United States - Human Rights Monitor

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darshan
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Executive Summary: Advancing Racial Equity With State Tax Policy
https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-bud ... tax-policy
States and localities could do more to help undo the harmful legacies of past racism and the damage caused by continuing racial bias and discrimination. If state budget and tax policies were better designed to address these harms and create more opportunities for people of color, state economies would be more equitable and likely also would be stronger, which in turn could benefit many state residents of all backgrounds.[1]

States and local governments account for nearly half of all domestic public-sector spending, and most of the funding for education and certain other investments important for economic growth. As such, how states and localities raise and spend revenue, including what services they finance, has major implications for racial and ethnic equity. Yet, while in recent decades people of color have made progress in many areas, state and local fiscal policies too often have not been part of this progress and instead have extended or cemented racial disparities in power and wealth.

Discriminatory public policies and racially prejudiced public and private actions of the past contributed to a historical context in which people of color were systematically held back. For much of our nation’s history, people of color had little to no power in state legislatures, and white lawmakers could set policies that sustained white dominance, even in states where people of color were a significant share or even a majority of the population. In that sort of environment, state and local tax policies often deepened the profound challenges that people of color faced, even when those tax policies were not explicitly race-based.
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Cook County Assessor Faces Questions About Property Tax Inequity — ProPublica
https://www.propublica.org/article/jose ... x-inequity
With questions swirling around his record as Cook County assessor, Joseph Berrios will take the unprecedented step Tuesday of defending his office before the Cook County Board after a Chicago Tribune investigation exposed widespread inequities in the county’s property tax system.

Published in June, “The Tax Divide” showed the assessor’s office overvalued low-priced homes while undervaluing high-priced ones. These disparities in assessments — known as regressivity — led to inequities in property tax bills, giving the wealthy unsanctioned tax breaks while penalizing low-income residents.

In the weeks since, mounting pressure has put the assessor on the defensive. The county’s independent inspector general opened an investigation; lawmakers at the state and local levels proposed legislation to limit the assessor’s ability to raise campaign contributions from tax attorneys; and a bill has been introduced in the General Assembly that would require greater transparency.


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Study: How Houston's Appraisal Industry Reinforces Racial Inequality
https://kinder.rice.edu/2018/03/16/stud ... inequality
Racial inequalities in homeownership have been well documented and that gap has been used to explain parallel gaps in wealth. Investigations have described mortgage discrimination and organizations, including the local chapter of the NAACP, for example, have organized education efforts to help boost homeownership among black and Hispanic families. But a new study out of Houston suggests that the benefits of homeownership are also ensnared in a discriminatory appraisal process that perpetuates racial inequality. Rather than just reflecting existing racial inequalities, the appraisal process has a hand in creating and continuing those inequalities, according to the findings.

In a study that drew on 2015 data from the Harris County Tax Appraisal District and neighborhood information about demographics, crime, school quality, parks and socioeconomic status, sociologists Junia Howell of the University of Pittsburgh and Elizabeth Korver-Glenn of the University of New Mexico found that appraised home values were guided by differences in neighborhood racial composition. This held true even after controlling for individual home quality, neighborhood location, school quality, crime, market demand, local parks and community socioeconomic status. In interviews with local appraisers, the researchers confirmed that race was a significant factor in determining home values.

"In 2015, 78 percent of Texas appraisers were men, 86 percent were white, 6 percent were Hispanic and 2 percent were black," said Howell. "Given the demographics of the state as a whole, that’s very shocking."
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Police investigate link between Bay Area shooter, racial manifesto
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2019/07 ... 595/?ur3=1
July 30 (UPI) -- Investigators say they've found white supremacist and anti-Semitic propaganda on a social media account connected to the gunman who killed three people at a Northern California festival over the weekend.

Police said Santino William Legan opened fire at a garlic festival Sunday in Gilroy, 30 miles southeast of San Jose. Two children were among the dead and a dozen others were injured.

Looking for a motive, investigators have searched Legan's home and Internet accounts, and went to a home in Nevada where he'd visited just days before the attack.
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From 1919 but still worth knowing.

Never Forget, America’s Mass Lynching: 237 Black Sharecroppers Were Murdered In Arkansas

http://www.blackwestchester.com/never-f ... -arkansas/
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/arizona-man- ... 35162.html

Arizona man learns mom's body sold to military, detonated in experiment
KGO – San Francisco KGO – San Francisco 11 hours ago

Her body was sold to the U.S. military for "blast testing," which involves strapping it to a chair before an explosive device is detonated underneath.
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Gang database made up mostly young men of color
http://www.sentinelandenterprise.com/lo ... -men-color
A summary provided by the department shows that 66% of those in its database are black, 24% are Latino and 2% are white. Black people comprise about 25% of all Boston residents, Latinos about 20% and white people more than 50%.

The racial disparity is "stark and troublesome," said Adriana Lafaille, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, which, along with other civil rights groups, sued the department in state court in November to shed light into who is listed on the database and how the information is used.

Central American youths are being wrongly listed as active gang members "based on nothing more than the clothing they are seen in and the classmates they are seen with," and that's led some to be deported, the organizations say in their lawsuit, citing the cases of three Central American youths facing deportation based largely on their status on the gang database.
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How judicial elections contribute to mass incarceration
https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/07/how ... arceration
Judges in states with more expensive and more competitive judicial elections impose longer sentences when facing re-election, according to a new study. (Public domain photo.)

In the 38 states where judges are elected, judicial races are seeing more campaign cash than ever. New research shines a light on how competitive judicial races contribute to mass incarceration.

A study by professors Christian Dippel of UCLA and Michael Poyker of Columbia University examined sentencing decisions in 10 state court systems from 1980 to 2018. North Carolina was one of three states where they found a statistically significant relationship between judicial elections and longer sentences.

On average, North Carolina judges sentenced defendants to an additional 5.4 months around the time they filed for re-election than they did at the beginning of their term. The researchers also confirmed previous studies that found a link between judicial elections and longer sentences for violent crimes in Pennsylvania and in Washington state.

The research from Dippel and Poyker also found that judges in seven states passed longer sentences for black defendants. In Georgia, for example, judges imposed an extra 2.5 months on black defendants. In Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, the average was less than two months. The disparity was around one month in Washington. Virginia was not analyzed because it doesn't provide data on defendants' race.

The relationship between harsher sentences and defendants' race was by far the strongest in Alabama, where judges sentenced black defendants on average to an additional six months of jail time.

The study confirms earlier research that demonstrated racial disparities in sentencing, some of which connected those disparities to judicial elections. For example, a 2017 dissertation by Kyung Park, now a professor at Wellesley College, revealed a relationship between racially biased sentencing and state trial court elections in Kansas. Park found that incarceration rates rise by 2.2 to 2.6 percentage points in an election year — but only for black defendants. That translates to a 10 percent increase in the likelihood of incarceration for black defendants in election years.

This research has important implications for Southern states, which have some of the highest incarceration rates as well as dramatic racial disparities in incarceration. To address these disparities, the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice reform advocacy group, recommends "adequate and regular training on the role of implicit, unchecked bias by key decision makers in the criminal justice system."
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Child Poverty Rises In Connecticut, Especially For Minority Kids
https://www.wshu.org/post/child-poverty ... ds#stream/
More Connecticut children are living in poverty than three decades ago. That’s the finding of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 30th annual Kids Count survey of child well-being in the U.S.

In the 30 years of the survey, Connecticut has found itself in the top 10 states for child well-being. But the racial disparity has widened. One in five black and Latinx children now live in high poverty areas, compared to one in 100 white children.

“The results aren’t worth celebrating today because there are clearly concerns. Concerns grown out of increasing levels of poverty, the result of generations of institutional racism that lead to inequities. In addition to losing ground overall, we continue to be a state that has different outcomes for different populations,” said Beth Bye, the state’s early childhood commissioner.
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Report: 30 Cities See Increase In Hate Crime While San Diego Remains Steady
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2019/jul/31/r ... while-san/
A new report from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University San Bernardino shows hate crime is up in 30 cities across the country.

https://csbs.csusb.edu/sites/csusb_csbs ... 1%20PM.pdf
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Phoenix race relations tinged by Southwest’s past segregation
https://ktar.com/story/2675440/phoenix- ... gregation/
PHOENIX – Three American Legion posts stand within miles of each other in central Phoenix, a curious reminder of how segregation once ruled the U.S. Southwest as well as the Deep South.

