Felecia Young remembered the day she walked into the Forrest County Courthouse in Hattiesburg, Miss. with her 11-year-old son, 9-year-old daughter, and mother on August 17, 1998.

The streets were barricaded. Buildings and streets showed the faces of police officers who were on site in case of a riot. An Aryan organization had threatened to demonstrate. But Young was determined to bear witness.

She and her children found seats in the balcony of the humid, packed courthouse.

“We sat in the balcony area, way up high,” Young said. “I don’t think I’d ever seen that area open, but they had to open it because there were so many people coming that there wasn’t any where to sit downstairs.”

Young is a black woman, born and raised in Hattiesburg. She attended high school there and graduated from the local college, the University of Southern Mississippi.

After serving six years in the Air Force, during which she visited or lived in 13 countries and earned the rank of captain before her commitment was fulfilled, she returned home, where she and her husband decided to raise their family. It was there where she became familiar with the Ku Klux Klan and its acts of violence. And the charismatic leader of the Klan’s Mississippi White Knights, Sam Bowers, was perhaps the most hateful person of them all.

At the courthouse, Young felt anxious, anticipatory, and inquisitive at beginnings of Bowers’ trial – his fifth trial, in fact, for the murder of Vernon Dahmer Sr. 22 years earlier. She wanted to take in the moment. Most of all, she wanted her children to see Bowers and to remember people like him are real. They exist.

“I wanted (my children) to have that historical perspective,” Young said. “A lot of people have sacrificed their lives so that you could have a better life than they had had.”

Bowers’ hate of all colors and creeds not his own was well known in the South.

“Sam Bowers lived a life consumed with hate for African Americans,” Vernon Dahmer Jr. told the New York Times in 2006. “He caused a lot of pain, suffering and death for many individuals and families in my race. During his life, he never apologized or asked for forgiveness for his actions.”

For Young, the Klan was not an urban legend but very real, frightful terrorist organization. She recalled the terrifying moment when it became real to her as a child.

“At some point, we had some people come by, some white people drive by our house,” she said. “My grandfather was sitting on the front porch with his walking cane in his lap. And they stopped. They slowed down and stopped like they were going to do something. We think they thought he had a shotgun or some kind of gun in his lap, and they drove off real fast.”

Dahmer was a grocery store owner and a known civil rights activist, allowing blacks to pay their poll tax in his grocery store, paying for the right to vote. Bower had threatened to punish the elder Dahmer if he didn’t put a stop to his efforts. Like others in Hattiesburg, Dahmer refused. Others like Peggy Jean Connor.

Connor is Young’s mother. She also allowed Hattiesburg’s black citizens to pay their poll tax at her business, Jean’s Beauty Shop at 510 Mobile Street, and knew of Dahmer’s work in the community.

Connor, who turns 80 years old in October, became a licensed beautician at 14. She began another career after her salon went out of business, as a nurse technician at Forrest General Hospital, and held it down for 27 years.

She was secretary treasurer for the Council of Federated Organization in 1963, while teaching citizenship classes for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at True Light Baptist Church in Hattiesburg. She was executive secretary of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and was arrested for picketing in front of the Forrest County Courthouse in 1964. She sued the governor of Mississippi – and, on May 31, 1977, she won. Two years later, she received the Carter G. Woodson Award for Courage in Civil Rights.

And, at the time of Bower’s threats, she paid the poll tax.

(l-r) Marie Blalock, Peggy Jean Connor and Vassie Patton. Courtesy of RJ Young

“During that time, you had to pay poll tax to register to vote before you could vote,” Connor said; the tax had to be paid for two consecutive years in order to qualify for registration. “So we were trying to collect poll tax from people who were afraid to go to the courthouse to pay their poll tax.”

And people did. They trusted people like Connor and Dahmer to go in their stead to the courthouse to pay their poll tax for them. But the Klan didn’t choose to come after Connor and her family; it chose to go after Dahmer and his.

The poll tax was deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1937. Mississippi was one of five states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Texas and Virginia, that upheld the poll tax. The twenty-fourth amendment, which sought to outlaw the poll tax, was submitted to the states for ratification on Sept. 24, 1962. The amendment’s ratification came on Jan. 23, 1964, outlawing the poll tax in federal elections.

Of the 50 states, Mississippi is the only one to reject the twenty-fourth amendment. The Supreme Court ruled the poll tax unconstitutional in all state elections with a 6-3 vote in 1966, but that decision came a few months too late for Dahmer.

On Jan. 10 of that year, two cars full of white men in white hoods spilled 12 gallons of gasoline on his home under the cover of night. His wife, Ellie, and two small children awoke to the sound of gunfire and the sight of black smoke. Inhaling smoke and badly burned, Dahmer defended his family against the hooded attackers and did his best to extinguish the flames, but there was too much damage. Both his home and his store burned to the ground.

The next morning, Connor said, she went to see the remains.

“It was still smoking,” she said. “I went to the hospital to visit him and he and his daughter were in the room together. He was in one bed and she was in another. And he was talking. I was just shocked when I heard that he had died. It hadn’t been an hour when I left the hospital and heard that he was dead. I couldn’t believe that.”

Dahmer died the next. He was 57. President Lyndon B. Johnson later sent a telegram to his wife, Ellie, expressing “deep concern and shock” over the attack.

“His work was in the best tradition of a democracy,” the President wrote. “His family can be justly proud as his work was a fine example of good citizenship.”

Young heard about the crime from her grandfather, John Henry Gould. She was eight years old.

“I was really small,” she said. “But I was really aware of the Civil Rights Movement and what my mama and my granddaddy where trying to accomplish. I remember somebody coming by to tell my grandfather that Vernon Dahmer had been killed and burnt out.”

Bowers was convicted of murder by a jury that consisted of six minority jurors and sentenced to life in prison, 32 years after his crime. He died in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at 82.

In the wake of Dahmer’s death, the Civil Rights Movement came into its own and permanently adjusted the lens through which race and class are viewed. It has ushered in much needed legislation and forced elected officials to become more transparent and vigilant while in office.

Hattiesburg elected its first black mayor, Johnny DuPree, in 2001. After achieving reelection twice, he is still in office. Last year, DuPree became the first black person to win a major party nomination to run for governor of Mississippi since Reconstruction, and he, like Connor, has urged young people to vote. But Connor is worried that the right to vote has become so impressed upon young people that they have become numb to it.

“It worries me that right here in Hattiesburg (young people) don’t think it’s necessary for them to do that,” she said. “You have to just plead with them to go and register. And then after registering, you have to beg them to go and vote.  A lot of people don’t think it was as bad as it was back in the Fifties and Sixties.”

But perhaps there is hope for this generation:  Circle, the center for information and research on civic learning and engagement, reported 23 million Americans under the age of 30 turned out to vote in 2008. The Times reported young black voters led all ethnic groups in voter turnout for the first time ever.

The socioeconomic results of the Civil Rights Movement could be best depicted in the lives of Connor’s two grandchildren. Both attended a predominantly white elementary school, Presbyterian Christian School, in that same Hattiesburg.

The 11-year-old son, this writer, has graduated from the University of Tulsa and is beginning his last semester of coursework in route to his master’s degree at the University of Oklahoma. The 9-year-old daughter is now majoring in biosystems and agricultural engineering at Oklahoma State University.

Neither child has ever been convicted of a crime. Both are registered voters. Both exercise that right.

CeCe and several friends, all black, were walking to the grocery store on June 5th, 2011 when white adults standing in the patio area of a South Minneapolis bar started screaming racist and transphobic slurs at the youth. CeCe, who is only 23 years old, approached the group and replied that she and her friends would not tolerate hate speech. In response, one of the white women said “I’ll take you bitches on” and smashed her glass into CeCe’s face. The broken glass sliced all the way through CeCe’s cheek. A fight ensued between the adults and the young people after this initial attack and one of the attackers, Dean Schmitz, was fatally stabbed.

