Human Rights – Page 6

Speechless

Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel by Alice Walker
(Seven Stories Press)

“In Kigali I paid my respects to the hundreds of of thousands of infants, toddlers, teenagers, adolescents, young engaged couples, married people, women and men, grandmothers and grandfathers, brothers and sisters of every facial shape and body size, who had been hacked into sometimes quite small pieces by armed strangers, or by neighbors, or by acquaintances and ‘friends’ they knew.” So begins Alice Walker’s Overcoming Speechlessness, an account of Walker’s travels to Rwanda and Eastern Congo in 2006 and Palestine in 2009. Working with Women for Women International and CODEPINK, Walker has done what few North American writers are able to: bear witness to atrocities in places that are geographically far away, but politically connected to the West.

Without a doubt, the strongest aspect of this lyrical little book is the parallel she draws between Dutch control of Rwanda and British influence in the creation of the state of Israel.

Read More…Read More…

May 1st: March for Immigration Reform

Tomorrow is May Day, and Reform Immigration for America is marking the day by holding marches in support of progressive immigration reform all over the U.S. Tens of thousands of people are expected to march in almost 100 locations across the country:

On May Day, we’re telling the our elected leaders in Washington DC that we’re not going to wait any longer for them to act. They’ve made promises and pledges – now it’s time for them to keep them. Every day that they don’t pass comprehensive immigration reform, millions of families and communities suffer. Workers are exploited. Ordinary immigrants live in fear of raids. Families are torn apart.

Every day that our leaders don’t act, the dream that is America is tarnished. Our leaders can’t hide behind their rhetoric. It’s time for concrete action.

On May Day tens of thousands of people will attend hundreds of marches all across the country. We’ll stand together to show our leaders that we’re not going to wait any longer for them to fix our broken immigration system. All of us, immigrants and native-born citizens, will be united to show the world that this country needs comprehensive immigration reform now.

Click here to find a full list of the May 1st marches and see if there is one near you.

via abbyjean

Stephanie Grace, racist Harvard emailer.

This is disgusting. Stephanie Grace, a 3L at Harvard Law School, apparently had a conversation about race during a dinner with other law students. Her comments, she believed, were perceived wrongly, and so she sent out an email to a few students in an effort to correct the record. That email was forwarded around, and eventually made its way to several Black Law Students Associations (BLSAs). Here’s what Stephanie Grace wrote to some of her fellow HLS students:

… I just hate leaving things where I feel I misstated my position.

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:) Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects. One example (courtesy of Randall Kennedy) is that some people, based on crime statistics, might think African Americans are genetically more likely to be violent, since income and other statistics cannot close the racial gap. In the slavery era, however, the stereotype was of a docile, childlike, African American, and they were, in fact, responsible for very little violence (which was why the handful of rebellions seriously shook white people up). Obviously group wide rates of violence could not fluctuate so dramatically in ten generations if the cause was genetic, and so although there are no quantifiable data currently available to “explain” away the racial discrepancy in violent crimes, it must be some nongenetic cultural shift. Of course, there are pro-genetic counterarguments, but if we assume we can control for all variables in the given time periods, the form of the argument is compelling.

In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.

Please don’t pull a Larry Summers on me,

Stephanie Grace

You know you’re an extra-special racist when you send out an email clarifying that your views are actually more racist than those that pissed people off at dinner.

I’m not going to get into why Grace’s arguments are wrong; that should hopefully be self-evident, and I don’t think we need to waste time entertaining completely ignorant ideas about the genetics of intelligence, or whether certain racial or ethnic groups are “naturally” more or less intelligent than others. There are certain ideas that just do not belong in the realm of serious intellectual conversation, and this is one of them. (UPDATE: At the bottom of the post, I explain this position a little bit more).

Instead, I want to discuss (a) the system that made Stephanie Grace feel that her email and her arguments were totally appropriate and within the realm of acceptable academic discourse, and that lead her to believe that her views would be accepted and welcomed; (b) the troubling reaction to the dissemination of her email, some of which has revolved around the ethics of naming her; and (c) why this matters. Because while Stephanie Grace is sending out racist emails, sites like Above the Law are falling all over themselves not only to obscure her identity, but also to say that maybe she was kind of right — and that her email wasn’t actually racist, and that the idea that black people are genetically inferior is one that we should entertain.

In other words, this isn’t just about Stephanie Grace.

