That's the name of Marian Douglas' new blog, a "media/society research information website." Read Marian's announcement of the project on her personal blog and go check out Coming Out Colored. Looks like a blog that should be interesting to follow.
Fridays we crossed the George Washington Bridge
to sit at her table.
Each time, she said, as if sure
he would forget, “Sol, what about the boy?
Give the boy his wine . . .”
Here she is:
my mother’s mother,
propped on the metal frame she pushes this way, through the grass.
On the bench, my grandfather sits behind an open NY Times—
my grandmother speaks for him.
Not even certain whom she speaks to,
she nonetheless says,
“Sol was wondering
When you’ll get a haircut . . .”
She is at her ease, now, outdoors, in her wheelchair,
the attendant beside her: at times
rising from her seat, as if to instruct or to remember—
the two of them chatting like dear friends.
Most of the trees are still bare.
The two women have coats on.
From the window, heat comes off
the stove coils.
At the far end of the yard
the dark pines sway.
It just so happens that this year Mother's Day falls on the same weekend that much of the Jewish world is observing Yom Ha'shoah, also known as Holocaust Remembrance Day (which fell on Thursday). This post started as a sort of personal history of coming to terms with the impact of the Shoah on my family. As the writing got underway, I realized that this is also a tribute to my mother and in the original spirit of Mother's Day.
Yom Ha'shoah is an occasion that I find hard to speak about. Grades 1-8 I went to a Jewish parochial school in Albany, New York, where Yom Ha'shoah was an occasion to barrage the students, even when very young, with gruesome statistics, names of death camps, images of wasted bodies, heaps of corpses, gas chambers, ovens, tales of selection lines where Dr. Mengele motioned prisoners either towards death or forced labor. . . Such experiences, common amongst American Jewish children, do not equip us with good tools for coping with and understanding our history.
I am fortunate that while commemorations at school and elsewhere in the Jewish community were along the lines of what I describe, above, my mother has had other ways of approaching the past. My mother used to teach kindergarten at the school I went to. In her class and in our home, over unfathomable death and evil she emphasized the life that was before the Shoah. After all, Europe had been home to a rich and varied Jewish civilization for roughly 1000 years before Hitler carried out his plans.
In her classroom, this meant things like teaching Eastern European Jewish children's games from The Shtetl Book and yiddish songs. And throughout the cycle of Jewish holidays, she would integrate curriculum on the life of Eastern European Jews. That may not seem so radical, but those familiar with Jewish history will know that since the turn of the twentieth century, Zionist ideology energetically promoted Hebrew over Yiddish and the Eastern European way of life it came from. For baby boomers and the next generation or so after them, negative attitudes towards the culture of Eastern European Jewry were compounded by the trauma of the Shoah.
For most, the struggle against Yiddish was rooted in a hatred of anything that was connected with the "Diaspora," considered to be marked by self-deprecation and cringing submission to non-Jews, a culture that was thoroughly second-rate, lacking in any estimable qualities, counterfeit and meretricious.
This image of the Diaspora was for a long time central to Zionism. As the American historian Howard Sachar notes in his A History of Zionism (vol. I, l986, p. 718), the dominant Zionist image of the overseas Jewish community was one of "half men, or at least an inferior breed of half Jews." The original Israeli reaction to the Holocaust was also shaped by this image. The millions of victims were considered cowardly, as one Israeli scholar put it, "inferior human beings that went like lambs to the slaughter." (Dina Porat, The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David, Cambridge, Mass, l990, p. 239)
Yiddish, the language of most of those miserable "half Jews" earned equal contempt, if not outright hatred. As Benjamin Harshav points out in his brilliant Language and Revolution (Berkeley, l993, p. 157), the conventional wisdom, "first formulated most harshly by Moses Mendelssohn, [held] that Yiddish was a perverted language, reflecting the perversion of the soul of the Diaspora Jew. The revulsion from it," Harshav continues," is a recoil from Diaspora existence, from the Yiddish language--the mother tongue, intimate and hated at the same time, from the parental home of the shtetl, corroded by idleness and Jewish trading, and from the irrational and primitive behavior of the Hasidim."
