We decided to pull together two One on One shows hosted by James Brown.

 

original article: http://rochesteraccent.com/post/71777692797/paris-hilton-and-the-art-of-...

#1: Paris Hilton and the art of fake DJing #ROC

 

#2: A brief history of electronic music with #Roc based DJ and Producer rajmarathe

 

original article: http://philebersole.wordpress.com/2014/01/08/nuclear-peril-was-and-is-wo...

 

We were in greater danger from nuclear weapons than we thought during the Cold War era, and that danger still exists.

That is what I learned from reading COMMAND AND CONTROL: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schosser, a history of nuclear weapons technology from World War Two to the present.

The danger was not so much that the USA or USSR would intentionally start a nuclear war.  Deterrence did work.  The danger was an accidentak discharge or launch of a nuclear missile.  As Eric Schlosser documented, this nearly happened literally hundreds of times.   Evidently nobody knows the actual number because the U.S. government doesn’t keep a list.

Even Robert Peurifoy of Sandia Laboratories, the leading advocate of safer nuclear technology within the government, didn’t know of all of them.

The book has two narrative threads.  One is the evolution of nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy from FDR to Reagan, the technical and engineering difficulties, and a relentless piling up of reports of bomber crashes, accident bomb drops, computer system failures around nuclear weapons and weapons being lost or left unguarded.  We’ve been on the brink of nuclear war and nuclear disaster many more times than we know.

The other thread is an hour-by-hour report on a near-disaster a Titan missile complex near Damascus, Arkansas, in 1980.   I had not thought of missile crews as brave in the sense that fighter and bomber pilots are brave, but the missile crews deal with dangerous and not completely predictable forces.

The accident began when an enlisted man, performing routine maintenance near the top of the missile, accidentally dropped a socket, which punctured the oxidizer tank of the lower stage.  Both the oxidizer and the fuel are toxic as well as highly flammable and explosive.  If the air pressure in the oxidizer tank were to fall below a certain level, the tank would collapse and the rocket fuel would explode.  The rocket carried a nuclear bomb with the explosive power of all the bombs dropped during World War Two, including the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The following few hours were a story of bureaucratic paralysis and individual heroism as a fire broke out in the complex and the rockets eventually exploded despite everything the crew could do.  It was only by good fortune the nuclear warhead was not detonated.

The U.S. nuclear arsenal, both as a whole and in its individual parts, is an example of what the writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls a fragile system.  The failure of any of its parts would have led to the cascading failure of the whole system.

Nuclear strategy for 40 years was based on the “Single Integrated Operational Plan,” which was an all-out attack which would have taken the lives of an estimated 200 million people in Russia, China and eastern Europe.  Some U.S. military leaders actually contemplated launching such an attack which would have taken the lives of more people than were killed by Hitler, Stalin and Mao combined; presumably the Soviets had a similar plan.
The U.S. had no plan for what to do after the attack.  Planning ended with the nuclear holocaust

Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger and others sought alternatives.  Their efforts were unsuccessful for, in my opinion, good reason.  If the leaders of a nation are going to use nuclear weapons at all against an enemy which also has nuclear arms, it is too late to hold back.

Schlosser gives great credit to General Curtis LeMay, who commanded the Strategic Air Command from 1948 to 1957 and higher Air Force positions through 1965, for his strict insistence on proper procedures and checklists and tough unannounced inspections.  It was said of LeMay that he did not distinguish between the unfortunate and the incompetent, and that to err is human, but to forgive is not SAC policy.  This tough attitude saved many lives, Schlosser said.

The situation is different now.  In 2003, Schlosser reported, half of the Air Force units responsible for nuclear weapons failed their safety inspections, despite three-day advance warnings.

Schlosser pointed out that the United States has never had an unauthorized detonation of a nuclear weapon—a remarkable achievement.  But each day that nuclear weapons exist is a gamble that a detonation won’t take place.  Meanwhile nuclear weapons proliferate.  India, as Schlosser noted, has double the industrial accident rate of the United States, and Pakistan has three times the rate.  How long until one of those weapons goes off?  And then what?

 

LINKS

If We Don’t Slash Our Nukes, “a Major City is Going to Be Destroyed,” an interview of Eric Schlosser by Michael Mechanic of Mother Jones.

A Sneak Peak at Eric Schlosser’s Terrifying New Book on Nuclear Weapons, an excerpt printed in Mother Jones.

