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katherineharron

Barack Obama calls for stricter gun laws following Colorado shooting to prevent more 'random, senseless acts' of gun violence - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

obama

shared by katherineharron on 23 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Former President Barack Obama on Tuesday called for stricter gun laws following the mass shooting in Colorado, bemoaning what he called a national tolerance for "these kinds of random, senseless acts."
  • they "are also feeling a deep, familiar outrage" for these types of tragedies.
  • "It is long past time for those with the power to fight this epidemic of gun violence to do so. It will take time to root out the disaffection, racism and misogyny that fuels so many of these senseless acts of violence," Obama said. "But we can make it harder for those with hate in their hearts to buy weapons of war."
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The statement by the former president came shortly before President Joe Biden publicly commented on the shooting
  • The attack, which came days after another shooting rampage in Georgia that left eight dead, has renewed calls from lawmakers for federal gun control reform. close dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.bx-row bx-row-image bx-row-image-d
  • During his time in the White House, Obama urged Congress to take up gun control legislation following several mass shootings around the country, though no significant congressional action was ever taken.
  • Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday called the shooting "absolutely tragic," but ignored a question about the future of gun control during a swearing-in ceremony for William Burns as CIA director.
  • Earlier this month, the House passed H.R. 8 that would expand background checks on all commercial gun sales and H.R. 1146 to try and close what's known as the "Charleston Loophole," which allows some firearms to be transferred by licensed gun dealers before the required background checks are completed.
kaylynfreeman

Targeting 'Critical Race Theory,' Republicans Rattle American Schools - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...critical-race-theory.html

politics US

shared by kaylynfreeman on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • In Loudoun County, Va., a group of parents led by a former Trump appointee are pushing to recall school board members after the school district called for mandatory teacher training in “systemic oppression and implicit bias.”
  • And across the country, Republican-led legislatures have passed bills recently to ban or limit schools from teaching that racism is infused in American institutions.
  • Republicans have focused their attacks on the influence of “critical race theory,” a graduate school framework that has found its way into K-12 public education. The concept argues that historical patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other modern institutions, and that the legacies of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow still create an uneven playing field for Black people and other people of color.
hannahcarter11

Tulsa marks race massacre centennial as US grapples with racial injustice | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...ial-as-us-grapples-with-racial

tulsa massacre injustice reparations centennial

shared by hannahcarter11 on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • On the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre — in which a thriving Black neighborhood was burned to the ground and hundreds of residents were killed by an angry white mob — local and national leaders find themselves grappling with the lasting effects of racial injustice and violence.
  • The centennial comes just a week after the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, an event that sparked nationwide Black Lives Matter protests calling for an end to police brutality and systemic racism.
  • In 1921, Greenwood was a bastion of Black wealth at a time when Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan hamstrung and terrorized Black Americans in the South.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Dubbed “Black Wall Street,” the northern section of Tulsa was home to dozens of Black-owned businesses, including hotels, restaurants, law firms and medical practices.
  • Despite its prominence, the massacre was little known, if at all, in most parts of the country, until the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was created in 1997
  • he seeds of violence were planted on the morning of May 31, when the Tulsa Tribune reported that 19-year-old Black shoeshine Dick Rowland had attempted to assault Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white elevator operator in the Drexel Building in the white part of town.
  • The Tribune’s overdramatized account of what happened — the story headline read “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator” — sparked the forming of a lynch mob outside the Tulsa County Courthouse, where Rowland was in custody.
  • A group of roughly 25 Black men from Greenwood went to the courthouse armed to stop the mob from taking Rowland, only to be turned away by authorities.
  • Later, after the white mob continued to grow and a larger group from Greenwood returned, a scuffle broke out, followed by gunfire
  • Tulsa police appointed hundreds of white men and boys “special deputies,” even supplying some of them with guns.
  • It’s a “striking example of how our institutions, particularly policing but not only policing, have played a role over our history in enforcing systemic racism and brutality against Black Americans,” Rep. Steven HorsfordSteven Alexander HorsfordTulsa marks race massacre centennial as US grapples with racial injustice Gun violence: Save the thoughts and prayers, it's time for Senate action Democrats offer bill to encourage hiring of groups hard-hit by pandemic MORE (D-Nev.), second vice chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, told The Hill.
  • The white mob had razed more than 1,200 houses across 35 city blocks, looting hundreds more. The prosperous business district of Greenwood was destroyed.
  • As many as 300 people died, historians say, though the exact number is unknown due to mass gravesites. The destruction displaced about 10,000 Greenwood residents.
  • In total, more than $1.8 million of Black property was destroyed, more than $27 million by today’s dollar.
  • The staggering economic loss was never recovered by Black Tulsans and is seen as a key factor in the stark racial wealth disparity in the city 100 years later.
  • Restorative justice, also known as reparative justice or reparations, was one of the recommendations of the Oklahoma commission’s 2001 report.
  • Steps toward justice, the commission said, could take the form of direct payments to the survivors and their descendants, a scholarship for descendants, economic development in Greenwood and a memorial for the massacre victims.
  • The 100-year anniversary includes events hosted by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, which spearheaded the building of Greenwood Rising, a $30 million history museum and center that will fully open in July.
  • Many advocates have argued that the centennial commission hasn’t done enough to raise up the voices of the survivors and their descendants, but Horsford said he doesn’t want that to detract from the importance of the weekend.The focus should be on “what caused the massacre and those who contributed to it and the systemic reasons for it,” Horsford said.
Javier E

