(I’d actually had something else ready to post, but due to recent reactions to a couple grisly murders by police, it seemed wiser to go with this.)
From Democracy Now!: Protests Erupt over Police Killings of Terence Crutcher & Keith Lamont Scott in Tulsa & Charlotte, September 21, 2016. Video interviews w/ Vince Warren, Bree Newsome, and Rashid Robinson; the transcript is here. Bree and Vince said it right, imo.
https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/778990969899233280
There were solidarity demos in NYC; as ever, my thanks to Keegan.
The po-po are on Orta’s case constantly, as are the men who’d filmed the assassinations of #Walter Scott and #Freddie Gray, may they rest in power.
Speaking to the illegitimacy of police:
@KeeganNYC :Police say the cop who killed #KeithScott in Charlotte didn’t have his body cam turned on. Convenient.”
But from this morning at RT: 9 people injured, 44 arrested in Charlotte night riots – police chief’
“Putney also said that video of the shooting will not be released, but it will be shown to the family first. When challenged over his pledge for transparency in handling the case, he told the reporter: “I appreciate your passion, but I never said full transparency.”
Egregious: #CharlesKinsey: Miami Herald, Aug. 5:
“Two 911 calls bookend the police shooting two weeks ago that left a behaviorial therapist — lying flat on his back in a North Miami street with his hands in the air next to the autistic patient he was trying to help — wounded, bleeding and handcuffed.
The first call from a passing driver described two men in the street, a white Hispanic man possibly armed and possibly mentally ill, and a black man talking to him. The second call reported gunfire in the same area, the burst from a police officer’s rifle.
Less than six minutes elapsed between those critical calls. That was scant time for police officers to assess and potentially defuse a confusing encounter in broad daylight with two unarmed men.”
“The black man, group home therapist Charles Kinsey, who pleaded with officers not to use guns while urging the autistic man he was caring for to lie on the ground, wound up with a bullet hole in his leg. It was a shot the police union chief later said was actually aimed at Arnaldo Eliud Rios, a profoundly autistic man whose perceived weapon proved to be a silver toy truck.”
‘After shocking shooting on the street, a familiar Florida failure’, miami herald
“Behavior aide Charles Kinsey instantly became an exemplar of the Black Lives Matter movement.
But for Rios, there is no movement to sustain him, no placards or demonstrations. If he is a symbol of anything, it is the state’s decades-long failure to provide adequate community-based services for children and adults with developmental disabilities.
Rios has languished in a psychiatric hospital since the shooting made headlines on July 18. The hospital has restricted his visitors, his family said, and refused to allow them to bring him toy trucks — which are as comforting as a teddy bear for a man who is large in stature but small in maturity.” (read on; it gets far worse, and includes video with Rios’s mama.)
‘Sandra Bland family reaches $1.9mn settlement in wrongful death lawsuit’, via RT, 15 Sep, 2016
From TRNN: ‘Thousands of Prisoners Strike Against Forced Labor’ On the 45th anniversary of the Attica uprising, Prison Radio’s Noelle Hanrahan explains how and why prisoners organized what may be the largest prison strike in US history
Also from TRNN: Rattling the Bars: US Prison Labor; On this Episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway interviews Asatar Bair Assistant Professor of Economics at Riverside City College about prisons and the ownership of a person’s labor power vs. the ownership of a person
‘Incarceration in the U.S. costs more than $1 trillion a year, Washington University study claims’, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sep 10, 2016
‘North Dakota becomes first US state to legalise use of armed drones by police’; It is unclear whether local police departments will use weaponised devices, even though they are technically legal’, Independent UK, 8 September 2015
Urban Shield held their annual exposé in Pleasanton from Sept. 8-12, but although the protestors were doughty, there weren’t all that many. Also, since Shane Bauer of Mother Jones was banned from attending (he bought a ticket!) and tweeted photos of the yummiest police militarization products in Oakland, 2014, there was no insider news, dammit. Some great photos and videos are here.
‘Dashcam shows mentally-ill man shot 14 times as he flees Sacramento police’ (GRAPHIC VIDEOS), via RT
“Officers were called to the scene in Del Paso Heights by two 911 callers who claimed to have seen a “mentally ill” man armed with a gun and brandishing a knife. The knife allegedly involved in the incident was later found, but no gun was located.
