MONEY: ICELAND SENTENCES 26 BANKERS TO A COMBINED 74 YEARS IN PRISON

In a move that would make many capitalists’ head explode if it ever happened here, Iceland just sentenced their 26^th banker to prison for their part in the 2008 financial collapse.

In two separate Icelandic Supreme Court and Reykjavik District Court rulings, five top bankers from Landsbankinn and Kaupping — the two largest banks in the country — were found guilty of market manipulation, embezzlement, and breach of fiduciary duties. Most of those convicted have been sentenced to prison for two to five years. The maximum penalty for financial crimes in Iceland is six years, although their Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments to consider expanding sentences beyond the six year maximum.

After the crash in 2008, while congress was giving American banks a $700 billion TARP bailout courtesy of taxpayers, Iceland decided to go in a different direction and enabled their government with financial supervisory authority to take control of the banks as the chaos resulting from the crash unraveled.

Read More:

http://usuncut.com/world/iceland-sentences-26-bankers-to-a-combined-74-years-in-prison/



You don't need a degree in math or finance to understand this basic truth: When the economy is in an upward swing, a banker can get away with a lot of crooked crap to earn himself and his institution a lot of money.  It's only when the economy takes a downward swing that he or she will be exposed. Prior to 2007 and 2008, the downward turns were small enough that the financial shenanigans never came all the way out into the open, as far as the American public and most of Europe and South America were concerned. But in 2008, the economic dip was so bad there was no Peter to rob in order to pay Paul

Some countries tried austerity measures that crushed the everyday people. Here we were luckier. Here President Obama did whatever he did, and it appears to have worked. Our president successful applied a bandaid to cover our current banking problem -- for now.

But President Obama did not successfully get any serious reform past his overwhelmingly republican congress. And this is the probably the one time the white republicans reaction wasn't founded on race, racism, and obstruction. The only thing white republicans are more dedicated than preserving the advantages of whiteness is protecting the 1% -- where the bankers who almost took us down reside.

The 2 to 5 years in prison each might not sound like much. But stop thinking about drug addicts and gangsters doing drive-bys on television cop shows. Two to five years sounds like nothing when you're thinking of the devistation caused by a small time criminal trying to prove his masculinity on a television cop show. Think about what you would do yourself, as a working person where jail is only a reality on television, to avoid jail. To me? Two to five years sounds like it's as good as a life sentence. As a middle class person my life is completely derailed. I'm thinking loss of property, credit score etc. A rich person probably has money to help him recover, but I'll bet they don't see it that way. I'll bet jail is something to be feared like a death sentence for the rich banker too.

I'm thinking a real threat of jail when you're essentially betting the horses with other people's money while sitting in a bank that's too big to fail would stop bankers from seeing financial vehicles riskier than the race track as attractive.

I hope somebody with a realistic knowledge on how to get our country and our congress to move in this direction is paying attention.  But in a year where the election is all about disaffected white people who actually think it makes sense that they can't choose between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, rather than Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, I don't see this happening in the United States anytime soon. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stefan-simanowitz/iceland-has-jailed-29-bankers_b_8908536.html

ROOTS RE-MADE ON THE HISTORY CHANNEL, EPISODE 1

Those "tired of slavery movies" should think twice about skipping this.  I hear the the toned down version of the 1970s has been redone better here, much better.

I consider a movie cheap and easy history. Whether this series turns out to be excellent or mediocre, it's likely to paint a enough of a picture that we want to learn more

The first episode of four is linked here. This first episode played on 5-30-16. The next episode is coming up tonight, 5-31-2016.



A link to Episode 1 
Available MAY/JUNE 2016
http://www.history.com/shows/roots/season-1/episode-1

MEMORIAL DAY, A BLACK AMERICAN CREATED HOLIDAY

Feeling Rebloggy

"Memorial Day was started by former slaves on May, 1, 1865 in Charleston, SC to honor 257 dead Union Soldiers who had been buried in a mass grave in a Confederate prison camp.

They dug up the bodies and worked for 2 weeks to give them a proper burial as gratitude for fighting for their freedom. They then held a parade of 10,000 people led by 2,800 Black children where they marched, sang and celebrated.

Thanks to Abstrakt Goldsmith for this nugget of history that most of us never learned in school."

From The Blue Street Journal

BLACK WOMEN PRESSURED TO BE SILENT

There is this silent, automatically understood thing in the black community. Do not do anything to put a black man jail. I know where this comes from. I think we all know.

We all know that black men are over represented in jail. Some of us even know that black women are heavily over represented in jail too.

