Sunday, April 18, 2021
Saturday, April 17, 2021
The Supreme Court Sanctioned "Driving While Black"
An excerpt from Politico -
How the Supreme Court Helped Create 'Driving While Black'
A reckoning with police violence must include a reckoning with how the nation’s highest court enabled it.
By CHRISTOPHER WRIGHT DUROCHER
The reason Brooklyn Center police pulled over Daunte Wright is unclear and largely irrelevant. The Department’s chief of police said the car he was driving had expired tags. His mother said he thought he was pulled over because he had air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror. Regardless of the reason, 20-year old Wright was shot to death by a police officer minutes after the traffic stop began.
Traffic stops figure prominently in some of the most high-profile police killings of Black people. We remember many of their names—Walter Scott, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile —but they are just a few of the many people who have been killed or died as the result of law enforcement’s expansive authority to enforce traffic laws.
Traffic stops might seem like a local matter, or a subjective police decision, but actually the practice is built on five decades of Supreme Court precedent, a set of decisions that has successively opened the door to — and given police an incentive to — use traffic stops as an invasive tool of policing aimed mostly at people of color, primarily Black people.
As a result, reckoning with police violence must include a reckoning with how U.S. Supreme Court precedent has enabled it through its decades-long campaign to empower law enforcement in the so-called War on Drugs. Litigators must continue to push the Court to revisit these damaging decisions with the goal of overturning or weakening the precedents that have put too much power and discretion in the hands of police. Federal, state, and local policymakers, meanwhile, must recognize that these precedents provide a constitutional floor for police behavior; laws and policies can and should be adopted to hold police to a higher standard.
“Driving While Black” is a tongue-in-cheek expression that describes a frightening reality—police can, and often do, find any reason to pull over Black drivers. Given the glut of traffic rules, police rarely have to concoct a reason to pull over any driver they choose. Their job as traffic enforcers enables police officers to pull over Black drivers whenever their implicit or explicit biases tell them that a Black driver is “up to no good.” Harassment, intimidation, violence, and sometimes death, too often ensue.
The Supreme Court opened the door to legally permissible racialized policing with the 1967 case Terry v. Ohio, by allowing police to conduct certain cursory searches, now known as stop-and-frisks, based on the low legal standard of “reasonable suspicion.” As our country’s experience with stop-and-frisk vividly demonstrates, however, for police, reasonable suspicion is too often synonymous with being a Black or brown person in public.
The practice of racially profiling Black drivers was effectively endorsed by the Court in the 1996 ruling in Whren v. United States, which decided that police are allowed to use minor vehicle infractions as a pretext to initiate traffic stops with the goal of investigating other possible unrelated crimes.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/17/how-the-supreme-court-helped-create-driving-while-black-482530
Only Rage
An excerpt from the NY Times -
Rage Is the Only Language I Have Left
Society has become horribly desensitized to police killings of Black men.
By Charles M. Blow, Opinion Columnist
These killings often happen during the day and in public, not under the cover of night, tucked away in some back wood. And they are often caught on video. Tamir Rice was killed during the day. There was video. Walter Scott was killed during the day. There was video. Eric Garner was killed during the day. There was video.
Now there is another: Daunte Wright, shot and killed during the day in Brooklyn Center, Minn., not far from where Floyd was killed. There is video.
Very little has changed. The aftermath of these killings has become a pattern, a ritual, that produces its own normalizing and desensitizing effects. We can now anticipate the explosions of rage as well and the relative intransigence of the political system in response.
That is not to say that absolutely nothing has changed, but rather that the changes amount to tinkering, when in fact our whole system of policing must be re-evaluated and fundamentally altered.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/opinion/us-police-killings.html
That examination, oddly enough, starts with gun control. The police justify their militarization and armed-and-ready positioning, by correctly observing that they can be outgunned by a public with such easy access to guns, including military-style guns.
Tuesday, March 30, 2021
A Reminder of the UAE Here in Sacramento
A Sacramento food influencer made her name in Dubai. She has a new plan for the U.S.
BY ASHLEY WONG
Despite the fact that she’s been up since 3 a.m. and caught about five hours of sleep, Lamees AttarBashi picked up the call with an easy laugh and a boisterous personality that bubbles through the phone.
“It’s the only way to have my peace and quiet. I love my kids to death, but please shush,” AttarBashi laughed.
This is AttarBashi, 38, an Instagram food blogger with a budding snack food company. Her Instagram page is testament to the hours she spends each day on her culinary creations, full of rich, smoky and hearty recipes whose fragrance practically floats off the photos, from the flaky sticky-golden basbousa to charred eggplant boats stuffed with pomegranate molasses and browned beef.
Her dishes are mainly Middle Eastern, but her page is also scattered with the British food of her youth like Scotch eggs and scones, as well as more whimsical offerings, like cookies piped with frosted mummy faces for Halloween. But what many Sacramentans new to her page may not realize is that she’s also a TV personality, having already made a name for herself years ago in Dubai.
It all started with a cake recipe in a children’s book when she was a kid. Her mother, whom AttarBashi credits with planting and nurturing her love of cooking, guided her through the steps as she created her own dish from start to finish for the first time.
“I was so fascinated, like how can you create something from nothing?” AttarBashi said. “Forty minutes in the oven ... I just sat in front of it waiting for it to bake. That was the spark of how it led to where I am right now.”
AttarBashi has been chasing that spark ever since, letting it guide her out of an unsatisfying engineering job to culinary school, a business degree and Dubai cooking TV shows. In Sacramento, where she, her husband and two children settled four years ago, AttarBashi is moving into food blogging and a forthcoming snack food company in the U.S.
https://www.sacbee.com/article248961094.html
Let the Debates Begin!
