The blogger Field Negro (created by an attorney in Philadelphia), writes about a police chief in South Jersey who is every inch the racist:
I happen to be really cynical when it comes to racism. I wouldn't be surprised if Mrs. Claus and Santa drop the n word to each other when they talk about having to deliver toys to little black children. I expect that type of behavior from certain folks, so when they are exposed I am never surprised.
The following case comes from South Jersey, not South Carolina
" Frank Nucera Jr. was the police chief in the small township of Bordentown, N.J., until he abruptly retired in February 2017 after investigators began looking into what authorities said was his history of racially motivated violence and hate speech. Nucera came under scrutiny after an 18-year-old accused him of bashing his head into a doorway and officers recorded him calling black suspects the n-word.
William E. Fitzpatrick, acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, called Nucera’s actions “a shocking breach of the duty of every police officer to provide equal justice under the law and never to mistreat a person in custody.”
Much of the evidence in the complaint comes from secret recordings made by one of Nucera’s fellow officers who was “increasingly alarmed by [Nucera’s] racist remarks and hostilities toward African Americans,” he said.
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Latina Lista, a latina feminist news site, gives us the score on how wages for Latinas, and women of color generally, compare to men:
… according to a new projection released by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), just in time for Latinas Equal Pay Day, Latinas fare the worst among all women waiting for equal pay with White men.
Women overall will not see equal pay until 2059, but the pace of change varies significantly by race and ethnicity. The exceptionally slow pace of progress for Hispanic women, for instance, is nearly two centuries behind when White women should expect to see equal pay with White men (2056). Black women are not projected see equal pay until 2124, 107 years from now.
The message we need to take from this, as I’ve been emphasizing in my diaries: Think economic issues matter? Want to fix income inequality? Then fight discrimination.
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Briyan W. Van Norden, in an essay for aeon, (an especially smart repository of writing on just about every subject) gives us the dirty laundry of Western philosophical tradition:
Africa and Asia were excluded from the philosophical canon by the confluence of two interrelated factors. On the one hand, defenders of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) consciously rewrote the history of philosophy to make it appear that his critical idealism was the culmination toward which all earlier philosophy was groping, more or less successfully.
On the other hand, European intellectuals increasingly accepted and systematised views of white racial superiority that entailed that no non-Caucasian group could develop philosophy. (Even St Augustine, who was born in northern Africa, is typically depicted in European art as a pasty white guy.) So the exclusion of non-European philosophy from the canon was a decision, not something that people have always believed, and it was a decision based not on a reasoned argument, but rather on polemical considerations involving the pro-Kantian faction in European philosophy, as well as views about race that are both scientifically unsound and morally heinous.
Kant himself was notoriously racist. He treated race as a scientific category (which it is not), correlated it with the ability for abstract thought, and – theorising on the destiny of races in lectures to students – arranged them in a hierarchical order:
1. ‘The race of the whites contains all talents and motives in itself.’
2. ‘The Hindus … have a strong degree of calm, and all look like philosophers. That notwithstanding, they are much inclined to anger and love. They thus are educable in the highest degree, but only to the arts and not to the sciences. They will never achieve abstract concepts. [Kant ranks the Chinese with East Indians, and claims that they are] static … for their history books show that they do not know more now than they have long known.’
3. ‘The race of Negroes … [is] full of affect and passion, very lively, chatty and vain. It can be educated, but only to the education of servants, ie, they can be trained.’
4. ‘The [Indigenous] American people are uneducable; for they lack affect and passion. They are not amorous, and so are not fertile. They speak hardly at all, … care for nothing and are lazy.’
Those of us who are specialists on Chinese philosophy are particularly aware of Kant’s disdain for Confucius: ‘Philosophy is not to be found in the whole Orient. … Their teacher Confucius teaches in his writings nothing outside a moral doctrine designed for the princes … and offers examples of former Chinese princes. … But a concept of virtue and morality never entered the heads of the Chinese.’
Kant is easily one of the four or five most influential philosophers in the Western tradition. He asserted that the Chinese, Indians, Africans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas are congenitally incapable of philosophy.
I was introduced to how deeply simple racism runs in the Western academic canon when I stumbled upon the work of Cedric Robinson, and his book Black Marxism, which I surveyed in this diary: ‘Black Marxism’: To fight economic inequality, fight systemic racism (long read).
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Angela Helm, at The Root, discovers that white people (of the Proud Boys variety) are pushing back in their own special way against that whole Black Lives Matter thing:
All around the country, in a coordinated effort by emboldened white supremacists without a shred of creativity or decency, there have been “IT’S OKAY TO BE WHITE” fliers plastered all over college campuses and on city streets over the last few days.
The impetus of this profoundly stupid idea is apparently a 4chan chatroom comment suggesting that the posters (and reactions to the posters) would bring the average white American over to the darkest side of overt white supremacy.
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The blog of the Transgender Law Center gives us a horrifying look at the experiences of LGBT asylum seekers in ICE custody:
“My experience being locked up in the detention center was awful,” said a translatina caravan member who was released last month. “Never in my wildest thoughts did I imagine the conditions would be that unbearable. I am very happy to be out and grateful for where I am in the process now and for the family I am staying with, who are making me feel welcome.”
The women, along with their advocates and lawyers from the National Immigrant Justice Center, Transgender Law Center, and Instituto Legal, remain extremely concerned about the gay men who still are detained. Those individuals have reported they are being harassed by jail guards and other detainees, have been denied medical treatment, and fear for their safety because of their sexual identity.
“The lack of oversight in this parole process is really unfair,” said Keren Zwick, associate director of litigation at the National Immigrant Justice Center. “If you ask for protection at the border, ICE can send you basically wherever it wants, and the decision as to where they send you can mean the difference between release and detention, as we are seeing in these cases. On the court side, when you have an LGBTQ-based claim, where you are detained also can make a difference between winning or losing your asylum case.”
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Katherine Martinko at treehugger speaks with photographer Caroline Power, who traveled to the Caribbean, and found a massive, nearly permanent floating pile of plastic waste (ours, by the way):
… the following collection of photographs, all of them a sickening depiction of the consequences of consumption and our human obsession with convenience and disposability.
Power told TreeHugger what she saw:
"The majority of the trash were small pieces of plastic and Styrofoam that had been broken up by wind and waves. There was also a seemingly infinite number of plastic forks, spoons, drink bottles, and plates. We saw Styrofoam [takeout] containers and packaging. There were broken soccer balls, a TV, and so many shoes and flip-flops, mostly Crocs, for some odd reason."
While most of these pictures were taken in September and October 2017, Power says she's been noticing and documenting the problem over the past six years. Pollution in Roatan is getting worse, and it's not because of the recent hurricanes in the eastern Caribbean. Nor is the problem unique to Roatan. Every coastal community faces the same challenge -- having the world's crap collect along its shore and tide lines.
previous Alternative Voices Roundup compilations:
Alternative Voices Roundup: Other voices around the net.
Alternative Voices Roundup: Other voices around the net. (Oct. 29, 2017)