Tag: racial profiling

For those wondering if hip-hop artists in Arizona would speak out against the state’s immigration laws, you got your answer. The hip-hop community in Arizona came together to protest by remaking Public Enemy’s song, “By the Time I Get to Arizona.”

At a community town hall on May 8, the discussion is expected to generate ideas for building community responses against violence that don’t involve police. The town hall will take place from 8 a.m. to 12 noon at Oakland City Council chambers, 1 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. No gang injunctions!

Cynthia McKinney sets the theme for Black Resistance to Police Terrorism Month, marked by five events in two weeks – four in Oakland, on Feb. 7, 17, 21 and 22, and one on Oscar Grant in Los Angeles, on Feb. 18, the eve of killer cop Mehserle's Feb. 19 hearing – featuring your favorite speakers coming to Cali from around the country. And pack the courtroom Feb. 22, 8:30 a.m., 1225 Fallon, Oakland, for Minister of Information JR's trial. Free JR!

Recently the cold war against Cuba was ratcheted up when an acrimonious debate broke out over the issue of racism in Cuba and for the first time the issue of Brazil was thrown into the mix. The brouhaha began when scores of prominent African Americans, many of whom should have known better, put their names to a petition calling upon the Cuban government to release a dissident from prison.

The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals overturned a conviction obtained by San Mateo County Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe and published its reason – racially discriminatory jury selection – stating: “overwhelming evidence indicating that the prosecutor [Wagstaffe] ... acted with discriminatory intent when he struck M.C. [an African-American juror].”

Ishmael Reed is one of the most read writers of his generation, along with Toni Morrison and Amiri Baraka, living in America. In 1962, Reed co-founded “East Village Other,” a well known underground publication at the time, and was a member of the Umbra Writers Workshop, which helped to give rise to the Black Arts Movement. He has published nine novels, four collections of poetry, six plays, four collections of essays and a libretto. He currently lives in Oakland, and I approached him one day while he was visiting KPFA’s studios to ask him what he thought about the state of affairs between the police and Oakland’s Black community, with the backdrop of the police murder of Oscar Grant and, in a separate incident, the police murder of Lovelle Mixon, after Mixon allegedly killed four Oakland police officers.

Blacks and Latinos in the United States have long complained of police harassment and racial profiling, but no one paid much attention until July 16 this year, when the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates at his home on a “disorderly conduct” charge – read for being an uppity Negro or forgetting his place.

"It's a civil war, us against the authorities - if you get pulled over, you're so afraid for your life that you're going to react as someone would react in war. A random traffic stop is life or death now." - Mistah F.A.B., interviewed by Davey D

Many TV channels broadcast live the entire funeral for four Oakland police officers killed March 21, news anchors calling them "heroes" and "angels." Police funerals are intended to legitimize past and future police violence and tell the public to shut up. The spineless left complies - no mention of Oscar Grant ... or Lovelle Mixon.

New data from the New York City Police Department shows the final total of stop-and-frisks for 2008 to be a record 531,159. Over 80 percent of them were of Black and Latino New Yorkers.

From 2005 to 2008, approximately 80 percent of NYPD's total stops made were of Blacks and Latinos, who are more likely to have physical force used against them than Whites.

On Wednesday, Oct. 31, a coalition of Black and Brown groups and individuals gathered at City Hall to express their opposition to San Francisco’s gang injunctions. Several themes emerged from those who addressed the crowd, including gentrification, racial profiling and the misuse of city money. During the course of the rally, it became clear that City Attorney Dennis Herrera, the political force behind the injunctions, has become an extremely unpopular figure in Bayview Hunters Point, the Mission and the Western Addition – neighborhoods in which the gang injunctions are now in place.