Monthly Archives: September 2016

Black Girls, Domestic Violence, and the Limits of Self-Defense | Black Agenda Report

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Black Girls, Domestic Violence, and the Limits of Self-Defense

Submitted by Lindsey E. Jones on Tue, 09/20/2016 – 17:42

by Lindsey E. Jones

Recent scholarship in the history of black women and the carceral state illustrates the extent to which systems of criminal justice and law enforcement have both historically failed to protect black female victims of domestic violence and criminalized black women who rise up in their own defense.

Black Girls, Domestic Violence, and the Limits of Self-Defense

by Lindsey E. Jones

This article previously appeared in the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society.

“Legal systems in this country explicitly and implicitly render black women defenseless against intra- and interracial violence.”

The case of Bresha Meadows, an African American teenage girl in Ohio, is a sad commentary on the failure of the state to protect victims of domestic violence. After a lifetime of watching him physically and psychologically abuse her mother—and of being subjected to threats and verbal abuse, along with her siblings—Bresha allegedly shot her father to death while he slept on July 28, 2016. While her mother’s family and her attorney consider her actions to have been in self-defense, the county prosecutor has charged Bresha with aggravated murder. It remains to be seen whether she will be tried as a juvenile or as an adult. At stake is the possibility that Bresha, who marked her fifteenth birthday in juvenile hall just weeks after her arrest, could spend the rest of her life in prison if convicted as an adult.

While the case is making its way through the courts and the families of Brandi Meadows (Bresha’s mother) and Jonathan Meadows (Bresha’s deceased father) share conflicting stories with news media about the latter’s personality and propensity toward violence, as well as their conflicting opinions about premeditation versus self-defense, it is important to note that this case is neither isolated nor entirely new. Recent scholarship in the history of black women and the carceral state illustrates the extent to which systems of criminal justice and law enforcement have both historically failed to protect black female victims of domestic violence and criminalized black women who rise up in their own defense.

“Survivors of intimate partner violence dramatically overrepresented among incarcerated black women.”

Historian Kali Gross, in providing historical context to the case of Marissa Alexander, argues that the state’s willingness to condemn this woman for defending herself against an abusive husband points back through centuries of American history to “the legacies of an exclusionary politics of protection whereby black women were not entitled to the law’s protection, though they could not escape its punishment.” Gross traces the ways in which “racialized, gendered notions of protection” have, from the seventeenth century on, shaped legal systems in this country that explicitly and implicitly render black women defenseless against intra- and interracial violence. She argues that this exclusionary politics of protection fuels the current mass incarceration crisis, with survivors of intimate partner violence dramatically overrepresented among incarcerated black women.1

Bresha Meadows’s case exemplifies Gross’s concept of the exclusionary politics of protection. This past May, Bresha ran away from home to the home of an aunt, Martina Latessa. Latessa, a police officer working in a domestic violence unit in Cleveland, was forced to return Bresha to her father, who had reported the girl as having been kidnapped by her aunt. Latessa reported her brother-in-law to Family Services, which resulted in an agent interviewing Brandi Meadows about the allegations of abuse—as Jonathan Meadows sat beside her. Neither law enforcement nor the state bureaucracy could protect Brandi Meadows and her children from this abuse, which she and her family assert intensified after this incident. As a result of the state’s failure to end the cycle of trauma in her family, Bresha Meadows took matters into her own hands—and was charged with aggravated murder, for which she could potentially spend the rest of her life in prison.

Gross’s essay compellingly reveals the intersections of race, gender, and class in black women’s hyper-vulnerability to domestic violence; state failure to prevent or put a stop to said violence; and the too-common outcome of black women being incarcerated for offenses resulting from attempting to defend themselves against domestic violence. However, as the case of Bresha Meadows illustrates, there is another vector of identity that often doesn’t appear in our historical analyses of black females and the carceral state: that is, age.2

“For black women in the Jim Crow South—as in antebellum times—domestic violence was constitutive of domestic labor.”

Where race, gender, and class have worked together to create the conditions discussed above, the erasure of age difference has historically created disadvantages for black girl victims of domestic violence. One prominent example recently provided by historian LaShawn Harris is that of Virginia Christian. Often referred to as the first woman to be executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia, Christian was in reality a seventeen-year-old girl when she was killed by electric chair in 1912—a fact that her advocates hoped would persuade the state to show her mercy.3

Virginia Christian belonged to a working-class black family in Hampton, Virginia, and needed to work in order to contribute to her household, including her disabled mother. From the age of thirteen, she served as a laundress for a middle-class white family named Belote in Hampton. During a dispute about missing jewelry that turned physical, Virginia killed the matriarch of the family—a crime she confessed to committing in self-defense. Harris argues that “Christian’s act of self-defense delineated working-class African American women’s impetuous ways of protecting their bodies and their often last attempts to seek and secure long-awaited personal justice—especially when legal protection seemed beyond their reach.” While there is no archival evidence that Ida Belote had laid hands upon Virginia Christian prior to this altercation, there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate that for black women in the Jim Crow South—as in antebellum times—domestic violence was constitutive of domestic labor, the racially prescribed set of occupations for black women and girls.4

Christian’s response was most immediately triggered by Belote’s accusations of theft and subsequent physical assault on March 18, 1912, but it is conceivable that she was also responding to other physical and psychological traumas accumulated over three years of working in the Belote household.

The analogy from Virginia Christian in 1912 to Bresha Meadows in 2016 is imperfect, but these cases both illustrate the extent to which the state has failed to consider age in evaluating black girls’ actions in self-defense from domestic violence. Sadly, over a century later, Bresha’s advocates find themselves making very similar demands of a system that hasn’t changed enough since Virginia’s trial, and employing very similar tactics in their pursuit of mercy for this abused adolescent girl.

“In the minds of whites, the accused, regardless of her age, was a deviant and vulgar black murderess that had to be punished for her crime.”

