Saturday, December 27, 2014 7:42:50 PM
Blue Lives Matter
Carlo Allegri/Reuters
Talking about "police reform" obscures the task. Today's policies are, at the very least, the product of democratic will.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Dec 22 2014, 10:00 AM ET
The reactions to the murders of two New York police officers this weekend have been mostly uniform in their outrage. There was the predictable gamesmanship exhibited in some quarters, but all agree that the killing of Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos merits particular censure. This is understandable. The killing of police officers is not only the destruction of life but an attack on democracy itself. We do not live in a military dictatorship, and police officers are not the representatives of an autarch, nor the enforcers of law handed down by decree. The police are representatives of a state that derives its powers from the people. Thus the strong reaction we have seen to Saturday's murders is wholly expected and entirely appropriate.
For activists and protesters radicalized by the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, this weekend's killing may seem to pose a great obstacle. In fact, it merely points to the monumental task in front of them. The response to Garner's death, particularly, seemed to offer some hope. But the very fact that this opening originated in the most extreme case—the on-camera choking of a man for a minor offense—points to the shaky ground on which such hope took root. It was only a matter of time before some criminal shot a police officer in New York. If that's all it takes to turn Americans away from police reform, the efforts were likely doomed from the start.
The idea of "police reform" obscures the task. Whatever one thinks of the past half-century of criminal-justice policy, it was not imposed on Americans by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Burge ]—are, at the very least, byproducts of democratic will. Likely they are much more. It is often said that it is difficult to indict and convict police officers who abuse their power. It is comforting to think of these acquittals and non-indictments as contrary to American values. But it is just as likely that they reflect American values. The three most trusted institutions in America [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx ] are the military, small business, and the police.
To challenge the police is to challenge the American people, and the problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that we are majoritarian pigs. When the police are brutalized by people, we are outraged because we are brutalized. By the same turn, when the police brutalize people, we are forgiving because ultimately we are really just forgiving ourselves. Power, decoupled from responsibility, is what we seek. The manifestation of this desire is broad. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani responded to the killing of Michael Brown by labeling it a "significant exception" and wondering [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/the-gospel-of-rudy-giuliani/380498/ ] why weren't talking about "black on black crime." Giuliani was not out on a limb. The charge of insufficient outrage over "black on black crime" has been endorsed, at varying points, by everyone from the NAACP [ http://www.ijreview.com/2014/08/167201-one-tweet-naacp-ferguson-riots-many-african-americans-outraged/ ] to Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-our-selective-outrage/2014/08/14/22a72dba-23e5-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.html ] to Giuliani's archenemy Al Sharpton [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6bnPTvEVh8 (next below)].
Implicit in this notion is that outrage over killings by the police should not be any greater than killings by ordinary criminals. But when it comes to outrage over killings of the police, the standard is different. Ismaaiyl Brinsley began his rampage by shooting his girlfriend—an act of both black-on-black crime and domestic violence. On Saturday, Officers Liu and Ramos were almost certainly joined in death by some tragic number of black people who were shot down by their neighbors in the street. The killings of Officers Liu and Ramos prompt national comment. The killings of black civilians do not. When it is convenient to award qualitative value to murder, we do so. When it isn't, we do not. We are outraged by violence done to police, because it is violence done to all of us as a society. In the same measure, we look away from violence done by the police, because the police are not the true agents of the violence. We are.
We are the ones who designed the criminogenic ghettos. We are the ones who barred black people from leaving those ghettos. We are the ones who treat black men [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CofLE3q3Qh0 (next below)]
When defenders of the police say that cops do the work ordinary citizens are afraid of, they are correct. The criminal-justice system has been the most consistent tool for making American will manifest in black communities. The tool for exercising that will is not the proliferation of ice cream socials. I suspect, we would like to know as little about criminal justice system as possible. I suspect we would rather the film of Eric Garner's killing not exist. Then we might comfort ourselves with the kind of vague unknowables that dogged the killing of Michael Brown. ("Did he have his hands up? Was he surrendering? Was he charging?") Garner, choked to death and repeating "I can't breathe," trapped us. But now, through a merciless act of lethal violence, an escape route has been revealed. This overstates things. To the extent that this weekend's murders obscure the legacy of Eric Garner, it will not be due to the failure of protests, nor even chance. The citizen who needs to look away generally finds a reason.
I wonder if there is some price attached to this looking away. When the elected mayor of my city arrived at the hospital, the police officers who presumably serve at the public's leisure turned away in a display that should chill the blood of any interested citizen. The police are not the only embodiment of democratic society. And one does not have to work hard to imagine a future when the agents of our will, the agents whom we created, are in fact our masters. On that day one can expect that the tactics intended for the ghettos will enjoy wider usage.
Related Story
Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/barack-obama-ferguson-and-the-evidence-of-things-unsaid/383212/
Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/blue-lives-matter-nypd-shooting/383977/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/blue-lives-matter-nypd-shooting/383977/?single_page=true ] [with comments] [(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=109301445 and preceding (and any future following)]
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The Case for Police Reform Is Much Bigger Than Michael Brown
There are clearer, more persuasive illustrations of law-enforcement misbehavior and the need to rein it in.
Nov 26 2014
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/the-case-for-police-reforms-is-much-bigger-than-michael-brown/383210/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/the-case-for-police-reforms-is-much-bigger-than-michael-brown/383210/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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Former Buffalo cop fights for pension after exposing brutality
Cariol Horne, discussing her lost pension and abuse allegations.
Dec 19, 2014
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/19/1352929/-Former-Buffalo-cop-fights-for-pension-after-exposing-brutality [with comments]
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Coming to Terms With My Father's Racism
Mrs. Norton's third-grade class. The author is in the second row from the top, next to the teacher.
Courtesy of Connie Schultz
How to find the fragile middle in a time of racial tension
Connie Schultz
Dec 23 2014, 7:00 AM ET
My earliest memories of my father’s racism are rooted in the family dinners of my childhood.
Dad sat to my left, always. My mother sat across from me, with my little brother seated to her right. My two younger sisters sat at opposite ends. In the 1960s, our table was metal, and small. There was no escaping whatever was on our father’s mind.
I cannot quote verbatim his tirades, and I am grateful for that small mercy, but I remember his tone with a bone-deep weariness. Raised voice, fist on the table. He was angry with black people for reasons that depended on his day at the plant, a song on the radio, a story he’d read in the afternoon paper. To this day, I hear the n-word and can see the contortions in his face.
Most daughters want to be daddy’s little girl. This aspiration was lost on me at an early age. I loved my father, always, and feared him too often, but by age 6 or so I knew there was something wrong about him. He would rant about black people he’d never met, and I would see the faces of my classmates, my friends. Silently, I’d pick at the fried Spam or pile of goulash on my plate and think about Sandy and Gary and Valerie and Phillip, and sometimes my eyes would sting. It was not the natural order of things to be so young and know your father had no idea what he was talking about.
I live in Cleveland, where a 12-year-old black boy named Tamir Rice was recently shot and killed by a white police officer. The community at large professed outrage, but when I attended his public funeral it was filled with black mourners, and I left wondering if maybe most of us white people think this isn’t our problem anymore. After weeks of reading and moderating public comment threads about the deaths this year of Tamir and two other unarmed black males, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, I can’t ignore this dark and familiar something clawing at my heart.
There are moments when it feels like we’re inching back toward the 1960s, but back into communities that are far more segregated, by race and means. If you are black and poor, you can now spend your entire childhood knowing only other poor, black children. If you are born lucky and grow up surrounded by mirror images of your good fortune, it’s easy to see yourself as a majority stakeholder in a world primed to do your bidding.
Last week, I walked down to the basement of my home to dig up class pictures from my elementary-school days. I haven’t looked at those faces in 20 years, I’ll bet, but I could summon the names of just about every child in them, and the complicated memories that tag along.
There we are, lined up shoulder-to-shoulder on risers in the basement of West Elementary School, hands to our sides, faces wide. In each picture, half of the class is black. Those black faces, as surely as the color of my eyes and the gaps between my two front teeth, are evidence of my roots. At the same time, they telegraph the lifelong struggle of my father, who for so long saw their existence in my life as a failure in his.
I grew up in Ashtabula, a working-class town of 20,000 people an hour east of Cleveland. Mom stayed home with us in the early years. Dad worked for the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company on Lake Erie’s shore. His job made him big and strong and often angry for reasons we didn’t understand. He worked in maintenance. Until I was 10, I thought that meant he was a custodian, when in reality he held one of the most skilled jobs at the plant. We were raised to understand that our father went to work so that he could take care of us. Our curiosity ended there.
We lived in a rental house on U.S. Route 20, on the integrated side of town. The West End, we called it. The house is still there, and has been boarded up for years. Our street was all white, but the short walk to school delivered me to classrooms evenly divided between white and black kids. In second grade, we had eight black kids, seven white. By fourth grade, the numbers jumped to 15 each. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Norton, was black. This was a big deal in my neighborhood. My mother often mentioned that Mrs. Norton had a lot of class, but she said this only to her girlfriends. Never at the dinner table.
The author is in the top right.
Courtesy of Connie Schultz
I grew up surrounded by children who didn’t look like me, and my only problem with that, aside from the constant tension with my father, was that I wanted to be them. The girls were my confidants, my touchstones. We played with each other’s hair and swapped barrettes and ribbons like boys trading baseball cards. I loved their music, from the Motown on their kitchen radios to the gospel songs in their churches, where worshippers praised God like they knew him, instead of sitting ramrod-straight week after week waiting to make his acquaintance.
I loved their mothers, too. Ours was not an “I love you” kind of home, and I melted in the arms of these women who called me “child” and “honey” and always ordered me to sit at their tables for after-school snacks. Surely they noticed that their children were never invited to my home, but I never felt they held that against me.
My father had no idea that I visited my black friends’ churches or stepped foot in their homes. I don’t remember my mother ever saying we were keeping our secrets. The conspiracy was implicit; the necessity understood.
Here begins the long list of excuses I’ve made for my father in my head all of my adult life.
He grew up on a farm in Northeast Ohio, surrounded by other white, rural folk, many of them family. By his lights, the high point of his life was his senior year in high school, when the local newspaper heralded him as one of the best point guards in the state. I have his scrapbook from that year. It’s full of yellowed newsprint and black-and-white glossy photos starring a skinny hotshot with sweaty red hair from Nowhere, Ohio. I have his collection of felt varsity letters, too. Nearly 60 years old, and in pristine condition.
My father had a chance to go to college on a basketball scholarship. I learned this only after his death, when my sisters found the letter from the university’s basketball coach. He never mailed in the appointment card, never used the bus ticket. Instead, Mom became pregnant with me, and Dad got a marriage license and a union card the same year. By the time he was banging his fist on the dinner table in 1963, he was still four years from 30 and the father of four. Everywhere he looked, he saw his missed opportunities blooming in someone else’s life.
When I started junior high school in 1969, my father and I were arguing all the time, sometimes about boys, occasionally about hemlines, but usually about race. He was full of contradictions. He liked a black guy at work, but that’s because he didn’t “act black.” He loved The Supremes until I played them constantly, at which point he set a limit on how many black artists’ records I could buy with my babysitting money. One a month, tops. He smashed my 45 of Aretha’s “Respect” into a pile of pieces when I violated the rule.
