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1. Look back and examine how your earliest racial attitudes were formed. If you are an oldster like me, you enjoyed Seor Wences & Speedy Gonzales. Since you were just a kid, you didn't know these caricatures shaped how you saw people of color. You also grew up loving What's Happening, Good Times, Sanford and Son, Sammy Davis, Jr., The Jackson Five, and Stevie Wonder. They were easy to love because they were happy and entertaining as opposed to those angry fist-raised Black Panthers. What were they so mad about? No one told you.

1 (a). You also went to all-girls religious school where there were only two Black girls in the whole school. You and your friends never spoke to these girls, because it was easier not to mix or even try. Now you wonder what school must have been like for those two invisible girls in a sea of white girls.

2.You learned about the Civil War and the Holocaust and learned slavery and anti-semitism were evil and wrong. But then a family friend casually says, "Blacks just aren't as smart as whites." You feel uncomfortable, but since your parents don't say anything, you ignore it. In the car on the way home, your parents tell you, like it's a secret, that the man was wrong, and that all people are equal. But no one wanted to be rude, so no one said anything.

3. You love I Love Lucy but can't imagine dating someone Hispanic because they are uneducated, lazy and drink a lot. You know this because of Speedy Gonzales and Slowpoke Rodriguez. Or you are told to lock the car doors because you are driving through a Black neighborhood. When white people impersonate Black people, you laugh, because you might be poor, weak and scared but least you aren't Black or have an accent. You have a single solitary black high school friend but dating outside your race doesnt even occur to you.

4. Then you move away, go to college and make new friends. Your world view expands as you meet people of other cultures, races, and gender preferences. Since you never tried to get to know people of other races, you fear saying something offensive or ignorant, so you don't interact as easily as you do with white people. With people who are just like you, white folks from the burbs, there is some kind of easy code, where if you make a cultural generalization, you all laugh because you know it's just a joke and you aren't really racist, because you are creative and liberal and evolved. (But if you have to look around before you make a joke, to make sure no one Black is listening, chances are the joke is a teensy bit racist. Harmless racism... you tell yourself)

5. Then someone (maybe your father) mocks your new gay friend. And it bothers you enough to defend your friend. This is the beginning of understanding the equality that your parents mentioned in secret in order to not offend a racist. You might use this newfound sense of injustice to defend gay people. You watch (and join) protests for gay rights. You realize that progress and equality and allowing people to be different scares a lot of people who think giving minorities equal rights somehow means less power for them. But when watching TV and a relative asks, 'Why do Blacks have to talk like that?', you feel angry inside but say nothing.

6. Then you get a job with Black and white people. At lunch, the white people sit together and all the Black people sit together. But not together. Everyone works hard to integrate. Everyone respects everyone else but silent segregation is deeply entrenched. You don't even realize that you invite the white people from work but not the Black people, because you never really were that close. The door was there and you failed to open it.

7. You are older. You finally meet your life partner, who is not the person you married in Step 6. But you can't make a baby. You take classes to become foster parents. The brilliant, hard working Black course instructor, teaches Black, white, Hispanic and mixed race people how to be foster parents.

Foster parent classes inadvertently teach you more about white privilege than they do about anything else. White people constantly raise hands to answer the questions. The people of color dont even try. You know everyone in this room is as smart as everyone else, but you begin to wonder if they feel inferior, less educated, or dont want to appear ignorant. You stop raising your hand in an attempt to level the playing field. But that also feels wrong.

8. Your child is Black. Her birth family's day to day reality exposes you to life without a safety net. You stay close to your child's birth mother and learn how hard it is for Black people to succeed when economic, medical, educational and legal institutions stack the decks against them. You watch this woman try to do the right thing for her family. Her struggle becomes personal. Then Trayvon Martin is shot and George Zimmerman is set free and you begin to learn how much you never knew.

9. You read Nurture Shock to learn about how to not fuck up your kid. Chapter 3 rocks your world. Chapter 3 is "Why White Parents Don't Talk About Race". White parents are uncomfortable discussing race with their kids, but families of color have to discuss racism when their children are as young as three, because they know their kids will be discriminated against, cursed at, bullied or worse.

