Campus racism
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
My campus at SUNY New Paltz celebrates Black Solidarity Day each fall semester on the Monday before election day. This event takes place on many campuses, nationwide.
The day after, two students rushed into my class, shouting "Denise...Denise....someone put a 'colored only sign' on the water fountain down the hall." I went to take a look. Yup - it was there. Students took pictures of the sign, and immediately posted them to facebook. The campus police and President were notified.
Soon after - a poster was discovered elsewhere on campus which read "lynch the N****rs" (N word covered in photo)
As a result of this incident - forums have been held, and the President, Dr. Donald Christian has sent out a campus wide email decrying it.
Northeast Public radio had this report today (click link for audio):
Racist Signs Shock New Paltz Campus
After a November 8th campus observance of "Black Solidarity Day," a label reading "Colored Only" appeared above a drinking fountain in the Humanities Building. Days later, campus police were notified that a "racially offensive poster" has been placed in an elevator at a residence hall, and that graffiti had appeared in other elevators. The college sent emails out to students within a day of the incident, which attracted national attention. A campus-wide forum was conducted on November 17th.
Officials and campus police are aware that there are suspicions that the incident may have been some sort of "social experiment" -SUNY New Paltz senior and Vice President of Student Affairs and Governance Ayanna Thomas says if the incident was a social experiment it was wrong. Thomas says a friend took the picture of the offending sign that was posted on facebook. She notes that students also discovered a tumblr blog featuring a photo of the original "colored only" sign which was captioned "my friend is trying to start a race war at New Paltz" - Chief Dugatkin has interviewed the person who uploaded the post, and that the individual is co-operating with investigators.
Dey Armbrister is affiliated with the campus' Culture Shock Dance Troupe - the Senior, majoring in public relations, has found the incidents at New Paltz State University of New York "disappointing". Campus administrators and student leadership are working together to foster healing and understanding - University President Don Christian says the incident has made its mark.
Williams College, in neighboring MA recently cancelled classes to hold a teach-in solidarity event, in the wake of a similar event, and a march was held with over 1000 students. Vermont Public Radio has a report.
These incidents are not isolated or rare. Right wing campus groups have been hosting "affirmative action bake sales" across then nation, for several years, most recently at UC Berkeley.
My campus at SUNY New Paltz has always been considered to have a pretty liberal/left student body. Each year the campus hosts "Rock Against Racism". New Paltz students helped elect a Green Party mayor, for the town in 2003, and several other left/progressive officials in recent years.
The campus has a progressive Black/Latino publication "Fahari/Libertad", founded many years ago.
Students on my campus have, for the most part, responded with disgust about this recent event, and have been actively asking questions and seeking solutions. What they have had to consider, is that racism has not been defeated due to the election of a black president, and that racism is not something simply in a history book, nor is it confined to the south.
As I head back to campus today - the dialogue is continuing. There will be a campus wide event held next week:
Can We Talk About It?: A Discussion about Race and Racial Equity on the SUNY New Paltz Campus on Nov. 30 from 6-8 p.m. in MPR
While some Americans harbor illusions of a post-racial society, the lives and experiences of many people of all races speak otherwise. Recent postings of racially offensive material on the New Paltz campus have reinforced this reality for our campus community. These incidents create an opportunity if not an imperative for us to discuss issues of race and racism. In this forum, students, faculty, and staff will speak and listen to each other about the ways these recent incidents have affected us individually and collectively, and how we can become better as a community.
Education about racism. sexism and classism doesn't just happen in the classroom.
Events like these, are important to raise awareness, among young people about how far we still need to go to build a society free from discrimination and inequality.
What's happening on campuses in your area?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Penn State’s Other Cover-Up. NewsOnes: Death Threats To Black Students
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As news unravels around the grand jury report revealing charges against former Penn State football defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky for raping and sexually molesting underage boys, some former black Penn State students are now painfully reliving a scandal that occurred at their university ten years ago. In 2000, the year a janitor witnessed a boy younger than 13 (“Victim 8” in a grand jury report) “pinned against a wall” while Sandusky performed oral sex on him, black students and football players on Penn State’s campus began receiving hate mail.
The hate mail sent to black students had nothing to do with Sandusky’s proclivities, but the two incidences shared something in common: both were ultimately covered up by the university, even as both chain of events grew worse. Sandusky went on to molest and possibly rape more boys, according to a grand jury report (Sandusky denies foul play), and hate mail against black students became death threats.