In the case of Virginia Christian, the Commonwealth of Virginia ignored evidence that Christian committed the crime at sixteen years of age in order to prevent her minority status from impeding its plan to execute her. Harris argues that, “in the minds of whites, the accused, regardless of her age, was a deviant and vulgar black murderess that had to be punished for her crime; essentially, Christians’ race trumped her gender and age. By denying Christian of her adolescent status, the State of Virginia sought to punish her to the full extent of the law.”5

Black and white Americans wrote letters and circulated petitions pleading with the Commonwealth to consider Christian’s youth as a factor in her crime and her punishment and to commute her sentence from execution to life in prison. In the end, neither Christian’s appeal to self-defense, nor her advocates’ appeal to adolescence, could spare her from the lethal retribution of the state.

In a throwback to the campaign to spare Virginia Christian’s life in 1912, advocates of Bresha Meadows are writing letters and circulating petitions in the hope that local prosecutors take into account her age and her status as a survivor of domestic violence as they proceed with charges against her. Because of the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons that it is unconstitutional to execute a person for a crime committed under eighteen years of age, the death penalty is not on the table for Bresha. However, because prosecutors could decide to try her in adult court, it is a real possibility that she could be sentenced to life in prison.

A century after Virginia Christian’s advocates passionately and strategically petitioned the Commonwealth of Virginia for life imprisonment, Bresha’s advocates argue that no adolescent should spend life in prison—especially not a girl pushed toward drastic action by a lifetime of trauma and abuse. There is thankfully still time for the prosecutors of Trumbull County to give real weight to Bresha Meadows’ traumatic life history, and to the fact that it spans fifteen short years, as they decide what action to pursue.

Lindsey E. Jones is a PhD Candidate in History of Education at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and a 2016-2018 Pre-doctoral Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation project, “‘Not a Place of Punishment’: the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1915-1940,” historicizes the education and incarceration of black girls by examining Virginia’s only reformatory for delinquent African American girls. Follow her on Twitter @noumenal_woman.

NOTES:

1. Kali N. Gross, “African American Women, Mass Incarceration, and the Politics of Protection,” Journal of American History 102, no.1 (2015), 25–33.

2. For a contemporary examination of black girls, interpersonal violence, and the carceral state, see Jody Miller, Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence (New York: NYU Press, 2008).

3. Lashawn Harris, “The ‘Commonwealth of Virginia vs. Virginia Christian’: Southern Black Women, Crime & Punishment in Progressive Era Virginia,” Journal of Social History 47, no.4 (2014), 922–42.

4. See, for instance: Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Sarah Haley, “‘Like I Was a Man’: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia,” Signs 39 (Autumn 2013).

5. Harris cites “a 1910 Virginia statue prohibiting death to ‘any child under seventeen years of age who is charged with any felony, and never having been heretofore convicted in any court of a misdemeanor’” (931).

Source: Black Girls, Domestic Violence, and the Limits of Self-Defense | Black Agenda Report

How Prison Labor is the New American Slavery and Most of Us Unknowingly Support it

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American slavery was technically abolished in 1865, but a loophole in the 13th Amendment has allowed it to continue “as a punishment for crimes” well into the 21st century. Not surprisingly, corporations have lobbied for a broader and broader definition of “crime” in the last 150 years. As a result, there are more (mostly dark-skinned) people performing mandatory, essentially unpaid, hard labor in America today than there were in 1830.

With 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prison population, the United States hasthe largest incarcerated population in the world. No other society in history has imprisoned more of its own citizens. There are half a million more prisoners in the U.S. than in China, which has five times our population. Approximately 1 in 100 adults in America were incarcerated in 2014.  Out of an adult population of 245 millionthat year, there were 2.4 million people in prison, jail or some form of detention center.

The vast majority – 86 percent – of prisoners have been locked up for non-violent, victimless crimes, many of them drug-related.

Big Business is making big bucks off of prison labor:

While prison labor helps produce goods and services for almost every big business in America, here are a few examples from anarticle that highlights the epidemic:

Whole Foods – You ever wonder how Whole Foods can afford to keep their prices so low (sarcasm)? Whole Foods’ coffee, chocolate and bananas might be “fair trade,” but the corporation has been offsetting the “high wages” paid to third-world producers with not-so-fair-wages here in America.

The corporation, famous for it’s animal welfare rating system, apparently was not as concerned about the welfare of the human “animals” working for them in Colorado prisons until April of this year.

You know that $12-a-pound tilapia you thought you were buying from “sustainable, American family farms?” It was raised by prisoners in Colorado, who were paid as little as 74 cents a day. And that fancy goat cheese? The goats were raised and milked by prisoners too.

McDonald’s – The world’s most successful fast food franchise purchases a plethora of goods manufactured in prisons, including plastic cutlery, containers, and uniforms. The inmates who sew McDonald’s uniformsmake even less money by the hour than the people who wear them.

Wal-Mart – Although their company policy clearly states that “forced or prison labor will not be tolerated by Wal-Mart,” basically every item in their store has been supplied by third-party prison labor factories. Wal-Martpurchases its produce from prison farms, where laborers are often subjected to long hours in the blazing heat without adequate food or water.

Victoria’s Secret – Female inmates in South Carolina sew undergarments and casual-wear for the pricey lingerie company. In the late 1990’s, two prisoners were placed in solitary confinement for telling journalists that they were hired to replace “Made in Honduras” garment tags with “Made in USA” tags.

AT&T – In 1993, the massive phone company laid off thousands of telephone operators—all union members—in order to increase their profits. Even though AT&T’s company policy regarding prison labor reads eerily like Wal-Mart’s, they have consistently used inmates to work in their call centers since ’93, barely paying them $2 a day.

