American Youth in the 21st Century
By Henry A. Giroux

Punishment and fear have replaced compassion and social responsibility as the most important modalities mediating the relationship of youth to the larger social order. Youth within the last two decades have come to be seen as a source of trouble rather than as a resource for investing in the future, and in the case of poor black and Hispanic youth are increasingly treated as either a disposable population, cannon fodder for barbaric wars abroad, or the source of most of society’s problems. Hence, young people now constitute a crisis that has less to do with improving the future than with denying it. As Larry Grossberg points out, “It has become common to think of kids as a threat to the existing social order and for kids to be blamed for the problems they experience. We slide from kids in trouble, kids have problems, and kids are threatened, to kids as trouble, kids as problems, and kids as threatening.” This was exemplified when the columnist Bob Herbert reported in the New York Times that “parts of New York City are like a police state for young men, women, and children who happen to be black or Hispanic. They are routinely stopped, searched, harassed, intimidated, humiliated and, in many cases, arrested for no good reason.” No longer “viewed as a privileged sign and embodiment of the future,” youth are now increasingly demonized by the popular media and derided by politicians looking for quick-fix solutions to crime and other social ills. While youth have always had to bear the misplaced fear and distrust of adults, how youth are represented, talked about, and treated has changed dramatically in the last two decades. 

Under the reign of neoliberal politics with its hyped-up social Darwinism and theater of cruelty, the popular demonization and “dangerousation” of the young now justifies responses to youth that were unthinkable 20 years ago, including criminalization and imprisonment, the prescription of psychotropic drugs, psychiatric confinement, and zero tolerance policies that model schools after prisons. School has become a model for a punishing society in which children who commit a rule violation as minor as a dress code infraction or slightly act out in class can be handcuffed, booked, and put in a jail cell. Racism, inequality, and poverty are on full display in the growing resegregation of public schools in the United States. Now more than ever, many schools either simply warehouse young black males or put them on the fast track to prison incarceration or a future of control under the criminal justice system. All across America, black and brown youth are being suspended or expelled at rates much higher than their white counterparts who commit similar behavioral infractions. For example, as Howard Witt writes in the Chicago Tribune, “In the average New Jersey public school, African-American students are almost 60 times as likely as white students to be expelled for serious disciplinary infractions. In Minnesota, black students are suspended 6 times as often as whites [and ] in Iowa, blacks make up just 5 percent of the statewide public school enrollment but account for 22 percent of the students who get suspended. . . . And on average across the nation, black students are suspended and expelled at nearly three times the rate of white students.” As schools become increasingly militarized, drug-sniffing dogs, metal detectors, and cameras have become common features in schools, and administrators appear more willing if not eager “to criminalize many school infractions, saddling tens of thousands of students with misdemeanor criminal records for offenses such as swearing[,] disrupting class,” or pushing another student. Trust and respect now give way to fear, disdain, and suspicion, creating an environment in which critical pedagogical practices wither, while pedagogies of surveillance and testing flourish.  If young people were once defined as part of the vocabulary of innocence and compassion, they are now largely understood through the discourse of fear, guilt, and punishment. 

Clearly, there is more at stake under the current regime of neoliberal politics than an attack on children largely characterized by “negative labels and characterizations of youth [that] are falsely totalizing” and punitive laws and public policies. Youth have also become collateral damage for conservatives and neoliberal advocates who want to dismantle the social state and in doing so justify themselves by pointing to an alleged rise of a generation of disorderly and dangerous youth dependent upon government entitlements. Within this discourse, government support for young people is both undermined and inappropriately blamed for creating a generation of kids labeled as psychologically damaged, narcissistic, violent, and out of control. Scapegoating youth as both a generation of suspects and a threat to the social order allows conservatives and neoliberals to further privatize those public spheres that youth need, such as education and health care, while developing policies that move away from social investment to matters of punishment and containment. In this instance, the punishing state combines with the logic of the market to produce priorities and policies that disinvest in the future of children and assert a ruthlessness that largely treats them as reified commodities or disposable populations. Both childhood and the state are now being reimagined in ways that reveal the priorities of a society that has fully embraced the reckless abandon of casino capitalism, where the only rules that matter are made to order by powerful corporations and rich investors. How else to interpret neoliberal-inspired government programs that in the midst of deepening inequality, rising levels of poverty, catastrophic increases in failed mortgages, and growing unemployment invest more in prisons than in public and higher education?  

It is more necessary than ever to register youth as a theoretical, moral, and political center of concern, even as it is increasingly evident that youth are one of our lowest national priorities. It is crucial to connect the current crisis in democracy to the war against young people. Doing so will remind adults of their ethical and political responsibility to invest in youth as a symbol for not only securing a democratic future but also keeping alive those elements of civic imagination, culture, and education that subordinate economic principles to democratic values. The category of youth may be one of the most important referents for beginning a critical examination about the pernicious consequences of a society driven by market values, one that not only abstracts young people from the future but shapes the present in a theater of war in which youth become the most innocent victims. Youth provide a powerful touchstone for a critical discussion about the long-term consequences of neoliberal policies, which undermine any viable notion of justice, equality, and freedom, while also gesturing toward those conditions that make a democratic future possible. Many young people are part of social movements that not only address these crucial issues but also provide a politics, modes of resistance, and connective relations that adults should take seriously as part of their own civic and political formation at the beginning of the new millennium.

I don’t know if there is research of how deeply American privilege impacts white privilege regarding white Americans, but I think the ‘double-privilege’, which seems to be mostly ignored is also important to understand the white American mind and therefore American white supremacy.

And for all who are interested, American nuclear weapons on German ground are one reason why I am trying to combat white supremacy and with rallying against American nw I started becoming aware of politics and more. I was around 14 back then.

“New German government to seek removal of US nuclear weapons

Foreign Minister-designate Guido Westerwelle has renewed calls for a withdrawal of US nuclear weapons based in Germany, saying he would hold talks with the Obama adminstration on the issue.

Speaking at a meeting of his business-friendly FDP party in Berlin on Sunday, Westerwelle said the new German government would support the vision of US President Barack Obama for a world free of nuclear weapons.

“We will take President Obama at his word and enter talks with our allies so that the last of the nuclear weapons still stationed in Germany, relics of the Cold War, can finally be removed,” Westerwelle said.

“Germany must be free of nuclear weapons,” he said, adding that he would personally make efforts towards that purpose.

No unilateral move to remove nuclear arms

His comments came a day after his FDP party reached agreement with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives for a new center-right government scheduled to take office on October 28.

The coalition agreement reached by the two sides calls specifically for talks with NATO and the US to remove the weapons.

Chancellor Angela Merkel confirmed this goal, but emphasized no unilateral action would be taken to remove the nuclear warheads. “We do not want any independent action here,” Merkel said on Saturday in Berlin.

The US, which deployed nuclear weapons in various European countries in the 1950s, is estimated to have 20 atomic warheads in Germany.

No official or publicly accessible information is available on where the weapons were stored. But some of the missiles are believed to be stationed at the Buechel airbase in the western German state of Rhineland- Palatinate.

Controversial issue in Germany

Westerwelle, 47, has little direct foreign policy experience. But the removal of US nuclear weapons from German soil is an issue he has regulary emphasized.

His FDP party is pro-American and has long campaigned for disarmament.

The nuclear issue, including nuclear power, is highly unpopular in Germany, with shipments of nuclear waste regularly triggering angry protests. The country has no permanent storage site for the waste.

The new German government recently agreed to reverse plans to abandon nuclear power. Berlin is eager to reduce dependency on gas and oil imports, but environmentalists have already vowed to fight the decision.”

LINK

There is one topic I am trying to explore and also trying to understand: White people’s skill of creating an image of oneself that doesn’t exist. I will take one example not related to race. I knew a women who calls herself ‘animal protector’. Yes, she also did some positive things in terms of protection, but also many negative and there is no other term to describe her: She is an animal hoarder. She collects animals, dogs, cats, guinea pigs, some of these animals live in the dark cellar, others are locked up in rooms up-stairs and when you enter the house, you enter a mess. Once there was a dying dog lying in the middle of about 15 other dogs, many of her cats suffer from asthma due to the high amount of ammoniac.
But because she created for herself the identity of being an animal protector she is completely blind to the pain she causes to the animals. There is no chance to open her eyes, I have tried it for many years, there is also no chance to interfere with law enforcement, because she is an “animal-protector” and other pro-animal organizations support her. They warn her when higher institutions protecting animal rights will come for control so she can hide a large number of pets etc.

But she is not blind towards other animal horders. When she gets knowledge about an animal hording case, she calls police or more powerful animal protecting organizations.
It is as if there are two different persons in one body, in the case of the woman it becomes visible to all who know her, in the case of white anti-racism the schizophrenic soul of the white mind is not always so visible.

There are some anti-racist blogs on internet, owned by whites, where the discrepancy of being and appearing to be becomes visible how such whites handle their comment sections. Their comment sections remain clearly white/racist, regardless what the owners try to claim they are. Blogs become ways of self-promotion, blogs become ways to criticize racism while at the same time these owners are not able to create a racism-free blog (comment section).
Some owners are then in addition not willing or able to challenge the racism in the comment section but relay more or less on their readers to do their job.
The problem of such blogs is that these white owners can privilege themselves in many ways. They can decide which comments are censored and not, and in all cases I know so far those who challenge the racism on such an alleged anti-racist blog are the ones who are finally discouraged by certain actions of the blog-owners. [Warnings, censorship or openly discrediting those who challenge the racism but remaining silent when those who challenge problematic comments are insulted etc.)

These blog-owners cannot be challenged because they won’t publish too critical comments that could show to others their bigotry. They can continue with self-promotion and also distancing from “those racists”, while at the same time their blog is a racist place, supported how the white owners handle the comment section.
Cyber racism finds its way into the comment sections of white anti-racist blogs as racism in real life finds its way into the organizations of anti-racists which are led by whites (and no surprise, in many cases led by white males). On blogs as well as in real life organizations this racism is mostly unchallenged, whites, who allegedly want ‘to change the world’ by ending white supremacy, but already unable to live what they preach. How do such whites think the ‘big change’ should be possible when they are already in such a small area like orgas or blogs still ‘too white’ to make a difference? They may be able to create an idealistic identity of themselves they actually believe they are, criticizing racism in others that they are unable to see in themselves.

LINK

Günter Wallraff is Germany’s most famous investigative journalist. He’s made a name for himself by going undercover to reveal the hidden side of many social issues. In his new film, he disguises himself as a black person to explore racial discrimination in Germany. His approach, however, is drawing criticism.

German journalist Günter Wallraff has accomplished a lot in his career. He has revealed to the German public how so-called “guest workers,” immigrants from Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain and other countries who came here in the 1950s and 60s and stayed, are discriminated against in this country, the questionable working methods of Bild, the country’s top-selling tabloid newspaper, and how call-center employees are exploited. His latest project also seems like a noble one. “I want to find out,” he says, “what it’s like to be black in Germany.”

The project involves both a book, “Aus der schönen neuen Welt” (“Out of the Beautiful New World”), and a film, “Schawarz auf Weiss” (“Black on White”), which will be released in theaters in Germany on Thursday. As part of the film, Wallraff has a makeup artist cover him in dark brown makeup, he wears brown contact lenses and he dons an afro wig. Then, using the alias Kwami Ogonno, he takes a trip across Germany. He goes to a soccer game in the eastern city of Cottbus, attends a city festival in Magdeburg, tries to secure a place to pitch a tent in campground in the Teutoburg Forest and takes his German shepherd to dog training in Cologne.

The film reveals the frightening degree of both blatant and latent racism in Germany. When he goes to festivals, people refuse to drink beer on the same bench. Landlords refuse to rent apartments to him. People seem to have no compunction about calling him the German word for “negro.” And hooligans in Eastern Germany even threaten him with physical violence.

Reception in the Black German Community

There’s just one odd thing about the movie: If Wallraff really wanted to find out what it’s like to live as a black in Germany, why didn’t he take the time to let any blacks living in Germany answer the question?

Wallraff’s modus operandi is to go undercover and film it to help show and tell what he experiences. He became famous for his 1977 film in which he infiltrated Bild under the alias of Hans Esser. Six years later, he disguised himself as the Turkish guest worker Ali Levent. But is this method appropriate for his new subject matter?

Black Germans are on the fence about the film. “We find the mindset behind Mr. Wallraff’s film very problematic,” says Tahir Della, a spokeswoman from the Initiative of Black People in Germany (ISD). “As is so often the case, someone is speaking for rather than with us.” Noah Sow, an educator and musician associated with the media watchdog organization Der braune Mob (The Brown Mob), even goes so far as to accuse Wallraff of “making money from our suffering” regardless of whether he “really intends to combat (racism) or not.”

There’s something odd about how Wallraff handles the issues of racism in his movie and book as compared with how he handles his other journalistic excursions. For example, in the book’s chapter on homelessness, his conversations with several homeless people — including Manfred, the software entrepreneurs, Walter, the truck driver, and Timo, the high school dropout — take up several pages. But you’d be hard-pressed to find the transcript of a conversation with anyone black.

Granted, in one episode in the film, Wallraff gathers stories about blacks who have been discriminated against in various German administrative offices. And then he dons his disguise to see what it’s like for himself. Accompanied by Avad, a black German, he tries to sign up to take the exam to get a hunting license. But the bureaucrats react aggressively to his request and refuse to provide him with information about the test. Avad doesn’t say a word, though, and he is never asked what it’s like when public servants refused to help him land a job. In the end, Wallraff pushes him out of the picture, too.

The main criticism levied against Wallraff’s film is that it fails to portray the debate about racism against blacks in Germany as being as advanced as it really is. For example, Della criticizes the film for “making absolutely no mention” of how much blacks in Germany have organized themselves. “We’re happy that racism is discussed,” she says, “but black groups have been doing the same thing for over 25 years.”

Sow* has a similar criticism. “Wherever you look,” [s]he says, “whether it’s in academia, publishing or the annual reports of anti-discrimination offices, knowledge about everyday racism is present — and accessible with the click of a mouse.” [S]he adds that: “Whites just have to stop ignoring and doubting these findings.” As [s]he sees it, the only reason Wallraff succeeds in drawing attention to the plight of Kwami Ogonno is that he is “privileged in the racist system (over) research results, publications and testimonials produced by blacks.”

The stories of black Germans have been portrayed in films, books and songs for many years. In 2006, the documentary “Black Deutschland” was released, which featured leading black Germans in the artistic community speaking about how blacks are perceived by themselves and others. In 2007, the black German actress, television host and film director Mo Asumang released “Roots Germania,” a film about her search for her family’s roots. And, in 2009, black German rapper Samy Deluxe released an album and book entitled “Dis wo ich herkomm” (“That’s Where I’m From”), both of which present a controversial examination of his relationship with Germany, his native country.

In response to such criticisms, however, Wallruff complains that “unfortunately, too few people either watch or read” these works. “It’d be much better,” he adds, “if they enjoyed a wider audience.”

What Is True in True-to-life?

While conducting research for his film, Wallraff even contacted the ISD to obtain reports about the experiences of blacks in Germany. He also consulted with Mouctar Bah, a prominent black human rights activist in Germany. But neither Bah nor any other blacks are interviewed as part of the film’s on-screen action.

“That would have made it another film,” Wallraff told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “As is the case in all of my roles, its about experiencing a situation at the gut level.” He also believes that it was completely appropriate to use is undercover method when treating this issue as well. “My approach makes everyday racism comprehensible for Germans,” he says — meaning, of course, white Germans.

When he played a Turkish guest worker living in Germany 25 years ago, Wallraff gave both a voice and a face to a segment of society that, at the time, was hardly represented in the German media at all. In 2009, as can be seen with the examples of Mo Asumang, Samy Deluxe and many others, black Germans have firmly established a presence in the public eye. But Wallraff pointedly chose not to place his Kwami character in the professional world. “With my Ali character, I wanted to expose discrimination in the world of work,” Wallraff says. “But, with Kwami, I purposefully chose a character that could help people primarily see the kind of racist things that happen in everyday life.”

A Failure to Make Subtle Differentiations

One of the things that Wallraff makes clear in his film is how the lines between race and class discrimination become blurred. For example, when he goes about as Kwami Ogonno wearing no jacket, carrying only a plastic bag and speaking broken German, he is usually treated like anyone else who is economically marginalized. But when he dresses stylishly and speaks German without an accent when visiting an expensive watch store in Düsseldorf, he is treated with the utmost courtesy.

When he delivered his speech on racism in 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama touched upon this issue of how race and class conflicts often get tangled up together. He spoke about “the resentments of white Americans” who feel threatened by gains made by blacks in American society. He went on to say that “to label (white Americans) as misguided or even racist without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns (also) widens the racial divide and blocks the path to understanding.” In the end, he concludes that they would both benefit more by fighting together for more opportunities.

In his film and book, however, Wallraff fails to reach this sort of subtle differentiation. In the film, he particularly complains that, as a black man, he is “always defined exclusively based on the color of his skin.” “When you’re black,” he says in one of the film’s few moments of commentary, “people don’t focus on or even recognize what really makes you a person.”

Still, he also seems to commit this same fault of over-simplification in his film. “In my role, I usually just made do without any personal history,” he says. “I was simply just ‘the other,’ ‘the black other.’”

* Noah Sow is a woman therefore I edited the parts where Der Spiegel refers to her as “he”

by James H. Sweet

Collective Degradation:
Slavery and the Construction of Race
Spanish and Portuguese Influences on Racial Slavery in British North America, 1492-1619

“At the end of the medieval period, slavery was not widespread in Europe. In fact, it was mostly isolated to the southern fringes of the Mediterranean, especially along the frontiers of Christendom. In those places where it existed, the physical labor of slavery was the preserve of social and religious “others.” Iberian Christians enslaved primarily Muslims, but also Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and so on. As “infidels,” Jews and Moors were considered incapable of redemption and therefore doomed to marginal, enslaveable status. When the Atlantic slave trade began in 1441, most Africans were placed into an entirely new and different category of enslaveable peoples.”
[...]
“The policies and ideas that flowed from these understandings of African inferiority only served to crystallize racial hierarchies, not only in Iberia, but across Europe. The first transnational, institutional endorsement of African slavery occurred in 1452 when Pope Nicholas V issued the bull, Dum Diversas, which granted King Afonso V of Portugal the right to reduce to “perpetual slavery” all “Saracens and pagans and other infidels and enemies of Christ” in West Africa. In 1454, the Pope followed up Dum Diversas with Romanus Pontifex, which granted Portugal the more specific right to conquer and enslave all peoples south of Cape Bojador.5 Taken together, these papal bulls did far more than grant exclusive rights to the Portuguese; they signaled to the rest of Christian Europe that the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans was acceptable and encouraged.”
[...]
“By homogenizing all non-Christians south of Cape Bojador, the Catholic Church also endorsed the idea that there was a certain oneness to sub-Saharan Africa, a oneness based not only on religious difference, but also on culture and race. The conflation of
cultural difference and race quickly found its way into the Portuguese language. Though legally in the same category of enslaved “infidels,” Islamic Africans were distinguished from “white” Moors by the term “Negro.” The term “mouro Negro” implied a double “othering.” As noted earlier, Moors were enslaveable due to their religious infidelity, but race was an aggravating factor that apparently made them even more enslaveable.
By the second half of the fifteenth century, the term “Negro” was essentially synonymous with “slave” across the Iberian Peninsula.”
[...]
“Europeans continued to solidify a common identity vis-à-vis “Negroes” across the Atlantic world, especially by the seventeenth century. In practical terms, the English, and especially the Dutch, whittled away at Iberian supremacy on the open seas, including in the African slave trade. From an ideological perspective, northern Europeans continued to draw from the Iberian example in their perceptions of blackness. One of the clearest examples of this can be seen in the terms used to describe black people. Instead of using the term “black” to describe Africans, the English, the Dutch, and the French relied on variations of the Spanish “Negro.” There were suitable terms for “black” in all of these languages, yet northern Europeans adopted variations of “Negro” by the mid-sixteenth century. The only reasonable explanation for the adoption of the word “Negro” is that it conveyed a concept or a meaning that was absent from the languages of northern Europe. In short, there was not another word in these languages that could capture both “blackness” and servile status. Just as was the case with the Spanish and the Portuguese, northern Europeans recognized that “Negro” was synonymous with “slave,” or at least, “enslaveable” status.”
[...]
“If Africans were widely understood to be members of an enslaveable Negro “nation,” then “Europe” must have been the normative political community against which these non-Christian, uncivilized, blacks were measured. While I would hesitate to impute conscious motive on the formation of a “European” or “white” identity during this period, it is clear that the bundle of norms associated with European “civilization” was what separated Europeans from Africans, at least in the European mind. Some might argue that these group distinctions were based on nothing more than cultural difference; however, this logic simply displaces race onto group difference. In practice, group differences between “Negroes” and “Europeans” were always marked by racial differences, as social and cultural realities were literally “read” onto black and white bodies.”