Opinion | 'The Point Was to Win,' Barack Obama Writes - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...obama-biden-democrats.html

obama presidency interview racism politics crisis Culture history Democratic party strategy

shared by Javier E on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • One passage, in particular, had stuck in my mind for weeks. Obama is reflecting on the Tea Party uprising, and the thrumming undercurrent of racism that powered it. He recalls the din of cable news chatter debating the Tea Party’s true nature, and the pressure that built for him to render his presidential verdict. He admits that his White House wanted nothing to do with this debate, in part because it had “reams of data telling us that white voters, including many who supported me, reacted poorly to lectures about race.”
  • I’m going to quote what Obama writes next at length:More practically, I saw no way to sort out people’s motives, especially given that racial attitudes were woven into every aspect of our nation’s history. Did that Tea Party member support “states’ rights” because he genuinely thought it was the best way to promote liberty, or because he continued to resent how federal intervention had led to an end to Jim Crow, desegregation, and rising Black political power in the South? Did that conservative activist oppose any expansion of the social welfare state because she believed it sapped individual initiative, or because she was convinced that it would benefit only brown people who’d just crossed the border? Whatever my instincts might tell me, whatever truths the history books might suggest, I knew I wasn’t going to win over any voters by labeling my opponents racist.
  • Over and over again, Obama tries to make clear that his assailants have a point, that his perspective is bounded by experience and self-interest.
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  • But what strikes me about that passage is that you can see Obama’s idealism and calculation shimmer into a single point. After suggesting that the motivations of his Tea Party critics were unknowable, he resolves the argument by saying the politics of it were thoroughly knowable. Whatever his own intuitions might tell him — whatever “truths the history books might suggest” — to cry racism, or even to coolly point it out, was to lose votes, and neither his version of hope nor of change would be helped along by defeat.
  • Obama is thoroughly a politician, and because he understood the depth of our divisions, he treated them gingerly, at times fearfully. In a particularly striking moment, Obama reveals that across the entirety of his presidency, his single largest drop in white support came when he criticized the white police officer who arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Black Harvard professor, on the porch of his own home. “It was support that I’d never completely get back,” Obama writes.
  • Much in our politics is not what it seems. Contrary to the aesthetics of our current political debate, there is a deep optimism in the confrontational politics of the modern left and a quiet pessimism in the caution with which Obama speaks.
  • Obama’s view of his own political situation echoes the current reality of the Democratic Party
  • When I brought up that passage about the Tea Party, Obama was frank in describing his calculations. “One of the ways I would measure it would be: Is it more important for me to tell a basic, historical truth, let’s say about racism in America right now? Or is it more important for me to get a bill passed that provides a lot of people with health care that didn’t have it before?”
  • To ask the question bluntly: Who truly believes America to be a racist country? The political voices who state that view clearly, because they think Americans can be challenged into change, or the ones who try to avoid even implying the thought, because they fear the power of the backlash?
  • Barack Hussein Obama, a Black man running for office during the era of the War on Terror, understood the deck was stacked against him. If he was going to win, he would need the support of people inclined to view him with suspicion. He would need to not just speak to their hopes, but to defuse their fears. To hear Obama tell it, those fears were not just that too much change would come too fast, but that those who fought that change, or just worried over it, would be judged or cast out.
  • “But I think maybe the reason I was successful campaigning in downstate Illinois, or Iowa, or places like that is they never felt as if I was condemning them for not having gotten to the politically correct answer quick enough, or that somehow they were morally suspect because they had grown up with and believed more traditional values.”
  • This is the fundamental asymmetry of American politics right now: To hold national power, Democrats need to win voters who are right of center; Republicans do not need to win voters who are left of center.
aleija

Opinion | My Ears Might Never Be Bored Again - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...music-streaming.html

Culture opinion technology

shared by aleija on 05 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Something unexpected happened to me during lockdown: I gained deeper appreciation for my ears. I don’t mean aesthetically, (though I’ve got no problem in that department, believe me), but rather functionally.
  • he other day I realized that I’ve taken to popping my AirPods Pro in just after I wake up, sometimes at the same time I put in my contact lenses. From there my ears are usually occupado all day, often until I sleep, sometimes even during.
  • If you’re under 35 or so, my paean to the mind-altering magic of ubiquitous digital audio might sound more than a bit outdated; Farhad, do you also get goose bumps when considering the TV remote?
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  • Streaming services are often said to have “saved” the music industry, which is no doubt true, notwithstanding persistent complaints from artists about the paltriness of their streaming paychecks. Revenue from the sale of recorded music in the United States declined for almost two decades before streaming services began turning the business around in 2016. In 2020, recorded music grew to $12.2 billion in sales, the vast majority from streaming (still well below the industry’s peak sales year, $14.6 billion in 1999).
  • For me, the clearest way that streaming has altered my relationship to music is in its steady blurring of the boundaries between genres. I
  • Streaming has turned me into a musical butterfly, flitting between moods and genres in whatever way my tastes happen to lean. Indeed, in the last half decade I have explored more kinds of music than in the decades before — and I keep finding more stuff I like, because thanks to endless choice, there’s never nothing to listen to.
  • The number of artists in the service’s most-played 10 percent of streams keeps growing — that is, there are many more artists at the top. “Gone are the days of Top 40, it’s now the Top 43,000,” Spotify crowed.
  • But you don’t need stats to show that music is increasingly breaking through staid genre boundaries — you can tell in the music itself.
  • What’s not going to change is the pre-eminent role audio now plays in our days. Once, I thought of my headphones as a conduit for music, and then they were for music and podcasts, but now they are something else entirely: They are the first gadget to deliver on the tech industry’s promise of “augmented reality” — the mashing up of the digital and analog worlds to create a novel, enhanced sensory experience.
  • Now that sound has been liberated from time, place and physical media — now that I can fly from the Nashville studio where Dylan recorded “Blonde on Blonde” to Taylor Swift’s Tiny Desk concert to the comforting, indistinct background murmur of a crowded coffee shop, all while on a walk in my suburban California neighborhood — my ears might never be bored again.
rerobinson03