Soldiers returning after World War I in 1919 chartered one of the first posts of the U.S. veterans organization near downtown. But when black and Mexican American men returned from World War II, they opened their own posts, in their own neighborhoods farther south.

Decades later, tensions in Phoenix’s minority communities remain, spilling over this summer after video of police officers pointing guns and cursing at a black couple revived disturbing memories of the days of segregation, when black and Hispanic residents recall commonly being mistreated by police.

Minority residents, meanwhile, packed meetings at a church and City Council chambers to express distrust and resentment of police, who they complained have historically meted out harsh treatment in their neighborhoods.

“That has long been a reality for African Americans, to not be treated fairly by the police,” said Rev. Dr. Warren H. Stewart Sr., pastor of the Institutional Baptist Church in Phoenix.

“Segregation has been outlawed, but the remnants of systemic racism and discrimination remain.”

Real estate covenants barred black and Hispanic people from buying or leasing homes north of downtown Phoenix, according to Thomas Sheridan’s book, “Arizona: A History.”

As late as 1960, half of the African Americans in Phoenix lived south of downtown.

Until the 1960s, nearby Tempe was a “sundown town.” Black people could work there during the day but were encouraged to live elsewhere.

Phoenix public schools such as the all-black Booker T. Washington Elementary were segregated for decades before Arizona state courts declared the practice unconstitutional in 1953, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision regarding the desegregation of U.S. schools, Brown V. Board of Education of Topeka.

Still, Tucson took longer to integrate, and partial compliance wasn’t reached until last fall in a federal court case overseeing the desegregation of black and Hispanic students at Tucson schools that has dragged on more than 40 years.

And despite changing demographics, tensions between minority neighborhoods and the police are “huge and historical,” said Lucas-Wilson, of the local NAACP’s criminal justice committee.
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Oklahoma Victims Compensation Program Disproportionately Denies Funds for Black Victims
https://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justic ... on-program
Tiras Johnson, age 23, was unarmed when he was shot and killed in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His family was devastated by his death, and they were struggling to pay for Tiras’ funeral. Like many victims’ families, Tiras’ mother applied for financial compensation through the Oklahoma Crime Victims Compensation Act in order to cover his funeral costs, but instead received a surprising response in the mail.

The letter, addressed to Tiras’ mother, Netarsha, explained that her claim was ineligible for funds because of implied contributory conduct -- that is, that the incident “appeared to be gang-related” and “[Tiras] exercised poor judgment by choosing to be a gang member.” All compensation was denied. “We extend our condolences for the loss of your loved one,” it read.

The ACLU Analytics team analyzed data from the District Attorneys Counsel, which oversees the program, to understand if our suspicions about disparate compensation were true. The data included information about the demographics (including race), crime, claims, and claim results of each victim that applied for compensation between late 2008 and early 2019. Sadly, the results were even worse than we expected.

Controlling for type of crime, crime location, and amount of monetary compensation requested, Black victims were 1.6 times more likely to be denied funds entirely than white victims. Further, Black male victims were almost 2 times more likely than white female victims to be denied monetary compensation.

Black people were disproportionately victims of serious crimes, but especially unlikely to receive compensation. Of just over 2,300 Black victims represented in the dataset with “denied” or “awarded” judgments, over 42% were victims of homicide or shootings with intent to kill. This is compared to just 17% of the nearly 7,250 white victims that requested compensation. Black people were being shot and killed at almost 2.5X the rate of white people, yet being denied compensatory funds more often for their deaths and suffering.
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Darshan ji, I would like to recognize you with many thanks for your efforts in promulgating this thread. Great job! You have provided us with a powerful arsenal of data-points with which to confront the inbred, self-righteous rhetoric of the US government and its agencies.
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Rudradev wrote:Darshan ji, I would like to recognize you with many thanks for your efforts in promulgating this thread. Great job! You have provided us with a powerful arsenal of data-points with which to confront the inbred, self-righteous rhetoric of the US government and its agencies.
Much appreciated. Just doing the Dharmic bit the best I can do on a very constrained route.
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Larry Nassar Abused “Dozens” More Victims While the FBI Sat on Allegations for Over a Year
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/ywy ... eport-says
The FBI and the U.S. Olympic Committee sat on allegations for over a year that could have kept Larry Nassar from abusing more young victims, according to a new congressional report.

The scathing report, spearheaded by Sens. Richard Blumenthal, Jerry Moran and other members of a Senate Commerce subcommittee, says the FBI barely acted on evidence of the sports doctor’s sexual misconduct, and further accuses Michigan State University, where Nassar saw patients, USA Gymnastics, and the U.S. Olympic Committee of failing to act in defense of Nassar’s victims.

Nassar was far from a “lone wolf,” Blumenthal told NBC on Tuesday. "He was enabled by others, and if they lied about it and if they obstructed the investigation, if they destroyed documents, then they should be held accountable." The senator described it as a cover-up, perhaps not criminal but at least "in spirit."

Even though the FBI knew about the allegations, Nassar continued to see patients at MSU until Aug. 20, 2016. He only stopped working when former gymnast Rachael Denhollander filed a complaint against him a day earlier.

The FBI helped USA Gymnastics hide the truth about Nassar, according to the report, when Steve Penny, the then-head of USAG, “expressed to the FBI his desire to ‘body-slam’ reporters investigating the Nassar situation” on Sept. 7, 2016. In 2018, Penny was arrested for tampering with evidence that would have assisted the investigation into Nassar.
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'Hands Up, Don't Shoot' Examines What Led To Ferguson And Baltimore Protests
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/01/74548465 ... on-t-shoot
If the past five or so years have taught America anything about policing, it's that a lack of trust between police and communities of color is an ongoing problem. But why?

In her tightly focused and morally important book, Hands Up, Don't Shoot, Jennifer E. Cobbina, associate professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University, analyzes how the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray at the hands of police resulted in sustained protests in Ferguson, Mo., and in Baltimore — and how we got there.

She begins with the historically unjust, power-imbalanced relationship African Americans have had with the police, writing that the "relationship between Blacks and law enforcement has been contentious throughout American history ... Faced with the threat of slave insurrection and the chronic problem of slaves fleeing captivity, many state legislatures in the South in the 1700s passed restrictive laws controlling and regulating the movement of slaves through what was known as 'slave patrol.' "

She goes on to note that after slavery, during Reconstruction, numerous Southern states moved to pass what were known as "Black Codes," which were "criminal laws that created new offenses, such as 'loitering' and 'vagrancy,' punishable by fines, imprisonment, and forced labor for up to one year ... Black Codes opened up a market for convict leasing, in which people in prison were contracted out as laborers to the highest private bidder for state profit." Chillingly, she concludes that "while Black people were rarely imprisoned during the era of slavery, criminalization had become the resolution for dealing with freed Blacks."

Fast-forward from Reconstruction to our era of mass incarceration today — and problems of policing and justice pertaining to race persist. Cobbina chooses to focus on Ferguson and Baltimore as representative cases for good reason: Both are African American-majority cities with high poverty and histories of racial disparity, and both experienced high-profile deaths of African Americans involving police that catalyzed large-scale protests. And protesters had a lot to protest about. In reports from 2015 and 2016 respectively, the Department of Justice found significant evidence of racial bias in policing in Ferguson and, in Baltimore, policing that stood in violation of federal anti-discrimination law and the Constitution.

When Michael Brown in Ferguson and Freddie Gray in Baltimore died at the hands of the police, each community decided it was time to act. Tremaine, a black Baltimore protester, put it simply: "It is our duty. This is our duty, I believe that if someone — if you, for instance, committed a crime, and I saw it and did nothing I am worse than you."

According to Cobbina's research (for the book, she drew from interviews of nearly 200 residents of Ferguson and Baltimore within two months of the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray), among Ferguson protesters "63 percent reported personal and 76 percent reported vicarious experiences with police that were negative in nature prior to Brown's death."

In Baltimore, many residents and protesters were angered by what they saw as the inhumane treatment that led to Gray's death. And, like in Ferguson, prior negative experience with police led protesters out into the streets there, too.