BP (British Petroleum) – When BP spilled 4.2 million barrels of oil into the Gulf coast, the company sent a workforce of almost exclusively African-American inmates to clean up the toxic spill while community members, many of whom were out-of-work fisherman, struggled to make ends meet. BP’s decision to use prisoners instead of hiring displaced workers outraged the Gulf community, but the oil company did nothing to reconcile the situation.

The full list of companies implicated in exploiting prison labor includes:

Bank of America
Bayer
Cargill
Caterpillar
Chevron
Chrysler
Costco
John Deere
Eli Lilly and Company
Exxon Mobil
GlaxoSmithKline
Johnson and Johnson
K-Mart
Koch Industries
McDonald’s
Merck
Microsoft
Motorola
Nintendo
Pfizer
Procter & Gamble
Pepsi
ConAgra Foods
Shell
Starbucks
UPS
Verizon
WalMart
Wendy’s

While not all prisoners are “forced” to work, most “opt” to because life would be even more miserable if they didn’t, as they have to purchase pretty much everything above the barest necessities (and sometimes those too) with their hard-earned pennies. Some of them have legal fines to pay off and families to support on the outside. Often they come out more indebted than when they went in.

“Prison farms” aka “modern plantations”
In places like Texas, however, prison work is mandatory and unpaid – the literal definition of slave labor.

According the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, prisoners start their day with a 3:30 a.m. wake-up call and are served breakfast at 4:30 a.m. All prisoners who are physically able are required to report to their work assignments by 6 a.m.

“Offenders are not paid for their work, but they can earn privileges as a result of good work habits,” the website says.

 

Most prisoners work in prison support jobs, like cooking, cleaning, laundry, and maintenance, but about 2,500 of them work in the Texas prison system’s own “agribusiness department,” where they factory-farm 10,000 beef cattle, 20,000 pigs and a quarter million egg-laying hens. The prisoners also produce 74 million pounds of livestock feed per year, 300,000 cases of canned vegetables, and enough cotton to clothe themselves (and presumably others). They also work at meat packaging plants, where they process 14 million pounds of beef and 10 million pounds of pork per year.

While one of the department’s stated goals is to reduce operational costs by having prisoners produce their own food, the prison system admittedly earns revenue from “sales of surplus agricultural production.”

Prisoners who refuse to work – again, unpaid – are placed in solitary confinement. When asked if Texas prisons still employ “chain gangs” in the FAQ section, the department responds:

“No, Texas does not use chain gangs. However, offenders working outside the perimeter fence are supervised by armed correctional officers on horseback.”

Similar “prison farms” exist in Arizona, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio and other states, where prisoners are forced to work in agriculture, logging, quarrying and mining. Wikipedia says while the agricultural goods produced on prison farms is generally used to feed prisoners and other wards of the state (orphanages and asylums) they are also sold for profit.

In addition to being forced to labor directly for the profit of the government, inmates may be “farmed out” to private enterprises, through the practice of convict leasing, to work on private agricultural lands or related industries (fishing, lumbering, etc.). The party purchasing their labor from the government generally does so at a steep discount from the cost of free labor.

Source: How Prison Labor is the New American Slavery and Most of Us Unknowingly Support it

If You Thought Obama Was Giving Less Military Gear to Local Police Departments, You Were Wrong :: In These Times

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If You Thought Obama Was Giving Less Military Gear to Local Police Departments, You Were Wrong

SPECIAL INVESTIGATION

BY SETH KERSHNER

Despite President Obama’s much-touted 2015 executive order, an In These Timesinvestigation reveals evidence that police departments are still receiving as much military hardware from the Pentagon as ever.

OCTOBER ISSUE | SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

WHEN PROTESTORS TOOK TO THE STREETS OF FERGUSON, MO., IN 2014 in response to the police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, they also turned the nation’s attention to a related issue: the growing militarization of local law enforcement. Images of suburban police threatening demonstrators with armored vehicles and assault rifles prompted changes to the controversial 1033 program, through which the Department of Defense (DOD) transfers surplus military equipment to police departments nationwide.

President Obama’s May 2015 announcement that he would freeze giveaways of certain gear drew outrage from law enforcement groups such as the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO), which later charged that the banned equipment was “essential in protecting communities against violent criminals and terrorists.” After shooters targeted and killed uniformed police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge in July, NAPO and other groups doubled down on criticisms that the administration was putting officers’ lives at risk. On July 21, Reuters reported that, following a meeting with police groups, Obama had agreed to revisit the ban.

But an In These Times investigation provides evidence that, in practice, the president’s much-ballyhooed reforms to the 1033 program have done little to stem the flow of battlefield gear to cops.

In fact, the total value of equipment distributed through the program actually increased in the year following the ban, according to figures provided to In These Times by Michelle McCaskill, media relations chief for the DOD’s Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which oversees the shipments.

So far in fiscal year 2016, (Oct. 1, 2015 – September 13), the DLA has transferred $494 million worth of gear to local police departments, In These Times learned from McCaskill.

That far exceeds the $418 million of equipment sent to police in FY 2015 (Oct. 1, 2014 – Sept. 30, 2015). According to an analysis published in May by the transparency organization Open the Books, 2015 was already a peak year for such shipments within the past decade, exceeded only by 2014’s $787 million. Since 2006, more than $2.2 billion of hardware has found its way into the hands of police, according to the report.

Many police accountability advocates warned from the outset that last year’s reforms were too limited in scope. Of seven items on the list of prohibited equipment, only one had actually been given to police departments in recent years, noted a May 2015 article in the Guardian. While the Obama administration placed additional requirements on the transfer of certain aircraft, armored vehicles and riot gear considered especially intimidating to civilians, hundreds of pieces of such equipment are still finding their way into the hands of local police. So far this year, for example, cops have acquired more than 80 mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles (MRAPs)—15-ton vehicles that were originally designed to withstand roadside bombs in war zones.