The disturbing footage shows two officers fire 18 shots at Mann, 14 of which hit him, following a five-minute pursuit.
Mann’s family claim the officers should not have used lethal force, alleging he was in the midst of a mental crisis and have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit and a claim against the city.
Although the possibility of Mann suffering from mental illness was raised during the 911 call, the dispatch did not pass this information on to officers, KCRA3 reports. John Burris, attorney for Mann’s relatives, said “Any reasonable police officer should have noticed that he was mentally impaired” and that his behavior did not warrant him being shot multiple times.”
Private Jack Witt: [voice over]
“We were a family. How’d it break up and come apart, so that now we’re turned against each other? Each standing in the other’s light. How’d we lose that good that was given us? Let it slip away. Scattered it, careless. What’s keepin’ us from reaching out, touching the glory?”
Private Edward Train: (voiceover)
“This great evil, where’s it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doing this? Who’s killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might’ve known? Does our ruin benefit the earth, does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?”
~ James Jones’ ‘The Thin Red Line’
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
Jisal Noor at TRNN reminds us that the killing of Terrance Crutcher by police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which took place 95 years after the Tulsa Race Riots. No wonder for the Black lower class, nothing has changed appreciably.
was it the first (maybe only?) firebombing in the US by the police state?
http://www.ebony.com/black-history/the-destruction-of-black-wall-street-405#axzz4L116xO9V
“property. the whole thing’s about property.” Sean Penn’s character in thin red line.
apt also, jason. when breaking bank windows is a larger crime than a cop murdering a citizen, it’s capitalism protecting property. when the underclass are treated like chattel for profit, same thing, no?
could anyone watch that film and not be changed forever? the philosophical prose voiceovers wre beyond compare; thank you so much for recommending it. RT just quoted carl dix:
“The thing is the police have been unleashed by the system to brutalize and even murder people and then when people refuse to continue accepting it, the police are unleashed to crush them standing up… The police are killing us, and everything that the system says you are supposed to do, people have done: they have elected officials who they thought would stop it, they have tried to get body cameras, they’ve held town hall meetings; tried to get reforms passed and still police continue to kill people and get away with it no matter how horrific the circumstances.
And then they tell people, “Wait for the investigation.” But what is there to investigate? In Tulsa, Oklahoma the man had his hands up on the car and they shot him and they are saying “wait for us to investigate” and told outright lies that contradicted by the video. In Charlotte, they are saying “We have a policy that we can’t release the video.” So you should believe the police story until you learn different. But why should we believe them if they lie all the time?”
– Carl Dix, founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
In Charlotte, there is a state law passed recently that shields the police video. Also, Gov. McCrory last night declared a state of emergency in Charlotte; that likely puts the response in the hands of the Fusion Center and not just the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department.
Charlotte Observer is a McClatchy Paper. They have done journalism recently.
As common sense tells you, if they had video of a gun, they would have already released it. But the CMPD is still peddling that story. And there are scattered tales of police finding drugs after the fact (which is neither here nor there). The popo was supposed a plainclothes undercover cop who was looking to serve a warrant on someone else and perceived that Keith Lamont Scott was pulling a gun on him; witnesses say Scott was reading a book and waiting for his kid to get home from school. (Sounds like a school bus had a stop at the apartments where Scott was killed.)
We have been seeing this play out for over 2 years without any effort of correction.
And the Trumpistas plan: racial profiling stop-and-frisk with no laws or permissive laws of open and concealed carry. Guess who doesn’t get Second Amendment rights under that strategy.
when you’d mentioned that the gov had declared a state of emergency i admit to having been baffled. what i’d meant to lead off with was that mr. had read early yesterday state of emergency declared in charlotte’; another wd brain hiccup.
the drugs, planted or not don’t matter legally, except insofar as the usual story of attacking and discrediting the victim, i.e., “see, he deserved to die anyway.” and it works all the time if you note comments below a lot of these articles.
but i went and scouted this out, and once again it was keegan:
even now the issue is a bit too complicated for the police (natch) but:
“The laws surrounding police video are set to change in October, as a law passed by the North Carolina General Assembly takes effect.
Under the new law, all police video is not public unless police receive an order from a judge to release it. The law allows for a chief of police to show limited portions of a video to a person appearing in the video at a time and place of their choosing.