As if it were not sufficiently tragic that a group of young people were subjected to such severe violence and that Dean Schmitz lost his life, police arriving at the scene arrested CeCe, denied her adequate medical treatment, interrogated her for hours, and placed her in solitary confinement. In the aftermath of being attacked, she was not treated with care, but launched into another nightmare. The only person arrested that night, she has since been charged with two counts of 2nd degree murder. Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman has the power to drop these charges, a choice he made in multiple other clear instances of self-defense this year, but he has not yet done so.

CeCe’s story is a portrait of the United States Criminal Justice System. Her story is what is meant when we are told that transgender people, especially transgender women of color, experience disproportionate rates of police harassment, profiling, and abuse. She is living one of the stories rolled into statistics like: trans people are ten to fifteen times more likely to be incarcerated than cisgender (not transgender) people, or nearly half of African American transgender people have spent time in jail or prison.

These statistics are the result of the all of the ways that transgender people, especially transgender people of color, are denied access to the resources and opportunities that we need to live healthy lives free of violence, discrimination, and oppression. Transgender people consistently experience high levels of harassment in school, extreme levels of unemployment due to discrimination and lack of education, denial of competent medical care, inability to change identification documents, and disproportionate violence and harassment. Nevertheless, for generations transgender people, especially transgender women of color, have been at the forefront of movements against police brutality, white supremacy, economic injustice, and for queer liberation and gender self-determination.

CeCe is one of these leaders. She is the everyday hero that is the college student, working her way toward the career of her dreams. She is a femme icon, reminding her many friends and loving community that it’s never the wrong time to look fabulous, even as she is unjustly held in jail and awaiting trial for unwarranted charges. She is the center of a growing community of supporters in Minneapolis and nationally, inspiring action and solidarity in our joint struggles to (in her words) “be able to help and comfort someone who is unsure about his or her own sexual identity and preference…eliminate people’s fears of being victims of hate crimes and domestic violence…[and] help someone to accept and be comfortable as whomever they choose to be.”

Today, we are faced with the opportunity and the obligation to challenge racism and transphobia. Locally, we have and will continue to support CeCe every step of the way- from ensuring she has access to hormones in jail to packing the courtroom at every one of her hearings. Nationally, an increasing number of support groups and individuals are following CeCe’s case and demanding that Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman drop the charges against her. In Minneapolis and the rest of the country we aren’t only watching Freeman; we are standing up beside CeCe, a leader in our community, and waiting for him to do the same.

For more information and new developments: http://supportcece.wordpress.com
To tell Michael Freeman you support dropping the charges against CeCe
call: 612-348-5561
email: citizeninfo@co.hennepin.mn.us
fax: 612-348-2042

I can’t stress enough that the following article only represents my opinions as an individual, and are not to be affiliated with any other person, organization or community.

December 15, 2011

Tonight was the march and vigil for Private Danny Chen, who was killed in the army on October 3, 2011. We don’t know how he died. The army is withholding all evidence, which it owes to the family, that could answer this question. What we do know is that he did not die in combat. We know he was constantly harassed and discriminated against by his fellow soldiers for being Chinese. We know some really twisted, violent hazing was committed against him by his superiors, right before he was found dead. We decided to hold a march and vigil because the army is currently carrying out an investigation, and we have to show them that the public is watching and that they cannot get away with another cover-up.

Just yesterday, board members of OCA-NY along with Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez and Council Member Margaret Chin went to the Pentagon to meet with high-ranking army officials, where they made demands that may fundamentally transform the way that hazing and bias crimes are dealt with in the military. We need them to know that the public and the media are watching, and that if they do not meet our demands, we will redirect our campaign to focus on our young men and women who are thinking of enlisting. These young people need to know before they enlist, the Army will not protect them from harm by fellow soldiers.

Before the vigil, we reached out to many organizations to support, and 36 signed onto our cause. We also reached out to Occupy Wall Street because justice and government transparency are in its mission, and we thought we could use the numbers and networks in OWS to bring out more support for our vigil, and we also wanted to show our solidarity with OWS.

So imagine my surprise when protesters from OWS showed up with OWS signs, not to stand with others lining up for the march to Columbus Park in support, but to stand in front of everyone, trying to direct them. These people, who had not, until that very moment, put in one bit of effort into organizing this action, who had no idea what the plan was, who had no idea who we were or who the family was, decided that they were going to make this an OWS event.

Conflict erupted when one of the OWS-affiliated protesters came with a giant Communist Party of China flag. This white man decided that he was entitled to represent us, at this protest for an American soldier, with a flag that has been used by this country to vilify the Chinese American community. When people began asking him not to demonstrate that flag because it was not the purpose of the event and we were in no way representing China or political parties, he began screaming at us about how we were ANTI-COMMUNIST and trying to take away his first amendment rights. We told him that Danny Chen was an American soldier and we wanted to respect the family and their wishes, but he continued screaming violent accusations at us at the top of his lungs and disrupting the event, until one of Danny Chen’s family members, on the verge of tears, finally convinced him to leave.

Then I overheard another OWS protester, who had earlier been trying to direct the protesters, give a video interview, and heard him saying, ever so solemnly, “They don’t want me here.” My question is: who are we and who are you? How do you expect to be welcomed as one of “us” when you have, from the beginning, made every effort to set yourself apart? Why do you think that you as an individual should be primary in this march for Private Danny Chen and his family? Why are you here giving video interviews?

Another white OWS protester began trying to use the human mic to direct the protest, and told me that I shouldn’t be using the blowhorn because the cops were going to take it away. I told her that, no, we had a parade permit and sound permit, which was why the police were there clearing the streets for our march. She looked confused and stopped yelling.

OWS protesters often make it seem like they are the birth of social justice activism, that they are here to teach us how to protest because none of us know what the fuck we are doing and need their wealth of experience to help us out. I was not at all surprised when that woman so naturally assumed that she, as a white woman, knew better than me – she thought that I had found a blowhorn somewhere and decided to play around with it. It didn’t occur to her that we had been planning this for weeks and thinking critically about every step, that it was led by a civil rights organization that has been at work for decades, that we had applied for 4 different kinds of permits so that our event could safely and effectively achieve its purpose.

The actions of these OWS protesters showed that they were at the march and vigil, not to show their support for Danny Chen’s family or the ongoing work on their case, but to provoke and garner attention for themselves and their brand, and then try to turn our strategic work and planning into a nonsensical, self-righteous tantrum. They acted like tourists on vacation in the social justice world, and our efforts and long-term goals were expendable in light of their self-interested pursuit of an interesting experience.

This is the problem I’ve always had with OWS—that it was a movement that came to earth as Christ himself, here to save us, to make the history of struggle, and the ongoing social justice work in this country by marginalized communities, irrelevant, and then to take the moral high ground and act as if we were the face of THEIR oppression when we took issue with their tactics.

I understand many people who came to the vigil from OWS were there with the right intentions, and it was great to have their support and solidarity. But these incidents of ignorance from OWS have been way too frequent and predictable to be isolated events. These incidents show that the OWS movement, while creating new opportunities to change the unjust world we live in, is, in many ways, the beloved child of our racist, sexist, intolerant capitalist society.

As marginalized people in this country rise, new forms of oppression are at work – those who have not experienced systemic oppression are claiming it anyway, turning social justice on its head and diluting the messages and movements that have been our hearts and souls. I think this quote from the New Jim Crow sheds a lot of light on why OWS emerged the way that it did: “Following the collapse of each system of control, there has been a period of confusion—transition—in which those who are most committed to racial hierarchy search for new means to achieve their goals within the rules of the game as currently defined. It is during this period of uncertainty that the backlash intensifies and a new form of racialized social control begins to take hold.”