BLACK AND WHITE
VARY LESS THAN 1% IN ILLICIT DRUG USE 
MOST YEARS
(note Latinx use less than both, then Asians even less)
http://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/Revised2k11NSDUHSummNatFindings/Revised2k11NSDUHSummNatFindings/NSDUHresults2011.htmhttp://www.samhsa.gov/

BUT NOW



LOOK AT THE DIFFERENCE IN ARREST RATES
BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE FOR MARIJUANA

But since all men, as a group, tend to execute violence than women as a group, all men go to jail more often than women. Then, if you add racism to being male, you have black men going to jail at higher rates than just about any other demographic. 

Black men go to jail for things white men get their wrists slapped for. Since the days of Jim Crow black people go to jail for grand theft auto and white people go to court for "joy riding." Racism is even codified into our laws.

Until President Obama came along, white people who more often preferred powder cocaine could have 100x more cocaine on them than black people who more often preferred crack cocaine before they became entangled in the web that is federal mandatory sentencing.

I'll never forget Charlie Sheen being on television, higher than a kite, getting fired from his television show, and people talking openly about his getting briefcases full of cocaine. I remember plenty about Sheen ranting about "tiger blood" and waving a machete, but there was virtually nothing on prime time news about this white presenting man possibly going to jail.

So yes, black men can also go to jail for almost nothing. 

But black men also go to jail for something too.


Black men prey on black women just like white men pray on white women. Most crime is intra-racial because criminals prey on who they live and work around. America is still fairly de-facto segregated. That's just the way it is.

But the thing that's different in the black race is has been already described above.


More of us know that black men go to prison
a lot more often than they should
without knowing that black women 
go to jail more than they should too. 



And that's just one facet of "racism against black men matters more."

When "racism against black men matters more" black women are supposed to be quiet when a black man hurts them. In some fantasy land made up by hoteps and the hotep adjacent, black women are supposed to wait for the black community to take care of it internally in some way.

This mindset is so common in the black community, so ever present, that I remembered while watching a scene in a movie totally unrelated to the subject of black women's supposed responsibility to protect black men even as they lay bleeding on the ground.

 I was watching an X-men movie, listening to Magneto say to Charles Xavier, "You know what they'll do to me" if they get me. 

Always ready to kill us regular humans, Magneto had just tried to kill the President of the United States and had already shot an ex-girlfriend mutant because he thought it advantagous. In response, Charles Xavier, the black woman in this little scenario, nods in agreement and lets Magneto go. Charles Xavier is indeed afraid that Magneto will be tortured and killed if the authorities get him.

I was a little distracted watching the end of that X-men movie, thinking Magneto ought to be hella grateful he was talking to Charles Xavier instead of me because I'd have let the authorities chop into steak size pieces after all the damage he'd already done to me and mine much less knowing the plans he had for me and mine.

I must say, I feel pretty close to the same way about men who attack women. I feel even more strongly about black men who attack black women.

After all the crap we've all been through? If you, as a black man, attack a black woman, you go to jail and do not pass go. And if your rape conviction winds up being the rest of your life due to white racism when it the same rape only costs a white man 5 years of life, then black women are luckier than white women for a change.

Hallelujah! 

WEIRD HISTORY OF ASIAN SEX STEREOTYPES by Chescaleigh

I know tons about how black stereotypes were constructed in the United States.  And I'm beginning to know snippets here and there about very similar black stereotypes constructed in white England, white France, and the ultra white Netherlands despite our black histories being so different because of Cecile Emeke's series on the Black Diaspora.

But Chescaleigh has put together a lot of information in the video below from here, there, and everywhere about the construction of Asian stereotypes.

I think I'd SEEN a bunch of the things she's describing here. But I hadn't put all the images together in a big picture and a history of Asian people in the United States.

Long Duk Dong in 16 Candles
one of the rare images of Asian Males In The Movies

Why Asian women are hyper-sexualized is explained.

Why Asian men are hypo-sexualized is explained

How institutionalized racism is at the root of it all is explained

It's not a sociology course, but it hits a bunch of the highlights at once so you can get a picture.
I'm a firm believer in learning all I can about other ethnic groups. If people of color being a larger group than white people in 2060 or so, then we better get to know one another's group-self as much as we get to know individuals in other groups. We don't all have to be the same. But we have to respect one another's differences. And respecting one another's differences means getting to know another group or demographic's history in the United States.

-
Quick education hit. Take it here!

