Racial Justice

Marissa Alexander, The One Who Lived

February 26, 2015 Avis Jones DeWeever, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Marissa Alexander, police brutality, Racial Justice, Women's Rights

Lives that matter are worthy of protection. They are due that most basic of natural laws, the reflex of self-preservation. Yet, a sad and haunting truth in America is that while all Black life is now and has always been devalued, Black women have faced a distinct reality. Ours is a history grounded in a context of habitual sexual and physical violence (at least one outgrowth of which is the colorism that remains a stain on our psyche to this day). Yet, our collective suffering, in days past as well as in the contemporary context, have been all but erased, hidden from acknowledgement, and sequestered from view. For centuries, white women have received the benefit of brutal, often undeserved protection. Even a mere gaze was at times, deemed worthy of lethal retribution. Yet as Black women, our femininity has never served the function of shielding us from harm.

103 Year Old Civil Rights Icon, Lessons From The Movement

February 25, 2015 Sasha Bronner, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Civil Rights, History, Law, Racial Justice

Amelia Boynton Robinson was nearly beaten to death in 1965 during the first march in Selma, Alabama, led by Martin Luther King Jr. She was 53 years old at the time. A graphic photo of Boynton Robinson, severely beaten and collapsed, spread around the world and became an iconic image of the civil rights era. Boynton Robinson survived the brutality and chaos of the time and is alive today to talk about it, at 103 years old. One of the nation's oldest civil rights activists, she remains an essential figure of the movement. She was one of the first people to urge King to travel to Selma in the first place, and was also the first woman and first African-American to ever run for Congress in Alabama. “Thank god I learned that color makes no difference,” Boynton Robinson said Friday at a private luncheon at the Soho House in West Hollywood, California. “My parents [were] an example for what they wanted their children to be.”

Bratton: Police Responsible For Abuses Against African Americans

February 25, 2015 Christopher Mathias, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! New York City (NYC), NYPD, police brutality, Racial Justice

New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton acknowledged on Tuesday that police were to blame for "many of the worst parts of black history" in the United States. Yet advocates for police reform say the comments are merely lip service from an official who continues to reinforce the city's racial tensions. Bratton gave a speech Tuesday morning to a predominantly African-American crowd during a Black History Month breakfast at the Greater Allen AME Church in Queens. “Slavery, our country’s original sin, sat on a foundation codified by laws enforced by police, by slave-catchers,” Bratton said. The commissioner pointed out that the first thing Dutch colonist Peter Stuyvesant did upon arriving in what was then New Amsterdam was set up a police force to prop up a system of slavery. “Since then, the stories of police and black citizens have intertwined again and again,” Bratton said. "The unequal nature of that relationship cannot and must not be denied.”

#BlackLivesMatter Activists Shut Down Emeryville Home Depot

February 23, 2015 CBS SF Bay Area, www.sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com Resist! police brutality, Racial Justice, San Francisco

Dozens of #BlackLivesMatter protesters forced Home Depot in Emeryville to close its doors for several hours Saturday. The group was demanding answers about the February 3 shooting death of Yuvette Henderson, an Oakland woman shot and killed by two Emeryville officers. Henderson was accused of shoplifting at Home Depot and trying to carjack motorists. Police said Henderson pointed a gun at them, but protesters don’t believe that. They want the store to release security tapes of the incident. One protester told KCBS, “Home Depot has tapes of what happened both outside and inside the store and they are refusing to release them. We’re demanding that police forces, both private security and police forces on our street to stop terrorizing our people and stop militarizing our communities.”

A Message In Motion: Reparations Now!

February 23, 2015 KH from Transformative Spaces, www.transformativespaces.org Resist! Chicago, Racial Justice, Reparations

Last night, a group of activists and alliestook to the subway in Chicago to make some noise about this week’s election and the much discussed reparations ordinance. The ordinance, which would provide care and compensation to individuals tortured by Chicago police under Jon Burge, will not be on the ballot, but the man who has prevented it from getting a hearing before the City Council will be: Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The majority of the City Council supports the ordinance, but in Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago, such details aren’t really relevant. Emanuel has never seen police torture victims, or other victims of police violence, as a political priority. Given this mayor’s overall treatment of communities of color – shuttering dozens of schools and clinics in black communities – his failure to prioritize the safety and dignity of those most affected by police violence is unsurprising.

