From Atlantic Wire:

A nation continues to wait for final word on the Supreme Court’s Big Four cases this term — voting rights, affirmative action, DOMA, and Proposition 8 — but the justices’ closest decision arrived first on Monday, in a 5-4 ruling on Salinas v. Texas in which the conservative members of the Court and Anthony Kennedy determined that if you remain silent before police read your Miranda rights, that silence can and will be held against you. Here’s what that means.

Basically, if you’re ever in any trouble with police (no, we don’t condone breaking laws) and want to keep your mouth shut, you will need to announce that you’re invoking your Fifth Amendment right instead of, you know, just keeping your mouth shut. “Petitioner’s Fifth Amendment claim fails because he did not expressly invoke the privilege against self-incrimination in response to the officer’s question,” reads the opinion from Justice Samuel Alito, which Justice Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts backed. Justices Thomas and Scalia had a concurring opinion while the remaining four Supremes dissented.

The Salinas case revolves around Genovevo Salinas, a man who was convicted of a 1992 murder of two brothers. Salinas was brought in for police questioning in January 1993. According to the dissenting opinion of Justice Breyer, he was called in to “to take photographs and to clear him as [a]suspect” and Salinas was questioned without being read his Miranda rights:

Because he was “free to leave at that time,” [App.14], they did not give him Miranda warnings. The police then asked Salinas questions. And Salinas answered until the police asked him whether the shotgun from his home “would match the shells recovered at the scene of the murder [Id., at 17.] At that point Salinas fell silent.

That silence was then used against Salinas in court, and he was eventually convicted. But the bigger question in revisiting this 20-year-old murder case was whether or not prosecutors were allowed to point to that silence, and win a case using Salinas’ own silence against him.

“I wanted to bear witness.”

For over 40 years, photographer Dick Bancroft has being doing just that, serving as the key documentarian of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

AIM was founded in Minneapolis in 1968. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, American Indians banded together to protest their treatment by modern society and the abuse of their ancestors throughout history. Bancroft and his camera followed AIM’s fight for political, social and cultural change. His work – capturing both injustices and successes – is compiled in the book “We Are Still Here: Photographs of the American Indian Movement.”….

Clyde Bellecourt,co- founder and national director of AIM, says now is the perfect time to celebrate Bancroft’s work “because it’s time people understand how much the American Indian Movement has accomplished.”

“People are standing up today. Our language is coming back and our culture,” says Bellecourt. “There’s no way the movement can be stopped.”

Fingerprint Files (Killer Version 1974)

“Right now somebody is listening to…… you
Keeping their eyes peeled…… on you
Mmm, mmm, what a price, what a price to pay….”

The War on Black – “Color-blindness” and Criminalization , Part 2
by nancy a heitzeg

Editors Note: As I write this, my Twitter feed is exploding in debate over the NSA/Prism spying program and the attendant leaks. I am seeing the Right decry the same policies they supported — hey voted for — under BushCo because.. well, the President is Black and must be ceaselessly criminalized. I am witnessing liberals defend USA PATRIOT ACT policies that they rejected under Bush because.. well, the President is Black and must be defended for what he  “represents”, at least to some. I am seeing the purity left and libertarians in outrage over governmental intrusion, because… well, White Privilege and now it matters since the target is not just people of color via COINTELPRO or NYPD Stop and Frisk.. But  never mind, let’s co-opt Rosa Parks and MLK..

This is exactly to the heart of my post: Overt racism v. Color-blind racism, an epic battle between two false choices all played out on a personalized level. No structural analysis, nor attendance to systemic racism/classism, and no ability to draw the straight line to consideration of race class gender in the law and its’ enforcement….There is another way..

Last week in Part 1, CI examined a recent report from the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report on the extrajudicial killing of 313 Black people by police, security guards and vigilantes. The report illustrated, in the extreme, how the criminalizing archetype – as  attached to Black Men in particular-  becomes the excuse for, quite frankly, Genocide.

