Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old Muslim student was arrested at his high school in Irving, Texas, after bringing a homemade clock to class, which school officials mistook for a bomb. Mohamed showed his engineering teacher first, but when the alarmed went off later in the day, that’s when the trouble started.
Kamilah Brock, a former New York banker, has filled a suit against the city after she was detained for eight days in a mental health facility against her will. Brock says she was committed after trying to pick up her BMW, which skeptical police did not believe she owned. To add insult to injury, Brock was then charged a hefty sum by the hospital.
I received a call from my sons’ school in March telling me that my oldest needed to be picked up early. He had been given a one-day suspension because he had thrown a chair. He did not hit anyone, but he could have, the school officials told me.
JJ was 4 at the time.
I agreed his behavior was inappropriate, but I was shocked that it resulted in a suspension.
For weeks, it seemed as if JJ was on the chopping block. He was suspended two more times, once for throwing another chair and then for spitting on a student who was bothering him at breakfast. Again, these are behaviors I found inappropriate, but I did not agree with suspension.
Still, I kept quiet. I knew my history. I was the bad preschooler.
I was expelled from preschool and went on to serve more suspensions than I can remember. But I do remember my teachers’ disparaging words. I remember being told I was bad and believing it. I remember just how long it took me to believe anything else about myself.
And even still, when my children were born, I promised myself that I would not let my negative school experiences affect them. I believed my experience was isolated. I searched for excuses. Maybe I was just a bad kid. Maybe it had something to do with my father’s incarceration, which forced my mother to raise me and my brothers alone.
So I punished JJ at home and ignored my concerns. Then, two months later, I was called to pick up my 3-year-old son, Joah. Joah had hit a staff member on the arm. After that incident, they deemed him a “danger to the staff.” Joah was suspended a total of five times. In 2014, my children have received eight suspensions.
Just like before, I tried to find excuses. I looked at myself. What was I doing wrong? My children are living a comfortable life. My husband is an amazing father to JJ and Joah. At home, they have given us very few problems; the same goes for time with babysitters.
I blamed myself, my past. And I would have continued to blame myself had I not taken the boys to a birthday party for one of JJ’s classmates. At the party, the mothers congregated to talk about everyday parenting things, including preschool. As we talked, I admitted that JJ had been suspended three times. All of the mothers were shocked at the news.
“JJ?” one mother asked.
“My son threw something at a kid on purpose and the kid had to be rushed to the hospital,” another parent said. “All I got was a phone call.”
One after another, white mothers confessed the trouble their children had gotten into. Some of the behavior was similar to JJ’s; some was much worse.
Most startling: None of their children had been suspended.
Tunette Powell’s 3-year-old son, Joah, has been suspended from school five times. (credit: Tunette Powell) Tunette Powell’s 3-year-old son, Joah, has been suspended from school five times. (Tunette Powell) After that party, I read a study reflecting everything I was living.
Black children represent 18 percent of preschool enrollment but make up 48 percent of preschool children receiving more than one out-of-school suspension, according to the study released by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in March.
I immediately thought back to my own childhood. I thought back to the humiliating labels that greeted me before I could read. I thought back to the number of black friends and family members who also were suspended and expelled. I thought about my family and friends who had not overcome the detrimental effects of being suspended in preschool. I did not want that for JJ and Joah. I did not want it for any child.
But the next step was the hardest. At news of all of this, friends and relatives suggested that I pull my children out of the preschool program and move them into another. At first, I considered that. That move may have changed my kids’ circumstances, but it would not have solved the problem. All across this country, black children are being suspended in preschool.
We can no longer put a Band-Aid on our nation’s preschool-to-prison pipeline, which pushes children out of the education system and criminalizes relatively minor offenses. Moving my boys to another school would have provided a stopgap solution. It may have solved my problem, but it would not have solved the problem.
The problem is not that we have a bunch of racist teachers and administrators. I believe most educators want to help all children. But many aren’t aware of the biases and prejudices that they, like all of us, harbor, and our current system offers very little diversity training to preschool staff.
A recent study published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that the subjects — mostly white, female undergraduates — viewed black boys as older and less innocent than their white peers. When photos of children were paired with descriptions of crimes, the subjects judged the black children to be more culpable for their actions than their white or Latino counterparts and estimated that they were an average of 4.5 years older than they actually were.
Authority figures strip black boys of their innocence at younger ages than white children. Diversity training for teachers and administrators would raise their awareness of how subconscious prejudices can drive racial discrepancies in disciplinary action.
TRENTON – A Trenton teen, Radazz Hearns, 14, was unarmed when he was shot seven times by police officers Friday night while attempting to run from the officers, a lawyer for the teen’s family said Wednesday.
Hearns remains in stable condition at Capital Health Regional Medical Center in Trenton after being shot five times in the right leg, once in the left leg and has a bullet lodged in his pelvis, said the lawyer Samuel A. Anyan Jr.
Two State Police troopers and a Mercer County sheriff’s officer were responding to a report of shots fired at the Prospect Village apartments when they encountered three males and say they got out of their vans to “question them.”
Rhonda Tirado, one of the witnesses, was in sitting front of her Trenton home Friday around 10:20 p.m. when she saw an unmarked gray minivan abruptly stop across the street and three police officers got out to question the trio of teens.
She saw Hearns run from the officers, and then the gunfire erupted.
“Those police were amped and they didn’t give that little boy a chance,” Tirado said Wednesday, while re-enacting the shooting where the encounter started. “There was no room for no chase. They just shot that little boy right there.”
As he turned and ran, Tirado said she saw him grab his red sweatpants to keep them from falling.
“I don’t think those little boys had no clue what was going on,” Tirado said. “I think they was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The police, not really having another story to concoct, pretty much state that this is indeed what happened—except, of course, they claimed that when they shot Hearns, over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, they thought he was reaching for a gun in his waistband.
Except, when they got to him, he had nothing.
The attorney for Radazz Hearns has stated that not only did police roll up in an unmarked vehicle, they weren’t in uniforms when they got out of the vehicle late at night.
Like magic, though, a full 12 hours after they shot Hearns seven times, police claimed to find a .22-caliber handgun underneath a vehicle on another street.
Right…..Whatever the case, it’s all garbage and this young man should’ve never been shot in the first place.
As I write this, activist Shaun King’s name is trending on Twitter…nationwide. If you are unfamiliar, with all the incidents of police brutality plaguing our nation, King has been a voice within the Black Lives Matter movement. And he doesn’t just have swift Twitter fingers, he’s about that work in real life as well.
King was also set to launch a new organization called the Justice Coalition, which seeks to end police brutality in this country by forming policy teams and launching an additional website to tell the true stories of how police brutality effects its victims.
But he’s not trending because of these new initiatives. He’s trending because people want to know if he’s really Black like he claims to be. They want to know if he’s “the next Rachel Dolezal.” And we all know how she dominated the news cycle for a good two weeks.
Breitbart, a right-winged, conservative news aggregation site named after its founder, Andrew Breitbart, alleged that King, who has said he has a White mother and a Black father, not only lied about being bi-racial. They claim he lied about his ethnicity to get a scholarship to Morehouse from Oprah Winfrey. They also claim he lied about being in a car accident and being attacked by racists during his high school years in rural Kentucky.
Breitbart claims to have obtained a copy of his birth certificate that seems to list a White man as his father.
The story blew up from there. You know folks love to have the tea. And in their quest to join the hashtag or unearth a scandal, many never even took the time to consider the source.
As a journalism major we were taught to question everything. When I was interning for a copywriter at MSNBC, she told me, “If your mother tells you she loves you, get a second opinion.” That’s the mindset we were trained to adopt when attempting to process new information.
Today, when I heard that it was Breitbart that was trying to call Shaun King a liar, I immediately doubted the notion. Not so much because I question everything I hear and read. Admittedly, I’ve become more and more lax on that front, but because I know the recent history of the publication.
For those who were paying attention to the news during the summer of 2010, you may remember Breitbart was the same publication that infamously cost Shirley Sherrod her job with Department of Agriculture.
Breitbart obtained excerpts from a speech Sherrod gave at the at an NAACP event. The site chopped and screwed the video and painted Sherrod as a racist. When in actuality, her speech warned people not to let their personal prejudices stand in the way of helping someone and developing quality friendships.
But everyone trusted Breitbart. Instead of watching the whole video for themselves, the story spread like wildfire. FoxNews led the way and then a New York CBS affiliate picked it up and then the Atlanta Journal Constitution. By that afternoon, Sherrod received numerous emails from government officials asking her to submit her resignation. The NAACP stepped forward saying they condemned her remarks. And her superiors told her The White House requested that she resign immediately.
And it was all a lie, for nothing. A conservative, White publication said something was true, put up a few video clips and a Black woman, who wasn’t even given the opportunity to tell her side of the story, lost her job because of it.
In all honesty, the Shaun King receipts seem plausible, just like the Sherrod receipts did five years ago. A White man on your birth certificate is pretty convincing.
But Breitbart is something like a MediaTakeout for conservative White folks. The story looks good on the surface, but when you do your own investigation, it’s bullshit. And for whatever reason, their rumors don’t just stir up drama and kick up mess, they cause emotional and psychological damage. Sherrod lost her job and was publicly shamed by her people and the government. At the end of the day everybody looked like fools, had to issue apologies, including The White House, and Breitbart, the site and the man, likely revealed in the exposure and visits to their website.
Judging by the way the story about Shaun King took off, their credibility didn’t even suffer.
And that is the very problem King is fighting against. We talk about Black Lives mattering and having value. But when it’s our word against a White man’s we discover we’re still less credible, inferior. It’s devastating when people, particularly Black people, are so ready and willing to believe something just because a White man said it.
I know I’ve referenced this before, but the same thing happened when Barack Obama was running for President. Black folks wanted to vote for him but didn’t think he stood a chance of winning. But when he took Iowa, when they saw that White folks were cosigning him, then all of a sudden we felt comfortable to support our own.
Y’all we don’t need the White man’s cosign anymore.
And we need to question the coverage of Black people on all media platforms, particularly when the only time Black people are mentioned is when someone is attempting to discredit us.
By now you might be wondering did Shaun address his racial makeup. He did, via his Twitter page.
Later, another Twitter user posted this picture as a response.
Boom.
If you can’t tell that that’s a Black man, then I’m going to need you to just click out and have a nice day.
It was a friend of King’s who offered a bit more explanation about his background on Facebook. You can read the whole thing here; and you should, but this part seems to be of particular importance.
And to question his race? Since the third grade, Shaun has had to deal with whispers as to his racial make-up. Whispers that no adult helped him deal with or process. Yes, that includes his mother.
Shaun got called “Nigger” just as much, if not more, than myself or any of my black friends and family while growing up in Versailles. Do you think an 8 year old would volunteer for that type of treatment? A funny colored, wavy haired child just trying to navigate life? To have anything from racial slurs to cups full of dip-spit (chewing tobacco) hurled at you from confederate flag covered pick-up trucks? And then 20 years later have some right wing assholes question whether it ever happened and go as far as to call you a fraud and try to de-bunk years of social justice work that you’ve put under your belt?
We grew up in a town where white mothers were constantly dis-owned by their families for having relationships and making children with black fathers. Where even into the 2000’s, the racial identities of mix-raced children were a taboo topic. Shaun was a direct victim of that. 20 years later, much progress has been made in my town of Versailles, but we are proving we have much further to go if people from my home town don’t speak the fuck up.
Honestly, at first I was wondering why he didn’t just explain explicitly. But this made it clear for me. He doesn’t owe us his story. He’s not another Rachel Dolezal trying to get shine by identifying with an oppression she willingly adopted. He’s about this life.
And it’s a shame that instead of riding for Shaun like he’s been riding for us, we were quick to start making memes, questioning his work and retweeting a story that was meant to undermine and distract from the very issues that are killing us.
