Race And Achievement: Balancing The Debate

The iPhone has its origins in America's constitution. One person one vote is heady stuff. Nepal and America were at similar levels of socio-economic development when America was born. But America was born out of democratic revolution, Nepal was born out of feudal conquest. And what a difference revolution has made.

The big broad picture in America is there is so much that works. The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India, recently made news because he has started work on what is the 911 service in America. You call 911 and the voice on the other end says, "What's your emergency?" Uttar Pradesh does not have that. It wants it. America has it.

So talk of intersection of law enforcement and race in America has to be balanced out with the fact that police service exists. But that appreciation also should keep the hunger alive. A more perfect union is always the goal. There is always room for improvement. The entire country struggles with race, so it is no surprise that law enforcement does. They don't operate in a vacuum.

There was a point in time when humanity had not yet discovered the human blood circulation system. I feel like on race we are at a point where not enough theoretical work has been done to give the right framework to the debates. Diversity is natural, almost like biology. As that appreciation seeps deeper among peoples, that will help.

On Racism and White Privilege

I am eager to see President Obama's criminal justice reform take shape. I am looking forward to it. I believe it will be quite a milestone.

President Obama: "Our Criminal Justice System Isn't as Smart as It Should Be"

A growing body of research shows that people of color are more likely to be stopped, frisked, questioned, charged, detained. African Americans are more likely to be arrested. They are more likely to be sentenced to more time for the same crime. And one of the consequences of this is, around one million fathers are behind bars. Around one in nine African American kids has a parent in prison. ...... Our nation is being robbed of men and women who could be workers and taxpayers, could be more actively involved in their children’s lives, could be role models, could be community leaders,

and right now they’re locked up for a non-violent offense

. ....... Last year, in fact, America's crime rate and incarceration rate both went down at the same time, for the first time in 40 years. ..... the three key areas in which we need to focus on reform: the community, the courtroom, and the cell block. ......

"The best time to stop [crime] is before it even starts," President Obama said, reiterating the need to invest in America's children. "If we make investments early in our children, we will reduce the need to incarcerate those kids."

....... One study shows that for every dollar that we invest in preschool, we save at least twice that over the long run in crime reduction. And summer jobs for teenagers are only a fraction of the cost of incarceration down the road. ......

strengthen community-police relationships across the country

...... we need to shorten the mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes, or eliminate them entirely....... We need to ask prosecutors to use their discretion to seek the best punishment, the one that's going to be most effective, instead of just the longest punishment. We should invest in alternatives to prison, like drug courts and treatment and probation programs -- which ultimately can save taxpayers thousands of dollars per defendant each year. ....... offering more job training for inmates. ..... if somebody in the midst of imprisonment recognizes the error of their ways, is in the process of reflecting about where they’ve been and where they should be going, we’ve got to make sure that they’re in a position to make the turn ....... the overuse of solitary confinement in our prisons, which is often more likely to make inmates more alienated, hostile, and violent. ...... It's unfair to put the entire burden on our police officers, our courtroom prosecutors, our judges, and our prison guards -- we have to invest in our communities, and we have to invest in expanding opportunity for all. ..... "Justice is not only the absence of oppression, it is the presence of opportunity. Justice is giving every child a shot at a great education no matter what zip code they’re born into. Justice is giving everyone willing to work hard the chance at a good job with good wages, no matter what their name is, what their skin color is, where they live."

Remarks by the President on Criminal Justice Reform

Over the course of this year, I’ve been talking to people all across the country about reforming our criminal justice system to be fairer, to be smarter, to be more effective. I’ve met with police chiefs and beat cops. I've met with prisoners, corrections officers. I've met with families of fallen police officers and families of children who were killed by gun violence. I've met with men and women battling drug abuse, and rehab coaches, and folks working on new solutions for treatment. ......

I have, at times, despaired about the magnitude of the problem.

...... disrupting the pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails. ...... We account for 5 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its inmates. They are disproportionately black and Latino. ...... almost all these individuals will eventually be released. More than 600,000 inmates are released each year. Around 70 million Americans have some sort of criminal record ...... the federal government is a big employer, as you know, and like a lot of big employers, on many job applications there’s a box that asks if you have a criminal record. If you answer yes, then a lot of times you’re not getting a call back. ...... a bill that would reduce mandatory minimums for non-violent offenders. It would invest in law enforcement. It would reward prisoners with time off if they complete programs that make it less likely that they will commit crimes in the future. .......

