Ben Carson Inadvertently Makes the Case for ‘Systemic Racism’ on Fox News

FORMER BRAIN SURGEON NOW BRAIN DEAD

Matt Wilstein, The Daily Beast•June 17, 2020


During an appearance with Martha MacCallum on Fox News Wednesday night, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson accidentally made the exact opposite argument of the one he was trying to make.

After once again defending the police officers who have now been charged with the killing of Rayshard Brooks, saying there was “wrong on both sides,” Carson addressed the larger debate over “systemic racism” in America.

“We live in a period of time where, if there’s any incident that goes on that involves a Black person and a white person, you can be guaranteed that the term ‘racism’ is going to be thrown into it,” he said. “The fact of the matter is, there are lots of interactions that occur between people that have nothing to do with race, but we impose that on everything.”

Ben Carson Defends Atlanta Police Officer Who Killed Rayshard Brooks on ‘Fox News Sunday’

From there, Carson outlined what might happen in the United States if systemic racism is acknowledged.

“If we say the system is systemically racist, then it gives us the excuse that we need to try to completely change the system,” he said. To those who say they want to “remake America,” Carson said, “First you have to make the case that America is broken,” something he obviously believes not to be the case.“Do we have defects? Absolutely,” he added. “We’re inhabited by imperfect people. But why don’t we look at situations like what just occurred in Atlanta, let’s dissect this and let’s make sure that we put in place policies so that people don’t continue to have these types of situations arise. That would be much smarter than getting into our respective corners and demonizing each other and getting angry all the time.”

Nodding in agreement, MacCallum finally chimed in with, “Wise words, Dr. Carson.”

For the activists who have been wanting America to address systemic racism in policing and other aspects of American society for years, that “excuse” for change that Carson describes is exactly what they have been fighting for. They probably couldn’t have put it better themselves.

NYPD officer bragged about taking off protester's mask and pepper-spraying him, bodycam footage shows

INSIDER•June 18, 2020

NYPD officers stand in formation as nearby demonstrators hold an anti-racism rally in Times Square, June 1, 2020, in New York City. Scott Heins/Getty Images NOT WEARING MASKS WAS ILLEGAL AT THE TIME IN THE CITY AND STATE.

A police officer gloated to his colleagues about tearing off a protester's mask and pepper-spraying him, footage from that officer's body camera shows.

The officer, Michael Sher, has been suspended without pay since June 5, the NYPD said.

The protester, Andrew Smith, has called for Sher to face "great consequences."


Andrew Smith, a Black man, had his hands in the air when a New York police officer ripped off his mask and pepper-sprayed him. The May 30 incident in Brooklyn was caught on camera and circulated widely on social media.

When the NYPD published body camera footage on Tuesday, another detail emerged: The officer — who a law enforcement source identified to Insider as Michael Sher — bragged to his colleagues just minutes after the incident.

"I took the guy's goggles, I ripped the s--- off and I used it," Sher said in the video, captured by his own body camera. The NYPD did not immediately respond to questions about the incident.

"It felt like a searing pain," Smith told a local NBC News affiliate. "There should be great consequences for that – and not just a slap on the wrist."

"At a certain level, I've come to expect the police to do things that they shouldn't do," Smith added.

Sher was suspended without pay on June 5, the NYPD said. Because in-person court proceedings are adjourned until October, any investigation into Sher and other instances of police violence would not be rushed, the law enforcement source told Insider.

Body camera footage from the protest.NYPD/YouTube

Smith's attorney, Alain Messena, has called on Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez to pursue criminal charges against Sher.

"They have had this information for at least a week. It begs the question, what are you waiting for? Why hasn't this officer been arrested? Why hasn't this officer been charged?," Messena wrote in a letter cited by NBC News. "Andrew Smith has patiently given the Kings County District Attorney's Office the benefit of the doubt. We are beginning to question whether the close ties between NYPD and the District Attorney's Office is preventing the office from charging this officer. If true, that is unacceptable."

Gonzalez's office launched an investigation "shortly after the incident," Oren Yaniv, a spokesperson for Gonzalez, told Insider. "It's an active investigation and we are looking, among other things, to interview other potential victims and witnesses that were seen in the bodycam video."

NYPD Police officers listen as Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York President Pat Lynch.PBA IS NOT A UNION IT IS A WHITE COP FRATERNAL LODGE TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images

Since anti-racist protests erupted in New York and around the country last month, the NYPD has come under fire for numerous instances of police brutality against peaceful protesters. Videos of NYPD officers using violence against peaceful protesters have circulated widely on social media.

When a reporter asked Gov. Andrew Cuomo about instances of police bludgeoning protesters with batons, he said the question itself was "a little offensive." There are too many videos of police beating protesters to list them all.

"A police officer doing their job, do you think there is any sensible police officer who believes their job is bludgeoning a peaceful person with a baton?" Cuomo asked at a press conference in early June.

Days earlier, footage emerged of two NYPD cruisers driving through a crowd of protesters, and of an officer aiming his handgun at protesters.

Voices have been overheard on a citywide police scanner saying, "Run them over" and "Shoot those motherf---ers," referring to protesters.

Expanded Coverage Module: black-lives-matter-module

Read the original article on Insider

Fact check: Images of witches, 'Amish' supposedly at Floyd protest are out of context

Adrienne Dunn, USA TODAY•June 19, 2020

The claim: Witches and the Amish protested the death of George Floyd

As thousands have gathered across the country — and the world — to protest the death of George Floyd, police brutality and systemic racism, photographs and videos from the protests have gone viral.

At the center of the protests is the phrase Black Lives Matter, a movement that began in 2013 following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who fatally shot the unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin.

A Facebook post falsely indicates that "witches" and "Amish" are at a protest following George Floyd's death.

The movement has been met with pushback for years, but in recent weeks it has seen widespread support from politicians, celebrities, organizations and businesses — some of which had previously voiced criticisms.

Among the viral images of protests were claims about groups that supported the movement. Some of the most reshared posts claimed that remote groups had joined the protest.

One viral post included two photos and claimed that witches and the Amish had joined protests saying "You know how wrong you gotta be for witches and Amish to be on the same side?"
Are those photos authentic? Did witches and the Amish join protests?

The post includes two photos, one of people dressed like witches and one of a group that the user identifies as the Amish. The two photos are real, but they have been taken out of context and misidentified.

The photo of the people in witches' clothing is actually from a 2017 protest in Boston. The "witches" held signs saying "Hex white supremacy" and "Good night alt-right."

The photo was taken by Scott Eisen and can be seen in a Guardian article about the counterprotesters or on Getty Images. The people in the photo are not explicitly identified, so it is unknown whether they are simply dressed up in costumes or actually identify as members of Wicca or other witch communities.

The other photo, which has widely circulated with claims that the people are Amish, has also been misidentified.

The image is real and it's recent, but the people in the photo are actually members of the Church of God.

The group has attended various protests and addressed the viral posts about being Amish in a message on Facebook, "We're onsite in Minneapolis, sharing the message of God's love to a hurting community. We're not #Amish, of course, but we are part of the one human family and we must stand together against oppression."
Our rating: False

The claims in the post are FALSE. While both of the photos in the post are real, they were taken out of context and misidentified.

The photo of witches does not identify the people — so it is unknown if they were dressed up or if they identify as members of witch communities — and was actually taken during a 2017 protest in Boston. The image of people described as "Amish" is actually a photo of members of the Church of God.

