Hate crime in Idaho

Eugene brings light to a case in Idaho, where five white people were arrested for beating and harassing a 13-year-old Native American girl.

A woman and her daughter were allegedly shouting “white power.” Police say the girl responded by saying “Native pride” and was then beaten up by the women.

“Basically they had confronted her, they struck her with closed fists, knocked her to the ground and kicked her,” Lewiston Police Lt. Tom Greene said.

Police reports show they kicked and punched the girl, even tearing her shirt off and stealing her purse. [Full story]

The girl is still recovering from the beating a week later.

That wasn’t the end of it, though.

40-year-old Jill Grant was arrested later that night but the harassment didn’t stop. Over the next several days police say Grant’s two teenage sons and their two friends drove by the complex shouting “white power” and even tracking them down at a nearby motel where police moved them for safety. Police arrested all four for intimidating a witness. [Full story]

Hate crimes on a nearly weekly basis, police brutality against people of color (including children, for ridiculous reasons), inappropriate and unequal sentencing, people hanging nooses as threats, people in blackface/brownface/yellowface for entertainment, people getting called the n-word at comedy shows or “nappy-headed hos” at basketball games … why do people say racism is over? The only thing that separates racism now from racism immediately before the Civil Rights Movement is the lack of segregation laws. And those have mostly been replaced by anti-immigrant laws and the Supreme Court just invalidated Brown v. Board of Education, so.

Dropped your cake? You’re under arrest.

Sixteen-year-old Pleajhai Mervin was celebrating a friend’s birthday in the lunch room at Knight High School, in Palmdale, Calif. When she went to toss out some leftover cake, someone bumped her and it fell on the ground. She picked up the cake, but that wasn’t good enough; a white security guard told her to clean it up better. She did, twice. That still wasn’t good enough, so he slammed her face-first into a table, breaking her wrist as he twisted her arm behind her back. [Source]

Fourteen-year-old Joshua Lockett began recording the incident with his cell phone, and was tackled by security guards and thrown to the ground. When his sister, Kenngela, 16, tried to pull them off, her wrist was broken as well. [Source]

All three students were arrested (Pleajhai’s charge was littering). When Pleajhai’s mother arrived at the school to complain to officials about her daughter’s treatment and raise some hell, she too was arrested, on an assault charge, and subsequently suspended without pay from her job as an instructional assistant at another school.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies said the guard told them he felt threatened by Mervin.

“There was resistance by her,” Sgt. Darrel Brown said. “He went to control her.” [Full story]

A huge white security guard, with back-up in the room, felt threatened by a 16-year-old black girl cleaning up cake? I don’t think so.

Not only that, Pleajhai says that the guard called her “nappy-head” while restraining her.

Shusli broke this story, and has photos from the cell phone video up at her blog.

Project Islamic H.O.P.E. is currently organizing the action supporting the Palmdale Four, including the protest held yesterday.

Defend the Honor campaign

I e-mailed Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez some time ago about the Defend the Honor campaign, and she recently replied. The campaign is not satisfied with the solution to Burns’ exclusion of Latino veterans in his documentary on World War II, nor with the eventual 28 MINUTES of footage of two Latino and one Native American veteran inserted as an afterthought in the 15-hour project.

We spoke briefly about the fact that another huge group of veterans, Filipinos and Filipino-Americans, were also excluded from Burns’ film and are also in the midst of a fight for recognition (and veterans benefits).

The short version of this story is, the Defend the Honor campaign is having a town hall meeting in Washington, D.C. on October 8. The meeting will be at the Gala Theater (2437 15th St NW). Ms. Rivas-Rodriguez is interested in hearing from Filipino-American veterans and/or their supporters at the meeting and perhaps seeing if the two campaigns might work together in any way. Unfortunately, as I’m on the West Coast, I am unable to go.

There is more information (and a copy of the campaign’s events calendar, which shares many other national events) at their website.

Support the monks in Burma

Yesterday, after several days of protests led by Buddhist monks, the military junta in Burma cracked down. They fired into a crowd of protesters, killing five and injuring several. They instituted a curfew and banned gatherings of more than five people.

Undaunted, the protests continued today. So far, another eight demonstrators and a Japanese reporter have been killed. [Source]

How brave the monks are to face down death, to see fellow marchers shot and killed and be threatened with the same and march back out the next day. Here in the U.S., where beatings and pepper spray are common at protests, we still have the luxury of knowing that we probably won’t be killed. Would we march out under the same threat, if things got so bad?

