End Police Bias

The King Center

Hope you all saw my hopeful letter to Martin, yesterday, but today I want to ask people to spend a little time further investigating the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and challenge everyone to get busy if they are not already in furthering his precepts though activism.

One of the best places to advance your education is The Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, known as The King Center. Here you will find thousands of digitized documents pertaining to his legacy which established and newly minted activists will find enlightening and empowering. Dr. King’s life and teachings are accessible and the most apt anchor to guide and ground our collective social justice campaigns while giving hope to all the individuals who today, more than ever before, are willing to lay down their lives on behalf of freedom for all people.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. November 15, 1964 Flickr/creative commons

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
November 15, 1964
Flickr/creative commons

The philosophy of Dr. King underpins his entire life and the lives of his many followers. At The King Center website, you can read all about it in just a few pages. It is guaranteed to give you a new or newly invigorated focus because he addresses the entire breadth of effective activism on any front, regardless of your specific cause for freedom: the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism that exist in an intersectional and vicious cycle; the six principles of nonviolence; the six steps to nonviolent social change; and, concluding, an outline of what Dr. King called, The Beloved Community. In your organizational spaces or at home, print out these few pages and put them on the wall; look and re-read them often.

The goal of Dr. King’s philosophy culminates in the realization of The Beloved Community, the future humane world where old, coercive, and inhumane systems are vanishing, and being replaced with new, voluntary, humane ways of doing things that do not leave anyone behind. VenusPlusX points to the same end point. Dr. King teaches us that this is not an idealistic, perfected world but one where the reconciliation of adversaries is based on a “mutual, determined commitment to non-violence,” where all conflicts are resolved peacefully, “a type of love that can transform opponents into friends.”

In his 1959 Sermon on Gandhi, Dr. King elaborated on the after-effects of choosing nonviolence over violence: “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle’s over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor.” In the same sermon, he contrasted violent versus nonviolent resistance to oppression. “The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But, the way of non-violence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.”

Laying down one’s life for the cause of freedom is perhaps the best, the most noble thing you can do because until everyone is free, no one is free. (For those wondering, yes, that’s also a Jesusonian principle, that the greatest love we have have is to lay down our lives for a friend. But this doesn’t mean dying, it just means living another way.) I can have all the money in the world but if there is one child, perhaps a poor child, maybe a hungry child, living under an oppressive system, I cannot be silent. So I challenge all of you lurkers out there to commit just one hour, 60 minutes, on one day of the week, to do something to advance freedom for all people. You will find it is the most interesting and life-giving party around.

 

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How Days of Action Work in Addressing Police Bias and Anti-Transgender Violence

Today in hundreds of cities and towns across the world transgender and gender-nonconforming people and their allies pause to honor our fallen heroes. The Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) was founded in 1998 by Gwendolyn Ann Smith—a transgender graphic designer, columnist, and activist—to memorialize the murder of Rita Hester in Allston, Massachusetts. It occurs annually on (or around) November 20, and its overarching goal is to bring attention to the continued violence endured by the transgender community with the hope that together we can end such violence and intolerance.

Not long ago, Washington, DC, found itself in the midst of an epidemic of violence and murders against transgender people. The rates had been steadily growing over 10 years and suddenly we suffered 4 murders in less than 3 months. (The increase in discrimination was perhaps due to a backlash against the migration of many transgender people to DC, from Virginia and elsewhere, wanting to live in a city that had, and still has, the country’s most comprehensive human rights protections for gender-nonconforming people.)

Transgender Day of Action  Washington, DC November 21, 2011

Transgender Day of Action
Washington, DC
November 21, 2011

Vigil followed vigil and soon it was time for our annual TDOR. But we decided to add on a more immediate and visible Transgender Day of Action to bring this outrageous state of affairs to the forefront of public consciousness and the media and put the police, city officials, and the U.S. Attorney for Washington, DC, on notice.

In 2011, we started with just 5 people who met once or twice a week to hear directly from survivors of anti-trans violence and police harassment because any action to be effective would have to be grounded in real-world circumstances. We called ourselves the TLGB Police Watch, and eventually represented a coalition that included more than a dozen local organizations which turned these community concerns into goals, a set of demands, and a plan for a day of non-violence civil disobedience.

