Five states have abridged early voting this year, including Florida, which canceled voting on the Sunday before the election. This directly targets black voters; black churches have traditionally helped increase turnout in a “Souls to the Polls” effort that, according to Time, resulted in African Americans accounting for one-third of the early votes cast on Sundays.
Transcript
On March 8, 2011, Governor Beverly Perdue established the five-member, Governor’s Task Force to Determine the Method of Compensation for Victims of North Carolina’s Eugenics Board. The following is the testimony of Elaine Riddick who was sterilized at the tender age of 14 when she became pregnant after being raped by a much older neighbor. Not only was she sterilized but she was deemed promiscuous.Elaine Riddick: I had to have a child at the age of 14 and when I had my son, they went into me at the same time they gave me a cesarean birth and they took my child they sterilized me. What do you think I’m worth? What do you think I’m worth?
Reporter: Elaine Riddick was just 13 when a neighbor raped her, then she endured what she refers to as her second rape. State officials declared Riddick feebleminded and unfit to have children.
Elaine Riddick: The main reason, reasons is because I was poor and out and Black. I believe that with all of my heart.
Reporter: Based on the pseudo science of eugenics, over 30 states passed laws regarding the sterilization of so-called defectives. The goal was to rid society of certain undesirable traits.
Charmaine Fuller Cooper (victim advocate): Some of those traits that they listed were epilepsy, feeblemindedness, promiscuity, criminal mentalities.
Reporter: Researches believe that as many as one hundred thousand Americans were victimized. By the time that North Carolina ended its own eugenics program in 1974, it had taken away the reproductive rights of 7,600 people - most like Riddick were poor. Tony Riddick still lives close to his mother’s town in the coastal plane. He says she doesn’t come home often.
Tony Riddick: They used to call it little Korea, yeah little Korea. The reason why is cause it was very violent you know, coming up. She grew up in a very very abusive home. My mother’s life and my life by any measure would have been, should have been, could have been totally written off, but the fact of the matter is God still prevails and I’m grateful for that, very grateful.
Reporter: Riddick’s mother would be grateful for justice. She drove from her adopted home in Georgia to testify before a North Carolina task force considering compensation for sterilization victims.
Elaine Riddick: There’s nothing that the state of North Carolina can do to justify what they did to me, what they did to these other victims. You know, it’s not my grandmother’s fault that she uneducated. It’s not my mother’s fault that she was abused by her husband. It wasn’t my fault that my environment that I was raised in - that I was brought up in this kind of environment; I had nothing to do with that. I was a victim. God said, be fruitful, multiply, replenish the earth in his image you know. I always told everybody, “how can you ever get to see the image of God when you are killing it off”?
Reporter: Riddick is tired of feeling like the victim but she’ll have to wait until next February to see if the tar heel state will give her and 2, 000 other eugenics survivors justice.
INCITE! works with groups of women of color and their communities to develop political projects that address the multiple forms of violence women of color experience in our lives, on our bodies, and in our communities.
We identify “violence against women of color” as a combination of “violence directed at communities,” such as police violence, war, and colonialism, and “violence within communities,” such as rape and domestic violence.
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There is currently no Chicago chapter of INCITE!, but they are a national organization so there’s no reason not to get involved. |
[A]n African-American prisoner with mental illness, who had smeared himself with feces was forced into a tub of water so hot that it caused third-degree burns. The skin peeled off parts of his body, and a prison nurse overheard a guard say, “looks like we’re going to have a white boy before this is through.
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| — | Jean Casella and James Ridgeway, Case Closed on Supermax Abuses at Pelican Bay « Solitary Watch |
The Associated Press and other news outlets are referring to Forde as a “border activist.” While it is true that Forde was involved in various political efforts to restrict immigration, many of those efforts consisted of running around with guns, as part of a self-styled “Minuteman” group. When people do that kind of thing in other countries, taking up weapons in support of their particular causes, we tend to refer to them not as “activists,” but as “militants.” And then when they use the weapons to murder somebody, sometimes we call them “terrorists.
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| — | Scocca : Arizona Minuteman Murder Conviction: Does Shooting a Nine-Year-Old Girl in the Head Count as “Activism”? (via mfstrong) |
For an example of something from AJE that isn’t about Egypt, check out this three minute clip about Tucson Unified School District and the Arizona state ban on ethnic studies.
There’s another infamous shooting of a nine-year-old girl that is making headlines this week in Tucson. This time, we wonder if the rest of the media will bother to cover it.
The little girl’s name was Brisenia Flores. She lived near the border with her parents and sister outside the town of Arivaca, Arizona. On May 30 of 2009, a woman named Shawna Forde, who led an offshoot unit of Minutemen who ran armed border patrols for patriotic “fun”. Forde’s gang had decided to go “operational,” which meant they concocted a scheme to raid drug smugglers and take their money and drugs and use it to finance a border race war and “start a revolution against the government”. They targeted the Flores home, which had neither money nor drugs, based on dubious information. They convinced Flores to let them in by claiming to be law-enforcement officers seeking fugitives, then shot him point-blank in the head when he questioned them and wounded his wife, Gina Gonzalez. And then, while she pleaded for her life, they shot Brisenia in cold blood in the head. (Her sister, fortunately, was sleeping over at a friend’s.)
(via CrooksandLiars)
We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. That’s really the part that I think is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit genocide, and you sit there and you don’t do anything about it, that’s violence.
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| — | Naomi Jaffe (via bradicalmang) (via krona) (via differentvoicecommunity) (via yesmeansyes) |
Most white-on-black crime happens without the majority of whites having to perpetrate a single violent act. Another unspoken benefit of white privilege is the ability to win without even having to fight. Gentrification, and the uprooting of communities that it entails, will happen regardless of how the incoming hipsters feel about their neighbors; the pieces are already in place, the gears turning. 911 doesn’t get called- it’s a slow motion race riot, which history has proven can be the most devastating kind.
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| — | Daniel José Older, NotSoMuch: The Truth About Black-On-White Crime | Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture |
For instance, white-on-black crime, which we see faaaar more frequently. A lawyer was interviewing me the other day for a case they wanted me to testify in. A patient I’d had who’d also been pistol whipped, also seven years ago, this time by cops, was suing the NYPD and this lawyer was trying to take apart the guy’s story. He showed me a picture of a middle aged black man with a swollen lip and busted eye and asked me if I remembered him.
I had to laugh. “Do you have any idea how many times a week I go to the precinct to take care of black men who’ve been beaten by cops? Plenty. Times fifty-two times eight. No I don’t remember that dude.” Or the kid I met last night, who’d been cardoored by a police cruiser and then arrested before he could get up, all for riding his bike on the sidewalk. Or Iman Morales, who was naked on a fire escape in Bed-Stuy having a psychotic fit when PD tasered him, causing him to fall to his death. Or Sean Bell. Or Oscar Grant.
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| — | Daniel José Older, NotSoMuch: The Truth About Black-On-White Crime | Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture |
