And now, let us honor our dead
Commentary by Black Kos Editor JoanMar
"All that it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
The
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. has been a place of refuge for the persecuted in days gone by, and a haven for those seeking a place to be spiritually rejuvenated. On Wednesday night evil walked in, was warmly welcomed, sat among the innocent, partook of the spiritual feast, and then proceeded to "profane the sanctuary."
We have a serious problem on our hands. Forgiveness is not the answer, and I am already sick and tired of hearing the word. Forgiveness is asking something of the victims who are already overburdened. It is about time that the spotlight be turned on the majority community and the institutions that protect and promote the interests of that community: the police and the media. I woke up this morning to talk about mental illness and "finding this young man before he harms others or himself." No talk of terrorism, or of thuggery, or discussion about the pathology of a community.
Good men and women can start the ball a-rolling by identifying the problem for what it is: Racism (a white problem) and easy access to guns. Let's start there.
As the president noted, "it is in our power to do something about it." We need good people to stop quibbling about peripheral issues and focus on the heart of the matter. We need good people to understand that if they are not with the oppressed in this struggle, then there is no question that they are against us. There is no space for nuance in this debate.
In the meantime, let us remember and honor our dead
The oldest victim was 87; the youngest was 26. They included a library manager, a track and field coach and a state senator, Clementa Pinckney, who also served as senior pastor at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where the shooting occurred.
Cynthia Hurd, 54
Cynthia Hurd was a librarian at the Charleston Public Library for 31 years...Hurd was the manager of the St. Andrews Regional Library, located a little more than six miles from the church where she was shot and killed.
Susie Jackson, 87
Ms Jackson was on the usher board and participated in the choir.
Ethel Lance, 70
She served as a sexton at the church to keep the building clean and loved gospel music.
Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49
Rev. Depayne Middleton-Doctor was admissions coordinator at Southern Wesleyan University's Charleston learning center.
Tywanza Sanders, 26
Ty described himself as a "poet, artist and businessman" on his Instagram account. His final post was a quote from late US African American baseball player Jackie Robinson, "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives."
Rev Daniel Simmons Sr., 74
Rev Sharonda Singleton, 45
Myra Thompson, 59
Myra Thompson, 59, was a pastor at the church and a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
Hon. Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 45
South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney was the church's pastor since 2010 and a well-known community leader. He was a married father of two.
Pinckney had been preaching since he was 13. He was considered a rising star of Democratic politics in a largely Republican state.
May they rest in peace.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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9 dead in ‘hate crime’ (I prefer domestic terrorism) shooting at historic African American church in Charleston. Slate: What the Charleston Shooting Suspect’s White Power Flag Patches Mean.
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After FBI officials identified the suspected shooter in Wednesday’s attack on a historically black church in Charleston as Dylann Roof, news outlets, including Slate, were quick to point out that Roof’s Facebook profile photo features him wearing two emblems of white supremacy: the Rhodesian flag and the flag of Apartheid-era South Africa.
Some, like Fox News’ Steve Doocy, have questioned why the attack—in which nine were killed—was being investigated by officials as a hate crime. The patches (along with the venue and other details of the attack) are an indication that this was a mass murder motivated at least in part by racism.
One of the symbols worn by Roof in the photo, the Apartheid-era South African flag, is listed in the Anti-Defamation League’s database of hate symbols, “Hate on Display.” The ADL says that after the end of Apartheid, the flag became a symbol for hate groups. “Since 1994, white supremacists in South Africa and elsewhere around the world, including the United States, have adopted the 1928 flag as a symbol of white supremacy,” the site reports.
In 1994, The Independent reported on how defenders of Apartheid were dealing with the transition to a new government and a new flag: by adopting the old one as an icon. The flag was “destined to become a symbol of resistance,” the newspaper said at the time.
Mark Pitcavage, the director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, says South Africa is especially important at the moment to hate groups in this nation as well. American white supremacists “have convinced themselves, along with the help of some South African white supremacists, that ‘white genocide’ is actually going on in South Africa and that the rest of the world will follow,” Pitcavage told me. There have even been South Africa-focused white supremacist rallies in the United States in recent years, Pitcavage notes.
