Open thread Wednesday.

This is open thread Wednesday.

Tell me whatever you want.

Feel free to comment on trump's trip South of the border today.

I thought that he was going to get in el presidente's grill and tell him in no uncertain terms that the Mexicans were going to pay for the wall. But alas, there was nothing. No mention of the wall. (Although the Mexicans say that trump is lying; there was talk of the wall.)



 

America in black and white.

My friend Solomon Jones wrote a very insightful and thoughtful article about America's latest case of fictus animo and racial double standard for Philly.com, and I think that it is worth sharing in its entirety.

"SAN FRANCISCO 49ers Quarterback Colin Kaepernick sits down during the national anthem to protest America's treatment of people of color, and he is accused of being a traitor to his country.

Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte is facing criminal charges in Brazil for falsely reporting he was robbed at gunpoint, and, while he lost several endorsements as a result, he ultimately was rewarded with a stint on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars."

Both men are accomplished athletes. Kaepernick appeared in Super Bowl XLVII. Lochte is a 12-time Olympic medalist.

But Lochte is white, Kaepernick is black, and when black men stand up against American oppression, the fears of the white establishment arise. Fears that a single man seated on a bench is the forerunner to violent rebellion; that an athlete with the gall to think for himself is a danger to the order of things.

Rooted in guilt, and watered by ignorance, those fears grow strong in bigotry's soil. Because the truth of the matter is this: So long as Kaepernick is content to collect a paycheck for throwing a ball, so long as he is satisfied with staking his livelihood to a game, so long as his words are restricted to signals on the gridiron, he poses no threat.

But when black athletes awaken to the cruel reality that they too are black, that they too are targets, that they too are susceptible to the treatment that other blacks endure, they become more than leaders on a field. They become leaders in life.

And for that, they must be punished.

Never mind that Kaepernick's right to protest is enshrined in the First Amendment. Forget that his decision to exercise that right is an expression of American freedom.

Kaepernick is a black man, and in the eyes of those who would deny the humanity of blacks, Kaepernick has no right to American freedoms; only the obligation to serve American interests.
I suspect that Kaepernick knew the risks when he sat down during the national anthem. He said as much when he was asked to explain his actions.

"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," he told NFL media. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

The data back Kaepernick's words. Overall, blacks are 2.5 times more likely to be shot by police than whites, and black men make up 40 percent of all unarmed people shot and killed by police last year, though we make up only 6 percent of the population. Convictions of police officers in such shootings are exceedingly rare.

Those facts haven't tempered the angry response to Kaepernick's action.

In thousands of social media posts and dozens of interviews, Kaepernick has been called a traitor, he's been denigrated as stupid, he's been pilloried with racial epithets, and he has been labeled a coward.
This for doing what America was founded upon - fighting government oppression.

Compare the anger aimed at Kaepernick with the response that greeted Lochte after he was caught on video committing what looked to be a crime. According to video evidence and their own statements, Lochte and three other American swimmers urinated in an alley, vandalized private property, and did not initially stop when confronted by security. Security leveled weapons in their direction, and Lochte and his teammates were forced to pay for the damage they caused.

Lochte lied about that incident, claiming he and his teammates were robbed. He repeated his false story to the media and to the police. Then he left Brazil, leaving his friends behind to deal with the consequences. As a result, swimmer James Feigen was fined nearly $11,000 before he was allowed to leave Brazil, and Lochte now faces criminal charges.

The 32-year-old Lochte was called a kid by apologists who refused to hold him accountable. His false report of a crime was labeled a youthful mistake. He issued televised apologies to a forgiving American public. He was coddled in a display of white male privilege.

Even now, as Lochte faces criminal charges that could result in up to six months in a Brazilian prison, ABC has announced that Lochte will appear on next season's "Dancing With the Stars." [More]

Thoughts?

You can leave your comments right here,  call Solomon's radio program in the morning, or hit him up on twitter. 

*Pic from huffingtonpost.com



 

To stand or not to stand.

Over sixty percent of Americans want to give San Francisco QB, Colin Kaepernick, a piece of their minds, because, to them, he has disrespected America by refusing to stand for the national anthem.

