Tag Archives: race and ethnicity

The Great Eviction: Black America and the Toll of the Foreclosure Crisis

by Curtis Tangredi Posted on August 1, 2013

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

We cautiously ascend the staircase, the pitch black of the boarded-up house pierced only by my companion’s tiny circle of light. At the top of the landing, the flashlight beam dances in a corner as Quafin, who offered only her first name, points out the furnace. She is giddy; this house—unlike most of the other bank-owned buildings on the block—isn’t completely uninhabitable.

It had been vacated, sealed, and winterized in June 2010, according to a notice on the wall posted by BAC Field Services Corporation, a division of Bank of America. It warned: “entry by unauthorized persons is strictly prohibited.” But Bank of America has clearly forgotten about the house and its requirement to provide the “maintenance and security” that would ensure the property could soon be reoccupied. The basement door is ajar, the plumbing has been torn out of the walls, and the carpet is stained with water. The last family to live here bought the home for $175,000 in 2002; eight years later, the bank claimed an improbable $286,100 in past-due balances and repossessed it.

It’s May 2012 and we’re in Woodlawn, a largely African American neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. The crew Quafin is a part of dubbed themselves the HIT Squad, short for Housing Identification and Target. Their goal is to map blighted, bank-owned homes with overdue property taxes and neighbors angry enough about the destruction of their neighborhood to consider supporting a plan to repossess on the repossessors.

“Anything I can do,” one woman tells the group after being briefed on its plan to rehab bank-owned homes and move in families without houses. She points across the street to a sagging, boarded-up place adorned with a worn banner—”Grandma’s House Child Care: Register Now!”—and a disconnected number. There are 20 banked-owned homes like it in a five-block radius. Records showed that at least five of them were years past due on their property taxes.

Where exterior walls once were, some houses sport charred holes from fires lit by people trying to stay warm. In 2011, two Chicago firefighters died trying to extinguish such a fire at a vacant foreclosed building. Now, houses across the South Side are pockmarked with red Xs, indicating places the fire department believes to be structurally unsound. In other states—Wisconsin, Minnesota, and New York, to name recent examples—foreclosed houses have taken to exploding after bank contractors forgot to turn off the gas.

Most of the occupied homes in the neighborhood we’re visiting display small signs: “Don’t shoot,” they read in lettering superimposed on a child’s face, “I want to grow up.” On the bank-owned houses, such signs have been replaced by heavy-duty steel window guards. (“We work with all types of servicers, receivers, property management, and bank asset managers, enabling you to quickly and easily secure your building so you can move on,” boasts Door and Window Guard Systems, a leading company in the burgeoning “building security industry.”)

The dangerous houses are the ones left unsecured, littered with trash and empty Cobra vodka bottles. We approach one that reeks of rancid tuna fish and attempt to push open the basement door, held closed only by a flimsy wire. The next-door neighbor, returning home, asks: “Did you know they killed someone in that backyard just this morning?”

The Equivalent of the Population of Michigan Foreclosed
Since 2007, the foreclosure crisis has displaced at least 10 million people from more than four million homes across the country. Families have been evicted from colonials and bungalows, A-frames and two-family brownstones, trailers and ranches, apartment buildings and the prefabricated cookie-cutters that sprang up after World War II. The displaced are young and old, rich and poor, and of every race, ethnicity, and religion. They add up to approximately the entire population of Michigan.

However, African American neighborhoods were targeted more aggressively than others for the sort of predatory loans that led to mass evictions after the economic meltdown of 2007-2008. At the height of the rapacious lending boom, nearly 50% of all loans given to African American families were deemed “subprime.” The New York Times described these contracts as “a financial time-bomb.”

Over the last year and a half, I traveled through many of these neighborhoods, reporting on the grassroots movements of resistance to foreclosure and displacement that have been springing up in the wake of the explosion. These community efforts have proven creative, inspiring, and often effective—but in too many cities and towns, the landscape that forms the backdrop to such a movement of hope is one of almost overwhelming destruction. Lots filled with “Cheap Bank-Owned!” trailers line highways. Cities hire contractors dubbed “Blackwater Bailiffs” to keep pace with the dizzying eviction rate.

