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Thursday, January 30, 2003 I was working today when a young woman walked into the store with her apparent boyfriend. She was 18, had a scar on her right eyebrow (which was shaved, as was her left) and she was black. She told me that she was brousing through the stores up and down the street. She mentioned to me the birth of her child, and told me that she had been put on probation for a year. She apparently had been in a fight with three other girls who were between the age of 15 and 16. These girls had ripped out her eyebrow ring, broken her ribs, and stolen her purse. In retaliation, she had broken a bottle over the head of one of them. The judge dismissed the charges against the girls, apparently citing that they were minors. The black girl was told that the charges would be dropped in a year were she to behave. There is no way to tell if she was truly guilty or any crime. She did not seem to have the angry superiority that many guilty people carry with them. Instead, she seemed confused, and she seemed small. Belittled. I forgot to ask if the three girls who assaulted her were white. posted by Unknown at 4:51 PM Wednesday, January 29, 2003 More from Tolerence.org CBS: Corporate Bigotry System Jan. 7 -- This spring, CBS hopes to unveil its latest reality show -- "The Real Beverly Hillbillies." The concept is simple: uproot a poor rural family, transplant its members into a Los Angeles mansion, let the camera roll -- and then laugh at them. Tolerance.org joins the Center for Rural Strategies in asking Americans from all walks of life to pressure CBS to abandon development of "The Real Beverly Hillbillies." Ridiculing rural Americans isn't funny; it's bigoted. posted by Unknown at 10:40 AM Monday, January 27, 2003 From Tolerence.org By Any Means Necessary Jan. 24, 2003 -- Organizers at University of Michigan plan a student-led march on Washington, D.C., to protest a pair of court cases they say could gut affirmative action. Can 100,000-plus young voices sway the Supremes? By Brian Willoughby Jan. 24, 2003 -- Student organizers in Ann Arbor, Mich., are hoping the combined voices of 100,000-plus young people will rise up against resegregation. “Every young person who stands for progress and democracy, for integration and equality, should make their presence and their voice known in Washington, D.C.," said organizer Jodi Masley. “This is a fight for the future of American society. This is a fight for everyone.” These young voices are at the center of one of the thorniest issues in America: affirmative action. Two University of Michigan cases will be argued April 1 before the Supreme Court. The student group, BAMN, (By Any Means Necessary) is spearheading a march on Washington to support Michigan’s affirmative action policies. The march will coincide with the Supreme Court hearing. Masley, a national organizer for BAMN, was a first-year law student when the Michigan cases were first filed and now is one of the attorneys representing student defendants. BAMN — also called the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration — was formed in 1995 at the University of California, Berkeley. Michigan formed a sister chapter in 1997, as the anti-affirmative action lawsuits were first being filed. Masley fears that while affirmative action is the focus of the debate, the real victim might be Brown v. Board of Education. “The result would be vast and pervasive inequality,” she said. The ongoing national debate about affirmative action has become ready fodder for news stories, talk shows and editorials. Once President Bush leaped into the fray, filing a brief against the University of Michigan race-conscious admissions practices, it has been difficult to find a major daily newspaper that doesn’t address the issues in some way on any given day. And while the debate has been vigorous, Ann Arbor organizers have a second interest as well; they hope to re-invigorate the national Civil Rights Movement, powered by strong young voices protesting Bush and others who they say are trying to gut affirmative action and dis-integrate the nation’s schools. “This is not democratic education, and it’s not public education,” Masley said. Stealing Bush’s own catch-phrase, she added, “This is not ‘leaving no child behind.’ This is leaving millions of black and Latino youth behind deliberately and consciously.” For its part, the University of Michigan law school projects a 73% drop in black student enrollment if its affirmative action program is eliminated. That, Masley said, is why BAMN wants to bus thousands of young people to D.C., bringing public pressure to bear on the decision-making process. “We cannot rely only on the courts or the lawyers or the politicians,” Masley said. “This is about using the power of social unrest.” Tracing affirmative action Affirmative action calls for special consideration to be given to minorities and women for purposes of employment and education. In the case of college admissions, a minority candidate may be given preference over an equally qualified white candidate. The University of Michigan, for example, awards points to under-represented minority candidates, one of several categories for which such points are awarded. The White House’s briefs in the case say that Michigan’s affirmative