a civil rights movement known as #blacklivesmatter, which attempts to raise awareness about racial bias in policing. It was inspired by a string of high-profile police shootings of unarmed black men.

     “We’ve heard black lives matter, all lives matter. Well, cops’ lives matter, too, so why don’t we just drop the qualifiers and just say lives matter and take that to the bank,” Hickman said in a news conference.

     Anderson made a similar point, albeit more subdued: “It is time for the silent majority in this country to support law enforcement,” she said. “There are a few bad apples in every profession; that does not mean there should be open warfare on law enforcement.”
     […]

     This may turn out to be yet another tragic story of mental illness and about all-too-easy access to guns. It may have nothing to do with race.

     Yet the damage has been done.

     Hickman’s comments have fed a national backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement, with Fox News gleefully fanning the flames, dubbing it a “Murder Movement.”

     “They’re a hate group,” host Bill O’Reilly declared. “And I’m going to tell you right now, I’m going to put them out of business.”

     He pointed to a protest in Minnesota over the weekend where marchers reportedly chanted “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.” O’Reilly interpreted it as a call for police to be killed. His guests pushed back, saying Black Lives Matter is a non-violent movement with the same right as any of us to question police.

     The chant was vile and callous, to be sure. But these days, any idiot with a hashtag can taint a good cause.

     And it is a good cause. Earlier this year, FBI Director James Comey spoke candidly about the need to address the rift between police and black communities. He acknowledged the cynicism that may shade some officers’ views about race. He acknowledged a history in which officers enforced a status quo “that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.” He acknowledged all people have unconscious racial biases.

     That kind of acknowledgment and openness to address the problem is all it seems most folks behind Black Lives Matter are seeking.

     And for this, the organization is being vilified and linked to murder? Bloggers, Internet commentators and even a presidential hopeful, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, have collectively insinuated the blood is on many hands: the media’s, President Obama’s and, according to one Chronicle commenter, mine. Presumably, because I’ve written about abuses in the criminal justice system and the need to repair relationships between police and communities of color.

     No column, no hashtag, no presidential speech can make someone kill. Besides that, authorities have provided no information that the suspect was motivated by Black Lives Matter. It’s irresponsible for Hickman to suggest it.

     Obviously, emotions were high when Hickman made his comments. He’d just lost a deputy, a seemingly beloved one at that. And yes, critics of police are sometimes quick to jump to conclusions, often immediately assigning a racial motive to officer-related shootings. But those critics aren’t the sheriff.

     “Many people on the other side have no power. The sheriff represents everybody,” said Larry Karson, a criminologist at the University of Houston-Downtown. “The sheriff has missed the point. It’s not that white lives don’t matter. It’s that black lives matter as much as white lives.”

     An annotated guide to racist police officers; more than a few bad apples and not just in the South, by Shaun King.

     Racism – it’s as American as it gets and is deeply woven into the very fabric of our nation. While we are all right to advocate for new and improved policies to address police brutality and misconduct across the country, doing so without simultaneously addressing the ever-present realties of racism within our police departments is a mistake.

     Below I have detailed just a sample of cases of racism in police departments from 2014-2015. We’re not talking about history here – these cases are right here, right now. Please feel free to add additional cases in the comments section below and I will keep this list updated.

     Includes a quick summary of the racism found at specific police departments (you can add some to the list if you want, via the comments), and includes source links for each (a least one per). It may not seem a particularly long list, but it’s way too long. (And this isn’t things like shootings, this is simple, everyday racism like racist jokes or racist emails or racist commentary.)

     Trial scheduled for October 2016 in Brown family’s wrongful death lawsuit against Ferguson

     A federal wrongful-death lawsuit by Michael Brown’s parents over his fatal shooting by a Ferguson police officer won’t be going to trial for at least another year.

     A federal judge in St. Louis has scheduled an October 2016 trial in the case of Michael Brown Sr. and Lesley McSpadden against the city of Ferguson, its former police chief and the white ex-officer, Darren Wilson, who killed the 18-year-old Brown.

     Brown’s August 2014 death during a confrontation with Wilson led to sometimes-violent protests in Ferguson and other U.S. cities, spawning a national “Black Lives Matter” movement that seeks changes in how police deal with minorities.

     An attorney for Ferguson and the other defendants has asked for the lawsuit to be thrown out.

     I hope they win.

     Jury awards $5.5 million to family of Euclid man killed by Cleveland cop – a killing that occurred in 2012.

     The eight-member jury, which began deliberating on Friday following a week-long trial, announced its verdict a couple of hours after restarting deliberations that began before the Labor Day weekend.

     It found that Cleveland police officer Roger Jones was liable for using excessive force when he shot Kenny Smith in the head at East 9th Street and Prospect Avenue following a disturbance outside Wilbert’s Food & Music on East Huron Road. Jones had just gotten off his shift that night and was downtown to get a drink.

     Smith, an aspiring rapper with no criminal record, was a passenger in a car driven by Devonta Hill, whom police believe caused the disturbance by firing into a crowd.

     The courtroom was quiet after a clerk read the verdict, as both sides showed little reaction. Jones was not present for the verdict.

     After the jury left, attorneys Terry Gilbert and Jacqueline Greene hugged Kenny Smith’s mother, Shauna Smith, who began to cry.

     After the verdict was read, Shauna Smith said she felt that she had justice.

     “I really didn’t feel like the story was told, and that’s all that I wanted, for the story to be told. To hear how things really happened,” Shauna Smith said.

     The city of Cleveland was never named as a defendant in the lawsuit, which was filed in 2013. However, since Jones was found negligent while performing official police duty, the city will be on the hook for the damages the jury awarded.

     A spokesman for the city, which is representing Jones, declined to comment on the verdict.

     So that 5.5 million? Tax-payers.

     Due to recent twitter comments, I think this needs a repost: Are Bernie Sanders’ Supporters His Biggest Problem? Specifically with regards to this:

     This “Bernie Bunch” has responded to all reservations towards their candidate by young black people with a deluge of condescension and racially tinged invective that seems absolutely chat-roomish in character. There are the white writers who lecture black protesters to trust their “best friend,” unaware of the racial politics behind generations of white people declaring themselves besties with unwitting black folk. There are the celebrity liberals with no political or activism experience somehow entitled enough to explain to protesters how protesting works. And there are the legions of Tea Party style copy-and-paste trolls that will flood my Twitter mentions after this. They all persist in direct contradiction to the fact that Sanders actually did respond to protests in exactly the way protesters wanted, and that his decision has pressured and will pressure other candidates to do the same.

     Their message, distilled: Shut the hell up if you want to sit with us.

     Details about people shot and killed by Virginia Beach officers, that’s the shooting in the final link of previous comment. Video only, unfortunately.

     Emmett Till’s death, and history, is fading in this Mississippi town

     Today, Bryant’s Grocery is derelict and forgotten, much like the town of Money. Although Till’s lynching is considered a pivotal spark of the civil rights movement, there’s little here to recall those events other than a modest historic marker erected outside Bryant’s four years ago.

     Some say the grocery store should be turned into a museum, like many other places critical to the civil rights movement, or at least prevented from falling down.

     “They should have preserved all of it,” said Eddie Carthan, a distant relative of Till’s mother and the former mayor of Tchula, which in the 1970s became one of the first Delta plantation towns to elect a black mayor.

     Some of the region’s black elder statesmen aren’t convinced it matters much, though. The slow deterioration of Money is symptomatic of the region’s badly ailing economy. Once propped up by agriculture, towns in this section of northern Mississippi are now marked by blocks of boarded-up buildings, deeply impoverished people and stray dogs. A civil rights museum in Money wouldn’t change that, they say.
     […]

     State Sen. David Jordan (D), who has represented these rural counties since 1993, joined the tour in Sumner. He glanced around the old-fashioned room and recalled attending the proceedings as a teenager. The most shocking thing about it, Jordan said, was seeing white reporters from out of town frequenting black businesses.

     “It was the first time I had ever seen racial integration,” said Jordan, who is black and 81. “There were all of these white people staying in the black hotel. I couldn’t believe it.”

     Despite that spectacle, Jordan said few locals believed Bryant and Milam would be convicted. The men claimed they had released Till after kidnapping him.

     The pair were tried by a jury of 12 white men, each of whom were visited by the local Citizens’ Council, an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, to make sure they would vote “the right way,” according to the FBI’s probe of Till’s death.

281. rq says

     9 September 2015 at 1:33 am

     Comment 280 in moderation due to excessive linkage.

     Baltimore reaches $6.4 million settlement with Freddie Gray family – ‘reaches’? Yesterday the sentiment was pretty clear that the deal hadn’t been finalized yet.

     Baltimore officials have reached a $6.4 million wrongful death settlement with the family of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old man who died in April from a neck injury he suffered in police custody.

     The deal still must be approved by the city’s Board of Estimates, the governing body that oversees the city’s spending. That group, which includes Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D), is expected to meet Wednesday.

     The agreement comes a week after renewed demonstrations sparked by a court hearing in which a judge concluded that the six Baltimore police officers indicted in Gray’s death and arrest should be given separate trials. This week, the judge will consider whether those trials should be held in Baltimore or moved to another jurisdiction.

     Ah, still requires approval… what are the chances? Also, note again, tax-payers will be covering this. You’d think people worried about where their tax money goes would be more worried about police officers and their trigger-happiness.

     Farmington police officer shoots man in custody at hospital – another one??

     A Farmington police officer shot a suspect in custody at the San Juan Regional Medical Center on Sunday night after “an unprovoked attack,” according to a press release from the Farmington Police Department.

     The suspect was identified as an adult man, but no other information about him was released. Farmington police spokeswoman Georgette Allen said police on Monday were still working to “positively identify” the man.

     Officers were dispatched at 8:49 p.m. Sunday to the 2600 block of Best Street to investigate a stolen company vehicle. Callers told police dispatchers the driver was driving erratically and was involved in several hit-and-run crashes, according to the release.

     Question, if he was driving erratically, perhaps there was a medical issue? And maybe he shouldn’t have been treated like a violent offender? More:

     The suspect is being treated at San Juan Regional Medical Center and his condition was not released Monday.

     The officer suffered minor injuries. The name of the officer involved in the shooting has not been released, and the officer has been placed on administrative leave, which is police department policy, the release states. Allen said the officer who shot the suspect had taken over the case from the arresting officers.

     So good thing he’s alive, but I’m… wondering… why the officer took the case over? Is this standard procedure?

     Students’ return to school is marred by renewed segregation across US

     Millions of students around the US have started autumn with familiar rituals: waiting for absent teachers, flipping through outdated books and watching their peers fall behind in strained, segregated schools that experts warn represent a slow-burning crisis neglected by leaders.

     Little has changed since a 2014 report concluded that 60 years after the supreme court declared segregation unconstitutional, major regions of the US have turned away from integration toward deeper inequality, said Gary Orfield, a UCLA professor and co-author of that paper.

     The “substantial majority” of black and Latino students are in schools segregated by race and poverty, Orfield said. Such students are being primed by struggling schools for “a downward spiral” in a society that increasingly demands college diplomas.

     “If you get in a really poor-performing high school, you probably were in a weak elementary school,” Orfield said.

     “Let’s say your family’s poor, and then your chances of going to a really great state university are basically nonexistent. It’s deeply unhealthy for a place where a majority of people are non-white.

     “If this is sustainable then it’s incompatible with democracy, and spells disaster for the long run.”

     According to the report, black people are most segregated in the north-eastern US, especially in New York, where 65% of black students go to school almost exclusively without white peers.

     In the western US, Latinos still largely lack access to mostly white schools, the report adds. In California, where white people are a minority, the average Latino student in a public school has only one to two white classmates.
     Advertisement

     In the south, where courts and officials worked hardest to desegregate schools and dismantle unconstitutional policies, integration has best endured.

     When the civil rights act was passed in 1968, 78% of black students in the south went to intensely segregated schools. By 1991, only 26% of black students were in similar schools, the lowest rate in the US.

     But following successive court decisions to roll back desegregation orders, that number has increased to 34%, still the lowest in the US but part of a national retreat toward segregation.

     Today, two out of five black and Latino children go to a school that is less than 10% white, said Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

     Post-racial America, folks. Ain’t it grand.
     (And what was that about black people and how they should educate themselves…?)

     5 facts exposing the media’s lies about police shootings. Turns out bartending is more dangerous than police work. Which means Tony (and other bartenders here and about) deserve the Bartending Medal of Honour. Your bravery is appreciated.

     ‘Baltimore 6’ fundraiser shirt features brick from ‘Battle of Mondawmin’. Ummm.
     1) Fundraising for those six? Okaaaay…
     2) “Battle of Mondawmin”? You mean that time the city shut down public buses and the police kettled stressed out teens? What a battle that was. Seriously, who thought this was a good idea?

     A fundraiser for the six Baltimore police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray features the image of a brick with the phrase “The Battle of Mondawmin.”

     The shirt refers to the beginning of the April 27 unrest in West Baltimore, where officers were injured as rioters threw bricks and rocks. The rioting broke out in the afternoon following Gray’s funeral — eight days after his death.

     The fundraising website, baltimore6.com, is rallying contributions for the families of the officers charged. Those officers, the subject of a hearing last week and another on Thursday in Baltimore, have been suspended without pay pending investigations.

     A spokesperson for Baltimore’s police union said the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 3 “had nothing to do with the design, production or sale of these shirts and to date, has not received any money from the fundraiser.”

     Watch: Racist Police Chief Resigns After White Officers File Complaint, ‘He Compared Blacks to Monkeys’. You know what’s encouraging? That it was white officers who complained. And actually did something about this, being in a position to do so. I am thrilled (and I’m not the only one):

     *Now we’re getting somewhere. If white people want to know what they can do to help end racism, they can call it out, in the moment! Hooray for the brave officers of Clatskanie, Oregon who stepped up to the plate and filed a complaint against the racist police chief who they say compared black people to monkeys following the arrest of a black woman.

     When the arrested woman threatened to sue for discrimination, Police Chief Marvin Hoover is said to have imitated a monkey and “beat his chest like Tarzan” after describing the woman as “an animal”.

     KOIN 6 became privy to a report in which Officer Alex Stone, a Caucasian, states, “I relayed several of the arrestee’s remarks such as, ‘When you look at me, my black [skin] and my nappy hair, all you see is animal.’”

     He added, “Chief Hoover interrupted me and said, ‘That’s what she is.’”

     The report reveals the discomfort of officers Gibson and Stone when the police chief apparently began acting like a monkey, placing his hands under his armpits and scratching them and making monkey noises, according to Stone, who states, “As Chief Hoover was comparing African-Americans to monkeys, I began to become extremely uncomfortable.”

     Stone adds,

     “I have never been in a work environment where a manager, especially an executive officer, is openly racist.”–Officer Alex Stone

     Hoover resigned after being placed on paid leave at the end of August.

     Don’t pat yourselves on the back too much, though, white folk. These officers speaking out is the teeniest drop and the smallest possible gesture to be made in the face of the overwhelming racism among police officers that exists out there. No resting on any laurels. Especially because of the community reaction (which included the mayor supporting the chief):

     Officer Stone and his family have now become targets in their Clatskanie community. And for his human decency and courageous action, (not to mention the fact that he even appeared on camera) I hope the people who believe in what he did will stand behind this family and support them; and at the same time put pressure on the city and its mayor for their apparent support of the police chief; and any danger in this family’s path.

     Why?

     Because we take care of people who take care of us. And going straight to the top to remove these racists from their powerful positions is the best way!

     We may not all be in Clatskanie, Oregon, so we cannot physically help protect Stone’s family. But we can lend our support for his actions by bombarding City Hall with letters: 95 S. Nehalem Street, Clatskanie, OR 97016

     Note bolded part (bolding mine).

282. rq says

     9 September 2015 at 2:41 am

     Listen to these 7 podcasts driven by black women

     Over the summer, one of my friends tweeted that podcasts were a #whitepeople thing and wanted to know why. On the surface, I totally understood what she meant. In the legacy of radio, which — aside from “urban” stations — is led by white voices, the new podcast phenomenon has largely been attached to those same identities. This is always evident to me when I ask white people — typically after they have just given a rave review of Serial or This American Life — if they’ve ever heard of my favorite podcasts, which are all curated by black hosts, and they say no. That “no” becomes even more pronounced when I inquire if they listen to any podcasts hosted by black women.

     So to put an end to the “podcasts are for white people and men” trend, here are a list of podcasts with black female voices that everyone should know about and listen to. The first five listed are the podcasts I’m currently into (with some new ones I discovered while writing this piece) but read to the end for Blavity staff favorites. Check it out!

     There’s a variety of topics, though there’s a distinct lean towards pop culture. Does anyone know of any science-based podcasts, run by black women (or black people, period)? Or with a science-y slant? That would be awesome to dig up, too.

     Raymond Kelly, Ex-Police Commissioner, Blames Mayor de Blasio for Rise in Killings. But is de Blasio really to blame?

     Former Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said last week that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s constraints on the stop-and-frisk strategy of the Bloomberg administration was to blame for the uptick in murders in New York City. Mr. Kelly also attributed the rise in homicides in other cities to a backlash to the killing last year of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.

     “Murders are up,” he said in an interview in conjunction with the release of his memoir. “And if you have a propensity to carry a gun and there’s a policy to de-emphasize stop and question and frisk, it’s only common sense you’ll see more people carrying guns and more crime.”
     […]

     In New York, Mr. de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said last week that this summer had been the safest on record, even as stops had declined 93 percent since 2011. Still, the overall number of murders is 8 percent higher since the start of the year compared with the same period last year. Also, Mr. Kelly writes that stops were a deterrent, and that “you can’t measure the amount of crime that wasn’t committed.”

     Karen Hinton, a spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, said on Monday that more officers had been trained to end distrust caused by “severe enforcement of stop-and-frisk in the past.” Stops should still be employed “when appropriate,” she said, but “to change course now, with overall crime rates lower than in many previous years, including 2014, would not be wise.”

     Despite a spate of racially charged deaths around the country of unarmed civilians, either in police custody or while being arrested, Mr. Kelly writes, “it is simply not true, statistically speaking, that American police are on a murderous rampage.”

     To clear the air, though, he urges the release of the testimony made before the grand jury that chose not to indict police officers in the 2014 death of Eric Garner on Staten Island. And he writes, “unarmed people should not end up dead, even if they are suspected of wrongdoing.”

     So there’s a 97% drop in stop-and-frisk searches with a ‘correlating’ 8% increase in murders. Now are those some solid numbers or what! More at the link.

     #ItDoesntMatter, for the photos.

     Florida trooper arrested a cop, then was stalked & harassed by the Thin Blue Line. Good cops? What good cops, right?

     The incident caused a firestorm of discussion among law enforcement and the public. The dash cam video went viral. Many applauded Trooper Watts for her willingness to take on lawbreakers hiding behind the uniform — a seemingly uncommon trait among those in her profession.

     Some, however, were not so supportive of her efforts. Soon after the incident, she was suffering from constant harassment.

     Watts says she would receive threatening phone calls from strangers. She would subjected to juvenile pranks like having pizzas delivered to her house which she did not order. She was stalked by police cars and unfamiliar vehicles idling in the cul-de-sac outside of her home. Sometimes she would be tailed around town for no apparent reason.

     The gang-like harassment of D.J. Watts became so severe that she felt in fear for her life, and afraid to do normal things like go outside and check the mail. The stress began to take a physical toll on her, and she began living like a hermit and eventually moved out of the county.

     After filing a public records request with the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, Watts discovered that her personal information had been pulled up by scores of officers from 25 different jurisdictions. Her data had been accessed more than 200 times total.

     “This is an invasion of privacy,” said Watts’ attorney Mirta Desir to the Sun Sentinel. “Law enforcement does have access to information most residents don’t and with that level of access there should come a certain amount of care. … This is something that is not supposed to be done.”

     Watts fired back against the corrupt gang, filing a 69-page lawsuit, citing grievances against 100 different officers from 25 different jurisdictions. Additionally, there were over 200 unidentified violators from several different agencies listed in the complaint.

     Talk about a disproportionate response.

     Larry Harvey on Burning Man’s race gap: ‘Black folks don’t like to camp as much as white folks’ because slavery. No, seriously:

     Well, that’s quite some gotcha quote from the Guardian’s sitdown with Burning Man head honcho Larry Harvey. When asked why there are so few black people at Burning Man, the annual Nevada festival’s co-founder replied, “I don’t think black folks like to camp as much as white folks”. And just in case that line wasn’t problematic enough, he added, “we’re not going to set racial quotas.”
     […]

     When asked by the Guardian reporter to explain his outrage-generating quote, Harvey replied:

     “Remember a group that was enslaved and made to work. Slavishly, you know in the fields. This goes all the way back to the Caribbean scene, when the average life of a slave in the fields was very short. And, so, there’s that background, that agrarian poverty associated with things. Maybe your first move isn’t to go camping. Seriously.”

     I’m afraid I’m not following his logic here.

283. Caine says

     9 September 2015 at 10:08 am

     Oh, bow and scrape to those cops, now!

     There are a gazillion articles about this, including many on unsavory bigot sites.

284. Caine says

     9 September 2015 at 10:17 am

     Rashid Robinson also has a petition up for Kenneth Davenport. http://act.colorofchange.org/sign/arbys/?t=3&akid=4772.1857509.LVOEpK

285. rq says

     9 September 2015 at 2:49 pm

     Black Activist Says ‘We’re at War With…Bad Cops’ — but What He’s Learned About Slain Texas Deputy Has Moved Him to Action – never mind the clickbait title, but you can rest assured that this is the kind of Black-Panthers-related story that is not going to make it into mainstream media with any real force.

     A black activist who said that he’s “at war” with bad cops and police corruption joined scores of others in organizing a fundraiser for slain Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Goforth on Sunday, calling Goforth “a good [cop].”

     “We’re at war with police corruption,” Quanell X, leader of the New Black Panther Party in Houston, Texas, told KTRK-TV. ”Police brutality, bad cops, not good ones and from everything that we’ve learned and we’ve seen, Deputy Goforth was a good one.”

     The activist — who insisted that he is not at war with all cops — said that the money he raised alongside other activists outside of a Houston Denny’s will go to Goforth’s family to help with education costs for his children.

     Conservative rightwingers, take note. This is how you do human.

     Remember Natasha McKenna? I think PZ even did a post about her: Death of Fairfax County inmate ruled an accident

     The February death of a mentally ill woman while at the Fairfax County jail has been ruled an accident by a Commonwealth’s Attorney.

     In a report released Tuesday, Commonwealth’s Attorney Ray Morrogh concluded that Natasha McKenna’s death was an accident and that Fairfax County Sheriff’s Deputies did not break the law when they used Tasers on McKenna.

     Morrogh’s report means that no charges will be filed in connection to McKenna’s death.
     […]

     McKenna, 37, was hit with a stun gun four times while deputies were transferring her to a different facility in Alexandria. Morrogh said McKenna fought with the deputies because of her mental illness, and that she could not help but do so.

     And here’s how he describes her struggle with the deputies:

     “It was an is a very sad video. But the more I watched it, and I watched it dozens of times, it’s clear that these deputies were pleading with her to cooperate. It was reported early on I think that she was 120-130 pounds, why did they need all these deputies. All of the deputies, all of them, said she was tremendously strong, she had almost superhuman strength,” Morrogh said.

     Pleading with their tasers. And note referral to Brute, her tremendous and superhuman strength. Remind you of anything?

     Words about slavery that we should all stop using

     “Plantation” = “labor camp”; “slave-owner” = “enslaver”; “Union troops” = “US troops.”

     I suggest we follow the lead of Finkelman and Baptist and alter our language for the Civil War. Specifically, let us drop the word “Union” when describing the United States side of the conflagration, as in “Union troops” versus “Confederate troops.” Instead of “Union,” we should say “United States.” By employing “Union” instead of “United States,” we are indirectly supporting the Confederate view of secession wherein the nation of the United States collapsed, having been built on a “sandy foundation” (according to rebel Vice President Alexander Stephens). In reality, however, the United States never ceased to exist. The Constitution continued to operate normally; elections were held; Congress, the presidency, and the courts functioned; diplomacy was conducted; taxes were collected; crimes were punished; etc. Yes, there was a massive, murderous rebellion in at least a dozen states, but that did not mean that the United States disappeared. The dichotomy of “Union v. Confederacy” is no longer acceptable language; its usage lends credibility to the Confederate experiment and undermines the legitimacy of the United States as a political entity. The United States of America fought a brutal war against a highly organized and fiercely determined rebellion – it did not stop functioning or morph into something different. We can continue to debate the nature and existence of Confederate “nationalism,” but that discussion should not affect how we label the United States during the war.

     There’s a bit more including another link at the link.

     BCSO: Video evidence shows man killed by deputies had knife in hand

     That first video was shot by witness Michael Thomas, who stopped as he was driving past the scene delivering paint in the area.

     Authorities said the second video they obtained as evidence was closer to the scene, confirming via press release Tuesday that Flores did have a knife in his hand.

     The second video has not been released to the public, but investigators have handed the findings to the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office.

     And yet they can’t release that video to the public. They will be working diligently on the case. Investigating themselves, adn all that.

     Scaring Up the Vote

     Long-term trends can obscure short-term variations, however, and there’s contested evidence that we’re in the middle of a violent crime spike, sparked by a so-called Ferguson effect where less aggressive policing—fueled by “Black Lives Matter” protests—encourages criminals. “Cities across the nation are seeing a startling rise in murders after years of declines,” reports the New York Times in a story on the rising murder rate in Milwaukee. Critics say this is overblown. Writing for the Marshall Project, Bruce Frederick—a senior research fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice—notes that of the 20 most populous U.S. cities for which there’s public data, only three experienced a “statistically reliable increase” in homicide rates. For the rest, “the observed increases could have occurred by chance alone.” If there is a new trend, we need more data. The same goes for the “Ferguson effect”; there’s no evidence that less policing has produced more violent crime.

     But humans are built to see patterns in unrelated events, and the crime increase—plus a rash of high-profile shootings aimed at police officers—has brought new partisan attacks on Black Lives Matter, even while 2015 stands as an unusually safe year for police officers, so far. “In the last six years under President Obama, we’ve seen a rise in anti-police rhetoric,” wrote Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in an op-ed last week, citing “demonstrations and chants where people describe police as ‘pigs’ and call for them to be ‘fried like bacon.’ ” Walker was referring to a small group of protesters in Minnesota who by all accounts are unrepresentative of the larger movement. Still, their actions came in the wake of a brutal attack on a Texas police officer, Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Goforth, who was shot 15 times at a gas station near Houston. And as such, it was fuel for Walker’s charge, as well as for claims from Fox News and other conservative outlets that Black Lives Matter is a “hate group.”

     A struggling Christie—who, along with Huckabee and Cruz, lags far behind in the polls—has picked up on this, and run with it. On Tuesday, during an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the New Jersey governor slammed Democrats on crime. “It’s the liberal policies in this city that have led to the lawlessness that’s been encouraged by the president of the United States,” he said. “And I’m telling you, people in this country are getting more and more fed up.” Likewise, on Fox News, he blasted President Obama’s rhetoric—or alleged lack thereof—on police killings. “The president says little or nothing about these issues where police officers are being hunted,” claimed Christie.

     This isn’t true. But that doesn’t mean Christie can’t find traction. With crime and killings in the news, Democrats may be vulnerable to claims of indifference or even encouragement, given their support for Blacks Live Matter. Indeed, this violence threatens the whole project for criminal justice reform.

     To a large degree, the move toward deincarceration and less draconian policing is a product of declining crime. Americans are less afraid of being victimized, which makes them either open to policies that might look “soft” in a more dangerous environment, or they are just apathetic about the issue. But even apathy works; when the public is indifferent, it’s easier to pass unpopular policies or make potentially unpopular commitments. It’s one reason why Hillary Clinton—a cautious politician by any measure—has felt confident enough to openly endorse Black Lives Matter; outside of a dedicated few, no one is paying attention, and no one is trying to use it against her.

     Christie and other Republicans are trying to change that. By blaming Obama and Black Lives Matter for an increase in crime or new attacks on police officers, they’re working to conjure the fear and uncertainty of the ’80s and ’90s—when violent crime was at an all-time high—and capitalize on them. And it’s worth noting the extent to which these appeals come at the same time that Republicans need to increase their share of the white vote to win a national majority. It’s no accident, perhaps, that Trump has called for giving “power back to the police, because crime is rampant.”

     More at the link.

     Defense filing alleges Walter Scott was on drugs when he got officer’s Taser; family calls it ‘smoke and mirrors’. Remember how clear things were when that video just came out?
     Who the fuck gives a shit about the drugs in his body? And they only have the officer’s word about the taser. I’m not inclined to believe him.

     Attorneys for former North Charleston officer Michael Slager filed court documents Tuesday alleging that Walter Scott, who had cocaine and alcohol in his blood, wrestled away the patrolman’s Taser and pointed it at him.

     Facing his own Taser, Slager said he drew his pistol and fired, according to police reports included in the filing.

     Attorneys for the officer now charged with murder in Scott’s death submitted the paperwork to offer an explanation of Slager’s actions and support his plea for release on bail.

     The documents provide a glimpse of Slager’s account about what might have happened in the moments before a bystander started filming the April 4 confrontation.

     But attorneys for Scott’s family said that none of the information is moving or shocking and that none of it directly supports Slager’s version of the shooting. The trace amount of drugs in Scott’s blood wasn’t enough to affect his behavior, they argued.

     Ultimately, they noted, Slager suffered only minor scrapes while five bullets tore through Scott’s body.

     More at the link.

286. rq says

     9 September 2015 at 3:29 pm

     Demonstrators stage sit-in at Thurston County Prosecutor’s office, because why? Because:

     Demonstrators angry about the charging decisions in the May 21 officer-involved shooting staged a sit-in Tuesday at the Thurston County prosecutor’s office.

     About 20 people filed into the Thurston County Courthouse just after 8 a.m. and demanded a meeting with Prosecutor Jon Tunheim.

     Olympia resident Caro Gonzales said she and the other demonstrators planned to stay at the courthouse all day — or until Tunheim agreed to drop the assault charges filed last week against Bryson Chaplin and Andre Thompson.

     However, the protesters left about 11 a.m. with plans to return Wednesday morning.

     The goal is for the charges to be dropped before the Olympia men are arraigned on Sept. 22, Gonzales said.

     “We have 15 days,” Gonzales said. “We want to get this done in 15 days.”

     Tunheim announced Sept. 2 that Olympia police Officer Ryan Donald wouldn’t face criminal charges for shooting Chaplin and Thompson during the May altercation.

     Donald had been searching for suspects in an attempted theft and assault at the west Olympia Safeway when he located the two men on the 1200 block of Cooper Point Road. Donald said he shot the men when they threatened him with their skateboards, according to the police investigation report.

     Chaplin and Thompson are facing second-degree assault charges in the alleged attack with the skateboards.

     If they’re not charging the officer, the least they could do is not charge those two young men, too.

     Brooklyn DA: We’re In An Open Warrant “Crisis”

     “There’s a crisis we have in the city that nobody’s really talking about, and that’s the crisis of 1.2 million open warrants,” said Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson during an AM radio appearance on Sunday. “If you’re stopped and you have a warrant out, you’re going to be put in handcuffs and brought to central booking, and I think that central booking should be reserved for folks who are committing gun violence or sexual assaults.”

     Of those 1.2 million open warrants, more than 260,000 are in Brooklyn. Most are for low-level or “quality-of-life” offenses, like drinking in public, spitting on the sidewalk, and public urination. All of these factor large in Commissioner Bratton’s Broken Windows approach to policing, and have a tendency to land New Yorkers—more often than not, men of color—in jail for failure to pay a small fine or respond to a court summons.

     City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito came out in favor of decriminalizing minor offenses this spring, and certain tabloids have since fear-mongered up the possibility of a urine-soaked city—arguing that Mayor de Blasio is tailspinning back to the Bad Old Days.

     In an effort to chip away at the million-plus outstanding warrants, DA Thompson held his first Begin Again event this Father’s Day, to adjudicate low-level offenses. More than a thousand New Yorkers lined up outside of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Clinton Hill, where a judge presided over a makeshift courtroom. According to the DA’s office, 670 warrants were cleared over the course of the weekend.

     Good start. More of this.

     Her Name Was India Kager: Police Gun Down Navy Vet While Her 4-Month-Old Son Was in the Backseat. And now a baby is parentless.

     Four Virginia Beach police officers have been placed on administrative leave after they fired upwards of thirty rounds at a parked car, killing a man and a woman while their four-month-old son was in the backseat.

     India Kager, 28, and Angelo Perry, 35, died during the tragic incident; thankfully, their four-month-old son was not harmed.

     According to Virginia Beach Police Chief Jim Cervera, Perry was suspected in a homicide and had been under surveillance for 30 minutes by officers in an unmarked car when they approached his vehicle.

     “He was a person of interest in a homicide case. And we did know that he was armed — we knew that he was heavily armed. We did have credible information that he was going to commit a violent act in our city,” Cervera said in a press conference.

     So if he was armed, and they spent a half-hour observing them and surveilling them… why is Krager dead? How did they not see the child? At best, this is sheer incompetence.

     #WhiteGirlsDoItBetter: Why White Women Remain One of Racism’s Most Slept On Weapons – white women, let’s listen up!

     From Jim Crow legislation, to Black castration, editor and journalist, Chloe Angyal, correctly acknowledged that blubbering white women have prompted untold incidents of white terror. But her assessment is incomplete. White women are equally proficient as weeping victims of alleged “negro” mischief or aggressive, violent ambassadors of white power. Contrary to the rubric of white patriarchy, white women are equal co-conspirators in the devaluation of Black life.
     […]

     Few white women brandish police shields, but all white females and males are expected to enforce white supremacy, monitor and abuse Black people.

     Decades of feminism have not extinguished white women’s antagonism towards Black females. White females routinely malign entertainment mogul Shonda Rhimes and FLOTUS Michelle Obama as “angry Black women.” So imagine what white female teachers think of Black girls?

     If white women are underrepresented in the field of law enforcement, they compensate with overrepresentation in the early stages of the school-to-prison pipeline. It’s estimated that white women comprise 63 percent of K-12 teachers in the United States. So when the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles documents that “African-American students are three times more likely to be suspended than whites,” that’s not “the man.”

     The accusatory white woman who incited lynch mobs and genital mutilation is not extinct. She now flings allegations and suspensions in the classroom. Sabotaging the academic genius of Black students is an act of genocide. Educational psychologist Dr. Jamilia Blake documents teachers’ debilitating perception of Black girls and boys as threatening, unsophisticated and defiant. In Unsettling Whiteness, Dr. Lucy Michael writes that white women are central to the criminalization of Black students because they are “not blind to their own cultural practices, but deeply committed to them.”

     “Deeply committed” white women of McKinney, Texas instigated the racial melee that introduced the nation to CNN’s “Best Place to Live.” Officer Eric Casebolt, who has since resigned, assaulted and violated a 15-year-old Black girl in a bikini. But a white female duo was the root of the conflict.

     Eyewitnesses confirmed a pair of white women “made racist comments” and violently double-teamed a black female child prior to Casebolt’s appearance. These women weren’t arrested or charged, nor did they require white manhood to launch a terrorist attack. Days later, Andrew Guilford and his Black male comrades were bamboozled by an equally devastating claims by a woman. Guilford and other three black men were tossed to the ground and shackled by McKinney’s finest. No arrests were made, no weapons were found, but officers justified their detainment because a white “woman called claiming one of the [Black] men was going to shoot her and police.”

     As for rallying white goons eager to pounce on and terminate Black lives, unquestionably, #WhiteGirlsDoItBetter. But women like Lake County, Fla.’s Lisa Elberson illustrate that white women are not confined to the pedestal of fragile, sanctified femininity. They’re equally proficient as aggressive, violent ambassadors of white power. Elberson was arrested and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, battery and child abuse after she was recorded terrorizing a group of black children—threatening them with a baseball bat while calling them “n-ggers.” Elberson publicly rebuked the notion of racial lynchings as white men’s work. She told the children, “I’ll hang your family from my tree.”

     Cliché assessments of white women’s purported inclination towards frailty and vulnerability impair our understanding of and defense against the maliciousness of Elberson, and other racist white women.

     A lot of it may sound harsh. Doesn’t mean it’s all wrong. (Also, this is a repost.)

     Writing Begins With Forgiveness: Why One of the Most Common Pieces of Writing Advice Is Wrong

     Writing advice blogs say it. Your favorite writers say it. MFA programs say it.

     Write every single day.

     It’s one of the most common pieces of writing advice and it’s wildly off base. I get it: The idea is to stay on your grind no matter what, don’t get discouraged, don’t slow down even when the muse isn’t cooperating and non-writing life tugs at your sleeve. In this convoluted, simplified version of the truly complex nature of creativity, missing a day is tantamount to giving up, the gateway drug to joining the masses of non-writing slouches.

     Nonsense.

     Here’s what stops more people from writing than anything else: shame. That creeping, nagging sense of ‘should be,’ ‘should have been,’ and ‘if only I had…’ Shame lives in the body, it clenches our muscles when we sit at the keyboard, takes up valuable mental space with useless, repetitive conversations. Shame, and the resulting paralysis, are what happen when the whole world drills into you that you should be writing every day and you’re not.

     Every writer has their rhythm. It seems basic, but clearly it must be said: There is no one way. Finding our path through the complex landscape of craft, process, and different versions of success is a deeply personal, often painful journey. It is a very real example of making the road by walking. Mentors and fellow travelers can point you towards new possibilities, challenge you and expand your imagination, but no one can tell you how to manage your writing process. I’ve been writing steadily since 2009 and I’m still figuring mine out. I probably will be for the rest of my life. It’s a growing, organic, frustrating, inspiring, messy adventure, and it’s all mine.

     Two years ago, while I was finishing Half-Resurrection Blues and Shadowshaper, I was also in grad school, editing Long Hidden, working full time on a 911 ambulance, and teaching a group of teenage girls. And those are the things that go easily on paper. I was also being a boyfriend, son, friend, god brother, mentor, and living, breathing, loving, healing human being. None of which can be simply given up because I’d taken on the responsibility of writing.

     You can be damn sure I wasn’t writing every day.

     I got it all done because I found my flow and I trusted it. Back when I first started writing Half-Resurrection Blues and I wasn’t doing so many other things, I would write on the stretcher in the back of the bus, literally between heart attack patients and gunshot victims. My life changed, my flow changed with it. When I was on the ambulance full time, I didn’t even consider writing anything that didn’t fit in 140 characters spurts on days I worked. Writing was simply off the table.
     […]

     So if writing every day is how you keep your rhythm tight, by all means, rock on. If it’s not, then please don’t fall prey to the chorus of “should bes” and “If onlys.” Particularly for writers who aren’t straight, cis, able-bodied, white men, shame and the sense that we don’t belong, don’t deserve to sit at this table, have our voices heard, can permeate the process. Nothing will hinder a writer more than this. Anaïs Nin called shame the lie someone told you about yourself. Don’t let a lie jack up your flow.

     We read a lot about different writers’ eccentric processes – but what about those crucial moments before we put pen to paper? For me, writing always begins with self-forgiveness. I don’t sit down and rush headlong into the blank page. I make coffee. I put on a song I like. I drink the coffee, listen to the song. I don’t write. Beginning with forgiveness revolutionizes the writing process, returns it being to a journey of creativity rather than an exercise in self-flagellation. I forgive myself for sitting down to write sooner, for taking yesterday off, for living my life. That shame? I release it. My body unclenches; a new lightness takes over once that burden has floated off. There is room, now, for story, idea, life.

     I put my hands on the keyboard and begin.

     Rock on, writers out there.

     From slavery to Ferguson, Ken Burns sees an unfinished Civil War

     “The Civil War,” which is airing on PBS this week in a handsomely remastered state, is Ken Burns’s most famous film. But while the documentarian’s subjects have ranged widely across the American landscape and American history, covering everything from the Shaker movement to the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and the trauma of the Dust Bowl, Burns has returned to race again and again. Whether he’s examining black art in “Jazz,” the integration of the national sport in “Baseball,” profiling American Indian leaders in “The West,” chronicling the rise and struggles of boxer Jack Johnson in “Unforgivable Blackness” or advocating for the men wrongfully convicted of rape in “The Central Park Five,” race defines Ken Burns’s America. And although “The Civil War” may have ended with a surrender, the issues over which the war was fought are far from settled.

     “I think in some ways, the subsequent films have convinced me only more certainly of our thing about the war, that it was the central event. Race is one of the things of American culture. I’ve taken a lot of criticism for saying that,” Burns told me when we met in a New York editing studio in May. “So, doing ‘Jackie Robinson,’ has echoes with Ferguson. Doing ‘Central Park Five’ has echoes back to Emmett Till and some of the realities of slavery. All of the way the Ferguson municipality behaved to its own citizens, its majority citizens, is not dissimilar to the way Jim Crow sharecroppers experienced the pernicious substitute for slavery: ‘Well, if we can’t own you, we have to pay you something, it won’t be very much, but we’re going to own every other aspect of you. And by the way now, since you’re no longer my property, I can kill you with impunity, because you’re not valuable to me.’ … And while there was no law that protected African Americans in slavery, and there were supposedly laws that protected them afterwards, they weren’t applied, and in many cases as we learn with chilling regularity, still aren’t applied.”

     Article continues at the link.

287. rq says

     9 September 2015 at 3:44 pm

     5 Ways Taylor Swift Exemplifies White Feminism – And Why That’s a Problem

     Now, White Feminism, for those of you who may not be aware, is not a pejorative term coined to describe all feminists that happen to be white (although, by my estimation, most feminists who are white are, indeed, White Feminists).

     Rather, White Feminism refers to the practicing of a feminism that assumes white (cis, straight, able-bodied, thin, middle-to-upper class) women as the default, actively avoiding critical analysis on any axis other than gender, thereby leading to a cookie-cutter feminism that can only possibly be useful to those it’s intended for: white women.

     And that’s a problem.

     And as much as I’m a Swifty, I’m a feminist first (and a white one, at that), and I’m not here for any kind of feminism that would excuse, for instance, Taylor’s misunderstanding that race is irrelevant in pop culture politics (a la the feud with Nicki Minaj that never was).

     So for those of you still confused about how Taylor’s version of feminism is too, um, white to be useful, here are five examples from each of the videos that she’s released in tandem with her singles off of her latest album, 1989.

     Read on.

     Speaking of music, Why Beyoncé’s Latest ‘Feminist’ Move Was So Problematic. While cheered on by black women on twitter, apparently this white woman disagrees. Let’s see how:

     As a card-carrying member of the Bey-Hive and a supporter of Rousey as a fighter, you’d think I’d be yelling all the lyrics to “Diva” and dancing in circles after watching this performance. But it left the feminist in me quietly cringing.

     It frustrated me that Bey presented Rousey’s quote in almost the same exact fashion that she did feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s quote, which is featured in “***Flawless,” during her On The Run tour. That quote defines feminism as “the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.” It’s factual, powerful and wholly uncontroversial (unless you’re an Internet troll).

     Bey likely had good intentions. On first listen, Rousey’s quote feels like it was meant to challenge cultural ideas which tell women our bodies are first and foremost for the consumption of men. But when you actually listen closely, the interview is fairly woman-shamey. Hearing it paired with “Diva” left me feeling a bit gross.

     Who exactly is this “do-nothing b*tch” that Rousey rails against? Is she the stay-at-home mom or housewife? Is she the hip-hop honey in rap videos? Is she the sugar baby who sleeps with older men to fund her education? Regardless, what does calling other women “do-nothing b*tches” really accomplish? It’s certainly not empowering, and it certainly does nothing to combat the larger issues that create a society where athletic bodies like Rousey’s are judged as less than.

     Rousey has broken down barriers as a fighter. She’s the current UFC Women’s Bantamweight Champion, an undefeated mixed martial artist and she won an Olympic medal in Judo in 2008. She even called out Floyd Mayweather on his infamous domestic violence charges. She’s a role model for any little girl out there who hopes to one day dominate an MMA cage.

     And that’s awesome. But.

     Rousey has made transphobic comments and her recent book My Fight/Your Fight has some racist undertones. She is by no means a feminist role model and her words should not share the same pedestal as Adichie’s.

     As a long-time follower of Beyoncé feminism, I’m disappointed.

     A lot of men and women are talking about feminism who probably wouldn’t be if Queen B hadn’t broadcasted it in her music and on the VMAs stage. But we need to understand Beyoncé feminism for what it is: A watered down, widely-digestable version of feminism. It’s not always perfect, but it brings feminist dialogue to a wider audience. It also means that we should speak up when Bey’s brand of feminism doesn’t do its subject matter or its audience justice.

     If Beyoncé is going to be seen and not heard, she needs to choose the words she broadcasts much more carefully — especially if she’s tying her message to the feminist movement.

     The specific quote in question is this:

     I have this one term for the kind of woman that my mother raised me to not be and I call it a ‘do-nothing b*tch.’ The kind of chick that just, like, tries to be pretty and be taken care of by somebody else. That’s why I think it’s hilarious, like, that people like say that my body looks masculine or something like that. I’m just like, listen, just because my body was developed for a purpose other than f**king millionaires doesn’t mean it’s masculine. I think it’s femininely badass as f**k. Because there’s not a single muscle on my body that isn’t for a purpose. Because I’m not a do-nothing b*tch.

     Going to take some thought here.

     Prosecutor will not pursue charges in death of mentally ill inmate in Va.

     Fairfax County’s head prosecutor announced Tuesday that he will not pursue charges in the controversial death of a mentally ill woman who died after being restrained and Tasered at the Fairfax County jail in February.

     Natasha McKenna, 37, resisted a team of deputies trying to remove her from her cell for a transfer. The deputies placed her in handcuffs, leg restraints and a mask before Tasering her four times. McKenna stopped breathing a short time later and died days later at a hospital.

     Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon that the Sheriff’s Emergency Response Team, or SERT, which dealt with McKenna, was facing an inmate they described as having “superhuman” strength and who resisted forcefully.

     “The men and women of the SERT team are good people who did their best to get her help under difficult circumstances,” Morrogh said. “They used, I think, restraint in dealing with her under the circumstances.”

     I’d like to see his dictionary, please. I think someone replaced ‘restraint’ with ‘excess’.

     Emerson professor has traffic citation vacated – kind of a good news? I think?

     Newton police Officer Gregory Helms thought he saw a bald African-American man with glasses and a thick beard, but maybe he saw a smooth-faced African-American woman with a full head of hair.

     In a strange case that played out in Newton District Court on Tuesday, the officer had cited Emerson College professor Jabari Asim for operating a vehicle without a valid license. But a clerk magistrate vacated the June citation and found that Helms probably cited Asim’s wife, Liana, a licensed driver who was simply running errands.

     “This occupied my mind and my time for three unnecessary months,” Asim said after magistrate Larry Okstein made the ruling. “How could they not see the difference?”

     ‘Cause all black people look the same? Even when they don’t at all?

     Michael Slager, Cop Who Killed Walter Scott, Says He Felt Threatened. Not buying it, not citing it. You can read, if you like.

     Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson to take ‘driving tour’ of Ferguson. He’s totally getting in touch with the community.

288. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     9 September 2015 at 11:05 pm

     Ava DuVernay expands her distribution company to support women and filmmakers of color:

     Filmmaker Ava DuVernay is relaunching her distribution company, African American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM), as Array. The newly launched Array will expand its focus to support Black, Latino, Asian, Native American, Middle Eastern and female filmmakers.

     “There’s a generation of filmmakers of color and women whose primary concern is that no one will see their work,” DuVernay told LA Times. “And that is a huge barrier. They’re asking, ‘Why make something if no one will see it?'”
     “Right now, there is a fundamental disrespect inherent in the distribution and amplification of films. There is a cinema segregation in how films are seen and not seen. What we’re saying is, we’re not going to depend on those things anymore.”

     Array announced that it has two films set to release this fall: “Ayanda and the Mechanic” by South African director Sara Blecher and “Out of My Hand” by Takeshi Fukunaga. Both were acquired after playing at the Los Angeles Film Festival. “Ayanda and the Mechanic” won the Special Jury Prize in the World Fiction Competition.

     “These are both terrific films and they reflect our broadened scope,” Tilane Jones, Array’s executive director, told TheWrap.
     Array’s current films include Mississippi Damned, Vanishing Pearls, Middle of No Where, I Will Follow, and more.

     Full LA Times article here: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-ava-duvernay-20150908-story.html

     Array’s new site here: http://www.arraynow.com/our-story

289. rq says

     10 September 2015 at 2:02 am

     Will The Ferguson Commission’s Final Report Just Collect Dust On A Shelf? “If it’s like other famous commission reports, yes.” Let’s hope it’s not like the others.

     3 new Cuyahoga County grand juries, one likely to get Rice case. They’ve been taking so damned long with this, do they really think people will just forget?

     Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court has just seated and sworn-in three new grand juries.

     It’s expected that one of the panels will be asked to decided if there should be criminal charges brought against police in the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

     Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty is reviewing the Rice case investigation of Cuyahoga County Sheriff Clifford Pinkney.
     […]

     McGinty has said the case will be decided by a Grand Jury, but has not publicly committed to a specific timeline.

     Courthouse observers figured a new grand jury would be asked to tackle the controversial Rice case. Now, three are in place.

     I hope to hear of indictments very soon. If the grand jury has any sense at all.

     Serena Williams is one of the most dominant athletes in any sport, but her paychecks don’t show it. I’m currently accepting theories as to why that might be. Perhaps she isn’t seeking out sponsors with enough determination? Perhaps her outspoken attitude is a turn-off to potential offers? Did I miss anything…?

     Ava DuVernay Expands Array to Distribute Films by Women and Minorities, as presented by Tony above. Thank you, Ava!

     Authenticity makes a comeback – and you might wonder why this is here. Well, look at the picture they’ve chosen to represent authenticity in a discussion of soul music – and then read this paragraph:

     Artists like Adele (pictured) and Aloe Blacc are pop singers who embrace or borrow elements of soul, an American genre originated in the 1950s that grew out of the blues, R&B and African-American church music. The emotion and pain of original soul is inextricably linked to America’s brutal history of slavery and racism. Music labels like Motown and Stax popularised the sound with artists such as Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. Propelled by the civil-rights movement, soul music went mainstream by the early 1970s with artists such as Al Green and Isaac Hayes. Then the rise of disco eclipsed its success.
     […]

     In a restless, post-Arab spring, post-Occupy world, soul may be the new punk, albeit with less snivelly angst and a beat you can dance to. Unlike much of country music, which expresses disappointment in life and love with a twang of resignation and a nod to alcoholism, soul tends to convey stories of shattered dreams and lost love with a more robust upbeat. Ultimately soul is about having a good time despite the hard times.

     .
     The new punk? More like the original punk. Except that only punk is, you know, punk, and soul music’s roots deserve to be acknowledged a lot more than just a few words in an article about white artists. And the photo. I mean, I like Adele, but if we’re going for ‘authenticity’, could have done better. (Article, by the way, from 2012.)

     Another one of those things I’m putting up here as an example, but I really, really, really… can’t. Just… UGH. Rick Santorum, Invoking MLK’s Time In Jail, Says He’s Proud Of Kim Davis. In addition to her comparing herself to Rosa Parks, this is the ultimate in appropriation. She is nothing like either of them, and I hate the people who make these comparisons and I hate the people who write about them like it’s just another stupid thing they say, rather than a symptom of a far deeper violence against black people.

290. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     10 September 2015 at 2:25 am

     Oregon cop who turned in racist police chief fears for his life:

     One of the Oregon cops who squealed on his chief for making racist remarks and dancing like a monkey after a black woman’s discrimination complaint now fears for his life.

     Police Officer Dustin Alex Stone says he’s been facing an overwhelming amount of backlash after he filed a report about the “openly racist” top cop at the Clatskanie Police Department last month.

     The 56-year-old chief Martin Hoover resigned after Stone and Officer Zack Gibson alerted authorities to an incident in which Hoover pounded on his chest like Tarzan and danced around the room as he howled like a chimp to mock a black suspect.

     Stone has been left scared for his family’s safety and his job, he told local news station KOIN 6.

     “I’ve received death threats, a tire flattened with a nail on my driveway. My kids, they’re afraid to go outside,” he said.

     The police officer says he doesn’t regret turning in his boss, which he did to stand up for his Christian beliefs.

     “I had to do this. I had to,” he said.

     But the tables quickly turned and the two cops became the center of the community’s outrage.

     The harassment had led the City of Clatskanie to issue a statement urging residents to “respect the rights of the individuals who brought this matter forward.”

     “The City regrets that this incident occurred and supports that the matter was reported,” the statement said.

     Stone and Gibson alleged Hoover also sang a Confederate battle song called “Dixie” when his squad debriefed him about a black woman’s threat to sue the force for discrimination after she was arrested for disorderly conduct.

     The incident took place in the police station’s break room on June 25.

     This shit is not right. This guy did the right thing and he’s getting threats of violence against him and his family.

291. rq says

     10 September 2015 at 2:30 am

     City approves $6.4 million payment to Freddie Gray’s parents; says it’s from Wall Street. So… not taxpayer money? I’m just wondering how they’re getting so much from Wall Street.

     Saying that the city will avoid protracted and “divisive” litigation, and that the money will be paid from unrelated lawsuits that the city has won, the Board of Estimates unanimously approved a $6.4 million settlement with the mother and father of Freddie C. Gray, the 25-year-old African-American man who died after he was arrested by police in April.

     Deputy City Solicitor David E. Ralph presented the case for settlement briefly before the vote, saying that “on behalf of the settlement committee” he recommended the payment to Freddie Gray Sr. and Gloria Darden. The family’s claim—which had not yet been filed in court—would not have been subject to the $400,000 cap on compensation in state cases, Ralph explained, but was more comparable to a 1997 case in which a jury awarded $39 million to a person who was killed by a rough ride in a police van, or a 2005 case in which another man was paralyzed in a similar circumstance. The settlement, he and others stressed, “expressly does not constitute an admission of liability or guilt.”

     City Solicitor George Nilson said after the vote that Baltimore is a plaintiff in three cases in which it expects to win settlements that will more than pay for the settlement to Gray. One is a class action against Wall Street banks for allegedly manipulating derivatives. That case settled recently, Nilson said, although the exact amount of the award is still to be decided.

     He said there are two other cases, which he declined to identify, that would yield the city millions of dollars.

     Oh. Okay. Note the part about previous cases of men dying and suffering spinal injuries in police vans. Patterns, patterns, patterns.

     Yall! We only have a week left in our @kickstarter push for @sevenscribes! It’s crunch time and we need your support https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1394424784/seven-scribes … Five days left at this point, though!!

     The devastating decision to not prosecute in the brutal in-custody death of Natasha McKenna, by Shaun King. Devastating is about right. Adding a Trigger Warning for the article, for details of violence.

     Utter and complete bullshit.

     Fucking bullshit.

     Motherfucking bullshit.

     Everything about Natasha McKenna’s arrest, murder, the bullshit investigation, and this bullshit decision not to prosecute the officers who killed her is a devastating, heartbreaking injustice.

     I first wrote about Natasha in April.

     Then again in May.

     To be clear, and everything starts and ends with this, Natasha McKenna should’ve never been arrested or jailed in the first place. On page 2 of the final report of her death, which is actually the first paragraph of her autopsy, it states that Natasha…

     “Has a well documented history of major mental illness. Her first psychiatric hospitalization occurred when she was 14 years old. In the ensuing years she accrued psychiatric diagnoses including: schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, and depression.”

     Natasha did not deserve, require, or need to be jailed, but desperately needed hospitalization. Taking someone like her to jail is the equivalent of taking your gravely ill newborn baby to a filthy veterinarians office for open heart surgery. Jails are ill-equipped to handle the emergency medical needs of mentally ill patients. At this point, it needs to be illegal to take severely mentally ill people to jail – unless they have a properly certified facility and staff within the jail to properly care for those in distress.

     In the month before Natasha was killed in custody, she was hospitalized over and over and over again because of extreme mental health episodes. Publicly and privately she had gut-wrenching mental breakdowns all month long. Her overseeing physician, Dr. Haile, advised police verbally and in writing that she lacked the capacity to make decisions for herself and was “quite ill.” In spite of her long and documented history of extreme mental health episodes, on January 26th Natasha McKenna was taken to the Fairfax County Detention Center – her local jail.

     What’s particularly gross about her January 26th arrest is that Natasha was actually arrested on January 26th, not for anything new, but for her behavior during a January 15th incident – in which she was actually hospitalized for ten whole days for during a complete psychotic breakdown. During that breakdown she resisted arrested. The day after she was released from the mental hospital, she was charged with assaulting an officer and resisting arrest from the January 15th incident that required her hospitalization. This is ludicrous. She spent pretty much the entire month of January in the hospital, but was arrested and sent to a jail that could not care for her the day she was released.

     This was doomed to fail. From the first day she arrived, the report describes violent and heartbreaking mental health episode after episode after episode. They were constant. In the notes, officers describe their encounters with Natasha as the worst encounters they’ve ever had in their lives. They could only compare her to male inmates they’ve dealt with on drugs, but Natasha wasn’t a man and she wasn’t on drugs. Any mental health facility would’ve seen hundreds of people like Natasha. I once worked as a counselor at a mental hospital for children and I saw children and teenagers like her daily.

     For days on end, according the notes, she was constantly restrained with brute force. Officers admitted to punching and hurting her, but claim they did so to protect each other. The deeper truth is that they had no idea what in the hell they were doing and she was not only wearing them out, but she was wearing them thin. Officers described her as being “demonically possessed.” This portrayal is troubling because it not only makes her “otherworldly,” and thus open to mistreatment, but demonic possession is not anything near a proper medical diagnosis.

     More at the link.

     Ron Johnson, Once Hailed as Ferguson’s Protector, Gets Slammed by Police in DOJ Report. He even got named as one of 2014’s most influential people, if you remember, though I forget which magazine.

     When Ron Johnson, a captain with the Missouri Highway Patrol, was named commander of Ferguson operations on August 14, 2014, he was stepping into a situation that had already stretched multiple police departments to the breaking point. The previous night, officers from the St. Louis County Police Department donned riot gear, drove armored vehicles along residential streets and deployed startling quantities of tear gas. The nation watched with horror.

     Enter Johnson. On that first day of his command, he marched with protesters down West Florissant Avenue — a sign that many hoped indicated an improving relationship between law enforcement and the Ferguson community.

     Of course, those hopes were dashed in the days, weeks and months that followed. And we now know, thanks to a Department of Justice report released this week, that Johnson’s leadership also created tension between himself and other officers, some of whom felt that the 26-year veteran put too much effort into schmoozing the media and the community, and not enough into coordinating the tactical needs of those under his command.

     According to the report:

     The incident commander, Captain Johnson, was involved in extensive community engagement efforts and media interviews. As a result, he was less engaged in day-to-day, hour to-hour incident command responsibilities and instead became the public face for the police response. As a result, the full responsibilities of incident command were often not executed. This resulted in a diminished ability to spend time monitoring the changes in staffing needs, to provide direction for command, and to engage in effective communications with commanders and deployed personnel.

     Consequently, according to interviews with officers and commanders, morale among officers dropped and inconsistent incident management decisions were being made. At the same time, the media was appreciative of his command; one report said Johnson “was specifically praised by many interviewees for his willingness to engage in dialogue, answer questions, and interact with protesters and the press.”

     Interviews with law enforcement and community members suggested to the DOJ that the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s approach to incident command was to provide more information, to be more engaged with the community, and to lessen the military image of law enforcement. However, this approach was either badly communicated to the officers, or misunderstood by them — or perhaps, the report suggests, the officers may have actively resisted this approach.

     I’m actually kind of guessing the last option, seeing as how they were all already trigger happy and high on adrenaline and basically in that combative state of mind where backing down and having dialogues would seem inappropriate and endangering because omg they’re throwing empty water bottles.

     “There is no ‘War on Cops'”; There is a Long-Overdue Conversation About Police Brutality

     Tomorrow is the funeral service for Harris Country Sheriff Darren Goforth, who a week ago was murdered while filling his police cruiser with gas in Texas. His death was senseless, tragic, and horrific. There’s no possible excuse for it. But, as I write in a new Daily Beast column,

     There’s also no excuse for attempts by law enforcement, media, and politicians to claim that the unmotivated killing is part of a “war on cops” or in any way related to the Black Lives Matter movement or other people critical of law enforcement and police brutality.

     To do so is simply to wave away a decade-long decline in confidence in police that has everything to do with behavior by law enforcement, not the citizens they serve. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans with “a great deal/quite a lot of confidence” in police has dropped from 64 percent in 2004 to just 52 percent, its lowest number in 22 years.

     So far this year, the same number of police nationwide have been killed in the line of duty as last year: between 25 and 28, depending on the source (this doesn’t include traffic and other on-the-job accidents unless the officer was in pursuit of or actively engaged in dealing with a criminal).

     As my Reason colleague Ed Krayewski writes, “In 2007, there were 67 cops shot and killed in the line of duty. In 2007 there was no ‘national conversation’ about police reform, no sustained focus on criminal justice reform, nothing in the national zeitgeist that would suggest the number of murders were the result of anything more than the number of people who had killed cops that year.”

     Regardless, police spokesmen, Fox News hosts such Sean Hannity, and politicians such as Ted Cruz are quick to say that Goforth’s killing by an in-custody suspect with a long rap sheet of violent assaults and mental problems is proof positive of a “war on cops.”

     GallupGallupIt bears repeating: There is no war on cops. There is a long overdue and very welcome national conversation about criminal justice reform and more going on. That’s partly due to new forms of media that allow citizens to document how police do their job and, to their credit, it’s also because police departments all over the country are trying to stop a long slide in citizen confidence.

     More at the link.

292. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     10 September 2015 at 2:33 am

     What if cops, not taypayers, paid the bill for their bad behavior?

     Vocativ looked at data for the amount of money the 10 biggest city law enforcement agencies in the U.S. have spent to settle police misconduct lawsuits between 2010 and 2014 and broke down how much officers in each department would have to pay if they were the ones on the hook for the settlements. Each of Chicago’s 12,042 cops would have to pay $20,735 to cover the $249.7 million in settlements for police misconduct lawsuits between 2010 and 2014. NYPD officers also would have a fairly large bill to cover the $601.3 million in settlements over that same period; each of the city’s 34,454 police officers would have to pay $17,452.

     In Baltimore, the city’s 2,949 cops would have to pay $4,069 each if they were on the hook for paying the $12 million in settlements the city has paid out between 2010 and 2014. If you add the proposed settlement in the lawsuit over Gray’s death that amount increases by more than 50 percent to $6,239 per officer.

     The data showing how much each department spent on legal settlements for police misconduct lawsuits was compiled by the Wall Street Journal in July, after the city of New York agreed to settle a lawsuit over the death of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died after being put in a chokehold by an NYPD officer last summer.

293. rq says

     10 September 2015 at 3:04 am

     Houston cops shoot unarmed black patient in hospital — and then charge him with assault. We’ve seen the story previously, but now with added charges.

     Alan Pean is a 26-year-old biology student with no criminal record and history of violence. But on August 27th, he was shot in the chest by an off-duty Houston police officer who worked as a security guard at the St. Joseph Medical Center. The police are claiming that Alan became combative and that they followed standard operating procedure. It’s Alan, they say, who is as fault, and is being charged with two counts of aggravated assault against a public servant. He was arraigned today.

     More details at the link.

     Sarah Palin refers to Black Lives Matter protesters as ‘dogs’ at rally against Iran deal. Let’s be specific, though – she only said:

     “Thank you for gathering to uphold the promise that was made, the promise of never again,” Palin told the crowd. “And thank you for gathering as we can because we are still a free people. And if you love that freedom, think of that.”

     She continued: “Oh and you know, since your president won’t say it, since he still hasn’t called off the dogs, we’ll say it. Police officers and first responders all across this great land, we got your back! We salute you!”

     “Thanks you, police officers!”

     See? She didn’t even refer to them directly. People are reading too much into her words!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

     ‘Black Lives Matter’—but Reality, Not So Much, “The movement was founded on a falsehood. Scapegoating the police ignores the true threats to the urban poor.” Yep, another victim-blame-y piece from the Wall Street Journal. I can’t access the full story, but I’d love to read it, if anyone can help me out.

     Cincinnati fires its police chief, launches search for third chief in four years

     Officials in Cincinnati announced Wednesday that they have fired the city’s police chief — an abrupt booting after two years on the job for the top-ranking official in a department with a clouded history that is dealing with declining morale and a rise in violent crime.
     […]

     “A culture of hostility and retaliation instituted by Mr. Blackwell has put the integrity of the police department at risk,” Black wrote in the memo. “Mr. Blackwell uses verbal abuse and insult to convey authority. This is one of the more troubling conclusions I have reached. … Individuals have been threatened and berated, in the presence of subordinate officers, superior officers, and members of the public. This tactic has served to damage morale and has caused a number of officers and CPD civilian employees to seek treatment for anxiety and stress caused by this environment.”

     Other allegations in the memo were that Blackwell gave disproportionate overtime hours and pay to a select group of personally preferred officers, and used his position to get his position to get free tickets to sporting events.

     Blackwell remains popular in much of the city’s black community, and his focus on community-oriented policing had earned him praise nationally, but he was facing an upcoming vote of confidence by the police union. Meanwhile, according to city crime data, violent crime is up 3 percent from 2014 and shootings are up more than 30 percent.

     I wonder if his favoured group of officers were black? I mean, if the union is holding a vote of (no?) confidence, I’m not inclined to believe that he was all as bad as they say.

     EXCLUSIVE: James Blake, former tennis star, slammed to ground and handcuffed outside midtown hotel by white NYPD cops who mistook him for ID theft suspect. Being a world-class athlete? Isn’t protection.

     Former tennis great James Blake was slammed to the ground, handcuffed and detained by five plainclothes city cops Wednesday outside his midtown hotel before heading out to the U.S. Open, Blake told the Daily News.

     The officers, who were all white, mistook Blake for a suspect in an identity theft ring operating around the midtown hotel.

     The incident occurred around noon in front of the Grand Hyatt on East 42 St., as Blake, a 35-year-old African-American who attended Harvard before going on tour, was waiting for a car to take him to Flushing Meadows, where he was making corporate appearances for Time-Warner Cable.

     “It was definitely scary and definitely crazy,” said Blake, who was once ranked No. 4 in the world and was among the most popular U.S. players of his generation. He suffered a cut to his left elbow and bruises to his left leg.

     Asked if he considered it a case of racial profiling, Blake said, “I don’t know if it’s as simple as that. To me it’s as simple as unnecessary police force, no matter what my race is. In my mind there’s probably a race factor involved, but no matter what there’s no reason for anybody to do that to anybody.

     “You’d think they could say, ‘Hey, we want to talk to you. We are looking into something. I was just standing there. I wasn’t running. It’s not even close (to be okay). It’s blatantly unnecessary. You would think at some point they would get the memo that this isn’t okay, but it seems that there’s no stopping it.”

     Blake said he had just answered a few questions from a writer for a tennis magazine and was texting when he looked up and saw someone in shorts and a T-shirt charging at him, splitting the doorman outside the Hyatt, an official hotel for the U.S. Tennis Association.

     “Maybe I’m naïve, but I just assumed it was someone I went to high school with or something who was running at me to give me a big hug, so I smiled at the guy,” Blake said. Blake said the officer, who he said was not wearing a badge, picked him up and threw him down on the sidewalk, yelled at him to roll over on his face and said, “Don’t say a word.”

     Blake said he responded, “I’m going to do whatever you say. I’m going to cooperate. But do you mind if I ask what this is all about?”

     An officer said, “We’ll tell you. You are in safe hands.”

     Said Blake, “I didn’t feel very safe.”

     So a non-uniformed, not-self-identifying police officer just comes charging at him…? I question this particular police procedure. I guess arrest training is now mostly how to tackle someone.

     We never abolished our human zoos – they are digital now

     It is nearly impossible to deny that we live in a gladiatorial zeitgeist. A world in which Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle’s shows mine working class sorrow for the satiation of eager and complicit audiences. A culture of humiliation. Humiliation of the disenfranchised plays an important role in maintaining an oppressive status quo. By playing often brutal and emotional mind games with their ‘guests’ these shows portray already disenfranchised people at their most brutish and undeserving, helping convince us that our own privilege and social capital is both deserved and secured due to our innate superiority.

     When our humiliation culture intersects with race politics we are presented with a particularly bleak picture. Through media and popular culture lenses, the fiction of white racial superiority and convictions about that innate difference are given enduring credibility. When Holmes speaks of the ‘Saartjiemania’ that swept London in the 18th Century[1] what she of course refers to is the widespread fascination and exploitation of Saartjie Baartman, coined ‘The Venus Hottentot.’ In the early 19th century, Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa, was displayed as a living exhibit in London and Paris. At the peak of her popularity her exaggerated physical form was seen as an abnormal object to be poked and prodded by white Westerners. In one final act of humiliation, Saartjie Baartman’s body (particularly her buttocks and genitalia) were dissected and put on display until the 1970s. Victorian London used her as evidence of their own ‘normality’.

