6/25/2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2015


Aboriginal Communities in Australia call for Solidarity
June 26, 27 and 28
http://www.sosblakaustralia.com/




In mid-May, I put out a commentary stating, "Stop the forced closures of Aboriginal communities in Western Australia and all across Australia." This is Jaan Laaman, your political prisoner voice, coming to you from the federal prison in Tucson, Arizona.

Let me share some new information from Human Rights and social justice activists and from Indigenous leaders in Australia, about the ongoing government attacks against Aboriginal communities.

Early this year the Australian government, especially the State of Western Australia and its Premier Colin Barnett, began shutting down all services, that is: water, electricity, schools and health care facilities in Aboriginal towns and communities located more than 100 kilometers from large urban areas. This policy is only directed at Indigenous communities. No white towns or stations are being shut down.

It has been widely speculated that by driving out the Indigenous people from these remote towns, this will open up these lands for mineral exploitation. Colin Barnett and his Western Australian government have close ties to huge mining corporations.

Whatever the full reason might be, the reality is that Aboriginal people and their communities are once again under direct attack by government policies and forces.

Aboriginal people and communities are resisting this latest colonial attack on their lands and lives. In fact Australians of all backgrounds have come forward to rally and demonstrate against these outrageous policies. Tens of thousands of people have rallied in cities all across Australia. In late May and on June 1st, there were also a small number of solidarity rallies in Europe and Asia.

Aboriginal leaders and Australian activists are mobilizing for an upcoming weekend of protests, and are asking people around the world to support them. This is part of the call from Australia, "With Aboriginal communities, culture and land under the threat of forced closures, we are calling on all communities, friends and allies around the world to stand together as one, on June 26, 27 and 28."
Go to www.sosblakaustralia.com, to find out more information.

Time is short, but why not organize or join an action in support or our Aboriginal friends.
This is Jaan Laaman, until next time, remember, Freedom Is A Constant Struggle!"



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On Sunday, June 28th, join Courage to Resist and the Chelsea Manning Support Network in this year’s 2015 San Francisco Pride Parade!

March for our heroic WikiLeaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning and show your support for Chelsea, whistle-blowers, and government transparency.

In 2013, the Chelsea Manning contingent was awarded the highest honor, “The Absolutely Fabulous Overall Contingent”. That contingent was the largest non-corporate group with well over 1,000 people! And last year, Chelsea Manning was honored as an official Parade Grand Marshal! With Chelsea’s legal appeals beginning soon, she needs your support more than ever!

* Help lead the Chelsea Manning parade contingent by holding our lead banner!
* Wave from the motorized cable car!
* Cheer on our Flash Mob Dancers!
* Help staff the Chelsea Manning booth at the TransMarch

Volunteers are urgently needed to attend a one hour contingent monitor training prior to parade day. Contingent monitors walk (or ride) along with us during the parade to double-check everyone is following the parade rules and being safe. SF Pride requires each contingent to provide their own monitors to participate, and we’ll need about 20 monitors to participate.

Organized by the Chelsea Manning Support Network and Courage to Resist – Please contact us to list your organization as an endorser! To RSVP, volunteer, and/or become a monitor, please contact: melissa@couragetoresist.org / 510-488-3559

http://www.facebook.com/events/824980007583098/
http://www.chelseamanning.org/events/sf-2015

Sunday, June 28, 2015
Chelsea Manning Contingent Meet-up at 10:00 am
Howard & Beale, San Francisco

Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org



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On Thursday, August 6, 2015 please join us for the Hiroshima commemoration, rally and nonviolent direct action, 8 AM at Livermore Lab, corner of Vasco Road and Patterson Pass Road in Livermore.

As we approach the 70th Anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, Daniel Ellsberg, Country Joe McDonald, Taiko drummers, A-bomb survivors and hundreds of peace advocates will gather at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab to shine light on the true cost of the nuclear age. On this major anniversary, we will confront the human, ethical, environmental, social and financial price that nuclear weapons are extracting from us – and, indeed, from all life on earth. And, together, we will act to change the future!

There will also be a pre-action organizing meeting in Berkeley on Saturday, July 11 at 10 AM.

For August 6 action and pre-action info…

We have downloadable fliers and more information on the web at:
http://www.trivalleycares.org/new/SaveDate.html

We have a Facebook page at:

August 6 Hiroshima Commemoration and Action at Livermore Lab


Please join us, let us know if your group would like to cosponsor the August 6 commemoration, and help us publicize the event with your members and friends.


More information, Tri-Valley CAREs, (925) 443-7148
www.trivalleycares.org
marylia@trivalleycares.org

Thanks!

###


http://www.care2.com the worlds largest community for good.
You care; We Care2.

Start a petition - we will help you win!

http://www.thePetitionSite.com/create.html


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Starting this September, Rising Tide North America is calling for mass actions to shut down the economic and political systems threatening our survival.

Already, hundreds of thousands are streaming into the streets to fight back against climate chaos, capitalism and white supremacy.

This wave of resistance couldn’t be more urgent. To stop climate chaos we need a phenomenal escalation in organizing, participation and tactical courage. We need a profound social transformation to uproot the institutions of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, the systems that created the climate crisis. And we need to link arms with allies fighting for migrant justice, dignified work and pay, and an end to the criminalization and brutal policing of black and brown bodies.

We need to #FloodTheSystem.

In the lead up to the United Nations climate talks in Paris, in December, we will escalate local and regional resistance against systems that threaten our collective survival. Together, we will open alternative paths to the failing negotiations of political elites.

This is not another protest. It is a call for a massive economic and political intervention. It is a call to build the relationships needed to sustain our struggles for the long haul. To build popular power along the intersections of race, class, gender and ability. To collectively unleash our power and change everything.

The Story So Far

Over the past year, hundreds of thousands of people have flowed into the streets to fight back.

Fast food workers in over a hundred cities went on strike, with thousands arrested demanding $15 an hour and a union. Young people in Ferguson, protesting the murder of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson, showed us the power of sustained action as they fought back against state violence for weeks, reinvigorating a national movement for Black liberation. Hundreds of thousands of climate activists marched at the People’s Climate March in New York, and the next day Flood Wall Street shut down the heart of New York’s financial district.

Across the country, and the world, powerful movements are using nonviolent direct action to to disrupt business as usual and demand lasting systemic change.

These moments show that broad mobilization and disruption are ways that we can transform our society. It is time we move beyond conventional strategies. Its time we connect across movements and #FloodTheSystem.

Rising Tide North America and its allies call on communities, networks, affinity groups and organizations across the continent to join together this Fall to rapidly escalate the pace and scale of the anti-capitalist climate justice movements.

We need to wash away the root causes of climate change -- capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and colonialism. These systems enable the domination of people and Earth. They place gains for the elite before the well being of our communities.

To build the scale of movements necessary to take on this challenge, we need everyone. Using sustained, coordinated direct action we can bring more people into a movement for radical social transformation than ever before.

The upcoming United Nations meeting of the Conference of the Parties in Paris (COP 21) at the end of the year provide us with an opportunity. Framed as climate negotiations they are really about capitalism and the corporate elites. We have an opportunity to focus the debate on capitalism itself as negotiators wedded to and benefiting from the status quo refuse to discuss the systems that drive the crisis. This is a natural moment to preemptively highlight community resistance and radical alternatives in advance of another colossal failure of international leadership. Through our combined action we can turn the failure of these critical talks into a moment in which the systemic nature of the crisis moves to the center and in which our movements begin to connect and collaborate.

In the past, the climate movement has repeatedly tried days of action and one-day marches. While these have built important relationships, they have not created the sustained movement swells we need. To lay the groundwork for exponential movement growth we are asking groups to convene Action Councils, like those forming in the Pacific Northwest, California, Montana, Northeast and elsewhere, with the intention of coming together to organize sustained actions beginning in late Summer, continuing through November and beyond.

With luck, waves of mobilizations breaking across the continent and world will build off each other to create a flood of resistance to fossil fuel extraction, capitalism and colonialism.

Vision

#FloodTheSystem invites the Rising Tide network, the larger climate justice movements, and other non-climate focused groups to create a flood of massive economic and political disruption of the systems that allow the climate and economic crisis to continue to escalate. This is not a simple call to action or day of action, it’s a long-term process. We want to organize a series of actions that would:
  • Build a more robust anti-capitalist movement that clearly defines climate change as a symptom of capitalism. Specifically, we hope to support and catalyze regional organizing networks and relationships to challenge extreme energy infrastructure and the systems of oppression that enable it.
  • Build long term local, regional and continental networks that can continue to coordinate, build connections between movements, and escalate these fights in 2016 and beyond.
  • Begin to work closely with other movements through the analysis of where our struggles intersect and through a commitment to anti-oppressive organizing practices.
  • Share, implement and gain experience in innovative models of horizontal movement structures and mass democracy in organizing that will serve radical forces for the long haul.
  • Create a flood of energy within regions that inspires others to join in with organic, spontaneous actions and organizing. Regional blocks of escalating action are already planned that will lead into, and play off, each other. More emerge everyday.
  • Preemptively highlight community resistance and real alternatives to the fossil fuel economy ahead of the inevitable colossal failure by global elites at the United Nations climate negotiations in Paris.

Principles

#FloodTheSystem will organize and act according to the following principles.
  • Anti-capitalism/colonialism/racism/patriarchy - We see the climate crisis as a symptom of hierarchical social systems based upon domination and exploitation of lands, and predominately people of color. Addressing the crisis at its roots means joining with and supporting those who are fighting for liberation from these and other oppressive systems, and for their replacement with relations based upon equity, mutual aid, and ecological stewardship.
  • Grassroots Led, NGOs in Support Role - Non-profits and NGOs often function to co-opt and defuse resistance into reform-based avenues which are amenable to the social systems we are ultimately seeking to dismantle and replace. The priorities of this mobilization should be driven by groups grounded in and accountable to the communities most impacted by white supremacy, capitalism, and settler colonialism, with NGOs in a support role -- not the other way around.
  • Community-Based Alternatives - Corporations, nation-states, and multilateral institutions like the United Nations are integral pillars upholding global capitalism and colonialism. We see alternatives to extreme energy and the climate crisis arising out of social struggles which challenge and seek to replace these institutions and their logics. However, we recognize that there may be important defensive struggles within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, such as fighting the expansion of carbon markets or advancing state recognition of Indigenous land rights.

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Free Albert Woodfox!

On June 8, 2015 a federal judge granted Louisiana prisoner Albert Woodfox unconditional release. Albert's conviction had already been overturned three times - most recently in 2013 - yet every time the state has appealed.

Today, Albert is still behind bars after spending four decades in cruel, unjust solitary confinement. He believes that he and fellow prisoners, Herman Wallace and Robert King, were first placed in solitary confinement in retaliation for their activism. All three men were members of the Black Panther Party. Together, they came to be known as the Angola 3.

It is time for the State of Louisiana to stop standing in the way of justice. Call on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to ensure Albert's cruel and unjust confinement is not his legacy. Learn more

http://act.amnestyusa.org/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=1839&ea.campaign.id=35593&ea.tracking.id=Country_USA~MessagingCategory_PrisonersandPeopleatRisk&ac=W1506EAIAR2&ea.url.id=414689&forwarded=true

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Amnesty for all those arrested demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Amnesty for ALL those arrested
demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Sign and distribute the petition to drop the charges!
Spread this effort with #Amnesty4Baltimore

"A riot is the language of the unheard"
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

An estimated 300 people have been arrested in Baltimore in the last two weeks. Many have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested include journalists, medics and legal observers.

One individual arrested for property destruction of a police vehicle is now facing life in prison and is being held on $500,000 bail. That's $150,000 more than the officer charged with the murder of Freddie Gray.  

The legal system has made it clear that they care more about broken windows than broken necks; more about a CVS than the lives of Baltimore's Black residents.

They showed no hesitation in arresting Baltimore's protesters and rebels, and sending in the National Guard, but took 19 days to put a single one of the killer cops in handcuffs. This was the outrageous double standard that led to the Baltimore Uprising.

 Sign the petition to drop the charges on all who have been arrested.

Petition to Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake

Download PDF of Petition 

http://www.answercoalition.org/amnesty_for_all_those_arrested_demanding_justice_for_freddie_gray?utm_campaign=baltimore_amn1&utm_medium=email&utm_source=answercoalition

Amn3.pngMayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake
City Hall, Room 250,
100 North Holliday St.,
Baltimore, MD 21202

Dear Mayor Rawlings-Blake:

I stand in solidarity with those in Baltimore who are demanding that all charges be dropped against those who rose up against racism, police brutality, oppressive social conditions and delay of justice in the case of Freddie Gray. The whole world now recognizes that were it not for this powerful grassroots movement, in all its forms, there would be no indictment.