The timing of his attempt to rein me in couldn’t have been worse, because everything was changing at school. Within days of my seventh-grade year, the kids who had come from the all-white elementary school on the other side of town took note of my companions at the lunch table and started calling me a n— lover. The kids from the mostly black elementary school badgered my friends for hanging out with the white girl. The same mothers who used to pull me to their bosoms now acted like they didn’t see me in the hallways and at Friday-night games, and nodded terse hellos to my parents.
My father saw a glimmer of hope in my feelings of abandonment. So much for friendship. Blood’s thicker than water. Guess you’re learning that God made us different for a reason.
Courtesy of Connie Schultz
I had spent most of my childhood identifying with children who did not look like me, and in a fit of pubescent angst, decided it was time to change that. A week before school pictures, I talked a neighbor lady into cutting my long hair and giving me a white girl’s Afro with a Toni perm.
My mother collapsed on the sofa and fanned her face with her apron. My father refused to be seen in public with me. When he found out I had a crush on a black boy, he grounded me for weeks. I bought tubes of QT [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03_7wzQjT7c (next below)]
My father and I were at war.
By the time I was a senior in high school, in the fall of ’74, my dad had finally managed to save enough money to buy a house on the white side of town. For the first time, I had my own room, and he took me to Sears to buy a bedroom set. A peace offering, but détente was temporary. I left for college and joined the school newspaper. I was back at it, this time with an audience. After a disastrous sophomore summer home, he ordered me to live elsewhere, and I happily complied.
If the story ended there, at the gulf of our divisions, I would feel no hope now in these troubled times. I would look at those class pictures from my childhood and see a failed experiment in good intentions. I’d have to tell myself that some white people, white people like my father, are just unreachable.
For years, I wondered: How good is a daughter’s liberation if her father only sees it as his failure? Where’s the victory in that? Maybe it’s enough for those who don’t care what their father thinks, but I always did. I didn’t want his approval. I wanted his agreement that he’d been wrong all along about black people. More to the point, I wanted him to admit he’d been wrong about me.
I wish I could say I stayed true to my roots in a rocket-straight trajectory from that first-grade picture to today. I raised my two children in diverse school systems, deliberately so, but after they graduated from high school I just as deliberately spent eight years in an all-white suburb on Cleveland’s west side. I didn’t move there because everyone looked like me—I had married then-U.S. Representative Sherrod Brown [ http://www.amazon.com/His-Lovely-Wife-Memoir-Beside-ebook/dp/B000SCHBCA ], and we had to live in his congressional district—but I should have known that a lifetime of something else would render me a hypocrite under the circumstances. If I’ve learned anything about myself in the last few years, it’s that somewhere inside me resides a five-year-old capable of delivering withering criticism. A child remembers, always.
Last year we moved into the city of Cleveland, where I’ve worked as a journalist for more than 30 years. I can’t run to the drugstore or fetch a loaf of bread without crossing paths with faces that remind me of what I came from—of who I came from, I should say. Some suburban acquaintances have questioned our move with various versions of the same indictment: What were you thinking? Always, I am able to answer: Home. I was thinking of home.
My father died in 2006. He lived seven years longer than my mother. She never got in the middle of our fights about race, but it was her short illness and death, at 62, that helped us find our way to a fragile middle.
The turning point arrived without warning in a hospital waiting room.
It was late August 1999. My mom was weeks from dying. Dad and I were a tag team of concern. We spent our days sitting in offices and waiting rooms, sometimes with Mom, sometimes without her. Over and over, my father would whisper to me, “This should be happening to me. I should be the one who is dying.”
On this particular morning, Dad and I sat wedged together in a packed room, our backs against a wall. We were waiting for Mom, again.
To get to this place, this moment, we had walked behind the black orderly who pushed Mom’s wheelchair down the hall. We had thanked the black receptionist who directed us where to sit. We had just nodded hello to the black resident who always made my mother smile.
My father leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes.
“God,” he said, “they’re everywhere now.”
I clenched the armrests and tried to control my breathing as I turned to look at him. Tears pooled at the corners of his eyes. For the first time ever, he reached for my hand.
We started there.
Connie Schultz [ http://www.theatlantic.com/connie-schultz/ ] is a nationally syndicated columnist and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/coming-to-terms-with-my-fathers-racism/383982/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/coming-to-terms-with-my-fathers-racism/383982/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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#BlackLivesMatter Condemns NYPD Cop Killings: 'Not Our Vision Of Justice'
Mourners gather before the bodies of two fallen NYPD police officers are transported from Woodhull Medical Center, Saturday, Dec. 20, 2014, in New York. An armed man walked up to two New York Police Department officers sitting inside a patrol car and opened fire Saturday afternoon, killing both officers before running into a nearby subway station and committing suicide, police said.
12/21/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/21/nypd-cop-killings-blacklivesmatter_n_6362400.html [with comments]
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The Importance of Treating NYPD Officers as Individuals
On the outrageous murder of two cops and the faction trying to exploit their deaths for political leverage
Dec 22 2014
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/the-importance-of-treating-nypd-officers-as-individuals/383976/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/the-importance-of-treating-nypd-officers-as-individuals/383976/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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Black-on-Black Racism: The Hazards of Implicit Bias
Matt Neale/Flickr
How the politics of respectability twists society
Theodore R. Johnson
Dec 26 2014, 8:00 AM ET
In his year-end press conference [second-last item below], President Obama was asked about the state of black America [ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/what-if-black-america-were-a-country/380953/ ]. He responded by saying blacks are “better off than they were,” but juxtaposed that with the lingering issues evinced in the recent tragic police encounters with unarmed black men. Interestingly, he took particular care in calling out the “hidden biases that we all carry around,” a sentiment he echoed in another recent interview [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/obama-as-a-black-man-hes-been-mistaken-for-valet/2014/12/17/d760bdbe-85e9-11e4-abcf-5a3d7b3b20b8_story.html ].
My own hidden biases punched me in the gut last week, as I stared in disbelief at a test result on my computer screen. Before I started the racial-bias assessment, a disclaimer explicitly warned me that those who are not prepared to receive uncomfortable news should not proceed. I was too intrigued to turn back, but it turns out I was unprepared for the outcome.
According to the Implicit Association Test [ https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/education.html , https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/iatdetails.html , https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/faqs.html , https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html (the author having taken what is currently the last IAT listed/accessible there, the "Race IAT")], I have a "strong automatic preference for European Americans compared to African Americans." That's a sterile way of saying that I'm biased against black people. For most people, such a designation would probably be unsettling. After all, the United States is a nation that ostensibly aspires not to judge others "by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." But for me, it caused a mini-existential crisis.
Why? Because I'm black.
As I read the results, I thought about what it means to be black and biased against other black people. Does it mean harboring a subconscious contempt for my race? Or considering myself to be part of the blessed segment of an otherwise unfortunate lot? Is it even possible for a black person to be racist against black people? In a moment of self-dramatization, I felt as if Kanye had just announced on national television that I didn’t care about black people.
Then, the tropes saturated my thoughts. I wondered if my bias was the undergirding of the sort of intra-race prejudice colloquially expressed in phrases like “Uncle Tom,” “crab in a barrel,” and “acting white.” Since my results were the same as the 88 percent of white Americans who show a bias [ http://healthland.time.com/2010/10/11/seeking-the-authentic-self-how-do-you-know-if-youre-really-racist-or-sexist/ ] in favor of white people, it seems to me that this demonstrated “strong preference” is the very definition of acting white—a well-worn pejorative that pained me as an awkward adolescent and suddenly felt fresh again.
The Project Implicit [ https://www.projectimplicit.net/index.html ] test [again, the author is referring specifically to the "Race IAT" listed at/accessible via https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html ] has been around for a few years, but a recent Mother Jones article titled, “The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/science-of-racism-prejudice ]” gave it wider currency and helped explain the role of implicit bias in the recent events in Ferguson, Cleveland, and Staten Island, where the aggressive policing of black people turned deadly. The IAT measures the ability to quickly and correctly sort selected words as positive and negative and to distinguish faces as belonging to a white or black person. Through a series of paired word and face sequences, the test detects in milliseconds the time it takes the respondent to associate black faces with positive and negative words relative to the time it takes to match white faces. When a respondent pairs black faces and negative words more quickly than other pairings, it reveals implicit bias.
As difficult as it was to learn about my black-on-black bias, such results are fairly common. This is sadly comforting. The data reveal [ https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/background/faqs.html#faq19 ] that black respondents’ implicit biases are split just about evenly between pro-white and pro-black. Other research has also shown [ http://www.cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Nosek_HarvestingImplicit.pdf ] that black participants tend to have a strong pro-black explicit bias. A conflict emerges: When blacks are asked about their predilections, they express a solid preference for their group over whites, but, in general, performance on the IAT suggests they subconsciously hold a slight preference for whites over blacks.
This dynamic is obviously a direct result of racism. Too often, racism is seen as a social phenomenon that happens to black people. But it happens through black people as well. That is, the negative associations thrust upon black people and black culture can color how we black people view each other. Blacks and whites receive the same narratives and images that perpetuate stereotypes of black criminality and flippancy while synonymizing white culture with American values. It is to be expected that there will be an observable impact on black intragroup perceptions.
The construct of racism is efficiently designed to politically and socially subjugate a segment of the population. For the oppressed, a natural response is to advocate for conformity with the dominant culture as an appeal for equal treatment. If black people were only more respectable, one line of argument runs, they would be less subject to the ills of racism.
The contrast between black respondents’ explicit and implicit biases is a fingerprint of the politics of respectability, a term coined by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in her book In Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 [ http://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Discontent-Movement-Baptist-1880-1920/dp/0674769783 ]. In her conception, the politics of respectability involves the “reform of individual behavior as a goal in itself and as a strategy for reform.” Higginbotham argued that black Baptist women “rejected white America’s depiction of black women as immoral, childlike, and unworthy of respect of protection” by teaching blacks to mind their manners, dress and speak appropriately, and remain free from sexual and other vices. Thus, the politics of respectability say that if black people behaved more like the proffered white ideal, the result would be equal treatment and the demise of racial discrimination. This tactic was a form of political protest based on an appeal to white humanity, but it has had troublesome side effects.
This thread has persisted in black scholarship and society for decades. From W.E.B. DuBois’ Talented Tenth [ http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-talented-tenth/ ] in 1903 to Bill Cosby’s infamous [ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/05/-this-is-how-we-lost-to-the-white-man/306774/ ] Pound-Cake Speech a hundred years later, the politics of respectability has often taken on the quality of black theology. Members of the black community are told that wearing the mask, playing the game, and being twice as good are the keys to making it in America. It’s as if to say, “If we only knew how to act, racism would just fall away.” This is, of course, absurd. Good behavior and attire deemed proper do not abrogate racism. Discrimination does not come with a dress code.
The politics of respectability is really a coping mechanism. It affirms the inferiority and unattractiveness of black culture. And it contributes to the formation of implicit biases that lead black people to prefer white people over their own.
