BlackLivesMatter…On a Stanford University Application

This kid is hot, and is shaping up to possibly be a leader in the future…

Meet the Muslim teen who repeated #BlackLivesMatter on his Stanford application and got in

When Ziad Ahmed was asked “What matters to you, and why?” on his Stanford University application, only one thing came to mind: #BlackLivesMatter.

So for his answer, Ahmed — who is a senior at Princeton Day School in Princeton, New Jersey — wrote #BlackLivesMatter exactly 100 times. The risky decision paid off. On Friday, Ahmed received his acceptance letter from Stanford.

“I was actually stunned when I opened the update and saw that I was admitted,” Ahmed said in an email. “I didn’t think I would get admitted to Stanford at all, but it’s quite refreshing to see that they view my unapologetic activism as an asset rather than a liability.”

On Saturday, Ahmed posted his answer and acceptance letter on Twitter with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. The tweet now has over 700 retweets and over 2,000 likes. It has also been retweeted by members of Campaign Zero, a police reform campaign, and some of its founders, Brittany Packnett and Samuel Sinyangwe.

“My unapologetic progressivism is a central part of my identity, and I wanted that to be represented adequately in my application,” Ahmed said.

Ahmed said his Islamic faith and his commitment to justice is intertwined. He believes he wouldn’t be practicing his religion correctly if he turned a blind eye to the injustices the black community faces on a daily basis.

“To me, to be Muslim is to be a BLM ally, and I honestly can’t imagine it being any other way for me,” Ahmed said. “Furthermore, it’s critical to realize that one-fourth to one-third of the Muslim community in America are black … and to separate justice for Muslims from justices for the black community is to erase the realities of the plurality of our community.”

Ahmed said as an ally of the black community, he felt it was his duty to make a statement and speak up against the injustices he witnesses. But while he does consider himself as an activist first, he emphasizes that it’s not his place to speak on behalf of the black community.

“As an ally of the black community though, it is my duty to speak up in regards to the injustice, and while this was not a form of ‘activism‘ as it was simply an answer in a college application,” he said. “I wanted to make a statement.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise, though, that Stanford wanted Ahmed among its class of 2021. The Bangladeshi-American teen has already been making impressive waves in his activism work. At just 18 years old, Ahmed has already been invited to the White House Iftar dinner and recognized as an Muslim-American change-maker under the Obama administration.

In 2016, he interned and worked for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton‘s presidential campaign after leading Martin O’Malley’s youth presidential campaign. In November 2015, Ahmed gave a TedxTalk in Panama City, Panama, discussing the perils and impact of stereotypes as a young Muslim teen.

 

“AllLivesMatter” = White Supremacy

Really good article from over at “The Root”. I agree with most, if not all of what the author is saying. AllLivesMatter is nothing more than a diversion, and a denial of the basic human right of black folks to seek redress for a system of racial privilege which catastrophically affects their lives. It is an extension of Jim Crow, in that it denies the very existence of a Criminal Justice System which has ripped any possibility of the American Dream from the poor – and serves as a constant reminder to the rest of the black community of their tenuous position in American Society. A mechanism of political and citizenship disenfranchisement, built upon the foundation…

That All Lives do not matter.

Where I tend to wander into question is the statement “Racism is “a polymorphous agent of death.” as expressed by Leonard Harris. The goal of racism is the preservation of a system of privileges and outcomes for the majority group. It’s result may be death, especially in terms of it’s enforcement upon the body Minority – but death is neither necessary or quintessential to its goal. The use of power as a mechanism to enforce a system of racism, where the minority group has the ability and cohesion to reject racism and attack it’s benefit to the majority group, is violence and death. As such, the use of power to enforce a racist system isn’t “racism” – it is business as usual in many human endeavors – in this writer’s humble view. The goal isn’t elimination – the goal is subjugation and incorporation into the economic and political gestalt as a resource.

If you eliminate the Minority Group, as HItler and others of his ilk attempted to do – then in a system of racism and privilege another group needs take it’s place. Which is the very reason poor whites support political racism on the part of the Republican Party.

Do the Math on #AllLivesMatter and It Equals White Supremacy

The unfortunate truth is that the hashtag #AllLivesMatter is a reaffirmation of white supremacy.

Let me be clear here. Yes, all language is contextual, and at face value, this particular hashtag, #AllLivesMatter, seems to be an affirmation of humanity. However, let us not be fooled into reading the word “all” as in “everyone.” We are reminded that the Founding Fathers used the same language of humanity. We do, indeed, “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” In the language of U.S. politics, “all” has never meant everyone. #SomeLivesMatter.

