Raising Cain...

Margaret Kimberly: How America Treats Black Women and Children Like Criminals | | AlterNet

We are told that the Republicans are waging a war on women. It is true that they are on an endless quest to restrict access to abortion, if not outlaw it altogether, and want to prevent insurance companies from paying for contraception. In Wisconsin, the Republican governor recently signed legislation which repealed that state’s equal pay enforcement act.

The Republicans deserve the label, but if there is a war on women in America today, it is being directed primarily at black women as a group and at their young children as well. Black women have been criminalized for the most minor of offenses, for enrolling their children in schools outside of their home districts, and even when their children are victimized by other people.

via www.alternet.org

The Unbelievable Brutality Unleashed on Kids in For-Profit Prisons | | AlterNet

It's way past time for prison reform, folks...

The Walnut Grove story is a cautionary tale that raises alarming questions about the treatment of youthful, mostly nonviolent offenders in Mississippi and elsewhere. And it calls into question the wisdom of turning over the care of these youths, some as young as 13, to private companies that exist solely to turn a profit – companies that have no incentive to rehabilitate youths, that thrive on recidivism, and that increase their profits by cutting corners and reaping ever more troubled souls into their walls. 

via www.alternet.org

Jeff Biggers: Feds Open Civil Rights Cases on Tucson Schools Under Pedicone's Latino Crackdown: "Sheriff Arpaio of American Schools?"

Coming at the year's end of the most brutal crackdown on Latino students, teachers and parents in Tucson's 140-year history of public education, civil rights advocates are announcing that the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights has opened multiple investigations into possible violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Not that the Tucson Unified School District, under the iron-grip of Superintendent John Pedicone, has bothered to inform the district's parents or taxpayers of the nearly month-long investigation.

Already saddled with an embarrassing federal desegregation order and growing concern over irregularities in funding allocations, Pedicone's silencing of discussion over the groundbreaking federal investigations -- which range from racial and language discrimination and access to school board meetings, unfair restrictions on Latino events at public schools, and potentially an investigation of extraordinary civil rights violations over the dismantling of the nationally acclaimed Mexican American Studies program -- appear to be part of his broader strategy to crush Latino participation in a district where 61% of the children come from Latino households.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

TV's Overwhelming Whiteness Changes How We Think | | AlterNet

Great article on the neuroscience of racism -- a subject that I think needs to enter the conversation on race. The author is a co-editor of Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology. Here's an excerpt from the article:

The research is overwhelmingly clear: job one is to confront the fact that racial difference exists. The new science of racism reveals that our brains do indeed seem to react negatively to people of different races — exposure of just milliseconds to a black face can cause white folks’ amygdalae to light up with fear.

Colorblindness doesn’t work because we never stop spotting differences in our environment.  Our brains are designed to do that; that’s how we survived on the savannah 50,000 years ago, and it’s how we survive in the globalized urban jungles of the 21st century.

Read the whole article at www.alternet.org

May Day's Radical History: What Occupy is Fighting for This May 1st

The history of May 1 as a workers' holiday is intimately tied to the generations-long movement for the eight-hour day, to immigrant workers, to police brutality and repression of the labor movement, and to the long tradition of American anarchism.

via truth-out.org

Jezebel: A Complete Guide to 'Hipster Racism'

I really enjoyed this post at Jezebel today. Here's an excerpt from the list of examples of "ironic racism":

4. "God, Don't White People Suck?"
Okay, I get what you're trying to do here—having some fun at the expense of the oppressors while setting yourself up as one of the "cool" white people—but mainly what you end up doing is implying that black people don't like informative radio or TED talks. Stuff White People Like: having the best brains! Isn't it great that we can make fun of ourselves while still reminding you that we're better than you?

And the thing is, when these things get called out, there really is no defense. But they try:

"No, don't you see? I'm just showing how I'm so down with [minority group] that it's totally cool for me to make jokes at their expense. Because we are just that kind of tight bros now."
No. You cannot unlock some secret double-not-racist achievement by just being regular racist. Otherwise Bill O'Reilly would be president of the NAACP.

"But it's a JOOOOOKE."
Here's the thing about jokes. They only work when they're aiming up. I wrote this in another piece recently, but I'm just going to plagiarize myself: People in positions of power simply cannot make jokes at the expense of the powerless.

Read the whole post at jezebel.com

Davey D: As We Watch the Trayvon Martin Case, All of Us Should Know Marissa Alexander

A blog from Davey D on Marissa Alexander, who is sitting in jail for firing a gun in the air to defend herself:

As we look at the drama surrounding the Trayvon Martin case, we encourage folks to connect the dots and pay attention to other cases to get an idea on how justice is elusive for some and the working quite well for others.. Yesterday we saw how George Zimmerman was granted bail after giving a half-hearted, insulting, insincere apology to the Martin family for profiling, stalking and eventually killing their son..

What we didn’t hear about was a how an African-American women who in the course of protecting herself from an abusive husband who beat her while she was pregnant, shot a gun that she legally owns into the air. No one was hurt, but she is now looking at 25 years. Yes indeed, you read that right, facing 25 years.. Her name is Marissa Alexander, she lives in Florida, is a mother of 3 and everyone should know her name and her case.The person who prosecuted her case is Angela Corey, the prosecutor in the George Zimmerman case.

via hiphopandpolitics.wordpress.com

Joe Brewer: The War on Women and What to Do About It

I really liked Joe's presentation because it connects some dots between sound bytes in the "war on women" and the larger systemic ground of patriarchy in which it is being waged:

 

Cognitive Policy Works (Joe's website)

How the War on Women Became Mainstream (the article that inspired Joe to make this video)

Fraser and Freeman: Creating a Prison-Corporate Complex | TomDispatch

Another take on the growing prison-industrial complex...

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world.  Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work.  The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate.  The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.

via www.tomdispatch.com

Sepia Mutiny’s Closure Is a Reminder: Blogging While Brown Ain’t Easy - COLORLINES

This article by Jamilah King brings up several ideas that were of interest to me as a blogger and as someone who believes that longer discussions about how we are all affected by systemic racism is a necessary part of dismantling racism...

When bloggers at the South Asian American website Sepia Mutiny announced that the site would close last month, readers were saddened, but not necessarily shocked. Since it began in 2004, the blog had become an all-important virtual community square to talk about everything from politics and cultural identity to fiction. But in recent years, the website faced many of the same challenges that have plagued bloggers of all stripes—white and of color, broke and economically self-sufficient.

“The blogosphere has evolved quite a bit since we first started and for a variety of reasons [Sepia Mutiny] has not been able to keep up in recent years so as to remain a cutting edge product both from a content and technological standpoint,” the blog’s authors wrote. It had always been a labor of love; all of its contributors maintained full-time jobs from the blog’s inception.

There was something else, too. The Sepia Mutiny team added that it felt its mission was complete, noting that there are many more media representations of South Asian Americans in 2012 than there were in 2004. “A Mutiny should naturally give way to a more organized movement of some kind. I believe SM did its job in sowing the seeds for that next chapter, whatever forms it now takes.”

Still, Sepia Mutiny’s closure hints at a broader dulling of the once-vibrant landscape of blogs run by and for communities of color. I talked to a handful of bloggers of color who described the unique challenges that come along with trying to maintain a safe space to talk meaningfully about race online. Some are paid for their work, but most aren’t. Together, they painted a picture of a steadily shrinking blogespere that, ironically, is being gobbled up by the same forces that helped create it.

Read the rest of the story at colorlines.com