After police violence in Ferguson and Baltimore, communities protested in anger and defiance. And that anger was just the beginning; the end will only come when black lives are consistently treated as equal in value to white lives in the eyes of the law. There's a lot of history to face before America gets there, but the protests in Ferguson and Baltimore set the country further on the way.
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Measure of Hate - Part I
https://www.kplctv.com/video/2019/08/02 ... te-part-i/
at least 65 high-profile hate crime cases the FBI investigated never ended up in the federal database the agency itself maintains. The question is: Why not? Investigate TV analyzes 10 years of the Justice Department's news releases about hate crimes it prosecuted.

Measure of Hate - Part II
https://www.kplctv.com/video/2019/08/02 ... e-part-ii/
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'Red, white, and blue version of ISIS’ - Columbus temple leaders respond after vandalism from alleged hate group
https://www.wtvm.com/2019/07/31/red-whi ... ate-group/


COLUMBUS, Ga. (WTVM) - A synagogue in Columbus is banding together in the face of anti-semitism this week.

According to authorities, Temple Israel, located on Wildwood Avenue, was vandalized with hate flyers from an alleged white supremacy group on Tuesday morning.

Leaders of the Temple say that while the vandalism is frustrating, it is the messages the posters are sending that is what has really upset them.

“The posters were from a white supremacist group. They were messages of hate about white supremacy. There was a message implying that Jews are Communist, which is a very old anti-Semitic trope and that has made us quite angry,” said Rabbi Beth Schwartz.

____________________________

Neo-Nazi SWATters Target Dozens of Journalists https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/07/neo ... urnalists/
Nearly three dozen journalists at a broad range of major publications have been targeted by a far-right group that maintains a Deep Web database listing the personal information of people who threaten their views. This group specializes in encouraging others to harass those targeted by their ire, and has claimed responsibility for dozens of bomb threats and “swatting” incidents, where police are tricked into visiting potentially deadly force on the target’s address.
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Woman Said to Show Her Entire Ass During a Traffic Stop Lives to Tell the Tale; Guess on Which Side of the Racial Divide She Resides?
https://www.theroot.com/woman-said-to-s ... 1836902283
woman in Oklahoma repeatedly refused being given a traffic ticket, authorities say, apparently going so far as to kick the cop and get herself shocked with a Taser.

Given the tragic ending of so many police encounters in this nation (read: Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, and Alton Sterling), you can probably guess how this story turned out.

And you’d be wrong.

According to NBC News, Debra Hamil, 65, is alive and well (well, as well as anyone can be when they’re facing felony charges) after police in Cashion, Okla., said they had to manhandle, stun-gun, and place her under arrest after she steadfastly refused to accept a traffic ticket for having a broken tail light.

And if you haven’t guessed already, Hamil is a white woman. A factor that led many online to posit that if she had not been, frankly, she would have likely been a “was.”

As Complex explains:

Naturally, the cop’s response to Hamil’s behavior—a taser followed by a brief verbal exchange—prompted many online to highlight what the police response would have been should she not have been white.

Among responses from the Twitterverse:

Police video released of the incident shows Hamil apparently refusing to sign off on an $80 ticket the officer has written over the tail light, stating, per NBC News: “I don’t think that I deserve to pay $80 for something that is fixable and I can fix it.”

That doesn’t go over well, and the cop says she’s under arrest.

That appears to lead to more words from Hamil (“you are full of shit”; “you’re not placing me under arrest”; “shut up”), as revealed by the video footage before the officer finally has had enough of her shit her.

She tries to take off in her vehicle, leading to a short police chase, before video footage shows the officer catching up with her and pulling her from the car. When she continues to put up a fight, the police video shows the officer using his Taser on her, all while she continues kicking him.

Wow. All Philando Castile had to do to merit being cut down in a hail of bullets by a cop during a traffic stop was to try to show his license and registration.

But as for Hamil, she has the privilege of still being alive to tell the tale, a tale that now includes, according to NBC News, a felony charge of assault on a police officer and a misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest.

Go figure.
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NYPD Suspends Officer Who Killed Eric Garner After Judge Recommends He Should be Fired
https://www.theroot.com/nypd-suspends-o ... 1836919523
A New York administrative judge has found, like those of us with working eyes, that Daniel Pantaleo—the New York City police officer who used a banned chokehold when arresting Eric Garner for the domestic terrorist crime of selling loose cigarettes—should be fired.

According to NBC News, after the judge’s recommendation, the NYPD suspended Pantaleo Friday, but ultimately, the police commissioner will decide if Pantaleo will lose his job. That decision is expected later this month.

“This has been a long battle. Five years too long. And finally, someone has said this cop has done something wrong,” Garner’s daughter, Emerald Garner Snipes, said at a news conference following news of the recommendation, NBC News reports.

Pantaleo was the officer seen in cellphone footage in July 2014 with his arm around Garner’s neck, as the unarmed Staten Island man struggled to breathe. His last words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for the Movement for Black Lives.
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Racism has devastating effects on children’s health, pediatricians warn
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/r ... de493404c1
Scientists have documented health disparities among races in the United States for decades. African Americans are more likely than whites to die of diabetes and have a higher prevalence of hypertension and heart disease. Black children are four times as likely to be admitted to the hospital for asthma.

Environmental factors such as income levels, education, exposure to pollution and access to high-quality health care explain some of the differences. But researchers have become increasingly certain that racism and discrimination play a role, as well.

Exposure to racism in adults has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, depression and other ailments.

And researchers have increasingly identified dangers racism presents to the development of babies and children. Studies have found lower birth weights in babies born to African American mothers who experience discrimination. A recent analysis found an increased risk of premature birth among Latina women following Trump’s election, part of a pattern of poorer health outcomes among Latinos during his administration. Other recent studies have found an increased risk of depression, obesity and greater susceptibility to sickness among children who are exposed to racism. Researchers have linked racism experienced by children to worsened sleep, higher rates of doctor visits and lower self-esteem.

One of the main mechanisms responsible for those effects, researchers say, is the way prolonged stress wears away at people’s bodies. Experiences of discrimination can flood the body with stress hormones such as cortisol — a chemical that readies the body to fight or flee. Studies have show that even the anticipation of discrimination can trigger the stress response. Over time, stress hormones can lead to inflammatory reactions that make the body more susceptible to chronic diseases.

There are other ways discrimination can affect children’s health. The American Academy of Pediatrics report points out structural problems such as the disproportionate number of minority youths incarcerated by the juvenile justice system, disparities in access to health care, food insecurity and poverty.

The new report issued by AAP to its 67,000 members includes an extensive list of recommendations. It advises pediatricians to take racism into account in their clinical practices — to be prepared to counsel families on their exposure to racism and to make their clinics as welcoming to all groups as possible. It also calls for pediatricians to examine their own biases and address them.

The report calls racism “a socially transmitted disease passed down through generations, leading to the inequities observed in our population today.” And, it says, “Pediatricians are uniquely positioned to both prevent and mitigate the consequences of racism as a key and trusted source of support for pediatric patients and their families.”
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How Should Unaccompanied Minors in Immigration Detention Be Protected From Coercive Medical Practices?
https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ar ... es/2019-07
Abstract

Current policies and ongoing border crossings have increased the number of unaccompanied minors and the length of time they spend in detention. The US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement and its detention facilities currently determine what constitutes appropriate medical care for unaccompanied minors in immigration detention. This care might not be in a child’s best interest. In contrast, juvenile detention and human subject research regulations rely on child advocates and court orders to protect children from coercion and safeguard a child’s best interest. It is urgent that the medical community advocate for these same safeguards to be put in place for the unaccompanied minors in immigration detention.

