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INDIANAPOLIS When Lamari Edwards joined Dreasjon Sean Reeds Facebook Live video, she could sense something bad was going to happen, but she never thought she was witnessing the last moments of her friends life. I had a bad feeling, but I did not think it would end this way, said Edwards.

Reeds video showed him driving at a high speed and narrating as officers from the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department chased him May 6. The officers said they observed Reeds car driving recklessly, almost striking other vehicles.

In the video, Reed, 21, is seen stopping the car and getting out to run. Reed dropped to the ground after being tazed by an officer. The video does not show what happens next, but several gunshots can be heard.

The news of Reeds death spread quickly. For many black Americans especially, his story seemed all too familiar: another black man killed by the police. When Edwards heard about a demonstration being held the next day in Reeds honor in front of the Indianapolis City-County Building, she knew she had to go.

But like many of the 200 people who showed up, she wrestled with an additional concern: staying protected from the coronavirus. Marion County which encompasses Indianapolis has been under a stay-at-home order but lifted some restrictions on Friday. It accounts for the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths in the state with, as of Monday, 8,303 confirmed cases and 477 deaths. Current Marion County Public Health Department orders state that all residents should wear a face mask or covering in public and practice social distancing.

Practicing proper social distancing can be difficult during a mass protest. And, unlike during some protests, particularly demonstrations in several state capitals against lockdown orders, people here took precautions. Although protesters recognized the dangers of the coronavirus that come with assembling in close quarters, they said they felt the cause was more important.

Thats partly because Indianapolis is no stranger to violence. In 2020, police have opened 52 criminal homicide investigations. This number does not include accidental or self-defense shootings. Moreover, police were also involved in two other deaths, in unrelated incidents, within eight hours of Reeds death: One was a police shooting, and the other was traffic fatality in which an officers car struck a pregnant woman.

An estimated 200 people showed up for a May 7 demonstration in Dreasjon Sean Reeds honor outside the Indianapolis City-County Building. (Tarena Lofton/Kaiser Health News)

Anthoney Hampton, an organizer of the demonstration, is a forklift driver who has mentored inner-city youth in Indianapolis for 25 years. (Tarena Lofton/KHN)

Brandy Taylor, a 23-year-old cake decorator, said she decided to come to the demonstration partly because of her kids. She is concerned about their safety once the pandemic passes. She explained that it seems like the violence has slowed down since the start of the stay-at-home order, but she said, You cant keep people at home for forever.

Anthoney Hampton, 50, an organizer of the demonstration, said he felt no hesitation. He felt it was his obligation. Hampton works as a forklift driver and has been a mentor to inner-city youth for 25 years. As a father and grandfather, he wanted his family to know it is important to stand up for a cause you believe in. And he sees the problem as much bigger than the ones in Indianapolis.

I changed my [Facebook] profile picture to the young man who got killed in Georgia [recently], and a few hours later, someone got killed in our backyard, said Hampton.

The young man he was referring to is Ahmaud Arbery. Arbery was shot to death Feb. 23 while jogging in a neighborhood outside Brunswick, Georgia. A video of the shooting was posted online May 5, causing a national outcry. State officials took over the case and arrested two men and charged them with murder.

As in Indiana, Georgia residents protested the death, gathering outside the state Capitol, in the streets of the neighborhood where Arbery was killed and in other places around the state.

At the gathering here, Hampton took precautions against the coronavirus. He wore gloves and a red face mask that read Give me 6 feet. Like Hampton, many others in the crowd showed up with masks.

Members of the Indianapolis chapter of Black Lives Matter passed out masks for protection. The organization also posted on their Facebook and Twitter pages urging participants to practice social distancing and wear protective gear such as gloves and masks but to stay home if they were sick.

Mat Davis was one of those distributing masks and telling people the fight against the coronavirus was also important.

I was terrified, said Davis. I was like Please take this. Youre upset; Im upset. Please cover your face up.

Here is the original post:
In The COVID Age, Bring A Mask And Gloves To A Protest - Kaiser Health News

In American Trial: The Eric Garner Story, black activist Netta Elzie says, I dont even know what the probable cause was for Eric Garner being arrested.

Whatever the reason for his apprehension, the July 17, 2014, altercation between a team of NYPD officers and Garner, a 350-something pound, asthmatic African American, resulted in his death.

There never was a criminal trial for officer Daniel Pantaleo, who a federal grand jury decided not to indict in December 2014, even though a departmental hearing found him guilty of applying a chokehold on Garner in violation of NYPD regulations. The police force fired Pantaleo for these transgressions in August 2019, more than five years after the fact.

I cant breatheGarners dying wordsbecame a protest chant for the Black Lives Matter movement. And now the Garner family is finally having its day in courtsort of.