From USA Today Sports -
The 51 best HBCU players in NFL history
By Doug Farrar
https://touchdownwire.usatoday.com/gallery/hbcu-walter-payton-jerry-rice-deacon-jones/
Too Good To Excerpt
From Faye - This article is too good to cherry-pick. Take the time to read it in its entirety. I promise you it's worth it.
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: 'One Night in Miami' Grapples With the Risk and Responsibility of Black Entertainers Speaking Out
The Oscar-contending film imagines a heated debate between Malcolm X and Sam Cooke about the duty of successful Blacks to be the public face of the civil rights movement — one The Hollywood Reporter's columnist long has embraced.
By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kareem-abdul-jabbar-one-night-in-miami-grapples-with-the-risk-and-responsibility-of-black-entertainers-speaking-out
Black Woman Building $25 Million Tech Hub in Mississippi
An excerpt from Black Enterprise -
MEET THE BLACK WOMAN TRANSFORMING 12 ABANDONED ACRES INTO $25 MILLION TECH HUB IN MISSISSIPPI
by Charlene Rhinehart
Dr. Nashlie Sephus purchased 12 abandoned acres to develop a $25 million tech hub for entrepreneurs in Mississippi. On September 11, 2020, the Jackson native closed on the purchase of 12 acres and seven buildings near Jackson State University. Now, she’s putting in the work to transform her vision into a reality to help the next generation of entrepreneurs.
“I think it’s really important for me to give back to the community that helped shape me and I always love to see people get enthused and exposed to technology and so I wanted to make that process a little bit easier,” Dr. Sephus shared with WLBT.
Last month, she shared her passion for her work in a LinkedIn post. “Some may not understand my labor of love and life’s mission of helping underserved communities reach their full potential in STEM. It’s not easy, but it WILL happen.”
https://www.blackenterprise.com/black-woman-transforming-abandoned-acres-tech-hub-mississippi/
Google's Strategy is a Roadblock
An excerpt from Washington Post -
Google’s approach to historically Black schools helps explain why there are few Black engineers in Big Tech
The company tried to recruit engineers by partnering with HBCUs. Critics say the program exposed how the search giant fell short.
By Nitasha Tiku
For years, Google’s recruiting department used a college ranking system to set budgets and priorities for hiring new engineers. Some schools such as Stanford University and MIT were predictably in the “elite” category, while state schools or institutions that churn out thousands of engineering grads annually, such as Georgia Tech, were assigned to “tier 1” or “tier 2.”
But one category of higher education was missing from Google’s ranking system, according to several current and former Google employees involved in recruitment, despite the company’s pledges to promote racial diversity — historically Black colleges and universities, also known as HBCUs. That framework meant that those schools were at a lower priority for hiring, even though Google had said in 2014 that it wanted to partner with HBCUs as a way to recruit more minority talent.
In lieu of a tier, Google’s University Programs recruiting division, responsible for forging partnerships with universities, labeled these colleges “long tail” schools, in reference to the fact that it could take a long time before they would produce a large number of graduates qualified to work at Google, according to the Google employees.
“Google allocated resources so disparagingly because of how they tiered — and thought of — our schools,” said former recruiter April Christina Curley, who helped lead Google’s outreach to HBCUs for six years. Curley, who is Black, said she was fired in September largely as a result of continually raising concerns about bias against HBCU students in the interview and hiring process.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/04/google-hbcu-recruiting/
Monday, March 29, 2021
Everyone should know the international sign for Help me. Let’s make this famous #HelpMe pic.twitter.com/RF5aOq8jCY
— Harjinder Singh Kukreja (@SinghLions) March 10, 2021
A Sharecropper's Child Gifted $50 Million to Black College
An excerpt from Bloomberg Equality -
Ivy League Star, a Sharecropper’s Child, Revives a Black College
But even a $50 million gift can’t reverse generations of state discrimination.
By Janet Lorin
Lawrence’s historically Black college, Prairie View A&M in Texas, had suddenly come into the kind of money once reserved for Harvard and the other richest schools. Over a month starting in November, students behind on their bills — one out of 10 undergraduates — got this year-end lifeline from economic turmoil in the pandemic. As much as $2,000 apiece, it was the first installment of what will ultimately be $10 million worth of “Panther Success Grants,” named after their school mascot.
It’s part of the unlikely homecoming and valedictory act of Prairie View’s president, Ruth Simmons, one of higher education’s most prominent Black leaders. Simmons is using her clout and connections — and the current U.S. reckoning with systemic racism — to create a renaissance at a school long neglected by its state.
“We don’t want our students to give up,” says Simmons, who will be Harvard’s commencement speaker in May. “We know what's waiting for them at the other end when they do finish and have a brilliant career. They get to lift their families out of poverty and have incredible lives. We don't want them to give up too soon.”
The youngest of 12 children in a family of sharecroppers, Simmons grew up in Texas, just a couple of hours north of Prairie View. She then rose to the pinnacle of the academy, as a French literature scholar with a Harvard Ph.D, a dean at Princeton and later president of Brown, the first Black person to lead an Ivy League school. She was a star fundraiser, sought after in corporate board rooms, where she was a director at Chrysler, Texas Instruments Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-19/ivy-league-star-a-sharecropper-s-child-revives-a-black-college
Blistering Indeed
From Mediate -
WATCH: Tiffany Cross Delivers BLISTERING Commentary on Sharon Osbourne and Her ‘Complicity to White Supremacy’
By Tommy Christopher
https://www.mediaite.com/news/watch-tiffany-cross-delivers-blistering-commentary-on-sharon-osbourne-and-her-complicity-to-white-supremacy/