If you have a daughter, you instill in her the belief that she can be anything, a doctor, lawyer, President of the United States. That's the same way to discuss skin color. Studies indicate that if white parents don't talk with their children about race, kids will learn it on their own, quite possibly not from credible or empathetic sources. The earlier we teach our kids that there are brown, white and blue eggs, but inside we all look the same, the easier. By third grade children have pretty much self-segregated based on looks.

10. When you do have the race chat, and you discuss how theres brown and white bread but its still bread. Or that there are white, brown, blue and spotted eggs, but inside its all the same it can really be that simple. So-and-so might have different color skin, come from a different culture, a different faith, a different language with different food, but we are all people with feelings who deserve love and respect.

Challenge yourself to go one step further. Ask your kid questions. Make race and equality an on-going dialogue, because as your children grow, so does their comprehension of what is happening around them. See Charlottesville and racism and Neo-Nazis and the Presidency as your opportunity to grow a compassionate, informed, integrated citizen of the world.

11. At the park or playground or through preschool, you make Black friends, and you learn to shut up and listen. You learn to not say things like "You're so articulate!" to a Black woman because she hears the silent "For a Black person" at the end of your alleged compliment. You learn to not tell Black people how much better it is nowadays then when you were young. That doesn't help Black lives right now. Your Jewish friends hopefully learn to not say, "We know about suffering and prejudice." Believe me, it's different when you are judged just by turning a street corner.

PS: And you brace yourself for the day you have to explain racism to your tiny, shining, bright, life-hungry three year old Black daughter.

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How To Not A Raise A Racist - HuffPost

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, the Associated Press (AP) has updated its style guide to change the standard usage of the term alt-right. The guide, widely followed across the US media, first added the term in November of last year, after Donald Trump won the presidential election, revealing the alt-right to be more than an electoral flash in the pan.

The update added anti-Semitism to the original definition. It now reads:

A political grouping or tendency mixing racism, white nationalism, anti-Semitism and populism; a name currently embraced by some white supremacists and white nationalists to refer to themselves and their ideology, which emphasizes preserving and protecting the white race in the United States.

Both the original and updated AP definitions resemble early attempts to explain fascism in the decades following the second world war. Like the style guide versions, early writers focused attention on regime or movement attributes. This approach, often employing lists of various sizes, proved either too inclusive, or not inclusive enough.

Subsequent attempts to define fascism can be divided into two rough camps. One, now associated with Robert O. Paxton, explained fascism in terms of its ascent to social and, eventually, political power. The other, generally attributed to Roger Griffin, explained fascism as having a minimal ideological essence.

Both approaches can be useful now, to look beyond haphazard attempts to keep up with the various hatreds and styles of the alt-right (ideological sexism and transphobia could be added to the above definition, for example) to distill the ideological commitment around which the alt-right centers: namely, eugenics.

By now, the genesis of the term alt-right is well known: it originated around 2008, when either Paul Gottfried or Richard Spencer employed the term to describe the wide array of right-wingers who saw themselves as outside of, and marginalised by, the conservative mainstream. That same year, Spencer, Colin Liddell, and Andy Nowicki received $5,000 from hate site VDARE to start a blog.

When alternative-right.blogspot.com launched in 2010, the groundwork had already been laid to constitute the alt-right into a cohesive, if not coherent, movement. In the early 2000s, the paleoconservatives with whom Spencer cut his teeth had ushered libertarians towards their platform against free trade and immigration. At the same time, white nationalists whom Spencer eventually joined in their call for a white ethnostate were signing the New Orleans Protocol, a pact between previously bickering factions to never punch right and to maintain a polite and non-violent decorum.

By 2010, a vast infrastructure of blogs, think-tanks, and civic organizations had been built up. This network facilitated a coordinated far-right response to the building of an Islamic Center six blocks from the former World Trade Center site, which included sustained anti-mosque protests and Quran burnings across the United States.

