FILM / Jonah Raskin : Reviewing 'Fruitvale' and Remembering the Panthers

Reviewing Coogler's Fruitvale Station
and reflecting on the Black Panthers

Fruitvale Station shows how far we’ve traveled since the days of the Panthers, and how little we’ve traveled.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / August 12, 2013

The only Oakland, California, African-Americans I’ve ever known belonged to the Black Panther Party founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1966. In my mind, Oakland and the Panthers are as one. I can’t think of the city -- its streets, churches, and parks -- without thinking of Panthers. And I can’t think of the Panthers without also thinking of the city.

Of course, I know that Oakland’s history includes much more than the Panther past. I know, too, that Oakland has continued to be a place of rebellion and defiance without the Panthers. The Occupy Movement rocked the city and the city rocked the movement. Violence has long stalked the city and its residents.

Not surprisingly, no Panthers appear in Ryan Coogler’s 85-minute feature film, Fruitvale Station, which recounts the life and the death of Oscar Grant III, the 22-year-old Oakland African-American who was shot and killed by an Oakland police officer on January 1, 2009.

The slaying of Grant would not have surprised Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, who are, of course, dead and who were well aware of police brutality in their own time, and saw the police as an occupying army in black neighborhoods. I doubt that Bobby Seale and Dave Hilliard, two living Panthers, would be surprised, either, by the murder of Oscar Grant.

The avant-garde American writer, Gertrude Stein, noted apropos Oakland, “There is no there there.” Unfortunately, there is a there there, and, now as in the past, it’s the there of violence and death.

The release of Coogler’s movie, Fruitvale Station, coincided with the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. George Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges on July 13, 2013. The movie was released July 28, 2013.

News about the trial and the verdict gave the film a boost at the box office and reminded audiences that white officers of the law have been murdering young black men for years and have gotten away with murder, too.

Oscar Grant III might have joined the Panthers had he been alive in 1967 or 1968. Newton and Seale might have tried to recruit him. After all, he’d been to prison -- he served time at San Quentin -- and he had street smarts. The film depicts him as a well-meaning young man who tries and fails to get his life together.

He’s a fuck-up but he’s not evil. Unable to keep a job, or to tell the truth consistently to friends and family members, he’d like to do the right thing and doesn’t. In the film, he deals marijuana, lies to the mother of his daughter, drives around Oakland in an old car, and hangs out with the boys in the ‘hood.

He doesn’t set his sights much further than tomorrow and he doesn’t look much further than the street around the next corner. His worldview is limited; he doesn’t seem to know his own personal history, the history of Oakland, its African-Americans, or the Black Panther Party.

His family members and his friends care about him and try to help him. They rally around him. They’d like to save his life and bring him back to life after he’s shot and killed.

The film offers a steady stream of images in which Grant and his friends hug one another, high-five one another, and talk the rhetoric of togetherness. They don’t have much tangible togetherness beneath the surface. They don’t go to church together, don’t have a clubhouse, don’t have anything at all that resembles the Black Panther Party, and don’t know a single older person who embodies the legacy of the Panthers.

Bobby Seale, left, and Huey Newton at Black Panther headquarters in Oakland. Image from Babylon Falling.

I didn’t take my eyes off the screen in the theater where I saw the film, but I found Oscar and his friends sad and even pathetic. I don’t doubt that the film accurately reflects Grant’s life. Ryan Coogler had the cooperation of the lawyer for Grant’s family. What I don’t know for sure is how typical or representative a figure Grant was and is.

I suspect that he is rather typical and that a great many young African-American men in Oakland share his sweetness and his anger, his desire to be something better than he is, and who, like him, lack the ability to get out of the traps in which they find themselves.

There’s something fatalist about the film. From the start, you know that he’ll be shot and killed on January 1, 2009; the film begins with documentary footage of his murder. You watch and you know that nothing will prevent that act from taking place.

The movie moves depressingly through Grant’s last day, and, because it’s depressing I can’t really recommend it. At the same time, I wouldn’t say stay away. If you want to see a movie made by a living African-American filmmaker about a dead African-American then by all means see the picture.

The director hasn’t aimed to make a big statement or to offer a plea for change. That speaks well for him. He mostly lets the story tell itself. But he hasn’t lifted his sights as a filmmaker beyond Grant’s individual life and beyond the lives of those in his immediate circle. That struck me as a lapse in filmmaking. It left me with a sense of disappointment.

I didn’t want slogans or sloganeering. I didn’t want Panthers to suddenly appear in the movie and to analyze and explain the situation. That would have been unreal. But I would have liked some acknowledgement that once upon a time in the West the Panthers made a difference.

