Racial Justice

Laughing While Black Brings Police To Tour Train

August 26, 2015 Damon Young, www.verysmartbrothas.com Educate! Black Women, Literature, Racial Justice

By Damon Young in Very Smart Brothas - Every once in a while, you’ll see a story that’s so uniquely and unambiguously Black — with so many different aspects of Blackness involved in it — that it’s almost like someone had a Blackness Bingo card and was trying to fill every slot. The story of the11 Black women thrown off of a train — a train where the train’s only purpose is to transport tipsy people to somewhere where they can get more tipsy — for having too good of a time on that train qualifies. Seriously, if this story got any Blacker it would have to involve a Denmark Vesey hologram hurling empty Hennessy bottles at Donald Trump. Let’s just go down the list of all the things involved with this that can be categorized as some Black-ass shit.

Hurricane Katrina: If Black Lives Matter, So Must Climate Justice

August 26, 2015 Elizabeth C. Yeampierre, www.theguardian.com Resist! #BlackLivesMatter, Black Lives Matter (BLM), Climate Justice, Hurrican Katrina, Racial Justice

By Elizabeth C. Yeampierre in The Guardian - Those of us from low-income communities of color are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. US cities and towns that are predominantly made up of people of color are also home to a disproportionate share of the environmental burdens that are fueling the climate crisis and shortening our lives. One has only to recall the gut-wrenching images of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath to confirm this. At a time when police abuse is more visible than ever thanks to technology, and our communities continue to get hit time and time again by climate catastrophe, we can’t afford to choose between a Black Lives Matter protest and a climate justice forum, because our survival depends on both of them.

Fed Activists To Highlight Racial Justice At Jackson Hole Conference

August 26, 2015 Daniel Marans, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! Economic Justice, Racial Justice

By Daniel Marans in The Huffington Post - The Fed Up campaign, a coalition of groups led by the nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy, will converge on Jackson Hole, Wyoming, later this week to urge the Federal Reserve to be more responsive to the needs of American workers. In doing so, it will focus on both “economic and racial inequality,” campaign director Ady Barkan told reporters on a Monday press call previewing the campaign’s plans. The gathering is aimed at influencing Fed officials attending the Kansas City Fed’s annual Jackson Hole symposium. A major theme of Fed Up's parallel conference on Thursday and Friday will be “Whose Recovery,” based on the premise that the economic recovery has yet to reach many workers, particularly those of color. They note that the official African-American unemployment rate -- 9.1 percent -- is much higher than the 5.3 percent rate for the overall population.

Cornel West: The Fire Of A New Generation

August 21, 2015 George Yancy and Cornel West, www.opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com Educate! #BlackLivesMatter, Black Lives Matter (BLM), culture, Ferguson, police brutality, Racial Justice

By George Yancy and Cornel West in NYTimes - The black prophetic fire among the younger generation in Ferguson was intense and wonderful. Ferguson is ground zero for the struggle against police brutality and police murder. I just wanted to be a small part of that collective fight back that puts one’s body on the line. It was beautiful because part of the crowd was chanting, “This is what democracy looks like,” which echoes W.E.B. DuBois and the older generation’s critique of capitalist civilization and imperialist power. And you also had people chanting, “We gon’ be alright,” which is from rap artist Kendrick Lamar, who is concerned with the black body, decrepit schools, indecent housing. This chant is in many ways emerging as a kind of anthem of the movement for the younger generation. So, we had both the old school and the new school and I try to be a kind of link between these two schools. There was a polyphonic, antiphonal, call and response, all the way down and all the way live.

1,000 Black Activists, Artists, & Scholars Demand Justice For Palestine

August 21, 2015 Various, www.ebony.com Resist! Black Power, Palestine, Racial Justice

By Various in Ebony - Over 1,000 Black activists, artists, scholars, students, and organizations have launched a statement expressing their solidarity and commitment to ensuring justice for Palestinians. Signatories to the statement span a wide cross-section of Black activists and scholars, including Angela Davis, Boots Riley, Cornel West, dream hampton, Emory Douglas, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Pam Africa, Patrisse Cullors, Phil Hutchings, Ramona Africa, Robin DG Kelley, Rosa Clemente, Talib Kweli, and Tef Poe. 38 organizations signed on, including The Dream Defenders, Hands Up United, Institute of the Black World 21st Century, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and Organization for Black Struggle. The statement is printed in full below...

