It's like deja-vu, all over again.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Yogi Berra said it; I feel it.
Another young black man dead. Murdered by our tax dollars that are paid out to hire people who ostensibly serve and protect us.
What a fucking cosmic joke.
One that isn't funny.
But before we even get to a grand jury, an indictment, a trial, a verdict...the vultures and naysayers, nit-pickers and 'splainers are already out in full-force.
I'm not talking about right-wing blogs, or news agencies. I'm not talkin' about the racist sewer-sludge who live in comment sections at youtube.
I'm talking about right here at the Great Orange Satan.
It doesn't fit any of the usual meta divides. It's not I/P or Rox-Sux or cis/lgbt or Hillary/Warren, male/female or even black/white.
However it is racist. And offensive. And patronizing. And disrespectful.
No sooner do we gather to mourn and rage against the death of (fill in the name of any young black man) it starts.
There are the victim blamers. There are the "you people need to take responsibility" pontificators. There are legal weasels eagles who might as well be witnesses for the prosecution of the victim.
There are those who still "deep in their hearts...they do believe...no cop ever tells a lie...any day."
There are others who become so obsessed with liberally demanding we see "both sides of the issue" when we don't give a damn about "both sides of a problem" in a lop-sided America that is crushing black people under its heel.
Don't waltz into a conversation and tell us we are "too emotional."
Don't try to dazzle us with your ability to cite case law.
We are neither amused nor impressed.
Mostly we are just disgusted.
Drop the "T" word. I don't give a shit how young brothers dress. I don't care if their pants are hanging down around their ankles. Your "thug" is some black mother's child. Could be my nephew. Or my neighbor's kid.
No one's clothing should mark them for summary execution.
Don't start yappin' about "gang signs," "too loud music," and "bullying."
Yeah we know you're afraid of young black men, but stop trying to couch your fear in big fuckin' words.
Every inflammatory meme from CNN, ABC, CBS, and Drudge has made its way here into comments.
Sure the outright blatant racist shit gets donuts. You can't waltz in here and call someone the "N" word and get away with it. Bojo will soon follow. But the sly insinuations not only don't get hidden they are often uprated.
Heaven forbid one of us calls the shit out.
People then try to tell us we are delusional and don't know what is or isn't racist.
Some are bold enough to mock us...by "talkin' black" at us.
I am not going to name names but in the last week or so every single Sister who diaries regularly on here has had to get up and walk away from the keyboard enraged. And plenty of our allies have felt the hurt too.
Y'all know who you are and how stressful this has been again.
BTDT with Trayvon.
So all I have to say today is that we need more back-up.
We cannot continue to have to fight the same-shit-different-day every damn time we lose another brother. And there will be a next time. Ferguson is just a way station on the racism railroad.
You want to talk about looters - deal with Wall Street and the Koch Brothers. Period.
You want to decry "violence." Dred Scott is buried in St. Louis and is probably turning over in his grave.
The violence is being done to us.
I am sick and tired of being sick and tired (thank you Mrs. Hamer).
Make a choice.
Stand with us, or don't. But don't think we can't see just where you are at.
"God don't like ugly," as my grandma used to say.
To leave on a brighter note, I'd like to thank all those people who stepped up today to donate to groups who can make a difference:
Support these steps to stop police abuse. All our rights are under attack
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Slate: What Should Protesters Be Demanding in #Ferguson?
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We learned three years ago, after the first Occupy protests, that mass arrests and police state tactics were surefire ways to get activists covered by the press. We also learned from Occupy that protests with uncertain themes and no leadership can peter out, leaving nothing behind but some slogans. ("We are the 99%.") In Ferguson, as at some Occupy protests, we see the arrival of some thugs who want to puff out their chests and toss Molotov cocktails in the name of "justice." (What's more cowardly than inciting violence when you know someone else, or a collective, will take the blame?)
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1. Arrest Officer Darren Wilson. I covered the aftermath of Trayvon Martin's killing in Sanford, Florida, and while that city was on edge it never became the scene of Ferguson-style protests. You can count the reasons the killing happened at night, in a gated community, so there was no rally; Sanford is a racially stratified city, not a mostly black suburb; the alleged killer was not a cop. "If we was in California," one Sanford resident told me, "they'd be burning this up."
But nothing burned up, and after George Zimmerman was arrested the tensions faded away. The idea that a kid could be shot and the shooter could walk away without a charge that was the outrage.