MXGM makes it plain  that ” the practice of executing Black people without pretense of a trial, jury, or judge is an integral part of the government’s current overall strategy of containing the Black community in a state of perpetual colonial subjugation and exploitation.”

It is a War Against Black People, and certainly, extra-judicial killings represent just one aspect of this criminalizing war:

These killings come on top of other forms of oppression black people face. Mass incarceration of nonwhites is one of them. While African-Americans constitute 13.1% of the nation’s population, they make up nearly 40% of the prison population. Even though African-Americans use or sell drugs about the same rate as whites, they are 2.8 to 5.5 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than whites. Black offenders also receive longer sentences compared to whites. Most offenders are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses

And how does this War persist without national outrage?  With no declared State of Emergency? With so few proposed remedies?

Short answer: White Supremacy.

The devil, of course, is always in the longer details, and so today we turn to a deeper exploration of  “color-blind” racism, the central role of criminalizing archetypes, the complicity of Left, Center and Right, and dare we hope?? – a way out of the color-blind fog..

The Post Civil Rights Era and Color-blind Racism

White supremacy – once writ large in the law via slavery and Jim Crow segregation – was removed from its’ legalized pedestal with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and finally, The Fair Housing Act of 1968. The law became “race-neutral” and it now suddenly was illegal to discriminate on the basis on race.

These strokes of the pen, of course, could not remove the bigotry that lurked in human hearts and minds long steeped in racist archetypes; nor could this legislation remove the nearly 400 years of white racial preference and cumulative advantage in the accumulation of wealth and property, education and housing, health and well-being, and all matter of social opportunities.

Racism, as both white supremacist ideology and institutionalized arrangement, remains merely transformed with its’ systemic foundations intact. Segregation in housing and education persists at levels beyond that noted in Brown v. Board of Education, racial wealth gaps grow, and racial disparities in criminal injustice proliferate at a pace that has led to the label “The New Jim Crow”.

Not only does systemic racism persist indeed with ever widening racial gaps, but the Reverend Dr, Martin Luther King Jr.’s own words have been subverted to construct the denial. “They will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” is not yet reality, but instead now the rallying cry for those who would deny the persistence of racism in any and all of its’ manifestations. These words have been expropriated to legitimate the newest racist paradigm – “color-blindness”.

One of the major challenges of the post-Civil Rights era involves confronting the notion that racism is now over. Many are content to believe that once de jure segregation ended – that once the “colored only” signs were taken down from walls – everything was magically equal on a now level playing field. “Color-blind racism” explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics and allows whites (others too) to equate racism with prejudice, ignoring the institutionalized and systemic racial structures that sustain and reproduce white racial privilege.

Much racial inequality is now embedded de facto in structural arrangements, it is certainly more invisible. It is easy to identify the overt racist, but much harder to see the racial dynamics that persist in institutional patterns. And, for many whites, it is harder still to see the more subtly coded appeals to racism that they may even unwittingly engage in. This is the goal of the color-blind paradigm – to disguise the persistent racialized patterns of inequality and reduce racism to mere prejudice of the most visible sort.

A large body of research documents the paradigmatic shift from overt essentialist racist to color-blindness. This style of racism relies heavily on ideological frames and linguistic shifts which allow whites to assert they “do not see race”, deny structural racism, claim a level playing field that in fact now victimizes them with “reverse discrimination” and appeals to the “race card”, and argue that any discussion of race/racism is on fact racist and only serves to foment divisions rather than reflect/redress societal realities.  “Color-blind racism” also creates a set of code terms that implicitly indict people of color without ever mentioning race,

Race has never reflected any biological reality; it is indeed a social and political construct, which in the US and elsewhere has served to delineate “whiteness” as the “unraced” norm – the “unmarked marker” – while hierarchically devaluing  ”other”  racial/ethnic categories. It is no surprise than that one of the first explicit articulations of color-blind racism was designed to serve political purposes. Race has long been user as divider of those who have common class and political interests, but the Post Civil Rights Era called for new tactics. This is clearly reflected in the so-called Southern strategy of Nixon et al as expressed by Lee Atwood as follows:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N%$^&#, n%$^&#, n%$^&# .” By 1968 you can’t say “n%$^&#”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N%$^&#, n%$^&#”.

