All things Racist...USA edition (3 Viewers)

[Farb]

I was looking for a place to put this so we could discuss but didn't really find a place that worked so I created this thread so we can all place articles, experiences, videos and examples of racism in the USA.

This is one that happened this week. The lady even called and filed a complaint on the officer. This officer also chose to wear the body cam (apparently, LA doesn't require this yet). This exchange wasn't necessarily racist IMO until she started with the "mexican racist...you will never be white, like you want" garbage. That is when it turned racist IMO

All the murderer and other insults, I think are just a by product of CRT and ACAB rhetoric that is very common on the radical left and sadly is being brought to mainstream in this country.

Another point that I think is worth mentioning is she is a teacher and the sense of entitlement she feels is mind blowing.

https://news.yahoo.com/black-teacher-berates-latino-la-221235341.html

 

[Optimus Prime]

Following the announcement of Francesca Amewudah-Rivers’ role in the Shakespearean play, the actress has faced excessive online hate.

More than 900 Black women and nonbinary actors have condemned the racist backlash targeting actress Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, who is set to star in a London West End production of “Romeo & Juliet.”

Following the announcement of Amewudah-Rivers being cast as Juliet opposite actor Tom Holland’s Romeo, she was quickly met with online hate and an outpouring of racist comments. In response to the online harassment, hundreds of Black performers signed a letter of solidarity this week criticizing the digital abuse and extending their support to Amewudah-Rivers and other Black female performers who have endured harsh criticisms.

“The racist and misogynistic abuse directed at such a sweet soul has been too much to bear,” the letter said. “For a casting announcement of a play to ignite such twisted, ugly abuse is truly embarrassing for those so empty and barren in their own lives that they must meddle in hateful abuse. Too many times, Black performers – particularly Black actresses – are left to face the storm of online abuse after committing the crime of getting a job on their own.”

MSN

 

[Bigdaddysaints]

North Dakota high schools are in spring sports mode and there is lingering tension from winter sporting events, where Native American players endured racist taunts from non-Native fans, and one lawmaker wants more follow-through with the response.

Several incidents of players being subject to discriminatory behavior from the stands have prompted apologies from districts of opposing schools. The state High School Activities Association has responded, including by implementing a zero-tolerance policy...........

MSN

cue SFL and Farb with the Jessie Smollet defense....

 

[Optimus Prime]

Guess this can go here
=================
Black incarcerated people have been subjected to prolonged and painful botched executions in the US at more than twice the rate of white death row inmates, a new study has found.

While glaring racial disparities have long been visible in US capital punishment, the report from the international human rights group Reprieve finds that the inequities exist even inside the death chamber.

It reveals a shocking racial disparity in the rate of botched executions in which lethal injections went awry, both nationwide and in individual death penalty states.

Reprieve analyzed all lethal injection executions between 1976, when the US death penalty was restarted after a brief pause, and 2023. It chronicled 73 confirmed botched procedures – a shocking figure in itself given the suffering that prolonged and flawed executions can cause despite the promise of a “humane” death made by advocates of lethal injections.

When looked at through a racial lens, 8% of executions of Black people were botched (37 times out of 465 executions), compared with 4% for white people (28 out of 780).

The Reprieve report has attracted congressional interest. Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senior senator from Massachusetts, said the findings “underscore the racial injustice of capital punishment and is yet another reason Congress must abolish the death penalty once and for all”.…..

Black death row inmates suffer botched executions at twice rate of whites in US

A glaring racial disparity is evident in the 73 botched procedures involving lethal injections since 1976, report by Reprieve finds

www.theguardian.com

 

[DaveXA]

Guess this can go here
=================
Black incarcerated people have been subjected to prolonged and painful botched executions in the US at more than twice the rate of white death row inmates, a new study has found.

While glaring racial disparities have long been visible in US capital punishment, the report from the international human rights group Reprieve finds that the inequities exist even inside the death chamber.

It reveals a shocking racial disparity in the rate of botched executions in which lethal injections went awry, both nationwide and in individual death penalty states.

Reprieve analyzed all lethal injection executions between 1976, when the US death penalty was restarted after a brief pause, and 2023. It chronicled 73 confirmed botched procedures – a shocking figure in itself given the suffering that prolonged and flawed executions can cause despite the promise of a “humane” death made by advocates of lethal injections.

When looked at through a racial lens, 8% of executions of Black people were botched (37 times out of 465 executions), compared with 4% for white people (28 out of 780).

The Reprieve report has attracted congressional interest. Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senior senator from Massachusetts, said the findings “underscore the racial injustice of capital punishment and is yet another reason Congress must abolish the death penalty once and for all”.…..

Black death row inmates suffer botched executions at twice rate of whites in US

A glaring racial disparity is evident in the 73 botched procedures involving lethal injections since 1976, report by Reprieve finds

www.theguardian.com

Maybe bring back the guillotine? Kinda hard to botch that.

But really, I don't know. I'd rather not have a death penalty at all. Not because some don't deserve it, but more because I don't want an innocent put to death.

 

[Optimus Prime]

A California district attorney’s office is reviewing more than 30 death penalty cases after it unearthed records suggesting prosecutors deliberately excluded Jewish and Black jurors from capital trials.

Pamela Price, the Alameda county district attorney, whose jurisdiction includes Oakland, announced Monday that her office had uncovered handwritten notes by former prosecutors documenting discriminatory jury selection tactics in the 1990s.

