Featured: August 2009 Archives

[Editor's note: I've included Glenn Beck's piece on Van Jones above, in case you'd like to hear a narrator say 'green jobs' in a scary voice. I kid, but seriously: while we might see these as the obvious falsehoods that they are, a lot of people don't have the facts. It's up to us to get the truth in front of people. Thanks to Eva Paterson for permission to reprint her piece. -CK]

This piece originally appeared at Equal Justice Society's blog and on Huffington Post.

After smearing White House special advisor Van Jones for days on his show, Glenn Beck said on August 27, 2009: "I want to point out the silence; no one has challenged these facts — they just attack me personally."

Well, the White House is wise to stay above the fray but someone has to set the record straight. And as the person who first hired Van Jones, initially as a legal intern and later as a legal fellow, I am in a unique position to know the truth.

And the truth is: Beck is fabricating his facts.

For instance: several times on his show, Beck has said or implied that Van went to prison for taking part in the Rodney King riots.

NO CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS

Van has never served time in any prison. He has never been convicted of any crime. And just to be clear: Van was not even in Los Angeles during those tumultuous days.

I know because he was working for me - in San Francisco - when the four Los Angeles police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King. I was the Executive Director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area when Van was an intern.

The verdicts came down on April 29, 1992. I remember Van (who was then a legal intern working with me from Yale Law School) coming into my office in San Francisco. Many of us, including Van, sat there together, listening to the news and weeping. We were all in a state of shock. That night, TV showed the tragic images of LA burning.

The next day, when an initially peaceful march in downtown San Francisco devolved into chaos, Van left the area in tears. He was not involved in any destructive activity. He even penned an essay despairing of the violence and the state of the country.

So how can Beck make such unsubstantiated claims?

THE TRUE STORY (FROM SOMEONE WHO WAS THERE)

This is what really happened. On May 8, 1992, the week AFTER the Rodney King disturbances, I sent a staff attorney and Van out to be legal monitors at a peaceful march in San Francisco. The local police, perhaps understandably nervous, stopped the march and arrested hundreds of people – including all the legal monitors.

The matter was quickly sorted out; Van and my staff attorney were released within a few hours. All charges against them were dropped. Van was part of a successful class action lawsuit later; the City of San Francisco ultimately compensated him financially for his unjust arrest (a rare outcome).

So the unwarranted arrest at a peaceful march – for which the charges were dropped and for which Van was financially compensated – is the sole basis for the smear that he is some kind of dangerous criminal.

Van has spoken often about that difficult period 17 years ago - and its impact on him, as a young law student. But to imply that he was somehow a rioter who went to prison is absurd. Beck also bizarrely claims that Van was arrested in the Seattle WTO protests. That is just a flat-out falsehood.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Arrests and convictions are all a matter of public record. Beck is at best relying on internet rumors or even inventing claims to boost his ratings.

Beck is no more accurate with present facts than he is with past ones.

Crossposted at Huffington Post.

Last week, the world's central bankers got together for a little strategy session in Colorado, and declared that the recovery is on its way. This is the way it works with recessions. They ravage the world, leave millions hungry and homeless, and are eventually said to be 'over.'

For communities of color, 'recovery' can be a vapid term. People of color consistently face rates of unemployment higher than what whites experience in the worst recessions. Meanwhile, people of color in the labor market are pulling in wages of 60 cents for every dollar that white people earn. If this is what recovery is going to look like, we've got a problem.

In this video, community organizer Shaw San Liu of San Francisco's Chinese Progressive Association explains what the inequitable economy means for her community — before, during, and after the officially recognized recovery.

It's time we take seriously that some people are locked out from the onset and build a truly fair economy for everyone.

crossposted to Jack & Jill Politics and Huffington Post.

(White House / Pete Souza)

What makes our president laugh? Is it conversation over beers with new friends? Is it a college photo of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs? Yes. But that's kind of boring, so we're hoping you can funny it up for us via juxtaposition and language.

In other words, we're having another caption contest. You know what to do. Best caption wins a copy of Tram Nguyen's Language Is a Place of Struggle: Great Quotes by People of Color. Winner announced next Tuesday.

Click detail to see full image.

We all know the job cuts and housing losses in this recession keep reaching new and scarier heights. But check out the numbers of people receiving food stamps these days, via a new graphic from the folks at Good.

There are also new reports to contend with these days, like the latest that links food stamp usage with obesity, and it's making me extra angry. These sorts of conversations inevitably ignite vile and racialized "personal responsibility" attacks on poor people's bad decisions and lazy lifestyles. But the real issue is about access and availability.