In my family, my mother's passion for preserving and understanding the life of our ancestors meant that she became the genealogist and historian for her side of the family. Beginning in the early 1980s, she began interviewing her parents and their siblings and some of their cousins about the family's history. She also began collecting and cataloging family photographs and negatives. She started studying Yiddish, which her parents did not teach her to speak, though they were both fluent, and my grandfather was an aficionado of Yiddish literature. In the pursuit of Yiddish, she became a regular at Klez Kamp and attended the Yugentruf Yiddish Vokh.
My childhood community's response to the trauma and incalculable losses from Europe's genocide of the Jews was to transmit the trauma to its children. The content and the intensity with which it was conveyed made it impossible for me to meaningfully engage the history of European antisemitism until I was in well into my twenties. While I know this was true for others, in the Jewish community at large, there are also many for whom this adds up to a Jewish identity defined largely by the Shoah and support of the State of Israel.
My mother's response as an educator and within her own family has been to model a love of the life that once was and to try to find authentic continuities between the past of her grandparents and the present of her children. In many ways, my mother's family history work culminated in a trip she organized to Poland and Belarus in May, 2000. My mother's first cousin Norman, my sister Jessica and I all joined her for 20 days in Eastern Europe—ten days of mostly touristy travel in Poland and ten days of travel through the small villages and towns that had been the shtetls of my family. Because of my mother's decades of persistence, we knew the names of the towns where each of my maternal grandparents were born and where each of their parents (my great-grandparents) had lived, and where some of the generation before that, my great great grandparents, had lived.
Many of the little villages that we came to seemed mostly unchanged in the century that had elapsed since my family had lived there. It was an amazing catharsis to walk along the dirt roads and by the houses and buildings and fields and trees in places that had only been mythic names in our family lore.
*** *** ***
Every former shtetl that we visited had at one time been 60-90% Jewish. Now they have Jewish populations of zero. The exception was the first place we went to, Radashkovitz, outside of Minsk, where my mother's mother was born. There was one Jewish woman who still lived there, a fifty-something daughter of parents who survived WWII in Russia's Red Army and then returned to Radashkovitz after the war. In Minsk, we met a man in his eighties who was born in Radashkovitz but now lives primarily in the capital city.
In the center of almost every town, was a memorial, erected in the memory of the town's Jews who had been shot and buried en masse by the Nazi's in the early 1940s, before the Final Solution was underway with its mass deportations and death camps. Some of the memorials were on the outskirts of town, by the mass graves. Unlike the one pictured here, from the town of Volpa, the memorials were usually very well maintained. (The two dark holes in the center of the monument are where the plaque stating the its purpose had been ripped off. The steel spike on top had been mounted with a decorative ornament. The concrete was broken and chipped all around.)
On a few occasions there were elderly non-Jews in town who had vivid memories of the Jews among whom they'd lived when they were young. Unlike Poland, relations among Jews and non-Jews in the Pale of Settlement (more) were reasonably good. The voices of the elderly men and women, who spoke to us through our translator, trembled with emotion. They were narrating the rending of the fabric of Jewish life, of which they had been part. Some of them remembered words of Yiddish, which my mother and her cousin Norman understood. These words, a few scattered buildings, and the cemeteries, memorials and mass graves were all that was left of the Jews who had lived there.
Very quickly, as I saw my first one of these sorts of memorials, when were in Radashkovitz, I remembered stories about other members of our family who had never come over to America. There were relatives with whom my grandparents and their siblings had corresponded up through the inter-war period. No one knows what happened to them. I realized that these memorials were to my own relatives, as well as to their friends. These were memorials to their lives, in every sense of the word.
In the knapsack I carried into Radoshkovits, with my camera and notebook, I also had instinctively decided to pack a small sized siddur, a Jewish prayer book. At that first memorial, near the center of that little village on a hill, I asked my mother to join me in reciting the Mourner's Kaddish, the prayer that Jews say to affirm life in honor their dead. We recited the Kaddish at every memorial and mass grave in each place we visited.