Read More…Read More…

Boycotting Arizona

This is not at terrible idea.

A spreading call for an economic boycott of Arizona after its adoption of a tough immigration law that opponents consider racially discriminatory worried business leaders on Monday and angered the governor.

Several immigrant advocates and civil rights groups, joined by members of the San Francisco government, said the state should pay economic consequences for the new law, which gives the police broad power to detain people they reasonably suspect are illegal immigrants and arrest them on state charges if they do not have legal status.

Critics say the law will lead to widespread ethnic and racial profiling and will be used to harass legal residents and Latino citizens.

La Opinión, the nation’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, urged a boycott in an editorial Monday, as did the Rev. Al Sharpton, and calls for such action spread to social media sites. The San Francisco city attorney and members of the Board of Supervisors said they would propose that the city not do business with the state.

They followed the lead of Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, who had urged conventions to skip the state, though other Democrats who oppose the law, including Mayor Phil Gordon of Phoenix, pleaded for people not to punish the entire state.

Don’t punish the entire state? I understand the argument, but perhaps the state shouldn’t be punishing Latin@s. And perhaps this — combined with a lot of immigrants leaving the state — will help Arizona to see that immigrants aren’t the enemy, and that racially profiling and marginalizing brown people has serious economic consequences.

Arizona Immigration Law: A Roundup

A map of several Southwestern U.S. states. Arizona is in read, and instead of bearing the state's name, reads "POLICE." Text placed in a brown banner below reads "Brown Skin is Not a Probable Cause. Stop SB 1070." Tiny text along the bottom says "No More Racial Profiling! Stop the Arizona Police State!" Recently, I wrote about a bill in Arizona that would require police to check the papers of those they “reasonably suspect” to be undocumented immigrants. Tragically, infuriatingly, and unforgivably, that bill has now passed both houses of the legislature and been signed by the governor.

A brief rundown of the law can be found here. Commendably, even the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police has openly opposed it (pdf), while the former police chief of a Phoenix suburb has condemned it as catastrophic. President Obama, too, has spoke out against the law, along with Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, though they didn’t go much further than calling it “misguided.” Others worry that the Arizona law could be used as a basis for similar legislation in other states.

It’s useless and cowardly to mince words here: this new law is racist as racist gets. It is without a doubt directly targeting Latin@s. And the arguments that it’s not are pathetic and disingenuous at best. Suspicion is not going to be primarily based on shoes or attire. A Latino man dressed in sneakers, jeans, and an old tee-shirt is indeed more likely to arouse “reasonable suspicion” than a Latino man in a business suit — but the fact that class may sometimes mitigate the effect for some Latin@s doesn’t change the facts that the effect is going to be felt almost entirely by Latin@s all the same, and that enforcement will be discriminatory. Enforcement based on race with a dash of class mixed in is not materially better than enforcement based entirely on race. And while the bill explicitly prohibits against profiling “solely” on race, it does leave the former entirely legal.

A lot of people have written a lot of really brilliant posts about the horrifying passage of this law. Field Negro has a great post, and you should definitely check out both Nezua’s post at the Unapologetic Mexican and Shark-Fu’s post at Angry Black Bitch. But my favorite post I’ve read so far is Problem Chylde’s post Arizona: All Latin@s Carry Papers or GTFO. She writes:

I don’t want to do a first they came chant. They’ve never stopped coming. They come through half-cocked racist philosophies; they come through brutal murders and attacks; they come in board rooms and conference rooms; they reduce humanity and need to numbers and ledgers. They won’t stop coming until we the people as a humane, peacemaking force make them never want to come again. Constant vigilance precludes passivity. When they come, and they always do, let them come knowing every step they take closer to fascism is a hazard to their power, their money, and their sense of morality.

We no longer wait for them to come. First we fight.

Go check out all of the linked posts in full (and feel free to leave more links in the comments, as there have been a lot of posts!).

I want to close this post with a list of actions you can take to combat this law. Sadly, most I’ve come across are little more than symbolic. But at least they’re something. Problem Chylde has a list:

Where do we go from here? There is a Facebook group to join, a petition to sign, a call to boycott Arizona and Arizona-based businesses, a list of organizations to check out, and badges you can use around the internet to show solidarity.

If you’ve got other ideas and actions, do let us know.

UPDATE: For more action items, see Kai’s comment.

