Category: Racism

A Rebuttal to Cleveland PD’s Infuriating Excuses on Why They Killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice

By Shaun King
DailyKOS

March 2, 2015 – Last known photo of Tamir Rice before he was killed by Cleveland PD. Taken just a few weeks before his murder.
Do you see the picture above of Tamir Rice? Please take a good look at it. Look at his eyes, his smile, his boyish manner. It was the last-known photo taken of Tamir just weeks before he was shot and killed by police on November 22, 2014.

Hanging out and having fun in the park near his home in Cleveland, Ohio, Tamir Rice broke no laws that day. A 12-year-old sixth grader, Tamir, according to his teacher, was on the drum line of the band, loved sports, and enjoyed drawing. He was the baby boy of Samaria Rice, had never been in any trouble with the law or his school, and he loved life.

Shot and killed by an officer who was dismissed from his previous police force for lying, mishandling his gun, and weeping uncontrollably during his gun training, Tamir is now being blamed for his own death by the city of Cleveland and called a "menacing" man child by the Cleveland Police Union.

Can I keep it all the way real? Call me dumb, but I just didn’t see this coming. I know ripping apart victims of police violence is the modus operandi of the police, but seeing them do it with a child is despicably low, unethical, and unnecessary.

Speaking about Tamir last week, the man chosen by the Cleveland Police to represent them to the public, Steve Loomis, stooped to a new low:

    “Tamir Rice is in the wrong,” he said. “He’s menacing. He’s 5-feet-7, 191 pounds. He wasn’t that little kid you’re seeing in pictures. He’s a 12-year-old in an adult body. Tamir looks to his left and sees a police car. He puts his gun in his waistband. Those people—99 percent of the time those people run away from us. We don’t want him running into the rec center. That could be a whole other set of really bad events. They’re trying to flush him into the field. Frank [the driver] is expecting the kid to run. The circumstances are so fluid and unique. …

    “The guy with the gun is not running. He’s walking toward us. He’s squaring off with Cleveland police and he has a gun. Loehmann is thinking, ‘Oh my God, he’s pulling it out of his waistband.’”

While a real part of me feels dirty for even responding to Steve Loomis—it’s not as if he’s some random racist—he is the official representative for the police and what he thinks and says matters. Police voluntarily pay this man to be their mouthpiece.

First off, Tamir absolutely is the boy we see in the photos. We’re not going back in time and showing photos of Tamir as a toddler, but we’re going back to the month before he was killed. That’s a boy. He has fat cheeks. His skin is as smooth (and hairless) as a baby’s butt. His eyes have an innocence that most of us lost decades ago. They look like an episode of SpongeBob and a slam dunk from Lebron would take all of his troubles away.

We must refuse to allow Steve Loomis or anyone else to make Tamir into a man, a man-child, or a kid in a man’s body—he was none of these things. He was a sweet, fun, playful son, brother, student, and friend. In the four weeks after the above photo of him was taken, he didn’t morph into a goatee-having, tattoo-toting, musclebound man. He looked just like he did in this photo.

Secondly, Loomis called Tamir "menacing." Since when did anyone, including a man who is 5’7" become menacing? This is not even the average height for an American man, but is short. Both officers who pulled up on Tamir and Steve Loomis himself are several inches taller than this child. At quick glance, Loomis appears to be a huge man and the notion that he would find Tamir "menacing" is preposterous. Furthermore, the word "menace" has so many loaded connotations that just don’t apply to Tamir. He was a boy playing at a park. (Continued)

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Moral Mondays’ Barber Says America’s Political System Suffers From a ‘Heart Problem’

Saturday’s Moral Mondays march once again brought a multicultural crowd of thousands to Raleigh, N.C., protesting budget cuts and voting restrictions enacted by the state’s Republican Legislature.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Cecile Richards and NAACP National President Cornell Brooks (far right) listen to the North Carolina NAACP’s the Rev. Dr. William Barber speak at the Moral Mondays march in downtown Raleigh, N.C., Feb. 14, 2015.