Producer/director Roee Messingers 101-minute motion picture synthesizes elements of nonfiction and fiction to depict the case against Pantaleo. Messinger uses news and archival footage as well as original interviews with experts, innovatively intercut with a staged jury trial of Pantaleo.

The media clips include footage of Pantaleo and other NYPD officers as they swarmed Garner and wrestled him face down to the pavement on a Staten Island street. He had been selling loosiesuntaxed, individually sold cigarettes.

American Trial includes testimony from Reverend Al Sharpton, President Barack Obama, and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. LeBron James appears in court with other Los Angeles Lakersincluding the late Kobe Bryantin T-shirts bearing Garners last words, I cant breathe, in an act of solidarity.

The media clips include footage of Pantaleo and other NYPD officers as they swarmed Garner and wrestled him face down to the pavement on a Staten Island street. He had been selling loosiesuntaxed, individually sold cigarettes.

Elzie and fellow organizer DeRay McKesson, who both emerged out of the protests at Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown, another unarmed black man, less than a month after Garners death. And attorney Alan Dershowitz, who recently defended President Trump during his Senate impeachment trial, appears to say that the matter involving Garner was so trivial he never should have been arrested. The offense he committed was worthy of a ticket, at most, Dershowitz opines.

The most compelling personality in American Trial is Garners widow, Esaw Snipes-Garner, who was married to Garner for twenty-six years; the couple had four children. Snipes-Garner plays herself during the films courtroom sequences, chafing at limitations on her ability to tell her own version of events on the witness stand. In real life, she ended up settling a lawsuit over her husbands death out of court. Keep your eyes peeled during the credits sequence, revealing how she is still traumatized by the tragedy her family has endured.

The legal proceedings, shot inside what appears to be an actual courtroom, are entirely fictionalized, as Pantaleo never stood trial. Nevertheless these scenes have a feeling of authenticity. Onscreen, Pantaleo is tried for second-degree manslaughter and first-degree strangulation as the film probes whether or not the officer killed Eric Garner with a chokehold prohibited by NYPD rules.

Yet in what the press notes call an unscripted courtroom drama, there are no histrionics before the bench, such as witnesses confessing their guilt on the stand, a la Perry Mason. But aficionados of television procedurals will likely enjoy the usual objections, whether sustained or overruled.

Taking a page from Italian Neo-Realism, the prosecutors in the film are played by people with civilian and military prosecutorial experience; the defense counsels are played by actual lawyers; and the expert witnesses called to testify are played by real-life medical examiners. The judge is an attorney in real life.

The film has only one accredited actor, Bronx-born Anthony Altieri, who portrays Pantaleo.

Other What if? trials that never happened have been staged for the screen, including several imagining Lee Harvey Oswalds court drama for the assassination of JFK. But American Trial is unique in that, while twelve non-actors sit in the movies jury box, the verdict is interactively decided by viewers watching at home.

As the unfolding tragedies of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor indicate, six years after Garner's death, American Trial: The Eric Garner Story remains all too relevant. That should choke us all up, and spur on the struggle against racism and police brutality.

More:
What if They Were Held Accountable? - Progressive.org

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Since Black voters in South Carolina propelled Joe Biden to a comeback victory a few months ago, there has been a big looming question: How can Biden increase his appeal to young progressive Black votersparticularly womenwho overwhelmingly backed rivals like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren?

In an unprecedented op-ed published Friday in the Washington Post, seven Black women, including Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, and comedian and cultural commentator Amanda Seales, start to answer that question. Vice President Biden, You need us, you owe us, they bluntly state, before going on to demand that Biden select a Black woman as his running mate, promise to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court if hes elected in November, and come up with a comprehensive plan to combat the over-policing of Black communities.

We have been the Democrats most reliable voting bloc since passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the op-ed reads. Bidens only path to victory is through black women and the voters we know how to energize.

Alongside the op-ed, the women published a moving video to make their case:

While his impressive showing in South Carolina showed that Biden still had the hard-earned support of older and more moderate Black voters, his appeal to younger and first-time Black voters is shakier. Progressive Black women lined up behind Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, arguingthat Bidens treatment of Anita Hill and his support of the 1994 crime bill outweighed his serving in the administration of the first Black president.

Biden seems at least receptive to these demands. Hes already promised to pick a woman as his vice presidential running mate. Elizabeth Warrenwho was endorsed by several prominent progressive Black women, including Garzaseems to be the favorite. But Stacey Abrams would be a popular choice, and shes making a very public push to join the ticket. Kamala Harris has stayed relatively quiet recently, but is another favorite in Bidens camp. Amy Klobuchar is reportedly still in the mix, though the op-ed explicitly agues against Biden picking her as his number two:

Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, does not need help winning white, working-class voters he serves that function himself.A choice such as Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), who failed to prosecute controversial police killingsand is responsiblefor the imprisonment of Myon Burrell, will only alienate black voters. These are the same voters who may be forced this fall to take personal risks to line up and vote in many states, especially where Republican efforts to suppress mail-in voting are successful. This is a lot to ask amid a coronavirus pandemic that is disproportionately more deadlyto black people.

