Mediaboss Marketing

Last Monday, students at the University of Connecticut Storrs Campus were met with a disturbing sight: Frat Lives Matter painted in (appropriately) white paint against a blue backdrop on the school spirit rock. It was soon repainted to read We are #UConn; but nothing could erase the feeling of disgust, disrespect and erasure that black bodies on our campus once again had to undergo at the hands of our more privileged peers. What may be the worst part of this latest slight, however, is that it is not surprising. This is not the first time the rock has been a site of racial tensions.

In fall of 2014, brothers of Pi Kappa Alpha verbally harassed women of Alpha Kappa Alpha at the spirit rock, using racist and sexist language as well as intimidation tactics in an attempt to stop the women from painting over their design. These women stood with strength no one should have to possess as they were called everything but their names, endured the torture of a trial by public opinion and had high-level administrators tell them that their experience was not racist or sexist enough to take action on. Still, no one saw them. When PIKE was later suspended from campus, it was because of hazing, as everyone knows that disrespecting black women is par for the course at UConn. To this day, the university failed to address the use of slurs against the women of AKA, including a faculty member.

This inaction only added to invisibility of black bodies at the university. In spring of 2015, the Resident Assistants for Social Justice Education used the spirit rock to bring light to this invisibility, painting the messages Black Lives Matter and Racism: In Storrs Now. The next day, students woke up to a rock defaced with gold paint covering the words Black and racism. Erasure in its most literal form. I walked around that day wondering if someone would like to erase me with a dash of gold paint.

Here we are again. On the same campus where megaphones are denied at vigils for Michael Brown and women murdered by police officers, a social justice framework used to uplift, affirm and highlight the painful experiences of Black America is being hijacked to bring attention to their lives. They cant seem to stop taking our voices. As if the lives of white frat boys have ever not mattered. As if those boys had to fear for their lives when they were arrested. As if a frat is as much part of someone's identity as the color of their skin. Like youve watched your kinfolk being gunned down like a rabid animal in the street on loop. Like youve watched their blood seep into the Earth that your ancestors toiled for centuries.

It is that deep. It will always be that deep. On a campus, at a rock where black lives have mattered neither to fraternity men nor the people responsible for keeping them in line, it is as deep as an ocean filled with tears of all the mothers and fathers of little black girls and boys taken away before their time. It is an identity erased in gold paint for the comfort of an overgrown toddler who needs everyone to remember that he too, matters. It is an isolated incident being compared to a phenomenon of unarmed black folks being shot, choked and pinned down into hashtags.

It is more than bad taste, you see. You wont let black women into the party that we hear Drake blasting at. You dont go to the protest, but you co-opt the language. You compare six arrests to our executions. Dont you know that a wrongful arrest is the least of our worries? Dont you know we pray for a black boy to be brought in to a precinct and not a coroner's office? To be tried and not mourned?

It is high time for you all to stop coveting things you are not willing to bleed for. Give thanks that you need not remind the world that your life is a life and not a plague to be rid of. Give thanks for your basic human rights, your privilege and your voice. You dont have to say radical things, say nothing if you must, but if youre going to say Lives Matter, you better put Black in front of it.

Continue reading here:
Spirit rock and the erasure of Black Lives Matter at UConn - UConn Daily Campus

By Ray Lam

Pride is a protest and it is troubling to see it used as anything other than a platform for queer rights.

Pride is the foundation most queer organizations build their entire volunteer, outreach, and fundraising programs on. Millions are spent in media, advertising, and sponsorship over Pride. When we mobilize and wield this economic power, people notice. Pride has the power to change laws and influence multinational corporations because it stands for something indisputable: inalienable human rights.

The 2013 #DumpStoli vodka boycott protesting Russias record is an unintentionally hilarious example of the unstoppable power of Pride. Stoli is a Latvian company and a long-time supporter of Pride. Latvian activists defended Stoli, as did Stuart Milk, founder and president of the Harvey Milk Foundation. The New York Times even sent reporters to Latvia to debunk the boycott. To dispel lingering doubts, Stoli poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Prides across North America, including World Pride in Toronto, and Vancouver Pride in the years to come.

Despite this tremendous power, queer rights are a mere privilege besieged everywhere with legislated equality facing an equally formidable power: ignorance and hate. Rather than fighting for trans rights or defending existing rights eroding under shifting political tides, Pride has lost its voice and Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO) found a platform.