Blacks Still Fighting For Health Care Access

February 23, 2015 Dr. Judy Lubin, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Health Care, Racial Justice

The ability to access quality health care services for the majority of the black population has been largely due to federal government policies and initiatives designed to address long-standing, systemic barriers to medical care for African Americans. As part of the White House's Black History Month panel co-hosted by the Association for the Study for African American Life and History (ASALH) this past Wednesday, I had an opportunity to elaborate on this history by discussing the significance of the Affordable Care Act and rejection of the Medicaid expansion by southern states within the context of the ongoing struggle for health equity in the U.S. While my research examines the interaction of racial politics with efforts to pass large-scale health reform from the New Deal to the ongoing opposition to the ACA, focusing on this year's 50th anniversary of the passage of Medicare and Medicaid offered an opportunity to shine light on how important these programs have been in reducing the discrimination and institutional racism that were once hallmarks of American health care.

3 Ways NYT Does Not Understand #BlackLivesMatter

February 17, 2015 Leah Hunt-Hendrix, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! #BlackLivesMatter, Black Lives Matter (BLM), Journalism, Media, Racial Justice, Social Change

Historian David J. Garrow tells Vega that the current movement bears little resemblance to the "clear goals" of the 1960s civil rights movement. "You could call it rebellious," he suggests, "or you could call it irrational." In this dismissal, he echoes Oprah Winfrey's similarly condescending remarks calling for the movement to develop "leadership," remarks Vega also saw fit to highlight. Notwithstanding its current hallowed reputation, at the time, many commentators portrayed the civil rights movement as "rebellious" and "irrational." Apparently, we have learned little about movements in the decades since. We need to address the myth that movements last only as long as their media moments and develop a better grasp -- and more respect -- for the quiet, persistent periods of organizing that go into changing the flawed structures of our society. The road is long, and the path is winding, but our role -- as the media and the public -- should be to seek understanding rather than to proliferate inaccuracies.

Police Turn Off Dash Camera While Beating Civilian

February 17, 2015 Terrell Jermaine Starr, www.alternet.com Educate! Camera, police brutality, Racial Justice, Wars and Militarism

A dash cam video capturing the arrest and subsequent tasing of a St. Louis man reveals how easily law enforcement can manipulate camera footage to defend its actions. According to the police report cited by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Cortez Bufford engaged in “aggressive” behavior and resisted arrest when cops pulled him over on the night of April 10, 2014. Video of the traffic stop reveals a more nuanced version of what really happened. Officers Nathaniel Burkemper and Michael Binz pulled Bufford’s silver Ford Taurus over because of an illegal U-turn and in connection with a 911 call over shots fired near the Lafayette Square area of St. Louis.

Raising Black Sons In A White Country

February 17, 2015 Jane Lazarre, www.tomdispatch.com Educate! police brutality, Racial Discrimination, Racial Justice

It is 2015 and I could list so many names. I would pray, but I am not a believer, as people call us now, but I do believe in action, in what has always been called struggle, in what I insist on calling faith in the human capacity and responsibility to know and feel another human story. I witness my son, now a man of 40, marching from Washington Square Park up Fifth Avenue, across 34th Street, downtown on Sixth, long renamed Avenue of the Americas, to One Police Plaza. He marches and shouts with colleagues and friends: I can’t breathe! Black lives matter! Whiteness is a social and political category created to embed in the mind a false description of the body, its purpose to confirm privilege and superiority, to deny solidarity. It is not me. I reject it. It is not you. We can’t breathe.