LINK

Durbin Introduces Bill to Eliminate Sentencing Disparity Between Crack and Powder Cocaine

Thursday, October 15, 2009

[WASHINGTON, D.C.] – Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-IL), joined by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Crime and Drugs Subcommittee Chairman Arlen Specter (D-PA), and seven other Senators, introduced legislation today to eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. His bill, the Fair Sentencing Act, would refocus scarce federal resources toward large scale, violent traffickers and increase penalties for the worst drug offenders. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, restoring sentencing parity would do more than any other policy change to close the gap in incarceration rates between African Americans and whites. The Obama Administration endorsed eliminating the sentencing disparity at a hearing chaired by Durbin in April.

“Drug use is a serious problem in America and we need tough legislation to combat it. But in addition to being tough, our drug laws must be smart and fair. Our current cocaine laws are not,” Durbin said. “The sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine has contributed to the imprisonment of African Americans at six times the rate of whites and to the United States’ position as the world’s leader in incarcerations. Congress has talked about addressing this injustice for long enough; it’s time for us to act.”

Under current law, possession of five grams of crack cocaine (roughly the weight of two sugar cubes) triggers a mandatory minimum five-year prison sentence, while trafficking 500 grams (approximately one pound) of powder cocaine triggers the same sentence. The so-called 100:1 sentencing disparity has been in place since 1986. The Fair Sentencing Act would eliminate the disparity, treating crack and powder cocaine equally.

“Today, the criminal justice system has unfair and biased cocaine penalties that undermine the Constitution’s promise of equal treatment for all Americans. To have faith in our system Americans must have confidence that the laws of this country, including our drug laws, are fair and administered fairly,” Chairman Leahy said. “I believe the Fair Sentencing Act will move us one step closer to reaching that goal. I commend Senator Durbin for his leadership in fixing this decades-old injustice. We should do what we can to restore public confidence in our criminal justice system. Correcting biases in our criminal sentencing laws is a step in that direction.”

The dramatically higher penalties for crack have disproportionately affected the African American community. While only 25 percent of crack users are African American, they constituted 81 percent of those convicted for crack offenses in 2007. The current drug sentencing policy is also the single greatest cause of the record levels of incarceration in our country. One in every thirty-one Americans is in prison, on parole, or on probation, including one in eleven African-Americans. Over 50% of current federal inmates are imprisoned for drug crimes.

“This legislation offers reasonable and much-needed reform in crack cocaine sentencing under federal law,” Senator Specter said. “Eliminating the unfair and unwarranted sentencing disparity between crack offenses and cocaine offenses is long overdue and represents an important step in addressing our drug laws’ discriminatory consequences.”

The current law was a response to the explosion in crack use around the country in the 1980’s. At the time, crack was believed to be more harmful, and its users far more violent, than powder cocaine users. However, current research has shown that there is little difference between the physiological impact of crack and powder cocaine. The research has also shown that crack is not linked to significantly more violence than powder cocaine. Today, only ten percent of crack cocaine cases involve violence.

The Fair Sentencing Act will:

Eliminate the sentencing disparity by instituting a 1:1 ratio for crack and powder sentencing.
Increase the quantity of crack cocaine needed to trigger a mandatory sentence. Under this new law, possession of 500 grams of crack and 500 grams of powder cocaine would trigger a mandatory minimum sentence of five years. Similarly, 5,000 grams of crack or powder would trigger a 10-year sentence.
Direct federal resources toward large-scale drug trafficking cases and violent offenders by increasing the number of aggravating factors subject to higher penalties.
A broad coalition of legal, law enforcement, civil rights, and religious groups from across the political spectrum supports eliminating the crack-powder disparity, including Attorney General Holder, Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton, Miami Police Chief John Timoney, the American Bar Association, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the National Black Police Association, and the United Methodist Church.

In addition to Senators Leahy and Specter, the bill is cosponsored by Judiciary Committee Members Feingold (D-WI), Cardin (D-MD), Whitehouse (D-RI), Kaufman (D-DE), and Franken (D-MN). Senators Kerry (D-MA) and Dodd (D-CT) are also original cosponsors.

LINK

STOCKHOLM – Two activists from Congo and New Zealand and a doctor from Australia on Tuesday won the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the “alternative Nobel,” for work to protect rain forests, improve women’s health and rid the world of nuclear weapons.

Congolese activist Rene Ngongo, Alyn Ware of New Zealand and Australian-born Catherine Hamlin, who has been based in Ethiopia for five decades, each will receive euro50,000 (US$74,000), the Right Livelihood Foundation said.

The honorary part of the award — without prize money — went to Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki, 73, for raising awareness of climate change.

Swedish-German philanthropist Jakob von Uexkull founded the awards in 1980 to recognize work he felt was being ignored by the Nobel Prizes.

The foundation said Ngongo, 48, was honored “for his courage in confronting the forces that are destroying Congo’s rain forests.”

Ngongo founded the OCEAN environmental group in 1994, exposing the impact of deforestation and monitoring the plunder of minerals by warring factions during Congo’s 1996-2002 civil wars. He also has been working for Greenpeace in Congo.

Ngongo told The Associated Press by telephone from Kinshasa that the award came at a “great time,” as negotiators prepare to meet in Copenhagen in December to try to draft a global climate pact.

The Right Livelihood Award “is a clear message that the campaign we started in is starting to be heard around the world,” Ngongo said. “It’s important to save our forests.”

Ware, a peace activist from New Zealand, was recognized for “initiatives over two decades to further peace education and to rid the world of nuclear weapons.”

The citation said the 47-year-old Ware has campaigned against nuclear weapons at the U.N. and through a network of lawmakers worldwide that he established in 2002.

Nuclear nonproliferation also was a key theme when the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday to President Barack Obama, citing in part his vision of a world free of atomic weapons.

Asked to compare the awards, Ole von Uexkull, the Right Livelihood Foundation’s executive director and nephew of the prize founder, noted that Ware had actively campaigned against nuclear weapons for 25 years, while Obama had yet to translate words into action.

“We have a window of opportunity with Obama opening up to the possibility of nuclear disarmament,” Ole von Uexkull said. “He will have the opportunity to take concrete steps now and I hope that he will do it.”

Hamlin, 85, moved to Ethiopia from Australia in 1959 to work as an obstetrician and gynecologist. Hamlin and her late husband founded a hospital where women can seek free treatment for obstetric fistulas, which are holes that develop between the birth canal and the bladder or rectum that can develop during long and difficult births.

They are common in Africa and other developing countries where prenatal care is limited.

Women with fistula experience incontinence and often give birth to a stillborn baby. Untreated, fistula can also lead to chronic medical problems, including ulcerations, kidney disease and nerve damage in the legs.

The Right Livelihood Foundation said the winners “demonstrate concretely what has to be done in order to tackle climate change, rid the world of nuclear weapons and provide crucial medical treatment to the poor and marginalized.”

The awards will be presented in a ceremony at the Swedish Parliament on Dec. 4, six days before the Nobel Prizes are handed out.

Link to article

Despite its liberal reputation, Massachusetts has one of the harshest laws in the country for sentencing murderers as young as 14 to life in prison without parole, and many of the 57 people serving such mandatory sentences are first-time offenders, according to an advocacy group that wants them to become eligible for parole.

The Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts, in what it said was the first comprehensive study of the 1996 law that resulted in such sentences for first-degree murder, found that a disproportionate percentage of the children locked up for the rest of their lives are black. Many of the offenders were convicted with adult codefendants, some of whom got milder sentences and have been freed.

The report, which is scheduled to be released today, followed a two-year review of most of the cases in which children ages 14, 15, and 16 were tried in adult court and sentenced to life. The study says that penalties for juvenile murderers were inadequate in the 1980s but that the Legislature went too far when it passed the current law in response to what the center describes as overblown fears of young super predators.

The group wants Governor Deval Patrick and the Legislature to change the law to at least make juveniles convicted of first-degree murder eligible for parole after 15 years, as is true for people convicted of second-degree murder.

“Life-without-parole sentences may be an appropriate response to some adult crimes, especially in a state like Massachusetts that does not impose the death penalty,’’ the 33-page report said. “But the current law treats youths as young as 14 exactly like adults, regardless of their age, past conduct, level of participation in the crime, personal background, and potential for rehabilitation.’’

Geline W. Williams, executive director of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association, said yesterday she could not comment on the report until she reads it. But, “There’s no question that there are some juveniles who commit absolutely horrific crimes and have absolutely horrific records before they commit the ultimate crime of murder,’’ she said.

The two state lawmakers who chair the joint Committee on the Judiciary, Representative Eugene L. O’Flaherty and Senator Cynthia Stone Creem, said they were willing to reexamine the 1996 law.

O’Flaherty said a few notorious crimes can often result in “legislative overreaction, and usually it takes a few years to see the unforeseen consequences of getting too tough, too quickly, and not being smart about getting tough.’’

Massachusetts is one of at least 39 states with youths serving sentences of life without parole; about 2,500 inmates around the country serve such sentences. But only Massachusetts and Connecticut give adult courts exclusive jurisdiction over murder cases against children as young as 14 and then impose a mandatory life-without-parole sentence for all first-degree murder convictions, regardless of the circumstances, the report said.

Several states are considering changing their laws to give youth offenders an opportunity to earn parole, in part because scientific research into the difference between the adolescent and adult brain shows that teenagers often cannot appreciate the consequences of their actions.

Last year, after citing similar neuroscientific evidence, Human Rights Watch called sentences of life without parole for juveniles “cruel, unfair, and unnecessary.’’

[follow the link above to read the entire article]

Link to the entire report
Until They Die A Natural Death

LINK

(CNN) — A state commission issued a finding of probable cause that racism was involved in the decision by a suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, swim club to revoke privileges of a largely minority day care center.