Opinion | Congress Needs to Defend Vote Counting, Not Just Vote Casting - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oting-law-rights-congress.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • It is a legislative assault motivated by the failure of President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and justified by baseless allegations about the legitimacy of his defeat. Mr. Trump and his supporters pursued indiscriminate lawsuits to overturn the results and then, urged on by Mr. Trump, some of his supporters stormed the Capitol to halt the completion of the election process. Now they are seeking to rewrite the rules to make it easier for Republicans to win elections without winning the most votes.
  • The new restrictions have a disproportionate impact on Black and other minority voters. There is little comfort in the fact that these rules are much less restrictive than those in the olden days. The Jim Crow regime was constructed gradually.
  • At least 13 states have joined Georgia in passing new restrictions. Among them are a Montana law that ends the practice of allowing voters to register on Election Day and an Iowa law that requires the state’s polling places to close one hour earlier.
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  • Because there is little chance the bill will pass in its current form, Democrats face a clear choice. They can wage what might be a symbolic (and likely doomed) fight for all the changes they would like. Or they can confront the acute crisis at hand by crafting a more focused bill, perhaps more palatable for more senators, that aims squarely at ensuring that Americans can cast votes and that those votes are counted.
  • Some of the areas that are addressed by H.R. 1, including protections for voting and provisions to limit gerrymandering, are also urgent, because the threats to electoral democracy are interlocking. Restricting participation in elections, and playing with district boundaries, both conduce to the election of more extreme politicians, who in turn are more likely to regard elections as purely partisan competitions waged without regard to the public interest.
  • Senators with hesitations about H.R. 1 need to put forward their own ideas for protecting the rights of voters. The power of the states to administer elections is unquestioned, but it is not unlimited. In a representative democracy, the legitimate power of the representatives cannot extend to acts designed to undermine democracy.
hannahcarter11

Biden Responds to Sen. Tim Scott: 'I Don't Think The American People Are Racist' : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...the-american-people-are-racist

biden Black people America

shared by hannahcarter11 on 02 May 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden says America is not a racist country, but that Black Americans have been left behind and "we have to deal with it."
  • Scott, the Senate's only Black Republican, said that "America is not a racist country" and warned that "it's wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present."
  • "I don't think the American people are racist," he said, "but I think after 400 years, African Americans have been left in a position where they are so far behind the eight ball in terms of education and health, in terms of opportunity."
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  • "I don't think America is racist, but I think the overhang from all of the Jim Crow and before that, slavery, have had a cost and we have to deal with it."
  • Biden was also asked in the interview about the situation at the Southern border. He said that the number of children seeking to cross into the country "is way down now, we've now gotten control" and that there's "a significant change in the circumstance for children coming to and at the border."
  • According to Customs and Border Protection, nearly 19,000 children and teenagers arrived at the Southern border in March — the most ever in a single month.
  • Biden defended his administration's efforts to reunite children separated from their families by the Trump administration.
  • Biden also discussed the state of the pandemic. Asked whether all K-12 schools should be open this fall for in-person instruction five days a week, the president said, "Based on science and the CDC, they should probably all be open."
aniyahbarnett

Evanston, Illinois, approves the country's first reparations program for Black residents - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US history

shared by aniyahbarnett on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • offering reparations to Black residents whose families have felt the effects of decades of discriminatory housing practices,
  • from a 3% tax on legalized cannabis into assistance for home loans.
  • We had to do something radically different to address the racial divide that we had in our city,
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • the first major American bank to endorse HR 40, a piece of legislation sponsored by US Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee that creates a commission to develop reparation proposals for African Americans.
  • three decades ago.
  • "as real and right as the fight we had for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act,
  • more attentive ears with Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden in office.
  • "targeted resources into public schools and neighborhoods that have been generationally deprived of the similar types of investments that white neighborhoods have gotten,"
  • voted overwhelmingly in favor of appropriating funds for the benefit of Black residents
  • "remains unanimously supportive"
  • she called upon National African-American Reparations Commission (NAARC) convener and Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW) President Ron Daniels to help Evanston develop an action plan.
  • "the community process"
  • The first is the transfer of wealth to descendants of American slavery via individual cash payments,
  • I've never seen the issue of reparations being taken as seriously as it is now,"
  • , I think the process has been quite flawed when you look at it next to an HR 40
  • , there are some Black residents in Evanston who question if these policies go far enough,
  • "the strict enforcement of existing civil rights law."
  • They fear the limited funds will result in an application process that only high-credit Evanstonians would have access to.
  • "Modernity is our challenge, not social justice"
  • The City Council agrees with that
  • HR 40 was still very much in its infancy,
  • it was designed to establish a commission to examine enslavement and other derivative outcomes
  • It did, however, gain the endorsement of major civil rights organizations
  • Congress was not ready for the bill.
  • Black celebrities
  • In the over three decades since HR 40 reached the House floor, the case for reparations has only grown more organized and action-oriented. Today, the bill has more than 170 co-sponsors and a Senate companion resolution.
  • So it's really an attempt to address both the moral harm, and the crime that slavery and Jim Crow were, but also the wealth gap that was created by both of these institutions,"
  • In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement's resurgence last year,
  • Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery,
  • cultural experts and the executive branch of government that America has reneged on its promises to African Americans
  • "I think the reality is that we will as Black Americans never gain an entitlement that is commensurate with the suffering we endured.
  • "is that Black Americans will get about exactly as far as they take themselves,
  • However, Simmons sees the critique as an opportunity for more conversations on what reparations could look like for residents
  • Over a century of both legally enforced and de-facto housing discrimination and redlining, blockage from small business loans, and suppression of constitutionally protected civil rights until well into the 1960s
  • n 1920 to roughly 1.3% of US farmers in 2017.
  • history was not studied, it was not known.
zoegainer