this is an area where we’ve seen some really strong bipartisan work

Obama Calls for Sweeping Criminal Justice Reforms in NAACP Speech

Obama called for reducing or eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, reviewing the use of the solitary confinement and barring employers from asking job applicants about their criminal history ...... Any system that allows us to turn a blind-eye to hopelessness and despair, that’s not a justice system,

that’s an injustice system

..... “Justice is not only the absence of oppression, it’s the presence of opportunity.” ..... the “strange bedfellows” that efforts to reform the criminal justice system have created, among them the Koch brothers and the NAACP. ...... the first sitting U.S. president to visit a federal prison

President Obama for the prisoners

the state of criminal justice in America. It is an aspect of American life that remains, in his words, “a source of inequity that has ripple effects on families and on communities and ultimately on our nation.” ...... disturbing statistics about the country’s incarceration rate, which is the highest in the world and riddled with racial discrepancies ..... sentencing reforms that would increase the discretion available to judges and prosecutors and either reduce or eliminate mandatory minimums. He called for changes to prisons that would reduce abuse, overcrowding and the use of solitary confinement, and increase job-training and drug-treatment programmes. He wants to restore voting rights to ex-felons and make it easier for ex-convicts to get jobs. He also proposed more investments in pre-school education, more humane community policing and more jobs for teenagers. .......

The $80 billion Mr Obama referred to is America’s annual corrections budget. That chunk of change might instead be used to fund universal pre-K for every 3- and 4-year-old, he opined, or to build bridges or double the salary of every high-school teacher. It could even be used, he said, to eliminate tuition at every public college and university.

........ “we need to be honest: there are a lot of folks who belong in prison.” The majority of state prisoners (54%) are behind bars for violent felonies. .......... most of America’s imprisonment takes place at the state level. So the real work of reducing mass incarceration falls to governors, police chiefs, sheriffs, prosecutors, judges, state legislators and activists around the country. The real challenge for them, then, is to convince voters of the benefits of reducing mass incarceration.

Obama pushes for ‘smarter, fairer’ criminal justice reforms

There have also been calls for reforms to policing policies around the country, particularly in minority communities, in large part because of the Black Lives Matter movement’s response to the killing of several unarmed black men and women by police officers.

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Race

President Obama Takes On the Prison Crisis

for the first time in American history, a president walked into a federal prison. President Obama was there to see for himself a small piece of the damage that the nation’s decades-long binge of mass incarceration has wrought. ...... a week in which he spoke powerfully about the failings of a criminal justice system that has damaged an entire generation of Americans, locking up millions — disproportionately men of color — at a crippling cost to them, their families and communities, as well as to the taxpayers and society as a whole. ..... “These are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes that I made, and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made. The difference is they did not have the kinds of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.” ...... people who commit violent crimes are not the reason for the exploding federal prison population over the last few decades. Most of the growth has come instead from nonviolent, low-level drug offenders caught up in absurdly harsh mandatory minimum sentences that bear no relation to the seriousness of their offense or to the maintenance of public safety. ...... “If you’re a low-level drug dealer, or you violate your parole, you owe some debt to society,” Mr. Obama said. “You have to be held accountable and make amends. But you don’t owe 20 years. You don’t owe a life sentence.” ...... Mandatory minimums like these should be reduced or eliminated completely, he said. Judges should have more discretion to shape sentences and to use alternatives to prison, like drug courts or community programs, that are cheaper and can be more effective at keeping people from returning to crime. ...... overuse of solitary confinement in which more than 80,000 inmates nationwide are held on any given day. Many are being punished for minor infractions or are suffering from mental illness...... the importance of removing barriers to employment, housing and voting for former prisoners. “Justice is not only the absence of oppression,” Mr. Obama said, “it is the presence of opportunity.” ..... Any comprehensive solution to this criminal justice catastrophe must come from Congress and the state legislatures which for decades enacted severe sentencing laws and countless other harmful measures. In recent years, the opposite trend has taken hold as lawmakers in both conservative and liberal states have reduced populations in state prisons — where the vast majority of inmates are held — as well as crime rates. ...... eliminate mandatory minimums for many low-level drug crimes and create educational and other programs in prison that have been shown to reduce recidivism. ..... One sign of how far the politics of criminal justice has shifted was a remark by former president Bill Clinton, who signed a 1994 law that played a key role in the soaring growth of America’s prison system. On Wednesday, Mr. Clinton said, “I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it.”

How ‘Privilege’ Became a Provocation

by the age of 10, white children don’t believe that black children feel the same amount of pain as they do, the first stage of dehumanization....... the grotesque contrast between the brutal police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and the treatment extended to Dylann Roof, charged with murdering nine black people last month in a church in Charleston, S.C. — captured alive, treated to a meal by the arresting officers, assigned a judge who expressed concern for his family. ..... the kinds of pressures we put on language, our stubborn belief that the right word can be both diagnosis and cure.