America’s biggest threat is its own N-weapons, an earlier post of mine.

The day we nearly bombed North Carolina, another earlier post of mine.

Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control, a review by Louis Menand in The New Yorker.

Hat tip to Jack Clontz for calling Schlosser’s book to my attention.

On January 12, 2014, I gave a talk at the Third Presbyterian Church in Rochester, NY, about Islamophobia and racism.

Since I am a filmmaker, I like to add an audio-visual dimension to everything I do, so I started with a Ted Talk by Melissa Boigon and then proceeded to focus on certain aspects of Islamophobia and explore how they overlap with the definition racism.

Melissa’s 10-minute talk is a great way to break the ice and get into the meaning and nature of Islamophobia:

It’s important to remember that barely three decades ago, Islam had been a marginal concern located on the edge of western consciousness. In fact during the cold war, the militant, conservative "Mujahideen" in Afghanistan, who had been fighting the evil Soviets with America’s help, were welcomed warmly by President Reagan. He invited them to the White House and called them “freedom fighters.” In order to jog our collective memory, please listen to this:

This was the 1980s, before we decided to invade and occupy Afghanistan ourselves.

Although Western imperialism and the knowledge it produced over centuries of colonialism were always suffused with Orientalist constructions of the “other,” the present preoccupation with Islam began with 9/11. All of a sudden “Islam” became a globalised issue, shaped by countless images and sound bites transmitted relentlessly and indiscriminately by Western media.

The Muslim world became a silent object that does not speak, but is spoken for, an anonymous background against which stands the reporter dispatched from the metropolis.[1]

It was this frustration at being constantly talked about while being willfully shut out of that discourse which motivated me to make a documentary called “The Muslims I Know”[2] in 2008. The idea was to give actual Muslims a chance to be a part of the ongoing conversation about them.

The creation of images and messages by Western media is not an objective or random process. It’s an intentional, fairly involved process of applying editorially distorting filters to news reporting. Nowhere is this reductionism and distortion more evident than in reports of conflicts in the Middle East.

Viewers are given a few minutes during which they watch and hear descriptions of wreckage, smoke, burnt cars, scorched bodies, severed limbs, blood, and wailing widows. With no attempt to explain the underlying causes and histories of the crises in question, the reports merely compound existing misunderstandings. The confusion is such that roles are often reversed, with the victim mistaken for the oppressor.[3]

For a better understanding of reporting on the Middle East, I strongly recommend a documentary that you can watch on YouTube or Vimeo. It’s called  “Peace, Propaganda & The Promised Land” and it provides a striking comparison of American and international media coverage of Israel/Palestine.

Also, we have to be aware of the nature of media. The media industry is unequivocally corporate, narrow and tightly controlled in the United States. Do you know how many companies own 90% of American media? A whopping 6. They include: Comcast, the Walt Disney Company, 21st Century Fox, Time Warner, CBS Corporation, and Viacom.[4] Six business corporations that sell us entertainment also produce 90% of our news. It’s truly stunning.

The presence of Muslim minorities inside western countries has created another level of hysteria. Fears of an existential Muslim threat overlap with fears of immigrants and aliens. Some of these fears, and the language in which they’re expressed, are reminiscent of anti-Semitism in Europe prior to WWII. Of course I’m not talking about the Holocaust, nothing like that has happened to Muslims in the West, so far. But anti-Semitism also manifests itself below the level of ethnic cleansing and genocide, it manifests itself through damaging stereotypes and how they mold mainstream culture.

Just like Muslims today, Jews were always perceived as the “other” within. They were accused of separating themselves from the mainstream on account of religion and culture. They were accused of harboring hostile feelings against the majority: they didn’t want to integrate and they were not loyal to the state.[5] In short, they were “corrupting” wholesome European culture. The exact same accusations are leveled at Muslims, who are often portrayed as being incompatible with Western modernity. The fear of Sharia law is kept hanging over our heads, as if it were an actual danger. First of all, do you know what percentage of the American population is actually Muslim? It’s 1.6%, so there’s hardly any fear of the country being overtaken by Islam. Secondly, the very idea of a Sharia “threat” is a deception.