By David Swerdlick
The Root

Raleigh, N.C., Saturday, Feb. 14: An African-American Muslim imam, Oliver Muhammad, offered the call to prayer; members of black Greek-letter fraternities served as event marshals; and as marchers in North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement began their walk across downtown Raleigh, the state’s capital, Chapel Hill Town Council member Maria Teresa Palmer announced—in Spanish—that “interpreters will be available at the intersection of Hargett and Fayetteville.”

It’s that kind of come-one, come-all event. And even though this year’s ninth annual march wasn’t as big as last year’s—one that The Nation’s Ari Berman reported as “the largest civil rights rally in the South since the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965”—organizers again brought together a diverse coalition of activists on a chilly Valentine’s Day to protest what movement leader and state NAACP President the Rev. Dr. William Barber II described as the state’s—and the nation’s—“heart problem.”

And while the Moral Mondays movement is left-leaning, Barber told supporters that he wanted them to be political “defibrillators” because “we find we’ve got, not a left problem or a right problem or a conservative problem or a liberal problem. We’ve got a heart problem. When money and greed and political hubris and pride and ego and beating your opponent become more important than working together to uplift humanity, we’ve got a heart problem.”

For the movement, the stakes haven’t changed.

Barber called on legislators to “fund Medicaid expansion, raise the minimum wage, index it with inflation—put it on the ballot and let the people vote,” as well as “restore cuts to public education,” reject “the attacks on women’s health and environmental protection, repeal the death penalty, reform the criminal-justice system,” enact “fair immigration reform, and respect the constitutional rights of all humanity, regardless of race, creed, color and sexuality.” (Continued)

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A Report and a Reflection on a Weekend of Anti-Racist Action: Boston, Martin Luther King Day Protest, January 2015

‘We Will Shake this System with the Truth of Our Message’

By Joe Ramsey
OpenMediaBoston.org

Jan 23, 2015 – This past Monday in Boston, at least 1,000 people braved the bitter downtown wind to gather, march and rally against a system that strangles Black lives.  Invoking the activist legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.—but also other historic figures, from Malcolm X and Fred Hampton to Assata Shakur—protesters took the streets for a “Four Mile March” through downtown, culminating in a spirited rally and speak-out on the Boston Common steps, across from the Massachusetts Statehouse. 

Twice along the way, at major intersections, marchers stopped and dropped to the ground for mass “die-ins,” collectively dramatizing the deaths of Black youth and young men shot and killed by police.  While they lay on the ground, organizers read out the names of victims of police violence, including those killed in Boston—such a Burrell Ramsey-White— as well as in Ferguson, New York City, and across the United States.

Drawing a clear—if gentle—distinction between Monday’s mass action and the controversial blockade that shut down Interstate-93 three days earlier, leading organizer and union member, Brock Satter made very clear from the start: “We’re not here to disrupt anything today.  We’re here for a peaceful march. We will shake this system with the truth of our message. And with the millions that we will mobilize to support us.” 

Throughout the day, Satter emphasized the imperative of organizing “not just thousands or even tens of thousands, but millions,” in order to create  mass movement that can fundamentally change this society.  Several speakers agreed that today was “just the beginning” and that the “real work lay ahead of us.” 

Satter further clarified the importance of insisting on the slogan “Black Lives Matter” not because all lives don’t matter,” he said, “but because, “Until Black lives matter, to say that ‘All Lives Matter’ is a lie.”

Fellow lead-organizer Brandi Artez, of Villa Victoria, kicked off the rally by targeting the resistance of “white moderates,” quoting Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”  As King there wrote:

Over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

“Who are these white moderates,” Artez asked of the crowd, “to tell me how to go about fighting for my freedom?”

If the protest’s MLK Day timing was symbolic, so was it’s starting place.  Protestors converged by the Old Statehouse, filling sidewalks —and soon the streets— at the site of the 1770 Boston Massacre.  As the leaflet for the demo reminded passerby: “It is here that Crispus Attucks, a black man, became the first casualty of the American Revolution.” As the hand-out further explained:  (Continued)

Continue reading A Report and a Reflection on a Weekend of Anti-Racist Action: Boston, Martin Luther King Day Protest, January 2015