More important, #AllLivesMatter does not have an organic origin. If the hashtag began on its own—organically—it might be possible to rally around its humanist potential. But this is not the case here. Contextually speaking, #AllLivesMatter is a rejoinder. It is a retort. It originates in direct response to the creation of the hashtag and movement #BlackLivesMatter. And it is here that we find its promotion of white supremacy.

For the past couple of years, I have given talks and presentations with a general title of “Diversity Kills.” This “diversity kills” theory is a three-part argument. No. 1, “diversity” has become a shortened pseudonym for “racial diversity,” and the way that institutions and universities practice “diversity” has become a new form of racism (i.e., organizations may want a face for the poster but have few plans to become more inclusive of nondominant cultures). Diversity becomes tokenized. Diversity equals racism.

No. 2, and most important to this conversation, is my definition of racism. Racism is “a polymorphous agent of death.” Racism is “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” This is to say that at the end of racism is death. Racism is a wanton disregard for humanity and life. Raced bodies are more likely to have shortened life expectancies, higher asthma rates, closer proximity to contaminations, and less access to health care, quality food and water. In addition, as Frank Wilderson once put it, raced bodies also seem to “magnetize bullets” (pdf). At the end of it all, it means inessential dying and gratuitous mortalities. Racism equals death.

The third, and last, part of the argument involves doing the math. If diversity equals racism, and racism equals death, then diversity equals death. Or … diversity kills. This is meant to be both metaphorical and literal—e.g., hypertension, stress, anxiety and hostile work environments. Diversity takes years off the lives of raced bodies. Diversity kills.

It is the racism-equals-death equation that gives the #BlackLivesMatter movement its resonance. #BlackLivesMatter has become significant to the new organizing movement precisely because it clearly and crisply identifies the truth of the racism-equals-death equation. As oppressed people speak back to and challenge white supremacy, there is a dire need for a mantra that counters anti-black racism … counters death … i.e., #BlackLivesMatter.

The response of #AllLivesMatter is an attempt to shift our focus away from the value of black lives. It is an effort to divert our attention away from the end result of racism: the death of black, brown and raced bodies. #AllLivesMatter is not a life-valuing statement. As Talib Kweli recently told an audience, “All lives will matter when Black Lives matter.” Replacing “black” with “all” is an attempt to respond to and ultimately replace (that is, silence) #BlackLivesMatter. It is a statement of disregard. It’s a denial of the reality that racism equals death. And the unfortunate truth is that this is the work of white supremacy.

Sean Eversley Bradwell is an assistant professor at Ithaca College. He is coordinator of the minor in African-Diaspora studies at Ithaca’s Center for the Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity and has research and teaching interests in educational policy, race theory and hip-hop culture.

 

Officers Involved In Freddy Gray Death to Be Tried

Earlier today a judge rejected a motion by the defense to dismiss the case against the 6 Officers involved in Freddy Gray’s death. Following that – a ruling on how the trial(s) would be conducted…

Trying the officers separately, will be a longer process, but will establish individual culpability.

Baltimore Officers To Be Tried Separately Over Freddie Gray Death

It’s “not in the interest of justice” to try them together, a judge ruled.

A judge has ruled that all six Baltimore police officers charged in connection with Freddie Gray’s death will be tried separately.

Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry Williams denied the state’s motions to try three of the officers as a group. He said evidence against any of the three is not mutually admissible and “not in the interest of justice.”

Gray, a 25-year-old black man, died a week after sustaining injuries following his arrest on April 12.

His death sparked riots and unrest in Baltimore for days following his funeral.

The trial for all six officers was initially set for Oct. 13. Dates for the new trials have not yet been set.

 

Marc Lamont Hill vs Sheriff David Clarke

Hill seem that he doesn’t recognize that with bloviators like Clarke – there is no need to be polite.Clarke is not for real, he is a hired Lawn Jockey –  and as such shouldn’t be accorded the respect of an intelligent or genuine person of differing opinion. Got this tube from a conservative racist type on Youtube – so you will have to excuse the tube title.

 

Buy a confederate Flag…From a Black Guy!

Too funny!

 

Hands Up! Shot…Again

This one in San Antonio, and the victim appears to be a white man. While conservative racists don’t want to admit it, BlackLivesMatter might also save them.

Police in San Antonio fatally shot man with hands up, unaware they were being filmed

This past Friday, after a domestic dispute, police were called to a San Antonio home. When they arrived there, the police claim they confronted the man who was involved in the dispute, but that he resisted arrest.

We have no idea if this really happened, but what we do see is that same man, in his own front yard, peacefully surrendering to police with his hands up in the air. This much is a fact. From all indications, he appears to be unarmed, motionless, and nonviolent when, suddenly, he is shot and killed by county police.