The ACLU has published a detailed report on the subject. Here is a brief description of the report’s findings from the ACLU’s website:

A new report by the ACLU, Nothing to Fear: Debunking the Mythical "Sharia Threat" to Our Judicial System, examines, in detail, the cases repeatedly cited by anti-Muslim groups as evidence of the alleged "Sharia threat" to our judicial system. The report concludes that these cases do not stand for the principles that anti-Muslim groups claim. Rather, these court cases deal with routine matters, such as religious freedom claims and contractual disputes. Courts treat these lawsuits in the same way that they deal with similar claims brought by people of other faiths. If Sharia law were completely banned from consideration, it would be nearly impossible for Muslims to bring First Amendment claims when their religious rights are violated because the court could be barred from referring to a Muslim plaintiff's religious beliefs. This result would be patently unfair because it would single out Muslims for disfavorable treatment in our judicial system and render them second-class citizens.[6]

It is good to remember that the invocation of an “occidental” or opposite identity is often needed to stabilize national identity, especially in times of uncertainty. Over and over again in history, we see how socio-economic and political malaise is accompanied by the resurfacing of the “us vs. them” narrative.

The Runnymede Trust has identified eight components that define Islamophobia. This definition, from the 1996 report “Islamophobia: A Challenge For Us All” is widely accepted, including by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia.[7]

The eight components are:

 1)    Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc. Do you know how many countries are included in what we simplistically call “the Muslim world”? There are 57 countries in the vast geographic and diverse cultural expanse known as the Muslim world.
 2)    Islam is seen as separate and “other”.
 3)    Islam is seen as inferior to the West.
 4)    Islam is seen as violent, aggressive.
 5)    Islam is seen as a political ideology, not a world religion.
 6)    Criticisms made of the West by Muslims are rejected out of hand.
 7)    Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and the exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society.
 8)    Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal.

Whenever the media indulge in any of these assumptions, they are in fact indulging in islamophobia. It has become a new form of racism because although Muslims are considered to be a religious group, not a race, they are nevertheless constructed as an ethnic category or a race.

Many argue that the term “Islamophobia” does not adequately express the full range and depth of antipathy towards Islam and Muslims in the West today. It is an inadequate term and a more accurate expression would be “anti-Islamic racism” for it combines the elements of dislike of a religion with active discrimination against the people belonging to that religion.[8]

The same kind of racial coding markers are at work here as those that apply to people of another race – these markers are eminently visible and impossible to miss. They work just as well for Muslims, who are often differentiated in America by clothing or skin color.[9] “Muslim” is always conflated with “Arab” or even with “Sikh.” There have been horrific attacks on Sikh temples and the Sikh community at large because Sikhs are perceived as being Muslim, not on account of their religion but due to racial markers.

The Ted Talk I started with, opens with a news report in which a woman pushed someone in front of a train in New York because she “hated Muslims and Hindus since 9/11.” Again, that’s hardly a religious or political articulation of hate. It’s clearly racist. Muslims and Hindus have completely different religions and could be from completely different parts of the world, but they’re being lumped together on account of how they look, they are being identified as the “other,” a monolithic category that can provoke discrimination and violence.

Islamophobia and racism come together most forcefully when we consider that the oldest and largest contingent of American Muslims is still Black. In “A People’s History of Muslims in the United States,” Alison Kysia shows how Muslims have been part of the American story since the beginning of colonization. For example, she describes a Muslim-led revolt against Diego Columbus (the eldest son of Christopher Columbus) that took place in 1522.

In “Mapping the Intersections of Islamophobia & #BlackLives Matter: Unearthing Black Muslim Life and Activism in the Policing Crisis,” Donna Auston elaborates on the close bonds between Islamophobia and racism as follows:

Parallels can be drawn fairly easily, of course, between Islamophobia and anti-black racism as specific manifestations of a similar impulse, but making the leap to consider them intimate bedfellows may seem like an analytical stretch. In public discourse, we easily link anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discrimination as being nearly one and the same. Yet, in spite of the fact that a full one-third of the U.S. Muslim population is black, we rarely tend to think of issues of anti-black racism, poverty, mass incarceration, or police brutality as legitimate “Muslim” issues. This is because we rarely consider black Muslims.

Black Muslims exist right at the intersection of these two forms of racism. Baltimore and Philadelphia are two American cities where the commonly accepted narrative of who American Muslims are, where their concerns lie, and the specific cocktail of intersectional racisms that they live with is radically disrupted. Both cities have long and rich black Muslim histories—and diverse manifestations of Afro-Muslim religious expression that are as much a part of the landscape of their respective cities as crab cakes and water ice. “As salaam ‘alaykum” emanates from the mouths of Muslim and non-Muslim black residents in both places as naturally as any other greeting. Khimars, bow ties, and the iconic red fez are all items in an array of sartorial indicators of particular racial and religious life worlds.

