Why blacks are urging a Black Friday boycott

By Soledad O’Brien and Rose Arce, CNN,  Wed November 26, 2014

(CNN) — Once again, the streets are electric with anger after a white police officer evades charges for fatally shooting a black man. Sirens screech and wood batons push back marchers protesting from Missouri to New York to Los Angeles. This time the cadence of “No Justice, No Peace” has been replaced with “Hand’s Up. Don’t Shoot.”

Protesters gather on the steps of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington on Tuesday, November 25. A grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in the August shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, has prompted demonstrations across the country.

But there was another sign raised above the crowd in a recent protest in New York: “Doing Nothing with Saying Nothing. Changes Nothing.” The mathematics of this one are clear. Something’s gotta give.

A loose network led by African Americans in the film and arts world has emerged from the fog of tear gas to call for a quiet riot in response: a boycott of Black Friday shopping.

Ryan Coogler, who directed the 2013 film about police brutality called “Fruitvale Station,” told us he was confounded by the eruptions of “human rights violations committed by public servants.”

Ferguson Protesters In Boston Stop Outside Jail, Chant ‘Black Lives Matter

Amanda Terkel, aterkel@huffingtonpost.com, 11/25/2014

WASHINGTON — Bostonians turned out Tuesday night to show solidarity with protesters nationwide, upset over the decision not to indict Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson for killing unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown. But the protest in Boston had a twist: Marchers stopped at a local jail to stand with the inmates there.

According to the Boston Globe, approximately 1,400 people marched to the South Bay House of Correction. Protesters were reportedly chanting, “We see you,” and “Black lives matter.”

The South Bay facility houses adult male and female inmates convicted of crimes with a sentence of 2.5 years or less.

African-American men are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men, according to The Sentencing Project. If current trends continue, one out of every three black men in the U.S. will go to prison. ProPublica recently found that “young black men [were] 21 times as likely as their white peers to be killed by police” between 2010 and 2012.

Shifting Tides, Shifty Obama-ists

[We are not accustomed to quoting the Bible, but sometimes the biblical words have become part of common culture, as in this:  “Matthew 7:15-20, ‘You Will Know Them by Their Fruits’ — ‘Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.  You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles?  Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.  Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  Therefore by their fruits you will know them.'”  Which is appropriate warned, when perusing the shifting claims and tides of Obama-ists like Angela Davis, whose latest statement (read down to her Guardian article) reaches into more radical territory to restore credibility.  Davis, who partially broke with the path of the revisionist CPUSA many years ago, and who has made contributions to the growing prison abolitionist movement, still has promoted electoral-democratic-reform illusions about the imperialist system against revolutionary strategies. (our highlights, for emphasis). —  Frontlines ed.]

• From Black Agenda Report, by Glen Ford — March 27, 2012 — “Angela Davis Lost Her Mind Over Obama” —  The “delusional effect” that swept Black America with the advent of the First Black President has warped and weakened the mental powers of some of our most revered icons – and it has been painful to behold. Earlier this month, Angela Davis diminished herself as a scholar and thinker in a gush of nonsense about the corporate executive in the White House. The occasion was a conference on Empowering Women of Color, in Berkeley, California. Davis shared the stage with Grace Lee Boggs, the 96-year-old activist from Detroit. The subject was social transformation, but Davis suddenly launched into how wonderful it felt to see people “dancing in the streets” when Barack Obama was elected. She called that campaign a “victory, not of an individual, but of…people who refused to believe that it was impossible to elect a person, a Black person, who identified with the Black radical tradition.”……There was a hush in the room, as if in mourning of the death of brain cells. Angela Davis was saying that Barack Obama is a man who identifies with the Black radical tradition. She said it casually, as if Black radicalism and Obama were not antithetical terms; as if everything he has written, said and done in national politics has not been a repudiation of the Black radical tradition; as if his rejection of his former minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was not a thorough disavowal of the Black radical tradition. In his famous 2008 campaign speech in Philadelphia, Obama blamed such radicals for compounding the nation’s problems.
• From Democracy Now, January 21, 2013  —  Addressing the Peace Ball in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, the renowned author, educator and political activist Angela Davis urges those content with President Obama’s re-election to continue pushing him for social change. “This time around we cannot subordinate our aspirations and our hopes to presidential agendas,” Davis says. “Our passionate support for President Barack Obama … should also be expressed in our determination to raise issues that have been largely ignored or not appropriately addressed by the administration.”
• And Angela today, adjusting her tone, more accurately and radical, to the shifting tides, as anger and defiance grow…………

“From Michael Brown to Assata Shakur, the racist state of America persists”

by Angela Davis, The Guardian, Saturday, 1 November 2014 

 

Although racist state violence has been a consistent theme in the history of people of African descent in North America, it has become especially noteworthy during the administration of the first African-American president, whose very election was widely interpreted as heralding the advent of a new, postracial era.

On Days of Rising Against Police Terror in Ferguson….

Remembering the Houston Police Murder of Jose Campos Torres, 37 Years Ago

a poem by the people’s griot, Gil Scott-Heron:

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.

Michael Brown: Hundreds attend new Ferguson demonstrations

BBC News | 11 October 2014 

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No violence was reported at Friday’s protest, in contrast to earlier demonstrations

Continue reading the main story

Michael Brown shooting

• Black officer on Ferguson ‘divide’
• Trigger decision: when police shoot
• Black and white viewsWatch
• How the world sees Ferguson

Hundreds of protesters have joined the first march of a planned weekend of demonstrations in St Louis against police shootings.

The protests were sparked by the killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by police in August.

Weeks of protests and violence in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson followed Mr Brown’s shooting.

Tensions in St Louis are high after another black teenager was shot dead by a police officer on Wednesday.

Police in riot gear used pepper spray to try to dispel protesters angry at the shooting of Vonderrit D Myers, 18.

Police said Myers shot at an officer, but the victim’s parents say he was unarmed and racially profiled.

One Picture Worth 1000 Words

from Deep Dish TV, 08/12/2014

Police confront protesters in Ferguson, St Louis, after the shooting by police of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown.

If the word “pigs” seems too offensive, or too 60s, or too derisive of the porcine species, this image should shatter the restrained, oh so fine and cautious language that now surrounds the militarized robo-cops who are charged to contain and repress communities of people of color throughout the United States. If this image does not make your blood boil, you are most likely deeply infected with racism.

In Ferguson Missouri, a community near St.Louis, a white cop gunned down Michael Brown, an unarmed Black high school graduate about to go to college. “Gunned down” is accurate. It means he pumped numerous bullets in to the boy’s body while his arms were raised over his head. The Police Chief at this writing won’t release the name of the murdering cop, for his “security.” (The town’s police force is 95% white, the town is 70% Black.)