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Back in May, Patrisse Cullors, an activist and one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter Movement, took to Instagram to explain what had taken place outside of her home. According to her, Candace Owens, a conservative influencer, showed up in her neighborhood. Cullors claimed that Ownes, accompanied by a camera crew, was "demanding" that she come outside and answered her questions.

It didn't take long for Owens tosee Cullors crying on camera-- which urged her to issue a response. The political commentator defended her actions and labeled the co-founder as a liar, claiming her narrative was false and that she had no idea she was inside her home at the time.

Not only did Owens speak on the issue, but she also released camera footage of what took place that day. In the clip, Owens kept her composure while talkingto the security guard and she even offered tovacate the premises.

While the issue took place weeks ago, Owens, seemingly, isn't done talking about it. Recently, she appeared on Akademiks'Off The Recordpodcast, a show centered around entertainment, music, and culture. AK reminded the 33-year-old of the incident, to which she responded, "I would never be a person that would show up and be banging on somebody's door."

When speakingabout how she wound up outside of the property in the first place, Owens admitted that it had been a mistake. "There was a bunch of properties that we were visiting," she started, "and I was actually confused when I walked up to it. I thought that... was the community house-- we went to that one right after. They're both just mansions in L.A."

The Connecticut-born activist alsoexpressed her initial reaction to seeing Cullors weeping on social media. "She was on Instagram fake crying, pretending that she had survived some attack, and I'm like, 'Are you kidding me? I couldn't have been nicer,'" she stated.

Check out the clip below.

Originally posted here:
Candace Owens Talks Pulling Up To BLM Mansion & Patrice Cullors' Reaction - HotNewHipHop

This spring marks two years since Louisville, KY, police killed 26-year-old Breonna Taylor. Officers shot 36 rounds of ammunition into her home in a bungled raid serving a no-knock warrant, realizing later that the suspect they were looking for was already in custody. The police who shot her could have intervened to save her, but they didnt; in Kentucky, as in most states, police are not obligated to deliver medical aid to people theyve shot or maimed.1

In concurrence with the lynching of George Floyd, Breonnas death sparked nationwide uprisings and prompted vigorous debates about the polices role in public safety. Coalitions like the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and organizations like Black Visions brought attention to abolitionist arguments that the only way to prevent deaths such as Mr. Floyds and Ms. Taylors is to take power and funding from police and reinvest those resources into other public safety measures.

Breonnas shooting was unusual in that, unlike most police shootings of Black women, it garnered significant media attentionalthough some argue only after the avalanche of news about the death of Mr. Floyd.

Police in America have killed 366 people so far this yearroughly three people a day according to data from Mapping Violence, a nonprofit research group. Their victims include Black women, amongst them Tracy Gaeta, a 54-year-old grandmother who was shot to death on February 22 in Stockton, CA. Ms. Gaeta backed her car into police officer Kyle Riberas police vehicle. In return, Ribera fired 30 rounds into Ms. Gaetas car, killing her. Although Ms. Gaeta was unarmed, Ribera was unrelenting, stopping briefly to load more bullets into the chamber of his gun then continuing to unload his weapon.

Black female victims of police violence also include children like 16-year-old MaKhia Bryant, who was killed last spring in her hometown of Columbus, OH, after police officer Nicholas Reardon was dispatched to quell a fight among foster youth. Within seconds of arriving, Reardon shot MaKhia. As police often do to Black people, Reardon justified his use of excessive force by attributing superhuman attributes to the adolescent; he claimed that MaKhia appeared bigger than him so he didnt think mace or other non-lethal approaches would be effective.2

This kind of excessive force by police isnt the exception when it comes to deadly encounters with Black women. Its the norm. Yet, while media attention of police shootings of Black men has increased dramatically thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, the grievous violence Black women suffer at the hands of police continues to attract little to no media attention.

Rather, at present, Black boys and men remain the face of police brutality and state-sanctioned violence in the US. Their deaths and the organizing that follows have given rise to powerful mass uprisings for racial justice and Black liberation. Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Eric Garner, Mike Brown, George Floydwe know their names. This is important. Black women and girls deserve the same recognition, rage, and people-powered response. As professor Brittany Cooper smartly asks, Why does it remain so difficult for outrage over the killing of Black women to be the tipping point for national protests challenging state violence?