WHEN WOMEN KILL MEN

Feeling Rebloggy
Men make up the vast majority of our nation’s prison population, roughly ten times the number as women, and commit the majority of crimes, particularly violence. Of the 200,000 plus women incarcerated in the United States, two-thirds are behind bars for a nonviolent offense, typically drug or property offenses.

"For those women incarcerated for homicide, many acted in self-defense against abusive partners. "

http://equalmeansequal.com/juvenile-justice-prison-and-rates-of-female-incarceration/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/23/domestic-violence-statistics_n_5959776.html

Crystal Wheeler served 26 years for killing her husband, who had beaten her repeatedly and threatened her with a gun (as well as his employer). Inside a California prison, she met Brenda Clubine who had refused a plea bargain, adamant she had defended her life at the time she killed her estranged husband, who’d broken her bones and fractured her skull and had 11 restraining orders and a warrant for his arrest. Clubine founded the first inmate abuse support group in the nation, Convicted Women Against Abuse in 1989. 

Due to the efforts of CWAA, “Battered Woman Syndrome” (now called “Intimate partner abuse”) became an accepted defense in California in 1992."

Read More

http://equalmeansequal.com/juvenile-justice-prison-and-rates-of-female-incarceration/

DEAR LATINX, LET'S CHECK OUR PRIVILEGE

THEE KATS MEOW

Watch Video HERE
OR
Read More Below

* * * * *


"While terms like "Latino" and  "Hispanic" aim to lump people of Latin American and Spanish Caribbean descent together, many of us are of different racial, national, language, cultural and historical identities, meaning that despite the fact that we all check "Latino" on forms and surveys, our experiences as Latinos in the U.S. are not identical to one another, for some of us, there are actually more differences than similarities.

Case in point: the privileges that light-skinned Latinos possess that most Indigenous and African descended Latinos don’t. Colorism is a principal and a practice that treats light, fairer-skinned people better than those with darker hues, and it's upheld both between and within communities of color. In the Latino community that looks like light-skinned Hispanics, who may deal with different forms of anti-Latino racisms, receiving preferential treatment in school, the workplace and politics...."

READ MORE by Raquel Reichard

http://dev.latina.com/lifestyle/our-issues/latino-light-skin-privilege-examples

DEPRAVED HEARTS AND MISSING AMBULANCES IN FREDDIE GRAY'S CHOCOLATE CITY

In case you've forgotten, some of the officers were charged with "Depraved Heart Murder" in the Freddie Gray case. Now that one of the officers who illegally detained Gray in the first place has been set free, not by a jury, but by a judge. Now, I'm wondering whose heart is actually depraved.

So many black people I've spoken to today are not surprised that Freddie Gray's killers appear to be walking one by one. But we should be. The Mayor was black, the Prosecutor is black, and they are both reigning in a town nicknamed "Chocolate City"

We should be outraged that white supremacy is rolling so quickly in Baltimore, just as unencumbered as it does in the mid west.  

* * * * *

ON ASSESSING A DEPRAVED HEART

Years ago, while on a jury, I listened to this dead faced black man, a fire department arson investigator, say about another, obviously mentally ill black man on trial,

"Yes, I've met dozens of people 

like him over the years, 

in various stages of self-destruction"

I hated that arson investigator for second or ten. I flat hated his bored black face. 

The black man that the state was trying for arson, was  very obviously off his medication. He waved at me, wriggled his fingers and giggled like a little girl though he had to be 40 or 50 years old. Later, I found out this man had schizophrenia. During the trial I found out this had been homeless more often than not. And since his current home had just burned to the ground, he asked the Arson Investigator if he'd get sent to a mental institution (where there's food and shelter) for a couple of days if he confessed to the arson.  

Apparently, the Arson Investigator said something that the defendant took to be "yes." So the defendant confessed.  Later physical evidence made it clear the defendant had lied in his confession.

When I thought about the Arson Investigator afterward, I thought about how  how judgmental I may have been. I thought about how many self-destructive people the Arson Investigator truly may have met in run down neighborhoods where arson occurs regularly. I wondered what I'd be like if I were him. 

I'd like to think I could get THAT jaded, but.... And I'm pretty sure I was "raised better than that," but...


THE DEPRAVED HEARTS OF POLICEMEN?
Last year, a woman at work told me she used to work in an Emergency Room. She told me the police would walk in and drop the drug addict or drunk on the floor in a heap. Just drop him or her on the floor until the emergency room personnel could find a cot or a bed for the person the officers dragged in. 