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2. Demilitarize the police. The transfer of military ordnance to police departments, a sleeper story for the better part of a decade, has become a national scandal. Even in the Pew Research poll that finds whites and blacks divided in their responses to Ferguson, a plurality of whites say that the cops have gone "too far" responsing to the protests.
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3. Turn out the vote. ThinkProgress' Ian Millhiser asks whether the timing of the city's elections April, not November guarantees a whiter electorate and a less representative local government.
The fact that Ferguson's elections are held at a time when few, if any, high-profile candidates are on the ballot contributes to an almost comically low voter turnout rate in these elections. In 2013, for example, just 11.7 percent of eligible voters actually cast a ballot.
Turnout is especially low among Ferguson's African American residents, however. In 2013, for example, just 6 percent of eligible black voters cast a ballot in Ferguson's municipal elections, as compared to 17 percent of white voters.
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In the St. Louis suburb, the white ruling class has created de facto apartheid. The New Republic: Ferguson Is a Microcosm of Our Racially and Politically Polarized Country.
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But if you pass Ferguson through a political filter, what comes out the other end is completely incoherent. Ferguson is situated in St. Louis County, one of only three Missouri counties President Obama won in 2012. But Ferguson has a Republican mayor, while the state of Missouri has a Democratic governor. Said governor, Jay Nixon, has been roundly criticized for sitting on his hands as Ferguson descended into chaos, and Obama, perhaps wary of inflaming tensions, issued a remarkably tepid response to the unrest days after it began.
They managed to get outflanked on the left not just by less powerful Democrats but also by people vying to lead the Republican party, most notably Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. His Time Magazine op-ed included a few ham-fisted phrases meant to construe police brutality as a symptom of big government an ill most conservatives view as synonymous with providing too much aid to residents of cities like Ferguson. But unlike Obama, he attributed the violence against civilians to police militarization, or some other derivative of the m word, eight times, and to race several more.
His core analytical error was a failure to connect the two more directly.
When you pass Ferguson through a racial rather than political filter, a much more consistent picture emerges, both with respect to the unrest itself and to its place within a broader social context.
You've probably seen the statistics by now. Ferguson is about two-thirds black. It's police force is nearly 100 percent white. Less than a third of its residents are white, but whites hold five of Ferguson's six city council seats.
When the black community in a city like Ferguson loses faith in its police force, and the police respond by crushing the community's civil and constitutional rights, it isn't a stretch to say that the white ruling class has created de facto apartheid. Probably temporarily, perhaps without segregationist intent. But functionally, that's what it is. They've also denied the people they serve the services to which they're entitled. Ferguson's police department commands a third of the city's budget and they are using those resources to provide aggressive disservice to the people who finance that budget
Ferguson presents an unusually extreme and condensed example of this sort of racial-civic polarization. But you can find expressions of the same basic dynamic of white public officials using their power to socially weaken black constituents all across the country.
Overall, according to the ACLU, 42 percent of people impacted by a SWAT deployment to execute a search warrant were Black, and yet black people comprise just over 12 percent of the national population.
Though not explicitly violent, voter suppression efforts in southern (and non-southern, GOP-controlled) states constitute a much broader and more insidious exercise of state power along the same racial axis. The politicians passing those laws are overwhelmingly white, the affected constituencies are heavily black.
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Stephen Colbert isn't the only one who "thinks we're beyond race" (wink, wink). These GOP candidates' beliefs will horrify you. Salon: GOPâs post-racial fantasy: Secession, delusion and the truth about America's most hateful dividers.
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On the one hand, there's Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, blasting Democrats for waging a war on whites it's only Republicans who are beyond race, as he made plain in a follow-up interview.
Then there's the Maryland GOP, which has its hands full with a wealthy, self-funded county council candidate, Michael Peroutka, who's a past leader of the League of the South, a group that thinks the wrong side won the Civil War, and whose president, Michael Hill, recently openly fantasized about creating their own three- to five-man death squads. The squads primary targets will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite. There's even a videotape of Peroutka leading a meeting of the League of the South in singing the national anthem, as he introduced it yes, Dixie.
