Guest Blogger - Open Letter to Sam Adams « Oh No a WoC PhD

Guest Blogger - Open Letter to Sam Adams « Oh No a WoC PhD: "So my friend tried to post this over at Sam Adam’s blog and it would not let here (even though there are other comments). After trying to help her and getting the same error message, I said . . . Let’s just put it up on my blog and see if good old Sam fixes the issue. (Oh and Sam, despite not being a Portlander myself, I have a lot of Portland readers who happen to vote.) Portland readers, feel free to repost this entire text widely you have both our permissions. All readers, please click at least once on Sam Adam’s blog to drive the traffic from here to there up so he will actually come by and read this message. (While you are there, you may want to note that none of the people who have been able to post are pro-change . . . )"

Panhandling for reparations - OregonLive.com

Panhandling for reparations - OregonLive.com: "Frances Miller's early attempts at starting a conversation Wednesday were a little rough. 'Hey, sister, are you a descendent of slaves?' she called out to a woman who looked African American, scoring a glare. Miller sat on Northeast 15th Avenue at Broadway -- a volunteer in the National Day of Panhandling for Reparations. She and others across the country asked white passers-by to pay reparations for enslaving black people, and then they gave money to black passers-by. Each got a receipt."

The Double Oppression of Black Women in America

The Double Oppression of Black Women in America

BY SOCIALIST ACTION- MARCH 2001

"Dat man ober dar say dat woman needs to be lifted ober ditches, and to have de best place every whar. Nobody eber helped me into carriages, or ober mud puddles, or gives me any best place and ar'n't I a woman?
"Look at me! Look at my arm! I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me-and ar'n't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear de lash as well-and ar'n't I a woman?
"I have born 13 chilern and seen em mos all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard-and ar'n't I a woman?"
-Sojourner Truth, at the women's rights convention of 1851 in Akron, Ohio, after being greeted with boos and hisses. According to her 1878 narrative, she used the word "ar'n't" instead of "ain't," as it has appeared in nearly all publications since then.

