My first person experience witnessing voter intimidation
— by dopper0189, Black Kos, Managing Editor
This is story I never thought I would have to write, because I never thought I would witness this in the first person. I tend to use early voting as on election day, I tend to volunteer to do GOTV. On October 27th I took my parents to city hall for early voting. Walking into the city clerk’s office I quickly felt ecstatic. The appearance of the crowd inside would warm the heart of any Democrat. In the front of the line was a young Latina with her mother going through the process of early voting, filling out some forms were three other millennial age white woman, my parents and myself were of course black, only one retirement age woman who was leaving as we entered “looked” like anything approaching a Trump demographic. Feeling hopeful I walked into line with my parents. A friendly city hall officer who was helping to maintain order asked us “what we there for?” I told him “I’m helping my parents early vote”. He asked me “do you want to early vote too?” I told him “I’ll do it after I help my parents”. I stood in line, helped my parents get the forms they needed and helped them sit down and fill them out. Everyone in line was pleasantly waiting their turn to vote. After helping my elderly parents fill out the forms, I helped my parents return to line. By this time a another man had approached the line, took one look and crossed his arms.
My parents were standing in the line holding their early voting forms, I didn’t have my form yet, but I was standing in line next to my elderly parents, just making sure everything was OK. The city hall officer noticed I didn’t have a form, he got a form with a clip board and pen, and started to hand itto me. He asked me “can I help you early vote too buddy?”. At this point the man “lost his shit” he angrily asked the security officer “are you going to call me buddy and help me vote too”, he then began to loudly talk to himself “what the fuck is this shit”, “this is what’s wrong with this place” and other comments along these general lines. I thanked the officer but waved him off, I looked directly at this disruptive man gave him my favorite “you don’t scare me smile” and told him ”Sir. I was already in line before, but since I’m helping my parents vote, I don’t want to cut the line, when I’m finished helping them, I’m going to return to line and vote”. He looked at me and said “I wasn’t talking to you”.
The officer then answered a question the Latina lady asked him in Spanish, this furthered set the man off on another rant. He asked the officer “are you a citizen” the officer told him “yes, I’m Puerto Rican, so yes I’m a citizen”. This jerk them asked him “are you registered to vote in Manchester”. The officer said “yes” he asked him “can you run for President?” The officer rolled his eyes and said “ I can run for any Federal office, but I’m not going to run for President”. He kept on asking the officer questions about this, but the officer, just tried to stop engaging him.
By this time this jerk-off had made it through the line, approached the desk. He pointed around the room, but his eyes rested on the Latinas who were sitting down at the privacy table,and he asked the lady “how can you tell these people are US citizens”. I saw her eyes, widen a little, She answered “ I check everyone’s id”. He quickly replied “You don’t have to be a US citizen to get a drivers license, don’t you know this” she replied, you have to “show proper documentation to register, I then check to make sure you are that person”, she also started to explain that non-residents have a identification on their license, but he interrupted her and began to speak loudly “I’m tax payer, I pay a lot of taxes, I’m not moving from this spot, until someone can explain to me how you make sure only US citizens are voting”. The lady at the desk tried to calm him down, she asked him if he had ever “early or absentee voted before” he said “no but that’s not the point, I know I’m being a jerk, but I don’t care, I’m not wasting these people’s money, I want to talk to whoever is in charge here, I want to know the answer to my questions”. The exasperated lady told him “I’ll call the head clerk”, she asked him some other questions to attempt to calm him down.
At some point the clerk asked him or he said he served in the US military. When she asked him a question about his rank, he became agitated again (I’m guessing he lied), at this point the the officer who was clearly trying to stay out of it, asked him to step aside out of the line until the head clerk came, you could visible see everyone in the room breath a quiet sigh of victory. But naturally being asked to step aside again set the man off, he began to say loudly “ I could claim to be anybody, I should be challenging these people’s right to vote, doesn’t this worry people, how do you know I’m not Jose Martinez or whatever”.