It's not just that state and local GOP leaders have had to struggle with themselves over whether to support Peroutka's candidacy, as he has refused to disavow the League of the South or its belief in secession. Deepening the incoherence even further, Peroutka himself uses exactly the same sort of rhetoric that Brooks uses he's not the racist, he explains, the Democrats are! They're the real haters, the real dividers of America despite the fact that Michael Hill, founder and president of the League of the South recently wrote:
It is clear, then, that God intended men to live separately with their own languages, kith and kin, and nations. Therefore, nations (i.e. peoples) have a Biblical mandate to exist and thereby to protect their interests from those who would destroy them either by war or more subtle means.
Because of a resurgence of godless multiculturalism and universalism (the new Tower of Babel), white Western Christians are threatened with extinction as a separate and identifiable people because of their own weakness and lack of Biblical understanding about the God-ordained principles of nationhood. While all other nations (i.e. groups based on race and ethnicity and blood and soil) are encouraged to preserve themselves and their cultures, white Christians in the West (the descendants of Japheth) are told that we must give up everything we have in order to placate those different from ourselves and who bear some alleged grievance toward us (i.e. slavery, racism, hatred, etc.)
This is not just the language of racism a broad, often nebulous term. It's the language of theocratic white nationalism which is a great deal more specific. It's surely not the case that every Republican is a secret white supremacist a la Michael Hill far from it. There's a very good reason that even Michael Peroutka didn't want to talk much about the League of the South in a recent come clean press conference he called. He told insistent questioners to go look at their website and see for themselves, rather than say anything himself. Yet, it is true that strikingly similar arguments are made by Republicans of all different stripes including those in the League of the South absolving themselves of any racial animus and shifting blame to everyone else instead. And those same arguments persist right alongside recurrent racist incidents.
That's why Rand Paul's racial incoherence is not just the image problem of one leading presidential contender, it's why Mo Brooks is not just an isolated congressperson, and why Michael Peroutka is not just an obscure local candidate. They are all actors in a much broader drama which they nonetheless help to vividly illuminate. So there's value to be had in considering each of these figures in turn.
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A resilient four-minute cartoon depicting the historic obstacles blacks overcome through Affirmative Action is once again appearing in Facebook and blog posts years after the African American Policy Forum produced it. The Grio: Affirmative Action: Time to flip the narrative.
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"The Race" is a metaphor depicting blacks and whites on a racetrack with the running times measured in years and centuries. As the race gets underway, blacks are at first held back for centuries and when finally green lit to advance around the track, obstacles such as slavery, poor education, discrimination, and economic disparities become tangible roadblocks as the white racers soar past with privilege and societal endorsements. Little is left for the imagination in the production's message. But it offers a lot to ponder about the lack of gains by African Americans when statistics show that a black college student having the same chances of getting a job as a white high school dropout.
The animation was created by my colleague and me to push back against the widely shared but incorrect framing of affirmative action as preferential treatment, says Kimberl Williams Crenshaw a prominent figure in Critical Race Theory and currently a professor at UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School. Crenshaw specializes in race and gender issues. As you can see, says Crenshaw, We frame affirmative action as removing barriers and obstacles that stand in the way of people of color. Offsetting the effects of these obstacles is definitely not preferential, but simply equal treatment.â
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Tip of the hat to this young lady. CBS Sports: Mo'ne Davis becomes first girl to throw LLWS shutout.
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Right-hander Mo'ne Davis of Philadelphia's Taney Dragons threw a complete-game shutout in her team's first game of the Little League World Series on Friday afternoon. They beat the team from Nashville 4-0.
As you can see in the graphic above, the 13-year-old Davis allowed two hits in her six shutout innings, striking out eight. She did not walk a batter and is the first female pitcher to throw a shutout in the Little League World Series.
Davis pitched so well that she caught the attention of a few big leaguers.
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What does a map have to do with a riot? Everything, in the case of Ferguson, Mo. BusinessWeek: The County Map That Explains Fergusonâs Tragic Discord.
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The map of St. Louis County, the home of Ferguson, looks like a shattered pot. It's broken into 91 municipalities that range from small to tiny, along with clots of population in unincorporated areas. Dating as far back as the 19th century, communities set themselves up as municipalities to capture control of tax revenue from local businesses, to avoid paying taxes to support poorer neighbors, or to exclude blacks. Their behavior has ranged from somewhat parochial to flatly illegal.
