Archives for category: Racism
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

White Nationalists Rallying Today in Portland, Oregon

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2018 //
34

The Southern Poverty Law Center is one of our nation’s most valuable organizations defending our Constitution and democratic values against extremists.

Their report today says that extremist groups are holding a hate rally in Portland, Oregon, today. There are many links, which I am not including because I would have to do each one manually. If you sign up to get their newsletter, you can get the full report with links. What SPLC describes is an example of the way the far-right is “weaponizing the First Amendment,” using it as a shield to defend hatred, racism, and incitement’s to violence. What or who incited these groups?

SPLC writes:

AUGUST 4, 2018
Weekend Read // Issue 91

The threat of violence hangs over a rally that’s being staged by far-right groups in Portland, Oregon, today, nearly a year after the deadly white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys have held more than a dozen rallies throughout the Pacific Northwest over the past year, events marked by street violence and harassment and buoyed by a wide array of racist and antigovernment extremist allies.

David Neiwert, who frequently writes for our Hatewatch blog, has been covering the rallies from the beginning. In a piece for The Baffler, he describes the last violent rally they held in Portland on June 30th:

The Proud Boys and Patriots were primed for battle. Indeed, the whole point of the event was to try to provoke a fight that they were not simply prepared for, but were keen to take part in. Prior to the onset of street hostilities, the alt-right crowd bristled with warlike talk about martyrdom as the price of freedom and “taking down” the antifascists across the street. Periodically they’d break into chants of Queen’s mock-authoritarian seventies anthem “We Will Rock You,” which they dedicated to British Identitarian Tommy Robinson.

As I watched the last of the Proud Boys—waiting for the final school bus that had brought them to the rally to arrive so they could leave, clustered on a street corner and haranguing the counter-protesters across the way—I mused about how conservatives’ sudden concern to safeguard civility in American discourse is a crude, cynical manipulation. Its operational logic is very similar to the Proud Boys’ insistence on claiming that their protests are about nothing more than the assertion and protection of free-speech rights.

That, after all, has been what Gibson’s Patriot Prayer events have been ostensibly about since they were launched in Portland last year. Gibson and his comrades claim that they’re standing up for “conservative speech,” which has always translated into a lot of immigrant-bashing, Islamophobia, “constitutionalist” gun nuttery straight from the Bundy Bunch, and a heavy dose of Deep State/globalist conspiracy theorizing. Unsurprisingly, the gatherings attracted more than their share of extreme rightists, including a broad array of skinheads and white nationalists; last year one of the more unhinged such fellow travelers showed up to one of the earliest Patriot Prayer events draped in a flag, and then began shouting that he was a Nazi and using racial epithets. Organizers kicked him out.

His name was Jeremy Christian. One month later, in May 2017, while riding a Portland MAX commuter train, he began harassing two Arab teenage women, one of whom was wearing a hijab, using ethnic slurs against Muslims. Three men riding the train tried to intervene; Christian pulled out a knife and stabbed them, two of them fatally. At his arraignment, he was still protesting Joey Gibson style: “Free speech or die, Portland! You got no safe place. This is America—get out if you don’t like free speech!”

Patriot Prayer had a previously scheduled rally just over a week after the murders. Civic leaders urged the group to cancel the event amid burgeoning anger in the community, but Gibson and his cohorts held it anyway. It turned into a gigantic melee, with the Patriot crowd heavily outnumbered, and a number of assaults and arrests on both sides. It was some of the worst crowd violence Portland had seen in decades.

Since then, Gibson has organized an ongoing series of “free speech” and “freedom” rallies along the West Coast and elsewhere—in Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, and Olympia and Vancouver, Washington. He’s denounced white supremacists after Charlottesville, but also openly embraced the Proud Boys, the group founded by the white identitarian hipster journalist Gavin McInnes, who’s long been a presence at Gibson’s rallies. The June 30 event was originally intended to commemorate the post-murder event, but it took on a life of its own after an early June rally in downtown Portland also dissolved into violence.

Gibson made a pitch for help from supporters across the nation, and the Proud Boys gladly obliged, putting out the word on their regional social media sites. As a result, a considerable number among the Patriots were wearing black polos and red MAGA ballcaps, and they came from all over the country, especially California.

