LeBron James Will Help 1,100 Kids Go to College

The Huffington Post reports that:

The deep ties LeBron James shares with his hometown of Akron, Ohio, aren't news to anyone. It's as much a part of the LeBron brand as the player's moves on the court.

Well, King James is taking the love one step further, announcing that he will fund over 1,000 kids' educations with a scholarship to the University of Akron, ESPN reported.

Through a partnership between the school and his LeBron James Family Foundation, the 1,100 children currently in his "I Promise" program will receive a fully sponsored scholarship.

"I think it's probably one of the best things I've ever been a part of," James said.

He continued, "This is very special to me. As a kid growing up in the inner city and as an African-American kid, you don't really think past high school because it's not possible or your family can't support you."

Good morning, family. I salute LeBron James for giving back to the community. He was blessed with great opportunity. Now, he is sharing that blessing with many others. Due to his great generosity, 1,000 kids will be able to attend college. Much respect.

Cointelpro 2.0: The Government Monitors @deray and #BlackLivesMatter

"For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.” Angela Y. Davis
"I'm probably on some government list for my rhymin." Talib Kweli

The Root and Vice News report that:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has monitored the Twitter account of prominent civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson, referring to him as a "professional protester" who is "known to law enforcement," according to documents obtained by VICE News in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Mckesson's Twitter and other social media accounts were being monitored by DHS last May during the height of the protests in Baltimore that followed the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who was critically injured while in police custody. DHS took note when McKesson, a former Minneapolis public school official and an activist in the Black Lives Matter movement, posted details to his Twitter account about a planned protest in Baltimore.

One email said DHS "social media monitors have reported that a professional demonstrator/protester known to law enforcement (Deray Mckesson) has post on his social media account that there is going to be a 3:00 pm rally at the FOP#3 lodge located @ 3920 Baltimore Ave, Baltimore, MD 21211 … This is early raw unevaluated and uncorroborated reporting at this time."

As reported in Intercept last month, the Department of Homeland Security has been monitoring the Black Lives Matter movement. Intercept reports that:

The Department of Homeland Security has been monitoring the Black Lives Matter movement since anti-police protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri last summer, according to hundreds of documents obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The documents, released by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Operations Coordination, indicate that the department frequently collects information, including location data, on Black Lives Matter activities from public social media accounts, including on Facebook, Twitter, and Vine, even for events expected to be peaceful. The reports confirm social media surveillance of the protest movement and ostensibly related events in the cities of Ferguson, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and New York.

They also show the department watching over gatherings that seem benign and even mundane. For example, DHS circulated information on a nationwide series of silent vigils and a DHS-funded agency planned to monitor a funk music parade and a walk to end breast cancer in the nation’s capital...

Brendan McQuade, a visiting assistant professor at DePaul University who researches the DHS’s intelligence-gathering fusion centers, believes that the DHS and its affiliated counterterror organizations monitor Black Lives Matter to such a exacting degree because the terrorist threats they were created to stop are exceedingly remote. “Fusion centers were set up for counterterrorism, but it became ‘all crimes, all threats, all hazards’ because terrorism isn’t a real threat. You are four times more likely to be struck by lighting than killed by a terrorist,” says McQuade. “Even at their moment of emergence it was clear that counterterrorism wasn’t going to be enough.”

Raven Rakia, a journalist who investigates state surveillance and policing, said that the DHS’ decision to monitor Black Lives Matter is hardly surprising, given the federal government’s well documented history of spying on and suppressing black social movements and groups like the Black Panthers. “There’s a long history of the federal agencies, especially the FBI, seeing black resistance organizations as a threat to national security,” says Rakia.

Mitchell, the Blackbird activist, says that this continuing surveillance serves not only to keep tabs on black activists, but also to deter them from pushing forward. “Surveillance is a tool of fear. When the police are videotaping you at a protest or pulling you over because you’re a well known activist — all of these techniques are designed to create a chilling effect on people’s organizing. This is no different. The level of surveillance, however, isn’t going to stop us. After all, we organize because our lives depend on it.” (Emphasis added)

During the 60s and 70s, the FBI implemented Cointelpro, the Counter Intelligence Program. Cointelpro was designed to "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder." Even nonviolent civil rights leaders and organizations were targeted.  Under Cointelpro, not only did the FBI monitor black leaders and black organizations, it destroyed them. Many black leaders were jailed and even killed by the FBI.

Today, even with a black man in the White House, the government continues to target black activists. With the advent of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it is far easier to monitor black leaders and organizations. History teaches us that surveillance is only the beginning of the repression. Just for peacefully organizing to end police brutality, we are treated like terrorists.