A Facebook group is calling on people to wear red tomorrow in support of the monks in Burma. In addition, they’re also asking people to email or write companies from their county that still deal with Burma. Contact information is listed at The Burma Campaign.

I would also suggest anyone in the U.S. write to their elected representatives (you can find them at Congress.org by entering your zip code), the Embassy of the Union of Myanmar, and the U.S. embassy to Myanmar to tell them why you are wearing red, that you support the monks and protesters like Aung San Suu Kyi, and ask them to take a firm stance against the actions of the military junta (or, in the case of the Burmese embassy to the U.S., to forward your statement of support to the military junta).

EDIT: Bfp at Women of Color Blog and ExpatJane at Where the Hell Am I? have more information, videos and links, if you need more details. And ExpatJane linked to this list of Myanmar bloggers.

Redirect: To the White Progressive Blogosphere…

While I’m doing redirects, check out this awesome post by Dr. Elle.

Do you ever wonder why Rosa Parks instead of Claudette Colvin (who’d refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, AL, bus nine months before Mrs. Parks?) was the face of the Montgomery bus boycott?

Do you ever wonder why this picture of Elizabeth Eckford remaining composed in the face of Hazel Massery’s vitriol was such an important image to promote?

Do you ever wonder why sit-in participants had to be so well-dressed, so calm, so “respectable?”

Redirect: More police brutality

Jack has a press release up at Angry Brown Butch.

NEW YORK - On the night of Wednesday, September 26, officers from the 9th Precinct of the New York Police Department attacked without provocation members of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and of its community. Two of our community members were violently arrested, and others were pepper sprayed in the face without warning or cause.

The Sylvia Rivera Law Project (www.srlp.org) is an organization that works on behalf of low-income people of color who are transgender, gender non-conforming, or intersex, providing free legal services and advocacy among many other initiatives.

More at Jack’s. Go read.

Taser-rama

Yes, white people, the police will Tase you, too.

If watching Andrew Meyer shriek for help while being Tased, John Kerry nonchalantly speaking in the background, was not convincing enough, I give you Heidi Gill.

Video footage from the police cruiser shows Gill, 38, crawling on the ground while the officer stands over her with the stun gun. She’s screaming wildly. At one point, officer Rich Kovach shoves her with his foot as she struggles.

“I’ve never been electrocuted,” she told CNN’s “American Morning” on Wednesday. “I didn’t know what this was. And I really didn’t think this pain was ever going to stop. It was nonstop.”

She said she was trying anything to get away “so I could live.”

In the video, Gill, once inside the police car, kicks the back-seat window and continues to scream. “At this point, I had been Tased for so long and just drug around by my handcuffs. I was terrified of this man. He was no longer a police officer to me.”

Authorities have launched a formal investigation into the September 2 incident. Kovach has been placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation. [Full story]

First off, I do sympathize with Ms. Gill. For a woman, it would be incredibly terrifying to have a strange man shocking you with a Taser, kicking you, and locking you up so you couldn’t escape, whether the guy had a badge or not. This should not have happened to her, period.

But can you imagine what would happen if a woman of color were to try to crawl away while a cop Tased her? I think she’d be sitting in a cell or possibly dead, not showing up on CNN while police investigate the officer who arrested her.

A woman of color had her head smashed into a car for asking why her son Marlo was being arrested back in February, while her other son was tackled by five officers and Tased by three separate weapons for over 40 seconds for, as far as anyone can tell, simply being at the scene. The Taser wounds Romel Custodio suffered required hospital care and left permanent burn scars. Marilou Custodio has post-traumatic stress disorder.

Where is the Custodios’ CNN interview? Where is San Jose Police Department’s internal affairs investigation? Where is the mainstream media at all on this one? (Hell, where is the blogosphere on this one?)

Where is the mainstream media on Steve Salinas, an American Indian man Tased to death by the San Jose police because a hotel manager reported him for noise complaints? [Source]

Why is it that people of color get Tased, sometimes fatally, and the mainstream media doesn’t have a word to say (unless there’s extensive YouTube video footage, as in the case of Mostafa Tabatabainejad), but a couple of white people, one of whom was actually resisting arrest rather violently, get Tased and it’s all over CNN and MSNBC and the news wires?