Listening to them bait the counter-protesters with ugly speech, and talk among themselves about fighting tactics, it was clear the “free speech” they wanted to defend was bigoted and threatening. The lofty constitutional principles were little more than a pretext: they were there mostly to bash some “leftist” heads.

Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys were emboldened by the fighting at that June 30 event. Organizers have discussed coming to the rally armed; open carry is legal in Oregon. We will be monitoring the event closely and reporting live on Hatewatch and Twitter.

The Editors

Categories Bias, Bigotry, Education Reform, Oregon, Portland, Racism

Kevin Lee: Discovering the History of Lynchings in Mobile

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2018 //
3

Kevin Lee is an editor at Lagniappe and a native of Alabama. He recently visited the National Lynching Memorial (formally called the National Memorial for Peace and Justice) in Montgomery and explored Mobile’s history in that awful story.

He tracked the history of each victim of this brutality in Mobile, and the cumulative effect is powerful in reminding us of the depths of human depravity, the ultimate expression of racism, and man’s bottomless capacity for pure evil.

As the world learns again and again, then forgets, it is easy to overlook the deaths of hundreds or thousands or millions, yet impossible to turn away from the fate of individuals.

Categories Alabama, Evil, History, Racism

Steven Singer: Voucher Schools Don’t Increase Test Scores, But They Make Racism Acceptable

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2018 //
11

Steven Singer read the article explaining that voucher schools do not increase test scores, a fact now confirmed by multiple studies and evaluation, but they do make racism acceptable.

He writes:

For decades, school voucher advocates claimed that sending poor kids to private schools with public tax dollars was acceptable because doing so would raise students’ test scores.

However, in the few cases where voucher students are even required to take the same standardized tests as public school students, the results have been dismal.

In short, poor kids at private schools don’t get better test scores.

So why are we spending billions of public tax dollars to send kids to privately run schools?

A 2018 Department of Education evaluation of the Washington, D.C., voucher program found that public school students permitted to attend a private or parochial school at public expense ended up getting worse scores than they had at public school.

Their scores went down 10 points in math and stayed about the same in reading.

These are not the pie in the sky results we were promised when we poured our tax money into private hands.

However, corporate education propaganda site, The 74, published a defense of these results that – frankly – makes some pretty jaw dropping claims.

The article is “More Regulation of D.C. School Vouchers Won’t Help Students. It Will Just Give Families Fewer Choices for Their Kids” by far right Cato Institute think tanker Corey DeAngelis.

In his piece, not only does he call for less accountability for voucher schools, he downplays the importance of standardized test scores.

And he has a point. Test scores aren’t a valid reflection of student learning – but that’s something public school advocates have been saying for decades in response to charter and voucher school cheerleaders like DeAngelis.

Supply side lobbyists have been claiming we need school privatization BECAUSE it will increase test scores. Now that we find this claim is completely bogus, the privatizers are changing their tune.

The new song is, “why shouldn’t parents be able to choose a school that has a ‘culture’ more to their liking?”

Singer hears a racist dog whistle in that reference to “culture.”

So parents don’t like the CULTURE of public schools. And they’re afraid public schools aren’t as SAFE.

Hmm. I wonder what culture these parents are objecting to. I wonder why they would think public schools wouldn’t be as safe.

Could it perhaps be fear of black students!?

Give DeAnglis credit for his honesty. No more happy talk about higher scores. It’s all about picking a school where the children look like you. Why are we surprised?

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Privatization, Racism, Segregation, Vouchers

A Better, Clearer Version of Martin Luther King, Jr., Historic Speech: “I Have a Dream”

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2018 //
7

Thanks to Fred Smith for sending a sharper, clearer video of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s magnificent speech, “I Have a Dream.” In addition to its clarity, it also has captions.

In these troubled times, beware the reactionaries who claim that Dr. King wanted only a color-blind society, where children needed nothing more than to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. The March on Washington was a march for jobs, a march for basic freedoms, like the right to vote, and a march for justice and equality of opportunity. Dr. King reminded us that 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, black Americans were still not free. Given our nation’s embrace of mass incarceration, millions of black Americans are literally not free, and millions more worry about excessive use of force by police.