Fruitvale Station shows how far we’ve traveled since the days of the Panthers, and how little we’ve traveled. It does seem to reflect the feelings of young people in Oakland today: their sense of injustice and powerlessness, too. The world is fucked up and there isn’t much to be done about it now, except go to movies like Fruitvale Station and go about one’s life.

The same week that I saw the film, I also saw at exhibit at Mills College in Oakland that focused on the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Part of the space was allocated to the posters of Emory Douglas, which had many of the slogans from the heyday of the Panthers such as, “All power to the people” and “We shall survive without a doubt.”

I thought that I could hear those slogans echoing in the distance, and I knew that I would never hear them again in my own lifetime.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professor emiritus at Sonoma State University. Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making of the Beat Generation. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Tom Hayden : Trayvon Martin and the Super-Predator Myth

Photo by Joshua Trujillo / AP Images / SeattlePI.com

The super-predator myth:
Trayvon died for our sins

The evidence of a violently divided America can be understood in the failure of the criminal justice system, where rationality and objectivity are supposed to prevail.

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2013

For Trayvon Martin and his family I feel a sadness that will not lift. For America, I feel a dread that certain horrors repeat again and again, chief among them the murder of young men of color, not only with impunity for their killers but under the cover of judicial sanction.

A re-armed George Zimmerman walks free, after a trial in which references to racism were forbidden by the judge. The unarmed Trayvon Martin, under the interpretation of the law, had no right to stand his ground against an armed vigilante. The “incident” considered by the jury, according to the instructions given by the judge, began with a physical confrontation between Trayvon and Zimmerman, not when Zimmerman launched his armed pursuit, muttering, “Fucking punks. These assholes, they always get away.”

Trayvon died bravely. But is that the only option for the many who are targeted deliberately and gunned down from the Arizona border to the boroughs of New York? The norms are broken, the laws are futile, and the Black Panther Party no longer exists to serve notice of vengeance.

The evidence of a violently divided America can be understood in the failure of the criminal justice system, where rationality and objectivity are supposed to prevail. In the case of Trayvon and countless others, however, the courts are where objectivity comes to an end.

The six jurors almost surely did not see themselves as driven by racial prejudice or stereotypes, but were in the grip of those stereotypes unconsciously. In the same way, poll after poll of New Yorkers shows a deep racial divide over the police stop-and-frisk policy, with whites believing it to be justified and people of color sharply opposed.

For a short while it appeared that this case would be different. At first, Trayvon appeared to be a fallen angel, a good boy grabbing some Skittles and iced tea before watching television with his family, a young man with no criminal record, assaulted by a vigilante who was completely out of control.

But gradually the prosecutors and media began dropping suggestions that Trayvon was a potential menace. There was the hoodie. The use of marijuana. The school suspension. Not that these factual crumbs were evidence of anything. But the public and media perception grew that Trayvon was “suspicious," precisely the conclusion of George Zimmerman on that rainy and fateful night.

Altering this initial -- and accurate -- perception of Trayvon was necessary to reframe Zimmerman’s account of a struggle in which the killer feared for his life. Trayvon Martin had to fit the profile of a super-predator. Trayvon was no longer an innocent kid in the mainstream view; he was an aggressive young man who considered Zimmerman nothing more than a “creepy cracker.” Having super-masculine powers, his aggression could only be stopped by a bullet directly into his heart of darkness.

And where did the concept of the super-predator originate? One can find it from the beginning of slavery times, but its contemporary resurrection came from neoconservative intellectuals, not from Southern crackers. To be precise:

• In the 1980s and 1990s, the official “wars” against gangs and drugs were unleashed in America, resulting in what Troy Duster has described as “the greatest shift in the racial composition of the inmates in our prisons in all of U.S. history.” By the year 2000, the U.S. had 25 percent of the world’s inmates. The inmate population of California alone rose from 28,000 to over 150,000.


• Incidents like the rape of a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989 fueled the new racial hysteria. All charges against the so-called Central Park Five -- five early Trayvon Martins -- were not vacated until 2002.


• UCLA professor James Q. Wilson predicted in 1995 that a teenage crime wave was inevitable. He said Americans should “get ready” for 30,000 more “young muggers, killers and thieves than we now have.” This plague was as inevitable as demography, Wilson declared, the year Trayvon Martin was born.


• In 1996, Ronald Reagan’s drug war czar, William Bennett, and another top drug warrior, John Walters, wrote a book predicting that “a new generation of street criminals is upon us -- the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known.” Trayvon Martin was one-year-old.


• The Bennett thesis was based on an article titled, “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” by John J. Dilulio, in The Weekly Standard, the house organ of the neoconservatives. Dilulio predicted there would be an additional 270,000 juvenile super-predators who would “terrorize our nation” by 2010, just when a kid like Trayvon would turn 15 years of age. A few years later, Dilulio acknowledged that his research was all wrong, but by then it was too late.