I mean, I had heard something about Steve Salinas dying in May, but never knew enough of the details to find out more. (I had heard he was killed in an incident with the police, but not that he was Tased to death or that he was taking a shower when it happened. The news wires had nothing, and what little I did hear made it sound like he was in a shootout or something.) I didn’t hear about the Custodios until Sunday. They were Tased in February — FEBRUARY — and the mainstream media has yet to touch it. Meyer was in the news the DAY he was Tased, and Heidi Gill was Tased earlier this month.

Don’t take this the wrong way. I think Tasers suck, I think cops overuse them because they are supposedly non-lethal, and I think that in many arrest cases excessive force is used. So do a lot of people. So do many, many community organizers, police watch groups, and anti-Taser activists, all of whom are actually actively working to change that.

But why does it take white people getting Tased before any of this hits the mainstream media? Suddenly, Taser stories are everywhere, presumably because of video of Meyer being Tased at a Kerry rally. But when Tabatabainejad was Tased last year by LAPD and the video was on YouTube, I don’t remember any appreciable increase in Taser stories in the mainstream media. I remember a report on Taser deaths coming out a month or two later, but that’s about it.

And why are people talking about fighting Taser use like some people haven’t been doing that for years? Why don’t people know about this stuff?

The evidence is there. The organizations are there. It’s time for people to open their eyes.

EDIT: Dr. Elle pointed me to this entry over at Diary of an Anxious Black Woman: Presumed Innocent: Heidi Gill, White Privilege, and Victimhood in the Media.

Does anyone really believe the police are here to protect us?

Via Angry Asian Man.

According to witnesses, the NYPD stopped a Columbia student, Garam Sohn, who was holding an open can of beer. He had no ID, so police “threw him to the ground” and arrested him. Witnesses say that he was upset but had offered no resistance to police, so there was no reason for them to be pushing him down.

Not only is that somewhat excessive, the arrest itself seems to have been racially motivated.

Another observer—George Cen, SEAS ’08,—said that while the police were questioning Sohn, two white students walked by carrying 40s. The officers instructed the students to cover their drinks with brown paper bags, but did not detain them.

As the incident progressed, a crowd gathered and the officers called for backup, witnesses said. Three more police cars arrived. According to Crone, one of the officers said to the crowd—composed mostly of Asian students—“Have you had too much sake tonight?”

Cen said that when one student asked a police officer why Sohn was being detained, the officer responded, “Do you understand English?”

“His friends were sort of trying to intercede on his behalf,” Crone said. “They were told rather forcefully to step back.”

Cen said that when he and other students asked for the badge number of the officer who had made the racially charged comments, she threatened them with arrest. [Full story]

I know that there are some good cops. I’m friends with some good cops and cops-in-training. But there are so many assholes like the woman described above, I wonder if maybe at this point the best step would be entirely dismantling the police and restarting from the ground up.

More info is up at Angry Asian Man, including a statement from Columbia University’s Asian American Alliance.

More on the Custodios

From the Justice for Custodios MySpace page:

This is a video from the May press conference.

Silicon Valley De-Bug, an East Bay ezine, has been covering the case and related actions. Several community groups took to the streets on Sept. 11 to march against Taser use. [Source] (De-Bug also has information about other, similar stories of SJPD abuse.)

I’ve emailed the Justice for the Custodio Family Campaign organizers and will hopefully be able to post more updates soon.

So, basically, China’s just a scapegoat

Durgamom over at Resist Racism pointed out an article about how a crib design allowed consumers to install the drop side improperly. Because of this design error, the drop side could trap children; this has led to the death of two babies, and possibly a one-year-old.

The poorly designed cribs were designed in Pennsylvania.

So why does the headline read, “1 million Chinese-made cribs recalled: Simplicity brand cribs made in China are recalled following reports of three infant deaths and entrapment; suffocation concerns”?

Again with the ingrained yellow perilish stereotypes. “1 million Pennsylvania-designed cribs recalled” just doesn’t have the same ring, does it? [Full story]

That’s probably it.

Ironically, the CNN crib story links to another story that lets the cat out of the bag: The majority of the 550 toy recalls since 1988 were issued because of design flaws, not because of the lone lead paint issue that actually can be connected to China.

The study from the University of Manitoba business school in Winnipeg, Canada looked at 550 toy recalls reported by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) since 1988.

The report showed that 420, or about 77 percent of those recalls, were as a result of problems attributed to design flaws. Only 54, or 10 percent of recalls, were due to manufacturing issues such as overheating of batteries, lead paint and inappropriate raw materials. [Full story]

I guess it’s just easier to blame China than to point out that American design is the problem far more often.