     In the western world the black body is necessarily a queer one, subject to a bloodthirsty and dehumanising discourse. Under the insecurity of mounting state violence, the victimhood of the black body is conflated with the deservedness of its status, this contemporary discourse convincing those that are not the immediate victims of epidemic structural violence that they do not deserve to be victims.
     […]

     In a recent and particularly telling moment, Glamour Magazine celebrated Taylor Swift’s silencing of Nicki Minaj’s important dialogue about how black women go unrewarded for their cultural contribution, as a victory of (white) feminism, only to backtrack and delete posts when Swift acknowledged her misstep. Black womanhood and the black female body which possesses and asserts sexual agency as Nicki Minaj does, cannot be celebrated when it moves beyond the license it is granted under white supremacy—nor can it be successfully allowed to celebrate or assert its excellence without repercussion. It is a body necessarily defined by its positionality relative to the white body; the greater its deviation from Eurocentric standard, the greater its worthiness of humiliation and violence.

     This violation necessitates its othering, using tropes loaded with racism and misogynoir. The ‘ex-gay’ black man proclaiming “I don’t like menz no more!”, and the viral video of Sweet Brown crooning catchphrases in southern AAVE are funny, because our common understanding of its comic value, is predicated upon its inferiority. We must remove the black colloquialisms from our voices, and swap homegrown, rich vernacular and oral traditions for the Queen’s English before we might be something not worthy of being laughed at. The eurocentric respectability politics that we must adhere to to survive in the white supremacist frameworks, demands it. The loud room that is oppression and socioeconomic duress twist us into complicity with our own degradation. Sweet Brown then, not as performer with agency, but as caricature, is viewed successfully with humour only through a white supremacist lens. Her stay in the zeitgeist was even promoted by an uncomfortable dental advert, evocative of old-school Aunt Jemima imagery.

     Both Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift have, unwittingly or not, used black women as props to contrast the ‘grotesque’ exaggeration of black womanhood with their own ‘true,’ white womanhood: as objects of rhetoric, ripe for vulgar metaphor and comparison. Widespread media mockery of people of colour goes unnoticed and unavenged by the mainstream feminist movement (they are in fact some of it’s most willing participants), and attempts to take white womanhood off the pedestal meet with rapid opposition. White feminism is more concerned about the fictional humiliation of the white, blonde archetype of Rihanna’s BBHMM— a Daisy Buchanan-esque woman prospering from and exploiting the alienated fruits of her labour—than they are about the real-life humiliation of the black female body.
     […]

     And yet in spite of the constant challenges to their sense of self, economic security, and even their humanity, the carefree black girl in popular culture continues to thrive. Indeed, despite detractors and a white supremacist structure, hellbent on her humiliation and downfall, Serena continues to rise. She is not just playing the tennis of her life—she is playing the tennis of our lifetime. Serena Williams, unlike Saartjie, is not a cautionary tale. She is the story of self-fashioning: a powerhouse, who humiliation slips off like sweat on a tennis court. Despite the jealousies and impertinences of white mediocrity, Serena stands her ground, demonstrating for all who want to see, the strength and resilience of black womanhood.

     Read all the skipped bits.

294. rq says

     10 September 2015 at 12:09 pm

     ‘No Blacks’ Is Not a Sexual Preference. It’s Racism.

     If you’re a gay man, phrases like “no blacks” and “no Asians” aren’t just words that you’d find on old signs in a civil rights museum, they are an unavoidable and current feature of your online dating experience. On gay dating apps like Grindr and Scruff, some men post blunt and often offensive disclaimers on their profiles such as “no oldies,” “no fems,” and “no fatties.” Among the most ubiquitous are racial disclaimers like “no blacks” and “no Asians,” which are most frequently posted by white men but, as Edwards’s case proves, not always.

     Sometimes, men even use foods as metaphors for entire ethnic groups: “No rice” to deter Asian men, “no spice” to keep the Latinos away, and “no curry” to tell Indians they don’t have a shot.

     Those who deploy these disclaimers defend themselves from accusations of “racism” by claiming that they merely have “preferences” for certain races over others. Wrote one gay blogger, “Don’t tell me I can’t have a preference! I don’t want to have sex with women. No hard feelings. Does that make me a misogynist?” Others have argued that it is impossible to separate the language of so-called sexual racism from racism in other spheres of life. There is a reason, they insist, that men of color are most often pushed to the sexual wayside. “No whites” is a much less popular slogan.

     Debates around “sexual racism,” as researchers have labeled it, are particularly heated within the gay community, although it is certainly a source of controversy in heterosexual circles as well. It is also an argument that could soon be settled by emerging sociological research.

     A new Australian study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior entitled “Is Sexual Racism Really Racism?” suggests that the answer to that question is probably “yes.” Sex researchers Denton Callander, Christy Newman, and Martin Holt asked over 2,000 gay and bisexual Australian men how they felt about race and dating through an online survey. These men also completed a region-specific version of the Quick Discrimination Index (QDI), a standard survey instrument that measures attitudes on race and diversity.

     After putting these two data sets together, the trend was clear: “Sexual racism… is closely associated with generic racist attitudes, which challenges the idea of racial attraction as solely a matter of personal preference.”

     There’s more at the link, and I encourage everyone to read, because these sorts of dating ‘preferences’ aren’t exclusive to gay men.

     Media when Beyoncé says something vs. when a white women says the exact same message.. See photos. Refers back to that article about Beyoncé I posted yesterday.

     September 9 Protest at Denver DA Mitch Morrissey’s house, a summary of an evening in Denver.

     Our visit to Mitch Morrissey tonight was a reminder that the people of Denver are sick of these racist, fascist violent cops brutalizing and killing us, and we are just as sick of bootlicking city officials like Morrissey who actively cover for and enable this violent behavior by law enforcement. From now on, endorsing police violence will come with personal and social consequences. To Mitch Morrisey and all future District Attorneys of Denver: indict and prosecute violent cops, or we will make sure your whole neighborhood knows what a cowardly piece of shit you are. You may seek to bury and ignore the truth about police violence in Denver, but we will continue to bring the truth to your doorstep.

     Cops In Freddie Gray Case Are Desperately Trying To Get Marilyn Mosby Off The Case – but we already knew that.

     From Borders: Injustice, Atrocity, Tragedy & Resistance [The Refugee Struggle]

     The following is a media report, info-drop and commentary I wrote two years ago this month while consumed with frustration about the lack of interest and attention on what everyone is calling the “Refugee Crisis”– which we refer to as the “Refugee Struggle”. After finding this unreleased writing just a few days ago I realized that all the information below is just as pertinent now as it was when I originally wrote it. The idea was/is that by exploring the struggles of Refugees from and in different regions that people, especially in the US would naturally connect the dots.

     Shortly after writing this piece, I boarded a plane for Greece to find out for myself what was really happening in this “First Entry” country where so many Refugees are stuck (in arbitrary detention or by the Dublin III– More on that later). Due to unforeseen complications, all the video footage, photographs and writings compiled during that trip sit on a shelf collecting dust.

     The Refugee Struggle is real and it’s global, and its knocking at all our doors. Now that the flood gates to “Fortress Europe” have opened with the blood of Syrians, this struggle is finally getting the attention it deserves, but so much is being left out the story. BAI hopes to dust off our aging material and release some new writings on this topic in the coming days. (So if you don’t see anything new, bug us about it, sometimes we need that)

     A big and belated THANK YOU! to Lampedusa in Hamburg, Lampedusa in Berlin, We Are Here / Wij Zijn Heir (Amsterdam), the heroes at Art Against (Greece), KEERFA (Greece), Pakistani Workers Union (Greece), Afghan Refugee and Migrant Community in Greece, Finn Henning of Moogtography (Hamburg) and Global Uprisings (International) for all the time, stories, space and support.

     Originally written in August/September 2013

     By A Refugee Contributor to Bay Area Intifada

     I’ve experienced a new level of racism since Donald Trump went after Latinos

     Donald Trump’s hate speech against Latinos seems to be emboldening white Americans’ racism. For many, it may be hard to wrap their minds around the fact that that a reality TV star and failed businessman who characterized Mexican immigrants as the “most unwanted people,” calling them “criminals, drug dealers,” and “rapists”, was not only running for president, but is now polling well.

     I can’t say I’m surprised.

     A couple of weeks ago, while I was running errands in my neighborhood, a stranger asked me if I was “illegal”. Around 10 minutes earlier another stranger asked me if I spoke English. Both were white and one of them even called me “senorita.” Then, late last week, I was standing in line to use the ATM when a white man approached me cautiously, asking if I spoke English. He was lost and said he didn’t want to be in a “bad area” longer than he needed to. He was holding a King Taco cup in his hand. I’ve seen white guys like him at the neighborhood taco spot. Stay for the tacos, leave before you have to interact with Mexicans who aren’t serving you.

     This is the world Trump wants when he says he’s going to “make America great again.” It’s the America of 1950s TV shows, where people of color don’t exist in the lives of white Americans unless they’re being served or entertained by them. This appears to be a world longed for by many, as a recent poll found that 47% of white Americans look upon Trump “favorably.”

     I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 29 of my 30 years. As a light-skinned, biracial Latina in one of the most diverse and Mexican-centric cities in the nation, I have never been asked the type of questions I’m now fielding from white people. I’m not the only one experiencing an uptick in seemingly out-of-the-blue racist exchanges. Latina journalist Aura Bogado recently tweeted about a strange interaction at a grocery store. My father recently told me a white neighbor he’s been friendly with since moving into the neighborhood 15 years ago, casually inquired about his citizenship status. As the days go on, I hear more of these kinds of stories from Latino friends and family members.

     White Americans can argue Trump is the all-American underdog, the anti-PC, shoot-from-the-hip politician they’ve been waiting for; that their support stems from an appreciation for someone willing to stand up for everything that once made America “great.” Yes, Trump is unabashedly American – in the way that racism and xenophobia are as American as apple pie. His demonization, dehumanization and push to further criminalize undocumented immigrants while having utilized their labor to build Trump Tower is also painfully American.

     You can read more at the link.

295. rq says

     10 September 2015 at 12:19 pm

     No charges to be filed against Pasco police officers involved in shooting death, so all those indictments and charges we saw earlier were a small piece of better news, but not all the news at all.

     The number of police officers shot and killed is down this year, and half killed are black… which is also an interesting statistic. How many police officers are black?

     In the United States, the perception of truth often means more than truth itself. While the conservative media lies to blame the Black Lives Matter movement for the tragic shooting deaths of police officers, the mainstream media is rushing to cover what appears to be a dramatic increase in gun violence against police officers.

     Except, this isn’t true. Our country is on pace to have fewer officers shot and killed while on duty this year than last year (and almost any year on record for that matter).

     Often, people who are sympathetic to police will quote that 83 police have died in the line of duty in 2015. And that is true, but what they aren’t telling you is that 13 of those officers had heart attacks or that 19 died in car accidents or that three died because of 9/11-related illnesses.

     A total of 26 police officers have been shot and killed in the line of duty this year. Each of those is tragic and a reflection of the violence in our country. This, though, is not some race-based dramatic uptick in police shooting deaths. Forty-seven officers were shot and killed in 2014 and we are on pace to have fewer than that this year. Comparatively, 662 people have been shot and killed by police in America as of September 1 and a total of 792 people have been killed by police altogether this year.

     Not only that, but as the media attempts to blame black activists for these deaths, the truth they aren’t telling you is that half of all police who’ve been shot and killed this year were actually African Americans. That, though, is inconvenient for their narrative.

     We should be able to have the emotional maturity and intellectual honesty to discuss these issues without misstating or skewing the facts (or outright lying about them). It only makes matters worse.

     Not only that, but far more police are dying by suicide than they are at the hands of others.

     More at the link.

     Two former Chatham County sheriff’s deputies indicted for perjury in Ajibade death

     Two former sheriff’s deputies on Wednesday were indicted on perjury charges for allegedly lying during a grand jury proceeding in the January death of Mathew Ajibade in the Chatham County jail.

     Jason Paul Kenny, 31, falsely stated before a grand jury on June 24 that “he had told Lt. Debra Johnson that he had Tased Mathew Ajibade four times before nurse (Gregory) Brown checked the restraints on” Ajibade, the Chatham County grand jury said in returning a one-count perjury indictment.

     In a separate indictment, Maxine Evans, 56, was named in three perjury accounts, each stemming from alleged false statements she made before the grand jury on June 24. Those counts included:

     • Stated “she entered a check performed by Officer Vinson at 12:20 a.m. on Jan. 2 into the restraint chair log when that check was reported.”

     • “By stating she entered a check made by Officer Capers at 12:40 a.m. on Jan. 2 as the fourth check on the restraint check log.”

     • “Stating that she recorded the checks in the restraint chair log as they happened.”

     In each instance involving both defendants, the grand jury found the statements were untrue and were made “by a person to whom a lawful oath had been administered in a grand jury proceeding (hearing).”

     The newest charges are in addition to those contained in a June 24 indictment charging the pair and Gregory Brown, a 45-year-old Corizon contract nurse, with involuntary manslaughter and related charges in the Ajibade death.

     EXCLUSIVE: James Blake, former tennis star, slammed to ground and handcuffed outside midtown hotel by white NYPD cops who mistook him for ID theft suspect. Not so exclusive, though, as it’s the same story, just a different source.

     Hearing on Freddie Gray trial location to play out amid tensions. More on that later today.

     Billie Holiday, via Hologram, Returning to the Apollo, which is kinda nice!!!

296. rq says

     10 September 2015 at 2:21 pm

     In Iowa, black voters are testing the Bernie Sanders waters

     Whether Sanders can win support among black voters will show whether or not he will draw votes away from Hillary Clinton, perhaps even taking the Democratic nomination, or be simply a thorn in her side with a following largely made up of the most liberal white segment of the Democratic party.

     Blacks make up 3.3% of Iowa’s population, compared with 13% for the nation according to U.S. Census data. While they are not a large part of the Democratic electorate there, black voters are a crucial block of Democratic primary voters in South Carolina.

     Sanders told Des Moines Register staffers that “we have a lot of work in front of us …to the African American community and, by the way, the Latino community and we are in the process of doing that.”

     But Sanders also said he was at a disadvantage with black voters compared to Hillary Clinton.

     “I am running against an unnamed candidate — you may know who she is — whose husband, who I will also not mention, but was a former president of the United States, was very popular with the African-American community. Period. And certainly that popularity will benefit Hillary Clinton.”
     Sanders though has been increasing his outreach to black voters and speaking out on issues of race relations, income inequality and police brutality since activists affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement have disrupted several of his campaign events, including seizing control of a Sanders event in Seattle that was celebrating the anniversary of Social Security and Medicare.

     “I heard about that,” Betty Copeland, a retired UAW worker who attended a Sanders rally in West Burlington, Iowa, said of the disruptions. “I believe all lives matter. I don’t care what color you are.”

     Copeland, a black Democrat who supported then-candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, said it was “rude” for protesters to interrupt a speaker and that they could convey their point “in another way.”

     But, she added, it was critical for Sanders and other Democratic candidates, to speak out on issues of race and police brutality.

     “I think it’s important that they do speak about these issues because it’s important to the people,” Copeland told Mashable “Lately there has been so many black young black men dying at the hands of cops …and I think it’s important for the candidates to show that they either support or don’t support so that way you know what you’re looking at.”

     Haven’t heard much about him lately, either he’s improved security or he’s started listening.

     NYPD commissioner to ex-tennis star James Blake: ‘Race has nothing to do with this’. Must be true then, hm?

     The New York Police Department’s top cop wants to apologize to ex-tennis pro James Blake after his officers mistakenly identified Blake as a suspect in an identity theft ring and slammed him to the ground outside a tony Manhattan hotel.

     New York Police Department Commissioner William J. Bratton also said that race was not a factor in the incident — despite suggestions to the contrary by the tennis star.

     Blake, 35, who reached the sport’s top tier before retiring in 2013, was slightly injured by NYPD officers when he was tackled and detained outside New York’s Grand Hyatt Hotel on Wednesday.
     […]

     Asked if he thought the incident was a case of racial profiling, Blake, whose father is African American, told the New York Daily News, “In my mind there’s probably a race factor involved, but no matter what there’s no reason for anybody to do that to anybody.”

     New York Police Department Commissioner William J. Bratton, however, disagreed. He told CNN on Thursday morning, “Sorry, race has nothing at all to do with this. If you look at the photograph of the suspect, it looks like the twin brother of Mr. Blake. So let’s put that nonsense to rest right now.”
     […]

     He added that Blake was “inappropriately arrested and detained and in handcuffs for a period of time” and that once he was freed certain “protocols” weren’t followed.

     “I and the mayor have tried to contact Mr. Blake and apologize,” said Bratton.

     Blake, meanwhile, appeared on Good Morning America and said he wanted that apology and seemed surprised when anchor Robin Roberts said the NYPD had been trying to contact him. He said he’d received plenty of media calls but nothing from the police department.

     Sounds like another case of black people looking the same.

     A Prescription for More Black Doctors

     Xavier University exists within a constellation of more than 100 schools federally designated as historically black colleges and universities. To achieve this designation, colleges must have opened before 1964 — the year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in all public facilities and institutions — and must have been founded with the express purpose of educating black Americans, though students of any race can, and do, attend them.

     The first of these historically black colleges, now called Cheyney University, was opened by a Quaker in Pennsylvania in 1837, at a time when black students were barred from most institutions of higher learning in the North and the South. But after the Civil War, colleges for black students proliferated across the South to serve the millions of newly freed people. They were founded by churches, philanthropists and the federal Freedmen’s Bureau, and then by states, after an 1890 federal law required states with segregated schools to open at least one black land-grant college. By the 1920s, black colleges dotted every Southern state and a few Northern ones.

     Around that time, a nun named Katharine Drexel, an heiress to a Philadelphia banker who has since been sainted, used part of her inheritance to open Xavier for black Catholics in New Orleans who were not allowed to attend the white Catholic colleges in town. It remains the only black Catholic college in the country. Its mission is the same as every other historically black college. While many colleges were started to groom the children of the nation’s elite, the goal of historically black colleges has always been to pull up through education the nation’s most marginalized — first the children of former slaves, then the children of sharecroppers and maids and today the children of America’s still separate and unequal K-12 educational system.

     Because of this mandate, the colleges have been one of the most important institutions in building the nation’s black middle class. The list of promi­nent Americans who studied within the classrooms of historically black colleges is striking. Among them are Julian Bond, Ta-­Nehisi Coates, Sean Combs, W.E.B. DuBois, Medgar Evers, Ralph Ellison, Nikki Giovanni, Alex Haley, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, James Weldon Johnson, Spike Lee, Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, Marian Wright Edelman and Andrew Young.

     The colleges, created as a result of the nation’s system of legal segregation, produced the very Americans who would eventually take down that system. Thurgood Marshall, who argued the Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court and later became its first black justice, went to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and Howard University’s law school. Four freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro started the large-scale sit-in movement in 1960. Two Fisk University students, Diane Nash and John Lewis, the long-­serving congressman, helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and were pivotal in the struggle for civil rights across the South. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is the most notable alumnus of one of these institutions; he entered Morehouse College in Atlanta at the age of 15.

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     With black students now attending schools that were once off limits, the percentage of black students who attend historically black colleges has declined from 90 percent in 1960 to just 11 percent today. But the role of these schools has not changed; they are still focused on addressing the needs of those whom privilege has passed over. Nearly three of four students at historically black colleges come from low-­income families, compared with about half of all American college students, and most are still first-­generation college attendees. Though the institutions account for just 3 percent of all colleges, they award 16 percent of the bachelor’s degrees earned by black students. Further, historically black colleges have always been incubators of black leadership; in the 1990s, the last time data was collected, graduates of these schools accounted for 80 percent of the nation’s black judges, 50 percent of black doctors and lawyers and 40 percent of black members of Congress. Along with Xavier, other historically black colleges like Morehouse, Howard, Hampton and Spelman are also among the top feeder schools for black medical students.

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     When that medical-­school report came across Francis’ desk all those years ago, he was certain of one thing: The small number of black students entering medical school was not a reflection of their capabilities. It was a reflection of the shoddy schooling so many of them received before they ever arrived at the college gate. If Xavier was going build a program to turn large numbers of its students into doctors, Francis knew the college was going to have to do more than just teach science. It was going to have to figure out how to overcome years of educational gaps.

     Plenty more reading at the link.

     Body Count, “Engulfed by crime, many blacks once agitated for more police and harsher penalties.”

     This summer, the Black Lives Matter movement got a literary manifesto, in the form of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” (Spiegel & Grau), a slender but deeply resonant book that made its début atop the Times best-seller list. Coates, a writer for The Atlantic, has been chronicling recent police killings, and he has responded with a polemic, in the tradition of James Baldwin, that takes the form of a lyrical letter to his fourteen-year-old son. Coates lists Michael Brown alongside other recent victims: Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Marlene Pinnock. He writes, “You know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body.” And he reminds his son that this destruction is so often unpunished as to be tacitly sanctioned:

     The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations.

     He means to confirm what his son suspects: that the shocking stories in the news are not anomalous; that police abuse is just another manifestation of the violence that has afflicted black people in America ever since slavery; that officers who kill are not rogues but, rather, enforcers of a brutal social order. One of the most severe lines in the book is also one of the most frequently quoted: “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”

     Four decades ago, a number of black leaders were talking in similarly urgent terms about the threats to the black body. The threats were, in the words of one activist, “cruel, inhuman, and ungodly”: black people faced the prospect not just of physical assault and murder but of “genocide”—the horror of slavery, reborn in a new guise. The activist who said this was Oberia D. Dempsey, a Baptist pastor in Harlem, who carried a loaded revolver, the better to defend himself and his community. Dempsey’s main foe was not the police and the prisons; it was drugs, and the criminal havoc wreaked by dealers and addicts.

     Dempsey is the most vivid character in “Black Silent Majority” (Harvard), a provocative new history by Michael Javen Fortner, a professor of urban studies who wants to complicate our understanding of crime and punishment in black America. He points out that while African-Americans have long been disproportionately arrested and incarcerated for committing crime, they have also, for just as long, been disproportionately victimized by it. His focus is New York in the nineteen-sixties and early seventies, when crime rates shot up, creating a demand in African-American communities for more police officers, more arrests, more convictions, and longer prison sentences. The book begins near the end, on a January day in 1973, when Dempsey joined Governor Nelson Rockefeller at a press conference in support of what became known as the Rockefeller drug laws—a passel of anti-drug statutes that helped make New York a mass-incarceration pioneer, increasing the number of “friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations” that Coates writes about.

     Like many scholars and activists, Fortner is profoundly disturbed by our modern system of criminal justice, calling mass incarceration “a glaring and dreadful stain on the fabric of American history.” But he thinks this history is incomplete if it ignores what he calls “black agency”: he wants us to see African-Americans not merely as victims of politics but as active participants in it, too. At a moment of growing concern about how our criminal-justice system harms African-Americans, Fortner seeks to show that African-American leaders, urged on by members of the community, helped create that system in the first place.

     Keep reading at the link.

     Being ‘hafu’ in Japan: Mixed-race people face ridicule, rejection, another case of racism in Japan (we’ve seen articles on blackface in Japan previously).

     Speaking of Japan, #ArianaMiyamoto, first half black, half Japanese woman named Miss Japan. Congratulations!

297. rq says

     10 September 2015 at 2:43 pm

     Just as a heads-up for tomorrow, they’ve released video of Natasha McKenna and her final struggle to live.
     Johnetta Elze is watching and tweeting.
     And it is disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. Should never have been classified as ‘accident’. Those officers should be facing charges, all of them.

298. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     10 September 2015 at 7:48 pm

     When street signs tells you to walk, yield, and stop racism:

     Street signs dot every city block in the U.S. Without commanding much attention, they serve as a silent but ever-present reminder to live within the rules. Now, an organization is harnessing that authority to create New York City street signs that challenge people to consider their own role in systemic racism.

     Displaying messages in support of the Black Lives Matter movement like “White guilt is complacency” and “Your privilege doesn’t need consent,” the signs will appear guerrilla-style along 14th St. in New York City as part of the Art in Odd Places public art project in October.

     The signs were designed by students at SUNY Purchase working with the organization Ghana ThinkTank, which was founded in 2006 to address problems in the “developed” world by brainstorming solutions with people in U.S. prisons and other countries including Cuba, Iran and El Salvador. Their messages emerged from street conversations and interviews on how civilians participate in systemic racism, according to Carmen Montoya, an organizer with Ghana ThinkTank.

     The signs originally appeared in New York City during the New Museum’s IDEAS CITY Festival in late May. As the group installed them, several people asked them to put up the signs in their own neighborhoods, according to Christopher Robbins, a Ghana ThinkTank organizer and associate professor of art and design at SUNY Purchase.

     The signs use the same materials and graphics that appear on New York City’s municipal signs, which carry the authority of a greater system, Robins said. “A street sign signifies the official voice of the system around you,” he told the NewsHour via email.

     Ghana ThinkTank first experimented with street signage in 2011 in a project aimed at addressing alleged police harassment of immigrants. For this project, dubbed “Legal Waiting Zones,” the group responded to complaints of police harassment toward people on Roosevelt Ave. in Queens by putting up posters in English and Spanish that read:

     It is OK for you to wait here.
     And in all public places.
     For a friend, your mom,
     or simply because it is too
     hot in your apartment.

     An effective street sign “should blend in enough to initially be absorbed as something official and sanctioned,” Robbins said. “Once the content has sunk in, a rupture happens.”

     Click the link to see some of the signs. My favorite says
     When being racist please be sure to use the appropriate language.
     Even funnier (in that twisted-not-really-funny-kinda-way)? What some nincomfuck said in the comments:

     Directed at white people, everyone knows that blacks can’t read….

     I’d say that qualifies as appropriate language.

299. rq says

     11 September 2015 at 6:57 am

     California lawmakers approve bills to track racial profiling, police use of force

     “The time has come to have a clear conversation with law enforcement about what we as a society will no longer accept — and that’s racial profiling by those who indeed take an oath to protect and serve all of us fairly and equally,” said state Sen. Holly J. Mitchell (D-Los Angeles), who presented the bill in the Senate.

     Republicans who spoke against the measure said it would be costly to implement.

     “An officer [will be] spending an abundant amount of time doing paperwork rather than being on the streets,” said Sen. Jeff Stone (R-Murietta).

     The bill now goes back to the Assembly, where it originated, for final approval.

     The Assembly passed a bill requiring police departments to submit yearly reports detailing all cases in which officers are involved in uses of force that result in serious injury or death.

     Under that measure, it would fall to the state attorney general’s office to decide how the reporting would be done and to keep the data. However, the reports could not contain information that would identify the officers. The bill heads to Gov. Jerry Brown.

     A nice step forward, if only in the data collected to draw further conclusions.

     Carson pulls punches as Trump pounces, which is kind of neither here nor there.

     Why everyone’s saying ‘Black Girls are Magic’

     It’s been almost two years since CaShawn Thompson told the world that black girls are “magic.”

     But not everyone has gotten the message.

     Not so long ago, mainstream news outlets published pieces saying that Oscar-nominated actress Viola Davis and tennis superstar Serena Williams don’t fit the “classic” or “ideal” images of beauty and femininity. Feminista Jones, a prominent feminist writer, has said that she is “attacked on a daily basis” online with derogatory and threatening messages.

     But the negativity extends beyond celebrities and public figures, affecting many black women of all ages. Michelle Obama was frank about this in a speech at the “Black Girls Rock!” awards in March, when she said that young black girls often heard “voices that tell you that you’re not good enough, that you have to look a certain way, act a certain way; that if you speak up, you’re too loud; if you step up to lead, you’re being bossy.”

     Thompson, who tweets at @thepbg, however, is inspired by the black women who persevere despite this adversity. For her, their achievements are like “magic.”

     “I say ‘magic’ because it’s something that people don’t always understand,” Thompson said in a phone interview with The Times. “Sometimes our accomplishments might seem to come out of thin air, because a lot of times, the only people supporting us are other black women.”

     With that in mind, Thompson began to use the hashtag #BlackGirlsAreMagic in 2013, to speak about the positive achievements of black women. Since then, the hashtag has spread widely. Calling it “viral” might risk misinterpretation, as this isn’t a flash in the pan that disappears once the moment is gone. Instead #BlackGirlsAreMagic has gradually been gaining popularity.

     Since its inception, the hashtag has been used for just about everything that shows positive images of black women. Tweets using the tag range from admiration for tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams or “Selma” director Ava DuVernay, to proud friends reposting pictures of college graduates from their hometowns.

     Keep reading at the link.

     NYPD Commissioner William Bratton pledges apology to James Blake. “Sorry we thought you looked like this other black guy but it wasn’t racially motivated.”

     New York Police Department Commissioner William J. Bratton has spoken further about an incident Wednesday in which undercover detectives tackles former pro tennis player James Blake after mistaking him for a suspect in an identity theft case.

     “We are very interested in speaking with Mr. Blake … to extend our apology. It should not have happened,” Bratton said, per New York’s NBC affiliate. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio also wants to apologize, Bratton told reporters during a short news conference Thursday morning at police headquarters.

     Bratton added that he had “concerns about the takedown” and “use of force” involved in the incident. He said the arresting officer in the incident, who’s been with the NYPD for about four years, has had his badge and gun taken away and placed on a modified assignment, pending an internal-affairs investigation.

     That’s the update, the rest of the story is pretty much as we saw yesterday.

     Pastor who led Freddie Gray marches arrested for blocking traffic – and note, he was arrested before actual protesting.

     Pastor Westley West, 27, of Faith Empowered Ministries, was charged with attempting to incite a riot, malicious destruction of property, disorderly conduct, disturbance of the peace, false imprisonment, and failure to obey, police said.

     What a list.

     Attorneys for man charged in Emanuel AME Church shootings seek evidence. Evidence for what, you may ask?

     Prosecutors must share whatever evidence they have against the white man accused of killing nine black churchgoers in Charleston, defense attorneys argued Thursday.

     In court papers, lawyers for 21-year-old Dylann Roof wrote that they want all documents, reports, witness statements and recordings the state plans to use in its case against their client.

     The request is fairly routine in a criminal case, and a judge will rule on it later.

     Last week, state prosecutor Scarlett Wilson said she will pursue the death penalty against Roof in the June 17 shootings of nine black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church.

     Addressing reporters outside her Charleston office, Wilson said the deliberate massacre required her to seek the most serious punishment the state allows. Autopsies determined each victim was shot multiple times and police said Roof spent nearly an hour at a Wednesday night Bible study before opening fire.

     “This was the ultimate crime, and justice from our state calls for the ultimate punishment,” Wilson said, reading a three-minute statement. She took no questions.

     A judge will hear arguments next week on whether documents, including 911 calls, from the church shootings should be released to the media.

     Because the victims were black, he’ll probably say yes.

300. rq says

     11 September 2015 at 7:10 am

     Huckabee: Dred Scott Decision “Remains To This Day The Law Of The Land”

     While defending Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis’s refusal to issue marriage licenses out of her religious opposition to same-sex marriage, Mike Huckabee said Wednesday that the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford — which held that all blacks, free or enslaved, could not be American citizens — is still the law of the land even though no one follows it.

     Radio host Michael Medved quickly pointed out to the former governor of Arkansas that the decision was overturned by the 13th Amendment. (Although the 13th Amendment ended slavery, the birthright citizenship clause in the 14th Amendment overturned the Dred Scott decision.)

     “I’ve been just drilled by TV hosts over the past week, ‘How dare you say that, uh, it’s not the law of the land?’” Huckabee said. “Because that’s their phrase, ‘it’s the law of the land.’ Michael, the Dred Scott decision of 1857 still remains to this day the law of the land which says that black people aren’t fully human. Does anybody still follow the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision?”

     Is he actually serious?
     Apparently yes.
     USAmerica, I fear for you.

     BREAKING: Video of encounter that led to death of Natasha McKenna at Fairfax jail released, link at the link… As mentioned above, it is disgusting viewing, and it is upwards of 40 minutes long. Major TRIGGER WARNINGS if you do decide to watch it.

     NBA player Thabo Sefolosha spurns plea deal, asks for trial. Good man.

     Prosecutors say professional basketball player Thabo Sefolosha (sehf-ah-LOH’-shuh) has declined a plea deal that would have wiped away criminal charges stemming from a confrontation outside of a Manhattan nightclub.

     The Atlanta Hawks guard-forward was arrested April 8. Police were investigating the stabbing of another NBA player. They say Sefolosha ignored orders to step away from the crime scene and became combative.

     He was charged with obstructing governmental administration, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

     Sefolosha sustained a season-ending injury in the struggle and missed the Hawks’ playoff run.

     The trial’s in October. Good luck!

     Report finds Tasers helped cause Va. inmate death. “Helped”. “Helped cause”. I think the official cause of death is still excited delirium, a condition, oddly enough, only seen in prisoners mysteriously dying while being restrained and tased by police.

     Now, the Virginia’s Medical Examiner finds McKenna’s cause of death to be “excited delirium associated with physical restraint, including the use of conducted energy device.”

     Virginia’s medical examiner cited excited delirium as the cause of death in seven cases, including McKenna’s, since 2007, according to Arkuie Williams, State Administrator of Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Five of those cases occurred while the victim was in law enforcement custody, added Williams.

     But the validity of term “excited delirium” is under debate in medical communities. The ACLU says the cause of death designation seems to only be used when a person, often mentally ill, dies after a struggle with law enforcement.

     GRAPHIC: Debunking The ‘War On Police’, just in case it needed more debunking. Lots of graphs to enjoy at the link!

301. rq says

     11 September 2015 at 10:52 am

     This is the difference between how a white feminist is viewed vs how black feminist are viewed…let that sink in. See photos.

     Reports: Paramedic recommended ER for inmate, but jailers wouldn’t release him. He was obviously faking it, amirite? Totally fooled this paramedic, but not those crafty police supervisors.

     When a paramedic from Northeast Fire Protection District went to the Pine Lawn jail last September to check out an inmate with abdominal pain and bleeding, he told police officers and jailers the inmate needed to go the emergency room, according to his report.

     The paramedic wrote that a police officer had started paperwork for the release and the inmate had changed into his street clothes to get ready to board the ambulance. But then a police supervisor canceled the release. The inmate, Bernard Scott, 44, who was being held in lieu of $360 bail for traffic cases, was ordered to change back into his jumpsuit and led back to a holding cell.

     Before leaving the station, the paramedic tried one more time.

     “PD again advised by EMS that pt should be transferred to ED for further medical attention,” his report said. But the answer was still no.

     Just 14 minutes later, the jail had to call another ambulance. Now Scott was unconscious, his muscles stiff. He was aggressive, difficult to pin down and his posture indicated possible brain damage, an EMT’s report said.

     Police officers disclosed five minutes after the second ambulance arrived that they had found Scott hanging by his neck from a shoelace tied to his cell door.

     Seriously.

     Baltimore Cops Have Found A New Enemy: Dirt-Bikers

     There are hundreds of riders in Baltimore, most of them young black men; they ride dirt bikes and ATVs, both of which are illegal in the city as of 2000. Named for their signature move of popping their front wheels and aiming their bikes skyward to simulate clock hands striking midnight, the 12 O’Clock Boys are among the most infamous of the organized groups, serving as a national face for the local biker community after the release of the 2013 documentary Twelve O’Clock in Baltimore.

     Largely from poor areas of the city, the riders come up young and help novices out as they get older. As documentary director Lotfy Nathan acknowledged in a 2012 VICE interview, immersing yourself in the city is an integral part of the sport: “It’s a chance for kids who would otherwise be stuck in their own neighborhoods to parade through the whole city and declare it as their own.” And once it’s theirs, they take care of it: In April, following West Baltimore resident Freddie Gray’s death while in police custody and the nationally televised protests that followed, the bikers provided live, impromptu entertainment amid the turmoil, performing tricks for the gathering crowds and curbing the high tension between the police and the protestors. Dirt-bike crews never appear politically affiliated, but they are community-affiliated.

     But they’ve also long been a public-safety concern in the city—in May, a woman died after a dirt bike struck her and its rider fled; in July, a 21-year-old biker was struck by a car and killed—and an ever-intensifying police crackdown has been in effect all summer. Cops use road blockades to prevent riding, conduct heavy surveillance to serve warrants, and even physically chase dirt-bikers through the streets, which contravenes official law-enforcement policy meant to curb accidents. Two Sundays ago, a police car hit a 16-year-old dirt-biker and left him with a broken ankle; a week later, witnesses say a police car hit a stalled dirt bike while its rider was still on it, and watched as officers tased the rider in the back when he fell down trying to get away. There was no mention of the incident in the press.

     At Druid Hill Park in Northwest Baltimore, where dirt-bikers have met up every Sunday for months, police, some openly carrying riot gear, have begun to assemble every Sunday as well, citing an alleged early-August fight between onlookers as their reason to watch the area more closely. During their first en-masse appearance, on August 9th, one officer brandished his gun at a crowd that had gathered to watch the bikers. (The officer is now on administrative leave.) A week later, policemen equipped with riot shields and helmets tapped their batons on the ground while a small group of children hung around news cameras on the side of the road. More recently, hundreds of orange traffic cones dot the street, slowing traffic and creating room for the dozens of parked police patrol cars that fill the negative space. It’s a turf war the bikers are losing, and it’s not the first one.

     ***

     In Baltimore, which creates its public policy within a segregationist paradigm, the ability to occupy space is a big deal. Though built into the city’s laws for over a century, the assumption that black people must move elsewhere to accommodate white interests is still frequently baked into tangible policy. Last month, the city closed one of its highest-performing and well-appointed schools; a primarily black elementary school, it was the only building that fell within the “redevelopment zone” surrounding the racetrack where American Pharoah won Preakness this year. That May event made more than $85 million, while a crowd of 131,680 mostly white onlookers drank in an around the Pimlico Race Track. The demographic makeup of the surrounding neighborhood, whose median household income sits under $24,000, is around 90-percent black. Children displaced from that elementary school in Park Heights—the neighborhood dozens of police officers now spend full Sundays discouraging dirt-bikers from entering—are now being sent to an underperforming and overcrowded school nearby.

     That Baltimore’s segregation is policed by the government might seem insane in 2015, but its roots are some of the oldest in the country. Over a century ago, in 1911, the city’s then-Mayor J. Barry Mahool signed an ordinance that constituted the first municipal-housing segregation law in the United States. At the time, white residents blamed black residents for a tuberculosis epidemic, and began vandalizing the homes of their black neighbors. The unrest persuaded officials to place legal barriers between residents of different races; today, government-funded “urban renewal” projects aimed at recreational areas around the Inner Harbor, previously DIY art spaces in Station North, and the neighborhoods around the Pimlico racetrack serve as their own, subversive way of furthering the racial divide by driving locals out.

     The bikers, however, have challenged this systemic separation simply by riding through it. They ride from their homes—poor areas of the city often sensationalized by shows like The Wire—through the wealthy, whiter neighborhoods that sit directly next to them. For much of the city’s black population (holding strong at 63 percent), they’re real-life examples of how to survive in a deeply segregated city: They’re powerful because they can go where they please, and because no one can catch them.

     Keep reading at the link.

     I’m Black And Queer At The Same Time, All The Time. Because #AllBlackLivesMatter.

     When I walk through the door, different people “see” different things and explain those things in different ways.

     But the room I enter is always set up on foundations built upon an oppressive country, and I am always me – a Black queer (or queer Black) cisgender male 23-year old from Cleveland, OH with 18 siblings, raised in a Muslim and Hare Krsna household, among many other things, and each of those things define me. Each of those things depend on one another in order to create me. And all of them enter through every door.

     There seems to be a never-ending conversation around two of those parts of me specifically which I most recently saw continued in a piece (again) making the rounds on Facebook by Terrance Chappell published on the Huffington Post entitled “Why I’m a Black Man Before I’m a Gay Man.” In it, Chappell explains that, for him, Blackness comes first because “It doesn’t matter where you live or what kind of car you drive; to some you’re still a nigger, and that is the cold, hard truth about the world we live in today, and it’s what my parents had to teach me growing up. I don’t experience this with my identity as a gay man.”

     While it’s true that Chappell’s experience is his own, and also true that anti-Black racism is sometimes more easily perceived than anti-queerness, to some I am similarly still a fag, and the question of putting one before the other and the willingness to answer it is part of a pattern of erasure all too familiar to Black queer, trans and women folk in conversations about Black and queer identities and what they mean. As a Black queer man, I can attest to how we are consistently asked to put aside either our Blackness or queerness in fighting for each respective liberation, implying that both Black and queer liberation do not rely on the liberation of Black queer folks, despite the fact that Black queer folks experience rates of certain anti-Black and anti-queer violences far greater than both their gay white and Black cishetero counterparts.

     Empathy with Chappell’s reluctance to be defined by the mainstream (white) LGBTQ community that has a history of demanding Black queer people put their sexuality before their racial identity is one of the reasons why I identify as queer and so many others have chosen to identify as same gender loving (SGL) rather than gay, which has come to be associated with Whiteness. But the alternative erasure, the pressure to place one’s Blackness before their queerness, is just as traumatic.

     A lot more at the link.

     NYPD cop who assaulted James Blake http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/bratton-defends-cops-tackled-tennis-star-james-blake-article-1.2354973 … Charged w/5 complaints in 7 months (There’s a link for that last at the link, too.)

302. rq says

     11 September 2015 at 10:56 am

     This is the difference between how a white feminist is viewed vs how black feminist are viewed…let that sink in. See photos.

     Reports: Paramedic recommended ER for inmate, but jailers wouldn’t release him. He was obviously faking it, amirite? Totally fooled this paramedic, but not those crafty police supervisors.

     When a paramedic from Northeast Fire Protection District went to the Pine Lawn jail last September to check out an inmate with abdominal pain and bleeding, he told police officers and jailers the inmate needed to go the emergency room, according to his report.

     The paramedic wrote that a police officer had started paperwork for the release and the inmate had changed into his street clothes to get ready to board the ambulance. But then a police supervisor canceled the release. The inmate, Bernard Scott, 44, who was being held in lieu of $360 bail for traffic cases, was ordered to change back into his jumpsuit and led back to a holding cell.

     Before leaving the station, the paramedic tried one more time.

     “PD again advised by EMS that pt should be transferred to ED for further medical attention,” his report said. But the answer was still no.

     Just 14 minutes later, the jail had to call another ambulance. Now Scott was unconscious, his muscles stiff. He was aggressive, difficult to pin down and his posture indicated possible brain damage, an EMT’s report said.

     Police officers disclosed five minutes after the second ambulance arrived that they had found Scott hanging by his neck from a shoelace tied to his cell door.

     Seriously.

     Baltimore Cops Have Found A New Enemy: Dirt-Bikers

     There are hundreds of riders in Baltimore, most of them young black men; they ride dirt bikes and ATVs, both of which are illegal in the city as of 2000. Named for their signature move of popping their front wheels and aiming their bikes skyward to simulate clock hands striking midnight, the 12 O’Clock Boys are among the most infamous of the organized groups, serving as a national face for the local biker community after the release of the 2013 documentary Twelve O’Clock in Baltimore.

     Largely from poor areas of the city, the riders come up young and help novices out as they get older. As documentary director Lotfy Nathan acknowledged in a 2012 VICE interview, immersing yourself in the city is an integral part of the sport: “It’s a chance for kids who would otherwise be stuck in their own neighborhoods to parade through the whole city and declare it as their own.” And once it’s theirs, they take care of it: In April, following West Baltimore resident Freddie Gray’s death while in police custody and the nationally televised protests that followed, the bikers provided live, impromptu entertainment amid the turmoil, performing tricks for the gathering crowds and curbing the high tension between the police and the protestors. Dirt-bike crews never appear politically affiliated, but they are community-affiliated.

     But they’ve also long been a public-safety concern in the city—in May, a woman died after a dirt bike struck her and its rider fled; in July, a 21-year-old biker was struck by a car and killed—and an ever-intensifying police crackdown has been in effect all summer. Cops use road blockades to prevent riding, conduct heavy surveillance to serve warrants, and even physically chase dirt-bikers through the streets, which contravenes official law-enforcement policy meant to curb accidents. Two Sundays ago, a police car hit a 16-year-old dirt-biker and left him with a broken ankle; a week later, witnesses say a police car hit a stalled dirt bike while its rider was still on it, and watched as officers tased the rider in the back when he fell down trying to get away. There was no mention of the incident in the press.

     At Druid Hill Park in Northwest Baltimore, where dirt-bikers have met up every Sunday for months, police, some openly carrying riot gear, have begun to assemble every Sunday as well, citing an alleged early-August fight between onlookers as their reason to watch the area more closely. During their first en-masse appearance, on August 9th, one officer brandished his gun at a crowd that had gathered to watch the bikers. (The officer is now on administrative leave.) A week later, policemen equipped with riot shields and helmets tapped their batons on the ground while a small group of children hung around news cameras on the side of the road. More recently, hundreds of orange traffic cones dot the street, slowing traffic and creating room for the dozens of parked police patrol cars that fill the negative space. It’s a turf war the bikers are losing, and it’s not the first one.

     ***

     In Baltimore, which creates its public policy within a segregationist paradigm, the ability to occupy space is a big deal. Though built into the city’s laws for over a century, the assumption that black people must move elsewhere to accommodate white interests is still frequently baked into tangible policy. Last month, the city closed one of its highest-performing and well-appointed schools; a primarily black elementary school, it was the only building that fell within the “redevelopment zone” surrounding the racetrack where American Pharoah won Preakness this year. That May event made more than $85 million, while a crowd of 131,680 mostly white onlookers drank in an around the Pimlico Race Track. The demographic makeup of the surrounding neighborhood, whose median household income sits under $24,000, is around 90-percent black. Children displaced from that elementary school in Park Heights—the neighborhood dozens of police officers now spend full Sundays discouraging dirt-bikers from entering—are now being sent to an underperforming and overcrowded school nearby.

     That Baltimore’s segregation is policed by the government might seem insane in 2015, but its roots are some of the oldest in the country. Over a century ago, in 1911, the city’s then-Mayor J. Barry Mahool signed an ordinance that constituted the first municipal-housing segregation law in the United States. At the time, white residents blamed black residents for a tuberculosis epidemic, and began vandalizing the homes of their black neighbors. The unrest persuaded officials to place legal barriers between residents of different races; today, government-funded “urban renewal” projects aimed at recreational areas around the Inner Harbor, previously DIY art spaces in Station North, and the neighborhoods around the Pimlico racetrack serve as their own, subversive way of furthering the racial divide by driving locals out.

     The bikers, however, have challenged this systemic separation simply by riding through it. They ride from their homes—poor areas of the city often sensationalized by shows like The Wire—through the wealthy, whiter neighborhoods that sit directly next to them. For much of the city’s black population (holding strong at 63 percent), they’re real-life examples of how to survive in a deeply segregated city: They’re powerful because they can go where they please, and because no one can catch them.

     Keep reading at the link.

     I’m Black And Queer At The Same Time, All The Time. Because #AllBlackLivesMatter.

     When I walk through the door, different people “see” different things and explain those things in different ways.

     But the room I enter is always set up on foundations built upon an oppressive country, and I am always me – a Black queer (or queer Black) cisgender male 23-year old from Cleveland, OH with 18 siblings, raised in a Muslim and Hare Krsna household, among many other things, and each of those things define me. Each of those things depend on one another in order to create me. And all of them enter through every door.

     There seems to be a never-ending conversation around two of those parts of me specifically which I most recently saw continued in a piece (again) making the rounds on Facebook by Terrance Chappell published on the Huffington Post entitled “Why I’m a Black Man Before I’m a Gay Man.” In it, Chappell explains that, for him, Blackness comes first because “It doesn’t matter where you live or what kind of car you drive; to some you’re still a n*gg*r, and that is the cold, hard truth about the world we live in today, and it’s what my parents had to teach me growing up. I don’t experience this with my identity as a gay man.”

     While it’s true that Chappell’s experience is his own, and also true that anti-Black racism is sometimes more easily perceived than anti-queerness, to some I am similarly still a f*g, and the question of putting one before the other and the willingness to answer it is part of a pattern of erasure all too familiar to Black queer, trans and women folk in conversations about Black and queer identities and what they mean. As a Black queer man, I can attest to how we are consistently asked to put aside either our Blackness or queerness in fighting for each respective liberation, implying that both Black and queer liberation do not rely on the liberation of Black queer folks, despite the fact that Black queer folks experience rates of certain anti-Black and anti-queer violences far greater than both their gay white and Black cishetero counterparts.

     Empathy with Chappell’s reluctance to be defined by the mainstream (white) LGBTQ community that has a history of demanding Black queer people put their sexuality before their racial identity is one of the reasons why I identify as queer and so many others have chosen to identify as same gender loving (SGL) rather than gay, which has come to be associated with Whiteness. But the alternative erasure, the pressure to place one’s Blackness before their queerness, is just as traumatic.

     A lot more at the link.

     NYPD cop who assaulted James Blake http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/bratton-defends-cops-tackled-tennis-star-james-blake-article-1.2354973 … Charged w/5 complaints in 7 months (There’s a link for that last at the link, too.)

303. rq says

     11 September 2015 at 11:03 am

     One Year Without Justice For Man Shot by Police For Wearing ‘Cosplay’ Outfit. #DarrienHunt.

     Today, Darrien Hunt’s brother walked the path his brother walked one year ago, when police shot him dead for his “cosplay” outfit. Darrien’s brother wore the same outfit, and carried the same sword, in memory of his murdered brother.

     Darrien’s mother says that she recently turned down an monetary offer for a settlement from the city that would have settled the wrongful death case for $900,000, but would have required her to never speak a word about his murder again.

     Susan Hunt explained to local reporters in Saratoga Springs, that the city offered her the settlement including the “hush clause,” but she knew “that’s not going to clear his name. I could not, in good conscience, agree to that.”

     Susan has obtained representation by the law firm of Johnnie Cochran to pursue a hefty civil suit against the Saratoga Springs Police Department.

     While Darrien’s brother marched in his slain brother’s footsteps, mourners honored Hunt with a memorial to “walk the path of his final steps.”

     Both his brother and the marchers who followed him gathered at the site where Darrien was fatally shot by police.

     I don’t like the idea of trying to buy people’s silence.

     Read this. Then I want you to think about how #NatashaMcKenna’s death was ruled an accident. A “Casual Killing” In VA.

     Student Sent Home For Wearing #BlackLivesMatter Shirt With List of People Killed by Police

     Harmony School for Advancement senior Fatimah Bouderdaben wanted to participate with the city-wide tribute to the recently murdered Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Goforth by wearing a blue shirt to school last Friday, but she also wanted to remind people that the issue of police brutality was still under debate. So she inscribed her blue shirt with “Black Lives Matter” as well as the names and ages of victims like Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Bouderbaden says she was sent home from school for refusing to change out of her shirt or turn it inside out.

     “Many of my friends were upset about the implications of wearing blue so I made t shirts with the words ‘Black Lives Matter’ on the front and the names and ages of 26 victims of police brutality on the back,” says Bouderdaben. “We were told by the administration to either cover it up / take it off or be pulled from class and sent home. My friends chose to change but I refused to because I was not breaking dress code.”

     Bouderdaben, 17, said she and three other students were addressed in their first period class by Dean of Students Meredith Millspaugh about how their shirts were disrupting the school environment. According to Bouderdaben the phrase “all lives matter” was also used, a phrase frequently seen by supporters of the BLM movement as an attempt to shut down conversations about the disproportionate number of blacks that have fatal encounters with the police. A recent investigation by The Guardian showed that blacks make up 29 percent of people killed by police despite being only 13 percent of the general population. Of those killed 32 percent were unarmed.

     Bouderdaben says that during her next period class, she was taken into the hall by Millspaugh, who told her she had to change or be sent home. Bouderdaben says that when she refused, Millspaugh began yelling at her until the teenager started to cry.

     “She was blaming me for pretty much everything going on in the school,” says Bouderdaben. “She told me that she heard some kids were calling her a racist and that had never happened before I put on the shirt so it was my fault people were calling her that. I don’t think it was very professional of her to yell at me because of my beliefs.”

     How fragile some feelings are.

     Family of Tamir Rice asks for aggravated murder charges against officer. I really hope they get them, too.

     Rice family attorney Subodh Chandra released a statement addressing Thursday’s letter to McGinty’s office:

     “Ms. Rice, her family and her counsel are urging the prosecutor’s office to request a charge of aggravated murder against officer Loehmann based on the fact that Tamir was a victim under the age of 13. The aggravated murder statute does not require pre-calculation and design – that is premeditation – where the victim is under the age of 13; all that is required is a purpose to cause death, which is plainly the case when one shoots a gun at someone else.”

     D.C. mayor’s plan would limit access to police body-camera footage. Sounds like a good idea. Tell me more!

     D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser said Wednesday that she would allow police officials to withhold some footage captured by body cameras, a move that members of the D.C. Council said backtracked from a proposal she made last month that would have given the public more access to videos.

     In August, Bowser (D) said a series of police-involved shootings caught on camera in recent months had led her to favor greater disclosure of video captured by body cameras that thousands of D.C. police officers could soon wear, a decision that encouraged members of the council who favor more transparency.

     But legislation that the mayor submitted to the council Wednesday added broad exemptions to the plan she laid out last month, including footage of any of the thousands of assaults that occur annually in the District.

     In addition, D.C. police would not allow members of the public to view footage of their own interactions with police if they file a complaint that leads to charges against an officer. That narrowed a provision she proposed last month to let members of the public view footage of themselves after incidents.

     Under Bowser’s new proposal, the subject of a video also would not be allowed to view recordings from body cameras if an officer has filed charges against an individual over their actions caught on camera

     In both of those cases, the city would release the video only if compelled to in the course of legal proceedings or if the mayor and police chief deem the incidents to be matters of great public interest.

     So basically there would not be much point to the bodycams.

     Lawsuit: IMPD’s account of man’s shooting death ‘entirely uncorroborated’

     Back in January, Indianapolis police said Donte Sowell, wanted on an outstanding warrant, fled from a traffic stop and — when confronted by an officer — opened fire, peppering patrol cars with bullets and shooting a cop in the foot before police shot and killed him.

     On Thursday, the department emphatically reaffirmed that account in the face of a scathing lawsuit filed by Sowell’s family that insists he was shot without justification.

     The lawsuit, filed in federal court, alleges that Sowell had no gun and that he died after being shot in the back. The family, through its attorneys, also expressed frustration with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, whom they said had failed to answer their questions about the case.

     “He had done nothing to justify the use of deadly force,” said Ruth Z. Brown, an attorney with the Chicago-based Loevy & Loevy law firm, which is representing the family. “Multiple witnesses confirm that he was unarmed and that he had surrendered to police and that they kept shooting at him until they killed him.”

     The attorneys produced an autopsy report Thursday from the Marion County Coroner’s Office that said Sowell, 27, was shot six times — and at least four of the shots were from behind. The coroner’s report said Sowell was shot twice in the back, including the fatal wound. The other shots were to the back of his right arm, the back of his right leg, the right upper arm and a graze wound on the top of the shoulder, the direction of which couldn’t be determined.

     The suit, filed by Sowell’s fiancee, Rachel Long, names several defendants, including IMPD, the city of Indianapolis and officers at the scene.

     Good luck to them, too.

304. rq says

     11 September 2015 at 11:58 am

     Freddie Gray trials likely to cost the city millions. An incompetent police force that is racist to boot is expensive.

     Tasing Inmate “Might Have Been Unreasonable” — But Still Legal, Court Finds. How nice.

     After stealing $7.38 worth of wine coolers from a convenience store on July 21, 2009, a “quite intoxicated” Danielle Hollingsworth found herself sitting in a processing cell in the St. Ann police station. A male officer entered the cell and gave Hollingsworth some paperwork to fill out. He also dropped off an orange jumpsuit and told her to disrobe to her bottom underwear and put it on.

     Hollingsworth balked. She reportedly told the officer that she was scared and wanted a woman in the room while she changed.

     What happened next became the subject of a lawsuit against the city of St. Ann and three of its officers. According to court documents, Hollingsworths’ refusal to strip and change into the orange jumpsuit prompted another officer, Joseph Mayberry, to enter the cell with a Taser at the ready. He told Hollinsworth that she had to change her clothes and then left.

     Moments later, however, a female officer monitoring a video feed of the cell signaled to Mayberry that their new inmate was still not complying. Mayberry returned to the cell and tasered Hollingsworth twice. Hollingsworth would later testify that she experienced “excruciating pain” through her legs and subsequently suffered leg spasms that required a trip to the hospital and a prescription for muscle relaxants.

     As for Mayberry, he testified that he hadn’t been in fear for his physical safety but deployed the taser against Hollingsworth anyway. He justified his actions by citing Hollingsworth’s noncompliance and the need to check her street clothes for contraband “of any type.”

     Unsurprisingly, the ensuing lawsuit, filed in August 2013, accused Mayberry of using excessive force. The lawsuit also targeted two officers who were on duty at the time for failing to stop Mayberry; it further alleged that the city of St. Ann was liable because its policies enabled Mayberry’s actions.

     Last week, a federal appeals court sided with St. Ann and its officers.

     Sounds legit. Seeing as how there was a woman officer already monitoring the security cameras, would it have been so difficult to have her come down to the cell?

     White People 101 “MTV’s documentary points out some facts about race that might seem obvious until you realize that for many Americans they’re not.”

     The new documentary White People opens with the journalist Jose Antonio Vargas approaching white people on the street and telling them he’s “doing a film for MTV on what it means to be young and white.” Each person giggles a bit. To them, the premise, on its face, seems funny.

     But it was groans, not giggles, that greeted the news in November that MTV had put out a casting call that asked questions like “Are you being made to feel guilty because you’re white?” and “Are you having a problem with race on social media?” It sounded like a Breitbart.com reporter fishing for a follow-up to the Shirley Sherrod story—an attempt to make it seem as though white people were victims of an increasingly diverse nation, even as headlines keep reminding Americans that race divisions still harm the same people that they have always harmed in this country.

     In the days before White People aired, though, professional critics started airing a different kind of disapproval of the project. The consensus seems largely to be that, in the words of Willa Paskin at Slate, the film’s “a little too remedial with and gentle on, well, white people.” The headline for Ken Tucker’s Yahoo review read, sarcastically, “Race Privilege Exists, MTV Discovers.”

     Still yet another reaction unfolded when the documentary’s title started trending on Twitter and Facebook last night, with some users accusing MTV of “race baiting” and “whiteshaming.” “Wow,” wrote Ryan Wesley Smith, a 17-year-old Christian speechmaker with 120,000 followers. “Just watched @MTV’s #WhitePeople docu. The most racially dividing thing I’ve ever seen. Really disheartening.”

     The spectrum of responses speaks to the difficult but admirable task that Vargas and MTV’s Look Different campaign have undertaken. In some parts of America, “white privilege” and “race is a construct” are catechisms; in other parts, they’re seen as huckersterish buzzwords; in most, perhaps, they’re totally unfamiliar concepts. Popular works of art and entertainment directly addressing racial issues have rightfully focused on minority struggles, which means the notion that whiteness itself can and should be held up for scrutiny is usually only implied. White People makes that idea explicit, telling white people that to understand inequality they need to understand the ways that they’ve unwittingly benefited from it. Aired alongside the likes of Teen Mom and Teen Wolf , it should hit a broad swath of young people who really might stand to learn something.

     Article from July of this year, worth a re-read.

     Black Women, Girls Trigger My PTSD: Iowa Man Who Called Black Girls Racial Slurs.

     According to the Dubuque Telegraph Herald, Tomkins told police that Saturday’s reported incident at Prescott Elementary School took place because black women and girls trigger his post-traumatic stress disorder.

     Tomkins admitted to police that he told the girls to “get out of my [expletive] school and to get out of my [expletive] town,” the Herald reports.

     Tomkins has been charged with disorderly conduct, the Herald reports.

     No word on how, exactly, they trigger his PTSD.

     Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to announce she won’t seek re-election. Opinions still divided on whether this is good news or bad news…

     Teaching Martin Luther King Jr. in the Age of Freddie Gray

     In 1968, when my father was a teenage boy in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. went there to support the city’s striking sanitation workers. He marched with King and thousands of other protesters, and in the violence that erupted afterward, the police shot another black boy, Larry Payne. They claimed he was a looter. King called Payne’s mother to console her, but a planned visit never happened. King was murdered just a few days later.

     When I was a young girl, my father transcribed from memory some of King’s great speeches and asked me to memorize them myself. Later, he bought old records with recordings of the speeches — ‘‘The Drum Major Instinct,’’ ‘‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’’ — and when I wasn’t too busy being a child, he would make me listen to them, again and again. By the time I was in high school, writing essays about the civil rights movement came easily. I had a vernacular and a mode of analysis, and also a discipline. I had learned by repetition how to question authority.

     Now I am a teacher, seeking a similar discipline in my students. Early on a Wednesday in April, I found myself standing before my English-composition class at New York’s Borough of Manhattan Community College. My students are earnest, hard-working, even brilliant, but many of them face significant challenges. They are first- or second-generation Americans or immigrants (from China, Georgia, Ghana, Mexico, Nigeria, Ukraine). They hold down full-time jobs. Some of them are raising their own kids.

     We were reading King’s ‘‘Letter From Birmingham Jail.’’ They groaned about the length, but I ignored them. King’s craft, I told them, is demonstrated in how he argues so persuasively for positions that seem at first to be in opposition, and to multiple audiences — not simply ‘‘My Dear Fellow Clergymen’’ but the public at large, which in 1963 may have supported desegregation but also recoiled from the spectacle of protest, with its intimation of lawlessness and chaos.

     The class was also struggling with an essay that the psychologist Erich Fromm wrote that same year, ‘‘Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem.’’ He argued that ‘‘freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth.’’

     We returned to King’s letter, in which he draws a distinction between just and unjust laws. They didn’t know about this King, I found, the one who fought the law. In their view, the civil rights movement was embodied in King the Christlike leader, who stands for peace, love and brotherhood.

     I told the students that King went to jail a lot for peace, love and brotherhood.

     More at the link.

305. rq says

     11 September 2015 at 1:55 pm

     An Open Letter from a Black Man to His White Family in a Moment of Violence

     To the white people I share home with,

     I’ve gotten degrees. I’ve been published. I’ve spoken at academic gatherings. I’ve taught classes and workshops. I’ve built up a resume. I’ve gained employment in the acceptable fields of social justice. For years, you told me these were the things I needed to do in order to be listened to.

     I’ve participated in direct action. I’ve been arrested. I’ve survived nearly three decades in a country that hates me. I’ve predicted the formation of movements, the swell of riots, months and even years before their occurrences. I don’t know what else I need to do to be legitimized, be validated, to be worthy of being heard and taken seriously.

     I am exhausted from trying to get you on board with a movement–one that mirrors those from previous eras you claim to revere, and that has reignited calls for social transformation once heralded by the writers, speakers, musicians and artists you claim to hold dearest. I wonder if you understand what any of the struggles which have occurred during your lifetime were ever actually about.

     I am not naive nor arrogant enough to believe my imploring can achieve in this moment what centuries of Black imploring has not been able to. I am not foolish enough to believe this letter will be the letter that changes your minds. I write because I need to speak, because I am in pain. I write because I cannot bear any more condescension, more indifference. I write to tell you I am not going to.

     The cry of this moment is Black Lives Matter. If you are not involved, I assume this is a statement you take issue with.

     More at the link.

     Why Aren’t More Black Voters Feeling the Bern? An article that apparently almost didn’t get published. And because it’s alternet, I can’t cite. But it’s a must-read for anyone who has ever wondered (or been asked) why black people don’t just shut up ad support Bernie Sanders.

     Campaign Zero

     “We can live in a world where the police don’t kill people by limiting police interventions, improving community interactions, and ensuring accountability.” So reads the hopeful, matter-of-fact vision statement of Campaign Zero, a momentous, sweeping initiative focused intently on ending police violence in the United States. Organized by four social justice leaders from around the country who established We the Protesters in the wake of the 2014 Michael Brown shooting and subsequent unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, Campaign Zero recently unveiled a comprehensive website outlining strategies and solutions for changing policing policies on the federal, state, and local levels.

     The initiative focuses on three main thrusts: interventions to stop draconian policing measures and seizure of assets from unconvicted civilians, interactions to decrease use of force and militarization of the police force while increasing anti-bias training and minority representation among police officers, and accountability measures such as body and police cruiser cameras, as well as community oversight, increased awareness of citizen rights, and independent investigations into harmful acts by police, leading to prosecutions. Campaign Zero presents detailed solutions for changing official law enforcement policies via legislative action in cities, counties, states, and nationally, plus strategies that can be implemented immediately by police agencies to end aggressive encounters with civilians and dismantle unfair protections for corrupt officers, and begin to build trust between the officers and the communities of color they are paid to serve.

     “I think what’s important is that folks who look at the website understand that not only are there solutions to this but a whole range of solutions need to happen in order for us to end police violence,” says Samuel Sinyangwe, the Orlando-raised, San Francisco-based policy analyst and data scientist who planned Campaign Zero alongside educators, activists, and social justice organizers Johnetta Elzie and Brittany Packnett of Saint Louis, and Baltimore native DeRay Mckesson. “I think Campaign Zero, as the site exists right now, is a great start, and as we continue to build and grow, as we continue to get insights and feedback from folks all across the country, we’re hopeful about really presenting these solutions, learning about more solutions, continuing to add to this basic knowledge about what we need to do as a country to move forward and have a world where people aren’t being killed by police,” Sinyangwe says.

     According to research compiled by MappingPoliceViolence.org, over a thousand people are killed by police each year, almost sixty per cent of whom did not have a gun or were involved in minor situations or mental health crises that did not warrant so brutal a use of force as to result in death. Campaign Zero’s policy solutions are a direct and urgent answer to these dire statistics. Sinyangwe sees some momentum among policymakers, as well as everyday citizens: “Twenty four states have passed legislation related to police accountability. Much of those things are included in Campaign Zero, so what we’re hoping to see is more comprehensive action on all of these policy areas at the local, state, and federal level.”

     With libertarians and other right-leaning groups arguing for less government intrusion, Sinyangwe thinks that Campaign Zero is something members of the public on both sides of the political divide can support. “I think this really is an issue that transcends partisanship because frankly what we’re talking about is the ability of government to intervene in people’s lives in the most extreme ways up to and until they take somebody’s life. That is something that is just as much a conservative issue as it is a progressive issue and something that we can all get behind to stop.”

     I’m not sure how to cite this next piece, as it is… well, ‘thought-provoking’ would be too simple. At any rate, here’s On Quitting by Keguro Macharia.

     Family of man shot and killed by CMPD officer wants federal trial. Judging from a federal decision upthread, I’m not sure that’s any guarantee or even a better chance at justice.

     Relatives of Jonathan Ferrell, the man shot and killed by CMPD Officer Randall Kerrick, want the police officer back in court again to face charges.

     The Ferrell family is turning to federal prosecutors to take up the case.

     Chris Chestnut, an attorney representing Ferrell’s mother, Georgia, and brother, Willie, told WBTV he has had preliminary conversations with federal prosecutors, and is working to schedule a formal meeting to pursue a federal trial.

     Jonathan Ferrell’s relatives believe race was a factor when Officer Kerrick shot Ferrell ten times back in September 2013. Kerrick testified that he acted in self defense because he was afraid Ferrell was going to take his gun.

     A mistrial was declared when jurors said they were deadlocked after three votes.

     The N.C Attorney General’s office recently filed a notice in court to dismiss the voluntary manslaughter charge against Kerrick.

     Chestnut says the Ferrells are hoping to have a formal meeting with federal prosecutors within 30 days.

     Former officer Michael Slager makes own plea for bail as judge again holds back decision. He sounds like he’s getting desperate.

306. rq says

     12 September 2015 at 12:36 am

     David Duke kicked out of LSU hotel

     Duke said he was invited to the gathering on his website, but a representative of the group told News 2 that was not the case.

     Duke, a Louisiana politician and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, was outside the hotel after the event finished when he got into an argument with another man about the “Black Lives Matter” movement. The hotel manager told Duke to leave and LSUPD officers escorted him off the premises.

     A group of LSU students along with the campus chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons held an event Thursday night to protest the Confederate gathering at Lod Cook. LSU spokesperson Ernie Ballard said the university had no involvement with the event except to rent the space.

     The Enduring Myth of Black Criminality

     In his upcoming October cover story, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores how mass incarceration has affected African American families. “There’s a long history in this country of dealing with problems in the African American community through the criminal justice system,” he says in this animated interview. “The enduring view of African Americans in this country is as a race of people who are prone to criminality.” You can read the full story on September 15, 2015.

     Video at the link.

     I think this is a repost as the article is from July, but just in case: New Report Uncovers Staggering Inequality for Anyone Not Young, White, Straight, and Male in Hollywood.

     Darrien Hunt’s mom turns down $900K settlement from Utah cops over gag order on cosplayer’s death

     An autopsy revealed that Hunt, who was carrying a katana sword his family said was used for cosplay, had his back turned to the officers when all six shots were fired — and an attorney for the victim’s family said Schauerhamer paused to reload his weapon during the shooting.

     Neither officer was charged in Hunt’s shooting death because prosecutors said the pair feared Hunt would “hack the first person he saw.”

     Susan Hunt, his mother, said she turned down a $900,000 offer to settle her lawsuit against the city and the two officers who killed her son, reported The Salt Lake Tribune.

     That settlement offer would have barred her from commenting publicly about the case — which she said was unacceptable.

     “That’s not going to clear his name, and I could not, in good conscience, agree to that,” Susan Hunt said.

