Political Opinions and Discourse on Human Rights
What I love to do
As I explore the media's scrutiny in deciding who's rights to honor in granting access to the media's forum, I realize that the power dynamics at play consistently practice a level of inequality that mirrors the rigid interpretations of the Constitution, that have been codified in our laws by right wing extremists.
I believe that rights should be afforded to everyone, so long as in accessing those rights, one is responsible enough as to not suppress the rights of others deserving of the same protections.
Whether you are black, white or anywhere in between; whether you are rich, poor or anywhere in between; whether you are straight, gay or anywhere in between; whether you are religious, an atheist or anywhere in between, you are guaranteed access to all rights and to deny anyone the rights, we expect to have access too is hypocritically and un-American.
We all live together, so we may as well live together peacefully; I wouldn't want to have it any other way.
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My site is about my opinions on denials of equal access to the law. I hope that you will comment on your views so that we can facilitate intelligent discourse. As the administrator of this site I will not acknowledge hateful, racist, sexist, or derogatory remarks to any classification of peoples. We are all humans and are all deserving of that respect; that is the theme of this site.
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Are We Ultimately Responsible For Allowing Ourselves To Be Deceived And Mislead?
I often engage in discussions with other members in the black community. Here, I have attcheched one in evaluating how access to equal treatment, or the lack thereof, have contributed to the inequlaities we still see playing out today. You might find it an interesting read when you have time. Interpretaions of laws go on in every aspect of society, but the actual shaping of those laws is undeniably carried out by certain segments of society, not all of society. I've learned alot from Gould for instance, but his theories, at least to me, are based on certain segments within our society and doesn't take into consideration the "all-to-real" inequalities that exist.
Even within the black community, there are competing theories. What I love about school is that I am becoming less angry in my disclosing my thoughts on political discussions.
I realize that I still need a lot of refinement, but I refuse to lose the passion which helps to iluminate certain points in my discourse, because law is violent and in order to change law, I realize that I must tell it like it is by not sugar-coating my perception of the truth.
David
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Discussions:
My response:
From: David
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2006 4:25 PM
Subject: Re: Are We Ultimately Responsible For Allowing Ourselves To Be Deceived And Mislead?
I agree with Juanita! We are not responsible, because racism is backed by institutionalized power. Lets say that you are a man with a slingshot as your weapon to back up your power and you come to a fight against the U.S. Army, who have Abrams tanks, surface to air missles and nuclear weapons to back up their power. Oh, they also have the Marines, Airforce and Navy, to throw in the mix.
Now, throw on top of that, an all dominant access to methods of pursuading generation after generation to believe in their doctrines: conditioning mechanisms. Then throw on top of that, they have control of the educational institutions and the job market.
Now, you are a black father, with a slingshot and you're going up against all of that; do you have a chance? Now, throw into that, they break your will by creating an environment, outside of your home where you are no longer your child's hero, because you don't have the things that the white kid's parents have, who have the backing of the dominant institutionalized power to widen the economic and social gap.
Everyone fights the fight in their own way. For you to make the obsurd statement that it's our fault is to simply validate my findings; that they have succeeded in convincing yet another generation that we proud black men are not our own children's hero. That some how we are to blame for the state we still find ourselves in. Then you wonder why so many say nothing? Maybe it's because when you do speak out, you're always confronted by people like you who tell us that we are trouble makers; that it's not that bad and that we need to stop whining and fix it ourselves or simply accept our lower cast.
Maybe you need to realize that by speaking out on this very real situation, that you are speaking to very brave people who actually have the guts to speak out, regardless of the obvious mismatch in power. Maybe before you simply try to devalue our voice, you should check yourself and look at the real picture instead of the mirage they have put before you?
Wake up from the conditioning before it's too late. You may think you are allowed into their secret club, but you're not; you're simply a tool for them to use against us, because one of us losing faith in what we are trying to achieve can do much more damage than the damage they have inflicted on us. You are the mole that has been released into our community to destroy us from within. Think about that before making such a rediculous statement in the future. Why not become a solution, rather than a perpectuation of the problem? Realize the destructive role YOU are playing in this equation before the damage is irreversible.