Immigrant Detention

From October 2017 through September 2018, more than 50 000 unaccompanied minors were detained while attempting to enter the United States at the border with Mexico,1 and more are arriving every day. Most are fleeing violence in their home countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala in the hopes of reuniting with family members and applying for asylum in the United States. Once in detention, these children are held for an average of 61 days before being released to local sponsors as they wait for their chance to claim legal status in immigration court.2-5 With ongoing border crossings, stringent policies (recently eased) for the vetting of potential child sponsors, as well as the growing backlog in the immigration court system, the number of children and length of time they are held in detention is only likely to increase over the coming months and years. If the Flores Settlement Agreement6—the result of a class action lawsuit that outlined standards for the detention and release of unaccompanied minors in US custody—is replaced with new regulations proposed by the current administration,7 it would, as Matlow and Reicherter note, “permit the detention of noncitizen children and their families for indefinite periods in facilities without appropriate and independent monitoring,”8 thus exacerbating the problem.
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Intense Segregation Is Returning to Boston's Public Schools, Report Finds
https://www.theroot.com/intense-segrega ... 1828136169
Boston is the latest city that is facing resegregation in its school system, an issue that many education advocates and experts say can intensify stark racial and economic divisions in the city.

A new report from the Boston Globe details the city’s problems, finding that nearly 60 percent of Boston’s schools are “intensely segregated”—meaning students of color (mostly black and Latinx) make up at least 90 percent of seats. Twenty years ago, that number was 42 percent, the Globe reports.

A Northeastern University report also attributed the push to separate children by race on the computer system that assigns students to schools, saying its algorithm propelled school segregation and left black and Latinx students shut out of the city’s top-performing schools, siloing them into under-resourced, low-performing ones.

In tandem with intensifying segregation, the Globe reported that there were more white-dominant schools than before; in the same 20-year time period, the number of majority white city schools went from two to five (most white children living in Boston bypass city schools altogether, attending private schools instead). The paper also noted that many of the majority-black and brown schools were underperforming.

Will Stancil writes:

Closures are about three times as common among segregated schools, and new schools account for a substantial share of current segregation. In 2016, 38 percent of all segregated schools had opened within the last two decades, compared to 20 percent of predominantly white and integrated schools. 

And apparent from reinforcing racial castes, Stancil says, educational segregation reinforces economic castes.

This leaves many parents around the country, not just in Boston, feeling as though securing a good education for their children is one big crap shoot—and that city officials and educational administrators aren’t doing enough to redress the problem of equitable, affordable education.

As one parent told the Globe, “it is almost as if the city is turning its back on our kids.”
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Re: United States - Human Rights Monitor

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How Gentrification and Displacement are Remaking Boston – AAIHS
https://www.aaihs.org/how-gentrificatio ... -boston-2/
Ask anyone in Boston, “what’s going on in Roxbury?” and the word you’re most likely to hear is gentrification. Ask that same question in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Roxbury, and the word you’re probably going to hear is displacement. These two responses both say something important about what’s happening in Boston as well as in other cities across the nation.

According to a study by the Boston Federal Reserve Bank, the median income for Black and Brown families living in the Greater Roxbury area is $30,000. The median net worth of white households in Boston stands at $247,000. And the median net worth for Black households is just $8.00–yes, eight dollars–and $28.60 for Latino households.

The sorrow and sadness that this hyper-gentrification has caused for working people who have lived in these neighborhoods, sometimes for their entire lives, has become a veritable “Trail of Tears” for Black and Brown Americans in Boston—one that has marked the legacy of Black Bostonians ever since their slow sojourn from the North slope of Beacon Hill in the 19th century.
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Re: United States - Human Rights Monitor

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The ghettos of Lincoln - National Motorists Association
https://www.motorists.org/blog/the-ghettos-of-lincoln/
Lincoln is one of the richest towns in Massachusetts but it has a ghetto too.

As in some other states, towns here are legally required to permit affordable housing. Most residents don’t want anybody moving in, and especially those people. What to do?

A compromise was reached. The dirty masses would be allowed to live at the edge of town but they would not be allowed to drive into town. A prohibition on turning right out of their driveway would leave them connected only to the highway. In Newton they called it a “gated community” ordinance. It protected an enclave of richer folks from poorer folks on the main street. In Lincoln it’s the reverse, a ghetto which the poor aren’t allowed to leave.

Buried in all the roadside spam you can find clues about which residents are too selfish to be allowed to live in our society. No right turn is the most common around here. There can be good reasons to ban left turns. A no right turn sign, unless it’s onto a one way street, usually means residents want a private street at public expense. Keep an eye out as you drive around Massachusetts. Lots of towns do it. Cambridge has a protected neighborhood near Alewife. Belmont is full of no right turn restrictions. Somerville openly posts streets for residents only. Farther west, Brookfield posted a fake bridge closed sign.
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Re: United States - Human Rights Monitor

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Texas Lt. Gov. tells Antifa to 'stay out' of El Paso after Walmart shooting
https://www.foxnews.com/media/texas-lt- ... t-shooting
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick explicitly warned the left-wing group Antifa against coming to the state following Saturday's mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart.

The shooting came 29 days before a scheduled visit from Antifa, which planned to conduct a "Border Resistance" militancy training tour.

"Stay out of El Paso," Patrick told Antifa during an appearance Fox News. He noted that while the group wasn't usually welcome in Texas, they especially weren't welcome after the shooting.
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Re: United States - Human Rights Monitor

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Emergency Medical Responders Confront Racial Bias
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-sho ... acial-bias
A recent study out of Oregon suggests emergency medical responders — EMTs and paramedics — may be treating minority patients differently from the way they treat white patients.

Specifically, the scientists found that black patients in their study were 40 percent less likely to get pain medication than their white peers.

Leslie Gregory, a Portland physician assistant, asks, "How can a person of color not disrespect a system that is constantly studying and talking about these disparities, but does nothing to fix it?" She wants the CDC to declare racism a threat to public health.

The study looked at 104,000 medical charts of ambulance patients between 2015 and 2017. It found minority patients were less likely to receive morphine and other pain medication compared with white patients — regardless of socioeconomic factors, such as health insurance status.

Research has also found African-Americans more likely to be deeply distrustful of the medical community, and that might play a role in diminished care, too. Such distrust is understandable and goes back generations, says Gregory.

"How can a person of color not disrespect a system that is constantly studying and talking about these disparities, but does nothing to fix it?" she asks.

Kennel says false stereotypes about race-based differences in physiology that date to slavery also play a role in health care disparities. For example, despite a lack of any supporting science, some medical professionals still think the blood of African-Americans coagulates faster, Kennel says, citing a recent study of medical students at the University of Virginia.

Another question in the survey asked the students whether they thought African-Americans have fewer pain receptors than whites. "An uncomfortably large percentage of medical students said, 'Yes, that's true,' " says Kennel.

On top of that, he says, EMTs and paramedics often work in time-pressured situations, where they are limited to ambiguous clinical information and scarce resources. "In these situations, providers are much more likely to default to making decisions [based] on stereotypes," he says.

Disparities in health care are well-documented. Whites tend to get better care and experience better outcomes, whether they're in a doctor's office or the ER. But before Kennel's study, nobody knew whether the same was true in the back of an ambulance.

And they nearly didn't get to know, because the research required ambulance companies to release highly sensitive data.
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Re: United States - Human Rights Monitor

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Woman could face fines for billboards decrying sex abuse law
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/wom ... w-64691349
New York ethics officials are threatening to fine a woman for unregistered lobbying after she rented billboards to criticize state laws on molestation and share her own story of abuse.

Kat Sullivan, a nurse who says she was assaulted by a teacher at a private school in upstate New York two decades ago, was part of the successful push that got lawmakers in Albany to relax the statute of limitations on molestation cases earlier this year.

Last year, as part of the effort, she rented three billboards to criticize the old law, which contained some of the nation's tightest limits on the timing of molestation charges or lawsuits. She got the idea from the film "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri," in which a woman uses billboards to seek justice for her daughter's murder.

Sullivan also set up a website and hired a pilot to fly a plane around Albany carrying a banner supporting the legislation.

Then she received a letter from state ethics officials saying she could be fined for violating a law requiring individuals to register as lobbyists if they spend more than $5,000 on efforts to influence the Legislature.

"They're talking about fining me up to $75,000," Sullivan, who has refused to agree to the commission's terms, said Wednesday. "This is intentional overreach. They're targeting citizens. They're worried about citizens having access to equal representation in government."

The conflict, first reported in The Times Union of Albany, highlights the increasingly blurred lines between paid lobbying and political advocacy by individuals or grassroots groups trying to be heard in a state Capitol known for insiders, cronyism and backroom dealing.