The viciously sexist manosphere began establishing its own web presence, through The Spearhead, A Voice for Men, and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) among others. Meanwhile, the Tea Party was vociferously protesting taxes and defending the for-profit healthcare system, while sharing artistic Hitlerisations of Obama and shouting racial slurs at congresspeople.

In 2012, a year after Spencer was appointed head of the National Policy Institute, a 17-year old boy named Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a known racist and self-appointed armed Neighborhood Watch patrolman. Right-wing and tabloid media sought out photos of Martin in macho poses, described his demeanor as thuggish, and implied that the hoodie he was wearing on the night of his murder made him look suspicious, demonising the teen with racist dog-whistles. When Zimmerman was acquitted a year later, protests reignited around the country.

By 2013, the relentless murders of Black people by police carried momentum from Trayvon Martin rallies into the Black Lives Matter movement. As the protests escalated to highway blockades and property damage, opponents called for and committed vigilante violence.

As the Council of Conservative Citizens and American Renaissance churned out stories and statistics of Black criminality, many on the right, including Dylann Roof and Chris Cantwell, were radicalised into white nationalism.

Meanwhile, though receiving less media attention, the manufactured Gamergate controversy prompted men to harass women through rape threats, doxxing, and swatting campaigns.

Having built up a white nationalist and paleoconservative milieu around the sleeker contraction alt-right, Spencer and others sought to harness the masculine internet rage of Gamergate. A Silicon Valley-based movement called Neoreaction, which extended the logic of libertarianism to argue that a single corporation ought to run a racial slave state, bridged the ideological gap between Gamergate and the alt-right. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel and former Business Insider chief technology officer Pax Dickinson are just two high-profile figures associated with Neoreaction.

In 2015, after the intentionally offensive Draw Mohammed contest in Texas was disrupted by armed men claiming allegiance to the Islamic State, various independent militia members organised another wave of anti-mosque protests this time with rifles and white nationalists.

Then, one day after Donald Trump announced his intention to run for president, Dylann Roof shot and killed nine Black parishioners. While most recoiled in horror in response to Roofs crimes, a far-right conservative movement was galvanised against subsequent calls to remove the Confederate flag from public spaces. The combined messages of free speech, heritage, and racial bigotry created just the platform for the increasingly broad alt-right to catapult themselves into the centre of conservative discourse.

By Halloween 2015, the National Policy Institute had a record attendance at its increasingly frequent conference, selling out of discounted tickets for attendees under 30.

After Hillary Clinton delivered a speech denouncing the alt-right as a basket of deplorables in August 2016, Google search trends for alt-right increased exponentially. They peaked again when Spencer delivered a speech in Washington DC, shouting Hitlers invocation hail victory in response to Trumps election win, as his audience gave Nazi salutes.

As this potted history reveals, the alt-right, fractious as it may be, was the result of numerous fragile alliances and unlikely coalitions. While white nationalists ultimately united the alt-right, that work did not necessarily translate into support for white nationalism, as internal denunciations of its origins reveal. The alt-right is, however, united in its commitment to eugenics.

Eugenics, the infamous Nazi-supported pseudo-science, is a belief that data proves biological or cultural explanations for differential social outcomes. The term is only explicitly embraced by the alt-rights racist core, which publishes academic books through a variety of financially-connected publishing houses (including the National Policy Institutes own Washington Summit Publishers). The historical eugenics, however, also extended to theories of gender and economic status, which have been embraced by the other segments of the alt-right. Eugenics theory posits that race, gender, and class determine intelligence and that any attempt to balance social outcomes for example, through affirmative action upends the meritocracy of natural selection.

These three axes, race, gender and class, can be seen in the alt-rights three major segments: the white nationalist-fascist nexus, the manosphere-tribalism nexus, and the libertarian-neoreactionary nexus. Although these movements are ideologically distinct, they converge when taken to their conclusion: domination through triumph.