I tried to love the movement. Since I wrote about OWS last, I’ve been attending OWS meetings and marches. I reached out to OWS about this action. I tried so hard to understand the movement, to check my own biases and question any negative feelings I had towards it, to engage with it as much as time would allow. I had so many conversations with people in OWS spaces, which usually just left me feeling perplexed, as the basic factors involved in social and economic inequity always seemed to be news to the people I was speaking to or a curious piece of trivia to be quickly passed over, and people would instead start talking to me about things like herbal medicine as if I had any fucking clue, or would say really ignorant things that would leave me feeling attacked.

I deal with ignorant bigots every day and am willing to do so as part of my own commitment to my work, but when bigots come posing as allies and then very dramatically play the martyr when we call out their bullshit, it really derails our ability to do our work.

I now realize that my time cannot be wasted trying to work in spaces that are paralyzed by ignorance. I will continue to engage in my activism using my experiences and empathy to guide the way I choose to live and work. But I’ll choose to do it in spaces where bigotry, drama, and ignorance do not masquerade as the thing I love. And I’ll choose to work with people who join community actions to respect and support those communities, not to objectify and use them as ornaments for their movement bereft of genuine compassion and understanding.

Besides the oppression brought by some OWS protesters, the march and vigil were beautiful. Over 400 people came out, and the interactions were passionate and heartfelt. I am proud to be an Asian American and glad to be involved in the struggle for a military and a world that does not ruthlessly exclude and exterminate those who are different in any way. I feel blessed to have a fierce mentor who, during the meeting with the Pentagon, told the Assistant Secretary of the Army to sit back down when he tried to leave their meeting early, and he actually listened. I think that our capacity for resistance is growing and we are finally feeling empowered and entitled in this country. We have taken far too much shit, and we are unapologetically asking to be seen as fully human. I am excited for the future of our communities and look forward to growing with each other and our true allies, and despite the importance of building relationships with the more enfranchised, we should never have to tolerate that kind of oppression, least of all in the spaces where we are trying to fight it.

Photos courtesy of Kwong Eng

Click here for coverage about the march and vigil.

Editor’s Note: Shortly after this one, Esther wrote a second piece. She wanted to center Danny Chen and the struggle for justice and not OWS. Also, in the time between the articles, eight soliders were charged in the death of Danny Chen, meaning that some progress was made. Click here to read “Private Danny Chen and threats to justice everywhere.” Next time the Chen case surfaces up in the news cycle, we’ll post the full piece here. – LDP

By Arturo R. García

Basketball fans are well-acquainted with stories about a local star who never got to show their skills outside the neighborhood courts.

And make no mistake, Tayshana Murphy was on her way to bigger things. As Grantland’s Jonathan Abrams wrote:

Mention a court in New York City — West 4th, Rucker, Orchard Beach — they don’t just know of Tayshana “Chicken” Murphy. They know her. She possessed that killer crossover and played “man strong,” as Taylonn, her father, likes to say. Tayshana loved contact. “Babies,” she called the girls who helplessly bounced off of her when she drove to the rim. She played taller than her 5-foot-7 and with a fierceness that contrasted against her gentle, hazel eyes.

Those eyes sized up Shannon Bobbitt of the WNBA’s Indiana Fever this summer.

Bobbitt conducts a clinic every year outside the Harlem projects where she grew up. The clinic is a way for children to see the footsteps she laid for them to follow. Bobbitt had heard of Tayshana and that she could ball. She probably had no idea that the high schooler was itching to test her skills against the professional.

“She’s fast as hell, Pops,” Tayshana told her father of Bobbitt. “But she’s so little. She can’t handle me. I’m too big for her.”

Murphy’s story came to a premature and violent end on Sept. 11, when she was shot and killed in the Grant Houses project where she lived. Initial reports said the shooting was a case of mistaken identity stemming from a feud between residents of the Grant Houses and the nearby Manhattanville Houses – a story her family refuted.

Three men have been arrested and charged in connection with Murphy’s murder: Tyshawn Brockington and Robert Cartagena, who allegedly shot her, and Terique Collins, accused of delivering the murder weapon. But since her death, details have emerged adding more layers to the tragedy.

Less than a month after Murphy was killed, WABC-TV reported that homophobic graphitti had been written and drawn on the wall near the stairwell where it happened. Yet, as Mecca Jamilah Sullivan observed in The Feminist Wire, Murphy’s sexuality and how that may have factored into her death was not being talked about:

The D.A.’s indictment press release doesn’t mention the homophobic comments or the possibility that anti-gay hate played a role in the crime. Even the New York Times article on the Grant-Manhattanville feud, which quotes another 18-year-old woman as Murphy’s “girlfriend” leaves the issue of homophobic hate silent, focusing instead on Murphy’s foreshortened basketball career. One exuberantly homophobic blog even goes so far as to say that the love of basketball turned Murphy gay. The message of all these sources is clear: Murphy wasn’t really a black lesbian; she was an athlete. And her loss should be mourned accordingly.

According to Bridgette P. LaVictoire at LezGetIt, the hate speech on the wall opens up another possibility.

“Even if Tayshana was not lesbian,” LaVictoire wrote after the graphitti was found, “there is always the possibility that she was murdered for just appearing to be lesbian, and because of a view of women that puts such an athletic woman into danger because of a patriarchal view that women should be far more submissive an far less athletic.”

It’s important to note that Murphy’s family hasn’t commented on her sexuality. But Sullivan’s point stands: coverage of the case has not mentioned whether authorities intend to prosecute her murder as a hate crime. (All three defendants have pled not guilty.) And stories reflecting on her life, whether at her wake or at an event named after her, have kept the focus primarily on the court.

Though the family’s right to privacy is unimpeachable, it may have opened the door for another, more problematic narrative to emerge: the New York Post reported this week that Murphy was part of a female gang, pointing to it as an example of “good girls recruited by neighborhood gangs into lives of violence, where carrying weapons and committing crimes is as commonplace as shooting a free throw.” There’s no source mentioned other than some mysterious “cops,” and the bulk of the article focuses on a whole other case.

But the story is already getting posted verbatim on other sites.  If it gets enough momentum, it’s not hard to imagine that in a trial it could be used as a way to paint Murphy as an Angry Lesbian Gangbanger – to define her life by hate, and put her sexuality, however she defined it, on trial as much as the men accused of killing her.

13 year-old Asher Brown was an 8th grader at Hamilton Middle School in Cypress, TX who killed himself last Thursday because, according to his parents, he was bullied at school. The Houston Chronicle reports that Asher was bullied for being small and for not wearing designer clothes; MSNBC reports that he was also singled out for being Buddhist and having a lisp. Most of all, his stepfather David Truong and mother Amy Truong believe, Asher Brown was bullied for being gay.

The Truongs now say that they had complained to Hamilton Middle School officials repeatedly over the last 18 months about the harassment Asher experienced, but their phone calls went unanswered and their visits to the school failed to stop the bullying. The school district of which Hamilton is a part, Cy-Fair I.S.D., is denying that they ever received complaints from the Truongs, other students, or school employees.

This story hits home for me because that’s exactly where it takes place. I grew up in Cypress, TX. I graduated from the Cy-Fair school district, attending both middle and high school there. The house that I grew up in is 2.5 miles away from Hamilton Middle School, which is listed on its website as a “2010 Texas Exemplary School.” I actually would have gone to Hamilton had it existed when I was that age.

It’s been many, many years since I’ve lived in Cypress, and it has changed considerably from the small town on the outskirts of northwest Houston that it once was. The woods I used to play in behind my subdivision and the ones surrounding so many homes in the area are mostly gone, built-up with more subdivisions, box stores, gas stations, grocery stores, mini-malls, and malls.