When BLMTO staged a sit-in during the 2016 parade, they hijacked Prides across Canada. Radical social justice warriors like BLMTO may start this self-immolation, but it has been fueled by community leaders who have lost their voice in the face of the scorched earth campaigns launched by trigger-happy allies from the troll-infested corners of the internet that make character assassination childs play.

BLMTO and the spectre of controversy are holding the queer community hostage. While seven or eight of BLMTOs nine demands arguably address longstanding concerns with Toronto Pride, that thin veil is a marketing ploy acting as the candy coating for BLMTOs most bombastic demand: banning police. This has dominated the national dialogue with police in Nova Scotia pre-emptively withdrawing and us-too-activists popping up to demand the same in Prides across Canada. This on-again off-again, will-they-wont-they drama with police is the sole creation of BLMTOs disrespect for Pride, akin to queer activists staging a sit-in on Selma to demand freedom at a time when our very existence was criminalized.

Extrajudicial killings may be the it-cause today but that is dwarfed by the socially acceptable killing of queers here and abroad. Queer murders are often diminished by gay/trans panic arguments in criminal courts throughout North America. There is a death penalty for queers in 12 countries throughout the world. In some, they are publicly tortured before being thrown off rooftops and left to die in the streets. In others, newspapers identify people with confirmed gay status, publish articles like 7 signs of a Gay, and debate laws literally referred to as a Kill-The-Gays-Bill, allowing lynch mobs to do the rest.

Queers can be jailed in 72 countries. Canada was number 78 or something until 43 years ago. Two years earlier, the Fruit Machine was decommissioned as a gay test used on over 9,000 suspected queers monitored by the RCMP, just as the last person was jailed as an incurable homosexual. Today, police protect us. Images of Pride being celebrated by police may be tedious those of us numbed by the privilege of equality. However, to others struggling to stay alive, they are messages of hope, sent to places hope does not exist. It is a picture of what life can be in 43 years.

The queer rights movement in North America was a response to police raids of queer venues. Our relationship with police is a source of Pride and sign of progress. This is reflected in Change.org petitions that overwhelmingly support police. In Vancouver, 2,831 people have signed a pro-police petition in under two weeks versus 966 who have signed BLMs petition in a month. Similarly in Toronto, its 7,943 pro-police after only one month versus BLMs 2,448 signers after six. That is over 13,000 voices that could be demanding equality in unison to create real change for trans people.Instead, 10,000 are left wondering how 3,000 silenced us while basic rights are slowly stripped away.

Whether it is Stonewall, Selma, or Suffrage, those who choose to deny us human rights place us in the same category: sub-human. BLMTOs tactics create headlines, not change, at the cost of stealing our voice and power as a community when we so desperately need to rise up and demand equal rights. BLMTO needs to take responsibility for this tremendous misstep before they cement their reputation in the queer community as a poorly planned guerrilla marketing campaign gone wrong, in the most epic fashion; and Pride need to step up because this fight needs leadership, not party planners.

Go here to read the rest:
Ray Lam on Black Lives Matter and Pride: No one wins when you rain on our parade - Straight.com

Commissioner Matt Johnson

A judge issued a restraining order on March 1 against a Black Lives Matter activist accused of threatening Los Angeles Police Commission President Matt Johnson.

Johnson, who is only one of two African American police commissioners is also the managing partner at Century City law firm Ziffren Brittenham, LLP.

The Los Angeles Times reports that according to testimony, on the morning of Dec. 16, the activist, Trevor Ferguson, and about 20 other Black Lives Matter protesters went to Johnsons law firm. The elevator requires a key card, but Ferguson managed to make his way to the 10th floor where he ran into Johnsons law partner, P.J. Shapiro. Johnson was not there.

Ferguson spoke about the evils of the LAPD and accused Shapiro of being complicit in the killing of innocent black children because he is Johnsons law partner.

Ferguson has denied any wrongdoing. He is part of a group that regularly attends commission meetings and often disrupt the proceedings by shouting or chanting primarily criticizing police shootings of black suspects. Ferguson and others have called Johnson a houseboy amid demands that police Chief Charlie Beck resign and the entire department be disbanded.

In a court declaration, Johnson alleged that Ferguson made a gratuitous reference to his children at a November police commission meeting and stated at another meeting that Johnson should be scared of him, The Times reported.

