Monthly Archives: July 2014

Get Out of Jail, Inc. – The New Yorker

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On a cold November afternoon, Harriet Cleveland, a forty-nine-year-old mother of three, waved me over from the steps of her pink cottage in Montgomery, Alabama. She was off to her part-time job as a custodian at a local day-care center, looking practical but confectionary: pink lipstick, a pastel yellow-and-pink tunic, and dangly pink earrings. We’d need to start walking soon, she explained. The job, which paid seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour, was the only one she’d been able to find for some time, and was four and a half miles away. As we set off beneath loblolly pines, she recounted the events that had led me to her doorstep: her arrest and jailing for a string of traffic tickets that she was unable to pay. It was, in part, a story of poverty and constraint, but it was also a story of the lucrative and fast-growing “alternatives to incarceration” industry.

Source: www.newyorker.com

Some investors have begun to turn their attention to extra-carceral institutions, such as private halfway houses, electronic monitoring, “civil commitment” centers for sex offenders, and for-profit residential treatment facilities. Private-prison corporations themselves have begun to expand into the “alternatives” industry. The GEO Group now has an array of “community reëntry services” and treatment programs. In 2011, it acquired the country’s largest electronic-monitoring firm, BI Incorporated, for four hundred and fifteen million dollars. 

See on Scoop.it – OUR COMMON GROUND Informed Truth and Resistance

OUR COMMON GROUND Voice, Matt Taibbi: “Obama’s Big Sell Out”

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Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA…

Source: thoughtmerchant.wordpress.com

"How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed."

See on Scoop.it – OUR COMMON GROUND Informed Truth and Resistance

Twitter’s Diversity Numbers And The Mystery Of Black Twitter

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I find myself getting very confused in this ongoing series of arguments and revelations about how white and male Silicon Valley seems to be. Companies are being castigated, castigating themselves even, for things that aren’t really under their control. Perhaps it’s simply because I’m not American and therefore am observing […]

Source: www.forbes.com

"But then I see the arguments being made about “Black Twitter TWTR -1.42%” and find myself not just confused but perplexed. For the evidence being offered is the very refutation of the contention being made. This isn’t a cultural matter, this is a logical error.

The latest installment of this is Twitter releasing their workforce diversitynumbers: . . . "

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Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race – Abstract – UNTHINKING RACIAL REALISM: A FUTURE FOR REPARATIONS?1

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Cambridge Journals Online –

“Considered costly, divisive, and backward-looking, reparations for slavery and Jim Crow appear to have no place in the politics of the This essay proposes that the dismissal of reparations concedes too much. First, I contend that the conjunction of postracial discourse, on the one hand, and deepening racial inequalities, on the other, demands a counter-language, one that ties the analysis of the present to the historical conditions out of which it was produced. I explore reparations as a political language that (1) situates political claims within the historical framework of slavery, reconstruction, and segregation; (2) links past to present to future in its demand for concrete forms of redress; and (3) has played an important role in African American political life and in contemporary democracies in transition. Second, in contrast to much of the reparations scholarship, I focus on the demands of democracy rather than justice. Doing so both helps to evade some of the technical questions that have prevented full consideration of the political work of reparations and provides a vehicle for redefining both governmental and civic responsibility in the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow.

Source: journals.cambridge.org

Race in a “Postracial” EpochUNTHINKING RACIAL REALISM: A FUTURE FOR REPARATIONS? 1Lawrie Balfour 

 

Department of Politics, University of Virginia

 

Abstract

 

Considered costly, divisive, and backward-looking, reparations for slavery and Jim Crow appear to have no place in the politics of the “postracial epoch.” This essay proposes that the dismissal of reparations concedes too much. First, I contend that the conjunction of postracial discourse, on the one hand, and deepening racial inequalities, on the other, demands a counter-language, one that ties the analysis of the present to the historical conditions out of which it was produced. I explore reparations as a political language that (1) situates political claims within the historical framework of slavery, reconstruction, and segregation; (2) links past to present to future in its demand for concrete forms of redress; and (3) has played an important role in African American political life and in contemporary democracies in transition. Second, in contrast to much of the reparations scholarship, I focus on the demands of democracy rather than justice. Doing so both helps to evade some of the technical questions that have prevented full consideration of the political work of reparations and provides a vehicle for redefining both governmental and civic responsibility in the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow.

See on Scoop.it – OUR COMMON GROUND Informed Truth and Resistance

White power and Black voices: Why we can’t rely on “good white people” | LBS Baltimore

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“LBS has developed one of the only programs in existence that can take youth from the so called “urban” context and produce nationally competitive scholars and advocates. “

Source: lbsbaltimore.com

"Just as we have advocated against mass incarceration in our fight against the Youth Jail and advocated against police brutality in our fight to pass Christopher’s Law, we will advocate against the parasitic nature in which the non-profit industrial complex in Baltimore uses Black suffering to create white institutional power.  The only people who are qualified to liberate us is us.  We do not want your charity, we want justice.  Unless you are willing to be beholden to Black power you are a part of the problem no matter how good your intentions are."