That normally would’ve been case closed. The police would’ve told us that this man rushed them, or went for their gun, or something else, but a young black college student who heard the disturbance decided he had to film it.

“I was watching and wondering, what was going on, but I couldn’t figure it out. I was like, with the things going on in the world, like different type of shootings with cops and different things like that, so I was like, ‘Well, maybe I can catch something with my camera,'” Thomas said.
The video shows the deputies follow the man to the edge of the driveway.

“He kind of just put his hands in the air. After he put his hands in the air, they shot him,” Thomas said.

In other words, this man was executed. The video below, which stops the second before the actual shooting, is worth watching to give you the visual context for what happened.
In another report, released before police knew the video existed, they claimed the man had a knife. If he did, it’s hard to see it in this video and their early account doesn’t really match what we see below.

These officers need to be fired and prosecuted immediately.

 

Faux News Attacks BLM With Favorite Tom

Once question…Why do all the Uncle Toms appearing on Faux News look like they are severely constipated? Guy  looks like he has a baseball bat up his rear end!

 

Fox News declares #BlackLivesMatter a “murder movement”

On “Fox & Friends” Monday morning, co-host Brian Kilmeade spoke to Milwaukee County Sheriff and let’s-be-honest-de-facto-Fox News contributor David Clarke about the murder of Texas Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Goforth, which Clarke attributed to the Obama administration’s ongoing “war on police.”

Clarke is no fan of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, having testified before Congress in May of this year that the group was part of a “wrecking ball” effort to “kick white America in the teeth,” but even so, it was surprising that Fox News chose to use a chryon reading “‘Murder’ Movement” when it brought him on to speak about the death of Deputy Goforth.

No connection between the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the suspected gunman, Shannon Miles, has been established, but that didn’t stop Sheriff Clarke from railing against black activists and anyone else who doesn’t offer unadulterated support to members of law enforcement.

“Let me start here,” he said, “the headline is ‘Black man shoots white defenseless police officer.’ I get sick and tired of seeing it the other way around when an officer defends his life. They always point out that it’s a white officer shooting an unarmed black suspect.”

Lest you believe Clarke capable of rising about the cacophony of anti-Obama condemnations emanating from Fox News, by “they” Sheriff Clarke clearly meant a conspiracy that goes all the way to the very top.

“President Obama has breathed life into this ugly movement,” he said, “and it is time now for good law-abiding Americans to rise up like they did around that Chevron station — an outpouring — but it can’t just be symbolic. We now have to counter this slime, this filth coming out of these cop-haters.”

Kilmeade offered that all President Obama did was “shed light” on law enforcement’s problematic relationship with the black community, but Sheriff Clarke would have none of it.

“That’s a lie,” he said. “If there is anything that needs to be straightened out in this country, it is the subculture that has risen out of the underclass in the American ghetto. Fix the ghetto and you’ll see a lesser need for assertive police officers, or policing in these areas, and then you’ll see less confrontation. Stop trying to fix the police. Fix the ghetto.”

First Sheriff David Clark is the only black policeman in a 95% white community in the Milwaukee suburbs – Milwaukee – which is the most segregated city in America.If the Sheriff was really concerned about the black community…Why isn’t he working in East Milwaukee?

Second, and even more important – we don’t know yet why the accused, Shannon Miles killed the officer in Harris County, Texas. The accused’s method would indicate that he specifically targeted this Sheriff for some personal reason. It fits the profile of a straight up revenge killing.

Lastly, the kickback sounds familiar to those who were alive during the CiviL Rights Movement, where the local Segregationist racist Sheriff would always complain about “Outside agitators” and “Civil Rights Troublemakers”…Not sure how this is supposed to help the situation.

Sounds a lot like another Sheriff in another time…

 

24 Year Old Man Dies in Jail after Being Held 4 Months for Theft of Candy Bar

A young man, with mental health issues, died after being jailed nearly 4 months for shoplifting $5 worth of candy bars and a Soda – despite being identified as a Mental Health Patient.

Since Raygun shut down all the public Mental Health Hospitals, the jails have increasingly become the sole source of treatment for poor victims. The results have been catastrophic.

Young black man jailed since April for alleged $5 theft found dead in cell

A young black man arrested by police in Portsmouth, Virginia, on the same day that one of the city’s officers fatally shot an unarmed black 18-year-old, has been found dead in jail after spending almost four months behind bars without bail for stealing groceries worth $5.

Jamycheal Mitchell, who had mental health problems, was discovered lying on the floor of his cell by guards early last Wednesday, according to authorities. While his body is still awaiting an autopsy, senior prison officials said his death was not being treated as suspicious.

