This was during a time period when I was sweating and uncomfortable in an extended heat wave in my part of the Northeast, and since I don’t have air-conditioning I was jumping into the shower several times a day to cool off.
If you are locked up, and they shut off air, cooling systems, during a heat wave-how many folks on the outside give a damn?
A beautiful resistance movement is happening in Florida.
Led by mostly black and brown young people, youths and oldsters of all colors are sitting in in the Florida state capitol.
Since Tuesday morning (7/16) Dream Defenders have maintained a presence at the Capitol for an extended stay to apply pressure and demand that Governor Rick Scott call for a special session of legislature to address issues related to the environment in Florida that led to this tragedy and injustice. Dream Defenders are pushing for what they are calling the ‘Trayvon Martin Act’ which addresses the repeal of Stand Your Ground, racial profiling, and the war on the youth.
There are, frankly, very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often. And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.
As we continue to protest and question the acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin in cold blood, I’ve read a bunch of news stories, and comments touting the belief that “justice is color blind.” One of the people who shouted the loudest was hypocritical and hypobigotal Texas Governor Rick Perry.
Those people who willfully ignore reams of data and statistics showing it is not, are those who are busy dismantling civil rights gains as fast as they can, from the Roberts Court 5, to states like North Carolina, which recently repealed the Racial Justice Act, which included dealing with racial bias in jury selection.
Let’s be clear. We don’t live in a “post-racial” America.
While watching the local news in NY, I ran across a small story which has wider implications for all of us. It concerns a special high school in New York City, designed to educate Spanish-speaking immigrants, which is a cause I support. Unfortunately, rather than making news because of a focus on its education program, the school has made local headlines because its new principal, has been charged with making racist remarks about the only African American teachers at the school, John Flanagan and Heather Hightower, who have been terminated. Lisa-Erika James, the only other black teacher, was no longer at the school because the theater program she taught was eliminated.
The assistant principal, who is white, is one of the people backing up those charges against the principal Minerva Zanca, since he has submitted an affidavit detailing statements made by the principal-to him-when the black teachers were not present.
Nineteen year old Rachel Jeantel, witness for the prosecution in the George Zimmerman trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin became the center of an internet frenzy of hatefulness, simply because she stood her ground on the witness stand against the attorney for the defense Don West.
The attacks against her have been based on her skin color, her weight, her inability to read “cursive” writing (which they don’t teach in school where she is), and her use of and facility with the English language.
She is grew up speaking Haitian Kreyòl, French, and Spanish. English is her fourth language.
Yet she is excoriated for being “dumb”.
But her biggest crime in the eyes of many of her vicious and vocal critics is her physical appearance.
The intersections of racism and sexism writ large.
The 94 year old former President of South Africa is still in critical condition in the Medi-Clinic Heart Hospital in Pretoria.
Across South Africa and around the world there is a call for prayers. If you are not a person given to prayer, I respectfully ask that you take some quiet time and turn your thoughts to this man, and the nation of South Africa.
Most of us are familiar with Brown v. Board of Education, a class action suit, with Oliver Brown as the named plaintiff, which ended with a landmark decision by the Supreme Court in which the Warren Court, in 1954, declared unanimously that state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional.
