Journey for Justice
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
You've seen all of the major national news outlets covering Ferguson, and the events surrounding the murder of Mike Brown through their own lens, especially focused on demonizing both Brown, and the people protesting. There were hundreds of reporters assigned to cover "violence" in Ferguson, and "looters" etc. It's telling how many aren't covering the ongoing protests and strategies being enacted by people committed to long term change. Try searching the headlines for what is going on right now. Where did the cameras go?
NAACP Announces March, “Journey for Justice: Ferguson to Jefferson City”
In response to the grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson for the killing of 18 year old Michael Brown Jr., the NAACP, including members of the Youth and College division and senior and youth organizations, will be embarking on a 120 mile, 7 - day march entitled, “Journey for Justice: Ferguson to Jefferson City”. The Journey for Justice will commence at the Canfield Green Apartments and conclude at the Missouri Governor's Mansion in Jefferson City. The purpose of the march is to call for new leadership of the Ferguson police department, beginning with the police chief, and for new reforms of police practice and culture in both Ferguson and across the country. First and foremost in that approach is a wholesale fight against racial profiling that involves advocating for adding subpoena powers to the Missouri racial profiling state law and passage of federal legislation on racial profiling. For seven days, beginning Saturday, November 29th at 12 noon, marchers will walk along the route to the Governor’s Mansion. Each evening, the marchers will participate in teach-ins and rallies that are open to the public. New participants are welcome to join the Journey for Justice each morning as walking commences. We expect buses will provide relief for marchers along the 120 mile Journey for Justice.
Al Jazeera didn't leave. Here's their clip. Good to see Rev. Barber there, making the linkages to the injustices we face across the board. This is not just about Ferguson. It's about Justice.
If you haven't seen these photos, take a look and pass them on. The NAACP flickr stream has more.
The NAACP has posted its own video.
You can get updates via twitter:
#JourneyForJustice
Yes. It is a journey. One we've been on for hundreds of years and we still have further to go.
We will walk on and fight on.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A feelgood story. Miami Herald: Community help transforms life of once-homeless Haitian teen.
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When Stanley Simon was 14, his father went back to Haiti for several months. He left the boy with $10 and the rent due on the one-bedroom house they shared.
First Simon sold his clothes on the street to try to make ends meet, but before long, the landlord evicted him. Then a two-year odyssey of couch-surfing, sleeping on the floor of an Oakland Park laundromat and skipping school began.
He stayed with an uncle and later with a cousin, but his father said he had not given his permission and threatened to call police if he remained with them, said Simon, who is now 17. “He didn’t want me to stay with anyone.”
With his relatives fearful of retaliation, his Haitian passport expired and his father threatening he would “get him deported,” Simon felt he had nowhere to turn. No one at school, except a few friends who offered temporary beds, knew what his life was like, he said.
Sometimes he only showed up at school a few times a month because he had nothing to wear, Simon said. His entire wardrobe was a pair of jeans, boxers and two shirts.
Some teachers noticed that he always wore the same clothes, but he didn’t reach out for help. Finally, last January he worked up his courage and confided in Paul Zenon, a social worker at Fort Lauderdale High School and a man he had known since middle school.
Then his life began to change very rapidly — for the better.
(Miami Herald)
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The communications director for a Republican member of Congress from Tennessee ignited a firestorm this weekend after she criticized President Obama’s teenage daughters in a Facebook post that touched a nerve even for Americans accustomed to political mudslinging. Washington Post: GOP aide’s online dig at Obama daughters creates backlash.
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“Try showing a little class,” Elizabeth Lauten, communications director for Rep. Stephen Lee Fincher (Tenn.), wrote Friday in a Facebook posting addressed to Sasha, 13, and Malia, 16, chastising them for their comportment during last week’s annual turkey pardoning event at the White House.
“Rise to the occasion. Dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at the bar,” Lauten wrote. “And certainly don’t make faces during televised, public events.”
Lauten was not the first to comment on the girls’ demeanor at the event, an annual rite that is comfortably embedded in Washington tradition if not universally appreciated.
After the Wednesday event, several media outlets declared that the young women, standing behind their father as he pardoned two turkeys named Mac and Cheese, looked bored, exasperated or just . . . teenager-ly. USA Today published this headline: “Malia and Sasha Obama are so done with their dad’s turkey pardon,” while the Gawker Web site observed that “not even the pomp and ritual of the White House can overcome the most powerful force known to man: TEEN CONTEMPT.”
Lauten’s Facebook post was shared on Twitter and then picked up by the blogosphere. Most of the online reaction to Lauten’s comments focused on her characterization of the girls’ appearance and their facial expressions, which was especially surprising given her role as a political communication adviser. Some Twitter users accused her of racial overtones in her comments.
U.S. President Obama speaks as his daughters Sasha, center, and Malia listen before the pardon of two turkeys during a ceremony at the White House on Nov. 26. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
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Bad data leads to bad decisions. New York Times: Crime and Punishment.
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One thing the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Mo., has sent back to the surface is just how difficult it is to have cross-racial discussions about crime and punishment in this country. That is largely because, perceptually and experientially, we live in vastly different worlds, worlds in which phrases like “bad choices,” “personal responsibility” and “tailspin of culture” must battle for primacy with “structural inequity,” “systemic bias” and “culture of oppression.”
