Everything Jesse Williams — star of “Grey’s Anatomy” — says here about the Michael Dunn trial is spot on. Dunn was convicted of attempted murder (but not first-degree murder) for firing on four black teenagers who wouldn’t turn down their “rap crap” outside a Jacksonville, Fla., convenience store in 2012, killing 17-year-old Jordan Davis.
My four favorite parts of Williams interview: 1) When he explains how people are tired of the criminalization of black people in America — it’s a white problem, an American problem, a societal problem, NOT a black problem. 2) The “What the fu…” look on his face when she says, “We’re on our way to justice — we have an African-American president…” 3) The fact that we have to explain why it’s racial is a huge problem. 4) Would this have happened if Davis had been blasting Bon Jovi?
When you’re a Supreme Court Justice, racism is not something you generally deal with and it is usually not directed to you. So when Justice Clarence Thomas spoke to a group on Tuesday, telling them that racism is more prevalent now than when he was a youngster growing up in a segregated south, you have to not only consider the message, but also the messenger.
The message, that an atmosphere where the KKK ruled, where blacks were never considered equal but subservient to whites, an atmosphere where regular lynchings, bombings, beatings and killings of men, women and children took place because of race, and where a justice and political system neglected to serve these people because of their skin color; to say that atmosphere was preferable to Justice Clarence is in itself bogus and utterly unbelievable.
Here is some of the nonsense the Supreme Court Justice said at the event in Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach Florida.
“My sadness is that we are probably today more race and difference-conscious than I was in the 1960s when I went to school. To my knowledge, I was the first black kid in Savannah, Georgia, to go to a white school. Rarely did the issue of race come up. Now, name a day it doesn’t come up. Differences in race, differences in sex, somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something. Everybody is sensitive. If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah. Every person in this room has endured a slight. Every person. Somebody has said something that has hurt their feelings or did something to them — left them out.
That’s a part of the deal.
But this is how and where you can tell that Clarence Thomas is full of sh… the waste matter that discharge from the body. The conservative Republican activist Supreme Court Judge blamed, get this, Liberals for today’s “race and difference” conscienceness, even saying that northern liberals treated his “the absolute worst” he’s ever been treated! Ever!
“The worst I have been treated was by northern liberal elites. The absolute worst I have ever been treated. The worst things that have been done to me, the worst things that have been said about me, by northern liberal elites, not by the people of Savannah, Georgia.”
Consider yourself lucky Mr. Thomas. You survived the apparent love, friendship and caring you received from a hateful segregated south that obviously saw your true potentials and decided to protect and nurture you. But there were many more who suffered, many more who hung from trees, were beaten, were forced to sit at the back of buses and thrown in jails if they even thought about sitting up front. There were many more, some who went to church as little girls and never saw the light of day again because those loving folks who were so great to you, bombed the building.
Many sacrifice their lives in those dark days Mr. Thomas. Days that you apparently thought were filled with peaches and creme. And maybe you should instead thank them for their sacrifice. Chances are, those sacrifices paved the road you traveled, a road that led you all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Mario Balotelli, 23, Italian professional soccer player for AC Milan, shed tears on the bench after racist taunts were repeatedly hurled at him, reports Bleacher Report.
Since Balotelli’s reaction was captured on video and spread like wildfire on social media, his coach and teammates have tried to downplay the incident, insisting that racism was not a factor.
“What can I say about Balotelli’s tears? They were the tears of a sportsman,” said CoachClarence Seedorf in a press conference following the game.
Seedorf insisted that Balotelli’s tears are “human.”
“These are things that happen many times in football and sport in general,” said Seedorf in an interview with Mediaset Premium. “I’d say it was actually beautiful, but I’d prefer to talk about the game.”
“We are players,” he said to Sky Sports Italia, “and there are times when we express ourselves that way. I see nothing wrong or abnormal in that. I experienced it at times too.”
According to Sporting News, Balotelli has been the victim of racist taunts for years:
But still, Serie A has not yet found a feasible solution to quelling fans’ disturbing treatment of Balotelli, and the fines the league has tried to issue as a penalty have not done enough to deter certain fanbases.
Watch Balotelli allegedly react to the racist taunts below:
Balotelli’s teammates insist that the tears were not due to racism, rather he was just disappointed about being benched.
