Psyche, Science, and Society

Criminal charges sought against MA woman who filmed brutal police beating

Springfield, MA police don’t want you to see this video. A Springfield police officer has filed n application for a criminal complaint against the woman who filmed his buddy’s brutality. Because, in this country, the right of police to beat black people is enshrined in the Constitution and only the state can record everyone, or so the Massachusetts legislature thinks:

http://video-embed.masslive.com/services/player/bcpid634584505001?bctid=605857696001

Raw Story explains the story behind the video:

Police officer seeks criminal charges against woman who videotaped police beating

By Eric W. Dolan

A police officer from Springfield, Massachusetts has filed an application for a criminal complaint against a woman who recorded his fellow officer beating a black suspect while he stood by, according to The Republican.

In November 2009, Tyrisha Greene made a 20-minute recording of now-retired Springfield patrolman Jeffrey M. Asher repeatedly beating Melvin Jones III with a flashlight during a traffic stop. The recording shows a group of other officers standing around Jones without intervening.

Jones was partially blinded in one eye from the attack, and had bones all over his face broken. The officers claimed that Jones grabbed one of their guns as they tried to arrest him and that Asher struck Jones with his flashlight in order to “disorientate him.”

But a grand jury rejected that claim, finding no evidence that Jones behaved aggressively towards them.

Michael Sedergren was one of the four officers disciplined for the incident. He was suspended for 45 days. Sedergren claims Greene violated the state’s wiretapping laws by recording him without his consent.

“If officer Sedergren feels his rights were violated under the law then he has the opportunity to make his case in court, just like everyone else,” Sedergren’s lawyer said.

“When you start charging people who have videotaped police wrongfulness, it borders on, in my opinion, an attempt to silence people,” Democratic Rep. Benjamin Swan told The Republican.

“I think it would be dangerous if this person were to be charged with a crime,” added the Rev. Talbert W. Swan, president of the NAACP’s Springfield branch. “It would say to the public that we don’t have the right to hold law enforcement accountable for their actions.”

Jones has been charged with shoplifting, domestic battery and drug trafficking on separate occasions since 2009.

August 12th, 2011

London riots commentary

When riots like those in London occur, it is so hard for people to simultaneously try and understand the social causes without confusing understanding with support for the violence. Here the former editor of Race Today tries to explain the conditions in which young black men live to a BBC newscaster with no interest in understanding:

From ColorLines:

68-year-old Darcus Howe, a broadcaster and columnist, who lives in South London where riots have been taking place offered some context this morning for BBC News viewers. Howe told a BBC News anchor that political leaders had no idea what was coming but if they had taken a moment to “look at young blacks and young whites with a discerning eye and careful hearing” they would of heard messages of what to do prevent this.

The Trinidad and Tobago native who says he’s been in London for more than 50 years goes on to tell viewers about his young grandson who can’t count how many times he’s been stopped and searched by London police.

And when the news anchors asks if he condones the riots he gives her a piece of his mind. “‎Have some respect for an old West Indian negro and stop accusing me of rioting. Have some respect, I have grandchildren. You sound like an idiot.”

Howe is a notable British writer and is the former editor of the magazine Race Today.

Another video making the rounds online is an elderly woman walking around in Hackney on one of the first nights of looting. “Get real black people, get real. If we’re fighting for a cause, let’s fight for a fucking cause” she tells people in her neighborhood that are looting.

Here is the woman trying to explain that unfocused rioting will only hurt the people in the community and is not a real insurrection:

If we’re fighting for a cause, let’s fight for a fucking cause

Unfortunately, discrimination and lack of hope can breed destructiveness.

The New Yorker provides this succinct background:

Like the 1981 riots, this weekend’s riots come early in the term of a Conservative Prime Minister at a time of deep cuts to public and social services. Tottenham, which has a large African-Caribbean population, has the highest unemployment rate in London, and the eighth highest unemployment rate in the U.K. Many of the jobs in the area are dependent on public funding. In the vacuum left by vacationing senior politicians, David Lammy, the Labour M.P. for the area (“from Tottenham, for Tottenham”) was left largely alone to deal with the media over the weekend. Standing near the hulls of burned-out buildings, Lammy told reporters, “The vast majority of people in Tottenham reject what’s happened. A community that’s was already hurting has had the heart ripped out of it.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/08/london-burning.html#ixzz1UZfQtPuj

August 9th, 2011

What country is this? Mom Sentenced to Jail For Seeking a Better Education For Her Children

And racism is dead?