See those two flags on his chest? They are hate symbols.
Via Dylann Roof's Facebook page
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Federal investigators are looking into whether the fatal shooting of nine people in Charleston is a hate crime; the city’s police chief has already said it is one. FiveThirtyEight: What We Know About Hate Crimes In South Carolina.
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South Carolina has a long history of anti-black racism and violence, but it’s hard to say whether hate crimes are more common there than elsewhere. In recent years, the state doesn’t appear to have had an inordinate share of the country’s hate crimes, but that may be because of the limitations of hate-crime statistics and the inconsistency of hate-crime legislation.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has compiled 4,121 hate incidents nationwide between January 2003 and May 2015. (The SPLC defines these as “incidents of apparent hate crimes and hate group activities … drawn primarily from media sources.” In addition to assaults and acts of vandalism, the count includes things like rallies held by hate groups as well as legal developments in hate-crime cases.) A little over 1 percent of those, or 47, were in South Carolina. Based on the state’s population in 2009, the middle of the period covered, that works out to 10.3 hate incidents per million people over the 12-year period. The national rate is 13.4 hate incidents per million people. South Carolina’s rate is the 31st highest among the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
The latest crime statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation paint a similar picture. In 2013, agencies in every state but Hawaii, plus Washington, D.C., reported hate-crime statistics to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program. South Carolina had 51 reported hate crimes, 33 of them motivated by racial bias. That’s 10.7 hate crimes per million 2013 residents — which was the 34th highest rate among the 49 states and D.C. — and 6.9 motivated by racial bias, which was 33rd highest.
Consistency across two different data sources might normally look like support for a finding, in this case of a below-average hate-crime rate in South Carolina. But these data sources don’t agree for many other states. For instance, Michigan has one of the highest rates of reported hate crimes and racially motivated hate crimes in the FBI data but a below-average rate of incidents according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. And Iowa has one of the lowest hate-crime rates in the FBI data but an above-average rate in the law center’s database.
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Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a shooting left nine people dead Wednesday night, has a history of civil rights activism and has long been one of the most prominent historic black churches in the South. Black Voices: Historic Black Church Attacked In Charleston Had Deep Roots In Civil Rights, Abolition
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Called “Mother Emanuel,” the church -- home to one of oldest black Christian communities in the country -- was established in 1816 after black members of the city’s main Methodist church left because of racial discrimination. For nearly 200 years, it has been home to clergy who have gone on to become politicians, leaders of the abolition movement and civil rights crusaders. One of the shooting’s victims, church pastor Rev. Clementa Pinckney, was a Democratic state senator.
Throughout the church's history, it has hosted speakers including Booker T. Washington -- who brought a crowd of white supporters to its pews during a 1909 speech -- Martin Luther King Jr. and Wyatt T. Walker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, led a march toward the church in 1969 to support the city’s striking hospital workers.
One of the best known members of the church was Denmark Vesey, who in 1822 attempted to organize what could have been one of the largest slave revolts in U.S. history. Vesey and five others were found guilty after a secret trial and sentenced to execution. Following the trial, the church was burned by a white mob and rebuilt.
By 1834, local laws were passed to make black churches illegal, forcing Emanuel members to meet in secret until the end of the Civil War.
“Every church is sacred, but Emanuel has so much history wrapped up in it. This church is the church of the sons and daughters of slavery and the membership today serves again as a model that the stones the builders rejected, by the Lord can be raised up,” Bishop John Bryant, one of the top-ranking clergy in the denomination, told The Huffington Post.
“It’s a wonderful church with a marvelous history. ... A great history and great pride, and wonderful people who constitute the membership who are proud of being positive citizens. This was a spot chosen to do carnage and the nation ought to see this as offensive,” Bryant said.
Experts on the history of violence against black Americans and black churches have suggested the church may have been targeted because of its role in the civil rights movement.
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The Dominican Republic’s Constitutional Court's choice to retroactively strip some of its residents of citizenship has created the fifth-largest group of stateless people in the world. FiveThirtyEight: The Dominican Republic’s Revocation Of Citizenship Creates 200,000 Stateless People.