Politically, the message of “the coming storm of super-predators” swept the nation. The leading perpetrators were New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and “Amerca’s cop” William Bratton, not George Wallace and Bull Connor. The super-predator concept was supposedly based on factual research, not age-old prejudice. Even today the image of what Bratton called “homeland terrorists” dominates the American imagination. The research overlays and reinforces the white subconscious to this day.

It is vitally important to understand, however, that the super-predator thesis was without intellectual justification and was promoted for ideological and partisan purposes. The reason that Dilulio rejected his own research was that it was based only on a demographic projection without any consideration of economic, educational, political, or other policy changes.

Only on this basis could a future super-predator be predicted while in diapers. Nothing in that child’s future -- jobs for their parents, a good pre-school experience, great teachers, nothing whatever -- could prevent the evolution into a beast. And since the teenage demographic was growing, the nation would be overwhelmed, as even Bill Clinton predicted.

The political purpose of the super-predator thesis, according to those like Bennett, was, first, to discredit the idea of rehabilitation, which was “emasculating” the criminal justice system. Instead the view was that youthful super-predators were incorrigible and infected with the disease of “moral poverty.” Private orphanages were often recommended as an alternative to prison.

The second political message was to demolish as “politically incorrect” the notions that poverty causes crime or that there was any such thing as disproportionate mass incarceration. The neoconservatives and their allies were employing public fear of violent crime to carry out their longtime agenda of slashing government social programs. Even prisons were to be privatized.

The neoconservative messaging was tremendously effective. Not until recent years, when the fiscal costs on states and municipalities grew too burdensome, has there been a lull and slight reduction in the incarceration rate, the highest or second highest in the world. The human damage is incalculable, so severe that even the right-wing Supreme Court of Chief Justice John G. Roberts has found California in systemic violation of the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

(Some of the hunger strikers in California’s Pelican Bay prison have been in solitary confinement for decades, precisely because they are considered incorrigible super-predators. The official state hypocrisy is revealed by the policy of easing restrictions on inmates if and only if they provide evidence of gang affiliations among other prisoners with whom they are serving time. The point is that they are not “incorrigible” if they change their behavior by putting their lives at risk.)

The super-predator thesis is racism with a pseudo-academic cover. The irony is that our civil rights progress has driven prejudice underground, into the unconscious, into a discourse and vocabulary of denial. Perhaps I am being too generous, but I believe the judge, prosecution, Florida jury, and most of Mr. Zimmerman’s supporters perceive Trayvon Martin as a super-predator without being aware of the racial filter closing their minds. Those in the mainstream media, which did so much to bring awareness of the historic case, also are likely unaware that they, too, would be afraid of a Trayvon walking anywhere near them, especially at night.

How does one break the grip of what Michele Alexander calls this “new Jim Crow," if it is both covert and unconscious? First, we need to deepen our understanding that this is the way many in the Tea Party, the white South, and the Republican Party view Barack and Michele Obama. Not that the Obamas are lurking super-predators themselves, although millions of white Americans were stricken with ancient fear when O. J. Simpson -- in their eyes, the perfectly acceptable black man -- could kill his white ex-girlfriend and a white man in her presence -- in such a “savage” act. (See Gilligan, James. Violence, for a brilliant dissection of this point).

The OJ murder case marked the moment that awakened the white fear that even an educated black man was inherently suspicious. (See the 2009 case of Dr. Henry Louis Gates and the Boston police for another example.)

In other words, we need to “get over” the broad assumption that sadistic racism is a thing of the past, when in fact it might increase because certain white people are extremely threatened at the loss of their superiority. (See the 2009 Homeland Security Report on increasing violent threats, including assassination threats, because of the recession and election of Obama. The report was shelved under Republican attack.)

Screen showings of the new documentary, Fruitvale Station, about Oscar Grant who was killed by the Oakland BART police in 2009, and the Ken Burns film, The Central Park Five. Learn about and support juvenile justice organizations in your community. Demand that cities adopt gang intervention programs like those fostered in Los Angeles after decades of community pressure.

Organize the juvenile justice movement with a stepped-up attack on racial profiling, arbitrary stop-and-frisk, and mass incarceration. Demand accountability from the neoconservatives who fabricated the “super-predator” doctrine as surely as their propaganda about “weapons of mass destruction” or the sweeping authorization of the Global War on Terrorism.

Counter the propaganda that government budget cuts and free-market extremism will lift the underclass to a better future. Defend the New Deal as a great beginning, not the cause of our deficits.

