OLD CONTENT
I support the recent increase in tendency to call out racists as un-American:
(I of course also appreciate the reference at 3:51 to Poland and Hungary.)
The following is a nice approach too:
www.yahoo.com/huffpost/trump-confederate-president-reelection-232605303.htmlRunning For Reelection, Trump Talks Like He’s Running For President Of The Confederacy
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We need more of this (just ignore the idiot at 2:57):
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A topic that should have been addressed a long time ago:
www.yahoo.com/news/officer-stood-george-floyd-died-224329297.html“People don't have a baseline of an understanding of what anti-blackness even is,” Vaj, who’s Hmong American, said. “Yes, we [Asian Americans] have pain and we suffer from oppression and discrimination and racism. Black people are in a different boat. On top of that, their struggle with the police, at least in this country, has a long history of 400 years of control and occupation. I think that that's really important for us to acknowledge that.”
Tensions between the black and the Asian communities have long existed. The strained relations stem, in part, from being set in opposition to one another throughout American history, Vaj said. One of the most glaring examples is the Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of four white police officers for use of excessive force in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, a black construction worker. Businesses sustained roughly $1 billion in damage, with roughly half being Korean-owned. Divisions between immigrant Korean business owners and their black customers widened.
The organizer, who comes from a refugee family herself, said she can look back to as recently as her own people’s journey in the U.S. as evidence. When America resettled Southeast Asian refugees following the Vietnam War, many were placed in poorly funded urban areas with little infrastructure, such as Long Beach and Stockton, California, or the Bronx, New York, where black and brown communities had already existed.
“When you are put into this situation, and you live amongst other poor black and brown folks with very little resources, there is that piece of strain between communities that must fight for the same resources,” Vaj said. “There isn't enough for all of you.”
Moreover, resettlement efforts did not include sufficient introductions between refugees and the communities they now inhabited, Vaj said. The information that was fed to the new immigrants often did not humanize communities of color, she added.
“Everything you've learned, you've learned through the lens of white supremacy. And this is what this country is built on,” Vaj explained. Even now, the organizer said she’s received abusive comments and criticisms from some members of her community for standing with the black community.
Ellen Wu, a historian and the author of “The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority,” overlapped many of Vaj’s thoughts. She noted white supremacy has historically fed on the exploitation and destruction of the black community.
As Asian Americans began to arrive in the United States, white supremacy targeted the group as well. The government passed racist legislation like the Chinese Exclusion Act, and fueled movements like the anti-Japanese movement of the early 1900s.
But Wu explained that as time went on, white supremacy took on other forms. Fearing that anti-Asian racism could jeopardize the U.S.’ place as a leader on the world stage and impede imperial expansion abroad, white liberals sought to dismantle Asian exclusion legislation and practices during and after World War II.
“In other words, they expected a geopolitical payoff to recognizing Asian Americans as ‘model citizens,’” Wu said.
In the 1960s, white liberals wielded the model minority stereotype to stifle black social movements, using Asian Americans as “proof” of meritocracy and equal opportunity for people of color. As she mentions in her book, politicians weaponized Japanese American “success stories” after World War II as a tactic in reframing Japanese American incarceration and weakening the civil rights movement. Compliance with, rather than opposition to, the state would bring rewards, the politicians hoped to show.
“The insinuation was that hard work along with unwavering faith in the government and liberal democracy as opposed to political protest were the keys to overcoming racial barriers as well as achieving full citizenship,” Wu wrote.
The evolving forms of white supremacy, Wu said, gave Asians more space for social mobility.
“These gains, however, have come at a cost: complicity with white supremacy.”
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Wu also clarified that Asian Americans are a diverse group with subgroups that have a range of power and privilege. Since their initial resettlement roughly 45 years ago, Southeast Asians, including Hmong, have dealt with the pain of impoverished neighborhoods and inadequate support under the backdrop of existing racial injustice, Quyen Dinh, the executive director of Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, said.
