Category Archives: human rights

Why Are White Liberals Getting So “Berned Up” By Black Women Activists? | Dame Magazine

Garza and the other Black women activists are unbossed and unbought, following in the footsteps of Shirley Chisholm, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer. They have made it clear that there can be no business as usual while Black people are dying in the streets.

BLM is also working in the tradition of ACT-UP and Code Pink, both mostly White organizations that have embraced the tactics of disrupting public gatherings and officials. The hostility directed at BLM, given the celebration of these White-led movements by White progressives, begs the question: Is it the tactics that people are uncomfortable with, or the sex and skin color of the people putting their bodies on the line?

“When these groups disrupted, they were heroes and courageous. Now we have a group of Black women who are disrupting forums on behalf of Black life and we’re seen as people who don’t have a strategy,” said Los Angeles–based BLM co-founder Patrisse Marie Cullors-Brignac. “That has everything to do with stereotypes of being Black and female in this country.”

“White supremacy is very real. If two Black women can go up there and hold space and get that kind of response from those folks in Seattle who claim to be so progressive then we have a problem. The vitriol from the left is a litmus test for what we imagine what would happened if we did this in a Republican setting,” said Moore.

The optics of two Black women publicly confronting powerful White men is certainly unprecedented. Willaford and Johnson pushed aside a history where Black women have been denied access to the political stage, a place where White male politicians routinely demonized and chastise them as bad mothers and welfare queens driving up the national debt, who regularly denounce their cultural influence as disputable and immoral. Willaford and Johnson snatched the mic, owned the stage, and made clear who was in charge, followed up with a hashtag: #BowDownBernie.

While eschewing White fragility in favor of Black survival, BLM activists are also challenging Black people’s hang-ups around queer leadership, women’s roles, and respectability politics.

“There’s a lot to be learned from Black women’s resistance,” said Garza. “Black women participate consistently in elections and toward the side of justice. Black women are consistently carrying the crisis of democracy and of the country’s economy on our backs. They have consistently taken risks that have opened up opportunities for everyone in the workplace, home, and in social justice.”

“From what I can see, it is a wholly new paradigm of Black women’s leadership,” said Daryl Scott, a history professor at Howard University. “Historically Black women have been expected to do be the support for the leadership of Black men, doing everything from serving food to carrying out the details of organization. BLM, however, places women in leadership roles and tosses aside gendered expectations of how roles are supposed to be fulfilled.”

Scott said he is not certain if we are witnessing a new brand of womanist politics or a new brand of Black feminist politics, but we are definitely witnessing a new paradigm. Historically, Black women were organizing, and working at a grassroots level, often behind the higher-profile Black male leaders. Now, they doing the work and are the face, and voice, of the movement.

The politics of respectability, which required male clergy leaders, have been pushed aside; the walls of a media that sought after those leaders and credentials have been kicked over by this group of Black women who aren’t calling press conferences or asking for a microphone, but snatching it without care or concern of the optics. For this generation, there are no worries about “airing dirty laundry” or reinforcing stereotypes. These women are literally fighting for their lives and they could care less if that makes White people uncomfortable.

via Why Are White Liberals Getting So “Berned Up” By Black Women Activists? | Dame Magazine.

Senator McCain to Photograph Seeker Holding “Protect Oak Flat” Sign: “Get Out of Here, Now!”

“I LISTENED TO THE MANY LEADERS THAT SPOKE. AFTER MR. MCCAIN SPOKE I APPROACHED HIM AND I ASKED FOR A PHOTO. THEN WHEN I SHOOK HIS HAND, I IMMEDIATELY PULLED OUT MY ‘PROTECT OAK FLAT’ CARD. WHEN HE SAW THE CARD HE SAID, ‘GET OUT OF HERE, NOW!’” TSINIGINE TOLD NATIVE NEWS ONLINE.

As he walked away from Senator McCain (R-Arizona), Tsinigine thought about how disrespectful the senator was to him and his Apache relatives.

McCain is the U.S. senator who pushed for the land exchange of Oak Flat, a land held sacred by Apaches and other American Indians, that was tucked into last December’s $585 billion National Defense Authorization Act of 2015 that was passed by Congress.

“I respect Mr. McCain for his service in the war and the sacrifices he has made for us all, but I have no respect for him as a senator in the state of Arizona,” Tsinigine continued.

via Senator McCain to Photograph Seeker Holding “Protect Oak Flat” Sign: “Get Out of Here, Now!”.

