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Police Repression of the Black
Community
Outrageous Myth or Persistent Reality?
White Officer Suspended After Tape Shows Handcuffed
Black Youth Was Punched
By Barbara Whitaker
Los Angeles
July 9, 2002
July 8 - A white police officer in the Los Angeles
suburb of Inglewood was relieved of duty today after a bystander
videotaped a confrontation on Saturday evening in which a handcuffed
black teenager was thrown against a police car and then punched in the
jaw.
"It was very disturbing," Mayor Roosevelt
F. Dorn said of the videotape, which has by now been widely televised.
"It appears that the officer picked this youngster up and
body-slammed him on top of the front end of the car and then punched
him."
"From the video I saw, there was one officer
that was involved," Mayor Dorn said. "As a matter of fact, one
of the other officers seemed to be stepping in to prevent any further
conduct by this officer." The officer involved, Jeremy Morse, was
removed from duty by the mayor pending the results of an investigation.
No action was taken against the three other Inglewood
police officers at the scene, or against any of at least two Los Angeles
County sheriff's deputies who were also there. The Inglewood police said
Officer Morse had no comment, and the police union also declined to
comment. But the Sheriff's Department, whose deputies had pulled over
the car in which the youth was riding, said he had become unruly before
the events that were videotaped.
The episode began, said Deputy Steve Jauch, a
Sheriff's Department spokesman, when the car was stopped about 5:10 p.m.
for expired license plates. "During the investigation, the
16-year-old passenger became involved in an altercation with our
deputies and Inglewood police," Deputy Jauch said.
The 16-year-old, who was not identified because he is
a juvenile, was taken into custody and charged with assaulting a police
officer. The driver of the car, Coby Chavis, 41, was also taken into
custody, and charged with driving with expired plates. As a result of
the tape, recorded by a man standing at a nearby motel, three
investigations are under way: one by the Los Angeles County district
attorney, another by the Sheriff's Department and a third by the
Inglewood Police Department.
Mayor Dorn said it appeared the incident was
isolated. "I have not received any information that would cause me
to believe that this type of conduct is going on in the
department," he said.
Nor, he said, does he expect the incident to ignite
racial tensions. "I can tell you without any question," he
said, "this matter will be handled with dispatch, and
appropriately."
Source:
NYTimes* * * *
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) / Gil Scott-Heron
& His Music Gil Scott
Heron Blue Collar
Remember Gil Scott- Heron |
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The Heart of Whiteness
By Robert Jensen
The first,
and perhaps most crucial, fear is that of facing the fact
that some of what we white people have is unearned. It's a
truism that we don't really make it on our own; we all have
plenty of help to achieve whatever we achieve. That means
that some of what we have is the product of the work of
others, distributed unevenly across society, over which we
may have little or no control individually. No matter how
hard we work or how smart we are, we all know — when we are
honest with ourselves — that we did not get where we are by
merit alone. And many white people are afraid of that fact.
A second fear is crasser: White people's fear of losing what
we have — literally the fear of losing things we own if at
some point the economic, political, and social systems in
which we live become more just and equitable.—Robert
Jensen
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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