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The Dominican Republic’s choice to retroactively strip some of its residents of citizenship has created the fifth-largest group of stateless people in the world. Until recently, the Dominican Republic considered all persons born in the country to be citizens, but in 2013, the Dominican Constitutional Court retroactively revoked citizenship for children born to foreign parents as early as 1929. Tuesday was residents’ last chance to petition for naturalization to regain citizenship (albeit a lesser form).
The ruling is expected to primarily affect persons of Haitian heritage, who have been targeted for expulsion previously. Applying the ruling as far back as 1929 meant that families who had been citizens for two or more generations lost their Dominican Republic citizenship and couldn’t turn to Haiti for a new home. A foreign-born person of Haitian descent is eligible for Haitian citizenship only if one parent is a natural-born Haitian citizen.
The United Nations Refugee Agency said at the time of the ruling that it was “deeply concerned” by the Dominican Republic’s policy. The U.N. estimates that 210,000 residents of the Dominican Republic are now stateless.
COUNTRY STATELESS POPULATION
1 Myanmar 810,000
2 Côte d’Ivoire 700,000
3 Thailand 506,000
4 Latvia 268,000
5 Dominican Republic 210,000
The Dominican Republic’s only attempt to mitigate the effects of the ruling has been a 2014 law allowing those who had previously been considered natural-born citizens to apply for naturalized citizenship, provided they had the documents to prove they were born in the Dominican Republic. Residents of Haitian descent have alleged that registration workers have illegally denied qualified applicants and even confiscated the documents that applicants provided.
Current and retired Haitian sugar cane workers listen to leader Jesus Nunez as they protest near the Interior Ministry to demand their pensions and legal residency status Tuesday in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
TATIANA FERNANDEZ / AP
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Civil rights activists see hypocrisy in how law enforcement and the news media describe attacks by whites as compared with similar attacks by blacks or Muslim Americans. New York Times: Many Ask, Why Not Call Church Shooting Terrorism?
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The massacre of nine African-Americans in Charleston has been classified as a possible hate crime, apparently carried out by a 21-year-old white man who once wore an apartheid badge and other symbols of white supremacy. But many civil rights advocates are asking why the attack has not officially been called terrorism.
Against the backdrop of rising worries about violent Muslim extremism in the United States, advocates see hypocrisy in the way the attack and the man under arrest in the shooting have been described by law enforcement officials and the news media.
Assaults like the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 and the attack on an anti-Islamic gathering in Garland, Tex., last month have been widely portrayed as acts of terrorism carried out by Islamic extremists. Critics say, however, that assaults against African-Americans and Muslim Americans are rarely if ever called terrorism.
Moreover, they argue, assailants who are white are far less likely to be described by the authorities as terrorists.
“We have been conditioned to accept that if the violence is committed by a Muslim, then it is terrorism,” Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights advocacy group in Washington, said Thursday in a telephone interview.
“If the same violence is committed by a white supremacist or apartheid sympathizer and is not a Muslim, we start to look for excuses — he might be insane, maybe he was pushed too hard,” Mr. Awad said.
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I was stunned by how low this number is. ColorLines: Only 74 Black Women Hold PhDs in Physics. She’s Raising Money to Make it 75.
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As is true for all the hard sciences, black women are woefully underrepresented in physics. According to African American Women in Physics, just 74 black women hold a PhD in physics, astronomy, applied physics and space physics combined. Compare that to the 1,743 people who, according to the American Institute of Physics, graduated with a physics PhD in 2013 alone. The numbers are simply staggering.
The Fisk-Vanderbilt Master’s-to-PhD Bridge Program hopes to improve that by providing students who’ve graduated with a bachelor’s in science the courses, training and research skills they need to prepare for a doctorate program in a supportive environment. The program is attended by just a handful of brilliant students each year. LaNell Williams, who graduated from Wesleyan with a bachelor’s degree in physics last month, is hoping to attend the Fisk-Vanderbilt program this fall in order to complete her master’s and apply for a PhD program. But she has to get there first.
LaNell Williams GoFundMe page
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