The “success” of this tactic lead to its’ widespread use in debates over welfare reform, affirmative action, and particularly “law and order” criminal justice policy;. In all these cases, the coded racial sub-text reads clearly. And, in all these cases, the resultant policies, while purportedly “race neutral”, resulted in disproportionate harm to people of color.

In the Post Civil Rights Era, the color-blind paradigm has become deeply ensconced in law and politics. Movement towards “race-neutrality” is the  hallmark of a series of Supreme Court decisions that deny the role of institutionalized racism and increasingly limit the role of of race in constitutional remedies for inequality in matters of affirmative action and educational access, voting rights, and all matters of criminal injustice. (See University of California Regents v. Bakke, McCleskey v Kemp, Gratz v Bollinger, and soon Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin and Shelby County v. Holder )

Ironically, the election of the First Black President has served to both re-ignite the overt racist tendencies of the right while simultaneously solidifying the color-blind paradigm, as issues of racial inequality and injustice have been pushed further to the margins of national politics. While race is now widely the text/subtext of  political debate, systemic racism still remains largely absent from either political discourse or policy debates of all sorts, including those related to criminal injustice.

Criminalization, Color-blind Racism, and The New Jim Crow

As Frederick Douglas observed nearly 150 years ago, there is no escaping “the general disposition in this country to impute crime to color”.  Post slavery the criminalizing narrative has been a central cultural feature of on-going efforts at oppression; from convict lease/plantain prison farms to the contemporary prison industrial complex the control of black bodies for profit has been furthered by the criminal justice system.”Slave Codes” become Black Codes and Black Codes become gang legislation, three-strikes and the War on Drugs. The persistent Condemnation of Blackness.

In the Post Civil Rights Era, there has been a corresponding shift from de jure racism codified explicitly into the law and legal systems to a de facto racism where people of color, especially African Americans, are subject to unequal protection of the laws, excessive surveillance, extreme segregation and neo-slave labor via incarceration all in the name of “crime control”. “Law and order” criminal justice policies were all guided by thinly coded appeals to white fears of high crime neighborhoods, “crack epidemics”, gang proliferation, juvenile super – predators, urban unrest, school violence, and more. In all these case, the sub-text reads clearly — fear of brown and especially black people.

This color-blind project was project originated with the right, but has widespread influence on the policies and appeals of both major political parties. As Kay Whitlock notes in Criminalizing President Obama:

The “get tough on crime” policy tidal wave was a direct response to the freedom/liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Barry Goldwater was the first presidential candidate to do so; Richard Nixon elevated it to an art….But the Right is not the only political sector to advance criminalizing narratives. “Our” liberal/progressive/left sector does it too, and so do libertarians, when there is a perceived or anticipated advantage to doing so. According to the Justice Policy Institute, “tough on crime” policies passed during the [President Bill] Clinton Administration’s tenure resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.”

Unfortunately, very few politicians from any perspective deeply question the premises and history of “get tough” and mass incarceration; almost none are willing to not only mount a challenge, but support the kind of deep-rooted organizing necessary to sustain challenges. That is because they depend upon mass support. And so far, voters favor “get tough.” No single politician can change that – and without a strong and deep base of community support, anyone who tried would be politically destroyed.

Color-blind racism and tough on crime combine in deadly fashion in the War on Drugs, with its’ attendant spike in mass incarceration, a 40+ year project that now indicts both Republican and Democratic administrations. It is no mistake that the subtitle of Michelle Alexander’s epic indictment of The New Jim Crow is this – Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-blindness. The Drug War, from start to finish  has always been racist: draconian sentences, crack v powder disparities, police patrol patterns, stop/frisk, and racial profiling, arrests, convictions, sentences, incarceration, and collateral consequences all fall heaviest on Blacks. (Please see Prison Culture’s on-going series: The Drug War: Still Racist and Failed).