The demographics have changed, too. Of the 1620 students enrolled at Hamilton Middle School this year, 7.3% are Asian. I’d have to dig up my old yearbooks to figure out what the percentage was back when I was in middle school, but I’m guessing it was less than half that number. I wasn’t the only Asian kid in school, but it sometimes felt that way. Back then, I was teased and bullied for being different; I was called “chink,” “gook,” “jap,” “snake eyes”; the very first high school football game I ever went to, an older kid ching-chonged me in front of hundreds of other spectators; people screamed from their cars at me and my family to “Go back to where you came from”; even my so-called “friends” told me one year at church camp that I could never date outside my race because the Bible said it was wrong. Still I feel like I had it easier than others because I was a girl–only once did someone threaten to kick my ass out by the school buses. Twice, if you count the time I voted for the Democratic candidate in a 7th grade mock election and wound up being the only one in a class of over thirty kids to do so, which got all the boys in my class spoiling for a fight, but that ballot was secret, so no one ever knew that the ass they had wanted to kick was mine.

I don’t have good memories of growing up in Cypress, even though it will forever remain in my mind as “home.” For those years when I was trying to be a fiction writer, almost all of my stories were set there. Looking back, most of those stories were really the same one told over and over. They were all concerned with misfits who couldn’t escape the intolerance of their small, conservative, close-minded Christian town. One reason I couldn’t hack it as a fiction writer was because I was frozen in this one place every time I tried to write. I couldn’t seem to write about any other. I even started to question if this place really existed, and if it was as bad as I remembered, whether it had calcified into something more terrible as time went by.

After hearing about Asher Brown’s suicide, and the story of another kid in the Cy-Fair school district who was bullied last year for being gay while school officials stood by and did nothing, I’m beginning to think I got it right the first time around, that my memory of where I grew up as someplace awful is, sadly, anything but a fiction.

We spend a lot of time documenting on campus racism here on Racialicious – everything from idiotic screeds in student-run magazines to various theme parties in the key of bigotry.

But sometimes, the situations that occur need no editorializing.

CNN reports:

The student body president of California State University, Chico, was recovering Monday from stab wounds suffered in what police believe was a hate crime, officials said.

Joseph Igbineweka, who was born in Nigeria, was stabbed early Sunday while walking in a Chico neighborhood near the college where mostly students reside, Chico police Sgt. Rob Merrifield said.

Igbineweka passed two men who began to make racial slurs, Merrifield said. He ignored them and continued to walk, but they followed him and continued to yell at him.

Igbineweka eventually turned around, and one of the men struck him, Merrifield said. He fought back, but the man pulled a pocket knife and stabbed him at least four times, in the neck, chest, stomach and arm, according to Merrifield. The attacker fled on foot.

Several police officers were in the area and were alerted to the situation, Merrifield said. An officer found Igbineweka and was able to get a description of the attacker and alert other officers in the area.

A suspect, 19-year-old Barry Sayavong, was found and arrested a few blocks away, Merrifield said. Sayavong, of Chico, is facing charges of attempted murder and a hate crime, according to Merrifield.

In this way, the off-campus party, dubbed the “Compton Cookout” and designed as a deliberate mockery of Black History Month at the University of California, San Diego, aptly demonstrates the terrible legacy of this politics of beauty. (If you’re not sure what this event and the resulting furor are about, please see here and here.) The Facebook invitation featured detailed instructions to party-goers on how to enact caricatures of black racial deviancy via “ghetto” dress and a performance of ugliness-as-subhumanity:

February marks a very important month in American society. No, i’m not referring to Valentines day or Presidents day. I’m talking about Black History month. As a time to celebrate and in hopes of showing respect, the Regents community cordially invites you to its very first Compton Cookout.For guys: I expect all males to be rockin Jersey’s, stuntin’ up in ya White T (XXXL smallest size acceptable), anything FUBU, Ecko, Rockawear, High/low top Jordans or Dunks, Chains, Jorts, stunner shades, 59 50 hats, Tats, etc.

For girls: For those of you who are unfamiliar with ghetto chicks-Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes – they consider Baby Phat to be high class and expensive couture. They also have short, nappy hair, and usually wear cheap weave, usually in bad colors, such as purple or bright red. They look and act similar to Shenaynay, and speak very loudly, while rolling their neck, and waving their finger in your face. Ghetto chicks have a very limited vocabulary, and attempt to make up for it, by forming new words, such as “constipulated”, or simply cursing persistently, or using other types of vulgarities, and making noises, such as “hmmg!”, or smacking their lips, and making other angry noises, grunts, and faces. The objective is for all you lovely ladies to look, act, and essentially take on these “respectable” qualities throughout the day.

The “Compton Cookout” continues in the American theater tradition of blackface minstrelsy. As nineteenth-century free blacks used dress and clothing to distinguish themselves as also human, blackface minstrel performances subjected this self-fashioning black person to ridicule and loathing. In this, and as evidenced by the above, the defamation of black style is absolutely crucial to the racist imagination. (And we can see in the above that particular revulsion is directed at black femininity as irrational, uncivilized and ugly.) The statement from UCSD’s Ethnic Studies Department explains this history:

This “monstrosity” (as some of the organizers called it) has a violent and racist history that began with blackface minstrel shows in the U.S., starting in the early 19th century, heightening with popularity during the Abolition Movement, and extending into 20th century theater and film. Both blackface minstrel performances and parties such as the “Compton Cookout” reinforce and magnify existing material and discursive structures of Black oppression, while denying Black people any sense of humanity, negating not only the actual lives that exist behind these caricatured performances but the structural conditions that shape Black life in the US. Far from celebrating Black history, events such as this one are marked celebrations of the play of power characteristic of whiteness in general and white minstrelsy in particular: the ability to move in and move out of a racially produced space at will; the capacity to embody a presumed deviance without actually ever becoming or being it; the privilege to revel in this raced and gendered alterity without ever having to question or encounter the systemic and epistemic violence that produces hierarchies of difference in the first place. Moreover, like their blackface minstrel predecessors, the organizers and attendees of the “Compton Cookout” demonstrate the inextricability of performances of white mastery over Black bodies from structures of patriarchy: by instructing their women ‘guests’ on how to dress (“wear cheap clothes”), behave (“start fights and drama”), and speak (“have a very limited vocabulary”), these young men not only paint a degrading and dehumanizing picture of African American women as so-called “ghetto chicks,” but offer a recipe for the objectification of all women—made permissible, once again, through the appropriation of blackness.

Because of this terrible history, the “Compton Cookout” cannot be viewed as an isolated incident. Every year there are more college campus parties that depend upon a dehumanizing politics of dress to enact racist caricatures for entertainment; for instance, the 2006 “Tacos and Tequila” Greek party at the University of Illinois saw sorority sisters in tank tops, hoop earrings,and fake pregnancies, and fraternity brothers dressed as gardeners and agricultural workers. (With regard to the ethics of performance, the statement from the Theater and Dance community is also well worth the read.)

Both dress and beauty bear the weight of much ideological management in its racial classifications of humanity, through which some persons are guaranteed the principle of human dignity and other persons are denied it. In which some are invited to “play” at blackness-as-savagery, blackness-as-degeneracy, and some Others are trapped by this image, this event and others like it foster and perform dehumanization through a frighteningly cruel, and terribly effective, politics of ugliness.

For more background and context, read or listen to this KPBS report about both institutional and “popular” racisms at UCSD, featuring our former classmate (Berkeley Ethnic Studies, represent!) and immensely fierce and formidable colleague Sara Clarke Kaplan, an assistant professor of Ethnic Studies and Critical Gender Studies at San Diego.

We’ve seen a number of posts supportive of hate crimes legislation. The widespread perception is that only hate-mongering Republicans are against it, but in fact a lot of queer radical activists and groups are against it for entirely different reasons. Below are excerpts and links to just two examples of dissent. The first is a Sylvia Riviera Law Project Statement in April of this year that addressed the addition of hate crimes legislation to NY’s Gender Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and the second is a piece I wrote for Bilerico some months ago. Note that the SRLP statement was co-signed by FIERCE, Queers for Economic Justice, Peter Cicchino Youth Project, and Audre Lorde Project.