     Hunt’s family said he was cosplaying — or costumed role-playing — as a cartoon character when he encountered police about 9:30 a.m. on the day he was killed.

     Witnesses disputed some police claims about the 37-second encounter, and one witness said police misrepresented his statements to investigators to claim that Hunt swung the sword at officers and the ran away.

     Former NFL Player Ray Lewis: ‘Let’s Make Lives Matter’

     As New Jersey’s largest city continues to grapple with urban violence, Former NFL player Ray Lewis sent an “urgent” call for residents of the predominantly Black city to “make lives matter.”

     The former Baltimore Ravens linebacker said while he understands that social conditions for Black people are among the worst nationwide, “it doesn’t give people the excuse to kill each other.”

     “Remove the word black and say ‘lives matter,'” he declared, in context of the Black Lives Matter movement. “Stop sending mothers back home empty. You can never replace a mother’s child. If we want black lives matter, let’s make it matter to us. That’s the new call.”

     He later decried a culture wherein artists, radio transmissions and television shows inject violence into the lives of at-risk youths who lack guidance.

     Lewis was speaking at public safety summit on Wednesday in Newark, a forum that seeks to galvanize public support and develop concrete solutions with residents, law enforcement and community activists to curb urban violence.

     Along with Lewis, the program, dubbed “Summit II: Redefining Public Safety” was headlined by NFL Hall of Famer Jim Brown. It is part of a national public safety campaign that Newark Mayor Ras Baraka says will “address violence as a mental health issue” and identify grassroots approaches to decrease gang-related, black-on-black and police perpetrated violence.

     This counts as caring about the community, doesn’ it?

     Scare Headlines Exaggerated The U.S. Crime Wave. All those clickbait titles.

     If you’ve read reports of a U.S. crime wave this year and wondered how many cities it was really affecting, you’re not alone. We’ve spent the last week trying to answer that question and have compiled 2015 homicide data for nearly all of the 60 biggest cities. The results confirm that there has been an increase in homicides this year in big U.S. cities of about 16 percent.

     But that doesn’t come close to reversing the long-term decline in homicides. And it’s a less dire picture than the one painted by reports in several large media outlets, which generally highlighted those cities that have suffered the biggest increase in homicides.

     The reports have been based on just a small, possibly cherry-picked sampling of cities. The country’s broken crime-data system makes it impossible to know what’s happening everywhere, and the “if it bleeds, it leads” journalistic imperative means the places we hear about often are the biggest outliers.

     The wave of crime-wave reporting began this spring with NPR, CNN, the BBC and USA Today, based on just a handful of cities. In August, after the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) announced results of a survey of a few dozen of its members about crime in their cities, many other outlets — including Reuters, Voice of America and Time — added to the chorus. And last week, The New York Times put the crime wave on its front page, saying that “cities across the nation are seeing a startling rise in murders.” The Times article was accompanied by a chart showing crime trends in 10 cities, which in turn provoked refutations from The Washington Post and the Marshall Project, based on fewer than 20 cities each.
     […]

     We ended up with homicide numbers for 59 of the 60 biggest cities. (We’re missing only Anaheim.) And in 25 of them, homicides were up by 20 percent or more from a year ago. Overall, homicides were up by 16 percent.1 But the picture varies a lot by city: Homicides are up 76 percent in Milwaukee, but down 43 percent in Boston. They’re also down in 19 other cities.

     Most of these changes aren’t statistically significant on a city level. Even amid the national upward trend, and in some of the country’s most populous cities, homicides remain, thankfully, a rare event. That means some increases that look large on a percentage basis affect the raw totals only slightly, to an extent that could arise by chance alone. A 20 percent increase in Seattle sounds a lot more significant than an increase to 18 homicides from 15 through Aug. 29. Homicides in Arlington, Texas, through Aug. 31 are down by 50 percent — to four from eight.
     […]

     Nonetheless, there are some big reasons not to assume that crime is on a long-term increase. While a 16 percent increase in U.S. major-city homicides is statistically significant, it comes after decades of declines — the murder rate fell by more than half nationally from its peak in 1980 to 2012.

     And big annual fluctuations aren’t unusual. For instance, in 2009, 17 of today’s 60 most populous cities had statistically significant decreases in the number of homicides, while just four had increases. In 1998, those numbers were 20 and four, respectively. Just a decade ago, in 2005, there were 15 cities with significant increases, roughly as many as this year. In 1986, 28 cities had significant increases; just two had decreases.

     A big jump or fall in murders in a city in one year could be a statistical fluke (variation in the percentage of gunshot victims who die from year to year) or the result of factors that subside the next year — for instance, this year has been unusually hot, and hot weather has been associated with higher crime in some studies. We asked cities to send us their data for years before 2014, and 10 provided numbers for 2013. In seven of them, whatever the trend has been this year reversed the trend from a year earlier. For example, there were five homicides in Riverside this year through July 31. That’s down from nine through July 31, 2014 — which was up from five through the same date in 2013. In Tulsa, the homicide count through July 31 was 38 in 2013, 21 last year and 38 this year. In these cities, it’s 2014, not 2015, that looks like the outlier. And that may be true more broadly: The latest UCR report for cities with at least 100,000 people shows that total homicides in the cities in the first six months of 2014 were down by 10 percent from the same period in 2013.

     More discussion on methods and data at the link, including all kinds of caveats for how this data was acquired (since nobody has actually been collecting it for this year yet).

307. rq says

     13 September 2015 at 11:13 am

     Long-Delayed Nina Simone Biopic Sets December Release

     Written and directed by Cynthia Mort, the film chronicles Simone’s struggles to balance social activism with her acclaimed music career, which included 15 Grammy nominations and legendary songs like “Feeling Good” and “My Baby Just Cares For Me.” Nina also touches on the isolation Simone felt living alone in France, where she met her assistant Clifton Henderson (David Oyelowo).

     Robert L. Johnson, RLJE chairman and BET founder, enthused about his excitement for the biopic and his personal connection to the iconic singer. “I had the special privilege early in my career of working with Ms. Simone while coordinating a performance for former D.C. Delegate Walter E. Fauntroy and knowing first-hand of her major contribution to the soul and emotion of the civil rights movement,” he said in a statement, noting that “her story and legacy” will made available across “various media platforms in the coming months.”

     Pyer Moss Addresses Police Brutality During Powerful NYFW Show – so nice to see it showing up on all kinds of different platforms.

     It’s the second day of New York Fashion Week and we’ve already seen the most powerful show of the season. Thursday night Kerby Jean-Raymond, the founder and head designer of Pyer Moss, executed a presentation that few will ever forget.

     Before a stitch of clothing went down the runway, the audience was presented with a short film about the horrific cases of police brutality on black men and women that have filled headlines — and several that flew under the radar.

     The fifteen-minute video (see clip below) was a barrage to the senses. Several gasps were heard as we watched footage from no less than 16 cases of police brutality, including Eric Garner’s fatal chokehold and Marlan Brown being run over by a police car, resulting in his death.

     “For as long as I have this platform and for as long as people are going to listen to me — I’m going to take a stand on something and this is something that is important to me,” Jean-Raymond told The Huffington Post, who also made waves after creating the “They Have Names” t-shirt in January.

     More details at the link.

     Serena Williams had the perfect answer to a reporter who asked why she wasn’t smiling

     While discussing topical things like playing against her sister, Venus, and the game of tennis, a reporter asked Williams why she wasn’t smiling. Her answer to the question, which was beyond obnoxious in case I haven’t made that clear, was perfect.

     Here’s the transcript:

     Q. You just won a match. Normally you smile when you win you come here, you laugh. What happens tonight? Is just because you beat Venus or because you’re thinking about what is going next? What’s wrong?

     SERENA WILLIAMS: It’s 11:30. To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t want to be here. (Laughter.) I just want to be in bed right now. I have to wake up early to practice.

     I don’t want to answer any of these questions and you keep asking me the same questions.

     It’s not really — you’re not making it super enjoyable. (Laughter.)

     Q. At least I made you laugh.

     SERENA WILLIAMS: I’m just being honest.

     Q. At least I made you smile. Can I just ask you…

     It’s infuriating, especially at the end when the reporter, instead of apologizing for a question that he would have never asked a male tennis player, congratulates himself on making Williams laugh halfheartedly. And when he went home he probably told everyone how obnoxious she was at her press conference instead of questioning what in the world he was thinking asking that question.

     Seriously? “What’s wrong?” Like he’s entitled to any answer that isn’t related to tennis? Jaysus.

     Not only was tennis star James Blake innocent, so was the other black man NYPD said he looked like. Srsly, tho, all black men look alike, don’t they?

     At first, the NYPD claimed it was a case of mistaken identity, and that James Blake looked like a “twin” of the man they intended to arrest. Someone even leaked a photo of the man Blake was supposed to look just like. Now it turns out that “twin” has absolutely nothing to do with the case, either. This admission was tucked deep in a few stories about the case:

     The team of officers, looking for suspects in a credit card fraud ring, were relying on a courier who identified Mr. Blake as one of the buyers, the police said. The officers also had an Instagram photo of someone believed to be involved. That person, who Mr. Bratton said looked like Mr. Blake’s “twin brother,” turned out to have no role in the scheme.

     Now this man’s face is all over the internet, mostly mentioned with the words “suspect” and “theft.” Who gave the them this photo of some other random dude off of Instagram? The courier? The NYPD now claims the company, GoButler, gave them the random Instagram photo of this man, but that still doesn’t explain the self-serving reason they released it to the public.

     What’s crazy about all of this is that the entire case is supposed to be about identity fraud. Yet the NYPD continues to mangle the identities of innocent black men who had nothing at all to do with the case.

     Maybe the police should get suspect identities straight before trying to straighten out anyone else’s.

     LETTER TO THE PUBLISHER: ‘I said officers don’t shoot us, we are law abiding citizens.’

     The email from Dr. Marcia Bowden came in Wednesday at 6:23 p.m., the height of deadline for The New Tri-State Defender (TSD). It arrived on the heels of a text from Dr. Bowden – a member of the TSD Women of Excellence corps (2008) and sister of Dr. Phillip Bowden. She and her husband, Ira Marche, had been jailed in Southaven, Miss., after being pulled over for a routine traffic stop.

     I pored over the details of her account, talked with the TSD’s executive editor, concluded that her story warranted immediate action and then reached out to the Southaven Police Department. A voice recording indicated office hours between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., except for dispatch. Dr. Bowden said she actually talked with the wife of Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr., attorney Ruby Wharton, during the traffic stop, so I reached out for her too. No contact had been made by the print deadline.

     The TSD is following up with the Southaven Police Department. Meanwhile, here is Dr. Bowden’s account of the encounter, which she says started around 4 p.m. on Southaven’s Church Rd.

     “My husband and I were in his Jaguar with his fraternity (Kappa Alpha Psi) tags. He was speeding and was pulled over by a motorcycle police officer. He asked for my husband’s driver’s license. My husband gave the officer his registration and started looking for his driver’s license. My husband gave the officer my business card. He asked, ‘What is this for?’ My husband said this is my wife’s business card, we were heading to her office for a patient’s emergency. The officer said he didn’t care about that. The officer asked my husband for his name and address. He ran his license. The officer had called for backup and Officer Delany approached. He immediately started asking questions. “My husband asked if he could look in the trunk for his license, the officer said yes. Officer Delany immediately talked about arresting my husband. My husband was allowed to look in the trunk. The officers at no time asked if they could search the car, but proceeded to look in the trunk and search the car.

     “Officer Delany asked who I was to ‘that man?’ I said he is my husband. Officer Delany said, ‘You are lying, y’all don’t even have the same last name.’ I said, officer I had a business 9-10 years before we got married and I didn’t change my name, My business is in my name “Bowden Internal Medicine” He (asked) where is that, I said Memphis. Officer Delany said you are lying, y’all don’t have the same address. I said we are married.

     “I gave him my full name, Social Security number and date of birth and they ran my information. The other officer came over to confirm, ‘You live on Madewood drive?’ I said, ‘Yes sir.’ I gave him (my) business name and address….

     “My husband asked if he could look in the glove box to see if he had his license. The officer said, ‘Yes.’ I swung my legs out of the car. Officer Delany started yelling at me (saying) don’t get out of the car. I said, ‘Officer, I am not getting out of the car, I am giving him room to look for his license.’

     “My husband leaned in the car over me with one hand on the seat for support. I looked out of the door (and) Officer Delany had his hand on the trigger of his revolver and had it lifted in the holster on his right hip. I was terrified that he would shoot my husband in the back. ‘I said officers don’t shoot us, we are law abiding citizens. I support the police and donate to all police causes, I know how hard the job is, but we are not criminals. PLEASE, you do not have to take your gun out, I am afraid.’

     “Officer Delany said, ‘shut up maam and get out of the car and let me see your license.’ My husband said to me, ‘Honey, be quiet, these people are red neck, they will hurt you. They don’t care who you are or what you have done for the community.

     “I stood and immediately started looking for my license. Officer Delany screamed over and over: ‘I told you to give me your license.’ I said, ‘I am afraid and I am looking for my license. My purse is always a mess and I will need to time to look for it.’

     “I held (the) purse over for him to see the mess. I offered to let Officer Delany take a look in my purse. Officer Delany took the purse from me roughly, walked away with it and riffled through it. Officer Delany kept hollering, “Where is your license?” I said officer you have my purse.

     “Officer Delany threatened, ‘I will throw all your mess on the ground and I will tow that car. Officer Delany asked, ‘Is your name on the car?’ I said I don’t know. Officer Delany said, ‘I thought you said y’all were married?’

     “I said officer, my father’s house is around the corner, I can go and get the license. Officer Delany said, ‘I am not about to wait for you to do nothing. I will have this car towed and throw you in jail too; that man is going to jail today.’

     The story continues at the link. Talk about de-escalation.

     Episode 3 – Sarah Kendzior

     Our EIC Erin has a phone call with Sarah Kendzior, a journalist based out of St. Louis, writing about an array of topics from Central Asia to social justice in the wake of Ferguson. They talked about life and changes that have happened in Missouri in the last year, and what the world can do to focus attention on urban renewal.

     Audio at the link.

308. rq says

     13 September 2015 at 11:55 am

     Watch: Video Released of James Blake Arrest; NYPD Cop Involved Has Been Sued Before for Excessive Force. In other words, there is wrongness on several levels here.

     #BlackLivesMatter Protester Deray McKesson to Teach at Yale

     *Fox News may call him a race pimp, but prominent #BlackLivesMatter protester Deray McKesson will share his philosophy this fall with students of Yale Divinity School as a guest lecturer.

     According to Mediaite.com, the activist will speak as part of the Transformational Leadership for Church and Society lecture series. Other lecturers include Democratic Senator Chris Coons and liberal United Church of Christ minister Nancy Taylor. Both are Yale Divinity alumni.

     McKesson’s lectures will include “Transformational Leadership in the Black Lives Matter Movement,” He’ll also “present case studies about the work of organizing, public advocacy, civil disobedience, and social change, through both Leadership of Presence, and Leadership in the Social Media.”

     Kinda wish it wasn’t all about the Divinity, but it’s good to have him speaking to that level of audience.

     Mayor’s announcement creates new uncertainty for troubled police department.

     With the announcement Friday that Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake will not run for re-election, she and her top lieutenants became lame ducks.

     Police leadership was thrown into flux after the mayor fired the Commissioner Anthony W. Batts in July. Kevin Davis has been serving on an interim basis since then. Even if Rawlings-Blake picks a permanent successor, her successor could impose change again.

     The next mayor is likely to pick a police commissioner who has a similar policing philosophy, said Joe Thomas, an expert in law enforcement leadership at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. The general election is in November 2016.

     Former NFL Player Ray Lewis: ‘Let’s Make Lives Matter’, which has been interpreted as ‘all lives matter’ rather than a focus on ‘black lives matter’. You know, self-policing the intra-community black-on-black-crime aspect.

     911 call: Dorchester coroner uses N-word before chasing neighbor. Post-racial USAmerica, eh?

     Study questions ‘broken windows’ theory of policing – because if it ain’t confirmed by a study, then we can’t officially say it ain’t working.

     The broken windows theory posits that low-level crimes, such as graffiti, panhandling, or littering, create an atmosphere of lawlessness in a neighborhood, encouraging more serious crimes.

     The study by the Boston Area Research Initiative found that the root of violence may instead be found in the escalation of interpersonal conflict, such as domestic violence, arguments over money, or landlord-tenant disputes.

     “Rather than the outside cues that are encouraging criminals into the neighborhoods, the findings suggest another potential interpretation: the notion of private conflict bubbling up and leading up to social disorder,” said Robert Sampson, a Harvard University professor who co-authored the report.

     The researchers analyzed Boston 311 calls (in which people can register complaints about graffiti, broken sidewalks, or darkened streetlights) and 911 calls in 2011.

     They amassed more than 1.2 million records and used sophisticated big data analytical techniques to try to determine how different factors were related.

     “It’s a whole different way of thinking about how violent crime comes from a community,” said co-author Dan O’Brien, a professor at Northeastern University.

     I guess “sophisticated big data analytical techniques” means they’re not going to be big on explaining methodology here, but it sounds legit, eh? Actually the study is pretty good. I’m criticizing the reporting here.

309. rq says

     13 September 2015 at 2:29 pm

     After a 24-Year Gap, Chicago’s South Side Gets a Trauma Center

     A trauma center will finally be built on the South Side of Chicago—and it only took a quarter century.

     University of Chicago Medicine (UCM) and the Sinai Health System are partnering up on a multi-million-dollar effort to install a Level 1 adult trauma center at Holy Cross Hospital in the Marquette Park neighborhood, officials announced Thursday. The new, state-of-the-art trauma center will be located at 68th Street and California Avenue, in the thick of the city’s most violent neighborhoods.

     Since the death of drive-by shooting victim Damian Turner in 2010, activists have renewed the push for UCM, backed by an endowment of more than $1 billion, to provide adult trauma care at its Hyde Park medical center. The 18-year-old was shot just three blocks from UCM, but had to be transported more than nine miles away since the university closed its adult trauma center in 1988 for financial reasons.

     While the decision is being declared a victory by some activists and community organizers who have been advocating for more comprehensive South Side emergency facilities, others say the center won’t fully solve the problem.

     Of course it won’t solve the problem, but will probably do much to mitigate the effects.

     NYPD Releases Video of Wrongful James Blake Arrest. Watch at the link. It’s very dramatic and horribly wrong. The cop probably wanted to look good on camera. Instead, it’s a fiasco.

     Blake says the issue isn’t race but the unnecessary use of force. The NYPD says it will investigate whether the officer used excessive force and whether he identified himself as a cop when he was supposed to. It likely won’t investigate whether “fast approaches” are appropriate in cases like this, or other cases.

     As a commenter noted in the last story, were Blake some deli employee the story likely wouldn’t make the news and police would brush it off as an unfortunate, unavoidable mistake, if he didn’t spend a few days in jail first. What’s he going to tell his boss, it was a case of mistaken identity? It gets even worse for him if he’s black.

     Fox News host: ‘Everyone benefited’ from putting more blacks in prison for drugs in the 1990s. Define “everyone”.

     Fox News host Tucker Carlson argued over the weekend that “everyone benefited” after the incarceration rate for non-violent drug crimes increased in the 1990s.

     On Sunday’s edition of Fox & Friends, Carlson opined that CBS host Stephen Colbert was “raising eyebrows” because he was seen wearing a Black Lives Matter wristband.

     “Was his show the right outlet for this message?” the Fox News host said. “I assume he doesn’t fully understand what Black Lives Matter is — maybe he does.”

     Ashley Bell, whose 20/20 group bills itself as an alternative to Black Lives Matter, argued that activists should be partnering with police if they wanted to see change.

     “You’ve got to have police officers at the table, you’ve got to have prosecutors, criminal justice experts,” Bell explained. “Which is why the first thing 20/20 did is partner with the National Association of Black Police Officers so we can have a real discussion.”

     Bell added that his goal was to educate presidential candidates on the need to reduce the sentences of non-violent offenders.

     “Well, I think there is wide consensus that the Clinton administration went a little overboard in the sentencing, for sure,” Carlson agreed. “On the other hand, the crime rate went way down. And everyone benefited from that, particularly in black neighborhoods, which always have the highest crime rates.”

     “That was good for people who live in those neighborhoods and every neighborhood,” he continued. “So you kind of have to balance those two imperatives.”

     These people are for real, aren’t they.

     An American void, a look at Dylann Roof’s friends.

     The trailer where Dylann Roof found refuge is faded yellow with a thousand tiny dents. It is on the western edge of Columbia, S.C., along an unpaved road strewn with damp garbage, and it is where Roof briefly lived until the day he allegedly killed nine black church members at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

     Now, a month after the June 17 shooting, the blinds are drawn at noon and the family that hosted Roof is inside, where the boom of gunfire and explosions is so loud the trailer vibrates.

     “Ha ha. I just killed all them mothers,” says Justin Meek, 18, playing a video game in which blood and body parts fly across a 42-inch TV screen.

     “You got enemy on the other side! Use a grenade!” says his brother Jacob, 15. “Kill yourself! Kill yourself!”

     On a lopsided couch is Lindsey Fry, 19, flicking her tongue ring, eyes locked on a cracked cellphone for news about the shooting, which has lately included her boyfriend Joey, 21, the third Meek brother who lives in the trailer, which is in a town called Red Bank that the Meeks call Dead Bank.

     “Wow,” she suddenly says and reads aloud what she is seeing on her phone: “The expanded scope of the investigation now includes people with whom Roof associated in the weeks before the June 17 shooting.”

     She looks at Joey. Joey looks at his two brothers and his mother, Kim Konzny.

     They are the people with whom Roof was associating in the weeks before the shooting, and this is the place he drifted into with little resistance, an American void where little is sacred and little is profane and the dominant reaction to life is what Joey does now, looking at Lindsey. He shrugs.

     For several weeks, Dylann Roof slept on the floor here. He played video games. According to the Meeks, he showed off his new Glock .45-caliber handgun, drank heavily and retreated to his car to listen to opera. And sometimes he confided in his childhood friend Joey, who wasn’t the type to ask questions.

     When Roof showed up asking Joey for a place to stay, Joey says, he invited him in without hesitation. When Roof told him that he believed in segregation, Joey didn’t ask why. When Roof mentioned driving two hours to Charleston and visiting a church called Emanuel AME, he didn’t ask anything about it. When Roof said that he was going to “do something crazy,” as Joey remembers it, he and Lindsey hid Roof’s gun but then gave it back, blowing it all off as a drunken episode.

     “I didn’t take him seriously,” is what Joey says again and again to the people who keep asking the same questions again and again, including investigators who arrived at the trailer after one of the most notorious mass killings in recent American history.

     Why did he do nothing? they asked.

     What kind of people would do nothing?

     Keep reading at the link.

     Stephen Colbert wore a Black Lives Matter bracelet on the ‘Late Show’, but has he ever spoken out in support?

     During Friday’s Late Show audience Q&A session, host Stephen Colbert was asked to wear a bracelet that reads: “Black Lives Matter.”

     When called upon by Colbert, BLM organiser Patrick Waldo was already standing up. Waldo spoke up and asked the host to promise to wear the group’s bracelet and address the issue on-air.

     “I’m not promising anything, but I will give it some thought,” Colbert said hesitantly, as he met Waldo to try on the bracelet.

     “I really want to give this one some thought and then I’ll get back to you. This bracelet was made for someone much bigger than myself,” he said with a smile, immediately putting it on his wrist, resuming the Q&A session.

     “If I don’t say it on tonight’s show I’ll work it in in one of the next few episodes.”

     It seemed as though Colbert would ditch his newly gifted swag for another day, as he adjusted and readjusted his bracelet while walking offstage to prepare for the September 11 taping. Upon his return, it was clear that Colbert was comfortable endorsing the message considered the “civil rights movement of our time.”

     Waldo told The Independent that he has “complete confidence” that if Colbert does mention Black Lives Matter, his writers will deliver something “intelligent and funny and true” but stressed the importance of “knocking out” both requests.

     “I may never have that chance again, and now more than ever, especially for straight white men like Stephen and me who have benefited from white privilege our entire lives, it is so necessary to assert that Black Lives Matter.”

     This Designer Stopped Everyone In Their Tracks With a Fashion Show About Police Brutality

     Fashion designer Kerby Jean-Raymond, founder of Pyer Moss, considered not presenting clothing at his runway show during New York Fashion Week.

     But when he did, his show became much more than a display of fashion. On Thursday, when he showcased his Spring 2016 collection, he confronted the issue of police brutality with a powerful mix of video, clothing and live graffiti art.

     “I decided to show the clothes last-minute,” Jean-Raymond said. “I just wanted to show the video.”

     The 10-minute video, which played before the runway show, was shot in black-and-white and opened with the killing of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man shot by police officers in South Carolina in April. Then came footage of black teens who were brutalized by police at a Texas pool in July. Then there was Eric Garner, being choked by police, with his final words: “I can’t breathe.”

     Only then came the clothes.

     “If I’m going to be the black designer,” Jean-Raymond told Mic, “I’m going to tell it my way.”

     Every detail sent a message: Gunshots sounded as the models walked. Red paint appeared in lines down the backs of jackets and spattered on shoes evoked blood. Garner’s final, now-iconic last words were written in black across the models’ all-white boots.

     As they marched along the runway, graffiti artist Gregory Siff spray-painted and wrote on their utilitarian jackets. When the final model turned to walk off the runway to close the show, written across the back of her jacket three times was the word “breathe.”

     The words represented not only an ode to Garner, but also served as a reminder of the countless black Americans who have to live and breathe in their black bodies everyday.

     There’s video at the link as well as lots of photos.

310. rq says

     13 September 2015 at 2:38 pm

     Woman Says She Endured 8 Days In Psych Ward Because Cops Didn’t Believe BMW Was Hers. Saw this stories several months ago, but … here it is again.

     Brock sued the city earlier this year in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She contends that her constitutional rights under the Fourth and 14th Amendments were violated and that she suffered “unwanted and unwarranted intrusion of her personal integrity, loss of liberty [and] mental anguish.”

     The suit details how Brock pulled up to a traffic light in Harlem on Sept. 12, 2014, the music on her car stereo playing loudly. An NYPD officer approached her and asked why she was driving without her hands on the steering wheel, according to the suit.

     “I said I was dancing, I am at a light,” Brock told PIX11. “He asked me to get out of the car.”

     For unclear reason, Brock contends, she was taken into custody and transported to the NYPD’s 30th Precinct, where she was held for a few hours before being released without being charged with any crime. She said she was told to come back the next day to pick up her car, a 2003 BMW 325Ci.

     When she showed up at a police substation to get the car the next day, Brock said, “I just felt like from the moment I said I owned a BMW, I was looked at as a liar. They put me in handcuffs and said they just need to put me in handcuffs to take me to my car. And I said OK, whatever it’s gonna take to get to my car.”

     “Then EMS approached me,” she continued. “And they said we’re gonna take you to your car. And I’m like, in an ambulance? I’m going to my car in an ambulance? I’m going to my car in an ambulance? I was just so confused.”

     Brock was taken instead to Harlem Hospital, where medical records obtained by her attorney, Michael Lamonsoff, show she was injected with powerful sedatives and forced to take doses of lithium.

     “He held onto me and then the doctor stuck me in the arm and I was on a stretcher and I woke up to them taking my clothes off, specifically my underwear,” Brock tearfully recalled for PIX11’s Nicole Johnson. “Then I went back out again. When I woke up the next day, I felt like I was in a nightmare. I didn’t understand why that was happening to me.”

     Medical records also show that over the course of her eight-day stay, personnel at the hospital repeatedly tried to get Brock to deny three things before she could be released: that she owned the BMW, that she was a professional banker, and that President Barack Obama followed her on Twitter.

     The lawsuit says it was these three assertions that were the basis for the city determining that Brock was delusional and to diagnose her with bipolar disorder.

     Sounds like a post-racial America, folks.

     Urban Shield’s “Top Seller” is a T-Shirt Riffing on #BlackLivesMatter. Talk about appropriation.

     Far from the prying eyes of pesky activists, dozens of law enforcement agencies will spend today at the conference’s vendor show, browsing the guns, ammo, armored vehicles, surveillance technology, and robotics before commencing 48 hours of training exercises and war games tomorrow.

     Plus, there are t-shirts.

     Chuck Garcia, proprietor and designer for American Spartan Apparel, says that this year’s “top seller” is a new design: “Black Rifles Matter.”

     Need I cite more?

     African infants were found washed ashore on a beach in Libya 5 days before #AylanKurdi. The media ignored their story. So there’s that, too.

     Ten Reasons Why Saying All Lives Matter Is Intellectually Immature.

     Here are 10 reasons why the “all lives matter” argument intellectually does not make sense:
     1. Were all lives stolen from their native land in shackles in chains?
     2. Are all lives enslaved?
     3. Are all lives robbed of their native language?
     4. Do white terrorists execute all lives in places of worship?
     5. Are all lives subjected to Jim Crow racial terror?
     6. Are all lives taught to hate themselves?
     7. Do the cops murder all lives disproportionately?
     8. Do all lives have access to equal educational opportunities?
     9. Are all lives discriminated in housing policies?
     10. Are all lives working against 500 years of past and current racial hostility and violence?

     All lives will truly matter when Black Lives Matter. And if you continue to say all lives matter, you are either intellectually immature or intellectually dishonest.

     Ten quick questions people should ask themselves before deploying #AllLivesMatter.

     They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist, on racist appropriation in the literary world with a focus on yellowface.

     To be Other in America is to be coveted and hated at the same time. It’s never been enough to know that I feel it, but I know I am often asked to prove it before I am allowed to speak on it. When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature. “No one is going to pay attention to a name like mine,” a white dude who exclusively wrote stories about white dudes said to me one time when I was feeling particularly low about my writing. I couldn’t enjoy a scrap of validation or wallow in a sliver of self-doubt without someone interjecting some version of “You’re so lucky. You’re going to have an easier time than any of us getting published.” They were shameless about their envy, not shy or coy at all about their certainty that my race and gender were an undeniable asset, which, in turn, implied that I could be as mediocre and shitty as I wanted and still succeed. This was how some of my white classmates imagined the wild spoils of my literary trajectory. This was how they managed to turn themselves into the victims.

     “I’m writing something for the first time that’s a little bit autobiographical,” this one extremely serious white woman once said to me after workshop. “I wanted to get your advice. You write about yourself all the time. How do you do it?” My characters were always young Asian American women or girls, but I hadn’t written anything autobiographical. Just like her, I had imagined my stories. I made them up. They were fiction. But to her, they were so obviously just an unimaginative extension of my already-limited self. I was just tracing my life and my identity artlessly into my stories. Another white writer talked openly about searching for some kind of obscure “ethnicity” that she could write into her stories to give them an extra edge. “Like what you have in your writing,” she added, meaning well, of course. She and the other white writers who marveled over my luck wanted to try on my Otherness to advance their value in the literary marketplace, but I don’t think they wanted to grow up as an immigrant in the United States. I don’t think they wanted to experience racism and misogyny on a micro and macro level, be made to feel perpetually foreign no matter how long they’ve lived here, and be denied any opportunity to ever write something without the millstone of but is this authentic/representative/good for black/Asian/Latino/native people? hanging from their necks.

     In the intro to The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, the editors Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda write, “A lot of us here when asked to talk about race are most comfortable, or least uncomfortable, talking about it in the language of scandal. It’s so satisfying, so clear, so easy. The wronged. The evildoers. The undeserving. The shady. The good intentions and the cynical manipulations. The righteous side talking, the head shaking. Scandal is such a helpful, such a relieving distraction. There are times when scandal feels like the sun that race revolves around.” I won’t be scandalized by Michael Derrick Hudson pretending to be a Chinese American poet under the pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou after his poem “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” was rejected 40 times under his real name. In Hudson’s bio for this year’s Best American Poetry anthology, edited by Sherman Alexie, he writes, “There is a very short answer for my use of a non de plume: after a poem of mine has been rejected a multitude of times under my real name, I put Yi-Fen’s name on it send it out again. As a strategy for ‘placing’ poems this has been quite successful for me. The poem in question, ‘The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve’ was rejected under my real name forty (40) times before I sent it out as Yi-Fen-Chou (I keep detailed submission records). As Yi-Fen, the poem was rejected nine (9) times before Prairie Schooner took it. If indeed this is one of the best American poems of 2015, it took quite a bit of effort to get it into print, but I’m nothing if not persistent.” I won’t be scandalized by a white man who hasn’t considered that perhaps what helped his poem finally get published was less the fake Chinese woman he pretended to be, and more the robust, unflappable confidence bordering on delusion that he and many privileged white men possess: the capacity to be rejected forty (40) times and not give up, to be told, “no we don’t want you” again and again and think, I got this. I know what will get me in. What may be persistence to him is unfathomable to me.

     Plenty more worth the reading of at the link. I recommend.

311. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

     13 September 2015 at 4:34 pm

     re @310:

     Woman Says She Endured 8 Days In Psych Ward Because Cops Didn’t Believe BMW Was Hers. Saw this stories several months ago, but …

     beat me to it. came here to post exactly that. Not out of rage nor anger, just disbelief the NYPD would be so *. (including ageism). Maybe the fact that she was so young could lead to disbelief she was the owner, yet the throw in also sexism and racism into the mix. She is a woman, womenz don;t own BMW only dudes in order to entice womenz, and no POC would ever own a BMW, they only steal them. OTOH maybe they were goin anti-Bimmer, ie, only douches own BMW, she too nice, therefore she not he owner.
     Regardless of the NYPD, incarcerating her into a mental hospital and subjecting her to medications is ~~~~ no words ~~~

312. rq says

     14 September 2015 at 2:02 am

     Just a last highlight from the last link of my previous comment (310):

     I’m not surprised Hudson chose a Chinese name instead of a name that might read as Latino or black. It’s been well documented in studies that a resume with a white-sounding name is 50% more likely to receive a callback for an interview than an identical resume with a black-sounding name. A white name like Emily “yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience” for the same resume with a name like Lakisha. Names do a lot, and Hudson did what any white man who could not bear the thought that his whiteness might keep him from success would do: take on the name of the ultimate model minority! Put another way: Everything people of color must endure, our sensational pain and our sensational brilliance, must be accessible to white people; they must have it in their quest to be rewarded. Put one more way: white people don’t like it when we don’t do well and they don’t like it when we do. But most of all, they don’t like it when they don’t do well.

     Anyway, onwards.
     She Had a Dream: Mae C. Jemison, First African American Woman in Space, a recently passed anniversary.

     Have you ever had a dream of what you wanted to do in life? How about a wish that you hoped every day would come true? Were you ever truly inspired by something or someone at an early age that shaped the course of your life? Living a lifelong dream does not come to many, but for Dr. Mae Jemison, space travel was always an area of fascination. Space travel was her aspiration from an early age, and together with inspiration from astronaut predecessors Guy Bluford, Jr. and Sally Ride, Jemison not only achieved her goal of flying in space, but also did so as the first African American woman on September 12, 1992.
     […]

     The astronauts often bring along small personal mementos. Jemison chose several that were special to her: a flag from the Organization of African Unity, an Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority banner, and proclamations from the Chicago Public School System and the DuSable Museum of African American History.

     Despite all of her achievements, and the fact that Jemison has served as an astronaut, she still confronts institutionalized prejudice similar to what she experienced as a student in Chicago. After Jemison returned from space, Jemison visited an elementary school and the principal told her that, at his school, he planned to have male teachers inform the children about the opportunities at Space Camp since men are more knowledgeable in science. Jemison asserted that one has to be mindful of preconceived ideas and perceptions of individuals.

     After leaving NASA, Dr. Jemison went on to teach at Dartmouth College, formed a company that researches advanced technologies, is an active public speaker, and continues to urge students to pursue their dreams and pursue math and science. She stresses the importance of excelling in school. Because of her achievements, a school in Detroit was named in her honor, the Mae C. Jemison Academy. Dr. Jemison gladly accepted the position of role model and hoped to remind other African Americans that the sky is the limit!

     More of her impressive biography at the link, though in summarized form.

     The Reason This “Racist Soap Dispenser” Doesn’t Work on Black Skin – it sounds silly, doesn’t it? A couple years ago there was that whole thing with those low-light web-cams that wouldn’t pick up on black people’s faces.

     At a Marriott hotel in Atlanta, the soap dispensers have a little bit of a race problem.

     An African-American guest of the Dragon Con sci-fi and fantasy convention visited a bathroom in the event’s host hotel and discovered the soap dispenser, from a British company called Technical Concepts, wouldn’t sense his hands. When his friend, a white man named Larry, tried after him, out came the soap.
     […]

     What’s actually happening: According to Richard Whitney, VP of product at Particle, the soap dispenser uses near-infrared technology, which sends out invisible light from an infrared LED bulb for hands to reflect the light back to a sensor. The reason the soap doesn’t just foam out all day is because the hand acts to, more or less, bounce back the light and close the circuit. “If the reflective object actually absorbs that light instead, then the sensor will never trigger because not enough light gets to it,” Whitney told Mic.

     Whitney presented two extremes. If someone were to put a mirror up to the sensor, the light would reflect easily, triggering the sensor with no problem. But a material like vantablack, which only reflects 0.035% of all light pointed at it, would be kryptonite to an IR sensor.

     “In order to compensate for variations in skin color,” Whitney said, “The gain, [or] sensor equivalent to ISO and exposure in cameras, would have to be increased.”

     So why not do that, esp. since (judging from the video) it wasn’t particularly dark skin? There’s more on other similar technological failures (really a failure of diversity in the workforce) at the link.

     Young activists getting results — in Chicago, across the nation. Go them!

     For more than five years, the determined group of young people has demanded that University of Chicago Medicine open a trauma center on the South Side.

     They marched through the streets with makeshift coffins. They used a metal pipe to barricade an office door, locking university workers inside. They disrupted an alumni gala. And they blocked a construction site on the Hyde Park campus, binding themselves together with bungee cords and locking themselves to a fence.

     Then they leveraged the University of Chicago’s victory in securing the Barack Obama Presidential Center to gain a national audience to get an adult trauma center for the South Side.

     These are the hardball tactics of the modern-day movement for civil rights and equality, according to those familiar with social protests.

     And they’re getting attention.

     From Ferguson, Mo., where the “Black Lives Matters” movement took off, to the South Side of Chicago, where Fearless Leading by the Youth launched the trauma center campaign, young people are leading the call for justice. And increasingly across the country, they are strategically amplifying their message to get results.

     U. of C. Medicine announced Thursday that it would partner with Sinai Health Systems to operate a trauma center for the South Side, culminating a lengthy standoff with a multiracial coalition of young professionals, students and community members who refused to back down.

     Following another high-profile demonstration by a different group, Mayor Rahm Emanuel agreed to reopen Dyett High School in Washington Park after a dozen protesters staged a hunger strike.

     Officials at U. of C. Medicine said the decision to invest $40 million in a new trauma center at Holy Cross Hospital in Marquette Park was in response to a need in the community, not a result of the protests. But the demonstrators claimed victory and vowed to continue fighting for medical parity in low-income communities.

     Funny how that ‘need of the community’ would probably have been completely ignored if it wasn’t for the protests…

     Writing Through Protest: 12 Influential Black Writers Share Why Their Work Is So Crucial

     This past year, I have on many occasions stared at my computer screen as the cursor flickered. My words tend to get lost when I am anxious, devastated or angry.

     Almost daily, I think about or offer commentary on issues impacting black people’s lives and collective well-being in the United States and abroad. Black people abused or killed by police on video. Black churchgoers fatally shot by racists as they worship. Black subpopulations overcriminalized and incarcerated. Black communities ripped apart by natural disasters made worse by human folly.

     On many occasions, I am expected to be a race expert. This is because I am a black writer.

     Writing is my job. But I am not immune from the devastating pain that surfaces after repeatedly watching a video of a black person fatally shot by a white police officer on my iPhone screen.

     I interviewed young people in Baltimore during the uprising responding to the death of Freddie Gray, and sensed the rage permeating the crowds. I empathized with the many black people protesting in the middle of the night. I talked to a young man as a building burned behind us. The city was on fire and so were the emotions of black residents. Gray died after his spine was snapped in multiple places while in police custody. He could have easily been my brother, sister, niece, nephew or cousin. Gray could have been me. So I refused to be objective while writing another piece in defense of legitimate black rage.

     Black journalists and pundits are needed, especially in this moment of social discord, and the work is not easy. “Each report I write about a black person being killed is basically an obituary. I pray each day that some other journalist doesn’t write mine,” AlterNet’s Terrell Jermaine Starr told Mic. “That’s why I have no problem describing myself as an activist reporter because being an activist is to seek the truth. So is being a journalist.”

     The critical perspectives black reporters bring to media have always been useful in expanding the public dialogue on race and much else, but there are costs black writers must pay. “As calls for newsroom diversity get louder and louder — and rightly so — we might do well to consider what it means that there’s an emerging, highly valued professional class of black reporters at boldface publications reporting on the shortchanging of black life in this country,” NPR’s Gene Demby recently wrote. “What it means — for the reporting we do, for the brands we represent and for our own mental health — that we don’t stop being black people when we’re working as black reporters. That we quite literally have skin in the game.”

     Following Demby, Mic asked black writers and journalists to share their experiences. Here’s what they had to say.

     Twelve statements for the reading of at the link. Also a great short-list of authors to look for in online publications (and offline, in some cases, too!).

     Crowd in Olympia questions prosecutor about charging decisions in May police shooting

     Last week, Tunheim announced that Olympia residents Andre Thompson and Bryson Chaplin — the two men shot by Olympia police Officer Ryan Donald — would each face assault charges for allegedly threatening Donald with their skateboards, and that Donald would not be charged.

     The decision has sparked outrage from some people in Olympia. On Tuesday morning, about 20 people staged a sit-in at Tunheim’s office, asking for a meeting with the prosecutor. Friday’s meeting was scheduled as a response.

     Several people at the meeting accused Tunheim of being racist. As Tunheim left the event, audience members chanted, “Step back, step back. We want freedom, freedom. Racist prosecutors, we don’t need ’em, need ’em.”

     Throughout the meeting, some members of the audience laughed at Tunheim’s responses to questions and shouted, “Drop the charges!”

     Tunheim defended his decisions, and said they were made based on evidence collected in an investigation conducted by the Thurston County Critical Incident Task Force and led by the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office.

     “I understand the emotion that’s involved in this issue,” Tunheim said. “My job’s to make a decision without emotion. … I believe that a jury could find (Thompson and Chaplin) guilty.”

     Of course they would. Probably a white jury.
     More at the link.

     Hank and Billye Aaron give $3M to Morehouse School of Medicine, a historically black college.

     Atlanta Braves Hall of Famer Hank Aaron and his wife Billye gave $3 million to the Morehouse School of Medicine to expand the Hugh Gloster Medical Education building and create the Billye Suber Aaron Student Pavilion.

     MSM will break ground on the Billye Suber Aaron Pavilion in January 2016, and the project will be the first part of a four-part expansion on its campus. The pavilion is scheduled to be completed by 2017.

     Awesome.

313. dianne says

     14 September 2015 at 3:21 am

     Woman Says She Endured 8 Days In Psych Ward Because Cops Didn’t Believe BMW Was Hers.

     The thing I still don’t get about this is the hospital. Didn’t they notice that she didn’t act like someone with bipolar disorder? Okay, so maybe someone who was forcibly sedated and woke up in a mental hospital is going to not be at their calmest and most reasonable and therefore might sound a little non-specifically “crazy” but even if they believed she had a mental issue, I see no indication that she ever expressed the slightest bit of homicidal or suicidal ideation so the criteria for involuntary hospitalization were not met and she should have been released. What the crap were the doctors who saw her thinking? Or the nurses? Or the dieticians, phlebotomists, and janitors? Isn’t anyone paying attention to the patient’s clinical state?

314. rq says

     14 September 2015 at 6:16 am

     dianne
     Well, she was black. As seen upthread in a case where a man went to the hospital for mental issues but wasn’t provided appropriate assistance and ended up shot – there seems to be this idea that black people cannot be trusted to describe their own mental state as accurate. Which is absolutely absurd.

     +++

     James Blake Says Officer Who Arrested Him Should Be Fired, for a Start. I do hope he manages to keep the pressure on.
     The most absurd part about this incident is how the chief insists that this was something extraordinary or unusual, yet it is exactly this kind of violence that happens to regular people all the time – so many we don’t hear about because they aren’t star tennis players.

     When Disney and Dr. Seuss Made Racist Cartoons… Sure it’s a look at the (animated) past, but I’m going to TW this anyway for terrible racist imagery (if you choose to watch the videos).

     So, were these cartoons a reflection of society or a seemingly harmless way to spread hate? Or was it misguided patriotism or a combination of all of these things?

     A big part of the issue is intent. The Creators Project spoke with amateur animation historian and graphic designer Christopher Norris, a.k.a. Steak Mtn., about this shadowy cartoon history. Norris also does the artwork for progressive punk acts such as Against Me! and, mostly recently, their live album 23 Live Sex Acts. He says, “It really depends on what [the cartoonist’s] policies were at the time, which in some cases could very well have been a product of the times. It was also not a very sensitive time. People, even if they didn’t think they were, were racist and sexist and homophobic.”

     Norris adds that the idea of being a radical outlier was also far less prevalent than it is today, and that events like Pearl Harbor created a political climate where otherness was viewed as a threat and propaganda against them a sort of public service.

     That said, it’s difficult to deny that the dark undertones of people like cartoonists or comedians—even if Peanuts was never racist, it is really, really depressing. “I mean most cartoonists I know are miserable people and can be serious rain clouds, which I guess could be said for all creative people, really. (It should come as no surprise that in this spirit, Norris has a signature Vannen Watch with the phrase “I PROBABLY HATE YOU.”) “I don’t think cartooning is specifically revealing the terribleness of the world or anything. Like all creative fields, it has a spectrum of light and darkness—and sometimes they mix and it works as entertainment that makes you think—but most times it’s the shadowy opposite, trying to convey the dark soul of man… usually one in a dumb outfit or something.”

     So did Disney’s portrayal of Hitler or “savages” have any influence on the young minds that were their target audience? It’s impossible to say. A more relevant question might be, does any of this matter when it comes to the ways we live today?

     Okay… a) I don’t see what intent has to do with this, even if it is a reflection of the times, that does not make it okay or not racist – it contributes to the general cultural climate of that time, and the effect is still negative; which leads to b) yes, I think this had influence on the young minds of the target audience and c) of course this matters.

     In A Church Basement, Chipping Away At A Mountain Of Minor Crime Warrants

     They aren’t the sort of crimes that make headlines, but they’ve caused a big problem in New York City. There are some 1.2 million outstanding arrest warrants in the city’s five boroughs — most for very minor crimes like drinking in public, or being in a park after it closes.

     But, however minor the crime, if someone is caught with an outstanding warrant, he or she can be arrested on the spot.

     So this weekend, Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson is trying a strategy to clear up many New Yorkers’ criminal records — and to clear some of his office’s backlog. At a one-day event hosted in a church basement Saturday, hundreds of people turned out to get their judgments rendered, hoping to get a clean slate.
     […]

     Thompson, the DA, says the idea is to let the police and the courts focus on real criminals.

     “Someone who walked their dog without a leash years ago and got a summons, and either forgot about the court appearance or could not make it on that one day — I don’t believe that person should be taken in handcuffs, arrested and brought to the criminal courts and put in a cell with someone who might have committed a sexual assault or engaged in gun violence,” he says.

     Dawn Ryan, a public defender in Brooklyn, says that clearing out old warrants is a good way for her clients to get on with life — to “be able to then go on, apply for jobs, go to school, drive cars, without worry that the police may stop them and incarcerate them because of these warrants.”

     She says it’s too bad that she and her co-workers can’t clear out all warrants. They can’t help with traffic violations, for example, or tickets issued by the transit police.

     But the bigger problem is how many outstanding warrants there are in the city. Saturday was just a drop in the bucket.

     More at the link.

     Losing My Religion in the Black South, on the complications of religion.

     It was always supposed to be that way. Aunt Gerry, me, and God. In the years that followed, I sang solos in the choir, taught Sunday school, and led morning devotional services. I had a lot to say back then. When testimonial sessions opened up during first Sunday communion services, I was always among the first of the flock to stand, grip the pew, and tell everybody what Jesus had done for me.

     To say that my faith has sustained me would not pay sufficient homage to the darkest hours when I fell to my knees, beseeching an unknown power for a reprieve. There was that night in a hospital room 27 years ago, only days after I attempted to take my own life, that a charge nurse pointed me to Romans 5:1-5.

     Since then, I’ve floated in and out of church. Five years ago, I found a new home at Buckhead Church in Atlanta, a super-sized church renowned for its inclusion and led by Pastor Andy Stanley. Forty years to the week after I was first baptized, I re-committed myself to Christ. The road has been anything but easy.

     Sometimes in life, we stumble upon a clearing in the woods. I am there now.
     […]

     I still believe in God, just not the kind I was raised on. I never told Aunt Gerry or even my mother, because I know it would break their hearts to know that I no longer share their brand of faith. I am not an atheist, per se. I simply do not know what holds the world together, if anything at all. I tell you this, because I am afraid we might lose her now.

     But letting go of Jesus was the hardest part. I cannot point to the day or the hour that it happened, but the notion that there is someone—a man, no less—who loves me without condition or border, is now difficult to embrace. I have earnestly tried to lead a good life, but I suppose it was soothing to believe that a mystical creature had “paid” for my many foibles and saw the best in me when others would or could not.

     As a black woman living in America, who knows well the spiritual legacy of slavery, to walk away from those traditions has been nothing short of traumatic. Was heaven not accessible before we were chained and dragged to these shores, our bodies plundered and sold as chattel? Had this God ordained and anointed the Middle Passage? Are the children who now live in war-ravaged Sudan, walking miles for water each day, not worthy of His grace and mercy? Are there no gay or lesbian people in this heaven? Where do transgendered people go when they die? If I plant crops side-by-side or wear garments of mixed threads, who will be in charge of the stoning? I don’t mind telling you that my eldest daughter, a breathtakingly beautiful, hard-working Ivy League alumnus who has a perfect smile, might surely fetch a good price on the open market, but she sometimes works my last nerve. Is it OK to sell her off?

     Those were a few of the many complications that led me to rethink my relationship with organized religion. Wars had been fought in the name of the “righteous,” towers of innocent people brought down by airplanes flown by men seeking Paradise, women subjugated and stripped of their humanity to earn the grace of a faceless power, and genocides justified by the most wicked among us clinging to a holy text.

     It is no small thing to think your own family delusional. Breaking those bonds is the sort of emotional jeopardy I have avoided my whole life long. Walking away also meant that questioning the basis for nearly every decision I have ever made—every relationship, every job, every single day of my 47 years—was now on the table.

     Read on to the end.

     Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable: Father of Chicago, just an interesting piece of trivia that floated down my twitter timeline today.

     According to Native American tradition, an African man born in Santa Domingo (Haiti) was the first non-native American to settle at the city that is now called Chicago. The native accounts were corroborated by the Europeans in 1779 when a British Commandant of Fort Michilimackinac reported the frontiersman as a “handsome Negro, well-educated, and settled in Eschikagou (Chicago).”
     […]

     As a Black man who was multilingual, free and self-employed, Du Sable may have been considered suspicious by the British and the French, as well as those Europeans who were identifying themselves as Americans. Whatever his reason, there is a Native American saying that may capture in part the magnitude of his historical legacy: “The first white man to settle in Chicago was a black man.”

     That’s an interesting bit there, about ‘the white man’ as something more than just a white man…

     Huckabee Claims Black People Aren’t Technically Citizens During Critique of Unjust Laws. Yep, Slate on Huckabee and Dred Scott.

315. dianne says

     14 September 2015 at 6:59 am

     rq: Even if you completely ignore her description of her own mental state, the fact that the doctors who (I presume and hope) evaluated her didn’t notice that she had no symptoms of bipolar disorder speaks to either incompetence or prejudice so severe that they couldn’t honestly evaluate her through it. (Which is, of course, also incompetence, but of a more specific sort.) I suppose that there is some chance that she was so upset by being forcibly drugged and stripped that she acted a bit “crazy”, but bipolar disorder is a specific syndrome that looks absolutely nothing like a mentally healthy woman who is in the midst of being traumatized by being kidnapped. How did they even choose BPD as an accusation? Delusions go with lots of different mental conditions. However it happened, here’s hoping she uses the money she makes as a banker (which she really is, despite the police and hospital’s delusions) to hire a really good lawyer. Several people need to lose their jobs.

316. rq says

     14 September 2015 at 7:22 am

     dianne
     Agreed.

317. rq says

     14 September 2015 at 2:38 pm

     Colour me surprised indeed: Color-Blindness Is Counterproductive.

     Many sociologists, though, are extremely critical of colorblindness as an ideology. They argue that as the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality have become more covert and obscure than they were during the era of open, legal segregation, the language of explicit racism has given way to a discourse of colorblindness. But they fear that the refusal to take public note of race actually allows people to ignore manifestations of persistent discrimination.

     For the first half of the 20th century, it was perfectly legal to deny blacks (and other racial minorities) access to housing, jobs, voting, and other rights based explicitly on race. Civil-rights reforms rendered these practices illegal. Laws now bar practices that previously maintained racial inequality, like redlining, segregation, or openly refusing to rent or sell real estate to black Americans. Yet discrimination still persists, operating through a combination of social, economic, and institutional practices.

     Concurrently, it is no longer socially acceptable in many quarters to identify oneself as racist. Instead, many Americans purport not to see color. However, their colorblindness comes at a cost. By claiming that they do not see race, they also can avert their eyes from the ways in which well-meaning people engage in practices that reproduce neighborhood and school segregation, rely on “soft skills” in ways that disadvantage racial minorities in the job market, and hoard opportunities in ways that reserve access to better jobs for white peers.

     The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf recently argued that the academic left errs in attacking colorblindness. He suggested that encouraging whites to be color conscious and to think of themselves in racial terms would encourage the nativism embraced by some Donald Trump supporters—that a heightened awareness of whiteness would produce a sense of persecution, and encourage some to rally in defense of white rights. He contends that there is some merit to colorblindness that has been ignored by what he describes as “the academic left,” which spends too much time focused on nitpicking colorblindness rather than drawing attention to “macroaggressions” such as “racially tinged hatred and conspiracy theories directed at the first black president” or the convenience of labeling Mexican immigrants rapists “despite the fact that first-generation immigrants commit fewer crimes than native born Americans.”
     […]

     Yet, in addition to suggesting that the academic left casts all proponents of colorblindness as naïve, Friedersdorf also contends that they waste time picking apart this concept rather than addressing “macroagressions” like police brutality and growing expressions of virulent racist hatred. But Bonilla-Silva, among others, describes the ways that colorblindness sustains these very macroaggressions that Friedersdorf thinks are ignored. In other words, Friedersdorf suggests the academic left wastes time dissecting the concept of colorblindness, and would be better served focusing on more pressing, systemic processes of inequality. But a careful read of sociological literature in this area finds that there are more than a few members of the “academic left” who argue that colorblindness is problematic precisely because it offers a way to avoid addressing these exact social problems. Other sociologists like Jessie Daniels and David Cort focus explicitly on researching hate speech on the internet and the lower rates of crime among immigrants relative to native born Americans, respectively—the very issues that Friedersdorf, by his own admission, charges are important and believes are overlooked by the academic left. Sociologists are actually very involved in highlighting these macroaggressions—and in underscoring the ways colorblind ideology allows them to go ignored.

     Advocates of colorblindness, like Friedersdorf, tend to claim that emphasizing whites’ group identity as whites (rather than as individuals) is counterproductive. Rejecting colorblindness and encouraging whites to see themselves as members of a distinct racial group, they argue, will produce nativism. They will cling to, rather than critique, the privileges that whiteness affords, which are jeopardized by a more multiracial society. Friedersdorf calls it naïve to believe that upon focusing on their status as members of a racial group and the privilege and power that affords them, “masses of white people will identify more strongly with their racial tribe and then sacrifice the interests of that tribe.”

     This is, in the abstract, a compelling point. The trouble is that the weight of the scholarly evidence directly contradicts this argument. Sociologists like Karyn McKinney, Eileen O’Brien, Joe Feagin, Hernan Vera, and Matthew Hughey, who have studied the pathways and trajectories by which whites become involved in antiracist activism, show that contrary to Friedersdorf’s beliefs, moving away from colorblindness can actually serve as a pathway towards antiracism. In many of these studies, as whites came to understand themselves as members of a racial group which enjoyed unearned privileges and benefits, this compelled them to forge a different sense of white identity built on antiracism rather than simply supporting the status quo. Moving away from the colorblind ideology that sociologists critique—the idea that it’s admirable to profess not to see color, that it’s problematic to see oneself as a member of a racial group—is, according to the research in this area, actually an important step to antiracist activism.

     A great deal of interesting reading continues at the link.

     Oklahoma police chief apologizes for 1921 attack on Black Wall Street, an article from 2013, but which serves as a reminder of forgotten history and of how necessary it is to acknowledg eit and 0yes! – also apologize for it.

     Chief Jordan spoke at the opening ceremony of “Literacy, Legacy and Movement Day” in Tulsa. It was an event meant to promote cultural awareness, literacy, health and entrepreneurship among African Americans in the community. In his apology, Chief Jordan said:

     “I cannot apologize for the actions, inaction and dereliction that those individual officers and their chief exhibited during that dark time. But as your chief today, I can apologize for our police department. I am sorry and distressed that the Tulsa Police Department did not protect its citizens during those tragic days in 1921.

     “I have heard things said like, ‘Well, that was a different time.’ That excuse does not hold water with me. I have been a Tulsa police officer since 1969 and I have witnessed scores of ‘different times.’ Not once did I ever consider that those changing times somehow relieved me of my obligation to uphold my oath of office and to protect my fellow Tulsans.”

     A summary of the events of the Tulsa riot at the link, too.

     Disabled Black Lives Matter, because #AllBlackLivesMatter.

     People with severe and chronic disabilities often go unheard, unseen, ignored, and at worst, abused. As a person with family members with disabilities, I recently spent hours on the phone with medical professionals advocating for my brother to get a hospital bed. We were told there were no beds for psychiatric patients and that he would have to wait. Waiting for a bed is like waiting to be rescued from a dark and cold cave where you’ve been shipwrecked without food, heat, or light.

     My personal experience with advocating for my brother’s care has heightened my awareness of the barriers to treatment that people with disabilities face. This is why I am horrified by the late-breaking news that a Black man with severe disabilities was neglected, tortured and left to die by Virginia officials in the Portsmouth, Virginia jail. Arrested in April for stealing $5 worth of junk food from a corner store, 24 year old Jamychael Mitchell died August 19 from starvation. This story was first covered by British news on August 28, 2015, in an article in The Guardian. They report that an investigation is underway.

     Mitchell was mentally disabled by severe bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. His disability interfered with his ability to advocate for himself and navigate the systems that killed him. Out of distress and mental impairment, he refused medications and food. Torture means abuse and ill-treatment. It was abuse for the officials to keep him in jail while he suffered through a medical psychiatric emergency. Concerned family members were banned by authorities from contact with him because Mitchell was unable to recall their names for the permission process. The system further alienated Mitchell from the only advocates he had, further damaging his sense of hope.

     Mitchell, a severely disabled man, was treated like a terrorist, left to die alone in his cell, emancipated and insane. Chronic and severe mental illness, such as Mitchell experienced, is a disability. He was denied humane treatment, treated instead with cruelty and neglect. Mitchell died waiting to be transferred to the state hospital. He waited four months for a bed. Refusing his medications and refusing nourishment were symptoms of his mental illness. He needed to be under the care of mental health professionals and nutritionists, not a security guard. How is it that America treats people with chronic illness and disabilities as if they are terrorists?

     Here we’ve seen the perfect storm of race, poverty, and mental disability. This tragic case represents the worst of America’s criminal justice system. Mitchell’s pattern of petty theft was a symptom of his chronic and severe illness and disabilities. What does America do with her sickest, poorest and most marginalized? The largest populations in our jails and prisons are people with disabilities, people of color and people living in poverty.

     Disabled Black lives matter.

     The picture NYPD used to arrest James Blake was of respected Australian designer Sean Satha. Yeeep, the NYPD has fucked that one right up.

     The New York Police Department trusted a man with enough racial profiling and brutality complaints filed against him to last a lifetime, Officer James Frascatore, to investigate an identity theft complaint that they believed focused on a black man that looked like tennis star James Blake.

     Except, we now know the man they thought they were looking for had nothing to do with the identity theft at all. His name is Sean Satha and he is an Australian sunglass designer working for a popular company called Local Supply. Not only did Sean Satha have nothing to do with the identity theft, he wasn’t even on the continent when the NYPD was armed with his photo and began looking for him in a midtown Manhattan hotel lobby.

     The NYPD claims a company called GoButler gave them Sean Satha’s photo, but they now admit that neither Sean Satha or James Blake had anything at all to do with this case of identity theft. Basically, this all confirms that the last agency you ever want investigating a case of identity theft is the NYPD—which has clearly shown it will railroad every black man in sight in the name of solving a case.

     Strangely, the NYPD wanted the whole world to know that Sean Satha and James Blake “look like twins,” when they actually don’t, which only fuels the stereotypical idea that the NYPD believes all black people look alike. As more photos come out, it’s clear that these two dudes look nothing alike at all.

     What a big effin’ mess. More pictures of Blake and his “twin” below.

     How the hell are they still a functioning police force?

     The Success And Controversy Of #CampaignZero And Its Successful, Controversial Leader, DeRay McKesson. I’ve been reading critiques of this article (incl. from DeRay McKesson himself!) on twitter, so I hope there’s an article out tomorrow. Anyway, here’s some cites (from the article):

     Inside the Washington office of the Open Society Foundations, the grantmaking network founded by liberal financier George Soros, there was a sense that Black Lives Matter was on the cusp of something bigger — and a real desire among people with money to make that happen. But there was an open question: How would Black Lives Matter affect actual change in a real, concrete way? How would the movement not disappear?

     “I think what’s bigger is our challenge of what policy solutions actually meet the moment,” Rashad Robinson, from the group Color of Change said at the meeting.

     This is the high-stakes, unresolved process that could shape what policy gets changed, the public perception of what Black Lives Matter means, and the identity of the movement’s public face: to find a policy or group that, in Robinson’s words, “meets the moment.” And the early frontrunner is a platform called #CampaignZero, led by DeRay Mckesson, the well-known activist who, like his project, is controversial inside and outside the Black Lives Matter movement.

     Created by Mckesson, and the activists Johnetta Elzie, Samuel Sinyangwe, and Brittany Packnett, among others, Campaign Zero focuses on decriminalizing or “de-prioritizing” minor infractions like marijuana possession, trespassing, and public alcohol consumption (also called broken-windows policing), which affects poorer communities of color. The campaign makes 10 policy recommendations that include broad paradigm shifts to narrower issues (like how police should confront the mentally ill).

     It’s a polished set of proposals with recommendations on the local, state, and federal levels — and the slate of proposals provides the kind of specifics that please donors and national Democrats, and is a favorite of Washington’s black political class.
     […]

     Campaign Zero has also become a source of contention within the broader Black Lives Matter movement, especially with the increased prominence of Mckesson, the Bowdoin graduate who left behind a six-figure salary as the senior director of human capital with the Minneapolis Public Schools system to protest in Ferguson. Critics say the plan is marked by a lack of transparency (who helped formulate the plan, they ask). More importantly, some critics argue Campaign Zero might be interfering with other activism and, therefore, lacks accountability. Campaign Zero’s willingness to participate in the question of ‘Where do we go from here?’ has created — and even exacerbated — the tensions that exist between the sprawling factions of the Black Lives Matter movement.

     The Black Lives Matter organization, with 26 chapters around the country is not in regular contact with Mckesson and the Campaign Zero team, nor does Campaign Zero consider itself part of the organization’s network. But because they are both under the umbrella of the broader Black Lives Matter movement, their campaigns, rallies, disruptions and direct actions often affect each other. It’s why one criticism of Campaign Zero is that, in some cases, it duplicates work already being done.

     Others are frustrated that the Black Lives Matter network and Campaign Zero are crossing wires. They fight for loyalty among prominent activists. More importantly, though, people outside the movement — from national leaders to major donors and presidential candidates — are unsure of how to navigate the different entities.

     Therein lies a caveat: Campaign Zero is not an organization — it’s simply a policy platform. The platform isn’t static; the group releases, for all to see, policy solutions, ideas, and general feedback the team has received since its launch date, and how that feedback is incorporated into what the activists call “a living document.”
     […]

     “My critique comes from this seemingly type of individual activism as opposed to working with people and groups that have been doing this work for a while,” said Black Lives Matter organizer Rosa Clemente. “For example in 2012 the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement published the Every 28 Hours report, which as early as 2010 began compiling the names of African American men women and children killed by the police.”

     Clemente said the platform is full of legislative or public policy changes that people have already been fighting for — “old ideas that have taken fertile ground,” she said — that have taken hold recently because of radical protest. The ideas are reformist, while other activists are fighting for more radical things, like defunding the police and ending systematic police brutality and oppression by calling for the police to withdraw from communities. Clemente added that Campaign Zero’s approach to the work has created, in her mind, and indeed in the minds of other activists, a problematic leadership model, though she said she was “dishearted and dismayed” by the veiled attacks on social media aimed at Mckesson in particular.

     Mckesson’s profile in the movement as something of a lone actor has added to the tension. He has repeatedly said he does not wish to join an organization. “You can’t be accountable to folks you are not in community with,” one activist said.

     But Mckesson sees the the independence as freeing. “I think that there are many people who believe in social justice work writ large who are invested in the movement who have chosen not to be in traditional organizations, who want to be in the work without [living] whatever connotation membership brings,” Mckesson said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. “I think there’s a way to organize for those people, too. It doesn’t make any other models of organizing any less effective, but it does say we have an opportunity to think about digital organizing in a new and profound way.”

     Even Mckesson’s critics will say Campaign Zero represents a pivotal moment in the movement’s young history. The question of policy and national politics remains a challenge — and one demonstrated, some activists say, in Black Lives Matter activists’ confrontation with Hillary Clinton in New England.

     More at the link.

     Panel Studying Racial Divide in Missouri Presents a Blunt Picture of Inequity. Surprise through-and-through.

     A commission appointed by Missouri’s governor after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white police officer is calling for sweeping changes across the St. Louis region on matters of policing, the courts, education, health care, housing and more.

     In a 198-page report to be made public in Ferguson, Mo., on Monday afternoon, the commission lays out goals that are ambitious, wide ranging and, in many cases, politically delicate. Among 47 top priorities, the group calls for increasing the minimum wage, expanding eligibility for Medicaid and consolidating the patchwork of 60 police forces and 81 municipal courts that cover St. Louis and its suburbs.

     The commission offers a blunt, painful picture of racial inequity in the region. Black motorists were 75 percent more likely to be pulled over for traffic stops in Missouri than whites last year, the report notes. The average life expectancy in one mostly black suburb, Kinloch, is more than three decades less than in the mostly white suburb of Wildwood, the report finds. And 14.3 percent of black elementary students in Missouri were suspended at least once during a recent school year, compared with 1.8 percent of white students.

     “We know that talking about race makes a lot of people uncomfortable,” says the report, which is titled “Forward Through Ferguson: A Path Toward Racial Equity.” “But make no mistake: This is about race.”

     Yep, it is.

318. rq says

     14 September 2015 at 3:15 pm

     My Police Academy Teaches the ‘War on Cops’ Myth

     The trumpets of the thin blue line and right-wing news sources have been sounding, piping out warnings of a “War on Police.” You may have heard it on talk radio, seen it on Fox News or even read it in The New York Post, but now the rhetoric of charlatans has reached me in class at my police academy in a northern red state.

     The War on Cops is a grossly inaccurate response to recent police killings which are on track for another year that will rival the safest on record. Gunfire deaths by police officers are down 27 percent this year, according to the Officer Down memorial page, and police killings in general are at a 20-year low, given current numbers for 2015. Police deaths in Barack Obama’s presidency are lower than the past four administrations, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

     Not a single iota of evidence supports a War on Police, but it has become a battle cry among some in the academy.

     Over 80 percent of police departments in the United States are facing issues with low recruitment numbers. As an Iraq War veteran I sought to solidify my chance of employment working in law enforcement by attending a local police academy. I enjoyed serving my country as military police and will do such now as a sworn police officer back home.

     Read more at the link.

     Questionable Medical Care Turns Short Jail Stays Into Death Sentences, including questionable mental health care. As pertaining to several recent instances.

     Fatal shootings by police eclipse 2014 total – in Tulsa, that is. Could be different elsewhere.

     The number of fatal shootings by police continues to climb in Oklahoma, with some saying the state is an extreme example of a host of cultural issues being experienced across the country.

     The shooting death of a man by Cushing police Aug. 30 marked the 26th time this year that law enforcement officers in Oklahoma have fatally shot someone, according to a database of deadly incidents compiled by the Tulsa World.

     A Cushing police officer shot Shawn Allen Hall, 20, of Ripley after he pointed a gun at others and did not follow commands by the officer to drop his weapon, according to law enforcement officials.

     The number of fatal law enforcement shootings in Oklahoma has increased or remained the same each year since 2009. Oklahoma law enforcement officials fatally shot 25 people in 2014.

