BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY. WEST SIXTH TODAY, EAST FOURTH TOMORROW…OHIO CITY AND COVENTRY THE DAY AFTER THAT.
Where does it end? Lakewood? Shaker? The thin blue line is all that is stopping this from happening, but it’s probably too late. Cleveland…the domino theory at work.

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grizzster commening on Reported beating of a Morehouse graduate by off-duty officer adds to controversy in Cleveland’s Warehouse District

Seriously, (almost) every single comment on this article is intensely racist.  Thank god the plain dealer comments are here to make sure everyone knows that Cleveland is serious about keeping black people in their place (as the commenter says, keeping them from ‘ruining’ certain neighborhoods)  and cracking down on black troublemakers BAMN.

from the original article:

The men said they had gone out that night with white co-workers from a downtown bank, members of the same executive training program. The two were in the lobby near the door, preparing to leave, when a security guard pointedly told them it was time to go.

Ruiz, who recently moved here from Charlotte, N.C., said they responded that they were waiting for friends to come down from upstairs. He said the security guard shoved them out the door and onto the sidewalk.

Ruiz said that when he objected, another security guard grabbed him and slammed him onto the roof of a parked car and began punching him.

The street was busy with people and police, and Ruiz said he assumed police would come to his aid. Soon, he said, he realized he was dealing with a police officer.

In a police report, Officer Anthony J. Sauto said he was working off-duty and in plain clothes for Velvet Dog when he saw Ruiz and Parilla refusing to leave and he intervened. He said Ruiz became “verbally and physically aggressive,” then resisted arrest and tried to hit him.

I hear a lot of people from the northern part of the United States talk about how racist the southern part of this country is, but honestly I am not sure I have been anywhere in this country where serious racism and open/outward support of segregation is more a part of public/private discussion than cleveland. And I know you obviously can’t judge a whole city by the people who comment on newspaper webpages, but its a bizarrely frequent part of normal conversation.

Ohio has a complicated white supremacist history, and it seems like we might fare better in the future if we really seriously got down to business and dealt with our white supremacist present.

I ask you, ‘What does reasonable suspicion mean?” Letona said through a megaphone. “It means not looking white. It means not sounding white. It means those who do not conform to a certain idea of what Americans should look like.

— Boston: Activists denounce Arizona immigration law [via]  

Shame on Arizona

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer just signed a law that will authorize officers to pull over, question, and detain anyone they have a “reasonable suspicion” to believe is in this country without proper documentation. It’s legalized racial profiling, and it’s an affront on all of our civil rights, especially Latinos. It’s completely unacceptable.

Join us in letting Arizona’s leaders know how we feel, and that there will be consequences. A state that dehumanizes its own people does not deserve our economic support.

The statement below will be sent on your behalf to state leaders including the governor, state and local tourism and commerce officials. You can also add a personal comment in the box provided below.

“As long as racial profiling is legal in Arizona, I will do what I can to not visit the state and to avoid spending dollars there.”

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Shame on Arizona [via]

I can’t really decide if all of the (racist, xenophobic, you know) goings-on in AZ should make me more or less interested in planning to have my dissertation research occur there. Which, you know,  I kind of was. At least now it is early enough where I am not tied to it.

Adjuncts are overworked and underpaid with little job security. The circumstances under which many work are appalling and I know that I’m fortunate to be on the tenure track. But I can pretty much guarantee that being an adjunct is markedly different from being “a nigger on a plantation.” For some reason, I’m certain of that.

— Things of which I Am Tired [via]

one of the things I marvel at daily when I’m teaching courses on/talking about race in my classes is that, when my students are being honest with me, many of them honestly believe we live in a culture that disadvantages white men in particular, that being white and male is the hardest thing to be in this country because of the complaints of women and PoC and unfair laws and every scholarship and job being earmarked for women and PoC and on and on.

— elle commenting on Things of which I Am Tired

try being a working class, black mother radical activist and find a midwife to mentor you because you really want to be a midwife to the marginalized. really. try it. its not just the money. its the way that (white) midwives look at you and talk to you. the way they talk about your neighborhood. your culture. the way that they dismiss racism as ‘really being about classism’. and classism about ‘really being about education’. and education ‘really being about trying hard enough’. when in reality, racism is about racism, classism is about classism. and while these issues intersect, we cannot reduce racism to classism. i have experienced racism in situations where i was class privileged and well educated from midwives.

