Posts tagged: ows
Not sure how comprehensive it is, but there’s a fuller list of events/meetings and descriptions at the link, so check that out, and brief summary below:
- “Wildcat March”: protestors distinct from the labor dominated march would march without a permit, potentially disrupting pedestrian and vehicular traffic beginning at 1:00pm at Sara D. Roosevelt Park (2nd Avenue and E. Houston Street). Organizers of this action have advocated the use of so-called “Black-Bloc” tactics to confront the police, sometimes violently.
- “Bike Bloc,”: relatively small groups of cyclists would be instructed to try to tie up automotive traffic. (Leaving Union Square at 9:00am)
- Attempts to block Manhattan-bound automotive traffic at bridges and tunnels, as well as protestors attempting to block ferry passengers;
- “NYC Hoodie March Against Police Violence”: occur at the same time and place as the “Wildcat March” (1pm, Sara D Roosevelt Park, 2nd Ave and Houston)
- “High School Walk Out”: high school students will leave class at noon and congregate at Fort Greene park in Brooklyn for a May Day BBQ;
- Picket lines staged in front of various businesses across the five boroughs.
SO, A SERIOUS HEADS UP: The anti-police brutality “NYC Hoodie March Against Police Violence” is scheduled to take place at the same time and in the same location as the “Wildcat March”, a march not supported by unions and with possible black-bloc activity, thus increasing the possibility of violent interaction with the police.
Please be safe and aware out there tomorrow. Reblog and share.
Guys, I don’t like to self-advertise or whatever but please, please reblog and share because the more I look the less thoughtful the Hoodie march appears to be. The Facebook page simply says it will happen “in tandem” with the Wildcat march, and the only comment on the page bringing up that it really is an issue that an anti-police brutality (and thus heavily POC-oriented) march is taking place at the same time as a black bloc march goes nowhere. I’m now genuinely and seriously worried for people’s safety (it’s hard to tell what the spirit of organizing the Hoodie march was in origin, but the lack of heavily advertised warnings regarding the nature of the simultaneous Wildcat Strike is enough to make me nervous). Please march safe and aware tomorrow: the NYC Hoodie March for Justice is taking place at the same time and place as the black bloc-oriented, non-union affiliated Wildcat Strike.
Be careful, guys. While the NYPD’s assertion that black blocs tend to attack police is false, police are more likely to attack black blocs because they know they’ll fight back and it’ll undermine the protest. Keep that in mind if you join the Hoodie March. The police will not likely be able to tell the difference between the two, and you may get caught in the crossfire. And if the anarchists are brawling with cops, the cops are more likely to get hella violent on you. Proceed with caution.
ARTICLE:
Are you kidding me with this guy?
It amuses me to no end when white folks laud the Declaration of Independence — with all of its lofty rhetoric about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — all the while stoically ignoring that all that happy-happy-joy-joy talk didn’t apply to the Africans whites dragged to this country and enslaved.
So when I see the tiny wizened messiah talking about the Civil War and lamenting all the liberty that was lost as a result of the war, I laugh bitterly. When I hear him talking about goooooold! and ending the Fed, I begin banging my head against the closest wall.
Dude is so out of touch with the 21st century, I’m starting to wonder if he’s some sort of time traveler who crawled through the Rift and has managed somehow to amass Paul-lovers and the Paul-curious from each end of the political spectrum, and everything in between. Everyone from Katrina vanden Heuvel and Glenn Greenwald to David Duke and Stormfront are singing this guy’s praises, in some fashion or another (but not necessarily endorsing him. *wink wink*)
I find it fascinating and more than a little unsettling.
Here is Ron Paul giving a speech about how the South was right, and the Civil War was awful because it destroyed “individual choice.” Never mind “individual choice” vis-à-vis the enslaved; they weren’t people and thus could lay no claim to “individuality” or “liberty.” What Paul means by “individual choice,” is “white men’s (specifically white property-owning men) individual choice.”
Just look at this silly little man, standing proudly in front of a Confederate flag talking about the enslavement of black people in transactional terms. In the Ron Paul Gospel, adherence to the quintessential American values of “individual choice and” “liberty” would have required the Yankees to buy the slaves’ freedom. A detestable notion, to be sure, but also historically inaccurate since, as we all know, the South started it.
Ultimately, when it comes to black people, the world “liberty” seems to disappear from Paul’s vocabulary. Funny, that.
