ataxiwardance

theatlantic:

New Racism Museum Reveals the Ugly Truth Behind Aunt Jemima

David Pilgrim was 12 years old when he bought his first racist object at a flea market: a saltshaker in the shape of a mammy. As a young black boy growing up in Mobile, Alabama, he’d seen similar knick-knacks in the homes of friends and neighbors, and he instinctively hated them. As soon as he handed over his money, he threw his purchase to the ground and shattered it into pieces.

Pilgrim’s story brings to mind the young biblical Abraham, smashing idols in his father’s shop. But that mammy was the only racist icon Pilgrim ever destroyed. Today he owns thousands of them: cereal boxes, statuettes, whites-only signs, and postcards of black men being whipped and hung. The public will soon be able to see his entire collection and more at the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, which opens April 26 at Ferris University in Michigan where Pilgrim spent years as a sociology professor.

The museum is divided into sections, each reflecting a different distorted vision of black people in America. One features Uncle Toms: cheerful, servile black men like Uncle Ben or the chef on the Cream of Wheat box. Another showcases “brutes”: muscular ogres who lurk in dark alleys and ravish white women. Most of the objects predate civil rights, but there’s a section devoted to modern racism: It includes dozens of caricatures of President Barack Obama as a monkey, a terrorist, and a watermelon-eating “coon.”

Read more. [Images: Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia]

FOLU! The internet has been reading our minds.

frombaghdadwithlove:

feministhope:

These are all so great.

My heart just exploded. So.

This is wonderful!

‎’Gasland’ director Joshua Fox arrested filming House panel

By Neela Banerjee, LA Times

February 1, 2012, 4:37 p.m.

At the behest of the Republican leadership of a House of Representatives subcommittee, Capitol Police arrested Joshua Fox, the maker of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Gasland,” when he tried on Wednesday to film a subcommittee hearing on hydraulic fracturing, a controversial method used to tap oil and gas reservoirs. … 

Congressional hearings are open to the public. Anyone with a cellphone camera could record the proceedings, as a video on Huffington Post of Fox’s arrest shows.

House Democrats and civil libertarians lambasted the arrest. “I have served in the House of Representatives since 1992, and I had the privilege of chairing the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. In all that time, I cannot recall a chair of any committee or subcommittee having ever ordered the removal of a person who was filming a committee proceeding and not being disruptive, whether or not that person was accredited,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.). “The proceedings of the House are open to the public because we are the People’s House.”

India Factory Workers Revolt, Kill Company President

Forbes, 1/27/2012 @ 3:08PM

Workers at the Regency Ceramics factory in India raided the home of their boss, and beat him senseless with led pipes after a wage dispute turned ugly.

The workers were enraged enough to kill Regency’s president K. C. Chandrashekhar after their union leader, M. Murali Mohan, was killed by baton-wielding riot police on Thursday. The labor violence occurred in Yanam, a small city in Andra Pradesh state on India’s east coast. Police were called to the factory by management to quell a labor dispute. The workers had been calling for higher pay and reinstatement of previously laid off workers since October. Murali was fired a few hours after the police left the factory.

The next morning, at 06:00 on Friday, Murali went to the factory along with some workers and tried to obstruct the morning shift, local media reported. Long batons, known as lathis in India, were used by police who charged the workers, injuring at least 20 of them, including Murali. He died on the way to hospital, according to The Times of India. Hundreds of workers gathered outside the police station and demanded that officers be charged with homicide.

Curfew and other civil orders were imposed in Yanam because of the uprising that ultimately led to the murder of the Regency president. Police reported that rioters also torched several vehicles outside the police station. Eight Regency Ceramics workers were injured in police firing that followed; the condition of two of them is critical. More than 100 protesters have been arrested.

India factory workers are the lowest paid within the big four emerging markets. Per capita income in India is under $4,000 a year, making it the poorest country in the BRICs despite its relatively booming economy.