An Ohio mother of two was sentenced to 10 days in jail and placed on three years probation after sending her kids to a school district in which they did not live. Kelly Williams-Bolarwas sentenced by Judge Patricia Cosgrove on Tuesday and will begin serving her sentence immediately.

The jury deliberated for seven hours and the courtroom was packed as the sentence was handed down. She was convicted on two counts of tampering with court records after registering her two girls as living with Williams Bolar’s father when they actually lived with her. The family lived in thehousing projects in Akron, Ohio, and the father’s address was in nearby Copley Township.

Additionally, Williams-Bolar’s father, Edward L. Williams, wascharged with a fourth-degree felony of grand theft, in which he and his daughter are charged with defrauding the school system for two years of educational services for their girls. The court determined that sending their children to the wrong school was worth $30,500 in tuition.

Of course, here real crime was not earning enough to live in the rich district. It is far past time to end local funding of education, which builds in vast inequalities.

January 27th, 2011

Defense of affirmative action

An impassioned, and rather convincing, argument for affirmative action by Tim Wise:

November 5th, 2010

Gilbert makes Gutemala-CIA link, via US prisoner and other research horrors

Alan Gilbert, at Democratic Individuality, discusses the Guatemalan research abuses and places them in the context of decades of horrific research conducted against unwitting prisoners, depressed housewives, and other “undesireables.” He concludes by relating it to the recent CIA research:

Experimentation on prisoners in America has abated, though, according to Reverby’s interview today, it is still being debated. Nonetheless, psychologists, anthropologists and other professionals have participated in “medicalizing” torture. As opposed to the American Medical and Psychiatric Associations which stood against war crimes, the leadership of the American Psychological Association has participated in certifying “walling” – so that a torturer who throws a prisoner against a wall without maiming her is just doing “kind and usual punishment” – and the like. The CIA has long corrupted medical research, working on sensory deprivation – covering the body in an orange suit, wearing goggles, distorting the senses, getting the prisoner in a diaper on the way to be tortured on Jeppeson airlines in Egypt or Uzbekistan or Guantanamo – to break down the person’s psyche (see Albert W. McCoy, A Question of Torture). Charles Graner, who went to jail for Abu Ghraib, “taking the fall” for the crimes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice inter alia, was a prison guard in America. He learned to put women’s underwear on the heads of naked men long before he got to Abu Ghraib.

Still, the medical experimentation practiced by government-instigated or sponsored physicians on prisoners in the US and Guatemala, and developed largely on a racist and sexist basis, has been stopped or, to some extent, abated. Now, however, similar procedures are engaged in by officials and doctor/psychologists torturing Arab and Muslim captives. The seemingly consolidated gains of one era have been undercut, in a sharply authoritarian direction, by the Bush-Cheney administation. They have been limited by Obama (as in the case of Hilary Clinton’s apology to the Guatemalan government), but the criminals have also been protected by the Obama administration. Jessica Mitford once quipped, “You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.” But sometimes, real victories can be won after long and difficult struggle. They are always, however, in danger of erosion. This is perhaps the most devastating argument against “reformism.” At the least, the will to fight must be constantly renewed. The American doctors knew they were “not Nazis”; in the absence of movements from below against racism, however, they distinguished – and today distinguish – themselves in the annals of crime.

The whole article, while long, is well worth reading. For long-time activists it will bring back many memories of struggles long past that are, alas, still all too contemporary.

October 5th, 2010

Could Obama’s election help African-American achievement?

A new study described in the New York Times suggests that Obama’s election may have some effects on African-American achievement. at least temporarily it wiped out the negative effects of racial stereotyping on performance. Of courser, as with all social science studies, we need replications to determine if this effect is more than a fluke. But we can hope:

Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers
By Sam Dillon

Educators and policy makers, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have said in recent days that they hope President Obama’s example as a model student could inspire millions of American students, especially blacks, to higher academic performance.

Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results.

“Obama is obviously inspirational, but we wondered whether he would contribute to an improvement in something as important as black test-taking,” said Ray Friedman, a management professor at Vanderbilt University, one of the study’s three authors. “We were skeptical that we would find any effect, but our results surprised us.”

The study has not yet undergone peer review, and two academics who read it on Thursday said they would be interested to see if other researchers would be able to replicate its results.

