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Anti-Muslim Hate Groups Have Tripled With the Rise of Trump

by MargotStrahan Posted on February 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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The number of anti-Muslim hate groups in America tripled last year, according to a report released Wednesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a watchdog organization that tracks political extremists. Between the beginning and end of 2016, the number of anti-Muslim groups increased from 34 to 101—by far the largest spike since SPLC began tracking the category in 2010.

The surge coincides with a 67 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes last year, a level of violence not seen since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Documenting hate crimes is challenging (both in terms of legal definition and incidents that may go unreported), and most hate groups don’t release membership statistics—two reasons why SPLC views the number of anti-Muslim groups as an important metric.

Notably, the steady rise in these hate groups began around the launch in mid 2015 of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Though the Syrian refugee crisis and terrorist attacks from Paris to Orlando may have fueled some increase in Islamphobia, Trump’s repeated invocation of the threat of “radical Islamic terrorism” and move as president to ban immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries has clearly fanned the flames.

“The rise in anti-Muslim groups in the last year I think demonstrates just how much the presidential campaign influenced the radical right in the US,” says Ryan Lenz, a senior writer for the SPLC’s Intelligence Project. “We have not seen this level of anti-Muslim rhetoric in quite some time, and Trump has done the lion’s share of infusing the anti-Muslim movement in the US with energy, which had been waning for years.”

Breitbart News, the far-right publication formerly led by Trump senior strategist Stephen Bannon, has written dozens of stories about Muslim “rape gangs,” the supposed threat of Sharia law in the United States, and alleged conspiracies by the Council on Islamic Relations, a moderate civil rights organization that Breitbart characterizes as a “front group” for terrorists.

Until stepping down from Brietbart News in August 2015 to lead the Trump campaign, Bannon hosted a Sirius XM radio show, Breitbart News Daily, where he conducted dozens of interviews with anti-Muslim extremists. One of Bannon’s guests on the show, Trump surrogate Roger Stone, warned of a future America “where hordes of Islamic madmen are raping, killing, pillaging, defecating in public fountains, harassing private citizens, elderly people—that’s what’s coming.”

Bannon also said on his show that George W. Bush’s statement after 9/11 that “Islam is peace” was “the dumbest” comment Bush made during his presidency. Bannon told listeners that the United States and Europe are engaged in a “global existential war” and suggested that a “fifth column” of Islamist sympathizers has infiltrated the US government.

Since his election, Trump has tapped several leaders with track records marked by anti-Muslim views. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s now ex-national security adviser, has described Islam as a “malignant cancer” and tweeted that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.” As a student at Duke University, senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller co-founded the Terrorism Awareness Project, which promoted “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” And Trump’s CIA chief, Mike Pompeo, has embraced apocalyptic views of Islam.

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Anti-Muslim Hate Groups Have Tripled With the Rise of Trump

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America Has a Lot to Learn From This Muslim Fashion Blogger

by Glinda6576 Posted on February 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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In sixth grade, Hoda Katebi decided she would start wearing the hijab.

It was a bold move. She’s American born, but her parents immigrated from Iran. Theirs was one of few minority families—let alone Iranian ones—in her small Oklahoma town. The September 11 attacks were only about five years in the rearview mirror, and her classmates were hitting the age when kids become more aware of the world—and of their parents’ political viewpoints, which in this case leaned pretty conservative.

To some of her schoolmates, Islam seemed scary, freakish. The hijab made Katebi a target for taunts, and worse. One middle-school student, after calling her “terrorist” all day at school, punched her in the face. A few years later, in high school, a peer pulled off her hijab, demanding to see her hair. Katebi never reported the assaults. She was convinced her teachers would look the other way rather than try and defend her. It was up to her to convince people around her that she was not to be feared, and that she largely shared their values.

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive order banning immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries (including Iran), Katebi, now 22, finds herself in the position of having to explain her culture to people all over again. Indeed, it’s part of her job. A year out of college, she heads up communications for the Chicago branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which says Trump’s immigration order targets Muslims directly—despite the administration’s claims to the contrary. CAIR is working with lawyers and other civil rights organizations to help people who have been detained in airports or stranded overseas as a result of the ban.

But Katebi was working to bridge the gap between America and the Middle East long before CAIR hired her. In her hometown, people were always looking to her to speak on behalf of all Middle Easterners—on everything from the history of Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Their questions compelled her to study up on Muslim history and culture so she could push back against her peers’ misguided views.

Continuing discrimination led her to develop a “don’t give a shit attitude” that later gave way to a healthier outlet for her frustrations. Recognizing the power of the hijab to dictate how people viewed her, Katebi became interested in the use of clothing as a political statement. So, the summer after her freshman year at the University of Chicago, she launched a fashion blog, calling it JooJoo Azad (“Free Bird” in Farsi). “Fashion is inherently and deeply political,” Katebi writes, and not many Americans understand just how complex and diverse fashion for Muslim women can be. She told me she wanted to “yell in a productive way” and tackle the nexus of clothing, Islam, and feminism—a topic she now lectures on.

From Tehran Streetstyle Hoda Katebi

For her undergraduate thesis, Katebi chose Iran’s underground fashion scene, and she traveled to Tehran during the summer of 2015 to research the topic. The Iranian designers she met were trending toward traditional motifs and designs, but also creating pieces that technically violated the country’s Islamic dress code. Iranian law requires women to cover their heads and to dress modestly, usually keeping their torsos, waist area, and a good part of their legs covered with large, loose garments. Rules on acceptable colors fluctuate depending on who is in charge, as does the zeal of the Gashte Ershad (morality police), who enforce the rules. Punishments can range from a warning or a ticket to arrest, in extreme cases.

