Across the Globe, Foreign Powers Attack Racism, Hypocrisy of U.S. Following Ferguson Grand Jury Decision. Tim Wise Pens Brilliant Editorial on Ferguson: Most White Americans are ‘Completely Oblivious’ If there’s any such entity as the Anti-Coulter, it’s Tim Wise. Wise has been one of the major voices in combating institutionalized racism in America for more than 20 years. Following his early college days in the Divestment Movement to end apartheid in South Africa, Wise has gone on to author six books on the subject, and has trained teachers, corporate employees and law enforcement members in overcoming the internalized racist views that they didn’t know they had.
In short: Tim Wise is not well-loved by conservatives. He’s also probably the nation’s foremost authority on race relations today; and in the wake of Ferguson, he says that most whites are simply oblivious to their own internalized racism. This article was originally posted to AlterNet, and spells out pretty explicitly White America’s massive blind spot when it comes to the (often quite neutral or even benign) racism that we act on daily. It’s a reflex. Some witnesses lied to Michael Brown grand jury, McCulloch says. So why have them testify?
Photos And Videos: America Responds To #Ferguson. 'Hands Up Don't Shoot': This Video Of #Ferguson Protestors At SCOTUS Last Night Is Amazing. Majority Of Americans Say Officer Wilson Should Face Charges–But That's Where Agreement Ends. 57 percent of Americans say Darren Wilson should be charged with something for killing Michael Brown. But what may depend on the color of your skin. Change the conversation, change the world Share this CNN just released a poll taken November 21-23, which finds that the majority of Americans do think Officer Darren Wilson should be charged with a crime. But only about a third, or 32 percent, say he should be charged with murder. A quarter say he should face lesser charges, and about one in five, or 21 percent, say Wilson should be charged with no crime at all. But along racial lines, the results look different. Less than a quarter of whites, just 23 percent, say Wilson should be charged with murder.
There is broad 63% agreement that peaceful protests are justified if a grand jury doesn't indict Wilson for murder. The New Civil Rights Movement will immediately report on the grand jury's decision to indict or not indict Darren Wilson. Are Ferguson and Eric Garner's Death Symptoms of a Deeper Problem? I sat down last week to write about what happened in Ferguson. As I began to write, there was no doubt in my mind that there would be a “next time” as soon as we hit the next news cycle, if not sooner. Then I heard the news that the New York City police officer responsible for the death of Eric Garner would not be charged. I was struck by the fact that I could write this article every day and just leave a blank spot to fill in a new name.
This is not just about Michael Brown or Eric Garner. These cases are not anomalies but symptoms of something much deeper. We have a system in this country that lets some get ahead while keeping others in the cycle of poverty. As Jews, we have in recent history benefited greatly from a system that has actively held down our black brothers and sisters. I say this not to impart guilt upon those of us who benefited, but as a reminder. Many people have told me that they are outraged but simply don’t know what to do.
What is our role in that repair? The language of protest: Race, rioting, and the memory of Ferguson — Constitution Daily. My Son Is Black. With Autism. And I’m Scared Of What The Police Will Do To Him. — Human Parts. An Elegy for Michael Brown | Dame Magazine. I'm an educator. I teach English at one of the top independent boarding schools in the world. I'm also a Black woman. With a Masters in English, which qualifies me to teach it, and a Ph.D. in African-American Studies from Harvard University, which, among other things, scares the shit out of everyone. Yet, here I am, in rural New England, teaching the literature of my choice and with an interdisciplinary bent (read: African-American) and how to write the personal essay to a mostly White, upper-class population.