Until the massacre in Charlottesville, the alt-right had managed to put aside its glaring differences in the conception of political praxis because of this shared faith in eugenics. In theory, fascists, tribalists, and libertarians should not get along. Fascists detest the chaos of the market and love futuristic technology. Tribalists detest social contracts of any sort and reliance on anyone, much less the government. Libertarians detest any sort of government planning and acquisitive violence.

Yet despite different theories of ideal governance circulating within the alt-right, each of the overlapping factions believes that its preferred social configuration can ensure a eugenic society: fascists through state intervention, tribalists through physical struggle, and libertarians through market forces. That the alt-right was ever able to manage to get these disparate factions to support each other (and further blend together) is an incredible feat.

The constant flux among these groups within the alt-right is something definitions like the APs style guide fail to capture or anticipate. The ever-changing list of bigotries espoused by the alt-right are not its defining characteristic. Each emerges from the core commitment to eugenics, which operates as the basis of its recruiting strategy.

The framework of eugenics allows a shifting of focus from particulars about governance or bigotry to innate ability and natural hierarchy in the abstract. The danger in merely listing what the alt-right has been is losing sight of where its going next.

Mike Isaacson is a lecturer at John Jay College and an anti-fascist researcher. Download his latest zine, You Cant Punch Every Nazi.

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The 'alt-right' is an unstable coalition with one thing holding it together - Red Pepper

Do you think there is enough tension and division in the United States right now? Are folks hot enough around the collar? Yknow what might cool things off here in Ohio?

Opening up our gun laws to stand your ground so that Ohioans have no duty to retreat and can kill each other whenever they feel under attack. Great. Perfect. Run with it.

Thats apparently the thinking of some Ohio Republicans.

From the Columbus Dispatch:

We want to eliminate your duty to retreat when you are under threat of violent attack, said (state) Sen. Jay Hottinger, R-Newark, a co-sponsor of Senate Bill 180, which was introduced Tuesday. Its difficult to defend yourself when you are running away or your back is turned.

Pending companion House and Senate bills also would expand the so-called Castle Doctrine, which allows people to act in self-defense, without retreating, when in their homes, cars or relatives cars. Under the new legislation, that would be changed to allow people to act in self-defense without retreating when also anywhere a person has a legal right to be, such as on a sidewalk or in a parking lot.

What about wanna-be vigilantes stalking kids armed with Skittles and Arizona tea through their neighborhood, like George Zimmerman did to Trayvon Martin? Legal right to stalk, provoke, and stand ground to kill? This doesnt sound like it will end well; it obviously hasnt before.

But wait! Theres more! From the Dispatch:

The bills also would shift the burden to prosecutors in self-defense cases to prove that criminal defendants did not act to defend themselves, others or their homes. Hottinger said Ohio is the only state in which people must prove they acted in self-defense in using deadly force.

The Republican-controlled House passed a wide-ranging, pro-gun bill in late 2013 that included stand-your-ground language, but the Senate removed the provision amid objections from prosecutors and police.

Ah, yes, but now the law and order party wants to make law enforcement and prosecutors jobs harder against their objections. Makes sense. Or maybe police and prosecutors have changed their minds?

The Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association and the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio have not changed their positions.

Well then.

We think a person who has a safe way of avoiding a confrontation should take advantage of that rather than just stand there and blast away, said John Murphy, executive director of the prosecutors group.

Murphy also said it is reasonable to require a defendant to prove a self-defense claim by a preponderance of evidence a lesser standard than beyond reasonable doubt. Current laws have worked well with no evidence that prosecutors are improperly pursuing charges against people who properly act in self-defense.

And what of the police?

Michael Weinman, governmental affairs director for the FOP, said the organization continues to oppose stand-your-ground legislation.

Even officers have a duty to de-escalate the situation before it gets to the point of using deadly force, he said.

De-escalation, what a concept.

The rest is here:
Stand Your Ground Again Threatening Ohio - Plunderbund

The time is 1980. The place is the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in New York City. The man is 18-year-old Colin Warner. Its a familiar scenario. An unarmed black man is walking through his own neighborhood, minding his business, when, within the blink of an eye, his whole life changes. Police officers pull up, tires screeching, and Warner is alarmed and confused because hes being arrested. And, immediately, were faced with one of Americas harshest truths: Black men (and men of color) are often deemed guilty until proved innocent. And, often, no one is trying to prove that black men are innocent.