“As of right now it is deemed ‘natural causes’,” Natasha Perry, the master jail officer at the Hampton Roads regional jail in Portsmouth, said of his death in an interview. Perry said there were no obvious outward signs of injury to the 24-year-old’s body. Portsmouth police are looking into the death.

Mitchell’s family said they believed he starved to death after refusing meals and medication at the jail, where he was being held on misdemeanour charges of petty larceny and trespassing. A clerk at Portsmouth district court said Mitchell was accused of stealing a bottle of Mountain Dew, a Snickers bar and a Zebra Cake worth a total of $5 from a 7-Eleven.

“His body failed,” said Roxanne Adams, Mitchell’s aunt. “It is extraordinary. The person I saw deceased was not even the same person.” Adams, who is a registered nurse, said Mitchell had practically no muscle mass left by the time of his death.

A few hours after Mitchell was arrested on 22 April by Portsmouth police officer L Schaefer for the alleged theft, William Chapman was shot dead by officer Stephen Rankin outside a Walmart superstore about 2.5 miles away in the same city. State prosecutor Stephanie Morales said on Thursday she would pursue criminal charges over Chapman’s death.

Except for a brief item stating that an inmate had been found dead, the story of Mitchell’s death has not been covered by local media in Virginia, and is reported for the first time here.

Adams said in an interview that her nephew had bipolar disorder and schizophrenia for about five years. Nicknamed Weezy, he lived with his mother Sonia and had been unable to hold down work. “He just chain-smoked and made people laugh,” said Adams. “He never did anything serious, never harmed anybody.”

Officials said that after his arrest, Mitchell was taken to Portsmouth city jail, where he stayed for almost three weeks before being transferred across the city to the regional jail on 11 May.

Ten days after that, the court clerk said, Judge Morton Whitlow ruled Mitchell was not competent to stand trial and ordered that he be transferred to Eastern State hospital, a state-run mental health facility in Williamsburg, for treatment.

The clerk said that typically in such cases “we do an order to restore the defendant to competence, send it to the hospital, and when the hospital has a bed, we do a transportation order, and he’s taken to the hospital.” Whitlow reiterated the order on 31 July and was due to review the case again on 4 September, according to the clerk.

But the hospital said it had no vacancy and the 24-year-old was therefore detained in jail until his death on 19 August, according to Adams, Mitchell’s aunt, who said she had tried to assist the hospitalisation process herself but was left frustrated.

“He was just deteriorating so fast,” she said. “I kept calling the jail, but they said they couldn’t transfer him because there were no available beds. So I called Eastern State, too, and people there said they didn’t know anything about the request or not having bed availability.”

When asked which state agency was ultimately responsible for ensuring Mitchell was transferred to the hospital, the court clerk said: “It’s hard to tell who’s responsible for it.”

Officials from the court, the police department and the jail could not explain why Mitchell was not given the opportunity to be released on bail.

Mitchell previously spent four months in the jail from April 2010, also on charges of petty larceny and trespassing, before being ordered released by the courts, according to Perry, the prison official.

She said Mitchell returned to the jail in January 2012, again on a petty larceny charge, before being released in May 2012 having spent a month in a state hospital…More...

 

Pulled Over for Looking at a Cop

Another over-the-top Police stop of a black man for DWB in Dayton. This comes on top of news of a Harris County, Texas Officer being shot execution style at a gas station – and what seems to be a rise in violence against Police in general. Hard to tell at this point if there is any correlation as the shooters have been both black and white. But as a person who has gone through the DWB routine, living in a high end majority white neighborhood for over 30 years – Once being stopped because the Dealer installed tags on my expensive car had a clear plastic cover (just as the hundreds of other cars sold by the local dealer in that town)…I can certainly agree with John Felton’s frustration

This Black Driver’s Mistake Was Looking a Police Officer in the Eye

John Felton was driving to his brother’s house in Dayton, Ohio, on a recent night when he noticed a police car tailing him. Not wanting to give the officer any excuse to pull him over, Felton, who is black and was visiting Dayton from Michigan, tried to drive extra carefully. But the effort was insufficient: Soon after making a turn, Felton was forced to stop his car and show the officer his driver’s license.

It turned out Felton had not switched on his turn signal at the exact right moment; as you can see from the video Felton made of the encounter and sent to talk show host David Pakman, the white officer told him he had failed to signal within 100 feet of making his turn.

But why, Felton wanted to know, had the officer decided to follow him in the first place? That’s when the stop went from being an ordinary illustration of racial profiling to an extraordinary one.