The Valley Swim Club canceled a contract for swimming privileges for the approximately 65 children from the Creative Steps day care center after a visit June 29.

Some black and Hispanic children said white club members made racist comments to them during that visit, asking why black children were there and raising concerns that “they might steal from us.”

The Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, in its 33-page finding, details the incident. It notes that the swim club maintains that it canceled its relationship with the day care center because members were requesting that their membership fees be refunded and because of safety concerns “attendant with overcrowding of the shallow end of the pool by a large number of non-swimmers.”

But the commission, in its finding, stated that the club “routinely has members at the facility in numbers that are equal in size or exceed the number of Creative Steps campers.” The club has also hosted groups of similar size without raising safety concerns, the commission said.

As the group was swimming at the club, one of its members voiced concerns that “all of these black kids” might “do something to my child.” When confronted by a Creative Steps official, the woman — a teacher at a local school — denied the comment but said she was concerned because one of the children “was a known thief” and had previously stolen a cell phone. The commission found no evidence that the child was ever accused of or disciplined for stealing at the school.

Other group members sent negative e-mails to club board members after the incident. One board member said in an e-mail, according to the commission, “I feel we were mislead (sic) with the type of camp this was. This camp is a city camp and it is run with tax payers money. This is not the type of camp that is going to bring any new members into the club.”

The finding is “an invitation to sit down with our staff and have the parties settle their differences,” commission Chairman Stephen Glassman said. “If they don’t, it will go on to a public hearing.”

Depending on the outcome of that process, the club could face damages for humiliation and embarrassment, as well as a civil penalty of up to $50,000, commission spokeswoman Shannon Powers said. The public hearing, she said, is held before a body of commissioners.

The commission enforces state human rights law, Powers said. It launched an investigation into the incident after being contacted by a number of advocacy organizations following media coverage of the story. Since then, she said, a number of complaints have been filed with the commission.

The commission noted in the finding that none of the club’s 155 paid members this year was African-American and that last year there were “179 paid memberships, none of whom were African American.”

In addition, the commission said that in 2009, the Valley Swim Club “made a concerted effort to expand the geographic range of its membership by engaging in a marketing campaign. … The respondent efforts were mainly directed at areas with overwhelmingly caucasian populations. … The respondent made no effort to direct such marketing efforts at areas with significant African-American populations.”

Glassman said the swim club had 30 days to appeal the finding.

Joe Tucker, a lawyer for the club, said his client will do just that. “We believe this is wrong,” he said.

“I believe the people at the PHRC are very good people, but they were put in a tough position. … If the PHRC would have decided against the children or in favor of the club, they would have been painted with the same unfair and untrue racist brush that the Valley Swim Club was painted with.”

The day care center had originally contracted to use the pool during the summer, but the club canceled the agreement and returned the day care center’s $1,950 check without explanation. The club canceled contracts with two other day care centers because of safety and crowding, swim club director John Duesler said.

Those facilities have not protested the club’s actions.

The issue was exacerbated when Duesler told two Philadelphia television stations that the children had changed “the complexion” and “atmosphere” of the club. The comment brought protesters outside the facility.

Duesler later said that safety and crowding, not racism, prompted the cancellation.

As the controversy gained national attention, the swim club asked the day care center to return. Center officials refused and said they would pursue a lawsuit

White supremacy adapts like a virus to new circumstances, gone are the times where blatant racism/white supremacy via laws is considered as accepted norms of the time, today’s white supremacy hides behind the surface of ‘tolerance’, wants to decorate itself with some selected Persons of Color, calls this ‘multiculturalism’ and open-mindedness, while white supremacy itself remains intact.

Those considered on the political right, the Limbaughs and others, who just give a voice to the ‘politically correct’ mainstream due to the silence of mainstream and also most white politicians, are at the same time the alleged out-casts where a ‘decent white’ can point his/her finger at, feeling calmed and self-satisfied not to be ‘like them’, not to be a white supremacist.

White America’s art to distort historical facts and to present their illusions like reality, the ‘good’ North vs. the ‘bad’ South, ignoring the Northern historical reality in first actively participating in slavery and later passively participating, ignoring the fact that the Civil War was not about ‘freeing the slaves’ and also forgetting the many Black victims of the Civil War, their lost lifes don’t count in the white narrative of sacrifying white life for the alleged freedom of slaves.
Also ignoring the schizophrenic ability of celebrating themselves as liberator of Europe from the evils of Nazism, with Jim Crow still at home.
Trying to take over the Civil Rights Movement as if it were a white success.
Trying to ignore the fact that without the high voter turnout of People of Color in the last election Obama wouldn’t be president but McCain.

So-called minorities are only acceptable within a racist system as long as they ‘know their place’ in the white narrative and as long as they are no serious competition to white entitlement.
Knowing their place means not to have a voice, which is considered ‘uppity’, not to insist in basic human rights and to equal access to all resources available within a nation. White people’s attitude also often infiltrates white ‘anti-racism’ on every level, where white entitlement wants again to define somebody else’s reality and expects the grateful Person of Color who should not contradict or challenge the ‘good white persons’, white entitlement unable or unwilling to truly create anti-racist places, truly living the change they allegedly want to see. But as it seems, not now, not within their own organizations, their neighborhoods, workplaces and so on.

The empty lip-service, ‘we [whites] are all complicit’ remains empty, as if this acknowledgement is already good enough to be ‘anti-racist’, as well as the acknowledgement of ‘white privilege’ or ‘we are all racist’ would be a heroic act to do without actually living the consequences of such acknowledgements. Anti-racists who believe that allowing People of Color to sit at white tables is a gracious act of tolerance, but only as long as People of Color don’t disrupt white entitlement and white self-proclaimed experts.

Looking to the US from outside right now, with white hysterical mobs displaying Obama as Hitler, witch doctor and more, it reminds me of slave patrols back in American history. Slave patrols, made up of white ablebodied men of every class, to control Black people and to protect whites from their greatest fear – Black revolts. Slave patrols, after Emancipation turning into the KKK as well as the today’s institutional power of police.
White people today who are trying with all means necessary to remain in control, to remain in power, to remain a political white nation with their feelings that only white power is the right power and also with their distorted assumption that Black people demand ‘too much’ by demanding basic human rights.

It is quite irrelevant how many whites today participate out of blatant racist motifs in ‘tea-parties’, alleged anti health care rallies, a white mob serving to intimidate and trying to control, relying on the knowledge of the old-ancient white fear that Black people ‘will take over’.

Relevant are the many silent white by-standers who allow this to happen right now, who also seem to believe, that racism is a Black problem Black people have to challenge or who are still caught in their post-racial illusion, who seem to believe that America’s somewhat democracy can remain intact when white militias based on irrational fears and white paranoia are training the overthrow of government, when a president gets more death threats than nobody before him.

White America’s hysterical reaction to 9/11 indicates how high the feeling of entitlement is, how aggressive their reaction is when the world’s most powerful bully gets only slightly back what she expects the world and certain groups within the US to take.
White America’s hysterical reaction to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who just put in words what many also outside America think about America indicates how far away white America is from reality, how unwilling to deal with her reality and how unable to accept Black voices who tell the truth.

Obama, his mere presence too much to accept for many whites, where inciting racial violence becomes more and more mainstream, with the Limbaughs just speaking out what the ‘politically correct’ average white only mentions behind closed doors.

America’s unique ‘freedom of speech’ laws which in reality never has been about the actual freedom of speech but the right of the powerful also to constantly incite racial hate and to have a mainstream voice to call for the oppression of those considered not white. Being able at any time to create a climate where violence of whites towards People of Color becomes acceptable and violence of People of Color towards whites raises fears of revolts.

White people’s collective inability to let go their slave holder mentality – both ways, the blatant racism as well as paternalism, with their silence aggreeing with the white mob who is doing the job for them, trying to keep America white dominated, relying once again on white terrorism, back then via patrollers, today via the average ‘angry white men’.

The strength of a democracy is not the protection of the power of those already in power, the strength of a democracy is only as strong as the alleged weakest member(s) of society. A democracy which can run over the rights of less represented members and/or can ignore their existance also because of the passive support of a majority is vulnerable to becoming a dictationship not only in a hidden but also open way.

A nation where it seems to be considered as normal or business as usual that innocent people are being executed in the name of the US, where a majority doesn’t seem to see it as problematic that already the next innocent person is at risk of being executed, where the high numbers of people shot by police don’t seem to cause an uproar in America and where the fact that America has the highest prison population is blamed on Black people and not on white supremacy controlling possible dissidents and also weakening opposing political powers already is a form of dictationship. Regardless what America wants to call herself.

A system which is able to distort white people’s reality, able to tell them the lies that they are ‘better’ than Black people, regardless how much the system also often works against those whites. Whites being stupid enough to work against their own well-being, being ready to act as the violent foot-soldiers for a system that has no use for them other than taking the advantage of how easy they can be manipulated against the alleged other.

Those whites who wave now their flags of alleged freedom and ‘government should get out of their way’ never have had any problem with governmental interference in people’s lifes on a daily basis and also government protecting white people’s ‘right’ to be white [via laws], they never have had a problem with their tax money helping to oppress an entire group of people and never have had a problem to take Black tax money who have paid for their own oppression via government and its executives. And so it becomes clear what kind of freedom those whites want to have: The freedom to continue oppression and white supremacy. Supported by the silence of ‘mainstream’ and also by most of its white representatives

by Naomi Klein

Guardian

Americans began the summer still celebrating the dawn of a “post-racial” era. They are ending it under no such illusion. The summer of 2009 was all about race, beginning with Republican claims that Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama’s nominee to the US Supreme Court, was “racist” against whites. Then, just as that scandal was dying down, up popped “the Gates controversy”, the furore over the president’s response to the arrest of African American academic Henry Louis Gates Jr in his own home. Obama’s remark that the police had acted “stupidly” was evidence, according to massively popular Fox News host Glenn Beck, that the president “has a deep-seated hatred for white people”.

Obama’s supposed racism gave a jolt of energy to the fringe movement that claims he has been carrying out a lifelong conspiracy to cover up his (fictional) African birth. Then Fox News gleefully discovered Van Jones, White House special adviser on green jobs. After weeks of being denounced as “a black nationalist who is also an avowed communist”, Jones resigned last Sunday.