Warner is brought into the precinct and basically told that hes murdered a man. And Warner has no say in his own fate. There are no choices for him to make as the officers try to make him confess, which Warner never does because he didnt do it. But the guttural pleas of innocence from Warners lips fall on deaf ears.

The film Crown Heights forces the viewer to face Americas demonsracism, a crooked justice system and the dehumanization of prisonersall in one emotional ride. The knot in my stomach ached for a teenage Colin (Lakeith Stanfield) having to face mental and physical anguish in prison, knowing he was an innocent man.

From the arresting officers to the prosecutors to the prison guards and Warners own legal counsel, the movie takes us down a long, frustrating road of something were mostly all aware: a system that doesnt work for people who cant defend themselves. And its usually people of color, namely black men, just like Colin Warner, who cannot defend themselves.

Crown Heights shows you that clear evidence doesnt even implicate Warner. But the evils of law enforcement are determined to finger him and make him pay for the crime. And as a viewer, youre left wondering why, even though youre fully aware of the dangers and circumstances of racism.

I just thought they would be fair, Warners mom says at one point in the film.

We all have the hope that the justice system will actually bring forth justice, even though we know better. We all held our breath, waiting to hear that George Zimmerman, Michael Dunn, or Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake were all found guilty of murder.

And even though you know Warners fate, you still hold your breath when the judge reluctantly reads the verdict.

Most prisoners know deep down they put themselves here. I dont have that comfort. Colin Warner (Lakeith Stanfield)

But perhaps the biggest star of this entire film isnt a person at allits Warners support system in the form of his longest and dearest friend, Carl King (Nnamdi Asomugha).

As soon as he hears about the arrest, King is at the precinct to bail his friend out, only to be told that he has been denied bail. This will be the beginning of a 21-year battle King willingly takes on to help his friend see freedom again.

How long would it take for you to lose hope? I know that I am a good friend, but to have a dedication like Kings and stick with Warner through 21 infuriating years of rejected justice is just a level of friendship Im not so sure Id have been able to reach.

At one point, even Warner is over the constant disappointment and he chastises King for being there for him and begs him to stop. But King (Asomugha) counters with: Its not just about you. Its bigger than that. It could be me in here. Sometimes I feel like it is me.

And it is us, all of us. Mass incarceration and wrongful imprisonment affect us all. People go to jail more than 11 million times every year. Many of them are criminals, yes, but not everyone fits into the same mold.

Colin Warners story is one of many, and thats what made me sad leaving the theater. While hes now free and able to champion for others falsely accused, the fact that people like him even exist makes you feel like this country is never going to value people of color in a way that humanizes us.

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Crown Heights Exposes a Very Common American Problem: Wrongful Conviction - The Root

Guy Miles was not a model citizen. In 1998, hed broken the conditionsfor parole (he had been incarcerated on charges of stealing cars from a valet parking service) by moving to Nevada from California. Thinking he was still concealing his true whereabouts, he traveled back to California to meet with his parole officer there, andhewas subsequently arrested.

But his arrest was not for theparole violation, instead it was for bank robbery. Two eyewitnesses to a robbery in Orange County, California, identifiedMiles as one of the robbers. Despite compelling evidence of Miles innocence, he was convicted and sentenced to 75 years in prison. In 2013, however, more evidence (including a confession from a co-defendant in Miles trial) that implicated two other men was uncovered whichremoved Miles from the scene of the crime. His appeal is still awaiting a court decision in California.

Even in the age of DNA evidence and advanced forensics science, the claims of an eyewitness still carry a lot of weightin court, in the media and in our heads. But reversals of convictions due to later evidence, and revelations of eyewitness misidentifications continue to mount. Of the first 130 convictions that were ever overturned by later DNA evidence, 78 percent of the caseswere initially decidedviamisidentification by witnesses, according to the Innocence Project. In addition, studies have shown that one-third of identified perpetrators were instead fillers deliberately put in a police lineup; these fillers had nothing whatsoever to do with the crime.

