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Kenneth Harding was shot to death in San Francisco in front of dozens of witnesses on July 16th as he ran from police for not having a bus transfer.
Harding was a black teen, and the SFPD have a history of murdering black men, usually unarmed black men.
So please excuse my massive skepticism at the brand new police version of events:
[T]he community reacted with anger to the shooting of a young man who was videotaped bleeding helplessly in the middle of a Bayview street while police stood around him with guns drawn and a crowd gathered.
Then in a startling turn of events, authorities announced on Thursday that Harding had not been killed in a hail of police bullets after-all. They said he evidently shot himself — either intentionally or by accident — with a .380-caliber bullet that passed through his neck and into his head, killing him. A bullet of that caliber was found in his jacket pocket but the gun was missing.
Riiiight.
Then for some reason SFPD released information about Harding’s criminal past, as though that somehow makes his shooting death acceptable.
San Francisco Police Gun Down Black Teen in Broad Daylight for Not Having Bus Transfer
Kenneth Harding’s story is even worse than it sounds. Please read it and send to friends. Racist police violence is really getting me down.
When police stopped a teenager stepping off the T-train yesterday to show his transfer as proof he’d paid his fare – $2 at most – he ran from them. They shot him as many as 10 times in the back and neck, according to witnesses. For many long minutes, as a crowd watched in horror, the boy, who had fallen to the sidewalk a block away, lay in a quickly growing pool of blood writhing in pain and trying to lift himself up as the cops trained their guns on him and threatened bystanders.
Here is a video filmed by a witness right after the shooting:
Fraudulent Documents Still Used to Steal Families’ Homes
Banks, some of whom received taxpayer stimulus funds, are still using forged documents to foreclose on families’ homes. Even though they totally promised not to do it anymore. But they don’t really have any motivation to stop. Not only do they get their hands on thousands of delicious houses to feed their insatiable appetite for the misery of others, BUT the state governments around the country are working out immunity for banks regarding suspicious foreclosures! Yayz!
More CIA Blacksites Uncovered! This Time in Somalia!
More extraordinary renditions! More filthy cells! More tortured interrogations!
Lesbians Told to Stop Being so Dykey
Whether visiting Dollywood in Tennessee or an exhibit on lesbian writer Gertrude Stein in San Francisco, lesbians just need to remember that they don’t enjoy the same freedoms as straights, because they are gay, which is gross and ungodly.
Beyond Androgyny
OH MY GOD GENDER IS ENDING! Everybody panic!
If you need a little lift after all of that, here is the theme song from Cannibal the Musical:
Read this BOMB post at the Incite! blog by New Orleans-based Women’s Health & Justice Initiative NOW!
Here’s just a taste:
Using the ‘Get Tough’ rhetoric of the War on Drugs; reproductive regulation; and neoliberal austerity measures to attack poor and marginalized women (who rely on government subsidies for financial support) irresponsibly exploits their economic vulnerability by falsely implying their assistance is the cause of the country’s financial woes. Although recipients of public assistance are no more likely to use illegal drugs than the general population, they are often disproportionately targeted by elected officials as social burdens in need of governmental regulation.
…If passed, Senator Vitter’s Drug Free Families Act of 2011 would amend part A of The TANF Program and thereby require all states to drug test all TANF applicants and recipients. The bill will deny assistance to individuals who test positive for illegal drugs and those convicted of drug-related crimes. Not only will this Act further restrict the privacy and agency of women who are daily portrayed as deceitful, deviant, oversexed, and addicts—all because of racialized gender-based misconceptions of what it means to receive public assistance- it will also subject them to various forms of discrimination with regards to housing, employment, education, and their voting rights.
Kenyon Farrow, ex-Executive Director of Queers for Economic Justice, wrote an amazing article recently. It dives more deeply into the meanings of New York’s passage of marriage equality and its effects on future politics.
He points out that, “[m]any progressive queer activists have long argued that the marriage equality movement is fundamentally a conservative movement,” and goes on to write:
If the same-sex marriage advocates, straight or queer, can use a family values framework, then what is to stop large-scale incorporation of gay and lesbian identity into social conservative logics, especially if LGBT people who desire to have their relationships (which is to say, sexuality) defined by the norms of the mainstream, can continue to demonize people whose bodies and sexualities have always been seen as deviant (black people, street-based urban queer communities, non-monogamous couples, transgender and gender nonconforming people, etc.)? Many of the gay donors who raise money, even for LGBT equality organizations, are “progressives” only because of marriage, and actually do not support most of what the rest of us would call a left agenda (single-payer health care system, collective bargaining, public education, and end to massive imprisonment, reproductive justice, etc.).
Farrow also asks the question: “What does it mean when so-called progressives celebrate a victory in large part won by GOP-supporting hedge fund managers, Tea Party funders and corporate conglomerates—the oft-spoken enemies of progressive causes?”
I’ve been wondering myself. The day after the passage of New York’s marriage equality legislation, the New York Times ran this photo:
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York signed a same-sex marriage bill into law late Friday in his office at the State Capitol. Photo by Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times.
Not the most progressive-looking crowd. And the accompanying article was quite illuminating.