It is an outrage that peaceful protesters have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested include journalists and legal observers.

Even the youth who are charged with property destruction and looting should be given an amnesty. There is no reason a teenager -- provoked by racists and justifiably angry -- should be facing life in prison for breaking the windows of a police car.

The City of Baltimore should work to rectify the conditions that led to this Uprising, rather than criminalizing those who took action in response to those conditions. Drop the charges now!

Sincerely,
[add your name below]

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CANCEL ALL STUDENT DEBT!

Sign the Petition:

http://cancelallstudentdebt.com/?code=kos


Dear President Obama, Senators, and Members of Congress:


Americans now owe $1.3 trillion in student debt. Eighty-six percent of that money is owed to the United States government. This is a crushing burden for more than 40 million Americans and their families.

I urge you to take immediate action to forgive all student debt, public and private.

American Federation of Teachers
Campaign for America's Future
Courage Campaign
Daily Kos
Democracy for America
LeftAction
Project Springboard
RH Reality Check
RootsAction
Student Debt Crisis
The Nation
Working Families


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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS

B. ARTICLES IN FULL


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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS


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More on Mumia's Medical Needs

Mumia Abu-Jamal's will to live and his commitment to telling the truth is matched by our collective resolve to see him well and free. 

Please take action again. Please know that your calls, letters, emails, and faxes (even the ones that they hang up on or seem to ignore) are the only reason that he was given diagnostic testing.  Mumia is still weak, in a wheelchair, and his legs are bandaged heavily. He has still not been given a diagnosis or a treatment plan. Mumia needs a plan that will address the underlying causes of his chronic and potentially life threatening conditions. Please know that his mind is clear, and his energy is returning. He sends his love and his understanding- that because you took action, he is alive.

Mumia spent nine days Geisinger Medical Center in Danville PA, and is now back in the infirmary at SCI Mahanoy. Our actions today will ensure that Mumia receives the urgent diagnosis and medical treatment.

In the latest outrage, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections is refusing to release Mumia's medical records. Their excuse- that Bret Grote from the Abolitionist Law Center and co-counsel Bob Boyle went to federal court to demand that his lawyers and family be allowed to advise and see him while he was hospitalized. Holding Mumia's medical records is simply retaliation for exercising his constitutional right to access to the courts.

And It is a direct attack on his ability to get expert advice and care. They are preventing Mumia and his doctor from seeing these critical records, at a time when his condition, while stable, remains serious.

Act Now.  

1. Call the Prison, the Governor, and the DOC. Demand that they release Mumia's medical records immediately (see numbers below).

2. Make a Gift to Prison Radio. We took a risk: we fronted $4K dollars so that we could place a full page Ad in The Nation Magazine. It appears in the June 1st issue. Stand with us as we amplify this message. Please give now. Then sign this important letter.

3. Make a gift to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Medical and Legal Fund. Help us get independent medical care for Mumia. We are still in need of funds for life sustaining advocacy and care. Click here to give.
Call, write and fax today!

John Kerestes, Superintendent SCI Mahanoy
Address: 301 Morea Road, Frackville, PA 17932
Phone: 570-773-2158 x8102
Fax: 570-783-2008

Secretary John Wetzel, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections
Address: 1920 Technology Parkway, Mechanicsburg, PA 17050
Phone:  717-728-4109, 717-728-2573
E-mail: ra-crpadocsecretary@pa.gov

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf
Address: 508 Main Capitol Building, Harrisburg, PA 17120
Phone:  717-787-2500
Fax: 717-772-8284
Email: governor@pa.gov
                      
Your support of Prison Radio allowed us to recently record: Mumia Abu-Jamal, Kenneth Hartman, Reverend Edward Pinkney, Shaka Zulu, Jane Dorotik, Bill Dunne, Bryant Arroyo, Troy Thomas, Mondo We Langa (David Rice), and more.

Mumia's and other commentators' searing truth is needed on the radio. Listen to these commentaries at prisonradio.org.

Mumia Abu-Jamal:
137 Shots (2:00)

Kenneth Hartman:
Stop Strip Searching My Mom (4:21)

Bryant Arroyo:
The Unconstitutional AEDPA (11:06)
As you know, we are pulling out all the stops to free Mumia and keep him alive. Together with International Concerned Friends and Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal & the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC) we placed this full page Ad in The Nation Magazine. Please print it out and share it with friends. Please sign it at bit.ly/OpenLetterForMumia. Please help us print this Ad. It is costing $4K to design, print and motivate. Please take a moment to help Prison Radio make it happen, by sending a gift now.

Support Prison Radio

$35 to become a member.

$50 to become a member and receive a beautiful tote bag. Or call us to special order a yoga mat bag.

$100 to become a member and receive the DVD "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary."

$300 to become a member and bring one essay to the airwaves.

$1,000 (or $88 per month) will make you a member of our Prison Radio Freedom Circle. Thank you!
Support Prison Radio

To give by check:
Prison Radio/Redwood Justice Fund
PO Box 411074
San Francisco, CA
94141

Stock or legacy gifts:
Noelle Hanrahan
(415) 706 - 5222
Prison Radio is a project of the Redwood Justice Fund a CA 501c3 non profit.

Prison Radio has recorded Mumia and other political prisoners for over 25 years, and we are pulling out all the stops to keep these voices on the air. 

Please donate today to amplify prisoners' voices far and wide beyond the bars:

     Support Prison Radio: prisonradio.org/donate
     Defeat SB 508: bit.ly/defendfreespeech


Copyright © Prison Radio

www,prisonradio.org 415-706-5222

Our mailing address is:

Prison Radio PO Box 411074, SF CA 94141

http://us10.campaign-archive2.com/?u=247585f092e945ff55b9a1bb2&id=e113d0b6d0&e=0107d76ccd

Donate Now

$35 is the yearly membership.

$50 will get you a beautiful tote bag (you can special order a yoga mat bag, just call us).

$100 will get the DVD "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary"

$300 will bring one essay to the airwaves.

$1000 (or $88.83 per month) will make you a member of our Prison Radio Freedom Circle. Take a moment and Support Prison Radio

Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,

Noelle Hanrahan, Director, Prison Radio

PRISON RADIO

P.O. Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141

www.prisonradio.org
info@prisonradio.org 415-706-5222


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The  Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Mobilizes Support Internationally:
No Execution by Medical Neglect!

International Unions Demand Decent Medical Treatment for Mumia Abu-Jamal

June 2, 2015

Mumia Abu-Jamal was recently sent back to prison after having been hospitalized for the second time. There are some reports that his health is improving. He said to Suzanne Ross of the International Concerned Friends and Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal that “if there had not been an international outcry about the lack of appropriate treatment, in fact AGAINST the 'treatment' that was bringing him so close to death, he was sure he would not be alive today”.

In some good news, he was also told by the prison doctor that his biopsy results came back negative.
However, neither Mumia nor his wife, lawyers or consulting doctors have been seen the actual medical reports detailing his condition. The Department of Corrections refuses to hand over his medical records, claiming that they don't have to hand them over because there is litigation to have them released! Denying Mumia and his family his medical records is an outrage!
We would like to inform you about some recent actions taken by unions around the world on behalf of Mumia.

- Unite, the largest union in the UK, representing over 1.4 million members, wrote letters to Governor Tom Wolf, Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel and Legal Counsel Theron Perez protesting Mumia's treatment.

- The International Dockworkers Council, representing 90,000 dockworkers from affiliated unions around the world, wrote an appeal to the labor movement calling for action on behalf of Mumia.
- The Inlandboatmen's Union of the Pacific sent a protest letter to Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel.

We hope that you will continue to take action on behalf of Mumia. Please call and email Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel and demand the following:

1) Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man! He should be freed immediatel
2) Confirm what Mumia's medical condition is. Release his medical records to his family and lawyers!

3) Allow Mumia to be given medical treatment from a doctor of his choice. His doctor should be allowed to conduct an on-site medical examination, to communicate by phone with Mumia, and to communicate freely with prison medical staff.

4) Allow Mumia daily visits from his family, friends and lawyers!

5) Conduct an independent investigation of healthcare treatment inside the Pennsylvania prison system!DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, SECRETARY JOHN WETZEL 717 728 4109

We are also attaching a sample union resolution for you to use as a template. Please consider submitting it to your union and asking them to take action on behalf of Mumia. We would also be happy to work with you and make a presentation to your union or community group about his condition.

The Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jam


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Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson

Lorenzo Speaks Concerning Prosecution's Brief:

JANUARY 1, 2015—The prosecutor has run away from (almost) every issue raised in my PCRA by begging the Court to dismiss everything as “untimely”. When they don’t do this, they suggest that me and my lawyers were “defamatory” towards either my former prosecutor Christopher Abruzzo or Detective Kevin Duffin, in our claims they withheld, misused or hid evidence of my Innocence, in order to secure an unjust conviction in this case. If I charged, a year ago, that about a dozen AGs (attorneys general) were involved in circulating porno via their office computers, people would’ve laughed at me, and seen me as crazy.

But, guess what? During 2014, we learned that this was the truth. How can it be defamatory to speak the truth? Notice the OAG (Office of Attorney General), never said the obvious: That AG Abruzzo didn’t inform the Defense about the relationship between his Motive Witness and his head detective (Victoria Doubs and Det. Duffin); that Det. Duffin doesn’t deny Doubs was his god-sister, and that she lived in his family home, or that he assisted her whenever she got into trouble.

Why not? Because it is true. How can you defame someone who defames himself? Mr. Christopher Abruzzo, Esq., when a member of the higher ranks of the OAG, sent and/or received copious amounts of porno to other attorneys general and beyond. What does this say about his sense of judgment? He thought enough about his behavior to resign from his post in the Governor’s Cabinet. If he thought that his behavior was okay, he’d still be sitting in the Governor’s cabinet, right? The OAG cannot honestly oppose anything we’ve argued, but they try by seeking to get the Court to do their dirty work, how? By denying an Evidentiary Hearing to prove every point we’ve claimed.

The prosecution is trying desperately to avoid dealing with the substance of my claims in Com. v. Lorenzo Johnson. So, they slander my Legal Team and blame them for defaming the good AG’s and Cops involved with this case. They try to do what is undeniable, to deny that they hid evidence from the Defense for years. They blamed me for daring to protest the hidden evidence of their malfeasance and other acts to sabotage the defense. They claim that they had an “Open File” policy with my trial counsel. But “Open File” is more than letting an attorney read something in their office. If it’s a search for the truth it must include what is turned over to the attorney, for how do we really know what was shown to her?

They say it is inconceivable that an attorney would read a file, beginning on page nine (9), and not ask for the preceding eight (8) pages. Yet, it is conceivable if trial counsel was ineffective for not demanding the record of the first eight pages. Pages that identify the State’s only witness as a “SUSPECT” in the murder for which her client was charged! How could such an attorney fail to recognize the relevance of such an issue, barring their sheer Ineffectiveness and frankly, Incompetence.

By seeking to avoid an evidentiary hearing, the prosecution seeks to avoid evidence of their wrongdoing being made plain, for all to see. If they believe I’m wrong, why not prove it? They can’t. So they shout I filed my appeal untimely, as if there can ever justly be a rule that precludes an innocent from proving his innocence! Not to mention the fact that the prosecution has failed to even mention the positive finger prints that ay my trial they said none existed. Don’t try to hide it with a lame argument about time. When isn’t there a time for truth? The prosecution should be ashamed of itself for taking this road. It is unworthy of an office that claims to seek justice.

After the trial verdict The Patriot-News (March 18, 1997) reported, “Deputy Attorney General Christopher Abruzzo admitted there were some serious concerns about the strength of the evidence against Johnson and praised the jury for doing a thorough job.” I guess he forgot to mention all of the evidence he left out to show Innocence.

Now, more than ever, Lorenzo Johnson needs your support.

Publicize his case; bring it to your friends, clubs, religious

and social organizations.

SIGN LORENZO JOHNSON'S FREEDOM PETITION

http://www.freelorenzojohnson.org/sign-the-petition.html

CONTRIBUTE TO LORENZO'S CAMPAIGN FOR FREEDOM!

http://www.freelorenzojohnson.org/how-can-i-help.html

Write: Lorenzo Johnson, DF 1036

            SCI Mahanoy

            301 Morea Rd.

            Frackville, PA 17932

 Email: Lorenzo Johnson through JPAY.com code:

              Lorenzo Johnson DF 1036 PA DOC


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 Join the Fight to Free Rev. Pinkney!