Madison Co. Judge Accused Of Racial Abuse Indicted

February 17, 2015 Kate Royals, www.clarionledger.com Educate! Criminal Justice, Law, Madison, Racial Justice

Nine months after a Madison County Justice Court judge was accused of striking and yelling a racial slur at a mentally challenged young man, a grand jury served an indictment for simple assault on a vulnerable adult. Justice Court Judge Bill Weisenberger turned himself in to the Madison County sheriff Thursday, according to a spokeswoman with the Attorney General's office. He was released on $10,000 bond. According to witnesses, Weisenberger struck 20-year-old Eric Rivers, an African American, and yelled "Run, n-----, run" at the Canton Flea Market on May 8 of last year. If convicted, the charge of simple assault against a vulnerable adult carries a fine of up to $1,000 or up to 5 years imprisonment, or both. The charge against him is a felony.

Study: Black Girls Are Being Pushed Out Of School

February 16, 2015 Karen GrigsBates, www.readersupportednews.com Educate! Balitmore, Children, Education, police brutality, Racial Justice

News surrounding a confrontation in a Baltimore school is raising new questions about the role race plays in discipline for black girls. Baltimore television station WBAL has been reporting on an October incident that led to three students at the city's Vanguard Middle School being injured, and later arrested and suspended, after an altercation with a school security officer. School officials have supported the officer's assertion that she was attacked, kicked and punched by the girls, but the school's security tape shows something more complicated. By the end of the incident, the officer had struck one of the girls repeatedly with her baton — causing an injury that required multiple stitches — and pepper sprayed the two others. All three girls required treatment at a hospital.

FBI Director Acknowledges Racial Bias Of Police

February 13, 2015 Ben Mathis-Lilley, www.slate.com Educate! FBI, police brutality, Racial Justice, Surveillance

Speaking at Georgetown University today, FBI Director James Comey said that American law enforcement officers can be racially biased and have a history of discriminating against black citizens—and asserted that the FBI needs to do a better job collecting comprehensive data on police killings and other uses of force against suspects nationwide. Comey’s remarks acknowledged that authorities have often protected the interests of white Americans by discriminating against blacks: “At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.”

Go To Trial: Crash The Justice System

February 13, 2015 Michelle Alexander, www.handsupunited.org Strategize! Criminal Justice, Law, Mass Incarceration, police brutality, Racial Justice

AFTER years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless. But some questions a woman I know posed during a phone conversation one recent evening gave me pause: “What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to trial? Couldn’t we bring the whole system to a halt just like that?” The woman was Susan Burton, who knows a lot about being processed through the criminal justice system. I was stunned by Susan’s question about plea bargains because she — of all people — knows the risks involved in forcing prosecutors to make cases against people who have been charged with crimes. Could she be serious about organizing people, on a large scale, to refuse to plea-bargain when charged with a crime? “Yes, I’m serious,” she flatly replied.

New Report Reveals Magnitude Of Black Lynchings In US

February 12, 2015 TeleSurTV, www.telesurtv.net Educate! History, Racial Justice, Terrorism

About 4,000 black people were lynched in the southern states of the United States between 1877 and 1950, equivalent to more than one per week, according to a new report published Tuesday by the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). Over 6 million black people also fled the South between 1910-1970 to escape the violence and terror in a region known for its extreme and widespread racism. This is the most extensive study published on “racial terrorism” recently, after five years of investigation in 12 southern states. It has added 700 more cases of lynchings to the previous investigation by sociologists Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck in 1995.

Chapel Hill Shooting: Three Young Muslims Have Been Executed

February 12, 2015 Shabbiyah Pervez, www.independent.co.uk Educate! Faith, Journalism, Media, Muslim, Racial Justice, Shooting

Just as I was getting my kids ready for school this morning, I heard my phone beep. I glanced down, and saw the words "Muslims Shot Dead in Chapel Hill". I froze, and felt a familiar chill run down my back. I rushed to Twitter in a desperate attempt to find out more. Who were these three people? Why were they killed? Are we at a point where Muslims are no longer safe in their homes? Or could this have been a random attack? I was secretly and maybe naively hoping it was the latter. The attack would have happened around 10pm in the UK. When stories break at this time, the British press might have sent their latest editions to print, but they are still usually picked up by their night teams, who monitor news around the world while everyone else is asleep.

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