Author: Linn Washington

 
A few hours before the Democrat Party made history on July 26, 2016 with the nomination of the first female to head a major party presidential ticket in America, Ray Lewis stood across from Philadelphia’s City Hall holding a sign that contradicted the position of his previous profession: policeman.

Standing about four miles from the meeting site of the Democratic National Convention (DNC), Lewis, a retired Philadelphia Police Department captain, held a sign demanding the legalization of marijuana.

Support for reform of laws criminalizing marijuana is included in the DNC’s Platform. But the legalization advocated by Lewis and millions across America is not a position held by Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s official candidate for the 2016 presidential election. Clinton’s vice-presidential pick, Virginia U.S. Senator Tim Kaine also opposes legalization.

Donald Trump, the Republican Party candidate for president, also opposes legalization. Trump has adopted the same ‘Law-&-Order’ campaign mantra of Richard Nixon, the discredited former U.S. President who launched the ‘War on Weed’ in the early 1970s…a few years before Nixon’s unprecedented resignation for serial misconduct. Trump’s VP pick, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, opposes legalization.

Former law enforcer Ray Lewis quickly cited his past experiences as a policeman when asked why he endorses the legalization of the long outlawed marijuana.
 
Ray Lewis – Retired Philadelphia Police Captain LBW Photo
 

Philadelphia — On the day before the opening of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, as top Democratic Party members settled into swank hotel suites around Philadelphia, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein spent much of that day interacting with the homeless and others in one of Philadelphia’s poorest communities.

Stein, a physician, walked the streets of Philadelphia’s Kensington section, hosted by anti-poverty activists in that community.

Kensington is a community where poverty in certain sections exceeds 57 percent. The unemployment rate in Kensington averages 19.1 percent, a figure that is nearly five times the current national average. Kensington is also a community with high levels of drug addiction and numerous drug sale locations. Stein stopped at an intersection in Kensington known as one of Philadelphia’s top drug sale/use locations.

“Kensington is what too much of America looks like,” Stein said. “In America today most people either live in poverty or are near poverty. This must change! Government today works for the wealthy special interests and not in the interests of most people.”
Jill Stein (left) Cheri Honkala (right) LBW Photo
 

One unintended consequence of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a death penalty case that rebuked actions of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice and prosecutors in Philadelphia for conflict of interest was to possibly open a new avenue for activist-journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal to appeal his own 1982 murder conviction because his appellate proceedings were tainted by alarmingly similar conflict of interest, involving the same appellate jurist who was a former DA.

That ruling by America’s highest court sharply criticized former Chief Justice of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court Ronald Castille for his participation in a 2014 death penalty deliberation because that justice had approved seeking that ultimate penalty when he served as the District Attorney of Philadelphia before becoming a state supreme court member.

That U.S. Supreme Court rebuke cited judicial conduct rules in Pennsylvania applicable to judges who had previously worked for a governmental agency like a District Attorney. Those conduct rules urged judges to remove themselves from “a proceeding if [their] impartiality might reasonably be questioned” because of their former position with such a governmental agency.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in the recent 5-3 ruling that rebuked Castille, stated that an “unconstitutional potential for bias exists when the same person serves as both accuser and adjudicator in a case.”

Paris Protest For Abu-Jamal. Jacques Lederer (left) and Abu-Jamal Collectif head Jacky Hortaut (right) – LBW Photo
 

Paris protestors for 21 years have held demonstrations monthly to criticize the lack of impartiality by judges in Pennsylvania, particularly judges once employed as prosecutors and/or in law enforcement. Those protestors have also condemned misconduct by prosecutors in Philadelphia like prosecutors unlawfully withholding evidence favorable to defendants.

When Donald Trump announced his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in June 2015 he unleashed a tirade against illegal immigrants from Mexico, libeling most of those immigrants as criminals and “rapists.”

Given Trump’s alleged concern about rapists running rampant and his silence on a California state court judge’s recent issuance of an insulting six-month sentence to a violent rapist, Trump’s unprecedented onslaught against rulings by a federal judge in California of Mexican-American ancestry is especially troubling.

Perhaps Trump’s silence on the wrist-slap sentence for that violent rapist revolves around the fact that this rapist is not one of those Mexican immigrants that Trump rails against for committing crimes.

Rather, that convicted rapist is a young white male whose crime occurred while he attended Stanford, a top-rated private university, on an athletic scholarship. The judge in that rape case is also a white male and an alumnus of the same prestigious university.