US judge Vince Chhabria, who is overseeing a case that led to the records discovery, has directed Price’s office to conduct the review of other cases, she said.

Chhabria wrote in an order on Monday that the “notes – especially when considered in conjunction with evidence presented in other cases – constitute strong evidence that, in prior decades, prosecutors from the office were engaged in a pattern of serious misconduct, automatically excluding Jewish and African American jurors in death penalty cases”.


The district attorney’s office released excerpts of prosecutors’ notes from the case of Ernest Dykes, who was sentenced to death in 1995 in Alameda county and whose appeal is ongoing.

The documents show prosecutors marked down when prospective jurors were Jewish, repeatedly writing “Jew?” next to some people’s names and in one case appearing to mark when they confirmed the person was Jewish.

In another record, a prosecutor referred to a Black woman as a “short, fat, troll”. A prosecutor also remarked that a Black woman “says race no issue but I don’t believe her”. The prosecutors who wrote the notes were not named…….

Prosecutors in California excluded Jewish and Black jurors, records suggest

Pamela Price, the Alameda county district attorney, is reviewing 35 death penalty cases after judge cites ‘pattern of misconduct’

www.theguardian.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

good read
==========

America fascinated me as America fascinates every newcomer. Nineteen years old and fleeing the study of medicine at my Nigerian university, I longed to be a writer, to live a life of the mind. Yes, it is hackneyed but America truly was, for me, about chasing and catching my dreams.

From my first days, I watched and read and learnt. I was struck by the excess and the newness, by the flagrant contradictions, but mostly by how identity as an idea shaped so much of American life.

America is indeed unlike any other country in the world, not in the kind of triumphalist manner of those who speak of “exceptionalism”, but because while it was created from violence like many other modern nations, it also claimed plurality, an unusual notion for founding a nation.

This plurality, this mix of those voluntarily and involuntarily American, living on land that did not belong to them, gave birth to a churning that magnified rather than diminished identity. In Nigeria, I had often thought about who I was – writer, dreamer, thinker – but only in America did I consider what I was.

I became Black in America. It was not a choice – my chocolate-coloured skin saw to that – but it became a revelation. I had never before thought of myself as “Black”; I did not need to, because while British colonialism in Nigeria left many cursed legacies in its wake, racial identity was not one of them.

Had I been raised in eastern or southern Africa, with their own insidious inheritances of history, perhaps I might have thought of myself in terms of skin colour. In Nigeria, I was Igbo and Roman Catholic, and even then, growing up on a genteel university campus, neither had a significant bearing on the way I moved through the world.

To be Black in America was to feel bulldozed by the weight of history and stereotypes, to know that race was always a possible reason, or cause, or explanation for the big and small interactions that make up our fragile lives. To be Black was to realise that it was impossible for people to approach one another with the simple wonder of being human, without the spectre of race lying somewhere in the shadows.

To be Black was to feel, in different circumstances, frustration, anger, irritation, and wry amusement, but it also brought the rare wealth of discovering African-American literature, those stories full of such graceful grit. Black American writing instructed and delighted me, and I must have at some unconscious level wanted to contribute to that tradition, but obliquely, as someone standing outside of American culture, a Black person without America’s blighted history...........

MSN

 

[Optimus Prime]

And to some’s great delight here is a story about a fake racist rant

Terrible and I’m glad this guy was caught
================

The 42-second voice recording, purportedly of a Maryland high school principal in the midst of a racist rant, derided Black students as “ungrateful” and unable to “test their way out of a paper bag.”
“I’m just so sick of the inadequacies of these people,” sneered the voice on the recording, which was posted on social media in January, igniting outrage and prompting the school district to place the principal on leave.


But the recording was not what it seemed, according to Baltimore County police. A school employee, investigators charged Thursday, had used artificial-intelligence tools to fabricate the audio with the intention of falsely depicting the principal, Eric Eiswert, as bigoted and antisemitic.


The employee, Dazhon Darien, 31, the former athletic director at Pikesville High School, was taken into custody at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport on Thursday as he was about to fly to Houston.

Airport security personnel, after detaining Darien because he was carrying a firearm, discovered that a judge had just issued a warrant for his arrest in the AI case.

Darien, in a text message, declined to comment Friday and referred questions to an attorney who was not immediately available. He was released on a $5,000 bond at a hearing Thursday where he was charged with disrupting school activities, retaliating against a witness, stalking and theft, according to court records.


Eiswert did not respond to a message seeking comment.
The case has drawn attention far beyond Baltimore County, raising fresh concerns about easily accessible AI tools that can allow users, with only a few seconds of real audio footage, to create believable clones of politicians, celebrities and ordinary citizens.


“Anyone can create these types of deepfakes, spread them online and very quickly and effortlessly wreak havoc on a person’s life,” said Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley who said Baltimore County police consulted him on the case.

Referring to the Baltimore incident, he said, “It certainly won’t be the last.”

Darien’s arrest is another reminder that the public should not “accept what you see on the internet for face value,” said Richard Forno, assistant director of the Center for Cybersecurity at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

“It may not be real. It’s becoming harder to trust your eyes and ears. You have to think critically before you retweet.”………

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/26/baltimore-ai-voice-audio-framing-principal/