Though we were told by our guides that there would be Jewish cemeteries to visit, we did not anticipate that the Nazis would have left so many of them intact. Many were overgrown. Some were better maintained than others. Because the cemeteries were one of the primary vestiges of the Jewish life that had been, we often spent considerable time wandering around in them, in part to look for stones with the family names on them, in part to capture what bits of the town's life that we could in the inscriptions and in the feeling of the place.
In the shtetls, most people could not afford the sorts of stones we think of when we think of cemeteries. Many were low stones, partially swallowed up by the earth and grown over with grass. Many of the larger ones were also quite worn, and frequently difficult to read. And there were often broken tombstones, which are a terrible sight to see, but we became accustomed to them as part of the shattered Jewish landscape of Eastern Europe.
Because both of my mother's parents came to America as infants at the turn of the twentieth century (and my father's were born here), I never used to think of myself as personally touched by the Shoah. Traveling to Belarus to follow my mother's lead into the life that our family left behind was also a journey into the unavoidable reality of death which had so consumed the Jewish community I grew up in. It was, after all, the 1970s, only three decades since the Shoah.
Some of my school teachers bore blue concentration camp numbers on their arms. Many of my teachers of Judaica seemed to have a sort of frantic intensity about how they taught us Bible, Hebrew language, religious practice, and Jewish history. It was as if we, the students, represented an impossible and fleeting opportunity for them to transmit what they knew of the Jewish civilization that Europe had burned, gassed, shot, starved and bombed out of existence. In their own way, my teachers were trying to do exactly what my mother was doing.
When I was 31, my mother's approach to transmitting Jewish life came full circle to the death it had been meant to counter. Thanks to her, I have an understanding of my people deeper than I ever could have imagined.
---
Photos: Jewish Cemetery, Volpa, Belarus (Benjamin T. Greenberg).
Volpa is not one of the shtetls of my mother's family. We also visited a couple of places from my cousin Norman's father's side. Norman and my mother are cousins through my mother's mother and his mother, who were sisters. I include these photos at this time because most of my photos from this trip are slides, which I have not digitized. I shot the photos from Volpa on regular film, and therefore have prints that I can easily scan.
Her recent escapades were the second time she's behaved in such a manner.
[T]he fleet-footed bride had fled before. Friends and other relatives of the former flame also confirmed the doomed engagement.
"They had picked out an engagement ring and put it on layaway and were looking at houses to buy together," the former fiancé's wife said.
"They never consummated their relationship," the woman added. "She claimed she wanted to wait [for marriage]. He said he was fine to have sex, but it was her decision."
When Wilbanks suddenly reversed course and dumped him, "He was shocked, and he was hurt," the woman said.
And she has a criminal record (registration required).
Court records show that Wilbanks was arrested three times in that county on shoplifting charges from 1996 to 1998.
In 1996, as district attorney, Sartain prosecuted Wilbanks for allegedly shoplifting $1,740 in merchandise from a Gainesville mall, court records show. Sartain dropped the felony charge after Wilbanks, then 24, completed a pretrial diversion program, the records show. Wilbanks performed 75 hours of community service and paid restitution, according to court records.
Months before that felony arrest, police had charged Wilbanks with misdemeanor shoplifting for allegedly taking $37.05 in merchandise from a Gainesville Wal-Mart. Court records show that officials dismissed the case after Wilbanks completed "Project Turnabout," a six-week counseling program for shoplifters.
In fact, she could use a little rough handling. If the cops don't teach her lesson now, at age 33, by age 40 she'll be knocking off banks and engaged in prostitution. Mark my words...
Let's hope the police investigate Jennifer's parents, too, since Jennifer's misbehavior must surely be reflective of their parenting. I mean how could Mr. and Mrs. Wilbanks give John Mason their blessing for the engagement without telling him about their daughter's history of immoral and criminal behavior?
[L]ast August, Harris Wilbanks got a call from the man his daughter was dating. Could Mr. and Mrs. Wilbanks join him for dinner?
At the dinner, Mason produced a diamond ring. The younger man asked the elder one for permission to marry his daughter.
"He did it the old-fashioned way," Harris Wilbanks recalled. "I couldn't ask for a finer Christian son-in-law."