Finally, consider building monuments and permanent memorials to the memory of Trayvon Martin. In his death, Trayvon becomes an iconic figure in our history and the future of the younger generation. His story, and the story of George Zimmerman’s trial, will be told and taught for decades to come.

The story will be as sharply contested as the verdict, and Trayvon’s supporters will need to claim his life and story as precious. Politicians at all levels can be challenged to commemorate his name. Public parks and school buildings can be emblazoned with his name as well. The photo of his young face should be included on the rolls of martyrs.

Let the rock be rolled back so his spirit can ascend, while his demonizers are sentenced to oblivion and shame. Let the world know: he died for our sins.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Arizona's Crackers : 'Illegal is Not a Race'

Image from Reform America.
Arizona’s Crackers:
Jim Crow is alive and well

Maintaining a whip hand, southern politicians once calculated, was the best way to defend white power. The same calculation drives contemporary Arizona politics.

By Char Miller / The Rag Blog / May 17, 2010

CLAREMONT, California -- Standing in the middle of a busy rotary intersection in Orange, California, was a clutch of anti-immigrant protesters; these young white males were demonstrating their solidarity with what they presumed to be embattled Arizonans.

As a steady stream of cars revolved around the circle, they held up hand-lettered signs, the most blunt of which read: “Illegal is not a race. It’s a Crime!”

That is a distinction without a difference in Arizona, however, where being Latina/o has become criminalized. When Governor Jan Brewer signed legislation requiring local and state police to demand identification of those they “suspect” are undocumented, she and the state legislature went on record establishing a two-tier caste system: those who look white will get a pass; those who do not will get rousted. Jim Crow is alive and well in the Grand Canyon State.

Like white Southerners’ intense efforts to segregate public space after the destruction of slavery, contemporary Arizona politicians are determined to define who is “legal” and who is not; who looks like an American and who does not; who can walk down the sidewalk without fear of harassment and who must hide in the shadows.

They have also decided -- as did their white-supremacist predecessors of the late nineteenth century -- that controlling the movement of a suspect people is but one part of the battle to dominate social life. As essential is managing who gets educated and on what terms. In the postwar south this was accomplished through the creation of a flawed and inequitable educational system that received constitutional sanction in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Until repudiated by Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Plessy succeeded in deflecting Blacks’ intellectual aspirations, lowering their economic horizons, and shackling their political ambitions.

In Arizona, legislators are just as serious about cracking down on the educational hopes of what is increasingly looking like a captive population. Within days of the passage of the anti-immigration law, another bill swept through the legislature: HB 2281. Its language is disturbing, for it “prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that: Promote the overthrow of the United States government. Promote resentment toward a race or class of people. Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group. Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”

HB 2281’s goal is clear -- to tar Chicano Studies programs in state universities and public schools as insurrectionary, denounce them as anti-white, and condemn them as sources of suspicious group cohesion. Its rhetoric may be different from the Black Codes that white southerners once enacted to manipulate former slaves, but the legislation’s desires are the same -- keep the downtrodden down.

Maintaining a whip hand, southern politicians once calculated, was the best way to defend white power. The same calculation drives contemporary Arizona politics. Three years ago, for instance, Tom Horne, the state superintendent of education, lashed out at ethnic studies programs. As author of HB 2281, and now a Republican candidate for state attorney general, he rails against “ethnic chauvinism” to scare up voters. More inflammatory still is his department’s recent ruling “that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English.” In Horne’s Arizona, only whites have the right to be chauvinistic.

We have been here before. In his incisive critique of segregated America, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. DuBois recorded the “many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the 20th Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” That same deeply troubling divide, as Arizona has demonstrated, is staining the 21st.

[Char Miller is director of the environmental analysis program at Pomona College, Claremont, CA. and is the former chair of the History Department and Director of Urban Studies at Trinity University in San Antonio. He is author of Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land and Life in South Texas and editor of River Basins of the American West. This article also appears in the Rio Grande Guardian.]

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SPORT / New Era in Arizona : Here Come 'Los Suns'

Image from IndyPosted.
Here come the Suns!
Taking a stand on Cinco de Mayo

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / May 4, 2010

A battle has been joined for the very soul of Arizona. On one side, there are the Minutemen, the craven state Republican lawmakers, Governor Jan Brewer, and the utterly unprincipled John McCain, all supporting SB 1070, a law that codifies racial profiling of immigrants in the state. On the other are the Sun Belt residents who protested on May 1st, the students who have engaged in walkouts, and the politicians and civic leaders calling for an economic boycott of their own state.

This battle has also been joined in the world of sports. On one side is Major League Baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks. Owned by state Republican moneyman Ken Kendrick, the team has drawn protestors to parks around the country. On the other side, we now have the Phoenix Suns.