So, is eyewitness testimony worth anything? While the latest headlines and court cases might indicate no, neuroscientists and criminal justice scholars say that eyewitnesses can have value, as long as we have a solid understanding of how the brain takes in visual or audio memories and how those memories can change over time.

George Zimmerman

There are many ways eyewitness testimony and memory can change. In the famous trial of neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman, accused of second-degree murder in the shooting death of a young black man named Trayvon Martin, eyewitness testimonywas inconsistent:

For many neuroscientists, the value of eyewitness testimony depends on timing when testimony was collected, as well as how well the eyewitness truly saw what was happening at the time of the crime.

A lot of howpersonal accounts arecreated depend on how the brain stores memories. Richard Wise, a University of North Dakota forensic psychologist, told Scientific American:

To reconstruct a memory, the eyewitness draws upon several sources of information, only one being his or her actual recollection. To fill in gaps in memory, the eyewitness relies upon his or her expectation, attitudes, prejudices, bias, and prior knowledge. Furthermore, information supplied to an eyewitness after a crime (i.e., post-event information) by the police, prosecutor, other eyewitnesses, media, etc., can alter an eyewitnesss memory of the crime.

To understand how memories can be filled in, changed and otherwise affected, its become important to know how both theeyes and brain work.

The eye, of course, takes in light through the lens and aligns images to the retina. Then, images are picked up and transmitted to the brain, via the optic nerve. At that point, things can get complicated. The brains various regions code information, and decide where it should be stored, or how it should be reacted to. This process can result in a number of optical illusions. These illusions, or false

An MC Escher print

images, include spots that arise when the eyes focused on very bright lights, optic migraines that produce shadows or other (nonexistent) light changes, or cognitive illusions, which occur when the eye records one image, but the brain encodes (or remembers) another. Prints by MC Escher, or pictures that seem to alternatively show an image of a horse and a tree exemplify this type of illusion.

These illusions can affect how a witness remembers somethinglikea crime and memories can be changed by much more than illusions. A U.S. National Research Council analysis on eyewitness testimony reported in 2014 that:

Factors such as viewing conditions, duress, elevated emotions, and biases influence the visual perception experience. Perceptual experiences are stored by a system of memory that is highly malleable and continuously evolving, neither retaining nor divulging content in an informational vacuum. As such, the fidelity of our memories to actual events may be compromised by many factors at all stages of processing, from encoding to storage and retrieval.

Timing of the eventmay be another issue with eyewitness testimony. Ahead of Zimmermans acquittal at trial, several witnesses changed their story from their initial impressions, but this was not isolated to the Zimmerman case. Scientists have started looking at how certain a witness was of his or her first impressions of a crime; often, if theyre not certain at first, they can later be coaxed (either by their brains or a prosecutor) into greater certainty, even if that certainty is wrong. Conversely, knowing a witness certaintyduring the initial investigative interview can help put that memory into some context.

To remedy these issues, psychologists have teamed up with the US Justice Department (which set up procedures for handling eyewitness accounts only in 1999) and criminal prosecutors to determine how eyewitness evidence is handled. These included procedures that mimic scientific studies, including a warning to witnesses that a suspect may not be in a police lineup, and double-blind situations in which a detective cannot influence a witness memory.

But the National Research Council report indicated that far more needed to be done, particularlyon the research side. The reportcriticized inadequate collaboration between police, courts and researchers, cited a lack of transparency of research methods on eyewitness handling, and found a lack of reproducibility with data reporting.

So for now, in eyewitness testimony, what you see isnt necessarily what you get. But at least now science canshow us how what we see changes what we get.

Andrew Porterfield is a writer and editor, and has worked with numerous academic institutions, companies and non-profits in the life sciences. BIO. Follow him on Twitter @AMPorterfield.

More here:
Can we trust the eyes of those who witness crimes? - Genetic Literacy Project