Race Continues to Take its Toll in America

(Source: Times Union)

Twenty years have passed since the verdict in the Rodney King beating case, and yet the problems of police brutality and racial profiling remain with us.

On April 29, 1992, a mostly white jury found four Los Angeles Police Department officers not guilty of assault with a deadly weapon and excessive force against 25-year-old Rodney King following a high-speed chase on March 3, 1991. Police struck King more than 50 times with their batons, tasered him and kicked him in the head. Unlike most such incidents, this one was captured on videotape.

British Police Officer to be Charged With Racially Abusing Man During 2011 London Riots

(Source: The Washington Post)

A London policeman will face criminal charges for allegedly racially abusing a black man detained during last year’s London riots, prosecutors said Tuesday, reversing an earlier decision not to charge the officer.

The Crown Prosecution Service said there was enough evidence to charge Constable Alex MacFarlane with “a racially aggravated public order offense.”

A 21-year-old man who was detained during the week of riots, but not charged, recorded a police officer using a racial epithet as he arrested him.

Ethics Expert Apologizes for ‘offending’ Remarks on Trayvon

(Source: USA Today)

Southern Baptist expert Richard Land, the voice of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, borrowed his diatribe on President Obama’s Trayvon Martin remarks but, oops, failed to credit the sources for whole paragraphs of invective.

He even stood by his Trayvon-Obama comments when they came under fire.

But then a Baylor grad student blogger caught the quotes in Land’s regular radio br0adcast — where Land never mentioned any sources — and checked the language against the footnotes on his website where the original authors of the language were cited.

Senate Panel Holds Hearing On Racial Profiling Bill

(Source: NPR)

Civil rights groups are lobbying Congress to put an end to racial profiling, the practice of targeting people because of their race or religion. A bill before Congress aims to do just that. On Tuesday, a Senate Judiciary panel heard from victims, police and lawmakers.

The story begins in February 2001, when President George W. Bush delivered an address to Congress in which he promised to stop racial profiling. Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“In the national trauma that followed, civil liberties came face to face with national security,” says Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin.

Trayvon Martin: What It’s Like to Be a Problem

(Source: The Nation)

Steven Jonhson, 3, joins a “Justice for Trayvon Martin hoodie rally” on Tuesday, March 27, 2012 in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Trayvon Martin was not innocent. He was guilty of being black in presumably restricted public space. For decades, Jim Crow laws made this crime statutory. They codified the spaces into which black bodies could not pass without encountering legal punishment. They made public blackness a punishable offense. The 1964 Civil Rights Act removed the legal barriers but not the social sanctions and potentially violent consequences of this “crime.” George Zimmerman’s slaying of Trayvon Martin—and the subsequent campaign to smear Martin—is the latest and most jarring reminder that it is often impossible for a black body to be innocent.

Shaima Al Awadi: Hijab or Hoodie, it’s always about race panic

(Source: Occupy | Decolonize | Liberate)

Iraqi mother, Shaima Al Awadi, dies after being beaten with tire iron. The racist note next to her body. Social media full of outrage.

Hijab or Hoodie, it’s always about race panic: Trayvon Martin?

Hoodies and Hijabs: Uncovering Injustice
Wake Forest and Salem Students, organized by Muslim peers, came together to show solidarity with Trayvonn Martin and Shaima Al Awadhi. Students are calling on our community leaders to condemn hate crimes and make sure our community is a safe place for everyone.

(Source: Occupy | Decolonize | Liberate)

Trayvon Martin and the history of lynching

(Source: Lenin’s Tomb)

What is lynching?  In its prevalent forms in American history, it appears as the administration of racial formations through terror.  The mutilation, shaming and degrading of black bodies, and also the corpses being retrieved and displayed as trophies, was intended to maintain the symbolic subjection of black people to, in bell hooks’ formulation, “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”.  I stress the symbolic as a material element in racial oppression, because the problem of etiquette, of racial manners, was invariably central to such violence.  Night-riders and lynch mobs were the enforcers of this etiquette.  We know it’s a peculiar problem in Jim Crow, the thousand and one rules and codes that crowded the field of sociality, exchange, transport, production and so on.

Trayvon Martin: The myth of US post-racialism

(Source: Al Jazeera)

Washington, DC – Trayvon Martin was just beginning his life. Trayvon Martin was a son. He was a high school junior, with college to look forward to, a career and perhaps a family of his own.

Trayvon Martin was many things, but for George Zimmerman, he was just Black.

The teenager’s race was enough to raise “suspicion” and trigger the neighbourhood watchman – who possessed no training or authority, except for his racist prerogatives – to murder an unarmed and frightened teenager running for his life.

I See White People: Hunger Games and a Brief History of Cultural Whitewashing

(Source: Jezebel)

Attention, everyone: Racism is BACK! [Electric guitar riff.] As you may have heard (because it’s both bonkers and everywhere), our national brain trust of semi-literate racist teenagers is not pleased with some casting choices in the newly released Hunger Games movie. And lo, they took to Twitter with a fury.

“Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as sad,” wrote one. (Okay, you’re racist. And you left out a “k.”) “HOW IN THE WORLD ARE THEY GOING TO MAKE RUE A FREAKIN BLACK BITCH IN THE MOVIE ?!?!?!??!” wondered another. One didn’t mince words (or use them correctly in any way): “Sense when has Rue been a nigger.” (Sidenote: Pretty much all of these teens have since locked or deleted their Twitter accounts—because it’s totally cool to be racist in front of your friends, but the rest of America can be a real drag, bro.)

Toll of Mexican Crime Wave, Written in Faces on the Wall

(Source: New York Times)

Rodrigo Cruz for The New York Times
Portraits in Ecatepec, a suburb of Mexico City, show crime victims, including those who have lost relatives or witnessed murders.

ECATEPEC, Mexico — When residents of this poor industrial city look to the hills, they now see the faces of crime victims staring back at them. Enormous photographic portraits cover concrete homes as part of a community art project that captures what has become a

“We speak too often in terms of numbers,” said Marco Hernández Murrieta, president of the Murrieta Foundation, which organized the photo project here in a suburb of Mexico City. “We’re putting a face on the statistics.”