The relative invisibility of Black womens experiences of policing in the US is a product of Black womens social positionality: Black women sit at the intersection of patriarchal misogyny and anti-Black racism. Patriarchy deploys ideological and physical violence to objectify and repress women in the interest of male dominance, denying womens fundamental humanity. Anti-Black racism, an essential part of the racial capitalism that structures US (and global) society, involves, as a professor of African American studies Dr. kihana miraya ross explains, societys inability to recognize our humanitythe disdain, disregard and disgust for our existence.

Existing at this intersection means Black women are doubly disregarded, and they are plagued by both hypervisibilitythe experience of being overly scrutinized when our bodies are stereotyped or commodifiedand invisibilitywhere violence against us is ignored or disregarded. This dualism makes talking about state-sanctioned violence toward Black women and girls hard, and it makes communicating about and organizing for a world that keeps us safe even harder.

The fight to defund the police and reimagine public safety is part of a larger, long-term social justice strategy to divest structural resourcesi.e., tangible recourses such as money, member networks, and organizational power3from harmful institutions such as the police, and to reinvest those resources into common-sense approaches to public safety. However, money isnt the only currency organizers must rest from the powerful. They must also take ownership of symbolic resources, which shape how we valueor fail to valuethe lives of Black women and girls, including transgender women and girls.

Such resources include words, signs, images, music and even bodies [which] shape our perceptions of reality and invite us to act accordingly.4 Social movements use these symbolic resources to expose patterns, cultivate compassion, recruit members, inspire collective action, and build public will for sweeping social changes. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter is a symbolic resource, as was Emmitt Tills open-casket. Tills mother, Mamie, believed people should see what is often concealedthe ghoulish manifestations of white supremacy.

As we lay the foundation for new public safety infrastructure in the United States, the control and distribution of symbolic resources, including narratives, can be deployed to make the invisible visible. For Black women and girls that means exposing the underlying network of intersectional, systemic narratives, stereotypes, and myths that result in our hypervisibility, invisibility, and dehumanization in life and death.

Narratives are collections of stories, refined over time, through which we make meaning of the world. Narratives and stories differ. To quote the Narrative Initiative, What tiles are to mosaics, stories are to narratives. The relationship is symbiotic; stories bring narratives to life by making them relatable and accessible, while narratives infuse stories with deeper meaning.5 Such meaning frames our worldview and understandings of our daily experiences, including our relationships with others, peoples behaviors, social structures, and global events. In sum, narratives are the foundation of our ideologies and belief systems, which shape our actionsand theyre powerful.

In all societies, multiple, competing narratives circulate, but some narratives are hegemonicor dominantcentering the desires, beliefs, and values of dominant groups. Hegemonic narratives deploy science, law, and cultural difference to devalue and dehumanize certain groups of people, normalizing inequality and exploitation. These beliefs are then reinforced in social institutions, including churches, schools, and the media, and in interpersonal interactions.

Throughout US history, hegemonic narratives have portrayed Black people as inherently inferior, deviant, and shiftless. One such narrative appeared in the widely circulated1965 Moynihan Report. Rather than focus on systemic employment and wage discrimination, the report argued that single-parented households and the breakdown of the nuclear family led to a culture of poverty in Black communities. This narrative of Black pathologysingling out Black people as the source of our own, and the countrys, social problemshas old roots and persists today.

Anti-Black narratives are gendered, meaning they target Black women and men in different ways. In particular, they have consistently stereotyped Black women as sexual deviants and unfit mothers. Such narratives have accumulated power over time and hold sway over our capacity to empathize with Black women and our perceptions of who does and does not deserve to benefit from public safety measures.

Today, for example, more than a third of Black women experience some form of sexual violence in their lifetime. Yet according to a Brandeis University study, prosecutors file chargesagainst just 34 percent of attacks reported by Black woman, compared to 75 percent of attacks reported by white women.6 According to research by the African American Policy Forum, the police are often perpetrators of sexual violence against Black women.7 Former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, for example, raped and/or sexually assaulted at least 13 Black women over several years.

In a future where public safety includes the welfare of Black women and girls, we have to interrogate how narratives of sex and race determine who is considered part of the public and from what and whom they need to be kept safe. As NYU history professor Jennifer Morgan, author of Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, writes, you need so many lenses to see all the different ways in which we are still grappling with the legacies of hereditary racial slavery in this country that you cant just look at it from one perspective. Youre going to miss so many other ways that this is being made manifest.