His daughter eventually moved into Mason's home as the couple prepared for their wedding. As devout Christians, Mason said, they lived chaste lives together, agreeing not to consummate their relationship until they said their vows in front of God and 600 friends April 30.
I bet they knew exactly what their daughter was up to when she "disappeared."
What on earth is wrong with these white, Christian, heterosexual families?
(via Steve Gilliard.)
Between 1992 and 2002, nationwide violent crimes at schools against students aged 12 to18 dropped by 50%.
Between 1994 and 2002, the youth arrest rate for violent crimes has declined 47% nationally.
From 1974 to 2000, the number of students suspended out-of-school increased from 1.7 million to 3.1 million. Research conducted over the past five years has detailed the growing use of suspensions for trivial conduct, much of which is subjectively labeled “disrespect,” “disobedience,” and “disruption.”
While national data is not available, data from various districts indicate the growing trend toward using arrests to address school disciplinary matters. For example, the number of arrests in Philadelphia County schools has increased from 1,632 during the 1999–2000 school year to 2,194 in 2002–2003.
In 2002, of the 4,002 arrests of youths by Houston Independent School District Police, 660, or almost 17%, were for disruption (disruptive activities, disruption of classes, and disruption of transportation). Another 1,041 arrests, or 26%, were for disorderly conduct.
From Stop The Schoolhouse To Jailhouse Track, a website to support the recent Advancement Project report, Schools On Lockdown(PDF).
Even 5-Year-Olds Have Civil Rights
By Lester Kenyatta Spence*, AOL BlackVoices columnist
I still don’t see how someone can agree with what happened in Florida just because teachers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. But people all over the country are agreeing, and many of them are black people.
Black people who believe in this claptrap are being hoodwinked into believing that our rights are based on something close to black perfection. It isn’t the first time.the civil rights movement would have looked a lot different if Rosa Parks was a single mother with a drinking problem.
Here is a lesson in American Citizenship 101: You do not have to act “right” to be treated like a citizen. You do not have to act “right” to be guaranteed an education. Wake up (emphasis added).
Granted, you can’t break the law, but we’re not talking about law breaking here.
We’re talking about a 5-year-old kid who had a couple of bad days at school. She wasn’t packing. She didn’t threaten to blow up the school. She didn’t get caught with weed in her locker. She wasn’t caught having sex in one of the bathrooms.
She.
Had.
A
Temper.
Tantrum.
That’s IT.
Racism in America has sunk to an all-time low
Baltimore Editorial Staff, The Afro American Newspapers
There must have been a better way to handle that situation.
First, the principal, rather than waiting for the student's mother to come to the school, invited the police to come in and inflame the situation. And the police, rather than reassessing the situation when they saw how quiet the child had become, shackled and "perp walked" the kindergartner, no doubt terrifying the child.
There must have been a better way.
A St. Louis principal was suspended, according to CNN, in a similar situation. The police spokesman in that case said handcuffing 5-year-olds "is not the practice of the department."
"Handcuffing indicates an arrest is being made," said Roxanne Evans of the D.C. Public Schools Office of Communications and Public Information. "In DCPS, a 5-year-old has not yet reached the age of reason to be charged with a crime. Therefore, there would be no reason for a 5-year-old to be handcuffed."
According to Baltimore City Public School System spokeswoman Vanessa Pyatt, the local policy is the use of passive restraint. The policy's description is disseminated annually to families in the "Information Guide for Parents and Students." She said a student would never be handcuffed without having been charged with a crime and being formally under arrest, which has never happened in our system to a 5-year-old.
School police would be called in because policy demands they be notified when situations erupt, but the goal is always that they be handled internally.
Florida apparently has no such policy.
The police procedures used to take that child into custody are reserved for people under arrest, who are violent, dangerous and might pull out a weapon and injure the arresting officer. None of those elements existed; therefore, there must have been another motive for such rash, demonstrative and dramatic action (emphasis added)
"Children need to have hope that they can succeed, and they need family stability and adults they can trust. They also need counseling when trauma affects them," said Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund, in reference to a similar case. "At critical points in their development, however, from birth through adulthood, a disproportionate number of poor children of color lack access to these important keys to healthy development and struggle to compete on an unequal playing field. Many fall inexorably behind. The pipeline to prison robs children of their God-given birthrights to opportunity, fulfillment and self-actualization, making it far more likely that they will end up behind bars" (emphasis added).