Did you know that some estimates put the number of Indian Naxalite-Maoist Communists as over 1,000,000. They are currently heavily concentrated in the impoverished Red Corrider and have, until recently, largely been a jungle / non-urban movement.

manicchill:

Lawyer Defending South Carolina’s Voter ID Law Thinks the Department of Justice is Biased Against White People | TPM Muckraker

South Carolina officials plan to file suit against the federal government because the Justice Department stopped the state from implementing a voter ID law that the state’s own statistics showed would have a disparate impact on non-white voters. Fighting on their behalf will be a former DOJ official who claimed that the Civil Rights Division is opposed to protecting the civil rights of whites and who defended the Bush-era politicalization of the division by Bradley Schlozman as an effort to “diversify.”

South Carolina has hired former Voting Section Chief Christopher Coates, who defied DOJ’s instructions and testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights during the Republican-led probe into the infamous New Black Panther Party case, a spokesman for the South Carolina attorney general’s office told The State newspaper.

Former colleagues said that Coates had an ideological conversion after an African-American woman was chosen over him as deputy section chief in July of 2000.

Read More

(image courtesy of Main Justice)

I know this might not get the blood boiling as much as other electoral issues but voter suppression is something that has always driven me insane with rage. Unfortunately, voter suppression is also something with a long and proud history in these United States. It doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere either. Just changing forms. Read this brief overview from the Brennan Center for Justice (like Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr.) on how over five million voters will find exercising their fundamental democratic right either more difficult or impossible in 2012. And yes, to the surprise of no one, these voters will be disproportional minority and impoverished populations.

Judge Rules That Alabama Republicans Acted With Racist Intent to Suppress Voter Turnout

A federal judge accused two state Republicans, called by federal prosecutors in a massive Alabama corruption case, of cooperating with the feds because of their “ulterior motives rooted in naked political ambition and pure racial bias.”

State Sen. Scott Beason and former Rep. Benjamin Lewis, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson wrote, “lack credibility for two reasons.”

“First, their motive for cooperating with F.B.I. investigators was not to clean up corruption but to increase Republican political fortunes by reducing African-American voter turnout. Second, they lack credibility because the record establishes their purposeful, racist intent,” Thompson wrote.

The judge’s order, first reported by Birmingham News, continued:

Beason, Lewis, and their political allies sought to defeat SB380 partly because they believed the absence of the referendum on the ballot would lower African-American voter turnout during the 2010 elections. One of the government’s recordings captured Beason and Lewis discussing political strategy with other influential Republican legislative allies. A confederate warned: “Just keep in mind if [a pro-gambling] bill passes and we have a referendum in November, every black in this state will be bused to the polls. And that ain’t gonna help.”

Thompson also brought up Beason’s reference, while wearing an FBI wire, to African-Americans as “aborigines” (a comment he later apologized for).

“The court finds that Beason and Lewis cooperated with the F.B.I. in order to secure political advantage. The evidence at trial showed that black communities in Alabama tend to support electronic bingo. The evidence further demonstrated that black voters tend to be Democrats,” Thompson said. “Indeed, Beason’s and Lewis’s scheme was predicated on their belief that blacks supported electronic bingo and Democratic candidates.”

Thompson continued: “It is, perhaps, unsurprising that politicians have political motives to disrupt and defeat legislation advanced by opponents. But Beason, Lewis, and other influential Republican politicians did not target Democrats generally in their opposition to SB380; they plainly singled out African-Americans for mockery and racist abuse.”

“Beason’s and Lewis’s statements demonstrate a deepseated racial animus and a desire to suppress black votes by manipulating what issues appeared on the 2010 ballot,” Thompson said. “Lawmakers who harbor such sentiments lack the integrity expected from elected officials.”

Thompson also dismissed the Justice Department’s contention that “the issue of racism is irrelevant to the crimes alleged in the indictment” because Thompson said “the issues of motive and bias are directly relevant to evaluating the credibility of the government’s cooperating witnesses.”

There is “no indication whatsoever that the prosecutors in this case condoned or shared any of the biases of their cooperating witnesses,” Thompson said. “But eliminating bribery will treat only one symptom of political corruption in this State. To cure the larger disease, it is essential to address with equal force the politics of racial prejudice and exclusion.”

Despite all of his criticism, Thompson ruled in favor the federal prosecutors, finding that statements of alleged co-conspirators could be admitted at an upcoming trial.

Reached by TPM, a Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment because the case is pending.