Conservative advocate sues to end affirmative action at Harvard

Posted on June 11, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Joan Biskupic

In recent months, Harvard University has come under attack in court for allegedly limiting the number of Asian-American students it admits. A Reuters examination reveals how the lawsuit brought in their name arose from a broader goal: upending a nearly 40-year-old Supreme Court decision that has primarily helped blacks and Hispanics.

A civil rights group representing African American and other minority students has recently filed papers seeking to enter the case, arguing they are the “real targets.” They say that if the lawsuit succeeds, the consequences for blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans would be “catastrophic,” and they cannot rely on Harvard to represent their interests.

The lawsuit was not initiated by Asian Americans. It names none in its 120 pages.

Rather, it was started by a conservative advocate, Edward Blum, who over the years has enlisted white plaintiffs to challenge race-based policies. He developed the case that two years ago led to a Supreme Court decision narrowing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Last week the justices accepted another voting-related case he started, one that could shift voting power from urban, Hispanic districts to rural, whiter areas in Texas.

Blum launched the Harvard case after a prior high-profile effort to overturn university racial preferences foundered. For the earlier case, he had encouraged the daughter of a friend, Abigail Fisher, to sue the University of Texas for allegedly discriminating against her under a diversity policy that favored blacks and Hispanics with lower scores. The Supreme Court rejected the argument in 2013, although it sent the case back for further hearings, and a new appeal is pending at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Even some advocates for Asian Americans agree with the claim of the civil rights group that Blum is going to wind up hurting blacks and Hispanics. Betty Hung, a spokeswoman for Asian Americans Advancing Justice, a civil rights group that contends race-conscious policies have broadly benefited  its constituents, says Blum is using Asian Americans “for another misguided attack on affirmative action.”

Read More Conservative advocate sues to end affirmative action at Harvard.

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Cleveland Judge Finds Probable Cause to Charge Officers in Tamir Rice Death

Posted on June 11, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Richard Perez-Pena and Mitch Smith

A judge in Cleveland ruled Thursday that probable cause existed to charge two Cleveland police officers in the death of a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, but also said he did not have the power to order the arrests without a complaint being filed by a prosecutor.

This week, a group of activists and community leaders asked the Municipal Court to have the officers, Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, arrested under a little-used Ohio law that allows “a private citizen having knowledge of the facts” to start the process by filing an affidavit with a court. They argued that the widely seen video of an officer killing Tamir had given nearly everyone “knowledge of the facts.”

On Thursday, Judge Ronald B. Adrine issued an order saying that probable cause existed to charge the officers, and “this court determines that complaints should be filed by the prosecutor of the City of Cleveland and/or the Cuyahoga County prosecutor.” What weight the order carries with the prosecutors is unclear.

The ruling puts prosecutors in a difficult position, deciding whether to bring charges in a high-profile case when a judge has already said that probable cause exists to do so.

In a statement, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, Timothy J. McGinty, said the case, “as with all other fatal use of deadly force cases involving law enforcement officers, will go to the grand jury.”

Read More  Cleveland Judge Finds Probable Cause to Charge Officers in Tamir Rice Death – NYTimes.com.

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Disillusioned black voters ask: Is voting even worth it?

Posted on June 11, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Robert Samuels

During those two electric Novembers, the chance to elect a black president, and then keep him in office, seized Regenia Motley’s neighborhood.

Nightclubs were registering voters. Churches held fish fries after loading buses that ferried parishioners to the polls. A truck hoisted a big sign that said “Obama.” And residents waited in long lines at precincts across the community.

But as Motley and some friends sought shade recently under a mulberry tree and looked across the landscape of empty lots and abandoned houses that has persisted here, they wondered whether they would ever bother voting again.

“What was the point?” asked Motley, 23, a grocery store clerk. “We made history, but I don’t see change.”

On Jacksonville’s north side and in other struggling urban neighborhoods across the country, where Barack Obama mobilized large numbers of new African American voters who were inspired partly by the emotional draw of his biography, high hopes have turned to frustration: Even a black president was unable to heal places still gripped by violence, drugs and joblessness.

The dynamic, made prominent in recent months after unrest in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., sets up a stark challenge for Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner.

While supporting Obama became a cause for many here rather than a typical campaign, Clinton faces a higher bar in making a case that she, too, can be a transformative figure.