As a result of the so-called War on Terror, the government's ability to monitor American citizens has increased substantially. Our fear of foreign Arab terrorists made it easy for us to voluntarily surrender some of our civil liberties. When the Arabs and Muslims were targets of surveillance, no one cared. Now that is us again, we have no choice but to care. The struggle continues.

One year later, the #BlackLivesMatter Movement is a Failure

One year after the killing of Michael Brown, there has been very little substantive change in America. As reported in the Nation,

Missouri lawmakers filed more than sixty bills inspired by last year’s protests, but only court reform passed into law, according to an Associated Press analysis. One of the bills that failed to move through the statehouse sought to make Missouri’s use-of-force laws compliant with a 1985 US Supreme Court decision. Other bills would have made body cameras mandatory and require special prosecutors to investigate officer-involved shootings. Last year, activists accused county prosecutor Bob McCulloch of being too close to law enforcement to objectively handle Wilson’s case.

Furthermore, the Washington Post reports that:

So far this year, 24 unarmed black men have been shot and killed by police - one every nine days, according to a Washington Post database of fatal police shootings. During a single two-week period in April, three unarmed black men were shot and killed. All three shootings were either captured on video or, in one case, broadcast live on local TV.

Those 24 cases constitute a surprisingly small fraction of the 585 people shot and killed by police through Friday evening, according to The Post database. Most of those killed were white or Hispanic, and the vast majority of victims of all races were armed.

However, black men accounted for 40 percent of the 60 unarmed deaths, even though they make up just 6 percent of the U.S. population. The Post's analysis shows that black men were seven times more likely than white men to die by police gunfire while unarmed.

The latest such shooting occurred Friday, claiming Christian Taylor, 19, a promising defensive back on the Angelo State University football team. Police said Taylor crashed an SUV through the front window of a car dealership in Arlington, Tex., and was shot in an altercation with responding officers. The case is under investigation.

The disproportionate number of unarmed black men in the body count helps explain why outrage continues to simmer a year after Ferguson — and why shootings that might have been ignored in the past are now coming under fresh public and legal scrutiny. (Emphasis added)

One year after the death of Michael Brown, the Black Lives Matter Movement has failed, for the most part. People are still marching, protesting and engaging in civil disobedience in Ferguson and around the country. That proves that the movement has not achieved its objectives. The End Racial Profiling Act has not been passed. In fact, a bill to protect lions and other wild animals is a greater priority in Congress than the End Racial Profiling Act. That is an obvious sign of failure. While unarmed movement members are arrested for engaging in civil disobedience, killers like Darren Wilson and George Zimmerman continue to walk free and armed white militia patrol the streets of Ferguson looking for trouble from the black natives. That is not success. That is failure. As previously stated, the brutal police continue to harass and kill unarmed black people. Recent examples include the killing of Walter Scott, Freddie Gray and Sam DuBose. Our lives still don't matter.  Again, the movement has failed miserably.

Certainly, the movement's catch phrase "Black Lives Matter" has become a popular slogan. That slogan has generated a much needed national discussion. Even that discussion has detoured into discussion about how "all lives matter." More importantly, slogans alone are a poor substitute for actual substantive reforms. Discussions are just that, discussions. Discussions are not actions. Clearly, the movement has gained publicity. Nonetheless, publicity without a focused purpose, other than 15 minutes of fame, is meaningless. Publicity for the stake of publicity accomplishes nothing.

For example, this past weekend, purported Black Lives Matter activists Marissa Janae Johnson (a former Sarah Palin supporter) and Mara Jacqeline Willaford interrupted Democratic Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders' speech. Ms. Johnson's "I don't give a f***" attitude is childish and unsophisticated. Unfortunately, that is not the first time that Black Lives Matter activists have interrupted a program. They also interrupted Al Sharpton's Justice for All march.

It is just plain stupid to attack, alienate and discard allies, especially when your movement is funded by the same white progressives that you criticize. By the way, black organizations should be funded primarily by black people. Anyway, the Black Lives Matter Movement should collaborate with Al Sharpton and other prominent civil rights leaders and organizations. Potential allies like Sanders have the power to pass laws to address the problems of police brutality and racial profiling. Instead of interrupting fellow progressives, the movement should be interrupting the police who harass and kill black people. Instead of interrupting organizations that have the same goals and objectives, the movement should be interrupting a Congress that is more concerned about slain lions than slain black people.