Our fact-check sources:

The Guardian, Rightwing rally and counter-protest in Boston – in pictures

The Church of God Facebook posts

Seattle police union expelled from large labor group

GOOD RIDDANCE TO A FAKE UNION OF WHITE COPS

Associated Press•June 18, 2020
  

In this June 3, 2020, file photo, police officers behind a barricade look on as protesters fill the street in front of Seattle City Hall, in Seattle, following protests over the death of George Floyd, a black man who was in police custody in Minneapolis. The King County Labor Council, the largest labor group in the Seattle area, vote Wednesday night June 17 to expel the city’s police union, saying the guild representing officers failed to address racism within its ranks. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)

   

Flowers are placed next to an image of George Floyd on a fence surrounding Cal Anderson Park, Wednesday, June 17, 2020, inside what has been named the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone in Seattle. Police pulled back from several blocks of the city's Capitol Hill neighborhood near the Police Department's East Precinct building earlier in the month after clashes with people protesting the police killing of Floyd in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

In this June 3, 2020, file photo, a Seattle police officer yells out orders at Seattle City Hall as protesters march toward them, in Seattle, following protests over the death of George Floyd, a black man who was in police custody in Minneapolis. The King County Labor Council, the largest labor group in the Seattle area, vote Wednesday night June 17 to expel the city’s police union, saying the guild representing officers failed to address racism within its ranks. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)

SEATTLE (AP) — The largest labor group in the Seattle area has expelled the city's police union, saying the guild representing officers failed to address racism within its ranks.

The vote Wednesday night by the King County Labor Council to exclude the Seattle Police Officers Guild comes after weeks of protests in the city over police brutality and racism following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

It's also significant as the labor council is politically influential. Local elected leaders are reluctant to go against the umbrella group of more than 150 unions and 100,000 workers.

“Any union that is part of our labor council needs to be actively working to dismantle racism in their institution and society at large,” the labor council said on Twitter after the vote. The police union “has failed to do that work" and is no longer part of the council, the labor alliance said.

The Seattle Times reports that the delegate vote was 45,435 to expel, with 36,760 voting to keep the police union within the council.

Before the vote, police union President Mike Solan told delegates the police union wanted to stay involved with the council and was “willing to learn.”

“We are human beings and we are workers who are committed to this city and committed to the community," Solan said. “We see a future, one that engages in these robust conversations, and in particular to race and how the institution of racism impacts all labor unions.”

Labor council representatives said the police guild could be readmitted at some point in the future.

“At this point, I just can’t justify to our members, ones who are staffing the medical tents and getting gassed" by the Seattle Police Department and having the Seattle Police Officers Guild at the table, “using our unity as a shield to justify contracts that go against our principles and mission," said Jane Hopkins, a registered nurse and executive vice president of SEIU Healthcare 1199NW.

The Seattle City Council on Monday voted unanimously to bar police from using tear gas, pepper spray and several other crowd-control devices after officers repeatedly used them on mostly peaceful demonstrators.

The 9-0 vote came amid frustration with the Seattle Police Department, which used tear gas to disperse protesters in the city’s densest neighborhood, Capitol Hill, just days after Mayor Jenny Durkan and Chief Carmen Best promised not to do so.

Police have now largely left a several block area of Capitol Hill, which for more than a week has been the site of active protests by demonstrators who have dubbed the area the “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest.”

Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County said in a statement Thursday that it stands with the labor council in demanding acknowledgement and addressing of institutionalized racism in Seattle policing, and that police accountability be included in contract negotiations.

The organization said it has demanded a seat at the negotiating table and that the mayor has responded by putting those police contract negotiations on hold until there is a plan for community representation.

SEE 
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=FOP

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=POLICE+UNIONS

'We are the ones who keep us safe': How abolitionists see an America without police and prisons

ABOLISH THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX 

#PIC

Alex Woodward, The Independent•June 19, 2020

Minneapolis councillor Alondra Cano speaks at a rally after two weeks' protest over the death of George Floyd and wider problems of police violence: AP

Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser — whose city streets just blocks from the White House had been painted with massive yellow block letters reading "defund the police" — told CNN on 8 June that those words don't necessarily mean what some might assume.

"I think a lot of people have different meanings for what they mean when they say 'defund the police', and as I've listened and read, most people are saying they want reform," she said, "and they want good policing."

Her remarks were echoed by pundits and lawmakers across the US as millions of people continue to protest police brutality and the killings of black Americans by police while repeating the mantra to shift the nation's priorities when it comes to public safety. Meanwhile, the phrase has been weaponised by Donald Trump as a campaign cudgel against his Democratic challenger Joe Biden, who has nothing to do with the abolition movement.

But police and prison abolitionists who have carried the phrase through decades of organising — against police violence, mass incarceration and their disproportionate and deadly impacts among communities of colour — say "defund the police" means exactly what it says.

Abolitionists are challenging lawmakers and communities to make policing and prisons obsolete.

"Defund the police means defund the police," says Critical Resistance member Kamau Walton. "One of the things to be wary and sharp about is the co-opting and mixed messaging in this moment. A lot of people are trying to say there's a difference between police reform, defunding the police and abolition. And the call to defund the police is abolitionist. It's a step towards abolition. It is not a separate, moderate or watered-down thing."

Critical Resistance, a national abolitionist organisation co-founded by revolutionary scholars Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, has sought the dismantling of a "prison-industrial complex", one in which for-profit prisons rely on government support for their expansion, justified by swollen prison populations, despite outside reforms to reduce America's world-leading incarceration rates.

Gilmore has argued that prisons and police have served as a "catch-all" response to address social and moral failures that would be better served by richer investments in social services that can prevent conditions that enable crime in the first place.

Instead of cities spending a lion's share of their budgets on their police departments, abolitionists argue that money should support affordable housing, healthcare, child care, mental health treatment and other services.

A 2017 report from the Centre for Popular Democracy, Black Youth Project 100 and Law for Black Lives found that several major cities have "stripped funds from mental health services, housing subsidies, youth programs, and food benefits programs, while pouring money into police forces, military grade weapons, high-tech surveillance, jails, and prisons".

The United States is the world's incarceration capital, housing a quarter of the world's prisoners in a nation that represents only 5 per cent of the global population.

It also disproportionately jails black people — African Americans make up 13 per cent of the US but more than 40 per cent of prison populations.

Abolitionists also seek to end the prison system's legacy of racism, from its roots in plantation-era America to its echoes in mass incarceration today.

Following the ending of enslavement at the end of the US Civil War, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery except for those convicted of a crime, allowing the adoption of "black codes" in economically devastated southern states at the end of the war to impose harsh penalties against newly freed black Americans for minor crimes, ensuring their continued "free" labour in prison.

"Convict leasing" would go on to provide labour for massive private infrastructure, while legalised segregation and Jim Crow-era terror criminalised black Americans.

Organisers argue that the system can't be "repaired" or "reformed" because it is doing what it set out to do; efforts to "reform" merely entrench law enforcement's role in policing and imprisoning communities.

Abolition is "absolutely getting rid of the systems and tools that support oppression, punishment and marginalisation of people," Walton says. "That means getting rid of policing, getting rid of imprisonment, [and] dismantling surveillance and court systems that are used to inflict harm, trauma and violence on marginalised people. And it also means changing what we prioritise and how we define safety, and it means building up institutions, systems, tools and resources that actually keep our folks safe."

Abolitionists argue it's not enough to "reform" these institutions but to divest from them entirely, with city budgets directing millions of dollars earmarked for law enforcement into other community services, not as a one-time emergency fix but as a long-term solution to repair and transform the conditions that create violence.
"Abolition is about being more forward-thinking and preventative and not only just responding to harm and violence but also investing in our communities and caring for each other so we prevent a lot of that violence from happening in the first place," Walton says. "When communities are stable, healthy and thriving, we know there's a lot less harm and violence."