During her trip, as many Iranian women do, Katebi tested the limits of the dress codes. She found that the Gashte Ershad rarely enforced it, and that violations are common. One officer saw her wearing a tight crop-top shirt that didn’t cover her waist area. He simply yelled that she should “cover up,” and then he drove away, she recalls.

Alongside her thesis work, Katebi collected material for her 2016 book, Tehran Streetstyle. The designers wanted Katebi to expose their art to the rest of the world, and her Western blog audience was clamoring for a window into Iranian fashion. The result was a collection of images of a sort Americans seldom see—Iranian women clad in vibrant colors, with creative designs and trendy accessories. While Katebi and most of the designers she spoke with dislike the dress codes, their feelings are complicated. “There’s a level of resisting the hijab law, but also wanting to resist Western cultural hegemony that exists globally,” Katebi explains.

From Tehran Streetstyle. Hoda Katebi

At a time when the US government is projecting a sinister view of Islam to the public, Katebi’s work pushes in the opposite direction, helping open-minded Americans appreciate the nuances and diversity in Muslim culture. It’s been a constant tug of war, and the fact that few Americans even bother to learn the basics of Islam before forming an opinion has not made her job easier.

In fact, the rhetoric of the 2016 campaign and beyond, combined with the recent attacks in Europe and the United States, have contributed to a notable resurgence of Islamophobia here. Hate crimes against Muslims spiked 67 percent in 2015, according to FBI data, and there have been many troubling incidents since the election. In late January, as the White House issued its immigration ban, a mosque in Texas was burned down and a gunman attacked the Quebec Islamic Cultural Center in Canada, leaving six people dead and five hospitalized. President Trump, Katebi says, continues to use the same divisive rhetoric against Muslims in the name of national security that leaders employed after 9/11. “Muslims are just recovering,” she says, “from the effects of what happened in 2002.”

At least 18 people were detained at O’Hare International Airport thanks to Trump’s executive order. Protesters—including Katebi and others from CAIR—flooded the airport with signs and chants demanding that detainees be allowed access to lawyers and that they be admitted into the country. A judge issued a stay to Trump’s order, but that injunction is temporary. Organizers are still scrambling to protect people left in limbo, including a friend of Katebi’s, a Stanford doctoral student who had to cancel his flight to the United States and now can’t get back to school. For Katebi, the past week has been a nonstop work frenzy. As she put it, she’s been running on “water and Starbursts.”

While she’s encouraged by the crowds showing up at the airport to protest Trump’s immigration move, Katebi has taken to her blog to challenge misconceptions even among Americans who support Muslim immigration. Consider the viral image of the woman clad in a stars-and-stripes hijab. The artwork was intended as a show of solidarity, but Katebi pointed out that it was the work of a white (non-Muslim) man—Shepard Fairey, the same artist who did the Barack Obama “Hope” poster—and noted that the woman who modeled for the poster does not normally wear the hijab.

She also made the point that, given the fraught history of American military actions in the Middle East, the image sends a decidedly mixed message. “I understand the good intentions,” Katebi wrote, “but my liberation will not come from framing my body with a flag that has flown every time my people have fallen. And I hope yours will not either.”

As the Trump regime ramps up, Katebi is dreading the prospect of having to play teacher all over again. “Educating people on the very basics, like ‘Islam is a religion of peace; this is what I believe,’ it’s incredibly emotionally taxing!” she says. “Having to deal with all of that and be able to respond in a very polite, educational manner is harder than people think.”

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America Has a Lot to Learn From This Muslim Fashion Blogger

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The Long History of "Nazi Punching"

by MaureenPaten444 Posted on January 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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By now many have seen the video of an unidentified man punching white nationalist Richard Spencer in the face during inauguration weekend. Much in the way that the new president’s vicious campaign rhetoric gave voice to the deeper resentments of some of his supporters, the assault on Spencer seems to have offered a cathartic and even comedic outlet for those on the left who were angered by thoughts of Trumpians goose-stepping through the streets of DC as Trump entered the White House. Since the video emerged, social media users have set the footage to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” and the Hamilton soundtrack, and comedian Tim Heidecker even wrote his own tune to celebrate the bashing. Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau tweeted, “I don’t care how many songs you set Richard Spencer being punched to, I’ll laugh at every one.” Journalists for the New York Times and other major outlets were soon mulling over the question at hand: “Is it OK to punch a Nazi?” A website, isitokaytopunchanazi.com, answered with a gleeful loop of the attack, with one neon-yellow word superimposed atop it: “Yes.”

Yet, this was more than just a morbid social-media sideshow: The attack on Spencer is part of a perennial conflict that may again be escalating. For decades, far-right extremists have faced the militant wrath of “antifas” (short for anti-fascists). With Trump’s campaign having summoned all sorts of white supremacists and other trolls from under their bridges, the old war—which I first got a front-row glimpse into a decade ago—appears ready to re-ignite.

This beef goes back to before World War II, when in Europe, a nascent authoritarian movement inspired by Hitler, Mussolini, and Francisco Franco squared off against a popular front coalition of liberals and radicals. At the Battle of Cable Street, in October 1936, Oswald Mosley brought 2,000 members of his British Union of Fascists to march through London’s Jewish East End neighborhood and 100,000 anti-fascists showed up to oppose them. In the resulting melee, Jews, Irishmen, Communists, anarchists, and socialists beat Mosley’s men with sticks, rocks, and sawed-off chair-legs. Local women dumped their chamber pots out of windows onto the heads of Mosley’s men.