The victim of that violent rapist is a woman and Trump has oozed a litany of offensive remarks about women during the campaign that has made him the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential candidate. Trump did speak out on behalf on a woman killed during a 2015 crime but that killer was an a different story. The killer was an illegal immigrant from Mexico.

Trump doesn’t like native-born Mexican-American Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s procedural rulings in a case against him, so he declares him racially biased
 

Trump denies that bigotry motivates his assault on that Mexican-American federal judge while he seamlessly declares that judge’s “unfair” rulings against him are motivated by that judge’s allegedly race-based retaliation against Trump.

During a casual conversation inside a store on a swanky shopping street located a short distance from London’s fabled Kensington Palace a twenty-something retail clerk said she feels a strange sense of discomfort that she’s never felt before in London, the city where this native of Algeria has lived most of her life.

She traces this alienating discomfort to the sharp increase in Islamophobia.

Islamophobia is generally defined as dislike of or prejudice against Islam or Muslims.

This London resident is an identifiable target for Islamophobia because she wears a modest headscarf that is traditional in her culture and religion – Islam. (She does not wear a full-face covering burka.)

Vakas Hussain (far left). Seated center Suresh Grover of The Monitoring Group and Rotherham 12 defendant Abar Javid. LBW Photo
 

For her and others, Islamophobia ranges from disdainful stares and caustic comments to physical assaults. A few assaults have ended in fatalities. And then there are British government policies like ‘Prevent’ – the professed counter-terrorism program that seemingly is targeted solely at Muslims. Prevent enlists citizens to report actions and attitudes deemed suspicious.

The Muslim community in Britain “has been targeted against the backdrop of hostility buttressed by the War on Terror,” stated a report issued by the London-based Institute of Race Relations in 2013. This report warned that racial violence across Britain is not “something consigned to history” citing police force statistics from 2011/2012 documenting over 100 racially or religiously aggravated crimes per day.

Hooey –- silly talk/nonsense –- frequently has slimy characteristics and slime is slippery.

Former President Bill Clinton recently slipped on some silly talk when trying to dance around a slime trail oozing from his presidency during the 1990s.

This hooey moment came during Bill Clinton’s finger-wagging attempted smackdown of a Black Lives Matter activist who called-out Clinton during a campaign event for the devastating impact the 1994 federal anti-crime bill he sought and signed had on black communities nationwide.

Bill Clinton, when he dressed down the BLM activist with delight, defended his backing of that mass-incarceration accelerating/police abuse-aggravating measure. He also defended his wife Hillary for having tagged many black teens as “super predators” during her anti-crime lobbying as First Lady.

The Bill & Hillary Clinton response to BlackLivesMatter critics has been self-righteous finger-wagging
 

And Bill Clinton shoveled other such hooey as his assertion that BLM activists defend criminals and BLM activists are obstructionist in ways comparable to GOP members in Congress.

Bill Clinton’s defense of his 1994 crime bill came during a recent political campaign appearance for his wife Hilary in Philadelphia, PA, set to hold a critical Democratic primary between Hillary and Bernie Sanders next Tuesday, April 26. Philly is the same city where Bill Clinton in July 2015 had apologized for the damage done to blacks by that ’94 bill during a speech before the NAACP, America’s oldest civil rights organization.

Hooey – silly talk/nonsense – frequently has slimy characteristics and slime is slippery.

Former President Bill Clinton recently slipped on some silly talk when trying to dance around a slime trail oozing from his presidency during the 1990s.

This hooey moment came during Bill Clinton’s finger-wagging smack down of a Black Lives Matter activist who called-out Clinton for the destructive impact the 1994 federal anti-crime bill he sought and signed had on black communities nationwide.

Bill Clinton, when he dressed down the BLM activist with delight, defended his backing of that mass incarceration accelerating/police abuse aggravating measure. He defended his wife Hillary tagging many black teens as “super predators” during her anti-crime lobbying as First Lady.

And Bill Clinton shoveled such hooey as his assertion that BLM activists defend criminals and BLM activists are obstructionist comparable to GOP members in Congress.

Bill Clinton’s defense of his 1994 crime bill came during a recent political campaign appearance for his wife Hilary in Philadelphia, Pa. Philly is the same city where Bill Clinton in July 2015 apologized for the damage done to blacks by that ’94 bill during a speech before the NAACP, America’s oldest civil rights organization.

