NYTimes | In many northern cities, the 1974 United States Supreme Court decision Milliken v. Bradley
killed any hopes of integrating the public schools. That ruling,
involving Detroit and its suburbs, said that a mandatory plan to achieve
integration by busing black children from Detroit across district lines
to mainly white suburbs was unconstitutional. The result accelerated
white flight to the suburbs, leaving the schools in urban centers even
more segregated than they had been.
Most famously, this happened in Boston, where court-ordered integration
resulted in a busing plan that wound up mainly moving children of color
around the city.
But busing had greater success in some places, particularly those where
the plans were carried out countywide, reducing the chances of white
flight. They included Louisville-Jefferson County, Raleigh-Wake County
and Charlotte-Mecklenburg County.
This week’s Retro Report video, “The Battle for Busing,” follows the
story of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, which became a national
model for racial integration for 30 years only to resegregate about a
decade ago, after a court ruling lifted the mandatory integration plan.
When the Charlotte busing plan began in 1971, there were whites who
threatened to go to jail before they would let their children attend
schools with blacks. The open racism voiced by whites in the Retro
Report’s archival footage is vicious and ugly; students were injured
when fistfights broke out between whites and blacks.
But by 1974, the district was being singled out in the news media as a
national model, particularly West Charlotte High, which had previously
been all black. The impact of integration was visible almost immediately
at the school. When whites arrived, the facilities were upgraded, said a
former chairman of the school board, Arthur Griffin. A gravel parking
lot was paved, and the football stadium and the gymnasium were
renovated.
Over the years, researchers like Prof. Roslyn Mickelson at the
University of North Carolina, Charlotte, conducted studies concluding
that children of any race who attended diverse schools were more likely
to succeed, in areas like graduating, avoiding crime and attending
college.
But in the end, the same federal courts that had ushered in integration helped kill it. In the late 1990s, Judge Robert D. Potter of Federal District Court
essentially said that the Charlotte district had met its constitutional
duty by successfully creating a single school system serving all
children regardless of race and that no more need be done.
In a few years’ time, West Charlotte High, which had been roughly 40
percent black and 60 percent white in the 1970s, became 88 percent black
and 1 percent white. And it wasn’t just Charlotte. Today, nearly
two-thirds of the school districts that had been ordered to desegregate
are no longer required to do so, including Seminole County, Fla. (2006);
Little Rock, Ark. (2007); and Galveston County, Tex. (2009).
The New York City system is more segregated than it was in the 1980s:
half the schools are more than 90 percent black and Hispanic. For more
about the nation’s “steady and massive resegregation,” see this Reporter’s Notebook from Retro Report.
This week’s Retro Report is the 10th in our documentary project, which was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report
has a staff of 12 journalists and 6 contributors led by Kyra Darnton.
It is a nonprofit video news organization that aims to provide a
thoughtful counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle. The videos are
typically 10 to 12 minutes long.
I was fetching around for a way in which to try and integrate today's dismissals of both BLM and the black political mainstream, with tomorrow's refresher course on American racism and living memory history. Tomorrow is REALLY important. That said, I suspect that even here, short attention span theater predominates - such that a simple succinct six minute turn that Irami Osei Frimpong offered - will have been lost even on my audience.
For sure what has been lost is the fundamental, core living memory experience of racism that shaped my life, largely i'm guessing, because it had little to no impact on any of your lives. What I'm referring to is public school desegregation attempted in the 70's and flatly and legally and politically rejected by white Americans of all socioeconomic and political persuasions.
Kunstler entirely misses this in his haste to blame black folks for their exclusion and alienation from the American mainstream. See, I and a number of my peers, my immediate personal cohort, were among the lucky and durable ones who integrated public and private schools during the 70's, survived, got tough, and thrived, all the while learning everything there is to know about white America.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, don't get me wrong. I'm not crying about anything, I'm not playing a victim card, and I sincerely believe and exemplify the ethos "that which does not kill you". But the simple fact of the matter is, that when white Americans refused to accept integration of public schools and shifted themselves in very dramatic macro-scale fashion in response to the prospective horror of little Cindy Lou sitting next to young Tyrone in the 3rd grade, well..., that kind of set the mold for much of what has followed over the next 50 years.
kunstler | That business was the full participation of Black citizens in
American life. The main grievance now is that Black Americans are still
denied full participation due to “systemic racism.” That’s a dodge. What
actually happened is that Black America opted out and lost itself in a
quandary of its own making with the assistance of their white
dis-enablers, the well intentioned “progressives.”
Let me take you back to the mid-20th century. America had just fought and won a war against manifest evil. The nation styled itself as Leader of the Free World.
That role could not be squared with the rules of Jim Crow apartheid, so
something had to change. The civil rights campaign to undo racial
segregation under law naturally began in the courts in cases such as
Brown v. Board of Education (1954). So-called public accommodations —
hotels, theaters, restaurants, buses, bathrooms, water fountains, etc. —
remained segregated. By the early 1960s, the clamor to end all that
took to the streets under the emerging moral leadership of Martin Luther
King and his credo of non-violent civil disobedience.