Within 24 hours after putting boots on the ground, at the Metropolitan Police Headquarters to City Hall and the offices of the U.S. Attorney of Washington, cold cases were reopened, the constitutionality of Prostitution Free Zones was questioned, police training efforts changed, and conference rooms once closed to transgender issues were opened wide.

At an international trans health conference the following spring, we reported out to trans activists from other cities, providing training and materials based on our success in effectively slowing the rates of violent incidents and murders.

Subsequent DC days of actions started popping up at other times during the year, fighting for healthcare access, employment opportunities, and housing nondiscrimination. The number of activists working directly on trans issues in DC right now includes more than 100 people and most of the organizations that were originally part of the TLGB Police Watch coalition.

The important take away is that days of action work and will continue work in visibly fighting this scourge of our community. It is an educational and effective way to make your demands heard and bring about change. The only requirement is your determination to organize across a spectrum of stakeholders, and then show up to do the work. Anyone who wants help in organizing a Transgender Day of Action in their community anytime of the year can tap into our resources and/or contact us for assistance and support.

DC was home city up until about 18 months ago, and tonight my heart and soul (and continuing support) are with all my friends there. Love is what it is all about because it has the power to extinguish hate in our world. Let’s work together to make world a place that is safe for everyone and human rights reign.

George Larcher image Flickr/creative commons

George Larcher image
Flickr/creative commons

 

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Part 2: Take Heart, Evidence Pouring In Hourly

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

Yesterday, I revisited my pre-election theory that progressives and all non-Republicans will see the greater good of a Republican takeover of the Senate and their increased footprint in the House. And I promised to riff on a few memes to substantiate that soon after. (Part 1 here.)

There’s nothing to fear since these election results are actually bringing about the best time in history to put these special interest jokers on full display and in sharper relief so that everyone, at least more and more people, can see them for who they really are and then respond.

A populist movement is the cure, the only cure. And populism is exactly what radical right-wing conservatives fear the most. These lawmakers and billionaires have made people that aren’t rich and white their enemy, out of fear. Populism is coming, call it our American Spring, because these right-wingnuts are and will remain mentally incapable of solving our most pressing problems.

While all the electioneering goes on and on, populist actions and non-violent civil disobedience are becoming ever more finely tuned to respond to our growing unrest. People are being stirred into action in direct proportion to the growing social and economic injustices wrought by this distinctly American capitalist theocracy entirely dependent on the enslavement of mostly everyone else. We’re not just taking it anymore.

Populists succeed in solving problems by standing up for human rights in spite of the temporal obstacles that haters throw at us. Our successes are in part due to our ability to connect across and learn more from different movements, from the climate and military to immigration and equality rights. We are helping each other make sense of the world. The more goofy the Repubs behave, the sooner we will succeed in making things right for all people throughout the world.

The first two issues the right-wingnuts have no clue whatsoever are matters of life and death: responding to the reality of climate change; and curbing our military, here and abroad. Why are these the first? Well, because there’s not much cause to fight for freedom and human rights if we destroy ourselves and/or this planet before then.

The U.S. military-industrial complex is led by special-interest lobbyists (public and private profiteers). They bring us incursions into dozens of countries, where we have no other business except greed and racism (no wonder Americans are hated), in order to annually justify huge defense spending. Along the way they fill body bags for the most part with unemployed poor people choosing to enlist because there is often no other options.

Likewise, these special interests are militarizing local police forces to control citizen uprisings. And, they stand in the way of police accountability. They are also lobbying lawmakers to harden and lengthen prison sentences to keep the growing number of privatized, for-profit prisons making money for the corporatists while disenfranchising huge swaths of the populace, especially brown and black poor men.

This terrible trend will only end if we stand up with each other and say, “No more gain based on someone else’s pain.” We can do it. We are doing it. Find organizations and people in your community to work with or otherwise support. Maybe start with CodePink and anyone in Ferguson, Missouri, these days.

Climate change, and the physical results which are already with us today, is a chief threat to life on this planet, and something that the well-financed, capitalist theocracy is incapable of dealing with.

