Beyond Guantánamo, a Web of Prisons for Terrorism Inmates
“It is the other Guantánamo, an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back roads. Today, it houses far more men convicted in terrorism cases than the shrunken population of the prison in Cuba that has generated so much debate.”
(via ziatroyano)
On this day, 50 years ago, Frantz Fanon passed away. A psychiatrist, Pan-Africanist, writer, and revolutionary, he was born in Martinique in 1925. In 1952 he published Black Skin, White Masks, which exposed the negative effects of colonization on the mental state of subjugated peoples.
As a psychiatrist in Algeria, he joined the FLN (National Liberation Front), which waged a war of independence against France. In 1961, Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth, a book on decolonization that has remained a classic and influenced revolutionaries the world over, including Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Che Guevara, and the South African Steve Biko, founder of the Black Consciousness movement. Fanon died in Maryland, where he had sought treatment for leukemia, and was buried in Algeria.
(Source: exhibitions.nypl.org)
Amnesty International issued a statement Thursday night hailing Martina-Correia as a “Hero of the Human Rights Movement.”
“Our hearts are breaking over the loss of this extraordinary woman,” Amnesty International CEO Curt Goering wrote. “She fought to save her brother’s life with courage, strength and determination, every step of the way. She was a powerful example of how one person can make a difference as she led the fight for justice for Troy Davis, even as she endured her own decade-long battle with cancer. And despite the terrible blow of his execution, she remained brave and defiant to the core of her being, stating her conviction that one day his death would be the catalyst for ending the death penalty.”
(Source: azspot, via ziatroyano)
First published in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back has been out of print since the expiration of its contract with Third Woman Press in 2008. Hopefully the digital copy will find its way to those who will circulate it and possibly build up pressure to have it printed again.
URL Set:
…
I want to ask you about your “political journey” of the past decade or more. Among Indian writers, you’ve come to occupy a unique place—not only have you remained in India, you’ve been extremely vocal and critical on a variety of national subjects. Is this a role you’ve embraced?
Yes, I have, but only reluctantly. You see, when you live here, inside of all of this, you end up writing to refuse to be humiliated.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has authorized more executions than any governor in the history of the United States. He said at a Republican presidential debate Wednesday that he has never worried that the state of Texas has executed an innocent man.
“I’ve never struggled with that at all. The state of Texas has a very thoughtful, a very clear process in place,” Perry said. […] “In the state of Texas, if you come into our state and you kill one of our children, you kill a police officer, you’re involved with another crime and you kill one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice in the state of Texas, and that is you will be executed.”
When NBC’s Brian Williams asked Perry the question about the death penalty and pointed to the 234 executions – even before Perry answered – the Republican debate crowd erupted in applause for the governor’s actions.
”—
“Death Penalty: Applause for Rick Perry’s ‘Ultimate Justice’ at Republican Debate”, ABC News
This is where US politics have arrived: probably the most crowd-pleasing moment of last night’s Republican debate was an enthusiastic ovation for killing people. And it’s not just the GOP: the most popular moment of Barack Obama’s presidency thus far has been his announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s assassination. Bill Clinton also bragged, during his presidential campaign, about ordering the execution of a mentally ill inmate as governor of Arkansas, flaunting his tough-on-crime support of the death penalty (and mandatory minimums). As the empire erodes and its institutions crumble and fail, you can always fall back on bloodlust and the spectacle of killing.
(via zuky)
history shows that the U.S. specializes in this sort of “spectacle of killing”
(via ziatroyano)
The sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is on the verge of collapse as investigators have uncovered major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her in his Manhattan hotel suite in May, according to two well-placed law enforcement officials.
“Strauss-Kahn Case Faces Test in Hearing”, NYT
Also: really?
I think what all of these have in common, whether they are funny or not, is the closed circle of the story. Each small fate is complete in itself. It needs neither elaboration nor sequel. The small fates, I feel, bring news of a Nigerian modernity, full of conflict, tragedies, and narrow escapes. Similar to the French papers’ fait divers, they work in part because whatever that strange thing was, it didn’t happen to us. They are the destiny that befell some other poor soul, which we experience from a grateful distance…
…In a 1993 interview in the Paris Review, Toni Morrison talks about the beginnings of jazz, and how unhappy the material of that music is. Someone’s always leaving, someone’s always losing something. But, she says, there’s a grandeur and satisfaction in that, because these are people who, until recently, were in a constricting and limiting situation. Then freedom came. “The whole tragedy of choosing somebody, risking love, risking emotion, risking sensuality, and losing it all, didn’t matter, since it was their choice. Exercising choice in who you love was a major, major thing.”
Fifty years after British colonialism, ten years after military rule, Nigerians are free. Not economically free, not yet, and we see the effect of that lack of economic freedom in the kinds of crimes that are committed. But they are free in important ways. You can live where you want, associate with whom you want. You can sue people in court, gather to practice your religion, under the leadership of whichever holy man or charlatan you prefer, and you can marry and divorce as you please. This is a major thing. This is modernity, and to tell these stories, to give the protagonists of these losses even that little bit of attention, is to honor the fact that they are there, that their life goes on. It’s not depressing at all, just as reading the Brooklyn Eagle and New York Herald from a hundred years ago is not depressing, though just about the only mention of blacks was as protagonists in crime reports. The fact is: they were there. And fate arranged a small form of immortality for them in that crime report.