Any doubt about any of that is dispelled again this week with a new Report from the ACLU: The War on Marijuana in Black and White. In sum:

• “Over-Policing: Between 2001 and 2010, there were over 8 million pot arrests in the U.S. That’s one bust every 37 seconds and hundreds of thousands ensnared in the criminal justice system.

• Wasted Time and Money: Enforcing marijuana laws costs us about $3.6 billion a year, yet the War on Marijuana has failed to diminish the use or availability of marijuana.

• Staggering Racial Bias: Marijuana use is roughly equal among Blacks and whites, yet Blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.”

“Color-blind racism” provides a convenient set of scripts to “explain” away these stunning disparities. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, the leading and award-winning  scholar on color-blind racism has a large body of work devoted to deciphering these new racial codes. What follows are what he describes as the central ideological frames that support the new racism.

• Abstract Liberalism – appeals politically to “equal opportunity” and economic individualism and “merit” (e.g. In the United States, success is primarily the result of individual merit and hard work; Regardless of race, class, gender or sexual orientation, all have equal opportunities to excel; Racism, classism etc is no “excuse” for failure to succeed.)

• Naturalization – explains social phenomena as natural occurrences (e.g. Racial and economic segregation in neighborhoods and schools is natural and nothing to be concerned about; if there are more people of color in prison, it is because they commit more crimes; If my friends are of the same race as me it is simply because I find more in common with them.)

• Cultural Racism – reliance on cultural explanations for racial inequality (e.g. People of color could have more success if they had a better work ethic; People of color would have more success if they would  try to speak standard English; People of color would have more success if they just got married; Youth of color would come under less police scrutiny if they stopped wearing sagging pants .)

•  Minimization of Racism – argument that discrimination no longer has a major impact on the life chances of people of color (e.g. Racial discrimination is no longer a major problem; People of color need to stop “playing the race card” whenever something goes wrong for them; Racism is the result of prejudiced individuals.)

These ideological frames are used to justify all sorts of racial arrangements, but play a particularly strong role in providing cover for institutionalized racism in the criminal injustice system. We have all heard them; some may have used them. The themes are already closely aligned with the larger tendency in the USA to deny the role of structure and a tradition in academic criminology to search search search endlessly for individual pathologies in explanations for crime.

The denial of systemic racism in criminal justice is unfortunately furthered – not just by whites – but by people of color too. There has always been in a strand in the Black community – as elsewhere – that emphasizes “personal responsibility” as the solution. From Booker T. Washington to Bill Cosby some say – with periodic calls for “The Talented Tenth”. Class matters some here, as do efforts to achieve distance from the criminalizing narratives most readily attached to those both Black and poor.

This has often been the position of the President too, even when directly presented with an opportunity to address the relationship between systemic racism and  “crime”. (To be fair, many assessments of the Obama administration and the Department of Justice policy on issues of criminal justice have been mixed.) Last February, with the backing of a 45,000+ signature petition, The Black Youth Project invited the President to come to Chicago to speak on gun violence:

…we urge the President to make his speech a substantive one that addresses the underlying factors that perpetuate violence in Black and Latino communities.

We hope his speech will detail how he will work with community groups, city and state officials to address the underlying issues leading to gun violence in the Windy City, and other cities across the country.

Namely, the illegal distribution and loose regulation of arms, the lack of living-wage jobs, the varied shortcomings of public schools, the disproportionate rate of incarceration for youth of color, the circumstances and culture that propels the cycle of violence, and yes, the misguided choices young people sometimes make.

The speech??? In the midst of crushing poverty/unemployment for Blacks and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s dismantling of the Chicago Public School system (the largest mass public school closing in US history), The President called for more parental responsibility and marriage. No mention of the fact that many of those “missing fathers” are swept up in the prison industrial complex, or that 1 in 3 Black men may expect to be imprisoned at some point in their life or that the policy of racialized mass incarceration is the primary contributor to the currently “imperiled Black family” via the large scale imprisonment of men, increasingly women, and juveniles via the school to prison pipeline.