The Child Victims Act passed in January following years of efforts by abuse victims and their advocates.

Under the new law, victims have until age 55 to file civil lawsuits and may seek criminal charges until they turn 28, as opposed to 23 under the old statute. The act also creates a one-year window for past victims to file civil suits that had been barred by the old statute of limitations. That window opens Aug. 14.

Powerful institutions including the Catholic Church had long opposed the act. Yet Sullivan noted that Cardinal Timothy Dolan isn't a registered lobbyist even though he spoke out against the bill.
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Re: United States - Human Rights Monitor

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9 dead, 27 injured in a shooting in Dayton, Ohio
https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/08/04/us/day ... index.html
The gunman in Sunday's mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, has been identified as Connor Betts, 24, according to local and federal law enforcement sources.
The FBI and local law enforcement have served a search warrant at the shooter's family home in Bellbrook, Ohio.

Connor Betts: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know
https://heavy.com/news/2019/08/connor-betts/
darshan
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Re: United States - Human Rights Monitor

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Don’t want to be like whites and not acknowledge that blacks get shot and die everyday in the US and nothing is being done to stop it like deploying US army in Chicago instead of for the protection of Saudi interests.



Tracking Chicago homicide victims
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/bre ... story.html
In Chicago, 293 people have been killed this year. That is 33 fewer than 2018.

At Least 3 Killed, 37 Wounded In Weekend Shootings Across Chicago
https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2019/08/04 ... chicago-2/
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Re: United States - Human Rights Monitor

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Dying of Whiteness
State policies shaped by white supremacy increase mortality rates in much the same way as other manmade health risks, such as pollution.

In early 2016 I met Trevor, a forty-one-year-old uninsured Tennessean ...[had] an inflamed liver, the consequence of “years of hard partying” and the damaging effects of hepatitis C...

Debates raged in Tennessee around the same time about the state’s participation in the Affordable Care Act and the related expansion of Medicaid coverage. Had Trevor lived a thirty-nine-minute drive away in neighboring Kentucky, he might have topped the list of candidates for expensive medications called polymerase inhibitors, a lifesaving liver transplant, or other forms of treatment and support. Kentucky adopted the ACA and began the expansion in 2013, while Tennessee’s legislature repeatedly blocked Obama-era health care reforms.

Even on death’s doorstep, Trevor was not angry. In fact, he staunchly supported the stance promoted by his elected officials. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” he told me. “I would rather die.” When I asked him why he felt this way even as he faced severe illness, he explained: “We don’t need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.:eek:

At the most basic level, Trevor died of the toxic effects of liver damage caused by hepatitis C. Yet Trevor’s deteriorating condition resulted also from the toxic effects of dogma. Dogma that told him that governmental assistance in any form was evil and not to be trusted, even when the assistance came in the form of federal contracts with private health insurance or pharmaceutical companies, or from expanded communal safety nets. Dogma that, as he made abundantly clear, aligned with beliefs about a racial hierarchy that overtly and implicitly aimed to keep white Americans hovering above Mexicans, welfare queens, and nonwhite others. Dogma suggesting to Trevor that minority groups received lavish benefits from the state, even though he himself lived and died on a low-income budget with state assistance. Trevor voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in this hierarchy, rather than participate in a system that might put him on the same plane as immigrants or racial minorities.

...White America’s investment in maintaining an imagined place atop a racial hierarchy harms the aggregate well-being of U.S. whites as a demographic group, thereby making whiteness itself a negative health indicator...
The author is a medical professional who has written a book on the health effects of these racist based political decisions:
Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland

Quoting one of the reviews which summarizes the three main case studies the author focuses on:
This book provides three case studies of states whose populist right-wing politics actually caused a quantifiable increase in death among their white populations. Missouri massively relaxed its gun laws, leading to a dramatic increase in white male suicide. Kansas slashed taxes and therefore school funding, and within two years the high school dropout rate exploded (high school dropouts have lower life expectancy). Tennessee refused to expand Medicaid, and yes, white people died as a result (the author speaks to a white man literally dying a slow painful death from Hep C, who would have been treated had he moved 39 MINUTES away to Kentucky and signed up for Medicaid. But he literally didn't want "his money" going to "welfare queens."
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Re: United States - Human Rights Monitor

Post by Prem Kumar »

Awesome job Darshan & others! You are doing what the GOI should've been doing all along. The research is phenomenal!
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Re: United States - Human Rights Monitor

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Prem Kumar wrote:Awesome job Darshan & others! You are doing what the GOI should've been doing all along. The research is phenomenal!
Appreciate it.
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Re: United States - Human Rights Monitor

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Personal Foul: Exploring the Exploitation of African-American Male Athletes at Predominantly White Institutions
Christina Kanu
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/14fd/b ... 3d67f0.pdf
Exploitation of African-American male athletes is one of the results of integrating collegiate sports. Predominately White Institutions’ infatuation with the athletic prowess of Black men has become a societal norm. Statistically speaking, African-American student-athletes make up a majority of these revenue-generating athletic teams. Universities have shown that they are willing to achieve fame by any means necessary, even at the academic exploitation of their Black student athletes. Since integration there have been multiple cases of academic malfeasance of student athletes. Select universities want to utilize the utility of Black male bodies but are not necessarily interested in expanding their minds. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) will be used as an example in this study. Since the 1960s, scholars have assessed this growing problem within collegiate sports. This study is significant as it exposes the exploitation of Black male collegiate athletes. It also will add to previous research and can assist universities across the country that are committed to solving the dilemma of Black athletic exploitation and reforming this oppressive model.


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A Study of Black Male Student Athletes (BSAS) on White Campuses
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/434969 ... b_contents
The types of exploitation we found and analyzed in this study existed within NCAA governing body and white power structure, whereby all rules and regulations were officially applied to white and black student athletes alike, despite the fact that well over one-half of football and basketball players in NCAA Division I colleges and universities were black and a majority of them were from low socioeconomic family background. Our study findings as well as those in the sports research literature indicate that many BSAs tend to be the victims of race and class exploitation of different kinds: (l) The commercialization and overemphasis of college sports; (2) Racial and class stereotyping and profiling practices; (3) Economic Exploitation; (4) Academic exploitation; (5) Campus Social Isolation; and, (6) Exploitative work place. This study examines each of these types in detail.


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Stereotypes, Control, Hyper‐Surveillance, and Disposability of NCAA Division I Black Male Athletes
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs ... 2/ss.20268
This chapter uses critical race theory as an interpretive framework to explain and operationalize the role of race and racism in the lived experiences and challenges of Division I Black male athletes, and specifically in relation to engagement and achievement at Predominantly White Institutions.


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Smith, D. (2015). When Race, Religion, and Sport Collide.
https://journals.shareok.org/jheai/arti ... ad/992/933
Dr. Darron Smith’s book, When Race, Religion, and Sport Collide makes the connection between historical teachings of Christianity, more specifically Mormonism, and the contemporary realities of the Black male student-athlete. This exploration is heavily informed by Feagin’s (2009) theory of racial framing, which is a generic meaning system that rationalizes the system of material of oppression. Since Smith is Black, Mormon although not practicing, and graduated with his doctorate from Brigham Young University (BYU), his analysis is informed by personal experience, as well as theoretical research. This insider examination of the ways religious universities exploit Black athletes allows the secular individual to understand how religion is used disproportionally against non-religious student-athletes but ultimately exploits most student-athletes similarly. The book is divided into eight chapters and begins by making the connection between sports and the frames by which society sees and stereotypes the Black body, then ushers the reader through an in-depth historic contextual understanding of how Blacks are viewed in the Mormon Church. The final chapters expound on the idea of free education, whether student-athletes obtain an education at all, and just how free it is. Because Smith is both a Ph.D. and a physician assistant, links between injuries incurred throughout student- athletes’ free education, the consequences of social isolation for Black males on predominately white institutions (PWI) and the detrimental effects of colorblindness are solidified by cross-referencing medical studies, statistical data on student-athletes, and a sociological understanding of race, religion, and sports.
What differentiates BYU from most other PWIs and their exploitation of Black student-athletes is that the doctrines of Mormonism are interpreted and applied to the BYU honor code. Most parents see church-sponsored post-secondary private education as somehow safer for their children than non-religious public schools. Mormons believe they have a universal mission to proselytize and convert all people to their faith. Black males, once they arrive at BYU, are at a considerable disadvantage as they are not members of the dominant faith, yet they will be judged and disciplined by those same standards. It does not seem fair to hold these men to a standard created from Mormon theology.


