connecting*the*dots

(uploaded by Thomas Hawk)

The back-story.

UPDATE: Thomas Hawk reports on the other side of the story.

Man, so much for the old campus cop cliché: “Stop! Or I’ll say stop again!”

I agree with Navaho — these students are a bunch of bitches. I don’t know how anyone could just stand around and let campus cops do this to another student.

UPDATE: Apparently, UCLA Chancellor Norman Abrams backs the action of his rent-a-thugs.

UPDATE II: It turns out that the abused 23 year-old student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, is Iranian-American. His lawyer is saying that his American born client was targeted because of his appearance (in the video you can hear Mostafa screaming about the Patriot Act). Meanwhile, UCLA students protested outside the UCLAPD office, demanding accountability for the police abuse.

Mos Def was apparently performing Katrina Klap without a permit outside the MTV Music Awards, so the cops came to shut his act down.

No authority-drilled cop would like the lyrics to that masterpiece, and a permit is a permit is a permit… but what’s up with the cop grabbing him on-stage?

Maybe they received a tip from a passerby that his mic was full of lip balm and soda and he was heading directly to JFK after the performance?

Assholes.

(via Southern SemAntics)

So much for trying.

Look, I’m not trying to force an opinion on anyone. It’s a well-known fact that in the very least, the Greensboro Police Department did not protect and serve its community on 11/3/79 — specifically, Morningside Homes and numerous other Greensboro residents who collected that morning to protest with the CWP (an organization armed with a location specific, city-sanctioned march permit).

Over the last month or so, conversations around town surrounding the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report — with a subsequent recommendation for the city to apologize for its role in the escalation of violence — has numerous residents and/or neighbors of Greensboro heroically trying to sweep that historical fact under the rug.

Completely blind to the negative, residual effects of 11/3/79 on other people within their own community — voices who have been silenced over the years and up through this loud and conflicting debate of privileged people on computers — people valiantly press on:

• meblogin: “How about nobody apologizes and Greensboro continues to be a great place where a horrid event took place?”…
• Dr. Mary Johnson: …”Hey Bubba, let’s you and me take off the albatross, go pay that cover and get some nice Southern iced tea. Not San Francisco, not Boston, not Seattle, not New York City tea. But good old-fashioned Greensboro, North Carolina iced tea. And let’s talk about something else.”
• Jeffrey Sykes: …”I’d dare say you and Andy and Sean and the TRC process have done more to hurt the national image of your city by ripping open a healed wound just to see what would happen.”…

The details behind the 11/3/79 incident were already well documented in literature, long before the initiation of the TRC process or the release of the report and recommendations.

From the May 2001 anthology entitled, Police Brutality:

[…]

Perhaps the worst incident occurred on November 3, 1979, in Greensboro, North Carolina, where five members of the Communist Workers Party were murdered by Klansmen and Nazis during an anti-Klan demonstration.

Not only did the Greensboro police know of the Klan’s plan to attack the demonstration but, just minutes before the confrontation, nearly all on-duty officers were called to the other side of town for a “lunch” break. When the shooting stopped, there was not a cop in sight.

Although the entire episode was caught on videotape, the all-White jury concluded that there was insufficient evidence to convict anyone.

[…]

Sorry folks, but the facts are out there for the world to see and they have been for years. You’d be dumbstruck by the sheer amount of evidence of police wrong-doing you could find in the Chapel Hill library.

Non-privileged folk in our community, such as former residents of Morningside — people who were most affected by the uncontested crossfire of hate on 11/3/79 and similar attitudes of institutional indifference that exists today — have already ingrained the details surrounding the event into their psyche long ago.

And I’d bet that image ain’t too pretty, either.

Examples of outside-the-community crafted literature and mounds of evidence available to the public is simply icing on the cake.

To me, it’s clear that city leadership, as a majority, doesn’t care at all about these ingrained attitudes, so my blunt question for you — my fellow residents and neighbors of Greensboro (online) — is do you give two shits?