And this is a good thing. When applying to grad schools I wrote in my personal statement that my presence in a classroom is a revolutionary act. I fill a space of authority that is still very much White, male and very, very privileged. In August, a month, before starting my job I'd visited Ferguson. I remember thinking, This man has never dealt with a Black person in his life. And they need to see me here for the White boys. That was in October. UN Condemns U.S. Police Brutality, Calls For 'Stand Your Ground' Review. Michael Brown's Mother: 'They Still Don't Care--They Ain't Never Gon' Care'
This Is What Darren Wilson Told the Grand Jury About Shooting Michael Brown. Source: Darren Wilson says Michael Brown kept charging at him. FERGUSON • Police Officer Darren Wilson told investigators that in a struggle for his pistol inside a police SUV, Michael Brown pressed the barrel of Wilson’s gun against the officer’s hip, according to a source with knowledge of his statements.... How many police shootings a year? No one knows. People march in Washington on Sept. 6 to protest the killing of Michael Brown. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images) A summer of high-profile police shootings, most notably the Aug. 9 shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., has rekindled a decades-long debate over law enforcement’s use of lethal force. Police unions and some law-and-order conservatives insist that shootings by officers are rare and even more rarely unjustified. Civil rights groups and some on the left have just as quickly prescribed racial motives to the shootings, declaring that black and brown men are being “executed” by officers.
And, like all previous incarnations of the clash over police force, the debate remains absent access to a crucial, fundamental fact. The government does, however, keep a database of how many officers are killed in the line of duty. But how many people in the United States were shot, or killed, by law enforcement officers during that year? “What’s there is crappy data,” said David A. Deadly Force, in Black and White. Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts – 21 times greater i, according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings. The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.
One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica's analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring – 185, more than one per week. ProPublica's risk analysis on young males killed by police certainly seems to support what has been an article of faith in the African American community for decades: Blacks are being killed at disturbing rates when set against the rest of the American population. Congress Just Passed a Bill Addressing Police Killings While No One Was Looking. After watching nationwide protests unfold against police brutality, members of Congress did what they have seemed incapable of doing for years: something.
A bill passed by both chambers of Congress and headed to President Barack Obama's desk will require local law enforcement agencies to report every police shooting and other death at their hands. That data will include each victim's age, gender and race as well as details about what happened. "You can't begin to improve the situation unless you know what the situation is," bill sponsor Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) told the Washington Post. It's not the first time Congress has tried: The same law was actually passed back in 2000, but was allowed to lapse in 2006 and was never reauthorized (despite repeated attempts by Scott).
It's just a first step: The bill is a first step to address a major problem activists, lawmakers and reporters faced after the deaths of Brown, Garner, Rice and others at the hands of law enforcement. Matt Connolly. Officer Darren Wilson's story is unbelievable. Literally. We've finally heard from Officer Darren Wilson. Wilson had been publicly silent since the events of August 9, when he shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. And, even as the grand jury announced its decision not to indict him, he remained silent. He had his attorneys release a statement on his behalf. But on Monday night, St. And it is unbelievable. I mean that in the literal sense of the term: "difficult or impossible to believe. " The story Wilson tells goes like this: At about noon on August 9th, Wilson hears on the radio that there's a theft in progress at the Ferguson Market. Moments later, Wilson sees two young black men walking down the yellow stripe in the center of the street.
And then things get weird. Brown's response to "what's wrong with the sidewalk? " Wilson says Brown replied, "Fuck what you have to say. " Wilson backs his car up and begins to open the door. Photos surround Michael Brown's casket in Ferguson, MO. Let's take a breath and recap. Grand Jury Documents *** Gannett *** Subject Specialists. The rarity of a federal grand jury not indicting, visualized. A data point from FiveThirtyEight's coverage of Monday night's events in Ferguson is worth pulling out.
"U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010," the site's Ben Casselman writes, "the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them. " That data is from a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and covers October 1, 2009, to September 30, 2010. Over that time period, over 193,000 federal offenses were investigated, about 16 percent of which were declined for prosecution. That leaves just over 162,300 offenses that the government tried to prosecute. For scale: As 538 and others have pointed out, this is a look at federal grand jury work, not state. It's not always that simple. Philip Bump writes about politics for The Fix.