A powerful speech to three racist murderers

By an African-American judge.

Here's an astonishing speech by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, one of just two African-Americans to have ever served as federal judges in Mississippi. He read it to three young white men before sentencing them for the death of a 48-year-old black man named James Craig Anderson in a parking lot in Jackson, Miss., one night in 2011. They were part of a group that beat Anderson and then killed him by running over his body with a truck, yelling "white power" as they drove off. The speech is long; Reeves asked the young men to sit down while he read it aloud in the courtroom. And it's breathtaking, in both the moral force of its arguments and the palpable sadness with which they are delivered. We have decided to publish the speech, which we got from the blog Breach of Peace, in its entirety below. A warning to readers: He uses the word "nigger" 11 times.

Actually getting something done

And doing something right:

Senate approves $4.6B for black farmers, Indians

By MARY CLARE JALONICK Associated Press

The Senate has approved almost $4.6 billion to settle longstanding claims brought by American Indians and black farmers against the government.

The money has been held up for months in the Senate as Democrats and Republicans squabbled over how to pay for it. Both of the class action lawsuits were filed over a decade ago.

The settlements include almost $1.2 billion for black farmers who say they suffered discrimination at the hands of the Agriculture Department. Also, $3.4 billion would go to Indian landowners who claim they were swindled out of royalties by the Interior Department. The legislation was approved in the Senate by voice vote Friday and sent to the House.

Parlor bigots

Chet Scoville of Vanity Press quotes Bob Sommerby:

Neither professor could imagine a world in which decent people, acting in good faith, made a judgment which differed from theirs.... they’re parlor bigots—people who assail the motives of anyone who disagrees with their views.

Down further in his post, Chet says:

What this means, unfortunately, is that the concept of fairness, and therefore the presumption of good faith disagreement, is in the United States a gendered and racialized concept. Women and non-white people just do not get the presumption of good faith applied to them when they seek or exert power. They are always thought to be cheating, and always thought to be illegitimate. This is especially true when someone is applying for the top job in the country: the more that is at stake, the harder it is to break the grip of entrenched cultural presumptions.

There's one other important point, though, which is that as far as the major media are concerned, the concepts of fairness and good faith are limited in another way: they are not only gendered and racialized concepts, but also partisan concepts. Anyone who has been paying attention to American presidential campaigns for the past two decades can't have failed to notice this: Democratic candidates are always attacked in the general election as phonies, liars, and cheats who act in bad faith, while Republicans are nearly always depicted as authentic, honest, regular guys who act in good faith (even their howling errors and distortions are often forgiven as good faith mistakes). No matter what the facts are, and no matter how many falsehoods have to be fabricated to make this narrative work, it's the one that gets told every time. Put these three things together, and you've got a shockingly narrow conclusion: the white male Republican is always portrayed, by definition, as the only good-faith candidate. Everyone else is portrayed as illegitimate.

It is true that we have been promising a place at the table and never getting around to finding a chair for anybody but the white Republicans males. But we have just been through the worst president and the worst administration in US history. This might be the thing that breaks all prejudices and throws down all hurdles and finally lets blacks and women, Democrats and liberals into the Oval Office.

And lets them finally be heard.

Asking the question

Nobody else is asking:


by Mapaghimagsik of Taking Stock.