These right-wingnuts are not just climate-change-deniers, they are science-deniers. The christianists deny science so much they fight to stay blissfully uninformed of reproductive health so they can still call Intra-Uterine Devices (IUDs) “built-in abortion factories.” They  don’t know how babies are made but they are determine to have the final say. When it comes to climate change they also fight to stay blissfully in the dark but with even more serious repercussions.

Repubs will always have the handful of scientists they can point to but these are just .001% of all the scientists who are telling us it’s practically too late to put off the degradation the burning of fossil fuels has already caused. Even allowing the science-deniers the luxury of believing that burning fossil fuels aren’t the culprit, everyone must get busy with the results of climate change now upon us: more lightning strikes, hurricane-tornados, lack of clean water, and loss of coastal square miles and assets, increasing exponentially as long as the fossil fuel capitalist elites control our economies. Yes, we have to move to a renewable energy economy but we are already engaged in the mass relocation and economic disruption that will continue to escalate to epic proportions. Consider that rising sea levels caused by the melting ice caps is already causing small island populations to abandon their lives because their fresh water has been compromised by salinization. (If you haven’t already, read Naomi Klein’s new book, a scholarly page-turner, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.)

We are on track to meet the goals the newly-elected President Obama set to reduce the effects of greenhouse gasses by the government, the largest energy consumer by far. Despite the political criticism from the Repubs, Obama used these same benchmarks to the U.S. as a whole this week to prompt China to set its goal, its first, to raise renewable energy sources to 20% by 2030. The recent UN report on climate change, which lays the groundwork for more significant agreements internationally in Copenhagen next year, and a newly invigorated climate movement have the power to curb capitalism in favor of planetary survival.

Make sure you are a part of it. If you can’t become an activist, do things in your local community to make it more earth-friendly, in one step healing us and raising awareness.

There are so many examples of how right-wingnuts will strip themselves bare as they fail these tests of leadership, and I could go on and on, but they will have to wait for a subsequent article. Next up is net neutrality because we cannot allow corporations to silence us and omit us from the debate for their own financial gain.

For now: get busy!

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Ethical Prostitution

19th Century German Sex Worker, Anna Dorthea Hansen Flickr/creative commons

19th Century German Sex Worker, Anna Dorthea Hansen
Flickr/creative commons

As a follow up to yesterday’s discussion of the decriminalization of sex work, take a look at this video of a sex worker ally drilling down to the issues. While perhaps relying too much on sensational memes based on unreliable data that says most sex workers are sex-trafficked children, she makes a durable case for the complete decriminalization and legalization of sex work.

Social acceptance and legalization of sex work is the key to ending sex-trafficking, not its cause. Sex-traffickers are involved in organized crime and should be pursued and punished vigorously; if they disappear so will their victims. But unless society can recognize a separate and growing sex work industry based on voluntary participation, we will not be able isolate and end the scourge of international sex-trafficking.

The first encounter society has with a voluntary sex worker need not be the result of police and the court system, nor their only portal to adequate support, healthcare, and other medical social services (more here) .

Sexual healing from an out-of-the-closet industry is not a bad thing, and will go a long way to ending sexual oppression.

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Reminder: Win one of VenusPlusX’s prized t-shirts for making a video, writing a poem, or creating a work of art as part of our Sexual Freedom Project, on this subject or any other related to sexual freedom, contact: columbia@venusplusx.org. (More videos, here.)

 

 

Decriminalizing Sex Work: The Work Ahead

Highly-acclaimed, reader-supported news site, Truthout, has once again zeroed in on a pressing matter of social justice, the continued criminalization of sex workers. Mike Ludwig‘s news analysis, well worth a full read, weaves together several different threads of this issue in terms everyone can understand.

Ludwig points our attention to “a great leap forward” in New York’s state court system that has introduced 11 new prostitution courts called Human Trafficking Intervention Courts (HTICs). These new courts were designed to treat arrested sex workers as “trafficking victims” deserving of medical and social services instead of jails, and to focus instead on the traffickers.

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

Sounds good on the surface, right? Except that sex workers have been protesting this controversial new model because: a) its premise is based on unreliable and very narrow data; b) actual data collected by sex workers rights organizations, such as the Red Umbrella Project’s recent report, “Criminal, Victim or Worker?” were flatly rejected; and, most important, c) ignores completely the need to decriminalize sex work to begin with.