MOD NOTE: Since this sadly came up last time, I need to say right now that I’m not going to entertain comments that try to argue that this law is not racist. I’m going to delete them. I have as much time and patience for those kinds of comments in this space as I would have for comments arguing a bill outlawing abortion is not misogynistic. The humanity and human rights of undocumented immigrants and of Latin@s are not any more up for discussion in a feminist space than the humanity and human rights of women, or any other marginalized group. I do not apologize for this, but maintain that it is necessary to a progressive space that is safer for all oppressed and marginalized people.

Events in Remebrance of Amanda González-Andújar

You may have heard of the recent murder of Amanda González-Andújar. A man has been taken into custody in connection with her murder, which is undoubtedly good news, but González-Andújar is still gone, and hers is sadly yet another name to add to this year’s Transgender Day of Remembrance list of the dead.

This Saturday, April 24, there will be both a memorial and vigil in NYC to honor and remember her.

For those who can’t read the flyer, it’s transcribed below the jump.

Read More…Read More…

Prison Rape: Assault Shouldn’t Be a Part of the Sentence

This guest post is a part of the Feministe series on Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Liliana Segura is a senior editor at AlterNet.org and a board member of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.

Trigger Warning

“I’ve been raped, physically beaten, extorted, pimped out/sold, intimidated, manipulated, threatened, humiliated, [and] harassed by both officers and inmates,” California prisoner Meagan Calvillo wrote a few years back, in a blunt summary of what happens every day in American prisons. Among transgender people behind bars, her story is not unusual; as Emily Alpert wrote in 2005, “outside of prison, transgender people are among the most marginalized in the United States; inside it, they confound a system that’s ill-prepared to serve them, or even to decide where to put them.”

Cavillo’s experience may sound extreme, but it mirrors that of the most vulnerable prison populations in the U.S. In 1994 in the case Farmer v. Brennan, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a prison official’s “deliberate indifference” to the risk that a trans woman prisoner named Dee Farmer would be raped when placed within the general population of a men’s federal prison violated her Eighth Amendment rights. Yet, “deliberate indifference” remains a good phrase to define the broader attitude towards prisoners who are raped behind bars; among them, transgender prisoners, gay prisoners, young prisoners, prisoners who are locked up for the first time, and prisoners who are mentally ill are often the most targeted for sexual assault by guards and other prisoners alike, their bodies treated as a commodity in the prison power economy. If survivors of sexual assault are routinely silenced in the outside world, those who are assaulted behind prison walls are even more invisible. They are also the least likely to receive sympathy or help from people on the outside.

“Survivors of sexual abuse behind bars experience the same emotional pain as other rape victims,” the staff at Just Detention Inc, the only organization in the country that is “dedicated exclusively” to eliminating sexual assault in prisons or jails, remind us. Yet the ugly reality — familiar to anyone who has ever seen depictions of prison on TV or in popular music, or heard the phrase “don’t drop the soap” — is that prison rape has long been ingrained in the cultural imagination as, at worst, a hilarious punchline about deserving convicts, at best, an indignity that simply comes with the territory.

Read More…Read More…

Clay and Harold: A Couple Forcibly Separated By Sonoma County

Recently making the rounds is a breathtakingly tragic story of an elderly gay couple that Sonoma County, California allegedly forcibly separated into different nursing homes, before possessing and selling off their property. It’s an incredibly upsetting story, so please be aware of that when making the decision to read further. From the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), which is helping Clay with his lawsuit:

Clay and his partner of 20 years, Harold, lived in California. Clay and Harold made diligent efforts to protect their legal rights, and had their legal paperwork in place—wills, powers of attorney, and medical directives, all naming each other. Harold was 88 years old and in frail medical condition, but still living at home with Clay, 77, who was in good health.

One evening, Harold fell down the front steps of their home and was taken to the hospital. Based on their medical directives alone, Clay should have been consulted in Harold’s care from the first moment. Tragically, county and health care workers instead refused to allow Clay to see Harold in the hospital. The county then ultimately went one step further by isolating the couple from each other, placing the men in separate nursing homes.

Ignoring Clay’s significant role in Harold’s life, the county continued to treat Harold like he had no family and went to court seeking the power to make financial decisions on his behalf. Outrageously, the county represented to the judge that Clay was merely Harold’s “roommate.” The court denied their efforts, but did grant the county limited access to one of Harold’s bank accounts to pay for his care.