Victims often blame themselves for being victimized...true healing comes in recognizing that it is not your fault. True healing also comes in repairing the damage in whatever way you can, not by internalizing the abuse and inflicting it on others and ourselves. We should never become the abuser because we, more than anyone else, know all too well the damage that it can do.
Wake up from the nightmare and breathe!
I agreed with this response:
From: Juanita
To:
C: ,
Subject: RE: Are We Ultimately Responsible For Allowing Ourselves To Be Deceived And Mislead?
Date: Wed, May 04, 2005 11:18 AM
NO, we're not. No more than a child or a woman who is abused is victimized themselves.
Our oppressors are responsible for our oppression, and the blood of billions who have suffered and are suffering still today is on their hands.
Juanita
I responded to the reasoning behind this truth of the state of affairs ; because the fault does not lie with the victim, as this writer would attribute, but with the abuser/ initiator and perpetuator, of this state of being:
-----Original Message-----
From: Wardell
Date: Tue, 3 May 2005 12:57:05 -0400 Subject: The Black Condition
We Are Ultimately Responsible For Allowing Ourselves To Be Deceived And Mislead
The Black Condition
The devastating facts below force us to question the leadership that led us here. As Blacks, we are responsible for allowing ourselves to be misled and deceived into this sad state of affairs. If you are not engaged in some effort to reverse one or more of these statistics you have sentenced yourself to total destruction.
POVERTY While constituting roughly 13% of the total population, Black America represents nearly 30% of America's poor. That compares with 11%, or 16 million, whites, who live in poverty; and 27%, or 8 million, Latinos. Black family income is just 60% of white income, and 43% of all Black children live beneath the poverty line--a figure almost identical to that which existed on the day Martin Luther King was assassinated, and 4 times the average for western European countries. Black children today are much more likely than whites to lack early pre-natal care, and have single mothers or unemployed parents. White Americans possess 12 times the average net worth of Blacks. Blacks are twice as likely as whites to be among the working poor-those who are employed at wages below the poverty level. 70% of elderly Blacks have no financial assets.
DRUGS & CRIME For many Blacks, drug use (including alcohol) amounts to self-medication for depression rooted in hopelessness caused by white racism. This medical need is exploited by a corrupt society hell-bent on criminalizing the Black race. Blacks, who comprise only 13% of the population and account for about 13% of drug users, constitute 35% of all arrests for drug possession, 55% of all convictions on those charges, and 74% of all those sentenced to prison for possession. Blacks are incarcerated at a rate that is more than 6 times that of whites. In total, between 1980 and 1999, the incarceration rate for Blacks more than tripled from 1156 per 100,000, to 3,620 per 100,000. This is more than 4 times the rate of incarceration of Blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era. The number of college-aged Black males in prisons and jails in the U.S., 583,000, is greater than the number of Black males enrolled in higher education, 537,000. On any given day, about 1 in 3 Blacks between the ages of 20 and 29 is in prison, on probation, or on parole. In 1999 nearly 1.5 million children in the U.S. had at least 1 parent in state or federal prison (up from less than 1 million in 1991). The Black male homicide rate is 7 times the white male rate. Black women are 18 times more likely to be raped than white women. The death penalty has been imposed in 682 capital cases since 1995. The U.S. attorney recommended the death penalty in 183 of them-of those cases 26% involved white defendants, 74% "minority." Blacks make up 40% of the death row population. Between 1989 and 1994, there was a 78% increase in the number of Black women under correctional supervision, the highest for all demographic groups within those years. Approximately 65% have children. The rate of imprisonment for Black women is more than 8 times that of white women.