Many acts of non-violent street protest were met by police using
fire-hoses, vicious dogs, and batons to terrorize the marchers. This
only shamed and horrified the rest of the nation watching on TV and
actually quickened the formation of a political consensus to end
American apartheid. That culminated in the passage of three major
federal laws: the Public Accommodations Act of 1964, the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
Meanwhile, something else was going on among Black Americans: not
everybody believed in Dr. King’s non-violence, and not everybody was so
sure about full participation in American life. Altogether, Black
America remained ambivalent and anxious about all that. That full participation implied
a challenge to compete on common ground. What if it didn’t work out? An
alternate view emerged, personified first by Malcolm X, who called MLK
an “Uncle Tom,” and then by the younger generation, Stokely Carmichael,
the Black Panthers and others retailing various brands of Black Power,
Black Nationalism, and Black Separatism. It amounted, for some, in
declining that invitation to participate fully in American life. “No
thanks. We’ll go our own way.” That sentiment has prevailed ever since.
So, the outcome to all that federal legislation of the 1960s
turned out not to be the clear-cut victory (like World War Two) that
liberals and progressives so breathlessly expected. The civil rights
acts had some startling adverse consequences, too. They swept away much
of the parallel service and professional economy that Blacks had
constructed to get around all the old exclusions of everyday life. With
that went a lot of the Black middle-class, the business owners
especially. In its place, the liberal-and-progressive government
provided “public assistance” — a self-reinforcing poverty generator that
got ever worse, especially in big cities where de-industrialization
started destroying the working-class job base beginning in the 1970s. Fist tap Big Don.
gatestoneinstitute | The idea that in the United States there is "structural racism" (defined
by the Aspen Institute as "a system in which public policies,
institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work
in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity")
has led, it seems, to a form of obsessive expiation. Films have been
removed from streaming services. Gone with the Wind will now be shown with five-minute disclaimer. (One minute would not have been enough?)
The film is probably just first on a lengthening list. A reporter from Variety recently listed "10 Problematic Films That Could Use Warning Labels". They include Forrest Gump:
for a brief moment, the title character is described, in an ironic
fashion, as having been named after a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Consumer product brands, such as Uncle Ben's Rice and Aunt Jemima syrup are abruptly having their names and logos changed. Princeton
voted to expunge the name of Woodrow Wilson from its public policy
school. Demands have been made that universities and corporations show
that they are not racist by declaring their support for Black Lives
Matter. Many have bowed to the demand.
Of course there is still some racism among individuals, but the idea
that the United States today is a society where "structural racism"
exists is contradicted
by decades of political decisions to repair the damage and, as in, for
example, affirmative action programs, to favor equality for all
Americans. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an American author who fled her homeland
of Somalia, wrote:
"The problem is that there are people among us who don't
want to figure it out and who have an interest in avoiding workable
solutions. They have an obvious political incentive not to solve social
problems, because social problems are the basis of their power. That is
why, whenever a scholar like Roland Fryer brings new data to the table—showing
it's simply not true that the police disproportionately shoot black
people dead—the response is not to read the paper but to try to
discredit its author."
For many years, American films dealing with racial questions have
been explicitly hostile to any racial discrimination, and it would be
impossible to find a book put out by a U.S. publishing house supporting
racial discrimination, unless it dates from an era long gone. Rewriting
history by falsifying it is simply an attempt to replace history with propaganda.
Removing films and other information that do not correspond to a
predetermined vision of history has long been the practice of totalitarian
despotisms. Dictating that universities and corporations face severe
consequences if they refuse to bowdlerize the past is simply a
fascistic, tyrannical
means of coercion. Worse, the submissive attitude of so many
universities and corporations is what enables the bullying to continue.
thediplomat | The protests in the United States have sparked a debate about the
militarization of American police forces. Much attention has been paid
to the literal usage of military hardware because it is the most obvious
manifestation of this phenomenon. But there is a much deeper history
that goes beyond just American police choosing to take on military garb
and ride Armored Personnel Carriers: American military adventures abroad
have long fueled a broader militarization that shapes norms, processes,
mentalities, and the relationship between the local police and the
citizenry.
There was a significant amount of concern in early
America and up to the late 1800s about the prospect of the U.S. military
being used as a means of controlling the public. The founding fathers
were suspicious of the idea of
a standing army, in part, for this reason. A number of laws including
the Militia Acts passed in the decades following American independence
and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 tried to limit the ability of the president to use the military in domestic circumstances.
That
being said, scholars have been mapping the relationship between wars
and the evolution of domestic policing for some time. Christopher J.
Coyne and Abigail R. Hall’s work on the matter is
particularly informative. They posit that a “boomerang effect”
contributes to the incorporation of intrusive and aggressive means used
to subdue foreign populations in domestic civilian settings. Other
scholars have looked at the impact of specific conflicts or the mindsets
that govern police conduct.