     Since 2007, there have been 139 deadly shootings by law enforcement officers, according to the World database.

     The article interviews someone who happens to blame regular citizens for the uptick in police shooting, declaring that a decrease in trust from the community causes people to be more combative, which in turn, well, increases an officer’s sense of danger. And we all know where that leads.

     Ferguson Commission Shines Light On Racially Divided St. Louis, NPR link with audio.

     Man who films Portland police files federal lawsuit against city stemming from arrest . *sigh*

     Baltimore pastor Jamal Bryant will run for Congress

     Baltimore pastor Jamal Harrison Bryant announced Monday he will run for Congress — seeking the seat held by Rep. Elijah Cummings.

     In a statement released early Monday, Bryant said, “After prayer, soul searching and long deliberation, I am officially announcing my candidacy for Congress of the United States representing the 7th Congressional District.”

     Bryant, pastor at Empowerment Temple in Northwest Baltimore, will make a formal announcement at a 10 a.m. event.

     “After the Freddie Gray uprising, the proliferation of police brutality across this nation, the lack of jobs, widespread poverty and hopelessness throughout our urban areas, I decided that leading a successful congregation and building a great church is not enough,” Bryant said in a statement. “I want to contribute to public policy in Washington.”

     Good luck.

319. rq says

     14 September 2015 at 3:23 pm

     The Ferguson Commission report itself, pdf format.

     Missouri commission formed after Ferguson concludes: ‘Make no mistake: This is about race.’ But will it bring change?

     The state-level commission convened by Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon after the protest and riots sparked by the police shooting of Michael Brown will issue a 198-page report Monday calling for sweeping changes to address racial inequality — which the commission concludes was a major underlying factor driving the at-times violent community reaction to the shooting.

     In a blunt assessment, the Ferguson Commission report declares that to address the concerns of the hundreds who took to the streets near St. Louis last year, the region must be willing to recognize that that the region’s structural inequities have undeniable racial components.

     “We know that talking about race makes a lot of people uncomfortable,” the report, titled “Forward Through Ferguson: A Path Toward Racial Equity,” states. “But make no mistake: This is about race.”

     The report declares 47 top priorities, many of which are politically ambitious and delicate goals. Among the commission’s proposals:

     * consolidating the police departments and municipal court systems in St. Louis County.

     * the creation of a statewide use-of-force database to track police shootings

     * the installation of the state attorney general as special prosecutor in the investigation of all deaths at the hands of the police

     * increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour

     “St. Louis does not have a proud history on this topic, and we are still suffering the consequences of decisions made by our predecessors,” the report goes on to state. “We are not pointing fingers and calling individual people racist. We are not even suggesting that institutions or existing systems intend to be racist.”

     But what remains to be seen is whether local lawmakers can usher in any of the sweeping change that this report calls for.

     All good ideas. Hopefully many will be supported beyond this report.

     Whitney Houston ‘hologram’ to tour next year – recently, it was a Billie Holiday hologram to perform in Vegas.

     A 3D moving image of the late singer Whitney Houston is being developed by a US entertainment firm.

     It is working with the Houston estate and hopes to tour the product in 2016.

     Hologram USA has patented what it calls a “high-tech version” of a 16th century illusion called Pepper’s Ghost.

     It can cost “millions of dollars” to develop an image of a deceased star. The company told the BBC that members of the public often enquire about being turned into a 3D moving image too.

     “I’m not sure if any have pursued it… for most people the cost is forbidding,” said head of marketing Owen Phillips.

     The traditional Pepper’s Ghost illusion involves foil and glass, to which Hologram USA has added a patented blend of computer generated images (CGI), moving parts and audio material.

     In its stable of so-called “holograms” are classic acts such as Patsy Cline, Frank Sinatra and Liberace.

     I do wonder who will be making the bigger profit here, and who will be short-changed in the end…

     The woman driving Patagonia to be (even more) radical, as related to DeRay’s vest, which some people on twitter will understand better than otehrs. See this paragraph towards the end:

     atagonia’s activist-friendly vibe can lead to unplanned endorsements. Perhaps the most visible ambassador for the Patagonia brand at the moment is a gay black man named Deray McKesson, who has emerged alongside the #BlackLivesMatter movement and now has 224,000 Twitter followers. His signature piece of clothing is a blue Patagonia down vest, similar to one that Marcario wears. The vest is famous enough to have its own Twitter handle: @deraysvest (though it has a mere 3,000 followers). He has said he wore it because it felt like a shield—he feels invincible in it. “I kind of feel like that when I wear my vest too,” Marcario says. McKesson, a twentysomething former educational consultant, says he was absolutely aware that Patagonia was a good company when he bought the vest. “I knew they had a commitment to social justice,” he says. But mostly he wanted something warm, light, and packable. He liked the fact that the company would repair the vest if it ever got damaged. “I just felt good about buying it,” he says.

     Matt Damon Interrupts Successful Black Woman Filmmaker to Explain Diversity to Her. NO MATT DAMON NO!

     The finalists are flown to Los Angeles to meet in person with the producers. At these meetings, they introduce Effie Brown, an experienced Hollywood producer and a black woman. She has produced seventeen feature films, including Dear White People and boy, the Irony Gods are working overtime today.

     As the only person of color in the group, Effie clearly understands that any attempt at diversity will be on her shoulders. She recalls growing up in the 1970s where most of the time when she saw black people in films, they were playing gangsters, criminals and prostitutes. She also explains that she is passionate about making films where marginalized people are recognized. Basically, she is their only line of defense against making yet another all-white dude project, something at best incredibly tone deaf or, at worst, a racist shitshow.

     During a discussion about one of the films, Brown helpfully points out that she’s worried that the only black person in the entire movie is a prostitute who is slapped by her white pimp. All she’s saying is that perhaps this roomful of white people should be cognizant of who they hire to direct a character like that—AKA hire some people of color so they can treat the role with some dignity and prevent it from descending into a racist trope.

     “You’re looking at this group right here and who you’re picking and the story that you’re doing,” she says calmly. Luckily, Matt Damon is there to swoop in with this Smart White Man cape and interrupts Brown in order to explain diversity to her and this room full of white people. He argues that actually, the less diverse directing teams brought up the same issue about the prostitute character that Effie is raising.

     Effie counters by saying that his summation is “not necessarily true,” and Matt Damon interrupts her again, this time by laying out what exactly diversity is.

     “When we’re talking about diversity you do it in the casting of the film not in the casting of the show.”

     Meaning that they don’t have to hire any diverse filmmakers on Project Greenlight as long as they throw a few women and black people onscreen.

     NOOOOOoooooooo…

     FOP seeks donations for officers in ‘extremely lengthy’ Freddie Gray case. Just… yeah.

320. rq says

     15 September 2015 at 3:11 pm

     Black Americans Don’t ‘Appropriate’ African Culture

     Appropriation. The latest word every one wants to use, hurling it at one another with faux intellect. As soon as you see it in an article or headline, you sigh because it’s either, “I can’t believe they [as in white people] are pulling this stunt again [side eye],” or it’s a tiring and confusing tirade that has been conflated far past the point of making sense. Occasionally a darling steps in, like Amandla Stenberg, and gracefully adds clarity on how the topic should be addressed.

     Other times, we’re left with the divisiveness that Zipporah Gene penned as she told black Americans to stop appropriating “African” culture.

     Yes, Gene asked, “Black America, please stop appropriating African clothing and tribal marks.” After perusing a collection of pictures from this year’s Afropunk in Brooklyn, N.Y., a festival celebrating multiculturalism in the black community, Gene attempted to call out the hypocrisy over the diverse cultural wears she saw in the pictures, tagging the looks “African,” a broad term that encapsulates the extremely diverse 54 countries and thousands of ethnicities, with varying cultures, on the continent. To her, septum nose rings are Fulani; loose-fitting caftans and robes are djellaba, a typical Moroccan dress; and face paintings are mocking Yoruba tribal marks.

     What we really have here is someone entirely unaware of the diversity in the black American community, especially in New York City, and the overall historical context of the trans-Atlantic loop that exists within the African Diaspora.

     Even on the surface of what Gene calls out as appropriation by black Americans, no one can attest to whether the images she sees are actually of African Americans who are descendants of enslaved Africans in the U.S. In New York City, where Afropunk is hosted, many within the black community are immigrants or children of immigrants. She doesn’t account for the first- and second-generation Americans who retain close cultural ties to the homelands of their parents and grandparents.
     […]

     Moving forward to the decolonization of West Africa, there was a strong connection between the civil rights movement of African Americans and the emerging black African political leaders who were working to take their countries back from Europeans. Was it appropriation that both the first African presidents of Nigeria (Nnamdi Azikiwe) and Ghana (Kwame Nkrumah) were Lincoln University-educated members of Phi Beta Sigma, a fraternity that has a deep history of members’ founding significant civil rights organizations, such as the Black Panthers? Rather, it was the ties that bound us via our oppression by European systems and the beauty of inspiration that came out of that.

     So while Gene points the finger at black Americans, we as the black community at large should be encouraging all of our members to become more culturally aware. Then we can all stop wearing the faux dashikis mass-produced in Asia and focus on what unites us, not divides.

     EXCLUSIVE: Iyanla Vanzant Issues a Challenge for #BlackLivesMatter Movement, Discusses the One Guest She Let Down

     The way Iyanla Vanzant sees it, the Black Lives Matter movement is in need of an intervention and the self-help guru believes she knows just where to start.

     “We’ve got to stop talking about it and really start doing the work about it,” Vanzant said recently while promoting the upcoming third season of Iyanla: Fix My Life, which premieres on OWN Saturday Sept. 19. “What is the ask? Black lives matter, therefore we ask …?” she continued.

     “What are we saying? What does that mean? Taking the moment and making it a movement requires some level of action and, unfortunately, some level of leadership, which is a problem for us.”

     Vanzant has already shot the episodes for season three, which include Olympic figure skater Debi Thomas’ fall from grace and closeted gay pastors– but said she might tackle #BlackLivesMatter in season four. If she does, she will challenge young people who use the hashtag to do something beyond their social media accounts.

     She is obviously missing more than half the story. I hope during the course of her research for this,she comes to realize everyone that stands behind the hashtag, and realizes that the leaders are there and that the solid action is already there, and that maybe they don’t need as much self-help as she believes.

     Denver District Attorney Clears Police in Shooting of Native American Man. That’s #PaulCastaway, in case you’ve already forgotten.

     Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey has declined to press criminal charges against a Denver police officer who shot and killed a Native American man in July. The man, Paul Castaway, holding a knife to his own throat and threatening to kill himself, was walking toward officers when Officer Michael Traudt fired three shots toward Castaway, two of which hit him in the midsection. Along with a nine-page report explaining his decision, Morrissey on Monday released surveillance footage of the shooting.
     […]

     Morrissey said his decision was based on the law.

     “In this case, Castaway’s decision to turn, confront the officers and deliberately advance toward Officer Traudt, knife in hand, rather than complying with his orders, compelled Officer Traudt to shoot,” Morissey said in the report. “The surveillance video clearly depicts Castaway moving quickly and purposefully toward Officer Traudt. Castaway’s actions and the statements he made suggest he had decided to die and further decided that Officer Traudt would be the instrument of his demise.”

     Well, he decided to die and the officer just happened to help him out. It was his own damned fault, in other words. *spits*

     Denver DA Releases Video of Paul Castaway’s Murder, a more personal blog post, with the video included.

     Bystander with cellphone shot by deputies in Sacramento County. I bet the police feared for their lives again.

     Deputies shot and wounded a bystander after they mistook his cellphone for a gun Friday during what authorities described as a chaotic scene with a gunman firing dozens of gunshots into a neighbor’s Rancho Cordova home.

     Another argument in favour of more guns… I mean… right?

     New Study: Racism Can Make Kids Sick—for the Rest of Their Lives. Now this, this…

     Racism is still one of America’s greatest social ills—and it might actually be making people sick. According to a new study out of Northwestern University, racial discrimination experienced in adolescence can have a profound impact on health later in life.

     Controlling for other factors that might cause stress, including socioeconomic status, health behaviors, and depression, researchers found that adults who had reported higher levels of discrimination when they were young had disrupted stress hormone levels 20 years later—and that African Americans experienced the effects at greater levels than their white counterparts.

     “There’s sometimes a tendency to say, ‘Oh, they are just kids—they will get over it,'” says developmental psychologist and head researcher Emma Adam. “But it turns out there can be lasting impact.”
     […]

     While the effects on daily functioning are troublesome, the long-term effects are far worse: These flat rhythms are associated with higher risk for life-threatening health problems like cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and also can cause depression and chronic fatigue.

     African Americans reported experiencing discrimination at much higher levels over the course of the study, and Adam believes that likely triggered chronic stress. “The stress hormones I study respond to not just the presence of discrimination but even the anticipation that it might happen,” she says. “That is why discrimination is such a pervasive negative influence and really harmful to biology and health.”

     While the study did not look into ways to mitigate the effects, Adam says previous research indicates increased emotional support and getting enough sleep can help improve hormone levels.

     “I think the message is: For folks who would like to say that this is a thing of the past—it is not,” she says. “These are concerns that are affecting the daily functioning, the health, and the well-being of African Americans, and it should be of concern to the whole country.”

     I think he’s talking to you, post-racial USAmerica. And I think he’s saying that you’re not all that post-racial after all.

     James Blake’s arrest wasn’t a mistake—it’s business as usual for America’s racist police force. So don’t believe anyone trying to pass it off as an extraordinary event.

     This past week, while all eyes were on Serena Williams’s historic (albeit unsuccessful) run in the US Open, another incident not too far from the arena has reignited the national conversation about police abuse and misbehavior. And as New York City officials rushed to get ahead of yet another embarrassing story, it’s important to remember that this type of incident is a common part of everyday policing.
     […]

     With protests against police brutality a constant drumbeat reverberating across the national landscape, the city responded swiftly to reports of a white officer’s seemingly unprovoked attack a black athlete. The mayor quickly released a statement apologizing and NYPD police commissioner Bill Bratton, for his part, conceded that Blake’s takedown appeared inappropriate. The officer involved, James Frascatore, was immediately assigned to desk duty.

     But at the same time, city officials offered up contradictory versions of event that the press nonetheless continued to report as fact, especially since the officers involved had not filed any report on Blake’s arrest. In some versions of the police explanation of events the officers were investigating a theft of shoes and credit card fraud, while in others Blake had been pointed out by an unidentified GoButler courier as someone who illegally purchased a phone. (The concierge service GoButler later refuted any link to Blake’s misidentification.) Police soon released an Instagram picture of a person who looked remarkably like Blake, arguing he was the suspect they were looking for, only subsequently admitting that the unnamed black man in the photo was also innocent of any crime. No photos of the two men actually charged for the crime have yet been released.

     Despite these inconsistencies in both the alleged crime or why an apparently nonviolent offense warranted such a violent arrest, the police—and far too many members of the media—have continued to frame Blake’s arrest as the unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate investigation. Blake resembled a suspect in a case. He was simply someone who “found himself on the wrong side of the law,” according to NBC Nightly News. This was all just a mistake.

     The word “mistake” implies that this incident was an aberration, a departure from normal police conduct in New York City. But we know that this is simply not true. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), at the peak of stop-and-frisk street interrogations in 2011, 87% of people stopped by police were black or Latino. And yet 88% of people detained were totally innocent of any crime and released without charges. Moreover, between 2006 and 2014, claims of police misconduct have risen 150%. Even the conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal pointed out that the New York Police Department had stopped more black men then actually lived in New York City. That’s a lot of “mistakes.”

     More at the link. What do you call a whole pattern of frequent such mistakes? Something like ‘incompetence’, no?

321. rq says

     15 September 2015 at 3:25 pm

     Added too many links to previous, but there’s good information within – so please look for a new 320 soon!

     Black Kids Get Less Pain Medication Than White Kids in ER. And that is despicable and sad. No one should have to endure extra suffering just because of some preconception about how ‘strong’ and ‘resilient’ they’re supposed to be. And this is just focussing on one type of emergency pain.

     Black children with acute appendicitis — a clearly painful emergency — are less likely than white children to get painkillers in the emergency room, researchers reported Monday.

     And nearly as troubling, only about half of any of the kids got painkillers, even though they’re strongly recommended in cases of appendicitis, the researchers found.

     “Black patients with moderate pain were less likely to receive any analgesia, and black patients with severe pain were less likely to be treated with opioids,” Dr. Monika Goyal of the Children’s National Health System in Washington and colleagues wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Pediatrics.

     What’s to blame? Probably a combination of an unwarranted fear of opioids such as morphine and fentanyl, combined with unconscious bias against African-American kids, experts said.
     […]

     “Our findings suggest that there are racial disparities in opioid administration to children with appendicitis,” Goyal’s team wrote.

     “Our findings suggest that although clinicians may recognize pain equally across racial groups, they may be reacting to the pain differently by treating black patients with nonopioid analgesia, such as ibuprofen and acetaminophen, while treating white patients with opioid analgesia for similar pain.”

     The researchers note that painkillers, including opioids, are strongly recommended for appendicitis. There were fears in the past that giving painkillers would mask symptoms important for diagnosing the causes of abdominal pain, but those fears have long been shown to be unfounded.

     There’s also a fear of giving opioids to children. It’s possible to overdose and to have dependence develop. But the whole point of opioids is to control severe pain like that seen in appendicitis, and there are protocols for making sure children don’t overdose and don’t become dependent.
     […]

     “If there is no physiological explanation for differing treatment of the same phenomena, we are left with the notion that subtle biases, implicit and explicit, conscious and unconscious, influence the clinician’s judgment,” they wrote in a commentary.

     “It is clear that despite broad recognition that controlling pain is a cornerstone of compassionate care, significant disparities remain in our approach to pain management among different populations,” they added.

     “Strategies and available knowledge exist to remedy this unfortunate situation; we can and should do better.”

     The findings are not surprising, they added. Other studies have shown biases in giving pain medication and in medical treatment in general.

     “Unfortunately, however, these findings fit a longstanding pattern. There is a substantial body of evidence documenting health care disparities during the past three decades, including disparities in pain management,” they wrote.

     It’s possible that black kids are less likely to say they’re in pain

     There’s one easy solution, the researchers suggested: Ask patients if they want pain medication.

     I do find those last two statements somewhat self-contradictory.

     Judge Denies Bail To Michael Slager, Former Officer Charged With Murder Of Walter Scott. Yes.

     A South Carolina judge denied bail to a white former police officer charged with murder in the shooting death of an unarmed black man who ran from a traffic stop, court documents filed on Monday show.

     Michael Slager, 33, has been jailed since his April arrest in the death of Walter Scott, 50. The shooting, caught on video by a bystander, renewed national debate over police treatment of minorities and led to Slager’s firing from the North Charleston police force.

     Judge Clifton Newman wrote in an order filed to the court record Monday that releasing Slager on bail “would constitute an unreasonable danger to the community.”

     In a hearing on Thursday, defense attorney Andy Savage argued that Slager was not a flight risk and that he had been violently attacked by Walter Scott, 50, in a confrontation after Scott had fled a routine traffic stop and Slager had chased him.

     Prosecutor Scarlett Wilson argued that Scott was not attacking the policeman but trying to get away from him. Slager had tampered with evidence by retrieving his stun gun, which had fallen, to place it closer to Scott’s body, Wilson said.

     “The state presented persuasive evidence that included memoranda of interviews with defendant, a memorandum of interview with the alleged eyewitness and still images of the shooting that resulted in the death of Walter Scott,” the judge wrote.

     Smart judge. I withhold negative judgement for now.

     Questions on the Blake Assault, for anyone who wants to read more opinion on that.

     The mayor and Mr. Bratton need to acknowledge all this, and they should explain a few other things.

     Like: Why shouldn’t Officer Frascatore be arrested for assault? Why was he still loose on the street despite his long history of excessive-force complaints, first reported by WNYC, including punching a driver in the mouth (after stopping him for a broken taillight) and another man in the stomach (while calling him a racial slur)? That those victims were both black and Mr. Blake, is biracial deserves attention. Why is no action taken when multiple complaints are filed with the Civilian Complaint Review Board?

     After the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island at the hands of the police in July 2014, Mr. Bratton promised to retrain all of his officers in professional, nonlethal arrest procedures. How could Officer Frascatore not have gotten the message?

     Worth reading.

     How Segregation Destroys Black Wealth, another foray into the world of real estate, segregation, and black wealth. I’m sad the situation is what it is, but I’m glad there’s more attention paid to the issue lately.

     Americans commonly — and mistakenly — believe that well-to-do black people no longer face the kind of discrimination that prevents them from living anywhere they can afford. But a federal housing discrimination complaint filed last week by the National Fair Housing Alliance shows that this toxic problem is very much with us, nearly 50 years after Congress outlawed housing discrimination in the Fair Housing Act.

     The complaint, and the investigations that led to it, shows how real estate agents promote segregation — and deny African-Americans the opportunity to buy into high-value areas that would provide better educations for children and a greater return on their investments.

     Over the course of nearly a year, the alliance reports, black and white testers posing as home buyers had drastically different experiences when they contacted a real estate company near Jackson, Miss. Agents often declined to show properties to black customers who were better qualified than whites, with higher incomes, better credit scores and more savings for down payments. Meanwhile, white testers who had expressed interest in properties in the majority-black city of Jackson were steered into majority-white communities elsewhere.

     These problems are not limited to the South. Indeed, another alliance investigation covering a dozen metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, Austin, Birmingham, Chicago, Dayton, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, San Antonio and the District of Columbia, suggests that housing market discrimination is universal.

     Despite being better qualified financially, black and Latino testers were shown fewer homes than their white peers, were often denied information about special incentives that would have made the purchase easier, and were required to produce loan pre-approval letters and other documents when whites were not.

     Moreover, real estate agents enforced residential and school segregation by steering home buyers into neighborhoods based on race. Whites were encouraged to live where the schools were mainly white; African-Americans where schools were disproportionately black; and Latinos where schools were disproportionately Latino.

     More at the link.

     State hasn’t collected racial-profiling data required by 1999 law, and I bet they’re not the only ones.

     They’re only 27 percent of Alabama’s population, but African Americans made up 42 percent of those cited by the state’s city and county law enforcement agencies in 2014 for failure to comply with the state’s seat belt law, state records show.

     The same disparity didn’t show up in seat belt citations by Alabama state troopers. Only 25 percent of troopers’ 2014 seat belt citations were issued to African Americans.

     Those percentages are based on numbers the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency provided The Anniston Star last week, outlining the racial breakdown of the 67,389 people cited for seat belt violations last year. The numbers don’t outline which cities are more or less likely to pull drivers over, or why.

     There was supposed to be more detailed data, and much more. When Alabama passed its current seat belt law, allowing police to pull drivers over for not wearing seat belts, lawmakers included a provision that required every police agency to compile monthly reports on the racial breakdown of their seat belt citations — a measure that was meant to track and stop racial profiling.

     That law passed in 1999. Sixteen years later, there’s no evidence anyone in state government tried to enforce that monthly reporting requirement.

     “They have never asked for it,” Oxford police Chief Bill Partridge said in a text message.

     You could still have produced it, Chief Partridge.
     Keep reading at the link.

     And with quite some ado, here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest: The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration. A long piece, and I will cite minimally, because I haven’t managed to finish it yet, myself. But it’s a must-read, which kind of goes along with the words ‘Ta-Nehisi’ and ‘Coates’.

     Influenced by the civil-rights movement, Moynihan focused on the black family. He believed that an undue optimism about the pending passage of civil-rights legislation was obscuring a pressing problem: a deficit of employed black men of strong character. He believed that this deficit went a long way toward explaining the African American community’s relative poverty. Moynihan began searching for a way to press the point within the Johnson administration. “I felt I had to write a paper about the Negro family,” Moynihan later recalled, “to explain to the fellows how there was a problem more difficult than they knew.” In March of 1965, Moynihan printed up 100 copies of a report he and a small staff had labored over for only a few months.

     The report was called “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” Unsigned, it was meant to be an internal government document, with only one copy distributed at first and the other 99 kept locked in a vault. Running against the tide of optimism around civil rights, “The Negro Family” argued that the federal government was underestimating the damage done to black families by “three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment” as well as a “racist virus in the American blood stream,” which would continue to plague blacks in the future:

     That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary—a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have … But it may not be supposed that the Negro American community has not paid a fearful price for the incredible mistreatment to which it has been subjected over the past three centuries.

     That price was clear to Moynihan. “The Negro family, battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice, and uprooting, is in the deepest trouble,” he wrote. “While many young Negroes are moving ahead to unprecedented levels of achievement, many more are falling further and further behind.” Out-of-wedlock births were on the rise, and with them, welfare dependency, while the unemployment rate among black men remained high. Moynihan believed that at the core of all these problems lay a black family structure mutated by white oppression:

     In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.

     Moynihan believed this matriarchal structure robbed black men of their birthright—“The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut,” he wrote—and deformed the black family and, consequently, the black community. In what would become the most famous passage in the report, Moynihan equated the black community with a diseased patient:

     In a word, most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in the tangle of pathology that affects their world, and probably a majority are so entrapped. Many of those who escape do so for one generation only: as things now are, their children may have to run the gauntlet all over again. That is not the least vicious aspect of the world that white America has made for the Negro.

     Despite its alarming predictions, “The Negro Family” was a curious government report in that it advocated no specific policies to address the crisis it described. This was intentional. Moynihan had lots of ideas about what government could do—provide a guaranteed minimum income, establish a government jobs program, bring more black men into the military, enable better access to birth control, integrate the suburbs—but none of these ideas made it into the report. “A series of recommendations was at first included, then left out,” Moynihan later recalled. “It would have got in the way of the attention-arousing argument that a crisis was coming and that family stability was the best measure of success or failure in dealing with it.”

     The report is both sexist and racist, and that’s just the beginning of the article!

322. rq says

     16 September 2015 at 12:59 am

     Added too many links to previous, but there’s good information within – so please look for a new 320 soon!
     Also this comment was written last night but for some reason didn’t post.

     Black Kids Get Less Pain Medication Than White Kids in ER. And that is despicable and sad. No one should have to endure extra suffering just because of some preconception about how ‘strong’ and ‘resilient’ they’re supposed to be. And this is just focussing on one type of emergency pain.

     Black children with acute appendicitis — a clearly painful emergency — are less likely than white children to get painkillers in the emergency room, researchers reported Monday.

     And nearly as troubling, only about half of any of the kids got painkillers, even though they’re strongly recommended in cases of appendicitis, the researchers found.

     “Black patients with moderate pain were less likely to receive any analgesia, and black patients with severe pain were less likely to be treated with opioids,” Dr. Monika Goyal of the Children’s National Health System in Washington and colleagues wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Pediatrics.

     What’s to blame? Probably a combination of an unwarranted fear of opioids such as morphine and fentanyl, combined with unconscious bias against African-American kids, experts said.
     […]

     “Our findings suggest that there are racial disparities in opioid administration to children with appendicitis,” Goyal’s team wrote.

     “Our findings suggest that although clinicians may recognize pain equally across racial groups, they may be reacting to the pain differently by treating black patients with nonopioid analgesia, such as ibuprofen and acetaminophen, while treating white patients with opioid analgesia for similar pain.”

     The researchers note that painkillers, including opioids, are strongly recommended for appendicitis. There were fears in the past that giving painkillers would mask symptoms important for diagnosing the causes of abdominal pain, but those fears have long been shown to be unfounded.

     There’s also a fear of giving opioids to children. It’s possible to overdose and to have dependence develop. But the whole point of opioids is to control severe pain like that seen in appendicitis, and there are protocols for making sure children don’t overdose and don’t become dependent.
     […]

     “If there is no physiological explanation for differing treatment of the same phenomena, we are left with the notion that subtle biases, implicit and explicit, conscious and unconscious, influence the clinician’s judgment,” they wrote in a commentary.

     “It is clear that despite broad recognition that controlling pain is a cornerstone of compassionate care, significant disparities remain in our approach to pain management among different populations,” they added.

     “Strategies and available knowledge exist to remedy this unfortunate situation; we can and should do better.”

     The findings are not surprising, they added. Other studies have shown biases in giving pain medication and in medical treatment in general.

     “Unfortunately, however, these findings fit a longstanding pattern. There is a substantial body of evidence documenting health care disparities during the past three decades, including disparities in pain management,” they wrote.

     It’s possible that black kids are less likely to say they’re in pain

     There’s one easy solution, the researchers suggested: Ask patients if they want pain medication.

     I do find those last two statements somewhat self-contradictory.

     Judge Denies Bail To Michael Slager, Former Officer Charged With Murder Of Walter Scott. Yes.

     A South Carolina judge denied bail to a white former police officer charged with murder in the shooting death of an unarmed black man who ran from a traffic stop, court documents filed on Monday show.

     Michael Slager, 33, has been jailed since his April arrest in the death of Walter Scott, 50. The shooting, caught on video by a bystander, renewed national debate over police treatment of minorities and led to Slager’s firing from the North Charleston police force.

     Judge Clifton Newman wrote in an order filed to the court record Monday that releasing Slager on bail “would constitute an unreasonable danger to the community.”

     In a hearing on Thursday, defense attorney Andy Savage argued that Slager was not a flight risk and that he had been violently attacked by Walter Scott, 50, in a confrontation after Scott had fled a routine traffic stop and Slager had chased him.

     Prosecutor Scarlett Wilson argued that Scott was not attacking the policeman but trying to get away from him. Slager had tampered with evidence by retrieving his stun gun, which had fallen, to place it closer to Scott’s body, Wilson said.

     “The state presented persuasive evidence that included memoranda of interviews with defendant, a memorandum of interview with the alleged eyewitness and still images of the shooting that resulted in the death of Walter Scott,” the judge wrote.

     Smart judge. I withhold negative judgement for now.

     Questions on the Blake Assault, for anyone who wants to read more opinion on that.

     The mayor and Mr. Bratton need to acknowledge all this, and they should explain a few other things.

     Like: Why shouldn’t Officer Frascatore be arrested for assault? Why was he still loose on the street despite his long history of excessive-force complaints, first reported by WNYC, including punching a driver in the mouth (after stopping him for a broken taillight) and another man in the stomach (while calling him a racial slur)? That those victims were both black and Mr. Blake, is biracial deserves attention. Why is no action taken when multiple complaints are filed with the Civilian Complaint Review Board?

     After the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island at the hands of the police in July 2014, Mr. Bratton promised to retrain all of his officers in professional, nonlethal arrest procedures. How could Officer Frascatore not have gotten the message?

     Worth reading.

     How Segregation Destroys Black Wealth, another foray into the world of real estate, segregation, and black wealth. I’m sad the situation is what it is, but I’m glad there’s more attention paid to the issue lately.

     Americans commonly — and mistakenly — believe that well-to-do black people no longer face the kind of discrimination that prevents them from living anywhere they can afford. But a federal housing discrimination complaint filed last week by the National Fair Housing Alliance shows that this toxic problem is very much with us, nearly 50 years after Congress outlawed housing discrimination in the Fair Housing Act.

     The complaint, and the investigations that led to it, shows how real estate agents promote segregation — and deny African-Americans the opportunity to buy into high-value areas that would provide better educations for children and a greater return on their investments.

     Over the course of nearly a year, the alliance reports, black and white testers posing as home buyers had drastically different experiences when they contacted a real estate company near Jackson, Miss. Agents often declined to show properties to black customers who were better qualified than whites, with higher incomes, better credit scores and more savings for down payments. Meanwhile, white testers who had expressed interest in properties in the majority-black city of Jackson were steered into majority-white communities elsewhere.

     These problems are not limited to the South. Indeed, another alliance investigation covering a dozen metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, Austin, Birmingham, Chicago, Dayton, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, San Antonio and the District of Columbia, suggests that housing market discrimination is universal.

     Despite being better qualified financially, black and Latino testers were shown fewer homes than their white peers, were often denied information about special incentives that would have made the purchase easier, and were required to produce loan pre-approval letters and other documents when whites were not.

     Moreover, real estate agents enforced residential and school segregation by steering home buyers into neighborhoods based on race. Whites were encouraged to live where the schools were mainly white; African-Americans where schools were disproportionately black; and Latinos where schools were disproportionately Latino.

     More at the link.

     State hasn’t collected racial-profiling data required by 1999 law, and I bet they’re not the only ones.

     They’re only 27 percent of Alabama’s population, but African Americans made up 42 percent of those cited by the state’s city and county law enforcement agencies in 2014 for failure to comply with the state’s seat belt law, state records show.

     The same disparity didn’t show up in seat belt citations by Alabama state troopers. Only 25 percent of troopers’ 2014 seat belt citations were issued to African Americans.

     Those percentages are based on numbers the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency provided The Anniston Star last week, outlining the racial breakdown of the 67,389 people cited for seat belt violations last year. The numbers don’t outline which cities are more or less likely to pull drivers over, or why.

     There was supposed to be more detailed data, and much more. When Alabama passed its current seat belt law, allowing police to pull drivers over for not wearing seat belts, lawmakers included a provision that required every police agency to compile monthly reports on the racial breakdown of their seat belt citations — a measure that was meant to track and stop racial profiling.

     That law passed in 1999. Sixteen years later, there’s no evidence anyone in state government tried to enforce that monthly reporting requirement.

     “They have never asked for it,” Oxford police Chief Bill Partridge said in a text message.

     You could still have produced it, Chief Partridge.
     Keep reading at the link.

     And with quite some ado, here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest: The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration. A long piece, and I will cite minimally, because I haven’t managed to finish it yet, myself. But it’s a must-read, which kind of goes along with the words ‘Ta-Nehisi’ and ‘Coates’. Excerpt:

     Influenced by the civil-rights movement, Moynihan focused on the black family. He believed that an undue optimism about the pending passage of civil-rights legislation was obscuring a pressing problem: a deficit of employed black men of strong character. He believed that this deficit went a long way toward explaining the African American community’s relative poverty. Moynihan began searching for a way to press the point within the Johnson administration. “I felt I had to write a paper about the N*gro family,” Moynihan later recalled, “to explain to the fellows how there was a problem more difficult than they knew.” In March of 1965, Moynihan printed up 100 copies of a report he and a small staff had labored over for only a few months.

     The report was called “The N*gro Family: The Case for National Action.” Unsigned, it was meant to be an internal government document, with only one copy distributed at first and the other 99 kept locked in a vault. Running against the tide of optimism around civil rights, “The N*gro Family” argued that the federal government was underestimating the damage done to black families by “three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment” as well as a “racist virus in the American blood stream,” which would continue to plague blacks in the future:

     That the N*gro American has survived at all is extraordinary—a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have … But it may not be supposed that the N*gro American community has not paid a fearful price for the incredible mistreatment to which it has been subjected over the past three centuries.

     That price was clear to Moynihan. “The N*gro family, battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice, and uprooting, is in the deepest trouble,” he wrote. “While many young N*groes are moving ahead to unprecedented levels of achievement, many more are falling further and further behind.” Out-of-wedlock births were on the rise, and with them, welfare dependency, while the unemployment rate among black men remained high. Moynihan believed that at the core of all these problems lay a black family structure mutated by white oppression:

     In essence, the N*gro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously r*tards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the N*gro male and, in consequence, on a great many N*gro women as well.

     Moynihan believed this matriarchal structure robbed black men of their birthright—“The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut,” he wrote—and deformed the black family and, consequently, the black community. In what would become the most famous passage in the report, Moynihan equated the black community with a diseased patient:

     In a word, most N*gro youth are in danger of being caught up in the tangle of pathology that affects their world, and probably a majority are so entrapped. Many of those who escape do so for one generation only: as things now are, their children may have to run the gauntlet all over again. That is not the least vicious aspect of the world that white America has made for the N*gro.

     Despite its alarming predictions, “The N*gro Family” was a curious government report in that it advocated no specific policies to address the crisis it described. This was intentional. Moynihan had lots of ideas about what government could do—provide a guaranteed minimum income, establish a government jobs program, bring more black men into the military, enable better access to birth control, integrate the suburbs—but none of these ideas made it into the report. “A series of recommendations was at first included, then left out,” Moynihan later recalled. “It would have got in the way of the attention-arousing argument that a crisis was coming and that family stability was the best measure of success or failure in dealing with it.”

     The report is both sexist and racist, and that’s just the beginning of the article!
     I asterisked everything I thought might be offensive, just to see why it won’t post.

323. rq says

     16 September 2015 at 1:23 am

     HAHA And I just noticed that it did post. Oh well! Read it twice, make sure you catch the links twice. :P

     What White Children Need to Know About Race, one for us white folks with kids.

     Growing up in the suburban Midwest, I (Ali Michael) never talked about race with my family. We were white, all of our neighbors were white, and it never occurred to us that there was anything to say about that. As a result, in later years, I developed a deep sense of shame whenever I talked about race — particularly in college, where I was expected to make mature personal and academic contributions to race dialogues.

     At a certain point, I realized that this shame came from the silence about race in my childhood. The silence had two functions. It was at the root of my lack of competency to even participate in conversations on race. But it had also inadvertently sent me the message that race was on a very short list of topics that polite people do not discuss. My parents did not intend for me to receive this message, but because we never talked about race, I learned to feel embarrassed whenever it came up. And so even when I wanted to participate in the conversation, I had to contend with deep feelings of shame and inadequacy first.

     Research on white racial socialization is beginning to emerge within the field of racial socialization that makes it clear that many white people share my experience. In particular, the research suggests that for fear of perpetuating racial misunderstandings, being seen as a racist, making children feel badly, or simply not knowing what to say, many white parents tend to believe that there is never a right time to initiate a conversation about race.1 They talk to their children about race if it becomes relevant in their lives (mostly in negative contexts). Otherwise, they tell their children that people are all the same and that they should not see race.

     While white parents’ intention is to convey to their children the belief that race shouldn’t matter, the message their children receive is that race, in fact, doesn’t matter. The intent and aim are noble, but in order for race not to matter in the long run, we have to acknowledge that, currently, it does matter a great deal. If white parents want their children to contribute to what researchers Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer describe as a “racially just America”2 in which race does not unjustly influence one’s life opportunities, their children will need to learn awareness and skills that they cannot acquire through silence and omission.
     […]

     While the research on white racial socialization is new, a 2014 study by Bartoli et al.4 describes the results of 13 in-depth family interviews in which white parents and their children (ages 12 to 18) were interviewed both separately and together as a family in the first qualitative study of its kind. They found that most of the white families opted to socialize their children by telling them not to be racist, not to talk about race, not to use the word “black,” and not to notice racial differences. They wanted their children to believe that all people are the same and that racism is bad. They defined racism as overt, violent, and, for the most part, anachronistic. They felt that, if they emphasize these messages, they will impart to their children messages of racial equality. However, the individual interviews with their children showed that when children only know what not to do or not to talk about, they don’t have the lenses to understand racial dynamics in their lives, nor the skills to address them.

     Regarding race, the messages that white teens in the Bartoli et al. study received were contradictory and incomplete. While they believed that everyone is the same, that race is superfluous, and that hard work determines where one gets in life, they also professed beliefs about differences among racial groups, including that black people are lazy or poor, that poor black neighborhoods are dangerous, and that black people are physically stronger than whites. Because these white teens lacked a systemic analysis of racism, they had no way of understanding the impact of the structural racism they observed around them, such as the de facto segregation through academic tracking in their schools or in the geography of their cities. Thus, in spite of the fact that they had been taught that race does not matter and that they should be color-blind, when faced with a question that challenged them to explain structural racism, the only answers available to them were ones that relied on racial stereotypes. Overall, the teens did not seem to be able to differentiate between what is racist and what is, simply, racial. They tended to classify any mention of race as racist.
     […]

     Because white students receive color-blind messages, they come to believe that merely talking about race is racist and, therefore, something that should be avoided. Students need to learn that there’s a vast difference between talking about race and being racist. Racial talk leads to greater racial understanding and helps undermine the power of racist laws, structures, and traditions. Racist talk, on the other hand, helps to perpetuate the status quo and to further entrench racial myths and stereotypes. Avoiding race talk makes race itself unspeakable, which, in turn, gives it a negative connotation. Most white adults and teens participate in conversations about race only when there is a problem. They need support in changing their worldview to see the ways in which race is always present, regardless of whether there are problems associated with it. Further, race and racial differences aren’t all bad. Racial tension is a reality, but so are cross-racial friendships and communities.

     Race is an essential part of one’s identity. Being white may have little meaning to some whites, but that does not mean it has no meaning. All white people are white in the context of a society that continues to disadvantage people of color based on race. Being white, in essence, means not having to deal with those disadvantages and therefore not having to notice them. Schools can help foster awareness about the meaning of whiteness by helping white students develop a positive racial identity, which requires an understanding of systemic racism. While students may need to be reassured that they did not ask to be white, or for any of the advantages that might come with it, they should also know that the reality in which they are embedded ascribes unearned privileges to their whiteness. It is through seeing themselves in a larger racialized context that white people can begin to understand how they can work to change racism — and change what it means to be white.

     Create a positive white identity that allows white students to move toward it. In her book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Beverly Daniel Tatum suggests that, in the traditional context of race, there are only three ways to be white: ignorant, color-blind, and racist. With options like these, she asks, who would choose to identify with their whiteness? She suggests that we have to create a fourth way to be white: the antiracist white identity. Schools need to create spaces in which students can identify as white and simultaneously work against racism. Whites have choices regarding how to use the privilege that comes from being white. All of the above considerations as well as content knowledge below can foster an antiracist white identity.

     Highly recommended reading, also a great deal about the school environment. Includes suggestions on how to have these conversations and how to discuss these topics in a way that does not delete race from the equation, but rather talks about it and explains the concept.

     Tampa police union slams city council over review board. Yep, they’re crying some blue, blue tears.

     In another twist on Tampa’s creation of a new police review board, police union leaders are calling on their members to boycott Officer of the Month ceremonies in City Council chambers.

     Union leaders also say some officers who previously won the award now want to return it in protest against City Council members who are challenging Mayor Bob Buckhorn over who gets to appoint the majority of civilians to the board.

     In a letter to the council, Police Benevolent Association President Vincent Gericitano said he was disgusted with council members who “sat back and enjoyed the accolades” the city received for lowering crime but are now pushing for a review board that he described as “an insult” to the police department and those who conduct investigations of possible officer wrongdoing.

     The union has offered to return awards on behalf of officers at Thursday’s council meeting or for officers to return them in person.

     “I am sick and tired of politicians saying, ‘We support the police,’ and when support is needed, they are silent,” Gericitano wrote.

     PBA leaders have said publicly that they do not see a need for a civilian oversight board but stopped short of openly criticizing Buckhorn when he created a board through an executive order last month.

     I don’t know how a civilian oversight board is unsupportive of police, since it can also provide insight into things police actually need, like mental health resources, general emotional support, etc.

     Fairfax County Sheriff Breaks Silence About Natasha McKenna Video

     Leaders in Fairfax County are struggling to cope with the death of inmate Natasha McKenna at the jail earlier this year. After the prosecutor declined to bring charges in the case last week, Sheriff Stacey Kincaid finally released video of the incident that she has been withholding from public view. Virginia reporter Michael Pope sat down with the sheriff to ask her what her reaction was when she watched the video that is now part of the public record.

     Let’s start with the video. Of course that’s what’s on everyone’s mind. I guess the first question I have for you is when you first saw the video, what was your reaction. What was going through your mind?

     “It’s a tragedy, and my reaction is that it was very sad that someone who was suffering from mental illness was in a jail where treatment is not what we do. It also fell in line with what I’ve been saying for quite some time, and that is that we need to do much better.”

     Now that you’ve had a chance to see the video, of course, and the public has had a chance to see the video. You’ve had a chance to think about this and reflect on it, what should have happened in this situation?

     “A better outcome most definitely would have been that Ms. McKenna was able to get into treatment and get the help that she so desperately needed. That would have been the most desirable situation, instead of bringing her to a jail where she was, you know, unfortunately … as far as treatment was concerned, our mission was to get her back to Alexandria where she could get the treatment that she needed, not wait for Alexandria to come pick her up.”

     When you watch the video, you don’t see any mental health professionals in it, right? Why is that?

     “Well, it’s changing now and I can tell you that that was not the way that business was done with the cell extraction.”

     Was that a mistake?

     “There’s a lot of lessons that were learned, I mean, first and foremost you don’t bring someone to jail for mental health treatment. You bring them to a mental health facility. You have to have more than a couple of people seated at the table in order for us all to come together as a community, which includes the judges. It includes public defenders. It includes public defenders. It includes the commonwealth’s attorney. It includes mental-health advocates. It includes law enforcement because we all have to come together so everybody is going to decide that this is something very important. It’s about human capital and it’s about taking care of people who are desperately in need.”

     If this same thing were to happen today, are there places you could take her of steps that could be taken to prevent the same outcome?

     “When a police officer does bring an individual to jail that’s placed under arrest, we do not have the option of diverting them. In this case, if a police officer comes into contact with the a non-violent offender there is the option of bringing them to the Merrifield Assessment Center as opposed to bringing them directly to jail.”

     Any other thoughts overall about this death or what it means for Fairfax County or the future of your office?”

     “You know I think about this all the time. This is a tragedy. We need better practices in place. We need people to pay attention. We need better resources. And we need a place to divert. We need a diversion program or a crisis care center.”

     I am unshocked and disappointed to see that there is no mention of the officers’ actions or how they are, honestly, to blame for the death of McKenna – it’s just a tragedy that happened on its own, is what it sounds like, rather than the horrible chain of bad, violent, power-mad decisions made by several correctional officers faced with a woman in distress.

     More than two dozen Ohioans died from stun guns over 5-year-period, not a pretty number.

     A review of state law enforcement records reveals more than two dozen deaths linked to stun guns over a 5-year period.

     Meanwhile, Springfield Township police are continuing their investigation into the death of a local man who died six days after police used a Taser while attempting an arrest.

     A Summit County Medical Examiner report indicated a relative told police the victim had “used meth and smoked K-2–a synthetic form of marijuana.”

     Records compiled by the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services reveal that 26 deaths in Ohio have been linked to the use of stun guns between 2008 and 2013.

     Trial of 2 officers in Boyd shooting set for Aug. 2016. Also moving very slowly on this one.

     The three-week trial of Albuquerque police officer Dominique Perez and retired detective Keith Sandy for the on-duty shooting of homeless, mentally ill camper James Boyd will be in mid-August 2016 before 2nd Judicial District Judge Alisa Hadfield, based on a scheduling conference before the judge Monday.

     The officers were bound over for trial on charges of second-degree murder based on a probable cause finding by 2nd District Judge Pro Tem Neil Candelaria in a proceeding that lasted seven days last month. Candelaria heard testimony from officers, civilians and experts during the preliminary hearing, but attorneys told Hadfield, the trial judge, at a scheduling conference that more complex legal issues are at play in a jury trial.

     For one thing, the defense is almost certain to ask through a change of venue motion for the trial to take place outside of the Albuquerque media market, but that will require polling beforehand, as Sandy’s attorney Sam Bregman pointed out.

     Both David Roman, part of the legal team for Perez, and Bregman asked for the case to be considered a “Track 3” – most complex – under a new local rule that sets tight deadlines based on the complexity of the case. Bregman said he could envision 2,000 prospective jurors being summoned to get an impartial jury because of the extensive pretrial publicity that he called a “media circus.”

     Special prosecutors Randi McGinn and Kevin Holmes took the position that the case wasn’t particularly complex – and could be tried sooner. But McGinn noted there are many witnesses.

     Defense lawyers said they may file motions seeking to sever their clients, which would mean two trials, but that hasn’t been decided.

     Hadfield said jury selection may need to take place ahead of the trial setting in order to have enough time for testimony.

     Similarly to the Freddie Gray case, we can see several roadblocks trying to be set up, and the idea that the case is actually far more complex than it appears. Well, they shot a man who was no real threat to them. How much more complex does it need to be?

     ‘My Name Is Natasha McKenna’: Protesters Demand Reforms in Va.

     Days after Fairfax County officials released video showing Natasha McKenna’s last moments in custody before her death, hundreds of protesters demanded reforms Monday night at a public meeting. News4’s Jackie Bensen reports.

     Video at the link.

324. rq says

     16 September 2015 at 1:39 am

     Deadlocked jury favored acquittal for officer who slammed down Indian grandfather – remember that case? Poor guy lived in the neighbourhood but spoke bad English, and ended up in the hospital for it.

     The jury that couldn’t reach a verdict in the criminal trial of police officer Eric Parker was split 10-2 along gender lines, according to one of the holdout jurors.

     Ten men wanted to acquit the officer who slammed down a 57-year-old Indian citizen during a sidewalk stop, leaving the man partly paralyzed.

     The two women on the jury thought Parker was guilty of the federal civil rights charge, deprivation of rights under the color of law. The charge carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.

     When contacted by al.com, one of those two women explained the two-day deliberation that ended in frustration for both sides. “I was the one saying he was guilty,” said the juror, who asked to withhold her name.

     The juror, who is retired from the U.S. Army, said from Thursday morning through late Friday no jurors changed their minds and extra time seemed unlikely to alter the deadlock. “It was 10 to 2. I wasn’t changing my story.”

     The jury also appeared to split along racial lines. Both female jurors were black. None of the 10 male jurors were black.

     This is very interesting, in a demographic sense – (a) why were there no black men selected (not trying to impart some sort of conspiracy, just… a point)? and (b) I wonder how they would have seen things?

     Former inmates: Incarceration makes economic stability nearly impossible for our families

     Nearly two in three families (65 percent) with an incarcerated member are unable to meet their family’s basic needs, according to a new report released today — which found that even after a family member is released from prison, the lingering impact incarceration is often economically crippling, not only for former inmates but also for their families.

     The report, conducted by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together and Research Action Design, is based on interviews with 1,500 formerly incarcerated people and their families and employers about the long-term impacts of incarceration. It focuses on the ability of former inmates and their families to find and retain employment, housing and economic stability.

     Particularly difficult for former inmates, the study found, was finding adequate employment after being released.

     More than three in four of the 700 former inmates surveyed rated their experience of finding work after their incarceration as either “very difficult” or “nearly impossible.” The study found that 67 percent of respondents were still unemployed or underemployed five years after their release, and just 40 percent of them said they were working full time after five years.

     Other findings include:

     * Nearly 2 in 3 families (65 percent) with an incarcerated member were unable to meet their family’s basic needs.

     * one in five families of the incarcerated were unable to afford housing because of the lost income of the incarcerated

     * 79 percent reported either being ineligible for or denied housing because of their past conviction

     There are currently more than 2.4 million people currently housed in the nation’s jails and prisons, and the nation as a whole currently spends upwards of $80 billion a year on incarceration today. As Wonkblog’s Max Ehrenfreund wrote in July:

     The population in American prisons began to increase in the 1970s when Congress and state legislatures started passing harsher sentencing laws in response to rising rates of violent crimes. As criminals were convicted, they stayed in prison longer, and the total number of prisoners began to increase.

     “The reality is, we got a lot more punitive about everything,” said Jesse Jannetta, a scholar at the Urban Institute.

     Long after crime rates began to fall again, those who had been convicted at the peak of the crime wave weren’t getting out. Only since 2007 has the share of Americans in prisons stabilized and begun to fall.

     And the survey released today declares that the families of those incarcerated are saddled with copious fees, fines, and debt related to their loved one being locked up — only to later be plagued with diminished economic opportunities once a jail time or a prison term is over.

     “This study confirms what society has ignored for too long — that already vulnerable families and the women who sustain them are being plummeted into greater poverty, stress, and strain when their loved ones are incarcerated,” said Alicia Walters, Movement Building Director at Forward Together, a leading organization in the project, in the report’s release. “Decades of bad policy have torn families apart, typically leaving mothers to make up the difference and bear the brunt of these costs.”

     More at the link.

     Batman confronts police brutality against black teen in latest comic book. Recently it was Spiderman, now Batman – not bad.

     People die every day in Gotham City, the fictional hive of corruption where Batman patrols the rooftops. But not until Wednesday did the Dark Knight find himself investigating a black teenager in a hoodie shot dead by a frightened white police officer, let alone wondering about his own indirect role in the boy’s death.

     The latest issue of DC Comics’ flagship Batman series throws itself headfirst into the agonising conversations roiling America more than a year after Ferguson officer Darren Wilson killed 18-year old Michael Brown . The globally iconic superhero confronts racialised police brutality and its intersection with urban poverty and gentrification – problems Batman comes to realise he exacerbates in his secret identity as billionaire industrialist Bruce Wayne.

     Comics critics say they are hard pressed to remember Batman ever addressing institutional racism and its socio-economic dimensions as bluntly as this in the character’s 75-year history. While police corruption has long been a feature of Gotham – even showing up on the eponymous Fox TV adaptation about to enter its second season – it it is rarely shown to disproportionately impact black people.

     Yet Batman #44 , a flashback story, begins with the blunt image of a dead black boy, his body left “for the crows,” as the narration reads, resonant of Michael Brown in Ferguson. He wears a hooded sweatshirt, as did Trayvon Martin before George Zimmerman killed the 17-year old. What begins as A Simple Case – the title of the issue – becomes a meditation on the meaning of a rich, white vigilante who attempts to solve intractable urban problems by beating up bad guys.

     “This issue is meant to be a thesis about what our Batman is,” lead writer Scott Snyder told the Guardian.

     “We’ve tried to be pretty relentlessly on-point about him being a symbol of inspiration in the face of tremendous fear, as opposed to a symbol of punishment, or a symbol of revenge, taking the city away from criminals. Here is where he begins to learn [the limits of] the methods that he thought would work: finding a criminal, making an example of the criminal, throwing the criminal in jail … Instead, what he has to learn is that the problems that he’s facing in today’s city are much more humbling, are much more complicated.”

     Hmm, I kind of really like that. There’s a few more very interesting points they make in the article, what I think is a subtle stab at gentrification, too. Or not so subtle, actually. Heh.

     Gwinnett sheriff issues scathing statement: ‘All lives matter’. You’re missing the point.

     In a scathing 818-word statement, Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway declared that “all lives matter” and said those making allegations of racism against law enforcement officers are “hate groups” and “domestic terrorists with an agenda.”

     “To say that I’m angry would be an understatement,” he wrote in the statement, sent Tuesday to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I’m angry that fringe groups who started the culture of police hatred have widened the racial divide in our country by alleging that officer involved shootings stem from racism.”
     […]

     Tuesday’s wide-ranging statement — which a prominent figure in the Black Lives Matter movement called “one of the most ignorant, uninformed and inflammatory statements” he’d ever read — references the “firestorm that began” in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death last year in Ferguson, Mo. It says Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Brown, “became the poster child for alleged police racism and suffered damaging, irreversible life-long consequences” despite acting “within policy.”

     It calls out the news media for “relentless coverage” of police shootings, saying the “common denominator in every controversial case of officers using deadly force has been police interaction with people who do not respect the law.”

     “It’s not about race,” Conway wrote.

     “Those inciting riots and committing murders are simply criminals and do not represent the majority of Americans. They are domestic terrorists with an agenda. Their message is that police lives don’t matter, which sure sounds like a hate group to me.”

     Oh shut up.
     You can read his actual statement at the link.

     New Study Says Black Kids Are Less Likely than White Kids to Receive Pain Medication in the ER, Vice looks at this information.

     Last week, Terry Gross of NPR interviewed Dr. Damon Tweedy, an Assistant Professor of psychiatry at Duke University whose recent memoir Black Man in a White Coat documents his time as a young black man going through medical school as well as his early days as a doctor. Tweedy recalled an instance in which he’d injured his knee while playing tennis and visited a white doctor for treatment. “The doctor walks in the room, and, first of all, he doesn’t make eye contact, doesn’t really talk to me, just looks at my leg and has me stand up and down a couple times, then just says, ‘Oh you’re OK, you’re fine.’ But being a doctor, I knew that there were a lot of pieces missing.”

     Once Tweedy revealed that he too was a doctor, his treatment immediately improved. “It was like I was two different people at the same time.”

     Something is not right with that picture, methinks.

325. rq says

     16 September 2015 at 2:31 am

     Let’s take a look at hte diversity in science:
     I want science to be more diverse. I’ve recently realized that it’s not diverse mostly because American culture squashes POC from childhood. That’s a tweet from Emily Lakdwalla. Is she correct?
     Yes:
     Ninth grader builds a clock, brings it to school, is arrested… because he is muslim. Can you guess what they feared? Vows never to bring an invention to school again. I could cry. (FYI I cannot read the article but I could read excerpts as screenshotted on twitter. It just won’t open for me.)

     Then there’s this: Florida Teen Girl Charged With Felony After Science Experiment Goes Bad. Chilly Climate in science? Fuck, it’s the fucking Antarctic for these kids right from the start. HOLY SHIT.

     On 7 a.m. on Monday, the 16 year-old mixed some common household chemicals in a small 8 oz water bottle on the grounds of Bartow High School in Bartow, Florida. The reaction caused a small explosion that caused the top to pop up and produced some smoke. No one was hurt and no damage was caused.

     According to WTSP, Wilmot told police that she was merely conducting a science experiment. Though her teachers knew nothing of the specific project, her principal seems to agree.

     “She made a bad choice. Honestly, I don’t think she meant to ever hurt anyone,” principal Ron Pritchard told the station. “She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did. Her mother is shocked, too.”

     After the explosion Wilmot was taken into custody by a school resources officer and charged with possession/discharge of a weapon on school grounds and discharging a destructive device. She will be tried as an adult.

     She was then taken to a juvenile assessment center. She was also expelled from school and will be forced to complete her diploma through an expulsion program.

     SHE WILL BE TRIED AS AN ADULT!!! Did you catch that part? DID YOU? And you expect other children of colour to read about these kids and suddenly want to do science? Recent sightings of black people in science notwithstanding.
     Here’s more from Emily Lakdawalla, Thoughts on Kiera Wilmot: Mentor curiosity to create future scientists:

     Please bear with me — this blog entry has nothing to do with planets but a lot to do with society.

     For the last two days, my Twitter feed has been roiling with outrage about the story of Kiera Wilmot (followed up here and here; search on the hashtag #KieraWilmot for a taste). Here are the alleged facts of the case: on Monday, April 22, a 16-year-old girl brought an 8-ounce water bottle containing a small amount of drain cleaner (which contains hydrochloric acid) and some aluminum foil with her to school, Bartow High School in Polk County, Florida. According to the incident report, the idea was an unnamed friend’s. While on the school property but unsupervised by a teacher, before school hours, she mixed the two materials because she was curious about what would happen. She expected some kind of chemical reaction and some smoke. Indeed, the hydrochloric acid and aluminum reacted, producing aluminum chloride and hydrogen gas, creating a small amount of smoke and a loud bang as the pressure of the hydrogen gas popped the bottle. It was a loud bang but a small event; no one was injured and no property was damaged.

     Alarmed by the bang, a school official, Dan Durham investigated, and Kiera “told him she was conducting a science fair experiment.” Durham “then checked with Wilmot’s science teacher who advised in no way was [sic] Wilmot’s actions part of any class work.” This is where the story diverges from sanity. Durham called the police. The police arrived, read Kiera her Miranda rights, arrested her, handcuffed her, and took her into custody. They contacted State Attorney Tammy Glotfelty, who ordered the police to charge Kiera Wilmot as an adult with two felonies: “possessing or discharging weapons or firearms at a school sponsored event or on school property F.S.S. 790.115 and making, possessing, throwing, projecting, placing, or discharging any destructive device F.S.S. 790.161.” Meanwhile, under the school’s zero-tolerance policy, Wilmot has been expelled. Wilmot is a student who Principal Durham described as “a good kid” who “has never been in trouble before…. She made a bad choice. Honestly, I don’t think she meant to ever hurt anyone. She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did. Her mother is shocked too.”

     My Twitter feed is going crazy because of course it mostly contains scientists, and there are few of us scientists who did not play with fire or chemicals growing up, because we were curious to see what would happen. And we knew it wasn’t entirely safe and that our parents wouldn’t want us to blow things up, so we often did it when parents weren’t around. Mom, don’t read the following sentence: I set lots of fires in our backyard in Dallas and tried burning all kinds of different stuff because I wanted to see what would happen. Seeing matter transform before our eyes is magical. It’s unfortunate but true that it’s easier to explore this kind of transformation in destructive ways (burning things, disassembling previously perfectly functioning machines) than in constructive ways — you have to take things apart before you can learn how to build things. Although this was the first I’d heard of them, so-called “Drano bombs” are evidently popular with kids, most of whom presumably want to just make something blow up, though they have sometimes been used for pranks, with potentially dangerous consequences. A blogger named Southern Fried Scientist has assembled stories of scientists blowing things up as kids, and others have pointed out that neuroscientist Cornelia Bargmann, who will be leading President Obama’s much balyhooed brain-mapping project, tells a harrowing childhood story of her and friends stealing sodium metal from her chemistry laboratory and blowing a toilet off the wall while in high school.

     I have complicated feelings about these stories, because I know that this kind of self-driven inquisitive drive to find out how things work is at the root of what makes good scientists. Yet, as a parent of two young girls, I have concerns about children playing with things that go boom without sufficient thought for the consequences. (Please, please, find some other way of satisfying your curiosity than throwing a lump of sodium metal into a toilet….)
     […]

     When I attended the American Astronomical Society meeting last year, I was uncomfortably aware of how the meeting was even whiter and more male than my usual planetary science meetings. Then I stepped in to a public outreach event where Bobak Ferdowsi was speaking to high school students, and that was the one place where I was in a diverse room, with boys and girls, whites and Blacks and Koreans and Latinos. What is preventing these kids from growing up to become the scientists speaking in all the rest of the rooms in that hall? Kiera Wilmot’s story is an example of the ill-guided, childish curiosity of an African-American girl being utterly crushed. Not only is her curiosity being crushed, but with the felony charges, every hope she has of being a productive member of society is being crushed, too. Perhaps she’s not alone. This does not make our society safer or more productive; quite the opposite.

     So what can we do, either generally for students from underserved communities, or specifically for Kiera Wilmot, to make a path for them to become scientists and engineers? For Kiera’s specific case, please follow Scientific American blogger and biologist DNLee, who is tracking the story and trying to answer that question. For the more general case, I don’t have great answers, but this whole episode is making me realize that one constructive thing to do is to work to connect underserved kids with mentoring and support for following their scientific curiosity.

     It seems like Science Fair is one way to do this, but Science Fair has this disturbing trend where only really rich kids who are mentored by professional scientists and doing projects that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars appear to be winning recognition. [EDIT: I just remembered that it’s a post on well-meaning discouragement of poor students from doing Science Fair projects that brought DNLee’s blog to my attention in the first place.] A stray remark on Twitter yesterday caught my eye: journalist Jeff Foust quoted NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden as saying that 90% of new engineers at Johnson Space Center participated in FIRST Robotics programs as kids. Get FIRST into underserved schools!! But maybe it doesn’t need to be anything so formal. Maybe all we need is after-school clubs supplied with a teacher or parent, safety glasses, and a fire extinguisher, and let kids safely do what they want to do — take things apart, and blow a few things up — so they can begin to learn how things work, and then, even before they grow up, kids can start to create new things that work better.

     So… yeah. I’m going to have to find DNLee’s blog and do some posts directly from there.

     Jail Says Man Tried to Hang Himself — Apparently, They Didn’t Expect He’d Survive

     According to public records obtained by the Post-Dispatch, Scott had prepared to go to the ER and changed into his street clothes for transport — but the jail supervisor abruptly changed his mind and refused to release him to paramedics at the last minute. Explaining to the supervisor that Scott had a painful mass in his abdomen and needed to see a doctor, the medics made a second request before leaving the scene. As their report states:

     “PD again advised by EMS that pt should be transferred to ED for further medical evaluation.” Once again, the request was denied.

     Just 14 minutes later, the jail had to call for another ambulance. Scott had lost consciousness, his muscles had stiffened, he was now aggressive and difficult to handle, and there were indications he had suffered brain damage, according to EMT reports.

     “Police officers disclosed five minutes after the second ambulance arrived that they had found Scott hanging by his neck from a shoelace tied to his cell door,” reports the Post-Dispatch.

     And that’s where things stop adding up.

     Scott survived. After being hospitalized for over three weeks — 11 days of which were spent in a coma — he had something interesting to say:

     Why would I hang myself? I was in on traffic tickets.”

     Answers aren’t easy to come by — a review of records found inconsistencies and discrepancies between the officers’ and paramedics’ reports and amongst the officers’ own reports that were never sorted out or accounted for following an internal investigation.

     A potential explanation might be found in Anthony Gray, the municipal prosecutor, who — as Pine Lawn’s public safety director at the time — oversaw the police and jail. He claimed in an email to the Post-Dispatch that he was out of town at the time of Scott’s attempted suicide; but he did turn over the investigation to a sergeant — Willie Epps.

     Sgt. Epps, according to the EMT report, is the supervisor who refused to release Scott for emergency treatment.

     Interestingly, as Epps’ wrote in his report, he wasn’t even there at the time. Scott was being evaluated by medics when Epps left for ten minutes, his report stated; and when he returned, the ambulance was gone.

     “What I wrote is what happened,” Epps stated, as reported by the Post-Dispatch.

     Just a weird case, eh?

     Fewer police killed during Obama’s administration than any two-term president in our lifetime, so you can stop blaming the non-existent War on Police on Obama.

     This isn’t an opinion piece. This is strictly factual.

     Wisconsin Gov. and White House-wannabe Scott Walker is lying when he says President Obama is responsible for a “disturbing trend of police officers being murdered on the job.”

     His fellow Republican and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz doubled down and told the same lie.

     Beyond the reality that President Obama and his administration work closely with police officers and police departments every single day for his own security, the fact is that fewer police officers have been killed during the six-plus years of his presidency than during the first six years of any modern presidency.

     The only trend that exists is a downward one. Police officers are safer during the Obama administration than they were during the Bush, Clinton, or Reagan administrations and every single fact and figure proves this.

     Some facts and figures at the link.

326. rq says

     16 September 2015 at 1:28 pm

     U of Mo. Student Posts Epic Facebook Response After Being Called ‘N–ger’. I’m wary of any headline labelling anything ‘epic’, because it’s usually a disappointment. In this case, while the response may not be ‘epic’, it is most certainly excellent.

     “I really just want to know why my simple existence is such a threat to society,” Head wrote in a Facebook post. “For those of you who wonder why I’m always talking about the importance of inclusion and respect, it’s because I’ve experienced moments like this multiple times at THIS university, making me not feel included here.”

     “Many of you are so privileged that you’ll never know what it feels like to be a hijab-wearing Muslim woman and be called a terrorist or a towel head. You don’t have to think about being transgender and worrying about finding a restroom where you can go and not be targeted for violence because you don’t fit into the gender binary,” he wrote.

     He continued: “You’ve never had to experience people throwing drinks on you and yelling [F–GOT] at you from the patio at Big 12 as you walk past on the street holding hands with your partner. You might never had to think twice about what you’re wearing walking around campus at night so that someone won’t think it’s okay to take ownership of your body because your outfit was ‘asking for it.’

     “These are some of my experiences and the experiences of the ones closest to me.”

     Head told the Columbia Missourian that he wrote the post to call attention to these problems and to issue a call to action to students not to stand passively by if they witness this behavior.

     “This is what I’m fighting against every day in boardrooms, conferences, meetings, classrooms, the Capitol, and in my daily life,” Head wrote in his Facebook post. “This is my reality. Is it weird that I think that I have the right to feel safe here, too? If you see violence like this and don’t say anything, you, yes YOU, are a part of the problem.”

     Head ended his post: “Your [N–ger/F–got] Missouri Students Association President, Payton Head.”

     The NYPD union just sent this email to reporters telling us we aren’t “qualified to judge the actions of police”. See attached. It starts with ‘To all arm-chair judges’ and gets no better from there. Knee-jerk reactions from ivory-tower pundits and all (and this is something I really hate about police unions, how they often play off the working-class police officer against some intellectual elite society that is Against!All!Police!, a rather false position to take).

     Woman Wants Help IDing The Jerk Behind This Random Racist Tirade

     Monica Johnson was on her way home from work in Nashville when she noticed a man in a truck next to her at a red light in front of an elementary school. He unleashed a tirade that managed to cram more hate speak and vitriol into six seconds than most people will hear in a year.

     At first confused as to what was happening, Johnson turned on her phone’s camera and rolled down her window, just in time to catch this:

     “Put it down n****! Put it down n****! If you let me catch you b****, I’ll punch the f*** out of you.”

     His intentions were immediately clear to Johnson, who is African American.

     “It wasn’t because of me. It’s because of what I represent and I represent black people but I hadn’t done anything personal to him,” she told a local Fox affiliate.

     Johnson then decided to share the clip on Facebook in hopes of people recognizing the truck’s driver.

     “I want his employers to see it, his friends to see it, his church, his family. I want them to see how he behaves towards people of color. I’m not the only black person here in Nashville. If he would say to me, he would say it to someone else.”

     Can he face charges of hate-speech? Because that would be kind of awesome.

     “To All Arm-Chair Judges”: Police Union Leader Slams Everyone Outraged Over James Blake Incident – oooh, it’s an article on that letter posted above! Easier reading.

     Ben Carson: Black Lives Matter “Alienating A Lot Of People Who Are Not Black”. Another case of Not Getting It.

     Ben Carson continued his criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement on Monday, arguing that it was “alienating a lot of people who are not black” in an exchange on NewsOne, an outlet targeted at black Americans.