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Hegemony in American Capitalism: The Exploitation of Race and Socioeconomic Status in Football
White, Kristopher C
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/pg_10?0::NO:10 ... ract-files
The purpose of this study was to find out whether or not black NFL players attend higher quality schools than black students in general regarding financial status, and the same for white NFL players. The other rather important purpose of this paper was to analyze whether or not there were any significant differences in socioeconomic backgrounds and race between the players and their owners, general managers, and coaches through the demographics of their respective high schools. To accomplish this, I used the method of `perceived race’ to match with the individual players, NFL owners, general managers, and head coaches and then matched that with NCES data on their high schools. The results revealed white NFL players on average go to high schools that are slightly more financially advantaged than white students in general but are significantly more financially advantaged than black NFL players and black students in general. Furthermore, black NFL players go to slightly more advantaged high schools than black students in general and overall NFL players go to schools that are more disadvantaged than students in general. Also, NFL owners, general managers, and head coaches on average went to high schools that are more white and financially advantaged than NFL players. The theoretical base this paper uses to analyze the systematic exploitation in our American economy comes from a Marxist perspective of capitalism.
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Re: United States - Human Rights Monitor

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Caste, Economy, and Violence
Allison Davis
American Journal of Sociology 1945 51:1, 7-15
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/a ... 086/219708
Caste in the Deep South integrates into one system all aspects of white-Negro behavior: social, sexual, economic, political, educational, religious, legal, associational, and recreational. The only institution which is not completely organized on caste lines is the economic. Whenever Negroes as a group achieve economic mobility, they meet with severe punishment from the whites. Thus conflict and violence indicate that Negroes are beginning to compete more effectively with whites.

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Foner, Laura. “The Free People of Color in Louisiana and St. Domingue: A Comparative Portrait of Two Three-Caste Slave Societies.” Journal of Social History, vol. 3, no. 4, 1970, pp. 406–430. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3786302.

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The Color Complex: Intraracial Discrimination in the Workplace
Turner, Ronald. Labor Law Journal; Chicago Vol. 46, Iss. 11, (Nov 1, 1995): 678.
https://search.proquest.com/openview/6b ... bl=1816463

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“If You're Light You're Alright”: Light Skin Color as Social Capital for Women of Color
MARGARET L. HUNTER
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10 ... 0222104895
This article uses two national survey data sets to analyze the effects of skin color on life outcomes for African American and Mexican American women. Using a historical framework of European colonialism and slavery, this article explains how skin color hierarchies were established and are maintained. The concept of social capital is used to explain how beauty, defined through light skin, works as capital and as a stratifying agent for women on the dimensions of education, income, and spousal status. The analysis shows that light skin predicts higher educational attainment for both groups of women. Light skin directly predicts higher personal earnings for African American women and indirectly affects personal earnings for Mexican American women. Light skin predicts higher spousal status for African American women but not for Mexican American women.
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Arrested for Shoplifting and Dead 2 Days Later
https://theappeal.org/kentrell-hurst-ne ... ays-later/
On May 25, 2018, Kentrell Hurst allegedly shoplifted $56.63 worth of items from a New Orleans grocery store. After the police arrested her, they ran her name and found she was wanted for two municipal tickets: theft of $37.43 and battery. Her court records show she had failed to pay $125 in fines related to the theft and $125 related to the battery. Hurst, 36, was arrested and brought to the Orleans Parish Prison. She died two days later.

Hurst struggled with an addiction to opioids, according to the suit. Her court records include a history of municipal tickets and traffic violations, which resulted in more than $6,000 in fines over the course of 11 cases—all but one for $15 remained unpaid. About a month before her arrest, she had testified at the trial of a man accused of raping, beating, and choking her in 2016, according to local news reports. He was convicted of kidnapping, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the rape charge.

Hurst’s bond for the shoplifting arrest was set at $1,500 and her arraignment was scheduled for May 29, according to court records.

During her brief incarceration, she reported to medical staff and deputies that she was vomiting, nauseous, and suffering from severe abdominal pain, the suit claims. But her vitals were not monitored and she was not taken to the hospital—neglect that led to her death, according to the suit.

Hurst’s case and the thousands of dollars of fines she incurred illustrate the city courts’ economic exploitation of Black residents, according to Snowden. As of June 10, the jail has 1,200 residents; about 80 percent of those are Black men, and about 7 percent are Black women.

In 2017, 8 out of 10 people in New Orleans charged with a felony who were incarcerated for more than two days because they couldn’t pay bail were Black, according to a report Vera released today on the need to abolish money bail and conviction fees. Eliminating money bail would reduce the city’s jail population by 304 to 687 people, according to the report.

“The criminal legal system is designed in New Orleans to really be focused on the extraction of wealth from poor Black and brown people,” said Snowden.

Last August, in response to a class action lawsuit, federal judge Sarah Vance declared that it was unconstitutional for New Orleans criminal court judges to jail people for failing to pay fines without inquiring about their ability to pay. She also found that judges had an inherent conflict of interest in making this determination because the money collected from defendants can go into the judicial expense fund, which covers courthouse related costs.
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Who Really Makes Money Off of Bail Bonds?
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/incomejails.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/ar ... ds/526542/
The deaths of Sandra Bland, Jeffrey Pendleton, and Kalief Browder—all of whom were black and remained unable to post bail after being arrested—have publicized how so many Americans are unable to get out of jail because of bail requirements. And yet, despite the well-documented inequalities and flaws in the system, and the increasing pressure to change it, “money bail,” as the practice is called, remains the norm in the American legal system, propping up a thriving for-profit bail-bonds industry.

It’s no wonder that so many low-income people awaiting trial have to turn to a bail-bonds operation. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit, black men and women ages 23 to 39 who were being held in local jails had median earnings of between $568 and $900 the month prior to their arrest. The median bail for a felony arrest, meanwhile, is $10,000, a sum most arrested individuals and their families would simply be unable to pay. On top of that, black defendants between the ages of 18 and 29 years old were asked to pay, on average, higher sums for bail and were less likely to be released on their own recognizance, meaning no bail payment was required.

A new report from the nonprofit Color of Change and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sheds further light on the country’s bail system. The report finds that around 70 percent of those currently in jail have yet to be convicted of a crime. Not unrelated: Between 1990 and 2009, the share of people arrested who were required to post money bail grew from 37 percent to 61 percent, according to the report.

This means that families who can’t afford bail face a difficult choice: either leave a loved one behind bars—something that’s been shown to threaten their physical and mental health, and increase the likelihood of conviction—or enter into financial agreements with bail-bonds corporations. Given that these are the usual choices, it’s no surprise that the share of releases that depended on for-profit bail bonds outfits has climbed along with the share of arrests requiring money bail for release, growing to 49 percent in 2009 from only 24 percent in 1990.

The sums that families lose in the for-profit bail system is striking. Over a five year period just in the state of Maryland, families of people who were accused of crimes and went on to be cleared of any wrongdoing parted with around $75 million in non-refundable bail-bond payments, according to the report. Looking at discrepancies by race makes the findings even bleaker. In 2015, fewer than 5,000 families in New Orleans together paid $4.7 million in non-refundable premiums, and black families paid 84 percent of bail premiums and fees city-wide that year.

The study also illuminates the structure of the bail-bond industry, and where it gets its capital. For-profit bail businesses are, it should be noted, not part of the country’s legal apparatus. (In fact, the only two countries that allow companies to operate for-profit bail operations are the United States and the Philippines.) And it’s not just bondsmen who are making money off of bail bonds. While bail-bond services are often associated with the myriad small storefronts that can be found in poor communities across the country, many of them, the report finds, are actually run by large global insurance companies.



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When Bail Feels Less Like Freedom, More Like Extortion
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/us/b ... rtion.html
As commercial bail has grown into a $2 billion industry, bond agents have become the payday lenders of the criminal justice world, offering quick relief to desperate customers at high prices. When clients like Mr. Egana cannot afford to pay the bond company’s fee to get them out, bond agents simply loan them the money, allowing them to go on a payment plan.

