I may have mentioned this before. When I was in college, in my senior year, I
took an honors seminar in the Social Sciences, and I think it was for the
final, I had to organize a sociological study, perform it, and write up the
results. At the time, I had a part-time job in the Lighthouse recreation
program, teaching guitar and autoharp to people of various ages. I decided to
study the racial attitudes of the teenagers with whom I worked. I composed a
set of questions which I asked them in order to elicit their racial attitudes.
There was one boy, just a few years younger than I, who'd been totally blind
since birth. What stands out clearly in my memory was that He described what he
believed, black people looked like. His description included every stereotype
you've ever heard. He'd learned what black people look like from the culture
which surrounded him. He had no visual knowledge which might correct his
beliefs. Interestingly, he became a social worker, ended up working for our
county hospital, eventually became president of the Nassau County Chapter of
the National Association of Social Workers. He married a sighted woman, and was
also President of our local chapter of NFB.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2017 9:32 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: For White America, It's 'Happy Days' Again
"It ain't easy being Green", or Black or Brown or Female or Gay. One solution
would be to provide every person with sleep shades, and force the to be worn at
all times. But then, I know some very prejudiced totally blind people...
Carl Jarvis
On 4/13/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage
non-federal law enforcement agencies," Jeff Sessions wrote in a memo
last week. (photo: Michael B. Thomas/Getty)
For White America, It's 'Happy Days' Again
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
13 April 17
Jeff Sessions rolls the clock back on civil rights enforcement
Two recent news stories crossed like ships in the night, without much
public discussion of how they were related.
Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered a review of all
agreements between the Justice Department and local police departments
around the country. Sessions wrote that "it is not the responsibility
of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement
agencies," and said the DOJ might "pull back" on federal oversight
responsibilities under Donald Trump.
The news came after the revelation by the New York Daily News that
Daniel Pantaleo - the officer who used a chokehold in the killing of
Eric Garner - had repeatedly been disciplined by the Civilian
Complaint Review Board
(CCRB) prior to the Garner case. New York City had fought like a tiger
to keep this information out of the public eye, and when it finally
was released, it was only through an anonymous leak.
The story about Pantaleo shows why the Sessions story is so unsettling.
People laughed when Donald Trump had to get Scott Baio to serve as an
opening-day speaker at the Republican National Convention. But the
Happy Days symbolism officially takes a darker turn with this Sessions
news. What Sessions is suggesting means literally going back to a
Fifties-era conception of the Justice Department's role in preventing
local police abuse.
If Sessions has his way, he will holster the most powerful weapon the
government has in addressing tragedies like the Garner incident:
federal civil rights laws.
The key statute is 18 USC 242, which gives the federal government the
right to intervene if a person has been harmed by a "deprivation of
any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the
Constitution."
An example of when this law comes into play would be a police murder
in which the officer is acquitted in a sham trial by an unabashedly
corrupt local government. The federal government is supposed to then
use its powers to step in and file charges for civil rights
violations, correcting the local wrong.
It took decades of hard-fought legal battles to get the government to
actually use this tool.
Back in 1959, during the days that Donald Trump once recalled fondly
to Michele Bachmann as the time when "even my Jews would say Merry Christmas,"
a deputy attorney general named William Rogers wrote a memo very
similar in tone to the one Sessions just wrote. He declared that the
federal government should not intervene in local controversies and
file civil rights charges absent "compelling circumstances."
In practice, the Rogers memo meant that, provided there had been some
kind of local due process, no matter how flawed, the feds wouldn't
step in and take a second whack at an offender in a race killing or a
police brutality case.
This prohibition against "dual prosecutions" was the law of the land
for nearly 20 years. It didn't change until after an egregious
incident involving an unarmed African-American man named Carnell Russ.
In 1971, Russ was shot in the head by a policeman named Charles Lee
Ratliff at point-blank range in Star City, Arkansas, after being
pulled over for speeding.
Ratliff was acquitted in a joke of a trial in which an all-white jury
in Star City took less than 15 minutes to deliberate. Years later, the
NAACP sued the federal government - specifically the attorney general
under Gerald Ford, Edward Levi - for failing to use its civil rights
authority to investigate the obvious problems in the Russ case.
The case went before a Nixon-appointed judge named Barrington Parker,
who would later become famous as the judge in the trial of would-be
Reagan assassin John Hinckley. Parker was African-American. He ruled
in the NAACP's favor. Although the federal government appealed, a deal
was later struck between the NAACP and Jimmy Carter's attorney
general, Griffin Bell, whereupon the federal government would look at
"each and every allegation of a violation of the civil rights laws ...
on its own merits."
The 1977 Bell memo gave birth to the modern civil rights investigation.
That
means it took until the late Seventies, over 110 years after the Civil
War, for the government to finally accept its responsibility to police
local police. That the federal government still needs to use those
powers is self-evident. Just look at the Garner case and countless
others like it, where local governments routinely fail to investigate
and/or secure indictments against brutal cops.
After the Garner case, three out of four Americans believed there
should be charges for Pantaleo. There were protests around the
country, and the onslaught of high-profile brutality cases that
followed - from Michael Brown in Ferguson to Tamir Rice in Cleveland
to Walter Scott in North Charleston to Freddie Gray in Baltimore to
Sandra Bland to Dajerria Becton, the 15 year-old girl in a bathing
suit thrown to the ground by police in McKinney, Texas - led some
people to hope that there would finally be some kind of national
discussion on the issue that would result in positive changes.
With the Sessions news of last week, things have officially gone the
other way. The Trump administration is pushing for steep cuts to the
Justice Department budget, including the outright elimination of
funding for the Legal Services Corporation and Violence Against Women
grants, as well as slashing up to a third of the Civil Rights Division's
budget.
Sessions has already hinted that he will stop investigating local
police departments. Coupled with the budget cuts, we can probably
expect the feds to get out of the business of policing cops entirely.
Add cuts to legal services, and what we get is a clear message from
the people who elected
Trump: Their response to all of these awful films of local police
beating or strangling or shooting unarmed black people is to worry
that there's too much federal oversight of police, and too much
advocacy for people who come in contact with police.
The facile conclusion to all of this is that white America wants to go
back to the Fifties. But it's worse, and weirder, than that.
Seventy years ago, affluent white people could huddle in the suburbs,
watch Leave It to Beaver, and pretend that cops weren't beating the
crap out of people in East St. Louis or Watts or wherever the nearest
black neighborhood was. But these days, the whole country regularly
gawks at brutal cases of police violence on the Internet. Nobody can
pretend it's not going on, but millions of people clearly don't want
to do anything about it - just the opposite, in fact. They want more.
Is this a twisted country, or what?
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