Following unrest and protests over the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, groups across the US began adopting an abolitionist framework, gaining broader support and traction across organisations in public health, housing and other areas, as well as direct action campaigns like bailout funds and community efforts to stop local jail expansions.

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and global protests against police violence, abolitionists have counted some victories across the US, paved not just by the growing demonstrations but by the groundwork from community groups in prior decades.

The Minneapolis City Council unanimously supported a resolution to determine a community-supported replacement for the city's police force. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti also announced his intention to strip $250 million from the city's police department budget, which tops $1.8 billion, and redirect funds into youth programs, healthcare and other areas.

New York City police commissioner Dermot Shea also dissolved a plainclothes unit that has been criticised for pitting police against communities it serves.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, following the police killing of Rayshard Brooks, also ordered her city's police department to "immediately adopt" deescalation policies, including holding officers accountable for their "duty to intervene" against another officer's use of deadly force.

Both chambers of Congress, meanwhile, are eyeing extensive policing reform packages, while self-described "law-and-order" president Donald Trump issued a set of policing guidelines, including funds for training and a ban on chokeholds — "except in those situations where the use of deadly force is allowed by law".

Following New York's passage of a massive legislative package with sweeping reforms, Governor Andrew Cuomo told protesters: "You won."

But abolitionists argue that incremental efforts ultimately do nothing to stop police violence and merely reinforce the institutions they have sought to disband, pointing to a history of investigations about police misconduct that all led to similar outcomes, while police killings and abuse persisted.
gettyimages-1248266122.jpg

Abolitionists painted a massive 'defund the police' message in Washington DC. (Getty Images)

Critical Resistance started its 8 To Abolition campaign as a counter to 8 Can't Wait, which was roundly criticised by abolitionist groups for its incrementalist approach to preventing police brutality.

The 8 Can't Wait platform calls for a ban on chokeholds, although these were already banned by the NYPD for more than two decades when Eric Garner was killed.

It also would require officers to warn people before they shoot them, which is already required in a majority of police departments, and would require officers to "exhaust all alternatives" before shooting. But officers have often cited perceived threats to their life in deadly encounters, which meet the legal threshold for use of deadly force.

A "duty to intervene" — also invoked by Mayor Bottoms — was in place in Minneapolis as three other officers looked on while Derek Chauvin placed his knee into the neck of Mr Floyd for nearly nine minutes.

In The New York Times, organiser Mariama Kaba argues that commissions, studies and the "best practices" that emerge from police abuse investigations from as early as 1894 only "served as a kind of counterinsurgent function each time police violence led to protests."

There were calls for reform following the 1967 uprisings in cities across the US and as a response to the police beating of Rodney King in 1991 as well as to the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014.

While Barack Obama's President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing led to bias training and use-of-force recommendations and community listening sessions after the Ferguson protests, a task force member noted in the report that "policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed."

"The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence," Kabe writes. "Why on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need to change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers."

That urgency is underscored by the coronavirus pandemic, Walton says, as millions of recently unemployed Americans navigate rent, healthcare and other needs without a safety net.

"When people are put in situations where they're not able to live in the homes they've been in, where they're not able to get access to running water in the midst of a pandemic, that puts them with a lot less options," Walton says. "We are not prioritising folks being able to shelter in place during a pandemic, and we don't have any services that balance that out, but we aren't willing to protect people and keep them safe."

But Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey, who is sympathetic to the abolitionist movement, argues that while communities should have a greater role in reducing harm in their communities, "those who argue that the police have no role in maintaining safe streets are arguing against lots of strong evidence."

"One of the most robust, most uncomfortable findings in criminology is that putting more officers on the street leads to less violent crime," he writes in The Washington Post. "Considered alongside the brutal response to protests over the past few weeks, this evidence forces us to hold two incongruent ideas: Police are effective at reducing violence, the most damaging feature of urban inequality. And yet one can argue that law enforcement is an authoritarian institution that historically has inflicted violence on black people and continues to do so today."

Abolition argues for restorative justice, or repairing relationships that existed in communities, as well as transformative justice, which shapes communities to prevent future harm.

"There is this effort to want to believe that there is someone else who is going to keep us safe, and if we give them the tools that they need they will finally do it right, but that's not the case," Walton says. "We are the ones who keep us safe, and we're the ones who deserve to be invested in."

Rather than public safety spearheaded by police, abolitionists call for the communities themselves to take the lead. Neighbours can learn to deescalate incidents, respond to mental health issues and hold one another accountable for their communities. Most conflicts could be disrupted through mediation, or defused by social workers or mental health workers and other care providers.

But the calls to abolish police and prisons don't ignore the inevitability of violence. Instead, abolitionists argue that police don't actually stop violence from happening, and that a better administration of justice should come from communities holding people accountable. Addressing the conditions that lead to people committing violence would prevent it from happening in the first place, they argue, while prisons don't inherently repair the health or harms that lead to a person's imprisonment, including their mental health, addiction or abuse.

The National Crime Victimisation Survey found that roughly half of all sexual assaults, robberies and aggravated assaults go unreported. For every 1,000 people who commit sexual assault, roughly 995 do not spend any time in prison, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, the nation's largest organisation against sexual violence.

As for court systems, abolition would dramatically reduce the number of people in pretrial detention — people held in jails before they're convicted of a crime. The number of people in US jails before they've been convicted swelled by 433 per cent from the 1970s to 2015, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.

A 2018 report from the National Institutes of Health determined that a "combined investment in a public health, community-based approach to violence prevention and a criminal justice approach focused on deterrence can achieve more to reduce population-level rates of urban violence than either can in isolation."

The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, for example, shifted from thinking about transformative justice within "communities" to "pods", which are "made up of the people that you would call on if violence, harm or abuse happened to you", had witnessed, or wanted accountability for.

"Why can't we be the ones taking care of each other, instead of police, who tend to escalate and further traumatise people when that doesn't need to happen?" Walton argues. "Why not invest in people who are going to see you as a neighbour, a cousin, a friend, a loved one, that they care for and want to take care of? That's the idea behind the solutions we want to see, that they need to be based in communities that see people as people, people connected to them and that they're accountable to."

Read more

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Is the BLM movement finally changing America’s legacy of racism?

What the George Floyd protests really look like from on the ground

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Democrats and Republicans move ahead with separate police reform bills

Trump's executive order on police reform is 'inadequate’, Schumer says

New York lawmakers to pass sweeping police reform measures

Cops’ Most Deranged Lies and Bizarre Claims About the Protests

Kelly Weill, The Daily Beast•June 18, 2020

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Photo Getty

Protesters are not filling ice cream containers with concrete. Shake Shack employees are not putting bleach in milkshakes. And buses full of anti-fascists are not about to descend on a small town near you.

That’s just what police are saying.

As protests over racial justice and police brutality unfold across the country, police departments are taking to social media to tell their side of the story. The trouble is, they’re frequently wrong—and sometimes so wildly so that it begs the question of why they even bother.

Christopher Slobogin, director of Vanderbilt University’s criminal justice program, said cops can be mistaken, just like everyone. But sometimes police lie because they view themselves as in opposition to criminals, who also lie.

“It’s possible that police concoct lies because even though they know what they’re saying isn’t true, they believe the lie is in service of a greater good,” Slobogin told The Daily Beast. “If cops are convinced that, overall, they’re in the right, what’s a little lying here and there? I think that’s human nature, not just cops. But the problem, the cops have the power, they have the weapons, and people in authority tend to believe them.”

