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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30284312
December 2014 Last updated at 13:51 ET
Ferguson and a new civil rights fight
The civil rights movement in the 1960s fought unjust laws. Can a modern movement brought on by the events in Ferguson, Missouri, take on a more ambiguous target? Journalist Ellis Cose examines the modern struggles of those protesting for racial equity.
We have been here far too many times - police confront black males, something goes horribly awry, and racial tensions roil the nation. All that changes are the details.
In this case, Michael Brown ended up dead as his companion ran in fear. Always, in the aftermath, there is agony and confusion as a community rises up demanding change that never fully comes.
Over the past half century or so, we have seen the pattern repeated countless times. So many of the riots of the 1960s - those uprisings that came to characterise the so-called long hot summers - were set off by encounters between police and civilians of colour. Those incidents continue to occur all too frequently, and all too frequently they end in death.
The journalism group ProPublica recently revealed that young black men were 21 times more likely than young white men of being gunned down by police.
Michael Brown's father Brown's father (centre) has called for peace, but he is also more likely to be stereotyped as aggressive
One obvious reason for the disparity is that blacks are more likely to live in high-crime neighbourhoods; so law enforcement officials are especially likely to feel threatened and therefore to draw their guns. An even more obvious reason is that black youths are more prone to be perceived as hulking brutes.
The election of Barack Obama gave rise to much talk of a post-racial society, of an America where blacks, Latinos, and other people of colours were no longer judged or hindered by race. There is something to that notion. Yet we continue to perceive race and racial differences in the same way we perceive differences - and make judgments - about other aspects of appearance and status. As a number of studies have made clear, even when job applicants present exactly the same credentials whites tend to be preferred.
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We have arrived at a moment when something has to change. Brown's death, after all, did not occur in a vacuum. ”
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This is not to say that race always rules. If someone looking like Barack Obama happened to be walking down a city street, virtually no police officer would see him as a threat worth shooting. His expensive suit and middle-aged status would merit a measure of deference. But for a young black man in casual clothes on a dark street in a presumably dangerous neighbourhood, reality would be quite different.
This country has a history of endowing such men with an almost mythical aura of menace.
To get some sense of how this plays out, one need only review the grand jury testimony of Darren Wilson, who defended killing Michael Brown by describing Brown as an inhuman, unstoppable beast. "It looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I'm shooting at him."
This stereotype of the hulking black brute, impervious to pain, capable of crushing strong white men with a single slap of his massive hand has been with us for a very long time.
More than a century ago, Clifton R Breckinridge, a former congressman who had been President Grover Cleveland's minister to Russia, observed that the black race was "the most negative and tractable of which we have any considerable knowledge" and went on to declare, "When it produces a brute, he is the worse and most insatiable brute that exists in human form."
What should Ferguson mothers tell their children?
Much as things have changed in America - and they have changed hugely since that analysis was published in 1900 - the image of the hulking, menacing black brute still haunts us; and it is getting young black men killed.
As rational human beings, we need to attack that stereotype with the same resolve and determination that Officer Wilson brought to his encounter with Michael Brown. Perhaps the protests spawned by Brown's death and Wilson's grand-jury exoneration are a sign that some among us are prepared to do just that.
But this movement is much more complicated than the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
What it shares with that movement is a sense that we have arrived at a moment when something has to change. Brown's death, after all, did not occur in a vacuum. It occurred on the heels of several arguably unjustified killings of black men by police or self-declared enforcers of order. Eric Garner was killed in Staten Island after being caught selling untaxed cigarettes. Trayvon Martin was shot by a gun-toting vigilante simply because he seemed suspicious.
Protesters at a "die in" in Washington DC Protests in Washington, DC, continued days after the grand jury decision in Ferguson
Bloody Sunday, in which a civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, culminated in a police riot, led directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It would be great if this movement could bring about something similarly concrete.
But how do you legislate against stereotypes, against people, some of them with uniforms and guns, acting on poisonous perceptions? Rather than the mid-century civil rights movement, this new movement is more akin to (and, indeed, can be seen as allied with) the Occupy Wall Street movement, or the anti-mass-incarceration movement.
It is a growing and collective howl of outrage raised against some things that are seriously wrong in the American system.
That outrage, I like to believe, is registering in some deep part of the American consciousness and will ultimately lead to self-healing.
But unfortunately, this sickness has no immediate remedy.