I’m working on collecting statements from a number of grassroots queer radical groups that are also against HCL; if you know of one in your area, drop me a line. I don’t want to give the impression that queer resistance can only be counted if it occurs within the framework of the Non Profit Industrial Complex. There’s a lot of amazing and usually unfunded queer radical work being done on prison abolition work, for instance, and I know those folk are against HCL as well.

I know this is likely to incite, shall we say, intense discussion. My point in providing the links below is to simply offer an alternative perspective on the issue, one that a lot of people may not have encountered or considered, given the way in which the gay media in particular portrays HCL as a progressive and much-needed reform. I’m writing a much longer critique of HCL, and I haven’t yet revisited my own earlier piece as I collect more data and analysis. I’m happy to have questions and critiques addressed to this post, and would be especially happy to be pointed to other critiques of HCL, or sent updates in relation to specific pieces of legislation. My hope for this piece is that it will encourage people to debate the matter in civil terms. Or at least to reflect on why we’ve invested so much hope in HCL.

From April 2009:

SRLP announces non-support of the Gender Employment Non-Discrimination Act!

As a nation, we lock up more people per capita than any other country in the world; one in one hundred adults are behind bars in the U.S. Our penalties are harsher and sentences longer than they are anywhere else on the planet, and hate crime laws with sentencing enhancements make them harsher and longer. By supporting longer periods of incarceration and putting a more threatening weapon in the state’s hands, this kind of legislation places an enormous amount of faith in our deeply flawed, transphobic, and racist criminal legal system. The application of this increased power and extended punishment is entirely at to the discretion of a system riddled with prejudice, institutional bias, economic motives, and corruption.

And:

There might be some cold comfort in “enhanced sentencing” if it actually benefited our communities in any way. Unfortunately, the harsher penalties of hate crime laws have not been shown to prevent or deter hate crimes. It is hard to imagine that someone moved to brutally attack a trans person would pause to consider that they might get a longer sentence. In fact, there is some evidence that longer sentences actually increase the chance that an incarcerated person will repeat a crime after they are released. Incarceration does nothing to address the root reasons why someone was violent or hateful; it only plunges them into deeper poverty, further isolates them from their community, and subjects them to further violence and trauma.

Read the rest here.

From my Bilerico piece: Loving Hate: Why Hate Crimes Legislation Is A Bad Idea

No one can deny that particular groups are in fact treated with discrimination and even violence. But rather than ask how about how to combat such discrimination and violence, we’ve taken the easy route out and decided to hand over the solution to a prison industrial complex that already benefits massively from the incarceration of mostly poor people and mostly people of color. It’s also worth considering the class dynamics of hate crimes legislation, given that the system of law and order is already skewed against those without the resources to combat unfair and overly punitive punishment and incarceration.

And:

We already have punishments in place for crimes, even the most violent ones. Whom does it benefit to enhance penalties for the same? Mandatory and draconian drug laws have done nothing to impede drug use, and only serve to increase the scope of surveillance against the poorest neighbourhoods, where laws against even the casual use of marijuana are used to haul the most marginal into jail.

Read the rest here.

For more on how queer activists are resisting the growth of the prison industrial complex, and their critiques of hate crimes legislation, go to QEJ’s archive of a phone conference on Police, Prisons and Queer Organizing. This features, among others, a new Seattle-based group, Queer and Trans Jail Stoppers.

Here’s the link to QEJ’s archive on Police, Prisons, and Queer Organizing.

For a review of Part 1, click here

No way around it: Latino In America was a failure.

At the very least, Thursday’s conclusion, “Chasing The Dream,” seemed equal parts melodrama and bait-and-switch, with the broadcast component weakened by a lack of questions that undercut even its’ more compelling segments.

For instance, in the report on the murder of Luis Mendoza, we got an overview of events in Shenandoah, Penn., leading up to the crime, and of the area’s history with several immigrant populations, but when one individual reported he felt he was being intimidated because of his speaking to CNN, we got no follow-up with local authorities. When it was mentioned that one of the four defendants – who were acquitted of hate-crime accusations – testified the cops told them to get their stories straight, we got no follow-up.

In another major mis-step, the incident was not placed in any sort of context – at least on-air. You had to venture to the series’ website (or look it up yourself) to get this kind of information:

FBI statistics show that anti-Latino crimes are on the rise. There were 595 anti-Latino crimes in 2007, up almost 40 percent from the 426 crimes in 2003; the Latino population in America grew only 14 percent during that time.
In December, Ecuadorean Jose Osvaldo Sucuzhañay died after he was beaten with a baseball bat in Brooklyn, New York.
One month earlier, a group of seven teenagers with a history of harassing Latinos went out looking for “Mexicans to f— up” and fatally stabbed Ecuadorean immigrant Marcelo Lucero in Patchogue, New York.
FBI figures from 2007 show that anti-Latino attacks account for about 8 percent of all hate crimes. About 35 percent of hate crimes were directed at blacks, 16 percent at homosexuals and 13 percent at Jews.
But experts say hate crimes in general are underreported. States are not required to report those figures to the FBI.

Surely including at least some of this information would have been a better use of our viewing time than Soledad O’Brien amiably chatting up the guy starting up his own “Save Shenandoah” group.

A similar lack of layering plagued the story of “Marta,” the undocumented immigrant who came to the U.S. To find her mother, only to find herself having to accuse her mom of neglect in order to stay in America. Marta’s story is woven with that of the Cuban “Pedro Pans,” which include Sen. Mel Martínez (R-FL). Never mind that Marta (pictured above) isn’t even Cuban. But, again, you had to go to the website to get more relevant information:

[Marta's] case is typical of the 7,211 children known to have entered the United States illegally in 2008 by themselves, according to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which runs the shelters where the children are detained. Children come searching for family members or a way out of poverty with little understanding of the legal ramifications they face.

And how does Martínez feel about a system that forces children to seek their own legal representation in these matters? Well, you had to watch Anderson Cooper to figure it out, I guess, because O’Brien seemingly never asked.

Other segments just seemed disjointed: the segment on Pico Rivera veered from covering its’ evolution into a “Latino Mayberry” (a rather condescending term) to a law enforcement crackdown against gang and tagging activity to the city’s Scared Straight-esque P.R.I.D.E program to following yet another at-risk teen trying to navigate through it. And in the middle of all this, seemingly staple-gunned onto the narrative, was a visit with a local car club. And all this was before we learned that the city’s otherwise sympathetic mayor, Gracie Gallegos, had to resign for allegedly cashing bad checks. What, exactly, was the lesson to be learned from this? There wasn’t even an online companion to this story to look to for an overall point.

The series’ final segment seemed to focus on the financial disadvantage of a naturalized immigrant who doesn’t speak English; not only would his story have fit in more tightly among those featured in “The Garcías,” but it was shoe-horned against an Anglo baseball instructor who successfully boosts his camp’s enrollments by hiring and recruiting Latino staff and students; and a very successful immigrant couple. In the end we learn that the guy’s girlfriend is pregnant and he failed his Sheriff Department entrance exam again.

And that’s where the series wraps up. Is this how the network wants to attract more Latino viewership? Based on these utterly depressing four hours, I can just imagine the slogan: CNN: ¡No se puede!

