For 40 years, we have been waging a “war on drugs.” Families are being kicked out of housing when many have done nothing wrong. Drug addiction is bad. But the war on drugs is worse. Frances Johnson, a 68-year-old grandmother in Washington, D.C faced eviction simply because her grandson was arrested for possessing a small amount of marijuana.
Black children are twice as likely to enter U.S. foster care than white children. The culprit: our inattention to poverty.
The United Nations is sending a special observer to investigate the role that racism plays in the ordinary life of the United States.
Spike Lee is slamming Clint Eastwood over his two recent Iwo Jima movies, saying the filmmaker overlooked the role of black soldiers during World War II.
Last year, California State Senator George Runner fought against a plan to provide every Californian with health coverage — legislation that threatened the profits of his wealthy allies in the insurance industry.1
Now his friends, including the California Association of Health Underwriters (CAHU), are bankrolling Runner’s push for a disastrous new ballot initiative that moves money from public schools and hospitals to build more prisons. Runner’s plan singles out poor people and people of color for increased scrutiny and punishment, while pushing the state’s already strained budget closer to bankruptcy.
SACRAMENTO — Los Angeles Democrat Karen Bass vowed urgent action to address California’s budget crisis Tuesday when she was sworn in as Assembly speaker, the first African American woman to lead a legislative body in U.S. history.
Bass held no elected office before winning an Assembly seat in 2004 to represent a district that includes West Los Angeles, Culver City and Baldwin Hills. A physician assistant raised by a homemaker and mail carrier in the Venice-Fairfax area, Bass sought in the early 1990s to find solutions to drug addiction, gun violence and other social ills she witnessed treating emergency room patients.
The Community Coalition, a nonprofit group she founded, helped limit the number of liquor stores that reopened in South Los Angeles after the 1992 riots. The group also helped bring more laundromats and grocery stores to the area. It also worked to close low-rent motels and replace cigarette and alcohol billboards near schools.
In the Legislature, Bass is best known as a fierce advocate for the state’s roughly 80,000 foster children.
Police patrol the halls and specialists counsel students on the first school day following Friday’s campus melee.
About half of the students said the brawling was prompted by their peers — bored with school and ready to ignite, said intervention specialist Holly Priebe-Diaz.
Other students, she said, blamed ongoing racial tensions and gang problems. Historically black Watts has changed rapidly to a Latino-majority community, with gangs of both ethnicities claiming overlapping turf in the economically depressed streets. Locke’s student body is about 65% Latino and 35% African American.
“This is a microcosm of something bigger happening in the community,” Priebe-Diaz said.
The U.S. attorney is investigating his nonprofit group, a probe that an undeterred Sharpton brushes off as the kind of annoyance that civil rights figures have come to expect from the government.
“Whatever retaliation they do on me, we never stop,” he told the AP. “I think that that is why they try to intimidate us.”
She’s won the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes and recently received the PEN/Borders Literary Service Award. A new collection of her nonfiction, What Moves at the Margin, is out now. Toni Morrison takes questions. Source Time.com
Do you think that young black females are dealing with the same self-acceptance issues today as your character was in The Bluest Eye? —Francesca Siad, Calgary, Alta.
No, not at all. When I wrote the book, the young women who read it liked it [but] were unhappy because I had sort of exposed an area of shame. Nowadays I find young African-American women much more complete. They seem to have a confidence that they take for granted.
What a Nation gotta do to get some justice?
Civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton was arrested Wednesday as he and hundreds of demonstrators blocked traffic to protest the acquittal of three detectives in the 50-bullet shooting of an unarmed black man on his wedding day.
This sister offers a personal analysis of the Wright “controversy” and rightly asks us where do we go from here. Seems to me the whole issue points the way for us and further defines the reality that as always, regardless of who is President, we got work to do.
“If he will break with Wright in order to win the presidency, I wonder where he’ll land on policy issues that affect black people.”
read more . Source Black Agenda Report.
More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates.
Thousands of prisoners languish in jail for months, even years, before they are tried.
On Sept. 4, 21-year-old Joshua Pomier will have served nearly four years in a detention center near San Bernardino, Calif. Pomier is charged with multiple counts of car theft and robbery. There are two deeply troubling problems with the amount of time he has spent behind bars. One, he has not been convicted of any of the crimes he’s charged with. He had barely turned 18 years old when he and another juvenile were arrested for the crimes in September 2004. Pomier and family members vehemently protest his innocence. The even more tormenting problem is not Pomier’s guilt or innocence, but the absurdly long length of time that he has been jailed awaiting disposition, any disposition, of the charges leveled against him.
Five years ago, President Bush dressed up in a flight suit for a self-congratulatory photo op on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under a banner that proclaimed “Mission Accomplished”. Certainly, the war was not over then and victory was not achieved. The mission has been redefined several times and what the president hopes to accomplish in Iraq is unclear.
Some leaders in the Democratic Party are playing with fire. They think that they can betray the will of millions of voters and choose Hillary Clinton as the nominee, regardless of whether or not she is the choice of the voters. We can’t let this happen. It would be the largest disenfranchisement in modern history, and it would mean the Democratic Party giving their stamp of approval to a clear and consistent pattern of race-baiting by the Clinton campaign.
If we make our voices heard, we can stop it. Please join us in signing an open letter to leaders in the Democratic Party — DNC Chair Howard Dean, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and all superdelegates — demanding that they reject an outcome that involves trampling voting rights and legitimizing the politics of division and fear:
Wild Roots Media