New York Cops Beat Protesters for Crime of Being There

What follows is a smattering of the most impactful, egregious, or just plain weird fibs, panicky projections, falsehoods, or exaggerations about protests to come from cops, their spokespeople, and their unions in recent weeks.

Dairy Disinfo

The New York City Police Benevolent Association, which represents city police officers, claimed this week that workers at Shake Shack had put a bleach-like substance in officers’ milkshakes. The PBA—which joined a similar claim made by the Detectives’ Endowment Association—cited no evidence, aside from officers’ apparent gastrointestinal distress after they purchased Shake Shack’s notoriously heavy drinks while on the job. An official NYPD investigation quickly cleared Shake Shack workers of wrongdoing.

No Concrete Proof

New York City police also claimed internally this month that protesters were filling ice cream containers with concrete—presumably to throw at cops as projectile weapons—and leaving them at a construction site. Twitter users quickly noted that, not only was the concrete in coffee cups instead of ice cream containers, but that mixing concrete samples in coffee cups is standard practice for construction workers. The cups were even labeled with workers’ notes on the concrete composition. The construction site where the cups were apparently recovered even had a permit for concrete work.

Phantom Brick Piles

In Brooklyn, NYPD hyped up a rumor about protesters gathering brick piles to throw during protests. “This is what our cops are up against,” NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea tweeted, parroting the rumor, which has also been promoted by President Donald Trump. “Organized looters, strategically placing caches of bricks & rocks at locations throughout NYC.” Reporting by The Daily Beast and other outlets cast doubt on those claims, pointing out that they were near a construction site, and nowhere near protests.
Time Travel

On Monday, New York City’s Sergeants Benevolent Association (another police union) tweeted a video of protesters running through a Brooklyn street and throwing things at a cop car. “This was tonight,” the SBA tweeted, “Flatbush Ave Brooklyn.” The tweet also implied that a program that discourages unnecessary arrests was responsible for the chaos. In fact, there was no chaos that night in Brooklyn. The video was from May, and that area of Flatbush Avenue had long been calm, reporters covering the protests noted. 

Murder Bus

In Columbus, Ohio, police tweeted evidence of what they said was a clear violent scheme: a bus full of rocks, clubs, and a meat cleaver. “There was a suspicion of supplying riot equipment to rioters,” Columbus Police tweeted. “Charges pending.” In fact, Columbus Alive reported, police had stumbled across a colorfully painted circus bus. The frightened circus troupe told the outlet that the “clubs” were juggling clubs, the rocks were crystals, and the meat cleaver was pulled from the troupe’s cooking utensils. “Yeah, there’s a hatchet on the bus—with a bunch of wood sitting next to a wood-burning stove,” the bus’s owner said, noting that the vehicle was literally his house.

Technically Tear Gas

U.S. Park Police offered an oft-changing explanation for firing irritants at protesters in Washington D.C.’s Lafayette Park in order to clear it for a Trump photoshoot in early June. Police initially denied using “tear gas” in a statement, then walked that back, claiming that, technically, the projectiles were “smoke canisters and pepper balls.” Nevertheless, reporters for D.C.’s WUSA9 recovered tear gas casings from the scene—and as Vox noted, “tear gas” can be a broad term, sometimes referring to the pepper projectiles Park Police admitted to using. Attorney General William Barr also falsely claimed that pepper spray “is not a chemical irritant. It’s not chemical.” The Washington Post’s fact-checking department awarded the claim “four Pinnochios,” which is the maximum number of Pinnochios.

A Bad Trip

Police in Buffalo, New York, became the focus of national ire after they were filmed pushing a 75-year-old man to the ground, causing him to lose consciousness and bleed from the head. But before the video went viral, Buffalo Police offered a different characterization of the incident. “During [a] skirmish involving protestors, one person was injured when he tripped & fell,” police said in a statement. The video would later reveal that the man was alone when he calmly approached officers. He has a fractured skull and is still unable to walk, his lawyer said this week.

Small Biz Shakedown

After protesters took over a six-block area in Seattle, the city’s police claimed—without evidence—that the activists were extorting businesses in the area. Police appeared to walk back that claim several days later, after the local business association and prominent businesses in the area said they’d seen no indication of the alleged protection racket. Some businesses even said they were volunteering with the protests.

The Antifa Express

Multiple police departments have promoted a hoax about anti-fascists coming to their towns by the busload to wreak havoc. In Oregon, Curry County Sheriff John Ward shared a Facebook post warning that "3 buss loads of ANTIFA protestors are making their way from Douglas County headed for Coquille then to Coos Bay." Hundreds of locals reportedly stood outside with guns overnight awaiting the menace that never came.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

More than 2 weeks after start of nationwide protests, little sign of COVID spike, but officials remain cautious

Hunter Walker and Sean D. Naylor Correspondents, Yahoo News•June 19, 2020

Fauci on George Floyd protests: 'I'm concerned' about the possible spread of the coronavirus

When protests started after the May 25 killing of George Floyd, health experts worried that the large gatherings could spark outbreaks of the coronavirus. Yet more than two weeks since those protests hit their peak, there is little evidence that has happened, though officials caution it is far too early — and the circumstances far too complicated — to draw any broad conclusions.

“We’re not seeing an increase in cases associated with the demonstrations (as of yet),” New York City Department of Health spokesman Michael Lanza wrote in an email to Yahoo News on Tuesday.

Between June 3 and June 14, New York City reported an average decline of approximately 8.3 percent in the number of positive cases each day. In the seven days immediately preceding potential post-protest incubation, New York City reported an average increase of roughly 11 percent in the number of positive cases each day.

The question of health risks from mass gatherings is a fraught one, because supporters of President Trump have claimed a double standard, in which some public health officials who have pushed for closures of businesses have recently expressed public support for the protests. While it’s hard to know why the Floyd protests haven’t caused a spike, at least not yet, supporters point to the fact that the protests were outdoors and encouraged the widespread use of face coverings, which organizers even helped distribute.

Analyzing the effect of the demonstrations is complicated by many variables, including irregularities in how daily numbers are reported, overall progress on the coronavirus and protesters from outside the various cities. Also, the demonstrations coincided with reopening measures and warmer weather, which have led more people to venture outside, including in defiance of social distancing recommendations.

Rich Azzopardi, a senior adviser to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, noted recent crowds at city restaurants and concurred that it is too soon to determine the effect the protests may have had.

“We’re keeping a close eye on the metrics, but at the moment it’s too soon to say what effect things like last weekend’s restaurant crowding or the protests will have, if any. Stay smart, wear a mask and wash your hands,” Azzopardi told Yahoo News.

Anti-police-brutality protesters in New York City earlier this month. (Yuki Iwamura/AP)

In Minneapolis, where large protests began shortly after Floyd was killed and are ongoing, Casper Hill, a spokesman for the city, also cited variables, and he said it is too early to draw definitive conclusions about any impact the protests may have had there.

“It is too soon to report on that given the delay in reporting and the testing timeline. Additionally, we only have access to Minneapolis data and protesters came from other places so the State may be a better source of information overall,” Hill wrote in an email to Yahoo News on Wednesday evening.

Julie Bartkey, a spokesperson for the Minnesota Department of Health, said it may take 42 days from the end of the protests to be clear about their impact.