Japan marks 70 years since its surrender ended World War II Some Still Support Japan’s War – fail

Hiromichi Moteki, secretary-general of the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact, said he was “disappointed” by the tone of the statement by the prime minister on the eve of the anniversary, in which Abe apologized for the “immeasurable damage and suffering” the nation’s military caused before and during the war.

“We have no reason to apologize to other nations in Asia that became independent because the Japanese military took on the European colonial powers,” Moteki told DW. “We helped them achieve freedom and they should be thanking us.”

 

Nationalist Moteki claims Japan’s aim was to “liberate” Asia from colonialism

Liberating Asia?

Like many nationalists, Moteki believes that Japan invaded and occupied parts of the Pacific and mainland Asia to create a “co-prosperity sphere” and that it was liberating its neighbors from colonialism.

Equally, Moteki and many on the right in Japan are convinced that China triggered the Sino-Japanese war in August 1937, there was no massacre of civilians in Nanking four months later, the United States provoked Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and “comfort women” were not coerced across Asia and the Pacific to serve as prostitutes for Japan’s soldiers.

via Japan marks 70 years since its surrender ended World War II | News | DW.COM | 15.08.2015.

Angry White Man | The New Republic Ron Paul analysis from 2008

To understand Paul’s philosophy, the best place to start is probably the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Auburn, Alabama. The institute is named for a libertarian Austrian economist, but it was founded by a man named Lew Rockwell, who also served as Paul’s congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982. Paul has had a long and prominent association with the institute, teaching at its seminars and serving as a “distinguished counselor.” The institute has also published his books.

The politics of the organization are complicated–its philosophy derives largely from the work of the late Murray Rothbard, a Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who viewed the state as nothing more than “a criminal gang”–but one aspect of the institute’s worldview stands out as particularly disturbing: its attachment to the Confederacy. Thomas E. Woods Jr., a member of the institute’s senior faculty, is a founder of the League of the South, a secessionist group, and the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, a pro-Confederate, revisionist tract published in 2004. Paul enthusiastically blurbed Woods’s book, saying that it “heroically rescues real history from the politically correct memory hole.” Thomas DiLorenzo, another senior faculty member and author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, refers to the Civil War as the “War for Southern Independence” and attacks “Lincoln cultists”; Paul endorsed the book on MSNBC last month in a debate over whether the Civil War was necessary (Paul thinks it was not).

via Angry White Man | The New Republic.

In Mexico, Hunted Down for Speaking Out

At a recent demonstration of journalists and human rights defenders, the sense of dread was palpable. As communicators in Mexico, we’re angry and intensely frustrated at how so many of our ranks have been killed, disappeared, displaced, or censored with no repercussions.

For many, including me, this crime especially hit home. For a long time, whenever I was asked if I was afraid to speak out critically in Mexico, I answered that fortunately Mexico City was relatively safe. Drug cartels and their allies in government only kept close tabs on reporters in more disputed areas.

The quintuple homicide in a quiet corner of the city shattered that myth — and with it what was left of our complacency. Several days before his murder, Espinosa told friends that a man had approached him to ask if he was the photographer who fled Veracruz. When he said yes, the man replied, “You should know that we’re here.”

Once considered a haven, Mexico City has become a hunting ground in a country where, too often, journalists end up reporting on the brutal assassinations of their colleagues — and wondering who will be next.

via In Mexico, Hunted Down for Speaking Out.

Settlers torch Bedouin’s tent, spray slogans calling on “Burning of All Arabs”

PNN/ Ramallah/

Israeli settlers from the “Pay The Price” extremist groups on Thursday morning have torched a tent in which lives a whole Bedouin family from Arab A-Kaabneh tribe, in Samia village West of Ramallah.

Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) field worker, Zakaria Sadah told the Official Agency that settlers have burned down the

via Settlers torch Bedouin’s tent, spray slogans calling on “Burning of All Arabs”.

“I left an abusive relationship and I have nowhere to go. I…

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“I left an abusive relationship and I have nowhere to go. I have Hepatitis C, so no one is willing to take me in. I don’t know how long I will live. I tried to give her up for adoption so that she’d have a good home. The wife of a minister told me about a place where I could drop her off. But when I got there, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.” (½)

(Lahore, Pakistan)

via “I left an abusive relationship and I have nowhere to go. I….