In recent years, the foreclosure crisis has been turning many African American communities into conflict zones, torn between a market hell-bent on commodifying life itself and communities organizing to protect their neighborhoods. The more I ventured into such areas, the more I came to realize that the clash of values going on isn’t just theoretical or metaphorical.

“Internal displacement causes conflict,” explained J.R. Fleming, the chairman of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign. “And there’s no other country in the world that would force so much internal displacement and pretend that it’s something else.”

Evictions at Gunpoint
It was three in the morning when at least a dozen police cruisers pulled up to the single-story, green-shuttered house in the African American Atlanta suburb where Christine Frazer and her family lived. The precise number of sheriffs and deputies who arrived is disputed; the local radio station reported 25, while Frazer recalled seeing between 40 and 50.

A locksmith drilled off the home’s locks and dozens of officers burst into the house with flashlights and handguns.

“Who’s in the house?” they shouted. Aside from Frazer, a widow with a vocal devotion to the Man Above, there were three other residents: her 85-year-old mother, her adult daughter, and her four-year-old grandson. Things began to happen fast. Animal control rounded up the pets. Officers told the women to get dressed. Could she take a shower? Frazer asked. Imagine there’s a fire in your house, the officer replied.

“They came to my home like I was a drug dealer,” she told reporters later. Over the next seven hours, the officers hauled out the entire contents of her home and cordoned off the street to prevent friends from helping her retrieve her things.

“I have no idea where some of my jewelry is, stuff I bought when I was 30 years old,” said Frazer. “I am sixty-three. They just threw everything everywhere, helter-skelter on the front lawn in the dark.”

The eviction-turned-raid sparked controversy across Atlanta when it occurred in the spring of 2012, in part because Frazer had a motion pending in federal court that should have stayed the eviction, and in part because she was an active participant of Occupy Homes Atlanta. But this type of militarized reaction is often the outcome when communities—especially those of color—organize to resist eviction.

When Nicole Shelton attempted to move back into her repossessed home in a picket-fence subdivision in North Carolina, the Raleigh police department sent in more than a dozen police officers and an eight-person SWAT team. Officers were equipped with M5 submachine guns. A helicopter roared overhead. In Boston, one organizer with the community group City Life/Vida Urbana remembers the police acting so aggressively at an eviction blockade in a Haitian neighborhood that the grandmother of the family had a heart attack right in the driveway.

And sometimes it doesn’t require resistance at all. On the South Side of Chicago, explained Toussaint Losier, a community organizer completing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, “They bust in the door, and it’s at the point of a gun that you get evicted.”

Exiles in America
There have been widespread foreclosures—and some organized resistance—in predominately white communities, too. Kevin Kirkman, captain of the civil division of the Lee County sheriff’s office, explained, “I get so many eviction papers in here, it’s unbelievable.”

Continue Reading »

Visit source – 

The Great Eviction: Black America and the Toll of the Foreclosure Crisis

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, oven, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Great Eviction: Black America and the Toll of the Foreclosure Crisis

Charts: Racial Polarization Increasing in Higher Education

by Donekola Posted on August 1, 2013

Mother Jones

College attendance rates for African-American and Latino students have been increasing steadily in recent years. But here’s the bad news that comes along with that: those students are mostly attending non-selective four-year colleges and community colleges, while whites are increasingly attending prestigious colleges and universities, the Washington Post reports.

A study released Wednesday by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that between 1995 and 2009, college enrollment more than doubled for Latinos and jumped 73 percent for African Americans, while only increasing 15 percent for whites. During that period, 80 percent of white college freshman enrolled in the nation’s top 468 colleges, while only 13 percent of Latinos and nine percent of African-Americans went to those selective four-year schools. More than two-thirds of African Americans and almost three-quarters of Hispanics went to non-selective schools. Look:

It’s not because minority students are less qualified. Thirty percent of African-American and Hispanic students who had an A average in high school attend community colleges, compared with 22 percent of whites, according to the report, which says that unequal educational outcomes for minorities can be attributed to things like family income, and peer expectations, but also to simply not being white.