I thought about what my behavior would be like after months or years of dragging drunk or high people, covered in vomit and feces into an Emergency Room. I'd like to think I'd GENTLY lay a person down on the floor. But I'd definitely lay a person a down if a cot or bed was not instantly forthcoming because the Emergency Room personnel were busy with somebody else. 

POLICE VAN ON LEFT -- what should happen for an arrested, able-bodied person

ARRESTED CENTER - Freddie Gray, decidedly looking like he's not able-bodied

AMBULANCE ON THE  RIGHT - the vehicle you use for someone injured/damaged

CHARGING FREDDIE GRAY VAN  OFFICERS WITH "DEPRAVED HEART MURDER"


All this let me to thinking about just how horrible the officers in Freddie Gray's van were.

I wondered if maybe they weren't as "depraved" as Marilyn Mosby made them out to be.

If  Sgt Alicia White, Officer William Porter, and  Officer Caesar Goodson Jr. pick up vomit cover, feces covered drunks and drug addicts routinely, then they are picking up people that look like they are completely out of it every day.  That is, they are probably picking up people that look like Freddie Gray, on the surface, every single day.

The thing they might not have known about Freddie Gray is that he was not high or drunk but severely beaten and/or deprived of medication.  (If Gray was not completely conscious, his neck muscles weren't going be doing their job were they?)

If you, as van personnel that came along later,  don't know a person is not drunk and not high but unable to control some of his bodily functions due a beating and/or due to asthma, THEN when you look in back of the van, at some point midway through the trip, and see somebody relatively limp, you're not going to be alarmed.

In order for the officers in the van to be alarmed, don't they have to know why Freddie couldn't walk on his own, get in the van, and buckle his own seat belt? 

Marilyn Mosby's "The Van Did It" theory combined with the implied "The Beating Was A Minor Factor" theory put a mixture of black and white faces in the news as "possibly guilty."

Coincidentally, there probably isn't another image that would have stopped the Baltimore Uprising faster than to put up a picture of 6 police officers that virtually screams "Freddie Gray's death is not about race"

The only image that would have stopped Black Lives Matter Protests and the resulting white riots* faster would have been if the prosecutor who charged the 6 officers was black too and then said something that implied the black officers were mostly to blame for Freddie's death because of a failure to put a seat belt on him.

Oh wait!!! That's exactly what happened.

Questions

 If the white officers know that Freddie Gray is not so drunk or so high that he cannot walk, climb into a van, sit in the van, and put on his own seat belt when instructed, why did they call for a police van and put him in a police van instead of putting him in an ambulance?  

Who had the final decision on police van versus ambulance?

And if "The Van Did It" for sure, why wasn't the person who decided on a police van instead of an ambulance charged?**

Would Mosby's "THE VAN DID IT" even be an issue if Freddie can climb in the van, sit down in the van, and put the seatbelt on himself.?

I have serious questions about what the Black Van Officers ignored. They stopped and talked to Gray more than once. But I see film of that police van up on two wheels going around a corner in order to give credence to "The Van Did It" story.  I might understand they should have stopped to go directly to a hospital based on verbal complaints. But I still  don't know how they could have known how badly Gray was beaten.

And Gray looked badly beaten to me.

I'm gonna say we, as black and brown people, made the mistake of trusting black faces in high places. We should have questioned Marilyn Mosby's approach to this a long time ago.

Baltimore has had black and brown people running it for a long time. Therefore Baltimore has more than earned the title "Chocolate City."  And yet Baltimore does NOT have the lowest police brutality rate in the country.

"Mayor Rawlings-Blake may be African American, but under her leadership, large swaths of Black Baltimore have remained poor, unemployed and perpetually harassed and abused by the police. In the last four years alone, more than 100 people have won civil suits against police brutality. During Rawlings-Blake’s tenure, the city has been forced to pay $5.7 million to settle civil suits regarding police misconduct and brutality—an amount that does not include the $5.8 million Baltimore has paid to defend police who have abused the Black public." 

 http://inthesetimes.com/article/17888/baltimore_riots_black_politicians

And if a white male prosecutor had brought 3 black officers in from side, from out of nowhere, and said, "The Van Did It!" we'd have known he was manipulating the media in order to end the riots, instantly.**

When Mosby mentioned the lack of a seatbelt four times during the interview that ended The Baltimore Uprising, I couldn't figure out why she would let the arresting white officers out of the hot box.

Back in 2015, I thought the arresting officers would get a slap on the wrist even if they were indicted.  Today, the judge made sure the slap on the wrist didn't even happen.