*Lester K. Spence is also a blogger over at Vision Circle.
Bright Eyes on the Tonight Show, channeling Bob Dylan.
Watch it (Quicktime) or download the bittorrent file (via Downhill Battle).
(via Professor Kim.)
Quote of note: We don't think it will bring any new evidence. Mississippi officials should do what's right by interviewing the people who know about Till's murder and redress the past inequity of this case.
The Justice Department announced its plans to exhume Emmett Till's body on Tuesday. In today's Chicago Defender, Bertha Thomas, a cousin and president of the Emmett Till Foundation, says that she and other family members learned of the FBI's plans through news outlets. Thomas also said:
Till's mother, Mamie Till Mobley, never asked for an autopsy prior to her death in 2003.
She was a quiet soul and was not vindictive. She just wanted an apology from the state of Mississippi before she died, Thomas said.
Thomas and some family members are at odds about whether the exhumation is necessary and what it would reveal.
Simeon Wright and Wheeler Parker were with Emmett when he was taken, and they feel there should be an autopsy, she said. But they're the only ones, to my knowledge, who feel this way. My uncle, who's the executor of Mamie's estate, disagrees with them, too.
This goes right to the heart of the questions I've been asking about how Civil Rights era murder cases are pursued and to what end. Justice in this case means identifying and prosecuting the murderers and acknowledging Mississippi's role in harboring them.
Two men, storeowner Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, were charged and acquitted of the murder. They bragged about the crime three months later in a Look magazine article.
The state (of Mississippi) and the FBI allowed sanctuaries for these racial terrorists and other who helped kill Emmett Till, Jackson said. We want to know who these people are. We do not want a grandstanding event on the remains of Emmett Till.
It is perverse that the Department of Justice is looking to Emmett Till himself to resolve questions of responsibility for state sanctioned racial murders of the past. Clearly the place to start is living suspects and witnesses and those that shielded them from justice in the past.
Further reading on Emmett Till (via Civil Rights Movement Veterans):
• Lynching of Emmett Till (In Search of Heroes)
• Murder of Emmett Till (American Experience, PBS)
• Murder of Emmett Till (African American History)
• They Stand Accused James Hicks (Cleveland Call)
• Death of Emmett Till (Bob Dylan song)
Blackwell Raines left another good comment on Monday, relating the Ja'eisha Scott story to the Jennifer Wilbanks story.
[T]he great charters--Constitution, Bill of Rights--of U.S. democracy can't just be real and consequential for some, and mere half-remembered school history for others. A basic premise in all the talk of government is the dignity of personhood. And yes, this principle extends to the very young, especially to a 5-year old, who cannot speak for themselves, or process through the events of an heavily-handcuffed arrest by three uniformed adults.
This doctrine comes with the expectation that every citizen is to be treated and accorded the equality of respect that comes with being a human being and citizen. It regards each person as an equal unit of importance because that person exist, not because given members of an institution chooses to disqualify certain persons based upon ethnic and socioeconomic grounds. . . .
A state away, over the weekend, a middle class white female was reported to have petpetuated a hoax: runaway bride: "bride-to-be gets cold feet," decides to disappear. Kidnapping was suspected, and later with the surfacing of the would-be bride, an alleged fabricated story was told to authorities. The search for the missing bride had involved 100 people on various government levels. Yet, upon learning of the fabrication, and seeing the bride-to-be arrive safely back in her hometown, there has been little criticism. In a carefully crafted statement, the police, called the experience most stressing--that is, for the bride-to-be. No charges have been filed the 32-year-old.
Institutions have long memories, and carry out their own aims and goals. The 5-year-old, acting up in kindergarten, is quickly claimed as disposable. The 32-year-old is deemed valued, and even criticism of her actions is muted, despite learning her disappearance a hoax. Accordingly, we're told the 32-year-old needs to have private time with her family, given the stress of it all. (Part of her disappearance was to Vegas.)