The undercurrent of all these attacks was that Obama, far from being the colour-blind moderate he posed as during the presidential campaign, is actually obsessed with race, in particular with redistributing white wealth into the hands of African Americans and undocumented Mexican workers. At town hall meetings across the US in August, these bizarre claims coalesced into something resembling an uprising to “take our country back”. Henry D Rose, chair of Blacks For Social Justice, recently compared the overwhelmingly white, often armed, anti-Obama crowds to the campaign of “massive resistance” launched in the late 50s – a last-ditch attempt by white southerners to block the racial integration of their schools and protect other Jim Crow laws. Today’s “new era of ‘massive resistance’,” writes Rose, “is also a white racial project.”

There is at least one significant difference, however. In the late 50s and early 60s, angry white mobs were reacting to life-changing victories won by the civil rights movement. Today’s mobs, on the other hand, are reacting to the symbolic victory of an African American winning the presidency. Yet they are rising up at a time when non-elite blacks and Latinos are losing significant ground, with their homes and jobs slipping away from them at a much higher rate than from whites. So far, Obama has been unwilling to adopt policies specifically geared towards closing this ever-widening divide. The result may well leave minorities with the worst of all worlds: the pain of a full-scale racist backlash without the benefits of policies that alleviate daily hardships. Meanwhile, with Obama constantly painted by the radical right as a cross between Malcolm X and Karl Marx, most progressives feel it is their job to defend him – not to point out that, when it comes to tackling the economic crisis ravaging minority communities, the president is not doing nearly enough.

For many antiracist campaigners, the realisation that Obama might not be the leader they had hoped for came when he announced his administration would be boycotting the UN Durban Review Conference on racism, widely known as “Durban II”. Almost all of the public debate about the conference focused on its supposed anti-Israel bias. When it actually took place in April in Geneva, virtually all we heard about was Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s inflammatory speech, which was met with rowdy disruptions, from the EU delegates who walked out, to the French Jewish students who put on clown wigs and red noses, and tried to shout him down.

Lost in the circus atmosphere was the enormous importance of the conference to people of African descent, and nowhere more so than among Obama’s most loyal base. The US civil rights movement had embraced the first Durban conference, held in summer 2001, with great enthusiasm, viewing it as the start of the final stage of Martin Luther King’s dream for full equality. Though most black leaders offered only timid public criticism of the president’s Durban II boycott, the decision was discussed privately as his most explicit betrayal of the civil rights struggle since taking office.

The original 2001 gathering was not all about Israelis v Palestinians, or antisemitism, as so many have claimed (though all certainly played a role). The conference was overwhelmingly about Africa, the ongoing legacy of slavery and the huge unpaid debts that the rich owe the poor.

Holding the 2001 World Conference against Racism in what was still being called “the New South Africa” had seemed a terrific idea. World leaders would gather to congratulate themselves on having slain the scourge of apartheid, then pledge to defeat the world’s few remaining vestiges of discrimination – things such as police violence, unequal access to certain jobs, lack of adequate healthcare for minorities and intolerance towards immigrants. Appropriate disapproval would be expressed for such failures of equality, and a well-meaning document pledging change would be signed to much fanfare. That, at least, is what western governments expected to happen.

They were mistaken. When the conference arrived in Durban, many delegates were shocked by the angry mood in the streets: tens of thousands of South Africans joined protests outside the conference centre, holding signs that said “Landlessness = racism” and “New apartheid: rich and poor”. Many denounced the conference as a sham, and demanded concrete reparations for the crimes of apartheid. South Africa’s disillusionment, though particularly striking given its recent democratic victory, was part of a much broader global trend, one that would define the conference, in both the streets and the assembly halls. Around the world, developing countries were increasingly identifying the so-called Washington Consensus economic policies as little more than a clever rebranding effort, a way for former northern colonial powers to continue to drain the southern countries of their wealth without being inconvenienced by the heavy lifting of colonialism. Roughly two years before Durban, a coalition of developing countries had refused further to liberalise their economies, leading to the collapse of World Trade Organisation talks in Seattle. A few months later, a newly militant movement calling for a debt jubilee disrupted the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Durban was a continuation of this mounting southern rebellion, but it added something else to the mix: an invoice for past thefts.

Although it was true that southern countries owed debts to foreign banks and lending institutions, it was also true that in the colonial period – the first wave of globalisation – the wealth of the north was built, in large part, on stolen indigenous land and free labour provided by the slave trade. Many in Durban argued that when these two debts were included in the calculus, it was actually the poorest regions of the world – especially Africa and the Caribbean – that turned out to be the creditors and the rich world that owed a debt. All big UN conferences tend to coalesce around a theme, and in Durban 2001 the clear theme was the call for reparations. The overriding message was that even though the most visible signs of racism had largely disappeared – colonial rule, apartheid, Jim Crow-style segregation – profound racial divides will persist and even widen until the states and corporations that profited from centuries of state-sanctioned racism pay back some of what they owe.

African and Caribbean governments came to Durban with two key demands. The first was for an acknowledgment that slavery and even colonialism itself constituted “crimes against humanity” under international law; the second was for the countries that perpetrated and profited from these crimes to begin to repair the damage. Most everyone agreed that reparations should include a clear and unequivocal apology for slavery, as well as a commitment to returning stolen artefacts and to educating the public about the scale and impact of the slave trade. Above and beyond these more symbolic acts, there was a great deal of debate. Dudley Thompson, former Jamaican foreign minister and a longtime leader in the Pan-African movement, was opposed to any attempt to assign a number to the debt: “It is impossible to put a figure to killing millions of people, our ancestors,” he said. The leading reparations voices instead spoke of a “moral debt” that could be used as leverage to reorder international relations in multiple ways, from cancelling Africa’s foreign debts to launching a huge develop­ ment programme for Africa on a par with Europe’s Marshall Plan. What was emerging was a demand for a radical New Deal for the global south.

African and Caribbean countries had been holding high-level summits on reparations for a decade, with little effect. What prompted the Durban breakthrough was that a similar debate had taken off inside the US. The facts are familiar, if commonly ignored. Even as individual blacks break the colour barrier in virtually every field, the correlation between race and poverty remains deeply entrenched. Blacks in the US consistently have dramatically higher rates of infant mortality, HIV infection, incarceration and unemployment, as well as lower salaries, life expectancy and rates of home ownership. The biggest gap, however, is in net worth. By the end of the 90s, the average black family had a net worth one eighth the national average. Low net worth means less access to traditional credit (and, as we’d later learn, more sub-prime mortgages). It also means families have little besides debt to pass from one generation to the next, preventing the wealth gap closing on its own.

In 2000, Randall Robinson published The Debt: What America Owes To Blacks, which argued that “white society… must own up to slavery and acknowledge its debt to slavery’s contemporary victims”. The book became a national bestseller, and within months the call for reparations was starting to look like a new anti-apartheid struggle. Students demanded universities disclose their historical ties to the slave trade, city councils began holding public hearings on reparations, chapters of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America had sprung up across the country and Charles Ogletree, the celebrated Harvard law professor (and one of Obama’s closest mentors), put together a team of all-star lawyers to try to win reparations lawsuits in US courts.

By spring 2001, reparations had become the hot-button topic on US talkshows and op-ed pages. And though opponents consistently portrayed the demand as blacks wanting individual handouts from the government, most reparations advocates were clear they were seeking group solutions: mass scholarship funds, for instance, or major investments in preventive healthcare, inner cities and crumbling schools. By the time Durban rolled around in late August, the conference had taken on the air of a black Woodstock. Angela Davis was coming. So were Jesse Jackson and Danny Glover. Small radical groups such as the National Black United Front spent months raising money to buy hundreds of plane tickets to South Africa. Activists travelled to Durban from 168 countries, but the largest delegation by far came from the US: approximately 3,000 people, roughly 2,000 of them African Americans. Ogletree pumped up the crowds with an energetic address: “This is a movement that cannot be stopped… I promise we will see reparations in our lifetime.”

The call for reparations took many forms, but one thing was certain: antiracism was transformed in Durban from something safe and comfortable for elites to embrace into something explosive and potentially very, very costly. North American and European governments, the debtors in this new accounting, tried desperately to steer the negotiations on to safe terrain. “We are better to look forward and not point fingers backward,” national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said. It was a losing battle. Durban, according to Amina Mohamed, chief negotiator for the Africa bloc, was Africa’s “rendezvous with history”.

Not everyone was willing to show up for the encounter, however, and that is where the Israel controversies come in. Durban, it should be remembered, took place in the aftermath of the collapse of the Oslo Accords, and there were those who hoped the conference could somehow fill the political vacuum. Six months before the meeting in Durban, at an Asian preparatory conference in Tehran, a few Islamic countries requested language in their draft of the Durban Declaration that described Israeli policies in the occupied territories as “a new kind of apartheid” and a “form of genocide”. Then, a month before the conference, there was a new push for changes: references to the Holocaust were paired with the “ethnic cleansing of the Arab population in historic Palestine”, while references to “the increase in antisemitism and hostile acts against Jews” were twinned with phrases about “the increase of racist practices of Zionism”, and Zionism was described as a movement “based on racism and discriminatory ideas”.

There were cases to be made for all of it, but this was language sure to tear the meeting apart (just as “Zionism equals racism” resolutions had torn apart UN gatherings before). Meanwhile, as soon as the conference began, the parallel forum for non-governmental organisations began to spiral out of control. With more than 8,000 participants and no ground rules to speak of, the NGO forum turned into a free-for-all, with, among other incidents, the Arab Lawyers Union passing out a booklet that contained Der Stürmer–style cartoons of hook-nosed Jews with bloody fangs.

High-profile NGO and civil rights leaders roundly condemned the antisemitic incidents, as did Mary Robinson, then UN high commissioner for human rights. None of the controversial language about Israel and Zionism made it into the final Durban Declaration. But for the newly elected administration of George W Bush, that was besides the point. Already testing the boundaries of what would become a new era of US unilateralism, Bush latched on to the gathering’s alleged anti-Israel bias as the perfect excuse to flee the scene, neatly avoiding the debates over Israel and reparations. Early in the conference, the US and Israel walked out.