“Mario really cares about doing well with Milan and making his mark. He is sentimental. It’s a shame that he got so downhearted about it, as he needs to keep his head up,” said Ignazio Abate.
Or could it simply be that several years of being called a “monkey” and a “nig***” have taken their toll on Balotelli?
You’d think Russia Olympic officials would do a bit more vetting before including these people in their Olympic ceremony. It is now being revealed that the lady who lit the Olympic flame to begin the games in Russia has some controversial tweets in her past. Notably one showing the President and First Lady looking at a digitally imposed banana.
Three-time gold medalists Irina Rodnina, who won gold in 1972, 1979 and 1980, tweeted this photo back in September. And like expected, the Republicans and racists here in America (most of the times, they’re all the same) rejoice in 3, 2, 1…
Some people are just racists, and there is nothing we can do to change that. I’ve now come to that realization. Yes, I know that racism exists, but come on, we’re knocking on the door of 2014… and we’re still dealing with this ignorance? And what’s even worse, there is no end in sight.
Twitter and other social media sites were all buzzing a little more than usual on Friday, and I needed to find out why. A few seconds later, I came upon this tweet by Justine Sacco:
Who is Justine Sacco? Well first of all she is a racist, apparently unaware that things posted on a social media website is not the same as writing in her personal diary. Secondly, she is a public relations officer and senior director of corporate communications at InterActiveCorp (more commonly known as IAC), a Media company that owns Match.com, Vimeo and CollegeHumor.com, among others.
The tweet above was made as Justine boarded a flight to Africa and by the time she landed, her Twitter account was deleted but her tweet had already gone viral, as people all over the world voiced their disgust at the so-call humor of Miss Sacco. But her boss did not find the tweet funny. IAC, trying to separate the company from their racist employee, quickly issued this statement:
“This is an outrageous, offensive comment that does not reflect the views and values of IAC. Unfortunately, the employee in question is unreachable on an international flight, but this is a very serious matter and we are taking appropriate action.”
IAC, who also owns other popular sites like About.com, OkCupid and Urbanspoon, took further steps and removed Justine’s name from their Contact page.
Some are saying that Justine’s twitter account could have been hacked, that someone took her cell phone for example and tweeted out that message. But some digging from Buzzfeed found more offensive tweets, spanning over two years.
Buzzfeed dug these tweets up before Justine’s account mysteriously disappeared. Tweets like;
We can tell this one is not going to fade away anytime soon, as the world awaits IAC’s decision on Justine Sacco. Waiting for Palin and Republicans to somehow use this as a political strategy to “protect free speech!”
Remember Trayon Christian, the 19-year old engineering student who was handcuffed and arrested by the NYPD after he bought a $349 Salvatore Ferragamo belt at Barneys New York? And Kayla Phillips, who bought a $2300 orange suede Céline bag from Barneys with her debit card — only to be accused of credit card fraud by cops just blocks away from the upscale store? Or “Treme” actor Rob Brown, who is now suing Macy’s and the NYPD after being handcuffed for “shopping while Black”?
October’s racial profiling stories that turned into a series of “shopping while Black” exposés highlighted the ugly racism that still runs rampant in New York City. Two NYC-based retailers, Barneys and Macy’s, were at the center of the storm. Shortly after the news that African-Americans were seemingly often accused of credit card fraud by New York City police, including repeated accusations of “how did you afford to buy that?”, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman began an investigation.
Schneiderman demanded statistics on how many customers — detailed by race and national origin — the stores had detained, what their policies for detaining customers are, what contracts or relationships they have with external security firms — including the NYPD — and what anti-discrimination policies are currently in effect.
In what appears to be a separate investigation by the NYC Human Rights Commission, Barneys apparently has complied, but Macy’s, and higher-end Bloomingdale’s, owned by Macy’s, have not, according to Women’s Wear Daily. WWD adds that the NYC Human Rights Commission is investigating 17 retailers in total.
The New York City Commission on Human Rights has issued a subpoena to Macy’s Law Department, ordering them to provide the commission with documents by Dec. 10 for all Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s locations in New York City, regarding information that pertains to their policies on loss prevention and approaching and detaining individuals suspected of theft.
Patricia L. Gatling, NYC Human Rights Commissioner, said Monday, “It is disappointing that they have not fully cooperated in the commission’s investigation into recent allegations of racial profiling at some of the city’s larger retail stores and instead sought to dictate the terms and scope of our investigation. The commission will be issuing subpoenas to other stores that have been unresponsive, including Old Navy and Banana Republic.”
