Saturday, June 27, 2015

The Charleston Massacre, the Legacy of the Confederacy, and the Ongoing Hegemony of Modern White Supremacy in the United States--FURTHER UPDATES AND ANALYSIS

Jitterbugs
by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka


The imperfection of the world
is a burden, if you know it, think
about it, at all. Look up in the sky
wishing you were free, placed so terribly
in time, mind out among new stars, working
propositions, and not this planet where you
can’t go anywhere without an awareness of the hurt
the white man has put on the people. Any people. You
can't escape, there's no where to go. They have made
this star unsafe, and this age, primitive, though yr mind is somewhere else, your ass aint.


(Published in Negro Digest, April 1966)

"...And it still is News..." as the late/always Great LadyDay aka Billie Holiday once put it...



Meanwhile check...this...out...Long Live Black Folks Everywhere!...Yes!

THANK YOU SISTER BREE ANN NEWSOME. IF ONLY THERE WERE A MILLION MORE JUST LIKE YOU...
 
http://www.usatoday.com/…/south-carolina-confeder…/29383973/


Pair released on bond after removing Confederate flag at S.C. Capitol
by Tony Santaella, WLTX, and Doug Stanglin
USA TODAY
June 27, 2015




COLUMBIA, S.C. — A black female activist in a helmet and climbing gear scaled a flagpole in front of the South Carolina State Capitol Saturday morning and briefly removed a controversial Confederate battle flag.

The woman, who law enforcement identified as 30-year-old Bree Ann Byuarium Newsome, and a male companion were arrested and released later in the day after posting bond.

In a video of the incident, security officers can be heard yelling, "Ma'am come down off the pole."

Newsome can be heard saying, "You come against me in the name of hatred, repression, and violence. I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today."

After scaling the 30-foot pole and retrieving the flag, she and her companion were arrested by State Capitol police who waited for her at the bottom inside a small, wrought-iron fence.

As she was being led off in handcuffs, Newsome could be heard reciting the 23rd Psalm from the Bible.

The flag, which is protected by state law, was hoisted again about 45 minutes later. A pro-flag rally was previously planned at the site Saturday morning.

"We removed the flag today because we can't wait any longer. We can't continue like this another day," Newsome said in a statement issued around the time of her arrest. "It's time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality."

Sherri Iacobelli, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Safety, said that Newsome, and a companion, James Ian Tyson, 30, both from Charlotte, were charged with defacing monuments on state Capitol grounds. The misdemeanor charge carries a fine of up to $5,000 and a prison term of up to three years or both.

A judge gave them each a $3,000 bond and told them they were allowed to leave the state if they wished. Democratic state Rep. Todd Rutherford of Columbia, who also is attorney, will represent Newsome. Rutherford is minority leader of the state House of Representatives.

The activist group known as Ferguson Action released video of the incident on Twitter .

Activist Bree Newsome told police she was "prepared to be arrested" as she removed the Confederate flag flying in front of the South Carolina State House. Newsome scaled the 30-foot pole, retrieved the flag, and was promptly arrested. VPC

"The flag is gone," Ferguson Action said on Twitter, congratulating "local organizers" for the operation. It also tweeted a photo of the woman being taken away by police.

The flag has been at the center of a heated debate following the killing of nine black parishioners at a historic black church in Charleston on June 17.

Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican, has called for the removal of the flag, and the state General Assembly has agreed to debate the issue next month.

Lonnie Randolph Jr., president of the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, said the two activists were apparently "well-intentioned," but he counseled that "(i)mpatience must always be tempered by purpose and prudence."

"This is not yet the time for civil disobedience, but a time for grieving over the tragedy in Charleston and a reflection on symbols and the hatred they fuel," he said in a statement. He also urged that opponents of the flag give the General Assembly the opportunity to address this issue in July "to at last remove this hurtful symbol from the people's State House."

Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old South Carolinian who has been charged with nine counts of murder in the attack on the Emanuel AME Church, was depicted online expressing white supremacist views and posing with the Confederate flag.




"It's time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality."
--Bree Newsome


“You come against me with hatred and oppression and bias,” she cried after she reached the top and unhooked the flag. “I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.”
—Bree Newsome

"Supporters started an Indiegogo page dedicated to raising money to pay Newsome’s bail and hire a defense lawyer. Within nine hours, it had raised nearly $80,000."

TAKE NOTE:  THIS  IS WHAT IS KNOWN AS RESISTANCE!


https://twitter.com/EdgeofSports



http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-woman-removes-confederate-flag-20150627-story.html
 
'Bree' Newsome's arrest for removing South Carolina's Confederate flag ignites both sides
by Jenny Jarvie and Katie Shepherd
June 27, 2015
Los Angeles Times
 

Brittany "Bree" Newsome of Charlotte, N.C., is taken into custody after she removed the Confederate battle flag from a monument in front of the South Carolina Statehouse in Columbia. (Bruce Smith / Associated Press)

A young black woman scaled a flagpole in front of the South Carolina Statehouse just after dawn Saturday and took down the Confederate battle flag that has become the focus of controversy since a gunman killed nine African Americans inside a historic Charleston church.

The woman, whom authorities identified as Brittany Ann Newsome, refused to descend until she had unhooked the flag.

“Ma'am, come down off the pole,” a police officer called when Newsome, who was wearing a helmet and climbing gear, was midway up the 30-foot flagpole.

“You come against me with hatred and oppression and bias,” she cried after she reached the top and unhooked the flag. “I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.”

“I'm prepared to be arrested,” she told police as she neared the ground. A group of observers cheered.

She was handcuffed along with James Ian Tyson, 30, who allegedly accompanied her inside a prohibited area.

Newsome and Tyson were charged with defacing a monument, a misdemeanor, according to a statement from the South Carolina Department of Public Safety. They were taken to the Alvin S. Green Detention Center. If convicted, they could face fines of up to $5,000 and up to three years in prison.