Ultimately, a black man’s dead body was found by police near Penn State as one of the death threats said it would. And some black students had to attend their graduation the following May with bulletproof vests on in fear of their life.
But few know about the death threats because Penn State and Joe Paterno were not willing to allow bad publicity to ruin the university’s image, say some of the black students at the center of the tragic events.
LaKeisha Wolf was president of Penn State’s Black Caucus ten years ago, and she received the lion’s share of life-threatening letters. Today, she watches the news about Sandusky’s rape charges, the firing of Joe Paterno and Penn State president Graham Spanier, and the student riots that ensued, and it takes her right back to her days dealing with the university.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have received a number of these fake emails over the years. Ta-Nehisi Coates for The Atlantic: What Bill Cosby Means To The White Populist Mind
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The question is interesting: Why would a conservative hoaxer consistently insert hard right wing views into the mouth of Bill Cosby? There's a certain "Off My Lawn" factor at work here, and Cosby seems about the age of someone who'd have these views. Moreover, Cosby is fondly remembered as "America's Dad" by much of the country. That a black man could be considered America's Dad--and not in an Uncle Ben sort of way--is a rather amazing sign of progress.
It must said that there are darker forces at work, here. Certainly part of the hops is that putting racially-charged rhetoric in the mouth of a respected black person will make it more credible. There's also the fact that Cosby, himself, loudly took a moral message to African-Americans a few years back, much to the delight of a certain segment of white conservatives.
But because white conservatives so poorly understand black people, they never quite understood Cosby or the organic black conservative tradition he was speaking out of. (I wrote about this for the magazine a few years back.) That tradition argues traditional conservative "up from your bootstraps" ideology, but has no real interest in acting as foil for white conservatives who want to downplay racism. When I interviewed Cosby back in 2007, he mentioned that his presence had been requested on Fox more than a few times, but that he'd declined. Cosby, and his black admirers, saw him in the tradition of Booker T. Washington, not Herman Cain.
This is an uncomfortable fact for white populists who'd like to use Cosby as a mouthpiece--or maybe not. If he won't say it, they'll just pretend he did. When you see stuff like this you get some insight into the support for Herman "I don't be reading" Cain.
Note: Click the link to see the emails, I won't potentially help spread this foolishness by copying them here.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
In today's "the Sun rose in the East" news, Rush Limbaugh uses racially loaded language, in other breaking news water was found to be wet. Talking Points Memo: Michelle Obama Booed At NASCAR Event Over ‘Uppityism’
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Breaking: Rush Limbaugh went there.
Following the mass booing of First Lady Michelle Obama (and Jill Biden, wife of the Vice President) at a NASCAR race this weekend, Limbaugh chose to buck the trend of condemning the act and offer up some dog whistling real talk.
Limbaugh, via Daily Caller:
“The NASCAR crowd doesn’t quite understand why, when the husband and the wife are going the same place, the first lady has to take her own Boeing 757 with family and kids and hangers-on four hours earlier than her husband, who will be on his 747. NASCAR people understand that’s a little bit of a waste. They understand it is a little bit of uppity-ism. First ladies have not been known to hop their own 757s four hours ahead of their husband when they’re going the same place.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Despite his influence throughout the civil rights movement the late Medgar Evers doesn't have the same name recognition as other prominent civil rights leaders. The Root: Naval Ship Named After Civil Rights Hero
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Despite his influence throughout the civil rights movement -- playing a central role in helping desegregate the University of Mississippi, launching boycott campaigns against discriminatory merchants, registering disenfranchised black voters and spearheading investigations into the murder of Emmett Till -- the late Medgar Evers doesn't have the same name recognition as other prominent civil rights leaders.
It's not that Evers, who was the Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP, has been forgotten. Though not quite a household name, there is New York City's Medgar Evers College and a Jackson, Miss., airport named in his honor. The song "Mississippi Goddam" was Nina Simone's response to Evers' 1963 murder and the two deadlocked trials for his killer by all-white juries.
But more people have been talking about Evers recently because last week the U.S. Navy christened a new cargo/ammunition ship named after him. The USNS Medgar Evers, unveiled earlier this month in San Diego, measures 689 feet and will deliver food, ammunition, fuel and supplies to other ships at sea. It marks the first time the Navy has named a vessel after a civil rights leader.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The Prison Industrial Complex insists that it is a growth industry; and it's hard to argue with that assessment. With the Security State building ever more prisons, in partnership with Government and Private Industry, with mandatory sentencing and inflexible drug laws, with anti-brown people round-ups and neo-gestapo document searches; the resonant cadences of chain gangs past can be heard echoing from sea to shining sea.