Dr. Friedman and his fellow researchers, David M. Marx, a professor of social psychology at San Diego State University, and Sei Jin Ko, a visiting professor in management and organizations at Northwestern, have submitted their study for review to The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Dr. Friedman said.

“It’s a very small sample, but certainly a provocative study,” said Ronald F. Ferguson, a Harvard professor who studies the factors that have affected the achievement gap between white and nonwhite students, which shows up on nearly every standardized test. “There is a certainly a theoretical foundation and some empirical support for the proposition that Obama’s election could increase the sense of competence among African-Americans, and it could reduce the anxiety associated with taking difficult test questions.”

Researchers in the last decade assembled university students with identical SAT scores and administered tests to them, discovering that blacks performed significantly poorer when asked at the start to fill out a form identifying themselves by race. The researchers attributed those results to anxiety that caused them to tighten up during exams in which they risked confirming a racial stereotype.

In the study made public on Thursday, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues compiled a brief test, drawing 20 questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Exam, and administering it four times to about 120 white and black test-takers during last year’s presidential campaign.

In total, 472 Americans — 84 blacks and 388 whites — took the exam. Both white and black test-takers ranged in age from 18 to 63, and their educational attainment ranged from high school dropout to Ph.D.

On the initial test last summer, whites on average correctly answered about 12 of 20 questions, compared with about 8.5 correct answers for blacks, Dr. Friedman said. But on the tests administered immediately after Mr. Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, and just after his election victory, black performance improved, rendering the white-black gap “statistically nonsignificant,” he said.

“It’s a nice piece of work,” said G. Gage Kingsbury, a testing expert who is a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association, who read the study on Thursday.

But Dr. Kingsbury wondered whether the Obama effect would extend beyond the election, or prove transitory. “I’d want to see another study replicating their results before I get too excited about it,” he said.

January 25th, 2009

Dan Schaefer: In My Liftetime

These feelings transcend any policy issues.

Words & music by Dan Schaefer.

January 19th, 2009

AirTran: The Bigot’s airline (TM)

Scott Horton reminds us of the horrifying  incident whereby a Muslim family was kicked off an AirTran flight for the crime of traveling while Muslim. Here is Scott’s article. Below it is a message I just sent to AirTran. remember, that is  AirTran: The Bigot’s airline (TM):

None Dare Call it Stupidity

By Scott Horton

CNN reports that a Muslim family is hustled off a plane after some morons misunderstand their conversation. (For the film version of this incident, check out Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay,–as usual, the most effective comedy carefully apes reality.) Note that the FBI behaves correctly and the airlines officials make asses out of themselves. This fits the recurrent pattern.

A Muslim family removed from an airliner Thursday after passengers became concerned about their conversation say AirTran officials refused to rebook them, even after FBI investigators cleared them of wrongdoing. Atif Irfan said federal authorities removed eight members of his extended family and a friend after passengers heard them discussing the safest place to sit and misconstrued the nature of the conversation.

Irfan, a U.S. citizen and tax attorney, said he was “impressed with the professionalism” of the FBI agents who questioned him, but said he felt mistreated when the airline refused to book the family for a later flight.

An incident to keep in mind next time you’re booking a flight. Remember the name of that airline: AirTran.

My message to AirTran: The Bigot’s airline (TM):

Sirs, As an American citizen, university professor, and frequent flyer, I am distressed and outraged at your airline’s bigoted actions in kicking off a Muslim family from a flight for no good reason. Even more inexcusable is your refusal to rebook them after they were cleared by the FBI.

I will remember this action when I choose an airline in the future. I will remind my traveling colleagues of your airline’s intolerant and inexcusable policies. And I will do what I can to alert the public.

I hope you will now do the right thing and publicly apologize and compensate this family. But such actions would be meaningless unless you also adopt clear nondiscriminatory policies to make sure such abuses never happen again.

Sincerely,

Let AirTran: The Bigot’s airline (TM) know what you think.

UPDATE: the media are reportiong that AirTran: the Bigot’;s Airline “apologized“:

“We regret that the issue escalated to the heightened security level it did,” AirTran said in a statement Friday afternoon. “But we trust everyone understands that the security and the safety of our passengers is paramount.” Read the full statement

They certainly made no acknowledgement that they did anything wrong. The did not discuss their refuisal to rebook the family after they were cleared by the FBI. And they have not a word about policies to prevent a recurrence. I still suggest that you let AirTran: The Bigot’s airline (TM) know what you think.