Ellis Cose, author of The End of Anger: A New Generation's Take on Race and Rage and numerous other books, is currently writing a memoir. |
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Sun Dec 07, 2014 5:58 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/12/3/labor-and-civil-rightsnotalwaysinsolidarity.html
How the labor and civil rights movements found solidarity
A brief history of the often tense relationship between organized labor and the civil rights movement
December 3, 2014 2:40PM ET
by Alia Malek - @aliamalek
Labor and civil rights organizations in the United States often stand shoulder-to-shoulder on a range of issues, but that solidarity has not always been the norm.
The first national labor federation in the U.S., the National Labor Union, was founded a year after the abolition of slavery in 1865, when millions of newly freed black people to were effectively allowed to enter the broad labor force. African-American leaders recognized that their new political rights would not mean much without jobs and economic stability. But although these two nascent communities — labor unions and newly freed former slaves — would seem to be natural allies, they weren’t.
“The assumption of black inferiority was not quite ubiquitous but pretty extensive,” said Eric Arnesen, a professor of history at George Washington University whose work focuses on race, labor, politics and civil rights. “White organized labor shared the view of African-Americans held by most other white Americans, and that shouldn’t be surprising at all.”
Many unions excluded blacks from key sectors of the labor market or restricted them to the least-desirable jobs, fearing they would undercut wages and working conditions. “With few exceptions, there was no solidarity across racial lines,” Arnesen said. “The relationship to African-American workers was at best indifferent and more often hostile.”
Not surprisingly, African-Americans regarded unions mostly negatively, as institutions that excluded blacks. The civil rights pioneer Booker T. Washington urged black workers to avoid unions and even to break strikes to secure jobs otherwise closed to them. When African-Americans wanted to organize, they created their own unions. In 1869, African Americans founded the Colored National Labor Union after the National Labor Union refused to accept black delegates.
But in these early years after the Civil War, the vast majority of African-Americans lived and worked in the agricultural South — not the industrial North, where organized labor was gaining ground — so unions had little relevance to their lives. A notable exception was Alabama, where coal and steel industrialists exploited the Ku Klux Klan's anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiments to undermine solidarity between American-born white Protestants and immigrant Catholics. With the Klan's history of violence against Southern blacks, the potential for labor solidary across racial lines was remote.
Organizing the black labor force became more urgent after the Great Migration, in which millions of African-Americans headed north in the first decades of the 20th century. In the cities, black workers began to protest barriers to jobs and employment discrimination, including those imposed by the unions themselves. Black civil rights organizations (the NAACP was founded in 1909) offered a platform to address labor rights concerns. A. Philip Randolph, who organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925, was a key figure in bringing the two struggles together and winning the support of middle-class African-Americans, Arnesen says. Randolph successfully fought against the Pullman Company’s efforts to block the union and, in 1937, the porters’ union became the first black labor group to align itself with the American Federation of Labor. The other big labor alliance, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, had officially championed inter-racial solidarity since the 1930s, although in practice the track record of their member unions was uneven.
The Great Depression and the industrial mobilization of World War II galvanized the labor movement, and the alliance between civil rights and labor rights groups deepened in the 1940s. They came together to push for fair employment laws, eventually realized with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and labor organizations to varying degrees supported the African-American struggle for full citizenship. The two movements have often walked the same path. |
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Sun Dec 07, 2014 6:09 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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http://thenat.in/1wAYLd0
Dani McClain
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Third-rail politics: Analysis at the intersection of gender, health and race.
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The Civil Rights Movement Came Out of a Moment Like This One
Dani McClain on December 4, 2014 - 5:47 PM ET
In this August 28, 1963 file photo, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledges the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial for his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington. (AP Photo/File)
Back in August, some observers drew comparisons between the shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. If parallels to civil rights movement history are helpful now, then let yesterday’s announcement that a Staten Island grand jury won’t indict the police officer who choked Eric Garner to death be a sign that we’re somewhere closer to 1963—when a series of devastating setbacks and subsequent widespread outrage transformed the civil rights struggle—than we are to Till’s lynching, that earlier consciousness-raising moment. There was a perfect storm this week: the continuing fallout of the failed indictment of Wilson; the news of the outcome in the Garner case; a Cleveland newspaper’s efforts to discredit and sling mud on the parents of a 12-year-old boy killed by police. This moment has the potential to catapult change, just as a series of events that transpired eight years after Till was killed did.