Two headline-grabbing examples, with the dignity of personhood being honored in one case, and summarily dismissed in the other, despite one being a very young child. But both are female.
In both instances, the institutions made judgment calls--they expressed harsh, severe reaction based upon the perceived social value of one person, while with the other, expressions of leniency, sympathetic support and even empathy, applying a different social value.
Interesting to note, there exist another disparity between the stories, on a different level: the 32-year-old received no heavy negative commentary of having been spoiled, of being overly privileged, or simply, of being too selfish, although much had been spent and scheduled for her Saturday wedding, and equally, much expense given in searching for her. . . .
Criticisms leveled against the mother of the 5-year-old are also anecdotal, and worst. They are too ready, too often, to cavalierly dismiss the brutalization of a 5-year-old as of no real consequence, a necessary function of order. They provide the strawperson argument that protests against criminalization and brutalization of minorites by institutions is, in reality, no more than an attempt to manufacture cover for wrongdoing. Even an excuse for malcontents.
It should be note that brutalization and criminalization is rarely defined by the administering of physical blows. This is why adults can win litigation efforts after citing "mental anguish" and "emotional abuse."
I'm only quoting the end of this piece by Joe McNally about his family's trip south on a Civil Rights historical tour. It's worth reading the whole thing.
Photo IDs replace dogs, hoses in push to nix rights
By Joel McNally
April 30, 2005Republicans in Madison who are trying to throw up obstacles to disenfranchise minorities would not like to think of themselves as modern-day versions of the illiterate thugs who blew up black churches and murdered civil rights workers in the '50s and '60s.
For the most part, they may not be motivated by explicit racism. They are merely seeking petty political advantage (emphasis added). The end justifies the means just as it did four years ago when Florida officials blocked every minority vote they could to put into office a president who came in second nationally.
At the very least, Republicans who seek to add requirements to make voting more difficult for African Americans and Latinos display a callous lack of regard for the monumental struggle and the lives that were lost to win the vote for racial minorities.
They're as willfully ignorant as the grande dame of Birmingham in a CBS-TV documentary from the '50s re-broadcast in one of the civil rights museums we visited.
Denying racial prejudice in Birmingham, the society matron proudly noted a black school child had won a citywide art contest. Of course, by law, the black child wasn't allowed into the public library to see the display of his winning entry.
All it took was a couple of phone calls from the important woman to get special permission for the black child and his family to enter the library after hours to view the honor bestowed upon his work. If requiring photo IDs doesn't turn away enough minority voters, we can always go back to the dogs and fire hoses.
Perhaps it's splitting hairs, but I'll part company from Joe ever so slightly. Though I think he is absolutely correct about the pragmatics of Republican voter suppression tactics, I believe the engineers of disenfranchisement also understand the wider effects of their local acts of suppression. Even when disenfranchisement laws are shot down and voter challengers are barred from the polls, continuous airing and consideration of bogus Republican claims about fraudulent voters have a desired effect. The voters in question are sent the message that powerful members of our society don't think they deserve the basic rights of American citizens. Pragmatic tactics to keep Democratic voters from the polls are also intended to reinforce feelings of exclusion and suppress the political will of low-income people and people of color.
That's another choice phrase from Joe McNally:
Finally someone has identified a voting problem we can do something about.
Even though the media have gone berserk since the presidential election trying to justify inflammatory Republican Party claims of vote fraud in Milwaukee, they have failed to identify a single fraudulent vote.
What the local newspaper says it has found - after sacrificing hundreds of acres of trees to a muddled investigation - is that at least 82 convicted felons, who had not yet had their voting rights restored, may have voted in the November election.
That is similar to the newspaper's claim after the 2000 presidential election that convicted felons may have voted illegally.
At that time, District Attorney E. Michael McCann charged three convicted felons with voting when they were ineligible. Those charges ultimately were dropped because prosecutors couldn't prove that the three knew they weren't allowed to vote.