Click HERE to view in browser

http://www.iacenter.org/prisoners/freepinkney-1-28-15/
   

On December 15, 2014 the Rev. Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan was thrown into prison for 2.5 to 10 years. This 66-year-old leading African American activist was tried and convicted in front of an all-white jury and racist white judge and prosecutor for supposedly altering 5 dates on a recall petition against the mayor of Benton Harbor.

The prosecutor, with the judge’s approval, repeatedly told the jury “you don’t need evidence to convict Mr. Pinkney.” And ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE WAS EVER PRESENTED THAT TIED REV. PINKNEY TO THE ‘ALTERED’ PETITIONS. Rev. Pinkney was immediately led away in handcuffs and thrown into Jackson Prison.

This is an outrageous charge. It is an outrageous conviction. It is an even more outrageous sentence! It must be appealed.

With your help supporters need to raise $20,000 for Rev. Pinkney’s appeal.

Checks can be made out to BANCO (Black Autonomy Network Community Organization). This is the organization founded by Rev. Pinkney.  Mail them to: Mrs. Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union Street, Benton Harbor, MI 49022.

Donations can be accepted on-line at bhbanco.org – press the donate button.

For information on the decade long campaign to destroy Rev. Pinkney go to bhbanco.org and workers.org(search “Pinkney”).

We urge your support to the efforts to Free Rev. Pinkney!Ramsey Clark – Former U.S. attorney general,
Cynthia McKinney – Former member of U.S. Congress,
Lynne Stewart – Former political prisoner and human rights attorney
Ralph Poynter – New Abolitionist Movement,
Abayomi Azikiwe – Editor, Pan-African News Wire<
Larry Holmes – Peoples Power Assembly,
David Sole – Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice
Sara Flounders – International Action Center

MESSAGE FROM REV. PINKNEY

I am now in Marquette prison over 15 hours from wife and family, sitting in prison for a crime that was never committed. Judge Schrock and Mike Sepic both admitted there was no evidence against me but now I sit in prison facing 30 months. Schrock actually stated that he wanted to make an example out of me. (to scare Benton Harbor residents even more...) ONLY IN AMERICA. I now have an army to help fight Berrien County. When I arrived at Jackson state prison on Dec. 15, I met several hundred people from Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids. Some people recognized me. There was an outstanding amount of support given by the prison inmates. When I was transported to Marquette Prison it took 2 days. The prisoners knew who I was. One of the guards looked me up on the internet and said, "who would believe Berrien County is this racist." 

Background to Campaign to free Rev. Pinkney

Michigan political prisoner the Rev. Edward Pinkney is a victim of racist injustice. He was sentenced to 30 months to 10 years for supposedly changing the dates on 5 signatures on a petition to recall Benton Harbor Mayor James Hightower.

No material or circumstantial evidence was presented at the trial that would implicate Pinkney in the purported5 felonies. Many believe that Pinkney, a Berrien County activist and leader of the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization (BANCO), is being punished by local authorities for opposing the corporate plans of Whirlpool Corp, headquartered in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

In 2012, Pinkney and BANCO led an “Occupy the PGA [Professional Golfers’ Association of America]” demonstration against a world-renowned golf tournament held at the newly created Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. The course was carved out of Jean Klock Park, which had been donated to the city of Benton Harbor decades ago.

Berrien County officials were determined to defeat the recall campaign against Mayor Hightower, who opposed a program that would have taxed local corporations in order to create jobs and improve conditions in Benton Harbor, a majority African-American municipality. Like other Michigan cities, it has been devastated by widespread poverty and unemployment.

The Benton Harbor corporate power structure has used similar fraudulent charges to stop past efforts to recall or vote out of office the racist white officials, from mayor, judges, prosecutors in a majority Black city. Rev Pinkney who always quotes scripture, as many Christian ministers do, was even convicted for quoting scripture in a newspaper column. This outrageous conviction was overturned on appeal. We must do this again!

To sign the petition in support of the Rev. Edward Pinkney, log on to: tinyurl.com/ps4lwyn.

Contributions for Rev. Pinkney’s defense can be sent to BANCO at Mrs Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union St., Benton Harbor, MI 49022

Or you can donate on-line at bhbanco.org.

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COURAGE TO RESIST

 http://couragetoresist.org/

New Action--write letters to DoD officials requesting clemency for Chelsea!

Secretary of the Army John McHugh

President Obama has delegated review of Chelsea Manning’s clemency appeal to individuals within the Department of Defense.

Please write them to express your support for heroic WikiLeaks’ whistle-blower former US Army intelligence analyst PFC Chelsea Manning’s release from military prison.

It is important that each of these authorities realize the wide support that Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning enjoys worldwide. They need to be reminded that millions understand that Manning is a political prisoner, imprisoned for following her conscience. While it is highly unlikely that any of these individuals would independently move to release Manning, a reduction in Manning’s outrageous 35-year prison sentence is a possibility at this stage.

Take action TODAY – Write letters supporting Chelsea’s clemency petition to the following DoD authorities:

Secretary of the Army John McHugh

101 Army Pentagon

Washington, DC 20310-0101

The Judge Advocate General

2200 Army Pentagon

Washington, DC 20310-2200

Army Clemency and Parole Board

251 18th St, Suite 385

Arlington, VA 22202-3532

Directorate of Inmate Administration

Attn: Boards Branch

U.S. Disciplinary Barracks

1301 N. Warehouse Road

Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027-2304

Suggestions for letters send to DoD officials:

The letter should focus on your support for Chelsea Manning, and especially why you believe justice will be served if Chelsea Manning’s sentence is reduced.  The letter should NOT be anti-military as this will be unlikely to help.

A suggested message: “Chelsea Manning has been punished enough for violating military regulations in the course of being true to her conscience.  I urge you to use your authorityto reduce Pvt. Manning’s sentence to time served.”  Beyond that general message, feel free to personalize the details as to why you believe Chelsea deserves clemency.

Consider composing your letter on personalized letterhead -you can create this yourself (here are templates and some tips for doing that).

A comment on this post will NOT be seen by DoD authorities–please send your letters to the addresses above

This clemency petition is separate from Chelsea Manning’s upcoming appeal before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals next year, where Manning’s new attorney Nancy Hollander will have an opportunity to highlight the prosecution’s—and the trial judge’s—misconduct during last year’s trial at Ft. Meade, Maryland.

Help us continue to cover 100% of Chelsea’s legal fees at this critical stage!


Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org


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B. ARTICLES IN FULL


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1) In Bed-Stuy Housing Market, Profit and Preservation Battle
By





2) In Charleston, a Millennial Race Terrorist
By Charles M. Blow





3) ‘The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning’
The murder of three men and six women at a church in Charleston is a national tragedy, but in America, the killing of black people is an unending spectacle.
By CLAUDIA RANKINE




4) Risk of Extreme Weather From Climate Change to Rise Over Next Century, Report Says
By





5) Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up?
By




6) More Americans Are Renting, and Paying More, as Homeownership Falls
By




7) At the Women’s World Cup, a Memento Players Are Stuck With and Stuck To
By
JUNE 23, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/sports/a-memento-players-carry-with-them-like-it-or-not.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below




8) Homegrown Radicals More Deadly Than Jihadis in U.S.
By




9) Freddie Gray’s Death Was Homicide, Autopsy Says
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS




10) New York City Settles Wrongful Conviction Case in Brooklyn for $6.25 Million
By




11) Prosecutors Say Officer Didn’t Help Man He Shot in Brooklyn Stairwell
By ILEANA NAJARRO and





12) Confederate Flags and Institutional Racism
By Charles M. Blow




13) Middle-Class Black Families, in Low-Income Neighborhoods
By




14) Racism’s Psychological Toll
Interview by




15) California: 3 Officers Convicted of Beating Jail Visitor
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS




16) Georgia: 3 Indicted in Killing of Student at Jail
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS









































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1) In Bed-Stuy Housing Market, Profit and Preservation Battle
By

On many days when the weather is accommodating, William Scarbrough stands outside the dry cleaner where he works, on the corner of Stuyvesant Avenue and Halsey Street in Brooklyn, observing the pedestrian traffic that distinguishes Bedford-Stuyvesant as perhaps the city’s most frenetic real-estate frontier. A tall and slender man of 60, he has lived several blocks from the cleaners for close to a year now, during which he has watched investors and developers canvass the streets looking for properties from which they might extract significant profits.

“They’re up and down here every day,” he told me, as he recounted getting approached by someone who offered him money to unearth information about the owners of a neighboring townhouse. “I thought about it for 10 minutes and then deleted the guy’s number from my phone,” Mr. Scarbrough said, remarking that he had no interest in facilitating the current venalities.

It is standard in Bedford-Stuyvesant to see posters calling on locals to join the dubious mission of turnover. “If you find someone who want to sell you will get up to $20.000.00 for finder fee,” reads one, somewhat inexplicably. In response to all of this, fliers in the neighborhood recently warned older black homeowners, many living in brownstones passed down through generations, to protect themselves from getting bilked by predatory, and by implication, racist real-estate interests. (“Free leg or thigh if you sell your grandma’s deed!” one of them proclaimed. This particular enticement to fury ran under the headline “Landgrabbers Realty Corp.,” and featured a drawing of a drumstick.)

The just-under-three square miles that make up Bedford-Stuyvesant have long represented one of the highest concentrations of black homeownership in the country, which gives the gentrification narrative there a distinct cast, one that in many cases is complicated less by the issue of displacement than the matter of threatening the right to maximize assets. “This is not simply a story about a nice, young white couple buying a house in Bed-Stuy,” Brenda Fryson, who has lived in a townhouse in the coveted Stuyvesant Heights section since the ’70s, told me. We were sitting in her sunroom overlooking her backyard recently. “That’s not the real issue. Bed-Stuy has always been a welcoming community. But it’s not welcome to wholesale investors and scams.”

I met Ms. Fryson through her friend and neighbor Barbara Sidbury, who has spent the entirety of her 81 years in Bedford-Stuyvesant, having bought her first house in the 1970s for $5,500. Ms. Sidbury worked wrapping meat for 48 years, many of them spent at a Grand Union on Church Avenue in Flatbush. Over time she bought and sold several brownstones and became a millionaire. Recently she bought a four-bedroom vacation home in Arizona with a pool, in a community that she noted is less than 1 percent black.

About two years ago, she said, while standing outside of her home on Decatur Street, a man got out of a car and asked her if she wanted to sell it. “ ‘I’ll give you $300,000 in cash,’ he said.” She answered mockingly, “Oh, that’s too bad because I just sold it for $100,000 in cash this morning.” She would go on to sell the house for $1.7 million through Ban Leow, a well-known broker in the neighborhood who moved to New York from Malaysia 22 years ago to work in his family’s restaurant business. The sale cemented Mr. Leow’s reputation as an unlikely hero among some older black residents.

“When I sold my house for 1.7, I ran and told everyone because I didn’t want people getting ripped off anymore,” Ms. Sidbury said. “Nobody shared information. Your neighbor would sell a house and nobody would know. ‘Don’t let anybody know your business.’ That’s what some people think. Everything is a secret. We’re still in a slave mentality.”Ms. Sidbury has worked to balance her real estate interests with an eye toward profit and preservation. A few years ago, she told me, she chose to sell another house she owned to a young black psychiatrist who offered her $830,000 instead of selling it to a white buyer who had offered her over $1 million. While the notion of privileging one race over another might seem problematic, the women see themselves as agents of a continuing history that seems more and more under assault. When Ms. Fryson and her husband bought their house four decades ago, she said, the seller told her a white buyer had come to the house with a bag full of cash. “She said, ‘But I wanted you children to have this house.’ ”

It is hard to overstate the acquisition frenzy that hangs over Bedford-Stuyvesant, and to reconcile it with some of the realities that persist in the neighborhood, where the felony assault rate is more than three times what it is in Park Slope. When I met Mr. Leow and his team last week — a team that includes a young broker named Mipam Thurman, the brother of the actress Uma Thurman, who told me he had to move to Flatbush because he couldn’t afford to buy anything in Bedford-Stuyvesant — they showed me a house on Lafayette Avenue that had just gone into contract for slightly under the asking price of $1,550,000. In October it had sold for $880,000, according to Property Shark, and still needed the kind of renovation that would send a person straight to a limitless prescription for Ativan.

“The gentrification conversation sucks up all the energy when this community has real problems,” Ms. Fryson told me. She talked about poverty and the gun violence she thought was escalating. I had met Mr. Scarbrough, in fact, following the visit to the Lafayette Avenue house, an hour after he had been held up at gunpoint at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, when three teenagers came in to rob the dry cleaner. This was the third armed robbery in the area in the past several weeks, the police standing outside said. In this instance, the robbers walked away with $100.


