So, putting armed policemen in schools is pretty much the best idea ever. I mean, I assume that when they’re not dealing with exceptionally rare school shootings I assume they just kinda mind their own business, and would never try to justify their existence by turning trivial disciplinary issues into criminal charges, right?
Yet the most striking impact of school police officers so far, critics say, has been a surge in arrests or misdemeanor charges for essentially nonviolent behavior — including scuffles, truancy and cursing at teachers — that sends children into the criminal courts.
“There is no evidence that placing officers in the schools improves safety,” said Denise C. Gottfredson, a criminologist at the University of Maryland who is an expert in school violence. “And it increases the number of minor behavior problems that are referred to the police, pushing kids into the criminal system.”
Oh. That’s surprising! But I assume once affluent suburban parents get sick of having their kids dragged away in handcuffs for sassing back at the teachers, it will all stop?
Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of students are arrested or given criminal citations at schools each year. A large share are sent to court for relatively minor offenses, with black and Hispanic students and those with disabilities disproportionately affected, according to recent reports from civil rights groups, including the Advancement Project, in Washington, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in New York.
Wow, this discretion is enforced in a selective and arbitrary manner against the relatively powerless? You learn something new every day!
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NAACP President Ben Jealous: Putting people in jail ‘is how we solve almost every problem’ in America (via current) |
Without slavery, however, the survey maps of the General Land Office would have remained a sort of science-fiction plan for a society that could never happen. Between 1820 and 1860 more than a million enslaved people were transported from the upper to the lower South, the vast majority by the venture-capitalist slave traders the slaves called “soul drivers.” The first wave cleared the region for cultivation. “Forests were literally dragged out by the roots,” the former slave John Parker remembered in “His Promised Land.” Those who followed planted the fields in cotton, which they then protected, picked, packed and shipped — from “sunup to sundown” every day for the rest of their lives.
Eighty-five percent of the cotton Southern slaves picked was shipped to Britain. The mills that have come to symbolize the Industrial Revolution and the slave-tilled fields of the South were mutually dependent. Every year, British merchant banks advanced millions of pounds to American planters in anticipation of the sale of the cotton crop. Planters then traded credit in pounds for the goods they needed to get through the year, many of them produced in the North. “From the rattle with which the nurse tickles the ear of the child born in the South, to the shroud that covers the cold form of the dead, everything comes to us from the North,” said one Southerner.
As slaveholders supplied themselves (and, much more meanly, their slaves) with Northern goods, the credit originally advanced against cotton made its way north, into the hands of New York and New England merchants who used it to purchase British goods. Thus were Indian land, African-American labor, Atlantic finance and British industry synthesized into racial domination, profit and economic development on a national and a global scale.
When the cotton crop came in short and sales failed to meet advanced payments, planters found themselves indebted to merchants and bankers. Slaves were sold to make up the difference. The mobility and salability of slaves meant they functioned as the primary form of collateral in the credit-and-cotton economy of the 19th century.
It is not simply that the labor of enslaved people underwrote 19th-century capitalism. Enslaved people were the capital: four million people worth at least $3 billion in 1860, which was more than all the capital invested in railroads and factories in the United States combined. Seen in this light, the conventional distinction between slavery and capitalism fades into meaninglessness.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel,
We are the Chicago Students Organizing to Save Our Schools. We are a student-led organization fighting to save our schools.
You have not done enough to help our schools!
We represent the thousands of students in Chicago Public Schools thatwill be directly affected by school closings.
These closings will force us to cross gang lines that will result in more violence and more children dying. This is unacceptable. Almost every school that will be closed is in a Black, Latino and low-income community; this is a racist decision. This is unacceptable! And we, the students, have had enough!
We demand:
1) An immediate moratorium on all school closings;
2) A better way to use the TIF funds and to actually be used for our schools;
3) And an elected school board
We expect to hear back from you soon. If not, you should expect that we will be back! This is our first action but will not be our last. This is our school, and we are taking it back!