But bondsmen have extraordinary powers that most lenders do not. They are supposed to return their clients to jail if they skip court or do something illegal. But some states give them broad latitude to arrest their clients for any reason — or none at all. A credit card company cannot jail someone for missing a payment. A bondsman, in many instances, can.

Using that leverage, bond agents can charge steep fees, some of which are illegal, with impunity, according to interviews and a review of court records and complaint data. They can also go far beyond the demands of other creditors by requiring their clients to check in regularly, keep a curfew, allow searches of their car or home at any time, and open their medical, Social Security and phone records to inspection.

Other judges see some bondsmen as trampling the rights of defendants. One judge in Lafayette, La., Jules Edwards III, held in contempt two bondsmen who were brothers for intercepting a defendant on his way to court and sending him, instead, to jail.

The judge said the commercial bail industry had put its financial interests above justice and public safety. “If he’s not in compliance with the contract, sue him. How do you get to snatch his body and hold him hostage?” Judge Edwards said in a phone interview.

Bond companies fall into a sort of regulatory gulf between criminal courts and state insurance departments, which are supposed to regulate them but seldom impose sanctions. With rare exception, defense lawyers and prosecutors are too busy with their caseloads to keep bond companies in line. Further complicating things, it is often unclear whether consumer protection laws apply, and insurance departments say they lack the resources to investigate complaints.

The use of bail bonds has come under attack in recent years because it keeps the poorest, rather than the most dangerous, defendants behind bars.

Together, the surety companies and the bail bond agents collect about $2 billion a year in revenue, according to an analysis by Color of Change, a nonprofit focused on racial justice, and the American Civil Liberties Union. “Bail insurers have shaped the entire industry, as well as the laws they operate under, to safeguard their profits at the expense of people’s lives,” said Rashad Robinson, the executive director of Color of Change.

While most insurance companies expect losses of up to 50 percent, one surety company, Continental Heritage of Florida, had no losses in its bail division for almost two decades. And an industry giant, AIA Bail Bond Insurance Company, said it underwrote more than $800 million in bonds in 2016. Its losses: zero.



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Ambiguous Texas Shoplifting Laws May Be Applied Inconsistently By Police
by Anna Martinez| Fri, Dec 7, 2018
https://www.smu.edu/cox/Learning-Cultur ... 1206_Braun
Dallas, TX—For more than three years, ambiguous wording in the Texas Penal Code led to inconsistent treatment of black and white arrestees for low-value shoplifting, according to a new study by a professor at Southern Methodist University.

The new study estimates that for a typical Texas police department arresting the same number of blacks and whites for “property theft” of less than $1,500, nearly twice as many blacks than whites were arrested for the more serious offense of “organized retail theft,” said Michael Braun, an associate professor at the SMU Cox School of Business and primary author of the research. Among female arrestees, about 2.6 times as many blacks as whites were arrested for organized retail theft, as opposed to property theft. These multiples quantify the association between the race of the arrestee and the charge applied at the time of arrest.

The study, “Police Discretion and Racial Disparity in Organized Retail Theft Arrests: Evidence from Texas,” appears in the December 2018 issue of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies and is currently available on the journal's website (http://rdcu.be/8vJZ). Braun is an applied statistician, whose core research focuses on inferring patterns of individual behavior from large complex data sets. His co-authors Jeremy Rosenthal and Kyle Therrian are criminal defense attorneys with the McKinney, Texas, firm of Rosenthal and Wadas, PLLC.

The researchers conducted a statistical analysis of arrests for both property theft and organized retail theft from 2012 to 2015. They estimated an association between the arrest charge and the race of the arrestee for 669 Texas police departments, and predict that a "typical" department would make about twice as many organized retail theft arrests of blacks than whites, and about 20 percent more of Hispanics than whites, given the same number of property theft arrests. Among female arrestees, this multiple is about 2.6 for blacks and 1.5 for Hispanics. However, both the frequency and racial disparity in organized retail theft arrests vary greatly across departments, in terms of both magnitude and statistical significance. For about 30 departments, the evidence suggests a significantly high probability of a tendency toward racial disparity in these arrests.
darshan
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Re: United States - Human Rights Monitor

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Teaching Hard History AMERICAN SLAVERY
https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default ... lavery.pdf

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Report: Students and Teachers Know Little About Slavery
https://www.afro.com/report-students-te ... e-slavery/
The report, “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery” was released Feb. 1 as part of the SPLC’s “Teaching Tolerance” program. The initiative is designed to educate students and teachers on how to improve relations between people of different races and backgrounds. The director of Teaching Tolerance, Maureen Costello, said the history of slavery has been taught poorly in U.S. schools.

“Schools are not adequately teaching the history of American slavery, educators are not sufficiently prepared to teach it, textbooks do not have enough material about it, and as a result students lack a basic knowledge of the important role it played in shaping the United States and the impact it continues to have on race relations in America,” Costello said in a statement.
The report surveyed 1,000 high school seniors and 1,700 social studies teachers nationally, and included an examination of state standards and textbooks.

The survey found that only eight percent of high school seniors identified slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, two-thirds didn’t know that it took a constitutional amendment to formally end slavery and only 22 percent could correctly identify how provisions in the U.S. Constitution gave advantages to slaveholders.

The report also found that while 89 percent of teachers claim to feel comfortable discussing slavery in their classrooms, their responses to open-ended questions reveal profound unease around the topic and 58 percent of educators said that their textbooks were inadequate on the subject.

Textbook coverage of slavery was lacking as well. Ranked on a scale of 1 to 100 for their comprehensiveness around the subject of slavery, textbooks evaluated by the program earned an average score of 46. In addition, 40 percent of teachers believed their state offers insufficient support for teaching about slavery.

Evaluators found that slavery is often taught without context, and while many prominent antebellum-era Blacks such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass are emphasized, there is little discussion about how slave labor built the country. In addition, many textbooks teach that slavery was an exclusively Southern institution, when in reality it took place in all of the 13 colonies and in all of the states after 1776.


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How Scholars Sustained White Supremacy
https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-S ... ite/243053
As part of a broader study of the legacy of the antislavery movement and the rise of the modern civil-rights era, I wanted to assess how abolitionism had been presented in textbooks. I imagined a quick look. Instead, I found myself immersed in Harvard’s collection of nearly 3,000 U.S. history textbooks, dating from about 1800 to the 1980s. Without intending, I had become engaged in a study of how abolitionism, race, slavery, and the Civil War and Reconstruction have been taught for generations.

After reviewing my first 50 or so textbooks, one morning I realized precisely what I was seeing, what instruction, and what priorities were leaping from the pages into the brains of the students compelled to read them: white supremacy. One text even began with the capitalized title: "The White Man’s History." Across time and with precious few exceptions, African-Americans appeared only as "ignorant negroes," as slaves, and as anonymous abstractions that only posed "problems" for the supposed real subjects of history: white people of European descent.

The assumptions of white priority, white domination, and white importance underlie every chapter and every theme of the thousands of textbooks that blanketed the country. This is the vast tectonic plate that underlies American culture. And while the worst features of our textbook legacy may have ended, the themes, facts, and attitudes of supremacist ideologies are deeply embedded in what we teach and how we teach it.

Noah Webster’s History of the United States (1832) is distressingly typical of most U.S. history textbooks published before the Civil War. Webster, of dictionary fame, once told the black minister and abolitionist leader Amos G. Beman that "wooly haired Africans" have "no history, & there can be none." Webster dismissed Africans as nonentities and elevated Puritans, especially Connecticut Puritans, to the level of founding fathers. His book made only passing mention of colonies (later states) below Mason-Dixon and completely ignored slavery. History, for Webster, was the record of his Puritan forbearers, and no others. The standard of whiteness-in-history had been set.

A drawing by Hanson Booth in "The Development of America," by Fremont P. Wirth (American Book Company, 1937). The captions reads in part: “Slaves at home, after the day’s work was over. Negroes always have been fond of singing and dancing.” Supremacist ideologies were deeply embedded in the textbooks of American history.