Balder Rosado, a member RedUP, told Ludwig that this new court model improves what it replaced but the issue remains that access to these services necessarily starts with an arrest by police.

Not every sex worker is a sex traffic victim as anti-trafficking advocates would have us believe. For many, it is a private and personal choice that should not by criminalized in the first place, and if “treatment” is required to help those who are trafficked or otherwise coerced, it should be within a non-criminal, non-police model.

Shira Hassan, a harm reduction and transformative justice specialist in Chicago, told Ludwig . . .

. . . [A]nti-trafficking advocates often push for laws and special courts that reduce the penalties prostitution defendants face, in the name of “decriminalization.” These efforts are not about decriminalization, she said. They are about “changing the process by which someone is criminalized.”

“Criminalization is about racism, it’s about your neighborhood, it’s about how you are dressed,” Hassan told Truthout. “It’s about policing.”

The needless criminalization of sex work unfairly targets poor people of color and is as unconstitutional as “stop and frisk.” As Ludwig notes, “Police can stop individuals for ‘loitering with intent’ if they are doing as little as wearing revealing clothing or hanging out in the wrong part of town.”

HTICs can only be called a diversion program, at best. They only serve a small number of those arrested, and only a small proportion of these people actually want and need medical or social services. And the HTICs to do not prevent re-arrest for simply walking in the same neighborhood where the first arrest took place thereby nullifying the HTIC’s decision. Only a minuscule number of traffickers every get arrested.

Ludwig quotes advocate Sienna Baskin from Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York:

“If the emphasis is changing to be about offering services and other income options to people who are doing sex work, and intervening in violent situations, and giving people what they need without [harming them], then we need to stop criminalizing them.”

I will add another disturbing dimension, one that Ludwig overlooked or chose not to include: The retired judge, Judy Harris Kluger, who helped develop these HTICs is using the very same faulty data to promote her new business providing the services that the court recommends, reaping financial benefits from the state. Worse still, there no regulations or public standards for non-profit, short-term service providers like hers. Unfortunately, privatization schemes and conflicts of interest now pervade our justice system. Mass incarceration itself is a testimony of how special interests have managed to lobby lawmakers to privatize probation and electronic monitoring services and the prison-industrial complex itself. When will special interests like these, that thrive on increased criminality and the personal pain of others, be brought to justice?

To learn more, get involved in your community to protect sex workers rights. The decriminalization of sex work will begin the end of sexual oppression, a first step towards a world of equality and peace.

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Op-Ed: Culturally Inept Policing Schools Criminals

Photo by Adam Fagen Flickr/creative commons

Photo by Adam Fagen
Flickr/creative commons

In our grassroots work in Washington, DC, 3 years ago, we discovered a sad reality that persists. Police training and code, cultural competency training, with additional Special Orders pertaining to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) people, and the country’s most long-standing and extensive human rights protections for the LGBT community were not enough to rid the police force of homophobes and transphobes. While there are many good policemen, this substantial group cannot not be persuaded to put their personal feelings second to enforcing the law, actually doing their jobs. In fact, some are perpetrators of crimes against the communities they were assigned to protect. Only in the most egregious criminal cases is it possible to overcome police unions to get certain police officers permanently removed from the force.

The worst part of these bad practices is that they allow bigotry to cast a pall across an entire community, creating an atmosphere at odds with serving and protecting the community, the whole community. And, it is in this atmosphere, where LGBT people are not valued, that all the rest of the criminals model their behavior.

In 2011, after a rash of anti-trans violence and murders in just as many months, VenusPlusX helped organize a coalition of a dozen mostly local LGBT organizations under the banner of the DC TLGB Police Watch (T being our priority). We went to work listening to victims of police bias and anti-LGBT violence, especially anti-trans violence, as well as other concerns of the TLGB community and the community-at-large. We turned those concerns into goals and objectives and developed the city’s first-ever Transgender Day of Action with targets, written demands, and built-in accountability.