“You made direct eye contact with me and held onto it when I was passing you,” the officer told Fenton. The implication was that Fenton had marked himself as a suspicious character simply by looking at the officer.

Update, Aug. 28, 5:10 p.m.: The city of Dayton put out a statement about the incident, acknowledging that “making direct eye contact with an officer is not a basis for a traffic stop.” The statement implies—but doesn’t say outright—that in pulling Felton over for not signaling within 100 feet of a turn, the officer was complying with a Dayton police initiative called “Safe Communities Through Aggressive Traffic Enforcement,” aimed at reducing traffic-related fatalities. The statement also says that the police department “is in contact with Mr. Felton,” and that he “has agreed to a conversation with the officer, facilitated by the Dayton Mediation Center” that will “allow Mr. Felton and the Officer to discuss the specifics of the incident.”

For those who have been following the past year in race relations between police officers and black people, that will sound familiar: Making eye contact with cops was also what set off a chase in Baltimore that ended with Freddie Gray sustaining fatal injuries in the back of a van.…More…

 

Megan Kelly vs Cornel West

Cornell West tries to give an education…Unfortunately being of Faux News, Megan has to pander to the resident Uncle Tom…

 

 

Uncle Ben Carson… Rebuttal

Uncle Ben decided to launch a broadside at the Black Community again in a piece for USA Today entitled Ben Carson: #BlackLivesMatter misfire. In the piece, Carson offers a number of “solutions” to the problem he sees a relevant to the “misdirected” black community…

Let’s have some fun batting that around. Dr Carson in black….My response in blue.

Let’s head down to the board of education. Teaching is a tough job and thank God there was a teacher who convinced me that I was not dumb, but our schools are failing and we have no power to abandon them. The actions of rogue police officers take black lives one at a time. Our public school system has destroyed black lives not in the ones and twos, but in whole generations.

The schools don’t teach and our children don’t learn. Too many public schools are controlled by teachers unions focused more on the convenience and compensation of adults rather than the education of children who started out far behind. Their failures don’t kill as quickly, but they do kill as surely as a bullet.

To begin with, the U.S. public school system is hardly the abysmal failure portrayed in the conventional conservative wisdom (yes, I know that is an oxymoron). The international comparative data is skewed, by vocational tracking in Europe (all American high school students are sometimes compared to select Gymnasium and Lycee students in Germany and France) or geography (the entire U.S. is compared to the Shanghai metro area, rather than to all of China — the French educational system would look pretty bad, if it were compared in its entirety to Westchester County, New York). Further, most of the right wing analysis of “failure” of inner city schools misses 3 points –

1. Comparing inner city poor schools to suburban middle class or wealthy districts is inherently going to result in those poor schools “failing”. A more apt comparison would be to compare those inner city schools to other equally poor rural areas such as Oswego County, Kentucky – which is 99% white, 95% Republican, and 95% of the residents are on Food Stamps.Indeed, the lowest “performing” schools in America aren’t in the inner city – they are in the very red, Republican South.
2. The Republican solution has been (as usual) to privatize schools systems through Charter Schools. The ugly fact is that these Charter schools have not only been systemic failures in terms o survival, but when they are subjected to the same testing regimen and measuring stick as the Schools they supposedly are replacing – the perform worse. When exactly are Dr Carson, and his fellow white conservative backers going to take responsibility for the tens of thousands of young black lives their misguided racism has ruined?
3. Those inner-city schools do not educate a majority of black kids. Indeed, they don’t even educate a significant minority. Only about 7% of the total black population in the US still lives in urbanized ghettos. Now – while we might dismiss the ignorance or racism of a white conservative in not really understanding what the black community is, or it’s dynamics…Dr Carson is supposed to be an educated man and the wherewithal to correct that racist stereotype is well within anyone’s capabilities who cares to look..

 

Let’s confront the entertainment industry that lines its pockets by glamorizing a life where black men are thugs and our women are trash. Let’s tell them we plan to start talking with our wallets.

It is time for them to pick on someone else because we have had enough. Demeaning women is not art, and it shouldn’t be profitable. Neither is glorifying violence and equating prison time with authenticity. Straight Outta Compton, #1 in movie theaters, is just the latest example. You only have to watch the trailers.

A day late and a dollar short. There already is a substantive movement to clean up some of the entertainment industry. There is a fairly strong kickback against members of that industry who have promoted the misogynistic, violent images. But you have to ask the question – why is it only black musicians or artists  who are guilty? No white musicians or artists promote the same imagery? Perhaps Dr Carson need listen to his fellow candidate Donald Trump’s comments about Megan Kelly. And I wasn’t aware Donald Trump was “passing”. We live in a society where white college fraternities believe it is OK to rape and objectify girls…But I don’t see anyone spouting that it is a “problem with the white community”. Lastly – who buys that Hip-Hop music? 80% is bought by white kids.