     Carson has previously argued, in an op-ed for USA Today, that the movement is inspiring anger and is distracting the black community from what matters most.

     On Monday, the Republican presidential candidate expanded on that line of attack, asserting that other problems from “institutions like Planned Parenthood,” “rotten schools,” “crime up on each other,” and toleration of drug use, were more damaging to blacks than bad policing.

     “Yes, black lives matter,” Carson said, “but I believe all black lives matter. And I am very disappointed that the movement doesn’t recognize that the carnage in the community coming about from institutions like Planned Parenthood and crime up on each other is very significant. And we need to be looking at the things that are keeping the black community from accelerating, like rotten schools and tolerating the drugs that are in your neighborhood.”

     When asked by host Roland Martin why he thought it was wrong for the movement to focus on one issue, Carson, who is the only black candidate in the presidential field, said that the movement needs to be “all-encompassing” in its approach to problems facing black communities.

     When pressed again on this point, Carson replied that, “I want them to be successful. And they’re gonna be a lot more successful if they don’t alienate a big part of the community.”

     The non-black community, I suppose.

     Constitutionally, Slavery Is No National Institution. Seriously, youse guyse, slavery is not a national institution and… well, here:

     THE Civil War began over a simple question: Did the Constitution of the United States recognize slavery — property in humans — in national law? Southern slaveholders, inspired by Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, charged that it did and that the Constitution was proslavery; Northern Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln, and joined by abolitionists including Frederick Douglass, resolutely denied it. After Lincoln’s election to the presidency, 11 Southern states seceded to protect what the South Carolina secessionists called their constitutional “right of property in slaves.”

     The war settled this central question on the side of Lincoln and Douglass. Yet the myth that the United States was founded on racial slavery persists, notably among scholars and activists on the left who are rightly angry at America’s racist past. The myth, ironically, has led advocates for social justice to reject Lincoln’s and Douglass’s view of the Constitution in favor of Calhoun’s. And now the myth threatens to poison the current presidential campaign. The United States, Bernie Sanders has charged, “in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this, from way back, on racist principles, that’s a fact.”

     But as far as the nation’s founding is concerned, it is not a fact, as Lincoln and Douglass explained. It is one of the most destructive falsehoods in all of American history.

     Yes, slavery was a powerful institution in 1787. Yes, most white Americans presumed African inferiority. And in 1787, proslavery delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia fought to inscribe the principle of property in humans in the Constitution. But on this matter the slaveholders were crushed.

     James Madison (himself a slaveholder) opposed the ardent proslavery delegates and stated that it would be “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.” The Constitutional Convention not only deliberately excluded the word “slavery,” but it also quashed the proslavery effort to make slavery a national institution, and so prevented enshrining the racism that justified slavery.

     The property question was the key controversy. The delegates could never have created a federal union if they had given power to the national government to meddle in the property laws of the slave states. Slavery would have to be tolerated as a local institution. This hard fact, though, did not sanction slavery in national law, as a national institution, as so many critics presume. This sanction was precisely what the proslavery delegates sought with their failed machinations to ensure, as Madison wrote, that “some provision should be included in favor of property in slaves.” Most of the framers expected slavery to gradually wither away. They would do nothing to obstruct slavery’s demise.

     The South did win some concessions at the convention, but they were largely consolation prizes. The notorious three-fifths clause tied slaveholding to political power, but proslavery delegates, led by South Carolinians, repeatedly pressed for slaves to be counted as full persons, which Charles Pinckney professed was “nothing more than justice.” They finally conceded to the three-fifths compromise. Over time, the congressional bulwark of the slave power became the Senate, where the three-fifths rule did not apply.

     Ummm… here, this paragraph, too:

     In the convention’s waning days, proslavery delegates won a clause for the return of runaway slaves from free states. Yet the clause was a measure of slavery’s defensiveness, prompted by then landmark Northern gradual emancipation laws, and was so passively worded that enforcement was left to nobody, certainly not the federal government. Antislavery Northerners further refined the wording to ensure it did not recognize slaves as property.

     I don’t see a good case against slavery-as-national-institution here. Not at all, actually. And returning runaway slaves from free states is a measure of slavery’s defensiveness? Am I misreading something here? Because something tells me this author is full of shit.

327. rq says

     16 September 2015 at 1:38 pm

     NC police chief retires after post criticizing Black Lives Matter. Going out with a bang and all that.

     A North Carolina town has approved the retirement of the police chief after he referred to the Black Lives Matter movement as a terrorist group in a Facebook post.

     Local news outlets report that the town council in Surf City approved the retirement of Police Chief Mike Halstead during an emergency meeting Tuesday.

     Halstead is white and had planned to retire this year. The town approved the retirement following a Sept. 3 Facebook post by Halstead.

     In the 662-word post, he called Black Lives Matter “nothing more than an American born terrorist group.” Halstead said neither the government nor blacks would tolerate a white supremacist group marching through the streets calling for the murders of public servants.

     Halstead removed the post, which was on his personal account, this week.

     Sounds like retiring that early wasn’t quite in his plans. Well done, community, if you had anything to do with the retirement.

     Lafayette black community leaders, residents demand answers in weekend police shooting

     City residents and some black community leaders on Tuesday called for an expedited and independent investigation into the weekend incident that led to a Lafayette police officer shooting and injuring a man as he ran from police.

     Three neighborhood residents who said they saw the shooting spoke through tears at a Tuesday news conference called by the NAACP to showcase statements from witnesses and to spell out a list of demands in the shooting’s investigation.

     “You’ve got community people feeling they’re scared of the cops,” Imani Temple Pastor John Milton said. “I don’t think anybody (outside of the community) understands the complexities and intensities of the problem.”

     Witnesses on Tuesday said they saw several police officers exit their vehicles with guns drawn and saw Tevin Lewis running from them. The witnesses said they saw him fall down in a ditch after he hopped a fence to try to escape capture and claim they saw an officer shoot him in the back.

     “I can’t sleep right now because of this. It plays over and over in my mind,” said Sheila Carter, a neighborhood resident who described the events she said she saw unfold that night.

     Initial information in the shooting, as released by the Lafayette Police Department three hours after it happened, stated officers on Saturday evening went to a house in the 100 block of Sonny Street to arrest a man wanted in city court on OWI. Of the five men standing in front of the house, one of them — Lewis — ran from the officers.

     As Lewis, 22, ran toward Soulier Street, the officer chasing him said he saw a pistol and ordered him to drop it. When he didn’t, police said, the officer fired at least twice and struck him. Police said they found a semi-automatic handgun tied to the man’s arm.

     Tied to his arm…?

     People Are Awesome: Teen Arrested For Science Experiment Now Heading to Space Camp, one good news for Ahmed.

     And another good news for Ahmed: President Obama Invites Teen Who Built Clock to the White House.

     Matt Damon’s staggering meritocracy lie: What his “Project Greenlight” blow-up with Effie Brown really shows

     The entirety of this exchange is one that many professional Black people have experienced, when they find themselves “the only one” in a room full of white colleagues. Many of us have felt the pressure of challenging the ways that whiteness is operating unnoticed, even as we are also saddled with the baggage of representing for our race/gender. When we demand, politely of course, that diversity take place on every level from the boardroom to the stage, frequently we are met with white defensiveness.

     Matt Damon’s defensiveness showed up in the way he spoke over Brown as she was speaking, the manner in which he then suggested that the directing team she wanted had no problem with the film script, the condescending way that he explained diversity to Brown as though his (erroneous) view was the only possible one, and then the condescending and dismissive way that he later offered his “appreciation” for Brown “flagging diversity” for her colleagues. To add insult to injury, Brown then felt compelled to quash all perceptions of her as the angry Black woman. Despite Damon’s defensiveness, it is Brown who tells her colleagues that she is not angry, reaffirming the love in her heart. It is Brown who must make her white colleagues not feel guilty or uncomfortable for the ways they are enacting their whiteness.

     Unmoved, Damon plays the merit card. The merit card is the white equivalent of a race card – it is the highest trump card, in a game of spades. Merit is the supposedly race neutral rubric that everyone should naturally agree is the best way to judge candidates, all questions of race aside.

     The myth of meritocracy is one of the foundational and erroneous ideals of white supremacy. Whether we are speaking about increasing racial access to education or jobs, the term merit is thrown around as though it exists in opposition to diversity. This happens when employers claim that they would like to hire a person of color for a position, but that they simply cannot find any qualified people of color for the position. Just recently one of my best friends, who attended a prestigious liberal arts college told me about the white woman who said to her on her first day of school, “Oh you must be here because of affirmative action?” That she might have been admitted based on her high SAT scores never occurred to her classmate. That affirmative action programs can also aid students of color with high SAT scores (as it did in my case) also never occurs to those who deploy race neutral ideas about merit.
     […]

     Not only do Matt Damon’s statements reflect a troubling belief in the myth of meritocracy, but they also betray a troubling belief in notions of racial colorblindness. Many White men are taught to believe that they can tell any story well that they choose to tell. Whiteness, particularly white maleness, is situated as marker of universality. The experiences of people of color are marked as too particular to be universal. The idea that our experiences of race and gender shape and inform how we perceive narratives and how we tell stories, makes many, many people uncomfortable.

     To be honest, I expected far better from Matt Damon. Not that I was waiting for him to come out with statements on racism and police brutality, but I would have thought his reaction to comments on diversity would have been more supportive, more listening, and less defensive.

     The most important parts of the Ferguson report are not about police violence

     The report, nearly 200 pages long, fingers every interlocking policy problem — in education, housing, transportation, the courts, employment, law enforcement, public health — implicated in the racial inequality at the heart of Ferguson’s unrest. Want to stabilize families in poverty? Rein in unregulated payday lenders. Want to enable a poor parent to get the job that will pay off the parking ticket that will keep her out of jail? Expand Medicaid so a single mom living on $10,000 a year can actually qualify for it (today in Missouri, unbelievably, she makes too much money).

     Want to dissuade police departments from ginning up revenue off petty traffic stops that disproportionately impact minorities? Restructure how public services are provided so every micro-suburb doesn’t need to fund its own police force. And so a driver with an expired tag doesn’t get pulled over multiple times on the same trip as he drives through several jurisdictions (St. Louis County has 81 different municipal courts, and 60 distinct police departments).

     This sprawling web — each system and institution is linked to others — isn’t unique to Ferguson. That makes the Ferguson report a valuable blueprint for any place with persistent racial inequality, which is just about every place.

328. rq says

     16 September 2015 at 2:16 pm

     Yoncé, a look at – yes! – Beyoncé and humanism and feminism.

     Last December I tried, unsuccessfully, to write an analysis of the one-year anniversary of Beyoncé’s Visual Album. The chief reason I didn’t finish the piece was because, to my mind, any fair analysis could be likened to a critique. Critiques require disinterest, dispassion—cold, hard, application of standards. I can pretend to none of those things when it comes to Beyoncé. Can any man critique his idols? I should think not; or, at least, not effectively. There’s a sense in which he can only revere them. I revere that woman. I am not disinterested. I am not dispassionate.

     Notwithstanding, I have spent a lot of time trying to organize my thoughts around what exactly makes Beyoncé paramount. Not commercially, and not in the artistic merits of her work (some defensible arguments could be made considering those things alone, I suppose), but in the hearts and minds of her militant fandom. After all that thinking, my considered opinion is this: it’s a form of humanism. Let me explain…
     […]

     Simply stated, Beyoncé became The Vessel. I watched America deify The Vessel for so many of my hopes and dreams. I watched her carve out another stratosphere  –  one in which she was above competing with anyone but herself. But what I find incontrovertibly humanistic about Beyoncé and her career trajectory is that watching her, you are under no delusions that you will ever be able to do that. What it makes you feel is a desire to cultivate the thing you’re meant to be doing as forcefully and beautifully as she has. To find something more important than pain or exhaustion. To see beyond and to create to the fullest extent of your abilities. I would compare this sensation to watching an athlete play exceptionally well in any given matchup. You know you’ll never be able to do that, but you’ve invested in that…and it feels like power. You carry it with you long after it has ended.

     There is a larger issue of cultural legitimacy, here. However annoying or unreasonable, it’s generally acceptable for my stepfather to root hard for the Eagles – to share in the joys of victory and the sting of defeat – in a way that it’s probably not for me to care so much about Beyoncé. After all, what kind of culture or media mostly consumed by women and gay men could be that important? I’m aware of this distinction, but I am also aware of its arbitrariness; that it is, in truth, a distinction without difference.

     So many things influence what kinds of popular culture we gravitate towards. Race, sexuality, gender, religion, political commitment. But what remains essentially the same is the investment. That this thing will be a part of my life in a way that is somewhat difficult to articulate. I’ll root for it. I’ll see myself in it. It will color parts of my life that it is ostensibly unrelated to. That’s Beyoncé for me and I’m inclined to believe – or at least, I’m hopeful – that we’re moving toward a space where that’s okay. To me, that’s a form of humanism. As if by magic, the line between who we are and the culture we consume and create becomes increasingly blurred. To employ a clichéd maxim, art imitates life. Or vice versa. Or whatever you’ll abide. Popular culture is, in many respects, vicarious.
     […]

     Hero worship is often seen as something pejorative. I do not dispute that there are certain cases in which it is deserving of that perception, but if by this we mean finding someone who shows us how to be, I should think it unavoidable. Beyoncé has shown the world how to be. We are sometimes fated to make gods of those whose magic we do not believe we possess. We believe this in error, as Juan Mascaró, in quoting the Upanishads, says, “that God must not be sought as something far away, separate from us, but rather as the very inmost of us, as the Self in us above the limitations of our little self. In rising to the best in us we rise to the Self in us, to Brahman, to God himself.” Let us worship our heroes, sure in the knowledge we are praying to that which is already within.
     […]

     There’s a sense in which Beyoncé as we know her could not have survived if she didn’t dare to be perfect. In an industry where sex sells, she had to portray an appeal that was so manicured, it might be said to be undesirable. In a society where black female sexuality is so regulated and scorned, she quested on a tightrope. Beyoncé had to teeter between giving it all away and leaving it all to the imagination. Sexy, but never sexual; the latter implying agency.

     White pop stars with comparable commercial sales could afford to be lax in their presentations in a way she could not. Beyoncé had to give you everything. Whereas perfection was something that could be faked for others, it was the essential mandate of Beyoncé’s career. If this were untrue, there would be no Beyoncé. She herself has confessed how creatively stifling and oppressive all of this became, how difficult it was.

     The massive effort required for Beyoncé to become and remain Beyoncé contributed to this notion of near-divinity. There is, after all, a reason her fandom is cult-like. But the weakness of divinity is that gods can only ever be feared, worshiped, venerated. They can never be truly loved, for love is a human endeavor.

     Friday, December 13, 2013 would change all of that. What is important about this date? That by its stealthy production and guerrilla-ambush-assault-release, the Visual Album forever changed content distribution models? That it would garner Beyoncé the highest first week sales of her career? No. What interested me was the idea that by conceiving this piece at all, Beyoncé did violence to the very flawless facade she’d projected to catapult herself to this rarefied space in the first place.

     I will never forget the initial shock and awe of hearing Beyoncé sing about doing unprintable things in the back of a car. I will never forget the thrill of Beyoncé defiantly and triumphantly telling the world, “Dis my shit! Bow down, b*tches!” It is beyond question that she had earned the right to say it, but witnessing her do so felt like the fulfillment of a manifest – if somewhat elusive – telos.

     To witness her vulnerability in tracks like “Jealous” and “Mine”. To experience the sexual baptism that was “Rocket”: Your love feels like all four seasons growing inside me, life has a reason. To observe the subtle politic of “Superpower”: The laws of the world tell us what goes sky and what falls; it’s a superpower. The laws of the world never stopped us once, ‘cause together we got plenty superpower. Here was someone who, for me, occupied that space of wonder which constitutes one’s childhood, one’s youth, while putting aside all childish things.

     It was 2013 – 10 years since the launch of her solo career – and Beyoncé had decided a few things: that after a decade of setting the world on fire and claiming a cultural territory theretofore unmatched in its scope, she would do more than entertain us; that her music – indeed, her very place in the American pop cultural pantheon – was political; that she belonged to herself; and that she would not be content simply to fill arenas and sell records. Beyoncé wanted to be human.

     Seattle officer who arrested black man carrying golf club as a cane fired for racial bias, confrontational manner: officials. Certainly took them a while to get around to it. What about some charges?

     The white Seattle officer who arrested an African-American man she claimed swung a golf club at her was fired Tuesday for her racial bias and combative approach, the city’s police chief said.

     Officer Cynthia Whitlatch drew an outcry when the video of the July 2014 arrest showed William Wingate, 69, doing nothing besides leaning on the club like a cane.

     The Seattle Police Department released the video in January and worked with the City Attorney’s Office to dismiss all charges against Wingate.

     Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole signed off Tuesday on findings by the department’s Office of Professional Accountability that Whitlatch, 48, broke the department’s rules in the arrest.

     Whitlatch “perceived mistreatment on account of your race” when she complained a black judge and black deputy chief dropped Wingate’s charges because she is white, SPD’s termination order said.

     “Your perceptions of race and other protected categories appear to be so deeply seated that they likely impacted the authoritarian manner in which you treated this man and your refusal to deviate from that approach towards an individual whose actions did not warrant such treatment,” the document said.

     It’s a start, I suppose.

     Why does St. Louis care more about Syrian refugees than its black population?

     On a warm September evening, hundreds of St. Louis citizens gathered in a parking lot off the commercial street of Delmar Boulevard to demand that 60,000 Syrian refugees be settled in St. Louis. The crowd was a mix of white Americans, Arabs and Pakistanis, united in their determination to make St. Louis the destination for Syrians whose homes have been destroyed in their country’s four-year conflict. “Millions hungry and displaced—make St. Louis your new place!” they cried as they marched down the boulevard.

     It was a touching moment in a region wracked by the racial strife of Ferguson and a year of violent crime. Since the death of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi on a Turkish beach prompted renewed sympathy toward the Syrian plight, St. Louisans have been particularly active in their determination to help. The march for Syrian resettlement was the first of its kind in the US, and an op-ed calling for the refugees to come to St. Louis brought record traffic for local website NextSTL. Mayor Francis Slay has expressed his commitment to resettling the refugees, and the International Institute, a refugee resettlement center, has vowed to help Syrians in the way it has helped St. Louis’s large Bosnian and Vietnamese refugee communities in the past.

     But drive further down Delmar Boulevard, and a different crisis becomes visible. This is the site of St. Louis’s “Delmar Divide“—separating rich from poor, and white from black. The area on the poor side of the divide is full of abandoned homes with no windows or roofs and people with no money or jobs. This is where St. Louis’s entrenched black underclass lives, in desperate conditions that have demanded attention—but received little—for decades. Drive further into the city and you will find the New Life Evangelistic Center, a homeless shelter deemed a “nuisance” by city officials, which may face closure. As St. Louis citizens vow to help Syrian refugees, many of their own neighbors remain without shelter and struggle to survive.

     Yet these conditions are not considered a crisis. In St. Louis, they’re life.

     The question is not whether St. Louis should help Syrian refugees or help its current residents. The question is how it can best help both, and why such a discrepancy exists between the compassion and generosity shown toward Syrian refugees and the continued neglect of St. Louis’s impoverished black communities, many of which have struggled to survive in this region for decades.

     Continue reading at the link. But I would add that this sort of looking at a situation dichotomously – why do refugees get so much financial support, while parents on parental leave get a third as much? – is not unique to St Louis.

     Church Blacklists 103-Year-Old Granny, Then Calls the Cops on Her. Because religion – and the authority many feel comes with it – is poison.

     Genora Hamm Biggs has attended Union Grove Baptist Church in Elberton since she was 11 years old. But last month, Rev. Tim Mattox sent a letter informing her she could no longer visit her lifelong parish “for any reason whatsoever.” The ouster has spurred a feud between the revered centenarian and other congregants in the tiny church.

     “The church means everything to me,” Biggs told The Daily Beast via phone. “I’ve been there for 92 years. Everybody I talk with says they’ve never heard of anything like this, and neither have I.”

     “I don’t plan to leave,” she added. “I’m here to stay.”

     Biggs returned to church the following Sunday despite Mattox’s warning, only to have the police called on her.

     Biggs and her grandson, Elliiott Dye, sat in the pews, refusing to move. “[Mattox] said, ‘If you don’t go, you’ll be escorted out.’ I still didn’t go,” Biggs said. “They turned out the lights while we were sitting there, so we got up and went out. After we left, they went back in.”
     […]

     Biggs said she disagreed with Mattox’s “style of preaching, moving around, moving his legs, falling on the floor. That’s not our style of service.”

     Indeed, Biggs has been vocal in her demands that Mattox leave Union Grove. “He has been asked to resign, but he did not resign,” she conceded.

     Despite local media attention surrounding the schism, the preacher’s standoff with the elderly churchgoer continues with no end in sight. Biggs claims Mattox refuses to return her calls and walks away when she approaches him with her walker.

     Dye said the un-Christian behavior doesn’t stop there. He claims that when he took Biggs to a monthly church business meeting she’s attended for years, fellow members ran off.

     “Now if she comes in the room, they go to another room,” Dye said. “She can walk very slowly but she can’t see very well, so I guide her. It made it impossible for her to participate. After they [moved] twice, I said, ‘Mama, that’s it. Let’s just go. We can’t keep chasing them.’”

     And they’ll know we are christians by our love. And compassion. And ability to work together.

     Media spin on violence against police, another discussion on the non-existent war on cops.

     A count of stories of police officers killed in the line of duty shows that media attention to these killings has increased dramatically since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Between one third and one half of all of the news stories that the “legacy” networks’ (ABC, CBS, NBC) have done on this topic over the last ten years have appeared in the last year. Fox News has run more stories on this topic this year than it did over the four previous years combined.

     Actual incidences of fatal violence against police officers perpetrated by civilians, however, have not been on the rise. Data on police officer deaths compiled by the FBI and the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund shows that the year since Michael Brown’s death has not been especially dangerous for police officers, at least when it comes to the danger of being maliciously attacked by another person. According to the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund’s data, in the year following Michael Brown’s death, 43 police officers were shot and killed, which is significantly less than the average of 54 police officer shooting per year over the last ten years. Looking back even further, policing is much safer now than any time in the last 45 years.

     Graphs and diagrams at the link.

     Chief Dotson says judges are part of the gun violence problem in St. Louis city

     ‘When you have a culture that is so prone to violence right now you have to interrupt that and to put that young man right back out on the street into a situation where guns are readily available, where violence happens in communities, you have to take him out of that environment,’ Dotson said. ‘Am I saying everybody needs to go to jail? No. But we do need to get people`s attention. What I do know is probation does not get people`s attention.’

     So why does he think St. Louis circuit judges give probation so often?

     ‘Some of them may want to say `I`ll give you the benefit of the doubt.’ They may not have the stomach for it, but the reality is with the recidivism rate as high as 70 percent in that group, it might be unpleasant but that`s the job they chose,’ Dotson said.

     The judge who gave Yates probation back in April tells FOX 2 he had several reasons for his decision, among them, that Yates did not flourish the illegal gun he was concealing, that the resisting arrest charge was only a misdemeanor, and that Yates was only 17, had no prior arrests and was in school.

     The judge says sending him to prison for a few months would only expose him to the bad influence of career criminals.

     So why is Dotson so obsessed with getting 17-year-olds in prison?

329. Saad says

     16 September 2015 at 10:03 pm

     My brother just texted me these pictures: Picture 1 | Picture 2

     That was just done to a mosque near where he lives.

330. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     17 September 2015 at 1:36 am

     Tangentially related to this thread.
     “No black men please” apartment listing yanked from Kijiji:

     In addition to plugging the unit’s proximity to transit and its new kitchen, the poster wrote, “no black men please,” adding “sorry.”
     The listing, posted September 16, also noted that a “small family” was preferred and a renter would be required to provide a letter of employment.
     According to Jennifer Ramsay, communications and external relations co-ordinator at the Human Rights Legal Support Centre, the posting was in clear violation of the Ontario Human Rights Code, and not only because of its racial rule. The posting also violated the code in two less obvious ways, Ramsay said.
     “You can’t limit a family,” Ramsay said. “You can’t say, ‘We only want one child or two children,’ unless it violates the actual municipal standards,” Ramsay said.
     The Ontario Human Rights Code guarantees “every person . . . arightto equal treatment with respect to the occupancy of accommodation,”and prohibits discriminationonthebasisofa variety of grounds, including,race,“family status,”and “the receipt of public assistance.”
     “You can’t discriminate against people if they’re in receipt of social assistance,” Ramsay said, referring to the post’s request for an employment letter. “You can’t say, ‘You have to have a job.’ ”
     Ramsay said the support centre would file a human rights claim on behalf of anyone who makes a complaint related to the unit.

     Here’s the connection to discussions of racism in the United States:

     The posting came to Ramsay’s attention by way of the United States Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, after its staffer Bryan Greene received an email about the ad from a colleague.
     “He said, ‘This ad’s going around Twitter. Can you guys look into it?’ ” Greene recalled.
     Greene initially concluded that, based on the location, his office obviously could not take action on the posting. “Then I thought, well, you know, folks in Canada probably would be interested that this ad is out there.”
     Greene said his office sees similar ads “occasionally,” though ads that are so “directly discriminatory” are less common. “Five, six years ago? Ten years ago? Certainly,” said Greene.
     Greene said “a range of discriminatory ads” were posted advertising housing to families leaving the New Orleans area in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
     Though Greene could have ignored the posting as well outside of his responsibilities, he felt it demanded attention.
     “Human rights are universal,” Greene said. “We wouldn’t want any black person anywhere in the world to experience this kind of treatment.”

     It’s laudable that Greene expresses that sentiment. It’s one I wholeheartedly agree with. I just wish the spirit of equality represented by the sentiment were reflected in the treatment of African-Americans by the US criminal justice system.

331. rq says

     17 September 2015 at 2:38 pm

     Saad
     That’s horrible!! :( Fucking racists.

     Let’s All Take A Moment To Marvel At Lupita Nyong’o’s Second “Vogue” Cover. Here’s a couple more.

     Okay, let’s get to the depressing stuff.
     Civil rights charges filed against Ole Miss student accused of putting noose on James Meredith statue

     The Justice Department said Friday that it had charged a student at the University of Mississippi with federal civil rights crimes for placing a noose on a statue of James Meredith, the school’s first black student, in what federal authorities said was a “flagrant” attempt to threaten black students at the school.

     These charges come a little more than a year after the noose was found on the neck of the Meredith statue, which has stood at the center of the Ole Miss campus in Oxford for nearly a decade. In February 2014, the noose was found along with an older Georgia state flag (before that state adopted a new flag without the Confederate symbol), prompting an investigation by the FBI and local police.

     Graeme Phillip Harris, the student who was charged, and others hung the rope and the flag “with the intent to threaten and intimidate African American students and employees at the university,” the Justice Department said.

     Only Harris was identified by federal officials, who said he has been indicted by a federal grand jury on one count of conspiring to violate civil rights and another count of using a threat of force to intimidate African American students due to their race.

     “This shameful and ignorant act is an insult to all Americans and a violation of our most strongly-held values,” Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. said in a statement Friday. “No one should ever be made to feel threatened or intimidated because of what they look like or who they are. By taking appropriate action to hold wrongdoers accountable, the Department of Justice is sending a clear message that flagrant infringements of our historic civil rights will not go unnoticed or unpunished.”

     Not as depressing as it could be, since charges are being brought, but still. That it happened at all? Depressing.

     Texas Grand Jury Could Get Sandra Bland Case Next Month, which will be… interesting.

     Assistant Attorney General Seth Byron Dennis told a federal judge that the findings of the Texas Rangers’ investigation of the arrest of Sandra Bland would be turned over to the Waller County district attorney, then submitted to a grand jury “probably mid to late October” to determine whether criminal charges are warranted.

     […]

     Dennis’ comments came during a court hearing on a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by Bland’s mother, Geneva Reed-Veal, who sued the state trooper who arrested Bland, the Texas Department of Public Safety, Waller County and two jail employees.

     Her lawyers told U.S. District Judge David Hittner, who wanted to set a trial date, they’ve been hampered by a lack of information from the state about the investigation.

     Dennis said he spoke Tuesday with the lead Texas Ranger handling the case. “My understanding … is it will be completed within the next few days,” Dennis said.

     Hittner told lawyers for Bland’s mother that if they believed there were unreasonable delays getting information, “You let me know.”

     “How about now?” Thomas Rhodes, one of the attorneys, replied, drawing a few handclaps and murmurs from the courtroom audience that included more than a dozen Bland supporters, some of them wearing shirts with references to the 28-year-old Chicago-area woman.

     Hittner said the hearing was intended to “provide a roadmap” to the civil case, and he peppered both sides with questions as they summarized Bland’s arrest and jailing for assault after state trooper Brian Encinia pulled her over for a minor traffic infraction. Dashcam video showed their interaction quickly turned into a confrontation.

     Hittner urged both sides to consider mediation or settlement but said if a jury trial was needed, he wanted to get it moving.

     “I’m not going to ram the case to trial, but many people want it done,” he said.

     He gave lawyers for Bland’s mother until Nov. 2 to respond to Dennis’ argument that their lawsuit lacked specific civil rights violations they raised against Encinia and set another hearing for Dec. 17.

     Sounds like another circus, as directed by the police.

     The Church of Nayvadius – basically an article reviewing several albums by Future. Of whom I hadn’t heard of, until now, but there’s plenty of sample songs at the link. And I know it’s a bit off-topic, but I want to make sure I keep posting from Seven Scribes because they’re trying hard to make it and be a voice for black people by black people. So think of this as a signal boost.

     Black household income plunges in one year in Minnesota. One wonders why.

     Household income for blacks in Minnesota plummeted in the past year, according to survey data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

     From 2013 to 2014, the median income for black households in the state fell 14 percent. In constant dollars, that was a decline from about $31,500 to $27,000 — or $4,500 in a single year.

     Meanwhile, the statewide poverty rate for black residents rose from 33 percent to 38 percent, compared to a stable overall state poverty rate of 11 percent.

     The median black household in Minnesota is now worse off than its counterpart in Mississippi. Among the 50 states, along with Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., Minnesota ranked 45th in median black household income. Mississippi ranked 44th.

     Income and poverty for other racial groups in Minnesota — whites, Hispanics and Asians — remained stable. Only blacks saw a worsening of income and poverty.

     “It’s alarming,” said Steven Belton, interim president and CEO of the Minneapolis Urban League. “It’s a deepening of the income disparity, not only across the state but across the nation. When you pair that with the continuing disparities we have in education, health and wealth, it’s disturbing.

     “The alleged rising tide has not lifted all boats.”

     Compare to those numbers to this:

     The U.S. median household income — meaning half made more and half made less — was $53,657. North Dakota led the nation with the largest significant increase, jumping from about $56,600 to about $59,000. Minnesota’s median household income was about $61,400. For white households, it was about $64,800; for Asians, $68,000; and for Hispanics, $42,000.

     The researchers are still not sure exactly what is going on, but either way, it’s not good.

332. rq says

     17 September 2015 at 2:45 pm

     Chicago cop acquitted in slaying should be fired, agency says

     A Chicago cop acquitted on criminal charges in the 2012 killing of a 22-year-old woman should be fired, a disciplinary agency is recommending.

     Detective Dante Servin was off duty early in the morning of March 21, 2012, when he fatally shot Rekia Boyd.

     The Independent Police Review Authority notified police Superintendent Garry McCarthy of the recommendation on Wednesday, police said.

     Not quite justice, but it’s something. I hope he is fired.

     Aurion, an African fantasy action RPG by an all-Black team from Cameroon, is on Kickstarter! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/plugindigitallabel/aurion-legacy-of-the-kori-odan/description … Give ’em some love, if you can spare it!

     Meet Baroness Valerie Amos: The first black female head of a British university

     Valerie Amos is a woman with a habit for making history. In 1997, she was joint first black woman to sit in the House of Lords, becoming Baroness Amos of Brondesbury. In 2003, she became the first black woman to sit in the UK Cabinet as secretary of state for international development. Later in 2003, she became the first black person to lead the House of Lords. Now, after over a decade of work on the international stage, including with the UN, her latest groundbreaking achievement is becoming the first black person to lead a British University.

     This week, Baroness Amos is taking up the role of director of the SOAS, part of the University of London. Baroness Amos will be leading SOAS as it enters its second century next year.

     Congratulations!!!

     And a rather tangential issue, not that you’ll hear about it all over the news, also from overseas: Joy as Mozambique declared mine-free

     Mozambique has declared itself mine-free, more than two decades after clearance work began. It’s the first time that one of world’s biggest mine-contaminated countries has achieved this status. Hundreds of people have been killed or injured as a result of mines deployed during Mozambique’s struggle for independence in the 1970s, followed by a civil war.

     Our Southern African correspondent Karen Allen spoke to Alberto Augusto, director of Mozambique’s national demining institute.

     Video at the link. (For the record, apparently they said the process would take 50 to 100 years… and it took 22.)

333. rq says

     17 September 2015 at 2:52 pm

     Fucked up something there, but all the links seem to be okay.

     St. Louis County Police bars use of dogs in crowd control – I would say an attempt at trying to show that they’re trying, but frankly… it’s something, that’s for sure.

     The St. Louis County Police Board adopted a policy Wednesday that forbids use of police dogs for crowd control, after a post-Ferguson federal report strongly criticized the practice.

     But Chief Jon Belmar insisted at the board’s meeting that the department did not use dogs that way in Ferguson, despite the Department of Justice’s “strong implication that we did.”

     He expanded on that frustration, warning police commissioners that a Justice Department analysis of the department’s patterns and practices, due out late this month, may not be fully accurate, in his view.

     Belmar said a draft he reviewed contained “several portions that the police department disagreed with and strongly disagreed with.” He did not specify them but said the Justice Department has promised a copy of several “amendments.”

     “I’m looking forward to some assurance that those were corrected,” he said.

     I wonder what the dogs were for, then.

     ACLU sues Hayward over fee for body camera footage of Black Lives Matter protest

     The ACLU sued the city Tuesday over what it calls excessive charges for police body camera footage requested under the state Public Records Act.

     The city billed the National Lawyers Guild almost $3,000 for footage from the Dec. 6 Black Lives Matter protest in Berkeley where several demonstrators were injured.

     Hayward police took part in crowd control during Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Berkeley and Oakland in December. The demonstrators were protesting grand juries that did not indict officers involved in the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York.

     The National Lawyers Guild requested the footage in January, and later narrowed its request to the Berkeley protest.

     The city charged the guild $2,938.58 to accommodate the request.

     It’s almost as if they want to discourage people from requesting that footage…

     Ole Miss linebacker C.J. Johnson on Confederate flag: ‘It sickens me’. What’s with the ‘Ole Miss’?

     ESPN interviewed Johnson, along with 12 others, about race and college football. The interviewees were asked about race in the context of Oklahoma linebacker Eric Striker’s Snapchat video last spring, in which he responded to video of a racist chant from an Oklahoma fraternity.

     Johnson had strong thoughts about the use of the Confederate flag, which sparked a national debate when it was taken down in South Carolina in the wake of racially-motivated crimes in July.

     “It sickens me when I see [a Confederate flag] on people’s cars on campus. If you have the Confederate flag on your vehicle, you have a problem,” Johnson said. “And I don’t care if it’s socially what you believe in or it’s morally what you believe in or you’re just doing it for s—s and giggles. It’s just the fact of what it stands for. It’s almost like you might as well put a tag on the front of your car that says ‘n—–.’ That’s really what it boils down to. You might as well just put a big tag on the front of your car or hang a big flag on the back of your car and just say the N-word.”

     White Supremacy and Taylor Swift’s ‘Wildest Dreams’ Video. Stop doing this shit, white celebrities.

     The problem is not that Taylor Swift’s video uses stereotypical images of Africa, though it certainly does tick off quite a few of Binyavanga Wainaina’s boxes. But if it were just that, it would be pretty unremarkable; stereotypes are, by definition, normal. Nor is the problem that the video uses the bodies of black people as props (as her video “Shake It Off” notoriously did). “Wildest Dreams” mostly doesn’t have any black people in it at all. There are a handful, but they aren’t even prominent enough to be objectified; if you blink, you’ll miss them:
     [video]

     That’s sort of the point: There are black people in this image of Africa, but they are in the background, serving. Otherwise, they are absent. This is Africa as a backdrop for white people taking selfies. This is Africa as white-supremacist fantasy, Africa as a romantic prop. After all, the video doesn’t show us “Africa” in any particular sense. It’s not set in Out of Africa’s Kenya, for example, or Botswana or Zimbabwe, or any other particular place; it’s set in “Africa,” timeless and placeless, an Africa that resembles the world of the Lion King more than anywhere real.
     The white fantasy that Swift is selling is the idea that you can play around with racism but not get your hands dirtied by it. You can have your racist cake and eat it too.

     And this is where the video’s cynicism is truly breathtaking: It doesn’t want the real thing; it wants the fantasy. “Wildest Dreams” (2015) is not set in Africa, but rather on the movie set of an imagined 1950 Hollywood film, Wildest Dreams.

     This is why the video carefully shows the construction of a stereotypical image of Africa. We see the blazing African sun … and then we see the movie lighting that is used to create the effect.

     More at the link.

334. Saad says

     18 September 2015 at 6:31 am

     Matt Damon apologizes for whitesplaining but then says another stupid thing

     Matt Damon has apologized after sparking an uproar in the season premiere of HBO’s “Project Greenlight” by explaining diversity in film to a successful black woman producer.

     “My comments were part of a much broader conversation about diversity in Hollywood and the fundamental nature of ‘Project Greenlight’ which did not make the show,” Damon said in a statement reported by Variety and other outlets.

     “I am sorry that they offended some people, but, at the very least, I am happy that they started a conversation about diversity in Hollywood. That is an ongoing conversation that we all should be having.”

     But some said the apology was tone-deaf.

     “DEAR POWERFUL WHITE MEN IN HOLLYWOOD-Here’s a thought-try DOING SOMETHING,” actress Rose McGowan tweeted. “Your awareness means nothing.”

     Another Twitter user chided Damon for suggesting that his comments started a conversation about diversity.

     “Black people have BEEN having this conversation,” the tweet read.

335. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     18 September 2015 at 5:11 pm

     Hahahahahahahahahaha
     Snorfle!
     The White House rebukes the Republican Party for not condemning Donald Trumps comments about Muslims:

     The White House is criticizing the GOP and its presidential candidates for failing to rebuke Donald Trump’s comments about immigrants and minorities.
     White House spokesman Josh Earnest is reacting to a Trump town hall. The GOP front-runner declined to correct a questioner who wrongly stated that President Barack Obama is Muslim.
     Earnest says it’s too bad Trump couldn’t summon the patriotism to correct the questioner. And he says it’s unsurprising it happened at a Trump event.
     Earnest broadens his critique beyond Trump to fault all the Republican candidates for not denouncing what he calls Trump’s “cynical strategy.”

     Why would the apologize when they all likely feel exactly the same way? The GOP is a party of unabashed racists and Donald Trump is the spokesperson.

336. rq says

     20 September 2015 at 1:56 pm

     Fla. Teen Passes Up Fixing Car, Buys Cross-Country Teammates New Running Shoes Instead. File this under ‘caring for the community’. Know what I hate? That an 18-year-old had to make this decision.

     Texas police caught in an enormous lie about their murder of unarmed mother Yvette Smith

     On February 16, 2014, Yvette Smith, a 47-year-old mother beloved by her family and community, was shot twice by an AR-15 assault rifle and killed on the spot by local police as she opened the front door of her home. A full 18 months later, as her case finally came before a jury, it’s disturbingly clear that the police lied, repeatedly, in an attempt to cover up their murder of Smith.

     First off, Smith called 911 for help because two men in her home were arguing over a financial dispute and she felt it was getting out of hand. She had nothing to do with the dispute and was an innocent bystander—a victim, even. When the police showed up, both men were already in the front yard and it appeared that the dispute was settled. This should’ve been case closed, but it wasn’t.

     When Smith opened the front door of her home, she was shot twice with a high-powered .223 caliber rifle in less than two seconds by Officer Daniel Willis of Bastrop County, Texas, outside of Austin.

     The lies and the coverup began immediately. The entire department was involved.

     Below, see the initial statement from Sheriff Terry Pickering, issued just hours after Smith died.

     A Black Woman’s Case for Atheism, by Sikivu Hutchinson.

     Kim Davis. Ben Carson. Donald Trump. The GOP clown car. The Planned Parenthood attacks. The Pope’s misogynistic anti-abortion “forgiveness” gesture. After a brief holding pattern, the resurgence of aggressive Christian fascist dogma and moral policing of women’s bodies is back on the rise. The GOP’s full-throated embrace of its reactionary standard bearers–God, gays, guns and gynecology–are the heart and soul of a nativist revival that’s in overdrive. Historically, when white Middle America felt most under siege “God” always comes out swinging. It was true in the 18th century with the first Great Awakening and it was true in 2011 when Harold Camping pimped out the Rapture. And it’s true now as white population growth declines and a so-called minority-majority society looms.

     Thus, reports of secular America’s meteoric rise are greatly exaggerated. Although the Pew Research Center trumpets a significant increase in non-religious Americans (many of whom simply identify as “spiritual”) the impact of this shift on public policy–aside from same sex marriage laws–is debatable. When it comes to women’s bodies, science education and climate change, Christian Americana’s God is still in the big house, still a flat earther and still a raging sexist.

     Which brings me to atheism. Yes, the historic Black Church played an important role in civil rights organizing and social justice, much of it powered by black women.

     However, despite being among the most religious/churched groups in the nation, there are compelling reasons for black women to be attracted to atheism. The stigma of public morality, fueled by white supremacy and patriarchy, has always come down more heavily on black women. Religious right policies gutting reproductive health care disproportionately affect poor and working class black women. Christian fundamentalist propaganda demonizing abortion as “black genocide” vilifies black women’s choices and right to self-determination. The HIV-AIDS epidemic in African American communities has been enabled by hyper-religious stigmas on black women’s bodies and homophobic, heterosexist views of gay sexuality. In some of the poorest communities in the U.S., robber baron multimillion dollar mega churches all but use black women as ATMs. And generations after 19th century religious orator and abolitionist Maria Stewart became the first black woman to preach on social justice and women’s liberation Black Church leadership is still overwhelmingly male dominated.

     Need more? See the link. Highly recommended.

     ‘He’s a f*cking kid’: Video shows nine California cops arrest sobbing black teen ‘for jaywalking’, another case of walking while black. Sickening. Absolutely atrocious.

     Why some Muslims don’t want Ahmed Mohamed’s blackness to be ignored – while the focus has been on his religion (quite appropriately) I feel this is also an important aspect to examine.

     As the news of Mohamed’s plight spread, some of the earliest accounts associated the teen, who is of Sudanese descent, with the word “brown,” a fuzzy bit of racial jargon that typically refers to non-black people of South Asian or sometimes Latin American descent.

     And others openly wondered how the world might have reacted to Mohamed’s story if he had been black.

     But Mohamed’s racial identity is as complex as the country of his descent. The African nation of Sudan is predominantly Muslim and is comprised of some 600 ethnicities. Arabs and indigenous Africans have intermarried and mixed there for centuries and most speak Arabic.

     To wit, the phrase given to the region now inhabited by Islamic people in Africa, which includes modern-day Sudan, is “Bilad al-Sudan” and it means literally “the land of negroes” or “the land of blacks.”

     Further complicating the situation is the fact that high-profile praise came from such figures as Indian American comedian Aziz Ansari, who compared his own experience to Mohamed’s.

     “#IStandWithAhmed cause I was once a brown kid in the south too,” Ansari wrote on Twitter.
     […]

     But Dash said that he actually doesn’t know whether Mohamed or his family identify as black. But they have been clear from the beginning that their religious identity is an important — if not the most important — factor in the 14-year-old’s treatment by the school and police.

     Online, another discussion brewed. Did the repetitious association of Mohamed with the term “brown” erase his blackness and render it irrelevant to his experience as an American Muslim of African descent?

     An intersection, of sorts.

     The Rise and Fall of Iggy Azalea, appropriation in the music industry.

     I saw the gentrification of hip hop where white artists with some edge would be pushed before audiences before the audience pushed back. I saw cultural appropriation and cooptation, inauthenticity, and an obvious — if not desperate — attempt to turn a quick profit.
     […]

     The accolades, invitations, and perks of star power status quickly rolled in. She was nominated for 151 awards, won 31 of them, and was a fixture within the pop culture circuit. Interviews, photoshoots, and endorsement deals lined up to the point where Iggy seemed poised to become an icon.

     But with her rapid ascension came impassioned critique. Rapping with an unnatural Southern accent, she was a non-stop controversy; a walking, talking, think piece-inducing oddity within hip hop culture. Iggy Azalea was a source of cultural discomfort — articles about cultural appropriation and new-age blackface were commonplace. Her racially insensitive lyrics — she’s referred to herself as a runaway slave master — were spotlighted as evidence for her cloaked racism.

     Black women in particular were vocal. We stood witness as Iggy’s manufactured persona of a down home hip hop chick was celebrated and compensated, while our instinctive existence — one that she sacrilegiously copied and pasted together — was routinely maligned.

     More at the link.

337. rq says

     20 September 2015 at 2:05 pm

     NYPD Union Chief Calls James Blake Arrest Critics ‘Un-American’, old news.

     9 Calif. Police Forcefully Arrest Black Teen for Jaywalking, yep, that story again. Took 9 cops to take down 1 black teenager.

     Dispatcher in Tamir Rice case resigned from Cleveland police department – which is nice, but where are the consequences? Where’s the punishment for not passing on vital information?

     The Jewish and Palestinian Activists of the Ferguson Movement, which almost didn’t get published at all.

     Since the killing of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014, Ferguson has been a tale told largely in black and white. The continued protests against police brutality and exploitation have been led by black activists fed up with decades of discrimination and a white leadership that has been, at best, apathetic, and at worst, overtly hostile.

     But St. Louis’s other ethnic minorities have also been drawn into the regional conflict. From the summer 2014 days when rabbis marched in the street to cries for black liberation to the present when a “Black Lives Matter” sign campaign is spearheaded by a concerned Jewish citizen, Jews have played a role in the Ferguson protests. It has been a controversial role, one that has caused debate within St. Louis’s diverse Jewish communities as well as hardship for those who participate.

     Neiss is one such example. On August 10, she was one of 57 protesters charged with “blocking an entryway” of the St. Louis federal courthouse during a protest commemorating the one-year anniversary of Brown’s killing. As an Orthodox Jew, Neiss wears a head covering, which she was asked to remove before being placed in a holding cell. She asked the officers who arrested her for a private space to remove it, which they allowed. That was when she realized yet again that she lived in a city where fairness, like everything else, was unevenly allocated.

     “The others who were arrested were mostly black. The look on their faces when I said I asked for a private space — it occurred to me that was something other people would not have done. I was comfortable being alone with a police officer without a second thought to my safety. I was treated well by them. And people were surprised that they gave it to me. That’s when we realized there was another woman, an African-American Muslim woman, who didn’t have her head covering. That’s when we saw the breakdown. I would have assumed that’s how everyone was treated until I realized that’s not the case at all.”

     St. Louis has the largest Jewish population in Missouri, making it one of the largest in the Midwest. It is diverse, with a tightly knit Orthodox community in the University City area, where Neiss works, and a number of conservative and reform communities, the latter of which have of lately attracted Jews of color, including black converts. It is difficult to tell how many Jews are involved in the Ferguson movement because the movement itself is fluid: protests can be massive or sporadic, with little consistency in participation.

     The problems of St. Louis, however, are shared by the region as a whole: segregation, discrimination, corruption, and the existence of a black underclass — very much separated by geography — that goes back decades. White flight has plagued the region since the early twentieth century, and Jews, while initially subject to discrimination, have generally followed their white Christian neighbors, fleeing to the western part of the county away from the black inner city. Although outreach groups dedicated to bringing Jews and blacks together exist, they speak to pre-existing segregation as much as a desire for camaraderie and collaboration.

     According to Neiss, the amorphous nature of discrimination in St. Louis makes it difficult for local Jews to find their place in the protest.

     “As Jews, we should appreciate what it means to be treated differently,” she says. “Yet our frame of reference is a whole government, in Nazi Germany, whose laws were targeted against Jews. Here we have a system that is biased against people, yet it’s in a country that’s democratic. There are no laws on the book that are specifically discriminatory — yet statistics show that discrimination unequivocally to be true. How do you account for that? No one wants to think that’s the country we live in. We don’t know who to blame. We’ve created a system where every step of the way the deck is stacked against a group of people.”

     Racism and religion in St. Louis are extremely touchy subjects. Many St. Louis Jews approached for this story shied away from discussing the issues on record — one rabbi said he feared offending his congregation, and other Jewish residents said they feared the animosity publicly commenting on a controversial issue would bring. Debate continues over whether Wilson’s shooting of Brown was justified, which has complicated how Jews who otherwise advocate for social justice participate in the cause. But everyone interviewed agreed on one thing: there is no monolithic Jewish community in St. Louis, no monolithic voice. Instead, there are competing narratives and individual pathways to activism. And one of the most complicated parts of the narrative is the role of Palestinian activists, many of whom have linked their own struggle to the Ferguson cause.

     Plenty more at the link. Kendzior’s writing and journalism is spot on.

     Nine California Police Officers Brutalize Frightened Black Teen for Jaywalking. The story got around a bit.

     Friend of Dylann Roof arrested by the FBI – had a story here about the friend recently. Looks like he’s been picked up after all.

     The man who opened his home to Dylann Roof in the weeks before the June killings of nine African-Americans in a Charleston church has been arrested by the FBI.

     Agents picked up Joseph “Joey” Meek Jr., 21, of Red Bank, while he was at work Thursday afternoon, his girlfriend, Lindsey Fry, told The State newspaper shortly afterward.

     Meek called her on his cell phone as it was happening, Fry said.

     “He just said, ‘They want to talk to me, but I think I’m going to jail,’” she said.

     Meek lives in a trailer in Red Bank with his mother, two brothers and Fry, who is 19.

     Meek was informed in an Aug. 6 letter from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Columbia that he was a “potential target” of the federal criminal investigation into the slayings of nine parishioners at the historic “Mother” Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

     The letter stated that Meek was under investigation for possible misprision and allegedly making false statements to law enforcement. Both crimes are felonies.

     Misprision, which in federal cases means the concealment of knowledge about a crime from authorities after or as the crime is being committed, carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison if Meek is charged with and convicted of that.

     If Meek is charged with and convicted of making false statements, he could be facing up to five years in prison. That number rises to eight years when the false statements concern certain types of crimes, including international or domestic terrorism.

338. rq says

     20 September 2015 at 2:57 pm

     Reformers Seek to Undo Growth of New ‘Debtors’ Prisons’

     In the three decades since the U.S. Supreme Court banned jailing people because they couldn’t afford to pay fines, the practice has crept back into fashion, giving rise to what critics describe as a new generation of debtors’ prisons.

     And now comes the backlash.

     A wave of investigations and lawsuits by civil rights organizations is forcing local courts to curtail their reliance on fines, fees and surcharges related to traffic tickets and other minor offenses. Officials across the country are slowly rethinking what it means to be poor in the eyes of the justice system — and finding ways to allow indigent people to avoid falling into a cycle of debt and incarceration.

     And guess who is disproportionately affected! So it’s good that this system of prisons is being looked at more closely. I hope some positive progress is made.

     Failure to put seat belt on Freddie Gray wasn’t reckless endangerment, defense attorneys argue. Seriously? I call some major bullshit. Like, MAJOR. How is a failure to put a seatbelt on ANYONE not reckless endangerment? Jesus fuck but this is stupid.

     Phoenix police: 2014 fatal shooting of Michelle Cusseaux was ‘outside’ policy

     An internal panel at the Phoenix Police Department has ruled that the fatal shooting of a mentally ill woman last year by an officer fell outside of department policy.

     The decision comes more than a year after the August 2014 death of 50-year-old Michelle Cusseaux, a woman shot while police were trying to serve a mental-health pickup.

     Sgt. Percy Dupra fired at Cusseaux after police said she opened her door with a claw hammer raised above her head.

     According to Phoenix police Sgt. Trent Crump, the recommendation by the department’s Use of Force Board was approved by Chief Joe Yahner and will now be forwarded to the department’s Disciplinary Review Board.

     That board will make a discipline recommendation for Dupra that could include suspension, demotion or termination.

     How about some criminal charges, too? Or at least a nice black spot on the record that says ‘no you can’t work as a police officer or a corrections officer anywhere in the future’?
     It’s like they think just letting the person go will fix things – as if they can’t just get hired at the next place over. Dunno, this has been annoying me more and more lately.

     Sandra Bland’s family attorney Cannon Lambert speaks on Bland case and law enforcement – no word yet on that grand jury, but sometime next week, I hear, there should be something.

     When justice is discussed it can take many shapes and forms. Justice can be a penalty or reward for actions. It isn’t something you can hold in your hand and touch; however, many seek it as a form of reparation. In this world riddled with litigation and language that defines what is right or wrong in the eyes of the law it makes sense to partner with someone who has the ability to speak on your behalf with knowledge of the law and can help to award an individual with the justice they seek.

     We had the opportunity to speak with one of these representatives. Cannon Lambert of the law firm Karchmar & Lambert P.C., the firm currently representing the family of Sandra Bland provided some insight as to who he is, and the importance of what he does.

     Interview at the link.

     Angry, cuss-filled rant sent to activists apparently came from local police station. “Oops” is right. Somebody needs to (a) clean up their PD and (b) take some lessons in tech.

     In a sign of tensions between local law enforcement and police-reform activists, a San Diego group says it has traced a furious, ALL CAPS, expletive-laden message sent through its website to the county sheriff’s office.

     “THIS WEBSITE IS A BUNCH OF STUPID BULLSHIT,” the message read. “COUNTRY WILL ALWAYS PREVAIL OVER SCUM LIKE YOU.”
     […]

     The group that received the message, United Against Police Terror, used an IP tracker to track the message to the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office. It was delivered through the Contact page of the group’s website.

     Real intellectual heights reached.

     Video shows clash between officer, teen in Calif. Same story as before. The kid nearly gained control of the officer’s baton! Nearly! It’s like possibly he was trying to avoid being hit with it or something. Amazing!

339. rq says

     20 September 2015 at 3:07 pm

     Black Lives Matter movement finds influencing 2016 contest a challenge

     There were more than 34,000 words uttered during the three-hour Republican presidential primary debate Wednesday night.

     None of them were “black lives matter.”

     For more than a year, the nation has been locked in a passionate discussion about race and policing — driven by the killing of unarmed black men and women by police officers. But, as underscored Wednesday night, the movement that has funneled thousands of protesters into American streets, prompted new scrutiny of law enforcement and forced Democratic presidential candidates into several stumbles on the trail, has yet to receive significant attention in the GOP race.

     Is anyone really surprised? More at the link.

     Teens in Schoolyard Fight Immediately Tazed by Cop. Filed under “Shocking” (no, really, look at the article, just above the headline).

     Running in from behind, the officer, who is white, immediately discharges his Taser, pumping tens of thousands of volts of electricity into school-aged kids. He holds the charge, standing over their fallen bodies before another officer appears on the scene.

     That’s more than shocking.

     St. Louis is one of the 10 most affordable places to live in the U.S.. Define ‘affordable’, as contextualized by this: Moody’s cuts Ferguson credit rating to ‘junk’ status. I know they’re two different cities. But still.

     White People Explain Why They Feel Oppressed. Key word “feel”. I wonder if any white person has conclusively proved white oppression yet. I mean, oppression of white people. We all know what white oppression actually looks like.

     Sometimes white people vex me. Maybe they confuse you, too. Maybe you’re a white person who is sometimes confused by white people. A lot of white people have told me they’re befuddled by the actions and perspectives of other white people. I hear you. What confuses me? I think it’s the utter lack of awareness of how race in America truly functions. In the midst of a national policing crisis, the Black Lives Matter movement is trying to will into existence a sense of value for black bodies and some white people respond, “Why are they so anti-white?” That’s dumbfounding to me. I wonder, how could they be so clueless? When white people question why blacks get to say certain words or make certain jokes that whites can’t or when white people ask where is White History Month or when white people question why they have to pay for the racism of their ancestors, it’s offensive and infuriating and it’s also confounding.

     In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s astounding new book, Between the World and Me, he refers to white people as “dreamers” to evoke the sense of them being not fully awake, like sleepwalkers. I’m not sure if white people are like sleepwalkers, or more like ostriches, consciously burying their heads in the sand, hiding from reality. And that’s exactly what vexes me the most about white people: their reluctance, or unwillingness, to recognize the vast impact their race has on their lives and on the lives of all those around them.

     Much more at the link, but I think it comes down to ‘not seeing race’ – being taught that race isn’t important, which means you believe that everything is based on merit, because you don’t see race, why the hell should all those black people be bringing it up all the time? Mm hmmm… Another short excerpt:

     For some white people, whiteness seems less economically valuable than it was decades ago. It’s as if w­hite privilege doesn’t take you as far these days in the same way that a dollar doesn’t go as far as it did in your grandpa’s time. Back in the Mad Men-era, if a white man showed up, he got a good job that let him take care of his family. No more, they say. But understanding the reasons behind that are hard. A woman who asked not to be named said, “Being a reasonably hard working white male no longer entitles you to respect or a middle class lifestyle. This has mostly to do with structural economic dynamics including increased competition globally and the decline of unions, but it’s a lot simpler to blame it on the black person or Hispanic person who got the job that you think was supposed to be yours.”

     Jon Dariyanani, co-founder of a software start-up called Cognotion, echoed that sentiment. “It’s much easier to believe that the reason the middle class life is slipping away from you is because some lazy group of people are soaking up resources and blocking the way, than to believe that it is caused by globalization and bad macroeconomic policy beyond any individual’s control. ‘Anti-white’ racism relies on an economic anxiety that is almost entirely a fantasy.”

     It’s definitely easier to blame a person of color than it is to try to understand how faceless global economic forces have screwed you over. You can’t see global economic forces working, many people don’t understand them, and who specifically are you supposed to blame? Besides, blaming black people is as American as Apple computers.

     Excellent stuff. Right down to the last paragraph (inclusive).

     Jury Watches Video of Shooting by Ex-Deputy

     The Black Lives Matter movement was barely on its feet by the time Yvette Smith was shot and killed in February 2014, but it may affect the fate of her killer, former Bastrop County sheriff’s Deputy Daniel Willis.

     During jury selection Monday, potential jurors filled out a questionnaire that included three questions on their knowledge and feelings about the movement, including whether they have liked posts supporting it on social media.

     Willis, who is white, is accused of killing Smith, who was black, with his own Knight’s Armament SR-15 semi-automatic rifle after responding to calls about disturbances at the Zimmerman Avenue house where she was.

     The Black Lives Matter movement, which questions racial bias and use of force in policing, began after the shooting of the unarmed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012. It has gained steam through a series of high-profile incidents involving black victims in Ferguson, Mo., Brooklyn and Baltimore. The Willis trial could be the latest to stir the national debate on policing.

     Because he is charged with murder rather than manslaughter or another lesser charge, the bar for prosecutors will be higher than usual. Most police-involved shootings do not result in murder charges.

     After hours of questions about their feelings on police conduct and their willingness to hear certain types of evidence, the jury pool of 118 was slowly whittled down throughout the day. Prosecutors and defense attorneys expected to settle on a dozen jurors late Monday evening, and the trial is set to begin Tuesday.

     Like Bastrop County as a whole, the jury pool was overwhelmingly white. Dozens of the potential jurors said they have had negative experiences with law enforcement in the past, with several saying it would prevent them from rendering a fair judgment in the case.

     Interesting. At the same time, I don’t think that a jury made up entirely of people with only positive experiences with police is the way to go, either.

340. rq says

     21 September 2015 at 2:33 am

     Mississippi Cops: We Totally Arrested That Black Doctor For Being Uppity, Ayup! By the Wonkette.

     In case you played hooky from Wonkette on Monday, we had the very weird story of a prominent black doctor from Memphis, Dr. Marcia Bowden, who was arrested along with her husband during a routine traffic stop in Southaven, Mississippi. Her husband, Ira Marche, admitted he was speeding — to rush his wife to a patient emergency at her clinic. At the time, we only had Bowden’s account, but now the paper Bowden sent her account to has the arrest reports, and surprise, it sounds like it went down just about the way she said it did. Huh!

     There’s a minor detail here and there that she left out or said a bit differently from the way the cops, Sgt. Brett Logazino and Officer Jeremy Delaney, reported it. Like for instance, she says her husband told her, “Honey, be quiet, these people are redneck, they will hurt you.” WHEREAS, Logazino’s account claims Marche said, “Just calm down, this is a bunch of shit from some redneck Mississippi cops.” Uppity cusses! Of course, we already knew from the original story that Marche had cussed once or twice during the altercation.

     While Marche was looking for his driver’s license in the glovebox, Bowden said the cops told her to stay in the car, at which point she explained that she was not getting out, just sticking her legs out so her husband had room to rifle around. However, she failed to report that she was SASSY. As per Officer Delaney’s report:

     “I stood back and behind to observe what was inside the glove box for officer safety,” Delaney reported. “Ms. Bowden became angry and attempted to get out of the vehicle as well. I ordered Ms. Bowden to remain inside the vehicle.”

     And then, due to all the obvious black people anger happening, Delaney did what he had to do:

     “I sensed that the verbal altercation was escalating so I took Mr. Marche into custody,” Delaney reported. Logazino’s account reflected the arrest: “Delaney then moved Ira to the passenger side rear of the vehicle and placed him in handcuffs.”

     Cusses and general uppityness, and who do these people think they are anyway? It’s not like she was a doctor rushing to a patient, oh wait, she WAS a doctor rushing to a patient.

     More at the link.

     Irving Mayor Defends School And Cops, Doesn’t Apologize For Arrest Of Muslim Teen Over Clock. Idiot.

     “I do not fault the school or the police for looking into what they saw as a potential threat,” Van Duyne wrote in a statement posted to her Facebook page Wednesday.

     Van Duyne said school and law enforcement officials were simply following school protocols when a “possible threat” or “criminal act” is discovered.

     “To the best of my knowledge, they followed protocol for investigating whether this was an attempt to bring a Hoax Bomb to a school campus,” Van Duyne wrote. “I hope this incident does not serve as a deterrent against our police and school personnel from maintaining the safety and security of our schools.”

     School protocol is to arrest without any particular investigation? Got it.

     My friend is dead. Why isn’t gun control part of the Black Lives Matter platform?

     In a year of spectacular shootings — a white supremacist kills nine black people in a church and a black journalist kills two white colleagues on live TV — getting caught in the crossfire between two rival gangs seems almost mundane.

     But I’m stunned by the reality that is what we’ve come to view as acceptable here in America.

     Carey’s case made the news because of who he worked for (the governor) and his incredible life story. (Boy makes it out of a Bronx public housing project, graduates from Harvard Law School, only to get shot like his brother.)

     From what I can tell, there have been no marches for Carey. Had he been shot by a police officer, there almost certainly would have been. His name would be another hashtag — like Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

     I get it: Police officers have a duty to protect us. We pay them. We have every reason in the world to hold them to a higher standards than a Crip or a Blood.

     But why do black lives seem to matter most when they are taken by white police officers? Is a death at the hands of a gangbanger with bad aim any more acceptable? Why do we explain such shootings away, like an embarrassing stain on our living room carpet?

     I applaud the Black Lives Matter movement for calling attention to the festering problem of police shootings, which have taken the lives of 980 Americans this year, including at least 74 unarmed black people.

     But I don’t understand why gun control is not on their agenda. The recently-released Campaign Zero, set up by Black Lives Matter activists, presents 10 policy solutions — including better training, body cameras, limits on the use of force, and independent investigations of police killings — to curb the violence. Good on them for proposing solutions, many of which are solid ideas.

     But it feels like they’re ignoring the obvious: If there were fewer guns on the street, there would be fewer shootings, including by police. Campaign Zero’s impressive website contains a graph that compares the number of people killed by police in the United States (1,100 in 2014) to the number killed in Germany (six), Australia (six), Britain (two), and Japan (none.)

     It fails to mention that the big difference between the United States and those countries is not body cameras, or police training, but gun laws, plain and simple.

     Hey! I have an idea! Why don’t you join the movement and work on the gun control aspect??? Since gun control isn’t going to take away guns from cops (not really, they’ll probably be excepted), and BLM as well as Campaign Zero have a specific focus on law enforcement, there might be a reason they don’t mention these things. But nobody’s stopping you!! Oh, wait, he does talk more about this:

     There are, of course, good reasons to avoid the gun control debate. If you think gun control is impossible, why waste time on it?

     But that’s not why Campaign Zero opted not to include it in the platform. Instead, the campaign claims that gun control “contributes to police violence in many cases.”

     “At least 30 people were killed in 2014 after police engaged them for possessing an illegal firearm. Forty-percent of these people were black,” the website states. “More research needs to be done to determine whether gun restrictions (i.e., criminalizing guns and those who carry illegal guns) will reduce or increase police killings — particularly of black people.”

     That’s missing the forest because of the trees.

     The climate of fear — both real and imagined — created by our concealed-weapon culture takes its toll on black people far beyond the realm of policing. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 11,208 people died in firearm-related homicides in 2013. Of them, 6,442 were black. Two-hundred-eighty-one people died from stray bullets or accidental discharges that year. Forty-three of them were black.

     For every life cut short by a stray bullet, there are countless lives that are circumscribed in immeasurable ways: kids who aren’t allowed to play outdoors; mothers who give up jobs on streets they deem risky; students who drop out of school rather than run the gantlet of guns.

     Although homicides have actually fallen from their peak in 1993, gun violence still takes an enormous toll on America — black America, in particular. Nobody suffers more than black people, who are twice as likely to die from gunfire as whites. (It used to be three times as likely, so there is some progress.)

     But this is still perhaps the greatest disparity of all in America: Some kids grow up in fear — not just of the police, but of stray bullets — while other kids grow up with the luxury of never having to worry about getting shot.

     That’s why 78 percent of blacks support tougher gun laws, compared to less than half of whites.

     The desire for stricter gun laws might be the one thing that the black community and police departments everywhere have in common. Except that Black Lives Matter activists aren’t sold on it. I wish they’d reconsider, and send the message that Carey Gabay’s black life matters, too.

     Well. Sounds like the beginning of something good. It seems BLM has a good reason for not including gun control – but you can go ahead and work on it, anyway. The more angles used to hit this racism thing, the better.

     How Asian-American Voters Went From Republican To Democratic, just a discussion on policies and racism and etc. Lots of relevancy.

     WATCH: Cop Beats and Pulls Gun on Unarmed Black Woman on a Crowded Bus. Sounds like bad judgment and incompetent policing to me. In a crowded bus? C’mon.

     Several people on the bus are seen filming the violent assault, as many of the witnesses speak up to defend the woman. At one point, a few of them are seen trying to walk up to try and diffuse the situation, but run and scatter after the officer turns to and points his weapon at them. Later in the video a man is heard yelling about an officer macing witnesses, so it is possible that is what occurred at this point.

     Sounds like he was doing a great job policing the community.

     #BlackLivesMatter banner drop overhead the #PoliceLivesMatter march in #Austin. #ftp #Racism #PoliceBrutality

341. rq says

     21 September 2015 at 3:47 am

     Texas Man Arrested in Hoax Claiming Members of #BlackLivesMatter Vandalized His Truck. These people try so hard to discredit the movement, which, I think, is a credit to the movement.

     A 45-year-old Whitney, Texas, man was arrested Friday on a misdemeanor charge of filing a false police report after officials concluded that it was he who wrote “Black Lives Matter” and other graffiti on his pickup truck, as part of a hoax, reports Raw Story.

     Scott Lattin, 45, a disabled veteran, claimed on Sept. 8 that members of the movement against police brutality defaced his family’s pickup truck because it displayed pro-police messages and symbols. He raised nearly $6,000 to help pay for repairs to the truck after a relative set up a GoFundMe account, the report says. Additionally, car dealers and body shops offered to pitch in to make repairs.

     But the arrest came after police noticed discrepancies in video recordings of Lattin talking about the incident, Whitney Police Chief Chris Bentley told Fox4, which broke the story.

     “We had initial video when the officers took the report and then when we saw your story on Channel 4. When we looked at those two videos, there were some differences in those and that led us to take the investigation into a different direction,” Bentley told the television news station. When officers wrote the initial report, Bentley said there was no damage to the inside of the truck. But when Fox4 arrived at the home, Lattin revealed that the glove box cover had been ripped off and the seats slashed, writes the news outlet.

     At the time of his arrest, he denied to Fox4 that he had vandalized his own vehicle, but the affidavit that officers prepared in order to obtain an arrest warrant shows that Lattin admitted to damaging the vehicle for insurance reasons, Fox4 reports.

     “We have so many groups that have participated and come to Whitney, Texas, of all places, to help these people—and for them to have been deceived? It’s just wrong,” Bentley told Fox4.

     And yet people like this will never be seen as a problem, as a symptom of white people’s mentality. Always just exceptions and aberrations.

     Police shooting protesters chain themselves to prosecutor’s house fence.