Sincerely,
Chicago Students Organizing to Save Our Schools54 Chicago schools are slated to close. 90 percent of students at closing schools are black, even though they make up only 40 percent of Chicago students.
if you’re not sure of the veracity of these claims, this this american life piece is a good primer showing what it’s already like for an already underfunded mostly minority-attended high school in chicago. and all rahm wants to do is make it worse. wtf.
| — | Joseph Weinberg & Michael Biernbaum, Conversations of Consent: Sexual Intimacy without Sexual Assault (via velvet-woods) |
During oral argument last week in Shelby County v. Holder, the constitutional challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Roberts asked, “[I]s it the government’s submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North?” Solicitor General Verrilli responded, “It is not, and I do not know the answer to that … .” This post offers a preliminary answer to the Chief Justice’s question, using recent data. Our initial results suggest that the coverage formula of Section 5 does a remarkably good job of differentiating states according to the racial attitudes of their nonblack citizens. There are essentially three schools of thought about how best to measure racial prejudice using survey questions. Some researchers favor explicit measures of prejudice (“old-fashioned racism” or stereotyping), based on agreement with statements like “blacks are less intelligent than whites” and “blacks are lazy.” Others favor symbolic measures of prejudice or “racial resentment,” based on questions about affirmative action and whether blacks have gotten “more than they deserve.” Still others favor measures of implicit or subconscious bias. For the results reported here we use explicit stereotyping, as it remains disputed whether racial resentment measures capture prejudice as opposed to conservatism, and it is uncertain whether implicit bias predicts political behavior. We created a binary measure of stereotyping that roughly captures whether a person is more prejudiced toward blacks than is typical of nonblack Americans. Our data source is the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), which asked non-black respondents to rate their own racial group and blacks in terms of intelligence, trustworthiness, and work effort, on a scale of 0-100. On average respondents ranked their own group about 15 points above blacks on each trait. We coded respondents as holding “prejudiced” views with respect to blacks on a particular trait if the difference between their rating of their own racial group and their rating of blacks exceeded the national mean difference for the trait. To create an overall measure of prejudice for each respondent, we summed the number of traits on which the respondent was more prejudiced than the national mean. Finally, we converted this sum into a binary variable, coding as “prejudiced overall” those respondents who exceeded the national mean with respect to at least two of the three traits.[1] To be clear, a respondent whom we have coded as “not prejudiced overall” may well be quite prejudiced. But the Chief Justice’s question—whether “citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North”—is a question about relative prejudice, and this is what we are trying to capture. We provide two estimates of the proportion of adult, nonblack residents in each state who are “prejudiced overall.” The first is based on simple disaggregation of the large NAES dataset (N=19,325). This method should work pretty well for the largest states but may yield unreliable estimates for smaller states, which contribute relatively few respondents to the NAES sample. For the second estimate we use multilevel regression with post-stratification (MRP), a recently developed statistical technique that has been shown to yieldremarkably accurate estimates of state-level public opinion. We model prejudice as a function of individual-level covariates (sex, race, age, and education) and a set of state-level predictors (black population, percent of blacks in poverty, segregation, and income inequality).
Using either technique we find a strong positive correlation between Section 5 “covered status” and anti-black prejudice, but with MRP the correlation is truly stunning.
L submitted this picture.
Wow, it’s really surprising that the news is reported in a fucking racist-ass way.
“It is a pity the young Pi was not nominated There’s not much you can do. He’s an Indian actor and nobody knows him so he was easily overlooked.
With peer voting, people will vote for their friends or based on their impressions. He’s a newcomer and we often said he had never acted before—that’s a disadvantage to getting nominated. But I do think his performance was the purest performance.”
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Taiwanese director Ang Lee noting Hollywood’s tendency to overlook Asian actors to a Chinese radio station. Ang Lee was disappointed that Suraj Sharma was not nominated for Best Actor for his performance in The Life of Pi. Lee added that he felt Irfan Khan should have been nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and that Zhang Ziyi was not nominated either for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, nor were any actors nominated for Slumdog Millionaire. What’s a guy gotta do to get an Oscar? Here’s some trivia about Sharma’s work on the film, from FirstPost.com.
1. This kid is badass. 2. When white actors like Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio do stuff like lose 20% of their body weight or cut themselves and keep acting everyone cheers uproariously. 3. It is weirdly dismissive when films about characters of color get nominated but their actors do not. Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Slumdog Millionaire, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Last Emperor, etc. 4. As FirstPost points out, a lot of the Oscar snubbed actors that people are talking about like Leonardo DiCaprio have plenty of other opportunities to star in other big movies. When is the next big project for an actor of South Asian descent coming up? (via racebending) |
In 1837, Persian was replaced by English as the language of governance in India. To secure a high-paying job, Indians had to know English. And to study English, an Indian had to be from those “classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies.” […]
Since the British saw Indians as groups of “Hindus” and “Muslims,” they also began to describe religion as a marker of linguistic difference, which is part of the reason why a shared north Indian language ended up getting divided into Hindi (for Hindus) and Urdu (for Muslims). […]
A class divide quickly emerged between vernacular-educated Indians and the English-speaking elites. An English-speaking Indian elite was desirable for officials like Macaulay, who needed “a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste and manners” as a buffer between themselves and the masses.
