Raising Cain...

Police Brutality in Anaheim Sparks Outrage After Two Latinos Shot Dead and Demonstrators Attacked

Amy Goodman's coverage of the situation in Anaheim:

Police in the California city of Anaheim are facing allegations of murder and brutality after fatally shooting two Latino men over the weekend and firing rubber bullets at crowds of protesters. On Saturday, Anaheim police shot and killed 24-year-old Manuel Diaz after he reportedly ran away from a group of officers who confronted him in the street. Diaz was unarmed. Hours after his death, a chaotic scene broke out when police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at a crowd of local residents protesting the shooting. Another Latino resident, Joel Acevedo, was shot dead by police the following day. Police say Acevedo was suspected in a car robbery, but the circumstances around his death remain unconfirmed. We discuss the situation in Anaheim with Gustavo Arellano, editor of the alternative newspaper, OC Weekly, and Theresa Smith, who has worked with families to call for police accountability in Anaheim since 2009, when officers shot and killed her son, Cesar Cruz, a 35-year-old father of five. "Given the fact that this is the eighth officer-involved shooting within one year in the city of Anaheim ... the community is going to be very upset," Arellano says. "There's a lot of angry residents, and rightfully so."

via truth-out.org

Anaheim needs to get its cops under control, not its citizens

While many of us were still trying to make sense of the violent shootings at a theater in Aurora, Colorado, Anaheim police unleashed violence of their own on citizens who were protesting police brutality in their community. On Saturday, July 21, Anaheim police officers fired rubber bullets, bean bags, pepper spray, and then released a police dog, into a crowd that included women and children:

  

You can sign Presente's petition to demand that Attorney General Kamala Harris launch an investigation into both the incident on video and the recent increase in officer-involved shootings in Anaheim:

In 2012 alone, there have been eight officer-involved shootings in Anaheim.  The disturbing images in this video took place just hours after the police killing of Manuel Diaz, as residents gathered to demand answers about his death.  The Anaheim Police then fired rubber bullets and unleashed a dog on a crowd that included children.  

via act.presente.org

The Challenge of Obtaining Voter Identification | Brennan Center for Justice

Interesting report from the Brennan Center for Justice on problems with voter ID laws. See also an articles on this report at Colorlines: Study Links "Racial Resentment" and Voter ID Support.

via www.brennancenter.org

From the report download page: Ten states now have unprecedented restrictive voter ID laws. Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin all require citizens to produce specific types of government-issued photo identification before they can cast a vote that will count. Legal precedent requires these states to provide free photo ID to eligible voters who do not have one. Unfortunately, these free IDs are not equally accessible to all voters. This report is the first comprehensive assessment of the difficulties that eligible voters face in obtaining free photo ID.

Jarvis DeBerry: An Unexpected, Enduring Lesson From ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’

Oh, yay...just found out this starts in Knoxville at Downtown West on July 27...I think this will be my 2012 real-theater birthday movie! See trailer below the clip.

Interesting review by Jarvis DeBerry (Nola Times-Picayune) of 'Beasts of the Southern Wild':

For all our celebration of the Underground Railroad, it’s important to acknowledge that not every African who ran away ran North. Some merely ran into the woods. There they were free from the clutches of their oppressors and free to form communities of their own. If you think of the people of the Bathtub as having formed that kind of maroon culture, then you see that  — appearances notwithstanding—Hushpuppy is nobody’s little pickaninny. She’s the heroine of the film, an itty bitty warrior girl fighting to maintain her way of life. That hair isn’t a sign of neglect, but a mighty display of her power.

Read the whole review at colorlines.com

 

 

Listening to some Billie Holiday today...

This poem came round on a listserv today, and I thought I'd share. Billie Holiday died on July 17, 1959 at age 44. I was a junior high school student in Chapel Hill, North Carolina at the time. I heard my mom singing many of her songs before I knew there was such a person as Billie Holiday. Mom liked jazz and sang with a local dance band for awhile to make extra money. My deeper interest in jazz came much later, but my connection with mom always rings a little when I'm listening. Just a little bit ago, hearing Billie singing "I'll Be Seeing You", I got a little teary...

The Day Lady Died

By Frank O'Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton   

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun   

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets   

in Ghana are doing these days

                                           I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)   

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life   

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine   

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do   

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or   

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and   

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue   

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and   

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Source: The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara (1995)

Immigration, Racism and the Supreme Court

Interesting article by Marjorie Cohn, who writes at the SALTLAW Blog:

Although the Court struck down three provisions of SB 1070, section 2(b) remains on the books. Instead of gratitude for the back-breaking work migrant laborers contribute to our society, there is an increasingly virulent strain of racism that leads to the targeting of non-citizens. Republican lawmakers are joining together to oppose federal immigration reform, opting instead for a "states rights" approach where each state is free to enact its own racist law.

via truth-out.org

Project Empire: How Anti-Muslim Sentiment is Used to Justify Imperial Adventures | | AlterNet

Interesting article...Deepa Kumar addresses conservative and liberal manifestations of "Islamophobia"...much to consider here if you think we can and must create a just society for all:

The term “Islamophobia” became known to Americans after the September 11 attacks. Whether it was efforts on the left to combat anti-Muslim sentiment or efforts on the right to attack Muslim-Americans and deny that there was something called Islamophobia, the term was here to stay.

But if we only look at anti-Muslim sentiment post-9/11, we would miss a lot. In fact, as Deepa Kumar shows in her new book Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, set to be released next month, the production of Islamophobia has a long history.

via www.alternet.org

Celebrating an Unfinished Revolution on the Fourth of July | | AlterNet

Here's a quote and link from a great piece by Bill Moyers to go along with my previous post:

Yes, Thomas Jefferson possessed "a happy talent for composition," but he employed it for cross purposes. Whatever he was thinking when he wrote "all men are created equal," he also believed black people were inferior to white people. Inferior, he wrote, "to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind." To read his argument today is to enter the pathology of white superiority that attended the birth of our nation.

Read the whole article at www.alternet.org

Frederick Douglass: What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?

This speech was delivered by Frederick Douglass in 1852, but as often happens when I'm reading old stuff, I find places in which time collapses and that "old stuff" speaks very clearly to the present...

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;" I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

Read the whole speech at teachingamericanhistory.org