“Because of the potential for asymptomatic spread of this virus, giving an ‘all-clear’ time frame is difficult,” Bartkey said in an email on Tuesday. “We need to allow about 21 days for the first generation of infections to appear (i.e. 21 days from exposure to test result – 14-day incubation plus another few days to seek health care or get tested and for the result to come to us); but if there is asymptomatic spread in a household, it could be another 14-21 days for those secondary cases to appear.”

For now, however, Minnesota has not seen a high positivity rate in tests from protesters. Bartkey said Health Partners, a health care provider in the state that is conducting testing, has conducted coronavirus tests on 8,500 people at its sites “where the person is confirmed to have been at a protest, vigil or clean up mass event.” Of this, Bartkey said there has been “a 1-percent positivity rate.”

Protesters in Minneapolis on Saturday. (Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images)

Washington, D.C., saw some of the largest protests in the country, particularly between May 29 and the first week of June. In a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, Dr. LaQuandra Nesbitt, director of the D.C. Department of Health, said it was too early to tell what impact the demonstrations may have had.

“I cannot give you trends on that,” Nesbitt said in response to a question from a reporter. “We would expect again, because of the incubation period of the virus, that it would be too early to start to make any inference about trends that we’re seeing being related to people’s participation in First Amendment demonstrations.”

Nesbitt also pointed to “complicating epidemiological factors,” which included the phased reopening taking place at the same time as the protests.

At that same press conference, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said that, as of Wednesday, the city had “achieved 13 days of sustained decline in community spread” of the virus.

Chicago has also been a site of major protest activity since Floyd’s death. Kim Junius, a spokesperson for the Cook County Department of Health, which covers Chicago, said it is not possible to draw a conclusion about the protests, although officials there are monitoring the situation.

“We have not seen any increases as of yet related to protests,” Junius said in an email. “We are monitoring COVID-like illness using emergency room chief complaints, which is often used to detect potential issues before formal diagnoses are made or clusters are reported.”

The county, she added, is “keeping a watchful eye on it.”

Erica Duncan, a spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Public Health, provided a similar response. “At this time we haven’t seen any impact on cases due to the protests,” Duncan wrote on Wednesday.

On the West Coast, there have been large protests in multiple cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. “We don’t have any information about positive cases conclusively linked to the protests,” a spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Department of Health wrote in an email.

In response to questions about potential cases of the coronavirus linked to the protests, San Francisco’s Department of Health issued a statement that expressed support for the demonstrations while also encouraging protesters to get tested by their health care provider or at two free sites run by the city.

“We support the right to protest injustice, and doing so safely is critically important, especially in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic,” the statement read, adding, “San Francisco supports the community in taking civic action, and also supports continued vigilance against the coronavirus. We are offering free COVID-19 testing for people who have been to recent protests and want to be tested.”

The San Francisco Department of Health also specified that “the two testing sites mentioned above do not ask people getting tested if they recently have participated in any demonstrations. Therefore, we do not know the data for protesters who have tested positive.”

“We are monitoring closely for any correlation between the protest demonstrations and the [number] of positive cases,” the statement read.

Demonstrators near the White House on June 6. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

Along with concerns about the spread of COVID-19 among protesters, there is also risk for the police and law enforcement who responded, though data on police is not easily available from the cities with the biggest protests.

In New York, the NYPD did not respond to a request for comment about the number of coronavirus cases in the department and whether any were linked to protests.

In Minneapolis, John Elder, the public information officer for the city’s police force, noted it has had an increase, but the total number of cases remains in the single digits.

“We have increased by one,” Elder said in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “We have had four cases, and we have increased up to five at this time.”

Elder noted that this small number of cases makes Minneapolis an “anomaly” compared with other “major city departments” that have seen hundreds of cases.

“A lot of the protesters were wearing masks, a lot of our officers were wearing masks,” Elder said of the demonstrations. “We did have a very, very proactive approach to this. We had a COVID task force put together. We did everything we could to get … supplies in the hands of our staff.”

That equipment included personal protective gear like masks, gloves and hand sanitizer, as well as supplies to clean uniforms.

While large protests are ongoing in Minneapolis, Elder said they are now largely peaceful, eliminating the “face to face contact” between officers and demonstrators that occurred during more violent clashes in the early days of the protests.

In Washington D.C., the Metropolitan Police Department is reporting 142 cases of the coronavirus among “sworn personnel.” That figure includes three new cases since June 4, or a spike of 2.2 percent in the period when incubation could have occurred following the protests.

In Chicago, the police department said that, as of Wednesday morning, there were 569 total cases of the coronavirus among civilian and sworn personnel. The department’s public information officer, Sally Brown, said “there has not been a spike in cases” among Chicago’s police force since the protests.

A protester confronts a New York City police officer on May 28. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)

On the West Coast, Sgt. Michael Andraychak, a public information officer for the San Francisco Police Department, told Yahoo News that, as of Thursday, it had “six members” who tested positive for COVID-19. “There is nothing to indicate that any of these cases are related to recent protests,” Andraychak added.

The Los Angeles Police Department has reported a pronounced spike in new coronavirus cases. According to Officer Norma Eisenmann, as of Wednesday there were 177 cases among the department’s sworn and civilian personnel. That’s an increase of 35 cases, or about 24.6 percent, since June 3, though it’s difficult to know whether that was a result of protests, or the recent record-setting increases in the city at large.

Alex Comisar, deputy communications director for Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garceitti, responded to questions about the increase in coronavirus cases among LAPD officers with a statement on Friday that emphasized the steps the city has taken to protect its police force.

“COVID-19 is as dangerous today as it was the moment we experienced our first case, and Mayor Garcetti is taking every possible step to protect Angelenos from this deadly illness. Los Angeles was the first city in the country to make free testing available to our essential workers, including police officers,” Comisar said. “These officers and first responders are on the front lines of this crisis, and the Department is taking extensive precautions to keep them safe.”

Along with local police forces, the National Guard was deployed to cities around the country to respond to protests. As the Guard took up its protest missions, there was a concern that not only might its members get infected, but their deployment could shift resources away from COVID-19 testing. Neither appears to be the case, according to spokespeople from multiple states’ Guard bureaus.

National Guard Bureau spokesman Army Maj. Rob Perino said that as of June 5, around the height of many of the protests, the National Guard had 41,506 personnel supporting civil unrest missions across 33 states and the District of Columbia, while another 37,485 Guardsmen were conducting COVID-19 missions.

“It’s not going to appear that states are sacrificing one mission for another,” Perino said. “We have a very deep bench of 450,000 troops nationwide.”

Of 18 states that Yahoo News queried, officials in 12 – New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Illinois, West Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin — said they had not been forced to cut the number of Guard personnel working on COVID-19 missions in order to provide forces to support local law enforcement during the protests.

Members of the California National Guard outside Los Angeles City Hall on May 31. (Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP)
A spokesperson for the Minnesota National Guard said fewer than five personnel had to move from one task to the other, while a spokesperson for the Georgia National Guard acknowledged there had been “a lot of juggling” involving the more than 2,000 Guard personnel who had been conducting COVID-19-related missions immediately prior to the civil unrest, but she was unable to immediately say how many of the more than 3,000 Guard troops who Georgia now counts as being involved in either COVID-19 or domestic unrest missions had to be shifted from the former to the latter. “We never stopped working COVID-19,” she said.

However, a spokesperson for the Florida National Guard said that of the 550 Florida Guardsmen who conducted civil unrest missions, “a couple of hundred” had been redirected from COVID-19 duty. “The Soldiers who were conducting COVID-19 missions prior to being redirected to civil unrest missions were primarily involved in the operation of Community Based Testing Sites,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Caitlin Brown. ”Those Soldiers were backfilled, and any COVID-19 mission that was affected was fully operational again within 24 hours.”

