The American people also learned from the report that Mueller declined to prosecute Donald Trump Jr. because, in plain English, he was too dumb to know that he was likely committing crimes.Of course, poor and working-class people are not allowed such latitude, or given the benefit of the doubt regarding how their emotions or intelligence may have impacted their decision-making and other behavior. This is true more generally for nonwhites, Muslims, immigrants and all those viewed as the un-American “other.”
Category Archives: Black Political Thought
We Should Stop Saying “People of Color” When We Mean “Black People”
“That being said, we need to stop saying “people of color” in instances we mostly (and sometimes only) mean “Black people.”What I’m saying is a bit meta, but the public use of the term POC seems to have become less about solidarity, and more concerned with lessening the negative connotations and implicit anti-Black reactions (fear, scorn, disdain, apathy) to Blackness. In popular discourse, POC is often a shorthand for “this issue affects Black people most directly and disproportionately, but other non-white people are affected too, so we need to include them for people to listen and so people to understand we aren’t talking about race as only Black vs. white.”Saying POC when we mean “Black people” is this concession that there’s a need to describe a marginalized group as “less” Black for in order for people (specifically, but not only, white people) to have empathy for whatever issue being discussed.”
Source: We Should Stop Saying “People of Color” When We Mean “Black People”
Du Boisian Double Consciousness and the Appropriation of Black Male Bodies in Jordan Peele’s ‘Get Out’ | The Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA)
Du Boisian Double Consciousness and the Appropriation of Black Male Bodies in Jordan Peele’s Get OutCivil American, Volume 4, Article 1 (April 16, 2019).
By Darrius Hills and Seth Vannatta |
The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him not true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. ~ W. E. B. Du Bois [1]
The Ghosts of 1964: Race, Reagan, and the Neo-conservative Backlash to the Civil Rights Movement – Race, Racism and the Law
Excerpted from: Anthony Cook, The Ghosts of 1964: Race, Reagan, and the Neo-conservative Backlash to the Civil Rights Movement, 6 Alabama Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Law Review 81 (2015) (Footnotes) (Full Document)
“American slavery was “officially” buried by our nation’s ratification of the 13 14 and 15 amendments to the constitution. But the ghosts of slavery soon inhabited new forms — political, economic, and cultural — intent on returning Blacks to a position of abject servitude and subordination. Jim Crow segregation embodied slavery’s spirit of White supremacy, allowing it to live on in a different form. The civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century was but another attempt to exorcise from American life the demonic spirit of slavery that had so horrifically deformed American institutions and culture. But by 1980 it was clear, yet again, that notwithstanding the “official” death and burial of old Jim Crow — a death certified by the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights, 1965 Voting Rights, and 1968 Fair Housing Acts — the past lived on. The ghosts of American slavery and its mutant offspring, Jim Crow, roamed the land of the free and haunted the home of the brave in search of new cultural, political, and economic practices to possess and infest. American slavery was “officially” buried by our nation’s ratification of the 13 14 and 15 amendments to the constitution. But the ghosts of slavery soon inhabited new forms — political, economic, and cultural — intent on returning Blacks to a position of abject servitude and subordination. Jim Crow segregation embodied slavery’s spirit of White supremacy, allowing it to live on in a different form. The civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century was but another attempt to exorcise from American life the demonic spirit of slavery that had so horrifically deformed American institutions and culture. But by 1980 it was clear, yet again, that notwithstanding the “official” death and burial of old Jim Crow — a death certified by the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights, 1965 Voting Rights, and 1968 Fair Housing Acts — the past lived on. The ghosts of American slavery and its mutant offspring, Jim Crow, roamed the land of the free and haunted the home of the brave in search of new cultural, political, and economic practices to possess and infest. ”
Cornel West and the Intellectual Dishonesty of the ADOS Movement
Cornel West recently expressed support for the ADOS movement . . . not surprising… Martin Luther King, whom West has written about, was not a Pan-Africanist, but he clearly saw the connection between the African struggle for freedom and the African American struggle for freedom. King said:
The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”
In embracing ADOS, West is embracing the opposite of King’s vision.
