Today's Blacks Are Too Smart for Racist Corporate Media (Videos)

Deray McKesson Tells CNN's Wolf Blitzer That He's More Worried About
Broken Windows Than Cops Breaking Black Necks

______________

Baltimore City Council Member Carl Stokes Schools CNN Host:
'Thug' is Racist Codeword for 'Nigger'

______________

Baltimore Protester Confronts FoxNews' Geraldo Rivera
Over Racist Propaganda

______________

Words Matter: How the Language Used to Describe the Unrest in Baltimore Supports White Supremacy

Using words like "thug" and "riots" derail the larger issue

By Terrell Jermaine Starr
As the unrest has grown in Baltimore, the word “thug” has been freely slung around by political leaders and the media. President Barack Obama referred to young people in the streets causing property damage as “thugs” and “criminals.” Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake called them “thugs who only want to incite violence.” The city’s council president Bernard Young also used the word thugs in a press conference Monday.

RELATED STORY: A Brief History of the Word ‘Thug’ — It Doesn’t Mean What You Think it Means

Donald Trump, the mega-rich troll of the black community, tweeted Tuesday, “Our great African American President hasn't exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!”

Days after 25-year-old Freddie Gray died after sustaining fatal injuries during his arrest on April 12, hundreds of people took to the streets of downtown Baltimore demanding that the officers who took Gray into custody be charged in his death. The mostly calm protests soon turned into unrest Saturday as hundreds of young people overcome with years of deprivation and despair responded with anger that left significant damage to local businesses and police vehicles. Most media outlets described what is happening in Baltimore as “riots,” while some people prefer the term “uprising.”

Even on Twitter, the hashtag #BaltimoreRiots stopped trending Tuesday and has been replaced with #BaltimoreUprising. So far, the hashtag hasn’t lost steam.

The use of the word “uprising” isn’t merely semantic. The characterization of protesters as thugs criminalizes young people who are responding to what they understandably regard as a hostile and murderous law enforcement system.

Several local Baltimore politicians have pushed back against news reporters who seem to want to talk about property damage as opposed to the abusive police behavior that precipitated the unrest. When Fox News reporter Leland Vittert asked Baltimore City Councilman Nick Mosby about the “rioting” and “looting,” the politician made clear that he did not approve of it and then focused on why young people were engaging in destructive behavior.

"What it is is young folks of this community showing decades-old anger, frustration, for a system that's failed them,” he said. “I mean, this is bigger than Freddie Gray. This is about the socio-economics of poor, urban America. These young guys are frustrated, they're upset, and unfortunately, they're displaying it in a very destructive manner. When folks are undereducated, unfortunately, they don't have the same intellectual voice to explain it the way other people are doing it and that's what we see through the violence today.”

After realizing that Vittert had no interest in discussing the larger socio-economic issues underlying the unrest, Mosby ended the interview.

Maryland state Sen. Majority Leader Catherine Pugh was captured on video hugging a protester. During an interview with Fox News reporter Geraldo Rivera, she told him the media is making the situation worse.

“No, they don’t want trouble,” she said. “We want our people to go home, but we also need the media to move back, because this is just inciting people.”

Pugh has taken a drubbing on social media for hugging the protester, but her actions and words were an important narrative shift because they mirror the efforts of other politicians and activists to decriminalize young people whom white society and the police seem to automatically criminalize.

Abdul Salaam, a 36-year-old mental health executive and activist from Baltimore, told AlterNet he has sat in meetings with Baltimore officials who referred to protesters as thugs and convinced them that their characterizations were harmful.

“Wording is very important, particularly when you're talking about people who cannot identify with disenfranchised and marginalized individuals, so such language disenfranchises them even more,” Salaam, who claims he was beaten by Baltimore police officers in front of his child in 2013, said in a phone interview.

Read More

America's 'Christian Taliban' Issuing 'Kill Obama Fatwahs': Using Codewords To Plant 'Kill Obama' Thoughts Into The Brains of Weak Minded Right-Wingers?

By Brian Tashman
Pat Robertson today asked God to "deliver" the US from President Obama before it's too late. After implying that Obama is a Muslim, Robertson told 700 Club viewers: "We need to do something to pray to be delivered from this president. He is a disaster, an absolute disaster. Democrat, Republican or whatever, this country is into serious decline unless something dramatic is done about it."

Such sentiments are nothing new from the right-wing televangelist. Robertson has previously suggested that Obama is a "crypto-Muslim" and once during George W. Bush's presidency prayed for God to remove justices from the Supreme Court.

Read More

Understanding Paul Ryan's Racism in Three Easy Steps

Republican Congressman Paul Ryan. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

Paul Ryan is the leader of a political party that is the country’s premier white identity organization. The Republican Party has also merged conservatism and racism in such a way that appeals to white racial resentment are its Lingua Franca and a taken for granted way of thinking about political and social reality. Paul Ryan traffics in racism because the Republican Party is a racist organization. The calculus is not complicated. 

 
By Chauncey DeVega
Paul Ryan has attempted to clarify  his racist argument that “inner city” black people are lazy and do not want to work. He issued a statement that:

After reading the transcript of yesterday morning’s interview, it is clear that I was inarticulate about the point I was trying to make. I was not implicating the culture of one community—but of society as a whole.

This is a false and disingenuous pseudo apology. Paul Ryan is the leader of a political party that is the country’s premier white identity organization. The Republican Party has also merged conservatism and racism in such a way that appeals to white racial resentment are its Lingua Franca and a taken for granted way of thinking about political and social reality.

Paul Ryan traffics in racism because the Republican Party is a racist organization. The calculus is not complicated.

There has been  some smart writing about Paul Ryan’s use of  coded racial appeals. However, the majority of the news media is asking the wrong question. Instead of trying to figure out “if” Paul Ryan is a racist, the more revealing question is “what type of racist is he?”

There are three basic ways to understand Paul Ryan’s racism, both as part of a pattern of behavior by Republicans, and as an example of (symbolic) white racism in the post civil rights era.

The Southern Strategy.
Paul Ryan’s claim that black people have “bad culture”, may be genetically defective, and do not have “normal” “middle class” values about the merits of “hard work”, is a simple channeling of legendary Republican strategist Lee Atwater’s tactics for mobilizing white voters by leveraging their hostility to black Americans.

Read More