MORE:
http://www.angryblacklady.com/2012/01/21/shorter-ron-paul-the-south-will-rise-again/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-becker/lgbts-for-ron-paul-huh_b_1197057.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HP%2FPolitics+(Politics+on+The+Huffington+Post)
I must confess that I’m truly baffled by the level of support I’m seeing among my friends for presidential candidate Ron Paul. While the number of Paul fans in my circles is relatively small, he nonetheless enjoys the highest level of support from my LGBT-identified and equality-supporting friends out of all the non-LGBT-friendly candidates. In addition, the Ron Paul supporters I know tend to be passionately, often blindly, devoted to their candidate, steamrolling over any criticisms of Paul, no matter how legitimate, and simply dismissing out of hand those they cannot out-argue.
To many people, Ron Paul’s sound bites are very appealing. Smaller government. Individual liberty. Legalization of marijuana and other drugs. (Yes, I think this has a lot to do with the support Paul receives, especially among young people and college students.) Unfortunately, it’s been my experience that most supporters of Ron Paul stop there and either don’t dig any further or ignore the digging done by others. This alarms me, because Ron Paul’s record is very, very anti-gay.
On his best days, Ron Paul supports the so-called “states’ rights” position regarding marriage equality. On his worst, he has specifically bragged about his efforts to obstruct and attack LGBT people’s civil rights and gone out of his way to slander and mischaracterize LGBT people.
Setting aside the generally disturbing deployment of the “states’ rights” argument at all, given its shameful history as a justifier of slavery and Jim Crow laws in this country, I’d like to ask Mr. Paul (as well as those who profess to support both Ron Paul and LGBT equality) why LGBT couples should be the only Americans whose marriages are subject to the “states’ rights” standard. Why should only LGBT people, but not straight people, have to seek the approval of our state legislatures and/or citizenry in order to marry the people we love? Why should our marriages be the only ones that dissolve when we cross state lines? And why is this an acceptable state of affairs, especially given the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law to all American citizens?
“Yeah,” many of my Paul-supporting friends will say, “but that’s just your opinion.”
This brings up another point: the difference between opinion and fact. Maybe it’s just me, but in this era of false equivalency memes, it appears as though this distinction is being increasingly overlooked. A fact is something that is empirically true and can be supported by evidence, while an opinion is a belief that may or may not be backed up with some type of evidence, usually taking the form of a subjective statement that can be emotionally based or result from a person’s individual interpretation of a fact.
- FACT: Ron Paul’s presidential campaign issued a flyer that boasted about the candidate’s efforts to introduce legislation that would remove challenges to the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act from the federal court system.
- FACT: Ron Paul’s Iowa state director is Mike Heath, a long-term Christian-right activist who formerly served as the board chairman of an SPLC-certified anti-gay hate group known as “Americans for Truth About Homosexuality.”
- FACT: Ron Paul has a long history of racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic comments.
- FACT: As state above, Ron Paul supports the so-called “states’ rights” approach to marriage, but interestingly, only for LGBT couples.
- FACT: Ron Paul said, “If I were in Congress in 1996, I would have voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which used Congress’ constitutional authority to define what official state documents other states have to recognize under the Full Faith and Credit Clause, to ensure that no state would be forced to recognize a same-sex marriage license issued in another state.”
- FACT: Ron Paul opposes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would prohibit discrimination against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity by civilian, nonreligious employers.
Based on the above examples and so many others, there is no way one can honestly characterize Ron Paul’s past statements and record as anything other than anti-gay. Of course, LGBTs and supporters of LGBT equality, like all voters, can and should vote for whomever they choose. I am neither disputing that right nor attempting in any way to tell anyone how to vote. What I am saying, however, is that LGBT and pro-LGBT voters should at least acknowledge that a vote for a candidate like Ron Paul is a vote for someone who opposes their rights.
As the year 2011 ends, there are several good year-end reviews about racial justice, this video from Colorlines and this post from a David J. Leonard writing at New Black Man, are both excellent. We here at Racism Review offer this as our own brief, and necessarily incomplete, recap of some of the notable events in the struggle for racial justice. Be sure to scroll all the way to the end, there are some victories there, too ~ and a challenge for you at the end.
We lost some fierce champions and scholar-activists:
- Manning Marable, aged 60, died in April, just days before his epic biography of Malcolm X was published.
- Derrick Bell, aged 80, a founder of critical race theory who famously resigned his tenured position at Harvard Law School in protest over their failure to hire any women of color, died in October.
Lots of things happened in 2011 which illustrate just how entrenched racial inequality (still) is, including:
- the execution of Troy Davis and the ongoing racism of the New Jim Crow. I argued here at the time of Davis’ execution that the U.S. death penalty is akin to the American practice of lynching in which black and brown people, especially men, are executed in disproportionately high numbers as a means of social control.