[...] I weave together these seemingly disparate threads to draw attention to the fact that in this historic moment when we are presumably more attentive to the way that marginalization endangers the lives of the invisible, being cognizant of the ways that intersectional identities are easily erased is more important than ever. Just as much of the activism around police brutality has centered the experiences of black men while ignoring the deadly perils that black women also face from law endorsement, assumptions about who “American Muslims” are, and flattened representations of who constitutes the “black community” place black American Muslim experiences and challenges out of perceptual range.

Dominant narratives—in both media and scholarly literature tend to doubly efface the existence and voices of black American Muslims—even in this moment when black bodies are at the very center of the unrest.
 

No Muslim Ban Rally in Rochester, NY, Jan 29, 2017. Photograph by Mara Ahmed.

Footnotes:

[1] Soumaya Ghannoushi, The propagation of neo-Orientalism, Al Jazeera, January 27, 2011.
[2] Mara Ahmed, The Muslims I Know, Neelum Films LLC, 2008.
[3] The propagation of neo-Orientalism
[4] Media cross-ownership in the United States, accessed Feb. 2017, Wikipedia
[5] Yasemin Shooman, Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in Europe, The Jewish Museum Berlin Journal, 2012.
[6] Heather L. Weaver, Debunking the Mythical "Sharia Threat" to Our Judicial System, www.ACLU.org, May 17, 2011.
[7] Islamophobia: A Challenge For Us All, www.runnymedetrust.org, 1996.
[8] Al-Maktabi, Islamophobia, www.salaam.co.uk.
[9] Donovan Schaefer, Is Islamophobia Racism?, Religion Bulletin, June 19, 2012.

Suggested Books:
Reza Aslan, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, Random House (March 15, 2005)

Reza Aslan, Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East (Words Without Borders), W. W. Norton & Company, Reprint edition (November 21, 2011)

Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, Harmony (June 21, 2005)

Stephen Sheehi, Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims, Clarity Press (February 1, 2011)

Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, Haymarket Books (August 7, 2012)

Edward Said, Orientalism, Vintage; 1st Vintage Books edition (October 12, 1979)

Suggested Articles:
Max Blumenthal, The Great Islamophobic Crusade (an investigation of the Islamophobia industry), CBS News, December 19, 2010.

Faiz Shakir, $42 Million From Seven Foundations Helped Fuel The Rise Of Islamophobia In America, thinkprogress.org, August 26, 2011.

Usman Ahmedani, Islamophobia as a political ploy (The fixation with diagnosing Islam's ills may mask deeper anxieties about upheavals in European and American societies), The Guardian, March 29, 2012.

Max Blumenthal, Anders Behring Breivik, a perfect product of the Axis of Islamophobia, mondoweiss.net, July 24, 2011.

NGOs call for recognition of Islamophobia as form of racism: Ahead of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on 21 March, the European Network Against Racism called the European Union institutions to recognize Islamophobia as a specific form of racism.

Muslim Americans: No signs of growth in alienation or support for extremism (Pew Center) - A Demographic Portrait of Muslim Americans

FBI: Bias Crimes Against Muslims Remain at High Levels (Southern Poverty Law Center): Hate crimes against perceived Muslims, which jumped 50% in 2010 largely as a result of anti-Muslim propagandizing, remained at relatively high levels for a second year in 2011, according to the FBI’s new national hate crime statistics.

Mychal Denzel Smith, Three Ways to Fight Racism in 2014, The Nation, January 3, 2014.

On Friday, January 17, 2014, Brenda Hardaway, between five and seven days past her due date, stood before state Supreme Court Justice Francis A. Affronti and plead guilty to felony second degree assault with the understanding that she would get a reduced sentence of six months in jail and five years of probation.

 

The Friday appearance was meant to be a Huntley hearing before the start of a trial on February 10, until Assistant District Attorney Brian Green said that he had spoken to several parties—his boss—District Attorney Sandra Doorley, the injured officer, Justice Affronti, and the defendant's attorney Eric Teifke—and felt that “a resolution in this matter is appropriate.”