Both were freed a few hours later after posting $300 bond.

The flag’s position is protected under state law, which legislators have agreed to revisit this summer. Officials put the flag back on the pole soon after Newsome brought it down.

Newsome, who goes by the nickname “Bree” and is from North Carolina, is identified on her Facebook page as a western organizer with Ignite NC, a nonprofit group challenging voting laws that it contends suppress voting and are discriminatory.

In a statement to the TV and radio news program “Democracy Now,” Newsome said she had decided with a group of “concerned citizens” to “do what the S.C. Legislature has thus far neglected to do.”

The social media response to Newsome’s arrest was swift and forceful.

Filmmaker Michael Moore offered to come to her aid. “I will pay her bail money or any legal fees she has. Please let her know this,” he said on Twitter, which lighted up with calls for police to release Newsome under the hashtag #FreeBree.

Comment:
  "Let us not forget that it was the Confederacy that TORE DOWN OUR AMERICAN FLAG and ripped our country apart. Before it was over, more than 600,000 Americans were dead. That anyone still defends this flag of TREASON is shocking." Posted at 7:44 PM June 27, 2015"

Supporters started an Indiegogo page dedicated to raising money to pay Newsome’s bail and hire a defense lawyer. Within nine hours, it had raised nearly $80,000.

The North Carolina chapter of the NAACP lauded Newsome’s protest as “an act of prayerful nonviolent civil disobedience.”

In a statement, Dr. William J. Barber II, the North Carolina NAACP president, likened her to Rosa Parks and urged that the Confederate flag be removed from state property.

The flag’s presence on the grounds of the Statehouse has been a subject of impassioned debate since the shooting attack at Emanuel AME Church on June 17, allegedly at the hands of a white gunman who posed for photos with the Confederate flag and wanted to ignite a race war.

Supporters defend the flag as a symbol of Southern history and culture. Critics decry it as a representation of racism and a reminder of slavery.

“The group took down the symbol of white supremacy that inspired the massacre, continued to fly at full mast in defiance of South Carolina’s grief, and flew in defiance of everyone working to actualize a more equitable Carolinian future,” Newsome said in her statement.

Later Saturday, arguments and scuffles broke out as scores of protesters descended on the Statehouse to applaud and protest Newsome’s feat.

“I’m standing for Bree,” said Bonita Jones, 28, a black activist from Columbia, as she stood below the flag at the base of the Confederate monument. “I’m standing for all the people who died in Charleston. I’m standing for all the people who can’t look after themselves.”

Frank Looper, 50, a white truck driver from Pickens County, drove 2 1/2 hours to the Statehouse to defend the flag after watching the news on CNN. He said he wanted to protect the legacy of his great-great-grandfather, who fought in the 3rd South Carolina Infantry Regiment, and another ancestor who rode in battle with Gen. Wade Hampton in the 2nd Regiment.

“We use the flag to honor our ancestors who died,” he said. “The way it was removed upset me. I don’t hate blacks. I’m not racist. Those poor people who died in Charleston, that’s terrible. … But then politics tried to make out that the flag pulled the trigger. It was a sick individual.”

Although the mood was tense, some demonstrators engaged opponents in friendly discussion on the symbolism of the flag, jobs and inequality.

“I'm just worried that the flag goes to the dust and is forgotten,” said James Green III, 65, a retired computer servicer who brought a large rebel flag to the Statehouse.

“Why not fight for it to be in a museum then?” asked Kimberly Conyers, 25, an insurance representative from Columbia.

Passing cars honked as protesters waved signs saying, “Take it down,” “I can’t believe” and “Evil prevails when good people do nothing!”

A row of pickup trucks and SUVs circled the block, flying Confederate flags on their trailer hitches.

“It's embarrassing to me as a Southerner,” said Tom Clements, 64, director of the environmental group Savannah River Site Watch. His great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War, he says.

“It's part of my heritage, but I think [the flag] should come down,” he said. “It was all about slavery, and it's a symbol of divisiveness and white supremacy.”

katie.shepherd@latimes.com

Special correspondent Jarvie reported from Columbia and Times staff writer Shepherd from Los Angeles.
Copyright © 2015, Los Angeles Times

UPDATES

7:03 p.m.: This report has been revised throughout for additional details and for clarity.

4:09 p.m.: Updated the money raised on line for Newsome.

2:58 p.m.: Updated with the release of Newsome and Tyson.

2:18 p.m.: Updated with more interviews from protesters at the Statehouse grounds.

1:45 p.m.: Updated with NAACP statement.

1:00 p.m.: This post has been updated with protests at the Statehouse.

11:23 a.m.: This post has been updated with staff reporting.

This post was originally published at 4:44 a.m.


http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/06/27/we-cant-wait-any-longer-activist-removes-confederate-flag-sc-statehouse
 

'We Can't Wait Any Longer': Activist Removes Confederate Flag from SC Statehouse

Saturday, June 27, 2015
by Nadia Prupis
Common Dreams


Activist Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole in front of the South Carolina capitol on Saturday to remove the Confederate flag from Statehouse grounds. (Photo: bbond/Twitter)

An activist and youth organizer named Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole in front of the South Carolina capitol in Columbia early Saturday morning and pulled down the Confederate flag still flying on Statehouse grounds, telling media, "we can't wait any longer."

Newsome, 30, of Charlotte, was about halfway up the 30-foot flagpole when police demanded she climb back down, but she kept going until she was able to remove the flag from its perch. Upon returning to the ground, Newsome was arrested along with another activist, James Ian Dyson, and taken to the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center on misdemeanor charges of defacing a monument on state capitol grounds. News of their action spread quickly under the hashtag #FreeBree, sparking a petition to remove the flag and drop the charges against Newsome.