Today, as the Trump administration plans to abandon affirmative action and desegregation, the movement for equality has been dealt a grievous blow. As it is poised to appoint another justice to the Supreme Court, all the gains of the civil rights movement of the past six decades are in jeopardy.

The March was funded by a coalition of civil rights groups and labor unions.

Please note that Bayard Rustin, the great intellect and strategist of the civil rights movement, can be seen at King’s side. Rustin was a pacifist and a brilliant writer. He was gay, and he was frequently pushed aside or hidden for fear he would hurt the movement. He went to propison during World War 2 as a conscientious objector. He was no coward. He risked his life repeatedly in demonstrations and protests. He was a beloved friend, who performed a capella in my home in a fundraiser for the Young People’s Socialist League. I am proud to have known this great man.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Jobs, Justice, Race, Racism, Unions

Mississippi: What Happens When a State Refuses to Fund Its Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2018 //
13

Mississippi is usually ranked #49 or 50 or 51 on any measure of poverty or funding for schools. Of course, its students have low scores because standardized tests accurately measure family income.

A state that refuses to fund its schools will have high poverty, a poorly educated citizenry and workforce, and a stagnant economy.

In 2015, educators and parents tried to pass a state referendum to force the Legislature to spend more, but a coalition of very wealthy people from inside and outside the state swamped the voters with propaganda and defeated the referendum. The Koch brothers debated a quarter million dollars (pocket change for them) to ensure that poor black and white children in Mississippi did not get enough funding to offer a decent education.

I recently posted Jeff Bryant’s Report on the pending state takeover of the public schools in Jackson, Mississippi. First, they underfund the schools, then they declare they are failing. And officials who can’t provide a decent education anywhere in the state plan to impose their will on the children of Jackson. You can be sure that their solution is charter schools, not more funding.

A teacher in Jackson wrote this comment after she read Jeff’s article.


Diane, you and I have corresponded several times over the years about the conditions in my school in Jackson. I regret to inform you that the conditions of the physical plant are now beyond words. When I was moved from a classroom with carpet that hadn’t been cleaned in years, a room where I fought respiratory and skin ailments for years, I found my new room infected with black mold. It took a few weeks and a trip to the doctor, but I got that mitigated to the point where I can deal with it.

Then over the Christmas holidays, the city of Jackson suffered a cold snap that destroyed the city water system. Jackson Public Schools had to close for a week due to the water crisis. When we resumed classes, our building’s pipes, I believe had also frozen, leading to a re-occurrence of a sewer line break that has literally rendered the main hall and its classrooms a s—hole. About fifteen years ago, the same situation had occurred when I was also on the main hall. Eventually the district dealt with the situation by going under the building to dig out the contaminated soil and re-plumbing the pipes.

I’ve told everyone who will listen, but the situation only got worse until they finally closed the restroom when the new poop was coming from. Even so, there is always a lingering odor of raw sewage which becomes unbearable after a rain and when the temperature warms up. When I was checking out of my room this week, the stench gagged me, and I swelled up with tears because the whole situation is just so surreal.

The facilities manager was in the building and I told him that I had been trying to decide whose office I needed to visit with a box of poop to put on the desk and ask “How would you like to smell this all day every day?” I told him that it would be his office. He assured me that they will address it this summer.

I also told this story to the principal who related that there is the intent to go back under the building, dig the dirt out again, and once more re-plumb the pipes. If it is effective, then it should hold out long enough to get me through to retirement.

Jackson Public Schools announced this week that they will issue a bond to put money into repairing aging buildings. Our building is one of the oldest in the city, with the distinctions of once having been the only high school in the state for African Americans. We’ll see if our building’s problems will be adequately addressed.

It is absolutely true that the power brokers in this state don’t want to pay for African American children to be educated. When Jackson Public Schools mainly educated the children of the power brokers, the schools were just fine. Now that those children are educated in the private and suburban schools, we see those schools excelling. Meanwhile, the students left in tax-poor JPS are languishing in second-world conditions.