 

Ms. Hardaway's case went viral on YouTube, when a video surfaced on August 27, 2013. The video showed an RPD officer—Lucas Krull—attempting to arrest her after it was alleged that she interfered with the arrest of her younger brother (a minor) Romengeno Hardaway. The video starts with her screaming that she's pregnant; officer Krull is behind her attempting to handcuff her. Eventually, she is thrown into a railing, punched in the back of the head multiple times, dropped to the ground belly first, and then kneed by the officer. While she is being attacked, her brother can be seen in the background with three or four officers attempting to subdue him. At one point during this attack, Romengeno expressed at a later date, the side of his head was smashed against a railing with an exposed nail causing the nail to be driven into the side of his temple. The video ends with Brenda and Romengeno being lead away in handcuffs with family members and friends protesting to more than 10 police officers. What began as a domestic dispute between family members escalated into a full-scale RPD brawl against the Hardaways.

Part of the plea deal involves Ms. Hardaway explaining and acknowledging her actions on the day in question.

 

After Justice Affronti checked in with Ms. Hardaway about her first, late pregnancy, the judge acknowledged that ADA Green's statements in favor of a resolution were accurate. He said that he had had conversations with the different parties on December 17, 2013. He then posed a question to ADA Green:

 

“I'm also asking, at this time, about the police officer. What is his medical status?” Earlier in the proceeding, the judge identified the officer as “the victim in this case.”

 

ADA Green replied, “He's on light duty right now—he has a shoulder injury and is scheduled for exploratory surgery because it has not healed right.”

 

Justice Affronti acknowledged the statement and moved on. “The court is deciding whether it is legally and procedurally appropriate to allow this resolution.”

 

Mr. Teifke reminded the judge that aside from the incident on August 27, Ms. Hardaway has no prior criminal record and that she has had no interactions with law enforcement since.

 

The judge agreed with Mr. Teifke's comments and then proceeded to ask Ms. Hardaway questions about her age and schooling; if she knew about the hearing today; that her case could go to trial before 12 people that would decide the outcome and where she would not be obligated to testify, offer evidence, or call witnesses. She acknowledged all of the questions asked of her. He asked if she was under the influence of alcohol or drugs. She responded in the negative.

 

“If you tell me today that you are guilty of assault in the second degree then you won't have a trial,” the judge said. “Do you understand that?”

 

“Yes,” Ms. Hardaway said.

 

The judge acknowledged that she was “clear minded” and able to enter into a plea deal.

 

“Do you know what your sentence will be?” the judge asked.

 

“Yes. Six months in Monroe County and five years probation,” she responded.

 

“What happened on August 27, 2013 Ms. Hardaway? What did you do? I want you to be as specific as possible,” the judge said.

 

“The officers were trying to arrest my little brother and i got involved with the arrest and I had pepper spray on me. I tried to stop the arrest,” she started.

 

“Wait a minute,” said Justice Affronit, “Where did it happen?”

 

“It happened at 384 Selye Terrace.”

 

“And where did it happen? Was it inside that address? Outside?”

 

“Outside in the front yard.”

 

“What is your brother's name?”

 

“Romengeno Hardaway.”

 

“Go on Ms. Hardaway.”

 

“I was trying to get them off my brother. I was trying to break them up. I didn't do anything with the pepper spray—we were grabbing and pulling at each other as I tried to break up the fight.”

 

“Did you hit or strike one of the officers, Ms. Hardaway?”

 

“I did not strike a police officer,” she said.

 

She continued, “As I tried to break the fight up I was pulled away from them and I fell to the ground. When I got up, then they arrested me. When the two of us fell to the ground, that's when the shoulder injury happened to the officer. I was pushing away from him—I never hit him. Could I show you?” she asked.

 

“Assault in the second degree requires that we know what if any part of your body came in contact with the officer causing injury,” said the judge. “This needs to be on the record, so you cannot show me.”

 

“I was telling him that I was five months pregnant and I was trying to get away from him.”

 

Mr. Teifke interjected here, “When her arms were pulled behind her back, she complained about the pain and then proceeded to try to bring her arms forward when the pain did not cease. At that point, they were moving forward together and fell to the ground. That's when the injury to the officer occurred. Assault in the second degree requires only that an officer was injured without any indication of her intent to injure. We do not dispute the injuries.”

 

The judge accepted this.

 

ADA Green then asked Ms. Hardaway, “how do you plead to assault in the second degree?”

 

“Guilty,” she said.

 

Her plea was entered into the record.

 

“This matter will be adjourned until her sentencing which will be on March 18, 2014, at 9:30AM,” said the judge.

