Category Archives: Gun-violence

Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, Dallas | Race Files – Truth is not easy but it opens doors

 

“Was he colored?” That’s what my grandmother would say whenever she heard news about a criminal act. She knew that if the alleged perpetrator were “colored” his criminality would be read not simply as the act of an individual, but as an expression of an ingrained racial tendency. Somehow being Black meant that the actions of every random thief, rapist or murderer who was also Black redounded to you and your people. I imagine most Black families had a version of “Was he colored?” And I wouldn’t be surprised if Muslim American families have an equivalent expression today. Untying the knot of individual culpability and the consequences of racial belonging is nowhere near as straightforward as it might seem.I was on a dance floor on Thursday night, desperately trying to shake off the news from Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights. My phone was in my back pocket and, like an idiot, when it buzzed with an incoming text, I left the dance floor and stepped outside to the news from Dallas. Though the action was still unfolding, I immediately surmised that the shooter was “colored,” and that he had been trained by the U.S. military.It has fallen to President Obama, time and again, to make sense out of the incomprehensible and bind the wounds of a nation apparently bent on self-destruction. In the aftermath of Dallas, Obama quickly condemned the despicable violence of a demented, troubled individual. The president’s intent was clear and laudable. He sought to defuse tensions by definitively asserting that the shooter’s action was not associated with a political movement or a particular organization, that his murderous deeds should in no way be linked to African Americans in general. He struggled to shift the focus from “Was he colored?” to “Clearly he was crazy, right?”But before boxing Micah Johnson up and setting him aside as deranged and demented it’s worth asking a few questions. Honestly, good people, did anybody in their right mind – that is, not troubled or demented – think that the police could continue to pick off Black people at will and on camera without producing a Micah Johnson? And is troubled and demented shorthand for “traumatized by repeated exposure to the graphic depiction of the murder of people who look just like me?” Or for “agonized by the fact that the officers of the law who placed a handcuffed man in the back of a van and snapped his spine in an intentionally “rough ride” were neither held criminally accountable nor labeled troubled and demented?” Or for “depressed beyond imagining and haunted by the ghosts of the men and women whose lives were snatched by the side of the road, down back alleyways, and in precinct stations from one end of the country to the other before the era of cell phone video?” Or for “pierced through the heart by the voice of four-year-old Dae’Anna, comforting her mama?” Because if demented and troubled is shorthand for any of that, then Micah Johnson may have been a lone gunman, but he is far from alone.That whoosh you heard on Friday morning was the sound of people rushing to condemn the Dallas shootings, or to extract condemnations from others. There is, of course, no moral justification for gunning down police officers. And, retaliatory violence aimed at the armed representatives of the state, beyond being a suicidal provocation, also shuts down all avenues for advancing the cause of racial justice. But there is a lot of room for reflection between the cheap polarities of condemn or condone.So here we are, once again, with calls from all quarters for dialogue across the racial divide. But if the long years before the emergence of the various movements for Black lives have taught us anything, it is this: our purported partners in dialogue simply turn their backs and leave the table as soon as the pressure is off. This moment calls for the vigorous defense of our right to continued protest and the intensification and elaboration of multiple movements for Black lives – for the sake of our ancestors and the generations to come. And for the sake of this country that is our home.

Source: Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, Dallas | Race Files

Fresno police release body-camera footage of fatal shooting of unarmed 19-year-old – LA Times ” It’s so easy, it’s so easy to… shoot ’em down.” Don’t hiccup, belch or … Might sound like a gun shot!

The chief of the Fresno Police Department took the rare step Wednesday of publicly releasing the body-camera video footage of officers fatally shooting an unarmed 19-year-old man last month — a shooting that has generated fierce protests amid a roiling national debate over police brutality.