The judge in Nero's case said the other officer, Officer Garrett Miller was responsible for the beating. So now, I have another question -- mostly born of my own ignorance. 

Will the same judge be in charge of Officer Miller's case? (Miller is the other arresting officer)

If a different judge sits for Miller's case, what's to stop that judge from saying "Nero" is primarily responsible for the arrest? (Do the judges have to agree?) 

Even if neither of these things is possible, "The Van Did It" means somebody in the van has to go to jail for Freddie Gray's murder, doesn't it? If at least one of white officers is not squarely blamed for arresting and putting Freddie Gray in a police van instead of an ambulance, what other choice is Marilyn Mosby going to have but to get AT LEAST ONE person for Freddie Gray's death?

Is she really going to put one of the black officers in jail for Freddie Gray's death because the officers weren't able to assess his true condition -- no matter how many times they stopped? Isn't that an ambulance crew is for?

And if you really decide that "The Van Did It" how can all three officers be equally responsible? One person has to be in charge of where the police van goes next. Three of them can't be arguing about what to take seriously and what not to take seriously and how fast to take it seriously.

If the purpose of the police van is to be an ambulance for arrested people then it should be outfitted like one and the people who are working in the van should be trained like ambulance personnel -- stopping to pick up other prisoners etc, shouldn't be a choice.

I don't know what to hope at this point.

Should I hope Mosby's got video of that van up on two wheels? For all I know, one or two or all of the black officers involved are like Uncle Ruckus on steroids.  For all I know Freddie Gray's breathing was obviously labored --- and they should have turned that police van into an ambulance, as far as racing to a hospital is concerned.

But how many times have the arrested people who are lying and complaining, while perfectly healthy, about a van that looks as uncomfortable as hell to me -- uncomfortable for a healthy person.

Should I hope the officers can explain why they put Gray in the back unsecured? Is it obvious to someone other than me that they laid him in his stomach instead of stuffing him onto that bench with a seatbelt because he was already hurt?

Should I hope Mosby's fired for putting three innocent black people in the center of a mess created by two or three white officers arresting Freddie Gray for running while being black?

Should I ignore all of this and hope somebody asks her how the hell she let the Nero get away with his part in this, then just  pray she get's Miller?  

(*- It's been said that the "riot" element of The Baltimore Uprising was caused by the predominantly white anti-protesters as the protests in black neighborhoods were peaceful) 

(**-I'm not sure that's the exact inside of the van above. But if it is, does that van look like it's for someone that's hurt? I'm not sure I could keep my spine straight for one good brake stomp if I'm sitting on a narrow ledge and also sideways to the momentum of the car)

ON OBJECTIONS TO TRANSGENDER ACCESS TO BATHROOMS

SOMEONE TAGGED ME ON A "WORRY" ABOUT TRANSGENDER ACCESS TO BATHROOMS

SHE SAID

"Honestly, I'm not worried about transwomen coming into women's bathrooms and attacking people or whatever. I'm worried about straight men who may use this as an opportunity to sexually attack women, etc..

What's to stop a straight man who decides to dress up like a woman and go into the bathroom because he wants whatever. What happens if fathers or uncles decide they should be able to accompany a girl child to the women's bathroom because the transgendered are allowed in?

MY ANSWER

Straight men have always had the ability to walk into a woman's bathroom -- dressed as female or not. And now they still do. Some may be rapists.

But the question is presenting a false dilemma here. The law is about female presenting people going to the female bathroom and male presenting people going to the male bathroom -- not anybody go to any bathroom.

Truth is, trans people have already been doing this for decades already. And according to FBI UCR data I've looked at, it wasn't the trans people in the bathroom raping people. It was the heterosexual male (and usually NOT in a public bathroom where they can be discovered -- who were doing the vast majority of the raping and sexual assaults.

Now that the law has changed, a heterosexual person can't call the cops and have a trans person arrested based on a suspicion based on seeing a more squared off jaw or an adam's apple or something else ridiculous.

For heterosexual people, the law changes nothing -- not really, except you can go to the bathroom with a transgendered friend and not have to worry about someone attacking your friend for attending to a basic need.

For trans people a b.s. basis of harassment and arrest is being removed. That's huge.

You can fit what I understand about trans issues in a thimble, but I"m learning. The thing is, you don't have to understand much to figure out that this whole debate is fear and loathing feeding on itself.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/05/12/feds-schools-transgender-bathrooms-letter-title-ix/84311104/

LOVE, JOY, AND PAIN FOR BROWN GIRLS WHO LOVED PRINCE

A subject I've refused to think about too hard, because it's too painful for the inner child I apparently carry within me.

