Racial Justice

Grand Jury Fails To Indict Another White Cop

December 24, 2014 Sputnik, www.us.sputniknews.com Educate! Criminal Justice, Houston, Law, police brutality, Racial Justice

It's becoming an all-too-familiar story. After months of hearing testimony, a grand jury in Texas decided not to indict officer Juvenito Castro in the fatal shooting of Jordan Baker, an unarmed 26-year old, in January. Castro was off duty and was working as a private security officer at a strip mall when he confronted Baker on suspicion of burglary. Authorities indicated that a “brief struggle and foot chase” followed. Officers claim that at one point Baker stopped running and turned around. When he reached for his waistband, Castro fired. Castro was wearing his police uniform at the time of the incident. A string of burglaries had been reported at the mall that same month, though no evidence suggested that Baker was involved.

The Police Aren’t Under Attack. Institutionalized Racism Is.

December 24, 2014 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, www.time.com Educate! Ferguson, New York (NY), NYPD, police brutality, Racial Justice

At the same time, however, we need to understand that their deaths are in no way related to the massive protests against systemic abuses of the justice system as symbolized by the recent deaths—also national tragedies—of Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, and Michael Brown. Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the suicidal killer, wasn’t an impassioned activist expressing political frustration, he was a troubled man who had shot his girlfriend earlier that same day. He even Instagrammed warnings of his violent intentions. None of this is the behavior of a sane man or rational activist. The protests are no more to blame for his actions than The Catcher in the Rye was for the murder of John Lennon or the movie Taxi Driver for the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. Crazy has its own twisted logic and it is in no way related to the rational cause-and-effect world the rest of us attempt to create.

NY Protests Continue Despite Mayor’s Plea

December 24, 2014 Lily Workneh and Sebastian Murdock, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! police brutality, Police the Police, Racial Justice

Hundreds of protesters gathered in New York City Tuesday evening, showing they don’t plan to halt demonstrations, despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s call to suspend their actions until the two NYPD officers killed over the weekend have been laid to rest. About 300 demonstrators clogged city streets after gathering at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, proceeding as they'd planned weeks earlier. Followed by a trail of cops, they marched uptown toward Harlem, holding signs that expressed condolences to the families of the slain officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, while openly criticizing de Blasio's request to pause protests. "Let's make sure they hear us!" an organizer shouted on a megaphone as the crowd gathered outside the 125th Street police precinct.

Chicago Artists Took Over Train Line #BlackLivesMatter

December 24, 2014 Joseph Erbentraut, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! Chicago, police brutality, Racial Justice

As Black Lives Matter protests have captivated the nation over the past month, artists in Chicago used a different kind of medium to shed light on America's racial divide. And they took over a whole train line on Friday to do it. A group of more than 100 artists gathered at a downtown train station just before the 5 p.m. rush hour commute, boarding every Red Line train in both directions to demonstrate with signs, chants, and performances. According to spoken word artist and activist Ayinde Cartman, the protesters were met with a range of responses. Some train riders simply put in their headphones or avoided eye contact, while others took part in chants and a few even asked how they could be a part of future demonstrations.

Beyond Ferguson And Staten Island, So Much Cause For Outrage

December 22, 2014 J.J. Goldberg, www.forward.com Educate! Economic Justice, police brutality, Poverty, Racial Justice

Start with this: Poverty kills, too. And like police shootings, it targets the weakest. But unlike police shootings, the number of deaths from poverty isn’t a mystery. There’s considerable research on it, from places like Columbia University, the University of Chicago, the Social Security Administration and the Centers for Disease Control. The most straightforward figure comes from a 2011 Columbia University study: 291,000 a year. You read that right. Two hundred ninety-one thousand. To borrow a phrase from the Ferguson protests, where’s the outrage? By way of comparison, heart disease, America’s top killer, causes some 600,000 deaths yearly, one in four total deaths, according to the CDC. Next comes cancer at 575,000. Respiratory disease is third at 143,000, followed by stroke and accidental injury.