But it’s not the only option. Unable to live with my “strong automatic preference,” I took the test a few more times. Through repeated attempts, I trained myself to react evenly to the black, white, positive, and negative pairings. In a sense, through acknowledgement of the bias and a concerted effort to modify my behavior, I suppressed the implicit bias. By my fourth and final attempt, I exhibited no preference at all. If each of us is willing to recognize our implicit biases and police our actions accordingly, there may be hope for the racial aspect of the American experiment after all.
Theodore R. Johnson [ http://www.theatlantic.com/theodore-r-johnson/ ] is a writer and naval officer. He has served as a military professor at the Naval War College and as a 2011 – 2012 White House Fellow.
Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/black-on-black-racism-the-hazards-of-implicit-bias/384028/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/black-on-black-racism-the-hazards-of-implicit-bias/384028/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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Wow. Eric Garner's youngest daughter, Erica, just came by memorial for NYPD cops. Told me she wanted to show solidarity for the families.
11:08 AM - 22 Dec 2014
https://twitter.com/Liz_Kreutz/status/547106301080522752 [with comments]
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A Message From a Protestor and Former Cop: We Are Not Anti-Cop. We Are Pro-Life.
12/22/2014 Updated: 12/23/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-karyn-carlo-phd/a-message-from-a-protesto_b_6369986.html [with comments]
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Hidden Racial Anxiety in an Age of Waning [. . .] Racism
Molly Riley/Reuters
Even as they quickly condemn the likes of Donald Sterling, surveys reveal whites have serious misgivings about a more diverse nation.
Robert P. Jones
May 12 2014, 8:00 AM ET
Typically, April showers bring May flowers. This year, however, April also delivered a torrent of racially charged issues to the national stage. In Michigan, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld [ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/04/schuette/361063/ ] the ban on university-admissions programs that use race as a criterion in college admissions. Clippers owner Donald Sterling ignited a firestorm [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/This-Town-Needs-A-Better-Class-Of-Racist/361443/ (third item below)] when a recording surfaced in which he asked his mixed-race girlfriend not to post photos of herself with black people on Instagram or bring black people to NBA games. Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy garnered support from Senator Rand Paul and other prominent conservatives in the wake of his standoff with the federal government over cattle grazing rights. But most supporters hurried to distance themselves from Bundy when he offered these stunning remarks [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/cliven-bundy-wants-to-tell-you-all-about-the-negro/361152/ ] at a news conference:
I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro …. They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?
The nearly unanimous denunciations of both Sterling and Bundy makes clear that as nation, we have moved beyond the point where blatantly racist statements are publicly acceptable, easily explained away, and carry no real consequences.
When did this happen? While cultural shifts are difficult to pin down, there is good evidence that the country reached a tipping point in attitudes about racism sometime in the mid-1990s. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and an anchor of southern culture, finally came around to offering a sober apology [ http://articles.philly.com/1995-06-21/news/25690255_1_northern-baptists-slavery-southern-baptists ] for its former defense of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and racism at its 1995 annual meeting in Atlanta.
Google’s Ngram viewer allows us to assess the relative usage frequency of the words “prejudice” and “racism” in American English books over time, revealing a confirming pattern. The frequency of the more generic word “prejudice” remains relatively stable from 1900 through 1970, when it begins to decline. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the more normative word “racism” did not appear until 1902 [ http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/01/05/260006815/the-ugly-fascinating-history-of-the-word-racism ], and its usage only begins to pick up in the mid-1960s just as major federal civil-rights legislation is passing. The term “racism” rises through the early 1970s, declines during the Reagan-era 1980s, but then rises sharply again in the 1990s. Most notably, the term “racism,” which relies both on the acknowledgment of racial bias and on a shared normative negative judgment, outpaces the term “prejudice” for the first time in the early 1990s and significantly exceeds it by the mid-1990s.
[dinky little interactive chart that won't embed here, illustrating the point just made, embedded]
Well before the election of the first black president in 2008, the condemnation of direct and open expressions of racism had become a social norm. While the fading acceptability of openly racist attitudes is to be celebrated, it clearly does not mean that race no longer matters or that racial tensions and anxieties have disappeared. In her scathing dissent [ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/572/12-682/case.pdf ] in the Michigan case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor chastised her colleagues for downplaying the continuing significance of race:
Race matters…. This refusal to accept the stark reality that race matters is regrettable. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.
For civil-rights activists, the challenge is that the open racism of the past may transmute into what Ta-Nehisi Coates describes [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/This-Town-Needs-A-Better-Class-Of-Racist/361443/ (again, third item below)] as an “elegant racism” that is less visible and that “disguises itself in the national vocabulary, avoids epithets and didacticism,” For researchers, journalists, and policymakers, the new challenge is that this positive social norm may make the public less willing to speak openly and candidly about race, a problem social scientists call “social-desirability bias.”
Recent research reveals that social-desirability bias remains active in the measurement of white anxieties about the changing racial composition of the country. In early 2013, the Public Religion Research Institute team set up a controlled survey experiment [ http://publicreligion.org/research/2013/03/march-2013-religion-politics-tracking-survey/ ] designed to assess anxieties concerning the changing racial makeup of the country. First, we asked respondents to tell telephone interviewers whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “The idea of an America where most people are not white bothers me.” Among whites, 13 percent admitted to an interviewer that the idea of a majority-minority America bothers them. There was only modest variation among white subgroups, ranging from 10 percent of younger whites young than 50 years of age at the low end to 18 percent of white Republicans at the high end who said an America that is not mostly white concerns them.
Next, we employed a technique called a list experiment, which is designed to allow respondents to indirectly express their views on sensitive subjects. We divided the survey respondents into two demographically identical groups and asked each group to tell us how many, but not which specific items from a list bothered them. One group was designated as a control group and received three control statements, while the other group was designated as a treatment group and received the same three control statements plus a fourth statement that read, “An America that is not mostly white.” Because the control and treatment groups were demographically identical, any variation in the average number of statements chosen between the groups is solely attributable to respondents in the treatment group picking the treatment statement. For any subgroup (but not for an individual), then, one can statistically estimate the proportion of respondents choosing the treatment statement by subtracting the mean number of statements chosen by the treatment group from the mean number of statements chosen by the control group. That number is presented in the chart below as the “indirect response.”
The indirect responses revealed significant social-desirability bias at work across all white subgroups and produced a much more dramatic spread in opinions among white respondents. Among white Americans overall, the indirect measure was nearly 20 percentage points higher than the direct measure (31 percent versus 13 percent). White non-born-again Christians and white non-southerners register the lowest indirect measures of concern, but even with these groups there is a double-digit social-desirability-bias effect at play. For example, while only 13 percent of whites outside the South say a majority-minority country bothers them, fully one-quarter register this opinion when the indirect measure is used.
Notably, the racial anxiety differences between white Republicans and white Democrats are significant on the direct question, with white Republicans more likely than white Democrats to say a majority non-white country bothers them (18 percent versus 11 percent). But this apparent difference disappears with the indirect measure; when white Democrats are given the opportunity to register this opinion indirectly, those expressing concern over racial changes jumps from 11 percent to 33 percent, while white Republicans expressing concern rises from 18 percent to 30 percent.
White born-again Protestants and white southerners, two overlapping groups, register both the highest indirect measures of anxiety about racial changes in the country and the strongest social-desirability-bias effect. When asked by a telephone interviewer directly about whether an America that is not mostly white bothers them, only 15 percent of white born-again Protestants are willing to agree. But that number climbs a stunning 35 percentage points when the question is posed indirectly. Similarly, the difference between the direct and indirect question among white southerners is 26 percentage points, 16 percent when asked directly but 42 percent when asked indirectly.
The core of Sotomayor’s dissent was that even after significant civil-rights legislation has passed, the Southern Baptist denomination has apologized, and the nation has elected a black president, race still matters. The data suggest we are still living in a liminal time, when outright racism is nearly universally condemned but when white Americans still carry significant unspoken anxiety and negative feelings about the shifting racial balance in the country.
Robert P. Jones [ http://www.theatlantic.com/robert-p-jones/ ] is the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute [ http://publicreligion.org/ ], a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization focusing on religion, values, and public life.
Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/unspoken-racial-tensions/362023/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/unspoken-racial-tensions/362023/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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Staying Focused in the Movement for Racial Justice
12/22/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/opal-tometi/staying-focused-in-the-mo_b_6366618.html [with comments]
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How to Deal With the Police
A workshop is teaching students how to handle confrontations with law enforcement, but some fear the class only reinforces negative stereotypes of cops.
Dec 23 2014
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/12/how-to-deal-with-the-police/384000/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/12/how-to-deal-with-the-police/384000/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist
Danny Moloshok/Associated Press
It's easy for polite American society to condemn Cliven Bundy and banish Donald Sterling while turning away from the elegant, monstrous racism that remains.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 1 2014, 11:30 AM ET
The question Cliven Bundy put to his audience last week—Was the black family better off as property?—is as immoral as it unoriginal. As both Adam Serwer [ http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/conservatives-condemn-cliven-bundy ] and Jamelle Bouie [ http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2014/04/24/cliven_bundy_and_some_conservative_pundits_are_not_so_different.html ] point out, the roster of conservative theorists who imply that black people were better off being whipped, worked, and raped are legion. Their ranks include economists Walter Williams [ http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704881304576094221050061598 ] and Thomas Sowell [ http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2004/08/17/a_painful_anniversary/page/full ], former congressman Allen West [ http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2014/04/02/12-quotes-that-will-make-liberals-heads-explode-from-allen-wests-new-book/ ], sitting Representative Trent Franks [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/oshadavidson/2011/07/08/michele-bachmann-salutes-the-upside-to-slavery/ ], singer Ted Nugent [ http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/08/29/nras-nugent-great-society-responsible-for-more/195662 ], and presidential aspirants Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/11/gop-candidates-caught-in-slavery-controversy/ ].
A fair-minded reader will note that each of these conservatives is careful to not praise slavery and to note his or her disgust at the practice. This is neither distinction nor difference. Cliven Bundy's disquisition begins with a similar hedge [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agXns-W60MI (next below)]:
But style is the hero. Cliven Bundy is old, white, and male. He likes to wave an American flag while spurning the American government and pals around with the militia movement. He does not so much use the word "Negro"—which would be bad enough—but "nigra," in the manner of villain from Mississippi Burning or A Time to Kill. In short, Cliven Bundy looks, and sounds, much like what white people take racism to be.
The problem with Cliven Bundy isn't that he is a racist but that he is an oafish racist. He invokes the crudest stereotypes, like cotton picking. This makes white people feel bad. The elegant racist knows how to injure non-white people while never summoning the specter of white guilt. Elegant racism requires plausible deniability, as when Reagan just happened to stumble into the Neshoba County fair [ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/opinion/13herbert.html ] and mention state's rights. Oafish racism leaves no escape hatch, as when Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond's singularly segregationist candidacy.
Elegant racism is invisible, supple, and enduring. It disguises itself in the national vocabulary, avoids epithets and didacticism. Grace is the singular marker of elegant racism. One should never underestimate the touch needed to, say, injure the voting rights of black people without ever saying their names. Elegant racism lives at the border of white shame. Elegant racism was the poll tax. Elegant racism is voter-ID laws.
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," John Roberts elegantly wrote [ http://www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2006/2006_05_908 ]. Liberals have yet to come up with a credible retort. That is because the theories of John Roberts are prettier than the theories of most liberals. But more, it is because liberals do not understand that America has never discriminated on the basis of race (which does not exist) but on the basis of racism (which most certainly does.)