Of those sixty percent, I m sure that more than half of them are supporting the republican nominee for president. He is a man who took multiple deferments instead of actually serving in the military like so many other young men did at the time. (He actually had FIVE draft deferments during the Vietnam war. FIVE!) But back to #7.

It would be so easy to rip him as just another pampered millionaire athlete who doesn't realize how good he has it here in America. "The guy makes millions to play a game for crying loud! Why can't he just cash his checks and shut his mouth? He should just take his black ass to Africa and see how good he will have it there"  But I say good for him for making a  stand (or in this case a seat) about something that he believes in. The fact that he happens to be a famous athlete makes his stance even more powerful, and it will no doubt shine a brighter light on what he thinks is the issue of inequality and institutionalized racism in this country.

Also, the fact that he was able to articulate his position in such a thoughtful manner was also refreshing. Obviously it is something that he has thought about, and he did not come to his decision overnight. Watching his impromptu press conference at his locker made that all too clear.

It's also nice to see that he is getting support from some of his fellow NFL players, it can be awful lonely out there on principle island; especially when you are a professional athlete who is expected to be a role- model while toe the party line.  

This country has a lot of problems, but one of the beautiful things about this country is that we have a Constitution that allows us to speak up about those problems without having to worry about losing our freedom. And we are also free to  disagree with each other as many have chosen to do with #7.

I love all the people having jersey burning ceremonies because the guy just made them so mad. ("This is America, damn it!! If you don't like it n****r you can leave.") It's sentiments like that one of course, which make Kaepernick's act of defiance even more irradiating. I doubt seriously if the folks making those types of vitriolic attacks see the irony in all of it.

I have loved ones who fought and died defending the First Amendment right of people like Kaepernick to refuse to stand for the anthem, as well as the rights of those who choose to call  him out as a piece of shit or idiot for refusing to do so.
Personally, I stand for the national anthem, as, quite frankly, I would for the anthem of any country. That's the Jamaican in me. But if someone chooses not to for whatever reason, I am honestly not bothered by it, and if that person happens to be a high profile athlete making a social or political statement; I say go for it.

“To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder".

OK, so it isn't Tommie Smith and John Carlos, but this isn't 1968, either. Although we seem to be getting back there really fast.

*Pic from latimes.com.

Governor, we are not "the enemy'.

  One of Donald trump's biggest supporters is a guy named Paul Le Page. Mr. LePage happens to be the governor of the lovely state of Maine, and he has some very interesting views about people of color.

"Speaking about Maine's effort to combat drug crime, Paul LePage said that "the enemy right now... are people of color or people of Hispanic origin".

When you go to war... and the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, then you shoot at red," he said.

Leading Democrats have urged him to resign.

Mr LePage made the comments while seeking to clarify remarks he made earlier in the week which were criticized as racist.

The press conference capped a controversial 72 hours for the Republican governor."

This is the same guy who went all Travis Bickle on a fellow lawmaker because he thought that the guy called him a racist.

Anyway, Le Page is catching some heat for his behavior, but I am pretty sure that he won't be forced to resign. In fact, you could argue, that given the demographic makeup of the state of Maine, he will win reelection if he decides to run for governor.

This is not the same for his buddy, Donald trump. In order to win the election to become the 45th president of the United States, trump will have to win significantly more minority votes than -according to the polls- he is currently going to receive.  With this in mind, Donald has put a full- court press on trying to court the black vote. Unfortunately for the orange haired one, though, that has not been going so well.

Once again, he gave a speech to an almost all white audience about "the African Americans" and about how  he plans to make America better by forcing them to clean up their act. You could see him reading the lines from the teleprompter as his handlers no doubt kept their fingers crossed. 

They wrote all the right things for him about how African Americans had contributed to America's greatness and how not all African Americans (as he implied before) were living in poverty and looking over their shoulders for fear of being shot, and he was delivering the message---- meant for college educated whites and white suburban mothers to a barn full of screaming right wingers.  The optics was sickening, and the speech was predictable.

The worse part of trump's day started before the speech. This is when he took it upon himself to use the tragic death of Dwyane Wade's (Donald, note the spelling) cousin to score cheap political points. 

"Donald Trump tastelessly used the tragic shooting death of basketball star Dwyane Wade’s cousin to appeal to black voters — but he couldn’t even spell the Chicago Bulls player’s name correctly.