“[T]he billionaire Paul Singer, whose son is gay, joined by the hedge fund managers Cliff Asness and Daniel Loeb” were successfully lobbied by Governor Cuomo’s aids to “cut six-figure checks to the lobbying campaign that eventually totaled more than $1 million.”
The article adds:
[B]ehind the scenes, [legalizing same-sex marriage] was really about a Republican Party reckoning with a profoundly changing power dynamic, where Wall Street donors and gay-rights advocates demonstrated more might and muscle than a Roman Catholic hierarchy and an ineffective opposition.
When it comes to brass tacks, I personally do not trust financiers, social or fiscal conservatives, or the organizations of wealthy white gays to have my interests at heart. For a host of reasons, in this specific instance, and as Farrow points out, a specifically conservative instance, our goals may match. But I can imagine few other times they will. I think plenty of non-marriage relationships are valid and should not be treated as less-than because they do not involve 2 married individuals. I think everyone should have access to things like health care, not just the spouses of well-off gay workers. I think single parent households still deserve community approval and support. And I think trans and gender non-conforming people need more support in combating discrimination and archaic laws that prevent their access to basic human needs such as housing, health care, and dignified work.
I don’t want the government to define acceptable relationships and genders. I want the freedom to be me, I want to contribute usefully to society, and in return I want society to protect me from indigence should American capitalism fail me.
This post will apply most directly to the non-profit field, but I have a feeling it will also be relevant to many other sorts of work.
Some organizations and companies like to play little power games when they post job openings, and the Recession and the desperation caused by high unemployment rates has only emboldened them in their unethical behavior. My biggest beef at the moment is with information about pay. How many of you job seekers have noticed that many employers don’t list any salary/wage information in their job postings? And of course if you inquire about that information up front, you’re automatically discarded as a trouble-maker.
Employers weaponize pay by creating information asymmetry: they refuse to provide any information, but then state that they will only consider applicants to divulge pay history or pay requirements in their initial applications. That way, they have all the cards in their hands and you have none. They can, in secret and from the outset, only consider applicants who grossly undervalue themselves. Of course, employers know that in these tough times, there will always be at least one, if not several applicants who are willing to undersell themselves out of simple desperation.
Employers who do this are unethical and have control issues. To job seekers, job postings that set up this information asymmetry should serve as red flags indicating work places where secrecy, hierarchy, disrespect of workers, and other poor management behaviors are probably present.
However, sometimes you are desperate and have to accept a job even if your human dignity won’t be respected. I get that.
Do a little personal assessment here. Does your identity, or people’s perception of your identity, provide you with societal privileges? Are you light-skinned? Male? Able-bodied? Hetero? And etc. If you have identities which are privileged in society, here’s what you can do as a job seeker. You can hold the line. You can refuse to play the employers’ game. You can give your real pay history. You can state an appropriate pay requirement in your cover letter. You can even proactively write to employers who engage in this behavior and say, “I noticed that you omitted the salary range you are offering for this position. Would you be able to post that or share that information with me so that I can assess whether this job is a good fit?”
People with marginalized and oppressed identities are already at a disadvantage in the job market, and will be extremely loathe to add to their disadvantages by being bold on this issue. But people with privileged identities can use their advantage for the good of all job seekers by calling out this employer behavior and refusing to undervalue their labor.
If you are currently employed and have any decision-making power around hiring practices, you can help out by stopping this practice. Encourage your company or organization to demonstrate transparency and good faith by publicly posting pay information with any job listing. And remember, paying a living wage is a human rights obligation!
The tale of Tatioun Williams and Brandon Ross is from several weeks ago, but I still wanted to put it up on this blog as a miscarriage of justice.
From the Chicago Tribune:
Bail was set at $900,000 today for a 16-year-old boy [Brandon Ross] charged with murder after his teenage accomplice [Tatioun Williams] in an alleged armed robbery was shot and killed by a responding Chicago police officer.
Ross told police that they had indeed robbed a man. That is a crime. HOWEVER, robbery should not carry an instant-death sentence, nor should one be charged with murder when one’s actual crime was robbery. Ross did not kill his friend. The police officer did. No one disputes that. Therefore, it is unjust to charge Ross with the killing. Someone needs to fix Illinois law.
1. Claim you used to be a MUSLIM TERRORIST and blew stuff up.
2. Claim you then converted to Christianity. (A peaceful religion with no terrorists.)
3. Invite people to pay you to hate on Islam.
4. PROFIT!!!!!!!!
“Our failure to create jobs is a choice, not a necessity.”
-Paul Krugman, in Sunday’s New York Times
The latest in anti-woman rhetoric, from Louisiana’s governor Bobby Jindal:
Jindal said he was proud to help make his state one that supports a “culture of life,” adding that women will soon be treated similarly to criminals who are read their rights after an arrest.
“When officers arrest criminals today, they are read their rights,” he said, according to a report by Louisiana paper The News-Star. “Now if we’re giving criminals their basic rights and they have to be informed of those rights, it seems to me only common sense we would have to do the same thing for women before they make the choice about whether to get an abortion.”