Color-blind rhetoric. At the highest levels.

Now What??

The color-blind paradigm is not progress; it is just a slicker, more insidious version of white supremacy. Arguably, it is even more damaging than overt racism. Certainly it is more difficult to confront; certainly it provides cover for undying institutionalized discrimination: “More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began”. Certainly it is foundational to the contemporary furtherance of racialized criminalizing narratives that fuel the War on Drugs and  the prison industrial complex.

Confronting the pic also requires a challenge to color-blind racism and the myth of “race-neutral policies.

There is no other way.

Some brief and non-exhaustive final thoughts:

• Examine your own biases — unpack your assumptions about “criminals”, “felons”, “public safety”. Who do you see? Who do you fear? Who should you fear??

• Ask hard questions about proposed legislation — Who will benefit from, for example, more police in schools? Who will be harmed?

• Be suspicious of any so-called “criminal justice reforms” that do not directly confront racial disparity ( See Smoke and Mirrors?, Con Artists, Profit and Community Corrections and Confidence Men & “Prison Reform”.)

• Stop thinking you are better than The Hood — embrace the power, the resilience, the creativity, the genius, the potential of The People.

• Support grassroots groups that are already doing the hard work of intersectional analysis/activism ( See Critical Resistance, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, Project NIA, Prison Activist Resource Center , Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Solitary Watch: News from a Nation in Lockdown, and many more.)

• Do not expect any political figures to do this without us pushing — Build a Movement

• Become Traitors to “Whiteness”

• “Say everything or nothing at all.”

• Let Your Motto Be Resistance.

• Imagine Abolition.

From Bitch Magazine:

While “colorblindness” in adoption has been widely challenged, however, not everyone is convinced – like the adoptive mother who recently told me, “I don’t see my son’s color. Race is just not an issue for us.”What do you think?

Some people maintain that any cultural loss is unimportant compared to what children gain through adoption. But in both mainstream media and personal conversations about adoption, cultural and racial identity need not be pitted against a child’s right to love, safety, and security.

This unfortunate “either-or” framing of the issue finds frequent expression in discussions of transracial adoption. Michael Gerson—whose wife is a Korean adoptee—wrote in the Washington Post: “Ethnicity is an abstraction…. Every culture or race is outweighed when the life of a child is placed on the other side of the balance.” In a National Review article criticizing Kathryn Joyce’s book The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, adoptive father David French dismissed “the ‘culture’” (note the mocking quotation marks) of internationally adopted children as “the culture of starvation, of rags, of disease, and of abandonment.”What do you think?

George Wallace stands in front of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama (AFP/Getty Images)

From The Root:

Fifteen years after Vivian Malone and James Hood successfully enrolled at the University of Alabama, I had my first day of classes in August of 1978 at the “Capstone of Higher Education” — the state’s flagship.

On June 11, 1963, Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, an iconic segregationist, stood in the door of Foster Auditorium to prevent Malone and Hood from enrolling as undergraduates at the university. Wallace stepped aside only after President John F. Kennedy activated the Alabama National Guard, which ordered him to allow Hood and Malone to enroll. They began classes on June 12.

I entered in the summer of 1978 fully aware of the institution’s racist past and with a quiet commitment to single-handedly tearing down any remaining vestiges of segregation. I exited four years later, with a crimson-covered diploma in hand, a few battle scars and dozens of lifelong friends, including many who grew up along winding roads in the countryside instead of on urban streets and asphalt courts.

Educated in the inner-city schools of Birmingham — where the works of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni had been woven into my tapestry — I put on my Levi’s jeans, sneakers and an Izod knit top and dashed off for a 9 a.m. Biology 101 class with Dr. Graham. In the huge auditorium filled with about 350 students, I counted five blacks.