On Tuesday the news came forth that tomorrow on Cinco de Mayo, the team would be wearing jerseys that say simply Los Suns. Team owner Robert Sarver said, after talking to the team, that this will be an act of sartorial solidarity against the bill. Their opponent, the San Antonio Spurs have made clear that they support the gesture.

In a statement released by the team, Sarver said,

The frustration with the federal government's failure to deal with the issue of illegal immigration resulted in passage of a flawed state law. However intended, the result of passing this law is that our basic principles of equal rights and protection under the law are being called into question, and Arizona's already struggling economy will suffer even further setbacks at a time when the state can ill-afford them.

He followed up the statement by saying to reporters,

I looked around our plane and looked at our players and the diversity in our organization. I thought we need to go on record that we honor our diversity in our team, in the NBA and we need to show support for that. As for the political part of that, that's my statement. There are times you need to stand up and be heard. I respect people's views on the other side but I just felt it was appropriate for me to stand up and make a statement.

After Sarver spoke out, the team chimed in against the passage and signing of SB 1070. Two-time MVP point guard Steve Nash, who in 2003 became the first athlete to go on record against the Iraq war said,

I think the law is very misguided. I think it is unfortunately to the detriment to our society and our civil liberties and I think it is very important for us to stand up for things we believe in. I think the law obviously can target opportunities for racial profiling. Things we don't want to see and don't need to see in 2010.

All-Star power forward Amare Stoudamire, who has no political reputation, also chimed in saying, "It's going to be great to wear Los Suns to let the Latin community know we're behind them 100%.”

After the story broke, I spoke on the phone with NBA Players Association President Billy Hunter about the Suns audacious move. He said,

It’s phenomenal. This makes it clear to me that it’s a new era. It’s a new time. Athletes can tend to be apolitical and isolated from the issues that impact the general public. But now here come the Suns. I would have expected nothing less from Steve Nash who has been out front on a number of issues over the years. I also want to recognize Amare. I know how strident Amare can be and I’m really impressed to see him channel his intensity. It shows a tremendous growth and maturity on his part. And I have to applaud Bob Sarver because he is really taking a risk by putting himself out there. I commend them. I just think it’s super.

He said that the union would have their own statement out by the end of the week.

This kind of political intervention by a sports team is without precedent and now every athlete and every team has an opening to stand up and be heard. Because when it’s all said and done, this isn’t just a battle for the soul of Arizona. It’s a battle for the soul of the United States. Here come the Suns indeed.

[Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love (Scribner). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com .]

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Casey Hayden in Arizona : Boycott 'Fortress America'

Alfonso Vasquez of Phoenix lights candles during a prayer vigil at the Arizona State Capitol on April 24, protesting Arizona's controversial new immigration law. Photo by Matt Pavelek / The Arizona Republic / AP.
Boycott Arizona:
Church leaders call SB 1070 'racist and sinful'

By Casey Hayden / The Rag Blog / April 29, 2010

"It is an act of injustice aimed at people whose appearance is suspect. To say there will be no racial profiling is an insult to the integrity of all Arizonans," -- Rev. Carmen B. Guerrero of Phoenix, representing the Episcopal bishop and church of Arizona, April 28 at Tucson gathering of religious leaders.

TUCSON -- Calling Arizona Senate Bill 1070 a racist and sinful law, more than 30 area religious leaders gathered for a press conference at noon Wednesday, April 28, in Tucson.

At the gathering at Southside Presbyterian Church, 317 West 23rd Street, they called for people of faith and conscience to resist enforcement of the legislation.

AZ SB 1070 is a huge bill. Presence in this country without citizenship documents is not prohibited by federal law, although it does subject the undocumented person to deportation. AZ SB 1070 makes such presence a crime.

Besides the racial profiling inherent in asking police to stop and demand papers from anyone who they think may be here “illegally,” everyone by law now has to report on everyone else they suspect, or face criminal prosecution. All police are now immigration agents.

Yesterday, at the press conference held by clergy, the speakers were eloquent. There was not much press coverage, although the Washington Post has a reporter here so maybe they will report. (Their online ongoing immigration discussion is informative.)

This gathering, at Southside Presbyterian Church, was much like movement church meetings back in the day -- but sadly, no freedom songs. Oh, well. Mostly Anglo gray hairs, whaddya gonna do?

There's a second clergy meeting here next Wednesday. We will attend. My husband Paul is an Episcopal priest, and is an organizer for the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) -- and the Pima County Interfaith Council -- and he was a leader in the Sanctuary movement. I'll tag along. Our buttons read "No papers." And "Resist SB 1070. Resist racism. Resist fear. Solidarity."

