It Is A Privilege To Ignore The Race Thing; A Duty To Engage With It

There is a brilliant scene towards the end of an old Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry David (having earlier in the show mistaken a well-dressed black man for a valet) parks his car, walks away and after a black man happens to pass him, turns back towards his car and clicks on his car alarm, causing a beep.  The black man turns around and asks, "think I'm gonna steal your car?"  Larry protests:  "No, no, I just forgot to, to put the alarm on. It's not you.  It's no race thing! No, no race thing."

Of course, the bit would have made no sense if it had been a white man passing by.  A white man would be unlikely to even notice the alarm going on and even if he did, would never assume that the actions of locking a car could be a knee-jerk response to seeing him. 

And there's your white privilege.

As Sally Kohn wrote in a piece for the Washington Post:

Privilege is like oxygen: You don’t realize it’s there until it’s gone. As white folks, we can’t know what it’s like to go through life without racial privilege because we literally haven’t. You may have heard stories about black friends being monitored in department stores or seen the research that black names on resumes get half as many job interviews as white names on the same resumes. Maybe you know that a black man or boy is killed every 28 hours in America by police or vigilantes. Maybe you’ve read the studies on implicit “shooter bias” — how we’re all more likely to pull a simulated trigger on unarmed black men than unarmed white men — and maybe you know that even the most egalitarian Americans harbor unconscious negative attitudes about black people. The studies and the stories are overwhelming. Just this week, police shot and killed a black 12-year-old for holding a BB gun.

To believe that this country has moved beyond race is to be wedded to denial and a romanticized view of America that never existed -- that while we might have sanctioned slavery long ago, it had little to do with our growing power and economic wealth; that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and thereby removed our Nation's moral taint; that any residual racism was quashed during the Civil Rights Era; and that the election of Barack Obama provided the ultimate proof that we are a post-racial society.

To find resonance in the views of a vicious hack like Rudy Giuliani, who responded to the outrage over police killings of unarmed black men by decrying the lack of an equivalent reaction to black-on-black violence, is, as Jamelle Bouie wrote, a failure to see this "an attempt to avoid the fundamental difference between being killed by a citizen and being killed by an agent of law."  Of course, as Michael Eric Dyson put it, "black people are[] weary of death ravaging [their] communities." The difference is that black murderers "often go to jail, unlike the white cops who kill blacks with the backing of the government."

To discount the thousands of nonviolent protesters while focusing on the small minority of more destructive ones that get all the media attention is to ignore the justifiable anger and despair engendered by putting hope, energy and time into government institutions ostensibly established to ensure justice for all that invariably prove to be arbitrary, biased and unfair.  As Michelle Alexander wrote, explaining the "pain, sadness and rage" underlying the setting of fires and breaking of windows is not condoning it.  At the same time, it is important to understand that "when people have been hurt over and over, and rather than compassion or understanding you’re given lectures about how it’s really all your fault, and that no one needs to make amends, you can lose your mind." 

An unassailable rebuttal that we are now a colorblind society comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates, who detailed in The Atlantic Magazine the relentlessly destructive impact of institutional racism that persists to this day:  "Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole."  As Coates summarized in an interview with NPR, "the legacy of slavery extends in the policy of the American government, in the policy of the states in the deep South, in the policies even of cities and states in the north long past slavery, for 100 years after. And the effects are there. And the people who suffered those effects are the people who were redlined, the people who suffered job discrimination, the people who suffered from educational discrimination are very much alive and still with us."

Another one comes from Michelle Alexander, who wrote so powerfully in The New Jim Crow about the mass incarceration of black men in the so-called war on drugs:  "Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. There are millions of African-Americans now cycling in and out of prisons and jails or under correctional control. In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African-American men are either under correctional control or branded felons and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives."

We don't need to feel guilty for being white or from benefitting from a culture that makes it a whole lot easier to be safe and successful if you're white.  But, as Sally Kohn pointed out, "responsibility isn’t the same as culpability." 