"We removed the flag today because we can't wait any longer," Newsome said in a written statement on Saturday. "We can't continue like this another day. It's time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality."

After Newsome's arrest, officials ordered the banner to be raised again around 8:30am—just in time for a pro-flag rally.

The action came just hours before funeral services continued for the third day for the victims of an attack on Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a gunman shot dead nine black men and women. Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, has been charged in the murders. The attack is being investigated as a hate crime and has sparked a renewed demand by activists to take down the Confederate flags flying on capitol grounds in numerous states.

Watch video of the action below:

"We could not sit by and watch the victims of the Charleston Massacre be laid to rest while the inspiration for their deaths continue to fly above their caskets," the group which organized the action said in a statement.

"The flag represents white supremacy," another activist, 25-year-old Tamika Lewis, told the Guardian on Saturday.  "The image alone is used to ignite fear and intimidation, especially among people of color and minorities. This was a long time coming."

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley this week called on the state legislature to vote in favor of removing the flag. But, as Lewis told the Guardian, "This was a Confederate symbol that ignited an individual to kill and murder innocent black people in a church, and it was still erected. The legislature was just taking too long to act morally and justly. They’re dragging their feet." 


#‎FreeBree‬

Sign the Petition

Early Saturday morning, a multiracial group of Carolinians led by teachers and activists took down the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds — within an hour the state had raised the hateful banner once again in time for an 11 A.M. white supremacist rally.

Bree Newsome, the Black woman who climbed the pole and cut down the flag, was arrested and taken into custody by Capitol Police. She should be promptly released from jail, any charges should be dropped, and the legislature should immediately vote to permanently remove the flag.

According to a statement from the activists they took down the flag because:

"We could not sit by and watch the victims of the Charleston Massacre be laid to rest while the inspiration for their deaths continue to fly above their caskets."

The confederate flag was born out of a government defending the enslavement of Black people and resurrected as an emblem for whites violently opposing racial integration. Any government that recognizes the flag is declaring that it cherishes a history of racial terror.

Taking down the flag is just one step but a symbolically meaningful one. Make no mistake about it, however, racism isn't just a flag or words it's baked into our economy and inequities in our democracy and criminal justice system.

In Bree's own words:

"It's time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality."

South Carolina officials have sided with white supremacists in choosing to restore the flag before a planned rally. The legislature must immediately vote to permanently remove the Confederate flag from the capitol and all state buildings.

ColorOfChange stands with Bree and the courageous activists who took down South Carolina's confederate flag. You can add a comment using the box provided.

UPDATE 10:01 AM: Bree Newsome was arrested along with a white ally, Jimmy Tyson. We will update this page with more information as it becomes available.

UPDATE 3:47 PM: Bail has been posted and Bree Newsome is scheduled to be released in the next few hours.

I demand that Bree Newsome is immediately released and any charges against her are dropped.



All,

RE: the Charleston Massacre and the vicious criminal hegemony and domination of White Supremacy in the United Hates


Forget about all the endless BS empty platitudes, misguided religious rhetoric, presidential celebrity grandstanding, absurd and ultimately self negating appeals to (of all of all things) "forgiveness", the torrential downpour of white media LIES, DISTORTIONS, AND DENIALS, the massive national indifference to and dismissal of black suffering by a substantial majority of American citizens, and the pervasive and utterly contemptible insincerity, dishonesty, and opportunism of politicians in general in the unrelenting mass murder of innocent black people across the country in the 21st century.

Just put all that aside for the moment and consider the following heinous data:

--According to the FBI's most recent statistics, blacks in 2013 were targeted in hate crimes more than all other races COMBINED.


Meanwhile consider the absolutely delusional responses to the calculated racist murder of nine people among a very large number of Americans generally, who out of hatred, indifference, fear, ignorance, and cynicism continue to pretend that these incidents are far from isolated or aberrant events and that much worse is definitely going to continue to happen VERY SOON…Stay tuned…And pass the word...

Kofi
 


Wednesday, June 24, 2015

The Charleston Massacre, the Legacy of the Confederacy, and the Ongoing Hegemony of Modern White Supremacy in the United States--FURTHER UPDATES AND ANALYSIS



Don’t Say ‘Terrorist’ About ‘White People Like Ourselves’
by Jim Naureckas
June 22, 2015
The Washington Post

Dylann Roof appearing in court
Dylann Roof appears in court: A Washington Post writer argues against calling him a “terrorist.”

Corporate media are demonstrably reluctant to use the word “terrorist” with regards to Charleston shooting suspect Dylann Roof–even though the massacre would seem to meet the legal definition of terrorism, as violent crimes that “appear to be intended…to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.”

Generally, news outlets don’t explain why they aren’t calling Roof a terrorist suspect; they just rarely use the word. But the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump gave it a shot in a piece headlined “Why We Shouldn’t Call Dylann Roof a Terrorist” (6/19/15), and his rationale is worth taking a look at.

Bump starts out by acknowledging that “a terroristic act, which this was, is treated and identified differently when the actor is a young white man.” He contrasts the treatment of the Charleston massacre with the attack on the Mohammad cartoon contest in Texas:
In each case, someone hoping to prove a political point attacked a gathering because of who was in attendance. In the case where the only deaths were the attackers, we call it terrorism. In the case where the only deaths were the innocent people, we debate it.
“But,” Bump then says, “we shouldn’t call Dylann Roof a terrorist.” His argument for this:
Roof wants to be a terrorist—for us to admit that he terrorized us. He likes the attention, telling the police as he admitted to his acts that he wanted to make sure they were “known.”… What if we just call him a racist, grotesque person. What if we laughed at him instead of telling him he scared us?
This makes as much sense as arguing that you shouldn’t charge someone with kidnapping because the person they abducted wasn’t a kid. “Terrorism” is the name of a crime, and the relevant question isn’t whether we like the etymology of the term, but whether the murders fit the elements of the definition—which has to do with intent to intimidate or coerce, not with whether anyone actually felt “terror.”