Her campaign is planning to build on the multiethnic coalition that turned out to support Obama. Running to be the first female president, Clinton will also try to generate Obama-like enthusiasm among new voters — those who were too young to turn out for Obama or have not previously been engaged with politics.

Yet as her allies prepare to register voters and expand the black electorate, her candidacy presents residents here with a question: If Obama’s presidency didn’t do more to help African Americans, then how could hers?

Read More  Disillusioned black voters ask: Is voting even worth it? – The Washington Post.

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Baltimore cops speak out on Freddie Gray, murder spike

Posted on June 11, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Brooke Baldwin and Dana Ford

Baltimore_Police_Department_logo_patchForty-two people were killed in Baltimore in May, making it the deadliest month there since 1972.

When asked what’s behind that number, a Baltimore police officer gave an alarming answer. Basically, he said, the good guys are letting the bad guys win.

“The criminal element feels as though that we’re not going to run the risk of chasing them if they are armed with a gun, and they’re using this opportunity to settle old beefs, or scores, with people that they have conflict with,” the officer said. “I think the public really, really sees that they asked for a softer, less aggressive police department, and we have given them that, and now they are realizing that their way of thinking does not work.”

He was one of two active Baltimore police officers who spoke to CNN on Tuesday about crime in their city. They also touched on the death of Freddie Gray, a young black man who died in police custody, and the riots that followed.

The officers were not given permission to speak from their department. Because of that, and in an attempt to allow them to talk candidly, CNN agreed on their condition of anonymity.

Both said the Baltimore Police Department is simply reacting to events instead of being proactive. They talked about feeling abandoned by their leadership and feeling scared — not about being hurt, necessarily, but about being charged criminally for doing what they see as their job. Six officers have been charged in Gray’s death, which has been ruled a homicide.

“Ultimately, it does a disservice to the law-abiding citizens. It does a disservice to the business owners. It does a disservice to everybody except the criminal element,” the second officer said about operating in reactive mode.

He denied the existence of a work slowdown but said he couldn’t promise proactive policing.

Read More Baltimore cops speak out on Freddie Gray, murder spike – CNN.com.

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When Black People Are Target Practice

Posted on June 11, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Chauncey DeVega

In this age of police thuggery, it seems that almost every few days brings another video recorded incident of white-on-black police violence and excessive force. Last week a white police officer in Mckinney, Texas was recorded pulling out his gun and threatening a group of black teenagers at a pool party before throwing a young girl onto the cement as she cried for help. The officer has since resigned.

From the American founding to the South’s slave patrols and now in the age of Obama, there is a seemingly endless pile of black and brown bodies, the poor, disabled and mentally ill, who have been subjected to unjust legal violence by the State, as well as those it has gifted with the power of life and death (like George Zimmerman, empowered by “stand your ground” laws”).

Violence by the State, and those who are designated as having the power to dispense it, reveals a great deal about the nature of power in America. If the ability of the government to use violence against its citizens is a type of social control, then a society structured around maintaining white privilege and white supremacy — as well as class inequality — will use violence in an unequal way along the colorline (as well as against the poor and working classes en masse).

Read More When Black People Are Target Practice | Alternet.

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Pastors are pushing the right buttons in McKinney

Posted on June 11, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By James Ragland

Pastor Mike Connaway and I sat on the steep concrete steps of his downtown church for two hours, talking about life, faith, parenting — and the infamous swimming pool incident that’s drawing global attention to McKinney.

The Seattle transplant recently moved just a few blocks away from where the melee occurred, in the Craig Ranch subdivision on the town’s fast-growing west side.

Like many other residents and leaders of McKinney, Connaway, who is white, was disturbed by the shocking seven-minute video that showed a white police officer throwing a bikini-clad black teenage girl on the ground and then kneeling on her back.

He found it disgusting. And he knew the town was sitting on a powder keg if it didn’t handle the matter openly and decisively.

“I’m not a big social justice guy,” said Connaway, senior pastor of VLife, a nondenominational church he founded in 2010. “But when it is a social justice issue, you must stand up.”

The truth is, as humiliating and humbling as the past few days have been for the city of McKinney — and there are still a lot of moving pieces in this saga — the townsfolk are, for the most part, juggling this about as well as one could expect.

That includes the relatively new police chief, who distanced his department from the actions of Cpl. Eric Casebolt; and the town’s seasoned mayor, who didn’t waste much time in describing Casebolt’s response to a reported fight at the pool as “out of control.”