While campaigning in a pandemic presents a whole host of new problems for any candidate, whats clear is that Joe Biden is going to have to do a lot more than show up in his basement studio if he wants to bring new or non-regular voters to the polls. Hell have to come up with a plan to energize voters, particularly Black women, around what he can do, not just on what he saw get done as vice president. A new New deal, which New York Magazine reported is his plan if elected, is necessary. Biden also needs to court dealmakers. Luckily, theyre telling him just how to do it.

Excerpt from:
Joe Biden Needs Black Women Voters. They Have a New Message for Him. - Mother Jones

Its a sure sign youve reached maturity in life when you stop trying to have it both ways. As an adult, you probably shouldnt expect to be able to eat all the ice cream in the fridge every night and still avoid the long-term health effects of a poor diet. And yet, when it comes to COVID-19, its as if many in the black community who suffer disproportionately from comorbidities expect the entire country to remain closed until they are no longer at risk of COVID-related illnesses.

Such was the substance of the heated rants of a Rutgers University professor who last week blamed Trump supporters and state officials in Georgia, Utah and Florida who are beginning to lift the restrictions on commerce and social isolation put in place as emergency measures to stem the tide of the virus. Brittany Cooper, a tenured professor in the dubiously named Womens and Gender Studies Department, blamed it all on the white man, stating in a rage-filled Twitter rant, Not only do white conservatives not care about Black life, but my most cynical negative read of the white supremacists among them is that they welcome this massive winnowing of Black folks in order to slow demographic shifts and shore up political power.

By massive winnowing of Black folks Cooper was referring to the fact that as many as 80 percent of the reported hospitalizations from COVID-19 in Georgia occurred among African Americans. But at a reported total of 1,035 deaths thus far in Georgia attributed to COVID-19, even if all of them were African American (they are not), that would hardly constitute a winnowing of the black population. Georgias African American population is roughly 3.5 million, and the leading cause of mortality for African Americans in Georgia is heart disease. In 2017, nearly 18,000 Georgians died of heart disease, and African Americans, at roughly 31 percent of the Georgia population, accounted for nearly half of those deaths or 9,000. In other words, heart disease by itself is 10 times more likely to kill African Americans in Georgia than COVID-19.

And yet, not one of those prognosticators would even think about advocating closing down businesses offering fried foods, confectionary items or barbecue because black people are at higher risk of contracting deadly heart disease from poor dietary habits. In fact, when in 2019 neighbors in a Houston suburb formed a coalition to petition the city to shut down the black-owned Turkey Leg Hut because of concern over noxious fumes emanating from the establishments meat smokers, local black leaders protested that the voiced health concerns of the (mostly white) neighbors masked a racist vendetta against the Huts black business owners.

Again, as a mature adult, you tend to learn you cant have it both ways. And yet, Ms. Cooper persists. As if suppressing a glint of self-awareness as in awareness of the preventable underlying condition that increases not only all-cause morbidity, but also the comorbidity associated with increased rates of critical infection and death from COVID-19 Ms. CooperTwitter-shouts: Black Lives Matter. Black Lives with hypertension, diabetes, and asthma matter ... All Black Lives Matter. Fat Black Lives matter.

But she doesnt really seem to believe that. If she did, perhaps she would sue fast-food restaurants to prevent them reopening in black neighborhoods until there is, say, a 70 percent reduction in diabetes, hypertension and obesity among black folks. That form of protest would seem to be more congruent with her self-righteous contention that black lives actually matter. But the glint of self-awareness quickly dims in the opportunity for political invective.

Professor Cooper is hardly alone in spilling her misplaced ire into the Twitter-sphere. When U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, a black man, advised African Americans this month to take preventative measures to address the COVID-19 threat including, horror of horrors, avoid[ing] alcohol, tobacco and drugs he was widely criticized for pandering to African Americans. Adams was excoriated by PBS NewsHours White House correspondent, Yamiche Alcindor, for offending African Americans because he used informal and idiosyncratic speech, urging people of color: We need you to do this, if not for yourself, then for your abuela. Do it for your granddaddy. Do it for your Big Mama. Do it for your Pop-Pop.

It made no difference that Adams himself has acknowledged on several occasions that he, too, suffers from underlying conditions, including asthma and high blood pressure, which he attributes to a legacy of growing up poor and black in America.

It would be absolute pandering of the most cynical variety for health officials to fail to advise African Americans of their increased susceptibility to COVID-19 given disproportionate rates of comorbidity factors among blacks. And it would be downright criminal for a responsible surgeon general to fail to suggest practical means of strengthening our health in the midst of this pandemic. But that would be true only if fat black lives really mattered.