My experience leads me to advocate for a new school funding mechanism that does not put schools at the mercy or benefit of their local tax base. Our country is clearly OK with relegating a third of our children to poverty and its consequences or we would have already done something about it.

(Thank you for letting me rant.)

Lorraine

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Funding, Koch Brothers, Mississippi, Poverty, Privatization, Racism

Jeff Bryant Assesses the Likelihood that Jackson, Mississippi, Can Overcome Its Racist Past

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2018 //
13

Jeff Bryant of the Educational Opportunity Network visited Jackson, Mississippi, to learn about the state takeover plan for the district. As you would expect, Jackson has a sordid and racist past, one where whites ignored the needs and potential of black students.

After the Brown decision declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional, Mississippi fought the decision. When compelled to comply, it introduced school choice, so that white kids would have tax money to pay for private segregated schools.

Today, Jackson has a progressive black mayor. The schools are 95% black. The state now threatens to take over the Jackson schools on mostly trumped-up violations. Test scores are low,but test scores in the whole state are low.

Governor Phil Bryant, a product of segregated white schools, says he wants to create a private-public partnership in Jackson.

Civic leaders are not sure he can be trusted. They know that the schools are desperately underfunded and that the legislature and the state’s Republican leaders don’t want to pay the cost of adequate funding.

The big actors behind the s eyes are the Walton family, which wants charters and vouchers, along with Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children. The black mayors of Jackson and Birmingham know that the purpose of charter schools is to drain money out of public schools that are already underfunded.

The bottom line is that the white Republicans of Mississippi don’t want to pay the cost of educating black children. They never have. The leadership of the state will blabber on about school choice but it’s still the same song and dance. Nothing Jeff reports persuades me that Jackson’s black leadership should trust Governor Bryant, the legislature or their appointees to devote new resources to black children in Jackson. It’s a hoax. Don’t fall for it.

Categories Charter Schools, Hoax, Lies, Mississippi, Racism

Yohuru Williams: Slavery Was Not a Choice

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2018 //
35

 

Rapper Kanye West made some ill-advised offhand remarks about slavery, suggesting that it was a choice. That kicked up a brief firestorm, which may have been his goal.

Yohuru Williams, scholar of African-American history and dean of arts and sciences at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis, used the occasion to offer a history lesson about slavery. 

Please read this concise response to the uninformed. 

“Were U.S. slaves in any way responsible for their own misery? Were there any silver linings to forced bondage? These questions surface from time to time in the American cultural conversation, rekindling a longstanding debate over whether the nation’s “peculiar institution” may have been something less than a horrific crime against humanity.

”When rapper and clothing designer Kanye West commented on TMZ.com that slavery was a “choice,” and later attempted to clarify by tweeting that African Americans remained subservient for centuries because they were “mentally enslaved,” he set off a social-media firestorm of anger and incredulity. And after a charter-school teacher in San Antonio, Texas asked her 8th-grade American history students to provide a “balanced view” of slavery by listing both its pros and cons, a wide public outcry ensued. The homework assignment was drawn from a nationally distributed textbook.

“Such controversies underscore a profound lack of understanding of slavery, the institution that, more than any other in the formation of the American republic, undergirded its very economic, social and political fabric. They overlook that slavery, which affected millions of blacks in America, was enforced by a system of sustained brutality, including acts—and constant threats—of torture, rape and murder. They ignore countless historic examples of resistance, rebellion and escape. And they disregard the long-tail legacy of slavery, where oppressive laws, overincarceration and violent acts of terrorism were all designed to keep people of color “in their place.””

Categories Education Reform, Injustice, Racism

Alt-Right and Neo-Nazis Are Using Popular Film “Black Panther” for Their Cause

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2018 //
22

 

A disturbing article in the Washington Post says that the Alt-Right and White Nationalists are co-opting the popular film “Black Panther” to promote their own hateful vision of ethno-nationalism.

White nationalists have embraced “Black Panther,” Marvel Comics’ blockbuster, to push their argument online that nation-states should be organized by ethnic groups, according to new research published Wednesday, an unlikely convolution of the ground-breaking African superhero movie.