This is another reason why you need to stop calling yourself "Asian", as I have long recommended. Or "black", for that matter. Or any other Western-invented category. The only category we need is the anti-category "non-white". WHICH DOES NOT INCLUDE JEWS.
“Let’s not forget that state violence in the United States has affected Asian Americans too,” Iyer said.
She pointed out that in 2006, a Minneapolis police officer Jason Andersen shot and killed a 19-year-old Hmong American Fong Lee who had been riding a bike with friends. An all-white jury ruled that Andersen, who claimed he saw Lee with a gun, did not use excessive force on the teen and exonerated him. A 57-year-old Indian grandfather, Sureshbhai Patel, was slammed to the ground and left partially paralyzed by Alabama officer Eric Parker during a visit to his son’s family.
“While incidences of police brutality against Asian Americans do not occur with the frequency they do against black people, we cannot deny that police brutality and discriminatory policing targets black and brown bodies at disproportionate and alarming rates,” Iyer said.
In addition to providing some historical perspective, Wu said Asian Americans can remind their own communities that many privileges they take part in came as a result of black movements.
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There has been marked support from many Asian Americans for the black community during this time, many of the experts noted, particularly after tragedies such as Floyd’s death. Iyer noted that organizations, students and activists have created toolkits, campaigns and town halls to further solidarity practices between black and Asian communities. She also mentioned she’s seen examples of youth engaging in conversations between Asian small-business owners who operate convenience stores in black neighborhoods and black residents.
This is what we need more of, and more publicity for.
For Asian Americans to avoid the discussion on race would bring dangerous results, Lakshmi Sridaran, the executive director of South Asian Americans Leading Together, explained. Particularly as the community observes the rise in anti-Asian hate violence and racism amid the COVID-19 pandemic, they must interrogate their own reliance and trust in law enforcement. She noted that some communities look to the criminal justice system to mitigate hate.
“These complex relationships of distinct and shared struggles are informed both by interpersonal and state violence,” she explained. “If we recuse ourselves from these discussions, then we further entrench ourselves in white supremacy and continue to endanger other communities of color.”
This is what I have been saying all along. And it's not just about having discussions. Eventually it will be about willingness to use firearms to protect one another.
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www.wsj.com/articles/protests-spread-beyond-big-cities-from-raleigh-to-santa-rosa-11591099005“The nation has erupted,” said Kami Chavis, director of the criminal justice program at Wake Forest University School of Law, who called the outcry more intense than past protests. “What feels different to me about this time is that there’s so much solidarity across communities.”
Bethany Cannon, a 25-year-old student and bartender, organized protests that drew hundreds both Saturday and Sunday in Lubbock, Texas, a conservative city of 258,000 that is majority white and just 8% black. Ms. Cannon and others couldn’t recall another Lubbock protest with such crowds, but she called Mr. Floyd’s death a breaking point of too many police killings and too little change.
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In El Paso, a Texas border city of 681,000 that is 81% Hispanic and less than 4% black, hundreds of people marched from a local park to police headquarters Sunday. Malik Dado, an Army reservist and activist of Asian and Hispanic descent, said that though El Paso is a long way from Minneapolis, the community understands racial injustice; a gunman accused of targeting Mexican-Americans killed 23 people in a Walmart there last year.
“It’s all of our fights, not as black or white or blue, but for the American people,” Mr. Dado said.
www.yahoo.com/news/teens-tiktok-exposing-generational-rift-141705669.htmlSocial media is awash with earnest shows of support for the Black Lives Matter movement. The best of these posts have been materially useful to the cause. Others, less so. But on TikTok, Gen Z is modeling the most important tenet of allyship: taking it upon yourself to research, point out, and confront racism, especially when it feels risky or uncomfortable to do so.
Fifteen-year-old Izabella, for example, documented her family's frustrating response to George Floyd's killing while in police custody, in a TikTok with more than 1.5 million views.