Because, while over time this conversational meme may putter out online and people will go back to focusing on their own lives, getting ready for back to school specials and the eventual holiday shopping season, this moment is our opportunity to approach these issues, out in the open, in an honest discussion to bridge even broader issues that currently affect all residents of Greensboro proper.

For if we continue with these attitudes, and life returns to “normal” for the majority of us, the streets of Greensboro — especially the ones less traveled by you or me — will continue to whisper, edify and drift apart.

Artist: T-K.A.S.H.
Song: Made In America

==========

[The Last Poets - updated by Ethan]

I love niggas, because niggas are me. And I should only love that which is me. I love that you niggas go through changes, love that you niggas act, love that you niggas make some plays and shoot the shit. But there’s one thing about niggas that I don’t love. Niggas are scared of revolution.

[T-K.A.S.H.]

There’s a war going on at home
It’s like Baghdad
In American cities where all the blacks at
Little kids that pack straps and backpacks
Who clap cats for scratch snacks and gas masks
Hard times
Niggas are on the grind
All of the time
Faith in Allah small as a dime
A cup of noodles for breakfast
A cup of noodles for lunch and
A cup of noodles for dinner
Every day is the Winter
Every day is December
Cause evin in the middle of Summer
The streets shudder from the poverty blizzard
Rocket propelled grenades
Landmines and letterbombs
Open up your envelops
With thoughts of them shuttin off
Your water and your lights
And your foods and your rights
All you got in your life
Is little dude and your wife
So you move in the white
With the crew in the night
But you’re nervous:
The block drafted you into the service
The curse

You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga

Wakin’ up is the beginning of a day that’s fucked
Spoons and forks and napkins and plates and cups
Everything but a meal
I bang with my steel
And feel hunger pains in me still
I hit the front line with my ammo and my canteen
Basketball and tennis shoes as a sand screen
Shootin’ jumpers as the boys in blue pass me
Casually
I pass cream to the crack fiends
The other day a first Lieutenant was moded
Started up the car and it exploded
But didn’t nobody notice
I’m knowin’ how it goes
When if the the nigga with the purple heart of courage ain’t the oldest
It’s cold shit
But if I let little man push
Little man could go and create a plan to ambush
Double jeopardy
Brothers reppin’ me
And tellin’ me they lovin’ and respectin’ me
Could be the death of me

You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
God in heaven could you tell me why you never chose me
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
Times I asked you to provide or we wasn’t goin’ to eat
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
Why was everything that you was supposed to do on me
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
Since I’m not in heaven it’s only one other place I can be

Now shit’s hard, when you’re up in rank this far
I hit bars and I mix and mingle with stars
You flip cars with overtime you get scarred
And with your broad you begin to whisper “discharge”
Traumatized by the lies of the turncoats
Who walk enemy ground to go and burn smoke
Five dead single shot glock nine to the head
And you like, “Fuck em’”
Them niggas have to learn though
But things deepen
Your enemy’s peepin’
The rate you’re gain’ weight got your thinergies creepin’
They see you’re not sleepin’
So they got reason
To send a soldier in your circle
And manipulate the treason
A psychological Hurricane Katrina
And ain’t nobody comin’ to help
Fuck FEMA
I slowly turn the gun to myself and squeeze it
And Mohhamed Era Su Allayet (?)
I couldn’t see it
The grievous

I didn’t create this shit, I was born into it. Like I didn’t create the projects, I didn’t create homelessness, I didn’t create poverty, I didn’t create unemployment, I didn’t create this poor educational system, I was pushed into it, and now you want to blame me for not rising above it? Shit, I may not be that strong!

You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga

(via Navaho Gunleg)

Now, this is a great example of investigative reporting. Better yet, an example of collaboration between the mainstream media (albeit a local CBS news team) and citizen media.

That first cop needs to be fired.

UPDATE: Apparently, that first cop feels he might be fired. He sued to try to block the airing of the footage.

(via Boing Boing)