The Domestic Legacy of the Philippines War
Despite
the formal end of the Philippine War in 1902, American colonial rule
faced an aggressive insurgency seeking independence. The insurgency in
the Philippines against the U.S. occupation authority provided the
opportunity to experiment with new concepts involving the use of
military entities to pacify a civilian population. The U.S. military
formed a constabulary manned primarily by sympathetic locals that
blurred the line between police and military. Rather than having two
distinct forces, one protecting the country from foreign threats and the
other providing security services to the populace, the Philippine
Constabulary (PC) was a hybrid of both, with a comfortable revolving
door between it and various other military and policing structures.
Many
U.S. veterans who had been at the forefront of establishing these
social control systems in the Philippines returned the United States
after the war, where they sought work in local law enforcement and
changed the structure of police departments, unleashing a torrent of
militarization. These veterans, many of whom were involved with the PC,
initially used the techniques they had mastered abroad to target
out-groups like foreign workers or prostitutes. Over time, the success
of these measures would open the door to a more widespread
militarization of the police and a shift in organizational and cultural
norms within police departments and public opinion shifted to
accommodate it. As historian Alfred McCoy notes:
[T]he
U.S. military, thrust into these crucibles of counterinsurgency,
developed innovative methods of social control that had a decidedly
negative impact on civil liberties back home. As the military plunged
into a fifteen-year pacification campaign in the Philippines, its colonial
security agencies fused domestic data management with foreign police
techniques to forge a new weapon—a powerful intelligence apparatus that
first contained and then crushed Filipino resistance. In the aftermath of
this successful pacification, some of these clandestine innovations
migrated homeward, silently and invisibly, to change the face of
American internal security. … Empire thus proved mutually transformative
in ways that have arguably damaged democracy in both the Philippines
and the United States.
The notion that returning
servicemen would seek employment in the civilian policing sector is not
inherently harmful, but as Coyne and Hall explain, rather than these
servicemen being mentored to adapt their skills for civilian service,
they became agents of importation for military tactics — especially as
they climbed the ranks of their respective departments:
nonsite | Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of
racial liberalism. Such expressions are not a threat but rather a
bulwark to the neoliberal project that has obliterated the social wage,
gutted public sector employment and worker pensions, undermined
collective bargaining and union power, and rolled out an expansive
carceral apparatus, all developments that have adversely affected black
workers and communities. Sure, some activists are calling for defunding
police departments and de-carceration, but as a popular slogan, Black
Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms
of liberal democratic capitalism. And the ruling class agrees.
During the so-called Black Out Tuesday social media event, corporate
giants like Walmart and Amazon widely condemned the killing of George
Floyd and other policing excesses. Gestural anti-racism was already
evident at Amazon, which flew the red, black and green black liberation
flag over its Seattle headquarters this past February. The world’s
wealthiest man, Jeff Bezos even took the time to respond personally to
customer upset that Amazon expressed sympathy with the George Floyd
protestors. “‘Black lives matter’ doesn’t mean other lives don’t
matter,” the Amazon CEO wrote, “I have a 20-year-old son, and I simply
don’t worry that he might be choked to death while being detained one
day. It’s not something I worry about. Black parents can’t say the
same.” Bezos also pledged $10 million in support of “social justice
organizations,” i.e., the ACLU Foundation, the Brennan Center for
Justice, the Equal Justice Initiative, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil
Rights Under Law, the NAACP, the National Bar Association, the National
Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Urban
League, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the United Negro College
Fund, and Year Up. The leadership of Warner, Sony Music and Walmart each
committed $100 million to similar organizations. The protests have
provided a public relations windfall for Bezos and his ilk. Only weeks
before George Floyd’s killing, Amazon, Instacart, GrubHub and other
delivery-based firms, which became crucial for commodity circulation
during the national shelter-in-place, faced mounting pressure from labor
activists over their inadequate protections, low wages, lack of health
benefits and other working conditions. Corporate anti-racism is the
perfect egress from these labor conflicts. Black lives matter to the
front office, as long as they don’t demand a living wage, personal
protective equipment and quality health care.
Perhaps the most important point in Reed’s 2016 essay is his
insistence that Black Lives Matter, and cognate notions like the New Jim
Crow are empirically and analytically wrong and advance an equally
wrong-headed set of solutions. He does not deny the fact of racial
disparity in criminal justice but points us towards a deeper causation
and the need for more fulsome political interventions.
Racism alone
cannot fully explain the expansive carceral power in our midst, which,
as Reed notes, is “the product of an approach to policing that emerges
from an imperative to contain and suppress the pockets of economically
marginal and sub-employed working-class populations produced by
revanchist capitalism.” Most Americans have now rejected the worst
instances of police abuse, but not the institution of policing, nor the
consumer society it services. As we should know too well by now, white
guilt and black outrage have limited political currency, and neither has
ever been a sustainable basis for building the kind of popular and
legislative majorities needed to actually contest entrenched power in
any meaningful way.
theamericanconservative | Lincoln’s legacy as the Great Emancipator has survived the century and a
half since then largely intact. But there have been cracks in this
image, mostly caused by questioning academics who decried him as an
overt white supremacist. This view eventually entered the mainstream
when Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote misleadingly in her lead essay to the “1619 Project” that Lincoln “opposed black equality.”
