America Is Not For Black People

Despite decades of fervent student protests that reached a peak last fall, the president of Yale announced on Wednesday that the university would keep the name of a residential college honoring the 19th-century politician and white supremacist John C. Calhoun.
The president, Peter Salovey, also said the university would name its two new residential colleges for Anna Pauline Murray and Benjamin Franklin. The selection of Ms. Murray, a legal scholar and civil rights activist who graduated from Yale Law School in 1965, represents the first time the school has honored either an African-American or a woman with the naming of a college.

Many students were perplexed by the selection of Franklin, who received an honorary degree from Yale. Franklin, like many other founding fathers, was once a slaveholder himself before he became involved in the abolitionist movement. Mr. Salovey explained that Franklin was a “personal hero and role model” of Charles B. Johnson, a businessman and Yale alumnus who donated $250 million to pay for the new buildings — the largest gift in the school’s history — and who suggested the honor.

In a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, Mr. Salovey said that while Mr. Johnson’s gift was not contingent upon naming the college after Franklin, “I really want you to remember this is the largest single gift ever given to Yale.”

In addition, the faculty leaders of all Yale residential colleges will shed their long-held title of master; they will now be called heads of college, acknowledging the discomfort many students and faculty members felt toward a title that conjures the country’s history of slavery.

As part of the resolution, Yale will start a historical study examining the “lesser-known people, events and narratives behind the familiar facades seen on campus,” beginning with an appraisal of Mr. Calhoun’s legacy.

The various decisions came in consultation with the Yale Corporation, the university’s governing body.

On Wednesday night, the Black Student Alliance at Yale issued a statement calling the naming of Murray College and the abandonment of the master title “long-overdue first steps towards creating a better and more inclusive Yale.” Retaining the name Calhoun, they said, “is a regression.”

Mr. Salovey defended the Calhoun decision as the best possible way for the university to confront its history.

“Universities have to be the places where tough conversations happen,” he said. “I don’t think that is advanced by hiding our past.”

Similar heated discussions about historic ties between universities and their racist pasts have inflamed campuses across the country. Princeton’s board of trustees decided this month that the name Woodrow Wilson would remain on its buildings and school, despite vociferous student objections. Mr. Wilson was an admirer of the Ku Klux Klan and reinstated segregation in the federal government.

Yale has long grappled with the legacy of Mr. Calhoun, who advocated slavery as “a positive good,” but the issue found footing last fall after an online petition demanding that the college’s name be changed garnered around 1,500 supporting signatures.
The dispute over Calhoun College, founded in 1933, that ensued soon revealed deeper discontent among students and professors over more substantive issues regarding race, in particular what many saw as the university’s lack of commitment to faculty diversity and the alienation experienced by many minority students.

A group of student activists — operating under the name Next Yale — handed Mr. Salovey a list of demands last year that included increasing the number and tenure of diverse faculty members; increasing the budgets for ethnic and racial cultural centers; abolishing the title of master; and naming the two new residential colleges after minorities.

Those demands were met in part, but students have largely remained skeptical. In November, the university announced that it was committing $50 million to a faculty-diversity initiative, an effort to address the fact that less than 3 percent of its Faculty of Arts and Sciences is black. Among Yale’s roughly 5,400 undergraduates, 11 percent identify themselves as black or African-American.

Karléh Wilson, a senior from Louisiana who has helped organize the Next Yale protests, said she felt the university did not go far enough to meet student demands. “There are more than enough alumni of color who the naming committee could have drawn from,” Ms. Wilson, 22, said.

Crystal Feimster, a professor of African-American studies, agreed, saying she was “deeply disappointed with the decision not to rename Calhoun” and found the selection of Franklin “a missed opportunity.” Still, she lauded the choice of Ms. Murray, whom she called “a relentless advocate for racial equality and women’s rights.”

Jonathan Holloway, the college’s first black dean of students, called this year “a moment of reckoning” that he hoped would strengthen the university.

“We’re trying to reconcile our current values and aspirations with these names,” he said. “We will have failed if we do not do that work going forward.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/ny...lege.html?_r=0

"alumni of color".....heh

Well, see, they all mixed up...that college was named after the learned barrister, Algonquin J. Calhoun; not some old ex-vice-president of USA.

Yales hockey team is better than Yales basketball team.

Yales hockey team is better than Yales basketball team. Originally Posted by Slitlikr

does either have any nappy headed ho's?