Black Lives Matter: Speaking Truth To Power In The US

December 22, 2014 Ismaael Qaiyim, www.roarmag.org Educate! police brutality, Protests, Racial Justice

The protests are ultimately about love. Love for one’s rights and love for fellow human beings. This is the type of love that provokes indignation at obvious and disagreeable injustices. Solidarity with those at the grassroots who are fighting for a voice is essential for any concrete challenges to institutionalized racial abuse and violence. Many have a vested interest in seeing political action fizzle away into the same inevitable cycle of outrage, shallow discussion and ultimate resignation to the same prolonged state of affairs. The protests all over the United States expose the thematic flaw in the American narrative. If anyone really wants to mount a challenge to the neoliberal order of vicious consumption and destruction, that effort must fundamentally address the status of black people in America. American exceptionalism does not justify such solidarity.

Another Black Boy Gunned Down By Police

December 20, 2014 Beverly Bell, www.otherworldsarepossible.org Educate! police brutality, Racial Justice

We will never learn of the names, lives, and deaths of countless Black men and boys murdered by police - and slavery enforcers, hate groups, vigilantes, and a host of others – dating back to the earliest days of this country’s history. The names and stories of a slew of recent victims of extrajudicial executions, such as Eric Garner and Michael Brown, and the exoneration of their killers, have become widely known through the blowback of public fury. This is a tale of another Black boy whose name and wrongful death were never reported in any official document or national media. The policeman responsible was not charged, indicted, or prosecuted. This child’s prematurely snuffed life was not spent in the US but in the Black nation of Haiti, though the US government subsidized his murderer.

Why We Need To Fix St. Louis County

December 20, 2014 Radley Balko, www.washingtonpost.com Educate! Economic Justice, Law, Racial Justice, St. Louis

Occupancy permits are just one of the myriad ways in which these municipalities can sap funds from poor people. Basically, if you live in St. Louis County, you’re required to get one for your residents. It doesn’t matter if you rent or own. The police can then periodically make compliance checks (although generally they conduct these checks after they’ve been called to a residence for another reason, like a noise complaint or domestic dispute). If there are more people in your place than your permit allows, they can fine you and each person in your home. Attorneys I spoke to say the regulation can end up being a way to enforce antiquated local laws against unmarried cohabitation, and judging by comments you sometimes hear in courtrooms or from local officials, a way for police and prosecutors to essentially fine people for having premarital sex.

From Ferguson To New York, Women Are Leading Protests

December 17, 2014 Hannah Giorgis, www.theguardian.com Educate! #BlackLivesMatter, Black Lives Matter (BLM), Racial Justice, Women

Saturday afternoon in New York, a diverse crowd of over 50,000 people marched through the city expressing frustration with a system that continues to let black die people without justice. The Millions March NYC, characterized as much by deep affirmation of black life as collective outrage over that injustice, brought together people of all backgrounds to protest ongoing state violence. But the latest successful moment of the post-Ferguson movement wasn’t the work of an established civil rights organization or well-funded non-profit: like the protests and organizing in Missouri and beyond, it was driven chiefly by the efforts of young black women and brought to fruition by a coalition of young multi-racial activists. Umaara Elliott and Synead Nichols, the lead organizers of Saturday’s march noted that they are part of a new generation of activists “willing to take up the torch” and “demand that action be taken at every level of government to ensure that these racist killings by the police cease.”

In Demanding Apologies, Police Unions Show White Supremacy

December 17, 2014 Shaun King, www.dailykos.com Resist! police brutality, Racial Justice

Racism has a hard time hiding. People love to deny its very existence, but it just has a way of telling on itself. Those who harbor prejudice on the inside eventually can't help but let it out in a way, so ugly and toxic, that you soon wonder how they kept it disguised for as long as they had. Few things smack of leaky-pen racism more than the police unions of Cleveland and St. Louis recently demanding apologies from athletes and sports franchises for wearing T-shirts showing solidarity with families of victims of police violence. Within hours of Cleveland Browns player Andrew Hawkins coming out to his pre-game warm up with a T-shirt stating "Justice for Tamir Rice & John Crawford," Jeff Follman, president of the Cleveland Police Union, issued a statement so incendiary that it was hard to believe.

