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	Act to prevent gun violence and racist crimes motivated by prejudice by NAACP, SPLC, agencies USA   July 2016   The Need for Action on Policing and Racial Justice after Baton Rouge, by Chris Stone. (Open Society Foundations)   At this moment of grief, fear, and frustration in the United States, the Open Society Foundations stand committed to solidarity and justice. The killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Philando Castile in Minnesota, and five police officers in Dallas in the last two weeks had already plunged the country back into a tense debate about racism and police use of force. The killing of three officers in Baton Rouge on Sunday has raised the stakes for everyone. There is danger everywhere, even as we are in mourning, and no one can stay above the fray.   In moments like these, it is difficult to see a path forward or even to find words to convey the turmoil of thoughts. But at least three things seem clear:   First, peaceful protests are the opposite of violence, not the cause of violence. In earlier years, indeed for decades past, police shootings like those of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile might well have sparked riots, but instead we’ve seen a deluge of social media and lots of peaceful protest.   The Dallas shootings were an aberrant response of a single individual, reportedly targeting white police officers. The Baton Rouge killings were different: there are conflicting assessments of whether the shooter initiated the incident. And one of the three officers killed was black.   Even as we wait for the facts to be established, we must help everyone understand that the protests are the opposite of the violence. It is imperative that no one blame peaceful protesters for violence.   Second, in this atmosphere it is even easier for routine encounters between police officers and people of color to go bad. There are literally thousands of those encounters every day across the United States, and we need to do everything possible to keep every encounter safe and respectful. Protesters and police will be especially on edge, and all need reassurance that these individual incidents are isolated and aberrational. We need shows of solidarity across these lines, even as the peaceful protests and professional police work continue.   Third, this is everybody’s issue. All of the United States is affected today by the racially polarized rhetoric and violent reactions that jeopardize the lives of activists, police officers, and everyone of color.   There will not be any one answer to close the longstanding divide between black America and American policing. The hostility and distrust is still today the legacy of slavery, the legacies of Jim Crow, of lynching, of the repression of the civil rights and black power movements, the legacy of the war on drugs. But today the resulting biases have metastasized, spreading throughout American society. At the very least, we must stop this cancer spreading.   To do that, we need to engage everyone, including those in law enforcement. American police officers are not a monolith, and while all are feeling the pain of the Dallas and Baton Rouge shootings, many are also determined to reduce the violence in American policing, end the racial disparities, and build mutual trust.   Jan 2016   UN expert group urges the US to address legacies of the past, police impunity and racial injustice crisis.   The legacy of enslavement in the United States of America remains a serious challenge as there has been no real commitment to recognition and reparations for people of African descent, a United Nations expert panel has said at the end of its second official visit to the country.   From 9 to 29 January, a delegation of the UN Working Group of experts on people of African descent visited Washington D.C., Baltimore, Jackson- Mississippi, Chicago, and New York City to address current concerns, and assess progress made in the fight against racial discrimination, Afrophobia, xenophobia, and protecting and promoting the human rights of African- Americans.   “Despite substantial changes since the end of the enforcement of Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights, ideology ensuring the domination of one group over another continues to negatively impact the civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights of African Americans today,” said human rights expert Mireille Fanon Mendes France, who currently heads the group of experts.   The Working Group visiting delegation, welcomed various efforts undertaken by the Government to address the issue, like a ban on solitary confinement for juveniles in the federal prison system announced this week.   “We understand these changes are part of a larger effort to pass criminal justice reforms now pending in Congress, and a lot more needs to be done”, Ms. Mendes France said.   However, they expressed serious concerns about the police killings, the presence of police in schools, and violence targeting the African American community with impunity and racial bias in the criminal justice system, mass incarceration and the criminalization of poverty which disproportionately affects African Americans.   “The persistent gap in almost all the human development indicators, such as life expectancy, income and wealth, level of education, housing, employment and labour, and even food security, among African Americans and the rest of the US population, reflects the level of structural discrimination that creates de facto barriers for people of African descent to fully exercise their human rights,” Ms. Mendes France stressed.   The human rights experts met representatives of the Government at the federal and the state levels, and the US Congress and Senate, as well as hundreds of civil society organization representatives, lawyers and human rights activists from more than 20 states who had gathered in the different cities. http://bit.ly/1SgP7qJ   June 2015   From Ferguson to Charleston and Beyond, anguish about Race keeps building, by Lydia Polygreen. (NYT)   Ferguson. Baltimore. Staten Island. North Charleston. Cleveland.   Over the past year in each of these American cities, an unarmed black male has died at the hands of a police officer, unleashing a torrent of anguish and soul-searching about race in America. Despite video evidence in several of the killings, each has spurred more discord than unity.   Grand juries have tended to give the benefit of the doubt to police officers. National polls revealed deep divisions in how whites and blacks viewed the facts in each case. Whites were more likely to believe officers’ accounts justifying the use of force. Blacks tended to see deeper forces at work: longstanding police bias against black men and a presumption that they are criminals.   Then, on Wednesday night, a young white man walked into a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., and joined a group of worshipers as they bowed their heads over their Bibles. He shot and killed nine of them. In his Facebook profile picture, the suspect, Dylann Roof, wore the flags of racist regimes in South Africa and the former Rhodesia.   The massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston was something else entirely from the police killings. But it, too, has become a racial flash point and swept aside whatever ambiguity seemed to muddle those earlier cases, baldly posing questions about race in America: Was the gunman a crazed loner motivated by nothing more than his own madness? Or was he an extreme product of the same legacy of racism that many black Americans believe sent Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Walter Scott and Tamir Rice to their graves?   Bryan Stevenson, a black lawyer who has specialized in death-penalty cases and chronicled the legal system’s unfairness to African-Americans, sees deep and systemic connections between Mr. Roof’s actions and the police killings of black males, as well as the rough actions of a police officer breaking up a pool party in McKinney, Tex.   “This latest violent act is an extreme and terrifying example, but not disconnected from the way black men and boys are treated by police, by schools, by the state,” Mr. Stevenson said in an interview. “The landscape is littered with monuments that talk proudly about the Confederacy and leave no record about the lynchings of the era.”   America is living through a moment of racial paradox. Never in its history have black people been more fully represented in the public sphere. The United States has a black president and a glamorous first lady who is a descendant of slaves. African-Americans lead the country’s pop culture in many ways, from sports to music to television.   It has become commonplace to refer to the generation of young people known as millennials as “post-racial.”   Yet in many ways, the situation of black America is dire.   “All of these examples in some ways are really misleading in what they represent,” Mr. Stevenson said. “We have an African-American president who cannot talk about race, who is exposed to hostility anytime he talks about race. These little manifestations of black artistry and athleticism and excellence have always existed. But they don’t change the day-to-day experience of black Americans living in most parts of this country.”   If current trends continue, one in three black men are expected to spend time in prison at some point in their lives. The Great Recession wiped out twice as much black wealth as it did white, and the raw numbers are even more stark: Post-recession median household wealth for a white family in 2014 was almost $142,000, down from $192,500. The median wealth for black households had fallen to $11,000 from $19,200. There are 1.5 million black men “missing” in America, because they are either dead or in prison.   Pull back even farther into history, experts say, and the picture gets starker. Black people were overwhelmingly excluded from the largest opportunities for wealth creation in the 20th century, from federally subsidized home ownership after World War II to the job training programs that created millions of middle-class livelihoods.   Black people across the South live on streets named for heroes of the side of the Civil War that opposed the end to slavery.   For many black people, Charleston is of a piece with the story of black life in America.   “Many of the conditions — housing, food, police brutality — they’re not isolated, they’re all connected experiences,” said Lamont Lilly, 35, a black journalist and activist in Durham, N.C., a city about 300 miles north of Charleston. Greg Tate, a black writer and musician, said black people could not help but feel that they are under siege in a society afflicted with amnesia about its own history.   “There has always just been a constant denial in America that racism really exists,” Mr. Tate said. “As James Baldwin says, there is just an incapacity of white Americans to look at themselves as bad people. We see with Dylann Roof there is already a rush to not only dissociate other white Americans from his violence but to distance he himself from his own stated investment in white supremacist ideology.”   The era of instantaneously shared images holds out hope for change. Cellphone videos of police officers shooting unarmed black males shock the conscience of Americans, the theory goes, just as TV footage of peaceful black protesters menaced by vicious dogs and water cannons in the civil rights era troubled white Americans of that time.   Yet many black Americans today lament facing struggles reminiscent of the last century. Highly militarized police forces patrol their communities. State voter ID laws, along with laws barring felons from voting, are widely seen as efforts to disenfranchise black citizens. Some scholars argue that mass incarceration and harsh policing tactics have replaced Jim Crow laws as a way to control the black population.   Life expectancy rates for black Americans lag those of white Americans, and infant mortality rates are higher. Black America, as the scholar Theodore R. Johnson has put it, “is a fragile state embedded in the greatest superpower the world has ever known.”   Michaela Angela Davis, an activist whose grandmother witnessed a lynching in South Carolina, said that each generation in her family had grappled with state-condoned violence against black people.   “Every generation has a symbol of the white supremacist structure,” Ms. Davis said. “My 24-year-old daughter has a symbol of Trayvon Martin like my mother had Emmett Till and I had Rodney King.” Who will be the symbol for her daughter’s daughter?   “Younger people are much more ready to have the very hard complicated conversations around structural racism and inherent bias,” Ms. Davis said. “These are words that my parents’ generation were not using. I have hope that this new generation will force a change.”   http://www.naacp.org/press/entry/naacp-statement-on-the-arrest-of-dylann-roof http://www.splcenter.org/hate-map#s=SC http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/charleston-shooter-s-manifesto-reveals-hate-group-helped-to-radicalize-him http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/i-am-sandra-bland http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/challenge-and-hope-baltimore http://blog.witness.org/2016/03/getting-the-truth-out-restorative-justice-for-victims-of-police-violence-in-the-united-states/ http://lab.witness.org/projects/police-violence-in-the-united-states/ http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/news/articles/bruce-western-other-hks-voices-join-in-the-debate-about-the-criminal-justice-system-in-america http://blacklivesmatter.com/ http://eji.org/ http://www.vera.org/ http://www.sentencingproject.org/issues/racial-disparity/   June 2015 (UN News)   In the wake of the appalling attack that left nine African Americans dead at church in South Carolina, a group of UN human rights experts called for prompt action by authorities in the United States to investigate the hate crimes and urged measures to prevent gun violence affecting the security of African-Americans, their communities and wider society as well.   Issuing a statement on behalf of the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, the current Chairperson, Mireille Fanon-Mendes-France, denounced what the experts flagged as racially motivated 17 June killings.   “We utterly condemn the appalling attack on the Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, this week and the killing of nine African Americans,” the experts said, welcoming the “prompt action by the authorities” to investigate the hate crime, underscoring that “every effort must be made to ensure the person guilty of this act is prosecuted and punished accordingly.”   The statement continued: “Urgent measures must be taken to prevent gun violence and racist crimes motivated by prejudice that affect the security of Afro-Americans, their communities and society as a whole.”   The Group"s heartfelt condolences were offered to the people of the United States, “especially the families and friends of those who were murdered while in worship at Church.”   The Charleston shooting - Racism deserves a remedy, by Rev. Jesse Jackson   Not unlike the four little girls killed in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, the nation and the world are saddened and outraged at the hatred and senseless killing of nine African Americans in the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The dead include its pastor and a state senator. Over three decades ago Operation Push – the organisation I founded in 1971 to improve the economic status of African Americans – held its national convention in this church.   