Source: Fresno police release body-camera footage of fatal shooting of unarmed 19-year-old – LA Times

The Media’s Exploitation of the Police Killings of Black Americans| Wake up Black folks! | 3CHICSPOLITICO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj9aqtjurwo

 

The death of black men & women and children are been televised like a reality show. These families of the victims go before the media cameras and spill their heart & Soul. They are being asked to forgive the killer of their family members within hours of their death. These folks are vulnerable, and they think going on TV will help them. While it gives voice to their grief and pain, in the long run, it has not always worked out in their favor.I don’t believe this serves them well. The perpetrators of these killings stays silent on the sidelines, while they build up their defenses, gathering information and building up their counter-defenses using the very words the victim families are issuing.The media DOES NOT care! It’ only goal is to get a story for ratings AND profit$.I also don’t think thee attorneys representing the victim’s families always have their back. If they did, they would not sanction all these TV interviews, before any charges are brought against these killer cops.Philando Castille’s family has a TV judge as their attorney. I’m sorry, but NO. HELL NO. I would not want someone defending my family who makes a living trying cases on TV. I’m not saying she’ isn’t competent. Just hire someone who IS NOT in the spotlight and has no agendas and no secondary gains by parading in front of the cameras. These families need better council, and they need it NOW.Because after that POS George Zimmermans’ TV trial, we have seen time and again the grandstanding and dismal outcomes. Thee TV trials have become common place and used, I believe to appear that justice is coming, when in reality, It has become a sideshow that serves to insult our emotions and our intelligence, when our eyes and ears have seen the truth.Look at the trials of those cops that killed Freddie Gray. It’ absolutely despicable to utter from their dirty, filthy mouths that Freddie killed himself, when we saw him being dragged into the van with his legs flailing in the wind like clothes on a clothesline.Take note, white families of those slain cops in Dallas are not parading in front of the cameras being asked to forgive Micha Johnson or  offer words of wisdom to the protesters, or “what is your opinion of police, in general?” Not one of those slain police family members would sit their child in front of a media reporter and camera and allow them to be asked those FUCKED UP QUESTIONS.Yet, Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell are just in awe of Cameron’s composure, his open heart, etc. GTFOHBut isn’t that what’s expected of the NEGRO?I’ll stop here for now, but more to come. I’d appreciate your insights, comments, opinions, links, videos, photos to add to this discussion.

Source: The Media’s Exploitation of the Police Killings of Black Americans| Wake up Black folks! | 3CHICSPOLITICO

Will White America Ever Reckon With Its Racism? | Dame Magazine

And let me tell you, as much as I weep for us, I’ve never been prouder to be Black than I am right at this very moment. Black folks are the product of muscle tearing, skin scarring, teeth grinding, salty, sweaty, almost fantastical endurance. We are powering a movement that will in decades only be remembered through poem and song. We are the rebels you idolize from Star Wars. We are the Patriots you celebrate every Fourth of July. We are the Mockingjay. We are Captain America in Civil War, Atticus Finch pre–Go Set a Watchman. That’s who we are. Black folks tell you about yourselves, you ain’t trying to hear none of it. It makes strange sense. We’re the terrorists, so you bomb us. You bomb us while revising your own atrocities, as there is no other community more responsible for actual domestic terrorism than White America. Has it not always been this way?To White America, I say the question you need to ask yourself is:Who are you?

Source: Will White America Ever Reckon With Its Racism? | Dame Magazine

Tim’s El Salvador Blog: When police kill

Salvadoran authorities have dismantled an alleged death squad partially made up of police and linked to around 40 killings of gang members since 2014, when a resurgence of gang-related violence began. Five civilians and five police were arrested Friday in the first crackdown in 20 years on a “social cleansing” group in El Salvador. Attorney General Douglas Melendez said the self-described “self-defense” organization was financed by local business leaders and Salvadorans living in the United States. Eleven other suspected members of the gang, which operated in the eastern province of San Miguel, remain at large. “We can’t allow our country to become the Old West and this case is an example of that, where we have evidence of summary executions carried out by the suspects,” Melendez said. Although the group has been linked to 40 homicides, the detainees will be charged with 9 killings, he added.

Source: Tim’s El Salvador Blog: When police kill

His name is Philando Castile. He was murdered by the police in Falcon Heights, Minnesota | 3CHICSPOLITICO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=486KsA193EE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlZVCyJoz0o

 

Philando Castile was stopped for a “routine ” traffic stop. AND NOW IS DEAD!! Asked for his information,  he volunteered to his murderer that he had a weapon, because he had a  permit. …

Source: His name is Philando Castile. He was murdered by the police in Falcon Heights, Minnesota | 3CHICSPOLITICO

Victims, Not Threats: The Massacred In Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Yemen Are Not Terrorists For Hateful Rhetoric