It’s always hot in Alabama in August. On that Monday morning, I quickly made my way on foot from my residence at Tutwiler Hall, passing Denny Chimes and crossing the huge quad along the way. A photographer had captured Malone making a similar trek in 1963. But on this day, there was no need for photographers or an escort. After the first two black students successfully entered and began classes at the university in 1963, thousands more would follow.

The theme for this year’s World Environment Day celebrations is Think.Eat.Save. Think.Eat.Save is an anti-food waste and food loss campaign that encourages you to reduce your foodprint. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), every year 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted. This is equivalent to the same amount produced in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, 1 in every 7 people in the world go to bed hungry and more than 20,000 children under the age of 5 die daily from hunger.

Given this enormous imbalance in lifestyles and the resultant devastating effects on the environment, this year’s theme – Think.Eat.Save – encourages you to become more aware of the environmental impact of the food choices you make and empowers you to make informed decisions.

While the planet is struggling to provide us with enough resources to sustain its 7 billion people (growing to 9 billion by 2050), FAO estimates that a third of global food production is either wasted or lost. Food waste is an enormous drain on natural resources and a contributor to negative environmental impacts.

This year’s campaign rallies you to take action from your home and then witness the power of collective decisions you and others have made to reduce food waste, save money, minimise the environmental impact of food production and force food production processes to become more efficient.

If food is wasted, it means that all the resources and inputs used in the production of all the food are also lost. For example, it takes about 1,000 litres of water to produce 1 litre of milk and about 16,000 litres goes into a cow’s food to make a hamburger. The resulting greenhouse gas emissions from the cows themselves, and throughout the food supply chain, all end up in vain when we waste food.

In fact, the global food production occupies 25% of all habitable land and is responsible for 70% of fresh water consumption, 80% of deforestation, and 30% of greenhouse gas emissions. It is the largest single driver of biodiversity loss and land-use change.

Making informed decision therefore means, for example, that you purposefully select foods that have less of an environmental impact, such as organic foods that do not use chemicals in the production process. Choosing to buy locally can also mean that foods are not flown halfway across the world and therefore limit emissions.

So think before you eat and help save our environment!

The War on Black ~ “Color-blindness” and Criminalization, Part 1
by nancy a heitzeg

For Kimani Gray, Cary Ball, Jr., and too many more…

As we brace ourselves for the George Zimmerman murder trial — where the defense will continue attempts to paint teen-aged Trayvon Martin as the stereotypical danger, not the victim – we have no shortage of brutalizing images to remind of us of the toxic power of that criminalizing narrative.

As we have written here before, the Black Man as Dangerous is a lethal idea, ironically, not to those who perpetrate and fear, but to those to whom it is attached. It is also a very old idea, one that has evolved over centuries. The Savage, The Brute, the Defiler of White Women — honed and solidified in the Post Civil Rights Era into an archetype that scholars and activists now refer to in aggregate short-hand: The Criminal-Black-Man.

This image is ubiquitous — it is the text and subtext of all crime-reporting and “reality” cop/prison programing. It shapes the contours of everyday racism, the school to prison pipeline, police patrols and profiles; it offers the framework for both creating and then perversely justifying the demographics of both the prison industrial complex and the face of death row.

The Criminal-Black-Man archetype is the centerpiece of the Post-Civil Rights Era’s reliance on color-blind coding to re-constitute the Old Jim Crow into the New – with The War on Drugs, The War on Gangs, and coming soon to a city near you, The War on Guns. Race need never be explicitly named but  “high crime neighborhoods”, “gangs”, “thugs”, ghettos, “hoods and “hoodies” all evoke a racialized image. As intended. All people of color — Latino/as and Native American especially-  the poor, the queer are targets here too – but it is Blackness that provides the paradigm.

And the Criminal Black Man need not be a literal “man” — Black women are deemed threatening too (See Kiera Wilmot), as are Black children. From the Scottsboro Boys to Emmet Till to Trayvon Martin, age has offered no mitigation for the irrational fear triggered in some by the presence of Black.

Just this week, 14 year old Tremaine McMillian was violently restrained by police for “dehumanizing stares” and was charged with a felony count of resisting arrest with violence and disorderly conduct.