Similar conflicts played out several decades later in America. In 1979, in Greensboro, North Carolina, the American Communist Party organized a rally called “Kill the Klan Day.” TV crews filmed as a nine-car caravan of Klansmen and neo-Nazis suddenly showed up and shot at marchers, murdering five participants, though no one was ever convicted of the crime. (In 2014, one self-proclaimed participant, Frazier Glenn Miller, went on a shooting spree at a Jewish cultural center in Kansas, murdering three people. The 74-year-old had just been diagnosed with lung cancer; he said that he “wanted to make damned sure I killed some Jews or attacked the Jews before I died.”)

In 1982, a street gang in Minneapolis named the Baldies began committing what they described as “righteous violence”—a term apocryphally attributed to Henry David Thoreau to describe John Brown’s attack at Harpers Ferry—against neo-Nazis who had started to appear in the city. The Baldies and their opponents both adopted the fashion of British punks—bomber jackets, bald heads, boots and braces—and kicked the Nazis, quite literally, out of town. On one occasion they even collaborated with now Congressman Keith Ellison, then a law student at the University of Minnesota, to lead a protest. “I remember he and the rest of the Black Law Student Association were friendly with us,” a founder of the Baldies told the Minneapolis City Pages. “I think they were just intrigued because we were so young and because we were anti-racist skinheads, which was weird to them.”

The battles in the Twin Cities were followed by a wider spread of neo-Nazi violence. In 1988, three members of a gang called White Aryan Resistance beat a 28-year-old Ethiopian student named Mulugata Serew to death in Portland, Oregon. In 1998, skinheads murdered Daniel Shearsty and Spit Newburn, a pair of anti-racists and best friends from Las Vegas—one black, one a white Marine—in the Nevada desert. The next year, a member of the racist cult World Church of the Creator went on a shooting spree in Indiana, gunning down nine Orthodox Jews, an African-American man, and a Korean graduate student before killing himself.

Anti-fascist groups like Anti-Racist Action, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, and the Love and Rage Anarchist Federation fought back. Their members advocated “direct action” against white supremacists, eschewing legislative efforts in favor of physically preventing Nazis from organizing, distributing literature, and speaking in public. To their supporters, these groups merged the moralism of America’s abolitionist tradition with the nihilism of punk rock, and boiled the culture wars down to their most primal element: vicious brawls over racism, sexism, and homophobia. The logic of their direct action was that, if a white-supremacist leader inspired someone to commit a hate crime, police couldn’t intervene until after a violent action had taken place. Anti-fascists wouldn’t wait. “Racism is an idea,” one anonymous ARA member said in the 2000 documentary Invisible Revolution, but “fascism is an idea mixed with action. It took fascism to establish Jim Crow and before that, slavery….Anti-Semitism has been around a long time but it took fascism to make the Holocaust….When you cross that threshold, you negate your rights to a calm, collective conversation.”

My own introduction to what anti-fascism looked like took place in South Philadelphia in 2004, where I attended a house party arranged around a half-keg of High Life in the kitchen. At the center of the gathered crew of mohawked kids was a man named Joe, whose skinny crimson suspenders strained over a swell of jiggling belly. A leader of ARA’s Philadelphia chapter, Joe regaled us with a story about a stranger in a pub who’d once called him a faggot. “So I grabbed this motherfucker by the collar,” he said, “and I dragged him outside.” In the parking lot, Joe explained, he beat the man unconscious. The tale was horrific. But it was also surprising—because Joe was gay, it turned out, as were many of his Philly ARA comrades. He wasn’t insulted by being called a faggot; he was insulted that someone would think there was anything wrong with being one.

“How does it feel!” Joe thundered, when he’d gotten to the climax of his yarn, in which he knocked his antagonist down and kicked him in the head repeatedly. Everyone laughed as Joe pantomimed his victory over the man by stomping the floor of the kitchen with his steel-toe combat boots: “How does it feel to get your head kicked in by a faggot?”

With the dawn of the Trump era, the Joes of the country may be stirring, and Spencer and his fans seem to sense it. On Tuesday, Spencer’s supporters offered a $3,000 bounty to anyone who could identify the alt-right leader’s assailant, and Spencer called for the formation of alt-right vigilante squads to prevent future attacks. “The ANTIFA thug who violently assaulted Spencer hid his face behind a mask,” an anonymous commenter said, “but some think they caught a glimpse of his face. There’s not much to go on—but let’s identify the ANTIFA criminal who punched Richard Spencer.”

Meanwhile, the same day that Spencer was assaulted, a 25-year-old anti-fascist was shot in the stomach during an inauguration protest at the University of Washington, allegedly by an alt-right sympathizer. New groups adopting an anti-fascist outlook such as Redneck Revolt, John Brown Militia, and the Bastards Motorcycle Club appear poised to revive the direct-action tactics of the 1980s and ’90s in order to confront white supremacists emboldened by Trump. Anti-Racist Action’s 20 or so chapters around the country have also promised to join the fray. The day after the inauguration, ARA’s branch in Louisville, Kentucky, posted on their website:

For decades, white supremacists were the face of the enemy and only a minute few dared show their true colors in public. This made them easy to dismiss, easy to ignore…However, recent events have proven that the fascist ideology has not only survived but thrived…Now, their labors of hatred have been rewarded with a sympathetic President-Elect and a federal Congress that is, at best, indifferent to their evil.