One popular image circulating on far-right corners of the Internet shows the title character — the superhero king of the fictional, secluded and wealthy African nation of Wakanda — wearing a red “Make Wakanda Great Again” hat. This is an explicit homage to President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign gear.

The image, first posted online in June, months before the Disney/Marvel film’s February release, carried a headline of “BLACK PANTHER IS ALT-RIGHT,” referring to the movement that espouses racist, anti-Semitic and sexist views and seeks a whites-only state. It claimed the superhero opposed immigration, diversity and democracy while favoring “ethno-nationalism” — a profound mischaracterization of the movie’s main themes, according to researchers at Data & Society, a New York-based think tank that studied far-right online conversation about the film. They said the film uses science fiction and “Afro-futurism,” a thematic exploration of African and African American history, to explore real-life questions of culture, race and politics.

This is such a crock of you-know-what. This country is thoroughly multicultural and that cannot be reversed or imagined away. We must learn to live together or we will surely destroy our great experiment in democracy.

Categories Democracy, Education Reform, Media, Racism

Indianapolis: Why Are White Parents Afraid to Send their Children to School with Black Children?

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2018 //
12

Matthew Gonzalez and his wife decided to move from the suburbs to the city of Indianapolis to enjoy the arts and culture and other amenities found in cities. But what to do about school? Indianapolis has many magnets and a choice system that has exacerbated segregation. They are trying now to manipulate the choice system to promote integration.

But in the meanwhile, the Gonzalez family had to decide whether to send their child to a mostly black neighborhood school. They did, he had a great year, and then they jumped for one of the coveted magnet schools.

Read here to see how they wrestled with the dilemma.

Another reminder that segregation is a social construction, that it can be thwarted, and that prejudice comes in many forms.

Categories Indianapolis, Inequity, Racism, Segregation

Julie Vassilatos: It’s an Act of Prejudice to Close This School

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2018 //
7

 

Julie Vassilatos writes about the latest School closing by Chicago Public Schools. It is a heart-breaking story.

The school closing is a real estate deal, she believes. It’s about gentrification, not education.

“Presto change-o, remove the public housing and the mostly-black grade school from the neighborhood, bring in a not-mostly-black high school, and watch the property values go up, up, up.

“These kinds of moves are the reason behind the twitter hashtags #RahmHatesUs and #RahmDoesntCareAboutBlackPeople. Outrageous claims, I bet you’re thinking. But the folks tweeting these hashtags know that actions speak louder than words. And Rahm’s actions via CPS in this new round of school closures tell of a man who will push his agenda no matter how many people it harms, no matter how obviously racist it looks.

“CEO Janice Jackson was not in attendance at last week’s NTA closure hearing. Neither was anyone at all from the board. The mayor wasn’t there. There was a man with a presentation, however, one man, Chip Johnson from the FACE office. He chided the crowd to be respectful this evening, and not carry on in a rowdy fashion like last time. He listened impassively to the 50+ speakers given two minutes each, never taking a note, never answering a question, positioning himself as a neutral party but very much committed to the CPS plan. This entire proceeding transported me back instantaneously to the fall and winter of 2012/13’s terrible school closing hearings, and I was glad I went up to the balcony to watch because I knew that I would probably get emotional or inappropriate or both.

“Because these events are an exercise in awfulness. Listening to one little child after another beg–someone (which public official listens to these things, again?)–to keep open the school they love, occasionally through tears, is something only a masochist can willingly do over and over. Which is maybe why no one from CPS leadership ever shows up.

“Seven children spoke, some as young as first grade. I can’t even imagine the poise of a six-year-old who takes the mic in a cavernous church sanctuary in front of a few hundred people, but I think it has much to do with the bravery that comes from despair. These little ones all love their school and wanted to tell Chip Johnson so. They spoke of their love for teachers and school family, the building, the staff, their classes. One child knew that the reason they were taking his school was that it was a good building with good things. One child knew that the reason they were taking her school was that they could. And one middle-school aged fellow who spoke of NTA’s caring staff had to pause 3 times in order not to cry. That was my cue to start weeping openly up in the balcony.”

It is no longer novel. No one listens to the parents or the children. They are the ones being removed.

 

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Closing schools, Disruption, Racism
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »