cheikh anta diop, africa's greatest anthropologist and historian born in senegal speaks on the history of africans and egypt and how europeans have desperately tried to distort and hide the truth over the years
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
Analysis: Travis McMichael Guilty On All Counts, Split Verdict For Greg McMichael, William Bryan
Under Georgia law, without a successful appeal, all three men are facing life in prison. They still face federal hate crime charges.
Monday, November 22, 2021
Sunday, November 21, 2021
The Star-Spangled Banner’s racist lyrics kept it from becoming the national anthem for a century - The Washington Post. This is the American history Republicans don't want taught in school.
The ugly reason ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ didn’t become our national anthem for a century
"The mission was successful; British commanders agreed to free the doctor. But while on the ship, the man — a 35-year-old lawyer named Francis Scott Key — overheard plans for a surprise attack on Baltimore. He and the doctor would not be allowed to leave until the attack was over.
That’s how Key ended up witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry while aboard a British ship. He couldn’t tell from his vantage point who had won or lost. But at dawn, he saw the American flag, 15 stars and 15 stripes at the time, still waving over the fort and was inspired to write a poem. Soon, it was set to the tune of an existing song.
That’s the short version of how “The Star-Spangled Banner” came to be.
The longer version — of both the song and the story of the man who wrote it — reveals not only why it has become controversial now, in this season of racial reckoning, football and presidential campaigning, but why it was too controversial to become the national anthem for more than a century after it was written.
First, a few things to know about the War of 1812: One of the main issues was the British practice of impressment — the forced conscription of American sailors to fight for the Royal Navy. Plus, the British promised refuge to any enslaved Black people who escaped their enslavers, raising fears among White Americans of a large-scale revolt. The final provocation was that men who escaped their bonds of slavery were welcome to join the British Corps of Colonial Marines in exchange for land after their service. As many as 4,000 people, mostly from Virginia and Maryland, escaped.
It’s important to know these things because “The Star-Spangled Banner,” originally called “The Defense of Fort M’Henry,” has more than one verse. The second half of the third verse ends like this:
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
These lyrics are a clear reference to the Colonial Marines, according to Jefferson Morley, author of “Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835.” They are clearly meant to scorn and threaten the African Americans who took the British up on their offer, he wrote in a recent essay for The Washington Post. Key surely knew about the Colonial Marines, and it’s even possible he saw them among the contingent of British ships that sailed into Baltimore Harbor.
But Mark Clague, a musicologist at the University of Michigan and an expert on the anthem, disagrees. In 2016, he told the New York Times: “The reference to slaves is about the use, and in some sense the manipulation, of Black Americans to fight for the British, with the promise of freedom.” He also noted that Black people fought on the American side of the war as well.
Whether manipulation or not, the British kept their word to Colonial Marines after the war, refusing the United States’ demand that they be returned and providing them land in Trinidad and Tobago to resettle with their families. Their descendants, called “Merikins,” still live there today.
And even if these lyrics aren’t meant to be explicitly racist, Key clearly was. He descended from a wealthy plantation family and enslaved people. He spoke of Black people as “a distinct and inferior race” and supported emancipating the enslaved only if they were immediately shipped to Africa, according to Morley.
During the Andrew Jackson administration, Key served as the district attorney for Washington, D.C., where he spent much of his time shoring up enslavers’ power. He strictly enforced slave laws and prosecuted abolitionists who passed out pamphlets mocking his jurisdiction as the “land of the free, home of the oppressed.”
He also influenced Jackson to appoint his brother-in-law chief justice of the United States. You may have heard of him; Roger B. Taney is infamous for writing the Dred Scott decision that decreed Black people “had no rights which the White man was bound to respect.” A statue of Taney and a school named after Key have been recent subjects of scrutiny during the protests following the police killing of George Floyd.
Although “The Star-Spangled Banner” and all of its verses were immediately famous, Key’s overt racism prevented it from becoming the national anthem while he was alive, Morley wrote. There was no official anthem, and many people chose to sing other songs, like “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”
Key’s anthem gained popularity over time, particularly among post-Reconstruction White Southerners and the military. In the early 20th Century, all but the first verse were cut — not for their racism, but for their anti-British bent. The United Kingdom was by then an ally.
After the misery of World War I, the lyrics were again controversial for their violence. But groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy fought back, pushing for the song to be made the official national anthem. In 1931, President Herbert Hoover made it so.
“The elevation of the banner from popular song to official national anthem was a neo-Confederate political victory, and it was celebrated as such,” Morley wrote. “When supporters threw a victory parade in Baltimore in June 1931, the march was led by a color guard hoisting the Confederate flag.”
Saturday, November 20, 2021
Jurors in the Rittenhouse case watch video but that won't prevent bias : NPR
The Rittenhouse jurors watch video, but that can't be counted on to prevent bias
Kyle Rittenhouse listens as Judge Bruce Schroeder talks about how the jury will view video during deliberations in Kyle Rittenhouse's trial at the Kenosha County Courthouse on Wednesday in Kenosha, Wisc.
"Ideally, the 12 men and women who serve as the jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial would base their final judgement solely on the evidence and testimony presented to them.
But humans don't necessarily work that way.
According to psychologists who spoke with NPR, jurors come into the courtroom with their own belief systems, experiences and identities, which all factor into how they decide on a verdict — or even what they see in a video.
"Jurors are not clean slates when they enter the courtroom," said Alexa Bankert, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Georgia. She studies the development and consequences of partisan identities. "They are people with personal and political beliefs and values, including ideology and partisanship."
For example, the racial makeup of a jury has been proven to have an impact on a case's outcome.
On Friday morning, the Rittenhouse jurors will meet for a fourth time to deliberate. They are tasked with deciding whether he acted in self-defense or whether he acted recklessly last year when he killed two protesters and wounded another in Kenosha, Wis.
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Video evidence is not all it's cracked up to be
As part of the Rittenhouse trial, jurors must review several pieces of video footage.
On the second day of deliberations, the jury requested to re-watch portions of the 10 hours of videos shown over the two-week long trial. They had specifically requested, and were granted permission, to see videos taken by Gaige Grosskreutz, the man Rittenhouse shot and wounded.
For video evidence in trial, it turns out what you see is complicated.
Mark Richards, Kyle Rittenhouse's lead attorney, gives his closing argument during Rittenhouse's trial at the Kenosha County Courthouse in Kenosha, Wis., on Nov. 15, 2021.
Along with her research team, Emily Balcetis, an associate professor of psychology at New York University, studies biases in how people look at video evidence.
She said even when people look at the same photo or video, they come away with their own conclusions.
Balcetis and her research team showed people video evidence depicting two men engaged in a physical altercation. They used hidden, eye-tracking technology to record where viewers looked.
"We discovered some people looked more at one of the men than the other," she said.
This was an important development. It was evidence of how those viewers connected with one of the men in the fight with the other, she said. That connection altered how those viewers saw what was on the video.
"People who already sided with, or felt connected to, one of the defendants misremembered what he did in ways that incriminated him," Balcetis said. "They thought he was more aggressive and wrongly believed he used unwarranted force. And this happened the more they focused their visual attention on him."
Viewers can fill the gaps with their own narrative
Viewing the video evidence again doesn't necessarily mean the Rittenhouse trial jurors came away with a better understanding of what happened, Balcetis said.
"You might think that the more you look at evidence, the better you'll understand what happened. But our research finds that that is not true," she said. "Our eyes can only focus on, and process the details of a very small portion of what we actually are looking at."
Activists calling for the conviction of Kyle Rittenhouse watch the trial on a phone in front of the Kenosha County Courthouse while the jury deliberates the Rittenhouse verdict on Wednesday in Kenosha, Wisc.
That means when someone is watching one person in "a complex social scene" — like a fight — they are missing what the other person is doing even though it's visible, she said. So, to fill the gaps, the viewer constructs a narrative to help understand what is happening.
"Because we actually have seen the evidence with our very own eyes, we are confident that what we believe is true and right," Balcetis said. "We're even more certain that what we think happened is actually what happened because we saw it for ourselves. We don't realize that we only saw about half of the story."
She continued, "Even when we look again, we don't always compensate for what we missed the first time around."
None of this research is meant to excuse any one person from bearing responsibility for their actions, Balcetis notes.
It's "instead meant to help explain why any two people can watch the same video evidence and come to form such very different interpretations of what happened," she said.
Political ideology is a big factor on perception
Race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age can all have a factor in how a person perceives the world. Other aspects such as immigration status, prior experience with discrimination, education, and even parenthood can alter how people view things, too.
This is part of why consulting to advise lawyers on jury selection is a big industry, said Christopher Federico, a professor of political science and psychology at the University of Minnesota.
"We are motivated to see the world in ways that reinforce whatever our prior attitudes and beliefs are," Federico said.
A supporter of Kyle Rittenhouse (left) argues with an activist in favor of conviction (right) in front of the Kenosha County Courthouse while the jury deliberates the Rittenhouse trial on Wednesday in Kenosha, Wisc.
Political ideology tends to make that a bit worse, according to Bankert, with the University of Georgia.
If people view the same videos of police violence against people of color, their political beliefs can strongly influence how that video is interpreted, she said.
"So in the case of Rittenhouse, a Democrat might see racially motivated murder while a Republican might see self-defense," Bankert said.
"We see this kind of partisan motivated reasoning especially for those who strongly identify with either the Democratic or the Republican Party," she said, "especially for cultural issues that are highly salient in the national debate such as racial justice but also reproductive rights and the rights of LGBTQ+."
People who are less attentive to politics tend to show weaker political biases in how they evaluate evidence, Federico said.
And some forms of evidence are harder to shape to our will, he said. "If the evidence is fairly unambiguous, it is harder for people to bend their views of it in a congenial direction."
Working around biases is possible
Just being reminded of the existence of biases and taking more time to think deliberatively can help, Federico said.
Bankert suggested people also take time to gain a new perspective: "In the case of partisanship, recent work has shown that embedding people in groups that include partisans from the opposing party can help them engage in less biased reasoning."
The jury box is empty in the ceremonial courtroom as the jury continues deliberations in private in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial at the Kenosha County Courthouse on Wednesday.
And juries are a form of that. Balcetis and her team told research participants to closely watch a person on video that they might not have normally paid much attention to. Just by doing this, they gained a different understanding of what happened.
"By intentionally looking at the video evidence and working to see what we don't see naturally," she said, "people can gain a new perspective on what happened and even perhaps change their opinion about who was in the right and who was in the wrong."
Lawyers for men exonerated in Malcom X killing discuss wrongful convictions : NPR
Please listen to how the FBI and the NYPD illegally covered up information and assisted the wrongful conviction of the wrong men after the assassination of Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz). The American criminal justice system is not just. It is a corrupt, rotten apple and none of the wrongdoers will be punished. This is pure evil. Men spent decades in jail for crimes they did not do and the NYPD and the FBI knew and covered it up. This is the real America.
Reaction to Rittenhouse trial verdict - The Washington Post
Rittenhouse acquittal magnifies divisions in a polarized America
"Ever since the early-morning hours that day in August 2020, when video footage of a teenager opening fire on the streets of Kenosha first started to circulate, Kyle Rittenhouse has been a human canvas onto which the nation’s political divisions were mapped.
To many on the right — including gun-rights groups, Trump loyalists and white supremacists — he was a folk hero, a vigilante for justice who had stood up to a rampaging mob.
Americans on the left, including racial-justice activists, gun-control advocates and police reformers, saw something quite different: a trigger-happy youth who had recklessly used his AR-15 to escalate an already-chaotic situation into the realm of deadly violence.
Those irreconcilable depictions played out vividly as news of Rittenhouse’s acquittal Friday on all counts in a Wisconsin courtroom ricocheted from coast to coast. Although the question before the jury had been relatively narrow — was Rittenhouse acting in self-defense, or not? — the jury’s decision was imbued with far greater resonance on both sides.
Rittenhouse’s defenders saw justice at work. His critics recorded one more count against a fundamentally unfair legal system.
Within seconds of the verdict, far-right forums were ablaze with celebratory messages and memes depicting Rittenhouse as a hero. In the Proud Boys public channel on Telegram, supporters mocked how upset “the left” would be once authorities release the gun used in the shootings, as is customary after an acquittal.
“NOT GUILTY!!!!!!!” tweeted Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who had suggested earlier in the week he would offer Rittenhouse a congressional internship if he was acquitted.
“May Kyle and his family now live in peace,” added Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who urged her followers to donate to Rittenhouse’s legal defense. “Those who help, protect, and defend are the good guys.”
Among racial justice advocates, there was a diametrically different response: a fear that people like Rittenhouse will be emboldened, making life more dangerous for protesters and activists.
The Rev. Al Sharpton and his National Action Network called the decision “an obvious signal that encourages and notifies ‘vigilantes’ that they can continue to use violence to assert their power, and more importantly that they are above the criminal justice system when they do.”
The pro-gun control group March for Our Lives said Rittenhouse “embodies the very danger posed by a toxic mix of a white supremacist culture that values property over human life, and wide proliferation of high-powered guns with fewer limits than a driver’s license.”
Amid the competing narratives, there also were appeals for calm and for the jury’s decision to be respected.
“I hope everyone can accept the verdict, remain peaceful, and let the community of Kenosha heal and rebuild,” tweeted Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson (R).
“The jury system works, and we have to abide by it,” President Biden said from the White House.
Vice President Harris said the verdict “speaks for itself.”
“As many of you know I’ve spent a majority of my career working to make the criminal justice system more equitable and clearly there is a lot more work to do,” she said.
The Rittenhouse case was an offshoot of the racial justice protests and wider reckoning on white supremacy that followed the murder of George Floyd by a White police officer in Minneapolis in 2020. Kenosha, a city of 100,000 on the shore of Lake Michigan, was drawn into the turmoil after a White police officer shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, paralyzing him from the waist down.
The dramatic way in which Rittenhouse has come to symbolize the nation’s polarization comes despite the fact that many of the facts in the case failed to neatly align with America’s divisions.
All three of the men Rittenhouse shot — two fatally — were White. The first, Joseph Rosenbaum, had not attended previous protests, and his fiancee has said she does not know why he was there.
And while some of those who came to Kenosha armed with semiautomatic rifles amid widespread rioting were members of militias or far-right groups, Rittenhouse himself was not.
When he pulled the trigger of his AR-15 on the night of Aug. 25, 2020, Rittenhouse was a nobody in the world of right-wing militants.
Rittenhouse, 17 at the time, had no known ties to organized extremist movements beyond a general affinity for guns and for pro-police campaigns that rose in opposition to Black Lives Matter, according to researchers of political violence.
Instantly, however, the killings turned him into a right-wing cause celebre — and his acquittal Friday on all charges ensures that his political utility will endure beyond the trial.
In Rittenhouse, analysts say, a variety of right-wing factions have found the perfect avatar for their racial and political grievances.
His record was clean, and the facts of that night messy, creating a case that could galvanize a broad cross-section of the right, including former president Donald Trump, MAGA loyalists, conservatives in Congress, white nationalists and self-styled militia groups. Members of the Proud Boys, photographed with Rittenhouse after his release on bail, also have latched onto the cause.
“The rhetoric is stated slightly differently, but the end result is the same: This is a young man who did the right thing,” said Art Jipson, a University of Dayton professor who has studied white supremacist movements for decades. “That, to me, is the fascinating and disturbing thing — the arguments start from different origin points, but they create an almost iconic, or at least a powerful, symbol.”
It was perhaps inevitable that Rittenhouse’s case became a political litmus test and his image a commodity. Segments of the right raced to outdo one another in their devotion, fundraising $2 million for his bail. A family-run campaign, the Kyle Rittenhouse Defense Fund, sells branded merchandise to raise money for his legal fees. Supporters print Rittenhouse’s face on T-shirts and spray-paint it on murals, sometimes calling him, “Saint Kyle.”