There is a very simple solution to this problem. Legalize all voting by convicted felons. There are a number of compelling reasons to do so, not the least of which is the embarrassment of charging citizens in a democracy with committing the act of voting.
In fact, the state of Wisconsin already recognizes the importance of allowing convicted felons to vote. Some convicted felons are allowed to vote in Wisconsin and others are not. That is probably the primary reason ineligible felons erroneously commit such a heinous act of citizenship. . . .
So why should law-abiding citizens care about whether felons are allowed to vote or not? The most obvious reason is that law-abiding citizens should be concerned about creating more law-abiding citizens. It's the same reason only people who haven't thought about it would support shortsighted efforts of politicians to allow employers to discriminate against convicted felons in hiring.
If an ex-offender can't get a legitimate job, he doesn't have much choice except to return to some illegitimate means of survival. For public safety, everyone has an interest in trying to help convicted felons reintegrate into the legitimate life of the community.
We all should be able to tell the difference between crime and good citizenship. The charges filed by McCann after the 2000 election threatened to send three ex-offenders back to prison for violating their parole. It was not for committing a crime that endangered their community, but for trying to improve their community by voting.
Disenfranchising those convicted of felonies further marginalizes people who already feel marginalized in our society. It also extends the racial bias of the criminal justice system to the right to vote. . . .
Of course, Republican attempts to make voting difficult have nothing to do with fairness. They reflect a crass political calculation that requirements such as a driver's license and photo ID card for voting turn away more Democrats than Republicans.
It's in the best interest of democracy to convict more Republican CEOs and legislative leaders. Then both parties will get interested in restoring the vote to convicted felons.
(Whole thing.)
Voting rights, right voting demand a return to basics
By Joel McNally
April 23, 2005The attempt by Wisconsin Republicans to reduce voting by undesirables such as the elderly and the poor is laudable. But it doesn't go nearly far enough.
Frankly, Republicans aren't thinking conservative enough. It's time someone had the political courage to stand up and demand a return to voting as originally envisioned by our founding fathers.
Voting in Wisconsin should be limited to wealthy, white, male property owners.
Requiring a photo ID to exercise the rights of citizenship is a good first step to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of old people and poor folks who don't have driver's licenses or state ID cards.
But we won't be absolutely sure that all possibility of vote fraud has been eliminated until we eliminate all of those who cannot be trusted to vote correctly. . . .
President Bush calls it "the ownership society." It's only fair that the people who own everything should be the ones to call all the shots, including who should be elected to public office.
After all, wealthy, white males already pay the most for the candidates who run for public office. They should be assured of getting the elected officials they pay for.
The poor, on the other hand, rarely attend political fundraisers. If they did, they would be shown the door for glomming free food. There are givers, and there are takers. The poor are not givers.
The character flaws of the poor make them easy prey for vote fraud. A few years ago in Milwaukee, there was a flap about a Democratic supporter giving free cigarettes to homeless people to get them to vote.
It was reminiscent of the old-time, big-city machines that used to liquor up derelicts and send them in to vote. You could never buy the votes of wealthy, white males with a few cigarettes and shots of cheap booze. They already smoke the finest cigars and drink expensive scotch.
You can't buy Republican votes for anything less than billions of dollars in tax giveaways and elimination of major environmental regulations. . . .
In these times, you also can anticipate loud complaints from the "something-for-nothing" crowd about only allowing white people to vote. You can always count on some people to play the race card.
We cheapen voting when we allow just anyone to do it. Maybe, one day, when African Americans prove they are responsible enough to handle the vote without using it to elect a lot of shysters and flim-flammers, we can consider giving them full rights. Maybe we can start out by counting them as four-fifths of a man.
Until then, the people who have the greatest stake in our society - wealthy, white, male property owners - should not have their votes diluted by the votes of a lot of riff-raff.
Wisconsin needs to return to voting as it was originally intended to end the public embarrassment of going Democratic in presidential elections and electing Democrats to the governor's office and the U.S. Senate.
(Whole thing.)
The latest one I've heard about was in Queens, NY (via Laurence at Blogging While Black):
Haitian Children Forced to Eat Like Animals
It's the kind of spat that flares thousands of times a day in schools all over the country.