Marissa Janae Johnson's and Mara Jacqeline Willaford's actions expose another fundamental flaw of the movement, its leaderless and decentralized nature. Such a structure breeds chaos and rogue action. If it is to be successful, the movement needs more structure and more discipline. Otherwise, it will be another short-lived moment just like the Occupy Wall Street movement. It will be here today and gone tomorrow. Rather than having an arrogant "know-it-all" approach and attitude, the movement should learn effective strategies from civil rights veterans and black power veterans.

Instead of engaging in such juvenile publicity stunts, the movement must present a clear set of demands to elected officials and candidates. The movement must demand that all politicians pass legislation that is in accord with those demands. Instead of just tweeting and marching, the activists should be conducting effective and massive voter registration and education drives. If we do not vote, we cannot complain about politicians not implementing reforms. If we do not vote, we cannot complain about juries and grand juries letting killers like Darren Wilson and George Zimmerman go free. Through the vote, we are able to serve on juries and render justice.

2016 GOP Presidential Debate

Good morning, family. In case you missed it, like yours truly, here is the first 2016 Republican Presidential debate. What did y'all think about the debate?

The Lynching of Sam Dubose

The Washington Post reports that:

CINCINNATI — A white campus police officer was charged with murder Wednesday for fatally shooting an unarmed black man after a routine traffic stop last week, an incident a local prosecutor decried as a “senseless, asinine shooting.”

The episode added Cincinnati to the list of cities where white officers have shot and killed black civilians, drawing national attention and fueling an ongoing debate over police use of deadly force against minorities.

A similar shooting in 2001 provoked violent riots here. With that memory still fresh, local officials moved swiftly and deliberately to try to contain the fallout.

“It was so unnecessary for this to occur,” Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters said at an afternoon news conference. Of more than 100 police shootings reviewed by his office, Deters said, “this is the first time that we’ve thought, ‘This is without question a murder.'”

University of Cincinnati police officer Raymond Tensing, 25, now faces life in prison for shooting Samuel Dubose, 43, on the evening of July 19, roughly two minutes after pulling him over for failure to display a front license plate. At first, Tensing said he was forced to shoot Dubose because he was being dragged by the car and nearly run over, according to the initial police report. But Deters said that didn’t happen, and Tensing was wearing a body camera that captured the incident.

In the video below, I strongly condemn the lynching of Sam DuBose. We must end this madness now.

In Defense of Ta-Nehisi Coates

Yesterday, Dr. Cornel West dissed renown writer Ta-Nehisi Coates on Facebook. He are a few excerpts from Dr. West's post:

Coates is a clever wordsmith with journalistic talent who avoids any critique of the Black president in power...Coates’s fear-driven self-absorption leads to individual escape and flight to safety – he is cowardly silent on the marvelous new militancy in Ferguson, Baltimore, New York, Oakland, Cleveland and other places...Coates can grow and mature, but without an analysis of capitalist wealth inequality, gender domination, homophobic degradation, Imperial occupation (all concrete forms of plunder) and collective fightback (not just personal struggle) Coates will remain a mere darling of White and Black Neo-liberals, paralyzed by their Obama worship and hence a distraction from the necessary courage and vision we need in our catastrophic times.

Blah. Blah. Blah.

Anyone who is familiar with my blog knows that I highly respect Dr. Cornel West. I usually defend him. However, today, I cannot and I will not defend Dr. West. He is simply wrong, dead wrong.  Instead, I am defending Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Dr. West asserted that Coates "avoids any critique of" President Obama. Contrary to that assertion, Coates has written several articles criticizing President Obama. Here are a few examples. In his article entitled How the Obama Administration Talks to Black America, Coates wrote:

But I also think that some day historians will pore over his [Obama's]many speeches to black audiences. They will see a president who sought to hold black people accountable for their communities, but was disdainful of those who looked at him and sought the same. They will match his rhetoric of individual responsibility with the aggression the administration showed to bail out the banks and the timidity it showed in addressing a foreclosure crisis, which devastated black America (again). They will weigh the rhetoric against an administration whose efforts against housing segregation have been run of the mill. And they will match the talk of the importance of black fathers with the paradox of a president who smoked marijuana in his youth but continued a drug war which daily wrecks the lives of black men and their families. In all of this, those historians will see a discomfiting pattern of convenient race-talk.

I think the president owes black people more than this. In the 2012 election, the black community voted at a higher rate than any other ethnic community in the country. Their votes went almost entirely to Barack Obama. They did this despite a concerted effort to keep them from voting, and they deserve more than a sermon. Perhaps they cannot practically receive targeted policy. But surely they have earned something more than targeted scorn.