action practices amount to quotas and are unconstitutional. Proponents of Michigan — including more than three dozen higher education organizations that use similar admission practices — say there are no quotas and that race is simply one of many factors used to determine admission. Other categories include everything from “men in nursing” to “provost’s discretion,” the latter of which carries the same 20-point scale as “under-represented racial-ethnic minority” — and certainly lends itself to a power-and-privilege vote for upper-crust applicants. The lack of a level playing field between white and nonwhite high schools is exacerbated by other factors in the list, including 10 points for the academic strength of the high school and 8 points for the strength of high school curriculum. Add in 12 points for SAT scores, which historically favors white test-takers, and the 20 points for minority status begins to tip to the lighter side of the scale. The Michigan cases threaten to overturn the 1978 Bakke v. Board of Regents decision that struck down racial quotas but said race could be used as a factor in deciding which students to admit. With oral arguments set for April 1, the court could issue a decision by the end of June. The ruling could affect admissions practices across the country. Bush supports “percentage plans,” which are used in California, Florida and his home state of Texas. These plans call for a certain percentage of top high school students — from 4% in California to 20% in Florida — to be guaranteed admission into the state’s public university system. But that plan led to a drop in black enrollment at the law school at the University of Texas at Austin, from 8.1% of entering students to 0.9%. Besides, others say Bush himself benefited from a different sort of affirmative action, the kind that has protected and coddled wealthy white males for decades. Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, said the old style of affirmative action has “operated to exclude women and people of color.” Citing Bush’s low grades, Gandy said he “was a beneficiary of … the kind (of affirmative action) that favored the sons of Yale graduates. Yet there has been no White House denunciation of the ‘extra points’ universities still give to children of big donors and former graduates — only a condemnation of efforts to offset that by considering race and ethnic background.” Gandy added, “Those diversity factors contribute much more to the breadth and depth of academic life, and are more deserving of affirmative consideration, than the wealth and connections that currently receive extra credit.” Loud and louder Criticism against Bush was loud when the White House brief was announced, but it grew even louder on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, when Bush spoke at a suburban-D.C. black church. Ignoring his earlier action opposing Michigan’s admission practices, Bush lamented, “There is still prejudice holding people back. There is still a school system that doesn’t elevate every child so they can learn.” Masley’s reaction? “It’s utter hypocrisy to speak out of both sides of his mouth,” she said. “The crocodile tears he shed were only a cover for the segregationist actions he took.” posted by Unknown at 9:36 PM This is going to be more commentary than I would prefer to do on this blog. However. Imagine if you will a society with a perception of superiority to all other societies - especially those based internally within its borders. Imagine this society deciding that said internal society - an entire race of people - is hurting and compromising its way of life. This entire race is blamed for its problems, accused of being destructive and harmful, when in reality that particular race is just trying to exist and more importantly, co-exist with its neighbors. Imagine then, that because they feel they have the right - and more importantly, the might - the larger more powerful society sets about toward the complete and utter destruction of that entire race of people. They shoot them. They send them to camps. They intentionally infect them to make them die. They send them on horrendous death marches. They rape the women, and cause them to perform sickening acts of degredation on themselves. They lie to them repeatedly and make promises they never intend to keep in order to divert them from resisting and properly subjegate them, for the time when they are prepared to kill them. Sounds a lot like the Nazis, right? Guess again. It's how America treated the Native Americans. In fact, if you look at the Declaration of Independance, you'll see that one of the reasons we wanted to leave Britain was because the British were supposedly acting in a way to get the Natives to attack us. In turn, our anscestors killed them, broke every treaty ever made with them, drove them from their land, raped their women, opened fire on sleeping villages killing men, women, and children, and the list goes on and on. George Washington, a founding father, was known to the Natives as "Town Destroyer." The very mention of his name would cause fear and panic. The difference between Americans and Nazis is that the Nazis were stopped. We weren't. posted by Unknown at 9:18 PM From cahro.org: Defining Hate Violence and Hate Crime The terms hate violence and hate crimes first appeared