I don’t believe in supporting unscrupulous people simply because they’re Black, but when White folks start going hard against Black revolutionaries, we should question the source, the motives and make sure the receipts check out.
PLEASE SHARE THIS INFO (ESPECIALLY ON TWITTER) BC HE’S BEING DEFAMED/ATTACKED LIKE CRAZY
1. Black women make up 6 percent of San Francisco’s population, yet made up 45.5 percent of all women arrested there in 2013.
San Francisco is known as perhaps the most liberal and inclusive city in all of America, but that reputation means little for the black women its police department places in handcuffs. According to the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice, black women have been arrested at higher rates than other races of women in the city for the last 23 years at least. In every major arrest category, including possession, prostitution, weapons, drug felonies and marijuana, black women far outpace other races of women. Perhaps the most notable arrest disparity cited in the report is that arrest rates of black women in San Francisco are four times higher than the rest of California.
2. In New York City and Boston schools districts, black girls are suspended and expelled at much higher rates than white girls.
During the 2011-2012 school year, 90 percent of all girls suspended were black, according to a recent report titled, “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected.” Not one white girl was suspended that year. Boston was no better. Sixty-three percent of the girls subjected to expulsion were black during the same time frame, but no white girls were suspended.
3. Black women were locked up in state and federal prisons at more than twice the rate of white women.
Overall, black women make up 30 percent of the prison population, despite being 14 percent of the U.S. population, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. There are a wide range of reasons why these disparities exists. A Huffington Post article cites a lack of economic resources, familial support, and systematic oppression as driving actors.
4. Black mothers in New Jersey are more likely than their white counterparts to be deemed “unfit parents.”
New Jersey Public Radio learned through its own investigation that the children of black mothers are four times more likely to be placed in foster care than the children of white mothers. Black children make up just 14 percent of the state population but account for 41 percent of those entering foster care. The report found that even if the mothers are at similar economic levels, the black mothers were still viewed as more unfit that white moms, so this is not a class issue.
5. Dark-skinned black women receive stiffer prison sentences in North Carolina than light-skinned black women for comparable crimes.
6. States that drug test pregnant women disproportionately jail black women.
At least 17 states consider drug use during pregnancy to be child abuse,according to Guttmacher Institute. Pregnant black women are no more likely to use drugs than white women during pregnancy, but they are reported to child welfare services for drug use at rates higher than white pregnant moms,according to a 2015 report by the Drug Policy Alliance.
7. More than half of all of women stopped by the NYPD are black.
In 2013, the most recent year from which arrest data is available, black women made up 53.4 percent of all arrests in New York City. Latina women were second at 27.5 percent and white women made up only 13.4 percent.
8. Black girls make up 14 percent of the U.S. population but make up more than 33 percent of girls detained or committed at juvenile justice system.
Willingham, whose research focuses on the incarceration of black women, says we see a higher rate of black girls behind bars than white girls because they aren’t getting the same support at the juvenile level. A recent report that analyzed how the sexual abuse girls experience can lead to incarceration points out that black girls make up a third of female juveniles detained or committed. Most girls in the juvenile justice system have experienced some form of sexual assault at some point during their lives. However, Willingham says black girls are less likely than white girls to get the rehabilitative support needed to decrease their chances of recidivism.
He said this in response to the Skyler Page fiasco where the creator of Clarence was called out & fired for groping female co-workers at Cartoon Network:
He also drew these “lovely” (translate: racist & antisemitic) pieces of “fanart” for the show not too long ago:
So yeah, please be aware of what he’s done & don’t encourage this dirtbag’s disgusting ego!
I do not like Hotdiggedydemon.
At all.
stop reblogging/retweeting hotdiggitydemon, please learn to love yourselves
After a long investigation, NPR reports that 60,000 black, Puerto Rican and Japanese-American soldiers were part of a Pentagon program to see how mustard gas impacted them physically. To make things worse, the testing on them may have been done on purpose to find an “ideal” soldier.