Despite Fergusons contention that his actions were lawful protesting, and did not cross the line between insults and threats, Los Angeles Superior

Court Judge Carol Boas Goodson granted the Citys request for a restraining order.

The order requires Ferguson to stay away from Johnson and his family, but it does not prevent him from attending Police Commission meetings.

Johnson told The Times following the March 1 hearing, There is a line, and for me, that line is when you threaten the safety of my family, he said. Like any father, Im not going to apologize for taking steps to protect the safety of my family.

See the original post here:
LA Police Comissioner Obtains Restraining Order Against Black Lives Matter Activist - Westside Today

Or all that sympathetic to the cause: the local conservative news site typically depicts BLM supporters as unreasonable and unruly protesters who exist solely to inflame racial tensions.

So, of course, the folks at Alpha just loved the video Trey Turner posted to Youtube last week.

In the 20-minute video, Turner, a mixed-race 27-year-old raised in a Twin Cities suburb, recounts how he rapidly fell in and out of favor with local Black Lives Matter groups.

Turner says he intends to "expose the truth about Black Lives Matter," which the storyteller says he was drawn to after Jamar Clark's death in a police shooting in Minneapolis.

Turner had trepidation about the movement, having seen "violence" during demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, but a friend assured him BLM espoused no "hatred toward whites."

Later, after Philando Castile was killed by a cop in Falcon Heights, Turner followed the Black Lives Matter cause to the governor's mansion in St. Paul. His first night during that leg of the protest was "fun," reporters Turner, thanks in part to the presence of "some alcohol" and "some weed."

(Oh man, Alpha News just knew it!)

Turner then blows the lid off the fact that some protesters were "Bernie Sanders supporters, anti-Trumpers."

Go on Trey...

"And I had been a Trump supporter prior to going out there."

(Record scratch noise.)

"Trump" as in Donald Trump? As in the guy who wanted the Central Park Five executed, the first black president deported, and whose campaign's race relations strategy was calling any place with more than three black people in it a "disaster" and a "warzone"? Him?

"I had debates with some of the people out there," Turner continues, recounting his Black Lives Matter stint. "We had intelligent debates, which is hard to believe, because it was liberals."

Is it becoming clearer why Trey Turner has quickly become the first Black Lives Matter member Alpha News has ever liked?

Turner claims he overheard Black Lives Matter members, leaders and organizers alike, hatching a plot of "burning down" the governor's mansion, other mansions of Summit Avenue, St. Paul City Hall, the St. Paul Police Department, the Minnesota State Capitol, and the "white suburban area of Roseville, Minnesota," if there was no indictment of Geronimo Yanez, the police officer who killed Philando Castile.

In the end, Ramsey County Attorney John Choi decided to charge Yanez with second-degree manslaughter and other offenses. And it's thanks to that decision that every major public structure in Minnesota's capital city and the whole of Roseville is not reduced to a pile of ash.

So now you know why Turner's video has more than 21,000 Youtube views, and has quickly become a favorite of right-wing blogs.

They finally found a black guy who will tell them what they want to hear about Black Lives Matter. Truth bomb: It's just as scary as they've always imagined.

In a response statement posted to Facebook, Black Lives Matter organizer Corydon Nilsson denied Turner's most outrageous claims. Neither of the two men Turner mentioned were even "organizers with Black Lives Matter Saint Paul," Nilsson writes, though he credits both for doing an "excellent job of keeping things non-violent and peaceful at the [governor's] mansion."

Nilsson says the two organizers forced Trey Turner to leave "after he consistently created problems, was intoxicated and would not respect others."

The threats Turner claims to have heard would be "extremely out of character" for those two guys.

Unlike this Youtube video, the mini-viral one produced by a Trump-loving conservative infiltrator of Black Lives Matter, who went to protests to talk about black-on-black crime, to deny racism's impact on black people, to criticize Islam, to say "police and whites" are right to "naturally have a fear towards a group of people" who "kill each other at such an alarming rate."

This, we can assume, is extremely in character for Trey Turner.

Read more:
Trump-loving BLM dissident claims activists wanted to 'burn down' stuff [VIDEO] - City Pages

Hes admittedly obsessed with the disgusting president

In order to promote diversity and inclusion on campus, Texas Christian University paid a Black Lives Matter activist $5,000 to call President Donald Trump a rapist.

Shaun King, a New York Daily News columnist with a reputation for mocking students who ask him tough questions, told a student audience that he has written probably over 100 articles about Donald Trump and I follow his news very closely, according to the conservative campus newspaper The Freedom Frog.