A warning to those who wish to destroy what we hold dear; We will resist you in the streets, in the poll booths and in the townhouses. Whether it’s in the bars, the concert halls, the conference centers or even City Hall, we will not allow a platform for your dangerous and divisive ideas. We will not allow history to repeat itself. We will shut you down everywhere you go. We will block your marches. We will interrupt your speeches. We will protest your legislation. We will be the thorn in your side. The glass in your bread. The pain in your ass.

Trump’s presidency is already promising to turn back the clock on American progress in multiple ways, with women’s rights, racial justice, and environmental protections under siege. The return of the war between fascists and anti-fascists is another expression of our current political atavism. This time, given a uniquely pugilistic president of the United States, the battle may rage hotter than ever.

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The Long History of "Nazi Punching"

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Cops’ Feelings on Race Show How Far We Have to Go

by johnsmithwindows Posted on January 16, 2017

Mother Jones

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This week, the Pew Research Center released a report entitled “Behind the Badge,” a comprehensive survey of nearly 8,000 law enforcement officials across the United States examining their attitudes toward their jobs, police protests, interactions with their communities, racial issues, and much more. The report states that it is appearing “at a crisis point in America’s relationship with the men and women who enforce its laws, precipitated by a series of deaths of black Americans during encounters with the police.”

According to 2016 University of Louisville and University of South Carolina study, police fatally shoot black men at disproportionate rates. Since the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the last few years have been marked with protests leading to a national discussion around race and policing. This report explores how law enforcement officers in the United States view the intersection of policing and race—often, not surprisingly, with very different perspectives between white and black officers.

Here are some of the highlights:

Racial equality: When asked about racial inequality in the country, 92 percent of white officers answered that the United States does not need to make any more changes to achieve equal rights for black Americans. Only 29 percent of black cops agreed. This is in sharp contrast to white civilians, the report notes: Only 57 percent of white adults believe that equal rights have been secured for black people; a mere 8 percent of black people agree, Pew found in a separate survey.
Demonstrations against police: Sixty-eight percent of the officers interviewed say demonstrations against police brutality are motivated by anti-police bias, and 67 percent say the deaths of black people at the hands of police are isolated incidents. Once more, there is a significant racial divide between the respondents: 57 percent of black cops think the high-profile incidents point to a larger problem, while only 27 percent of their white colleagues agree.
Police involvement in immigrant deportation: During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump supported local law enforcement having more of a role in deporting undocumented immigrants, and a small majority of cops agree. Overall, 52 percent of police officers believe they should have an active role in immigration enforcement; 59 percent of white cops agree, compared with 35 percent of black officers and 38 percent of Hispanic police officers.
Community policing: The idea of training police officers to work with community members to achieve better policing has become the center of the conversation surrounding police reform since President Barack Obama organized a task force around the “community policing” concept. But 56 percent of all police officers interviewed consider an aggressive approach to policing more appropriate in certain neighborhoods than the approach of being courteous. There was no racial breakdown for this result.
Physical confrontation: For most police officers, according to the report, physical confrontations do not occur every day, but one-third of those interviewed reported having a physical struggle with a suspect who was resisting arrest within the last month. Thirty-six percent of white officers reported having such an incident, while 33 percent of Hispanic officers reported the same thing. Only 20 percent of black officers said they had a physical altercation with a suspect.

The report also includes police officers attitudes on job satisfaction and police reform proposals. “Police and the public hold sharply different views about key aspects of policing as well as on some major policy issues facing the country,” the report concludes.

Read the full report here.

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Cops’ Feelings on Race Show How Far We Have to Go

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We Can’t Stop Looking at These Unforgettable Images of the Black Panthers

by MiaOddo02554 Posted on October 15, 2016

Mother Jones

For the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, two exceptional new books take on the legacy and history of one of the most powerful and controversial community empowerment movements in America. One book offers a succinct but in-depth history of the party at its peak. The other scratches the itch that always surfaces around anniversaries like this, asking, “Where are they now?”

In 1968, as a student at the University of California-Berkeley, Stephen Shames befriended Bobby Seale, who became a mentor to Shames. Recognizing the importance of having someone document their revolution, Seale gave Shames unfettered access to himself and the Black Panther Party network to take pictures. It gave Shames an unparalleled, insider’s perspective on the party, from 1968 through Bobby Seale’s campaign for Oakland mayor in 1973. It’s a remarkable body of work, not just for its historical significance, but for the poignancy of the images.

Oakland, 1971. Black Panther children in a classroom at the Intercommunal Youth Institute, the Black Panther school. Stephen Shames from the book Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers (Abrams). Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Oakland, July 28, 1968. Kathleen Cleaver, communications secretary and the first female member of the Party’s decision-making Central Committee, talks with Los Angeles Panthers at the Free Huey rally in DeFremery Park (which the Panthers dubbed Bobby Hutton Park). Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers, Shames’ new book with Seale, collects photos he shot through 1973 and pairs them with Black Panther Party ephemera and oral history. It’s an excellent introduction to a movement many people see only in a dramatically cinematic fashion. In popular culture, the Black Panthers are associated with tough dudes in cool leather jackets toting guns, fed up with racism and injustice. The truth, of course, is much more nuanced.