I, Racist

I had great reservations talking about the one topic that I think about every single day. ..... "The only difference between people in The North and people in The South is that down here, at least people are honest about being racist." ..... New York State is one of the most segregated states in the country. Buffalo, New York where my aunt lives is one of the 10 most segregated school systems in the country. ..... She doesn't need to realize that "better schools" exclusively means "whiter schools." ..... I don't talk about race with White people because I have so often seen it go nowhere. When I was younger, I thought it was because all white people are racist. Recently, I've begun to understand that it's more nuanced than that. ....... They have no need, nor often any real desire, to think in terms of a group. They are supported by the system, and so are mostly unaffected by it........ an incessantly repeating argument where a Black person says "Racism still exists. It is real," and a white person argues "You're wrong, I'm not racist at all. I don't even see any racism." My aunt's immediate response is not "that is wrong, we should do better." No, her response is self-protection: "That's not my fault, I didn't do anything. You are wrong." ......

Martin Luther King did not end racism.

......... Racism is the fact that "White" means "normal" and that anything else is different. ...... Benedict Cumberbatch playing Khan in Star Trek. Khan, who is from India. Is there anyone Whiter than Benedict fucking Cumberbatch? What? They needed a "less racial" cast because they already had the Black Uhura character? That is racism. Once you let yourself see it, it's there all the time......... The system was made for White people, so White people don't have to think about living in it....... Living every single day with institutionalized racism and then having to argue its very existence, is tiring, and saddening, and angering. Yet if we express any emotion while talking about it, we're tone policed, told we're being angry. In fact, a key element in any racial argument in America is the Angry Black person, and racial discussions shut down when that person speaks. The Angry Black person invalidates any arguments about racism because they are "just being overly sensitive," or "too emotional," or- playing the race card. Or even worse, we're told that we are being racist (Does any intelligent person actually believe a systematically oppressed demographic has the ability to oppress those in power?) ...........

The entire discussion of race in America centers around the protection of White feelings.

........ The reality of thousands of innocent people raped, shot, imprisoned, and systematically disenfranchised are less important than the suggestion that a single White person might be complicit in a racist system. ... This is the country we live in. Millions of Black lives are valued less than a single White person's hurt feelings.......... White people and Black people are not having a discussion about race. Black people, thinking as a group, are talking about living in a racist system. White people, thinking as individuals, refuse to talk about "I, racist" and instead protect their own individual and personal goodness. In doing so, they reject the existence of racism. ......... It's evident in the school to prison pipeline and the fact that there are close to 20 people of color in prison for every white person. ....... "Charleston shooting: Black and Muslim killers are 'terrorists' and 'thugs'. Why are white shooters called 'mentally ill'?" ....... America has a growing number of violent hate groups, populated mostly by white men, and that nearly *all* serial killers are white men can not shadow the fundamental truth of white male goodness. In fact, we like White serial killers so much, we make mini-series about them. .......... White people are good as a whole, and only act badly as individuals. .......... Racism is so deeply embedded in this country not because of the racist right-wing radicals who practice it openly, it exists because of the silence and hurt feelings of liberal America. ........ Racism exists because I, not you, am silent. .......... White people are in a position of power in this country because of racism.

Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person

I came from the kind of poor that people don't want to believe still exists in this country. Have you ever spent a frigid northern-Illinois winter without heat or running water? I have. At 12 years old were you making ramen noodles in a coffee maker with water you fetched from a public bathroom? I was. Have you ever lived in a camper year-round and used a random relative's apartment as your mailing address? We did. Did you attend so many different elementary schools that you can only remember a quarter of their names? Welcome to my childhood. ....... Poverty colors nearly everything about your perspective on opportunities for advancement in life. Middle-class, educated people assume that anyone can achieve their goals if they work hard enough. Folks steeped in poverty rarely see a life past working at the gas station, making the rent on their trailer, and self-medicating with cigarettes and prescription drugs until they die of a heart attack. (I've just described one whole side of my family and the life I assumed I'd be living before I lucked out of it.) ....... As a child I was constantly discriminated against because of my poverty, and those wounds still run very deep. ..... being a straight, white, middle-class, able-bodied male, can be like winning a lottery you didn't even know you were playing.

Why We Left

Everyone said, “I need a break,” but the subtext from my Black friends was screaming, “I needed to get out of the United States because I can not breathe.” ..... Most Black Americans, when shit starts hitting the fan, the walls, etc. — they can’t leave. ......... “Why are we even staying in a country that hates us?” someone asked me on Twitter. ..... racism in Paris can be acute, if not for African-Americans, most surely for the North Africans, whom I have been mistaken for on occasion. ..... Living while Black in America requires an intellectual and mental athleticism and finesse that has few peers. It is the startup of all startups. It is the ultimate marathon. Blackness demands from its cognizant participant a rigor and focus that can only produce majesty and mania. It is both heaven and hell. It is mercilessly reviled and hopelessly imitated. It is in short, a spiritual experience.