We were, at least temporarily successful, not only because the murders stopped for a almost 2 years, but because new channels of communication were opened in a way they had not been before among and between the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), the Mayor’s Office, the City Council, and, especially the US Attorney for Washington, DC. Within 48 hours, our phones were ringing, cold cases were being re-opened, and the US Attorney championed our position that the city’s feckless Prostitution Free Zones (enacted temporarily wherever there was a pocket of citizen complaints, supposedly) were unconstitutional in that they unfairly targeted people of color, the poor, and sex workers, especially trans sex workers forced to the streets when they had no other choice.

This coalition seeded the trans community with a new activists and allies and went on to bring about positive change such as a birth certificate bill, and better access to health care, employment, and housing. Police anti-trans bias was somewhat quelled a few years ago, but has gradually emerged again putting this latest spate of senseless anti-trans violence and murders in sharp relief.

Walking while trans is a real thing. It can often be a matter of life and death.

A young trans woman of color leaves here downtown office after sunset, heading for her bus stop. She spent years trying to get employment, and she was feeling good about her new job.

Her route takes her near, but not in, a city park. She sees two patrolman heading towards her and she holds steady on her path.

One of these patrolman grew up hating lesbian, gay, bisexual, and, especially, trans people. He still hates them, despite his training, the special orders re LGBT people, and the human rights laws in the city. He suspects the woman walking towards him is trans, believing she is probably a prostitute. The hairs on the back of his head stand up, his sternum stiffens. Why do these freaks think they can just walk around, these dudes in a dress, he asks his partner. By the time they are face to face with the innocent woman, they are primed to give her a hard time. They want to arrest her. They ask for ID, and then permission to dig deep through her belongings. They find 3 packaged condoms and arrest her for prostitution based on no other evidence. She will go to jail and probably stay there, losing her really nice job.

More has to be done to weed out the underlying problem of police bias and misconduct, setting the poorest examples for would-be criminals. Activists and advocates must redouble their efforts to put pressure on public officials, demanding leadership to forge better police recruitment and training standards, and helping good police officers transform their unions to have zero-tolerance for bad actors.

The Department of Justice has at last launched a program “to train local police departments to better respond to transgender individuals.” This is not a reason to go lightly. It’s all hands on deck, including yours, the more local the better.

 

Stay Informed. Stay Active.

Light Brigading Flickr/creative commons

Light Brigading
Flickr/creative commons

We speculate that unlike the consciousness raising on gun control following the Newtown Massacre, which petered out along partisan lines since the National Rifle Association owns most of the U.S. Congress, this singular event in Ferguson will succeed in merging the message with the messenger at just the right moment. It has brought about a laser-focus on the rotten mass of shameful, bankrupt, coercive, and inhumane systems, forcing elected officials, conservative and liberal alike, to say, wait a damn minute.

 “The eyes of the nation and the world are watching Ferguson right now. The world is watching because the issues raised by the shooting of Michael Brown predate this incident. This is something that has a history to it and the history simmers beneath the surface in more communities than just Ferguson.” — Attorney General Eric Holder

Politicians can ignore these issues now, at their peril, but we will continue to pose the epic questions:

How will we end this country’s war on brown and black men, especially young men?

How will we demilitarize our police forces?

How will interfere with the scourge of mass incarceration?

How will we end our outsourcing to for-profit prison industry and the for-profit probation system?

We have to keep reminding ourselves that ALL of this is connected to greed and the money (including your tax dollars) that elites accumulate from the pain of others. The War on Drugs later upstepped by the War on Terror placed immense pressure for more arrests. Brown and black men have been the primary targets and the easiest targets. We pay for your senators, congressmen, and prosecutors to entertain for-profit prison industry lobbyists pushing for longer and stiffer sentences to increase their corporate bottom line. We penalize debtors further by putting them into for-profit probation programs at once increasing the original debt on a weekly basis and the likelihood of jail time for things like an overdue water bill.

More Americans have become aware that their hard earned tax dollars finance the military-style firepower we’ve seen on display in Ferguson. Add to that the local police’s sad rendition of how trained military personnel actually behave with these arms and equipment that has put all public safety at risk.

People united have all the power to stop all of this.