“The higher-education system is colorblind in theory but in fact operates, at least in part, as a systematic barrier to opportunity for many blacks and Hispanics, many of whom are college-qualified but tracked into overcrowded and under-funded colleges, where they are less likely to develop fully or to graduate,” Anthony Carnevale, one of the report’s authors, told the Post.

Here’s how unequal college paths for whites and non-whites contributes to growing inequality in America, via the Post:

Students at the nation’s top 468 colleges are the beneficiaries of much more spending—anywhere from two to five times as much as what is spent on instruction at community colleges or other schools without admissions requirements. And students at top schools are far more likely to graduate than students at other institutions, even when they are equally prepared, according to the report. In addition, graduates of top schools are far more likely than others to go on to graduate school.

The financial implications of those differences are huge: A worker with an advanced degree is expected to earn as much as $2.1 million more in his or her lifetime than a college dropout, the report said. Also, the report said graduates of selective colleges earn an average of $67,000 a year 10 years after graduation, about $18,000 a year more than their counterparts who graduate from non-selective schools.

The report’s authors say that in order to combat growing racial polarization in higher education, more resources need to be directed to improve students’ academic experiences at non-selective schools, which often struggle with over-crowded classrooms and outdated materials. The authors say that colleges and lawmakers should also do more to bring black and Hispanic students into top schools.

The report comes just as the Supreme Court recently dealt a blow to affirmative action. In June, the high court allowed affirmative action to survive, but made it harder to institute as part of the admissions process, ruling that schools must first prove there are “no workable race-neutral alternatives” to achieve diversity on campus.

Continued here: 

Charts: Racial Polarization Increasing in Higher Education

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Charts: Racial Polarization Increasing in Higher Education

It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know. Seriously.

by london Posted on July 31, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

You know the old saying, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? Well, Kelly Shue of the University of Chicago has found an intriguing way to test this. At Harvard Business School, students are randomly assigned to sections, where they presumably build strong friendships. (Stronger than the average friendship from just being at Harvard, anyway.) So what effect does this have on success later in life?

I test whether executive and firm outcomes are more similar among section peers than among class peers. I find evidence of significant peer effects in firm investment, leverage, interest coverage, and firm size, with the strongest effects in executive compensation and acquisition activity. Section peers are 10% more similar than class peers in terms of compensation and acquisitions.

In other words, if you get randomly assigned to a section with successful peers, you’re more likely to go along for the ride. I don’t have access to the article itself, and there are several possible explanations for this effect, but the most likely one is that friends help friends, and it’s nice to have friends who are successful. I hope there’s some followup research along these lines. It has some pretty obvious implications for diversity in schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces.

Original link:  

It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know. Seriously.

Posted in alo, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know. Seriously.

Are American Political Parties Becoming Defined Largely By Race?

by Curtis Tangredi Posted on July 28, 2013

Mother Jones

A new AP report suggests that 80 percent of the U.S. population struggles with poverty at some point in their lives. Ryan Cooper riffs on this to make a nonpartisan point about American political parties:

It’s probably fair to say also that poor whites are overwhelmingly Republican, and in large part due to an overhang of racial resentment….This is why I despair of analysis like Matt Yglesias’ or Sean Trende’s making the case the Republicans can keep winning with white voters alone (though NB that Trende doesn’t argue that this means the GOP doesn’t have to change). Because that does not bode well for our future.

I lived in South Africa for a time, where voting breaks down almost entirely by race. To a first approximation, blacks vote for the African National Congress, whites and Coloureds (the non-offensive term adopted by mixed-race people) vote for the Democratic Alliance. The upshot is that because blacks make up about 77 percent of the population the ANC has won every election with over 60% of the vote. (An outcome, I should add, that is the predicable outcome of the Apartheid state’s vicious racist terrorism.)