Source: Cornel West and the Intellectual Dishonesty of the ADOS Movement
The Cases For Reparations: How 2020 Presidential Candidates Address The Issue | On Point
Democratic presidential hopefuls are talking about reparations for slavery. They’re talking seriously, but with few specifics. What would a reparations policy actually look like?
Source: The Cases For Reparations: How 2020 Presidential Candidates Address The Issue | On Point
Pan-Africanism and The #ADOS Phenomenon – iMWiL!
Thanks to Baltimore’s Reality Speaks and Pleasant Hope Baptist Church for hosting this conversation. The full video will be coming soon from the good folks at Reality Speaks but here are excerpted audio clips which include the initial remarks by both Drs. Ray Winbush and [Dr.]Jared Ball ( OUR COMMON GROUND Voices) followed by their responses to questions and comments from the audience.
Subject of Discussion: #ADOS, Co-Founder Yvette Carnell, OUR COMMON GROUND Voice.
Research Shows Entire Black Communities Suffer Trauma After Police Shootings ::: TruthOut
Research Shows Entire Black Communities Suffer Trauma After Police Shootings
Mourners attend a candlelight vigil in memory of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr. on October 9, 2014, in St. Louis, Missouri. Meyers was shot and killed by an off-duty St. Louis police officer.SCOTT OLSON / GETTY IMAGES
Following several nationally publicized police killings of unarmed Black Americans in the United States, Eva L., a fitness instructor who identifies as Black, started to experience what she describes as “immense paranoia.” She would often call in sick, because she feared risking an encounter with police upon leaving her house. She also started to second-guess her and her husband’s decision to have children.
“Seeing Black bodies murdered and physical/emotional violence online and on the news” was a trauma she could no longer bear, Eva says. “I was terrified of bringing a child into the world we live in and experience as Black people. I thought not having kids was a truer sign of love than risk them being harmed by this world.”
A recent study sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania — released just before the anniversaries of the deaths of Eric Garner (2014), Michael Brown (2014), John Crawford (2014), and Philando Castile (2016) — found that there could be millions like Eva, for whom these killings have been a mental health trigger.
Research included data from the Mapping Police Violence Projectdatabase for police killings between 2013 and 2016 and information from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System of over 103,000 Black Americans. The results indicate that police killings of unarmed Black Americans are having a population-level impact on the mental health of Black Americans.
According to researchers, the incidents may contribute to 1.7 additional poor mental health days per person every year, or 55 million more poor mental health days every year among Black Americans across the United States. That means the mental health burden for African Americans caused by police killings of unarmed Black victims is nearly as great as the mental health burden associated with diabetes. African Americans have some of the highest rates of the disease, which contributes annually to 75 million days of poor mental health among them.
Eva started seeing a therapist who diagnosed her as having generalized anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s been two years now, and she admits that her progress toward healing has been slow, yet steady.
Jacob Bor, co-author of the study and assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, says the responses in his social circle to police killings of unarmed Black victims is what interested him in conducting this study. Bor noticed that White people were able to comprehend “the injustice on an intellectual level but did not experience the same level of trauma.”
The study findings confirmed Bor’s personal observations. The research team did not observe spillover mental health effects in White respondents from police killings. It should also be noted that among respondents of either race, there were no spillover effects for police killings of unarmed White people or killings of armed Black people.
The research is essential in considering our own personal experiences, says Bor, adding that the findings speak to the overall “value of different people’s lives.” This society “has a long history of state-sanctioned violence” toward racially marginalized groups, he says.
The mental health sector is only now researching the impact of police brutality, a concern that has affected African Americans for decades. “Clinicians can go through medical school without [gaining] any experience in treating the effects of racism,” Bor says. Studies like his, he adds, can help to create long overdue critical mainstream discussions about the effects of racism on mental health, such as, “How do we in public health, society, and among the clinical and mental health services support people when these incidents occur?” and “Can a profession dominated by White providers effectively treat the emotional struggles of ‘living while Black’ in this country?”