And, not unlike the economic and political context of Birmingham, the nation and its leadership are still failing to see, understand and come to grips with the underlying economic and political circumstances that led to such a tragedy. This young white man responsible for the killings, Dylann Roof, did not originate terrorism. He is merely reflecting decades and centuries of institutional and active political terrorism. There were 164 lynchings of African Americans between 1877 and 1950 in South Carolina.   The shooting in Charleston is the result of institutionalised racism, centuries of dehumanisation and the current denial of economic and political equality of opportunity. Today everyone is outraged at the killings, but there is not the same outrage that African Americans have the highest rates of infant mortality, unemployment, of being denied access to capital and bank loans, of imprisonment, segregated housing and home foreclosures, segregated and underfunded public schools, poverty, heart disease, liver disease, diabetes, mental health issues, HIV/Aids and more. We ignore this institutionalised state of terror and the resulting racial fears at our peril.   There was an urgency to identify and arrest Roof before he hurt anyone else, but there is not the same urgency to identify and arrest the current economic and political conditions – the institutional racism and structural injustices – before anyone else gets hurt. Today in South Carolina a historically black university, South Carolina State, is on the verge of closing, but I don’t see the same urgency to save it by the governor and the South Carolina legislature. Governor Nikki Haley appropriately asked South Carolinians to pray for the victims of these killings and their families and decried violence at religious institutions. But she denies poor people access to healthcare by refusing to accept Medicaid monies under the Affordable Care Act – which is jeopardising the economic viability of the state’s hospitals and costing South Carolinians thousands of jobs – and she still flies the Confederate flag on the Capitol grounds.   But these injustices and indifferences are not limited to South Carolina. They’re national in scope. We need a White House Conference on racial justice and urban policy to make sure no one else is being hurt because of economic, political and leadership indifference or lack of vision about what needs to be done. Racism deserves a remedy.   We need the president, the congress, the 50 governors and state legislatures to all put the same effort, resources and energy into ending the crime of racism, economic injustice and political denial throughout the nation. We’ve had enough Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Walter Scott killings. We’ve had enough infant mortality deaths. We’ve had enough unemployment –always at least twice the rate of white unemployment.   We’ve had enough of segregated and inadequately funded educational opportunities. We’ve had enough of a lack of access to capital and health care. We’ve had enough of homelessness and home foreclosures. We need prayer and we need hope, but we also need a political commitment and a financial budget committed to ending this protracted political genocide.   We need leadership with a vision for racial justice. We need an investment for economic justice – the current rising tide hasn’t lifted all boats. And we need fairness in political representation. That’s what we need if we are ever going to put an end to the protracted “political genocide” of which African Americans have been the victims for nearly 400 years in the United States. We deserve equal economic and political opportunity. We deserve equal justice under the law.   * Jesse Jackson is the founder and president of the Rainbow Push Coalition, and one of America’s leading civil rights activists   http://www.bradycampaign.org/ http://www.demandaction.org/blog/2013-03-mayors-against-illegal-guns-leads-national-day-to-de http://www.vpc.org/ http://americansforresponsiblesolutions.org/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gunned-down/ http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/22/barack-obama-n-word-racism-marc-maron-interview http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/20/charleston-south-carolina-shooting-gun-control-reform-myths http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=16172&LangID=E http://www.thenation.com/blog/210313/charlestons-mother-emanuel-church-has-stared-down-racist-violence-200-years http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2015/s4367710.htm http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/08/26/katrinas-message-americas-poor-still-unheard http://www.thedreamcorps.org/ Visit the related web page