Spokespersons for the California and District of Columbia National Guards did not respond to queries.

Army Lt. Col. Brad Leighton, a spokesman for the Illinois National Guard, disputed a news account that stated that the state’s Guardsmen had been reassigned from COVID-19 testing sites “to help local police departments reduce violence and protect property.” That did not happen, he said, in part because the COVID-19 missions were being paid for by the federal government, with any support to law enforcement coming out of the state’s coffers.

There also did not appear to be any known sharp increases of cases among Guardsmen in those states contacted by Yahoo News.

Demonstrators in Los Angeles on June 3. (Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP)

Spokespeople for Guardsmen who deployed from other states to support law enforcement authorities in handling the protests in Washington, D.C., said that for the most part they wore masks and took all possible precautions to avoid catching or spreading the coronavirus.

For the 400 Mississippi National Guardsmen who deployed to D.C., “the guidance provided for the staging area and the on-site mission was to maintain social distancing wherever and whenever possible, and to don masks whenever social distancing was not a viable option in maintaining mission focus,” said Army Lt. Col. Deidre Smith, a spokesperson for the Mississippi Guard, in an email to Yahoo News.

The Mississippi Guardsmen were screened for the virus before departing Mississippi and daily during the mission, and were placed in quarantine while completing their military orders upon their return to their home state, according to Smith. As of June 12, none of them had tested positive for COVID-19.

The Idaho National Guard also deployed “just over 400” troops to D.C., according to Air Force Lt. Col. Chris Borders, a spokesperson for the Idaho Guard. All the Idaho Guardsmen were issued masks and screened for COVID-19 before they left for D.C., according to Borders, who added that their mission, which was to protect the Washington Monument and the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, meant they avoided close contact with protesters.

The Idaho Guardsmen wore masks on their flights to and from Washington, and were sent home to self-isolate upon their return, according to Borders. As of June 12, “we have no positive tests in the Idaho National Guard,” he said.

Trump global media chief faces GOP backlash over firings

MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press•June 18, 2020


The Voice of America building, Monday, June 15, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The new chief of U.S.-funded global media is facing a conservative backlash over his decision to fire the heads of two international broadcasters, adding to concerns about the direction of the agency, which oversees the Voice of America and other outlets.

The criticism of Michael Pack, who defended his personnel moves, is unusual because it’s coming from supporters of President Donald Trump who had backed his controversial nomination to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media over staunch Democratic objections.

Trump allies, including former adviser Sebastian Gorka, have offered public support for the ousted head of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Alberto Fernandez, while others have taken issue with the firing of the head of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Jamie Fly.

Pack, a conservative filmmaker and onetime associate of Trump adviser Steve Bannon, sacked both of them late Wednesday in a purge of USAGM’s outlets, which also include Radio Free Asia and the Cuba-focused Radio/TV Marti. Those moves have alarmed Democrats who fear Pack intends to turn the agency into a Trump administration propaganda machine.

“Every action I carried out was — and every action I will carry out will be — geared toward rebuilding the USAGM’s reputation, boosting morale, and improving content,” Pack said in a statement released by the new agency's new public affairs staff.

The statement called the moves “significant and long-overdue” and said Pack and his team are “committed to eradicating the known mismanagement and scandals that have plagued the agency for decades."

In addition to the agency chiefs, Pack dismissed veteran broadcast news executive Steve Capus, who had been a senior adviser to the organization and its leadership, according to two congressional aides and an AGM employee, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly. Capus, who was previously president of NBC News for nearly eight years, did not respond to a query sent to an AGM work email address.

And, he ousted the head of the Open Technology Fund, a non-broadcast arm of the AGM that works to provide secure internet access to people around the world. Last week, Fund chief Libby Liu submitted her resignation, effective in mid-July, but she was removed with the others.

There was no public explanation of why Pack would dismiss any of the officials, let alone those favored by conservatives beyond the general statement of improving the agency.

The firing of Fernandez, in particular, has raised conservative hackles. A former career diplomat fluent in Arabic, Fernandez had been hailed by conservatives for bringing what they saw as balance to the Arabic-language outlets AlHurra television and Radio Sawa.

“Ambassador Fernandez was the greatest asset America had in foreign broadcasting,” Gorka wrote on Twitter shortly after the dismissals became public.

Michael Doran, a former National Security Council and State Department official during President George W. Bush's administration, called Fernandez's ouster “asinine" and said that without him, "Pack will be as effective as a drugged bug in a bottle.”

David Reaboi, a noted conservative national security analyst, was even more critical, calling Fernandez's removal “shameful." “It was unusual for the pro-American side to get represented, and Alberto always made sure it did," he told the AP. "It was a model for recapturing territory from the far left and righting the ship.“

“Michael Pack gets confirmed by the Senate and, rather than take stock and talk to people who know what’s happening, he fired everybody," Reaboi wrote. “Michael Pack destroyed that because he was too dumb to listen — or too dumb to be able to figure out the difference between friends and enemies.”

The dismissal of Fly, a former staffer for Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., also attracted criticism, including from Mark Dubowitz, a well-known advocate of the Trump administration's hawkish policies on Iran. “Poor decision to fire (Fernandez) and (Fly) whose exemplary leadership of MBN and RFE/RL respectively, made America’s public diplomacy more effective, more persuasive and more consistent with American interests and values,” he wrote.

Juan Zarate, a Republican former NSC and Treasury staffer, agreed, calling the two dismissals “incomprehensible." “I’ve watched both for years work with integrity to promote US interests abroad," he wrote.

In addition to Fernandez and Fly, Pack also removed the head of Radio Free Asia, Bay Fang, and the acting chief of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting on Wednesday. He replaced each outlet's corporate board of directors with allies and installed himself as chairman of each.

One of the people added to the board of Radio Free Asia, Jonathan Alexandre, attracted particular concern from Democrats who noted that he is also director of public policy for the conservative Liberty Counsel, a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group for opposing gay rights.

The director and deputy director of the Voice of America, Amanda Bennett and Sandy Sugawara, resigned from their positions on Monday. Taken together, top House Democrats who oversee AGM funding said Pack's moves were dangerous.

“That Mr. Pack took this drastic measure in his first week on the job is shocking, and we have deep concerns that he takes the helm of a critical agency with the intent to prioritize the Trump administration’s political whims over protecting and promoting independent reporting, which is a pillar of freedom and democracy," said Eliot Engel, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Nita Lowey, chair of the House Appropriations Committee.

The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, denounced the firings as an “egregious breach” of the agency’s mission. Menendez had led an unsuccessful fight to block or at least delay Pack’s confirmation.

On Juneteenth, a look back at how America perfected the ‘art of demonizing black men’
Juneteenth on June 19 is the observance of the ending of slavery in the U.S.

Published: June 19, 2020 By Quentin Fottrell

African American men say they are not surprised by the police killing of George Floyd or a white woman in Central Park to calling 911 to falsely claim that a black man, Christian Cooper, was threatening her life. CEPHAS WILLIAM\

‘A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. He reacts to the fear in his parents’ voices because his parents hold up the world for him and he has no protection without them.’ — James Baldwin, ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind’ (1962)

When Cephas Williams, a London-based artist, visited the House of Lords last year, he went through all the usual security procedures and was asked to take a seat. Williams, a black man, was then approached by a white woman who asked him why he was sitting there. She asked him to move and, believing that he was sitting in a restricted area, he agreed.