London and Philadelphia — Over three thousands miles and more than forty years in age separate anti-violence activists Bilal Qayyum and Noel Williams, yet each advocates a similar solution to ‘the problem’ they seek to solve in their respective cities located on separate sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Qayyum, 69, of Philadelphia, Pa and Williams, 25, of London, UK each see employment as the critical tool needed to counter violence among youth and young adults living in low-income communities.

“In all my years of working to reduce violence, it’s very clear to me that jobs are a major solution to reducing violence in low-income communities,” Qayyum said, speaking about his roots in violence-reduction efforts dating back to the 1970s when he was an anti-gang worker.

“Jobs, well-paying ones, give people a strong feeling of worth. Poverty breeds violence.”

Sadly, Williams and Qayyum each see the same roadblock on violence reduction: the persistent failure of public sector authorities on both sides of the Atlantic to fully engage community-based persons with the front-line experiences required to effectively resolve the “violence problem” that authorities proclaim they want to solve.

Noel Williams (all photos by Linn Washington, jr.)
 

Williams, an ex-gang leader in southwest London turned university student, said, “Who comes to me and asks for advice? I know gangs. I know how it feels to be shot and how it feels to walk down the road feeling oppression from police.”

Williams bristles at the fact that authorities continually employ persons with no life-connection to violence as paid staff to lead violence-reduction initiatives.

“If you want to help people who’ve been to prison, why is it that people who’ve been in prison are never hired?” ex-inmate Williams asked.

The consequential changes sweeping across Europe, from immigrants impacting demographics to an increasing embrace of right-wing ideologies, are not surprising to Professor Donald Muldrow Griffith, an American who has lived in Berlin, Germany for over three decades.

Griffith, born in Chicago and respected in Berlin for his achievements as a cultural impresario, feels “tensions” are afoot in Germany and other European countries.

“Many years ago, we knew the demographics of Europe would change,” Griffith said.

“As Europeans had partaken and continue to partake in the resources of many places in the world…those persons from the ‘contributing countries’ [will] seek to come to European countries for a return on their ‘investments’ and renewed hope, as a result of the past and recent political, economic and social chaos in their countries.”

Donald Griffith
 

When Griffith first settled in Berlin decades ago, that city was in the Cold War cauldron. While West Berlin was a city aligned with ‘The West’ it was located deep inside of what was then East Germany –- officially the German Democratic Republic –- a Communist ruled country that was an ally of the Soviet Union.

That East-West political divide inside Berlin had a literal reality because the city itself was split into east and west sectors since the war, and eventually by a wall built by the East German government. That barrier inside Berlin, constructed in 1961, was demolished beginning in 1990, just before the reunification of the two halves of Germany.

Griffith is an Afro-American living in a city quickly associated in the minds of most Americans with Cold War intrigues and/or World War II Nazi-era excesses. However, Griffith said race-based ugliness has not proved a major problem in either his professional or personal experiences.

“I have been fortunate to avoid unpleasantness in Europe, although one senses a change in attitude in the atmosphere, with declining economies and newcomers from various countries seeking to become a part of Europe,” Griffith said.

Hollywood honchos told a big lie 74-years ago.

That lie told in 1942 is a link in the sordid chain of perceptions and practices that have produced the present brouhaha surrounding the 2016 Oscar awards featuring an all-white bevy of acting category nominations.

That lie is part of a legacy the stretches to the very founding of the United States of America. That legacy is the persistent refusal to forthrightly tackle racism, particularly insidious institutional racism.

The fact that so few have no clue about this Hollywood lie evidences the need for better understandings about facets of American history that are purposely forgotten yet have a pronounced impact on the contours of current society.

Highlighting forgotten facets is a prime reason for the existence of Black History Month, an annual recognition of the contributions and achievements of African-Americans held every February. However, each year, many across America castigate Black History Month as unnecessary and divisive.
The Birth of a Nation – One of Hollywood's most racist movies
It’s not surprising that many of those who find Black History Month unacceptable are comfortable with accepting a movie industry that continues to present an illusion of inclusion while fanning the race prejudice that pollutes the very core of democracy in America.

Interestingly, assailing Black History Month is an interracial exercise in America. Critics of Black History Month include blacks, most recently FOX News commentator Stacy Dash, a person who gained her stature through starring in the 1995 Hollywood movie “Clueless” and its network television spinoff.