Until 1860, no American history textbook ever mentioned the name of an abolitionist or even the existence of an antislavery movement. If slavery was mentioned at all, the discussion focused on Congress and on political leaders like Henry Clay. History took place in European exploration, colonization, revolution, Constitution-forming, party politics, and presidential administrations — and nowhere else.

The Connecticut-born Samuel Griswold Goodrich, who sometimes wrote as "Peter Parley," may have been the most successful textbook author and writer of the mid-19th century. He claimed to have published 170 volumes, selling seven-million copies. He also boasted that his Pictorial History of the United States, originally published in 1843 and still in print after the Civil War, sold 500,000 copies. His 1866 edition simply tacked on a new chapter about the war, but his textbook neglected to discuss the fall of slavery. The message to students: Black lives do not matter.

The hundreds upon hundreds of other textbooks, however, some providing sympathetic views of the abolitionists and even treating John Brown dispassionately, categorically reveal the authors’ real themes and prejudices when dealing with the history of Reconstruction. The worst chapter in almost every textbook published before the 1960s, these books repeated relentlessly and emphatically the phrase "ignorant negro." Indeed, descriptions of the Reconstruction era in history textbooks published from about 1900 to the mid-1960s provide a stunning immersion in white arrogance, black incapacity, and nostalgia for the sweet days of slavery and Southern white racial domination.

But for generations of students, the textbooks of the Columbia University historian David Saville Muzzey shaped their understanding of the central crisis of American history. With over 50 publications, his influence became pervasive, especially through his History of the American People, a heavily illustrated tome of 700 pages for high-school students, used relentlessly between 1927 and 1938, and for many decades after under various other titles.

For Muzzey, "the mutual provocation of the abolitionists and the ardent defenders of the slavery system" caused the Civil War, and the North bore prime responsibility for causing the South to secede through its relentless hostility to slavery. More to the point, Muzzey explained that Reconstruction proved an unmitigated disaster, setting the untutored former slaves against "the only people who could really help them … their old masters." Instead, Northern radicals manufactured an "orgy of extravagance, fraud, and disgusting incompetence," placing upon the South the "unbearable burden of negro rule." This "crime of Reconstruction," he wrote, would be the root cause of sectional bitterness that would endure "to the present day."

Authors more familiar to current scholars and historians, such as Marcus Jernegan, Merle Curti, Ralph Henry Gabriel, Ralph Volney Harlow, and John D. Hicks, leading historians of their time, also crafted textbooks for junior high and high schools. Between 1931 and 1943, the Yale intellectual historian Ralph Henry Gabriel, along with Mabel B. Casner, a Connecticut high-school teacher, explained to students that the central problem of Reconstruction was that the former slaves "found that freedom could be a greater curse than slavery." In Southern states under Republican rule, the "Negroes were ignorant, and most of the carpetbaggers were rascals." Fortunately, however, white men organized secret societies to "fight the evils that surrounded them," especially theft, which was "very common among those who had recently been slaves" and restored white power.

The University of Chicago’s Marcus Jernegan’s The Growth of the American People (1934) relied on the toxic scholarship of Claude Bowers, George Fort Milton, and even Thomas Dixon Jr. Jernegan described the Freedmen’s Bureau as an organ for "race hatred," but the Ku Klux Klan appeared as the bulwark against carpetbag corruption. According to Jernegan, the Klan did little more than play on the "superstitious fears of the negroes" and scared them at night by dressing in white sheets and shouting "Beware! The Great Cyclops is angry!" and thus discouraged blacks from voting. Accusations of real Klan violence, he asserted, were largely fabricated.

The University of California at Berkeley’s John D. Hicks, best known for his study of the Populist Movement, described slavery in his advanced textbook, A Short History of American Democracy (1943), as "By and large … a distinct advance over the lot that would have befallen him [the slave] had he remained in Africa." Besides, Hicks suggests, where else could a people so untutored enjoy picnics, barbecues, singing, and dancing? The slaves’ "devotions [religion] were extremely picturesque, and their moral standards sufficiently latitudinarian to meet the needs of a really primitive people. Heaven to the Negro was a place of rest from all labor, the fitting reward of a servant who obeyed his master and loved the Lord. … [C]ohabitation without marriage was regarded as perfectly normal, and a certain amount of promiscuity was taken for granted. Slave women rarely resisted the advances of white men, as their numerous mulatto progeny abundantly attested." Berkeley’s history department recalls Hicks’s enormous influence, classes with over 500 students, and the impossibility of estimating "the number of students whose knowledge of American history has been built on the Hicks histories, but it is certainly an immense number."

That such rabid fiction could pass for history in 1943, or at any other time, still leaves me reeling. But such textbook "history" continued, largely ignoring the work of prodigious African American scholars like John Wesley Cromwell, George Washington Williams, Carter G. Woodson, and W.E.B. Du Bois, until the 1960s when new generations of black and white scholars transformed our understanding of the American past, and the place of race in it.

According to a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, "Teaching Hard History," as a nation we have failed miserably in our responsibility to accurately and honestly teach about slavery. Only 8 percent of high-school students surveyed by the SPLC could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. Few teachers and even fewer textbooks connect the nation’s slave past to the history of race relations, and nearly every single teacher and textbook surveyed avoided the subject of white supremacy as avidly as the school textbooks of the 19th and 20th centuries.

It would appear that despite the monumental outburst of scholarship produced since the mid-1960s, the way we teach history remains as lifeless as John Brown’s body. But as Hasan Kwame Jeffries, an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University, observed in the introduction to "Teaching Hard History": "Slavery isn’t in the past. It’s in the headlines."
Karan M
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Re: United States - Human Rights Monitor

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I wonder when somebody will take an axe like the above to the Romila Thapars and the other members of the INC-Left gang on their "work".
Kati
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Re: United States - Human Rights Monitor

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Mexico angry over El Paso shooting
Politico By Bianca Quilantan,Politico 2 hours 29 minutes ago
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Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs Marcelo Ebrard on Sunday denounced Saturday’s mass shooting in El Paso, calling it “an act of terrorism against the Mexican-American community and Mexican nationals in the United States.”

He also announced actions to protect Mexicans in the United States, ask the U.S. government for access to its investigation into the shooting, and possibly request the extradition of the shooter to face charges in Mexico.


President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced Sunday that six Mexican nationals were killed in the mass shooting at a shopping center. Seven others were wounded.

A total of 20 people were killed and more than two dozen injured; 21-year-old Patrick Crusius from Allen, Texas, stands accused of the massacre.

Earlier on Sunday, Ebrard, in a video on Twitter, announced that Mexico would take legal action against the United States over Saturday's mass shooting.

“Mexico declares its profound rejection and complete condemnation of this barbaric act, in which innocent Mexican men and women lost their lives,” Ebrard said the video.

Ebrard added that López Obrador had instructed him to make sure “the position, the indignation of Mexico, translates first in protecting the affected families," and that there be “effective, prompt, expeditious and forceful legal actions for Mexico“ to protect Mexicans in the United States.

At a news conference following the Twitter announcement, Ebrard said that Mexico is outraged by the shooting and warned that "we will act with reason and adherence to the law, but firmly."

The foreign affairs secretary announced several immediate actions the Mexican government was planning to take in response to the shooting.

Ebrard said his office and consulates are in contact with the affected families, and that they plan to accompany them and represent them in the investigation process. In addition, starting Monday, meetings will be held in Texas, California, Chicago, New York and Atlanta with the consuls of Mexico in the United States to expand the protocols for care and protection of Mexicans.

"We are also calling for a meeting of Spanish-speaking countries with communities in the United States," Ebrard said, to safeguard “the culture and rights” of their citizens in the U.S.

He added that the Mexican government also plans to move forward with the corresponding legal actions against whoever is responsible for the shooting and will ask U.S. authorities for access to the investigation. They will also send a diplomatic note Monday to the U.S. government to respectfully, but firmly, ask that it take a clear and strong position on hate crimes.

"We are going to ask for access to see how this weapon was sold and how it came to their hands. And to know if the authorities knew about the potential of this individual," Ebrard said.

The Attorney General's Office, he said, will then analyze whether a complaint for terrorism against Mexicans in the United States will be filed. But they may also request to extradite the gunman.

“For Mexico, this individual is a terrorist,” he said.
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