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Racism

Racialized Militarism, Peacebuilding And Defunding The Military

June 25, 2020 By Brent Patterson, Rabble.ca. , , ,
As the Canadian government prepares to spend $1 billion on Raytheon missiles and related equipment, award a $19 billion contract for new fighter jets in 2022, and increase spending to $32.7 billion a year on the military by 2026, it is both timely and necessary to have a conversation about peacebuilding and the structures of violence. In this regard, the Canadian Peace Initiative has a campaign to establish a federal Department of Peace. And Eriel Tchekwie Deranger has urged NGOs advocating for a Green New Deal to: "center the destructive intertwined roles of capitalism, consumerism, militarism and colonialism as foundations to the current crisis."

Arrest Of Activist Leads To Protests; At Least Four Vehicles Strike Protesters

June 24, 2020 By Robert Chappell, Madison365.   , , ,
Hundreds of people are protesting in downtown Madison after the arrest of activist Yeshua Musa. Videos of the arrest posted to social media show as many as five police officers wrestling Musa, also known as Devonere Johnson, to the ground and carrying him to the back seat of a police cruiser, while he asks what he’s being arrested for. After officers get him into the car, he can be seen jumping out of the opposite car door before being tackled again and taken into custody. In one of the videos, witnesses can be heard asking why Musa is being arrested and saying he had only been speaking in a megaphone, exercising his first amendment rights.

NYPD Enforcement Of Low-Level Offenses Accounts For Huge Department Expenditures, Racial Disparities

June 24, 2020 Drug Policy Alliance. , , ,
New York City criminalizes drugs and low-level broken windows offenses at a startling rate, with enforcement in these areas accounting for a vast proportion of the NYPD’s policing activities and the city’s budget, according to a new brief from Drug Policy Alliance. DPA released the brief in support of the Communities United for Police Reform coalition call for Mayor de Blasio and the NYC Council to cut the FY21 NYPD expense budget by $1 billion and redirect savings to core needs in Black, Latinx and other NYC communities of color that have long been the target of the drug war and racist policing.  The brief, “NYC’s Costly Drug Enforcement & Broken Windows Policing,” finds that in 2019, NYC spent an estimated $96 million enforcing drug arrests and violations, and an estimated $456 million enforcing low-level broken windows offenses, which accounted for 28.5% of all NYPD arrests and violations issued for the year. 

Class And Racial Inequalities In Police Killings

June 24, 2020 By Justin Feldman, People's Policy Project. , , ,
“Police Killings in the US: Inequalities by Race/Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Position" examines the databases of police killings contain important demographic information like race, gender, and age. But they do not contain socioeconomic information like education and income. This analysis shows that socioeconomic position plays a big role in police killings. The highest-poverty areas have a police killing rate of 6.4 per million while the lowest-poverty areas have a police killing rate of 1.8 per million, a 3.5-fold difference. A similar class skew exists within each racial group as well. Whites in the poorest areas have a police killing rate of 7.9 per million, compared to 2 per million for whites in the least-poor areas. Blacks in the poorest areas have a police killing rate of 12.3 per million, compared to 6.7 per million for blacks in the least-poor areas.

Report: White Supremacy Is A Pre-Existing Condition

June 24, 2020 By Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Chuck Collins, and Omar Ocampo, Institute for Policy Studies. , , ,
For months now, a deadly pandemic and deep recession have pummeled the U.S. economy. Yet even as tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs, U.S. billionaires saw their collective wealth increase by leaps and bounds.  At the same time, the Movement for Black Lives has drawn attention not just to police brutality against Black Americans, but to systemic racism more broadly. A huge cause and consequence of that systemic injustice is the underlying racial wealth divide — the financial legacy of centuries of white supremacy. Even before the pandemic, we found that median white families had literally dozens of times the net worth of median Black and Latino families. The pandemic is supercharging that inequality, with the skyrocketing wealth of the largely white billionaire class putting most Americans, especially people of color, further and further behind.