Let’s go down to city hall. Living behind a door with three deadbolts is not living in freedom. Being too scared to walk around your block at night is not the pursuit of happiness we were all promised.

I know Dr Carson doesn’t get out much beyond the bubble of white racist Republicans who fawn over his absolution… But BLM and other black organizations are taking on City Hall every day. Moral Mondays ring a bell? Moral Mondays Georgia? Ferguson, Mo?

Let’s go over to the crack house. We need to tear it down. Profiting from selling poison to our children and destroying lives must not be the ambition of our children. These monuments to our destruction deserve our active scorn not our silent acceptance.

“Crack House”?  How so very …90’s. Hate to be the first to tell you Dr – but the current “epidemics” are Meth…And Heroin. And the folks being affected are in large majority white and suburban or rural. This is the sort of racist stupidity that is just jaw-dropping.

We should go to Washington. For decades they have fought the “War . on Poverty.” Poverty won. We lost.

Over 19 trillion dollars has been wasted, but can anyone identify a single battle won as a result? We certainly have not helped the poor “lift themselves out of the ruts of poverty” as Lyndon Johnson promised — far from it. These programs have been a great American failure.

In 1960, the black poverty rate was 65%. Under Bill Clinton hat sunk to under 20%, and now hovers in the 20-25% range. Uncle Ben has been drinking that funny Kool-Aid again. And of the “purported” $19 Trillion number hawked by conservatives – 80% of that was poured into The Great White Ghetto – and that isn’t even talking about other majority poor white areas of the country. The idea that all this money was poured into the black community is the typical racist flim-flam of the racist right. Below is a simple map of the areas with the highest concentration of people on Food Stamps and “Welfare”.

The “Solid South”…Indeed.

We should have a talk with the Democratic Party.  Let’s tell them, we don’t want to be clothed, fed and housed. We want honor and dignity.

We don’t want a plan to give us public housing in nice neighborhoods. We want an end to excuses for schools that leave us without the means to buy our own houses where we choose to live. We want the skills needed to compete, not a consolation prize of Section 8, Food Stamps and a lifetime of government paperwork.

Finally, we need to go over to the Republican Party. We need to tell them they have ignored us for too long. They need to invite us in and listen to us. We need to communicate and find a different way.

There are many things to be angry about when you are consumed by hopelessness. Bernie Sanders isn’t one of them.

Two simple answers to that in graphic form.

This is a county by county map of percentage of poverty and welfare participation –

County by County Food Stamp Enrollment shows most Welfare recipients live in the “Red Zone”

SNAP Enrollment Rate (%)

• 0-4
• 5-9
• 10-14
• 15-19
• 20-24
• 25-29
• 30+

Lastly…If conservatism worked – wouldn’t the Red States be richer?

I mean….Just sayin’…

 

 

Twisted – Freddy Gray and MLK

 

Yeah…I got a problem with this. Putting Freddy Gray, a victim of out of control police violence in Baltimore next to Martin Luther King seems a bit of appropriation that just doesn’t belong here. Martin developed a philosophy, moved a nation with his words, and fought against the forces of Jim Crow oppression, and ultimately gave his life. He stood up, knowing exactly the extent to which racist forces in America would go, suffering imprisonment and beatings for the simple act of non-violent resistance, and ultimately being murdered. Gray was a street kid and a drug dealer. Which doesn’t make his murder right at the hands of Baltimore Cops…But he “ain’t no hero” in terms of what he may or may not have accomplished while alive. He is a small part of a black community which suffers in small part due to his illicit acts.

Injustice in this case was a purely personal event.

Seems folks worry more about the racial background of a few folks working to end this type of injustice…Than the fact those folks are working for the betterment of the entire American community.

And no – I am not buying into the black-on-black crime racist meme – because all crime in a largely segregated America is intra-racial. Crime is more a statement of opportunity, than any wall painted large of cultural or racial dysfunction. The most dangerous thing for the BlackLivesMatter movement is an identification with the victim, instead of a disgust and opposition to the crime, and it ever happening again. I don’t think (and I hope) that is any secret to the folks at BlackLivesMatter.

3 year old Mckenzie Elliot, whose murderer has yet to be brought to justice.

 

“He shouldn’t be up there with Martin Luther King”: A mural of Freddie Gray with the civil rights leader provokes disgust, on my ride-along with the Baltimore Police

The streets are quiet tonight in West Baltimore. I’m in the backseat of a car on a ride-along with two Baltimore City police officers in late May, nearly a month after the riots following the death of Freddie Gray. There have been 26 murders this month to date, a number that will leapfrog to 43 before May draws to a close.