But the lack of political competition has been disastrous. Especially during the tenure of Thabo Mbeki, the whole South African government was shot through with corruption and rank incompetence, culminating in the 2008 power crisis. Single party states, outside of a few possible exceptions like Singapore, are a recipe for failure.

I don’t have time right now to ruminate on this at length. But it’s worth tossing out for further thought. My big problem with Cooper’s thesis is simple: it’s not clear to me that poor and working-class whites actually do vote overwhelmingly Republican. That’s certainly true in the South, but everywhere else this vote is split fairly evenly between the parties—and this has changed very little over the past few decades. There’s really no national trend of working-class whites becoming more Republican.

At least, that’s one view. Andrew Levison and Ruy Teixeira present a different one here. They don’t address regional differences, but they present fairly dire national data and go on to suggest that things might actually be even worse than they look. Democrats really are losing the white working-class vote, and this is a recipe for disaster unless things change.

I share Cooper’s apprehension about the future of American politics if our major political parties both end up being defined largely by race and ethnicity. For that reason, among others, it’s important to figure out which of these views is actually true.

Original article:

Are American Political Parties Becoming Defined Largely By Race?

Posted in alo, FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Are American Political Parties Becoming Defined Largely By Race?

Why North Carolina’s Voter ID Bill Might be the Nation’s Worst

by siteforme Posted on July 24, 2013

Mother Jones

For decades, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 required cities, counties and states with histories of discriminatory voting laws to seek federal permission—preclearance, in legal parlance—before changing their election rules. When the Supreme Court invalidated part of the VRA last month, that all changed. The high court’s decision made it easier for jurisdictions with troubled pasts to enact restrictive voting laws. Now North Carolina is set to do just that.

North Carolina’s GOP-led legislature has taken many controversial steps in recent weeks—sneaking anti-abortion measures into a motorcycle safety law and cutting unemployment benefits for 70,000 North Carolinians, to name two. But new revisions (pdf) to a photo ID voting bill, which passed the House in April and is up for a Senate vote today, might take the cake. The revised bill prohibits same-day registration, ends pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, eliminates one week of early voting, prevents counties from extending voting hours due to long lines (often caused by cuts in early voting) or other extraordinary circumstances, scratches college ID cards and other forms of identification from the very short list of acceptable state-issued photo IDs, and outlaws certain types of voter registration drives.

It’s quite possibly the most restrictive voter ID bill in recent years, says Denise Leiberman, senior attorney for Advancement Project, a nonprofit civil rights organization.

“The list of acceptable identification has been whittled away to such a small list, and that’s really what makes it so repressive,” she says. “The list is so small that many, many people in North Carolina aren’t going to have an acceptable ID.”

The bill’s new provisions make it so that, with very few exceptions, a voter needs a valid in-state DMV-issued driver’s license or non-driver’s ID card, a US Military ID card, a veteran’s ID card or a US passport. According to an April 2013 analysis (pdf) of state Board of Elections data by Democracy North Carolina, 34 percent of the state’s registered black voters, the overwhelming majority of whom vote Democrat, do not have state-issued photo ID. The same study found that 55 percent of North Carolina Democrats don’t have state-issued photo ID. Only 21 percent of Republicans have the same problem.

But ask the bill’s Republican proponents, and they’ll say that this isn’t a partisan ploy to suppress voter turnout. It’s all about fraud.

“People need to have confidence in the fact that everyone only votes once, and that their vote matters, and establish integrity in the electoral process,” Sen. Bob Rucho (R-Mecklenburg) told the Associated Press. “I would hope we can pass this bill and re-establish a level of integrity and confidence in the electoral system.

The problem with the GOP’s argument is that this voter fraud crisis is largely a figment of the right’s imagination—or a convenient exaggeration. A Democratic analysis of the last six state elections found just two instances of in-person voter fraud.