By TOM SANDERS
The reproductive rights of African American women have been under attack, one way or another, ever since they were first brought to America. The method of assault has changed from time to time, but it has continued without let up to the present day.
"While slave owners profited from encouraging slave women to bear many children, modern-day taxpayers believe they save money by discouraging poor Black women from having children," states Dorothy Roberts in her book "Killing the Black Body" (Pantheon Books, 1997). "But these practices share the common theme of denying a woman's freedom to control her own reproductive life because of her race.
"Poor crack addicts and welfare mothers are punished for having babies because they fail to measure up to the state's ideal of motherhood. These women are not penalized simply because they may harm their unborn children or because their childbearing will cost taxpayers money. They are penalized because the combination of their poverty, race, and marital status is seen to make them unworthy of procreating."
However, Black women were considered to be very worthy of having children when they were slaves-so much so that the white master himself often fathered as many Black babies as he could. We know this to be true not only because history covers it very well, but because some of these babies, in their old age, were interviewed by various government agencies.
In 1934 the Federal Emergency Relief Administration began to collect the testimony of ex-slaves in the Ohio River Valley and in the lower South. In 1936 the Works Progress Administration took charge of the project and broadened it to all of the Southern states as well as Indiana, Kansas, and Oklahoma.
One elderly ex-slave, whose name was not given, had this to say about her white father: "Well, you know, Uncle Stephen, he kinda overseer for some widow womans. He mama' husband. He come to see my mama any time he gits ready. But I find out he ain't my pappy. I knowed that since I's a little thing.
"I used to go over to Massa Daniels' plantation. They tell me all 'bout it. The folks over there they used to say to me: 'Who's your pappy? Who's your pappy?' I just say: 'Turkey buzzard lay me and the sun hatch me,' and then go on 'bout my business. Course all the time they knows and I knows, too, that Massa Daniels was my pappy" (B.A. Botkin, editor, "Lay my Burden Down," University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958).
During slavery times African American slave women were considered to be very worthy of having babies. In fact, most white men, even Northerners and foreigners thought that Black women were so worthy as willing mothers that a foreign visitor, Johann Schoepf, wrote that "in almost every house there are negresses, slaves, who count it an honor to bring a mulatto into the world." Even the abolitionist James Redpath wrote that mulatto women were gratified by the criminal advances of Saxons (Deborah Gray White, "Ar'n't I a Woman?" W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1987).
Since foreign visitors and northern abolitionists felt this way we can easily imagine how most of the Southern whites must have felt about it.
Research shows that most slave children began work in the fields by the age of 11 and many began work there at the age of six. They were usually placed in the "trash gang" that pulled weeds, cleaned up, hoed, or picked cotton. This means that the ex-slave who helped raise me as a very young child was not as old as I've long thought she was.
Thus, much of the United States wealth was built by child labor-a fact that few people are willing to acknowledge. Most also prefer to ignore the fact that the pace of scientific and technological change destroys the lower rungs of the economic ladder just as most African Americans begin to reach them. This tends to keep most Blacks not much higher in labor skills than the youngest Black slave children in the old plantation fields-by the standards of today's modern "computer revolution."
The rapid changes occurring in society, with the development of a new "educated" elite, has resulted in a new change of attitude on the part of people in various positions of power, even those with very limited power. One example is the effort to control the Black population growth through a form of carefully concealed violence perpetrated upon helpless medical patients.
Dorothy Roberts reports in "Killing the Black Body" that during the 1970s sterilization became the most rapidly growing form of birth control in the United States, rising from 200,000 cases in 1970 to over 700,000 in 1980.
"It was a common belief among Blacks in the South," Roberts writes, "that Black women were routinely sterilized without their informed consent and for no valid medical reason. Teaching hospitals performed. unnecessary hysterectomies on poor Black women as practice for their medical residents. This sort of abuse was so widespread in the South that these operations came to be known as 'Mississippi appendectomies.'
"In 1975, a hysterectomy cost $800 compared to a tubal ligation, giving surgeons, who were reimbursed by Medicaid, a financial incentive to perform the more extensive operation-despite its 20 times greater risk of killing the patient.
"Fannie Lou Hamer, the leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, informed a Washington, D.C., audience in 1965 that 60 percent of the Black women in Sunflower County, Mississippi, were subjected to postpartum sterilizations at Sunflower City Hospital without their permission. Hamer had suffered this violation herself when she went to the hospital for the removal of a small uterine tumor in 1961. The doctor took the liberty of performing a complete hysterectomy without her knowledge or consent. This practice of sterilizing Southern Black women through trickery or deceit was confirmed by a number of physicians who examined these women after the procedure was performed."
"Sterilization abuse was not confined to hospitals in the South," Roberts continues. "In April 1872, the Boston Globe ran a front-page story reporting the complaint by a group of medical students that Boston City Hospital was performing excessive and medically unnecessary hysterectomies on Black patients. Among the charges were: surgeries were performed for 'training purposes'; radical and dangerous procedures were used when alternatives were available; medical records did not reflect what had really been done to patients; patients were pressured into signing consent forms without adequate explanation; and doctors treated patients callously, adding to the women's anguish."
