kpete
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Nicholas Kristof this morning calls for an American Truth and Reconciliation Commission
We feud about the fires in Ferguson, Mo., and we can agree only that racial divisions remain raw. So let’s borrow a page from South Africa and impanel a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine race in America.“In the jewelry store, they lock the case when I walk in,” a 23-year-old black man wrote in May 1992. “In the shoe store, they help the white man who walks in after me. In the shopping mall, they follow me.”
http://www.stanforddaily.com/2013/01/23/cory-booker-why-have-i-lost-control/
He described an incident when he was stopped by six police officers who detained him, with guns at the ready, and treated him for 30 minutes as a dangerous suspect.
That young man was future Senator Cory Booker, who had been a senior class president at Stanford University and was a newly selected Rhodes Scholar. Yet our law enforcement system reduced him to a stereotype — so young Booker sat trembling and praying that he wouldn’t be shot by the police.
...........
White Americans may protest that our racial problems are not like South Africa’s. No, but the United States incarcerates a higher proportion of blacks than apartheid South Africa did. In America, the black-white wealth gap today is greater than it was in South Africa in 1970 at the peak of apartheid.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-when-whites-just-dont-get-it-part-5.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-regionhttp://www.stopracialprofiling.net/uncategorized/100/
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/lets-talk-by-bloggersrus.html
Ferguson isn’t about black rage against cops. It’s white rage against progress.
By Carol Anderson August 29
Carol Anderson is an associate professor of African American studies and history at Emory University and a public voices fellow with the Op-Ed Project. She is the author of “Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960.”
When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Mo., during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What we’ve actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless.
Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn’t have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations.
White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancement, there’s a reaction, a backlash.
....................
So when you think of Ferguson, don’t just think of black resentment at a criminal justice system that allows a white police officer to put six bullets into an unarmed black teen. Consider the economic dislocation of black America. Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin interacted, thus transforming a 17-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim. Remember the assault on the Voting Rights Act. Look at Connick v. Thompson, a partisan 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2011 that ruled it was legal for a city prosecutor’s staff to hide evidence that exonerated a black man who was rotting on death row for 14years. And think of a recent study by Stanford University psychology researchers concluding that, when white people were told that black Americans are incarcerated in numbers far beyond their proportion of the population, “they reported being more afraid of crime and more likely to support the kinds of punitive policies that exacerbate the racial disparities,” such as three-strikes or stop-and-frisk laws.
Only then does Ferguson make sense. It’s about white rage.
MORE:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ferguson-wasnt-black-rage-against-copsit-was-white-rage-against-progress/2014/08/29/3055e3f4-2d75-11e4-bb9b-997ae96fad33_story.html
Off-Duty Cop Charged With Shooting Woman For Cutting Him Off In Traffic
An off-duty cop got upset at a woman for cutting him off and allegedly fired his gun into her window, hitting her in the head.
Now Houston Police Officer Kenneth Caplan is charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, according to Click2Houston.
The woman, whose name was not released by the station, said the bullet grazed the left side of her head, allowing her to avoid a major injury.
"I feel like I got a taste of death, honestly," she told the station. "My heart was slowing down and I couldn't really breathe."
VIDEO & MORE:
http://crooksandliars.com/2014/11/road-rage-duty-cop-shoots-woman-cutting?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
GOP Staffer to Obama's Teenage Daughters: "Dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at a bar."
GOP aide's online dig at Obama daughters creates backlash--
The communications director for a Republican member of Congress ignited a firestorm this weekend after she criticized President Obama's teenage daughters in a Facebook post that touched a nerve even for Americans accustomed to political mudslinging:
way more plus reactions:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/30/1348355/-GOP-Staffer-to-Obama-s-Teenage-Daughters-Dress-like-you-deserve-respect-not-a-spot-at-a-bar
Michael Brown Family's Church Burned to the Ground - Arson Investigation by ATF
As chaos engulfed several Ferguson streets Monday, Pastor] Lee tried unsuccessfully to chase away looters and put out fires along West Florissant Avenue. Then his phone rang.
The officer on the other end of the line told him that he needed to get to his church right away. By the time Lee arrived, the cinder-block structure had been gutted by flames. [...]
Although other buildings were burned during the violence that consumed much of Ferguson on Monday, the flames at Flood Christian Church were different. The church building, purchased in March by the 31-year-old Lee, sits well outside the area where things were violent, far from the riots. The glass storefronts on each side remain unscathed.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/29/1348212/-Michael-Brown-Family-s-Church-Burned-to-the-Ground-Arson-Investigation-by-ATF
Ferguson-area church torched; ATF searches for arsonists
FERGUSON, Mo. - The smell of smoke still wafts through the air from the window in the children's area of Flood Christian Church.
This was the safe place. The sanctuary. The hope of a pastor's dream of building a church catering to people who abandoned the concept of church. It's the church that Mike Brown Sr. attends.
Alcohol Tobacco and Firearm investigators said somebody purposely set fire to Flood Christian Church on Monday night at 11:44 p.m.
Burning a church is a federal offense.
http://www.ksdk.com/story/news/local/ferguson/2014/11/27/ferguson-area-church-torched-atf-searches-for-arsonists/19569757/
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Anyone wishing to donate funds to rebuild the Flood Christian Church can go to their Go Fund Me site here: Mike Brown Church The Flood
http://www.gofundme.com/huw1h0
Cross-posted from Booman Tribune
Michael Brown Family's Church Burned to the Ground - Arson Investigation by ATF
Source: Daily Kos
sorry this happened a few days ago, so I reposted in GD
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025888396
Read more: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/29/1348212/-Michael-Brown-Family-s-Church-Burned-to-the-Ground-Arson-Investigation-by-ATF
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Shot in Cleveland
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/29/1348204/-Editorial-Cartoon-Shot-In-Cleveland
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