The affordable food that fills the belly very often isn't the food that can keep the body healthy.For low-income communities of color, a very serious and well-documented "grocery gap" of food deserts exists. According to the USDA, 26 million people who live in low-income urban neighborhoods do not have a single supermarket within walking distance of their homes.

Which brings me to my one quibble with the infographic above. Beautiful as it is, I felt like it was a little idealistic in its representation of food and health for the very poorest who depend on public assistance.

The Progressive Book Club has started a video series, Open Books, in which they ask "PBC authors to tell us about the books they love." This week, Rinku Sen, ARC's Executive Director and co-author of The Accidental American, recommends two novels about characters trapped “between the oppressed and the oppressor,” and tells us why these books speak to her.

The Accidental American is available now.

When financial crisis hit, the California legislature didn't raise taxes, end tax giveaways, or cut corporate welfare. Instead, they cut services to the people made most vulnerable by the recession -- children, the elderly, the sick, victims of domestic violence, AIDS patients, and people just trying to get back to work. Now -- where could our legislature have learned their priorities? Too many movies? ColorLines' Darlene Pagano takes on the Governator in this new video.

Former California State Senator Sheila Kuehl has written an excellent essay detailing exactly who the cuts affect. Spoiler alert: it's not anyone who can bear the burden. Also check out this L.A. Times article that digs into the question of whether Schwarzenegger's last-minute vetoes were constitutional.

I know Daisy just beat me to the punch on posting this trailer, but stick with me.

I remember very clearly an exchange I had with a Black woman I'd just met, shortly after I'd left my rural Missouri hometown to join Americorps*NCCC. My new teammate told me, casually, that her hair was about the same length as mine.

I had, you know, scruffy hipster hair, like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. My friend had a million thin black braids that poured past her shoulders.

Just nod, I thought to myself. I know that you don't understand what she just said. We'll figure it out later. I nodded.

Eventually I found out about braids (oh), but it was still years before I learned anything about the social and economic implications of Black hair. Or even the scheduling implications. Not that I wouldn't have been interested — it was simply a non-subject in my world. They never talked about it on Friends, if you know what I mean. I couldn't even find out that I didn't know about it.

I bring it up because of two posts I just read about the trailer for Chris Rock's new documentary, Good Hair. Trailer and ruminations below the cut.

Yasmine Farhang, reporting for ColorLines, talks about the ongoing discussion around New York state's GENDA. Advocates are moving swiftly to get it passed, but there are queer groups that oppose the bill:

The Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (known as GENDA) would protect people who are routinely kicked out of housing, fired from jobs and harassed in schools and other public institutions because of their gender expression. The bill has passed the state assembly and is up for a vote on the Senate floor. Thirteen other states and the District of Columbia have already enacted similar legislation.

But a group of queer justice organizations is not supporting the bill because it would also add “gender identity and expression” to the list of hate crime offenses and result in longer prison terms. Because the same communities vulnerable to violence face increased policing, it’s a move that would “expose our communities to the inherent racism and classism that is rooted in the criminal justice system,” said Pooja Gehi, staff attorney at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, which opposes the hate crime portion of the proposed bill.

Check out more at ColorLines.com

Via our @racialjustice Twitter account, from RaceWire reader @JoseDelBarrio, comes this video with some all-too-familiar themes.

A Latino family in Manassas, Virginia, is celebrating the baptism of their two young boys, at a party held in their grandfather's backyard. The police arrive in response to a noise complaint, and ask to see the grandfather's ID. The family's account says that he provided it, but the police report say that he refused; both accounts agree that the grandfather was then Tasered three times in rapid succession, on his own property, and then charged with 'public intoxication.' The pregnant mother of the two boys ran to help him as he lay on the ground — and was also Tasered, then charged with assaulting a police officer.

I'll say it again — all parties agree that county police officers arrived at a children's baptism party being held at a private residence, then Tasered a 55-year-old Bible study teacher three times and Tasered a pregnant woman once, in front of a yard full of kids, including her kids, and family members. Then they read rights. To the grandfather and the pregnant woman. For 'public intoxication' and 'assaulting a police officer,' respectively. As they lay temporarily paralyzed on the ground.

Can you imagine being one of those two boys, and watching as your own mother, pregnant with your sibling-to-be, is electrocuted by police officers and arrested, for rushing to the side of your grandfather as lay paralyzed on the ground? How would that make you feel about your relationship to the police, as a young Latino man about to grow up in the astonishingly xenophobic state of Virginia?

Does that make you angry? It makes me angry. It's natural to feel anger in this situation.

So let's be angry. Let's be so angry that we don't call anyone a racist.