In The Struggle Against Police Violence, The Youth Shall Lead

December 17, 2014 Mychal Denzel Smith, www.commondreams.com Strategize! Ferguson, police brutality, Racial Justice

This new movement is being led by mostly young black women who won’t allow us to forget that black women’s lives matter, too (Columbia University Law professor Kimberle Crenshaw was present with a large banner that featured the pictues and names of black women and girls also killed by police). It is drawing in diverse crowds, including white allies who are not calling for gradual change, but a total end to white supremacy. The people in the street have neck tattoos, are dressed in sagging skinny jeans, and curse loudly (among the more popular chants: “BACK UP, BACK UP, WE WANT FREEDOM, FREEDOM, ALL THESE RACIST ASS COPS, WE DON’T NEED ‘EM, NEED ‘EM!” and “WHO SHUT SHIT DOWN? WE SHUT SHIT DOWN!”). The movement doesn’t look or sound like anything our elders remember (or were taught) about the civil rights era. And that’s OK. We have a new fight. We have to create a new model of resistance.

Locking Up Black Dissidents And Punishing The Poor

December 16, 2014 Mumia Abu-Jamal and Johanna Fernández, www.tandfonline.com Educate! Mass Incarceration, police brutality, Racial Justice

This volume is a leap into the abyss that is the American Gulag. Our purpose is to explore the origins of the current system of carceral punishment, which began to mass-incarcerate poor and working-class African Americans and Latinos living in urban centers beginning in the late 1970s. We link the new characteristics of imprisonment as it then emerged to the campaign of state repression unleashed against the civil rights and black power movements in the 1960s. Some of those imprisoned are veterans of these movements, and are political prisoners. Although this important segment of the prison population remains absent from contemporary public debates on incarceration, the political atmosphere within which ‘60 s black radicals were criminalized is key to understanding the frenzied reaction to the black freedom movement that set the stage for today's hyper-incarceration of poor urban black and brown communities.

5 Big Myths About ‘Next Generation’ Civil Rights & Open Internet

December 16, 2014 Malkia A. Cyril, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Civil Rights, Ferguson, Internet, Net Neutrality, police brutality, Racial Justice

As Black communities emerge from the shadows of criminalization, hashtags like#BlackLivesMatter have jumped off the computer screen and into the street. Beyond sparking a long-awaited new civil rights movement, they are also catalyzing an amazing 21st century model for civil rights activism. But the ability of Black communities to use the Internet to sustain this growing movement is threatened. Last year, a D.C. circuit court struck down network neutrality rules. The court told the FCC, the agency that regulates the Internet, that the only way to legally prevent discrimination online and enforce the net neutrality rules that make the Internet such a powerful tool, is to reclassify broadband as common carrier service -- a public utility, like electricity or water.

It’s All Tied Together And The Starting Point Barely Matters

December 15, 2014 Mark Bittman, www.nytimes.com Resist! Economic Justice, Inequality, Racial Justice

THE police killing unarmed civilians. Horrifying income inequality. Rotting infrastructure and an unsafe “safety net.” An inability to respond to climate, public health and environmental threats. A food system that causes disease. An occasionally dysfunctional and even cruel government. A sizable segment of the population excluded from work and subject to near-random incarceration. You get it: This is the United States, which, with the incoming Congress, might actually get worse. What makes this an exciting time is that we are beginning to see links among issues that we have overlooked for far too long. Everything affects everything. It’s all tied together, and the starting place hardly matters: A just and righteous system will have a positive impact on everything we care about, just as an unjust, exploitative system makes everything worse.

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