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2) In Charleston, a Millennial Race Terrorist
By Charles M. Blow

“You don’t have to do this,” said Tywanza Sanders to the young man who suddenly rose and drew a gun, and according to witnesses, said he was there “to shoot black people.”

He had been sitting in the Bible study session at Charleston, S.C.’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church for an hour, next to the pastor, debating scripture.

Dylann Storm Roof, the unassuming, boyish-looking man with the bowl-cut hair, replied: “Yes. You are raping our women and taking over the country.”

Then he “took aim at the oldest person present, Susie Jackson, 87.” This according to Sanders’s cousin, Kristen Washington, as reported in The New York Times.

Roof opened fire, killing nine; Jackson was the eldest slain, and her nephew, Sanders, the youngest at 26. Four of the dead were reverends — one of whom was the church’s pastor, a South Carolina state senator, Clementa Pinckney.

This was a savage act of barbarism by a young man baptized in a theology of race hate.

There are so many threads to pull on this story that one hardly knows where to begin, but let’s begin here: Roof was only 21 years old. He is a millennial race terrorist. Roof was born in 1994, 30 years after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

He had a white power flag fetish. He was once pictured wearing a jacket emblazoned with an apartheid-era South African flag and another flag of “Rhodesia, as modern-day Zimbabwe was called during a period of white rule,” according to The Times. Apartheid ended the year Roof was born, and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe long before that.

Who radicalized Roof? Who passed along the poison? We must never be lulled into a false belief that racism is dying off with older people. As I’ve written in this space before, Spencer Piston, an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University, has found that “younger (under-30) whites are just as likely as older ones to view whites as more intelligent and harder-working than African-Americans.”

Racism is to social progress what cockroaches are to nuclear fallout — extraordinarily resilient.

Furthermore, there is a widely published photo of Roof sitting on his car with an ornamental license plate with Confederate flags on it. That is the same Confederate flag that flies on the grounds of the state Capitol. What signal is South Carolina sending?

There is the thread of couching his cowardice as chivalry, framing his selfish hatred as noble altruism in defense of white femininity from the black brute. So much black blood has been spilled and so many black necks noosed in the name of protecting white femininity, and by extension, white purity. Roof is only this trope’s latest instrument.

Then there is the question of whether to call this terrorism. Terrorism, as commonly defined, suggests that the act must have some political motivation. (By defining it this way, we conveniently exclude that long legacy of racial terrorism as a political tool of intimidation and control in this country.) And yet, this case may even reach that bar.

Reuters reported Friday that the case “is being investigated by the Justice Department as a possible case of domestic terrorism.” But whether it reaches the legal definition of domestic terrorism (it has already passed the common sense definition), some conservatives have even been reticent to call it a hate crime, which it surely is, rather preferring to twist this massacre into their quixotic crusade to establish evidence of a war on Christianity in this country.On Fox News’s “Fox and Friends,” one host called the killings “a horrifying attack on faith.”

Another anchor on the show chimed in, responding to the comments of a guest: “Extraordinarily, they called it a hate crime. Uh, and some look at it as, ‘Well, it’s because it was a white guy, apparently, and a black church,’ but you made a great point just a moment ago about the hostility towards Christians. And it was a church! So, maybe that’s what they’re talking about. They haven’t explained it to us.”

Oh Fox, there is so much that needs explaining to you. First, Roof was a member of a Lutheran church in Columbia, S.C. As Rev. Tony Metze of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church confirmed to the Huffington Post, “He was on the roll of our congregation.” Lutheranism is one of the branches of Protestant Christianity.

Beyond that, according to CNN, “a friend recalled a drunken Roof ranting one night about his unspecified six-month plan ‘to do something crazy’ in order ‘to start a race war.’ ”

CNN also reported that Roof confessed his intention to cause a race war to investigators. This wasn’t a war on Christianity, but a war on black people.

Roof was a young man radicalized to race hatred who reportedly wanted to start a race war and who killed nine innocent people as his opening salvo. If that’s not terrorism, we need to redefine the term.



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3) ‘The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning’
The murder of three men and six women at a church in Charleston is a national tragedy, but in America, the killing of black people is an unending spectacle.
By CLAUDIA RANKINE

A friend recently told me that when she gave birth to her son, before naming him, before even nursing him, her first thought was, I have to get him out of this country. We both laughed. Perhaps our black humor had to do with understanding that getting out was neither an option nor the real desire. This is it, our life. Here we work, hold citizenship, pensions, health insurance, family, friends and on and on. She couldn’t, she didn’t leave. Years after his birth, whenever her son steps out of their home, her status as the mother of a living human being remains as precarious as ever. Added to the natural fears of every parent facing the randomness of life is this other knowledge of the ways in which institutional racism works in our country. Ours was the laughter of vulnerability, fear, recognition and an absurd stuckness.

I asked another friend what it’s like being the mother of a black son. “The condition of black life is one of mourning,” she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son’s reality: At any moment she might lose her reason for living. Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.

Eleven days after I was born, on Sept. 15, 1963, four black girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. Now, 52 years later, six black women and three black men have been shot to death while at a Bible-study meeting at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. They were killed by a homegrown terrorist, self-identifed as a white supremacist, who might also be a “disturbed young man” (as various news outlets have described him). It has been reported that a black woman and her 5-year-old granddaughter survived the shooting by playing dead. They are two of the three survivors of the attack. The white family of the suspect says that for them this is a difficult time. This is indisputable. But for African-American families, this living in a state of mourning and fear remains commonplace.

The spectacle of the shooting suggests an event out of time, as if the killing of black people with white-supremacist justification interrupts anything other than regular television programming. But Dylann Storm Roof did not create himself from nothing. He has grown up with the rhetoric and orientation of racism. He has seen white men like Benjamin F. Haskell, Thomas Gleason and Michael Jacques plead guilty to, or be convicted of, burning Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield, Mass., just hours after President Obama was elected. Every racist statement he has made he could have heard all his life. He, along with the rest of us, has been living with slain black bodies.

We live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here. Dying in ship hulls, tossed into the Atlantic, hanging from trees, beaten, shot in churches, gunned down by the police or warehoused in prisons: Historically, there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against. When blacks become overwhelmed by our culture’s disorder and protest (ultimately to our own detriment, because protest gives the police justification to militarize, as they did in Ferguson), the wrongheaded question that is asked is, What kind of savages are we? Rather than, What kind of country do we live in?

In 1955, when Emmett Till’s mutilated and bloated body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River and placed for burial in a nailed-shut pine box, his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, demanded his body be transported from Mississippi, where Till had been visiting relatives, to his home in Chicago. Once the Chicago funeral home received the body, she made a decision that would create a new pathway for how to think about a lynched body. She requested an open coffin and allowed photographs to be taken and published of her dead son’s disfigured body.

Mobley’s refusal to keep private grief private allowed a body that meant nothing to the criminal-justice system to stand as evidence. By placing both herself and her son’s corpse in positions of refusal relative to the etiquette of grief, she “disidentified” with the tradition of the lynched figure left out in public view as a warning to the black community, thereby using the lynching tradition against itself. The spectacle of the black body, in her hands, publicized the injustice mapped onto her son’s corpse. “Let the people see what I see,” she said, adding, “I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me.”

It’s very unlikely that her belief in a national mourning was fully realized, but her desire to make mourning enter our day-to-day world was a new kind of logic. In refusing to look away from the flesh of our domestic murders, by insisting we look with her upon the dead, she reframed mourning as a method of acknowledgment that helped energize the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s.

The decision not to release photos of the crime scene in Charleston, perhaps out of deference to the families of the dead, doesn’t forestall our mourning. But in doing so, the bodies that demonstrate all too tragically that “black skin is not a weapon” (as one protest poster read last year) are turned into an abstraction. It’s one thing to imagine nine black bodies bleeding out on a church floor, and another thing to see it. The lack of visual evidence remains in contrast to what we saw in Ferguson, where the police, in their refusal to move Michael Brown’s body, perhaps unknowingly continued where Till’s mother left off.

After Brown was shot six times, twice in the head, his body was left facedown in the street by the police officers. Whatever their reasoning, by not moving Brown’s corpse for four hours after his shooting, the police made mourning his death part of what it meant to take in the details of his story. No one could consider the facts of Michael Brown’s interaction with the Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson without also thinking of the bullet-riddled body bleeding on the asphalt. It would be a mistake to presume that everyone who saw the image mourned Brown, but once exposed to it, a person had to decide whether his dead black body mattered enough to be mourned. (Another option, of course, is that it becomes a spectacle for white pornography: the dead body as an object that satisfies an illicit desire. Perhaps this is where Dylann Storm Roof stepped in.)

Black Lives Matter, the movement founded by the activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, began with the premise that the incommensurable experiences of systemic racism creates an unequal playing field. The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility. This assumption both frames and determines our individual interactions and experiences as citizens.

The American tendency to normalize situations by centralizing whiteness was consciously or unconsciously demonstrated again when certain whites, like the president of Smith College, sought to alter the language of “Black Lives Matter” to “All Lives Matter.” What on its surface was intended to be interpreted as a humanist move — “aren’t we all just people here?” — didn’t take into account a system inured to black corpses in our public spaces. When the judge in the Charleston bond hearing for Dylann Storm Roof called for support of Roof’s family, it was also a subtle shift away from valuing the black body in our time of deep despair.

Anti-black racism is in the culture. It’s in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system. The unarmed, slain black bodies in public spaces turn grief into our everyday feeling that something is wrong everywhere and all the time, even if locally things appear normal. Having coffee, walking the dog, reading the paper, taking the elevator to the office, dropping the kids off at school: All of this good life is surrounded by the ambient feeling that at any given moment, a black person is being killed in the street or in his home by the armed hatred of a fellow American.

The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness. Mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives. Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us. If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.

The truth, as I see it, is that if black men and women, black boys and girls, mattered, if we were seen as living, we would not be dying simply because whites don’t like us. Our deaths inside a system of racism existed before we were born. The legacy of black bodies as property and subsequently three-fifths human continues to pollute the white imagination. To inhabit our citizenry fully, we have to not only understand this, but also grasp it. In the words of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, “The problem is we have to find some way with these dialogues to show and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical.” And, as my friend the critic and poet Fred Moten has written: “I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world and I want to be in that.” This other world, that world, would presumably be one where black living matters. But we can’t get there without fully recognizing what is here.

Dylann Storm Roof’s unmediated hatred of black people; Black Lives Matter; citizens’ videotaping the killings of blacks; the Ferguson Police Department leaving Brown’s body in the street — all these actions support Mamie Till Mobley’s belief that we need to see or hear the truth. We need the truth of how the bodies died to interrupt the course of normal life. But if keeping the dead at the forefront of our consciousness is crucial for our body politic, what of the families of the dead? How must it feel to a family member for the deceased to be more important as evidence than as an individual to be buried and laid to rest?

Michael Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, was kept away from her son’s body because it was evidence. She was denied the rights of a mother, a sad fact reminiscent of pre-Civil War times, when as a slave she would have had no legal claim to her offspring. McSpadden learned of her new identity as a mother of a dead son from bystanders: “There were some girls down there had recorded the whole thing,” she told reporters. One girl, she said, “showed me a picture on her phone. She said, ‘Isn’t that your son?’ I just bawled even harder. Just to see that, my son lying there lifeless, for no apparent reason.” Circling the perimeter around her son’s body, McSpadden tried to disperse the crowd: “All I want them to do is pick up my baby.”

McSpadden, unlike Mamie Till Mobley, seemed to have little desire to expose her son’s corpse to the media. Her son was not an orphan body for everyone to look upon. She wanted him covered and removed from sight. He belonged to her, her baby. After Brown’s corpse was finally taken away, two weeks passed before his family was able to see him. This loss of control and authority might explain why after Brown’s death, McSpadden was supposedly in the precarious position of accosting vendors selling T-shirts that demanded justice for Michael Brown that used her son’s name. Not only were the procedures around her son’s corpse out of her hands; his name had been commoditized and assimilated into our modes of capitalism.

Some of McSpadden’s neighbors in Ferguson also wanted to create distance between themselves and the public life of Brown’s death. They did not need a constant reminder of the ways black bodies don’t matter to law-enforcement officers in their neighborhood. By the request of the community, the original makeshift memorial — with flowers, pictures, notes and teddy bears — was finally removed by Brown’s father on what would have been his birthday and replaced by an official plaque installed on the sidewalk next to where Brown died. The permanent reminder can be engaged or stepped over, depending on the pedestrian’s desires.