The narratives circulating around Black women in America contribute in essential ways to the hypervisibility and scrutiny Black women experience when alive, and to the erasure and invisibility Black women like Ms. Taylor, Ms. Gaeta, and MaKhia share in death. As professor Cooper writes about police killings of Black women, in a world where the pains and traumas that Black women and girls experience as a consequence of both racism and sexism remain structurally invisible and impermeable to broad empathy, these killings recede from the foreground quietly.8

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The narratives that shape how we valueor fail to valueBlack women and girls have their roots in slavery; over time, they have accumulated immense power. To justify slavery, European and white settler experts exploited sciences growing influence, developing theories that argued that Black people were the result of an evolutionary diversion. According to such scientific racism, while white people evolved thanks to their environments and inherent biological traits, Black people remained evolutionary stagnant or regressed, resulting in a host of inferior qualities, including laziness, stupidity, hypersexuality, and deviancy. In other words, Black people were more akin to beasts of burden than people, and it was justifiable if not laudable to treat them as commodities from which enslavers extracted value.

The slave plantation was essential to the national and global economy, and it took shape within a patriarchal society that reduced women of all races to mens sexual objects and breeding machines. While white womens sexuality was policed to ensure the purity of the white race, Black womens reproduction became a brutal business enterprise designed to perpetuate the institution of slavery. Stated otherwise, the first role of Black women in US society was not that of a mother, let alone citizen, but as producers of an enslaved labor force.

While white women bore responsibility for transferring superior whiteness to their offspring, Black women bore responsibility for passing down inferior Blackness. As professor of law, sociology, and civil rights, Dorothy E. Roberts, writes in her classic book, Killing the Black Body,

For three centuries, black mothers have been thought to pass down to their offspring the traits that marked them as inferior to any white person. Along with this biological impairment, it is believed that black mothers transfer a deviant lifestyle to the children that dooms each succeeding generation to a life of poverty, delinquency, and despair. A popular mythology that portrays black women as unfit to be mothers has left a lasting impression on the American psyche.

In other words, according to hegemonic narratives, Black people were to blame for their own problems, and this blame resided in particular with Black women, the producers of Black children.

After emancipation, this myth that Black women wereby virtue of their reproductive powerthe source of Black inferiority continued to permeate US culture, and stories of bad Black mothers were ubiquitous. Eventually, these stories gave rise to the welfare queen narrative, according to which Black women took advantage of social programs, misappropriating the tax dollars of hardworking Americans. Given that anti-Black racism barred many Black women from accessing public services, this narrative, which had no factual foundation, rendered Black female welfare recipients hypervisible. It also burdened Black women with the stereotype of the welfare queen who, as the Frameworks Institute writes, is portrayed as a pathologically greedy, lawbreaking, deviant, lazy, promiscuous, and Cadillac-driving Black woman who cheats the system and defrauds the American people.9

For much of US history, law enforcement meant implementing laws designed to subjugate Black people and uphold white supremacy. The first slave patrols, created in the Carolinas in the 1700s, were made up of volunteer white men who hunted enslaved escapees and squashed rebellions led by enslaved people to free themselves. Such policing continued in southern states through the end of the Civil War.

Even after emancipation, southern plantation capitalism relied on cheap Black labor. So, although the 13th amendment technically freed some four million Black people in 1865, southern states swiftly implemented Black Codesa combination of harsh vagrancy and contract lawsto keep Black people indentured. The police were responsible for enforcing these laws.

In 1868, the 14th amendment was ratified, and Black Codes were abolished, theoretically granting Black people equal protection. However, Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation quickly took their place. Black people were forbidden from living in predominately white neighborhoods. Theaters, restaurants, pools, and even water fountains were segregated. Black people who violated these rules risked violent interactions with police, resulting in unjust arrests, beatings, or death.

As Jim Crow evolved so too did the violent and lethal relationship between police and Black women. During slavery, hegemonic constructions of Black womanhood invisibilized Black womens humanity, propagating stories that justified our rape and forced reproduction. Such stories alleged that Black women were easy and responded eagerly towards any sexual advance. During Jim Crow, the stereotype of the promiscuous Black woman converged with growing anxieties that promiscuous women destroyed families and communities. Increasingly, cities passed laws against public-disorder, including vagrancy and prostitution. In her book, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification, Anne Gray Fischer argues that the police who enforced these laws targeted Black women, whom they viewed as both sexually deviant and likely to produce a new generation of criminals. According to Fischer, sexual policingthe targeting and legal control of peoples bodies and presumed sexual activities10disproportionately impacted Black women, as did the mass misdemeanor policing that followed in its wake.11 In other words, by virtue of racist patriarchal narratives, Black women were hypervisible to police, with often violent results.