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I write in the language of my colonizers. It is the only language I know. (via soniasaraiya) |
| — | Literacy Privilege: How I Learned to Check Mine Instead of Making Fun of People’s Grammar on the Internet (via stowaway) |
kdo:
Gloria Jones - Tainted Love (1964 Version)
last thing
ok where was that post that was going around earlier about how white musicians cover black folks music and everyone acts like the white folks did it first
cause i didn’t even realize the 80s pop version by whatever white boy band version of this song was a cover
and im fucking pissed about it
this isn’t something that stopped with elvis
everybody but black folks can get praise and paid for making black music
School suspensions have long been used by educators to discipline the most unruly of students, but a new study finds striking disparities between the number of white and minority students suspended from class—a process that ultimately undermines the academic success of minority students living in high-risk areas. In their paper “Misbehavior, Suspensions, and Security Measures in High School: Racial/Ethnic and Gender Differences,” Dr. Jeremy Finn, a professor of education (quantitative methods) and associate dean for research at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Buffalo – SUNY, and his co-author, Dr. Timothy Servoss of Canisius College, find that minority students are suspended more frequently than their white peers who commit similar offences. “African-American students and Hispanic/Latino students were suspended at higher rates than were non-Hispanic whites, differences in most cases not attributable to different levels of misbehavior,” the report abstract says.
WANT TO STOP BEING STOP-AND-FRISKED? STOP BEING BLACK
January 22, 2013For the past five months, an anonymous group called “Racism Still Exists” has been posting powerful billboards in bus shelters around Bed-Stuy, with the stated aim of “[illuminating] some of the ways in which racism operates in this country.” Their latest, spotted by photographer Stephanie Keith, is a poster that takes refreshingly direct aim at the NYPD for its racially-biased stop-and-frisk policy.
The tagline, “Don’t want to get stopped by the NYPD? Stop being black,” is both as striking and as true as it could possibly be, and is underscored by a series of statistics: in 2010, 52 percent of the 601,285 stops were of black people (according to the 2000 census, black people make up 26 percent of the city’s population), 98 percent of stops against black people did not yield any contraband, and of the 32,375 black people stopped for having a “suspicious bulge,” only one was found to have a pistol.
In the past, Racism Still Exists (RISE) has used billboards to document the racial disparities surrounding education, the fast food and tobacco industries, home ownership and wealth, and the film industry. Each poster is backed by a smart, thoroughly sourced argument on RISE’s Tumblr.
ColorLines did some looking into the ads, and though they weren’t able to find out who’s behind RISE, they did get some commentary from local activists, many of whom support the project. “Bed-Stuy, and Brooklyn in general, is going through a very profound transformation and we gotta put that in context,” said Kali Akuno of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. “For many of the young yuppies and buppies, they see the police playing a positive role and trying to engage in a race neutral dialouge.
“What the billboard is doing is kinda opening up and exploding this myth that [stop-and-frisk] is taking place in a race neutral light — it’s making people confront it in a very real way.”
Also, please note the upcoming ‘STOP THE COPS’ unity march from Bronx to Harlem event. Please think about attending. It’s going to be huge.
I think the problem is that many people in America think that racism is an attitude. And this is encouraged by the capitalist system. So they think that what people think is what makes them a racist. Racism is not an attitude.
If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.
Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you’re anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.
You cannot be a racist without power. You cannot be a sexist without power. Even men who beat their wives get this power from the society which allows it, condones it, encourages it. One cannot be against racism, one cannot be against sexism, unless one is against capitalism.
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Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) answering a question about racism, sexism, and capitalism. Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tug8RJyLoz0 (via disciplesofmalcolm) |
Apparently in the 50s, a popular nightclub, Mocambo, would not book Ella Fitzgerald because she was black. Fortunately for Ella, she had a powerful and unlikely benefactor.
“I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt…it was because of her that I played the Mocambo, a very popular nightclub in the ’50s. She personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him - and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status - that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman - a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.” - Ella Fitzgerald(x)