See on Scoop.it – OUR COMMON GROUND Informed Truth and Resistance

The ALFO Show l Serving hot grits with his politics l Friday, 10 pm ET

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From chokehold murder in NY to broken baby bodies on the Gaza to protests against children, Any American moral fabric left has been torn away. Is the plan to make it so unbearable that we all just go home?

ALFO opens up all the lines LIVE to hear from you.
Friday, July 25, 2014     10 pm EDT

Call IN or Listen on a Smartdevice:  914-338-1610

The ALFO Show

ADVANCED URBAN PROGRESSIVE ALTERNATIVE Poliitical TALK RADIO

Common- Sense, Informed Advanced Politics

 The Nexus of Politics, Truth and Common Sense?

LIVE and Call-in 

Friday, July 25, 2014     10 pm EDT

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A National Shame

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by OUR COMMON GROUND Voices Ruby Sales and Susan SmithThis article appeared in the August 2014 issue of Sojourners magazine.

Police killing of black people is not a black problem. It is an American problem.

Source: sojo.net

"AFRICAN AMERICANS around the country are finding it is dangerous to call 911. Jack Lamar Roberson’s family in Waycross, Ga., discovered this the hard way when they placed an urgent call to 911 in October 2013 because his fiancée thought that he had taken an overdose of diabetes medicine.Instead of sending EMTs, the dispatcher sent the police. Within 20 seconds of being in the house, police shot Roberson nine times, with bullets striking his back, arms, chest, and head as he held his arms up in the air. Although he was a veteran, he did not die from bullet wounds at the hands of strangers in a foreign land. Instead, white police gunned him down in his home.Killings like this—which could be called anti-black hate crimes by po…"

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“Dispatch from Amerikka” l Dr. Tommy J. Curry l LIVE l Detroit , the Border and the Gaza

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“Dispatch from Amerikka” l  Dr. Tommy J. Curry l  LIVE  l Detroit , the Border and the Gaza 

"Dispatch from Amerikka" l  Dr. Tommy J. Curry l  LIVE  l Detroit , the Border and the Gaza 

ABOUT Dr. Tommy J. Curry

Professor of Philosophy, Texas A&M University

Tommy J. Curry’s work spans across the various fields of philosophy, jurisprudence, Africana Studies, and Gender Studies. Though trained in American and Continental philosophical traditions, Curry’s primary research interests are in Critical Race Theory and Africana Philosophy. In Critical Race Theory, Curry looks at the work of Derrick Bell and his theory of racial realism as an antidote to the proliferating discourses of racial idealism that continue to uncritically embrace liberalism through the appropriation of European thinkers as the basis of racial reconciliation in the United States. In Africana philosophy, Curry’s work turns an eye towards the conceptual genealogy (intellectual history) of African American thought from 1800 to the present, with particular attention towards the scholars of the American Negro Academy and the Negro Society for Historical Research.

In Biomedical ethics, Curry is primarily interested government regulation, the ethical limits of government intervention in the practice of medicine, and democratic potentialities that arise from collaborative doctor-patient diagnoses and regenerative medicine like stem cells. Currently his research focuses on the linking the conceptualization of ethics found in the Belmont Report to Civil Rights and social justice paradigms.

The “‘Model Black Immigrant’ vs. Black American” Stereotype

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Despite the fact that non-American born Black people (who may not go by “Black” until they actually live in the States, if at all; complex varying cultural, colonial and imperialistic histories impact…

Source: www.gradientlair.com

"When people think that I am Jamaican, they treat me with a different respect at times. They make jokes about “stupid” Black Americans while consuming literally everything that Black Americans create. They make insults about Black American people or erase the impact of that peculiar institution on Black American life today. And though I experienced some bullying from Black American children growing up (which was admittedly very rough and painful) because they didn’t like how my parents spoke or the food I ate at times, I also had long-term friendships with Black American girls. In fact, none of my closest friends now in adulthood are Jamaican women (though of course I love them too). They’re Black American women. We still share so much because we are all Black women though, wiling to learn and celebrate our differences and navigate the spaces of our multiple similarities.

"At the same time, when people think that I am American, other Black immigrants (and most certainly Whites) have insulted me. Called me “stupid” or “lazy.” Some have even suggested that Black Americans do not work hard. They completely ignore the intricacies and unique experiences of Black Americans here, especially the impact of the legacy of slavery on Black women here and how some colleges will gladly open their arms to foreign-born Black students while allowing their White students to publish “research” on the inferiority of Black Americans. Worse, some really think to be Black in America is to be Mitt Romney. In a past essay, Black In The 99%, I laid out why these myths of the “great” socioeconomic experience of Black people in America are myths."