The media is calling this a “surge in violence” and touting theories to account for the spike, everything from officer apathy to a plethora of looted prescription drugs flooding the market and causing gang violence, but tonight the streets of West Baltimore are largely deserted. We see one group of young men hanging on a corner and a few kids pedaling around on bikes, but otherwise it’s eerily quiet.

I’ve come on this ride-along because I want to see for myself what’s happening on the streets in the wake of the riots. Many of stories told by the media have sympathized either with the protesters or with the police, thus setting up an “us versus them” dynamic that feels reductive.

I don’t buy into this good guy/bad guy type of narrative. I don’t believe that the majority of the rioters were bad people or that the majority of police officers are bloodthirsty brutes. What I believe is that most of the rioters were good people engaging in bad behavior and that most of the police are good officers doing the best they can while working in deeply flawed system, a system that revolves around the “War on Drugs,” a system that targets poor, black neighborhoods.

We ride by the burned-out CVS and the boarded-up buildings. We slow down next to the huge mural that has been painted on the side of a row house in Sandtown-Winchester, close to the spot where Freddie Gray was first arrested. Two chimney-like structures divide the mural into three panels. In the center is a huge painting of Freddie Gray’s face; on the left Martin Luther King Jr. is depicted marching with a group of protesters, and on the right, Freddie Gray’s family also marches.

We all stare at the mural in silence for a moment. It reminds me of the statue that towers outside of Baltimore’s Penn Station, which features two bisecting body profiles, one male and one female. Baltimoreans either love or hate this polarizing piece of art. Whenever I look at it, I both understand it and question it, which is the same way I felt when the riots occurred.

The riots made no sense to me and yet, they made perfect sense. For years, I’ve heard stories from young, black men about their experiences with the cops — young men who have been pulled over without cause, who have been illegally searched, who have been spoken to disrespectfully. Some have been physically assaulted.

I have also been witness to some of these acts on a handful of ride-alongs that I went on several years ago with the Baltimore Police Department (BPD). I went with the goal of writing about the fraying relationship between the BPD and the black community, but every time I tried to put pen to paper, the task felt impossibly complex.

On one of the ride-alongs, I watched a car full of young black men dressed in bright polo shirts and cocked ball caps get pulled over for a minor traffic infraction. The driver of the vehicle handed over his license and explained that he was a college student, and that he and his friends were on their way to meet some friends.

The young man was polite and respectful, but it was easy to see that getting pulled over like this was not a new experience for him. There was a lilting impatience in his voice, the slightest tinge of angry exasperation that he attempted to keep tucked away. After the young man answered a few questions, the officers let him off without issuing any sort of traffic citation.

I remember watching him drive off and wondering what he would do with the remnants of that anger that he’d kept so neatly tucked beneath those polite answers. I have long wondered where that young man and all the others like him put their anger over this kind of degradation.

But I stopped wondering on the day of the riots; when I saw the images of young people lobbing bricks, stomping on cars and looting stores. There, I thought, the anger is right there.

The riot was a release. A giant exhale on a long held breath that has been waiting for the proverbial arc of justice to bend toward it.

“He shouldn’t be up there with Martin Luther King,” one of the officers finally says of the Freddie Gray mural, a note of disgust in his voice.

These officers, one Caucasian, one Hispanic, knew Freddie Gray long before the media ever uttered his name. At the station where we started the night, there were photographs of Gray hanging on the wall. In the photos, he was surrounded by a posse of baby-faced young men who mugged for the camera. In one picture, Gray held up his middle finger. There were handwritten numbers above the head of each of the young men and below a list of names that corresponded with the numbers.

When these officers look at this larger-than-life mural with Gray in the center, they see a drug dealer next to the greatest civil rights leader of all time and they can’t seem to make sense of that.

“Put that little girl up there. McKenzie. Not him,” the officer says.

He is referring to 3-year-old McKenzie Elliot, who was killed in a drive-by shooting last August. “Why weren’t there riots for her? That, I would understand.”

McKenzie Elliot and Freddie Gray — the former was presumably killed by drug dealers (although nobody has been arrested despite the fact that the crime occurred in front of multiple witnesses), the latter indisputably died in police custody….More…

 

 

How the World Sees America’s Racial Issues

For the last two nights demonstrators have taken to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri on the 1 year anniversary of Mike Brown’s Murder.

This is what British Reporters saw, and what was on British News.