Of course, it’s still unclear in the NYPD was acting alone, or in conjunction with the retailers, or if the retailers were the ones who contacted police.
But between NYC’s “shopping while Black,” and “stop and frisk” attacks, and recent reports like the three Black Rochester, NY high school basketball stars arrested for waiting on the sidewalk for their school bus, it feels like the entire state has jumped into the 1950s.
Did Houston police illegally arrest three teens? Landry Thompson is 13 years old, white, and a dancer. She was traveling from her home in Oklahoma to Houston, Texas, with her dance instructors, who are both Black.
Thompson’s mother had given them a signed and notarized letter giving full guardianship and custody to dance instructor Emmanuel Hurd, for their trip to meet with other dance teachers. But Houston police managed to handcuff the teens and wrest the girl from her guardian — and hand her over to Child Protective Services.
Hurd told KHOU that the three dancers where parked at a gas station, and “were on the GPS trying to figure out where the hotel was.” That’s when the cops “just pulled us out of the car and put our hands behind our backs like we were criminals.”
“The officer asked me ‘who’s the girl?’ and I said ‘she’s my student,’” Hurd says. “I told him I had a notarized letter from her parents stating that we have full guardianship over her while we’re here.”
Not only did Houston police detain and handcuff Thompson and Hurd, but they removed the teenaged girl from her guardian and gave her to local Child Protective Services. Police “put handcuffs on me and it really scared me,” Thompson says. “And they put me in the back of a cop car and I was terrified.”
Cops initially demanded Thompson’s mother travel from Oklahoma to Houston to retrieve her child, but later allowed her to be released back in Hurd’s custody.
“She was with the people I wanted her to be with,” Destiny Thompson says. “She was with people I trusted. And now she was taken away from those people and in a shelter with people I didn’t know.”
In a very affluent neighborhood, school children waiting for the bus is still profiled and arrested… if they are black. That is apparently what happened to three members of the Edison Technical High School basket ball team in Rochester New York, as they stood waiting for a bus.
Main Street merchants have long been clamoring for the police to keep young blacks off of the street and this appears to be part of that campaign.
Police, acting on a complaint from a merchant who has a history of these kinds of complaints, charge that they were obstructing the street and loitering at a location where there is a bus shelter and bus stop. The boys maintain that they were doing nothing wrong and were only waiting for the bus as instructed.
Their coach, Jacob Scott who is also the guidance counselor, says that they are all good students who have never been in any trouble. He says that he informed the officer that he was supervising them and they were waiting for a bus — at which time the officer told him that if he didn’t leave he too would be arrested.
Scott said, “He goes on to say, ‘If you don’t disperse, you’re going to get booked as well.’ I said, ‘Sir, I’m the adult. I’m their varsity basketball coach. How can you book me? What am I doing wrong? Matter of fact, what are these guys doing wrong?’”
The officer, backed up by his sergeant, said that if he had a big enough vehicle he would arrest them all.
School board member Mary Adams appeared at the arraignment and said, “I think the charges should be immediately dropped and I think the district attorney’s office should be stepping in an looking at these kinds of matters.”
The parents of the three arrested had to post $200 bail in order to have their sons home for Thanksgiving dinner and they will appear in court again on December 11.
In an interview to promote “Lee Daniel’s The Butler,” Oprah Winfrey shared her thoughts on racism.
Miss Winfrey told interviewer Will Gompertz that stomping out racism would not be easy as long as old racists still roam the earth.
“There are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die,” she said.
When asked if it has crossed her mind whether President Obama has faced racism in the White House, Oprah replied;
“Probably it’s crossed my mind more times than it’s crossed your mind… I think that there is a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that occurs in some cases and maybe even many cases because he is African American. There’s no question about that and it’s the kind of thing nobody ever says but everybody’s thinking it.”
A New Hampshire man who had been accused of scrawling racist graffiti on the homes of African immigrants was hospitalized recently after shooting himself in the head.
According to court records obtained by the Concord Monitor, 43-year-old tattoo artist Raymond Stevens attempted suicide last week by walking into a cemetery and firing one round into his head. He reportedly survived the shooting but his current condition was not known.
In October, Steven had been charged in connection with racist graffiti written on the home of three African immigrants in 2011.