The attitude expressed by these illegal sterilizations is very similar to the distorted attitudes towards Black females in general, regardless of their ages, 150 years ago. For example: When George, a Mississippi slave, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1859 for the rape of a 10-year-old female slave, Judge Harris reversed the decision and released George. According to Harris the original indictment could not be sustained under common law or under the statutes of Mississippi because 'it charges no offense known to either system. ... There is no act which embraces either the attempted or actual commission of a rape by a slave on a female slave.'
A Tennessee judge made this latter point when he remanded a slave named Grandison to jail for attempting to rape a white woman named Mary Douglas. According to Judge Green, what gave 'the offense its enormity' was the fact that Douglass was white. 'Such an act committed on a BLACK WOMAN, would not,' he noted, 'be punished with death'" (Deborah Gray White, "Ar'n't I a Woman?").
Since recorded history, women of all ethnic groups have been have been made victims because of their sex. This has been true even though some women are physically stronger than men, have more endurance than men, and are capable of doing manual labor even better than men.
Such a woman was the slave Susan Mabry of Virginia, who could pick 400 or 500 pounds of cotton a day. However, 150 to 200 pounds was considered respectable for an average worker; when this writer was a teenager I found it very hard to pick 200 pounds in one day and rarely ever did.
Jacqueline Jones in "Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (Vintage Books, 198), writes: "Together with their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, black women spent up to fourteen hours a day toiling out of doors, often under a blazing sun. In the Cotton Belt they plowed fields; dropped seed; and hoed, picked, ginned, sorted, and moted cotton. On farms in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, women hoed tobacco; laid worm fences; and threshed, raked, and bound wheat.
"For those on the Sea Islands and in coastal areas, rice culture included raking and burning the stubble from the previous year's crop; ditching; sowing seed; plowing, listing, and hoeing fields; and harvesting, stacking, and threshing the rice. In the bayou region of Louisiana, women planted sugar cane cuttings, plowed, and helped to harvest and gin the cane.
"During the winter, they performed a myriad of tasks necessary on nineteenth century farms. ... During the busy harvest season, everyone was forced to labor up to sixteen hours at a time-after sunset by the light of candles or burning pine knots. ... It is significant that overseers ordered and supervised much of the punishment in the field, for their disciplinary techniques were calculated to 'get as much work out of the slaves as they can possibly perform' ....
"Consequently, many slave women were driven and beaten mercilessly, and some achieved respite only in return for sexual submission. To a white man, a black women was not only a worker who needed prodding, but also a female capable of fulfilling his sexual or aggressive desires. For this reason, a fine line existed between work-related punishment and rape...."
The mold was already formed when slavery "officially" ended. For many years it was nearly impossible for Black women to assume roles other than those they had held in slavery. Many white Americans, even today, continue to perceive African American women as individuals who can be worked hard, treated rudely, and who desire promiscious relationships.
From the official end of slavery in 1865 through almost all of the 20th century, no southern white male was convicted of raping or attempting to rape a Black woman. And if the perpetrator was Black, the Black woman had no hope for justice either. When a Black man raped a Black woman, police nearly always reported the crime as "unfounded," and in the few cases that reached the courts, the testimony of Black female victims was seldom believed by white juries.
Unbelievable as it may seem, one of the reasons given as proof that Black women in the United States are naturally promiscuous is the fact that prior to the American Revolution the female slave population grew more as a result of natural increase than by importation. Unlike the other Western Hemisphere countries with slavery, the United States achieved a one to one sex ratio-the same number of women as men, although far more men were brought from Africa.
One reason for this was the creation of monogamous families in this country, while in Latin America and the Caribbean Black men were forced to live in barracks-like environments away from the women.
However, this fact did not make the U.S. slaves as well off as it may appear. The North American male slaves were more easily manipulated since their spouses and children could be held hostage and compelled to answer for their "transgressions."
During the 19th century, when "protecting women" was almost a part of the national religion, only slave women were so totally unprotected by men or the law. Only African American women had their womanhood so totally denied.
Yet, in spite of the great gulf between white and Black women at the time, their lives were paradoxically similar. All women were overwhelmed by work. Slave and free women alike had no visible control over reproduction. Both were forced to relinquish control over this highly personal aspect of female life to white males, who made all crucial decisions regarding the future of the children.
They even decided whether or not there would be an abortion. Have the times changed very much today?
"Relative to white men all women were powerless and exploited," says Deborah Gray White. "The powerlessness and exploitation of black women was an extreme form of what all women experienced, because racism, although just as pervasive as sexism, was more virulent. Slave women suffered from the malevolence that flowed from both racism and sexism."
Of all large groupings of people in the United States today, Black women are treated the worst, any way you look at it. There's less respect for them, fewer jobs, less of everything that is needed for an even half-way decent life. An increasing proportion of them, as well as Black men, in future generations will exist outside the world of gainful employment as long as the capitalist system prevails in this country
It is our task today to see to it that this system is replaced by a new society run by and for working people and their allies-by socialism.
History is supposed to give people a sense of identity, a knowledge of who they are and why they are living like they are. It should also act as a springboard for the future. History must replace myths with facts. We Americans of all colors have had enough myths, and especially African American women.
Despite all that she has lived through and accomplished, the Black woman today is still waiting for an affirmative answer to the plaintive question asked 150 years ago: "Ar'n't I a woman?"

