Tag: Black Lives Matter

Florida sheriff says he’ll deputize gun owners if department can’t handle protesters

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Florida sheriff says he’ll deputize gun owners if department can’t handle protesters

Clay County Sheriff Darryl Daniels released a three-minute video of himself standing with 18 deputies in which he condemned Black Lives Matter demonstrators as a godless group “making themselves a spectacle disrupting what we know to be our quality of life in this country.”

“If we can’t handle you, I’ll exercise the power and authority as the sheriff, and I’ll make special deputies of every lawful gun owner in this county and I’ll deputize them for this one purpose to stand in the gap between lawlessness and civility,” Daniels said in the video. “That’s what we’re sworn to do. That’s what we’re going to do. You’ve been warned.”

Unions Are Taking a Stand for Black Lives

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Unions Are Taking a Stand for Black Lives

“You represent the potential and the power of the labor movement,” said Angela Davis, the activist and former member of the Black Panther Party, to the assembled crowd. “Whenever the ILWU takes a stand, the world feels the reverberations,” she said, listing the dockworker union’s history of activism—against, for example, the internment of Japanese Americans and apartheid in South Africa, in support of civil rights, and in solidarity with past victims of violence police.

Why NASCAR’s Bubba Wallace says he’ll take embarrassment over the alternative

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Why NASCAR’s Bubba Wallace says he’ll take embarrassment over the alternative

“Yes, it was a garage pull for our stall at Talladega, but that was in the solid shape of a noose,” Wallace continued. “And when my guys seen that, when my crew member had seen that — who happened to be African American — he did his research first, and I was very proud of that. David Cropps — a guy I’ll stand by in any trenches, any day — walked up and down the garages to make sure he wasn’t overreacting. And when he seen that the other garage pulls were basically just a solid piece of rope, no knots in them, and we had a knot that was in the shape of a noose — yeah, that calls [for an investigation].”

Rapper Lil Baby’s new single begins to address “The Bigger Picture”

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Rapper Lil Baby’s new single begins to address “The Bigger Picture”

“The Bigger Picture” is significant and stands out because it strongly rejects the idea employed by identity politics that there is an unbridgeable gap between blacks and whites, it begins to form a critique of capitalism and it shows the development of a popular artist beginning to take the times and his art seriously.

However, the song’s suggestion that voting is the answer to all the great problems is extremely weak. First of all, it comes in the midst of enormous, multi-racial protests whose objective logic clearly indicates that popular struggle against all the existing institutions is where the way forward lies. Second, the call to “Vote” is most often in entertainment industry circles at the moment virtual short-hand for “Vote Democratic” or “Vote for Anyone but Trump.” It is no accident that Lil Baby recently announced he is working with Democratic Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottoms—who has openly defended the police after the recent Atlanta police killing of Rayshard Brooks—to put together a police reform plan “for Atlanta to the whole world.”

Community Control of the Police – and a Whole Lot More

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Community Control of the Police – and a Whole Lot More

Although community control of the police is within reach of becoming law in Chicago, a majority Black and brown city with the second largest concentration of Blacks in the nation, the demand has gotten less traction in nationwide demonstrations than the call for defunding the cops, or eventual abolition. That’s undoubtedly because Black Lives Matter demands have been pervasive in the current demonstrations, and BLM supports defunding of police. However, Black Lives Matter is more a quilt than a monolith, and many Black Lives Matter chapters and individuals also support community control of the police, while CPAC activists also back defunding and abolition of the cops as a logical outcome of community control. The elements of Black Lives Matter that are resistant to community control of police are those under the influence of hashtag founder Alicia Garza, who is now a Democratic Party political player and go-to person for corporate philanthropy.