[Regarding a similar shooting in 1943 . . . ] The shooting, the funeral and the riot, taking place so close together, led Baldwin to realize that we must always hold in our minds two opposite ideas. The first is that “injustice is commonplace” in our world. But the second is that we cannot be complacent. We “must never … accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all [our] strength. This fight begins … in the heart.” (via Laila Lalami’s ‘This Fight Begins In The Heart’: Reading James Baldwin As Ferguson Seethes)

Stay informed. Stay active.

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Also see:

Love Pierces Hate

by Rafee Jewell Flickr/cretaive commons

by Rafee Jewell
Flickr/cretaive commons

 

After a week of writing about the senseless murder of Michael Brown, a young, unarmed African-Americn in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white policeman, I’ve spent the last few days reading posts we have written over the past few years, and those from other authors, condemning racism. It’s become a meditation on the racism upon which this country was founded.

Fear of other did not begin with America. Fear of something different than yourself springs from caveman DNA, and it is only the gradual grasp of Love, in your intellect and in actuality of the Love you express, that raises anyone above the primitive. When we evolve as individuals, and as a mass of humanity, to be able to reject fear as a way of life, the earth and its people tick closer to a world built on Love. This is a world where every child is born with its personal autonomy intact, where governments, corporations, religious hierarchies, or local custom do not rob us of mutual equality. This is the age of universal plurality, the only pathway to Peace, the only future that applies to all people.

Organized religion has done the most to retard this evolution away from the primitive. From the earliest shamans, humans have been exploited by greedy (and lazy) interlopers presuming to come between us and the reality of love, something we can actually feel flow into, through, and out of our own bodies.

To the extent that our successes or our happiness sits atop the exploitation of others, the love in our lives is an illusion, a mental appetizer only of what could be. Every decision we make is a personal moral question. There is no morality greater than one person, despite what religious hierarchies and others would have you believe. No decision is based on what others think or tell you because if you just quiet your mind for a moment you know exactly what each decision is and where it will lead. At that moment you know whether you are choosing love over hate, mutual support over exclusion, purpose over failure. It is not only our intellect or even our heart that guides us, although they are helpful. It is recognition of the underlying and inescapable ecology of Love, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Consciously or unconsciously we understand in our gut that love has a future and that hate dies on the vine, however long that might take.

The founders of Amerika, and everyone since, sprung from a white supremacist point of view. First up? The eradication of the non-white natives. Next? The ruthless exploitation of black people brought to this country against their will, permanently indentured to the whim of their white owners. Now? Closing our borders selectively because white people fear that we are fast becoming a blended brown nation.

Every white person, individually and collectively, knows they are consciously choosing hate or at least something short of Love, whenever and wherever they are unwilling to give up the systemic exploitation and enslavement of those they consider “other.”

The only future for white people in this country is to embrace Love of their fellows by silencing the haters. We have to call the haters out in capital letters, on a daily basis. The legacy of Michael Brown and his family is giving this country an ideal platform to recognize this country’s racists roots, and to make amends by finding ways to make things right.

“Not everything that is faced can be chaged;
but nothing can be changed until it is faced
James Baldwin (1924 – 1987)
American novelist, essayist, playwright,
poet, and social critic

Jamelle Bouie Gives the Larger Picture

Photo by Steve Rhodes Flickr/creative commons

Photo by Steve Rhodes
Flickr/creative commons

Why the Fires in Ferguson Won’t End Soon

But while calm is hard to predict, one thing is clear: The events in Ferguson—from the shooting to the police response and everything since—are a product of familiar forces and stem from a familiar history. Put another way, the area’s long-bottled racial tension has burst, and it’s difficult to know if it can be resolved, much less contained. — Slate’s Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) 

In a mere 3000 words, Jamelle Bouie schools us in reality versus perception. The article is well worth a full read and understanding because it applies to every other American city. Here are some highlights . . .

Mr. Bouie aptly blends history with current events to put the Michael Brown shooting into a larger context. He forces us to recognize that modern events cannot be considered apart from St. Louis area’s dark history of segregation and police brutality.