In his article entitled Color-Blind Policy, Color-Conscious Morality, Coates wrote:

And you will hear no policy targeted toward black people coming out of the Obama White House, or probably any White House in the near future. That is because the standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy. It is not hard to see why that might be the case. Asserting the moral faults of black people tend to gain votes. Asserting the moral faults of their government, not so much. I am sure Obama sincerely believes in the moral invective he offers. But I suspect he believes a lot more about his country which he chooses not to share.

In Fear of A Black President, Coates wrote:

Whatever the political intelligence of this calculus, it has broad and deep consequences. The most obvious result is that it prevents Obama from directly addressing America’s racial history, or saying anything meaningful about present issues tinged by race, such as mass incarceration or the drug war. There have been calls for Obama to take a softer line on state-level legalization of marijuana or even to stand for legalization himself. Indeed, there is no small amount of in­consistency in our black president’s either ignoring or upholding harsh drug laws that every day injure the prospects of young black men—laws that could have ended his own, had he been of another social class and arrested for the marijuana use he openly discusses.

Clearly, those three articles alone rebut Dr. West's claim that Coates avoids criticizing Obama.

Next, Dr. West falsely claimed that Coates "is cowardly silent on the marvelous new militancy in Ferguson, Baltimore..." It is becoming painfully obvious that Dr. West is not familiar with Ta-Nehisi Coates' writings. In several articles, Coates discusses the rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore. In Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid, Coates states that:

Black people know what cannot be said. What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street, but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is the idea of superhuman black men who "bulk up" to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson, but a staple of American racism.

What clearly cannot be said is that violence and nonviolence are tools, and that violence—like nonviolence—sometimes works. "Property damage and looting impede social progress," Jonathan Chait wrote Tuesday. He delivered this sentence with unearned authority. Taken together, property damage and looting have been the most effective tools of social progress for white people in America. They describe everything from enslavement to Jim Crow laws to lynching to red-lining.

On the issue of Baltimore, Coates boldly asserts in Nonviolence as Compliance that:

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be "correct" or "wise." Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.

Lastly, Dr. West incorrectly claims that Coates does not analyze capitalist wealth inequality. Well, Coates' article entitled The Case for Reparations
addresses wealth inequality. Coates writes:

Black families, regardless of income, are significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do. Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net. When financial calamity strikes—a medical emergency, divorce, job loss—the fall is precipitous.

And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack of wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice of neighborhood. Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. “Blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods,” Sharkey writes, “that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children.”

In sum, Dr. West's claims about Ta-Nehisi Coates are false. By making such unsubstantiated assertions, Dr. West has undermined his own creditability and reputation. As prominent scholar, Dr. West should have done his research before posting fallacies on Facebook. Such conduct raises disturbing questions about Dr. West's real motives. Apparently, the substantive issues are not Dr. West's motivation. Egoism and jealousy are.  Dr. West should apologize and delete that post.

Clinton Helped Create the New Jim Crow

Yesterday, former U.S. President Bill Clinton addressed the NAACP National Convention. During his address, he acknowledged that he was wrong for increasing sentences for drug offenses.

In Michelle Alexander's brilliant masterpiece, The New Jim Crow, she fully explains how truly wrong Clinton was.  He paved the way for the New Jim Crow.  Ms. Alexander states that:

Despite the jaw-dropping impact of the "get tough" movement on the African American community, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans revealed any inclination to slow the pace of incarceration. To the contrary, in 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton vowed that he would never permit any Republican to be perceived as tougher on crime than he...

Once elected, Clinton endorsed the idea of a federal "three strikes and you're out" law...The $30 billion crime bill sent to President Clinton in August 1994 was hailed as a victory for the Democrats, who "were able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans and make it their own." The bill created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and expansion of state and local police forces. Far from resisting the emergence of the new caste system, Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives imagined possible a decade earlier. As the Justice Policy Institute has observed, "the Clinton Administration's 'tough on crime' policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history." (page 55)

Ms. Alexander further asserts that Clinton "ended welfare as we know it" and established a "life-time ban on eligibility for welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense-including simple possession of marijuana."

Yet, this is the man that y'all adore. This is the man that y'all call the first black president. Smoking weed, playing the saxophone, being raised in a single parent household and being a womanizer don't make you black or "colored". Such a suggestion is racist.

While Clinton was locking up massive numbers of black people, his wife, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, stood by his side and supported those oppressive policies. We need much more than an acknowledgement of the obvious. We need clear answers to tough questions. We need reforms to correct the disaster that Bill Clinton helped create.