I also attended a rally at Congressman Raul Grijalva’s campaign office in Tucson last weekend. His other offices are closed following death threats.

There is a strong church based coalition of nonviolent resistance here in Tucson, active for years around border issues: people of color/Anglo/native. (Humano Derechos, Sin Frontera, Samaritans.) This bill criminalizes their humanitarian activities (leaving water in the desert, harboring sick migrants, or welcoming them to churches).

There were many stories at the meeting of home intrusions by INS agents, children being separated from parents on the road into foster care... the human toll. All police departments opposed the bill. No training, no staff, no place to house detainees, nothing.

There is great support across the country for opposition to the bill. Black churches, even Korean churches in Phoenix, are very strong against it. But Arizona polls are 75 percent in favor. Arizona is now the right wing leader, as Mississippi was previously.

This bill is Republican immigration reform. If Obama wants their input, this is it. He should be asking for input from human rights groups instead. This would provide the potential for some radical thinking from the left to emerge, as it has from the right. If he delays immigration reform, he will have to take on every state one at a time.

Make it clear we would like for Obama to to take his attention away from the Republicans for a minute or two, and direct it instead at the opinions of his constituents, us. The great Raul Grijalva, our Congressional representative, is calling on Obama not to cooperate with this bill. Arizona will need the feds to take rounded up detainees off their hands. Obama must refuse to take these detainees into federal hands. Attorney General Eric Holder may try to tie this law up in court, but it’s my guess the state will resist.

Everybody knows we are in an unsustainable mode on all fronts: energy, financial industry malfeasance, economy, military overextension, immigration, jobs. Because we all know this, right and left alike, the time is right for radical ideas, large and deep-seated ideas which will address the depth of the situation we are facing.

Not to knock the great unified movement of which I was a part in the 60’s, but we made some bad moves which led to our fracturing. One result was that the right took the churches. Immigration provides a way into deep conversation -- which should include religious leaders -- about the kind of country we want.

AZ SB 1070 is the most obvious example of Fortress America, the right wing’s answer to the real issues we all face: "We’ve got it and we are keeping it and we’ll shoot you if you try to get any of it."

If that’s not you, please come forward around this bill. Boycott Arizona. And get on Obama’s case. Enough buddying up to the Republicans and Wall Street. Immigration reform now. Rule by the Constitution, not states’ rights.

Pass it on.

[A Texas native, Casey Hayden was a pioneer in the civil rights, New Left, and feminist movements. She was involved in anti-segregation efforts in the 50s while attending the University of Texas at Austin, was a founding member of SNCC and SDS, and organized white welfare women in Chicago. Hayden and Mary King wrote "Sex and Caste," a document about the role of women in the civil rights movement that helped to set in motion the modern feminist movement. She was a co-author of Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement. Casey Hayden now lives in Tucson with her family.]

Religious leaders denounce 1070



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Racial Profiling : What's Up With the Mormons?

Image from Early Onset of Night.
Mormons for racial profiling?
Unsustainable contradictions in immigration law

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / April 27, 2010

What’s up with the Mormons? Orem, Utah legislator Stephen Eric Sandstrom last week pledged to follow the lead of “my friend” Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce and expand the number of states with show-me-your-papers bills aiming to criminalize, jail, and deport irregular migrants.

Rep. Sandstrom, who is a graduate of Brigham Young University and a former Mormon missionary to Venezuela, takes credit for co-founding a state’s rights organization called the Patrick Henry Caucus.

Sandstrom’s “friend” Sen. Pearce of Arizona, sponsor of the recently signed SB-1070, hails from the Mormon stronghold of Mesa and claims to be the mastermind behind Maricopa County’s infamous Tent City Jail.

For Pearce and Sandstrom, the crucial issue of liberty in the 21st Century would appear to involve the rights of states in relation to the federal government of the USA -- never mind the rights of individual people who reside in those states.

What’s curious about this particular Pearce-Sandstrom movement for state’s rights over individual rights is how it seems to contradict the interests of the Mormon family itself, which has been witnessing an increase in Spanish-speaking congregations.

Last summer, Salt Lake Tribune writer Peggy Fletcher Stack reported increasing fears among Spanish-speaking members of the Mormon Church of Latter- day Saints (LDS) who were concerned about travel restrictions they were facing for missionary work and then-impending implementation of Utah’s anti-migrant law, SB-81. “People are very scared,” said one woman via translator.

“Other than for its missionaries, the LDS Church takes a ‘don't ask, don't tell’ approach toward the immigration status of its members,” reported Fletcher Stack. “But some estimate between 50 percent and 75 percent of members in Utah's 104 Spanish-speaking congregations are undocumented. That includes many bishops, branch presidents, even stake presidents.”

Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank declared that Utah’s SB-81 would require illegal racial profiling, so he openly refused to enforce the self-contradictory statute. Last week Chief Burbank “blasted” Arizona’s SB-1070, telling KSL NewsRadio talk-show host Doug Wright: “This sets law enforcement back 30 to 40 years.”


Mormon Times columnist Jerry Earl Johnston shook his head last year in dismay over the unwisdom of the Utah anti-migrant legislation:

“I can only speak from my own LDS experience here, but I hold Utah lawmakers responsible for breaking up good LDS families and forcing young American citizens out of their native land,” wrote Johnston, predicting that victory would not reward the shortsighted anti-migrant forces.

“I could see these Hispanic brethren were going to win,” wrote Johnston. “I could see their faith, resilience and strength. They wanted to be in Utah more than Utah lawmakers wanted them out. They had weathered tribulations with good humor and without malice toward those who persecuted them.”

Meanwhile, in the Mormon stronghold of Mesa, Arizona, represented by SB-1070 sponsor Sen. Pearce, the number of Spanish-speaking LDS congregations had grown from five to 13 between 2002 and 2007 according to East Valley Tribune reporter Sarah N. Lynch.

Last fall, official LDS printing presses in Salt Lake City ran off an approved Spanish-language edition of the Mormon Bible -- The Santa Biblia: Reina-Valera 2009 (Publicada por La Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Últimos Días, Salt Lake City, Utah, E.U.A.) -- with an initial press run of 800,000 copies.

“It is one of the most significant scripture projects ever undertaken by the Church,” proclaimed a notice of Sept. 14, 2009, posted at lds.org. “The volume contains new chapter headings, footnotes and cross-references to all scriptures used by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Announcement of the volume was reportedly shared among “thousands of Spanish-speaking Latter-day Saints congregations.”

Mormon political leaders, like everyone else in today’s global economy, are confronting a real crisis in human welfare. Maricopa County in particular is a frontline disaster zone for the crisis in real estate values, mortgage defaults, unemployment, and revenue shortfalls.

“In Maricopa,” according to an April report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Q3 2009 unemployment, “every private industry group except education and health services experienced an employment decline, with construction experiencing the largest decline (-32.2 percent).”

Crisis reveals character. So when Mormon political leaders campaign for agendas of states’ rights according to Patrick Henry rhetorics of “liberty or death,” perhaps their Spanish-speaking LDS brethren can remind them that there are millions of people of goodwill in need of actual freedom-loving legislators in whatever state they have freely chosen to congregate and build up.

[Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. He can be reached at gmosesx@gmail.com.]

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SPORT / No One is Illegal : Boycott the Diamondbacks

Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick: his family gave $1,023,527 to the Republicans. Photo by Brian Smale. Original graphic from Fortune. Satirical enhancement by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.

Echoes of Apartheid:
Boycott the Arizona Diamondbacks

By Dave Zirin / April 24, 2010

Gonna find a way
Make the state pay
Lookin’ for the day
Hard as it seems
This ain’t no damn dream
Gotta know what I mean
It’s team against team

-- Public Enemy, By the Time I Get to Arizona

This will be the last column I write about the Arizona Diamondbacks in the foreseeable future. For me, they do not exist. They will continue to not exist in my mind as long as the horribly named “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” remains law in Arizona. This law has brought echoes of apartheid to the state.

One Democratic lawmaker has said that it has made Arizona a “laughingstock” but it’s difficult to find an ounce of humor in this kind of venal legislation. The law makes it a crime to walk the streets without clutching your passport, green card, visa, or state I.D.

It not only empowers but absolutely requires cops to demand paperwork if they so much as suspect a person of being undocumented. A citizen can, in fact, sue any police officer they see not harassing suspected immigrants. The bill would also make it a class one misdemeanor for anyone to “pick up passengers for work” if their vehicle blocks traffic. And it makes a second violation of any aspect of the law a felony.

In response, Representative Raul Grijalva, who’s from Arizona itself, has called for a national boycott against the state, saying, “Do not vacation and or retire there.” He got so many hateful threats this week that he had to close his Arizona offices at noon on Friday.

Many of us aren’t in either the imminent vacation or retirement mode. We do, however, live in baseball cities where the Arizona Diamondbacks come to play.

When they arrive in my hometown in D.C., my back will be turned, and my television will be off. This is not merely because they happen to be the team from Arizona. The D-backs organization is a primary funder of the state Republican Party, which has been driving the measure through the legislature.