Governor Pat McCrory hailed the new law as one that would increase transparency when he signed it earlier this year.”
how very transparent, lol.
i thought i’d read that the charlotte police video shield wouldn’t take effect until oct.1, but the sayer might have been wrong, or i could be. yes on trump’s love for stop-and-frisk; i’d mentioned it on a past thread to a seeming trump supporter. dunno if he’ll see it via email. ;-)
yes on the conflicting accounts on mr. scott; keegan reminded us of direct video evidence of a baltimore cop planting a gun, never mind that any identifying marks would have been burned off of a throw-down weapon. don’t even need to guess on who doesn’t get second amendment rights; he’s made it clear, but that’s him trying to court the black vote? ha ha.
still, i really don’t care between the two of them, myownself, but the red queen is so much better situated to wreak havoc on the rest of the world, and that matters to me greatly.
sleep well, your national security state is awake. heh.
oh, tiddly pom, i’d forgotten to add this ‘calming the waters’ news:
‘Tulsa police officer who killed Terence Crutcher charged with manslaughter’ ;A warrant has been issued for Betty Shelby’s arrest and ‘arrangements are being made for her surrender to the’ the sheriff’s department
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/22/terence-crutcher-betty-shelby-manslaughter-tulsa
oh, betty had never been so scared in her life! (hint to betty: get an office job then, don’t carry a gun, you cow.)
the observer‘s reporting that keith lamont scott’s family and their attorney have watched the videos, and the police are claiming that they found a gun, but no book. that can be easily arranged after the fact, of course. cop speak by putney:
“Charlotte-Mecklenburg police Chief Kerr Putney said he reviewed the videos and they do not “give me absolute, definitive visual evidence that will confirm a person was pointing a gun. I did not see that in the video.”
But Putney said the “totality” of the evidence supports the police conclusion that officers confronting Scott faced an imminent, deadly threat.
Putney said the videos would not be released because, among other reasons, it might infringe upon a parallel state investigation into the shooting.”
WTF? got the po-po’s defense all set; ‘experts at the trial will confirm’ certainly. but this is just rich, isn’t it?
“Roberts also spoke to the president, and she took a call from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to discuss restoring bonds of trust between police and their communities.”
“outside instigators and agitators! our coloreds wuz real happy till yankees came to town starting trouble.” cops are saying 70% of the arrested are from “out of state.” uh huh. riding on the George Soros bus eating Open Society sammiches, reading Obama admin-provided collected works of Saul Alinsky. was it the rockafellas in the 60’s busing all those trouble-makers in to Ole’ Miss and ‘Bama?
all that paranoid hoohah aside, what to say when someone says “inciting race wars is part of the strategy of tension?” b/c that statement, in a very broad sense, is true (like the shia & sunni). but it does ignore that the grand conspiracy of the oligarchs against *all of us* (and the earth) is being played out in the 1st instance on the bodies of black people. and if one doesn’t embrace those black bodies as THE locus of resistance at the moment when they are being shot, one has already given up the fight.
brilliant, jason. ;-) that was the claim in baltimore, ferguson, too. how many agents provocateurs from out of state?
the other locus being first americans. but yes, it’s not altogether race, it’s class, of course. and the wrong kind of dissident. but your final truth is just so. ha. i remember putting up a long diary at my.fdl on the ‘2012 operation ghetto storm report’ (if that were the exact name), and i was blown away by how many seemed to have cared enough to read it or comment.
i finally was so vexed that i spoke my peeve on a post by david seaton (never mind) and he said: “what are WE supposed to do about it? ”
you’ll love this:
yep; as he also said ‘she’s helping him manufacture his legacy’, and aren’t they lovey-dovey treacle friends?
OBAMA: Right. “And I’ve got to make a bunch of decisions.” And so there’s a little bit of a jolt that you feel.
There wasn’t a time where I felt fearful that I couldn’t make the best decisions possible. The times where I had been anguished almost exclusively had to do with deploying our men and women overseas. The first Afghan decision to surge additional troops there because the situation was deteriorating. I remember giving a speech at West Point and seeing all those amazing young people and knowing that some would be sent and not every one of them would come back. Weighing that—those never get easy.
But that’s a feeling different than fear. It’s a feeling of the weight of the decision. And a different feeling, but related, is the decisions I’ve had to make to launch strikes. I don’t want ever to be a president who is comfortable and at ease with killing people. I don’t want my generals or my defense secretary or my national-security team to ever feel deploying weapons to kill people as routine or abstract, even if the targets are bad people. And that weighs on me.”