A SECOND LIFE FOR LETHAL WEAPONRY

The 1033 program, which refers to a section of the 1997 National Defense Authorization Act that created it, is a popular way for cash-strapped local law enforcement agencies to get gear on the cheap. Police departments typically are responsible only for the costs of shipping and maintaining the equipment.

Advocates also say the 1033 program allows underutilized Pentagon inventory to find a second life. “Since the American taxpayers have paid for this equipment already, does it not make more sense to share this equipment with local law enforcement agencies, as opposed to asking for the taxpayers to buy the same equipment twice?” asks Jim Franklin, executive director of the Minnesota Sheriffs’ Association, in an email to In These Times.

ACLU Minnesota legal director Teresa Nelson says that she is sensitive to the needs of law enforcement. “Nobody wants the police to be unsafe,” she says. “At the same time … when you have police in armored vehicles that look like tanks, you really change the dynamic between the police and the communities they serve.”

In January 2015, Obama responded to growing criticism of the program in the wake of Ferguson by issuing Executive Order 13688, which created a federal interagency group to investigate police militarization and come up with recommendations. As a result of this investigation, police were prohibited from receiving certain equipment, including bayonets, tracked armored vehicles, firearms and ammunition of .50‐caliber or higher, grenade launchers, camouflage uniforms and weaponized aircraft.

Critics said the reforms were superficial. Last year, an NPR analysis of 10 years of DLA data showed that of all the aircraft given to local police through the 1033 program, none were weaponized. The investigation further revealed that nearly 87 percent of the hundreds of armored vehicles being used at the time by local police ran on wheels, not tracks. Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Social Justice Studies and one of the leading researchers of police militarization, told the Guardian that the new rules were nothing more than a “publicity stunt.”

The ongoing transfer of armored vehicles, such as MRAPs, epitomizes these criticisms. Since the vehicles run on wheels, they aren’t on the new list of banned transfers. Nevertheless, their heft and design for use in warfare illustrates what critics see as the increasingly blurry line between police and military.

According to the DLA, police departments have received 708 MRAPs through the 1033 program since 2011, when the drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan first created a large reserve of unused equipment. At press time, 84 police departments had received the armored vehicles this year. More than 100 others have been approved and are awaiting delivery, according to DLA records obtained by In These Times through a Freedom of Information Act request.

As part of the Obama administration’s reforms, law enforcement agencies receiving “controlled” items, such as MRAPs, must demonstrate that they plan to train officers on proper use. But training materials used by various California police departments, obtained by the website MuckRock in June, show that instructional time for MRAPs ranges from 20 hours to as little as 15 minutes.

COMING TO A TOWN NEAR YOU?

Previously, only large urban police departments would have had the resources to justify acquiring the armored vehicles, which can cost upwards of $1 million. In 2014, Bill Johnson, executive director of NAPO, told USA Today that the 1033 program allows smaller police forces to play catch-up: “It’s their turn to get some of this equipment.”

That may explain why the 1033 program is particularly popular in states with significant rural populations such as Minnesota, where 74 of 87 county sheriffs have received surplus military equipment since 2005—mostly assault rifles and armored vehicles.

Jason Dingman, sheriff of sparsely populated Stevens County, Minn., told In These Times that an MRAP arrived this summer with only 56 miles on it. Virtually brand-new, the armored vehicle will just need a paint job and a fresh battery before being ready for use by West Central SWAT—a multi-agency task force that carries out tactical operations along the South Dakota border, but is called to the scene just six to eight times per year. “If we’re just executing a search warrant then we won’t bring [the MRAP] out,” Dingman says.
“But if the bad guy starts shooting at us then it’s a different situation and we can call out the MRAP to give our officers more protection.”

The DLA’s data show that police agencies receiving MRAPs in 2016 included those serving such tiny municipalities as Fallon, Nev. (pop. 8,458), and Westwego, La. (pop. 8,542). Even the police force in rural Pigeon Forge, Tenn. (pop. 6,171), found the need for an MRAP—perhaps to more effectively repel potential terrorist attacks on Dollywood, the town’s Dolly Parton-themed amusement park.

While police contend that equipment such as MRAPs are used defensively, renewed concerns arise whenever protests are met with a show of force. Following the police killing of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge in July, a local reporter videotaped an armored vehicle pushing up against a crowd of protestors.

John Lindsay-Poland, who has researched the topic for the anti-militarism group American Friends Service Committee, thinks that the 1033 program fosters a “warrior mentality” that can further corrode police-community relations. “If we do not want our police to be at war in our communities,” he tellsIn These Times, “then we shouldn’t equip them with war-fighting equipment.”

Investigative stories like this are only possibly because of the support of readers like you. If you want to see more hard-hitting journalism, make a tax-deductible donation to support In These Times.

From the November 2016 Issue

SETH KERSHNER is a writer and researcher whose work has appeared in outlets such as Rethinking Schools, Sojourners, and Boulder Weekly. He is the co-author (with Scott Harding) of Counter-Recruitment and the Campaign to Demilitarize Public Schools (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Source: If You Thought Obama Was Giving Less Military Gear to Local Police Departments, You Were Wrong

The Radical Democracy of the Movement for Black Lives :: Peniel Joseph

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The Radical Democracy Of The Movement For Black Lives

SEPTEMBER 18, 2016 BY LEAVE A COMMENT

“Black Lives Matter has cast a strobe-light on contemporary myths of racial progress, arguing correctly that the criminal justice system represents a gateway to a panoramic system of racial and class and gender and sexuality oppression.”

The Black Lives Matter policy agenda represents one of the most important agenda setting documents collectively produced by black activists in a generation. The proposals, authored by over fifty different civil rights organizations, offers a panoramic narrative, diagnosis, and political alternatives to the intricacies of structural racism, state-sanctioned violence, and the institutional exploitation of black bodies across the nation.