in the Final Report of the Attorney General's Commission on Racial, Ethnic, Religious and Minority Violence issued in April, 1986. It defined hate violence to be: Any act of intimidation, harassment, physical force or threat of physical force directed against any person, or gamely, or their property or advocate, motivated either in whole or in part by hostility to their real or perceived race, ethnic background, religious belief, sex, age, disability, or sexual orientation, with the intention of causing fear or intimidation, or to deter the free exercise or enjoyment of any rights or privileges secured by the Constitution or the laws of the United State of California whether or not performed under color of law. When hate violence is punishable under a criminal statute it is a hate crime. It should be noted that civil statutes (as opposed to criminal statutes) may provide relief for some types of hate violence. Rape is therefore considered a hate crime, as it is an act of intimidation and of physical force directed toward a person based on their gender. The number of hits for "rape" on google.com: 6,470,000. At the bottom of the screen, under "10 Related Web Searches Found:" are the following searches: hard core women, hot movies, sexual incest, sexual assault, child sexual abuse, cyberspace, prisons, roman legends, sexual abuse, and rainn. Question: why are there so many pornography-based web sites that involve rape - a defined hate crime? Get informed: go to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network. http://www.rainn.org/ posted by Unknown at 11:00 AM Sunday, January 26, 2003 From The Global Hangover Guide (http://www.hangoverguide.com/over/factbook/dayslave.html) By a conservative estimate, there are 27 million people working under various forms of slavery in the world today, and the number is growing. In contrast to the slavery America knew, today's slaveholders mainly exploit people of their own race. But as in the American past, they use violence and threats to force people to labor for no pay. Slavery is illegal everywhere, but it thrives because of the corruption of police and government authorities. Many people are unaware that modern slavery exists. People held in some form of bondage pick sugar cane in the Dominican Republic, make the charcoal used in Brazil's steel industry and work as prostitutes in Thailand. In Mauritania and Sudan blacks are forced into domestic and agricultural slavery in Muslim households. Similar forms of oppression are not unknown in developed nations. The Central Intelligence Agency estimates that 45,000 women and children are smuggled into the United States each year with false promises of decent jobs. Instead, most find that their passports are stolen and they are forced to work as prostitutes or maids, on farms or in sweatshops. But the majority of people who are treated like slaves, perhaps 20 million, according to the United Nations, are South Asians in debt bondage. The system is chillingly described in "Disposable People," a survey of contemporary forms of slavery by Kevin Bales, who teaches at the University of Surrey in England. Whole families, including children, are trapped into peonage to pay debts incurred by medical expenses, a funeral or crop failure. Their debts are inflated by outrageous prices for food and usurious interest rates. Families can essentially be enslaved for generations. Slavery and related kinds of servitude are a growing business because the number of desperately poor people is increasing and globalization has disrupted rural communities. In many nations, children, mainly girls, must drop out of school to work. A girl in a northern Thai village can be sold into prostitution for $2,000 „ a huge sum there. A Thai survey found that many families knowingly sold daughters into prostitution because they felt pressure to buy consumer goods such as televisions. Girls stay until they contract AIDS, and are then sent back to their villages to die in disgrace. While slavery is illegal, it is hard to eradicate. Even the United States lacks adequate criminal penalties for those who traffic in human beings. Moreover, the victims - the potential witnesses - are usually deported. This may change, however, as both houses of Congress recently passed a bill that would criminalize trafficking, end the rapid deportation of victims and provide help for them here and modest programs to prevent slavery abroad. Slavery and forced labor are even more difficult to fight in nations where they draw support from traditional structures of power and corruption, the devaluation of women and, in India, the caste system. Educating the poor about how to avoid falling victim helps, as do small loans and skill training. India has an excellent program to pay off laborers' debts and give them training and land. But Dr. Bales argues that local officials and judges often sabotage it. The first step in combating modern variations of slavery, however, is education. The developed world needs to realize that slavery exists, and that its victims may have helped produce the clothes, rugs and other goods we buy. It is especially important for people in nations where it is widespread not to accept it as a traditional practice but to see it as one of the most serious abuses of human rights. posted by Unknown at 10:03 AM