Today, we find Lincoln statues desecrated. Neither has the memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry,
one of the first all-black units in the Civil War, survived the recent
protests unscathed. To many on the left, history seems like the
succession of one cruelty by the next. And so, justice may only be
served if we scrap the past and start from a blank slate. As a result,
Lincoln’s appeal that we stand upright and enjoy our liberty gets lost
to time.
Ironically, this will only help the cause of
Robert E. Lee—and the modern corporations who rely on cheap, inhumane
labor to keep themselves going.
***
The
main idea driving the “1619 Project” and so much of recent scholarship
is that the United States of America originated in slavery and white
supremacy. These were its true founding ideals. Racism, Hannah-Jones
writes, is in our DNA.
Such arguments don’t make any sense, as the historian Barbara Fields clairvoyantly argued in a groundbreaking essay
from 1990. Why would Virginia planters in the 17th century import black
people purely out of hate? No, Fields countered, the planters were
driven by a real need for dependable workers who would toil on their
cotton, rice, and tobacco fields for little to no pay.
Before black
slaves did this work, white indentured servants had. (An indentured
servant is bound for a number of years to his master, i.e. he can’t pack
up and leave to find a new opportunity elsewhere.)
After
1776 everything changed. Suddenly the new republic claimed that “all
men are created equal”—and yet there were millions of slaves who still
couldn’t enjoy this equality. Racism helped to square our founding
ideals with the brute reality of continued chattel slavery: Black people
simply weren’t men.
But
in the eyes of the Southern slavocracy, the white laboring poor of the
North also weren’t truly human. Such unholy antebellum figures as the
social theorist George Fitzhugh or South Carolina Senator James Henry
Hammond urged
that the condition of slavery be expanded to include poor whites, too.
Their hunger for a cheap, subservient labor source did not stop at black
people, after all.
Always remember Barbara Fields’s
formula: The need for cheap labor comes first; ideologies like white
supremacy only give this bleak reality a spiritual gloss.
The true cause of the Civil War—and it bears constant repeating for all the doubters—was whether slavery would expand its reach or whether “free labor”
would reign supreme. The latter was the dominant ideology of the North:
Free laborers are independent, self-reliant, and eventually achieve
economic security and independence by the sweat of their brow. It’s the
American Dream.
But if that is so, then the Civil War ended in a tie—and its underlying conflict was never really settled.
niemanlab | On Aug. 20, 2018, the first day of a federal police surveillance
trial, I discovered that the Memphis Police Department was spying on me.
The ACLU of Tennessee had sued the MPD, alleging that the department
was in violation of a 1978 consent decree barring surveillance of
residents for political purposes.
I’m pretty sure I wore my pink gingham jacket — it’s my summer go-to
when I want to look professional. I know I sat on the right side of the
courtroom, not far from a former colleague at The Commercial Appeal. I’d
long suspected that I was on law enforcement’s radar, simply because my
work tends to center on the most marginalized communities, not
institutions with the most power.
One of the first witnesses called to the stand: Sgt. Timothy
Reynolds, who is white. To get intel on activists and organizers,
including those in the Black Lives Matter movement, he’d posed on
Facebook as a “man of color,” befriending people and trying to
infiltrate closed circles.
Projected onto a giant screen in the courtroom was a screenshot of people Reynolds followed on Facebook.
My head was bent as I wrote in my reporter’s notebook. “What does this
entry indicate?” ACLU attorney Amanda Strickland Floyd asked.
“I was following Wendi Thomas,” Reynolds replied. “Wendi C. Thomas.”
I sat up.
“And who is Wendi Thomas?” Floyd asked.
She, he replied, used to write for The Commercial Appeal. In 2014, I left the paper after being a columnist for 11 years.
It’s been more than a year since a judge ruled against
the city, and I’ve never gotten a clear answer on why the MPD was
monitoring me. Law enforcement also was keeping tabs on three other
journalists whose names came out
during the trial. Reynolds testified he used the fake account to
monitor protest activity and follow current events connected to Black
Lives Matter.
My sin, as best I can figure, was having good sources who were local
organizers and activists, including some of the original plaintiffs in
the ACLU’s lawsuit against the city.
In the days since cellphone video captured white Minneapolis police
officer Derek Chauvin squeezing the life out of George Floyd, a black
man, residents in dozens of cities across the country have exercised
their First Amendment rights to protest police brutality.
Here in Memphis, where two-thirds of the population is black and 1 in
4 lives below the poverty line, demonstrators have chanted, “No
justice, no peace, no racist police!”
The most recent protests were sparked by the killings of Floyd and of
Breonna Taylor, a black woman gunned down in her home by Louisville,
Kentucky, police in March. But in Memphis, like elsewhere, the seeds of
distrust between activists and police were planted decades ago. And law
enforcement has nurtured these seeds ever since.
nonsite | But, when we step away from focus on racial
disproportions, the glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or
nearly half of all those killed annually by police. And the demand that
we focus on the racial disparity is simultaneously a
demand that we disattend from other possibly causal disparities. Zaid
Jilani found, for example, that ninety-five percent of police killings
occurred in neighborhoods with median family income of less than $100,00
and that the median family income in neighborhoods
where police killed was $52,907.