OVER the past several years, we have borne witness to grainy videos of what “protect and serve” looks like for black lives — Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Kajieme Powell, to name a few. I don’t think any of us could have imagined how tiny cameras would allow us to see, time and again, injustices perpetrated, mostly against black people, by police officers. I don’t think we could have imagined that video of police brutality would not translate into justice, and I don’t think we could have imagined how easy it is to see too much, to become numb. And now, here we are.

There is a new name to add to this list — Alton B. Sterling, 37, killed by police officers in Baton Rouge, La. It is a bitter reality that there will always be a new name to that list. Black lives matter, and then in an instant, they don’t.

Mr. Sterling was selling CDs in front of a convenience store early Tuesday morning. He was tasered and pinned down by two police officers, who the police say were responding to a call. He was shot, multiple times, in the chest and back. He died, and his death looks and feels as though he were executed.

Mr. Sterling leaves behind family and children who will forever know that their father was executed, that the image of their father’s execution is now a permanent part of the American memory, that the image of their father’s execution may not bring them justice. Justice, in fact, already feels tenuous. The body cameras the police officers were wearing “dangled,” according to the police department’s spokesman,L’Jean McKneely, so we don’t know how much of the events leading to Mr. Sterling’s death were captured. The Baton Rouge police department also has the convenience store surveillance video, which it is not, as of yet, releasing. Mr. McKneely said the officers were not questioned last night because “we give officers normally a day or so to go home and think about it.”
It has been nearly two years since Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo., and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. It has been nearly two years of activists putting themselves on the front lines as police officers continue to act against black lives with impunity. At the same time, according to The Guardian, there have been 560 people killed by police in the United States in 2016.

Tuesday night I heard about Mr. Sterling’s death, and I felt so very tired. I had no words because I don’t know what more can be said about this kind of senseless death.
I watched the cellphone video, shot by a bystander and widely available online, of the final moments of a black man’s life. I watched Alton Sterling’s killing, despite my better judgment. I watched even though it was voyeuristic, and in doing so I made myself complicit in the spectacle of black death. The video is a mere 48 seconds long, and it is interminable. To watch another human being shot to death is grotesque. It is horrifying, and even though I feel so resigned, so hopeless, so out of words in the face of such brutal injustice, I take some small comfort in still being able to be horrified and brought to tears.

We know what happens now because this brand of tragedy has become routine. The video of Mr. Sterling’s death allows us to bear witness, but it will not necessarily bring justice. There will be protest as his family and community try to find something productive to do with sorrow and rage. Mr. Sterling’s past will be laid bare, every misdeed brought to light and used as justification for police officers choosing to act as judge, jury and executioner — due process in a parking lot.

In the video, a police officer can be heard shouting that Mr. Sterling had a gun (Louisiana is an open-carry state). The National Rifle Association is likely to stay silent because the Second Amendment is rarely celebrated in these cases. TheDepartment of Justice will investigate this case. Perhaps things are changing because the investigation was announced immediately. Charges might be brought against the two officers involved, but, as history both recent and not shows us, it is rare for police officers to be convicted in such shootings.

I don’t know where we go from here because those of us who recognize the injustice are not the problem. Law enforcement, militarized and indifferent to black lives, is the problem. Law enforcement that sees black people as criminals rather than human beings with full and deserving lives is the problem. A justice system that rarely prosecutes or convicts police officers who kill innocent people in the line of duty is the problem. That this happens so often that resignation or apathy are reasonable responses is the problem.
It’s overwhelming to see what we are up against, to live in a world where too many people have their fingers on the triggers of guns aimed directly at black people. I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know how to allow myself to feel grief and outrage while also thinking about change. I don’t know how to believe change is possible when there is so much evidence to the contrary. I don’t know how to feel that my life matters when there is so much evidence to the contrary.



The video that truly haunts me is from a news conference withQuinyetta McMillon, the mother of Alton Sterling’s oldest child, a 15-year-old boy, who sobbed and cried out for his father as his mother read her statement. The grief and the magnitude of loss I heard in that boy’s crying reminds me that we cannot indulge in the luxuries of apathy and resignation.

If the video of his father’s death feels too familiar, the video of this child’s raw and enormous grief must not. We have to bear witness and resist numbness and help the children of the black people who lose their lives to police brutality shoulder their unnatural burden.

by Roxane Gay

NYTimes

The BR shooting sickens me, I grew up in La and I just remember people of all backgrounds getting along, at it was so different in south La than the movie stereotypes, etc. I know peace officers back home and to me the Sterling killing does not represent them. Very sad for his family first, and I fear bad reactions to the events are coming.