Court rules 'Jena 6' defendant to stay behind bars - CNN.com

Court rules 'Jena 6' defendant to stay behind bars - CNN.com: "Also on Friday, the FBI said it was looking into an online posting by a neo-Nazi white supremacist group that published the home addresses of all six of the African-American teenagers, as well as the phone numbers of some. The group said on its Web site it is calling on followers to 'let them know justice is coming.'"

National and Global Liberation « The Blog and the Bullet

National and Global Liberation « The Blog and the Bullet: "Jaguarito writes:

I contend that today, no liberation project can limit itself to the national terrain, and that our struggles must be global if we are to achieve true liberation. Key to this is an understanding that capitalist sovereignty no longer resides at the level of individual nation-states, but rather, at the level of the global. This new form of global sovereignty, which some understand as neo-liberalism, is being administered by such institutions as the World Bank and World Trade Organisation. Multinational institutions such as these, along with nation-states, and multinational corporations all comprise this new neo-liberal world order. If we limit our struggles to the national terrain, we are, in effect, leaving the wider problem of the neo-liberal world order unattended to."

Cleveland School Shooting

School Shooting In Cleveland

A 14-year-old gunman opened fire at an Ohio high school Wednesday, wounding at least four people before killing himself in the latest school shooting to rock the United States.

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson two students and two adults were wounded in the shooting at SuccessTech Academy.

"The shooter is a 14-year-old student from the school. He has committed suicide," Jackson said at a press conference.

A 17-year-old student who was shot in the elbow was expected to be released from hospital in the evening while a 14-year-old who was shot in the side will likely be held overnight for observation, he said. The two adults are in stable condition.

Local media reported the student, who was described as a loner, was frustrated after being suspended from school for getting into a fight on Tuesday.

He came to school early Wednesday and roamed through the hallways with a gun in each hand and shots were heard on two different floors.

Screams and panic filled the building, witnesses said. Some students and teachers rushed outside at the sound of gunfire while others hid in closets and under desks while police searched the multilevel building for the shooter.

"I know that dude was crazy. We just knew it. You know when people are crazy, come on, man," one student who fled at the sound of gunshots told CNN.

"He was in my class ... He always wore a trench coat."

The boy was described by other students as a loner and devil worshipper who had made jokes about shooting other students in front of teachers.

"I didn't think he meant it," another unidentified student told news station WKYC. "I thought he just said it because he wanted to be popular."

Frantic parents rushed to the school to get news of their children and many were told to wait until police had finished interviewing them. Several complained the school had recently denied requests to hire a security guard.

Cleveland school district head Eugene Sanders said counselors were on hand to help students and administrators were working to reunite students with their parents. A decision had not yet been made on when classes would resume.

It was just the latest in a spate of shootings over the past weeks.

In September, two 17-year-old students were wounded when they were shot by a gunman at Delaware State University.

On Tuesday, two people were killed and two others injured in a shooting at a workshop in Simi Valley, California, police said.

That shooting took place at a tire assembly shop in the city of 120,000 some 50 kilometers (30 miles) northwest of Los Angeles often listed among the country's safest communities.