As the cases of Breonna Taylor, Tracy Gaeta, and MaKiah Bryant reveal, today, when Black women interface with police, the outcomes are still violentand sometimes fatal. According to reporting from the Washington Post, Black people are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans, and Black women are fatally shot at rates higher than women of all other races. Since 2015, police have fatally shot 247 women. Of these women, 48 were Black, accounting for 20 percent of the women killed.12

Though pervasive, however, police violence against Black womenand to a more severe degree against Black transgender womenremains structurally hidden. This means that when you look at the most obvious places these stories and experiences should be documented and contended within the media and policy documentstheyre absent. This invisibility is a product of long-standing narratives that rupture empathy and compassion with Black women and exclude Black women from the public.

Narratives are part of the activists toolbox of symbolic resources, and indeed, the Black Lives Matter movement has changed many of the narratives around Black people, crime, and policing. The movement has embraced a framework of narrative power, whereby social movements take advantage of political opportunities to construct counter narratives that disrupt hegemonic thinking and expand collective perceptions of what is socially, economically, and politically possible. Narrative power goes beyond a cursory understanding of a problem, using symbolic resourcesincluding ethical storytellingto radically shape the rules and norms by which we live.

This type of analysis has its roots in Black feminism. A framework that insists on the simultaneous eradication of racism, sexism, and classism, Black feminism articulates Black womens experiences where the feminist and civil rights movements failed to do so, making the invisible visible through intersectional analysis and storytelling. Indeed, Black feminism inspired intersectionality, the recognition that many of us hold concurrent identities that impact our lives. Today, Black feminism continues to expand as a framework, as organizers and thinkers like Charlene Carruthers build on it by making explicit the influence of queerness in the politic of reimaging society away from patriarchal sexism and anti-Black racism.13

The Black Lives Matter movement has followed in the footsteps of Black feminists. In a recent interview with Jacobin Radio, historian Donna Murch argues that through the use of symbolic resources, the Black Lives Matter movement delegitimized narratives of Black pathology that were used to justify the wars on poverty and drugs and the militarization of police in Black communities. In turn, the movement put the blame for Black suffering where it belongson the staterecasting Black pathology as state-sanctioned violence, which includes any forms of harm produced, promoted, and/or institutionalized by the state to the detriment of Black women, their families and communities. Through decentralized organizing, policymaking, electoral justice, a narrative power strategy, and other tactics, M4BLan ecosystem of Black-led organizationsis using symbolic resources to reframe how we understand Black suffering in America and offer a vision for how to reduce it.

Increasingly, organizers and scholars are also intervening into the erasure of Black women and girls. One such intervention is the #SayHerName camping launched by the African American Policy Forum in 2014. #SayHerName is a symbolic resource that provides communities routinely excluded by mainstream media institutions with a platform from which to speak our truths and replace narratives that reflect a single subjective angle with those that include our voices, stories, and lived experiences.

BYP100s She Safe We Safe is another campaign to put an end to violence against women, as well as gender non-conforming people.She Safe We Safe uses counternarratives to call for the reallocation of funding from the police to community-run programs that address gender-based violence in Black communities. In 2021, in collaboration with Times Up, me too international launched We, As Ourselves, a narrative power campaign to make visible the stories of Black survivors of sexual violence and to reshape the narrative around sexual violence and its impact on Black survivors. These are critical interventions by Black-led organizationsand we need more.

The humanity, freedom, and self-determination of Black women and girls are directly connected to the symbolic resources and power we have to define the problems we are working to solve. Who we collectively agree has the power to define both these problems and their solutions matters. In the next part of this series, Ill explore the elements of the narrative power framework. In the third and final piece, imagining were in the near future, where what was once invisible is now common sense, Ill explore how we use symbolic resources to reimagine public safety for Black women and girls.

Originally posted here:
To Build a Public Safety That Protects Black Women and Girls, Money Isn't the Only Resource We Need - Non Profit News - Nonprofit Quarterly

We are in a new golden age for Black British theatre. Over the last two years, a raft of productions from Black theatre-makers have been making waves, garnering critical acclaim and exciting audiences. Black writers and directors are relishing telling the stories that they want to tell and are undeterred in getting them on stage. Alongside plays and musicals, productions that interweave drama, movement, music and even verbatim theatre are coming to the fore, creating a diverse ecology of storytelling that aims to inspire more Black writers and directors into the industry.