Meet Adel Al-Jaf. He also calls himself Adel Euro, so you might know him by that. He was a rapper, a dancer and a man who tried to do the best that he could with what he had in his country. Last ye…

Source: Victims, Not Threats: The Massacred In Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Yemen Are Not Terrorists For Hateful Rhetoric

Sarah Sadaka, an Arab living in the United States, was going to a Best Buy store today. She went into that store speaking on her phone in Arabic, only to be circled by a woman who made it clear that her presence, her skin, her language made her uncomfortable. No one came to Sarah’s defense: she was just another sand nigger, breathing that free American air on the fourth of July. She did not deserve to have her right as a human being not to be violated that way taken away, she is, after all, only Arab.

Sarah, today, is the living embodiment of what it is to be the victim of terrorism in the United States, except this time it’s the brand championed by the likes of Donald Trump and the people with whom his rhetoric resonates.

When Omar Mateen went to a gay night club in Orlando and killed 49 people, mainstream American media only saw his name Omar as enough reason to justify his actions. He was just another Muslim. He was just another Middle Eastern offended by “our” way of life. Except Omar Mateen did not do so in the name of Islam, he did it in the name of his own insecurities, the insecurities of a man who is afraid of his own sexuality and who is so deluded in his own belief that he’d support two politically opposed factions in Hezbollah and ISIS as vindications for his action.

Omar Mateen’s characterization, and the repercussions that follow it, are a direct result of the kind of terrorism that Arabs and Muslims have to endure at the hands of people like Donald Trump, the Far Right across the world, and the minds that listen to them.

My mother tongue has become synonymous in people’s minds with death. If I speak it on a plane, I become an automatic threat, forced to undergo security checks, apprehended by officials because the words I utter from lips only resonate with fear, even if it’s to say: peace be upon you.

Victims, not threats. The more we are silent towards our murder, our decimation, and our characterization as people who do not deserve to live, the more we perpetuate the notion that people who think of Muslims, Arabs, Middle Easterners and those that live in the area are worth nothing is true. The more we are subdued in not demanding our deaths be remembered, be proclaimed, be cared for, the more our inherent value slips even further, even less than it already is, down an abyss in which the least valuable lives on this planet are Arab lives.

I should not be living in a world where I need to convince a friend of mine not to name his son Abdul Rahman because the name is “too Muslim.” I should not be living in a world where I have to defend myself at my own funeral. I should not be living in a world where the deaths of two hundred Iraqis is considered as just another bleb on the evening news, as they are just a waste of space.

We are people too, and we are worthy of life, one in which two hundred of us do not die at a mall buying new clothes for their children. We are victims, not threats.

This rapper rallied to stop violence on Baltimore streets. An hour later, he was shot and killed. – The Washington Post

RIP – He was a rapper trying to stop violence in Baltimore. Tyriece Travon Watson, better known as Lor Scoota, had just finished hosting a charity basketball game. The fliers advertising the event had said, “Pray for peace in these streets.” Music artists and important faces from around the city had come together to prove they could get along. Lor Scoota got in his car and left the arena. Bringing peace to Baltimore was a message he had been trying to spread — on panels, in classrooms and in his music. “How I’m supposed to live with all this death in my sight?” the 23-year-old had once sang. Lor Scoota was about a mile away from the arena when he was shot and killed Saturday night.

Source: This rapper rallied to stop violence on Baltimore streets. An hour later, he was shot and killed. – The Washington Post

Tribute to Judith, to nine years of femicide in the villa 31 – Red Harvest

Paul Zapulla, head of the National Campaign Against Institutional Violence in Villa 31, told Red Harvest that one of the objectives of the campaign is “to organize the families of the victims of trigger within neighborhoods so they can seek justice” and avoid other cases. For them, “Gumer is a pride to have lost value representing a daughter and keep fighting every day.” She is always the first to “get to meetings and the last to leave.” Judith Gimenez’s mother encourages young people to continue fighting. Does not give up not only by the memory of her daughter, but her two grandchildren “villera pure strain” Nicholas Valentina four years and two. “I fight so that they can grow and live freely, enjoy your neighborhood and walk to the time it is,” said Red Harvest. He added: “where there is an injustice, murder or police doing a bad job there will be present, always.”

Source: Tribute to Judith, to nine years of femicide in the villa 31 – Red Harvest