….
What the pattern in those states with high rates of police killings
suggests is what might have been the focal point of critical discussion
of police violence all along, that it is the product of an approach to
policing that emerges from an imperative to contain
and suppress the pockets of economically marginal and sub-employed
working class populations produced by revanchist capitalism.
There is no
need here to go into the evolution of this dangerous regime of
policing—from bogus “broken windows” and “zero tolerance”
theories of the sort that academics always seem to have at the ready to
rationalize intensified application of bourgeois class power, to
anti-terrorism hysteria and finally assertion of a common sense
understanding that any cop has unassailable authority
to override constitutional protections and to turn an expired
inspection sticker or a refusal to respond to an arbitrary order or
warrantless search into a capital offense. And the shrill insistence
that we begin and end with the claim that blacks are
victimized worst of all and give ritual obeisance to the liturgy of
empty slogans is—for all the militant posturing by McKesson, Garza,
Tometi, Cullors et al.—in substance a demand that we not pay attention to the deeper roots of the pattern of police violence
in enforcement of the neoliberal regime of sharply regressive upward redistribution and its social entailments.
I’m not much given to autobiographical writing,
least of all as a mechanism for establishing interpretive authority,
even though I recognize that that pre-Enlightenment ploy has become coin
of the realm for the “public intellectual”
and blogosphere bloviator stratum.
——-
I’m still not going to natter on about my racial bona fides; I’ll leave
that domain to the likes of Mychal Denzel Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates,
for whom every sideways glance from a random white person while waiting
on line for a latté becomes an occasion for
navel-gazing lament and another paycheck. (A historian friend has
indicated his resolve, when white colleagues enthuse to him about
Coates’s wisdom and truth-telling, to ask which white college dropouts
they consult to get their deep truths about white people.)
I just wanted to anticipate the reaction and make clear that I
recognize it for the cheesy move that it is.
payday | Friday evening, bus drivers in New York City and members of TWU Local
100 refused to cooperate with police in transporting arrested Justice
for George Floyd protestors.
Payday Report has learned that transit union leaders
nationwide are instructing members not to cooperate with police in
arresting protestors.
Many union leaders have instructed their members that their union
contracts protect them against being forced to work in dangerous
conditions. They have informed their union members that their unions
would use organizational legal resources to protect bus drivers who
refuse to cooperate with the police.
“It’s safe to say that bus drivers in a lot of places are going to be
refusing work,” said one top labor leader, who wished to remain
anonymous.
For decades, transit unions, which are heavily African-American, have
sought to build community alliances around environmental racism and
expanding public transit communities. These community-labor alliances
have helped communities to expand transit services in many areas.
As a result of this organizing, many transit union leaders are
vehemently opposed to helping with police crackdowns in communities of
color.
fivethirtyeight | Trying to pin 2014 as the start of a new era is a subjective
exercise, perhaps a fool’s errand. But if politics is driven by emotion
and memory, so in this case is its hindsight analysis. 2014 was in my
book an annus horribilis, a blur of mortality. Perhaps if Gallup had called me, I’d have told them I’d lost trust.
In June 2014, someone I knew well was murdered. In July, Eric Garner
died on Staten Island, in the city where I’d just moved. In August, I
remember sitting on a fluorescent-lit subway car and reading about the
beheading of a journalist named James Foley by some group called ISIS. A
year later, I’d have to watch his beheading video and speak with his
family for a magazine story
I fact-checked about the vain attempts to save him and other Americans.
Michael Brown was killed in August, too. September brought another ISIS
beheading video. In October, a doctor in New York City was diagnosed
with Ebola — a global terror of its own kind — and I found myself
thinking uncontrollable thoughts about biohazards let loose on the
subway. In November, Tamir Rice was killed in my hometown, and the
midterm election gave the Republicans control of the U.S. Senate —
though that’s only a blip in my memory. The emotions stirred by 2014
lingered longer with me than its discrete politics.
Perhaps that’s why the themes of fear and mortality that hovered over
the 2016 election made some sense to me with 2014 in the rearview
mirror. It’s hard to tell how long it takes for emotional responses like
mine to get into the political bloodstream of a country, but when
pricked by the right needle, America’s primal worry and righteous anger
bled out over an election.
mediaite | CNN host Don Lemon hit network colleague Chris Cuomo with a monologue on Wednesday evening as riots took place in Minneapolis over the police brutality against and subsequent death of George Floyd.
As Cuomo spoke about the coronavirus pandemic, Lemon changed the subject.
“So, in that same vein, because we are talking about these viruses
that are infecting America,” said Lemon. “Imagine if that was me on the
ground, how you would feel as a friend, as someone I spend a lot of time
with. Imagine how people around this country feel when their friends,
like you, both of us are of a different background, when their friends
say nothing. When they do nothing. except send out a tweet or say, ‘Oh,
man, that’s terrible. I can’t believe that happens.'”
“Then when they see everyday racism, they don’t stand up for it.