     Many of the protesters at Tunheim’s house also have been gathering regularly at the prosecutor’s office inside the Thurston County Courthouse. Caro Gonzales was among two protesters arrested Wednesday morning for blocking the office’s doorway and disrupting business at the courthouse. They were charged with interference and obstruction of a court, which is a gross misdemeanor.

     Gonzales said another protest is planned for 3 p.m. Monday on the steps of the Capitol. The group will urge Gov. Jay Inslee to “investigate the investigation” of the Olympia police shooting and investigate Tunheim’s charging decision.

     “It’s up to Tunheim if he wants us to stop,” Gonzales told The Olympian. She said if Tunheim were to drop the charges against Thompson and Chaplin, the protesters would shift their focus toward charging Officer Donald.

     I like their determination and planning ahead.

     Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch Delivers Remarks at the Congressional Black Caucus 45th Annual Legislative Conference Judiciary Brain Trust Panel – from twitter, I understand there was a huge focus on black-on-black crime, especially from the older generation, and Lynch’s remarks aren’t entirely without problematic aspects, but here they are:

     Well, thank you all so much. Thank you so much for that warm welcome. Thank you for your patience. I’m not usually running this late, but I understand that you have had some excellent presentations before me. I see a number of old friends and hopefully new friends on this panel. Great voices all in our common struggle and so I think you have had excellent presentations and I’m just sorry I had to miss so many of them – I’m so looking forward to reading a recap of this because there’s so many important issues here. Dr.[Philip] Goff, such a pleasure to meet you. Your leadership at UCLA on the Center for Policing Equity is something that is not only vital in terms of what we need today; it really is the key to a lot of issues that we’ve faced.

     When I’m looking at the agenda for the entire CBC Foundation events, I see so many different panels of so many different issues but they all come together in regards to the central issue of our community’s relationships with law enforcement and with our government at large. So many of the issues that you all are tackling all this week come back to that essential issue. And so I thank you so much for giving me a few minutes to talk to you this afternoon about what the Department of Justice is doing in this important area because I will tell you that I view it as one of my main priorities as Attorney General of the United States.

     I know that Congressman [John] Conyers had to go and vote, he is also pulled in many different directions but I want to thank him and his staff for their invitation to this event as well as for setting up this particular panel and of course, the Congressman’s lifetime of service to these issues. He has been in this fight for a long time, a long time.

     As have many of you, not just here on the panel, on the podium next to me, but out here in the audience. I see a lot of fighters. I see a lot of people who have walked a lot of lines and walked across a lot of bridges. And so I thank you for that as well.

     Whether you have been in the struggle for years or whether you are new to it and part of the new and exciting and dynamic young voices that we need to tell us the truth – I commend you and I am so, so glad to hear from you. Your commitment is important, your ideas are important, your energy and your passion. And now is the time that we have to all come together around these important issues. Because while we have made just extraordinary progress since the CBC was founded over 40 years ago, it is clear that we have so much more work to do. In the recent weeks and months we’ve seen these reminders. You know it’s not just the overall philosophy that we always say; there’s more work to do we have to keep marching. We’ve seen it. We’ve seen it played out in a very stark and very painful reality captured for the world to see.

     We’ve experienced tragedies that make it clear that this fight for our common welfare goes on. And I will tell you that what hurts me so much in my current role, is that we have seen the mistrust between our law enforcement officers and our communities also deepened. At a time when, not that it always hasn’t been the case; but at a time when our communities need perhaps more than any other time, the protection and the resources that law enforcement is committed and sworn to bring to bear. It has always been my view that the essential role, not just of government, but of law enforcement in particular, is the protection of people who don’t have anyone else to call on. You know those times in the middle of the night when people are cold and afraid and they know that someone is out there who means them harm; we have someone on whom to call. And we have to be able to trust and rely upon those individuals, to come when we call and to also look out for us when they do arrive.

     Now this is an issue that I know you’re talking about today, not just on this panel but so many others, but in this panel in particular you’ve got the voices to do it. You’ve got the experience and you’ve got the people who will also provide you the perspective of what it feels like to be left out of that dynamic of protection, to be left out of that umbrella in that circle of guardianship that every American is entitled to. It is such an important voice today.

     Now, it’s also not a new issue although it is an issue that is very deep and very personal for me. As some of you may know, I am fortunate enough to have my father here with me this week. This issue is generations old and when I was a young girl I remembered one of the things my father was telling me about. You all talk about your grandparents and aunts and uncles and the family lore. That’s what makes you who you are. That’s how you know what the Lynches are like, what the Harrises are like – and they are both stubborn, just so you know. But I remember my father telling me about his father, about my grandfather; a minister, third grade education, no money, eight children, dirt poor, living in rural North Carolina in the 1930s – when my father was born. And even with all of those things stacked against him, he built his own church beside his house, called it Lynch’s Chapel- that’s what you can do when you build a church yourself.

     One of the things my father remembers is that there were times when he was a young boy in the ‘30s when people in the community, black people in the community, were in trouble, as my grandfather used to say, “caught up in the clutches of the law” and didn’t have a place where they could go. They would come to my grandfather and he would help hide them – until they could leave the community. Sometimes the sheriff would come by the house and ask my grandfather, “Have you seen so-and-so?” My grandfather would say, “Well not lately.” So-and-so is hiding in a closet or hiding under the floorboards. Because in those days, 1930’s North Carolina, there was no justice in the dark of night on a rural road. No Miranda warnings. No procedural protections. None of the things that we take for granted today. And so despite what happened with these individuals, my grandfather knew that sometimes in order to preserve the fight for justice into the future you had to take action in the moment – you had to take action in the moment.

     Judging from the remarks as delivered, she spoke for quite some time. I believe one of the more problematic (and historically inaccurate) things she said is found in these paragraphs:

     But we also have to acknowledge more than just the actions because there is something that goes on as well, there’s something that’s deeper when we have these situations, we have to acknowledge the anger and the despair; the feelings that develop. People always talk about wanting us to handle things in a certain way and that’s true and this country was built on peaceful protests and it is a fundamental right of ours and it has achieved a great deal of change. But we also have to acknowledge the anger and the despair that develops when these concerns that we now see on tape are still pushed aside by so many people as if they don’t exist. You have to acknowledge the kind of pain that develops. You have to acknowledge that feeling – and you know people say “I don’t think it was that bad,” “Well I don’t think they meant it that way,” or even “That just didn’t happen – that just didn’t even happen”. And so when that happens to people – to a people, to our people – time and time again, you have within our community a sense of disconnection and despair that is a dangerous as any bullet or any billy club, it absolutely is. But of course, I’m not the first to note that and honestly I would refer you back to that work of art by Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man –` and you will see all of that there and you will see the consequences of it as well.

     And of course the reason why we have to face this and deal with these issues is of course because, as always, as it was with the movement 50 years ago and the issues now, is our children who are bearing the brunt of these issues. It’s our children who are growing up without the sense of connection, without the sense of protection and security that they are entitled to have and that we want them to have.

     See if you can find it.

     Jurors Could Be Swayed By That $6.4 Million For Freddie Gray’s Family. I find it interesting that the city settled so publicly, so quickly – well in advance of the upcoming criminal trials. I wonder.

     Before criminal proceedings began for the six officers charged in his death, a $6.4 million wrongful-death settlement — one of the largest in police brutality cases in recent years — was awarded to the family of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man who died after sustaining a spinal injury in police custody in April.

     This is uncommon in high-profile cases. People immediately wondered if the settlement might suggest to the jury pool that the city of Baltimore was essentially admitting the officers’ guilt.

     Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said earlier this month that city officials’ decision to settle the civil claim prior to any decision in the criminal cases was “unusual,” but emphasized that it “should not be interpreted as a judgment” on the officers.

     Legal experts think potential jurors might still take away that message. The experts suggest that awarding the funds so soon may have helped taint the jury pool, which could ultimately lead the judge to move the trials out of Baltimore. The settlement was announced just a day before the judge decided the trials would remain in the city for now.

     “The settlement does help the defense’s argument that it will be difficult to find a fair and impartial jury in Baltimore,” Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University and a former public defender, told The Huffington Post. “Even though the settlement does not constitute an admission of guilt, it does signal that the city did not believe it had a strong defense.”

     “It is fair to say that some, perhaps many, citizens will interpret it as a sign of the city’s – and, by extension, the officers’ — wrongdoing,” he added.

     Ah, but I think the city is at fault for creating this impression. These things don’t usually move so quickly, do they? Most wrongful death suits I’ve heard of are settled a year, two years, after the fact – and those are the quick ones.

     Freddie Gray Died From The Same Racial Injustice That Will Keep His Neighbors Off The Jury. Yep. I don’t see why people with bad police experiences should be kept off the jury – as long as there are also present those who have never had a bad police experience. But considering the experiences of black people in USAmerica, I would say that this criterion (and I know, it’s not the only one, it just came up earlier in this thread, too) is just another way of skewing the jury white.

     In July 1991, a California appeals court unanimously agreed to move criminal proceedings against four police officers charged with assaulting Rodney King out of Los Angeles. The videotaped beating of the 25-year-old black motorist had already set off racial tensions nationwide.

     The defense argued that their clients could not get a fair trial in Los Angeles due to the extra-contentious pretrial publicity. So the trial was relocated — to Simi Valley, a highly conservative and predominantly white city in nearby Ventura County. One Asian, one Hispanic and 10 white people sat on the jury that eventually acquitted the officers — a decision that led to the infamous 1992 Los Angeles riots.

     Lawyers for the six Baltimore police officers charged in the April death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray recently attempted a similar maneuver. In May, they called for their clients’ trials to be shifted outside the city, citing fears that national media coverage of Gray’s death and the subsequent protests had tainted the jury pool.

     Last week, a judge ruled that the criminal trials will remain in the city for now and that the officers will be tried separately. There’s still a chance that the trials could be moved if the judge concludes during juror selection that a unbiased jury can’t be seated.

     But no matter where the trials take place, residents from West Baltimore — where Gray lived — aren’t likely to sit on the jury.

     Keep this in mind (from the article):

     White Americans are far more likely than black Americans to say police in most cities treat black people as fairly as they treat white people.

     In Louisiana, murders of whites more likely to mean death penalty – but #AllLivesMatter equally, amirite?

     The killers of white people in Louisiana are roughly five times as likely to be sentenced to death as the murderers of black people, according to a study released last month.

     Meanwhile, black people account for 72 percent of all homicide victims in the state — a comparison the report’s authors say shows implicit bias in the way juries and the courts go about punishing killers based on the race and gender of a victim.

     The report, by University of North Carolina political science professor Frank Baumgartner and documentation specialist Tim Lyman, will be published in the fall edition of the Loyola University of New Orleans Journal of Public Interest Law.

     “I think there’s the death penalty that we might wish we had, and then there’s the death penalty that we really do have,” said Baumgartner, who earlier this year published a nationwide study, partially titled “#BlackLivesDon’tMatter,” which showed similar findings.

     “What are the racial and gender dynamics of which lives are said to be worthy of executing the offender, and which are not? And how just is that?” he asked.

     When it comes to executions, Louisiana is “an even more extreme example” of racial disparities compared with the rest of the U.S., Baumgartner said. In Louisiana, killers of black men are executed at a rate of 0.236 per 1,000 homicides, but nationwide, at least 0.94 murderers of black men are executed per 1,000 homicides, he said.

     A Louisiana legislator criticized the report, saying faulty methodology led to skewed findings.

     The study considered all 225 people sentenced to death in Louisiana from 1976 through July 2015, resulting in 28 executions, the last of which occurred in 2010. Of those sentenced to death, 64 percent of their victims were white and 33 percent were black, with another 3 percent labeled as “other,” according to the report.

     Those numbers stand in contrast to how killings play out overall in the state. Black men, in particular, are more likely to be murdered than are other groups. Black men constituted 61 percent of all homicide victims in the state, the report says, while white men made up 19 percent; white women, 7 percent; and black women, 12 percent. (The remaining percentage is labeled “other.”)

     Killings of white people are 10 times more likely to result in an execution in Louisiana than those involving black victims, the study concludes. And it asserts that there is no documented case in the history of Louisiana in which a white person was executed for murdering a black man.

342. rq says

     21 September 2015 at 3:57 am

     Pushing back on respectability politics, 7 minute video.

     Tef Poe, William Jawando, Robert Traynham, Judith Browne Dianis and E.J. Dionne discuss the criticism from black conservatives over Black Lives Matter.

     Mi’kmaq elder calls Harper’s ‘old stock Canadians’ offensive and racist. Yeah, that’s Canada’s leadership right now. ‘Old stock’ Canadians. Fuck Harper.

     Last night’s federal leaders debate was about the economy. But, today, many people who watched it are focusing on Stephen Harper’s use of the phrase “old stock Canadians.”

     The Conservative leader used the phrase when speaking about cuts to refugee health care, saying that both new immigrants and “old-stock” Canadians agreed with his stance.

     The use of the term quickly trended across social media, drawing confusion from many.

     Earlier today, Harper defined the term saying it referred to “Canadians who have been the descendants of immigrants for one or more generations.” He also defended his stance on health care.

     Regardless, Mi’kmaq elder Stephen Augustine says the term is “offensive and racist.”

     “There are Canadians and I just like to refer to them as Canadians,” he tells As it Happens host Carol Off. “I think our health-care system should be available to anyone who is in Canada regardless of their origin.”

     Augustine is Dean of the Unama’ki College at Cape Breton University. He’s also a Hereditary Chief of the Sigenigtog District Mi’kmawey Mawiomi.

     He has been at the forefront of a push to bring more Syrian refugees to Canada.

     “It’s a matter of sovereignty that we should exercise to help desperate families running on the road with their children,” he says. “It’s totally inhumane what has happened to them trying to escape oppression and violence.”

     Augustine says that Canada’s indigenous people have a long history of welcoming people from around the world.

     “We have a long tradition of opening our doors and sharing our food and resources to people who are in need. We’ve always done that,” he says. “I’m talking about John Cabot, Jacques Cartier, Samuel de Champlain … All these people arrived here … and the Mi’kmaq opened their arms and welcomed them and said ‘you are our brothers.'”

     Now, more than ever, he says that tradition should continue. Augustine is calling on other First Nations leaders to help out with the refugee crisis.

     Not that they’ve ever received much gratitude for their generosity. Time to do better, Harper. You have an opportunity.

     Video Shows Cops Wrestle a Black Teen to the Ground for Walking in the Street, Vice News looks at the incident.

     Virginia tops nation in sending students to cops, courts: Where does your state rank? A reposted story, I believe, on the school-to-prison pipeline.

     Protesters demand release of private surveillance footage in Lafayette police shooting

     A dozen Lafayette residents gathered outside police headquarters on Friday morning, demanding the release of private surveillance footage that captured the shooting last weekend of a man said to be running away from police.

     Chanting and holding signs with slogans like “Back Turned Don’t Shoot” and “WEED OUT BULLY COPS,” the protesters stood in front of the Lafayette Police Department building on University Avenue while community leaders inside met with police officials about the shooting of 23-year-old Tevin Lewis.

     “We’re here today to make sure this video is released to the public,” said Denise Gobert, 28, a Lafayette activist in the Black Lives Matter movement.

     The group on Friday morning delivered a public records request to release the video. They then had an impromptu meeting with the leaders of the department’s criminal investigations and patrol divisions, along with the department spokesman and the assisting officer to Chief Jim Craft, who’s been on leave this week.

     The Rev. John Milton, of Imani Temple — who, along with civil rights attorney Carol Powell Lexing, is providing legal services for Lewis — said afterward that he and his colleagues were assured the department is working to produce answers soon. But police gave no indication about if and when they would release the video.

     Milton said releasing the video immediately would quell rumors.

     “That leaves nothing for people to draw conclusions. It limits our speculation,” Milton said.

     Police Department spokesman Cpl. Paul Mouton said technicians are working to extract the video from the private surveillance device while taking care not to damage the equipment or its images. The FBI will then “enhance” the video for clarity, and all evidence will be presented to the 15th Judicial District Attorney’s Office for review, Mouton said.

     The footage may be the only video evidence in the case.

     The image I get, from those technicians working to extract the video? Like they’re physically in there, with tweezers and magnifying glasses, trying to pull the film out from among all the other techno bits inside the surveillance device. Like, don’t these things have a USB port or something?

     No, DeRay Mckesson Is Not Getting $40,000 to Speak at Yale, which was a rumour going around. On the other hand, even if he was, so what? Guy deserves some compensation for the work he’s been doing. But nope, I guess protestors gotta be poor, otherwise they’re being bought. Ech.

343. rq says

     21 September 2015 at 4:12 am

     Denzel Washington Is Bringing All 10 of August Wilson’s Plays About Black Life to HBO, just a nice thing going on for the visibility of black authors and film makers.

     Confederate flag flies in Nutley. WHY?

     Sadura and her husband purchased the flag on a recent trip to Virginia after visiting Civil War sites, she said. Two days after returning, the couple decided to hang the flag outside, which immediately drew attention.

     She noted a backlash on social media.

     “They all need to go back to school and learn American history,” Sadura said. “I believe in freedom and every war that this country has fought from day one. If these things did not happen, we would not have what we have today.”

     “I am really angry over this. I have three children. They can talk about American history. They have no issue with [the flag],” she said. “Because they know the American history of the Confederate flag – what it meant back then and what it should mean today.”

     Her neighbors have not complained, Sadura said. “My neighbors are nice, pleasant people, not hypocrites,” she said.

     Sadura has lived in Nutley for eight years, previously living in Pennsylvania.

     “The issue with this country today [is] everything revolves around racism. That’s not who I am,” she said. “I want people to mind their own damn business and to stay away from my house. Leave me alone.”

     And fuck you too.

     Denver Mother Says Fetty Wap Inspired Her Son to Go Outside Without His Prosthetic Eye. The importance of role models.

     Fetty Wap is probably one of the more recognizable newcomers to the hip-hop scene, since he has an eye deformity that he doesn’t hide. According to MTV News, Fetty lost his eye to congenital glaucoma when he was a kid.

     He doesn’t wear a prosthetic eye to cover it up, and that inspired Jayden Vaden, a young boy from Denver who also lost an eye. Jayden’s mother, Brenda Vaden, took to Facebook to thank Fetty for giving her son the confidence to go without his prosthetic eye.

     “Today I am forever thankful to a young man named Willie Maxwell, aka, Fetty Wap. While his music is catchy (not always agree with his lyrics but hey who am I to judge … ), I’m not necessarily his fan (although Trap Queen is my jam), BUT today I’m his biggest fan,” Vaden wrote.
     […]

     “Jayden, let it be known, is a Fetty Wap fan, a real fan, not like me ha! Well, today, after weeks of asking, Jayden is venturing [into] the world without his prosthetic,” Vaden said. She said that she was a bit anxious about Jayden’s decision because the world can “be cruel,” but ultimately she’s proud of her son and thankful to Fetty Wap.

     “This young rapper unknowingly gave Jayden something we weren’t able to give him—the confidence to be different—and I am grateful to him,” she said. “We’ll be purchasing his album, a small thank you to him for changing Jayden’s life forever.”

     Funny how some people will never see this positive impact, but will instead continue to malign black music (until appropriated by a proper young white starlet).

     MGH discovers why black women have more aggressive breast cancer, which hopefully will lead to better and earlier care for black women at risk.

     “In addition to having a higher prevalence of triple-negative breast cancers than Caucasian women – something that has been documented in previous studies – we found that African American women with breast cancer had a significantly higher prevalence of the TP53 driver mutation, basal tumor subtype and greater genomic diversity within tumors, all of which suggest more aggressive tumor biology,” said Dr. Tanya Keenan, of the MGH Cancer Center and lead author of the study, in a statement.

     Keenan said that when scientists controlled for these factors, the higher risk of tumors reoccurring was reduced.

     The findings suggest “that these genomic differences contribute, at least partly, to the known racial disparity in the survival of African American and Caucasian breast cancer patients,” Keenan said.

     Socioeconomic factors, such as income, health insurance and access to health care treatment, also may contribute, scientists said.

     O’Malley on his time in Baltimore: Amid Protests, Martin O’Malley Defends ‘Zero Tolerance’ Policing

     As politicians and groups across the political spectrum join forces to address the U.S.’ mass incarceration and police violence crises, former President Bill Clinton and other officials who implemented ‘tough on crime’ policies in the 1990s now say they regret their actions.

     But former Maryland Governor and Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, who promoted a regime of ‘zero tolerance’ policing in the late 90s and early 2000s, told ThinkProgress this weekend that he has no regrets from his time leading what he called “the most addicted and most violent city in America.”

     “We had a horrible problem in our city with the proliferation of open air drug markets,” O’Malley said. “People wanted them shut down, so that’s what we did. Yes, enforcement levels spiked. But we saved about 1,000 lives, probably.”

     Imagine how many more could have been saved.

     Growing Up as a Black Trans Man, a demographic little heard from.

     In the last few months, we have seen substantial growth in media coverage of trans people, and especially black trans people. From Orange Is the New Black star Laverne Cox to brilliant writer and advocate Janet Mock, black trans women are breaking out. Black trans men have also gained exposure for their achievements, from filmmaker Kortney Ryan Ziegler to artist and athlete Kye Allums.

     But even in this very visible moment for my community, I still feel invisible. Trans people have been thrust into the cultural conversation of the moment, but our actual lives and what we do to survive and thrive have not made the cut.

     For me, talking publicly about being a trans man is scary because I’ve spent a lifetime navigating situations where invisibility has been essential to survive.

     Growing up in England as a child of Caribbean immigrants, I learned quickly to minimize my visibility, embracing white English culture and distancing myself from my Caribbean roots to blend in with my peers. I would sit in the cafeteria eating traditional English food and wearing my school uniform, complete with skirt and tie, my cultural and gender identities hidden. Putting on that skirt every day was devastating, but that was what I had to do to get by.

     Keep reading at the link.

344. rq says

     21 September 2015 at 4:27 am

     Demonstrators Protest Deadly Police Shooting Outside DA’s House, this time in Denver. #PaulCastaway

     The DA’s Office provided this statement in response to the protesters: “Ms. Epps voices concerns shared with some others, because they may not have a true understanding of officer safety protocol, or the law. If she still feels that not indicting officer Traudt was the wrong decision, rather than protest at the District Attorney’s house, she should seek a judicial review.”

     In a letter to White, the DA states the officer’s use of deadly force was justified. The letter also provided information that Castaway was under the influence of drugs, suicidal and acting extremely violent when police tried to take him into custody. Castaway died at the hospital.

     In the letter, the DA acknowledges that the suspect was holding the knife to his own throat, but continued to aggressively approach the officer while refusing to comply with his orders.

     Holding a knife to his own throat, but his aggression was still more dangerous to the officers than to himself. Who seem to have been incapable of talking to him as a human being in distress.

     Families of people slain by cops protest NRA’s police shooting competition in Albuquerque. There’s your gun control aspect to the movement.

     Dozens of New Mexicans, many of them family members of people killed by police officers, took to the streets of Albuquerque on Saturday in protest of an annual police shooting competition sponsored by the National Rifle Association.

     The five-day National Police Shooting Championships in Albuquerque, which began Saturday, was hosted in a city that has come under fire in recent years for having one of the nation’s highest rates of police officer-involved shootings. It also comes as an Albuquerque officer and a retired police detective face second-degree murder charges in the March 2014 shooting death of James Boyd, a homeless man who had been camping illegally in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains.
     […]

     The demonstration, which passed by the Albuquerque Police Department headquarters, culminated with a tense standoff at the Embassy Suites Albuquerque Hotel and Spa, the host hotel for the shooting contest, where participants were meeting for a cocktail hour. The protesters, attempting to disrupt the party, tried to charge the hotel doors but were blocked by police. Namaste said Villalpando’s sister, 13, asked to speak with the officers, but only one came out to meet with her — and only to tell her that her request had been rejected.

     “I wanted them to look at us,” the girl announced through a megaphone to the crowd of about 70 demonstrators.

     A clerk at the Embassy Suites said no one was available at the hotel Saturday night to comment on the competition or the protest, which Namaste said had left several hotel guests “stunned.”

     Officials from the NRA didn’t return calls seeking comment on the contest or the demonstration. On its website, the NRA says the National Police Shooting Championships “are open to public and private law enforcement members and select law enforcement members of the U.S. military.”

     Meanwhile, Officer Dominique Perez and retired detective Keith Sandy — the first Albuquerque officers ever to face charges in a fatal shooting — have pleaded not guilty to murder charges in Boyd’s death. Perez is expected to face a hearing to determine whether he will keep his job with the department, and KOAT-TV reported last week that the two men have asked the state to investigate death threats against them.

     Maybe not the movement as such, but there’s definitely a huge overlap in the communities here.

     4 arrested during Samuel DuBose rally – seems like it was a busy weekend.

     A group of Cincinnati-based activists gathered the families of Samuel DuBose, Samantha Ramsey, Tamir Rice and John Crawford III to join in a “United March for Justice” from the University of Cincinnati’s campus to the corner of Valencia and Rice streets – where DuBose was killed – and back again.

     After the group left the corner where DuBose was shot to death, at least four arrests were made on Calhoun Street by Cincinnati police, according to Enquirer reports.

     Some pictures at the link.

     A dangerous myth about who eats fast food is completely false

     There’s a popular narrative about poor families and fast food: They eat more of it than anybody else. It’s dangled as evidence for the high rate of obesity among poorer Americans — and talked about even by some of the country’s foremost voices on food. “[J]unk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories,” wrote Mark Bittman for The New York Times in 2011

     But there’s a problem with saying that poor people like fast food better than others. It’s not true.

     New data, released by the Centers for Disease Control, show that America’s love for fast food is surprisingly income blind. Well-off kids, poor kids, and all those in between tend to get about the same percentage of their calories from fast food, according to a survey of more than 5,000 people. More precisely, though, it’s the poorest kids that tend to get the smallest share of their daily energy intake from Big Macs, Whoppers, Chicken McNuggets, and french fries.

     As shown in the chart above, children born to families living just above the poverty line and below get roughly 11.5 percent of their calories from fast food. For everyone else, the portion is closer to 13 percent.

     Surprisingly, the better-off children—those between the ages of 2 and 11 years—lead the pack. The average percentage of calories coming from fast food for kids with working and middle class parents is 9.1 percent. But poor kids only get 8 percent of their calories food.

     For teenagers, it’s those born to the poorest families, once again, who rely on fast food the least.

     Much more at the link. And I doubt the haters will pay attention to this study anyway. But basically, that’s another stereotype lopped off the list.

     Charles Theatre shut down after shooting threat. Yeah, that happened. They were screening a documentary about the Black Panthers. Coincidence?

     Buzz Cusack, owner of the Charles, said a call about the threat came in around 1 p.m. from the New York distributors of the documentary “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution,” who informed him that there was a message on Twitter claiming that a shooting would take place during the film’s 1:15 p.m. showing.

     Cusack said he called police and headed to the theatre, which was evacuated.

     Detective Jeremy Silbert of the Baltimore Police Department said officers were investigating “a threat posted on social media,” about the Charles Theatre. Police were informed of the threat around 1:30 p.m., he said.

     “In addition to our investigation, and out of an abundance of caution, we have increased patrols around the movie theater,” Silbert said.

     Cusack said that all screenings of all movies at the Charles were canceled for the rest of Saturday.
     […]

     Shortly after people were allowed to return to the theatre, a small group of moviegoers stood huddled around Nelson at the popcorn counter discussing the film — which was about 30 minutes from ending when the evacuation occurred.

     A visibly disappointed Nelson said he has enjoyed talking with moviegoers, and said he was still looking forward to a “wonderful discussion in Baltimore.”

     With police on hand, Cusack allowed that screening of the film to be completed, and Nelson said he planned to continue the discussion when it ended.

     “We don’t have a huge publicity budget, so it’s all been word of mouth and opportunities like these,” he said. “We’ve been getting out talking to as many people as we can.”

     The discussion was to have been moderated by Deray McKesson, a civil rights activist and Baltimore native who became a renowned, albeit controversial, protester on the front lines of the Black Lives Matter movement.

     McKesson said he remained unshaken by the threat, which he noted was made only against the screening he and Nelson were attending.

     “I will never be afraid to be in spaces where the truth is spoken,” he said. “These threats are an attempt to silence us, to manifest fear in ways that limit community-building. I remain as unafraid as I have ever been while remaining aware of the context within which we struggle.”

     Maurice Vann, a professor of social work and criminal justice who splits his time between New York and Baltimore, said he was excited for the screening, and especially to have McKesson and Nelson in the same room. He left, however, before the movie resumed.

     “This was an opportunity to see an intergenerational connection, that I felt lucky to purchase the right tickets for,” Vann said. “I understand the liability, and the theatre reacting this way, but I was just really excited.”

     Ergh. I’d love to see that documentary.

     Charles Theater closed following a shooting threat via social media directed at a screening of ‘Black Panthers’ documentary – a more complete headline, and just a quick summary of the same incident.

345. rq says

     21 September 2015 at 6:06 am

     Protesters hold rally near Jeff DavisMonument against bike route w confederate statues. Confederate flag flies above.

     Emmys 2015: Viola Davis becomes first black Outstanding Actress winner, leaves Kerry Washington and others in tears with impassioned speech. I believe she herself was nearly in tears.

     Viola Davis became the first Africa-American woman to win the Emmy’s top acting award – Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series – last night, thanking her fellow black actresses for persevering in an industry where the roles are often “simply not there” for people of colour.

     Accepting her award for ABC’s How To Get Away With Murder, Davis quoted Harriet Tubman, for whom she is currently working on an HBO biopic:

     “In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers, and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line. But I can’t seem to get there no-how. I can’t seem to get over that line.”

     I believe there is full video of her speech right here.

     Uzo Aduba wins historic Emmy for best supporting actress in a drama, another historic moment.

     Emmys: Viola Davis Becomes First Black Lead Actress Winner. There she is again. Congratulations! A transcript of her speech at the link.

     Cops: Man Raised $5,000 After Vandalizing Own Truck, Blaming Black Lives Matter Activists. Previous article says he raised $6000. Either way, a good amount of money.

346. rq says

     21 September 2015 at 6:25 am

     The stunning — and expanding — gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor

     Wealthy and middle-class baby boomers can expect to live substantially longer than their parents’ generation. Meanwhile, life expectancy for the poor hasn’t increased and may even be declining, according to a report published Thursday by several leading economists.

     Call it a growing inequality of death — and it means that the poor ultimately may collect less in money from some of the government’s safety net programs than the rich.

     As of 2010, the average, upper-income 50-year-old man was expected to live to 89. But the same man, if he’s lower income, would live to just 76, according to the report.

     The authors considered the effect of these shifts on the federal budget and the full range of entitlements. As their years lengthen, the rich will benefit more from Social Security, a program intended to help protect the poor from poverty in old age.

     That last little paragraph…
     Also, I wonder if they have this data by race.

     ‘Man, I Went Viral’: My Day With Ahmed Mohamed, the Most Famous Boy on Earth, which… well, this:

     Ahmed’s story struck such a nerve because the world saw a model student thrown in handcuffs like a suspect whose crime was being brown. Where most would see a white kid holding a crude electronic clock, the school apparently saw a Muslim terrorist.

     Walking up to Ahmed’s house and seeing the media, I wondered, What more is there to write?

     Really? I don’t think there’s any way you could mistake him for someone white. Anyway, note also this part:

     After the MSNBC segment, Eyman and I sit down in the hallway where she says the same thing happened to her as Ahmed.

     “I got suspended from school for three days from this stupid same district, from this girl saying I wanted to blow up the school, something I had nothing to do with.”

     Eyman talks with the slightest lisp, almost imperceptible, but it becomes stronger as she gets emotional.

     “I got suspended and I didn’t do anything about it and so when I heard about Ahmed, I was so mad because it happened to me and I didn’t get to stand up, so I’m making sure he’s standing up because it’s not right. So I’m not jealous, I’m kinda like—it’s like he’s standing for me.”

     Eyman said her suspension was in her first year of middle school, “my first year of attempting middle school in America. I knew English, but the culture was different, the people were different.”

     Anyway. I didn’t like the article. It felt a bit voyeuristic or something. Sure, he’s famous, but… I dunno.
     Annnnyway.

     Ben Carson’s Campaign Responds to Outrage Over Comments on Islam. You’d think he’d know better. Oh, and also, I don’t think christianity is consistent with the values of the Constitution, either, but I’m not USAmerican, so I probably don’t know.

     Florida Girl Arrested Under Similar Circumstances as Ahmed Mohamed Has Advice for Teen. Oh look!

     A Florida teen who was arrested in 2013 under remarkably similar circumstances as Ahmed Mohamed — who was cuffed when Texas school officials mistook a homemade clock for a bomb — has some advice for him.

     “When I read the story about Ahmed…I said ‘Oh my gosh, how could this happen again?'” Kiera Wilmot of Lakeland, Florida told ABC News today. “[In my case] sometimes I think it was racial profiling and sometimes I think it was just ignorance.”
     […]

     Wilmot, now 19, said that in April 2013 she brought a science project to school in Bartow, Florida — a makeshift volcano that she was very excited to show her teacher.

     “He said he needed to approve it first, so I brought it in thinking he literally needed to see it in person,” she said.

     She said the project was “more advanced” than a “baking soda and vinegar volcano” and her classmates asked to see how it worked.
     […]

     Wilmot said she activated the volcano outside the cafeteria of Bartow High School that morning, when the lid popped off and the bottom of the device began to smoke. No students were hurt and no school property was damaged.

     Soon after, the then 16-year-old was approached by the dean of students.

     “He said ‘What’s going on?'” Wilmot recalled. I said ‘Oh, I was just showing my science project to my friends.”

     Wilmot said when her science teacher was approached by a school official, he said there were no science experiments assigned to his class that week.

     Wilmot was then brought to the juvenile detention center where she was arrested on bomb charges.

     “I cried as soon as they told me,” she said. “As they were fingerprinting and taking mugshots I said ‘Oh my gosh, I’m an actual criminal. I know I didn’t do anything wrong but I felt like I had to believe I did something wrong.”

     At least the charges were dropped in her case. A month later, of course. But hey, she was probably only doing it to get to Space Camp, right??? *sigh*
     I’ve been wondering, who took that photo of Ahmed in handcuffs?

     Breaking tongues: carrying names across borders

     At some point in my life, without me even realising it, some white people, including university lecturers, started calling me ‘Sinth’. They pronounced the ‘th’ not as a soft ’d’ as Tamil would require it, but as an English ‘th’. It was an alteration that I had never encountered or even imagined as possible. I felt colonized. My initial shock and anger were quickly replaced by resignation as to how our bodies and cultures, including our names can be subjugated. Born into a Western dominated world, my name after all was always at risk, something that was not necessarily mine. In similar ways to my body, it was up for negotiation. When you grow up with phrases like ‘do you go by any other name?’ on meeting new people, you acclimatise to appreciating even small, albeit problematic or clumsy attempts, to call you by your birth name. Thank you for trying, thank you for seeing me, thank you for leaving me with five of my name’s original nine letters.

     Later on, some white people thought that my already butchered name was still too long and complicated. They reduced me to nothing more than ‘Sin’. ‘Sin’. In their attempts to make my name sound familiar, they cut it to what was not just remotely relatable, but a term quite literally taken from their vocabulary. And an unfortunate word at that. Known territory also provided a translation they could work with – but I couldn’t. My foreign name was no more foreign. At the end of it, it was no longer my name anymore. I wasn’t sure how to react to it, how to express my frustration and resistance without being called ‘angry’ or ‘dramatic’, without being that man of colour who sees racism and power everywhere. When you are born with nine letters and watch how you, over a short time span, are reduced to no more than three, you wonder what you’ll be left with upon death – if anything will remain of you.

     More at the link.

     Watch: Boston Cop Probed in Violent Encounter With Female Transit Rider, with video.

     A Boston transit cop has been reassigned to administrative duty after a video emerged of violent encounter between him and a female passenger aboard a bus filled with fightened and startled passengers, according to the Boston Globe.

     The video shows the unnamed transit officer raising his baton and repeatedly striking the woman, who also is not named in the incident that occurred Friday aboard the Route 15 MBTA bus in the mostly black Roxbury section of the city, the report says. After the baton strikes, the officer appears to push the woman into a seat in the back of the bus before she lunges back at him in a chaotic scene.

     Transit Police Lieutenant Richard Sullivan told the Globe that the officer confronted the woman after a vendor in the MBTA’s Dudley Square station accused her of theft. The officer walked with the vendor aboard the bus, where he pointed out the alleged thief, notes the report. She allegedly threw rubbing alcohol in the officer’s face when he asked her to step off the bus for questioning, the report says.

     “He’s on a bus giving her lawful orders to cease her behavior and she’s assaulting him,” Sullivan told the Globe. “He obviously felt threatened.”

     I didn’t think people would randomly carry around rubbing alcohol.

347. rq says

     22 September 2015 at 12:14 pm

     13 voices, 13 perspectives on Eric Striker, race and college football, because it’s okay when black people entertain us, but they should stop being black at all otehr times. Or at least, they shouldn’t make themselves noticeable.

     Are Black Women Paying the Costs of Incarceration?

     With more than 2.4 million people in jails and prisons, the United States spends $80 billion a year to sustain its system of incarceration—more than it spends on education, housing, and other important services that could prevent crime in our communities.

     Locking people up is expensive — and few groups understand that better than black women.

     I’ve paid more than my share of legal fees to support a loved one who was trying to recover from incarceration — and I know that I am not alone. In a society that stigmatizes incarceration, access to employment, housing, treatment for addiction, and other important services are often nearly impossible to access without the support of a loved one who might be more stable — even if only marginally so.

     Given the exhaustive discussions on racial disparities that present us with a working knowledge of disproportionately high incarceration rates in Black communities, it comes as no surprise how deeply impacted our women are by the incarceration of a loved one. And yet, we should all be concerned.

     According to Who Pays? The True Cost of Incarceration on Families, a new report by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together, and Research Action Design, not only are Black women largely footing the bill for our nation’s overreliance on incarceration, they are also often stigmatized when their loved ones return home and are subject to restrictive (often discriminatory) housing policies that ultimately render them vulnerable to homelessness and poverty.

     The study showed that the average debt incurred for court-related fines and fees was $13,607, a financial burden that is altogether unacceptable when you consider this amounts to almost an entire year’s annual income for people earning less than $15,000 per year — the group most vulnerable to incarceration in the first place.

     According to the report, in 63 percent of cases family members of incarcerated people were responsible for court-related costs associated with conviction. Among those responsible for these costs, 83 percent were women

     “Families are stepping up to fill the gap despite the obstacles,” said Azadeh Zohrabi, National Campaigner for the Ella Baker Center. “This report shows the generational effect of incarceration, and how it destroys social ties we need for healthy and safe communities.”

     More at the link. And people wonder why the cycle of poverty is so difficult to escape.

     I’m Bringing “Womanist” Back, an article that was relevant what with the Emmys.

     The post you’re reading is part of Book Riot’s observance of #BlackOutDay. We are turning our attention fully to issues facing black authors and readers with help from the folks at #BlackoutDay, #WeNeedDiverseBooks, and #BlackLivesMatter. Book Riot is grateful to have a platform to celebrate diversity and critically examine the book world every day, but today we have turned the reigns over to our black contributors and guest contributors all working towards social justice and good books. Enjoy!
     […]

     Through this book, Alice taught me the words I needed to be myself. Described feelings I’d never even dreamt of, but somehow understood, and knew they applied to me. Sang me to sleep on stories of Zora Neale Hurston, Rebecca Jackson, Coretta Scott King. I turned to this book—a collection of history, interviews, essays, musings, short biographies on African American writers, the Black Experience—I turned to it again and again, searching for answers the way you open the Good Book to a random page, knowing that it will give you just what you need at that moment. And it has never failed. It gave me lessons, inspiration, strength.

     Alice had me at Womanist. And my antennae vibrated: this is it.

     I’ve never been comfortable with, embraced the word or description of feminist. Just never seemed to fully apply to me, to my experience, although I support women/my/rights (I mean, as you do). Feminist seemed to limit me, to leave out a crucial side of my genetic makeup, equally as important as being a woman: I am black. I can’t and won’t separate the two, deny one in favor of the other. And more importantly, I’m about people, inclusive, full stop.

     Womanist: “from womanish…a black feminist or feminist of color…committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female…traditionally universalist.”

     Makes sense to me.

     Bratton Tries a Community Policing Approach, on the New York Police – ah, but will the police become more community-oriented?

     Watch Viola Davis’s Speech as First Woman Of Color to Win ‘Outstanding Actress’ Emmy. Oh, watch it again. And again.

     White As the Default

     As I got a bit older, passed through my obligatory Twilight and Hunger Games phase, entered college, and became a young adult interested in Social Justice and Human Rights, I became a bit critical of the things I had encountered. A large number of the protagonists I had learned to love, both contemporary and classical had one thing that tied them together: they were white. I had consumed hundreds of books, encountered thousands of characters and a large majority of those that were human, or humanoid, were white or white coded. Characters of Color were lacking and many of my favorite series were guilty of having all white characters or one or two token People of Color. Lack of diversity isn’t a trend specific to literature; we see it all the time in the other forms of media we consume. The idea that literary characters, even when they are left open for a bit of interpretation, are white by default contributes to this lack of representation for readers that are People of Color. I realized that “white unless described otherwise” had become an internalized idea I had despite the fact that I was a little black girl growing up within African American and Afro-Caribbean cultures. Lack of representation on the page lead me to believe that people that looked like me did not really exist in the worlds authors built. Even characters that could exist as any race with no major change to the story were white.

     No roles for black people.

348. rq says

     22 September 2015 at 12:20 pm

     FROM THE ARCHIVES: “You can’t do that! Stories have to be about White people”. FALSE! So sad how many people believe this.
     Read on.

     Defectors: ISIS is killing Muslims, not protecting them

     Much has been written about the young men and women who join the Islamic State. We are familiar with their biographies and pathways, backgrounds and motivations.

     But virtually nothing is known about those who quit: the “defectors” who didn’t like what they saw, abandoned their comrades and fled the Islamic State. Yet their stories could be key to stopping the flow of foreign fighters, countering the group’s propaganda and exposing its lies and hypocrisy.

     For a short paper, I collected all published stories about people who have left the Islamic State and spoken about their defection. I discovered a total of 58 — a sizable number but probably only a fraction of those who are disillusioned or ready to leave.

     They are a new and growing phenomenon. Of the 58 cases, nearly two thirds of the defections took place in the year 2015. One third happened during the summer months alone.

     The defectors’ experiences are diverse. Not everyone has become a fervent supporter of liberal democracy. Some may, in fact, have committed crimes. They were all, at some point, enthusiastic supporters of the most violent and viciously totalitarian organization of our age. Yet they are now its worst enemies.

     The quality of their testimony varies, and the precise circumstances and reasons for leaving the Islamic State aren’t always clear. What convinced me that, as a whole, their stories are credible is how consistent their messages were.

     Among the 58 defector stories, I found four narratives that were particularly strong:

     One of the most persistent criticisms was the extent to which the group is fighting against other Sunni rebels. According to the defectors, toppling the Assad regime didn’t seem to be a priority, and little was done to help the (Sunni) Muslims who were targeted by it.

     Most of the group’s attention, they said, was consumed by quarrels with other rebels and the leadership’s obsession with “spies” and “traitors.” This was not the kind of jihad they had come to Syria and Iraq to fight.

     Another narrative dealt with the group’s brutality. Many complained about atrocities and the killing of innocent civilians. They talked about the random killing of hostages, the systematic mistreatment of villagers and the execution of fighters by their own commanders.

     None of the episodes they mentioned involved minorities, however. Brutality didn’t seem to be a universal concern: it was seen through a sectarian lens, and caused outrage mostly when its victims were other Sunnis.

     Keep reading at the link.

     Blood at the Root, which is weirdly dated September 28 of this year, but what the heck, I’ll take the future.

     In the winter of 2008, Barack Obama was in no way guaranteed the African-American vote in the Democratic primaries. He had split the opening contests, Iowa and New Hampshire, with Hillary Clinton, and had narrowly won more delegates in Nevada, yet the black voters of South Carolina, particularly the middle-aged and graying churchgoers who come out to the polls in great numbers, were torn. At first, some knew so little about him that they were not sure he was black. Others, following the lead of well-known figures in the old civil-rights establishment, felt warmly toward the Clintons and saw no reason to break with them. There was also a more visceral concern: many African-American voters told Obama’s volunteers in South Carolina that they could not shake the memory of the many black leaders over the decades who had met a violent end. When they looked at Barack Obama, hope and change was not the only future they could imagine.

     Anton Gunn, a self-confident young community organizer, told Obama’s campaign chiefs in Chicago that if they wanted to win the state they needed to hire him and follow his advice. The Clintons had already enlisted many black leaders in South Carolina—politicians, pastors, downtown business people—but the Obama campaign could still win, Gunn said, by targetting the “Miss Mary”s, older women who were centers of good will and polite gossip in the black churches, who had a hand in every charity event and Bible-study group. To win the younger black vote, Gunn told the campaign chiefs, they should, in classic hip-hop fashion, distribute free mixtapes of Obama’s best stump performances. Obama, who had to erase any lingering impression that he was a callow newcomer, came to Sumter County and, echoing the language of Malcolm X as portrayed by Denzel Washington, told an enthusiastic crowd, “Don’t let people turn you around, because they’re just making stuff up. That’s what they do. They try to bamboozle you, hoodwink you.”

     But that was not quite enough. A CBS poll before the primary said that forty per cent of the black voters in the state believed that the country was not ready to elect an African-American President. The campaign planned an event that was intended to resonate more deeply with black South Carolina, particularly with its Miss Marys. The event was to take place in the town of Orangeburg. In 1968, after protests against a segregated bowling alley, police shot into a crowd of black college students, killing three and injuring dozens more. This became known as the Orangeburg Massacre. Michelle Obama went to Orangeburg as her husband’s surrogate. Born on the South Side of Chicago, she was descended from Low Country slaves who worked in the rice fields around Georgetown, South Carolina. At the rally, she assured the crowd that her husband was “running to be the President who finally lifts up the poor and forgotten,” and gently prodded her listeners to tear away the “veil of impossibility . . . that keeps us waiting and hoping for a turn that may never come.” She ended on a note of solidarity and daring: “Imagine our family on that inaugural platform. America will look at itself differently.”

     On January 26th, Obama crushed Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in South Carolina, sweeping the black vote and winning fifty-five per cent of the vote over all. The victory secured the black vote for Obama during the rest of the campaign and a lead in the primaries that he never lost. At the victory celebration in Columbia, Obama told his volunteers that they had assembled “the most diverse coalition of Americans that we’ve seen in a long, long time.”

     The crowd answered Obama in full-throated euphoria: “Race doesn’t matter! Race doesn’t matter!”

     Ah, the cry of post-racial America, how it resounds even unto today!

     General Hospital’s Nancy Lee Grahn on Viola Davis’ Historic Emmy Win: “She’s Never Been Discriminated Against”. Yep, she said that, was corrected on Twitter, and then she dug her heels in. And was rightly pointed out that, when Davis mentions ‘women’, Grahn automatically excluded white women, as Davis not being representative of all women. There was a lot more. But this article pretty much covers it.

349. rq says

     22 September 2015 at 3:24 pm

     Regina, Uzo, Viola and The Blackest Emmy Awards Ever. Let’s hear it for being given the opportunity!!

     I (and countless others) have spent years complaining about the monochrome Emmy Awards (read: my post on 2013 Emmy Awards Embodied TV’s White Problem). It is usually a show that is white people giving other white people every award, and the audience is sprinkled with a few Black and brown faces to keep everyone patting their own backs. Not this year. Well, it’s still a big white scoop with colored sprinkles, except the Black sprinkles walked on stage and got the props they deserve. It was the Blackest Emmy Awards I’ve ever seen, and this is why I have hollered myself hoarse.

     And check this out, as a sample:

     First was for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie. Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard were presenters and it was a tough category that included Kathy Bates the Beast. I was sure she would win because it’s Kathy MUFUGGING BATES. THREE out of the six the nominees were Black women, though (Angela Bassett for American Horror Story: Freak Show and Mo’Nique for Bessie). The name that Taraji called out was REGINA KING for American Crime. She SCREAMED it out!

     Scream it. LOUDER. There’s some white people in the back who don’t hear you. And this:

     Even the commercials were hella Black. Especially that Apple Music ad featuring Mary J. Blige, Kerry Washington and Taraji jamming to the “Instant Boyfriend Mixtape Playlist.” AND it was directed by Ava DuVernay, whose Blackness can’t ever be questioned. She’s so Black, she could vouch for Rachel Dolezal to come into our annual picnic and I’d only be mad for like 15 minutes. You already know how Black the rest of those ladies are. Mary J. has sang about chicken before. It does not and will not ever get any Blacker than that. And Taraji told Jody how much she hates him several times. And Kerry is married to a Nigerian man and got an Igbo name now (Ogechi). I call her AdeKerry, doe, because us Yorubas wanna claim her too. That’s my cousin.

     And to finish:

     Whew. The Emmys got me TOO hype. It was special. If you’re white and wondering why we’re celebrating this so much, you should know that this is what privilege looks like. Never noticing that you are NOT in the room means you are ALWAYS in the room, which is a benefit we do not have.

     The issue of diversity (or lack thereof) in Hollywood is critiqued often. When Emmy host Andy Samberg was doing a mini tribute to Lorne Michaels, creator of Saturday Night Live, he mentioned that over 40 of the people who were nominated for a 2015 Emmy Award had worked for Lorne. It showed how incredibly powerful this one man and that ONE show is to the careers of people working in TV. SNL is a spring board and if comedians of colors are being locked out, it locks them out of many other opportunities in the TV industry. That lack of diversity goes down to Upright Citizen Brigade, where most of SNL’s castmembers are plucked from. Rita Chinyere, a Black woman who has been in UCB wrote a piece recently saying why she’s quitting the place.

     Back in May, when that Deadline piece dropped asking if there was too much “ethnicity” on television, we had to fight the air in rage. How dare they ask that question when TV’s commitment to be Pre-technicolor Pleasantville is long and strong? And here we are, few months later, celebrating historical wins by Black women who have not just earned it, but they have the experience and training to back it up. They have put in WORK.

     Last night’s wins were not tokenism. They were a long time coming and it was given to women whose performances in their shows have compelled people to fall in love with their characters and marvel at their work every episode.

     Trivial? Nuh-uh. Never. Representation matters. Ope, I lied, here’s the last thing from that:

     Now’s a good time to remember that diversity does not just mean “More Black people.” It means more Latin@s, more Asians, more Trans* people, more gay people, more disabled people. Diversity is supposed to be about a better reflection of the world we live in. Every space does not need to be for everybody nor it does mean every single show needs to be the Rainbow Coalition. But television as a whole, can no longer be majority straight, white men and women. It cannot. Sure, there’s room for Girls but ALL programs cannot look like they’re about their next door neighbors and family members.

     We might be getting our feet in the door but we need to get the rest of our bodies in there too. This is a start. THIS is a victory that we should celebrate. However, we cannot stop the work that got those gains, because when we rest, they get erased.

     So yah, representation matters – for everyone.

     Protester says Cincinnati Police used Taser on him because he ‘flipped off’ another officer. Who do YOU believe?

     Confederate Group Counters #BlackLivesMatter Protest with Misspelled Plane Banner. Laugh at them. Go ahead. I did.

     TheBlaze reported that this group, called The Virginia Flaggers, was trying to push back against #BlackLivesMatter and efforts to get Confederate monuments renamed.

     #BlackLivesMatter was in Virginia on training day for the UCI Road World Championships and protesters spoke about how “most Richmonders do not support showcasing these monuments to Confederate military and political leaders during this world-famous sports event.”

     How One Designer Risked Everything To Prove #BlackLivesMatter

     On Friday, September 11th, the second day of New York Fashion Week, dozens of excited fans flocked to Pyer Moss’ 2016 Spring/Summer runway show. Anticipation was justifiably high: a few weeks prior, Kerby Jean-Raymond, Pyer Moss’ 28-year-old designer, had received an in-depth look by The Washington Post. In the interview, he detailed his intentions to put on a fashion show that would take a searing look at society. The Washington Post wrote, “He is producing a video, to be played during his runway show, in which he is asking people to discuss race, racism and racial injustice in policing.” It was a prestigious look for the designer, for the brand, and for the fashion world as a whole, a scene so often derided as shallow and myopic. It also nearly shut Jean-Raymond down before he’d even gotten started.

     Meeting with the designer the day before the show, Fashionista describes a high-level of agitation and anxiety. The venue where he’d originally planned to hold his presentation backed out, saying “they didn’t think he could keep the attendance under capacity.” Jean-Raymond says he lost a retail account in Europe, and worried that his stance had put his employee’s livelihoods in jeopardy. It was a bleak look for a brand that just passed its second anniversary.

     But Jean-Raymond remained adamant. The next day, at The Altman Building in Chelsea, a 12-minute compilation of footage from the documented police killings of Eric Garner, Walter Scott, as well as interviews with the families of Oscar Grant and Sean Bell was screened to a captive audience. The crowd reacted: gasps and murmurs of “oh my god” can be heard in the background of clips of the film that have since been uploaded to the internet. Jean-Raymond went on to say that he intended on not showing the clothes at all, telling the Washington Post, “I wasn’t even going to show the collection…I wanted to just show the video, open the doors and let everyone out.”

     More at the link.

     Can’t read this but it seemed intriguing – Black Lives Matter: Thoughts from the Delivery Ward in St Louis. Anyone?

     This is one of the best paragraphs I’ve read on black-on-black homicides

     But in her new book Ghettoside, journalist Jill Leovy argues that the abhorrent levels of black-on-black homicide and other racial disparities in the criminal justice system are two sides of the same coin — as summarized by this great paragraph:

     Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.

     Under this argument, black Americans are exposed to both neglect and over-policing by the criminal justice system. The question isn’t whether police use of force in black communities or black-on-black crime is a bigger problem, but rather how we got to a point in the criminal justice system in which both are problems.

     Council to vote on removing Sandra Bland from road name. They just put it up…

350. rq says

     22 September 2015 at 3:40 pm

     Dayum, moderation on the previous. Highly recommended reading.

     Junot Diaz on reading, writing, and America’s amnesia about race

     When Junot Diaz published “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” in 2007, fans had been waiting almost a decade since his stellar debut, the short story collection “Drown.” The wait paid off: “Oscar Wao” was a wildly engaging novel about a Dominican teen in New Jersey. The novel hit bestseller lists and scooped up a heap of literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Diaz followed that up with a number of short stories published in the New Yorker and later in the 2012 collection “This Is How You Lose Her,” a National Book Award finalist.

     Now a writing teacher at MIT, the Dominican Republic-born, New Jersey-raised Diaz doesn’t make it to the West Coast very often. He’ll be visiting Occidental on Tuesday at 7 p.m. to read from his work, which he’ll discuss with writer Danzy Senna. The event is free and open to the public.

     Diaz categorizes his stories in different ways — “family loss,” “masculine stupidity” — but hasn’t yet decided what he’ll read. As a frequent presenter of his work, Diaz says he waits until the last minute, wanting to get a feel for the room and the audience.

     Interview at the link.

     James Blake meets with New York mayor and NYPD chief after arrest. See link for more.

     Jews in America struggled for decades to become white. Now we must give up whiteness to fight racism. A decent argument –

     This summer, I had a conversation with a young woman about her Jewish identity. She told me how she grew up in a family that was very involved in her synagogue. She went to Jewish day school. She had been to Israel multiple times. But she felt very far from her Jewishness. She simply couldn’t find the relevance of Judaism as she was making her way on her own in the world. I asked her what she did feel passionate about. She told me she has been reading and thinking a lot about racial justice. What moved her was the #BlackLivesMatter movement — how, in light of Ferguson, Charleston and seemingly endless incidents of injustice against black people in our society, she felt a need to grapple with the racism that is so pervasive in this country and how it affects her identity.

     “As a white woman,” she said, “as the product of so much white privilege, it makes me all the more angry to see how other white people so blindly and carelessly feed into the racial climate of our society.” “So the fact that you are white makes this issue all the more painful, all the more personal for you?” I asked. “Yes,” she said.

     I certainly identified with her angst. I find the reality of American racism unbearable: the legacy of slavery; the institutional discrimination that is so pervasive; the scourge of mass incarceration of black Americans, with its collateral damage on families; the ongoing blight of housing segregation; the role of law enforcement in furthering racist systems and hierarchies; all this, and so much more. My answer to her, and my answer for all American Jews during these Days of Awe, is that finding our true Jewish identity can begin by questioning our whiteness.

     In a flawed and racist society, we Jewish Americans are prospering, reaching the top echelons of privilege and power. With racism and injustice entrenched year after year, generation after generation, we must now ask ourselves: What role do we play in that injustice now that most of us live as white people in America? We must cease to consider ourselves to be part of the social construct of whiteness, despite all the white privilege that America affords us, privilege that eluded many of our parents and grandparents. Starting in this new year of 5776, we must teach our children that we are, in fact, not white, but simply Jewish.

     That takes care of one segment of the population, what about white christians? Oozing all that privilege?

     DUMBO Parents Push Back Against Rezoning That Would Integrate Schools. Because having children of colour interact with your precious white genetic material is… dunno? Bad? Heh. I can only wish for more diversity around here.

     Demonstrators Protest Deadly Police Shooting Outside DA’s House, about Denver- possible repost?

351. rq says

     22 September 2015 at 3:43 pm

     Tonight I leave you with some Ta-Nehisi Coates and the tail-ends:
     Ta-Nehisi Coates to Write Black Panther Comic for Marvel. Have I posted this before? Yes? Well BOOM read it again! Nice. Representation.

     The shocking racial epithet hurled at USC’s student body president. Is it shocking because nobody’s heard it before? I like how all this racism all the time is ‘shocking’ when… heck, white people, you just haven’t been listening! We’ve been sitting around not paying attention. Shocking, indeed – only to those with their ears shut and hands over their eyes.

     Utah mom says school ‘racially profiled’ her teenage daughter for being white and having dreadlocks. Sweet dreams, everyone.

352. rq says

     22 September 2015 at 3:46 pm

     Note: Y’all have time to catch up on the reading for the next four or five days. I’m travelling sans computer, therefore sans Twitter (no smartphone for me), so no major catching up. I will just post all the open tabs from work computer tomorrow, and then – regular scheduling resumes around Monday or so. See y’all!

353. chigau (違う) says

     22 September 2015 at 3:54 pm

     Thanks, rq.
     We’ll be here when you return.

354. rq says

     23 September 2015 at 8:48 am

     Here’s the leftovers I have at work (it’ll take a couple of comments, then I’m off):
     An article from the Toronto Star on racial disparities in children staying in foster care, sorry, I lost the title because reasons.

     Brampton residents push to end street checks, the slightly more polite, Canadian, version of stop-and-frisk.

     Positive steps in Ferguson;
     A plan to end police abuse;
     Bernie Sanders and the black vote;
     James Blake arrest video.
     Those last four from Mano Singham.

355. rq says

     23 September 2015 at 8:57 am

     A better way to handle protestors, a somewhat aside that demonstrates a different approach to heckling from people who disagree.

     When irrational fears provoke murder, also somewhat tangential but also not.
     These two previous from Mano Singham.

     The Dishonest Self-Appeasement of “Not All Cops”

     Listeners of the show and Graffiti Wall Readers, don’t always get to ask me questions outright; sometimes ya’ll need clarity. Although I read them, it’s impractical for me to address every single email, especially the mini-novels. I’ll try and address some issues on air, however the rest I’ll address here. So today, I want to address the big one:

     [image saying Alix hates all cops]

     Its an indictment from law enforcement and their supporters, which usually emanates from the lack of understanding of the dynamic between policing and the “minority” communities (Black, Brown, and Native Americans). The complaint is often coupled with anger, disdain, and a general sentiment of personal attack. Its normal to take it personally, I would. I address the often immoral policies they protect, the code they live by, and ultimately, their livelihood. Its like talking to theists about the justification of their specific beliefs, where they can’t separate what they believe from who they are. Its frustrating.

     However, even in the best conversations with officers, just as I have with theists, there is usually a missing piece of history that they gloss over or blatantly dismiss. For theists, it might be the whole killing babies thing, inability to reconcile creation thing, or the Flood that never happened thing. For many police supporters, its the the historicity of policing and its influence on the way they approach minority communities they over police.

     Hyperbole aside, when I draw a parallel between today’s policing and hired slave hunters, militia, and overseers from the plantations, there’s merit. As prominent police historian Samuel Walker succinctly noted:

     “…the difficulty of establishing dates marking the origins of American modern-style policing, that is, a system of law enforcement involving a permanent agency employing full-time officers who engage in continuous patrol of fixed beats to prevent crime. The traditional analyses, based on urban evidence, have suggested that such policing evolved from older systems of militias, sheriffs, constables, and night watches, and culminated in the “new police” of Boston in 1838, New York City in 1845, Chicago in 1851, New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1852, Philadelphia in 1854, St. Louis in 1855, Newark and Baltimore in 1857,and Detroit in 1865.

     … these analyses neglect that: [many other cities with] elaborate police arrangements were those with large slave populations where white masters lived in dread of possible black uprisings.”

     Mitigate the possibilities of the damage from the inevitability of a black insurgence. Sounds right.

     If you use that as as your premise, instead of serve and protect, things start to make more sense.

     More at the link.

     What a privilege indeed, a post by our Tony. In case you aren’t already doing so, I highly recommend perusing his blog archive for past articles on racism, police brutality, and white supremacy. Great stuff.

     You’ve got a (black) friend, from Dr Singham again.

     Ta-Nehisi Coates rips Trump, Ted Cruz and conservatives campaigning against #BlackLivesMatter

     Coates appeared in the wake of his latest story for The Atlantic, in which he argued that the “original intent” of the Moynihan Report — published 50 years ago by then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan should be reclaimed.

     He told Hayes that, while he did not care to use the phrase “both sides” in discussing political criticism, he felt that both liberals and conservatives had misunderstood the report.

     “From the liberal perspective, the notion that Moynihan was in any way blaming the victim, I think, is just completely off,” he argued. “Moynihan is very, very clear about where the blame should be. And not only that, if you listen to the speech that [then-President] Lyndon Johnson gave that was inspired by the Moynihan Report, he literally says — even as he talks about family breakdown — that blame must be laid at the feet of white society, a statement no president would make today.”

     But conservatives alluding to the report’s emphasis on family, he continued, “are not so eager to make allusions to the fact that Moynihan was very much calling for government action — for money to be spent on behalf of black people. He thought it should be done through the family, but he was a liberal who believed in government action. One of the regrettable decisions that Moynihan made was leaving out solutions, and the result was it left it open for folks who wanted to just lament the problem but felt that government should do nothing about it.”

     Read it all at the link.
     Video also available, I believe.

356. Saad says

     23 September 2015 at 5:09 pm

     Presidential hopeful and racist theocrat Mike Huckabee says Obama just pretends to be Christian

     Mike Huckabee suggested President Barack Obama “pretends to be” a Christian in knocking the President’s handling of Pope Francis’ first visit to the U.S.

     When asked on Newsmax TV’s “The Hard Line” on Tuesday about Ben Carson’s comments that a Muslim should not be president of the United States, the former Arkansas governor began by saying there is no religious test for public office, but then shifted to a comment about Obama.

     “I’m less concerned about what faith the person has. I’m more concerned about the authenticity of their faith and how that plays out in their politics … I’m also concerned about a guy that believes he’s a Christian and pretends to be and then says he is, but then does things that makes it very difficult for people to practice their Christian faith,” Huckabee said.

     “I’m disappointed if someone says, ‘I’m a Christian,’ but you invite the pope into your home and then you invite a whole bunch of people who are at odds with the Catholic Church policy. I think there’s something very unseemly about that,” he added.

     He also tweeted this about the Pope’s visit:

     I welcome @Pontifex to America & offer my apologies that @POTUS will not offer him the warm, respectful welcome he deserves

     Ha ha. He’s just jealous that the Pope came to see Obama and has never even heard of Mike Huckabee.

357. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     25 September 2015 at 1:34 pm

     CFPB and DOJ Order Hudson City Savings Bank to Pay $27 Million to Increase Mortgage Credit Access in Communities Illegally Redlined:

     Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a joint action against Hudson City Savings Bank for discriminatory redlining practices that denied residents in majority-Black-and-Hispanic neighborhoods fair access to mortgage loans. The complaint filed by the CFPB and DOJ alleges that Hudson City illegally provided unequal access to credit to neighborhoods in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. The bank located branches and loan officers, selected mortgage brokers, and marketed products to avoid and thereby discourage prospective borrowers in predominantly Black and Hispanic communities. If the proposed consent order is approved by the court, Hudson City will pay $25 million in direct loan subsidies to qualified borrowers in the affected communities, $2.25 million in community programs and outreach, and a $5.5 million penalty. This represents the largest redlining settlement in history to provide such direct subsidies.

     “We allege that Hudson City’s redlining practices illegally cut off opportunities for consumers in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods to get a mortgage and achieve the dream of homeownership,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray. “Without access to affordable credit, neighborhoods deteriorate in the long shadow cast by unfair lending. Today’s action seeks to remove the redline by bringing more than $27 million in mortgage subsidies and outreach programs, along with new bank branches to the communities who should have had access from the beginning.”

     “This case should send a message to lenders throughout the country that the Justice Department will not tolerate racial discrimination in the extension of credit,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, head of the Civil Rights Division. “A lending institution must treat all potential borrowers equally, regardless of their race or the racial composition of their neighborhood, when deciding to offer its loan services. We encourage all lenders to proactively identify responsible lending opportunities that exist in predominantly minority neighborhoods within their lending areas.”

     “Hudson City Savings Bank structured its business operations to systemically avoid providing credit services in predominantly minority neighborhoods,” said U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman of the District of New Jersey. “There is no room for such behavior in our banking system. In addition to paying $25 million for a loan subsidy program, today’s settlement agreement will require the bank to take a number of concrete steps to ensure that they improve access to responsible and affordable credit to qualified borrowers in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.”

358. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     25 September 2015 at 1:44 pm

     Gov. Kasich waives food stamp time limit for rural whites, forces urban minorities to go hungry:

     In 1996, then-Congressman John Kasich cosponsored a welfare reform bill that, for the first time ever, put a time limit on recipients’ access to food stamps. Healthy, childless adults would be able to receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for no more than three months in any three-year period, unless they were employed or in a training program for at least 20 hours a week. When Congress balked at a rule that would cause an estimated 1 million people to lose food aid each month, Kasich added an exception that would allow states to seek time-limit waivers for areas with especially high unemployment.

     Twenty years later, in his second term as Ohio’s governor, the GOP presidential hopeful is taking advantage of these waivers, as most governors have done. But Ohio civil rights groups and economic analysts say Kasich’s administration is using the waivers unequally: It applies for waivers in some regions of the state but refuses them in others, in a pattern that has disproportionately protected white communities and hurt minority populations.

     “The Kasich administration could have addressed the racial inequity in 2016,” says Wendy Patton, a senior project director at Policy Matters Ohio, an economic policy research nonprofit, who has written extensively on the state’s recent food stamp waiver policy. “The Kasich administration chose not to. The state should broaden its request to encompass all places and regions where jobs are scarce and people are hungry.”

     In 2014, the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS) had the option to waive time limits on food stamps for the entire state. Due to a struggling economy and high unemployment, Ohio had qualified for and accepted this statewide waiver from the US Department of Agriculture every year since 2007, including during most of Kasich’s first term as governor. But this time, Kasich rejected the waiver for the next two years in most of the state’s 88 counties. His administration did accept them for 16 counties in 2014 and for 17 counties in 2015. Most of these were rural counties with small and predominantly white populations. Urban counties and cities, most of which had high minority populations, did not get waivers.

     […]

     The policy went into effect in October 2013. By January—the three-month mark where those without waivers began losing their food stamps if they couldn’t meet the work requirement—it had become clear that the policy had spawned a stark racial disparity in food aid. Across the 16 counties the state had selected for waivers, about 94 percent of food stamp recipients were white. Overall in Ohio in December 2013—immediately before the new policy’s effects began to surface—food stamp recipients were 65 percent white.

     All lives matter, huh?
     Yeah…right.

359. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 September 2015 at 4:29 pm

     I don’t think this link has been posted. If so, my apologies.
     If black lives matter, respectability politics should be a thing of the past:

     This week’s compulsory reading is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ wonderful, harrowing, depressing Atlantic cover story, an examination of the prison-industrial complex entitled “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” The essay examines the history of incarceration, and how the criminalization of the young black male functions as a form of social control and a source of cheap labor. One of the striking things in Coates’ piece is the observation that the rise of incarceration has paralleled the rise of emancipation; mirroring their increase in the wake of slavery’s abolition, incarceration rates have continued to rise since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, despite crime rates actually falling in that time. In this light, the victories of the ’60s seem like mirages, ghostly images that have no power to affect the plight of today’s generation of African Americans.

     As if to provide a counterpoint, this month’s Harper’s cover story, by Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy, is called “In Defense of Respectability,” and provides a decidedly old-fashioned call to resurrect the respectability politics of the Civil Rights Movement. (Unlike some of those expressing similar views, Kennedy doesn’t quite tell his younger contemporaries to pull their pants up, but he comes close.)