Ideologies of hatred have never required coherent definitions of the hated. Islamophobes kill Sikhs as easily as they kill Muslims. Stalin needed no consistent definition [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak ] of "Kulaks" to launch a war of Dekulakization [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization ]. "I decide who is a Jew," Karl Lueger said [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Lueger ]. Slaveholders decided who was a nigger and who wasn't. The decision was arbitrary. The effects are not. Ahistorical liberals—like most Americans—still believe that race invented racism, when in fact the reverse is true. The hallmark of elegant racism is the acceptance of mainstream consensus, and exploitation of all its intellectual fault lines.
Here is a lovely illustration of elegant racism:
This graph is from Robert J. Sampson's essential 2011 profile of Chicago, Great American City [ http://www.amazon.com/Great-American-City-Enduring-Neighborhood/dp/0226734560 ]. Sampson's data depicts incarceration rates in the early to mid-'90s in Chicago among black (black dots) and white neighborhoods (white dots.) Increasingly, sociologists like Sampson are showing us how our brute and strained vocabulary fails to articulate the problem of racism. Conservatives and liberals frequently wonder how it could be that unequal outcomes endure for blacks and whites, even after controlling for income or "class." That is because conservatives and liberals underestimate the achievements of white supremacy [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/other-peoples-pathologies/359841/ ] and still believe that comparisons between a "black middle class" and a "white middle class" have actual meaning. In fact, black and white people—of any class—live in wholly different worlds.
A phrase like "mass incarceration" obviates the fact that "mass incarceration" is mostly localized in black neighborhoods. In Chicago during the '90s, there was no overlap between the incarceration rates of black and white neighborhoods. The most incarcerated white neighborhoods in Chicago are still better off than the least incarcerated black neighborhoods. The most incarcerated black neighborhood in Chicago is 40 times worse than the most incarcerated white neighborhood.
Perhaps black people are for reasons of culture or genetics 40 times more criminal than white people. Or perhaps there is something more elegant at work [ http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2009/November/09-crt-1187.html ]:
The Justice Department announced today the largest monetary payment ever obtained by the department in the settlement of a case alleging housing discrimination in the rental of apartments. Los Angeles apartment owner Donald T. Sterling has agreed to pay $2.725 million to settle allegations that he discriminated against African-Americans, Hispanics and families with children at apartment buildings he controls in Los Angeles.
Throughout the 20th century—and perhaps even in the 21st—there was no more practiced advocate of housing segregation than the city of Chicago. Its mayors and aldermen razed neighborhoods and segregated public housing. Its businessmen lobbied for racial zoning. Its realtors block-busted whole neighborhoods, flipping them from black to white and then pocketing the profit. Its white citizens embraced racial covenants—in the '50s, no city had more covenants in place than Chicago.
If you sought to advantage one group of Americans and disadvantage another, you could scarcely choose a more graceful method than housing discrimination. Housing determines access to transportation, green spaces, decent schools, decent food, decent jobs, and decent services. Housing affects your chances of being robbed and shot as well as your chances of being stopped and frisked. And housing discrimination is as quiet as it is deadly. It can be pursued through violence and terrorism, but it doesn't need it. Housing discrimination is hard to detect, hard to prove, and hard to prosecute. Even today most people believe that Chicago is the work of organic sorting, as opposed segregationist social engineering. Housing segregation is the weapon that mortally injures, but does not bruise. The historic fumbling of such a formidable weapon could only ever be accomplished by a graceless halfwit—such as the present owner of the Los Angeles Clippers.
As Bomani Jones noted back in 2006, Donald Sterling has long been a practitioner of racism and the NBA could not have cared less [ http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=jones/060810 ]. Jones is rightfully apoplectic [ http://deadspin.com/in-10-minutes-espns-bomani-jones-lays-waste-to-the-ste-1569195989 ] at the present response. That is because he understands that the NBA, its players and its fans, don't so much object to Donald Sterling's racism—they object to his want of elegance.
Like Cliven Bundy, Donald Sterling confirms our comfortable view of racists. Donald Sterling is a "bad person." He's mean to women. He carouses with prostitutes. He uses the word "nigger." He fits our idea of what an actual racist must look like: snarling, villainous, immoral, ignorant, gauche. The actual racism that Sterling long practiced, that this society has long practiced (and is still practicing) must attract significantly less note. That is because to see racism in all its elegance is to implicate not just its active practitioners, but to implicate ourselves.
How can it be that in a "black league," as Charles Barkley calls the NBA, an on-the-record structural racist like Donald Sterling was allowed to thrive? Everyone now wants to speak to Elgin Baylor [ http://deadspin.com/in-10-minutes-espns-bomani-jones-lays-waste-to-the-ste-1569195989 ]. Where were all these people before? Where was Kevin Johnson [ http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2014/04/27/clippers-stage-silent-protest-to-owner/ ]? Where was the Los Angeles NAACP [ http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/04/29/308054638/the-naacps-less-than-sterling-intentions ]? When Donald Sterling was driving black tenants out of his buildings, where was David Stern?
Far better to implicate Donald Sterling and be done with the whole business. Far better to banish Cliven Bundy and table the uncomfortable reality of our political system. A racism that invites the bipartisan condemnation of Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell must necessarily be minor. A racism that invites the condemnation of Sean Hannity can't be much of a threat. But a racism, condemnable by all civilized people, must make itself manifest now and again so that we may celebrate how far we have come. Meanwhile racism, elegant, lovely, monstrous, carries on [ http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/512/house-rules ].
Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/This-Town-Needs-A-Better-Class-Of-Racist/361443/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/This-Town-Needs-A-Better-Class-Of-Racist/361443/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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The False Choice of Protesting for Justice and Supporting Our Police
12/21/2014 Updated: 12/22/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-raushenbush/liu-ramos-garner-brown_2_b_6362468.html [with comments]
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Petty - I Can't Breathe [ft. Samuel L. Jackson]
Published on Dec 23, 2014 by TeamFrostbiteTV [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC33BTZ7S0DrShXmWSabX8Ew / http://www.youtube.com/user/TeamFrostbiteTV , http://www.youtube.com/user/TeamFrostbiteTV/videos ]
Nashville, TN's Petty (@Petty615) takes Samuel L. Jackson up on his challenge and portrays his views on the societal issues we have been facing the last few months.
Directed by: Petty
Edited by: Devo B. (@DevynBetancourt)
Prod. by: Zuki Mondunkwu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQDwPlNVces [with comments]
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President Obama Holds the 2014 Year-End Press Briefing
Published on Dec 19, 2014 by The White House [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYxRlFDqcWM4y7FfpiAN3KQ / http://www.youtube.com/user/whitehouse , http://www.youtube.com/user/whitehouse/videos ]
On December 19, 2014, President Obama delivered remarks at the 2014 year-end press briefing at the White House.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T54DHPEb2Q8 [with comments], http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/12/19/americas-resurgence-real-president-obama-reflects-2014 , http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2014/12/19/president-obama-holds-2014-year-end-press-briefing
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Weekly Address: America’s Resurgence is Real
Published on Dec 20, 2014 by The White House
In this week’s address, the President reflected on the significant progress made by this country in 2014, and in the nearly six years since he took office.
*
Weekly Address: America’s Resurgence Is Real
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
December 20, 2014
WASHINGTON, DC — In this week’s address, the President reflected on the significant progress made by this country in 2014, and in the nearly six years since he took office. This past year has been the strongest for job growth since the 1990s, contributing to the nearly 11 million jobs added by our businesses over a 57-month streak. America is leading the rest of the world, in containing the spread of Ebola, degrading and ultimately destroying ISIL, and addressing the threat posed by climate change. And earlier this week, the President announced the most significant changes to our policy towards Cuba in over 50 years. America’s resurgence is real, and the President expressed his commitment to working with Congress in the coming year to make sure Americans feel the benefits.
The audio of the address and video of the address will be available online at www.whitehouse.gov at 6:00 a.m. ET, December 20, 2014.
Remarks of President Barack Obama
Weekly Address
The White House
December 20, 2014
Hi, everybody. As 2014 comes to an end, we can enter the New Year with new confidence that America is making significant strides where it counts.
The steps we took nearly six years ago to rescue our economy and rebuild it on a new foundation helped make 2014 the strongest year for job growth since the 1990s. Over the past 57 months, our businesses have created nearly 11 million new jobs. And in a hopeful sign for middle-class families, wages are on the rise again.
Our investments in American manufacturing have helped fuel its best stretch of job growth since the ‘90s. America is now the number one producer of oil and gas, saving drivers about 70 cents a gallon at the pump over last Christmas. The auto industry we rescued is on track for its strongest year since 2005. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, about 10 million Americans have gained health insurance in the past year alone. And since I took office, we have cut our deficits by about two-thirds.
Meanwhile, around the world, America is leading. We’re leading the coalition to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL. We’re leading the global fight to combat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. We’re leading global efforts to address climate change, including last month’s joint announcement with China. We’re turning a new page in our relationship with the Cuban people.
And in less than two weeks, after more than 13 years, our combat mission in Afghanistan will be over, and our war there will come to a responsible end. Today, more of our troops are home for the holidays than at any time in over a decade. Still, many of our men and women in uniform will spend this Christmas in harm’s way. And as Commander-in-Chief, I want our troops to know: your country is united in our support and gratitude for you and your families.
The six years since the financial crisis have demanded hard work and sacrifice on everyone’s part. But as a country, we have every right to be proud of what we’ve got to show for it. More jobs. More insured. A growing economy. Shrinking deficits. Bustling industry. Booming energy.
Pick any metric you want – America’s resurgence is real. And we now have the chance to reverse the decades-long erosion of middle-class jobs and incomes. We just have to invest in the things that we know will secure even faster growth in higher-paying jobs for more Americans. We have to make sure our economy, our justice system, and our government work not only for a few, but for all of us. And I look forward to working together with the new Congress next year on these priorities.
Sure, we’ll disagree on some things. We’ll have to compromise on others. I’ll act on my own when it’s necessary. But I will never stop trying to make life better for people like you.
Because thanks to your efforts, a new foundation is laid. A new future is ready to be written. We have set the stage for a new American moment, and I’m going to spend every minute of my last two years making sure we seize it.
On behalf of the Obama family, I wish all of you a very Merry Christmas.
Thanks, and have a wonderful holiday season.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/12/20/weekly-address-america-s-resurgence-real
*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIQkG3wAHLU [with comments], http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/12/20/weekly-address-america-s-resurgence-real
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Carlo Allegri/Reuters
Talking about "police reform" obscures the task. Today's policies are, at the very least, the product of democratic will.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Dec 22 2014, 10:00 AM ET
The reactions to the murders of two New York police officers this weekend have been mostly uniform in their outrage. There was the predictable gamesmanship exhibited in some quarters, but all agree that the killing of Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos merits particular censure. This is understandable. The killing of police officers is not only the destruction of life but an attack on democracy itself. We do not live in a military dictatorship, and police officers are not the representatives of an autarch, nor the enforcers of law handed down by decree. The police are representatives of a state that derives its powers from the people. Thus the strong reaction we have seen to Saturday's murders is wholly expected and entirely appropriate.