According to Bor, these discussions are needed to implement change. “Among many White Americans, there is an empathy gap … and a failure to believe when people of color say ‘this hurts me,’” he says.
Adding to the deficiency of culturally competent therapists, poverty and other formidable socio-economic challenges — also stemming from structural racism — remain steadfast barriers to African Americans accessing mental health care, according to the American Psychological Association.
New York City’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, has also become a passionate advocate for what she describes as a movement for “culturally competent mental health care.”
“When you talk about people of color, who are obviously facing discrimination and legacy of racism and poverty in huge numbers, you are talking about something that is really tough to overcome,” McCray says.
Inadequate care undermines benefits from policies and resources designed to mitigate the burdens of systemic oppression. “Mental illness along with substance abuse disorders are hardship multipliers,” she says. Struggling unsupported with “mental illness can make everything that much harder.”
For example, holding on to affordable housing, staying enrolled in college, and even surviving encounters with law enforcement can be extremely more difficult for those suffering from mental illness or trauma, McCray says. In fact, the most recent annual numbers from the Washington Post’s database of fatal police-shooting victims indicate that “nearly 1 in 4 of those shot was described as experiencing some form of mental distress at the time of the encounter with police.”
“Mental health is the ultimate intersectional concern,” McCray says. “It is reflected in all of our policies … education, housing, school, relationships.”
In 2015, she and her spouse, Mayor Bill de Blasio, launched Thrive NYC, a $850 million mental health program that incorporates 54 initiatives. Among the program’s several core objectives is the aim to address the stigma around mental illness and increase access to treatment across the city. McCray believes that ThriveNYC’s community focused approach is one of several necessary steps toward reaching historically under served groups.
“Culturally competent care to me is all about trust,” McCray says. “It improves early identification, accessibility, and outcomes.” Also, she says, “People have to be seen.” From her advocacy experience she has observed that “people have to feel that they can turn to someone that they trust.”
Connecting people with the appropriate resources, however, means surmounting many challenges. “There is great deal of work to be done to eliminate the stigma,” McCray says. There is also the matter of affordability and infrastructure. “We’ve never had a well-coordinated mental health system in our country — ever. People who have the money find ways to manage.” She says she wants to fight for everyone to get the resources they need to cope.
Eva recognizes that her path to healing has taken a significant amount of work and support beyond the means of many African Americans. “Access to therapy is a privilege,” she says. “I know that most people can’t afford weekly sessions at $150-plus.” Yet, she adds, “[going through therapy] is the only reason why I’m OK planning for kids at 32.”
Millions of Black Voters Are Being Purged From Voter Rolls, Often Illegally: Report
Millions of Black Voters Are Being Purged From Voter Rolls, Often Illegally: Report
Residents cast their votes at a polling place on November 4, 2014, near Ferguson, Mo. Photo: Scott Olson (Getty Images)
As the end of Barack Obama’s presidency grew closer, election officials began preparing for the next election. Instead of strengthening the security of voting machines and making voting more accessible to citizens, states did the exact opposite. But they didn’t just make it harder to vote. For hundreds of thousands of registered, eligible voters across the nation, they made it impossible.
Voter Purges (pdf), a new report by the Brennan Center, highlights the systematic purging of voters from rolls by state and local officials around the country. These are not random, isolated cases. It is a methodical effort that disproportionately affects minority voters. Even worse, no one seems to care.
In 1993, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) which was an attempt to make registering to vote easier by offering driver license applicants the opportunity to register to vote. The law also prevented states from purging voters unless they met certain requirements.
But the Brennan report highlights how states have skirted the law and purged voters without punishment. And after the Supreme Court dismantled the requirements for voter pre-clearance with the Shelby v. Holder ruling, states with histories of voter discrimination no longer required federal pre-clearance before purging rolls.
Between 2014 and 2016, 16 million registered voters were removed from state rolls, 33 percent more than were moved between 2006 and 2008. For the election of 2012 and 2016, the Brennan Center estimates that two million fewer voters would have been purged if those states had to apply by the provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
Some of the egregious highlights of the report include:
- In June 2016, the Arkansas secretary of state gave a list of 7,700 names to county clerks to be removed from the rolls because of supposed felony convictions. That list included people who had never been convicted of a felony and formerly convicted persons whose voting rights had been restored.