Fittingly he signed HB 636, which mandates that clinics offering abortion post signs listing “women’s rights” when it comes to abortion, at the First Baptist Church of West Monroe. Interestingly, this list of rights doesn’t include any information about women’s right to choose abortion, such as that it is protected by federal law, that choosing abortion is a private decision between a woman and her doctor, different abortion methods available, and any funding options.
You can find a copy of the bill here.
Jindal said, “There were nearly 9,000 abortions performed in our state last year alone, and that is an awfully humbling statistic. What that tells me is much, much, much more work remains to be done so that everyone is choosing life in our state.”
He also pontificated about how women “deserve to know their legal rights and the protections already afforded to them under the law,” yet the language of the bill and the rest of his speech make it clear that he does not believe this. He has already decided what choice he wants every woman facing unwanted pregnancy to make, and he is only interested in providing information that will induce women to make the choice he wants. The only “women’s right” he is interested in is forced birth. This cynical appropriation of the language of the women’s rights movement to flimsily patch over his true interest of whittling away our rights makes me nauseous. And to do it at a church of a religion whose leadership lobbies hard for the subjugation of women… wow.
From Brownsville, Brooklyn by Wendell Pritchett (published 2002):
Much debated among academics and policymakers, the popular perception of many American cities was that they were filled with poor, black and Latino persons mired in a “culture of poverty” that prevented them from joining the mainstream of American life… According to many analysts, the underclass was a self-selected group of the poor responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime, deliquency, drug addiction, teen pregnancy, and other social problems.
…
Throughout the twentieth century, urban elites attempted to erase physically decayed neighborhoods. They failed because the slum was an integral part of urban society.
More Hispanics Identifying Themselves as Indians
“Hispanic is not a race, ” said [activist and blogger Carlos A.] Quiroz, whose ancestors were the Quechua people, of the Central Andes. “Hispanic is not a culture. Hispanic is an invention by some people who wanted to erase the identity of indigenous communities in America.”
Sarah Nyakuoth William
South Sudan war widow: ‘I will have a country at last’
On the occasion of South Sudan’s independence from the Republic of Sudan, Sarah Nyakuoth William said, “I knew we’d get here in the end, but I didn’t know if I would ever see the day. Finally the day is here. I’m happy, happy for the future for my children, and all of South Sudan.”
No “boys” and “girls” at gender-neutral preschool in Sweden
At the “Egalia” preschool [in Stockholm], staff avoid using words like “him” or “her” and address the 33 kids as “friends” rather than girls and boys.
Kansas Sued Over Nonsensical Abortion Clinic Guidelines
…which seem oddly more intended to prevent women from accessing abortion than making abortion safer. Huh, how about that.
Under the new requirements, the three remaining clinics in the state would have to make enormous structural changes to their buildings and obtain new certifications in just two weeks or face possible closure.
Lawsuit pending!
NYPD Celebrates Gay Pride by Raiding a Gay Bar Minutes After Gay Marriage Victory
The Eagle patron Christopher J. Borras said, “I find interesting the timing. I would just like to know from the police: `Why did they do that?’ To me, it is a blatant sign of intimidation and harassment, I mean, 42 years after the Stonewall riots and we still have to live in fear of the police disturbing our quiet enjoyment of life?”
That’s how much Ontario Catholic leaders hate fun: they banned images of rainbows in their schools because they are associated with — excuse me as I choke back vomit — gayness.
First, some students wanted to form a Gay-Straight Alliance. President of the Ontario Catholic School Trustees’ Association, Nancy Kirby, said “It won’t be a gay-straight alliance. When I look at a gay-straight alliance, I see an activist group. We are answering the students’ request for support and assistance, not for activism. Students don’t want to become activists…”
Halton Catholic District School Board Chair Alice Anne LeMay said the board “doesn’t allow Nazi groups either. Gay-straight alliances are banned because they are not within the teachings of the Catholic Church.”
Then students at St Joseph Catholic Secondary School decided to name their club Rainbow Alliance instead. But their principal Frances Jacques said that was “too LGBT-sounding.” She instead mandated the name “Open Arms”, which completely obscures the purpose and actual membership of the group.
One student, Leanne Iskander, has tried to start some sort of LGBT group at that school, and already has 40 members. Of the Open Arms name, she said, “There’s no point having the support there if students don’t know it’s there, so the name is important.”
She reports that members of the group have been victims of homophobic bullying. Her group tried to set up an information booth.
She reports: “We brought signs and posters with rainbows, and we were told that we can’t put them up. They said rainbows are associated with Pride. There’s so many other things that a rainbow could be. It’s ridiculous.”
Since rainbows couldn’t be displayed openly and proudly, the students baked rainbows into the cupcakes by dying the batter in a rainbow of colours.
Leanne Iskander and Taechun Menns setting up the rainbow cupcakes at St Joe's Catholic Secondary School in Mississauga. (Meagan Smith of St Joe's)
You can find some of Iskander’s own words about her experiences at the Torontoist.
Show your support and keep up-to-date on the students’ struggle by joining the St. Joes Gay-Straight Alliance Facebook group.
H/t to Autostraddle.
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