On some level, Bump understands that “terrorism” is a legal term with serious legal consequences, and that the fact that it’s unevenly applied based on the race and religion of the perpetrators is a real problem:
When Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested in Boston in 2013, the debate was over how to treat him given that he was a terror suspect—as manifested by Sen. Lindsey Graham—not over whether or not he was a terror suspect. That’s part of why Tsarnaev and the Texas cartoon attackers were so quickly identified as terrorists.
This, Bump notes, “reflects the same racial chasm that Roof wanted to exacerbate.”

He also notes that the word has become politicized by the “War on Terror”—”which is, in essence, a war on certain groups of Middle Easterners and Muslims.” As Bump observes, “Calling more non-American people terrorists also serves to bolster the arguments of those calling for more military intervention.” Which leads him to conclude that “the problem…isn’t that we’re too slow to call Roof a terrorist. It’s that we’re often too quick to call everyone else a terrorist.”

Yet Bump doesn’t seem to have written a column about how “we’re too quick to call everyone else a terrorist”; he didn’t seem to have any problem referring to the Boston Marathon bombing as “terrorism,” for example. (“The key component to any terrorist attack is luck” was the lead sentence for a piece he wrote on the Tsarnaev brothers, for instance—The Wire, 4/22/13.) So why write this piece, urging people to do what most journalists are already doing—avoiding saying “terrorism” in connection to Charleston?

Philip Bump
Washington Post‘s Philip Bump: “When I see Dylann Roof, I remember being a white male his age”

The answer seems to be in a remarkably revealing passage in the middle of the piece, where Bump acknowledges that he identifies with Roof because they share a skin color:
Most Americans are white, and we see white people like ourselves. When I see Dylann Roof, I remember being a white male his age, barely out of my teenage years and experiencing weird anger in a difficult time…. We can identify much more easily with who he is.
Huh. You would think a self-respecting journalist, recognizing this kind of irrational bias in himself, would try to avoid letting it influence his work—would certainly not want to call for giving a criminal suspect special journalistic treatment based on this identification. Yet there’s not really any other explanation offered in the column as to why it was written about Roof and not about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Bump closes his column by rejecting the arguments that referring to the Charleston massacre as “racial terrorism” would “help…America come to terms with the fact that the ideology he assumed is dangerous and urgent” and put Roof in line for stiffer penalties. “Fine,” he says—but
each of these is predicated on our insistence that terrorism is somehow a higher order of evil than simply murdering elderly people for being black even as they held their Bibles in a church. It implies that his mass murder was one thing, but that his scaring us was made things more problematic. Perhaps we should demonstrate to him—and every other angry young man like him—that we aren’t scared of his dumb Internet rhetoric. Not in the least.
And let’s reel in our use of the word “terrorism” back in.
Let me note parenthetically that the law constantly takes intent into account—it’s the difference between murder and manslaughter, to name just one example—so suggesting that there’s something odd about taking the intent of a murder into account is specious.

But the real debate here is not about whether terrorism is worse than mass murder with no political motive; it’s whether we’re going to call some acts of politically motivated murder “terrorism” while withholding that label from other murders that are equally politically motivated—when we know that this label has real consequences, legally and politically.

“We aren’t scared by his dumb Internet rhetoric,” says Bump. If he’s still using “we” to mean “white people like ourselves,” it is  certainly true that whites generally don’t feel personally afraid of white supremacist terrorist who target African-Americans. They’re much more likely to be afraid of Muslim terrorists who target Americans in general—even though right-wing extremists (not all of whom are white supremacists, of course) killed five times as many people in this country as Muslim extremists in the decade after 9/11, according to a study from the  US Military Academy (New York Times, 6/16/15).

If you really think the word “terrorism” is being used too much, you should argue against it in the cases where it’s actually frequently used—which is mostly in cases involving Muslim suspects. But that would mean going against conventional wisdom, possibly with some professional cost. To argue instead that journalists are right to avoid the label with regard to a suspect with whom “we can identify much more easily”—well, there’s never much of price to be paid for endorsing institutional prejudices.

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.
Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.


The racist disease we never discuss: Dylann Roof, over-policing and the real story about safety in America


People of comfort get freedom and security. People of color and the poor get neither

 

by Corey Robin

SALON


The racist disease we never discuss: Dylann Roof, over-policing and the real story about safety in America 
Charleston, S.C., shooting suspect Dylann Storm Roof is escorted from the Cleveland County Courthouse in Shelby, N.C., Thursday, June 18, 2015. Roof is a suspect in the shooting of several people Wednesday night at the historic The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)(Credit: AP)

In response to Wednesday’s murder of nine African Americans at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, President Obama said, “Innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”

I’ll admit: When I first read that statement, I thought Obama was talking about the police. Unfair of me perhaps, but it’s not as if we haven’t now been through multiple rounds of high-profile killings of African Americans at the hands of the police.

Indeed, until Wednesday’s murders, it seemed as if the national conversation about public safety had dramatically and fruitfully shifted. From a demand for police protection of white citizens against black crime—which dominated political discussion from the 1970s to the 1990s—to a scrutiny of the very instruments of that presumed protection. And how those instruments are harming African American citizens.

It’s tempting to seize on this moment as an opportunity to broaden that discussion beyond the racism of prisons and policing to that of society itself. In a way, that’s what Obama was trying to do by focusing on the threat posed not by the state or its instruments but by private guns in the hands of private killers like Dylann Roof.

But that may not be the wisest move, at least not yet. So long as the discussion is framed as one of protection, of safety and security, we won’t get beyond the society that produced Dylann Roof. Not only has the discourse of protection contributed to the racist practices and institutions of our overly policed and incarcerated society, but it also prevents us from seeing, much less tackling, the broader, systemic inequalities that might ultimately reduce those practices and institutions.