Driving While Black, Walking While Black, Standing While Black, Carrying Skittles While Black, Doing Science While Black, Now Looking While Black are supposed rationale for a series of disproportionate responses from law enforcement, security personnel and every day would-be vigilantes.

Often these encounters are lethal. Too often. A recent report issued by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report on the extrajudicial killing of 313 Black people by police, security guards and vigilantes , notes this:

Every 28 hours in 2012 someone employed or protected by the US government killed a Black man, woman, or child.

Extra-judicial Killings and the Black Body Count

Operation Ghetto Storm is a follow-up report to MXGM’s Report on the Extrajudicial Killing of 120 Black People, January 1n to June 30 2012 that documented  the police killing of one Black Man Woman or Child every 36 hours; this data is not otherwise nationally gathered or reported. While local state and Federal law enforcement agencies keep absolutely accurate records of the number of police officers killed or assaulted in the line of duty (typically less than 60 killed per year), there is no comparable systematic accounting of the number of citizens killed by police each year.

This report is an attempt to fill that void. MXGM acknowledges that the data is probably an under-count of Black deaths at state hands; it certainly under-estimates the total number of extra-judicial killings for all people of color.  A  look at 5 key cities provides a brief glimpse of broader racial disparities.

Please read the Full Report as well as the curriculum guide, We Charge Genocide Again. Comprehensive and Stunning.  A few highlights:

• the majority of those killed — nearly 60% -were between the ages of 18-31;
• most are unarmed;
• the majority were are initially targeted via profiling and stop/frisk activities;
• many cases involved some indication of mental health issues;
• a disturbing number were killed after actually calling 911 for assistance;
• not surprisingly, perceived threat was the over-whelming rationale given by officers for their use of deadly force

“We Charge Genocide Again”

MXGM  locates their report in the tradition of “On Lynching” by Ida B. Wells-Burnet and “We Charge Genocide” by William L. Patterson, and makes it plain in the preface that ” the practice of executing Black people without pretense of a trial, jury, or judge is an integral part of the government’s current overall strategy of containing the Black community in a state of perpetual colonial subjugation and exploitation.”

It is a War Against Black People, and certainly, extra-judicial killings represent just one aspect of that criminalizing war:

These killings come on top of other forms of oppression black people face. Mass  incarceration of nonwhites is one of them. While African-Americans constitute 13.1% of the  nation’s population, they make up  nearly 40% of the prison population. Even though African-Americans use or sell drugs about the same rate as whites, they are 2.8 to 5.5 times more likely to be  arrested for drugs than whites. Black offenders also  receive longer sentences compared to whites. Most offenders are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses.

The report and curriculum guide also raise critical questions: Why are only a handful of the 313 names recognizable? Why did only a few of these cases come to national attention? Where is the outrage?

A recent New York Times headline/article of an “aberrant” police shooting, reveals extent to which polite society has avoided, justified, normalized, and otherwise accepted the War on Black in America.:

A Police Killing That Seemed to Go Against Type

But after officers were called to the Fairfield County home owned by John Valluzzo last week, it was as if the expected story line evoking Amadou Diallo or other police killings had been turned on its head. This time the person who was shot was a successful 75-year-old businessman and philanthropist, and the policeman a well-liked veteran who was a rare minority officer in a virtually all-white department. The setting was not a dark city street but a 9,000-square-foot estate in a green, historic Connecticut town whose residents have included Eugene O’Neill, Judy Collins and Henry Luce.

Police are not expected to be shooting old white businessmen in lush neighborhoods — even if the victim was allegedly “drunk and brandishing a gun.” This is not the scenario polite society expects — the police are there to “protect and serve” them. And protect them, of course, from the Criminal-Black-Man.

In this context of deep archetypical criminalizing, the extra-judicial killing of Blacks is unsurprising, routinized, expected, perhaps, legitimated by some. And not just by overt racists or those designated to speak on behalf of police state tactics. Aside from exceptional/notorious/high profile cases, this on-going systemic practice is ignored  by upstanding liberals of all stripes, including by those who have public platforms and the political power to illuminate and seek change.