- In 2013, Virginia deleted 39,000 names from its voting roster. In some counties, the mistakes on the list were as high as 17 percent.
- A federal court halted a purge after Hurricane Katrina after justices found that one-third of the purged names came from a majority black parish in of New Orleans.
- After the Shelby v. Holder decision, Texas purged 363,000 more voters than it did the election cycle before the case. Georgia purged 1.5 million more voters.
- Alabama, Indiana and Maine have illegally instituted the widely ridiculed Crosscheck system (on which Charles D. Ellison previously reported on for The Root) that purges voters without federally-mandated notification.
- In 1986, one Louisiana official remarked that a voter purge effort “could really keep the black vote down considerably.”
- Instead of checking out inequities, Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice has been urging states to do more purging.
Almost every type of voter purge disproportionately affects black voters and voters of color. Some states purge rolls based solely on names but non-whites are more likely to have the same names. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 16.3 percent of Hispanic people and 13 percent of black people have one of the 10 most common surnames, compared to 4.5 percent of white people.
Black and Hispanic voters are more likely to move, often in the same jurisdiction, but voter purges based on address eliminate them from voting. Officials also use “voter caging” which intentionally sends mail to verify addresses in a format that cannot be forwarded, leading to the disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.
African Americans are also more likely to have felony convictions, and elderly and minority voters are more likely to be incapacitated, all reasons for which someone can be purged from a voter roll.
Almost every study ever done on this issue shows that in-person voter fraud is almost nonexistent. Instead, these purges are intentional efforts to restrict voting rights.
Some of the easily-implementable recommendations to rectify this travesty include:
- Public notifications of impending voter purges.
- Making purge lists available to the public, including at polling places.
- Accepting provisional ballots from purged voters.
- Universal voter registration forms and rules.
- Stop using failure to vote as a reason to purge voters.
All of these policies seem like they would be universally-accepted fixes for a flaw in our democracy.
But then again, not having a Russian agent for a President seems like a smart thing too. How’s that working out?
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America’s 1.5 million missing [B]black men is nothing short of genocide ::: theGrio
America’s 1.5 million missing [B]black men is nothing short of genocide
Protestors participate in a vigil for Freddie Gray down the street from the Baltimore Police Department’s Western District police station, April 21, 2015, in Baltimore, Maryland. Gray, 25, died from spinal injuries on April 19, one week after being taken into police custody. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Where have all the brothers gone?
The numbers are staggering.
According to a report in The New York Times, black women between the ages of 25 and 54 outnumber black men by 1.5 million, based on an analysis of data from the 2010 U.S. Census. There were 7.046 black men of that age group not incarcerated, to 8.503 black women.
To put it another way, for every 100 black women, there are 83 black men. This is not the case in white America, where for every 100 women, there are 99 men, almost complete parity.
What that means, effectively, is that black men have disappeared. This reality lends credence to the idea that black men are an endangered species — not just symbolically or rhetorically, but based on the hard numbers.
Let’s explore this a little more. The Times estimated that more than a third of that 1.5 million gap — or 580,000 — is missing due to prison. With about 625,000 black men of prime age incarcerated and 45,000 black women also in prison, you get a discrepancy of 580,000. This is due, of course, to the staggeringly high incarceration rate of black men, which is higher than any other group, in the nation a quarter of the world’s prisoners, and the most prisoners in the world.
Putting this in perspective, in the 25-54 age range, 1 in 12 black men is in prison. However, only 1 in 60 nonblack men is in prison. Meanwhile, 1 in 200 black women and 1 in 500 nonblack women is behind bars.
Of the remaining 900,000, it was estimated that somewhere between 300,000 and 700,000 are due to mortality, early death. After all, homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men, who also die from heart disease, respiratory disease and accidents more than the rest of the nation.