Despite the disruptions, Africa was not denied its rendezvous with history. The final Durban Declaration became the first document with international legal standing to state that “slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity and should always have been so, especially the transatlantic slave trade”. This language was more than symbolic. When lawyers had sought to win slavery reparations in US courts, the biggest barrier was always the statute of limitations, which had long since expired. But if slavery was “a crime against humanity”, it was not restricted by any statute.

On the final day of the conference, after Canada tried to minimise the significance of the declaration, Amina Mohamed, now a top official in the Kenyan government, took the floor in what many remember as the most dramatic moment of the gathering. “Madame President,” Mohamed said, “it is not a crime against humanity just for today, nor just for tomorrow, but for always and for all time. Nuremberg made it clear that crimes against humanity are not time-bound.” Any acts that take responsibility for these crimes, therefore, “are expected and are in order”. The assembly hall erupted in cheers and a long standing ovation.

Groups of African American activists spent their last day at the conference planning a “Millions for Reparations” march on Washington. Attorney Roger Wareham, co-counsel on a high-profile reparations lawsuit and one of the organisers, recalled that as they left South Africa, “people were on a real rolling high” – ready to take their movement to the next level.

That was 9 September 2001. Two days later, Africa’s “rendezvous with history” was all but forgotten. The profound demands that rose up from Durban during that first week of September 2001 – for debt cancellation, for reparations for slavery and apartheid, for land redistribution and indigenous land rights, for compensation, not charity – have never again managed to command international attention. At various World Bank meetings and G8 summits there is talk, of course, of graciously providing aid to Africa and perhaps “forgiving” its debts. But there is no suggestion that it might be the G8 countries that are the debtors and Africa the creditor. Or that it is we, in the west, who should be asking forgiveness.

Because Durban disappeared before it had ever fully appeared, it’s sometimes hard to believe it happened at all. As Bill Fletcher, author and long-time advocate for African rights, puts it: “It was as if someone had pressed a giant delete button.”

When news came that the Durban follow-up conference would take place three months into Obama’s presidency, many veterans of the first gathering were convinced the time had finally come to restart that interrupted conversation. And at first the Obama administration seemed to be readying to attend, even sending a small delegation to one of the preparatory conferences. So when Obama announced that he, like Bush before him, would be boycotting, it came as a blow. Especially because the state department’s official excuse was that the declaration for the new conference was biased against Israel. The evidence? That the document – which does not reference Israel once – “reaffirms” the 2001 Durban Declaration. Never mind that that was so watered down that Shimon Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister, praised it at the time as “an accomplishment of the first order for Israel” and “a painful comedown for the Arab League”.

When disappointed activists reconvened for the Durban Review Conference this April, talk in the corridors often turned to the unprecedented sums governments were putting on the line to save the banks. Roger Wareham, for instance, pointed out that if Washington can find billions to bail out AIG, it can also say, “We’re going to bail out people of African descent because this is what’s happened historically.” It’s true that, at least on the surface, the economic crisis has handed the reparations movement some powerful new arguments. The hardest part of selling reparations in the US has always been the perception that something would have to be taken away from whites in order for it to be given to blacks and other minorities. But because of the broad support for large stimulus spending, there is a staggering amount of new money floating around – money that does not yet belong to any one group.

Obama’s approach to stimulus spending has been rightly criticised for lacking a big idea – the $787bn package he unveiled shortly after taking office is a messy grab bag, with little ambition actually to fix any one of the problems on which it nibbles. Listening to Wareham in Geneva, it occurred to me that a serious attempt to close the economic gaps left by slavery and Jim Crow is as good a big stimulus idea as any.

What is tantalising (and maddening) about Obama is that he has the skills to persuade a great many Americans of the justice of such an endeavour. The one time he gave a major campaign address on race, prompted by controversy over the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, he told a story about the historical legacies of slavery and legalised discrimination that have structurally prevented African Americans from achieving full equality, a story not so different from the one activists such as Wareham tell in arguing for reparations. Obama’s speech was delivered six months before Wall Street collapsed, but the same forces he described go a long way toward explaining why the crash happened in the first place: “Legalised discrimination… meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations,” Obama said, which is precisely why many turned to risky sub-prime mortgages. In Obama’s home city of Chicago, black families were four times more likely than whites to get a sub-prime mortgage.

The crisis in African American wealth has only been deepened by the larger economic crisis. In New York City, for instance, the unemployment rate has increased four times faster among blacks than among whites. According to the New York Times, home “defaults occur three times as often in mostly minority census tracts as in mostly white ones”. If Obama traced the Wall Street collapse back to the policies of redlining and Jim Crow, all the way to the betrayed promise of 40 acres and a mule for freed slaves, a broad sector of the American public might well be convinced that finally eliminating the structural barriers to full equality is in the interests not just of minorities but of everyone who wants a more stable economy.

Since the economic crisis hit, John A Powell and his team at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University have been engaged in a project they call “Fair Recovery”. It lays out exactly what an economic stimulus programme would look like if eliminating the barriers to equality were its overarching idea. Powell’s plan covers everything from access to technology to community redevelopment. A few examples: rather than simply rebuilding the road system by emphasising “shovel ready” projects (as Obama’s current plan does), a “fair recovery” approach would include massive investments in public transport to address the fact that African Americans live farther away than any other group from where the jobs are. Similarly, a plan targeting inequality would focus on energy-efficient home improvements in low-income neighbourhoods and, most importantly, require that contractors hire locally. Combine all of these targeted programmes with real health and education reform and, whether or not you call it “reparations”, you have something approaching what Randall Robinson called for in The Debt: “A virtual Marshall Plan of federal resources” to close the racial divide.

In his Philadelphia “race speech”, Obama was emphatic that race was something “this nation cannot afford to ignore”; that “if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like healthcare, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American”. Yet as soon as the speech had served its purpose (saving Obama’s campaign from being engulfed by the Wright scandal), he did simply retreat. And his administration has been retreating from race ever since.

Public policy activists report that the White House is interested in hearing only about projects that are “race neutral” – nothing that specifically targets historically disadvantaged constituencies. Its housing and education programmes do not tackle the need for desegregation; indeed Obama’s enthusiasm for privately-run “charter” schools may well deepen segregation, since charters are some of the most homogenous schools in the country. When asked specific questions about what his administration is doing to address the financial crisis’s wildly disproportionate impact on African Americans and Latinos, Obama has consistently offered a variation on the line that, by fixing the economy and extending benefits, everyone will be helped, “black, brown and white”, and the vulnerable most of all.

All this is being met with mounting despair among inequality experts. Extending unemployment benefits and job retraining mainly help people who’ve just lost their jobs. Reaching those who have never had formal employment – many of whom have criminal records – requires a far more complex strategy that takes down multiple barriers simultaneously. “Treating people who are situated differently as if they were the same can result in much greater inequalities,” Powell warns. It will be difficult to measure whether this is the case because the White House’s budget office is so far refusing even to keep statistics on how its programmes affect women and minorities.

There were those who saw this coming. The late Latino activist Juan Santos wrote a much-circulated essay during the presidential campaign in which he argued that Obama’s unwillingness to talk about race (except when his campaign depended upon it) was a triumph not of post-racialism but of racism, period. Obama’s silence, he argued, was the same silence every person of colour in America lives with, understanding that they can be accepted in white society only if they agree not to be angry about racism. “We stay silent, as a rule, on the job. We stay silent, as a rule, in the white world. Barack Obama is the living symbol of our silence. He is our silence writ large. He is our Silence running for president.” Santos predicted that “with respect to Black interests, Obama would be a silenced Black ruler: A muzzled Black emperor.”

Many of Obama’s defenders responded angrily: his silence was a mere electoral strategy, they said. He was doing what it took to make racist white people comfortable voting for a black man. All that would change, of course, when Obama took office. What Obama’s decision to boycott Durban demonstrated definitively was that the campaign strategy is also the governing strategy.

Two weeks after the close of the Durban Review Conference, Rush Limbaugh sprang a new theory on his estimated 14 million listeners. Obama, Limbaugh claimed, was deliberately trashing the economy so he could give more handouts to black people. “The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state. The objective is to take the nation’s wealth and return it to the nation’s ‘rightful owners’. Think reparations. Think forced reparations here, if you want to understand what actually is going on.”

It was nonsense, of course, but the outburst was instructive. No matter how race-neutral Obama tries to be, his actions will be viewed by a large part of the country through the lens of its racial obsessions. So, since even his most modest, Band-Aid measures are going to be greeted as if he is waging a full-on race war, Obama has little to lose by using this brief political window actually to heal a few of the country’s racial wounds.

Innocence Project Blog:

An exhaustive report released today by the New Yorker finds that Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004 in Texas for murders he didn’t commit. The report follows years of investigation into the case, and concludes that the arson analysis used to convict Willingham was wrong — and that none of the other evidence used to convict Willingham was valid.

The findings in the New Yorker report and other evaluations of Willingham’s case have brought renewed calls for a moratorium on executions and comprehensive reforms of forensic science in the United States.

[...]

Innocence Project Co-Director Barry Scheck writes in the Huffington Post today that this case should lead to sweeping improvements in the forensic sciences:

Whether our criminal justice system has executed an innocent man should no longer be an open question. We don’t know how often it happens, but we know it has happened. Cameron Todd Willingham’s case proves that.

The focus turns to how we can stop it from happening again. As long as our system of justice makes mistakes — including the ultimate mistake — we cannot continue executing people.

Today’s 16,000-word New Yorker story comes a week after independent arson expert Craig Beyler submitted his report to the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which is conducting a review of Willingham’s conviction. Beyler, like a panel of national arson experts assembled three years ago by the Innocence Project, found that the science used to convict Willingham was wrong. The Texas Forensic Science Commission announced that it is reviewing Beyler’s report and will release its conclusions next year.

Source and further reading

“Obama tells black America: ‘Your destiny is in your hands’…No Excuses”

This sentence above was the emphasis of main-stream media of Obama’s recent speech for the 100th anniversary of the NAACP.

You can read the entire speech here: Link

The media presents to its white audience what the white audience wants to hear. That Black people use racism as an excuse.

It is in this alleged ‘post-racial’ America where white people display for everybody who can see what Obama was talking about in January 2008: Americas empathy deficit

“Maybe if white folks marched because they had come to understand that their freedom too was at stake in the impending battle, the wall would begin to sway. And if enough Americans were awakened to the injustice; if they joined together, North and South, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, then perhaps that wall would come tumbling down, and justice would flow like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Unity is the great need of the hour – the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.