In order to be away from the site of the murder of her son, Tamir Rice, Samaria moved out of her Cleveland home and into a homeless shelter. (Her family eventually relocated her.) “The whole world has seen the same video like I’ve seen,” she said about Tamir’s being shot by a police officer. The video, which was played and replayed in the media, documented the two seconds it took the police to arrive and shoot; the two seconds that marked the end of her son’s life and that became a document to be examined by everyone. It’s possible this shared scrutiny explains why the police held his 12-year-old body for six months after his death. Everyone could see what the police would have to explain away. The justice system wasn’t able to do it, and a judge found probable cause to charge the officer who shot Rice with murder. Meanwhile, for Samaria Rice, her unburied son’s memory made her neighborhood unbearable.

Regardless of the wishes of these mothers — mothers of men like Brown, John Crawford III or Eric Garner, and also mothers of women and girls like Rekia Boyd and Aiyana Stanley-Jones, each of whom was killed by the police — their children’s deaths will remain within the public discourse. For those who believe the same behavior that got them killed if exhibited by a white man or boy would not have ended his life, the subsequent failure to indict or convict the police officers involved in these various cases requires that public mourning continue and remain present indefinitely. “I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back,” Toni Morrison said in April. She went on to say: “I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’ I will say yes.” Morrison is right to suggest that this action would signal change, but the real change needs to be a rerouting of interior belief. It’s an individual challenge that needs to happen before any action by a political justice system would signify true societal change.

The Charleston murders alerted us to the reality that a system so steeped in anti-black racism means that on any given day it can be open season on any black person — old or young, man, woman or child. There exists no equivalent reality for white Americans. The Confederate battle flag continues to fly at South Carolina’s statehouse as a reminder of a history marked by lynched black bodies. We can distance ourselves from this fact until the next horrific killing, but we won’t be able to outrun it. History’s authority over us is not broken by maintaining a silence about its continued effects.

A sustained state of national mourning for black lives is called for in order to point to the undeniability of their devaluation. The hope is that recognition will break a momentum that laws haven’t altered. Susie Jackson; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton; DePayne Middleton-Doctor; Ethel Lee Lance; the Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr.; the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney; Cynthia Hurd; Tywanza Sanders and Myra Thompson were murdered because they were black. It’s extraordinary how ordinary our grief sits inside this fact. One friend said, “I am so afraid, every day.” Her son’s childhood feels impossible, because he will have to be — has to be — so much more careful. Our mourning, this mourning, is in time with our lives. There is no life outside of our reality here. Is this something that can be seen and known by parents of white children? This is the question that nags me. National mourning, as advocated by Black Lives Matter, is a mode of intervention and interruption that might itself be assimilated into the category of public annoyance. This is altogether possible; but also possible is the recognition that it’s a lack of feeling for another that is our problem. Grief, then, for these deceased others might align some of us, for the first time, with the living.

Claudia Rankine is a professor of English at Pomona College. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including, most recently, “Citizen.”





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4) Risk of Extreme Weather From Climate Change to Rise Over Next Century, Report Says
By

WASHINGTON — More people will be exposed to floods, droughts, heat waves and other extreme weather associated with climate change over the next century than previously thought, according to a new report in the British medical journal The Lancet.

The report, published online Monday, analyzes the health effects of recent episodes of severe weather that scientists have linked to climate change. It provides estimates of the number of people who are likely to experience the effects of climate change in coming decades, based on projections of population and demographic changes.

The report estimates that the exposure of people to extreme rainfall will more than quadruple and the exposure of people to drought will triple compared to the 1990s. In the same time span, the exposure of the older people to heat waves is expected to go up by a factor of 12, according to Peter Cox, one of the authors, who is a professor of climate-system dynamics at the University of Exeter in Britain.Climate projections typically are expressed as averages over large areas, including vast expanses, like oceans, where people do not live. The report calculates the risk to people by overlaying areas of the highest risk for climate events with expected human population increases. It also takes into account aging populations — for example, heat waves pose a greater health risk to old people.

The report is part of a series of efforts to analyze how climate change might affect human health. Other major climate reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global document, and the National Climate Assessment in the United States, have addressed the issue. But Professor Cox said the new report was the first large-scale effort to quantify the effects that different types of extreme weather would have on people.

“We are saying, let’s look at climate change from the perspective of what people are going to experience, rather than as averages across the globe,” he said. “We have to move away from thinking of this as a problem in atmospheric physics. It is a problem for people.”

The Lancet first convened scientists on the topic in 2009, and produced a report that declared climate change was “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.” Monday’s report notes that global carbon emission rates have risen above the worst-case scenarios used in 2009, and that in the absence of any major international agreement on cutting those rates, projections of mortality and illness and other effects, like famine, have worsened.

“Everything that was predicted in 2009 is already happening,” said Nick Watts, a public health expert at the Institute for Global Health at University College London, who led the team of more than 40 scientists from Europe, Africa and China that produced the report. “Now we need to take a further step forward. The science has substantially moved on.”

For years, climate change was presented in terms of natural habitats and the environment, but more recently, experts have been looking at how it might change life on earth for people. Scientists and some governments are trying to frame the dangers of climate change in health terms in order to persuade people that the topic is urgent, not simply a distant matter for scientists. Governments around the world are preparing for a United Nations summit meeting on climate change in Paris in December to discuss new policies to limit greenhouse-gas emissions.

The report measures the increase over time in “exposure events,” which it defines as the number of times people experience any given extreme weather event.

By the end of the century, the report estimates, the exposure to heat waves each year for older people around the world is expected to be around 3 billion more cases than in 1990. The number of times people of all ages are exposed to drought would increase by more than a billion a year. The rise in exposures to extreme rain would be around 2 billion a year by the end of the century, in part because populations are growing.

Even without climate change, the health problems that come along with economic development are significant, the authors note. About 1.2 million people died from illnesses related to air pollution in China in 2010, the report said.

Most broad climate reports do not go further than explaining the science, but much of the Lancet report is dedicated to policy prescriptions to slow or stop climate change and mute its effects on health. It notes that using fewer fossil fuels “is no longer primarily a technical or economic question — it is now a political one,” and urges governments to enact changes that would accomplish that.


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5) Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up?
By

Why are today’s working poor so quiescent? I’m not the only one posing this question.

“Why aren’t the poor storming the barricades?” asks The Economist. “Why don’t voters demand more redistribution?” wonders David Samuels, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. The headline on an April 7 National Catholic Reporter article reads: “Why aren’t Americans doing more to protest inequality?”

There are legitimate grounds for grievance. For those in the bottom quintile, household income in inflation-adjusted dollars has dropped sharply, from $13,787 in 2000 to $11,651 in 2013. According to the Census Bureau, 64 million Americans currently live in the bottom quintile.

Still, it’s possible that poverty is less grueling than in the past, for several reasons. First, although incomes have declined, the cost of many goods – televisions, computers, air-conditioners, household appliances, cellphones – has fallen, leaving the bottom quintile less deprived than simple income figures might reflect. Second, people nowadays marry and have children later in life than in the past, postponing some financial demands to better earning years. Third, some economists contend that commonly used inflation measures result in excessively high estimates of the real-world cost of goods for consumers, thus making living conditions less dire than they might otherwise be.

But there is another reason that there has not been broad public insurrection.

Society has drastically changed since the high-water mark of the 1930s and 1960s when collective movements captured the public imagination. Now, there is an inexorable pressure on individuals to, in effect, fly solo. There is very little social support for class-based protest – what used to be called solidarity.

Describing a process that sociologists have termed “individualization,” Christopher Ray, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in England, makes the point that individualization is, on one hand,

a positive, enabling and democratic phenomenon. On the other hand, the same dynamic generates the conditions of omnipresent and ever-changing risk, perceived as new obligations or burdens, and new forces bearing down on the individual and on local life.

People today, Ray continues, “are not only able to make choices in an ever-expanding range of situations, but they are also compelled to do so.”

In effect, individualization is a double-edged sword. In exchange for new personal freedoms and rights, beneficiaries are agreeing to, if not being forced to, assume new risks and responsibilities.

In addition to opening the door to self-fulfillment, “the rise of individual rights and freedoms has its price,” writes Nikolai Genov, a sociologist at the Berlin Free University in “Challenges of Individualization,” published earlier this year.

Placing an exclusive stress on the expansion of rights and freedoms of individuals by disregarding or underrating the concomitant rise of individual responsibilities brings about social pathologies. They undermine solidarity as the glue of social life.

As a result, individualization can come “at the expense of various forms of common good in general, and of various forms of solidarity in particular,” Genov observes.

Ulrich Beck, a German sociologist who died earlier this year, noted the obstructions to collective social action. In 2002, in his book “Individualization,” Beck wrote that those who in the past saw co-workers as colleagues and allies now face competitive pressures such that when “a shared background still exists, community is dissolved in the acid bath of competition.” The result is “the isolation of individuals within homogeneous social groups.”

Beck goes on to contend that in advanced nations people have been released “from traditional class ties and family supports.” That has forced people to use their own resources to determine their “fate in the labor market, with all its attendant risks, opportunities and contradictions.”

In a 2007 paper, Beck argues that in the new social order, traditional classes – and traditional bonds of community — are disappearing. In their place, an alternative social hierarchy has emerged with comparable inequities:

Risk and social inequality — indeed, risk and power — are two sides of the same coin. Risk presumes a decision, therefore a decision maker, and produces a radical asymmetry between those who take, define the risks and profit from them, and those who are assigned to them, who have to suffer the ‘unforeseen side effects’ of the decisions of others, perhaps even pay for them with their lives, without having had the chance to be involved in the decision-making process.

Insofar as individualization has taken hold in the United States, the prospects for collective action on behalf of the poor are dim, at best.

Collective action on behalf of the poor requires a shared belief in the obligation of the state to secure the well-being of the citizenry. That belief has been undermined by what Beck calls the “insourcing” of risk, transferring obligations from the state to the individual. This reallocation of responsibility has been studied from various angles.

In his book “The Great Risk Shift,” Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, joins the argument by documenting the economic pressures on individuals resulting from the widespread erosion of social insurance. “For decades, Americans and their government upheld a powerful set of ideals that combined a commitment to economic security with a faith in economic opportunity,” Hacker writes. “Today that message is starkly different: You are on your own.”

Collective social action, in turn, has been supplanted by a different kind of revolt. David John Frank, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, noted that the top priorities of the specific movements associated with individualization – “the feminist movement, lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender movements, the black power movement, the disability rights movement, and, most recently, the fat-acceptance movement” – do not lend themselves to broad economic demands on behalf of the less well off.

Instead, Frank wrote in a chapter of the 2013 book “The Future of Social Movement Research,”

concern with distributional inequities and injustices tends to take a back seat to procedural issues and injustices bearing on rights and associated matters of inclusion and exclusion and to group reputational issues.The most recent example of the populace’s rising up to substantially change the course of legislation was not in support of raising the minimum wage or of making the tax system more progressive. It was the enormous and successful outcry – three million emails to Congress, a petition with 4.5 million signatures, 2.4 million tweets and 10 million calls to members of Congress — over the attempted enactment of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012. Supporters of the net neutrality movement saw free or low-cost access to music and video resources on the Internet threatened by the measure. Their complaints, backed by tech firms whose profits depend on open access to the Internet — Google, Facebook, eBay, Twitter etc. – defeated the bill backed by their commercial adversaries, the music, motion picture and cable industries.

Compare the SOPA protest to the sole organized attempt to challenge the flow of wealth to the top 1 percent and the profits funneled to the finance industry: Occupy Wall Street, which collapsed in less than a year, despite intensive, generally favorable media coverage.

Instead of boosting prospects for the poor and working class, the agenda associated with individualization works in tandem with rapid technological advance, the internationalization of commerce and the demise of the paternalistic or loyalty-based workplace to exacerbate inequality. This agenda has contributed to an upheaval in traditional family structures. And the well educated and the affluent are better equipped to adapt to such upheaval while the less well off and the less well educated bear the brunt of change.

The differing consequences for those at the top and those at the bottom are visible in the class-based responses to a key element of individualization: changing sexual mores.

After a period of turbulence and high divorce rates in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the well educated are coming to terms with the sexual revolution by postponing marriage and delaying fertility as divorce rates for this class have stabilized or declined. The children of the affluent are, in turn, prospering.

Conversely, the less well off – from all backgrounds — have struggled with high levels of family dissolution, father absence and worklessness, leaving their own prospects, and those of their children, bleak.

The cultural pressures driving inequality are, in addition, reinforced by heightened competition that has accelerated the decline of unions, served to justify the Republican refusal to raise minimum wages and undermined the workplace stature of employees. The result has been not only surging incomes at the top and little or no growth for the rest, but a withdrawal of community from those who need it most.

All of which brings us back to the question of why there is so little rebellion against entrenched social and economic injustice.