Being a constructive part of America’s necessary discussion on race and racial bias means acknowledging how bias and privilege may shape your own life even if you don’t want it to. It is not your personal fault that Michael Brown was shot and killed or that we have deep and structural racial bias in America. But that bias is nonetheless a reality, and so you do have a responsibility as to whether you are part of the problem or part of the solution. Just like you’re mistaken if you don’t think white is a race, you’re mistaken if you think you can remain neutral.

Thus, we ignore race at our own peril.  Michael Eric Dyson is absolutely right:

More than 45 years ago, the Kerner Commission concluded that we still lived in two societies, one white, one black, separate and still unequal. President Lyndon B. Johnson convened that commission while the flames that engulfed my native Detroit in the riot of 1967 still burned. If our president and our nation now don’t show the will and courage to speak the truth and remake the destinies of millions of beleaguered citizens, then we are doomed to watch the same sparks reignite, whenever and wherever injustice meets desperation. 

Want To Combat Police Misconduct And Document NYPD's "Stop And Frisk"? There's An App For That

The New York Civil Liberties Union announced “Stop and Frisk Watch,”which it describes as "a free and innovative smart phone application that will empower New Yorkers to monitor police activity and hold the NYPD accountable for unlawful stop-and-frisk encounters and other police misconduct."

Mayor Bloomberg continues to defend the stop-and-frisk policy despite serious concerns that it disproportionately targets young black men. Yesterday, as the New York Times reports, "several thousand demonstrators conducted a silent march" to protest the  policy, "which the organizers say single out minority groups and create an atmosphere of martial law for the city’s black and Latino residents."  

NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman explains that the “Stop and Frisk Watch is about empowering individuals and community groups to confront abusive, discriminatory policing.”

The NYPD’s own data shows that the overwhelming majority of people subjected to stop-and-frisk are black or Latino, and innocent of any wrongdoing. At a time when the Bloomberg administration vigorously defends the status quo, our app will allow people to go beyond the data to document how each unjustified stop further corrodes trust between communities and law enforcement.

Stop and Frisk Watch is available in English and Spanish on Android phones.  An iPhone version will be released later this summer. The app allows bystanders to fully document stop-and-frisk encounters and alert community members when a street stop is in progress.

According to ThinkProgress, since the app’s release last week, more than 75,000 people have downloaded it.

Occupy Heads Into The Spring

Mad, Passionate Love -- And Violence.  Or Why The Media Loves The Violence Of Protestors And Not Of Banks.

By Rebecca Solnit, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

Robbie Conal

When you fall in love, it’s all about what you have in common, and you can hardly imagine that there are differences, let alone that you will quarrel over them, or weep about them, or be torn apart by them -- or if all goes well, struggle, learn, and bond more strongly because of, rather than despite, them. The Occupy movement had its glorious honeymoon when old and young, liberal and radical, comfortable and desperate, homeless and tenured all found that what they had in common was so compelling the differences hardly seemed to matter.

Until they did.

Revolutions are always like this: at first all men are brothers and anything is possible, and then, if you’re lucky, the romance of that heady moment ripens into a relationship, instead of a breakup, an abusive marriage, or a murder-suicide. Occupy had its golden age, when those who never before imagined living side-by-side with homeless people found themselves in adjoining tents in public squares.

All sorts of other equalizing forces were present, not least the police brutality that battered the privileged the way that inner-city kids are used to being battered all the time. Part of what we had in common was what we were against: the current economy and the principle of insatiable greed that made it run, as well as the emotional and economic privatization that accompanied it.

This is a system that damages people, and its devastation was on display as never before in the early months of Occupy and related phenomena like the “We are the 99%” website. When it was people facing foreclosure, or who’d lost their jobs, or were thrashing around under avalanches of college or medical debt, they weren’t hard to accept as us, and not them.

And then came the people who’d been damaged far more, the psychologically fragile, the marginal, and the homeless -- some of them endlessly needy and with a huge capacity for disruption. People who had come to fight the power found themselves staying on to figure out available mental-health resources, while others who had wanted to experience a democratic society on a grand scale found themselves trying to solve sanitation problems.

And then there was the violence.

Drones Are Coming To America

The ACLU has released an important report on the domestic use of drone aircraft by law enforcement and what protections must be implemented to protect our privacy.

