Blogs

In Trayvon Martin’s death, consider race and privilege
By Leonard Pitts Jr.
lpitts@MiamiHerald.com

I'm less sick than I was but still sick.

Not working sucks. You (well, I) lose whole days to a deadening sameness.

There are questions I don't get asked anymore. One of them is, "What is a 'sell-out', anyway?" My answer was,"A sell-out is a black personthat denies Black Americans' history and/or experiences for their personal benefit."

Our most recent example is Joe Oliver, "close friend" of George Zimmerman. Or not.

Oliver's whole motivation seems to be to get face time on the air. That, or he's p-whipped...

Longtime news anchor Joe Oliver, a close friend of Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman for six years, appeared on Fox News Monday morning to offer a defense of his friend. Oliver, whose wife is also friends with Zimmerman’s mother-in-law, spoke briefly to Zimmerman over the weekend.

Three days ago, the NY Times ran a story on "stop and frisk" titled "Taking On Police Tactic, Critics Hit Racial Divide" that gave me soooo much to comment on...

The divide, they say, is largely informed by personal experience: many who object to the practice say that they have themselves been stopped by the police for reasons they believe were related to race.

Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat, recalled several occasions when, as a high school student walking home in Flatbush, he was stopped by the police, patted down, told to empty his pockets, produce identification and divulge his destination.

Assemblyman Karim Camara, a Democrat from Brooklyn, remembers greeting a woman who was walking down a street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, when, he said, officers in plain clothes approached him and demanded to know who he was, where he was going and whether he had any guns or drugs.

And when Senator Adriano Espaillat, a Manhattan Democrat, was just 14, he said, detectives threw him against a wall and patted him down in Washington Heights, in Manhattan, when he was on his way to buy a Dominican newspaper for his father.

The lawmakers say the racial imbalance with which stop-and-frisk is applied has a corollary effect: Many white legislators have remained silent on the issue, or have supported the police, revealing a racial gap over attitudes toward the practice.

...that I had to pick and choose.

I was unconscious when Trayvon Martin was murdered. I have never been so behind on such a major event. To catch up, I started collecting pointers to clear analysis...Mark Anthony Neal is always been a good place to start for that sort of thing.

Continuing my search, I ran into a concatination of the 911 calls concerning the murder. I didn't listen to it all because I couldn't take it. I broke down in the middle.

The most complete summary to date is on Mother Jones, and such summaries are important...required but not sufficient. If this Zimmerman is not charged, prosecuted and convicted I think Black folks have to consider boycotting Florida. Yeah, it would be difficult...there would be college scholarships involved, Disneyland, and I know you got relatives down there. but economic activity is all the powers-that be care about.

Meanwhile, get on Color Of Change's petition to Attorney General Holder if you haven't already. Join the local marches if you can.

Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres

If blacks are going to make a difference in the 21st century, it will not be through their own movement. (Jan. 11)

Dorian T. Warren

Incompatible and irreconcilable interests among blacks represent the fundamental challenge to today’s black politics. (Jan. 11)

Robin D. G. Kelley

Neoliberalism is a more powerful foe than just about anything we’ve seen before. (Jan. 11)

Michael C. Dawson replies

Black solidarity must be institutionalized and organized, not simply felt. (Jan. 12)

The PBS Black Historty Month Broadcast schedule. It's a bag of good stuff there.

Sub-Saharan Africa economy: Key issues in 2012
December 23rd 2011

FROM THE ECONOMIST INTELLIGENCE UNIT

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) was the fastest-growing region in the world last year, and is expected to stay at the head of the pack in 2012. However, as Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, warned in late December, many individual Sub-Saharan states are less prepared to deal with an economic shock now than was the case during the 2008 food and fuel crisis, and the global financial turbulence that followed. The impact of global economic trends on Sub-Saharan prospects is likely to dominate the regional headlines in 2012, underscoring questions about whether economic downturn might provoke a belated "African spring".

* Market contagion. The ongoing debt crisis in Europe and the weakness in the US has significantly raised the risk of a global recession, to the extent that the Economist Intelligence Unit attaches a probability of more than 40% to a global slump in the next two years. This would dent Africa's performance, hurting commodity prices and terms of trade (together the US and Europe account for around 50% of Africa's exports). Specific risk factors include a drying-up of trade credit, declining commodity prices and contracting demand for the region's exports—as well as falling remittances, aid, foreign direct investment (FDI) and tourist receipts.

That said, a major shift in SSA's trade links promises to provide at least some partial insulation against falling demand in developed-country markets. Around two-thirds of the region's export growth in 2005-10 is explained by an expansion in exports to emerging markets. Consequently, around half of Sub-Saharan Africa's trade is now conducted with emerging economies, compared with negligible amounts in the 1990s. China, India and Brazil, which together account for more than one-quarter of the region's trade flows, are of particular importance. By the same token, this means that any significant slowdown in the pace of expansion in those three—and China in particular—would be of great concern.

In August, however, a different judge ordered the record unsealed, and Mr. Morton’s lawyers discovered that Mr. Anderson had provided only a fraction of the available evidence. Missing from the file was the transcript of a telephone conversation between a sheriff’s deputy and Mr. Morton’s mother-in-law in which she reported that her 3-year-old grandson had seen a “monster” — who was not his father — attack and kill his mother.

Also missing were police reports from Mr. Morton’s neighbors, who said they had seen a man in a green van repeatedly park near their home and walk into the woods behind their house. And there were even reports, also never turned over, that Mrs. Morton’s credit card had been used and a check with her forged signature cashed after her death.

