BLM aftermaths–news, tweets, observations, etc.

Seattle:https://www.democracynow.org/2020/6/18/seattle_police?utm_source=Democracy+Now%21&utm_campaign=6e476408e0-Daily_Digest_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-6e476408e0-192214769

“….Seattle socialist Councilmember Kshama Sawant ….
…..
…….NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Kshama, explain. You proposed the legislation to have tear gas and chokeholds banned in Seattle. What did it take to do that? And what kind of response have you received?

KSHAMA SAWANT: Absolutely. And, you know, this is what’s happened. This Monday is absolutely historic. Our movement was able to force a unanimous vote on the Seattle City Council, which is dominated by the Democratic Party establishment, to make Seattle the first city in the nation to win a comprehensive ban on the use and purchase of chemical weapons and other barbaric weapons used against protest movements, so tear gas, as you mentioned, mace and pepper spray, rubber bullets, flashbang grenades, water cannons, ultrasonic weapons. I mean, these are just horrific weapons that are being deployed against peaceful movements. And as you said, Nermeen, we also won a ban against the police use of chokeholds.

And what it took to win was an absolutely determined and united movement on the ground, because despite all the co-opting of the vocabulary of the movement by the Democratic Party establishment saying, “Black Lives Matter,” “We want to dismantle and reimagine the police” — despite all of that, there was a shameful attempt by the Democratic establishment to drive a truck-sized amendment into the bill, basically gutting the bill. And we were able to force them to back down because of the ferocity of the movement, where we said, “Absolutely not. This is the bare minimum you need to do. In fact, you need to pass this strong ban, make Seattle the first city, have other cities follow, make this a national trend, and defund the police by at least 50%.”

AMY GOODMAN: Police union, Kshama Sawant? What have you done about the police union in Seattle?

KSHAMA SAWANT: That’s a very important thing, Amy. I’m so glad you brought this up. This shows the momentum that the movement is having and the tremendous solidarity there is among the working class to fight unitedly against racism and police violence.

So, we won these important, historic bans against chemical weapons and chokeholds on Monday. And then, last night, on Wednesday night — and I speak as a rank-and-file member of the teachers’ union myself — the Martin Luther King County Labor Council, the rank-and-file and progressive unions won a vote to expel Seattle’s police from the Labor Council by saying that there is no place for a racist, anti-poor, anti-homeless police department in the Labor Council, because the labor movement itself was built on the understanding that an injury to one is an injury to all. You cannot build a working-class resistance against capitalism’s exploitation unless the working class comes together against all forms of oppression, like racism and sexual violence. And that is the only basis on which we can all unite against economic inequality, as well.

And I think that’s why these demands have to also be connected to — ultimately, really, in addition to winning defunding the police by at least 50%, we also need to fight for an independently elected community oversight board with full powers over the police, including hiring, firing and subpoena powers, because not a single police officer responsible for the murders of Black and Brown people at the hands of the police has been held accountable, because they are serving at the behest — the police are serving at the behest of the Democratic establishment, and the Democratic establishment itself is complicit in these crimes. And that’s why, you know, it’s not a coincidence that alongside the removing of the Seattle police from the Labor Council, there’s also a demand within the rank and file in the labor movement, and within the Democratic Party, actually, to demand that Democratic establishment Mayor Durkan resign. And this really calls for the labor movement to break from the Democratic establishment itself and build independent political parties for the working class.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Kshama, you’re also calling for the imposition of a tax on Amazon. Could you talk about what you’re asking for and how you think that’s connected to these protests and support for Black Lives Matter?….see link…”

“Trump:Can anyone believe that Princeton just dropped the name of Woodrow Wilson from their highly respected policy center…”
————-

Well that should make utube’s ‘cynical historian’ very happy.

w
v
“…Trustees say Wilson’s name will remain on the alumni award however, because it was endowed by a gift that came with a “legal obligation to name the prize for Wilson.”

Alongside the veneration have also been concerns by students over Wilson’s prominence on campus. In 2015, students protested, occupying the president’s office. In response, the trustees assembled a special committee to review concerns over Wilson’s legacy and provide recommendations.

The committee recommended that the school keep the 28th president’s name on both schools, even as it acknowledged that “Wilson indisputably opposed the idea of admitting black students to the Princeton of his time.”

But as anti-racist protests surged across the nation, the celebration of Wilson’s legacy at Princeton was one more longstanding debate to reenter the spotlight.