Behind The Shiny Veneer Of Seattle’s White Liberalism

August 20, 2015 Rachael DeCruz and Gerald Hankerson, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! #BlackLivesMatter, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter (BLM), Progressive, Racial Justice

By Rachael DeCruz and Gerald Hankerson in The Huffington Post - When two young black women from #BlackLivesMatter disrupted a rally that Bernie Sanders was speaking at, we saw a crowd of progressive, mainly white liberals spiral into anger, frustration, and even hate. If the conversation stays focused on debating the tactics used by the activists, we're missing the point. Were the actions of these women uncomfortable to watch? Yes. Did they upend a carefully planned event that progressive organizers had spent months working on? Yes. Did they use the most effective tactics, in the most effective way? That question detracts from the bigger, and far more important question of what it means to be a white ally in the fight to dismantle systemic racism. If two people's actions cause someone to revoke their support of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, it begs the question of whether their support was ever there to begin with.

The Long Distance Revolutionary – Larry Hamm

August 19, 2015 Interview with Lawrence Hamm Chris Hedges, www.therealnews.com Strategize! History, police brutality, Racial Justice

Interview with Lawrence Hamm by Chris Hedges in The Real News - Police brutality is deeply rooted in contemporary urban communities, especially African-American communities, but not exclusively African-American communities. And for African Americans, of course, they are part of an overall system--this is my opinion--of racial control that has existed essentially since Africans came to the United States. Laws and instruments of state power were established to essentially hold slaves in check and put down slave rebellions. We can go all the way back to the colonial period, almost from the time that Africans first appear in large numbers in the colonies, and see the establishment of slave patrols and night watches and all kinds of precursors to what we would call contemporary modern day policing. And their job was to use force, and they used it in the most brutal, most terrifying ways, the force that was used.

Flood The System Organizing Booklet – Movement Momentum

August 18, 2015 Flood The System, www.floodthesystem.net Organize! Capitalism, Collective Liberation, Education, Patriarchy, Racial Justice, Resistance

By Flood The System - We envision Flood the System as a step towards building the DNA of a robust movement that has the collective power to challenge global capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and oppression. This booklet is designed to give you a sense of why we need to escalate, what Flood the System might look like, and what structures we will all use to organize. The authors drew inspiration for this booklet from the 1986 Pledge of Resistance Handbook, the 1999 WTO Direct Action Packet and the 2014 Ferguson Action Council Booklet. This booklet was edited by Arielle Klagsbrun and Nick Stocks.

Against Police Violence, From The Panthers To #BlackLivesMatter

August 18, 2015 Juan Thompson, www.firstlook.org Resist! #BlackLivesMatter, Black Lives Matter (BLM), Black Panthers, police brutality, Racial Justice

By Juan Thompson in The Intercept - I turned away more than once while watching Stanley Nelson’s documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. I averted my eyes from the screen when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s nefarious mug first appeared. I turned away once more when the charismatic and admirable Fred Hampton was first shown, knowing that eventually he would be murdered by Chicago police and federal agents. But, of course, I could never turn away for long, because Nelson’s documentary is something all Americans should watch to better understand the country’s current racial climate, including the formation of the #BlackLivesMatter campaign. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter first entered public consciousness after George Zimmerman’s acquittal, in July 2013, on charges of second-degree murder in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

Black Labor Organizers Urge AFL-CIO To Reexamine Ties To Police

August 15, 2015 Sarah Jaffee, www.truth-out.org Resist! Labor Unions, Police, Racial Justice

By Sarah Jaffee in Truth Out - The rise of the Movement for Black Lives got Brandon Buchanan and some of his fellow graduate student employees in the University of California system thinking. Many of them had taken part in the protests rippling across the country, and the movement had also inspired them to think about what they could do within their own union, United Auto Workers Local 2865, to deal with questions of racism and anti-Blackness close to home. "To get our voices heard we realized that we needed to come together to form a committee that specifically addressed the needs of Black workers in the union," Buchanan, a graduate student in sociology at UC Davis, told Truthout.