- the Occupy Wall Street movement, initiated and led predominantly by white people, missed theracial significance of the “occupy” terminology, and thereby missed an opportunity to galvanize a movement across racial boundaries. Dick Gregory said in October that the Occupy movement had a ‘whiff’ of the civil rights movement, with a key difference: “The difference between this movement and our movement is that white people — rich, poor, educated — are born with 300 years of white privilege. So there are certain things that you don’t do to me when you’re born with privileges. When it was us, the cops could do anything they wanted to. You can’t do these children like this.”
- the racism in presidential politics has been off the hook this year, with the Republicans on center stage as they search for a viable opponent to defeat President Obama. This is not to say that Democrats are not capable of practicing racism in the service of a political goal, it’s just that the Republicans have been taking up all the air time. From the buffoonery of Herman Cain and the strategic racism of his Koch brothers’ supporters, to the ‘food stamp president’ racism of Newt Gingrich, to the white-supremacist-supported campaign of Ron Paul, it’s been an epic year for racism in presidential politics.
- immigration reform has stalled and deportations have increasedunder President Obama. In 2010, the U.S. government deported some 400,000 people, more than in the entire decade of the 1980s. However, it’s not all immigrants who are being targeted; research indicates that Asian and European immigrants are almost never deported, yet blacks and Latinos are deported in large numbers.
- Facebook (and YouTube) racism continue. In a move that continues to baffle me (you know we can see what you’re saying, right?), white people continue to post racist crap to Facebook, YouTube and any other form of social media. One of the more infamous examples from 2011 was Alexandra Wallace, former UCLA college student, who posted a racist video of herself mocking her Asian American classmates. She later left UCLA amid reported death threats. More recently, the racist postings on Facebook by NYPD cops was exposed.
- Islamophobia on the rise, and mass murder in Norway. In July, Anders Breivik opened fire on a Norwegian camp killing about 90 people, many of them children. He was said to be upset about “immigrants” especially Muslim immigrants that were supposedly “destroying Europe.” In the U.S., Rep. Peter King (R-NY), led the way in fomenting Islamophobia through a series of congressional hearings that targeted Muslims living in the U.S. as potential terrorists. King refused to focus any of his congressional hearing on predominantly white militia groups or white supremacist organizations.
Recall:
- Since 1979, the income of the top 1% has increased by 275% even after taxes and income transfers.
- Half of all workers in the United States make less than $26,364 a year.
Gee, I wonder why there are all these Occupy Wall Street protests. What could they possibly want?
Representative Allen West (FL-R)
GOP 2012: Equality and Fairness are Anti-American
-Joe
(via stfuconservatives)“I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police,” Bill O’Reilly said tonight, discussing the appalling use of pepper spray by UC Davis police on Friday. No, God forbid we Monday-morning quarterback the police, especially, as O’Reilly continued, “at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus.”
Indeed: what right do we have to think that Lt. John Pike should probably not have indifferently dusted peacefully sitting protesters with pepper spray from only a few feet away? And, gosh, even if we were going to Monday-morning quarterback the police, shouldn’t we remember, as Megyn Kelly tells O’Reilly, that pepper spray is “a food product, essentially”? I mean, Kelly and O’Reilly aren’t saying the cops did the right thing! God, no! They’re just saying, hey, what right do we have to judge a cop for spraying a simple food product on a bunch of liberal college kids’ faces?
A food product.
Okay, it may have been unpleasant when sriracha splashed into my eyes the other day, but I will never put pepper spray on my pizza. Doesn’t go both ways there.
They’re locking up citizens in their own houses. Jesus Christ. Is that even legal?
Another picture of Stallone Cop serving and protecting the shit out of unarmed protesters.
So this crossed my Twitter stream a few minutes ago.
@tjholmes Heard NY protester say OWS “much grander than Civil Rights Movement” b/c it deals w/more than just 1 race. Agree?
I’m going to need some of y’all to come get your people. Why is there supposed to be a competition between movements in the first place? What kind of backwards ass knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement do these children have if they think it was only about black people? For that matter as they co-opt the words & tactics of the CRM, why aren’t they honoring the people who were involved? Why all the insistence that they’re doing this for everyone while ignoring the needs of everyone? I stopped by Occupy Chicago this last week & it was not about inner city POC or even poor whites. It was primarily middle class suburban white kids playing at being radical & not understanding that the people they claimed to be helping were capable of agency, much less respecting that agency. If you’re treating all the marginalized people like children who need you to parent them through protesting? You’re failing miserably at being progressive & are just another imperialist with a different version of Manifest Destiny & White Man’s Burden pouring out of your mouth.
seriously, the past 24 hours has given me so very many reasons to place ows on permanent side-eye status.
What kind of backwards-ass paternalist logic is this?!
White kids, come get your cousin.