This moment has been a long time coming. In the 1950s, three writers Wole Soyinka, Errol John and Barry Reckord paved the way for Black writers when their plays were staged at the Royal Court in London. Between the 1960s and 80s, many Black writers and actors were denied opportunities for regular work and turned to forming collectives and theatre companies to create and stage their plays. Many failed to survive without continued public funding. Contrast that with today, when three theatre companies Croydon-based Talawa, Eclipse and Tiata Fahodzi, which focuses on the changing African diaspora in Britain receive regular funding from Arts Council England.

Actor and director Yvonne Brewster, a pioneer of Black British theatre, now in her 80s, recalls that when she graduated from Rose Bruford drama school in 1959 she was told she would never get work. Suffering from a dearth of career opportunities, she co-founded Talawa in 1986, to create opportunities for Black theatre-makers. However, she faced resistance from men when she set up writing workshops for women and encouraged female directors. We werent supposed to direct, she says. Youre out of your place, get back in the kitchen And then you want to encourage women to write? It was crazy.

Just as the pioneers in Black British theatre created spaces for Black work to thrive, Londoner Ryan Calais Cameron has recently done the same, setting up the collective Nouveau Riche in 2015. Cameron, now 34, is an actor turned writer, whose play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy, about five young men who join together for group therapy, opened to rave reviews at the Royal Court this year.

Cameron created For Black Boys after noticing how the pandemic was affecting the mental health of young Black men. What youre dealing with right now isnt that you just dont want to go out, he says. Youre dealing with anxiety. Youre not someone whos just a moody guy; youre dealing with depression. I wanted to create characters who were talking about this, but without being able to have the science for it, because it wouldnt be authentic for one of my characters to be like: Hey, Im so depressed.

Cameron asked the Royal Court to go further than just stage the play. He wanted to create an environment within the building that would be welcoming to his target audience of young Black men. He recalls his conversation with the Royal Courts artistic director, Vicky Featherstone: Were going to need this kind of music being played, were going to need this type of drink being sold, youre going to need to walk around the theatre and see images of young Black boys. Cameron is rightly proud of his play 70% of tickets sold out before the show opened. The thing that meant the most to me was that young Black men were gonna come in and see this.

Another play to emerge amid the lockdowns was Running With Lions. Commissioned by Talawa to create opportunities for Black writers to keep working and earning during the pandemic, the play began life as a Radio 4 drama, part of a three-part series by new writers. It tells the story of a British-Caribbean family dealing with their unique reactions to the death of a loved one. According to director Michael Buffong, something like 800,000 people listened to the series, and to capitalise on this success he transferred Running With Lions to a live setting earlier this year. We had the opportunity to do the full-length version of it at [Londons] Lyric Hammersmith. And it was brilliant. Its fantastic to be the launchpad for these writers. We can look back and go: Yep, they started here [and] we were the people who helped them.

During the pandemic, some Black plays moved from the stage to screen. Natasha Marshalls play Half Breed, a semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age drama about finding your voice, was broadcast on BBC Four in 2021, and Nicle Lecky adapted her 2019 one-woman stage play, Superhoe, about the world of influencers, sex work and mental health, into the daring drama series Mood, which earned much acclaim when it aired on BBC Three earlier this year.

In February, Chinonyerem Odimba, artistic director of the Watford-based Tiata Fahodzi, won the 2020 Writers Guild of Great Britain award for best musical theatre bookwriting for Black Love. The play is about a brother and sister who look after each other in a small flat filled with the memories of their parents love. Along with House of Ife, Heres What She Said to Me and Running With Lions, Odimbas play is one of many tracing the contours of Black family life. Nothing gives me [more] joy than new work coming up and flourishing and growing, she says. Still, Odimba sounds a note of caution about the potential for Black work to be marginalised when it comes to marketing. Sometimes the messaging around [a show] and putting it in special lights, or giving it a particular sense that its something different, can be detrimental to inclusion for Black artists and their work.

Buffong says we need to get rid of all the barriers that people refuse to believe are there for us. Determined to dismantle those barriers for Black writers are two passionate and insightful women working as artistic directors, Natalie Ibu from Newcastle upon Tynes Northern Stage and Lynette Linton from the Bush theatre in London.