But at Public School 34 in Queens Village, Assistant Principal Nancy Miller's ghastly way of handling a minor scuffle between two Haitian fourth-graders has sparked fury.
According to parents and students, Miller, who is white, chose to punish all 13 Haitian pupils in the school's only fourth-grade bilingual class - even though just two were involved in the March 16 incident.
She ordered all 13 to sit on the cafeteria floor, then made them use their fingers to eat their lunch of chicken and rice, while all the other students watched.
"In Haiti, they treat you like animals, and I will treat you the same way here," several students recalled Miller saying.
http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/queensoutrage.html
http://lefthook.org/Politics/JG041305.html
This one is a close cousin of the one about the abusive treatment of African American siblings at Tyrone Elementary School, in Pinellas County, FL.
Florida has a particularly abysmal record when it comes to criminalizing small children, but the problem is actually a national epidemic. In the last couple of years, there have been a number of other stories about children under twelve being handcuffed. This list is just what I culled quickly from Zero Intelligence, a group blog "dedicated to keeping an eye on, and pointing out the excesses of, bad school policies and actions . . . [with] a particular focus on zero tolerance policies." I'm sure a serious Google session would yield more . . .
• Williamsburg, VA: Police Arrest 8-Year-Old After Alleged Outburst in Williamsburg Elementary School
The four-foot pupil was led away from Williamsburg's Rawls Byrd Elementary School in handcuffs Tuesday and charged with disorderly conduct and assault and battery.
• Ocala, FL: Boys arrested for stick figure drawings
Two Florida students, one 9 years old and the other 10 years old, were arrested and taken out of school in handcuffs. They are being charged with "making a written threat to kill or harm another person", a felony.
One drawing showed the two boys standing on either side of the other boy and "holding knives pointed through" his body, according to a police report. The figures were identified by written names or initials.
• Tuscaloosa, AL: County officials defend handcuffing
Deputy Antonio Bostic handcuffed a 9-year-old fourth-grader at Holt Elementary School (in the Tuscaloosa County School System). This action followed a non-violent verbal argument between the student and her gym teacher and was apparently done to "teach the girl a lesson". Toniko L. Alexander, the girls mother, sued and the County is busy defending the officer's actions.
Another teacher overheard the argument from across the gymnasium and ordered the student to come speak with her, according to the complaint.
While the girl was walking to the teacher, Bostic intervened and ordered her to come speak with him, insisting that he handle the situation when the other teacher said she could take care of it.
According to the complaint, Bostic stood the girl in a doorway, placed handcuffs on her and told her: “This is what happens to people when they break the law," and “This is how it feels to be in jail."
The girl remained handcuffed for 10 minutes while her classmates looked on. Since this happened she has a fear of law enforcement officials in general and Bostic in particular. The complaint also claims that she suffered "internal bleeding, bruising, severe personal embarrassment, public humiliation and continuing mental anguish, including nightmares and crying spells".
• Houston, TX: 11 year-old girl arrested at school for shoving match that happened a week previous
It started as a shoving incident, and then one of the two girls was suspended for two days. But then parents of the girl who wasn't suspended simply were not satisfied with Cy-Fair's punishment so they filed a complaint and had the other student arrested.
...
The 11-year-old girl was arrested, handcuffed, photographed and fingerprinted after she was picked up from Walker Elementary. She and her mom say there had been a shoving incident last week. She says the other girl wound up with a bloody nose, that she was suspended for two days and thought it would end there.
The increases in these kinds of cases occurs at the same time that violent crime in schools has dropped dramatically in the last decade. Here's Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund:
Increased criminalization of children is occurring despite a recent federal report that shows violent crime in schools fell 50 percent between 1992 and 2002. The growing reliance on police and courts to manage children with mental health, behavioral, learning and other issues merits the attention of parents, educators, faith leaders, and lawmakers. We must prevent the juvenile justice system from continuing as a dumping ground for poor and minority children with serious emotional and behavioral problems. Minority youth make up 34 percent of the adolescent population but 62 percent of youth in detention. (Emphasis added.)
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