The answer is that those bearing the most severe costs of inequality are irrelevant to the agenda-setters in both parties. They are political orphans in the new order. They may have a voice in urban politics, but on the national scene they no longer fit into the schema of the left or the right. They are pushed to the periphery except for a brief moment on Election Day when one party wants their votes counted, and the other doesn’t.


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6) More Americans Are Renting, and Paying More, as Homeownership Falls
By

WESTFIELD, N.J. — To Johnnie McDowell, the house on Livingston Street seems to taunt him every time he walks by. It’s nothing special: The two-story home is a bit shabby, and it’s been on and off the market in recent months without finding a buyer. Still, he cannot stop dreaming of a better life for his family as he imagines the extra space inside and his children and dog playing outdoors once he weeds the yard.

The McDowell family, however, remains squeezed into a rental apartment: a single floor of an oddly configured duplex that Mr. McDowell has fashioned into three small bedrooms for himself, his wife, Takiba, and two children. With a monthly rent of $1,400, car payments, unpredictable family expenses, a spotty credit report and an empty savings account, Mr. McDowell sees no way to soon pull together a decent down payment.“My wife and I have been wanting to go on the market to buy a house for years now,” Mr. McDowell, 41, said. “But bills, bills, bills and car notes and car insurance. We haven’t been able to save anything.”

In the past, many families like the McDowells, whose household income is almost $100,000 a year, would already be nestled in a starter home, maybe even on the cusp of upgrading to something bigger and more expensive on the profits from their first house.

But even as the market continues to improve — sales of existing homes in May increased to their highest pace in six years, the National Association of Realtors reported on Monday, and first-timers make up 32 percent of the buyers — it is leaving millions of Americans unwillingly stuck in rental housing.

“It’s more of a new normal,” said Robert J. Shiller, an economics professor at Yale University and a Nobel laureate. “We went through a wrenching experience with the biggest housing bubble and the biggest collapse since 1890. This is an anxious time.”

The nation’s homeownership rate has been falling for eight years, down to 63.7 percent in the first quarter of this year from a peak of over 69 percent in 2004, according to a new report released on Wednesday by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The flip side of the decline in homeownership is a boom in rentals and a significant rise in the cost of renting. On average, the number of new rental households has increased by 770,000 annually since 2004, the center’s report said, making 2004-14 the strongest 10-year stretch of rental growth since the late 1980s.

Many people living in rentals were once owners; they lost their homes to foreclosure and now have such damaged credit reports that they find it nearly impossible to qualify for a mortgage. Others are trapped because lenders have significantly tightened credit standards after the abuses of the boom era.

And while the federal government has created programs to encourage lenders to offer mortgages requiring only a small down payment, the efforts are so nascent that officials won’t say how many people have taken advantage of them.

Apart from the hangover from the housing collapse and the worst economic downturn since the 1930s, the nation’s changing demographics are also causing a major shift in housing trends. For instance, a majority of new households expected to be formed in coming years will consist of people with a minority background. Historically such Americans have had lower incomes and fewer assets and were less able to buy homes, according to the Urban Institute.

At the same time, millions of young adults who normally would be first-time home buyers are still struggling to find decent jobs; many are also putting off marriage and having children, a trigger for home buying. They are also more likely than previous generations to be saddled with heavy student loan payments that hurt their ability to save for a down payment.

But it is not just younger people who are having trouble owning a home. According to the Joint Center’s report, that rate dropped the fastest for people in their late 30s to early 50s. These people were in their prime home-buying years right before the recession; when housing prices plummeted, they were left with little or no equity.

“People in their 40s and 50s were very hard hit by the housing crisis,” said Chris Herbert, managing director of Harvard’s housing center. “They’ve been a bit of a forgotten generation.”

Some economists see signs of a turnaround, with reluctant renters like Mr. McDowell starting to find ways to enter the mortgage market, where interest rates are still at bargain levels. The economists predict home buying will continue to rise as long as the economy keeps growing and unemployment falls further, prodding employers to raise wages faster than inflation.

“With each passing year,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, “we’re making progress.”

But in the meantime, the flood of renters has reduced the national vacancy rate to its lowest point in nearly 20 years, according to the center’s report. And while builders are adding apartments rapidly, they are concentrating on the higher end of the market, pinching those in the middle and bottom. Last year, rents rose at a 3.2 percent rate, more than twice the pace of overall inflation.

“During the broader recovery, the jobs have been created in the same metro areas where housing is relatively scarce — Boston; San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; Seattle,” said Stan Humphries, chief economist at Zillow, a real estate website. “That’s inflamed rent appreciation.”

According to the housing center’s report, the share of renters paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent — defined as “cost burdened” — has held at near-record highs. In 2013, almost half of all renters fell into that category. The share of cost-burdened renters is growing among people with moderate incomes, those who earn from $30,000 to $75,000 a year, the report said.

The situation is particularly acute in New Jersey, where the McDowell family lives. According to an analysis of 2013 government data by Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit based in Columbia, Md., dedicated to creating more affordable housing, more than three out of 10 New Jersey renters spend at least half of their household income on rent and utilities, the second-highest rate in the nation, behind Florida.

Mr. McDowell is Exhibit A in the nation’s new housing schematic. The McDowells pay $800 a month for preschool tuition for their 5-year-old daughter, Erin. A big chunk of Mr. McDowell’s paychecks go to repay student loans, making his $70,000 annual salary seem much smaller.

Mr. McDowell and his wife have long commutes. After being stranded when his car broke down, he bought two new vehicles last year to ensure they both can get to work. Payments total about $750 a month.

The son of a single mother, Mr. McDowell has no family to tap for a financial gift or even a loan. He could move to a less expensive town where homes are cheaper, but he wants to stay in pricier Westfield for its good schools.

Mr. McDowell moved around a lot when he was growing up, and so he craves the opposite for his family: a place that he can be assured his children will call home for years. That fixer-upper on Livingston Street, listed for $200,000, could be the one. “It teases me,” he said.

On a recent warm evening, Mr. McDowell stood outside the broken white picket fence that lined the home, with Erin bouncing down the sidewalk.

“I would rip up all of this,” he said, plotting how he’d clean up the yard so the children and their shih tzu, Cleo, could safely play. “I have dreams. My wife and I have dreams.”





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7) At the Women’s World Cup, a Memento Players Are Stuck With and Stuck To
By
JUNE 23, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/sports/a-memento-players-carry-with-them-like-it-or-not.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below

WINNIPEG, Manitoba

Before the United States played Sweden in a Women’s World Cup match here this month, some American fans waited in line for hours to be the first to enter the stadium. When the gates finally opened, it was like the running of the bulls.

Parents sprinted down the main concourse. Preteen girls dodged food carts and garbage cans to cut in front of people ahead of them.

They were not off to their seats; their destination was the souvenir shop. In a matter of minutes, a line snaked out the store’s doors. Those poor people. What they didn’t know was that the best memento from this World Cup was actually down on the field, hidden — for the moment — between the blades of fake grass.

Millions upon millions of tiny rubber pellets.

That’s the collectible fans should take home from this World Cup, the first to be played exclusively on artificial turf. It’s certainly what many of the players will remember.

“We find those things everywhere,” United States defender Julie Johnston said. “They are between your toes and in your shorts. Two days later, you’ll find some on another part of your body. You’re like, ‘I don’t understand how this isn’t leaving.’ ”

Midfielder Megan Rapinoe said that she had discovered the dark pellets in her hair and her nose, but not yet, thankfully, in her mouth. The mere mention of the topic drew a feigned look of disgust from her teammate Meghan Klingenberg.

“I’ve found them in my bra — it’s incredible where you can find them,” Klingenberg said. “I’ll take a shower later that day, and I’ll be like, ‘What in the world?’ ”

A World Cup T-shirt will fade and become threadbare, but these World Cup souvenirs will last and last — because, after all, bits of recycled rubber don’t exactly scream biodegradable. They will also stand a constant reminder that neither FIFA nor the Canadian Soccer Association valued the women’s game enough to mandate that its biggest championship be played on grass — the way the game should be played, and the way the men get to play it.

FIFA has long supported and praised developments in artificial turf technology, and it has pushed its wider use. And in some parts of the world, it does make financial sense to install a durable artificial field rather than a natural one that might not hold up to overuse or the elements. But questions have been raised about whether players’ repeated exposure to all that ground-up rubber comes with the risk of health problems. Much of the evidence remains anecdotal, and the studies on the topic have been limited or financed by the industry itself.

Until there is more data, women’s soccer will have a World Cup to remember, black pellets and all. This one has featured better TV ratings than ever, more fans than ever and more interaction between players and recycled bits of car tires than ever.

Watch the ball or any player hit the turf during a game, and you’ll see a spray of black scatter so naturally that it’s as if drops of rain are splashing into the air (if there were such a thing as coal-black rain).

Still, artificial turf is the future of the sport, FIFA’s president has said, so players should embrace it and prepare to be pelted in the face with grains of rubber, game after game, for years to come. Besides, nothing accentuates the game’s beauty and long history more than the world’s best players battling for 90 minutes on Liga Turf RS+CoolPlus World Cup Edition 260 W ACS Bionic Fibre Infill.

So maybe every player should take home a jarful of crumbs of old Goodyears to share with their grandchildren one day. There will be so many stories to tell.United States midfielder Lori Chalupny will remember finding the pellets in her bedsheets days after playing on artificial turf. Alex Morgan and others will recall how the pellets absorb not only shocks but heat, making a match in the midday summer sun something like playing on a simmering frying pan. Morgan has told stories of playing on turf so hot — as high as 160 degrees — that she needed to be in constant motion to keep from searing the soles of her feet right through her cleats.

“Your feet will burn right off,” Klingenberg said.

The Swedish midfielder Nilla Fischer said some of her teammates wrapped each of their toes with athletic tape every time they played on turf, to prevent blisters created by the scorching surface.

And when those players remove the tape, what do they find collected on it? You guessed it: more souvenir pellets.

Chalupny said she felt terrible every time she changed in her hotel after a game or a practice, knowing that the simple act of peeling off her shorts and shirt would send the traveling tidbits in every direction — onto the carpet, into the tub, onto furniture.

“I’m sure the maids just love us,” she said.

But one maid at a team hotel here couldn’t tell me how much of a nuisance the pellets might have been at this World Cup, or how annoying it could be to find them in the laundry days after the teams had departed. She said she was afraid to talk to a reporter.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think FIFA would like that,” she said. “And we don’t want to get in trouble with FIFA.”


 


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8) Homegrown Radicals More Deadly Than Jihadis in U.S.
By

WASHINGTON — In the 14 years since Al Qaeda carried out attacks on New York and the Pentagon, extremists have regularly executed smaller lethal assaults in the United States, explaining their motives in online manifestoes or social media rants.

But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.

The slaying of nine African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church last week, with an avowed white supremacist charged with their murders, was a particularly savage case. But it is only the latest in a string of lethal attacks by people espousing racial hatred, hostility to government and theories such as those of the “sovereign citizen” movement, which denies the legitimacy of most statutory law. The assaults have taken the lives of police officers, members of racial or religious minorities and random civilians.

Non-Muslim extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11, according to the latest count, compiled by David Sterman, a New America program associate, and overseen by Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert. By comparison, seven lethal attacks by Islamic militants have taken place in the same period.

If such numbers are new to the public, they are familiar to police officers. A survey to be published this week asked 382 police and sheriff’s departments nationwide to rank the three biggest threats from violent extremism in their jurisdiction. About 74 percent listed antigovernment violence, while 39 percent listed “Al Qaeda-inspired” violence, according to the researchers, Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina and David Schanzer of Duke University.

“Law enforcement agencies around the country have told us the threat from Muslim extremists is not as great as the threat from right-wing extremists,” said Dr. Kurzman, whose study is to be published by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security and the Police Executive Research Forum.

John G. Horgan, who studies terrorism at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said the mismatch between public perceptions and actual cases has become steadily more obvious to scholars.

“There’s an acceptance now of the idea that the threat from jihadi terrorism in the United States has been overblown,” Dr. Horgan said. “And there’s a belief that the threat of right-wing, antigovernment violence has been underestimated.”

Counting terrorism cases is a notoriously subjective enterprise, relying on shifting definitions and judgment calls.If terrorism is defined as ideological violence, for instance, should an attacker who has merely ranted about religion, politics or race be considered a terrorist? A man in Chapel Hill, N.C., who was charged with fatally shooting three young Muslim neighbors had posted angry critiques of religion, but he also had a history of outbursts over parking issues. (New America does not include this attack in its count.)