The place in America with the lowest rate of black men is, believe it or not, Ferguson, Missouri, with 37.5 percent. New York is the city with the most missing black men (118,000), followed by Chicago (45,000), Philly (36,000) Detroit (21,000) and Memphis (19,000).
So what does this all mean? What struck me is that this is not a fluke, nor accidental, nor by chance. But rather, we can point to specific policies that have made black men disappear. First, I decided to look up the definition of the word genocide. The United Nations Genocide Convention defines genocide as the following:
ARTICLE II: IN THE PRESENT CONVENTION, GENOCIDE MEANS ANY OF THE FOLLOWING ACTS COMMITTED WITH INTENT TO DESTROY, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, A NATIONAL, ETHNICAL, RACIAL OR RELIGIOUS GROUP, AS SUCH:
(A) KILLING MEMBERS OF THE GROUP;
(B) CAUSING SERIOUS BODILY OR MENTAL HARM TO MEMBERS OF THE GROUP;
(C) DELIBERATELY INFLICTING ON THE GROUP CONDITIONS OF LIFE CALCULATED TO BRING ABOUT ITS PHYSICAL DESTRUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART;
(D) IMPOSING MEASURES INTENDED TO PREVENT BIRTHS WITHIN THE GROUP;
(E) FORCIBLY TRANSFERRING CHILDREN OF THE GROUP TO ANOTHER GROUP.
When society reinforces the notion that black men are a threat, then sets in motion laws and policies to address and ultimately eliminate that threat, is it any wonder that the brothers are missing? If the disappearing of black men is not genocide, then what should we call it?
Assessing the conditions in which black men are placed, and our historical role in society as the official national scapegoat, perennial boogeyman and monster, should we really be surprised we have disappeared? Society always believed that black men were to be fearedand loathed, devalued and disregarded. This mindset has been reinforced in the culture, in the media, and in the laws. During slavery, black men were perceived as a threat to the master’s house, criminalized based on the fear they would stage an uprising, burn down the plantation and, of course, rape the white women.
The war on drugs has been a war on black America, in which the justice system targets black men, locks them up and throws away the key. Although whites and blacks use drugs at similar rates, young men of color are racially profiled, harassed and brutalized through stop-and-frisk policies and arrested at much higher rates for drug possession. And the black incarceration rate is ten times that of whites, according to Human Rights Watch. Families and communities have been decimated by this war, and a generation lost.
From an early age, black children, and particularly black and brown boys, are dehumanized and criminalized and perceived as much older than their actual age. Funneled through a school-to-prison pipeline, many are provided an inferior education and unequal job opportunities — on purpose. And yet, in the land of 300 million guns, while the most vulnerable young black men and boys may not have access to a nourishing meal, education or job — or the ballot, for that matter — there never is a shortage of bullets for black bodies, it seems, and the black community is not a weapons manufacturer.
Further, we must not ignore the toll that racism plays on the black psyche, and on black health. As Billi Gordon, PhD wrote in Psychology Today, racism is causing a silent black genocide: “Stress acts first, and foremost, on the cardiovascular system. Hence, it is reasonable to suspect the pathophysiology of race-based stress as an antecedent to elevated heart disease in Black America.” Gordon also touched on the inherent sources of stress in the black community, including the numbers of black men in prison versus college, disintegrating support structures for black families, and the fact that the life expectancy of black men is seven years lower than anyone else.
In a land that advocates throwing away black men — in the streets, behind bars, and in the execution chamber — we now know the policy is a success, as the numbers show. The question is: how will society address this? This is not the past; this is happening now. Perhaps the idea of reparations does not sound so far-fetched.
Follow David A. Love on Twitter at @davidalove
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OCG note: Black when speaking of a group of people who share cultural and historical background and lineage is a Proper noun and should be spelled with a capital “B”. black is a noun which describes a color. Things journalist should know. Example:
- A regular noun or generic noun might be that of a category of animal such as dog, cat, or horse. …
- Individual species within the categories such as German Shepherd, Abyssinian, or Lipizzaner would be capitalized because they are proper nouns.