Imagine how that feels to people of color in this country. It feels
terrible. Is that really being a friend?” he questioned, adding, “I’m
not saying you specifically, you understand what I’m saying. You know
what I’m saying.”
Cuomo responded, “I totally understand and, you know, the only word I can use is just hurt, it all hurts.”
“I’ve heard from so many people that I love that they’re so afraid
that it’s going to be them, it’s going to be their kid, and white people
roll their eyes like, ‘Come on, man. This only happens like once in a
while,'” he continued. “It doesn’t have to happen that often if every
time it happens in your mind it seems to go unanswered in terms of why
it’s okay.”
Lemon shot back, “But that’s the problem Chris… It happens a lot. We
just don’t see it. We’re just seeing from the video. This is the reason
that Colin Kaepernick was taking a knee, and then people were upset. The
president of the United States having the nerve to call him, and then
others standing up for this sort of injustice, to call them ‘sons of
bitches.’ This is why people are standing up, so that it doesn’t lead to
this.”
apnews | More than 11 million
people have been tested in the U.S. for COVID-19, all with the
assurance that their private medical information would remain protected
and undisclosed.
Yet,
public officials in at least two-thirds of states are sharing the
addresses of people who tested positive with first responders — from
police officers to firefighters to EMTs. An Associated Press review
found that at least 10 of those states also share the patients’ names.
First
responders argue the information is vital to helping them take extra
precautions to avoid contracting and spreading the coronavirus.
But civil liberty and community activists have expressed concerns of
potential profiling in African-American and Hispanic communities that
already have an uneasy relationship with law enforcement. Some envision
the data being forwarded to immigration officials.
“The information
could actually have a chilling effect that keeps those already
distrustful of the government from taking the COVID-19 test and possibly
accelerate the spread of the disease,” the Tennessee Black Caucus said
in a statement.
Sharing
the information does not violate medical privacy laws, according to
guidance issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But
many members of minority communities are employed in industries that
require them to show up to work every day, making them more susceptible
to the virus — and most in need of the test.
In Tennessee, the issue has sparked criticism from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, who only became aware of the data sharing earlier this month.
The
process is simple: State and local health departments keep track of who
has received a test in their region and then provide the information to
dispatch centers. The AP review shows that happens in at least 35
states that share the addresses of those who tested positive.
At
least 10 states go further and also share the names: Colorado, Iowa,
Louisiana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, South
Dakota and Tennessee. Wisconsin did so briefly but stopped earlier this
month. There have been 287,481 positive cases in those states, mostly in
New Jersey.
“We
should question why the information needs to be provided to law
enforcement, whether there is that danger of misuse,” said Thomas Saenz,
president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Guardian | The racial wound at the center of the coronavirus pandemic
in the US continues to fester, with latest data showing that African
Americans have died from the disease at almost three times the rate of
white people.
New figures compiled by the non-partisan APM Research Lab and released on Wednesday under the title Color of Coronavirus provide further evidence of the staggering divide in the Covid-19 death rate between black Americans and the rest of the nation.
Across the country, African Americans have died at a rate of 50.3 per
100,000 people, compared with 20.7 for whites, 22.9 for Latinos and
22.7 for Asian Americans.
More than 20,000 African Americans – about one in 2,000 of the entire black population in the US – have died from the disease.
At the level of individual states, the statistics are all the more
shocking. Bottom of the league table in terms of racial disparities is
Kansas, where black residents are dying at seven times the rate of
whites.
“This is a call to action for our county commissioners, our state and
our city officials,” the Kansas state representative Gail Finney told
local TV channel KWCH12 recently.
In other states, the gulf is almost as extreme. In the nation’s
capital, Washington, the disparity in death rate between blacks and
whites is six times, in Michigan and Missouri five, and in major
hotspots of the disease – New York, Illinois and Louisiana – three.
dailymail | New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York
Governor Andrew Cuomo have been pushing for enforcement instead of
education, leading to heavy-handedness and a 'business as usual'
attitude within the NYPD which has long been accused of marginalizing
communities of color.
'We were told
we were getting a mayor who was going to change this,' Williams said.
'That's what makes some of this so difficult to swallow.'
The mayor claims that police have actually shown restraint during the lockdown period.
'We
do not accept disparity, period,' de Blasio said during a coronavirus
briefing. 'On the arrests and summonses, the thing to focus on first, is
the sheer fact that we're looking at numbers across a city of 8.6
million people and across a time span I believe is six weeks, the
numbers of arrests and summonses are extraordinarily low.
'So,
I don't, for a moment, misunderstand folks who raise alarms and
concerns, or project forward concerns,' said de Blasio. 'But I say,
"Hey, start with these sheer facts, that we're talking about very few
people have been arrested and very few people have been summonsed."
'And there's been a huge amount of
restraint by the NYPD. That's just factually obvious from the numbers,
and we intend to keep it that way only using summons and arrest when
needed.
'We're dealing with something
absolutely unprecedented, and there's no way in hell we are going to be
able to keep people safe if we don't use the strongest, best public
safety organization in this country.'
