Tag: systemic racism

Virginia Opens Investigation Over Army Officer Who Was Pepper-Sprayed

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The state attorney general requested records going back as far as a decade after two officers were involved in a traffic stop during which a Black U.S. Army lieutenant was pepper-sprayed.

The attorney general of Virginia said on Monday that he was investigating whether there was an “unlawful pattern or practice of conduct” at the Windsor Police Department after a uniformed Black U.S. Army medic was held at gunpoint and doused with pepper spray by its officers.

Two members of the Police Department conducted a traffic stop on Caron Nazario, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, in December, during which one of the officers, Joe Gutierrez, threatened Lieutenant Nazario before dousing him with pepper spray and pushing him to the ground, according to body camera footage of the episode.

Mr. Gutierrez’s actions were “appalling” and “dangerous,” Mark Herring, the attorney general, said in an interview on CNN on Monday night. Continue reading.

Biden, in Kenosha, says U.S. confronting ‘original sin’

KENOSHA, Wis. — Joe Biden told residents of Kenosha, Wisconsin, that recent turmoil following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, could help Americans confront centuries of systemic racism, drawing a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump amid a reckoning that has galvanized the nation.

“We’re finally now getting to the point where we’re going to be addressing the original sin of this country, 400 years old … slavery and all the vestiges of it,” Biden said at Grace Lutheran Church, where he met with community leaders after a private session with Blake and his family.

The visit marked the former vice president’s first trip to the battleground state of Wisconsin as the Democratic presidential nominee and was a vivid illustration of the contrast he offers to Trump. Continue reading.

‘I knew I would be here today’: Thousands demand racial justice at March on Washington

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Just past dawn Friday, more than a half-century after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the Lincoln Memorial’s marble steps and offered his vision for a fair and righteous America, thousands of protesters descended on the nation’s capital at the end of a summer that has laid bare just how distant the fulfillment of his vision remains.

Among them was Marilyn Boddy, 62, who had never attended a protest. As a decades-long federal employee, Boddy had always been reluctant to join in public demonstrations, but that changed when she heard the Rev. Al Sharpton eulogize George Floyd, who died in May beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.

“It was right there, in the emotion of that moment, that I knew I would be here today,” Boddy said, describing the anger and anguish that shot through her while watching the televised service from her New Jersey living room. Continue reading.

Sharpton, police reform take center stage at National Mall

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The Rev. Al Sharpton headlined his new March on Washington on Friday, delivering a fiery speech in which he demanded more legislative action to address police brutality and racial inequality in the country.

“Enough is enough,” Sharpton told a large crowd of demonstrators gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, the same spot where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech 57 years ago to the day.

“We didn’t just come today to have a show. Demonstration without legislation would not lead to change,” he said. “We come to let you know, if we will come out in these numbers in the heat, and stand in the heat, that we will stand in the polls all day long.” Continue reading.

Trevor Noah on Militia Member Shooting People in Kenosha

Minneapolis police officer fired for decorating racist Fourth Precinct Christmas tree gets job back

The officer was ordered to serve a 320-hour suspension. 

A former Minneapolis police officer who was fired for decorating a Christmas tree with racist items two years ago should get his job back, an arbitrator has ruled.

The arbitrator said that Mark Bohnsack was wrongly terminated for the November 2018 incident that also resulted in the firing of another cop, but that Bohnsack must serve a 320-hour suspension without pay, officials said. The city has a right to appeal the decision.

It comes amid renewed scrutiny of the arbitration process in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, which touched off protests worldwide against systemic racism and policy brutality. Continue reading.

‘The world is watching’: Amnesty report details human rights violations by US police during racial justice protests

AlterNet logoIn a report titled “The World is Watching,” Amnesty International USA revealed on Tuesday that U.S. police violated the human rights of protesters, medics, journalists, and other people at least 125 times in the first weeks of the current U.S. racial justice uprising.

Between May 26 and June 5, police in 40 states and Washington, D.C. responded to protests with “shocking amounts of excessive force,” according to (pdf) the organization.

Amnesty recorded the widespread “use of militarized equipment [and] excessive force including the use of batons, kinetic impact projectiles, and tear gas and pepper spray.” Continue reading.

The lies our textbooks told my generation of Virginians about slavery

Washington Post logoState leaders went to great lengths to instill their gauzy version of the Lost Cause in young minds

A series of textbooks written for the fourth, seventh and 11th grades taught a generation of Virginians our state’s history. Chapter 29 of the seventh-grade edition, titled “How the Negroes Lived Under Slavery,” included these sentences: “A feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes.” The masters “knew the best way to control their slaves was to win their confidence and affection.” Enslaved people “went visiting at night and sometimes owned guns and other weapons.” “It cannot be denied that some slaves were treated badly, but most were treated with kindness.” Color illustrations featured masters and slaves all dressed smartly, shaking hands amiably.

This was the education diet that Virginia’s leaders fed me in 1967, when my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Stall, issued me the first book in the series deep into the second decade of the civil rights movement. Today, Virginia’s symbols of the Lost Cause are falling. But banishing icons is the easy part. Statues aren’t history; they’re symbols. Removing a symbol requires only a shift in political power. A belief ingrained as “history” is harder to dislodge.

How hard becomes clearer when you understand the lengths to which Virginia’s White majority culture went to teach young pupils that enslaved people were contented servants of honorable planters — and why for all of my six decades we have been intermittently dismantling the myth that the Confederacy represented anything noble. That dismantling began with Reconstruction 155 years ago and still isn’t finished. Continue reading.

Bill Barr has done this before

AlterNet logoAs violent crime continued to climb in Chicago and other cities across the country, Attorney General William P. Barr announced that the U.S. Department of Justice was mobilizing to help: Dozens of federal agents would be sent to work with local police to combat gangs and illegal guns.

“Our message to gangs, gang leaders and gang members is this: When we throw the federal book at you, it will be a knockout blow,” Barr said.

That was in 1992, during Barr’s first stint leading the Justice Department, under former President George H.W. Bush.

If it sounds too recent or familiar to have happened nearly three decades ago, that’s because Barr, now attorney general under President Donald Trump, made a strikingly similar announcement on July 22. Continue reading.

Obama delivers call to action in eulogy for Lewis, likens tactics by Trump and administration to those by racist Southern leaders who fought civil rights

Washington Post logoFormer president Barack Obama delivered a call to action in his eulogy Thursday of late congressman John Lewis, urging Congress to pass new voting rights laws and likening tactics by President Trump and his administration to those used by racist Southern leaders who fought the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Obama, speaking for 40 minutes at the pulpit where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, tied Lewis’s early life as a Freedom Rider to the nationwide protests that followed the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. He compared today’s federal agents using tear gas against peaceful protesters, an action that Trump has cheered on, to the same attacks Lewis faced on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965.

“Bull Connor may be gone, but today we witness with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans,” the nation’s first Black president said at Lewis’s final memorial service. “George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators. We may no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here there are those in power who are doing their darndest to discourage people from voting.” Continue reading.