“I got up to leave, and she immediately went from 0 to 100,” Williams said. “She said, ‘Why are you raising your voice?’ ” She approached the armed security guards, a white man and a black woman. Williams said he was calm throughout. “I wanted to report what just happened, but they said, ‘There’s no point. She’s one of the most senior people in the House.’ ”

‘Whether it’s your skin color or the place, they reserve the right to police you and police your presence.’— Rich Benjamin, author of ‘Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America’

In 2018, Williams created a campaign called 56BlackMen, a series of stark portraits of black men from all walks of life wearing hoodies to show, in his words, “I am Not My Stereotype.” He said it happens on the street, in the school, the workplace, in white-tablecloth restaurants and, yes, even in the venerated House of Lords. “There are people who see the black man as angry or threatening,” he said.

A U.K. Parliament spokesperson told MarketWatch: “We are very sorry to hear of the experiences reported by Cephas Williams. Parliament is working hard to improve its processes for reporting and handling bullying and harassment. We know there is still work to be done, and we would encourage anyone who has experienced bullying or harassment in Parliament to report their experience to our Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme.”

Given such experiences, Williams was not surprised by recent events in the U.S. The country has been rocked, and also inspired, by protests over the death of George Floyd. Floyd, who was black, died on May 25 after a white Minneapolis policeman kneeled on his neck with the full weight of his body for nearly nine minutes. This week, prosecutors added a second-degree murder charge in addition to the third-degree charge already filed against former officer, Derek Chauvin.

Also see:‘America just really needs to start being honest with itself’: How money and the slave trade shaped policing in the U.S.

Earlier that same day in New York, Amy Cooper, a white woman who was walking her dog without a leash in Central Park, called 911 on a bird watcher, Christian Cooper, who is no relation, after he asked her to put her dog on a leash. “I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life,” she said on a video recording Cooper made on his smartphone. They both left the rambles in the park before the police arrived.

The video may have been unpleasant to watch, but it was not something seen as unfamiliar to many black men. “I was mortified by the Amy Cooper incident, but struck by a bit of recognition when you have a white person who perceives you to have less rights than they, and they to have more rights than you,” said Rich Benjamin, author of “Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America.”

“Whether it’s your skin color or the place, they reserve the right to police you and police your presence, and that implies that it’s a white space, and the condition for you being there is their comfort,” he said. “This is prevalent and more common than everyone suspects. It’s not surprising. It’s not new. It’s not rare. The only difference is that this was caught on an iPhone.”

‘A perfected art of demonizing black men’

Terence Fitzgerald, a clinical associate professor of social work at the University of Southern California and author of “Black Males and Racism: Improving the Schooling and Life Chances of African Americans,” said Amy Cooper’s 911 call is a prime example of the kind of leverage that white people can use any time they see fit. “She knew exactly what strings to pluck,” Fitzgerald said.

“It goes beyond just calling her a racist or saying what she did was racist,” he said. “We’re talking about systemic racism, and relying upon a story that has been morphed, honed and perfected throughout time. Politicians have used language with roots in that fear. We are recycling it over and over and over. It’s become a perfected art of demonizing black men.”

‘We’re talking about systemic racism, and relying upon a story that has been morphed, honed and perfected.’— Terence Fitzgerald, author of ‘Black Males and Racism: Improving the Schooling and Life Chances of African Americans’

Fitzgerald said the U.S. media did not put the Central Park video in context. “I watched the reaction of newscasters. It really underestimated the situation. It really didn’t give her the credit or due diligence for what she was doing,” he said. “It’s the tactic that has been used since 1619, the tactic of playing the victim, and knowing that the system would look at her like the innocent one.”

“It goes all the way back to ‘Birth of a Nation’ in 1915, the portrayal of the white woman as the victim,” he said. “She needed a knight to protect her from this dastardly devil, this black man. It was played in the White House for Woodrow Wilson. This false narrative was passed down from generation to generation. The hypersexed black male, known for violence against white women.”

Fitzgerald said the protests over George Floyd’s death and other such incidents, including the one between Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper, represent a moment that Americans should not just walk away from. “That does a disservice to the thousands of black men who have been lynched in the United States,” he said. “This idea of protecting the chastity of white women was the No. 1 reason for lynchings.”


Cephas Williams: ‘I am not my stereotype.’ LIMA CHARLIE

In 2015, the Equal Justice Initiative documented 4,075 racially motivated lynchings of African-Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 — at least 800 more lynchings of black people in these states than had previously been reported.

One such murder: that of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American from Chicago, who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her parents’ grocery store. The all-white, all-male jury took 67 minutes to acquit the two men accused of the crime. One juror reportedly said, “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop, it wouldn’t have taken that long.”

Black women and men are significantly more likely than white men and women to be killed by police.

According to a news report at the time, one of the defense lawyers, J. W. Kellum, told the jury that they were “custodians of American civilization,” adding, “I want you to tell me where under God’s shining sun is the land of the free and the home of the brave if you don’t turn these boys loose; your forefathers will absolutely turn over in their graves.”

Last year, police in the U.S. killed 1,099 people, according to Mapping Police Violence, a research and advocacy group. Black people accounted for 24% of those killed, it found, despite being only 13% of the population; they are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people, and 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed than white people.

“Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and men are significantly more likely than white women and men to be killed by police,” a recent study by researchers from Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, and Washington University in St. Louis found. “Latino men are also more likely to be killed by police than are white men.” They wrote, “Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police.”

The Pew Research Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., last year released a survey of more than 6,637 adults in English and Spanish that concluded: “Blacks are considerably more likely than whites, Hispanics or Asians to say that people have acted as if they were suspicious of them; that they have been treated unfairly by an employer; or that they have been unfairly stopped by police.”

George Floyd, meanwhile, is one of 44 people that Minneapolis police rendered unconscious with neck restraints in the last five years, according to an NBC News analysis of police records, and three-fifths of them were black. The Minneapolis police define “neck restraints” as any time an officer uses an arm or a leg to press someone’s neck without directly pressuring the airway.

Related:What the 1921 Tulsa race massacre can teach us about the racial wealth gap in 2020


Rich Benjamin: ‘This is prevalent and more common than everyone suspects. It’s not surprising. It’s not new. It’s not rare.’

The narrative of ‘the other’

It is an age-old narrative, Fitzgerald said. “When someone is considered ‘the other,’ naturally we do not see them as one of us or carrying the same morals and values,” he said. “We see them as less than and below us on this imaginary apex and this hierarchy of supremacy. We treat them worse, and not as someone valuable and not a reflection of ‘me.’ ”

Cases in which fictitious black men were accused of crimes are too numerous to list, but some have caught the mainstream public’s attention more than others. In 1994, Susan Smith, a South Carolina mother of two, told police a black man had driven off with her young children strapped into the back of the car. After her car was found in a lake, she was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the murders of her 3- and 1-year-olds.

Other fictitious allegations caught on like wildfire. In 1989 in Boston, a pregnant Carol Stuart was killed and her husband, Charles, was shot after he said they were set upon by an African-American man. During the manhunt, police were accused of harassing black men in their search for the killer, while some politicians called for the death penalty.

Mike Barnicle, then a Boston Globe columnist, defended the dragnet: “Where, after everything they had been told, would they expect the cops to start looking? The Myopia Hunt Club?” Charles Stuart, it would soon be revealed, had cashed in his wife’s $82,000 life-insurance policy, bought a new car and, before he could be charged with his wife’s murder, jumped off a bridge to his death.

