Serena Williams Speaks Out On Police Violence, Dallas Shooting

Instagram photo by Shana Renee • Jul 9, 2016

“I feel anyone in my color in particular is of concern. I do have nephews that I’m thinking, ‘do I have to call them and tell them, don’t go outside.’”

07/09/2016

By Martyn Herman

LONDON (Reuters) – Wimbledon champion Serena Williams said on Saturday she was concerned about the safety of her nephews in the United States after two black men were shot dead by police and five law enforcement officers were killed in an assault in Dallas.

The 34-year-old, whose elder half-sister Yetunde Price died in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles in 2003, was asked about the violence back home shortly after winning her seventh Wimbledon singles crown and 22nd grand slam singles title.

The shooting of two men in Louisiana and Minnesota this week led to a protest march in Dallas where a lone gunman opened fire killing five police and injuring seven.

“I feel anyone in my color in particular is of concern. I do have nephews that I’m thinking, ‘do I have to call them and tell them, don’t go outside. If you get in your car, it might be the last time I see you?’” Williams told reporters.

Why Bill Clinton’s Apology and Barack Obama’s Prison Drive-By, Token Clemencies Are Cynical Election Year Posturing

[Beware, the electoral season is upon us and the masters of political deception and fraud are invading every home.  In the US, every four years, presidential elections are theatrically staged, designed to confuse and disrupt popular movements against class exploitation and racial oppression, and other democratic movements. The elections claim to be “the way democracy works”, and people “must vote” for politicians to represent their interests. Whoever wins, the people’s interests are lost in the shuffle, and their independence and political initiative and action has been suffocated or destroyed.  Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have in their Presidencies continued the mass incarceration, predominantly black and brown men and women, at world-record levels, and now they have made a dramatic last minute cosmetic relief to cleanse their legacy, at least rhetorically, so that Hillary Clinton’s campaign may not have to apologize to potential black voters for the Bill and Barack legacies.  They cannot avoid blame for things too many know.  —  Frontlines ed.] 

A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon, 07/17/2015

Ten whole years ago, back in July 2005 when the Black Agenda Report crew was still at Black Commentator, I wrote that

“With under 5 percent of the world’s people, the US accounts for 25 percent of the planet’s prisoners.  More than half its 2.2 million prisoners come from the one eighth of its population which is black.  Today, an astounding 3 percent of all African Americans languish in prisons and jails, and nearly as many more are on probation, parole, bail, house arrest or court supervision… Right now, the shadow of prison squats at the corners of, and often at the center of nearly every black family’s life in this nation.”

Yesterday President Obama repeated some of these same figures, and they are pretty much the same. Total US prisoners are still 2.2 or 2.3 million, and a slight drop in the black incarceration rate makes us now a little less instead of a little more than half, but the overall picture is unchanged in a decade. The president then announced the release of forty-some nonviolent federal drug offenders out of a total of about 70,000, and stopped in at a federal prison Thursday. The same day, ex-president Bill Clinton offered a half-hearted “apology” for his 1990s crime bills, which he admitted “set the stage” for state and federal governments to nearly double the US prison population.

Why? Why did President Obama wait six and a half years into his presidency to say the basic damning numbers and free a token handful of drug war prisoners? And how come Bill Clinton, fifteen years out of office chose this week to publicly admit that black mass incarceration was maybe not the best public policy?

Michael Brown jury: putting a value on a black life in the United States

Protestors in Ferguson, Missouri. ‘When black kids fill the jails and the morgues so disproportionately we are in a state of extreme dysfunction.’ Photograph: Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images

Is there a price to pay for summarily killing a man, or is it just what happens in Ferguson when one man has a badge and the other too much melanin?

• 
• • Gary Younge, theguardian.com, Friday 10 October 2014

 

 

In September 1955, an all-white jury took just 67 minutes to acquit Emmett Till’s killers. Till, 14, said either “Bye, baby” or wolf-whistled at a white woman in a grocery store in Mississippi. Three days later his body was fished out of the Tallahatchie river with a bullet in his skull, an eye gouged out and his forehead crushed on one side. “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop,” said one juror, “it wouldn’t have taken that long.”

In 2014, racism is more sophisticated but no less deadly. The grand jury investigating the killing of Michael Brown is taking its time. Brown, 18, was unarmed when he was fatally shot by police officer Darren Wilson in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, in August. Wilson has been suspended on full pay and has not been charged. The four-month period that a panel usually convenes for expired last month. The judge gave the grand jury 60 more days to make a decision, so it has until January 7 to decide whether to indict Wilson. That’s a lot of pop.

New York: Rally in Support of People in Ferguson

Community activists Montague Simmons and Tory Russell listen as rapper Tef Poe speaks during a rally in Ferguson. Photograph: Whitney Curts/Reuters

 Ferguson Protest Leaders:  ‘We’ll take our anger out on people who failed us’

Organisers tell New York rally not to expect a ‘casual revolution’ and vow greater demonstrations over police shooting of teen

• Jon Swaine, The Guardian, in New York

• theguardian.com,Wednesday 8 October 2014

• Organisers of demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, promised to intensify their protests over the killing of Michael Brown if the officer who shot him does not face criminal charges, warning police that they are prepared to die on the streets for their cause.

• Three prominent members of theprotest movement that sprung up  after the deadly police shooting of Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old,  told a rally in New York on Tuesday night that there would be a fierce backlash if a grand jury declined to indict officer Darren Wilson.