Police Reassess Security for Inauguration and Demonstrations After Capitol Attack - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uguration-security-police.html

police inauguration capitol attack Politics US trump history

shared by zoegainer on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Federal and local authorities across the country pressed their hunt this weekend for the members of the angry mob that stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, as Washington’s mayor issued an urgent appeal to start preparing immediately for more potential violence before, during and after the inauguration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
  • The Capitol complex, typically a hive of activity, remained cut off from its surroundings Sunday night by troop deployments and an imposing scrim of seven-foot-tall, unscalable fencing
  • As of Sunday, nearly 400 people had joined a private group online dedicated to what is being billed as the “Million Militia March,” an event scheduled to take place in Washington on Jan. 20. On Parler, a social media site popular on the far right that is in danger of being taken offline because of rampant talk of violence, commenters were debating what tools they should bring to the march, mentioning everything from baseball bats to body armor to assault rifles.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Security experts warned this weekend that some far-right extremist groups have now started to focus attention on Inauguration Day and are already discussing an assault similar to the one on the Capitol, which led to the sacking of congressional offices and the deaths of at least five people, including a Capitol Police officer.
  • In a separate statement, Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat and former Army Ranger, said he had spoken with military officials who were aware of “possible threats posed by would-be terrorists” in the coming days and were working with local and federal law enforcements officers to prevent them.
  • Armed with federal warrants, law enforcement officers spent much of the weekend cracking down on people who had stormed the National Capitol, making a series of arrests in states from Iowa to Florida, and filing new charges against some of the more than 80 people who were taken into custody last week by local officers in Washington
  • The F.B.I. has said that it has received more than 40,000 tips online about the Capitol mob, including photographs and video clips
  • the Justice Department was considering charges for “theft of national security information” after some in the mob looted laptops, documents and other items from congressional offices.
anonymous

About 20,000 National Guard Members To Deploy For Inauguration, Officials Say : Insurrection At The Capitol: Live Updates : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...inauguration-d-c-official-says

shared by anonymous on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Local and federal security officials expect about 20,000 National Guard members to be involved in securing Washington, D.C., for President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration next week.
  • "I think you can expect to see somewhere upwards of beyond 20,000 members of the National Guard that will be here in the footprint of the District of Columbia,"
  • It represents an uptick in National Guard troops that will be deployed to the area. Army Times reported earlier this week that the Pentagon had authorized 15,000 National Guard members to be sent to the District for the inauguration.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The troops will be coming from nearly all states, Bowman reported, adding that only those who are either military police or have law enforcement experience will be armed.
  • The exact number to be deployed is still being worked out by the Secret Service, the lead agency on inauguration security, and others,
  • Contee said the inauguration has been designated as a "national special security event," adding the final numbers of troops would come from the Secret Service and leaving open the possibility the numbers could fluctuate.
  • Others will have access to their weapons but not carry them, and it remains unclear where the troops will deploy at the U.S. Capitol, according to the U.S. official.
  • President Trump issued a statement Wednesday urging supporters to commit "NO violence," citing unspecified reports on future demonstrations.
  • Presidential inaugurations are always massive security operations, but Biden's inauguration on Jan. 20 is facing heightened security concerns following last week's breach of the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead, including a Capitol Police officer.
  • These security moves come as the House of Representatives voted Wednesday to impeach President Trump a second time.
  • It was a startling reminder that just a week ago rioters attacked the building, overrunning Capitol Police in an attempt to block lawmakers from confirming Biden's Electoral College victory.
  • Since the siege, some members of Congress, including Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, have requested that Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy review backgrounds of any National Guard troops involved in inaugural security.
Javier E