“The police and citizens were screaming for retribution,” Fitzgerald said. “Police were harassing black males and even publicly humiliating them, and there was this lynch mob in the city. Every black male the police had run into were seen as guilty, [with] particular men [told] to strip down in public as they were searching them. It was about humiliation and control.”

“People walk around with these intergenerational images and stereotypes in this locked closet within their minds, their souls,” he added. “Whenever they are exposed to the language of ‘the other,’ this locked closet opens up, and all of these images come out. It could even come out as policies and programs that discriminate, and stop one having access to resources.”


Never forget. CEPHAS WILLIAMS

“Racial and ethnic inequalities loom large in American society,” according to the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank founded by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. “People of color face structural barriers when it comes to securing quality housing, health care, employment, and education. Racial disparities also permeate the criminal justice system.”

What can be done to undo years of systemic discrimination? Understanding how deep it goes is a start, observers say. “For decades, our researchers have called attention to the role of race and racism in our public and private institutions and offered evidence-based solutions for how to address these inequities,” the Urban Institute added.

“A good number of black people I know are fed up educating people who are not black about what it means to be black,” Williams said. “Most of the time when you see black men in the media or newspapers, if they’re not a victim of knife crime or a perpetrator of violence, they’re a rapper or a football player. It’s a conversation about racism, but it’s also about economics.”

‘A good number of black people I know are fed up educating people who are not black about what it means to be black.’— Cephas Williams, London-based artist

In New York City, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, black and Latino people are being hospitalized at twice the rate of Caucasians, data released last month by the City of New York showed. Black New Yorkers were hospitalized at a rate of 632 per 100,000 people, followed by Latinos (570 per 100,000 people), while Caucasians were hospitalized at a rate of 284 per 100,000 people. “This virus is not hitting New Yorkers equitably,” Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot said.

“We’re seeing this around the country,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, said when the figures on racial disparity began trickling out at the beginning of the public-health crisis. He said the same pattern was found in major cities across the U.S., some worse than New York City. “You know, it always seems that the poorest people pay the highest price. Why is that?”

Some point to cases like those of George Floyd and Christian Cooper as merely a glimpse into the disparities people of color face in other aspects of American life, including health care, housing, the media, schools and corporations. Seventy-five percent of all frontline workers during the coronavirus pandemic are people of color, according to the New York City comptroller.

Others say elementary and high schools are places of systemic discrimination. Black students are three times more likely than white students to be suspended or expelled, according to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. Research in Texas found that suspended students are more likely to be held back a grade and drop out of school, the Justice Policy Institute reported.

The economic disadvantages continue long after people of color have graduated from college. Twelve years after entering, white men have paid off 44% of their student-loan balance on average, according to an analysis released last year by Demos, a left-leaning think tank. Black men see their balances grow 11%, and black women by 13%.

White fragility in ‘Whitopia’

“Redlining” housing policies, the refusal of financial services to neighborhoods typically populated by people of color, are still felt today. The term refers to how the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation drew up color-coded maps that designated how risky it was for lenders to originate mortgages in different neighborhoods across the country.

Common in the first half of the 20th century, redlining was outlawed through legislation in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet many of America’s largest cities, particularly in the northern part of the U.S., remain heavily segregated by race or ethnicity. The practice continues to this day, and housing in many redlined areas is still worth significantly less than similar homes in a nonredlined neighborhood.

In his book, “Searching for Whitopia,” Benjamin spent two years traveling 27,000 miles around the U.S., spending time in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Forsythe County, Ga.; and St. George, Utah — the areas with the country’s fastest-growing white populations. “I wanted to see why white flight was happening, and how and why white conservatism was developing.”

Housing in many redlined areas is still worth significantly less than similar homes in a nonredlined neighborhood.

They were different in some ways: Georgia was more Baptist than Idaho or Utah, for example, and Utah was more Mormon than Idaho or Georgia. “As the country gets more demographically diverse, all kinds of fears on political issues like taxes, so-called national security, public school funding and immigration are fueled by this fear of white decline,” Benjamin said.

During his travels, from 2007 to 2009, he attended a three-day white separatist retreat with links to Aryan Nations in northern Idaho and in exurban megachurches in the South. “Call these places White Meccas,” he writes in the book. “Or White Wonderlands. Or Caucasian Arcadias. Or Blanched Bunker Communities. Or White Archipelagos. I call them Whitopia.”

“The key commonalities that stuck out was the divide between what was going on in these places and what was going on in Washington,” Benjamin said, who is on record as correctly predicting the result of the 2016 presidential election. “There was a tin ear in Washington and the coast about how violently these places opposed immigration and taxes, and the backlash to the Obama presidency, and a rabid defense of the Second Amendment.”

Last week, one week after the killing of George Floyd, prosecutors charged three more police officers with aiding and abetting, and filed a new, tougher charge against the officer at the center of the case. Protesters lauded the charges, while lamenting that it had taken nearly 10 days to charge all the officers involved. The charges were sought by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who called the protests unleashed by the death “dramatic and necessary.”

So what happens now? What can you do? “Your greatest challenge as individuals is, and in perpetuity will be, to hold yourself accountable and to teach your children to do the same," Tiara Darnell, a writer and audio producer based in Buffalo, N.Y. and Portland, Ore., wrote in the latest edition of Portland Monthly magazine. “Your everyday actions and inactions are threads in the larger narrative playing out right now in cities and towns here and around the world.”

‘I no longer have the patience or desire to be deferential to those who get instinctively defensive and lean into their white fragility to gaslight me.’— Tiara Darnell, a writer based in Buffalo, N.Y. and Portland, Ore., writing in Portland Monthly magazine.

Darnell suggests her essay, “Can White Portland’s Fragility Handle a Megaquake?” could also have been entitled, “Can White America’s Fragility Handle a Megaquake?” She writes, “To borrow a term from the lexicon of pandemic, be your own contact tracer: investigate how your inner thoughts and your past and present interactions with the Black people you encounter in your everyday life upholds the values of white supremacy and the white dominant status quo.”

“Maybe, you’re not sure how to talk to your children about racism, but it hasn’t occurred to you that their toys, favorite shows and movies, and maybe even their school, aren’t representative of the diversity of the world,” she added.

Darnell added, “This is the last piece I will ever write and spend my sacred Black energy on that centers whiteness in this way. I no longer have the patience or desire to be deferential to those who get instinctively defensive and lean into their white fragility to gaslight me into believing what I’m seeing and feeling doesn’t exist or ‘can’t be that bad.’”

“So, you hired one or two new Black employees, made (highly problematic) bias training mandatory for everyone, instituted a well-meaning but misguided mandate to use “lunch and learn” instead of brown bag lunch,’ but Black employees are still disillusioned with your internal culture and unwillingness to change. How is that working out?” she wrote.

Racial-justice campaigners say systemic change is needed in the justice system, in law enforcement, the health-care system, the media, education system and throughout American society, adding that undoing a 400-year-old system of systemic racism in a society that built its economy off the slave trade will not happen overnight.

Pernicious racist beliefs and language permeate most people’s language, values upbringing that provide he invisible architecture for a predominantly white society to function. “It can be very difficult to address and tackle racism when it’s not so overt,” Williams said. He said change will have to come in all aspects of society. “There’s a lack of progression in the corporate world and in society, in roles that dictate economic advancement.”

“You have to appreciate the differences and commonalities,” Williams added. “In the cases of George Floyd and Christian Cooper, it was the idea of one race being perceived as superior to the other. There’s a commonality between me as a black man seeing every other black man that has been killed and abused in America and around the world, and feeling that connection.” What can’t happen, he said, is for George Floyd to become just another hashtag.


56 Black Men.

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