Protecting Privacy From Aerial Surveillance: Recommendations for Government Use of Drone Aircraft

Cross-posted from the ACLU website

Unmanned aircraft carrying cameras raise the prospect of a significant new avenue for the surveillance of American life. Many Americans have heard of these aircraft, commonly called “drones,” because of their use overseas in places like Afghanistan and Yemen. But drones are coming to America, and, as an ACLU report concludes, protections must be put in place to guard our privacy. Download the report »

As technology is quickly becoming cheaper and more powerful, and interest in deploying drones among police departments is increasing around the country, our privacy laws are not strong enough to ensure that the new technology will be used responsibly and consistently with democratic values.

In early 2012, the Federal Aviation Administration is expected to propose new rules to make it much easier for law enforcement agencies to gain permission to use drones in the U.S. If the FAA is unable to implement the needed reforms, then Congress must act.

The ACLU’s report outlines a set of protections that would help protect Americans’ privacy in the coming world of domestic drones. The report recommends that drones should not be deployed unless there are grounds to believe that they will collect evidence on a specific crime. If a drone will intrude on reasonable privacy expectations, a warrant should be required. The report also calls for restrictions on retaining images of identifiable people, as well as an open process for developing policies on how drones will be used. Download the report »

Routine aerial surveillance in American life would profoundly change the character of public life in the United States. Rules must be put in place to ensure that we can enjoy the benefits of this new technology without bringing us closer to a “surveillance society” in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded, and scrutinized by the authorities.

Download the report, “Protecting Privacy From Aerial Surveillance: Recommendations for Government Use of Drone Aircraft” »

The Right Wing Spin Machine: Pepper Spray Is Just A Food Product

I suppose the protesters just needed a little seasoning to spice things up.  According to the blowhards on the right, pepper spray is merely a food product and when used to disperse protesters was probably diluted anyway.  But wait, I thought the right wingers are against untoward government intervention? 

This seeming hypocrisy is explained at Vast Left:

 

UC Davis And The Militarization of Campus Police

By Bob Ostertag, cross-posted from Huffington Post

Yesterday [November 18th], police at UC Davis attacked seated students with a chemical gas.

I teach at UC Davis and I personally know many of the students who were the victims of this brutal and unprovoked assault. They are top students. In fact, I can report that among the students I know, the higher a student's grade point average, the more likely it is that they are centrally involved in the protests.

This is not surprising, since what is at issue is the dismantling of public education in California. Just six years ago, tuition at the University of California was $5357. Tuition is currently $12,192. According to current proposals, it will be $22,068 by 2015-2016. We have discussed this in my classes, and about one third of my students report that their families would likely have to pull them out of school at the new tuition. It is not a happy moment when the students look around the room and see who it is that will disappear from campus. These are young people who, like college students everywhere and at all times, form some of the deepest friendships they will have in their lives.

This is what motivates students who have never taken part in any sort of social protest to "occupy" the campus quad. And indeed, there were students who were attacked with chemical agents by robocops who were engaging in their first civic protest.

Since the video of the assault has gone viral, I will assume that most of you have seen the shocking footage. Let's take a look at the equally outrageous explanations and justifications that have come from UC Davis authorities.

UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi sent a letter to the university last night. Chancellor Katehi tells us that:

The group was informed in writing... that if they did not dismantle the encampment, it would have to be removed...  However a number of protestors refused our warning, offering us no option but to ask the police to assist in their removal.

No other options? The list of options is endless. To begin with, the chancellor could have thanked them for their sense of civic duty. The occupation could have been turned into a teach-in on the role of public education in this country. There could have been a call for professors to hold classes on the quad. The list of "other options" is endless.

Another Out of Control Police Response to Occupy, And Where's the Media?

by Fuzzyone

The Police in Davis, CA are apparently still using Bull Connor's old crowd control manual.  The video above shows police walking down a row of totally peaceful protestors blocking a sidewalk and spraying pepper spray on their faces.  I hope those who criticized the violence of a small number of anarchists in Oakland will be as unstinting in their criticism of the police here, though for some mysterious reason the national media does not seem to be covering this. More on the story here.