The entire endeavor of mass criminalization – from stereotyping to racial profiling to arrest, incarceration, legal/extra-legal death – is rendered possible by complicity. Certainly the complicity of white liberals, but also that of some people of color themselves, whose participation ranges from by-stander to active enforcer of the laws.

This too is a complex topic, fueled by many factors, including, not least, the desire for distance from on-going efforts to criminalize them as well.

We Charge Genocide Again, an organizing toolkit produced by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement to accompany the Operation Ghetto Storm report, makes an important point about colonial regimes:

Neo Colonialism is the same system as colonialism, but instead of having outside white soldiers, politicians, even business people dominate Black and Brown people; the white power structure positions Black and Brown soldiers, politicians and business people to dominate the Black and Brown people on their behalf. The white power structure still makes the same money off of the oppressed people. The white power structure maintains the same control over the oppressed people. The difference is that white people are not in all of the system’s positions. Remember people who are not white still work for the white power structure.

• Why is it good for the white power structure to have Black police officers?
• Why is it good for the white power structure to have Black mayors?
• Why is it good for the white power structure to have Black business people?
• Why is it good for the white power structure of the United States to have a Black president?

We turn to those questions next week in Part 2.

Until then,  Let Your Motto Be Resistance.

From NYT:

In a formal Rose Garden ceremony normally reserved for Supreme Court nominees and prominent cabinet members, Mr. Obama announced plans to nominate three people to fill the remaining vacancies on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The president called on Republicans to abandon what he called partisan obstruction of his judicial nominees and approve his nominees quickly.

“This is not about principled opposition. It’s about partisan obstruction,” Mr. Obama said. “What’s happening now is unprecedented. For the good of the American people it has to stop.”

“What I’m doing today is my job,” Mr. Obama said as he announced the nominations. “What I need is the Senate to do its job.”

By nominating the judges as a group, the president is trying to restore what his allies consider to be ideological balance on a crucial court that has overturned some important parts of his first-term agenda. And he hopes to heighten public anger at Republicans for repeatedly using the threat of filibuster to block his choices for the cabinet and the courts.

…

The president named Cornelia T.L. Pillard, a law professor; Patricia Ann Millett, an appellate lawyer; and Robert L. Wilkins, a federal district judge, as his choices to fill the three open spots on the 11-member court. The three joined Mr. Obama in the Rose Garden on Tuesday morning.

From WashingtonPost:

It has long held true that elderly people have higher suicide rates than the overall population. But numbers released in May by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show a dramatic spike in suicides among middle-aged people, with the highest increases among men in their 50s, whose rate went up by nearly 50 percent to 30 per 100,000; and women in their early 60s, whose rate rose by nearly 60 percent (though it is still relatively low compared with men, at 7 in 100,000). The highest rates were among white and Native American and Alaskan men. In recent years, deaths by suicide has surpassed deaths by motor vehicle crashes.

As youths, boomers had higher suicide rates than earlier generations; the confluence of that with the fact that they are now beginning to grow old, when the risk traditionally goes up, has experts worried. The findings suggest that more suicide research and prevention should “address the needs of middle-aged persons,” a CDC statement said.

There are no large-scale studies yet fleshing out the reasons behind the increase in boomer suicides. Part of it is likely tied to the recent economic downturn — financial recessions are in general associated with an uptick in suicides. But the trend started a decade before the 2008 recession, and psychologists and academics say it likely stems from a complex matrix of issues particular to a generation that vowed not to trust anyone older than 30 and who rocked out to lyrics such as, “I hope I die before I get old.”

…

Instead, compared with their parents’ generation, boomers have higher rates of obesity, prescription and illicit drug abuse, alcoholism, divorce, depression and mental disorders. As they age, many add to that list chronic illness, disabilities and the strains of caring for their parents and for adult children who still depend on them financially.