"I literally hate my family so much," Izabella said, eyes wet from crying. "It's just. They just tried to argue with me that George Floyd — like, they just tried to tell me that he deserved that 'cause he did something wrong, and that it was okay. That is not okay. And it's just making me so upset. I don't know. I do not wanna live here. I hate livin' in Louisiana. I hate livin' around these racist f-cks. Like, I just wanna leave."
In two days, her TikTok following went from roughly 50 to 17,000 people. After picking up traction on the platform, her video eventually landed on Twitter when culture critic Safy-Hallan Farah shared it.
"My sister sent me a TikTok of a white girl crying about her parents saying George Floyd deserved to die, tearfully disowning them," she wrote. "There's a whole genre of white gen z kids processing in real-time what's new information to them (but not us), that their parents are sociopaths."
Racism is
psychopathy towards the outgroup. This is one of the simplest ways to explain what racism is.
Elaborating on the everyday racism she has observed in her community, which is located in the deep south, Izabella said she routinely hears white people "saying the n-word and making fun of black people."
"It makes me sick," she added.
On Monday, 16-year-old TikTokker Grace shared a tearful excerpt from a conversation with her father.
"Why can't I just speak my mind about it without anyone getting mad?" she asked her father in the clip, which was filmed using her front-facing camera.
"Because you won't stop," he replied. "And it's really, really, really annoying."
"Because I'm trying to say that black lives matter?" the teen asked, visibly upset.
"You said that, and now you're good," her father said. "You just keep talking about it and talking about it...We can choose not to listen because you've already said all of your points. And then you just keep going on and going on and going on. And it's ruining — it's just like, ruining the day."
To all anti-racists with racist parents, the best long-term thing that you can do is voluntarily refrain from reproducing.
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www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/black-lives-matter-protests-near-me-small-townsThe movements and marches that convulse big cities don’t usually (or ever) make it to Havre. Nor do they usually make it to hundreds of other small towns across the country. But the protests following the death of George Floyd, who was killed in police custody on May 25, are different.
All over the country, people are showing up — often for the first time in their lives — to protest police brutality and injustice. In tiny ag towns like Havre and Hermiston, Oregon, but also in midsize cities Topeka, Kansas, and Waco, Texas; on island hamlets (Friday Harbor, San Juan Island; Nantucket, Massachusetts; Bar Harbor, Maine); and in well-to-do suburbs (Lake Forest Park, Washington; Darien, Connecticut; Chagrin Falls, Ohio). They are showing up at the courthouse. They are kneeling and observing eight minutes of silence — a reference to how long Floyd was pinned to the ground in a knee chokehold by the Minneapolis police officer who was later charged with his murder. They are marching down interstates and waving signs on street corners. Sometimes, like in the town of Alton, New Hampshire (population 5,335), where one woman organized a protest just two months after being hospitalized with COVID-19, only seven people come. Sometimes, like in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, there are thousands.
These protests are covered by local news outlets, but amid the deluge of national news — major protests in major cities, guard tanks and helicopters, tear gas and rubber bullets, looting and destruction in select cities, the president’s reaction, massive economic anxiety and unemployment, all against the backdrop of the continued spread of COVID-19 — it’s hard for these stories of smaller, even silent, protests to break through.
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There have been protests in Belfast, Maine. In Farmington, New Mexico. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In Bentonville, Arkansas. In Lubbock, Texas. In Idaho Falls, Idaho. The biggest anyone can remember in Paducah, Kentucky, in Bozeman, Montana, in Pendleton, Oregon, in Frisco, Texas, and in Ogden, Utah. In Tacoma, Washington, pastors knelt in the rain, pleading with God. In Bowling Green, Kentucky, three rolling days of protests. In Owatonna, Minnesota, a student-led protest lasted for 10 hours. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, thousands gathered on the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre. In Myers Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Charlotte, North Carolina, where black people were prohibited from owning property for decades. And in Petal, Mississippi, where protesters have spent days calling for the resignation of Mayor Hal Marx, who tweeted last week that “If you can talk, you can breathe.”