“Dwayne Wade's cousin was just shot and killed walking her baby in Chicago. Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP!” Trump tweeted Saturday, a day after 32-year-old Nykea Aldridge was shot dead in the city's South Side. The mom of four did not appear to be the target of the shooting.

Critics swiftly condemned the Republican presidential hopeful's callous message — which at first offered no condolences to Aldridge’s grieving family — and mocked the real estate mogul for misspelling Wade’s first name.

Three hours later, Trump deleted the typo tweet and sent out a new message, which was identical to his first post but with the correct spelling of Dwyane."

 I bet Donald wishes that he was running to be governor of Maine instead of president of the United States, then he wouldn't have to deal with "the blacks".           

*Pic courtesy of huffingtonpost.com  

CAPTION SATURDAY.

 

I need a caption for this pic.

Example: What do you people have to lose at this point?

*Pic from blackstar.com

The alt-right takeover.

The Field Negro education series continues. 

"A political movement most Americans have never heard of is suddenly in the spotlight, thanks to Donald Trump — who has hired one of its leading spokesmen to run his campaign — and Hillary Clinton, whose speech planned for Thursday afternoon is expected to denounce it.

It’s the “alt-right,” a loose aggregation of bloggers, radio hosts, think tanks and activists that emerged from the “white nationalist” movement of the 1980s and 1990s. It occupies positions on the far right of American politics, but it is not primarily about the issues that motivate mainstream conservatives, such as taxes or government spending. Instead, it postulates that the culture of white America is under attack, and sees itself as its defender.

Trump has for much of his campaign flirted with “alt-right” themes, mostly through retweets, some of which he later disavowed. When former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke — a major figure in the “alt-right” world — urged his supporters to back Trump, the candidate maintained, implausibly, he didn’t know anything about Duke before grudgingly disavowing the support.

But with the hiring of Breitbart Media chairman Steve Bannon as CEO of his campaign, Trump has embraced someone at the heart of the movement, who boasted of turning Breitbart.com into “the platform of the alt-right.” Duke himself celebrated the hiring with the boast: “We’ve taken over the Republican Party,” although presumably the party’s mainstream leadership would disagree.

There are, of course, many strains of thinking under the “alt-right” umbrella. Some factions are preoccupied with a return to “traditional values,” while others espouse a philosophy called “Human Biodiversity”: the belief that there are significant biological differences between people of different races, which justifies treating them differently. (The other name for this is “scientific racism.”) Anti-Semitism is common, in various forms, ranging from Holocaust denial to full-bore denunciations of Jews as agents of the collapse of white Christian society. Bannon, personally, has not been accused of anti-Semitism, however.

The common thread, however, that connects members of these different factions is a shared desire to protect Western civilization from what many refer to as “white genocide.” This manifests in opposition to things like immigration and multiculturalism, as well as a steadfast aversion to political correctness and to establishment politics of all kinds, including Republican.

The term “alt-right” was coined in 2008 by Richard Spencer, who runs the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank. Spencer founded the influential Alternative Right blog in 2010 to define the movement’s core principles.

The term represented a “shallow rebranding” of white nationalism, according to Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups. “They don’t want to be identified as white nationalists anymore,” she said. “People associate that with white supremacy, which is what it is, so instead they changed it to ‘alt-right.’”

And with that, Beirich said, the movement quickly made its way from the fringe “into right-wing politics.”

“They’re self-mainstreaming,” she said. “But it should be called out for what it is, which is just pure racism.”

Spencer’s own reasons for supporting Trump seem to directly reflect the alt-right’s central “white genocide” fears.

Asked by a reporter at the Republican National Convention about the possibility that some of Trump’s policy proposals, such as banning Muslims from entering the country or abolishing birthright citizenship, might be unconstitutional, Spencer replied, “Who cares? The whole point is that we’ve got to survive.” [More]

Mr Spencer, your savior has arrived.   

When cops don't get it right, and when a presidential candidate is caught in another lie.

Some of our boys in blue across the country are really going to have to start doing a better job when it comes to some things.

Field's Exhibit A is this case from Newark New Jersey:

"On August 11, a ten-year-old in Newark, New Jersey, named Legend Preston was chased by the police....