"...In the weeks since Prince’s death, I’ve been falling in love with him all over again, listening to his music daily, listening closely to the words, allowing my three children to listen – to the non-sexual songs, of course – and watching my only daughter, who is right around the age I was when I met him, fall in “like.” She is intrigued with him. I don’t think it’s as intense for her as it was for me. But, I think more than anything, she is using this opportunity to get to know me – to understand why her mom is so impacted by this man she never met.

I have also had the opportunity to reflect on Prince’s impact on little brown girls like me and like her. I am a media scholar and I specifically focus on 

Prince and Beyonce

media portrayals of African Americans. I have been doing so for more than two decades, but when I met Prince, I was clueless. I had no idea of the subliminal message his choice of women had on me."

Read more about this idol's real and potential impact on young black girls here.  (It's short but dense)

http://www.forharriet.com/2016/05/for-colored-girls-who-loved-prince.html#ixzz48wlEpagy

I'd love to read a light-skinned woman's view of Prince and his choices.

I want to know if Prince's choices led to jealousy from those "more awake" than I was as a young dark-skinned teenage girls.


 I think I excused Prince, for years and years, as a "mixed race person" looking for other "mixed race people" when I was girl, though the sting of his never ever being attracted to someone like me - dark skin, plump lips, and wide nose--did hurt me.

But it isn't like Prince was unique in this. (another excuse for him even now)

And, I felt the the sting of Prince's light girl choices again immediately after his death.

A black man wrote an article on how Prince considered himself "black" and not "bi-racial" The author of the piece, unwittingly, blew my teenage excuse for Prince right out of the water.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/24/prince-loved-his-blackness-and-yours.html

"He LOVED HIS BLACKNESS

--AND YOURS"

the article says. 

I didn't let my mind light on that little factoid for more than a half a second because I loved Prince just as much as the author of the quoted ForHarriet article did.

I didn't want to think about Prince and colorism in the same space of time.

I didn't want to think about how Prince loved "his blackness -- and yours" for so long as you were not a black woman as dark as me.


All shades of black men could be near Prince on and off stage. But women? There was a paperbag test to be passed, and an extra pale paperbag too.

Prince and Misty Copeland
RELATIVELY RECENTLY

The niggling little colorlism worries regarding Prince came to me over and over again through the years, and upon hearing of his death as well. But I pushed  those worries away until I read the ForHarriett article linked above.

 I think the author captured my feelings perfectly -- hurt, disappointment, and set me wondering about the DEEP lack of self esteem I experienced in my past.


I don't know that I EVER actually wished to be paler (once I passed 5 or 6 years of age). But I absolutely wished to be treated like I was beautiful, like light skinned girls were.


In the back of my mind I'll bet I wished for the beautiful, worthwhile treatment from black boys every single day from 12 to 22, when I left college. And Prince had a piece of that. Even if it was only a sliver of a piece, it was a sliver too many for someone who supposedly thought so far outside the box and was supposedly all the way pro-black.

Prince had his problematic side.  I acknowledge that every black star that was raised inside white supremacy has some sort of problematic side. And if you can think of a black someone you think of as race woman perfection or as race man perfection,  then their flaw simply hasn't been exposed yet.


 But I'd like to know the thoughts and feelings of others now.  
I know light women have to deal with jealousy from dark women because black men choose their paleness for its own sake so often.

 Accusations like "You think you're better than us" are hurled at light women even before boys, when they are still small children. Parents and aunts can prefer light-skinned children as "beautiful" with "good hair" too. (I believe Oprah has told this story more than once)

So I'd like to know if Prince's choices of Vanity, Appalonia,  Sheila E, then Beyonce and Misty led to light skinned women resenting Prince, for adding fuel to the jealous dark-skinned fire

 OR 
if Prince's choices simply made them more secure and confident, being closer to European standards of beauty. I think that's what I mostly saw at college, joy and feigned ignorance of superior social position among black men based on paleness. I think so? I was a nerd anyway. But I think I lived out aspects of "School Daze." I think I saw Prince style colorism affect non-nerd, dark-skinned black girls.  (Isn't it ironic that Spike Lee married what looks like a "Wanna Be?")


So, I wonder if light-skinned women mostly decided not-to-see Prince repeatedly identify pale as "beautiful" back when they were children. If light women did see Prince's choices of pale girls as negative, did they assume that his choices only had "negative" impact on darker girls-become-women. That is, I wonder if light-skinned women are rethinking Prince just like some of us dark women at are....or at least trying not to rethink Prince because it's too painful to realize he loved all blackness --except dark-skinned women (maybe)

I keep hoping a dark-skinned woman that was secretly married to Prince for 20 years will come out of the wood work and redeem Prince.