For much of the MAGA world, Rittenhouse embodies the self-proclaimed Republican ideal of law and order, a patriot standing up to an out-of-control left. The anti-government militia movement broadly supports that militancy and also views the case as a flash point for Second Amendment issues. White supremacist groups, meanwhile, used the trial as a chance to push their overt hate into the mainstream, “a friendlier face for the race war,” as Jipson, the professor, put it.
As conservatives coalesced around the idea of Rittenhouse as a blameless defender of law and order, many on the left just as quickly cast him as the embodiment of the far-right threat. Despite a lack of evidence, hundreds of social media posts immediately pinned Rittenhouse with extremist labels: white supremacist, self-styled militia member, a “boogaloo boy” seeking violent revolution, or part of the misogynistic “incel” movement.
“On the left he’s become a symbol of white supremacy that isn’t being held accountable in the United States today,” said Becca Lewis, a researcher of far-right movements and a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. “You see him getting conflated with a lot of the police officers who’ve shot unarmed Black men and with Trump himself and all these other things. On both sides, he’s become a symbol much bigger than himself.”
Soon after the shootings, then-candidate Joe Biden told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Rittenhouse was allegedly part of a militia group in Illinois. In the next sentence, Biden segued to criticism of Trump and hate groups: “Have you ever heard this president say one negative thing about white supremacists?”
Since the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, there have been around 886 “vigilante incidents” in which right-wing activists intimidated or assaulted racial justice protesters, according to a tally by Alexander Reid Ross, a Portland State University professor who tracks right-wing movements.
Although those numbers have declined this year, “the Rittenhouse trial shows that these currents remain powerful in the U.S. and could erupt with even greater force than before,” Ross said.
That was the fear expressed Friday by racial justice activists and First Amendment defenders, who faulted not only Rittenhouse, but also the Kenosha police. The police, said Brandon Buskey, director of the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, had praised and encouraged armed outsiders such as Rittenhouse, who traveled to the city from Antioch, Ill.
“In Kenosha, we saw the police shoot a Black man in the back — in front of his children. When the community rose up to exercise their First Amendment right to protest, police enabled white supremacist militia members, which helped to spur rank vigilantism,” Buskey said in a statement. “The result of this failure was bloodshed, the loss of lives, and enduring trauma.”
Ben Crump, the civil rights attorney who represents Blake, said Rittenhouse had “not only escaped accountability, but laughed in its face.”
“From the outset, this case has pulled back the curtain on the profound cracks in our justice system — from the deep bias routinely and unabashedly displayed by the judge, to the apathy of officers who witnessed Rittenhouse’s crimes and did nothing,” Crump said in a statement. “If we were talking about a Black man, the conversation and outcome would be starkly different.”
In the moments after the verdict, Justin Blake — Jacob Blake’s uncle — said Rittenhouse is the second White person to escape charges for a shooting in Kenosha, a reference to officer Rusten Sheskey, who faced no charges for the Blake shooting — the incident that sparked the very protests and unrest that drew Rittenhouse to town.
“It’s an insult,” he said.
As Blake and others spoke, Rittenhouse supporters tried to drown him out.
“He deserves his freedom!” a man shouted.
Issac J. Bailey, a communications professor at Davidson College in North Carolina who has written about race and the Kenosha trial, said Rittenhouse’s hero status was already cemented in right-wing circles before Friday’s verdict. That’s dangerous, Bailey said, given the backdrop of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the FBI naming the violent right as a top domestic threat.
“I believe he was a clueless kid someone should have guided away from that situation instead of toward,” Bailey said. “But the message many people on the right have already taken from this is that it is good, righteous even, for young White men like him to pick up arms to protect their communities. That‘s not a good message. It can only lead us to darker places.”
Kim Bellware, Razzan Nakhlawi and Ellie Silverman contributed to this report."