I never intended to write about the scarf/veil/hijab/niqaab. Like a lot of people who write about the Middle East and North Africa (Muslim and otherwise) I roll my eyes at the Western preoccupation with the scarf, which seems to dominate the discourse. The Islamic practice of covering seems to excite the imaginations of both Judeo-Christian/nationalist/conservatives and (largely) white/western/feminists, an unlikely alliance that occurs from time to time around representations of women (as in pornography, for example). I will admit that I do not understand this preoccupation… I am not a Muslim so I have no religious or cultural investment in covering one way or the other. For me, the scarf is just clothing. This may be because many of my Muslim neighbors in Brooklyn cover to varying degrees and I see them going about their lives, just like everyone else. When you are standing behind a veiled woman in line at the supermarket and you see her trying to keep her kids quiet with one hand while she organizes coupons with the other, the whole thing seems pretty ordinary, at least in my part of the world.

As far as I can tell, I have only one neighbor who goes about fully covered, while others wear their scarves in very different styles, depending on their preferences, home countries and cultures. It is very common to see Moms with their heads covered while their little girls are bounding around in jeans and Dora the Explorer t-shirts, but there are a few little girls with their heads covered as well. Two or three summers ago I was walking down the street and a hijab-wearing 11 year old girl went whizzing past me on a Razor scooter, scarf and dress flapping, face split with a giant grin. Despite the wide range of styles, these women and girls all seem to socialize together and I have seen zero indication of the isolation and division that are often assumed to be part and parcel of the practice of covering. I know there are issues with the scarf in Islamic cultures, and it is not my intention to minimize them, none of my female Muslim friends and colleagues wear it and some have spoken against it. But my assumption is that any intra-cultural issues around the practice of covering can be addressed by the women it impacts directly, so I feel no pressing need to climb on to my white horse with my American flag clutched between my teeth.

So even when French President Sarkozy floated his wrong-headed hijab-ban I never thought I’d write about the scarf. It is annoying that so much of the conversation, not to mention the ban itself, is based on perpetuating Islamophobic and Orientalist stereotypes (even among people who should know better) but again I thought, “Not my fight.”

And then Marwa Sherbini was murdered.

Sherbini was an Egyptian woman living in Germany who sued a white German man for calling her a “terrorist” last year because she wore a headscarf. Last week the man, identified as “Axel W.” attacked Sherbini, who was 3 months pregnant, and stabbed her 18 times, killing her in front of her 3 year-old son and husband, who tried in vain to protect her. Incredibly, the attack took place in a German courtroom, where Axel W., Sherbini and both of their families were gathered as W. appealed the 750 euro ($1,050) fine that resulted from Sherbini’s suit. In the chaos that ensued a security guard shot at Sherbini’s husband when he tried to stop W from killing her because he assumed her husband was her attacker. Her brother Tarek told an Egyptian television station, “The guards thought that as long as he wasn’t blond, he must be the attacker so they shot him.” According to the BBC News, “German prosecutors have said the 28-year-old attacker… was driven by a deep hatred of foreigners and Muslims.”

Yeah, no kidding.

So I find myself writing about the scarf after all. About how little it matters to me how Muslim women dress and how crazy I think it is for people who have no connection to the practice of covering to obsess over it. About how funny it is that participants in a culture in which women of means willingly and enthusiastically paralyze their facial muscles criticize the hijab/niqaab with a straight face (pun intended). And further, how such a (to me) bizarre practice as voluntary facial paralysis can be presented as “empowering” with no irony whatsoever. Who needs the Taliban?

It is easy to consider each little racist and ethnocentric test balloon floated by European governments in the last few years, like the ridiculous Italian measures to “safeguard” Italian culture by outlawing “foreign” foods or Sarkozy’s misguided efforts at outlawing the veil in France, as mere blips, but Sherbini’s murder reminds us of the old Orientalist and Islamophobic hatreds simmering just beneath the surface of European society.

Marwa Sherbini took advantage of the court system of her new country to defend her rights under its democratic system. These are the values and behaviors that Europeans say they want in their Arab and Muslim minorities. And she was murdered for it.

Here is a link to the BBC News article about Sherbini’s murder. And here is a link to the Huffington Post’s coverage of the aftermath of Sherbini’s murder in Egypt (fair warning: the comment thread on the Huff article is nauseating. It takes exactly three comments for someone to mention Danny Pearl AND 9/11…)

UPDATE:
Our friends at Muslimah Media Watch have written a great article about Marwa Sherbini’s murder. Here is the link to that post, written by Sobia Ali.

UPDATE:
Safiya has written a response to the UK Guardian article melodramatically titled “The Burqa is a Cloth Soaked in Blood” on her great blog Outlines. Here is the link to her post, “How Do You Soak Yours?”

The media reform movement is an offshoot and part of the civil rights movement. It was born in 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King and Rev. Everett Parker of the United Church of Christ initiated a lawsuit against white-owned TV stations in the South for consistently portraying African Americans in a racist manner, while refusing to show any coverage of the civil rights movement.

Because of their pressure, the FCC shut down a Mississippi TV station, stating that the power and influence that media companies have gives them the responsibility to operate with the broader public interest at heart – with special consideration given to oppressed minorities.

Since then, political pressure has been brought to bear against the FCC and Congress on a wide variety of issues: female and minority ownership of stations and publications, the dangers of consolidation of the media, the need to build public communications infrastructure like cable access stations or city-owned Internet networks, and the need for everyone to have broadband access.

The percentage of our time that the American public spends with media has been steadily climbing for 40 years, and with that, its influence over our lives. The media is our environment, and the battle I am engaged in is over the nature of this environment: whether it is an environment in which ordinary people have a voice – or whether we are to passively absorb content controlled by a small number of people and corporations. Whether the media is democratic, and reflects a variety of voices.

Why is this important? I will take an extreme example of the media’s power, when it is used by one group over another. In 1994, radio stations played a significant role in the Rwandan genocide, broadcasting hate-filled rants and giving directions to how to kill Tutsis, resulting in a genocide that killed approximately 500,000 Tutsis in 100 days.

I use this example because it is similar to a battle we are fighting now: hate speech online. Researchers at UCLA have just completed a study that shows a recent rise in hate speech online and in broadcast media, particularly against Latinos, while the number of hate crimes against Latinos has been rising. The report is pretty harrowing – a short summary is posted here.

I’m just gonna put in one quote, from neo-Nazi radio host Hal Turner, who wrote on his website in March 2006:

“We’re going to have to start killing these people. I advocate using extreme violence against illegal aliens. Clean your guns. Have plenty of ammunition. Find out where the largest gathering of illegal aliens will be. Go to the area well in advance, scope out several places where to position yourself, and then do what has to be done.”

This is illegal, and the FCC currently does nothing about this.

The National Hispanic Media Coalition is asking the FCC to open a docket to take comments on hate speech in order to determine what action, if any, needs to be taken. As an organization of writers and producers, the NHMC itself is very concerned about upholding freedom of speech; but NHMC and many of its partner organizations think that the FCC has a moral obligation to enforce current law, and find other ways to turn down the volume of hate speech that reinforces racist hatred and keeps many people from even participating online.

I’d like to make an appeal to you folks especially to write a note to the FCC, or through NHMC, or blog about it, in order to open a docket. They won’t do this unless they hear from the community – and site managers are the best people for them to hear from. The FCC has not studied hate speech seriously in 15 years – since before the popularization of the Internet!

Here is how to get in touch with Inez Gonzalez, of the NHMC: igonzalez@nhmc.org.

We are working on a lot of stuff right now, and I will be sure to highlight things as they come up. What you are doing, by presenting platforms by which people can freely communicate, is a democratic act in and of itself; my job is to make sure that the system is set up so that you can continue doing that.

Hannah Miller is the National Field Director for the Media and Democracy Coalition.

Continuing a semi-yearly tradition of mine since my days working at my college paper, just a few notes about today:

1. This is not Mexican Independence Day
Nope, that’s September 16th. 5/5 commemorates an unlikely Mexican victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. The battle delayed, but did not stop, an eventual French occupation of the country, which lasted three years before it was toppled.