Since the 1960s, when law and order became the rallying cry of the country’s rightward turn, particularly around issues of racial inequality, the notion that safety and security are the primary political goods has migrated across the ideological spectrum. In 1975, the influential libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick declared that a “minimal state”—“limited to the functions of protecting all its citizens against violence, theft, and fraud, and to the enforcement of contracts”—was the only legitimate form of government.

Though critical of the minimal state, liberals have also come to believe that “the ‘first’ political question,” in the words of British philosopher Bernard Williams, is “the securing of order, protection, safety, trust, and the preconditions of cooperation. It is ‘first’ because solving it is the condition of solving, indeed posing, any others.” Meeting those requirements of order, protection, safety, and so on is what distinguishes a legitimate state from an illegitimate state.

Providing for the safety and security of citizens, in this view, may not be a political question at all. It is instead the ground upon which we ask and answer all political questions. Before we can talk about justice or equality, before we can debate the kinds of schools we want or the amount of retirement or medical care we need, we have to be safe in our bodies and secure in our rights (minimally defined). Like the faith in God that once lay at the foundation of political order, the provision of safety and security is supposed to lie beneath or beyond politics. Whether we’re black or white, rich or poor, men or women, everyone needs it, all are entitled to it, no one can dispute it.

Unless we address those deep inequalities and systemic injustices that this security consensus declares to be secondary or ancillary, however, we’re not likely to provide for that security in any kind of universal way. If anything, we’ll make some men and women less safe and less secure.
Not only are blacks systematically under-protected against crime but so are they—and the poor more generally—over-policed by the state. That’s no accident, argues Georgetown Law professor David Cole, for “our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on” inequalities of class and race. It grants broad constitutional rights—against unreasonable searches and seizures, say, or to the defense of counsel—to all citizens. But it interprets those rights in such a way that they are enjoyed by wealthier, more privileged citizens. People of comfort get freedom and security; people of color and the poor get neither. Yet pay for both. “By exploiting society’s ‘background inequality,” Cole notes, the country “sidesteps the more difficult question of how much constitutional protection we could afford if we were willing to ensure that it was enjoyed equally by all people.”

To assume that the state can provide for the safety and security of the most subjugated classes in America without addressing the fact of their subjugation is to assume away the last half-century of political experience. If anything, the discourse of safety and security has made those classes less secure, less safe: not merely from freelance killers like Dylann Roof or George Zimmerman, who claim to be acting on behalf of their own safety and that of white society, but also from the police. As Cole writes, the proliferation of criminal laws and quality-of-life regulations that are supposed to make poor and black communities safer often serve as a pretext for the most intrusive and coercive modes of policing in those communities.
The net of traffic regulations is so wide that everyone will fall within it, and as a result police officers have virtually unfettered discretion to decide whom to stop. That discretion will often be guided by the same prejudices and stereotypes that guide bus and train sweeps. And as a result, minority drivers on the nation’s highways simply do not have the same Fourth Amendment rights as whites.
Far from providing the ground upon which a more expansive vision of social policy can be built, the discourse of safety and security ensures that politics never gets off the ground at all. When we make the safety and security the sine qua non of politics—whether in the form of Nozick’s minimal state or Williams’ “Basic Legitimation Demand”—we start refracting all political problems through that lens. As the political scientist Marie Gottschalk has recently argued:
Problems such as crime, poverty, mass unemployment, and mass incarceration are no longer seen as having fundamental structural causes that can be ameliorated via policies and resources mobilized by the state. Rather, these problems are regarded as products either of fate or individual action….Anyone deemed unable or unwilling to change must be banished—either to the prison or to the prison beyond the prison represented by probation, parole, community sanctions, drug courts, and immigrant detention.
Berkeley Law Professor Jonathan Simon goes further, claiming that our entire society is now organized around the principle “governing through crime.” Social problems are treated as crimes, citizens as victims or criminals, and solutions as punishments.

Given the historic vulnerability of African Americans to the despotic power of whites, whose crimes against them so often went unpunished, it makes perfect semse that the demand for justice should sometimes assume a penal form. Not merely under slavery and Jim Crow, but also today, when the police and private citizens kill blacks with seeming impunity. Of all the things Dylan Roof said to and about his victims, that “you have to go” is by far the most chilling. Seldom have the words of a murderer been so well chosen: not only do they reveal his belief that it is his power, his right as a white man of all of 21 years, to select who is and is not a part of the body politic, who must be gotten rid of and what remains, but they also give voice to an ancient dispensation in this country, a conviction that the only solution to the Negro Question is expulsion or elimination. It was Jefferson who spoke darkly—part warning, part incantation—of “convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race” and who said of the black slave: “when freed, he must be removed from beyond the mixture.”

“Justice justice shall you seek,” says Deuteronomy. That puzzling second cry for justice reflects the conviction that a crime unpunished may be, in certain instances, more than an individual wrong. It can also disclose a systemic derangement of power—in this case, a deep and grievous loss of social standing among African Americans. But that’s the point: crimes like Dylan Roof’s or the recent spate of police murders should take us past the politics of safety and security to the abiding social domination that lies behind them.

In 1833, John C. Calhoun, a slaveholder and a racist who had been Andrew Jackson’s Vice President and was now representing South Carolina in the Senate, defended the honor of his state by claiming that “no State has been more profuse of its blood in the cause of the country.” Calhoun was referring to South Carolina’s sacrifices during the American Revolution, but his comments can be usefully read against the grain of this week’s events.