I’m not talking about a budget deficit. I’m not talking about a trade deficit. I’m not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans.

I’m talking about a moral deficit. I’m talking about an empathy deficit. I’m taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.

We have an empathy deficit when we’re still sending our children down corridors of shame – schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education.

We have a deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months; when families lose their homes so that lenders make a profit; when mothers can’t afford a doctor when their children get sick.

We have a deficit in this country when there is Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others; when our children see nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree today, in the present, in the twenty-first century.

We have a deficit when homeless veterans sleep on the streets of our cities; when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur; when young Americans serve tour after tour of duty in a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged.
[...]
So we have a deficit to close. We have walls – barriers to justice and equality – that must come down. And to do this, we know that unity is the great need of this hour.

and here are some parts of the NAACP speech which the main-stream media left out or treated it more like a side-note:

“What we celebrate tonight is not simply the journey the NAACP has traveled, but the journey that we, as Americans, have traveled over the past 100 years.

It’s a journey that takes us back to a time before most of us were born, long before the Voting Rights Act, and the Civil Rights Act, Brown v. Board of Education; back to an America just a generation past slavery. It was a time when Jim Crow was a way of life; when lynchings were all too common; when race riots were shaking cities across a segregated land.
[...]
They also knew that here, in America, change would have to come from the people. It would come from people protesting lynchings, rallying against violence, all those women who decided to walk instead of taking the bus, even though they were tired after a long day of doing somebody else’s laundry, looking after somebody else’s children. It would come from men and women of every age and faith, and every race and region — taking Greyhounds on Freedom Rides; sitting down at Greensboro lunch counters; registering voters in rural Mississippi, knowing they would be harassed, knowing they would be beaten, knowing that some of them might never return.
[...]
And so the question is, where do we direct our efforts? What steps do we take to overcome these barriers? How do we move forward in the next 100 years?
[...]
The first thing we need to do is make real the words of the NAACP charter and eradicate prejudice, bigotry, and discrimination among citizens of the United States. I understand there may be a temptation among some to think that discrimination is no longer a problem in 2009. And I believe that overall, there probably has never been less discrimination in America than there is today. I think we can say that.

But make no mistake: The pain of discrimination is still felt in America.
[...]
But we also know that prejudice and discrimination — at least the most blatant types of prejudice and discrimination — are not even the steepest barriers to opportunity today. The most difficult barriers include structural inequalities that our nation’s legacy of discrimination has left behind; inequalities still plaguing too many communities and too often the object of national neglect.
[...]
There are overcrowded classrooms, and crumbling schools, and corridors of shame in America filled with poor children — not just black children, brown and white children as well.

The state of our schools is not an African American problem; it is an American problem. Because if black and brown children cannot compete, then America cannot compete.
[...]
And that’s what the NAACP is all about. The NAACP was not founded in search of a handout. The NAACP was not founded in search of favors. The NAACP was founded on a firm notion of justice; to cash the promissory note of America that says all of our children, all God’s children, deserve a fair chance in the race of life.
[...]
It’s a simple dream, and yet one that all too often has been denied — and is still being denied to so many Americans. It’s a painful thing, seeing that dream denied. I remember visiting a Chicago school in a rough neighborhood when I was a community organizer, and some of the children gathered ’round me. And I remember thinking how remarkable it was that all of these children seemed so full of hope, despite being born into poverty, despite being delivered, in some cases, into addiction, despite all the obstacles they were already facing — you could see that spark in their eyes. They were the equal of children anywhere.

And I remember the principal of the school telling me that soon that sparkle would begin to dim, that things would begin to change; that soon, the laughter in their eyes would begin to fade; that soon, something would shut off inside, as it sunk in — because kids are smarter than we give them credit for — as it sunk in that their hopes would not come to pass — not because they weren’t smart enough, not because they weren’t talented enough, not because of anything about them inherently, but because, by accident of birth, they had not received a fair chance in life.”

.

But all what white America has to tell Black America via media is: ‘Your destiny is in your hands’…No Excuses”
Empathy deficit indeed…

by Robert Jensen

[Rob Shetterly, the artist who created the Americans Who Tell the Truth website (http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/), asked some of the people he painted to respond to this query: “Everywhere I go, kids and adults want to know how you got started. What was the defining moment that triggered your dedication to fighting for justice or peace, or the environment?” Below are my thoughts.]

My transition to political radicalism — going to the root of problems, recognizing that dramatic and fundamental change in the way society is organized is necessary if there is to be a decent human future — involved a lot of pain, in two different ways.

The first concerned the process of coming to know about the pain of the world. I had never been a naïve person who thought the world was a happy place, but like many people who have privilege (in my case, being white, male, a U.S. citizen, and economically secure, though never wealthy) I was able to remain ignorant of the depth of the routine suffering in the world. I was able to ignore how white supremacy, patriarchy, U.S. imperialism, and a predatory capitalist economic system routinely destroy the bodies and spirits of millions of people around the world. When I made a conscious choice to stop ignoring those realities — in my case, when I returned to a university for graduate education with the time to read and study — the process of coming to know about that pain was wrenching. But I found myself wanting to know more.

Why would someone with privilege press to know more about the pain of the world when that knowledge creates tension and emotional turmoil? In my case, coming to understand that the world’s pain is the product of profoundly unjust social systems helped me understand a different kind of personal pain I had been struggling with. Most of my life I had felt like a bit of a freak, like someone out of step with the culture around him. There’s nothing dramatically wrong with me physically or psychologically, but I always struggled to fit in. I had always had a lingering sense that I didn’t want what others around me seemed to want. Because of my privilege, the world offered me a lot, and I am grateful for much of what I have — work I have usually enjoyed, an adequate income, relative safety. But I could never figure out how to be normal — how to kick back with the guys; how to get excited about sports, television, or the latest hit music; how to care about what kind of car I drove. In many ways I had it made, on the surface, but that sense of being out of step always dragged me down.

The best way to deal with our individual struggles is to put them in a larger context. That means both understanding the forces that shape our world as well as placing our problems in perspective. Becoming radicalized politically allowed me to see that I was suffering because I didn’t want to fit into a world shaped by unjust systems; the problem wasn’t my values and desires but the pathology of those systems. That didn’t solve all my personal problems, but it sure helped. Radical politics also helped me understand more clearly how others were suffering much more than I; it shook me out of my self-absorption. Both realizations led me to want to continue the search for more knowledge and understanding about how this all worked, and to commit as much time and energy as I had to movements for social justice.

The paradox is that since I have immersed myself in the pain of the world, I have been able to find new joy. I still understand that the world is not a happy place, and to be truly alive we must face what my friend Jim Koplin calls the “sense of profound grief” that comes with looking honestly at the world. As the writer Wendell Berry has put it, we live on “the human estate of grief and joy” [The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), p. 106]. Grief is inevitable, and it is only through an honest embrace of the grief that real joy is possible. The conventional world tries to sell us many pleasures, but it offers us little joy. That’s because the conventional world is also trying to sell us many ways to numb our pain, which keeps us from that grief. So long as we are out of touch with the grief, we are unable to feel the joy. We are left only with the desperate search for pleasure and a panicked scramble to avoid pain.

This process has, for me, been slow and gradual — there have been no epiphanies. I don’t believe in epiphanies, and I don’t trust people who claim to have epiphanies. I don’t think the deep understanding of the world that we strive for can come in a single moment. It comes from the long and painful struggle, with the world and with ourselves. Insight doesn’t magically descend upon us. We have to work for it, and that always takes time.

As the singer/songwriter Eliza Gilkyson (who also happens to be my partner) has put it, “Those are lost who/try to cross through/the sorrow fields too easily” [“He Waits for Me,” from the CD “Beautiful World,” Red House Records, 2008]. To expand on her metaphor, we cross those fields not in search of a utopia somewhere ahead. Our life is that journey across those fields, facing the grief and celebrating the joy along the way.

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/gettingradicalized.htm

This is an answer to Joe from Racismreview, I post it here because it is “off-topic” there and also quite long.

@Joe,

I made two observations when it comes to white anti-racism in the Usa: it is obsessed with ‘the other’ and uses an American perspective only. I can be wrong with these observations, but this is the picture I got throughout the years.
Your post ‘Racism in the USA – and in the other USA, there is a Freudian typo: “Professor Jansen talks about living between two racial cultures and compares the USA to the USA” (it should read compares the USA to South Africa I guess). It ends with the question: “Sounds like the other USA?”

Marimba Ani is very thouroughly examining European thought and behavior.

in the comment section on RR you wrote to me:
Jwbe, I prefer to accent just how racialized this broad frame is…..It certainly has Eurocentric elements.

and some posts later:
Yes, I have used Yurugu numerous times in my sociological theory seminars, and regularly cite the book. She makes very important points about the character of the Western philosophical approach to the world.

The “white racial frame” is part of Eurocentrism, not reverse like you state.

All started in Europe. There was a culture of ‘othering’ already before race was ‘invented’. Starting in Europe Europeans conquered the world and regardless where they went, there patterns have always been the same: Conquering, killing indigenous people, enslavement or committing genocide, imposing European cultural norms including religion etc.

Acting as if the world belongs to them (Europeans) and nobody else.

Also within Europe itself it was about wars, conquering each other, oppression of ‘othered’ groups. [Inquisition, witch hunts etc.]

For me my approach is: what is it with us Europeans? I don’t know of any larger European group that came peacefully and integrated into the already existing non-European culture.

And what is it today that in every country where whites still dominate, the patterns of denial and attitudes towards PoC are exactly the same. There is no difference, regardless if you talk to white mainstream in Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Australia, South Africa, US and so on.

The Holocaust demonstrates, that those who define themselves as superior, can quite easily use their ‘cultural knowledge’ to display their genocidal attitudes towards any group.
Wherever Europeans went, they took their culture – Eurocentrism – with them. Their point of view, their individualism, their inability to respect the alleged other and so on.

Marimba Ani: “Hypocrisy as a way of life”, and with this she hits the nail on the head.

Racism is ‘only’ one part of a deadly system without an own emotional center, I call this soul (but not in a religious context).
It is my conviction that whites won’t be part of the solution to end white supremacy as long as they resist to search for their own soul and this is not collectively possible as long as Eurocentrism dictates our being and how we relate to the world and how we approach ourselves.