White Fragility

White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.

Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race

The journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings. Their eyes glaze over in boredom or widen in indignation. Their mouths start twitching as they get defensive. Their throats open up as they try to interrupt, itching to talk over you but not really listen, because they need to let you know that you’ve got it wrong. ...... they’ve never known what it means to embrace a person of colour as a true equal, with thoughts and feeling that are as valid as their own. ..... As the heckles rise and the defiance grows, I have to tread incredibly carefully, because if I express frustration, anger, or exasperation at their refusal to understand, they will tap into their pre-subscribed racist tropes about angry black people who are a threat to them and their safety. It’s very likely that they’ll then paint me as a bully or an abuser. It’s also likely that their white friends will rally round them, rewrite history and make the lies the truth. Trying to engage with them and navigate their racism is not worth that. ........ Amidst every conversation about Nice White People feeling silenced by conversations about race, there is a sort of ironic and glaring lack of understanding or empathy for those of us who have been visibly marked out as different for our entire lives, and live the consequences. It’s truly a lifetime of self-censorship that people of colour have to live. The options are: speak your truth and face the reprisal, or bite your tongue and get ahead in life. It must be a strange life, always having permission to speak and feeling indignant when you’re finally asked to listen. It stems from white people’s never questioned entitlement ...... I cannot continue to emotionally exhaust myself trying to get this message across, whilst also toeing a very precarious line that tries not to implicate any one white person in their role of perpetuating structural racism, lest they character assassinate me. ......... I don’t have a huge amount of power to change the way the world works, but I can set boundaries. I can halt the entitlement they feel towards me and I’ll start that by stopping the conversation. ..... Their intent is often not to listen or learn, but to exert their power, to prove me wrong, to emotionally drain me, and to rebalance the status quo.

Iran: Am I Running Late? Maybe Not

Iran Democracy

Image by break.things via Flickr

Iran's Uprising Continues -- From Prison Cells The Huffington Post News about Iran's Uprising is scarcely found on mainstream media these days...... few stories chronicle the constant struggle for democracy and human rights in Iran. This, however, does not mean that the struggle is dead. It is a daily struggle that continues ever vigorously. ..... there are so many incidents, and so many other major stories are waiting to be covered that updates about the continuing struggle for freedom are simply ignored ..... Majid Tavakoli is perhaps the most important student leader inside Iran right now..... many family members of prisoners have claimed that in the past two months, conditions are getting even worse. ..... as soon as news of the hunger strike found space in a few online social media networks, the Iranian government quickly cut-off phone services inside Evin's Ward 350 where the solitary confinement cells are located in an effort to prevent the news from further permeating through the blogosphere. ....... Kahrizak was an infamous detention center in Tehran where scores of detainees died from hunger, thirst, disease, and torture following the Iranian Uprising last year. ..... Staff were quoted as telling the prisoners that they had 'thrown the country into chaos' and now they were 'throwing the prison into chaos, too'. ..... opposition leader Mir Hussein Mousavi asked the prisoners to end their strike in a statement posted on his website ...... dozens of other stories that continue to come out of Iran. Surprisingly, finding them isn't hard. The time of millions wearing green in the streets seems to have passed. The government has resorted to absolute terror in an attempt to stifle the movement, but it lives through these brave men and others. What the Iranian people need is for free people to be their voice

I could not revive it in Burma. The uprising in Burma died in a matter of weeks, and when it died I felt like it might be another decade or so before we can revive the spirit there. Tibet is harder than Burma, more complex.

In Iran you see ambers right now. Are they dying ambers? Or are they ambers with which you can light the fire all over again?

Makes me so very angry with the dumbfucks in New York City who messed with me in June 2008. They took me away from the peace process in Nepal. They took me away from Iran. When the green revolution was in full swing would have been a great time to get involved. But I was too busy trying to pick up the pieces of my life at that point. I just didn't have the bandwidth.

It was such a waste. Such a grand loss.

The street show was impressive, but it was a politically immature revolution. All the shouting in a soccer stadium is enough energy to maybe make a cup of coffee. So much of the pain could have been avoided if the political homework had been done.

But I see hope. I think this work can be done. The spirit can be revived. But the work has to start in the diaspora. Asking the people to brave the streets again has to be the final step. And that part should not last more than a few weeks. Such has to be the political preparation beforehand.

Action 1: A tweet.

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