Dylann Roof shed blood for the sake of a racism that, if not quite the cause of the country, is nevertheless not exclusive to South Carolina or the South. To counter that bloodshed, we need to move beyond a politics of safety and security that would seek only to punish or prevent it. For that politics of prevention and protection, of safety and security, has indeed become the cause of the country. A cause that is all too friendly to racial inequality—and all too hostile to a politics that might overcome it.
Corey Robin is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin and Fear: The History of a Political Idea, he is currently writing a book about Clarence Thomas.
 
https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366
 

All,

I have been waiting fervently since last wednesday night to see/hear a black person in this country actually SAY ALOUD IN PUBLIC what the great majority of us are no doubt actually thinking and feeling about the brutal racist/white supremacist terrorist act of mass murder in Charleston, SC. and what it ACTUALLY MEANS to us. I was beginning to think/dread that no black human being would actually be given the opportunity to step forward and actually appear IN PUBLIC MEDIA to once again SAY ALOUD what we REALLY THINK AND FEEL about this truly heinous act.

FINALLY we don't have to wait any longer because MS. ROXANE GAY has come to our rescue and said aloud what desperately needs and deserves to be said so there will be no more "misunderstanding" about what this mass murder was really  about and what it really means.

SO THANK YOU SISTER GAY...WE TRULY NEED AND DEEPLY APPRECIATE YOUR WORDS AND THEIR MEANING WHETHER ANYONE ELSE IN THIS DELUSIONAL COUNTRY "UNDERSTANDS" OR "GETS IT" OR NOT... 

 
Kofi

http://www.nytimes.com/…/why-i-cant-forgive-dylann-roof.htm…

The Opinion Pages | Contributing Op-Ed Writer

Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof
by Roxane Gay
JUNE 23, 2015
New York Times





Edel Rodriquez

I DO NOT forgive Dylann Roof, a racist terrorist whose name I hate saying or knowing. I have no immediate connection to what happened in Charleston, S.C., last week beyond my humanity and my blackness, but I do not foresee ever forgiving his crimes, and I am wholly at ease with that choice.
 
My unwillingness to forgive this man does not give him any kind of power. I am not filled with hate for this man because he is beneath my contempt. I do not believe in the death penalty so I don’t wish to see him dead. My lack of forgiveness serves as a reminder that there are some acts that are so terrible that we should recognize them as such. We should recognize them as beyond forgiving.

I struggle with faith but I was raised Catholic. I believe God is a God of love but cannot understand how that love is not powerful enough to save us from ourselves. As a child, I learned that forgiveness requires reconciliation by way of confession and penance. We must admit our sins. We must atone for our sins. When I went to confession each week, I told the priest my childish sins — fighting with my brothers, saying a curse word, the rather minor infractions of a sheltered Nebraska girl. When I didn’t have a sin to confess, I made something up, which was also a sin. After confession, I knelt at a pew and did my penance, and thought about the wrong I had done and then I tried to be better. I’m not sure I succeeded all that often.

Ever the daydreamer, I spent most of my time in Sunday Mass lost in my imagination. The one prayer that stayed with me was “Our Father” and the line “and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I always got stuck on that part. It’s a nice idea that we could forgive those who might commit the same sins we are apt to commit but surely, there must be a line. Surely there are some trespasses most of us would not commit. What then?

Forgiveness does not come easily to me. I am fine with this failing. I am particularly unwilling to forgive those who show no remorse, who don’t demonstrate any interest in reconciliation. I do not believe there has been enough time since this terrorist attack for anyone to forgive. The bodies of the dead are still being buried. We are still memorizing their names: Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons Sr., Sharonda Coleman-Singleton and Myra Thompson.

We are still memorizing these names but the families who loved the people who carried these names have forgiven Dylann Roof. They offered up testimony in court, less than 48 hours after the trauma of losing their loved ones in so brutal a manner. Alana Simmons, who lost her grandfather, said, “Although my grandfather and the other victims died at the hands of hate, everyone’s plea for your soul is proof that they lived in love, and their legacies will live in love.” Nadine Collier, who lost her mother, said: “You took something very precious away from me. I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you and have mercy on your soul.”

I deeply respect the families of the nine slain who are able to forgive this terrorist and his murderous racism. I cannot fathom how they are capable of such eloquent mercy, such grace under such duress.

Nine people are dead. Nine black people are dead. They were murdered in a terrorist attack.

Over the weekend, newspapers across the country shared headlines of forgiveness from the families of the nine slain. The dominant media  narrative vigorously embraced that notion of forgiveness, seeming to believe that if we forgive we have somehow found a way to make sense of the incomprehensible.

We are reminded of the power of whiteness. Predictably, alongside the forgiveness story, the media has tried to humanize this terrorist. They have tried to understand Dylann Roof’s hatred because surely, there must be an explanation for so heinous an act. At the gunman’s bond hearing, the judge, who was once reprimanded for using the N-word from the bench, talked about how not only were the nine slain and their families victims, but so were the relatives of the terrorist. There are no limits to the power of whiteness when it comes to calls for mercy.

The call for forgiveness is a painfully familiar refrain when black people suffer. White people embrace narratives about forgiveness so they can pretend the world is a fairer place than it actually is, and that racism is merely a vestige of a painful past instead of this indelible part of our present.

Black people forgive because we need to survive. We have to forgive time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive. We have had to forgive slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching, inequity in every realm, mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, inadequate representation in popular culture, microaggressions and more. We forgive and forgive and forgive and those who trespass against us continue to trespass against us.

Mr. Roof’s racism was blunt and raggedly formed. It was bred by a culture in which we constantly have to shout “Black lives matter!” because there is so much evidence to the contrary. This terrorist was raised in this culture. He made racist jokes with his friends. He shared his plans with his roommate. It’s much easier to introduce forgiveness into the conversation than to sit with that reality and consider all who are complicit.

What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a traumatized community is absolution. They want absolution from the racism that infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile America’s racist sins. They want absolution from their silence in the face of all manner of racism, great and small. They want to believe it is possible to heal from such profound and malingering trauma because to face the openness of the wounds racism has created in our society is too much. I, for one, am done forgiving.