	Combatting child marriage to save girls from slavery by Aidan McQuade Anti-Slavery International   There are a lot of euphemisms for atrocities in the contemporary world. Genocide has become “ethnic cleansing”; the slaughter of civilians in indiscriminate aerial and artillery bombardments has become “collateral damage”; and the enslavement of children for the purposes of rape and sexual exploitation has become “child and early marriage”.   The war crimes of Boko Haram and Islamic State kidnapping girls and young women for rape and forced marriage is a stark example of how the symbols of marriage are used as the thinnest of veils of respectability for this form of enslavement. But beyond the battlefields the euphemism of “marriage” is used as a distressingly commonplace excuse for the enslavement, overwhelmingly, of girls.   According to UNICEF, 250 million women alive today were married before their 15th birthday. The highest rates of child marriage are concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, while, due to population size, the highest absolute numbers of child marriage take place in South Asia, where 46% of girls marry before the age of 18 and one in five marry before the age of 15.   The issue of child, early and forced marriage and its impact on health and education has been brought to the forefront of the international development agenda in recent years, largely due to the efforts of organisations such as Girls not Brides and UNICEF. But the issue has not been adequately considered as a human rights one, in particular as an issue of child slavery.   This context is of enormous importance. Whilst the impact on girls’ health and education is important, it fails to acknowledge that a huge amount of girls married as children face a lifetime of abuse, exploitation and forced labour, with no realistic chance of leaving this situation. It’s time to be clear: they are in slavery.   Currently, there is an enormous gap between international standards of protection and the reality experienced by those that fall victim to slavery and slavery-like practices as a result of marriage.   Clearly, not all cases of child marriage can be treated as slavery, particularly between couples aged 16 to 18 years, where they go on to have a relationship based on mutual respect. But in so many cases, especially involving younger children, it’s much more clear cut.   Let’s look at the law: child slavery is defined in the 1956 Supplementary Convention on Slavery as, “Any institution or practice whereby a child or young person under the age of 18 years, is delivered … to another person… with a view to the exploitation of the child or young person or of his labour”.   Now let’s look at what one young girl described what happened to her:   “I’m 13 years-old and I’m a fourth grade student … I like going to school. One day, my mother informed me that I should marry a cousin of mine. I cried a lot because I didn’t want to leave school but my parents threatened to beat me if I refused.”   The intent described in these short sentences is inescapable: her own parents were proposing to deliver her to another for the purpose of sexual exploitation under the guise of marriage with no concern for the either what the child herself wanted or what was in her best interests. In other words she was to be trafficked.   That this young girl ultimately escaped her proposed enslavement is the only thing that redeems this story from the banal reality of violence, abuse and stunted potential that most child brides experience.   In a newly published paper entitled “Behind Closed Doors” Anti-Slavery International argues that the UN and the international community as a whole should intensify efforts to combat situations of slavery and slavery-like practices arising from child and early marriage. In doing this we hope to help advance the struggle to end all child marriage that colleagues in Girls Not Brides and other similar organisations have been waging.   To define when child marriage becomes slavery, we propose that one or more of the three indicators are present: when the ability to refuse, leave or end a marriage is denied; when a child spouse is exploited within the marriage or denied freedom of choice on her personal matters; and when a child spouse is subject to rape and violence without recourse to law or society for protection.   The word ‘protection’ is key when we talk about addressing this issue, and the term “marriage” cannot be used as an exemption under which any form of child abuse, including rape and enslavement, are permitted.   The struggle for human rights and justice tends to encounter the most entrenched resistance when it confronts the self-interest of others. And men, who still hold most of the power in the world, tend to become deeply attached to the right to rape and abuse women when granted this by custom or law.   But just because a struggle is difficult does not mean it should not be fought.   In 1792, in A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote of the general situation of women: “They may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent.”   Child spouses remain “convenient slaves” and their continued abuse and enslavement degrades our whole human society. We should no longer be cowed by the vested interests across the world who wish to maintain this form of abuse in the name of tradition.   Some traditions deserve to be repudiated, and in repudiating child marriage the world will come a step closer to the one hoped for by Wollstonecraft and all who still fight for the idea of upholding basic human rights for every human being on this planet.   * Aidan McQuade is the director of Anti-Slavery International, which works at local, national and international levels to eliminate all forms of slavery around the world. http://www.antislavery.org/ http://www.antislavery.org/includes/documents/cm_docs/2015/b/behind_closed_doors_child_marriage_as_slavery.pdf http://www.girlsnotbrides.org/ Visit the related web page
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