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act used to provide a check on certain jurisdictions—including 40 in North Carolina—that wanted to change election rules. If they wanted to get voting changes approved by the feds, state legislators presiding over Section 5 districts had to structure new laws so they wouldn’t hinder the voting rights of any specific group. If the state legislators passed discriminatory laws, the Justice Department would strike them down and the legislators would have to go back to the drawing board.

With the VRA gutted, it’s open season, Leiberman says: “Unfortunately, I think that states around the country are looking at North Carolina right now—particularly those former Section 5 states—to see just how brazen they can be.”

Continued – 

Why North Carolina’s Voter ID Bill Might be the Nation’s Worst

Posted in FF, GE, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Why North Carolina’s Voter ID Bill Might be the Nation’s Worst

Full Video: Obama Delivers Surprise Address on Race, #RealTalk Ensues

by apitjwdu Posted on July 19, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

“If Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk?” – President Obama, on Friday.

Watch:

Obama made a surprise address at Friday’s White House press briefing. He weighed in on the Trayvon Martin case, spoke about race issues in America, and called for an evaluation of the efficacy and wisdom of Stand Your Ground laws. “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” the president said.

To read the full text of Obama’s remarks, click here.

Source: 

Full Video: Obama Delivers Surprise Address on Race, #RealTalk Ensues

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Full Video: Obama Delivers Surprise Address on Race, #RealTalk Ensues

This Man Has an IQ of 70. Will Georgia Execute Him Tonight? (Update: No)

by RupertxMcmillan Posted on July 15, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Update: A Fulton County judge has stayed Hill’s execution, pending a hearing on Thursday.

At 7 p.m. EST on Monday, Georgia is set to execute Warren Hill, who has been on death row since 1989 for murdering his cellmate with a wooden board. (Hill had, at the time, been serving a life sentence for murdering his girlfriend.) That in itself isn’t especially unusual, except that according to every expert who has examined him, Hill is mentally disabled—and states are prohibited from executing mentally disabled individuals under a 2002 Supreme Court decision.

At this point, no one seems to dispute that Hill meets even the state’s high standard for proving he’s mentally handicapped. But Georgia contends—and in April, a federal appeals court agreed—that his mental capacities are irrelevant, because he is procedurally barred from making that case. That is, even though there is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Hill is unfit for execution, Georgia is going ahead with the lethal injection anyway, on a technicality; he’s all out of options.

But there’s another wrinkle. In February, a state court granted a stay of execution for Hill due to questions about the legality of the state’s lethal injection cocktail. The difficulty in acquiring new lethal injection cocktails is such that in February, Georgia sought to expedite the executions of its 94 death row inmates before its cocktails reached their March 1 expiration date. So in May, Gov. Nathan Deal (R) signed the Lethal Injection Secrecy Act, which classifies the state’s execution drug cocktail as a “state secret,” and therefore immune from judicial oversight:

The identifying information of any person or entity who participates in or administers the execution of a death sentence and the identifying information of any person or entity that manufactures, supplies, compounds, or prescribes the drugs, medical supplies, or medical equipment utilized in the execution of a death sentence shall be confidential and shall not be subject to disclosure under Article 4 of Chapter 18 of Title 50 or under judicial process. Such information shall be classified as a confidential state secret.

Under the new law, judges—or anyone else, really—are prohibited from finding out what drugs are actually being used to execute death row inmates, and where those drugs are coming from. (In Oklahoma, for instance, lawyers have successfully blocked executions that make use of new, more experimental drugs.) Because the cocktail is unknown, it is impossible to know whether such an execution process would square with other Constitutional tenets, such as the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

Hill’s last best hope now is the US Supreme Court, which had previously announced it would conference on the case in September. But that’s only pushed Georgia to speed up its own deadline. The law went into effect on July 1. On July 3, Georgia set the new execution date for Hill. We’ll keep you updated.