Opinion | Armaud Arbery is dead but the stench of vigilantism lives on - The Washington Post
Opinion: The stench of vigilantism in Georgia
"The foul odor one encounters when passing through the Low Country town of Brunswick, Ga., hasn’t been lately caused by local pulp mills but emanates instead from the Glynn County Courthouse, where three White men face murder charges in the shooting death of an unarmed Black man.
It’s the same abominable story we’ve heard too many times before. This time, however, Ahmaud Arbery was killed by citizen vigilantes rather than by cops. Arbery died on Feb. 23, 2020, three months before the police killing of George Floyd and the start of a national movement.
Arbery, just 25 at the time of his death, was guilty of nothing more than jogging when he caught the attention of a father and son, Greg McMichael, 64, and Travis McMichael, 34, who pursued him in their pickup truck, allegedly because they suspected he might be responsible for a rash of burglaries in their Satilla Shores neighborhood.
The third defendant, William “Roddie” Bryan, a neighbor, also pursued Arbery in his own pickup truck and recorded the video footage that police ultimately used to make the McMichaels’ arrests.
The local police department said there had been only one reported burglary in the neighborhood for seven weeks before the shooting. And although I’ve never been a burglar, I don’t imagine that if I were, I’d go jogging midday to review my work and begin plotting my next caper. Arbery was killed at 1 p.m. on a Sunday.
In the final two days of testimony, which ended Thursday, the younger McMichael took the stand in his own defense. He didn’t help himself. In essence, Travis McMichael testified that Arbery had said nothing threatening to him or to his father when they began following him. In fact, Arbery reportedly never spoke at all. Also, he never reached for anything resembling a weapon, Travis testified.
The prosecutor summed it up this way: Arbery wasn’t a threat to anyone, based on the shooter’s own testimony. He had been stopped by the two McMichaels, one of whom threatened to “blow your f---ing head off” — a nice greeting played to the background tune of dueling banjos, as I imagine events.
The father-and-son team, by the way, did not at the time resemble the well-groomed, coat-and-tied “church deacons” we’ve seen in court the past two weeks. Everybody puts on their Sunday best for court, of course, but the mug shots of those two, as well as of Bryan, are likely more accurate representations of what Arbery was seeing that day.
As a White Southern woman all too familiar with the gun-and-pickup culture, I can tell you that few sorts are more frightening if you happen to be alone in the wrong place, such as driving on one of the many back roads crisscrossing the rural South. While I have scores of friends, male and female, who drive pickups and use shotguns for bird or target shooting, there’s a certain kind of White troublemaker who haunts those routes; and everybody around here knows exactly what I mean.
I can’t imagine Arbery’s fear when, having encountered Bryan and seeing no way out at one end of the street, he reversed directions and ran toward the McMichaels. In those next seconds, Arbery apparently decided to be proactive and lurched toward Travis, as can be seen in the video. Travis, the self-styled citizen-hero, after chasing down his quarry, was finally scared: “We were face to face,” Travis testified. “I’m being struck and that’s when I shot.”
So, he fired three times at close range. With a shotgun.
The prosecutor pointed out that Travis could have gotten back in the truck, if he was so afraid, but Travis said doing so would have allowed Arbery to get away.
If only. We can’t know what went through Arbery’s mind in those final desperate moments, but let’s borrow a page from John Grisham’s “A Time to Die” and reverse roles. Imagine you’re a White man jogging on a Sunday afternoon when two Black men in a pickup truck, one with a shotgun, stop and interrogate you and say they’ll blow your head off if you don’t stop — while a friend of theirs waits at the end of the street. What would you do?
Now there’s a conversation starter for Thanksgiving dinner.
Here’s another: Why is it that armed White men who shoot unarmed Black men always say they’re acting in self-defense?
Because the law in too many places lets them off the hook when they do.
Noxious odors in Brunswick, Ga., are nothing new. Locals wary of industrial pollution have a phrase they like to use when the air is worse than usual: Smell something, tell something.
Let’s hope the next time someone witnesses armed White men stalking and threatening a Black man, they’ll think to report it. Evil has a particularly foul stench."
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