Roxane Gay is the author of “An Untamed State” and “Bad Feminist” and a contributing opinion writer.



A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 24, 2015, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Why I Can’t Forgive the Killer in Charleston.  

http://www.truth-out.org/…/31517-dylann-roof-is-not-an-extr…
 
Dylann Roof Is Not an Extremist
Tuesday, 23 June 2015
by Zoé Samudzi,
Open Democracy | Op-Ed
 A demonstrator wears the Confederate flag outside a Democratic presidential debate in Greenville, S.C., Jan. 29, 2004. (Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)A demonstrator wears the Confederate flag outside a Democratic presidential debate in Greenville, S.C., Jan. 29, 2004. (Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)

I am the daughter of two Zimbabwean immigrants. My parents were born in what was then Rhodesia, an apartheid state ruled by a white minority government.

My parents have not told me much about life in Rhodesia outside of my mother's time spent in an internment camp and my father's brush with political activism in his youth. They are now both naturalized American citizens, and I am sure they would prefer to not resurrect memories of growing up under apartheid.

When I saw Dylann Roof wearing a jacket with a patch of the flag of the Union of South Africa (a South African apartheid flag), I was shocked and disgusted. But when someone pointed out that the other flag was that of Rhodesia, one I had never seen until Thursday (and one that my mother did not initially recognize), I was sick to my stomach - even more so when I learnt his blog was called "the last Rhodesian".

This past Wednesday evening, Roof entered Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church - a church in Charleston, South Carolina with historical importance to the Black community - and opened fire, killing nine churchgoers.

American white supremacy had, in a way, come full circle.

We're missing something when we debate the nature of Roof's actions and whether they constitute a hate crime or terrorism. Why would he emblazon his jacket with apartheid South African and Rhodesian flags and have an affinity for southern Confederate iconography and beliefs if a common thread did not link all three things together?

The common thread is settler colonialism, and American white supremacy as settler colonial nostalgia. Roof wearing those apartheid patches on his jacket while simultaneously embracing the white supremacist narratives of the American Confederate South is nostalgia for this projected past.

Settler colonialism is a process in which foreign families move into a region claimed by those foreigners as their own, or on behalf of an imperial power: the United States and Rhodesia were colonized by the British, and South Africa by the Dutch. This colonization is often characterized by the displacement and/or forced assimilation, genocide of indigenous populations, and the imposition of power dynamics of  settler (i.e. white) supremacy.

While settler colonial processes are unending, colonialism in its golden era was a time of global white leadership and dominance, where indigenous people were raped and enslaved and resources were plundered. The antebellum south was a slave economy in which white owners had unfettered access to Black bodies.

The legacy of the Confederate States of America was the preservation of this racist ownership and use of enslaved Blacks as a labor force. Nostalgia for this era of Black servitude represents a longing to return to a time of uncontested white male leadership and dominance, a return to the America "that used to be."

While the media may try to construct Roof as some kind of lone anomalous monster or extremist who committed an horrific hate crime in a vacuum, he is not an extremist. He is a terrorist, but he is not an extremist.

As a first generation American of Zimbabwean origin, my interactions with whiteness include both American and Rhodesian settler colonial forms, though in a new and jarring way. The similarities between these structures became more apparent when I learnt about the role that Rhodesia plays in American white supremacist militia and paramilitary culture.

Rhodesia is viewed as the land "lost" by the white savior-colonizers, spurring on "macho adventure fantasies as well as terror fantasies of black hordes wiping out virtuous white minorities."

I see little difference between the Transatlantic slave trade, state-sanctioned segregation and American apartheid, the entitled land theft of Manifest Destiny, the slaughter of indigenous people, medical experimentation on Black bodies, the state's infiltration and assassination of resistance groups and leaders of color, and Dylann Roof's slaughter of nine innocent Black people in that church.

The conversation that white America is having is incomplete. Beyond many people's failure to admit his act was one of terrorist violence (indicting the state as a perpetrator of terrorism as a result), there is a failure to recognize that his actions are consistent with the violence and racism that has characterized America since its creation.

Roof's whole-hearted embrace of Confederate ideologies, his hatred of Blacks and Latinos, his naming of the "Jewish problem," and his perception of East Asians as a "model minority" and the group in most active collusion with white supremacy may all be considered fringe and extremist views, but they are all political understandings that exist within mainstream conservatism and within mainstream whiteness more broadly.

President Obama called racism "a blight that we have to combat together." We do not need a continued insistence on moving forward in solidarity when we still do not have a proper understanding of the past.

We need white Americans to be jolted from their racialized ignorance and fragility and to begin to be honest about what America historically has been and continues to be: honesty that the shining "city upon a hill" is ideologically and functionally similar to other racist settler colonial projects around the world.

While Dylann Roof's manifesto was unspeakably racist and admittedly painful to read, white self-identified liberals or progressives should read it. The description of white supremacist racial processes is surprisingly astute (though his understanding unfortunately led him to violence rather than an active challenge of their legitimacy and function). In particular he takes to task white liberals who move to areas to attend better schools. His criticism of "white flight" to suburbia points out that many white liberals are not vastly different from him in their internalizations of white supremacy (though their expression differs drastically).

While all non-Black people of color must address anti-Blackness in their own communities, white liberals should very carefully analyze their own politics and the ways in which their white privilege ultimately maintains structures of racial oppression.

There are some very tangible things that white liberal and progressive allies can do to challenge white supremacy in the spaces they occupy. They can stop allowing casual racist jokes and comments to go unchallenged. They can share anti-racist narratives from Black people and people of color rather than simply similar comments made by white liberals. They can be mindful of the demands that they as "allies" make from Black people (e.g. demanding support and information, which takes away a person's time and energy).

