Tag Archives: racism

Political Rants

War comes home.

Obama now has something like 1,000 American military personnel “on the ground”, as they say, in Iraq. The situation for the Yazidi families, while serious, was not as dire as the government had suggested apparently, as thousands had been escaping their mountaintop exile every night, according to the NY Times. Just yesterday, NBC’s Brian Williams characterized their plight as “a modern Exodus,” though I don’t recall him using that terminology to describe the thousands upon thousands of Palestinians driven from their homes in northern Gaza under withering Israeli fire (that would have been all his job is worth).

Mine proof assult vehicles. That's community policing?Still, the U.S. military action will continue in Iraq, sans dramatic justification. Neatly done. And we will continue to provide arms to the people fighting those other people we provided arms to. There’s a foreign policy for you. What’s even more worrying than that, though, is the degree to which our military have been providing arms, armored vehicles, and advanced tactical gear to police departments across the country, like the one in Ferguson, Missouri. In the wake of the seemingly arbitrary police killing of teenager Michael Brown, this mostly African-American community looks reminiscent of Soweto, South Africa, during the bad old days of Apartheid.

This is not limited to one small Missouri town. Police tactics with regard to young Black men appear uniformly driven by aggression and the presumption of guilt, even in the absence of any definable criminal transgression. Michael Brown was walking up a street with his friend. Eric Garner, in New York, was selling individual cigarettes. Ezell Ford, in Los Angeles, was lying on the ground, under arrest, when he was shot in the back by the police. We have seen this movie before, right? Only now, it seems, the tactics and firepower of the U.S. Military are being brought to bear to confront communities justifiably outraged by these killings. What are these police departments so afraid of? Why do they always turn the amp up to 11 when it comes to Black people?

There are many answers to that question, and they’re all pretty ugly. Suffice to say that there’s a culture of discrimination in law enforcement in the United States. After over a century of deliberately criminalizing Black life, it’s a hard habit for them to break. But we must break it … peacefully … with our collective resistance.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

White hats.

Ladies and gentlemen, Cliven Bundy has spoken, and mainstream conservatives are now running for the exits.

Well, his hat's in the right place.I use that term “conservative” in the very expansive sense that is in common usage now, descriptive of the type of “conservative” who appears to favor facing off against federal law enforcement officers with firearms. That’s the kind of conservative we saw praising Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his militia-inspired neighbors as he took his somewhat bizarre and incoherent stand against the Bureau of Land Management. It was the classic reactionary fairy tale, and our friends at FoxNews, the Drudge Report, and Limbaugh central sucked it up with great relish and spewed it out over the airwaves so that everyone in America knew the name of this rambling, aged, white-hatted patriot.

I’m no fan of extreme police tactics (like, for example, the violent dispersion of Occupy Wall Street), but pulling guns on federal agents is a serious matter, and I was flabbergasted over the past couple of weeks that I would need to explain that fact to people who term themselves conservatives. Of course, it seems that they didn’t make a very close study of the man they were raising to the level of Paul Revere, as it seemed to come to them as quite a surprise when he piped up with this little gem about African Americans:

They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.

Okay, I may as well just say it. Not only is this guy a racist, he appears to be suffering some form of dementia; perhaps early stage Alzheimer’s. I think the latter condition may play a role in his lack of the ability to conceal the former. I would almost feel sorry for him, frankly, were it not for the fact that he’s bilking the federal government for a million dollars in back grazing fees and fines (note: the fees are very, very reasonable) and apparently content to start the equivalent of a modern range war to keep from parting with his cash. (It’s not hard to imagine what would happen to black people in, say, Philly if they were to try something similar.)

My advice to the Feds is this: the man has bank accounts, doesn’t he? Do to him what you are doing to the Russians and the Iranians. Freeze his assets until he complies. No guns needed for that.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Making a killing.

I’ll keep this short, because there’s stuff to do. My advice to anyone who wants to kill someone (non-white) with impunity is simply to follow these three steps:

  1. Invite said person down to Florida
  2. Take them somewhere where no one can observe you closely, perhaps the Everglades, and shoot them dead
  3. Claim they made you feel threatened, thereby invoking  the “Stand Your Ground” law (signed by noted moderate Jeb Bush)

That’s pretty much all you need to know. Watching the Zimmerman trial, I can’t help but feel like he’s going to walk through that massive legal hole opened for him by bullet-brained state legislators (fueled by ALEC) and Big Jeb. I am struck by that sense, and by the overwhelming irony of the defense’s efforts to frame Zimmerman as the target of racial profiling. Cross examination of Trayvon Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel was ludicrous. The girl did not want to be there, but felt she had to. She lost her friend, and she was herself being stereotyped on the stand. The insinuation that her use of a very standardized form of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) was just bad speech, uneducated muttering, etc., was quite simply racist. Watching the defense attorney, surrounded by white people, disrespecting this young lady was truly nauseating.

Regardless, though the Zimmerman defense team seems less than stellar, their fight is downhill all the way. All they need to do is sow doubt. It’s Zimmerman’s word against the silence of a dead young man. Seems like there was a time when a jury might take one look at this 200-plus pound vigilante, look at the slight kid he shot, and toss him in the slammer.  That time, if it ever existed, was before “Stand Your Ground”. (I’m not certain it ever existed when the young man was black and the shooter white, particularly in a place like Florida. )

Color me disgusted. On a week when they’ve gutted the voting rights act, it’s appropriate that we should be reminded of our deep cultural racism.

luv u,

jp