What happened next is even more chilling: without authority, without determining the value of Clay and Harold’s possessions accumulated over the course of their 20 years together or making any effort to determine which items belonged to whom, the county took everything Harold and Clay owned and auctioned off all of their belongings. Adding further insult to grave injury, the county removed Clay from his home and confined him to a nursing home against his will. The county workers then terminated Clay and Harold’s lease and surrendered the home they had shared for many years to the landlord.

Three months after he was hospitalized, Harold died in the nursing home. Because of the county’s actions, Clay missed the final months he should have had with his partner of 20 years. Compounding this tragedy, Clay has literally nothing left of the home he had shared with Harold or the life he was living up until the day that Harold fell, because he has been unable to recover any of his property. The only memento Clay has is a photo album that Harold painstakingly put together for Clay during the last three months of his life.

This story instantly reminds me of one that I blogged about last year, regarding Janice Langbehn and Lisa Marie Pond. As Lisa died, her partner of 17 years, Janice, was not allowed to see her in the hospital. Neither were their three children. While the abuse of Clay and Harold extended well beyond visitation rights, this core part of the story is tragically not unheard of. There are certainly many other couples who had their rights similarly violated but did not make the news.

Last week, President Obama issued a directive requiring hospitals to allow visitation rights to patients’ same-sex partners, as well as to other designated visitors. This action was apparently inspired by Janice and Lisa’s story, and Janice’s persistent activism. Obama even called Janice and apologized to her for what she endured. It’s a noble and necessary action, and one that I certainly hope will be enforced effectively.

But it’s too late for Harold and Lisa to spend the end of their lives with their partners. It’s too late for Clay and Janice to say goodbye. It’s also too late for Clay to retain his property, or to get back the months of his life he lost while forcibly confined to a nursing home. And it didn’t have to happen. In a world that treated all people, all partnerships, all love as equal, and in a world that respected LGBT rights, and in Clay and Harold’s case elder rights, it wouldn’t have happened.

I’m at a loss for words, but s.e. smith has much more.

RIP Dorothy Height, Civil Rights Leader

Dorothy Heights, a civil rights and women’s rights activist, died this morning.

I first learned about her in college because of her role as president of the National Council of Negro Women, but after hearing of her death this morning, I’ve learned even more awesome things about her:

She was the only woman on the stage during the “I Have a Dream” speech, and she was there when JFK signed the Equal Pay Act; she worked alongside various Presidents and First Ladies, counseling them on civil rights and human rights issues; she focused on housing, food, education and other social issues during her tenure at NCNW and in working with the YWCA; she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame; and so forth.

Today, Obama called her the “godmother of the civil rights movement” and I couldn’t help but tear up when I heard that. Here’s hoping that we all remember the leaders of the past as we keep struggling for social justice.

Confronting Citizenship in Sexual Assault

This guest post is a part of the Feministe series on Sexual Assault Awareness Month. brownfemipower blogs at Flip Flopping Joy.

Trigger Warning

What does it mean to be a citizen? What does it mean to you to be a citizen of whatever country you were born in?

As a citizen of the US, the Constitution states my rights. I have the right to vote, to have a gun, etc. But I also have the right to a driver’s license, and thus a job. I have the right to a social security number, and again, thus a job. I have the right to welfare, to disability and unemployment.

And even more pointedly, I have the right to drive, to rent a house, to call the police.

I’m sure we can all think of more rights–but the point here is not so much to gather a list of every privilege citizenship grants us, but rather to expose or shine a spotlight on a rarely talked about identity: citizenship.

I read this story about a young woman who was more than likely raped at a university party with no small level of disgust. Although there was a lot of evidence that indicated that a rape probably happened, no rape kit was preformed for her and she didn’t even get a proper exam to deal with the obvious signs of poisoning (whether by alcohol or date rape drugs is beside the point) or the sore rectum and leg she spoke of. The article rightly notes about the case: “You’re not a rape victim unless the police say you are.”

You’re not a rape victim unless the police say you are.

Let’s take a minute to sit with the ramifications of this sentence. It means something huge for all rape survivors–but it means something very specific in terms of citizenship. If it takes the nation/state to confirm a rape happened–what does it mean when states require local police to check the immigration status of anybody who “reasonably” looks “illegal“?

In a racist, heteropatriarchal society, who “looks” illegal? What bodies are “illegal” just by existing? And what happens when one of those “illegal” bodies are violated?

Read More…Read More…