The book details how the Black Panthers took a proactive role in bettering poor communities that were ignored, if not outright shit on, by the powers that be. Their school breakfast program—famously reviled by J. Edgar Hoover—set a now-common standard for making sure school children don’t start the day hungry. The Black Panthers helped get old people to the grocery store and, in particularly tough neighborhoods, escorted them to cash their Social Security checks. They launched schools and newspapers, organized strikes, arranged health care for people. Such community “survival programs” were the backbone of the party. As Seale puts it, “The real heroes of the Black Panther Party were the thousands of sisters and brothers who made our survival programs work.”

Shame’s photos concentrate on the Black Panthers’ activities in Oakland and Berkeley, but he also got around, traveling across the United States in 1970 to document Panther activities in Boston, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, and Toledo, Ohio, among other cities. This was at the height of tension between the FBI and the Black Panthers, when the group’s headquarters around the country were being raided and bombed and fortified in anticipation of shootouts. A time when Panthers like Fred Hampton were being killed. It was a heavy time.

Shames says his photos are “aspirational,” but the tension and disquiet come through. The photos don’t capture the more controversial aspects of the Panthers, which are instead bluntly dealt with in the text by Seale and others.

Oakland, 1971. Black Panther Gloria Abernethy sells papers at the Mayfair supermarket boycott, with Tamara Lacey in the rear. Abernethy now works for the state of California, and Tamara is a real estate agent. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Oakland, August 28, 1971. Party members carry George Jackson’s coffin into St. Augustine’s Church for funeral services. Jackson was killed in a San Quentin prison riot a week earlier, in which three corrections officers and two other inmates were also killed. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

August, 1970, Berkeley. Minister of Defense and Black Panthers co-founder Huey Newton listens to a Bob Dylan album at home shortly after his release from prison. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Oakland, 1973. Black Panther Chairman Bobby Seale campaigns for mayor on a city bus. Seale came in second out of nine candidates that year, only to lose the runoff. But the party’s 1972 voter registration drive helped Lionel Wilson became Oakland’s first black mayor in 1977. Stephen Shames, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.

Power to the People wraps up with Shames and Seale reflecting on the current mood in America and the legacy of the Black Panther Party, featuring photos of recent Black Lives Matter protests.

And that brings us to Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams‘ book, The Black Panthers: Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution (Nation Books).

While no doubt rooted in the past, Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution focuses squarely on the present, with portraits and interviews with former members today. While the authors did an excellent job of tracking down higher-ups in the party, the book smartly turns its focus to the “real heroes,” the group’s rank-and-file members, giving us a fuller picture of life as a Black Panther, and the impact those years had on people’s lives. Some of the former members are now academics. Some are solidly working class. Some are in prison. And many remain active as organizers and activists.

Shih’s simple, powerful, Richard Avedon-esque black-and-white portraits are paired with short pieces on each person: who they were then, where the Black Panther Party took them, and where they are now. Interspersed among the interviews are essays on different aspects of the Black Panthers.

Ericka Huggins was a leader of the Black Panthers Los Angeles chapter along with her husband, John Huggins, who was later killed in a shootout on the UCLA campus. She later founded the party’s New Haven chapter. A longtime director of the party’s Oakland Community School, she helped create educational and social justice programs with an emphasis on spirituality. She is also a professor of sociology and women’s studies at several California colleges and universities. (See our recent chat with Huggins here.) Bryan Shih

Phyllis Jackson grew up in Tacoma, Washington, before joining the party at its national headquarters. She served as a communications secretary and ran a voter registration campaign. She is an associate professor of art history at Pomona College, teaching arts and cinema of Africa and the African diaspora. Bryan Shih

Abdullah Majid (formerly Anthony Laborde), born in Flushing, New York, was a founding member of the Queens Chapter of the party and a full-time party member from 1968 to 1971. At the time of his death this past April, he was incarcerated in Five Points Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, for his role in the shooting death of one NYPD officer and the wounding of another. Bryan Shih*

Mike Tagawa was born in 1944 at the Minidoka Relocation Camp in southern Idaho, one of the locations where Japanese were interned during World War II. He and his family moved to Seattle. He joined the Air Force and later the Black Panther Party in Seattle, where he now works as a bus driver. Bryan Shih

B. Kwaku Duren coordinated the Black Panthers’ reorganized Southern California chapter (January 1977 to March 1982). After his sister was shot and killed by the police, he helped establish the Coalition Against Police Abuse, which became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the LAPD. The lawsuit was settled for $1.8 million and led to the disbanding of the LAPD’s Public Disorder and Intelligence Division. Duren worked as a paralegal and lawyer in the South Central office of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles from 1977 to 1990. Bryan Shih

Ronald “Elder” Freeman grew up in Detroit and in the early 1960s moved to California, where he became a founding member of the Southern California chapter of the party, along with his brother, Roland. He was a priest in the African Orthodox Church, was affiliated with the Marcus Garvey Universal Negro Improvement Association, and was a longtime prison reform advocate. Both brothers died of illness within a week of each other in October 2014, a few months after this interview was conducted. Bryan Shih

Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party from 1974 to 1977, the only woman to serve in this top position. The author of two books, A Taste of Power and The Condemnation of Little B, Brown is now executive director of the Michael Lewis (“Little B”) Legal Defense Committee and CEO of Oakland and the World Enterprises, a nonprofit that helps former prisoners create businesses—including an urban farm in West Oakland, where the party was headquartered. Bryan Shih

Taken together, the books offer a well-rounded primer on the Black Panther Party, then and now, top to bottom. You can find books out there with a more detailed history and books that go deep in the political thinking and revolutionary tactics employed by the Black Panthers. Dozens, if not hundreds of academic books parsing the party have been written. If you want to go deep on biographies, they’re out there, too. But for a solid introduction or a quick refresher, you can’t do better than this.

Shames’ photos are on exhibit at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York City through October 29. Shames and Seales will be doing book signings in DC the last weekend of October, including one at the National Museum of African American History and Culture on October 30. Shih’s photos are part of the Oakland Museum of California’s impressive “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50” exhibition, on display through February 12.

* Name corrected.

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We Can’t Stop Looking at These Unforgettable Images of the Black Panthers

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“Moonlight” Is a Rare and Beautiful New Film About Growing Up Black and Gay

by BrentonJanousek Posted on October 15, 2016

Mother Jones

The forthcoming film Moonlight, out October 21, is at once particular in its perspective and universally relatable. Set in Miami in the late 1980s and ’90s, the film chronicles the coming-of-age of a gay black boy—Chiron (“shy-rone”)—as he struggles with his sexuality, peer pressure, and a drug-addicted single mother. Over the course of the film, he is taken under the wing of a sympathetic local drug kingpin (Mahershala Ali), and he finds, loses, and finally reconnects with his first love, Kevin. The action unfolds in three acts—each one a different stage in the life of Chiron, whose conflicted teenage persona is captured beautifully by Ashton Sanders. Overall, the film is a moving reflection on black masculinity and human vulnerability.

Moonlight—directed by the rising filmmaker Barry Jenkins—was a breakout hit at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and is already the subject of Oscar talk. But that should come as no surprise. It is based on In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, a play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, a former international resident at London’s Royal Shakespeare Company, a 2013 recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” Fellowship, and winner of numerous other accolades for plays highlighting the diversity of the African American experience. I caught up with McCraney to talk about his own coming of age and why it’s so important to tell stories about queer black identity. Watch the trailer, and then we’ll talk.

Mother Jones: Let’s start by talking about your own childhood and how that informed the play and the movie. Do you relate to Chiron?

Tarell McCraney: Yes. The movie is set in the neighborhood where I grew up. My family still lives there. A lot of what we depicted in the movie is what I saw on a daily basis. The process of growing into your own person is a pretty universal thread. I don’t know if one can write characters you don’t relate to.

MJ: I came out as bisexual in February. Even though I knew I liked boys in middle school, I didn’t apply that term to myself until my junior year in college, two years ago. In part, that had to do with the fact that people would call me gay or feminine, and it was always a word they used to hit me with. I think it was because I had to reject that label growing up that it took me so long to see myself in that space, and begin to identify with the community. So I could also relate to Chiron.

TM: That’s pressing. The film is that story of whether or not you were even allowed space to figure out for yourself.

MJ: How old were you when you knew you were gay, and were you allowed that space at home?

TM: I always knew. And there was no need for me to come out—I was out! Whenever I was bullied, it was understood why. I never hid—it more so made me feel like there was something in me that was not wanted, which is different from hiding. I can’t hide it because everybody can see it. But no is the answer—which is why this work is necessary.

Tarell McCraney

MJ: Would you say it’s harder to come out in the hood than in other places?

TM: It varies by person, the journey of coming out. It’s important for us to note that on all levels, in all parts of society, some people are able to be their full selves regardless. There were gay people in Liberty City when I was a kid. People we knew were gay, whom our parents talked to and talked about. There were people who cross-dressed. There were people who were transgender—I’m talking about the ’80s. That has always been a part of our community. Maybe people didn’t want to tell everybody that was a part of our community. But to say it’s harder to come out in the hood is not true. There’s bias everywhere.

MJ: Let’s talk about the movie. You’ve acted in and written a lot of plays. What was it like to see your work on the big screen?

TM: It was really exciting to see. It’s such a beautiful film. Those performances are earth-shatteringly good. I didn’t know you could find a young actor with that kind of power. The script was actually written in 2004, right before I went to grad school. I’ve always tried to have conversations about the difficulty in becoming one’s full self, and choosing one’s path, and what that means.

MJ: Are there any major plot points where the movie deviates from the play?

TM: There are no huge plot turns. But there are some, because it’s Barry’s movie just as much as it is mine.

MJ: In the first chapter, Chiron is looked out for by this drug dealer. In the hood, the hypermasculine gangster archetype seems like the antithesis of gayness. Rap music will tell you that. Why did this dealer feel compelled to take in this gay kid and make him feel comfortable with himself?

TM: What did you think?

MJ: I assumed he saw a vulnerability in Chiron that he recognized in himself—perhaps from a younger age.

TM: Yup. And he could see that past a perceived homosexuality, a trait they probably didn’t share. He could think back to when he was seven or eight and see himself. It’s important for all people to be able to recognize humanity.

MJ: In another scene, some boys make Kevin (Chiron’s love interest) beat him up in the schoolyard. Afterward, he cries when an administrator tells him that if he were a man he wouldn’t let the other kids pick on him. Why was that so triggering for him?

TM: Because the person he was closest to just punched him in the face and left him there.

MJ: My editor gave me the same answer and said it was obvious, but I didn’t read it that way. When Chiron keeps getting up even though Kevin is telling him to stay down, to me, Chiron is trying to show the boys he can take it like a man, but he’s also sticking it to Kevin—who cared for Chiron but opted to hit him anyway—by making Kevin do it even as Kevin tried to lessen the pain for both of them. He broke down because he felt like he’d failed at both tasks.

TM: So why did that trigger this in you?

MJ: Because my own femininity was ridiculed, and accepting my queerness meant embracing that I didn’t have to act in a conventionally masculine way.

TM: That’s one of the things in society that we don’t do well. We create a binary and try to fit everybody into it. And that’s a kind of insanity for both sides. But look at that moment in the film and see how many variations on the theme there are. You’ve got the personal: The person Chiron most trusts is hurting him the most. You’ve got the political: If I’m a man, I stand up to these people. And there’s the larger unknowable: What actually constitutes me in this moment? All those avenues pour into this section. Which is why it’s important to not just make it into one thing. Chiron cried because it was complicated.

MJ: The last time we see Kevin and Chiron together is the morning after they’ve reconnected for the first time in years. The film leaves a lot hanging. Where would you like audience members to go with this?

TM: I can only guess at what Barry wanted us to do. And I enjoyed that that leaves open possibilities about what happens next. As a storyteller, I enjoy when I’m brought to a place where I can imagine the infinite. It allows me to keep these people with me. I’m always going to be trying to figure out what’s next for them.

MJ: There’s been very little representation of queer black kids on screen. We’ve had Pariah and Tangerine most recently, but not much else. What would you want those kids to take away from the movie?

TC: The more colors we can add to the conversation the better. But kids in general are going through this. This representation is solidly for queer black kids to be able to see themselves. But I think it’s important for people to see how they’re intertwined in all of our lives. I was describing the community I came up in. It would be harmful for me to pretend that there were no gay people around. They were there. And their lives are important to be told. The transgender sex worker two doors down—her life is important. And not having it in the collective memory is dangerous. Because if we don’t remember that that’s a part of who we are, then there’s going to be somebody thinking that there’s nobody else out there like them.

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“Moonlight” Is a Rare and Beautiful New Film About Growing Up Black and Gay

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Michael B. Jordan, Danny Glover, and Omar from “The Wire” Star in this Haunting Police Brutality Protest Video

by GabrielPorterfie Posted on October 12, 2016

Mother Jones

Big names including Michael B. Jordan (Creed, Fruitvale Station), Danny Glover, and Michael K. Williams (The Wire, Boardwalk Empire) are the stars of “Against the Wall,” a new video PSA from singer/social activist Harry Belafonte that highlights the issue of racial bias in police shootings of black men and women. We see each of the stars in turn, their hands pressed against a wall (or a rug made to look like one), looking into the camera with faces that reflect sadness and frustration. The audio consists of police radio and 911 calls—you’ll recognize snippets from the Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, and Terence Crutcher cases—spliced with news reports and demands for justice (notably, from Anderson Cooper and the viral YouTube video of Nakia Jones, an Ohio cop). Also featured: former Obama adviser and CNN regular Van Jones, Sophia Dawson, Marc Lamont Hill, Sydney G. James, and rapper Mysonne.

The PSA opens with Jordan and an audio clip from 89-year-old Belafonte, whose social justice organization, Sankofa, partnered with directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz to create the video. “You cannot just go about, if it’s once or twice you can say it’s an accident or a coincidence, but when you have as large a population of murdered young men in the streets of America and they’re all black or of African American descent, I think there is somebody sending us a message,” Belafonte says. “And we should respond to that message.”

The PSA ends with a shot of Williams, best known for his portrayal of Omar on The Wire, lying on the ground, presumably injured. His eyes close, the screen fades to black, and the takeaway message appears: “BLACK IS NOT A WEAPON.”

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Michael B. Jordan, Danny Glover, and Omar from “The Wire” Star in this Haunting Police Brutality Protest Video

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White Nationalist Leader Doubles Down on Support for Donald Trump

by BeatrisParnell Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last May, William Johnson stepped down as a delegate for Donald Trump to the GOP national convention after Mother Jones revealed him to be the leader of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. Reluctant to draw negative attention to Trump, Johnson has largely receded from view since then—until yesterday, when the Los Angeles Times reported that Johnson’s white nationalist super-PAC is funding pro-Trump radio ads set to run in more than a half dozen states.

“It is certainly to help Trump,” Johnson told me. “If you look at the content of the radio ad, it promotes what Trump stands for. And every time people read these things, it helps convince them. There’s been 50 years of propaganda on the other side, so it is going to take a long process to change people’s opinion and this is just one step in that direction.”

The spot will begin running on Saturday on The Political Cesspool, a show hosted by AFP co-director James Edwards, and on Liberty RoundTable, a radio program where Edwards is listed as a “columnist.” Trump’s son Donald Jr. has appeared on Liberty Roundtable with Edwards, and this week Trump’s son Eric also appeared on the show.

Unlike robocalls that Johnson recorded during the GOP primary in support of Trump, the new radio ads do not explicitly mention race. “Do you want a strong leader who will secure our borders and stop the flow of illegal aliens and radical Islamic terrorists,” the ad says in part. The ad discloses that it is paid for by “William Johnson, a farmer and a deplorable.”

Johnson had originally wanted to call himself “a farmer and a white nationalist,” he told me, but Edwards preferred “deplorable,” a term that’s been taken up by white supremacists on social media ever since Hillary Clinton thrust it into the election. “It’s tongue-in-cheek,” Johnson says. “It’s like the term ‘gay’ used to mean something else, and now it’s positive in the homosexual community. Maybe ‘deplorable’ will become a positive term.”