An overbearing police presence is a defining feature of life in Ferguson and the rest of North County. Last year in Ferguson, 86 percent of stops, 92 percent of searches, and 93 percent of arrests involved blacks, despite the fact that police found more “contraband” stopping white residents than black ones. I spoke to several young men in Ferguson—all teenagers or in their early 20s—who said they were stopped on a weekly basis. At a makeshift Michael Brown memorial, I asked one 20-year-old how many times he’s stopped by police, “About 10 times a month,” he said.

Mr. Bouie takes us back to 100 years when St. Louis became one the first places to create African-American ghettos with boundaries illegal to cross, and sequestered areas where brown and black people were allowed to own homes.

He goes on to offer the best analysis of the facts I’ve seen anywhere, including a documented history of police brutality that breeds fear and disables any notion of serve and protect. He points us to The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (also a must read).

“Blacks were the easiest targets of the police; their rights were the least respected, and they had only a modicum of political influence to hold officers accountable.

Criminality was well-distributed among the ethnic and racial groups of the North, but blacks were disproportionate targets for police. The result was a perception of black criminality despite the lack of clear evidence it actually existed.”

This deep distrust of law enforcement stems from decades of unfair treatment, says Bouie, who suggest this is perhaps what motivates desperate looters. Unless we can turn this tide with new laws, policies, and human rights protections the current state of affairs will continue and there will continue to be police shootings of brown and black men in this country.

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I submit that tonight in American there are hundreds of African-American parents forced to sit their young children down to explain how they should watch out for and behave in any encounter with the police. These hard truths rob these children of part of their childhood, making them feel there is something wrong with them in spite of their parents’ attempts to dispel that false and crippling notion.

Congressional panels and other inquiries are being launched to answer the epic questions raised by Michael Brown’s murder: the war on brown and black men in this country, police bias and brutality, systems of mass incarceration in for-profit prisons. It is our job to make sure we find the answers and create new, human, and voluntary associations to replace the coercive systems built on the pain of many for the advantages of the few.

We need to coproduce a world in which no mother ever has to have that conversation with her children.

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Also see:

Old Ferguson Makes New Commitments

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

VenusPlusX’s unique mix, what we mean by The New Age of Sexual Freedom, is aimed at solutions to change the state of our country, our world, through the removal of all obstacles such as racism, sexism, the worst of nationalism, and all the other “isms,” that stand in the way of Peace, universal pluralism based on love. (Our Mission, our Manifesto.)

In this context, we have written all week about the shooting of young Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, his legacy and his family’s continuing legacy, a lightening strike heard around the world that has forever changed how many people look at the self-destructive systems, laws, and policies that led to this senseless death. These obstacles to Peace include the war against young black men, the militarization of local police, mass incarceration, for-profit prisons and probation systems, and more that we have long focused on, and will continue to.

So, what’s the good news?

Today, Attorney General Eric Holder is visiting Ferguson as part of the Justice Department’s federal civil rights investigation.

“I realize there is tremendous interest in the facts of the incident that led to Michael Brown’s death, but I ask for the public’s patience as we conduct this investigation. The selective release of sensitive information that we have seen in this case so far is troubling to me. No matter how others pursue their own separate inquiries, the Justice Department is resolved to preserve the integrity of its investigation. This is a critical step in restoring trust between law enforcement and the community, not just in Ferguson, but beyond.”

Holder’s full statement is available here. He has ordered a third and last autopsy on Michael Brown to establish evidence, and finally freeing the family to bring him to rest. All this is happening as the county grand jury for Ferguson is convening to consider criminal charges, a result we might not know until mid-October, a result entrusted to St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch with a questionable track record who has refused calls for his recusal. 

In the meantime, Holder has fielded 40 new FBI investigators to canvas the area, interview witnesses, and collect evidence as part of the federal investigation. Justice awaits us.

Also, today, the Ferguson Police Department issued a list of new commitments. Again, we have to try not to be immediately skeptical, but again, we will have to wait and see. Here is the full announcement.

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The other day, we noted how effective body cams can be.

Make every policeman wear a body camera, a simple fix that has shown a dramatic 88% decline in the number of complaints about police, and a similar drastic reduction in the use of force and police brutality.

We asked that you sign the White House petition demanding these body cams for all police officers, and it has just reached over 100,000 signatures, a threshold that requires a direct response from the President.

Stay tuned.