These protests cut across demographics and geographic spaces. They’re happening in places with little in the way of a protest tradition, in places with majority white population and majority black, and at an unprecedented scale. People who’ve watched and participated in the Black Lives Matter movement since 2015 say that this time feels different. And the prevalence of these small protests is one of many reasons why.
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Riverton, population 11,000, is surrounded by the Wind River Reservation in central Wyoming. Like a lot of towns that border Native American reservations — it can feel, as Steele put it, “old-fashioned.” But on Monday, more than 150 people showed up to protest. Some were from Riverton; others drove from the reservation and as far away as Lander. An older white woman had written “THIS WYOMING NATIVE KNOWS BLACK LIVES MATTER” on the back of her T-shirt.
In September 2019, a Riverton police officer shot and killed a Northern Arapaho man outside the local Walmart after he allegedly had attempted to stab the officer, giving new life to long-standing complaints about the mistreatment of tribal residents by off-reservation police. (Native Americans are killed by police at a higher rate than any other ethnic group in the United States.) In November, the city met with the Northern Arapaho tribal council to attempt to improve relations between the two. But as Layha Spoonhunter, who is Eastern Shoshone, Northern Arapaho, and Oglala Lakota, told me, there was significant skepticism and racism from people in town.
Spoonhunter decided to put together the event, along with Micah Lott, as a way to “bring to light issues that we experience as people of color,” he said. He said the overwhelming response from the city, where you still regularly see Confederate flags hung in windows and in trucks, was positive. “There were people who shouted, ‘Hope you get the ‘rona,” he said. “But most people honked in support, or raised their fist, or if we shouted ‘black lives matter’ or ‘justice for Floyd,’ they would open their windows and yell it back.”
“As Indigenous people, we wanted to stand in solidarity with Black Lives,” Lott told me. “We put it on in Riverton, because of its older white conservative population and its prejudice toward Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.”
mexiconewsdaily.com/news/demonstration-at-us-embassy-protests-against-police-violence/
About 300 people participated in a peaceful protest against police violence and racism in the United States Thursday night at a candlelight vigil in front of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City.
Dressed in black, wearing masks and holding candles, the assembled crowd of mostly young people paid tribute to George Floyd, the African-American man who was killed on May 25 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, allegedly by a police officer.
U.S. citizens, Mexicans and other foreigners expressed their solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and added their voices to protests that have occurred in all 50 U.S. states and in major cities around the world.
“We are here to remember the black lives that have been killed by the police in the United States where racism is an integral part of its systems and institutions,” said one of those attending the vigil.
“Your fight is my fight #BlackLivesMatter,” “Racism kills. I can’t breathe” and “Justice for George Floyd” read some of the signs hoisted by the crowd.
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“Just like our oppressions, our struggles are also linked. The anti-racist struggle in the United States is the same as that of Mexico and other parts of the world, the struggle of indigenous peoples is the same as that of blacks,” Bailey added.
This is what I like to see.
Bonus:
metro.co.uk/2020/06/05/protesters-form-circle-around-muslims-can-pray-peacefully-12810202/
Muslims were able to pray safely during a Black Lives Matter protest in Brooklyn after hundreds of people formed a protective circle.
A moving video shows non-Muslims creating a human shield to keep Muslims out of potential harm from officers of the New York Police Department (NYPD), who have come under fire over their excessive use of force.
Stance Grounded, who tweeted the footage, said: ‘Non-Muslims surround Muslims so they can pray safely from the harm of the NYPD during a Black Lives Matter protest in Brooklyn, New York. I LOVE THIS. THIS IS HUMANITY!’ He added: ‘They were really prepared to get tear gassed, maced, shot w/ rubber bullets just so fellow humans could pray in peace. If that isn’t LOVE, I don’t know what is. If that isn’t HOPE, I don’t know what is’.
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The video of Muslims being protected as they pray has been praised for showing people coming together in a show of solidarity against racism.