AIDS There is strong evidence that AIDS is a disease created by white bio-chemists and deliberately released in Africa through vaccination programs. Blacks account for 30% of people with AIDS in America. 54% of children under age 13 with AIDS are Black. HIV/AIDS is the number 1 cause of death for Blacks aged 25 to 44. In recent years, the estimated incidence of HIV/AIDS has declined for every race except Blacks. In 1997, four times as many Latinos and eight times as many Blacks as whites contracted AIDS. Whites with HIV are far more likely to receive advanced drug therapy--a trend that slowed the white death rate from AIDS by 28% from 1995 to 1996, but by only 10% for Blacks. Blacks account for 57% of new infections of HIV and by the year
2005, African Americans will account for 60% of AIDS cases.
HEALTH The state of Black health scores below every other race in the U.S. Every year 250,000 Blacks--a number of people equal to the population of Birmingham, Alabama--are killed by the 10 biggest killers of Blacks of all ages: heart disease, cancer, stroke, AIDS, accidents, homicide, diabetes, pneumonia and influenza, chronic pulmonary diseases such as asthma and bronchitis, and infant mortality. 79,680 Black boys and men were violently murdered between 1985 and 1993, mostly by other Blacks. If Blacks had the same mortality rate as whites, about 64,000 people each year-more than all Americans who died in the Vietnam War-would still be alive. Whites live 6 years longer than Blacks. Black infant mortality is more than twice as high as that for whites and higher than in many "Third World" countries. A Black baby is more than twice as likely as a white baby to die before its first birthday, yet babies of largely poor West African immigrants survive just as well as whites. 1 in 7 Black babies is born with a low birth weight, which makes them 40 times more likely to die. Blacks have a 60% higher diabetes-related mortality than whites and suffer 30% higher cardiovascular mortality, 25% higher cancer mortality
(including breast cancer). Blacks with prostate cancer are 2-3 times more likely to die than whites. African-American men have the highest rate of prostate cancer in the world. Blacks with lung cancer were 24% more likely than whites to die within 5 years. The death rate of middle-aged to elderly Black women from coronary heart disease is more than 70 percent higher than that for white women. Blacks and Latinos run a higher risk than whites of getting Alzheimer's disease, though it is virtually unheard of in Africa. Blacks have almost twice as many strokes as whites. Black males who suffer a stroke have a 95% higher death rate than whites--75% higher for Black women. 30% of Blacks are smokers, 23% of whites. Blacks are more likely to be obese and to have hypertension. For African Americans, high blood pressure is epidemic. It's the severe high blood pressure that leads to greater rates of stroke, heart attack, and kidney failure. Further, for African Americans, the darker the skin, the higher the blood pressure. Africans generally have low blood pressure. Blacks, in particular, receive outdated or far less aggressive treatment, even when their condition and health insurance are identical to those of whites. Doctors are less likely to perform high-tech, diagnostic procedures on Blacks and less likely to go to extreme measures to keep them alive if they go into cardiac arrest on the table. Whites are two-thirds more likely to receive kidney transplants than others. When hospitalized for pneumonia, whites are more likely to receive intensive care than Blacks are. Twenty-five percent of Blacks in the U.S. have no health insurance. The rates of syphilis and gonorrhea are many times higher among Black teens than white. 90% of Black women suffer complications in pregnancy--a rate 3 times that of whites. Suicide now ranks among the top 10 major killers of Blacks in their teens to mid-40s. Sixty percent of all deaths of Black boys between 15 and 19 in 1990 were from guns. In 1997, that rate had dropped more than 40%, but was still more than 4 times the rate for their white peers. The Justice Department estimates that one out of every 21 Black men can expect to be murdered, a death rate double that of U. S. soldiers in World War II. A young Black male in America is more likely to die from gun fire than was any soldier in Vietnam.
HOUSING 55% of Blacks live in the cities, while 70% of whites live in the suburbs or rural areas. Los Angeles and New York are ranked 2nd and
3rd behind Sao Paulo, Brazil, in their homeless population, and 80% of America's homeless are Black. 60% of the total Black population in the U.S. lives in communities with one or more
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