View original:

This Man Has an IQ of 70. Will Georgia Execute Him Tonight? (Update: No)

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Man Has an IQ of 70. Will Georgia Execute Him Tonight? (Update: No)

Images of Protest: Rallying for Trayvon Martin Across the US

by Aale Thomas Posted on July 15, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Saturday’s verdict in the George Zimmerman murder trial triggered waves of emotion, ranging from elation to despair, that rippled far beyond the confines of Sanford, Florida, where Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old, last February. Zimmerman claimed self-defense in the closely watched, divisive trial, which ended Saturday evening with an acquittal.

Unfounded speculation that a not-guilty verdict would lead to riots and widespread violence was rampant in the week before the jury made its decision. The riot rumor-mongers were right about one thing: People were angry enough to take to the streets Sunday, but the protests, which occurred from coast to coast, were largely peaceful demonstrations of anger and disappointment.

Here are images from some of Sunday’s demonstrations:

Hundreds gather in Boston’s Dudley Square. Nicolaus Czarnecki/Metro US/Zumapress.com

Two people lean on each other as a protest begins at Fort Mellon Park in Sanford, Florida. Jacob Langston/MCT (Zumapress.com)

Reverend William Brown of Morning Star Baptist Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico, speaks to a crowd at the city’s Civic Plaza. Around 200 people participated in the protest. Adolph Pierre-Louis/Albuquerque Journal/Zumapress.com

A Los Angeles police officer watches a crowd of demonstrators. Thousands of Angelenos took to the streets in protest. Ringo Chiu/Zumapress.com

Niciah Petrovic (center) and Joanna Cherry (right) comfort each other at a protest in Washington, DC. Miguel Juarez Lugo/Zumapress.com

Demonstrators hold up a sign at they march down Washington Boulevard in Detroit. Courtney Sacco/Zumapress.com

Emmanuel Thombs, 13, joins about 100 people at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina. Travis Long/MCT/Zumapress.com

Protestors convene in New York City’s Union Square. Thousands took to the streets of the city in protest. Staton Rabin/Zumapress.com

See more here:

Images of Protest: Rallying for Trayvon Martin Across the US

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Images of Protest: Rallying for Trayvon Martin Across the US

"Fruitvale Station" and The Weinstein Company’s Push for Social Justice

by Isaiah McKenna Posted on July 13, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The tears had not yet dried, but immediately upon exiting theater 15 at San Francisco’s AMC Metreon for a screening of Fruitvale Station, each of us was handed a business card. On one side: an image of Michael B. Jordan (playing Oscar Grant) embraced by Ariana Neal (playing Grant’s daughter Tatiana). On the other side: a message encouraging us to channel our newfound rage, confusion, and sadness to fix the injustice we just witnessed on screen.

Call it insensitive, or call it smart marketing, but The Weinstein Company is hard at work making Fruitvale Station more than just something to watch while munching on popcorn. They’re engaged in a campaign to raise awareness about social injustice.

Photos by Brett Brownell

Just after midnight on January 1, 2009, Oakland resident Oscar Grant was riding home from San Francisco on the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), when he became involved in an altercation. The train stopped at Fruitvale Station and transit officers responded to the scene. While attempting to restrain Grant, officer Johannes Mehserle shot him in the back. A few hours later, Grant, the 22-year-old father of a 4-year-old girl, died at Highland Hospital.

Numerous cell phone users captured the scene and uploaded their videos. Bay Area residents were incensed and protests erupted. Officer Mehserle later testified that instead of grabbing a Taser, he mistakenly grabbed his gun. Mehserle was charged with murder, but a jury only found him guilty of involuntary manslaughter. He was releases after 11 months in prison.

The story of Oscar Grant left a painful scar on the Bay Area, and a literal one on the floor tile where he was killed. During filming of Fruitvale Station, actor Michael B. Jordon, who plays Grant, found a bullet hole where Grant was shot. “I remember putting my chest to the hole and being scared while I was shooting that scene,” he told the L.A. Times. The hole was later filled by BART officials, but Jordan told the paper, “There’s energy at that spot—people know it and what happened there. And oftentimes, people won’t stand at that end of the platform.”

Director Ryan Coogler helms this story of Grant’s final day, and included in his retelling is a brutally visceral recreation of what happened that New Year’s morning on the platform.