     Clearly, these two pieces illustrate a generation gap in the thinking of black intellectuals; Coates has been a pretty vocal critic of the ideas Kennedy espouses, and indeed, Kennedy quotes him as calling respectability “one of the most disreputable traditions” in politics. The arguments against it are easy to make: a) it doesn’t work — you can be as respectable as you like and still get arrested or killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; and b) it involves subjugating yourself to the standards of those who are oppressing you. Kennedy doesn’t argue with the latter point, but he does challenge the former: “My parents’ goal was not to apportion blame; it was to keep their children clear of danger — even as they recognized that the need to expend energy to avoid that danger was itself an unfair product of racism.”

     On a fundamental level, what we have here is a pretty classic question of pragmatism versus idealism. Clearly, if you’re living in a country where the color of your skin has meant for centuries that you’re criminalized, brutalized, exploited, and oppressed, you do whatever you can to survive, and no one should ever blame you for doing so. It’s like riding a bike in traffic: cars should treat you with respect and not do dumb things that could kill you, but in an argument between a bicycle and a two-ton steel death machine — or between a black person and a giant police state that thrives on the prison industrial complex — there’s only going to be one winner.

     Of course, all your survival strategies can be for naught. You can ride defensively and obey traffic signals and wear a helmet and still get collected from behind by some dickhead who’s more interested in sending a text message than watching the road. You can be Sandra Bland, an avatar of respectability (job, car, etc.) who gets stopped by the cops for a made-up reason and ends up dead in a cell. Black America never gets to get off the bicycle. Again, Kennedy doesn’t deny this; his rationale lies in giving yourself the best chance you can of not being a victim.

     As a white man, I don’t have an opinion on whether respectability politics are valuable in a pragmatic sense; I wouldn’t presume to tell black Americans what they should or shouldn’t do in their attempts to survive and/or bring centuries of oppression to an end. Obviously, I think that the need for respectability politics is nonsense; a fellow human is worthy of respect no matter what the color of their skin, or how low they wear their pants. It’s not black Americans who need to adapt to white standards; it’s whites who need to stop killing black Americans for failing to conform to those standards.

     Which brings me to the point I do want to discuss, as a white man: what white people can do about this. Being white in a state that is underpinned by 400 years of the exploitation of people who don’t look like you for the benefit of people who do look like you brings its own… discomforts, obviously, at least if you’re inclined to basic human decency and thus to questioning the existence of the apparatus that enables your comfort and prosperity. Equally, the challenge of changing anything can seem overwhelming — as Coates’ essay makes all too clear, the prison industrial complex is so deeply woven into the fabric of the American economy (sometimes in the most unexpected ways) that dismantling it seems a hopeless task.

     But paralysis is its own form of privilege; you can choose to absent yourself from the struggle because it all seems too hard. Black Americans don’t have the luxury of making that choice. The struggle can come and take them at any time.

     The truth is that if you were inclined to listen, you’d listen anyway — and if not, no amount of politeness and respectability would sway you. So here is what you can do as a white person: listen anyway. Don’t dismiss the opinions of people — any people, let alone disenfranchised minorities — out of hand. All of us have latent prejudices, so interrogate those prejudices and examine why they exist. If you react badly to an “angry” black man or woman, think about why that is. Understand that by the dint of the color of your skin, your voice carries more weight than theirs. Think about how to use it.

     And then: do something. I have nothing but admiration — deep, humbling admiration — for writers like Coates. I have the same admiration for those who took to the streets in Ferguson, men and women whose names I don’t know, and that America doesn’t know. There’s a Japanese proverb that says, “The stake that sticks up gets hammered down,” and that’s exactly what these people are doing: sticking up and risking being hammered down, again and again and again.

     As a white man in America — even one like me, who lives on the knife edge of the visa system — the stakes are far lower. My single glimpse into what Coates calls The Grey Wastes, America’s own Gulag Archipelago, was the only one I’m likely to have, unless I’m extremely unlucky: I got ticketed last year for riding my bike on the sidewalk, and I was the only white man in line at the district court on the morning of my scheduled appearance. I got no chance to argue my case, because of course I didn’t — I just paid the $100 fine and left. I had $100 to spare, so it was no problem. The cops who ticketed me seemed almost apologetic. “We have to do this,” they told me. “Just pay the fine.”

     I’m not arguing for whites to take the lead in this latest civil rights struggle; I’m arguing for them to form the vanguard. As ever, there’s a dilemma for whatever privileged group wants to get involved with a fight that is not, strictly, theirs: how to direct the heat away from those whose fight it is, while not marginalizing them in their own battle. So: be leaders in your own communities. Remove the need for respectability politics. Educate your parents and your friends and your contemporaries and your racist uncle. Stop finding reasons to turn your ears away. And when the time comes, take to the streets and take the welts that were destined for your black neighbors. The bruises will fade. You’ll be fine.

360. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 September 2015 at 6:21 pm

     Black tv journalist in VA granted order of protection against white man:

     “Donald ‘Donnie’ Visel Jr. made a shooting motion at WSLS reporter Duke Carter while he was reporting in the field, according to court testimony in Montgomery County, where Carter resides,” Austin wrote Wednesday.

     “Based on other court evidence and testimony Wednesday, here’s what happened on Saturday, Sept. 5:

     “Carter said he was working on a story at the Smith Mountain Lake Kroger on a fundraiser for WDBJ shooting survivor Vicki Gardner. WDBJ journalists Alison Parker and Adam Ward were killed as a result of the shootings at Bridgewater Plaza at the lake.

     “Around 11:30 a.m. that day, Carter said he heard a man’s voice yelling at him from a nearby truck.

     ” ‘Hey, Frankie Jupiter,’ the man, later identified as Visel, yelled at Carter.

     “Jupiter is a former WDBJ reporter.

     “Carter said he was confused by the comment, ignored Visel, and continued filming his shot.

     ” ‘I thought, he must be talking to the Channel 7 guy who was filming next to me,’ Carter said.

     “But again, the voice rang out at Carter, yelling ‘Frankie Jupiter!’

     “Carter said he eventually realized the man was trying to get his attention, and Carter said he responded, ‘I’m not Frankie Jupiter.’

     “Visel, 28, who had been circling the parking lot said to him, ‘Oh, you’re right. You’re dead,’ and then proceeded to make a shooting motion with his hands directly at Carter.

     ” ‘I was frozen in fear,’ Carter said. ‘This was the exact same road where Alison and Adam were shot.’ . . .”

     As reported in this space on Sunday, Kelly Zuber, WDBJ-TV news director, told journalists at the Excellence in Journalism convention in Orlando Saturday that an African American reporter from WDBJ-TV and another from the competing WSLS-TV were reporting in the aftermath of the shooting incident when a man in a pickup truck formed his hand like a gun, pointed it at the reporters and called out the name of the shooter.

     Carter sent word through a colleague Sunday that he did not want to discuss the incident or speak with Journal-isms because the perpetrator was unaware of the order. The colleague told Journal-isms never to call the station again.

     Austin also wrote, ” ‘All of the news journalists in the area were on high alert,’ Carter said.

     “Roanoke police confirmed that extra patrol officers were sent to WSLS on Sept. 5, prompted by the incident.

     “Carter said he decided to seek a protective order against Visel because no criminal charges were filed.

     “Visel, 28, has a criminal history in Franklin County, including a trespassing conviction from June of this year as well as drug and alcohol convictions, according to online court records. He also has an assault charge pending in Franklin County.

     “Visel, who remained quiet for most of Wednesday’s hearing, said at one point: ‘I just want to apologize to the man.’

     “After listening to testimony, Judge Randal Duncan looked directly at Visel and said: ‘How could you be so callous?’ . . .”

361. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 September 2015 at 6:30 pm

     Fundraiser Friday: ‘An American Nightmare’ Documentary Series Will Explore American Racism’s Roots:

     As contemporary activism brings the historic and systematic abuse of black labor into the public, organizations based in New York and Mississippi are crowdfunding to support an incisive documentary series that explores the roots and future of American anti-black racism.

     “An American Nightmare: Black Labor and Liberation” is a joint project of Deep Dish TV, a New York-based grassroots media organization, and Cooperation Jackson, a collective of Jackson, MS-based enterprises aimed at empowering economic diversity in the city; Kali Akuno, Cooperation Jackson’s founder, will be directing the documentaries.

     The seven-part series will address evolution in segregationist policy and global economic practices that have devalued black labor in America over four centuries.

     Here’s their Kickstarter page.
     Their goal is $50,000. So far they’ve raised $3932. I hope they can meet their goal. They have 40 days left, so there is quite a bit of time.

362. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 September 2015 at 6:32 pm

     Here is more on that documentary:

     American Nightmare: Black Labor and Liberation challenges not only the myths of a post-racial America, but also the myth that racism is simply an attitude or behavioral problem. It documents an economic and social necessity for the demeaning and dehumanizing racism towards Black people in the U.S. It describes a racism that is systemically generated – from the first import of slaves in the 17th century to the mass incarceration and extrajudicial killing of Blacks in the 21st century.

     For over 400 years Black labor created vast wealth for settler colonies that became the United States. Slavery, convict labor, Jim Crow laws, segregation and the denial of high quality education constrained the life chances for the vast majority of people. Black labor, slave or “free”, was a necessary source of cheap labor to be endlessly exploited. In the 1950s and 60s the Black mass rebellion against this U.S. system of apartheid coincided with the acceleration of globalization and automation — the drive to secure cheaper and more compliant labor and means of production. Over time, this eliminated the dependence of US corporations on Black labor making it disposable. While other communities have also been effected, the impact on Black people has been devastating.

     It’s not enough to fight racism. We have to understand its roots and dig them out. Join us in this project. Support us financially and help us explore answers to these critical questions. You can document and send us solutions that are being developed by grassroots organizations and many of the most dynamic minds presently at work in the country.

363. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 September 2015 at 8:56 pm

     Inland interfaith group organizes against racial profiling:

     An Inland interfaith group is holding a press conference and a vigil to raise awareness of a bill that aims to curb racial profiling.
     The bill, AB 953, seeks to, among other things, create a system for collecting and reporting information on police-community interactions and would establish an advisory board that develops solutions to curb racial profiling.
     It passed the Assembly and Senate earlier this month.
     The Inland Congregations United for Change is holding the press conference at 10 a.m. Wednesday, Sept. 23 in front of the Riverside Police Department, 4102 Orange St.
     A vigil is scheduled at 7 p.m. at Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine, 2858 9th St. in Riverside.
     Lyzzeth Mendoza, an organizer with the Inland Congregations United for Change, said residents will give testimonies of being stopped and profiled by law enforcement in the Inland area.

364. Saad says

     28 September 2015 at 1:13 pm

     George Zimmerman retweets picture of Trayvon Martin’s dead body

     George Zimmerman retweeted an image over the weekend showing the corpse of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager he shot and killed without consequence three years ago.

     An apparent Zimmerman admirer tweeted the photo to him, adding a boast: “Z-Man is a one man army.”

     Zimmerman, a former neighborhood watch guard, recirculated the graphic crime scene photo to his 11,000 Twitter followers. The picture — which was used as evidence in the trial that ended with Zimmerman’s acquittal — shows Martin’s body lying on grass as investigators stand over it.

365. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     28 September 2015 at 7:58 pm

     Study: white people react to evidence of white privilege by claiming greater personal hardship:

     In a study published in the November issue of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, L. Taylor Phillips and Brian S. Lowery point out that progress on racial equality is limited by the fact that many whites deny the existence of inequities.

     “Despite this reality, policy makers and power brokers continue to debate whether racial privilege even exists and whether to address such inequity,” the researchers noted. “One reason for this inaction might be an unwillingness among Whites to acknowledge racial privilege — acknowledgment that may be difficult given that Whites are motivated to believe that meritocratic systems and personal virtues determine life outcomes.”

     “However, claiming personal life hardships may help Whites manage the threatening possibility that they benefit from privilege.”

     The researchers argued that understanding the reaction to evidence of racial inequality was important because whites who did not feel that they personally benefited from their ethnicity would be less willing to support policies that were designed to reduce racial inequality.

     Subjects in the study were separated into two groups. The group that was shown evidence of white privilege “claimed more hardships than those not exposed to evidence of privilege,” the study found.

     A second experiment suggested “that people claim more life hardships in response to evidence of in-group privilege because such information is threatening to their sense of self.” Researchers observed that whites who read self-affirming statements before completing the survey claimed less hardships, and they found that self-affirmations could actually reverse the denial of white privilege.

     “Furthermore, Whites’ claims of life hardships mediated their denials of personal privilege, supporting our hypothesis that hardship claims help people deny they personally benefit from privilege — that White privilege extends to themselves,” Phillips and Lowery wrote. “Importantly, these denials of personal privilege were in turn associated with diminished support for affirmative action policies — policies that could help alleviate racial inequity.”

     Researchers recommended that efforts to reduce racial inequalities also include the education of advantaged populations.

     ****

     Oooh, look! Heartless Republicans being heartless again.
     NC Senate votes to cut food stamps after GOPer promises it will make lazy people go to college.

     A bill to ban so-called sanctuary cities offered by state House Republicans last week also aimed to cap food stamp benefits at three months for most unemployed adults without children. Even though the Supplemental Assistance Program (SNAP) is paid for with federal dollars, state Republicans argued that people in counties with double-digit unemployment should no longer be eligible to receive assistance after the initial three month period.

     Democratic state Sen. Angela Bryant offered an amendment on Thursday to overturn the food stamp cuts, saying that there are not enough jobs to go around in rural counties.

     “Over several sessions here were have reduced funding for job training and education,” Bryant pointed out during floor debate. “So we are basically relegating them, I guess, to steal for food.”

     Bryant asserted that there were better ways to police the abuse of SNAP benefits, but her amendment was dead in the GOP-controlled Senate.

     “I think that everybody in this chamber would agree that one of the best things we can do for anyone who has found themselves caught up in the — whether it’s the SNAP program or unemployment or any other of the program that we offer to people who are in emergency situations — one of the best things that we can do is to help them find a job,” Sanderson said.

     The senator added: “And I think that we will be amazed that when this goes into effect, and I don’t know the exact number of people that this can ultimately effect, but I think you are going to see a lot of them either go and get that 20-hour a week job or they’re going to enroll in some kind of higher education to improve their job skills. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to get here.”

     On Monday, The Charlotte Observer‘s editorial board blasted Republican lawmakers as “heartless.”

     “Then there are the occasions when such decisions are just mean,” the paper noted. “Keep in mind that the food stamps are issued under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which is paid for with federal dollars. That means HB 318, if it passes, won’t save North Carolina money. In fact, the bill’s passage could be costly to retailers that sell food, especially in the rural areas that see SNAP dollars because of double-digit unemployment.”

     Nevermind all the people that would suffer if their family were forced off food stamps.

366. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     28 September 2015 at 9:59 pm

     Kerry Washington: It’s not ‘risky’ to cast black actresses. It’s good sense.

     The “Scandal” star spoke with AOL Build’s Donna Freydkin on Friday and talked about auditioning for the show’s lead role of Olivia Pope and the excitement the opportunity brought, especially among the countless other black actresses who had an opportunity to audition for the role.

     “It was a lot of attention when we first aired about the idea that there hadn’t been a black woman in the lead on a network drama in almost 40 years,” Washington said. “So imagine giving all of these black actresses in Hollywood, this opportunity, this script of like: ‘You could be the lead on the show. Something that has never happened in your lifetime. Go.’”

     Washington recalled the anticipation she felt when “Scandal” first premiered and how the show’s success could elevate more black actresses into leading TV roles.

     “If you guys tuned in, if the numbers were right, the other networks were gonna do what they called ‘taking a risk’ and cast other black actresses in roles, which turns out, is not such a risk,” Washington told the audience. “Turns out you can have an actress who wins an Emmy, Viola Davis. Turns out you can have the hottest juggernaut of a show on the planet, Empire. Turns out it’s not a risk. If you let us in the door, we can get the job done.”

     Hopefully tv execs will move past this belief that it’s “taking a risk” to cast black actresses (and other women of color). It’s too early to tell though.

     ****

     Jeb Bush’s Claim That Blacks Want ‘Free Stuff’ for Votes Insults Our Dignity and History of Struggle:

     During an interview with Fox News Sunday, Bush doubled down on his comments. “We need to make our case to African-American voters and to all voters that an aspiration message fixing a few complex things will allow people to rise up,” explained the Republican presidential hopeful. “That’s what people want. They don’t want free stuff. That was my point.”

     Bush’s demonization of African Americans as a group whose loyalty to the Democratic Party has been purchased via big-government spending continues the Republican assault on black dignity and citizenship, a struggle marked by contemporary voting-rights battles taking place across the nation.

     Black Americans have been the hardest-working and least-rewarded group in American history. African-American rates of employment, income and wealth pale in comparison with those of whites, the result of a long and continuous history of institutional racism that Bush simply ignores.

     Racial insensitivity is a Bush family trait. George H.W. Bush, the 41st president, defeated Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988 by running the infamous Willie Horton ads that played upon national fears of black criminality and racial violence.

     George W. Bush’s halting response to Hurricane Katrina inspired widespread criticism punctuated by Kanye West’s famous assertion that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

     Neither does his younger brother, apparently.

     The most offensive part of Jeb Bush’s statement is that it’s rooted in a racist mythology about black folks that ignores our national history. Unpaid black labor literally built American and global capitalism. Slavery produced undreamed-of wealth that helped propel American financial, industrial and political institutions into undreamed-of power and privilege. African Americans were repaid for centuries of chattel slavery with Jim Crow segregation, lynching, imprisonment and poverty.

     Jeb Bush’s statement perpetuates this tragic history through willful ignorance that casts black folks as an ignorant and lazy mass of people who are dependent on government largesse for their existence.

     Bush and other Republican presidential hopefuls who’ve embraced a toxic message of racial intolerance robust enough to make Tea Party advocates and Birthers proud have touted this false narrative.

     Such comments also serve as coded messages to white voters convinced that President Barack Obama’s entire presidency has both been illegitimate (by virtue of his supposedly being born in Kenya) and unfairly discriminated against the white populace by giving black folks special treatment.

367. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     1 October 2015 at 10:19 pm

     NYPD will document virtually all instances of force:

     For the first time in its modern history, the New York Police Department is establishing explicit guidelines — backed by a sweeping new tracking system — for using and documenting force.

     Every police officer will have to detail virtually every instance when force is used not only in an arrest but also in other encounters with the public, including the sort of brief, violent detention and release that occurs routinely on the street and, in the case of the retired tennis star James Blake, is captured on video.

     Officers, who have long been required to intervene when they see other officers using excessive force, will now face formal discipline, up to and including dismissal, not only if they fail to step in or report excessive force, but also if they also fail to seek medical assistance for someone who requests it.

     The new rules for the New York Police Department are to be announced on Thursday by Commissioner William J. Bratton after more than a year of consideration by top police officials. They coincide with a rollout of 900 new Taser stun guns to patrol officers, until now carried only by some supervisors and by officers from the elite Emergency Service Unit.

     “What we’re developing here could become the national template for how do you not only investigate all levels of use of force, but how do you report it in a way that it is transparent,” Mr. Bratton said in a brief interview on Wednesday.

     Taken together, the department’s new rules, to go into effect early next year, cover the range of police encounters with unarmed black men and women that have drawn widespread condemnation since last summer, from the death of Eric Garner in an arrest on Staten Island, to the fatal shooting of Akai Gurley in a Brooklyn housing complex, to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in Baltimore.

     Those deaths focused national attention on the inconsistent and incomplete data collected on police killings and other use of force. The Obama administration has sought to address the lapses and, on Monday, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James B. Comey, urged the country’s 18,000 local police agencies to provide comprehensive data on officer shootings.

     The New York Police Department, the nation’s largest, with more than 35,000 officers, is now going further than most.

     For years, each shot fired by a New York City police officer has been meticulously studied to look for trends in who is shooting, who was struck, when, where and why.

     But no such systematic treatment was given to the far more routine episodes of force — baton blows, physical altercations, mace spraying, takedowns — that erupt in an instant on the street, drawing witnesses, complaints and, increasingly, video recorded by bystanders and officers’ own body cameras.

     In part, that was because the Police Department simply did not know how often force was used by its officers. Mr. Bratton admitted to a “hole in our data” in a letter to The Daily News in September.

     Many of the everyday rough encounters between officers and civilians, which rankle observers but that Mr. Bratton has called “awful but lawful,” are not presently documented. Officers can note force on forms filed for an arrest, but not after hundreds of thousands of other interactions, including car stops, criminal summonses and dealings with emotionally disturbed people.

     The changes will not occur overnight, police officials conceded.

     ****

     I don’t normally post entire articles, but this whole thing is worthy reading, IMO.
     We need surveillance for white male predators who operate under the radar:

     When I was 10 years-old, a white man parked his truck in the alley behind our apartment building. He grabbed my four-year-old neighbor, Cynthia, who was in the backyard. In the vehicle, he demanded that the child perform oral sex. Her screams alerted the adults. The man shoved Cynthia from the vehicle and fled.

     This attack is reminiscent of a time described by Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D. in Why Blacks Kill Blacks. “The master openly attacked and raped black women in the fields,” Dr. Poussaint said. “Non-blacks have always projected their sexual fantasies onto African-Americans.”

     In this era, when the white-dominated media and law enforcement officials belabor the issue of “black on black” crime, I recall the times that I was the victim of white male predators. Two incidents were blatantly sexual. The others involved intimidation and lewd demonstrations of disrespect for African-American women. One episode involved police officers.

     When I was seventeen-years-old, a white man attempted to kidnap me from a bus stop in front of Saks Fifth Avenue in Detroit. I ran nearly half a block before he gave up. When I was about twenty-eight, vulgar white police officers in a small city, assailed me. At that time, I was the police beat reporter for the local newspaper. As usual at 6:30 a.m. I arrived at the precinct. I went to the same designated office I always went to and began reading the reports. Eventually, the next room filled with rowdy cops.

     One man loudly said, “What happened out there?” Another man shouted, “Oh, black woman.” Next, he began grunting. Another officer shouted, “Oh, black woman, walking down the street.” He grunted several times. Another white cop said, “Oh, black woman getting off the bus.” Another round of grunting. An officer shouted, “Oh, black woman, walking to work.” Another serenade of grunting. Yet another white cop shouted, “Young black female walking to school.” More grunting. Finally, the old police officer, who was always hostile to me, strolled into the room. He loudly said, “Someone can hear you.” Silence. I thought, Someone was meant to hear you.

     Did I complain? To whom would I complain? Imagine me reporting the police, to the police. Should I have taken my objections to the white male newspaper editor? An absurd idea. One day, he was talking to a colleague about a pleasant, young African-American man, who was seeking a position. I overheard the editor say, “No, if you have two of them they might ‘play’ together. He’d probably get her knocked up.” Fortunately, there was no reoccurrence of the drama at the police department.

     When I was in my forties and residing in a different town, I came face-to-face with another white male predator. In the early afternoon, I arrived in the parking lot of one of the city’s hospitals. Physicians were evaluating my elderly mother who had dementia. On the other side of the lot, in my sightline, was a black pick-up truck. When I reached the building entrance, a tall, skinny white man wearing cowboy boots, was walking too close behind me. He said, “Beautiful day.” I half-turned my head and said, “Yes.”

     I stayed with my mother about two hours. I left and returned a few hours later. This time I departed after dark. When I started my car, at nearly the same instant, another vehicle also started. I could not identify the location because its lights were off. I drove to the street light and waited. A vehicle was behind me, and when I headed south, it stayed glued to my back bumper. When I increased speed, the driver did likewise. The stalker followed when I drove around the block. Nevertheless, I continued south and passed my street. However, I had a plan and a destination. I slowed waaaaay down, and cruised as if I did not have any cares. However, when I approached a certain street, I jammed on the accelerator and raced into the huge parking lot of a grocery store. I parked, turned off the lights, and lay across the seats. Every few moments I peeked through the windshield. The man in the black truck was driving through every row of cars. After a while, he left.

     The following day, I returned to the hospital earlier. The black vehicle was present, however only two white females were inside. I approached the rear and copied the license plate number. The women started screaming, “Why is she doing that?” I have not seen that vehicle since.

     Since the United States has always been unrestrainedly anti-black despite laws and pronouncements to the contrary, I was certain that “white on black” crimes occur, and law enforcement documents them. I was wrong. On a television news program the journalist stated that the Federal Bureau of Investigation retains a record of “white on black” crimes. The statement was made at the end of a report regarding the police killing of unarmed black men. One of my questions for officials was: “Has there been an increase in “white on black” crimes during the year following the August 9, 2014 police killing of Mike Brown by a white officer in Ferguson?”

     When I emailed Stephen G. Fischer Jr., at the Criminal Justice Information Division, the response was “the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program does not have that data.” If the statistics exist, I assume that widespread public knowledge would not be beneficial for law enforcement. Unrest might result from people of color having additional documented evidence of law enforcement’s lapses in “protecting and serving.” Moreover, the data would be another example of institutional and individual racism.

     Get Active! We need that data to know the true state of affairs regarding our safety, along with the degree of police attention to their mandate to serve and protect. It is imperative that we remain cognizant of “white on black crime,” especially in regards to children and women. Contact African-American activist groups, associations of black attorneys, prosecutors, physicians, therapists, social workers, members of the legislature and newspapers. Demand that law enforcement track “white on black crimes,” and inform the public.

368. rq says

     2 October 2015 at 1:44 pm

     Firstly, some apologies for overstaying my vacation. Coming back, it’s difficult to pick everything up again. But I will. With the caveat that I’m currently causing a kerfuffle at work that might actually be a lot more emotionally taxing than expected – and the expected emotional taxation was already to be quite steep. So.
     I see Tony has been doing a right fair job of curating while I’ve been out (thanks, partner!).
     As for me: Right now, I’m going to take care of the week-plus old tabs I have open, and then I’m going to figure out how I can keep curating this thread at a lower volume that doesn’t make me think I should be doing more.
     As always, anything from anyone else at anytime is absolutely 100% welcome. So. Ready for some old news?

     +++

     This was rather tangential, as it does not directly address racism, but also extremely relevant, as it discusses (in)equality of opportunity: The case against equality of opportunity.

     But the problem goes much deeper than monetary inequality. Imagine two families, one headed by two classical musicians, one headed by two computer programmers. Each set of parents decides to teach their children their trade. The children of programmers are left with a highly marketable skill that earns them hundreds of thousands of dollars and considerable social prestige later in life. The children of the musicians face exceptionally difficult odds in finding work in that field, and even if they succeed in finding steady jobs, they almost certainly won’t make as much as the children of programmers.

     If we take equality of opportunity seriously, that’s a problem. The musicians’ children are being wronged, and either they deserve compensation from the government to make up for this wrong, or the programmer parents have to be barred from teaching their children to code.

     If you think that conclusion is absurd, you are correct. There are important values other than equality — like the freedom of parents to raise children how they like, and the importance of goals other than money or social standing — that tell us it would be disastrous to micromanage the skills parents teach their children.

     That’s the deepest difficulty with achieving full equality of opportunity. Parents, in practice, endow their children with a diverse array of opportunities. Some teach their children violin. Some teach their children C++. Some teach their children to speak Mandarin. Some teach their children French cooking. Some of those skills are going to be more valuable on average. But all of them are going to be valuable to someone. We need programmers and violinists, and chefs, and fluent Mandarin speakers. We could attempt to control children’s opportunity sets so that everyone grows up with opportunities that, together, provide an equal shot at economic or education success. But that would be monstrous, and would deny us the benefits of our current pluralist approach to parenting.

     More stuff at the link.

     Apple Censored an App About the Ferguson Shooting — Here’s Why

     Ferguson Firsthand is a virtual reality app that transports you to the scene of the fatal and tragic shooting of Michael Brown. It does what great journalism does — surfaces and presents a diverse, muddled collection of perspectives — then takes you viscerally to the scene and challenges your previously held perspective.

     But two weeks ago, Dan Archer, a reporter with Empathetic Media who helped build the app, got a call from Apple saying they had rejected Ferguson Firsthand from the App Store.

     Archer was told that an app “targeted at a specific event is not appropriate,” a criteria that’s not in Apple’s submission guidelines. He tried to discern what exactly the problem was if he didn’t violate Apple’s guidelines and was told, in what he described to Mic as “cyclical legalese,” that he should feel free to resubmit the app in the future.

     Archer suspects the reason has more to do with how they recently censored educational apps for containing the Confederate Flag: They don’t want the fuss of potential controversy. It’s a troubling trend for a company trying to build a news app for original journalism.

     There’s plenty more at the link. Warning, though, for some possibly traumatic content (clips from the app and similar).

     A noose hanging outside of Mitchell Hall at The University of Delaware a day after a BLM demonstration. #TheRealUDel Right, that actually happened.

     Hillary Clinton Agrees To Meet With DeRay Mckesson, Campaign Zero. Now this is one thing I would love to catch up on, as it occurred just as I was leaving and I have no idea how things went. But I like that it happened!

     Hillary Clinton agreed to meet with leaders from the Campaign Zero movement Tuesday evening, the latest public victory for the platform to end police violence made up of a collection of activists from the Black Lives Matter movement.

     Early Monday, DeRay Mckesson requested a meeting with Clinton before the release of her justice platform.

     Clinton responded to Mckesson’s tweet on Tuesday evening. It would be just the second time Clinton has spoken directly with Black Lives Matter activists since she agreed to meet with them weeks ago after a campaign event in New Hampshire.
     […]

     “It demonstrates a willingness on her part to have a conversation about the issues,” Mckesson said in a brief interview with BuzzFeed News. “I’m hopeful that the conversation will be candid, that we will be able to talk about a range of issues, and that the conversation will inform the release of her platform.”

     Mckesson and other activists also recently met with Bernie Sanders, and discussed, according to a tweet from activist Samuel Sinyangwe, “police violence and militarization, community empowerment, ending the drug war and closing the wealth gap.”

     That meeting was attended by Mckesson, Brittany Packnett, Johnetta Elzie, Erika Totten, and Samuel Sinyangwe as well as Martinez Sutton, the brother of Rekia Boyd.

     “They are different people,” Mckesson said, adding that Sanders’ already released platform served as a tool to “ground the conversation.”

     Republican Bush says multiculturalism wrong for US. Because…. I’m sure he has reasons.

     Hilarious ‘Daily Show’ Writer You’ve Never Heard of Is Winning Post-Emmy Social Media

     Chances are Travon Free isn’t who you think of when you think of the show. In fact, you may have never heard of him. His post is behind the scenes—He’s a writer for the show and has been since October 2012, when he went to the set for what he thought was a casual visit and was surprised backstage when Jon Stewart offered him a full-time writing job on the show.

     So you might wonder why he isn’t better-known: wonder away.

369. rq says

     2 October 2015 at 2:22 pm

     Former NBA Champion Devean George Developing Affordable Housing in North Minneapolis. I think they call it ‘caring about the community’ or something like that.

     The 47-unit building will be located on Penn Avenue and Golden Valley Road, and George hopes the building will be a positive change for an area known for crime and violence.

     “Housing, I believe, is the foundation to doing whatever you want to do,” George said.

     “If you don’t have stable housing, you’re not worried about education, you’re not worried about eating healthy, you’re not worried about anything else,” George said.

     George is also making it easy for residents who’ll live in the building. Instead of having to travel miles to a grocery store, residents will be able to take advantage of a grocery co-op that George is also developing in the building.

     “That’s what people look for when they go live in a neighborhood,” George said. “Where’s my grocery store? Where is my movie theater? Where can we go eat? Where can our kids go play at a park? And this was just a place where there is just housing.”

     And this is just the beginning for George and Ford. After this initial building is finished, they plan to build another one.

     “This is just the start,” George said. “This is just the catalyst of everything that’s going to go on.”

     I wish them all the luck possible.

     Why I’m Done Trying To Solve White Ignorance. This is a fucking dense read, but I highly recommend slogging through it all. You’ll barely notice it, actually, and you’ll be better off for it. Excerpt:

     Over the past few years, I’ve become extremely passionate about the subject of racism in America. In large part that is because of going to college and taking Black Studies courses that shocked me to my system. When my father suggested to me as a teenager that I take Black Studies courses in college, I was annoyed by the idea. I was raised in the 90s; a time where every kids television show had a diverse cast of almost every color. I was taught in school that acknowledged race is racist. I learned that specifying or recognizing someone’s race is racist and well into adulthood this is what racism meant to me. Then I took a writing course in College that was specifically about lending voices to people of color who were trying to create their own narratives about being a person of color in America. I didn’t take the class because I thought the subject was necessary or good. I took the class because I thought it was going to be easy and that since I was black, I was bound to get a good grade. In the space of a semester, this class started to make me uneasy. Not the writing bit, the writing bit was fun and I’ve always been complimented on how I write. The parts of the class where we discussed the history of racism in America… that’s what made me uneasy. Learning that what I learned in public schools was watered down, white washed and downplayed made me upset. It made me upset because I slowly came to understand that I’d been told half truths. I can’t say that I was lied to, but I wasn’t told the full extent of the truth and that angered me.

     On my platform, i try to have informed conversations about racism that relate the fact that these things aren’t taught in schools. I don’t even remember reading about the Pequot massacre that gave America the reason to celebrate Thanksgiving. I don’t remember reading about how the same church where Dylan Roof shot 9 black people had been burned to the ground by white supremacists in 1822. I don’t remember reading about how the war on drugs started largely as a way of attacking Chinese Americans. I didn’t remember reading about how the Irish became white through supporting anti-black unions and how they and several other groups assimilated into whiteness; or even further that whiteness is a legal construct. I didn’t learn these things in school. I didn’t learn the full extent of racism in this country and as and adult I now know that I didn’t learn it because how could I grow to become a patriotic adult if I knew all of the dark and divisive things that America has done to people of color since first stepping foot on this continent? We are fed a version of history that allows us to know some of what happened, but never everything because the truth is too painful and would cause too many people to become critical of how great of a country this actually is.

     What I have learned bringing this conversation to people is just how unprepared people, especially white people, are to have this conversation. It is so much easier for everyone to simply maintain the status quo of what we’ve learned and to never really challenge ourselves to know the truth or to understand our history to prevent the same things happening in the future. The post below is what inspired this post.

     And it goes on from there. SO MUCH INFORMATION.

     11 Art Exhibitions by Black Women You Must See this Fall and Winter

     We’ve complied a list of national and international solo art exhibitions of work by Black women. This fall and winter take the time to celebrate and appreciate art created by Black women with this guide.

     Some aMAZing art on that list.

     Burning Man’s black campers explain why they are the 1%

     After three treks to Burning Man, the famously hedonistic festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, I must admit it: I am a black Burner. My black friends and family think I’m crazy for going to Burning Man. According to its own 2014 census, Burning Man is 87% white and 1.3% black. But while Burning Man founder Larry Harvey recently told me that the reason so few of us are here is because “black folks don’t like to camp as much as white folks”, the 20-odd black burners (plus one Chicano and one Latina) I interviewed during this year’s Carnival of Mirrors-themed festival had a more nuanced take. Some agreed with Harvey, but many had very different ideas about what keeps black folk from Black Rock City.

     We black Burners hailed from several countries and included virgins and veterans. Below are excerpts from our conversations, as we chatted about white hippies, the great outdoors, the problems of black hair and skin in the unforgiving desert and everything in between.

     Article continues at the link.

     Color film was built for white people. Here’s what it did to dark skin. An interesting look at some of the more subtle biases that exist around us, and that most of us white people would never even think about. Not even remotely. Because the world is so fair (pun intended).

     “We Shall Not Be Moved”: A Hunger Strike, Education, and Housing in Chicago

     The hunger strike was started in response to the closing, at the end of the last school year, of Walter H. Dyett High School. The closure was the final act in a four-year phase-out: the school was no longer allowed to enroll new students, teachers slowly trickled away, and the students who remained were encouraged to transfer elsewhere. In the 2014-2015 school year, only thirteen students remained in Dyett’s final graduating class. The school was shuttered for being what the district called “chronically underperforming.”

     In response to the planned closure, a group of local community members, educators, and organizations calling itself the Coalition to Revitalize Walter H. Dyett School submitted a plan to re-open Dyett with a focus on “global leadership and green technology.” The Chicago Public Schools system agreed to review the proposal, along with two others, but ultimately cancelled the hearing. In August, 2015, members of the coalition announced the hunger strike. In early September, eighteen days into the strike, C.P.S. announced plans to re-open Dyett as an arts-focussed school. According to the strikers, they were not involved in the development of that new plan and they were barred from entering the press conference at which it was announced. On Saturday, the strike’s thirty-fourth day, the protesters announced its end.

     Many Chicagoans have rallied behind the coalition, but others, on the school board and in the media, have questioned whether a new Dyett will be able to enroll enough students to be a vibrant and sustainable school. The population in the surrounding community has fallen in recent years, and that decline has become a justification for school closures. “Where are they going to get their children from? Because right now there are not that many kids in the neighborhood. That would be the only question I’d have,” Dr. Mahalia Hines, a Board of Education member, said at an August meeting. This argument—that schools on the city’s predominately African-American South and West Sides should be closed because too many people have moved away from these areas—was also used during the saga of Chicago’s 2013 school closings, in which forty-nine public schools were closed in one fell swoop.

     The former superintendent Barbara Byrd-Bennett explained the closures by citing what she termed a “utilization crisis.” “For too long, children in certain parts of our city have been cheated out of the resources they need to succeed in the classroom because they are trapped in underutilized schools,” she said at the time. “The utilization crisis threatens our ability to provide every child in every school with access to a well-rounded, high-quality education that they deserve.” Byrd-Bennett’s argument that the schools should close because they were enrolled below their capacity was intended to counter another argument that was persistently bubbling up across the city—that the school-closing process was racist, and the schools were being closed because they served black students and, in many cases, employed black teachers. “What I cannot understand, and will not accept is that the proposals I am offering are racist,” Byrd-Bennett told members of the school board, local media, and assembled community members at a 2013 board meeting. “The greatest population losses in our city over the past decade have taken place in the South and the West sides. Underutilized schools in these areas are the result of demographic changes and not race.”

     But this picture fails to account for two of Chicago’s least-favorite reasons for national notoriety: the city’s history of segregation and its public-housing system. Perhaps the demographic changes that drove enrollment numbers down at schools like Dyett—indeed, the very “utilization crisis” itself—did not arise by happenstance but through the machinations of where and how black people in Chicago have been allowed to live in the course of the last hundred years. (Jelani Cobb recently wrote about school reform, closures, and racism in the magazine.)

     More at the link.

370. rq says

     2 October 2015 at 2:53 pm

     Invoking “Black Lives Matter” – DON’T DO IT. Just don’t. The important bit:

     This isn’t the first time a white person has tried to invoke BLM/ALM for some other bullshit, but damnit, it’s getting tiring. You can’t compare a movement about black people being shot, beaten, killed in the streets by cops to whatever bullshit bugbear that’s bothering you. You can’t. Because it’s comparing apples to a fucking grenade with the pin pulled. Stop it.

     It’s not the same, it’s not remotely the same, and it reminds me why I’m always wary of white feminists who seem to forget that whole “intersectionality” thing. You’re not on my side. I don’t want you on my side. Our struggle isn’t fodder for your bullshit.

     I don’t act like an ‘angry black woman’ – but I’m read that way if I broach race
     

     Yes, the angry black woman trope is alive and well, and even if I don’t display the satirized signifiers of that trope, I’m still censured for my supposed “anger”. I have always been opinionated, but my “anger” as a black woman shifts me from rebel to problem. I’m never just offended, or annoyed, or feeling strengthened by my convictions; I’m always just “angry”.

     But let me tell you what – the people who think that I’m angry aren’t wrong just because I’m not performing my anger. The anger is real.

     I’m angry about a lot of things. I’m angry that we live in a culture where stupidity and narcissism are rewarded (Ann Coulter gets paid upward of $25,000 per speaking gig), and psychological trauma is a reality show (see: 17 Kids and Counting). I’m angry that entitlement is reserved for white people (Miley Cyrus is always entitled to her opinion) while black people have to package it as empowerment (Amandla Stenberg is empowered and empowering for black girls). I’m angry that our talents and intellect as a race (whether Beyoncé or Ta-Nehisi Coates) are simultaneously scrutinized (black women don’t sell magazine covers; how dare you question the American Dream) and held commercially hostage for an impossible ransom (but if black women do sell magazines, make a statement for white women; your success as a black intellectual means you must speak for all of black America). I’m angry that black people are being killed – intentionally, randomly, excessively.

     I’m angry that I was surrendered into adoption by a white mother whose exotification and resentment of black men resulted in my unwanted existence, and then adopted by white parents who are, for the most part, willfully colorblind. I’m angry that not one of these parents – or anyone left in either my birth or adoptive family – understands or thinks about what it feels like to be black in America. I’m angry that the same white friend who said to me years ago that letting go of my anger will set me free responded defensively to my efforts to engage with her about her own racial awareness as if I were attacking or bullying her: “What am I supposed to do, just sit back and take it?” (Well, actually, yes.)

     I’m angry. I’m not just the kind of angry you want me to be.
     […]

     To be honest, my anger has never hurt me. Instead, it’s given me a fully realized life that is big and beautiful and lucky, that is filled with love, surrounded by friends. And it has also given me another family in my husband and my son – neither of whom would ever characterize me as an “angry black woman”, and so I never really am.

     Seriously, black woman have every reason to be angry, so why should we dismiss them as ‘angry black women [not worth listening to]’? Start wondering why they’re so angry…

     Elizabeth Warren praised for echoing Black Lives Matter arguments in speech

     Elizabeth Warren earned high praise from activists for a Sunday speech on racial inequality that unabashedly echoed many of the arguments of the Black Lives Matter movement, after their persistent disappointment with presidential candidates’ rhetoric on the issue.

     The US senator called for better police training, an emphasis on community policing, and body cameras, and traced a direct line from the struggles of the civil rights era to the new era of activism that has come into prominence since Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.

     “The first civil rights battles were hard fought. But they established that Black Lives Matter. That Black Citizens Matter. That Black Families Matter,” Warren said, during her speech at the Edward M Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in Boston.

     “She was willing to give the speech that other politicians seem to be afraid to give, which is to say that black humanity matters without equivocation,” said Brittany Packnett, a Black Lives Matter activist and member of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

     “We’ve seen sickening videos of unarmed black Americans cut down by bullets, choked to death while gasping for air – their lives ended by those who are sworn to protect them,” Warren said, in language that could have been lifted from a protest rally.

     Well done, Warren. I hope others have the guts to follow your fine example.

     Oh, and this tab is ancient, but I wanted to put it here, not the feminism thread, though I should probably do that, too: #WhyIStayed: Year One

     There is still so much confusion about “staying”. After #WhyIStayed went viral, subsequent (and necessary) hashtags arose, such as #WhyILeft and #HowIHelped. So many voices were heard that day, and it was beautiful.

     But society is not opposed to victims “leaving” or communities “helping”. It is “staying” that is the scandal.

     It is staying that society at large condemns. It is staying that breeds victim blaming. It is staying that we struggle to comprehend. We rejoice when survivors leave. We celebrate when communities help. We demoralize victims who stay.

     So, I think we must reexamine our reactions to the power of individual choice. I stayed because I knew what was best for me. I stayed because I wanted to make it out alive.

     On this one year anniversary of #WhyIStayed, let’s recenter our thoughts on those who have made this impossible choice, and learn how to support them right where they are.

     And after we recenter, let’s begin to ask victims of intimate partner violence the question that only they can answer: what do you need?

371. rq says

     3 October 2015 at 1:39 pm

     Biracial Privileges and Social Justice: ‘Black Americans Are Not Angry. They Are Hurting’. I think some of them are angry too, though.

     In an interview with The Guardian, Grey’s Anatomy star Jesse Williams does a fantastic job of articulating the privileges and insights that being biracial affords him, and how he uses that knowledge to inform his work as an activist in working-class black communities. Williams’ mom is white, and his dad is black.

     “I have access to rooms and information. I am white and I am also black. I am invisible man in a lot of these scenarios,” Williams said, referring to the Ralph Ellison classic. “I know how white people talk about black people. I know how black people talk about white folks. I know I am there and everyone speaks honestly around me.”
     […]

     “We can’t just show up and tell people what they should be doing in a condescending, bulls–t manner, which is common for a lot of organizations,” Williams said. “We are just like your husband, son, your father, your brothers. We have the same fears and worries.”

     He’s also sick and tired of hearing about the angry-black-person stereotype, and instead wants people to understand that it’s a hurt that they’re sensing from black people—not anger.

     “There is zero evidence—zero evidence—that black people are more inclined to be angry in [a] vacuum than anybody else,” Williams said. “It doesn’t begin with rage, right. It’s a community that’s f–king hurting and is really disappointed in itself, in the people that it trusted, in the government it paid taxes to,” Williams argued. “That is where the frustration comes from.”

     I think, though, for a lot of biracial people, their blackness is a lot more obvious than that of Jesse Williams, and that can seriously alter the way the world perceives them, and they’re more or less forced into addressing the side of them that is black far more than the white side, simply because they can’t get away with looking white.
     I may be articulating that wrong. I hope the idea gets through, though.

     Antonio French vows to block stadium funding in absence of ‘comprehensive’ crime plan. I don’t always agree with him (he did oppose raising the minimum wage and had his reasons), but that is one person who cares about the community. Trouble is, nobody’s really caring about the fact that he cares.

     St. Louis Alderman Antonio French on Friday said he and other aldermen would block city funding for a new riverfront stadium unless Mayor Francis Slay develops with other leaders a “comprehensive plan” to reduce crime.

     He announced his plan at the Board of Aldermen’s meeting Friday afternoon. Slay’s office, which supports the stadium effort, responded in part that the city has “taken a comprehensive approach to crime fighting for 14 years…”

     French said in an interview he and other aldermen have multiple options to block a stadium financing bill, expected to be filed next week. Those could include preventing a quorum at committee, extending debate, attaching amendments to or filibustering the bill. Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed will decide which committee will consider a stadium financing bill.
     […]

     The $1 billion Mississippi riverfront plan is dependent on some $66 million in new St. Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority (RSA) bond proceeds from the city of St. Louis — not including interest. The current stadium task force proposal and an RSA analysis assumes the city of St. Louis would make payments of $5 million each year through 2023, $5.5 million in 2024, and $6 million annually through 2051.

     Violent crime in the city is up this year. As of August, the city counted 136 homicides, up 60 percent from the same period in 2014.

     French and others have already drafted a so-called “ comprehensive plan” to combat crime, a hallmark of which is coordination among city departments, including the police.

     Mary Ellen Ponder, Slay’s chief of staff, said in a statement, “There are too many shootings, too many deaths. Politicizing crime won’t make anyone any safer. The best way to fight crime is for everyone to be united against criminals.” She also pointed to the city’s current public safety programs.

     I’m just wondering, though, if you can’t politicize the crime by having the government get more involved in increasing public safety, why is it okay to politicize a football stadium by having the government support funding for it…? Just asking.

     Artist Paul Rucker Is Taking Back The Racist Symbols Of America’s Past. The colours are amazing.

     Step inside the Baltimore Museum of Art this fall and you could find yourself face-to-face with a crowd of seven-foot mannequins dressed head to toe in Ku Klux Klan robes.

     Of course, they are not your average white hoods. The robes are made from patterns like Kente cloth and camouflage fabric, turning the ghost-like memory of a KKK uniform into a chilling, anachronistic image. Unlike the black-and-white photos of Grand Wizards buried in American history books, these vibrant costumes force the horror of racism in the United States into the present moment. Standing before the imposing statues, you can’t ignore they’re there.

     The carefully crafted robes are one piece of a larger installation currently on view, courtesy of conceptual artist Paul Rucker. The multimedia show is titled “Rewind,” an apt name for an installation “about American history repeating itself over and over again.” From Kente cloth Klan robes to reimagined postcards of lynchings to celestial maps that document the proliferation of the American prison industrial complex, Rucker’s show is a jarring look back on the bits of U.S. history that predate acts of contemporary brutality — for example, the death of Baltimore resident Freddie Gray.

     “Rewind” is “my life’s work,” Baltimore-based Rucker told The Huffington Post in a phone interview. He says he’s been documenting police violence and incarceration since April 29, 1992, the day the police officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King were acquitted. That day was also Rucker’s 24th birthday.

     More info at the link, plus samples of his art – content warning for disturbing images.

     I was a domestic violence victim. My town wanted me evicted for calling 911. Apparently you’re a ‘nuisance’ if you call 911 too much. Sounds a lot like some hardcore victim-blaming.

     I remember the day I realized that I had to stop calling the police, no matter what danger I was in. It was 9 April 2012 when the police came to my home to arrest my ex-boyfriend, who had physically assaulted me. When they were there, an officer told me I was “on three strikes”. I had no idea what he was referring to, nor did he explain. “We are gonna have your landlord evict you” he added. Later, after I requested more information from the police department, I was told I was being punished for calling 911.

     Norristown, Pennsylvania, where I live, had a local nuisance law that specifically said that calls about domestic violence would count as “strikes”. Three would lead to eviction. I wanted to keep my home for me and my child – so I stopped calling the police, even when there was more domestic violence at my home. But I couldn’t stop other people calling 911. I received two more strikes from the city as a result of other people trying to help me.

     In late May, my landlord and I met with Norristown officials because the city was threatening to revoke his rental license unless I moved out. I tried to explain that I was dealing with domestic violence, but no one listened. Instead, I was told I was at fault for needing police protection. I had brought a witness with me, but the city did not allow her to speak.

     The town where I had lived for many years was literally going to put me out on the street for being the victim of crime. My landlord advocated for me but there was not much he could do because of the ordinance. The property was put on a 30-day probationary period, during which neither I nor my neighbors could call the police.

     My abuser knew that the city had gagged me and took full advantage. He knew that the officers who were supposed to serve and protect were not protecting me at all. At that point, he used the law to come to my home whenever he pleased. I couldn’t call the police to remove him.

     Some graphic details at the link, but I would just like to say WTF to this kind of law? Seriously? Like… I understand prank calls and the like, or senseless ones about ‘is my computer plugged in’ or ‘where’s the internet’, but fucking domestic violence? You’ve got to be shitting me.

     Loretta Lynch: government shouldn’t require reports of people killed by police. I’m just going to leave that little piece of whatthefuckery like that.

372. rq says

     4 October 2015 at 2:27 pm

     Racial pattern in Alabama DMV closings suggests dirty trick. Who’dathunkit?

     Rachel Maddow reports on the closing of DMV offices in Alabama, ostensibly due to budget problems, but the closures are in predominantly African-American counties, and a driver’s license is the most common form of ID used to comply with the state’s new voter ID law.

     Yep, i’ts a video you have to watch at the link.

     Black Lives Matter and Psychotherapy

     This month marks the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s death, and the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Eleven psychotherapists, from the Bay Area, Seattle, and Austin, TX, share how Black Lives Matter has impacted their work, how they work cross-culturally, and how race and racism appear in the therapy room.

     Excerpt:

     Eboniña: This question [How do you think the Psychological community can best care for people who are on the front lines of anti-Racism activism?] is definitely from a perspective of someone who’s White. My people (all People of Color, not just African Americans) have always been on the front lines of anti-Racism activism. Always. Now, has it always been covered on the news? Not so much, and when it is it’s very jaded. But we are constantly having to be active in making people aware of their own ignorance.

     So, how care for people on the front lines? The best way to go is an empathetic route. Purely to be a therapist. You know. LISTEN. Provide a place for the person to get out those feelings of disappointment, frustration, anger, anxiety, whatever they’re bringing. Leave space for that and validate those feelings.

     For People of Color, a lot of it is self care. These are issues that are never going to be solved, or at least, not right now. It’s a rarity that you’re going to have a conversation with someone who then says, ‘Oh! I see the error of my ways! I was being racist just now! I apologize! How can I best educate myself going forward?” So, People of Color walk around with what I would call unresolved activism, from trying to educate those around you, yet you still having to push forward in your day to day without coming across as an angry Person of Color.

     Now, when it comes to White people trying to be anti-racism activists, it’s a combination of self-care along with possibly seeing if there’s any shame or embarrassment within yourself for past generational influences. Were your parents or grandparents coming from racist points of view? See if shame is a motivation for you. If so, talk about that! Let your clients talk about that! And listen to the younger generation’s anger and frustration at the ignorance level. Along with self-care. Whoo! Caucasian anti-racism is complicated!

     Mark: First, hear and normalize feelings [of helplessness and frustration], express our own similar feelings, and empower our clients to give voice to their thoughts and feelings in ways that support their own values and goals.

     Rhea St. Julien: Gaslighting is a huge problem in conversations about race, and we in the psychological community can model empathy and listening when we see People of Color being responded to in ways that invalidate their experience. Instead of “You’re making this about race!” we can listen and reflect back to the Person of Color “Your experience is important and real. The world is hella racist. You’re not making this up.”

     Leanna Ramsey-Corrales: I think that the psych community should offer free therapy to BLM activists. I would like to have seen therapists driving to Ferguson the way firefighters drove to NYC after 9/11. It would have been nice to see people in private practice shell out a bit, believe that they had something to contribute. I wonder if most therapists don’t feel like they have an understanding of what short term crisis work looks like, and how it’s valuable. Like they think, “If someone isn’t sitting on my couch once a week for the next two years, I don’t know what we’re doing!” So that might have been a block to offering help.

     It’s all very good (well, fine, the vast majority). More mental health care for anti-racism activists and people of colour everywhere.

     Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King will join the New York Daily News as a justice correspondent. Hooray for that, I suppose! Unless they’re one of the ones with a monthly free article limit. :/ Good luck to Shaun King!

     We’ve obtained documents proving the GPS device #VonDerritMyers wore completely contradicts Officer Flannery’s story. So far no further substantiation.

     EXCLUSIVE: Winthrop Poll: Most say state should decide fate of historic names, this spec. in ref. to confederacy-related names.

     The ghost of Ben Tillman might be safe on the campuses of South Carolina universities.

     Most S.C. residents – 63 percent – say state lawmakers, not the institutions, should decide whether to change the names of streets, parks or buildings that bear the names of historical figures or events, according to a new Winthrop Poll question asked exclusively for The State.

     The results could be bad news for The Citadel, whose leaders want to remove a Confederate banner from a campus chapel, and to Clemson and Winthrop students and alumni, who want to remove the name of Ben Tillman – a white supremacist, lynch-mob advocate and former S.C. governor and U.S. senator – from campus buildings.

     A.D. Carson, a Clemson University graduate student who advocates removing Tillman’s name from that school’s Tillman Hall, said he was “not surprised” by the poll results.

     “We talk about the so-called idea of rewriting history,” Carson said. But, he added, people do not spend enough time “attempting to empathize with the people who might be offended.”

     Only a third of S.C. residents said the name changes should not require legislative approval. The poll surveyed 963 S.C. adults from Sept. 20 to 27, and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.

     Time to work on those people within the legislature, I suppose.

     Most Americans Get ‘Free Stuff’ From The Government, “What kind they get varies by race and income level.”

     But “free stuff” from the government is far more extensive than the benefits disdained by those politicians, and is eagerly accepted by people of every race and income level. As Howard Gleckman, a tax expert who writes for the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, pointed out recently, virtually every American gets some kind of government subsidy, from people who have mortgages or employer-sponsored health care (big tax deductions) to those who work for or invest in big companies (big corporate tax subsidies). Recipients of Social Security and Medicare get back far more in benefits than they paid in taxes.

     Benefits to people who are not poor often equal or dwarf the cost of those for the poor. The home mortgage interest deduction, which the Congressional Budget Office found largely benefits the top one-fifth of income earners, cost the federal government about $70 billion in 2013; food stamps cost the government $74 billion last year. The tax break for employers who provide health insurance cost Washington $250 billion in 2013.

     Medicare, which is available to all seniors regardless of income level, is more expensive ($587 billion in 2013) than Medicaid ($449 billion), the health care program for the poor, and an average-income couple retiring this year will get back three times more in Medicare benefits than they paid in Medicare taxes.

     These comparisons of benefits rarely come up when talk on the campaign trail turns to “handouts.” But even the “free stuff” the politicians do bring up goes to a larger, more diverse group of people than is commonly believed.

     More at the link.

373. rq says

     4 October 2015 at 2:32 pm

     From the last link previous comment, just a few numbers:

     Black Americans are overrepresented among recipients of those benefits, but they are not the majority of recipients. In any given month during 2012, 42 percent of black Americans received a means-tested benefit, compared with 36 percent of Hispanics, 18 percent of Asians/Pacific Islanders and 13 percent of non-Hispanic whites. Currently the U.S. population is 77 percent white (62 percent of them non-Latino white Americans), 13 percent black, 17 percent Latino and 5 percent Asian. (Latinos are an ethnicity and may be of any race.)

     Overall, white Americans still make up the largest number of people on means-tested programs (though they represent less than their share of the population). Among food stamp participants in fiscal year 2013, 40 percent were white, 26 percent black, 10 percent Latino and 2 percent Asian. Among TANF recipients in fiscal year 2010, the overall numbers are 32 percent white, 32 percent black and 30 percent Hispanic.

     Onwards:
     Remember this? Motorist pleads guilty to 1 traffic count, fined $575 for driving through Mpls. protesters. I think I hear the sound of privilege, loud and clear. Wasn’t there a half-million bond on that black kid breaking a car window…? And check out how they describe the event, now:

     The motorist who slowly drove through a throng of protesters in a south Minneapolis intersection and slightly injured a teenage demonstrator pleaded guilty Friday to one misdemeanor and had two other misdemeanor charges dismissed.

     “Slowly”. “Slightly”. Uh-huh, so not like real injuries n stuff, right.

     Black men are six times more likely to die from gun homicide than suicide. For whites, it’s reversed. Less guns might help both. TW for suicide.

     Suicide ranks among the top 10 causes of death for white men in America — specifically, No. 7 — and guns are the most common device used to achieve that tragic end. For black men, homicide ranks among the 10 leading causes of death, coming in at No. 5. Again guns play an outsized role.

     And while white men are about eight times as likely to kill themselves with a gun than be killed by someone using a gun, black men are about six times more likely to be shot and killed by someone other than by themselves.

     Among Latino men, both suicide and homicide rank among the 10 leading causes of death, occupying the eighth and ninth slots on the list. And the grim pattern also holds for Asian and Native American men too. Suicide, most often by gun, is the eighth leading cause of death for Asian men and the sixth leading cause of death for Native American men.

     And in case you are wondering, neither suicide nor homicide rank among the leading causes of death for any group of women in the United States. In fact, for nearly 15 years, suicide has occupied a slot in the top 10 causes of death for all American men. And homicide occupies different slots in the top 10 causes of death for every group of men between the ages of 1 and 44. Guns, it seems, are much more likely to kill American men, regardless of context.

     Behold the leading causes of death for all males in the United States between 1999 and 2013, the most recent year for which CDC data, verified by death certificates and other info, are available.

374. rq says

     4 October 2015 at 2:35 pm

     Also there’s a giant flood in SC – South Charleston, I believe. It’s quite… impressive.

375. Saad says

     7 October 2015 at 9:12 pm

     Rupert Murdoch: Ben Carson would be a “real black president”

     Murdoch’s tweet was championing Ben Carson, a Republican who is the only African-American candidate in the presidential race.

     “Ben and Candy Carson terrific,” he wrote. “What about a real black President who can properly address the racial divide? And much else.”

376. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     9 October 2015 at 8:24 pm

     American Bar Association President “Black Americans face an inherently biased legal system”:

     Speaking to the Guardian during a visit to London for the formal opening ceremonies of the legal term at Westminster Abbey and in parliament, Brown said one of the priorities of her year in office would be to lead the drive to encourage the ABA’s 400,000 members to carry out more voluntary, pro-bono work.

     But after going to Ferguson, Missouri , and other places where there have been protests over the treatment of black suspects, she has also become more concerned about the way defendants are processed through US courts.

     “One in 16 African Americans are subjected to the criminal justice system,” Brown explained, “compared to one in 106 of white people. A lot of that is drugs. The evidence, however, shows that black people don’t use drugs any more [than white people].

     “But they are being arrested for it and charged with it [more frequently] and some of that is implicit bias – particularly on the part of prosecutors. Prosecutors are overcharging.” She added: “Ninety-five percent of all prosecutors are white; 88% of all lawyers in US are white.”

     Brown, who was brought up in Baltimore, moved to New Jersey where she specialised in commercial litigation and employment defence. She has also served as a municipal court judge for three years.

     “In our system, prosecutors have so much control – sometimes more than the judges,” she added. “They decide whether someone is to be charged with a crime and what crime that will be. The judge doesn’t have discretion. The prosecution has so much power so they have a bad reputation in the community.

     “Public defenders think they are really the do-gooders, but are they encouraging a group of people to plead to higher offences than others? For example, there’s no evidence that black people use drugs more than whites, but they are arrested at a rate more than six times than that of their white counterparts for drug use.”

     Public defenders, she added, do not have the same resources as prosecutors – nor are they paid as much, “so you are sending a message saying that public defenders are not as important”.

     ****
     California mom outraged to find son’s play pirate ship includes dark-skinned doll with ‘slave collar’:

     Ida Lockett told CBS Sacramento that she was helping her son put his Playmobil pirate-ship figurines together when she realized that the instructions were showing her how to assemble a play shackle to go around the black character’s neck.

     “You cannot have this specific accessory and call it anything else,” she told CBS Sacramento. “The fact that you can Google it, look it up, say what it is—it’s a slave collar.”

     The Houston Chronicle notes that the black figurine is shoeless and wearing ripped jeans and a torn shirt. The newspaper adds that the ship to which the black figurine is connected appears to include a dungeon.

     “It’s definitely racist,” Lockett told CBS Sacramento. “It told my son to put a slave cuff around the black character’s neck, and then to play with the toy.”

     Playmobil issued a statement defending the toy ship and the historical context of its characters.

     “If you look at the box, you can see that the pirate figure is clearly a crewmember on the pirate ship and not a captive,” Playmobil said in a statement to the Washington Post. “The figure was meant to represent a pirate who was a former slave in a historical context. It was not our intention to offend anyone in anyway.”

     According to the Chronicle, the ship was a gift from the boy’s aunt. When she learned that the play ship included a play slave and a play slave collar, she took to Facebook to blast Playmobil with a scathing note.

     “#PlaymobilUSA, I am MORTIFIED to have recently bought your Pirate Ship Set 5135 for my nephew only to hear that when assembling it, they found that its assembly instructions indicate to add the neck cuff/shackle to the black character’s neck,” she wrote. “I suppose it’s optional as to whether a kid chooses to then place said character into chains or into a prison cell at the bottom of the ship.”

     ****

     Artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby wins one of the Smithsonian’s highest awards:

     Nigerian-American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby has won one of the Smithsonian’s most prestigious awards. Crosby was awarded the James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize, a $25,000 award bestowed by the Smithsonian American Art Museum to artists, who “consistently demonstrate exceptional creativity.”

     32-year-old Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s large-scale portraits and still-life works display her American husband, her African family members engaging in domestic activities. Crosby puts an innovative spin on classical academic Western painting ideals through her works which incorporate photo-transfers, collages, pastel and pencil drawings with acrylic paints.
     “We’ve had recipients of this award who work in lots of different media, but never someone who’s coming out of a more traditional Western painting legacy,” says museum’s curator and Dicke prize administrator Joanna Marsh. “I think that’s an important part of both our collection and our focus. It’s wonderful to be able to give the award this year to someone who upholds that tradition.”

     Beautiful photos at the link.

377. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     12 October 2015 at 5:35 pm

     TX councilman tasered and arrested in front of his home by same police force that arrested Sandra Bland:

     According to Click 2 Houston, Prairie View police officers were questioning four men about drug activity when police say Councilman Jonathan Miller began interfering with the investigation since the men being questioned were guests at his home. According to KHOU, the men were Miller’s fraternity brothers and were outside to practice a step routine for homecoming when police began questioning them.

     Video of the incident, which was captured on officers’ body cams and released to the public, shows Miller, 26, telling an officer, “Please do not put your hands on me!” He adds: “I live here.” A male and female officer can be heard off camera telling Miller to put his hands behind his back. Shortly after issuing the command, Miller is stunned with the Taser. He screams and falls to the ground.

     An officer says off camera, “Oh yeah, he’s going to jail for resisting.”

     Video that was shot and released by Miller’s friend Brandon Wilson shows that while Miller did not have his hands behind his back when police stunned him with the Taser, he was on his knees with his hands by his side.

     Miller was charged with resisting arrest and interference, and was booked at the Waller County Jail, the same jail where Sandra Bland was found dead in July. Miller was released on bond.

     “It went from me asking questions, to me basically being put facedown on the ground. I’m curious to have a conversation with those officers,” Miller told KHOU shortly after his release.

     “Usually I would think if you’re tasing somebody, it’s somebody that’s running from the cops, somebody that’s trying to inflict harm on somebody, not somebody that’s on their knees with their arms by their sides,” he said.

     I’m sure supporters of respectability politics have some incredibly useless advice to offer Miller.

     ****

     Hey look! This never happens-
     Mississippi man found dead while in police custody:

     Jamal Mallard, 29, was found unresponsive in a holding cell early Sunday morning and was pronounced dead shortly afterward. “He was found on the floor of one of our holding cells. [American Medical Response] was called. Once he arrived, they pronounced the individual dead,” Vance said.

     Mallard’s mother, Nanette Mallard, is now demanding answers about her son’s death.

     On Saturday night, Mallard was chased by police for allegedly stealing a lawn mower. He escaped, but hours later officers were tipped off that Mallard was at his home.

     “I called them to come pick my child up,” Nanette Mallard acknowledged. “The next thing I know, he’s dead. I feel terrible. If he would have stayed here, he probably would still be alive.

     “This morning they said, ‘Your son is dead,’ and I just started hollering,” the grieving mother added.

     According to the police chief, there was no struggle with Mallard when he was taken into custody and charged with petty larceny. Mallard had been in the cell for more than two hours before he was found.

     “[There were] no signs of trauma to this individual’s body that we found. No complaints of pain, nothing to indicate something was going wrong with his health,” Vance said.

     And we should just trust what the police say, bc they never lie or engage in deception. Nosiree.

378. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     12 October 2015 at 6:00 pm

     That’s So Raven: Why We Can’t Dismiss Raven-Symonè’s Latest Antics:

     Earlier this year, Raven made headlines due to her comments agreeing with a comparison of First Lady Michelle Obama’s looks to that of a monkey. This comment resulted in immediate gasps of disbelief to which she indifferently responded “some people look like animals,” conceding with her own resemblance to a bird.

     Now, there are two types of people who were offended by this comment. The first are those who found offense in the comparison between humans and animals. The second are those who found offense in the racial implications of Michelle’s comparison and Raven’s cavalier disregard for racist comments that overtly offend both her and Michelle Obama. The first group of people mark the majority of society that shallowly conceptualize conflict. Said group are always ready and willing to solve conflict, but in their inability to fully comprehend the issues at hand, the solution never truly solves anything. The second group is insulted for the right reasons and bear the ability to truly address the conflict at hand.

     Given my awareness of the history of black people in the US being dehumanized and treated as animalistic (and very often compared to, or even called, animals), I’m very much in the second group.

     The comparison of a Black woman to monkeys or to animals is a prevalent component in our past. Although absolutely beautiful, Black women are denied acknowledgement of their beauty in order to maintain the myth of white women as aesthetically superior. Thus, Raven’s proclamation of Mrs. Obama’s likeness to a monkey echoed what historic and much of contemporary society still believe of Black women. The exact same dynamic is present in her most recent statement.

     Last week, Raven confessed that she wouldn’t hire Black people with “ethnic” names. While co-host Whoopi Goldberg’s immediate shock mirrored the response of many watching, Raven’s words sound exactly like her oppressor. Black folks traditionally faced discrimination for the color of their skin, facial features, body shape, speech, etc. Contemporary society discriminates against names like Jamal, Shakeesha and Monique that sound “too ethnic.” While companies and hiring directors may claim their actions are an effort to maintain professionalism, the reason is deeper.

     If we rewind to our parents’ generation or even further, Black people had names that sounded exactly like their oppressors. Gertrude, Mary, Emily, Alice and Catherine (to name a few) are the common names of many Black women born during and prior to the 1950s. In the 70s, 80s and after, black naming took a turn. There was an influx of Black women named Keisha, Shameka, and Gevonna. Say what you will about these names, but the move away from being named after your oppressors is a feat to evoke esteem, not embarrassment. It is through the bravery of black naming that Raven is “Raven-Symonè” and not “Rachel Sarah.” It is her own ethnic sounding name that probably earned her an audition for The Cosby Show – the show that launched her career.

     That’s one thing that kills me about her comments: her name, while not “ghetto-sounding”, is very much a non-traditional name.

     While it is easy to dismiss Raven’s actions, there are a number of reasons that she may exhibit such behavior:

     1. Exceptionalism and success: The latest domino to fall following Raven’s words is an open letter from her father. Understanding that a parent’s love is unconditional, the letter offers insight into just the kind of reasoning that raised Raven. The letter focuses on Raven as an individual, not as a Black woman. An individual who occasionally makes off the wall comments is worthy of forgiveness; however, a Black woman who uses her platform to deny her blackness entirely or discount her people rather than build them up is not. The focus on her “success” is also problematic. Raven has fame, fortune and fair skin, and if this is how her father defines success then it is no surprise that Raven refuses to see the error in her ways.