He whispered something to a white lady who had entered during this time ( a few more people has arrived) she loudly proclaimed “you’ve insulted three people since I’ve been here, I have nothing in common with you”. The head clerk then arrived and they stepped out into the hall way “I heard him loudly shouting, no one in there knows the electoral laws, there’s nothing safe guarding the vote”, I also heard lots of talk how “when he was a kid he could walk to get ice cream even when it was dark” I heard him call someone a “commie liberal”, “pinko commie”, and several more derogatory terms. This man not only held up the voting line, he made this entire voting area a hostile toxic environment.
All I could think was heaven help us, if this is what election day is going to be like. If my parents were not there I would have told him off, and I almost never lose my temper. I can only imagine groups of people like this holding up lines, and disrupting the process. If the site of five people of color, and four white woman was enough to set this guy off, what happens on election day, when woman and people of color flood the polls?
All I can ask is please if you have the time, register and volunteer as a poll monitor to make sure guys like this don’t get away with crap like this on election day. After calling Denise I called my local Democratic party office, and sent this story to our local NPR and a college radio program.
Every year, I ask people to GOTV, This is the first time I ask people to not only vote, and get out the vote, but also to carry the number of whom to call if you spot voter intimation tactics. The Trump poll goons are going to be a real phenomenon this year. Be prepared to help not only yourself, but to report if you see someone else’s voting rights being violated. This year we all have to stay vigilant.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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HOW are sub-Saharan African economies doing? It depends on where you look, says the IMF in its latest survey of the continent, which is published today. Regional growth will slow to just 1.4% this year, the most sluggish pace for two decades. Things look grim in Nigeria, which is mired in recession. But Ivory Coast, a short flight away, is thundering along at a growth rate of 8%. Similar contrasts are found across the continent. Better to talk of two Africas, says the IMF, moving at different speeds.
The big divider is resources. As commodity prices have slumped, so too have the fortunes of big exporters. As a group, resource-rich countries will grow on average by 0.3% of GDP, says the IMF. Take oil-rich Angola, once the fastest-growing country on the continent: it will not grow at all this year, and is wrestling with inflation of 38%. Commodity-exporting countries saw the value of their exports to China almost halve in 2015. Public debt is rising sharply. Exchange rates are falling. Private consumption has collapsed.
Things look very different in countries which are less resource-dependent. They will grow at 5.5% this year. They have been helped, of course, by falling oil prices, which makes their imports cheaper. But they are stronger in other ways too. In east Africa, for example, a wave of public investment in infrastructure has boosted demand.
Governments cannot set commodity prices. Nor can they stop drought, which has hit agriculture in countries such as Ethiopia and Malawi. But their decisions do make a difference. Nigeria’s disastrous attempt to prop up its exchange rate hurt far more than it helped. Investors in Mozambique were unimpressed when the country revealed hidden debts in April. Growth in South Africa has slowed to almost zero amid political wrangles and an energy crisis. Now is the time to get the policies right, urges the IMF.
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To protest the redrawing of municipal boundaries earlier this year, residents in a poor part of Limpopo province set fire to their schools. More than three dozen schools were damaged; many were burned to the ground. “Service delivery” protests over the shoddy provision of electricity and basic sanitation regularly see major highways barricaded with burning tyres. In protests at universities, where students are seeking free tuition, libraries and lecture halls have been torched. Why do South African protests readily descend into violence?
South Africans have plenty to feel angry about. Public services are patchy. Youth unemployment runs at around 50%. The economy is both stagnant and lopsided. A majority of black South Africans are still poor. Many feel frustrated with the lack of fundamental change in their lives, 22 years after the introduction of universal adult suffrage. Researchers at the University of Johannesburg reckon there are on average 11 protests a day, many of them over labour issues. Other research has found an increasing number of “service delivery” protests in recent years. The vast majority of protests are peaceful. Yet they are largely ignored by the government and media, and so citizens up the ante (“burn to be heard”, is one refrain). Moreover, some demonstrations get co-opted by opportunistic looters, while others are fuelled by factional politics. There is also a sense of impunity, caused by the rarity of convictions for burning buildings or stone-throwing.
