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A Note About the 50th Selma Jubilee March

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By Rev. Richard Lawrence

March 7, 2015 is a Saturday that will live forever in the hearts of every freedom-loving citizen in the world who caught the news about the 50th Selma Jubilee March.

That day found me completely overpowered with emotions as my four grown kids and I pushed to stand as close as we could to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to hear our President speak.

I had marched in Selma in 1965, and I remembered the terror of being in a place where I was not wanted and where the opponents of voting rights for Black Americans were uninhibited in demonstrating their first Amendment right to freely express their disdain for our cause and savagely denigrated us for our misguided choice of lovers.   [Read more…]

Celebrations of César E. Chávez Span Six Weeks Around San Diego

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“The legacy of the United Farm Workers union in its first decade provides us with key lessons for the present and future. It reminds us that grass-roots power organized and deployed by ‘disposable’ workers, fearlessness in the face of corporate exploitation, and the political uses of music, theater, and ritual can change history. In 2015, in a society based on greed and personal ambition, we ignore these lessons at own peril.” –Jorge Mariscal, Professor, UC San Diego

While Monday, March 31st is the official César E. Chávez day, activities celebrating his legacy as a labor and civil rights leader will continue into May. The day is commemorated to promote service to the community in honor of his life and work. The ongoing activities are about continuing that legacy.

Thanks to the UCSD Blink, produced by the faculty and staff of that fine institution, for providing us with a list of activities over the next six weeks honoring the life and achievements of César E. Chávez.   [Read more…]

Pushback on Civic San Diego Accountability: Here Comes the “Uncertainty” Ploy

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By Doug Porter

A showdown is in the works over community input on plans by Civic San Diego to absorb neighborhoods beyond downtown for permitting and planning development projects. For the moment we’re talking about Encanto and City Heights. I doubt it will stop there.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez has introduced legislation to clarify the ability of non-profit groups like Civic San Diego to perform permitting work for local governments, as it’s uncertain what legal authority in California law the organization has to approve building projects on behalf of the City of San Diego after redevelopment’s demise. Specifically AB504 calls for the City Council to have final say on projects.

The “uncertainty” defense is being rolled out on behalf of Civic San Diego (and the developers who love it) by former Mayor and Chamber of commerce CEO Jerry Sanders, along with Kris Michell, president and CEO of the Downtown San Diego Partnership by way of a commentary published earlier today by Voice of San Diego. Used with great success in previous campaigns to pull the wool over the eyes of San Diegans, this sort of effort is supposed to instill fear the local economy will be damaged if (fill-in-the-blank) happens.   [Read more…]

A Deeper Examination of the Sheer Joy of Oklahoma Students Chanting About Hanging N*gg*rs from Trees

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By Shaun King/ Daily Kos

Money, during a bad economy, doesn’t actually disappear, it just moves around into different hands and different accounts. If a whole segment of America all of a sudden doesn’t have money because of shifts in the economy, it just means that it has shifted to another group, but please understand—that money still exists—just not in your wallet.

Racism is like money. It changes hands. It shape-shifts and finds itself a new carrier, a new account, a new way to express itself in changing times, but it never actually disappears. Suppressed racism is no less real than money in a savings account, but rest assured, suppressed racism always has a way of telling on itself—sometimes in the most despicable, hurtful, and shocking ways.

Before I dig into why a group of white University of Oklahoma college students from the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, clad in tuxedos and ball gowns, so giddily chanted about “hanging n*gg*rs from trees” let me clear—racism is dangerous. It’s not funny. It’s not just words. It’s not kids being kids. It’s not playful. This is shit is real and it’s dangerous.   [Read more…]

March GOP Madness Tournament Underway

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By Doug Porter

Having lost out on a Congressional attempt to derail President Obama’s executive orders on immigration and facing increasing grim news about the possibility of their Supreme Court challenge to Obamacare blowing up in their face, Republicans nationwide are amping up the crazy.

To help readers better understand this off-election year phenomena, I’ve organized the best of the worst stories from this past week’s reportage into four brackets, not unlike a certain annual basketball contest. Highlighting all 65 contenders in this contest of crazy would take more time and effort than it’s worth, so I’ve focused on a few efforts I think have the potential to make it to the April Fool’s Day championship.