(yes, probably should say brown bodies).
boy DK Goodwin is a snooze-fest, ain’t she? “team of rivals”? the title itself is a heavy dose of Ambien, probably w/worse side effects. “Lincoln is like a Gandhi or a Picasso.” “the pyramids are one of those things that live up to the hype.” unlike certain presidents…and she just spoon feeds segues to him and lovingly dabbles up the Gerber dribble “…not unlike the turn of the 20th century, when so many of those same anxieties and fears had developed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.” was she born & bred in the WH to be court stenographer? it is telling that the only thing he could possibly point to as a positive domestic-wise from his terms is the ACA, the 1st thing every little pwoggie libtard would also point to. “I will miss Air Force One.” eh, Bill C and Donald T can instruct you in how to get lots of time on Epstein’s pedo-jet (sorry, not funny.) 466, mas o menos, Terror Tuesdays under his belt, starting off with prayer (“guide our tomahawks, oh lord”) & a reading from Aquinas or Augustine (or Niebuhr on lazy days) on just war theory. his conscience seems to be very light, probably b/c someone else is carrying it around in their wallet.
the recuperation of Nixon: I don’t remember where, but some time ago I read a piece on BHO’s desire to recuperate the Vietnam War as great & glorious, erasing even Saint Carter’s monstrously mild pseudo-admission: there were crimes committed on both sides. kids’ll be singing odes to the Philippines invasion before BHO’s term is out.
ta for bringing in moar; i was kinda embarrassed that i actually spent the time reading the treacle syrup, really. white woman spoon-feeding pablum to the O, so humble Commander in Chief…with a soulful conscience.
“The Pyramids lived up to their hype. OTOH, i saw myself in them: one day dust will over me over, unless….unless…” (I pass those trade ‘deals’, get the Red Queen elected (yanno, chocolate people, if ya don’t vote for her you’ll be dissin’ ME!’). if the next fools can ramrod a few changes into the ACA: hooray and booyah!
duterte: that’s all a bit of a cipher to me, but moar on that later (or not). i’m just sick w/ pain and fury for keith scott’s family.
Lord luv a duck. keith scott’s wife just gave the video she’d recorded just before he was…dispatched to nbc. it’s a bombshell. the reporters did surprisingly well, esp. the white woman contrasting black v. white and the po-po. “He doesn’t have a gun!” jayzus; i’m reeling. how do you think things will go tonight in charlotte? will they make the curfew even earlier than midnight? bring in more troops to ‘protect their assets’ as (was it?) the mayor said?
http://www.nbcnews.com/video/exclusive-video-moments-leading-up-to-charlotte-shooting-of-keith-scott-771901507743
RT has some of the voice quotes, especially hers.
another witness
they just showed the copter video of the shooting in Tulsa on a local TV news program…a few hours in the tank, 50k bond (paid by FOP no doubt), and admin leave with pay. “he was acting aggressively and not defusing the situation,” by backing away from her w/his hands in the air, oinked some spokespig, maybe chief barrow himself.
oh yeah, the black vs white (et al) “strategy of tension” been going on a long, long time. some people who recognize that fact do so simply so they can poo poo legit anger. just b/c it’s been going on for centuries doesn’t mean i can get angry about it now. that would just feed the strategy of tension! some abstract, if legit, observation thus becomes an excuse to ignore bullet-sprayed bodies on the ground.
heh. i read a whitewash of Officer Friendly Shelby’ record. ‘she admitted ed some things’, judge found no grounds for a restraining order’, yada, yada, but apparently her ex-husband was in the chopper, perhaps piloting it. twitterverse is gagged by: “support is pouring in for her”.
good thought on ‘recognizing it’ mooting legit rage. by the by, some of the most racist and ignorant comments o these stories might just be at RT.
meanwhile, it snowed here earlier, and noaa is calling for moar tonight. mr. wd’s out covering what’s coverable in the garden. he’s been trying to get the apples and pears picked since it’s time for the bears to come in.
wow. is this unusually early for snow?
yes; first freeze before climate change used to be just after the full moon, if t’were mid sept. this year? anyone’s guess, even…noaa’s. ;-) but we made a fire this a.m., kept it almost alive, built it up a bit to bank it for the night.