British reporter in Ferguson finds whites openly carrying rifles and peaceful blacks being arrested

Kylie Morris of Channel 4 in Britain visited Ferguson on Tuesday and tried to explain to the British people why white “Oath Keepers” were allowed to openly carry firearms on the street while peaceful black protesters were arrested.

“The men, calling themselves Oath Keepers, only added to the already simmering tensions,” a Channel 4 anchor noted before tossing to Morris for a live report from Ferguson.

Morris told her British audience that the commemoration of the one year anniversary of Michael Brown’s death had been interrupted by armed Oath Keepers, who claimed that they were there to protect businesses and conservative journalists.

“But certainly their presence, their state of wearing uniforms, military-type uniforms — some of them are ex-military, some of them are even serving police, we’re told,” she reported. “They were, you know, carrying weapons.”

Morris noted that black protesters faced pepper spray, arrests and other actions by riot police.

The Oath Keepers, however, “openly carry sidearms and semi-automatic weapons as is their right,” she said.

“You and people who look like you, white males, have the sovereignty to walk around with assault rifles,” one black protesters told a white Oath Keeper, “But we [black protesters] can’t even like stand out here and assemble peacefully and exercise our constitutional right to do so without being gassed, maced and arrested.”

“I don’t have a perspective,” the Oath Keeper replied flatly.

Morris said that she had a hard time understanding why police would arrest otherwise peaceful protesters.

“It’s hard to know how this keeps the peace, putting civil rights leaders in handcuffs, including the prominent philosopher Cornel West and Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson during a peaceful sit-in outside the federal court,” she remarked.

During an interview with Mckesson, she asked if the police appeared to be taking retribution on the protesters for all of the negative attention the Black Lives Matter movement had brought to the area.

“There is a long history of law enforcement targeting people who are fighting for their rights,” Mckesson told Morris. “The reality is that the status quo didn’t just happen overnight, the status quo [developed] over many years and people work hard to reinforce it, including the police.”

Morris noted that there was a “right-wing push back” against the Black Live Matter movement, which she said “feels more and more vociferous every day.”

“There are people whose bread and butter is sustaining racist oppressive systems like for-profit prisons,” Mckesson said. “The right’s response to us is a sign the movement is working.”

As for the Oathkeepers, Mckesson said that they were a reminder that law enforcement in Ferguson “police based on race.”

“If black people had come out with rifles like that, it would have been sheer pandemonium outside,” he added. “But white people, there was no response by the police. They left, they didn’t return.”

“And that’s real. Policing is racially coded in places like Missouri and places all over the country.”

 

 

Wilmore – Pop Tarts, Republican Debate, BlackLivesMatter

Answering the mind bending question – Is it possible to toast a Pop Tart in the time dedicated in the Republican Debate to race?

 

 

Bernie Sanders Gets Message…Black Lives Matter

Just a few days ago some folks claiming to be from BlackLivesMatter – Seattle disrupted a planned speech by Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in Seattle.

Bernie Sanders Adds Racial Justice Platform to Website, Says He’s “Disappointed” by Seattle Rally Interruption

The Bernie Sanders campaign website has revealed a new section devoted to racial justice a day after activists claiming to represent Black Lives Matter Seattle interrupted the candidate at a social security rally in Westlake Park. The racial justice link is now under the his campaign website’s “issues” tab.

Here’s what the Bernie Sanders issues tab looked like yesterday:

And here’s what it looked like today:

“We need a societal transformation to make it clear that black lives matter and racism cannot be accepted in a civilized country,” the new section reads. The website adds that input from the Black Lives Matter movement ought to help “reinvent” policing in America and help the federal government work toward a model police training program.

When asked if the website change came in response to yesterday’s interruption, Sanders’ communication director Michael Briggs said the new racial justice platform “was already in the works.” He added that it “consists mostly of information already on the website from a speech last month to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.”

“We must reform our criminal justice system,” Sanders said in his address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on July 25. “Black lives do matter. And we must value black lives.” He mentioned Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and Tamir Rice specifically.

On Saturday, Marissa Johnson, one of the activists claiming to represent Black Lives Matter Seattle by interrupting Sanders, said that she wanted Sanders to “take responsibility for his actions” at the July Netroots Nation conference, where Sanders was interrupted by Black Lives Matter activists. “Bernie, you were confronted at Netroots by black women who said black lives matter, and you have yet to apologize or put out a criminal justice reform package like Obama did,” Johnson said.

A week after the Netroots conference, Sanders laid out his vision for criminal justice reform in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference speech, naming community policing, a federal police training model, education and skills training for the incarcerated, and ending the incarceration of young people as initiatives that he believes need to be pursued.

Oh, My!