Ibram X. Kendi, Prophet of Anti-racism | National Review - 0 views

www.nationalreview.com/...x-kendi-prophet-of-anti-racism

anti-racism racism activism politics history Culture

shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Kendi now has four books at or near the top of the best-seller lists, including Stamped from the Beginning, which is a history of American racism that won the National Book Award in 2016, and two books on racism for younger readers. Racism is Kendi’s thing. His newest, How to Be an Antiracist, reappeared at the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list this summer
  • Boston University announced it would offer Kendi, 38, the most prestigious tenured chair at its disposal, making him only the second holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities.
  • The chair has been vacant since the death of the novelist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel four years ago.
  • ...51 more annotations...
  • The “antiracism” of which Kendi is the most trusted exponent is not just a new name for an old precept. It is the political doctrine behind the street demonstrations, “cancelings,” Twitter attacks, boycotts, statue topplings, and self-denunciations that have come together in a national movement
  • His parents moved to Manassas, Va., where he attended Stonewall Jackson High School. He won an oratory contest for a Bill Cosby–style exhortation calling on blacks to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, a performance that (on one hand) he remembers with shame but that (on the other) he begins the book with.
  • the anti-racism movement has grown to the point where Ibram X. Kendi can be said, for better or for worse, to be changing the country.
  • Kendi’s devout parents were drawn through their churches into political activism in the 1970s
  • Anti-racists assume that the American system of politics, economics, and policing has been corrupted by racial prejudice, that such prejudice explains the entire difference in socioeconomic status between blacks and others, that the status quo must be fought and beaten, and that anyone not actively engaged in this system-changing work is a collaborator with racism, and therefore himself a legitimate target for attack.
  • Asante’s goals were polemical as much as scholarly. “The rejection of European particularism as universal is the first stage of our coming intellectual struggle,” he taught Kendi
  • “What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse,” he writes. “And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist.”
  • the autobiographical parts of this book show him to be tentative, even anguished, about identity
  • His mentor in Philadelphia was Molefi Kete Asante, notorious at the dawn of political correctness a generation ago as the author of Afrocentricity (1980), which stressed that, long before the high point of Greek culture, Egyptians, who lived in Africa, were building the Pyramids.
  • The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . .
  • As a prose stylist, Kendi is clear, direct, and even witty.
  • we must understand what Kendi means by “racism” in the first place.
  • “Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.”
  • it uses the concept of racism to define the concept of racism. It will seem less strange, and more powerful, when examined through the lens of academic race theory.
  • As the Minnesota legal theorist Alan David Freeman noted in his landmark 1978 essay “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Antidiscrimination Law,” the beneficiaries of a racist system (Freeman calls them “perpetrators”) are likely to view its dismantling as an ethical challenge. Getting over such a system means adopting an attitude of fairness and treating everyone the same.
  • The historic victims of that system, however, have a different perspective. They look at the system as having taken from them concrete things that were theirs by right — above all, jobs, money, and housing. They will not consider the problem fixed until those deprivations have been remedied
  • Kendi has done a bit of everything. He is an ideological everyman of race consciousness, his life a Bunyanesque pilgrimage from the Valley of Assimilation to the Mountains of Intersectionality.
  • ideas about race and racism are central to Kendi’s system of thought, and you will understand why when you focus on its one truly original element: His “antiracism” is not a doctrine of nondiscrimination. In fact, it is not even anti-racist, as that term is commonly understood.
  • He does not even pay lip service to neutral treatment
  • If practical equality for blacks is the imperative, discriminating on their behalf is going to be necessary
  • He wants not pious talk but the actual policies that will redistribute the advantages, the stuff, that whites have undeservingly acquired. “What if instead of a feelings advocacy,” he asks at one point, “we had an outcome advocacy that put equitable outcomes before our guilt and anguish?”
  • The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. 
  • It is why this book really is as “bold” as reviewers say it is, and why the judges who in 2016 gave Kendi the National Book Award were right to say he “turns our ideas of the term ‘racism’ upside-down.”
  • Kendi has decided that the two approaches to civil rights described by Freeman are not simply different perspectives on the same issue; they are mutually incompatible — one must destroy the other. “There is no neutrality in the racism struggle,” he insists. The old view of the perpetrators — that everything will be well as long as we treat people with equality, neutrality, and respect — is no longer just a different approach to the problem. It is illegitimate. It is a “racist” obstruction.
  • But also Oscar Lewis, once considered the hippest of radical anthropologists, for describing a “culture of poverty” in La Vida (1966) and other books.
  • To allude to color blindness or talk of a “post-racial society,” to back religious freedom or voter-ID laws . . . these are racist things, too. Even the overarching vision that rallied white liberals to civil rights — the belief that blacks could, and should, assimilate into American society — becomes morally suspect
  • Assimilation, Kendi announces at the start of his second chapter, expresses “the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior.” The idea is racist, Kendi reasons, because it is assumed the out-group would be improved by joining the in-group.
  • Also racist are those intellectuals and politicians whose explanations lessen in any way the weight of white racism among the causes of inequality:
  • Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, naturally, for their ideas on black family structure in Beyond the Melting Pot (1963)
  • Ihad to forsake the suasionist bred into me, of researching and educating for the sake of changing minds,” Kendi writes. “I had to start researching and educating to change policy.” Something similar is inscribed on Karl Marx’s gravestone in Highgate Cemetery in London. It is the credo of an activist, not a scholar
  • Kendi grants that blacks, too, can be racist, but we must understand the grudging sense in which he concedes this
  • He believes blacks can collaborate with the structures of white racism, as turncoats, agents, and enforcers
  • When Kendi opposes “racism,” he means only the treatment of blacks by European-descended peoples since the Age of Discovery, especially under the American system of slavery and Jim Crow.
  • But the racism itself is always white, no matter what the color of the person practicing it
  • He explicitly does not mean that he considers it wrong to discriminate by race in any abstract ethical sense.
  • On the contrary: He is carrying out the de-universalization of Western values that his mentor Asante urged.
  • To oppose reparations for slavery (or to have no opinion on the matter) is racist.
  • In African-American studies departments you can address racial problems in an atmosphere of esprit de corps and ideological unanimity.
  • their very isolation has turned them into mighty bases for consciousness-raising, dogma construction, and political organizing
  • It is from these hives of like-minded activists that the country’s human-resources departments have been staffed.
  • Those who are confident that Kendi’s argument is something they can take or leave probably do not understand what civil-rights law has become
  • The word “racist” is a powerful disciplinary tool; whoever controls its deployment can bend others to his will
  • it has become clear that corporations fear the word “racism” so much that they will betray their employees and permit their lives to be destroyed rather than risk being accused of it.
  • All this requires is a few redefinitions, and here the law appears to be on Kendi’s side. With its Bostock decision this spring, the Supreme Court went into the business of policing transphobia,
  • In Kendi’s book — which, it bears repeating, has been for much of this summer the best-selling nonfiction book in the United States — the line between white supremacists and climate-change deniers, between white supremacists and opponents of Obamacare, is hard to draw or discern
  • It is difficult to imagine a reform more likely to drive American ethnic (and other) groups apart than the much-discussed project of defunding, or even abolishing, urban police forces
  • The same can be said for the wave of iconoclasm. Satisfying though it may be to throw ropes around a monument of Andrew or Stonewall Jackson and pull it down on one wild night, the effect is to add a grievance to American history, not remove one
  • In light of these unintended consequences, one assertion of Kendi, mentioned earlier, is particularly troubling, because even a skeptical reader will need to pause over the author’s point. This is Kendi’s dismissal of assimilation — the belief that blacks can “join” American society on equal terms — as racist. “While segregationist ideas suggest a racial group is permanently inferior,” Kendi writes, “assimilationist ideas suggest a racial group is temporarily inferior.”
  • . For a couple of decades after the passage of civil-rights legislation, such black socioeconomic inequality as remained could be wished away by well-meaning people of all persuasions, whether quota Democrats or enterprise-zone Republicans
  • the persistence of this inequality through two whole generations puts those promises in a different light. The difference between “temporary” and “permanent” disadvantage looks like a rhetorical one. The dream, as Langston Hughes put it, has been deferred. A radical temptation arises.
  • Kendi, terrible simplificateur that he is, has picked up the gauntlet. As he sees it, there are only two explanations for this delay: Either you believe the problem is with blacks, unable to make it in a system that has been designed fairly for everyone, or you believe the problem is with whites, who have designed an unfair system that keeps blacks down.
katherineharron