Exonerated of Murder, Texan Seeks Inquiry on Prosecutor
By JOHN SCHWARTZ and BRANDI GRISSOM

AUSTIN, Tex. — A Texas man wrongfully convicted in 1987 of murdering his wife is scheduled to be officially exonerated on Monday.

That is no longer so unusual in Texas, where 45 inmates have been exonerated in the last decade based on DNA evidence. What is unprecedented is the move planned by lawyers for the man, Michael Morton: they are expected to file a request for a special hearing to determine whether the prosecutor broke state laws or ethics rules by withholding evidence that could have led to Mr. Morton’s acquittal 25 years ago.

“I haven’t seen anything like this, ever,” said Bennet L. Gershman, an expert on prosecutorial misconduct at Pace University in New York. “It’s an extraordinary legal event.”

The prosecutor, Ken Anderson, a noted expert on Texas criminal law, is now a state district judge. Through a lawyer, he vigorously denied any wrongdoing in Mr. Morton’s case.

Mr. Morton, who was a manager at an Austin supermarket and had no criminal history, was charged with the beating death of his wife, Christine, in 1986. He had contended that the killer must have entered their home after he left for work early in the morning. But Mr. Anderson convinced the jury that Mr. Morton, in a rage over his wife’s romantic rebuff the previous night — on Mr. Morton’s 32nd birthday — savagely beat her to death.

Mr. Morton was sentenced to life in prison. Beginning in 2005, he pleaded with the court to test DNA on a blue bandanna found near his home shortly after the murder, along with other evidence.

Paul Disowns Extremists’ Views but Doesn’t Disavow the Support
By JIM RUTENBERG and SERGE F. KOVALESKI

The American Free Press, which markets books like “The Invention of the Jewish People” and “March of the Titans: A History of the White Race,” is urging its subscribers to help it send hundreds of copies of Ron Paul’s collected speeches to voters in New Hampshire. The book, it promises, will “Help Dr. Ron Paul Win the G.O.P. Nomination in 2012!”

Don Black, director of the white nationalist Web site Stormfront, said in an interview that several dozen of his members were volunteering for Mr. Paul’s presidential campaign, and a site forum titled “Why is Ron Paul such a favorite here?” has no fewer than 24 pages of comments. “I understand he wins many fans because his monetary policy would hurt Jews,” read one.

Far-right groups like the Militia of Montana say they are rooting for Mr. Paul as a stalwart against government tyranny.

Mr. Paul’s surprising surge in polls is creating excitement within a part of his political base that has been behind him for decades but overshadowed by his newer fans on college campuses and in some liberal precincts who are taken with his antiwar, anti-drug-laws messages.

The white supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists who have rallied behind his candidacy have not exactly been warmly welcomed. “I wouldn’t be happy with that,” Mr. Paul said in an interview Friday when asked about getting help from volunteers with anti-Jewish or antiblack views.

But he did not disavow their support. “If they want to endorse me, they’re endorsing what I do or say — it has nothing to do with endorsing what they say,” said Mr. Paul, who is now running strong in Iowa for the Republican nomination.

The libertarian movement in American politics has long had two overlapping but distinct strains. One, backed to some degree by wealthy interests, is focused largely on economic freedom and dedicated to reducing taxes and regulation through smaller government. The other is more focused on personal liberty and constraints on government built into the Constitution, which at its extreme has helped fuel militant antigovernment sentiment.

Mr. Paul has operated at the nexus of the two, often espousing positions at odds with most of the Republican Party but assembling a diverse and loyal following attracted by his adherence to libertarian principles.

Jake Mescher, a freshman organizer for Mr. Paul at Drake University in Des Moines, predicted that the newsletters would not reduce the ardor of his supporters. “I’ve heard of that four or five times, but it really has not made me wary,” Mr. Mescher said. “He has nothing in his record to suggest that that is part of his personal beliefs as a member of Congress or a presidential candidate.”

New Focus on Incendiary Words in Paul’s Newsletters
By JIM RUTENBERG and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

Emerging as a real Republican contender in Iowa, Representative Ron Paul of Texas is receiving new focus for decades-old unbylined columns in his political newsletters that included racist, anti-gay and anti-Israel passages that he has since disavowed.

The latest issue of The Weekly Standard, a leading conservative publication, reprised reports of incendiary language in Mr. Paul’s newsletters that were published about 20 years ago.

A 1992 passage from the Ron Paul Political Report about the Los Angeles riots read, “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.” A passage in another newsletter asserted that people with AIDS should not be allowed to eat in restaurants because “AIDS can be transmitted by saliva”; in 1990 one of his publications criticized Ronald Reagan for having gone along with the creation of the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which it called “Hate Whitey Day.”

The magazine article largely matched a similar report in The New Republic in 2008, and it was written by the same author, James Kirchick. The passages were plucked from a variety of newsletters that Mr. Paul’s consulting business published during his years out of Congress, all of them featuring his name: Ron Paul Political Report, Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, Ron Paul Survival Report and Ron Paul Investment Letter.

Mr. Paul did not respond to an interview request, but repudiated the writings in 2008. Likening himself to a major news publisher, he said he did not vet every article that was featured in his newsletters. “I absolutely, honestly do not know who wrote those things,” Mr. Paul said in an interview on CNN at the time, adding that he did not monitor the publications closely because he was busy with a medical practice and “speeches around the country.”