The violence begets a vicious cycle. Thuggish protests draw heavy-handed responses by police. Tactical units, set up to deal with serious crimes such as car-jackings, have been dispatched to university campuses to quell student protests. Poorly trained private security guards are often deployed as well. Students throw stones at security guards, who hurl them right back. Last week police shot one student leader 13 times with rubber bullets. A broader worry is that legitimate complaints are tarred as thuggish disorder. And arson and looting cause billions of rand in damage—something South Africa can ill afford.
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Author wins for The Sellout, a satire of US racial politics, making him the first American writer to win award. The Guardian: Paul Beatty wins Man Booker prize 2016
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Paul Beatty has become the first American writer to win the Man Booker prize, for a caustic satire on US racial politics that judges said put him up there with Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift.
The 54-year-old Los Angeles-born writer won for The Sellout, a laugh-out-loud novel whose main character wants to assert his African American identity by, outrageously and transgressively, bringing back slavery and segregation.
Beatty has admitted readers might find it a difficult book to digest but the historian Amanda Foreman, who chaired this year’s judging panel, said that was no bad thing.
“Fiction should not be comfortable,” Foreman said. “The truth is rarely pretty and this is a book that nails the reader to the cross with cheerful abandon … that is why the novel works.
“While you’re being nailed, you’re being tickled. It is highwire act which he pulls off with tremendous verve and energy and confidence. He never once lets up or pulls his punches. This is somebody writing at the top of their game.”
Foreman called it a “novel for our times”, particularly in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement.
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More white Americans are convinced that police officers “generally treat blacks and other minorities the same as whites”, and Donald Trump is most likely responsible for that trend. The New Republic: The Racial Divide on Perceived Police Bias Is Widening. Thanks, Trump?
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Over the past year, more white Americans became convinced that police officers “generally treat blacks and other minorities the same as whites”—and Donald Trump may well be responsible for that trend.
According to new data released Tuesday by the Public Religion Research Institute, 52 percent of Americans—including 64 percent of whites—believe officers mostly treat people equally, regardless of race. That’s up 11 points from this time last year, when just 41 percent of the public thought it was true.
The uptick is driven by a 14-point increase among whites. Latinos saw an 11-point increase, while 63 percent of them still reject the concept of police colorblindness. And black Americans saw a 5-point increase, but 81 percent of them think officers typically don’t treat the races equally.
“The big takeaway is that the distance betweens whites as a whole and African-Americans as a whole has widened over the past year—and it was already a very large gap,” Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute CEO, told The New Republic. The racial divide on the question used to be 36 points. It’s now 45.
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School closures are the not-so-distant cousins of policing, housing and health policies that seek to unearth, delete or disperse community assets as a way to improve outcomes. The Root: Black Children Deserve the Stability That Neighborhood Schools Offer
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School closure is a tactic we don’t have to take. Under the new national education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, states have been freed to employ strategies they deem fit just as long as they act on the bottom 5 percent.
When we’re talking about improving urban districts, though, we always seem to land on the “solution” of closing them. Black communities are constantly losing the anchor institutions we actually need strengthened.
Within those very districts, there are schools that offer somewhat of a model. The elements that make those schools successful could be replicated in others if we valued the teachers and leaders enough to build their capacity. We build people’s capacity when we believe they can improve.
The Education Research Alliance of Tulane University earlier this month released “Extreme Measures: When and How School Closures and Charter Takeovers Benefit Students” (pdf).
The study examined the effects of school closures in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La., from 2008 to 2014 to show that school closures can have positive effects on student outcomes.
“What gets measured gets done.” If research never leaves the confines of the “gap closing” framework, “growth” will always burden black families—not the institutions that caused inequities in the first place. Being compared with whites, which gap-closing work and research constantly reinforce, insidiously assumes that white institutions and people are not problems to be solved.
Many other urban districts, including Newark, N.J., Oakland, Calif., and Philadelphia, have used school closure as an approach to improve overall performance while reducing the number of ineffective institutions.
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