What is an impeachment manager? - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 16 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The fight over the impeachment of President Donald Trump is now heading to the US Senate for a trial, but that won't be the end of the line for House Democrats.
  • On Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the seven House Democrats who will serve as managers: Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff of California, Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler of New York, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Zoe Lofgren of California, Val Demings of Florida, Jason Crow of Colorado and Sylvia Garcia of Texas.
  • The way a Senate trial will ultimately unfold will depend on what senators can agree to and the full parameters for a trial have not yet been set.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Pelosi had final say over who is named as an impeachment manager and made her announcement on Wednesday, kicking of the next stage in the impeachment fight.
  • There are no restrictions on the number of House impeachment managers the speaker can name to serve in the role. During the impeachment trial against Trump, seven House Democrats will serve as managers.
chrispink7

Impeachment: Trump wants Senate trial over before State of the Union address | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...crats-republicans-senate-trial

shared by chrispink7 on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump wants his impeachment trial to end before his state of the union address in just two weeks’ time, Lindsey Graham said on Sunday.
  • “His mood is, to go to the state of the union [on 4 February] with this behind him and talk about what he wants to do for the rest of 2020 and what he wants to do for the next four years,” the South Carolina senator and close Trump ally told Fox News Sunday.
  • That timeline is ambitious, given overwhelming public support for a fair airing of the charges against Trump at his Senate trial, in which opening arguments will be heard on Tuesday. Graham conceded that a swift dismissal of the charges, which he had hoped for, will not be possible.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The trial could include testimony from top Trump advisers with firsthand knowledge of his alleged attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. But the White House has indicated that Trump would invoke executive privilege to prevent such advisers from testifying, setting up a court fight that could drag the trial out for weeks or longer.
  • The House impeachment managers, who will act as prosecutors, declared the president must be removed for putting his political career ahead of the public trust and seeking to hide that betrayal from Congress and the American people.
  • The seven managers led by intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff published a 46-page tiral brief. A 61-page “statement of material facts” was attached.
  • Another impeachment manager, Jason Crow of Colorado, said the White House was in effect arguing that Trump was above the law. “If all of the president’s arguments are true, that a president can’t be indicted, and that the abuse of power, the abuse of public trust doesn’t count as an impeachable offense – if that is true, then no president can be held accountable,” he told CNN’s State of the Union. “Then the president truly is above the law.”
  • Trump must be removed, Democrats argue, owing to the egregiousness of his past misconduct and his ongoing efforts to encourage foreign tampering in US elections.
  • “President Trump’s continuing presence in office undermines the integrity of our democratic processes and endangers our national security,” the managers wrote. “President Trump’s abuse of power requires his conviction and removal from office.”
blairca

MLK Day: Americans marking Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and birthday as fears of deep racial divisions roil the nation - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...-racial-divisions-roil-america

mlk americans inequality US race relations

shared by blairca on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • But at the same time, he's struggling to come to grips with the deep racial divisions roiling the nation
  • As the nation marks the holiday honoring King, the mood surrounding it is overshadowed by deteriorating race relations in an election season that has seen one candidate of color after another quit the 2020 presidential race.
  • People have the right to be — and should be — concerned about the state of race relations and the way people of color, in particular, are being treated
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • You can't understand a minority if you've never been in a minority situation. Even though you can advocate for us all day, you could never understand the issues we go through on a daily basis."
  • people are showing their hatred openly, but it doesn't mean it wasn't there," Savitt said. "There is a coming realization in our country. We have to come to a reckoning about our past and the truth about our history from slavery to the lynching era to Jim Crow. Only with real honesty about our situation can we come to some reconciliation and move on to fulfill King's hope and dream of a real, peaceful multicultural democracy."
  • In 2018, there were more than 7,000 single-bias incidents reported by law enforcement, according to FBI hate crime statistics. More than 53% of the offenders were white, while 24% were black. Nearly 60% of the incidents involved race, ethnicity and ancestry.
  • "With Trump, he has pushed the American nationalist identity that I think tamps down the kind of conflicts we would have,"
katherineharron

Law enforcement braces for more extremist violence in DC and around the US ahead of Inauguration Day - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

riots

shared by katherineharron on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Calls for new protests in Washington, DC, and states across the country have law enforcement bracing for more possible violence in the coming days after rioters stormed the US Capitol last week leaving five people dead, including a Capitol Police officer.
  • A Department of Homeland Security official told CNN that the breach of the Capitol will sharpen the response and planning for inauguration.
  • DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has asked for additional security measures with ten days to go before Inauguration Day as Wednesday's riot has set off a shockwave of concern among federal, state and local officials for more possible bloodshed over the outcome of the 2020 election that ousted President Donald Trump from office.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • the Department of Defense is aware of "further possible threats posed by would-be terrorists in the days up to and including Inauguration Day."
  • Layers of security, standoff distancing and tactical teams on standby will be used to minimize violence near the inaugural events, he said, adding that the biggest concerns should be an active shooter scenario, vehicle ramming and the deliberate targeting of critical infrastructure.
  • More than 6,000 members have already been mobilized in the wake of the Capitol being stormed by pro-Trump rioters to work in 12-hour shifts on Capitol grounds and work traffic control points throughout the city.
  • Plans for future armed protests, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, began proliferating on and off Twitter last week, the social media company said.
  • "Trump WILL be sworn in for a second term on January 20th!!," said a commenter on thedonald.win, a pro-Trump online forum, on Thursday, the day after the siege. "We must not let the communists win. Even if we have to burn DC to the ground."
  • "Law enforcement was ill prepared for an event the entire country knew was coming, and one that POTUS had been signaling for weeks," said Brian Harrell, former DHS assistant secretary for infrastructure protection. "The normal 'layers of security', with each inner layer being tougher to breach, was nearly non-existent. It's shocking, that in a post 9/11 world, we witnessed the 'people's house' be breached and ransacked with ease."
  • "I will tell you that given the events of this last week that this inauguration preparation has to be different than any other inauguration," Bowser said in an interview with CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.
  • Washington State Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee announced Friday that he was mobilizing up to 750 members of the National Guard to provide security for the beginning of the state's legislative session, which starts Monday.
  • The inauguration is designated as a National Special Security Event, which allows for greater federal security cooperation and law enforcement resources.
  • "You're going to see immediate improvement, fully aggressive posture by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice as well, because we accept violence from no one," he said in an interview on Fox News Thursday.
  • Experts warn that the calls for violence, which circulated ahead of Wednesday's siege of the Capitol, have intensified ahead of Inauguration Day.
  • "We fully expect that this violence could actually get worse before it gets better."
  • "It's to show that a relatively small number of people can actually take over the system. It's supposed to be a rallying cry for -- 'join us, or you are now the enemy.'"
  • "We could start to see a lot of lives lost because of the moment that occurred on Wednesday, so very, very concerned about the cascading effects," the former official said. "It's a very concerning moment."
  • On Saturday afternoon, an unlawful assembly was declared in San Diego after protesters clashed and threw objects at police officers. According to tweets from the San Diego Police Department, protesters threw rocks, bottles and eggs at officers shortly after they were asked to leave the area. The tweets also said that pepper spray was being dispersed from the crowd toward the officers.
  • On the same day as the siege in Washington, DC, the Texas State Capitol building and grounds were closed to the public "out of an abundance of caution,"
  • At the Pentagon, officials are assessing whether there is a need to bolster the number of National Guard forces to as many as 13,000 guardsmen for President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration, according to a defense official with knowledge of the planning. Prior to the US Capitol breach, the estimated need called for approximately 7,000 guard troops.
  • "In light of the most recent insurrection activity, the state cannot tolerate any actions that could result in harm, mayhem or interruption of function of democratic institutions," Inslee said Friday evening. In addition to Guardsmen, the governor says a "large number of Washington State Patrol troopers will be on hand."
  • "Some of the online rhetoric has called for protests at all 50 capitols plus DC," the official said. "FBI in particular has been continuing to put our threat assessments and we are at the state level as well."
aidenborst