Likewise, what about mass killings in which no ideological motive is evident, such as those at a Colorado movie theater and a Connecticut elementary school in 2012? The criteria used by New America and most other research organizations exclude such attacks, which have cost more lives than those clearly tied to ideology.

Some killings by non-Muslims that most experts would categorize as terrorism have drawn only fleeting news media coverage, never jelling in the public memory. But to revisit some of the episodes is to wonder why.

In 2012, a neo-Nazi named Wade Michael Page entered a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and opened fire, killing six people and seriously wounding three others. Mr. Page, who died at the scene, was a member of a white supremacist group called the Northern Hammerskins.

In another case, in June 2014, Jerad and Amanda Miller, a married couple with radical antigovernment and neo-Nazi views, entered a Las Vegas pizza restaurant and fatally shot two police officers who were eating lunch. On the bodies, they left a swastika, a flag inscribed with the slogan “Don’t tread on me” and a note saying, “This is the start of the revolution.” Then they killed a third person in a nearby Walmart.

And, as in the case of jihadist plots, there have been sobering close calls. In November 2014 in Austin, Tex., a man named Larry McQuilliams fired more than 100 rounds at government buildings that included the Police Headquarters and the Mexican Consulate. Remarkably, his shooting spree hit no one, and he was killed by an officer before he could try to detonate propane cylinders he had driven to the scene.

Some Muslim advocates complain that when the perpetrator of an attack is not Muslim, media commentators quickly focus on the question of mental illness.“With non-Muslims, the media bends over backward to identify some psychological traits that may have pushed them over the edge,” said Abdul Cader Asmal, a retired physician and a longtime spokesman for Boston’s Muslim community. “Whereas if it’s a Muslim, the assumption is that they must have done it because of their religion.”

On several occasions since President Obama took office, efforts by government agencies to conduct research on right-wing extremism have run into resistance from Republicans, who suspected an attempt to smear conservatives.

A 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security, which warned that an ailing economy and the election of the first black president might prompt a violent reaction from white supremacists, was withdrawn in the face of conservative criticism. Its main author, Daryl Johnson, later accused the department of “gutting” its staffing for such research.

William Braniff, the executive director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, said the outsize fear of jihadist violence reflects memories of Sept. 11, the daunting scale of sectarian conflict overseas and wariness of a strain of Islam that seems alien to many Americans.

“We understand white supremacists,” he said. “We don’t really feel like we understand Al Qaeda, which seems too complex and foreign to grasp.”

The contentious question of biased perceptions of terrorist threats dates back at least two decades, to the truck bombing that tore apart the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Some early media speculation about the attack assumed that it had been carried out by Muslim militants. The arrest of Timothy McVeigh, an antigovernment extremist, quickly put an end to such theories.

The bombing, which killed 168 people, including 19 children, remains the second-deadliest terrorist attack in American history, though its toll was dwarfed by the roughly 3,000 killed on Sept 11.

“If there’s one lesson we seem to have forgotten 20 years after Oklahoma City, it’s that extremist violence comes in all shapes and sizes,” said Dr. Horgan, the University of Massachusetts scholar. “And very often it comes from someplace you’re least suspecting.”



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9) Freddie Gray’s Death Was Homicide, Autopsy Says
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BALTIMORE — A medical examiner found that Freddie Gray sustained a “high-energy injury” while riding in a Baltimore police van and that the failure of the officers to follow procedures meant the death was a homicide, according to an autopsy report obtained by The Baltimore Sun.

The police arrested Mr. Gray, 25, on April 12, and he died a week later, prompting protests and rioting.

A grand jury indicted six police officers on various charges; one of the officers faces the most serious charge of second-degree ”depraved-heart” murder. All have pleaded not guilty.

The Sun reported Tuesday that the autopsy found the injury, similar to those sustained in shallow-water diving, was probably caused when the van suddenly decelerated. The report said Mr. Gray’s death could not be ruled an accident and was instead a homicide because officers did not follow safety procedures “through acts of omission.”A spokesman for the Maryland medical examiner and for the prosecutor’s office declined Tuesday to release the report, and Marilyn J. Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore, condemned the leak in a statement.

“As I have repeatedly stated, I strongly condemn anyone with access to trial evidence who has leaked information prior to the resolution of this case,” she said.

Lawyers for the officers released a statement saying they had not received the report, although Ms. Mosby is expected to turn it over to the defense by Friday. The newspaper reported that it had obtained a copy of the autopsy, and sources who verified it for The Sun requested anonymity because of the high-profile nature of the case.

Although the officers loaded Mr. Gray into the van on his abdomen, the medical examiner surmised that Mr. Gray may have made it to his feet and then been thrown into a wall when the van abruptly changed direction. Because he was not belted and he had his wrists and ankles shackled, he was “at risk for an unsupported fall during acceleration or deceleration of the van.”

The police and a lawyer for the Gray family have said Mr. Gray sustained a severe spine injury.


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10) New York City Settles Wrongful Conviction Case in Brooklyn for $6.25 Million
By

Jonathan Fleming, who was cleared last year of a murder conviction after a decades-old phone receipt supporting an alibi emerged, has reached a $6.25 million settlement with New York City for years of imprisonment.

The agreement, reached on Tuesday with the office of the city comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, reflects that office’s strategy of trying to resolve wrongful-conviction cases before lawsuits are filed. Mr. Stringer, whose office announced the settlement, has reached similar resolutions with other wrongly convicted men recently.

Mr. Fleming was set free last year after spending 24 years of a 25-years-to-life sentence in prison. He had been convicted of killing a rival drug dealer in 1989 in Brooklyn, but had maintained he was in Florida at the time of the murder.

In 2013, a conviction-review unit at the office of the Brooklyn district attorney examined Mr. Fleming’s case. In the case file, investigators found a receipt showing that Mr. Fleming made a phone call at 9:27 p.m. in Orlando, five hours before the shooting at 2:15 the next morning, making it nearly impossible for him to have returned to Brooklyn to commit the crime.

In April of last year, a judge with State Supreme Court in Brooklyn vacated Mr. Fleming’s conviction. “Mr. Fleming spent nearly half of his life behind bars for a crime that evidence available at the time proved he could not have committed,” Mr. Stringer said in a statement.

 


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11) Prosecutors Say Officer Didn’t Help Man He Shot in Brooklyn Stairwell
By ILEANA NAJARRO and

A prosecution document unsealed on Tuesday provides the government’s most detailed public account of a shooting last year of an unarmed black man by the police in a Brooklyn stairwell.

The officer who fired the fatal shot, Peter Liang, has been charged with second-degree manslaughter and other offenses. In the court document, prosecutors say he and his partner failed to aid the man who was shot, Akai Gurley, 28.

Prosecutors have not said Officer Liang intended to shoot Mr. Gurley, who had been visiting his girlfriend in a housing project and was heading down a stairwell with her when he was struck by a ricocheting bullet. But they have said that Officer Liang acted recklessly in his handling of his weapon and that he and his partner, Officer Shaun Landau, did not assist Mr. Gurley after they realized that the shot had struck him.Specifically, prosecutors said the officers walked around Mr. Gurley’s body and down a flight of stairs, leaving his girlfriend administering CPR as an emergency medical services operator gave instructions. Both officers were trained in CPR.

In an interview, Mr. Liang’s lawyer, Stephen Worth, said the officer was hyperventilating and was too distraught to help Mr. Gurley. The defense has portrayed the fatal shooting as accidental.

The document was filed to rebut a defense motion to dismiss the charges. Justice Danny K. Chun denied the motion.

Officers Liang and Landau were conducting a so-called vertical patrol in a building in the Louis H. Pink Houses in November when Officer Liang’s weapon fired a shot into a darkened stairwell from an eighth-floor landing. The bullet hit Mr. Gurley just as he and his girlfriend entered the stairwell on the seventh floor.

In February, Officer Liang, who had been on the force for less than 18 months, was indicted on six counts, including second-degree manslaughter, reckless endangerment and official misconduct. Officer Landau has not been charged.

According to the prosecution document, about 11 p.m., just after the shot was fired, Officer Landau heard the sound of running footsteps from the hallway below. When he asked Mr. Liang what happened, Mr. Liang said “it went off by accident” and said he would be fired.

The men argued over who should report the discharge. The exchange lasted two minutes, according to the court document (though in announcing the indictment, District Attorney Kenneth P. Thompson said the argument lasted four minutes).

Mr. Gurley, mortally wounded, and his girlfriend, Melissa Butler, had run downstairs. After he collapsed on the fifth floor, she went to a neighbor’s apartment and asked an occupant to call 911; the call was placed at 11:14 p.m. Ms. Butler returned to Mr. Gurley, still alive, on the landing, and the neighbor, talking with the 911 operator, told Ms. Butler to put pressure on the wound.

The two officers began to descend the stairs, trying to find out what had happened, and Officer Landau “saw Mr. Gurley’s body, lying on the floor, and Ms. Butler kneeling over him, crying,” according to grand jury testimony Officer Landau gave that was excerpted in the motion.

Then, Ms. Butler screamed, “He’s not breathing!” The operator asked the neighbor if Ms. Butler would perform CPR, and she said she would try; the neighbor relayed instructions from the operator. The officers walked around Ms. Butler and Mr. Gurley, stopping on the fourth-floor landing. “Hurry up and call,” Officer Landau told Mr. Liang. About 11:19, they radioed for help.



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12) Confederate Flags and Institutional Racism
By Charles M. Blow

In the wake of the Charleston massacre, there is a rapidly growing consensus sweeping the country to remove the Confederate flag, a relic of racial divisiveness, from civic spaces.

Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina has called for its removal from the grounds of that state’s capitol.

Alabama’s governor, Robert Bentley, has used executive powers to take down Confederate flags at that state’s capitol grounds.

As The Associated Press reported Wednesday:

“U.S. Senator Roger Wicker became Mississippi’s second top-tier Republican to call for changing the flag that state has used since Reconstruction. Wicker said it ‘should be put in a museum and replaced by one that is more unifying.’”

“Lawmakers in Tennessee said a bust of Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest must go from their Senate. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe was among several state leaders taking aim at vanity license plates with Confederate symbols.”

Furthermore:“Wal-Mart, e-Bay, Amazon, Target and Sears were among those removing Confederate merchandise from stores and online sites, and at least three major flag makers said they will no longer manufacture the Confederate flag.”

All of this is well and good. We should move overt symbols of racial division to places like museums, where they can be displayed in proper context and where education is part of the mission.

And yet, there is a part of me that still believes we are focusing on the 10 percent of the iceberg above the water and not the 90 percent below.

When do we move from our consensus over taking down symbols to the much harder and more important work of taking down structures?

I worry much less about individual expressions of racism than I do about institutional expressions of racism. And we live in an age where people are earnestly trying to convince us that institutional racism doesn’t exist.

In an interview for the podcast “WTF With Marc Maron,” President Obama used a racial slur to make the point that eliminating the use of such language from polite society wasn’t the “measure of whether racism still exists or not.”

The slur got most of the attention; far less was devoted to the point the president was making about the resilience of institutional, intergenerational racism.

As the president put it: “It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened” 200 to 300 years ago.

This is not to deny progress, but only to point out that the process isn’t complete. It is to point out that overt displays of racism are not the appropriate measure thereof. Focus less on the individual and more on the institutions.

Yet The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page this week juxtaposed Civil Rights-era institutional racism with our present day environment to argue that institutional racism no longer exists in this country.

According to The Journal: “Back then and before, the institutions of government — police, courts, organized segregation — often worked to protect perpetrators of racially motivated violence, rather than their victims.”

It continued: “Today the system and philosophy of institutionalized racism identified by Dr. King no longer exists.”

The Fox News contributor Monica Crowley said this week on “The O’Reilly Factor”:

“Are there individual racists in this country? Sadly, yes. Does institutional racism exist anymore? No, it does not.”

She continued:

“We’ve got to understand that when we talk about racists or racism in America, it is not created by government action or codified law or social acceptance. O.K. But you have people on the far left who believe that America is a nation that was founded on genocide, theft, crimes and lies.”“Slavery,” Bill O’Reilly sighed.

“Slavery,” Crowley agreed.

On Fox News’s “Hannity,” after the contributor Deneen Borelli said of the president, “I have dubbed him today Rapper in Chief,” the guest host David Webb posed the question to another guest: “Is America institutionally racist, that’s racism which requires codified law, a social acceptance, societal acceptance — and we know that racists, racists will always exist. Bias, prejudice in some form, black, white, in any form will always exist. Is America institutionally racist or are there racists in America?”

As if the two are necessarily mutually exclusive.

Webb later answered his own question: “I say we’re not.”