“Your subhuman culture has already brought many crimes linked to your mud people,” one message said. “You are not welcome here… You lower the value and safety of our good town… You bring death wherever your cursed people go.”
Messages on another home in August described a Somali family as “scum” and “primitive beasts.”
On Facebook, Stevens noted that he was a “proud Aryan man” and often posted screeds against President Barack Obama. He was also known to be a member of white supremacist groups and sing in a heavy metal band.
Some may stay that I am reading too much into this piece of graffiti by Justin Bieber, proudly displayed on his Instagram. On the instagram post, Justin says, “this is my escape.” But I agree with Gawker‘s take: That monkey figure sure looks familiar! It looks just like, what’s it called, centuries of racist caricatures of blacks.
“There’s no difference between the R-word and the N-word,” ~ Alan Yelsey, American Indian Activists
A Native American coalition in Minnesota has come up with a new strategy in the movement to replace the NFL logo and mascot for the Washington Redskins, which the they deem defamatory.
A letter written by representatives of the Minneapolis-based American Indian Movement asks the MSFA to refrain from printing or broadcasting the Redskins’ name or logo inside the Metrodome during the team’s November 7th game against the Minnesota Vikings. Their reasoning is that doing so within a publicly owned facility, violates federal labor laws, hate-speech protections and the civil rights of American Indians.
Indian activist Alan Yelsey, who co-wrote the letter, says failure to do so could lead to a class-action lawsuit on behalf of American Indian children. Letters were also sent out to Minnesota’s media outlets so that everyone could be on the same page.
“There’s no difference between the R-word and the N-word,” Yelsey said. “There’s no reason why this discriminatory and damaging term needs to be used when alternatives exist.”
On another front: Seventeen years after initially challenging the Washington Redskins trademark, Suzan Shown Harjo, a Native American writer and public policy advocate, along with six other activists have renewed their fight against the use of the trademark. Harjo says that it violates the Lanham Act, which bars trademarks that “disparage” people living or dead. The original petition was denied by a lower-court ruling based on statute of limitations laws, but it was announced last Monday that Harjo’s group will appeal that decision.
Across the country the origin of the word “redskin” is being newly debated. Some scholars say that the word was coined by early settlers in reference to the skin tone of Native Americans, asserting that the actual origin of the word is “positive” and reflects the more benign aspects of early relations between Native Americans and whites.
Uh-huh.
It was only later that the term became more derogative, when books on the “wild west” published between 1875 and 1930 showed an increasingly negative association between the use of redskin, with “dirty”, “lying”, “savage”, etc.; while so-called benign or positive usage such as “noble” redskin were used condescendingly. And let’s not forget the American Western movies emblazoning the more negative connotation in several generations of fans.
An Associated Press GfK poll, conducted from April 11-15, interviewed 1,004 Americans on the subject. The survey found that nearly four in five of those polled didn’t think the team should change its name. 11 percent thought it should be changed, while 8 percent weren’t sure and 2 percent didn’t answer.
“That’s who they’ve been forever. That’s who they’re known as,” said Sarah Lee, a 36-year-old stay-at-home mom from Osceola, Ind., and one of those polled. “I think we as a people make race out to be a bigger issue than it is.”
But those who thought the name should be changed said the word is obviously derogatory. No report on whether any Native Americans were part of this survey.
“The use of any stereotype in the portrayal of Indians is considered … to be contributory to their dehumanization and deracination”, says Harjo, “It is the worst thing in the English language you can be called if you are a native person.”
And while it could be said that other NFL teams trademark names such as the Braves, Indians, Chiefs and Blackhawks all describe a group of people, Redskins clearly references an individual “being called out his name” as the old slang goes.
President Barack Obama said Saturday he would consider getting rid of the name if he owned the team.
On his ultra-conservative talk show, Rush Limbaugh said he was confused as to why anyone might be offended by the much maligned moniker, saying that the whole matter was a controversy “manufactured by the left.”
However, in the end, the AP-Gfk poll and other such opinions are irrelevant.
The verdict of the case Harjo wants put back before The Supreme Court judges — a case said to be one of the most compelling lawsuits in sports history — must be based on Section 2 of the Lanham Act of the trademark law which decides whether or not “relevant parties involved may be discredited or brought into contempt or dishonored” by the Washington Team’s name. Those ‘relevant parties’ are Native American people. And they are saying “Yes” to that.
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