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White Nationalist Leader Doubles Down on Support for Donald Trump

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Shonda Rhimes, Norman Lear, and Common Take Aim at Inequality in This New Documentary Series

by BurtonCracknell Posted on September 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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In “America Divided,” a new five-part documentary series premiering tonight on Epix, the nation’s growing inequality—in matters economic, racial, and otherwise—takes center stage.

Headed by executive producers Shonda Rhimes, Norman Lear, and Common, the project looks into the ways inequality underlies so many modern crises, profoundly affecting our schools, our housing landscape, and our political discourse. The correspondents are all household names: Actress Rosario Dawson, for instance, takes us to Flint, Michigan, to meet families affected by lead poisoning. Actor Jesse Williams returns to the classroom to understand the school-to-prison pipeline. Comedian Amy Poehler grills well-to-do families about their relationships with struggling domestic workers.

The actors are invested, and in some cases confrontational. And while it’s a little strange to see them so out of context (especially comedians such as Poehler and Zach Galifianakis) there’s something refreshing about their earnestness. Take Dawson, who displays her humanity when she reaches out to hold the hand of a tearful woman who has been describing the toll Flint’s contaminated water has had on her family. The issues the series explores won’t be anything new to Mother Jones readers, but they are as timely as ever. So if A-list celebs and high production quality will convince you to think more about America’s more entrenched problems, and maybe even to step up and do something, then this series is for you.

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Shonda Rhimes, Norman Lear, and Common Take Aim at Inequality in This New Documentary Series

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New Report: Poor Americans of Color Drink Filthy Water and Breathe Poisonous Air All the Damn Time

by DieterBainton Posted on September 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 2009, trains arrived in Uniontown, Alabama carrying four millions tons of coal ash, the toxic residue from burning coal. The ash was recovered from a spill in Kingston, Tennessee—a town that is more than 90 percent white—and brought to a new landfill less than a mile from the residential part of Uniontown, which is 90 percent black. Soon, Uniontown residents began reporting breathing problems, rashes, nausea, nosebleeds, and more.

“The smell, the pollution, and the fear affect all aspects of life—whether we can eat from our gardens, hang our clothes or spent time outside,” resident Esther Calhoun later said.

Uniontown residents filed a complaint to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Civil Rights in 2013, alleging that the waste was disproportionately affecting black property owners. By allowing the landfill to exist, they said, Alabama was violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which mandates that federeal funds not be used in a discriminatory purpose. The EPA is supposed to respond to such complaints within 6 months. Three years after filing the complaint, Uniontown residents are still waiting for an answer.

The story is one of many detailed in a scathing report by the US Commission on Civil Rights, a government watchdog group, on the EPA’s “long history” of not effectively enforcing its anti-discrimination policies. “EPA does not take action when faced with environmental justice concerns until forced to do so,” it reads. “When they do act, they make easy choices and outsource any environmental justice responsibilities onto others.”

For years, critics have accused the EPA of neglecting communities of color, pointing to cases from toxic air in Richmond, California to lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan.

The report sheds light on why this might be the case: Despite receiving early 300 discrimination complaints since 1993, the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights has “never made a formal finding of discrimination and has never denied or withdrawn financial assistance from a recipient in its entire history,” the report found. Last year, the Center for Public Integrity found that it takes the EPA a year, on average, to decide to accept or dismiss a Title VI omplaint, and that the agency dismisses or rejects the discrimination complaints in more than 9 out of 10 cases.

Much of the US Commission on Civil Rights report focuses on coal ash, which typically contains arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals that are “associated with cancer and various other serious health effects,” according to the EPA. The ash is America’s second largest industrial waste stream (after mining waste), with 130 million tons generated each year—more than 800 pounds for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Until recently, the coal ash was typically dumped in unlined pits and covered with water, sometimes contaminating local water sources.

In 2014, the EPA came out with the first ever a coal ash storage rule—after environmental groups sued the agency for evading its responsibility to revise its waste regulations. The regulations say that new coal ash pits must be lined, and unlined pits need to be cleaned up—but only if they’re connected to active power plants and found to be polluting groundwater. What’s more, the rule doesn’t allow federal enforcement, leaving lawsuits as the only mechanism of ensuring that the guidelines are followed.

The US Commission on Civil Rights report took issue with these weaknesses, saying the rule “requires low-income and communities of color to collect complex data, fund litigation and navigate the federal court system—the very communities that the environmental justice principles were designed to protect.”

It recommends that the EPA bring on additional staff to respond to discrimination complaints and handle the current backlog (some cases are decades old). It calls for the agency to classify coal ash as hazardous waste, test water near coal ash ponds in poor and minority communities, and study the health effects of the waste. It also points out that all this will be difficult without funding from Congress—currently, only eight EPA staff members are directly responsible for Title VI compliance.

In a statement to the Center for Public Integrity, the EPA said that the report had “serious and pervasive flaws” and included factual inaccuracies and mischaracterizations of EPA findings. Mustafa Ali, environmental justice advisor to EPA head Gina McCarthy, said, “EPA has a robust and successful national program to protect minority and low-income communities from pollution.”

In places like Uniontown, Alabama, it’s hard to see evidence of such a program. “EPA is more focused on process than on outcomes; more focused on rhetoric than results,” wrote commission chairman Martin Castro in in the report. “By any measure, its outcomes are pathetic when it comes to environmental justice.”

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New Report: Poor Americans of Color Drink Filthy Water and Breathe Poisonous Air All the Damn Time

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