All of these definitions of institutional racism are incredibly narrow, and therefore take an incredibly myopic view of what institutional racism looks like. These definitions require a sort of direct discrimination, an articulation either in law or custom, to be deemed real.

But institutional racism will not be limited in that way. Institutional racism is often like a pathogen in the blood: You can’t see it; you have to test for it. But you can see its destructive effects as it sickens the host.

Furthermore, institutional racism doesn’t require the enlisting of individual racists. The machine does the discriminating. It provides a remove, a space, between the unpleasantness of racial discrimination — and indeed hatred — and the ultimate, undeniable and, for some, desirable outcome of structural oppression.

I prefer the Aspen Institute’s definition: “Institutional racism refers to the policies and practices within and across institutions that, intentionally or not, produce outcomes that chronically favor, or put a racial group at a disadvantage.”

Yet institutional racism’s defenders — or more precisely, its concealers — demand an articulated proof for something that moves in silence. They demand to see chapter and verse for something that is unwritten. They demand to know the names of the individual architects of a structure built subconsciously over time by each member of the vast multitudes adding their own bit, like beavers adding branches to a dam.

Institutional racism isn’t so much a grand design as it is an accumulation of racial detritus.

Symbols are important. Those Confederate flags must come down. That will be a spiritual victory. But we must not stop there. Institutional racism is the real prize on this hunt. Bring that down and cheers can truly go up.


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13) Middle-Class Black Families, in Low-Income Neighborhoods
By

Many of the nation’s racial disparities stem from the simple economic fact that white families make more money than black families on average, a gap that has remained stubbornly large in recent decades.

Yet neither this income gap nor blatant discrimination is the only reason for the disparities. A new study, by three Stanford researchers, highlights another big cause: the neighborhood gap.

Even among white and black families with similar incomes, white families are much more likely to live in good neighborhoods — with high-quality schools, day-care options, parks, playgrounds and transportation options. The study comes to this conclusion by mining census data and uncovering a striking pattern: White (and Asian-American) middle-income families tend to live in middle-income neighborhoods. Black middle-income families tend to live in distinctly lower-income ones.Most strikingly, the typical middle-income black family lives in a neighborhood with lower incomes than the typical low-income white family.

“I was surprised by the magnitude,” said Sean Reardon, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and the paper’s lead author. “I thought comparing people at exactly the same income level would get rid of more of the neighborhood differences than it did.”

The findings are especially notable because they come shortly after a separate research project, by two Harvard economists, that we’ve covered in detail at The Upshot. That project has tracked several million children since the 1980s to analyze how the area where they grew up affected their lives. Children who grew up in better neighborhoods — which tended to have less poverty, less crime, more two-parent families and schools with higher test scores — fared much better as adults than otherwise similar children from worse neighborhoods.

The new paper, being published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, suggests that these neighborhood effects are helping to widen racial disparities, including disparities in upward mobility.

Consider these numbers: A typical black child living in a household with $100,000 in annual income lives in a neighborhood with a median income of $54,400. And a black child in a household making $50,000 typically lives in a neighborhood with a median income of $42,200.

White and Asian children are much more likely to live in neighborhoods where median income is similar to — or higher than — that of their own family. Latino children fall in the middle, less likely than white and Asian children to live in middle-class or affluent neighborhoods but more likely than black children to do so.

The gaps are largest across much of the Northeast and Midwest. The two metropolitan areas where black and white children of similar family incomes grow up in the most economically different neighborhoods are Milwaukee and Newark. In both, a typical white family with $50,000 in annual income lives in a neighborhood with a median income 1.8 times larger than a typical black family making $50,000.

Not far behind those two areas are: Gary, Ind.; Bridgeport and Hartford, Conn.; Buffalo; Albany; Chicago; and Philadelphia. Among the 100 largest metro areas, the 25 with the largest gaps also include Cleveland, Detroit, Boston, New York and Baltimore.

Generally, the neighborhood gap tends to be biggest in metro areas with large black populations, though that’s not an ironclad relationship. Birmingham, Ala., Atlanta and Memphis, which have very large black populations, have neighborhood gaps not so different from average.

The other end of the spectrum — where white and black families of similar incomes tend to live in economically similar neighborhoods — is dominated by midsize Western metro areas. There is virtually no white-black neighborhood gap (after taking income into account) in El Paso or Riverside, Calif. Also in the bottom 25 are Albuquerque; Phoenix; Las Vegas; Portland, Ore.; San Jose and Sacramento, Calif; and Seattle.

(This list reminds me that, in several respects, the West seems more comfortable with diversity than any other part of the country. Rather than being divided on white-black lines, much of the West is a multiracial melting pot. The metro areas with the largest gay and lesbian shares of the population are also disproportionately Western, a recent Gallup analysis found.)

Of course, the neighborhood gap arises in part from voluntary choices. Many Americans, of all races, prefer to live among people who are similar to them, note Mr. Reardon and his colleagues Lindsay Fox and Joseph Townsend. For African-Americans, such a choice often means living in lower-income areas, given the racial disparity in incomes.But the neighborhood gap is also a reflection of the wealth gap: White families have considerably higher net worth than black families, even after controlling for income, Federal Reserve data shows. A white family making $50,000 is much more likely than a black family to have the savings for a down payment on a house in a middle-class neighborhood.

And some of the wealth gap, in turn, is a result of outright discrimination.

Many of the generous federal housing programs of the 20th century were for whites only — even in the North, as Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute has detailed. Through the Federal Housing Administration and other agencies, the United States government essentially ran a whites-only wealth creation program. Although this blatant discrimination has largely disappeared into history, it still has a large effect on family wealth, handed down from one generation to the next.

Meanwhile, more subtle discrimination continues. A 2013 study by the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that black home shoppers were often shown fewer options than similar white shoppers.

Taken together, the research shows that neighborhoods matter enormously to a child’s life chances — and play a big role in the nation’s racial inequalities. Some of the gaps will persist as long as the white-black income gap does. But some of the problems are more easily addressed through housing policy.

Housing developments that allow low-income families to move into higher-income neighborhoods appear to be a cost-effective antipoverty strategy. Vouchers that help lower-income families move into better neighborhoods may be even more so.

Partly inspired by the new research, federal housing officials, including Julian Castro, the housing secretary, have recently shown more interest in varying the value of vouchers to encourage families to move to better neighborhoods. Current policy — both federal and local, on both vouchers and taxes — goes in the opposite direction, creating incentives to put up buildings in worse neighborhoods and for poor families to remain there.

The notion that your neighborhood matters is almost a cliché. But it’s also true — and yet much of the nation’s housing policy effectively pretends otherwise.



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14) Racism’s Psychological Toll
Interview by

Our screens and feeds are filled with news and images of black Americans dying or being brutalized. A brief and yet still-too-long list: Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride. The image of a white police officer straddling a black teenager on a lawn in McKinney, Tex., had barely faded before we were forced to grapple with the racially motivated shooting in Charleston, S.C.

I’ve had numerous conversations with friends and colleagues who are stressed out by the recent string of events; our anxiety and fear is palpable. A few days ago, a friend sent a text message that read, “I’m honestly terrified this will happen to us or someone we know.” Twitter and Facebook are teeming with anguish, and within my own social network (which admittedly consists largely of writers, academics and activists), I’ve seen several ad hoc databases of clinics and counselors crop up to help those struggling to cope. Instagram and Twitter have become a means to circulate information about yoga, meditation and holistic treatment services for African-Americans worn down by the barrage of reports about black deaths and police brutality, and I’ve been invited to several small gatherings dedicated to discussing these events. A handful of friends recently took off for Morocco for a few months with the explicit goal of escaping the psychic weight of life in America.

It was against this backdrop that I first encountered the research of Monnica Williams, a psychologist, professor and the director of the University of Louisville’s Center for Mental Health Disparities. Several years ago, Williams treated a “high-functioning patient, with two master’s degrees and a job at a company that anyone would recognize.” The woman, who was African-American, had been devastated by racial harassment by a director within her company. Williams recalls being stunned by how drastically her patient’s condition deteriorated as a result of the treatment. “She completely withdrew and was suffering from extreme emotional anxiety,” she told me. “And that’s what made me say, ‘Wow, we have to focus on this.’ ”

In a 2013 Psychology Today article, Williams wrote that “much research has been conducted on the social, economic and political effects of racism, but little research recognizes the psychological effects of racism on people of color.” Williams now studies the link between racism and post-traumatic stress disorder, which is known as race-based traumatic stress injury, or the emotional distress a person may feel after encountering racial harassment or hostility. Although much of Williams’s work focuses on individuals who have been directly targeted by racial discrimination or aggression, she says race-based stress reactions can be triggered by events that are experienced vicariously, or externally, through a third party — like social media or national news events. She argues that racism should be included as a cause of PTSD in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (D.S.M.).

Williams is in the process of opening a clinical program that will exclusively treat race-based stress and trauma, in a predominantly black neighborhood in Louisville. Shortly after the Charleston shooting, I called Williams to discuss her work; what follows is a lightly edited and condensed transcript of our conversation.

What is race-based stress and trauma?

It’s a natural byproduct of the types of experiences that minorities have to deal with on a regular basis. I would argue that it is pathological, which means it is a disorder that we can assess and treat. To me, that means these are symptoms that are a diagnosable disorder that require a clinical intervention. It goes largely unrecognized in most people, and that’s based on my experience as a clinician.

What are the symptoms?

Depression, intrusion (the inability to get the thoughts about what happened out of one’s mind), vigilance (an inability to sleep, out of fear of danger), anger, loss of appetite, apathy and avoidance symptoms and emotional numbing. My training and study has been on post-traumatic stress disorder for a long time, and the two look very much alike.

Over the weekend, I received several distressing emails and texts from friends who were suffering from feelings of anxiety and depression. Do you think we should all be in treatment?

I think everyone could benefit from psychotherapy, but I think just talking to someone and processing the feelings can be very effective. It doesn’t have to be with a therapist; it could be with a pastor, family, friends and people who understand it and aren’t going to make it worse by telling you to stop complaining.

What do you think about the #selfcare hashtags on social media and the role of “Black Twitter” as resources for people who may not have the resources they need to help process this? Are online interactions like that more meaningful than they initially might seem?

Online communities can be a great source of support, of course — with the caveat that even just one hater can be stressful for everyone, and that’s the danger of it. But if you don’t have a friend or a family member, just find someone who is sensitive and understanding and can deal with racial issues.

In our initial email about the ripple effects of the murders in Charleston, you used the phrase “vicarious trauma.” What does that mean?

Because the African-American community has such a long history of pervasive discrimination, something that impacts someone many miles away can sometimes impact all of us. That’s what I mean by vicarious traumatization.

Is racial trauma widely recognized as a legitimate disorder?

The trauma of events like this is not formally recognized in the D.S.M. It talks about different types of trauma and stress-related ailments, but it doesn’t say that race trauma can be a factor or a trigger for these problems. Psychiatrists, unless they’ve had some training or personal experience with this, are not going to know to look for it and aren’t going to understand it when they see it. In order for it to be recognized, we have to get a good body of scientific research, a lot of publications in reputable peer-reviewed journals. Right now, there’s only been a few. And we need to produce more.

On your blog, you chronicled the experience of a woman who encounters a therapist who dismisses her fears about racism. Is one barrier to treatment getting the medical community to acknowledge that racism exists?

Yes. A lot of people in the medical community live very privileged lives, so racism isn’t a reality to them. When someone comes in and talks to them, it might sound like a fairy tale, rather than a real daily struggle that people are dealing with. Research shows that African-Americans, for example, are optimistic when they start therapy, but within a few sessions feel less optimistic and have high early dropout rates. It could be that clinicians don’t know how to address their problems, or they may even be saying things that are subtly racist that may drive their clients away. If the patient feels misunderstood or even insulted by the therapist and they don’t go back and get help, they end up suffering for years or even the rest of their lives for something that is very treatable.

Is there a recommended model for treatment?

We have great treatments that are empirically supported for trauma, but the racial piece hasn’t really been studied very well. That’s no easy task, because when we write these articles, they go to journals, where an editor looks at it and decides if it’s worthy and applicable to go in the journal. And then it goes to reviewers who decide if it’s a worthy and applicable topic.

Why has it taken so long to get momentum?

If you think about it, they weren’t even letting black people get Ph.D.s 30 years ago in a lot of places. Ethnic minority researchers are the ones who are carrying the torch, by and large. We’re only to the place now where we have enough researchers to do the work. And there’s so much work that needs to be done.

Jenna Wortham is a staff writer for the magazine.

 


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15) California: 3 Officers Convicted of Beating Jail Visitor
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



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16) Georgia: 3 Indicted in Killing of Student at Jail
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



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