Coogler grew up near Oakland, and at the time of the shooting he was home on break from film school. He recently told the New York Times, “When we saw that happen to Oscar, and we saw it on video, it was like the wind getting knocked out of us. I was questioning who we were as a community.” Soon after the shooting, Coogler decided to make the film.

It’s beautifully and subtly acted by Jordon, Melonie Diaz (playing Grant’s girlfriend and mother of his daughter), and Octavia Spencer (playing Grant’s mother). Meanwhile, the other cast members come across so natural and real it’s as if we’re peeping through a key hole at a real family in the kitchen. This level of comfort makes Grant’s death feel personal, leaving you rooting for his survival in the midst of a painful awareness that history had other plans.

But after years of anger and tension in the Bay Area, The Weinstein Company, which purchased Fruitvale Station for $2.5 million at Sundance earlier this year, is using it as an opportunity.

As stated in big bold letters at the top of the post-screening business cards, they’re inviting everyone to “Commit to end social injustice in the name of Oscar Grant.” (A fitting sentiment, although the enticement of winning a gift card is jarring in this context.) The film’s website encourages visitors to share stories of overcoming prejudice, bullying, social injustice or mistreatment with their “I AM __” campaign. And of course they’re taking to social networking, such as this recent Instagram photo. Wish them luck. They’ll need it.

Fruitvale Station opened in limited release Friday July 12, and wide release on July 19.

Here’s the trailer:

Jump to original – 

"Fruitvale Station" and The Weinstein Company’s Push for Social Justice

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on "Fruitvale Station" and The Weinstein Company’s Push for Social Justice

Why Violent Right-wing Extremism Doesn’t Scare Americans

by Shicsshaw Posted on July 9, 2013

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

The evangelical Christians of Greenville County, South Carolina, are afraid.

There has been talk of informants and undercover agents luring young, conservative evangelicals across the South into sham terrorist plots. The feds and the area’s police want to eliminate a particularly extreme strain of evangelical Christianity opposed to abortion, homosexuality, and secularism, whose adherents sometimes use violent imagery and speech. They fear such extreme talk could convince lone wolves or small groups of Christian extremists to target abortion clinics, gay bars, or shopping malls for attack. As a result, law enforcement has flooded these communities with informants meant to provide an early warning system for any signs of such “radicalization.”

Converts, so important to the evangelical movement, are now looked upon with suspicion—the more fervent, the more suspicious. In local barbecue joints, diners, and watering holes, the proprietors are careful not to let FOX News linger onscreen too long, fearing political discussions that could be misconstrued. After all, you can never be too sure who’s listening.

Come Sunday, the ministers who once railed against abortion, gay marriage, and Hollywood as sure signs that the US is descending into godlessness will mute their messages. They will peer out at their congregations and fear that some faces aren’t interested in the Gospel, or maybe are a little too interested in every word. The once vibrant political clubs at Bob Jones University have become lifeless as students whisper about informants and fear a few misplaced words could leave them in a government database or worse.

Naturally, none of this is actually happening to evangelical Christians in South Carolina, across the South, or anywhere else. It would never be tolerated. Yet the equivalents of everything cited above did happen in and around the New York metropolitan area—just not to white, conservative, Christian Americans. But replace them with American Muslims in the New York area and you have a perfect fit, as documented by the recent report Mapping Muslims. And New York is hardly alone.

Since 9/11, American law enforcement has taken a disproportionate interest in American Muslims across the country, seeing a whole community as a national security threat, particularly in California and New York City. But here’s the thing: the facts that have been piling up ever since that date don’t support such suspicion. Not at all.

The numbers couldn’t be clearer: right-wing extremists have committed far more acts of political violence since 1990 than American Muslims. That law enforcement across the country hasn’t felt similarly compelled to infiltrate and watch over conservative Christian communities in the hopes of disrupting violent right-wing extremism confirms what American Muslims know in their bones: to be different is to be suspect.