2. This is not that big of a deal back home
Don’t let the beer ads fool you; 5/5 is a regional holiday, usually celebrated at the site of the battle. But, it’s nowhere near as big a deal as it is in El Otro Lado. Now, is that because of immigrant pride, or American corporate opportunism? That, I leave for you to decide. During my time working in local Spanish-language radio, the biggest sponsors for our Cinco de Mayo concerts were — you guessed it — beer companies. Banners everywhere, beer girls hawking their wares on the stage, booze selling like hot cakes in the fenced-off drinking area. I don’t doubt that at least some of the people who attended the events had their hearts in the right place, but the commercial aspect definitely got on my nerves when I thought about it.

3. ‘Celebration’ does not equal acceptance
Sure, people around the country will don their fakest sombreros and sing Ricky Martin at karaoke bars — because all Latinos are from Mexico, right? — but the furor over the H1N1 virus revealed examples of how we’re still Others here, no matter the method of emigration. Check out these comments by Boston radio host Jay Severin regarding Mexicans:

“When we are the magnet for primitives around the world – and it’s not the primitives’ fault by the way, I’m not blaming them for being primitives – I’m merely observing they’re primitive.”

“It’s millions of leeches from a primitive country come here to leech off you and, with it, they are ruining the schools, the hospitals, and a lot of life in America.”

“We should be, if anything, surprised that Mexico has not visited upon us poxes of more various and serious types already, considering the number of criminaliens already here.

And in Pennsylvania, two white teens were acquitted in the beating and killing of an immigrant. From the story:

“Isn’t it a little late for you guys to be out?” the boys said, according to court documents. “Get your Mexican boyfriend out of here.”

… Burke recalled hearing one final, ominous threat as the teens ran. “They yelled, ‘You effin bitch, tell your effin Mexican friends get the eff out of Shenandoah or you’re gonna be laying effin next to him,’ ” she said.

On the more anecdotal side, have you ever noticed that, in some discussions about the increase in Spanish-language radio stations in this country over the past few years, that there’s almost always one person in the talk who gets indignant about it? That complains about “fucking Mexican music” as if it were clogging up his or her airwaves, depriving them of valuable time that could be spent listening to Sublime for the 80 millionth time? The guy who fancies himself a new Zapata today might be parroting Lou Dobbs tomorrow. Just something to listen for, if you’re joining the party at your local watering hole tonight. Myself, I’m probably gonna sit it out, think about home, and have a drink.

Not tequila, for the record.

During a one month period in Autumn 2000, the predators abducted five Japanese exchange students, ranging from age 18 to 20. Motivated by their sexual biases about Asian women, all three used both their bodies and objects to repeatedly rape – vaginally, anally and orally — two of the young women over a seven hour ordeal.

In Spokane, one of the attackers immediately confessed to searching only for Japanese women to torture and rape — and eventually all pled guilty and were convicted. It clearly was a racially-motivated criminal case. The victims also believed they were attacked because of their race, the prosecutor told me.

What is astonishing, however, is that the district attorney failed to bring an additional charge that would have tagged the crimes as motivated by racial bias. The police also neglected to report the crime as a “hate crime,” as demanded by the Justice Department to keep accurate statistics of all bias-driven crimes. Although the attackers all received long sentences, an important opportunity to raise the nation’s consciousness was lost. We, as a society, were told that it’s not a hate crime to rape an Asian woman because of her race.

In most states, as well as the federal justice system, crimes committed against a person because of the victim’s race, ethnicity or national origin (as well as other protected classes) are considered “hate crimes” or “bias crimes.” Such a label doesn’t always add much to a sentence, but this enhancement to the charges is considered an important public policy matter and receives greater press coverage than standard crimes. A bias-driven crime is particularly egregious, say the laws, and must be defined as such.

But in rapes and sexual assaults targeting Asian women, I can find no instance of prosecutors or police bringing “hate crime” charges. It seems our society frowns on the rape itself, but accepts the racial motivation behind it. Mainstream society simply is blind to this type of racism. Indeed, the Spokane police detective handling the case wrote in an email to me: “It was felt that there was no hate involved instead he [the lead rapist] was very infatuated with the Japanese race.” (sic).

[...]

The attackers in the L.A. and Spokane rape cases did not use typical “hate speech.” But the biggest obstacle to bias crime charges in those cases is that society at large thinks it benign to hold sexualized stereotypes about Asian women. The woeful abandonment of “hate crime” categorization when Asian women are sexually attacked comes from the mistaken belief that weight should be attached to the attacker’s claim to an “attraction” or “fetish” for the victim’s Asian race. There is a disconnect: while authorities do not see the “fetish” as an excuse for the rape, they see it as an excuse from hate crime labeling. Like society at large, they fail to see that this is a form of racial discrimination.

— From Jaemin Kim’s Huffington Post entry “Asian Woman: Rape and Hate Crimes”

(Thanks to reader Kristin for sending this in!)

An ugly blame game ensued after the passing of California’s Proposition 8, which restricted the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman. With exit polls reporting 70 percent of Blacks and 53 percent of Latinos/as supporting the ban on gay marriage, many white members of the LGBT community blamed people of color for the ban’s success.

The December issue of gay news magazine The Advocate stepped into the fray. The cover of the issue provocatively announced, “Gay is the New Black.” Although the cover story’s author, Michael Joseph Gross, dismissed blaming Black voters as a “false conclusion” and a “terrible mistake,” comments posted to the site took him to task for other reasons. Most comments strongly disagreed with Gross’ Black/gay comparison, but many others asked why communities of color and queer communities are still considered mutually exclusive in the mainstream LGBT rights movement.

A comment posted by “Greg J,” pointedly charged, “Gays of color, transgender, and yes, even lesbians are missing from the larger discourse of the gay rights struggle – primarily the gay marriage issue. The gay right’s movement was and remains the ‘gay, white, middle class’ movement!”

The Prop 8 fallout shows how much work remains to be done to connect the LGBT rights movement with other struggles for social justice across a spectrum of issues. Unfortunately, it may have taken the brutal murder of Ecuadoran immigrant Jose Oswaldo Sucuzhañay to highlight the invisibility of queer people of color – particularly queer immigrants – in LGBT rights discourse. His murder will hopefully provide an impetus for coalition building.

Jose Sucuzhañay and his brother Romel were attending a Sunday evening church party on December 7, 2008. They later decided to end the night with some drinks at a local bar in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. The two brothers left the bar at 3:30 a.m. and walked home arm-in-arm to support each other. Three men drove up to the Sucuzhañay brothers, one man got out of the car and began to shout anti-gay and anti-Latino slurs at them.

The man then attacked Jose Sucuzhañay and broke a bottled over the back of his head causing him to fall to the ground. His brother Romel ran to call the police. Romel saw the attackers kick his brother’s prone body and beat him with an aluminum baseball bat. The beating stopped when Romel returned and told the attackers that he had called the police. Jose was rushed to Elmhurst Hospital and remained in critical condition until he passed away five days later. He was 31 and left behind two children.

Sucuzhañay’s killing comes a month after a group of Long Island teens fatally stabbed Ecuadoran immigrant Marcelo Lucero; it also follows the murder of Luis Ramirez, who was beaten to death last July in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania.

The increased violence and surveillance against immigrant communities has coincided with violence against queers of color, including the murder of Duanna Johnson, a Black transgender woman. Johnson was beaten by two Memphis police officers last February. Nine months later, she was found shot to death in North Memphis.

Blogger Angry Brown Butch reflected on Johnson’s murder: “Just to be trans, just to be a woman, just to be a person of color in this country is enough to drastically increase one’s exposure to hatred and violence; when oppressions overlap, violence tends to multiply.”

Although Sucuzhañay was not gay, his murder represents the danger and uncertainty facing queers, people of color, immigrants, and other marginalized communities. For the most part, however, both mainstream LGBT rights groups and immigrant rights groups have failed to recognize the potential for collaboration and coalition, even in the wake of Sucuzhañay’s murder.