We are trying to Europeanize the rest of the globe entirely. We were able to infect the world. And it is not ‘only’ how we Europeans regardless where on earth relate to PoC within our individual nations in the always same ‘othering’ ways, but also how we relate to nations we consider as ‘the other’ = non-European. And it is about how we ‘whites’ relate to each other and how we view the world. How we treat humans as well as nature and even the the universe, this mind-set that all is ours (Europeans), that we have to “explore” all and to dominate all.

Whites regardless where feel immediately discriminated against when they are not always in the center of attention or not always in the dominant position, they feel threaten in their very existence when PoC insist in their basic human rights. We whites create together, internationally, new ‘races’, Muslims. The ‘other’. Back then it was Jews.

Our culture ‘enables’ us to include into ‘whiteness’ and exclude from ‘whiteness’. On another board somebody once posted a picture of Anne Frank with the question: what makes her non-white. It was not her skin-color.

But Europeans created the ‘opposite’ to themselves: African people. Black. This alleged opposite can never be included as *us* in the European mind-set, this leads to a post Nquest wrote:
“Baldwin asks White America to question:

Baldwin reasons that the very creation of the “n*gger” indicates that there was a need for the “n*gger” and that White America has to find out why. Baldwin said then that the future of the country depends on how White America answers that question.”

And this is not just the question to white America but to all whites worldwide. And yes indeed, why do we need an alleged opposite to us to define ourselves?
Earlier I published some thoughts about this

The ‘white racial frame’ and your suggestion of ‘counter framing’ again needs ‘the other’ to define whites. That’s the problem I see and it is also not searching for who we are as Europeans.

In this past weeks confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Senator Lindsey Graham started the White (Male) Identity Politics party off right:

“If I had said anything remotely like that, my career would have been over.”

BULL-fuckin’-SHIT.

“To the argument made by Thurgood Marshall that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitution right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are.”

That was part of the infamous memo the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote.  Beside having a racist ring to it reminiscent of another deceased Chief Justice, Roger B. Taney — who stated that “[the black man] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” — Rehnquist quote is unmistakable:  White people’s views, perspectives and opinions should (*my bad*) WOULD not only dictate the rights racial/ethnic minorities have but the Constitution itself, or a justice’s fidelity to the rule of law, would not determine the matter.  Now place that up against the backdrop of Rehnquist’s much alleged racism and then come up with a reasonable rationale why he was allowed to serve a life sentence as a Supreme Court judge in this country with the kind of racist history we have.  This makes me want to question the Gore v. Bush voter disenfranchisement issues all over again.

And then you have Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and a whole line of White men who had long careers in federal government well after their clearly racially problematic statements or actions were known to the public.  Just the list of the usual suspects should be enough to put this “If White man had said…” nonsense to rest.  I mean, with White men like Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms and even Trent Lott who left the Senate on his own accord, years after his loose-lips slip of the tongue incident. Hell, both Alito and Roberts had question marks regarding their racial views but they were not charged with subscribing to White (Male) Identity Politics.

And, seriously, a country that only in recent history did away with WHITE ONLY policies, customs and practices and still those problems, in Philadelphia at least (*sarcasm*), and to act like its women and “minorities” who are the ones into identity politics is as big a lie as Pat Buchanan citing to Civil War battles (and ignoring the recent House bill passed to acknowledge how slaves built the Capitol building) as evidence that “This has been a country built basically by white folks.”

Samantha grew up living with an aunt in Camberwell. She was arrested in Laos with 0.6 kg of heroin in August last year – an amount that exceeds the statutory minimum for the death penalty in Laos.

Although Phonthong Prison is a woman’s only prison Samantha became pregnant in December, and is due to give birth in September.

It is understood that her trial was planned for next year but on Thursday 30th April the Laotian authorities announced that it had been bought forward to next week. Samantha has still not seen a lawyer.

Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve said yesterday “It’s absolutely no coincidence that yesterday the Laotians announced that they were moving her trial up probably by a year to next week. It’s pretty shocking that they would do that, apparently to avoid her seeing a British lawyer, before she has to go to trial. The notion that no lawyer should be appointed to defend her is outrageous.”

Reprieve believe that Samantha’s life hangs in the balance. There are many reports of abuse and several deaths in Phonthong Prison, including that of a British national last year. Conditions remain harsh and the diet is dangerously inadequate and Reprieve has grave concerns for her health and that of her unborn child.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:
- Email Harriet Harman, Samantha’s MP, and Gordon Brown:
- Harriet Harman: harmanh@parliament.uk / Tel: 0207 219 4218
- Gordon Brown: https://email.number10.gov.uk/Contact.aspx

Link to the facebook group

Because of the negativity of real life events as well as the negativity of many online discussion, when it comes to discussions about race, racism, white supremacy, I write this thread.

There are two forms of talking about race:

first: where whiteness and whites can dominate, regardless whether in ways of subtle racism or blatant racism. “Discussions” which become exhausting (to me at least), because the real topic can no longer be discussed. This deeply reflects real life “discussions”. With white insults, non-knowledge, denial, “I want to learn” and all else.
I have to say, for me personally such experiences can sometimes be very exhausting, emotionally. I cannot disconnect my feelings from what I have to read on discussion boards or blogs and what I have to hear in real life about or towards People of Color. It hurts, and sometimes very deeply.

second: talks about race that are honest, dominated by People of Color and with participants who know what they are talking about. Discussions which are an enrichment. Discussions where I feel ‘at home’ (in lack of a better expression) because all people are respected and nobody’s humanity is questioned. Safe spaces. Unfortunately very rare places, online as well as in real life.

Any thoughts?

There are moments where I would like to say so much, but where I don’t find any words that could express my thoughts and feelings.

Marwa El-Sherbini , I cry for you, your family and your children.

“How many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn’t see?

How many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?”

(Blowing in the wind)

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers here are learning the hard way that trying to apologize for historic injustices isn’t as easy as saying “I’m sorry.”

The Senate found that out two weeks ago when it passed a resolution calling on the U.S. to apologize formally for more than three centuries of enslavement and segregation of African-Americans.

Senators thought they’d done the right thing. The feel-good moment was short-lived, however, after several members of the Congressional Black Caucus vowed to fight the measure when it reached the House of Representatives . They object because it contains a disclaimer saying that the resolution can’t be used to support legal claims against the U.S. by those seeking reparations, or cash compensation for the suffering endured by blacks.

So instead of an elaborate July 7 signing ceremony in the stately Capitol Rotunda with Senate and House leaders delivering an apology, lawmakers are struggling to find common ground that would soothe Black Caucus members while satisfying senators that the nation is sufficiently protected against lawsuits.

“Apologies are never easy,” said Melissa Nobles , a Massachusetts Institute of Technology political science professor and author of “The Politics of Official Apologies.” “These things are always hard-fought, never mind the political stuff, the implications of what they mean down the line, and who’s sponsoring the resolution.”

The slavery apology resolution is one in a long line of recent measures written by Senate and House members seeking to acknowledge the government’s role in some of the most painful episodes in U.S. history.

Rep. John Lewis , D- Ga. , and Sen. Blanche Lincoln , D- Ark. , introduced companion bills last month calling for the placement of a marker in the Capitol Visitor Center’s Emancipation Hall to acknowledge that the Capitol was built on the backs of slave labor.

The House and Senate also recently passed bills to award the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The women were civilian pilots employed to fly military aircraft during World War II by the U.S. Army Air Corps .

Though they were flying military missions and aircraft, the female pilots were denied full military status and benefits, and their records sealed and classified for more than 30 years.

They will join the World War II-era Tuskegee Airmen as gold medal recipients. Surviving members of that barrier-breaking African-American flying squadron received their medals from former President George W. Bush in 2007.

The moves to honor those discriminated against while in service to their country reflects generational change and a desire to honor these group members while some are still alive, Nobles said.

Apologies by governments for long-standing, deep-seated grievances, however, are a tougher proposition, scholars say.

“Politically, you have issues of who’s the best person to make the apologies, to whom?” said Brian Weiner , a University of San Francisco politics professor and author of “Sins of the Parents: The Politics of National Apologies in the United States .”

“What’s really key is some sense of sincerity. Part of the sincerity — with lovers and friends — you can see face-to-face. But in the political realm, how can you test the sincerity of the U.S. government? In that case, it usually comes to money, and that’s a problem politically.”

The issue of reparations has been divisive and one that’s a non-starter for many politicians, including President Barack Obama .

A 2002 CNN / USA Today /Gallup Poll found that nine out of 10 whites opposed reparations payments to descendants of slaves, while more than half of African-Americans supported such payments.

Former Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R- Colo. , addressing Native American leaders last year, suggested that fear of reparations contributed to the demise of congressional resolutions in 2008 that called on the government to apologize to tribal governments and Native Americans nationwide.

The word “reparations” doesn’t appear in the Senate’s slavery apology resolution. Senate aides, however, said the disclaimer was added to satisfy senators who worried that the resolution could open the door to claims against the nation. The resolution wouldn’t have passed without the disclaimer, the aides say.

Supporters of a slavery apology insist that the disclaimer, in a resolution that doesn’t have the force of law, wouldn’t bar slave descendants from seeking reparations.

Hilary Shelton , the director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau, said the venerable civil rights group has no problem with the resolution and the disclaimer. The group is looking forward to some sort of ceremony during a historically significant year for blacks that includes the NAACP’s 100th anniversary, the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln , the 80th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. , and year one of the nation’s first African-American president.

“It opens up a discussion, an opportunity for Americans to start a healing process,” Shelton said. “There are those who would like to see us move quickly in the House and have a ceremony.”

However, he quickly added that concerned Black Caucus members should take their time if they “need a moment” to thoroughly study the resolution before making a decision whether or not to try and block it.

Rep. Bennie Thompson , D- Miss. , said he’s done that.

“Respectfully, all of us are members of the NAACP , probably,” Thompson said of the Black Caucus membership. “But the vote is vested with us, members of Congress . If they bring the resolution up and it still reads as it does, I’m going to vote against it.”

MIT’s Nobles thinks that the worries of some African-American lawmakers might yield to the significance of the moment and the impact of Obama’s election.

“The country may now be able to look back at its history honestly,” she said. “We can look back and say we’ve overcome things. We have a triumphant ending to the story instead of a painful one.”

Link