And on Sunday, a gun-toting sheriff's deputy went on a rampage, killing his ex-girlfriend and five other youths at a house party in a small town in Wisconsin, authorities said.

The 20-year-old deputy and all those shot were all part of a close-knit group of friends, sources said.

Wednesday's incident recalled the horrors eight years ago of the Columbine high school shooting in Colorado and a similar bloodbath at Virginia Tech earlier this year.

During the massacre at Columbine High School massacre in April 1999, two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, embarked on a shooting rampage, killing 12 students and a teacher, as well as wounding 24 others, before committing suicide.

That shooting led to a period of introspection across the United States as the country briefly contemplated the downside of its celebrated "gun culture" but in the end, failed to pass laws or make other changes that would have made firearms less available.

A similar reaction followed the shooting in April of this year of 32 people by mentally disturbed student Cho Seung-Hui at Virginia Tech University, who also turned his arm on himself.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported last month that more than 1.4 million murders, rapes, robberies and assaults were committed around the United States last year, or a violent crime every 22 seconds.

The number of victims of violent crime in the United States last year was the equivalent of the entire population of European Union member Estonia or the African state of Gabon falling victim to murder, rape, robbery or assault.

The rate of violent crime was up by 1.9 percent compared with 2005, with murders climbing by 1.8 percent to nearly 15,000 cases last year.

Africa Aims for a Scientific Revolution - Worldpress.org

Africa Aims for a Scientific Revolution - Worldpress.org: "African leaders have pledged to devote more resources to the development of science and technology, an area deemed vital for economic development, yet long neglected and poorly funded in many countries. At a January 2007 summit of the continent's political body, the African Union, heads of state 'strongly urged' all member countries to allocate at least 1 percent of their gross domestic product to research and development by 2020. They also pledged to revitalize African universities—many of which have declined due to dwindling support over the last few decades—and to promote the study of science and technology by young people."

(The Lack of) Freedom of Movement in the Balkans - Worldpress.org

(The Lack of) Freedom of Movement in the Balkans - Worldpress.org: "A fellow Hungarian shares the following story. 'We Hungarians were the most free of all the peoples in Eastern Europe during communist times. Once in three years we could travel out of the country without any restrictions.'"

NewsDaily: TopNews -- Immigration sting targets gang members

NewsDaily: TopNews -- Immigration sting targets gang members: "WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 (UPI) -- U.S. agents used immigration laws in a massive sweep to arrest and deport alleged gang members in multiple U.S. cities."

NewsDaily: TopNews -- U.S. woman jailed for espionage in Nigeria

NewsDaily: TopNews -- U.S. woman jailed for espionage in Nigeria: "PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria, Oct. 9 (UPI) -- A U.S. woman faces espionage charges in Nigeria after assisting two German filmmakers in the country's oil-rich Niger Delta."

Independent Media Center | Tens of Thousands of Peasants Currently Mobilizing All Over Colombia

Independent Media Center | www.indymedia.org | ((( i ))): "Beginning the 10th of October, rural popular organizations will mobilize in particular places in Colombia. Going from their streets and villages, they aim to arrive in the capitals of their departamentos. They seek to launch a repeal of the anti-popular laws recently approved by the Congress; for example, the ill-fated Rural Statute and the reduction of transfers, that place equally in danger the campesinos and all Colombians."

desert-rock-blog.com :: Daily Times: "Uranium workers meeting set for Shiprock" (October 9 2007)

desert-rock-blog.com :: Daily Times: "Uranium workers meeting set for Shiprock" (October 9 2007): "SHIPROCK — Navajo Nation residents who worked with uranium are invited to an informational meeting Wednesday at the Shiprock Chapter house. Known as the 'yellow monster,' uranium is blamed for thousands of cases of cancer, lung conditions and pulmonary and renal diseases, said Larry Martinez, program manager for the Office of Navajo Uranium Workers. Those affected by the element prior to 1971 are eligible for federal payments and free health care."