Watts: Remember What They Built, Not What They Burned

August 15, 2015 Robin D. G. Kelley, www.latimes.com Educate! History, LAPD, police brutality, Racial Justice

By Robin D. G. Kelley in LA Times - As we mark 50 years since the Watts riots, expect endless newsreel footage of buildings aflame and National Guard units occupying Central Avenue, experts rattling off gruesome statistics, eyewitness accounts of that stifling hot night on Aug. 11, 1965, when Marquette Frye's drunk driving arrest became the flashpoint for one of the worst incidents of civil unrest in U.S. history. But a focus on violence and looting reduces the people of Watts to “rioters” rather than residents confronting social and economic catastrophe. What they burned is less important than what they built, both before and after the insurrection. By 1965, Watts faced double-digit unemployment, rampant poverty and a shortage of livable housing. Restrictive covenants, real estate agents, lending institutions and white civic associations conspired to maintain racial segregation.

An Open Letter To Civil Rights Groups In The U.S.

August 14, 2015 Jeffrey Sterling, www.stltoday.com Resist! #BlackLivesMatter, Black Lives Matter (BLM), CIA, discrimination, Racial Justice

By Jeffrey Sterling in St. Louis Post Dispatch - Dear NAACP, National Action Network, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Congressional Black Caucus and others: Where were you? Where were you when I was faced with blatant discrimination at my job, when my employer told me I was “too big and too black” to do the job? Where were you when I, one of the first black officers to do so, filed a discrimination suit against the Central Intelligence Agency? Where were you when the justice system of the United States dismissed my discrimination suit because the U.S. government maintained that trying my suit would endanger national security? Where were you during the many years I reached out to you, begging, pleading for help from you while the United States government pursued and tormented me for years, bent on retaliation and persecution?

An Open Letter To Bernie Sanders Supporters

August 14, 2015 C. Robert Gibson, www.occupy.com Resist! #BlackLivesMatter, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter (BLM), police brutality, Racial Justice

By C. Robert Gibson in Occupy - Dear Bernie Sanders supporters, Shut up and listen for once. When black women interrupt your candidate, don't call them "thugs." And when protesters hijack your hero's microphone to have their story heard, it doesn't mean they're paid provocateurs in some elaborate plot involving George Soros and Hillary Clinton. You know who else propagates wild conspiracy theories about George Soros funding left-wing protesters? Glenn Beck and Allen West. So congratulations, white progressives – your fanaticism for Bernie has turned you into the thing you hate. Bernie Sanders says the only thing that will guarantee his election is a "political revolution." But when that revolution tried to speak, you suppressed it. Unlike Occupy Wall Street, this movement wasn't started by or largely made up of white progressives.

Police Militarization A Year After Ferguson

August 12, 2015 Kanya Bennett, www.aclu.org Educate! police brutality, Racial Justice, State Terror, Wars and Militarism

By Kanya Bennett in ACLU - Last August, Ferguson and Fallujah had a lot in common. Those protesting the death of Michael Brown were met with “armored vehicles, noise-based crowd-control devices, shotguns, M4 rifles like those used by forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, rubber-coated pellets and tear gas.” The scene looked more like a foreign warzone than a Midwestern American town, and no one could tell why local police were taking up arms against those they are sworn to protect and serve. The world was shocked by this highly and dangerously militarized response by local law enforcement. Foreign leaders equated Ferguson to combat zones in Iraq and Gaza. Veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars expressed horror at the reality that they had been less heavily armed while on active duty abroad. President Obama reacted by saying “[t]here is a big difference between our military and our local law enforcement, and we don't want those lines blurred.”

Texas Cops Sexually Assault 21-Year-Old Charnesia Corley

August 12, 2015 Mark Frauenfelder, www.boingboing.net Resist! Civil Rights, Law, police brutality, Racial Justice, Sexual Abuse, Texas

By Mark Frauenfelder in Boing Boing - A Houston deputy who pulled over Charnesia Corley, a 21-year-old black woman on her way to the store to pick up medicine for her sick mother, thought he smelled weed in Corley's car. He searched the car and couldn't find any. He called for a female officer to come to the gas station where Corley was being held so she could have her vagina searched. They arrested Corley because she objected to having her vagina examined in a gas station parking lot. From KRTK: "She tells me to pull my pants down. I said, 'Ma'am, I don't have any underwear on.' She says, 'Well, that doesn't matter. Pull your pants down,'" Corley said. She admits hesitating. Deputies say she resisted. "I bend over and she proceeds to try to force her hand inside of me. I tell her, 'Ma'am, No. You cannot do this,'" Corley told us candidly.

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