It is presumed that Drug Prohibition began with the Harrison Act of 1914, but California enacted the Nation's first anti-narcotics law in 1875 in response to anti-chinese sentiment. Ostensibly enacted to crack down on opium dens, the law was used to incarcerate or banish Chinese nationals deemed as unfair competition with white workers. When several boatloads of Punjabi Sikhs landed in San Francisco in 1910, it sparked an uproar of protest from Asian exclusionists, who pronounced them to be even more unfit for American civilization than the Chinese. Immigration authorities capped the influx at little more than 2,000 in the state, mostly in agricultural areas of the Central Valley. Even so, the Sikhs remained a popular target by racists of the times; and were accused of many crimes, crimes committed, it was reported in the xenophobic yellow-sheets of the day, while under the influence of hashish or marijuana. In the 1920's and 1940's, when Braceros and other workers from Mexico were no longer needed, even harsher laws were enacted to hasten their exodus. Anti-narcotics laws were also enacted in the South to intimidate the black population and used as an excuse to deny them the vote.
To ignore the racial animus the Security State utilizes to drive the Prison Industrial Complex, is to ignore the obvious; it is to ignore the history of our nation.
As the Security State has militarized the constabulary in a marriage of commerce and government, the citizenry is leveled as the enemy. Paramilitary cadres bust heads and gas grandmothers with impunity, caring not if their actions are a viral world-wide outrage.
Divide and Conquer is a strategy used by military, intelligence and political professionals alike. If people can be divided by culture, class and race, the job of the General and the Oligarch runs smoother.
The Security State has always and will always, sow divisions inside and between groups. Those divisions can be mitigated if we observe the obvious; and act on it.
Otherwise, we will just be following the Stasi Quo.
Intelligence
Wiretaps and tapes, concealed
bugs and mikes,
intercepted letters
full of passionate declarations, contradictory
intelligence—
how attached he’d grown
to the subject’s documents, revising and rearranging
the influx of intelligence
with a sentiment, he acknowledged, almost
like love: he felt
the cool gray eyes of his superiors
trained on him, rebuking him
for swerving, for letting
himself go—such tender obsession
occasioned by the file!
Not quite the professional style
he or the Agency expected…
But such official loyalties
seemed mere protocol to this!—
what was wrong with him,
he wondered, that he construed
the documents to make the subject
seem a hero,
a bastard whose sole patrimony
was a pair of shoes and a rusted sword
left by an unknown father beneath a stone?
And yet his exploits in the tabloids,
the headlines screaming,
SCOURGE OF MONSTERS STRIKES AGAIN!
HERO FOUNDS REPUBLIC
were these heroic
different in kind from the rumors,
unverified,
of a rape, a murder?
—But to have met undisguised the devouring monster!
To have escaped the twisting tunnels of the maze…
On balance, for such a life,
the hero’s reputation wasn’t bad:
think of the opportunities for evil
a man of such qualities must have had!
How well he knew him—an essential innocence
that followed impulse, blind
to protocol, not noticeably more kind
than he was cruel.
But to stamp Case Closed and cease
gathering intelligence,
to give the hero up, almost, he admitted,
like a lover…:
such limits the hero
unknowingly transgressed!
And the Agency, cold-blooded where
limits were concerned (“mere protocol”?—
more like a second backbone!), committed
to keeping order, could not afford
such sentiments—the Chief of Security
felt an awful pang: that the work of intelligence
should lead to this…
He leaned back in his chair and sighed:
a forged genealogy certifying
that the hero’s father was a king; a mutual
assistance pact
to aid in taking back the usurped crown:
he could see them now, the wind
blowing lightly, the two of them sweating
as they climbed the cliff, discussing
the terms, exchanging information,
intelligence—
how would his own face look
staring down across the sea
as he gestured earnestly toward
some island, saying,
“According to our sources,
the tax revenues…”
And then, edging
the hero closer to the cliff, pointing
out the harbor, he’d push.
-- Tom Sleigh
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Front Porch is now open - grab a seat, and a bite to eat.
Sit down and rap with us.