as to your ‘outside agitators’, and more (and yes, i should let go of it all, but Rt live coverage,night 4, won’t play for me, even after scoring a new Firefox. hope it goes well; they’re still there after midnight curfew.:
once more on the strategy of tension: i sat in business meetings all day at times thinking what a waste of time this crap is as we are sitting on a powder keg w/the rooskies in Syria et alibi and everyone has tinderboxes & sparklers & lighters in their hands. and if, zed forbid, something happened, everyone in the room (except heroic me, natch) would unhesitatingly & immediately side w/the Home Team. they already do. and these are the good solid citizen vertebrae of the country. (ahhh, the word good. so corrupted & perverted & debased in our day. a la The Good German.)
and the only people* regularly standing up to anything going on in this goddam shithole are the black people getting shot. and THESE are the people that are the dupes for phony race wars, suckers for the “strategy of tenions”? (a la alex jones or someone of that ilk.) it’s a very sickeningly smug, self-satisfied, pompous, self-righteous, haughty, do nothing, scornful position, ain’t it? (sorry, i dropped my thesaurus.) oh yeah, me sitting on my derriere praising myself for “seeing thru” the strategy of tension, boy, i got the PTB quakin’, don’t i?
*yes, i know there’s more going on, but things in the BLM sort of orbit get the most attention most of the time. and many, many things are just flat out ignored. e.g., are the prisons still on strike? sorry, i don’t know.
your self-mockery does you proud, i think, but that you see so clearly that the race war have been constructed and the flames fanned while pretending not to…is no small thing, especially given that you actually *talk* to people out in the world. it’s the interpersonal discussions that can change minds bombarded by media demagogues sometimes, no?
the other thing that’s making me crazy is that even for people of good will, far too many believe voting is what matters, esp. for a prez. also, far too many amerikans are far too comfortable still to be able to imagine walking in anothers’ shoes, as in skin hue, poverty, hunger, precarity of any sort. so sadly, even though black lives activists (including many of different hues are getting some media juice, too much of it is negative, as per the comments under news articles such as the one below.
i admit that i’ve been really heartened by the sports teams members who are increasingly dropping to one knee for that accursed song. when their white comrades join them, it will be beautiful. fancy this: mr. wd listened to a nebraska college football game (his alma mater) yesterday…and three team members took that knee-plunge. it made me kinda teary, to say the truth.
the police finally released two more videos of the murder of keith lamont scott; they say they know…well, yanno, but really ya can’t see crap. but there was a gun and a blunt!!! all we really know is that he is DEAD at the hands of the po-po, and they never should have approached him to begin with. ‘protestors *snaked* their way thru charlotte..’ get it?
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/amid-pressure-charlotte-police-release-videos-in-shooting-of-keith-lamont-scott/ar-BBwAkWp?li=BBnb7Kz
prison strikes, and forgive me for not reading it yet, but they seem to be over for now.
This is righteous and heartenning:
‘Calls to shut down NY’s notorious Rikers Island prison grow louder (VIDEO, PHOTOS)’, RT 25 Sept, 2016
This.Is.Not.Heartening.Terrifying.
Witness set to testify in NYPD cop’s drug conspiracy trial whacked ‘Don Corleone’-style, prosecutors say’, sept. 23
https://nmaahc.si.edu/about/founding-donors
less tuskegee airmen, more tuskegee syphilis! i endured cheerleading this a.m. for the opening of this museum on the national “victory narrative” mall yesterday. Oprah Winfrey! Donna Brazil! Barak Obama!
“they had a wonderful display honoring the black men who volunteered in WW1.” mmmkay. what about the black men who refused? yeah, not so much.
obvs i haven’t been to any of the exhibits. the donor list is not encouraging.”this history of Nazi medical experiments brought to you by I.G. Farben, better known as Bayer.”
oh sigh plus three. you’ll scarcely credit it, but the new museum is art of my next diary. good gawd all-friday. and i scored the photos from the NYT, kinda using a theme from david swanson, and a few quotes from yes, the black misleadership class’. so over-worked a cliché, but so true in so many respects.
i may get it up tomorrow; i’ve only had it the works for a week. life keeps interrupting, yanno? or other diaries need to take primacy. but then, the house is full of the scent of simmering pears and other heady foodstuffs; not a thing to sneeze at. ;-)
yes, i read swanson’s piece on this too. otherwise, this could have been one more chapter in the “Great Minds” series…
nice food smells are…um…nice. speaking of great minds, lol.