 

Justice Affronti then looked at Ms. Hardaway and said, “Between now and March 18, you are to have contact with the Monroe County probation office. You must make all your appointments with them so that I can have their report on March 18. Between now and then you are not to be arrested for any violation of the law. If you don't keep your appointments or have involvement with the police, I can't keep my promise regarding your sentence.”

 

Court was adjourned.

 

After court I asked Mr. Teifke about the plea deal.

 

“It's a deal she can live with. Going to trial always has risks and in this case, all the prosecution has to prove to get a conviction for assault in the second degree, is that the officer was injured during the arrest.”

 

He told me that the statue is “extremely police friendly” and joked that it seems like every year a new type of civil servant is added to the list of the protected. Reading the statute, you get a sense of that: sanitation workers, first responders, police officers, and everyone in between is protected by this law. He also told me that the maximum sentence is seven years in jail.

 

“You could be running from the police, two blocks ahead of them, and one of the cops chasing you trips and wrecks his elbow. Once arrested, you can be charged with assault in the second degree because that's the way the statue is written,” said Mr. Teifke. “There doesn't have to be intent to injure—just that an injury has occurred.”

 

The plea deal says six months of jail and five years of probation. Mr. Teifke thinks that she will be out in two months because of time served and good behavior. There was no misdemeanor offered by the DA, so his client went with the next best thing—pleading to a felony conviction with minimal time in jail. Part of that decision was influenced by her impending delivery.

 

Impossible choices

 

Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness makes the argument that “mass incarceration in the United States has, in fact, emerged as a comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.” Under this “well-disguised system” people are forced to make impossible choices that may lessen their bodily punishment now (shortened jail sentences), but in the end, creates a life-time of punishment (a felony conviction) where there is no way to atone for one's transgressions.

 

Eric Teifke, a lawyer with the Monroe County Public Defender Office and Ms. Hardaway's lawyer, told me that a trial was risky and that this was a deal that Ms. Hardaway could live with. It seems to me that this is an impossible choice: have your child and then go to jail for two months with a felony conviction, or take your case to trial where your chances of being found not guilty are slim compounded by a heavy amount of anxiety that is neither good for you nor your newborn. On top of that, if you are in fact found guilty, be prepared to be sentenced to a potential seven years in jail with a felony conviction.

 

The way Justice Affronti talks about police being victims in this case makes me think he would not have much compassion for Ms. Hardaway.

 

Neither choice is appealing when police go crazy by storming the front lawn of the Hardaways' home, escalating instead of de-escalating a verbal dispute, and then arresting a minor after smashing his head into a post driving a nail into his temple and then punching and dropping a pregnant woman to the ground. This kind of insanity would never fly in the suburbs of Rochester, NY so why is it allowed to flourish in the city? (It's a rhetorical question; one doesn't have to look far beyond race and class.)

 

The life-time punishment of being convicted of a felony is listed in Alexander's book as well as the article published in The American Prospect:

 

...we use our criminal-justice system to associate criminality with people of color and then engage in the prejudiced practices we supposedly left behind. Today, it is legal to discriminate against ex-offenders in ways it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, depending on the state you're in, the old forms of discrimination -- employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, and exclusion from jury service -- are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights and arguably less respect than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

 

She calls the system colorblind because instead of it being an explicitly racially discriminatory system, it is predicated on one's criminal status—and it doesn't just happen to be a coincidence that people most targeted by law enforcement are people of color. (Thanks, War on Drugs!)

 

The lack of confidence in the public defender's office by many people of color I've spoken to is of high concern. A lot of folks think the judges, district attorneys, and public defenders collude to get those charged with crimes—though innocent until proven guilty—convictions and jail time. This does not bode well for an office that is supposed to fight and advocate for their court-appointed clients. I've also had conversations with lawyers who think that part of the problem stems from the county's lack of funding and staffing for both offices. In the end though, it is the people who have to make the impossible choices, not their lawyers. This has to end.

 

Coming up

 

Romengeno Hardaway, also arrested on August 27 and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, has court before Judge Thomas Rainbow Morse on January 27, at 9:30AM.

 

Brenda Hardaway's sentencing is March 18 at 9:30AM before Justice Affronti.

 

Enough is enough.

 

Rochester Indymedia coverage: United Christian Leadership Ministry make demands in the Brenda Hardaway case | Affronted by Affronti: Hardaway Bail Increased, Unexpectedly and Without Explanation, to $25K | Video from the Forum on Police-Community Relations