Let’s begin to unpack this by pointing to what the data say about our distortions of perception when it comes to crime.
A September report by the Sentencing Project found that “white Americans overestimate the proportion of crime committed by people of color, and associate people of color with criminality.” For some crimes, the overestimation was “by 20-30 percent.”
This is particularly significant in light of the fact that Americans overestimate the presence of crime in general. As a Gallup report pointed out recently: “For more than a decade, Gallup has found the majority of Americans believing crime is up, although actual crime statistics have largely shown the crime rate continuing to come down from the highs in the 1990s and earlier.”
If we continue to think that crime is up, data be damned, and we associate people of color with that crime, of course our concepts of guilt, innocence, veracity and compassion in encounters between police and people of color will be affected.
This is not to say that statistics don’t tell us that crime rates are disproportionately high in minority neighborhoods, but rather than ascribe that to some racial pathology — and doing so is racist on its face — we must consider the intersection of race and concentrated poverty, which is attended by everything from poorer-performing schools to fewer job opportunities.
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The International Criminal Court has rejected an appeal by the Congolese militia leader, Thomas Lubanga, against his conviction for using child soldiers. BBC: ICC rejects Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga's appeal.
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The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has rejected an appeal by the Congolese militia leader, Thomas Lubanga, against his conviction for using child soldiers.
Prosecutors said boys as young as 11 had been abducted to fight in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo that started in 1999. Girls were used as sex slaves, the trial heard.
In 2012, Lubanga became the first person to be convicted by the ICC.
He had been the leader of the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), an ethnic Hema militia which was active in the war that started in the Ituri region in north-eastern DR Congo.
Thomas Lubanga, seen here in court on Monday, was the first person to be convicted by the ICC
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The Impossibility of Categorization might be the first theme of the American Epic. By turns, the Hero might be the Rugged Individual traversing mountain and stream, or the stout but tender Matriarch helping bridge the decreasing gulf between the Wilderness and the Town. The Hero might at once be anti-heroic, then by actions and deeds, raised to the Heroic, then by another set of actions and deeds, once again to fall and fail utterly; while retaining the mantle of Hero, still.
As the National Myth though, the Epic functions as a device to define the members of that nation; and by what marks they were to be identified.
For the American Epic she set out to construct, Phillis Wheatley could see no method for determining who was a member of the culture and who was an other; indeed, the two positions expatiate each other constantly and indefinitely. Wheatley's subversive refusal to accept the taxonomies of a culture that marked her as the other shows Wheatley's own assimilation; she would not and could not place herself outside the narratives she recites. Her construct of the American Epic and its narratives of belonging required her participation in the culture, even if it wasn't the culture her masters constructed. For Wheatley, all Colonial Americans were equal; precisely because definitions of equivalency or difference cannot be established.
Wheatley's investigation of the dominant notions of who belongs, within the boundaries of what it is to be American, is particularly evident in her poem, To The Right Honourable William, Earl Of Dartmouth, His Majesty's Principal Secretary Of The State For North-America. She makes explicit her African marginality, while issuing correctives to her audience; important, because writs issued to the good Earl were also made public for all the colonies to read.
Writing before the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of a Constitution which permitted slavery, Wheatley offered a vision of an American Culture without a privileged center and without qualifications for membership based on race, class or gender. Indeed, Wheatley is the archetype American, a type which paradoxically marks itself as belonging, through a constant process of making and unmaking; of repeating and then differing from itself.
It might just be a Romantic notion, though. Not too dissimilar to Fenimore Cooper's vision of an America that was more dream than reality.
She wrote of this so long ago and though in retrospect, her dream-like narrative is of an America with no class distinction, where paupers and kings worked on equal footing; in spite of its Romantic notions, we may get there still.
To The Right Honourable William, Earl Of Dartmouth, His Majesty's Principal Secretary Of The State For North-America
HAIL, happy day, when, smiling like the morn,
Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn:
The northern clime beneath her genial ray,
Dartmouth, congratulates thy blissful sway:
Elate with hope her race no longer mourns,
Each soul expands, each grateful bosom burns,
While in thine hand with pleasure we behold
The silken reins, and Freedom's charms unfold.
Long lost to realms beneath the northern skies
She shines supreme, while hated faction dies:
Soon as appear'd the Goddess long desir'd,
Sick at the view, she languish'd and expir'd;
Thus from the splendors of the morning light
The owl in sadness seeks the caves of night.
No more, America, in mournful strain
Of wrongs, and grievance unredress'd complain,
No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,
Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand
Had made, and with it meant t' enslave the land.
Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?
Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd
That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
For favours past, great Sir, our thanks are due,
And thee we ask thy favours to renew,
Since in thy pow'r, as in thy will before,
To sooth the griefs, which thou did'st once deplore.
May heav'nly grace the sacred sanction give
To all thy works, and thou for ever live
Not only on the wings of fleeting Fame,
Though praise immortal crowns the patriot's name,
But to conduct to heav'ns refulgent fane,
May fiery coursers sweep th' ethereal plain,
And bear thee upwards to that blest abode,
Where, like the prophet, thou shalt find thy God
-- Phillis Wheatley
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