“A Vision For Black Lives” builds on, expands, and goes beyond policy agendas promoted by a range of civil rights and Black Power era groups, including the Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, NAACP, SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), CORE, Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity, and Martin Luther King Jr’s SCLC. In its poignant urging of the United States to “end the war on black people,” the document is reminiscent of the “Gary Agenda,” the historic 1972 document that emanated from the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana.

Gary Mayor Richard Hatcher speaks at the National Black Political Conference in Gary, Ind. (AP/Charles Kelly)

That meeting of over 8,000 black delegates from across black America’s political and ideological spectrum proved to be a watershed event, albeit one that was hamstrung by an inability to translate grassroots insurgency into tangible political power, accountability, and resources.  Gary, like the Black Power Conferences from the late 1960s and the African Liberation Day and Sixth Pan-African Congress of the 1970s, sought to modernize the black convention movements that could be traced back to the Reconstruction era, where black activists organized for political power in slavery’s aftermath.

By the early 20th century efforts like the “Niagara Movement” faltered due to a lack of resources and political infighting. For a time, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association cast a shadow large enough to encompass the complexity of black life, uniting economic strivers with revolutionary activists in developing a black agenda broad enough to attract millions of black people across several continents.

Garvey’s decline fractured aspects of black political life, but not dreams for a cohesive vision, plan, and strategy for black liberation, a cause taken up during the Depression and Second World War by a variety of groups including the Southern Negro Youth Congress, National Negro Labor Congress, The Nation of Islam, the Civil Rights Congress, and the Council of African Affairs. The NAACP’s membership reached almost a half-million by 1946, the closest it would ever come to mass membership in scale. Black political leaders pushed an agenda to the left of the New Deal creating space for the global popularity of Paul Robeson, the political resurrection of W.E.B. Du Bois, and the insider status of Mary McLeod Bethune and Ralph Bunche.

 

Organizers like Ella Baker in New York City and Septima Clarke in South Carolina, worked the lower frequencies of black life, working at the margins of the black quotidian: the ordinary black folk from New York to South Carolina whose dreams remained disarmingly pragmatic ones focused preserving hope and dignity.

The Black Lives Matter Movement is rooted in this wider Black Freedom Struggle, one whose two dominant branches are reflected in the Civil Rights and Black Power era. BLM activists’ successful adoption of non-violence is rooted in the civil rights era even as their unapologetic focus on structural racism, community control, and political self-determination reflects the Black Power era’s radical politics. Surprisingly, so does the movement’s focus on intersectionality. Popularly remembered as deeply masculinist, unapologetically sexist, and homophobic, the Black Power era proved to be more complicated than such simple generalizations indicate. Despite the movement’s many political and ideological blinders, black women, queer activists, and others on the margins of African American life consciously shaped an expansive Black Power politics.

 

The Third World Women’s Alliance articulated a vision of radical black feminism, socialism, and Black Power militancy that made it a visionary example of cutting edge social justice movements. The Combahee River Collective gave voice to radical black lesbian feminists whose politics went to the far left of the more mainstream National Black Feminist Organization. In many ways both of these organizations reflected the black radical feminist politics revealed in Toni Cade Bambara’s groundbreaking 1970 anthology, The Black Woman, an intellectual and political intervention that ushered in Black Women’s Studies and helped give attention to the works of Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Gloria Hull, and many others.

BLM activists have taken some of the best aspects of these two generations of the Black Radical Tradition and linked it with more recent efforts to promote reparations (especially by grassroots a organization like N’COBRA, although reparations go back to the formerly enslaved activist Callie House as the historian Mary Frances Berry teaches us); divestment from domestic and global racial exploitation which Jesse Jackson, especially in 1984, promoted as a hallmark of his presidential campaign; the pursuit of independent black political power that had been advocated in the post Gary era by a series of organizations including the National Black United Front, the National Black Independent Political Party, and the Black Radical Congress; the movement for economic justice that has been promoted by a spectrum of grassroots labor, community, church, and secular activists, including black nationalists in communities such as St. Petersburg, Florida, who famously booed candidate Obama in 2008 by chanting and holding signs, “What About the Black Community Obama?”

Black Lives Matter has cast a strobe-light on contemporary myths of racial progress, arguing correctly that the criminal justice system represents a gateway to a panoramic system of racial and class and gender and sexuality oppression. This intervention, while important, is incomplete without an acknowledgment of the way in which the rise of mass incarceration is connected to systems of racial segregation, voting rights denial, state-sanctioned violence and exploitation of black bodies, all while criminalizing and decimating the very communities that remain largely under assault even in the Age of Obama.

The Age of Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Black Lives Matter has shattered conventional civil rights narratives, ones that begin with Rosa Parks, continue with King’s Dream, and sought to end with Barack Obama’s election. This version of history as a bedtime story, complete with heroic individual blacks, stalwart white allies, and the thanks of a grateful nation has only one glaring problem.

It’s a lie.

The Civil Rights era heroic period experienced pervasive anti-black violence that only increased during the Black Power era and its aftermath. What is now universally acknowledged as a moral and political good—complete with a multiracial cast of characters—was demonized in word and deed by the larger society, a denigration that became inscribed in a series of intricate anti-black legal, legislative, and policy challenges that have utterly decimated some of the gains of the era, especially for the black poor.

“A Movement For Black Lives” is essential precisely because it helps to expose what is at the root of our national amnesia regarding slavery and anti-black racism-white supremacy and its relationship to conceptions of citizenship, the rule of law, democracy, and justice. In its passionate repudiation of the political status quo and elevating the lives of the black community’s most vulnerable residents—the poor, young, elderly, trans, LGBT, mentally ill, incarcerated, ex-offenders—the BLM has produced a watershed document that once again illustrates why the black freedom struggle has always been on the cutting edge of movements for radical democracy: we have no choice.

Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and Professor of History at The University of Texas. He is the award-winning author of several books, including Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, and Stokely: A Life. Follow him on Twitter @PenielJoseph.

Source: The Radical Democracy of the Movement for Black Lives

Triumph of truth: new museum upends ‘great denial’ of African American history | Culture | The Guardian

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Triumph of truth: new museum upends ‘great denial’ of African American history. The Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture is a tour de force of more than 3,000 artifacts with a mission to ‘tell the unvarnished truth’

   

Source: Triumph of truth: new museum upends ‘great denial’ of African American history | Culture | The Guardian

It’s Time To Call Out ‘Nice Racists’ And Their White Fragility | Huffington Post

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We usually don’t call out our acquaintances and friends about their micro-aggressions towards us — probably because we know they’re fragile, and when we do correct them, there’s a large amount of white tears that fall and hit our shoes, shoes that are now soaked from the previous white person’s tears you just had a work meeting with.

When you think of a racist what pops in your mind? White supremacists? The KKK? You usually think of white people down south right? You know, the ones who have confederate flag bumper stickers, and hurl the N-word at Black people who cut them off while driving, or school districts that ban Black hairstyles. These folks are more of the poster children of racism.

I’m here to let you in on a little secret: You don’t need to write a resume for the new available seat in the Ku Klux Klan to be a racist. We’ve heard many times before that racism is taught, that it starts at home with our parents and caregivers. This is absolutely true, but racism is also in our school systems, the media, it even comes from the mouths of orange men running for president.

I’m sure your parents never actually said that you should cross the street when you see a black person walking on the same side walk as you, but you do it anyway because you’ve witnessed them do it. Or maybe you’ve seen hundreds of movies where the predator character was a black person, and over the years you took that theatrical scene into you’re reality, allowing your mind to swallow it whole.

Racism isn’t always angry and mean. I’s subtle, mild and, at times, friendly. It was your boss in that interview who was amazed at how intellectual you were, so amazed that he even prolonged the interview with concerning inquiries and assumptions:

“How did you manage to succeed in a low-income one parent household? Was it hard growing up without a father?”

It’s hopping on the train and seeing the sweet white lady scoot her belongings over and make room for a white person to sit down. Although five minutes ago you asked if the seat was taken, and she put on a Oscar-worthy performance about how sorry she is that it’s not available for your black body. Or the white friend who laughs and makes fun about racial stereotypes, but they insist its only a joke, to take them at their word, it’s not how they truly feel.

We usually don’t call out our acquaintances and friends about their micro-aggressions towards us — probably because we know they’re fragile, and when we do correct them, there’s a large amount of white tears that fall and hit our shoes, shoes that are now soaked from the previous white person’s tears you just had a work meeting with.

People of color are made to feel wrong and guilty when we voice our pain and correct our white counterparts. We avoid these racial stress related topics because the guilt you feel from hurting us, form into fear and anger. Instead of an apology, you defend your character and explain repeatedly how nice you are, you use your white tears as a weapon. Suddenly, a knife is pointed at me, and I’m the bad guy.

You’ve gone on and on for hours to tell me that I’ve hurt your feelings. Well, you know what? It’s a privilege to only get your feelings hurt after being called a racist, rather than experiencing racism itself.

We’ve been conditioned to think that racism and being a nice person can’t go hand and hand. We have to start realizing that racism is built in this society, it’s a dangerous and violent system that oppresses people of color in more ways than just a white supremacist group. You don’t have to wear a white hood and hate black people to play into stereotypes and racist undertones.

Yes, you’re a kind person — we all love your joyous smile — but one day, you’ll be confronted and have that talk with a black friend about an offensive status you wrote or that comment you made at dinner. Don’t start to defend your character or your intentions. Wipe your tears. You shouldn’t be the one hurting right now.

Don’t make this about you.

Don’t put your fear over my pain.

Don’t make my feelings less important than your anger.

While you’re still here, and still crying, I should also add that I don’t really appreciate your reaction to MY hurt feelings. Quite frankly, I find it to be abusive. To flip the script, shed tears, and make me feel horrible, horrible to the point where I lose focus on myself, (the person who’s truly offended), to comfort you.

My entire existence as a black person is to make white people comfortable, to coddle your feelings and never tell you that you’ve hurt me — the least you can do is apologize, take responsibility and own up to your offense, try harder, learn from this.

We’re not always aware of what we’re taking in from the world, but it influences our behavior and actions, regardless if we’re nice people. It doesn’t matter if the racism you endured was intentional or not, just know that racists don’t always appear as evil and violent. It’s inviting, it’s friendly, it’s simple, and at many times, it’s produced by the nicest of people.

Source: It’s Time To Call Out ‘Nice Racists’ And Their White Fragility | Huffington Post

White Supremacist America: Trump and the “Return” of Right-Wing Hate Culture

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SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

White Supremacist America: Trump and the “Return” of Right-Wing Hate Culture

by ANTHONY DIMAGGIO

Many of my friends from college and fellow academics in the last year are focusing their anxieties on the Donald Trump campaign. A common frustration voiced among intellectuals is the disbelief that a candidate as bigoted, pig-headed, and willfully ignorant as “the Donald” could be running neck and neck with a seasoned political veteran like Hillary Clinton. This piece is not about Hillary Clinton, however. Rather, it’s about promoting a much needed discussion of what Trump’s rise really tells us. I don’t believe we have a “Donald Trump” problem in this country. The problem is much worse than that. More ominously, we have an American public problem that cuts to the very core of the quality of our democracy. Demagogues rise to power on the backs of workers, citizens, and your average “Joe” or “Jane.” They do not owe their success to their actions alone.

