At The Field Negro, attorney-blogger Wayne Bennett reminds us where we are, and what time it is:
The president of the United States retweeted something that was originally posted on what is the equivalent to a KKK website in Britain, and he got mad at the British Prime Minister for calling him out on it. I need every American to think about that for a minute.
He has also been telling people that he still believes Barack Obama was not born in this country, and that he (trump) made a mistake by apologizing for spreading his racist lie for years.
And people like Lindsey Graham (who himself called the president a kook) wonder why we are questioning his sanity.
These are interesting and scary times. It's when a racist White House can boldly and shamelessly flaunt their racism for all of us to see. They have given up on trying to pretend that they are not a more powerful version of of their white nationalist brothers and sisters, who play weekend war games in rural America and hide behind their sheets…
Bennett tells us an all too familiar story about white supremacy draped in uniform, and steeped in toxic masculinity:
"A Mississippi police officer who was suspended for racially bigoted social media posts earlier this year was put on leave after killing a black man once he returned to active duty.
Columbus Police Department (“CPD”) Patrolman Jared Booth was given a 28-day suspension in June after the Columbus city council voted 4-1 against him on the basis of those posts.
One of the posts is said to be sexually explicit–featuring a female CPD officer, an image of a sex toy and a reference to oral sex. Another post used a racial slur–a common derivation or permutation of the N-word.
A third post was homophobic in nature and directed toward a different, former officer with the CPD who later filed a wrongful termination suit against the department.
One of those posts was made on April 18, while another made its way to Facebook the day after.
Columbus’ social media policy forbids city employees from posting content that is “malicious, obscene, threatening or intimidating, that disparages co-employees, suppliers or that might constitute harassment or bullying.”
Earlier this month, on November 4, Booth responded to a disturbance call outside of a nightclub. That call, alleged disturbance, and night ended in the shooting death of 24-year-old Raymond Davis, who is black. Booth was the officer who fired the fatal shots.
Immediately after the shooting, Columbus city officials insisted that Davis was holding a gun. Columbus Mayor Robert Smith even went so far as to state, “We know for a fact the gun wasn’t planted.” He continued:
Officer Booth did activate his camera at the time he received the call of a disturbance at the Premier Lounge…The entire incident was captured on body camera. It is early in the investigation and I am not allowed to go through the entire incident at this time. But I will say the video shows Raymond Davis with a gun in his hand at the time of the shooting.
Police Chief Oscar Lewis was pressed on whether Booth’s prior Facebook posts would factor into any investigation over his lethal use of force. He said, “I think they are two different incidents, and I think the first incident has been addressed.”
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Latina Lista gives us the story of a a remarkable sixteen year old Latina high school student from the Central Valley in California, using technology to improve the health and safety of migrant farmworkers:
High school senior Faith Florez knows how dangerous it is for farmworkers to work in the fields with little protection from the sun. A third-generation Central Valley Mexican-American, whose own great-grandparents arrived in the 1900s to harvest the crops, grew up hearing the story of how her great-grandmother died working in the fields.
Seeing that apps can be used to monitor various health conditions, Florez thought why couldn’t there be a “heat stress protection app.” She proposed her idea to graduate coding students at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering in 2016…
…for the app to be effective, it means that all farmworkers must be wearing an Apple watch. Florez and the student coders plan to run a pilot program where they already have commitment from farmers to provide their workers with a smart watch at the beginning of the harvest job, but the farmers have to pay for the watches.
To help the farmers in the pilot program defray the costs, Florez created a fundraising campaign.
Her hope is that once the pilot is completed and farmers understand how this technology cannot only help them to reduce heat illness, it will also help them to improve the health of their employees during a time when the farming industry is already seeing a shortage of workers.
My mission is to change the statement “work or health” to “work AND health.” ~ Faith Florez
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Chris Bragg writes about millennials and HIV for PRIDE:
Whether they are aware of it or not, millennials are greatly affected by HIV/AIDS. Born between the early 1980s to the early 2000s, this emerging generation currently accounts for more than a quarter of new HIV cases in the U.S., and more than half of them do not even know they have the virus…
The epidemic continues, even though it has been pushed far from the headlines, and receded in public consciousness:
Rolando M. Viani, professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego calls HIV/AIDS a “silent epidemic” among young people. He observes that since most young people today have not witnessed the epidemic killing their friends and partners like others did in the 1980s, many millennials have developed a somewhat nonchalant attitude toward HIV risk — and they don’t understand the difficulties they will face if they acquire the disease and the challenge of treating it.
A recent CDC study found that 70 percent of HIV-positive Americans didn’t have the virus under control.
