Race & Racism (News)

By Kai Wright

Trayvon Martin had it coming, or so we will soon be led to believe. The surely unattractive details of his short life as a black man in America will tumble forward—his troubles in school, the weed baggie that got him suspended, the altercation in which police and George Zimmerman claim he was the aggressor. He was a maladjusted, Negro man-child, so ferocious he could kill an armed man with his bare hands. He had to die.

Yesterday, local law enforcement offered a preview of this old, familiar narrative when someone leaked Zimmerman’s account of the night to the Orlando Sentinel. According to the Sentinel, Zimmerman had given up his hunt of Martin and was returning to his SUV when the 17-year-old caught him by surprise. Do you have a problem, Martin is said to have asked, before answering for himself, “Well, you do now.” He reportedly began pummelling Zimmerman, leading the armed man to shoot and kill.

Sadly, it’s necessary to point out that there isn’t an imaginable scenario in which an armed man can shoot an unarmed child to death and it be okay. But set that obvious fact to the side. Trayvon Martin did in fact have it coming. He was born black and male in the United States and was thus marked for death. The cruelness of our economy and of our criminal justice system isn’t reserved for men or for black people. But there is a particularly gendered and particularly racist way in which black men are set upon in this country, most acutely those who don’t have the resources to push back. And it has a very long, still relevant history.

By Sweta Vohra and Jordan Flaherty, Fault Lines

A version of this article originally appeared on the Al Jazeera website
http://louisianajusticeinstitute.blogspot.com/2012/03/race-gender-and-occupy-by-sweta-vohra.html

At a recent panel discussion on the Occupy movement, a left-leaning professor from New York University speculated that identity politics - the prioritizing of issues of race and gender in movements for justice - could be a plot funded by the CIA to undermine activism. While most commentators do not go this far, the idea that activists who focus on these issues are "undermining the struggle" has a long history within progressive organizing. And in Occupy Wall Street encampments around the country these debates have often exploded into public view.

By Dan Bilefsky

In Deborah Brown’s family lore, the American South was a place of whites-only water fountains and lynchings under cover of darkness. It was a place black people like her mother had fled.

But for Ms. Brown, 59, a retired civil servant from Queens, the South now promises salvation.

Three generations of her family — 10 people in all — are moving to Atlanta from New York, seeking to start fresh economically and, in some sense, to reconnect with a bittersweet past. They include Ms. Brown, her 82-year-old mother and her 26-year-old son, who has already landed a job and settled there.

By Christine Joy Ferrer

On November 11, at the Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland, Youth Speaks in partnership with Urban Peace Movement, AYPAL, Ella Baker Center and Raw Talent presented the Youth Town Hall on Police Brutality. This was done in memory of Oscar Grant and one week after Johannes Mesherle’s sentencing. These youth rolled deep. With standing room only, at least a hundred youth from all around the San Francisco Bay Area rose up to speak on police accountability and civil rights–pissed off at the injustice of our criminal justice system and frustrated at the misuse of the badge supposedly meant to protect us. I hope you are all moved by the spoken words of these amazing youth as they bust a verse. Their time to remain silent is over. They chant, “Ain’t no power like the power of the youth cuz the power of the youth don’t stop.”

 Listen to the Eyes Opened Blog podcast on the Youth Town Hall on Police Brutality.