Police
Commissioner Dermot Shea also stressed that arrests are down 50
percent across the city and believes overall social distancing
enforcement has gone smoothly.
'We have been doing it with an extremely light touch,' he said.
'We
have been interacting with millions of people and given out only a
handful of violations, summonses and arrests, and that's the way it
should be,' Shea said. 'I don't want the NYPD to be the morality
police.'
The viral videos of black
people and other people of color getting violently arrested across the
city stand in sharp contrast to photos and video tweeted by the NYPD
showing friendly officers handing out face masks and gently reminding
people to stay 6 feet apart.
asiatimes | Fasten your seat belts: the US hybrid war against China is bound to go on frenetic overdrive, as economic reports are already identifying Covid-19 as the tipping point when the Asian – actually Eurasian – century truly began.
The US strategy remains, essentially, full spectrum dominance, with
the National Security Strategy obsessed by the three top “threats” of
China, Russia and Iran. China, in contrast, proposes a “community of shared destiny” for mankind, mostly addressing the Global South.
The predominant US narrative in the ongoing information war is now
set in stone: Covid-19 was the result of a leak from a Chinese
biowarfare lab. China is responsible. China lied. And China has to
pay.
The new normal tactic of non-stop China demonization is deployed not
only by crude functionaries of the
industrial-military-surveillance-media complex. We need to dig much
deeper to discover how these attitudes are deeply embedded in Western
thinking – and later migrated to the “end of history” United States.
(Here are sections of an excellent study, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia, by Jurgen Osterhammel).
Only Whites civilized
Way beyond the Renaissance, in the 17th and 18th centuries,
whenever Europe referred to Asia it was essentially about religion
conditioning trade. Christianity reigned supreme, so it was impossible
to think by excluding God.
At the same time the doctors of the Church were deeply disturbed that
in the Sinified world a very well organized society could function in
the absence of a transcendent religion. That bothered them even more
than those “savages” discovered in the Americas.
As it started to explore what was regarded as the “Far East,” Europe
was mired in religious wars. But at the same time it was forced to
confront another explanation of the world, and that fed some subversive
anti-religious tendencies across the Enlightenment sphere.
It was at this stage that learned Europeans started questioning
Chinese philosophy, which inevitably they had to degrade to the status
of a mere worldly “wisdom” because it escaped the canons of Greek and
Augustinian thought. This attitude, by the way, still reigns today.
dallasnews | The fast-moving sequence of events that
sprang her from jail, though, left some local lawyers and state
Democrats distressed over state GOP leaders’ hasty back-pedaling from
public health orders on the novel coronavirus.
Critics
from the legal profession and Texas’ minority political party accused
Abbott and other top Texas Republican politicians of advocating
selective enforcement that aided a white business owner from Far North
Dallas – all the while, setting a bad precedent.
“Greg
Abbott dangles political red meat for his base while ignoring his own
established guidelines and executive orders,” said Manny Garcia,
executive director of the Texas Democratic Party.
“Abbott
wants Texans to focus on the trivial,” to divert attention from deaths
from COVID-19, Garcia said in a written statement.
U.S. Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Terrell, though, tweeted, “Great move by Governor @GregAbbott_TX.”
Abbott spokesman John Wittman declined to comment on criticism of the Republican governor’s intervention.
In
Washington, President Donald Trump attributed Luther’s release to
Abbott -- though it was her lawyer’s victory in obtaining an emergency
order from the state Supreme Court, not Abbott’s action, that did the
trick.
Abbott, during a White House visit, was happy to take credit.
“She
is free today,” Abbott said, explaining the executive order he issued
earlier in the day “saying that in the state of Texas, no one can be put
behind bars because they’re not following an executive order. So that
includes the woman.”
“Good,”
said Trump, adding, "I was watching the salon owner and she looked so
great, so
professional, so good. And she was talking about her children.
She has to feed her children.”
The
day began with Luther in jail and Abbott, who’d criticized her jailing
on Wednesday, tweaking his coronavirus orders to prohibit confinement --
a punishment he’d stressed in all his stay-at-home and closure orders
in March and last month.
Abbott
announced he was eliminating confinement as a punishment for violating
the emergency orders over COVID-19, and said they would apply
retroactively.
That
meant Luther should be freed from the Dallas County Jail before her
week-long sentence was completed, if Abbott’s latest tweak is “correctly
applied,” he said in a news release.
SCMP | Lieber’s
arrest dovetails with Washington’s aggressive “China Initiative”, which
began in 2018. Earlier this month, the Trump administration launched a
“whole of society” counter-intelligence strategy to further guard
against Beijing “stealing our technology and intellectual property in an
effort to erode United States economic and military superiority”, the
administration said.
Chinese
intellectual property theft costs the United States up to US$600
billion annually, according to US trade representative figures. FBI
officials characterise academia as a weak link in their efforts to stem
the loss.
“The Chinese government doesn’t play by the same rules of academic fairness and freedom,”
Academics
and legal experts acknowledge the growing threat from China and admit
they need more safeguards to avoid becoming a pawn in Beijing’s hands.