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Sister Outrider is the blog of black feminist Claire Heuchan, and in a series of posts she bluntly addresses the complexities and contradictions of race and racism within feminism:
Regardless of how their feminist politics manifest, the question of race is one that is not so easily answered, or even acknowledged, by many white women. Through both feminist theory and activism, women develop a structural understanding of the patriarchal hierarchy and where we are positioned within that system. Techniques such as consciousness raising and collective organisation have enabled women to connect the personal with the political – and it is deeply personal. Within feminism, women become fully aware of how we are marginalised by patriarchy. White women rightly consider themselves to belong to the oppressed class in terms of sex. Being aware of the implications carried by belonging to the dominant class, white women are therefore discomfited by the notion of being the oppressing party in the hierarchy of race (hooks, 2000). This brings us to our first fallacy:
‘Making it about race divides women.’
Time and time again, this line is used by white women to circumnavigate any meaningful discussion of race, to avoid the discomfiting possibility of having to confront the spectre of their own racism…
...talking about race does not divide women. It is racism that does that – specifically, the racism white women direct towards women of colour, the racism that white women observe and fail to challenge because, ultimately, they benefit from it. Whether intentional or casually delivered, that racism has the same result: it completely undermines the possibility of solidarity between women of colour and white women. White women’s unwillingness to explore the subject of race, to acknowledge the ways in which they benefit from white supremacy, makes mutual trust impossible…
Women of colour face a double jeopardy of sorts, our labour undervalued both on grounds of race and sex. Zora Neale Hurston once described Black women as the “mule uh de world”, an observation that is spot on when applied to the wage gap. BAME women are also more likely to be asked about our plans relating to marriage and pregnancy by prospective employers than white women. White women are objectified by men, the result of misogyny. Women of colour are objectified, Othered, fetishised, and treated like hypersexual savages by men, the result of misogyny and racism. BAME and migrant women also “experience a disproportionate rate of domestic homicide.”
Even if you are not prepared to listen to what women of colour have to sayabout racism, the facts and figures bear out.
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The Indigenous Environmental Network, devoted to “building the capacity of Indigenous communities and tribal governments to develop mechanisms to protect our sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, health of both our people and all living things, and to build economically sustainable communities”, highlights how the voices of indigenous peoples are ignored in the international discussion of climate change, even though they bear the brunt (as they have for centuries) of environmental degradation and exploitative resource extraction:
Today, November 17, 2017, The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 23rd Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 23) has come to an end. And while progress has been made on the UNFCCC traditional knowledge Platform for engagement of local communities and Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Peoples’ rights are not fully recognized in the final platform document of COP 23. The burden of implementation falls on local communities and indigenous peoples…
Alberto Saldamando, Attorney and Expert on Human Rights and Rights of Indigenous Peoples, IEN “We are not waving the victory flags yet, the local communities and Indigenous peoples platform does not recognize the rights of Indigenous peoples in the human rights sense of the term “recognize”. It only “recalls” the UN Declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples in its preamble. Given the resistance of States during these negotiations to fully recognize the rights of Indigenous peoples, the task for a greater recognition of our rights as peoples will be difficult” Saldamando further says, “The platform for traditional knowledge is merely that. It should allow Indigenous knowledge holders to advise and inform the UN climate conference in mitigation and adaptation…
Dallas Goldtooth, IEN “During the COP23 conference there has been engaged discussion on the mitigation of climate change and the implementation of the agreements made in Paris during COP21. However, it’s been a real struggle to get parties, nation-states, to take the sincere steps needed to addressing the climate chaos we are seeing across the globe. There has more emphasis on building up the monetization of forests and trading carbon than there has been on the managed decline of fossil fuel production, and Indigenous peoples are right in the middle of this. We need international solidarity for Keeping Fossil Fuels in the Ground and to reject carbon trading as a climate solution. We must exert our our power as citizens of the world to protect indigenous rights, address the climate chaos, and to defend the sacred integrity of Mother Earth. I firmly believe in the collective power of us all to make the changes we need to see.”
It is our understanding that the false solutions of carbon marketing offsetting greenhouse gas emissions offered by the US White House representatives or California’s very own Governor Jerry Brown will cause more harm to humanity and continue to silence indigenous voices and our existence. False solutions like these are cancerous and have negative impacts like respiratory problems and autoimmune diseases.
As I’ve noted in numerous diaries and comments, social justice is economic justice. I’ll expand on that— social justice is economic justice is environmental justice. They are inextricably intertwined.
previous Alternative Voices Roundup compilations:
Alternative Voices Roundup: Other voices around the net.
Alternative Voices Roundup: Other voices around the net. (Oct. 29, 2017)
Alternative Voices Roundup: Other voices around the net. (Nov. 6, 2017)
Alternative Voices Roundup: Other voices around the net. (Nov. 12, 2017)
Alternative Voices Roundup: Other voices around the net. (Nov. 19, 2017)
Alternative Voices Roundup: Other voices around the net. (Nov. 26, 2017)