January 3rd, 2009

Gre Palast: Vote for him – because he’s Black

Greg Palast expresses what many are thinking — vote for Obama, despite his pro-corporate policies, because he’s black and his election will signal a profound cultural transformation in this country. [Then, of course, on Wednesday, start organizing those social movements that will force him to do the right thing at least some of the time.]:

Vote for him – because he’s Black

by Greg Palast

No question, Mr. Bruce was my favorite teacher in junior high.

I went to this Loser-ville school in the San Fernando Valley. It was all Chicano kids and working class white losers like me. Everyone had to take ‘metal shop’ so we could work the bottom-end jobs in the Chevy plant.

My brain was dying – until Mr. Bruce showed up, the new science teacher. DOCTOR Bruce, actually – the only Ph.d teacher in the place.

At lunch hour, instead of hanging out in the teachers’ lunchroom, Mr. Bruce would invite me and my friends into his classroom. Over coffee made on a Bunsen burner, he would talk about topics from Einstein to Buddha while munching on this strange stuff called “organic” food.

He was simply like no adult I’d ever met – an exceptional guy who could make us dull-brained students sizzle.

My parents had him over for Sunday brunch and he talked about his work as a ‘honey-dipper’ in the Deep South where he grew up. The honey-dipper was the guy who hunted for lost glasses and whatever else was dropped in outhouse cesspools. Dr. Bruce said he enjoyed the work because it taught him pleasures of quiet grace, of dignified acceptance.

The kids were crazy about him, but not all the parents. Some called to complain about the school hiring him.

So he left. Months later, Mr. Bruce mailed me a letter from Japan where he’d taken a university post.

It’s odd, but it was only this year that I put it all together: his exclusion by the other teachers, his job as a honey-dipper, his need to escape America.

Dr. Bruce, of course, is Black.

So, I’m going to do something that Dr. Bruce would think little of. I’m going to vote for the Black man. Because he’s Black.

The truth is, I’m wary of Barack Obama. His cozy relations with the sub-prime loan sharks who funded his early campaign; his vote, at the behest of his big donor ADM corporation, for the horrific Bush energy bill.

But there’s one thing that overshadows policy positions, one thing he cannot change once in office: the color of his skin. The same as Mr. Bruce’s.

I’m going to say something that I know the Obama campaign will just hate; but that many others are feeling but won’t say out loud. We must vote for Barack Obama because he’s Black.

For four centuries, our nation has poisoned itself with the corrosive venom of racism. From the slave trade, to our still-segregated schools, to the Bush family stealing the White House by cynically, and sinfully, calling Florida Black voters felons; to the exile of a brilliant science teacher four decades ago.

The time has come to cleanse the wound that will not heal.

November 3rd, 2008

Ackerman on “The Race Card”

In a few qwords Spencer Ackerman explains the true horrors of John McCain’s latest campaign antics. We as a country will pay for years:

My ex-boss explains the dark and awful road ahead:

Let’s see how this works. McCain runs his Britney/Paris ad on the alleged but improbable basis that they’re the #2 and #3 celebs in the world, according to Rick Davis. McCain camp seizes on Obama statement that Obama has made multiple times before, accuses him of playing “race card”. Now McCain repeats Race Card, Race Card, Race Card a hundred times.

McCain has made the strategic decision that he can only win the election on the basis of Obama as friend of terrorists, unpatriotic suspicious outsider and radical, black guy who’s really more a flashy showbiz star (call it playing the Diddy card) than someone with the heft to be president. He’s probably right. That’s his only chance. And it may work.

It’s important to remember that Race Card is a euphemism. It’s a device to scare white people into believing the Dark One is out past the fence, sending signals to his Dark allies that stoke their resentment. It’s meant to cause the political equivalent of the mental shudder that makes white women grip their purses tighter on the subway. To stoke an impulse that ugly is evil.   I don’t believe John McCain can win the election. The hurdles — financial, electoral — are too great, the GOP base trusts him too little, and the narrative of his campaign is too solipsistic. But what he can do is prepare the country for four years of vile, small ugliness, in which new euphemisms are invented to allow white people to say This country’s gone to shit ever since they let Those People in charge… Is there something worse than Nixonland?

August 2nd, 2008