Immediately after the attack, media outlets discussed the homophobic and xenophobic nature of the attack against the Sucuzhañay brothers. But as time went on, reports began to only highlight either the anti-gay or the anti-Latino/a nature of the attack rather than seeing the two as joint-causes.

“I have seen some members of the Latino community express indignation at some outside the Latino community using the attack for political gain,” notes Andrés Duque of the Latino/a LGBT site Blabbeando. “I have also seen a Queens-based Ecuadorian community organization put out a call for a vigil highlighting the xenophobic nature of the crime while not mentioning that it might have also been a homophobic crime.”

Indeed, rather than illuminating the vulnerability that both Latino/a and LGBT communities face and interrogating the systemic inequalities that enable that marginalization, some are more concerned with shaping how the incident is described and remembered in the media. One example of this is Diego Sucuzhañay’s denial that the attack on his brothers was homophobic in nature. Although Romel told the police that anti-gay and anti-Latino slurs were shouted at them as they were assaulted, Diego denies that homophobia was an aspect of his brothers’ attack.

Diego told New York’s El Diario/La Prensa that, “My brother Romel told me that they shouted insults against Latinos, that they shouted ‘Hispanic sons of bitches,’ but not anti-gay insults.” But Romel has not publicly retracted his statement regarding anti-gay slurs. And other family members have spoken about the murder in terms of homophobia also being a motivating factor. So some observers following the case wonder whether Diego’s statements to the press are an attempt to disassociate his brother’s murder from any implications of queerness.

Still, many others are people speaking out against Sucuzhañay’s murder by clearly connecting issues of racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. At his brother’s funeral in Cuenca, Ecuador, German Sucuzhañay told the Associated Press, “The brutal killing of my brother Oswaldo is the result of xenophobia, of homophobia and racism that our compatriots are experiencing in these times.”

Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa condemned the xenophobia and homophobia behind Sucuzhañay’s tragic death. Correa told the press that Sucuzhañay was “vilely murdered because of xenophobia and homophobia. They confused him for a homosexual…” The President called on the public to fight against “xenophobia, homophobia and all types of phobia, all types of discrimination, all types of violence.”

While a number of U.S.-based organizations including Bienestar, The Audre Lorde Project, People of Color in Crisis (POCC), and Incite! have all been working to address the intersections between multiple forms of oppression, both the mainstream LGBT and Latino/a rights movements remain remarkably single issue oriented.

The killing of Jose Sucuzhañay, however, challenges Latino/a and LGBT leaders to build a broad-based vision for social justice that acknowledges the linkages between various communities and struggles. Hopefully, both immigrant rights group and LGBT rights groups will begin to see the parallels between a number of these ballot initiatives sponsored by right-wing groups – whether they are anti-immigrant, anti-choice, or anti-gay.

The fight in 1994 to repeal California’s Proposition 187, which sought to prevent undocumented immigrants from accessing state benefits, can perhaps serve as inspiration for those working to overturn Prop 8 and provide an in-road for collaboration between these intersecting struggles. Though not identical, these grassroots struggles provide a crucial space for collaboration between marginalized communities.

Last weekend in Queens, a young Sikh man was attacked and beaten so badly he may lose his left eye: Brutal Attack Has NYC Sikh Community In Uproar.

18-year-old Jasmir Singh was walking on the street early Sunday morning when he was approached by three men who demanded his money. Then they began to taunt him because of his turban, touching his hair and threatening to cut it. When he tried to run away, they beat him.

This appears to be hate crime, plain and simple. They targeted and taunted Singh because of his turban and beard — an important part of his Sikh faith. But the police and the Queens district attorney have simply classified it as a robbery and an assault. What’s up with that?

But here’s the part that kills me. That same night, police arrested two of the three suspects, described as “16-year-old Asian Pacific male and a 21-year-old Latino.” Ack. You freaking hateful idiots. That’s racist!

You’d think as people of color, as racial minorities, these two idiots would know what it’s like to be targeted and violated like this. Maybe they do. But I guess we know that ignorance and hate extends across all color. Police are still searching for the third suspect.

Herrington, Alexander and Collins. 

It’s unlikely that these names ring a bell, that upon hearing them a knot will form in your stomach as often happens to those who hear the names of another trio—Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney. The latter threesome received worldwide recognition after a lynch mob executed them in 1964 for trying to register black Mississippians to vote. On the other hand, the former threesome was shot during Hurricane Katrina by a group of men described as “white vigilantes.” Unlike Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney, however, Herrington (pictured above), Alexander and Collins survived to tell their tale.

Now, A.C. Thompson, a writer for The Nation, has launched an investigation into the shootings of Herrington, Alexander and Collins. In an article called “Katrina’s Hidden Race War,” which was published online Dec. 17, Thompson asserts that at least 11 blacks were shot as the hurricane unfolded—all by white men.

“So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for shooting Herrington, Alexander and Collins—in fact, there was never an investigation,” Thompson writes. “As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.”

It’s especially surprising that no arrests have been made for the shootings considering that the victims haven’t exactly kept them a secret. Herrington spoke of his ordeal in Spike Lee’s documentary “When the Levees Broke,” according to Thompson. To boot, Cox News and pro-gun blogs reportedly mentioned them as well.

The main reason Thompson believes that an uproar hasn’t broken out over the shootings is because of the pervasive portrayal of blacks as looters and thugs during the media’s coverage of Katrina. In short, while America would normally classify a group of white Southerners who went on a shooting rampage against blacks as a lynch mob, in this case such whites were considered to be innocent men simply protecting their property from lawless African Americans.

Add this episode to the long series of missteps that occurred during the chaos that was Katrina—from FEMA’s slow response to the largely impoverished victims to W.’s delayed arrival to New Orleans to Condi Rice shopping for shoes as the hurricane unwound.

It took public outcry for the FBI to conduct an investigation into the murders of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney. Perhaps similar outcry is needed to spur the authorities to hold the white vigilantes who terrorized blacks in New Orleans during Katrina responsible. 

(Color of Change has an appeal to the state to investigate ready and waiting for you to fill it out here. Thanks to reader Tawra for the tip. Photo credit: Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun for The Nation)

SAALT (South Asian Americans Leading Together) has been keeping track of an increase in xenophobic violence and rhetoric against South Asians in the weeks and months leading up to the 2008 elections, including assaults targeting immigrants who either supported or were perceived to support President-Elect Obama. Here are a few examples of recent violence against South Asians and other communities of color:

• Hardwick, New Jersey — On November 6, 2008, an incident occurred in which Alina and Gary Grewal found a cross burned on their front lawn. The cross was wrapped in a congratulatory banner the family had made which read “President Obama, Victory ’08″.
• Carteret, New Jersey — On October 30, 2008, an incident occurred in which an elderly Sikh gentleman, Ajit Singh Chima, was punched and kicked repeatedly in the face, suffering fractures in his jaw and near his eyes. This occurred soon after a 10-year-old Sikh boy, Gagandeep Singh, was attacked on October 8, 2008, by an individual who pushed him to the ground and forcibly cut his hair.
• Staten Island, New York — In early November, an incident occurred in which four white men beat a Liberian-American Muslim teenager, Ali Kamara, near his home. The attackers jumped out of a car and assaulted him with a baseball bat after shouting “Obama.”
• Providence, Rhode Island — In September 2008, an incident occurred in which a Sikh-American man was accosted by an individual who said, “I have a gun in my car and since you are a hajii no one will care if I kill you. You know why the police won’t do anything? Because I got blond hair and blue eyes.” As the assailant left, he screamed, “F*** Arabs and F*** Obama.”

In light of these incidents, SAALT is re-circulating a basic factsheet on hate crimes with answers to frequently asked questions and resources for those in need. To learn more about the work SAALT is doing, and its services and resources for hate crime victims, visit the SAALT website here.