For activists and protesters radicalized by the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, this weekend's killing may seem to pose a great obstacle. In fact, it merely points to the monumental task in front of them. The response to Garner's death, particularly, seemed to offer some hope. But the very fact that this opening originated in the most extreme case—the on-camera choking of a man for a minor offense—points to the shaky ground on which such hope took root. It was only a matter of time before some criminal shot a police officer in New York. If that's all it takes to turn Americans away from police reform, the efforts were likely doomed from the start.
The idea of "police reform" obscures the task. Whatever one thinks of the past half-century of criminal-justice policy, it was not imposed on Americans by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Burge ]—are, at the very least, byproducts of democratic will. Likely they are much more. It is often said that it is difficult to indict and convict police officers who abuse their power. It is comforting to think of these acquittals and non-indictments as contrary to American values. But it is just as likely that they reflect American values. The three most trusted institutions in America [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx ] are the military, small business, and the police.
To challenge the police is to challenge the American people, and the problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that we are majoritarian pigs. When the police are brutalized by people, we are outraged because we are brutalized. By the same turn, when the police brutalize people, we are forgiving because ultimately we are really just forgiving ourselves. Power, decoupled from responsibility, is what we seek. The manifestation of this desire is broad. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani responded to the killing of Michael Brown by labeling it a "significant exception" and wondering [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/the-gospel-of-rudy-giuliani/380498/ ] why weren't talking about "black on black crime." Giuliani was not out on a limb. The charge of insufficient outrage over "black on black crime" has been endorsed, at varying points, by everyone from the NAACP [ http://www.ijreview.com/2014/08/167201-one-tweet-naacp-ferguson-riots-many-african-americans-outraged/ ] to Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-our-selective-outrage/2014/08/14/22a72dba-23e5-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.html ] to Giuliani's archenemy Al Sharpton [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6bnPTvEVh8 (next below)].
Implicit in this notion is that outrage over killings by the police should not be any greater than killings by ordinary criminals. But when it comes to outrage over killings of the police, the standard is different. Ismaaiyl Brinsley began his rampage by shooting his girlfriend—an act of both black-on-black crime and domestic violence. On Saturday, Officers Liu and Ramos were almost certainly joined in death by some tragic number of black people who were shot down by their neighbors in the street. The killings of Officers Liu and Ramos prompt national comment. The killings of black civilians do not. When it is convenient to award qualitative value to murder, we do so. When it isn't, we do not. We are outraged by violence done to police, because it is violence done to all of us as a society. In the same measure, we look away from violence done by the police, because the police are not the true agents of the violence. We are.
We are the ones who designed the criminogenic ghettos. We are the ones who barred black people from leaving those ghettos. We are the ones who treat black men [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CofLE3q3Qh0 (next below)]
without criminal records as though they are white men with criminal records. We are the ones who send black girls [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/us/judge-in-maryland-locks-up-youths-and-rules-their-lives.html ] to juvenile detention homes for fighting in school. We are the masters of the American gulag, a penal system "so vast," writes sociologist Bruce Western [ https://books.google.com/books?id=ZfUWAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=%22as+to+draw+entire+demographic+groups+into+the+web.%22&source=bl&ots=_FqNB8dE5R&sig=tTtB_nB_Zh7rwYOvU9IYIBdWCyk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=zSOYVJfSHcjgggTpjIOwCQ&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22as%20to%20draw%20entire%20demographic%20groups%20into%20the%20web.%22&f=false ], "as to draw entire demographic groups into the web." And we are the ones who send in police to make sure it all goes according to plan.
When defenders of the police say that cops do the work ordinary citizens are afraid of, they are correct. The criminal-justice system has been the most consistent tool for making American will manifest in black communities. The tool for exercising that will is not the proliferation of ice cream socials. I suspect, we would like to know as little about criminal justice system as possible. I suspect we would rather the film of Eric Garner's killing not exist. Then we might comfort ourselves with the kind of vague unknowables that dogged the killing of Michael Brown. ("Did he have his hands up? Was he surrendering? Was he charging?") Garner, choked to death and repeating "I can't breathe," trapped us. But now, through a merciless act of lethal violence, an escape route has been revealed. This overstates things. To the extent that this weekend's murders obscure the legacy of Eric Garner, it will not be due to the failure of protests, nor even chance. The citizen who needs to look away generally finds a reason.
I wonder if there is some price attached to this looking away. When the elected mayor of my city arrived at the hospital, the police officers who presumably serve at the public's leisure turned away in a display that should chill the blood of any interested citizen. The police are not the only embodiment of democratic society. And one does not have to work hard to imagine a future when the agents of our will, the agents whom we created, are in fact our masters. On that day one can expect that the tactics intended for the ghettos will enjoy wider usage.
Related Story
Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/barack-obama-ferguson-and-the-evidence-of-things-unsaid/383212/
Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/blue-lives-matter-nypd-shooting/383977/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/blue-lives-matter-nypd-shooting/383977/?single_page=true ] [with comments] [(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=109301445 and preceding (and any future following)]
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The Case for Police Reform Is Much Bigger Than Michael Brown
There are clearer, more persuasive illustrations of law-enforcement misbehavior and the need to rein it in.
Nov 26 2014
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XFYTtgZAlE ]
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJU3GhyF4e4 ]
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWH578nAasM ]
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[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1UjKqzVDCw ]
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/the-case-for-police-reforms-is-much-bigger-than-michael-brown/383210/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/the-case-for-police-reforms-is-much-bigger-than-michael-brown/383210/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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Former Buffalo cop fights for pension after exposing brutality
Cariol Horne, discussing her lost pension and abuse allegations.
Dec 19, 2014
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/19/1352929/-Former-Buffalo-cop-fights-for-pension-after-exposing-brutality [with comments]
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Coming to Terms With My Father's Racism
Mrs. Norton's third-grade class. The author is in the second row from the top, next to the teacher.
Courtesy of Connie Schultz
How to find the fragile middle in a time of racial tension
Connie Schultz
Dec 23 2014, 7:00 AM ET
My earliest memories of my father’s racism are rooted in the family dinners of my childhood.
Dad sat to my left, always. My mother sat across from me, with my little brother seated to her right. My two younger sisters sat at opposite ends. In the 1960s, our table was metal, and small. There was no escaping whatever was on our father’s mind.
I cannot quote verbatim his tirades, and I am grateful for that small mercy, but I remember his tone with a bone-deep weariness. Raised voice, fist on the table. He was angry with black people for reasons that depended on his day at the plant, a song on the radio, a story he’d read in the afternoon paper. To this day, I hear the n-word and can see the contortions in his face.
Most daughters want to be daddy’s little girl. This aspiration was lost on me at an early age. I loved my father, always, and feared him too often, but by age 6 or so I knew there was something wrong about him. He would rant about black people he’d never met, and I would see the faces of my classmates, my friends. Silently, I’d pick at the fried Spam or pile of goulash on my plate and think about Sandy and Gary and Valerie and Phillip, and sometimes my eyes would sting. It was not the natural order of things to be so young and know your father had no idea what he was talking about.
I live in Cleveland, where a 12-year-old black boy named Tamir Rice was recently shot and killed by a white police officer. The community at large professed outrage, but when I attended his public funeral it was filled with black mourners, and I left wondering if maybe most of us white people think this isn’t our problem anymore. After weeks of reading and moderating public comment threads about the deaths this year of Tamir and two other unarmed black males, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, I can’t ignore this dark and familiar something clawing at my heart.
There are moments when it feels like we’re inching back toward the 1960s, but back into communities that are far more segregated, by race and means. If you are black and poor, you can now spend your entire childhood knowing only other poor, black children. If you are born lucky and grow up surrounded by mirror images of your good fortune, it’s easy to see yourself as a majority stakeholder in a world primed to do your bidding.
Last week, I walked down to the basement of my home to dig up class pictures from my elementary-school days. I haven’t looked at those faces in 20 years, I’ll bet, but I could summon the names of just about every child in them, and the complicated memories that tag along.
There we are, lined up shoulder-to-shoulder on risers in the basement of West Elementary School, hands to our sides, faces wide. In each picture, half of the class is black. Those black faces, as surely as the color of my eyes and the gaps between my two front teeth, are evidence of my roots. At the same time, they telegraph the lifelong struggle of my father, who for so long saw their existence in my life as a failure in his.
I grew up in Ashtabula, a working-class town of 20,000 people an hour east of Cleveland. Mom stayed home with us in the early years. Dad worked for the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company on Lake Erie’s shore. His job made him big and strong and often angry for reasons we didn’t understand. He worked in maintenance. Until I was 10, I thought that meant he was a custodian, when in reality he held one of the most skilled jobs at the plant. We were raised to understand that our father went to work so that he could take care of us. Our curiosity ended there.
We lived in a rental house on U.S. Route 20, on the integrated side of town. The West End, we called it. The house is still there, and has been boarded up for years. Our street was all white, but the short walk to school delivered me to classrooms evenly divided between white and black kids. In second grade, we had eight black kids, seven white. By fourth grade, the numbers jumped to 15 each. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Norton, was black. This was a big deal in my neighborhood. My mother often mentioned that Mrs. Norton had a lot of class, but she said this only to her girlfriends. Never at the dinner table.
The author is in the top right.
Courtesy of Connie Schultz
I grew up surrounded by children who didn’t look like me, and my only problem with that, aside from the constant tension with my father, was that I wanted to be them. The girls were my confidants, my touchstones. We played with each other’s hair and swapped barrettes and ribbons like boys trading baseball cards. I loved their music, from the Motown on their kitchen radios to the gospel songs in their churches, where worshippers praised God like they knew him, instead of sitting ramrod-straight week after week waiting to make his acquaintance.
I loved their mothers, too. Ours was not an “I love you” kind of home, and I melted in the arms of these women who called me “child” and “honey” and always ordered me to sit at their tables for after-school snacks. Surely they noticed that their children were never invited to my home, but I never felt they held that against me.
My father had no idea that I visited my black friends’ churches or stepped foot in their homes. I don’t remember my mother ever saying we were keeping our secrets. The conspiracy was implicit; the necessity understood.
Here begins the long list of excuses I’ve made for my father in my head all of my adult life.
He grew up on a farm in Northeast Ohio, surrounded by other white, rural folk, many of them family. By his lights, the high point of his life was his senior year in high school, when the local newspaper heralded him as one of the best point guards in the state. I have his scrapbook from that year. It’s full of yellowed newsprint and black-and-white glossy photos starring a skinny hotshot with sweaty red hair from Nowhere, Ohio. I have his collection of felt varsity letters, too. Nearly 60 years old, and in pristine condition.
My father had a chance to go to college on a basketball scholarship. I learned this only after his death, when my sisters found the letter from the university’s basketball coach. He never mailed in the appointment card, never used the bus ticket. Instead, Mom became pregnant with me, and Dad got a marriage license and a union card the same year. By the time he was banging his fist on the dinner table in 1963, he was still four years from 30 and the father of four. Everywhere he looked, he saw his missed opportunities blooming in someone else’s life.