Ibu spent six years as artistic director at Tiata Fahodzi before being appointed by Northern Stage in 2020. She is currently directing The White Card by the African American playwright, Claudia Rankine, in which a wealthy, privileged white couple invite a talented Black artist to dinner. Tensions run high and a heated debate uncovers some uncomfortable truths that cant be ignored about white privilege, cultural appropriation and representation. As part of a national tour, the play is at the Soho theatre in London for a four-week run. For Ibu, it felt really important that it was made by a global-majority creative team. So while there are four white actors on stage, and one Black woman, I wanted to make sure that the lens of this production was held by the global majority. Who better to talk about whiteness than those who have to navigate it every single day?

For all that Black theatre is enjoying a post-Black Lives Matter breakthrough, the bright lights of the West End have thus far proved elusive for Black British writers and directors. Lintons vision for making sure that works by Black writers and directors dont only appear on the Bushs stage is simple: Black British work is part of the canon and the ecology of British theatre. For her, the Bush is about disrupting the canon, disrupting the West End, disrupting what we see, so stories like House of Ife and Red Pitch can be seen as plays that could be staged in the West End.

There is a temptation to see these recent successes as some kind of renaissance for Black British theatre, with more productions and writers being given opportunities to adapt their work for the screen, but the future will determine how decisive this period in the aftermath of the pandemic, the killing of George Floyd, and BLM has been in creating lasting change and equity in British theatre. Dismantling systemic racism is the key to achieving true inclusion. As Cameron says: I want longevity, I dont want to be part of a fashion trend.

See more here:
One giant leap: why we are witnessing a brave new world for Black British theatre - The Guardian

The U.S. Department of Justice must investigate local prosecutors in Memphis and elsewhere where policies are disproportionately targeting communities of color.

Kerry Kennedy| Guest Columnist

Bond posted for Rosalyn Holmes

Josh Spickler, Executive Director ofJust City, and Wade McMullen, an attorney with Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, speak about Rosalyn Holmes' release. Rosalyn Holmes, 16, was reunited with family after more than 40 daysin an adult prison.

Brad Vest/The Commercial Appeal

In Memphis, more children are prosecuted in adult court than in the rest of the state combined. Nearly all of them are Black.

On the Fourth of July, our nation celebrates the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But for too many, that promise is not only broken, it is weaponized by prosecutors who criminalize poverty and race.

More than a half century after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, the city remains a cradle of profound injustice.

Black Memphians are disproportionately targeted for harsh criminal enforcement and punishment. Prosecutors break the rules to rack up convictions, prison terms, and even death sentences.

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I visited Memphis in April with colleagues from Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the organization founded to carry out my late fathers dreams of a better world. Through our partners at the Memphis Community Bail Fund, the local chapter of Black Lives Matter, and Just City, we met with residents who had been unjustly targeted by local prosecutors.

Among them: Rosalyn Bird Holmes, a Black woman, charged as an adult at only 16 in a robbery committed by two boys while she sat in the backseat of a car. Her bail was set impossibly high $60,000 and she was sent to solitary confinement for more than 40 days, prevented from attending school.

Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights paid her bail and secured her release, but even then, while no one accused Bird of the robbery or taking any money, she still potentially faced decades in prison. She eventually won her case, but it took two years. And the terror of being locked away in a cage as a child will remain with her forever.

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We also met Pamela Moses, a Black woman sentenced to six years in prison for simply registering to vote.

Officials had told Moses incorrectly that she could vote despite a previous felony conviction; she followed their advice in good faith. Yet Memphis elected prosecutor, Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich, aggressively pursued a voter fraud conviction.

A court later overturned Moses conviction; Weirich and her office had violated the Constitution by failing to disclose emails showing Moses had been misled by a county official. Still, Moses spent nearly three months in prison because of that officials mistake. Several times during our conversation, we had to pause the pain of her experience remained raw.

On the surface, Holmes and Bird have little in common except for three damning factors in the eyes of Memphis prosecutors: they are poor, Black, and call Memphis home.

But they also share remarkable courage and resilience. These women could have been broken by the system, but they bravely shared their pain to prevent it from happening to others.

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A group of local lawyers and community leaders are working to ensure the womens experiences arent repeated. The advocates this year demanded a Racial Equity Audit of Weirichs office to identify, and hopefully correct, the systemic practices that lead to racist outcomes.