But the most crucial thing white people can do is to engage mindfully with people of color in discussions of racism: to recognize the assumptions they carry as a result of socialization are likely steeped in white supremacy to some degree, and to really listen to and trust what people of color tell them about racism. Only through honest discussions about white supremacy and actively taking responsibility for identity-privileging structures can white Americans play their role in upending and ultimately dismantling still existing settler colonial structures.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.


Zoé Samudzi is a social psychologist working on public health issues relating to HIV prevention among transgender women of color. She passionately theorizes about race and gender hegemony, specifically about the nature of white masculinity. Twitter: @ztsamudzi.

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Is the FBI Ignoring White Violence by Refusing to Call Dylann Roof a Terrorist?
Monday, 22 June 2015
by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!

Video Interview



Civil rights activist Kevin Alexander Gray and Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, discuss whether the shooting in Charleston was an act of domestic terrorism. "Dylann Roof was a human drone, and every Tuesday morning the Obama administration uses drones to kill people whose names we don't even know and can't pronounce," Kevin Alexander Gray says. "So I don't know if I feel comfortable with the idea of expanding this word 'terror.'" But Richard Cohen calls the shooting "a classic case of terrorism." "It's politically motivated violence by a non-state actor and carried out with the intention of intimidating more persons than those who were the immediate victims," Cohen says. "I think in some ways it's important to talk about terrorism in that way, not so we can send out drones, not so we can deny people their due process rights, but so we can understand the true dimensions of what we're facing."

TRANSCRIPT:

AMY GOODMAN: But I wanted to go to the issue of the massacre being terrorism. Speaking at a news conference on Friday, the FBI director, James Comey, refused to label the Charleston massacre as a terrorist act.

JAMES COMEY: I wouldn't, because of the way we define terrorism under the law. Terrorism is an act of violence done or threatened to - in order to try to influence a public body or the citizenry, so it's more of a political act. And again, based on what I know so far, I don't see it as a political act.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was the FBI director, James Comey. It's surprising many, because the Department of Justice said they were investigating whether they would call this a terrorist act, and he came out against it. Again, we're joined by Kevin Alexander Gray, activist from Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, and Richard Cohen, who is president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Kevin Alexander Gray, your response to him saying this is not a terrorist act?

KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY: Well, you know, most people would say a crime like this, you're trying to terrorize people. But when we start talking about the so-called expansion of the war on terrorism and expansion of the use of that word, and especially when, in a post-9/11 world, it has meant denying due process rights to a whole lot of people - Dylann Roof was a human drone. And every Tuesday morning, the Obama administration uses drones to kill people whose names we don't even know and can't pronounce. So, I don't know if I feel comfortable with the idea of expanding this word "terror."

Let's convict this young man or try this young man for murder, nine counts of murder. I am opposed to the death penalty. I would like to see him go to jail with life without parole. But, you know, the law - when you start using terms like "terrorism" in this country, for me, it's always had a racial tinge to it going into it. So that's problematic. And it's been an expansion of the denial of due process with the use of the term. So I'm a little troubled by it. I just - you know, I believe -

AMY GOODMAN: Let me - let me turn to Richard Cohen and ask your response -

KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY: - that there ought to be a standard of law, one standard law.

AMY GOODMAN: Richard Cohen, your response to whether this is terrorism?

RICHARD COHEN: Well, I understand Mr. Gray's reservations, but I do think it is a classic case of terrorism. It's politically motivated violence by a non-state actor and carried out with the intention of intimidating more persons than those who are the immediate victims. And I think in some ways it's important to talk about it as - and terrorism in that way, not so we can send out drones, not so we can deny people their due process rights, but so we can understand the true dimensions of what we're facing. We're not facing just kind of the lone nut who walks in some place and kills a bunch of people. We're talking about someone who sees himself as part of a larger movement, intended to, you know, deny all black people their rights. So I think there is some consequence in thinking about it that way.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan Cole recently tweeted that since 2002 right-wing white terrorists have killed more Americans than Muslim extremists. Richard Cohen, the minute the Boston Marathon killings took place, "terror," the word "terror," was everywhere, unquestioned, the horrific event that took place in Boston, the horrific attack. But here, it's different. And can you talk about how it's framed over the years? You have been tracking white supremacist groups for decades at Southern Poverty Law Center. And by the way, how much have they increased in the last years?

RICHARD COHEN: Well, actually, the number of organized white supremacist groups has fallen fairly significantly over the last few years. But I don't think that means that the level of white supremacist activity has fallen. We still see a high level of violence. And what we're seeing is people drifting away from the organized groups, you know, and retreating to the anonymity of the net. You know, there's a website out there called Stormfront. Right now it has 300,000 registered users. Those are people who have signed up to post their hatred. And that's an increase of about 50 percent over the last five years.

I want to go back to the earlier question that you asked, the earlier point that you made. You know, after 9/11, we saw all of the resources at the federal level go towards jihadi terror, and, you know, kind of ignoring our homegrown terrorism. That began to change last year somewhat after the killings in [Overland] Park, Arkansas, by a well-known white supremacist. But I still think it's really important for the government, at all levels, not to put all of their eggs in the jihadi basket and to recognize that we have as much, or if not more, to fear by what we call sometimes homegrown terrorists.

AMY GOODMAN: Richard Cohen and Kevin Alexander Gray, we thank you both for being with us.

RICHARD COHEN: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, co-author of the editorial published in today's New York Times - we'll link to it - "White Supremacists Without Borders." And Kevin Alexander Gray, community organizer in the capital of South Carolina, Columbia, edited the book Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence. And, in fact, it was Dylann Roof, if in fact he wrote this manifesto, who tracks his hatred to the Trayvon Martin case. He said that opened his eyes and changed him forever.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, a Democracy Now! exclusive: A new candidate enters the presidential race. Stay with us.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,100 public television and radio stations worldwide. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its "Pick of the Podcasts," along with NBC's Meet the Press.

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