Opinion | Supreme Leader of Voter Suppression - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-voter-suppression.html

Politics US trump crisis Culture gop election election-overview future-elections anti-patriotism exclusion

shared by aidenborst on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • we have trudged through these last months of President Trump trying, at every turn, to overthrow the will of the people by overturning the election he lost in November. Even if his ultimate loss is inevitably secured, it seems as though he is burning down the village as he retreats.
  • Trump has essentially claimed that fraud occurred during the election in large swing-state cities within counties that have large African-American populations — cities like Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.
  • The New York Times pointed out in November: “All three cities voted pretty much the same way they did in 2016. Turnout barely budged, relative to other areas in these states. Joseph R. Biden Jr. saw no remarkable surge in support — certainly nothing that would bolster claims of ballot stuffing or tampered vote tallies. Mr. Trump even picked up marginally more votes this year in all three cities than he did four years ago.”
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • But that thought is antithetical to the war Trump wants to wage in America between the suburbs and what he deems problematic “inner cities” and “Democrat-run cities” — code for where concentrations of Black people and other people of color live.
  • It threatens to strengthen efforts to disenfranchise Black voters and other voters of color who disproportionately vote for Democrats in the future.
  • “ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election and in all future elections.” As Jay Willis pointed out in The Washington Post, “Even after Trump’s presidency ends, that message will pave the way for G.O.P. politicians and judges to further one of their party’s and the conservative movement’s most important ongoing projects: restricting voting rights.” He continued: “Trump lost this election, but he can still help Republicans win in the future.”
  • Trump not only attempted to erase Black votes after they were cast, he attempted to suppress them before they were cast. This is nothing new among conservatives, but Trump has dragged the practice out of the back rooms and into the light of day once again, giving it a telegenic, digitally contagious persona.
  • As Eric Levitz pointed out in New York Magazine: “The G.O.P. is now a party that has no compunction about nullifying the voting rights of its opposition to retain power. And once a party has liberated itself from the shackles of respecting its detractors’ rights, much else becomes permissible.”
  • But we don’t talk enough about how for Black people and other racial minorities, this isn’t only about faith. For them, it’s about being able to participate in elections at all.
  • Republicans plan to challenge the counting of state Electoral College votes. This effort, too, is expected to fail. But it will provide yet another spectacle on a grand stage for the lie that Trump and his sycophantic courtiers have sown: that the political machine in liberal cities full of Blacks, hipsters, gays and gangs stole elections from the real Americans in the hinterlands.
  • What we are seeing unfold before our eyes is not about building trust in elections, it is anti-patriotic. It is not about ensuring that every legal vote is counted. It’s about attempting to legally limit whose ballots can be counted.
  • Trump is attempting to drag Jim Crow into the Twitter era.
katherineharron

Inauguration: DC Mayor asks White House for emergency declaration funding for security - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

biden

shared by katherineharron on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser on Sunday sent a letter to President Donald Trump asking for an emergency declaration in order to get additional funding for President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration as safety concerns mount following the US Capitol breach.
  • "I have determined that the plans and resources previously assigned to the Inauguration are insufficient to establish a safe and secure environment as a direct result of the insurrectionist actions that occurred on January 6. Based on recent events and intelligence assessments, we must prepare for large groups of trained and armed extremists to come to Washington, DC."
  • "We are seeing ... chatter from these white supremacists, from these far-right extremists -- they feel emboldened in this moment," said Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks and counters hate. "We fully expect that this violence could actually get worse before it gets better."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Biden has indicated he intends to proceed with the inaugural -- already curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic -- as planned despite the violence at the Capitol last week.
  • Bowser told CBS' "Face the Nation" earlier Sunday that she will also ask the Department of Homeland Security to begin their "national special security event" timeline sooner than planned, as well as include the US Capitol in their coverage area for the inauguration.
  • Bowser ultimately assessed in her letter to Trump that despite the security assets the city has in place, "significant preparedness gaps remain that cannot be remedied without this emergency declaration and direct federal assistance."
kaylynfreeman

Opinion | Some Trump Supporters Might Be Relieved If He Loses - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-voters.html