     2. “New Black” syndrome: Contemporary society prides itself on the implementation of a “new blackness” wherein a famous person is Black in skin color only. This stance is taken in order to capitalize on the ability to fill any and all roles targeting Black people without being “too black” and warding off white folk.

     3. The Stacey Dash Affect: During the 2012 Presidential campaign many of those in the Black community were shocked and insulted following Stacey Dash’s endorsement of Mitt Romney and open disappointment in Obama’s presidency. Her endorsement launched a series of other small-minded comments that made the 90s beauty a contemporary hot topic. Like Dash, Raven’s prime was over a decade ago. So in seeing how Dash was afforded an opportunity to obtain relevancy in the foolish act of distancing herself from blackness, it is quite possible that Raven jumped on that same tune. Stacey Dash’s comments have taken her many places. But while her behavior takes her from Clueless to correspondent, the one thing she is not taken is seriously. Raven’s comments place her in the same dynamic, but she’s seemingly exchanged a positive legacy for contemporary relevance.

     ****

     Piers Morgan Tweets ‘I love my whiteness’ to Black Lives Matter activist, calls #BlackTwitter racist:

     The problem here isn’t that anyone, of any race or ethnicity, shouldn’t love him- or herself. The issue is that loving one’s blackness is not solely about loving one’s skin color. It is pushback against the pathologizing of black people, black communities and black culture. It’s saying that despite this country’s record of killing, subjugating and disenfranchising us and appropriating our culture, we love our blackness and the many ways that it can manifest and be expressed. We love its textures, complexity, brilliance and beauty. Lucille Clifton wrote, “Celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.” That is celebrating blackness in the United States.

     Celebrating whiteness in the United States? It means you are celebrating privilege. You are celebrating the history of white oppression, imperialism, racism and supremacy. It’s not celebrating the lack of melanin; it’s a celebration of lack of accountability. Morgan—and any other white person, for that matter—can love themselves all they want, but loving “whiteness” is loving a structure that has terrorized people of color since this country’s—and Morgan’s country’s—inception. If that’s how he feels, fine. But in the words of the famous philosopher Silkk the Shocker, “You ain’t gotta lie to kick it.”

     This man needs an entire plate of shut the fuck up.

379. Saad says

     14 October 2015 at 7:31 am

     I want to throw up…

     Residents of mostly white areas use private apps and websites to track and report “suspicious” black people

     It was nearing closing time in March last year when a manager at Boffi Georgetown dispatched a series of alarmed messages. Observing two men yelling outside the luxury kitchen and bath showroom, Julia Walter reached for her phone and accessed a private messaging application that hundreds of residents, retailers and police in this overwhelmingly white, wealthy neighborhood use to discuss people they deem suspicious.

     “2 black males screaming at each other in alley,” Walter wrote. “. . . Help needed.”

     One minute later, a District police officer posted he would check it out, and Walter felt relieved. But as weeks gave way to months and the private group spawned hundreds of messages, Walter’s relief turned to unease. The overwhelming majority of the people the app’s users cited were black. Was the chatroom reducing crime along the high-end retail strip? Was it making people feel safer? Or was it racial profiling?

     These are questions being asked across the country as people experiment with services that bill themselves as a way to prevent crime, but also expose latent biases. The application “SketchFactor,” which invited users to report “sketchy” people, faced allegations of racism in both the District and New York. Another social network roiled Oakland, Calif., when white residents used Nextdoor.com to cite “suspicious activity” about black neighbors. Taking it even further was GhettoTracker.com, which asked users to rate neighborhoods based on whether they thought they were “safe” or a “ghetto.”

     And there’s an app that retailers use to report “suspicious” shoppers (aka black people):

     Now “Operation GroupMe” is stirring controversy in Georgetown. In February of last year, the Georgetown Business Improvement District partnered with District police to launch the effort, which they call a “real-time mobile-based group-messaging app that connects Georgetown businesses, police officers and community members.” Since then, the app has attracted nearly 380 users who surreptitiously report on — and photograph — shoppers in an attempt to deter crime.

     The correspondence has provided an unvarnished glimpse into Georgetown retailers’ latest effort to stop their oldest scourge: shoplifting. But while the goal is admirable, the result, critics say, has been less so, laying bare the racial fault lines that still define this cobblestoned enclave of tony boutiques and historic rowhouses that is home to many of Washington’s elite.

     Since March of last year, Georgetown retailers have dispatched more than 6,000 messages that warn of suspicious shoppers. A review by the Business Improvement District of all the messages since January — more than 3,000 — revealed that nearly 70 percent of those patrons were black. The employees often allege shoplifting. But other times, retailers don’t accuse these shoppers of anything beyond seeming suspicious.

     “Suspicious shoppers in store,” an American Apparel retailer said in April last year. “3 female. 1 male strong smell of weed. All African American. Help please.”

     “What did they look like?” a True Religion employee in May last year asked an American Apparel retailer who had reported a theft. “Ratchet,” the American Apparel worker replied, using a slang term for trashy that often has a racial connotation. “Lol.”

     And fucking transphobia too:

     “Suspicious tranny in store at Wear,” reported one worker at Hu’s Wear in May. “AA male as female. 6ft 2. Broad shoulders.” Tranny means transsexual in the app-users’ jargon.

380. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     14 October 2015 at 9:19 pm

     Black Lives Matter activists have new ally in Edward Snowden. So much of the info at the link is made up of Tweets between DeRay Mckesson and Snowden that can’t be copy/pasted here. So you’ll have to click the link to see the discussion.

     ****

     Listen: Alabama Republican goes on callous rant against black ex-Marine affected by DMV closures:

     “It’s almost as if some people enjoy being a victim,” Ball told radio host Dale Jackson. “They want somebody else to do everything for them. That’s a miserable way to live. You’re going to be miserable and you’re going to bring misery to everyone around you.”

     Ball’s remarks came in response to an article profiling 34-year-old Kimberly Spruell, a Marine and National Guard veteran who is among the residents affected by the closure of 31 drivers’ license offices, most of them in counties with predominantly African-American voting populations.

     The closures were quickly criticized, and Spruell described it as the latest hit to rural Wilcox County, where she lives.

     Residents there now have to travel 45 miles to the nearest license office, which is necessary to be eligible to vote under the state’s “voter ID” law. Spruell herself will not have to make such a trip, because she has an identification card that can be renewed at the local courthouse.

     “Voting is obviously a big deal to us because the people we elect do things like [closing state parks and license bureaus], that’s on us,” she told AL.com. “My vote absolutely matters, so we have to find a way to do it.”

     On Monday, Ball played along when Jackson mockingly suggested that Spruell could walk to a polling place.

     “We Marines believe in ‘improvise, adapt and overcome,’” the legislator said.

     “Now they believe in crying to the newspaper,” Jackson added.

     What an assclam. He’s dismissing the very real problem of disenfranchising people. He doesn’t care that the closing of the DMV locations disproportionately affects black Alabamians.

381. Saad says

     15 October 2015 at 6:50 am

     I can’t believe my eyes…

     Group who drove past birthday party waving Confederate flag and shouting slurs indicted

     Months after a convoy of pickup trucks waving large Confederate flags rumbled past a birthday party in suburban Atlanta, a grand jury has indicted members of the group on terror-related charges.

     The indictments charge 15 members of an organization known as Respect the Flag with violating Georgia’s Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act and making terroristic threats. If convicted, they could face up to 20 years in prison.

     Melissa Alford, who hosted the July birthday party, where many of the attendees were black, said tensions flared when the trucks drove by the home in Douglasville, Georgia. The people holding the flags were also brandishing weapons, she said.

     “They used the N-word and said they were going to kill people on my property,” Alford told CNN affiliate WSB.

     [. . .]

     The indictment alleges that Respect the Flag is a “criminal street gang,” and that members of the group threatened “to commit a crime of violence” against people at the party, “with the purpose of terrorizing those individuals and in reckless disregard for the risks of causing such terror.”

     White supremacy actually being treated as terrorism?

     Pinch me.

382. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     15 October 2015 at 8:55 pm

     Professor gets suspended for going to Black Lives Matter protest:

     Last Thursday, at a rally initiated by the Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee, PHL, Black Lives Matter activists and others took to the grounds of Community College of Philadelphia to protest, among other things, the presence of a Philadelphia Police Department recruiter on campus that day. The speakers at the protest included CCP adjunct English professor Divya Nair, and later that same day, Nair was suspended by the school.

     “The administration suspended her with no explanation at all within hours of the protest,” says Kasturi Sen, a Philadelphia attorney who is assisting Nair in an unofficial capacity. More recently, says Sen, CCP administration sent Nair a letter citing a number of policies that she had supposedly violated, but the school did not explain exactly how she violated those policies. “We still, to date, don’t have any factual basis. They’re not saying anything. We’re staring into a black hole at this point.”

     Nair has not responded to our requests for an interview, and we were told by her supporters that she is likely to refrain from commenting until after a closed-door disciplinary hearing that will take place Thursday afternoon at 3:30 p.m. at 1500 Spring Garden Street, an administrative building at the school. Another protest is scheduled outside of that building at the time of the hearing.

     Last Thursday’s protest began outside, where Nair spoke about policing and colonization, according to Drexel politics professor George Ciccariello-Maher, who also spoke that day. “She was not disorderly in any way,” he observes. “Security kept yelling about people being disorderly, but she was quieter than most people present. There was no aggression. It’s egregious that she’s being targeted. She an adjunct faculty member, and they think they can get rid of her.”

     As the rally progressed, some of the protestors, including Nair, went inside, where the police recruiter had a table. (As fellow protestor Ciccariello-Maher put it, the protestors were taking issue with “police on campus recruiting poor students of color to then send them into their neighborhoods to police and kill their own people.”) The protest moved into the same room as the recruitment table, and according to two people in attendance, CCP president Donald Generals asked the protestors to go back outside. They refused, and one protestor reportedly shouted over a bullhorn “Go fuck yourself!” at Generals in response to his request.

     Eventually, officials decided to move the recruitment table outside the building, as seen in the video below. The protest continued, with a small group of protestors chanting, “Tell the pigs: Pack up, go home.”

     ****

     Packets containing racist, anti-Semitic messages found on the East Side of Providence, RI:

     Police are investigating anti-Semitic and racist leaflets tossed onto residential properties on a few streets in the Blackstone neighborhood Thursday morning.
     The leaflets, in 22 plastic bags weighted by rice, had various messages attacking African Americans and Jews, and referenced the Ku Klux Klan.
     Providence Public Safety Commissioner Steven M. Paré said that no group appeared to be taking responsibility for the leaflets, and it was unclear whether they were related to a similar incident earlier this year in East Greenwich.

     The discovery of the leaflets drew a heavy presence of law enforcement and fire officials, as well as Mayor Jorge Elorza, the U.S. attorney’s office and the state police fusion center. The fire department’s hazardous materials team deployed to check whether the rice was a volatile substance — it was not. The police are investigating whether there was any specific target for the leaflets.
     Most of the bags landed on lawns on Methyl Street, and a few on Lorimer Avenue, Ogden Street and Overhill Road, in a predominantly white and well-off neighborhood. Paré said that as of Thursday afternoon, there didn’t appear to be any particular homes or residents who were being targeted.
     That’s an important distinction in the investigation, to determine whether the offensive materials constitute a hate crime against a person or group, or whether the material falls under free speech. “We haven’t looked at all of the papers,” the commissioner said. “It’s still early in the investigation.”

383. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     16 October 2015 at 1:45 am

     Slack engineer Erica Baker: Diversity efforts need to extend beyond gender:

     Erica Baker, a build and release engineer at Slack, is making waves in tech right now. She’s the ex-Google employee who released employee salary data at Google. She’s also the one behind #RealDiversityNumbers, a Twitter movement to get companies reporting numbers around retention, number of lawsuits settled out of court, etc. And just this week, Re/Code’s Kara Swisher told C Magazine that Baker’s a woman to watch.

     And now, from her latest, thoughtful post on Medium, #FFFFFF Diversity:

     Marc and Parker’s words echoed the message many Silicon Valley companies have been saying with money: Get in line people of color. Wait for (white) women to get theirs, then we’ll get to you.

     Baker was referring to the chat Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Co-Founder Parker Harris had about diversity with Swisher at the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last month. The panel was originally called “Building an Inclusive Workplace,” but was renamed to “Advancing Women in the Workplace” after the conversation ended with a sharp focus on women. In case you missed it, Harris said, “right now, I’m focused on women” and Benioff said, that while overall diversity is important, Salesforce’s “major focus right now” is “the women’s issue.”

     Baker’s advice to Salesforce: “Stop acting like you don’t have resources,” Baker told TechCrunch. “To say that ‘We can’t focus on anything else but women right now’ is such a cop-out.”

     Despite what Harris and Benioff said at Dreamforce, Salesforce says that it’s committed to addressing other forms of diversity, such as ethnic diversity.

     “There has been a big spotlight on women and issues like equal pay, and we have focused more on women in our diversity efforts, but not exclusively,” Salesforce EVP of Global Employee Success Cindy Robbins said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Salesforce has many other initiatives to create a more diverse workforce across the board. We are still learning and committed to addressing gender and ethnic diversity.”

     Yes, Salesforce is clearly still learning, as is everyone else. And, even though it’s not the responsibility of black people and people of color to teach white people, Baker is willing to help. She doesn’t work in any diversity and inclusion departments at Slack, but she’s motivated to keep speaking up about the absence of people of color in tech.

     “If we don’t talk about it, if we accept the status quo as is, like, ‘Oh, it’s ok to just focus on women for our diversity efforts.” If we just let that be, then that’s all a company is going to do,” Baker said. “Let’s be honest, they’re going to do the bare minimum because it’s not a thing they want to deal with anyway.”

     ****

     How mass incarceration creates million dollar blocks in poor neighborhoods:

     There are neighborhoods on the West Side of Chicago where nearly every block has been painted red — a sign, on the above map, that someone there was sentenced to time in an Illinois state prison between 2005 and 2009 for a nonviolent drug offense.

     On several dark-red blocks, the missing residents are so many — or their sentences so long — that taxpayers have effectively committed more than a million dollars to incarcerate people who once lived there.

     This is the perverse form that public investment takes in many poor, minority neighborhoods: “million dollar blocks,” to use a bleak term first coined in New York by Laura Kurgan at Columbia University and Eric Cadora of the Justice Mapping Center. Our penchant for incarcerating people has grown so strong that, in many cities, taxpayers frequently spend more than a million dollars locking away residents of a single city block.

     In Chicago, Daniel Cooper, Ryan Lugalia-Hollon, Matt Barrington and the civic technology company DataMade have reprised the concept for one of the most divided cities in America. By their count, there are 851 blocks in Chicago where the public has committed more than a million dollars to sentencing residents to state prison for all kinds of crime. The total tops a million dollars for nonviolent drug offenses alone in 121 of those blocks.

     Those places, tracing the city’s segregated history, are clustered in neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. These patterns, the project points out, mean that most of Chicago’s incarcerated residents come from and return to a small number of places. And in those places, the consequences of incarceration on everyone else — children who are missing their parents, households that are missing their breadwinners, families who must support returning offenders who are now much harder to employ — are concentrated, too.

     Check out the maps at the link for sobering images of these “million dollar blocks”.

384. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     16 October 2015 at 8:59 pm

     Tamir Rice family wants prosecutor to step aside:

     “I am very disappointed in the way [Cuyahoga County Prosecutor] Tim McGinty is handling this case, I would like for him to step down and allow an independent prosecutor to take over [the] Tamir Rice case,” Samaria Rice, Tamir’s mother, said at a press conference on Friday.

     Rice was shot by Officer Timothy Loehmann on Nov. 22, 2014, less than two seconds after police arrived at a Cleveland playground where the boy was seen playing with a toy gun.

     A grand jury is set to determine whether criminal charges should be brought against Loehmann or his partner, Officer Frank Garmback, who was driving the police car that surveillance video showed pulling within a few feet of Rice.

     In a letter to McGinty, released this morning, Jonathan Abady, attorney for the family, said his clients no longer believe the prosecutor’s office “is discharging its duty in a way that justice and accountability will be achieved.”

     “We respectfully request,” Abady writes, “that you recuse yourself from this case and that a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate and prosecute this matter, including presentation of the proper evidence to a grand jury. That is the only way that Tamir’s family, the community in Cleveland and the nation as a whole will have any faith in this process.”

     Asked Wednesday about demands for McGinty to step aside, Joseph Frolik, the director of communications for Cuyahoga County’s Office of the Prosecutor, told Al Jazeera, “We have no plans to do that.”

     Of course not. Your interest in seeing any substantial amount of justice done appear nonexistent.

     ****

     Why ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’ is bullshit:
     (excerpt)

     Some of us, spent our childhoods trying to survive our parents, and their vices. Trying to survive, literally, with them. Whether it was having a place to stay for a few weeks, battling an eviction notice, or trying to keep up with school materials, even though we knew next week we would have to move. Then later, when we become adults and we escaped or families, the burden to figure out survival came on us, and even more than surviving because of our pasts, we now have a will to thrive, and do better than the life that was handed to us.

     But society unfortunately, holds us to the same standards, and timelines as they do a student, or worker with no such background and complications; as if the playing field was level. Are we all the same? Well in fact, adversity, made us stronger, and our desire to succeed stronger, but that doesn’t mean we have all the same tools and access in our tool kit as our well-polished counterparts with less of a background to spring back from. In fact, part of our adulthood maybe spent reconciling some of the tragedy we experienced, for our own mental health, while simultaneously trying to achieve the same things as our counterparts, in the same work and school arenas as them. And unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of support for this process along the way. On the contrary there is a reinforced value, that all people have the same opportunities to achieve as each other, regardless of where we came from, what built us, or the amount of obstacles placed before us. This can make us even drive ourselves further, and harder without checking up on ourselves, taking care of our health, and pacing ourselves at a healthy rate that is good for us; because we are overly concerned with “success”

     I loathe the bootstrap mentality. It presumes everyone has the same resources and opportunities growing up. And anyone with an ounce of awareness knows this is light-years from the truth.

385. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     17 October 2015 at 9:00 pm

     Cops pepper spray crowd of school kids protesting cop caught on film body slamming teen:

     At Tolman High School on Wednesday, a brief video sparked outrage showing a police officer violently arresting a 14-year-old boy.

     Police said the student was acting unruly before the incident, allegedly trying to fight with another student. According to police, while the officer was trying to arrest the 14-year-old, the student’s 17-year-old brother attacked the officer.

     The video does not show the attack; it only shows the 17-year-old boy face down on the floor. At this point, the 14-year-old approached the officer, and he’s immediately slammed to the ground.

     CIVIL LIBERTIES
     Cops Pepper-Spray Crowd of School Kids Protesting Cop Caught on Film Body-Slamming Teen
     A brief video of the incident has sparked outrage.
     By Matt Agorist / The Free Thought Project October 16, 2015
     Print
     55 COMMENTS

     Pawtucket, RI — At Tolman High School on Wednesday, a brief video sparked outrage showing a police officer violently arresting a 14-year-old boy.

     Police said the student was acting unruly before the incident, allegedly trying to fight with another student. According to police, while the officer was trying to arrest the 14-year-old, the student’s 17-year-old brother attacked the officer.

     The video does not show the attack; it only shows the 17-year-old boy face down on the floor. At this point, the 14-year-old approached the officer, and he’s immediately slammed to the ground.

     On Wednesday, the video quickly went viral sparking a subsequent protest at Tolman High on Thursday. The protest was peaceful at first but became chaotic when the fire alarm went off inside the school, and all the students were forced to evacuate.

     As the protest grew, the mayor got involved. “I’m asking you to put your trust in me,” Mayor Don Grebien said to the students. “I’m going to listen to you.”

     According to WDAM, Grebien pleaded for the students to head back to class. He decided to meet with a few students at city hall.

     As the police presence increased, so did the tension, and a window was allegedly broken.

     After police arrested two adults and eight teenagers, they began to move in on the crowd, dousing them with pepper spray in the process. Police say they were forced to pepper spray the crowd of high schoolers because they were “being threatened.”

     You know, at this point, the ‘I feared for my life/felt threatened’ excuse is meaningless, bc it is used as a justification far too many times and in far too many cases where it is sheer nonsense.

     ****

     From WaPo-
     When white friends don’t believe what black go through, they’re not friends:

     I still remember it perfectly, more than 10 years later. It’s terrifying to be stopped in your car and approached by first one and then two more white police officers with their hands resting on their holstered guns. I kept my hands in plain sight on the wheel while they inspected my license and registration. On second thought, I recall thinking during the 15-minute stop, perhaps the scruffy sweats and baseball cap that were perfect for my spin class weren’t the best choices when you’re African American and you’ve just bought a red car. (Why didn’t I pick the gray Camry?) I was given a written warning about running a stop sign that I’d actually stopped at, but I knew better than to argue.

     “Forty-five percent of blacks say they have experienced racial discrimination by the police at some point in their lives; virtually no whites say they have,” according to a recent New York Times/CBS News nationwide poll. (I’m shocked the 45 percent figure isn’t higher, considering the stories African Americans tell each other all the time.) So when I share the trauma of that particular incident and so many like it – fraught interactions that may have involved a son (stopped driving a nice car in our nice neighborhood), nephew or friend – I expect, first of all, that I will be believed.

     Yet whites are, frequently, disappointingly, incredulous. Very often a “friend’s” reaction that goes something like this: “I don’t think a police officer would stop anyone for no reason at all.” Or: “You must have done something suspicious.” Or my favorite: “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.” I am not some child coming home with some tall tale, and I am certainly not a delusional liar.

     I don’t expect much. Just nodding and acknowledging my words would be enough. Instead, jumping in to explain what must have really happened before I can finish a sentence means that – whether you realize it or not – you’ve shattered an important bond and traveled the distance from friend to acquaintance. I smile, make a mental note, and change the subject, realizing that with this person, topics from now on will be limited to rating entrées at the latest neighborhood bistro or judging whether the new Scorsese film shows the master back in top form.

     In the national conversation about race, especially after a well-publicized confrontation like the one in Ferguson this summer, different sides don’t need to agree. But they do have to accept that the other side is speaking sincerely and from the heart. And whites need to believe blacks when we say what we’ve been through.

     The discussions I’m talking about are those that have the potential to be most effective—ones that happen naturally, among people of different races who already interact with an easy rapport: the women who sweat together at the gym and compare aches and pains, the moms and dads at the PTA with questions about the new coach, neighbors exchanging tips on backyard gardens. It’s people who already share the ordinary, sometime mundane details of life. From there, it should be easy for one side to give the other the benefit of the doubt. (Yes, America is deeply segregated, but most people do have co-workers of different races; there are opportunities for interaction.)

386. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     22 October 2015 at 5:47 pm

     This morning, racists burned a 7th black church near Ferguson:

     Seven predominantly-black churches in North St. Louis, Missouri, which is near Ferguson, have been targeted by one or possibly more arsonists in the past 11 days. St. Louis and the surrounding region have been home to a resurgence of new-era Civil Rights organizing in the wake of the 2014 killing of Mike Brown by Ferguson police. The Ferguson uprising is credited with launching the nationwide #BlackLivesMatter movement.

     This recent string of arsons is the second wave of black church burnings this year. The first occurred this past summer, after arsonists targeted at least six black churches in the wake of the massacre by a young white supremacist at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

     “You can burn down the building, but you cannot break our body,” said the Rev. David Triggs, pastor at New Life Missionary Baptist Church, one of the seven churches targeted.

     Arson against black churches has a long history in America, related to the central role these churches have traditionally played in black communities. Dating back to the decades before the Civil War, the black church has been both a place of worship and a site of resistance to violent oppression. From 19th-century movements to end slavery, to 20th-century opposition to Jim Crow segregation, to present day struggles like #BlackLivesMatter, the black church has been key to the long and ongoing fight for civil rights and equality for all Americans.

     Given the historical importance black churches have played in the community and the fight for equality, it’s quite evident why they’re being targeted. Fucking racists.
     Goddammit.

     ****

     FL police killed this beloved church musician after his car broke down:

     Corey Jones, a well-known local musician and assistant manager of the Delray Beach Housing Authority, was shot and killed by a plainclothes police officer driving an unmarked car early Sunday morning.

     As of this writing, the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department hasn’t yet released a detailed report describing Corey Jones’ last moments, however police did finally make a statement Monday afternoon, saying that Officer Nouman Raja was “suddenly confronted by an armed subject” upon stopping to investigate what he believed was an abandoned vehicle on I-95 around 3:15 a.m.

     Armed? Yeah right. I don’t buy that for one fucking second. He had car troubles. Worse, the police haven’t told the family much of anything about what happened.

     “He was sitting on the side of the road and got shot. We didn’t find out about it until about 12 hours later,” Sylvester Banks Jr., Jones’ uncle, told the Sun-Sentinel.

     Though police maintain Jones was “armed,” no details about what weapon Jones allegedly carried have been released to the public. However, Jones’ friends, family, and coworkers told the New York Daily News that they have never known Corey to have ever carried a firearm, nor do they recall any instance in which he used one.

     The lack of any details surrounding Jones’ death leaves one obvious question unanswered: What really made Officer Nouman Raja feel threatened enough to kill Corey Jones?

     Detectives are now saying that it could take months before a formal investigation can be completed. Dorothy Ellington, CEO of the Delray Beach Housing Authority, told the Daily News she remembered Jones as a hard worker who only took a vacation once in 8 years, and who would never threaten a police officer.

     Of course when it comes to many cops in this country, the mere existence of a black person is an affront worthy of execution.

387. Rowan vet-tech says

     22 October 2015 at 8:04 pm

     He was black and he had arms, so therefore he was armed, and thus automatically incredibly dangerous, because mumble mumble.

     /irate sarcasm

     Just, fucking hell.

388. Saad says

     23 October 2015 at 6:22 pm

     Shame on my city paper.

     Of the hundreds of reader opinions they must receive daily, THIS got published.

     That’s some Nazi level of hate and fear-mongering. Singling out that Muslim woman who this person living in the American South knows fuck all about is especially revolting.

     This newspaper has a history of taking a “both sides” approach to things, but I’ve never seen anything this atrocious from them. Jesus.

389. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

     23 October 2015 at 6:55 pm

     Seems to be a lot of anti-Muslim hatred out there:
     http://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2015/10/22/fbi-hate-crime-probe-launched-iu-student-attack/74380738/

390. rq says

     24 October 2015 at 2:20 pm

     This is a bit old, but well worth the read and the notice: Remarks by the President at the Congressional Black Caucus 45th Annual Phoenix Awards Dinner

     Of course, black women have been a part of every great movement in American history — (applause) — even if they weren’t always given a voice. They helped plan the March on Washington, but were almost entirely absent from the program. And when pressed, male organizers added a tribute highlighting six women — none of them who were asked to make a speech. Daisy Bates introduced her fellow honorees in just 142 words, written by a man. Of course, Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson sang. But in a three-hour program, the men gave women just 142 words. That may sound familiar to some of the women in the room here tonight. The organizers even insisted on two separate parades — male leaders marching along the main route on Pennsylvania Avenue, and leaders like Dorothy Height and Rosa Parks relegated to Independence Avenue. America’s most important march against segregation had its own version of separation.

     Black women were central in the fight for women’s rights, from suffrage to the feminist movement — (applause) — and yet despite their leadership, too often they were also marginalized. But they didn’t give up, they didn’t let up. They were too fierce for that. Black women have always understood the words of Pauli Murray — that “Hope is a song in a weary throat.”

     It’s thanks to black women that we’ve come a long way since the days when a girl like Ruby Bridges couldn’t go to school. When a woman like Amelia couldn’t cast her vote. When we didn’t have a Congressional Black Caucus — and its 20 women members. (Applause.)

     So I’m focusing on women tonight because I want them to know how much we appreciate them, how much we admire them, how much we love them. (Applause.) And I want to talk about what more we have to do to provide full opportunity and equality for our black women and girls in America today. (Applause.)

     Because all of us are beneficiaries of a long line of strong black women who helped carry this country forward. Their work to expand civil rights opened the doors of opportunity, not just for African Americans but for all women, for all of us — black and white, Latino and Asian, LGBT and straight, for our First Americans and our newest Americans. And their contributions in every field — as scientists and entrepreneurs, educators, explorers — all made us stronger. Of course, they’re also a majority of my household. (Laughter and applause.) So I care deeply about how they’re doing.

     The good news is, despite structural barriers of race and gender, women and girls of color have made real progress in recent years. The number of black women-owned businesses has skyrocketed. (Applause.) Black women have ascended the ranks of every industry. Teen pregnancy rates among girls of color are down, while high school and four-year college graduation rates are up. (Applause.) That’s good news.

     But there’s no denying that black women and girls still face real and persistent challenges. The unemployment rate is over 8 percent for black women. And they’re overrepresented in low-paying jobs; underrepresented in management. They often lack access to economic necessities like paid leave and quality, affordable child care. They often don’t get the same quality health care that they need, and have higher rates of certain chronic diseases — although that’s starting to change with Obamacare. (Applause.) It’s working, by the way, people. Just in case — (laughter) — just in case you needed to know.

     […]

     When women of color aren’t given the opportunity to live up to their God-given potential, we all lose out on their talents; we’re not as good a country as we can be. We might miss out on the next Mae Jemison or Ursula Burns or Serena Williams or Michelle Obama. (Applause.) We want everybody to be on the field. We can’t afford to leave some folks off the field.

     So we’re going to have to close those economic gaps so that hardworking women of all races, and black women in particular can support families, and strengthen communities, and contribute to our country’s success. So that’s why my administration is investing in job training and apprenticeships, to help everybody, but particularly help more women earn better-paying jobs, and particularly in non-traditional careers. It’s why we’re investing in getting more girls, and particularly girls of color interested in STEM fields — math and science and engineering — (applause) — and help more of them stay on track in school.

     It’s why we’re going to continue to fight to eliminate the pay gap. (Applause.) Equal pay for equal work. It’s an all-American idea. It’s very simple. And that’s why we’re going to keep working to raise the minimum wage — because women disproportionately are the ones who are not getting paid what they’re worth. That’s why we’re fighting to expand tax credits that help working parents make ends meet, closing tax loopholes for folks who don’t need tax loopholes to pay for. It’s why we’re expanding paid leave to employees of federal contractors. And that’s why Congress needs to expand paid leave for more hardworking Americans. It’s good for our economy. It’s the right thing to do. No family should have to choose between taking care of a sick child or losing their job. (Applause.)

     […]

     I spoke about this at length earlier this year at the NAACP, and I explained the long history of inequity in our criminal justice system. We all know the statistics. And this summer, because I wanted to highlight that there were human beings behind these statistics, I visited a prison in Oklahoma — the first President to ever visit a federal prison. (Applause.) And I sat down with the inmates, and I listened to their stories. And one of the things that struck me was the crushing burden their incarceration has placed not just on their prospects for the future, but also for their families, the women in their lives, children being raised without a father in the home; the crushing regret these men felt over the children that they left behind.

     Mass incarceration rips apart families. It hollows out neighborhoods. It perpetuates poverty. We understand that in many of our communities, they’re under-policed. The problem is not that we don’t want active, effective police work. We want, and admire, and appreciate law enforcement. We want them in our communities. Crime hurts the African American community more than anybody. But we want to make sure that it’s done well and it’s done right, and it’s done fairly and it’s done smart. (Applause.) And that’s why, in the coming months, I’m going to be working with many in Congress and many in the CBC to try to make progress on reform legislation that addresses unjust sentencing laws, and encourages diversion and prevention programs, catches our young people early and tries to put them on a better path, and then helps ex-offenders, after they’ve done their time, get on the right track. It’s the right thing to do for America. (Applause.)

     And although in these discussions a lot of my focus has been on African American men and the work we’re doing with My Brother’s Keeper, we can’t forget the impact that the system has on women, as well. The incarceration rate for black women is twice as high as the rate for white women. Many women in prison, you come to discover, have been victims of homelessness and domestic violence, and in some cases human trafficking. They’ve got high rates of mental illness and substance abuse. And many have been sexually assaulted, both before they got to prison and then after they go to prison. And we don’t often talk about how society treats black women and girls before they end up in prison. They’re suspended at higher rates than white boys and all other girls. And while boys face the school-to-prison pipeline, a lot of girls are facing a more sinister sexual abuse-to-prison pipeline. (Applause.) Victims of early sexual abuse are more likely to fail in school, which can lead to sexual exploitation, which can lead to prison. So we’re focusing on boys, but we’re also investing in ways to change the odds for at-risk girls — to make sure that they are loved and valued, to give them a chance.

     And that’s why we have to make a collective effort to address violence and abuse against women in all of our communities. In every community, on every campus, we’ve got to be very clear: Women who have been victims of rape or domestic abuse, who need help, should know that they can count on society and on law enforcement to treat them with love and care and sensitivity, and not skepticism. (Applause.)

     I want to repeat — because somehow this never shows up on Fox News. (Laughter.) I want to repeat — because I’ve said it a lot, unwaveringly, all the time: Our law enforcement officers do outstanding work in an incredibly difficult and dangerous job. They put their lives on the line for our safety. (Applause.) We appreciate them and we love them. That’s why my Task Force on 21st Century Policing made a set of recommendations that I want to see implemented to improve their safety, as well as to make sure that our criminal justice system is being applied fairly. Officers show uncommon bravery in our communities every single day. They deserve our respect. That includes women in law enforcement. We need more of you, by the way. We’ve got an outstanding chief law enforcement officer in our Attorney General, Loretta Lynch. (Applause.) We want all our young ladies to see what a great role model she is.

     So I just want to repeat, because somehow this never gets on the TV: There is no contradiction between us caring about our law enforcement officers and also making sure that our laws are applied fairly. Do not make this as an either/or proposition. This is a both/and proposition. (Applause.) We want to protect our police officers. We’ll do a better job doing it if our communities can feel confident that they are being treated fairly. I hope I’m making that clear. (Applause.) I hope I’m making that clear.

     From September 20 of this year.

     And this happened, a couple of weeks ago, too: Million Man March anniversary in sees black Americans call for change

     The original march brought hundreds of thousands to Washington to pledge to improve their lives, their families and their communities. Women, whites and other minorities were not invited to the original march, but organizers welcomed all on Saturday.

     President Barack Obama, who attended the first Million Man March, was in California on Saturday.

     Saturday’s march brought out young and old, including some veterans of the 1963 March on Washington. Nate Smith of Oakland, Calif., who was on the Mall for Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech and the 1995 Million Man March, returned once again for Saturday’s proceedings.

     “It’s something that I need to do,” the 70-year-old man said. “It’s like a pilgrimage for me, and something I think all black people need to do.”

     The National Park Service estimated the attendance at the 1995 march to be around 400,000, but subsequent counts by private organizations put the number at 800,000 or higher. The National Park Service has refused to give crowd estimates on Mall activities since.

     Rev. Jamal Bryant of the Empowerment Temple AME Church in Baltimore, who helped organize the anniversary march, estimated there were almost one million attendees Saturday. Farrakhan refused to guess how many people filled the Mall from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial.

     One Southerner says the Confederacy was a ‘con-job’ on white people — and its legacy still is today

     Hyman’s a stone mason, a carpenter and an avid gardener who writes the “Coop Builder” column for Chickens Magazine. You can have him build you a custom chicken coop if you’d like.

     And he wants people to know that for a significant share of white Southerners, the Confederacy — and the slave economy it defended — was a huge scam. And in an essay that ran last month in a number of newspapers across the South, he argued that the mythology surrounding the Confederacy still hoodwinks many of his white working-class Southerners to this day.

     Hyman appeared on Politics and Reality Radio last week to lay out his argument. Below is a transcript of our discussion that’s been edited for length and clarity.

     Basically about the wealth-gap back then. Also an old article.

     From the beginning of October, Bracing for Gentrification in the South Bronx

     When I moved back to the South Bronx and started the Bronx Documentary Center in 2011, we began training and mentoring a small group of local photographers. We called it the Bronx Photo League, after the legendary Photo League of the 1940s, which consisted of factory workers and clerks who loved photography and cared about social justice.

     Our group includes Mexican and West African immigrants. David (Dee) Delgado, who went from a troubled youth to becoming a responsible family man, helps lead the group along with Rhynna Santos, a Latin music manager, and Adi Talwar, an Indian immigrant. All are passionate and perceptive photographers; all share a commitment to accurately document the realities and changes in our own community, some positive, some not. We strive for balance, not sensation.

     Since its inception, the group has photographed the South Bronx as part of a continuing chronicle on gentrification. This year, its major project — funded by a grant with the Workforce Development Institute — looks at the impending transformation of a major South Bronx corridor, Jerome Avenue. The street, much of it under the shadows of the elevated 4 train, is the end of old New York, a gritty two-mile stretch of low buildings where thousands of immigrants work in small stores, factories and car repair shops.

     A city rezoning study of Jerome Avenue is underway. The final verdict is not yet in, but, as seen in Willets Point, Williamsburg, Dumbo and elsewhere, the city needs housing perhaps more than it needs poor workers. The formula is simple: rezoning; tax incentives for developers; new 11-story buildings that house thousands (some low income, most not). Chain and big box stores are in — immigrants fixing cars are out. Speculators are already staking claims.
     […]

     The photos taken by the Bronx Photo League show the faces of immigrant men and women who stand on their feet all day, building, fixing and serving. Most earn little money, yet take enormous pride in their work. The portraits will be installed, fittingly, at Vasquez Muffler, 1275 Jerome Avenue, where residents and workers from the community can stop by and discuss the photographs and the future of their community.

     But some of them are already worried about the coming changes. José Cruz fled the Salvadoran civil war in 1990. He has turned a wrench on Jerome for 25 years, raised his family on the handful of cash he made each week.

     “If they close these shops, I will have to leave New York,” he said. “There is no place left for me in this city.”

     I’d like to read more about this, as the article felt far too short.

     And because there hasn’t been any Coates on here for a while, So What’s the Solution to Mass Incarceration? Goldberg v. Coates

     Below is the back-and-forth blog exchange between Jeffrey Goldberg and Ta-Nehisi Coates on the question. It was spurred by Coates’s new essay, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” For our broader debate over the essay, go here.

     (Link in the last word at the link.)
     There’s a lot of readable stuff in there, some good answers from Coates.

     And no, this is not a prelude to the former volume of posts.
     Sorry. Still kerfuffling at work and I haven’t even looked at twitter in weeks.

391. rq says

     24 October 2015 at 2:30 pm

     For Muslim-Americans, Baby Aidan or Baby Muhammad? I think there was some discussion about names before and then Raven Symone had her comments about names. The article is from the beginning of October.

     The process of choosing a name for a tiny human being is a tremendous, anxiety-inducing responsibility that can lead to marital spats, desperate crowdsourcing and late-night prayers for divine inspiration.

     For Muslim parents, it carries a much heavier burden.

     “Should we give our baby a less Muslim-y name?” I asked my wife after we did an awkward, late-night celebration dance upon seeing the “+” sign appear on the pregnancy test over a year and a half ago.

     It wasn’t crazy to be entertaining the question. Why burden your kid with a profile-worthy name in addition to the problems he will likely inherit because of his skin color, ethnicity and religion?

     The same issues can be applied to other groups with distinctive names and/or spellings.

     Can’t forget, this is going on: First up for trial in Freddie Gray case, Porter faces ‘a great deal of pressure’. Should I feel sorry for Porter? So many tough decisions to make.

     Racial profiling bill draws praise from activists, criticism from police, from October 3.

     The governor’s approval of the racial profiling bill was “disappointing” to David Bejarano, president of the California Police Chiefs Assn., which had concerns about the cost and burden of collecting so much data.

     “There is no proven information that this reduces or prevents racial profiling. It’s a huge amount of data collected without any consequence,” said, Bejarano, chief of the Chula Vista Police Department.

     The chiefs, they said, want to eliminate racial profiling but believe departments are taking steps to make that happen.

     Amador County Sheriff Martin Ryan said the governor called him Saturday and they talked for half an hour about why he was signing the bill. The governor felt something needed to be done, said Ryan, president of the California State Sheriffs Assn.

     “Frankly, it’s disappointing,” Ryan said. He said counties and cities face a costly process of gathering data that will lack context because, for instance, it will not say whether a stop is made in an area with a large minority population.

     “It seems to me to be an emotional response to collect information to help them reach a conclusion that they have already reached,” Ryan said of the bill’s backers.

     Well, he could have offered some suggestions and some proof that racial profiling is on the out, that might have changed some minds about the necessity of this particular measure. Nope, he’s disappointed.

     WATCH: White Florida Cop Fired After Tasering Man Who Did Not Resist Arrest. Can this be the scent of something resembling justice…?

     Lupe Fiasco Is Funding Start-Up Businesses Created by Working-Class Entrepreneurs. I think they call it ‘caring for the community’ or something like that. Apparently it’s a phenomenon that doesn’t exist, and yet…
     Good luck!

     This Book Is Creating A Space For Queer Black Boys In Children’s Literature

     In Large Fears, Jeremiah Nebula longs to travel to Mars where he thinks he will find people and things that accept him rather than shame or alienation for being different from other young black boys in his life. According to Johnson, this longing leads to a daydream that causes Nebula to confront several fears he would have about going to Mars. The story follows him as he lands on different stars that symbolize different fears he has along his journey.

     Johnson told The Huffington Post that he wanted to explore the subject of children and fear through a character navigating multiple, intersecting identities. “Maybe the next time they see a black boy who wants to jump rope instead of play football, he won’t be strange or a sissy. He’ll be human, he’ll be himself, or he will be ‘just like Jeremiah Nebula,'” Johnson elaborated.

     Check out an interview with Johnson below, as well as Daye’s illustrations, and learn more about this revolutionary book in the world of children’s literature.

392. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     24 October 2015 at 9:32 pm

     Black Louisville judge dismissed entire white jury due to there not being one black person.

     Jury of your peers? What’s that?

     Unhappy with the number of potential black jurors called to his court last week, Jefferson Circuit Court Judge Olu Stevens halted a drug trial and dismissed the entire jury panel, asking for a new group to be sent up.

     “The concern is that the panel is not representative of the community,” said Stevens, who brought in a new group of jurors despite objections from both the defense and prosecutor.

     And this wasn’t the first time Stevens, who is black, has dismissed a jury because he felt it was lacking enough minorities. Now the state Supreme Court is going to determine whether the judge is abusing his power.

     On Nov. 18, after a 13-member jury chosen for a theft trial ended up with no black jurors, Stevens found it “troublesome” and dismissed the panel at the request of a defense attorney.

     “There is not a single African-American on this jury and (the defendant) is an African-American man,” Stevens said, according to a video of the trial. “I cannot in good conscious go forward with this jury.”

     A new jury panel was called up the next day.

     After that, the Jefferson County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office and Attorney General asked the Kentucky Supreme Court to look at the issue and see if Stevens has the authority to dismiss jury panels because of a lack of minorities. And last month, the high court agreed to hear arguments.

     Jefferson County has long had a problem with minorities being underrepresented on local juries. Several black defendants have complained over the years that they were convicted by an all-white jury – not of their peers.

     The Racial Fairness commission – a group made up of local judges, lawyers and citizens – has studied the issue for years, monitored the make-up of jury panels and found them consistently lacking in minorities.

     For example, in October, 14 percent of potential jurors were black, far below the estimated 21 percent for all residents of Jefferson County, according to records kept by the commission. In September, 13 percent of potential Jefferson County jurors were black.

     “It’s a problem,” said Appeals Court Judge Denise Clayton, head of the commission. “We are not hitting that representation.”

     ****
     Hillary Clinton stops accepting contributions from private prison:

     Hillary Clinton has agreed to stop accepting contributions from federally registered lobbyists and PACs for private prison companies, her campaign staff confirmed with Fusion early Friday morning.

     The campaign has promised to donate any previous direct contributions from private prison lobbyists to charity.

     “It’s an encouraging step forward,” said Rashad Robinson, executive director of the online civil rights group ColorOfChange.

     Robinson said the Clinton campaign agreed to stop taking contributions from private prison lobbyists after a lot of “substantive and open conversations.” He noted other civil rights and immigrant rights groups pressured Clinton, including Black Lives Matter, Get Equal, Presente, and United We Dream.

     The Clinton campaign announcement comes three months after The Intercept reported “lobbyists for two major prison companies are serving as top fundraisers for Hillary Clinton.” Earlier this month Juan Carlos Ramos, 22, an activist with United We Dream, interrupted Clinton while she delivered a speech at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s gala. Ramos said he was urging Clinton to stop accepting “prison money.”

393. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     24 October 2015 at 9:41 pm

     FBI Director: Viral video era affecting police work.
     This is an article on Jame Comey’s belief in the so-called ‘Ferguson Effect’.

     He said while there likely are multiple factors behind the spike in violence in cities, including Chicago, officers and others nationwide have told him they see “the era of viral videos” as a link.
     “I don’t know whether this explains it entirely, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year, and that wind is surely changing behavior,” Comey said.
     He added that some of the behavioral change in police officers has been for the good “as we continue to have important discussions about police conduct and de-escalation and the use of deadly force.”
     Comey likened the strain between law enforcement and local communities to two lines diverging, saying repeatedly that authorities must continue to work at improving their relationships with citizens. But he added: “I actually feel the lines continuing to arc away from each other, incident by incident, video by video.”
     Most of the country’s 50 largest cities have seen an increase in shootings and killings, he said, citing Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas and others. In Washington, D.C., he said homicides are up more than 20 percent. And he added that Baltimore is averaging more than one homicide a day — a rate higher than New York City, which has 13 times the people.
     “Why is it happening … all over and all of a sudden?” he asked. “I’ve heard a lot of theories — reasonable theories.”
     He suggested other factors, including the availability of cheaper heroin, guns getting into the wrong hands for wrongdoing, and street gangs becoming smaller and more territorial.
     But he said his conversations with officers often come back to cellphones. He said they describe encounters with young people and their cellphone cameras “taunting” them “the moment they get out of their cars.”
     “They told me, ‘We feel like we’re under siege and we don’t feel much like getting out of our cars,'” Comey said.
     He said he has been told about higher-ranking police telling officers “to remember that their political leadership has no tolerance for a viral video.”
     A spokesman for the ACLU of Illinois, Ed Yohnka, said later Friday he disagreed with Comey’s assessment.
     “Police officers who respect civilians and the law will only enhance the reputation of their departments when recorded by civilians,” Yohnka said. “And officers should be trained to conduct themselves with professionalism regardless of whether a camera is recording them.”

394. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     24 October 2015 at 11:26 pm

     #Riseupoctober: 3-day New York events focuses on police brutality:

     Thousands marched through the streets of Manhattan on Saturday to protest police brutality. A diverse, grass-roots coalition of activists and concerned citizens staged the three-day action, dubbed #RiseUpOctober.

     Supported by such notable figures as scholar and academic Cornel West and actor Jesse Williams, the movement condemns a state-sanctioned system that they say endorses campaigns of “police terror” in poor communities and especially in communities of color.

     Because of the hard work of the Black Lives Matter movement, victims such as Travyon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland have become household names. Coalition groups such as Stop Mass Incarceration are building on this growing political consciousness to expand the movement against “police terror” in communities of color.

     At least 100 families who lost a family member through police violence were said to have attended the events. Saturday’s march, from Manhattan’s Washington Square Park to Bryant Park, followed events on Thursday and Friday, including a #ShutDownRikers protest to call attention to inmates at the New York prison who can’t afford bail.

     Video of today’s march at the link.
     ****
     Confederate flag proposal goes down in flames in TN:

     In a 20-1 vote, the Greene County Commission in Tennessee voted down a proposal to fly the Confederate battle flag above its county courthouse.

     The lone vote in favor of flying the flag was made by Commissioner Buddy Randolph, who proposed the measure. “I didn’t figure the resolution would pass,” Randolph said following the vote. “I wish it had went through because it is a part of history and it ain’t got anything to do with race or anything like that.”

     Ironically, Greene County, near Tennessee’s border with Kentucky, Virginia and North Carlolina, was not popular with the Confederacy for its pro-Union leanings during the Civil War. In 1862 it was declared “enemy territory” by the secessionist government.

     “Greene County was profoundly anti-Confederate,” historian Richard Hood, who lives is in Greene County, wrote in a letter to the editor published last week in the Greeneville Sun. “Commissioner Randolph may not like this history, but it has the virtue of being factual. He should be celebrating Greene County’s heritage of resistance to the Confederacy, not propping up a grotesque distortion of ‘history’ that debases our true past and offends many, many of our own neighbors.”

     I know every little bit of chipping away at racism helps, but damn, this should be a no-brainer. The Con flag is a symbol of all that the Southern states fought for in the Civil War: slavery, white supremacy, and racism. I wish schools taught students accurate history instead of the deliberately distorted history southerns came up with so their loss in the war would be downplayed.

395. rq says

     26 October 2015 at 1:14 am

     Canada, we need to talk about racism, a short list of some of the bigger race-related issues in Canada.

396. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     26 October 2015 at 1:52 am

     Inmates punished with 20 years of solitary confinement for posting a rap video to social media:

     (not happy with the title of this article, bc it’s misleading)

     According to BuzzFeed, Dave Maass, an investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, obtained the records that were revealed during an investigation of the rap video, along with records of the punishment.

     After the video was posted online, the seven inmates who were involved were investigated by the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC). After the investigation, five inmates were punished with 180 days in “disciplinary detention.”

     Two were given punishments of 270 and 360 days, for “creating or assisting with a social media site.”

     However, the inmates were given additional punishments for being a “security threat group” (gang-related) materials, as well as possession of a contraband cell phone. Combined, the inmates were all sentenced to 7150 days, or 19.75 years, in solitary confinement.

     “When the video went viral the first time, viewers caught a fleeting glimpse of the creative energy that exists behind bars,” Maass told BuzzFeed News. “Now that we know how dearly each inmate paid for their participation, the video takes on all new significance. People in this country are still sacrificing their freedom and well-being for expression.”

     The SCDC, however, feels the punishment is justified.

     “Their placement is not just tied to that rap video,”spokesperson for the SCDC Stephanie Givens told BuzzFeed News. “It’s the fact that they are gang members and a continued threat to safety.”

     I don’t care about the damn rap video. I don’t care that they violated some rules somewhere. I *do* care about the fact that solitary confinement is hazardous to the mental health of human beings and amounts to torture. It should be abolished immediately.

     ****

     Anthony Mackie says Black Panther film doesn’t need a black director:
     (I disagree)

     “I don’t think it’s important at all,” Mackie told The Daily Beast. “As a director your job is to tell a story. You know, they didn’t get a horse to direct ‘Seabiscuit!’ The thing is I don’t think the race of the director has to do with their ability to tell a story. I think it’s all about the director’s ability to be able to relate to that story and do it justice. I think men can direct women, and two of my greatest work experiences were with female directors. So I think it all depends. May the best man — or woman — win.”

     The Black Panther film might not yet have its director, but it has its title character already cast, with Chadwick Boseman playing the comic book superhero in Captain America: Civil War before his solo movie comes out.

     I think Mackie is looking at this from the wrong perspective. Looking back at the history of Hollywood, with its whitewashing and racism and minstrel shows and racial stereotypes, African-Americans have almost *never* been in control of the narratives being told about black characters in movies. Its almost always been white people. For a movie like this-Marvel’s first black superhero finally getting a live-action movie? I think it is important to let a black director share their vision and perspective on such an landmark film.

     Also, a more diverse Hollywood isn’t going to happen all by itself. It’s going to take deliberate action to create that. African-American directors are not given enough opportunity in Hollywood. Here is a chance to contribute to changing that. And with a character that I’m sure a black director will have different thoughts (bc of lived experiences) on than a white one.

397. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     26 October 2015 at 1:06 pm

     God I hate when Fox “News” throws one of their “black experts” on screen. They have one of their House Negroes speak out against police brutality and the Black Lives Matter Movement. Here is David Clarke, House Negro:

     Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade argued that activists protesting police brutality in New York City over the weekend were a “slap in the face” to the NYPD because an officer had been recently murdered.

     Clarke insisted that demands to end abuse of force were just “crazy talk.”

     “That’s ignorance in its purest form,” the Wisconsin sheriff opined. “They’re not protests. Those people advocate for the overthrow of our legally constituted government.”

     Clarke suggested that officers should stop protecting Black Lives Matter protesters so that business owners and people in the community could “clash” with them.

     “Then the police can show up and arrest these subhuman creeps for creating a disturbance,” he recommended.

     Clarke continued: “There is no police brutality in America. We ended that back in the ’60s. So, I don’t know where they’re coming from.”

     “The president of the United States knows better, he’s playing the race game, he’s playing race politics,” he added. “He has been a nightmare and I cannot wait until January 2017 so that America’s nightmare can be over.”

     “Show me the data, show me the research that demonstrates that supports that lie that law enforcement officers use and inordinate amount of force against black people!” Clarke exclaimed. “Black people use an inordinate amount of force against themselves and each other in the American ghetto.”

     “There are no valid arguments! There is no police brutality in the United States!”

     ****
     Is it possible that the Black Lives Matter movement is having an effect upon our criminal justice system in positive ways? Yes. But…Prosecution of US police for killings surges to highest in a decade:

     A dozen officers have been charged with murder or manslaughter this year resulting from shootings, up from an average of about five a year from 2005 to 2014, said Philip Stinson, an associate professor of criminology at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University. He sifted court records and media reports as part of research for the Justice Department on police crimes and arrests.

     The 2015 number does not include six Baltimore officers facing trial for the death of Freddie Gray. The 25-year-old black man died in April from a spinal injury after he was arrested and bundled in a transport van. Four of the officers face murder or manslaughter charges.

     None of the officers has been convicted, and over the previous decade just one in five officers charged was found guilty, said Stinson, a former police officer.

     Stinson, attorneys and criminologists say it is too early to tell if the upturn indicates a permanent change or is a statistical fluke.

     “We can tell for one year, but is that just an anomaly or is it a trend?” said Stinson.

     The prosecutions represent only a small fraction of the killings by U.S. police. A Washington Post database last week showed 796 fatal police shootings this year, and one maintained by the Guardian newspaper recorded 927 deaths from all causes.

     It’s news in the good department, but the bar was set so low that this is…underwhelming. Only 12 officers have been charged. If the number were 600, that would be different. Plus, it’s not like they’ve been convicted. This baby step is necessary, I know, but in the face of all the ethnic minorities killed by police, it’s just occurring too slowly.

398. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 October 2015 at 1:13 pm

     Where would black people be without ignorant, police brutality defending white folks telling us how to avoid being brutalized by cops?
     White people on Twitter give helpful tips to blacks on how to behave themselves around cops. I’m sure all that advice comes from people who have dealt with so much race-based harassment from cops throughout their lives.

     ****

     Anonymous to reveal identities of 1,000 KKK members on anniversary of Ferguson protests.

     Anonymous hacktivists are planning to reveal the identities of 1,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) on the one-year anniversary of the Ferguson protests. Operation KKK, or #OpKKK, will also aim to shut down websites and other social media accounts affiliated with the KKK.

     The on-going battle between the KKK and Anonymous began during the protests in Ferguson last year, which erupted in the wake of a grand jury decision to not indict police officer Darren Wilson for killing unarmed black teenager Mike Brown. During the protests a local chapter of the KKK – known as the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (TAKKKK) – warned protesters that “lethal force” would be used against them.

     In response to this threat, Anonymous took control of the KKK’s main Twitter account and published personal information regarding some alleged members of the TAKKKK. The amorphous group also alleged that it had evidence of a connection between the Ferguson police department and the TAKKKK.

     Following the Anonymous operation, several members of the KKK reportedly left the group after having their identities exposed. Ahead of the anniversary of the Ferguson protests, a faction of Anonymous has now threatened to reveal the identities of more KKK members.

     “We are not attacking you because of what you believe in as we fight for freedom of speech,” Anonymous said in a statement released last week. “We are attacking you because of what you do to our brothers and sisters.

     While I do support outing KKK members, I hope that the information Anonymous has in their possession is accurate.

399. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 October 2015 at 1:33 pm

     Remember the 19-year-old white kid who was shot and killed by a South Carolina police officer? Despite the fact that that it doesn’t look like the officer’s life was in danger, he’s not going to be charged for the murder:

     Prosecutors declined to charge Seneca Police Lt. Mark Tiller in the July 26 shooting death of 19-year-old Zachary Hammond as he attempted to drive away from the officer in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant.

     Investigators finally released dashboard camera video, which shows Tiller park his patrol car directly behind the car where Hammond and a friend, Tori Morton, were eating food while on a first date.

     Video shows the officer get out of his patrol car and draw his gun as Hammond backs up and attempts to drive around the approaching Tiller.

     “Hands up, stop, stop, stop,” the officer screams at Hammond.

     The officer gets close enough to Hammond’s car to place his hand on the hood before he can turn the wheel and switch gears to drive forward past the officer — who is leaning into the open driver’s side window with his handgun drawn.

     Hammond continues driving as the officer keeps his hand on the car’s hood, and Tiller steps back once — out of the car’s path — and opens fire twice less than 6 seconds after getting out of his patrol car in the Hardee’s parking lot.

     An independent autopsy found that Hammond had been shot twice, once in the left shoulder from behind and once in the left side of his chest.

     A witness said Tiller pulled Hammond’s body from the car, went to the rear of his patrol car and pulled something out that he placed under the slain driver’s body.

     A police officer from a neighboring department said Seneca police officers lifted Hammond’s lifeless hand and slapped it for high-fives.

     The initial police report did not mention the shooting, which Chief John Covington said was justified because Tiller believed Hammond intended to run him over.

     Oh yeah. The kid trying to drive away from the cop was going to try and kill him. What about the fact that the cop stepped out of the path of the car, which took him out of the danger he said he was in, and then killed the kid?!

400. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 October 2015 at 3:26 pm

     Black U.S. citizen Kyle Lydell Canty seeks refugee status in Canada:

     Kyle Lydell Canty, 30, crossed into B.C.’s Lower Mainland in early September of 2015, telling border agents that he was here to visit and take photographs, but once in Vancouver decided he would apply to remain as a refugee.

     “I’m in fear of my life because I’m black,” he told IRB member Ron Yamauchi in a hearing on October 23rd in Vancouver. “This is a well-founded fear.”

     Canty argues that black people are “being exterminated at an alarming rate” in the U.S. and included examples such as the shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri and the death of Eric Garner in New York City at the hands of police.

     Canty represented himself at the hearing, which he applied to have made public, and was commended by Yamauchi at its conclusion, who said Canty had put together a “well prepared case … and argued it as well as it could be.”

     Canty submitted a significant evidence package to the IRB including videos, media reports and the UNHCR’s handbook on determining refugee status.

     In order for someone to be called a refugee in Canada, they must prove they are in danger in their home country, “that you’re someone with a well-founded fear of persecution in your country, based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.” said Melissa Anderson. who speaks for the IRB.

     Born in New York, Canty has lived in six different states before arriving in Canada, a country he says he’s never been to before.

     Claims police harassment

     He told the IRB that in every state he resided, police have harassed him and targeted him because of his race.

     As part of evidence submitted to the board, Canty edited together multiple point-of-view videos of his interaction with police, including one where he was arrested for trespass in Salem, Oregon, when he spent two hours talking on the phone and using free Wi-Fi at a bus station.

     “I got bothered because I’m black,” he said. “This is a history of false arrest. My name is ruined because of the false arrest.”

     He described another video submitted to the IRB that shows a police car driving past him and then stopping.

     Two officers emerge. Canty asks them why they are stopping. The officers reply they believed he was flagging them. When Canty says no, they depart without incident.

     Yamauchi questioned Canty over whether or not this could be considered a negative, threatening interaction with police.

     Canty admits that he has several outstanding charges in multiple states for things including jaywalking, issuing threats, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest but says he has no intention of returning to his home country to face those charges.

     “I’m in fear of my life,” he said. “I already know the outcome.”

     His goal is to stay in Canada where he says he feels safe and even comfortable enough to talk to police.

     Canty wants to own a photography business and open a training centre for a martial art that he practises. Currently he is residing at a homeless shelter in Vancouver.

     ****

     Justice Dept. opens civil rights probe into violent arrest of SC student:

     Richland County, South Carolina, Sheriff Leon Lott asked for federal help after placing sheriff’s deputy Ben Fields on leave for tossing a female high school to the ground.

     On Tuesday, he got it as the Associated Press reports that the Justice Department and the FBI have opened a civil rights probe into the incident, which, took place at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina and was caught on tape. The video footage appears to show Fields flipping a student from her chair and tossing her to the ground before placing her under arrest.

     On Tuesday, Columbia, South Carolina Mayor Stephen Benjamin issued a scathing statement noting that his outraged with what he watched on tape. Read the mayor’s statement below:

     “I want to respond publicly to the incredibly disturbing video involving a Richland County Deputy Sheriff and a Spring Valley High School student being viewed around the world.

     As Mayor, a concerned citizen and most importantly as the father of two beautiful school-aged daughters- I was simply outraged.

     First I need to clarify that Deputy Fields, the officer involved in this incident DOES NOT work for the City of Columbia.

     Though this incident involved a Richland County Sheriff’s Deputy and not an officer with the Columbia Police Department, we still cannot and will not accept this kind of behavior from any law enforcement officer and I firmly believe that we need an independent investigation to get to the bottom of this incident and see that justice is done.

     We have to understand that this kind of incident does real damage to all the progress we’ve made over the past year with the City of Columbia’s Justice for All reforms http://columbiasc.gov/depts/mayor/docs/justice_for_all.pdf and it must be dealt with swiftly, transparently and decisively.

     I have spoken with Sheriff Lott to express my concerns. He has assured me that he understands the gravity of this matter and that it will be dealt with promptly.

     It is during these painful moments in our nation that we must individually and as a community recommit ourselves to promoting real reforms that ensure that justice, accountability and transparency are not mere rhetoric but the hallmarks of every law enforcement agency in our country. We should not rest until this is truly realized.”

401. Tony! The Queer Shoop says

     27 October 2015 at 5:50 pm

     Corey Jones was phoning roadside assistance when cop shot and killed him.

     This is the same cop that was in an unmarked car, without a badge, and not in uniform when he killed Jones.

     The records show that Jones called AT&T’s roadside assistance number, #HELP, at 3:10 a.m. on Oct. 18. Jones, a musician, was using a phone provided by his employer, the Delray Beach Housing Authority. He was killed by Palm Beach Gardens officer Nouman Raja about five minutes after calling for help, but the call reportedly lasted 53 minutes.

     AT&T has not stated whether Jones’ phone call was being recorded. Similarly, the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office has not stated whether it has obtained the records. However, Jones’ best friend Clarence Ellington told the Post that the victim’s family was meeting with its attorneys after seeing the phone logs.

     “The consensus is the same, and that’s that we’re angry,” Ellington said.

     Jones’ call to AT&T — the fourth that evening — was the last of several attempts he made to get help on the night of his death. According to the Post, he first called a woman, identified as Manoucheka Sinmelus, at 1:21 a.m to say he was on his way to pick her up after a performance in Jupiter, Florida. He then called a bandmate around 1:35 a.m. Nine minutes after that call, he called the Florida Highway Patrol for help, but the contents of that four-minute conversation have not been released.

     He subsequently called the #HELP line for the first time at 2:09 a.m. Records show that that conversation lasted 36 minutes, and that Jones immediately called the line again. That call lasted 32 minutes.

     ****

     How race influences why people die in America.
     There are several graphs at the link.

     The death rates from three major causes—heart disease, stroke and diabetes—are starting to flatten after continuous declines. The researchers speculate the death rates didn’t continue their steady decline because the obesity epidemic started to emerge around that time. As Americans became heavier, their risk of these diseases increased, blunting some of the improvements that new drugs, better education and lifestyle changes have made in the morality from these conditions.

     The other less rosy news comes from a closer look at the breakdown of mortality trends by race. A TIME analysis of the Centers for Disease Control’s mortality database, used in the JAMA study, provided age-adjusted death rates by race and ethnicity. The graph below shows data back to 1999, when CDC updated disease classifications. While death rates declined among African Americans, they were still higher than those for whites in 5 out of 6 leading causes of death.

     Analyzing death rates in this way, say the study authors, is critical to better understanding where our health system is improving the health of Americans, and, perhaps more importantly, where it is not. The fact that declines in mortality for some diseases is beginning to slow down highlights the need to address obesity and its effect on our health more aggressively, while gaps among different racial and ethnic groups stresses the importance of improving access, quality and education about health care to all groups.

402. quotetheunquote says

     28 October 2015 at 3:20 pm

     Gosh, speaking of the KKK, candidate Trump has picked up a couple of key endorsements: Neo-nazis and White Nationalists.
     In other breaking news, a man was bitten by a dog.

     And this guy is still leading in many states? Despair.

403. CaitieCat, Harridan of Social Justice says

     28 October 2015 at 3:29 pm

     Never underestimate the popular appeal of telling one group “you’re better than THOSE people.”

404. rq says

     29 October 2015 at 3:42 am

     Here’s a readable thing from Australia, with a lot of parallels to North America: I’m Not A ‘Proud Australian’.

405. rq says

     29 October 2015 at 11:57 am

     Some old tabs from the work computer and other things that I’ve been meaning to set down piecemeal but will occur in one fell swoop.
     Peel residents ask police chief to end ‘broken system’ of street checks

     When confronted by members of the public about the lack of evidence for the success of street checks, Evans was asked why she won’t stop them.

     “We’re asking for the broken system to be put away,” Peel resident Tony Deans said.

     “I’m listening to your recommendations on how you would like street checks to be improved,” she told residents in a Malton community centre during a public consultation on street checks hosted by Evans and her force Tuesday evening.

     In September, calling street checks a valuable tool to help solve crimes, Evans rejected a motion passed by the Peel Police Services Board, asking the chief to suspend the practice.

     “Street checks has become quite a live issue in the media and in the community,” she told members of the public, in a room that was about two-thirds full.

     Street checks were described to the audience as “interactions” with an individual, “recording information” about the individual, “for use in current and future investigations and crime prevention.”
     […]

     Evans told the Star that the force is currently implementing a number of changes, such as linking street checks with crimes they help solve. Currently, the force has only provided six examples of crimes solved with any help from a street check.

     Evans, who said she knows street checks work because “officers tell me”, replied: “The system is working.”

     A young black man, who said Evans should look at the issue from the perspective of those most impacted by it, asked, “At what cost are we keeping the system in place?”

     Dated but worth noting, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hanya Yanagihara win Kirkus Prize, belated congratulations to the winners there.

     Protests haven’t stopped just because I’m not keeping up with them: Baltimore protesters charged in overnight City Hall demonstration. The response seems to be unchanged as well.

     As many as 50 protesters, some of them teenagers, disrupted a meeting Wednesday night where city officials were recommending the interim police chief be permanently hired. The activists said they were upset at their lack of input into the appointment, six months after the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who sustained mortal injuries while being transported in the back of a police van..
     […]

     As attention turned to the protesters in the balcony, the committee below quietly voted to approve Davis’s appointment, which is scheduled to be voted on Monday by the city council. Frustrated at being ignored, the activists refused to leave, in a protest that took police eight hours to break up.

     The group called for a sit-down meeting with Davis and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, and refused to leave until officials agreed to meet a list of demands that included better treatment for protesters, a significant investment in public schools and social services and a promise that police would avoid using armoured vehicles and riot gear. The protesters also asked that officers always wear badges and name tags.

     Yep, still not being heard or listened to.

     ‘There is no police brutality in America’: Fox sheriff blows up at ‘subhuman creeps’ in Black Lives Matter, I believe mentioned by Tony upthread. Apologies if it’s a re-post.

     Black Lives Matter encouraging ‘murder of police,’ Chris Christie alleges, Chris Christie being the ultimate authority on BLM. Obviously.

     “I don’t believe that that movement should be justified when they are calling for the murder of police officers,” Christie said on CBS’s Face the Nation. When challenged that individuals may have called for the deaths of officers, but not the official movement, Christie replied that the deadly environment is “what the movement is creating.”

     “The problem is this, there’s lawlessness in this country, [and] the president encourages this,” said Christie. When asked how Obama was encouraging lawlessness, the New Jersey governor said by his rhetoric and the fact he doesn’t support the police.

     Funny, I recall a relatively recent speech by President Obama that seemed to explicitly mention his support for the police. Just a few comments up.

     Quentin Tarantino joins police brutality protest in New York, a nice move, though it doesn’t make me like his movies. The fact that the NYPD said, and I cite,

     “It’s time for a boycott of Quentin Tarantino’s films.”

     is a notch in his favour, though. The full quote from the ever-eloquent Patrick Lynch:

     Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, blasted Tarantino in a statement issued Sunday, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

     He calledthe Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill filmmaker a “purveyor of degeneracy” with “no business coming to our city to peddle his slanderous Cop Fiction.

     “It’s no surprise that someone who makes a living glorifying crime and violence is a cop-hater, too. The police officers that Quentin Tarantino calls ‘murderers’ aren’t living in one of his depraved big-screen fantasies — they’re risking and sometimes sacrificing their lives to protect communities from real crime and mayhem,” he said.

     “It’s time for a boycott of Quentin Tarantino’s films.”

     But I say raise the awareness, Mr Tarantino. You have a platform and status.

     And here’s a collection of articles in the Toronto Star on the Toronto PD’s practice of carding, which has come under scrutiny and thus discussion over the past few months. I suppose it’s the Canadian version of stop-and-frisk. Isn’t any more polite, though.