These pieces are generally not events of the kind that alter a nation’s course. They are not about movie stars or, with exceptions, famous politicians. They are about the small fates of ordinary people. The idea is not to show that Lagos, or Abuja, or Owerri, are worse than New York, or worse than Paris. Rather, it’s a modest goal: to show that what happens in the rest of the world happens in Nigeria too, with a little craziness all our own mixed in. In this odd sort of way, bad news is good news because these instances of bad news reveal a whole world of ongoing human experience that is often ignored or oversimplified.
If your name suggests a country where bells
might have been used for entertainment
or to announce the entrances and exits of the seasons
or the birthdays of gods and demons,
it’s probably best to dress in plain clothes
when you arrive in the United States,
and try not to talk too loud.
If you happen to have watched armed men
beat and drag your father
out the front door of your house
and into the back of an idling truck
before your mother jerked you from the threshold
and buried your face in her skirt folds,
try not to judge your mother too harshly.
Don’t ask her what she thought she was doing
turning a child’s eyes
away from history
and toward that place all human aching starts.
And if you meet someone
in your adopted country,
and think you see in the other’s face
an open sky, some promise of a new beginning,
it probably means you’re standing too far.
* *
Or if you think you read in the other, as in a book
whose first and last pages are missing,
the story of your own birthplace,
a country twice erased,
once by fire, once by forgetfulness,
it probably means you’re standing too close.
In any case, try not to let another carry
the burden of your own nostalgia or hope.
And if you’re one of those
whose left side of the face doesn’t match
the right, it might be a clue
looking the other way was a habit
your predecessors found useful for survival.
Don’t lament not being beautiful.
Get used to seeing while not seeing.
Get busy remembering while forgetting.
Dying to live while not wanting to go on.
Very likely, your ancestors decorated
their bells of every shape and size
with elaborate calendars
and diagrams of distance star systems,
but with no maps for scattered descendants.
* *
And I bet you can’t say what language
your father spoke when he shouted to your mother
from the back of the truck, “Let the boy see!”
Maybe it wasn’t the language you used at home.
Maybe it was a forbidden language.
Or maybe there was too much screaming
and weeping and the noise of guns in the streets.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is this:
The kingdom of heaven is good.
But heaven on earth is better.
Thinking is good.
But living is better.
Alone in your favorite chair
with a book you enjoy
is fine. But spooning
is even better.
—Self-Help for Fellow Refugees by Li-Young Lee (via whale)
(via whale)
The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
”—
Though it’s often glossed over, particularly by those on the right who want to appropriate him for their cause, towards the end of his life Martin Luther King Jr became convinced that economic justice was key to building a good and just society.
Today, as Anna Holmes notes, is the 43rd anniversary of his assassination.
(Via.)
(via michelledean)
In each case there has been an explosive clash between the rapidly modernizing city and the embattled, conservative village culture upon which the capital increasingly encroaches. The victims are almost invariably young, educated working women who are enjoying freedom unknown even a decade ago. The accused are almost always young high school dropouts from surrounding villages, where women who work outside the home are often seen as lacking in virtue and therefore deserving of harassment and even rape.
What a refreshing lens: using women’s bodies - specifically, violence perpetrated against women - to illustrate a broader ideological or cultural battleground.
Sexual violence and rape do not symbolize a precipitous conflict between old and new. Tradition and culture are not sole custodians of the misogyny and oppression on which ‘civilization’ (read: westernization, modernization) ‘encroaches.’
No, sexual violence is the result of societal misogyny that is not limited to ‘Old’ India or India alone. Around the world, the shaming and blaming of rape victims and lengthy, arduous legal procedures discourage victims from seeking help or reporting their rapes. That’s the real battle here.
When I moved out from America, I began to see it from a different perspective…
I can see now what happened to so many people who had perished around me and I could see that it was a political fact, a political disaster, and that I, myself, was in any case a political target; and menaced by forces which I had not seen as clearly when I was in America.
I also realized that to try to be a writer (which involves, after all, disturbing the peace) was political, whether one liked it or not; because if one is doing anything at all, one is trying to change the consciousness of other people. You’re trying also to change your own consciousness. You have to use your consciousness, you have to trust it to the extent— enough to begin to talk; and you talk with the intention of beginning a ferment, beginning a disturbance in someone else’s mind so that he sees the situation…
The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen… Perhaps it can’t be done without the poet, but it certainly can’t be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that’s all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.
(Source: pwf.cz)
Guernica: I’ve noticed that you often use the phrase “life chances.” Why not just say “the distribution of wealth”?
Dean Spade: I think that to me “life chances” is a phrase that captures the many, many vectors of harm and well-being that are being distributed in ways that I’m concerned about. For example, whether or not fresh groceries are available in your community, whether there’s toxic waste and polluting industry nearby where you live, whether in your whole life you’re likely to have a job that interests you, what level your local schools are funded at, whether someone in your family is dying or suffering from lack of healthcare and you’re carrying around the stresses of that.
Ruth Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” and I think that’s really useful for thinking about what we’re trying to get at. This definition turns our attention away from the questions that discrimination law gets us caught up in: did someone intentionally exclude you because of your identity and can you prove that? Instead, it lets us see that where we find population-level maldistribution of life chances, there is injustice. It doesn’t matter whether we can find one individual with a bad intention, or whether the law stated an intent to exclude a certain group. If a group is being exposed to premature death through overexposure to pollution, police violence, hunger, lack of healthcare, poverty, homelessness, military occupation—those conditions must be remedied and the systems causing them must be dismantled. Sometimes movements have gotten too concerned with law reform or just trying to get government recognition instead of actually trying to change people’s chances at living. We need to not be satisfied until people actually have good housing, healthcare, education, and all those things that you actually need to live well and thrive.
(Source: lowendtheory, via curate)