Maybe I'll just pretend I never heard or saw anything that indicated that Prince thought of himself as all-the-way-black. I preferred him in the bi-racial zone choosing bi-racial women like himself. 

JUSTICE VERSUS LEGALITY

MALCOLM X FOR WOMEN

Somebody wrote that Malcolm's legacy is hard to pin down because he changed so much. To me, that Malcolm's ability to learn and change is his legacy. His faith and his studying changed him while in jail. He changed again, more than once, after he was a leader for the Nation Of Islam.

Too many people, especially men, think holding firm and being immovable is a sign of strength when that's more often a sign of fear.

Malcolm X, it seems to me, had one of the most flexible minds I've read about.

I've met dozens and dozens of people of all shades that cannot incorporate a new thought and toss out old thoughts that no longer serve. And I've met more black people than I'd like to admit that are frozen by their resentment and fear of white people, so afraid that they don't even know that their desire for total separation from white people is fear, damn near panic level fear. 

Some black people are so scared don't even want to vote because America is "theirs" (the wypeepo's) Constantly, the fearful say "We need to" move over there and get our own. Move over there in this fictional someplace without leaving the U.S. where our blood has been mixed with the soil for 400 years, where we built most of the old buildings worth gawking at and admiring. 

But Malcolm wasn't scared. Or if he was, he educated himself and lost his fear. He was not afraid of changing his mind. He wasn't afraid of losing his father figure (like so many black men did when it became clear Cliff Huxtable might be tainted by Bill Cosby's behavior)  

Malcolm's legacy is not hard to pin down because he changed so much. His legacy is marking it as a sign of superior adulthood for one to have the ability to lose one's fear and change one's mind. 


In the excerpt below, from Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, Malcolm's evolution can almost be described as from HOTEP to FEMINIST.  Who knows who he would have been when he finished growing up -- because he was STILL growing up. He wasn't just moving politically, the way I perceive Martin Luther King doing. He was growing. 

In reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X, we should always keep two things in mind. First, that the interviews were begun while Malcolm was still in the Nation, with Elijah Muhammad’s approval. And second, that Malcolm was denied the opportunity to review and edit the final draft, or bring it in line with his views at that time. According to Haley, the assassination coincided with the days he and Malcolm had tentatively set aside for that review.

Toward the end of the Autobiography, Malcolm is describing his visit to Beirut, Lebanon, on the last day of April 1964. Going out for a walk, he says,

...immediately my attention was struck by the mannerisms and attire of the Lebanese women. In the Holy Land [Saudi Arabia] there had been the very modest, very feminine Arabian women—and there was this sudden contrast of the half-French, half-Arab Lebanese women who projected in their dress and street manners more liberty, more boldness. I saw clearly the obvious European influence upon the Lebanese culture. It showed me how any country’s moral strength, or its moral weakness, is quickly measurable by the street attire and attitude of its women—especially its young women. Wherever the spiritual values have been submerged, if not destroyed, by an emphasis upon the material things, invariably, the women reflect it. Witness the women, both young and old, in America—where scarcely any moral values are left.

So that’s how Malcolm still approached the question of women’s social position a month or so after his break with the Nation. The emphasis remained on religious standards of modesty and sexual morality.

At roughly this same time, Malcolm was still an unequivocal opponent of what he called “intermarriage.”

In the Autobiography, once again, Malcolm writes: “I’m right with the Southern white man who believes that you can’t have so-called ‘integration,’ at least not for long, without intermarriage increasing. And what good is this for anyone? Let’s again face reality. In a world as color-hostile as this, man or woman, black or white, what do they want with a mate of the other race?” …

By the end of Malcolm’s second trip to Africa and the Middle East in 1964, between early July and late November, however, his views had undergone a striking change—one that paralleled the evolution of how he thought and acted on other social and political questions. At a news conference during a stopover in Paris following that trip, Malcolm said that one of the things he had noticed during his travels was that

in every country you go to, usually the degree of progress can never be separated from the woman. If you’re in a country that’s progressive, the woman is progressive. If you’re in a country that reflects the consciousness toward the importance of education, it’s because the woman is aware of the importance of education.

