Never Be Silent

thesmarttart:

“W. Horace Carter, the founding publisher of a small-town North Carolina newspaper that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for his reporting on and editorials against the Ku Klux Klan, died yesterday in Wilmington, NC… In 1950, after witnessing a Ku Klux Klan motorcade drive through Tabor City, Carter began reporting on and editorializing against the white-supremacist terrorist group, which at the time was resisting the growing Civil Rights Movement. Three years and 130 stories later, the Tabor City Tribune became the first weekly newspaper to win the Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service for its work on the Klan. It shared the award with the News Reporter in nearby Whiteville, N.C. under editor Willard Cole, who along with Carter received numerous threats. Their crusade helped helped lead to the convictions of 254 Klansmen, with 62 sent to prison or fined…”
via the Institute for Southern Studies

From the Huffington Post, excerpt:

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Brandon Huntley was exultant when he first won a ruling that granted him refugee status in Canada.

“Look for me in tomorrow’s Ottawa Sun people, lookout I’m a celebrity!” he wrote on his Facebook site.

But he quickly deleted the comment and now faces a backlash that could force him back to South Africa. Under heavy pressure from the South African government, Canada has said it will ask its Federal Court to review the controversial decision that granted Huntley refugee status on the grounds that as a white man he was persecuted by black criminals in his home country.

If Huntley is sent back to South Africa he will find a hostile media and strong criticism from mainstream political leaders.

South Africa’s home affairs spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa said that Canada’s decision was based on “absolute rubbish,” while the African National Congress called it “racist.”

“Our anger is wasted on such a numbskull and his sympathetic party of simpletons,” said an editorial in the Sowetan. “When people display such shocking levels of ignorance as Huntley and the Canadian refugees board have, they deserve our pity, not our anger.”

Nor does South Africa’s main opposition party, with widespread white support, have any time for Huntley. “If he’s not prepared to contribute to change and opts to live abroad, good luck to him, we have no support for his cause,” Melany Kahn from the Democratic Alliance told Johannesburg’s The Times.

Huntley, 31, who grew up in Cape Town and first worked in Canada as a carnival attendant, told the refugee board that he was attacked seven times in South Africa, including three stabbings. He said he was called a “white dog” and a “settler” by black assailants during these attempted robberies and muggings, although he didn’t report any of the crimes to police.

Canadian refugee tribunal chairman William Davis ruled that Huntley, as a white person, “would stand out like a sore thumb due to his color in any part of the country.” This is what strikes so many South Africans as absurd as more than 5 million whites live in South Africa, making up more than 9 percent of the total population, according to Statistics South Africa.

Davis also said that Huntley had given “convincing proof” of the South African government’s “inability or unwillingness to protect him.”

But South Africans admit that, the issue of race aside, Huntley’s case underlines the country’s significant crime problem and negative international perceptions of South Africa less than a year before it hosts the FIFA World Cup.

Crime impacts all South Africans and whites are not specific targets, said the chairman of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies Zev Krengel to AFP. “If anything, black South Africans are more vulnerable due to the sad historical reality of higher poverty in their communities,” he said.

From the BBC, in its entirety:

Nearly 60% of black and African people living in Russia’s capital Moscow have been physically assaulted in racially motivated attacks, says a new study.

Africans working or studying in the city live in constant fear of attack, according to the report by the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy.

A quarter of 200 people surveyed said they had been assaulted more than once. Some 80% had been verbally abused.

But the number of assaults was down from the MPC’s last survey in 2002.

The report’s clear conclusion was that Africans living in Russia exist in a state of virtual siege, says the BBC’s Rupert Wingfield Hayes in Moscow.

Extreme violence

Many of the African respondents said they:

• Avoided using the Moscow metro
• Were also careful to avoid crowded public places
• Did not go out on Russian national holidays or on days when there were football matches

Many of the attacks on Africans were pre-meditated and extremely violent, the report found.

One Nigerian migrant interviewed by the BBC had been repeatedly stabbed in the back and then shot.