Students of the public policy school recently sent a letter, dated June 22, demanding, among other things, a name change.

“If Princeton saw fit to change the name of the School of Public and International Affairs in 1948 to reflect the politics of the midcentury United States, then it is time to change the name once again, over sixty years later, to reflect the morals and principles of our institutional identity in 2020,” the letter read. ”
link:https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/27/884310403/princeton-to-remove-woodrow-wilsons-name-from-public-policy-school

LA:https://laist.com/2020/07/01/los-angeles-city-council-votes-lapd-budget-cuts-150-million.php
City Council Votes To Slash LAPD Budget By $150 Million
by Libby Denkmann in News on July 1, 2020 5:10 PM
—
The L.A. City Council on Wednesday voted to cut $150 million out of the Los Angeles Police Department’s $1.8 billion operating budget, with plans to reinvest the funds in marginalized communities.

The move comes in response to recent historic protests that saw hundreds of thousands of Angelenos take to the streets, demanding justice for Black people killed at the hands of police following the death of George Floyd. Four former Minneapolis police officers — all fired — have been charged in Floyd’s killing.

A coalition of community groups led by Black Lives Matter-LA has been organizing sustained protests and civic engagement, including:

Calling and writing city council members
Showing up to demonstrate outside elected officials’ offices and homes
Developing their own alternative spending plan called The People’s Budget.

That budget proposal calls for investing in public safety alternatives, housing and social services instead of armed law enforcement….see link

For those who can’t get to the NYT:

By Caroline Randall Williams

Ms. Williams is a poet.

June 26, 2020

NASHVILLE — I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.
Instagram Live
Caroline Randall Williams will be doing a reading of this essay and answering questions on Instagram (@nytopinion) on Tuesday, June 30 at 7 p.m. Eastern.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.

This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.

But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

Caroline Randall Williams (@caroranwill) is the author of “Lucy Negro, Redux” and “Soul Food Love,” and a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University.

This one moved me too. At least from high school on, I’ve known this is a deeply personal issue for black Americans. Damn personal. Obviously, I can’t possibly know all the whys and wherefores from their perspective, but I’ve always known it matters.

Am proud of Virginia for doing this.

Marwa Eltaib stands in front of the Robert E Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia. The Crown Act was passed unanimously and was signed into law in 2019. Photograph: Dee Dwyer/The Guardian

‘Wear your crown, because change is coming’: Virginia joins states banning hair discrimination

(Lotsa cool pics online via the article)

Excerpt:

Virginia’s Crown Act goes into effect on Wednesday – and other southern states could follow

Kenya Evelyn in Richmond and photographs by Dee Dwyer Jonts
@LiveFromKenya

Wed 1 Jul 2020 07.46 EDT
Last modified on Thu 2 Jul 2020 03.05 EDT

Shares
1,074

Carmen Davis went natural in 2004, motivated by her mother to do the “big chop”, a phrase commonly used to describe cutting off chemically straightened Black hair in favor of naturally textured kinks, coils or curls.
Cut and run: the underground hairdressers of lockdown
Read more

Standing in front of the recently defaced statue of the Confederate leader Robert E Lee in Richmond, Virginia, she recalled the backlash against her decision.

“My roommate in college stopped talking me,” she said, noting how even in college at the time, being natural was rare. “She told me it was embarrassing to be seen with me and that I’d regret it.”

Today, Davis is a natural hairstylist, helping women in the Richmond area transition from chemical processing. Her former roommate eventually became one of her many clients.

Business is growing for Davis, but she admits change is slow in the “conservative, southern” state where, in many places, wearing natural hair could mean being denied a job or socially ostracized.

“Society overall frowns upon Black hair, but here it can still be uncommon for people to embrace it because of judgment or just the every day exhaustion of having to explain your Blackness,” she said.

Now they won’t have to. Virginia became the fourth US state, and the first in the south, to pass legislation banning hair discrimination based on racial identifiers including hair texture and hair type, as well as “protective hairstyles such as braids, [locs] and twists”. The law, known as the Crown Act, goes into effect on Wednesday.

With Veto-Proof Majority, Seattle City Council Votes to Defund Police by 50%
link:https://www.democracynow.org/2020/7/10/headlines/with_veto_proof_majority_seattle_city_council_votes_to_defund_police_by_50

Not sure where to put this one: Historian on Police