As the official Arizona Diamondbacks boycott call states, “In 2010, the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s third highest Contributor was the [executives of the] Arizona Diamondbacks, who gave $121,600; furthermore, they also contributed $129,500, which ranked as the eighteenth highest contribution to the Republican Party Committee.”

The team’s big boss, Ken Kendrick, and his family members, E. G. Kendrick Sr. and Randy Kendrick, made contributions to the Republicans totaling a staggering $1,023,527. The Kendricks follow in the footsteps of team founder and former owner Jerry Colangelo. Colangelo, along with other baseball executives and ex-players, launched a group called Battin’ 1000: a national campaign that uses baseball memorabilia to raise funds for a Campus for Life, the largest anti-choice student network in the country.

Colangelo was also deputy chair of Bush/Cheney 2004 in Arizona, and his deep pockets created what was called the Presidential Prayer Team -- a private evangelical group that claims to have signed up more than 1 million people to drop to their knees and pray daily for Bush.

Under Colangelo, John McCain also owned a piece of the team. The former maverick said before the bill’s passage that he “understood” why it was being passed because “the drivers of cars with illegals in it [that] are intentionally causing accidents on the freeway.”

This is who the Arizona Diamondback executives are. This is the tradition they stand in.

The Diamondbacks’ owners have every right to their politics, and if we policed the political proclivities of every owner’s box there might not be anyone left to root for (except for the Green Bay Packers, who don’t have an owner’s box). But this is different. The law is an open invitation to racial profiling and harassment. The boycott call is coming from inside the state.

If the owners of the Diamondbacks want to underwrite an ugly edge of bigotry, we should raise our collective sporting fists against them. A boycott is also an expression of solidarity with Diamondback players such as Juan Guitterez, Gerardo Parra, and Rodrigo Lopez. They shouldn’t be put in a position where they’re cheered on the playing field and then asked for their papers when the uniform comes off.

[Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love (Scribner). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com .]

Source / The Progressive

Graphic by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
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Arizona to ID 'Immigrants'? : Cranking up the Fear

Image from creativenonfiction.com.
Demonizing Immigrants:
Arizona cranking up the fear

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / April 16, 2010

When people get scared, they become much more willing to give up their rights for a perceived safer world, and it looks like that is what's happening in Arizona. The right-wingers in the Republican Party have been demonizing immigrants for several years now -- especially those with a darker skin color -- and Arizonans seem to be buying the racism the party is selling them.

The Arizona House of Representatives has just passed a bill, supposedly to fight illegal immigration. The bill is expected to also be passed by the senate and signed by the governor. The bill would forbid any city to adopt a "sanctuary" policy that would restrict police and social service workers from enforcing immigration laws. It would also expose drivers to sanctions if they knowingly transport an illegal alien -- even a family member.

But perhaps the most troubling aspect of the new law is the power it gives police to stop anyone and demand to see paperwork showing they are in the United States legally. I remember during the days when the Soviet Union was in existence, one of the differences between that country and America was the requirement to carry identity papers which could be demanded by police at any time.

The only identification that a citizen of the United States has been required to carry is a driver's license, and then only when driving. It has always been a mark of our freedom that we are not required to carry identification. It seems strange to me that the party that claims to be upholding our freedoms and our Constitution -- the Republicans -- would be the party to take away some of that freedom . I guess they can't be both the party of freedom and the party of fear at the same time, and they've chosen fear.

Of course, this law will almost force the police to engage in racial profiling (unless they plan to stop every citizen and demand to see their papers). No, I expect this will only happen to Hispanics -- many of them American citizens. This has to be a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment in that it creates a law aimed at only one class or race of people. It is simply wrong for Hispanics to be singled out to be harassed in this manner.

I think the law is also unconstitutional in a different way. Just a few years ago, an African-American man liked to take walks through a high-class suburb of San Francisco. He was repeatedly stopped and arrested by the suburban police because he did not carry any identification, although he always told them his true name and address and cooperated with them. He just believed that in America a man had the right to walk on public property anywhere without carrying identity papers.

He finally became angry with the continued harassment and sued the suburb. The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and the court found the suburban community's police had violated the man's rights. They found that there was no requirement for an American to carry identity papers, and since the man cooperated and gave them his name and address, he should not have been arrested.

This Arizona bill is trying to do the same thing the suburban police had tried to do -- require American citizens to carry identity papers. It is wrong and should be quickly nullified by the courts.

I have nothing against the requirement to carry a driver's license when driving, but I have no desire to live in a state or country where I have to carry identity papers anytime I go out in public. That is just like an old-style East European police state, and cannot be tolerated in a truly free country.

It all boils down to one question. Do we want to live in a free country, or are we so fearful that we are willing to give up more of our freedoms? Personally, I choose to live in a free country.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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