Another man said his attacker had attempted to remove his scalp.

Officially there are some 10,000 Africans living in Moscow, but far more are believed to live there illegally - many as economic migrants.

The Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy is an English-speaking interdenominational Christian congregation that has ministered to Moscow’s foreign community since 1962.

From AP, excerpts:

Glenn Beck returns to Fox News Channel after a vacation on Monday with fewer companies willing to advertise on his show than when he left, part of the fallout from calling President Barack Obama a racist.

A total of 33 Fox advertisers, including Walmart, CVS Caremark, Clorox and Sprint, directed that their commercials not air on Beck’s show, according to the companies and ColorofChange.org, a group that promotes political action among blacks and launched a campaign to get advertisers to abandon him. That’s more than a dozen more than were identified a week ago.

While it’s unclear what effect, if any, this will ultimately have on Fox and Beck, it is already making advertisers skittish about hawking their wares within the most opinionated cable TV shows.

The Clorox Co., a former Beck advertiser, now says that “we do not want to be associated with inflammatory speech used by either liberal or conservative talk show hosts.” The maker of bleach and household cleaners said in a statement that is has decided not to advertise on political talk shows.

The shows present a dilemma for advertisers, who usually like a “safe” environment for their messages. The Olbermanns, Hannitys, O’Reillys, Maddows and Becks of the TV world are more likely to say something that will anger a viewer, who might take it out on sponsors.

They also host the most-watched programs on their networks…

Beck’s strong ratings — even at 5 p.m. EDT he often outdraws whatever CNN and MSNBC show in prime-time — make it unlikely Beck is going anywhere even with the list of advertisers avoiding him approaches three dozen.

But it could mean advertising time becomes cheaper on his show than such a large audience would normally command. Some of his show’s advertisers last week included a male enhancement pill, a law firm looking to sue on behalf of asbestos victims, a company selling medical supplies to diabetics and a water filter company.

From the Guardian, op-ed by Michael Crowley. Excerpts:

One year later, politics in America has indeed changed, but largely in the sense that the fury that liberals once directed at George W Bush has largely been transferred to the conservatives now raging against Obama. That much has been clear in the spectacle at this month’s congressional town hall forums around the country, where the debate over Obama’s healthcare reform plan has become a focal point for familiar themes of conservative cultural resentment.

The town hall events attracted gun rights zealots carrying handguns. Anti-abortion fanatics screamed at congressmen about taxpayer-funded infanticide. Anti-government ideologues, including the newly unemployed Facebook provocateur Sarah Palin, warned of socialism, the loss of “freedom” and technocratic elites allegedly plotting to decide which infirm Americans shall live and which shall die before what Palin has despicably labelled “death panels”. So much for common purpose and the grace to bridge divides.

To witness the mad, hysterical spectacle is to appreciate what has become increasingly obvious for months now: that despite the earnest hopes of the misty-eyed Obamamaniacs, things are not so different in Obama’s America. Indeed, we are witnessing the latest iteration of the long-running American culture war that Sullivan and others promised Obama would transcend…

Today, white men again symbolise the conservative resistance to a Democratic president. And with a black man in the White House, the racial element is even more pronounced. Think of the recent cast of heroes trotted out by the conservative message machine. Last autumn there was Joe Wurzelbacher – better known as “Joe the Plumber”, the Ohio voter who confronted Obama about his tax policies on the campaign trail. It was through this burly, working-class everyman that John McCain was finally able to crystallise a clear campaign theme, one which warned that hard-working, blue-collar Americans were about to be steamrolled by know-it-all elites with visions of a socialist utopia. Implicit in the celebration of Joe the Plumber, whether intentional or not, was also a racial contrast with the African-American Democratic candidate. In this sense, the message was cultural as much as economic, one that reached back to Richard Nixon’s appeals to the Silent Majority…

It was precisely because Obama recognised this explosive culture-war dynamic that he quickly intervened in the controversy, admirably seeking to turn it into a “teachable moment” by inviting Gates and Crowley to sit down for beers at the White House. But it was also in this context that the inexplicably popular Fox News host Glenn Beck, perhaps the most cynical demagogue of the moment, articulated the venal id of this new moment last month. Obama, Beck explained, “has exposed himself… as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture”.