The divisions are: You’re Not Worthy (Racism/Sexism), Not A Scientist (Science/Technology), BombBombBomb (Foreign Policy), ObamaScare (Everything Else)
  [Read more…]

50 Years Later: I’m Still Standing with Selma

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By Congressman John Conyers /Daily Kos

I was in Selma, Alabama on the historic Freedom Day to register voters. Tensions were high and leaders were escalating their tactics.

I saw the inequality and violence that African-Americans endured on a daily basis. It crippled our communities. All of what I experienced should have scared me enough to avoid challenging the system that allowed these injustices to occur. But my father, a union organizer, taught me that if the door of opportunity cracked open, we must dare to open it wider and hold it open for as many people as possible.   [Read more…]

Obama Task Force Calls for Significant Changes to Policing in America

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Report recommends that law enforcement report shootings and other incidents of police brutality to federal government

By Lauren McCauley/ Common Dreams

Rights groups and others are welcoming the release of a report by the president’s policing task force on Monday, saying that the policy recommendations are the best chance the White House has for improving the relationship between law enforcement agencies and the communities they are meant to protect and serve.

The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing was established in the wake of recent police killings of people of color in an attempt to build trust between citizens and law enforcement. The Interim Report (pdf) calls for increased transparency around incidents of police brutality, an emphasis on de-escalation, and policies that prohibit police profiling and discrimination of any kind, among other things.   [Read more…]

The Right and the Righteous Aspire to Greatness at CPAC

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Infotainment for a Rainy San Diego Weekend

By Doug Porter

It’s time for that annual exercise in wingnuttery known as the Conservative Political Action Conference(CPAC), wherein activists of the far right persuasion gather in what Salon columnist Jim Newell calls the “fake shopping town of National Harbor, Maryland.”

Given that the biggest news around San Diego this morning appears to be anticipation about the arrival of rain (!) and possibly snow (!!) at the higher elevations, I’ll take the bait and share highlights from the annual gathering of the right and the righteous. 

It’s important to note that CPAC induces sympathetic craziness among the faithful who, for job-related reasons, are unable to attend during high profile sessions where CSPAN cameras may be turned on. This weekend is, after all, their turn to steal the spotlight from the liberal media’s endless praise of the Obama administration.    [Read more…]

The Origins of Institutionalized Racism – a System to Control Blacks … and Whites

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100 Years Before Lexington and Concord, Bacon’s Armed Rebellion of Whites and Blacks Forced Plantation Elite to Create System of Racial Slavery

By Frank Gormlie

Since the turmoil last year in Ferguson, Missouri, swept in a new civil rights movement, once again America is faced with the reality of its system of institutionalized racism. For Americans with conscience, understanding this system is key to changing it, and it cannot be understood without understanding its origins which trail back, of course, to colonial America.

Confronting a system that predates the very formation of the Republic itself necessitates understanding its raison d’etre – its reason for being. Why is there such a system that has a solid foundation and that has existed all this time, and is so deeply ingrained? Why is there institutionalized racism? If one accepts such a premise, that there is such a thing, then the most obvious answer is that it exists to control blacks, African-Americans. And to control other minorities, Mexican-Americans, Native Americans.

Yet this system is not meant to only control blacks – and other peoples of color – but it also meant to control white people.   [Read more…]

Justice Comes to Mississippi

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Sentencing begins for the ten white teenagers who beat and murdered African-American James Craig Anderson in 2011

By Federal District Court Judge Carlton Reeves

Editor Note: James Craig Anderson was attacked and murdered by a mob of teenagers who went out for the purpose of terrorizing African-Americans. They surrounded Anderson in a parking lot and ran over him with their pick-up truck. His death has been described as a Jim Crow style lynching. In the words of William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” The following is Judge Reeves’ complete remarks at the sentencing of the first three of the teenagers on February 10, 2015.

One of my former history professors, Dennis Mitchell, recently released a history book entitled, A New History of Mississippi. “Mississippi,” he says, “is a place and a state of mind. The name evokes strong reactions from those who live here and from those who do not, but who think they know something about its people and their past.”   [Read more…]

Brown unLike Me

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By Emmanuel Ortiz

In Venezuela I watched
As the people of the nation
Stood at the plate
Swung out
In defense of their president,
Who won a democratic referendum
By a majority of the majority
(Unlike our own president that same year).
In defense of Chávez,
Millions of hands upon a single bat
Swing for the fences,
Un jonrón over the wall of the White House lawn.   [Read more…]

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