uh-oh; i dunno the ‘great minds’ series i guess.
ha; remember loretta swit on M*A*S*H*? “it’s nice to be nice….to the nice”. we do that one here now and again.
somewhat OT, but could this museum be as bad as the native american “history” museum? it was mostly “the natives gave us corn, or ‘maize,’ as they called it”/”buffalo were an important food source” kind of narrative. i wish i were joking. another victory for “american” ingenuity! “60% [or so] of global food staples are derived from native american sources.” hurray america!
you’re killing me, amigo; but no, it’s not that bad, and i reckon they left out the george washington carver ‘783 uses for a peanut’ display,\s.
but what got my freakin”; goat was was working for ben turncoat campbell for co state legislature based on his alleged objections to the colorado ute 345 kv line to span our la plata mountains to ‘connect the US grid’ once we got ‘im in office in 1982, he didn’t know us ever again.
in ’95 he switched from dem to R, never gave back all those contributions, and then when he resigned or failed to run again under a cloud, let’s say…they gave him his own fake cheyenne jewelry shop inside that museum, fuck them. he now has his own consultation bidness, as well, of course, mr native money man does.
i sat next to him once in a diner in his then ‘hometown’ and it was all i could do to not knock him in the mouth, or at least crack wise to him. but the diner folks were verrrrry protective of him, clearly; they prolly comped his meals, as well.
every morning when the sun hits those needless and hideous lines in the la plata foothills, i curse his soul. well, almost always. sorry for mistypes i need to cut my nails to the quick again w/ this lame keyboard that takes a mallet to type.
“many natives make a living selling native arts & crafts on the roadsides & highways of america.” i am not joking. i was SO disappointed that casinos on indian land was not discussed. or uranium mines. or drunken ira hayes. i couldn’t take the whole tour of the museum, couldn’t stomach it, but of the 2/3rds i did take, this was the tenor.
to jason above: well, what’s important is how picturesque induns along the highway are for the tourists, no? and if ya can buy a trinket to show your utter appreciation, so much the better. mebbe these hawaiians can weave more palm from baskets and hats, sell them on the roadside.
‘Hawaiians Reject President Obama’s Rule To Federalize Hawaiian Tribe’
“As President Obama announces his plans to federalize Hawaiians as a tribe, Hawaiian community leaders and groups who have for many years protested attempts to turn Hawaiians into Native Americans (the Akaka Bill), will hold a press conference Friday, September 23rd at 12 noon in front of‘Iolani Palace. They will restate their opposition to the Obama Administration’s Department of Interior (DOI) rule change. [snip]
“Asked why the US would want to federalize Hawaiians when, in fact, hundreds of tribes on the continent have been trying to get federally recognized for many decades, Sonoda-Pale said, “Why? Because they want our land. They want to create a so-called universal land claims settlement of our Crown and Government lands, aka ‘Ceded Lands.’ And further,” she said, the United States of America, who has never been respectful of indigenous peoples—as we are seeing in North Dakota, is trying to dissolve our rights as a people to self-determination as defined by international law, and our human rights as indigenous people that have also been codified by the United Nations.”
(she means individual tribes, not one sole whopper of a tribe.)
such cheap garbage at the african-american museum as pulled at the native american museum would never, ever fly. takes a subtler touch.
but here we see the intersection of the policing of the blacks & the enclosure of the browns/natives. which actually applies to everyone outside the upper uppers.
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying “weep! ‘weep!” in notes of woe!
“Where are thy father and mother? say?”
“They are both gone up to the church to pray.
Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil’d among the winter’s snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery.” – one of w. blake’s two “chimney sweeper” poems.
blake said it right, and how wise he was to have seen the church and the king as one…to keep the peasantry always oppressed and immiserated.
the objects in the AA meeting are good uns; they’ve displayed on a portion of the 40,000 items given in their ’15-state antiques roadshow’. do ya reckon they’ll be curio stands there? i couldn’t tell by the Times coverage.
i’m sure you’re quite familiar w/ the value of ‘n*ggerabilia’.
no, i hadn’t heard the antiques road show connection. but since my landlord is black, many, many thanks for the suggestion.
i liked the way the terms black & white are used in that poem cuz, on a technicality*, the boy would be considered “white.” (*the accident of birth.)