US politics trump

shared by kaylynfreeman on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • My relative was adamant that Mr. Trump’s bid for a second term was finished. So adamant, actually, that it sounded as if she wanted it to be over.
  • He didn’t actually like Mr. Trump. His vote was a protest.
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 02 Nov 20
       
      protest to what? A women president?
  • But I’ve come to believe that some people who publicly support the president don’t fully want him to win. They have to put up a fight for their sense of dignity. But even those who definitely plan to vote for him again privately admit ambivalence or even a wish that he could be magically swept out of the White House without a straightforward ballot-box defeat.
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 02 Nov 20
       
      Do they have to much pride to go against their previous views? Sounds pretty selfish to me.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • These are public Trump fans who, in private, acknowledge that his tweets are humiliating, his crowing about his victories is tasteless, his policy flip-flops are dispiriting and some of his statements are hurtful and damaging. They won’t say they’re tired of him to a pollster. It can be as embarrassing to admit you liked Mr. Trump and now fear him as it was to admit you were attracted to him in the first place. Mr. Trump’s critics portray his supporters as fools, and to say you only now realized he has problems seems to concede the point.
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 02 Nov 20
       
      So why are they voting for him if they admit he is a horrible president!
  • Other Trump-supporting friends used this phrasing, too, and I began to wonder if it was a sublimated yearning. It would accomplish two things: first, make Mr. Trump a martyr to leftist intolerance, and second, get him out of office.
  • My relative was more upset. She called me near tears. “What’s going to happen to your health care?” she asked. (I rely on the Affordable Care Act.) She never thought Mr. Trump would occupy the White House. Her vote was a form of trolling.
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 02 Nov 20
       
      bruh how is she gonna vote and then complain. she put herself in that position.
  • President Bill Clinton was a prime example of this double standard; he represented a party that insisted it — and only it — supported women’s empowerment while he preyed on a female intern.
  • They expressed strangely little anxiety that Mr. Trump would get very sick or die. Compassion for his suffering, yes. Anger at Democrats’ schadenfreude, yes. But no fear he would be swept off the political stage.
  • Mr. Trump’s shtick became less satisfying when he was president. My relative found his demonizing of Baltimore appalling and confessed she’d had to stop looking at his tweets. “Reagan was very genteel,” another pro-Trump friend complained to me — very much unlike Mr. Trump.
  • “How could so many of my countrymen love this man so much?” The answer may be simpler than we expect: a lot of them don’t.
  • Perhaps it is actually disturbing to consider that Trump fans’ intense public enthusiasm may be a front, because that would mean a proportion of them had a wish to throw the country into chaos. They don’t think America looks good right now, either. They think it looks bad, and they possessed — and probably still possess — such anger and cynicism about American politics that they risked a conflagration.
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 02 Nov 20
       
      So why are they gonna vote for Trump again if Biden can make our country better? Make it make sense.
anonymous

Abbas Is Counting on a Trump Loss to Revive Palestinian Fortunes - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bbas-biden-trump-election.html

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The Palestinians are counting on a Trump defeat next Tuesday. They don’t even want to think about Plan B.
  • But former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has made clear that he opposes Israeli annexation of land Palestinians want for a future state, and Israel has said it would not proceed without United States support.
  • solated diplomatically and running out of money, plagued by old internal ideological divisions and by new threats like the coronavirus, the Palestinians are looking to Tuesday’s election more desperate than ever for a change in Washington.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • They are expecting a return to United States support for a two-state solution that Palestinians would consider viable.
  • Rolling back other moves by Mr. Trump, however, would be more complicated, like reopening a Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington.
  • Should Mr. Trump win a second term, the Palestinians see no good options.
  • Ultimately, many analysts say, Mr. Abbas may have to eat crow and re-engage the Trump administration, ideally with some sort of face-saving diplomatic cover like the intervention of a multilateral institution.
  • Difficult as it may be to believe now, Mr. Abbas was quite optimistic about the Trump administration in its first few months,
  • But those hopes were quickly dashed, and the administration’s treatment of the Palestinians became a growing nightmare of aid cuts, affronts and insults.
  • Allowing the reopening of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s diplomatic mission in Washington or restoring much of the aid to projects that directly benefited the Palestinian Authority would require Mr. Biden to overcome a number of legal obstacles, some of which might require Congressional approval.
  • “These are all possible but they would require heavy political lifting,”
  • Some Palestinians support renewed efforts to revive negotiations with Israel. Others want the Palestinian Authority to dissolve itself, forcing Israel to take responsibility for their lives
  • “I feel like we’re in a very dark tunnel with no light at the end,” he said.
katherineharron

The painful absurdity of AG William Barr's slavery comment - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

global politics

shared by katherineharron on 17 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • "It is incredible, as chief law enforcement officer in this country, to equate human bondage to expert advice to save lives. Slavery was not about saving lives. It was about devaluing lives."
  • Slavery was not about saving lives. It was about devaluing lives. For hundreds of years, enslaved Africans were beaten, tortured, raped and treated as property.
  • "The institution of slavery was, for a quarter of a millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired,
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In this system, African captives "could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner's debt or to spite a rival or to settle an estate," Wilkerson writes.
  • That Barr painted a few months of being told -- or really, in many cases, asked -- to stay home during a global pandemic as even remotely in the same category as the practice of enslavement is ridiculous. (To say nothing of the fact that he skipped over, among other things, Jim Crow, Japanese internment during World War II, and the slaughter of Native Americans.)
  • You know, I think the narrative that the police are on some, you know, epidemic of shooting unarmed Black men is simply a false narrative and also the narrative that that's based on race," Barr said earlier this month
  • According to The Washington Post's police shootings database, Black Americans are killed by police at more than twice the rate of their White counterparts, despite the fact that the former make up less than 13% of the country's population.
  • "It was also Barr, serving as then-President George H.W. Bush's attorney general, who helmed the federal response during 1992's Los Angeles riots, which came after four officers were acquitted of beating Rodney King," Vazquez wrote. "That was, in fact, the last time the Insurrection Act was invoked -- the 1807 law allowing for the use of US military on US soil.
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