When I started junior high school in 1969, my father and I were arguing all the time, sometimes about boys, occasionally about hemlines, but usually about race. He was full of contradictions. He liked a black guy at work, but that’s because he didn’t “act black.” He loved The Supremes until I played them constantly, at which point he set a limit on how many black artists’ records I could buy with my babysitting money. One a month, tops. He smashed my 45 of Aretha’s “Respect” into a pile of pieces when I violated the rule.
The timing of his attempt to rein me in couldn’t have been worse, because everything was changing at school. Within days of my seventh-grade year, the kids who had come from the all-white elementary school on the other side of town took note of my companions at the lunch table and started calling me a n— lover. The kids from the mostly black elementary school badgered my friends for hanging out with the white girl. The same mothers who used to pull me to their bosoms now acted like they didn’t see me in the hallways and at Friday-night games, and nodded terse hellos to my parents.
My father saw a glimmer of hope in my feelings of abandonment. So much for friendship. Blood’s thicker than water. Guess you’re learning that God made us different for a reason.
Courtesy of Connie Schultz
I had spent most of my childhood identifying with children who did not look like me, and in a fit of pubescent angst, decided it was time to change that. A week before school pictures, I talked a neighbor lady into cutting my long hair and giving me a white girl’s Afro with a Toni perm.
My mother collapsed on the sofa and fanned her face with her apron. My father refused to be seen in public with me. When he found out I had a crush on a black boy, he grounded me for weeks. I bought tubes of QT [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03_7wzQjT7c (next below)]
and worked on my tan.
My father and I were at war.
By the time I was a senior in high school, in the fall of ’74, my dad had finally managed to save enough money to buy a house on the white side of town. For the first time, I had my own room, and he took me to Sears to buy a bedroom set. A peace offering, but détente was temporary. I left for college and joined the school newspaper. I was back at it, this time with an audience. After a disastrous sophomore summer home, he ordered me to live elsewhere, and I happily complied.
If the story ended there, at the gulf of our divisions, I would feel no hope now in these troubled times. I would look at those class pictures from my childhood and see a failed experiment in good intentions. I’d have to tell myself that some white people, white people like my father, are just unreachable.
For years, I wondered: How good is a daughter’s liberation if her father only sees it as his failure? Where’s the victory in that? Maybe it’s enough for those who don’t care what their father thinks, but I always did. I didn’t want his approval. I wanted his agreement that he’d been wrong all along about black people. More to the point, I wanted him to admit he’d been wrong about me.
I wish I could say I stayed true to my roots in a rocket-straight trajectory from that first-grade picture to today. I raised my two children in diverse school systems, deliberately so, but after they graduated from high school I just as deliberately spent eight years in an all-white suburb on Cleveland’s west side. I didn’t move there because everyone looked like me—I had married then-U.S. Representative Sherrod Brown [ http://www.amazon.com/His-Lovely-Wife-Memoir-Beside-ebook/dp/B000SCHBCA ], and we had to live in his congressional district—but I should have known that a lifetime of something else would render me a hypocrite under the circumstances. If I’ve learned anything about myself in the last few years, it’s that somewhere inside me resides a five-year-old capable of delivering withering criticism. A child remembers, always.
Last year we moved into the city of Cleveland, where I’ve worked as a journalist for more than 30 years. I can’t run to the drugstore or fetch a loaf of bread without crossing paths with faces that remind me of what I came from—of who I came from, I should say. Some suburban acquaintances have questioned our move with various versions of the same indictment: What were you thinking? Always, I am able to answer: Home. I was thinking of home.
My father died in 2006. He lived seven years longer than my mother. She never got in the middle of our fights about race, but it was her short illness and death, at 62, that helped us find our way to a fragile middle.
The turning point arrived without warning in a hospital waiting room.
It was late August 1999. My mom was weeks from dying. Dad and I were a tag team of concern. We spent our days sitting in offices and waiting rooms, sometimes with Mom, sometimes without her. Over and over, my father would whisper to me, “This should be happening to me. I should be the one who is dying.”
On this particular morning, Dad and I sat wedged together in a packed room, our backs against a wall. We were waiting for Mom, again.
To get to this place, this moment, we had walked behind the black orderly who pushed Mom’s wheelchair down the hall. We had thanked the black receptionist who directed us where to sit. We had just nodded hello to the black resident who always made my mother smile.
My father leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes.
“God,” he said, “they’re everywhere now.”
I clenched the armrests and tried to control my breathing as I turned to look at him. Tears pooled at the corners of his eyes. For the first time ever, he reached for my hand.
We started there.
Connie Schultz [ http://www.theatlantic.com/connie-schultz/ ] is a nationally syndicated columnist and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/coming-to-terms-with-my-fathers-racism/383982/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/coming-to-terms-with-my-fathers-racism/383982/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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#BlackLivesMatter Condemns NYPD Cop Killings: 'Not Our Vision Of Justice'
Mourners gather before the bodies of two fallen NYPD police officers are transported from Woodhull Medical Center, Saturday, Dec. 20, 2014, in New York. An armed man walked up to two New York Police Department officers sitting inside a patrol car and opened fire Saturday afternoon, killing both officers before running into a nearby subway station and committing suicide, police said.
12/21/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/21/nypd-cop-killings-blacklivesmatter_n_6362400.html [with comments]
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The Importance of Treating NYPD Officers as Individuals
On the outrageous murder of two cops and the faction trying to exploit their deaths for political leverage
Dec 22 2014
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/the-importance-of-treating-nypd-officers-as-individuals/383976/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/the-importance-of-treating-nypd-officers-as-individuals/383976/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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Black-on-Black Racism: The Hazards of Implicit Bias
Matt Neale/Flickr
How the politics of respectability twists society
Theodore R. Johnson
Dec 26 2014, 8:00 AM ET
In his year-end press conference [second-last item below], President Obama was asked about the state of black America [ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/what-if-black-america-were-a-country/380953/ ]. He responded by saying blacks are “better off than they were,” but juxtaposed that with the lingering issues evinced in the recent tragic police encounters with unarmed black men. Interestingly, he took particular care in calling out the “hidden biases that we all carry around,” a sentiment he echoed in another recent interview [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/obama-as-a-black-man-hes-been-mistaken-for-valet/2014/12/17/d760bdbe-85e9-11e4-abcf-5a3d7b3b20b8_story.html ].
My own hidden biases punched me in the gut last week, as I stared in disbelief at a test result on my computer screen. Before I started the racial-bias assessment, a disclaimer explicitly warned me that those who are not prepared to receive uncomfortable news should not proceed. I was too intrigued to turn back, but it turns out I was unprepared for the outcome.
According to the Implicit Association Test [ https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/education.html , https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/iatdetails.html , https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/faqs.html , https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html (the author having taken what is currently the last IAT listed/accessible there, the "Race IAT")], I have a "strong automatic preference for European Americans compared to African Americans." That's a sterile way of saying that I'm biased against black people. For most people, such a designation would probably be unsettling. After all, the United States is a nation that ostensibly aspires not to judge others "by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." But for me, it caused a mini-existential crisis.
Why? Because I'm black.
As I read the results, I thought about what it means to be black and biased against other black people. Does it mean harboring a subconscious contempt for my race? Or considering myself to be part of the blessed segment of an otherwise unfortunate lot? Is it even possible for a black person to be racist against black people? In a moment of self-dramatization, I felt as if Kanye had just announced on national television that I didn’t care about black people.
Then, the tropes saturated my thoughts. I wondered if my bias was the undergirding of the sort of intra-race prejudice colloquially expressed in phrases like “Uncle Tom,” “crab in a barrel,” and “acting white.” Since my results were the same as the 88 percent of white Americans who show a bias [ http://healthland.time.com/2010/10/11/seeking-the-authentic-self-how-do-you-know-if-youre-really-racist-or-sexist/ ] in favor of white people, it seems to me that this demonstrated “strong preference” is the very definition of acting white—a well-worn pejorative that pained me as an awkward adolescent and suddenly felt fresh again.
The Project Implicit [ https://www.projectimplicit.net/index.html ] test [again, the author is referring specifically to the "Race IAT" listed at/accessible via https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html ] has been around for a few years, but a recent Mother Jones article titled, “The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/science-of-racism-prejudice ]” gave it wider currency and helped explain the role of implicit bias in the recent events in Ferguson, Cleveland, and Staten Island, where the aggressive policing of black people turned deadly. The IAT measures the ability to quickly and correctly sort selected words as positive and negative and to distinguish faces as belonging to a white or black person. Through a series of paired word and face sequences, the test detects in milliseconds the time it takes the respondent to associate black faces with positive and negative words relative to the time it takes to match white faces. When a respondent pairs black faces and negative words more quickly than other pairings, it reveals implicit bias.
As difficult as it was to learn about my black-on-black bias, such results are fairly common. This is sadly comforting. The data reveal [ https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/background/faqs.html#faq19 ] that black respondents’ implicit biases are split just about evenly between pro-white and pro-black. Other research has also shown [ http://www.cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Nosek_HarvestingImplicit.pdf ] that black participants tend to have a strong pro-black explicit bias. A conflict emerges: When blacks are asked about their predilections, they express a solid preference for their group over whites, but, in general, performance on the IAT suggests they subconsciously hold a slight preference for whites over blacks.
This dynamic is obviously a direct result of racism. Too often, racism is seen as a social phenomenon that happens to black people. But it happens through black people as well. That is, the negative associations thrust upon black people and black culture can color how we black people view each other. Blacks and whites receive the same narratives and images that perpetuate stereotypes of black criminality and flippancy while synonymizing white culture with American values. It is to be expected that there will be an observable impact on black intragroup perceptions.
The construct of racism is efficiently designed to politically and socially subjugate a segment of the population. For the oppressed, a natural response is to advocate for conformity with the dominant culture as an appeal for equal treatment. If black people were only more respectable, one line of argument runs, they would be less subject to the ills of racism.
The contrast between black respondents’ explicit and implicit biases is a fingerprint of the politics of respectability, a term coined by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in her book In Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 [ http://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Discontent-Movement-Baptist-1880-1920/dp/0674769783 ]. In her conception, the politics of respectability involves the “reform of individual behavior as a goal in itself and as a strategy for reform.” Higginbotham argued that black Baptist women “rejected white America’s depiction of black women as immoral, childlike, and unworthy of respect of protection” by teaching blacks to mind their manners, dress and speak appropriately, and remain free from sexual and other vices. Thus, the politics of respectability say that if black people behaved more like the proffered white ideal, the result would be equal treatment and the demise of racial discrimination. This tactic was a form of political protest based on an appeal to white humanity, but it has had troublesome side effects.
This thread has persisted in black scholarship and society for decades. From W.E.B. DuBois’ Talented Tenth [ http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-talented-tenth/ ] in 1903 to Bill Cosby’s infamous [ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/05/-this-is-how-we-lost-to-the-white-man/306774/ ] Pound-Cake Speech a hundred years later, the politics of respectability has often taken on the quality of black theology. Members of the black community are told that wearing the mask, playing the game, and being twice as good are the keys to making it in America. It’s as if to say, “If we only knew how to act, racism would just fall away.” This is, of course, absurd. Good behavior and attire deemed proper do not abrogate racism. Discrimination does not come with a dress code.
The politics of respectability is really a coping mechanism. It affirms the inferiority and unattractiveness of black culture. And it contributes to the formation of implicit biases that lead black people to prefer white people over their own.
