Racial Justice

Convicted By An All-White Jury, Black Leader Faces Life

December 13, 2014 Victoria Collier and Ben-Zion Ptashnik, www.truth-out.org Educate! Law, Racial Justice

As reports escalate of police assaults and murder of unarmed black men for "suspected" crimes, a jury trial certainly sounds like welcome justice. Not so for many in Michigan, where a 66-year-old black activist, Rev. Edward Pinkney, convicted of felony election fraud by an all-white jury, faces a life sentence, amid accusations of trumped-up charges and no direct evidence of wrongdoing. When an all-white jury is chosen to try a prominent black community leader of an impoverished city with a 90 percent black population, when the powers that be have numerous reasons to want him discredited, when the evidence is entirely lacking and the punishment is draconian, there is ample cause to suspect another egregious breach of justice - one as blatant as refusing to indict the police who killed an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, and choked a father of six to death in Staten Island.

Policing Justice Requires Economic Justice, Part II

December 12, 2014 Matt Stannard, www.occupy.com Educate! Economic Justice, police brutality, Racial Justice

While police oppression hurts everyone, it disproportionately hurts people of color, a fact interwoven with police oppression towards poor people. The symbolic and identity-based degradation of people of color is a manifestation of a larger degradation – one of inequality, exploitation, and structured economic injustice. The relationship between police oppression, economic oppression and racism was most supercharged in Ferguson because of the city's now-notorious system of trickle-up wealth extraction through tickets and fines. When stories emerged of this pervasive practice, Ferguson took on the image of a Kafkaesque prison camp for the working class, whose citizens walked in and out of revolving doors, paying the fines that kept this otherwise unviable municipal entity afloat.

White House Refuses To Meet Grieving Black Mothers

December 11, 2014 Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, www.blackagendareport.com Educate! Ferguson, Obama, police brutality, Racial Justice

With Washington reeling from the spontaneous uprisings against police terror that continue nationwide, the Obama administration announced the formation of a commission to investigate police terror against African-American communities and especially its men and boys. Not since the 1960’s civil rights movement has the country experienced a popular uprising that cuts across this broad a spectrum of American society's racial and generational barriers. Only two years shy of leaving Washington, the Obama Administration has finally moved to address the most fundamental social and political crises beleaguering the African-American community: police brutality and mass incarceration.

Consciousness Rising On Racial Injustice, Connected To All Issues

December 11, 2014 Lauren McCauley, www.commondreams.org Resist! Racial Justice, Solidarity

With the nation's streets still filled with protesters and a plan for thousands to march on Washington brewing, the call for justice for Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and other black victims of police violence has only grown stronger. In the days and weeks since two grand juries failed to indict the police officers who killed the two men, expressions of solidarity have poured in from all corners—from professional athletes to fast food workers, education leaders and environmental groups, with the message that an injustice against one is an injustice against us all. On Monday evening, several NBA players took the court wearing t-shirts that read, "I can't breathe," a reference to the final utterance issued by Eric Garner, who was forced into a chokehold by New York Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo on July 17.

Policing Justice Requires Economic Justice, Part I

December 10, 2014 Matt Stannard, www.occupy.com Educate! Economic Justice, police brutality, Racial Justice, Wars and Militarism

The fear generated by our unstable and alienated economy makes the more privileged among us susceptible to the belief that anything less than unconditional support of all police tactics spells danger to public safety. Help from the White House is not promising either. On Dec. 1, President Obama appointed Philadelphia Police Chief Charles Ramsey as one of two co-chairs to head a commission on police demilitarization. But according to Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, Ramsey was responsible for several “bloody and abusive crackdowns on protesters” when he was Chief of Police in Washington D.C. The police cannot police the police.

Bad Ass Teachers: Investigate Civil Rights Abuses In Education

December 9, 2014 Badass Teachers, www.badassteachers.blogspot.com Organize! Civil Rights, Education, Racial Justice

Dear Secretary Duncan and Mr. Kim: This open letter is a respectful request to convene a national committee to investigate civil rights abuses that have reached a crisis point. While we commend you for meeting with BATs, Save Our Schools, United Opt Out, Journey for Justice, among other educational activist groups (and hope that you have read the Journey for Justice report entitled "Death by a Thousand Cuts”), we are requesting a follow up process that will result in action regarding disturbing trends we have observed with regards to civil rights violations of both students and teachers. As a national group of nearly 53,000 educators, we have collected the following observations as areas of concern. . .

A Society Of Captives

December 9, 2014 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com Educate! Genocide, Mass Incarceration, police brutality, Racial Justice

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plans to launch a pilot program in New York City to place body cameras on police officers and conduct training seminars to help them reduce their adrenaline rushes and abusive language, along with the establishment of a less stringent marijuana policy, are merely cosmetic reforms. The killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island was, after all, captured on video. These proposed reforms, like those out of Washington, D.C., fail to address the underlying cause of poverty, state-sponsored murder and the obscene explosion of mass incarceration—the rise of the corporate state and the death of our democracy. Mass acts of civil disobedience, now being carried out across the country, are the only mechanism left that offers hope for systematic legal and judicial reform. We must defy the corporate state, not work with it.

From New York To Greece, We Revolt ‘Cus We Can’t Breathe

December 8, 2014 Jerome Roos, www.roarmag.org Resist! Eric Garner, Protests, Racial Justice

“I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” Those were Eric Garner’s last words. He repeated them at least 11 times, clearly audible to the camera that recorded it all, as one cop sat on his chest and another suffocated him in choke-hold. And then he stopped moving. For six minutes they just left him lying there on the sidewalk — they didn’t do a goddamn thing to save his life. The coroner ruled it a homicide; another black man murdered by a white cop. Yet a white-majority grand jury chose not to indict him. Now we can’t breathe. We can’t breathe with this injustice in the air. We can’t breathe knowing that in America a black man is killed by police every 28 hours — and the cop usually gets away with impunity.