— mai’a commenting on Stuff White People Like: Talking About Birth [via]

A3N: Many people call Angola Prison a “modern day slave plantation.” Do you think this is a fair label?

NAH: Absolutely. Angola was and is still is very much a plantation. At 18,000 acres, it is the largest prison in the US—the only prison with its own zip code. Mostly black men are still maintaining the same agricultural activity—planting, hoeing, picking cotton and other crops by hand—that slaves did originally. And they are doing so as captives who are compensated for their back-breaking labor with mere pennies per hour. While Warden Cain may not be Simon Legree, he is still a plantation master—albeit one who uses Christianity as a means of controlling the neo-slave labor under his watch. The very same practices and social control mechanism that existed under slavery persist—just under a new name.
My interest in Angola is as both a paradigm of the Southern transformation of plantations into prisons and as a prototype for what we now call the prison industrial complex. Many old plantations in the South became prisons after the Civil War. Angela Y. Davis traces the initial rise of the penitentiary system to the abolition of slavery, writing: “in the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for the newly released slaves.”
Slave Codes became Black Codes and criminalized a range of activities if the perpetrator was black. The newly acquired 15th Amendment right to vote was curtailed by tailoring of felony disenfranchisement laws to include crimes that were supposedly more frequently committed by blacks. And, the liberatory promise of the 13th Amendment – “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the United States”- contained a dangerous loophole- “except as a punishment for crime”. This allowed for the conversion of the old plantations to penitentiaries, and this, with the introduction of the convict lease system, permitted the South to continue to economically benefit from the unpaid labor of blacks.
The patterns established in the old south have proliferated and expanded throughout the US, as African Americans are disproportionately policed, prosecuted, convicted, disenfranchised and imprisoned in the prison industrial complex. There has been a corresponding shift from de jure racism codified explicitly into the law and to a de facto racism where people of color, especially African Americans, are subject to unequal protection of the laws, excessive surveillance, extreme segregation and neo-slave labor via incarceration—all in the name of “crime control”. It is the current manifestation of the legal legacy of the racialized transformations of plantations into prisons, of Slave Codes into Black Codes, of lynching into state-sponsored executions. The “imputation of crime to color” that Frederick Douglass warned of 125 years ago continues to the present.

— Visiting A Modern Day Slave Plantation: an interview with Nancy A. Heitzeg

What this suggests is that the key to understanding today’s anti-immigration movement—as well as anti-Obama organizing such as the “tea parties”—is to see it as a “virtuous middle” movement. In other words, these are movements whose members see themselves as a virtuous middle—religious, moral, hardworking, patriotic and truly American—who face the threat of losing their relatively privileged social status. They fear that they are under attack by a bewildering global economy and unscrupulous corporations that are moving their jobs overseas. Even more, they feel they are being attacked by cultural elites—Harvard and Hollywood, the universities and pop culture—who undermine the moral values of this virtuous middle with moral relativism and sexual permissiveness. They also fear that they are under attack by the rabble below them—lazy people who live off public benefits paid for by the virtuous middle’s tax dollars (these folks are often secretly coded as black) and illegal aliens who are flooding the country, stealing jobs and degrading American culture (these folks are often coded as brown). The virtuous middle fears that cultural elites from above and the black and brown rabble from below are conspiring —now with the help of a black president!—to undermine their social status and by extension the moral, political, and economic foundations of America. The fall into Sodom is right behind.

— Minutemen and Klansmen [via]

Whites often confuse comfort with safety and state that we don’t feel safe when what we really mean is that we don’t feel comfortable. This trivializes our history of savage brutality towards people of color and perverts the reality of that history. Because we don’t think complexly about racism, we don’t ask ourselves what safety means from a position of dominance, or the impact on people of color for Whites to complain about their safety when merely talking about racism.

— My Class Didn’t Trump My Race: Using Oppression to Face Privilege [via]