But it’s not the only option. Unable to live with my “strong automatic preference,” I took the test a few more times. Through repeated attempts, I trained myself to react evenly to the black, white, positive, and negative pairings. In a sense, through acknowledgement of the bias and a concerted effort to modify my behavior, I suppressed the implicit bias. By my fourth and final attempt, I exhibited no preference at all. If each of us is willing to recognize our implicit biases and police our actions accordingly, there may be hope for the racial aspect of the American experiment after all.
Theodore R. Johnson [ http://www.theatlantic.com/theodore-r-johnson/ ] is a writer and naval officer. He has served as a military professor at the Naval War College and as a 2011 – 2012 White House Fellow.
Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/black-on-black-racism-the-hazards-of-implicit-bias/384028/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/black-on-black-racism-the-hazards-of-implicit-bias/384028/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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Wow. Eric Garner's youngest daughter, Erica, just came by memorial for NYPD cops. Told me she wanted to show solidarity for the families.
11:08 AM - 22 Dec 2014
https://twitter.com/Liz_Kreutz/status/547106301080522752 [with comments]
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A Message From a Protestor and Former Cop: We Are Not Anti-Cop. We Are Pro-Life.
12/22/2014 Updated: 12/23/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-karyn-carlo-phd/a-message-from-a-protesto_b_6369986.html [with comments]
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Hidden Racial Anxiety in an Age of Waning [. . .] Racism
Molly Riley/Reuters
Even as they quickly condemn the likes of Donald Sterling, surveys reveal whites have serious misgivings about a more diverse nation.
Robert P. Jones
May 12 2014, 8:00 AM ET
Typically, April showers bring May flowers. This year, however, April also delivered a torrent of racially charged issues to the national stage. In Michigan, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld [ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/04/schuette/361063/ ] the ban on university-admissions programs that use race as a criterion in college admissions. Clippers owner Donald Sterling ignited a firestorm [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/This-Town-Needs-A-Better-Class-Of-Racist/361443/ (third item below)] when a recording surfaced in which he asked his mixed-race girlfriend not to post photos of herself with black people on Instagram or bring black people to NBA games. Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy garnered support from Senator Rand Paul and other prominent conservatives in the wake of his standoff with the federal government over cattle grazing rights. But most supporters hurried to distance themselves from Bundy when he offered these stunning remarks [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/cliven-bundy-wants-to-tell-you-all-about-the-negro/361152/ ] at a news conference:
I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro …. They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?
The nearly unanimous denunciations of both Sterling and Bundy makes clear that as nation, we have moved beyond the point where blatantly racist statements are publicly acceptable, easily explained away, and carry no real consequences.
When did this happen? While cultural shifts are difficult to pin down, there is good evidence that the country reached a tipping point in attitudes about racism sometime in the mid-1990s. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and an anchor of southern culture, finally came around to offering a sober apology [ http://articles.philly.com/1995-06-21/news/25690255_1_northern-baptists-slavery-southern-baptists ] for its former defense of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and racism at its 1995 annual meeting in Atlanta.
Google’s Ngram viewer allows us to assess the relative usage frequency of the words “prejudice” and “racism” in American English books over time, revealing a confirming pattern. The frequency of the more generic word “prejudice” remains relatively stable from 1900 through 1970, when it begins to decline. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the more normative word “racism” did not appear until 1902 [ http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/01/05/260006815/the-ugly-fascinating-history-of-the-word-racism ], and its usage only begins to pick up in the mid-1960s just as major federal civil-rights legislation is passing. The term “racism” rises through the early 1970s, declines during the Reagan-era 1980s, but then rises sharply again in the 1990s. Most notably, the term “racism,” which relies both on the acknowledgment of racial bias and on a shared normative negative judgment, outpaces the term “prejudice” for the first time in the early 1990s and significantly exceeds it by the mid-1990s.
[dinky little interactive chart that won't embed here, illustrating the point just made, embedded]
Well before the election of the first black president in 2008, the condemnation of direct and open expressions of racism had become a social norm. While the fading acceptability of openly racist attitudes is to be celebrated, it clearly does not mean that race no longer matters or that racial tensions and anxieties have disappeared. In her scathing dissent [ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/572/12-682/case.pdf ] in the Michigan case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor chastised her colleagues for downplaying the continuing significance of race:
Race matters…. This refusal to accept the stark reality that race matters is regrettable. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.
For civil-rights activists, the challenge is that the open racism of the past may transmute into what Ta-Nehisi Coates describes [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/This-Town-Needs-A-Better-Class-Of-Racist/361443/ (again, third item below)] as an “elegant racism” that is less visible and that “disguises itself in the national vocabulary, avoids epithets and didacticism,” For researchers, journalists, and policymakers, the new challenge is that this positive social norm may make the public less willing to speak openly and candidly about race, a problem social scientists call “social-desirability bias.”
Recent research reveals that social-desirability bias remains active in the measurement of white anxieties about the changing racial composition of the country. In early 2013, the Public Religion Research Institute team set up a controlled survey experiment [ http://publicreligion.org/research/2013/03/march-2013-religion-politics-tracking-survey/ ] designed to assess anxieties concerning the changing racial makeup of the country. First, we asked respondents to tell telephone interviewers whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “The idea of an America where most people are not white bothers me.” Among whites, 13 percent admitted to an interviewer that the idea of a majority-minority America bothers them. There was only modest variation among white subgroups, ranging from 10 percent of younger whites young than 50 years of age at the low end to 18 percent of white Republicans at the high end who said an America that is not mostly white concerns them.
Next, we employed a technique called a list experiment, which is designed to allow respondents to indirectly express their views on sensitive subjects. We divided the survey respondents into two demographically identical groups and asked each group to tell us how many, but not which specific items from a list bothered them. One group was designated as a control group and received three control statements, while the other group was designated as a treatment group and received the same three control statements plus a fourth statement that read, “An America that is not mostly white.” Because the control and treatment groups were demographically identical, any variation in the average number of statements chosen between the groups is solely attributable to respondents in the treatment group picking the treatment statement. For any subgroup (but not for an individual), then, one can statistically estimate the proportion of respondents choosing the treatment statement by subtracting the mean number of statements chosen by the treatment group from the mean number of statements chosen by the control group. That number is presented in the chart below as the “indirect response.”
The indirect responses revealed significant social-desirability bias at work across all white subgroups and produced a much more dramatic spread in opinions among white respondents. Among white Americans overall, the indirect measure was nearly 20 percentage points higher than the direct measure (31 percent versus 13 percent). White non-born-again Christians and white non-southerners register the lowest indirect measures of concern, but even with these groups there is a double-digit social-desirability-bias effect at play. For example, while only 13 percent of whites outside the South say a majority-minority country bothers them, fully one-quarter register this opinion when the indirect measure is used.
Notably, the racial anxiety differences between white Republicans and white Democrats are significant on the direct question, with white Republicans more likely than white Democrats to say a majority non-white country bothers them (18 percent versus 11 percent). But this apparent difference disappears with the indirect measure; when white Democrats are given the opportunity to register this opinion indirectly, those expressing concern over racial changes jumps from 11 percent to 33 percent, while white Republicans expressing concern rises from 18 percent to 30 percent.
White born-again Protestants and white southerners, two overlapping groups, register both the highest indirect measures of anxiety about racial changes in the country and the strongest social-desirability-bias effect. When asked by a telephone interviewer directly about whether an America that is not mostly white bothers them, only 15 percent of white born-again Protestants are willing to agree. But that number climbs a stunning 35 percentage points when the question is posed indirectly. Similarly, the difference between the direct and indirect question among white southerners is 26 percentage points, 16 percent when asked directly but 42 percent when asked indirectly.
The core of Sotomayor’s dissent was that even after significant civil-rights legislation has passed, the Southern Baptist denomination has apologized, and the nation has elected a black president, race still matters. The data suggest we are still living in a liminal time, when outright racism is nearly universally condemned but when white Americans still carry significant unspoken anxiety and negative feelings about the shifting racial balance in the country.
Robert P. Jones [ http://www.theatlantic.com/robert-p-jones/ ] is the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute [ http://publicreligion.org/ ], a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization focusing on religion, values, and public life.
Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/unspoken-racial-tensions/362023/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/unspoken-racial-tensions/362023/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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Staying Focused in the Movement for Racial Justice
12/22/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/opal-tometi/staying-focused-in-the-mo_b_6366618.html [with comments]
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How to Deal With the Police
A workshop is teaching students how to handle confrontations with law enforcement, but some fear the class only reinforces negative stereotypes of cops.
Dec 23 2014
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/12/how-to-deal-with-the-police/384000/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/12/how-to-deal-with-the-police/384000/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist
Danny Moloshok/Associated Press
It's easy for polite American society to condemn Cliven Bundy and banish Donald Sterling while turning away from the elegant, monstrous racism that remains.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 1 2014, 11:30 AM ET
The question Cliven Bundy put to his audience last week—Was the black family better off as property?—is as immoral as it unoriginal. As both Adam Serwer [ http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/conservatives-condemn-cliven-bundy ] and Jamelle Bouie [ http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2014/04/24/cliven_bundy_and_some_conservative_pundits_are_not_so_different.html ] point out, the roster of conservative theorists who imply that black people were better off being whipped, worked, and raped are legion. Their ranks include economists Walter Williams [ http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704881304576094221050061598 ] and Thomas Sowell [ http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2004/08/17/a_painful_anniversary/page/full ], former congressman Allen West [ http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2014/04/02/12-quotes-that-will-make-liberals-heads-explode-from-allen-wests-new-book/ ], sitting Representative Trent Franks [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/oshadavidson/2011/07/08/michele-bachmann-salutes-the-upside-to-slavery/ ], singer Ted Nugent [ http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/08/29/nras-nugent-great-society-responsible-for-more/195662 ], and presidential aspirants Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/11/gop-candidates-caught-in-slavery-controversy/ ].
A fair-minded reader will note that each of these conservatives is careful to not praise slavery and to note his or her disgust at the practice. This is neither distinction nor difference. Cliven Bundy's disquisition begins with a similar hedge [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agXns-W60MI (next below)]:
"We've progressed quite a bit from that day until now and we sure don't want to go back." With so little substantive difference between Bundy and other conservatives, it becomes tough to understand last week's backpedaling in any intellectually coherent way.
But style is the hero. Cliven Bundy is old, white, and male. He likes to wave an American flag while spurning the American government and pals around with the militia movement. He does not so much use the word "Negro"—which would be bad enough—but "nigra," in the manner of villain from Mississippi Burning or A Time to Kill. In short, Cliven Bundy looks, and sounds, much like what white people take racism to be.
The problem with Cliven Bundy isn't that he is a racist but that he is an oafish racist. He invokes the crudest stereotypes, like cotton picking. This makes white people feel bad. The elegant racist knows how to injure non-white people while never summoning the specter of white guilt. Elegant racism requires plausible deniability, as when Reagan just happened to stumble into the Neshoba County fair [ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/opinion/13herbert.html ] and mention state's rights. Oafish racism leaves no escape hatch, as when Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond's singularly segregationist candidacy.