Over One Million People View Poor People’s Assembly And Moral March On Washington

June 23, 2020 Sarah Anderson, Inequality.org. , , ,
President Trump drew a smaller crowd than he expected for his rally this past Saturday, but that wasn’t the case for the Poor People’s Campaign. Well more than a million people viewed the campaign’s Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington via Facebook that same day. Many more viewed MSNBC and C-SPAN simulcasts and two repeat broadcasts over the weekend. According to organizers, the three and a half hour event was “the largest digital and social media gathering of poor and low-wealth people, moral and religious leaders, advocates, and people of conscience in this nation’s history.” The virtual rally lifted up people who are living the interconnected injustices that have been the campaign’s focus for the past two years: systemic racism, poverty and inequality, ecological devastation, and militarism and the war economy. Many spoke of how the Covid-19 pandemic has only deepened existing inequalities.

DC Protesters Try To Pull Down Andrew Jackson Statue Near White House

June 23, 2020 Popular Resistance. , , , ,
Protesters tried to pull down a statue of President Andrew Jackson near the White House Monday night before being dispersed by police. Police used pepper spray to move protesters out of Lafayette Square, where the Jackson statue is located. Videos posted on social media showed that the protesters had climbed on the statue and tied ropes around it, then tried to pull it off its pedestal. The statue shows Jackson in a military uniform, riding a horse that is rearing on its hind legs. The 19th-century president’s ruthless treatment of Native Americans has made his statue a target of demonstrators protesting the United States’ legacy of racial injustice.

The War Zone Is America

June 22, 2020 By Andrea Mazzarino, Tom Dispatch. , , ,
As a military spouse and therapist, it’s clear to me that, these days, whether people of color or not, active-duty servicemen and women, as well as veterans, generally face a host of difficulties in this country. They range from problems accessing much needed responsive healthcare services to social isolation from a civilian population that understands little about their experiences, to chronic illnesses and injuries they suffer, to repeated deployments in America’s forever wars. Now, add to all that the current showdown between highly militarized police and Black Lives Matter protesters, as well as the president’s deployment of the National Guard and his threats to deploy federal troops to quell protests in Washington, D.C. (and elsewhere). As one Washington therapist who works with military service members and their families told me, many veterans find that memories of combat are triggered by the sight of police in military-style equipment facing down crowds of civilians and, in response, they socially isolate themselves more.

Armed Protesters Peacefully March On Oklahoma Governor’s Mansion

June 22, 2020 By Dave Cathey, Oklahoman. , , ,
Between 150 and 200 protesters peacefully marched from the Ralph Ellison Library to the Governor's Mansion on Saturday to deliver a double-barreled message. “We aren’t going to allow people to come into our communities and brutalize us,” event organizer Omar Chatman said before the event. “If you come into our community, know we are armed.” The 1000 Brothers and Sisters in Arms protest might not have approached its eponymous numbers, but it bore enough artillery to pop the National Rifle Association's buttons. Community organizer Michael Washington was among the speakers who said the march was a response to the recent killings of Black men by police as well as local cases they want reopened.

Police Violence And Racism Have Always Been Tools Of Capitalism

June 21, 2020 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, Popular Resistance. , , , ,
The system-wide challenges the United States faces with policing are entrenched and deeply rooted. When the historical and current practices of police are examined, it is evident police have been designed to uphold the status quo including racial injustice and class inequality. Whenever political movements develop to respond to racial and class unfairness, the police have undermined their politically-protected constitutional rights. Police have used infiltration, surveillance, and violence against political movements seeking to end injustices throughout the history of the nation. It is the deeply embedded nature of these injustices and the structural problems in policing that are leading more people to conclude police must be completely transformed, if not abolished.