If Donald Trump is enjoying electoral success, it’s because the public – passively or actively – allowed it to happen. While Pew Research Center surveys do find considerable ignorance among Trump supporters – the most commonly cited reasons for supporting him have nothing to do with policy, but everything to do with personality characteristics – this trend was observed across all the front-runners, including Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Ted Cruz supporters. What makes Trump’s case more disturbing than the norm of across-the-board voter ignorance is that such a large contingent of Americans know full-well about his bigotry, and embrace it. The ascendance of Donald Trump tells us much about the quality of American character – particularly about our enduring and toxic legacy of hate, ignorance, bigotry, and white-supremacy.

Hillary Clinton caught a lot of flak for referring to half of Trump Supporters as “the deplorables.” She was being far too generous. Public opinion surveys over the last year or so suggest that the white supremacist contingent of Trump voters is even larger. When I say white supremacist, I’m not referring to the old-style, KKK, white robe donning and lynchings of America’s past. Rather, the contemporary form of white supremacy is more of a “hate-lite” – if such a thing exists – in terms of its supporters embracing horrible, racist stereotypes, while claiming to reject racism. Call this “color-blind” racism, dog whistle racism, coded racism – or whatever you like, but it’s clear that white supremacy never disappeared from America’s political culture.

Consider recent surveys, if you want to ascertain the size of the problem. Polls of Trump supporters and Republicans more generally from 2015 and 2016 find clear and indisputable evidence of racism and prejudice against non-white, non-Christian Americans. I review these findings below.

Xenophobia

Irrational hatred of foreigners is pronounced on the American right. Public Policy Polling (PPP) found that in August 2015, 54 percent of Republicans, and 61 percent of Trump supporters still believed Obama was born in another country – drawing on fringe the birther conspiracy. Sixty-six percent of Trump supporters thought Obama was a Muslim, compared to 54 percent of all Republicans. The findings hadn’t changed much in 2016, when a May PPP poll found 65 percent of Trump supporters said Obama was a Muslim and 59 percent said he was born outside the U.S. The birther-Trump right is obviously impervious to evidence-based logic on anything related to Obama, considering this conspiracy theory was debunked long ago by countless sources.

Christian Supremacy

Much of the right-wing Christian contingent seems set on demonizing non-believers. Most Trumpeters see “Muslim” as synonymous with “bad.” A Reuters-Ipsos June 2016 survey, for example, found that 58 percent of Trump supporters said they held a “somewhat unfavorable” or “very unfavorable” view of Islam. This type of blanket hatred is troublesome when Pew Research Center polling finds that the vast majority of American Muslims reject terrorism, and hold moderate, rather than extreme political values. A Texas Policy Project poll from June 2016 also found that 76 percent of Republicans “somewhat supported” or “strongly supported” a blanket ban of Muslims from entering the U.S. – no doubt based on the erroneous, blanket notion that Muslims represent an imminent threat to national security.

More Xenophobia

Most Republicans and Trump supporters also embrace negative views of unauthorized immigrants. Seventy percent of Republicans agreed in an August 2016 Pew survey that “undocumented immigrants are more likely to commit serious crimes.” This view persists, despite statistics from the Public Policy Institute of California concluding that immigrants actually commit fewer crimes than U.S. citizens. The myth remains popular, despite national data over the last decade and a half showing that, as the number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. grew, violent crimes rates were on the decline. On the macro- level, then, there is little merit to the idea that unauthorized immigration is destabilizing society and making us less safe. Still, 70 percent of Republicans agreed in a Fox News July 2015 survey with Donald Trump’s statement that Mexico is “sending people that have lots of problems…they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” The hatred was not reserved for unauthorized immigrants. Two-thirds of Trump supporters agreed in a March 2016 Pew survey that “immigrants [in general] today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing, and health care.”

Anti-Black Stereotyping

Old-fashioned, anti-black racism is alive and well on the American right, despite naive academic claims that the U.S. was “getting beyond race” as early as the 1990s. Reuters polling from June 2016 finds that nearly half of Trump supporters agree that African Americans are more “violent” and “criminal” than whites. Similarly, 40 percent say African Americans are more “lazy” than whites. These findings are prominent on the reactionary right, despite social scientists’ longstanding findings that race is not a significant predictor of Americans’ level of commitment to work, or hours worked, and despite the reality that the vast majority of whites, African Americans, and Hispanics are employed. Anti-black stereotypes are not surprising. They have long been woven into U.S. political and media commentary, as seen in academic studies identifying how African Americans are far more likely to be depicted in the media as criminals and as poor, in far greater numbers than the actual number of African Americans who commit crimes or are in poverty.

After framing Trump supporters as “deplorables,” Hillary Clinton publicly apologized, rejecting “grossly generalistic” characterizations, which are “never a good idea.” Her apology was unfortunate. Generalizations are perfectly acceptable, even valuable, if they are an accurate depiction of reality. And the above data suggests that it is indeed fair to generalize about Trump voters, considering most of them are racist and xenophobic. The polls I’ve reviewed should be sobering and disturbing for Americans who call themselves supporters of equal rights and democracy, and for those who abhor irrational hatred and bigotry. America’s white supremacy culture is wide-spread indeed. Consider the following: if approximately 55 percent of the voting age population turned out in 2012, and 2016 sees similar turnout, and about half of likely voters say they are planning on voting for Trump, his support base includes approximately 28 percent of American adults – give or take a few percent because of the small number of Americans who may vote third-party. Of this 28 percent, the polls above found that approximately two-thirds can be categorized as racist in their attitudes, meaning that nearly 20 percent of American adults – or one in five – fall within the category of Trump supporting white supremacists.

In the title of this piece I spoke of the “return” of the hate culture in America. Realistically, that culture never disappeared, even if many intellectuals thought we had transcended the old racist, sexist, and homophobic battles of the past. The right-wing reactionary movement has always been there, but was waiting for a populistic, demagogic character of the Trump variety to take the reins. On a symbolic level, public discourse on issues like race and immigration speaks to an overarching and enduring culture war in America. We are in the midst of a battle for this country’s very soul, and there is much uncertainty about the path forward. Reactionary forces – organized under Trump – represent an old order, which would like to reinvigorate the racist, bigoted, white supremacist culture of the past. Progressive societal forces, as seen in the rise of social movements like Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and others, are pushing for a progressive future in which government plays a crucial role in promoting political equality between social groups, and reduces economic inequality.