The murder of 14-year-old Till and the 1963 murder of four black girls at Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church both became national stories that hit Americans square in the chest, reminding them of the Jim Crow system of justice in which black people had no rights that whites were bound to respect. With the killings of Garner, Brown, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice and others, we are all reminded that black life is still too often devalued, and that police officers are often not subject to the rule of law. That reminder has packed a similar emotional wallop. It is all coming so quickly: these announcements that a trial isn’t even needed to determine the police officer’s guilt or innocence. These exonerations through other means. People are taking to the streets nationwide to protest: just last night saw an outpouring of response in New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta and beyond.
But one problem, as my colleague Zoë Carpenter noted yesterday, is that some who are protesting are wondering how to turn these coordinated actions into a movement. From a DC community townhall meeting, Carpenter reports:
[Eugene] Puryear noted that the gap between protest and large-term organizing still has to be bridged. “Right now, just to be honest, we have tactics—we do not have strategy. We are doing a lot of interesting things and a lot of important things…but ultimately, where is it going? What are we doing? What are we really asking for?” he asked. “We’re ready to get arrested, and I love that. I’m ready. But are we ready to build institutions?”
These are critical questions. During the first four years of the Obama administration, I worked at a social justice organization that uses online organizing tactics to engage people in civil rights and racial justice campaigns. The work was and continues to be important and often successful, but far too often, it felt like we were responding to news events rather than setting the agenda. Someone would say something nauseatingly racist about the president, and we would respond. A law would be at risk of being stripped of a key provision, and we would try to pressure responsible parties. But the questions I kept coming back to were: When do we craft and push for the next Civil Rights Act? The next Voting Rights Act? How do we keep playing this necessary defense—while also going hard on offense? How do we identify the deep, structural problems, if only one at a time, and devise plans to solve them? In other words, when do we start to think big like the A. Philip Randolphs, Bayard Rustins, Ella Bakers and other brilliant strategists of yesteryear?
The group of young organizers who have been active in Ferguson and who earlier this week met with President Obama and members his administration are starting to answer these questions. Among the demands put forth by activists from organizations including Millennial Activists United, Ohio Students Association, Dream Defenders, Make the Road New York are for:
•The federal government to use its power to prosecute police officers that kill or abuse people.
•The removal of local district attorneys from the job of holding police accountable, and instead having independent prosecutors at the local level charged with prosecuting officers.
•The defunding of local police departments that use excessive force or racially profile. Instead of having the Department of Justice (DOJ) wholesale giving more than $250 million to local police departments annually, DOJ should only fund departments that agree to adopt DOJ best practices for training and meaningful community input.
These demands take a step toward vision and big thinking—a commitment to playing offense and addressing the problems at their roots—that we need right now. If we take history as our guide, it’s worth noting that public outcry in response to the rapid fire events of 1963 is credited with making the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act inevitable. The four little girls were killed in September of that year in a place already dubbed “Bombingham” for the level of racist backlash to the small steps toward progress the city was making. King had been jailed there in the spring of that year. Medgar Evers had been assassinated that summer in Mississippi. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom had happened not even a month before the church bombing, and had shown the world that a critical mass of people were mobilized in the service of fundamental change.
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Granted, those dead at the hands of police today are not civil rights leaders, or children killed in their place of worship. For some observers, these more recent victims are unsympathetic: they were involved in roughing up a bodega owner or selling untaxed cigarettes. But for others, we find ourselves at a similar moment fifty years after that critical turning point in civil rights movement history—with “Again?” on our lips and a familiar feeling of dread in response to the violence we witness on the video of the killing of Eric Garner, the incredible amount of force used on a man who announced over and over again, “I can’t breathe.”
What would it take to scrap and rebuild a system that makes it nearly impossible to indict an officer when he or she kills a civilian? What is the landmark legislation that all this fury in the streets can demand and drive? Some of the organizers and strategists who are responsible for the displays of coordinated, righteous protest are putting their minds on these questions. The sense of being up against an unchangeable justice system designed to brutalize black life at the slightest perception of provocation can make one feel that the United States has proven itself to be a failed political experiment, one in which some people’s rights will never be secured. But if the history of this country’s most revered revolutionary period is any guide—and if a policy program is developed to channel all this growing energy—then we’re just getting started. |
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Sun Dec 07, 2014 6:10 pm |
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