Elegant racism is invisible, supple, and enduring. It disguises itself in the national vocabulary, avoids epithets and didacticism. Grace is the singular marker of elegant racism. One should never underestimate the touch needed to, say, injure the voting rights of black people without ever saying their names. Elegant racism lives at the border of white shame. Elegant racism was the poll tax. Elegant racism is voter-ID laws.
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," John Roberts elegantly wrote [ http://www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2006/2006_05_908 ]. Liberals have yet to come up with a credible retort. That is because the theories of John Roberts are prettier than the theories of most liberals. But more, it is because liberals do not understand that America has never discriminated on the basis of race (which does not exist) but on the basis of racism (which most certainly does.)
Ideologies of hatred have never required coherent definitions of the hated. Islamophobes kill Sikhs as easily as they kill Muslims. Stalin needed no consistent definition [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak ] of "Kulaks" to launch a war of Dekulakization [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization ]. "I decide who is a Jew," Karl Lueger said [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Lueger ]. Slaveholders decided who was a nigger and who wasn't. The decision was arbitrary. The effects are not. Ahistorical liberals—like most Americans—still believe that race invented racism, when in fact the reverse is true. The hallmark of elegant racism is the acceptance of mainstream consensus, and exploitation of all its intellectual fault lines.
Here is a lovely illustration of elegant racism:
This graph is from Robert J. Sampson's essential 2011 profile of Chicago, Great American City [ http://www.amazon.com/Great-American-City-Enduring-Neighborhood/dp/0226734560 ]. Sampson's data depicts incarceration rates in the early to mid-'90s in Chicago among black (black dots) and white neighborhoods (white dots.) Increasingly, sociologists like Sampson are showing us how our brute and strained vocabulary fails to articulate the problem of racism. Conservatives and liberals frequently wonder how it could be that unequal outcomes endure for blacks and whites, even after controlling for income or "class." That is because conservatives and liberals underestimate the achievements of white supremacy [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/other-peoples-pathologies/359841/ ] and still believe that comparisons between a "black middle class" and a "white middle class" have actual meaning. In fact, black and white people—of any class—live in wholly different worlds.
A phrase like "mass incarceration" obviates the fact that "mass incarceration" is mostly localized in black neighborhoods. In Chicago during the '90s, there was no overlap between the incarceration rates of black and white neighborhoods. The most incarcerated white neighborhoods in Chicago are still better off than the least incarcerated black neighborhoods. The most incarcerated black neighborhood in Chicago is 40 times worse than the most incarcerated white neighborhood.
Perhaps black people are for reasons of culture or genetics 40 times more criminal than white people. Or perhaps there is something more elegant at work [ http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2009/November/09-crt-1187.html ]:
The Justice Department announced today the largest monetary payment ever obtained by the department in the settlement of a case alleging housing discrimination in the rental of apartments. Los Angeles apartment owner Donald T. Sterling has agreed to pay $2.725 million to settle allegations that he discriminated against African-Americans, Hispanics and families with children at apartment buildings he controls in Los Angeles.
Throughout the 20th century—and perhaps even in the 21st—there was no more practiced advocate of housing segregation than the city of Chicago. Its mayors and aldermen razed neighborhoods and segregated public housing. Its businessmen lobbied for racial zoning. Its realtors block-busted whole neighborhoods, flipping them from black to white and then pocketing the profit. Its white citizens embraced racial covenants—in the '50s, no city had more covenants in place than Chicago.
If you sought to advantage one group of Americans and disadvantage another, you could scarcely choose a more graceful method than housing discrimination. Housing determines access to transportation, green spaces, decent schools, decent food, decent jobs, and decent services. Housing affects your chances of being robbed and shot as well as your chances of being stopped and frisked. And housing discrimination is as quiet as it is deadly. It can be pursued through violence and terrorism, but it doesn't need it. Housing discrimination is hard to detect, hard to prove, and hard to prosecute. Even today most people believe that Chicago is the work of organic sorting, as opposed segregationist social engineering. Housing segregation is the weapon that mortally injures, but does not bruise. The historic fumbling of such a formidable weapon could only ever be accomplished by a graceless halfwit—such as the present owner of the Los Angeles Clippers.
As Bomani Jones noted back in 2006, Donald Sterling has long been a practitioner of racism and the NBA could not have cared less [ http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=jones/060810 ]. Jones is rightfully apoplectic [ http://deadspin.com/in-10-minutes-espns-bomani-jones-lays-waste-to-the-ste-1569195989 ] at the present response. That is because he understands that the NBA, its players and its fans, don't so much object to Donald Sterling's racism—they object to his want of elegance.
Like Cliven Bundy, Donald Sterling confirms our comfortable view of racists. Donald Sterling is a "bad person." He's mean to women. He carouses with prostitutes. He uses the word "nigger." He fits our idea of what an actual racist must look like: snarling, villainous, immoral, ignorant, gauche. The actual racism that Sterling long practiced, that this society has long practiced (and is still practicing) must attract significantly less note. That is because to see racism in all its elegance is to implicate not just its active practitioners, but to implicate ourselves.
How can it be that in a "black league," as Charles Barkley calls the NBA, an on-the-record structural racist like Donald Sterling was allowed to thrive? Everyone now wants to speak to Elgin Baylor [ http://deadspin.com/in-10-minutes-espns-bomani-jones-lays-waste-to-the-ste-1569195989 ]. Where were all these people before? Where was Kevin Johnson [ http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2014/04/27/clippers-stage-silent-protest-to-owner/ ]? Where was the Los Angeles NAACP [ http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/04/29/308054638/the-naacps-less-than-sterling-intentions ]? When Donald Sterling was driving black tenants out of his buildings, where was David Stern?
Far better to implicate Donald Sterling and be done with the whole business. Far better to banish Cliven Bundy and table the uncomfortable reality of our political system. A racism that invites the bipartisan condemnation of Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell must necessarily be minor. A racism that invites the condemnation of Sean Hannity can't be much of a threat. But a racism, condemnable by all civilized people, must make itself manifest now and again so that we may celebrate how far we have come. Meanwhile racism, elegant, lovely, monstrous, carries on [ http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/512/house-rules ].
Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/This-Town-Needs-A-Better-Class-Of-Racist/361443/ [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/This-Town-Needs-A-Better-Class-Of-Racist/361443/?single_page=true ] [with comments]
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The False Choice of Protesting for Justice and Supporting Our Police
12/21/2014 Updated: 12/22/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-raushenbush/liu-ramos-garner-brown_2_b_6362468.html [with comments]
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Petty - I Can't Breathe [ft. Samuel L. Jackson]
Published on Dec 23, 2014 by TeamFrostbiteTV [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC33BTZ7S0DrShXmWSabX8Ew / http://www.youtube.com/user/TeamFrostbiteTV , http://www.youtube.com/user/TeamFrostbiteTV/videos ]
Nashville, TN's Petty (@Petty615) takes Samuel L. Jackson up on his challenge and portrays his views on the societal issues we have been facing the last few months.
Directed by: Petty
Edited by: Devo B. (@DevynBetancourt)
Prod. by: Zuki Mondunkwu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQDwPlNVces [with comments]
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President Obama Holds the 2014 Year-End Press Briefing
Published on Dec 19, 2014 by The White House [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYxRlFDqcWM4y7FfpiAN3KQ / http://www.youtube.com/user/whitehouse , http://www.youtube.com/user/whitehouse/videos ]
On December 19, 2014, President Obama delivered remarks at the 2014 year-end press briefing at the White House.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T54DHPEb2Q8 [with comments], http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/12/19/americas-resurgence-real-president-obama-reflects-2014 , http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2014/12/19/president-obama-holds-2014-year-end-press-briefing
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Weekly Address: America’s Resurgence is Real
Published on Dec 20, 2014 by The White House
In this week’s address, the President reflected on the significant progress made by this country in 2014, and in the nearly six years since he took office.
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Weekly Address: America’s Resurgence Is Real
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
December 20, 2014
WASHINGTON, DC — In this week’s address, the President reflected on the significant progress made by this country in 2014, and in the nearly six years since he took office. This past year has been the strongest for job growth since the 1990s, contributing to the nearly 11 million jobs added by our businesses over a 57-month streak. America is leading the rest of the world, in containing the spread of Ebola, degrading and ultimately destroying ISIL, and addressing the threat posed by climate change. And earlier this week, the President announced the most significant changes to our policy towards Cuba in over 50 years. America’s resurgence is real, and the President expressed his commitment to working with Congress in the coming year to make sure Americans feel the benefits.
The audio of the address and video of the address will be available online at www.whitehouse.gov at 6:00 a.m. ET, December 20, 2014.
Remarks of President Barack Obama
Weekly Address
The White House
December 20, 2014
Hi, everybody. As 2014 comes to an end, we can enter the New Year with new confidence that America is making significant strides where it counts.
The steps we took nearly six years ago to rescue our economy and rebuild it on a new foundation helped make 2014 the strongest year for job growth since the 1990s. Over the past 57 months, our businesses have created nearly 11 million new jobs. And in a hopeful sign for middle-class families, wages are on the rise again.
Our investments in American manufacturing have helped fuel its best stretch of job growth since the ‘90s. America is now the number one producer of oil and gas, saving drivers about 70 cents a gallon at the pump over last Christmas. The auto industry we rescued is on track for its strongest year since 2005. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, about 10 million Americans have gained health insurance in the past year alone. And since I took office, we have cut our deficits by about two-thirds.
Meanwhile, around the world, America is leading. We’re leading the coalition to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL. We’re leading the global fight to combat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. We’re leading global efforts to address climate change, including last month’s joint announcement with China. We’re turning a new page in our relationship with the Cuban people.
And in less than two weeks, after more than 13 years, our combat mission in Afghanistan will be over, and our war there will come to a responsible end. Today, more of our troops are home for the holidays than at any time in over a decade. Still, many of our men and women in uniform will spend this Christmas in harm’s way. And as Commander-in-Chief, I want our troops to know: your country is united in our support and gratitude for you and your families.
The six years since the financial crisis have demanded hard work and sacrifice on everyone’s part. But as a country, we have every right to be proud of what we’ve got to show for it. More jobs. More insured. A growing economy. Shrinking deficits. Bustling industry. Booming energy.
Pick any metric you want – America’s resurgence is real. And we now have the chance to reverse the decades-long erosion of middle-class jobs and incomes. We just have to invest in the things that we know will secure even faster growth in higher-paying jobs for more Americans. We have to make sure our economy, our justice system, and our government work not only for a few, but for all of us. And I look forward to working together with the new Congress next year on these priorities.
Sure, we’ll disagree on some things. We’ll have to compromise on others. I’ll act on my own when it’s necessary. But I will never stop trying to make life better for people like you.
Because thanks to your efforts, a new foundation is laid. A new future is ready to be written. We have set the stage for a new American moment, and I’m going to spend every minute of my last two years making sure we seize it.
On behalf of the Obama family, I wish all of you a very Merry Christmas.
Thanks, and have a wonderful holiday season.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/12/20/weekly-address-america-s-resurgence-real
*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIQkG3wAHLU [with comments], http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/12/20/weekly-address-america-s-resurgence-real
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in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (other) following, see also (linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=100630976 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=100654247 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=101374546 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=103100000 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=109392585 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=109040184 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=109059061 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=109059137 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=109059201 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=109078207 and following
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=109089642 and preceding and following
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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