How Our Bloated Military Strengthens The Police State

June 19, 2020 Shireen Adeimi and Sarah Lazare, In These Times. , , ,
Nationwide uprisings over the police killing of George Floyd have forced a long overdue discussion about the injustices of U.S. policing—an institution that has consistently harassed and terrorized and, in the words of organizer, writer and educator Mariame Kaba, remains a consistent “force of violence against Black people.” As demands to abolish the police are thrust into mainstream discourse, promising—if uncertain and mixed—political changes are being debated and implemented every day. We are seeing a rigorous interrogation of the systems that uphold and compound the brutality of policing: prisons, austerity, and racial housing segregation. The U.S. military, by far the most well-funded in the world, with roughly 800 bases scattered across the globe, must factor heavily into this conversation.

Solidarity Means Dismantling The System Everywhere

June 19, 2020 Progressive International. , , ,
A new solidarity movement is rising. From Los Angeles to Sao Paulo, Minneapolis to London, “Black Lives Matter” is a cry and a demand heard around the world. The message of this movement is powerfully simple: stop killing black people — in their homes, on the streets, and traveling across the sea to safer shores. Yet in its simplicity, it contains the seed of a radical transformation in our planetary system, raging against a machine of racist dispossession to make room for collective and communal liberation everywhere. The last decade has witnessed a sharp turn in two terrifying directions: turning in and cracking down. A new cohort of authoritarians has shunned international cooperation in a retreat to the nation-state and its ancient myths of blood and soil.

The Black New Yorker Who Led The Charge Against Police Violence In The 1830s

June 19, 2020 By Jonathan Daniel Wells, TIME. , , ,
At the apex of the kidnapping club were two members of the New York police force, Tobias Boudinot and Daniel D. Nash. Both had grown up in or near Manhattan and they shared a deep disdain for Black people. Like all members of the police force, Boudinot and Nash were poorly paid, inadequately trained, and largely uneducated. Boudinot in particular was constantly in debt, sued by creditors and desperate for the extra money he could make by capturing runaway enslaved people who had managed, against tremendous odds, to escape southern bondage and forge new lives in New York. The nation’s founding document, the Constitution, required free states to return runaways to southern masters, and Boudinot and Nash were all too willing to comply. The police with the explicit approval of Wall Street financiers and merchants dependent on slave-grown cotton, terrorized the 15,000 or so Black residents who called New York City home in the decades before the Civil War. Seizing Black men, women and children off the streets and arresting them as fugitive slaves who needed to be returned to southern masters.

At Least 2,000 More Black Americans Were Lynched Than Previously Reported

June 19, 2020 Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, Huff Post. , , ,
White mobs and individuals lynched at least 2,000 more Black Americans than previously documented, according to a new report from the Equal Justice Initiative. The report, released Tuesday, documents confirmed lynchings during the Reconstruction era, from 1865 to 1876, after the end of the Civil War and Black Americans’ emancipation from slavery. The group’s previous report on the subject, from 2015, detailed 4,500 racial terror lynchings from 1877 to 1950 — adding up to nearly 6,500 confirmed lynchings of Black people in the U.S. from 1865 to 1950. EJI notes that thousands more lynchings “may never be documented,” defining lynchings as when Black people were “attacked, sexually assaulted and terrorized by white mobs and individuals” who were largely “shielded from arrest and prosecution.”

Lost Manuscript Of Eyewitness Account Of Tulsa Race Massacre

June 19, 2020 Allison Keyes, Smithsonian Magazine. , , ,
With President Trump holding a campaign rally in Tulsa, OK on June 20, 2020, we thought it would be good to republish this article on the Tulsa Massacre, often referred to as the Tulsa Race Riot. It was a white rampage in the successful black community of Rosewood, also known as Black Wall Street. No one knows how many people were killed in the massacre but “the vast majority of Tulsa's African American population had been made homeless by the event.” The white race riot began around a false charge of a white woman being raped by a back man, and conflicts between white and black people at the courthouse, with whites seeking to lynch the man.  Greenwood had been considered one of the most affluent African American communities in the United States for the early part of the 20th century,
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