... and he claimed that the cops had drawn their guns as they chased the child, who had been in the street retrieving a basketball, according to his mother. The Newark Police Department claimed to WABC 7 that weapons were drawn, but never pointed at the child. In the end, the family says the police did not apologize to them, even when they caught the suspect that they had been sure Preston resembled. The suspect is 20 years old with a beard and dreadlocks. Preston is 10 with a baby face and short hair.

Solomon recorded the aftermath of the incident because she “knew [she] had to get some type of documentation.” She told the New York Daily News that she thinks it’s important to always keep phones charged in case a need to document an encounter with an officer arises. The merits of recording police interactions have been a hot topic this summer, especially, in the wake of a woman livestreamingthe death of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, at the hands of police officers in Minnesota.

In their latest piece on the incident, the New York Daily News is reporting that Solomon doesn’t want an apology from the department at all. She explained that she never wanted to be an activist of any kind but now sees no other option. She said this:

What option have they given me but to speak out? I didn’t ask for any of this. My prime concern is not an apology. My concern is reform of this system. I want to see accountability and responsibility.

She also spoke with the paper about how upset she gets, even two weeks later, thinking of what could have happened to her son if he had tripped or reached for a toy as he ran.

The incident is reminiscent of what happened to Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who was playing with a toy gun in a public park in the open-carry state of Ohio in 2014. Officers shot and killed him “one-and-a-half to two seconds” after pulling up to the park." [See video and story here]

And if you think it's only black folks catching it, you would be wrong.

Field's Exhibit B is a tragic story as well:

"Daniel Kevin Harris, 29, was shot and killed by North Carolina state trooper Jermaine Saunders Thursday after a pursuit that ended at Harris' home, authorities said.

"Daniel's death is just a shock — what is it for? It's definitely worthy, it has value, and I'm angry about it," Harris' brother, Sam Harris, who is also deaf, told mourners using sign language at a memorial service Tuesday.

"You know that night, he was driving home, he was excited, he had a new job … and he died just a few yards from home," Sam Harris said.

The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation is conducting a criminal probe into the shooting. The district attorney's office will also review the shooting.

The director of the state Department of Public Safety, which oversees the highway patrol, called the deadly shooting "tragic" but urged the public not to rush to judgment before investigations are finished.

"Any loss of life regardless of the circumstances is truly a tragic and sad event for all involved," DPS Secretary Frank L. Perry said in a statement Tuesday.

"While the Highway Patrol, the State Bureau of investigation and the District Attorney's Office conduct their respective reviews, we are keeping all those affected by this tragedy in our thoughts and prayers," he said.

The National Association of the Deaf said police need more training in dealing with the deaf and officers sometimes act aggressively when verbal commands aren't immediately followed." [Source]

Finally, speaking of the police, it turns out that Donald was caught in yet another lie about a meeting he had (in his twisted mind) with the Chicago police department.

"Earlier this week, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trumprecounted, in great detail, a conversation he says he had with a top police source in Chicago. According to the Chicago Police Department, however, that conversation never happened.

On Monday’s episode of The O’Reilly Factor, Trump explained to host Bill O’Reilly just how quickly a Trump administration could restore law and order by relating a conversation he’d had with a “top police officer”:

I went to a top police officer in Chicago, who is not the police chief, and he—I could see by the way he was dealing with his people, he was a rough, tough guy. They respected him greatly, he said. I said, ‘How do you think you do it?’ He said, ‘Mr. Trump, within one week, we could stop much of this horror show that’s going on.’

On Tuesday, the Chicago Police Department refuted Trump’s accountin a statement to the local NBC station:

“We’ve discredited this claim months ago,” CPD spokesperson Frank Giancamilli said in a statement. “No one in the senior command at CPD has ever met with Donald Trump or a member of his campaign.”

…”Beyond that, the best way to address crime is through a commitment to community policing and a commitment to stronger laws to keep illegal guns and repeat violent offenders off the street,” Giancamilli added.

Perhaps the CPD should check their visitor’s logs for an entry indicating a visit from Trump spokesman John Miller." [Source]

 

Ouch!

Yes, the man is a liar. 

But this too shall pass. Because...you know....e-mails and stuff.

*Pic from theroot.com