Bulls Derrick Rose Wears ‘I Can’t Breathe’ Shirt At Game

December 8, 2014 Andrew Hart, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! Eric Garner, police brutality, Racial Justice, Sports

Chicago Bulls point guard Derrick Rose warmed up for his game against the Golden State Warriors on Saturday night wearing a T-shirt with the words "I can't breathe," paying tribute to Eric Garner, the unarmed black man killed by a police officer's chokehold in New York. This isn't the first instance of professional athletes using this form of protest. Last month, five St. Louis Rams players entered the field with their hands raised as a form of surrender. Some witnesses said Michael Brown had his hands up when shot, and the gesture, along with the phrase "Hands up, don't shoot," has been embraced by demonstrators nationwide.

St. Louis Cop: ‘Whole System Is Guilty’

December 8, 2014 Redditt Hudson, www.washingtonpost.com Educate! Human Rights, police brutality, Police the Police, Racial Justice

Unfortunately, I don’t think better training alone will reduce police brutality. My fellow officers and I took plenty of classes on racial sensitivity and on limiting the use of force. The problem is that cops aren’t held accountable for their actions, and they know it. These officers violate rights with impunity. They know there’s a different criminal justice system for civilians and police. Even when officers get caught, they know they’ll be investigated by their friends, and put on paid leave. My colleagues would laughingly refer to this as a free vacation. It isn’t a punishment. And excessive force is almost always deemed acceptable in our courts and among our grand juries. Prosecutors are tight with law enforcement, and share the same values and ideas. The number of people in uniform who will knowingly and maliciously violate your human rights is huge. At the Ferguson protests, people are chanting, “The whole damn system is guilty as hell.” I agree, and we have a lot of work to do.

National Day Of Action On Police BrutalityFor MLK Day

December 6, 2014 Faraji Muhammad, Kamau Franklin and Sharmini Peries, www.therealnews.com Organize! Ferguson, police brutality, Police the Police, Racial Justice

I think many folks are not surprised by the outcome. And recently I've been saying to folks clearly that we should stop saying that the American criminal justice system is broken, because it's not broken. It's working the way it was intended to work. It was up to us in the organizing community and other communities to make changes to that system. But that system is working the way it was built to work. And like you said, I have been around, unfortunately, for these decisions in terms of my activist life since the Rodney King fiasco back in the early '90s and that was caught on videotape.

Whitey To Whitey: White Privilege Needs To Change

December 6, 2014 Daniel Patrick Welch, www.bellaciao.org Educate! police brutality, Police the Police, Racial Justice

White Americans have essentially never internalized the Kenner Report. Assembled by Lyndon Johnson to address what was laughably referred to as the Negro Problem, the panel very quickly saw that this was a joke. There is no Negro Problem in the US, but rather a white people problem. FIFTY years ago (let that sink in), it opined, "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white—separate and unequal…Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American." The report explained that the race riots were rooted in segregation, inadequate housing, poor access to quality education, systematic police violence, and labor market exclusion. For these factors, the report concluded, "White racism is essentially responsible."

“I Can’t Breathe”: Blacks & Whites Actually Breathe Different Air

December 6, 2014 Max Ehrenfreund, www.washingtonpost.com Educate! Eric Garner, health, NYPD, Racial Justice

There's a profound truth to one of the mottoes of protesters in New York who are upset about a grand jury's decision not to indict an officer in the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island this summer. "We can't breathe," they have been chanting. And in New York, as in most American cities, the air itself has been tainted by decades of disparity in public policy. We'll never know if Garner would have survived the altercation if he hadn't had asthma. We also don't know what caused the asthma, which he developed as a child. What we do know is that asthma is much more common among blacks than whites, and that air pollution is much worse in communities of color nationwide.

What Ferguson Can Teach The Food Movement

December 5, 2014 Eric Holt-Giménez, www.foodfirst.org Educate! Ferguson, Food and Agriculture, police brutality, Racial Justice

As a person of mixed heritage I know that racism has tangled roots: white privilege, internalized oppression, fear, guilt, grief. I also know that while it is structural, it is also visceral, bound up in our psyche and our emotions, hard to get at and painful to work through. This is why many people in the food movement choose not to address it. They are afraid that addressing racism is just too hard, too complicated and too messy. They’re afraid that bringing up the issues of oppression and privilege will end up dividing the movement rather than strengthening it. They’re afraid. They are also mistaken. We can’t have a just judicial system, or an impartial law enforcement system, or build a sustainable food system on the foundation of an oppressive social and economic system.

FCC, Deliver The Internet We Deserve

November 29, 2014 Center For Media Justice, www.freepress.net Resist! Civil Rights, Human Rights, Internet, Net Neutrality, Racial Justice

We brought this delegation of civil rights leaders to Washington, D.C., to remind Commissioner Clyburn that the communities that will be most adversely affected by weak Net Neutrality rules are communities of color. Presente shared how vital an open Internet has been in pushing the immigration debate forward and empowering President Obama to issue last week’s executive order. For ColorOfChange, an organization that grew from one email in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the largest online community of African Americans, the Internet has allowed it to stake out a powerful political voice. The evidence of this power is unfolding in Ferguson as we speak. We delivered the message that strong Net Neutrality 1) ensures companies are not allowed to discriminate against voices online, 2) bans fast lanes and slow lanes, and 3) provides equal protections for the 60 percent of Latinos and 43 percent of African Americans who access the Internet primarily through their cellphones.

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