Armstrong Williams (@ARightSide) is the owner and manager of Howard Stirk Holdings I & II Broadcast Television Stations and the 2016 Multicultural Media Broadcast Owner of the Year. He is the author of Reawakening Virtues.

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Why fat black lives must not really matter | TheHill - The Hill

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I almost started this post with the words Studs Terkel. And then I wanted to punch myself in the face. Studs Terkelthe irreverent, leftist, legendary oral historianmay be well-known and beloved, but the idea that theres a great man of oral history is totally antithetical to the entire concept of populist history that he supposedly represents. In fact, there are hundreds of people, many using she/her pronouns, who are working feverishly to collect audio recordings, videos, photographs, and written accounts about what peoples lives look like during this pandemic.

One of them is Meral Agish, the community coordinator for Queens Memory, a community archiving partnership between Queens Public Library and Queens College CUNY.

On March 16, the Queens Public Library closed all 65 its branches to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. Within the next two weeks, central Queens emerged as the epicenter within the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with more than 7,260 cases recorded within a 7-square-mile radius. It felt like we need to do whatever we can to record what life is like in Queens right now, Agish told me.

Queens Memory has been collecting oral histories, photographs, and home videos from Queens residents since 2010. On the day the library closed, Agish and the Queens Memory team discussed creating a large crowdsourced campaign, the likes of which theyd never done before, to collect the stories of daily life in Queens during the pandemic. I was familiar with the work of Queens Memory, and I gave them some tips on a workflow for the first season of their podcast. But I havent been involved in their oral history collection.

As COVID-19 rages around the world, archivists, librarians, oral historians, and activists have spun up oral history projects to document their communities everyday experiences during an extraordinary social, political, cultural, and historical moment. Documenting the Now, for example, an initiative born out of documenting Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement, has collated a crowdsourced Google document of #doccovid19 projects. So far there are 103 such initiatives on the list, ranging from community archiving projects at public libraries to the coronavirus subreddit.

Our whole goal is to empower people who arent necessarily professional historians to identify stories that should be in their public librarys local history collections, said Natalie Milbrodt, director of the Queens Memory Project at Queens Public Library. They work with us to capture those stories and digitize photos and give future researchers a really accurate depiction of life in contemporary Queens, New York City.

Two weeks after the Queens Memory team started talking about a COVID-19 project, they launched it.An online submissions page and toll-free number went live on April 9, thanks to fast work from the Urban Archive team and a broad coalition of Queens Memory staff and volunteers. As of this week, theyve received about 200 submissions, ranging from highly edited videos to short audio clips to written accounts. We are living through history right now, and you wonder, how are we going to look back at this time? said Agish.

While everyone is susceptible to a virus, the coronavirus has not in fact been the great equalizer. An investigation by my colleagues Edwin Rios and Sinduja Rangarajan showed that black and brown communities have disproportionately higher rates of infection and fatality. In the neighborhoods in Queens hardest hit by the coronavirus, 38 percent of the working population are employed in the service sector, such as food delivery, child care services, and janitorial services, compared to 18 percent citywide according toCenter for an Urban Future, a nonpartisan policy organization focusing on economic mobility and inequality.These numbers partly explain how this borough became the epicenter. But they dont tell the whole story. Its just coming across as statistics, but we knew that for every healthcare worker, every delivery person, it was having a real human impact that was not necessarily being recorded very well, said Milbrodt.

By capturing a broad swath of stories from the borough of Queens, Agish hopes to document how the pandemic has been affecting the community in uneven ways.

This pandemic experience is casting such a harsh light on how unequal our life in our borough is, said Agish. Theres a tendency to think about the pandemics effect in numbers, percentages, rates, these abstract measures that of course tell a particular story about the pandemic, but they completely lose the human aspect of what this experience is like.

In a time of crisis, chronicling the truth can feel like a form of resistance. As any dictator will tell you, destroying the archives and a common history has been one of many reliable techniques for subjugating a population. Theres a large overlap between the community archiving techniques deployed at Queens Memory and the work of organizations like WITNESS, whichcrowdsources the documentation of human rights violations. At a time when the escapism of celebrity culture feels a little less benign, its comforting to know that the lives of the rich and famous arent the only ones that willendure when future historians reflect on the pandemic of 2020.

We find that people coming into our local history collections are very interested in daily lives of people who lived 100 years ago, said Milbrodt. We want to make sure that were capturing the stories of people who dont necessarily think of themselves as important historical players. We do a lot of convincing people that their stories are important.

Just like Studs Terkel did.

Link:
How Are We Going to Look Back on This Time? Oral Historians Record Daily Life During COVID-19. - Mother Jones