But in every backward country you’ll find the women are backward, and in every country where education is not stressed it’s because the women don’t have education. So one of the things I became thoroughly convinced of in my recent travels is the importance of giving freedom to the women, giving her education, and giving her the incentive to get out there and put the same spirit and understanding in her children. And I am frankly proud of the contributions that our women have made in the struggle for freedom and I’m one person who’s for giving them all the leeway possible because they’ve made a greater contribution than many of us men.

[ … ]

This is a very advanced level of political understanding: that you can measure the degree of progress and development of a society by the place of women in its social, economic, and political life. Unlike Malcolm’s remarks just a few months earlier about women in Beirut, where female “modesty” and religious “morality” had been his starting point, now Malcolm was using political criteria. He overcame simple prejudice—which is what Malcolm’s earlier views reflected, whether expressed by him or by anyone else—and began replacing them with facts about the social position of women. He began talking about what women can and do accomplish to advance human progress, to advance revolutionary change, if barriers erected against them begin to be torn down.

Malcolm also changed his mind on interracial marriage.

Appearing on a television talk show in Toronto, in mid-January 1965, Malcolm was asked by the host, Pierre Berton, whether he still held his earlier views on this question. Malcolm replied: “I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being—neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there’s no question of integration or intermarriage. It’s just one human being marrying another human being, or one human being living around and with another human being.”

What needs to be attacked, Malcolm told Berton, is the racist society that produces attitudes “hostile toward integration and toward intermarriage and toward these other strides toward oneness” of human beings, not “the reaction that develops among the people who are the victims of that negative society.”

In assessing the evolution of Malcolm’s attitude toward women’s rights—including the place he had come to recognize women would occupy in coming revolutionary struggles in the United States and worldwide—we should also note the shattering impact on Malcolm of his discovery that Elijah Muhammad was sexually abusing young female members of the Nation of Islam.

According to Malcolm, this was the single fact, more than any particular political conflict per se, that marked a turning point in his relationship with the Nation. It deeply shook Malcolm’s confidence in the religious, political, and moral integrity of Elijah Muhammad and of the Nation of Islam itself… .

Finally, Malcolm deepened his understanding of the importance of combating the oppression of women as he watched them help lead the fight for Black rights in this country.


When Fannie Lou Hamer came to New York in December 1964 to win support for the freedom struggle in Mississippi, Malcolm spoke alongside her at a rally in Harlem and gave her a platform that night at the meeting of the OAAU [Organization of Afro-American Unity]. Malcolm also admired and worked with Gloria Richardson, who had refused to call off demonstrations in Cambridge, Maryland, in face of white-supremacist thugs and the National Guard—as well as public rebukes by conservative Black leaders—and who publicly solidarized with Malcolm’s call for the right of self-defense against racist terror.

I mentioned earlier Malcolm’s insistence that the aim of the movement he was working to build was to awaken Blacks “to their humanity, to their own worth.” During the final months of his life, Malcolm also deepened his understanding that the fight to liberate half of humanity from their oppression, and to assert in action their political worth, sharply increased the potential forces of revolution in this country and around the world. 

TWITTER ESSAY on MICHELLE OBAMA VS MELANIA TRUMP

TRUMP SAYS DEATH PENALTY FOR A GROUP THAT IS 70% WHITE MEN

BUT NUMBSKULL DOESN'T KNOW IT


Feeling Rebloggy

Would it shock you to learn that the number of police who've been shot and killed in 2016 is up an astounding 59% from where it was this same date last year? Seventeen police officers have already been shot and killed in 2016, by mid-May. Only 10 had suffered that fate by May 10th, 2015....

Seventy-one percent of police who've been shot and killed this year weren't murdered by black men with cornrows or hoodies. They weren't gunned down by Latino gang members in low-rider drive-bys. Those stereotypes would be too convenient. Instead, 71% of police who've been shot and killed so far in 2016 have been killed by good old-fashioned white men.

~Daily News

Read More: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-cops-killed-white-men-conservatives-silent-article-1.2632965

As it is Donald Trump wants the death penalty for cop killers, Donald Trump has committed to killing a group that is 70% white male.

"Donald Trump announced Thursday that if elected president, he would sign an executive order to mandate the death penalty for convicted cop...."

CNN, December 2015http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/10/politics/donald-trump-police-officers-death-penalty/

You know Trump and his supporters were imagining sneering black people when he said this, right? You know they weren't looking in mirrors, imaging with self-satisfied glee, people that look like themselves crying and terrified as they are about to get the needle, right?* You know the Trump followers were not imagining white boys that look just like their sons, brothers, cousins, and husbands right? 

You know that right? 

*Tell me how this isn't a form of torture.