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Texas Justice
By Junious Ricardo Stanton
"This year Dallas residents
learned that their police department had been convicting and
deporting people for cocaine sales that had never happened. What
made the cases particularly bizarre was the police didn't even
bother to plant actual cocaine, the arrests were made on the
basis of planted sheetrock powder. Now sheetrock made from
mineral gypsum powder and the organic chemical cocaine don't
bear much chemical similarity to each other . . . so the Dallas DA
office simply maintained a policy of not having the sheetrock
"cocaine" tested by the county forensic lab unless
cases went to court. To avoid trials, plea bargains were foisted
upon the mostly working class and small business owner Mexican
immigrant victims who were naturally in a state of shock after
being arrested for 'crimes' that never happened."-Bill
Walker http://www.aci.net/kelliste
While perusing a list of links on current
events I decided to check one out. Going to the site, I selected
an article about a police narcotics unit drug scam in Dallas
Texas. The article chronicled how once Dallas police made an
arrest the District Attorney's office never sent the confiscated
"cocaine" to a forensics lab for testing. In almost
all of the cases, the working class and small merchant Mexican
immigrants plea bargained for lesser sentences or deportation
because they feared they would be sent to jail for long
sentences even though they were innocent of any wrong doing. But
in the eighteen cases where defense lawyers demanded testing, it
turned out to be powdered gypsum the material used in sheetrock!
As a result over forty cases were dismissed.
The tragedy is that many innocent Mexicans
were deported and their property confiscated. Reading about that
case, I immediately reviewed and compared it to the scandal in
Tulia Texas where forty African-Americans were arrested and
charged with being part of a cocaine drug ring only to discover
a white undercover officer, Tom Coleman, (who fled prosecution
on theft charges on a previous job as a law enforcement
official) was the sole witness in the arrests. In the Tulia
cases the undercover police officer worked alone and provided no
collaborating backup audio or visual evidence beyond his word
against the people he arrested which resulted in convictions and
lengthy jail sentences for many first time offenders.
Another article mentioned a case in Hearne
Texas where state prosecutors were forced to dismiss charges on
seventeen residents, all African-Americans, who were arrested on
the testimony of a police informant who later failed a polygraph
test on the issue of tampering with the evidence. In still
another case in San Antonio eight police officers were arrested
and charged with protecting cocaine shipments into and around
the city. Is there a nefarious plot going on here? Texas
has historically been an oppressive place for people of color.
The horror stories of their chain gangs and prison abuses are
legendary (although no worse than some other places).
Keep in mind that current white house
resident George W. Bush was the governor of Texas where he
gleefully ordered the execution of over thirty inmates. This
from a man who professes to be a "born again
Christian". I suspect if he were called on it he would just
say "I was following the law." It never occurred to
Dubeyah to take the bold step like the governor of Illinois and
order a moratorium on capital punishment. Back to the drug
arrests, the alarming common threads in all these cases are:
people of color (African-Americans and Mexicans) were the
targets of these arrests and the collaborative malfeasance of
the police and prosecutors.
This is another example of how the law has
been used to destabilize our community through profiling and
stigmatization of people of color as drug dealers, and through
incarcerating huge numbers of our people, often on bogus charges
by over zealous or racist police-prosecutorial tandems. Nation
wide, black and brown folks are being arrested using the so
called War on Drugs as a tool to incarcerate and ruin the lives
of countless little people while someone like the daughter of
Jeb Bush is repeatedly given breaks.
Prison construction is at an all time high.
AmeriKKKa now warehouses over two million of its mostly black
and brown residents. Couple this with the moves of states like
Florida to disenfranchise convicted felons it becomes a triple
whammy. Not only does it place more black folks in jail, it
reduces the available jury pool and the voter rolls! The most
revealing aspects of all of this is that the lawmakers aren't
stupid, they know what's wrong, in many instances they are loath
to correct it.
POSITIVELY BLACK Junious Ricardo Stanton jrswriter@comcast.net
posted 30 July 2002
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Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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1960
1965
1970
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 8 December 2011
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