I think he is terrible human being, King said, adding later: I think [Trump] is a disgusting person.

The event was hosted by TCUnity, a student-led initiative to promote advocacy for diversity and inclusion that started last year, as part of its Unity Week last week.

MORE: Shaun King inserts himself into Ole Miss lynching protest

The group chose King, who has said he is three-quarters white, as an ideal speaker to discuss race relations.

The student government covered Kings $5,000 fee, saying in an approved bill that King would be beneficial to educate students, faculty, and staff on racial and ethnic issues by facilitating open dialogue and conversations to better TCUs social climate and understanding on these issues for all students.

The bill also justified Kings appearance by citing recent student protests on campus and a list of demands, likely referring todemands made by the Black Students And Allies Of TCU.

Their listcalled for a 10 percent increase in nonwhite faculty, a zero tolerance policy for racially insensitive and hateful speech, and a $100 million endowment to support minority students.

They also demanded the flag be lowered when people of color around the nation are murdered by people who are supposed to protect and serve.

List of Demands by Tamera Hyatte on Scribd

Official campus news organization TCU360 focused on Kings description of the Trump era as crazy times, his discussions about violence against black men and the selfies he took with audience members.

The Freedom Frog, on the other hand, noted that King brought up decades-old rape accusations against Trump by his then-wife, Ivana.

MORE: Shaun King bullies students who ask him tough questions

His first wife testified under oath that he brutally raped her and violently assaulted her and pulled out huge chunks of her hair. She told her friends about it, King said. That should have been the end of his career, that was in 1989.

Trump has consistently denied this, and in 2015 Ivana Trump called the allegations without merit and said she was the best of friends with her ex-husband.

King also encouraged students to try to force your colleges hand to become a sanctuary campus that doesnt cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

Fox 4 said that King told the station it wasnt his decision to close the event to outside media.

Much fanfare for Shaun King, none for Allen West

I thought Mr. Kings speech was very divisive, not to mention ironic, TCU College Republicans President Matt VanHyfte told The College Fix.

With it being TCUnity Week, I find it incredibly unfortunate that TCUs Student Government Association (SGA) decided to bring someone that only causes division between groups of people rather than unifying them, he said in an email.

It was irresponsible of SGA to not bring another speaker with countering and opposing views so students have the ability to see both points of view and develop their own opinions, VanHyfte said.

MORE: Black students issue demands because of black students offensive cartoons

Andrew Wilbraham, a junior economics major, contrasted the administrations hype of Kings speech with its silence when retired U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Allen West, a former Republican congressman, spoke on campus.

West visited TCU last April at the invitation of the Young Americans for Freedom chapter. Several students questioned his past statements, but a rumored plan to shut down his speech never materialized.

Campus leaders have picked a side on the political spectrum, Wilbraham told The Fix. They never missed a step when advertising Shaun Kings speech, but when Allen West came to speak you wouldnt have even known.

TCU provides diverse learning opportunities

TCU junior Annabel Scott, editor-in-chief of The Freedom Frog, said her family pays a significant amount of money for my education at TCU and she was deeply disappointed in TCUs decision to fund Kings appearance on campus.

Sophomore Lauren Dooley praised TCU for welcoming speakers of all opinions, backgrounds, and purposes, but told The Fix that Kings role in Unity Week was odd.

MORE: Students walk out of Allen West speech because he says radical Islam

Its just confusing when one comes per request of the university for unity week, a movement all students have gotten behind, but preached disgust towards our students who supported our current president before ideas on how to improve race relations, she said.

An administration spokesperson told The Fix that it had nothing to do with the King invitation, but said TCU provides diverse learning opportunities for students.

Many student- and faculty-led organizations throughout the Texas Christian University community sponsor a variety of campus speakers in any given academic year, he said. The university does not support political, ideological or personal statements associated with any of them.

MORE: White Student Union releases hilarious list of demands

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter

IMAGE: The Young Turks/YouTube

About the Author

Justin Caruso is a student journalist based in the Washington, D.C. area. He attends George Washington University. In addition to writing for The College Fix, he contributes to Daily Caller and Campus Reform, and his work has been featured on Fox News and the Drudge Report.

Continue reading here:
University pays Black Lives Matter activist to call Donald Trump names for 'Unity Week' - The College Fix