Read More  James Ragland: Pastors are pushing the right buttons in McKinney | Dallas Morning News.

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Frenship ISD teacher apologizes after McKinney-related segregation post

Posted on June 11, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Karen Michael & Adam D. Young

8034055_GA Frenship teacher said she apologized after writing a Facebook post saying she was “almost to the point” of wanting segregation regarding a racially charged police issue in McKinney.

Karen Fitzgibbons, a teacher at Bennett Elementary School, told A-J Media she deleted the post Wednesday evening — a day after writing the publicly viewable post on her Facebook page.

Asked about the post, a Frenship ISD spokesman said such matters are “taken very seriously.”

Fitzgibbons started the post by saying a McKinney police officer’s resignation after a dispute at a swimming pool made her angry and that the officer should not have to resign.

“I’m going to just go ahead and say it … the blacks are the ones causing the problems and this ‘racial tension.’ I guess that’s what happens when you flunk out of school and have no education. I’m sure their parents are just as guilty for not knowing what their kids were doing; or knew it and didn’t care. I’m almost to the point of wanting them all segregated on one side of town so they can hurt each other and leave the innocent people alone. Maybe the 50s and 60s were really on to something. Now, let the bashing of my true and honest opinion begin….GO! #imnotracist #imsickofthemcausingtrouble #itwasatagedcommunity,” the Facebook post stated.

Read More  Frenship ISD teacher apologizes after McKinney-related segregation post | Lubbock Online | Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.

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Woman Involved in Starting McKinney Pool Fight Placed on Administrative Leave by CoreLogic Inc.

Posted on June 11, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Stephen Benavides

Tracey Carver-Allbritton (Dallas Communities Organizing for Change/Twitter)

Tracey Carver-Allbritton (Dallas Communities Organizing for Change/Twitter)

While the primary focus of the incident in McKinney, TX has been calling for the termination of now resigned Corporal Eric Casebolt, Twitter launched an impromptu campaign to identify the two women confirmed to have made racist comments that led to the fight and the police being called in the first place. The video begins with an adult white woman and what appears to be a much younger African American girl locked in a fight, with each holding the others hair attempting to throw punches. A group of black teens initially act as observers but eventually try to separate the two. Another woman, now known as Tracey-Carver Allbritton, at first seems to be trying to break up the fight, but quickly decides to start throwing punches to the top of the younger girls head. After a few seconds the fight is broken up and both parties go their separate ways.

That video led activists on Twitter to ask who were the two women and why hadn’t they been arrested, or at least questioned for their role in the fight.  At this point they seemed to have slipped under the radar.  It didn’t take long for that video to be matched up with a Facebook profile linking Ms. Allbritton directly to the incident, and to her apparent employer listed on the account, Bank of America.

The tweet sent by Dallas Communities Organizing for Change, an organization who fights for racial justice and police reform, spread like wild fire and eventually forced the banking behomoth Bank of America to conduct an investigation of its own to determine whether or not Ms. Allbritton actually did work for her.  Contrary to what is listed on her Facebook profile, Bank of America released a statement online confirming that in fact she didn’t work for them, but that she did work for one of their vendors.

Read More Woman Involved in Starting McKinney Pool Fight Placed on Administrative Leave by CoreLogic Inc..

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List of CEOs and politicians invited to 2015 Bilderberg Conference in Austria

Posted on June 11, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Oscar Williams-Grut

A select group of global elite will gather in Telfs-Buchen, Austria, on Thursday for a super secret annual conference where they can discuss politics, foreign policy, and economics freely.

The Bilderberg Conference has been running since 1954 and according to its barebone website was “designed to foster dialogue between Europe and North America.”

Attendees hold “informal discussions to help create a better understanding of the complex forces and major trends affecting Western nations.”

Topics for discussion this year include artificial intelligence, cyber security, Greece, Iran, and the US elections.

But it will be almost impossible to find out what is said on these topics as Bilderberg is closed to journalists. Because of this, conspiracy theorists believe it is where the global elite plot how to rule the world.

What we do know, however, is who will be attending. Some notable names include Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn Co-founder Reid Hoffman, and British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.

Read More List of CEOs and politicians invited to 2015 Bilderberg Conference in Austria – Business Insider.

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How To Survive A Traffic Stop “I Don’t Answer Questions”

Posted on June 10, 2015 by The Soul Brother

Not exactly sure if this will work for my Brothers & Sisters, but there is some good information in this video.

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