Beck’s idiotic commentary may have been self-defeatingly crazy. (Several advertisers have since boycotted his show.) But as a general proposition, it’s hard to dismiss the notion that a carefully orchestrated white man’s cri de coeur is at last partly to blame for dragging down Obama’s agenda. The president’s approval ratings have been sinking steadily and public opinion is now turning against his healthcare reform plan. Polls reveal rising voter trust in Republican ideas on other issues, like taxes and the economy (although Republican approval ratings overall remain dismal). With a new political narrative in motion, it may be that such cultural resentments may lead Republicans to a strong showing in the 2010 midterm elections…

Good news from Amnesty International!

North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue signed the Racial Justice Act into law, making North Carolina only the second state in the country to allow death row prisoners to meaningfully challenge their death sentences if racial bias is evident.  (Kentucky is the only other state that has adopted similar provisions.)

Related previous post: Racial Justice Act video

This is heartbreaking.

Maha Elgenaidi, the executive director of a nonprofit community organization in Santa Clara, California, outlines her experience being detained and interrogated at US customs after a trip to Malaysia, an experience all too common for American Muslims. Excerpt:

I was told to take my bags and put them on the table. They then began to search all of my belongings, taking out and looking through each and every item including my laundry, private articles, books, and folders. When they were done with each item, they literally tossed it aside, without any care or respect; all of this was occurring in public view of people just arriving into the US.

At one point a few of my books and folders fell to the floor. When I asked them if I could pick them up they responded with a no. When I asked why, one agent said, “Because you may use these items as a weapon against us.” At that point, I broke down crying, in shock. There were five agents surrounding me at that point, three watching me, and two going through my belongings. They even went through my wallet, taking out business cards I had received, receipts, car registration, driver’s license, everything it contained.

One of the agents tried to comfort me by telling me that she goes through a similar inspection when she travels. This was difficult for me to believe, but even taking her for her word, I imagine it’s a much different experience to suffer humiliation at the hands of authority as a person of color, belonging to a minority religion who also wears the hijab as I do, than for a White American who’s an officer of law enforcement.

During all of this back and forth, I was asked to step away from the people searching my bag. I asked, “Why can’t I collect my things that have been searched?” They responded, “Because we don’t know who you are and what you might do.” This was a refrain they repeated frequently, as if to add insult to injury.

Survival’s Stamp It Out campaign aims to challenge racist descriptions, however unwitting, of tribal peoples in the media.

What’s the problem?

Terms like ‘stone age’ and ‘primitive’ have been used to describe tribal people since the colonial era, reinforcing the idea that they have not changed over time and that they are backward. This idea is both incorrect and very dangerous. It is incorrect because all societies adapt and change, and it is dangerous because it is often used to justify the persecution or forced ‘development’ of tribal peoples. The results are almost always catastrophic: poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, disease and death.

How can I help?

Survival would like you to be on the lookout for terms like ‘stone age’ and ‘primitive’ used to describe tribal peoples in the media today. When you spot one, please fill in one of our Stamp it Out postcards or e-cards with the information given below and send it to the editor.

brooklynmutt:

Tommy Christopher at Mediaite

Sadly, the comment sections of the internet are home to some of the worst of humanity. The issue here is that the websites where the comments were made, Free Republic, temporarily took the comments down and then put them back up again.

Stay classy, Freepers! - via soupsoup

“Ghetto street trash.”

“A typical street whore.”

“Wonder when she will get her first abortion.”

Really, anonymous internet conservatives? You see a peace sign on the t-shirt of an 11-year-old and that’s what comes to mind? Congratulations, you’re the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the world.

Dear Republicans: Kindly STFU about how bad David Letterman’s joke was, your side now has no room to criticize.