The stupid fucker was resisting and not complying with the police demands......I hope the other stupid fucks in this world learn a lesson from this

^^^^^ Same goes for the dipshit in Walmart that wouldn't drop the pellet gun.

So what about the guy from MN? I saw the video on Nancy Grace. I'm far from soft, but that made me cry.

^^^^^ That's old news. We're now tuned to three dead cops in Dallas

Edit: Nancy Grace?...... Really?!

^^^^^ Just saw that. Madness. Their poor families. I can't fathom the pain they are going to experience. Everyday I want to leave America more and more and raise my precious baby somewhere peaceful. But where in the hell is that?

Black citizens of the United States have seldom enjoyed the same right to bear arms that Whites do.

The shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile share several striking, stomach-churning similarities: They were black men, killed by police, in deeply segregated communities. Both killings were captured on video, a product of an age in which anyone can tape an encounter with police—and increasingly, anyone, especially anyone black, realizes doing so may be important.

But both Castile and Sterling also shared one other thing in common: Both men were apparently carrying guns when they were killed.

According to Lavish Reynolds, Castile’s girlfriend who was in a car with him when he was shot and posted a Facebook video of the aftermath, the officer asked Castile for his license and registration. As he reached for his wallet, he also told the officer than he had a concealed-carry permit and a gun. Reynolds said the officer told him not to move, but as Castile tried to put his hands up, he was shot and killed.

Sterling, meanwhile, was outside a store when police came. A gun was reportedly found in his pocket after he was shot and killed. The store’s owner Abdullah Muflahi, who knew Sterling, said that Sterling was not reaching for the gun, and videos don’t show any evidence that Sterling was reaching for his gun.

On social-media, many are already asking why the Second Amendment did not protect Sterling and Castile, and why gun-rights advocates like the National Rifle Association are not speaking out on their behalf. In each case, there are complicated legal questions, and many of the details remain unclear, but it is true that gun-rights groups like the NRA and its allies have typically pushed for laws that would allow citizens broader freedom to bear arms than currently permitted. It is also the case that the interpretation of the Second Amendment has for decades been deeply intertwined with the ways the law protects—and more often fails to protect—African Americans in comparison with whites, a history that begins in earnest in the 1860s, flares up in the 1960s, and is again relevant today.

The Sterling case is the more complicated one. Sterling was a convicted felon, and thus probably was not legally permitted to have a gun. While Louisiana allows open carry of handguns for anyone legally allowed to possess one, concealed carry requires a permit, for which Sterling would have been ineligible. Sterling had allegedly been displaying the gun, which is the reason why police were called.

The crucial point is that the police couldn’t have known when they arrived on the scene whether Sterling’s gun was completely legal or not. An additional irony is that, according to Muflahi, Sterling had begun carrying the gun because he was concerned about his own safety—that is to say, for the very reasons that gun-rights advocates say citizens should be able to, and many argue should, carry guns.

The Castile case looks more straightforward, based on what’s known now. Assuming Castile’s permit was valid, he was placed in an impossible position by the officer. Unlike Sterling, who seems to have been resisting arrest (a fact that in no way justifies an extrajudicial execution by officers), Castile was attempting to comply with contradictory imperatives: first, the precautionary step of declaring the weapon to the officer; second, the officer’s request for his license and registration; and third, the officer’s command to freeze.*

Some activists contend that white men in the same situations would never have been shot. It’s an impossible counterfactual to prove, although there’s relevant circumstantial evidence, such as the fact that black men are much more likely to be shot by police than any other group. Raw Story rounds up stories of white people who pointed guns at police and were not shot. Castile’s shooting is reminiscent of a 2014 incident in which South Carolina State Trooper Sean Groubert pulled a black driver over in Columbia. Groubert asked the man, Levar Edward Jones, for his license and registration, but when the driver turned to get them, Groubert promptly shot him without warning. Groubert seems to have feared—however irrationally—for his safety when Jones reached into the car, but what was Jones supposed to do? He was complying with the officer’s instructions. (Groubert later pled guilty to assault and battery.)

The two shootings give a strong sense that the Second Amendment does not apply to black Americans in the same way it does to white Americans. Although liberals are loath to think of the right to bear arms as a civil right, it’s spelled out in the Bill of Rights. Like other civil rights, the nation and courts have interpreted it differently over time—as an individual right, and as a collective right. But however it’s been applied, African Americans have historically not enjoyed nearly the same protection as their white fellow citizens.