The result of fragmentation today is a county whose small towns are highly stratified by both race and income. As blacks move into a town, whites move out. The tax base shrinks, and blacks feel cheated that the amenities they came for quickly disappear, says Clarence Lang, a University of Kansas historian who has studied St. Louis. Ferguson flipped from majority white to majority black so quickly that the complexion of the government and police force doesn't match that of the population. That mismatch was a key factor in the tense race relations that contributed to the riots and, perhaps, the shooting itself.
That's not all. Businesses choosing where to locate can play the tiny municipalities off against one another for tax incentives, prompting a race to the bottom that robs them all of desperately needed revenue. âThereâs a tremendous opportunity and incentive to just poach from one municipality to another,â says University of Iowa historian Colin Gordon, author of Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City.
There's widespread recognition that fragmentation is holding back the economic development of greater St. Louis, but once a municipality is formed, however small, it's exceedingly difficult to merge out of existence. Ferguson is comparatively populous at about 21,000 people. Many of St. Louis County's postage-stamp municipalities have fewer than 1,000 people. Champ may be the smallness champ, with a 2010 population of 13, all white.
The crazy quilt that is St. Louis County government helps explain why violence broke out in Ferguson, of all the places in the country for a riot. It's not because Ferguson is desperately poor; it's lower-middle-income, with a healthy business district and a range of big, close-by employers, including Emerson Electric (EMR), Express Scripts (ESRX), the University of Missouri at St. Louis, Christian Hospital, and Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals (MNK).
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Incidents like this, show why public information health campaigns are so important. BBC: Seventeen suspected West Point (Liberia) Ebola patients are "missing" in Liberia after a health center in the capital was attacked, the government says.
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The attack on the quarantine centre in Liberia, in Monrovia's densely populated West Point township, took place on Saturday evening. There are conflicting reports over what sparked the riot, in which medical supplies were stolen.
Assistant Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah said the protesters were unhappy that patients were being taken there from other parts of the capital.
Other reports suggested the protesters had believed Ebola was a hoax and wanted to force the centre to close.
A senior police officer, speaking to the BBC on condition of anonymity, said blood-stained mattresses, bedding and medical equipment had been taken from the centre, potentially furthering the spread of the virus.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Cause and Effect is a powerful dynamic, it informs all the Physics of human interaction. Quantum Mechanics would strive to show an infinitesimal amount of existence in which every possibility could be. A kid walking down the street on a summer day would find himself home and caring for a relative in one dimension, where in another, he would be harassed by a steroidal addled small town goon cop, shot down like a dog and left to lay in the middle of the street for hours and the world to see.
I have been meditating on this dynamic, breathing deep a calming breath of an infinitesimal amount of possibilities, each molecule of existence yet another universe of Being. I've been praying for a world where fear succumbs to reconciliation, where an impulsive act can be apologized for and rectified. A world where a disagreement can be simply and calmly understood and everyone can be on their way.
It might be silly, but I dream of a...
Minor Miracle
Which reminds me of another knock-on-wood
memory. I was cycling with a male friend,
through a small midwestern town. We came to a 4-way
stop and stopped, chatting. As we started again,
a rusty old pick-up truck, ignoring the stop sign,
hurricaned past scant inches from our front wheels.
My partner called, "Hey, that was a 4-way stop!"
The truck driver, stringy blond hair a long fringe
under his brand-name beer cap, looked back and yelled,
"You fucking niggers!"
And sped off.
My friend and I looked at each other and shook our heads.
We remounted our bikes and headed out of town.
We were pedaling through a clear blue afternoon
between two fields of almost-ripened wheat
bordered by cornflowers and Queen Anne's lace
when we heard an unmuffled motor, a honk-honking.
We stopped, closed ranks, made fists.
It was the same truck. It pulled over.
A tall, very much in shape young white guy slid out:
greasy jeans, homemade finger tattoos, probably
a Marine Corps boot-camp footlockerful
of martial arts techniques.
"What did you say back there!" he shouted.
My friend said, "I said it was a 4-way stop.
You went through it."
"And what did I say?" the white guy asked.
"You said: 'You fucking niggers.'"
The afternoon froze.
"Well," said the white guy,
shoving his hands into his pockets
and pushing dirt around with the pointed toe of his boot,
"I just want to say I'm sorry."
He climbed back into his truck
and drove away.
-- Marilyn Nelson
I spoke with Shanikka on The After Show on Netroots Radio last Friday about Ferguson and systemic, institutional racism. You can check out the PodCast here at our Libsyn Page. -- JP
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