I wouldn’t presume to tell anyone who they should vote for in the coming election, although I can say without hesitation that I’m entirely opposed to the continuation of the Trump-inspired, old reactionary order. I don’t know whether or not a Trump defeat would be a fatal blow to racist forces in this country. I can say this much: at some point soon, Americans will have to decide whether they want to live in a country that respects democracy and equal rights for all, or embraces the racist, fascistic politics of a white supremacist culture. The answer to which side prevails will soon be upon us.

Anthony DiMaggio is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. He holds a PhD in political communication, and is the author of the newly released: Selling War, Selling Hope: Presidential Rhetoric, the News Media, and U.S. Foreign Policy After 9/11 (Paperback: 2015). He can be reached at:anthonydimaggio612@gmail.com

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Anthony DiMaggio is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. He holds a PhD in political communication, and is the author of the newly released: Selling War, Selling Hope: Presidential Rhetoric, the News Media, and U.S. Foreign Policy After 9/11 (Paperback: 2015). He can be reached at: anthonydimaggio612@gmail.com

Source: White Supremacist America: Trump and the “Return” of Right-Wing Hate Culture

America’s New Demons and the Second Coming of the Neocons :: CounterPunch

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Photograph by Krassotkin (derivative), Gage Skidmore (Donald Trump), Gage Skidmore (Hillary Clinton), distributed under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

The horror of a Clinton v. Trump election is making everybody who pays attention a little crazy. Not paying attention isn’t easy – not with everybody hooked into social (actually anti-social) media and with“ news” and commentary coming from every direction.The hypocrisy is breathtaking.In the midst of it all, the American propaganda system, the one that supposedly doesn’t exist, has gone berserk — targeting RT America (formerly Russia Today).

Anyone who relies on The New York Times or The Washington Post or NPR or, worse, CNN or MSNBC, to find out what’s shaking – or rather what the guardians of the status quo want people to think is shaking (and “fit to print”) — and who also has access to RT America on satellite TV or a handful of cable stations, or who goes to the trouble of watching it over the internet, will know what I mean.RT America is a better source for news and commentary than America’s finest by many orders of magnitude.  It is less biased too.The Russian government funds it, but this doesn’t make its output propaganda – not unless anything funded by governments is propaganda by definition. RT America is more like the BBC or CBC than, say, Radio Free Europe.

Source: America’s New Demons and the Second Coming of the Neocons

Privately Run Mississippi Prison, Called a Scene of Horror, Is Shut Down – The New York Times

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The Walnut Grove facility that had been operating since 2012 under a federal consent decree for violating prisoners’ constitutional rights was the scene of two major riots in 2014.

 

This jail is likely 90 percent black men. Privately Run Mississippi Prison, Called a Scene of Horror, ““The sexual misconduct we found was among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere in the nation,” the report said.

Some of the guards, the report said, were themselves members of the gangs, including at least one prison supervisor who let prisoners out of their cells to assault unsuspecting rivals.

Organized gladiator-style fights between prisoners and encouraged by guards were also a frequent occurrence, with guards betting on the outcomes, according to the report.” FB comment from Antonio Moore

Relevant READ:

The Black Male Incarceration Problem Is Real and It’s Catastrophic

 

How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence

Read the piece from NYT.

Source: Privately Run Mississippi Prison, Called a Scene of Horror, Is Shut Down – The New York Times

Black Men In Chicago Are Taking Over Abandoned Property & Rebuilding The Neighborhood With The Youth By Creating Their Own Jobs – Ear Hustle 411

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Black Men In Chicago Are Taking Over Abandoned Property & Rebuilding The Neighborhood With The Youth By Creating Their Own Jobs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chicago, Illinois – Black men are demanding the city help them with the resources to help rebuild the community. These men are literally in the process of taking over abandoned property and training at risk youth to help fix up the properties that the city is trying to demolish.

Many of the properties are generally in pretty decent condition as far as the frame being solid brick and these men are saying they are not going to allow the city to tear down perfectly good homes.

A lot of the homes are boarded up and abandoned due to subprime lending where the Lenders/Bankers sucked the resources out of certain communities, left them in total disarray, foreclosed on the properties and resold many of them for pennies on the dollar to Hedge Fund Investors.

This happened by way if issuing Interest only mortgages where the borrower paid only the interest and no principal and when the term was up, they were forced to pay interest plus principle which the majority was unable to do therefore losing their properties while hedge fund investors bet against the people and walked away with tons of properties.

These investors slowly take over certain areas which are considered prime real estate and move the minorities out and gentrify the neighborhoods.

The men called on Alderman Michael Scott 24th Ward, Alderman  Jason Ervin 28th Ward,  and Alderman Walter Burnett 27th Ward and all the Aldermen across the city to help them make this happen.

The group said they are going all over the city and taking over the 20,000 properties that are sitting idle waiting to be torn down.

They then said that the people in the community want the buildings demolished however they don’t realize that for every building that is demolished, property taxes goes up.

The spokesperson Mark Carter said NHS, CIC and Globe Trotters organizations were supposed to help their parents and grandparents but instead they allowed the city to demolish their homes.

The men said the Mayor and Alderman sit back and watch these children get murdered in the communities and they refuse to sit back and do nothing about it.

He said they are demanding  the resources be given to them and they can rebuild themselves.

Check out the video:

 

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 Photo Credit:  Mark Carter- Facebook

Source: Black Men In Chicago Are Taking Over Abandoned Property & Rebuilding The Neighborhood With The Youth By Creating Their Own Jobs – Ear Hustle 411