Conducting Suspicionless Surveillance
In the aftermath of 9/11, law enforcement has infiltrated Muslim American communities and spied on them in ways that would have outraged Americans, had such tactics been used against Christian communities after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, or after any of the other hate crimes or anti-abortion-based acts of violence committed since then by right-wing extremists.

Documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the American Civil Liberties Union make clear that FBI agents in California used community outreach programs to gather intelligence at mosques and other local events, recording the opinions and associations of people not suspected of any crime. In 2008, the FBI loosened its internal guidelines further, allowing agents to collect demographic information on ethnically concentrated communities and map them for intelligence and investigative purposes.

There is no question that the most extreme example of such blanket, suspicion-less surveillance has been conducted by the New York City Police Department (NYPD). As revealed by the Associated Press, the NYPD’s Intelligence Division carried out a secret surveillance program on the city’s varied Muslim communities based on the erroneous belief that their religion makes them more susceptible to violent radicalization.

The program, which continues today, looks something like this, according to Mapping Muslims: “rakers,” or undercover officers, are sent into neighborhoods to identify “hot spots”—mosques, schools, restaurants, cafes, halal meat shops, hookah bars—and told to chat up people to “gauge sentiment,” while setting up “listening posts.” “Crawlers,” or informants, are then recruited and sent to infiltrate mosques and religious events. They are ordered to record what imams and congregants say and take note of who attended services and meetings.

These crawlers are encouraged to initiate “create and capture” conversations with their targets, bringing up terrorism or some other controversial topic, recording the response, and then sharing it with the NYPD. The intelligence unit also went mobile, checking out and infiltrating American-Muslim student groups from Connecticut to New Jersey and even as far away as Pennsylvania.

When news of the NYPD’s spying program broke, it shattered trust within the city’s Muslim communities, giving rise to general suspicion and fraying community ties of all sorts. This naturally raises the question: How many terrorism plots were identified and disrupted thanks to this widespread and suspicionless surveillance program? The answer: none.

Worse, the chief of the NYPD Intelligence Division admitted in sworn testimony last summer that the Muslim surveillance program did not even generate a single criminal lead. The incredibly invasive, rights-eroding program was a complete bust, a total waste of the resources of the New York City Police Department.

And that’s without even considering what is surely its most harmful aspect: the likelihood that, at least in the short term, it has caused irreparable damage to the Muslim community’s trust in the police. Surveillance, concludes the Mapping Muslims report, “has stifled constitutionally protected activity and destroyed trust between American Muslim communities and the agencies charged with protecting them.”

When people fear the police, tips dry up, potentially making the community less safe. This is important, especially given that the Muslim-American community has helped prevent, depending on whose figures you use, from 21%–40% of all terrorism plots associated with Muslims since 9/11. That’s grounds for cooperation, not alienation: a lesson that would have been learned by a police department with strong ties to and trust in the community.

Numbers May Not Lie, But They Sure Can Be Ignored
The idea that American law enforcement’s mass surveillance of Muslim communities is a necessary, if unfortunate, counterterrorism tool rests with the empirically false notion that American Muslims are more prone to political violence than other Americans.

This is simply not true.

According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), right-wing terrorists perpetrated 145 “ideologically motivated homicide incidents” between 1990 and 2010. In that same period, notes START, “al Qaeda affiliates, al Qaeda-inspired extremists, and secular Arab Nationalists committed 27 homicide incidents in the United States involving 16 perpetrators or groups of perpetrators.”

Last November, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center published a report on America’s violent far-right extremists. Its numbers were even more startling than START’s. “The consolidated dataset,” writes report author Arie Perliger, “includes information on 4,420 violent incidents that occurred between 1990 and 2012 within US borders, and which caused 670 fatalities and injured 3,053 people.” Perliger also found that the number of far-right attacks had jumped 400% in the first 11 years of the 21st century.

Continue Reading »

Link:

Why Violent Right-wing Extremism Doesn’t Scare Americans

Posted in alo, FF, GE, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Violent Right-wing Extremism Doesn’t Scare Americans