But
turning universities into fortresses and jealously guarding basic
research is counterproductive, threatening to undermine the economic
leadership and innovation Washington seeks, they argue.
Academic
watchdogs say they have long warned researchers that standards were
tightening – foreign talent programmes were, until recently, viewed as
prestigious – as Washington’s distrust of Beijing increased. But their
warnings were often brushed off, they add.
“The
Lieber case has been the biggest help we could possibly get,” said Mary
Sue Coleman, the American Association of Universities’ president.
“Before the view was, if you’re not a Chinese national, not a
naturalised American citizen, it didn’t affect you.”............
FBI
agents are investigating an estimated 1,000 China-related cases from
its 56 field offices, Wray said, while US attorneys in five cities
oversee their prosecutions. Law enforcement authorities have arrested 19
people in such cases since October, compared with 24 the previous year.
Lelling
denied any administration bias in choosing which China-related cases to
investigate and prosecute. Investigating Lieber’s many Chinese students
without specific cause, for example, would be problematic, he said.
“This
isn’t racial profiling,” the US attorney said. “You have a rival nation
state made up almost 100 per cent of Han Chinese. Unfortunately there’s
going to be tremendous overlap. We’re looking for the conduct, then the
person.”
unz |A
fascinating feature of coverage of the Winter 2019/2020 attacks on Jews
by Blacks in New York has been the total absence of media enquiry into why the assaults took place. Like so much historiography on European anti-Semitism, there is simply no room for the question Why? As
in Kiev, or Odessa, or the Rhine Valley, or Lincoln, or Aragon, or
Galicia, the assaults on Jews in Brooklyn apparently emerged from the
ether, motivated by some miasmic combination of insanity and demonic
aggression. NBC New York reported
bluntly on a “spree of hate,” but had nothing in the way of analysis of
context other than a condemnation of “possible hate-based attacks” —
one of the most remarkably opaque pieces of analytical nomenclature I’ve
ever come across. Former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind has said
“The attacks against Jews are out of control, and we must have a
concrete strategy to address the rise of these attacks,” but how he can
develop a strategy to address something that apparently does not yet
have an explanation is another question left unanswered.
What
is clear is that Black anti-Semitism presents Jews with an objective
problem in terms of their (publicly-expressed) self-concept as a people
and the received wisdom regarding the nature of anti-Semitism (now given
quasi-legal standing in many countries via the IHRA definition). The
multiple ways in which Jews have sought to deal with this challenge will
be addressed in a forthcoming follow-up essay, but it should suffice
here to close with the remarks of Steven Gold on the Jewish response to
growing Black anti-Semitism in 1940s Harlem:
Being well organized, Jewish communal associations took note when Jewish
merchants were accused of inappropriate behavior. When African-American
journalists or activists complained about the exploitative behavior of
ghetto merchants, Jewish spokesmen often resisted accepting
responsibility and instead labeled accusers as anti-Semites for
referring to the merchants’ religion. Contending that Jewish merchants
treated Blacks no worse than other Whites did, they objected to being
singled out.[17]
An
age-old pattern had thus been employed with a 20th century twist.
Denials of responsibility and accusations of blind and unfair bigotry
had been honed to perfection for centuries in Europe, but now came the
masterful flourish of the pluralist culture — to dissolve into
“Whiteness” at will and direct Black anger at that mask instead. After
all, isn’t the Jew the best friend a Black could ask for?
NIH | Studies of patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)
demonstrate that the respiratory tract is a major site of
SARS-coronavirus (CoV) infection and disease morbidity. We studied
host-pathogen interactions using native lung tissue and a model of
well-differentiated cultures of primary human airway epithelia.
Angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), the receptor for both the
SARS-CoV and the related human respiratory coronavirus NL63, was
expressed in human airway epithelia as well as lung parenchyma. As
assessed by immunofluorescence staining and membrane biotinylation, ACE2
protein was more abundantly expressed on the apical than the
basolateral surface of polarized airway epithelia. Interestingly, ACE2
expression positively correlated with the differentiation state of
epithelia.
golemxiv | Like every issue of consequence, in our Age of Incomprehension,
opinion about the truth concerning the Corona virus outbreak is
divided. Either China is taking all prudent steps, the virus, while
transmissible, has a low mortality rate and the West, with its travel
bans, is over-reacting in a vaguely racist manner, or China has the
virus far from contained, we don’t know just how transmissible it is nor
its mortality rate because the figures from China can’t be trusted and
therefore travel bans are a wise precaution.
If travel bans to and from the infected parts of China turn out to
have been justified then one country in particular may be worth
watching, Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s Bole International airport is the main
African gateway to and from China. On average 1500 passengers per day arrive from China every day. Ethiopia scans them all for symptoms which essentially means taking their temperature.
Many of those passengers then fly on to other parts of Africa where
Chinese companies are doing business. These are 2018 figures courtesy of Brookings.
The three main areas of Chinese business in Africa are transport,
which generally means building airports and railways, energy which means
building power stations and grids and metals which means mines.
One of the airports the Chinese funded and built is Bole International Airport in Ethiopia.
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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