Race discrimination in our legal system from how Black people are prosecuted and punished more harshly, to how Black crime victims are dismissed and disregarded is a crisis that can no longer be ignored, the group wrote.

While the audit is a sound idea, this is not simply a local matter. When law enforcement is driven by discrimination and prosecutors disregard the Constitution, the U.S. Department of Justice and its Civil Rights Division must intervene.

The DOJ has the power to investigate local prosecutors. In 2020, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and a coalition of civil rights groups urged the DOJ to investigate state and local prosecutors in Georgia after white men chased down and murdered Ahmaud Arbery, but prosecutors initially failed to bring charges.

In Memphis and Shelby County, such intervention is long overdue.

Bird Holmes is not the only Black child whose life Weirich has threatened. From 2018 to 2020, 98% of the 217 Shelby County children transferred to adult court were Black. It has been four years since a federal monitor tasked with oversight of the countys juvenile justice system described Weirichs tactics as toxic … for African-American youth, and the racial disparities have only worsened since then.

Similarly, shirking constitutional obligations to fairly present evidence such as in Pamela Moses case has been a hallmark of Weirichs career: A Harvard Law School study examining the first five years of her tenure uncovered more than a dozen cases of misconduct and found Weirich led the state in findings of misconduct and the number of cases reversed because of it.

This sort of repeated discrimination and misconduct is precisely why DOJ enforcement is essential. Memphis system of injustice has gone unchecked for too long, and the Civil Rights Division has the power, and the duty, to force change.

Kerry Kennedy is a human rights lawyer and president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.

The rest is here:
We must restore the promise of freedom and justice for Black people in Memphis | Opinion - Commercial Appeal

The more a congressional investigation reveals about the Jan. 6 insurrection, the more outrageous it is that anyone would try to compare it to the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the nation after George Floyd was murdered.

Its not even apples and oranges. Its apples and tractor trailer parts.

And the fact that an American football coach could still be employed after trivializing the violent assault on our government as nothing more than a dust-up says so much about whats wrong with our country right now.

In the days before the Jan. 6 hearings started, Jack Del Rio, the defensive coordinator of the Washington Commanders, weighed in with a controversial tweet.

Would love to understand the whole story about why the summer of riots, looting, burning and the destruction of personal property is never discussed but this is ??? the coach wrote.

Then he doubled down in remarks to reporters after a team practice.

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Peoples livelihoods are being destroyed, businesses are being burned down no problem, Del Rio said. And then we have a dust-up at the Capitol, nothing burned down and were gonna make that a major deal?

Del Rios specialty is defense, but he sounded more like the offensive coordinator.

Del Rio apologized, was fined $100,000 and deleted his Twitter account, straight out of the lack of accountability playbook.

But the damage was already done.

Add Del Rio to the growing list of big mouths who wrongly assume that exercising their First Amendment right to free speech means saying anything they want without consequences.

Dust-up, he said. Nothing burned down.

Because the one revisited last week by the congressional committee shows an angry lynch mob hellbent on literally hanging Mike Pence, the vice president of the United States, whose fuse-burning boss did all but tie the noose.

Maybe our supporters have the right idea, then-President Donald Trump told staffers at the time, according to U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the vice chair of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6.

What insurrection did Del Rio see?

Because the one revealed in new, behind-the-scenes footage during the hearings showed frenzied rioters and traitors relentlessly assaulting police officers, threatening elected leaders and storming the venerable halls of government.

Shots were fired in the Capitol, where elected officials were huddled under their desks. Insurgents were walking door to door shouting, Where the f--- are they, and Trump won that election.

It was carnage. It was chaos, Cheney said. It was just hours of hand-to-hand combat, hours of dealing with things that were way beyond any law enforcement officer has ever trained for.

At least the Black Lives Matters demonstrators were protesting something real, not some voter fraud lie concocted by the Contriver-in-Chief.

George Floyd died, with a police officers knee in his neck. He was on the ground in handcuffs. Everybody saw it.

Donald Trump lost an election. Nobody stole it from him. He sicced a mob on America, and everybody saw it.

We will never give up, Trump said that day. We will never concede. It doesnt happen. If you dont fight like hell youre not going to have a country anymore.

Apples and oranges. Its more like apples and costume jewelry designs.

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Leonard Greene: Black Lives Matter and the truth about Jan. 6 - Greensboro News & Record