As Adam Winkler wrote in The Atlantic in 2011, one crucial testing ground for a personal right to bear arms came in the aftermath of the Civil War. Blacks in the South encountered a new landscape, one which they were ostensibly free but vulnerable and beset by white antagonists:

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866,Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

In response, General Dan Sickles, who was in charge of Reconstruction in South Carolina, decreed that blacks could own guns. State officials ignored him, so Congress passed a law stating that ex-slaves possessed “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.” In the words of the Yale constitutional-law scholar Akhil Reed Amar, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”

Black Americans again prominently asserted their right to bear arms during the 1960s. In 1964, Malcolm X was famously photographed holding a rifle as he looked out a window. The image was often misinterpreted as a statement of aggression, as though he was preparing a guerrilla assault. In fact, Malcolm wasexercising his own right to own a gun for self-defense, concerned that members of the Nation of Islam—which he had recently deserted for Sunni orthodoxy—would try to kill him. (His fear was, of course, vindicated the following year, when Nation members did murder him.)
In 1967, Black Panthers began taking advantage of California laws that permitted open carry, walking the streets of Oakland armed to the teeth, citing threats of violence from white people and particularly white cops. When people were pulled over, Panthers would arrive on the scene—to ensure that justice was done, they argued, or to intimidate the cops, the cops contended. In response, Republican state Assemblyman Don Mulford introduced a bill to ban open carry. The Panthers then decided to go to the state capitol, heavily armed, to exercise their right.

As theater, it was an incredible gesture. As politics, it was a catastrophe. The sight of heavily armed black men brandishing rifles galvanized support for Mulford’s bill, which promptly passed and was signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan. It set off a spree of gun-control laws that only began to be rolled back years later—leading to the current regime of permissive laws.

“The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative,” Winkler wrote.

Signs of that shift are visible around the nation now. In Texas, gun owners (largely white) staged an open-carry rally on the capitol grounds in Austin in January, an echo of the Panthers’ rally in Sacramento. (Even some gun advocates looked askance at that move.) Meanwhile, the Panthers’ tactic of carrying guns and watching the police has an echo in the rapidly spreading practice of filming encounters with the police, just as happened in the Sterling and Castile shootings. Black Americans may not enjoy the full protection of the Second Amendment, but technology has offered a sort of alternative—one that may be less effective in preventing brutality in the moment, but has produced an outpouring of outrage.

One common thread through all of these cases is the constant threat of state violence against black Americans: from un-Reconstructed Southern officials; from California police; and today, from police around the country.

Gun advocates frequently argue that more guns, and more people carrying guns, produce a safer society. This, and the contrary claim that they undermine public safety, depend on statistics. But anecdotally, both Castile and Sterling represent cases in which carrying a gun not only failed to make the men safer, but in fact contributed to their deaths. The NRA has not made a public statement on either case, and a spokesman did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

In any case, the American approach to guns is, for the moment, stable. The courts, and particularly the Supreme Court, have inched toward much broader gun rights, including a suggestion of a personal right to bear arms. The death of Justice Antonin Scalia may, in the long term, produce a more liberal court, but that will require reversing years of precedents. In the meantime, spates of mass shootings and a slightly increase in violent crime have produced highly vocal calls for gun control, but there’s little reason to expect those efforts to succeed. To date, they have almost universally failed. In fact, the last few years have brought ever looser gun laws. Quick changes in gun laws, regardless of whether they’re desirable, are a remote possibility. As a result, the most relevant question right now is not whether gun laws should change, but whether existing gun laws apply equally to all Americans—and if not, why they don’t.

by David A. Graham
the atlantic

Hi Brooke,

Actually you would be surprised how much safer Europe is than the U.S. I have traveled extensively throughout Europe. My son lived in Lyon, France in 2014-15 while attending college there. He did not want to come home afterward. He has been to all the places where the terrorist have struck recently, Paris and Belgium and Turkey. ( Before it all happened). DESPITE all of those attacks, Europe is still much safer than the U.S.

I am going to piss a lot of people off stating this, but civilized countries that do not have as many guns available to the general public have significantly lower murder rates. Europe is also much more child friendly, parents are encouraged to spend more time with family and they enjoy much more time off from work to do so. I was surprised the last time I was in Europe, 2005 how well people lived and how quiet it all was.

I actually would live in Europe myself if I was not a homeowner and not in a relationship. I have not ruled out one day moving to the French countryside. You can keep your U.S. citizenship and stay 6 months of the year in some European countries I believe.